Huberman Lab Essentials: Dr. Andy Galpin on building strength, muscle size, and endurance
Andrew Huberman interviews exercise physiologist Dr. Andy Galpin on the science of physical training adaptations.
Summary
Andrew Huberman hosts Dr. Andy Galpin, an exercise physiologist, in this Huberman Lab Essentials episode focused on the science of strength, hypertrophy, power, and endurance training. Galpin outlines nine distinct physical adaptations that exercise can produce and explains how manipulating a short list of modifiable variables — exercise choice, intensity, volume, rest intervals, and frequency — determines which adaptation you get. He makes the case that training to muscular failure is essential for hypertrophy but not for strength, and that the mental intent behind a movement — not just the movement itself — measurably changes the physiological outcome. The conversation closes with a strong recommendation for post-workout down-regulation breathing, which Huberman credits with eliminating his afternoon energy crashes and improving workout-to-workout recovery.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the Nine Training Adaptations
Andrew Huberman: Welcome to Huberman 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 ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin.
Welcome, Dr. Professor Andy Galpin. There are only a handful — meaning about three or four people — who I trust enough in the exercise physiology space that when they speak, I not only listen, but I modify my protocols. And you are among those three or four people. I would love to have you share with us what you think most everybody — or even everybody — should know about principles of strength training and principles of, let's call it, hypertrophy, power, and the other categories of training.
Dr. Andy Galpin: There are about nine different adaptations you can get from exercise. The first one to think about is what we'll just call skill. So this is improving anything from a golf swing to a squatting technique to running. This is simply moving mechanically how you want your body to move. From there, we're going to get into speed — moving as fast as possible. The next one is power. Power is a function of speed, but it's also a function of the next one, which is strength. If you actually multiply strength by speed, you get power. So there's carryover. A lot of things you would do for the development of strength and power are somewhat similar, but there are differences.
Once you get past strength, the next one down the list is hypertrophy. This is muscle size — growing muscle mass is one way to think about it. After hypertrophy, you get into categories that are all globally endurance-based. The very first one is called muscular endurance. This is your ability to do, say, how many push-ups can you do in one minute — things like that.
Past muscular endurance, you're now into more of an energetic or even cardiovascular fatigue. You've left the local muscle and you're now into the entire physiological system and its ability to produce and sustain work. I call this anaerobic power — your ability to produce a lot of work for, say, 30 seconds to maybe one to two minutes. The next one down is more closely aligned to what we'll call your VO2 max. This is your ability to do the same thing but in a time domain of, say, three to twelve minutes — maximum heart rate, but well past just max heart rate. Then after that, we have what I call long-duration endurance. This is your ability to sustain work. The time domain doesn't matter in terms of how fast you're going — it's how long can you sustain work. This is 30-plus minutes of no break.
So as a high-level overview, those are the different things you can target. Some of those cross over, and some are actually a little bit contrarian to the other ones. Pushing towards one is maybe going to sacrifice something else.
Progressive Overload and Modifiable Variables
There are a handful of things you have got to do to make all of those things work. One of them is functionally called progressive overload. If you want to continue to improve, you have to have some method of overload. Adaptation physiologically happens as a byproduct of stress. You have to push a system. If you continue to do the exact same workout over time, you better not expect much improvement. You can maintain, but you're not going to be adding additional stress. In general, you have to have some sort of progressive overload. This could come from adding more weight, adding more repetitions, doing it more often in the week, or adding complexity to the movement. There are a lot of different ways to progress, but you have to have some sort of movement forward. If you have a routine where you've built Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, and you just do that infinitely, you're not going to get very far.
Huberman: So what are the progressive overload principles that are most effective over time for strength and hypertrophy?
Galpin: You have what we call modifiable variables. This is a very short list of all the things you can modify within your workout that will change the outcome — a fancy way of saying if you do this differently, you're going to get a different result.
The very first one is called choice — the exercise you select. If you choose to do a bench press to get stronger, but you do the wrong set range, the wrong repetition range, the wrong speed, you won't get strength. You might get muscular endurance and very little strength adaptation. So the exercise selection itself is important, but it does not determine the outcome adaptation. It is the application of the exercise — what are the sets, what are the reps, what are the rest ranges — that's going to be your primary determinant.
The second one is intensity. In this context, that doesn't refer to perceived effort like "wow, that was a really intense workout." It is quite literally either a percentage of your one-rep max or a percentage of your maximum heart rate or VO2 max. For strength-based things, you want to think about what percentage of the maximum weight you can lift one time — that's what we call one-rep max. If I tell you to get on a bike and do intervals at 75%, I'm typically referring to 75% of your max heart rate or VO2 max. If I tell you to do squats at 75%, that means 75% of the maximum amount of weight you could lift one time.
The third one is volume — how many reps and how many sets are you doing. If you're going to do three sets of ten, that volume is 30. Five sets of five, that volume is 25. It's a simple equation: how much total work are you doing?
The next one is rest intervals — the amount of time you're taking in between sets. Then from there you have progression, which is what we started talking about with progressive overload. Are you increasing by weight, reps, rest intervals, or complexity? All of those things can be changed as a method of progression. Maybe you want to progress from a single-joint exercise like a leg extension on a machine and move to a whole-body movement like a squat. You don't have to change the load, the reps, or the rest — that movement itself is a representation of progressive overload.
That's probably a pretty good place to start, especially for beginners. You want to make sure the movement pattern is correct. Don't worry about intensity, don't worry about rep ranges. You need to learn to move correctly and give your body some time to develop tissue tolerance so you're not getting overtly sore.
In general, soreness is a terrible proxy for exercise quality. It's a really bad way to estimate whether it was a good or a bad workout, especially for people from beginner to moderate level. We do not use soreness as a metric of a good workout even for professional athletes. On the same token, because stress is required for adaptation, you don't want to leave the gym feeling like you didn't do much. If you're moving around and you're a little bit sore, you can train. If you can't sit on the couch without crying because your glutes are so sore, you've actually gone to the place of detriment — now you're going to have to skip a training session and you're behind. Your actual total volume across the month is going to be lower because you went way too hard, had to take too many days off in between. You're going to cover less distance over the course of a month, six months, or even a year. So you want to walk a pretty fine line, and for most people I would say hedge a little bit on the side of less sore rather than more sore, because frequency is very important for almost all these adaptations.
Training Frequency
Which is the last modifiable variable — frequency, meaning how many times per week you're doing that thing. Those are our global things that we can play with. When I'm trying to manipulate and get strength versus hypertrophy, or a little bit of both, all those variables are the things going through my mind — which one do I need to move in which direction to get this outcome and not that one?
Some folks might want to get stronger but not put muscle mass on. Some folks want both, and that's a lot of the general public — I want to get a little stronger and a little bit more muscle. But there are instances where people, for performance reasons or purely personal preference, don't want any more muscle but want to get stronger. If you manipulate those variables correctly, you can get exactly that — very little development of muscle size and a lot of development in strength. This is why we continue to break world records in sports like powerlifting and weightlifting that have weight classes. There's a top number we can hit in terms of body size, but yet we continue to get stronger and faster. This is very possible if you understand how to manipulate all those variables.
Strength Training: Exercise Selection and Intensity
Huberman: How should we modify the variables?
Galpin: One of my other laws of strength and conditioning is that in general, the default is all joints through all range of motion. The ankle should go through the full range of motion of the ankle, the knee through the full range of motion of the knee, the hip, the elbow, and so on. Across the week, try to get every joint through full range of motion. When I say full range of motion, that's the default — that doesn't mean every single person can do that for every single exercise. It means that's where we should be striving, and that's our starting point. You're going to see a lot less injury and a lot more productivity out of your training sessions. The science is fairly clear on this: strength development as well as hypertrophy is generally enhanced with a larger range of motion of training. If you're doing a deadlift and in order to take your knee through a full range of motion you have to compromise your back position, that's no good — caveats aside, always maintain good positions.
Huberman: And don't kill yourselves, more importantly.
Galpin: So why that matters is if we walk through strength, the very first thing is exercise selection. Choose an exercise which ideally has a full range of motion, or close to it, that doesn't induce injury for you, that you can still maintain good neck and low back position, and that you feel comfortable with so you can feel strong. If you've never snatched before, having you do a snatch at even 75% is a terrible idea — you're not going to feel confident, it's going to be a train wreck. I would rather put you on a machine bench press so you can feel stable, feel safe, and just express your strength.
Exercise choice in general: full range of motion, and you want to balance between the movement areas. This is an upper body press — pushing away from you, bench press, things like that. Upper body pull — pulling an implement towards you, bent row, pull-up. The pressing should be horizontal, perpendicular to your body, as well as vertical, lifting a weight over your head. The pull version is pulling horizontally to you and pulling vertically down, like a pull-up. If you were going to do a single workout, you could choose four exercises — one upper body press, one upper body pull, one lower body hinge, one lower body press — and that would be a decently well-rounded session. If you're taking those through your full range of motion, you're at a pretty good spot.
The next one is intensity. If you want to develop strength, there's a certain recruitment threshold needed for neurons to fire. We have fast-twitch muscle fibers and slow-twitch muscle fibers. In general, you're going to activate the slow-twitch ones first because they tend to be associated with low-threshold motor neurons. The only way to activate some of these higher-threshold neurons is to demand the muscle to produce more force.
These big chunks of your muscle are incredibly important for aging, by the way. One of the major problems with aging-related muscle issues is that we lose fast-twitch fibers preferentially, and then we have major problems because we've lost a big chunk of our strength and size. You want to make sure these fibers stay alive and intact. The only way to develop strength is to challenge the muscle to produce more total force. If you want to get stronger, you need to impose a demand of strength, not repetitions. The load has to be very high — in general, you're probably looking at above 85% of your one-rep max if you're moderately trained, maybe 75%.
Because the intensity demand is so high, that is going to enforce a low repetition range. You can't do 12 reps at 95% — then it wouldn't be 95% of your one-rep max. So by definition, true strength training is really going to be in the five repetitions per set or less range.
So we've covered choice, intensity, and repetitions. The total number of sets is really up to your personal fitness level. If you did as little as three sets per exercise, that's probably enough.
Huberman: Work sets.
Galpin: Totally, yeah — work sets. Get fully warmed up and build up to that 85%. Don't just walk into the gym and throw 85% on the bar. A very classic warm-up would be a set of ten at 50%, a set of eight at 60%, a set of maybe eight again at 70%, and then maybe a set of five at 75% — two, three, or four sets building intensity and lowering the rep range. Then you go after your two or three working sets.
In terms of rest intervals, the primary driver of strength is intensity, not volume. In order to maintain that, we have to do a low repetition range, but we also have to have a high rest interval. If we have any amount of fatigue and have to reduce the reps or reduce the intensity, we've lost the primary driver — we've lost that main signal. The number we typically throw out is two to four minutes. Imagine you did your set of bench press, five repetitions at 85% — you probably want to rest two to four minutes before coming back.
That doesn't mean you have to sit there on your phone — please don't. You can engage other muscle groups. This is what we call supersets — you're doing your bench press and while that two-minute clock is running for your chest to rest, you go over and do your deadlifts. You can move back and forth, and this is how you can make strength training not a seven-hour workout. If you're a professional athlete, you're going to take that full rest time because you want to maximize the outcome. We've actually done this in our lab too — supersets will reduce the strength gains, but by a tiny amount, and most of us don't care enough relative to the fact that it's going to triple the length of your training session. It's not worth it. For the average person, I'll say yes, superset. For someone trying to break a world record in weightlifting or powerlifting, I don't superset.
Recovery, Frequency, and Hypertrophy
Huberman: How often can and should one train a muscle, and how do you know if a muscle is recovered locally and how do you know if your nervous system is recovered systemically?
Galpin: One question is: what are you training for? If you're training for hypertrophy — muscle size, muscle growth — we need to hedge towards recovery, because what you're trying to do is cause a massive insult there, then allow protein synthesis to occur, the building of new tissue, which takes time — 48 to 72 hours at a minimum for that process to occur.
If you're doing more pure strength work, strength is not going to cause a lot of soreness. Intensity is the driver. Therefore, frequency can be as high as you want. You can train every single day on the same exact muscle if speed, power, or strength are the primary training tools. But if you want to allow the process of contractile proteins to add and grow, you're going to have to allow some recovery. If you go back into that muscle too soon, you're going to blunt the response — you're going to stop it, cut it off. You have all kinds of problems going on in the cell that are going to attenuate that growth response.
So the answer for hypertrophy is: if you're probably less than a three out of ten on level of soreness, you can go again. In general, you're probably looking at 72 hours as the optimal window. If you trained your shoulders on Monday, you probably don't want to train them again on Tuesday if hypertrophy is the goal. Maybe Wednesday, maybe Thursday is best — an every two-to-three-day window is probably optimal.
We know a little bit more now about why that is. The gene cascade and signaling response happens instantaneously — within seconds. The gene cascade peaks in about the four-hour window, depending on which gene you want to look at. But the protein synthesis process is a 24-to-48-hour thing. It tends to look like: let that thing finish, let that signal go back to baseline, then hit it again. As long as you're providing the nutrients, the recovery should happen and you should be able to sustain the same work output in the training session. The stimulus stays high, the recovery is there, and you can now continue to grow muscle.
Huberman: What if the training split and lifestyle factors mean that somebody trains shoulders on Monday, and ideally they would train them again on Thursday, but they wait until Saturday or Sunday for whatever reason — maybe it's more compatible with their work and exercise schedule? Are they actually losing hypertrophy that they gained, or have they just missed a window to induce further hypertrophy?
Galpin: It's probably better to think about it as the latter. It's not that you've lost anything — you've just lost an opportunity to make more progress. If you want to take five or six days in between each muscle group, you can do that. The research is going to show that frequency can handle changes as long as you get to the same total volume. You just have to do a lot more work in that one workout.
The challenge with splitting up your training sessions for hypertrophy into smaller numbers — once or twice a week — is that it's just difficult to get the volume done. The more recent meta-analyses are going to say you're probably looking at around ten working sets per muscle group per week as the minimum threshold you want to hit. So if you did three sets of ten at your shoulders on Monday, three sets of ten on Wednesday, and three on Friday, that's nine working sets. The problem is ten is kind of the minimum — you probably want to look for more like fifteen to twenty, and for well-trained folks, twenty to twenty-five. That becomes very challenging in one workout. You're not going to be able to do it. That is where it's not the frequency that limits you — it's the fact that you've got to get the total volume done. The total driver of strength is intensity, but the total driver of hypertrophy is volume, assuming you're taking it to fatigue or muscular failure. It's just tough to get enough done.
Repetition Ranges for Hypertrophy
Huberman: What are the repetition ranges that are effective, and what are the most effective ones if someone is trying to maximize some of the other variables — like people who don't want to spend more than an hour to 75 minutes in the gym?
Galpin: The quick answer is anywhere between five to thirty reps per set — that's going to show across the literature pretty much equal hypertrophy gains. But I'm remembering something from a moment ago — I want to give a better answer for frequency. You can train every single day for strength if you want, but what's probably minimally viable is twice per week per muscle. Hamstrings for strength, twice per week — that's a good number to get most people really strong. You can do every single day, but you don't need to. Two is a good number, three is great, but even two is really effective.
When it comes to hypertrophy training, the way I like to explain it is it's kind of idiot-proof. The programming is idiot-proof — the work is hard, though. Here's your range: anywhere between five reps and thirty. Can you hit somewhere in there? Perfect. It's all equally effective. You can't screw that up. The only caveat for hypertrophy is you have to take it to muscular failure.
Huberman: And you need enough rest for the adaptation and protein synthesis to occur.
Galpin: Yep. And if you recover faster, you can maybe do it more frequently. If you don't, maybe less frequently.
Huberman: Should people experiment and figure out what repetition range allows them to recover in concert with the training frequency they can do consistently?
Galpin: My recommendation is that you should actually use the repetition range as a way to have some variation, because most people don't want to go in the gym and do three sets of ten — they're going to get very bored very quickly. I think you should actually intentionally change the rep schemes for the simple sake of having more fun. It is a very different challenge.
The mechanisms that are inducing hypertrophy are different, but there's only a maximum amount of growth one can get. The three most likely drivers are: one, metabolic stress; two, mechanical tension; and three, muscular damage. You don't have to have all three — one is sufficient. You can have a little bit of one or two and kind of play there.
We've already talked about muscular damage. More damage is not better, but it is somewhat a decent proxy. A little bit of soreness is good — just don't get so sore it's compromising your total volume. Mechanical tension is kind of like strength. This is why if you do even sets of five or eight and you're close to that strength range, you will gain a little bit of muscle. It's not optimal muscle gain, but you're going to gain some, because everything in physiology doesn't cut off at four reps and then five reps is a different thing — it's always a blend. Think of it as a fading curve. As you get closer to the end, it fades and becomes less effective. Anywhere between eight reps per set to thirty, it's equally effective. Past thirty, it's going to blend out. Past eight, down to five, four, three, it's going to blend lesser.
The third driver is metabolic stress. This is an area of some scientific contention, but something's there — we're just fumbling to figure out exactly what it is. Metabolic stress is the burn. So you want to train to failure, but you don't need to go to extreme failure. You don't need to have a partner lift the barbell off your chest, but you have to get close.
The Three-to-Five Framework
Huberman: If you'd be willing to throw out a few sets and rep parameters that could act as broad guidelines for people who want to explore further.
Galpin: A really fast answer is what I just call the three-to-five concept. Pick three to five exercises. If you're feeling better that day, choose on the higher end. If you're feeling less that day or you have a shorter time frame to train, go less. Three to five exercises. Do three to five reps, three to five sets, take three to five minutes rest in between, and do it three to five times a week. That can be as little as three sets of three for three exercises three times a week — that's a twenty-minute workout three times a week. It can be as high as five sets of five for five exercises five days a week. It's very broad and allows people to stay within the domains of strength and power while still being able to contour toward their lifestyle, soreness, time, and all those things.
The only differentiator to pay attention to between power and strength is intensity. If you want strength, this is 85% plus of your max. If you want power, it needs to be a lot lighter because you need to move more towards the velocity end of the spectrum — power is strength multiplied by speed. While getting stronger by definition can help power, you probably want to spend more of your time in the 40% to 70% range. Both conceptually work with everything else — the exercise, the reps, the frequency can all still be in the three-to-five range. Just change the intensity depending on which outcome you want.
The Mind-Muscle Connection
Huberman: The nervous system obviously plays an important role at the level of nerves controlling the contraction of muscle fibers. But we also have upper motor neurons residing in our brain that control the lower motor neurons that control muscle. This takes us into the realm of where the mind is at during a particular movement. I can imagine doing workouts mainly focused on strength or mainly focused on hypertrophy. In the case of strength, am I trying to move weights? And when I'm trying to generate hypertrophy, am I trying to challenge muscles? That subtle mental shift changes the patterns of nerve fiber recruitment. So can we say: to get stronger, focus on moving weights — still with proper form and safely — and to get hypertrophy, focus on challenging muscles, still with proper form and safely?
Galpin: Intentionality matters for both. If you look at some interesting science done on power development and speed development, the intent to move is actually more important than the actual movement velocity. If you're doing something for power or strength and you're doing just enough to get the bar up, that will result in less improvement in strength than if you're moving at the exact same speed but intending to move faster. This is one of the reasons why good coaching matters. If you're coaching an athlete through a power workout and they're doing just enough to lift 50% of their one-rep max, it's not going to generate as much speed development as them trying to move that bar as fast as they can, even if the net result is the same barbell velocity. Turns out nerves matter.
Huberman: Even if the bar is moving at the same speed, same weight, if my internal representation — my thoughts — are "I'm trying to move this as fast as possible" versus "I'm just trying to get the bar away from me and get the weight up," I'm going to get different outcomes.
Galpin: Yep. This is quality of work — did you do enough to just check off the box, or did you actually strive for adaptation? A similar concept actually works for hypertrophy. There are a handful of very recent studies that have looked at what we'll call the mind-muscle connection. Doing things like imagining a bicep curl, looking at and watching your biceps, and thinking about contracting it harder — even though you execute the same repetitions at the same exact intensity, initial indications are that the mind-body connection is going to result in more growth than not.
I think it's very much worth your time to do a higher-quality training session, be more intentional, be present, rather than just executing the same exact workout. That is globally very clear to be to your advantage. So if you're thinking, "I don't want to work out today, I've got all this going on, I'm tired, I'm just going to get through it" — okay. But if you can say, "I'm going to cut fifteen minutes out of this thing, get my head right, and go get twenty minutes of quality work done" — that's your best option by far.
Activating Difficult Muscle Groups
Huberman: Are there ways that people can learn to engage particular muscle groups more effectively over time, for the sake of hypertrophy or strength, or for cases of trying to overcome injury potential, because imbalances are bad across the board?
Galpin: This is actually very common, and I think everyone has probably gone through this — there's some part you just can't get going. Which goes back to the earlier part of our conversation: exercises themselves do not determine the adaptation. It's the execution that matters — the technique, the rep range, all of those are going to determine your actual result. So if you're banging your head against the wall thinking, "Why am I not getting movement here, growth or strength or whatever," it's guaranteed to be one of those areas. You're probably not getting the muscle groups to activate.
Whenever I'm diagnosing movement quality, I look for a handful of things, but the very first one is awareness. You'd be surprised how many people, when you simply tell them that muscle group right there and give them a tactile prompt — you touch it and tell them, "Hey, squeeze my finger" as they're doing their bent row or pull-down, you can touch the lat — all this stuff can help get people to activate.
Outside of simple awareness, eccentric overload is a very effective way to activate a difficult-to-target muscle. Take a pull-up. If I'm going to do a pull-up and I have poor lat activation, I'm going to step on a box, go all the way to the top of that pull-up position, and simply lower under control. You're just breaking the movement down into smaller pieces that allow you to focus on the execution more. Eccentrics are great for strength development, very good for hypertrophy, and allow you to focus on control.
I'm willing to bet a huge percentage of people out there who have said, "I've never had a sore lat even though I've done a lot of pull-ups" — if you do that eccentric only, you'll probably wake up the next day going, "Oh gosh, I feel it there." That's a sign. Even if you didn't feel it during the workout, if it got a little sore the next day, keep down that path and eventually work that into a progression where you can do the concentric, eccentric, and isometric portions and get activation. That may take you six weeks, may take you six months, but that's generally a pretty good strategy for learning how to activate a muscle group.
Breathing During and After Training
Huberman: Is there a prescriptive for how to breathe during resistance training that applies 75% of the time to 75% of the people?
Galpin: In general, a decent strategy is to maintain a breath hold during the lowering or eccentric or most dangerous part of the movement, and then exhale on the concentric portion. If the bench press is our example — hold in, brace, lower under control, start the concentric pushing-away force, and then take an expiration during the last half of the concentric portion. That's an okay strategy.
If you're going to do a single rep, you don't need to worry about it — you can just omit breathing entirely and you'll be just fine. If you're doing more than that, especially three to eight reps, you're going to have to have some breathing strategy. A very common one is probably every third rep — exhale on the third, reset, rebreathe, something like that. If you feel like you need to breathe after every rep, that's okay, but it's going to get wasteful because you have to take time in between reps. There is a little bit of game here depending on the exercise. In general though, that 75-75 rule: breathe in, do the lowering, and exhale on the way up if you have to. Fewer reps, don't worry about it. More reps, then you need to come up with some sort of breathing strategy.
Huberman: How about breathing in between sets, and maybe even after the workout?
Galpin: We're not going to just finish a workout, high-five, drink water, and walk out of the gym. There will be a down-regulation strategy that is heavily involved with some sort of light control as well as breath control. The individual prescription has a ton of variation. The easiest thing is: do something that calms you down. Most likely that's going to be moving towards as much nasal breathing as you can possibly do. A really easy rule of thumb is a double exhale length relative to inhale. If you need to take a four-second inhale, double that time and breathe out for eight seconds. Box breathing is fine too — equal inhale, equal hold, equal exhale, equal hold. Four-second inhale, four-second hold, and so on. Just breathe for five minutes.
I started doing this and it completely changed the rate of recovery for me. I realized I was leaving workouts — both endurance workouts and strength and hypertrophy workouts — feeling great, but then looking at my phone, getting right into email and meetings, not concentrating on my breathing.
Huberman: And all I did was introduce, on your recommendation, a five-minute down-regulation — exhale-emphasized breathing of a bunch of different varieties: physiological sigh, box breathing, exhale emphasized, twice as long as the inhale component, for five minutes. I noticed two things. One, I recovered more quickly workout to workout — no question about it. And the other is that I used to have this dip in energy that would occur three or four hours after a hard workout. I always thought that had to do with the fact that I hadn't eaten a meal at some point post-workout. Turns out it wasn't the meal at all. It's that the adrenaline ramp-up during the workouts — I wasn't clamping that at the end. Eventually it just crashed. The down-regulation allowed me to work through the afternoon. It's really been quite powerful. I'm grateful to you for that. I think this is something that 98% of people are not doing, and it's only five minutes.
Galpin: You don't even have to do five. Give me three. If you really have to push it, give me three. You can do this in the shower if you have to. You need some sort of internal signal that says: we're safe, throttle down here, we're going to move on. That has to happen.
Huberman: And you're saving energy — neural energy. I think fighters do this. Good fighters learn to do this between rounds. Sprinters learn to do this between events. I think humans should learn how to do this between any social engagement. This is such a powerful tool. Do this for one minute after every important interaction — whether it's an individual high-volatility interaction, or you just did a nice 45-minute sprint of deep work, or whatever. Give me one minute, and that will also pay dividends.
I think the listeners can well appreciate on the basis of today's discussion what an enormous wealth of information you are, how clearly and potently you communicate that information, and how you can take a huge cloud of information and still distill it into protocols that ought to work for 75% of people 75% of the time — which is an immensely valuable thing to do. So from me and from the listeners, I just want to say thank you so much.
Galpin: My pleasure. I'm glad we finally got to connect.
Huberman: Professor Andy Galpin, thank you ever so much.
Galpin: My pleasure.