Welcome to the Dr. Gabrielle Lyon show. In this episode, if you are a person who has ever been confused about what kind of training to do, how much to lift in the gym, my guest, Dr. Pat Davidson, clears it all up for you. He’s a PhD in exercise physiology. He’s a former professor, and this guy is jacked. By the way, you’re gonna love this episode because you’re gonna come away with a framework for how to think about training. If you like content similar to this, please take a moment to go to my website and sign up for my fully free newsletter that puts out information related to health and wellness. And as always, take a moment to share, subscribe. Again, this content is fully free for you. Now let’s jump into the show.

Pat Davidson, welcome. Welcome to the podcast. – It’s great to be back. – I know, this is great. So people may not know this. You were one of the first guests on the show. I was really excited to talk everything, body composition, training, you name it, something that is very practical for people, and you were a professor. – Yes. – Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the fact that you do, don’t take this the wrong way, and look a bit like a meathead, but actually are a PhD and a former professor of exercise physiology. – Yeah, well, I am a meathead. Whenever I have to introduce myself to people in my regular life, oftentimes I’ll do it as Dr. Meathead. So I don’t run from that, or I like being a meathead. I embrace it. Actually, I don’t embrace it, I just am it. – You just are it. – Yeah, I’ve always liked sports. I’ve always liked the traditional big strength power sports, like typical American things, baseball, football.

And it’s been my life and training for those kinds of things. Mixed martial arts, strongman, bodybuilding, that’s what I grew up with, that’s what I still love. – But even before, so you started out being very interested in sports. We’re gonna talk a bit about that. But you did, I believe you did your undergraduate and your PhD in exercise phys, is that true? – I actually did my undergraduate in history. – We won’t hold that against you. – No, I specialized in modern European history. I thought I was going to be a high school history teacher and probably coach football and baseball. And then that just didn’t really work out, so I went a different route. – And tell me, what did you get your PhD in? – I got my PhD in exercise physiology. I got a master’s in strength and conditioning. – And you were a professor, where did you teach? – At Brooklyn College first, and then I went to Springfield College, which is also where I got my PhD. – Okay, what was your area of focus?

 – At the time, it was with hormonal concentrations in response to resistance training. – Really? – Yeah, a lot of people were interested in that. – Wait, tell me more about the hormone. You mean the acute impact of, say something like testosterone or IGF-1 on hypertrophy of skeletal muscle? – Or the responses to resistance training protocols.

This was the kind of the era dominated by William Kramer, and William Kramer was the most preeminent professor in that region. He was at UConn, which is only like a hop, skip, and a jump from Springfield College. And I actually was, I interviewed with him to do my postdoc with him when I finished my PhD. And he, it was sort of split. There was a military research base in Natick, Massachusetts, and then UConn, and Brad Nindl was at the military base, and William Kramer was at UConn, and they did a ton of work together. And Kramer measured the growth hormone, and Nindl measured the IGF.

 And that was like the biggest area of research at the time in straining and conditioning, hypertrophy-based science, and then– – And when was that? – That would have, I got– – Roughly. – I finished my degree in 2009, so it was sort of the early 2000s, and the late 90s was the era of the hormone hypothesis, which has been completely debunked. – Wow. – And it’s like these guys did these full careers on something that now people don’t even bother looking at. – What, just very briefly, what was the hypothesis? – The hypothesis was that certain types of resistance training protocols lead to significant increases in testosterone, growth hormone, and that if you could create those responses, it would be a much more profound hypertrophy response. And it just turned out that what was happening under normal physiological levels of hormonal responses was literally a stress response. So you’d see a spike in testosterone, and growth hormone, and cortisol, when you would do things like around a 10RM with 60 seconds rest with repeat sets. And so it was hypothesized that those were the best kinds of workouts to do for hypertrophy. – So 10 rep max? – Yep, with short rest. – With compound movements. And with that, you would get the biggest heat response, the biggest hormone response, but all it really was was the biggest stress response.

And so it was like what they sort of discovered with more data and bigger plots of time was that it wasn’t enough time under the curve for hormone elevation to make any difference. Like when people are taking exogenous hormones, the time under the curve of hormone, mechanistic downstream cascades is full time. It’s always elevated, it’s always doing what it should be doing. And that’s enough to make a difference. But with these responses to exercise, it was like a tiny blip on the radar, and it literally made no difference.

 – And they spent their whole careers doing that. – William Kramer is still probably considered to be the most preeminent sports scientist in American history. Even though the area that he was working in has now been debunked, but I mean, he was so good in so many areas. It’s like that was his primary research concentration. – And of course, when just because something doesn’t necessarily pan out the way that the original hypothesis would be, there’s still benefit from learning and gaining a foundation of information. – Yeah. – We can all, I think we can all agree on that.

Then you taught exercise physiology. What were the things that you, so I gave you a quick little tour of the studio. And the first thing that you noticed was there was an exercise metabolism book in the podcast guest suite. – Yeah, I was saying that I recognized that book and I used that to develop or to, you know, to put all my biochemistry lectures together that I taught with exercise physiology. – What were some of the biggest things that you taught? What were some of the courses? – Exercise physiology, strength and conditioning.

Let’s see, exercise testing and prescription for special populations, statistics.

You know, those are kind of like some of the foundational courses, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. – And when you say special populations, do you mean aging population or? – That’s one of them. It’s sort of, let me think, it’s children, elderly people, pregnant women, people with metabolic syndrome problems, which includes like asthma as well, obesity. You know, there’s skeletal, like orthopedic considerations as well. – Do you think that some of the literature has changed? – Oh, I’m sure. – Regarding pregnancy, children in training, obesity? – I would imagine, I mean, obesity is so heavily funded, pardon the pun, but you know, wherever the money goes is where most of the research is gonna happen and I think that the, you know, whenever you’re pumping money into research and you have really smart people working in an area, like you’re gonna see drastic changes really fast. – Yeah, when you decided to leave academia, where did you, what did you do? – Oh, that’s a whole other story. I actually, one of my former students was working at a gym in New York City called Peak Performance. We have a mutual friend, Dawn Saladino. – Donnie, Uncle Donnie. – So Peak was kind of the rival of Drive. It was sort of a very similar kind of a gym. And at the time it was being funded by a super wealthy person and it was going to have a new flagship location, 25,000 square feet put on the corner of 14th Street and Fifth Avenue. And it was like, I was being hired to be the director of training and education. And they had another person that was this super prominent physical therapist who was gonna be the director of rehabilitation. And my former student was the director of internship. Anyways, it was supposed to be like the next big thing. And ultimately construction costs and problems and delays. – Didn’t pan out. – Just pulled the plug on it before it ever happened. So, but that was the reason I went to New York was to work on that project. And then all of a sudden I was just in New York. I had gotten married. And then the reason that I went there for was just a non-entity. So then it was like, okay, no, what do I do? So I kind of reinvented myself as just a independent entrepreneur. – An educator. – Yeah. – I think you do a lot of education. You said something really profound on your Instagram. And obviously I recommend that everyone follow you as long as you have a little thick skin, that’s gonna be important. But you said something that in order to improve your body’s ability to move through space and time, you have to improve your body composition. – Yeah, I think it’s just people for whatever reason don’t appreciate the significance of when you alter, you know, body fat levels, body, like muscle levels. Like it’s probably the most significant change that an individual person could make. You know, there’s so many things that people focus on that are like smaller return on investment from a movement perspective. – What would an example of that be? – Oh, I mean, I think that even stretching, you know,

 does stretching work? Yes, but you have to stretch in a progressively overloaded manner. What does that mean? That means like, it’s gotta be a very intense stretch and you’ve gotta hold it for a significant amount of time. And you have to always do more and it’s gotta be a little harder.

 Very few people stretch that way.

And even if you do, it’s kind of like a fairly low return. It’s not like aerobic training where on day one, you might be terrible, but like, if you keep at it for a month or you’re like, “Oh, I’m doing so much better.” It’s versus if you actually lose weight and lose body fat, your ability to move is going to be improved by, you know, tremendous orders of magnitude. I don’t just mean like range of motion, like range of motion will improve dramatically, but even your ability to run, to do pull-ups, to do dips, to do push-ups, when it involves moving yourself through space, less fat and less weight will be the biggest catalyst to improvement of any variable. And I’m also guessing increased muscle mass may potentially hinder that as well. So if we were talking about, is it just weight, then would having more muscle mass actually be a challenge in kind of this perspective or from this perspective? – It can be. You know, whenever you can always look at these things and take it to the furthest extreme, what’s the greatest example of moving yourself through space? Ultra endurance races. And you’re not going to see anybody that looks like they’re going to win the Olympia doing well in those things despite having tremendously low body fat. So at a certain point, just mass does matter. – I think that that’s valuable. And we’re going to talk a lot about body recount position, fat loss, muscle gain.

 One question that I have for you is, what is the biggest mistake that you’re seeing in the health and wellness, influencer, exercise? And you can only just pick your top, just pick your top three biggest things that the fitness industry has wrong. – This is, I mean, I saw this on the sheet of like topics that you’re going to go with. – And you wanted to gloss over it? – Oh no, like, because in some ways it’s like, who am I to even know what’s wrong or what’s right?

 I need to eat my own slice of humble pie. I think everybody does in trying to say like, what’s so wrong? Like, boy, I don’t know. I think this is like, if I actually knew the answer to this, like this is the billion dollar question in some ways. I think that the fragmentation of the industry is the biggest problem. There’s no central theme that just ties everything together that people are aware of that really they can rally around. It’s just that there’s so many tribes and specialists and things like that, that it’s, like I said, fragmented is the best word I have for what the problem is.

 – Do you think that that is because it seems as if different body types do well at different things. For example, an ultra marathon person might feel that their body responds. There is a book called the Sports Gene. I don’t know if you remember that book. But do you think that maybe there’s such a diversification or maybe even division is a better word because, for example, you might be built for power and power for you would be the thing in the way that you train. Whereas I might be built for, I don’t know, hula hooping. And Matt, my producer over there might be built for picket, hypertrophy, valet.

 Do you think that different body types kind of go to different areas and maybe that’s where the vision is? – I think that it’s almost two different topics. I think number one, yes, people gravitate towards what they’re good at. And I think that most sports and oftentimes activities are natural selection based. Like you just arrive at the place ultimately because it’s like you’re built for it, you perform well there. People follow their dopamine.

 But I think that from a fitness standpoint,

 it’s more homogenous, I think, than we realize. Particularly for health, the kinds of outcomes that we are looking for as a country. I think that you as a medical professional getting into this and sort of this longevity topic, where we’re kind of unpacking it and discovering what are the variables that actually lead towards longevity. And I think that you could probably summarize it in some ways as muscular fitness, aerobic fitness, social health, emotional wellbeing.

 Those are some of the major ones. And if I wanted to just get at what drives muscular fitness it’s like, well, the easiest way is to lift weights. And there’s a lot of different avenues that are not as specific and it would take 20 years longer to actually get the same results. – What would that be? Would that be say like Olympic lifting or something like that? – Yeah, I think there’s just, like or people that could look at and say like, oh, look at gymnasts are very muscular. People should do gymnastics. And it’s like, okay, well,

 yes, gymnasts are muscular usually when you see them. And I think that there’s tremendous strength associated with being able to do bars and rings and pommel horse and things like that. But the skill level is through the roof. The amount of time it would take to develop hypertrophy through those modalities would be significantly longer than just using barbells and machines and dumbbells and things like that.

 – Do you think that there is a foundation of activities? And if the ultimate end point is longevity, and maybe we should define longevity or what we feel would be a significant realistic outcome. I think maybe longevity is not necessarily, maybe we take that off the table from a lifespan perspective and we say physical longevity. That would mean being able to do activities of daily living. That would be going to the grocery, being able to travel by yourself.

 These are all things that we wanna do. And you and I, perhaps at this age, maybe we take that for granted and we assume that that will always be available.

 We also wanna be strong.

 I think that it’s one thing to say, if I fall, I wanna be able to catch myself. I wanna be able to get up off the floor. That’s one perspective. But I think a more valuable perspective is how do we go into the trajectory of aging, which we know is gonna happen from a place of durability and capacity. And in my mind, that is where longevity starts and probably ends. – Right. – With that in mind, what are the things that you think that everybody should be doing and specifically as to why? Would it be hypertrophy? Would it be strength? I know that your goal is going to say, your goal is going to be activating the tissue necessary

 to induce hypertrophy, which is really, I think, what you find most valuable. So all of that to say, what are the things that we have to do? – Yeah, I think from at least looking at the data and the research that is available, I believe it’s still the greatest predictor of all-cause mortality is your VO2 max. So your aerobic fitness is the top of the pyramid. If you have a high enough VO2 max, then it should support your ability to sustain life and to be able to move through space.

 I think that muscular fitness has emerged as something that’s like, whoa, how’d we miss this? – I agree. – And it’s becoming more and more demonstrated in all walks of importance here. So what is it about it? Number one, I think that in order to be able to have, VO2 is based on your cardiac output and your AVO2 difference. So your AVO2 difference is the more technical of the two, I think like it’s when your blood is out at the muscles, it’s how much oxygen leaves the arterial side and is actually extracted and consumed at the tissue level. So it’s the difference between oxygen and the arteries and the veins, okay? But the one that’s like the bigger hammer is the cardiac output, which is stroke volume and heart rate. You can’t do anything about your heart rate in terms of it’s genetically capped in terms of your max heart rate, but your stroke volume is the one that is very modifiable. And that’s just how much blood gets pumped out by the heart every time it beats, okay? And ultimately what that comes down to is it’s a supply meeting demand based system. So if you are creating a demand for oxygen, then your heart has to try to meet it, okay? But that demand is based on your mechanical output, your actual movement that you’re expressing with your body.

 And I think that, well, I don’t think, like what seems to be the model is that as people age, they lose so much muscle tissue that they can’t move through space with the force, power, speed to create enough demand to make the heart supply it. So if you’re gonna move through space, the only way you do that is through skeletal muscle, creating propulsion. And if you lose enough muscle, you can’t create enough propulsion to move through space to create enough demand for the heart to actually meet and pump out enough blood. So the base of the pyramid is threshold levels of muscle tissue. And if you are holding onto that, you can actually move with enough force, work, all of the big hitter biomechanical variables that we look at to make the heart hit that demand. So is, and when that muscle tissue falls below that threshold, it’s like all hell’s gonna break loose physiologically. – And when you say below the threshold, I’m assuming that you’re talking about say, frailty or sarcopenia, whatever those– – We don’t even know, I don’t think we know what the threshold is, but it’s basically you have crossed this line and you do not have enough muscle anymore to support the, as an organism, what are we? We are a system of systems. I have a cardiovascular system, I have a skeletal muscle system, a nervous system, lymphatic system, blah, blah, blah, all these systems, they all collectively work together to support a super system, which is my whole self. And any one of those systems can go. Any one of them can be the first domino. And once that first domino goes, you tend to have multiple system failure. And skeletal muscle might be the most commonly expressed first domino in our current societal state. – I absolutely agree with you.

 And yes, we can see numbers for sarcopenia, an appendicular lean mass index that is low. We can see based on graphs where someone should be, but that is right at disease. That is, we’re not good at testing skeletal muscle mass, we’re not good at understanding where someone should be. We don’t necessarily have a great framework for thinking about what is optimal. I think this is a huge oversight in how we’ve thought about the importance of skeletal muscle. But what I think is extremely valuable in what you’re saying is that we agree upon that VO2 max is really important for longevity. And this has been shown over and over again. The question then becomes is what is the relationship between skeletal muscle and VO2 max? And do we have an equivalent marker for skeletal muscle that we do for VO2 max? – Great question. And I think that thought is important for this one. So, okay, let me kind of unpack this one a little bit. – And we might not. – Yeah, so the one that really jumped out, do we have an equivalent marker for skeletal muscle tissue as we would for VO2 max? VO2 max is the number that represents your aerobic fitness. That is your aerobic fitness. So muscular fitness tends to get divided into a few different realms, where we have, I guess, hypertrophy, actual cross-sectional area of the tissue. And then you have strength, then you have power, and then you kind of have some of these speed-oriented things as well. Power and speed, breaking that down is not that important right now.

 So what I would say about all of these things, strength, power, speed, is that they’re very movement-specific, okay? So my quadriceps don’t necessarily contribute that much to a bench press, where it’s gonna be more pectoral. So do we have measurements for muscular fitness? Yes, it’s just that we have a lot of them, because we have a lot of different muscles. Like the heart is just one muscle. It is in and of itself a thing. So, and when you’re measuring aerobic fitness, you are generally speaking measuring the heart. Right, and it is in a closed system that we know exactly what we’re looking at, and we’re able to, based on large data sets, understand what it should be.

 We don’t have that with skeletal muscle. Yeah, and skeletal muscle, it does concentric behaviors, it does eccentric behaviors, it works differently in lengthened positions and shortened positions, and it expresses itself different at different velocities. There’s a lot of different tiny subtypes of muscular expression that you could look at if you wanted to. I think that the big thing is to look at it. What is the biggest, if I was going to create a hierarchy of variables, I think number one is just cross-sectional area, is probably strength, the greatest predictor of strength is cross-sectional area. Meaning the size of your quadricep or the size of your bicep. Yes, yep. I don’t know, then that means I would be pretty weak, because I am– You just have low body fat. A very tiny, but I’m a very tiny person. So I have small cross-sectional area. We don’t know that, because you have lower body fat than a lot of other females. So while your circumference of your limbs might be lower, there’s probably less fat making up that measurement as well. So the best way to measure cross-sectional area is probably with one RM testing, because then you actually know how strong the person is. Unless you have an MRI or something like that. But when you get into the topic of measuring body composition and all of the idiosyncrasies inside of that, every test has problems. That is certainly true. Yeah.

 Basically what I’m hearing you say is that VO2 max is wonderful for the idea of longevity and cardiovascular health, which we know aerobic fitness. For muscular health, what I’m hearing you say is strength and cross-sectional area. Or is it– did I get that right? Yeah. So I think that– I’m just really– this is a very interesting question. And I think that it’s like– if I’m thinking about it from a health perspective, I’m starting to think, what are the most common– we talk about, hey, people– threats of longevity. Low fitness is a huge threat. But as people age, what really happens is they become frail. They fall. They injure themselves. Or they get sick. And when people get hurt or sick, now they just fall to pieces. They can’t exercise. They lose their fitness. Disease overrides. And it happens very quickly. Within a week of bed rest, an individual might lose three pounds of skeletal muscle mass. Yeah, it just unravels. It does. So what could be protective against falls or disease or things like that? I think that proximal muscle tissue is really important. So I think about musculature around the hip, the hip girdle. Lumbopelvic femoral muscle is probably tremendously important, as well as scapulothoracic humoral muscle. And that would be chest, scapular back? Yeah. Bromvoids, traps, lats, deltoids, pectorals, biceps, triceps.

 And then for the lower body, well, certainly abdominal muscles, spinal erectors, glutes, quads, hamstrings, the big hitter muscles that support the pelvis and the thorax.

 Now, did you work with clients? Did you ever train, work with clients? Oh, yeah. You did.

 Did you ever work with, I don’t know, say pre-pari-menopause, post-menopausal women? Yeah. And Don, Saledino, and I talk a lot about this.

 What do you think their best course of action is? So let’s take a woman who is, I don’t know, mid-40s, late-30s, mid-40s. We know that down the line, she’s going to go through hormonal changes. She’s probably already started.

 She doesn’t want to get this mid-belly fat. She doesn’t want visceral fat. She doesn’t want fat around her organs.

 How would you say– and let’s say she was an exerciser who did lots of cardio before. She got a great VO2 max.

 Maybe she’s taking some of the classes that we talked about earlier. She comes to you, or she comes to a strength conditioning exercise physiologist. What do you tell her to do? It sounds like she needs muscular training.

 That sort of pops from the description that I’m hearing.

 Particularly as hormonal levels decrease with getting older, there’s less support to skeletal muscle maintenance. So muscle can– you see it without enough stimulus. It’s going to start declining. But it doesn’t have to, does it? It doesn’t have to. No, I mean, you just create enough tension, and you’re able to, at the very least, maintain it.

 Look, I would go for trying to put muscle tissue on this person, which would probably scare the hell out of her, because in order to put on muscle tissue, you do have to eat in a calorie surplus. And a calorie surplus will be associated with some weight gain. And usually, that’s when all of the alarm bells start going off in women’s minds about, oh, no, I’m getting bulky. I’m, this is happening. This is happening. And it’s like– it usually doesn’t take that long with a calorie deficit diet to see, like, you weren’t getting bulky. Like, this is just– this is what happens with calorie surplus.

 It’s very difficult to build things. It’s very easy to lose things. Isn’t that crazy? Like, everything. I mean, like, eight weeks in a calorie deficit is– it strips everything away. You actually see what you built. But convincing people to go into a calorie surplus and to strength train in a way that would actually grow some tissue, for the population you’re bringing up, I think is a psychological bee’s nest. You know, it’s just like– It is. And it’s a challenge, because if people have– I was talking to my makeup artist before you got here. I figured you didn’t need makeup. But Katie Burns and– No, I did that myself. Yeah, you did. Did a great job. We were talking about body re-composition. And for example, if a person is struggling with being overweight or obese, which we know, quite frankly, is the majority of the population. It’s a huge percentage of the population. But we also know that those individuals need to build muscle. There’s this idea that people that have more weight on them have more muscle, yes, but that doesn’t mention anything about the quality of the tissue, which we know changes. Fat infiltrates.

 There’s fibrotic changes that happen over time, if long enough.

 Would it be safe to say that those individuals– would you still put those individuals who are going through body re-composition on a 10% to 20% calorie surplus?

 When people are so at the beginning stage, they can build muscle tissue– And they likely will. Yeah. In a deficit.

 It’s like, at a certain point, you’re not going to build any muscle tissue until you get into a surplus. But I just look at it like there’s a couple of levers that you can pull with people. One of them is training stimulus. And if that lever has never been pulled, it’s very powerful. And even if I do nothing with diet, or the diet lever is terribly orchestrated,

 if the training lever has never been moved before, you can grow muscle tissue in someone with a bad deficit diet.

 How do we know if someone has never reached an appropriate training stimulus?

 This is a hard question because you and I have been in the health and wellness space for a long time. And here’s what we see. We see a lot of people going to the gym and lifting five pound weights and not necessarily progressing or maybe progressing to 10 pound weights. And then that might be 10 pound weights for a year. That is likely not– is that a stimulus? Totally. Is it enough to likely maintain? Yeah. The evidence would suggest that those kind of behaviors or habits would be enough to maintain. But is that the stimulus that you are talking about? I’m talking about progressive overload.

 That’s really it. And it’s so hard because there’s so many levels to the onion of training in the United States and what needs to be done with people. And it’s kind of like there’s the psychological part, which is probably step one, just getting people to move away from their misconceptions and fears and things like that and get them to actually train with appropriate modalities, with the right amount of intensity, with the right amount of volume. And that’s hard to do. That’s really hard to do. Really quickly, I’d like to take a moment to thank one of the sponsors. And that’s Fatty 15. You’ve heard all about essential fatty acids. And Fatty 15 is a new fatty acid, the first one discovered in the last 90 years. And let me tell you, essential fatty acids are critical for health and wellness. We’ve all heard this, of course. But Fatty 15 is unique. So it’s a carbon 15. And by the way, it is going to be helpful for cellular aging. The reality is we’re all getting older. But there are ways and things that we can do to combat the destruction and impact our lifestyle has on our body and our brain and our mood. Fatty 15 is one of those supplements. Fatty 15 is amazing. And it’s extremely potent. And by the way, you will not be burping up Fatty 15 because it is tasteless and odorless, which also makes it amazing. Fatty 15 has great research behind it, which again, I think is extremely valuable. So a lot of different supplements on the market. I’m only bringing to you supplements that I love and use myself. Fatty 15 has helped me with energy. I’ll let you know about aging next year. But Fatty 15 is an amazing product. I think that you’re going to love it. Go to fatty15.com slash Dr. Lion. That’s fatty15.com slash Dr. Lion. And no surprise, you will get 15% off on your first 90-day subscription. Thank you to ZocDoc for sponsoring this episode of the show. If you have not heard about ZocDoc, I’m about to change your life. As adults, we have to do responsible things like go to the doctor. And ZocDoc is a free app and website that allows you to pair an in-network doctor with your insurance and location.

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 I’ve been a lifter my whole adult life. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that I fully understand, can I use machines or not? Can I get the same stimulus from a weight machine versus a hack squat versus a leg press? And you were the first person that really changed my perception of what was possible and what is necessary for stimulus, which has me ask the question, what is a reasonable paradigm to follow? And by the way, your shirt says rethinking big patterns. I’m assuming that this is all collaborative. – This is why, you know– – Tell me. – Yeah, so it’s funny. I hopped in the elevator of my building a couple weeks ago, and one of the maintenance guys was in there, and he’s like, “You going to work out right now?” And I was like, “Yeah.” And he’s like, “How long have you been doing that?” And I was like, “I don’t know, maybe it’s like 20 years or something?” And then I was like, “Wait, what year?” And I was like, “Oh my God, I’ve been lifting weights for 30 years.”

 Wow, it just kind of dawned on me. That’s a huge chunk of time to be involved with something.

 So, you know, this has been my whole life. Like it’s education, yes, but from a practical experience, from a, “What do I care about?” Like, “This is it.” So I’m deeply invested in training. And so I think that what I’m pretty good at is building models and creating frameworks for things.

 And that’s what I think is really missing overall for people to be able to follow is just, and I say that because it’s like, there’s a lot of great information, there’s a lot of, but like, can somebody do something with it to make it more user-friendly and helpful? Like, “Where the hell do I start? What do I do?”

 And so that’s what this idea of like a better paradigm kind of comes from. And so from a muscular standpoint, like where do people start? Like we have fundamental principles for training that exist. Like if you open up any textbook, exercise physiology or strength and conditioning, there’s usually four principles that get presented. Specificity, overload, individual differences and reversibility. Reversibility means that you can always lose whatever it is that you built. – They should take that one out. – That one’s the worst one. I used to have this picture of Diego Maradona, the soccer player on the slides that I would have because he at one point in time was the greatest soccer player in the world and then ballooned up out of control, like obese, like 300 pounds. It’s like, this is the same guy. So you can, doesn’t matter what you were at any point, like you can go in the opposite direction. Individual differences just means, different people will respond differently. Some people have a higher genetic ceiling for adaptation. Other people have a lower. Overload means that it has to be, the stimulus has to be strong enough to be able to get you to change, to adapt, to respond with your body, to get better over time. And specificity is probably the king of principles. And it means that in order to get better at something, you have to do pretty much exactly that thing.

 And specificity is the area that I really try to tackle with the models that I put together.

 So if we’re talking about trying to grow muscle

 and you’re starting the conversation with specificity, like, you know, what we talked about before with, hey, the heart is just one thing. It’s one muscle. But if I look at your whole body, you’ve got hundreds of muscles around your body. – 600 and something like, we have to look. – Insane number. And each one, like, does each one need to have its own individual exercise? No, but there’s regions at the very least, where if all I did was squat, I wouldn’t have much deltoid development, you know? So I need to at least begin by having an exercise that targets muscles. And that might be the biggest, you know, checkpoint of all of these boxes that I would cover. Like, you know, if you have an exercise for your biceps that features elbow flexion, and you do it hard enough with enough weight, it almost is like, okay, great. That’s probably 80% of the game right there. – And from the listener, for the listener or the viewer, however they’re choosing to consume this material, does it matter what muscles are being, because it would be very arbitrary. You know, Monday is universal chest day, everyone’s doing chest, and then there’s Wednesday, which is universal leg day, but you know, Matt doesn’t do legs ever, or calves. So how do we think about, does everybody need to do a bicep? Does everybody need to do a tricep? Or can we say if a woman who is new to, or a man, is new to hypertrophy training, would there be things very specific that you would pick? For example, do you pick a squat, a hinge, a push-pull? How does someone get through all of the confusing information out there? – Yeah, yeah, sure. Well, I think that from the standpoint of what do you have to do? If we’re looking at this from a longevity perspective, okay, so if you look at the most common fracture sites, what you have is hip, spine, wrist, as the big three. And so I would have to load those structures in order to create adaptations at the level of the bone to be able to make the bone have greater density and resilience and decrease the likelihood that it will fracture to certain forces.

 – Which makes a lot of sense. – Yeah. – Which makes a lot of sense. – So if I’m going to load the hip and the spine, I would need some kind of standing exercise that actually loads the axial skeleton. So something where probably the weight is in the hands or pushing down on the shoulders to be able to create enough stimulus for those areas to respond to. – Hip, spine, wrist. – Yeah, and for wrist, oftentimes it’s like, that’s usually like an upper body load, some kind of compressive force pushing down through the wrist. And so when you start thinking about that, it’s like, well, probably some kind of a hinge, some kind of a squat for the lower body in order to be able to stimulate hip and spine, and then some kind of a press and some kind of a pull to stimulate the upper body for wrist. – Which all that makes sense. So this is very practical and important for people to understand. We are going to show you in a video, in a series of videos what Pat is talking about. But again, the conversation is longevity. How do we go and tackle the inevitable aging process, which probably doesn’t have to be as rough as it is how we’re seeing it now, because we are largely a sedentary population.

 You would choose something to load each of these areas, hip, spine, wrist.

 When you talk about the paradigm, and you and I have talked a lot about, again, the skeletal muscle adaptation, do you then decide after you’ve picked, how many exercises are you picking? And I understand that there’s a spectrum, but just take us through from a beginner standpoint, how many exercises, what kind of loads, what kind of, does tempo matter? How can we frame everything up to just say, you know what, I listened to Pat, and I’m gonna go to the gym tomorrow talking to you, mom, and they’re gonna execute. So I think that where this leads us is sort of this topic of the constraints of hypertrophy for us. And I’ll tell you, Mike Isretel from Renaissance Purification– – He’s coming on the pod. – Oh, amazing. I mean, this is his wheelhouse. He has videos on YouTube, these foundational RP videos, and he has this whole constraints of hypertrophy series that I think is fantastic and very well constructed and he’s amazing. So– – I’m excited. – I think that this really is a big part of my mentality in terms of what I’m talking about from these concepts as well.

 So I think, number one, from a specificity standpoint, we need to target and stimulate the major muscles that would be lumbopelvic femoral, so lumbar spine, pelvis, and femur. And then thoracoscapulohumeral. So the thoracic spine, the scapula, and the humerus. And so if I’m going to get those muscles, like I said, it’s some kind of a hinge, some kind of a squat, some kind of a horizontal push, some kind of a horizontal pull, some kind of a vertical push, some kind of a vertical pull. Those are the big categories that I lay out as like, these are sort of the foundational, essential patterns that you need to evoke. – Everybody should be doing, you agree with this, life is better this way, and everyone should be doing this. So that has really been in the textbooks for a long time and that has not changed.

 Once a beginner chooses these exercises,

 how many exercises should they choose? And I think that we put this together, we looked at,

 I have to look here, but I think that when we were talking about it, you said, we defined the categories of resistance training, just logistically, you said starting at anywhere from eight to 24 sets per week, five to 30 reps, two days a week. So I’m gonna repeat that for everybody. And again, you guys, we have a program for you to check out and it’s starting at eight sets, eight to 24 sets. So that’s per week and five to 30 reps, two days a week. – And again, this is very Mike Isertel based and he does a great job, I think, of having a really big picture view of all of the research on this and then having these sorts of upper and lower ends that make sense depending on what we seem to know from the evidence. And I think that what’s important is like to point out, number one, science is not an N equals one phenomenon. Like it’s a– – What do you mean, tell me more. – So science speaks in generalities, okay? So these recommendations are going to be for average, you know what I mean? Like every individual person can fall above or below these sorts of boundaries. And so I think that’s important to understand is that like what I’m going to present to you is probably the most middle of the road sort of a thought process, but there’s extremes that can exist and people can fall into extremes.

 So when we’re talking about this, this is sort of like upper and lower ends. Like if you’re going bowling, like we have kind of the gutters. – Never gonna lie. – Never been bowling. You get the gutters on both sides. We want to avoid the gutters. We want to roll the ball down the middle and have it hit the pitch. – You mean you’re not supposed to just put it– – Now I know, I know when it ever invites me bowling, okay. – So what the research seems to suggest is that in order for muscles to grow, somewhere around a minimum of like 10 sets a week is about the level.

 So if I want my biceps to grow, 10 sets for the biceps done per week is like the minimum it seems. Now the problem with being a person is that that which used to work for you will cease to work for you as you make progress and improvements. – Do we know how long that is? So do you define a beginner who is doing resistance training

 through a period of weeks? Would it be six to eight weeks or is it just overall training age? When someone who is listening to this, they say, okay, well, am I a beginner? Am I intermediate? How fast can I expect some kind of gains or hypertrophy? – Yeah, well, I think that a beginner,

 a beginner is someone that can improve, make progressive quantitative improvements session to session. – I learned that from you and I thought that was very interesting. A beginner is someone who is going to make progression from day to day. Is that right? Day to day, week to week or is it day to day? – It’s very common if I have a new guy that comes in, never lifted weights before in his life and we put him on the bench press on Monday,

 struggled to get the bar, got the bar for five reps. It was wobbly and shaky. Comes back in on Wednesday and gets the bar for 20 reps. And I’m like, whoa, okay, comes back in on Friday and I put 10s on both sides of the bar and he gets it for 20 reps. And then it’s like, he’s made hundreds of percentage points and improvements across a week. And that can happen. It’s just every system in the body is sensitive and fresh and new to learning with this stuff. And it’s like exponential rates of gains very quickly session to session. – Do you see that strength that’s probably neurological adaptation? There’s a whole host of reasons. Strength will happen faster than hypertrophy. – Yes. – How long? And I was looking at some of this data. I spoke to Don Lehman about it. I messaged Sue Phillips about it. It seems as if it is so variable. If someone is new, let’s say a new drug-free,

 they could potentially put on two pounds of skeletal muscle a month. – Yeah. – Maybe if it’s a young man. I don’t know. Do we have a cadence for middle-aged men and women who are eating a higher protein diet and in an appropriate calorie range? – Yeah. – Do we know how fast they can put on muscle? – I don’t think that there’s, I mean, look, I bet there is some research somewhere that actually tackles this. I’m not aware of that information. What I usually hear is people that, they generally talk about, look, what we’re really dealing with is you’re putting on grams of muscle tissue. You’re putting on grams of muscle tissue per week. So it’s a frustrating game in reality because the rate of adaptation is so slow that it’s frustrating for most people because your mind is going a lot faster. The pace of modern society is a lot faster, but unfortunately, physiology is from the Stone Age and it goes really slow. – And the sensitivity of our testing, the majority of individuals measuring body composition will get a DEXA. DEXA is not very sensitive to those very small changes. – Right, right. – An individual may be training, putting everything into it and I don’t know, not seeing gains until they see gains. And that can be very challenging for people. – I think that though, like an easier way to think about this is that there is a sequence of adaptations that happens in response to resistance training and it generally works from superficial to deep. So the first changes that take place will be neurological

 and then you’ll improve the firing and the sequence of the nerves that speak to the muscles for a movement. So you’ll use more muscle fibers of an individual muscle to be able to power a movement and then you’ll begin to recruit additional muscles as well to contribute to that movement.

 And then the next series of adaptations would go to the muscle tissue. And what we know is that there is a sequence of what sorts of proteins we synthesize. So the first kinds of proteins that you’ll synthesize will be structural proteins. So the, you know, your muscle cells are made up of kind of like barriers cell to cell. You know, you have a Z-disc that divides specific fibers from one another and then you have kind of a lattice like network of structural proteins that actually have formed what’s called the cytoskeleton. So the, basically the foundation and the infrastructure of the cell itself

 and things like Titan is a prolific structural protein but you will synthesize those first. Basically you’re building a stronger foundation for the cell and you’re making it assembled in a way where it’s more robust.

 After that, you’ll synthesize contractile protein. So actinomiesin that are actually the things that create tension and pull and shorten the cell and are able to demonstrate force production externally. – And would that be myofibrillar proteins? – Yes. – And the mention before that, are you talking about sarcoplasmic hypertrophy or is this more just ribosomal? – No, it’s ribosomal protein synthesis. It’s just that you have the structural proteins first. And from what I understand from a timeline perspective, it’s typically like two to four weeks, I believe, where you’re going to be doing structural protein synthesis. And then following that, you will begin to go into a contractile protein synthesis. And that will take place for weeks, like anywhere like weeks three, four, up to like 12 to 16 weeks. So it’s funny because people, like the topic of exercise variation can get brought up in people varying exercises, switching exercises. And I’m kind of like, you don’t really want to switch exercises in my mind for a minimum of like 12 weeks because people switch exercises every four weeks. And I’m like, you just went through neurological relearning and structural protein synthesis. And you didn’t even start contractile protein synthesis for the motor units for that specific exercise. Stick with one exercise for at least 12 weeks to be able to actually create protein synthesis of contractile proteins for those muscles. – And if you can continuously do some kind of progressive overload, would you ever have to switch your training program? I mean, aside from being very bored, but would there ever be a physiological need? – I think that there’s real world logistical things that you have to consider. Like if you get really strong at a specific exercise, it can kind of beat you down, you know, like you’re connected. So again, like it’s the sequence of adaptation that really gets interesting because again, it goes from superficial to deep, nerves and then muscles are what will adapt next, structural and then contractile. Then the next tissue that tends to go into adaptation will be the connective tissue, the tendons in particular. And following tendons, now you get into bone remodeling. So like I said, it’s just, you’re getting deeper and more towards the center of the body as far as the adaptation is actually happening. What’s interesting is it does continue to go further and further after that, where you then ultimate, like the most deep adaptations are epigenetic changes at the level of like the nuclei. And then finally changes in the gamete, which would be expressed genetically being passed off to the offspring. – It’s incredible. – Yeah. – It’s incredible. I was looking at the protein turnover, muscle protein turnover is one to 2% per day and collagen is, and tendons are much slower.

 I don’t know how fast bone turns over, but it’s slower. There’s this cadence of being able to leverage skeletal muscle to push the limits of physiology and also health and wellness. – Yeah. – And it’s interesting. – From a timing of changing exercises though, at a certain point, like you’re just kind of beating up the joints with the same exercise. It’s not a perfect explanation, but I would just say, you can, if you really stick with an exercise long enough, you can get really strong at it. And there’s like almost some downsides to that where it’s like, your joints can start to get, like I said, inflamed, beat up. And then if you just simply rotate to a new exercise, oftentimes it’s like fresh, it feels good on your joints. You’re not strong enough at this point for it to really create that much of stress. – Yeah, that makes sense.

 I have a lot of questions for you.

 We might even take a break to ask five questions. So you do rapid fire questions. This was actually my producer’s idea. – I’m game for whatever here. – It actually goes yes or no. Okay, so it’s shake wake. – No. (laughing) That was Matt’s question. Stretching.

 I know it’s very hard for peach. – I don’t think it’s worth it for most people.

 – Cardiovascular training. – Yes.

 – Okay.

 Creatine. – Yes.

 – Testosterone replacement.

 – Merky.

 – Okay, fair. – Yes. – So the real question that Matt had, I’m not even gonna mention, I’ll joke it off air to you. – Okay, I’m super curious now. I’m sure everybody is. – Yeah, it’s actually very funny, but I’m not sure if anyone else would find it funny. You would definitely find it funny.

 Walking. – Yes.

 – Go go. – Yes. – Okay. So basically any physical movement is something that you agree with? – Yes. – Gluten.

 – It’s fine for most people. – See? – Totally fine. – Agree with you. – Yeah. – I think, Matt, you got any other questions? Any of our, we did more than five.

 I don’t know if you have any more. You’re yes or no. – Just that one question. – Okay, well we’re gonna ask that one question off air, friends. If you are in our private community, I will definitely put the private community question up there and you can all get a very good laugh, which by the way you’re gonna think is very funny. – I can’t wait.

 – So we talked about resistance training and that importance for physiological adaptation, what we have to do for longevity. We talked about it has to be two days a week.

 What is, I guess the next question is after resistance training, there is, you mentioned the importance of cardiovascular fitness,

 joint integrity, where does high intensity interval training fit into any of this? If at all– – It doesn’t need to. It’s, I think that it’s just, it’s nice to have options. And I think that it’s an option for people to develop their aerobic systems. And it can fit in nicely for people if they are limited on time. And they’re okay with doing some really hard stuff for a shorter period of time. – Where does it fall into from the hypertrophy standpoint? So if you were to say there is different categories of resistance training, is there? – Yes, for sure. – Okay. Tell me the different categories of resistance training so that we can have just from an overview of when we say resistance training, what exactly are we talking about? – Yeah, I think that it’s a great question and a problem that currently exists because it’s not a one size fits all thing. So there’s strength training, you know, which is like one to five repetitions generally speaking and like oftentimes used by competitive strength athletes like power lifters and– – And that’s one to five. So strength is one to five. – Yeah, roughly. – Roughly. – Yeah. And you know, you’re going to get certain adaptations and there’s some bleed over between these things, but think of it as kind of a Venn diagram.

 Strength training is largely neurological. It’s more neurological than it is necessarily like muscular. It really improves, you know, recruitment, rate coding, synchronization, firing of the nervous system more than anything. Then you have more hypertrophy training. – Can I ask you a question before you do hypertrophy? If strength training is more neurologic in nature, would those individuals be more likely to be inhibited by say over-training or stress?

 – Well– – Not necessarily. – If they did enough volume of it, yes. Like it would be really brutal. And you know, we have some like, you know, we’ve kind of alluded to it, the upper and lower limits for reps that you would do to grow muscle tissue. And it’s sort of five on the low end and 30 on the upper end. You don’t really want to do fewer than five reps typically if your goal is to grow muscle tissue. And why? Because well, the research seems to indicate that it just beats up your joints too much if you’re gonna do that much volume. – Okay. – Where if you go a little bit lighter, you have tend to see less joint provocation.

 And you know, but this other category of just resistance training for muscle growth is not synonymous with strength training. And again, there’s bleed over. – But it’s all resistance training because you’re moving your body against, or you’re moving something against force. Is that how you would define resistance? – Yeah, you’re creating force with your muscles to move something through space. Either yourself or an external object. – Or a person. – Yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, like wrestling is strength training. But again, it’s not the most streamlined way to accomplish hypertrophy. Like I’m not going to recommend four sets of wrestling to most people as like– – I mean, you could, it could be the new thing. – Yeah, right? I’m sure it will be. (laughs) – You guys heard it here first. – So then you also have like, what I would say like resistance training for speed and power athletics, where like I might be doing things involving really like launching things fast through space with certain populations. – Give me an example. – Well, if I’m training a tennis player and I’ve got like a nice cable set up with like, you know, there’s certain like Kaiser is in a pneumatic resistance exercise company. And they make a functional trainer with, it’s a cable machine, but you can move this thing really fast. And it doesn’t have slack in it the way that free weights would. You’re trying to create very high rate of force development. And I could do it with rotational movements that would be more similar to the movements in tennis as compared, like, does that athlete need to be very muscular? No, like if you look at elite tennis professionals, they oftentimes are not very muscular athletes, but they can rotate at unbelievably high velocities and hit a tennis ball way harder than I can. – Yeah. – So it really is population specific. And I try to just break it down simply by saying like, sort of, you know, strength, speed, hypertrophy as an easy way to do it. – An older individual, my dad was just here visiting from Ecuador and I took him to the gym. And I was thinking he’s going through obviously, not obviously, but he’s very tight. He’s working on strength. He does lots of body weight type pushups. But the other thing that when I was looking at the literature, there seems to be a decline in both force and speed as we age. And to me, I was thinking, okay, well,

 what could someone do beforehand? Would that be something like a ball slam, a medicine ball slam? Would it be something like ropes?

 How can an individual prevent that decline? And is it an important skill to have? – So, you know, this ties into this, the aging research and power is this variable that pops when you really get into the data, where power is work divided by time,

 you think of it as like strength times velocity. That’s a pretty good way to– – Which is strength. So if you were picking, if I were to think about this, I’d be picking up a 10 pound medicine ball for strength. And then would I be throwing it? Would that be– – Yeah, you’re expressing it with speed. You’re both able to have high force and high speed happening simultaneously, I think is, it’s a probably wrong way to say it and from a technical standpoint, but it gets the point across.

 And, you know, there is a,

 the problem with it, the reason that power comes out as this variable that is like, oh my God, it’s dropping so much with aging populations is because it’s a multiplication equation. If you think like strength times speed equals power, if speed drops, power drops. If strength drops, power drops. If they both drop, it really drops. So it gets highlighted just simply because of the equation style.

 So, you know, the natural reaction to this is, oh my God, old people need to do more fast stuff then. And it’s like, whoa, let’s hold on a second. – And everyone’s going, whoa, who are you calling old? – Yeah, well, you know, I just sometimes just trying to say these things.

 And look, I think that from a practical standpoint of training people across a very widespread of ages and ability levels, the average person exercising,

 when you try to get them to do higher velocity things, it’s a train wreck. And I’m like, oh, it’s not worth it. Like I’ve seen enough attempts to get people to do things like jumps or throws where it’s like, there’s not enough horsepower there for the exercise to be expressed the way that it should be expressed. – So take a pause there because I think it’s really important. From the perspective, frankly, nutrition is easy. I can say, you know what, Pat, you’re gonna have a hundred grams of protein, a hundred times four is 400 calories, you know, or whatever it is, right?

 Or a hundred calories of protein, you know what I’m saying? There’s four calories per one gram of dietary protein, whatever the equation is. But when we’re talking about exercise stimulus, it is so variable that it becomes increasingly difficult, not just from a confusion standpoint, but from a conversation standpoint of saying, you know what, hey dad, I need you to do 10 box jumps. And we watch Nate do a box jump and basically it might be a partial jump or he might fall, not necessarily fall, but he might not be able to elicit the amount of power necessary. Is that what you’re talking about? – Yeah, I think it’s a combination of a couple of things. Number one, if you just look at the rate of adaptation, the rate of change or the magnitude of change,

 certain fitness types have a big potential for change. Like the aerobic system has an enormous potential for change. I could take someone off the couch and maybe they run a mile in 11 minutes on day one. And if I train them very effectively for aerobic fitness and running, you could believe that they might be able to run a seven minute mile by week 15, okay? That’s like not outside the realm of reasonability.

 Why? Because there’s so many, like your mitochondria can adapt in terms of number and enzymes inside of them. And the heart can get so much more effective at pumping blood out and the arteries can dump more into, like you can have more capillaries. You have so many things that can change in response to that stimulus. Okay, if I’m looking at speed and high rate of force development things, I have my phosphogen energy system, which could influence this. That thing changes like practically nothing, okay? It might not even change. There’s like kind of confusing research on that. The one thing that will definitely make a change is taking creatine. – Yeah, I was just thinking that, yeah. – That’s about- – Phosphate protein system. – That might be better than training.

 And then it’s almost like if you could only jump over a matchbook on day one, by week 12, you might only be able to jump over two matchbooks. Like it’s not an impressive change that takes place. – Okay, so what you’re saying is that- – It’s low return on investment. – A focus on hypertrophy with hypertrophy, right? And you correct me. Is where you get good muscle tissue. Muscle tissue and ultimately good muscle tissue, healthy skeletal muscle tissue supports VO2, supports cardio fitness, supports cardio metabolic health. We don’t have to do, if what I’m understanding is correct, we don’t have to do explosive type exercises that are specifically designed for power. – I think things that would be a power measurement are not necessarily the best training modalities to pursue to improve power. I bet you if I had an older population and I increased their muscle tissue by using more like hypertrophy specific resistance training, their power tests would probably improve more than training them with power modalities. And part of it is that it’s just, again, the actual magnitude of adaptive change is like, you get almost no change from speed exercises. – You mean you get no change physically or- – There’s very few target tissues that will change much. Like I said- – Give me an example of a speed activity that’s purely speed or something like that. – A box jump for that population.

 Versus if I had them do 12 weeks of hack squatting with appropriate weight and progressively overloaded it.

 If I had them do a 12 week box jump program, I’d probably see minimal changes in muscle tissue, minimal changes in anything I measured, I’d probably see minimal changes in. And I’d probably see minimal changes in jump height too. – And people don’t appreciate that. And this is also, it puts individuals at risk also for injury. – Absolutely.

 – So the juice might not be worth the squeeze or whatever they say. – And then I can almost guarantee like,

 again, it’s tricky, I don’t have the research support to be able to make this conclusively, but my feeling is that they would probably improve their jump height more through the squatting with that population. Than they would through jump training specifically. The last thing is I’ve watched it enough in person. And sometimes it’s like, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck. And when you watch people that have low training histories and are older try to do these things, it’s just like, oh God, please stop. Like that is not the way that should look. That is not anything that I ever wanna see again. – And we’re kind of teasing about it, but it’s not from that perspective. We don’t want people to get injured. – It’s partly that, but it’s also like, I’m just looking at this thing and it’s like, that’s not gonna do anything. Nothing is happening. So nothing’s gonna change. Like when you watch people do med ball slams and they don’t have the athletic background and they don’t have the training history and they don’t have the strength, it’s just like the most, like it’s like that wouldn’t– – Like watching Matt do it. – Pain and glass. This marshmallow throw is not gonna do anything.

 So I think that it’s, I’m looking at it from those perspectives. – Thank you to Our Place for sponsoring this episode of the show, Our Place has changed the game for me. Our Place makes cookware and a number of other kitchen appliances. Now, in case you didn’t know this, I’m a mom of two little children. My kids right now are five and three. And I’ve spent a lot of time being very concerned about what I was cooking in because kids, let’s face it, are vulnerable and their bodies are much smaller. I was very worried about these forever chemicals that are in traditional cookware, forever chemicals. And we’ve all seen Teflon, maybe we’ve used Teflon and eaten out of it for many years. I know that I have and I didn’t want that for my kids.

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 You have to be able to see if what you are doing is working and where you need to improve. Whether you want to improve your hormones, brain, heart health, Inside Tracker reveals the exact areas of your health that needs improvement through comprehensive blood testing, DNA analysis, sleep, and fitness tracking data. And of course, currently your daily habits. I love you guys and deeply believe that you are responsible for your own health. So if no one is coming to save you, you have to save yourself and save 10% off the Inside Tracker subscription and any plan. Go to insidetracker.com slash DrLion. That’s insidetracker.com slash DrLion for 10% off Inside Tracker subscription and any plan. It makes a lot of sense because while in theory, these things are really great. In theory, I’m not really that athletic. In theory, I would love to be able to do a med ball slam and have it look as good as when I see Danica Patrick do it, who’s a friend in it.

 When you see someone athletic, it’s like, whoa. When you see someone athletic or you see Steffi Cohn do it, you see someone athletic do it, and then you see, I’m trying to do it, and it looks so different. Meanwhile, I’m exhausted doing it. And they’re exhausted doing it, but they’re recruiting and moving in a way that has finesse, and it seems to have safety. It’s coordinated. It’s skilled.

 You see it, and you’re like, wow, that’s a thing. When you see it, you know it. And maybe there are certain things that you don’t have to do to get better at the ultimate outcome, which is force or speed production or power. And that is actually what we’re getting at. And yes, I’m teasing my producer, Matt, only because he’s over there. Boy, does he bust my chops when we are not on camera. So this is my only time to do it. Now, I want to move into something that is very complex for me to understand. So I want you to talk to me like I am in third grade or less,

 because you and I spent a considerable amount of time thinking about– and I spent time learning from you–

 putting together a program by defining certain things. And for the listener, you guys, this is going to be new to you, I’m assuming, because it was very new to me. And you know where I’m going with this, this idea of ground. And I’m not talking about coffee grounds. I am talking about this idea of ground, high ground, medium ground, low ground. I don’t even know what that means. When I hear ground, I think of coffee and beef. That’s all I know about ground in relation to training. So you have to talk to me very, very– Very fast with this. Very slowly. Yep. And this is my baby. This is my– Is it boy or girl?

 Mom joke’s coming in hot. All right, guys, don’t turn this off. I’m not even going to touch someone. I’m just trying to loosen up the science for you all. Yeah. OK. So right, this is kind of like if I have a thing that’s uniquely me, this is really my topic. So I read this paper years ago. It was by Glazier in 2017. And it was called Moving Towards a Grand Unified Theory for Exercise Science. And it had a subtopic to the title as well. But I just noticed this guy is a researcher. And he’s ballsy enough to say that he’s got the grand unifying theory for exercise science. Wow. What is this? And it’s AKA the constraints paper. And so I had to read this thing a few times. It’s not an easy paper to read.

 The constraints paper? Yes. But the title of it is Moving Towards a Grand Unified Theory of Exercise Science. That sounds like a physics paper. Yeah. Well, I mean, constraints kind of move you in that direction. So constraints are blockers. They create boundaries. And without constraints, you have random movement in all directions.

 Constraints create direction. And this is a giant topic. Like it’s not specific to human movement. It’s deep. Well, we’re talking about deep. But we’re going to pull it back to this idea of understanding constraints and where this falls into training. Constraints create shapes. And they create direction.

 And Glazier breaks down the constraints for humans in this paper by saying that there are individual constraints, task constraints, and environmental constraints. So the– I like that. It’s been wise. It’s– Wise. So I assembled Rethinking the Big Patterns to Seminar series that I teach. And I have a seminar for individual constraints. And I have two seminars primarily for environmental and task constraints.

 What it was– just briefly, what is that? So the primary individual constraint for human movement is the skeleton. So the unique assemblage of the human skeleton creates the unique expression of human movement, where if I was to watch a silhouette go by, I would know like, oh, that’s a human and not a giraffe and not a hyena. And like the individual unique constraints of their skeletons create the way that they move that we can observe. And we know that it’s different, which is fascinating to really think about.

 And so as a for instance, like if you have surgery and somebody puts screws in a plate into your shoulder, that changes the constraints for your shoulder’s ability to move. And then there’s also ways in which I can analyze your skeleton and the general shapes of it and your body type and possibly be able to make some temporary modifications with certain exercises to be able to open up the possibilities for you to move slightly differently more or less. Would that be, for example, choosing basically a squat based on arm length or a sumo deadlift based on– Doesn’t get as much into that as it gets into like me being– I’d put you on a table test and I’d say, OK, you have 105 degrees of hip flexion. And then I would sort of measure like the angles of your rib cage and other things and have a game plan for how– like the funny thing, people don’t realize like how much you can change the shape of someone’s rib cage acutely through breathing and specific exercise strategies. And when you change those shapes, you change the ability of the arms and the legs to move through space. That’s fascinating. It is. If you guys want to learn more, you can check out his breathing and big patterns. It’s a whole two day seminar on that stuff. Which we’ll link. But what I want to stay focused on is the– The other constraints are the more specific to resistance training.

 Like task constraints I can quickly kind of get into and say like, I’m going to give you the squat as an exercise. But I can modify the task and it would change the way that you would squat. If I said, hey, I’m going to have you– I want you to do body weight squats. And I’m going to see how many you can do in half an hour. Oh my god. Or if I said, I want to see how many you do in five seconds. You would squat very differently based on me actually changing the task constraints.

 And you can do that in a million different ways.

 Environmental constraints are the big one that I kind of looked at and made the cornerstone for how I define resistance training for people.

 And so I said to myself, OK, environment. What do we mean by this? What’s the environment of Earth?

 Anybody can kind of figure that out. They can go outside or they can turn on the weather. They can go to Texas. Yeah. And so I said to myself, OK, a lot of things can impact the environment. You can have altitude. You can have humidity. You can have wind. You can have precipitation. Those are all significant impacts to the environment. But is there one thing that really is most powerful from a– yes, the solar load. OK, like if you are closer to the equator, it’s probably going to be hotter than if you’re further away from the equator. And it’s winter time for that part of the world. And this translates to– what this translates to is I started to look at the gym and I started to say, well, there’s lots of different variables, OK? What’s the rain? What’s the altitude? What are the lesser important environmental variables? For example, when we were choosing a gym to shoot

 the program. Is that what you mean? Yeah. OK, so what does an individual have available to them? Right. Or like what– long story short, what’s the son of the gym?

 And the answer that I arrived at, it is this concept of ground, OK? And what is ground?

 It’s the combination of external support provided to an exercise and neurological feedback coming from an exercise. So pausing here– remember, I’m in third grade. Ground is this idea that there’s two– would you say two branches? There’s neurological support. And then there’s physical support. External support. OK, so external support, meaning when we go to do a hack squat, I have my back support or a leg extension. Is that what you’re talking about? You’re not talking about– Yeah, all the things that hold you up. Everything that holds you up that is outside of your body. Right. A bench? A bench. A preacher curl that you’d put your arms on.

 The back support of a leg press. Yes. OK, so that is ground. And then neurological feedback. Like, I always give– like, this is one of these ones I have to give an example for people to understand more than a definition. If you’ve ever been on the subway in New York City, you can– It smells. The smell, that’s another environmental factor. But– Bad. A lot of times, tourists, they get on, and they’re looking at the map. And then the thing starts moving, and it lurches, and they get knocked all over the place. And if they just had one finger on the subway pole, they wouldn’t get thrown around as much. And so all that finger on the pole does is it provides reference of where you are in space relative to everything around you. And it organizes yourself in terms of knowing where your pieces are relative to each other. And if you have that information, it’s so much easier for you to do the task. I love it. Yeah. What is so fascinating about your concept of rethinking these big patterns and this idea of ground, high ground, medium ground, and low ground, is that it’s a very intellectual way of putting training together. Yeah. I mean, it is. It’s a very intellectual way. It is, which has upsides and downsides. There’s a lot of front-end work to get through it. But once you see it, you’re like, oh my god, again, because the Glazier paper is the universal theory of exercise science. And we’re going to pull that up. The whole thing that ties everything together. And so again, I’ve been training for 30 years. And I’ve been around the block more times than a couple. And so I’ve seen every weird training style. And I’ve seen functional training come and go. And I’ve seen bodybuilding and weightlifting. And you know, the Bosu balls. And it’s like, what do I do with all this stuff? Why do these things exist? How can I explain their existence? And that’s what you’re going to do very quickly.

 So I just started to look at different sports, just from a big picture, noticing how different athletes’ bodies are in different sports. And I categorized sports by ground as well, saying that there are some very high ground sports. And then that there are very low ground sports. High ground meaning support, physically supported. Is that how you define it? In neurological feedback. So you’re touching stuff to give you a sense of where you are in space. And then there’s objects that you’re physically interacting with. This actually makes a lot more sense when I think about low ground.

 So would high ground be both physical touch or touching something other than yourself plus support? Yes. I have a question about swimming.

 Would swimming be– It’s a weird one. Because you’re actually in water. I have a very–

 under the topic of external support,

 the actual– the next variable under that is the degree of deformation of the substance that you’re interacting with. So the more deformable the substance that’s supporting you, the lower the ground. So water is very deformable. So that would be a low ground support. Correct. When you are designing a program is the first thing– obviously, we talked about your principles of hypertrophy, the lifts that we all agreed upon. And then to take it another level, based on your foundations, you then move to high ground, medium ground, low ground.

 When you are choosing a high– when would you choose– number one, what is an example of high ground exercises? Because ideally, what we’re doing is we’re taking exercises with–

 what we talked about was a woman who’s going to the gym. And we know that she needs to do a squat. A high ground squat would be a hack squat because she has contact to– Tremendously supported. She’s supported. It doesn’t deform much.

 The neurological piece– Oh, she’s touching stuff with her hands. She’s touching everything. Her feet are touching a platform. So how do we define based on high ground, medium, low ground? And why would we pick? Is it based on skill set? How are we– You’ve got to go back to finishing with the athletes to do this. So my low ground athletes– the lowest ground athletes I can think of are Olympic divers and half pipe skateboarders. Which is not touching really anything, but being in space. They’re in the air. And they’re then going into water.

 And so what makes someone a great low ground athlete? It’s their ability to turn and tumble through space. And then what makes someone a great high ground athlete? And the highest ground sport that I can think of competitively is powerlifting. But then you have other super high ground sports like playing interior line in football

 and super heavyweight wrestling or other high ground sports. Because you are in contact with a heavy load. Yes. Like another 300 pound dude that’s lined up across from you is not an easy to deform thing. OK. I’m just kidding. I’m totally kidding. But what makes you a great high ground athlete is your ability to not be turned and to not be tumbled by external forces. So it’s exact opposite. So interesting. And what would make you better at being a great high ground athlete would be being more massive and having more skeletal muscle. Like you are now harder to turn and you are harder to tumble.

 What makes you better at being a great low ground athlete? Less body weight. Maybe. That’s a harder one to figure out. I see. I think that there’s weird things probably. I think that coordination. I think that proprioception. I think your motor potential to be able to learn new skills and techniques and things like that. But what makes you great at tumbling and turning is tricky.

 But I think that ultimately we are now making this jump to the gym. And I would say– Because that’s what we care about, the outcome of– There’s high ground exercises and there’s super low ground exercises. And I think that when I– what’s the easiest way to stimulate and grow muscle tissue? High ground exercises. More support and more neurological feedback.

 And then what would be the least likely way to grow muscle tissue? Super low ground exercises, which would be like you’re not interacting with much stuff.

 I think that if I’m talking about a squat,

 some of the highest ground squats I can think of would be a hack squat or a pendulum squat, something like that. The lowest ground squats I could think of would be a rear foot elevated in a TRX strap with your front foot on a Bosu ball squat.

 There’s the super deformable thing you’re standing on. The TRX strap is incredibly deformable. It would be really hard to grow a lot of quadricep and glute tissue doing that TRX strap RFE split squat. Which, by the way, makes me think about a lot of the activities that middle age people choose that are somewhat in the vein of what you’re describing. And then they wonder why they’re not necessarily putting on muscle or changing their body. And it’s potentially because they’re choosing low ground activities. I think that’s really it. So this to me is like the great differentiator. And who should do low ground exercises? Well, probably low ground athletes. I try to categorize different sports by where they fall. But what about the general population? Well, the general population’s primary outcomes they’re looking for is increasing muscle tissue. When we’re talking about a– They’re high ground 101. We are high ground 101. OK. Tell me about– and really, I think basically you did unless you wanted to mention high ground. Because I have a list here of low fat, high muscle.

 I guess I put that there. But really, from a body composition perspective, high ground. I have hack squat, pendulum, Smith machine, a good leg press. These are all high ground. And if you are looking for hypertrophy, you are looking for high ground. Yeah. I’m a probabilities person. And I look at it like–

 if I’m doing a squat exercise, the outcome that I’m looking for is I’m trying to– Bigger butt. Yeah, glutes and quads. Those are the target tissues. How can we get– So what would increase the probability of actually stimulating the glutes and the quads? The more ground put into the exercise, the more likely it will actually hit the target tissue. If I put you into this rear foot elevated BOSU ball contraption, I have no idea what the target tissue is going to be on you. It might be your neck from trying to stabilize. It could be your QL– Excellent plaque. Hey, if you’re super skilled and you’re the most motor coordinated person on Earth, it could be your quads and your glutes. But from a probability standpoint, it’s very low. You would– to me, the only people I put in the low ground– and I wouldn’t use the BOSU ball in a TRX step. But I have my own variations of low ground exercises that I think are appropriate.

 The only people that would get low ground exercises with me are low ground athletes who have started with high ground exercises, learned the fundamentals– This is exactly what you were talking about. And then I progress them by stripping away ground until they land in the spectrum of ground for their needs. It’s really intelligent. And I believe that this translates over to the progression of a everyday person. And here’s why– is that we all want more muscle. At least, if you guys don’t, I would put that on your Christmas list. Even if people say they don’t, they actually do. Everybody does.

 Except for you. You don’t need any more muscle. That’s not true at all, by the way.

 High ground activity, high probability of hypertrophy. Yes. Friends, you’re not going to get bulky unless you’re Pat Davidson or Don Saladino. It’s just not going to happen.

 Choosing those and then actually thinking about the progression of becoming a more skilled human. And this is just my perspective of then removing more ground, going to medium, then going to low ground. There is a potential that you can be more skilled at– whether it’s rotational movements or functionality type training or movements. And I think it’s a very unique and valuable way to think about things. I think it’s the only logical way to actually make decisions about exercise selection.

 I think that that– we all have our little niche in the world of this thing. My niche is exercise selection. That’s actually what my whole system is based on. It is an exercise selection algorithm. Because exercise selection is the avenue into specificity.

 Specificity determines what changes. And I just tried to figure out a system to actually land you in the appropriate chute for you to pick the right exercise to change the right thing. And I just– my enemy in the world is arbitrary decision making. And I think it’s so rampant and below the radar that people don’t even see it. And people make egregious mistakes with exercise selection. And it’s completely arbitrary. I just like this thing. This guy I know likes this thing. I’m doing this because the girl that teaches this class has the butt that I– that’s what I want my butt to look like. She does this thing. So it doesn’t make any sense. If any other industry operated this way, it would be shut down immediately. But exercise has gotten away with it for so long because there’s never been a unified approach to actually categorizing it. There’s no thread that ties it together. And that’s what I wanted to create. Which is extraordinary in the way that you’re creating a system of classification and execution that is data driven and not arbitrary. It’s almost as if it’s a– again, it’s an algorithm. And we have that in medicine. Somebody gets pneumonia. Here’s your first line treatment. Here, if they’re allergic to this, here’s your second line treatment. That doesn’t exist for exercise physiology. It almost does. Because what exists is we do have a pretty good knowledge of the dose and the titration of the dose. OK? But you still have to pick the right medicine. Exactly. And that’s where I think people were dropping the ball. And I think that in the beginning, you can get away with a lot as a beginner exerciser. Even if you make a slightly wrong selection on the exact right thing– Your reps could be eating potato chips from the sofa of moving your arm. Yes, you probably– And you’re probably going to improve something. Yeah, right. You grow. As long as you’re having enough protein and– But once we get past that point, now it’s like– and again, it’s also like, do you have a framework to think this topic through? And I just don’t think that existed. When people go to you– so if you get messages from this discussion or from the program that we have,

 do people call you or download software? Is there a manual for putting in x and getting out y? Yeah, well, I started it with just– I have a book that I wrote on it. And it’s called A Coach’s– No big deal. A Coach’s Guide to Optimizing Movement. It’s sold through the Renaissance Periodization website. Incredible. We’ll link everything. I think Mike is so good at creating– he created an algorithm for volume and intensity for progression, like quantitative progression. And I really wanted to create an algorithm for the nebulous, weird side of it of qualitative and exercise selection and who should get what thing that then, ultimately, you put into a quantitative algorithm. Like, we’re going to get into some of the things about how many sets and how many reps in reserve and how much progression week to week and beginners, intermediates, advanced and all. That is Mike’s world. He has laid that out with perfection. And I just felt like, hey, there’s this whole other realm over here. Because to me, it’s like there’s specificity and overload as the two big key principles. And he nailed overload as hard as anybody possibly could from the standpoint of organizing it to drive muscle adaptation. And I wanted to nail specificity as hard as someone could so that you had an idea about where to start with all humans that want a resistance train. And then depending upon the different goals that they have, how to systematically move them on a trajectory towards doing exactly the right versions of these exercises to support the end outcomes that they want. It’s really smart. It’s really meaningful work. And we’re going to do our part to bring it to the world.

 Pat Davidson, I’m so grateful to have you. To have you as a friend and someone who I can count on to talk about things, science, muscle hypertrophy, and also count on to discuss it in a very intelligent way that makes it translatable and usable. And at the end of the day, fast forwards people’s ability to get the ultimate outcome that they’re looking for.

 Well, thank you. It’s very mutual.

 I just appreciate the opportunity to be able to come on here. And I just think that what you’re doing is really some of the most important work that can be done from a societal standpoint of being able to really impact and change people’s lives.

 And having anything to do with assisting is really just like I’m grateful for the opportunity. Well, we love having you. And we’re going to link where to find you. You’re obviously on Instagram, Dr. Pat Davidson. Where else? We’ll link your website and your book and all the things. So thank you so much. Thank you. The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon podcast and YouTube are for general information purposes only. And do not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice. And no patient-doctor relationship is formed. The use of information on this podcast, YouTube, or materials linked from a podcast or YouTube is at the user’s own risk. The content of this podcast is not intended to substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their health care professional for any such conditions. This is purely for entertainment and educational purposes only. [MUSIC PLAYING]