Essentials: Optimal Protocols to Build Strength & Grow Muscles | Dr. Andy Galpin

19:01Andy Galpin:And now you're selecting exercises based on a muscle you want to work. For strength development and power, we want to think about movements rather than individual muscle groups. So there should be things like I need to train explosive hip extension, which is like a vertical jump or something like that. I want to train pushing or pulling movements. I want to train rotation, which is a whole area we haven't gotten into, which is very important for overall health and wellness longevity. So we want to select big movements by the muscle, the movement patterns that we want to introduce. And we just want to select a reasonable balance between these.

19:39Andy Galpin:I don't care what the exact ratio is. You just don't want to go an entire six months without doing anything in this rotational area or an entire eight to 10 weeks without doing something that's a lower body hinge, right? So any number of examples there. So just think about the rough movement patterns, upper and lower, push and pull, and then some sort of rotation. That puts you in a pretty good spot. If you're using three by five method, and you're going to pick as little as three exercises, just pick one from each one of those groups. So that's exercise choice, our first variable. The next one is exercise order.

20:12Andy Galpin:So because that everything driving power and strength is quality-based, you wanna do these at the beginning of your workout. You would not want to do anything fatiguing before this. So no cardiovascular training, no other repetition to failure stuff. If you do those before and now you're slower, all you've done is practice getting slower. You also need to do them when you're very fresh because they are the most neurologically demanding. They're complicated. They tend to have multiple steps and they're often in multiple planes and coordination is a difficult thing. And if you're trying to do all that at maximum speed, your nervous system needs to be tremendously fresh.

20:48Andy Galpin:And so any amount of fatigue here is only going to compromise results. The next one after that is volume. The general number we're going to look at here is something like three to 20 sets.

20:57Andrew Huberman:Total per workout.

20:58Andy Galpin:Per workout. but that would be like 20 would be a little bit of a special case. The last one is frequency and we've already sort of indirectly talked about that where frequency can be as high as you'd like in this area it really depends on your recovery. If you're really truly pushing maximum strength you probably do need a few days to recover. Last little piece here is progression. How do I progress over time? So I mentioned this earlier but just wanted to fill this gap right back in before we head over to hypertrophy, which is three to 5 % increase per week of intensity in general. And you can do upwards of about 5 % increase in volume per week over time.

21:33Andy Galpin:And I generally recommend running that for at longest eight weeks, but probably most realistically, you want to go about five weeks or so, and then have some sort of a deload or back off week. If you do that, you're generally going to be a pretty good spot. One last little thing I don't think we did justice is intention. And the reason I want to go back to this now is because we've talked a lot about specific loads you have to hit. And that's generally the case. But if intention is there, you can fudge those numbers in terms of how much load goes on the bar. In fact, you can get as low as no load on the bar.

22:10Andy Galpin:A great example here is like a plank exercise. So you can do a plank in which you get in a position and you simply contract the least amount necessary to hold the position. Also, you could contract as hard as possible, pulling your scapula down and back, squeezing your core, squeezing your quads, squeezing your glutes. That is actually going to still help strength production because you're attempting to contract very, very hard, even though, quote unquote, the load is the same. That thing extends to weight on the bar. So you could theoretically see large improvements in strength at 50 % of your one at max if you're contracting as hard as possible.

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23:57Andy Galpin:Probably a better way to think about that question is really, what stimuli do I need to give the muscle to induce hypertrophy? Now, there are hormonal factors that are important. There are nutritional factors. But just to stick with the context of training, this is really going to frame a lot of our answers. and as you'll see, it's one of the reasons why I call hypertrophy training kind of idiot-proof in terms of programming. Now, the work is hard, difficult, and all that, but the precision needed is a lot less than what we saw in power and strength. And so if you note there, it's very important that you do it in this style with this intent and within these parameters, and if you're outside these parameters, it's not gonna be it.

24:41Andy Galpin:Hypertrophy has a very broad range in terms of your actual applications. And this is why you have and will continue to see countless styles of training that all work. So if we look at like the classic dogma, we have to basically challenge the muscle to need to come back, in this case, specifically bigger. And the nutrients need to be there to support that growth. So all you have to do there to not fail is to make sure the training is hard enough and it's gonna work. The only wrong combination here is infrequent and low intensity and low volume. That's it. As long as one of those three variables is high, you're going to get there, which is why crafting your program, which is best for you, is actually fairly simple when it comes to hypertrophy.

25:25Andy Galpin:You just have to make sure you do the work. I actually think that it's important that you do some number of combination of what we call bilateral and unilateral exercises. So bilateral being, think about it like a squat, where bi meaning two, lateral, you have two feet on the ground moving in sequence here. Unilateral is one. So this could be something as simple as a rear foot elevated split squat. It could be a single leg leg press or single leg curl. It could be a pistol squat, something where the individual limb is moving one at a time. Also very important for making sure for hypertrophy's sake, you're not getting any imbalances as you progress, especially through months and years of training.

26:05Andy Galpin:So make sure you're doing a little bit of a combination. whether you want to pick specific implements. That's really a methods question and a preference question. And then it is concepts. So dumbbell, great. Kettlebell, fine. Barbell, awesome. Band, doesn't matter. Body weight. None of these things are as important because all you're trying to do is create a certain insult in the tissue. And the implement is just whichever one you feel best doing it. Because of the way that people move differently, their anthropometrics and their biomechanics and even their technique, The same exact exercise will not necessarily work the same exact muscle groups for multiple people.

26:44Andy Galpin:So if you and I both went and did a back squat, if you did it a little bit more of what we call a high bar squat, so this is the bar is literally sitting up higher up on your neck. You're keeping your back more vertical. And because in order to do that, you shift your knees much further past your toes, keeping of course your whole foot on the ground in good position. Okay. that's going to generally put more of an emphasis on the knee joint right and so that's not a bad thing you tend to see a little bit more work in the quads there a little bit less work in the spinal erectors and back because you're actually not supporting the weight horizontally which is a different it's a much more difficult position it's vertically stacked if I were doing the classic low bar squat which is again lowering the bar down my further down my back towards a little more like my shoulder blades, I probably take a little bit of a wider stance.

27:32Andy Galpin:And when I squat, I drive my glutes back further away from the midline. In fact, as a general rule, if you take the midline of your body, the thing that moves the farthest away from that midline is likely to be the thing that's activating the most. So in the case of the front squat, you're not generally going to be using your glutes as much if you're in that, or not even front squat, just that high bar squat where you're very, very vertical. Your knees are going to be moving very far over your toes, which is fantastic. Therefore, it's a little bit more knee dominant, that's how we say it. The other version here, you can keep your shins really close to vertical.

28:03Andy Galpin:You move your butt backwards. You're going to have to then lean forward with your torso, which means it'll be more low back, more glutes, and a little bit less knee. Now, that's a general statement. It's not necessarily always true, but as a guideline there, that is one exact exercise where you may be going, man, I'm trying to improve this clear weakness I have in my quads. I can't even leg extension my body weight. I have a significant problem there. So maybe in your particular case, if I'm hammering you or you're hammering yourself in a squat exercise and you're wondering why your quads aren't getting any stronger or growing in any size, it may be because of the style of the movement.

28:39So I may need to go, Andrew, all right, look, squats in general,

28:43Andy Galpin:if you look at the research are an excellent exercise for quad development, but for you, they're not because of the way you stand or just because of, you know, neural activation, it doesn't matter. So I need to take you to a machine and isolate that muscle group so we can make sure we see development in that. So if you're trying to grow a specific body part, area, individual muscle, it's very important that you're actually seeing progress there. And don't worry about, well, in the textbook, the bench press is supposed to be good for your pec. Because if you're not actually moving the right position, or it depends on the angle in which your sternum actually sits in your body, a bench press may actually be doing very little for your a pec.

29:19Andy Galpin:And you may need to adjust to say an incline bench or a decline bench or a pec fly. So machines can be fantastic at letting you isolate without having to worry about things like stability, your low back position, getting hurt, where's your neck at? You can really concentrate on just the movement, concentrate on the muscle and let everything else kind of go away and ensure you're getting training in that specific area. What about exercise order? You get to play a couple of games here. When we talked about strength and power, I basically said stick to the big movements, most complicated and compound movements first.

29:52Andy Galpin:You don't have to do that with hypertrophy. You can do this in a couple of ways. You can do the thing you're just simply most interested in first. You can do this thing called pre-fatigue. So say you're going to do a back day. You could go in and do nothing but isolated biceps as your very first exercise, and then roll into your pulling movements, because what you'll see is during most pulling activities, the biceps are a secondary or tertiary muscle group. But you've pre-fatigued them. You've guaranteed that muscle of most interest, got its most training in, and everything else is secondary. So you can start, if you want, with single joint movements.

30:26Andy Galpin:You can start with isolation stuff, or you can start with compound stuff. Either way, it just really comes down to preference and what you're specifically trying to develop. Now, this also goes back to the exercise choice question, right? Because it's sort of the same thing, right? Like, which one am I choosing? And where I wanted it to cap this was, the exercise splits. And so we just sort of talked about, am I doing body part splits? And I know a question I get a lot here is, well, which ones should I package together? I'm not really concerned with it. All you should worry about is how many times per week, and in fact, total volume you achieve on a muscle group per week.

31:02Andy Galpin:And it doesn't really matter how those things are folded in. It's really a personal preference issue. One mistake that we see here commonly is grossly underappreciating that the legs are not a muscle group, right? So the legs have a whole bunch of muscle groups in them. So we see a classic split, like I'll do shoulders and chest Monday, and then I'll do, you know, biceps and forearms Tuesday, and then legs Wednesday or whatever, and then back to upper body. And then I was like, you're like, wait a You have four days dedicated to the upper body and one for quote unquote legs. Hopefully you can see the imbalance that's going to happen there over time is you're going to do far more upper body than you are lower body.

31:47Andy Galpin:And that's not appropriate. So you just want to think about your lower body like you would do. If you're going to do body part splits, then include those things as well. And don't just chunk everything in as legs once a week. If you want to do that, that's actually okay. But that day has to be very, very challenging. And you probably should do quite a bit of volume there because you're almost surely not going to hit the total weekly volume needed to optimize muscle growth if you're literally only doing once a week of your quote unquote legs.

32:13Andrew Huberman:Along those lines, let's talk volume. Yep. How much volume does each muscle group need per week in order to generate and for that matter, maintain hypertrophy?

32:24Andy Galpin:Right. So the kind of minimum number we're going to look for here is 10 working sets per week. Correct. Per muscle group. Correct. So 10 would be sort of the minimum number you want to get to, the more realistic number that most people, especially if you're advanced or even intermediate, is more like 15 to 20 working sets per week. Okay. Now, if you're very well trained, you probably want to even push more towards like 25. And in fact, past that, there's not a lot of research. If you went in and you did three sets of 10, it's a very standard.

32:54Andrew Huberman:Three sets of 10 repetitions. Correct.

32:56Andy Galpin:You're already at three. You did that three days a week. You're at your nine. That's almost 10. If you also just went to the gym one day a week, you did three sets of 10, and you did three exercises, you're at nine working sets. You're basically done. So achieving 10 sets per week per muscle group, and now we're not even talking about indirect activation of a secondary. So you're going to hit 10 fairly easy. Extension to that, hitting 20 is actually still not that hard. However, if you're not seeing adaptations, then I'd say maybe the repetitions aren't enough. So if you're going to do a set of 25, and you finish it and you're like, ooh, yeah, that was kind of starting to get hard at the end.

33:34Andy Galpin:That's not going to be enough. If you're going to do a set of five or six and the same sort of expression comes out of your mouth, it's not going to be enough. So in that case, it doesn't matter, your rep range, if you're not getting somewhat close to failure. Again, it doesn't need to be complete failure. A good number to think about is like minus two, which is what we call reps in reserve, which is sort of like I got within two or so reps of failure and then I stopped. You have a lot of room to play here. You also have a lot of room to adapt based on your circumstances. God, I'm short on time today.

34:04Andy Galpin:Typically, my workout takes me 60 minutes for this plan I have. I've only got 35 today. What do I do? If you're training for hypertrophy, you need to make sure you hit that total volume. So in this particular case, lower the load, lower the rest intervals, and just get to the burn and get going as much as you can. If you're training for strength, I would rather you cut your volume in half. get those few repetitions done at that high load and just don't do very many sets today that's a better result so the goal that you're going after is going to determine what we call chaos management which is that thing like that um running out of time today my time is short or you don't even think my time was short something got cut off i'm not feeling it today i'm in a hotel etc etc etc which is life right that's going to be 10 to 50 of your workouts is going to be chaos management

34:51Andrew Huberman:I'd like to ask about frequency, but I'd like to frame it a little bit differently than that. I'd like to ask about total workout duration, which dovetails with frequency because if one is hitting the appropriate number of sets per week and one is combining different muscle groups on the same days, well, then workouts are going to be a very different duration than if one is doing a different body part each day, for instance. And so I feel like any discussion about frequency has to be within the context of workout duration and vice versa.

35:26Andy Galpin:Yeah. If you are a, a lifting junkie and you're very consistent in your schedule, I'm actually okay with body parts, but most people are not that. And so the concern there is if you say are isolating and waiting to do your glutes on one day of the week, and something happens on that day. You might go another 13 days now before training, you know, between workouts. And that's really difficult to maintain. The frequency won't be high enough unless the load and volume on that one day is astronomically high. It's just not going to happen. So while if you look at the research, frequency in terms of how many days per week doesn't matter that much as long as the total load and failure are equivalent.

36:10Andy Galpin:Practically, it's a challenge. So it's hard because life gets in the way for most people, especially if you have kids and a job and all these things out there. So I actually prefer doing something more like three days a week of total body. And if something happens, you've just missed that body part for 48 hours, 72 hours. I like that a little better for most people, not because it's more effective, but just because it's a little bit more resilient to life and you can get there. If you wanted to actually do a little bit of a combination, so if you wanted to do like two days a week of whole body and then two days a week of a little bit of a body part split, then you're actually sort of hedging against all risks there.

36:48Andy Galpin:As long as you get to that total number there. Now, there is actually some evidence in a couple of ways that maybe a little bit more frequently is a little bit better, but the difficulty is now going back to the practicality question of like how many people really can train just their strength training six days a week. That doesn't count any of their long duration stuff. It doesn't have their high heart rate, their flexibility. Okay. It's just really, really, really hard to get all that stuff in. So it is, it tends to be easier on folks in terms of execution and long-term adherence, in my opinion, to get that volume accomplished in a little bit more frequent patterns, but not once a week.

37:27Andy Galpin:So I like to kind of have it right there for most people, Again, not because it is technically quote unquote more effective, but because you're less likely to fail to progress because of skipping a workout, something popping up. Great.

37:41Andrew Huberman:Well, thank you for that very informative answer. This was incredibly informative. Thank you so very much.