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

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab guest series, where I and an expert guest 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's episode marks the first in a series with Dr. Andy Galpin. Dr. Andy Galpin is a professor of kinesiology at Cal State University Fullerton, and one of the foremost world experts on the science and application of methods to increase strength, speed, endurance, hypertrophy, and various other aspects of fitness, exercise, and sports performance. Across the six-episode series, Dr. Andy Galpin pulls from his expertise working with everything from professional athletes to recreational exercisers and teaches us the mechanisms, logic, and specific protocols for how to achieve any of the number of different exercise adaptations that I mentioned a moment ago, ranging from strength to endurance, hypertrophy, and everything in between. We get really far into details, but at all times, paying attention to the macroscopic issues, that is how to create a program for endurance, or strength, or hypertrophy, or speed, or one that combines all of those. We also talk about supplementation and nutrition and how to maximize recovery for each of the different types of exercise adaptations. During today's episode, Dr. Galpin teaches us how to assess our level of fitness, and more generally, how to think about fitness, so that we can best achieve our fitness, exercise and performance goals. Dr. Professor Andy Galpin, super excited to have you here. You're such an immense treasure trove of information on physical training and optimizing for specific goals and outcomes with physical exercise. I'm curious, however, so many people have different levels of fitness.
Some people are professional athletes, of course, but most people are not. Many people exercise regularly. Some people are trying to do that more. Some people are doing too much of that. They're overtraining. They're not recovering enough. If we were to take a step back and each and every one of us ask, how fit are we? With the word fit, of course, being a very broad encompassing word. It could encompass endurance. It certainly does. Strength, the ability to run fast, even if for short distances. It might even include hypertrophy or directed hypertrophy, trying to balance one's musculature, to offset asymmetries, recover from injuries, et cetera. How should I, or anyone else for that matter, think about their level of fitness? You know, I know my resting heart rate, but what do I do in terms of really assessing whether or not I'm as fit as I could be and should be, both for the sake of health and performance? And here I'm asking you the question, not as an athlete, but as somebody who's been pretty consistent as an exerciser, but if we were to throw our arms around this question of how do we assess our fitness, what would be sort of the different levels of assessment that we should think about and do?

**Andy Galpin** (3:08)
When it comes to exercise, people generally have two major goals in mind. Goal number one is achieving some sort of appearance. This is I want to be big or I want to not be too big or I want to be lean, something. It doesn't matter what that goal is, but 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 to be able to hit those goals. Now there are infinite methods. So the saying we actually use here a lot is, the methods are many, but the concepts are few. 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.