How to Build Endurance in Your Brain & Body

**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. 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 Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or twice a day is that it helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs. It makes up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, it has probiotics, which are vital for microbiome health. I've done a couple of episodes now on the so-called gut microbiome and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body. With Athletic Greens, I get the vitamins I need, the minerals I need, and the probiotics to support my microbiome. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman and claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs, plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2. There are a ton of data now showing that vitamin D3 is essential for various aspects of our brain and body health. Even if we're getting a lot of sunshine, many of us are still deficient in vitamin D3. And K2 is also important because it regulates things like cardiovascular function, calcium in the body, and so on. Again, go to athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3 K2. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the exact ratios of electrolytes are an element and those are sodium, magnesium, and potassium, but it has no sugar. I've talked many times before on this podcast about the key role of hydration and electrolytes for nerve cell function, neuron function, as well as the function of all the cells and all the tissues and organ systems of the body. If we have sodium, magnesium, and potassium present in the proper ratios, all of those cells function properly and all our bodily systems can be optimized. If the electrolytes are not present and if hydration is low, we simply can't think as well as we would otherwise. Our mood is off, hormone systems go off, our ability to get into physical action, to engage in endurance and strength and all sorts of other things is diminished. So with element, you can make sure that you're staying on top of your hydration and that you're getting the proper ratios of electrolytes. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element. That's lmnt.com/huberman, and you'll get a free element sample pack with your purchase. They're all delicious. So again, if you want to try element, you can go to element, lmnt.com/huberman.
Today's episode is also brought to us by Thesis. Thesis makes what are called nootropics, which means smart drugs. Now, to be honest, I am not a fan of the term nootropics. I don't believe in smart drugs in the sense that I don't believe that there's any one substance or collection of substances that can make us smarter. I do believe, based on science, however, that there are particular neural circuits and brain functions that allow us to be more focused, more alert, access creativity, be more motivated, et cetera. That's just the way that the brain works, different neural circuits for different brain states. Thesis understands this. And as far as I know, they're the first nootropics company to create targeted nootropics for specific outcomes. I've been using Thesis for more than six months now, and I can confidently say that the nootropics have been a total game changer. My go-to formula is the Clarity formula, or sometimes I'll use their Energy formula before training. To get your own personalized nootropic starter kit, go online to takethesis.com/huberman.
Take a three-minute quiz, and Thesis will send you four different formulas to try in your first month. That's takethesis.com/huberman, and use the code Huberman at checkout for 10% off your first order. For the last month, four episodes to be exact, we've been discussing physical performance and skill learning. We've talked about how to learn skills faster, whether or not those are skills for athletic performance, dance, music, things of that sort. We've also talked about how to gain strength and how to lose fat faster by leveraging the nervous system. Things like shiver and non-shiver, non-exercise activity induced thermogenesis. We talked about how neurons can actually trigger accelerated fat loss. We talked about hypertrophy, also called muscle growth. And we covered everything from sets and reps, protocols, how long to stay in a cold ice bath, when to get out, how to keep shivering. We've covered a lot of tools and a lot of science. So if you're interested in those things, and you even perhaps want to learn a little bit about how we make energy ATP from carbohydrates or from fats, it's all covered in the previous four episodes. This was going to be the time that we moved to a new topic entirely, but we are going to do one more episode in this series on physical performance for the simple reason that you asked many questions about something that's vitally important, both for physical performance and long-term and short-term health, and that's endurance. And so today we are going to talk about endurance. Now, if you're a strength athlete or you're not interested in endurance, don't depart just yet because it turns out that there are ways to train endurance that are very different than I would have previously imagined. If you only think about long runs, long swims, marathons, half marathons, 10Ks, 5Ks, and that sort of thing puts you to sleep, kind of like Costello is snoring in the background right now. He's not a long-distance endurance athlete, that's for sure. If you're interested in those things or if you are averse to those things, I encourage you to continue listening because we are going to talk about a little bit of science and then some specific protocols that really define what endurance is, the four types of endurance and ways to train those in concert with the other things that you might be doing, like weight training or skill training or yoga. And if you are an endurance athlete, we are going to cover a lot of tools and science that I'm certain will also help enhance your training and performance in races or even just recreationally. The topic of endurance I think has been badly misrepresented, frankly, online. And when you start digging into the science and you start talking to real experts in this area, what you discover, what I've discovered is that it's an incredibly interesting area because it teaches us so much about how our body and our brain use fuels and how we can control which fuels are used by our body and brain. So today we will talk about the four kinds of endurance. We will also cover the topic of hydration, which might sound incredibly boring. Like, okay, just drink more water. But it's really interesting because not only is hydration a limiting factor on performance, but there is a right way to hydrate. And there is a wrong way to hydrate. There actually is a formula that I'll teach you to know how much water to be drinking depending on your activity levels. And if that sounds like a simple thing, like, oh, just tap off water until your urine runs clear, that's actually the wrong advice. It turns out that if you don't hydrate properly, you can see 20 to 30% reductions in performance, whether or not that's strength, whether or not that's increasing hypertrophy, whether or not that's running, swimming, even mental performance. So even if you're not an athlete or a recreational athlete at all, I encourage you to stay tuned for the part about hydration. So we're going to cover, as usual, a little bit of science, and then we're going to dive right into protocols that you can apply if you like, and if you deem those correct and safe for you. Before we dive into all that, I want to make an important announcement, which is all the episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast are now housed on a single website, which is hubermanlab.com. If you go to hubermanlab.com, you can find all the episodes in YouTube, Apple, and Spotify format with links there. The website is also searchable. So if you go into the little search function, which you'll find very easily and you put in, for instance, creatine or sleep or ice bath or sauna, it will take you to the specific episodes that contain that information. And in addition, if you go to the website, hubermanlab.com, you have the opportunity to sign up for what we call the Huberman Lab Neural Network. The Huberman Lab Neural Network is a zero cost resource where once a month, perhaps more often, you'll receive a email newsletter. And that newsletter will contain specific protocols, announcements, attachments of PDFs and things of that sort of protocols, tools, and science from the podcast. We will also make any announcements about live lectures, which at some point I'll probably start doing in various cities in the US and probably around the world as well, as well as other things that I think would be really useful to you. All of course at zero cost. So that's hubermanlab.com. Sign up for the neural network newsletter. You can find that in the menu tab or it might pop up when you get there. And I hope you will join. And as a final announcement, if you're not already following us on Instagram, you can go to Huberman Lab on Instagram. And if you do that, I often make announcements and release protocols and links to protocols and things there as well. I briefly want to touch on something from the previous episode, which is that if you are somebody that is trying to increase muscle strength and or size, or if you're simply somebody who doesn't want to increase muscle strength and size, and you just want to maintain the musculature that you have, it's vital that you perform at least five sets of resistance training per muscle per week. If we don't do that, we lose muscle over time. And that is one reason among many to have a regular resistance training protocol. Nobody wants to start resembling a folded over envelope or a melted candle. No one wants to have challenges getting up out of a chair or off the ground. Maintaining musculature is vital, not just to our immediate health, but to our long-term health trajectory. So I just want to emphasize that point. If you're curious about the sets, the reps, how close to failure to go or not go, whether or not you should be doing your cardiovascular training before or after your weight training, all of that is in the previous episode, right down to the details. And I like to think it made simple for you to understand. But I do strongly believe that resistance training, whether or not it's with body weight or bands or weights or simply lifting rocks in the yard or logs in the yard, is vital for our systemic physiology and our overall health. And that includes our brain health. And I described the reasons for that and the mechanisms in the previous episode. Today, I'd like to talk about endurance and how to build endurance and how to use endurance for the health of your entire body. Endurance, as the name suggests, is our ability to engage in continuous bouts of exercise or continuous movement or continuous effort of any kind. And I do believe that our ability to engage in activities that we call endurance training or physical endurance activities do have carryover to mental performance of things that require long-term effort. I'll touch on that at the end and why there's reason to believe that there's a biological crossover between those two things. I don't think it's simply the case that if you train yourself to be a strength and speed athlete and to do short bouts of exercise that are very intense, that you can only do mental work that's of short bouts and very intense. But it is clear that cardiovascular exercise, exercise where you're getting your heart rate up continuously for a period of time and endurance exercise, we will define what that is in a moment is vital for tapping into and enhancing various aspects of our biology in the body and in the brain such that our brain can perform work for longer periods of time, focused work, learning, et cetera. So I want to dive into the topic of endurance and I want to just begin by addressing something that's vital to any kind of effort, whether or not it's mental effort or physical effort. So as always a little bit of science and we'll get right into protocols. So the key thing to understand about energy production in the body, meaning your ability to think, your ability to talk, your ability to walk, your ability to run is this thing that we call ATP. ATP and mitochondria, which are just little, what we call organelles within cells, these little factories that make energy, if you will.