Andy Galpin: 3 Ways to Lose Weight and Gain Muscle (the Fitness Plan You Will ACTUALLY Stick To)

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Meds are prescribed to provider's discretion. You want to gain more muscle.
You want to have more energy. You want to have more mental focus.
Okay, why haven't you done that before? I want to find what is that single thing that stopped you from winning and that's all I want to work on. Professor of kinesiology.
Expert in muscle physiology. Dr.
Andy Galpin. What's going to burn more calories? Walking a mile or running a mile? Running a mile.
A calorie is energy. Walking a mile, running a mile, it's the same thing.
If someone's listening right now and they're thinking fitness and strength are my big goals this year, how would you encourage them to think about it? Number one predictor of success with training programs is the number one health and wellness podcast. Jay Shetty.
Jay Shetty. The one, the only Jay Shetty.
Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the place you come to become happier, healthier, and more healed. Today's guest is going to help us do that for our physiology, for our body, for our muscles.
I'm excited for you to listen to this episode because I know it's going to make a big change in your life this year. Today's guest is Andy Galpin, professor, podcast host, and leading expert in human performance science with a PhD in human bioenergetics.
Andy focuses on muscle physiology, strength training, and performance science. Andy has worked with elite athletes across sports, including Olympians, UFC fighters, NBA, and MLB All-Stars.
Welcome to On Purpose, Andy Galpin. Andy, it's great to have you here.
It's a pleasure, man. We have many friends in common.
It's about time here. Yeah, I love it.
Thank you so much for being here. And I want to dive straight in.
And today, what we did is we asked our audience to tell us what they wanted to know from you. And we had so many questions.
People had so many things they wanted to learn. And I think when we're releasing this, it's going to be at a time when it's like kicking off the year.
Like this is a big goal for people. This is what people want to achieve this year.
They want to be fitter. They want to be stronger.
And so the first question I wanted to ask you is, what routine is the best for someone that wants to gain muscle and lose weight? There is no specific direction to that. And I know that was like the most deflated answer possible after that enormous setup.
But I'm saying that because I actually want to empower people, not the opposite. Having done this for many years, having taught for a very long time, one thing that is very clear, if you give hyper-specific answers to questions like that, when someone hears that and they go, oh, I can't do that exercise because my knee hurts, or I can't train like that because I fill in the blanks, right? Then they often feel like they can't do anything.
And so what you do is you take people from 10 to zero. And I hate that.
I want to go everyone from zero to two. I want to get somebody to 10, but I want all the wins we can possibly get.
And so if you look at that combination of things you said, two very specific things, grow muscle, lose fat. Okay, great.
That gives you effectively every option under the table for your fitness routine. There are some core things that will lay in that foundation though, that will be true regardless of your approach.
I can hit those very quickly. This is a basic saying that we will,

and there's variations of this,

but the concepts are few and the methods are many.

As long as you hit these next couple of concepts,

you can choose all kinds of different methods.

The methods are things like how many days you do it.

Do you use kettlebell?

Do you run?

Do you go outside?

Do you use group classes?

Those are all methods, methods. They're important.
We can get to that detail. But concepts are few.
Here's what that's going to look like. Are you doing something consistently? If you look across the literature for many years now, the strongest predictor of success with training programs, fitness programs, exercise programs, and nutrition programs, number one predictor of success, short and long-termterm is adherence.
You have to be consistent. I will take a consistent approach with a suboptimal program with a bad program any day of the week for that particular question.
So be consistent. Second one is there's got to be some sort of progressive overload.
That doesn't mean you have to lift more weights. It doesn't mean you have to train harder or more, but there has to be some sort of intentional progress that could be done within the day, the week, the month.
You get lots of ways to get there, but be consistent and try to keep progressing eventually. Outside of that, we're getting into more nuance.
And so now we're thinking about things like you probably want to use really high efficient movements. These are exercise types, movement patterns that have a lot of caloric expenditure with minimal time, right? Most likely I'm inferring from that question, that person probably doesn't want to spend 20 hours a week in their fitness.
And so you want to choose things. This is not typically isolation work.
So I wouldn't spend 20 minutes doing bicep

specific exercises for that particular person. You got to get a lot of muscles worked and you got to burn a lot of calories.
So this could be a combination of some type of strength training program and some type of cardiovascular program or anything in between. The reality of it though is I'll reiterate one more time.
And because I've done this many, many times personally personally, this is consistent across the literature. Those two goals can be achieved with no or minimal cardiovascular training.
These can be achieved with very minimal strength training. These can be achieved with body weight training, with any other combination of those things.
You have tons of options there. So if that is truly your goal, pick something that's going to give you a little bit of both sides of that equation.
Stay safe. Don't get hurt.
You still got to work. And because this is our third one, there's got to be consistent effort there.
So be consistent, keep doing it. Try to be high productivity with that.
And then you got to try. I need a six to seven out of 10 on an effort scale.
We'd love to see a little bit more, but I'll live with six. Below six, we may not be having enough actual stimuli to grow muscle or lose weight, but you give me those three things and most people are going to have a tremendous amount of success.
Absolutely. Thank you for that.
And I appreciate the refreshing answer and not having to be specific. And I agree with you.
I think that's a very fair way to go. And it's actually the only truth and reality to it as well.
Yeah. You know, honestly, I have a hard time when I get questions like that because I want at home as a listener, when I hear people on podcasts, I'm like, but just give me like one example.
So I'm so sensitive to that. But the reality of it is, that's not the most honest answer.
It's not the answer scientifically. And me coaching people now, the people that I personally train, the non-athletes, it's not real.
That's not really how I would approach them. So I tried to do my best to give an honest answer.
And I know that's not always as tangible, but it is honest reality. Yeah.
If someone's listening right now and they're thinking fitness and strength are my big goals this year, how would you encourage them, like the people that you work with? If someone's like, Andy, train me now, coach me now, how should I be thinking about my goals over the next 12 months? How would you encourage them to think about it? There's a handful of ways. We will always start at the top.
Okay, what's our biggest constraint? And that sounds a little bit backwards, but we call these things performance anchors. So you want a goal, right? And I use the soccer example here, football, maybe if you're listening, you want to kick, you want a goal.
And there's something in that way. There's a defender.
There's a goalie there. What's your goalie? And I'm saying that to say, is it finances? Is it time? Is it injury? Is it you've never been to the gym before and you're nervous? Because once I know that, the entire path I'm taking is going to be different based on that very first filter.
You want to gain more muscle. You want to fill in all those blanks.
Okay, why haven't you done that before? Have you tried in the past and failed? Have you never tried? That's the biggest lever we have to work on. If it is a finance issue, I can't afford gym membership.
Okay, got it. Now I'm going to take you on a totally different route.
If it is unlimited finance, like, okay, now we're doing next level stuff. If it's somewhere in the middle, we have different answers.
So this could be a combination of saying, identify why you failed in the past or why you've never started and overcome that barrier and I'm done. I'm going to stop right there.
That'll give me six months, right? In this initial case, in that person you laid out, I'm going back to what I said earlier. Adherence is number one and consistency over time.
So I want this first January push, this February push towards fitness, like new year, new me. I want to win.
I want wins, wins, wins. I don't care if it's an optimal program.
It doesn't necessarily matter. We'll come to those details later, but I want you to have an experience through fitness that went, yeah, that was kind of, it was okay.
It wasn't so bad. I wasn't super sore and I, okay.
Now you're a believer. Now I can get that two days a week to three.
Now I can get you to invest $50 and get you a kettlebell at home. Okay, great.
We can start pushing the pace here. If we do the opposite and we get these big, huge charges that can work if you're an all-in type of person, you, maybe I could get you on that.
All right, let's get it personality-wise. But if that's not your personality, oftentimes that is a crash and burn by February or March.
And that actually dissuades you probably more from starting again the next time. So for the general population, as an aggregate answer here, I want to find what is that single thing that stopped you from winning? And that's all I want to work on.
When we program this for our executive clients and all those, we look at the year. And we look at this whole thing and we use what we call a quadrant model.
So the quadrant is you get 10 total points and you can choose to spend those 10 total points across four areas, right? So 10 total, not 40 total. Here are your four areas.
And we do this practice before they start anything. They don't get a workout before any of this question is answered.
We go through this exercise. We lay out their answer.
This gets posted on a note card. It goes in their most vulnerable place.
This could be their office. Where's the point where it's going to, you were going to work out today.
And then you didn't. Is that your Netflix TV? Is that the office? Cause you wouldn't stop working.
Is it right? You could held accountable to that. And we're going to hold you accountable to that.
Here's what the card looks like. Quadrant one is, we'll just call it business.
Whatever you do for your life and your finances. Okay.
That's business. Quadrant number two is social, family, relationships, whatever that means to you.
Number three is your physical health. Again, these, these are wide ranging definitions and everyone gets to define it for themselves.
Go out of number four is recovery. So we start off by asking, and we

always do this, and if you want to play along, you're welcome to. This is kind of fun sometimes.

Let's do it.

Great. Let's do that right now for you.
So you got 10 total chips. Let's start with business.

Of your 10, how many do you want to spend? Let's say this is January and you're going to get

kickstarted. Jay, where are you going to put in business?

And it's time? Am I thinking about it in terms of time or energy or? It's all of it. Right.
So we intentionally keep it vague. If I say you got life energy.
Yeah. You got 10.
Right. Could be money, could be combination, focus, attention, resources.
However, that makes sense to you. Yeah.
And it's business, family. Let's start with business.
Health and? Recovery. Recovery.
Right. So business., and over what period of time? It doesn't matter.
You define it. Okay.
So I'd say, yeah, over the year. Let's do it a quarter.
Quarter one. Over the quarter.
Okay, yeah. So I'd say, honestly, where I'll probably prioritize would be like five.
Great. Yeah.
Most common answer is five. Okay.
By far, the most common answer is five. Nobody wants to say six because in their head, they go...
Haven't got enough left. And no one knows it's not four.
Yeah. Right.
So we're at five for business. Now, let's go on to relationships.
Relationships, I'd say, is... Well, my work...
Business relationships are very strong in that sense. So my personal relationships, it's an easy one for me.

My circle is small.

So I'd say two.

Okay, great.

We're at seven now, right?

How many is your fitness?

Two.

Great.

Now we have an obvious one left.

A couple of rules we have on this one.

By the way, what you just gave is by far the most common total answer, right? Almost everybody has this problem. There's issues with what you just said.
We never let recovery be less than half of our next highest category. I'm happy you did two in one.
That's great. Most people, recovery end up going to zero.
What does recovery mean? It doesn't necessarily mean a massage or sauna. Fine.

That can be it. Recovery can be a night out with friends.
Recovery can be, I need alone time.

Recovery, tons of ways. Well, what is the thing that gives you energy back is what we're trying

to go after. Physical fitness, same sort of thing.
There's always overlaps between these things. We

will work through you on that one. So that, that routine you laid out says fine.
Okay. You gave me

two for physical fitness. I'm going to construct a program now that says this is at most 20% of Jay's energy.
If I come then and get you with this program five days a week, I know I've lost already. You're not going to get it.
And if you are, are you going to get it for three straight months? You just told me business was a really big priority. At the same token, when you come back to me and you're asking and you're wondering why

the program isn't getting you the success that you want, I'm going to say, you gave

it 20%.

What expectations did you have?

Okay.

What do you want to take it from?

If you're not willing to move it from somewhere else, there's only finite things that a human

can do.

So we're going to walk backwards from that equation.

So I might say, fine, we're there.

Now we get to quarter two and you want to adjust that. You want more results.
You want to lose more fat, fill in the blank for the adaptation. I go, great, where are we going to pull it from? It's not going to come from recovery.
Now it means less business, less friends. This is the ultimate dynamic we have to play, right? People don't want to do the recovery and they don't want to pull it from there, but then they expect massive gains in fitness.
We can get you through short periods of time.

We have these special scenarios all the time

where it's like, hey, the Olympics are coming,

world championships are coming.

We can juice up this a little bit

with all kinds of little tricks, but those don't last.

And sometimes they burn you into a bigger hole.

So if we're thinking long-term strategy with you,

I'd say, great, I'm fine with two.

We would scoff up a little program.

And in your brain, it goes to two.

And I'm watching.

And I'm like, Jay, you didn't do this thing for recovery.

It's been three days.

It's been a week.

We're at zero for recovery.

Don't expect fitness goals with no recovery.

Bam.

Jay went out again last night.

Went out a little again, took another trip.

Friends has been at three or four.

You get the point here, right?

So I can hold you really accountable to that

and saying if you're not getting your fitness goal, number one starter is, are you even giving it a chance to succeed? If not, we have a non-starter and we have to change our expectations. Yeah, smart.
If you want more results, you got to give me more pie. Give me a bigger shot at it and we'll get more results.
Yeah, super smart. Yeah, I really appreciate the constraint approach too.
I found my constraint was travel. And so I haven't traveled for the last six weeks, and I've felt my absolute best with sleep, food, diet, everything.
I've been on the road for probably eight straight weeks, and I'm the opposite. Yeah, exactly.
And that was my life was like I'd be working out for one week, eating right for one week, everything's good. Then I'm traveling for one week.
Then one week. So I was one week on one week off.
And then I'd planned to spend these two months in LA. And it has been life changing from a workout point of view, sleep point of view, recovery point of view, everything we just talked about.
I can do, I have been doing five days of workouts a week, you know, eating really well, whatever, because I'm in one place. Because I'm saying all of this to reiterate your point, it was all about the constraint.
It was all about the constraint. I had the motivation, I had the drive, I had the discipline, I had all that stuff.
But travel was the thing that made me feel like I was having gains for a week and then losing it and then getting discipline and then losing it. And that was just exhausting.
So let me run you through two specific examples on that. I love you brought up travel.
This is super easy. We have a coaching program called Arate.
This is this like excellence in kind of everything program. If you were an Arate with us right now, I was like, great, you've been home.
I'm going to change your entire program. It's going to be more gym stuff.
We're going to lift more weights. We're going to have a very specific plan.
I'm going to ask you to report back exactly how much you lifted and we're going to track it and we're going to do heavy there. Had we flipped the role and you were all of a sudden on the road, I would say, great.
If I gave that same program, that's going to be a terrible one. It's not going to work.
Why? Because everywhere you land, you're going to have to go to find a gym. It's not going to work.
And then the hotel gym sucks. Like I've set you up for failure.
That's bad coaching. I would have sent six weeks going, you know what? Here's what we're doing.
It's called a flexible program. We don't need anything more than a band and a kettlebell.
Okay. Maybe not even the kettlebell.
And we're going to rotate the days. So what I mean by that is right now, if you're at home, I would say, okay, Mondays are this, Tuesdays are this, Wednesdays are this.
And when you didn't do that on Wednesday, I'd be calling you. Why didn't you finish? Why don't we train Wednesday? I don't care.
I'm on it, right? That doesn't work on the road. I would do more flexible program where we have a concept we're trying to hit.
We're trying to get a strength training day in. You do that strength training day, whatever day that comes up.
And as soon as you get in, we check it off. And then we have, say, the next day is going to be a long duration workout.
Great, you get that in when you can. But we also have flexibility because when you go, hey, you know what? I got an extra hour today.
There was no gym, but I went for an hour walk. Boom, got that thing in.
You have different things you can plug in and play based on availability, time, and energy, right? So that's the way to have you success. At the end of the six weeks, we wouldn't have probably made a ton of progress on you if you're on the road constantly, but we would have not gone backwards anywhere.
The literature is really clear. The science is clear.
You can maintain muscle size. You can maintain muscle strength very, very well.
Cardiovascular fitness is incredibly stable with one or so training sessions per week. We could have kept you right where you're at.
And then we would have looked at this and said, okay, our expectations for progress are not going to be high during Jay's six weeks of travel. Let's all set expectation here.
But when we get home, we're getting after it and our expectations are higher. So at the net end of both of those, you add them together and you see where I'm going with that, right? So it's not just expecting yourself to gain five pounds of muscle every single month.
It's unrealistic. We looked at the whole quarter or the whole year is what we, in our day, we look at the whole year for people.
And we go, okay, great. Quarter one is not the quarter we're going to go after it.
We're going to work on mobility. We're going to work on our breath work.
We're going to work on a thousand other things that can be done on the road, can be done to traveling. We're going to get our best gains in, fill the other blank when we've got maybe it's quarter three.
And we actually have goals for each quarter for the year that are plotted out. And so we give people the best chance of success.
The best example I can give of that is quarter four is the worst possible time to have fat loss goals in America. Like it's impossible.
You run into Halloween, I have a little bit of candy, right? And then it's like, well, I'll get back on it. But reality it is like, Thanksgiving's going to be here in a couple of weeks.
All the way out through new year. Terrible.
If you try to have, for most people, a huge fat loss goal, you're going to lose. So we don't play that game.
You know what we typically focus on this part of the year. We're going to shift towards muscle growth.

That's when you need excessive calories, right?

Let's feed the beast.

Let's not fight our life.

Life will win.

We're going to go back.

Typically just as, you know, big examples here, it's different for everyone.

We will focus more typically on, on fat loss quarter two.

You know why?

No holidays, nothing around.

And everyone has a little bit of extra motivation

to look a little bit better over the summer

when the sun comes out

and they're more likely to have their shirts off,

clothing down.

So it fits life a little bit better.

You see my point here, right?

Yeah, seasons.

Totally.

There's seasons of when to shift.

And sometimes we have one goal.

It's really basic.

It's really simple. It's like, I want to do this.
And it's not possible throughout the year. And we don't shift it and mold it.
And I think, Andy, you know, I'm taking a couple of steps back here, but it comes from this societal view of what fitness is, right? Like that's, and I want to talk about that with you because- Oh boy, I love this. Yeah.
Because I just feel like as I'm listening to you, I know it's one of the biggest challenges is we don't actually know. It's like every year there'll be a new thing.
Like strength is really important. Protein is really important.
There's whatever, right? And it just, there's a new fad every year. And I want to talk about that with you.
But I think for a lot of us, we don't really know what the pillars of fitness are. Like we don't know what defines someone as fit.
We just have goals like, oh, I want abs this year. I want this this year.
I want less belly fat this year. And, you know, for someone who grew up overweight, I grew up overweight.
And then when I changed my diet, started working out, I just got super skinny and lean. It's like, to me, there was a point in my life where I just believed if I was lean and I wasn't overweight, then I was healthy, right? It was as basic as that.
And I think a lot of us carry that around where it's like you see someone with abs or whatever you want and it's like, yeah, they're healthy, they're fit. If you had to break down and say, what is the pursuit of fitness? What's the answer? Hey everyone, it's Jay Shetty and I'm thrilled to announce my podcast tour.
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Head to jshetty.me and get yours today. Yeah, no, I absolutely love that.
So at its highest category, we always define it as people generally want three things in their fitness. They want to look good, They want to feel good and they want to perform good.
Pardon my grammar, right? Now, what does look mean? I don't know. You tell me you want to have this look or you don't want, I do not care.
But at some point you want your body to look a certain way or not like a certain way. Up to you to define.
You want it to feel a certain way. You want it to feel strong.
You want it to feel fast. You want it to feel mobile.
You want it to feel, don't care, you define that. Then you want to perform.
What's that mean? You want to have more energy. You want to have more mental focus.
You want your digestion problem to go away. You don't want that knee pain gone.
Okay, so it's a look, a feel, or performance metric. Absolutely.
Ultimately, everybody's after, right? Yeah. So from our professional athletes to non, to the students that work in my lab for our research questions, that's the first lens I'm looking at.
What does that mean for you? So when I'm designing a, when we're designing a study or we're, again, working with individuals, filter number one, what does fit, what does look mean to you? What does feel, what does perform look to you? Now I'm calibrated, right?

Because I love this question so much.

Fitness can be, I just want to be able to surf every day.

Amazing.

I'm in, right?

Fitness just means I want more energy with my kids.

I'm here for all of that.

All of that can be rooted in performance.

We have a saying that if you have a body, you're an athlete, which is to say, I don't care if you want to use those physical abilities to shoot a basketball or hit a golf ball, like some of our clients, or you want to use that to just run your business better, be a better leader, make better decisions, be able to work more hours and less fatigue. Fine.
You're still asking your body to perform. It's the exact same thing, except for a couple of little points at the end of physical movement skill, right? So that's answer number one.
Now, taking this question entirely differently, if you look at what is generally true for most people, fitness is a combination of a handful of things. You want to be able to do activities and not pay major consequences.
That is it, right? I I want to be able to walk up this dang hill and then not wake up tomorrow in screaming pain. So it is a, I want to do A, and then I don't want B to happen as a consequence, right? So I want to empower everyone to be able to have that.
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So for most people to execute a resilient physiology, that is, be able to do many things, this, one of the reasons, again, we called it RTA. It's this concept of, I want to be able to do many things and then not have severe consequences.
So you're going to have to have some semblance of physical strength. Number one, right? You don't need to be a power lifter or a bodybuilder or a weight lifter, blah, blah, blah.
But minimal levels of strength. If you want to look at this

from the medical perspective, I can make that argument. We can go into tons of the research.
I was about to ask you that. Yeah.
Why is strength so important? Because I feel like we've undervalued it for a long time and you don't, you could go your whole life without. Well, I would say that we, as a strength conditioning field, didn't help ourselves much.
this was actually

the whole fun story here

in the early 1900s we as a strength conditioning field didn't help ourselves much. This was actually the whole fun story here.

In the early 1900s,

strength training was viewed as something that was really deleterious.

It was dangerous.

It was a long story here, but you'll have a heart attack.

It's this thing, right?

And that stayed along for a long period of time.

The science said it was bad for you.

And then the science changed.

In fact, there's a famous individual named Dr. Karpovich, who himself was a scientific advocate of this is dangerous, and then collected more data and realized, actually, it's not dangerous.
And then, oh my gosh, there's all these health benefits. That happened in the 1950s and 60s.
Right after that, on the back of it, you've got Arnold Schwarzenegger. You've got pumping iron.
You've got Conan. You've got these things.
And you went from bad for my health to, oh my gosh, I can become a superhero. And this empowered a generation of men mostly.
Oh my gosh, I can become a physical superhero. That was awesome.
But the downside of that was everyone's association with them with strength training was muscle and bodybuilding. And that is a very limited perspective of strength.
So scientifically, the people in this field were not strength training people. The exercise physiologists, the nutrition scientists for most part, the 1960s through 90s were all endurance folks.
And so you had no research being done. I mean, you couldn't make the argument anymore that it was bad for your health, but there was no argument that it was really great for your health.

And they had a whole generation of kids like me

who came up on that,

but then also liked science

and started saying like,

why aren't we doing studies on strength

and high intensity stuff?

And well, that only lasted so long

before work started coming out in that area.

And now it is so clear.

We have mechanism.

We have epidemiological evidence.

We have randomized control trials in men and women, young, old, and the research goes on. Physical strength is one of the single strongest, pun intended, predictors of lifespan.
And so you've got lifespan, which is how long you're going to live. You have healthspan, which people talk about now, which is how healthy are you within those years.
And now scientifically, we call it strength span, right? And what they're saying is strength span, it's not the only thing that matters, but it's an important characteristic to your health span. If you lack physical strength, a number of things start to happen.
Number one, this is one of the reasons why we look at, for the record, like leg strength and grip strength as two of the most ubiquitous predictors.

And you'll see this all across the literature as statistically significant predictors of mortality. And in fact, some of the papers that directly compare strength, again, mostly leg strength, leg extension, and grip strength, to VO2 max, oftentimes, but not always, but oftentimes will show strength is a stronger predictor of mortality or all-cause mortality than VO2 max.
So we've talked ad nauseum in the last bunch of years about important VO2 maxes, and it's absolutely true, but strength is right there as an equivalent predictor of how long you're going to live. So the question is why? Well, you have correlation and causation here.
Lots of evidence on both sides.

If you are weak, say in your hands,

it is a proxy for overall strength.

So that in and of itself is true.

It's also direct intervention.

If you can't carry a bag confidently

and you can't put a backpack

in an overhead compartment,

you're not going to take the bus. You're very less like, you're much less likely to go on an airplane.
This now leads to secondary problems with social isolation. You're not confident.
One of the single biggest predictors of one of the single biggest issues we have with unsuccessful aging is that people, when people start to feel like they become a burden on society, they start to withdraw rapidly. No one wants to be the person in line holding everybody up.
No one wants like, you just, you know, all those examples there, right? So people are more likely to just socially withdraw. And now we're having all the secondary problems of social isolation and even physical activity starts to go down because people don't leave their house.
They watch TV more and this whole cascade of things start to happen. And so we have direct and indirect mechanism there that say, again, you don't have to be massively strong, but just maintain some semblance of grip strength.
Your legs are going to tell the same story. This is your interface with the world, your legs and your hands.
And so your ability to locomote, to move throughout the world is mostly your legs. If you don't feel confident that you can walk up the steps to that museum, slowly you stop going on those trips.
You start doing that extra thing. It hurts too much.
It's too exhausting. Again, fill in all the blanks here.
And so having some sort of physical leg strength gives you confidence that allows general physical activity, which then pays all those additional benefits.

That doesn't even carry and count the direct physical benefits. So if we start looking at muscle specifically, muscle quality, and this can be defined a lot of different ways, is going to regulate in part things like your blood glucose.
And you've, I'm sure, talked to many people about the importance of metabolic health. Skeletal muscle is going to explain about 80% of the variance in your resting metabolic rate.
That's your, you know, your faster, slow metabolism. Again, 80% of the variance is going to be explained by how much lean muscle you have for the most part.
So you don't need to be huge, but losing muscle is called sarcopenia. If you lose muscle faster than you should be with aging, highly associated with inflammatory states, reduced resting metabolic rate, which then goes right back to the equation, glucose regulation, inflammation, all of these things start to happen.
Last fire hose, I know I'm going after this little bit here, but this is a topic of clear passion to me, is you have the presence of strength as well as the act of the training itself. So going through the strength training process has additional benefits to things like your central nervous system, brain, and neurological system.
The evidence is very clear. Your physical brain will stay healthier in terms of white matter and things like that when you strength train.
It will stay around a lot longer. There's actually a lot of research now that's starting to point to the fact that things like dementia and Alzheimer's, late onset specifically, is highly preventable.
And by highly, I mean it's an extraordinarily high number. You'd have to get a neuroscientist on to really get numbers there, but it is way more preventable than we realize specifically from physical activity and exercise as a, as a, not the only thing there, but a huge component to that.
Lastly, why remember the way that you move throughout the world has three big components to it. So when you pick your leg up like that and you just shifted your toe, what ended up happening there is three things.
Some signal went from your central nervous system. This could be your brain, spinal cord.
It doesn't matter. Nerves.
Send a signal. That's part one.
Part two, those nerves activate or turn on muscles and then the muscles contract. That's part two.
Those muscles are surrounded by connective tissue. The connective tissue actually is tied into your bone.
Pulling the connective tissue is what actually made your foot move like that. So connective tissue is part three.
So the reality is anytime you're strength training, you're keeping connective tissue healthier, you're keeping that muscle quality high, and you're continuing to keep that nervous system activated. Keeping that nervous system alive is keeping your brain alive.
It's physically what you're doing. It's keeping your entire nervous system around and fine-tuned.
It's the same process. And so when we tend to think about strength training as something we're doing for our muscles, we cannot forget we're also doing it for our joints, we're doing it for our bones, and we're also doing it for our brains and nervous system.
It's, yeah, I really appreciate the, I actually, please go into as much detail as you like. It's very useful to get to that granular level to actually understand the value of strength training.
Because I think, like you said, because of the bad PR that it's had for so long, we've kind of- We did it to ourselves. Yeah, we did it to ourselves, yeah.
I was going to ask you, you specifically spoke about leg muscles and like strength training there. What's the difference between walking, because we always hear walk 10,000 steps if that's the least you can do.
What's happening when you're walking 10,000 steps versus running a mile, three miles, five miles,

whatever it may be,

versus strength training with weights for your legs?

Great, man, you're on fire.

I love these questions so much.

Let me ask you a trick question.

And I'm telling you, I'm tricking you right now.

Yeah.

Right.

What's going to burn more calories?

Walking a mile or running a mile?

Running a mile.

What's calorie? Oh, walking. Sorry, my bad.
A calorie is energy. Right.
Calorie is work. Right.
Walking a mile, running a mile. Oh, same thing.
It's the same thing. Interesting, yeah.
Now, it's a bit of a trick because you probably would burn a few more calories walking or running rather because there's a little bit of inefficiency in the system. But theoretically, if you're simply looking for caloric work, this is why we have so much evidence at this point, you can manage calories any way you'd like.
That'll hit people. If you like long duration, slower stuff, you like cardio or heart, I hate those phrases, but if that's ringing a bell to you.
Which phrases do you hate? Things like cardio. Okay.
Because? It doesn't mean anything, right? Well, it's cardiovascular training. Anything that uses your heart.
Like, well, fantastic. That is literally every form of exercise, right? Like, it doesn't make any sense.
Right, right, right. If you hate that though, you don't ever have to do it.
We can get this same place. And the energy thing I just gave you was just a little silly example of saying, Hey, look, if we really actually get down to the physiology and science, these are not major differences like people think that they are.
So I, if I'm looking at fitness across the entire spectrum here, I think it's helpful to break it up into three global areas. If you can't tell by this point in the show, I'm a teacher.
So I love it. I like systems and numbers.
Yeah, it's great. Number one, what you laid out when you said walking 10,000 steps, I will bucket that into physical activity.
This is human movement. We should have a default state of human movement, right? Whether this is walking, standing, playing with our kids, gardening.
If you're in a labor and you have a physical, fantastic. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, my lifestyle is really active because I'm a construction worker or I'm a nurse and I'm walking up.
Okay. You probably don't need to go out of your way to do a whole bunch of low intensity cardiovascular exercise.
And you could, but if we're trying to get really efficient and saying kind of what's my minimal viable option here, I could say, if we got to give one up, let's give that one up because you're getting your 10,000 or 15 or 20,000 steps. If you've ever paid attention to a teacher's, my wife spent 17 years as a preschool special ed teacher.
Her step count was outrageous because her whole life was just going three steps at a time, trying to keep a kid from like doing something really naughty or dangerous or whatever. So there's a lot of professions that are even outside of a true like construction jobs that get a lot of physical activity.
They don't realize it. So that person I'm going to go, we're good there.
Maybe we're going to go float on category two, which is we'll just call this structured cardiovascular exercise. This is intentionally going to work out.
This could be intervals. It could be swimming.
It could be pickleball, sports, wrestling, like any number of things. It could be higher intensity stuff or even lower intensity stuff, but you're, you're going to work out, right? Heart rate's going to be much higher here.
You're probably going to break a sweat or something like that. I hope you're not breaking a sweat walking like that's physical activity, right? So if those things help you kind of understand the general category of number two, that's what we're after.
So if we go back to that nurse or that teacher and we're thinking, okay, we're good over there, but we still need to get one to two days a week, most likely, of this structured cardiovascular training. If we want to make it simple, give me one day where we get a really high heart rate.
I'd like to, I'll call it max. It doesn't necessarily need to literally be 100%, but it's going to have to be well past comfort zone.
One day a week is all we really need up there. It doesn't have to be a long time.
I don't care the method you pick. I don't care the machine you go on.
If you want to run sprints, I'm all for it. You want to swing kettlebells to do it? Like, great.
What I'm looking at is, did we get that node knocked off? Yes, we got high, high right up there. Cool.
Category three is more of our traditional strength training thing. And you asked a little bit of a question earlier, but why is that different? Why is it not the same? Why isn't the walking and the higher intensity? I did sprints.
My legs are tired and sore. Why is that not strength training? Well, there's a very specific reason.
First of all, it's pretty good. If that's all we can do, I'll take it.
That's a win. But your muscles are actually constructed of hundreds of thousands of individual muscle fibers.
So think of this like a ponytail. So a ponytail you think of as like one thing, but in reality, it's just a conglomerate of a bunch of individual hairs.
That's how your muscles work. You have lots of hair, you know, we call them muscle fibers in there.
Each one of those muscle fibers can be broadly categorized as either fast twitch or slow twitch. Fast twitch does what it sounds like.
Slow twitch has more mitochondria in it. It handles most of your basal physical activity.
Right now, you and I are using almost exclusively slow twitch fibers. Nothing we're doing fast here.
Right. And so they're not fatigable.
So if I asked you to take your finger, maybe your right finger, left finger, we'll do left finger, and reach up and touch your nose with that left finger. Now, what you just did right there is you activated a set of neurons that said, okay, turn on the muscles in combination to touch that nose.
The neurons you just turned on are very low threshold, which means they're easy to activate. They're very energy efficient, but they're going to activate generally those slow twitch fibers.
Now, if I said, grab that can of juice, will you? Or too sorry to call it juice. Tea? Yeah, sparkling tea.
Yeah. Okay, great.
Put that back in your left hand. Now, do the same exact activity and raise it to your nose.
Boom. You just did the exact same process, but you needed to produce more force.
Why? Because you got an extra eight ounces or something in that. So your body went, wait a minute.
I'm assuming nothing was going to be in my hand, but then I realized there's an additional amount of force needed. And so how did it increase force production? Your muscle fibers can't squeeze any harder.
When they contract, they contract as hard as possible every single time. The only way that you increase force production is to turn on more of those nerves.
We just train our nervous system. That's what it is.
More of those nerves turned on. If I were to now take that T and we had it made it 40 kilos, the only way that you can continue to produce more force to lift it up to your nose is to turn on those additional muscle motor neurons, which are going to be your fast stretch muscle fibers.
So if we extend this all out, when you're doing those other activities, you're not ever going to get to that high threshold. You're never going to use those muscle fibers.
And so one of the things we know happens with aging, when we omit strength training or strength training-like activities, those motor neurons and those muscle fibers die. And this is why we lose strength and power as we age is because we never activate those neurons.
I don't care about getting you PRs in the gym right now. We're trying to make sure that we just don't lose any functional capacity 50 years from now.
The sprinting that got your leg sore was good, but those nerves are turned on when force is required. We didn't get enough physical force production.
This is the exact same reason why things like bodyweight exercise is great. It's good.
It can take people a long way, but eventually we're going to run out of some options here, especially for our lower body, because we just won't have enough load to activate all the nerves or the motor units rather in the legs to truly get force production, to keep them as strong and healthy as possible. So that third category we're talking about, remember category one was kind of physical activity.
Category two is that structured cardiovascular. Category three was structured strength training stuff.

You got to give me one of those days a week, right?

So if we go back to this kind of nurse,

lots of physical activity,

one to two days a week of that,

one to two days a week of something related to strength,

we'd be good there.

We changed that scenario up to somebody more like you and I.

It's probably not doing a lot of steps throughout the day because we're sitting. You and I are going to have to engineer that back into our lives.
So the fitness routine, I don't know anybody about how your day is set up. I'm just assuming you're sitting more than that type of person, that avatar.
I would put more structured physical activity in your life. We would maybe do something like a 10 minute walk three times a day, two times a day.
We would maybe, hey, let's add in a walking treadmill. Maybe let's add in, like we would look for little games that we can, maybe we need to add in one or two days a week of an hour long hike as a part of your structured fitness program to get that back, right? So what we're always doing is again, assessing the entire nature and saying, those are the three big areas most people have.
And you got to move well within those categories and don't get hurt and never lose your flexibility. And there's more stuff, but categorically, these are the first layers of filters I'm going through and saying, okay, if we have to leave one of these things out, maybe we can, right? So maybe you sit at a desk job, but then you go and you do kickboxing class.
Okay, we actually got node two out of there. Maybe now we just put some physical activity in there and put some strength training in there and we're actually, we're okay.
We can survive with that, right? That's kind of the best way to think about your lifestyle and think, am I getting any of these three? Great. And then if, okay, optimal is not realistic to me, then what do I have to do to just kind of get MVP out?

And that's how I go about thinking it.

Yeah, that's brilliant.

That's such a great breakdown

because I think we often, like you said,

we kind of live in either extreme.

We're doing a lot of number three and not one

or two and not three or however it works.

And I think I've been through every phase in my life

of doing tons of one, ignoring two and three, doing tons of two, ignoring one and three, and then doing tons of three and ignoring one and two. It's hard to be really good at all three.
This would go back to quadrant. And we would say, okay, what's the realistic goal? Okay.
Realistic goal is I'm at five with business. Okay.
Well, then maybe we go, look, he doesn't have time to do three and a half hours of zone two

and then do a strength training

and then do it.

That's, we're going to lose that.

But we're not going to let that be an excuse

for never doing it.

Yeah, yeah.

So next quarter, we're going to come back

and you got to pay me back.

We're going to go back into it.

We're going to now emphasize

maybe caloric restriction.

We're going to do more movement

because it'll burn the same calories

and we have more time and you got to promise me we're going to take business down to four. Deal.
Great. Now you have a window.
You're looking at it. You're going, okay, I got this month.
I got the, you don't have to feel bad about skipping this thing because there's a plan. There's a strategy, right? But then I'm also going to be able to hold you accountable to something that was realistic and making progress.
So you don't have to have those balances I talked about all year round. It's okay to shift them.
Different priorities, different times of the year. Look at your schedule.
Look what you want. Look at what's realistic and then set yourself up for the best chance for failure.
For success, sorry. Yeah, for sure.
What recovery aids or what supportive environment do you need for strength training? Because as you explained, that's like the most intense or the one that's really working you the hardest in that sense. What do you need to support that to make sure it's effective? Right.
So with recovery, when you think about strength training, recovery in most people's mind is how sore was I? Okay. However, you got to remember with higher intensity cardiovascular stuff that has a different recovery demand as well.
So I don't want you to think strength training requires my recovery because we've seen a lot of people burn themselves into the ground with lots of high intensity cardiovascular training and they have no idea why. Right.
Especially your, your hard charging executives, decision makers, surgeons, high pressure jobs, high pressure, high pressure, high pressure, high ventilatory rate, high sympathetic drive all day. And then leave straight to the gym.
High, high, high, high, high, probably had a pre-workout. And then guess what? We can't sleep.
Stunning, right? So there's a recovery requirement for both pieces there and they're separate, right? So when we're thinking that higher intensity cardiovascular stuff, we're thinking more systemic, right? So now I'm looking at, is our overall caloric expenditure there? Do we have recovery time? Are we down regulating throughout the day? Are we not overindulging in stimulants? A whole set of equations over there.

From the muscle side, number one,

if we're getting excessively sore, we might have

issues with our training program.

We shouldn't be getting that sore

that often unless you're at a pretty high level.

And even then, the research is very clear.

The amount of muscle soreness you get

after lifting weights has

almost no correlation to how much

muscle growth you'll get from that workout. Wow.
So that's the terrible proxy for good or bad workout of how sore I got. What is the proxy for a good or bad workout? There's a, there's a fantastic model that I heard years ago from a friend of mine named Dr.
Mike Isretel. And I'm stealing this directly from him.
So I'll give him his due credit for that. You can kind of think of three

things. Here we go with the list again.
In the workout, if you're trying to grow muscle, you

should probably feel that muscle. This sounds crazy, but you'd be stunned how many people have

tried to say, get a bigger chest and they're benching and they're benching and they're benching

and it's, they're never getting a bigger chest from it. And like, are you feeling your chest

contract? No. Well then for you, that position,

the way that your anatomy works,

your technique, whatever equipment you're using,

it wasn't probably targeting your chest.

So then why do we expect your chest to grow?

Doesn't mean it has to be maximally contracted,

but there's gotta be probably some feeling of,

it's feeling like it's contracted.

Number two, you probably wanna feel some sort of what we call a pump in there. So after the session, that muscle should look a little bit bigger.
It should have contracted, filled with blood, filled with fluids. Like it should look a little bit bigger.
Number three, you should feel it something the next day, a little bit tight. Good.
Three out of 10 in terms of like how tight, how sore. It's probably good.
If it's seven, eight, nine out of 10, you may actually be going backwards because you may take so long to recover from that, that it's going to compromise the quality of the next training session. If you love this stuff and you're into it, I'll take fives.
Fives. Okay.
Uh, but if more than that, if you're at zero,

then I might be thinking,

okay, maybe we didn't get actually enough out of that session.

Two to three is a really good level of soreness out of that.

So we're initially thinking those types of things.

So number one,

if you're getting extensively sore,

my biggest tip for recovery is making sure you're not actually getting too

sore to begin with.

Second one,

by far,

there's nothing that will land even close to as impactful as,

Let's go. recovery is making sure you're not actually getting too sore to begin with.
Second one, by far, there's nothing that will land even close to as impactful as even moderate quality sleep. You have to have that.
If you look at any of the scientists that work in this area of muscle growth, if you look at many of the people that coach people here, when you start seeing stalled progress, you start looking at sleep as your first. Before you look at supplements, before you look at anything else, you definitely go to sleep.
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And if you see compromises in sleep, you're going to go back to that as your first area of emphasis. And I know people hate to hear that, but I'm telling you, look at the people who are the best in the world at growing muscle.
There's a reason that that's like one of the first places they're going after. So don't get overly sore.
Number one, make sure you're prioritizing your sleep. After that, if you want to go to nutrition, we can look at it.
Okay, great. Maybe our total caloric intake is low.
That's generally where we're going to start. From a protein perspective, oftentimes, as long as it's reasonable.
Walk us through the ideal amount of protein we actually have. Yeah.
I mean, reasonable is, and this is a heavy-ish, by the way, something like one gram per pound of body weight or 2.2 grams per kilo, rough starting point. If you want to go below that, I'm not going to argue.
If you want to go below that is, and let's say you're at a 0.8, 0.6. Uh, I can survive that.
Uh, that'd be closer to say to like 1.6 grams per kilogram. So 0.6 would be grams per pound, right? So both units there for you.
I can live with that. People can grow muscle like that.
No question about it. Um, people can grow muscle very clearly on, on many food sources, plant-based animal-based, like they're both effective.
If you go above that, you don't necessarily guarantee more growth either. And so what we're looking at with protein for most people is like, just be in the stratosphere.
Don't make it your constraint. Don't make it the problem.
Once you make it not the problem, then it's probably like going up more. Sometimes that's helped with people, but it's generally not been the thing that, that has really been like, Oh, I was only at one gram per pound and I went to 1.5 and I don't get sore anymore.
That can happen, but it's probably not what we're looking at. Um, so it, it, it's, again, it's one of those things where like, just don't make it the contractor and you're probably okay.
Yeah. That was a big one for me because I've definitely, I tried to match my body weight and protein, but I just couldn't take it every day.
It just

wasn't possible for me. Ah, we got a lot of tricks.
We could get you there if you want.

Like how? Depends on how you're eating it is why, right? So we can sneak it in

in different places. A really good example of this is how many meals do you eat a day roughly?

Three meals. Okay, great.
So sliding in 25 grams in between before or after a meal

is not as hard as one thinks. If you're trying to eat that in eight ounces of chicken breast, that's going to be uncomfortable.
But if we get that in, in terms of this is why protein shakes- Unplant-based as well, yeah. No problem.
We can easily get that. A friend of mine, Dr.
Mike Ormsby at Florida State, has been doing research in an area for over 15 years now of protein feeding immediately before bed. Now, a lot of people immediately are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, what? Yeah, that's surprising.
15 years of research in this area. He's tested combinations, men, women, metabolically unhealthy people.
And in general, most of his studies point to the same thing. That is 40 grams of protein about 30 minutes before bed.
He's yet to find any disturbances in sleep. Now this is 40 grams of protein.
There's 120 to 150, 60 calories. These are not 500 calorie full meals, right? This is a fairly modest amount.
Admittedly, I think the best he's done with sleep so far are kind of questionnaires. And so I know one of the things he's working on right now is more high fidelity sleep testing.
Because this is one of the things that, yeah, obviously I'm a, you know, I have a sleep company. Like I'm very interested in maximizing sleep.
So in fairness there, it's plausible, but on the surface so far of all of his studies, he's yet to report any significant disturbances in sleep. What he has reported though, is very little change in things like fat oxidation.
So one, there's this misnomer, like if you eat right

before bed, your body won't use it. So you'll store it all as fat.
And he's done so many studies now that I think that door is about to slam shut. That's possible that that's just not going to be the case.
And so his research is also not indicating some over the top advantage for muscle growth. It's not going to increase muscle growth by 25%.
Like, none of that's true. It's a modest benefit.
So for me, when I summarize his work, I say, okay, look, very little detriment, an opportunity to get in 40 more grams of protein if you're low on your protein targets. So if you're okay on your protein targets, I don't think you need to do this.
I don't think there's a huge advantage. But if you're really struggling, this is one of the things that we'll go to.
And 30 minutes, by the way, is an arbitrary number. If you go, oh my gosh, I tried that one time and I don't do it then.
Like, absolutely. There's not worth, there's not a ton of benefit here.
And I'm trying to make that really clear, right? I don't like overselling. This is just, hey, there's no detriment really.
And if it's not messing with your sleep and this helps you get closer to your protein, I would imagine. And by the way, he's done this in plant-based as well.
Same thing. Like basically the same results from plant-based ones.
So maybe 40 is too much for you. All right.
Give me 25. Give me 20.
15. We don't want to like, don't get too lost in detail there, right? The point is, here you go.
You had dinner at 6, 630, something like that probably. And then maybe a couple of hours later, you want to do whole food.
Great. In his research, you know, scientifically, he uses protein powders just to control.
Oh, he's actually used whole food, great. In his research, scientifically, he uses protein powders just to control.
He's actually used whole food as well. You want to do a yogurt thing.
You want to do whatever your favorite source protein is. 150, 160 calories.
These are not going to all of a sudden massively disrupt your blood flow and stuff like that. I think it's a very viable option.
It's not required. no special magic benefit to it, but that's one of the many little tricks we can use to plug in.
And you, you kind of put together two or three of those strategies. You'd be surprised 60, 80 grams of protein can kind of come like that.
And you're like, oh wow, like that was actually sort of. Yeah.
That's surprising. I want to hear your thoughts about another thing that I think people get hung up on and maybe don't know the insights behind is what should you eat before and after a workout? I have an old YouTube video up that is called something like post-exercise anabolic window.
I think it's like 25 minutes or something. So you want all the details, you can go there.
I'll give you the two-minute version for those that don't want to do that. The post-exercise anabolic window was this idea that there's this magic.
It started off as 30 minutes. Window, post-exercise, where you had to consume your nutrients, specifically carbohydrates and protein, to maximize.
And there was good rationale, molecular mechanisms, as to why we thought that existed. Summarized many years later, it's very clear that that's just not the case.
And so the way you want to think about this is total protein intake throughout the day is going to determine almost all of your variants there. So as long as you hit your total, and even I'll say total protein intake throughout the day is not even that important, it's probably thought about as like protein throughout the week.
So as long as kind of like, maybe you're a little bit lower today, a little bit higher tomorrow. That's, that's how real life actually works.
Right. Yeah.
Yeah. End up having steak for one night and got extra 60 grams of protein.
The next night you had a pasta dish and it'll be okay. Right.
So don't get overly concerned about you were 10 grams low today or 20, like'll be fine. So that matters most.
There are some exceptions though. When you are performing at a high level of energy expenditure, let's take some of our baseball players.
It's not a big deal because the energy expenditure in baseball is not incredibly high for Major League Baseball. NBA players, this is different though.
Our UFC fighters, way different. Our professional boxers, way different.
They're training hard twice a day, almost always, right? Golfers, a little bit different. So if you're training really, really hard, whether you're an athlete or not, but you're a workouter, you're super active, you're on the walking treadmill, you're an endurance, but you'd burn all those calories.
Your nutrition window might matter because you may not have enough time to restore muscle glycogen. Remember you store carbohydrates in your muscle and you'll use some of those during exercise.
And if you're doing a lot of hard work, you use a lot of it. And then if you're not consuming nutrients, you just, you kind of run out of time before then the session happens again, four hours later.
So in those particular cases, nutrient timing does start to matter, but it's not a magic molecular signaling window as so much as it is practical issue of just like you ran out of time to refill those muscle glycogen stores. And so your training for the next session went down because we couldn't refuel.
We actually just completed an intermittent fasting study. And it was the first of its kind because we were looking specifically at, there's been a lot of research.
Grant Tinsley in Texas Tech has done a lot of awesome work and many others on 16-8 intermittent fasting, right? Really, really common. You eat all your calories in an eight-hour window.
Let's just say you don't eat breakfast. You start eating at 11 AM and you eat dinner at seven, like really common thing.
Lots of research on that compared to normal feeding three meals a day, six, five, whatever. And the evidence is pretty clear at this point.
Intermittent fasting does nothing particularly special. Doesn't help you lose fat any faster

or anything like that.

Really?

No, not at all.

Wow.

As long as you equate for protein

and you equate for calories,

you'll get basically the same result.

Wow.

Some studies have reported

maybe like a half a kilogram extra fat loss.

Others not.

But if you look at the research on aggregate,

it's about the same. If it fits your lifestyle, if it has you be more adherent, tremendous.
I'm all for it. That's great.
Nothing's super special about it for caloric restriction, right? Probably 15, 20 studies from different labs at this point. So like generally they're all kind of saying the same thing.

What we were interested in though is

what about if you're trying to grow muscle?

What happens, right?

Because all those studies have put people

in a caloric deficit, trying to lose weight, right?

So you bring them down there for the most part

or caloric maintenance.

So we took young, highly trained people

that were trying to grow muscle.

We put them in a caloric surplus.

We went way above energy needs, put them on very high protein.

One group did 16-8, one group did not.

And we did everything.

We took muscle biopsies, looked at molecular signaling, genetic signaling, single fibers

adaptations.

We looked at muscle size.

We looked at sleep.

We looked at digestion.

We looked at hunger.

We looked at happiness, complaints of how hard or easy the diet was. We looked at all of it.
Net result, there were differences. But in terms of muscle growth, about the same.
Wow. One of the biggest things with the fasting group was there was just a lot of anecdotal like, oh, this is hard.
It's just hard. And specifically the problem was carbohydrates.
It was hard for them to get their carbohydrates in without getting a lot of GI distress. We had that come up a number of times.
Performance, specifically leg strength, started to come down in the fasting group. And I think we have pretty good rationale to suggest if you're trying to maximize, because we were progressively overloading them.
Basically, you can imagine this, like you're in the gym training and you finish every set. This isn't exactly what we did, but it gives you the concept.
You finish every set and let's say you do a leg press at 200 pounds and you do 10 reps. Okay, next time you come in, you're going to do 11.
If you did 11, next time we're going to do 12. So like every single session, if they were getting, they were going to, so they were training really hard for eight weeks.
I just don't think they had the recovery capacity. Right.
I think either there was underreporting because it was just like, I can't, I'm just going to write the number down, but I can't really eat that food. That's always possible in like real human studies.
Or there was actually, and we had in the paper, we have pretty good rationale to think that this is a real finding. So coming all the way back, like if you're trying to maximize strength and muscle gain and you're training really hard, both would work.
In fact, actually the intermittent fasting group didn't put on as much fat. So the reality of it is, it's my opinion, this is how science, this is how nutrition really works.
One of the reasons I advocated so hard to ask sleep questions, fatigue was higher in the fasting group too. Oh, interesting.
Energy got lower. Interesting.
Harder throughout the day. More naps, and actually naps are the same, but just perceived energy got lower towards the end of the study.
People go into change. From my worldview, that's exercise.
That's nutrition. There's many forms of change though, right? When you go into change, you often do it because you're inspired.
You heard something. You heard your podcast.
You're like, great, I'm going to try that. That sounded awesome.
So you go into it with an expectation. The reality of it is very few things are panaceas.
So maybe higher protein is better for muscle, but maybe it hurts your digestion. Okay.
Maybe it hurts your sleep. Maybe it then helps your hormone.
I'm making those up. But that's the real honest truth of how it works, right? You're going to have to make your selections, right? I don't like to be the person of going like, you should optimize for this or that, right? But you should have some knowledge of going, okay, I'm going to choose the intermittent fast.
Okay, I like it because I get A, B, and C, but then I'm probably going to lose D and B. You're constantly experimenting and figuring it out.
Yeah, I really appreciate that take because I think that's what it's been for me. I've found that there's so many things that you've heard and tried to do and felt it was right.
And it's like, well, actually, I just want to feel. And it goes back to what you started with, right? How do I want to look? How do I want to feel? And what was the third one? Perform.
Perform, right. Yeah.
And so I spent a lot of time in that. How do I want to feel and perform? And so many things that I'm told would help me look better are not things that help me feel and perform better.
That's probably pretty true, yeah. Right, yeah.
No, but I just love the take that it's about figuring it out. How important is hydration and how much water do we actually need? Okay, this is another one where if you want to get scared, look at the hydration research, scared in the sense of, um, you want to pick erectile dysfunction.
You want to pick headaches. You want to pick, in fact, there's, there's actually a paper that I just saw a week ago, two weeks ago, less than I actually, yeah, I think it was about 1% dehydration will reduce cognitive function in a statistically significant manner, right?

So if you are less than 1% dehydrated, which is almost functionally impossible for you

to notice, you will see clinically meaningful and statistically significant reductions

in a number of different markers.

This is, when I say cognitive function, I mean, I think, I can't remember honestly

specifically this paper, but it's often things like word recall, executive decision-making, short-term memory, things like that. Right.
So I'm, again, I can't remember the exact metrics in this particular study. So you'll see that you can pick thermoregulation.
You can pick, I mentioned sexual function, endocrine health, body composition, sleep. Like you'll run yourself dead worrying about this.
That said, it's not as scary as it sounds because when we typically report like 1% dehydration, 2% dehydration, what we're talking about is percentage of your body weight. I'm not like, oh my God, I'm just tiny below optimal.
You have to be like pretty far below optimal to be 1% of your body. You have, most of your body is water.
So to lose 1% of that is, you know, a liter or sort of more, right? So that's to say when we have done this a lot, I'd probably say I'm making this number up somewhere between five and 15% of our people that we've coached over the years have come in with problems. And all we had to do is just get their hydration, not terrible.
And this is everything from headaches, constant headaches to brain fog. Brain fog is probably the biggest one.
Brain fog and energy are the most common ones. 10%.
I'm comfortable saying 10% of the time it's just been a hydration issue. Wow.
What is it the other times? Sometimes it is, by the way, sometimes it's overhydration. Interesting.
Very, like probably, this is just anecdote here. This is not my lab.
I don't know the research on this or if it exists or not, but this is just what we've seen. Generally, women have an issue with overhydration.
There's like, my wife and her friends have these like called emotional support models. It's like they go to work or whatever.
It's like seven different, a tea and like a recovery drink and their hydration, it's like bottles everywhere, right? I'm talking about you, Darren, Danny. But sometimes that's a case of like, they just consistently drink water, water, water, water.
And so they get close to what's called hyponatremia. That's the science word for salt, right? Sodium more specifically.
And hypo meaning low. So what ends up happening is not that your salt or sodium gets low in your system.
By the way, this is actually really common in endurance athletes. And every year somebody dies in an endurance race from hyponatremia.
Drinking too much pure water. You drink too much pure water, it gets really dilute.
Sodium is part of the equation that causes an electrical gradient that lets muscles contract. Why that kills you is your heart is a muscle.
So your heart will stop contracting because there's no gradient difference. It's not a positive and negative charge from one side of the cell to the other side, so it won't contract and transmit electricity.
It's not really super common. You're probably not going to die drinking like a little bit of extra water.
But if you remember back in the day of, there used to be things like fraternity rushes and things like that, where they make the new pledges, drink a gallon of water. Or there's been terrible stories of parents like punishing their kids.
And again, it's not really common, but people have died pretty routinely. Really? Yeah, lots of fraternity people died from these like- That's terrible.
Your heart will stop. Yeah.
Right? You get super deluded. So most likely you're not drinking.
You're not going to kill yourself, but what you can get is some way up that journey to where electricity can, I'm kind of screwing up some science here on purpose to, for communication purposes. But if you can't send electricity from one side of a neuron to the next one, then why are you expecting cognitive function to be at its peak? So we have seen this again, many times It's not the most common.
Maybe 10% of people, it's hydration issue. Of that 10%, probably I'd say 70% are under hydrating.
So 30% of that 10, it's a small number, but it is real, are just drinking too much. And the rest? And the rest of that are on the opposite side of the equation, right? So they're drinking insufficient amounts of water or they're having things that look like dehydration that are, this is going to sound funny, but they're actually, we'll call them anxiety related.
There's a very clear relationship between hyperventilation and this is resting hyperventilation. So if you're sitting there and you don't realize it, but your respiratory rate is actually like, I'm exaggerating, but you're making a point, right? Yes, yes, yes.
That can actually put you in a position of where you're actually getting rid of too much carbon dioxide because you're breathing in oxygen, breathing out carbon dioxide. You're getting carbon dioxide concentrations too low in your system.
This is going to put you into what's called respiratory alkalosis, okay? Respiratory alkalosis is oftentimes then matched with metabolic acidosis. So that, that entire side of the equation tries to balance the pH in your system.
One of the mechanisms that has to do that is to then start altering how your kidneys reabsorb and reabsorb electrolytes, salts and things like that, which then alters hydration. So some of the times this comes back to us going, and I'm using anxiety like very inappropriately here, but roughly of saying, oh, okay, this is a hydration issue, but that's not because you're not drinking enough water or having enough salt or whatever the case is.
This is the fact that your system is continually trying to dump fluids. That's the problem we have to come backwards and solve.
So we can cover the symptom, give you more salt or reduce water, something like that. But really we got to work all the way back to the beginning and say like, let's stop this problem from reoccurring.
That happens really commonly. We see that a bunch in that 10% sort of people.
What are some other healthy solutions for brain fog? Yeah, I mean, we get this one a lot. So it's funny.
I would say brain fog people, I don't know. Again, I'm making a number up, but it feels to me like 90% of the time they think some thing unique and special is going on.
Some micronutrient is out of whack. They've got some sort of toxic thing floating around.
They got a pathogen or gut bacteria thing. And those, those happen.
We, we see those and that's a real thing. Mostly it's the basics.
And I, and I really truly mean that we have a very high success rate at RTA with brain fog, really high success rate. And often the majority of time it is the, okay, for you, it might be your sleep is completely dysfunctional.
Boom. Maybe you don't realize your sleep is dysfunctional.
Gone. Brain fog, gone.
Like that's it, right? Maybe it has nothing to do with your sleep. Your sleep is okay.
Maybe it's not great, but it's okay. And your nutrition is really mixed with your physiology.
Great. Sometimes it is gut microbiome related.
Sometimes we do see heavy metal toxins at high concentrations. Like those things are real.
I would say if you don't have access to a program like ours or advanced testing, if you do the basics, really get your stress management under control, quality water, like really all that stuff. And I'm really trying to emphasize that because that's mostly free stuff.
You don't need to turn to coaching. You don't need to turn to a stool sample.
You don't need to turn to a blood test. You don't need to buy supplements yet.
Get your house in order with movement, sunlight, quality food. A large percentage of your brain fog is probably going to go away.
If you've tried that and haven't had success, maybe you can take additional steps, but really we've had, we joke sometimes that like, we've had a lot of people spend a lot of money and we're like, you knew the answer. We told you this coming in and you, so past that, it can be micronutrient related.
There's no question about that. We were getting where we couldn't pay the bill.
PG&E asked customers about their biggest concerns so we could address them one by one. That's terrifying.
That's fair. Joe, Regional Vice President, PG&E.
We have to run the business in a way that keeps people safe, but it starts driving costs down. I would love to see that.
We're on our way. I hope so.
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You see that pretty routinely. That can look like all kinds of different stuff.

I'm wishing there was like one or two I could pull out and say, Jay, it's usually B6 or B12. It's not the honest answer though.
It has come up, but like sometimes it's, it's all, it's, it's honestly, it's super sporadic. If you get your breathing in order though, if you get stressed in order, you get reasonably close with hydration, reasonably close with quality foods and see some sun, like most of you will probably see really significant improvements.
Yeah. Andy, I'm intrigued.
We talked about all of this. I'm wondering what's your schedule? What do you prioritize? Well, I have a family.
I have five companies and I have a research lab. Let's answer it with your quadrant.
Oh, my quadrant. We'll start there.
Yeah, no. So that's actually really cool because I do this practice.
Just moved my family pretty recently, moved my lab. So now my lab is in, I'm at Parker University in Dallas, Texas.
We're building a 65,000 square foot human performance center. It's going to be open to the public.
So really, really excited about that. Yeah.
We're going to be able to do a lot of testing and stuff in there. Graduate students, a lot of research in there.
Um, we have a cool visitor center. That's going to be a part of it.
I'm just like so stoked to be. Congrats, man.
That's awesome. Thank you, man.
So that all happened this quarter. And then my sleep company, Absolute Rest, our blood work company, Vitality, and our coaching program, all this stuff came up.
So this quarter was quite frankly a seven in business. And I have to give a huge shout out to my wife because we knew coming into this quarter, I'm like, this is going to be rough.
And I'm not going to say she hasn't complained at all, but for the most part, so my fitness has been a one, the lowest it's probably been in my memory. I'm doing the best I can.
My coach, Tim is sort of like, geez, are you ever going to train? I'm like, I'm doing sort of the best I can. Everything, the rest of it's one, right? So it's one-on-one, all category.
Recovery one, relationships one. My relationships, personal things like that have been almost non-existent very intentionally.
That said, I'm super stoked because I'm about, well, in fact, when I leave here, I'm going to be spending about seven straight days with nothing but family. I love that.
So I'm paying that back. Um, when the new quarter comes and when we start off that, that's going to go back down to five from a business perspective.
And that's all going to come back up in training. So I'm super stoked to get back after it, but we made this decision in early summer.
Um, just, it's the unfortunate thing of like the, the lab move and our family move and two of our companies really taking off, like really taking off. And I was like, I see where this is going and I'm just going to set expectations personally.
Yeah. Well, it's great to hear the reality of it, right? Like that's the point.
That's the reality of life that you've kind of had throughout this whole conversation. I feel like you've given no false solutions, quick fixes.
There's no hacks and habits that are like, it's not who you are. And I appreciate it because even in your life, you're like, yeah, this is what it actually looks like.
When you are working out consistently, training every day, what does your workout look like? So I have different phases is what I do right now. One of my biggest things I look forward to every year, my dad, my brother, and I always go on a hunting trip in the fall, right? Like all kinds of stuff.
This year we're up in about 10,000 feet elevation in the, in Western Wyoming, and we're running up and down the hills basically the whole time. So I will generally schedule my entire year around that phase, which means prior to that, it was a lot more long duration, rucking, moving, training, things like that.
Not emphasizing muscle growth, not emphasizing even like VO2 max or anything like that. I need to be able to handle the mountain and I need to be able to handle my respiration and the elevation.
So I'm geared towards that. Coming back off of that trip, then I knew this quarter was going to be awful.
So this quarter was just about moving. I'm trying to move.
I did a little workout yesterday in the hotel room. Um, today, all I basically got in was, was sauna for the most part, right? No time.
And I had, well, that's a lie. I did a bath.
I did a bath in the hotel rooms. Like the best I could come up with.
I had no break a meeting. And I'm like, I can get a 15 minute hot bath in and like sweat move throughout the day.
Okay. That's how it is now.
When I go back, um, to start off after this refresher here, it's generally going to look something like this. I'm mostly going to be lifting weights three to four times per week.
And I don't ever have a Monday is legs, Tuesday is arms, things like that, because that's never going to happen. I just have the next workout and I get that thing done the next time it's available.
So I don't actually have like seven day routines. I just have a thing I'm trying to get done over across 90 days.
And so what that ends up working like is generally like 70 workouts. I try to get done in 90 days.
Sometimes that's nine or 10 or 11 days in a row because I like have the space and then I know I'm going to have two workouts in eight days. Right.
So I'm just like, if I have a chance to train, I'm going to train because I know like schedule is going to eat me right now. So I do that.
So generally three to four days a week of lifting generally one to two days a week of trying to move a ton. This could be a lot of steps up and down the mountain where I live.
This could be, I will do many of my meetings where like people always laugh at me because I'm just going to like pace back and forth. I love pacing when I work.
So I'm just like trying to accrue movement throughout the day. And then something at least once a week, like I said earlier, where I touch maximum possible heart rate and a lot of different varieties.
The last probably year or so of lifting specifically has been probably the most frustrating year of more like almost a year and a half now, because I made a conscious decision of saying, you know, I feel good. Everything's great, but I need to be thinking about the next 60 years.
And so I have a couple of little asymmetries and a couple of little things that I know are not moving how they should be moving. So I have a coach and all of my programming is just correcting those things.
So the workouts are just infuriating because it's all the stuff you suck at.

It's none of the stuff that like feels these big rewarding things out of it.

But it is a saying, it's me stepping back and going, what if you spend a year?

What if you spend a year and you weren't trying to maximize growth or maximize strength,

but you're really trying to maximize joint health and function.

Would you regret that 40 years from now?

I doubt it. Right.
And so it was just like looking back and going, let's run the counterfactual. What if you didn't do that? You probably regret it.
Yeah. So then you make that choice.
So, um, lifting for me specifically the last year has just been like, so not fun, but like, that's the conscious decision I made of investing in myself. So, um, for the honesty, man.
Yeah, man. Yeah, I really appreciate it.
It's great to hear. And I think everyone who's listening can give themselves a bit more grace as well, because, you know, you know, all of this.
And I think often people look at people who know a lot and are doing so much research and have good, healthy habits. Yeah.
But there's a reality of, you know, and I, Like, I, you know, same for me, like in the work that I do, like it's, you know, I'm constantly trying to share the moments where I'm like, you know, probably didn't respond as well as I could have or wasn't as mindful as I should have been. Sure.
You know, that's the reality of what it means to be alive. And so- It's a practice, man.
It's always a practice, right? Yeah, absolutely. Andy, we end every episode with a final five, but before we do that, there are a few more questions I kind of wanted to loop back to.
And so one of them was, why do you suggest that we don't work out at night? You can work out at night, but you want to just be careful of how much is disrupting your sleep and what type of workout you're doing, especially if your day is laid out. The example I think I gave earlier was really high intensity, sympathetic fight or flight type of day.
If you're then always matching that with additional sympathetic drive, some people that's okay, but a lot of people in our experiences that has been their, you know, quote unquote, root cause of fill in the blank, right? So low testosterone, brain fog, sleep, sort of like, okay, when you're on gas pedal all day, maybe for you right now, your exercise needs to be a little bit more restorative rather than the opposite. It's not always the case though.
I train at night with generally no issues whatsoever. I like it.
I almost always train at the end of the day. So it can be just fine.
Got it. Just be mindful of, if you're looking at your system and going, okay, great.
I can do really high intensity stuff. I can do, we've like, our sleep technology is pretty outrageous.
So I can verifiably say these things. I can do lots of stimulatory stuff.
I can watch Lord of the Rings in 8K on a 90-inch screen. I don't have this, but like right in front of my face, a minute before bed.
And I have zero issues with blue light. I have zero issues with stimulation.
And that's just how you're wired. Sleep architecture is going to be fine.
Sleep duration, sleep quality, the amount of time, the depth within each sleep phase. I track all these every night, right? No change for me.
So intensity of exercise is going to have no bearing on me. But that's for you specifically.
Yeah. Totally.
Yeah. What I've seen though, for a lot of our people is not always, but many people, it's the opposite where we have to be a little bit more mindful.
And so what we might have to do is say, okay, we can train, but your training has to look

like this.

We have to redefine what training is for you.

We have to do our higher intensity stuff earlier or at minimum.

And this is what we do for our athletes because they don't have an option.

They have to, their competition is at night, right?

NBA plays at seven o'clock or you get the idea.

Let's at least match the high intensity work with down regulation post-exercise.

If you want to off the court or walk out of the gym and go right now, now we finally see our kids for the day or whatever, like you're just asking for disaster here. Give me five minutes, three to seven is what I say.
Give me three to seven minutes. Can we down regulate a a little bit? And we have really found that can give us 80% of what we need to get.
It's not a hundred, but if all those things are, or your fuse, you're like, that's it. That's my only time of day.
And I'm not giving up my, okay, fine. Give me my five minutes post-training.
You can do this in a car. You can do this in the locker room or wherever it is.
Lights down, cover your face with our athletes. We'll put just their shirt or their towel over their face, lie on your back.
I would love to give you a specific and highly designed down regulation breath work routine. That's what we, that's our gold standard.
But if you can't do that or won't do that, just give me the other stuff. Fine.
Just breathe through your nose. All right.
You want to do a double extended exhale. So you want to do a cadence, like a four second inhale, eight second exhale.
Generally, the longer you're exhaling, the more down regulatory it is like, okay, great. Like we have lots of protocols.
We can go into tons of customized breathing programs. We do that a lot.
But if not, can you make it as simple as go sit in your car, close your eyes, and just breathe through your nose, set a timer for four minutes? That actually is a stunning amount of effectiveness to that. Wow.
I love that, man. That's great.
Yeah. I definitely, I was playing pickleball at night.
I was doing my morning workout in the gym and then pickleball in the evening was destroying my sleep. It would take me two take me two hours.
Like I'm someone who thankfully falls asleep pretty quickly. And it's like, I would get in bed at like 9.30 and I wouldn't get to bed till like 11.30, 12.
Cause I was just like wired from playing pickleball for like seven to nine or whatever it was. And so I'm having to figure out, I just stopped playing because it was having such a big impact, but I appreciate it.
Try that. I will try it out.
Yeah. You'd be surprised.
It might not be enough for you. You might, you might have to do 15 or 20 minutes or it might not work at all, but, but give it a go.
You might, we've seen enough. I'm, might work.
I'll try it out. Another audience question we had to answer was, what do you suggest for women with PCOS in terms of an ideal workout? So when you get into situations like that,

whether it's PCOS,

whether it's just simply really difficult menstrual cycles to manage,

whether it's a menopause or, you know,

you know, if we're going through it, things like that.

This area of research is so tricky

because symptomology is so wide ranging.

Defining menopause is physiologically easy,

but even understanding, you know, it could be six months or 10 years. Like it's a really hard thing.
Symptoms are up and down. The menstrual cycle alone, independent PCOS, you're adding on top of those things.
I have yet to see a clear cut specific, this is better. Got it.
And just sort of like, if you want to follow some guidelines and you're feeling better, I'm all in. Like, that's great.
If not, though, I don't have a specific thing that says you have to do this this way. We are yet to give women different styles of training while we're here.
We don't train them differently just because they're women. We don't do anything different throughout the menstrual cycle with training or nutrition just because they're women.
We do everything that's based on the individual. So if we need to do such stuff, we absolutely will.
But we do not walk them in and say, oh, okay, our women do this style of training. Our men do this.
We absolutely do not. And I know that wasn't what you're asking.
No, no, but that's really useful. Yeah, I didn't know that.
No, I'm intrigued. We definitely do that.
You don't have different protocols. You have it.
It's so individual. It's not based on gender.
It's not like, oh, you're male, so this is better for your strength than female. Yeah, yes.
Like men and women have massive differences and we're always going to acknowledge and pay attention to those things. But I'm always just coaching you.
What are the differences that people should be aware of? You have clear hormonal differences generally, right? One of the things that we have seen in our research, and I would say it's held true in our coaching practices, a lot of the times women handle volume better from an exercise perspective. And when I say handle, I mean, you can give them more reps, more sets.
They can train more often. Their recovery is faster.
The other way you can flip that. Why is that? Well, we've actually done some work here and nobody really knows.
I noticed that with my wife. My wife's like that.
Yeah. Honestly, it's pretty true.
My friend Brett Contreras made a really awesome post recently. I'm like, wow, this is great.
Specifically on this point, again, I want to give him credit because I'm like, oh, actually he nailed this. When people say things like, oh, we don't train men and women differently.
Like I just said, I generally hear that and go, okay, you never train women. Like you never train women.
If you're going to say that, that's exactly what Brett's post was. I'm like, okay, because honestly we sort of do now walking in, we do not, but I know that oftentimes we can bring the volume up.
Also, it oftentimes means they need more volume. Not always, but I'm hedging quickly of going, okay, we got to start probably thinking more volume here.
And if we're not getting responses as quickly as you want, we're pretty quick to just go to volume. And it oftentimes went, oftentimes men that'll go the other direction.
When it comes to performance to women, because of that generally don't need as much of a taper. They don't need to have, they don't have to back off as much to get that super compensation, that, that peaking day.
Again, these are very generalizations, right? We're always coaching the individual. Yeah.
We can't get specific without a avatar in front of us. Exactly.
So those are some ones that we kind of like pop out to immediately where we see differences i've coached world champion females in probably six or more sports at this point so we've done power lifting and ufc and a bunch of different sports i'm wrestling i can also say most often women are more in tune with their body than men. They generally give better feedback.
If you go ask one of our male athletes, like, how are you feeling today? Like, I know what they're going to say. Pretty good coach.
Like, whatever. Where women are more likely to be like, oh, I feel pretty good, but back's a little bit tighter here.
Energy's just a touchdown. You're like, oh.
And they're really in tune with this thing just a little bit off over here. Men are like kind of blunt instruments.
A lot of the times, women will be more responsive to changes in caloric intake, where again, men are a little more robust to those things. So you have to be really careful.
You have to be really careful of lowering calories too much, too long for women. You got to be careful not in men, but you can get away with it a little bit more.
So when it comes to just sort of these generalities, those are the ones that pop up the most. Some things that are counterintuitive actually, since we're here, we, and there's a lot of research on this that I'd say empirically, our coaching practice, scientifically, we actually just published a meta-analysis.
I was a co-author on this one. So somebody else led this one.
But you don't really see much of a difference in rate of increase between men and women in terms of strength and muscle. It's not that different.
You grow at about the same relative rate. It's just that men are generally bigger.
So if you both gain 10%, your absolute amount is as far as much higher. So it looks like you just got it there.
There are some subtle differences there within that meta-analysis. You can read the details if you're a nerd like that.
But the take-home message for that is it's pretty much the same. And I would say our coaching experience has seen that.
We don't see women on average struggling to put on more muscle relative to men or strength. If the training and the nutrition and all the other factors are equal, they're going to progress pretty much equally for a long, long period of time.
The last one that would jump out to me is on a similar note. There is we generally see women through aging are a little bit more successful against joint injury.
Oh, interesting. Men are going to be a little more banged up for the most part.
So I think that's a believable story too. I don't know why, but well, I can guess.
Go on. A little more aggressive, probably worse decision making, but you get it.
So categorically, those would be some of the differences. Got it.
Thank you. Andy, I want to ask you a final five.
These questions have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum. Oh boy.
So the first question is, what is the best health advice you've ever heard, received, or given? The notion of adaptability and plasticity is far greater than people realize. Your genetics play a big part, of course, but your lifestyle is far more important to your end story than your genetics.
So you have the ability, the capacity within reach to make a significant improvement in any aspect of that look, feel, perform that you choose. Some work there, but you have autonomy in your body.
That's very hope-giving. I love that.
Question number two, what's the worst health advice you've ever heard or received? Oh boy. I'm going to cheat with my answer here and give a antithesis to my first answer, which is the idea that there is a certain food you can or can't eat, that all of us in humanity have to be eating or sleeping or training or living a certain way, or we're going to be unhealthy.
That is colossally untrue, unfair, and unhelpful. Great answer.
Question number three, for someone who's really trying to lose some stubborn belly fat, what should they do? This will sound a little bit counterintuitive, but a large portion of your resting metabolic rate, your metabolism is defined by how much muscle you have. So getting those last few pounds off the belly, maybe try to put some muscle on.
My guess is you've already done everything else. So try that option.
And would you recommend how, or that's case specific? Yeah, totally. Question number four, what's something you used to believe to be true about health that you disagree with now? I have a lot of answers.
I've been open, honest, and probably should do more about things that change. I was very against cardiovascular exercise.
I thought strength training is the only thing you need to do. That's very wrong.
I was also very against low-carbohydrate diets in any form. I was very against intermittent fasting.
And I think I wasn't totally wrong on that, but those are viable strategies for most people. They're not perfect for all goals, but those things are options.
So I'd say those three specific ones, but in general, I was simply too closed-minded about assuming I knew what everyone wanted in terms of the outcome and the goal. When you do that, you start limiting options and you are working too much off of hubris.
The more you realize people are looking for different things, then you start to realize, oh, okay, these are potentially acceptable. They just aren't going to get to where I thought everyone wanted to go.
And that was not the appropriate approach. So all of your questions, by the way, I'm in like sentence nine.
I love it, man. It's all good.
Fifth and final question. It's the question we ask everyone who's ever been been on the show if you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow what would it be you know what's quite funny about this answer is I literally sent a tweet out yesterday that said I think we should make it illegal for people to recline their seats on airplanes that's so good it's on top of my brain I'd be really mad at you for that, Laura.
God, I hate that. But you can recline yours too.
That's the whole point. No, not because you're smashing into my lap and I can't work.
Oh, right. Oh, you're a worker.
That's what you're getting. Yeah.
I'm like, plane time is perfect work time. Got it.
Plane time is the only time I switch to entertainment. Oh, really? Yeah.
I'll read a book or I'm watching something. No, man, I hate it.
So my cheeky answer here would be how to make it illegal to recline seats on airplanes. I love it.
Andy Galpin, everyone. Thank you so much for listening and watching, Andy.
Thank you for all your incredible insights, wealth of wisdom. I hope that you will take away one thing and apply it from this episode.
Remember, that's my request. You won't be able to do all of it.
You won't be able to do everything. Try and pick the one thing and just apply it to make a shift in your life.
Follow Andy across social media, his podcast, everything else he has going on to make sure that you're connected to his insight. I'm sure it's had a big impact on you.
I know it has on me. And Andy, I look forward to having you on the show many, many times.
Thank you so much. That's my pleasure, man.
I can't wait to come back. Yeah, thank you.
If you love this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain.
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