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

**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 marks the second episode in the six episode series with Dr. Andy Galpin, a professor of kinesiology at Cal State University Fullerton, and one of the foremost world's experts on the science and applications of methods to increase strength, hypertrophy, and endurance. Today's episode is all about how to increase strength, speed, and hypertrophy of muscles. Professor, Dr. Andy Galpin, great to be back. Last episode, you told us about the nine specific adaptations that exercise can induce, everything from strength and hypertrophy to endurance, muscular endurance, so on and so forth. And you gave us this incredible toolkit of fit tests for each of those adaptations so that people can assess them for themselves, and then of course improve on each and every one of them if they choose. By the way, people can access that information simply by going to the first episode in this series with you. And it's all there and time stamped, and I highly recommend people do that. Today we're talking about strength and hypertrophy. And so right out the gate, I just want to ask you, why should people think about and train for strength and hypertrophy? And that question is of course directed towards those that are trying to get stronger and grow bigger muscles.
But I know that many people out there perhaps have not thought about the benefits of strength and hypertrophy training and how beneficial it can be, not just for people that want to get bigger biceps, et cetera, but that have other goals, longevity goals and health goals unrelated to what most people associate with hypertrophy. So what are the benefits of training for strength and hypertrophy for the everyday person, for the athlete, for the recreational exerciser and so on?

**Andy Galpin** (1:55)
There's a wonderful saying, I think it was Bill Bowerman, one of the founders of Nike, and he always said, if you have a body, you're an athlete. I think that's very important for people to understand because one of the major disservices we've done in this field is convince people that things like strength training are for athletes or for growing bigger muscles, and cardiovascular training are for things like fat loss and heart health. That is a tremendous disservice because it puts a lot of unnecessary barriers and leads to a lot of assumptions and therefore poor actions. Classic examples of this are people who are resistant to strength training because they don't want to put on too much muscle. People who only perform one type of exercise because they want, say, fat loss or they're in it for longevity and health, and they're not worried about being an athlete. And so right out the gates, we can actually draw back a little bit to what we were, our previous conversation, when I walked you through the history of exercise science. And the reason I did that is to help you understand these are the railroads that you're running down and you don't even realize it in terms of everyone thinks of strength training and they immediately default to our principles to optimize muscle growth. And that's not the only adaptation one should be after with strength training. When we think of endurance training, we immediately default to things like, again, cardiovascular health or fat loss or things like that.
What I really want to do across this entire series and conversations is to just break that immediately, talk about all the other things that you can do with your training. And so that people can be comfortable and confident in doing an optimal training program for whatever goal they have, whether that be specific like growing muscle or nonspecific, like just feeling better, having more energy, being more prepared for life and longevity. And so to directly answer your question, I could really, we could do 100 episodes on the benefits of exercise. And we could run all the way from mood and focus, cognitive tasks, to a better immune function, you'll get less colds, you'll be, you'll fight them off more effectively, to mortality, right? So some of the strongest predictors of how long and how well you will live or exercise. However, there are independent benefits that come from just endurance training, and there are independent benefits that come from strength training. And so to just give you one categorically, the way that you want to think about this is resistance exercise and strength training is the number one tool to combat neuromuscular aging. You cannot get that through any other form of exercise besides heavy overload strength training. And we can walk through in detail what that is, but that is reason number one. In general, human movement is a function of number one, some sort of neuromuscular activation, so nerves have to turn on. The second part is muscles have to contract, and the third part is those muscles have to move a bone. All right. If you want to be alive and you want to live by yourself, you have to be able to engage in human movement. If you have any dysfunction in the neuromuscular system there, then you're not going to be able to do that. And again, as I mentioned, the only way to preserve that or fight that loss of aging is to strength train. So, people will tend to hear numbers like you lose about 1% of muscle size per year after age about 40 And that's true. However, what they don't realize is you lose about 2% to 4% of your strength per year. So, the loss of strength is almost double that the loss of muscle mass with aging. Muscle power is more like 8% to 10% per year. And so, we can very clearly see the problem you're going to have with aging is not going to be preservation of muscle, although that is incredibly important. It's going to be very specifically preservation of muscle power and strength. And why that really matters is your ability to, again, stand up and move, your ability to catch yourself from a fall, your ability to feel confident doing a movement. That is a function of muscle power more than it is muscle size. And so, functionality is really what we want to be, right? You want to be able to do whatever you want to do physically and feel confident in doing that as you age. That's going to only be obtained through strength training.