Built to Last: Muscle, Longevity, and Training Smarter | Dr. Andy Galpin | The Metabolic Link Ep. 76

Welcome to the Metabolic Link, a medical and science-focused podcast that explores the common thread of metabolism in health and disease. This is where science meets society.

[Music]

Welcome to the Metabolic Link podcast. I'm your host, Victoria Field, and I am so thrilled to be here with you today. It's going to be such a great episode. I am going to give you a little bit of backstory to who I am. I'm the co-founder of Metabolic Health Initiative, which is the overarching organization to Metabolic Health Summit, the scientific conference, to this podcast right here, and to the medical education platform, the Metabolic Initiative. You'll want to check that out. Go to metabolicinitiative.com to learn more about what we do, but we're really dedicated exclusively to sharing the science on metabolic health and therapy, not just to the medical world, but to everybody in general. So, head on over, check that out.

But today, I'm joined by my brilliant co-host, Dr. Dominic Dustinino. I'm so excited to be sharing an episode with him. And our guest today is one of the sharpest minds in performance science. His name is Dr. Andy Galpin. And Dr. Andy Galpin is really someone who's doing much more than just studying muscle. He's actually helping people use it to live better, longer, and stronger. Dr. Galpin is a tenure-full professor at Parker University and is the executive director of the Human Performance Center. He's got a PhD in Human Bioenergetics and over a 100 peer-reviewed publications and presentations. Dr. Galpin has worked with elite athletes across the UFC, MLB, NBA, PGA, NFL, boxing, Olympics, MMA, military, and special forces, and much more. And he's also the co-founder of Vitality Blueprint, Absolute Rest, Biomolecular Athlete, and Rapid Health and Performance.

And in this episode, we really dig into how strength training ties into every aspect of metabolic health, the truth about fasted workouts and whether or not you should do them, what women should really know about training and how to train into midlife and beyond, and then why what kids are doing right now may determine their bone health decades later. It's such a just mind-blowing episode.

But before we dig in, I want to mention that we are actually going to have Dr. Andy Galpin on our medical platform, open to everybody, not just physicians, general public, where you'll have an opportunity to gather all your questions from this episode and then ask him directly live on October 9th at 8 a.m. PT, 11 a.m. ET. That's 8 a.m. PT, 11 a.m. ET over on our medical education platform, October 9th. Go to membership.metabolicinitiative.com/galpin to register for this event. Uh, it's free to join the platform. First seven days are free. Head on over membership.metabolicinitiative.com/galpin to jump into that just awesome opportunity to connect with Dr. Galpin really almost one-on-one.

With that said, now let's get into this episode with Dr. Andy Galpin. Dr. Galpin, we loved having you at Metabolic Health Summit, uh, our last conference, and we're just thrilled to have you here with us today. You really have completely reshaped, I think, how we think about performance, how we think about strength, how we think about pushing our limits with human potential, not just for elite athletes, not just for the pros, but for everyday people just trying to live and age better. So, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the show.

Well, that was quite the compliment, and I don't know if I truly live up to that, but I appreciate it nonetheless.

Well, we certainly think you have done so much in the field, and we're excited to dig in today because in this episode, we're going to be covering all kinds of topics, really from building functional muscle to optimizing recovery to just maybe not even simply falling apart in your 40s and 50s. How do you optimize those things, right? How do you feel better? We're also going to be talking a little bit about kids and sex-specific differences. So, uh, really excited to kind of dig into a wide range of topics with you today.

Um, but first, I want to kind of rewind and take it back to the beginning because I know for you, really, your interest in this field, this this started for you when you were in your early teens, just first picking up weights. So, why don't we kind of talk about what pulled you into the field and what got you really excited about bridging the gap between the lab and sort of the real world?

Sure. You know, I'm a, I'm a country kid. So, I live up, uh, in the mountains and I'm from an area like that. And so, everybody plays sports, but we also didn't have access to the internet, of course, back when I was a kid. But even scientists, I didn't know what a PhD was. I had never met a scientist in my life. I didn't know anybody who was famous. I didn't know anybody who had ever met anybody who was famous. And so, we played sports. And when the wave of strength training came, uh, started to become more prevalent, our attitude was sort of, hey, lift weights, we'll be better at sports. And that, like, we didn't know anything different than that. And so, everybody I grew up with, you know, generally the community, the coaches, the parents around had the same sort of mentality of losing is okay. Of course, there are more talented people, but it should never be a reason to lose because you didn't prepare, you didn't try, you didn't work hard enough, things like that. So, that was just a natural mentality. I was a, a decent athlete. I was right in the middle. I was good enough to where when I trained harder, it showed it mattered, right? It was more accolades and things like that. Also, I wasn't that good to where, like, didn't matter what I did off the field, right? So, I was good enough to play college football, but I was not a five-star Division One recruit. So, I was right in that sweet spot. So, for me, continuing on, it was, uh, hey, let's see if you can do something as a profession in this field. At the time, really, it was only be a sport coach, you know, be an actual football coach or baseball coach or something. I didn't really want to do that. Uh, this, this kind of like physiology and the body stuff was really fascinating, mostly because of mystery. Again, I didn't know anybody that was a doctor or, like, again, I didn't know what a PhD was. A scientist was a completely abstract thought. Even as a college student, I had no concept that these things could exist. No idea you could do this for a living. And some part, you couldn't back then. But that's really where it all came from. So, I was just like, weight training specifically, lifting weights was sort of like, hey, I'm a small kid, kind of, and my brother is older and bigger, and all his friends are older and bigger. Like, this is how I beat them. This is great. This is also super fun. I loved it. And then I got better at sports because of it, and that was great. And then I figured out how to try to make that into a career and a profession. And so, becoming a scientist still feels weird to me. Like, I do not like my identity is like, there's no way I'm a scientist. Like, I'm just a strength training dork and just like happens to have that. So, I feel like I back-ended my way into the science part, um, rather than the other. So, to wrap up that part of the question, really, then that that shapes why I've had the career I've had. I don't want to just be a scientist who's in the lab. It's awesome, but not for me. I didn't also want to be a pure strength coach. Not for me. And so, I've always wanted to be in the middle of saying, how do we take stuff into the lab that is relevant and needed to answer practical questions, and the opposite? How do we actually enhance performance through science? So, um, the reason I'm here is because that's just me. That's exactly what I am and who I was, and trying to solve the problem for the younger me.

That's awesome. You've really kind of changed the way, you know, things go in terms of education. You've kind of brought, and you have a podcast now, which is amazing, season two, and really excited about that because you're really, uh, one of the few researchers that are really bringing the lab to the, you know, to the general population, which I think is so critically important.

Um, I'm going to toss things now to Dom because he's going to kind of bring us back to sort of like the physiology behind where all this starts, muscle metabolism, why it matters. Uh, so Dom, I'll let you take it away in terms of, uh, some great questions we have for, for the foundation of this interview.

Yeah, I mean, I've got like dozens of questions, but, uh, one, uh, one that's maybe you haven't answered before, or maybe you have, but maybe not specifically, uh, is, and, and I've gotten this quite often, and maybe it sort of relates to people that you know. Is there such a thing as too much muscle for long-term health and longevity? For example, like life insurance premiums drop by 25% if you just get your BMI from 30 to 28. So, this was something I experienced. So, just drop. Uh, so you've, you know, you've explored the benefits of hypertrophy exclusively, but are there diminishing returns really when it comes to long-term health, particularly like in recreational or aging athletes? And, uh, could pursuing extremes in muscle size, uh, or maybe strength related to size, impair flexibility, cardiovascular strain, you know, more tissue, your organs have to work harder? Uh, or can it negatively impact, you know, metabolic function? So, uh, I'm sure you work with athletes that may be a little bit larger on the spectrum, but they're, you know, lean, but their BMI is high, and that puts them in maybe even in the obese category.

I would probably say about everybody we work with would be technically obese or higher in that category. And we need to bring this, this is a really question, Don, thank you, actually, for. We need to bring this answer into two separate parts because the reality of it is, is it the muscle per se, or is it the actions some people take to accrue that kind of muscle? And that's, it's a very distinct answer. The reason, the reason is, I can answer this first one quickly. There is no evidence at all to indicate excessive or any amount of muscle is detrimental at all to health. No data on that. In fact, we, uh, have published some data from an NHANES database arguing quite the opposite. And so, sometimes you will see these like inverted U's of total muscle mass against mortality rate. This is where you get this idea of like, wow, too much muscle is detrimental. But the reality of it is, those, and we showed this very clearly in the paper, um, those are almost always associated with people who have accrued their size not from exercise. And so, if, yeah, if you have an additional 10 or 20 kilos of muscle mass and you got that without any semblance of exercise, then you can probably start to infer why you got that. It's almost always because you're just simply a larger human being. You add total mass, some muscle will come with that.

And so, it's low-quality muscle, um, to say it lightly. So, we could dive into that paper more specifically, um, but the reality of it is, that is really clear. Now, that said, you asked some other similar questions, which would be part two of the answer. So, if you're getting there, let's say, for example, um, you're getting this additional muscle mass, um, from a traditional powerlifting perspective. So, this is consume any calorie you can find, have no other physical activity in your life besides your maximal strength training. Throw in potentially anabolic steroid use, and that's not going to lead to a long life. And so, it's not necessarily the muscle per se, but it was the actions that that person took that could be soft tissue damage as well. That could be lack of range of motion, flexibility. It would be those things. So, as far as we know at this point, if we throw that stuff, which is honestly a, I mean, you and I like that stuff, Dom, but like, not many people are truly competitive powerlifters. So, for the vast majority of people, if you're trying to get the message through, the overwhelming majority of individuals will have no concerns doing any amount of strength training, you know, save injury, uh, resulting in muscle mass accretion. So, that, that's not going to be an issue at all. I, I don't think, um, I mean, data could change in the future, I guess, but to this point, we would have no information, no, uh, no rationale to think that, and I would struggle to even think of a mechanism that's been demonstrated that would potentially indicate that that's a problem. So, I think as a general answer, you're very, very safe with adding as much muscle mass as you want, as long as you're not using actions to get there that are detrimental to your long-term health.

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Can strength training match or exceed, uh, cardio for metabolic health? So many people still assume that cardio is superior for heart and metabolic health, but we know resistance training also improves insulin sensitivity, glucose uptake, mitochondrial function. So, how would you structure an ideal weekly routine for someone aiming for metabolic longevity? And is that sort of, does that factor into the last question? Like, if you have someone with a lot of muscle mass and they're into training, maybe even doing high volume, probably have to to get a lot of muscle mass, uh, and they're not doing cardio, like, does that predispose them or or is that, how do you factor?

Okay, this is another really fantastic question. I'll try to keep this brief because this could be several hours, actually. You have a lot of interesting data points to pull from. If you were to go all the way back and just think of this intuitively. Now, intuitively, it probably makes most sense for somebody to age in the most successful fashion to have a combination of strength training, cardiovascular training, and a bunch of other ones I could explain. But at minimum, we would, if we broadly categorize them as those two things, it makes the most intuitive sense even for metabolic health to do that. If you go back to basic sophomore-level exercise physiology, we have different energy systems, they are crossed over. Of course, they work more like gears that turn each other rather than these, you know, polarized opposite non-connecting items, but the reality of it is, it makes the most intuitive sense.

Pivot here. If you look at some of the more recent papers that have come out on things like lifelong exercisers, we've done some of this stuff in the lab myself, um, in a handful of different fashions. You combine that with the information we have on twins. So, generally, what I'm speaking about here is monozygous twins. So, you have two twins with the exact same DNA but different lifestyle patterns. So, I'm smashing all these data points together. This is a combination of observational studies as well as like ours, which is just like, hey, you find these people that are in their mid-50s and they had a divergent path of exercise in their early 20s. So, yeah, we didn't, it's not a 30-year-long study, but you have a pretty good breakpoint of, uh, including things like, you have all their exercise records for 30 years, you know, like, you have lots of detail there. So, it's pretty close to an actual longitudinal study, if you will. So, if you look at that, you see, um, this cascade of lifelong endurance exercisers being very healthy. So, these are folks in their 70s, 80s, 90s who have only basically done endurance training, walking, running, swimming, uh, biking, cycling, rather, is the traditional ones. And from a cardio-respiratory perspective, from a fat burning, from an efficiency, from a mitochondria, they're, uh, as exactly like you guys would predict. VO2 maxes are high generally, blood lipid panels are really good. Um, body composition is really great, and they tend to have really good RQs and RS and things like that. And they're just like, pretty chill rest, low resting heart rates, such. More papers are now starting to come out on the opposite of the spectrum, which is these lifelong strength trainers. And that's been harder because endurance exercise was popular 20 to 25 years earlier than strength training was, um, you know, in the zeitgeist. But now we're starting to get these people who started lifting weights in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, and they are on decade three, four, five of lifting. But that chunk of people is much smaller to pull from. Well, we're seeing them be as successful at aging as the other folks, but differently. They don't, they don't have super high VO2 maxes. They don't have low either, but they have higher quality muscle. Quality muscle being defined as functional power, being defined as via imaging. So, if you look at it, they have less intramuscular fat in the tissue. Um, this is via like single-cell analysis. So, take biopsies and look at the properties. So, like, kind of all three levels, and you colloquially call that quality of muscle, they tend to actually be the same or exceed. They are very specifically way past the endurance athletes. In fact, this paper just came out last year that directly compared biopsy-level data. Way more fast-twitch fibers in the strength training folks than the endurance-only other folks. But that said, they're both aging well. And so, it's really hard to be like, "Wow, these endurance people are doing something wrong or bad because they're losing their fast fibers." They are, but they're clearly very functional. They're very healthy from every level. And so, I think, um, the way that I would conclude this would be, if you look at the data, you could argue this however you like. You could argue endurance exercise is not mandatory. You could argue strength training is not mandatory either. You could also argue there are observational studies, there are metabolic studies, there are, um, mechanistic studies that would suggest pre-post, pick your time domain, six weeks, six years, we have all these data, right? That things always get better with both, for the most part. And so, that's when you have to kind of go back to where I actually started, which is like, okay, if, if you really shake this thing out of your head, what do I think is, um, past the data, just based on my thoughts, my Andy's personal opinion, I think you're probably better off metabolically, if that's the central question here, doing both because they're similar, similar and complimentary and overlapping mechanisms. And I'll end with this. If you look at like mitochondria specifically, I just saw a paper this week that was out last month. It's basically arguing for the fact that fiber size is the single biggest predictor of mitochondria, not VO2 max, not anything else. Like, it just comes down to the tissue itself. Like, you have a bigger muscle cell, you're going to have more mitochondria. You have a smaller one, you sort of don't. And then there's a whole history of like exercise science and, um, arguments on this mitochondria density and other stuff I could, it's probably not important, but we could go into, but that is how I would think about it. Um, one could argue it either way, but I think most people are going to be generally better off doing a little combination of both across the lifespan, right? Doesn't mean you can't take six weeks or six months or six years even to focus on one thing, but across your life, you'd want a lot of low-level activity combined with some high force stuff as well.

Last point, I just want to clarify. So, what I hear, I think you're saying is that like, uh, strength training induced muscle enhancement or metabolic longevity tied to an increase in type 2A fast-twitch, low oxidative fibers, like fiber size. Like, if you generated that, it almost decouples it away from the high VO2 max that, you know, like people like Peter Attia rightly so says this is the biggest longevity kind of, like, you could have someone who's sort of strength training, metabolically elite, but does not have a high VO2 max and still have the longevity benefits independent of the VO2 max because?

Yeah, you can, you do have to be careful there, though, because it's not as likely, uh, as the opposite. And so, if one were to just dive hard on that, um, it would be likely that your VO2 max, and if we're just also using VO2 max as a surrogate because it's a direct marker as well as a surrogate of just general cardiovascular pulmonary, um, functionality, um, those can be decoupled in a negative way, too. So, you can be strong with high-quality muscle and be really poor cardiovascular fitness, and that will detrimentally be a detriment, um, to your even direct metabolic health, not even longevity and mortality risk, but straight up metabolic health. So, um, they are complimentary for sure, but they are also very independent.

That was great. I want to shift gears a little bit though to a population that's really been underserved for decades when it comes to strength science. Women, as you, sure, I'm sure you guessed. Um, there's a lot of buzz around just in terms of, um, training around the menstrual cycle, differences in fasting tolerance. Uh, so, I'd love to dig into some of these questions with you. Um, some researchers, one in particular, you probably have heard of, exercise physiologist, and nutrition scientist, Stacy Sims, has argued that women should never train fasted because of hormonal stress and, you know, potential performance consequences. But I know you've previously talked about nuance here. So, can fasted training offer some benefits to women? You know, to what degree do you agree or maybe push back? And for which life goals or life stages might fasted exercise or sessions really make sense?

Yeah, we've run a number of studies in my lab. We're running running one right now. We're actually doing a really high-fidelity sleep study across the menstrual cycle. This is the most accurate testing ever been done, every single day with verified hormone cycling across the menstrual cycle. In this particular study, we're starting with young, healthy, asymptomatic women.

Um, we've done a number of these types of studies in my lab in the past. We really like this question. There's a difference between, as you two know, including women in your study, and there's a difference between that and then studying women or female-specific questions that are just not relevant to men. Right? We need both. We also need male-specific research, like we need all of these things, right? Certain cases, it doesn't matter, men or women, or our intermittent fasting study, we had men and women in it, didn't matter. And so, to answer that question right there, we actually also just recently published a 168 intermittent fasting study, but where we were unique is we looked at muscle hypertrophy. This was not a caloric deficit. This was not, how does it impact fat loss or adherence or anything like that? It was, when people are trying to intentionally grow as much muscle mass as possible. And so, they were in a caloric surplus. They were doing very aggressive four days a week progressive strength training in the lab, of course. And we had men and women in that study. We looked at a whole host of factors, cellular stuff, molecular stuff, to muscle size, to hunger, to energy levels throughout the day, to sleep, so on and so forth. I could get into the results of that, but, uh, the direct question at hand, we didn't see any difference in the men and women for anything. There was differences from people to people, sure, but there was no specific, women responded better or worse or different. And to be really clear here, we had them all lift in the morning, the fasting group fasted, and then they waited at least an hour after they lift until they started their feeding window. So, they were as fasted as one could possibly get here, and we saw nothing. Also need to add, though, in fairness, we, uh, not a huge sample size, right? So, sure, maybe if you had 50 per group or something. So, all, all things, this, you know, that, that we didn't design this specifically to be a male versus female. Actually, we had both in the same groups, right? So, a different research design maybe has a different research answer.

Um, that said, uh, I won't speak to any claims directly that Stacy has made or hasn't made, and be most fair for her to be on here to clarify her position and things like that if I do that. But if we were to answer these things at a high level, in addition to the research we've done in our lab, I've coached hundreds of women, if not thousands at this point, we're still actively coaching them. This is 18-year-old professional athletes to 65-year-olds, never been an athlete. We still are very actively coaching all these individuals. I've never seen those things be true. We don't opt to, we don't put them on a specific training program around their menstrual cycle just because, again, I don't know what, what Stacy would argue or not argue here. I don't want to make any comments on what she would say. I'm familiar with her, but I don't listen to everything she's ever done, and, you know, that wouldn't be fair. If someone's having an issue or something around that or rationale to it, we'll do whatever it takes for the individual. If that is menstrual cycle related, great. If that is because their daily schedule or their personal preferences or their trust. We're always individualizing programming, and a menstrual cycle is of course something we pay a lot of attention to. We will actually track. We just got doing this done, doing this, uh, a few days ago, actually. There are at-home kits that you can use. We can track hormone concentrations every single day throughout the menstrual cycle.

Yeah.

So, if this is something we're working with, we will actually do this with our individuals, and we will get a full profile. We don't just estimate when their ovulation was. If we need to know that, if we think that's a concern, we're going to directly test that and verify that, then change their programming, their nutrition, their sleep, their supplementation, their down-regulation strategies, whatever we're doing based around their actual data, not just a random, you're a woman, do this, right?

To me, that's really terrible coaching if possible to avoid, like, completely unnecessary.

So, you guys are actually looking at their ovulation and?

100%. Like, we're, I would never make a recommendation to somebody that I'm working with based on like, oh, well, you're a woman, therefore you, you bleed this many days per month and you ovulate this day, like, and then therefore we're going to change your nutrition and training based on.

No. Yeah. So, you take that into consideration when kind of modifying, potentially modifying based on how they're feeling, what's happening. Oh, you know, that might make a little bit more sense because you're almost, you know, you're just ovulated or whatever the case may be, and then adjust accordingly.

Yeah. But never, it's never this. We don't ever start there.

Yeah.

Right. Like, if we're seeing metrics over time from their blood, or we're seeing performance data or recovery metrics or output or perceived, um, mental, um, brain fog, focus, or this seems way harder today than it used to be. I don't want to do this motivation, whatever the thing is, we have some rationale for that, then we go.

And the reason we don't start there is because the vast majority of time, we haven't had that issue. We have some women that fast. Some of our professional athletes, really high-level, high energy, um, that you would probably consider these to be, if not direct endurance athletes. In fact, we have some endurance runners, female runners, some of them fast in the morning and they train fasted. They just don't like eating in the morning for some of their sessions. It's hard in their stomach and they feel nauseous and so on and so forth. So, fine, we've had no issue with that. We have never gone out of our way to tell women to go fast in the morning for any performance benefits. Um, we have done that sometimes with, um, non-like low-level exercisers or sedentary women for a variety of reasons. Um, for coaching recommendations, it's honestly like, it's these are, you know, practical answers. Um, it's a good way to restrict calories, of course, or they make worse choices. Um, for the record, we've done the opposite too, where we've had them fuel a lot in the morning to set better habits, to set better satiation, hunger control, and then taper calories out in the evening. Um, so we will use any of these strategies, but I'm not aware, I'm not convinced with any data set that just off the cuff says women can or can't handle fasting. I'm certainly not aware of any data set, and this is something that I will feel comfortable saying, and I'm not sure if Stacy's actually directly said this ever, or if people just say she said it, like that happens to me, that happens to you, Dom, like all the time. So, like, you never know, but some people will say things like, women have to get protein in 30 minutes post-exercise, or something like that. And again, our study showed clearly, like, no, you don't.

Yeah, like nothing there. Um, I'll stop there, but that's that's a big reaction to all that stuff.

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That's really, really helpful. Um, I do think she might say, and, and some others, not just Stacy, but others, you know, give you about like, sort of a 45-minute window of of protein, and as you age as well, 40, 50 years of age, there's an even larger requirement for that. So, um, it's really interesting for you to say that not only does it maybe not impact hypertrophy, but also performance. And you guys do factor in, sounds like, the menstrual cycle into the picture as well, which is obviously, which is obvious for you, but not all coaches, of course, do this kind of thing, which is really, really helpful in in providing perspective. And actually, I was going to be asking you about cycle-based, um, periodization. You know, if there was any adjustments that you make in terms of programming by phase, that you found helpful, or is it just sort of overcomplicated in, in your opinion, and just on a case-by-case basis?

Yeah, we've never seen any rationale to do it based on cycle.

Okay.

Um, some women have a really challenging psychological or physical time in certain phases for them. Um, some don't. So, yeah, we would never do this just arbitrarily based on, you're at this phase, even if we verified it. So, we had a hormonal test and we verified you're in luteal phase or high hormone phase or low, whatever. Therefore, you're going to back off or do that. We, we would never ever do that, and I don't see any rationale to do that unless it is, we've got demonstrated data over time that says, hey, look, we're just injuries are going up if we do this in this case for you, or, um, you don't like it, you don't want to do it, like, you're fine, but the reality of it is, in my personal opinion, just based on our sample over a couple decades now, too many other factors go into that. Travel schedule goes into that, work schedules go into that. I'm on the road right now. Like, you just don't have the luxury of being like, "Oh, you're in this phase, so you're going to recover right now." Like, I feel fine. I feel great, coach. Like, I have to compete next. Like, this is not going to work.

Right?

Um, we, it would be such a disaster for us. If other folks have had more success, great. Um, but these would be, as you said, Victoria, based on that individual, the same that we would do for men.

Yeah, it's really interesting. Thing. I mean, as a female, obviously, I feel like my strength definitely changes as my cycle changes, but that could be just case by case, individual basis. I will say I feel great fasted and working out when I'm not breastfeeding. I do have a little guy.

Oh, sure.

Otherwise, um, I, when I made that switch to fasted training, oh my gosh, it was life-changing. So, I feel like everybody's different, right? It's, it's really to hear your perspective, too. And, um, I'd love to know though, in terms of like, just differences in general with women, uh, you know, tendon structure, uh, fiber composition, recovery timelines, what adjustments would you make, you know, for a woman, you know, particularly when it comes to training volume or intensity, you know, when it comes to differences between men and women for you?

I think the best way to answer questions like this is you have to understand what science and in our, this case, exercise science can do and can't do. Exercise science can never give you an individual coaching prescription. It just can't, right? It can tell you like, hey, where are you most likely to start for most people in this category? So, to answer that part of the question is like, okay, if I'm looking at every female ever we've coached and every male we've ever coached, would I generally hedge towards some things? Yeah, I can say things like that. So, women and, and we have found this, um, we did a study with, we biopsied, um, two people from the World World Championship and World Team, um, over USA Weightlifting a number of years ago, and we looked at men and women, and we looked at them by, uh, Olympic level caliber and just like national caliber. Now, to be a national caliber Olympic weightlifter, if I confused you there, is still really, really hard. Like, if you are on the national team and competing at national championships, you're really strong. And then there's World Team, and then there's the Olympic Team, right? These are very distinct levels. And so, we actually looked at it by that. And why that matters is we saw a very specific difference in fiber type profile based upon category. World Team, Olympic Team, National Team.

Interesting.

It didn't matter sex. So, what we will see, if you look at, um, if you were to pull every study ever done on fiber type, you will generally see women have a little bit more slow-twitch fiber than men do categorically. However, what I'm trying to highlight here is in that particular study, in that subset of very specialized, selected for that sport, right there, if you're at the Olympic level, you probably were self-selected a little bit plus training. Now, we also saw that level of fiber type change was dependent upon years of training as well. And so, categorically, generally, women have a slight hedge towards most more slow-twitch fibers than men. But they, as at an individual level, your background, your training experience, your unique inherited genetic profile, those things actually matter more than that broad category. So, if we put 10,000 people in a database, yes, you would see a little bit of a statistical difference of women having more slow-twitch. But if you're coaching a human, it doesn't matter. Like, it does not matter. I've bled a bunch of slow-twitch men and a bunch of fast-twitch women, and like, it really just, it doesn't matter that much at that level. So, um, you can see those things. I can answer the same thing with training volume. You'll generally see, and having talked to, I've actually asked this question a lot. It's one of the questions I've been most fascinated with my entire career. I ask strength coaches this. I ask track coaches this. Most people will generally agree, and maybe this is just lore that keeps getting repeated, but most people will agree because of, well, in part because of the solution thing. Women tend to handle volume better. Sometimes you actually argue women tend to need more volume to get similar adaptations. Okay. You also then because of that, women tend to not need as much of a taper prior to competition where men will need more of it. Um, we will see actually that holds up pretty well with fiber type along. More fast-twitch people tend to get more hurt, more sore, uh, need less, can't handle as much volume, and they need more of a taper part of competition, where the more slow-twitch, it seems to to be the other end of that spectrum. So, I think he would say that like, there's probably something real there. I'm comfortable enough to say on the group level, those are real things. Um, so we will oftentimes start women off with more volume than we would a man, just like as a starting place, and then we're going to adjust from there, you know, like quickly scratch things. Um, the same with with men, right? We do the opposite. Um, intensity. Women seem to recover, seem to be fine. Like, you can hit them with more high intensity. Men don't, again, broad categories here, don't seem to handle it as much. We're also talking small differences here. We're not talking like women do zone one and men do zone five. Like, what you're talking about is like at an average training load of say 75% versus 68%. Like, you're just, you're talking about small, but in our world, like those are different numbers.

Differences there. So, um, that, that's what I think would be some generalities that I'd say comfortably would line up with the research and with what a lot of people would say in the practical, uh, scene as well.

Yeah, that's really interesting to kind of hear that, especially that women can kind of take on a little bit more intensity than men. I feel like we have kind of intense, more intense things that happen throughout our lives, childbirth, all of these other things, right? So, maybe that's, maybe that's why.

Yeah, you're seeing fist pumps for my wife in the background right now as you suffer.

Right. Exactly. Give her a fist bump for me. Yeah. Um, so question for you. I'm sure you get this quite a bit. Um, but, you know, as women are approaching perimenopause, menopause, these time periods in life where, you know, bone density, there's a real decline in bone density and in power output. How do you kind of handle that and, and what suggestions do you have in terms of staying explosive and strong well beyond 40?

Yeah. So, bunch, bunch of questions in there. Um.

I know.

Here's how we'll tease it out. Um, categorically, we're, we're going after both species the same, right? Um, you, you have to do something that activates high force output. Don't care. Man, woman, like, whatever you want to say there. How's that look? I don't really care. Um, if you're coming from a default state of minimal activity, then we have a, you know, you'll know this one, but like, we will call this newbie gains. So, like, when you're, if you've gone from nothing, you're like, "All right, I'm 44 years old. My two kids are now in middle school. Like, I can finally start working out again. I haven't worked out since my 20s." Then I wouldn't specifically worry about doing plyometrics and, and things like that. Even though that if you look at the research on something like bone mineral density, those are some of the highest reward activities you can do, but your tissue is not ready for that.

You're just not the same. Would be like if you switched out mom from dad there. All right, great. You finally sold the business, or you finally got promoted to manager, you can breathe a little bit now. Don't go play pickleball at at max effort five days a week. Like, you're going to tear a. It's going to happen. Like,

Yeah.

Be smart here. So, where we want to get to versus how we get there are a little bit different. Where we want to get to is one to two days a week of a landing activity. We want those landing activities to be, um, not random, but we want them to be in different planes and different loading strategies and different movement patterns. If the best you can do is start off with a, a backpack on when you're going for a walk, great. But we have to realize that's not going to be the same. You're not going to get the same benefits if we're taking example specifically of bone mineral density with rucking as you will traditional strength training or plyometrics. Like, it's just not even going to be close, actually. But we don't want to take something like that and then tell people, oh, rucking is garbage, or it's, it's a myth, or it's like, no, no, also good, does a lot of other stuff. Newbie gains. You might get some bone mineral density bump from that, but eventually, we're going to have to progress past that into more traditional loading strategies, which could be a whole host of things for people. Strength training with weights, with free weights, with dumbbells, with kettlebells, a group activity class, like tons of ways you can go about it, but you have to load the bones frequently and of a high, uh, with a high intent, and again, in a variety of different forms and fashion. So, I know that's also like, sometimes I say things like that and people are like, "Well, then I don't know what to do." But I'm actually hoping it's the opposite. I'm trying to give you freedom of saying there's a lot of ways that you can cut this thing and don't be so scared that you're not doing, you're doing something that's not productive at all. That's probably not the case. It's probably working if you stay consistent and you give it time. Those

are going to be the biggest keys.

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Now, back to our episode with Dr. Andy Gapin. We're going to um jump into recovery and longevity here in a second with Dom. I just have a question that you've recently brought up around kids. You know, the younger generation. I think this is really important. You've talked about it on social on your YouTube. Um, but unfortunately there's still that myth that strength training stunts growth in kids. And so I'd love to hear what you have to say, you know, for our audience around what the the science actually says and how early is maybe too early to introduce resistance training and should there be any sort of considerations around um, you know, building a foundation for long-term athletic performance. There's a big thing around you know sport specialization with children and things like that. So would love to to hear your thoughts and I know that was a lot of questions in one go.

Oh, good. That was actually probably my favorite episode I did of the entire season 2.

Yeah, it was good.

Um I I loved it the most.

Watch it if you haven't watched it and you're watching our podcast for sure.

It's funny cuz Rob was like, I don't know, man. Not that many people are strength training kids. And I was like, I don't care. And he was like,

"Yeah, people care about this information." Especially, you know, I'm a mom and I I'd love I I thought that was super helpful because you do do hear that so often, especially the older my mom is just like, "What are you doing?" This is the kind of thing. So, it's helpful to hear your thoughts.

Yeah, we've known a really long time, I'm talking 20 plus years, that strength training is not detrimental to specifically growth in kids, right? Growth place and development and so on and so forth. You can look at any number of Avery Fagenbomb's publications over the decades to find that. So we we can get past that one hopefully pretty quickly. One of the things that we also know is regarding age of starting. There doesn't seem to be any rational think there's any specific time when they have to start or can't start. the way that we would generally say in the field and if you ask the practitioners in this space and the scientists Avery as soon as you're mature enough to pay attention to care to be safe then do it. If they're not then don't.

Um I have a seven-year-old and a 5-year-old. I will not let my 5-year-old anywhere near weights.

He's out of his mind. Like there's just no chance. Right.

Safety perspective. Is that what you're saying? Yeah.

Yeah. He's not mature enough to pay attention at all to anything. I'm I have other friends who three-year-olds their three-year-olds lift weights.

Yeah,

they're done. I'm like, damn. Like, I'm jealous. But I'm like, okay, fine.

He's out of his mind. Like, he just can't. My seven-year-old has been in the gym with me since she was like two plus.

So, she's just a different person. Like, she'll do whatever and

halfyear-old tries to pick up our kettle bells when we do family workout.

It's a totally natural thing to do. Okay. Now, when we were saying lifting weights at this age, by the way, like 3 years old, 5 years old, 7 years old, 8 years old, you're not putting them on structured training plans. Most likely, you're not progressively overloading them. You're not doing one rep maxes or anything like that. It's more play and probably even like sub 13 years old, you know, 11. again depending on the kids's maturity that you should be focusing on play and you should be focusing on a variety just like we talked about with the bone marrow density you want a variety of loading patterns that is exactly what you want for bone marrow density in kids if this looks like sport to you if it is actual structured sport fine if you don't do sports or you're like my daughter who's just like not into any sports at all but you can get them to play in the field to jump off of the wall to run obstacle courses is this is the same thing, right? You want these kids jumping and landing a lot in a variety of ways, and you want them to learn to solve movement problems. You don't want to overcoach. I do not coach my seven-year-old on running technique at all, and she is a horrific runner, but like she needs to learn to solve, boy, when I do this way, I go slower. When I go this way, I start going faster. She needs motor control. She learns body awareness. She needs propriception. and she needs to learn and we'll continue to say how to solve movement problems. So we tumble, we shoot things, we throw things, we catch things, we jump off stuff, we put her on bikes, we put her with bikes with wheels on them, we put them on like we let and try to get her to do as many things as we possibly can. My 5-year-old's way more advanced physically, like way more advanced, but we still have the same basic thing. He doesn't go in the weight room, as I said earlier, but we can do have him do more aggressive, more complicated movements, more multi-step things. because he's there.

Um, the data are really, really, really clear on this point. General physical activity, just movement is cripplingly low in this sub 10-year-old population right now. It's not the same problem we had when we were kids. Like the the adage I always fight on this one is the people saying, "I don't need to do all that crap. I didn't do that when I was a kid." You know, why do I have to pay for my kid to go do these like physical development camps or whatever? Because your kid's not growing up in the same world you grow up in. They're just simply not. Physical activity in schools is way down.

You used to play all the time at school. Your kids are not. You used to play outside all the time. Your kids are not because of screen time as well as you. You are probably watching your phone more. You were on your TV more. You're on your computer more where your parents were not. So your parents were outside or whatever with you. They were working. They were doing whatever else. You combine all these factors and it it's just way down. And then you have sports specialization to add on top of that, which is okay, I'm moving a lot, but I'm now just a volleyball player. Like, you're not a volleyball player, you're a seven-year-old. Like, you're not a like that's not how we should be approaching things.

Um, if you look at actually data, this is one of my favorite examples. Every year they publish these data and it looks at the players in the Super Bowl game and you generally have a 95% multis-port participation rate of the people that play in the Super Bowl. meaning as a poorly worded way of saying 95% of the people who play in the Super Bowl were multiport athletes growing up. They're not specializing in football. They're not only football players. That's not how you get to the Super Bowl. Every time I say that, yes, I know gymnastics is different, right? Like sure, get it. Like gymnast like do gymnastics, they peak at 13 and then the career is over. Cool. I got it. But most sports, golf, baseball, basketball, multi-port is better for all these reasons. Final thing I'll say in this which I think is important to add here is women girls rather and boys your bone mineral density your bone quality as an adult is almost 80% predicted by what you did as a kid specifically between the ages for girls it's like between the ages of 9 and 13 and for boys it's more like 10 or 11 to 14 and puberty just tends to hit a little bit earlier on average. What you do in that window will determine almost all of your bone mineral density later in life. And this is why I've been arguing so much for this is if you're 45 years old, got your first exos scan and got told you have osteopenia or osteoporosis or whatnot. Okay, great. Let's let's do all the things we can. But the reality of it is that's in large part because of what happened when you were 9, 10, 11, and 12 years old. Not exclusively. Tons of stuff can happen as a 23-y old. But you see the point here. So, when I look at this field of of crippling, and by the way, bone marrow density is also falling off a cliff globally. It's getting horrifically bad. It's getting way worse than it's ever been. Um, it's something nobody's talking about in terms of like a national health epidemic. It's just it's just falling off the face of the earth. Well, look what look what happened. Look what happened about 20, 30 years ago in a bunch of 5 to 15 year olds. Like we saw the plummeting initially of physical activity because of internet and so on and so so forth technology and then of course 20 25 years later bone marrow density is just awful in these folks. So it is extremely preventable not for everybody. There are some unique factors that happen. It's going to go down postmenopause with estrogen crashing. The goal here is can you be as high as possible going into that state so you can survive those issues. So yeah I'm super passionate. Nobody likes it. Like if any every time I put something up about vulnerable density, it's just like crickets on the internet. Nobody cares. But I'm like, you should. You should.

Interesting. Well, yeah, that's really interesting, but not surprising considering just, you know, anyway.

Who cares,

right? Right. Well, thank you for that. That was really fascinating. Sounds like we've got to start young with our kids to make things fun and active because it matters as an adult what you do when you're a child. Dom, I'm going to toss it to you because we got some really interesting questions that I know you're eager to ask around recovery and longevity. So, I'm gonna kick it over to you.

Still thinking about the bone marrow like so to do a Dex every year, I guess. Uh, recovery. So, uh, can you be overly aggressive with recovery strategies? So, this is like a question that, you know, ice baths, we have compression, we have NSAID drugs obviously, uh, or maybe even like overeating, like you train and then, you know, you're kind of, you know, a big meal. Uh, maybe the inflammation associate. So, um, could this potentially undermine, uh, your adaptation to the training stimulus if we're focusing, you know, on these recovery modalities and how do you balance that?

Okay, really another awesome set of questions. This is great. You guys are awesome. This is really fun. You You want to think of this on a spectrum, okay? Spectrum in terms of swing, size of a hammer you're swinging, and how chronically you're using it because the answer is different. Let's start at the very beginning. Let's say you had a massage done every day. I I doubt you're ever going to run into problems. There's no rationale. If you used a Normatch every day, if you used uh Hypervolt every day, I I don't think we have any rational to think that's going to lead to any problems and wouldn't undercut any adaptations. We go to the other end of the spectrum and now you start adding pharmacological dosing. you're adding either whether you're actually looking at supplementation and you're say taking really high dose vitamin C vitamin E combination or you're actually directly going into pharmarmacology and you're going into drug now we have a way different answer because the hammer is enormous relative to what's happening from a cellular perspective or hormonal or tissue perspective to a a gun right not even in the same stratosphere we can also tack on things like an ice bath again you're talking now like a pretty big hammer not the same as taking a medication. Like not even close, right? Like if you take clinical grade glutathione injections way different than getting an ice bath once a week, right? Like we're in different stratospheres of of issues. So yeah, we see very clearly the the body adapts to stress and it drops it adapts specifically, right? The old said principle sid specific adaptation to impose demand. You give it a demand, it will adapt to that. If you block that signal for stress, you block the then signal for adaptation. And so if you're coming behind an oxidative stressor and then putting on an antioxidant, then we're now going to block. And that's been shown many times. Muscle hypertrophy is attenuated. It is blunted. If you get into an ice bath immediately after hypertrophy, it is attenuated. If you take really high doses of vitamin C, vitamin E, very specifically, it's not attenuated. If you eat high antioxidant foods, eat blueberries to your heart's content. I'm not aware of any rationale that's ever been shown that that will block. So, it's a it's a co it's a dosing. It's a concentration issue in this particular case. I'm also not aware of anybody who's ever shown that doing an ice bath once a week away from training did anything to hypertrophy. I can't imagine it would. It's just not enough of a dosage to like do much of anything. Right.

The the timing, you know, if not done immediately after. Yeah.

The timing, the frequency.

Yeah.

Are you in 50° water for 5 minutes? Are you in 30°ree water for 12 minutes? like this these are very very different protocols that are presumably going to have very different responses. Um one actually throw out there that people don't think about a lot you we have seen the same thing with downregulation practices. So if you and actually this is actually going back earlier one another uh sex specific thing we have seen men don't tend to always need a specific windown down regulation routine. Women need it more often than men do and that's that's something we've seen in our practice a lot right like men are just psychopaths. You can go through a hard day, you can like be done and shut off where women, especially women with children, it it's just like a it's just they need to actively engage in down regulation. Again, generally across as a generality. So, we see the same thing. Sometimes what's happened in in the sake of recovery is people over downregulate. They're doing these really excessive breath work routines. uh they're, you know, taking these bin blocks an hour in the morning, two hours at night, and you're actually lowering sympathetic tone so much that you can actually get to a position where you feel lethargic. You little lose motivation a little bit. You're your HRB is 180 and you aren't actually primed to do any activity. You're way too far down that end of the spectrum. And that doesn't happen often, like 95% of the time, people should downregulate more than they are for sure. like almost always. But we we do see that from time to time where we're like, "Dude,

Okay,

we don't need an hour of breath work every other hour of the day." Like like chilling out way too much. You're like, "I'm trying to recover. Trying to recover."

Like, well, you don't need to recover from nothing.

Like, there's no stressor here. So, like

I I'd love to see that person, right, that just chills out too much because most of the people in my life are the psychopaths that you're talking about. They're just like go go go. So, that sounds like a

This is um here's here's what this will present. Uh depression, uh can't get back in the gym, not motivated,

hard to get up and like those are the people you'll see like most of the time other things, but sometimes you're like, "Okay, what are you doing?" And people will it's it's with good intent, but they're like, "Man, I don't feel good. I heard this breath work stuff. I heard meditation is good for me, like mental health, because it is. It's really been shown." And so, they do it, but you're doing it. You're actually kind of exacerbating the problem because you're already like overly send it out and we need to actually give you some energy back and that's when we like put some metallic on, put it in your ears and like we're doing some intervals like we need to give you some energy back rather than take it away. Anyways,

um yes, most of the time it's the opposite almost always.

That's awesome. Dom, keep going. Rip if that's okay. I know you've got limited time, Dr. Gin, but I know he's got a few more questions here.

Quick one. what's the most underrated uh and overrated uh recovery modalities and specifically uh we just bought a vibration plate. You know, there's red light, there's things like that. So, you know, the space is pretty crowded with uh gadgets and gimmicks out there and and have you uh we just kind of want to cut through the BS and like what are legit recovery modalities that you would recommend?

Oh man, this is a tough one. um

Vibration plate specifically because I was very hesitant about that until I went to PubMed and I saw some interesting things on bone density and and recovery and so my wife

started using vibration plates in 2004.

Um I had one of the biggest jumps I've ever personally had in power production capacity when doing a lot of work on vibration stuff. Um yeah it's it's not fake. There is stuff there. Specifically, if you look at people who are minimally physically active or not physically active at all, if they're showing up and doing vibration plate three, four times a week, you'll see you'll see a bump there. Um, will you take somebody like the three of us and see a bump from vibration plate? I don't don't know about that. Um, but yeah, there's a little bit of that one there. Um, in terms of other ones, you know, it's really tough because there's this the calculus here is also in exchange for cost. Yeah.

For example, one of my absolute like favorite things in the whole world right now for recovery is this chair called Shift Wave. It's phenomenal. You sit in this thing. It has full body vibration. It's sensory deprivation. It has a cadence of breath work that it puts you through. It has sound control. It's phenomenal. It's also based directly on your HRV. So, you're learning BOF feedback off of it, but it's like 10 grand. So in terms of like it is highly effective but it's also completely unrealistic for the vast majority of people. You contrast that with something like look at the data on walking in nature. Yeah.

It's really impressive and it's fruit or well if you have access so there. Um, so overrated one could say like well um hey real night therapy is overrated. Well, is it overrated relative to cost relative to walking in nature? Well, yeah, because you're going zero to most red light panels are what, 1,500 bucks sort of at this point.

Yeah.

So, you have to factor in what your price point is for that. Um, red light is something I was like vibration with you on that, Dom, like I was just like, "No way. This stuff has to suck." And then you're like, "Actually, okay. All right. There's some All right. There's some data there. Um, could you get the same thing out of sunlight? Probably close. Probably if you live in a place where you can get in the sun and you have a lifestyle where you can be a lot of sun exposure, probably don't need red light therapy at all. So, one could call that overrated, but also one could say I don't live in a place that has that, so it's not overrated for me. So, um, I'm always going to be wishwashing things like that because our clientele and people I've worked with range from zero dollars to money is not even a real thing anymore to me. So we have a it's hard for me to answer outside of that.

Yeah. I I like walking for active recovery. I think that's

Totally

best. Yeah.

Yeah. Walking specifically the way that we will do it always almost always is walking with nasal breathing and no headphones.

No podcast, no business meetings, no music. Uh total blocking of sensory input as much as we can. um that has been a big difference maker for us even compared to walking with headphones, walking with other things. So really giving yourself some time of decompression, force decompression and blocking of sensory input uh has has been one of the biggest ROI things we like we've ever done with our clients. So, uh, three supplements that you would recommend with robust evidence and, uh, and also one that you wish people would stop buying, I think. And I also had a specific, uh, question about liposal creatine and you mentioned beetroot extract and I just started using that this week, last week. And then hydrogen water. So, so it's constellation of questions there, but yeah, three supplements with robust evidence behind it and then one one you wish people would stop buying. So,

yeah, the top one would have to be creatine monohydrate,

right? Like that is the thing. Um, now with the liposoma stuff, we'll see,

right? This is the thing that that the huge percentage of the supplement industry is going to. They're marketing, they're going after. Um I'm just scientists of saying like

we'll see.

Yeah, for me like creatine mono gives a little bit of gut irritation when I go to like 10 to 20. So I like got liposomaal and did a high dose and had no GI irritation. So that's like the only thing that I noticed. I don't know, you know, is more getting in? Who knows? But I just noticed no GI irritation with the Lazone.

Yeah, for sure. The the thing you want to pay a little bit of attention to with creatine is right now the industry gold standard is what's called Crea Pure.

And the rationale for that is most cheap lower level creatine monohydrates for years we always just said like creatine's creatine get it from whatever it doesn't matter. Well, it's not really the case anymore. Um, so manufacturing of Creapure has a slightly but clinically meaningful difference in purity and so you're reducing the amount of heavy metals contaminants and so on and so forth which is actually like a bigger deal that something we just didn't think about really honestly as a field for for decades. Um, so if you get Crea Pure anyone that makes that and it has transparent testing for contaminants and things like that then I think you will well generally you'll reduce some of the negative symptoms like that. Like you'll often see that. So when we hear things like that, I'm like, "Have you tried have you bought it from a brand that uses Crea Pure?" And then when they do, they're like, "Oh, okay. Now, now that things seems kind of way, but not always." Some people still get nauseous and and whatever from the higher dosage. But creatine is on that list of like gez. Uh I mean, I think there's three more papers this week that just came out looking at different dependent variables on creatine that I had never thought of before. And you're like, "Oh my goodness." Like it just cheaps landing on the list of like pretty cheap relative to stuff

Cognitive function. Yeah. It's like off the off the charts.

Yeah. The Alzheimer's paper that just came out this this week and cognitive function uh to free radicals and antioxidant stuff to metabols to mental health to other stuff where we're like what in the world? So that one is a gift that gets keeps giving. When you actually think about it, it actually makes a whole bunch of sense. It is that forgotten fourth macronutrient. That's what I always talk about. Is the most direct fastest fuel source we have in the body of an actual fuel source on a stimulant, right? It's like the pre pre-carbohydrate, if you will,

Right?

Um, so that's that would be certainly on that list of number one. uh fish oil, omega-3s more specifically, is also on that list of just almost no detriment or downside uh to that whatsoever and a a cascade of positive benefits for omega-3s. So, that land's pretty good. After that, you start getting into ones that are a little bit more esoteric. Multivitamins can be, you know, a mix of like eh to like okay, a little bit sort of good. That's generally more context dependent. High quality diet versus moderate versus no, high activity or not. Like those ones will change that calculus a little bit. Kind of second tier ones that would fall on that would be then magnesium. Magnesium is low in a lot of people. It is really low in most people that are highly physically active for a bunch of reasons. Uh it's just just not around not as abundant in the food sources that it used to be. Soil issues and things like that. And so you'll see that one pop up pretty good. that it's involved in a a large list of processes throughout the entire body and is is lower than it used to be in our food. And so that's that's the rationale for that as is a pretty common supplement. So you'll see that one again pretty especially people that are physically active a lot particularly that those that are sweating a lot and really training hard. So those would be sort of on my top list. um ones people I wish people would stop taking. I'll probably have to defer to uh colloquially energy drinks

in this one. Totally fine with stimulants, totally fine with caffeine specifically. Um, but I'm I'm just not a huge fan of uh the servings, the dosages, the amounts that folks take when they take them, the other things that come in those products, you know, as as a big group. I think in general many people would be a lot healthier if they reduced or minimized or you know some doesn't mean zero you know don't get mad lane sorry but uh I don't think it's a good idea to drink five cans of energy drinks a day for most people

uh hydrogen water so that that one comes up a lot and I just had two emails about it just like yesterday. So, uh, I've been taking these hydrogen tablets, you know, in there. I don't I've been feeling great this week. I don't know.

Uh, I did revisit the literature and I'm seeing some stuff with anti-inflammatories, so it's a question that I keep getting. So, hydrogen.

Yeah. Well, you and I have probably read the same papers in the last couple of weeks because I have also had an onslaught of uh in the last month of these funds.

Uh, a couple things to pay attention to here. Number one, um, we're not talking about alkaline water. So molecular water or hydrogen water is not the same. We actually ran a study with one of my students years ago on alkaline water. It just like nothing shook up at all. Um, I would say generally that field was is kind of dead. It just didn't do much of anything. So this is a new way. This is specific again will will be referred to as molecular water or hydrogen water. This comes in a couple of forms. One group will sell tabs and you dissolve in your water. Others show sell a special bottle that does it for you. Uh the research is more impressive than I was anticipating.

Yeah.

That said, the primary mechanism is not pH.

Yeah.

You you drink a liter of anything that is, you know, slightly altered pH, you're going to change that right back to your endogenous pH instantaneously. Basically seems to be antiaxis. Again, we're reading the same papers. Okay, fine. So then my question would be the followup. If it is an antioxidant play, that's great. That's a really good thing. There's probably easier ways to do it though, right? Like antioxidants are a very easy thing to get to from food, from other supplements. And so the question now is yeah, the dots have to be connected. Number one, is the product you're buying been clinically shown to actually add the hydrogen? I'm not aware of any studies with any commercial products that have done that yet. Can we show your product is actually executing on that? That inflicts step number one and that's missing from the literature as much as I can tell right now. Then step number two is let's assume it's actually in there. Is it leading to a clinically meaningful difference in whatever metric we want to look at that exceeds what I could get with a couple blueberries? The answer might be yes. It could very very well be yes. Um, because of the fact that we could dose it at a level bioavailability other nutrients and counter anti-nutrient. So the answer could sure be I'm very open to this as much as I generally start with disdain on this thing. Um, so that that's where I stand on the molecular water hydrogen. All that to wrap up and say I think our position of caution here has been warranted and is majorly warranted because of two reasons. one, we've all been around long enough. We see how this stuff plays out. Comes up hot couple and then filters back down. So, I don't how many times do we have to be fooled before we go into these things with more caution than optimism? So, the false status of pessimistic even when we have a couple of studies should be the place. And right now, I think with molecular water, that's where I'm at. I'm cautiously optimistic, interested, paying more attention, but I'm not a believer yet. I'm not recommending it to people. I'm not buying it myself. Second one would be um the people that are associated with that movement are are beyond low and untrustworthy. And so there may be some good actors in that field. We don't know. But we certainly know of a bunch who are extremely bad actors. And so because of that, that field itself is going to pay the consequence of that.

That's just part of the game.

Yeah. I it reminds me I failed my exercise physiology exam in 1995 because I wrote up an erogenic aid being creatine monohydrate and now I'd like to go back to my professors at Ruckers University. So 1995 it came out like 1994 because I was using it you know first in 1993 or four I started using it but the research was that not there in 1995 you know and I I I like went back and forth and there was a couple papers but um yeah so like what was that like 30 40 years ago it's like

So this is a classic case of uh you were punished because your process was wrong even though you were right but you were not basing that on a bunch of high quality papers because they didn't exist. So you were rough three. Yeah.

But the professors were also right because your process wasn't what we would say is the best.

But we know the scientific rationale was there. But with the hydrogen it's still a little bit fuzzy. You know how actually mechanistically how it's working. I think yeah

Super fuzzy at this point,

right? Like because the other answer would be okay. Wow. Lactate.

Yeah.

Like this is like

Yeah. You can measure, you know, do the lactate meter and measure that the effects on that. So,

Yeah.

Well, we'll have to check back in at a later date because this was a super fun conversation. We might have to have a part two if you have the time because it was we've got what that um

We got a lot more questions. But yeah, part two,

we got hundreds of questions from CO2 tolerance to circadian timing, you name it. But um maybe another time we'll have to have you back on because this was so much fun. And I just want to let our listeners know, I'm sure a lot of them are already following you, but where can people find you? Um, and maybe even learn more about uh Parker University Human Performance Center as well.

Oh, great. Thank you. The uh social media, Instagram and and X um Dr. Andy Galpin are the easiest places to follow along live. Uh my website andygalpin.com is kind of a hub of course as they always are. And then the podcast perform with Dr. Andy Galpin. Season two, as we mentioned, is out now. So, we do about 10 or so episodes per season. We'll have another one later this year. So, you got plenty of time to go back to season one and make your way through all those things if you so choose. And then, yeah, thank you. We um I'm actually have recently in the last year transitioned to Parker University and we are building a 64,000 square foot human performance center. We are under construction right now and we're very very excited about that. There's uh some stuff in there that that you won't find anywhere else in the world. So, um we have open space for master students. We have an online program. We have an in-person program. I have space in my lab. I have funding right now. So, um any people out there that are looking or have a friend, feel free to to share, pass along. If uh faculty members or whatnot have talented undergrads looking for spots, uh feel free to send them my way.

Amazing.

We certainly will. We'll link everything in the show description. And again, thank you for this really fun conversation that really offered so many practical insights, but also science as well, which is is what you're so talented at in combining the two worlds of practicality meets science and education. So, thank you for the important work you do, for chatting with us today, and um we'll look forward to hopefully having you on another time soon.

Thank you so much. It was awesome. Super fun, actually. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you, Andy. appreciate it.

Thanks for watching this episode with Dr. Andy Galpin. I hope you're walking away with some major insights and action steps just as Dom and I did. It was such a mindblowing episode full of just so many different topics and areas of performance from myths busting myths about strength training in women and kids to exploring the real role of recovery and supplements in muscle performance and longevity. And it's truly been such a eyeopening evidencebacked episode that I really hope you enjoyed. And if you haven't yet and you loved this episode and maybe some of the others that we've done, please be sure to head on over to give us a review, write us a comment. It really goes a long way in helping us spread the message of what we're trying to do here at Metabolic Health Initiative. And if you haven't done so yet, be sure to check out Dr. Dr. Andy Galpin's website, andygalpin.com, for more information, for links to his podcast. And finally, last but not least, don't miss our live Q&A with Dr. Andy Galpin, where you actually have an opportunity to gather all your questions from watching this episode and then ask him directly in a live Q&A on our medical education platform. It's going down October 9th at 8 a.m. PT, 11:00 a.m. ET. Be sure to sign up because that's how you get the link. Go to membership.mabolicinitiative.com/galpin. That's membership.mabolicinitiative.comgalpin to sign up and join us on October 9th. And as always, again, if you like this episode, give us a review. It goes such a long way. And until next time, thank you so much for listening and watching the Metabolic Link. We'll see you soon. Do you love learning about metabolic health? So do we. It's why we created the Metabolic Initiative, an online educational platform providing evidence-based education on metabolic health and therapies for health care professionals and the general public. By joining the Metabolic Initiative, you'll gain access to hundreds of expert lectures, interviews, panel discussions, and even private episodes of the Metabolic Link. CMEs are available. Go to metabolicinitiative.com to get started. And as always, thank you for listening to the Metabolic Link.