How to Learn Skills Faster

**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. This month on the Huberman Lab podcast, we're talking all about physical performance. So that means athletic performance, recreational exercise, weightlifting, running, swimming, yoga, skills and skill learning. Today, we're going to talk about and focus on skill learning. We are going to focus on how to learn skills more quickly, in particular motor skills. This will also translate to things like musical skills and playing instruments, but we're mainly going to focus on physical movements of the body that extend beyond the hands, like just playing the piano or the fingers, like playing the guitar. But everything we're going to talk about will also serve the formation and the consolidation and the performance of other types of skills. So if you're interested in how to perform better, whether or not it's dance or yoga or even something that's just very repetitive, like running or swimming, this podcast episode is for you. We're going to go deep into the science of skill learning. And we are going to talk about very specific protocols that the science points to and has verified, allow you to learn more quickly, to embed that learning so that you remember it and to be able to build up skills more quickly than you would otherwise. We are also going to touch on a few things that I get asked about a lot, but fortunately recently I've had the time to go deep into the literature, extract the data for you. And that's mental visualization. How does visualizing a particular skill or practice serve the learning and or the consolidation of that practice? Turns out there are some absolutely striking protocols that one can use. Striking, meaning they allow you to learn faster and they allow you to remember how to do things more quickly and better than if you were not doing this mental rehearsal. But the pattern of mental rehearsal and when you do that mental rehearsal, turns out to be vitally important. So I'm excited for today's episode. We're going to share a lot of information with you and there are going to be a lot of very simple takeaways. So let's get started. Before we get into the topic of skill learning and tools for accelerating skill learning, I want to briefly revisit the topic of temperature, which was covered in the last episode and just highlight a few things and clear up some misunderstandings. So last episode talked about these incredible data from my colleague Craig Heller's lab at Stanford. He's in the Department of Biology, showing that cooling the palms in particular ways and at particular times can allow athletes or just recreational exercisers to do more pull ups, dips, bench presses per unit time, to run further, to cycle further and to feel better doing it. There really are incredible data that are anchored in the biology of the vascular system, the blood supply and how it's involved in cooling us. Many of you, dozens of you in fact, said, wait a second, you gave us a protocol in this episode, which says that we should cool our palms periodically throughout exercise in order to be able to do more work. But on the episode before that, on growth hormone and thyroid hormone, you said that heating up the body is good for release of growth hormone. And I just want to clarify that both things are true. These are two separate protocols. You should always warm up before you exercise. That warm up will not increase your body temperature or the muscle temperature to the point where it's going to diminish your work capacity, that it's going to harm your performance. The cooling of the palms, which is really just a route to cool your core in an efficient way, the most efficient way in fact, is about improving performance. Heating up the body with exercise and focusing on heat increases or using sauna for heat increases is geared toward growth hormone release, which is a separate matter. So you can do both of these protocols, but you would want to do them at separate times. So just to make this very concrete before I move on to today's topic, if you're interested in doing more work, being able to do more sets and reps per unit time and feel better doing it or to run further or to cycle further, then cooling the palms periodically, as I described in the previous episode, is going to be the way to go. If you're interested in getting growth hormone release, well then hot sauna, and I offered some other tools if you don't have a sauna in the episode on growth hormone and thyroid hormone, is going to be the way to go. Okay, so those are separate protocols. You can include them in your fitness regime and your training regime, but you do want to do them at separate times. And as a last point about this, I also mentioned that caffeine can either help or hinder performance depending on whether or not you're caffeine adapted because of the ways that caffeine impacts body temperature and all sorts of things like vasodilation and constriction. It's very simple. If you enjoy caffeine before your workouts and you're accustomed to caffeine, meaning you drink it three or five times or more a week, 100 to 300 milligrams is a typical daily dose of caffeine. Some of you are ingesting more, some less. If you do that regularly, well, then it's going to be just fine to ingest caffeine before you train. It's not going to impact your body temperature and your vasodilation or constriction in ways that will hinder you. However, if you're not a regular caffeine user and you're thinking, Oh, I'm going to drink a cup of coffee and get this huge performance enhancing effect. Well, that's not going to happen. Chances are it's going to lead to increases in body temperature and changes in the way that blood flow is happening in your body. And caffeine in particular on these palmar surfaces and in your face, that is going to likely diminish performance. So if you enjoy caffeine and you're accustomed to it, so-called caffeine-adapted, enjoy it before your training. If you regularly, excuse me, if you do not regularly use caffeine, then you probably do not want to view caffeine as a performance enhancing tool. And while we're on the topic of tools, and because this is a month on athletic performance and exercise and physical skill learning, I want to offer an additional tool that I've certainly found useful, which is how to relieve the so-called side stitch or side cramp when running or swimming. This actually relates to respiration and to the nervous system, and it is not a cramp. If you've ever been out running and you felt like you had a pain on your side, that pain could be any number of things, but that what feels like cramping of your side is actually due to what's called collateralization of the phrenic nerve, which is a lot harder to say than a side cramp or a side stitch. But here's the situation. You have a set of nerves, which is called the phrenic nerve, P-H-R-E-N-I-C, the phrenic nerve, which extends down from your brain stem, essentially, this region to your diaphragm to control your breathing. It has a collateral, meaning it has a branch, just like the branch on a tree, that innervates your liver. And if you are not breathing deeply enough, what can happen is you can get what's called sometimes a referenced pain. Reference pain is probably going to be familiar to any of you who have ever read about how to recognize heart attack. People who have heart attacks will sometimes have pain on one side of their body, the left arm. Sometimes people that have pain in a part of their back will suddenly also get pain in their shoulder or part of their face. This has to do with the fact that many of our nerves branch and are meaning they're collateralized to different organs and areas of the body. And the way those nerves are woven together, it's often the case that if we disrupt the pattern of firing of electrical activity in one of those nerve branches that the other ones are affected to the side stitch, the pain in your side is often because of the contractions of the diaphragm, because of the way you're breathing while you're exercising, running or swimming or biking. And as a consequence, you feel pain in your side, but that's not a cramp. The way to relieve it is very simple. You do the physiological side that I've talked about in previous episodes of the podcast and elsewhere, which is a double inhale through the nose, very deep, and then a long exhale. And you might want to repeat that two or three times. Typically, that will relieve the side stitch because of the way that it changes the firing patterns of the phrenic nerve. So the side stitch is annoying, it's painful sometimes where you think we're dehydrated and you might be dehydrated, but oftentimes it's just that we're breathing in a way that causes some referenced pain of the liver. We call it a side stitch or a side cramp, and you can relieve it very easily through the double inhale, long exhale.