Build Muscle, Great Posture & Resilience to Injury | Jeff Cavaliere | Andrew Huberman Transcript

Andrew Huberman interviews fitness expert Jeff Cavaliere on building muscle, posture, and injury resilience

Andrew Huberman speaks with Jeff Cavaliere of Athlean-X about the "small" exercises and habits that make decades of pain-free training possible.

Summary

Andrew Huberman interviews Jeff Cavaliere — a master of science in physical therapy and certified strength and conditioning specialist — about the foundational but often overlooked elements of long-term fitness. Cavaliere argues that most chronic pain, including lower back and shoulder pain, originates not from structural damage but from specific muscle weaknesses — particularly in the glutes, rotator cuff, and neck — that are entirely trainable and fixable. He presents a framework in which targeted small exercises protect and amplify the big compound lifts, enabling people to train hard and pain-free across decades. The conversation also covers nutrition, cardio, training splits, volume, and how to adapt training to real-life constraints including poor sleep and family obligations.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Introduction and the case for training the "small" things

Andrew Huberman: Jeff Cavaliere, welcome back.

Jeff Cavaliere: Thank you for having me. This time it's actually nice to come out to California. Got a little workout in.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, we have a studio this time. Last time I think we were in a rented apartment in New York City.

Jeff Cavaliere: It worked.

Andrew Huberman: I said it then, I'll say it again — you're the man. I've been watching your videos and following your training advice for many years. I would say Mike Mentzer, Dorian Yates, and you. I've merged the principles and —

Jeff Cavaliere: That's very humbling praise for me, for sure.

Andrew Huberman: Well, you're 50. Never touched gear — that's slang for steroids. You're not on TRT. You've never done it. And you look amazing. I know you're very disciplined with your diet and your training, but you're married, you have two kids, you put in the work all over life. You're a testament to what's possible if people do things right.

So today I want to talk about a number of things, but something that I believe is not discussed enough — which you discuss a lot, and which has been transformative for me, because I also happen to be 50 — is that we both know the big things, like doing regular compound multi-joint lifts, are all critical. People talk about the big stuff all the time, but you talk about the small stuff that makes the big stuff possible for decade after decade. I credit you for fixing my back pain. I credit you for the fact that I basically have no pain despite training very hard for more than three decades.

So let's talk about the small stuff, which is not actually the small stuff. I think of it as the hinges and bolts on the system that allow that system to work. Low back, shoulders, neck — these are the pieces that nobody wants to train, no one wants to think about, no one wants to talk about. So let's start right there. How can we keep our lower back strong and pain-free while also doing things like deadlifts and squats?

Jeff Cavaliere: I'm glad you're talking about all of this. It's such music to my ears. The background of being a physical therapist is what set the stage for my focus on these things. When I was younger, pre-physical therapy days, I did all the dumb stuff too. I did all the big things and realized that wasn't necessarily a path to longevity. In my 20s I was literally breaking down. I had knee pain, back pain, shoulder pain. So I think people who are in their 20s these days have the luxury of having access to videos like this where they don't just say, "Oh, that's just a hard workout." Now they start to say, "Well, maybe I'm actually doing some damage here. Maybe I do need to pay attention to the smaller things."

When you have enough videos out there that showcase these small things — for instance, you mentioned back pain. We talk about a major cause of back pain not being structural back pain. A lot of the times the back pain we suffer from in our lives is not surgical. It doesn't need surgical treatment. It just needs the right addressing of the muscles that contribute to it, or how we allow muscles to get tight that shouldn't get tight if we did full range of motion on certain exercises.

In particular, I mentioned the glute medius. The glute medius is a muscle that is going to control hip position and hip movement. So if it's controlling the position of our hips, that means it's controlling our pelvis. And if our pelvis is tilted or twisted or forward or backward, obviously the spine is literally adapting to the position of the pelvis beneath it, because it's connected through the sacrum. So how is that not important? All these muscles that connect to the pelvis and change its position are inadvertently going to change the position of the low back — directly the lumbar spine — and that is going to likely cause dysfunction down the road if you don't address it.

So it is these little tiny muscles and these little tiny exercises. I made a video years ago about an exercise you could do to help loosen up a knot in the glute medius — an area of spasm, a localized area of spasm. Because when the spasm's there, you adjust the way you move. You're in pain, so you're trying to move around that spasm. Something as simple as a leg raise down and back while holding down that pressure point on the glute medius helps to alleviate some of that discomfort and that spasm, to the point where you can restore normal motion again because you're not avoiding pain. And all of a sudden the back pain goes away. There's nothing structurally there.

Andrew Huberman: That's a great video. It helped — I think 50 million people have seen it. We'll put a link to it. This is the one where you lie on your side, one leg in front of the other, toe down on the ground, you put it up and back. Jeff provides a beautiful description of what is essentially a very simple movement, but if you do it properly, the pain evaporates. It's wild. I thought it was a back issue, but it was a glute medius issue.

Glute medius weakness, spasm, and how to fix it

Jeff Cavaliere: And again, you can feel referred pain anywhere. But what happens next is great — you solve that area of spasm. Why do we get spasm? Often it's because we're providing artificial stability to an area of weakness, because spasm is basically the muscles holding on and saying, "I need to protect this area." So if the muscles around the low back are protecting that area, there's a reason for it. It's probably because the muscles that are supposed to be stronger are not strong enough.

So that doesn't mean you do this one thing and you're done. Yes, you might have no back pain that day, or you might have relieved that episode, but it means there's an area of weakness that could benefit from strengthening. So you come back and you start to do glute medius strengthening. I demonstrate an exercise where you put yourself up against the wall. You stand on the leg furthest away from the wall and you let yourself drop — you just let your hips drop, they get lazy. When they drop like that, the only way you can get them level again is to slide yourself back towards the wall. That's abduction of the hip to get you back to that level position. That is the glute medius doing its job to get you back to that level position.

Ironically, every time you lift a foot off the ground to walk, you're getting a pelvis that drops side to side. Every time you go into single leg stance, the pelvis is going to drop a little bit. The people that have less control of that have more of what they call a Trendelenburg gait, where the pelvis rocks side to side as they walk.

Andrew Huberman: It's like if you were looking at them from the back — the butt swinging from side to side.

Jeff Cavaliere: Might look good on Instagram, but it's not going to do good for your back. All that uncontrolled motion starts to wreak havoc, and eventually those muscles start to say, "I've got to provide this artificial stability." So what do I do? I spasm. And if you don't extend the plan beyond the fix, how do you then build that strength up to prevent it from coming back? So I'm all about not just the fixes, but really about the preventative things you can do to stave this off long term.

Andrew Huberman: So let's say somebody is going to do some hip slide up the wall, and/or reverse hypers if they're lucky enough to have a gym with a reverse hyper machine, or even just a high bench or hyperextension machine. Let's just assume for a second that somebody listening to this is training their lower body twice a week. They're doing compound exercises and some isolation exercises, but they're dealing with some back pain — or they're in their 20s or 30s and structurally they're blessed and they're not dealing with it yet. What are some additional things — what we'd call small things that make the big things possible for much longer — that people can do? Would you say back hyperextensions? Would you say watch your video on glute medius training? What would be the exercise to insert, how many times per week, and when?

Jeff Cavaliere: That's a good question. Reverse hypers are an amazing exercise. I like doing them because they're very easy to do anywhere. You don't have to have resistance on them. They make a great machine that actually provides resistance — straps over your legs that you can lift additional weight on. But the challenge for most people is that they're chronically weak in these areas. So even just their body weight lifting of their own legs is going to be a significant enough challenge to get overload. But you can literally do it on your bed in the morning. You can get up, lay enough of your torso on top of the bed so that you're not falling off, but have your legs hanging off the edge and your body up on top of the bed and do a reverse hyper.

Andrew Huberman: So raising the heels —

Jeff Cavaliere: Raising the heels so they're as level as you can get them. The bed's a little soft, so sometimes you kind of dip down as you're lifting your legs up, but it's sturdy enough that you can get to almost a parallel position to the floor. I like to make sure the muscles are doing the work and not momentum. So you want to hold that contraction briefly at the top to convince yourself that you actually were able to perform the movement. Get up, hold it for a second.

What's important on that too is that people who don't have the strength in their glutes — because it really is a glute weakness issue, not necessarily a low back issue — a lot of times it's weakness in the glutes that's transferring the load to the low back that can't handle it. People get the symptoms in the back, but it's the weakness somewhere else that's causing that.

So I like to focus first and foremost on the glutes — glute max, glute medius — to make sure they're strong enough. And again, if you test even big-time athletes, we would test their rotational strength of their hips. Some of the strongest athletes, some of the biggest squatters, some of the best lungers — they're lunging over 200 pounds — you put them in position and try to bend their hip into internal or external rotation of their bent knee, and they can't resist it at all. It just goes to show you that all the squatting, all the big lifts, aren't enough to counteract the smaller muscles. There are different functions. A rotational muscle of the hip is not a sagittal plane muscle of the hip. It has a different function. So they all have to be strengthened.

Along that line, we do the reverse hyper as a good sagittal plane exercise focusing on the glute. When they get to the top and I tell you to contract it, squeeze so you know it's the glute that's squeezing and doing the work — not that you're arching at the low back, using the muscles that are already overworked. Get that up there, squeeze, reinforce that it's the glute that did the work. Great exercise.

The glute medius — the hip bump. Super easy exercise. You can do it anywhere against the wall. And this is sometimes where you have to invest — and these are small things, but they're also small investments — a little mini hip band. The little elastic bands, just loops, they're called fit loops. Put it around your heels, lay on your belly, bend your knees to 90°, and then just try to open your feet apart. Spread your feet apart. Now you're strengthening rotation of the hip. Or hold one steady and let one leg come a little bit in front of the other, then try to cross it over the other one. So now you're getting external rotation of that hip. You're working external rotation against resistance, internal rotation against resistance.

Super easy things to do. You can attach a band around your ankle and do lateral hip swings with a component of rotating against the resistance of the band too. So you're moving your leg out and rotating out at the same time. How do you do that? Just focus on your toe. If your toe is turning out, your hip is turning out. If your toe is turning in, your hip is turning in. So you don't have to focus so much on how to move that — just focus on what the foot is doing. As long as the knee is going with the foot — you're not just spinning the foot, the knee and the foot go together.

There are simple things, and again, you might need a band or a mini band to get these smaller muscles more specifically, but it's $10 or $15 for a band. It's well worth the investment if you can get rid of these long-term recurrent issues that keep coming back and causing agony every two or three months as a reminder of what you're not doing.

The dog leash drill and functional glute medius training

Andrew Huberman: Once I realized that the glute medius was causing back spasm issues that were severe enough to be immobilizing — but then resolved by the information you provide in your videos — I started doing the hip slide up the wall movement, which I still do, the reverse hyper, and then one that you put in a video that I found a little bit more of a setup but seems really useful. You take some sort of rope or dog leash and you put it around your waist, and then you actually have a weight between your legs hanging a couple of inches off the floor. The goal is to walk and not let the weight swing and hit your feet. I know that sounds really awkward, but it really works. And all this strengthened other lifts for me dramatically. I was kind of at a sticking point with a number of lower body and upper body lifts, and it really seems like it helped create real stability in the lower back and glute area. What is that dog leash thing doing?

Jeff Cavaliere: Anytime you can take these smaller exercises and bring them a little closer to actual function, I think it's better carryover. If you're talking about actually being on your feet and walking, that's a step towards function. But what you're doing is, as I mentioned before, every time you pick up a foot off the ground, you're in single leg stance. So when you're in single leg stance, if you're not contracting the glute medius on the side you're standing on, your pelvis is going to drop. You drop towards the up leg. You may not drop if you're consciously trying to stay level because you're firing the glute medius. But for someone with a weak glute, you just have them stand on that one leg and you're going to see that pelvis drop.

When you're doing this test and adding the weight to the equation, the weight is really to create a pendulum effect. Because when you start to move, that weight's going to want to go in an exaggerated way. So what we're trying to reinforce is: can you take these slow steps in alternating single leg stance and prevent that weight from shifting so much — i.e., because you're dropping too much — that it would hit or bang into the other leg? You have to be able to walk slowly through single leg stance and not allow enough of a drop, by having good contraction and control of the glute medius, so that it minimizes the motion of the weight itself. You're reinforcing how hard you can keep this thing engaged as you walk. The faster you can move yourself and still have minimal displacement of the weight would be a good indicator that you're really starting to get good control and strength in that glute medius.

Another thing I like to do is what we call a suitcase lunge. You do a lunge where you offset the weight on one side — you carry it on the opposite side from the leg you're lunging forward with. What that's going to theoretically do is, when I lunge forward, I'm going to want to fall to the side of the weight. Picture having even a 50 or 60 lb weight in your hand — it's going to want to go that direction. In this lunge position, if I can straighten myself out and keep my torso rigidly in place the whole time, I can really strengthen that glute medius on the opposite side. And what's cool about that is it's also done in conjunction with a sagittal plane lunge. So now I'm starting to train in multiple dimensions and planes at one time. A lunge in this direction, suitcase carry offset with only one dumbbell — obviously you're going to get that desire for the body to fall towards the side of the offset weight. And again that starts to shift the pelvis up. The only thing that will keep it down is keeping the hip in abduction and level. So we'll do that with a lot of our athletes and work up to some pretty heavy weights there too. It's a kill-two-birds-with-one-stone type exercise because you still get the benefits of the lunge, which I love as an exercise.

When to do these exercises — and the importance of dedicated programming

Andrew Huberman: So let's say somebody is going to do some hip slide up the wall and/or reverse hypers. Should those be done at the end of a lower body workout when the lower back and glutes are partially or very fatigued, or done separately at a time when they're really fresh?

Jeff Cavaliere: Two times. I think you could do them on a dedicated day at a dedicated time. I approach my ab training as ab training and I always keep it separate. I just like to focus — I'm going to do 5 to 10 minutes of core strengthening right now, here and now, separate from my workout, because I don't want it to be an afterthought. I think it should be a key component of what I do to keep a strong core. So I want to focus it, and I don't want to add it to the end of my workout when I'm already mentally checked out.

I think when you start to have these issues that require special programming, you should own that special programming because it's yours. It's what you need specifically. Others might need things for their shoulders or for the rotator cuff, but whatever special programming is, do it as a small routine on its own day at its own time — or even on a workout day, but a separate time that you just go through as a routine. Five to seven minutes, three times a week or so. That's it.

If you want to put it on a training day, it's actually not a bad idea to put these smaller muscle exercises after your bigger training, because a) you're not going to compromise your big training and the goals you have for that, but you're also pre-fatiguing some of those bigger muscles that are going to want to dominate these small movements anyway. The compensations you're going to see on these small movements are always going to be the big muscles trying to kick in and do what they've always done, which is take over. And you're trying to get them to not. So if you can pre-fatigue them a little bit prior to doing these small exercises, you're actually setting the smaller muscles up for more success.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. If I could travel back to my teens — I started lifting when I was 16 — and my 20s and 30s, I would have started doing all of these things a couple of times a week, or even just once a week, even before there was any pain. Because I had the same — I don't know if it's arrogance or just ignorance — that "oh, pain is what old guys talk about, I have no pain, I feel fine." But I think by training a certain way without pain for a very long time, it's almost like the spring is getting compressed. Because unless someone has perfect mechanics and they're covering all their bases through other sports and things of that sort, the stronger and stronger you get, you're just setting yourself up for one of these things to go. And in my case, it was this lower back thing.

Jeff Cavaliere: When you're young, those things that appear as post-workout soreness can be masquerading for long-term pain problems and dysfunction down the road. Because when we're young, we just feel, "Hey, I'm sore, I had a hard workout yesterday, I'm a little stiff." We get through it, we manage it, it's not that interruptive of our life at that point. So we move on. But I believe that those are many examples of what is potentially happening beneath the surface. If you continue down that road, that normal workout soreness becomes more chronic joint pain, discomfort, movement limitations. And we also lose range of motion as we get older. So if we're not focusing on actually trying to maintain that, it just starts to pile up.

It's one of those things where you look back years later and go, "Wow, I can't believe I've lost this much range of motion." When it really was just the accumulation of many, many of those days of doing things where you weren't paying attention to all the little things. So it doesn't really creep up on anybody. It's happening every day. It's not like you can't intervene. You just have to be aware of what you need to do to intervene.

The "old man test" — a longevity benchmark for balance and hip strength

Andrew Huberman: You have a post that really humbled me — and people are going to laugh. They're going to be like, "I can't believe you can't do that." Well, now I can do it. A longevity test that includes a test of balance, strength, and inner fortitude. And that's putting your shoes and socks on standing on one foot — obviously one foot then the other — not sitting down, but doing that in the morning every day. This is a very cool test and I force myself to do it now. A lot of mornings I'm like, "I just want to sit down and put my shoes on." I've got this puppy now and he's grabbing my shoelaces, which makes it even more dynamic. But in all seriousness, it's a very interesting, very simple test. If you could just explain what it is — folks, trust me, you want to do this every single day.

Jeff Cavaliere: They call it the old man test — though it's gender neutral. It could be a woman test. Everybody is fair game. The goal is simply to put your sock and your shoe on the floor on both sides. Lay them down in front of you. Untie your shoes, make sure they're loose enough that you can get them on your foot. Stand on one foot to begin the test. Lean over, pick up that sock, put the sock on, pick up that shoe, put it on, tie it — and then put the foot down. Only after you've tied the shoe can you put it down. Then go and do the other side.

And it is difficult. It is very, very difficult. It happens to be one of the tests that I do a little bit better than other tests, but — we were joking before — I told you that about twice a year I still get back pain every now and then, and mine came from leaning over to put my sock on the other day and my whole back felt like it was going to blow up on me. Because you don't realize the responsibility that those lumbar paraspinal muscles have in trying to control even just leaning forward. They're trying to make sure you're doing it at a pace that's safe for your spine. So doing this every day is a little mini workout for those muscles.

I think we tend to get so lazy and complacent as we get older, so that once you start sitting down, you're just going to sit down when you put on your socks and shoes. You can't be seeking easy. If you seek easy, you're going to get old a lot faster.

So this test is testing your balance. It is testing the mini dynamic control from those muscles in the low back. It's testing your ankle mobility in a way, because you're going to get a lot of perturbation through your ankles and your knees. And it's testing your hip strength, because again, once you go on one leg, you're now talking about pelvic control the same way we did before. It's not uncommon for people to not be able to pass this test. But with practice, like anything else, you're training these muscles to get stronger. You're training your balance. These are all skills that can be learned and improved. They're all trainable.

I actually put a video out not long ago about different measures of longevity. One of them was that test. Another one was pull-ups. Another one was the number of push-ups you could do. But the number one was going back to your glute medius strengthening. Can you lay in a side-lying plank position with the top leg up about 45°? You can keep it stacked — it's a lot easier to stay in a plank position. You raise that leg off the other. Now it's all relying on that lateral pillar strength of the underside hip, the one closest to the floor. One arm down or stacked on the elbow.

Andrew Huberman: Okay. Heels stacked at first.

Jeff Cavaliere: At first. On your side. So side plank — not just lying on your side. Side plank. And then you're going to raise the top leg up to make a 45° angle and see if you can hold that even for just 30 seconds. And it's difficult. You'll feel a lot of shaking. You'll feel a lot of sagging of that bottom hip because you're asking your glute medius on that underside leg to hold you up into that position. The beauty about that series of tests though is that they're all trainable. So if it's trainable, it's fixable. You can improve, as you have.

Andrew Huberman: There are mornings when I want to cross one leg over the other and go into that kind of pseudo crow pose they talk about in yoga — rest the ankle on the knee. Sometimes people are probably laughing at this. Go try it, folks. Some people might do it right away very easily. Many people will find this difficult to the point where they think, "I don't think I can do this." But they quickly get good at it.

Jeff Cavaliere: Strength is not even a determining factor or predictor here either. You could be very, very strong and do incredibly poorly on this test, because you're not strong in these areas. Or you could just have bad vestibular balance — it could be that alone. Once you start to lean forward or look down, you don't have good control. But it is testing a variety of things. And if you do poorly on it, you can look a little deeper, investigate a little deeper through additional tests to try to find out exactly where your weakness is. But it's a good broad-spectrum test to see how good your functional balance is.

Sport-specific training, imbalances, and the weight room

Andrew Huberman: One thing that we don't think we've ever talked about on this podcast is that many people don't just work out — they also play a sport. Maybe they do golf or baseball or softball, maybe they swim. In every sport there are obviously dominant patterns of movement. I'd like to ask the opposite question. Let's say somebody played baseball or golfed, and now they have imbalances that are the consequence of having done some activity like a golf swing over and over and over. They have pain and they are thinking about longevity — not just of their golf game but of everything else. What can people do to compensate for these unilateral movements or always-left-foot-forward type stances that won't compromise their game but also overcome any pain and imbalances?

Jeff Cavaliere: That brings up the point of how sport-specific training has evolved over the years. There was a time when sport-specific training meant doing everything you could to replicate the motions of the sport and trying to strengthen those movement patterns. I think gladly we've moved past that stage, because you can get better at that movement pattern by simply doing that movement pattern. You can increase the strength of your entire body by increasing the strength of your entire body. So the focus of the weight room can be to do your general strengthening bilaterally, regardless of what movement pattern direction your sport favors, and improve the strength and function there — because the carryover to your movement pattern is there.

When you get stronger and then you go back to swing a bat, you're going to still have the increased strength you built in the weight room in your swing. You can throw harder if you're a pitcher, or throw further if you're a quarterback, if you improve your overall upper body strength. A lot of upper body throwing strength has nothing to do with your arm — it has to do with the stability of your core. So if you're getting much stronger in your core, you can have more torque generation to throw the ball further without having to do anything to your arm.

I think the strategy should be that when you're playing a sport and devoting a lot of time to it, whether at the professional level or not, you should still be focusing the majority of your strength training and conditioning work towards your overall balanced physique — trying to get strong across your entire body. Let the skill work be the skill work. And if you want to focus on a few things specific to your sport, that's fine. Maybe more forearm work if you're swinging a racket or a bat — that can be done in addition to your basic core lifting. But to go back to the days where strength training was basically replicating the motions of the sport, especially nowadays where you've got athletes who never stop playing their sport — young athletes playing baseball year-round through fall leagues and winter leagues — there's way too much repetition of the same movement pattern. And that doesn't end well.

You can see what's happening these days with pitchers. It's almost a rite of passage — how many years are they going to be able to pitch before they have to have Tommy John surgery?

Andrew Huberman: What is Tommy John surgery?

Jeff Cavaliere: Their ulnar collateral ligament, basically being replaced after it tears in their elbow. They're out for an entire season. But it's like some of these pitchers, they want to get it done early so they can hopefully come back and then have a string of years where they can dominate. It's crazy. But I think a lot of it is coming from overuse, a lot of repetition, not enough moving into other sports and movement patterns to balance off the strains and stresses of their chosen sport. And it's causing a lot of avoidable stress that again, fixing it through a more managed, well-balanced approach in the weight room is probably key number one.

Andrew Huberman: That's not the answer I expected, but really cool to hear. So doing the classic all-around weight training — squats, some deadlifts —

Jeff Cavaliere: The goal should be to strengthen your body, to improve your flexibility everywhere. If you're talking about a pitcher who has hypermobility of the shoulder because their throwing requires a lot more range of motion than a non-throwing shoulder, you don't have to say, "Well, I'm mobilizing my shoulders, so I have to do a lot of mobility work on my throwing shoulder." That might not be necessary. In some cases, you might actually want to not do that because it's already mobile enough because of the skill work. So it's not a broad "you do everything here, you do there on each side." You might actually want to steer away from some of the things you're repetitively using in the sport itself.

But from a strengthening standpoint, you'll never go wrong sticking to the core lifts, building up your strength in those core lifts, and bilaterally strengthening your body — your balance, your coordination, your explosivity, your power. That does transfer back over to the sport itself. People think it has to be in a sport-specific motion to transfer back over there. That's not true.

Training like an athlete — stance, stability, and the screw-down principle

Andrew Huberman: One thing I noticed yesterday when we were training, as well as in your videos, is that whenever you have the opportunity to do a movement standing as opposed to seated, you'll do that. Whenever you have the opportunity to stagger your stance a bit — not fully lunging, but offset your stance a bit — you'll do that. And you also talked about even on a dumbbell curl, leaning a bit toward the side you're curling up, assuming you're doing alternating dumbbell curls, can be very useful. Would you explain the general logic for that?

Jeff Cavaliere: I have a phrase: if you want to look like an athlete, you have to train like an athlete. What that really means is that a lot of people want to look athletic — they want the six-pack abs, they want what they think is an athletic-looking physique. That's great. But you have to train for it. It comes at a price. And I believe the way to get there is by training like an athlete. That doesn't mean going out and doing all the things people thought athletes need to do to be athletic. You just have to start caring a little bit more about what you do.

Functionally, what do athletes do? Most athletes are on their feet. Most athletes move around. You move around — you're not squared up with your feet right next to each other. You need to be able to operate from a staggered position as often as you can, because it's not to produce professional athletes. It's to produce a body that's functioning the way it prefers to function. Why do we default to that? If I told you I'm going to come over here and try to push you over right now, would you stand with your feet together or would you put one foot back? By default, you would instantly go to one foot back and try to lean into me and get more stable, because your body instantly knows that's a more stable position.

If I can train with more stability, I know I can decrease injury risk no matter what I'm doing. When I turn towards the bicep and I kind of screw down on that weight — I call it screwing down — I'm able to stabilize the torso a little bit more over that shoulder. I can even dig the arm into my side a little bit, engaging the lats, stabilizing the shoulder girdle, so that when I lift the weight, I have more tension in the biceps but more stability that the biceps can work from. When I'm out in space like this, it's a little bit more of a freewheeling deal where I don't have that stability. So is something going to go wrong from doing that? No. But that's not creating the most functionally stable body.

I take it the same way down to the ground with a lunge. When you lunge and do my favorite — a reverse lunge, which takes a little bit of the stress off the anterior knee — stepping backward rather than forward. I'm sensitive to that because I have pretty bad knees from those early days in my 20s of doing things wrong with flat feet. As you step back, take a little bit of a wider step on that back leg. So you're creating a wider base of support, more balance, rather than being completely narrow.

Andrew Huberman: This is key. It's funny — if you're in the gym with people, you say "widen your stance" and they immediately put one foot further out in front of the other. But what you're talking about is getting the space between the insides of your feet further apart — literally widening outside shoulder width.

Jeff Cavaliere: Right. And especially as you lengthen your stance, widening them in conjunction is going to create a wider base of support, more stability. So when you step back, you create a little bit of that width and balance. But as you go down into the lunge, if you don't lean your torso or turn your torso a little bit in the direction of that forward leg and do that same screwing down effect, that front leg will wobble a little bit. You'll feel that the hip is a little bit more unstable.

What I'm doing is basically tying the muscles of the pelvis together — muscles of the hip co-contracting and creating more stability — so that now when I ask that quad and glute and hamstring to work and push me back to a standing position, it's working more efficiently because it's on a stable base.

If we were going to jump and try to get the highest vertical jump we could, would you jump off this floor or would you jump off sand? You jump off the firm floor. As soon as you try to place force down into sand, it's going to dissipate because the ground itself is moving. Well, we want to create as much force and efficient force as possible. We want to have a stable base. So all that co-contraction of the hip when you screw down into it, or even in the shoulder girdle when you're going to then operate this elbow flexion shoulder flexion movement of a curl, you basically get a more efficient movement. Stability is key for more efficient movement and also, I think, long-term safer movement.

Elbow pain and the grip problem on pulling movements

Andrew Huberman: Jumping around a little bit here, but I'm recalling the many things that have reversed or eliminated pain that is very common in anyone that works out. And one of those is pain at the kind of inner elbow point, kind of forearm, inner elbow. I figured I had an elbow problem, something going on with tendonitis of the elbow. And it turns out it was all happening at the level of the grip. And you said — and I listened, fortunately, on pull-ups — to not let the bar be at my fingertips, to try and get my knuckles over the bar. You have a beautiful demonstration of this. You put some resistance to each of your own fingers — your index finger, your middle finger, your ring finger, and then your pinky finger. And when you put the pressure on that pinky finger, you can feel it right at that elbow. Sure enough, I was causing this elbow pain by doing pull-ups and slipping off the bar a bit, at my fingertips. As soon as I took your advice and got my knuckles over the bar, even though it requires a little bit of a wrist bend, I haven't had elbow pain in a decade.

Jeff Cavaliere: It is one of those things that can happen so quickly too. You can go from having no elbow pain to the very next day having elbow pain, or even right after the workout, if you're doing a lot of chin-ups with this issue where the bar is too far away. It's essentially an overload issue. The muscles — the flexors, the deep flexors of the forearm that run down into the fingers — it's actually the ring and fifth fingers, the fourth and fifth finger, that tend to be the weakest and least resilient to that kind of stress. If you're gripping through there and that bar gets deep into the fingers, or if you do a curl where the bar sits too deep into your hand and you try to curl heavy toward the ends of your fingers, it's just a lot of strain more than that muscle is really built to handle. Those tendons get a little bit strained and it can immediately feel like a knife in the elbow. And it takes a long time to go away because how many other exercises do you do where you're gripping?

Now, if you want to intentionally do this, you can — it's called a hook grip. What people want to discourage is pulling down too much with the bar, causing too much forearm involvement in whatever back exercise you're trying to do. In that case, you're really trying to hook through the stronger fingers — the index finger, middle finger — and you're still pulling down a lot through your lats to pull that bar down. So it's not like you're just letting it hold all the weight. But that little hook grip is meant to discourage any meaningful wrist flexion that would take over and take away some of the work of the lats. If you've got a history of elbow issues, you don't need to use that grip. The extra benefit of a little extra forearm involvement may not be worth it for you.

Andrew Huberman: How did you figure that out?

Jeff Cavaliere: I was just blown away. I was like, okay, I've got this inner elbow pain, and I'm curling and doing my tricep work and my back work and I'm wondering, what's wrong with my elbows? And then it makes perfect sense — ring finger, pinky finger are taking too much of the load near the tips of the fingers. Force yourself to put the bar or the dumbbell in the meat of your hand. Now, we take a more traditional grip — you're not relying on those distal tendons to do all that work and manage that load. The hand can hold on to hundreds and hundreds of pounds if we can just get it into the meat of the hand. Now I'm getting all the assistance of the intrinsic hand muscles on top of it. So now it's no longer a strain or a stress to those particular tendons.

Two things contribute to me figuring these things out. Number one, being a physical therapist changed everything for me because I had to think of things differently. Number two, when you're treating patients, not everyone presents the same. So you have to come up with alternative ways to get to the same end result. I might be able to tell nine out of ten people to do a Bulgarian split squat to alleviate knee pain, but for that tenth person it just lights them up and they can't do it. You have to figure out how to work around that.

And the second thing is that I had the unfortunate but fortunate experience of having to deal with a lot of these things through my life in the early years and even still now. I still do things that cause inflammation and a need to reassess and look at what I'm doing and maybe why. Like you, I knew when I first started experiencing that pain in my 20s that there was nothing structurally wrong with my elbow. So I had to look somewhere else. I didn't look then, but I looked when I got older and had way too many of those incidents happen. It forces you to look and figure out what's causing this, and more importantly, what can you do to stop it.

Shoulder health — internal rotation, external rotation, and the rotator cuff

Andrew Huberman: The shoulders. I'm going to knock on wood because I've been fortunate that my shoulders haven't given me issues — but that means it's probably just next. Perhaps that's also the consequence of having listened to your content, and whenever possible I've tried to get into external rotation — thumbs out, thumbs rotated away from the belly button, away from the midline. Could you explain where the shoulder tends to be most vulnerable, and this business of internal rotation versus external rotation during all sorts of movements and also just daily life?

Jeff Cavaliere: Good point here too — on top of the thumbs, it's not just the flipping of the hand itself through supination and pronation of the forearm, but literally letting the elbow travel with that. So you're letting everything move together because it's the rotation that's happening in this ball and socket up top. Shoulders have to rotate out. We're not just talking about moving your thumbs away from your belly button — we're talking about getting the elbows in a bit more. As those thumbs go out, the shoulder is externally rotating as well.

The issue with internal rotation and external rotation is that they're both motions of the shoulder — we need both of them. A pitcher needs to be able to externally rotate and then of course internally rotate to throw the ball. I'm not saying internal rotation is the devil. What we need is the ability to control internal rotation. We need enough external rotation strength to hold that position for longer, or to have the eccentric control from the external rotators — which is what actually controls the internal rotation. As we're lengthening the external rotators, we're controlling the pace of internal rotation. That's extremely important when it comes to pitching. We have this rapid internal rotation going on — the thumb is moving toward the midline to throw. If the external rotators are eccentrically strong, they can control that and make sure it's not outpacing what your shoulder itself can structurally protect.

But internal rotation in the world of the non-athlete is particularly problematic if you're posturally holding that position for way too long throughout the day — which is what we all chronically suffer from, whether we're texting, typing, not focusing ever on the external rotators in our training. You're just getting chronically tight and internally rotated. And then when you go to do even basic things like lift your arm up over your head, you're creating an internal shoulder environment that's more prone to creating less space and inflaming tissues that wind up getting pinched in that position.

When you're tight internally, you get changes to the shoulder capsule itself — all the ligamentous structures that surround it — that make you more internally rotated and tight. You can't get out of that position. So now when you go to raise your arm, there's just less room in there. For instance, if I were to have you just lean forward and slump your shoulder and then raise your arm as high as you could in front of you — that's as far as you get. And you're limited not because of anything that's necessarily tight right there, but structurally there's a little bony bump on the top of your humerus that's actually getting stuck on the upper portion of your shoulder joint. Now bring your arm down, open up your chest as much as you can, turn your arm out a little bit, and now raise it up overhead — and it goes higher. Why? Because you just created external rotation inside the joint that allows it to go up in a higher position.

Well, what happens if you're chronically in this position of internal rotation and you go to raise your arm — you go to wash your hair, you go to get stuff out of the cabinet, you go to do all the things you do every day? Every time, with there being less space in there, there's more likelihood to pinch on a supraspinatus tendon, more likelihood to be pinched on a bursa. And every time we pinch, we potentially inflame and cause more swelling inside that joint, which causes less joint space. You're inflaming those tissues, more compression in that joint, and then more pain ultimately. And that winds up causing down the road things like partial thickness tears and full tears of the rotator cuff that we don't want.

So having external rotation abilities or strength can help to centralize — and what it really does when people talk about rotator cuff training is, yes, you're working the external rotators, but really the main job is to actually keep that ball centered in the middle of the socket. As you raise your arm in an internally rotation-dominant shoulder, it will migrate up. Why? Because the deltoid pulls up. So as you're raising your shoulder up, the deltoid is pulling that humerus up, and the internal rotation of the other muscles are already too tight, keeping it in the front side anyway. So you're lifting your arm up and you're getting very little space.

What the external rotators will do is keep it centered, so that as you raise, instead of it migrating up, it's countering the force of the deltoid. It stays in the middle and can rotate and stay right in the middle where it has to be. You're not getting this migration or pinching going on. So that's the real function of the rotator cuff — to maintain a more centralized position with less of this pinching.

So you really have to focus on, when we're talking about avoiding shoulder issues, the biggest thing you can do is start training the rotator cuff, not stop training the rotator cuff. And if you're doing a lot of heavy pressing or a lot of work with exercises that tend to internally rotate your shoulders, then you have to do even more work for the rotator cuff to try to maintain that balance. If you're doing all kinds of delt work and never doing rotator cuff work, you're just creating more and more of that imbalance.

The biggest things you can do are: maintain mobility of the shoulder, maintain mobility of the shoulder girdle itself — so the scapula being able to rotate — and then have strength of the muscles of that shoulder girdle, which are the rotator cuff. Those are the three main things you can do to keep that shoulder functioning well and staying out of this domination of internal rotation with elevation.

Andrew Huberman: What's your favorite external rotator exercise?

Jeff Cavaliere: My favorite is simply attaching a band to something stable — it could be a stair post, or in a gym just a rack. You step away, you put the band in your hand from the anchor point, you step out until there's good tension on the band. If you were to let it relax, it would pull your hand towards your chest, towards your belly. You externally rotate to about back to neutral, or a little bit beyond if you can — a little beyond your torso. That's even better if you have that range of motion. When you get it there, you hold it for a second, just so you know that you actually muscled it out there. You didn't just swing it out there.

The number one thing people do here to cheat — your body knows how to compensate. If you ever want to know what you're doing wrong, just look at yourself in the mirror and see what your body's trying to do. You'll realize the compensation is the direct opposite of what the job is. When the rotator cuff is trying to externally rotate the shoulder, the way I can avoid that is just lift my elbow away from my side. I can get my hand from here to here if I raise my arm out to the side. But now I'm using my delt to do it and not the rotator cuff. You've got to keep the elbow pinned to the torso. The easiest thing you can do is just put something underneath your arm — a little folded towel — and then do the exercise. If you find that your towel is dropping to the floor, it's because you're lifting your elbow away from your body and using the wrong muscle.

Do this as a warm-up. Do it at the end of the workout. There are different applications. You can do it before a workout — if I'm going to bench press, I could use this as a good warm-up before I go press, almost as a neuroactivation technique to make sure those muscles are alert and firing. So I can make sure they're working when I go to press, to keep my shoulders back in a better position. And especially as I raise my arms up in an overhead press, I can make sure they're alert, fired up, willing to contribute to keep that head centered when the arm's going up overhead.

So I like to do them on pressing days as a neuroactivator before I train. And it's serving as a warm-up too. Or on other days — treating it as my special program, which is what I have to do because of all the issues I've had with my shoulders. Not from bad training necessarily, but from a dumb decision trying to throw a baseball back with the Mets. I lost a bet. It's kind of famous at this point. A player bet me that I couldn't throw the ball from right field to third base on the fly, because it just looked rather short from where I was — but it's actually a lot longer, and only the better arms in baseball can actually do that really easily. I have no idea why I thought I could, but I did. And literally the moment I let that ball go, I felt like my labrum went with it and maybe landed somewhere near second base, because it just felt like a burning zipper pain in my shoulder. And I've had to deal with it ever since.

Andrew Huberman: Did the ball get to third base?

Jeff Cavaliere: Oh, no. No way. I think it landed with the labrum at like second base. So I learned my lesson.

Once you get into position where you can do the actual repetition, you can then hold it in a neutral position — where your fist is pointing straight ahead — and then take a big giant step away from the band. So you're increasing the resistance of the band dynamically but still having to keep yourself in that same position. Elbow still locked to the side, fist out in front of you, you're holding the band, there's tension. Step away from the anchor point, so there's additional tension. And it's going to want to pull your hand back, but you keep it right where it is.

And then the fun part is you can then jump out there. So now it becomes a little bit more ballistic and dynamic. You can be in this position and then jump. If you jump quickly, now it really wants to pull you in, but you have to still keep that same position. So it's mimicking a little bit more of a ballistically dynamic force. You can start to change the angle too — you can be facing the anchor point and it still wants to pull you into internal rotation. You can jump back and see if it pulls you in that direction.

Internal/external rotation is done so many different ways. I could be in this position here, just reaching my arm out in front of me and turning my arm all the way — thumbs down to the floor, all the way back past the sky, and then thumbs out towards my side. That's internal/external rotation without even a bent elbow, because we're talking about a shoulder movement, not an elbow movement. You can do it down low, which is going to be easier for people to start. And the more things you start to do with external rotation and internal rotation with the arm elevated, the more challenging it starts to become. So you progressively move towards movements where you're rotating against resistance in a higher and higher arm position.

Neck training for posture, injury resilience, and longevity

Andrew Huberman: I want to take care of my shoulders. For me, neck training has been fundamentally important for avoiding injury outside of the gym. I got rear-ended in a car — I had just bought my first car, a 2005 CRV, driving my first new car. I was stopped at a light and all of a sudden someone just ran into me. The person next to me ended up with some pretty bad whiplash and back pain. I was a little sore but nothing really. And I credit that to having been training my neck even back then. Now I learned how to do it properly from you in your video, and we will definitely provide a link to it. I talk about this non-stop. This video is so valuable. You don't need any special equipment — some standard plates and a towel.

This neck thing, it's not just for fighters. It's your upper spine. Posturally, I feel like people's posture is so terrible nowadays. Posturally, it just makes your default posture better. But neck training for men and women — I think men would probably be okay with having a slightly bigger neck. Women probably want to avoid that. Is there a way that women can strengthen the neck muscles and achieve that without thickening the neck?

Jeff Cavaliere: I think that women would be less resistant to the idea of having a stronger neck, as long as we weren't talking about building massive traps along with it. And I think they think neck and traps because they do feed into each other. The reason why men who train their neck tend to have a thicker look to their neck is that they're also likely training their traps either directly or indirectly through other movements in a heavy way. Women who tend to train their neck directly and not focused on building their traps at the same time are just going to have a stronger neck, because they're not necessarily building the biggest muscles in here to substantial proportions. And again, when you look at the proportional growth in muscles from men versus women, there's already a difference in how big these muscles will grow. In an area where the muscles themselves don't grow to astronomically large proportions, you really aren't going to get that much size in the neck.

I think women are chronically undertrained when it comes to the neck. I can't tell you how often you'll prescribe some kind of an ab routine and a lot of people will complain — and most often it's women — that doing the crunch is hurting their neck. It's only hurting because of fatigue, not because their neck is being held in one position and cranked. And it's also that's how you want people doing crunches — not cranking, just touching the back of their head very lightly. And you know what you're getting there also is a little extra weight — the weight of your arms back there is going to provide a little bit of extra resistance on a basic crunch. But it's also leaving the neck unsupported.

So often people are used to holding the entire weight of their head, and then what happens is they start to fatigue. The body's natural compensation: they know that the eyes have to get up when they're doing a crunch. So what do they do? They just pull on the head and the eyes come up. They're not doing any more work for their abs, but they've gotten to where they thought they were supposed to be. Natural compensation gone wrong.

When women are encouraged to do it right and don't pull on your neck, they don't have the strength in their anterior neck to do that. So doing this neck series is a great way to strengthen the neck. And again, depending on how much weight you use, you could just use a five or a ten pound plate and have plenty of overload there to create a stronger neck without a lot of hypertrophy.

For those that aren't aware, the series is simply taking a plate — let's say we start really light, a 5 lb plate. We wrap it in a towel, a nice cushy towel so it's not uncomfortable at all. You lay on a bench and you're going to go basically in four different directions. You're going to rotate your body's position on that bench in four different ways to work the extensors, the flexors, and then the lateral neck muscles on both left and right sides.

Let's say you're starting on your back. You lay on your back, head is off the edge of the bench, that nice cushy towel with the plate inside of it is put up on top of your forehead. You allow yourself to lean your head back, but as you come up, you want to also pull your chin down. Because you're not just trying to hyperextend your neck at any point. The stability you get here is the retraction of the chin, which provides stability to the neck. So you have the retraction of the chin — which is just pulling it straight back, it's going to feel like it moves only about a half an inch or so — and then you pull your head back up to neutral again. You flex your neck until you're back to neutral. You do that 12 repetitions, however many, sub-fatigue, but just enough to cause some fatigue.

Turn onto your stomach at that point. Put the weight on the back of your head and then do the same thing — retract first, make sure you've got the stable neck, and then basically allow your head to sink down forward off the edge of the bench. And then you're going to extend your neck back up again to neutral, or in this case a little bit beyond into a little bit of extension. Then you go to your side and the same deal — you allow your head to just bend a little bit laterally, ear towards the shoulder, but you're laying on the bench. Place the weight on top of the opposite side of your head. And then you're going to lift up against that weight. These are just supposed to be done very slow, very controlled. There's nothing crazy explosive about these. You're just supposed to feel those muscles.

Trust me — if you have not done these, you do one round of this and then wait until tomorrow, because you don't want to do too much. I guarantee you're going to be sore. Back in the day when I played football, you didn't realize how weak your neck could get in an offseason until you put the helmet on for the first time. Just one practice with the helmet on, and you're controlling all that extra weight of the helmet dynamically, and the neck would be sore for two or three days. We had to accommodate even to the weight of the helmet.

So with neck training, it's a long, slow process. You just start very light. You start submaximal and you start building up your strength. And then when you talk about a crunch, that's a nothing exercise for maintaining stability and control. When you get into situations like yours where you have car accidents, you become not only resilient but potentially life-saving by having a stronger neck.

If I could highlight, bold, and underline this and send it out as far as I can — the neck stuff, men and women — you will be positively amazed at the transformations. Your pressing lifts will get stronger. Your pulling lifts will get stronger. You get stronger. Aesthetically for guys, a lot of guys who work to widen their shoulders — if their neck strength isn't coming up proportionally, it looks like they got the wrong head on that body. It looks crazy. You look ridiculous, especially in street clothes. I'm not saying you need a giant neck, but there's a proportion thing there that's important.

As I say this, I know that most people won't take the time to do it because it looks awkward. It's a weird thing to do in a gym. But people do a lot of weird stuff in gyms, and this is one of the better weird things you can do if you're going to invest some time. It really doesn't take a lot to pay big dividends here, because it is an area that's pretty much untrained. Again, we're not talking traps — traps get a lot of work. But those deep muscles of the neck don't get trained very often at all.

Longevity, the distal muscles, and training around injury

Andrew Huberman: So much of what you teach is about winning the short game and the long game. And to me, winning the long game is about being able to come in and do the big stuff year after year, decade after decade — so that when you're 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, why not? The experiment of whether people can have great strength and mobility into their 80s and 90s, with rare exceptions, has never actually been done. And that experiment is happening now because resistance training, especially for women — a few years back, if it wasn't bodybuilders, nobody did it. Now everyone knows this as part of the longevity game.

I saw a cool video — we'll put a link to it — of a woman escaping from a Chinese resting home. She's 92 and she's climbing over the front gate. She was caught on surveillance camera. She's crawling over the gate and then she gets out and walks away. She's got some frailty to her, but there was a drop down to the ground off this big iron gate and she's just like, "I'm out of here."

Jeff Cavaliere: But that's not to say that when you do the small things, you're not going to still have aches and pains that you have to manage. How can you show up each day and still manage the fact that this shoulder is still a little bit sore, or this knee is a little cranky? You have to continue to show up if you're going to play this longevity game. Because stopping is the fastest way to slow your body down to a point of really poor quality of life. You have to figure out how to manage through these injuries and train around and through them.

I always like to use the analogy of a construction zone. If there's one street that's shut down, you're not going to shut the whole city down. You need to find a way to redirect traffic around there so the city can operate. So if it was that shoulder and you were doing a dumbbell or barbell overhead press and you can't do it — it hurts — you have to have a way to reroute that. Let's say it's a machine press. Is that my first choice based on the things we talked about? You're sitting down, you're on a machine, you're in a fixed pattern. No. But if it allows you to still train, you're getting a lot of other benefits. You're getting some additional strengthening and activation of the deltoid. You're getting some movement through the joint itself, which we know bathes the joint surfaces and helps to provide nutrition to the joint. You're moving that capsule so it doesn't get stiff and tight. You're doing a lot of things right, even though it might be choice B for the exercise.

Let's say you can't do any pressing at all. Again, you don't shut the city down. You just take a back road. The back road might be rowing. Rowing is going to still work the shoulder joint through extension. It's still going to provide some of those joint benefits, the capsule benefits. It might not be stimulating the delts that way, but there are other exercises you can do for the delts that won't do that. Our job is to figure out how we can always have something we can do so that the alternative is not nothing. Because that's when things really start to go wrong — when you opt for nothing. That's when the aging process starts to really accelerate to the point where even just the functional aging, how you feel and the quality of your life, will sink if you don't continue to figure out ways to do that.

I always felt my mission or my goal was to empower people with these options and these alternatives. Because if someone came to me as a PT and my bag of tricks contained one, two, and three and they couldn't do any of them, then what do I do? I have to have options four and five there too. And I think that's always been my strength — to figure out not just to have option four and five on reserve, but then also have six, seven, eight, nine, and ten in case I needed those too. And if I can provide people with that information, then they know how to dip into those at the right time to keep going, keep training.

Andrew Huberman: I'm starting to see more content out there about foot strength. You've mentioned you have flat feet. I had some foot injuries from skateboarding years ago, broke my left foot twice, some quote-unquote snapped arches — it's not really a thing, but — and have started to think about foot health and foot training and stability. On the one hand, it seems kind of silly — are we really going to start training our feet? But on the other hand, our feet are always in contact with at least our shoes if not the ground. So what are your thoughts on flat feet, foot strength, and how it plays into stability and performance and just overall ability in life?

Jeff Cavaliere: It's actually something I wish I had done more of at an early age. One of the easiest ways to test this — especially for someone like me who has flippers for feet — is to put a towel on the floor, put your foot on it barefoot, and try to scrunch up the towel with your feet. If you start to rapidly cramp up in those foot muscles, the cramps are coming from a lack of strength. They're trying to provide support in an area that doesn't have it. So if you don't have intrinsic support or arch strength, then you're trying to ask the foot to do too much of what it can. Even a simple scrunching or activation of those muscles to scrunch the towel together is too much for you to handle. Kind of like the weak neck on a crunch.

Some people recommend running in sand. Some people recommend using these towel drills. Even just balancing barefoot and doing single-leg balance drills barefoot are going to not just cause ankle strength improvements, but intrinsic foot strength improvements. They're all good things to do because you can improve. They're literally muscles too. You can improve the muscular strength of your feet. And when you do, I think you can start to restore some of the natural arch that you've lost. If it's because of tendinous dysfunction or inherited genetic predisposition, you may not be able to have the arch of somebody who has naturally better arches, but you can certainly create enough of an arch where all the arch is really doing is changing the position of your ankle joint itself — how the tibia sits on your ankle.

If the foot collapses, the tibia is now torqued in its relationship to the foot. And so every time you step, whatever forces are being incurred on the ground are being sent up through the ankle into the knee into the hip into the back. So you're just trying to maintain a better, more natural alignment between the tibia and the foot itself. That's what happens with the weakness of the foot — you're basically allowing it to collapse too far, creating that torque in its relationship to the tibia. If you can start to increase the strength of those muscles, they can basically maintain a higher arch or more natural position that's more aligned with the tibia, and that's where the benefits come from.

Something I knew nothing about back in my 20s. All I did was go put an orthotic in, which basically put me in a better position. It lifts the foot up and puts me in better alignment to try to start decreasing some of the ongoing damage I was doing to my knees by being in that torqued position. But it did nothing to actually fix the problem itself.

Andrew Huberman: It's like wearing braces — not mouth braces, but like a knee brace. A mouth brace would actually create some long-term change, but a limb brace does nothing but support.

Jeff Cavaliere: Yeah, exactly.

Andrew Huberman: This is something I've been thinking about and reading up about a lot. I'm trained as a developmental neurobiologist, and what you learn is that development doesn't just stop at puberty or when someone turns 25. Our whole life is a developmental arc. And it really is an arc. People who can offset that last third of the arc have remarkably better lives in terms of their unassisted living, their ability to be there for others, cognitively and physically.

To make a long story short, it really appears that both at the level of the spinal cord and brain, but also at the level of the muscles, the muscles that are furthest away from the midline degenerate first. And it's interesting — today we've been talking about neck, yesterday we did forearm training, we'll provide a link to that. Grip strength goes, calf strength goes, foot strength goes. And this could be taken down to the motor neuron level, the spinal cord level, the molecular level. There are data starting to emerge. So I'm of the mind that many of the things you've been teaching and that we've been talking about today — working these distal muscles, especially as one gets older, but ideally one's entire life — are really going to be a big piece of the longevity game.

Jeff Cavaliere: Longevity ultimately is being able to maintain function as you age, because it's not the number of years but the quality of the years. So all muscles in your body serve a function. They're all there for a reason, almost. I think there's one or two that potentially don't actually even have a function — I forget which ones they are — but for the most part they're there to serve a purpose. The idea that we don't train all of them in some way is a little bit crazy. They're there. They need to be able to function for the lifetime of however long you're going to be here.

Finding ways to do it where we don't have to do hundreds of different exercises to address all these muscles is the ultimate goal, so we can become more efficient with our efforts and we're not skipping them. But the idea that they're not necessary or don't need to be maintained or maximized over a lifetime doesn't make sense to me either. We need to find ways to work them into what we're already doing.

And I do think that we have different rates of decay too — you versus me versus someone else. So that's where I really believe people need to adopt individualized plans. We all do the basic strength training, but then your specialized plan that addresses your accelerated weaknesses is this group of exercises, and my specific plan to address my accelerated weaknesses is this specific exercise plan. But they're all there to be worked on and they're all there to be maintained.

Training splits, volume, failure, and frequency

Andrew Huberman: There are millions of hours of content on the internet about body part splits and ways to train. Maybe we could do a pseudo yes/no Q&A type thing for a moment about body part splits and rests and training to failure. And then I have a very specific question about training splits that relates to real life and how to incorporate a resistance training program into real life in a way that's truly sustainable. First things first — how many warm-up sets per exercise?

Jeff Cavaliere: Depending upon what you're doing — we're right off into the nuance of all this, because the nuance is really everything here. But let's say you're doing a pull workout — back and biceps and even rear delts if we want to put them on the same day. You would warm up your bigger muscle group first. So let's say you start with back and you warm up the first exercise you're doing there. You could do a general body warm-up like we did a little warm-up for our arm workout yesterday. Then you start the first exercise with lighter weights. I'm doing two or three warm-up sets and I'm done, as long as I feel like I've sufficiently warmed up that movement pattern before I start to load it. As long as I feel like I've got all the creaks out and I've done enough of an assessment of how everything feels for that day, then I'm ready to go.

People spend way too much time warming up to work out. You just get yourself ready, and what happens is the workout itself becomes the rest of the warm-up you need for the subsequent exercises. Once you get through that first exercise, you're usually ready to go. And when we're talking about then shifting focus to the biceps — my biceps have been working every one of my pulling repetitions, whether I was rowing or doing pull-downs. So there's no more warm-up after that.

Andrew Huberman: Train work sets to failure, or stop with so-called reps in reserve?

Jeff Cavaliere: Oh, this is a great one for me. I mean, I'm failure. I understand the science shows that you can get close, but it's also very heavily dependent upon volume. So when you're looking to do a workout that you can do in 30 to 45 minutes and have a high impact in terms of its ability to stimulate growth, you're going to train to failure if you're with me. And I like objectively training to failure because I know I got to failure. I'm not talking about getting to a point where I don't recognize the exercise I'm doing, where I'm compromising the quality of the exercise. I'm not talking about doing it on the more compound or complicated exercises that require synchronized movement for multiple muscle groups, because that could get dangerous if you're losing body position because of fatigue. So we're doing it on the exercises that are the hypertrophy-based exercises — a little bit more focused on one single muscle group, a little bit more isolated in nature.

For instance, a single arm row versus a bent-over barbell row. That'd be a good difference between the two.

Andrew Huberman: So you won't take the bent-over barbell row to failure necessarily.

Jeff Cavaliere: Yeah. For me, it's always going to be close. My criteria there would be form breakdown. So as soon as my form started to break down, I might have had another two or three reps left, but that's it for the barbell row. Whereas if I'm doing a one-arm cable pull-down for my lats — which I love that exercise, it gets a really good stretch on the lats — I could let it look a little ugly at the end where I'm just doing a couple of partial repetitions just to add a little bit more stimulus with no extra risk to my body. So there's the difference between them.

But I'm always advising that you're training towards the high end unless you're training for strength, which is a whole different game. That's a whole different set of rules. It's a whole different stimulus that you're trying to build. That is high loads that you're trying to manage efficiently, not with inefficiency to try to force muscle growth. You're really trying to stay away from true failure there. It's actually not the way you would build maximum strength, because maximum strength relies on clean, efficient, well-performed repetitions done cumulatively over time. That's how we get neurologically stronger.

Andrew Huberman: And a lot more volume.

Jeff Cavaliere: Right. So that's a different game. For squats and deadlifts, are you taking them to failure?

No. Same concept as the row — those big presses, those big leg movements. I'm not doing true failure on those. I could do other exercises in different variations. I could do a Bulgarian split squat to failure, because when I go down and I can't go up anymore, I just simply drop the weights right to the floor next to me. So there are different ways to still do squatting patterns without having to put a bar on my back with the heaviest of loads.

Andrew Huberman: And then total volume — if you're going close to failure or failure, per muscle group, work set ranges per workout?

Jeff Cavaliere: Per workout, probably somewhere between 6 to 10 on some of the smaller muscle groups like the biceps, and a little bit more — maybe 10 to 15 at most — if you're looking at some of the larger muscle groups like the quads or the lats. That breaks down into around three to four exercises to get to those larger muscle groups. And for the biceps, you can get away with doing two or three exercises for a total of around seven or eight sets.

When we do our workout, we expose ourselves to more exercises because we can influence the biceps in different ways — a little bit of long head stretch, short head focus, heavier load, more concentration work. You can do that just by doing fewer sets of each exercise. There's nothing magic about doing three sets. You could do two and then move on to a different exercise that stimulates the biceps differently. That's a better total effect than maintaining that you have to do three of this and three of this and three of this, and therefore limiting yourself to three exercises. I could do four or five exercises that give all complementary functions to the biceps, do two of each, and get a better workout.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, I like a couple of warm-ups on the first exercise, two work sets, move to something else. And a few regular listeners of this podcast are probably thinking, well, how does this square with the conversation with Dorian where it was really like one, maybe two work sets per exercise, always insisting on taking the work sets to failure and often beyond failure with forced reps? When you start looking at it — with squats and deadlifts or rows, you're not going completely to failure. There is some offset there. It's either taking one, maybe two sets to complete failure with four reps per exercise, or it ends up being about six work sets with some pushing beyond failure. You're talking about 10 to 12 sets but maybe not so many where you're pushing past failure.

Jeff Cavaliere: And I grew up watching Dorian Yates and doing those workouts and I loved it. I found it hard for me to maintain that kind of intensity, especially training alone. Forced reps are almost impossible alone unless you have machines that can allow you to do that. So it was more of a difficulty of being able to stick with that type of training or reproduce it over and over again.

Dorian Yates is Dorian Yates for a reason — a six-time Mr. Olympia for a reason — because he had the ability. It's like he's the Michael Jordan of bodybuilding. Michael Jordan did the things he could do because he could do things other people couldn't. Dorian Yates could do things that a lot of other people couldn't in terms of tapping into that pain and discomfort and ability to go further when he wanted to quit. Right when it got to the hardest part of the set, he could start to revel in it and go further and further and further. I don't know if everybody has that ability. I can do it intermittently but I can't do it consistently. So for me, I just have to realize that and say, "Okay, I'm going to have to back off a little bit of the intensity, some of the forced reps, increase my volume just a little bit."

Because it ultimately comes down to a volume and intensity game. There are extreme examples of this. There are a lot of cyclists who cycle at 80 to 100 RPMs but do hours and hours of that, who blow up their quads and have amazing lower body size from their cycling. How is that working? Well, there's a metabolic effect they're getting too, which we know is another stimulus for growth. But at the right amount of volume, even low levels of absolute load can create growth.

I always go back and use the example of my wife, who was a barber and used to cut 30 to 40 haircuts a day. She was like a machine, but she's a little girl and she has these great traps — really well-developed traps. Not necessarily from the load of the scissors that weigh ounces, but from the weight of the arm being held like this all day long. No direct trap work ever in her entire life. Massive traps that look great. But she had great trap development because of that. That's an extreme example — that's eight hours a day, every day, with very minimal load but extreme amounts of volume. So in terms of muscle growth, I always think there's always a possibility to get where you want to get, but you have to know how to balance volume and intensity.

Andrew Huberman: In terms of frequency of training a given muscle group across the week — I'll just say two things that most people don't think about. One, there's nothing special about a week. Muscles don't really care about weeks. They care about stimulus and recovery, the adaptation, the hypertrophy, the strength. I consider myself somebody with a relatively poor recovery quotient. I can hit each muscle group directly hard once per week. There's a lot of indirect training — for instance, I'll train my legs really hard one day per week, but then I'll also do a HIIT workout on the assault bike. And yeah, it's not a squat workout, but my legs get some stimulation from that. I'll do a sprint workout one day per week. So that's what works for me. For you personally — how often can you directly hit a muscle group with the kind of intensity and volume that we did in the video?

Jeff Cavaliere: I can only directly hit that muscle group once a week with that level of intensity. Even in what we were doing yesterday, a lot of my focus was on you — I'm trying to make sure you're doing what you're doing right, I'm coaching my way through what I'm doing. So if it was just me and my own gym, I might have even zoned out a little bit more, gone a little bit harder. I can't do that more than once a week for a muscle group.

But you're also training back, you're also training chest, you're also training shoulders on a separate day. That's the key. When people recommend higher frequency sessions — every 48 hours or twice a week minimum — you are also forcing yourselves into splits that have a lot more muscles being trained at once. Because in order to get back to them again in the same 7-day week period, you have to do multiple in one day. So let's just say in a push/pull/leg scenario, you have to do all your pushing muscles. Right off the bat, you're doing chest, shoulders, triceps in one day. I find even that to be a lot to ask at times, not all the time, but especially if I'm short on sleep and short on time that day. I can't get through all those and get an adequate stimulus because there's just too much work to be done.

So that creates a need to condense into these multi-muscle group splits. Now you've got to have one rest day, come right back again. So you're training six days a week. Some people can't manage that either. But what I do is I say, "All right, if I train biceps like we did and I do them really hard, I still have to get through legs, shoulders, chest." I break legs into anterior and posterior chain, so there are sort of two workouts. I have to get through a lot more in the week. So if I had to get it all done in one week, I would run out of time.

The first thing I do is I extend beyond the seven days. So I break that rule, because I realize like you said that our body doesn't know the difference. It's okay if it takes me a little bit longer to wrap around before I do arms again. It could be nine days for me in terms of my cycle. But I know that when I come back after biceps, if I do posterior chain legs and then chest, when I come back and do back, the reason why back is following chest is I'm going to give my chest a reprieve from the day before. I'm going to go pulling when I was just pushing. Neurologically, I'm giving myself a complete break. But I also know that I'm looking backwards to when I did biceps — it was 48 to 72 hours prior. When I do my back, I know I'm going to get indirect work for my biceps again. Guaranteed.

And if I don't know that, I can make sure I do by doing underhand rows, underhand pull-downs, chin-ups rather than pull-ups if I feel like I didn't adequately stimulate my biceps that day. So I can make selections in these back exercises that indirectly hit the biceps. That's a lot of volume. That's enough. There's no rule that says it has to be directly hit to contribute volume to the work being done by that muscle group.

A lot of times these studies — I actually spoke to Brad Schoenfeld about this when he spoke at my event — they don't do a lot of accounting for the indirect work because we can't quantify what indirect contribution that row had to a bicep. So there's not a lot of data around that anyway. When they do these studies and they look for how much total volume, they're looking at direct work for that muscle group. So I feel that intuitively, from my experience, I definitely get another exposure for that muscle group and that contributes to the overall volume. And then again, if it takes me a little bit longer to wrap around based on how I'm pairing things together, then so be it. But I'm getting that indirect work — never twice directly.

Andrew Huberman: So in some sense you are similar to the Mike Mentzer philosophy — not of one set to absolute failure, because he was really on the far end of —

Jeff Cavaliere: I did that too. I just couldn't sustain that.

Andrew Huberman: Right. But in terms of not making the 7-day week the holy grail of how you organize your schedule. Mike — I was fortunate enough to know him. I paid him for a consult and got to know him over the years before he unfortunately passed away. And he had training like — I think it was shoulders and arms, rest two days, then legs, rest two days, then chest and back, rest two days. Mindblowing.

Jeff Cavaliere: Yeah, it was mindblowing. And the problem with that for a beginner is you get results — you certainly get results — but you don't get the opportunity to develop the skill of training.

Andrew Huberman: Or the enjoyment of it.

Jeff Cavaliere: Or the enjoyment. So three, maybe four days a week of resistance training for me is just the sweet spot. But as with you, I found that I can give myself permission — if travel comes up or a poor night's sleep or some extra workload — okay, there can be an extra day after legs, or you can modify things.

Splitting the split — adapting training to real life

Andrew Huberman: Which brings me to my other question. Yesterday after we were training, I learned something remarkable, which is there are times when you will split your split simply based on real life constraints. And you gave a beautiful example. There are times when you're supposed to train at night, but you go in to read to your boys or spend some time with them before sleep and you'll fall asleep next to them.

Jeff Cavaliere: That's more often than not.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. So then you'll go into the gym at your home gym at like 10 or 11 o'clock at night and you'll do half of your leg workout, and then you'll split — literally split the split — and come back and do the remainder of that workout a few days later. I love this example because it's the real world, and obviously you're prioritizing time with your boys, and that's what really matters. That's why you're training in the first place. So splitting the split — you wouldn't suggest it to people, but life happens. What does that look like?

Jeff Cavaliere: Here's the irony of it. I don't know if I wouldn't recommend splitting the split. I feel like I'm starting to learn that splitting the split is me breaking a bad habit that I was unwilling to break a long time ago because of the same mentality that led me to think of a 7-day training week.

What I've been seeing is that splitting the split does a few things for me mentally. It recharges me on a night where I really don't have a lot in the tank. If I get over there and I was just sleeping for the last 30 or 45 minutes, I'm not in the greatest state of mind to train. But if I know that the requirement is to just get through half of what I would normally do — let's say I'm going to do my shoulders. Let me get through the non-strength-focused stuff, because I'm just not neurologically prepared to do that right now. So let's just work on the lateral raises, the strict lateral raises. The hip hugger exercise. Different exercises that would be perceived as the non-compound exercises. And I'll do those.

What I find very quickly is that because I can ease into those exercises — they're not as heavily loaded, but they're high intensity, and it doesn't have to come from the load, it comes from the effort — I can ease into them after one or two sets. I'm good. I'm kind of into it. And I know that once I'm done with these six sets or so, I'm done for the night. And I can come back and do my strength work when I'm ready, which could be two days later usually, sometimes the very next night.

Whatever was planned gets bumped one spot. It's going to extend that training week even further so that nine days can become 11 or 12. But I think this seems to be working well with my recovery at this age. And again, I have very bad sleep habits only because the result of working out at 11 or 12 is that I then eat dinner after that — that's my dinner time. I get to bed at 1:30 in the morning and I'm getting up at 7. This might be what works for me best right now because I don't have the recovery through as much sleep as I should get.

Now, I know a lot of people will say, "Well, you need to work on your sleep and get better recovery." I understand that. Right now, this little pattern is where I'm at. It can be fixed by me training earlier in the day, stepping away from work and training earlier in the day. I haven't found the time or the way to do that effectively at this moment. So this is what I have to navigate. And I encourage people to do the same thing — find what works with your current schedule. You can have an eye towards fixing it, but what works for your schedule to get you through this time period?

I think it's working because I have more recovery time in a less-recovered sleep state that seems to still be progressing, because I can still lift heavier than I have been able to. I'm still able to create effective workouts. I feel good. My joints are actually feeling good. Things are feeling even a little better than they were. So it happens to be working for me.

I might be changing my mind a little bit about frequencies and volumes in terms of what I do in a given workout. And accepting the fact that it can happen over two days is so relieving, because it's like I don't have to bring it all today. I can just get this much done today, and it allows me to have a higher effort to handle some of the lower volumes that we're doing. So it's a win-win all around, and the kids like me more for it too.

Cardio, conditioning, and caloric burn

Andrew Huberman: Do you do cardio? I mean, you're naturally pretty lean. I know you eat extremely well. What are your thoughts on cardio?

Jeff Cavaliere: Cardio is like the right foot to the left foot. It's very important for the overall picture of health. If you're avoiding cardio and conditioning entirely, you're not as healthy as you think you are. I don't do as much cardio as I should — it's always my big confession. And the reason is simply because I have to choose based on time limitation. With priorities being to spend some time with my family and my boys, and how much I can actually get done with work and my workout time, I always will take a step in the direction of strength training and weight training, but I try not to ignore it entirely.

When I do cardio, I jump on a bike and do stationary bike riding, because I can increase resistance on the pedals and kind of turn it into almost a pseudo resistance activity — but of course doing it for the duration to improve my cardiorespiratory health. It's also good for my knees. My knees are quite beat up. Anytime I try to do anything where I'm running or jumping, it tends to hurt a little bit. I do still love to jump rope. Jump rope happens to be a lot lower impact for me as long as you can do it properly on the balls of your foot and absorb the shock. But between jump roping and stationary bike at a higher resistance level done in interval fashion, those are my two favorite ways to do it.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah, jump rope's great. I hadn't been doing it as much as I used to. I'd forgotten how effective it is at getting heart rate up, especially if you're doing some double unders or speeding it up or high knees. The coordination piece is awesome.

Jeff Cavaliere: There's a gamification aspect — you want to learn a new skill. Can I do it single leg? Can I do it side to side? Can I do it double under? There are little built-in challenges that I think we inherently always try to up the level of. That's not really built in on a lot of the other modes of conditioning, which is why people who skip it skip it — it tends to be unapologetically the most boring part of training. If you're used to doing lots of different exercises and feeling the weight in your hands, it can be a little bit boring. But there are ways to make that more fun.

Andrew Huberman: Do you like running?

Jeff Cavaliere: I actually like running, but I can't tolerate it. My knees just feel like they want to detonate after about a quarter mile. Now, I could do it on my Woodway treadmill, which is incredibly forgiving.

Andrew Huberman: Which one is it?

Jeff Cavaliere: Woodway. We used to have them in all the MLB weight rooms. There's no deck underneath them, so it's like running on air. Best treadmill. Also pretty super expensive, but they're worth the money if people have the ability to invest in one and want to run indoors.

They actually have some amazing versions of the Woodway called the Alter G, where they actually take the gravity away so you can run in a gravity-free environment. Which is crazy, because if you think about injury rehab — we've taken players with lower body injuries, put them on the Alter G, and had them run with only 5% or 10% of their weight. So you can unweight their body, get them into the mechanics of foot on the ground and running and transmitting the force through the whole body, but do it in an environment that takes all of their body weight away. And then you can progress them — now you've got 10% of your body weight that you're running on, and 20% of your body weight. So you can actually progress them from non-weight-bearing to fully weight-bearing in a cool athletic way.

Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Swimming is great, but you have to have access to a pool. I miss swimming. I swam as a kid all the time.

Jeff Cavaliere: Likewise. Yeah, every kid in my town did soccer and swim team. Those were kind of the big sports. I'm comfortable in the water. I live near the ocean now, but unfortunately the ocean hasn't been that clean since the fires.

Andrew Huberman: There are a bunch of hazards to ocean swimming. One person I know got hypothermia once, so I don't know. I think the cardio piece — the big debate seems to be whether or not, if people have a limited amount of time, they'd be better off investing in some high-intensity interval training or some so-called zone 2, zone 3 kind of steady-state stuff. We know that caloric deficit is required for fat loss. But assuming caloric deficit, is there a best cardio for fat loss?

Jeff Cavaliere: The one that you're going to do is going to be the best one, for sure.

Andrew Huberman: Good answer.

Jeff Cavaliere: It's hard to sustain some of the higher zone 5 cardios for long enough to have a significant calorie burn effect. I did a famous video with Jesse where I had him do burpees, which is one of the most calorically demanding exercises you can do. You basically quickly lower yourself down to the ground, do a full push-up, push yourself explosively out of that push-up back to standing, and jump up. That can burn around 13 to 15 calories per minute if you did them non-stop for a minute. Well, if you're doing burpees non-stop for a minute, you're likely not doing them non-stop for many more minutes after that, because it's a very demanding exercise. So while your heart rate will go soaring through the roof very quickly, you're going to start to fatigue because of the anaerobic part of it too — the muscles of the chest and the arms getting fatigued. You just can't really do it for more than, let's say, 10 minutes even in interval format. So what are you really burning there? If you did it straight through for 10 minutes at 15 calories a minute, you're talking about 150 calories.

So people who use their cardio for weight loss or caloric deficit are going to do better doing longer distance cardio at lower intensity levels. Getting on a bike and riding, or jogging or running, or even doing laps in interval fashion where it's a jog and a run and a jog and a run. There are a lot of different ways to do that, but sustaining them for a lot longer periods — 45 minutes to an hour.

But again, I'm a big believer that when you're trying to create the deficit, relying on the conditioning is a much more inefficient way to go about this than what should actually be done, which is to focus on your nutrition. It's just so much more effective to create large deficits from cutting back the crap you're eating right now than it is to try to get it through zone 2 cardio done for very long periods of time. Again, not to say that's not beneficial for your cardio and your cardiac conditioning — that's a separate issue. But when you're trying to create caloric deficits, I always tell people first you've got to work on what you're putting in your mouth. The old saying goes, you can't outrun a bad diet. And there's just no way to really do that effectively over time.

So of the two forms, I'd say the zone 2 steady-state longer form is going to do more absolute levels of caloric burn.

Nutrition — the clean omnivore approach

Andrew Huberman: What does nutrition look like for you in a given day?

Jeff Cavaliere: I don't know how many calories I take in in a given day. I've never really counted past when I first started out. And I think it's an important part of the process — people should count, because it does two things early on. They should count because it gives you awareness. You may have no idea how many calories you're actually having until you actually count them. You also become aware of many of the things you're doing almost second nature that are just not healthy. You're eating or drinking things repetitively that are just not healthy. When someone asks you to log what you're eating, you become very aware of every calorie you put in your body.

The second thing is there's an education that goes into learning how many calories each food has. I can't tell you how many people think that chicken parmesan is the same as grilled chicken just because it's chicken — and they're very different in terms of their caloric impact. So educating yourself about what those macronutrient profiles look like for whatever food you're having is part of the process too, because ultimately where you want to get to is: can you make equivalent swaps in your head on the fly wherever you are? That would be nutritional freedom.

As far as what that day would look like, I try to build my base around protein. I always have. The reason for that is it's one of those macronutrients that I know I need to build lean muscle. It's one that I know can provide satiety. It's one that I know is important to everything I'm trying to pursue and what everyone really should be trying to pursue if they're trying to be healthy. So they should base their meal around that first. Start with your protein.

I usually use a visual way of doing that where I just say, "Hey, take your plate and divide one-third of that plate — or that meal if you're having it in separate dishes — from a lean source of protein." That could be chicken, fish, beef, whatever you prefer. Have that be the one-third. And then divide the rest of your plate with carbohydrates, preferably in a 2:1 ratio with fibrous carbohydrates to starchy carbohydrates. The fibrous being the green vegetables — asparagus, broccoli — and then the starchy carbohydrates: rice, potatoes, pasta.

I personally don't believe I should eliminate my starchy carbohydrates. Inherently I'm an athlete and I know that's served a very important purpose for me for energy, for fuel resources, for glycogen for my muscles. Plus, I know that I could never long-term restrict myself from carbohydrates. So when I started out, I said, "I have to adopt a plan here that I know I can stick to." If it was taking away pasta and taking away oatmeal and taking away the things I love, there's no way I could sustain that. I don't think people should try to start out on some change to their diet where they're restricting foods they know they're never going to be able to maintain long term. If you can learn to manage them and eat them in a way that's more controlled — because the rest of the stuff on your plate is actually helping to minimize your cravings for that or controlling your portion sizes — that's the long-term goal.

And then overarching all of that, calorically — it's a fact of nature that fats are more calorically dense than carbohydrates and proteins. So just be aware of your fats. I know a lot of people who go down the path of healthy eating and they're putting olive oil on everything and avocado on everything because they're healthy foods, but they're putting so much of it because they want to feel like they're doing the healthy thing. But you're also skyrocketing your calories. So you have to at least be aware of where and how you're applying your fats, because calorically they will add up. I have nothing against fat. I think everybody should have it. I think it should be part of every meal. I'm just saying you need to be aware of your fat content.

I try to go low sugar as much as I possibly can. I try to avoid processed foods. I try to avoid blatant sugars unless it's my birthday and I'm having my carrot cake. But for the most part, I really try not to indulge in those things. But I'm not missing it. I really enjoy it when I have it, but I'm not depriving myself of it along the way. If people felt deprived and have it more often — I could have a piece of carrot cake once a week and probably not have anything happen to my physique. The fact that I don't is just really more out of habit than anything else.

But if you're in a plan where you feel so deprived that you're pulling your hair out and the first chance you get you jump off your diet and eat all the things you were keeping yourself away from, then you're on the wrong plan. No matter what it is — whether it be keto, whether it be what I'd call a bodybuilder-style diet —

Andrew Huberman: Or I call it clean omnivore.

Jeff Cavaliere: There you go. You know, like I basically eat the same as you, although I'm probably a little high on the fats sometimes just because I love nuts and parmesan cheese and a little bit of butter and some olive oil and stuff.

Andrew Huberman: Which are all good foods. It's just that calorically there's an impact there.

Jeff Cavaliere: And if you're going to eat them, what I always recommend is you could just cut back a little bit on some of the other portion sizes to accommodate calorically for what you're doing. But I do think that concept of the equivalent swaps is big. Because if you learn to eat the way I just suggested — and there's no magic behind what I do, it's just been very consistent — you'll be able to make swaps when you go anywhere. What's a protein I could have here today? What does the restaurant have? Oh, they only have pork chops. Okay, fine. I'll have a pork chop. You're visually just replacing equivalents on the plate.

Sometimes it doesn't always work. I just did a video where I talked about how a steak and a grilled chicken breast are potentially the same protein in terms of their protein content, but they're not the same calorically because the steak has a lot more fat than the chicken breast does. So you might have a smaller steak to make that equivalent swap. But that's only going to come through your understanding and knowledge of the foods and what they contain. So that early phase of learning what they have is important. But ultimately, nutritional freedom comes from the ability to be consistent with what you do.

I talk a lot about the fact that we can get to the gym, we can train for an hour. It's not easy for people, especially to do it at a high enough intensity level, but we can train for an hour, go home, and feel like, "I did my work today. I feel good. I did what I was supposed to do." Great. Your nutritional job just started. You now have to figure out how to navigate the next 23 hours — whether you're asleep or awake — and that challenge is infinitely harder. The reason why a lot of people struggle with their weight is because they have to figure out how to get that right and do that in a repeatable way, day in and day out.

I've been doing what I've been doing with my nutrition approach for 30 years. So when people ask me if it's hard, for me it's not hard at all. But it wasn't super easy in the beginning. There's a process to go through to get there. And I was willing to go slowly, but also not sacrifice the things that I really knew I wouldn't be able to live without. So therefore, I could live with it forever. And I think people make way too aggressive changes when it comes to nutrition. You're not just changing your diet — you're changing your habits and you're changing your lifestyle. So when you go and start making these radical changes to your nutrition plan because you're on a diet, it does not work.

Andrew Huberman: What you described — what I'll just call clean omnivore — I think it's just an awesome way to approach nutrition for a couple of reasons. One, it works. Like you said, it's flexible. Even with travel, you can always make some adjustment toward that. It handles the protein needs thing pretty much on its own. And as you were saying it, I realized that it gets people away from the marketing-based draw of nutrition. People say, "Oh, like a protein bar, or high-protein yogurt." And listen, there are some great yogurts — I love Bulgarian yogurt. It's like Greek yogurt's great, but Bulgarian yogurt is so good. Full fat Bulgarian yogurt or low-fat Bulgarian — amazing. And you get outside the marketing pull and you start thinking about food for its macronutrient content and its micronutrient content and quality, as opposed to the packaging-based stuff. Because even the non-highly-processed foods — mostly we're reaching for them because of what's on the label, the colors, the words. What you're describing is completely different. It's getting to the actual food. And once people make that switch, they're really in the driver's seat.

Jeff Cavaliere: Yeah. And even with some of the push towards higher protein foods now — the packaging is bragging about the protein content, but they've also increased the sugar, they've increased the fat. Even Snickers has a high protein bar.

Andrew Huberman: Are you serious?

Jeff Cavaliere: Yeah, Snickers or Milky Way — they have a high protein bar. It's like, okay, this is insanity. So show me the physique of the Snickers spokesperson. Something tells me they're not eating that stuff.

Andrew Huberman: Thank you again for being a voice of reason in the nutrition space.

Jeff Cavaliere: And I'm not a nutritionist — people are quick to remind me of that whenever I speak of nutrition. I'm only speaking from my experience, both with myself and anybody I've ever advised on how to do that. It works. It's sensible and it's something that can be sustained. So for me, that's what's most important with nutrition. And again, I don't fixate on any one particular way. If doing keto works for you, great — as long as you can sustain eating that way. Because all we're trying to do is manage our weight long term and not sacrifice other elements of our health in the process. If it works for you, cool. But this is what's worked for me.

Closing reflections

Andrew Huberman: Well, Jeff, thank you so much for the workout yesterday. I definitely learned a number of things. I'm definitely feeling more of those. And thank you for coming back to educate us. When you speak, people learn super valuable information — everything from the basics all the way up to the nuance. You're constantly educating yourself. Just a moment ago you were evolving the way you're doing things and you share that. And again, these so-called small things that allow one to do the big things for much longer and much more effectively — that's really what it's all about. And you clearly walk the walk. You look awesome. You're 50, steroid and TRT free, and you look incredible. You're truly an N of one that can encapsulate all this. And you're just so generous with your time and your energy. So I'm very grateful for you coming on here again.

Jeff Cavaliere: I was so pumped. I've been wanting to come back here for so long, and negotiating the travel is always a thing for me, but I was so excited to finally do it — getting the workout in and coming back and sitting down with you is always my favorite thing. So thank you for having me.

Andrew Huberman: Well, please come back again. You're an inspiration to me and an absolutely extraordinary educator.

Jeff Cavaliere: Thank you.