GUEST SERIES | Dr. Andy Galpin: Optimize Your Training Program for Fitness & Longevity

**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 fourth in the six episode series on fitness, exercise and performance. And today's episode is all about optimal fitness programming, that is how to design a fitness and exercise program that can achieve the goals that you want for fitness and for sports performance. Dr. Andy Galpin, great to be back. In previous episodes, you taught us about the various adaptations that occur at the level of cells, at the level of organs, indeed at the level of the entire body, that underlie things like improvements in strength and speed, hypertrophy, aka muscle growth, and the various forms of endurance. And you laid out beautifully the various protocols that one can do in order to achieve each and every one of those adaptations. Today, I would love for you to teach us how we can combine different protocols to achieve multiple adaptations in parallel. For instance, how to improve endurance and strength, how to achieve some level of hypertrophy, perhaps directed hypertrophy at specific muscle groups, while also maintaining endurance and perhaps improving speed, for instance. And if you would, I'd love for you to tell us how we can combine different protocols and vary those across the week, across the month, across the year, so that we can make regular progress and perhaps even you could give us a window into the ways to make the fastest progress possible.

**Andy Galpin** (1:34)
Yeah, I would love to do that. You know, we've invested a lot of time in the previous episodes covering background and concepts and detail about the physiology so you understood why you're making the choices you're making and why other choices are less effective. In this discussion, I would actually like to jump, maybe more directly to the answer and kind of get right into the protocol and maybe a little bit less background. If you're interested in that stuff, I suppose you have to go backwards a little bit and watch some of those previous episodes. But I would love to jump in to just some samples, some case studies if you will and kind of walk through different protocols. I know that over the course of my 11 years as a college professor and being in the public space a little bit, but probably the most numerous style of question I have gotten is exactly that. So I know the rep range for this or I know the style of training for that adaptation. But how do I put them together? And I would just like to spend our time today going through those things. And the reason I want to do it is this. Some people listening at home surely just love exercise. They're already bought in and they're going to train no matter what. And they're interested in just actually being more effective. And so the way that you structure and put your plan together will in large part determine getting more progress for less effort or actually being able to put the same amount of effort in and getting results faster. There's also some folks probably listening who are like, okay, I exercise, I do what I can.
I'm bought in to the benefits. So you've talked so elaborately over the 100 plus episodes you've done about the various benefits of exercise. But you don't like absolutely… You're kind of doing it because you know it's important, but you're not there. So for those folks, it's sort of like, okay, how can we actually make this thing more effective? So we can make sure you hit the things you absolutely have to get for the short and long-term benefits, right? To make sure that you're looking the way you want to look, you're performing physically the way you want to perform, and then you can do that across your lifespan. So how can we give you all some structure to where, again, you don't have to turn into an absolute lover of physical fitness and it doesn't have to take over your life, but you can still get more results for your same time restrictions, whether that be you have two days a week or five days a week, or only certain access to equipment or experience, whatever the case may be. How can we help those folks as well put together a protocol that will get them closer to their goals with less restrictions?

**Andrew Huberman** (4:07)
Fantastic. I'm hoping that along the way you'll also point us to how often to take the fitness assessment for each of the adaptations that you referred to in a previous episode. We will also link to that fitness assessment segment in the show note captions for this episode because that fitness assessment for different adaptations I think is a really powerful way for people to touch in and see how much long endurance do they have, how much anaerobic capacity do they have, how much strength do they really have, and then perhaps you'd also be willing to throw in a couple of additional ways that we can assess our level of fitness and progress in this arc of fitness program across the year.