The science of strength, muscle, and training for longevity | Andy Galpin, Ph.D. (PART I)

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia. This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter all focus on the goal of translating the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone. Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled a great team of analysts to make this happen. If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more in-depth content if you wanna take your knowledge of the space to the next level. At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you wanna learn more now, head over to peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe.
Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
My guest this week is Andy Galpin. Andy is a professor of kinesiology at California State University, Fullerton, where his biochemistry and molecular exercise physiology lab researches the acute responses of chronic adaptations of skeletal muscle to high intensity power or force and fatiguing exercise.
Andy's research spans adaptations from whole muscle to cellular level changes, which he's applied to his work with professional athletes for more than about 15 years. In this episode, we focus our conversation specifically around one of the four pillars of exercise, which is strength. And we focus a lot of the conversation around muscle. Now at the beginning of this episode, which I really enjoyed, we talked pretty technically. I'm not gonna hide that. We get into the anatomy, micro anatomy and physiology of the muscle.
And I think it's important because I do think that this is a subject matter that I talk about a lot. I think a lot of podcasters talk about this stuff a lot. But I think it's important to really understand some of the details. I mean, something as simple as what does it mean to undergo hypertrophy? What does it mean for a muscle to get bigger? What exactly is getting bigger? What is the difference between power, strength, speed and hypertrophy? And how do those differences phenotypically relate to what's happening at the cellular level or at the functional unit level? So we talk about all of those things. We talk about muscles and their energy sources. We talk about the importance of protein on muscle synthesis. We talk about the various types of muscle fibers, which is actually something where I probably learned more in this discussion on that particular topic than anything else that Andy and I spoke about. We end the conversation looking at a case study of how Andy would create a program for an untrained person who just started to do a few hours of cardio but wanted to spend three days a week building strength with a focus on building strength for longevity. Now, we did this because that approach was so popular in some of our previous podcasts. I think listeners really like hearing how we take kind of this high-fluid science and now bring it back down to how can you apply this to your life?
One final point I'll make here is that, as is sort of common with me, I go into these podcasts with a long list of topics I want to explore, and sometimes I don't get close to it. And that was certainly the case here. Andy and I barely scratched the surface of what I wanted to cover. So this will be part one of two, because I'll be sitting down again with Andy shortly to do the second part of this. So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Andy Galpin.

**Andy Galpin** (3:23)
Yeah.

**Peter Attia** (3:27)
Well, Andy, it's wonderful to see you here on video. We were supposed to do this in person, but we got a good laugh as to why that didn't pan out, but that's okay.
Perhaps there will be an in-person chance the next time.

**Andy Galpin** (3:40)
I'm excited to be here this way. It would have been more enjoyable in person, but we'll make it work.

**Peter Attia** (3:45)
You know, I've wanted to speak with you for quite a while and think listeners to this podcast are not strangers to the idea of how much of an emphasis I place on exercise. Said it many times before. I'll continue to reiterate it until the data suggests. Otherwise, that there's really no more potent tool to improve longevity, meaning extending the length of life and improving the quality of life in exercise.
And that includes nutrition, that includes sleep, and that includes the entire pharmacopoeia of medication, supplements, drugs, hormones, et cetera.
So it's probably for that reason that I would say that exercise makes up a disproportionate amount of the content on our podcast. And of course, within exercise, I tend to divide it really down into these different pillars of strength, stability, and cardiorespiratory fitness, which of course then gets further subdivided by the metabolic state and energy state of it. And of course, what we're gonna probably talk a lot about today is strength, but also all of the things that kind of stem from that, like hypertrophy and various things like that, which I think are of huge interest to people. But maybe for folks who don't know you, can you give us a sense of your path, frankly, out of high school, college, what was your athletic background and what made this be something that you have dedicated all of your time to?