Fitness Toolkit: Protocol & Tools to Optimize Physical Health

**Andrew D. Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we are discussing fitness. Now, fitness, of course, is vitally important for cardiovascular health, for strength, for endurance, for lifespan, for health span. I can't think of anyone out there that wouldn't want to have healthy hormonal function, healthy cardiovascular function, to live a long time and to feel vital, that is to have a long health span as well as a long lifespan. Fitness and fitness protocols are tremendously powerful for developing all of that. However, despite there being an enormous amount of information out there on the internet and in books and elsewhere, it can be a bit overwhelming. So today's episode is really designed to synthesize science-based tools that we've covered on the podcast, some with expert guests, like Dr. Andy Galpin or Dr. Peter Atiyah or world-renowned movement specialist, Ido Portal or physiotherapist and strength and conditioning coach, Jeff Cavalier. We've had all of them as guests on the podcast, and each and every one of them provided a wealth of knowledge in terms of the various things that you can do to optimize very specific or multiple aspects of fitness. Today we're going to do something a little bit different than usual. Typically on the Huberman Lab podcast, I offer mechanism up front or first, and then we talk about protocols that you can use that really lean on those science and science-based mechanisms. Today I'm going to describe a specific protocol that serves as a general template that anyone, in fact, everyone can use in order to maximize all aspects of fitness, so that includes endurance, strength, flexibility, hypertrophy, aesthetic changes, et cetera. However, this general framework can also be modified that is customized to your particular needs. So if you're somebody who really wants to build more strength or bigger muscles, you can change the protocol and the overall program according to that. And I'll talk about very specific ways to do that. Or if you're somebody who really just wants to maintain strength, but you want to build endurance, we'll talk about that. And of course we will cover real life issues such as, should you train if you are sleep deprived? What about food? When should you eat? What if you haven't eaten and you're hungry? Should you still train, et cetera, et cetera. We're going to cover all of that again in the context of this, what I would call foundational template of fitness. And this foundational template of fitness is something that I personally use. In fact, I've used it for over three decades. Hard to believe that I'm that old, but I just recently turned 47 and I still use this basic protocol or template across the week and modify it according to what my particular goals are that year, that month, even that day, because I like you live in the real world. And sometimes I've been traveling or I miss a workout. Yes, it does happen. Or life isn't organized in exactly the way that I need to in order to have everything go according to the protocol that's on paper. So we're going to discuss real world issues and how to work with the real world issues in order to get the most out of your fitness program. And again, by the end of today's program, I can assure you, you will have a template protocol that you can build up from, build out, change and modify, and that will really serve your fitness goals according to the science and what peer-reviewed studies and the experts that have appeared on this podcast and other podcasts really tell us is best and optimal for our fitness. Before we dive into today's content about fitness and fitness protocols, I want to tell you about a brand new study that is very exciting and frankly, very unusual. This is a study that was published out of the University of Houston, examining a, what I would call a micro exercise or a micro movement. It's a very small movement of a very small portion of your body. In fact, just 1% of your musculature that when it's performed continuously while seated has at least what they report are very dramatic positive changes in terms of blood sugar utilization and metabolism. So the title of this study is a potent physiological method to magnify and sustain soleus oxidative metabolism improves glucose and lipid regulation. This study was published in iScience and as I mentioned earlier, it is getting a lot of attention and it's very unusual. Without going into all the details of this study, let me just briefly give you a little bit of the background. First of all, you have a muscle called the soleus. The soleus muscle is a more or less wide flat muscle that sits beneath what most people think of as their calf, although it's part of the calf muscle. The other portion of the calf is called the gastrocnemius. The soleus sits below that. Now, the soleus muscle is a unique muscle because it's largely slow twitch muscle fibers. It's designed to be used continuously over and over again for stabilizing your body when you're standing upright, for walking. This is a muscle that's designed to contract over and over and over again. In fact, you could walk all day on this muscle and most likely it would not get sore. You've probably done that and it did not get sore. In contrast, a muscle like your bicep or your tricep, if I were to have you perform hundreds or thousands of repetitions, even with a very light weight, a one-pound weight or a two-pound weight, eventually it would fatigue. You would feel a sort of a burn there. It's a very unusual set of muscles to use repeatedly, but the soleus is an unusual muscle in that it really is designed to be used continuously. Now this study was focused on how people who sit a lot of the day and don't have the opportunity for a lot of physical movement or maybe who don't even exercise at all can improve their metabolism and glucose utilization without going into a deep dive about glucose utilization because we've done the deep dive on this podcast on episodes such as metabolism, et cetera. You can look those up at hubermanlab.com. They're all timestamped and available there. Anytime you eat, your blood sugar goes up to some extent. So your blood glucose as it's called goes up to some extent and then insulin is a hormone that's used to essentially chaperone and sequester and use that blood glucose so it's basically the idea is you don't want blood glucose to go too high. Hyperinsulinemia is something associated with blood glucose that's too high because insulin goes up to essentially match the level of blood glucose. You also don't want to be hypoglycemic. You don't want to have blood sugar that's too low and insulin is involved in both regulating peaks and troughs in blood sugar, blood glucose. So we can basically say, and this is very simple, but we can basically say that you don't want blood glucose to be elevated too much or for too long. That's not good. In fact, people who have diabetes, because they don't make insulin, people who have type 1 diabetes do not make insulin at all. Their blood glucose is so high that they actually have to take insulin in order to regulate it. Otherwise their blood glucose can go so high that it can damage cells and damage organs. It can even kill people. People who have type 2 diabetes are so-called insulin insensitive. They make insulin, but the receptors to insulin are not sensitive to it. And so they make more insulin than normally would be made and blood glucose isn't regulated properly, et cetera, et cetera. The take-home message about blood glucose is that you want your blood glucose levels to go up when you eat, but not too high and you don't want them to stay elevated for too long. This study looked at how people who are largely sedentary or at least sitting can increase the utilization, the clearance of glucose from the bloodstream after eating. And they also looked at overall metabolism for people, get this, that were using just that 1% of muscle, the soleus, by doing what they call a soleus pushup. So the soleus pushup can be described very simply as if you're sitting down with your knee bent at an approximately right angle, like a square corner, and pushing up, or I should say lifting your heel while pushing down on your toe and contracting the calf muscle, as it were, and then lowering the heel and then lifting that heel again, lowering the heel, lifting the heel again. Each one of those is what they call a soleus pushup. This study had people continuously do soleus pushups, and they looked at things like blood glucose utilization, they looked at metabolism, and so on. Now, a couple of important things about this study before I tell you what they discovered, which was frankly pretty miraculous, almost hard to believe, and yet I believe the data, the data look to be collected quite well, and there are a lot of statistics, and the study looks to be quite thorough. First of all, they used an equal number of male and female subjects. There were a wide range of body mass indices, okay? So this wasn't just super fit people or people that were purely sedentary and not fit. They used a wide variety of ages, time of day, people who tended to walk a lot or not walk a lot. They measured changes in metabolism and blood glucose utilization in people that had done these soleus pushups while seated in the laboratory, and I must say they had them do these soleus pushups for quite a long while, continuously. So they had them do it for as long as 270 minutes total throughout the day. So if you divide that, that's four and a half hours, you might say, well, four and a half hours of lifting the heel and putting the heel down, lifting the heel, putting the heel down. That's a lot, but they didn't always do it continuously. They had some breaks in there. So this is the sort of thing that you could imagine you or other people could do while seated, while doing Zooms or while on calls, or maybe even while eating, doing that sort of thing. Although, I'm not suggesting that you constantly be focusing on soleus pushups throughout your life. The point is that people who did these soleus pushups experienced dramatic improvements in blood sugar regulation and in metabolism, despite the fact that the soleus is just 1% of the total musculature. So here I'm going to read from the abstract about what they found. People who did these soleus pushups, despite being a tiny muscle and using very little local energy, in fact, they measured muscle glycogen, the burn or essentially the utilization of fuel within the muscle. And there was very little utilization of fuel within the soleus itself. And that's because the soleus has this unique property of needing to basically keep you going all day, walking all day or moving all day. What they saw was a large magnitude, for example, 52% less postprandial, that's after a meal, glucose excursion. So 52% less increase in blood glucose. And 60%, six zero less hyperinsulinemia, so reduced levels of insulin. They also miraculously observed that despite this being, again, a small muscle, 1% of the total muscle mass, so very small oxidative use, they saw big improvements in systemic metabolic regulation. So this is interesting, and I think something that we should at least know about. I'm not aware that anyone's replicated this study yet. I know there's a ton of excitement about this study in the popular press. And if the data turn out to hold up, which I like to imagine they will, I can understand why there's so much excitement. What this means is that if you're somebody who cares about blood glucose regulation, you want to keep your metabolism running, please don't stop exercising the other ways that you exercise. But if you're somebody who wants to maximize your health, doing these soleus pushups fairly continuously while seated is going to be beneficial. And in addition to that, I know that there are going to be people out there who, for instance, might be injured or you're traveling and you're stuck on a plane or you're in the classroom and you're forced to study all day or take notes all day. You're just not getting enough opportunity to get those steps that you want to take, whether or not it's 10,000 or fewer or more, getting enough steps or movement. Maybe you don't have time to get out and do your run or maybe you're also running weightlifting and doing yoga classes and things of that sort, but you want to further improve your fitness, at least in terms of your metabolic health. This seems like a terrific, very low investment way to do it, certainly zero cost. It does take a little bit of attention. So you have to divert your attention from other things you're doing to make sure that you're still doing these soleus pushups. I'm sure that many of you are going to have a lot of detailed questions such as, you know, how high did they lift the heel and did they contract the muscle very hard or not? Couple of things about that. They did not have subjects really contract the muscle hard. They did measure the angle of heel raise and it was anywhere from 10 to 15 degrees. So they didn't have to go way, way up on their tippy toes or things of that sort. In any event, 270 minutes, four and a half hours of doing these soleus pushups is a lot. But by my read of the data and the rather significant, or I should say very significant effects that they observed on blood glucose regulation and metabolism, et cetera, seems to me that doing less would still be beneficial and that you don't necessarily have to do the full 270 minutes in order to get the benefits that they observed. More about this study includes the fact that the benefits they observed were very long lasting as long as two hours after a meal, they could still see this improved blood glucose utilization. I don't know because I wasn't able to find it in the methods, whether or not they were doing the soleus pushups while they were consuming blood sugar in this study. The point being that if you're somebody who cares about their fitness, this study is interesting because what it means is that, again, if you are forced to be immobile or sitting longer than you would like, if you're stuck in a meeting or zooms or class or on a plane, et cetera, or if you're simply trying to add a bit more fitness and metabolic health to your overall regimen, soleus pushups, at least to me, seem like a very low investment, simple, zero cost tool to improve your metabolic health. For those of you that want to peruse the study in more detail, we will provide a link to this paper published in iScience in the show note caption. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Element. Element is an electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium and potassium, the so-called electrolytes, and no sugar.