Optimize Your Exercise Program with Science-Based Tools | Jeff Cavaliere

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, an Emma Professor of Neurobiology and Optomology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today my guest is Jeff Cavaliere. Jeff Cavaliere holds a Master of Science in Physical Therapy and is a Certified Strength in Conditioning Specialist. He did his training at the University of Connecticut stores one of the top five programs in the world in Physical Therapy and Sports Medicine. I discovered Jeff Cavaliere over 10 years ago from his online content. His online content includes information about how to train for strength, how to train for hypertrophy, which is muscle growth, how to train for endurance, as well as how to rehabilitate injuries to avoid muscular imbalances, nutrition and supplementation. I've always found his content to be incredibly science-based, incredibly clear, sometimes surprising and always incredibly actionable. It is therefore not surprising that he has one of the largest online platforms for fitness, nutrition, supplementation and injury rehabilitation. Jeff has also worked with an enormous number of professional athletes and has served as head physical therapist and assistant strength coach for the New York Metz. Again, the content that Jeff Cavaliere has posted online has been so immensely useful to me over the years. That I was absolutely thrilled to get the chance to sit down with him and ask him about everything from how to train in terms of how to split up the body parts that you train across the week, how to integrate strength training and endurance training, when to stretch, how to stretch. Indeed, we talked about nutrition, we talked a bit about supplementation, we talked about how to really avoid creating imbalances in muscle and in neural control over muscle. It's one thing that's really wonderful about Jeff is he really has an understanding of not just how muscles and bones, intendons and ligaments work together, but how the nervous system interfaces with those. We talked about the mental side of training, including when to bring specific concentration to the muscles that you're training and when to think more about how to move weights through space and think more about the movements overall. I'm certain that you'll find the conversation that we held to be immensely useful and informative for your fitness practices and also for how you mentally approach fitness in general and how to set up a lifelong fitness practice. One that will give you the strength that you desire, one that will give you the aesthetic results that you desire, one that will set you up for endurance and cardiovascular health, basically an overall fitness program. I really feel this is where Jeff Cavaliere shines above and beyond so many of the other PTs and fitness so-called influencers that are out there. Again, everything is grounded in science, everything is clear and everything is actionable. And while we do cover an enormous amount of information during today's episode, if you want to dive even deeper into that information, you can go to ATHLEANX.com where you'll find some of Jeff's programs. You can also find him at ATHLEANX on YouTube. There you will find videos for instance like how to repair or heal from lower back pain, something that I actually followed directly long before I ever met Jeff has over 32 million views and that is not by accident is because the protocols there again are surprising and actionable. They relieved my back pain very quickly without surgery. So I'm immensely grateful for that content and it extends into everything from again hypertrophy endurance and straight training and so on. Again, it's ATHLEANX.com as the website ATHLEANX on YouTube and also ATHLEANX on Instagram. The Uberman Lab podcast is proud to announce that we've partnered with Momentus Supplements. We've done that for several reasons. First of all, the quality of their supplements is exceedingly high. Second of all, we wanted to have a location where you could find all of the supplements discussed on the Uberman Lab podcast in one easy defined place. You can now find that place at livemomentus.com/huberman. In addition, Momentus Supplements ship internationally, something that a lot of other supplement companies simply do not do. So that's terrific whether or not you live in the US or you live abroad. Right now, not all of the supplements that we discuss on the Uberman Lab podcast are listed, but that catalog of supplements is being expanded very rapidly and a good number of them that we've talked about, some of the more prominent ones for sleep and focus and other aspects of mental and physical health are already there. Again, you can find them at livemomentus.com/huberman. 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, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. And now, from my discussion with Jeff Cavaliere. Jeff, such a pleasure for me to have you here. I'm glad to be here. It's amazing. I have a long time consumer of your content. I've learned a tremendous amount about fitness, both in the weight room, cardio, nutrition, things that I've applied for over a decade. So for me, this is particularly meaningful. And my goal here is really to ask a bunch of questions to which I'm interested in the answers, but also for which I know the audience is really curious about. So one of your mantras is, you know, if you want to look like an athlete, train like an athlete. And I think that's something really special that sets aside what you do from a lot of other very well-qualified people do. And in terms of the use of weights and resistance, whether or not it's body weight or weights in the gym or polies versus cardio, you know, in terms of overall health, aesthetics and athleticism. Is there a way that you could point to, you know, the idea that maybe people should be doing, you know, 50% resistance training and 50% cardio. Maybe it's 70/30, maybe it's 30/70. And here I'm talking about the typical person who would like to maintain or maybe even add some muscle mass, probably in particular areas for most people, as opposed to just overall mass, although we'll talk about that later. And people want to maintain a relatively low body fat percentage and being good cardiovascular health. What's the sort of contour of a basic program that anybody could think about as a starting place? I think it's like a 60/40 split, which would be leaning towards weight training, you know, strength and then, you know, the conditioning aspect, be about 40%. So if you look at it over a course of a training week, I mean, five days in a gym would be a great task. And obviously not in the gym, it could be done at home. But three days, strength training, one day, Wednesday, Friday, conditioning, Tuesday, Thursday, you know, two days. It's a pretty easy roundabout way to split that up. Of course, depending upon training goals. And as you said, the aesthetic goals, like that will shift dramatically. But if you want to see the benefits of both, that's probably the effective dose for strength training and the effect of dose for conditioning at the bare minimum level. Again, being a much better performer, conditioning wise, you're going to want to do more than that. And in terms of the duration of those workouts, what's your suggestion? I've been weight training for about 30 years, running for about 30 years. And mainly for health and have found that if I work hard in the gym or at resistance training for more than 60 minutes or so, it's very hard for me to recover. I start getting colds, I start getting weaker from workout to workout. But amazingly, at least to me, if I keep those workouts to about 10 minutes, 10 minutes of warmup and 50, five, zero minutes or so. Of really hard work for resistance training. And I keep the cardiovascular work to about 30 to 45 minutes. I feel great. And I seem to make some progress, at least someplace in the workout from workout to workouts. Yeah, I mean, it's those are good numbers because those are kind of numbers that we usually preach. We try to keep our workouts to an hour or less, if possible. Now, depending upon the split that you're following, if you're on a total body split, there's just going to be more that has to be done in a given amount of time. That, and again, if you're training primarily for strength, that could prolong the workout because the longer rest times in between sets. But in general, when you're not focused on that one aspect, but the overall health picture, then you can get the job done in under an hour. And again, I always say on top of if you want to look like an athlete train, like an athlete is you can either train longer, you can train hard, but you can't do both. And I really believe that the focus for me, I have a busy life, I have a lot of other things that I do believe are not. And it's like I want to go hard and I want to go get out. And I find that my body also responds to that. I think a lot of guys bodies respond to that. And particularly as you start to get older, I think it's the it's the length of the workout that actually causes more problems than the intensity of what you're doing. Particularly if you're warmed up properly, like you said, I found personally that my warm up has had to become more of an integral part of my workout than it ever has before. I never I could get in the gym when I was 20 and I'm going right over I'm doing the one set two sets. I'm in and I'm ready to go. And I never do another workout warm up set for any of the other exercise I do the rest of the day. That's not that's not true anymore, you know, and I found that as long as I'm willing to sort of give myself a little bit of a warm up, the intensity is not what bothers me. I'm very much in control of the weights that I use and it doesn't bother me. But if I start to go pretty long, I start to feel achy or I start to have problems. So again, depending upon age, that also plays a factor in the length. But again, I think everybody can achieve on a standard program can achieve the results that they want within an hour in terms of splits. You mentioned splits. And so for those who aren't familiar with this term splits, it's really which body parts are you training on which days seems like almost everybody follows a weekly workout schedule of the body, of course, doesn't care about the week. Right. There's no reason thing that once every seven days or twice every seven days makes sense physiologically is just the bite doesn't work that but that's the way life is structured. I've seen you discuss, you know, three days a week whole body workouts. I've heard of splits like a pushing one day, pulling another. day, legs another day, a day off, repeat. I mean, there's so many variations on this. What are some general themes that we can throw out there? And in order to avoid the huge matrix of possibilities, you have some wonderful content that points those. And we will cap in our caption show notes. We'll link out to some of those that are different ways to design splits. But in terms of giving people a logic of how to think about splitting up body parts, what's governing the split? What are the rules and the logic that dictate a split? For me, the first rule is, will you stick to it? Because there are split, I don't particularly like full body splits. I was actually talking to Jesse about that the other day. I don't necessarily like to have to train everything. Now, of course, the volumes will come down per muscle group. But if you don't like to do that, and you actually don't look forward to your workout because you're dreading having to do everything and feeling maybe too fatigued by the time you work out so over, or the fact that those generally do take a little bit longer and don't fit into your schedule. I don't care how effective the split is. A split not done is not effective. So you need to find one that fits. So maybe you go into an alternative option like a push pull legs, like you mentioned. And that could be done either one cycle through the week on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday split, or it could be twice in a week. So you're actually training six times where you repeat it. Pull push legs, pull push legs, however you want to do with either a day off and between the three days or at the end of the six days. And again, that actually impacts your schedule. I've broken that down before where it's, you know, if you put it in between the three days, it's good because you're giving yourself an extra rest day in between. But it starts to shift that day off every week as we wrap around. So for those guys that were choosing that seven day schedule out of convenience in our heads, you know, it starts to mess with that off day. So others like to just keep it predictably lit sound a Sunday and train six days in a row. But that's a better way to maybe group similar muscle actions together, which I think I definitely prefer that because if I'm going to be training, you know, pulling movements, at least there's a synergy between them. And I feel like I'm looking to achieve one goal that day. And then I mean, quite honestly, you can go back to the bros split days and there's those still work effectively. There's a reason why they worked in the past. Like I think that science shows that there's smarter ways to do them these days. Like you can, you can come back and hit a related muscle. So you could do, let's say biceps on one day and then come back two days later and do back realizing again, synergy between the exercises there, your biceps are going to be restimulated again. So you could figure out ways to make that work. But the thing that I think is effective there is that tends to be one of the ones that people like the most because they can go in, they get their pump, they feel good. It's pretty solely focused on one muscle group. Is that the definition of a bros split one? One muscle group a day. Yeah, I see. So it's very much geared towards strength and aesthetics, really maximizing chest one day. Probably more aesthetics than strength. Yeah, you're just the bro, the bro name. Yeah, but again, like, you know, in here I am a science guy and I could appreciate the benefits of a bros split, especially because again, like what to what end? You know, who's who's goal are we trying to achieve here? Brothers or ours, you know, like, I mean, if I'm applying my standards and my goals or even like athletic ideals, but they just want to get in shape, then it's perfectly fine to do a bros split in that instance. If you're sticking to it again and you're seeing the results that you want to see from it, but they're able to, you know, really keep their focus on one muscle they get to focus on, you know, like, it look a lot of times people struggle with the way of an exercise feels until their second or third set. Like they don't have that proper set of ability to kind of lock in on an exercise. So spending a few not only sets in the same, you know, exercise, but then doing another exercise from the same muscle group helps them to dial in a little bit better and get more out of their training. Yeah, that raises a really interesting, I think, important question early on when I started resistance training, which was when I was 16 in high school. I got in touch with and I was learning from Mike Menser. Me too. So it's interesting. Yeah, and Mike was very helpful. Very, very helpful. We got to be friendly. I just read his book. I didn't get a chance to buy some gel. Sorry. Well, I back then, no internet. I, you know, I paid by Western Union type thing to send him some money for the back of the magazine. And then he got on the phone with me and my mother at the time was like, why is this grown man falling in the house? And he gave me a very straightforward split, which was shoulders and arms. One day, he had to be taking two days off and then training legs and then two days off and then chest and back, etc. And that's a variation of a pro split, too, where you're sort of, you know, breaking them down that way, chest and back or chest and thighs, you know. Yeah. And he worked very well for me. I probably would have, because of my age, I think, and because it was the, I was untrained, I think it, largely untrained. I think it would have grown on many different programs, but it worked very well for me. I eventually just just made that in every other day things. Shows arms day off legs day or two off because he hit legs right, at least for me. I'm not training the next day. And then I'm not doing much of anything athletic the next day and chest and back and repeat and so on. And the reason I found that helpful is I almost always recovered between workouts. The six day a week program of push, pull legs, push, pull legs. To me, seems excruciating from two standpoints. One is at least with my recover abilities or lack of recovery abilities. I can't imagine coming back feeling fresh. And the other one is if I, if I'm in the gym more than four days a week, I really start to fatigue about the whole psychological experience of it. Whereas if I'm in there three or four days a week, in other words, if I put a day off in between each workout, I really want to be there. And I get in there with, with a lot of fire. And I'm also doing other things on the off days. So I think that I love that you mentioned the split that you'll stick to and that you can bring the intensity to because I think that that's really important. I sometimes hear about two a day training. I've done two a day training twice in my lifetime. No, I've got sick two days later. That's correlation, not causation. But is there ever an instance where two a day weight training makes sense for the non-drug assisted, typical recovery ability person? I actually, I think it makes sense in some scenarios, but it doesn't make sense practically for a lot of people's schedules. So like, if you could break down, let's say you were going to do even a, you know, some version of a, of a total body session or maybe like you're going to do an upper lower split, right? You can do an upper workout and do the anterior chain or the pushing portion of that in one session and then come back and do the pulling session later on at night if you had the opportunity to the thing that you benefit from there is the freshness of focus. Again, like, something in my head sacrificed by the time you get towards the latter half of whatever workout you're in. At the same point in maybe four, like when you start to approach that 50 minutes an hour, you know, Mark, you are either losing focus, you're losing energy, you're losing contract liability, you're losing something. And if you're relegating whatever it is, the pulling portion of that to the end of that workout, something suffers. So that, okay, and that, if we realize that's happening, then maybe you switch them up the next time you do the workout where the pulling portion of the upper workout goes first. And then the pushing goes later. So you're at least not just continuing that cycle. But at the same time, if you were able to kind of split them up, you get a chance to kind of take a break, you could have that freshness of focus again, and you could actually get a better effort in. Because again, I think effort drives the results. So if the effort is not compromised, then you should be able to do that. But systemically is that a problem. And I think that it is a problem for a lot of people. It's just hard to, it's hard to rev the engine up a lot of times the only the day. You know, you warm that thing up once. It's like that car in the winter. You get it going once. You're lucky. Okay, now you got to drive it the rest of the day. But you know, you put it in the garage and try to start the next day. It's a problem. So, you know, young people can get away with it a lot more than older people could. You know, I've never had a strong recovery quotient. But if I stick to this one day off in between every once in a while, two days in a row of training, maybe because I have to travel and I want to make sure I get all the workouts and kind of think, I seem to be okay. I like your example of warming up the car, spoken like a true East Coast. East Coast. Are those of us from the West Coast? I took a moment there. But folks from the East Coast and the Midwest get it and certainly from Europe. In terms of the mixing up of cardiovascular training and resistance training, same day, different day, which one should come first, which one should come second? If one main goal is again, everyone listening has different goals. Are most people would like to either maintain or gain some muscle. I don't know many people that want to lose muscle. But maintain or gain some muscle, usually in specific locations on their body. Most people would like to be a bit leaner or a lot leaner. There are a few people out there that are either naturally lean or don't want or actually just want to gain weight. But assuming that people want to get leaner, put on some muscle, maintain muscle and want to have a healthy heart and a healthy brain, which basically requires a healthy cardiovascular system, how would you incorporate cardiovascular work into the overall weekly regimen? So again, I think that the bare minimum is probably twice a week in terms of cardiovascular. If you want to have some semblance of cardiovascular conditioning, but I think most people who actually need it more or want to pursue it more than that are going to need more time to do that. At some point, it can't just be relegated to a day off or a day off from the weight training workouts. So at some point, it has to occur on the same day. In that case, I just like to put it, if that is you're not your primary goal, but you're looking more for just the overall picture, the aesthetics you mentioned, putting muscle on in certain areas, then I would put it at the end of the workout because you don't want to end anyway. compromise the weight training workout. And as we've sort of referenced a couple of times already, the intensity of those workouts is important. And we know there's a strength component to those workouts also that is going to, you know, be a helpful stimulus for growth. So the conditioning, the cardio, that stuff done prior to any training, you know, strength training workout is likely going to impair your ability to perform at your best. So unless it's just done for a quick little warmup in the beginning, but then it's not sustained long enough really to be a benefit for cardiovascular conditioning. So I just like to, you know, put that at the end, realizing that even if my effort level is lower, my output is lower, if it's still placing a demand on my cardiac output to get that conditioning effect because I'm fatigued, it still has a demand on my cardiac output. So it's still achieving its goal, but it didn't interfere with my main goal of being able to increase my performance in the gym. I got it. And in terms of the form of cardiovascular training, I've seen you do a number of, I have to say, very impressive high-intensity interval type work. So burby type work or push-ups with, you know, with crunches mixed into them. Anyway, people can see your videos to, I didn't describe those in the best way, but rather than on the treadmill or out jogging for 30, 45 minutes, is that because you prefer higher intensity, higher heart rate type training or is it because you live in cold Connecticut and you don't want to be out jogging on the roads in the middle of winter? Well, I think all the above, I mean, those are factors from a personal level, but I think that if you are, if we could blend function across these realms and not have such a delineation between, this is my way of training and this is my conditioning, but figure out a way to blend them together. I always think that you've got a better opportunity to get that more well-rounded result. And I like to kind of mix up that straight conditioning work and also some of the footwork, you know, drills, like we have some high expectations for guys that come into our programs, like to just do some footwork drills, like ladders. Like ladders or lying drills or something. And you know what happens? People become intrigued and interested. Like I never, I haven't tried this since high school, you know? And they become interested in just the challenge of it. And as we become almost distracted by the challenge, we're now like finding ourselves conditioning, you know? And I always think that's an important part that sometimes you gotta draw people in to show them what they might be interested in. And from the output or the effect of it, I just think that when you're able to blend some of some, you know, still maintain some of that strength training into the exercise. So as you mentioned, let's say I'm doing some kind of a pushup or a burpee, I mean, there is an anaerobic component to that that is going to be helpful, that rather than just walking or just jogging. Not to say that that isn't an effective means for strict cardiac conditioning. It's one of the ways that we've had for, you know, centuries, you know, to do it. But I just think that if we can blend it, then it becomes maybe a little bit more interesting and you get some of those crossover benefits and it doesn't become so segmented in terms of what we're trying to do. I love the idea of bringing some mental challenge and some desire to improve a skill while conditioning. That's not something that I've thought of before and it's simply because I've overlooked it, but it makes sense because my sister who's reasonably fit, although I'm always trying to get her to do a bit more, she always asks me, what should I take? And I believe in supplements of for certain people in certain instances, but I keep telling her, you know, the behaviors are going to, and nutrition are gonna have the greatest outsize positive effect. And she loves things like dance classes and things or kickboxing, these kinds of things, which so it makes sense that if you can hook somebody on the conditioning aspect or the skill aspect and kind of trick them into doing more cardio. And so to speak, that's terrific. Also, the neuroscientist in me just has to say, forgive me, that anytime you're engaging the two sets of motor neurons, the ones in your brain, the upper motor neurons and the ones in your spinal cord, anytime you're engaging those upper motor neurons, which are for deliberate, well controlled action, you're doing a great thing for your brain in terms of brain longevity. So I'm now I need to incorporate some actual skills in the wine training. Going back to weight training a bit, one of the most important things I learned from you so over the years was that when training to increase muscle size, to really think not so much about moving weights, but more about challenging muscles. - Yeah. - I also heard this from my friend Ben Pekolsky, who's a very well accomplished, he was a bodybuilder now, he's into other aspects of fitness, teaches fitness, but don't move weights, challenge muscles, unless you're trying to power lift or something in that sort, which I'm not immensely helpful. But the other thing that I learned from you that I combined with that was this idea that certain muscles will grow better and get stronger much more easily, maybe even will recover better because of our ability to contract them really hard. And this, what I call the cavalier test, which is, at least if I compare a phrase, so for instance, if I can, it's always the bicep isn't it. Let's use the calf or the bicep. If you can flex your bicep to the point where it hurts a little bit, like it almost feels like a cramp or a cramp, or you can flex your calf to the point where it really cramps up a little bit, almost feels like it's nodding up. That's a pretty good indication that you're going to be able to stimulate that muscle well under load if you're doing the movement properly. And that's the feeling to actually aim for each repetition, maybe even throughout the repetition. For me, this completely transformed my results. And this was, I think maybe five, six years ago that I first heard this from you. Body parts that for me lagged behind that I thought maybe genetically weren't going to work for me, immediately just started growing, right? And I was getting stronger and stronger. And I thought, this is really something so much so that I've dedicated a portion of my research along with in collaboration with another group to try and understand what's happening in these upper motor neurons in the brain that can engage the muscles even more. And that it's not just about progressive overload or putting a pump into the muscle, that it's really, this mind muscle connection is a real thing when it comes to predicting results and that you can get better at it. So forgive me for paraphrasing your incredible content around this, it made a tremendous difference for me and a number of other people that I passed that along to. But what can you, first of all, how did you arrive at that? Because we hear about the mind muscle connection, but I really heard it first from you. How did you arrive at this kind of cramped test, the Cavalier test, as I'll call it? It's always weird when people name things after themselves and science, but other scientists can name things. So there is now officially the Cavalier test is whether or not you can cramp the muscle in the absence of load, just flexing it. So the point where it hurts a little bit, that would be a good indication that you could grow that muscle well. How did you come up with this? I mean, it just, honestly, it's something that made sense to me because during my workouts, even as a young kid, just starting out, I always wanted to know what is it working. A lot of people ask that question more suddenly you think, what is this supposed to work? And I don't know if you've ever noticed, but when people ask that question, if they're being trained by a trainer, and the trainer is saying, well, just do this, do this exercise, and they'll show you how to do it. But then they'll say, but what is it supposed to work? Where am I supposed to feel this? People, it did just inherently ask that question. A lot of people will. I was one of those that did that, and I asked that question, not because I knew what I was doing, but just because I don't know, I wanted to know what was supposed to be doing the work. Once you do that, and you start to seek that out, and say, okay, well, the bicep is what's supposed to be doing the work, then I want to make sure the biceps doing the work, right? So then I would just sort of really tweak the movement to make it do more work, or feel more uncomfortable, or get a stronger contraction, knowing if that's supposed to do the job. It wasn't until PT school that I'm learning, oh, well, flexion of the elbow is the brachialis and the biceps responsible for supination. You start to learn other components of it, but all I wanted to know was to bring my arm up in a curl what is supposed to do the job. So I would seek out ways to make that happen better. And when I was able to do that, I could feel the stronger contraction. And I just, I don't know what it was. I was no visionary. I just felt like I knew that that was going to be better for me if the muscle I was trying to grow was being stressed more effectively. So when I was attempting to do this across different exercises, I would notice that what I could do potentially on a curl where my arm is up, where you ask me to flex my bicep that position, I couldn't do if I was doing a concentration curl, or I couldn't carry over to a cable curl. And that shouldn't really change, right? Because the function is still largely the same. There's still elbow flexion, there's still supination. Like, why am I not able to do it there? And that's when it sort of clued into me that like, you're my muscle connection on not just your mind with one muscle, but on every exercise matters. And it varies from exercise to exercise. And even if you don't gain muscle size from doing that, although I think it's very hard not to, especially if you're not used to doing that, there's a term I like to call muscularity, which is a difference, right? It's the level of sort of resting tone in the muscle. That improves dramatically. If you can learn how to just start to engage that muscle better, the muscularity, the resting tone of that muscle is harder, it's more at attention, it's more alive. And it's all driven from being able to connect better neurologically with the muscle that you're trying to do. to train. I've talked about a lot in efficiency is really what you're trying to seek in movements when you're trying to create hypertrophy. When strength is your goal, efficiency of the movement is what you're looking for. You're looking to have muscles tied together and work well efficiently, the chest, the shoulders, the triceps to get a bar off of your chest during a bench press. You're not looking to make it a very inefficient, you know, leverages for your chest to try to grow your chest in a bench press. You're trying to let the whole package come together for a greater output. But when you're trying to go and create muscle hypertrophy or even this muscularity that I talk about, you need to seek ways to make it feel more uncomfortable, right? If you don't feel the discomfort, then you're doing something wrong. And I struggle to this day on certain muscle groups to still do that, even knowing what I'm trying to work and knowing with the goal of everything I'm preaching here. It's very difficult for some muscles and for certain people to do this on certain muscles. But as you mentioned, practice does help. And the more you become consistent and deliberate with what you're trying to do, the more of a result you actually get. It's a couple of really poor boyids I'd like to delve into further. First of all, my hunch was always that the muscle groups that grew most easily and that I could contract hardest without any, the first time I did the Cavalier test got 10 out of 10. We give it a 10 out of 10 scale. It could just isolate those muscles, cinch them, grow them easily. I mean, there's certain why parts I want to say which ones because it doesn't really matter that I always felt like if I just did push-ups, they would grow and these muscles are far away from any of the muscles that are supposed to be involved in push-ups. Even though I like the thing I'm doing push-ups correctly, you'll tell me if I'm not. But some of that, I think, is genetic and some of that has to do with the sports that I played when I was younger. So I swam, I played soccer, I skateboarded, and then later I boxed. The muscles involved in those sports were always very easy to engage later when I went into the gym. I guess I call to parents having kids do a lot of dynamic activity seems like it might be a good idea. The other thing is this issue of muscularity. I'm so glad you brought that up. There are, I have to imagine a large number of listeners who don't want to get bigger. They don't want to take up a larger clothing size. They don't want to take up more space. In fact, some of them would like to take up less space, but they want that quality that you're describing, which is that oftentimes you hear more in the, here I'm stereotyping a bit, but with kindness, you know, you hear from women who I haven't weight trained, they say, I don't want to get big often. Sometimes they do, but most women that I've helped weight train or talked to about weight training, say, I don't want to get there. I want to get tone. And I think what they're referring to is this quality of muscularity. This idea that at resting or at close to rest or anytime someone reaches out and grabs a glass, that the muscles almost look like they're kind of twitching underneath the skin. And yet it's not saran wrap skin anatomy chart type skin. Right. So this thing of muscularity or resting tone, you know, has a physiological basis. I think it's how readily the nerves are communicating with the muscles. And you're saying that by learning to engage the muscles more actively, the resting tone or muscularity can improve. Have you seen that both in men and women? Yeah. Oh yeah. And do you think this is something that takes upkeep maintenance or that you know, once you develop that muscle, you can just kind of let it coast. So I think like everything it requires upkeep, you know, user lose it. I do believe firmly, but like I think that it's the development of the connection is going to be harder than the maintenance of the connection. As I said, I still struggle to this day for myself with, you know, unnamed muscle groups, you know, also, you know, but like, you know, there's just there's there's just certain areas that are harder for your brain for whatever reason to just develop that that connection at that type of level to create that extra strong contraction. But I think that with proper dedication and focus, I'll go right out and say, you know, calves is one of the areas that I don't necessarily have a great connection with. And I also obviously must not care so much because I don't put in the time and effort to create that connection as I could. So I think what might happen is, you know, yeah, there could be a struggle there, but then with with struggle comes this interest, you're like, well, screw it. I'm a calf not. I'm not going to do anything about it. You know, so I think if you put the they're required effort in and the time and repetitions that you will develop that and once you do develop it, it's going to stick around a lot longer than it would had you not invested any time into it at all. You know, not requiring as much of that. But I mean, I don't know, like, you know, you mentioned now when you train, it's like, you're you're just this is just part of how you train now. Like you're going hard, you're trying to, you know, really forcefully contract. You're not just moving the weight, I say, from point A to point B, but you're like trying to contract the weight through that range. That is a mindset that I try to put into what everything I'm doing, unless, of course, I'm focused on a strength exercise where I'm just trying to lift a greater amount and use all the muscles together. But when the goal is in efficiency for hypertrophy, I am really trying to create that contraction. And it's just part of my training. So I guess that, you know, that for consistency sake, as long as I'm training is happening, you know, if I get away from training, that's not happening at all. But, you know, even there, I probably another embarrassing admission, probably, you know, will mindfully do it throughout the day, even when they'll wait in my hand, you know, in certain muscle groups, whether it be my abs or my arm or my shoulders or something, I'm doing something just to sort of engage the muscles. And I do think that some of that sort of a name practice actually helps by the time you go back into the gym. You just kind of keep that, you keep that that that connection going. Well, it certainly obeys all the rules of neuroplasticity. You know, the the fire together, wire together mantra, which is the word to my colleague Carla Shatz, hold true for all aspects of neural function, including nerve to muscle. So these flexing throughout the day or the the deliberate isolation of contracting a muscle throughout the day is without question engaging neuroplasticity. And if you were to do fewer of those repetitions, you're going to get less engagement of the nerve to muscle connection. I can say this with with with a smile and and with confidence because one of the first things all neuroscience students learn is about the neuromuscular junction because it's a it's a really simple example of where the more times the nerve fires and gets the muscle to contract, the stronger that connection get receptors are brought there, etc, etc. There's a whole bunch of mechanisms for the topic of another podcast, but basically that practice throughout the day is makes total sense and works. And there's no there believe me, there's no science behind that in terms of, you know, the application of it. You do it when you catch yourself doing it, you know, time to time, you know, but it is definitely something that's easily done discreetly and you know, you wind up doing that. Actually, I think in a recent video, when I I did talk about growing your arms by just improving, you know, improving the connection, not that connection itself is applying any load or, you know, resistance that's significant to create overload for growth, but it's the development of that connection that I then take back with me into the gym at a more effective level that takes every exercise I do there and makes it more effective. That's a sharpening the blade. Yeah, so to speak. Yeah, certainly obeys the laws of nerve to muscle physiology. One to just touch on a couple of things. If the goal is to challenge muscles and one is dividing their body into, let's say, you know, three or four day a week split or so or maybe up to six. How do you know when a muscle is ready to be challenged again? I've heard, okay, every 48 hours is, you know, protein synthesis increases and then we'll get into this and then it drops off. But, frankly, if I train my legs hard, I can get stronger from workout to workout or at least better in some way, workout to workout, leg workout to leg workout, training them once every five to eight days. If I train them more often, I get worse. So whatever that 48 hour to 72 hour thing is, somehow my legs don't obey that, but, you know, or maybe something else is wrong with me, but I'm sure there are many things else wrong with me. But how do you assess recovery at the local level, meaning at the level of the muscles? We'll talk about soreness and getting better, stronger, more repetitions, etc. And then the systemic level, the level of the nervous system. And I'd love for you to tell us about the tool that, again, I learned from you, which is actually using a physical scale because it turns out this is that it will let you to what the tool is. But that tool is also actively being used for assessing cognitive decline and cognitive maintenance and cognitive function in people with Alzheimer's and dementia. Makes total sense. Makes total sense. Regarding the first part of the question, how would you dictate when a muscle is recovered? So I do think that what you're experiencing is totally real. That different muscles recover at different rates. And I've always been so fascinated by this concept. I've talked about internally with my team, but I feel like what we really need, the holy grail to training is going to be when we're able to crack the code on an individual basis when a muscle is recovered. And that is going to dictate its training schedule. And the fact that you might have a bicep that could be trained via a pulling workout or regular bicep dedicated care workout. Forget the split at the moment. You might have a bicep that's able to be trained. That can be trained again the next day. And then the next day. And then maybe you need a day off after that. But in that, that can vary from person to person for sure. And it can vary from muscle to muscle in that that person over the course of time. As you mentioned, 'cause the systemic recovery is gonna impact all those muscles anyway, but let's say you're systemically recovering, every muscle itself is gonna have a recovery rate. And I think what's fascinating is that when you talked about before, we like to train in this week, or we have like the way our mind looks at training, well, if that was the case with the biceps, that biceps is a slave to the rest of your training split. You know, where it's like, well, why does it have to be also at the end of every eighth day or whatever, when it might be spawned better to something much more frequently? And your legs are also being thrown into that mix. There's a Mike Menser concept where he's like, training one set and be done for 14 days. I mean, there's such variability between muscle groups and you're linking them all together. I think that coming back and using muscle soreness as a guideline for that is one of the only tools we have in terms of the local level. You know, we don't really have, you know, being able to measure, let's say, CPK levels inside of a muscle would be amazing, you know, at a local level to see how recovered that muscle is, but that becomes fairly invasive, at least to my knowledge, it becomes fairly invasive. So what are our tools? I mean, I think that at the basic level, that's the one that most people can relate to and easily identify and then use that as a guideline. And if you're training when you're really sore, it's probably not a great idea. And it's probably a good indication that that muscle is not recovered, but at least hearing what you and I are saying here might be a comfort to the person to say, yeah, it is possible that it's not recovered. Just because 48 hours is the recommendation and just because research points to muscle protein synthesis needing a restimulation, well, maybe not. Maybe you're not necessarily there yet. You're in that, and for that muscle, you're not there yet. So it's all really interesting stuff, but as far as the systemic recovery, I think there's a lot of ways people talk about resting heart rate measured in the morning, all different kinds of, you know, core temperature and things like that that might become altered in a state of non-recovery. But grip strength is very, very much tied to performance and recovery. And when I was at the Metz, we used to actually take grip strength measurements as a baseline in spring training all the time. Now, obviously as a baseball player, you're gripping a bat, you're pitcher, you're gripping a ball, like, you know, having good grip strength is important. So if we've noticed, somebody had a very weak grip, it's just a good focal point of a specialized training component for the bonus every day with those guys. No, we do in spring training, we do sort of a baseline entry level measurement, and then we would measure it throughout the season, maybe once every two weeks or three weeks. And, you know, the idea there was to manage, you know, manage to recover, measure the recovery. And I just gave it away, you know, to determine overall recovery, your grip strength is pretty highly correlated. So we have found that with one of those scales, those old-fashioned bathroom scales at like the bath and beyond, or whatever you can get, which by the way, almost impossible. I believe Justin and I were searching for the last scale to put in that video, and we almost couldn't find one because everything is like digital. And I was like, you know, this I'm looking at the old-fashioned dial controls. It's like an old Macintosh, but there's a huge market for them and old phones. - Right, I have to keep your phones now. In 30 years, the lame phone now, we're the lot of money. - Right, we're the lot of money. - So, you know, I wound up finding one, and it's a great tool for just squeezing the scale with your hands and seeing what type of output you could get. And I think we all can relate to this when you just visualize, imagine the last time you were sick, or just try this the next time you wake up in the morning. When you first wake up in the morning, you're still groggy. Try to squeeze your hand. Try to make a fist as hard as you can. You're gonna sit there, anger at your fist because it won't contract as hard as you know it can. You don't have the ability to just create the output. And that is because in that state, you're still sleeping, you're still fatigued. You're not even awake at the whole level at this point. Well, that is still an actual phenomenon. That happens that a lack of recovery, or lack of wakefulness, or whatever you wanna say, is gonna lead to a decreased output there. So when you start to measure that on a daily basis, you can get a pretty good sense of where you're at. And I think when people start to see a drop off of 10% or even greater of their grip output, you really should skip the gym that day because I don't think there's much you're gonna do there that's going to be that beneficial, even if it is the day to train legs or whatever day it is. I love this tool. It's simple, it's low cost if you can find such a scale. I guess you could also find one of those grippers that, and you can do this in a very non-conantative way, but better would be a scale where you could actually measure how hard you can squeeze this thing at a given time of day. It draws to mind just a little neuroscience factority in the world of circadian neurobiology. One of the consistent findings is that in the middle of your nighttime, you know, the wake people up and they'll say, do this test in the laboratory. They use a different apparatus, but it's essentially the same thing. And in the middle of the night, grip strength is very, very low. And you know, mid-morning grip strength is high, and as the body temperature goes up into the afternoon, grip strength goes higher and higher and higher, and then it drops off. There's a circadian rhythm and grip temperature. So you probably want to do this more or less the same time each day if you're gonna use it, but I think it's brilliant and in its simplicity and its directness to these upper motor neurons, 'cause that's really what it's assessing. Your ability, again, it's about the ability to contract the muscle's heart. If you can't do that, it's not gonna get an effective work. - Yeah, and they also, I mean, they're certainly are more sophisticated tools to us as a PT that we have hand-grip dynamometers. And we can measure one side at a time too. I'm not really, I'm getting a little bit blinded by the fact that both hands are squeezing into that scale and I don't get really our left, right comparison. But even at that level, that could give you a little bit more detail, but that comes at a cost, such a pretty expensive devices. But if it's, listen, if you were an athlete, the 200, 300 bucks it costs to have one of those would be well worth the added investment. - Well, and I'm sure some of our listeners will want one too, 'cause there are a lot of tech geeks out there. Not tech industry geeks, but people like tech gear, what's it called again? - It's a hand-grip dynamometer. - Hand-grip, done-and-off. - Done-n-off. - Done-n-off. - Done-n-off. - Said on top of that. - By Jeff with the great East Coast accent and by me in a terrible botched at West Coast version. Thank you. We'll put that in the show now. It's also, I think recovery is key. We always hear about sleep, you grow when you sleep and incidentally your brain, you stimulate learning when you're awake, obviously, but the reordering of neural connections happens in sleep. This is why sleep is the way to get smarter, provided you're also doing the learning part. This leaves a way to get stronger for you're also doing the training part. You've got some really, you've put out interesting content over the years in terms of even sleep position. One of the major changes that I made to my sleep behavior is to not have the sheets tucked in at the end of the day. And I'll tell you, this had a profound impact on several things. First of all, my feet have always been the pain of my existence, broke them a bunch, skateboarding. And I noticed when I'd run, I'd get shin splint. And then I started to notice that my feet sort of, you're the PT, they're kind of floppy. And as if I was pointing my toes slightly all the time at rest, if I was, and I realized that, based on listening to you previously, that my sheets were wrapped tight, not hotel tight. - Right, right. - One thing in the hotel. - They'd get a feet in. And I started releasing the sheets at the end of the bed. And I also started doing some tibialis work. Front of shin's work essentially changed everything. My back pain from running, my shin splints disappeared, my posture improved, although my audience will tell me that it still needs improvement. There are always five or 10 people that want to sit up straight. I've actually had chairs sent to our mail and they're dressed. Very nice chairs. So I'm trying there. But this is fascinating, right? The position that one sleeps in. I fortunately have never had any shoulder issues, knock on wood. But maybe you could just talk to us a little bit about sleep and sleep position for sake of waking position and movement. Because this I think is a very unique and very powerful way to think about sleep. This podcast has done a lot of episodes about keeping the room cool, getting sunlight in your eyes, it's said how to get into sleep. But you've talked about physically what positions might be better to sleep in. So please, please enrich us. Yeah, I mean, first of all, some people's opinions of that type of content is that you know, sleeping the position that's most comfortable so you ensure that you're sleeping. Oh, great. I understand that. We all want to sleep. That's the goal when we put our head on the pillow is to actually fall asleep and wake up in the morning and not know what the hell happened unless you had a dream. But beyond that, there are certainly physical components to sleep that. That is why a lot of times people wake up and say like, you can incur pretty serious injuries and sleep. People will wake up and have like a shoulder that did not bother them at all be humming the next day or even for weeks after because of the one sleep position they put themselves in a prolonged way and they happen to have a deep sleep even through the discomfort. That can do actually some damage. So it's understandable that the body can incur some strain and stress if you're sleeping in the wrong way. One of the things I say right out the bad is sleeping on your stomach doesn't really have many benefits. So you're putting yourself into a position that is depending upon the orientation of your mattress or how many pillows you're using, but you're basically putting yourselves into excessive extension of a lumbar spine, which for most people isn't very good. If you're a disc patient, I guess that might be helpful for relocating the disc, but I mean for the most part, your hands are then usually not at your sides, but they're up under your arms. So you've got them into sort of internal rotation, up over elevation in your head. It's just not a great position. You also have to crank your neck for one side of the other in order to breathe, or you're going to be your face down straight into the pillow. So I would skip that one. There's some people that are total belly sleepers. And I would just say, listen, I don't think that is the most healthful, long-term way for you to sleep, try to adopt the different position. Sleeping on your side oftentimes is also brought along with that. The legs and knees coming up towards the chest, prolonged hip flexion. Listen, we're doing enough of that during the day. We don't need to do it right now. We don't need to do it like 10 hours or eight hours or something at night like that. You know, and it just is reinforcing, you know, and as we said to, you know, let's say you trained that day, you're just reinforcing muscle shortening overnight, you know, where the body is healing and trying to create some, you know, changes in your body. One of the reasons why I recommend stretching or static stretching prior to going to bed. Let people don't really want to do it at that point because it could take 10 minutes, five, 10 minutes, depending on how many muscles you have to stretch. But, you know, it's good to sort of try to establish this longer length temporarily prior to going into a state where you're going to be not moving and recovering and creating new changes in the muscles. So, you know, that kind of, I don't say it doesn't rule out the side sleeper. The side sleeper could be very, very helpful for somebody that has apnea or, you know, other other conditions. So again, it's not at all or nothing approach, but it's just something that you need to pay attention to. When you are on your back, like you were talking about in your feet, are wedged underneath a tight sheets at the end of the bed. And most of us, unless we consciously are pulling them up, don't prefer our beds to have really loose sheets at the end of the bed. It's hard to make a bed in the morning. Right. So it's like you're going to want to have, you know, them tight. Well, I'm saying, as you experienced, you know, you're going to have these, there's, you know, prolonged planar flexion that's going to likely lead to shorter, you know, calves over time, because you're lacking all that length for that long period of time that you could have if you just loosened up the sheets and allowed your feet to just, you know, hang out where they are. Now the resting position of the ankle is not endorseive flexion. It's going to be still in some planar flexion, but not being driven down and pulled down into that position. And I think what happens actually is people who get uncomfortable that way, even in their sleep, will shift away from that by turning either onto their stomach. So there's definitely an impact of the body position and sleep and figuring out the best way that you can still sleep, of course, and get your rest, but have a mindful eye towards what is doing to your body and choose the one that's least, you know, abrasive to your body is the way you should go. Terrific. And again, it's really helped me and, I'm a big believer based on good science out of Stanford and elsewhere, that, you know, as much as we can be nasal breathers in sleep, we probably should be. I don't know if you've done any content yet about taping the mouth shut with some medical tape, but you know, the, the benefits of nasal breathing and sleep are pretty tremendous, but it takes a little bit of training for people to do and the training is very simple. It's a little piece of medical tape. So again, a topic for another time. I'm glad you mentioned stretching. I was going to ask about stretching a little bit later, but let's talk about stretching. When's the best time to stretch for particular types of results? And maybe you could define some of the different types of stretching. So you just mentioned a little bit of, what do you call it, light stretching or, okay, I'm completely naive here on stretching. So let me just say I can think of stretching where I hold the stretch and really trying lengthen in air quotes folks. I don't want the PT's jumping all over. I don't know what it is, but nutrition and the PT's online are really, they've got pitch forks in both hands. I can. That's a recent, that's a recent evolution, I think for sure. And not the nutrition as much, but the PT's have become a little bit angry these days. I see. Well, I always say with feelings of powerlessness comes aggression. Remember that folks. So in any case, they're stretching where I'm trying to consciously lengthen again in air quotes. The muscle, I'm not yanking on the limb or bobbing up and down. Maybe you could define the different types of stretching for people. Maybe give us some rough guidelines about whether or not to do it cold or warm before training after training, etc. So yeah, there's obviously there's a lot of different types of stretching there. I could get even to, you know, PNF stretching and things that are a little bit more, you know, niche, but like in general, the two basic forms of stretching are active stretching and passive stretching and your, or, you know, your dynamic work and your passive stretching is done with the goal of trying to create an increase in the flexibility of the muscle. So whether you're actually increasing the length of that muscle, you know, more so what you're doing is increasing the resist, or decreasing the resistance of that muscle to want to stay at a certain level of flexibility. So when we can sort of take the breaks off and allow that muscle to allow us more range of motion, we're inherently increasing flexibility without necessarily having to increase the length of that muscle. That is usually done at a time far away from your workout because they have shown where this type of stretching done prior to an activity. And it could be like a structured activity like, like lifting or it could be a little bit less structured, like competing in a sport in a, in a spontaneous type way, that there is a period of recalibration that is needed after doing this because you're disrupting the length and relationship of the muscle that causes you to not necessarily be able to rely on these, I've talked about before stored motor angrioms in your mind in terms of this is the pattern for how I swing a golf club say, you know, and now introducing a little bit of flexibility or add flexibility or range because of the stretching idea before, it takes maybe a whole or two or three to match up again. Oh, this is the, this is what he's trying to do that golf swing thing that I remember it again. Like it's not remembering that every component, like I have to bend my right wrist back 10 degrees. And then I have to bend my elbow and I have to break like your body stores these patterns for motor efficiency. So, and when I have to start matching up that stored pattern with what's feeling new because of the increased range, I can impair performance. And again, it could happen even a gym workout where you're talking about your first second set, third set, where maybe the repercussions aren't as big because I'll just do a few extra sets. But in performance, if you screw up your first three rounds, you're playing on a PJ tour and you shoot you're six over after three or you're done. You know, so I think it matters there. As far as the dynamic, you know, so we so we relegate that as I mentioned, sort of towards the end of the day when it's not going to impact performance, but even maybe have the additional benefit of creating the the feeling of length or the increase or decrease in resistance to this length. At a time when I know my body is going to try to tend to heal and heal shorter, never longer, but heal shorter. So if I can introduce a little bit of that extra length or decrease resistance to that length, it's a better time to do it. So I think it promotes a better recovery. If I want to start to interrupt stretching later in the day, because I'm intrigued by this concept of heal shorter. Yeah. So part of the healing and recovery process means a shortening of the muscles. This is the tensing up and sleep. Could you elaborate just a bit on that and then sorry to break your flow, but then to continue? Just basically, you know, what's been shown is that when when the repair process muscular repair from, let's say, strength training during the day, the repair process usually results in a muscle that is slightly shorter rather than increase in length. You know, it's just a it's, you know, muscles prefer to sort of, you know, ratchet their way down into that that contraction and then, you know, maintain that that that more comfortable length tension relationship. So when you're sleeping, it tends to, you know, air on the side of shorter rather than longer. When ideally, we don't really want that. We want to maintain as much of that length. Because with more length, we actually have more leverage, right? That muscle has more leverage to contract. If it was all the way contracted, you know, you really can't obviously know generate much force in a muscle that's already maximally contracted. So I think we want to do something that we, whatever we can, whatever little weapons we have in our arsenal that could allow us to do this prior to sleep. And again, it's just making a conscious choice to do it a time of the day that makes a little bit more sense. Dynamic stretching is really not done for that purpose of trying to create any type of of feeling of act or increasing the potential length, as you said, of the muscle, but more so the readiness of the muscle to perform. And increasing, you know, exploring the ends of that range of motion in a more dynamic way. So you're not hanging out there and disrupting that length tension relationship was just sort of touching the ends of those barriers. So that when you feel movement again, it feels looser, it feels more ready. And obviously the same time warming up blood flow, all the benefits we get from just warming up in general. So like, you know, that's that's the series you've probably seen a bunch of times, but like, you know, legs swings and and you know butt kicks and you know lunge walking lunges and all type of touches toe touches all those kind of drills those active stretching drills or, you know, lunging with rotations of the upper body to try to get some of the thoracic spine involved. To those are the drills that people will do prior to training that are both excitatory in terms of just the nervous system, but also helpful for just the general warm up the body because the blood flow, but from a muscle readiness standpoint, not impairing the performance while the same time exploring the increased ranges. because as you know, the first toe touch you do is not as high as the last toe touch you do. For me, it doesn't even include the toe. Right. The shin touch. No touch attempt. Right. So like, you know, those are going to improve with each subsequent rep. And I think that's what people actually, like, when you can see those, those actual changes from rep one to rep seven, you just feel ready. You feel more alert and ready to go on your workout. So the dynamic type of stretching, and I mentioned earlier on, you know, like what I've had to do to sort of increase my warm up focus, you know, I think that's more of what I try to do these days. I try to be a little bit more alert to the fact that, you know, my body is not ready. When I was working with Antonio Brown, I remember like he would spend 20 minutes, 30 minutes on all dynamic work. And I've never seen anybody spend that long on their dynamic work, but like, he said he just didn't feel right and ready to go unless he did a lot of that. And I mean, you know, his dynamic stretching routine would be a workout for most everybody, you know, it's crazy how much he did. These pro athletes are amazing. And you've had the great fortune of working with and improving their, their abilities. But I can only imagine, because I also imagine he's pretty strong in the gym also. I mean, you know, and so it always amazes me the guys that make it to that level no matter what sport they do. They're so gifted in everything, you know, like David Wright used to make me laugh all the time with the meds because no matter what I ping pong, you know, like anything, he, because of his hand eye coordination, like anything, you know, great at jump rope. I remember he hadn't done a lot of jump rope. And I, I think jump rope is one of the best things you could do from a conditioning standpoint. It's actually fairly interesting. It's not just, you know, it's not too harsh on the joints, depending on, you know, even though it's a ballistic move. And he wasn't, I have to admit, I, you know, if you listen to this, he's going to want to kill me, but I was better at him than jump rope. When the only things I could do. And then I gave him about five days and he completely blew me out of the water to the point where I could never keep up with him anymore. He made it look effortless. It's like that's the, where the athlete in someone comes out no matter what they pick up, they're good at it. And I think that when you see guys like this in the gym, like their strength levels tend to be pretty damn good and their, and their abilities, their coordination, their, their everything just tends to sort of be good at that level, you know, and it sort of amazes me. And I think that's what I think is the most important thing to do. You know, out swim, Pat, ever, ever, he actually goes back and forth sometimes just to check up on me, which I appreciate. Thank you, Pat. I'm in the round yet. But the, but in addition to that, you know, we could play horse shoes and it's like this switch that just flips on. Like he's going to murder. And he's in a very nice guy, right? In general, they tend to be very nice, but, but the level of competitiveness is very fun. They're trying to beat themselves and I'm trying to beat you. That's right. I'm not even in the competition. You're not even there. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. Now it feels bad. That were worse. It's true. It's a remarkable thing. I'm glad you mentioned jump rope thing. I used to skip rope for warm up for boxing. Yeah. It was Tim or like three, three, three minute rounds or something like that. But I'm glad you brought it up because skipping rope is something that obviously has a cardiovascular component. There's the conditioning component. There's timing and it is kind of interesting, right? You can, it's frustrating when you don't get it. Especially on a whipsy on the air if you're using a proper rope. I'm just curious if you could just give us a quick skipping rope one on one. Do you like to see people jumping with both feet and toes? We'll link to a video if there was one and I missed it. Do you like to see people doing high knees? Do you like people basically like shuffling? You want to see people doing double dutch? What do you want to see people doing over time? All of the above, maybe not the double dutch, but all of the above. I mean, I think that that's the cool thing about it, right? Once we sort of master the skill because for all of us, that first jump with the two feet going together is a challenge because you just got a time. That rope, you got time, you jump. And then we get bored as we often do as humans. We get bored of what we can do and want to take on new challenges. So then it becomes one leg at a time where then it becomes side to side hops, right? All of those things are beneficial. I believe neurologically to enhancing the ability to do the skill as a whole, but also just because I'm such a believer in training in all three planes. So like just doing straight up and down versus now I can do frontal plane side to side motion and then I can even do small little twists or corkscrews. Recall them. It requires a different, you would know more about it better than I do. It requires different neurological patterns to be able to coordinate that because you're changing the orientation of your body in space. So it's not just that I'm changing the exercise, but I'm changing how my body interprets that exercise because what's happening to my body in space. So I love whatever people wind up doing, but I am amazed. There are people, I just started following this young woman on Instagram who is like, I'll give her a plug out of this, like Anna Skips or something. And she is ridiculous. Like I watch her and I'm like mesmerized at what she can do with the rope. You know, it's like, isn't extremely athletic endeavor. Believe it. When it gets to be at that level in the speed and the precision in the, you know, and, you know, I think one of the goals that you want to be able to have is to where you're feeling as if you're almost effortlessly dancing without a rope, like where you're just bouncing off of the ball of your foot. And it's an important skill to learn too, whether you go back to run or, you know, or even even jog, right? Just like, you know, more casual running. Learning how to land is so important. One of the drills that people should try is like try to jump on your heels. So just stand up, pull your toes off the ground, right? And just jump from your heels and land on your heels. You'll feel it in your jaw. You'll literally feel your jaw rattle when you land on your heels. There is no shock absorption capabilities through your heels. Meantime, a lot of people land on their heels a lot when they, when they run. And you're just, your body's not built to absorb the forces like the ball of your foot could. It's really built as a spring. And the, and the foot is up to me as a physical therapist. The foot has always been one of the most amazing. You know, you talk about having bad feet. I have flat feet. It looks like I got flippers if I took my, if I took my shoes off. Like I like one wearing scuba fins. There is no, there is no adaptability of that foot to the surface. You know, when you, when it's completely cave, then flatten like that, the job of the foot is to be adaptable. Well, there is, maybe there is some adaptability because it's so floppy. But at the same time, at some point, that critical junction when you're going to then step through and you need to be able to push off, the foot has to actually change is in the mid foot itself to become a rigid lever as they call it. You're going from a mobile adapter to a rigid lever that rigid lever literally locks up the mid-tarsle joint to become solid so that you can push off of it with leverage. If you lack that capability, all those stresses that are supposed to be born by the foot go up into the ankle, into the knee, into the hip, into the low back. So learning how to land and start to train your body to experience ground reaction forces the right way is so critical to all other function and all their disability up the kinetic chain. And jumping rope is like one of the best ways to learn how to do that. Great. I own a jump rope. I love doing it in the morning while I get sunlight in my eyes. It's actually a protocol I picked up from Tim Ferris who mentioned because, you know, listeners of my podcast, you know, I'm like a broken record with Get sunlight in your eyes even through cloud cover. It's just sets your sleep rhythms and your waking rhythms, the yada, on and on. But sometimes they'd be kind of boring for people and I want to get them off their phone. So jumping rope is also just a great way to wake up. So jumping rope can be a, the cardio workout, the 15 or 30 minutes. Definitely. I mean, there's sort of that hybrid that we were talking about before of like, no, you're not necessarily dropping down on the ground and doing burpees, but I just look at it as a more athletic endeavor because of the coordination involved than just simply walking or jogging. And you, it's not much of an equipment requirement. No, very minimal cost. You could even use a rope or or something if you, although we even instruct people that he used no rope and just pretend, you know, and just move the arms. Right. And just like zero cost. You're never going to hit the rope, which is good, but you know, at the same time. So you're never going to know if you're doing it wrong, but at least you can, you can move through the, and get the same benefits through the feet. I love it. I love it. I told myself before sitting down with you today that I wasn't going to focus on specific exercises because there's such a wealth of incredible content that you put out there that people could just put into YouTube or elsewhere and arrive at the proper way to do a chin or a dip or for whatever purpose. But there's one exercise and one particular motion that I'd like to discuss for a moment because I believe that learning about this cautionary note from you is one of the reasons that I've maintained steady training for 30 years with no major injury, knock on wood. And that's the upright row. You know, one thing that whether or not be weight trainer or not, we should show this podcast and you're censoring to be beeped this out or no. Oh, I do. Do you get beef about that? No, no. No, no. You know what? I, we always get beef in that, in any social media platform where we put out, but like, no, I guess I'm, I get some from it, but I'm, I'm, I'm fully prepared to defend myself. So the, but here's the reason for asking about this. I never really cared much for upright rows. It's not a joke. exercise I tend to do. But one thing that's apparent in all my colleagues in every child I see and every adult I see is that almost everybody is an inward rotation now. So folks think if you stay, I think I learned this from you also if you stand up straight and then you just point your thumbs out like a thumbs up but you're just pointing your hands are down, you're pointing your thumbs straight out. Ideally they would go straight out. Most people the thumbs are going to be pointing toward one another because most people are starting to look somewhere between a non-human primate and a melted candle. Bent at the hips etc. from too much sitting. We're all sitting we're an inward rotation but I learned from you that the upright road compromises some important aspects of our shoulder mechanics and can be actually a sort of a dangerous movement in some ways. I'm sure there's a safe way for people to do it but so I've always made it a point now on the basis of this advice to a not do upright rows but I wasn't doing them before but to really strive for external rotation on things like bench dips on a number of different things. Whenever I can I try and go into external rotation and provide you know without looking like an idiot walking out with my palms facing outward. Please tell us about internal external rotation. The upright row is one aspect of that but why this is so important not just for weight training but as it terms of posture and mechanics and not looking like a melted candle or partially melted candle. I'm happy to talk about it because I love the shoulder as a joint. I think PT's tend to fall in love with certain areas and the shoulder is one of the cool areas for me. It's like the foot is but like the shoulder has the most mobility in the body of any joint but it's also got the least stability right there's always that trade off of mobility and stability. So your stability comes from you know certain muscle groups and one of the ones that the only muscle group that actually externally rotates the shoulder is going to be the rotator cuff okay and unless you are devoted to training through external rotation and exercises that are going to externally rotate the shoulder you're not training that function and it's so easy for us in everyday life especially those that aren't training to not ever really undergo any of those stresses that could be beneficial to counteracting what happens freely and naturally which is internal rotation. So when you think about the imbalance created just by nature and how we live our lives internal rotation far far far outweighs external rotation so you need to address it and the reason why you need to address is because you need to normalize those biomechanics of the shoulder if you want their long-term health and one of the functions of the shoulder is to raise our arm up over our head and with we do that from an internally rotated position we're going to have a higher likelihood of creating stress inside that joint. Funny thing is I talked about before my PT brethren can be somewhat angry these days I don't know what happened but fairly angry you know they want to they want to discredit the existence of something like shoulder impingement which I don't know how I mean certain study look at you both we all read studies and we we studies will say one thing one day potentially conflict entirely in a different direction some studies will point to the non-existence of a of a of a shoulder impingement meanwhile we have thankfully digital motion x-rays that will literally show the impingement occur in real time in real function and that's one of the limitations I'm off on a tangent here but like those types of x-rays are that type of flora's could be that we have nowadays like gives us such insight that we never have before because we're taking static x-rays and someone laying down on a table you know when I want to see what happens when he actually raised my arm up over my head in function and they in the tools now exist to do that we see that the problems occurring because in order to get normal mechanics and free up the joint maximally inside you need to externally rotate as you raise the arm up so if your muscles aren't firing and they're not necessarily as strong as the internal rotation bias that pulls them in you're asking for trouble every time you do that well this exercise is literally putting you in elevation and internal rotation and if you were to walk into a PT office and someone said I think he's got impingement will you diagnose him there's a test calls a Hawkins Kennedy test and I would put you in the position I know we're not visible at this point through the podcast but I'll put you in this position here where I have your arm elevated and your hand pretty much under your chin pushing downward on that to create that internal shoulder rotation pretty much the exact position that we're in when we're holding a bar in an upright row some will say we'll just don't go so high go only up to the level of the chest but you're still in this internally rotated position the thing that I think frustrates me the most about the exercise is that I have an alternative and the alternative does the same thing in terms of helping the muscles grow by simply fixing the biomechanics to the exercise but just allowing the hands to go higher than the elbows so instead of the elbows being higher than the hand which drives you into inter rotation if the elbow is lower than the hand the hand being higher here I'm an external rotation and I could do something called a high pull and still get the same abduction of the arm and still get the same benefits of the shoulders the delts and the traps without having to undergo any of the stresses that have come from the somewhat awkward movement of an upright row and for those listening we'll put a link to a short clip of what this looks like but basically what Jeff is doing and tell me if I'm describing this incorrectly or correctly Jeff is taking your two thumbs and pointing behind you and you know so elbows up kind of near the chin and pointing behind you like go ahead of that way like somebody directing the airplane like come back come back back yeah I forget what they call that I think it's called semaphoren is the action of like where they direct the planes or something the flags or whatever someone of course tell me I'm wrong about that too which is why I say these things because I like being told what the correct answer is in any case so this replaces the upright row and probably does a number of other important things as well yeah well again I listen I when I without naming names or programs or anything that when I got involved and when I got involved in in athlete next and I first started you know my online presence there was a very very very popular program that was out there that I just for fun I wanted to as a PT this is the nerdy things we do but I wanted to evaluate the the workout structure and I went and I looked at every rep over a course of a week and there was something like you know 890 repetitions or something done and zero of them were dedicated external rotation of the shoulder so if you think about it me get it was a very popular program that was done by a lot of people there is no there was no focus at all no dedicated focus towards creating a balance to an action that is so predominant and remember it's not just because we sit with that posture but the fact that our chest can internally rotate our lats can internally rotate there's like muscle other big muscles that participate in things that we do every day that will further internally rotate the shoulder the only weapons we have for external rotation are those little rotator cuff muscles and three of them actually three of the four and the job is to sort of actively and consciously train them through really the boring exercises right like you've seen them with the band you you you anchor a band to a pole you stand with the band in the opposite hand so if it's anchored to the pole on my left side I've got the band on my right side and you see people where they kind of rotate their hand towards the back again kind of what you're saying but at a lower elevation taking the back of my hand to trying to point it to somebody behind me well you know that that is that is one of the ways to train the muscle it's just of one function of the shoulder external rotation of the shoulder and you need to do it and again it's not that if somebody was doing more external rotation work could they absorb the upright row better probably because as they elevated the arm they probably have a little bit more of a contribution from the rotator cuff to what one of the functions is to centralize the head of the humorous inside of the glenoid you know the capsule so as it rises up it stays central as opposed to migrating up because the deltoid likes to pull up so if the rotator cuff has some ability to counter act the upward pull of the delt then it can maintain a more healthy relationship with overhead movement so just realizing that that that functions only gained through doing these exercises you know we we would probably dedicate more time there but the rotate the upright row might be better absorbed by that person because they have a little bit more strain but again why because if you have an exercise that does the same thing for what you're trying to do musculally to build the muscles that it affects why wouldn't you just do it where you can still see actually actually pick up more repetitions of external rotation you know so you're getting none of the harm all the benefits I see zero reason to ever do the upright row and people will argue this is the way they argue that I've done this for 30 years and I've never hurt myself and I always say yeah yeah like I listen the goal is to not hurt yourself ever so even if you it's sort of like you know the championship game you know you might play the game of your life but if you lose you lost and when you get into the end of the you know the record books you're still lost so even if you had the game your life you lost I don't care if you do it for 30 years no pain you still doing it and there's no pain I'm giving you an option that's gonna give you the same results in the exercise that you're seeking that's why you're doing the exercise without the the possibility of having the you know the the bad outcome come from it so you know I get a little bit you know defensive of the of the of the move but I feel like it's like why would you do that you know no it makes it makes it's being able to train for a long period of time and feel good you know know I I'm proud to say it's And I don't have the kind of genetics where we don't have a lot of impressive athletes in our family tree or anything. There's some fit individuals, some less fit individuals, but I really believe it's about putting in the work consistently over time. And the more often you can wake up, not in pain, the better. And so, I think that being an external rotation as often as possible is good. This is actually a good friend who's a yoga teacher told me, this is also a problem with the yogis, a lot of all the downward dog stuff. For those listening, you can think of inward rotation as thumbs down. Just like thumbs down, inward rotation isn't bad, but less thumbs down, more thumbs up as external rotation. So for those just listening, maybe that gives a visual, the more exercise you can do in external rotation, the better it seems on average. I'd love to chat with you just a little bit more about biomechanics. And this is a personal thing that, again, your contact really helped solve for me. One is, I thought I had lower back pain, but I had sciatica. So badly that on a few trips, I worked trips years ago when I was doing a lot more international travel. I mean, it was hard to stand up sometimes. I mean, like excruciating pain. I didn't want to take medication. I wanted to do back surgery. In the end, it turns out it wasn't a back injury at all. And one of the things that helped fix it was this, just learning about this thing called the medial glute. And you had a video that said, "Fixed back pain." And then you quite accurately say that some back pain isn't really about the back at all. And had me do an exercise or allowed me to try and exercise where I lay on my side. And essentially pointing my toe down, the top toe down, almost like pointing a toe down. And then would slowly lift the leg up while pointing the toe down. Maybe I got it, you're correct, sure. And then holding that, and there's a muscle that sort of sits at the top of the glute. It kind of peaks out every once in a while. You can feel it there with your thumb, which is I think you had push back on it a bit, creating that mind muscle link again. And there with proprioception, the actual feeling of a muscle literally with a limb, we know, based on the neural circuits for movement, that enhances the contractual ability of a muscle. So like if you touch your bicep, you literally can contract it more strongly. And this makes total sense, based on neuro muscular physiology. So having to do that repeatedly, and I started doing that in my hotel room, and the pain started to disappear. And then it came back again in the afternoon, so I did it again in the afternoon. So this is something I did for three or four days, and lo and behold, a back pain's gone. I handed this off to my father, because he liked me, has a slightly lower right shoulder. I think our gate is probably thrown off by this as probably genetic. Who knows? He handed it off to somebody, you know, it turns out that we don't suffer from back pain. And in fact, now I don't suffer from rain pain, because I was doing this exercise, which I think is helping my my medial glute. Two reasons why I raised this. One, I know a lot of guys who have this right side sciatica, 'cause people to keep the wallet there is one idea or left side sciatica, there are a lot of people male and female who think they have back pain when they don't actually have back pain. And the other thing is that, is a general question about biomechanics or statement about biomechanics. I had of a feeling that a lot of what people think is back pain or knee pain or neck pain or headache or shoulder pain is actually the consequence of something that's happening above or below that side of pain. And this is a whole landscape of stuff related to PT and recovery and pain management. But maybe you just educate us a bit on this and why this works, what is the medial glute? Why did it make my so-called back pain disappear? And how should people think about pain? And I'd like to use this as a way to get into a little bit deeper discussion about pain and recovery. - Sure, so this is definitely like a big cornucopia PT stuff here, and this is what I love. So first of all, that video, that is my proudest video that I have. And the reason being is that it's helped so many people. Like we get comments on that video every day. I don't even know how many of you just got an out 30 some of them on a million or there's a whole lot. - We will link to it. - Yeah, there's a lot of views. - And quite honestly, it was a little bit of an afterthought video in terms of its origin. I think that that day maybe Jesse was having some problems or something like that, a little bit of low back pain. And I showed him and it helped right away. And I was like, well, we can make a video on it 'cause this will help people, not everybody. If you have a real disc problem, it's not gonna help because you're not changing the structural problem that's there. But as you said, a lot of people don't. And even disc issues, a lot of them are nonoperative. So you would wanna try these things first. As far as what you're sort of experienced, sometimes that glute media is really tightened down and that's again from poor biomechanics up and down the canaic chain. It can actually press on the sciatic nerve and give you what they call pseudosciaticia, where it's not like you're making it up. It's not like you're not feeling that pain over that same sciatic distribution, but it's not caused from a disc, it's not caused from something mechanical. There, it's caused by the fact that this glute medias has posturally become a problem for you or weak because you don't train it and you need to address it. So unlike any other muscle in the body, there are common trigger points in common areas where the muscle will become tightened or painful or spasmed. And you can basically apply pressure to these areas to and then sort of thread that muscle through the pressure by pushing down through there and then contract in the muscle, which is why you go through that action of, I think we call it toe stabber, but like stabbing down and lifting up and stabbing down and lifting up, taking that glute medias through its function. So there's basically kind of working underneath the downward pressure of the finger. And that tends to help you to almost need out what might be that trigger point. And that's why people can see immediate relief there because once the trigger point lets go, it feels like, and that's what the comments are in that video, like my god, I couldn't walk, I've been on my hotel floor, I did this and I'm fixed. And meanwhile, then it could come back because your body is like, well, I like being more like this, this is how I've been ingrained to be. So it might come back, but then when you do another round of it and another round of it, and then finally it starts to say, all right, I'm not gonna do that anymore. Kind of eases up and you can relieve yourself of those trigger points. You can do that up and down the back. There's other people that get that and that sort of inside their shoulder blade, that same type of cramping in another area. But once that takes place, well, then the job that I think people have is become educated that the glute medias is different than the glute maximus. Their functions are different. You have to work on not just extending the hip but also abduction of the hip, external rotation of the hip. Same thing is in the shoulder. And this actually segues nicely into the whole concept you were talking about. The body is like a mirror image. The hip is like the shoulder, right? The ankle is the wrist, the foot is the hand. Like they're, they're, they're, the knee is the elbow, they're two hinge joints. They function that way. Well, with the shoulder, you've got that mobility that comes from having all that freedom of motion, but the stability is lacking. Well, the same thing with the hip. Like you've got mobility, but if you don't fully stabilize it by training all the muscles of the hip, and if you don't strengthen the external rotation of the hip, then you've, you're gonna have issues. Like it's that biomechanically gonna work the same way. If you think of the body as a series of, you know, bands, you know, pulling in different directions at different levels of tension, you know, you're being pulled into one direction or the other just by the balance of tension from one weak area to one dominantly tight area. And you need to make sure that you can sort of balance this out in order to eliminate some of the adaptations and compensations that happen. So what I say when we look at sort of the, the, the, the body as a whole, most often wherever you're feeling the pain is absolutely not to blame. There's not blame. It is somewhere above or below as you hint to that. You know, you're talking about the, the knee is my favorite example of it. Whenever you have knee pain, tele-10 and I this, which I, I have forever, I've had a, you know, bad bad case of the tele-10 and I this where squatting is very difficult for me. It's not the knee, the knee is, the knee is literally a hinge joint that, you know, there's a minor rotation in capabilities in the knee, but it's a hinge joint. And it's being impacted by the hip and the ankle and in the foot. As I said before, how critical the foot is, if you thought of the knee being the, like the middle of a train track where the femur down your thigh and your shin down below your knee were the train track, what would happen if the foot collapses at the bottom? All of a sudden that train track on the bottom gets torched just a little bit. Well, who's going to feel that the most? The area where it's torquing, which is at the knee. So the stresses are going to be felt there. Meanwhile, the problems with the foot or the problem is the ankle. People that are chronic ankle sprainers, you are almost always going to wind up having back pain because the ankle sprain causes weakness and mal adaptations in the ankle that then gets connected through the chain. Because now once I distort the ankle and the shin, now the knee is trying to maintain its ability to hinge smoothly. So it torques on the femur to do that. Well, the femur's now inside the hip joint, pulling on the pelvis. And the pelvis is at a whack. So it's really, it's really as fascinating. Like it's one of my favorite things about how the body works is like how interconnected it is and how one little thing somewhere causes repercussions somewhere else. And the easiest way to find out what your problem is is to say, okay, I know where my symptom is, but I got to find someone who can help me find the source somewhere else because it is going to be usually either above or below. Mostly usually below because it usually translates up to kinetic chain, but usually it's going to be below where the real source is. So people with low back pain usually have hip issues. This is tightness, flexibility issues. It's almost always below. When you get into really high performance athletics though, it almost works the other way. Like where we have pictures who can't, I mean, I'm always fascinated by guys that have Tommy John issues, you know, in their elbow, right, pictures. Like if you can't externally rotate the shoulder that we talked about again, the ability to get your shoulder back in external rotation, well, your arm has to get to a certain position for release of the baseball. If it can't get there because you can't externally rotate the shoulder to get there, then the elbow has to sort of torque more in order to allow the arm to get back further. And it will try to take some of that motion from a joint that's not really, again, another hint of the hinge joint really capable of doing that. So it starts to stress that media elbow ligament to get a little bit further back because the shoulder is not working. And that just ultimately places stride in the elbow. So when you see a guy that has pain that floats around, a picture that floats around their arm, all that is is sort of this balance of compensation. Once his shoulder elbow starts hurting, then he can't do the range from the elbow. So he tries to dig a little bit further back into external rotation and then the rotator cuff gets inflamed. And then he feels that's inflamed. So by the way, during that time period, it takes some of the strain off the elbow so the elbow feels better. Then he decides, okay, now I got the extra rotation, but I'm getting too much of that. So now I start straining the elbow again and it keeps going through this cycle. So your body is very smart and it's going to compensate every single time. It's going to find the compensation, but there's no guarantee that that compensation doesn't leave you with a whole host of other issues. Yeah, it's fascinating. And another lifetime I would have gone and been a PT, although it sounds like the community of among PT's online. I don't know what to listen. We're the people, but it's like, yeah, scientists and neuroscientists can get into pretty intense battles. And coming from the academic community, the etiquette is so different online because I would say, I think in person, people would probably behave a bit differently. So your hand and say hello. Yeah, you say your hand and say hello. And there's also, look, I'll just be very direct about this. There are a lot of people online for whom their only content is pointing out the misunderstandings or alleged flaws of other people. It's like that bulk of their identities, which to me is sort of a sad existence, but there's always more to gain by thinking about what's possible and what's new and what's good, but teach their own demise or win. I mean, questioning what's out there is healthy. Sure. Normal is great. It actually spars conversation. But as you said, some people's existence is solely to find things to nag about and not actually with the goal of being too advanced, I think, but rather just to. Yeah. All the science being skeptical, but not cynical is encouraged. But I would say that the longer that somebody's in a career path, it's certainly in science or medicine. And they realize how hard it is to do various studies. Once they publish a few studies, generally, they sort of get a better understanding of how the various things are done. In any case, another, along the lines of pain and pain relief and misunderstandings about the origins of pain in the body, one of the great tools that I picked up from your content, which is benefit. I know a huge number of people is, I think I used to hold weights sometimes in the tips of my fingers as opposed to in the meat of the palm of my hands. And I had elbow pain. And I always thought that I felt it most on tricep exercises and pushing exercises. And I thought I was doing those exercises wrong. Turns out, toward the end of my pull ups or my bicep work, I was letting the weight or the bar drift into my fingertips. And the mere shift to making sure that my knuckles were well over the bar or that the weight was really in the meat of my palms has completely ameliorated that for reasons that you point out. And maybe you could just share with us why that is. You have this kind of finger pull exercise. Usually when someone says pull my finger, it's like a bad middle school or elementary school joke. But you're, this is what they push your finger. Yeah, right. Yeah, this is fascinating. This is because it just shows again how intricate the body is and how responsive or over-responsive it can be to something so little. And what you're talking about is that when you grip a bar, whether it be through a curl or whether it be through, and this is mostly pulling exercises because the tendency for the bar is going to be to fall out of your hand, not like with a pushing exercise where it's kind of you're pushing your hand into the bar. So on a bench press say that bar can drift just by gravity, doing its thing or fatigue of the hand grip strength, can start to drift further away towards the distal digits, right, through those last couple knuckles that we have on our hands. And though our hand can still hold it there, the muscles are not equipped to handle those types of loads. And that can start at a very, I'm not going to say light, but like, you know, it could start at, you know, dumbbell weight, you know, 40 pounds, 30 pounds, you know, even 25 pounds or something depending upon the overall strength levels. But then when you start to apply it to something like your body weight with a chin up, right, because that's natural for the bar to somewhat kind of float down towards your fingertips. And it actually is a little bit easier to perform the exercise with that sort of like false grip, little hook grip at the end of it because you're not going to engage the forearms into the exercise. You're not going to start pulling down. But at the same time, while it could help you to perform them better by getting the back more activated, if you have weakness in these muscles, because it's not a thing that happens to ever. It is not one of those upright row type things where I think this is happening to everybody. This is happening to people that have these inherent weaknesses in this, in this, in this muscles. You or haven't done enough of the gripping in the fore in the meat of the hand, you know, for long enough. But it starts to put that stress on these muscles that are ill-equipped to do this and to handle this. And it starts to, it's particularly on that fourth finger, you know, which is part of the muscle we call the FDS, the flexured digitorum, that is just too much for the handle. And that comes all the way down and meets right at the medial elbow, right on that spot that you can say feels like someone's niphing you right in the middle in that medial elbow. And medial epiconvillitis or they call it golfer's elbow is something that a lot of us deal with in the gym. It's one of the most common inflammatory conditions people get from the gym and it all comes from this positioning of the dumbbell or barbell or hand on a pull up bar over time. So the easiest thing to do is just grip deeper so that what you're doing is you're using, you know, more leverage from the palm to encapsulate the bar or the dumbbell or whatever. And you're not putting that pressure really distantly right on that last digit because that's where that FDS muscle is most strained. So you're just almost eliminating that from the equation. And it's one of those exercises that the load can exceed its capacity pretty quickly. So that like, you know, maybe it's only capable of handling 30 pounds and then when you're doing a chin up and it goes and it drifts so far that it's now you know, let's say you're a 200 pound guy, you've got let's say a hundred pounds through one arm and a hundred pounds, this is simple, simplify math that obviously is offset by other muscles, but 100 pounds to one arm, 100 pounds to the other one, 100 pounds off of a muscle that can handle 30. It's not going to take many repetitions to strain it and you're going to feel that maybe by the time that sets over or certainly by the time that workouts over or the next day you wake up and you've got that notable stabbing pain. Whenever someone feels that the best thing would be to determine, okay, what exercise is by doing that we're pulling and where the bar could have drifted deeper. And further from the meat of my palm into my fingers and figure out a way that deep in that grip when that happens, though, the best thing to do with most of these inflammatory conditions is not do any of that stuff for a little while, not ever just for a little while. There's always things that you can do around it. I'm not saying ever do I say like don't go to the gym or don't find something you can do, but I'm saying that particular exercise that you feel the pain on while you're doing it, never a smart idea to do that exercise when it's inflamed. If you are doing exercise and it hurts, you probably shouldn't do the exercise because another reason for the variability of exercises, there's so many other options that you can do that will train similar muscles or even the same motion and not cause that stress. So I mean a cable curl would be much easier to do that on than let's say a chin up where you don't have the control over the weight like you do by moving a pin on a stack. So I think that that is a common thing that people find and the best thing to do is just figure out how deep are you gripping that bar and you're going to find that, oh my God, I didn't realize that because it was just even though you might start a step in a good position and it drifts away as you go. Yeah, I think that's what was happening to me and I'm very conscious of this now. Again, for me, it's completely, I haven't had this elbow pain at all. That's great. You know, very fortunate. So again, a dead of gratitude to you. Never, I thought there's some wrong with my elbow, basically. And I thought it maybe was tennis elbow. I don't even play tennis. And so there you go. Other aspects of recovery and variables for recovery, I think you and I both put out content about the use of cold and I think we can see. summarized it by saying, yeah, it does seem like cold water, immersion immediately after hypertrophic strength workouts might be a problem, but a cold shower is probably not a problem. What about heat? Do you personally use heat in cold? Sauna's hot, you know, hot baths, hot compresses, and by you, I mean, you personally and athletes that you coach or people that you coach. What are your thoughts on the use of heat and or cold? Well, I think, you know, it might just be an inherited practice from the days of, you know, trainers of, you know, since Babe Ruth, you know, but we, in baseball, we used a lot of cold following performance, you know, just because the idea would be there, there is some, especially pictures, you know, there is some inflammation that is abnormal. You know, the arm is not really designed to do what they do, especially at the, at the speed that they move it and everything else. So we would use, you know, ice as a pretty standard practice after that. But not not a lot of heat, you know, and I'm going to use a lot of heat. And of course, from the recovery or the healing aspect, that actually becomes rather personal preference they've found now, after let's say the first 12 to 24 hours, you know, where you're really trying to control inflammation of what you know might be an injury. But then it can kind of shift the personal preference because the heat can bring blood to the area also. And then the, you know, the, the cold has its sort of anti-inflammatory effects. So like, there's a balance between which one's working better for you. So there's really no standard anymore for heat or cold in that way. But from a standpoint of like post workout, healthy status, I haven't used much heat or cold in terms of what we do. You know, we cover the topic of the cold showers and to try to dispel the myth of the, you know, even people saying that there's giant testosterone releases and, you know, all kinds of stuff that, you know, listen, we hear all kinds of things because people want like, I think the idea of just turning the water cold and being in it for 30 seconds and then all of a sudden magically growing three times your size isn't treating a lot of people. And that's why they ask these questions because they're like, that would be a hell of a lot easier than going to the gym and training hard. But like, I'm always fascinated by some of the stuff that you talk about. In fact, we started to talk about some of the stuff in terms of cooling and what it can do on performance. And that was, you know, like, there's some untapped territory there that I think you're, you're finding out about. Yeah, well, we fun would be to bring the cool myth technology from Stanford. This is Craig Heller, my colleague, Craig Heller's lab at Stanford. It's done really important and amazing work in this area. But then it moved on to some other things. He's also working on Down syndrome and he works on a number of other really important topics that scientists often do. But I have access to this cool myth technology. No relationship to the company, by the way, would love to come out to your facility and we can do the blind type studies. Like a blue blocker test. Exactly. Exactly. And see how that goes in with somebody advanced as advanced trained as you. That's probably the best thing to do. So content for the future. Yeah, I think heat and cold are kind of staples in the PT world and I does seem like people use them slightly differently, but they are kind of the macro nutrients of recovery there along with sleep. I do have a question about precision of record keeping. Do you keep a training journal? Do you recommend people keep training journals? Are you neuratically fixed to cadence of movement? Are you looking at the, do you have a buzzer going off for night when it's 90 seconds rest? Is it 90 seconds rest? I confess I have my slow workouts and my faster workouts and they scale with whether I'm training heavier with longer rest or whether or not maybe midway through a workout. I'll shift over to doing higher repetition and lower rest. This is kind of my crude way of keeping time, but I'm not, you know, will be just to kind of watch the clock, but I'm not neuratically fixed to the buzzer. Nor am I on social media during my workouts, which is actually a way to really improve workouts is to just not be on social media. Yeah, I can't claim that I'm not guilty of that. Sometimes I am on social media, but sometimes I'm trying to post something. Well, that's different. It's your profession. But I mean, I, I, I'm not, I'm not necessarily chained to some sort of protocol in terms of how I do. I think by this point, I've been doing this a long time and not only is it something that I've done for a long time, but it's a passion of mine. Something I really enjoy. So I probably inherently have the ability to stick to these, these guidelines in terms of rest time to know what I lifted, you know, even six months ago on a lift and, and, and how it felt without journaling it. But I recognize the value it has to a lot of people. It goes back to that whole, my muscle connection idea that we talked about in the beginning. Like there's a lack of awareness for all aspects of training, especially maybe isn't like your interest level. And we're talking you and I from a position of interest. Like this is what we do. We, we enjoy just how our bodies work and understanding how they work. Some people don't care. They just want the end result. But journaling and keeping track of that raises awareness to where like, oh my god, I have been on, you know, Instagram for the last seven minutes. And I was supposed to be back at my next set in 90 seconds. Like there is a training effect of that. You know, like you, you know, if you're training for metabolic overload, you've blown that opportunity because you have, you know, your rest time was very, was very important to that protocol working as it should. If you were training for strength, maybe the extra few minutes doesn't matter so much when you get back on the bar. You might find, I mean, you might find that it's a better response for your body to rest even longer than you've been told three, four minutes, five minutes. And so that way, maybe it helps. But I think that anything you can do to increase your awareness of your performance and also give yourself some objective goal. Whenever we have an objective goal, it's a lot easier to actually obtain it. When you're just there to get a pump and you're just there to lift how you feel that day, you have to be incredibly disciplined in all other aspects of your workout in order to make that effective. You know, and I've done that too. I've actually been able to do that too. But again, the level of repetitions I've accumulated over the course of my life and the amount that I read about this stuff. And I think I'm able to get away with that. But I think more often than not, what I'm doing is not journaling. But journaling in my head, exactly what I think people should be doing and that is getting a specific effect from what you're trying to do. It's not so haphazard. You know, you want to get a specific effect just like any other experiment that you're doing. You're doing an experiment on your own body with your own ways, which to me is one of the most empowering things someone can ever do when they get bitten by the bug for exercising in training. And I like to use word training in the rather than exercise because there's a purpose behind it. But when they get bitten by that training bug and they start to see actual changes and results, you know, empowering that is because we can't we can't really control that many things in our life. Unfortunately. And so there's some things that happen to us that we really wish never happen. And those are not something that we can do anything about. But this is one thing that we can do our best to we can't avoid disease entirely. We can't predict when we're going to die. We can't you know, do those things. But we can certainly decide to show up into the gym that day and get a workout in or go for a run or do something. And by doing that, you're giving yourself, I think a better chance of a higher quality of life. So anything you can do to increase your awareness of it and keep you on track with that is like I'm endorsing fully. Couldn't agree more. I could not agree more. The there's a topic. It's sort of a dreaded topic. But I think it's an important one. And that's the topic of nutrition. And rather than again, to specific meal programs, which would, you know, take take hours and probably wouldn't even manage to scratch the surface even with hours. We could talk about principles around nutrition. What are sort of the themes that you think people should keep in mind when thinking about how to eat generally and pre training and post training are too particularly sensitive times for most or times that people want to know a lot about. You know, what should they before training or can they train fastage? What should they eat afterwards? But just in general, what do you think are some some axioms of nutrition that that really hold? And I ask this because not because there's a lot of debate about this, but because you've been around this space a long time. And you've seen what works for you obviously, but for other people too. What tends to work? What tends not to work? And how should we think about nutrition? I mean, look, you've touched on it a bit, but like, you know, nutrition can be a touchy subject for people. And I understand where that comes from. I've talked about before the there's a dogmatic tendency to nutrition. And there's a reason for it because it's an area that people struggle with. More than anything else. And the reason why people struggle with nutrition is because the commitment is extremely high. You know, you could start a workout program and actually get to the gym three to five times a week. That's five hours based on how you and I were discussing it before. Well, what about the other 23 hours of each of those days? There's opportunity to eat incorrectly or unhealthily every one of those hours. People wake up in the middle of the night to go eat. You know, like there are there are things that you can do that can cause amazing amounts of damage to your longevity in the 23 hours. Not the one hour, the 23 hours. So when people finally figure out a way to make that work for them, it's very passionate. And I understand their passion. I do, like, I put out. my approach. My approach is like, I've always been sort of a low sugar, lower fat guy. I made the mistake of going no fat years ago and I paid for it. I was like in college. And you know, back in the day, we were the same age, you know, we read all the magazines and that was what we have in our internet then. So we were reading magazines and the recommended path was to go low fat. It helps you to become hypochaloric very easily because the density of the calories, you know, in a gram of fat versus a gram of carbohydrates or protein is nine versus four for the carbs and protein. So if you're cutting out grams of fat on a daily basis, you're quickly cutting out calories that allows you to get leaner. Well, of course, as everything, I mean, I if little is good, then a lot is better. So I would cut all of them out or almost all of them. And at the age of 22, 21, I'm like standing at a stop at a bit university, Connecticut waiting for the tram to come and bring me to campus. And I couldn't even open my eyes because the light was blinding to me. It was normal sunlight. It was blinding to me. The photosensitivity I had, you know, learning later on after a few more courses that I took there in biology, you know, how, how, you know, necessary fat was for the development of healthy, you know, cells. I realized what was going on. Then nothing made other stuff. Skin was bad, hair was fallen out, all kinds of stuff. So I think that the approach to decreasing fat so it's not excessive, you know, because again, how calorically dense it could be in having lower sugar. I don't, I'm a firm believer in sugar is really pretty toxic. And something that we would all do better getting rid of a lot of it. That is the best approach for, I believe again, in my opinion, personally for the overall big picture because though the people can take exclusionary approaches to nutrition and taking carbs out or, you know, eating only fats and proteins or again, I'm not saying it doesn't work for you. And if it's the first thing that actually allowed you to gain control of your nutrition to the point where you actually saw results and got to a healthier weight, then I always say then do it, then do it. But just make sure something you can do forever and doesn't bring upon other repercussions. But I think that non-exclusionary approaches to diets are the most sustainable for the rest of your life. And when I, and all I'm interested in from an nutrition standpoint is something that's sustainable. So when I preach what I preach, I've been doing this since I was 15, 14, you know, people say like, how's he get so ripped? How's he get? I have been doing this for four, since for how many years, 30, 30 years, 30 years, 30 years. Yeah, 30 years, you know, and in the beginning, it was a slow shift I had to make where I was like, I went from the worst diet in the whole world. I was even when I was 14 years old, my breakfast was, I talked about this many times, but like, animals, I would eat animals, you know, donuts and those long road. Yeah, yeah. And I even took the whole out of the donut. Yeah. The crumb, the crumb, exactly. Why would you, why would you delete the middle of the donut? The crumb, the crumb donut there. I would eat donuts. I can taste it in my, I don't like sugar very much, but over the years, I've lost my appetite for sugar. Right. But as you talk about the end of the end of the day, I can literally smell and taste the frosting. And to me now it's disgusting, but back then it might have been appetizing. You would probably have like really good information on this, but like, my ability to actually remember, they've said smell is very evoking of memories. Yeah. So there's a smell is unlike the other senses because there's a direct line literally from our sense of smell to the memory centers of the brain. It doesn't have to go through any intermediate station. Okay. So, you know, my ability to actually recall exact taste of all the stuff that used to love is enough to satisfy me to not engage in those things now. It's crazy that is. I like, I almost get my fill through remembering because of these strong senses of memory of what it was like. It's odd. I used to taste so good. Okay. That's good. I had it. Fantastic. Yeah. Well, that's, that's, we know the neuromodulator there. That's dopamine. Your ability to get the dopamine release from the thought of something. Most people, when they get that dopamine release, it causes a triggering of the desire for more. Right. People think of dopamine as pleasure. Dopamine that there's a book, great book called The Molecule of More. I didn't write the book unfortunately, but someone else did. And it's a great book. And it's really about how dopamine, we think it's about pleasure, but it establishes gravy. So, you're able to satisfy that. And it's a very adaptive thing for you because you are indeed very lean. Yeah. And that's one of your kind of hallmark things. And, you know, as a professional who does this in the public space, that's important. You know, when people are out there talking about getting lean and I look at them and you're like, you know, maybe you need to do the protocols. It's a huge advantage. But yeah, I think that it sounds like you cultivated practices around avoiding certain things. Yes. Yeah. I mean, but not, you know, avoiding certain things that I think are easily avoided if you realize that there, I mean, I think that we have enough science and literature out there to prove that the altered path is a better path. You know, I mean, like, I feel like if I if I was just doing it because I wanted to be lean, I'm not quite sure it would have held for so long. And we have a guest that whose episode has been recorded for this podcast who runs an eating disorder clinic at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School studies binge eating disorders and aurexia OCD. And he will go on record and obesity. And he will go on record saying that these very highly palatable processed high sugar foods of the sort that we're talking about, donuts and so forth, that they are actually dangerous, right? That there are elements of the way that they engage neural circuitry. He's a neurosurgeon that reshaped the brain in dangerous ways. And those are his words. And I thank animals. Yeah, he's not just animals. I mean, I think I'm not just animals, right? Yeah, they're coming out with what with donuts. They can't catch us. In any case. So in terms of what you do eat, how do you structure that? In terms of when you look down at a plate, you've done these, describe this before. But I think it's just a beautifully simple description because I think a lot of people don't want to do calorie counting and all this. And how should people think about what to eat? So yeah, I have what I call plate method. And it's just simple because it works for me. And again, if you're struggling with real eating issues, these mechanisms become admittedly less effective because you're having maybe you have emotionally triggered eating and you can't stop at one plate. I mean, that you can get the plate right, but if the portions are out of control, plate, right? Plate has the dimensionality of high-tech or multiple plates, you know, like second and third plate, right? Or plate, right? Like then I, you know, all these things can be challenged. But what I would I say is when you have your plate, then you just simply look at it as like a like a clock, right? And if you just make a 920 on the clock, so one arm goes over to the nine and one of the arms goes over to 20, well, then you're basically, you're going to take the second largest portion, you know, of that because you think you're going to make a line towards 12 o'clock, too. And the largest portion is going to be your fiber's carbohydrate. So that's the, the, you know, the green vegetables, right? So whether it be broccoli or brussels sprouts or asparagus or, you know, pick your, pick your favorites, you know, like those are the ones that give us a lot of the micronutrients we need. They're the ones that are generally, you know, accepted as more healthy. And they're also going to provide the fiber that's going to be both beneficial in terms of its impact on insulin and also just through filling you up, right? And then I take the next largest portion of that and I devote that towards protein. And I think it's really important, especially for anybody active, the more active you are, the more you embark on trying to build muscle, you're going to need to have protein every meal. So I have that. And again, you know, we're talking cleaner sources of protein. But like I am, you'll never find like boiled chicken on my plate. Like I ditched those days when I was 16 or 15 or 16. Like I realized after reading those bodybuilding magazines that maybe the low fat things stuck for too long, but the, or the no fat things stuck for too long. But the boiled chicken and, and, you know, a steamed broccoli thing that ended quickly for me because I'm not going to eat this forever. So I'll have some sort of fish or chicken. But I don't, it will be, it will be cooked in a way that's that's like, you know, it's got maybe some sauce on it. It's got some, maybe it's tomato sauce, anything that just make it a little bit more palatable and interesting without blowing the value of the meal. And then that last portion is where I put my star-tube carbohydrates. And again, that's the part that some people say exclude them entirely because they're not healthy or they don't work for you or they're not, you know, beneficial long-term. For me, it's been a god-sent. And I do think I'm like most people. My body craves those carbohydrates. I choose things like sweet potatoes, which is my favorite, you know, or I'll have rice or I'll have pasta. I'm Italian, so I like pasta. And I like, I will have those things. I'm not excluding them, but I don't put them in the portions that you would generally find. You know, my wife and I will go out and we'll go to the restaurant sometimes because we travel quite a bit or used to at least with baseball too. There's a cheesecake factory ever where you went. And I love cheesecake factory. But like, the way they structure meals is it's all rice on the bottom and a little bit chicken on top. And I mean, it's a plate full of rice. That you wouldn't find me make a plate that way. I'm going to just devote that portion of the plate to the star-tube carbohydrate. And so it gives me a little bit more more responsibility in terms of control because those are the foods again probably. probably dopamine driven that are most easily overeating. I always ask the question, what's the last time you ate 10 chicken breast at a meal? You're getting sick of it after maybe two or three. But you could eat a whole hell of a lot of carbohydrates, start to eat carbohydrates because they're just so satisfying. And I think those triggers, as you said, they want more, that's what happens. Even when you're feeling full, you want more. And that's the biggest danger to carbohydrate. So if you can develop some sort of discipline around them, then you can still enjoy them. If you can't develop that discipline for whatever reason, then maybe they do become something that you have to work yourself around or adopt a different eating style. And as I said, I'm never to the point where I'm not trying to be dogmatic in my approach. I'm always trying to say, this is how I do it. And I'm a believer in it, just like everyone else is believer in their method. But I'm open to the idea that something that works for you and gets you to a healthier weight and a sustainability. Like that is good. That's good for me. Provided it doesn't introduce other issues. - Yeah, something one can do consistently. That's something I picked up from you over the years. What can you do consistently? And for me, that also meant when and how can I eat? What can I eat consistently that will also allow me to be alert after lunch so I can actually get some work done? - Yeah. - Or eat, I like to train fasted in the morning, but I don't do any long-term fasting. It just so happens that I'm fine doing water and caffeine in the morning and training in the morning. And then I eat my first meal afterwards. But I get carbohydrates at night. So my glycogen is restored. I think carbohydrates are wonderful. I just don't eat them in excess. So to me, I feel like when what you describe is a very rational, literally balanced approach. And obviously there will be variations for people who are dealing with obesity or diabetes. Or, you know, I've got friends that are on the pure carnivore thing, I have friends that are vegan. And it's always impressive to me when somebody can stick to anything consistently. Except when they're sticking to just poor behavior. Because that's, there's nothing impressive about that. Well, I think that that's very helpful because I think there's for the typical listener of this podcast, you know, the online content that people see, the battles are very confusing. They're distracting. Because people really think, oh, there's a right way and a wrong way. And it sounds like the way that one can eat consistently over time that's healthy. Certainly fewer processed and sugary foods, I think almost every day. Everybody almost every one agrees on that, right? So I think it is a, it's a calorie manipulation through some other method, right? So even, even intermittent fasting, like you said, like that could be, it's for people that are grazers. Like if you are a grazer and your real problem is portion control over the course of the day, but you can respond to a rule that says, no, you're eating between here and here. You can obey that rule. Well, you're not going to be able to graze during the times that you might be doing additional damage. So sure, there's other hormonal benefits that people will talk about from that approach. But from a longevity standpoint and habit forming standpoint, if it's fixing the habit that you're breaking too often by eating throughout whenever you feel like you walk by food, it's good. You know, and it works. And again, it's, it's, you know, people can, we'll tell you you can probably eat whatever you want to eat as long as you're eating within those, that window. But I think the more responsible people who are practitioners of that will say, no, you still want to avoid process sugar and things like that. So, and that's just a mechanism of eating that really a diet, right? But like it's, I think that people, I hate to, I hate to be as like as basic as it sounds with that, but it's for the exact reason that if it's that 23 hour day phenomenon, that's like, you know, you said you're impressed, it is impressive. You know, it's so hard to control all of our behaviors and food being one of the hardest, you know, the biggest temptations for people. You gotta learn how to control that for so long and then do it day after day after day. Whatever that mechanism is that works for you is impressive. And I'm a, I'm a believer in it, you know? I think that's the, that's how I feel. I just feel like people need to be able to be given some reins to be able to find what works for them. - Well, I love to eat and one of the beauties of weight training is I feel like I can eat plenty for my age and I'm not as lean as you are, but I'm happy with where I'm at. I could always do better. All right, you know, with each year, actually, I've been getting better, probably because I'm eating cleaner, probably because I also have someone to cook for me now. And we like, and we like, and we like, I have that too. - We like healthy food and so we're, I'm very fortunate. I don't think we have any packaged food in our home. We even started making sour crowd at home. I don't make it. - Yeah. - She makes it. - Well, my wife actually, you know, she, she turned me on to a tip that I actually shared with the whole channel, which was like, you can, you can go to, we have a student Leonard's around our big grocery store chain around us and they have a catering department. And, you know, they're often used for catering big parties and, you know, big tubs of, of, of grilled chicken, but like really good grilled chicken, like, yeah, not the boiled chicken, but, you know, big tubs of sweet potatoes and, we'll, you know, we'll get a bunch of those and show go over and show get them. And then she'll sort of arrange, you know, them on plates and put the plates in and like, I'm okay with repetitive eating. I think more people are probably okay with repetitive eating than they think. I think that when you actually break down how many different breakfast variety, like variations do you have? Three, two, two or three. - Two or three. - So like, I think when people do, there's more variety for dinner probably, but like, even there, you're probably five different types of dinners, you know, over the course of, you know, a week or a month. Well, you know, if you have that ability to identify the things that you like, and again, no plan is gonna work if you're eating stuff you don't like. It's not gonna work forever. Nothing will. You have to really enjoy what you're eating. As long as these, these variations of this meal are something that you really enjoy, and there are limited versions of them, their reproducibility of that is simple, you know? It will take some time, but if you're fortunate enough, in our case to have somebody who can prepare it for you, now that's even part out of the equation, you know? And it's like, it just makes it very simple. But I do think when you tally up all the costs of medical care that are spiked by having poor nutrition, and you then offset that by what it might cost you to invest in a faster strategy like this catering trick or whatever it might be, you'd be best off figuring out a way that maybe reallocate some of your money that's preparing this because you know how important it is to your long-term health and longevity. If you can figure out your nutrition issues, if everyone listening to this podcast can figure out their nutrition issues, this whole world will be different. That is like the one with the largest sources of disease and pain and discomfort because people really struggle with nutrition. - Yeah, and it's a huge problem. I mean, the OVC, it is an epidemic in this country. It's very, very serious. Also, a lot of highly processed foods are more expensive than healthier foods. When you really break it down, even the better source high quality foods are right there on par less than the processed foods for sure. But a couple other questions as it relates to training because I think that one thing that a lot of people wonder about, and maybe we could do this in kind of a true false method, first just to get through some of these. - 50-50, I'll get it right at least. - Exactly. Men and women should train differently. - The science of it will say false. And again, not to generalize, but kind of the point you touched on earlier today. I do find that casually interested women in training will migrate more towards certain types of fitness. Like kickboxing, like dancing, like low-rest circuit types. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think again, whatever is that you're going to engage in regularly is what you should do. Physiologically, no. And I think if we can get more women to feel more comfortable in the gym, performing the same exercises and the same, and receiving the same training benefits and working on progressive overload. And like, yeah, we've hit the holy grail. But I think that it's a big bridge that has to be gapped still because there's just some reality to listen. There are very, my wife is a perfect example of this, living a very complicated, busy life. We have two young boys, their twins. And her attention and focus is there. And it's like, she doesn't do this for a living like I do. And if she can get a decent workout and she's happy, but she's not necessarily working on her deadlift PR. And so I think that that would help her and serve her in the long term to work on increasing her PRs and different lifts and building her strength progressively. But in her life right now, it's not necessarily in the cards to have the time to focus on that. So would you then discourage this other thing that she might find interesting? Like some boxing, there was a little, I remember the brand, but one of those punchable boxing stand up things. And she enjoys it. And anything to get you moving is going to be preferable but I don't think that necessarily physiologically there's a difference. - You start weight training pretty young. - Yeah. - But I messed around with my brother 'cause he was older, he was four years older. So I was kind of messing around with weights probably 12 or 13 with a five pound dumbbell. - Okay. - Yeah, you hear that young kid shouldn't work out with the weights. I don't know what the going standard is now. They say, you know, shuts down long bone growth or growth plates, you know, this sort of thing. You've got two young boys adorable kids, by the way. Yeah. I wanted that one of the things that is very heartwarming is to see you're in great shape. You're extremely bright. You know, you're craft. You loved your craft. You work with Jesse who we'll talk about as well. It's great. You know, which is great. You know that there's a camaraderie there having great teammates as part of a business or to work out with is just makes life better. Let's just be honest. I'm grateful to have great teammates for the podcast and my lab, of course, as well. But to see your boys and your dogs and the whole picture, you know, it's a, you know, I'm sure it has a lot of contours and complexity that we don't know about and shouldn't know about, but it's a beautiful picture. And will they wait train? I've seen the videos of one or both of them hanging from the box. Kids are natural. I'm telling you that I don't I wonder where they get it. I don't even I, you know, I don't even encourage it. I'm not going to be the dad who's sitting there saying, let's go somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. We got our two days here. I'm not going to not going to do that. But they they have a natural interest in the gym. They just sometimes like to be out with daddy. So look, come out there and, you know, I, I of the two of us, my wife and I will be the one who has a little bit more of a longer leash to let them explore things because I was a dummy at times too and figured out best through the mistakes. The injury. In neuroscience, we call that one trial learning. So these guys are going to be masters of one trial learning because, you know, they'll go grab, you know, the bars of my, the handles of my jammer. They're there because it's at a lower level to them. And they're swinging around. They're doing pull ups on it naturally. Uncoach nothing from me. One will walk out to a deadlift bar stand over it naturally. Never saw me do it. Stands over there and this goes, er, he's trying to pull it. So there's a there's a definitely an inclination to liking the gym. And I will fully support that. But of course, you know, body weight will be good for quite a while. Yeah. So what age you think is reasonable for kids to start exploring a non body weight, like, I think around 13, you know, I think around 13 once puberty, I think it's okay to start to, um, you know, because there's so much. I would even say for people that are like later in age who are just starting out, learn with your own body weight first. There's plenty of resistance to be had by learning how to command your body in space. So if you have never trained before, you're going to get very stimulated by doing lunging and reverse lunging, even learning some of the proprioception around movement through space, pull ups, chin ups, pull ups and chin ups are challenging for even people that have had 20, 30 years of experience in the gym. So there's a lot of stimulus to be had by body weight and jumping straight to dumbbells or barbells is actually doing yourself a disservice. You can learn better command of your body in space. So that when you go back to the bigger lifts, um, you're going to have a easier time, sort of progressively loading them and building up that foundation of strength. I'm not saying that you have to become a master calisthenics athlete before you can touch a barbell. That's not even true. I'm just saying there's so much capacity. Kids are going to be doing this anyway. And really just if you look at general play, they are jumping, they are lunging, they are climbing, they are pulling like that's what they do, you know? So why I don't know where the avoidance of like structured training is for younger kids. Again, provide other using body weight and maybe less ballistic movements or something like that. You know, things that are, you know, or certainly overloaded movements. Um, I think we should encourage kids to do more. There's a lot of, uh, obesity and, and kids on the rise also. And that is incredibly, you know, disconcerting to me. So I think in, in, in, I hope it doesn't come from the advice of some that say, well, wait until you're older to start doing something like that's a way worse trade off than, than engaging in something smart. Now we used to get kicked out of the house when we were kids. Totally. My mom would kick us out. Right. I don't know. I had a huge pack of boys that lived on my street, you know, but we get kicked out side like literally you're not allowed in the right no television. Right. There were video games and of course, but we were, we were kicked out of the house. We had to play, first of all, skateboarding soccer and then we, you know, we'd find our trouble. Yeah. But, um, so, um, post training nutrition. So we're the same age. Uh, years ago I was sort of neurotic about the idea that I had to ingest a certain amount of carbohydrates and proteins within two hours, then it was 90 minutes of training. I confess I get, if I train hard, sometimes by the resistance training, not the running, but the resistance training, you know, 60 to 90 minutes later, I'm really hungry. But there have been days when I just skip and then the hunger passes and then later I eat more on my twice as much later. Yeah. That's just the way sometimes schedules go. But what are your thoughts in terms of the nutrition science, the training, the training related effects of the post training meal? Is it something that you try to get? Is it something that you think people should pay attention to? Um, so that, that science has actually probably been the one that's changed the most in my lifetime, honestly, because I, I, I, I, again, we're at the same age and I was, uh, falling for the same, uh, trap, you know, where I would really be focused on like, I'm, I'm, I'm risking speeding tickets driving home from the gym. Yeah. The big, serious, metabolic window, you know, like I, I did all that. I really did. I'm, you know, but, um, thankfully that's been sort of debunked in, in your body. It isn't just rushing through, you know, these certain periods of time to utilize the nutrients in our body, but are able to partition them and use them over a long, much greater duration up to now. They're saying, you know, if a three to four hours after training, five hours after training, you can still see the, you know, the benefits of replenishment. A lot of that is just, you know, I think there's a consistency element to it. Um, that just utilizing a post workout window or a post workout meal, even if it's within two hours or one hour is just ingrating the habit of saying, listen, I just did this activity and now I want to replenish some of what I lost the energy that I used to to perform, you know, the exercises that I did. And just getting into the routine, knowing that the, the engine is ultimately fed by what we put in it. And the concept of replenishing the fuel lost is still a concept that I think, again, different in mechanism, but still important in terms of fueling the overall performance. So, you know, the, the pre workout period of time gives us a chance to actually have a longer window because if that, if those nutrients are obtained pre workout, it's not like they're gone in that hour that you've trained. They're still there and available for your body to use. So, you know, I think it's important to get one of the two, you know, right or at least make sure you're consistently uh, uh, having one or the two, or you might risk going through all these periods of having no nutrition to support your efforts. Not only where your workouts potentially suffer in terms of the output, but then you're also not providing your body and ability to capitalize on, on an opportunity to feed it and refuel and recover. So, um, I'm not very dogmatic about what specifically to, to eat pre or post, you know, workout, but I do think you should have protein, um, surrounding your, your training, whether that be ahead of time or after, protein could be a little bit hard to digest for some people. So, if you do that pre workout and then you're finding your workouts slogging because you don't feel good, then suddenly you put that after your meal. But this whole concept of the urgency of time has thankfully been removed and we can just learn to eat a little bit more, uh, you know, responsibly and drive more responsibly. So we're not, you know, trying to rush home from the gym and risk, you know, killing people on the way. You know, I think, I think it's, uh, but I think it's great because I think that that was something that it just showcases a belief that people had for so long that has since been proven to be not that important and there's a, there's a, there's a tip of the cap towards research in a good way where it's like, all right, I think we could all agree that this isn't necessarily true anymore. Um, and look at yourself and say, oh my god, I did that so often. You know, I, I, I bit that one hook line and sinker, but, um, but then realize, okay, we could always make a change. And the good thing about nutrition is those changes can happen the very next time you go to eat, you know, and you'll start to see the benefits of that. So I'm, uh, I'm not a big believer in that strict approach to pre or post workout. Um, I mean, even as far as pre workout supplements, um, a lot of people don't take them. A lot of people don't like them. They don't take them. They don't like, they're not necessarily even being used as the new, new, nutritive side of the pre workout. They're just more new used to fuel the workout. Um, for me, it's a water and some form of caffeine. Yeah. I mean, it's whatever, you know, again, I think it's important. I do think it's important to maintain a high level of output. So if your pre workout nutrition requires a stimulant in order to help you do that, or if your pre workout nutrition is causing you to have a harder time, the train because you're feeling full or stomach ache or something else, then that, that's not achieving what you're trying to do. The ultimate goal is to still be able to perform at the highest level. So whatever your nutrition is required to allow you to still do that, that is probably the most important factor of all of it. Great. I love the very clear and rational approach. Don't ingest anything right before your workout or near your workout. That's going to make your workout worse. So even if you end it so simple and yet you don't hear this because I think people will think, oh, they must have a pre workout. They must have a post workout. Again, like even if there are the benefits that are to be had from whatever's being suggested, it's going to be easily offset by the fact that you can't perform at an output capable of driving any change. Yeah. So that would pretty much negate the fact that there, you know, there's no, you're not outweighing those benefits of whatever nutrient, nutrient approach you took, and struggling through your workout. Yeah. For me, the best pre workout is a good night's sleep, hydration, caffeine, music. Yeah. Yeah. There's - There you go, I mean, it works. - It works. - It works, it works. And then post where I do, I do find I get quite hungry and wanna eat quite a bit more. And, well, that's a natural response. The body's going to, and most people wanna do that. And I think it should be fed. I work out, as, you know, again, a lot of my postings on Instagram will happen at 10 o'clock at night, 10, 30 at night, 11 at night, 'cause I am actually training there. And that's where I'm taking those little breaks in between sets to actually film or post something. But like, I then go inside a dinner. So I'm eating at 11 o'clock at night. You know, it's not necessarily ideal. I'm not recommending that as a tool for anybody. I think it dispels one thing. I've never been a believer in Kenny Carbs after six. - Yeah, that makes no sense to me. - Zero. - Based on all the new, all the science of metabolism that I've seen, I think as long as you can, sort of like napping. I talked to Matt Walker, one of the great sleep researchers where why we sleep, et cetera. And, you know, as his own podcast about sleep, tremendous researcher, public communicator about sleep. And he said, you know, naps are fine. Provided they don't interrupt your ability to sleep well at night. - Right. - Simple. - Right. - Some people can sleep from eight to nine p.m. and then go to bed at midnight and not a problem. Other people, they take a 30 minute nap after lunch and they can't sleep at night. Same thing with caffeine's a little different because Matt would argue the architecture of sleep can be disrupted, et cetera. But if you can eat dinner late, eat carbohydrates late, actually need carbohydrates at night in order to be able to sleep. Whenever I've done a low carbohydrate type regimen in the evening, I have a hard time falling asleep. I'm just too alert. - Yeah. - I eat carbohydrates in the evening to restore glycogen, but also in order to make sure that I can fall asleep. - I actually can, again, obviously it's already late at night by the time I'm done eating, but like I can fall asleep within five, 10 minutes of finishing my meal, you know, because I do think that they have that same effect on me. But I'm never like, I'm not bothered by the feeling of fullness. I'm not unable to sleep because of feeling of fullness. But I do like, I do like the fact that I'm, I feel as if I'm at least replenishing what was lost through my hard training. And I do like to back it up with a dinner. I don't need to eat smaller amounts. Some people can't have that much. I will say after a hard leg workout, I don't have the same appetite that I do after let's say, you know, an upper body workout. It can really disrupt my whole feeling of well-being. - You want to eat less after you train your legs? - I do, yeah. - Oh wow. - I'm the opposite. - No, 'cause I just feel like I can feel sick to my stomach, you know. - You're clearly training harder. - I've seen the way you train. You do train very intensely. - Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think it's important. I mean, I think that, again, it's that trade-off between if you're not gonna train for a long period of time, then you're gonna wanna train harder. And again, I actually feel like contrary to what people might think as you age, you're better off training harder for shorter period of time. You know, it's always within the realm of safe training. I mean, I think that's what I like to think that's what I bring to the table, like an approach that's smarter, so I can train harder, you know. Like not doing the dumb things I did when I was a kid. And with that trade-off being a harder trainer, I think I get the results that I want because I'm able to really push it and then back off. And again, the meal feels like I'm almost a physiological reward for the hard effort I put in the gym, knowing that I'm also replenishing and setting the stage for the next day to be another successful day of training, or maybe not depending on how many times a week I train. But yeah, I think that it's a lot less, it's a lot, I hate to say, but it's a lot less scientific than we wanna make it. And as it seems to be coming back often times, like the thing that works for you is really the most important thing because ultimately getting your ass in there and doing what you do is really the thing that provides the best benefit. Absolutely, and there are many things that I would say are hallmarks of Jeff Cavaliere, but one of them is certainly consistency. You make it happen one way or another. Huge, I mean, consistency really is the determinant. And I know that that is the hardest part for people that are, and why people tend to look for the shortcut because consistency is the part that becomes the biggest challenge. But if you could find, listen, if you could find the, I'm gonna, through what I've been trying to encourage here is if you could find the nutrition approach, if you could find the training approach, if you could try finding the training split, if you could try all those things that encourage you to wanna go to the gym. Like you're locked in at the point where you said you actually look forward to going and doing your work out. Oh, I love it. I look forward to, I mean, it's, you know, actually this morning, one of our teammates for the podcast, I got to work out and halfway through, I just turn to him and I said, I'll never figure out why that feels so good, but it feels so good. I just, I really enjoy it. And it lets, and I love to eat and it lets me, and I love the way it makes you feel afterward. I don't understand this concept of not enjoying the gym. Cardio's a little different. I always load the first 10 or 20 minutes of the jog. I mildly load the middle third and by the end, I think this is the greatest thing ever. Why don't you do it all the time? And then that feeling evaporates before the next time I do it. Yeah, of course you don't even remember either. You get on, you hit it again. Exactly. Yeah, I think if people could, if we had one gift we could give to everybody, it would be the love of fitness. If they could be bestowed the love of fitness, it would change the entire world. But I think when you hear things like this that like, hey, that will work and that will work too and that this will work too, rather than the dogmatic one way only approach, which could be to come discouraging for people. Then I think it becomes a little bit uplifting like, well, I've never tried that. I've actually never tried a total body split or I've never tried that style of eating. It becomes encouraging that you might want to explore and then you might finally get locked in and say, I really like this and then you're often running. Let's, what I so enjoy about your content, we would be remiss if we didn't just briefly discuss Jesse. One of the great pleasures for me in watching your content and learning from it over the years is that you took on, you decided to mentor somebody, Jesse and there's some poking fun back and forth between the two of you, which is very amusing. But I have to say it inspired me to do something early on and developing this podcast as I have a young intern who has helped me with some of the research and he's an, he's interested in science, he's about to go off to college, but he also got really into fitness. We watched the videos of you guys. He was helping me get the Instagram content out early on. And one thing that was just, it was such a pleasure to be able to pass along knowledge and, and of course, I'm learning from him. This is always the way it works. We learn from teaching and we learn from students. But it's been great to see Jesse's progress. It's amazing. I've gotten to meet him in person just now and, and he's, he has grown. He's changed physically and, and I think that you mentioned a love of fitness. I think that in a, one of the best ways to be consistent is to take on the responsibility of teaching others. Once one has proficiency in something. So maybe you just tell us a little bit about how that's going. How, how is Jesse doing? And where, where, where does he need a little more work? Where is he thriving? I'm impressed by the progress. Well, we have, I mean, physically we can obviously see the, the, the changes, you know, the list of things to work on or is immense. It's so long for him to continue to improve. But now actually, you know, in reality, Jesse, the story of Jesse was that I knew Jesse prior to starting even athlete next. And in a matter of fact, I think the funny thing is the very first video that was ever posted on my channel was a video that he shot as, I don't know, a 13 year old or something. And I said, can you just film this for a second? I was over there, you know, training members of the family. So he then off went off to college, went into film, realized he had much greener pastures at athlete next instead of becoming the next Scorsese or something. And he decided to come work with me. And, you know, the expectations in the beginning were just to edit videos or just to, you know, help with various aspects of, like my day to day that I don't think I was, you know, equipped to really handle and grow the business anymore. So then, you know, look at by virtue of being in that environment, there's an interest. I think if I worked in a gym, I might become interested in working out. And though that might not a commercial gym is sitting right behind my office, you know, window, there became an interest in wanting to work out a little bit. And it wasn't even an intentional experiment, you know, to put Jesse there. I just thought that he's a very likable person. He has a very funny personality. He's also the every man, you know, in some ways, you know, as I'm sure maybe you experienced sometimes, like, I'm the guy that this comes naturally for me is what people will say. Like this is what you do for a living. Like this is what you, like there's an element of disconnect in terms of the relatability because I do do this for a living. I can't deny that. I do work with professional athletes. So like there's a level of interest in this above and beyond. But for him, he's just the kid who wants to train maybe if he rolls out of bed before 11 a.m. and, you know, doesn't have a date on Friday night. But that's the guy everybody can relate to. And watching him transform. And I love the fact that even the interest level, you know, was up and down. Like it wasn't consistent for him because he was like, you know, part interested in them, maybe not interested for three months. And then interested in that. And I never pushed it on him. This is, again, this was no orchestrated experiment for me. It was just like, if you want to do this, then do this. And also from a standpoint of like, um, lending my help or expertise to him, like I said with my son, I'm not going to force it on anybody. I don't want to do that to anybody. I don't think that that's ever going to spark that desire for long-term, you know, adoption. So he got more interested. He started to learn more about it. He was just a video is that we're filming. He films the videos that we're filming. And he's learning through what I'm saying. He's becoming more of a student of the field. And I have to say, his knowledge in the field has grown with the growth of his physique. And he's put into practice some of the things that I say. He's put in practice some things. He hears other places and he winds up improving as he goes and he winds up starting to love this like he never thought he would. But it's great to see anybody grow and whether that be physically or that be emotionally or that be just in their career, it's great to see somebody grow. And I like to tease him, funny admission here. There are times when the jab is that I will throw at him or something that we might know ahead of time of what I'm going to say to him. People will say, you're so mean to him. I can't believe it. You're that's so abusive. And like, dude, honestly, we laugh after it's over. It's good. We're good. You know, so, you know, of course, but like, but there's. He's tougher than he looks is what you're saying. He's definitely looks. He's got the big beard. He looks more manly than I do. I can't grow a beard. I don't. I mean, believe me. He's totally alpha and I'm like, you know, quickly becoming, you know, the second star of this show. But like, you know, he's definitely contributed and people enjoy his presence for sure. I certainly do. And I think that you, as you pointed out, he's a kind of a proxy and a template for everybody. We can relate to him because even though I've trained for many years, you know, it's been a struggle, you know, through graduate school postdoc, you know, it made it happen one way or another, but with more or less attention and admittedly through, you know, waxing, waning levels of motivation, although, you know, unfortunately, that I do enjoy it. What I think is nice about it too is that it's a realistic expectation that we set, I think, you know, there was your showcasing what the journey actually looks like. And he's been on the journey for, again, you know, devotedly for, let's say the last year and a half, but on the journey for five years. If I could make the gains that he did starting when I started training at, you know, 14, 15, and you're saying, "Hip, by 20, you're going to have the strength levels he does, the physique that he does, the knowledge that you've gained." Like, that seems like a blink of an eye now looking back, you know, at 46 years old, I'm like, holy cow, like, I think it took me 20 years, you know, 15, 20 years. So, you know, to just even start to get into a groove. For him to do it at, in a period of five years, it doesn't seem long. Whereas there's people that will criticize his journey, like, "Oh, it's taken so long, it's so long." And there's such an instant gratification, you know, that people seek. Luckily, that's the minority. Most people are like, "This is amazing," you know? But I think that it becomes very uplifting because not only is it relatable, but the journey is real and people can, and people can appreciate that. Like, this is what will happen if you actually put in consistent hard work. And you'll watch him transform and go back and watch the videos. Like, you look at, we like to oftentimes throw back to videos where he appeared as, you know, smaller Jesse, but also shy Jesse. Arms crossed, head down, not making eye contact with the camera. You know, to where now he's got his own skits and intros, you know? It's like, it's funny because the confidence with the growth of physique came confidence, too, which is great. Absolutely. It's a pretty soon to be his world and we're all living in it, as they say. Well, on behalf of myself and all the listeners, I really want to thank you. First of all, for the discussion today, I learned an immense amount. Even though I thought I knew your content well, I still learned an immense amount. Many things we could deploy from when to stretch, how to stretch. The skipping rope, we talked about nutrition, we talked about heat, cold, training regimens. And what I love about all of this now that you've given us is that there's a backbone of logic, you know, and some consistent themes indeed about consistency. But the logical backbone, I think, is what will enable people to really show up to the table and stay there for training consistently over time. As you said, the gift of fitness is an immense gift. I can't thank you enough. I know you're an incredibly busy human being with kids and dogs and a marriage and a pleasure. That's my pleasure. I'm happy I was able to make it work because I've been watching your stuff for a while and I really, I love the science of it. I like the way you think. And it's just, you know, it was a, I'm just really fortunate that I was able to do it. Well, I feel very gratified in hearing that and honored to have you here. So thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for joining me for my discussion with Jeff Cavalier. I hope you found it as interesting and as actionable as I did. If you're learning from and are enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's the best zero cost way to support us. 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