Pavel Tsatsouline: The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

My guest today is Pavel Tsatsouline. Pavel is considered one of the premier strength training and fitness coaches in the world. He has pioneered various programs to improve strength, which he calls the "mother of all fitness." Indeed, today you will learn about strength as a practice and a skill that can be applied to sports, general fitness, getting leaner, getting faster, and improving endurance.

As Pavel explains, by building strength through bodyweight exercises, free weight exercises, and occasionally machines, one can develop incredible levels of fitness at any age. We discuss some spectacular examples of people in their 70s and 80s performing strength feats, like 100 pull-ups per week. We emphasize that one does not have to seek hypertrophy or larger muscles to become exceptionally strong.

I myself am currently focusing on getting stronger and building endurance for health and general life reasons. Getting really strong turns out to be very beneficial in every aspect of life. Today, you're going to learn how to get extremely strong. You can add muscle if you want, or as Pavel explains, you can pursue strength and flexibility for their own sake, which has tremendous value.

So, today's discussion pertains to women, men, and frankly, people of all ages. I believe that pursuing strength as its own goal, independent of muscle growth, is a tremendously valuable endeavor. Today, you're going to learn how from the world's premier expert on this topic. You're in for a very special episode with Pavel Tsatsouline, who is truly in a class of his own when it comes to fitness and strength training.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. However, it is part of my desire to bring zero-cost consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors.

And now, for my discussion with Pavel Tsatsouline.

Pavel, welcome!

Andrew, it's a pleasure to be on your podcast. I respect your work a lot.

Thank you! Likewise. I will say that you and perhaps one other person have truly changed the way I think about fitness and how I train. I'm super excited to talk to you today.

There are a bunch of different ways to think about this thing we call fitness: strength, endurance, hypertrophy, and there's so much information out there now. How do you conceptualize fitness? Do you look at things through the lens of the nervous system, bone, connective tissue, or muscle? Do you look at things through the lens of anterior chain, posterior chain, hypertrophy, strength? I would just like to get your high-level conceptualization of this thing we call fitness, keeping in mind that most people would like to have some level of endurance, some level of strength, feel healthy, and presumably look however they want to look. But let's set aesthetics aside for the moment. How do you think about this thing we call fitness?

Well, first of all, Andrew, strength is the mother quality of all the other qualities. This is a statement by Professor M. Mat, going way back. Without a foundation of strength, you cannot build anything. Any athletic event requires a base of strength. Of course, a shot putter is going to need much more strength than a triathlete, but they all need strength.

Speaking of which, in triathlon, marathon running, and distance 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—makes them race faster. So once you're stronger, everything becomes easier.

How much stronger you need to get will vary. In the Soviet Union, they had something called the model athlete. They figured out that for every particular event, your odds of succeeding are much higher if you're able to squat this much, bench this much, and jump this high, and so on. This is easy enough to find for your individual sport and talk to various coaches.

For people who are not competitive athletes and just want to enjoy life, you need to think about having a reserve of strength for whatever it is you might do. Look at some PT standards in the military or law enforcement and possibly apply them to yourself. I don't want to impose my set of standards because there are many different ones. I might prefer pull-ups and other exercises, but if we're looking at strength as the foundation for general physical preparation, there’s such a thing as general strength preparation.

That's part of it. There's also special strength, which is sport-specific work. There are different ways of getting this done, but as you and I know, certain exercises have a great carryover outside these particular exercises.

As long as you're mobile and symmetrical—those are the things you have to address first—you need to look into the work of Gray Cook, for example. Then strength has to be your priority. Once you have reached a certain level of strength that's appropriate for your sport or lifestyle, at that point, you can just maintain it and focus on other qualities.

I'll give you an example. Soviet scientists measured a number of athletes in 20 different sports, evaluating various qualities. One was absolute strength, another was rate of force development, which is pretty much power, and the third was the rate of muscular relaxation—how quickly the muscle can relax after contraction, which is very important.

They found that strength grew very little from the intermediate level to the advanced level. There wasn't a lot of improvement, but power increased a little more. However, the speed of relaxation shot up as the athlete became more advanced. So again, strength is the mother of all qualities, but that's not the end-all for everybody.

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 and other qualities, we'll get to them later.

What movements do you believe all people should include in their weekly routine when thinking about how to develop or maintain strength?

I think there should be a very low quantity of exercises—just a few exercises you want to focus on. I'm going to give you some options to choose from.

At StrongFirst, my company and school of strength, we try to provide people with various simple, low-tech, high-concept ways of addressing their needs. For one reason or another, for some individuals, the barbell is the preferred tool; for others, it's the kettlebell or bodyweight exercises.

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. You definitely ought to do something for the posterior chain.

If we are looking at the barbell, I would start out with the narrow sumo deadlift. This is a narrow grip, but your stance is just wide enough to let your arms through. Your arms stay parallel to each other, so you just find a comfortable stance for yourself.

Professor Milos has been on your podcast; he explained to you about different hip architecture and so on. You have to find whatever works for you. When people talk about functional strength training and then they start standing on a ball and juggling oranges, that doesn't make a lot of sense to me because that doesn't look like my life or yours, probably.

But if you have to get a heavy bag of groceries, you need to deadlift. The narrow sumo deadlift is a great example. If you look at powerlifters, a classic example would be Ed Coan. That's a narrow sumo; I'm not talking about wide sumo—that's a very sport-specific event.

You practice that first; you learn how to hip hinge. It's extremely important to learn how to hip hinge. Stuart stresses how important it is for your back health and longevity. You learn to do that, and whether you decide to pursue deadlifting or not, if you decide not to pursue high numbers in the deadlift, maybe it's not appropriate for you.

A fantastic exercise for everybody is the Zercher squat. In the Zercher squat, you hold the bar in the crooks of your elbows, resting right there. It's possible to pick it up off the ground, but it's an advanced skill; it's better just to walk it off the rack.

The advantage of the Zercher squat over, let's say, the back squat or front squat is that even if you have messed-up shoulders, wrists, or elbows, you can still do it. Coaching the Zercher squat is very easy and simple, and you have tremendous reflex stabilization of your midsection. It's just very powerful.

You acquire that skill of getting tight. Getting high numbers on that exercise, let's say an athlete could shoot for double body weight—that's a really good goal.

For those listening, not watching, the bar is cradled in the crooks of the elbows in front of the body. You can hold your arms crossed or in different ways, but you definitely want to get proper coaching. You don't want to bruise yourself; you want to be comfortable and do it right.

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, the bench press has gotten a better reputation thanks to the gym bros.

You know, all gym bros do is bench, pretty much. Well, these days, they also check their phones, I guess, between every set.

If you look at athletes who also do some lower body work, some posterior chain work, and something for the midsection, again, the Zercher squat could address that. They are making great use of the bench press.

It's a very simple exercise—well, not very simple; it's a relatively simple exercise. Unlike other pressing exercises, it allows you to make strength gains with a very low volume of training. You can do several sets of five once a week in the bench press and keep getting stronger.

Good luck doing that with the overhead press or the one-arm push-up or something like that. Those are just a couple of examples. There are many other examples; you can do snatch grip deadlifts. The list is very long.

We can address the same thing with kettlebells or bodyweight exercises, but you need to find several exercises that have a reputation for building strength that reaches beyond the ability to do that exercise. If you just do curls, you're going to get better at curls but not much else.

A Canadian scientist back in the '80s, Duval and his team, made some interesting discoveries. They found that doing something like leg extensions is not going to carry over to the squat. 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 for, and that you have proper coaching for. 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 a narrow grip bench press, squats with a pause, and so on. But you don't really have to do a great variety of things.

Variety is a good topic we can discuss later, but looking at the example of weightlifting, as much as we can find many reasons why variety could be beneficial—improved neuroplasticity, reduced risk of repetitive strain injury, and so on—the statistics in weightlifting show no correlation between the number of exercises and platform results.

For people outside the sport, it's going to be the same. So, find a limited battery of exercises that you can do well, pain-free, and enjoy for years.

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Would a combination across the week of some sort of squat, let's say the Zercher squat, perhaps a kettlebell swing or something else for the posterior chain, pull-ups, and dips be a fairly comprehensive program?

Absolutely! I'm a fan of dips; I like dips a lot. I heard you say that you were using dips for economy of time. I started getting into dips, but I haven't quite figured out the best way to load them. Once you get past 15 or 20 repetitions of the bodyweight dip, it turns into something else.

Sure, absolutely. It turns into aerobic exercise, perhaps. Well, Luke Iams, a powerlifter from the Golden Age of American powerlifting, says anything over six reps is bodybuilding.

I'm trying to stay in the lower rep range today. I'll talk about this with you more because I think a growing number of people, both men and women, who are starting to do weight training or really incorporate strength training into their program are seeking a combination of strength and perhaps endurance as well without putting on too much size—maybe size in some select body parts.

Andrew, I think they need to do possibly several different types of training. But going back to your examples, dips are fantastic if your shoulders can handle them and if you know how to do them. It's a great exercise, but it's not particularly democratic—that's the problem.

So either you can do it safely, or you can't. It's possible to coach some people to do dips. The first prerequisite is to build up to a full skin-the-cat, which means hanging upside down on a bar. You have to be able to get yourself in that position.

If you're able to do that and get out of the position strongly and confidently, there's a good chance you can start doing dips and be coached into that. If you can't, then probably try to build up to that unless there are medical restrictions.

You mentioned the example of pull-ups. Absolutely, pull-ups are one of the best general strength exercises. Again, for your listeners, "general" versus "special" in Soviet terminology just means sport-specific.

The carryover when you start doing pull-ups or excel at pull-ups or dips is going to be far beyond these exercises, which is exactly the reason you do that. So I like your choices very much.

What about specialized training for grip strength? I believe that if someone is large, if they can squat 500 pounds, if they can deadlift 600 pounds, I don't really care if—

The question is, can you open the pickle jar?

Sure, this is critical! I just get my wife to do it.

Grip strength is extremely important, and you being a neuroscientist know the disproportional representation of the motor cortex of your gripping muscles and forearm.

There's another reason why grip is so important. If you make a fist, a very tight fist, you're going to feel the overflow of tension radiating to other muscles. By gripping tighter, you instantly increase your strength in anything you do.

A very simple example for your listeners: take some pedestrian exercise like curls and do as many strict reps as you can the way you normally do them. Then start crushing that bar or dumbbell while you're curling. You will immediately be able to knock out several more reps.

That makes you so much stronger. The value of a strong wrist and grip is obviously very important for whatever reason. It correlates with longevity; we don't know why.

We have no idea if correlation is causation, but it’s worth a try. You can either find exercises that train the grip in the context of developing something else or train the grip directly. Either way is great.

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 grip strength.

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.

Another example would be exercises like the kettlebell snatch. When you start snatching a heavy kettlebell and drop it from overhead, that eccentric loading is very powerful and develops grip very well.

Right now, we're talking more about what people in the grip world call the crushing grip—how you squeeze something. There are other types of grip that they differentiate, but this type of crushing grip is what's going to help most athletes and non-athletes the most.

I also warn you that hanging on the bar and doing farmer's carries, as beneficial as they are for many reasons, are not going to do much for grip strength.

Interesting! I started incorporating farmer's carries thinking it would improve my grip, but they're healthy. If you look at McGill's work, he will tell you that carrying two heavy objects is going to really pound your spine.

On the other hand, a symmetrical carry appears to be very beneficial.

Then there's another interesting example. Right now, I'm not talking about grip training at all; I'm not even talking about strength training. I'm talking about a former run by Dr. Mike Prost, who used to work with the US Marine Corps 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. He has good reasons for why it has to be that way.

You pretty much run with this kettlebell and switch hands as often as you want. It's a fantastic way to improve your running posture, develop stabilizing muscles, and improve your ability to rock.

But it doesn't beat you up as much as traditional running does. Carrying heavy weight is rough on the body, so it's a fantastic way to train your endurance.

How heavy is the kettlebell?

That 30% is important because he says when you start going heavier, it's going to affect your gait. You have to kick your leg over to the side; it becomes something else.

That's a heavy kettlebell—30% of your body weight.

Yeah, I mean, I'm 210 pounds, so it's not trivial. It's probably something like 62 pounds or something like that. A 70-pound kettlebell is not trivial by any means, but it's also not something you jump into immediately.

What's very cool is that because you get to switch hands very often, you're not destroying your QL and other stabilizers that are contracting isometrically.

What we're doing right now is kind of a form of anti-glycolytic training. If the muscle contracts briefly and relaxes, with short contraction cycles, you're able to avoid glycolysis and keep that muscle working aerobically for a long time without beating yourself down.

To the listeners who'd like to try it, start by walking with a kettlebell. Switch hands often, and then eventually build up to running.

You're holding it like a suitcase?

Yes, only like a suitcase.

Okay, yeah. There's a podcast led by a guy named Cam Haynes. He's a bow hunter and one of the people who really brought extreme fitness and ultras to the sport of bow hunting.

For his podcast, he has you carry a 72-pound rock up about 1,000 feet in the wilderness. I've done it; it's hard because of the shape of the thing. You're moving it from shoulder to shoulder, to a football carry, to an infant carry.

You're not talking about that; you're talking about suitcase carry on the right, correct?

Are you trying to crush the grip while you're doing it?

No, you're not. This is not developing grip whatsoever.

And you're running for 10, 20, or 30 minutes?

Well, he says run for a mile; that's the goal. He has some numbers I can give you a link to. You can look up Dr. Mike Prost.

Direct grip strength training is great as well. For example, the best product for that would be the Captains of Crush grippers from IronMind.

IronMind is the company that started serious grip training in the modern era, and their grippers are the gold standard. Some years ago, my colleague Brad Jones and I decided to get serious about it and see what that feels like.

We spent many months, and we were both able to build up to closing the number three gripper from a parallel set. That means that gripper takes 280 pounds to close, and when you're using very small muscle groups, it's extremely hard.

The observations we both made, along with other colleagues, were that once you are able to do that, everything becomes so much easier. However, the training itself is extremely hard because people think that when you're training grip, it's just some kind of isolated thing.

You can drive the car and squeeze this little pink thing you picked up at the department store. No, when you train with a heavy-duty gripper like the one from IronMind, it's a full-body effort.

You need to use pretty much every neurological trick in the book to exert yourself. For example, if you've ever seen the Sunadin stance in kettlebell training, it's a stance where the knees are pulled inward and shoulders are pressed down.

There's a lot of tension; everything's very engaged. The toes are gripping the ground, so you're pretty much gripping the ground with your toes, contracting your glutes, bracing very hard, compressing your viscera, and your lats are firing.

You're sending all this effort; the only thing that's not working is your traps and face. You're directing this effort into your grip. You get just as tired from doing that work as from doing heavy squats or something.

That's remarkable! If you like that, it's a fantastic thing to do.

The motor neuron recruitment that you are describing is phenomenal. I have one reflection on this relationship between grip strength and longevity.

Just a little bit of neuroscience— you may be familiar with this, so forgive me if you are, but for the listeners as well: the motor neurons that control movement of the torso lie closer to the midline on both sides of the spinal cord.

The motor neurons that are responsible for more distal muscles, further from the midline, sit outside of those. As you get out to the movement of the digits, the fingers and toes, those are the most distal from the midline.

The rate and pattern of degeneration of neurons as a function of aging—even if there's no ALS, Alzheimer's, or Parkinson's—is always outside in. We don't know why this is; it may relate to the presence of the enzyme superoxide dismutase.

But it does seem that people who train their peripheral strength can offset some of that outside-to-in or distal-to-midline degeneration. I believe, and this is just a belief, that it's not just correlative.

When one trains their periphery, they can offset some of the degeneration. It's also the way it's mapped in the brain, which is a discussion for another time. We need to get some diagrams up for people to really conceptualize that.

It's also the case that if you look at older people—70s, 80s, 90s—their calves are generally atrophied, even if their torso is still very thick and muscular if they did training.

I feel like training the core and torso is key, but training the peripheral muscles, at least from the perspective of longevity, makes sense why that would be important.

There are so many reasons to do that. I think that whether you choose to do that directly with grippers or as part of another exercise, like climbing the rope, I definitely encourage your listeners to do that.

I'm going to try this running with the kettlebell on one side for a mile.

You can switch hands as much as you want because if you try to do it on one side, you're going to pound your stabilizers. You're not going to recover forever.

This is one of the secrets to developing isometric endurance: rapid switching, short contractions, and brief rests over and over. That way, the muscle doesn't go into ischemia and keeps getting oxygen.

I'd like to talk about concentric versus eccentric portions of a movement. Concentric generally being the lifting phase and eccentric, of course, the lowering phase.

Is there a case for just doing concentric movements? Is there a case for emphasizing the eccentric portion? How does one balance those when thinking about soreness, recovery, and frequency of training?

Well, first of all, the case for concentric-only training is if you're trying to minimize muscle growth and also minimize soreness. For athletes in weight classes or sports where you get punished for carrying extra weight, it's a very good idea.

For example, when Barry Ross coached Allyson Felix, who became the fastest woman in the world, he would have her do deadlifts, and they were concentric-only. The reasoning for that is you're able to get stronger without putting on extra muscle mass.

It's a safe way to train. In programming a protocol for someone who's not necessarily in that boat, it's still a good idea to avoid the eccentric on certain days if you're trying to recover and accelerate recovery.

You lift the weight, but then you step down. You could definitely do 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 about eccentric strength work. Eccentric work for strength is very important because the muscle is strongest when you're lowering the weight.

It's very easy to do something knuckleheaded and get hurt, which gym bros do all the time. Instead of doing that, a much wiser approach is to get a perfect spotter—a great, competent spotter—and put on maybe 5 to 10 pounds over your maximum after you've done your normal couple of low-repetition heavy sets.

Add a perfect eccentric with an intense intention of lifting it. You're lowering the barbell to your chest, loading yourself like you're ready to press it back. You pause on your chest without losing tension, ready to blast it back, and then your spotter takes it off you.

You do this about two or three times. This strategy or a variation of it was used by Rick Weil, who was able to bench press over 500 pounds at a body weight of about 181 back in the '80s. He was one of the greatest bench pressers who was extremely intelligent about his training.

Incidentally, even better—not even better, I should say—you can do this on a different day when you combine this same type of eccentric work with a perfect assisted rep.

Not forced reps like gym bros do, where the guy is shaking and dying. Let's say your best bench press is 315. You load up 325, lower it perfectly, and you're lowering at the speed of your max attempt.

You pause, then press it, and your training partner gives you enough assistance to make it feel like it's about 90%. The fact is, you get to feel a supermax weight, but you're not experiencing any psychological stress.

It's very powerful. You do this maybe for one or two singles. This also ties with Soviet research on gymnasts. They came up with something called an artificial controlling environment.

They compared a group of gymnasts working up to some strength-demanding skill with typical regressions and at the same time working on typical strength training—weighted pull-ups and so on.

The other group had the coach provide perfect assistance to enable the athlete to perform the skill at a high level, as they put it, living their motor future motor future but with enough help not to make it hard but not stressful.

The difference in gains was dramatically faster. I would say that would be a very good way to use eccentric work.

Isometric training can also be very powerful for strength. A great value of isometric training is its ability to coach you to lift properly—not just lift properly, but for other athletic events as well.

If you're trying to learn to throw a front kick and you're all over the place, if you place your foot on a wall and your coach positions your body and foot in a certain way, teaching you to apply pressure to that wall and the ground at the same time, you can adjust your body.

Then you relax, shake off your muscles, and go hit the bag. Suddenly, you're going to do so much better.

The same thing applies if you're trying to optimize your position for the bottom of the deadlift. You load up more weight than you could possibly lift, wedge yourself under, and start applying pressure.

It doesn't feel good, so you change a little bit. Isometrics are very powerful for not just strengthening the sticking points but also for optimizing angles.

We're also dealing with something that has a great disinhibition effect. What your listeners might not know is that you have two pedals in your nervous system: excitation and inhibition.

Pardon me for telling you this; you don't need to know all this, but there's excitation and inhibition—the gas pedal and the brake pedal. There are various influences, some psychological but not all, that take away from your strength.

That's called inhibition. Under certain circumstances, there are documented cases, like a lady lifting the front of a 1,000-pound car to save her son. There are documented cases of that.

That disinhibition takes place. Isometrics do have some disinhibition effects. It's very powerful. Isometrics teach you not to give up on a heavy attempt.

If you put inexperienced people on a machine moving at a slow rate, when it starts approaching zero, inhibition takes place. The subject thinks the gig is up; they’re not going anywhere.

They give up because they failed. Training with isometrics allows you to develop this kind of neural drive endurance that you need to grind through a heavier attempt safely.

Very, very powerful.

How would you incorporate isometrics into training?

You can do this as part of your warm-up. You can also do pause reps; they're fantastic. This is when you combine eccentric, concentric, and isometric contractions all in one.

For example, for the squat, you lower to parallel, stay tight, and hold for 3 to 5 seconds, then explode upward. That's a great way to train.

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I'd like to talk about neural drive. I attribute you with popularizing, maybe you invented it, but certainly popularizing the term "greasing the groove" in one of your books.

By the way, we provide links to Pavel's books in the show notes. I'm a collector of your books, and I love them. Some of them are becoming collector's items; they're a little harder to find. You'll have to compete with me on eBay, but some can be found elsewhere, and we'll provide links to those.

This notion of greasing the groove completely changed my conceptualization of strength training. I was more or less trying to run cross country during the cross country season. I only ran it once, but I greatly enjoyed it.

I continued that sort of training while trying to put on strength and size—kind of a numbskull young male approach to things. But it served me reasonably well. I'm grateful that I included both.

However, I was so tuned to this notion of training a body part, creating an adaptation, then waiting for the adaptation to occur, and then training the body part again.

The arguments are all over the Internet: two times a week, three times a week. Then I came across this concept of greasing the groove, which, as a neuroscientist, felt intuitively correct.

It turns out to be correct. You'll explain what it is, but the idea that more frequent training or practicing of a movement opens up a tremendous number of opportunities for the development of strength, size, hypertrophy if one wants, and generally more flexibility over one's total fitness program.

Once one understands this concept, you no longer look at this split or that split or this many reps or that many reps or this volume or that volume.

That is important, but you can start to think about it through the lens of the nervous system. To me, it was like water in a desert to finally encounter something that brought together all these different concepts.

Could you please explain for people what greasing the groove is? I think the implications of it will become obvious, but we'll also spell out the details.

Please interrupt me because this might get really long.

First, I'll talk about the neural component, then we'll talk about frequency and the morphological adaptations, structural adaptations as they lead.

Ladies and gentlemen, greasing the groove—we're talking about, let's use an analogy. Imagine that you are a bow hunter, and you work in your garage. Then you walk out of your garage, shoot an arrow, and go back to working in your garage.

Or let's say you're a kid who practices martial arts. Every break between classes, you go in the corner and practice your kata. This is the best way to practice your skill in small portions in a spaced-out manner.

What's really fascinating is traditional education and traditional strength training are based on the cramming model. Remember cramming for an exam? You're studying at night, and you somehow squeak by and pass.

Okay, great, and then a couple of days later, you happily forget everything. In contrast, imagine that you're studying a foreign language. You write words on cards, and at every opportunity, you're standing in line at the bank.

While lesser mortals are fooling around on their phones, you're going through your deck like, "Oh, can I translate this word?" You put it back in the deck, flip it over, and the next time you're in some other place, you do this again.

This is an example of spaced practice versus traditional mass practice. The evidence of the superiority of spaced practice is overwhelming. It goes back to the 19th century, and there are more than a thousand papers published on that.

Still, very few people do that, which is really sad. Strength is a skill.

Two interesting things happened in the '50s. One is Thomas DeLorme, an American exercise physiologist, proposed that strength adaptation was largely skill. He looked at the adaptations and noticed that there was no correlation between muscle growth and strength.

At the same time, a Soviet scientist named Tanov was measuring the electrical activity in the muscles of weightlifters who were pressing overhead. Back then, the press was one of the competition events.

What he found was that as the athletes got stronger after some months, the EMGs started dropping off when they were lifting the same weights. He found that the nervous system activity became more economical. They were able to try less hard yet still lift the same weights.

Hypertrophy could not explain that because in the '50s, the Soviets were very anti-hypertrophy. They were just doing doubles, triples, and singles.

If we look at what's going on, it's the heian mechanisms. Every time you activate a particular synaptic connection between the neurons, that connection becomes stronger. If you do it over and over, the groove becomes greased.

The command coming in from your brain to your muscles—that's the groove, that pathway. The more you use it, the more grease it becomes. It becomes a superconductor.

In the future, you don't have to try as hard to lift the same amount of weight, or you can try the same amount and lift it harder. We haven't even addressed the neural drive yet; we just made the motor neurons more responsive.

It's a very easy and simple way to train, and strength comes very easily and unexpectedly. To make sure that it does happen, you have to address the issue of specificity.

Specificity means that to get stronger, you need to lift weights that are heavy enough. If you're looking at percentages of one-rep max, we're looking at about 75% to 85%.

If you go too light, you don't make an impression on your nervous system, and it's just not specific enough. If you go too heavy, you're going to burn yourself out quickly.

So, pretty much, it's a weight that's heavy enough to respect and light enough not to fear.

Surprisingly, you only do about half or fewer reps than you could possibly do. For example, let's say you're lifting 80% of your one-rep max, and you're able to do eight reps maximum with it.

You're only going to do about three to four reps per set, and at this point, the gym bros go crazy: "Where's the intensity?"

Well, intensity in strength training is just how heavy the weight is; it has nothing to do with the effort. It's been proven over and over that that's much more important than how hard you're exerting yourself.

There are times for that, but if the weight is heavy enough and you have the repetitions you can possibly do, you're going to get stronger. It's very safe, and you're not going to burn out psychologically.

It's also very easy on your body, and that builds muscle as well. The Soviets found out that there's a correlation between volume and hypertrophy. Everything else being equal, you're going to get bigger.

So almost every day, you're doing sets of three, four, or five, and they start adding up. Before you know it, you're stronger, and at the same time, you've developed muscle.

To summarize greasing the groove, you're trying to train moderately heavy as often as possible while staying as fresh as possible.

If you decide to do it in the gym, a very simple protocol would be a set every 10 minutes. It sounds bizarre—like, why would you rest for so long?

This apparently has to do with initial memory consolidation. There's so much still unknown, but we do know that the groove works great. We speculate that some of it has to do with phenomena related to learning in other fields.

If you're doing something over and over, like saying "2 plus 2 is 4," you're just using your short-term memory. You're not memorizing anything.

But if you say "2 plus 2 is 4," go get a coffee, come back, and try "2 plus 2 is 4," there's that desirable difficulty you have in there. You have to process that instead of just going through the groove.

That apparently helps with adaptation. So rest for at least 10 minutes, do sets of about half the repetitions you can possibly do, and listen to your body.

Typically, train two to three days in a row, then take a day off. But listen to your body. Incidentally, this greasing the groove is the topic of my next book.

I have completed it; it's not published yet. If you look at the Hungarian professor's work, he talks about the perfect challenge lying in that channel between boredom and anxiety.

If you put yourself in that channel and keep lifting moderately heavy weights with moderate effort over and over, you're going to get strong. That's one of the many ways to get stronger.

Are you doing anything in the rest periods between these 10 minutes?

So, let's say you're doing bench press. Wait 10 minutes until you bench press again, but in the meantime, you're doing Zercher squats five minutes after the first bench press.

That's one way to do it. You can do up to three exercises at the same time. Let's say Zercher squat and bench press, and maybe a third thing, but I say those two are enough.

Another option is to incorporate this into your lifestyle or athletic practice. For example, in a track practice or martial arts class, every 10 minutes on the clock, you just have the class do three hard one-arm push-ups and then get back to the class.

There's no interference whatsoever; in fact, it's better than no interference. Back in the '60s, Soviets found out something called the strength after effect.

If you do strength work that's not exhausting and not novel to you, it has a tonic effect for anything you can do with your brain or body.

Some coaches would do a strength warm-up, let the athletes do their usual track class, then do three sets of three with 80% max, which is not much.

If the coach noticed that the athletes were starting to droop a little, he would repeat that. He might repeat that up to three times.

By having this short, very small dose—like a nano practice of strength—you rejuvenate yourself, and your productivity increases so much.

Whether you want to do strength exercises or combine that with writing a great American novel, that's your business, I suppose.

If someone has access to the appropriate equipment at home, you could incorporate greasing the groove into your entire day.

That's ideal, yes. Obviously, it's difficult with some equipment, but you could use heavy-duty grippers, do one-arm push-ups, or keep a kettlebell under your desk and press it at every opportunity.

The idea is really just practice. You just try to hit it perfectly. Notice that if you have some issues—if you're a warm-up-dependent person for orthopedic issues, I'm talking about warm-up in the body, not the mind in this case—then it might not be appropriate for you.

Although, with 10-minute rest, it might still be okay. Practicing a skill without the warm-up means rehearsal is very powerful for improving that skill.

People think they automatically equate performance with improvement and learning, but it's not so. When you're doing something out of the blue, it's like a sniper taking a cold shot.

That's so much harder because you have to produce that solution. Or maybe an example that's closer to most viewers: you go to the driving range, start hitting, and think, "Wow, you're amazing!"

You get yourself fine-tuned, hit perfectly, then go play the game and cannot replicate that because suddenly, different club, different topography—everything's different, and you didn't have the luxury of tuning yourself up right there.

It feels like you're not stronger, but you are going to get much stronger.

I've been eager to share with you some recent findings that are not my own but that I think you might be curious about, and I think most people hopefully will be curious about as well.

It's not greasing the groove specifically, but it provides at least a partial mechanistic understanding of how particular types of physical movement, with high motor neuron and attentional engagement, can generate high levels of alertness.

There’s a guy at the University of Pittsburgh named Peter Strick who, for the first time, started to map the connections between the adrenals and the brain. He was able to do this using some really cool technology.

The basic takeaway is the following: adrenaline released from the adrenals, as some listeners may know, doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier. But it turns out it binds to receptors on the vagus nerve, which then stimulates noradrenaline in the brain and provides this increase in alertness.

So then the question is, how do you get your adrenals engaged? We can sit here and do a staring competition, which I'll lose for certain, but there are all sorts of psychological tools.

We can use caffeine, etc. There are all sorts of ways to cold water, but it turns out what Peter found was that there are particular locations in the motor cortex that send a two-synapse connection directly to the adrenals.

The areas of the motor cortex that engage the adrenals cause them to release adrenaline. Just by sheer movement of particular muscle groups, like bracing the core, causes the release of adrenaline, which then, via the vagus nerve, causes the brainstem area to release noradrenaline.

This wakes up the whole brain, essentially increasing learning and performance in anything. The stronger and stronger activation of the motor neurons, deliberate activation of the motor neurons, seems to engage adrenaline release.

To me, this was a wonderful way of trying to persuade people that they have internal control over this thing we call motivation. Movement itself can increase adrenaline, which can increase the tendency to want to move.

As long as, again, you don't want to have too much adrenaline either.

I'd like to talk about that, but I think I and so many other people were kind of raised and conditioned, at least in this country, to think, "Oh, if I want to increase my level of motivation, I need to watch an inspiring video."

That could be great, or I can drink caffeine or an energy drink, and certainly that will do it. But to me, the discovery that particular movements and particular muscles being engaged in activity itself changes the neurochemical milieu—of course, it had to be, right?

It's a big "duh," but I think that—anyway, I was excited to share with you these data. I didn't discover them; that is new to me.

I read "The Naked Warrior" when it was closed. It's a wonderful book because it talks about bodyweight-only exercises and this concept of, for instance, trying to crush one's fist on the other side and how that will increase your gripping ability on the other side.

As you know with your background in neuroscience, there are so many neurological phenomena. If we can think of muscle software that we have access to, if we become conscious about accessing that, we can be so much stronger.

When you talk about doing a set of three or four repetitions at about 85% or 80% of one-rep max, waiting 10 minutes, and then in the intervening 10 minutes going and trying to learn something important—whether physical or cognitive—this makes perfect sense to me because of the relationship of adrenaline.

But also the way that your entire nervous system has changed in the intervening period. Plus, you have the contextual interference.

One of the greasing the groove concepts is not something I invented; it's something I was able to codify and explain and possibly refine. But it's been around since the day of Ecclesiastes.

Specifically in strength training, Paul Anderson, one of the greatest weightlifters of all time, was a big favorite of the Soviet public—a very tough group to impress. They called him the "Wonder of Nature" because he was so strong.

Paul Anderson would do a set of squats, then wander around, drink some milk, and half an hour later do a set of presses. He invented many of the training concepts that are cutting-edge today.

This concept of contextual interference—remember I talked earlier about how if it's harder for you to produce a solution, if you're trying harder to remember "2 plus 2 is 4" or how to throw the ball, then you're going to learn more as opposed to if somebody just hands it to you.

Paul Anderson had both the spacing time and the contextual interference. He did another exercise that erased whatever previous groove was there.

It's fascinating how looking at some of these old-timers shows how genius they were.

I don't want to disparage common gym programs these days, but I do feel like the way that most people train—

Yeah, you'll do that.

The way that most people train, thinking, "Okay, I'm going to hit the gym three or four times a week," or "I'm going to train chest one day and chest and biceps," while that has some value, I feel like there is an incredible treasure trove of other things that you're sharing with us today that are just not discussed as much because people don't take the lens of the nervous system component.

One thing that I'd love to ask about the nervous system in terms of training adaptation and recovery is that I was weaned somewhat under the thought patterns of Mike Mentzer. This was in the Dorian Yates era, and I knew Mike a little bit.

I paid for a consult with him over the phone; we never met in person. That had my mother asking, "Why is this grown man calling our home, and why are you wiring money?"

But it was so worthwhile because Mike taught me that the goal of training was to induce an adaptation. Anything additional was not necessary, and in his case, he felt it was counterproductive—very infrequent training, etc.

It worked tremendously well to take me from 150 pounds to 210 pounds, which I had no need to do, but my body just reacted like crazy.

But then again, I was 16, 17, and 18 years old at that time, so I probably could have done any number of different things and experienced similar results—who knows?

The concept, of course, is that you train to induce an adaptation, then you rest, and then you allow the adaptation to serve you in moving higher poundages in good form, this sort of thing.

The problem, however, is that training of any kind—running, lifting, etc.—taxes both the nervous system as a whole and the muscles locally and the connective tissue.

How should we think about training and recovery?

When you describe greasing the groove, I could imagine if I had a home setup or was going to the gym, I could maybe do four or five rounds of this training, but at some point, it becomes counterproductive.

Wow, a lot of great questions! I'm just trying to think about how to schedule this sort of thing, keeping in mind that the nervous system fatigues as a whole, and then there's also the issue of local muscle fatigue or even the propensity for injury if you just overdo it.

Sure, yeah. If we could just riff on this, if you don't mind, Andrew, I'll break it up because there are a lot of great questions right there.

One, as you mentioned, there are different ways of training. The greasing the groove load parameters, apart from the long rests, are very much based on the Soviet weightlifting system.

I'd like to talk a little bit about that later. Another system that is completely and radically different ties very much to Mike Mentzer's training for reasons that will become obvious.

When people argue about training methods, what they need to understand is that there are many ways to get the job done. Research in Estonia found that there are so many different combinations of stimuli and different adaptations that result.

You can arrive at similar outcomes in many different ways. To say this is right and this is wrong—you cannot. Sometimes, I can say most things are wrong, but I can also say there are multiple right ways of training, and they can be radically different.

They're different because they rely on very different phenomena. In this particular case, you're talking about recovery and frequency, which is a great way to address it.

I'm going to talk about two systems that are completely different and yet have the same pedigree. They have brought so many gold medals.

One system is the Soviet weightlifting system, where athletes would train several times a day. The Bulgarian system is a more extreme example of that.

On the other extreme would be the American powerlifting system exemplified by Marty Gallagher, Ed Coan, and Kirk Karasi. Starting from the '70s through the '90s, those were glorious years for American powerlifting.

In that system, they would do one or two heavy sets per lift once a week. It's kind of a little bit like Mike Mentzer's work, but not quite. We'll address why.

How can that be, and how can both systems work? You address recovery. There's a concept called heterochronicity, which means different systems in the body recover at different rates.

If you don't take that into account, you're going to have some serious problems. The Soviet system took this into account. They looked at frequent practice, which is exactly what we do.

We don't want to beat the muscles up so much that they take a long time to recover. You avoid too much eccentric stress and acidosis.

They were able to adjust the loads in such a way that your weights are heavy but not too heavy. The reps don't go too high, so you're able to recover pretty much overnight.

The benefit of that is it's been shown that if you fragment a given workload over more days and sessions, you get better results. Your body, nervous system, endocrine system, and everything can handle much more if it's split into smaller doses.

Let's use an example of a meal. If you're trying to win an eating competition, how much can you eat in 24 hours? It's not like those Coney Island hot dog competitions where you eat one sitting.

You would probably eat a lot more if you spread it throughout the day. This is the same idea. It's like that parable from Nim Talb about the king who got angry at his son and said he was going to crush him with a big rock.

He realized, "What did I do? I don't want to kill this kid." But the king's word is the king's word, right? He ordered his peons to break up the rock into pebbles and dump them on the kid.

That's the same idea. Fragmenting the load allows you to do more and do it safer.

Something else is related to that. In some training systems, some training systems rely on adaptations that go in the muscle beyond just the contractile proteins that create force.

For example, the Soviet system tried to increase the storage of creatine phosphate, which is the immediate fuel for muscle contractions for this type of work—lifting heavy weights over and over.

By training sometimes easier, you're able to keep stimulating that creatine phosphate adaptation without beating up the muscles.

This kind of dance is fairly complex. On the other hand, the American system did something completely different.

The explanations for what happens in the muscle within this American system are not fully understood, but there's a hypothesis by Russian specialist Vassiliev that seems quite credible.

Here's the system: you train hard, do one hard set once a week or two hard sets. The satellite cells, which are immature cells in the muscle, are 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, scientists have tried to figure out what sort of stimuli are required. 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 specific. If you beat up the muscle with a baseball bat, you're just going to get a lot of scar tissue. Some satellite cells will die, and others will become scar tissue.

If the cross-bridges in the muscle tear in a very specific way, it seems to do the job. The way the muscle contracts is like rowing a boat on the water.

Water is one protein called actin, and myosin is the ore that moves in there. The ore dips into the water, hooks, and pulls. That ore relies on available energy in the muscle.

These ATP molecules of stored energy are floating around, and the myosin head needs that ATP to produce force, but it also needs ATP to unhook.

In this in-between stage, it's called rigor. Whenever the muscle has produced force but there's not enough energy for it to relax, the muscle is stuck in rigor.

If you tear a dead body's muscle, it's going to tear. This supposedly happens only when you're able to consume ATP at a high rate in the muscle, but the supply is not there.

If you do that in the first 20 to 30 seconds before acidosis sets in, that's what should happen. If you wait longer, when there's a lot of acid in the muscle, it kills that reaction that uses ATP.

You're not using as much anymore; the demand is down, and the supply is down, but it's on demand, so it's not so good.

If you erase that fatigue point, if you try to deplete that creatine phosphate—kind of the rocket fuel of the muscle—within about 20 to 30 seconds, then presumably some of these hooks are going to get stuck.

When the muscle lengthens, 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.

Whether this is true or not, I do not know, but it's a pretty good theory that explains Mike Mentzer's method and the American powerlifting method.

Interestingly about Mike Mentzer, and again for the listeners who are not aware of the method, that means training muscle really hard, very infrequently, with very low volume.

Professor Yevgeny Kolesnikov, before he died, was known in the West mostly as the father of what is called "periodization."

But he also did many other things as well. He spoke very highly about Mentzer. He thought Mentzer was brilliant; he was an innovator.

But many people—some people get good results from it, like you did, and a lot of people do not. Pretty much, what Prasena suggested 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 and interaction between the Soviet and American strength schools is absolutely fascinating. Soviet track athletes in the '50s were using the typical high-rep, high-rep reps to burn.

In the late '50s, some very sharp young specialists, Vitaly Chervonenkis, made a case at a conference: "What are we doing? Let's look at what Paul Anderson, Doug Hepburn, and Bruce Randall are doing. They're lifting heavy stuff for sets of three to five reps. Let's knock this down."

Soviet track athletes started doing that right there. This is how the Soviets learned from Americans.

That's an example of how it went the other way. The classic periodization, as it's known in the West, is not used by lifters in the Soviet Union. Lifters thought that was just completely inappropriate for their needs.

Professor Arad, an Olympic champion, made a very strong case for why. But Americans, who got some limited information about it, were able to develop a training system based on that premise.

Something that the Soviets didn't do. The way it worked is like this: you don't necessarily have very high volume, but you start—I'm going to give you the most classic example of this type of cycling.

Again, this is Cassidy Gallagher, Coan, and Kwasi. Four-week blocks—let's say there are three or four-week blocks, maybe four.

You do lifts once a week. On week four, you go for a PR. Let's say this is a month of fives. On your week four, you're going to do a PR set of five. You plan for it.

Week three is somewhere around your old PR. Week two is lighter, and week one is lighter still. After that, you may increase the weight, but the relative effort is going to drop.

You can repeat the process. It does multiple things on the muscular level. What Paras explained is that you pretty much decondition yourself temporarily.

You progressively increase that creatine phosphate use. Initially, when you decondition, 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.

There's a concept in periodization called reactivity versus resistance. Reactivity means how responsive your body is to the stimulus, and resistance refers to how much it can handle.

When you're starting light after a layoff, your reactivity is high, and your resistance is low. It doesn't take much, so boom! Suddenly, you build muscle.

Then you can build up, and when you reach a peak, you just step back again. On the side of the nervous system and endocrine system, much later Soviet research said you can train hard for a maximum of two weeks out of four.

More than that, you cannot handle. For every month, you're training two weeks hard; the other ones are cruising—not as hard, sometimes easy.

There are different ways of programming it. The typical one you hear about in the West is that you build things up for three weeks and then down in four.

It's one of about 16 different possible arrangements. It doesn't have to be that way. Here's one brilliant way: Franco Columbu, who passed away unfortunately, was not just a great bodybuilder; he was a great chiropractor and a great strength athlete—super strong.

He told me about one of his deadlift cycles: week one moderate, week two heavy, week three moderate, week four very heavy. Again, this is a different way of arranging the same concept.

These American powerlifters were able to build a system that built muscle probably exactly in this manner. What was happening at the same time?

Oh yeah, and there's also another angle. Any type of exercise you do makes your muscles more slow-twitch. It's just the way it is; it's very bizarre.

Even explosive work—if you do explosive work, even just trying to crush the bar and drive the deadlift up, even that—the more you do it.

Goldspink's research back in the '80s showed that any cycle of stretching or contraction resets the heavy chain myosin, the contractile proteins that make it towards slower types.

If you do a 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.

Very counterintuitive!

So that's like a default setting for the fibers. However, if you take time off, something changes, and it changes beyond the change.

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 fibers.

Then they took a couple of months off, and they experienced what they called an MHC overshoot—myosin heavy chain overshoot. They had something like 70% more fast fibers after that.

Nobody takes two to three months off these days, but they figured out that it's not needed for athletes because obviously, you get deconditioned in other ways.

You're constantly playing whack-a-mole. This is getting out of shape, but this is not recovered yet. It's a game of training programming.

In the American system, first of all, the infrequent training reduces the stimulus for the conversion of the fibers towards slower types.

Secondly, the taper they did later—suddenly switching from five to like one triple, one double for a few weeks—if you do that for just a few weeks, you're not going to lose muscle mass.

It really takes over a month, but there's enough time for the myosin to configure itself to a faster type. That's probably what happens.

Interestingly, neurologically, I think what happens is they exerted themselves very strongly once or twice a month.

So again, you know, neural drive probably with strength and disinhibition and other things like that. The irony is that the system has lost its popularity.

Some records in deadlifting, like Dan Austin's record and possibly NAA's record back in the '90s and '80s—oh yeah, Lamar Gant is the strongest deadlifter pound-for-pound in history.

He did 683 at about 132 or something like that, and it was done back in the '80s. There were some great lifters who trained this way, but then the system lost its popularity for reasons that 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 doesn't allow for much practice, and that's a problem.

Unless you're training under a very high-level coach or you're already coming in with great skills, it's really good.

If you need any kind of level of endurance or if you're playing another sport, you're going to be very sore from this type of training.

So it's a great system for a certain type of people.

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on our energy levels, and post-exercise, many people experience a dip in energy that can affect their focus and productivity.

This phenomenon, often referred to as post-exercise caloric depletion, suggests that after intense workouts, the body may require a significant amount of energy to recover, which can lead to feelings of fatigue or lethargy.

To mitigate this, it's essential to refuel properly after workouts. Consuming a balanced meal or snack that includes protein, healthy fats, and carbohydrates can help replenish energy stores and support recovery.

Additionally, hydration plays a crucial role in recovery. Dehydration can exacerbate feelings of fatigue, so ensuring adequate fluid intake before, during, and after exercise is vital.

Incorporating rest and recovery days into your training schedule is also important. These days allow the body to repair and rebuild, which can enhance overall performance and prevent burnout.

Listening to your body is key. If you notice consistent fatigue after workouts, it may be worth evaluating your training intensity, duration, and recovery strategies.

In summary, while exercise is beneficial for energy levels and overall health, it's crucial to pay attention to post-exercise recovery to maintain focus and productivity throughout the day.

on epinephrine, norepinephrine, and acetylcholine release in the brain, and of course, muscle contractions. Acetylcholine is the dominant transmitter from nerve to muscle communication.

But this idea that if we exercise too intensely, or even if we just do cognitive work that's very intense for a period of time, there's this post-exercise cholinergic depletion. Then we get what people typically call brain fog, although that's not a real medical term.

From a practical standpoint, a lot of people who would like to train more for strength, train more often for strength, or do strength and endurance work, the challenge sometimes isn't just scheduling it; it's that we feel depleted and tired afterward.

Have you observed this? Is there a way to use strength training or other forms of training to improve cognitive function? Because, as you pointed out, these are compromises, not solutions. But I do see a world in which one could use their physical training to give them, for lack of a better word, a boost into the day.

So you're getting stronger, developing your health, and you're also able to lean into your day with more focus and attention. That would be the ultimate scenario.

Well, there's obviously a zero-sum game here; 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 to do more, whether it's endurance training, strength training, or some cognitive work.

That's one thing to consider. The other is feedback; you have to listen to your body. The Soviets stressed very much that you have to take a cybernetic approach. You have to have feedback. No matter what the training plan says, you have to listen to that feedback.

Freshness in the Soviet system of strength training, and not just in weightlifting, was paramount. Let's talk about how track athletes in the Soviet Union trained for strength. This would be even more applicable to a lot of the listeners because they definitely didn't spend two and a half hours in the gym.

Professor Vladimirov was the head coach and one of the first to implement heavy lifting for track athletes. Right after the Soviets decided, "Hey, look at these Americans lifting heavy," like Bruce Randall, Paul Anderson, and Canadian Doug Hepburn, he always said to do low reps.

They would never do more than three or four reps, even with the lightest weight, even with a warm-up weight. They spent a lot of time doing just singles and doubles. It was absolutely essential that they stayed fresh. Part of it was just how they felt, part of it was performance, how well they jumped, and how they felt afterward.

They found that if you're really obsessive about it, you have that tonic effect that lasts at least until the next day. The tonic effect is both for your strength and power, but also for your cognitive functions as well.

It's also very interesting that here's an idea: do a bench press the day before you're competing in a jump, or do a heavy squat the day before you're competing as a thrower. It's very interesting how stimulating the opposite part of the body was very helpful.

They found that if the strength work is familiar and non-exhaustive, it absolutely facilitates whatever you do afterward. This is where track athletes were very different from a lot of other people; they tried to restrict their volume of strength training as much as possible.

In part because they had to do other things and because they had to stay fresh. If you look at the volume, generally speaking, how many repetitions you want to perform per exercise per training session, these are purely empirical numbers. They come from Soviet weightlifting but were also applied in track.

The minimal volume is 10 to 20 repetitions total, the optimal is 20 to 30, and the maximum becomes 30 to 50 in that window. So when you're looking at 20 to 30 reps, maybe on the lower end, you're going to build strength.

If you're also not going to failure and resting sufficiently between sets—unless you're greasing the groove—you need to look at at least five minutes. That's for both neural and biochemical reasons. More is really better.

Unfortunately, a lot of it just comes down to listening to your body and using your judgment. I wish I had a better answer here.

I think it's a terrific answer. I like to leave the gym with some gas in the tank because, well, I get paid to think and to speak, not to lift. Many great thinkers in the strength world, starting from Lederer back a hundred years ago to Soviet weightlifting authorities like Ronov and Roman, and later on, someone like Steve Justa, a brilliant strength athlete, would say that you've got to finish stronger than when you started.

I love that, and that theme permeates professional or high-level strength training. This mentality of a workout being about trying to get smoked, pumped, or throwing up in a bucket would be seen as insane.

One of the reasons the Soviets restricted the number of reps in the squat is that if you do sets of 10 in the squat, you're definitely going to put on some muscle mass, no question about it. But one of the reasons they restricted that is that very few people did sets of 10, except for heavyweights who had a hard time bulking.

Even more, it's like, "Okay, that's too much cardiorespiratory stress." Even though Soviet weightlifters did some general physical training, like cross-country running or playing soccer, they weren't trying to get their cardio in on the lifting platform. That made no sense whatsoever.

So restricting the reps will go a long way. Increasing the rest periods to at least five minutes would go a long way, and restricting the number of exercises is important. People don't realize that you're using different muscle groups but still using the same brain.

All that really adds up. I would say during one training practice, maybe two, maybe three exercises max lifts. There's nothing wrong with doing just one. If you want to do your curls and calves later, that's fine. You can tack it on at the end or do it totally separately. Those things don't really zap you.

You can just come in on a separate day and enjoy your calf burn.

There seems to be an over-reliance nowadays on pre-workout stimulants. I'm a big consumer of caffeine in the form of yerba mate and coffee. I'm old school that way.

You still drink coffee every day?

Yes, I do.

But only twice?

In moderation.

These days, there's a lot of emphasis on just trying to get absolutely wired and geared up for training. I think that, in part, contributes to why people feel this post-exercise fatigue. They hit the gym hard after a pre-workout, then do their post-workout shake and a bunch of carbohydrates to replenish their glycogen.

Then, of course, two hours later, they want to take a nap. It's amazing anyone could study or do anything at that point. I think that's very different from the kind of training you're describing.

I'd love your thoughts on stimulants generally and how they can support or hinder performance. I'm also curious about what's lost in that model in terms of learning how to cycle one's energy up and down.

You've mentioned several times the ability to relax the muscles and the nervous system in between sets, maybe even in between reps, who knows, but usually between sets.

Yeah, so maybe we can talk about stimulants. Before we started today, we were discussing when stimulants can actually hinder performance and when they can help. Then maybe we can talk about this cycling of tension and relaxation because I look at physical training as a venue for exploring nervous system function and control over the nervous system generally that one can apply elsewhere.

That's the kind of theme I'll roll out onto the table.

First of all, I'll preface it by saying that stimulants and any kind of pharmacy are out of my wheelhouse. What I'm about to say is purely reflective knowledge. With your neurobiology background, you can tell the listeners so much more than I could possibly do.

Top athletes, when they compete, after a competition—I'm talking about power strength sports like powerlifting or weightlifting—for the next two weeks, they're just gone. They're completely flat.

There are two adaptations that take place in proper strength training. On one hand, it's a much more economical function of the adrenal glands. On the other hand, it's a much higher capacity as well.

These are the guys and gals who can crank it up really high when they want to, but they're also able to keep it down when they don't have to. They know that for the next two weeks after a competition or after some idiotic gym max, they might take a week; they're going to be flat. They're going to be completely gone.

You really have to spare your adrenaline. The lifters who take heavy lifts in the gym typically stay at the training max, not the competition max.

So what's the training max? It's the heaviest weight that you can possibly lift without getting too excited about it. Back in the '50s, Luchkin, one of the fathers of Soviet weightlifting, came up with a great tactic to find that weight. If your heart rate goes up before the set, that's too heavy.

You have to monitor yourself unless you're in competition, of course. That's a different game. I will defer to others about how much one should or could take stimulants before training or lifting.

Generally speaking, you have to do it in moderation, and especially save it for the times when you really need it. In the American powerlifting system, during weeks three and four, that's a good time to do it. During weeks one and two, when the weights are lighter, let your adrenals recover, and you don't need to push yourself as hard anyway.

That's just one example of 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.

It is something about lifestyle choices that you need to address. If you always feel exhausted after training, you're missing out on life. 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 destroy yourself on a daily basis with a lot of sets to failure or metcons or whatever it is, well, it's your choice.

If you want to destroy your life like that, but again, if you look at your adrenal profile, your sympathetic dominance, how you're just feeling, it's going to be really awful.

The other angle to this is, as we talked earlier, in learning and skill training, skill practice is learning. Current performance is not indicative of learning. 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.

You just need to come in, put in your practice, and walk away. Then when it's time to go heavier, that's when you do that.

I don't want to discourage you from drinking coffee. In fact, if you drink a stimulant, coffee should be the only thing. The rest of this stuff, I don't know.

Yeah, coffee, tea.

Then figure out what is that moderate amount. Figure out how to use it when you truly need it, as opposed to relying on it all the time.

Would you mind, before we go to the next question, if I share with you a result that I just wanted to plant in your brain? I've been excited to tell you about this because it's new results from the field of neuroscience that I don't think anyone's discussed anywhere, but I think you might find interesting for the sake of discussion here and looking forward.

I didn't do this study; I wish I had. The study, very briefly, is interested in the neural basis of choking—not choking someone out or anything else related to choking—but when one feels that the stakes are really high and suddenly their ability falls away, what is that?

What they did is they developed this game where essentially the potential payoff in this game, while recording from neurons in the brain, is either low, medium, or very high, or the occasional jackpot, like you could just win the whole thing, and the payoff is very considerable.

Then they looked at the amount of upper motor neuron recruitment, essentially the areas of the brain that drive coordinated muscular behavior or action. What they found is that it basically scales with the level of reward.

You get more neuronal engagement as the reward scales up. However, every time the jackpot was offered, it over-engaged too many motor neurons. This notion of choking, when the stakes are really high, is like hyperarousal that you cannot control.

It's like a spillover of too much excitement, but it's not adrenaline in this case, although that's probably associated with it. You think, "Oh great, I'm going to get an award. I'm going to get bigger or even bigger."

Then, oh my goodness, this could change everything, and all of a sudden, performance just tanks. It turns out it's a brain thing at the level of over-recruitment, which just speaks to this idea of being able to maintain arousal within a certain range.

It's an essential skill for any performer. I just wanted to share that; it's a fun set of results.

All I learn something, and I have to share it with somebody who I think might care. So if ever people wonder about why people choke, it is a hyperarousal at the level of the brain, not apparently so much the body.

Well, being able to control arousal is such a key skill for an athlete. Part of that, obviously, should be directed as sports psychology, and there are some fantastic techniques.

For example, Dr. Jud Boto, who is an author and published a book with StrongFirst, squatted 602 at a body weight of 132 back in the '80s. He was in his 40s after serious back injury surgery. He was a sports psychologist and discusses various skills.

It's fascinating; his control of excitation and 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, get himself into a frenzy, lift the weight, and then go back to sleep nine times a day throughout the day.

Now that's mastery of excitation and inhibition—your on switch and off switch. Part of that is sports psychology; there are tools in sports psychology for that.

Part of it is training; whatever you do in the gym, some of your habits and practices, like for example, David Rigert, one of the greatest weightlifters of all time—some people would say the greatest weightlifter of all time—when he was discovered by Rud Plukfelder, his coach, who was another Olympic champion and world champion, one of the things the coach was impressed with was that Rigert would do his set, and then after his set, he would just go completely limp like a rag.

He was very impressed with that. Later in Rigert's career, when he was a world champion already in the United States, there's an American coach who writes about how he saw him in Columbus, Ohio, or Cleveland, Ohio, competing back in the '70s.

He was lying and smoking a cigarette, then he gets up, snatches 60 kilos, like 135 pounds or something, then he just picks up something else equally trivial, and then he goes and does his first attempts and ends up with a superior performance.

At a different time, Rigert bet Box of Kanyak that he would snatch 90% of his max, which was probably around 370 or something. He was able to snatch 90% of that with no warm-up whatsoever.

This is the ability of that incredible control. 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. The Russians did some numbers on powerlifters and found that the top powerlifters spent time cooling down, while the guys who were not so good did not.

Not only does it allow you to bring your excitation down and get your parasympathetic system to start recovering, but you do some easy stretching, meditating, or breathing exercises—whatever you do.

But even after each set, you put up that heavy deadlift or squat, and you just immediately come down, then walk around and chill. You just try to tune your switch.

Breathing exercises come in handy for that. There are breathing exercises to increase your excitation, and there are breathing exercises that can put you in a very deep inhibition state.

Some of them are hypercapnic, some are hypoxic, which means you try to increase carbon dioxide or decrease oxygen. There are some very sophisticated yet really quite simple techniques that can help you do that.

I love this concept of just learning to push on the accelerator, push on the brake, and to play with disinhibition. You're the first person to come on this podcast, even among the neuroscientists I've spoken with, to talk about disinhibition. Thank you for bringing that up.

The history of that is a beautiful concept and an important one for how we function. The original research was done in the '60s by E.A. and Steinhouse, I believe in 1961. Later on, that was a big part of the training method of Dr. Fred Hatfield.

Fred Hatfield is a legend in the iron game; he was one of the first to squat 1,000 pounds in competition. He was just a fantastic lifter and a brilliant scientist. He tried to direct a lot of the training towards this inhibition.

He even developed special techniques that are largely forgotten, ironically. But yes, disinhibition is huge. It's also one of the things about disinhibition to avoid failing because never failing a lift is part of disinhibition.

Like we talked about Ed Coan, another one of the powerlifting greats, who competed over several decades and set over 70 world records in several weight classes. He only missed a couple of lifts in competition and never missed a training lift whatsoever.

He was always calm and composed—an amazing lifter, an amazing guy. What's very likely happened is that his inhibitory pathways just shriveled and got pruned and died.

What people don't realize is that greasing the groove—that's the proper term for long-term potentiation—is like when you're getting better at something. That transmission gets stronger; it's like your nerves become superconductors.

But there's also its evil twin, long-term depression. What happens is now you're trying as hard, but your muscles are not jumping in response anymore.

One of the ways to get this long-term depression is by failing. Whenever you're attempting something and it doesn't happen, that's a way that pathway starts firing weaker, and the inhibitory pathways become stronger.

It becomes even worse if you're emotional about it. You said quite a few things about adrenaline, but adrenaline does promote neuroplasticity, but not always in a good way.

If you look at PTSD treatments, you'll find that if a person re-experiences a bad event, it gets into a feedback loop. That positive feedback doesn't mean good; it just means it keeps increasing.

Every time there's a spike of adrenaline, it reinforces the memory. If you missed the attempt and got really upset about it, and you remember it again, you're making yourself weaker and weaker.

This reminds me of a fascinating way that the ancients used to record events before writing. Let's say there's a wedding between VIP families. They bring a young kid, a seven-year-old, and make the kid watch the whole thing.

After the festivities, they throw the kid into the river. The kid crawls out of the river, not knowing to expect it. When the kid climbs out, 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. That really did increase neuroplasticity, so part of disinhibition is not promoting inhibition; it's just not failing.

Fred Hatfield had a beautiful line: "Success begets success; failure begets failure. Train to success, not to failure."

Do you recommend actually avoiding training to muscular failure?

Absolutely. There is really no reason for that. If you're doing that with single-joint bodybuilding exercises like curls, it probably doesn't matter. If you're doing it for bodybuilding, I still don't see the point.

Every rep closer to failure is going to exponentially increase your recovery time, so you're not going to get quite as much. Yeah, you might get more muscle gain from that particular last rep, but your recovery is going to be increased so much.

Also, as you start training to failure, you're converting more of your fibers toward slower types. On the other hand, if you don't train to failure, you don't.

There's an interesting Spanish study that found that when athletes train to failure, some of the type 2X fast fibers convert to 2A, so they become 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. On the other hand, the athletes that trained with half the maximum possible repetitions did not experience that decline.

This goes back several decades to when Arad Vario, an Olympic champion and scientist, head coach, and incredible person, said there is a big difference between six sets of three and three sets of six.

You think 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.

That's fundamental. Pushing to failure also affects the control of your technique. Towards the last reps, there's no control left.

Imagine that you always have that perfect technique, so you grease that pathway. That becomes a reflex. Early on, Soviet sports scientists viewed strength adaptation as just the development of conditional reflexes, kind of like Pavlov with the drooling dogs.

Then you go into competition, 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 way. Any other way, the neurons are trained to complete the execution of the movement exactly and in a very specific way.

Because there's no plan B for top athletes, they don't have a plan B. Watch a top lifter fail an attempt; he or she is going to shake with that bar, shake, shake, shake, and finally, it's going to come down.

It's not like the butt's going to shoot up or something ugly is going to happen.

Going back to that point you made earlier about the quality of practice, quality is absolutely paramount. 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. Even hiking is a practice; you're trying to stay tall, you're trying to breathe in a particular manner.

All practice. The crossovers between physical training and mental pursuits are astonishing to me.

As we're talking about this, avoiding going to failure, I'm in the process of writing my first book. I know you've written several books, and I'm finding it to be very different from anything else I've ever done.

The experienced writers tell me that you should end on a sentence where you kind of know what the next sentence could be, perhaps to seed the unconscious mind for the next day.

But you don't want to run right up into a wall and then bang your head against that wall, metaphorically speaking, because it places a kind of frustration into your nervous system that you arrive at the page with the next day.

I guess the opposite could be argued too, but it fits very well with what we're talking about here. Because of the early Mike Mentzer training, or the influence, I should say, I've tended to train to failure purposefully and used to do forced reps and drop sets and all that stuff.

As the years have gone by, I've started only incorporating a few sets to failure, and my volume has increased somewhat. I'm training heavier at lower repetitions, and my progress, as I get toward my fifth decade, just continues.

So I just decided, as you were saying in the last couple of sentences, that for the rest of the year, I'm going to not train to failure because I really want to experience what it's like to do that for a long period of time, as opposed to just reducing the number of sets that I take to failure.

I'm also very stringent about form and always have been. I do want to ask, what are your thoughts on, unless somebody's training for isometric or eccentric specific training, full range of motion—not just for the sake of building strength—but can using a full range of motion also improve flexibility without some dedicated flexibility training?

And I'd like to use this as a segue to talk about flexibility training.

Yes, it can. Sarcomeres can grow in length as well. The contractile part of the muscle can grow lengthwise as well.

It's something that needs to be done carefully and cautiously, of course, and not with heavy weights. Eventually, it's possible for a person to perform flexibility feats with heavier weights if it's desirable, but initially, something lighter is better.

So yes, absolutely, you can. It's one of the easiest ways to promote flexibility. Flexibility also has a very neural component as well.

You're looking at what's happening in the joints, of course, but you're also looking at the length of the tissues too. A lot of it is also the ability to reset the regulation of muscle lengths and tension.

For example, the ability to do a split is part of it. If your hip joints are built for that sort of thing, a lot of it is really in your mind because you're experiencing defensive inhibition.

You're just afraid you're going to get torn in half. This brings us to a very interesting parallel.

As we kept talking about quality, we also talked about that flow channel by Professor Csikszentmihalyi. Thank you.

Between boredom and anxiety, when you're trying to do a split, for example, you see somebody trying to get into that stretch. That person goes, "Oh," sitting there and panicking and being in total pain. Nothing good is going to happen; you're pretty much just facilitating these pain pathways, and you're just learning to hate this exercise.

A smarter individual would get to the edge of pain and then stay there for a while, owning it until the spindle is reset. You know, accept the new range of motion, add some contraction-relaxation, contraction-relaxation, isometric stretching, and progress even further.

In any type of training, forcing the adaptation is just not going to work, whether it's flexibility, strength, or endurance. There's time for a very high level of effort, but there's never time for ripping yourself in half.

There's never time for hurting yourself on purpose. So yes, do long-range motion work to increase range of motion for the upper body.

I'm obviously very partial to kettlebells, but one of the many benefits of kettlebell training is the way it's designed. When you press it from overhead, that offset center of gravity helps to pull your arm back.

You're improving shoulder flexion, improving thoracic extension. It's so much easier to place yourself in a good position and then just stay there.

It's very important to stay open, to keep that useful posture and good shoulder function. With squats, you can definitely do that, just very progressively.

One warning about squats: if you're going for a parallel squat, like it is in powerlifting, parallel is defined as the top of the knee being a little higher than the crease on the hip.

Not a right angle at the knee, correct?

It's parallel; the top of the thigh should be parallel to the floor, or deeper.

When you do go for that depth or somewhere in that ballpark, you can go wide in the stance. You can progressively increase the width of distance.

If you do it for flexibility, there have been people who have done squats in almost a horse stance style and progressively developed a great level of flexibility.

It's possible to do that, but you are doing that; you're going wider but not necessarily deeper. It's okay to go wider, but your femur should not be dipping too much.

If you're trying to go rock bottom in a wide stance, your hip architecture is not designed for that.

Tom Platz is famous for squatting very deep; he used a narrow stance.

He was a shorter guy, but he was also squatting in a pretty narrow stance. In this particular case, you're not experiencing hip limitations.

It's okay for you, but imagine if you try to go wider and then try to go deeper. It's just not a good idea; you could end up on the floor—literally on the floor.

If you want to develop flexibility for this type of rock-bottom squat and you're not there yet, initially, even without resistance, assume your normal squat stance.

I'm talking about a narrower stance, shoulder-width or somewhere there, and approach the wall. Face the wall, put your arms out, and start squatting.

You will find the wall is going to teach you. The feedback from the wall is important; if you start doing something funny with your spine, you're going to hit your head on the wall and fall back.

It provides terrific feedback. This is something I learned originally from a Shikune practitioner. Quite a number of skills in my system are picked up from martial arts, but we applied the StrongFirst method to teach people that upright squat and develop the mobility for a deep squat.

It's foolproof; it's like Greg Cook would call this a self-correcting exercise. Those are really the best when the coach can walk away, and the student is still going to be able to do it.

I love your book "Relax into Stretch." I think it's a really important concept, this idea that the nervous system and our mental state are preventing or inhibiting a good amount of our natural flexibility.

We can work with the mental state and progressive relaxation and contraction of muscles and related tissues.

Absolutely, it can. I have a great success story. One of my senior instructors at StrongFirst, Steve Freides, met him a couple of decades ago. He had a severe back injury, so he spent eight months in bed.

He was not athletic; he had done some jogging or things like that in the past. He decided to get serious about getting strong. He healed up until he was healthy, started lifting kettlebells, and then started powerlifting.

He started doing proper stretching like this. Now, Steve, in his late 60s, holds a bunch of American Masters records in the deadlift, even though his back was totally messed up.

He lifts without a belt; you can break your fist on his abs. I like having people punch him.

Would you please punch Steve? Just don't hurt yourself. He also worked out to suspend his splits. At that point, he was probably in his 50s when he did that, maybe 60s.

He even competed in these crazy all-around meets where there's one lift where you hang between two chairs, then you pick up a dumbbell from the ground. You can find the footage somewhere on the internet.

Here's a man who did not take his injury lying down. Once he was cleared to train, he decided to approach his training with the attitude of a musician because he's a music professor.

In my experience, people who become very successful in strength, musicians, and martial artists are among those who can succeed because they're used to practicing for many hours.

They're used to paying attention to small details and doing whatever others consider boring over and over.

So again, here is this 67-year-old man with abs you can break your hands on, deadlift records, and full splits. That's what a human mind is capable of.

I love this concept of practice, or of practice—not of a practice, but instead of training. I always thought training is such a better word than working out, and it probably is.

But I think practice is such a better verb than training. It's also good, of course, but practice puts you in the right frame of mind.

You imagine the word "workout." Like Lederer said, he literally worked himself out.

As long as you're highlighting remarkable instances of people in the second half of their life, let's say, getting quite strong and developing impressive skills.

Before we started recording today, you were relaying to us that your father has acquired some significant strength. Could you just share some of his abilities to inspire both the people in the second half of their life and to motivate or intimidate the younger ones and get them going?

Because they really have no excuse.

I'm very proud of my parents; they're both 87 years old. My father has always been an athlete. At the age of 71, I brought him to a powerlifting meet.

I see him in the warm-up area picking up 225 pounds with bad form. I said, "Dad, what are you doing?" He got interested so fast forward a few years, and by the time he was 75, he had several American records in several weight classes.

He deadlifted in the low 400s without a belt at a body weight of 198. In fact, back at that point, when Professor Stuart McGill, who is a very good friend of mine, came to watch my dad, I think he pulled like 385 for a triple before competition at Gold's Gym Venice.

Stuart examined his back and said he had the muscularity in the back of a 40-year-old. I thought that was pretty cool.

He's not deadlifting right now because an old injury caught up to him. He fell off a track vehicle—imagine a tank without a gun, a military tractor vehicle on ice in the winter—about 40 years ago, and there are some things that caught up to him.

He cannot deadlift right now, but he still does over 50 pull-ups in total at least twice a week. He also does over 100 perfect bodyweight squats, powerlifting style squats, and push-ups.

He just stays on top of that and maintains very good strength and muscularity. The approach to building muscle for him is that same volume with medium reps and medium effort.

It always works because it builds strength, builds muscle, and it's very safe and enjoyable. My mother used to be a professional ballerina, and she started training when she was six.

Because she had to train all day, she hates exercise, but she still does it because she must. She came up with a great anti-glycolytic training protocol for herself.

This is something she invented; I had nothing to do with it, but it totally goes with Vassily's work. She climbs stairs in a high-rise.

She will climb stairs from one floor to the next, walk the hallway, come back, and then go to the next floor. That's the same idea that Vassily had: intensify the intensity of contraction and then give a little time to not let the acid pile up.

You keep that effort creating phosphate-powered and aerobic-powered. She does that for 17 floors or whatever a few times a week, plus other things.

I'm very fortunate and proud of my parents. My father-in-law, Roger, is a great example and a great greaser groove success story.

He is a retired firefighter and Marine. At the age of 64, he always lifted, which was unusual for his generation. He started when he was 15 and never stopped.

But he couldn't quite do 20 pull-ups when he was a Marine. At the age of 64, he got on the Grease the Groove protocol.

At that point, his max was 10 reps. I said, "Roger, every time you go by the pull-up bar, hit five." When they became really easy, he could add a rep.

A few months later, he finally worked up to nine daily reps and tested that he could do 20 pull-ups. At 64, he finally aced the US Marine Corps pull-up PT test, something he couldn't do as a young Jarhead.

Seeing these older folks who are not taking their age lying down and taking their training very seriously is just very admirable. You see much younger people start complaining.

Some 30-year-old comes in and says, "I'm aging; I'm getting older. What should I do?" It's like, "What's wrong with you, son?"

I completely agree; these are inspiring stories—truly inspiring. People of all ages should pay attention.

It's not done in one leap; there's a progressive nature to it. I think not training to failure just resurfaces in my mind now as we have this discussion.

The idea isn't to grind; it's to just grease the groove, get in there, and do it.

That's right. Practice. Actually, I'm going to change my language around this. I realize that when I call it a practice as a noun, it's not as effective as practice as a verb.

I'm going to practice, not just for me. This is just my own internal thing; you know my neuroses insist that I share this.

But I do think semantics are important, as you pointed out before, because it has a lot to do with how we feel about ourselves and what we think we're capable of.

It starts with being inspired to try something. I didn't grow up in a particularly athletic family. None of us are unathletic, but I didn't think I could be reasonably strong or have decent endurance.

I wouldn't consider myself an athlete by any stretch, but my consistency—if I bite down into something—there's a good chance I'm going to do it for the next 30 years.

Well, in consistency, my friend Jim Wright, who passed, used to say consistency over intensity. That's absolutely true.

If you're doing things correctly with proper form, if you do it over and over, you will win over the long term. This also brings me to an interesting point you made about long-term athletic development.

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.

Later, by the way, the Russian powerlifting team uses exactly the same training methodology derived from that, which means you train many times a week—let's say squat four or five days a week—and you're doing a lot of reps with moderate effort.

You do this for years, achieve a high level, and then at some point, you switch to this American powerlifting system because your skills are already fully honed.

You fully adapted to the type of stimulus that that first system brings, and you switch to this once-a-week cycling method. It would be very interesting to see what would happen and how far one could go.

So folks in your 20s and 30s, get going on it now, and we'll have a podcast in a couple of decades to check back.

Send us a note or put it in the comments. I'd love to talk about bodyweight training. I love, love, love the book "The Naked Warrior."

Thank you! I got that book initially because in the early days of starting my laboratory, I was traveling a ton, and I didn't always have access to gyms.

I wanted to try and grease the groove when I arrived in my room in the middle of the night in Germany or whatever. I still have not succeeded in doing pistol squats on both legs.

One is I have some dominance and weakness, as it were. But I, without any natural strength ability to speak of, was able to learn one-arm push-ups and one-arm pull-ups.

I'm not there now; I have to return to that level of upper body strength. It's remarkable what one can do with bodyweight training, and you describe some really beautiful progressions in the book.

I highly recommend this book, folks. Maybe we could just take the push-up as an example, and a handstand push-up as the extreme of that, right?

What I love so much about that book is that doing a push-up against the wall is trivially easy for most people, while doing a handstand push-up free-standing is very difficult.

But there's a series of progressions in between that maybe you could describe to us. Once you realize that you can work through this over time, and if you're not in a rush to get through it, and you just do these a few times a week or more, you could do a handstand push-up free-standing or a pistol squat or a one-arm push-up or a one-arm pull-up.

It's not outside one's reach at all.

Absolutely, yeah. So could you fill in some of the gaps? Getting people to think about the physics of this and the principles behind it is such a valuable system, and one that is a lot of fun too.

Before talking about the system, Andrew, may I speak about the relative benefits of different types of resistance?

Please.

Okay, yeah. So bodyweight resistance—I'm going to talk about bodyweight, kettlebells, and barbells. Obviously, there are other things as well, but it's going to take too long.

Bodyweight training has the great advantage of accessibility. You can do a push-up absolutely anywhere, so that's a huge selling point.

For some people, someone who travels all the time and is in places where gyms are not available, that's a great asset. Some people just simply enjoy it greatly, and that's just fine.

The downside of bodyweight training is that it's a lot harder to learn these skills than it is to learn many kettlebell skills or even some barbell skills.

It seems very innocent and easy, but it may take time to really get some of this. The beautiful thing about the barbell is, first of all, the satisfaction of lifting really heavy stuff.

Some people find it extremely satisfying; if you don't, maybe it's not for you. But if you do, it's incredible. Then there's the ability to adjust the weights in small increments.

You can prescribe 87.5% of one rep max, and you can do that. You cannot do that with bodyweight. In fact, with bodyweight, it's very hard to calibrate resistance; that's another one of the problems.

You do need to have some skills to figure out the regressions and progressions of how to do that. The other great benefit of the barbell is that some of the lifts, especially the three power lifts, allow you to make great gains in strength.

If you choose muscle mass with a very low volume, 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.

We can speculate on the reasons for that; we know some reasons, and we don't know others, but it is what it is. The beauty of the kettlebell for strength specifically is that it's very easy to teach the body language of strength with the kettlebell.

You would think that with bodyweight, it should be easier because a lot of the skills I teach in my book "The Naked Warrior" are either gymnastics or martial arts-based.

It's like, "Okay, here's the hollow position from gymnastics," or "Here's this little trick from hardstyle martial arts." Both use bodyweight. Nevertheless, it takes a lot more processing to figure out how to do this right from scratch, 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 Zerchers; your abdominal wall is going to light up.

You suddenly learn, "Oh, this is what it means to get tight." Or you stick your elbows inside the knees and do a goblet squat. "Oh, this is what the proper squat feels like."

It's very easy to integrate your whole body into one lift. There is an apparent disadvantage of the kettlebell, which can also be an advantage.

You can't program 87.5% of bodyweight, I mean one rep max, because kettlebells jump in large increments. For example, from 53 to 70 pounds, that's a big jump.

These days, some companies will manufacture kettlebells with small jumps, but what's the point? You're defeating some of the reasons for this particular piece of equipment.

Here's what they are: one is simplicity; you only need a couple of bells to do a lot of things. But the other is that when you suddenly, let's say 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, it'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. 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—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.

As you're doing your sets of five with a 53-pounder, you're also doing cleans with a 70-pounder. You're starting to see what it feels like.

You're doing get-ups with it; you're starting to see how that weight feels. Again, we're talking about disinhibition here. You're planning and owning this weight.

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.

Plus, you're also having that desirable difficulty in skill learning. There is that concept by Robert Bjork about desirable difficulties for learning.

If learning is very easy, something is presented, you don't learn much. If you have to struggle, like even if you're reading something and the font is illegible, ironically, you end up learning better.

That's an example of a desirable difficulty as you're progressing this way.

So that is for strength. Obviously, kettlebells have their benefits for endurance and other things as well, but just for adjusting the resistance, oftentimes it's just a matter of preference and accessibility.

I'm not going to say you pick this tool, you pick that tool, you pick the other tool. But if you decide to pick bodyweight, my recommendation would be just be ready and 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; you watch the sunin in some styles of karate, and you'll see that amazing linking of the different parts of the body into one chain, how the tension is used.

It's very rewarding, but I would say that's probably the most attention-demanding, even though it seems so innocent and simple and safe.

But it demands a lot of attention. If that's your speed and if you enjoy true practice, that's a great way to go.

I haven't explored kettlebell training so much. Whenever I've tried the standard kettlebell swing, just kind of—if there is such a thing—but you know, between the legs, two-handed kettlebell swing, I tended to get some right-side lower back pain, medial glute thing.

I'm sure I'm not doing it correctly, and I've wanted to learn kettlebells properly. You have an online kettlebell course?

Yes, we do have several resources. We have the book "Kettlebell Simple and Sinister," which is available on Amazon. We have an online course under the same name.

We also have live instructors that you can find locally at our website, StrongFirst. 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, some people who have problems with shear might have issues. But a great number of people, the majority, can do swings very successfully.

We have seen some really 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 arms.

For that, we have very specific progressions. You cannot move beyond this until you do this.

Okay, here you are doing this particular hip hinge drill with no weight. Okay, good, you got that down. Now you're going to do a kettlebell deadlift, which is just a sumo deadlift with a light kettlebell.

Then you're going to progress with a very particular type of swing. 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? Again, the snatch is more of a less democratic exercise.

Like the dips, parallel bar dips are fantastic for those who can do that, but if you can't, that's too bad. There are alternatives.

The snatch is great; if you cannot do the snatch, you can do the swing. The swing allows you to train power and power endurance in an extremely safe manner.

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.

Besides, for some athletes, it's not appropriate. Racking the bar and overstretching the wrist ligaments, like for fighters, that's a kiss of death.

That's a really bad idea to stabilize the wrist in this manner. For many athletes, other athletes too, a pitcher doesn't want to do that, a baseball pitcher.

Then you try to do things like sprinting. A sprinter requires a lot of coaching, proper coaching, much more than a kettlebell swing.

It's very easy to rip a hamstring or something like that. The kettlebell swing allows you to train power and power endurance in a very safe manner.

What's also very unique about it is that you don't have to use a lot of weight. What's unique about the kettlebell and kettlebell swing is that you can swing it back between your legs, but you don't have to let it passively swing between your legs.

You can choose to accelerate it. This is called over-speed eccentric. Some years back, our colleague, one of our instructors, Brandon Heiler, put me and several of our colleagues on the force plate.

We started doing swings with over-speed eccentric, which means accelerating downwards and upwards. We were using just a 53-pound bell.

The most experienced guys were able to generate over 10 Gs of acceleration. Basically, we made that 50-pound bell weigh 500 pounds.

For 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 safely.

You can apply tremendous amounts of load, of course, you don't start with that. It's not how you start your swings.

You can develop power endurance, so you can do a whole lot of different sets. Many sets—you've had Megan Kelly, our certified instructor out of the UK—she set a Guinness World Record for a crazy number of swings done in an hour.

Her training is she would go and do swings, do a few reps, pick it up, set it down, and she would do it for, let's say, 90 minutes. She would do it with a heavy kettlebell, and the adaptations are fantastic from that.

In the kettlebell world, we refer to the "What the Hell Effect."

What's the "What the Hell Effect"? The "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. Suddenly, you're able to do something, and the improvements in fat loss, improvements in resilience—speaking of resilience, 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.

You have this amazing way to do eccentric loading for the hamstring, but it's very safe and just really prepares you.

One of my friends, he's still playing baseball in his 60s. He says, "Thank you for the kettlebells." He went through the course in federal agencies 20 years ago, and he's still doing that.

That's a great benefit—the amount of pure workload that you can do. That's why you can burn a lot of calories, develop cardio, whatever.

But also, why would anybody want to do power training who's not a power athlete? For so many reasons right now, I don't need to speak about it.

Your other guests have spoken about the reasons for longevity and how important it is to have high levels of power. The kettlebell swing is one of the ways to develop it.

Interestingly enough, going back, like you know these acceleration patterns, Professor Yakov, Nikolai Yakovlev, a Soviet biochemist, was just talking about sprints during added sprints.

When you were adding sprints just to a jog, this kind of fartlek work, he was saying how important it is for the elderly and for teenagers.

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.

Again, you have one tool that can train all the qualities. You can develop mobility; the bent press is a tremendous exercise.

The bent press requires the mobility of the T-spine and the mobility of the shoulder. Watch Dr. Pope Mosley, one of our instructors.

He's also a doctor and a researcher. The gentleman is 70 years old, and he's doing these beautiful bent presses, getting himself in the range of motion that young guys on phones can possibly get into, and he's doing it in a healthy manner.

You can develop mobility, strength, endurance, and resilience in one package. 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.

In the overall lifelong journey, if you're looking at three things right now, your newest strength, what should I start with? I would say start with the kettlebell.

It's the best entry point. 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've got that bodyweight language of strength down.

I'm going to have a few questions in the upcoming months about kettlebells. I'll try not to bother you too many times, but I'll use the course as a guide.

I'm determined to derive some of these benefits from kettlebells because they've been around me for over a decade now, and I just haven't quite taken to them—not through some aversion, but I'm going to approach it correctly.

I love the bodyweight work. I don't know, maybe it takes me back to PE class when I was in high school or something when we did these fit tests.

It usually involved some pull-ups, some push-ups, a reach, and a run or something like that—a straight-legged toe reach. Who knows if it's a meaningful metric?

In any case, there's something so satisfying about going from struggling with push-ups to being able to do a one-arm push-up or something like that.

You describe it in how to make that progression in the book.

For people, let me just interrupt you. It's also cool that you're a bigger guy and you're doing that. This is what I love to see.

We're seeing that at StrongFirst a lot. We'll have to see bigger guys and gals getting into bodyweight exercises because that's not typical of their strength.

We like to see skinny people getting into the barbell and just go against it. For example, seeing somebody like Dr. Mike Hartle, one of our master instructors, a former American bench press record holder and coach for the Powerlifting Team USA—watching him do one push-up, you've got to love that stuff.

Normally, big guys hate bodyweight work; it's humbling. Little guys hate the barbell, and we just get it. Not just guys, but women too.

We have these ladies, these skinny little ladies lifting amazing weights. That's just always awesome to see.

It is awesome, and I love that strength training, resistance training, is starting to really make a showing here in the US.

I think it's one of the best things to happen in the last few years, and this discussion, your knowledge, is going to put even more momentum behind it.

If I may 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. Follow it for a long time. Do not try to over-customize everything.

Daniel Kahneman spoke about how much algorithms outperform humans so often. I've seen this over and over—how a properly designed strength program or endurance program that was generically designed but with certain feedback loops in there, "Okay, if this happens, you have to go back and make some changes," delivers much better results than customized programs very often.

So find something that's simple, find something that does not have a lot of moving parts, and just stick with it for a long time. If it's working, do not look for the next thing.

The next thing may be as good, maybe not, but also keep in mind that every time you change gears, you lose momentum.

You're a neuroscientist; I don't know if you've spoken to your audience about the law of neural Darwinism, but there's a competition between the synaptic sites.

You can only do so many things well. A child can do everything, but poorly. As we get older, some of these pathways get pruned, but others get reinforced.

Unfortunately, we can't excel at everything. There's this classic example with taxi drivers. Back in the days before GPS, taxi cab drivers were supposed to pass an extremely challenging test on how to navigate through a city that was not designed to be navigated through.

They found that a certain part of their hippocampus was more developed than in others. They thought, "Well, maybe it's just pre-selection."

Maybe whoever made it through the test were the guys with more muscular hippocampi. Then they monitored two groups of students over several years.

They started with the same size, and in the group that passed, their brains, so to say, got bigger in that part. The others didn't.

But then at the same time, in a different test of memory, the guys who passed the test were not so good. They lost something in the process.

It's just life. Many things in life are zero-sum games. You want to seek some balance up to a point, but there comes a point where you cannot do it all.

We are limited in time; we're limited in our adaptive capacity.

Amen to that, and I appreciate you highlighting the London cab drivers experiment. Your knowledge of neuroscience is truly impressive.

You're way too kind.

No, it's true. No other guest on here has discussed long-term depression, which is—my dad said something early on that is good things happen at the junctions of fields.

If you always stay exactly in your own narrow field and just repeat the same thing, but when you start going somewhere else, a little bit outside, adjacent—whether it's neuroscience or martial arts skills, how do martial artists do for striking?

Sometimes you see patterns. That's what happens.

Your father's a smart man.

Thank you.

Kids and young people training—I don't know what the going word is now as to whether or not there's a too young to resistance train age.

Some people say there isn't. When I was growing up, it was thought that if you squatted heavy or deadlifted heavy before you reached your natural limits of height, it could, quote-unquote, stunt your growth.

What are your comments on that?

Based on what we were just talking about, it seems that if a young person is interested in developing a super skill in one area, one sport, okay, but there's a real trade-off to that.

Perhaps what we should do as kids is a little bit of soccer, a little bit of swimming, a little bit of gymnastics.

Seems like a wonderful all-around sport. Maybe a little archery, you know, try a bunch of things—some ballet, you know, try.

That's the time to do that. That's explosiveness, neurodiversity, and the things that you can possibly do.

Then find the things that you click with. 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.

There may be a bias towards strength or a bias towards endurance, but they really need to do it all. Specialist athletes break; they really do.

That balance between general and specific is a tough balance.

Psychologically, sometimes too. We had a guest on here who has become a psychologist, but she was a concert-level violin player.

Then she injured her finger, and it was like the most devastating thing. When we put all of our identity into one thing, sure, you get your Michael Jordans and your Tiger Woodses, and that's great.

But there's no right answer or wrong answer. I remember Ivan Abadov, who was the head coach for the Bulgarian weightlifting team, said if Paganini played whatever instrument, you know, in addition to his own instrument, playing 15 hours a day, he would not have become Paganini.

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. You're looking at a budget: do I want to buy a couch, or do I want to go on a vacation to Italy?

Or do I want to go on a much lamer vacation and buy a lamer couch and do both? I'm not saying what's the right answer there, but 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 an endurance sport.

They can't study everything to a high level just as well. If you want to be a polymath, that was fine in the 18th century. Right now, it's a little bit tougher.

A previous guest, you may know him, Josh Waitzkin, of chess PRG fame, has gone on to do several things at a world-class level by severing from the previous endeavor completely.

He hasn't picked up a chess piece since he was 16, which is remarkable. Pivoting to other things, when one looks at the data on child prodigies, very few of them are like Josh.

Most of them don't actually succeed in doing anything else at a very high level, except hopefully survive and thrive in their personal life. Who knows?

After being ultra-successful as a young child, probably because their nervous system is so—greased the groove so heavily for one endeavor, it's very hard to cross over.

Josh is exceptional in that regard.

Well, exceptions prove the rule, usually.

Exactly. Not to be too mechanical and specific, but I'd love to talk about abdominal, or rather core work.

Sure.

Another thing that I love in "The Naked Warrior" are the abdominal exercises. I must tell you, after years of doing some crunches here and there in different classes or trying to—I never really cared about having my abs defined for its own sake.

One should probably be able to at least contract their abs.

Okay, it's the level of—we assess them by punching them, right?

Right, exactly.

But there are some wonderful exercises in there about learning to brace the entire body and some, dare I say, rather unorthodox ways of assessing stability at the level of the core.

I'm thinking about the plank, where somebody tries to either kick you over or push you over. This might sound violent; this is not where you start, folks—kind of gentle.

But I never thought I could do hanging pikes, for instance. Now, pikes are a standard part of my weekly routine.

I love doing five sets of five of hanging pikes. I will tell anyone that decides to go down this path that when I first tried to do a pike, I failed miserably.

I tried once, failed miserably, tried again, and just getting into a chair position and could barely hold that. The progressions are what matter—slow progression and patience.

Now, five sets of five pikes are trivial for me, but I just want to emphasize that when I started, I was far, far away from that.

It's the progressions in the book that really helped me, and I've maintained that pike ability. So thank you for that.

I say it not to highlight what I can do, but to highlight what I believe most anybody can do if they put in the work.

They can, if they put in a lot of attention. Midsection training is one of the most misunderstood, messed-up areas of physical culture.

There are a thousand different exercises, and people say, "Oh, you got to have variety, this many reps." That's not the point.

The point really is tension and attention. Ideally, your best first step is really learning abdominal tension through something like a Zercher squat or double kettlebell front squat, where the load distribution is such that it forces reflexive stabilization.

You feel, "Oh, that's what tight abs feel like." Getting somebody just weak in a plank is hopeless; there's absolutely not going to help.

There are ways of building up to it, yes, by rolling on 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 with your abdomen.

You need to learn things like, for example, you need to learn to contract the pelvic diaphragm, pull your butt up 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.

There is this argument in the strength world about internal focus versus external focus and queuing. The agreement is in motor learning that external focus queuing is so much better than focusing on whatever happens within the individual muscle.

It may be true in the beginning, and maybe outside of the strength game, but any top strength athlete you meet has their own internal cues on how they do something.

Later on, they may forget them; it disappears. But they know how to engage the lat in the bench press.

George Halbert, a bench press world record holder, famously said it took him many years to finally understand how the triceps are used in the bench press.

Many years. So there's a lot of internal component, and for the abs, very, very much so. You have to learn how to direct your attention there to get high tension.

You have to keep the rep slow. Like you said, five sets of five perfect 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 treat your ab training very much like a strength event. If you do that, you're going to get those results.

Finally, the final detail is you need to use that intra-abdominal pressure as your friend because in lifting, like a deadlift or squat or something, intra-abdominal pressure helps you.

It supports you. When you're doing abdominal work, you work against that abdominal pressure.

You're just creating that pressure and contracting again. This is something called internal isometrics.

It's kind of interesting; it's just a combination of classic strength work with a very internalized kind of almost martial arts approach to it.

Then you need to learn how to use your abs in lifts. Once you do, and this is the beauty, you don't really have to train your abs anymore.

Franco Columbu, for example, a great example—in addition to winning Mr. Olympia, he won the best abs. He told me, "I hate ab training."

He just stayed tight whenever he did his heavy lifts. This is pretty much what happens when you reach a certain level of strength and a certain level of awareness.

Simply staying tight during your strength work and also employing power breathing, which is very important, you're going to be able to get as strong as you need in the abs and get your six-pack or whatever, provided you don't need the Twinkies.

How do you pressurize? In fact, may I show an abdominal exercise right now that is just sitting at this table?

That's also going to teach you how to properly pressurize for lifting. Normally, it's better down standing, and it's not for people with high blood pressure or heart concerns.

Check with your doctor if that's the situation. You take a normal breath in your abdomen, and you pull up your butt, pretty much like you imagine you have to go to the restroom.

You're trying to stop yourself, but you can't quite. Then you put your tongue between your teeth and start hissing.

You do this in a ratcheting kind of manner. Try to keep all the pressure out of your head and out of your neck.

Direct all the pressure; all this pressure is just—you're really staying below. This type of hissing, you will notice that very rapidly, you're going to contract everything around your waist.

Everything around your waist is going to contract, and you're going to strain your abdomen. You're also going to start learning how to properly stabilize yourself under heavy weights.

The difference between using this technique for lifting and just training the abs is that when you're training the abs, there's going to be some spinal flexion—not a whole lot.

You don't want to do a lot of that. There's going to be some spinal flexion when you're doing that under a heavy barbell squat.

You're maintaining your spine in neutral; it's like your body stays a cylinder. You're going to hold your breath pretty much, but the idea is the same.

It's like the Valsalva maneuver. One Russian coach called it an exhalation that didn't happen.

People don't know how to hold their breath properly; they just hold their breath, and then their eyes are bulging out. Well, there's no stability right here.

So first of all, you've got to inhale low. How do you do that? If you watch top lifters, how they do that, they will do it through pursed lips.

You can also do it through the nose, but you cannot do it through a big wide-open mouth.

I'll show you why. If you can, you folks can try it.

At home, if you place your hand on your stomach and try to do an abdominal breath, it doesn't go very well.

Now, for contrast, pinch off one nostril and take an abdominal breath, or you can do that through pursed lips. Try it again. You see more resistance, more resistance, and again you're engaging the diaphragm instead of just your thorax.

So, you take that breath into your abdomen, like through a small opening in your nose or through your pursed lips. You draw it in right there, and then down below, you pull it up. After that, it's that exhalation that didn't happen.

Do you see? I'm familiar with sort of bracing my abs. What I've not done before is the resisting going to the bathroom thing that you mentioned—the pulling up of the butt. So, you're creating compression from the bottom, from the top, and also from all around. That happens reflexively as well.

I see. So, that's the position to get into before, say, a hard Zercher squat or something like that. Absolutely.

If you're doing that for an exercise that's long in duration, you know, if you don't want to be holding your breath too long, then we have an expression that comes from one of the KES tiles: breathing behind the shield.

So right now, I can speak to you, but I'm still just as tight. So you see what you're doing. The way we tested it, where we teach it in our workshops, is you lie on the ground. I tell you to tense up, and I'm going to stand on your stomach. I'm going to have you sing a song, and you're going to have to learn to properly maintain that pressure while still continuing to breathe.

So you're able to stabilize your spine, but you're not going to pass out from maintaining that by holding your breath for a period of time.

Finally, what you have to learn to do is match the breath with a force. Synchronize. When you're punching, when you're throwing, when you're lifting, you have to learn how to match that contraction—the timing of the abdominal contraction and the pressurization. Sometimes exhalation, sometimes just pretending to with the effort.

Once you learn how to match the breath with the force, it's like magic. What people don't realize is it's not just purely mechanical. Mechanically, yes, of course it works. You know, Stu explained this so well about the stiffness of the structure—the analogy of the bicycle frame.

It's the same thing. You're getting an expensive bicycle frame when you have strong abs as opposed to the cheap one that rattles and wiggles.

But there's also something that is never spoken about in the West for some reason. The Soviets studied that decades ago. This is something they called the "numo-maatic reflex." "Numo" is from "pneu," meaning air.

There are baroreceptors—sensors for pressure—inside your abdominal cavity and thoracic cavity. Whenever these receptors are stimulated, they automatically increase the sensitivity of alpha motor neurons.

So, what this really means to the audience is this: If you imagine your brain is the music player and your muscle is a speaker, the amount of intra-abdominal pressure is your volume control. By increasing that pressure, you're increasing strength, but by releasing that intra-abdominal pressure, you relax the muscle.

That's why, in stretches, as I mentioned before, you can be sitting in a half split and groaning. No, you need to release. If you release that passive breath again, your muscles are going to relax.

So, controlling your breath is very much, as it's known in martial arts, synonymous with controlling your body and your mind.

Very often, when one throws a punch, is it true that exhaling actually provides additional power?

No question about it. Yeah, it's been measured. It's been measured on fighters; it's also been measured in lifting as well. There was a study done in the West showing that even screaming increases strength significantly.

Again, this is not just a psychological component. I mean, there may be some psychological component to that, but again, there's this very distinct increase of strength through that reflex.

It's very easy for the listeners to test that. Get a dynamometer hand gripper and just test yourself on that. Just see how it works with different breathing patterns.

Whenever you see this idiotic practice at some gyms, "Oh, you can grunt right here," well, I guess you can be strong here. Of course, if you're doing this on purpose, you're walking in with the bros and just trying to make noise to attract attention, that's wrong.

But strength is a noisy endeavor. There may be some hissing, there may be some grunting—it's just absolutely unavoidable. If you're trying to be quiet and if you're trying to be a lady or a gentleman, well, maybe it's not for you. It's for somewhere else, not for the gym.

Some potentially trivial questions, but I think they are not trivial. I hope they're not, in any case. Where should we place our eyes when we're in exertion?

Should we close our eyes and grind it out, or look at form in the mirror? I'm a big fan of gyms without mirrors, yes, because I have to concentrate on the form.

Vision is a powerful tool and a source of feedback, but also a source of a lot of distractions. There must be a rule about this, or at least a set of guidelines. Are we eyes closed and grimacing, or are we checking our bicep vein in the mirror? Just kidding—don't do that, folks.

During a lift, where should our eyes be? Is there any idea that looking up makes it easier to drive up out of the bottom of a squat? Has this been explored?

Well, it has. There are several sides to that. Part of it is spinal safety. Stu will tell you that extending the neck is going to facilitate the entire posterior chain.

He'll also tell you that lifters with longer necks may be able to get their heads up, and that might work better for them. For some other lifters, especially those with pronounced lordosis, where there's a big arch in the back, that may arch them too much. That might be inappropriate or just kink their neck.

It's all possible. A lot of coaches these days, including Andy Bolton—Andy Bolton, he's the legend of deadlifting. He's the first lifter to lift over 1,000 lbs in the deadlift. Andy and I co-authored the book "Deadlift Dynamite."

So, Andy's got the most beautiful deadlift—just the most incredible, beautiful deadlift. What Andy does is pretty much what the standard recommendation for most people is these days: maintain a neutral neck, and your eyes kind of go with that.

You get yourself in position, you know, at the bottom of the deadlift, where your head is the continuation of your body, like you're an insect or something. Then you look at a spot on the ground that's appropriate, and your eyes will come up.

That's a good general standard recommendation for people with long necks—looking straight ahead is a good recommendation. Some lifters succeed with crazy ideas.

Lamar Gant, again, pound for pound the biggest deadlifter, was in tremendous hyperextension. He was looking at the ceiling. At a high level of competition, there are some other subtle ways—some things people try.

Constantin Constantino from Laia, he was another great deadlifter who passed. He would look down at the start—he would look absolutely down. If you look at it from your perspective, when your neck is in flexion, interestingly enough, that facilitates the knee extension, which is really weird.

Yeah, my chin towards my chest—not all the way down, but yeah, you will find that your quads are going to be stronger. But it's not for everybody. For someone else, that's a great way to mess up the back.

So, there are some subtleties, and there are also some people who really get fancy with eye movement. You know, follow the bar, do these other things like in gymnastics.

A good rule of thumb is if you look straight ahead, more often than not, you're going to be okay. But from that, there are a lot of fancy ways to do it.

As for closing your eyes, closing your eyes is not recommended. It changes the coordination of the lift. But for advanced lifters, lifting blindfolded is a really good idea.

Robert Roman, one of the top Soviet specialists, pioneered that. He would have his lifters do some of the sets blindfolded, and it's really amazing how much not relying on your vision, relying on your kinesthetic sense, what that does. It's quite remarkable.

Also, just to add one more thing: in competition, at least in powerlifting, a lot of the top guys, they don't see anything really. They're just deep inside their rage. It's total tunnel vision, auditory exclusion—everything.

So, whatever they had in whatever remembered position, don't ask them to look at you or see you. It's not going to happen. They're someplace else.

Pav, I must say this has been a spectacular voyage through.

You're very kind, Andrew. It's been a real pleasure—a very stimulating conversation.

Oh, thank you. I'm going to embarrass you a little bit further by telling you more positive things about you. I notice it makes you uncomfortable; it's perhaps the only thing that makes you uncomfortable.

But in all seriousness, I can't sense any discomfort. I want to thank you for a number of things that are reflective, I'm sure, of what other people are thinking.

First of all, the level of rigor that you've approached this whole thing of strength, fitness, flexibility, and breathing—every one of these topics, too many to list off just now—is remarkable. It's really fantastic.

I love my job, so that's easy.

This comes through, and it's rare these days. It's rare in any age to find people that are so dedicated to this level of rigor in a given area, and it's so appreciated. Coming from me, it means a lot.

Thank you. We really need people like you. You're truly a scientist and a practitioner. You embody the principles that you discuss clearly, which is also important.

If I could blush, I would.

Right, Russians don't blush.

Got it. A topic for another podcast.

The rigor and the quality of the information that you put forth in your books, on this podcast, and elsewhere—your online course—is just absolutely spectacular.

I hope people notice. I couldn't help but notice, as an academic, your attention to proper attribution for people that have done the work and accomplished the various feats from whom you've gleaned various aspects of this knowledge.

It's not to be overlooked because that's something that's so lacking these days. It's remarkable and important to highlight.

It should go without saying.

It really shouldn't, but it doesn't. These days, it's more about who can glean the most attention as opposed to shed light on others and their work.

In doing so, as we've observed, absolutely nothing is lost, and so much is gained. It's for everybody.

Thank you. Proper attribution is spectacular, and I really look forward to sharing the resources where people can learn more.

But already today, you've just provided such a wealth of knowledge for us, and it's a real honor to sit here with you and learn from you.

I plan to listen to this podcast several times over and take detailed notes. We timestamp it all, and I just hope that we'll have the opportunity at some point to sit down again.

As well, perhaps to get the opportunity to train together so I can personally learn from you.

In the meantime, on behalf of myself and everyone listening and watching, thank you ever so much, Pav.

Thank you, Andrew. It's a real pleasure. You're a real...

Thank you for spreading the word of health and strength.

Wonderful. Thank you.

Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Pav Satlin. I hope you found it to be as interesting and actionable as I did.

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This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, based on more than 30 years of research and experience. It covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation.

Of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols included. The book is now available for pre-sale at protocolsbook.com. There, you can find links to various vendors, and you can pick the one that you like best.

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