Brian (0s):
Coming up on the Get lean, eat Clean podcast,
Andy (4s):
Three to five days a week, three to five exercises, you're going to do three to five reps per set. Three to five sets, okay? And then you're gonna rest three to five minutes in between each set. Now you can actually get a little bit, you can get, you can typically get quite shorter on that rest, but it, it emphasizes the point that with strength training, particularly when you want to truly get strong, you need to be fresh. And that's because the quality of each repetition needs to be high. So what that means is if you were to do five sets of five that's within the spectrum and you were to rest a minute in between each set, certainly by the third or fourth, or absolutely by the fifth set, you the fatigue would be building up.
Andy (46s):
So you'd either have to do less sets, less reps, or less weight. And that is exactly the opposite of what we're trying to do with strength. Remember when I started this conversation, the whole idea is left as close to possible as that one at max. And if you're intentionally lowering that because you're lowering rest, well now you're simply working on endurance. Fine. Two, that's a different goal, but that's not what you told me. You said the goal was strong, right? So if we're hedging towards strong, we need to have a lot of rest.
Brian (1m 15s):
Hello and welcome to the Get Lean Eat Clean podcast. I'm Brian Grn and I'm here to give you actionable tips to get your body back to what it once was, five, 10, even 15 years ago. Each week I'll give you an in-depth interview with a health expert from around the world to cut through the fluff and get you long-term sustainable results. This week I interviewed Dr. Andy Galpin. Dr. Galpin has his PhD in human bioenergetics and has been a professor at CSU Fullerton since 2011. He's also the director of the Center for Sports Performance since 2015, where he conducts research on anything that's relevant to human performance. We discussed many topics surrounding nutrition strength training, along with his three by five training protocol, the difference between strength versus hypertrophy, tools to optimize recovery, effective supplements for building muscle, and is one tip to get your body back to what it once was.
Brian (2m 12s):
Really enjoyed my interview with Dr. Galpin. I know you will too. Thanks so much for listening and enjoy the show. All right. Welcome to the Get Lean E Clean podcast. My name is Brian Gr and I have Dr. Andy Galpin on welcome to the show.
Andy (2m 27s):
Yeah, thanks for having me here, man.
Brian (2m 29s):
Yeah, for your intro, I was gonna say you're a scientist, teacher, coach, author. Am I missing anything? Podcast host, right?
Andy (2m 38s):
Something like that yet?
Brian (2m 40s):
Yeah, well I'm, I'm excited to have Yon. You're out in California, professor at, at csu, is that correct?
Andy (2m 48s):
Cal State Fullerton? Yeah, there's like 26 csu so you gotta kinda distinguish which one there.
Brian (2m 53s):
Gotcha, gotcha. And maybe just explain the audience, your background and, and how you got into nutrition and strength training and, and you know, just everything about, you know, becoming a professor and everything.
Andy (3m 6s):
Yeah, sure. I mean I grew up in a small town in the Pacific Northwest and so I, I sort of did everything athletically as baseball, football, basketball, all those things. And I had this, what I call like perfect mix for my current job, which is that I was pretty good at sports but not too good. And so that puts the emphasis squarely on making sure that you do things better. So whether that was, you know, training hard or watching more tape or eating better because if I didn't do those things it was gonna make a big impact and if I did it was also going to make a big impact. So early on I always knew that sports was a major love and if I could figure out a way to be in sports my whole life, that would be great.
Andy (3m 49s):
So initially kind of in high school I thought maybe that's, you know, PE teacher or actual sport coach. That's sort of your only two avenues, you know, pre-internet and all that stuff. And then so I was fortunate enough to play college football and got, in fact, it's funny cause I remember going on recruiting trips and they kinda ask your interest and I was just like, well I wanna do this human performance kind of thing. And everyone's just like, oh, okay, like athletic training or pre-med. And I'm like, no, like I'm not taping ankles, I'm definitely not gonna med school. And it just, kinesiology exercise science didn't really exist. So I was fortunate there was an exercise science program where I was, but it was very little.
Andy (4m 30s):
It was no sport performance, it was obesity, public health, you know, but it was still physiology. Right. Okay, great. So from there I went and worked at a place called Athletes Performance in Arizona that trained, we had several hundred professional athletes and then I spent half a year or so down there and realized that I don't wanna actually be like a strength and conditioning coach, right. That was just a terrible experience. So I went back and got my master's degree at the University of Memphis in human movement sciences, which is all kind of the same thing, you know, exercise science, kinesiology, it's same word really. Yeah.
Andy (5m 10s):
Started competing in Olympic weight lifting and combat sports and started coaching athletes cuz we opened up a gym. My, my buddies Barb shrugged and opened up a gym and so some of our first clients were fighters. So we started working with them and then started competing in those sports myself and was like, wow, this is pretty cool. Went on and got a, got a PhD in human bioenergetics and then continued on the side to train and compete and worked with those clients. Then on 2011 I got my job here at Cal State Fullerton. So I came all the way, kind of circled the, the the content or the content the country rather, and got back down here to Southern California and then just, you know, started my labs eventually took over the center for sport performance down here, continued to work, work with athletes and of course got higher and higher profile athletes.
Andy (6m 0s):
And then that's what brought you to today
Brian (6m 4s):
And, and I see you got a UFC shirt on. What did you learn from working with some of the guys, the MMA guys? I know you've got a background yourself. Do you do jujitsu or,
Andy (6m 16s):
Yeah, well what happened was I supposed to do, I was competing in Olympic weight lifting and I was having a pretty good amount of success there, but I just was sort of at the end of that road. I didn't want continue there. I don't even know why I was going very well and I had about six week left before I was gonna leave Memphis and go to start my PhD in central Indiana. And the jujitsu guys and the fighters were just like, why don't you come over and just play around for six weeks? And, and like anyone who's done jujitsu will tell you like the first two or three assessments you're just like, wow, this is incredible. Like I can just fell in love there. So that was great.
Andy (6m 56s):
And then when I got to Indiana, like the only in little town I was in, there's this sort of one gym really and it was just like a full fight gym. It's just like we just showed up fought, but I was like, this is still pretty cool. Later on there it was a full proper juujitsu gym that opened up. So I spent a lot of time over and both places. But I did that. And then, yeah, you know, like I've had, I've had a lot of experience. I've been fortunate to work with a handful of, a large handful of, of some of the best fighters in the world that, that we've ever seen. From heavyweights to straw weights to middleweights lightweights. I got a guy fighting here in a couple of weeks, you know, I had multiple world championships and, and done all that stuff.
Andy (7m 39s):
So it's a ton of lessons and, and I guess to kind of come back to your initial question was one of the reasons why I was interested in that sport. Cause I don't come from a a martial arts background. I never thought like kung fu was cool or like I hated wrestling. I still think wrestling's the stupidest thing ever. I just can't stand any of those things. It was just more of like academically this was very different. It was very, when I had gone back like six years prior and I was working with baseball players, major league baseball guys and NFL guys, it was just like, it wasn't intellectually difficult to figure out, okay, energy systems, okay movement patterns, like all this stuff was very textbooky. So it just, not that it's easy to work with those folks, but it's like, it's not that challenging mentally.
Andy (8m 21s):
And when I got the fighters I was like, whoa, like what energy system you would work in that's not gonna work. Movement pattern. Like all the nothing was in the textbook and I'm just like holy cow. So I just got really excited to work with a population of folks who, it was gonna have to be different than whatever you're gonna find on any textbook at all. So, or any clinic or anything like that. There was no internet like really still. And so you couldn't just like buy a book on MMA training, whatever, it's just like you're gonna have to figure these things out and use some science and some physiology and solve some problems. So yeah, that's, that's where I got into that stuff.
Brian (8m 54s):
And speaking of that of like strength training, why don't we talk a little bit about, I know you have different protocols depending on the individual obviously, but you have sort of this three by five concept for strength training. Maybe explain a little bit about how you know, someone can sort of implement that into their lives.
Andy (9m 11s):
Yeah, so there's a whole bunch of adaptations you can get from exercise and way, I'll say it is this, if you're untrained, which means like you don't really exercise at all, it's sort of irrelevant what you do, you're going to get, you're gonna get stronger, you're gonna get faster, you're gonna gain more muscle, you're gonna lose fat, you're gonna get all these adaptations. After that though, once you're even moderately trained, then specificity starts to matter. And so regarding strength, if you're truly trying to optimize strength, then specificity is what matters. And so think about it like this. If you wanna get better at shooting pre throws, the most important thing you could ever do is shoot pre throws. If you wanna get better at being strong, the most important thing you could ever do is push or pull or drag or whatever it is.
Andy (9m 56s):
Something that is just beyond what you can currently do. Like that's its specificity, right? You practice the exact act of overcoming the amount of force that you can no longer, yeah, you can't currently do. That's how you get stronger. So in theory, the most specific thing you could ever do to improve strength is to do nothing but one repetition maximums. So what's the maximum amount of you can bench, thus you go in there and you do one rep at that weight or slightly even higher. Okay? So theoretically that's the most direct path unfortunately that that's a short game to play because you're not gonna be able to do that very long injury risk starts to get up there and you're not actually, you haven't really actually addressed the potential limiter.
Andy (10m 36s):
So what I mean by that is you may be having technical issues, you may have the fact that if you train like that, you can only do it so many days in a row before you get hurt or or anything else. So if we back off that a little bit and think, okay, what's really close to specific but also is a long term strategy, something I can continue to progressively overload. So that's a term we're gonna hear in our field a lot and it's very, very important. In fact, if I had to boil it down, all of exercise training, the single most important concept is probably progressive overload. You just have to continue to get better and better. Initially you're going to think that just means, okay, I'll put a few extra pounds in the bar every time I work out, or I'll go one more mile on my run or I'll do five more minutes on the bike or whatever.
Andy (11m 23s):
But you can't necessarily do that either because again, run that math in your head like five more pounds this week, five more. Well how many more weeks can you continue to do that before you're up a hundred pounds? Like that's just not realistic. So what you have to do is progressively overload, but you have to do it in a fashion that's realistic and has a little bit of baked in what we call D loads or back off weeks or regressions or something like that. So to finally answer your question then the three by five concept is a little bit of a combination of all these things. It's not optimal for the highest trained individuals, though it would certainly work. It's not the only thing you could ever do or have to do, but it is a system where you can take it and work probably most people for many years and be just fine as long as they're progressing within this concept, right?
Andy (12m 13s):
You still have to progress and you still have to back off at some point. So three to five is not mine. I did not develop it. It's been around for decades and decades. It was around when I was, in fact, the reason I I, I posted about this a long time ago was I remember doing this in college and just being like, just keep it, you know, explaining it to me was like, right three to five just do this. Like, oh, okay, now I don't have to answer all your questions. Just go like go do this. Right? It's a very simple way. Simple. Yeah. So here's what this is three to five days per week. So if you're more trained or like training more, go to five, it's the opposite. Go to three, like that's a, most people can train summer between three, five times a week. You're gonna pick three to five exercises.
Andy (12m 54s):
So just out the gates, this could be five days a week of five exercises. It could also be as little as three days a week of three exercises. It's a very, very manageable system that takes you from like a lot of training to actually pretty little, all right? Or some combination between. So three to five days a week, three to five exercises, you're going to do three to five reps per set, three to five sets, okay? And then you're gonna rest three to five minutes in between each set. Now you can actually get a little bit, you can get, you can typically get quite shorter on that rest, but it, it emphasizes a point that with strength training, particularly when you want to truly get strong, you need to be fresh.
Andy (13m 41s):
And that's because the quality of each repetition needs to be high. So what that means is if you were to do five sets of five that's within the spectrum and you were to rest a minute in between each set, certainly by the third or fourth or absolutely by the fifth set you the fatigue would be building up. So you'd either have to do less sets, less reps, or less weight. And that is exactly the opposite of what we're trying to do with strength. Remember when I started this conversation, the whole idea is left as close to possible as that one at max. And if you're intentionally lowering that because you're lowering rest, well now you're simply working on endurance to fine two, that's a different goal, but that's not what you told me. You said the goal was strong, right?
Andy (14m 22s):
So if we're hedging towards strong, we need to have a lot of rest. In reality, if you're doing like three sets of three, you probably don't need five minutes of rest. Most people, right? That may be like a little excessive. Sure. So take every one of these numbers with just a, it, it's just how can I make this one word three by five? So like not everything here has to line up perfectly well. So three days a week or three to five days a week, three to five exercises, three to five sets, three to five reps, three to five minute rest. And then in terms of the load, you wanna go as heavy as you possibly can within those parameters. So that's, you know, again you're trying to get strong so you gotta push the amount of weight on the bar and that's where I'm gonna go after.
Brian (15m 10s):
And I know there's, you know, there's some individuals out there preaching about like one set to failure. Like what's your thoughts around that and versus something like the three to five method?
Andy (15m 23s):
Well it, it's all, it's all context. I mean, yeah, one set to failure, one total set to
Brian (15m 31s):
Of failures, like time under tension and yeah sure.
Andy (15m 35s):
I mean and we've, we already, we've answered that question, I mean quite clearly. Yeah, in the literature it goes against specificity, it goes against, there's just no little actual load there. I mean is it waste a total waste? No, not at all. In fact, you can go back and watch old Mike Metzer videos, just, just type that guy in a legendary body mailing coach. He had fantastic results with super slow stuff. You know, one set, one repetition, sometimes 20 or 32nd set. Yeah. Rep, you know, same thing, you can get a lot of results there. It's just not gonna maximize strength. Can you get stronger that way? For sure. And so the difference here you have to pay attention to is like, is it optimal versus does it work?
Andy (16m 17s):
When I, when I say it's not optimal, doesn't mean it doesn't work and you might not care. You know, maybe it's a 20% difference. You might not be like, okay, well fine, I don't care about 20. Okay, great. Like then it totally works.
Brian (16m 29s):
And then what about endurance training? Would that just be like obviously higher rep range and what, what protocol would you prescribe someone for building endurance?
Andy (16m 42s):
Depends on what kind of endurance. There are many, many, many, many types of endurance.
Brian (16m 48s):
Yeah, well muscular endurance, you know, you got fast for slow for first, you know, slow twitch muscles. So how would you go about that?
Andy (16m 59s):
Yeah, so muscular endurance is, think about this as how many repetitions can a muscle execute independent basically of external fuel. What I mean by that is it's typically something in the like eight to 50 rep range. When you start crossing past that rep range, you're now usually not being gonna get failed by the muscle, but you're gonna get failed by systemic problems. So people tend to call this more of like cardiovascular or energetic or metabolic. I mean really fatigue comes down to a couple things. Number one, is it excess buildup of waste? Number two, is it reduction of fuel?
Andy (17m 40s):
The overwhelming majority of time you're gonna run into problems is not running out of fuel. It's always going to be fatigue management. So in the case of what you're talking about, like know how many pushups in a row can I do, it's not gonna be, you're not gonna run low on oxygen, you're not gonna run out of carbohydrate or muscle glycogen. It's simply going to be how much burn, how much metabolic waste can you handle before you quit? Like that's all it comes down to. So the protocol, do whatever you want that makes the muscle tired,
Brian (18m 10s):
Right?
Andy (18m 11s):
That that's as simple as it is. And so whether that's a set of 15, great, whether that's isometrics and you just hold it, whether it's super slow stuff like you talked, it doesn't really matter. All you're trying to do is put the muscle into fatigue and then you want to progressively overload that. That's, I mean that's as idiot proof as it gets, right? It's like you did 20 reps last time next week, either increase the weight a little bit or keep the weight the same and do 22 reps, like that's, and you held it for 15 seconds last time, hold it for 20 now that's all you have to do for endurance. It's very difficult. It's very easy in terms of if the muscle's getting tired, then you're working on endurance.
Brian (18m 51s):
Got it. And I mean you could, is there some, is it black and white? Like you obviously if you take someone who's untrained and they start lifting and doing 15 to 20 reps and fatiguing the muscle, they're gonna, they're not, they're gonna build endurance but they're also gonna build muscle strength as well. Is that, would you agree?
Andy (19m 8s):
Yes, of course. Yeah, that's a really nice point. Right now there's a, it's a huge overlap between all these things. So like here, here's a good example. If you were to do sets of like six to nine reps, so six to nine reps per set and you did, you know, four sets of that or something, you're gonna build a little bit of strength even at sets of seven. Like there's overlap, it's a taper, right? So kind of starts coming down, you're gonna build some hypertrophy cuz you're starting to taper into that range. You're gonna actually start tapering a little bit in a muscular endurance you can go into that range, right? So you're actually getting multiple things. So this is why generally people like to program things between like five to 10 reps per step for the general population because you're going to get multiple adaptations at once and a little bit strong, little bit of muscle, little bit of muscular endurance, bang we're there.
Brian (20m 0s):
What, how would you define the difference between strength and hypertrophy?
Andy (20m 5s):
Strength is force production. So how strong you are, how much can you move or in the science service force, right, what's the maximum amount of force you can produce? Hypertrophy is simply a measured muscle size. So hypertrophy is diameter of of the muscle. How large is it? A hypertrophy has nothing to actually do whatsoever with functionality. Doesn't describe anything about how the muscle contracts, how much force it can produce, how fatigue resistant it is, how strong it is, anything like that. Now obviously those two things are intertwined. Generally a bigger muscle is stronger though it's not a perfect correlation, but generally it's going to happen. Generally if you get bigger you're going to get stronger at least a little bit.
Andy (20m 46s):
Generally if you get stronger you're gonna get bigger. But not always the, that second one is not as attached. So it's quite easy to get strong I should say. It's, it's easier to get strong without gaining muscle if you desire to. It's very difficult to put on a lot of muscle and not get kind of strong. Not that everyone would ever sort of want that, but like it's very challenging thing to do.
Brian (21m 11s):
And what do you do with your workouts and how do you, you know, cuz like for, I've been lifting for a while and like 20 years of traditional lifting, but over the last few years I've actually implemented some resistance bands during like c I started doing some of the X three, I don't know if you're familiar with the X three. Okay. And either way started implementing resistance spans and it was actually felt, it was easier on my joints but I, I did feel like I was building, building strength and hypertrophy. I would say I don't really do like one rep max anymore. I mean do you say oh a person gets to maybe a certain age, I don't know if a certain age or if like you know, is the risk not worth it as far as like one rep mask max and things like that.
Brian (21m 60s):
But what type of protocol would you say for someone that's maybe 40 plus getting into as opposed to someone who's 25?
Andy (22m 6s):
Yeah, I actually don't draw that much distinction between the two. Okay. So I don't think that, and not the way that you think, in other words like I don't think that necessarily the 25 year old should be doing what most 25 year olds are doing.
Brian (22m 17s):
Okay.
Andy (22m 18s):
Is the way I'll think about it. Right. So a couple things in there. Number one is the risk of doing like a one rep max go up after 40? No it doesn't actually you're totally fine. I would say that if you've ever watched a 25 year old and the gym do a one at max, it's terrifying. They generally shouldn't be doing it either cause they dunno what the hell they're doing.
Brian (22m 39s):
True.
Andy (22m 40s):
And that's, that's like, that's what I mean when I say I don't see a distinction actually I think a lot of people that are doing one at maxes should not be doing them or or getting even close. So that that's the first sort of thing about it. The protocols I don't think should differ. 40 is not old. 40 I'm not.
Brian (22m 58s):
Thank you so much. How old are you? Are you 40?
Andy (23m 1s):
I'm in my thirties still. Okay. So I got some time but no, like it's not, it's not even close to old, like to me distinction, you start drawing 55 plus maybe, but prior to that, no. Right. There's a bigger, there's a difference between just you personally but your ages 40, 41, those are not ages that I care about. So the, yeah, I mean the protocols should be specific to the individual's needs and that's the reality of it is. So you just start with how many days per week can you train? Cause that's gonna anchor everything. If you're just like, hey, three days a week is the max I'm gonna put out there like okay and we're gonna design it within those parameters and then we're gonna design, you know, what do you need?
Andy (23m 46s):
Do you need energy throughout the day? Are you crashing? Are you, is your blood glucose all over the place? Are you high tension, high stress person or not? Are you personally recovered? Do you sleep well? Do you put on muscle? Do you, are you overweight? Okay great. Are you overweight and under muscle? Do we see that quite commonly? Do you have personal disclose? I just want to get this bigger, I want to get, you know, most people at 40 stop having performance based goals like some do but most. So then what are you going after? And we're just gonna construct a program that fits your physiology. I mean the reality of it is every time I work with an individual, they're gonna run through our full, what's called rapid health optimization stuff.
Andy (24m 27s):
So they're gonna run through full diagnostics, they're gonna run through full labs. So they're gonna get blood, hair, urine, stool, saliva, all that's gonna be collected, right? Cause I wanna know everything that goes in their body as well. So they're gonna have a full dietary analysis. I want everything. I wanna understand everything from what type of shampoo you're using, where you getting your water from, all the foods you're eating, everything that's going in your mouth, everything that comes outta your body is number two, which I just described. Extensive blood work, urine, saliva, stool, everything. How that all makes you feel. So it's a whole bunch of very specific and tailored and scientifically validated questionnaires plus a whole bunch of questionnaires that I've used over my life, you know, and things that I wanna know.
Andy (25m 7s):
And then the fourth component of that is always how do you perform? So it's a whole bunch of functional tests on you as well as some other stuff of metabolic flexibility and energy and things like that. Once I have a beat on all four of those areas, then you're gonna get a hand constructed program based on all those needs. And that's obviously gonna come with sleep program, nutrition, program supplementation, breath work, whatever else is needed. But the training program is gonna be a function of that. And the reason I'm bring all that up is like sometimes for example, you can combine things in a workout and you can get things like meditation and recovery and energy production all done in the same workout of strength.
Andy (25m 48s):
Sometimes you can just separate those. And so when people talk about things like, oh I need to do more yoga and I need to do like not breath work. You're like okay, maybe love all those things. We could also probably incorporate that into your training and save you get all this done in 40 minutes or maybe not, maybe you actually need to do them separately depending on sort of where your stuff is at. So when you understand kind of the full physiological package, we can actually put together full programs that are gonna hit what we call your performance anchors. So these are these most severe things that are just dragging you back and holding you down. So rather than just coming around and trying to like push on every part of the boat that we can push on, this is like let's find that anchor, pull that anchor up and then just get outta the way and then just watch how fast and how least resistant you feel just moving at your physiology zone pace.
Andy (26m 38s):
If we can just find that anchor. And then, so we have a lot more success doing that, pulling that thing up and, and then just watching the body just take off. And then all of a sudden now you're getting more outta your workouts, you're getting more results, you're getting up faster, energy's going up, focused mental brain fog, like all the things are just getting taken care of yourself. So I mean that's, I know that's not really at what you asked, but that one might be kinda like, hey what's, how would you put the protocol together? I'm like, that's that's our system man. That's how it works.
Brian (27m 7s):
Yeah, no, there's a lot of moving parts. And you, I know you mentioned eating and you've done some, I watched some of your, your videos on, on eating for like hypertrophy and things like that. What type of program do you typically align for someone who's looking to to build, you know, get stronger and you know, get hypertrophy?
Andy (27m 28s):
Yep, so you got a handful of pillars that we go after. All of our diets are actually micronutrient based. So what that means is because we have the full panels and, and full analysis, you're gonna get put on a, a nutrition plan that's not only based for your calories and your macros, like how much protein, but it's also micronutrient specific. So it's very food items. So you're gonna have like an apple at lunch, not an orange like an apple very specifically because we need to get a cetera. But if you wanna go to any of those videos on YouTube, you can see what I call the 90%, which is like what's 90% likely to work for 90% of people. Okay, great. Like you don't wanna do all the labs, you don't whatever. You just wanna get like what's most likely to work.
Andy (28m 9s):
If you want high precision, we can do that. And it's like, do you wanna not miss, hey this will work for sure. There's no way it misses. If you just wanna like start though with the free stuff, it's probably going to work 90% of the time for 90% of people, which is a big ass chunk. So you're probably fine s just watch that 90 for 90 video. But the, the quick kind of version is, you know, in a case like you just laid out, you wanna get hypertrophy and stronger, you need to get protein's, gotta be there, a gram of protein per pound of body weight is a, is a pretty good starting point if you get there or even a little bit higher then things like protein timing, so you know, when do I have it throughout the day? Protein quality, you know what type of protein is better.
Andy (28m 50s):
Those questions actually don't matter that much if you get just enough total protein in, right? If you're not getting enough in, then you're gonna be really careful with when and what types and what forms and and everything like that. But if you just get enough protein, you're fine from there. We want a nice variety of foods and colors. People tend to eat brown and orange a lot and, and the other colors not. So everyone tends to think green, that's great, dark green is amazing but you need orange and yellow and blue and purple and and red and pink and like as many different colors as you possibly can. So we want that. I want a consistent pattern. So eat at roughly the same time most days and whether that's gonna be three meals a day or five, I don't really care, but just try to be on a consistent plan.
Andy (29m 35s):
Consistent is the number one starting place for nutrition. If you wanna make a change by far, just be consistent in your routine. Your body will thank you tremendously for that. In fact, we know the literature, there's this interesting study that came out where they, they matched people for micronutrients and total calories, but they just had one group eat consistently in terms of what time of day they ate and the ones were inconsistent and the ones that ate more consistently lost more body fat despite the fact that calories and food items were identical, like the exact same food items, just consistent timing or not consistent timing. So that part really, really, really matters. You wanna make sure your fiber intake is sufficient.
Andy (30m 16s):
So something around the lines of 10 grams of fiber per thousand calories you eat. So for most people that's 25 or so grams, you know, 20 grams of fiber per day. You wanna have a a, a bunch of servings of vegetables at most meals. You wanna have multiple servings of fruit throughout the day. And then your carbohydrates should be a nice mix of, of starches and even a little bit of faster acting carbohydrates. So those are a handful of the rules. I mean fat can fill in the gaps for whatever else you have left in your calories. So if you do that and your calories are roughly appropriate and you don't even need to track them by the way, you just need to sort of track your body weight and your recovery and your sleep and everything like that, then you should be in a really good spot.
Andy (31m 1s):
So that's like, that's a quick outline of sort of the 90%.
Brian (31m 6s):
Do you have any thoughts on the carnivore craze that's going on?
Andy (31m 10s):
I think it's super boring. Do it if you wanna do it, I don't really care, but that's not interesting at all to me.
Brian (31m 20s):
Let's talk hydration because I do, I don't know, I do yoga from hot yoga from time to time and everyone's like, oh, drink water, drink water. But really it comes down to more than that, right? Why don't, why don't you touch on the importance of hydration and you know, sodium and potassium in the minerals.
Andy (31m 39s):
Sure. So there's another couple of hours of videos I need to, if you wanna get the full explanation. Got
Brian (31m 46s):
It
Andy (31m 46s):
There. So yeah man you mentioned it correctly. Most people say things like hydration. It's important to be, you wanna drink around half of your body weight announces per day of water. All right, so what the hell having, I'm 200 pounds, half my body weight is a hundred, so you wanna drink around a hundred ounces a day. Most water bottles are like 16 ounces or something like that, sometimes 20. And I think the big one I got here is like 24, something like that. So yeah, if I was 200 pounds and I had a 20 ounce water bottle and you're gonna do five those a day, that's, that's a rough starting point.
Andy (32m 26s):
Okay, great hydration though is only one part of that is fluid intake. The other part of it is you have to be able to maintain the osmo osmolarity and osm morality in the blood. What that means is, you know, if you look at how many particles are in fluid, the concentration is is another way to think about this. And what happens is you wanna actually have, you need to have fluid in your blood, but the vast majority of the fluid in your body, you know 70 so percent of your body being water, but most of that is actually in your cells. And so you need to think about water being in your cells. You need to think about it being in your blood with your plasma and then you need to think about it as being what's called interstitial.
Andy (33m 7s):
So it's the fluid that surrounds each cell. All right, so the trick with hydration is you need to get water from in your mouth out of your belly in the blood and then end the tissue. Well if you remember basic concentrations, you know that you can re regulate where fluid goes based on osmolarity, right? So if you have a high concentration on one side, low concentration on the other side, it's gonna go from the low to the high, right? So they're gonna even these things out. Well what that means is then you have to get the ability to regulate both the fluid as well as the concentrations because the concentration thing I'm talking about is made up mostly by electrolytes and glucose and things like that.
Andy (33m 48s):
So if you're just dumping a bunch of of fluid in, say your blood, so you drink a whole bunch of pure water and then your blood gets super dilute and you didn't really actually do anything to get that water from this blood into the cells, what ends up happening is your body registers you as being super hydrated, over hydrated and it actually will get you to start peeing water out despite the fact that that water actually never got into the tissue, which is where you needed it to begin with. So if you were to be very, very, very dehydrated and your blood got very thick and concentrated and you just put a bunch of water back in there, sure. So if you got an IV of just like straight water, then you would actually pee pee clear and still be dehydrated, dehydrated, cellular.
Andy (34m 31s):
So you wanna put back in exactly the concentration that you lost. And so one ways that we do this is we actually measure what's coming outta the athletes so we know what exactly the sweating. And so when we formulate their hydration in cocktails, it's specific to concentration in their system and that actually helps them avoid things like diarrhea. So if you actually get in way too much salt, then that salt will actually go to your digestive system and will pull fluid into it and you'll get diarrhea, right? And so now again you're dehydrated, but now you're having diarrhea which is just like a massive, massive problem, right? Depending on how dehydrated you actually. So you need to nail both sides of the equation here, which is fluid intake as well as electrode intake.
Andy (35m 12s):
And that's, that's what's gonna happen. And when we say electrolyte, what we're generally talking about is sodium chloride, which is salt right now there are other parts to hydration, electrolytes, magnesium is another very important one, calcium, things like that. But generally we're talking about sodium and chloride, potassium being the other part of the equation. And the reason that's important is because we have a gradient between sodium and potassium in and outside of the cell. And when that gradient gets changed that's what causes muscle contraction. And so if you put in way too much, say potassium on the outside or way too much sodium or something like that, you mess with that gradient and now you start getting things like cramps or you get the opposite, right?
Andy (35m 55s):
Where you just get no contraction, which is what happens when like if you were to give people a giant bag of potassium and put give 'em like an IV of potassium, their heart would just stop because there's like no contraction any happen, there's no gradient. And the reason is potassium, sodium and well any rock, any mineral is gonna have has a electrical charge. And so you're trying to balance that electrical charge between inside and outside of the cell. And if those things become actually balanced then there's no electrical exchange, then nothing happens. So you need to have a gradient between one side and the other one. So you can get electrical charge chloride being the negatively charge charged one that everything else is possibly charged. So you gotta balance where that chloride is.
Andy (36m 34s):
You gotta balance where that sodium is and sodium and chloride, we'll we'll finish that off. Salt sodium chloride, like I said, the sodium is positive and the chloride is negative. So you put them together, you form this wonderful little molecule called salt and it's evenly charged and it's happy like that you put in your system, you can split it up and now you can put some of the charge one place, some charged in another place and now you have your gradient.
Brian (36m 57s):
Got it. Good explanation. Yeah cuz I would say like I did a hair mineral test and sure I found out that I was, you know, slightly dehydrated. And what type of ways do you get sodium into the diet for individuals and even yourself?
Andy (37m 12s):
Yeah, so one of the reasons we see this being a a huge problem is people tend to, oftentimes when they wanna get healthier it's like great they start cutting out or or reducing or cutting out entirely processed foods. Great, awesome start. They start going to restaurants eating out, okay great, awesome start. Well the downside about that is if you don't add salt to your food, then your sodium intake just went way, way, way down, right? So it's not crazy for people to be consuming like eight to 10 grams a day of sodium and it's like, well wait a minute, now a sudden that drops you 1500 milligrams or 1.5, right? You're just like, holy shit, you're like I feel terrible. Like yeah right? So you gotta go back and add it.
Andy (37m 54s):
So just the easy way around this, cook all of your food yourself prepared, you know as much as you can. No one's a robot, you're gonna eat out a couple times a week, it's not a big deal, right? But most of the meals, if you're creating them at home, just salt them heavily, not excessive, like to salt them to really good taste but that's all you have to do, right? For most people, if you are are living in an extremely human environment or have a very physically demanding job where you're sweating a lot and or you train really, really hard, then we may need to supplement that a little bit more. But outside of that, if you just salt your food very well and again it shouldn't taste like super salty, you shouldn't be like w outta that's salty. It's like don't skip on it. Be like yeah this tastes delicious.
Andy (38m 34s):
And then if you do that you should be fine.
Brian (38m 38s):
Let's talk recovery. What other than just rest I know and we can talk about your, I know you have a product coming out or absolute rest, we can touch on that, but what type of recovery supplements do you like or perhaps even like some type of cold or heat when it comes to recovery and just like training?
Andy (39m 3s):
Sure. Which one do you wanna start with?
Brian (39m 5s):
Yeah, so let's start. Well I will say this, I put a cold plunge in my house and it's like the best thing I've put in my house, but I try to use it, you know, I use it thoughtfully. I'm not like going in there, you know, all the time. I try to find days where maybe I have an off day or I don't do it like a few hours before bed or things like that. I'll usually do 'em, you know, middle of the day. But you know, if I do a strength training workout, I know that since I just broke down muscle, I don't, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't wanna just jump into a cold exposure right after that, maybe if I went for a run. But you know, anytime I muscle building I won't go into it at least for a few hours.
Brian (39m 48s):
But I guess what would you say around cold and how, how someone can implement that into their lives?
Andy (39m 54s):
Yep, sure. I mean you, you pretty much nailed it there. So I would stay out of the cold after exercise. That's, if you think about it this way, the body adapts when stressed and the whole point of exercising is to generate a stress, right? If you then know immediately after go suppress that stress signal, then you've suppressed the physiological signal to a data. So you don't wanna do that. And the research will show that really clearly. It's going to blunt or block muscle growth and gains post exercise. So I would say completely out of it for many hours, if not half a day or more, or just do it before the session or do it like you said on on off days.
Andy (40m 35s):
So I don't do it anywhere around the training programs. You're better off going hot actually if you wanna go sauna or hot jacuzzi or something like that, post-exercise
Brian (40m 44s):
Post. Okay, got it. Yeah,
Andy (40m 47s):
Yeah, yeah. That, that's a good way to go about it. So yeah, you, you can use cold cold's. Great. Obviously I've been a huge advocate of cold water immersion for many, many years now, so I'm a big fan of it. If you wanna do contrast, that's fine too. You have a hot cold, hot cold, not a lot of research on contrast, we have a lot of practical experience with it. You know, some people say it's math, some people like it. I don't know, there's a lot of evidence on on sauna though, or sauna or I like, I like hot water immersion much better. So I like a hot bathroom jacuzzi much more than a sought personally. But sauna's fine too, either way you're gonna get really hot. That's the way you wanna go about it. So those, those are good for recovery.
Andy (41m 27s):
Those are also just generally good for basic health stuff. I think it's very important for people to sweat very hard twice a week, whether that's from your training, whether that's from your jujitsu, whether that's from sauna work, whatever, I don't really care. It is incredibly important though for you to, to, to move things out the body in and out the body and then have that pumping right. There's also a whole bunch of physiology behind why it's important to turn on those heat signals. So very, very important there. It's on assistant, like people love doing the sauna cuz they like you to sit there. It feels,
Brian (42m 2s):
I was just gonna say I've done some cold exposure pre-workout maybe like an hour before, 30 minutes before and like I actually find my endurance goes up during Yeah because you know, you're, you're, I'm, I'm assuming your core temperature, it takes it more stress for it to actually get, you know, higher. So you can almost last longer.
Andy (42m 23s):
Well your core temperature actually is like pretty robust against change. It doesn't like to move much nor should it, like you don't want that thing to right be be going much different. But yeah, like there's, there's, there's some stuff there. It, we've played a lot in that, that in arena. Yeah. So yeah, I don't have any problem with it. Of course then you're gonna rewar back up and get ready to do all your training, you know, and all that,
Brian (42m 46s):
Right?
Andy (42m 47s):
It, it's good for recovery. Like there's, you, you wanna quickly change your like HIV score or something like that, do cold water immersion, like you'll, you'll bounce up, you'll, your HIV will shoot way up, you know, thirty, sixty, ninety, a hundred eighty minutes post cold water immersion and your HIV will be super high, which is good. So yeah, pre, pre in the morning is much, much more likely to do something like that.
Brian (43m 12s):
What about supplementation? I know you have some favorites. What are some of your maybe top three?
Andy (43m 19s):
Yeah, sure. So recovery's an interesting thing because it's, again, it's a systematic thing. The way that you wanna think about it is this, so you have, you know, the stress bucket as people like to say, right? And so there's this total bucket and it can only feel so much. So the way that we like to paint this picture is, okay, if you wanna maximize recovery, what you're really talking about is you want adaptability. So you wanna get more results from your training, okay? Then you actually have to bring in the full equation here. So the whole equation is adaptability is equal to your visible stressors combined with your hidden stressors taken into account than your recovery capacity. And so what's that mean is, well, do we really need to improve recovery capacity or do we just need to reduce a visible stressor or hidden stressor?
Andy (44m 5s):
If you do that, adaptability goes up and so people tend to just jump to recovery. But I always jump to the purse like, well hold on here, let's go back to the beginning. So how are we sure we're optimizing your visible stressors? So visible stressors though that I define those is things that you are aware of and can see that are combining and adding toward that stress bucket. So these are things you tend to feel, you tend to see and you probably, you probably know better, but they're adding to your stress bucket, which means you can think about it this way, they're reducing your recovery capacity. So you don't need to add recovery, you just need to reduce these visible stressors. Alcohol, bad sleep, mental stress, poor CO2 tolerance, bad diet, things like this, right?
Andy (44m 52s):
You know better, you probably feel the effects quite clearly. And if you just get those better, all of a sudden bottom bang boom, recovery capacity shoots up. I didn't, I didn't need to go by a sauna, right? You just needed to actually figure your sleep out or you needed to figure out something else. The second one is called a hidden stress. So these are things that are causing same amount or more stress to the system, same exact effects, but you don't necessarily know them or feel them. So this is a vitamin B6 deficiency. No one wakes up and goes, God, my B6 is low today. Right? You can't feel that though. You feel the effects, you have a fungal infection, bacteria, something else going on inside your body. Your immune system compromise.
Andy (45m 32s):
Excessive inflammation, oxidative distress, like something like this, maybe cortisol is dysregulated maybe or d e or or antigens are way up or down or testosterones out. Free total sex hormone binding globulin outta whack. Insulins having a problem. You don't realize that your fasting glucose is okay, but your insulin's dysregulated, your metabolically inflexible. There's all these things that you may or may not be feeling but that are happening causing stress, your system. So that's, that's the other place we're going. If we fix those two things, we tend to not have to do anything for recovery tricks and people's recovery just blasts. People just like, oh my god, I don't need get sore anymore, feel great the next day and you're like, I didn't add any penny to recovery.
Andy (46m 13s):
You know, tricks or whatever, right? If you have to go to that next level though, in terms of recovery tricks, you know, you mentioned the the hot, that's a nice one. You can do something like, you know I've used the mark pro eem, it's not E but it's similar, right? So that like electrical pads you can put on your body and kind of twitches the, those can be very, very, very effective. I've used those for years. Mark Crow's my favorite by far. NormaTec compression boot, that's fine too. We've actually done studied our lab on them. Those are are quick ones. You can even do more mental stuff like you know, a five minute meditation or a Zen session is eyes closed.
Andy (46m 53s):
I'm a huge fan of down regulation, breath work, you know, simple tricks like that. These are all really, really good for, even though you're like, well that's a mental thing, well trust me, they're all tied. If you can calm down, physiology is gonna get better. So those are all tricks there. And then when it comes to food and when it comes to supplementation, it's the same thing. It's not necessarily that there's fancy recovery supplements, it's just that these are supplements that your body that's picking up for a hole in your body and that by default will then enhance recovery. So very, very basic, almost guaranteed ones. We talked earlier about protein has to be there, so protein should be there. I generally love putting in making sure carbohydrates are around training.
Andy (47m 37s):
Timing of protein isn't as important, but timing of carbohydrate can be important. So I like to have those as well. Creatine has just absurd amount of research behind it. It's highly effective for a number of things. Making sure your salt and hydration is on point. I love, actually Momentus makes a recovery protein powder blend basically that that, that's really nice. And this s sort of like your whole recovery package in one by momentus me.
Brian (48m 5s):
So
Andy (48m 6s):
Yeah, that, that's a nice place to start if you want that one. But that's really, that's honestly it. Like most of our folks are gonna have something like some sort of combination of carbohydrate protein. You don't necessarily have to have creatine around your workout, but as long as it's there in in your protocol someplace, then you're totally fine. But that's really all you need.
Brian (48m 29s):
And if someone's working out late, let's say four times a week, doing like an upper body, lower body split, would you say recovery time, you know, two to three days between workouts?
Andy (48m 45s):
Well it doesn't have to be, it could be a day. So if you're doing like upper lower splits, so say Mondays upper lower is Tuesday off, Wednesday, Thursday, upper Friday lower, something like that. Sorry, hold
Brian (48m 56s):
On one second. That's
Andy (48m 60s):
Alright. Clear my throat. Then you did Monday upper and then you did Thursday upper again. That's, that's plenty. If you wanna skip that off day on Wednesday though, and just give yourself one day off, that's totally fine too. It just depends on the volume, how much you're doing on that Monday. It depends on how heavy you're doing. It depends on kinda like the time of training. It depends on you, you know, if your stress bucket's really full from all this other stuff, well then you're gonna have to just give yourself more time, do less volume. But the, the nice part about emptying that stress bucket from things you don't want stress in there, which means you get to pour more and more stress in from the areas you want, which means way more training. So you get to train so much harder and you get the same level, that stress bucket by getting that type of stress outta there that you didn't want in there.
Andy (49m 42s):
Right? And now, now you can train super, super, super hard and come back again a day and a half later or two days later or those same day, like depending on what you're doing or the next day for sure.
Brian (49m 55s):
A few more and then we'll, we'll we'll finish it up. Do you have any thoughts around fasting?
Andy (49m 60s):
Sure. Any thoughts? What would you like to talk about?
Brian (50m 5s):
Is this something that you do personally or that you implement with your clients from time to time?
Andy (50m 12s):
Well, fasting is a triggered word here. You're gonna evoke some emotion in some, unless there's, it depends on what you mean by fasting, right? So we all fast. Of course the vast majority of people are going to fast somewhere like 12 hours a day anyways. So do I think there's some special magic pushing your eating when back two hours in a day? No, no, I don't. So a 14 hour fast is basically like so close to what most humans do that this is totally irrelevant if you're asking about like longer extended fast. Yeah, I've done lots, plenty of 40 hour fast and things like that. And by fast I mean nothing like water, no coffee, no butter, no, no calories.
Andy (50m 52s):
Like if you're having a calorie friends, you're not fasting. I don't care if that, I had kid one time he's like, oh I even fast this was in class poor. And I was like, oh, I fast, what type? And he was like, oh yeah, 16, eight. I'm like, okay, great. So that means you go, you're eating, you're eating windows compress into an eight hour window and you're fasting it for 16,
Brian (51m 11s):
Right?
Andy (51m 12s):
I'm like, great. He's like, yeah. So I don't eat until like one or 2:00 PM and I'm like, okay, great. What are you doing in the morning? He's like, oh yeah, I have, I just have black coffee with MCT oil. And I'm like, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. You know, MCT oil is food, right? And he's like, no, no, no. It's just oil. And like you can just see the look on his face. He's like, oh no. And like his whole world shattered.
Brian (51m 33s):
Yeah.
Andy (51m 35s):
So I'm like, if I put that whole oil and like put it into a whole nut, is that food? He's like, definitely. And I'm like, so if I just smash that all up and put in a blender, it's no longer nut. And he's just like, oh, damn it. Yeah. So if you're putting calories in, Fran, you're breaking your fast. The question is, do you care? I don't know. Why are you fasting to begin with? Right. Do you think there's some sort of magic happening there? There's not. If it's just like, I don't like to eat food in the morning cause my stomach is nauseous. Oh, that's fine. I don't care. So do I ever go outta my way to program fasting to, to athletes and our executive clients? Not often. If they prefer it that way, sure, we can work with that.
Andy (52m 17s):
There's no benefit to that at all. And then there's sometimes there's occasional things that pop up where we need to do some things. We'll go out of our way to do it. But for the most part, I'm rarely going to it.
Brian (52m 32s):
Yeah.
Andy (52m 33s):
Unless I really like it, it's fine. It's just not needed.
Brian (52m 35s):
Right. I mean, I find for, for some people, and including myself, sometimes it just gives you boundaries around your day. You know, sometimes, cuz most thing, most people that are eating past seven, eight o'clock, there's not a lot of good things that are being eaten at that time. Yeah,
Andy (52m 49s):
Sure. Yeah. Fair. I mean, yeah, totally. Yeah. Yeah. You gotta create the boundaries one way or the other. There's gonna be some restriction with food one way or the other. You gotta pick your poison. If that's the poison you like, I have no issue with it whatsoever.
Brian (53m 2s):
And one last question that I asked on my guests. What, what one tip would you give someone, middle-aged, 45 plus individual looking to get their body back? What, what one tip would you give that individual?
Andy (53m 17s):
What I would say is precision. And what I mean by that is if this is not your full-time life, this is not your full-time passion. You're just gonna get inundated constantly with podcasts and posts and things you should be doing. That's all true. It's gonna get overwhelming though. So you need to find kind of like that one thing that is the most important for you. And then just be happy with that. If not, you're gonna, your head's gonna explode with what ifs,
Brian (53m 45s):
Right?
Andy (53m 47s):
Yeah. What if I take this special supplement for aging? What if I do this and what if I,
Brian (53m 53s):
So keep it simple. Find
Andy (53m 54s):
The, keep it simple and find the biggest thing, the thing that moves the needle the most. And just make sure you get very, very good at that. And then find the next biggest thing. And then do that and just work your way down. But just don't get, don't major in the minors. That's the way I put
Brian (54m 12s):
It. Yeah. I love that. Well, Dr. Galpin, thanks for coming on. A lot of great, a lot of great knowledge. And where's the best place for people to learn about you?
Andy (54m 25s):
Instagram and Twitter are the most acting places. And then of course all the educational stuff is up on YouTube.
Brian (54m 33s):
Okay. And then I know you got that absolute rest.com, right? That's that's coming out too.
Andy (54m 38s):
Yeah. So two other things. Absolute rest is one of my companies that's by far the world's most advanced sleep diagnostics. So this is a full clinical grade sleep study done in your own house, in your own bedroom. It's in full biomarkers. It is full psychological evaluation by a Harvard trained MD in sleep. It is full circadian trading rhythm light training by the folks who worked on the International Space Station and things like that. Some of the most published sleep scientists in the world, full environmental scan of your bedroom. So of your air quality, temperature, organic mullet, organics that are coming outta your mattress or your wall and formaldehyde and mold and lead and just anything like that, that that's floating around.
Andy (55m 23s):
And then it is a whole program individualized to your data based on sleep. So you can check that out. And as well as the other one is Rapid Health, I think you can go to rapid health report.com and then you can see a sample of kind of what I was talking about of us going through somebody's blood work and all the stuff you can find in there and how you can create these high precision stress, sleep, brain focus, sexual function, energy, libido, like all these things can really, really be improved with high precision stuff. And this is without drugs. So the no drug, no therapy, no t like none of that stuff. It is just getting your sleep dialed. But how to actually do that rather than just a bunch of blanket statements.
Andy (56m 5s):
It's getting your nutrition dialed, but how to actually do it rather than just, here's some macros and then some high precision supplementation that's all third party certified. You know, basic stuff. But it's, it's precision that matters here.
Brian (56m 17s):
So yeah, and that's rapid health and absolute rest. And I'll put, I'll put some note, put 'em in the show notes, put the, the websites in the show notes, and then andy galpin.com. So thanks. That works. Yeah. All right, Andy. Well, I appreciate you coming on, and thanks again.
Andy (56m 35s):
All right. Thanks a lot, Brian.
Brian (56m 39s):
Thanks for listening to the Get Lean Eat Clean podcast. I understand there are millions of other podcasts out there and you've chosen to listen to mine and I appreciate that. Check out the show notes@briangr.com for everything that was mentioned in this episode. Feel free to subscribe to the podcast and share it with a friend or family member who looking to get their body back to what it once was. Thanks again, and have a great day.
