welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday

[Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and

Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Pavo satlin Pavo satlin is considered one of the

Premier strength training and fitness coaches in the world he has pioneered the development of various programs to

improve strength which he calls the mother of all Fitness indeed today you will learn about strength as a practice

as a skill that can be applied to sports that can be applied to general fitness to getting leaner to getting faster and

to improving your endurance as Pavo Satan explains by building one's strength through body weight exercises

free weight exercises and occasionally machines one can develop incredible levels of Fitness at any age we

discussed some of the spectacular examples of people in their 70s and 80s performing strength Feats like 100

pull-ups per week and we emphasize that one does not have to be seeking hypertrophy one does not have to be

seeking getting larger muscles in order to get exceptionally strong I myself these days am focusing primarily on

trying to get stronger and build endurance for sake of health and for General Life reasons and because getting

really strong turns out to be very beneficial in every aspect of life today you're going to learn how to get

extremely strong you can add muscle if you want in parallel with that or as pav Satan explains you can pursue strength

and flexibility for their own sake and there's tremendous value for doing so so today's discussion pertains to women to

men and frankly to people of all ages I do think that pursuing strength as its own thing independent of muscle growth

right which we hear so much about these days everyone wants hypertrophy grow muscle this and that pursuing strength

as its own thing is a tremendously valuable Endeavor today you're going to learn how from the world world's Premier

expert in this topic you're in for a very special episode with Pavo satlin he is truly in a class all his own when it

comes to Fitness and strength training before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my

teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer

information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme this episode

does include sponsors and now for my discussion with Pavo saulin Pavo sat welcome Andrew uh pleasure to be on your

podcast I respect your work a lot thank you likewise thank you I will say that you and perhaps one other person

have truly changed the way that I think about Fitness the way that I train and I'm super excited to talk to you today

so I'm withholding excitement there are a bunch of different ways to think about this thing

that we call Fitness strength endurance hypertrophy and there's so much information out there

now how do you conceptualize fitness meaning do you look at things through the lens of Are We focused on nervous

system bone connective tissue or muscle do you look at things through the lens of anterior chain posterior chain

hypertrophy strength I would just like to get your sort of high level conceptualization of this thing that we

call Fitness with the idea in mind that most people would like to have some level of endurance some level of

strength and feel healthy and presumably look however they want to look but let's set Aesthetics aside for the moment how

do you think about this thing we call Fitness well first of all Andrew is uh strength is the mother mother quality of

all the other qualities so this is again it's a statement by Professor M mat going way back and without a foundation

of strength you cannot build anything so any athletic event requires a base of strength of course that uh shot putters

going to need much more strength than Triathlon uh Triathlon athlete but they all need strength speaking of which uh

in Triathlon in Marathon running in distance uh in cycling it's been proven that putting athletes on a heavy low

repetition strength regimen the kind that doesn't really add muscle but just makes you stronger neurologically and uh

it makes them race faster so once you're stronger everything becomes easier how much stronger you need to get that will

vary in the Soviet Union they had something called the model athlete so they figured out that for every

particular event uh your odds of succeeding are going to be much higher if you're able to you know Squad this

much or bench this much and jump this high and so on and so forth and this is easy enough to find these numbers for

your individual Sport and talk to various coaches for people who are not competitive athletes who just want to

enjoy life you just need to think about uh having a reserve of strengths for whatever it is that you might do so look

at some PT standards and let's say in the military or in law enforcement and possibly apply them to yourself I don't

want to impose my set of Standards because there are many different like I might prefer you know pull-ups and X and

Y and Z but if we're looking at strength as the foundation for General physical preparation right so there's such a

thing as general strength preparation that's part of that there's also you know special strength which is Sport

specific work that's different and uh there are different ways of getting this done but as you and I know that uh

certain exercises are going to have a great carryover outside these particular exercises so as long as you're mobile as

long as you're symmetrical and those are the things you have to address first you need to look into work of uh gr cook for

example then strength has to be your priority once you have reached a certain level strength that's appropriate for

your sport or appropriate for your lifestyle at that point you can just maintain it and focus and other

qualities so I will um give you an example uh Soviet scientists research and Gena they OBS they

measured a number of athletes in 20 different sports athletes of different levels so they evaluated various quality

one was absolute strength and other was rate of force development pretty much power

and the third was is the rate of muscular relaxation so how quickly the muscle can relax after contraction which

is very very important and they have found that uh strength grew just very little from the

intermediate level to the advanced level there's not a lot of improvement power increased a little bit more but the

speed of relaxation is just just shut up as the athlete be became more advanced so it's again so strength it is the

modable qualities but that's not the end all for everybody so reach the level that is appropriate for your Sporter

activity then just maintain it efficiently and uh focus on something else if we talk about strength if we

talk about other qualities well we'll get to them later what movements do you believe if they exist all people should

include in their weekly routine someplace when thinking about how to develop perhaps maintain but but for

most people it's going to be the goal of still achieving some strength okay strength increase excuse me I think

there has to be a very low quantity of exercises just very few exercises you want to focus on and uh I'm going to

give you some options to choose from so what we try to do a strong first in my company my school of strength is we try

to provide people with various simple very low Tac High concept ways of addressing reaching their needs because

for one reason or another for this indiv the barbell is the preferred tool for another it's the kettle bell or body

weight or some or something else so I'm not going to say that if you don't do kettle bell swings or barbell squats

you'll never amount to anything that's just not true but you can pick some you can pick some events so you definitely

ought to do something for a posterior chain you absolutely do if we are looking at uh at the

barbell I would start out with the narrow Sumo deadlift so this is narrow grip but not Nar grip pardon me but your

stance is just wide enough to let your arms through uh your arms stay parallel to each other and uh so you just find it

very comfortable stance for yourself so Professor Mill has been in your podcast he explained to you about the uh you

know different hip architecture and so on so you have to find whatever works whatever works for you and when people

talk about functional strength training and then they start standing on a ball and jugle oranges doesn't make a

lot of sense to me because that doesn't look like my life or yours probably right but if you have to get a heavy bag

of groceries or something you got a deadlift and the narrow Sumo deadlift so if you look at powerlifters an example

would be classic example would be Ed cone that's a narrow St Sumo I'm not talking about wide Sumo that's a very

sport specific event and uh you practice that first you learn how to hip hinge it's extremely important to learn how to

hip hinge again uh Steward stress that how important it is for your back health and for your longevity so you learn to

do that then whether you decide to pursue deadlift or not if you decide not to pursue High numbers in the deadlift

maybe it's not appropriate for you or maybe you're liking the coaching a fantastic exercise for everybody is a

zercher squat so in the zercher squat you hold the bar like this in the crooks of your elbows so it's resting right

here it's possible to pick it up off the ground but it's you know it's it's an advanced skill that's it's an advanced

skill better just to walk it off the rack the advantage of the zerra squad over let's say the back squat or the

front squat is even if you have messed up shoulders wrists elbows you still can do that coaching uh desert your squat is

very easy very simple and you have tremendous reflex of stabilization uh of your midsection it's

just very very powerful so you acquire that skill of getting tight so getting high numbers on that exercise in the

zercher so let's say an athlete could shoot for double double body weight it that's that's a really good goal and the

bar for those listening not watching is cradled in the in the crooks of the elbows in front of the body are the arms

uh cross you can hold them like this you can hold them like this or different ways of holding them you definitely

would want to get proper coaching uh you don't want to you know you don't want to bruise yourself you want to be

comfortable you want to do it right but it's not doesn't take a lot of skill to do that you find some pressing exercise

and again uh if we're sticking with the example of the barbell the bench breast has gotten better reputation you know

thanks to the gimm Bros and you know all gim Bros do is they bench pretty much well these days they also check out

their phones I guess every set between every set the 11th rep I joke people checking their phones yeah there we go

but if you look at athletes they athletes who also do some lower body work some posterior chain

chain work and something for the midsection and again Zer sad could address that they are making a great use

of the bench press so it's nothing it's a very simple exercise well not very simple it's a relatively simple exercise

and uh unlike other pressing exercises it allows you to make strength gains with a very low volume of training so

you can do several sets of five once a week in the bench press and keep getting stronger good luck doing that to the

overhead press or the one arm push-up or something like that so those are just couple examples uh there are many other

examples you can do snatch grip deadlifts you can uh list as very very long we can address the same thing in

the same way with kettle bells you can look in the body weight exercises but you need to find several exercises that

have a reputation for building strength that reaches beyond the ability to do this exercise if you just do curls you

know you're going to do you're going to get better at curls but not at much else so Canadian

um Canadian scientist back in the 80s the duale and his team made some interesting uh some interesting

discoveries and again they just found that doing something leg extension is not going to carry over to the squad it

just not the coordination is so radically different so you find several exercises that you enjoy that don't hurt

you that uh you uh have the equipment available that you got the proper coaching for and you pretty much stick

with them and there's absolutely no reason for you to change these exercises it's possible to change them on the

margins you know from a wide grip bench press to Nar grip bench press uh squats with a Paws and so on and so forth but

you don't really have to do uh a great variety of things variety it's a good topic we can discuss this later but uh

like looking at the example of weightlifting as much as we can find many reasons why variety could be

beneficial improved neuroplasticity uh reduced uh reduced risk of repeative strain injury and so

on but the so did the statistics in weightlifting there's no correlation between the number of exercises and uh

the platform results and for people outside the sports it's going to be the same so find this limited just limited

battery of exercises that you can ex you can do well you can do painfree and just enjoy them for

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membership would a combination across the week of some sort of squat let's say the zercher squat a um perhaps a kettle

bell swing or something else for a posterior chain pull up and dip be a fair Fairly comprehensive program

absolutely I'm a fan of dips I like dips a lot I heard you say that you uh were some years ago you said that you were

using dips for economy of time um and I started getting into dips I um haven't quite figured out the best way to load

dips once because once you get past 15 20 repetitions of the body weight dip it gets I turns into something else sure

absolutely uh it turns into aerobic exercise perhaps well uh Luke Iams uh he was a powerlifter from the Golden Age of

American powerlifting he says anything over six reps is bodybuilding yeah I'm trying to stay in the lower rep range

today I'll talk about this with you more uh because I think a growing number of people both men and women who are

starting to do weight training or really incorporate strength training into their program are seeking a combination of

strength and perhaps endurance as well without putting on too much size maybe size in some select body parts Andrew I

think they need to uh do possibly several different types of types of training but going going back to your

examples dips are fantastic if you can if your shoulders can handle them if you know how to do them it's a great

exercise but not particular Democratic that's the problem so either you can do it safe or you can't and possibly it's

possible to coach some people to do to do the dip so if you're coaching somebody to do the dip the first

prerequisite is to build up to a full skin the cat so it means you're hanging upside down you know look up what it

means folks uh on a bar so you got to be able to get yourself in that position so if you're able to do that and if you're

able to get out of the position you know strongly and confidently there's a good chance that you can start up and doing

dips and be coached into that if you can't probably not so either try to build up to that unless there medical

restrictions or not uh you mentioned the example of pull-ups absolutely pull-ups are one of the best General strength

exercises and again to your listeners uh General versus special special in Soviet terminology just means sport specific so

the carryover when you start doing pull-ups when you excel at pull-ups or the dips you are going to get a

carryover so far beyond these exercis which is exactly the reason you do that so I like your choices very much yeah

what about specialized training for grip strength I I believe that if somebody's large if they can squat 500 lb if they

can deadlift 600 lb I don't really care if um the question is can you open the pickle jar sure this is a critical I

just get my wife to do it so uh it's uh grip strength is extremely important and you being in

neuroscientist you know the disproportional representation the motor cortex of your gripping muscles and the

forarm and everything so so uh and there's another reason why grip is so important so if you make a fist if you

make a very tight fist you're going to feel uh you're going to feel the Overflow of tension IR radiation going

to other muscles so pretty much by gripping tighter you are instantly increasing your strength in anything

that you do and uh so very simple example for your listeners take some um pedestrian exercise like

curls and and do as many strick traps as you possibly can the way you normally do them and then start just crushing that

bar or that dumbbell or whatever that you're curling you will immediately be able to knock out several more reps so

that makes you so much stronger and again the value of a strong wrist and grip is obviously very important uh for

whatever reason obviously it correlates with longevity we don't know why we have no idea correlation is not uh causation

so we don't know whether getting stronger a stronger grip is going to make us live longer but statistic

basically is worth a try right so one can either find exercises that train the grip in the context of

developing something else or train the grip directly so either way is is great so the first examples would be climbing

the Rope or doing pull-ups and weighted pull-ups on a rope that's a great way to train obviously so what you do the way

you program it is uh let's say once a week you climb the rope and a couple days a week you do pull-ups that's a

good way to go about it and you don't need to do anything else and another example would be some exercises like the

cattle Bell snatch when you start snatching a heavy kettle bell and you drop it from overhead that eccentric

loading uh is is very very powerful and that develops grip very very well and again right now we're talking more about

what uh what people in the grip world called the crushing grip you know how you squeeze something there are other

types of grip that they differentiate but this type of crushing grip is what's going to help most athletes and

non-athletes the most and uh I also warn you that uh hanging on the bar and doing Farmers carries beneficial as they are

for many reasons it's not going to do that much for it interesting I started incorporating Farmers carries thinking

it was going to improve my grip but they're healthy uh if you look at McGill's work you will he he will tell

you that carrying two heavy objects it's going to really pound your spine and uh but on the other hand as symmetrical

carry it appears to be very beneficial then there's another interesting example now right now I'm not talking about grip

training at all uh I'm not even talking about strength training but I'm talking about sort of a former run uh Dr Mike

Prost who used to work with the US Marine Corps Navy he developed this very interesting protocol and a test called

the kettle bell mile where you take a kettle bell that's approximately 30% of your body weight and uh he he has good

reasons for why it has to be that way and you pretty much run with this kettle bell and you switch hands as much as

often as you want and it's a fantastic way to uh improve your running posture to develop very stabilizing muscles and

to improve your ability to rock but it doesn't beat you up as much rocking does you know rocking carrying heavy weight

that's it's rough on the body so it's a fantastic way uh it's a fantastic way to to

train your endurance an additional way how heavy is the kettle bell that 30% because he says when you start going

heavier it's going to affect your gate so you're not really you know you have to you have to kick your hi over to the

side it becomes it becomes something else that's a heavy Kettle Bill 30% of your body weight yeah I mean I'm 210 lbs

it's not not trivial it's probably something like to 62 LBS or something like that uh 70 lb Kettle bill it's not

no no no it's not trivial by any means but it's also not something you jump in to immediately and also what's very cool

is because you get to switch hands very often you're not destroying uh your ql and other stabilizers that Contracting

isometrically and so what we're doing right now here is kind of a form of anti-glycolytic training if you muscle

contracts briefly and relaxes contracts relaxes with and the contraction Cycles are really short you're able to avoid

glycolysis you're able to keep that muscle working aerobically for a long time and not beat yourself down so uh to

the listeners who'd like to try it start by walking with a kettle bell pass you know switch hands off and then

eventually build up to running and obviously build up gradually held like a suitcase yes only only like a suitcase

mhm okay yeah there's a podcast um led by a guy named cam Haynes he's a bow hunter he's one of the people that

really brought Extreme Fitness and Ultras to the sport of bow hunting and is legendary there and for his podcast

he has you carry the 72lb rock up a it's about 1,000 feet of the wildness and I've done it it's uh

it's hard because of the shap of the thing and so you're moving it from shoulder to uh to you know to football

carry to uh you know uh infant carry and uh you're not talking about that you're talking about suitcase on the right

correct are you trying to crush the grip while you're doing it no you're not no this is not this is not developing a

grip whatsoever and and you're running at a 10 20 minutes 30 minutes well he's go he says run for a mile that's the

goal and he has some numbers I can give you a link can look at up Dr Mike prast and direct grip strength strength

training is great as well so for example the best product for that would be the captains of Crush grippers from Iron

mind iron mind iron mind is the company that started a serious grip training pretty much in modern era and their

grippers are the golden standard some years ago my colleague as strong for Brad Jones and I we decided to get

serious about it and see what that feels like and we spel spent many many months we were both able to build up to uh uh

closing the number three gripper uh from a parallel set so uh that means that gripper takes 280 lbs to close and when

you're using very small muscle groups it's extremely extremely hard and the observations that we both made and uh

other colleagues and people have made that once you are able to do that everything becomes so much easier

however the training itself is extremely hard because people are thinking that when you're training the grip is just

some kind of isolated thing you can you can write it drive the car and you can kind of squeeze this little pink thing

that you picked up at uh at the department store no when you train with a heavy duty gripper like the one from

Iron mind it's a full body effort and you need to use um pretty much every neurological trick in the book in

order to to uh exert yourself so for example if you uh if you have ever seen uh the

sunanin stance in Kate which is it's a stance where the knees are kind of pulled Inward and uh shoulders are

pressed down there's a lot of lot of tension everything everything's very very seriously engaged the toes are

gripping the ground so you're pretty much gripping the ground with your toes you're Contracting your glutes you're

bracing very very hard you're compressing your viscera your ltis firing and you're sending this all this

effort everything the only thing they're not working like you try to keep your traps and face out of this and you're

directing this effort into your goup you get just as tired from doing that work as from uh doing like heavy squats or

something that's remarkable but if you like that it's a fantastic thing to do well the the motor neuron recruitment

that you are describing is phenomenal um I have one reflection on this relationship between grip strength and

Longevity uh just a a little bit of Neuroscience um you may be familiar with this so forgive if you are but for the

listeners as well the motor neurons that control movement of the Torso lie closer to the midline on both sides of the

spinal cord the motor neurons that are responsible for more distal mus muscles um that is further from the midline sit

outside of those and so as you get out to the movement of the digits you know the fingers and toes um those are the

most distal from the midline the rate and pattern of degeneration of neurons as a function of Aging even if there's

no ALS or Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or anything is always outside in we don't know why this is it may relate to the uh

presence of the enzyme um sod superoxide dutas um but it does seem that people that train their peripheral

strength they can offset some of that outside to in or distal to more uh close to the midline degeneration so I believe

and this is just a belief that it's not just correlative that when one trains their periphery they actually can offset

some of the degeneration it's also the way it's mapped in the brain which is a kind of a discussion outside of here we

need to get some diagrams up for people to really um conceptualize that but it's also the case if you look at older

people 70 80 90 their calves are generally atrophied even if their torso is still very thick and muscular if they

did training so I feel like obviously training the core and the Torso is so key but training the the peripheral

muscles at least from the perspective of longevity it makes sense why that would be important well there are so many

reasons obviously to do that so I think that whether you choose to do that directly with grippers or and there are

some other devices obviously unlimited number of devices and exercises or as a part of another exercise like climbing

the Rope uh definitely strongly encouraging your listeners to do that I'm going to try this running with

the kettle bell on one side for I'll go out for a mile with it on the right and then oh no no you s all the time

as much as you want because if you try to do on one side you're going to pound your stabilizers just pound them you're

not going to recover forever and this way this is one of the secrets secrets to developing uh isometric endurance is

very uh rapid switching you know short contractions and uh brief rests and over and over and over that way you are not

uh you you know the muscle doesn't go uh into esia and you know keeps getting oxygen pretty much

I'd like to talk about concentric versus Ecentric portions of a movement concentric generally being the lifting

phase and Ecentric of course folks the the lowering phase um is there a case for just doing

concentric movements yes um is there a case for emphasizing the Ecentric portion uh how does one balance those

when thinking about soreness recovery and frequency of training okay well first of all the case for concentric

only is if you're trying to minimize muscle girls and uh if you also are trying to minimize soreness so for

athletes uh in weight classes or athletes in sports where you get punished by carrying extra weight it's a

very good idea so for example uh when Barry Ross coached telis and Felix at that point she became the uh

fastest she won the 200 meters uh in the world she was 17 years old I think she was the youngest and so he would have

her do deadlifts and they were conscent only and she would have her drop the bar and uh the reasoning for that is is

exactly that you're able to get stronger you're not putting on extra muscle mass also it's it's safe it's really very

very safe way to train and in programming in programming a protocol for somebody who's not

necessarily in that in that boat it's still just for the sake of variety you may want to choose to avoid the avoid

The Eccentric on certain days like you're trying to recover accelerate the recovery so you uh lift the weight but

then you step down so you could definitely do that eccentric work it's suppos supposedly very helpful to

promote hypertrophy but there are a lot of ifs and butts in there I'm going to talk right now about The Eccentric

strength work Ecentric work for strength specifically it's very because the muscle is strongest whenever you're

lowering the weight it's very easy to uh do something knuckleheaded and get hurt which is Jim Bros do that all the time

and instead of doing that what the wise much wiser approach is to get a perfect spotter great competent

Spotter and put on after you've done your normal couple of low repetition heavy sets add maybe 5 10 pounds over

your maximum and make a perfect eccentric with an intense ion of lifting

it so you're lowering this bar that you're just you know the bench press bench press barbell you lowering to your

chest and you're loading yourself like you're ready to press it back you pause on your chest without losing tension

you're ready to blast it back and then your spotters take it off you and you do this about do this about two three

times this uh this sort of a strategy or variation of it was uh us used by reek will he was uh he was able

to bench press over 50000 lb wearing a t-shirt uh at a body weight of buak 81 back in the 80s one of the great

greatest uh bench pressers who was extremely intelligent about his training and he did the same thing with his heavy

attempts as well and incidentally even better not even better I should say you do this in a different

day when you combine this this same type of eccentric with a very uh uh con perfect assisted trip not Force Trap

like Bros do it's so you bro you know the guy shaking there and dying no so again let's say that your best bench

press is you know 315 so you load up 325 you lower it perfectly and you're not and you're lowering at the speed of

your uh Max attempt so you're not going very very very slow you know how guys do it they take the first uh quarter of the

range of motion very slow and they fall through that doesn't do anything at all no you lower it at that uh rhythm of

your maximum weight you pause and then you press it and your training partner gives you enough assistance to make it

feel like it's about your 90% so the fact is you're not you get to feel a supera maximum weight but you're not

experiencing any psychological stress it's very very powerful and again you do this uh you do this maybe for one or two

singles this uh also ties with the Soviet research on gymnast they came up with

something called artificial controlling environment so they compared a group of gymnasts that was uh working up to some

strength demanding skill with doing typical regressions and at the same time they were also working on um typical

strength training weighted pull-ups and so on and the other group would have the coach provide this perfect assistance to

enable the athlete to perform the skill at a high level as they put it uh living their motor future motor future but with

enough help not to to make it hard but not stressful and the difference in gains were just just just dramatically

so much gain so much faster so I would say that would be a very good way to use uh eccentric work uh isometric isometric

training calls can also be very powerful for strength

and a great value of isometric training is and its ability to coach you to live properly and not just live properly

other uh other athletic events as well if let's say that you're trying to learn to throw a front kick and you're doing

it you're all over the place but if you place your foot on a wall and if your coach or Sensei positions your body your

foot in a certain way and teaches you to start to start applying pressure to that wall and the ground at the same time and

kind of a pulse it against the wall adjust your body uh and then you relax shake off your muscles and you go hit

the bag and suddenly you're going to do so much better the same thing let's say that you're trying to optimize your uh

position for the bottom of the deadlift so you load up more weight that you could possibly

lift and then you wedge yourself under and you start applying pressure and it doesn't feel good so you change a little

bit so isometrics are very powerful for uh not just for strengthening the sticking points but also for optimizing

the angles then we're also dealing with something that um there's also great disinhibition

effect so what your listeners might not know is uh so there two you're you have two pedals in your nervous system as and

pardon me for telling you this you don't need obviously you know all this but there's the exitation inhibition there's

the gas the gas pedal and the brake pedal and there are various influences some of

them psychological but not all of them that are taking away from your strength that's called inhibition and under

certain circumstances there are documented cases like a lady lifting off the front of a 36 pound 36 100 pound car

to save her son and there are documented cases of that so that disinhibition takes place so isometrics does have some

disinhibition effects property is very very powerful also isometrics teaches you to

uh teaches you not to give up on a heavy attempt because if you put um the experiments were done in a safe

manner on the machines obviously but if you put an inexperienced person and uh the machine is moving a slow at a slow

rate so when it starts speed starts approaching zero uh that inhibition takes place so pretty much the subject

thinks the gig is up I'm not going anywhere that's it I'm done I'm just giving up because I failed but training

with isometrics allows you to develop to develop this kind of a neural Drive endurance that you need to grind through

safely through a heavier tap so very very powerful how would you incorporate isometrics into it so you can do this uh

as a part of your warm-up you can uh also do pause reps they're fantastic it's when you combine

combine a eccentric concentric and isometric contraction all in one so perfect Temple for the squat you lower

to the parallel and you stay tight and you stay there for 3 to 5 seconds and then you explode upward so that uh

that's a great way to train I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor ag1 ag1 is an allin1

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drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3

K2 with your order of ag1 again go to drink a1.com huberman to claim this special offer I'd like to talk about

neural Drive um I attribute you with popularizing maybe you invented it but um certainly

popularizing the term like greasing the groove uh in one of your books and by the way we provide links to um Pav's

books in the show note captions I'm a collector of your books than I love them um some of them are getting to be

collector's items they're a little bit harder to find but you'll have to compete with me on eBay um but some of

them can be found elsewhere and we'll provide links uh to those but this notion of greasing the groove complet

completely changed my conceptualization of strength training because I was weaned U more or less trying to run

cross country during the cross country season only ran it once but I greatly enjoyed it continued that sort of

training or trying to put on strength and size kind of a a numb skull young male approach to things but what it

served me reasonably well I'm grateful that I included both however I was so tuned to this notion of training a body

part creating an adaptation then waiting for the adaptation to occur and then

training the body part again you know the arguments are all over the Internet two times a week three times a week and

then I came across this concept of greasing the groove which as a neuroscientist felt so intuitively

correct and turns out to be correct you'll explain what it is but the idea that more frequent training or

practicing of a movement opens up a tremendous number of opportunities for development of strength of size

hypertrophy if one wants and I would say just generally more flexibility over one's Total Fitness program once one

understands this concept you no longer look at this split or that split or this many reps or that many reps or this

volume or that volume oh that is important but you can start to think about it through the lens of the nervous

system and to me it was like uh water in a desert to finally encounter something that brought together all these

different concepts so could you please explain for people what greasing the groove is and then I think the

implications of it will become obvious but we'll also spell out please interrupt me because this is about to

become a this might get really long so please interrupt me at any time so first I'll talk about the neural component

then we're going to talk about the frequency and the morphological adaptation structural adaptations as it

leads so ladies and gentlemen greas the groove we are talking about uh let's use an analogy let's imagine that you are a

bow hunter and you work in your garage and then you walk out of your garage and you sho an arrow and you just

go back to going about your business just working in your garage or let's say you're a kid who uh who practices

martial arts and every on every break between classes you just go in the corner and you practice your kada this

is the best way to practice your skill in small portions in a spaced out manner what's really fascinating is um

traditional education and traditional strength training it's based on the cramming model so remember

cramming for an exam so you're studying at night and you somehow squeak by and you pass it okay great and then a couple

days later you happily forget everything so in contrast imagine that you let's say you're studying a foreign language

you write words on cards and at every opportunity you're standing in line in the bank so the Lesser Mortals are

fooling around on their phones you're just going through your deck like oh can I translate this word I go put it back

in the deck flip it over then next time you in some other place you do this again so this is an example of space

practice versus the traditional Mass practice and the evidence of the superiority of space practice is just

overwhelming it goes back to the 19th century and there's at least like a more than a thousand papers published on that

and still very few people do that which is really sad and uh strength is a skill so two

interesting things happened in the 50s one is Thomas rash he was an American uh exercise physiologist he proposed that

strength adaptation was largely uh largely uh skill and he looked at pretty much the

adaptations he noticed that there's no correlation between the muscle growth and

strength then uh at the same time as Soviet scientist uh tanov was his last name he was measuring the electrical

activity in the muscles of weightlifters who are pressing overhead and back then the Press was one of the competition

events and what he found is as the athletes got stronger after some months the emgs started dropping off when

they're lifting the same weights so pretty much he found out that the nervous system activity became more

economical they were able to try less hard yet still live the same weights or pretty much they they could try harder

and lift even heavier weights and hypertrophy could not explain that because in the 50s the Soviets were very

anti- hypertrophy they were just doing doubles triples singles pretty much so if we look at what's going on it's uh

the heian mechanisms so pretty much every time that you activate a particular connection synaptic

connection you know between the neurons that connection becomes uh Stronger so if you do it over and over and over so

the grease the groove is the analogy is that command that's coming in from your brain to your muscles that's the groove

that's that pathway and the more you use it pretty much the more grease it becomes so it's like becomes a

superconductor so in the future you don't have to try as hard to live the same amount of weight or you can try the

same amount and you can live it harder so we're not we haven't even addressed the neural drive yet we just pretty much

made the Mo neurons more responsive more responsive to it and um it's a very easy and very simple way to train and uh

strength comes very easily and very very unexpectedly to make sure that it does happen you

have to address uh the issue of specificity so specificity pretty much means without getting too too much into

the weeds to get stronger first of all you need to lift weights that are heavy enough and uh

if you're looking about percentages of one R Max we're looking at like 75 to 85 typically if you go to light you don't

make the impression on your nervous system and it's just not specific enough if you go to heav very quickly you're

just going to burn yourself out and uh so pretty much like it's a weight That's Heavy enough to respect and light enough

not to fear and second of all and this is very surprising is you only do about half or

fewer reps that you possibly could do so for example let's say that you're lifting 80% of your one rep max and

let's say that you're able to do eight reps maximum with it that's your that we're just fairly fairly common well

you're only going to do about three uh three to four reps per set and that's it and the Jim Bros at this point go crazy

like where's the intensity well intensity and strength training is just how heavy the weight is it has

nothing to do with the f and it's been proven over and over that that's much more important than how hard

you're exerting yourself there are times for that there are absolute times for that but if the weight is heavy enough

and if you have the repetitions that you possibly could do you're going to get stronger it's very

safe and you're not going to burn out psychologically and it's also very easy on your body so

um also that builds muscle as well purely because you're able to do a very high volume of work I'm not able to

explain the mechanism why it builds muscle but as the Soviet found out in weightlifting research there's a

correlation between the volume and uh Robert troman between the volume and the hypertrophy everything else being equal

you're going to get bigger so almost every day you're doing the sets of three four WS maybe even five and they start

adding up and before you know it you're stronger and at the same time you have developed muscle so to summarize the

grease the groove you're trying to train uh moderately heavy as often as possible while staying as staying as

fresh as possible and uh if you decide to do it in the gym a very simple protocol would

be a set every 10 minutes it sounds really bizarre like why why why would would you rest for so

long this apparently has to do with initial memory consolidation there's so much is still unknown so we do know the

G the group works great but we speculate that some of it has to do with some the same phenomena related to uh to learning

in other fields so if you're doing something over and over like like you're saying 2 plus 2 is 4 2 plus two is four

you're just using your short-term memory you're not memorizing anything but if you say 2 plus two is four you go get a

coffee you come back and you try 2 + 2 four so there's that desirable difficulty that you have in there and

you have to process that instead of just go through the groove that uh that apparently helps helps this adaptation

so rest for at least 10 minutes do sets of about the repetitions of half of what you're possibly able to do and you know

listen to your body typically train two three days in a row and then take a day off but listen to your body incidentally

this Greaser group is the topic of uh my next book I have completed it it's not published yet if if you look at uh I

can't pronounce the Hungarian professor's last name chahi thank you thank you I appreciate that so he's

talking about that perfect uh challenge perfect practice lies in that channel between boredom and anxiety so if you

put yourself in that channel and if you keep lifting this moderately heavy weights with a moderate effort over and

over and over you're going to get strong that's one of the many ways to get stronger are you doing anything in the

um rest periods between these 10 minutes so is it uh let's say uh bench press um wait 10 minutes till you bench press

again but in the meantime you're doing zercher squat 5 minutes after the first bench press that's one of the way to do

that you can do up to three exercise three exercises at the same time so let's say like Zer Squad and the bench

press and maybe a third thing but I say those two are enough and uh another option is you can do that you can

incorporate this into if you do only one exercise you can squeeze it into your lifestyle or your athletic practice so

for example uh in uh that's say you're teaching a track uh track uh practice or martial arts class and every 10 minutes

on the clock you just have the class do drop and do three hard let's say three one arm push-ups okay and then get back

to the class so there's no interference whatsoever in fact it's better than no interference back in the 60s Soviets

found out something called the uh strength after effect so if you do strength work that's not exhaust in

nature and that's not novel to you it has a tonic effect uh just for any any uh anything that you can do with your

brain or with your body anything so what they would even do some coaches they would do soal strength warmup let they

would um B up as usual for a track class let's say track practice then they would do let's say three sets of three of

something like with 80% Max which is not much and they start they start their practice the then the coach noticed that

the athletes are starting to droop a little he'll repeat that you know he might repeat that up to three times so

what you have is by having this short very small dose like a nano practice of strength you rejuvenate yourself and

your productivity increases so much so whether you want to just do the strength exercise several of them in that one

hour period or whether you want to combine that with writing a great American novel that's you know that's

your business I suppose if someone has access to the appropriate equipment at home you could incorporate Grease the

groove into your entire day that's ideal yes and obviously it's difficult with some equipment but what you could do you

could use the heavy duty grippers you could do uh one arm push-ups you could uh uh you could keep a kettle bell under

your desk and do press it at at every opportunity and again the idea is really just practice you just try to hit it

perfect perfect trap and notice that uh if you have some issues if you're a warm-up dependent person for Orthopedic

issues I'm talking about warmup in the very much in the uh body not the mind in this particular case then it might not

be appropriate for you although you know with 10- minute rest it might still be okay but uh practicing a skill without

the warmup that means rehearsal is very powerful for improving that skill people think they automatically equate

performance with improvement with learning but it's not so not at all when you are doing something that's just out

of the blue it's uh you know the way a sniper would take a cold shot that's so much

harder because you have to produce that solution uh or maybe an example that's closer to most uh viewers

GF uh you go to the driving range you start hitting it and like wow you you're amazing you just get yourself fine-

tuned you hit you're perfect then uh then you go and you play the game and you cannot replicate that because

suddenly different club uh different topography everything's different and you didn't have the luxury of that

tuning yourself up right there so it feels it doesn't feel like you're stronger but you are going to get much

stronger I've been eager to share with you some recent findings that are not my own but that I think you might be

curious about and then I think most people hopefully will be curious about as well it's not greasing the groove

specifically but it provides a at least partial mechanistic understanding of how particular types of physical movement

with this High motor neuron and attentional engagement can generate high levels of alertness that can be devoted

to as you say writing the Great American novel perhaps uh there's a guy at University of Pittsburgh named Peter

strick who for the first time started to map the connections between the adrenals and the brain and he was able to do this

using some really cool technology the basic takeaway is the following uh adrenaline released from the adrenals as

uh some of the listeners may know doesn't cross the bloodb brain barrier but turns out it binds to receptors on

the Vegas which then stimulates noradrenaline in the brain and provides this increase in alertness so then the

question is how do you get your adrenals engaged you know we can sit here and we can we can do a staring competition

which I'll lose um for certain but you know there are all sorts of psychological tools we get you know

caffeine Etc there there're all sorts of ways to cold water but it turns out what Peter found was that there are

particular locations in the motor cortex that send a two uh basically a two synapse connection D synaptic connection

directly to the adrenals and the areas of motor cortex that Engage The adrenals cause them to release adrenaline but

just by sheer movement of particular muscle groups are the core as you were talking about before like bracing the

core causes the release of adrenaline which then via the Vagas uh causes the brain stem area uh to release nor

adrenaline wake up the whole brain essentially increase learning and performance in anything and

as well the stronger and stronger activation of the motor neurons deliberate activation of the motor

neurons seems to engage adrenaline release now to me this was a wonderful way of um trying to persuade people that

they have internal control over this thing that we call motivation that movement itself can increase adrenaline

which can increase the tendency to want to move as long as again you don't want to have too much adrenaline either right

right and and I'd like to talk about that um but I think I and so many other people were kind of raised and

conditioned at least in this country to think oh if I want to increase my level of motivation I need to like um I don't

know watch an inspiring video that could be great or I can uh drink caffeine and that or an energy drink and certainly

that will do it but to me the the discovery uh that particular movements and particular muscles being engaged in

activity itself changes the neurochemical milu I mean of course it had to be right it's a big duh but I

think that um anyway I was excited to share with you uh these data I didn't discover them that is new to me so I

read The Naked Warrior I was closed when I when I read it um but it's a wonderful book because it talks about body weight

um only exercises and this concept of for instance like trying to crush um one's fist on uh you know making a

really strong fist on the other side and how that will increase your uh your gripping ability on the other side this

kind of thing yes as you know with your background and Neuroscience obviously there's so many uh neurological

phenomena like if you can think of like muscle software that we have access to that if we become conscious about

accessing that we can be so much stronger yeah so when you talk about you know doing a a set of three or four

repetitions or two to three repetitions at about 85% or 80% of one rep mask waiting 10 minutes and then the

intervening 10 minutes going and trying to learn something important or physical or cognitive this makes perfect sense to

me because of the relationship of adrenaline but also the way that your tire nervous system has changed in the

in the intervening period and plus you have the contextual interference so uh one of the Greer group is not something

that I invented it's something that I was able to codify and explain and possibly refine but it's been around

since the day of Ecclesiastes and uh specifically in strength training Paul Anderson Paul Anderson one of the

greatest weightlifters of all time uh he was uh he was a big favorite of the Soviet public you know very tough group

to impress but they called him The Wonder of nature he was so strong and uh Paul Anderson would do a set of squats

then he would wander around drink some milk half an hour later do a set of presses then go do this again and uh so

he reinvent not not should say reinvent no he invented without knowing neurons from

Nyland many of the Training Concepts are just Cutting Edge today and again so this concept of contextual interference

remember I talked earlier how if it's harder for you to produce a solution if you're trying harder to remember 2 plus

2 is four or how to throw the ball then you're going to learn more as opposed to if somebody just hands it OH 2 plus 2 is

four so Paul Anderson had both the spacing time came like so the the groove has been forgotten in the sense of time

and the contextual interference he did another exercise that erased whatever previous groove right there and it's uh

it's very fascinating how looking at some of these oldtimers and just how how genius s were MH yeah the unconscious

genius aspect of it is is so cool and of course I don't want to be disparaging of common um gym programs these days but I

do feel like the way that most people train yeah you'll do that yeah the way that most people train in terms of

thinking okay I'm going to hit the gym you know three four times a week or I'm going to train chest one day and chest

and biceps while that has some value I feel like um for creating all-around strength and hypertrophy there's just

such a incredible Treasure Trove of other things that you're sharing with us today that that are just not discussed

as much because people don't take the lens of the nervous system component one one thing that I'd love to ask about the

nervous system in terms of training adaptation and Recovery is that I was weaned somewhat under the uh thought

patterns of Mike mener this was in the Darian Yates era and I knew Mike a little bit I paid for a consult uh with

him over the phone we never met in person um so that had my mother asking you know why is this grown man calling

our home and why are you wire in the old days you had to wire somebody money so I do um but it was so worthwhile because

uh Mike taught me that the goal of training was to induce an adaptation anything additional was not necessary

and in his case he he felt was counterproductive very infrequent training Etc and it worked tremendously

well to take me from like 150 lbs to 210 lbs which I had no need to do but my body just reacted like crazy but then

again I was 16 17 and 18 years old in that time probably could have done any number of different things and and

experienced similar results who knows but the concept of course is that you train to induce an adaptation then you

rest and then you allow the adaptation to serve the you know moving higher poundages in good form this sort of

thing the problem however is that and mener highlighted this is that training of any kind running lifting Etc taxes

both the nervous system as a whole and the muscles locally and the connective tissue how should we think about

training and recovery so when you describe Grease the groove I could imagine if I had a home setup or I'm

going to the the gym I could maybe do four or five rounds of this training but at some point M it becomes

counterproductive so um wow a lot of great question I'm just trying to think about how to schedule this sort of thing

keeping in mind that the nervous system fatigues as a whole and then there's also the issue of local muscle fatigue

or or even the propensity for injury if you just overdo it sure yeah so if we could just Riff on this if you don't

mind Andrew I'll break it up because a lot of great questions right there so one as you mentioned there are different

ways of training and again uh we the greas grp load parameters apart from the long rests are very much based on Soviet

weightlifting system and I'd like to talk a little bit about that later another system that a completely and

radically different and it ties very much to Mike menser's training uh for reasons who become obvious is the

classic American powerlifting system from the SE from the 80s and uh when people argue about training methods what

they need to understand is uh there are many ways to get the job done you know at his research in Estonia found because

there's so many different combinations of stimuli and the different different adaptations that result you can arrive

to similar outcomes in a lot of different ways so to say this is right and this is wrong you cannot sometimes

do that I mean I can say most of things are wrong but I can also say there's multiple right ways of training and they

can be radically different and they're different because they rely on very different phenomena so in this

particular case you're talking about recovery and frequency which is again a great way address it I'm going to talk

about two systems that are completely different and yet have that same

pedigree that they have brought so many gold medals so one system is the Soviet weightlifting system is again where

athletes would train several times a day and Bulgarian system is a more extreme example of that and every day and the

Other Extreme would be the American powerlifting system exemplified by U uh hassid Marty Gallagher Ed Co Kirk kaasi

so starting from the 70s through the '90s those a really glorious day for years powerlifting and in that system

they would pretty much do one or two heavy sets per lift once a week so it's kind of a little bit like Mike menser's

work kind of but not but we we'll we'll address why so how can that be

and how can both systems work so you address the recovery there's a concept called

heterochronicity which heter means different chronicity refers to time so the different systems in the body to

cover recover different rates and if you don't take that into account then uh you're going to have some serious