Essentials: How to Assess & Improve All Aspects of Your Fitness | Dr. Andy Galpin

Andrew Huberman (0:00)

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin. Dr. Professor Andy Galpin, super excited to have you here. You're such an immense treasure trove of information on physical training and optimizing your specific goals and outcomes. How should I or anyone else for that matter think about their level of fitness in terms of really assessing whether or not I'm as fit as I could be and should be, both for sake of health and performance?

Andy Galpin (0:44)

When it comes to exercise, people generally have two major goals in mind. Goal number one is achieving some sort of appearance, right? This is I want to be big or want to not be too big or I want to be lean. There is an aesthetic component to almost everybody. They want to look a certain way or not look a certain way. The other one is functionality. So I want to be able to perform a certain way. Now again, that definition differs per person. So I want to be better at strength. I want to be better at mobility. I want to be able to have energy throughout the day, whatever it is. So there's some sort of appeal to aesthetic and there's some sort of appeal to functionality. So within both of those categories, we want to be in a position where we can understand, where do I need to go with my exercise training so that I can be as fit and as healthy and achieve these goals that I want now, as well as be in a position where I can maintain them for a long period of time. So this blends both immediate goals. So say you're just interested in squatting a lot of weight. Say you're interested in running 5K time the best you want. It doesn't matter.

It blends that with the desire to have a long wellness span, to be fit throughout life, to achieve all those things for as long as possible. So then the question kind of comes back to saying, how do I know which area I need to focus on the most? And why am I not achieving these goals? Or how can I get there more effectively?

And if we look at the big picture, we have to understand that there are several major components to physical fitness that are going to be required in all of these categories.

And to achieve that, there are a handful of components that have to happen. So what I'd love to do today is, over the course of our discussion is, hit exactly what those concepts are, and then cover a whole bunch of different methods, and we could do that for hours. But we'll cover a number of them for various goals.

Andrew Huberman (2:32)

What are the major adaptations that one can create in their body using exercise?

Andy Galpin (2:37)

The physiological adaptations can be bucketed really into nine areas. So the very first one is what I call skill or technique. This could be running more effectively, this could be practicing a skill, like shooting a ball or an implement.

Swinging a golf club, anything like that. I call that skill development. The second one is speed. This is simply moving at a higher velocity or with a better rate of acceleration. That's very similar to the next one, which is power and power is speed multiplied by force. The next one then of course on top of that is force or strength. Those are really synonymous terms, right? How effectively can you move something? Now, this is often confused strength rather as muscular endurance. So what I mean by that is strength truly is a marker of what's the maximum thing you can move or it's the maximum amount of force you can produce one time. Number five is muscle hypertrophy. And this is the first time now we're talking about an appearance rather than a functional outcome. This is the first one that's just simply how big is your muscle and that's muscle hypertrophy or muscle size.

After that is muscular endurance. So this is how many repetitions you can typically do of a movement. So think of how many push-ups in a row you can do, how many sit-ups in a minute you can do, things that are typically in like five to fifty repetition sort of range, and it is almost always local muscle. A push-up test is really how many reps that your triceps and pecs and deltoids can do. It is not a cardiovascular endurance, it is not a global physiological endurance, it's specific to typically one or a few muscle groups at a time. This is why you have to do multiple tests for sort of every group there.