Build Muscle Size, Increase Strength & Improve Recovery | Huberman Lab Essentials

Summary

In this episode of Huberman Lab Essentials, Andrew Huberman provides a deep dive into muscle physiology and strength training, focusing on the key elements that contribute to muscle growth, strength gains, and recovery. He explains the importance of neural control of muscles, detailing the role of upper and lower motor neurons and central pattern generators in movement. He also touches on nutritional aspects relevant to muscle growth, particularly the importance of certain amino acids. Furthermore, Huberman outlines effective training regimes and debunks common myths, emphasizing the role of volume and recovery in muscle development. This transcript is packed with actionable insights into improving physical performance and delaying age-related muscular decline.

Highlights

• Andrew Huberman revisits past episodes to share essential tips on muscle development for life and longevity. 🚀
• Neural control is key to muscular function, involving upper motor neurons and central pattern generators. 🧠
• Strength doesn't always mean bigger muscles; muscle size generally contributes to increased strength. 💪
• Training doesn't require the heaviest weights; proper volume and technique can lead to muscle gain. 📈
• Recovery after training is when muscles actually grow; focus on nerve to muscle connectivity. 🔄
• Key recovery tests include grip strength and carbon dioxide tolerance for assessing readiness to train. 🧪
• Beware of ice baths and NSAIDs post-workout; they may hinder muscle recovery and growth. ❄️
• Essential nutrients such as salt, creatine, and leucine are foundational for muscle performance. 🧂
• Tailor your training regime according to age, goals, and recovery capabilities for optimal results. 🎯

Key Takeaways

• Muscle strength and size are not always directly correlated, but increasing muscle size tends to enhance strength. 💪
• You don't need heavy weights to build muscle; moderate weights lifted with proper parameters can be equally effective. 🏋️‍♂️
• Three key stimuli for muscle growth are stress, tension, and damage—but you only need one to impact change. 🔥
• Proper recovery is crucial for muscle growth and involves understanding systemic recovery indicators like grip strength and carbon dioxide tolerance. ⏱
• Avoid ice baths and anti-inflammatory drugs immediately after training as they can interfere with muscle repair and growth. 🚫
• Salt, creatine, and essential amino acids like leucine play vital roles in nerve-muscle communication and muscle performance. 🧂

Overview

Andrew Huberman kicks off this episode by delving into the fascinating relationship between the nervous system and muscular function, crucial for athletic performance and overall longevity. He simplifies complex neural mechanisms controlling muscles, highlighting the role of neurons and the importance of upper motor systems. This sets the stage for understanding how we can control and enhance muscle performance more effectively.

The episode shifts focus to debunking the idea that heavyweight lifting is the sole path to muscle growth and strength. Huberman breaks down the Henman size principle and the role of moderate weight training, emphasizing that as long as you adhere to key parameters, moderate weights can be sufficient. He also touches on how different training activities, like sets and recovery protocols, affect both hypertrophy and strength.

Finally, Huberman discusses the nuances of recovery, outlining practical tools like grip strength and carbon dioxide tolerance tests to assess your readiness for further workouts. He warns against common errors like using ice baths or NSAIDs that inhibit recovery. To round off, essential nutrients such as salt, creatine, and leucine are discussed for their critical roles in muscle and nerve function.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Huberman Lab Essentials and Muscle Importance The chapter introduces the Huberman Lab Essentials podcast, where Andrew Huberman revisits past episodes to share potent, science-based tools for mental and physical health and performance. Huberman clarifies that this podcast is independent of his roles at Stanford School of Medicine. His goal is to provide free access to science and science-related tools for the public, indicating a focus on disseminating valuable information without cost barriers.
• 00:30 - 01:00: The Role of the Brain in Muscle Movement The chapter "The Role of the Brain in Muscle Movement" explores the crucial function of the brain in directing various types of muscle movement. It emphasizes the importance of the nervous system, neurons, and their connections to muscles for not only athletic performance but also for overall life quality and longevity. The brain's ability to control different speeds and durations of movements is highlighted, showcasing its intricate role in managing muscle activity.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Mechanism of Neurons and Muscle Recovery This chapter covers the mechanisms by which neurons control muscles. It explores nutritional aspects, particularly focusing on a specific amino acid crucial for muscle building when available in sufficient quantity and frequency in the bloodstream. The chapter also discusses the importance of recovery, emphasizing that it's the phase when muscle growth occurs.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Muscle's Role Beyond Strength The chapter 'Muscle's Role Beyond Strength' emphasizes the diverse functions of muscles in the human body beyond just providing strength. Muscles play crucial roles in a variety of everyday activities and body functions such as speaking, sitting, standing, lifting objects, breathing, moving, and performing various skills. The importance of muscles goes beyond mere physical strength to encompassing essential bodily functions and movements. The chapter also touches on the concept that muscle adaptability and flexibility do not primarily develop during training but rather post-training.
• 02:00 - 03:00: Nervous System Control of Muscle The chapter discusses the control of muscles by the nervous system, highlighting three main nodes of control. It begins by emphasizing that muscle function is controlled not just by the muscle tissue itself, but primarily by the nervous system. The focus is on the role of upper motor neurons located in the motor cortex, within the skull, which is responsible for deliberate movements. These neurons transmit signals down to the spinal cord to facilitate muscle movement.
• 03:00 - 04:00: Mechanisms for Muscle Growth and Strength This chapter explains the two types of neurons in the spinal cord involved in muscle contraction: the lower motor neurons and central pattern generators (CPGs). Lower motor neurons release acetylcholine onto muscles, causing them to contract. CPGs facilitate rhythmic movements, allowing for actions like walking without conscious thought.
• 04:00 - 05:30: The Henman Size Principle The chapter explores the concepts of how central pattern generators, motor neurons, and muscular contractions interact during deliberate and reflexive movements. It explains the role of upper and lower motor neurons in controlling these movements and introduces central pattern generators for rhythmic and reflexive actions. The discussion highlights the importance of understanding these elements to enhance the effectiveness of muscular contractions.
• 05:30 - 07:00: Stimuli for Muscle Change: Stress, Tension, Damage The chapter discusses stimuli for muscle change, specifically focusing on muscle hypertrophy (growth) and strength improvement. It explains that while muscle size isn't the only factor in getting stronger, increasing muscle size generally leads to increased strength. The chapter underlines the various reasons why strengthening muscles is beneficial for everyone.
• 07:00 - 09:00: Principles of Strength vs Hypertrophy The chapter discusses how muscles generally weaken over a person's lifespan and the goal of getting stronger is not only about lifting heavier weights but also about offsetting the natural decline in strength, maintaining posture, and ensuring safe movement as one ages.
• 09:00 - 12:00: Practical Science in Training: Sets, Intensity, and Volume The chapter explains the principle of motor unit recruitment, describing how muscles use different amounts of nerve energy depending on the weight of an object being lifted. Light objects require minimal nerve-to-muscle energy, while heavier objects require more.
• 12:00 - 15:00: Recovery and Training Frequency The chapter titled 'Recovery and Training Frequency' delves into the physiological aspects of muscle movement and energy conservation. It begins with a foundational discussion on the minimal nerve to muscle connectivity and the energy required to facilitate movement. This notion is tied to the broader concept of conserving energy during physical activities. The chapter further explains that as sustained effort is applied during movement, there is a progressive recruitment of motor units. This increasing activation results in enhanced connectivity between lower motor neurons and muscles, which is a critical aspect of understanding recovery and training frequency.
• 15:00 - 16:30: Recovery Tools and Techniques The chapter discusses the changes in muscles that occur during weight training and bodybuilding. It highlights the potential for muscles to become stronger and larger. However, it notes a widespread misunderstanding of the process, particularly in online literature related to bodybuilding and sports physiology. A key aspect covered is the Henman size principle, which is considered a foundational principle in muscle physiology, despite its misinterpretation by many.
• 16:30 - 17:30: Central Role of Salt in Performance The chapter discusses recruiting high threshold motor units and the common misconception that heavy weights are solely necessary for this process. It highlights that research indicates using weights from 30% to 80% of one's maximum can effectively alter the nerve-muscle connections, indicating the potential for moderately light to heavy weights to elicit performance benefits.
• 17:30 - 19:00: Supplements for Muscle Performance: Creatine and Leucine Chapter Title: Supplements for Muscle Performance: Creatine and Leucine
• 19:00 - 20:30: Protein Sources and Essential Amino Acids This chapter discusses the importance of protein sources and essential amino acids in muscle building and strength training. It addresses the common belief that lifting heavy weights is necessary to build strength. However, it highlights that for most people, especially those looking to offset age-related strength decline or achieve moderate increases in hypertrophy and strength, lifting the heaviest possible weights may not be necessary. Instead, appropriate protein intake and essential amino acids can support muscular health and strength development without the need to lift exceptionally heavy weights.
• 20:30 - 21:00: Conclusion and Appreciation The chapter focuses on the elements that drive muscle adaptation and growth, emphasizing the importance of stress, tension, and damage as key stimuli. It highlights that while not all three stimuli need to be present simultaneously, stress is a crucial factor for muscle improvement, drawing a parallel with neuroplasticity in the brain. The discussion suggests that understanding these stimuli can help predict and enhance one's efficiency in building muscle strength.

Build Muscle Size, Increase Strength & Improve Recovery | Huberman Lab Essentials Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 welcome to Hubberman Lab Essentials where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health physical health and performance i'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stamford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public today I want to talk about
• 00:30 - 01:00 something that is vitally important for not just athletic performance but for your entire life and indeed for your longevity and that's muscle and one of the things that's exquisite and fantastic about the human brain is that it can direct all sorts of different kinds of movement different speeds of movement movement of different durations all of that is governed by the relationship between the nervous system neurons and their connections to muscle
• 01:00 - 01:30 so today as always we're going to talk a little bit of mechanism i'm going to explain how neurons control muscle we will touch on some nutritional themes and how that relates to muscle in particular a specific amino acid that if it's available in your bloodstream frequently enough and at sufficient levels can help you build and improve the quality of muscle we are also going to talk about recovery that's when muscle grows that's when muscle gets
• 01:30 - 02:00 more flexible none of that actually happens during training it happens after training most people when they hear the word muscle they just think about strength but of course muscles are involved in everything that we do they are involved in speaking they are involved in sitting and standing up they're involved in lifting objects including ourselves they are absolutely essential for maintaining how we breathe they're absolutely essential for ambulation for moving and for skills of
• 02:00 - 02:30 any kind so when we think about muscle we don't just want to think about muscle the meat that is muscle but what controls that muscle and no surprise what controls muscle is the nervous system the nervous system does that through three main nodes of control basically we have upper motor neurons in our motor cortex so those are in our in our skull and those are involved in deliberate movement those upper motor neurons send signals down to my spinal
• 02:30 - 03:00 cord where there are two categories of neurons one are the lower motor neurons and those lower motor neurons send little wires that we call axons out to our muscles and cause those muscles to contract they do that by dumping chemicals onto the muscle in fact the chemical is acetylcholine now there's another category of neurons in the spinal cord called central pattern generators or CPGs and those are involved in rhythmic movements anytime we're walking or doing something where we don't have to think about it to do it
• 03:00 - 03:30 deliberately it's just happening reflexively that central pattern generators and motor neurons anytime we're doing something deliberately the the top down control as we call it from the upper motor neurons comes in and takes control of that system so it's really simple you've only got three ingredients so you got the upper motor neurons the lower motor neurons and for rhythmic movements that are reflexive you've also got the central pattern generators i'd now like to shift our attention to how to use specific aspects of muscular contraction to improve
• 03:30 - 04:00 muscle hypertrophy muscle growth as well as improving muscle strength there are a lot of reasons to want to get stronger and I should just mention that it's not always the case that getting stronger involves muscles getting bigger there are ways for muscles to get stronger without getting bigger however increasing the size of a muscle almost inevitably increases the strength of that muscle at least to some degree reasons why most everyone should want to get their muscle stronger is
• 04:00 - 04:30 that muscles are generally getting progressively weaker across the lifespan so when I say getting stronger it's not necessarily about being able to move increasing amounts of weight in the gym but rather to offset some of the normal decline in strength and posture and the ability to generate a large range of movement safely that occurs as we age so there's an important principle of muscle physiology called the Henman size principle and the henamman size
• 04:30 - 05:00 principle essentially says that we recruit what are called motor units motor units are just the connections between nerve and muscle from a in a pattern that staircases from low threshold to high threshold what this means is when you pick up something that is light you're going to use the minimum amount of nerve to muscle energy in order to move that thing likewise when you pick up an object that's heavy you're going to use
• 05:00 - 05:30 the minimum amount of nerve to muscle connectivity and energy in order to move that object so it's basically a conservation of energy principle now if you continue to exert effort of movement what will happen is you will tend to recruit more and more motor units with time as you recruit more and more of these motor units these connections between these lower motor neurons and muscle that's when you start to get
• 05:30 - 06:00 changes in the muscle that's when you open the gate for the potential for the muscles to get stronger and to get larger and so the way this process works has been badly misunderstood in the kind of online literature of weight training and bodybuilding and even in sports physiology the Henman size principle is kind of a a a foundational principle within muscle physiology but many people have come to interpret it by saying that
• 06:00 - 06:30 the way to recruit high threshold motor units the ones that are hard to get to is to just use heavy weights and that's actually not the case as we'll talk about the research supports that weights in a very large range of sort of uh percentage of your maximum anywhere from 30 to 80% so weights that are not very light but are moderately light to heavy can cause changes in the connections between nerve and muscle that lead to
• 06:30 - 07:00 muscle strength and muscle hypertrophy put differently heavy weights can help build muscle and strength but they are not required what one has to do is adhere to a certain number of parameters just a couple of key variables that I'll spell out for you and if you do that you can greatly increase muscle hypertrophy muscle size andor muscle strength if that's what you want to do and you don't necessarily have to use heavy weights in
• 07:00 - 07:30 order to do that now I'm sure the powerliffters and the the people that like to move heavy weights around will say "No if you want to get strong you absolutely have to lift he heavy weights." And that might be true if you want to get very strong but for most people who are interested in supporting their muscular such that they offset any age related decline in strength or in increasing hypertrophy and and strength to some degree there really isn't a need to use the heaviest weights possible in order to build strength and muscle so
• 07:30 - 08:00 there are three major stimuli for changing the way that muscle works and making muscles stronger larger or better in some way and those are stress tension and damage those three things don't necessarily all have to be present but stress of some kind has to exist so this is very reminiscent of neuroplasticity in the brain there is a good predictor of how well or how efficient you will be in building the strength andor if you
• 08:00 - 08:30 like the size of a given muscle and it has everything to do with those upper motor neurons that are involved in deliberate control of muscle you can actually do this test right now you can just kind of march across your body mentally and see whether or not you can independently contract any or all of your muscles because everything about muscle hypertrophy about stimulating muscle growth is about generating isolated contractions about challenging
• 08:30 - 09:00 specific muscles in a very unnatural way if you whereas with strength it's about using musculature as a system moving weights moving resistance moving the body the specific goal of hypertrophy is to isolate specific nerve to muscle pathways so that you stimulate the chemical and signaling transduction events in muscles so that those muscles respond by getting larger so there's a critical distinction in terms of getting stronger versus trying to get muscles to
• 09:00 - 09:30 be larger hypertrophy per se and it has to do with how much you isolate those muscles so you can nest this as a principle for yourself which is if you want to get stronger it's really about moving progressively greater loads or increasing the amount of weight that you move whereas if you're specifically interested in generating hypertrophy it's all about trying to generate those really hard almost painful localized
• 09:30 - 10:00 contractions of muscle if ever there was an area of practical science that was very confused very controversial and almost combative at times it would be this issue of how best to train i suppose the only thing that's um even more barbed wire of a conversation than that is how best to eat for health those seem to be the the uh two most common areas of of online battle what's very clear now from all the literature is that once you know roughly your one
• 10:00 - 10:30 repetition maximum the the maximum amount of weight that you can perform an exercise with for one repetition in good form full full range of motion that it's very clear that moving weights or using bands or using body weight for instance in the 30 to 80% of one rep maximum that is going to be the most beneficial range in terms of muscle hypertrophy and strength so muscle growth and strength
• 10:30 - 11:00 so let's say you're somebody who's been doing some resistance exercise kind of on and off over the years and you decide you want to get serious about that for sake of sport or offsetting age related declines in strength the range of sets to do in order to improve strength ranges anywhere from two believe it or not to 20 per week again these are sets per week and they don't necessarily all have to be performed in the same weight training session it appears that five sets per week in this 30% to 80% of the
• 11:00 - 11:30 one repetition maximum range is what's required just to maintain your muscle so think about that if you're somebody who's kind of averse to resistance training you are going to lose muscle size and strength your metabolism will drop your posture will get worse everything in the in the context of nerve to muscle connectivity will get worse over time unless you are generating five sets or more of this 30% to 80% of your one repetition maximum per week okay so
• 11:30 - 12:00 what this means is for the typical person who hasn't done a lot of weight training you need to do at least five sets per muscle group now that's just to maintain and then there's this huge range that goes all the way up to 15 and in some case 20 sets per week now how many sets you perform is going to depend on the intensity of the work that you perform this is where it gets a little bit controversial but I think nowadays most people agree that 10% of the sets
• 12:00 - 12:30 of a given uh workout or 10% of workouts overall should be of the highintensity sort where one is actually working to muscular failure but the point being that most of your training most of your sets should be not to failure and the reason for that is it allows you to do more volume of work so we can make this simple perform anywhere from five to 15 sets of resistance exercise per
• 12:30 - 13:00 week and that's per muscle and that's in this 30 to 80% of what your one repetition maximum that seems to be the the most scientifically supported way of offsetting any decline in muscle strength if you're working in the kind of five set range and in increasing muscle strength when you start to get up into the 10 and 15 set range but it's pretty clear that performing this five to 15 sets per week whether or not it's in one workout or whether or not it's divided up across multiple workouts is
• 13:00 - 13:30 really what's going to be most beneficial and please do keep in mind Henman's uh size principle and the recruitment of motor units and remember the better you are at contracting particular muscles and in isolating those muscles the fewer sets likely you need to do in order to get the desired effect what about people who have been training for a while if you're somebody who's been doing weight training for a while the data point to the fact that more volume can be beneficial even for muscles that you are very efficient at contracting now the the curve on this
• 13:30 - 14:00 the graph on this begins again at about five sets per week for maintaining a given muscle group and extends all the way out to 25 or 30 sets per week however there are individuals who for whatever reason can generate so much force they're so good at training muscles that they can generate so much force in just four or six or eight sets that doing this large volume of work is actually going to be counterproductive so everyone needs to figure out for
• 14:00 - 14:30 themselves first of all how often you're willing to do resistance exercise of any kind and then it does appear that somewhere between five and 15 sets per week is going to be what's the thing that's going to work for most people now this is based on a tremendous amount of work that was done by Andy Galpin and colleagues Brad Shfield and colleagues Mike Roberts there's a huge group of people out there doing exercise physiology and a small subset of them that are linking them back to real world protocols that don't just pertain to
• 14:30 - 15:00 athletes so that's mainly what I'm focusing on today and surely there will be exceptions now if you are going to divide the sets across the week you're not going to do all 10 sets for instance for a given muscle group in one session then of course it's imperative that the muscles recover in between sessions you might ask well what about the speeds of movements this is actually turns out to be a really interesting data set for generating explosiveness and speed it's very clear that learning to generate forces quickly and to move heavy or
• 15:00 - 15:30 moderately heavy loads quickly is going to be beneficial because of the way that you train the motor neurons and of course changes in the muscle and so what this would involve is something like 60 to 75% of a one repetition maximum and then in a controlled way moving that as quickly as one can throughout the entire set and certainly not going to failure because as you approach failure the inability to move the weight with good form the weight inevitably slows down so as you're probably starting to realize
• 15:30 - 16:00 you need to customize a resistance practice for your particular needs and goals so we've talked about a few principles the fact that you need to get sufficient volume you need at least five sets to maintain and you probably need about 10 sets per muscle group in order to improve muscle that moving weights of moderate to moderately heavy weight quickly is going to be best for explosiveness that isolating muscles and really contracting muscles hard something that you can test by just when you're outside the training session seeing whether or not you can cramp the muscle hard will really uh will tell you
• 16:00 - 16:30 your capacity to improve hypertrophy or to engage strength changes in that muscle that your ability to contract a muscle hard is inversely related to the number of sets that you should do in order to isolate and stimulate that muscle now how long to recover between sets there's a question for the testosterone protocol duncan French and colleagues found that it was about 2 minutes keeping that really on the clock 2 minutes not longer for hypertrophy and for strength gains it does seem that
• 16:30 - 17:00 resting anywhere from 2 minutes or even three or four or even five or six minutes can be beneficial so how do we know if we've recovered how can we test recovery and this is not just recovery from resistance training this is recovery from running recovery from swimming up until now I've been talking about resistance training more or less in a vacuum i haven't even touched on the fact that many people are running and they're doing resistance training or they're swimming and they're doing resistance training well you can assess systemic recovery meaning your nervous
• 17:00 - 17:30 system and your nervous system's ability to generate force both distributed and isolated through three main tests and fortunately these tests are very simple and two of them are essentially zero cost require no equipment hrv heart rate variability has made its way finally into the forefront of exercise physiology and even into the popular discussion i've talked about HRV before how when we exhale our heart rate
• 17:30 - 18:00 slows down because of the way that our diaphragm is connected to our heart and to our brain and the way our brain is connected to our heart when we inhale our heart rate speeds up and that is the basis of heart rate variability heart rate variability is good but heart rate variability is difficult for a lot of people to measure there are two measures however whether or not you recovered that you can use first thing in the morning when you wake up in order to assess how well recovered you are and therefore whether or not you should train your whole system at all that day
• 18:00 - 18:30 the first one is grip strength grip strength the ability to generate force at the level of squeezing the fist or you know squeezing down on something might seem like kind of a trivial way to assess recovery but it's not because it relates to your ability to use your upper motor neurons to control your lower motor neurons and to generate isolated force and so that's really what you're assessing when you do that some people will use uh you know one of these um grip tools if I've been working
• 18:30 - 19:00 really hard not sleeping very well or I've been training a lot any one or combination of those things my grip suffers i can't actually squeeze that thing down as much as I can but on a good day I can squeeze this thing so that I eliminate the hole in the donut so to speak you can also take a floor scale and squeeze the scale and see how much force you can generate i would do that as a baseline to establish what you can do when you're well rested and then if you do that in the morning you can see whether or not you're able to generate the same amount of force a lot of this is very subjective with the scale you're really trying to assess
• 19:00 - 19:30 whether or not you can generate the same amount of force if you start seeing a 10% or 20% certainly reduction in that that's concerning it means that your system that your nervous system as a whole it's not necessarily fatigued it's that the pathways from nerve to muscle are still in the process of rewiring themselves in order to generate force and you might think well I trained one muscle group one day why am I having a hard time doing this for a completely different muscle group doesn't make any sense but there's something about the upper motor neuron to lower motor neuron pathway generally that allows you to use
• 19:30 - 20:00 something like grip strength as a kind of a a thermometer if you will of your ability to recover so look for your ability to generate force in grip when you first wake up it's not going to be as good as it is at you know 3 p.m after a cup of coffee and uh and a couple meals but that the point isn't performance overall the point is to assess whether or not you're getting better worse or the same from day to day the other one that's really terrific is carbon dioxide tolerance so this is a really interesting tool that endurance
• 20:00 - 20:30 athletes strength athletes I think can all benefit from so here's how you do the carbon dioxide tolerance test you wake up in the morning and what you're going to do is you're going to inhale through your nose as deeply as you can you can do this lying down sit uh you know sitting whatever inhale through your nose and then exhale all the way so that's one you're going to repeat that four times then you take a fifth inhale as deep as you can through your nose fill your lungs as much as you can and if you can try and expand your uh
• 20:30 - 21:00 make your stomach go out while you do that that means that your diaphragm is really engaged so you're inhaling as much as you possibly can then hit the timer and your goal is to release that air as slowly as possible through your mouth so it looks like you have a tiny tiny little straw in your mouth and you're letting it go as slowly as you possibly can measure what we call the carbon dioxide blowoff
• 21:00 - 21:30 time or discard rate i know you can all sit with lungs empty after you eliminate all that air but don't lie to yourself don't stop the timer when you've been sitting with your lungs empty for a while stop the timer when you are finally no longer able to exhale any more air your carbon dioxide discard rate will be somewhere between 1 second and presumably 2 minutes 2 minutes would be a heroic carbon dioxide
• 21:30 - 22:00 discard time 30 seconds would be more typical 20 seconds would be fast if your carbon dioxide discard time is 20 or 25 seconds or less you are not necessarily recovered from your previous day's activities if your carbon dioxide discard time is somewhere between about 30 seconds and 60 seconds you are in what we would call
• 22:00 - 22:30 kind of the the green zone where you are in a position to do more physical work and if your carbon dioxide discard time is somewhere between 65 and 120 seconds well then you have almost certainly recovered your nervous system i'm not talking about the individual muscles but your nervous system is prepared to do more work i'm really keen on this tool because everybody has different recovery abilities i realize people have varying levels of stress and demand in their
• 22:30 - 23:00 life it's just impossible to to prescribe an entire protocol that says "Okay yes you should train today and this is exactly what you should do." No you shouldn't use carbon dioxide discard rate because A it's valuable it's informative B it's zero cost and C it's something that you can track objectively over time and that's really the key so recovery is a complex process it's got a lot of things but the CO2 tolerance test should be a valuable tool now another tool for recovery that people are very
• 23:00 - 23:30 excited about is the use of cold and the ice bath and this is important yes it will reduce inflammation yes it will reduce the amount of delayed onset muscle soreness but it does seem to interfere with some of the things like mTor pathways the mamalian targeted rapamyosin pathway and other pathways related to inflammation that promote muscle repair remember and muscle growth remember stress tension and damage are the stimulus for nerve to muscle connections to change and for muscles to get bigger stronger and better and so if
• 23:30 - 24:00 you're getting into the ice bath after doing resistance training you are likely shortcircuiting the improvements that you're trying to create the other thing are non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs you know their trade names these are painkillers that many people take those as I've mentioned in a previous episode seem to prevent a lot of the gains the improvements in endurance strength and size that people are specifically using exercise for so be cautious about your use of non-steroid anti-inflammatory
• 24:00 - 24:30 drugs especially within the 4 hours preceding or the 4 hours following exercise let's talk about some of the things that seem to work across the board to improve strength incre improve hypertrophy and improve nerve to muscle communication and performance the first thing that's absolutely key for nerve to muscle communication and physical performance of any kind might not sound that exciting to you but it is very exciting and that's salt nerves nerve cells neurons communicate with each
• 24:30 - 25:00 other and communicate with muscle by electricity but that electricity is generated by particular ions moving into and out of the neuron and the rushing in of a particular ion sodium salt is what allows nerve cells to fire if you don't have enough salt in your system your neurons and your brain and your nerve to muscle communication will be terrible if you have sufficient salt it will be excellent how much salt will depend on
• 25:00 - 25:30 how much water you're drinking how much caffeine you're drinking and how much food you're ingesting so and whether or not you're taking any diuretics how hot it is etc how much you're sweating so you want to make sure that you have enough salt potassium and magnesium in your system if you want to perform well the other thing that's been shown over and over again numerous well-controlled studies to improve muscle performance is creatine how much creatine well I asked the experts and they tell me that for somebody who's about 180 pounds 5 g a
• 25:30 - 26:00 day should be sufficient or so creatine seems to have a performance-enhancing effect there are 66 studies 66 showing that power output is greatly increased anywhere from 12 to 20% and this is sprinting and running and jumping as well as weightlifting by creatine the ability to um hydrate your body is improved by creatine because of the way that it brings more uh water
• 26:00 - 26:30 into cells of various kinds it reduces fatigue when it comes to supporting muscle it does seem that ingesting 700 to 3,000 milligrams of the essential amino acid leucine with each meal is important now that does not necessarily mean from supplements in fact most people recommend that you get your protein you get your amino acids including your essential amino acids and your leucine from whole foods high quality proteins are high density
• 26:30 - 27:00 proteins what do you mean by that well it is true that a lot of sources of protein are found in things like beans and nuts and things like that that all the essential amino acids can be found there but per unit calorie if it's in your practice if it and it's in your ethics to ingest animal proteins it's true that for instance 200 uh calories of steak or chicken or fish or eggs will have a higher density of essential amino acids than the equivalent amount of calories from nuts
• 27:00 - 27:30 or plants so I'm not for the vegans and vegetarians I'm certainly um not saying there's no way that you can support muscle growth you absolutely can i encourage you to think about this protein density issue and whether or not you're getting sufficient essential amino acids especially leucine but I think the simple takeaway from the literature that I was able to extract eating two to four times a day making sure you're getting sufficient uh amino acids that in a way that's compatible with your ethics and with your
• 27:30 - 28:00 nutritional regimen is going to support um muscle repair muscle growth strength improvements etc just fine last but not least I want to thank you for your time and attention today and as always thank you for your interest in science [Music]