Exercising and getting fit has many benefits for longevity. You won’t have difficulty convincing people about the benefits or how exercising will affect their lives, in the short and long terms. There are still a lot of misconceptions about exercise, and how to achieve certain goals. Here, we dive into the various topics regarding exercise, diet, adaptations, heart rate, the different types of endurance, and much more. Here's everything I learned from Andy Galpin on the Huberman podcast.

Adaptations of exercise

While it’s true we have infinite methodologies, the adaptations are relatively few. Generally speaking, there are 9 different adaptations you can get from exercise. Fat loss is not one of them, but it’s a by-product. Let’s get into the different adaptations:

• Skill: this can go from improving a golf swing, or squatting technique, to running. This is how you want your body to mechanically move.

• Speed: moving as fast as possible.

• Strength: your ability to move, push, or pull against a certain resistance

• Power: is a function of speed and strength; it’s speed multiplied by strength.

• Hypertrophy: muscle size or growing muscle mass

• Muscular endurance: how many pushups can you do in 1 minute

• Anaerobic power: your ability to produce a lot of work in 30 seconds to 2 minutes

• VO2 max: your ability to produce a lot of work for 3 minutes to 12 minutes.

• Long duration endurance: the time domain doesn’t matter in terms of how fast you're going, but how long can you sustain work. This is 30+ minutes of no break.

Overlaps and collision

Some of these concepts might overlap, and some might collide. You might improve something else when you focus on concept A, but you might have to sacrifice a little from concept C for example.

Strength and conditioning laws

These are the fundamental laws for building strength and conditioning your body.

Progressive overload

You need some way of adding more stress to your body to improve. This might be adding more weights, doing more reps, adding different complexity movements, or doing a full range of motion of something. Bottom line is, that you need some way to move forward.

Specificity

To target a specific category, you need to focus on exercises that induce the variables or benefit of that adaptation. Your choice of exercise matters here, as well as how you execute this exercise.

Exercise choice vs Adaptation

Your choice of exercise does not automatically determine the adaptation. If you want to be stronger, you can’t just select an exercise, because that doesn’t determine you getting strong. If you’re not doing the exercise correctly (not referring to technique, although it matters of course), but if you’re not executing that exercise in the right fashion, you’re not going to get that adaptation. Let’s make an example: if you choose to become stronger, and you choose to do a bench press. If you do the wrong set range, the wrong repetition range, and the wrong speed, you won’t get the strength, but you might develop muscular endurance. The exercise choice itself is important, but it does not determine the outcome of the adaptation.

So the first thing you want to consider if you want to build strength, for example, is to think about the application of the exercise. What are the sets, what are the reps, and the rest ranges you’re using? That’s going to be the primary determinant.

Having said that, some exercises are certainly better for some adaptations. A deadlift is probably not the best exercise for long-endurance training. You could theoretically do 30 minutes of deadlifting, but it’s probably not the best choice of exercise you can make. But that might be a pretty good choice for strength development, low reps high set range. Another example, you could theoretically do bicep curls for power, but it’s probably not the best choice, because a single joint isolation movement is not the best for developing power.

Bad exercises

If you hurt your back doing a deadlift, that doesn’t mean the deadlift is bad, but you didn’t execute it properly. You either did too many reps, or put too much weight, or the complexity of the movement/exercise was too much. All of this would cause you to be out of position, and sustain an injury because of that. Big stress was put somewhere, and that part of your body couldn’t handle this much stress.

You cannot ever blame the exercise for causing the problem. It’s always either the user or the coach. So swallow your ego, take it slow and use your common sense. Having pain? Go to the section on muscular endurance to read more about this.

Modifiable variables

With each category or exercise adaptation, you have modifiable variables. This is a list of a few things that you can change, depending on the category, that will change the outcome. In human language: “if you do this differently, then you’re going to get a different result”. Let’s see what these are:

Variable 1: Choice

This is the exercise choice you select. Advice for beginners: choose an exercise with an easier movement technically. You don’t have a coach, and you’re not a professional athlete. The chance of you hurting yourself is much lower and the chance of succeeding is high.

Variable 2: Intensity

You can call this your 1 rep max. If you want to know what your 1 rep max is, you can follow a conversion chart. For example: if you do 75 pounds bench press for 8 reps, you could probably estimate your 1 rep max to be 95 pounds. There are many conversion charts on google that can help you determine that.

Variable 3: Volume

How many sets and how many reps you can do? 3 Sets of 10 will give you a volume of 30.

Variable 4: Rest intervals

How much time are you taking resting between a set?

Variable 5: Progression

This is more linked to the progressive overload law. For beginners, don’t worry about the intensity, rep ranges, or any of that. You have to focus on the correct movement pattern, and you need to give your body the time to develop some tissue tolerance. That means not getting overly sore. Soreness is a terrible proxy for determining whether the exercise was done correctly or not. Contrarily, you don’t want to leave the gym feeling “I didn’t do much”.

Soreness can be felt. If you’re crying every time you sit on the couch, then you should probably rest and not train. But if you feel some kind of soreness that is not terrible, you can probably go for some exercise.

Variable 6: Frequency

How many times per week are you training?

Variable 7: Joints and range of motion

Default is all joints, through all ranges of motion. In general, the ankle should go through the full range of motion of the ankle, same for the knee, hip, elbow, etc.

Manipulating these variables

How you manipulate these variables determines what the outcome will be. Some people for example want to gain more strength, but not muscle. If you manipulate and play around with these variables correctly you can certainly do that. That’s why there are Olympic weight-class athletes and such.

Strength/Hypertrophy training

Ideally, you want exercises that aim for a full range of motion, while maintaining a good position for your lower back, neck, etc. Full range of motion is the default that we should be striving for, but it should not be encouraged if we have to sacrifice bad posture or movement patterns that will injure us. It sounds pretty logical, but when people go for a deadlift while compromising their lower back, that’s not good.

Choice

Full range of motion generally speaking should be the first thing to focus on, then you need to balance between the movement areas. This is an upper body press, pushing away from you (e.g. Bench press), upper body pull, pulling an implement towards you (bent row, pull up). The pressing should be horizontal, as well as vertical (lift a weight over the top of your head). The same thing goes for pulling.

The same thing goes for the lower body. You could choose a lower body hinge and lower body press. Lower body push can be a squad, a split squad, or a lunge. Lower body pull or hinge, is a deadlift, Romanian deadlift, hamstring curl. If you’re doing a single workout, a decent one might be to choose 4 exercises: upper body pull/push, and lower body hinge/press.

Intensity

You’re looking at 85% of your 1 rep max. 75% for moderately trained people, and untrained people will have a tremendous boost when they first start. So anything works. The law of specificity works, if you want strength you need to produce more force, not a high amount of reps.

Repetition and volume

Because you’re looking at producing force, each set will be 5 reps per set or less range. The amount of sets you do depends on your fitness level, if you do as little as 3 working sets per exercise, that’s probably enough. But these should be work sets!

You need to get warmed up first and build the intensity to 85%. You can’t just walk into the gym and start at 85%. A classic warm-up would be 1 set of 10 reps at 50%, 1 set of 8 reps at 60%, a set of 8 at 70%, then a set of 5 at 75%. So 2 or 3 sets build the intensity and lower the rep range, then you go after your 2 or 3 working sets.

Rest intervals

The primary driver of strength is intensity, not volume. To maintain that, we have to do a low repetition range, and a high rest interval, because if we have any amount of fatiguing occur, we will have to either reduce the reps or reduce the intensity, we have lost the primary driver. The number that gets thrown mostly is 2 to 4 minutes. What you can also do during your rest interval is do something else, not be on your phone. This is what is called a superset. If you are resting from the bench press, you can go do a deadlift in these 2 or 4 minutes of resting. Super sets might reduce the strength gains by a fraction, but compared to the time saved and the maximum outcome they are worth it. If you are however trying to break the world record for a deadlift, then super sets might not be a good choice to make.

Frequency

How do you know if a muscle is ready to train again? Soreness is not a good indication, because of the simple fact that some exercises will induce more soreness than others. The question we need to ask to answer that, is what are you training for? If you’re training for hypertrophy (muscle size, muscle growth), you need to hedge toward recovery.

If you are training for strength, in theory you can train the same muscle group every day. Because you should not get sore from strength training. But if you want to allow for muscle growth, you need to give your muscles the time to grow and recover.

If you are training for hypertrophy, is probably less than 3/10 on the level of soreness, so you can go again. In general, you’re looking at 72 hours. If you trained your shoulders on Monday, you probably don’t want to train them again on Tuesday. Maybe Wednesday, but maybe Thursday’s best. That’s because the protein synthesis process is 24 to 48 hours, so you want to wait it out and let that signal go back to the baseline, then hit it again. As long as you are providing the nutrients to recover, you can repeat this process and grow muscle.

The minimum amount of working sets is 10 per muscle group, per week. You’re probably looking at 15 to 20 sets, and well-trained folks will go for 20 to 25. That becomes very challenging in 1 workout you won’t be able to do it. Because the total driver of strength is intensity, and the total driver for hypertrophy is volume, assume you’re taking it to fatigue or muscular failure.

Hypertrophy needs to be between 5 to 30 reps, the caveat is taking it to muscular failure, and you need time to recover. Knowing your max, you should probably feel 3 or maybe 5 out of 10 on the scale of soreness if you feel an even better pump, and if you feel the muscles contract during the even better exercise. You don’t have to kill yourself though.

Speed, power, strength

Here we can do the 3 to 5 concept. How this goes: pick 3 to 5 exercises, do 3 to 5 sets, do 3 to 5 reps, take 3 to 5 minutes rest in between, and do it 3 to 5 times a week. If you’re feeling better that day, choose the higher end. If you have less time, pick less, etc. This can be as less as 3 sets of 3, 3 exercises, 3 times a week. That’s a 20 minutes workout 3 times a week. It can be as high as 5 sets of 5, 5 exercises, for 5 days a week.

Power vs Strength

Strength is, well, strength. It’s the ability of your body can overcome resistance. Power is strength multiplied by speed. The desired outcome depends on the intensity. If you want strength, the working sets will be 85%+ of your max. If you want power, it needs to be a lot lower because you’re moving toward the velocity end of the spectrum. So while getting stronger by definition can help power, you probably have to spend your time between the 40% to 70% range.

Conceptually speaking, all of the discussed variables early (3 to 5 concepts), should work for both of them. The only difference is the intensity, so change accordingly for the desired outcome.

Breathing

Between sets, it is important to breathe down and regulate your breathing and heart rate. This will calm you down, will help with recovery between sets and after workouts, and will greatly benefit you in the long run. You can incorporate that into your day-to-day life. After an intense meeting or something like that, take a minute or 2 to breathe properly and slowly. The breathing technique can vary, you might do 4 seconds inhale 8 exhale. Or do the box breathing, that’s 4 seconds inhale, 4 seconds hold, 4 seconds exhale, 4 seconds hold, etc.

Endurance training

Endurance training needs to be looked at a bit differently from strength/speed training. When considering an exercise choice, you must consider eccentric landing and concentric activities.

Eccentric landing

With endurance training, you need to be concerned with eccentric landing., relative to strength and speed training. You don’t need to avoid it, but you have to recognize it and the risks. With speed/strength training, you might have a bit of eccentric absorption, which is ok for the most part. But the more eccentric the greater the chance of muscle damage and soreness. Imagine if you do a full exertion for even 5 minutes, you will demolish your body.

Let’s take running as an example: If you haven’t run in forever, and you used to run for 30 minutes before, if you run this distance, you have to think about how the eccentric landing plays a huge part in this. With running, you’re never on your 2 feet at the same time, it’s always 1 foot, after 1, step after step, and so on. With each step, all your weight + gravity will be put on your leg. That’s for every step. And if you’re not landing properly, which is more likely if you are a beginner, you might end up with knee pain, shoulder, or back pain, because of the movement compensation you’re doing. So anytime we start pressing to fatigue, let’s be very concerned with that and don’t take it lightly.

Concentric based activities

This is the initial recommendation to follow. The easiest example of this is cycling. When you are on a bike, you’re pushing the pedal, but you’re never landing and absorbing it. Even if you go out and do a 45-minute bike ride, you’re not going to get that sore because there are not a lot of eccentric loads.

Swimming is another great example. The nerdy people might say you have a few eccentrics when your hand hits the water, but that’s fairly minimal. It’s mostly pushed, push, push, not load. Rowing is also similar. Pushing a sled is great. Going uphill, running, or even walking hard uphill is also good because there’s a minimal landing, relative to running downhill, which will be a very bad idea to start your endurance training.

Having said that, you need to progress your volume with these activities very slowly, especially if it involves eccentric landing.

Choice

Pick the activity you’re most technically proficient in, and whichever one you will feel great joy in, because you will be doing that a lot, and there will be a lot of repetitions.

You can also use weight to do that, for example with farmer’s carry. Carry weight and walk for 5 minutes, then set that down and do a 1 or 2-minute plank, then do a full-body squat, slowly and at tempo. And you can do a handful of different exercises to not get bored.

A very simple workout can be a 30-minute workout where you do 10 minutes on a treadmill, 10 minutes on a bike, and 30 minutes on a rower. So if you can’t do 30 minutes of running, you can simply split this up into smaller exercises.

Zone 2 cardio

Incorporating 150 to 180 minutes of zone 2 cardio every week is very beneficial. Where you can just barely have a conversation. You can split these up into different sessions, and that will most likely not interfere with your muscle growth, especially if it is in zone 2 cardio. It might help with hypertrophy by increasing the blood flow.

Ideally, you want to do that through your nose only. If you want to use your mouth a little, that’s fine, but this is a good way to indicate the intensity of this exercise. You will be able to increase your work output very quickly and will have a lot of other benefits as well.

Interference effect

The interference effect is mostly known between strength and endurance. This was discovered initially by a study that went in this manner: scientists made 3 groups, 1 group did the endurance exercises, the steady state cardio. The second group did the strength training piece, and the third and final group did both of these workouts combined, with both volumes stacked on top of each other. The results were: the endurance group had the greatest increases in VO2 max and endurance markers. The strength group had the greatest increase in muscle hypertrophy. The interesting thing, however, started with the third group, which did the concurrent training.

Concurrent training typically refers to hypertrophy and strength training, stacked on top of some steady-state endurance, in the same hours, or same week doesn’t matter really. The concurrent group saw the same improvements in the VO2 max as the endurance group, however, they saw much lower increases in strength and hypertrophy. So the conclusion was, that the addition of endurance work compromised muscle growth and strength development, however, the addition to strength training to your endurance workout will not compromise your endurance gains.

Having said that, the interference is real, but it is greatly overblown. If you’re considering a 20-minute jog at a conversational pace, then this will do very little to your hypertrophy and strength, that is with the assumption that you’re doing this with eccentric activity like running. Cycling will even have way less of an effect. If you’re eating enough calories, you can still be in an anabolic state. But if the addition to the extra energy expenditure (cardio, that’s really what it is), put you in a negative energy state, then it’s going to become very difficult to go through anabolism. If you’re running a few laps around the track as a warmup, that’s not an interference effect, what matters is a big volume performed consistently.

If the exercise is heavily eccentric-based, the volume is very high, you’re trying to maximize muscle growth, and energy’s not controlled. If that’s not the case, the interference effect is probably not something most people should worry about, especially when you compare that against the well-roundedness that you need for total physiological health.

Best things to do

Generally, suppose you’re looking at something that will give you the most benefits in the different physiological adaptations, across most categories. In that case, you’re almost always looking at hypertrophy type of training, and anaerobic conditioning. That’s what’s going to hit most systems at once.

Moving around

Doing a 150 - 180 minute zone with 2 cardio per week is very beneficial, and we will talk about that in the next segment. So that can be a run at a conversation pace. But in all honesty, this is hardly called an exercise, because if you’re doing this at a conversation pace, that’s more of a movement, and we as humans need to be doing this more frequently. We have failed to do that due to our comfortable lifestyle. So when considering a weekly schedule, this long duration stuff is not even counting, because it’s simply what you need to do as a human, moving forward. If you are extremely unfit, you will see a huge improvement doing this, and the timeframe shouldn’t be a concern for you at the start, so you shouldn’t worry about hitting the 180-minute mark, but instead focus on starting to move.

What you also can do is add movement to your daily life. An example of that is moving around when you take phone calls. Let’s say you got a 30-minute phone call every day or most days of the week, and you can do that while walking, then you’ve checked a big chunk from that checkbox. That can be done inside, of course, by pacing back and forth. A cool tool you can also buy if you often work at a desk, and you’ve got the budget for it, is to buy an under-desk treadmill.

Zone 2 cardio

Incorporating 150 to 180 minutes of zone 2 cardio every week is very beneficial. You can split these up into different sessions, and that will most likely not interfere with your muscle growth, especially if it is in zone 2 cardio.

Ideally, you want to do that through your nose only. If you want to use your mouth a little, that’s fine, but this is a good way to indicate the intensity of this exercise. So go as hard as you can while still being able to breathe through your nose only. You will be able to increase your work output very quickly and will have a lot of other benefits as well.

Max heart rate

Once a week, get to your maximum heart rate. Do any activity that would be death. Get your heart rate as high as you can get it. A general rule of thumb to know your maximum heart rate is to take 220 - your age. So if you’re 40, your maximum heart rate is probably around 180 bpm. This rule however is not always accurate. You can be 39 and have a max heart rate of 210, and some top professional athletes who are in their twenties can have a max heart rate of 175. So the max heart rate is not a good proxy for physical fitness, it’s a rough number.

So once a week, 4 to 8 minutes should be ideal, and these will be extremely beneficial if you want full-rounded physiology. If you can’t manage the mental energy for this, do it every other week. It’s still very good, and better than nothing.

It’s very important to breathe in and regulate after this type of workout. Give yourself at least 5 minutes to properly calm down and breathe properly. Also, don’t jump into these very quickly. Do a very good thorough warm-up, sweat broke, then give it 4 minutes of work and you’re done.

Middle ground

You want to do between 4 to 12 minutes of intense workout. Not as intense as your max heart rate workout, and not as easy as your conversational zone 2 cardio workout. The question you need to answer for this exercise is can you get to 80% of your max heart rate and hold that for 4 minutes? If you can’t, you can aim for 2 minutes at 80% max heart rate, rest for 2, and do that twice. Or do for 4, rest for 4, and repeat. Or just do 2 to 6 minutes of hard work. Of course, don’t forget to regulate your breathing and you’re done.

This workout is lower in intensity than your max heart rate workout, but it is a much higher workload exercise. This exercise is arguably going to give you the most cardiovascular benefit because it sustained work output. The downside of that kind of conversational pace, well, it is physical activity, it’s movement, it’s blood flow, it’s lymphatic drainage, but it’s not very cardiovascular challenging. It is extremely beneficial and you should do it every week, but you’re not going to get optimal health from just actively walking.

Muscular endurance

You also want to train your muscular endurance. Muscular endurance is how long you can do a wall sit or the plank, or how many push-ups can you do in 1 minute. This is all muscular endurance. It is beneficial for joint maintenance.

If you’re having pain doing an exercise, simply back off. Practically speaking, that would mean lowering the volume, reducing the complexity (giving yourself more stability and fewer moving parts), or doing less intensity.

If you look at In the physical therapy world, in terms of the pain literature, it’s very clear that stopping a movement will rarely ever work. What you want to do is back down below that threshold of that’s what aggravates the pain, and you want to train right there in that zone. That’s going to allow you to do 2 things: tissue tolerance, and desensitization. Let’s take back pain as an example. There’s not necessarily often much damage there, but it’s a lot of hypersensitization of pain signals. Omitting the movement entirely does not get that signal to go away. You need to train just below that signal, to desensitize it. If you execute this in this manner, muscular endurance is beautifully effective for that.

Hypertrophy & Strength

You also need to incorporate these strength and hypertrophy training. You can refer to the concept of 3 to 5 for example or other methodologies.

Hydration

You can look at hydration as a curve. If you’re at the end of the curve, or under-hydrated, well, you could die. Water is the only thing ubiquitous across biology. In human language, that means that every living thing has to have it. There’s no other vitamin, mineral, or nutrient that is required among all living things, except water. That should give you a pretty good indication that it’s important.

So going back to the curve: right in the middle, you’re good. But if you keep overconsuming water, you will also go down to the other side of the curve where you will have other problems. If you’re super over-hydrated, you can get for example what’s called hyponatremia, which is more common than people realize. This means the sodium concentration is too low. If sodium potassium balances inside or outside of the cell get disrupted, the heart might stop. Muscle contraction ends, and all these things. So you don’t want to be over or under-hydrated.

The context for hydration that we will discuss will be: how much water to drink throughout the day, and how much water to drink during exercise.

Daily water consumption

The Formula for total fluid consumption to drink throughout the day is as follows. This is just a rough and very loosely estimate of the amount of fluid you need to consume:

• Imperial system: Half your body weight in ounces per day. If you’re 200 pounds, drink 100 ounces of water.

• Metric system: Multiply 110% of your body weight (in kg) times 30. Let’s say you weigh 80kg. You calculate your body weight first (80 × 1.1), so that will be 88, then multiply that by 30, so that will be 2640 ml.

Exercise

If you go to exercise, you need to account for the fluid loss with exercise. In general, you want to be drinking 2 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, every 15 to 20 minutes. For my fellow Americans there, or your body weight in pounds divided by 30, the results are the ounces you need to drink, over 15 to 20 minutes.

As for the amount of salt, you can consider taking 500 mg of salt before the workout, and 500 mg after. If you’re a high salt sweater, you can maybe take 750 mg, before and after.

If you lose more than 1% of your body weight after a workout, then you want to consume 125% to 150% of the amount of weight you lost as fluid. Here are some examples in both the imperial and metric systems:

• Imperial system: If you lost 2 pounds after a workout, that’s 32 ounces, so you need to drink something between 40 to 45 ounces of water

• Metric system: If you lost 1kg, drink between 1250 to 1500 ml

Speaking about eating before or after the workout, it’s a personal preference. Just make sure you’re eating and drinking properly for the workout you’re doing, and use your common sense.

Diet

Your diet matters. If you’re eating a whole food-based diet, your endogenous hydration will be pretty high already just from your food. A steak still contains a lot of fluid even after it’s cooked. Watermelon contains something like 98% or something of water. If you’re eating a very highly processed, dehydrated, over-salted diet, you’re way low on hydration, and you need to compensate for that. So you have to factor in all of these things.

If you’re changing your diet, from a low-quality to a high-quality one, you need to consider the differences in fluid intake. If you used to drink 2000 ml of water with the old diet, you might want to adjust that depending on your new diet. This is the same case for sodium. You might come from 10 grams of sodium to 3 because of the new diet. If that’s the case you’ll have to make sure to salt the food and get enough sodium.

Sodium

It’s difficult to know exactly the optimal amount of sodium (salt) one should intake. High sodium concentrations are associated with a lot of negative health outcomes, especially in combination with poor physical activity, low food quality, and other comorbidities. You need to be very careful about those things. If everything else is ok, assuming you’re on a well-balanced diet and you drink enough water, it will be mostly ok increasing the salt a little bit. You probably will feel a bit better. Having said that, it needs to be very clear: if you are overweight, highly stressed, have poor physical activities, and have known comorbidities, then you need to pay attention to salt intake. On the other side, low sodium intake is a problem and can cause several health issues.

When you’re exercising, it’s ideal to know whether you’re a low/high sodium sweater. If you didn’t know, when exercising or sweating you are also losing sodium, not only water. So depending on that, you might want to look at electrolytes that have either low or high sodium per serving. The question is how to know whether you are a low or high-sodium sweater. You can either get professionally tested with Levelen. Levelen will tell you exactly how much sodium you lose when you sweat and tell you the exact products that match that. This test will cost around 150$. Of course, not all of us are at this level nor want this testing accuracy. So another consumer-friendly option is to go with a sweat patch from Gatorade. You can get these patches for around 25$ and you can wear them while doing an exercise, and download the Gatorade app. They will also tell you how much sodium is in your sweat and you can figure out how low, mid, or high that is. Another easy way to do it if you don’t want to buy anything: when you’re doing exercise, wear a hat or a headband. After the workout, if you see a huge white band, then you’re probably a high-salt sweater. If it’s super clear, then you will be on the lower side.

Cold and heat exposure

Heat and cold can be very effective tools to recover and improve your general physiology. They can be used for recovery, or to enhance certain adaptations.

Cold and training

Deliberate cold exposure, or cold water, is amazing for your health. However, getting into an ice bath, immediately after a hypertrophy session, is getting pretty close to making that session almost irrelevant. It is detrimental. If you’re however not concerned with growing muscle, and you want the other benefits that come with cold water immersion, that’s fine as well. This is not taking you backward or anything. We don’t know exactly how much this will affect us, but it’s enough for us to say the following rule: don’t get in the ice immediately after a workout. How long should you wait? In theory, the best answer will be 4 hours. Cold showers are fine, and they’re not going to deliver the same stimulus as an ice bath (fully immersing your body and limbs under the ice water, for 1 to 5 minutes).

Having said that, this is mostly concerned with maximizing muscle growth and mass. Strength is not as clear. But in general, if you can do this on your off days or when you’re not exercising, that would be ideal. Doing cold before the workout, or when you start your day is also a great thing to do, if you can do it of course.

Optimization vs adaptation

When you’re pushing for adaptation, let’s say hypertrophy, you don’t want to block the signal for adaptation. This means less recovery, you’re not going to feel as good, and you probably should be hedging toward stress. When you’re pushing for optimization, it’s the opposite. Let’s elaborate: if you’re a pitcher in season for a champion match, and you had thrown 125 pitches, the concern is not trying to cause adaptation, but you will try to optimize your recovery. You will be trying to recover as quickly as possible because 4 days from now you’ll do this again, so you need to recover as fast as you possibly can.

However, if you spend all of your time in one of those two areas, optimization vs adaptation, you’re going to face problems. You need to be judicious about thinking: is this the point in my life, or training cycle, that I want to cause adaptations? Or am I trying to optimize? So that’s in general how you can treat the ice for all of these adaptations.

Heat and training

Studies about hypertrophy or heat can sometimes be misleading. Some of the studies would conclude that certain methodologies might increase mTOR or growth hormones by 300%, for example. That 300% isn’t a direct increase in muscle mass. So this is something you should pay attention to if you’re researching this topic.

Getting into hot baths or a sauna after hypertrophy training is very good for this adaptation. Hot showers are not as effective. Getting to these hot places is very important and healthy, but it is not a substitute for exercise. Going to the sauna VS not going, it’s very clear that going is a very good idea. But if you choose to go to the sauna over doing a workout, then it’s not a good idea. Of course, hydration becomes crucial if you go to the sauna, so be aware of the amount of weight you lose after doing the sauna to hydrate properly.

Recovery

There is some study that’s being done on this topic, but an easy way to measure your recovery is to measure your strength in different situations. You can measure your grip strength when you first wake up in the morning, or how long you can do a vertical jump. With even fewer physical activities, like how many times can you tap with your finger in 1 minute (there are some apps for that), or how long can you hold an exhale. The way you would do that is when waking up, breathe 4 deep breaths and then inhale as much as you can, then start counting when you start your exhale and stop when the lungs are empty. All of these things can be a rough indicator of how much you recovered, but they’re not strict rules or ways that you need to follow.

Energy system

You can skip this part if you want, because we’re mainly going to discuss the energy system and the lactate acid, from a scientific and in-depth perspective. But if you’re interested, it’s going to be worthwhile.

Carbohydrates & glycogen

When you take an inhale, you’re mostly breathing in oxygen, and when you exhale you’re breathing out CO2. So the difference is that you gained a carbon somehow. This is because all of the carbohydrates in your body come in the form of long carbon chains. That’s what a carbohydrate means: it is a one-carbon molecule that has one water molecule attached; it’s a carbon that has been hydrated. In the case of glucose, and blood sugar, let’s say 6 carbon molecules. In terms of fat, which are the only 2 places you’re going to get most of your cellular energy carbohydrates into fat, that is also a big long block in a chain of carbons. So whether you’re getting your energy from fat or carbohydrate, you’re going to split those atoms. In other words, you got 6 carbons attached, and in this part of chemistry it’s exergonic, so when you break that carbon bond, let’s say you break one of those carbons off from the other, that’s going to release energy, just like if you had a pencil and you snapped it, it will pop. After all, you broke the bonds that were connecting that graphite to the next piece of graphite, and that released energy, because you put energy into the system, etc. So back to the carbons: as a result, we’ve now had, say 5 or 6 carbons chained together, we broke 1 off the end (which is not how it works but just making the point), and now you have 1 free floating carbon, used that energy release to go make ATP to then go make your muscles contract. But now you got carbon floating around, and your body at this point will look for an oxygen molecule available that you can bind this to immediately, and the answer is yes. So that carbon attaches to that oxygen molecule, and because you can’t just put CO2 in the blood, this is going to be bound through this bicarbonate process. It’s going to go through your blood, then it’s going to go into the lungs, then it will change back to its carbon dioxide molecule, it’s going to trans, go through the alveoli into the lungs, and then you’re going to exhale. So you went from carbon to this bicarbonate system, back into carbon, exhale. In your blood, those 6 carbon chains are called glucose, if we store that in your muscle, it’s called glycogen, so you take a bunch of glucose and stack it together. All that to say: if that’s happening and we know that a by-product specifically of anaerobic glycolysis, meaning the breakdown of carbohydrates for fuel, typically at a very fast pace with low oxygen availability, the downside to that equation is acid production. So what if we could reduce the acid build-up, so that we could prolong and sustain energy, especially in this anaerobic interval environment? Again, that’s important because in those situations failure is not a result of running out of fuel or oxygen, it’s a result of fatigue building up way too quickly.

Aerobic & anaerobic

Let’s bind all of this together: the way we produce energy is either aerobic or anaerobic. Aerobic meaning with oxygen, and anaerobic meaning without. And in terms of muscle contraction, you’re talking about carbohydrates or fat. Fat is going to be exclusively aerobic, meaning you’re going to use fat from the entire body, roughly equally. That’s why if you want to lose the most fat you need to train in your aerobic zone, or zone 2. An example: if you’re doing a sprint up a hill, and your hamstrings, glutes, or your quads are on fire, you’re not just going to use the fat that’s directly in those hamstrings, you’re going to lose it from your entire body. The fat has to go through lipolysis, so it’s in this stored form in adipose tissue, it’s going to get broken down, put into blood, and the blood is going to have to go through your body and get taken up into muscle and the mitochondria. Then we’re going to have to go through this process called beta-oxidation. Now, remember, carbohydrates and glucose especially is a 6-carbon molecules. Fat if it’s in the form of a triglyceride, is a 3-carbon glycerol backbone, and 3 fatty acids, so the 3-carbon backbone and those 3 fatty acids are just long chains of carbon. So we’re going to break that thing down, put it in the blood, move it up into our mitochondria, but you can’t walk those things across the mitochondria wall because they’re too big, so you have to leave them off into little chunks, and it turns out we break them off into 2 carbon chunks, so we call it beta, as in 2, move those into mitochondria that can go through this little thing called Krebs cycle (or tricyclic acid cycle), and you kick a bunch of energy out of that. You add 2 carbons, so as a result of that process, you’re going to generate 2 carbon dioxides. Are you with me yet? We’re almost there. Remember, you can only go through that process if oxygen is available because you have to be able to place those carbons onto something, or acid gets up way too high, too fast. This is one of the reasons why fat is a nice fuel source, but it’s very slow. It takes physical time to move from the back of your shoulder, into your blood, down your hamstrings, then uptake, and in addition, it’s required oxygen availability. If you need energy faster, you simply don’t have the time to bring in the oxygen, transport it through and go through capillaries, exchange it through a tissue, etc etc. Carbohydrates on the other hand are going to be stored in the exercising muscle cell, specifically in the cytoplasm, as glycogen. Let’s continue.

Lactic acid

What’s going to happen initially is that your initial demands for fuel are going to come from the glycogen within the muscle fiber itself, it’s going to break right there. So you have the 6-carbon molecules, and you’re going to break it into 2 separate 3-carbon molecules (that breaking provides you a tiny bit of energy, very small but some). Now you’re going to take those 2 3-carbon molecules and you want to be able to oxidize them because that’s the only next step. But to do that, you got to go those into mitochondria, and for that, you have to break one of those molecules off, so you’re left with 2-carbon molecules just like you did with that, and that’s going to go into mitochondria and then it’s going to go through the same Krebs cycle. But here’s the thing, if you don’t have sufficient oxygen, or sufficient mitochondria availability, and you’re stuck at that two 3-carbon molecules place, then what do you do? If we have a 3-carbon molecule, and we have a bunch of this acid building up, now acid functionally speaking is hydrogen. That’s what pH means, potential hydrogen. So if hydrogen is building up as a by-product of muscular contraction and you’re having this 3-carbon molecule, what it can do is grab one of those hydrogens (those 3-carbon molecules are called pyruvic, or pyruvic acid). So if you take a pyruvic acid and you grab hydrogen and put it on top of it, we now have a different name for it: hydrogen peroxide, or lactate / lactic acid. So technically speaking, lactate is not causing your fatigue but preventing it. The point is, that system can only last for so long and it can get overwhelmed very quickly. So what are you going to do with the rest of this hydrogen? You can slow this process a bit using baking soda. More on that under the supplements section.

Supplements

Here are some interesting supplements that you can use that can be very effective. When you look at these supplements, they’re not required for anything, nor should they be treated as a replacement for a proper diet. They are simple tools that can enhance your training if used correctly and appropriately.

Sodium Bicarbonate

Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) can surprisingly be a very effective training tool, and this is mainly due to the pH levels. If you start at a normal pH range, you don’t have very far to go before you’ve gone into that level of too much acidity (if you need more info on that you can read the lactic acid section). If you start in a more basic, and with basic I don’t mean simple, I mean in chemistry, and more alkaline, then that same amount of increase in pH will now just put you back in your physiological range. So sodium bicarbonate, whether taken as a cream, a powder, baking soda, or anything else, can simply put you in a more alkaline state, even acutely. This is something you can take right now, before your workout, and you’re going to delay the progression of fatigue. However, you need to be cautious about the possible gastric distress, as it can be easily a side-effect if you’re not careful enough because baking soda can be a very effective laxative (and sometimes an unwanted laxative effect).

Now, after discussing the benefits and how that would work, and what the possible downsides are, the question is: how would you approach that? You can simply do that with store-bought baking soda, and the most important tip: start with a lower dose. You can always go more later. So for example, you can start with a half teaspoon, dissolve that and slug that down. The benefit of this or peak performance gain can start from as low as 20 minutes after consumption and up to 90 minutes. A very rough standard is around 45 minutes. If this is to be done correctly, the perceived and real fatigue ought to be reduced. This can also be used repeatedly for longer-duration training. Again, please be cautious of gastric distress. Just make sure there’s a bathroom nearby when you’re trying this.

Beta-alanine

This is another classic and very effective supplement. It has a similar idea to sodium bicarbonate. Beta-alanine is going to be converted and stored as what’s called carnosine in the muscle, and carnosine is an intracellular buffer. In another word, it’s going to delay the build-up of acid. So it’s kind of like a fatigue blocker. It’s well-studied, very effective, very cheap, and very safe.

Creatine Monohydrate

Incredibly strong safety profile, it’s cheap, it’s a simple form to get, has an important magnitude of effect, and is effective across multiple domains of physical health and performance. This is by far the best supplement that you can use. It affects so many things. We typically think about it as it’s muscle stuff, like the creatine phosphate system. But it’s important to mention that the vast majority of research on creatine phosphate is not in sports performance and hasn’t been in 20 years, instead it’s in clinical. It has many benefits, from effects on the neurological system to some associations with mental health and depression. To be clear, we’re not saying you should take creatine that will cure anything, or it will stop you from depression. But there’s a lot of research on these areas, and there’s a reason people doing it.

Final highlight

Ultimately, how you approach exercising is solely up to you. There are a thousand and one ways to stay active, and if you can take one piece of advice from this whole article: as cliché as it might sound, find something you enjoy doing, and be consistent with it.