The Fundamentals of Training for Muscle, Strength & Longevity

1. Dr. Andy Galpin

   The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport, play, and life. Welcome to Perform. I'm Andy Galpin. I'm a professor and human performance scientist, and today we're going to be doing something for the first time ever in the history of Perform, and that is an open Q&A. I went to all of you a couple of days ago and asked for your questions, and I did not prepare for how many you had. And so what I'm trying to do today is to bucket them into some categories. And so I've got five areas that we're going to address, and I hope in doing that, I'll cover a large portion of your questions. I'll try to keep my answers tight, but I've never been accused of being short-winded. In this particular episode, I'll cover most of things related to exercise and what I'll call program design. So I'm going to start off with my take on how I'm thinking about training for longevity, lifespan, healthspan, strengthspan, powerspan, and things like that.

2. Dr. Andy Galpin

   There was a lot of questions that I'll just categorize into that bucket. This will include, but is not limited to, things like grip strength and VO2 max, and then lots of other areas yet to be discussed. From there, we'll move on and talk more generally about the basics. And this is something that I've forgotten to really do enough of, and that is go back to the beginning and talk about what are the basics of exercise for muscle growth or hypertrophy, muscle strength, and fat loss, and how do I alter my training programs based on one of those goals or more of them. So in doing that, we'll cover the basics and the starting point on what you need to know for those outcomes. That'll roll perfectly into the third question, and that is what I call program design. And that's how I personally go about writing programs for people, how we pay attention to their goals, what do we pick first, whether that's the exercise choices, the repetition range, the intensity, and all that kind of stuff.

3. Dr. Andy Galpin

   So my process, all the things I think about, and then the order in which I do them to build out my own training programs for myself, our clients, and our athletes. After that, we'll round things out with the discussion of functionality. There was a lot of questions about how do I get more functional, and which exercises are more functional than the other ones, and how do I move better and things like that. So I'll just bucket that into the function bucket, if you will. And then lastly, we'll talk about artificial intelligence. I have had a huge number of questions about how we're using it. Is it okay? Is it bad? And so I'd like to answer as many of those questions as I can. So that all said, let's go ahead and get started by talking about longevity, healthspan, and how we think about exercise and training for that. We're going to start with longevity. Now, this is obviously of interest to all of us.

4. Dr. Andy Galpin

   We all want to live a long life, a healthy life, and a high-performing life, whether we play sports or not. And I think the best way I can describe my philosophy or point of view with longevity in terms of exercise is the following. You want to actually think about outcomes. What are we trying to optimize for? And that will then help us walk backwards into how we set up our training programs. To me, when I think of longevity, we want to, of course, live a long life. That's great. But then past that, we also want to be resilient. And that word is important to me because as I think about my own aging, I want to be able to do the activities I want and not feel hyper-restrictive or restricted rather, and at the same time, also not feeling in danger. So I want to be able to do something new. I want to be able to play a game of tennis if I'm not used to it and then not be incredibly sore at a really high risk of injury.

5. Dr. Andy Galpin

   That is really all it comes down to. I don't want to be at risk of dying early because of some physiological limiter, and then I want to be able to do what I want within reason. So if that is our actual goal, we can start going backwards and saying, "Okay, well then what are the different physiological skills or attributes I need to have to be able to execute on that?" And so you immediately start thinking of things like you need what we'll call tissue tolerance. So your Achilles and your back and your neck and your adductors and all different parts of your body need to be functional. They need to be able to handle stressors. The antithesis of this would be something like, say you choose one mode of exercise, cycling only, or bench press only, or even lifting weights only. That's great, but then what happens if you ask that muscle to do something fast when it's never done that, or load it really heavy, or in a different range of motion?

6. Dr. Andy Galpin

   Well, now we're not necessarily resilient against those things because we haven't practiced them in years or decades. And so ultimately what I'm saying here is you want a wide variety of movement skills, of training styles, of range of motion, of speed, and all the other things I laid out. That's truly at the core of longevity. And so I think you should be setting yourself up and thinking about your training on the months and years rather than individual workout programs. And you should be thinking about, can I get all of my joints moving through all of its range of motions? Can I be doing, as I've alluded to earlier, some things fast, when appropriate, of course, and some things slow? Can I work on building a good amount of muscle? Can I work on building a good amount of strength? Can I work on a good range of motion? Can I work on balance? Can I work on proprioception? And you just really start to paint the picture here of saying, "Well, I just really want you to be well-rounded."

7. Dr. Andy Galpin

   That's the top of our pyramid. That's really what we're going after. Rather, I should say that's the base of our pyramid. When you start to get below that, now you can start looking into things like the research. And I'm bringing this up as a lower tier because as much as I have been as guilty of this as anybody else of saying things like VO2 max are critical to longevity, and leg strength, and grip strength, it's true But where we're failing in this conversation is thinking that those are the most important or only things that you need for longevity. The reality of it is there is a ton of research on all three of those and more. Foot speed, power, balance, these are all highly related to both long lifespan and wellness span. But it's not that simple. In fact, those are just proxies. I'll get into more of that detail in one second, but what I mean by proxies is those measures are not inherently that special.

8. Dr. Andy Galpin

   They're only special and well-documented in the research because they are easy to measure in a laboratory. They predict functional outcomes, human movement, human capacity. So they're really awesome, but let's not lose the forest through the trees. The only reason we don't see things like single-leg squat strength as a major predictor of longevity is we just don't have buckets of research on it. But I think you'd be a little bit crazy to think that it wouldn't show up if it had an equal amount of exposure in large databases. But that's not scientifically realistic. So we do want to be grounded in the scientific evidence, and we are, but we also, again, maybe the phrase I'll just keep saying is we don't want to lose the forest through the trees there, meaning we don't want to all of a sudden turn all of our longevity programs into only grip strength training and VO2 max training and thinking we're optimizing for human capacity and resilience, because we're probably leaving a lot of attributes on the table by doing so.

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