Pavel Tsatsouline
Appearances
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
One of the reasons that also Soviets restricted the number of reps in the squat, because you do sets of 10 in the squat, you're going to definitely put on some mass, no question about it. But one of the reasons they restricted that, very few people did sets of 10 except for heavyweights who had a hard time bulking and even more, is like, okay, that's too much cardiorespiratory stress.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And even though Soviet weightlifters did some general physical training like cross-country running or playing soccer, but they're not trying to get their cardio on the lifting platform. That has just made no sense whatsoever. So restricting the reps will go a very long way. increasing the rest periods to at least five minutes would go a very long way, and restricting a number of exercises.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Because people don't realize that you're using different muscle groups, but still using the same brain. You're still using the same adrenals. And all that stuff really adds up. So I would say during one practice, one training practice, maybe two, maybe three exercises max, lifts. And nothing wrong with doing just one. And yeah, if you want to do your curls and whatever calves later, that's fine.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Absolutely.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But you can tack it on in the end or you can do totally separate. Those things don't really zap you. You can just come in on a separate day and just enjoy your calf burn.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Yes, I do. Yeah. But only twice. Got a moderation. Moderation. Right.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
but usually between sets and certainly- And sometimes between reps under certain circumstances. Interesting.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, first of all, I'll preface it by saying that stimulants and any kind of pharmacy is totally out of my wheelhouse. So what I'm about to say is purely reflected knowledge. With your neurobiology background, you can tell the listeners so much more than I could possibly can.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But top athletes, when they compete after a competition, I'm talking about strength sports like powerlifting or weightlifting, for the next two weeks, they're just gone. They're completely flat. Because there are two adaptations there. that take place in strength training, proper strength training. So on one hand, it's much more economical function of the adrenal glands.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
On the other hand, it's much higher capacity as well. So these are the guys and gals who are able to crank it up really, really high when they want to, but they're also able to really keep it down when they don't have to. And they do know that for the next two weeks after the competition or after some idiotic gym max, you know, that might take a week, they're going to be flat.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
They're going to be completely gone. So you really have to spare your adrenaline. The lifters who take heavy lifts in the gym, they still typically stay at the training max, not the competition max. So what's the training max? The training max, it's the heaviest weight that you can possibly lift without getting too excited about it. And back in the 50s...
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And Luchkin, he was one of the fathers of Soviet weightlifting. He came up with a great tactic how to find that weight. If your heart rate goes up before the set, that's you have it. So you've got to monitor yourself, unless you're in competition. Of course, that's a different game.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
If I will defer to others about how much one should or could take stimulants before training, lifting, I'm talking about. But generally speaking, you've got to do it in moderation. And especially you've got to save it for the times when you really need it. Like in the American powerlifting system, when you have during week three and four, that's a good time to do it.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Uh, Luke Ames, uh, he was a powerlifter from the golden age of American powerlifting. He says anything over six reps is bodybuilding.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
During the weeks one and two when the weights are lighter, let your adrenals recover and you don't need to push yourself as hard anyway. So it's just one example how to go about this. If you have to drink some stupid energy drink to just get yourself up to training, there's something wrong in your life possibly. It is something that's a lifestyle choices and you need to address it.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
If you always feel exhausted after training, you're missing out on life.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
I mean, if you're doing a desk job that does not require high cognitive ability, something that's really mechanical with pen and paper or computer, and you choose to just destroy yourself on a daily basis with a lot of sets to failure or math counts or whatever it is, well, it's your choice if you want to destroy your life like that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But again, if you look at your adrenal profile, if you look at your sympathetic dominance, if you look at how you're just feeling, it's going to be really, really awful. The other angle to this is, as we talked to earlier, in learning and skill training, skill practices, learning, current performance is not indicative of learning.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So just because you're able to lift five pounds more because you got yourself all jacked up on some drink doesn't mean you necessarily got stronger. So you just need to come in and put in your practice and walk away and come back. And then when there's time and it's the day to go heavier, that's when you do that. So don't want to discourage you from drinking coffee.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
In fact, if you drink a stimulant coffee, it should be the only thing. The rest of this stuff is... Yeah, coffee, tea. Coffee, tea, and then figure out, again, figure out what is that moderate amount, figure out how to use it when you truly need it as opposed to be relying on it all the time.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So you have irradiation that you cannot control. Exactly.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, being able to control arousal, it's such a key skill for an athlete. And part of that, obviously, it should be directed at sports psychologists. And there are some fantastic techniques For example, Dr. Judd Biasotto, who is an author who published a book with Strong First. Dr. Judd squatted 602 at body weight of 132. And that was back in the 80s.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
He was in his 40s after a serious back injury, surgery. And he was a sports psychologist. And he discusses these various, various skills. It's fascinating. His control of excitation inhibition was such that he would sleep between attempts. A couple of minutes before the attempt, his handler or coach would wake him up. He would wake up. He'd get himself into frenzy. He'd lift the weight.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, Andrew, I think they need to do possibly several different types of training. But going back to your examples, dips are fantastic if your shoulders can handle them, if you know how to do them. It's a great exercise, but not particularly democratic. That's the problem. So either you can do it safely or you can't. And possibly it's possible to coach some people to do the dip.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
He'd go back to sleep nine times a day throughout the day. Now, that's a mastery of excitation inhibition. You're on switch and off switch. So part of that is sports psychology. There are tools in sports psychology for that. Part of it is training, is whatever you do in the gym, some of your habits and some of your practices. Like for example, okay.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
David Riggert is one of the greatest weightlifters of all time. Some people would say the greatest weightlifter of all times. And when he was discovered by Rudolf Pluckfelder, his coach, who was another Olympic champion, world champion, one of the things that the coach was impressed with is that Riggert would do his set, and then after his set, he would just go completely limp, like a rag.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And he was very impressed with that. Later, in Riggard's career, when he was a world champion already, in the United States, so there's an American coach who writes how he saw him in Columbus, Ohio, or Cleveland, Ohio, competing back in the 70s. He was lying and smoking a cigarette. And then he gets up, he snatches 60 kilos, like 135 pounds or something once.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Then he just picks up something else equally trivial, and then he goes and does his first attempts and then ends up with superior performance. At a different time... Riggert bet a box of cognac that he would snatch 90% of his max, which his max was probably around 370 or something. So he was able to snatch 90% of that, no warmup whatsoever. And so this is this ability of that incredible control.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So part of it is whatever you're born with, part of it is sports psychology techniques, but part of it is developing some habits. As soon as you're done with your lift, just power down. Incidentally, after training, a strength athlete ought to perform a cool down.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And Russians did some numbers on power lifters and they found that the top power lifters, they spend time and cool down and the guys who are not so good, they don't. Because not only it just allows you to bring your excitation down, get your parasympathetic, get you to start recovering. So you do some easy stretching, you do some meditating, you do some breathing exercises, whatever you do.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But even after each set, so you put up that heavy deadlifter squat and you just immediately come down, And then you walk around and you chill. So you just try to tune your switch so much. Breathing exercises come in handy for that. There are breathing exercises to increase your excitation.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
There are breathing exercises that are able to very much put you in a state of inhibition, very deep inhibition even. Some of them are hypercapnic, some are hypoxic, which means you try to increase carbon dioxide or you're trying to decrease oxygen. There are some very sophisticated yet really quite simple techniques that can help you do that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, the history of that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So if you're coaching somebody to do the dip, the first prerequisite is to build up to a full skin the cap. So it means you're hanging upside down, you know, look up what it means, folks, on a bar. So you got to be able to get yourself in that position.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
That absolutely is. The original research was done in the 60s, Ekai and Steinhaus, 1961, I believe. And then later on, that was a big part of the training method of Dr. Fred Hadfield. Fred Hatchfield is a legend in the Iron Game. He was one of the first to squat 1,000 pounds in competition, and he was a... He was just a fantastic lifter and just brilliant scientist.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So he tried to direct a lot of the training towards disinhibition. So he even developed special techniques that are largely forgotten, ironically. But yes, disinhibition is huge. And it's also one of the things about disinhibition too, it's also very important to avoid failing. Because... Never failing a lift, that's part of this inhibition.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So like we talked about Ed Cohn earlier, another one of the powerlifting greats. Ed Cohn competed over several decades, set over 70 world records in several weight classes, only missed a couple lifts in competition, never missed a training lift whatsoever. Always calm, always composed, an amazing lifter, amazing guy.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And what's very likely happened is that his inhibitory pathways just shriveled and got pruned and died. What people don't realize that, you know, greasing the groove, that's the term, proper term, long-term potentiation is like when you are getting better at like that transmission gets stronger. It's like your nerves become superconductors. But there's also it's evil twin, long-term depression.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So pretty much what happens is now you're trying as hard, but your muscles are not jumping in response anymore. So one of the ways to... get this long-term depression is by, by failing. So whenever you're attempting certain thing, and if it doesn't happen, that, that's a way that pathway starts, starts firing weaker and the inhibitory pathway start become stronger.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
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 is a good chance that you could start up and doing dips and be coached into that. If you can't, probably not. So either try to build up to that unless there are medical restrictions or not. You mentioned the example of pull-ups.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And it becomes even worse if you're emotional about it. So you said quite a few things about adrenaline, but, uh, Adrenaline does promote neuroplasticity, but not always in a good way. So if you look at the PTSD treatments, you will find that if a person re-experiences that bad, whatever thing that happened, and then it gets into the feedback loop, that positive feedback.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Positive doesn't mean good. Positive, it just means it keeps increasing it. Because every time that there's a spike of adrenaline, that reinforces the memory.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So if you missed the attempt and you also got really upset about it and you remember it again, so you're making yourself weaker and weaker, which reminds me of a very fascinating way that the ancients used to record some events before there's writing. So let's say there's a wedding between VIP families. They bring a kid, young kid, seven-year-old, let's say, and make the kid watch the whole thing.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And after the festivities, they throw the kid into the river. The kid curls out of the room. He doesn't know. He doesn't expect it. And the kid climbs out of the river and he's going to remember that wedding for the rest of his life. He's going to hold that record. Because of the adrenaline spike associated with the cold water. Exactly. So that really did increase the neuroplasticity.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So that memory became really deeply ingrained. So yeah, part of disinhibition is not promoting inhibition. It's just not failing. So Fred Hadfield had a beautiful line, success begets success, failure begets failure. Train to success, not to failure.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Absolutely. There's really no reason for that. If you're doing that with single joint bodybuilding exercises like curls, it probably doesn't matter. And if you're doing it for bodybuilding, But I still don't see the point because every rep closer to failure, that is going to increase exponentially recovery time. So you're not going to get quite as much.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Yeah, you might get more muscle gain from that particular last rep, but your recovery is going to be increased so much. And also, as you start training to failure, you're converting more of your fibers towards slower times. So on the other hand, if you don't train to failure, you don't. So there's an interesting Spanish study
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
when they found that when athletes train to failure, again, some of the myosin and type 2X fast fibers, they converted to 2A, so they became slower, probably because now it's an endurance event. When you're training for as many reps as possible, it's really an endurance event.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
On the other hand, the athletes that trained with half the maximum possible repetitions, they did not experience that decline. which goes back several decades to when Arkady Vorobyov, Vorobyov, Olympic champion, scientist, head coach, incredible, incredible person. He said, there is a big difference between six sets of three and three sets of six.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And because, and you think like, this sounds like the most obvious thing to say. But the fact is you build just as much strength with six sets of three as three sets of six. You get a lot less tired. You get to practice for three extra sets and you can train sooner. So that's fundamental. So pushing to failure. Also, the other thing is about the control of your technique.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Absolutely, pull-ups are one of the best general strength exercises. And again, to your listeners, general versus special. Special in Soviet terminology just means sport-specific. So the carryover, when you start doing pull-ups, when you excel at pull-ups or the dips, you are going to get a carryover so far beyond this exercise, which is exactly the reason you do that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Towards the last reps, there's no control left. But imagine that you always have that perfect technique. So you grease that pathway that becomes a reflex. In fact, early on, the Soviet sports scientists very much view strength adaptation as just the development of conditional reflex, kind of like, you know, Pavlov with the dogs, drooling dogs.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And then you go into the competition and you psych yourself up and you don't even know what's going on. You're not aware, but you only have one pathway. There's no plan B. You only remember how to do your deadlift in this particular manner, no any other way.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Exactly, and only in a very specific way because there's no plan B. When you start failure, so you start, okay, this is the stressful situation, so I revert to plan B. But there's plan B for amateurs. Top athletes don't have plan B. Watch a top lifter fail an attempt. He or she is going to shake with that bar, shake, shake, shake, shake, and finally it's going to come down.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But it's not like the butt's going to shoot up or something ugly is going to happen. So going back to that point you made earlier about the quality of practice, quality is absolutely paramount. And it's strength training is a skill practice. Any athletic training is a skill practice. Maybe riding the elliptical is not a skill practice, but it's not a sport anyway. It's not anything anyway.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Even hiking is a practice. You're trying to stay tall. You're trying to breathe in a particular manner. It's all practice.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
in, ch, ch. I don't know. I don't know.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So I like your choices very much. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
I just get my wife to do it. So grip strength is extremely important. And you being a neuroscientist, you know the disproportional representation in the motor cortex of your gripping muscles and the forearm and everything. And there is another reason why grip is so important.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
to, to, to, to, I I I So the approach to building muscle for him is, it's that same volume with medium reps and medium effort. It always works because it builds strength. It builds muscle. It's very safe. It's, uh, it's very enjoyable. And, uh, my mother, she, uh, she used to be a professional ballerina and she got started training since she was six.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So if you make a fist, if you make a very tight fist, you're going to feel the overflow of tension, irradiation going to other muscles. So pretty much by... gripping tighter, you are instantly increasing your strength in anything that you do.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And so a very simple example for your listeners, take some pedestrian exercise like curls and do as many strict 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. That makes you so much stronger.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So she, because she had to train all day, she hates exercise. but she still does it because she must. And she came up with a great anti-glycolytic training protocol for herself. So this is something she invented. I had nothing to do with it, but it just totally goes with Verkhoshansky's work. She climbs stairs at a high rise and she will climb stairs from one floor to the next.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
She'll walk the hallway, come back and then go to the next floor. So that's the same idea that Verkhoshansky had. Intensify the intensity of contraction and then give a little time to not so in order to, for the acid not to pile up. So you keep that effort creating phosphate-powered and aerobic-powered.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And, you know, so she does it for 17 floors or whatever, a few times a week and plus other things. But, yeah, I'm very fortunate, very proud of my parents. My father-in-law, Roger, he's a great example and a great Grease the Groove success story. So he is a retired firefighter and Marine. And at the age of 64, and he always lifted, very unusual for his generation.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
He started when he was 15 and never stopped. But he couldn't quite do 20 pull-ups when he was a Marine. So at the age of 64, he got on the Greaser groove protocol. So at that point, his max was 10 reps. So I said, Roger, every time you go by the pull-up bar, hit five. And when they become really, really easy, then you can add a rep.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, a few months later, when he worked up to nine daily reps, he tested he could do 20 pull-ups. So at 64, he finally aced the U.S. Marine Corps pull-up PT test, something that he couldn't do as a young jarhead. And, yeah, seeing these older folks who are – not taking their age lying down and taking their training very seriously. It's just very admirable.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Again, the value of a strong wrist and grip is obviously very important. For whatever reason, obviously, it correlates with longevity. We don't know why. We have no idea. Correlation is not causation, so we don't know whether getting a stronger grip is going to make us live longer, but statistically, it's worth a try.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And, you know, you see much younger people start complaining. Some 30-year-old comes, well, I'm aging, I'm getting older, what should I do? It's like, what's wrong with you, son?
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, and consistency. My friend, Jim Wright, who passed, he used to say consistency over intensity. And that's absolutely true. If you're doing things correctly with proper form, if you do it over and over, you will win over long term. Which also interesting kind of brings me to an interesting point. You made me think of the long-term development, athletic development.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Here's what I'd like to see in a perfect world. Nobody has tried that yet. But I imagine a strength athlete starting out using the Soviet system.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And later, by the way, the Russian powerlifting team uses exactly the same training methodology derived from that, which means you're training many times a week, let's say squad four or five days a week, and you're doing a lot of reps with this moderate effort, and you do this for years, and you achieve high level.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And then at some point you switch to this American powerlifting system because your skills are already fully honed and you're fully adapted to the type of stimulus that first system brings. And you switch to this once a week cycling method. It'll be very interesting to see what would happen, how far one could go.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
One can either find exercises that train the grip in the context of developing something else or train the grip directly. So either way is great. So the first 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.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Before talking about the system, Andrew, may I speak about the relative benefits of different types of resistance? Please. Okay. So the body weight resistance, I'm going to talk about body weight, kettlebells and barbells. And obviously there are other things as well, but it's going to take too long. So Body weight training, the great advantage of body weight is its accessibility.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So you can do a push-up absolutely anywhere. So that's a really huge selling point because for some people, somebody who travels all the time and somebody who is in places where gyms are not available, so that's a great asset. Some people just simply enjoy it greatly. That's just fine. The downside of body weight training is it's a lot harder to learn these skills
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
than it is, let's say, to learn some many kettlebell skills or even some barbell skills. So it seems very innocent and so easy, but it may take time to really get some of this. So that may take time to do it longer. It might take a longer time. Beautiful thing about the barbell is, well, first of all, the satisfaction of lifting really heavy stuff. Some people find it extremely satisfying.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
If you don't, maybe it's not for you, but if you do, it's incredible. Then the ability to adjust the weights in small increments. So you can prescribe 87.5% one rep max, and you can do that. You cannot do that with body weight. In fact, with body weight, it's very hard to calibrate resistance.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
That's another one of the problems because you do need to have some skills, figure out the regressions and progressions, how to do that. And the other thing, the other great benefit of the barbell is some of the lifts, especially the three power lifts, allow you to make great gains of strength. And if you choose muscle mass with a very low volume.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So what you do, the way you program it is, let's say once a week you climb the rope and a couple of days a week you do pull-ups. That's a good way to go about it. And you don't need to do anything else. And another example would be some exercises like the kettlebell snatch. When you start snatching a heavy kettlebell and you drop it from overhead, that eccentric loading is very, very powerful.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It's possible to do three sets of five once a week in the squat and get very strong. Try to do that with pistols, it's just not going to happen. So reasons for that, we can speculate. We know some reasons, we don't know others, but it is what it is. The beauty of the kettlebell for strength specifically is it's very easy to teach the body language of strength with the kettlebell.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You would think that with a body weight it should be easier because a lot of the skills that I teach in my book, The Naked Warrior, they are either gymnastics or martial arts based. So it's like, okay, here's the hollow position from gymnastics or here's this little trick from hard style martial arts. So they all both use body weight.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Nevertheless, it takes a lot more processing to figure out how to do this right from scratch, like especially contracting your abs properly, especially if you don't have abs to start with. By the time you have them, that's good. But if you don't have them, it's hard. With a kettlebell, for example, you start doing double front squats with a pair of kettlebells. It's going to be like zurchers.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Your abdominal wall is going to light up. You suddenly learn exactly, oh, this is what it means to get tight. Or you stick your elbows inside the knees and do goblet squat. Oh, this is what the proper squat feels like. And just very easy to integrate all your body in one lift. There is an apparent disadvantage of the kettlebell, which also can be an advantage.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
There is no, you can't program 87.5% body weight. I mean, one rep max. Because kettlebells jump in large, you know, like, for example, from 53 to 70 pounds, for example. That's a big jump. And, I mean, these days some companies will manufacture kettlebells with small, like, you know, small jumps. What's the point?
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You're defeating some of the reasons for the being for this particular piece of equipment. And here's what they are. One is simplicity. You only can have a couple of bells and do a lot of things. But the other is simplicity.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
When you go, when you suddenly, let's say that you've been pressing a 53-pound kettlebell and you're doing a lot of sets and your goal is to press a 70-pound kettlebell, that's a big jump. So what you're going to do is, first of all, you're going to have to put in a very significant volume of work.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
That foundation of the pyramid, many strength authors throughout history, Bill Starr and many others use that analogy of volume as being the foundation of the pyramid. You're going to have to press that 24 kilo many times properly before you're going to have a run at 70. You have to develop the confidence. The other thing is you're going to have to acquire the skill of tension.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
total body tension, everything is linked up because when you go up a couple of pounds, it doesn't make a difference. You're doing the same thing. You're not noticing. When you go up a lot, everything has to be just so. So as you're going through your sets of five with a 53-pounder, you're also doing just cleans with a 70-pounder. You're starting to see what it feels like.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You're doing get-ups with it. You're starting to see acquiring, see what that weight feels like. Again, we're talking about disinhibition here. You're planning and owing this weight. So you're forced to put in a very significant volume of work, which is very healthy. It will lead to a lot of really healthy adaptations. And you will be forced to develop the skills to make that transition.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And that develops grip very, very well. And again, right now we're talking more about what people in the grip world call the crushing grip, you know, how you squeeze something. There are other types of grip that they differentiated, but this type of crushing grip is what's going to help most athletes and non-athletes the most. And I will also warn you that...
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And plus, you're also having that desirable difficulty. In skill, in learning, there is that concept by Robert Bjork about desirable difficulties for learning. If learning is very easy, something is presented that you don't learn much. If you have to struggle, like even if you're reading something and the font is ineligible, ironically, you end up learning better.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So that's an example of a desirable difficulty as you're progressing this way. So that is for strength. Obviously kettlebell have their benefits for endurance and for other things as well, but just for adjusting the resistance. Oftentimes, it's just a matter of preference and a matter of accessibility. So I'm not going to say you pick this tool, you pick that tool, you pick the other tool.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But if you decide to pick the body weight, my recommendation would be just be ready, patient for a long road because you have to patiently learn these little subtleties of micromanaging your body. Again, you watch the body language of gymnasts.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You watch the San Chin Kata in some styles of karate, and you'll see that amazing linking of the different parts of the body into the one chain, how the tension is used. So it's very rewarding, but I would say that's probably the most attention demanding, even though it seems so innocent and so simple and so safe, but it demands a lot of attention.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But if that's your speed and if you enjoy practice, true practice, that's a great way to go.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
wanted to learn kettlebells properly you have an online kettlebell course yes uh we do have several resources so we have the uh book kettlebell simple and sinister we which is available on amazon we have an online course under the same name we also obviously have uh workshops live instructors that you can find locally at our website strong first
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But I can tell you that, of course, some people are not supposed to do swings, as is true for every exercise. For example, in McGill's work, say some people who have problems with shear, sometimes they might have issues. But a great, great number of people, majority people can do swings very successfully.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
We have seen some really pretty broken people when they're cleared to do that and when they're coached properly. The big issue is you have to hip hinge, not lift the kettlebell with your back or with your arms. And for that, we have very, very specific progressions. You cannot go move beyond this until you do this. Okay, here you are doing this particular hip hinge drill with no weight.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Okay, good. You got that down. Now you're going to do a kettlebell deadlift, which is just a, you know, sumo deadlift with a light kettlebell. then you're going to progress with a very particular type of swing. So it's about patience. But the benefits are really worth it. So what are the benefits, let's say, of the kettlebell swings as opposed to... Or snatches.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Again, snatch is more of a less democratic exercise, like the dips. Parallel bar dips, fantastic for those who can do that. But if you can't, that's too bad. But there are alternatives. So again, the snatch is great. If you cannot do snatch, you can do swing. So the swing... It allows you to train power and power endurance in extremely safe manner.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Because if you try to develop power in a lot of conventional ways, you will find like, okay, you try doing Olympic lifts. It's very skill intensive, trying to learn how to do that. And besides, for some athletes, it's not appropriate. Racking the bar and overstretching the wrist ligaments, like for example, for fighters, that's a kiss of death.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
That's a really bad idea, destabilizing the wrist in this manner. And for many athletes, other athletes too. You know, a pitcher doesn't want to do that, a baseball pitcher. So then you try to do things like sprinting. Sprinter requires a lot of coaching, proper coaching, much more than a kettlebell swing. And it's very, very easy to rip a hamstring or something like that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
hanging on the bar and doing farmer's carries, beneficial as they are for many reasons, it's not going to do that much for it.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So this kettlebell swing allows you to train power and power endurance in a very safe manner. And what's also very unique about it, you don't have to use a lot of weight. What's unique about the kettlebell and the kettlebell swing, another thing about the design, you can swing it back between your legs, but you don't have to let it passively swing between your legs.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You can choose to accelerate it. This is called overspeed eccentric. So some years back, our colleague, one of our instructors, Brandon Hetzler, he put me and several other of our colleagues, instructors on the force plate, and we started doing swings. with overspeed eccentric, which means accelerating it downwards and upwards. So we were using just a 53-pound bell.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So the most experienced guys, we were able to generate over 10 Gs of acceleration. So basically we made that 50-pound bell weigh 500 pounds. But to the listeners who know about how the tissues, how the passive tissues can handle the load, when the loading is really rapid, it's amazing how these tissues can handle it very, very safely. So you can apply tremendous amount of load.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Of course, you don't start with that. It's not how you start your swings. So, and you can develop power endurance. So you can do a whole lot of different, many different sets, many sets. You've had Megan Kelly, one of our certified instructors out of UK, you know, she set a Guinness world record for a crazy number of swings done in an hour.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And so she would just go, her training is she would go and do swings. She'll do a few reps, pick up, set it down. And she would do it for, let's say, 90 minutes. Then she would do it with a heavy kettlebell. And the adaptations are fantastic from that. In the kettlebell world, we refer to it as the what the hell effect. So what's the what the hell effect?
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
What the hell effect is when you're getting an adaptation that's not a beginner's gain, but it's an adaptation that's totally unexpected. There's some collateral benefit, how suddenly you're able to do something. And the improvements in path loss, improvements in resilience.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
They're healthy. If you look at McGill's work, he will tell you that carrying two heavy objects, it's going to really pound your spine. But on the other hand, asymmetrical carry, it appears to be very beneficial. Then there's another interesting example. Now, right now, I'm not talking about grip training at all.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So like for example, speaking of resilience, so some of the tactical teams that I worked with in the US here, when they added either swings or snatches to their training with the kettlebell, plus one-legged kettlebell deadlifts as well, they stopped tearing their hamstrings. So you have this amazing way to do eccentric loading for the hamstring, but it's very safe and just really prepares you.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
One of my friends is still playing baseball in the 60s. He says, thank you for the kettlebells. He went through the course in one of the federal agencies 20 years ago, and he's still doing that. He's retired, but he's still doing that. So that's a great benefit. The amount of pure workload that you can do in this amount, that's why you can burn a lot of calories, you can develop cardio, whatever.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But also, why would anybody want to do power training who is not a power athlete and Because for so many reasons right now, I don't need to speak about it that your other guests have, for the reasons of longevity, how important it is to have high levels of power. And the kettlebell swing is one of the ways to develop it. And interestingly enough, going back, these accelerations...
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Professor Nikolai Yakovlev, top Soviet biochemist, he was just talking about sprints during added sprints. When you're adding sprints just to a jog, this kind of a fart-like work, he was saying how good it is for elderly and for teenagers, how good it is. So the kettlebell, even if you're not sprinting, if you don't know how to sprint, you're able to get so many of these youth-promoting benefits.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And again, you have one tool that can train all the qualities. You can develop mobility. You know, the bent press, that's a tremendous exercise. The bent press where the mobility of the T-spine, the mobility of the shoulder. So like you wore a watch and watch, for example, Dr. Pope Mosley, he's one of our instructors and he's also a... a doctor and biomed researcher.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
I mean, the gentleman is 70 years old and he's doing this beautiful bent presses, getting himself in the range of motion that young guys, you know, on their phones can possibly get into. And he's doing it in a healthy manner. So you can develop mobility, you can develop strength, you can develop endurance and resilience in all one package.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So obviously I'm biased and I'm not saying it's the only way to go. But that's one relative benefit, one of the many relative benefits of kettlebells. But in the overall lifelong journey, like if you're looking at three things right now, your newest strengths, what should I start with? I would say start with the kettlebell. It's the best entry point.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
We find it so easy to start coaching people in powerlifting or transition to some bodyweight strength after training them with kettlebells. It's extremely easy because they get that bodyweight language of strength down.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
I'm not even talking about strength training, but I'm talking about sort of a former run. Dr. Mike Prevost, who used to work with the US Marine Corps and Navy, he developed this very interesting protocol and a test called the kettlebell mile, where you take a kettlebell that's approximately 30% of your body weight And he has good reasons why it has to be that way.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
For people that are... If I may just interrupt you, and it's also cool that you're a bigger guy and you're doing that. This is what I love to see, and we're seeing that as strong first a lot. We'll have to see bigger guys and gals getting into the body weight exercises because that's not typical of their strength.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
We like to see skinny people getting into the barbell and just go against the... Like, for example, seeing somebody like Dr. Mike Hartle, one of our master instructors, you know, he's a former... American bench press record holder and coach for the powerlifting team USA. I mean, watching him do 100 pushups, you got to love that stuff because normally big guys hate bodyweight work. It's humbling.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And little guys hate barbell. And we just get, and not just guys, women, we have these ladies, these skinny little ladies lifting amazing weights. That's just always awesome to see that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
If I just made to guide people just briefly on a very high level, great news, you have so many choices. Bad news, you have too many choices. So pick one program with an established track record and just stick with it and follow it for a long time. Do not try to over-customize everything. Daniel Kahneman spoke how much algorithms outperform humans so often.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
I've seen this over and over how a properly designed strength program or endurance program that was generic design but with certain feedback loops in there. Okay, if this happens, you have to go back and make some changes. Deliver much better results on customized programs very often. So find something that's simple. Find something that does not have a lot of moving parts.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And just stick with this for a long time if it's working. Do not look for the next thing because the next thing, maybe it's as good, maybe not. But also do keep in mind that every time you change gears, you lose momentum. you know, you're a neuroscientist. I don't know if you spoke to your audience about the law of neural Darwinism, but there's a competition between the synaptic sites.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So you have the pathways. So you can only do so many things well. So a child can do everything, but poorly. But as we get older, some of these pathways get pruned, but others get reinforced. And unfortunately, we can't excel at everything. So there's this classic example with, and not just physically, mentally as well, cognitively as well, this classic example with taxi drivers.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Back in the days before GPS, taxi cab drivers, they were supposed to pass an extremely challenging test how to navigate through the city that was not designed to be navigated through. And they found that a certain part of their hippocampus was more developed than in others. And so they thought, well, maybe it's just pre-selection.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And you pretty much run with this kettlebell. And you switch hands as much as often as you want. And it's a fantastic way to improve your running posture, to develop very stabilizing muscles, and to improve your ability to rock. But it doesn't beat you up as much as rocking does. Rocking, carrying heavy weight, it's rough on the body.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Maybe whoever made it through the test were the guys with the more muscular hippocampus, you know. And then they monitored two groups of students over several years, and they said they started with the same size. And in the group that passed, their brains, so to say, got bigger in that part, and the others, they didn't.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But then at the same time, in a different test of a different test of memory, the guys who passed the test, they were not so good. So they lost something in the process. It's just life. It's many things in life are zero-sum game. You want to seek some balance up to a point, but there comes a point where you know you cannot do it all. We are limited in time. We're limited in our adaptive capacity.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
That is good things happen at junctions of fields. If you always stay exactly just in your own narrow field and you're just, you know, just the same thing is repeated. But when you start going to somewhere else a little bit outside that's adjacent, whether it's neuroscience, whether it's okay, how do they, you know, what are the martial arts skills?
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
How do the martial artists do for striking or somewhere else? I think that just really interesting to kind of a step a little bit outside your comfort zone. And sometimes you see patterns. That's what happens. Your father's a smart, smart man. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, that's the time to do that. That's exposed that neurodiversity and the things that you can possibly do and then find the things that you click with. And for the physical body, early specialization destroys athletes. It is really terrible because early on kids absolutely need to do a wide variety of different activities and really pursue a fairly balanced development.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You know, there may be a bias towards strengths or bias towards endurance, but they really need to do it all. And, uh, specialist athletes break, they, they break, they really do. So that balance between general and specific, uh, it's a tough balance.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Tiger Woods is... And seriously, there's no right answer or wrong answer. So I remember Ivana Badriyev, who was head coach for the Bulgarian weightlifting team, he says, if Paganini played whatever instruments, you know, in addition to his own instrument, playing in 15 hours a day, he would not have become Paganini.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And that's true, but I'm not saying that specialization is necessarily the right choice for everybody. Some people prefer to be decent in many things and it is healthy. But you still have to decide. You still have to make decisions. Very much you're looking like at a budget. Do I want to buy a couch or do you want to go on a vacation to Italy?
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Or do I want to go on a much lamer vacation and buy a lamer couch and do both? And I'm not saying what's the right answer right there, but just people do have to understand there are limitations. They can't successfully compete in two sports, for example. It's not going to happen, especially if it's a power sport and endurance sport. And they can't study everything to a high level just as well.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
If you want to be a polymath, that was fine in the 18th century. Right now it's a little bit tougher.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Because he says when you start going heavier, it's going to affect your gait. So you're not really, you know, you have to kick your hip over to the side. it becomes something else.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It's the level of- We assess them by punching them.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It's kind and gentle.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It's not trivial. It's probably something like 62 pounds or something like that, 70-pound kettlebell. No, no, no, it's not trivial by any means, but it's also not something you jump into immediately. And also what's very cool is because you get to switch hands very often, you're not destroying your QL and other stabilizers that are contracting isometrically.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
If they put a lot of attention in. So midsection training is one of the most misunderstood and messed up areas of physical culture. There's a thousand different exercises and people are going, you got to have variety, this many reps. That's not the point. The point really is tension and attention. So those are the two things. And...
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Ideally, your best first step is really learning abdominal tension through something like a Zurcher squat or double kettlebell front squat, where the load distribution is such that it forces reflexive stabilization and you feel, oh, that's what tight abs feel like. And getting somebody just weak in the plank, it's hopeless. There's absolutely not going to help. It's not.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
There are ways of building up to it, yes, by rolling in the back and so on. But if you don't have that option or if you choose not to exercise it, you have to be extremely attentive to the details of what's going on within your abdomen. So you need to learn things like, for example, you need to learn to contract the pelvic diaphragm, pull your butt up.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
because you're trying to constrain the intra-abdominal pressure, then you need to learn how to direct attention to the different parts of your abdomen, almost like a bodybuilder, but really not quite, more like a gymnast.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
There is this argument in the strength world about internal focus, external focus in cueing, and the agreement is in motor learning, well, external focus cueing is so much better than focusing on whatever happens within the individual muscle.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It may be true in the beginning, and it may be true outside of the strength game, but any top strength athlete that you will meet, they have their own internal cues how they do something. Later on, they may forget them. It despires them, but they know how to. This is how I engage the lat in the bench press.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
George Halbert, bench press world record holder, famously said, it took him many years to finally understand how the triceps is used in the bench press. Many years. So there is a lot of internal component and for the abs very, very much. So you have to learn how to very much direct your attention there. To get high tension, you have to keep the reps low. Like you said, five sets of five, perfect.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
High reps are not necessary. You're not going to burn off fat by doing more reps. You're just going to irritate your back. That's all you're going to do, nothing else. So you treat your ab training very much like a strength event. And if you do that, you're going to get those results. And finally, the final detail is you need to use that intra-abdominal pressure as your friend.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
because in lifting like a deadlift or a squat or something, the intra-abdominal pressure helps you, it supports you. When you're doing abdominal work, you work against that intra-abdominal pressure. You just create that pressure and contract against it. This is something called internal isometrics. So it's kind of interesting.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It's just a combination of classic strength work with very internalized, kind of almost like a martial arts approach to it. Then you need to learn also how to obviously use your abs in lifts, in lifting. And once you do, and this is the beauty, you don't really have to train your abs anymore.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So Franco Colombo, for example, great example, in addition to winning, you know, being super strong and winning Mr. Olympia, he won the best abs. He didn't train abs. He said, he told me, I hate ab training. He just would stay tight whenever he did his heavy lifts. And this is pretty much what happens. When you reach a certain level of strength, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And so what we're doing right now here is kind of a form of anti-glycolytic training. If your muscle contracts briefly and then relaxes, contracts, relaxes, and the contraction cycles are really short, you're able to avoid glycolysis. You're able to keep that muscle working aerobically for a long time and not beat yourself down.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. B B B B B B B B
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So to the listeners who'd like to try it, start by walking with a kettlebell.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Correct.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
No, you're not. No, this is not developing a grip whatsoever.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, he says run for a mile. That's the goal. And he has some numbers. I can give you a link. You can look it up. Dr. Mike Prevost. And direct grip strength training is great as well. So for example, the best products for that would be the captains of crushed grippers from Iron Mind.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It's quite remarkable. And also just to add one more thing, at a competition, at least in powerlifting, a lot of, I mean, the top guys, they don't see anything really. They're just deep inside their rage. It's a total tunnel vision, auditory exclusion, everything. So it's whatever. They're had in whatever remembered position, but don't ask them to look at you or see you. It's not going to happen.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
They're someplace else.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You're very kind, Andrew. It's been a real pleasure. Very stimulating conversation.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
I love my job, so that's easy.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Coming from you, it means a lot.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
If I could blush, I would write.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Iron Mind is the company that started a serious grip training pretty much in the modern era, and their grippers are the golden standard. Some years ago, my colleague at Strong First, Brad Jones, and I, we decided to get serious about it and see what that feels like. And we spent many, many months. We were both able to build up to closing the number three gripper from a parallel set.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It should go without saying.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Andrew, a pleasure to be on your podcast. I respect your work a lot.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you, Andrew. Real pleasure. You're a real gem. And thank you for spreading the word of health and strength. Strength and health. Wonderful.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So that means that gripper takes 280 pounds to close. And when you're using very small muscle groups, it's extremely, extremely hard. And the observations that we both made and 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.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Because people are thinking that when you're training the grip, it's just some kind of isolated thing. You can drive the car and you can kind of squeeze this little pink thing that you picked up 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...
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
pretty much every neurological trick in the book in order to exert yourself. So for example, if you have ever seen the Sanchin stance in karate, which is a stance where the knees are kind of pulled inward and shoulders are pressed down, there's a lot of tension, everything's very, very seriously engaged. The toes are gripping the ground. So you're pretty much gripping the ground with your toes.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You're contracting your glutes. You're bracing very, very hard. You're compressing your viscera. Your lat is firing and you're sending all this effort. The only thing they're not working is like you try to keep your traps and face out of this. and you're directing this effort into your grip, you get just as tired from doing that work as from doing like heavy squats or something. That's remarkable.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But if you like that, it's a fantastic thing to do.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
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, definitely strongly encouraging your listeners to do that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You switch all the time. Switch as much as you want. Okay. Because if you try to do it 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 to developing isometric endurance is very rapid switching, you know, short contractions and brief rests and over and over and over.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
That way you are not, you know, the muscle doesn't go into ischemia and, you know, it keeps getting oxygen pretty much.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Okay. Well, first of all, the case for concentric only is if you're trying to minimize muscle growth and if you also are trying to minimize soreness. So for athletes in weight classes or athletes in sports where you get punished by carrying extra weight, it's a very good idea. So, for example, when Barry Ross coached Alison Felix, at that point she became the fastest athlete
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
She won the 200 meters 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 concentric only. And she would have her drop the bar. And the reasoning for that is exactly that. You're able to get stronger. You're not putting on extra muscle mass. Also, it's safe. It's really a very, very safe way to train. And in programming...
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
protocol for somebody who's not necessarily in that boat, it's still just for the sake of variety, you may want to choose to avoid the eccentric on certain days, like you're trying to recover, accelerate the recovery. So you lift the weight, but then you step down. So you could definitely do that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Eccentric work, it's supposedly very helpful to promote hypertrophy, but there are a lot of ifs and buts in there. I'm going to talk right now about the eccentric strength, eccentric work for strength specifically. It's very, because the muscle is strongest whenever you're lowering the weight, it's very easy to do something knuckleheaded and get hurt, which is, gym bros do that all the time.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
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 intention of lifting it. So you're lowering this bar that you're just, you know, the bench press barbell.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You're lowering it 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 two, three times. This sort of a strategy... or a variation of it was used by Rick Will.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
He was able to bench press over 500 pounds wearing a t-shirt at the body weight of back 81, back in the 80s, one of the greatest 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,
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
when you combine this same type of eccentric with a very perfect assisted trap, not forced trap like bros do. It's all you, bro. You know, the guy's 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 lowering at the speed of your max attempt. So you're not going very, very, very slow.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You know how guys do it. They take the first quarter of the range of motion very slow, and then they fall through. That doesn't do anything at all. No, you lower it at that rhythm of your maximal 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%.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So the fact is you get to feel a supramaximal weight, but you're not experiencing any psychological stress. It's very, very powerful. And again, you do this maybe for one or two singles. This also ties with the Soviet research on gymnasts. They came up with something called artificial controlling environment.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So they compared a group of gymnasts that was working up to some strength demanding skill with doing typical regressions. And at the same time, they were also working on typical strength training, weighted pull-ups and so on.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And the other group would have the coach provide this perfect assistance to enable the athlete to perform the skill at a higher level, as they put it, living their motor future, motor future, but with enough help not to make it hard but not stressful. And the difference in gains were just dramatically. There's so much gain, so much faster.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So I would say that would be a very good way to use eccentric work. Isometric training calls can also be very powerful for strength. And a great value of isometric training is in its ability to coach you to lift properly. And not just lift properly, other athletic events as well.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
If let's say that you're trying to learn to throw a front kick and you're doing it 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 applying pressure to that wall and the ground at the same time and kind of a pulse it against the wall, adjust your body and then you relax, shake off your muscles and you go hit the bag and suddenly you're going to do so much better.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, first of all, Andrew, is strength is the mother quality of all the other qualities. So this is, again, it's a statement by Professor Matveev, Leonid Matveev, going way back. And without a foundation of strength, you cannot build anything. So any athletic event requires a base of strength. Of course, that shot putter is going to need much more strength than triathlon athlete.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
The same thing, let's say that you're trying to optimize your 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 it a little bit.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So isometrics are very powerful for not just for strengthening the sticking points, but also for optimizing the angles. Then we're also dealing with something that... there is also great disinhibition effect.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So what your listeners might not know is... So there are two... You have two pedals in your nervous system, as in pardon me for telling you this, you don't need, obviously you know all this, but there's the excitation inhibition, there's the gas pedal and the brake pedal.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
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 3,600-pound car to save her son. And there are documented cases of that. So that disinhibition takes place.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So isometrics does have some disinhibition effects properties. Very, very powerful. Also, isometrics teaches you not to give up on a heavy attempt. Because if you put... The experiments were done in a safe manner on the machines, obviously. But if you put an inexperienced person and the machine is moving at a slow rate, so when the speed starts approaching zero, that Inhibition takes place.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
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 this kind of a neural drive endurance that you need to grind through safely through a heavy attack. So very, very powerful. How would you incorporate isometrics into it so you can do this as a part of your warm-up?
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But they all need strength. Speaking of which, in triathlon, in marathon running, in distance, in cycling, it's been proven that putting athletes on a heavy, low repetition strength regimen, the kind that doesn't really add muscle but just makes you stronger neurologically, and it makes them race faster. So once you're stronger, everything becomes easier.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
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, your odds of succeeding are gonna be much higher if you're able to squat this much or bench this much and jump this high and so on and so forth.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
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Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you. just for anything that you can do with your brain or with your body, anything. So what they would even do, some coaches do this so-called strength warmup. They would warm 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 their practice.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
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 having a reserve of strength 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.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
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.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
I don't want to impose my set of standards because there are many different, like I might prefer, you know, pull-ups and X and Y and Z. But if we're looking at strength as the foundation for general physical preparation, right? So there's such a thing as general strength preparation. That's part of that. There's also special strength, which is sport-specific work. That's different.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
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.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
That's ideal, yes. And obviously it's difficult with some equipment, but what you could do, you could have it do the grippers. You could do one-arm push-ups. You could keep a kettlebell under your desk and press it at every opportunity. And again, the idea is really just practice. You just try to hit a perfect, perfect trap. And notice that...
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
If you have some issues, if you're a warm-up-dependent person for orthopedic issues, I'm talking about warm-up very much in the body, not the mind in this particular case, then it might not be appropriate for you, although with 10-minute rest it might still be okay. But practicing a skill without the warm-up, that means rehearsal, is very powerful for improving that skill.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
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 the way a sniper would take a cold shot. That's so much harder because you have to have produced that solution, or maybe an example that's closer to most viewers, golf.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You go to the driving range, you start hitting it, and like, wow, you're amazing. You just get yourself fine-tuned, you hit, you're perfect. Then you go and you play the game, and you cannot replicate that. Because suddenly, different club, different topography, everything's different. And you didn't have the luxury of that tuning yourself up right there.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So it feels, it doesn't feel like you're stronger, but you are going to get much stronger.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And there are different ways of getting this done. But as you and I know that certain exercises are going to have a great carryover outside these particular exercises. As long as you're mobile, as long as you're symmetrical, and those are the things you have to address first, you need to look into work of Greg Cook, for example, then strength has to be your priority.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
As long as, again, you don't want to have too much adrenaline either. Right, right.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Yes, as you know with your background in neuroscience, obviously, there are so many neurological phenomena, like if you can think of muscle software, that we have access to that if we become conscious about accessing that, we can be so much stronger.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And plus you have the contextual interference. So one of the grisa groove 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 specifically in strength training, Paul Anderson. Paul Anderson, one of the greatest weightlifters of all time. He was a big favorite of the Soviet public.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Very tough group to impress, but they called him the wonder of nature. He was so strong. And 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. Now go do this again.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And so he reinvent, not should say reinvent, no, he invented without knowing neurons from nylons, many of the training concepts that are just cutting edge today.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And again, so this concept of contextual interference, remember we talked earlier how if it's harder for you to produce a solution, if you're trying harder to remember two plus two is four or how to throw the ball, then you're gonna learn more as opposed to if somebody just hands it out, two plus two is four.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So Paul Anderson had both the spacing, time came like, so the groove has been forgotten in the sands of time, and the contextual interference, he did another exercise that erased whatever previous groove right there. And it's very fascinating how looking at some of these old timers and just how genius some of them were.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Once you have reached a certain level of strength that's appropriate for your sport or appropriate for your lifestyle, at that point you can just maintain it and focus on other qualities. So I will give you an example. Soviet scientists, Vysoch and Dzienisinka, they measured a number of athletes in 20 different sports, athletes of different levels. So they evaluated various quality.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
If you don't mind, Andrew, I'll break it up because there are a lot of great questions right there. So one, as you mentioned, there are different ways of training. And again, we... The greasy groove 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.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Another system that is completely and radically different, and it ties very much to Mike Mentzer's training, for reasons that become obvious, is the classic American powerlifting system from the 80s. And when people argue about training methods, what they need to understand is... there are many ways to get the job done.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You know, Art Coveo, his research in Estonia found because there's so many different combinations of stimuli and the 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.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
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 to address it.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
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.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And the other extreme would be the American powerlifting system exemplified by Hugh Cassidy, Marty Gallagher, Ed Cohn, Kirk Kowalski, so starting from the 70s through the 90s. Those are really glorious days for his powerlifting. And in that system, they would pretty much do one or two heavy sets per lift once a week.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So it's kind of a little bit like Mike Mancer's work, kind of, but we'll address why. So how can that be and how can both systems work? So you addressed the recovery. There's a concept called heterochronicity, which hetero means different, chronicity refers to time. So the different systems in the body recover at different rates.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
One was absolute strength. Another was rate of force development, pretty much power. And the third is the rate of muscular relaxation, so how quickly the muscle can relax after contraction, which is very, very important. And they have found that strength grew just very little from the intermediate level to the advanced level. There's not a lot of improvement. Power increased a little bit more.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And if you don't take that into account, then you're going to have some serious problems. The Soviet system took, if you look at the Soviet system with frequent training, they looked at, okay, we want to do frequent practice, which is exactly what we do. We don't want to beat the muscles up so much that it takes them very long time to recover.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You know, not too much eccentric stress, not too much acidosis, avoiding things like that. And they were able to adjust the loads in such a way. So let's say your weights are heavy, but not too heavy. The reps don't go too high. So you're able to recover pretty much overnight.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And the benefit of that is it's been shown that if you fragment a given workload over more days and more sessions, you get better results. And it's your body is able and your nervous system, endocrine system, your carcass, everything is able to handle much more if it's split into small doses. So let's use an example of a meal.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Let's say if you were trying to do an eating competition, how much you can eat in 24 hours. So it's not like those Coney Island, you know, how many hot dogs you can eat in one sitting. No. But you would probably eat a lot more if you spread it throughout the day. And this is the same idea. Just like that parable from Nassim Taleb about the king that got angry at his son.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And he says he's going to crush him with a big rock. And then you realize, well, what did I do? I don't want to kill this kid. But the king's ward is king's ward, right? So he ordered his peons to break up the rock into pebbles and then just dump these pebbles in the kid. So that's the same idea. So fragmentation, the load always allows you to do more and do it safer.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So something else is related to that. Indeed. Some training systems rely on adaptations, let's say for strength, that go in the muscle, that go beyond just the contractile proteins, just the part that create force. So for example, the Soviet system, They also tried to increase the storage of creatine phosphate, which is the kind of immediate fuel for muscle contractions for this type of work.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
We're lifting heavy weights over and over. And so by training sometimes easier, you're able to keep stimulating that creatine phosphate adaptation, but without still allowing muscles to recover. So there's kind of a dance. And it's fairly complex. Then on the other hand, the American system did something completely different.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And the explanations for what happens in the muscle within this American system, we didn't know for sure, but there's a hypothesis by a Russian specialist, Vadim Piatasenko, that seems quite credible. So again, the system, here's the system. You train hard, you do one hard set once a week, or two hard sets. So the...
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
satellite cells that are immature cells in the muscle, they're sitting there waiting to jump in if you need to replenish the messed up ones. In order for the satellite cells to get their job done, they try to figure out, scientists try to figure out what sort of stimuli are required. And
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
One, a strong case can be made that a very particular damage to the microstructure of the muscle can provoke that stimulus. But that damage has to be very, very specific. If you beat up the muscle with a baseball bat, you're just going to get a whole lot of scar tissue and some satellite cells will just die and others will just become scarred. But if...
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
The cross bridges in the muscle, the cross bridges is that part that does create force in the muscle. If they do tear in a very specific way, it seems to do the job. So the way the muscle contracts is so there is, imagine that you're rowing a boat on the water. So water is one protein, it's called actin, and myosin is the ores that are moving in there.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So the ore dips into the water, hooks, and pulls. And that ore relies on available energy in the muscles. So these ATP molecules of stored energy, they're floating around. And the head, myosin head, needs that ATP in order to both to hook to produce force, but it also needs ATP to unhook as well. And it's in this in-between stage, it's called a rigor.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But the speed of relaxation is just shut up as the athlete became more advanced. So it's again, so strength, it is the mother of all qualities, but that's not the end all for everybody. So reach the level that is appropriate for your sport or activity, then just maintain it efficiently and focus on something else. If we talk about strength, if we talk about other qualities.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So whenever the muscle has produced force, but there is not enough energy for it to relax, so the muscle is stuck in rigor. So think of rigor mortis. So if you tear that body's muscle, you know, it's going to tear. And supposedly this is going to happen only when you're able to, when the consumption of ATP is really high in the muscle. but the supply is not.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And so if you do that in the first, let's say, 20, 30 seconds before acidosis set in, that's what should happen. Because if you wait longer, when there's a lot of acid in the muscle, acid, it kills that reaction that uses ATP. So you're not using as much anymore. Sure, the demand is down, the supply is down, but so on demand, so it's not so good. So if you erase that fatigue point,
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So if you try to deplete that creatine phosphate, that kind of rocket fuel of the muscle within about 20, 30 seconds, then presumably some of these hooks, some of these oars are going to get stuck. And when the muscle is lengthening and they're going to tear. And that's a very specific tear. It doesn't happen on the outside of the muscle. It happens just on the inside in there.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Whether this is true or not, I do not know. But it's a pretty good theory that does explain Mike Menser's method and explains the American powerlifting method. Interestingly enough about Mike Menser, and again to the listeners who are not aware of the method, that means train the muscle really hard, very infrequently, with very low volume.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Professor Yuri Verkhoshansky, before he died, a famous Soviet sports scientist, known in the West mostly as the father of what is called plyometrics in the West. But he's also done many other things as well. He spoke very highly about Menser. He thought Menser was brilliant, Menser was an innovator. But many people, some people get good results from it like you did, and a lot of people do not.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And... So pretty much what Protasenko suggested that might happen is eventually you'll reach the limit of adaptation of how much you can deplete the creatine phosphate in that window. That's when you hit the wall. And this is where the American system comes in. This system is called cycling. The history of cycling is fascinating. The relationship...
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
The interaction between the Soviet and American strength schools is absolutely fascinating. So just to go back for a minute, Soviet track athletes in the 50s were using the typical stupid high rep reps to burn. Then in the late 50s, some very sharp young specialist, Vitaly Chudzinov, he made a case at a conference and said, what are we doing?
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Let's look at what, he said, let's look at Paul Anderson, Doug Hepburn, Bruce Randall, these North American strength athletes, let's look what they're doing. They're lifting heavy stuff for sets of three to five reps. Let's knock the stunts and soft. Soviet track athletes started doing that right there. So this is how the Soviets, for example, learned from Americans.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
That's an example of how it went the other way. The classic periodization, as it's known, not various periodization, in which you kind of start out with higher volume and less specific to lower volume, more intensity and so on, that periodization is not used by lifters in the Soviet Union. Lifters thought that's just completely not, it's just not usable. It's just inappropriate for their needs.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Arkady Vorobyov, the professor and Olympic champion, made a very strong case. Why? But Americans who got some limited information about it, American power lifters, not weight lifters, were able to develop their own training system based on that premise, something that the Soviets didn't do. And the way it worked is like this.
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The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, we'll get to them later.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You don't necessarily have very high volume, but you start, I'm going to give you a most classic example of this type of cycling. Again, this is, again, Cassidy, Gallagher, Colin Karwoski. Four week blocks, let's say there's gonna be three, four week blocks, maybe four. So you do a lift once a week. On week four, you go for a PR. So let's say this is a month of fives.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So this is on your week four, you're going to do a PR instead of five, you plan for it. Week three is somewhere around your old PR. Week two is lighter, week one is lighter still, okay? And then after that, you may increase the weight, but still a relative effort is going to drop, and you're going to kind of repeat the process. So it does multiple things.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
On the muscular level, so what Pratasenka explained, you pretty much decondition yourself temporarily, and you progressively increase that creatine phosphate use. So initially, when you're deconditioned, it doesn't take as much to get the stimulus. You don't have to push really hard in the first week. You push harder in the second. and harder and harder.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
There's a concept, their concept in periodization, so in sports science, of reactivity versus resistance. Reactivity means how responsive your body is to the stimulus, and resistance, kind of like in the medical terms, you know, how much it can, you know, it's not affected by it. So, when you're starting light, after layoff, your reactivity is high and your resistance is low. It doesn't take much.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So boom, suddenly you build this muscle. And then you keep building up. And when you reach a peak, then you just step back again. And on the side of the nervous system, an endocrine system, much later Soviet research, they said you can train hard maximum two weeks out of four. That's it. More than that, you cannot handle.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Sometimes easy, sometimes... There are different ways of programming it. The typical one that you hear about in the West is you're going to build things up for three weeks and then down to four. It's one of the about 16 different possible arrangements. It doesn't have to be. There can be... Here's one brilliant way. Franco Colombo, who passed unfortunately, was not just a great bodybuilder.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
He was a great chiropractor and great strength athlete. Super strong. Very strong. And brilliant. So he told me about his deadlift cycle. Week one, moderate. Week two, heavy. Week three, moderate. Week four, very heavy. Again, this is a different way of arranging the same concept. And These American power lifters were able to build a system that built the muscle probably exactly in this manner.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
What was happening at the same time? Oh, yeah. And there was also another angle how that system possibly has worked. This is fascinating. Any type of exercise that you do makes your muscles more slow twitch. It's just the way it is. It's very, very bizarre. Even explosive work. Even explosive. Even just trying to crush the bar and drive the deadlift down. Even that, the more you do it.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
I think there has to be a very low quantity of exercises, just very few exercises you want to focus on. And I'm going to give you some options to choose from. Mm-hmm. So what we try to do at Strong First in my company, my school of strength, is we try to provide people with various simple, very low-tech, high-concept ways of addressing, reaching their needs.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So Goldspink's research back in the 80s that any cycle of stretching or contraction resets the heavy chain myosin, you know, the contractile proteins that makes it towards slower time. So any type of work. If you do biopsy on somebody who is a couch potato, you're going to find that person probably has a higher concentration of white fibers than you and I. Wild. Very counterintuitive.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Very counterintuitive. And so that's like a default setting for the fibers. However, if you take time off, something changes. And it goes beyond the change. So this research came out of Sweden, I believe. When they trained a group of subjects in strength, they saw a predicted decrease in the ratio of type 2X fast-fish fibers. Then they took a couple months off.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And then they experienced, they called it MHC overshoot, myosin heavy chain, again, like fast fiber overshoot. So they had something like 70 more percent fibers after that. Wild.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And, but... They figured out, Verkhoshansky figured out that is not needed for athletes because obviously you get deconditioned in other ways, right? So remember we're talking about heterochronicity, different processes take place at different rates. So it's like you're constantly playing the whack-the-mole. So this is getting out of shape, but this is not recovered yet. It's a game.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
That's a game of training programming. So in the American system, first of all, the infrequent training, It reduced the stimulus for the conversion of the fibers towards the slower isoform, slower types. And the second, all the taper that they did later. So suddenly switching from five to like one triple, one double for a few weeks.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
If you do that for just a few weeks, you do like a one triple, one double, you're not going to lose much muscle mass because it really takes over a month. But there's enough time for the... for the myosin to reconfigure itself to a faster type. So that's probably what happens. Interesting. And neurologically, I think what happens, probably they exerted themselves very strongly once, twice a month.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So it's again, you know, neural drive, probably with strength and disinhibition and other things like that. And the irony is The system has lost its popularity. Some records in the deadlift, like Dan Austin's record and possibly Naba's, set back in the 90s and 80s, there's, oh yeah, Lamar Gant. Lamar Gant, this is the strongest deadlifter pound per pound in history.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So like 683 at buck 32 or something like that. And it was done back in the 80s. So he trained that way. Dan Austin. In other lifts, records have increased in part because of the equipment changes and some other reasons. But Ed Cohn dominated the platform for decades.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Because for one reason or another, for this individual, the barbell is the preferred tool. For another, it's the kettlebell or bodyweight or something else. So I'm not going to say that if you don't do kettlebell swings or barbell squats, you'll never amount to anything. That's just not true. But you can pick some events. So you definitely ought to do something for a posterior chain.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So there are some great, great lifters who train this way, but then the system lost its popularity for reasons have nothing to do with its effectiveness. It doesn't mean it's appropriate for everybody, though, because training a lift once a week for one or two sets, there's not much practice. And that's a problem.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So unless you're training under a very high level coach or you're already coming in with great skills, it's really good. Second, if you need any kind of level of endurance or if you're playing other sport, you're going to be very sore from this type of training. So it's a great system for certain type of people.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You absolutely do. If we are looking at the barbell, I would start out with the narrow sumo deadlift. So this is narrow grip? Not narrow grip, pardon me, but your stance is just wide enough to let your arms through. Your arms stay parallel to each other. And so you just find a very comfortable stance for yourself. So Professor McGill has been in your podcast.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You may want to explain that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, in California, it doesn't. It does, right.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
The belt squat and this leg work that's not spine compressing, I'm going to address healthy people like yourself. So if somebody has medical restrictions, you got to do belt squat because the doctor says so, that's what you got to do.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
As long as you're also addressing the rest of your posterior chain, as long as you're training your lower back, your upper back, obviously your neck, which obviously you're doing that, and in some other manner, there's absolutely no problem with that. So let's say you're doing some shrug pulls or something. You got that taken care of or you're doing some deadlifts.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And also for powerlifters, what powerlifters do, it's a tactic, is when you're training the same lift, especially if you train the same lift very frequently, there is always that heterocronicity. Something is not catching up quite as fast. So you're going deadlifting and your hands are beat up. Use straps.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
or you come into the deadlifting and your back feels like, well, it's time to deadlift, but my back is not quite ready. Well, you could go do a narrow sumo or something like that. So there are ways of modifying things this way.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So you're able to, if let's say you hit some hard deadlifts or hard squats and you need some additional leg work, sure, you don't need any extra stimulation for your upper back and mid back. However, if you are a person who has... more of a minimalist who does fewer exercises, then you just can't afford that because then you're going to have to do some additional exercises.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
He explained to you about the different hip architecture and so on. So you have to find whatever works for you. And when people talk about functional strength training, and then they start standing on a ball and juggle oranges doesn't make a lot of sense to me because that doesn't look like my life or yours probably, right?
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You're going to do something else. So may I suggest for your listeners and viewers to do Zurcher squats. Again, a fantastic exercise. It does not beat up your shoulders. It does not build up your elbows or your wrists. It may leave some bruises, you know, but it's okay. You can live with that. And does that answer for the bell squat? Yeah.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And by the way, machines in general, here's also a very interesting observation about machines. Machines are very useful for advanced trainees and fairly useless for beginners.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But if you imagine the scenarios, what do people do? What do people do? Oh, it's safer. Get in and climb into this machine right there. You're not developing any stabilizers. So you get out of this machine, you get crushed somewhere.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But on the other hand, if you're a more advanced lifter, so like Marty Gallagher, one of the top powerlifting coaches in the world, he might recommend leg presses in a very specific deadlift stance to a lifter. And this is going to increase strength on your leg drive without beating up your back, but you're already doing your deadlifts. You can definitely do that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So advanced lifters may make a good use of machines and they don't need to be taught how to do that. They can figure it out. But beginners really should just use exclusively free weights. I'm not saying everybody should do squat, bench, deadlift, kettlebell snatch, and this and that. No.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
There's a large menu of exercise to choose from, but you got to choose just from that menu where you discover the weight that's free, that's truly, truly free. Should we move on to the cycle, shorter cycle? Yeah, the shorter cycle. A lot of it depends on the type of programming that you do. So the type of progression that you use. So if I may, may I step to the side on that?
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So in strength training, you can look at the typical linear progression. We just progressively increase the weight. It only works for beginners, obviously. You look at the wave progression where, you know, you're going up for a while, then backing off and then going up again. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
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, a classic example would be Ed Cohn. That's a narrow stance sumo. I'm not talking about wide sumo. That's a very sport-specific event. And you practice that first. You learn how to hip hinge.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It's extremely important to learn how to hip hinge. Again, Stuart stressed that, how important it is for your back health and for your longevity. So you learn to do that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Then whether you decide to pursue the deadlift or not, if you decide not to pursue high numbers in the deadlift, maybe it's not appropriate for you, or maybe you're lacking the coaching, a fantastic exercise for everybody is a Zurcher squat. So in the Zurcher squat, you hold the bar like this in the crux of your elbows. So it's resting right here.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. a cardiopathologist originally, but later again, his research in stress is amazing. So there's the cost of adaptation. And it's the same thing as pretty much as buying a car or a table. You can get the same table for a lower price, or you can pay the top dollar.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It's possible to pick it up off the ground, but it's an advanced skill. It's an advanced skill. Better just to walk it off the rack. The advantage of the Zurcher squat over, let's say, the back squat or the front squat is even if you have messed up shoulders, wrists, elbows, you still can do that. Coaching the Zurcher squat is very easy, very simple.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And you have tremendous reflexive stabilization 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 Zurcher, so let's say an athlete could shoot for a double body weight, that's a really good goal.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So you can increase your strength while at the same time blowing your back out, or you can increase your VO2 max while getting arrhythmia in the process. Or you can do it in a healthy way. So one of the issues you have to look at, they're trying to lower the biological cost of the adaptation. So in strength training, we do that by very careful and not training hard too often.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So again, the American system, it's two weeks out of four. The Soviet system, pretty much the same, although the planning is going to be different. First, if we look at the cardiovascular adaptations, before we're looking into the mitochondria and into the muscle, most of the work should be done below the threshold, pretty much. So what's the threshold?
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So for runners, let's say you're running and you're able to maintain the conversation. And when you start running too fast and you cannot maintain the conversation, you pass the threshold. It's like you're going faster and you're breathing harder linearly, and suddenly it goes like this, like a hockey stick.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So at that point, your body is no longer able to process all that acid and things are starting to get harder. So there are certain implications. There are certain implications for your muscles, for sure. We'll discuss that in a few minutes. But for your heart, there are two things we're primarily trying to train.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
One, we're trying to train the stroke volume, so pretty much how much blood the heart can pump out with each contraction. And it's a very simple thing to do. You get up to, like... 70% to 70% to 85% of your maximal heart rate. So the heart starts stretching, literally. So this blood is incoming and the heart starts stretching and it requires volume.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Some Tour de France riders, they might throw the food in the back of the cycle and they ride all day. because that's what they've got to do. And that requires that adaptation. For people who just do it for health, you don't need to do that much. 30, 40 minutes several times a week is enough. But for a high level, you have to stretch the heart.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
If you start redlining the heart rate, the heart starts twitching. So there's no time for it to fully relax and stretch. You're no longer really increasing your stroke volume. And what you're doing right now, you're strengthening your ejection fraction, which is like the strength of the heart, which is needed for athletes whose sport require redlining the heart rate.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You know, if you're a fighter, if you are a 400-meter runner, you absolutely need to do that. But what they found, it went back to German research going to decades later and then the Soviet research. If you start redlining your heart rate, before you have that volume that you put in and built up the stroke volume, you're just heading for pathology.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So there are arrhythmias, there's all sorts of different things that the aphids, all sorts of things that can start happening that are bad. And also your performance is not gonna be very high because again, your stroke volume is not there. And even for athletes who do that, they should do it for a very short period of time. It's just too stressful and it's just not needed.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Typically it's a peak, it's peaking phase for some weeks before leading up to the competition. So pretty much steady state, steady state exercise, like riding a cycle or jogging or hiking, when you're still able to talk, It's the best, most efficient and healthiest way to promote that quality when you're increasing your heart stroke volume.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You can hold them like this. You can hold them like this. There are different ways of holding them. You definitely would want to get proper coaching. You don't want to bruise yourself. You want to be comfortable. You want to do it right. But it doesn't take a lot of skill to do that. You find some pressing exercise. And again, if we're sticking with the example of the barbell,
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
If you decide to get a little more intense at some point, interval training is appropriate, but unfortunately it's completely and totally messed up and misunderstood. It's like a catch-all term, high-intensity interval training. Brent Rushall, a professor out of San Diego said, this is nonsense. This term is a nonsense. What does it even mean? Like what's high intensity?
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And also here's a question. What does low intensity interval training mean? Going back to taking a step to the side, but that discussion will help us when we discuss what happens in the muscle terminology. So there are different rest periods between sets. There is the ordinary rest period, which means you pretty much recover your function.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It's like you're just as strong or just as enduring as from the previous set. There is the supramax rest period, when if you rest extra, sometimes you get some extra performance out of it. And there is the stress rest period, when the next set is going to be harder. Your performance may or may not be compromised, but it's going to be harder.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So with ordinary stress or ordinary rest periods, that is called, in track, it's called repeat training. You know, so you run 100 meters, then you rest for, you know, whatever, 10, 15 minutes, as long as you need, longer possibly, then you repeat it again. And your performance stays this way. Interval training, again, it's established.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It just means that things are going to get worse from set to set. So that's the definition of interval training. The irony is that interval training was designed to increase the intensity of exercise while reducing the demands on the body. So if you look at the work of Fox and Edwards, they're pioneers of interval training in the United States, they gave some great examples.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So let's say you're running for 30 seconds and you're at this speed and you're gonna produce this much acid and your heart rate is gonna be this high. Well, if you run for 10 seconds with short periods in between, at the same speed, you're going to produce less and less acid and your heart rate is not going to climb to the stratosphere. And that type of training is very, very useful.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And interval training can be used for promoting any type of adaptation. You can use it for hypertrophy. So here is one training method I learned from my colleague Fabio Zonin. It was designed by Professor Massaroni, an Italian mystery universe and professor. Okay, you take 80% of your one rep max, so let's say presumably eight rep max. Set of five, rest for 30 seconds.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Set of five, rest for 30 seconds. If you cannot do it anymore, you're done. And then you come back maybe 10 minutes later to do it again. That's an example of interval training again. I see. And you can structure interval training for adaptations within the muscle, a mitochondria, and you can also do that for your heart. So here's how you do it for the heart.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Today, there are a lot of fancy popular protocols, but all you have to do is go back to what Germans did many decades ago. Here's the premise. Your vegetative system, your heart, your lungs, your plumbing, they have inertia. So, for example, imagine yourself as a kid. You run really, really hard. You know, you run for, you know, 100 meters or something, or less maybe. And everything's fine.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
The bench press has gotten bad reputation, you know, thanks to the gym bros. And, you know, all gym bros do is the bench pretty much. Well, these days they also check out their phones, I guess.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And then you're talking to your body and suddenly you start sucking wind. So that's an example of this inertia. So if you get your heart rate up to about 85% to 90% one rev max, And then you suddenly switch to jogging. You don't wanna stop because that's just way too hard for your heart without getting that venous return from muscles working. What happens is the heart slows down
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But there's that blood keeps on moving, and the blood literally stretches the walls of the heart.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Traditionally, it was not quite a sprint. The duration would be typical 60 to 90 seconds. The intensity is such that you get up to top off at 85, 90% of your heart rate max, something like that. And then you jog until your heart rate goes to about 60, 70%. So that's roughly about the same probably. And that, to look things up, it's like German interval training that was done.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It is based on very definite physiological events. Like this is what the heart does. This is what we're trying to do with the heart. And instead of inventing some things that are just simply trash the body for no reason whatsoever. And part of the problem also, Andrew, is It's very easy to get misled by quick gains. And it happens in strength world and in endurance world.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Let's remember the years when you and I and every other male listener bench press their max once a week. You're strong. Next week, you're stronger. Third week, you're stronger. Like, you're doing the math. Like, okay, well, I should be setting the national record by Christmas and maybe I'll be going to the Worlds by summer. And then at six weeks, you're done.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And for experienced athletes, it happens sooner, like after three weeks. The same thing with endurance. When you start doing glycolytic work, when you start redlining heart rate and increasing the abscesses, your performance jumps so quickly. It's very contagious. It's like, oh, not contagious, pardon me. It's very exciting.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And you think that you're going to keep going forever, but you really absolutely will not. So if you want to train your heart, A good way of doing that is steady state work. If you decide to do some sort of intermittent work, there are several different ways. One is intermittent exercise that's more of a repeat in nature, not interval, which is very bizarre to people.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Yeah, there we go. But if you look at athletes, they, athletes who also do some lower body work, some posterior chain work, and something for the midsection. And again, the Zurcher squad could address that. they are making a great use of the bench press. So it's a very simple exercise. Well, not very simple. It's a relatively simple exercise.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Let's say that you go moderately hard for 10 seconds, you go easy for 10 seconds, and you do this for 30 to 60 minutes. Imagine doing that. That's good work. It is good work, but you know what would be shocking to you? That you're not going to produce that much acid or you're not going to redline your heart rate. Better would be like 10 seconds of work, 20 seconds of rest.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
That would be fascinating research that Swedes did back in the 50s and 60s on that. It's amazing. If you keep the work periods short, you're able to not produce a lot of acid but just go very, very hard. And you're going to be able to train your heart and your lungs in this manner too.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You can also do, and you also have peripheral adaptations in the muscles, mitochondria and so on, vascularia, so some capillarization happening too. But it's also interesting, there's one particular type of, I hate the fact that it falls under the high intensity interval training umbrella because it's not.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Because everything that sounds like hit, it's not good to me because it's just made up label. But there's one type of training that delivers great benefits to your cardiorespiratory system. And at the same time, it also does that for, you know, for your mitochondria and even builds muscle in the same time. In track, it is called glycolytic power repeats.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And in the last 20 years, there are several good papers that were done on that. Dybala, Bergamaster, I think, pardon me if I'm mispronouncing their names. But pretty much you do a Wingate, like a 30 seconds of hard exercise, followed by approximately five minutes of rest, and you repeat it several times. Here's what's unique about this type of method.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It gets your heart rate up to about that 85, 90% or something. Then you're going to walk it off after that. So you are going to get adaptations for your heart. It's not the most effective way, but for healthy people, it's a healthy way and it's a very efficient way. At the same time, we'll discuss later what happens in mitochondrial level.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But also what's interesting, you're also likely to get built some muscle as well. And typically there is the conflict, which we're getting to this point about like strength versus endurance.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Typically there's a conflict of strength versus endurance because, you know, if you're looking in the mTOR on one side, AMPK on the other side, things seem to be like, okay, this is pulling one way, this is pulling the other way. But somehow this particular load
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
while promoting peripheral and central endurance also, endurance at least in the fast and intermediate fibers, also does promote muscle growth. Interesting.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
In the studies that were done, they used wing gates, they used cycle, they cycled. Sprinting, if you are going uphill, you can certainly do that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You're pushing. Yeah. Going in a track, it's too easy to get something messed up. So going uphill, you can do that. We do this with kettlebells. We did this work in my first kettlebell school over 20 years ago where we would do a set of you take a heavy kettlebell, moderately heavy kettlebell, like, you know, for you or me to be like a 70-pounder.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And unlike other pressing exercises, it allows you to make strength gains with a very low volume of training. So you can do several sets of five once a week in the bench press and keep getting stronger. Good luck doing that in the overhead press or in the one-arm push-up or something like that. So those are just a couple examples. There are many other examples. You can do snatch grip deadlifts.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And we would snatch it really hard for a set of 20, 25 reps. And then we just jog till the heart rate comes down. And then we take this leisurely power lifting rest. And we're going to do it again. And it's a fantastic way to promote various aspects of fitness. So you're going to get in cardio-respiratory endurance. You're going to get peripheral adaptations, endurance in the muscle.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And you're also building muscle at the same time. The reasons for that... Here's the theory. Again, all the conversations we have about this is what happens in the muscle, all these are theories. We know pretty much if we do X, we're going to get Z, whatever, or Y, some kind of result at this point, but we may not necessarily know for sure.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So the following is another one of the theories, but it's another good, credible one. So this is Professor Viktor Silyanov. So according to him, the preconditions for muscle growth, in addition to the obvious like food and things and hormones.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So when you reach a certain level of acidosis, only a certain level of acidosis, not necessarily very high, that those hydrogen ions will make the membrane permeable to the hormones. They're going to enter and go into the nucleus and start doing their job. So that's one of the part of the explanation.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Then at the same time, also the free creatine, when creatine phosphate, that hot fuel, gets burnt off, that's also anabolic for one reason or another. So there are some explanations. Whether that's how it is or not, I don't know.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But the fact is doing a hard 30, 40-second set followed by a very generous rest, we're talking about 5, 10 minutes, and repeating it five times, possibly more, it works very, very well.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
All right, well, first of all, whenever your heart rate is high, the very first thing is to not to suddenly stop. Because you want to, there are valve, one-way valves in the veins that whenever you contract the muscles of the legs, they help to milk the blood back through to the heart. So basically they reduce the stress on the heart.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So just walk it out first, the first step, if your heart rate was high. Then the second thing is you want to do exercises, you want to do relaxation, myorelaxation, muscle relaxation exercise. What they are is if you watch boxers, how they shake off their shoulders and drop their hands and do things like that. These exercises go back to the 30s.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
The list is very, very long. We can address the same thing in the same way with kettlebells. You can look at the bodyweight exercises. But you need to find several exercises that have a reputation for building strength that reaches beyond the ability to do this exercise. If you just do curls, you're going to get better at curls, but not at much else.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Soviets used them since the 30s, and they used them with elite athletes, kids in grade schools, and everybody. So these exercises serve several functions. One is if you are doing an exercise that... is strength exercise in nature, some of the cross bridges are stuck pretty much. And so your muscle is thixotropic, it's like gel. So by moving your muscle in a passive manner, you get it unstuck.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And so you restore circulation, obviously. And the other reason is, again, control of muscular tension is very, very important. It's important to learn how to contract the muscle for strength. It's very important how to relax for speed, for endurance, just for a happy life. If you look at the best sprinters, note how relaxed their faces are when they're on their jaws, how relaxed their necks are.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So relaxation is something that's practiced, just like tension. So regardless of what exercise that you just did, shaking off, we call this fast and loose drills, shaking like passive, like turn your muscles to fat. So you want to do this for a little bit. Then after that, it depends how long is your rest. So if you're taking, it depends which exactly that you're doing.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
In some extreme examples, let's say that you're a sprinter. I remember we talked like doing sprint repeats with, let's say, 100 meters in 15 minutes. You think, wow, sounds like a great, great training session. Well, the problem is these guys do need these 15 minutes to get the acid out of the system and have some other functions to recover.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But after a couple of minutes, the CNS excitability goes down. So what the Soviets figured out back in the 40s still is what you do then after you walked it off, after you shook it off, you here and there, you insert some very kind of like enlightened easy hops or whatever using the same muscle groups. So these poor athletes really have a complicated rest protocol.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
There's really no rest for the wicked there. If you are a lifter who's taking very long rest periods in between, let's say you take those 10 minutes, Then after your heart rate is down and after you shook off and after you walked a little, you can just sit down. You can do whatever you want. Do not sit a slouch because obviously Stu McGill explained why that's not a good idea.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And speaking of slouching, one reason that runners get their backs jacked up after running or some endurance event is, again, they go into their knees and they get into that collapsed posture and And their discs are really pliable and warm after the run and then suddenly put them into flexion and they get messed up.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So yeah, you also got to, like you point out, to watch our posture, but you really got to watch your posture during recovery because you slump between your sets of squats and then, you know, you could blow something out right there.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So Canadian scientists back in the 80s, Digby Sayle and his team made some interesting discoveries, and they just found that doing something like extension is not going to carry over to the squat. It's just not. The coordination is so radically different. So you find several exercises that you enjoy that don't hurt you, that you have the equipment available,
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, also the other thing you can do, I remember when I watched your podcast with Stu McGill, you mentioned that the – Upward facing dog, cobra or cobra helps you, right? Putting yourself in extension.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So for people who, for whom that works, it's you can just lie on the, lie on the floor in your elbows and just read a book. So for example, add strong first courses when people do exercise and then we teach them. So we have several authorized postures. So you either have to sit ramrod straight, You know, you can sit in a lotus or a caesar or something like that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Or you can, you know, half kneel still upright, or you can lie on your stomach. So we do not allow this collapsed posture because this is a great, great way to get hurt. Plus, you know, you look like a slacker when you're a slacker. Mentally, you're not going to be focused on whatever you're supposed to be doing. So I think that's a good idea.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And to bring us back to, do you want to talk a little bit about the peripheral adaptations from endurance?
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And then maybe we can talk about like, what should people do who are not athletes? So a much bigger thing than the VO2 max is the adaptations, the ability of your muscles to extract and use the oxygen. So this, again, called this revolution, anti-glycolytic revolution, comes from also Yuriy Verkhoshansky. Again, he's known as the father of plyometrics, but he's so much more than that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And back in 1980, he looked at the typical endurance training protocols and he says, okay, everybody's trying to push the athlete to the greatest degree of discomfort and make the athlete accustomed to that degree of discomfort. And he says that that's just wrong. Instead, we need to figure out how to postpone the fatigue and how to fight the mechanisms that produce the fatigue.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And he says glycolysis, anaerobic glycolysis is the primary cause of that. We could split a lot of hairs, whether it's the glycolysis itself or it's... the acid from coming from ATP breakdown or whether it's non-organic phosphates or whatever. But whatever it is, it always happens when the acid doses is running high, when acid becomes high. So that doesn't really matter which exact factor is.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So he figured out you need to promote aerobic metabolism in the working muscle fibers. So he decided that endurance training for high-level athletes and people who are not athletes, it will apply to you as well, has to be specific. That's exactly why, like that marathon runner who joined the MMA class and then sucking wind, his endurance is totally not specific.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Here's an example of specific endurances where you're using the same muscle fibers in your sport and in a mode that's consistent with that sport. So Verkhoshansky would have people like skiers, for example, do this very long push-off on the ski and then glide. Push-off and glide. And, yeah, Sulianov, who came after him.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So an example of that, you have this really powerful contraction of the muscles that are used in your sport. And then there's that relaxation during which the muscle recovers its myoglobin oxygen. There's a small amount of oxygen in the muscle. And it requires that creatine phosphate fuel that is used for that short term.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So pretty much instead of relying on that acid-producing metabolism, glycolytic metabolism, that you start using, on one hand, to use lifters metabolism. Creatine phosphate, that's what fuels a set of three reps. And on the other, you're using this marathon runner, aerobic metabolism. So you're like putting glycolysis in a vise.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And a great example of that comes from, Prakashansky is not the only one who came up with this idea. It's been reinvented by others. So in boxing, Leon Spinks. To the viewers who don't know who he is, Leon Spinks was a professional boxing world champion. And he defeated Muhammad Ali, among others. So he's a great champion.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
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 narrow grip bench press, squats with the paws and so on and so forth, but you don't really have to do a great variety of things.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And he hired Arthur Lyddiard, who was a great running coach from New Zealand, to work on his conditioning. And Lyddiard had him do work in the heavy bag for an hour and a half to two hours, nonstop. And he says, no, of course you're not going all out, sometimes harder, but you're definitely not tapping the bag. You're not shadowboxing.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And so if you're putting your muscle fibers in a very specific metabolic window and do it over and over and over, they start adapting to it. Fast fibers start developing mitochondria. Fast fibers start developing capillaries. Fast fibers don't lose their strength. But they start developing the plumbing and the ability to use the oxidative system to recover rapidly.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But going back to, again, this larger periodization idea is when you start with a new stimulus, your body is highly reactive, but the resistance is low. You cannot take much of it. Then that teeter-totter goes the other way. So you have to figure out how to restore that reactivity. And different training systems do it differently.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So an example of the American powerlifting system, you basically go lighter, start over with a light weight. So you decondition yourself purposefully, like two steps forward, one step back. And that's another example would be to use what the Soviets called specialized variety.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And this is something that you could see in the Soviet weightlifting system with Medvedev and Alexey Medvedev, one of the scientists and coaches, and also the West Side Barbell Powerlifting Club. So specialized variety, as opposed to random variety, is when you... have the same lift and with just very slight modifications. So the motor program, the intention stays the same.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But again, imagine that instead of deadlifting from the platform, you're deadlifting standing off a plate. So just slightly increase the range of motion, but you're still doing the same thing. Or imagine that you bring your grip and the bench press a couple of inches in. Or imagine that you use a block, just as a popular exercise in powerlifting.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You put a, like imagine putting a brick on your chest, something the size of a brick, lowering it to that, pausing and pressing back to work that very specific sticking point. So you're still benching. So what you're doing is you're resolving this conflict between accommodation and specificity. And on one hand, it's novel, but on the other hand, it's like same but different.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It's a very good tactic. It requires the knowledge of the iron game. Because if you go from the bench press to the military press or dips, you might see improvement or might not, because that's not specialized variety anymore. But if you look at...
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But all these variations were like, okay, so now we're snatching from hang. Now we're snatching from blocks. Now we're jerking from the rack. Do you see what I mean? This reminds me of this humorous book about Scandinavians, written by a Scandinavian, explaining how very different different Scandinavians are. And so this book has pictures of the same guy wearing different sweater.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Variety is a good topic, we can discuss this later, but like looking at the example of weightlifting, As much as we can find many reasons why variety could be beneficial, improved neuroplasticity, reduced risk of repeat of strain injury and so on, but the statistics in weightlifting, there's no correlation between the number of exercises and the platform results.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Sounds about right.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
I'm going to give you a great example how when not seeking pump is going to deliver great adaptation for you. So... Do you remember that idea of punching the bag for an hour, let's say, or two hours? That's how that promotes mitochondrial endurance, developing the fast-switch fibers. That can also be done with strength exercises as well for wrestlers and MMA fighters.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So you can do the bench press. You can do bench press and develop. endurance in your fast fit twitch fibers. The nature of endurance is very, very peculiar. You know, in team sports, there's a term repeat sprint ability. So repeat sprint ability means that let's say that you sprint for 20 meters, rest for less than a minute, sprint for another 20, you know, just something like that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So sprint rest, sprint rest, which is, which reflects the nature of a team sport, football, soccer, and so on. It's totally different from running 400 meters around the track. In strength endurance, it's the same thing. NFL combined, you know, it's a fine test, whatever. It's a nice bodybuilding exercise, good pump. But on the field, you're not doing 30 reps.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You're doing one rep, and then a little bit later, you're going to do another rep. So your conditioning for fast-twitch fibers can be structured in the same manner. So there's... Russian researcher named Bovykin, he put his several groups of athletes in different protocols. So one of them was doing the typical high intensity, whatever, circuit training, smoker, right?
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So you take 70% of your one rep max and you do this for 30 seconds and you go push hard and then you do the next one and very typical. Then the other group, anti-glycolytic group, these athletes would lift the same 70% one rep max for three reps. They do one exercise, second exercise, third exercise, rest for one minute, do it again and again and again.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So to the listeners, 70-rep max, an average athlete can probably crank out about 12 reps with it. A fighter is probably going to crank out 20-some reps with that easily. So they only do three reps. And so three reps, another exercise, another exercise, rest for one minute, do it over and over and over. And the end result was really fascinating, the outcome.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
There is one particular test discovered by the same researcher that like correlated, has the highest correlation competitive performance for MMA fighters. So this test was R0.888. It's very, very high. And very interesting thing, what it is, it's the rate of heart rate recovery after an all-out set with 70% one rep max deadlift. It's hard set. It's brutal. Very, very brutal.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Interestingly enough, the reps with 70% one rep max correlation was not so good. Even the deadlift strength was not so high. But it's that recovery from that was very, very high. So the group that did this anti-glycolytic work never did more than three reps, completely blew the traditional training group out of the water.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And for people outside the sports, it's going to be the same. So find this limited, just limited battery of exercises that you can do well, you can do pain-free, and just enjoy them for years.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Then in addition to that, they were able to bang out a lot more consecutive reps as well. They weren't even in training for that. Then after that, they also saw competitive, better results in competition and so on and so forth. It's a great way to train. Because you're able to, so you take, imagine taking a weight that you can lift maybe 12 to 20 times. And you lift it about three times.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Rest for a minute and do it again and again and again. This is very much like a blue collar worker's day routine. and you're not seeking pump whatsoever, but as a result, you're going to develop that type of endurance that repeats strength endurance that very much is applicable to most combat and team sports, and also for the real life. Whenever you are moving furniture,
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
You're not trying to look, I'm going to try to get a pump. Let's see, get this piano up there and I'll get another one. Then we're going to rest for 20 minutes. Then we're going to start over.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
No, Swedish work on occupational strength, they found that old and crafty and wily workers like loggers and others, they were able to like, they keep their efforts very brief and then they rest for a few seconds and do it over and over and over. So that intermittent nature of rest is very powerful.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And rest active again. Just walk around, shake it off. And do this about 15 times, possibly later. 15 rounds. Up to 15 rounds.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Maybe going deadlift in the Zurcher squat. Yeah, I probably would not do the deadlift. You know, you used really good examples. So this is a protocol that I did for a couple of friends of mine for their high-level BJJ competition. We did exactly that. They did Zurchers. They did pull-ups on towels and, you know, more specific and more grip. And they did the closed-grip bench press.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And the reason it's closed, it doesn't put on quite as much mass, but it, you know, works the triceps really quite nicely. But, yeah. But you can even do it with one exercise. Three reps, rest for a minute, three reps, rest for a minute, and so on. How many times per week is one repeating that? You can repeat this three, four times a week easily, but it depends on what else you do.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Twice a week is enough. Even twice a week is enough, and it fits your strength training regimen. It doesn't take away from your strength day. So pretty much you can treat that as your light day for your strength for the same lifts.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It's going to increase strength somewhat. In Bhavikin's experiments, it definitely did, at least on fighters. But realize fighters typically are not that strong. So up to a point, up to a point, it is going to increase your strength as well. And at the very least, it's going to support your strength. And it's a great way to just perfect your technique, perfect your skill. It's wonderful.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It's very, very meditative. My colleague at Strong First, Brad Jones, he even just... uh wrote a book about it the iron cardio because uh he took a protocol strength aerobics protocol like this russian protocol developed by another one of my colleagues alexis and that another one of our instructors and he just used the whole system and people loving it because uh Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Oh, no doubt about it.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
In the Soviet system, when you're talking about your training session, oftentimes it was referred to as a lesson. When various qualities were developed, like strength, endurance, and so on, Verkhashinsky, for example, often mentioned that like education of qualities. And at Strong First, we talk about a practice, not a workout.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And a great line that was written 100 years ago by Earl Litterman in his Secrets of Strength. And back then, strength athletes understood the importance of not training on the nerve. So they understood. You just train, and then eventually you're going to go for a PR. But the rest of the time, you don't kill yourself.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And when he's describing kind of this early adherent of this high intensity, whatever, and he's referring to him, he says, he has literally worked himself out. And he says that that's something that strength seeker cannot afford. So semantically, when you're trying to work yourself out, that you're trying to exhaust yourself? Or are you trying to practice to excel, to get better at something?
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And that applies to any quality, because endurance very much has a skill component just like strength, because the ability to reuse the elastic properties of the tissues, the ability to relax between the contractions to restore the circulation, the ability to maintain the proper posture and so on and so forth. These are all skills.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
The breathing, breathing skill, huge, extremely important for strength, for endurance, for absolutely anything. And if you're going through this mindlessly, it's, yeah, nobody's going to get very far this way.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
If we're talking about right now people who are just active, people who are not athletes, there are several things they need to keep in mind. One is the timing, relative timing of strength work and endurance work.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
If the strength exercises that you're doing are primarily neural adaptations, which you're targeting, which means lower repetitions, heavier stuff, then it's important to be fresh when you're doing the exercise. It's not really, doesn't matter as much what happens afterwards.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So, which means that you could do some heavy deadlifts, you know, heavy deadlifts, and then a few hours later you can go for a hike. On the other hand, if your lifting is more hypertrophy oriented, it's less important if you're coming tired. It's okay even if you just hiked in the morning and then you went, did your curls.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But afterwards for 36, 48 hours, it's ideally to restrict endurance exercise. So because you're really going to have a massive conflict right there and it's not a good idea to do that. If you're doing our preferred work of, let's say, sets of five reps, five reps, again, they address both endurance and strength. Well, I guess you better keep a window on both ends right there.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
There's always a conflict. Thomas Sowell said there are no solutions. There are only compromises. So you just have to decide which way you want to compromise. But that separation in time really does help. The other thing is spending different times when you focus on one thing versus the other.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So the next two months you're going to spend on hitting your strength hard and you're just going to do two hikes a week just for your health, just to maintain. And then summer rolls around and you put your lifting on the back burner. You lift less, not necessarily lighter, just less. And you spend a lot more time outdoors and do these different things.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Keeping in mind also the duration of training. So the longer your training session is of any kind, the more you are triggering adaptations that are more in favor of endurance. So your cortisol level goes up and there are some other things that do happen that drive you towards endurance as opposed to strength. So even in your strength training, don't make the sessions too long. What's too long?
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
It's really hard to know at this point. In the Soviet weightlifting practice, the top guys would spend two and two and a half hours. They would, for them, that worked, that seemed appropriate. But then again, don't forget at that point they're juicing. And in the pre-steroid areas, those times are shorter.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And this is one of the differences in steroids, by the way, that's in your training when you use steroids or not. As I mentioned earlier, the Soviets established the correlation with the volume of lifting and muscle mass. That's one thing. But they also established correlation between volume of lifting at 80% or higher and strength. And the correlation is very strong, 0.84.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
However, if you're talking about the muscle mass with that lighter stuff, some lifters would just get great results and some lifters would just get more endurance. And they found that guys who are juicing, they can keep doing higher volumes and still keep getting more muscular. But the guys who are clean, they're just not able to do that.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So trial and error, probably like Marty Gallagher says, fill an hour. I think that's a safe guideline, fill an hour.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Well, obviously, we're looking at a zero-sum game. So you only have so much. Your resources are limited. One thing that will absolutely help is fragmentation. It's been proven that dividing up a given workload into smaller chunks allows you, it doesn't matter what it is, whether it's endurance training or strength training or some cognitive work, you're able to do more.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And that's one thing that to consider. The other is obviously the feedback. You know, you have to listen to your body, pretty much. Soviets stressed very much that you have to take the cybernetic approach. You have to have the feedback. No matter what the training plan says, Arkady Varobyev says, you have to listen to that feedback.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And freshness in the Soviet system of strength training, and not just in weightlifting, freshness was paramount. It's even better, let's talk about how track athletes in the Soviet Union train for strength, and that will be even more applicable to a lot of the listeners, because they definitely didn't spend two and a half hours in the gym.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So, Professor Vladimir Dyachkov, he was a head coach, and he was one of the first to implement heavy lifting for the track, right after the Soviets decided, hey, look at these Americans lifting heavy weights, Bruce Randall and Paul Anderson and Canadian Doug Hepburn, So these lifters, he has absolutely, he says, always do low reps.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So they would never do more than three, four reps, even with the lightest weight, even with the warmup weight. They spent a lot of time doing just singles and doubles, and it was absolutely essential that they stayed fresh. And part of it was just how they felt. Part of it is the performance, how well they jumped and so on, how they felt after.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So they found if you're really obsessive about it, you have that tonic effect that lasts at least until the next day. And the tonic effect is both for your strength, for your power, but also for your cognitive functions as well. But it's also very, very interesting that Here's an idea. Do a bench press the next day before you're competing in the jump.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Or do a heavy squat the day before you're competing as a thrower. So it's, again, it's very interesting how the opposite part of the body stimulating that was very, very helpful. Very interesting phenomena. So they found if the strength work is familiar and non-exhaustive, it absolutely facilitates whatever it is that you do afterwards. And...
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
Restricting, this is where the difference, this is where track athletes were very different from a lot of other people. They tried to restrict their volume as much as possible of strength training, in part because, well, they had to do other things and because they had to stay fresh.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
So if you look at the volume, if you look at, generally speaking, how many repetitions that you want to perform per exercise, per training session, And again, these are purely empirical numbers. They come from Soviet weightlifting, but they were also applied in track. So the minimal volume is 10 to 20 repetitions total. So minimal. And optimal is 20 to 30.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
maximal it becomes 30 to 50 in that window. So when you're looking at 20 to 30 reps, maybe on the lower end right there, you're going to build strength. And if you also are going to not go to failure and rest sufficiently between sets, unless you're greasing the groove, you need to look at at least five minutes pretty much. And that's both for neural and biochemical reasons.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
But more is really better. Unfortunately, really, a lot of it just comes down to listening to your body and just using your judgment. I wish I had any better, I wish I had any bad answer here.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
And many great thinkers in the strength world, starting from Lederman back 100 years ago to Soviet weightlifting authorities like, you know, Radionov and Roman. And later on, somebody like even Steve Justa was a very colorful individual, just brilliant, brilliant people.
Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
strength athlete, a farmer from Nebraska who just came up with some fantastic protocols, but he would say that you've got to finish stronger than when you started. I love that. And that theme is very much permeates professional or high-level strength training where this mentality of a workout or try to get smoked or pumped or throw up in the bucket is They would look at you as that's insane.