Essentials: Optimize Your Exercise Program with Science-Based Tools | Jeff Cavaliere

**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 Jeff Cavaliere. Jeff, such a pleasure for me to have you here.

**Jeff Cavaliere** (0:23)
I'm glad to be here, it's amazing.

**Andrew Huberman** (0:25)
I'm a long time consumer of your content. I've learned a tremendous amount about fitness, both in the weight room, cardio, nutrition, things that I've applied for over a decade. One of your mantras is, you know, if you want to look like an athlete, train like an athlete. And I think that's something really special that sets aside what you do from what a lot of other very well qualified people do. What's the sort of contour of a basic program that anybody could think about as a starting place?

**Jeff Cavaliere** (0:56)
I think it's like a 60-40 split, which would be leaning towards weight training, you know, strength and then, you know, the conditioning aspect be about 40%. So if you look at it over the course of a training week, I mean, five days in a gym would be a great task. And obviously not in the gym, it could be done at home, but three days strain training, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, conditioning, Tuesday, Thursday, you know, two days. It's a pretty easy roundabout way to split that up. Of course, depending upon training goals. And as you said, the aesthetic goals, like that will shift dramatically. But if you want to see the benefits of both, that's probably the effective dose for strain training and the effective dose for conditioning at the bare minimum level. If we try to keep our workouts to an hour or less, if possible. Now, depending upon the split that you're following, if you're on a total body split, there's just gonna be more that has to be done in a given amount of time. But in general, when you're not focused on that one aspect, but the overall health picture, then you can get the job done in under an hour. And again, I always say, on top of if you want to look like an athlete, train like an athlete is you can either train long or you can train hard, but you can't do both. As you start to get older, it's the length of the workout that actually causes more problems than the intensity of what you're doing, particularly if you're warmed up properly, like you said. I've found personally that my warmup has had to become more of an integral part of my workout than it ever has before.

**Andrew Huberman** (2:17)
In terms of splits, you mentioned splits. And so for those who aren't familiar with this term, warm splits, it's really which body parts are you training on which days? I've seen you discuss three days a week, whole body workouts. I've heard of splits like a pushing one day, pulling another day, legs another day, a day off, repeat. I mean, there's so many variations on this. What's governing the split?

**Jeff Cavaliere** (2:41)
For me, the first rule is will you stick to it? I don't particularly like full body splits. I don't necessarily like to have to train everything. Now, of course, the volumes will come down per muscle group, but if you don't like to do that and you actually don't look forward to your workout because you're dreading having to do everything and feeling maybe too fatigued by the time your workout is over, or the fact that those generally do take a little bit longer and don't fit into your schedule, I don't care how effective the split is. A split not done is not effective. So you need to find one that fits. So maybe you go into an alternative option like a push pull legs like you mentioned. That could be done either one cycle through the week on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday split or it could be twice in a week so you're actually training six times where you repeat it, pull push legs, pull push legs or however you want to do it with either a day off in between the three days or at the end of the six days. And again, that actually impacts your schedule. I've broken that down before where if you put it in between the three days, it's good because you're giving yourself an extra rest day in between but it starts to shift that day off every week as we wrap around. And for those guys that were choosing that seven day schedule out of convenience in our heads, it starts to mess with that off day. So others like to just keep it predictably, let's say on a Sunday and train six days in a row. But that's a better way to maybe group similar muscle actions together, which I think I definitely prefer that because if I'm going to be training, pulling movements, at least there's a synergy between them. And I feel like I'm looking to achieve one goal that day.