The science and practice of enhancing human performance for sport play and life Welcome to perform. I'm dr. Andy Galpin a professor of Kinesiology in the center for sport performance at Cal State Fullerton
in the center. Our mission is to conduct and disseminate research that enhances human performance in addition to my role as
a scientist. I also work directly with high-performing athletes. This could include Olympic gold medalist world champions MVPs Sai Yeung winners All-Stars
across multiple Sports the NHL NBA the NFL PGA Tour boxing the UFC and many more. So while our Focus most of my career on Sport and athletes specifically my real passion is the physiology behind that and so what I hope to share with you over this podcast is a deep dive into the physiology of human performance. Now that doesn't necessarily mean Sports per se this is really human performance at its finest most broadest definition. This could be athletes musicians.
Leaders scientists educators are anything else in between
human performance really is what you want your body to be capable of so in order to accomplish that I'm
extremely excited to share with you the physiology behind
human performance in a way that is engaging applicable and most importantly useful today. We're going to be talking about muscle more specifically skeletal muscle my favorite now, I know when you first hear that your mind May jump to things like sport
performance and big giant muscles.
And
bodybuilding and Aesthetics and while that may or may not be of
interest to you. I will tell you candidly. It's a large interest of mine.
You may be surprised to learn the muscle quality and quantity are incredibly important for your overall health and well-being. Yeah, you heard that right quality muscle is essential for the Vitality of nearly every cell organ or organ
system in your entire body. Let
me give you two specific examples of what I'm talking about. First is the connection between muscle and the
Now there are many lines of
evidence. We could utilize here but
one that I think highlights the point beautifully is a recent
study on about a half a million participants, mostly middle-aged men and women and in that they
found that about 30 percent of dementia cases were directly attributable to low
grip strength. Now that may sound alarming and or interesting to you and I promise we'll get into the Diesels about study and many others later in the show.
Now. That was an example of muscle quality or functionality.
Let me give you another one regarding muscle quantity or size and how that will directly relate to longevity or lifespan. Once again, there's lots of research to pull from and we'll get into this later in the show, but it's very clear that being under muscled is a significant problem. In fact, we know this is such a big problem. The National Institute of Health has an entire Wing dedicated specifically to sarcopenia, which is the advanced
loss of muscle with age. If you'd like
some hard numbers to wrap your head around a little bit here consider this those in the bottom 20th.
I'll versus the top 20 percentile in terms of how much muscle mass you have on your entire body.
Well those in the bottom portion
how about two times the risk of all-cause mortality as those in the top and so while
we certainly are going to consider functionality or quality most important
quantity matters a lot as well.
So based upon what I've
just shared and more that we'll get into later in the show to
me skeletal muscle is by far
the most important.
Even in your entire body
now in order to convince you of that I'm going to start by telling you how it
actually regulates performance across the entire system. This includes everything from its relationship to how long and how well you're going to live to how it regulates your blood glucose metabolism and overall energy production to other factors that you may or may not also be aware of
after that. We'll get into what muscle actually is.
How is the structure and the function of it determining how you move throughout the
world and then
Only will get into the assessment piece. How do you identify whether or not you have enough muscle and if you
don't how do you go about improving that now
before we go too much further? I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors because they make this show possible. Not only are they on this list because they
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So why do I think skeletal
muscle is so special.
Well, I want to break this into two parts. The first is the quantity of muscle you have in the second is quality now the
Quantity of muscle
compared to other organ systems say your immune system your brain central nervous system or even like your bones
skeletal muscle is the one you have the most control over
with lifestyle factors.
So what I mean by that is it is the one you can manipulate the
most to alter your physical appearance. Now, you may want to look a certain way or not another way that's entirely up to you.
But skeletal muscle is the place you will go to determine that of
course you can reduce
On a body fat you have overall with lifestyle,
but it's hard to really pick that from a certain
space or place on your body. For example, if you wanted to lose fat on your triceps or the back of
your arm or on your legs or so. It's really difficult to Target the
fat loss in that area. It tends to come globally a little bit from everywhere in your body.
But skeletal muscles different you can absolutely Focus
entirely on growing your
cops or on one arm relative the other or anything else you want to do. So again of
all of the different organ systems and structures on your body. It is the one you have the
most control over to determine how you
look that said I want to focus
more on the second part of our discussion here, which is the quality of the muscle. So the
functionality what is
providing to your body and how it's helping you navigate to the world. So remember
skeletal muscle is the direct interface with the
world. I know
folks that are in the
Neuroscience Department people like Andrew love to give all the credit.
The nervous system and the brain
and that's fine.
Obviously, that's what's making the decisions but skeletal muscle
is the Workhorse. So nothing will actually get accomplished without the skeletal muscle.
It's a little bit of chicken and egg here I get that
but in my opinion nothing is going to happen in your body
health-wise or actual again interfacing with the world
without skeletal muscle. This is the Workhorse of your life. Now before we go too much further, I want
to back up just a touch. I realize I've described skeletal muscle as an organ system several times now.
And many of you may not know what that means or why it matters
you see if you would have gone on
something like Jeopardy in 1990 and they asked the question of what's the biggest organ in your body? You would have probably said skin and that would have been correct at the time. However, hopefully Jeopardy's made a change
we realized that's not the
correct answer. It is skeletal muscle by a
landslide. So what it means to be an
organ is that it secretes something and communicates to other parts of your body
and it wasn't really until the last 20 years where
It says have identified and realize that skeletal muscle is what we'd say not stupid. In other words. We used to again neuroscientist
think that skeletal muscle
just is a one-way Street information comes in from the nervous system tells muscle what to do and then it executes when
we now realize skeletal muscle is
far smarter than that. It is not only accepting information from the nervous system also from the hormones endocrine system things that are in your blood and everywhere
else. It's also sending
signals back out. This includes things that are now called.
Excerpt kinds so these are cytokines are again other information molecules excreted from muscle in this case in response specifically to exercise and their direct Target is other organ systems in the body. This would include the kidneys liver lungs brain and every other part of your system.
There are also other molecules that will discuss later
such as non-coding mrnas that are critical to your body understanding its overall status.
You see really the way that I think about it is
Little muscle given the fact that it occupies far more
space in your body than anything else
is the primary key
to physiology communication. It is the biggest factor that is both
receiving and
extending information out to the rest of your body. So when you don't have enough of it or it is
compromised you're going to see problems in every other
area of your
life to double down on that statement. If you were to
look across the literature on both skeletal muscle mass as well as muscle quality.
So think in this case muscle power muscle strength or something like
that. You will see connections do
basically every aspect of overall human health and performance. And this is
why if you were to look into the scientific
literature on everything from sport performance to all-cause mortality,
you'll see a strong
tie to skeletal muscle quantity and
quality. So for example, skeletal muscle has been implicated in the
regulation of numerous systems, which include but are not limited to all cause morbidity and
mortality.
Larry cardiovascular health cognitive Health brain health mood inflammation immunity fertility metabolic Health Hormone Health bone health
and much more. Another important thing to realize is that
most of your metabolism in your body is actually occurring in your
skeletal muscle, in fact because of this around 85 percent or so of the heat you generate in your body is coming from skeletal muscle. It's also the primary place in
which you dispose of and regulate blood glucose, which is
important for both short-term performance as well as long-term Health
fact Recent research has shown that athletes are up to 25% more effective at disposing glucose into their muscle than non-athletes.
So regardless of how you're defining Human Performance,
whether that be hit a golf ball 300 yards fix your low back pain have more focus at work or alter how you physically appear skeletal muscle is going to be at the center of that conversation.
So how much can it really?
Inch let's talk about the adaptability or what we call
plasticity of skeletal muscle in my opinion.
I judge the overall quality of skeletal muscle in three main areas
effectively. You can think of these three
as look good feel good and play good what that means for every one. The first one is pretty obvious. It should look how you want it to look
and that's going to be different for
everyone people want different sizes and shapes. Some folks want more size and certain muscles and muscle groups and less than others that's entirely up to you.
You
the second one feel good. This should be resilient and non sensitive. So you should be able to engage in
multiple types of metabolic processes should be able to handle multiple types of contractions in multiple ranges of motion Etc. So again, we want
resilient muscle that can do many things
basically on demand. The
last one then is Play Good. Can we
execute on the things were asking it to do so, can I go fast when we want it to go fast. Can it go under control when we want it to be under control? Can it be high precision?
And going to be gross movement and cannot
respond and recover
quickly. So as we continue on this discussion, I'm going to have all three of those goals in mind that really at the end of the day. It should look a certain way. It should be resilient
to be able to do many things and many areas,
but then also be able to execute the exact
way that you personally want it to execute
as a quick example, when we say smooth
muscle think about the tiny muscles involved in digestion, moving food throughout your digestive tract stuff. That is really not under your
Voluntary control not really going to respond and change say growing in size increasing in strength and responds to a workout a lifestyle interventions. Its kind of the stuff that moves your life beyond your somatic or cognitive control now in terms of cardiac, we're really basically talking about one thing and that's your heart. There's a few other things that go along with that but that's basically what we're talking about. Skeletal muscle is almost everything else. So it is your biceps muscles your hamstring muscles your quadriceps the things that you have both voluntary.
And involuntary control over they tend to be large muscles, but they can be the small ones as well. Think of your intercostals the muscles between your ribs that are contracted to expand your chest so that you can breathe and bring volume and your lungs the small muscles in your eye that control fine motor movement and everything else like that. So to recap smooth muscle is the stuff you have very little control over tends to be the muscles necessary to keep you alive for digestion and breathing and things like that. Cardiac is effectively your
Heart and then skeletal muscle is basically everything else. It's the stuff that relegates human movements. You have both control and involuntary control of it. They can be large muscles or small muscles. But once again, it's basically everything non smooth and noncardiac
now, if you listen to any of
dr. Andrew humans work, he's talked extensively about the role of neural plasticity, which is the ability of your nervous system to adapt or change in response to various stimuli or lack thereof.
Well skeletal muscles are
Ready to respond like that is even greater.
So it will change its nature in both the short term and
now we're talking in order of seconds to minutes as well as in the long term so its ability
to alter how you feel and perform is extensive in order to understand that we need to talk briefly about what muscle really
is. So what exactly is skeletal muscle? Well the start all the way back at the beginning in your body. You've got somewhere between six to seven hundred different muscles
now, we don't know the exact number there's no
sign.
Terrific consensus on that fact, I remember fairly recently a paper came out arguing for the identification of a fifth quadricep muscle. So the tradition is that you've got four hence quadricep muscles in your quad or your thigh there and they had argued that they had identified a fifth one now. I don't know the literature on that as well anymore. But the
point is you've got a large number of
muscles throughout your entire body. We tend to group them into muscle groups. So continuing with the quadriceps theme we tend to call that the quad muscles, although that is actually for
The visual
muscles your biceps
are actually a combination of several different biceps muscles your triceps, etc. Etc. And so we've got all the muscles in our body. We've got these sub grouping of muscle groups
and then within each individual muscle
you have hundreds of thousands of muscle fibers think of this like a ponytail. So while you'd call that ponytail one
thing it's actually just comprised of thousands of
different individual hairs. So when we want to talk about the individual hair we say,
Hair follicle we want to talk about the ponytails a unit. We say the ponytail. So the same thing would happen. I could talk about your hamstring muscles. But really am I talking about one muscle that say the semimembranosus or somebody tendinosis the hamstrings as a group or the individual fibers within each of those individual muscles.
So drilling down on that if you can imagine going back to the ponytail there is a layer of connective tissue or faccia that surrounds each of these muscle fibers that holds them together, but that's what actually collectively makes them one unit. And why we call that a muscle that muscle is then wrapped around further with more connected tissue all that comes together to form a tendon that tendon then connects to the Bone such that when you activate or contract any of those muscle fibers, it contracts the muscle as a whole.
Tends to contract the entire muscle group that entire muscle group comes together goes into a tendon that tendon then pulls the bone.
So the easy example again sticking with the
quads is an easy theme you can track any of the muscle fibers within say the vastus lateralis the muscle that is on the far outside of your leg that is one of the quadricep muscles the entire quad tends to feel like it's Contracting that then goes over through the patella tendon the patella tendon inserts on the front of the lower leg bone which causes
his lower leg bone to lift up and for your lower leg to extend that quickly is how muscles work and how they actually cause human movement. It's through one the activation of the muscle
to the contraction of the muscle and then three the muscle pulling on connective
tissue, which makes bones move. Now the
amount of muscle fibers you've got in each
muscle varies pretty highly and it's
somewhere in the neighborhood of one the 300,000 individual fibers interestingly. This number will double during the first few months of your life.
And then basically stabilized by the time you reach adulthood.
Now as I mentioned, you've got somewhere between 100 and 300
thousand fibers per muscle one example, the biceps brachii has been shown to have about 250,000 muscle fibers. And
so if you ran some quick math there that
would mean most of us probably have somewhere in the neighborhood of between 125 to 250 million muscle fibers throughout our entire body and these
fibers are extraordinarily
unique in all of biology
for a couple of reasons. Number one. They are absolutely
huge. They are some of the biggest
his cells by volume in all of biology. It is common to have a muscle fiber that is up to two to three centimeters long. And in fact many have been shown to be up to 10 centimeters or so long think about the Sartorius muscle this muscle that goes from the kind of the inside of your hip bone that front side there and goes all over the inside of your knee. It is theorized in some folks will say in physiology lower that you can have a single muscle fiber that runs the entire length of that. I don't actually know whether or not that's true, but it would not be rare to see if
Over that is again for 25 to up to 6 inches long,
which is enormous in terms of the width. Same kind of idea. You'll see these things as
extremely large right somewhere between four to five micrometers in terms of cross sectional areas micrometers squared to
give you little bit of concept of how big that is number one. You can see that
with the naked eye. I can pull up in my laboratory a pair of tweezers a single muscle fiber from a human. I can hold it up right now. And on this camera you would absolutely be able to see that both on camera as well as
With your naked eye. If you were within even 5 to 10 feet of me in terms of cross sectional area. You're looking at something like four to five thousand micrometers squared
which little bit of context there one time actually. I had a
long-established powerlifter as well as anabolic steroid user in my lab. And we biopsy this individual and his muscle fibers were closer than
9,000 and
the closest equivalent we found there was actually a rhinoceros so
muscle fibers are not only large in
terms of biology.
G but they ability to gain size is extraordinary
as again I said earlier one of the things that makes skeletal muscle
in humans, especially unique is the ability to respond and adapt based on stimuli. In fact, it seems to be quite unending now, we'll come back and talk about muscle fibers size and how to develop it a little bit later
but getting back to this idea of fiber number as I mentioned is thought to be fairly
fixed once you reach adulthood. However, it is extremely clear that this number will
Go down with aging unless you do something proactively to prevent that it's actually also very clear that this number can increase with anabolic steroid.
Use now. This concept of growing
new muscle fibers is called hyperplasia and something that is been hotly contested in the exercise physiology world for many many decades. Now, I will give you a little bit of a behind-the-scenes here. I personally am always been a big believer in hyperplasia happening.
I won't say the science is strongly in my support.
But it's when one of the passion projects that that I'm not going to give up on okay.
Now what I'm really talking about here is there's no question whatsoever that new
cells can grow. That's not really the debate. What is up for discussion though is whether or not that happens as a normal response to normal training in healthy humans, there is strong evidence that anabolic steroid use especially over a number of years can increase that number. And again, we know it will decrease with aging now when I say anabolic steroid use I'm mostly talking about
Testosterone here now, please so I can be ultra clear here. I am not encouraging anyone to utilize anabolic steroids or testosterone. I'm not a medical doctor if you are interested in any use of exhaustion as hormones. That's something you need to work out with your personal physician. This is not again me encouraging or recommending the use will not also suggest it will make your muscle healthier or any better. There are many factors to think about when considering exoticness hormones, and I'm not the person to take advice from
On those things. We also know that consistent strength training will prevent the loss of those muscle fibers over time whether or not you can again go above and
beyond your normal
set at a normal age with just basic strength training I guess is still up for debate. There are maybe some things if you catch me off camera, I'm willing to share with you but according to the current science right now. That's the best we can say.
So what this means is you've got to pass to
changing skeletal muscle structure and function. The first is increasing.
Amount of muscle fibers as we just got done discussing. That's probably quite challenging to do in normal settings. And so I want to spend more of our time talking about how do we alter the metabolic and contractile
properties? So another thing that makes skeletal muscle extremely unique is the fact that it is multinucleated. So now remember the nucleus of the cell is what holds your DNA
it relegates all activities and tells the cell to grow shrink died repair or any other necessary function
the overwhelming
majority of
And all about algae are single nucleated some of them actually get very interesting when they have two or three
but skeletal muscle has thousands per cell. This allows it to actually have
such extreme size because now we have more relegation centers throughout it. I can
give you an analogy here.
Let's imagine you're running a business and you want to have a branch manager at every one of your offices. Well, if you only have one branch manager, it's hard to have an office in say Chicago New York Dallas and Seattle
too many little things happen and local
Areas, it's hard to
relegate and to change things quickly. But if you could put a manager in every single
location the success of each branch as well as the speed and turnover goes
up. That's effectively what your muscle cells are doing. They're putting a lot of nuclei and a lot of different places. So that allows not only the size to expand but where this really matters is the adaptability
your muscle is hyper
responsive to things that are happening in a short time window across a broad domain of insults. What I
In this could be responsive to physical contraction to blood flow nutrient availability glucose oxygen hormones lifestyle
factors. All of these things are being measured and monitored by skeletal muscle and because it has the ability to adapt and multiple segments. It can do that and it can do that very
quickly giving you
some firm numbers on this
nuclei. Let's say that biceps brachii muscle we talked about a second ago was 10 centimeters long. It may have something in the neighborhood of
Thousand nuclei if you were to then count up all the muscle fibers in total. This would mean you would have in the ballpark of 750 million nuclei in the entire biceps muscle you extend this out to all 600-plus of your muscles and that
puts you somewhere in the neighborhood of
around 500 billion nuclei throughout your entire body. That's how responsive and adaptive skeletal muscle is to everything you're doing in your life.
We're going to talk a lot more about these Manu Klee I in future
episodes because as I mentioned they are the primary
place that are going to regulate how your muscle cells respond and change to external stressors, but what regulates the contractile and metabolic properties that's actually something different and it's what we call the muscle fiber type. You've probably heard of this referred to as a fast twitch or slow twitch muscle fibers, but it actually extends beyond that now on
the surface, that's a fine broad
explanation, but we can go a little bit past that and I think it's helpful to do so without being unnecessarily
exhausted.
Really fibers can be classified as the
following slow twitch or another way to say that is type 1 and then your fast twitch fibers are broken down into two major categories your type 2A as well as your 2x fibers
many of the properties are the
same between all these fiber types. They micro Anatomy how they're designed all the things we've talked about how the wrapkin connected tissue there in my own nucleation size, etc. Etc.
The properties that are really distinct are again the
contractile and metabolic
ones slow-twitch fibers.
And to be
but are not always smaller. In fact an endurance trained individuals. They can often times be larger than fast-twitch
fibers. But their contraction is exactly that the twitch of the speed of contraction is slower doesn't necessarily mean
the strength or force behind the contraction is smaller or less. It's just that I can tracks a
little bit slower the advantage though is they tend to be highly fatigue
resistant. They are better at utilizing fat as a fuel source. They have more mitochondria
and their overall good at what we call anti-gravity or
Astral, so when you think about slow-twitch fibers, they
tend to be the ones that are on kind of all day. Keep you upright and erect. Keep you moving and keep you at a low level of contraction but continuously fast-twitch fibers particularly the to a fibers
are really the opposite. So there are going to be hedged more
towards fast speed of contraction, but
really they're not particularly
effective at fatigue resistance. They are going to prefer using things like phosphocreatine or carbohydrates as a fuel source and are not as effective at things like
fat or long-term sustained
contractions the third and final type 2 x are
the fastest of the
bunch while you're to a
and fast-twitch fibers are some of the neighborhood of five to six times more powerful than a slower type 1 fiber a 2X fiber is in the neighborhood of 20 times more
powerful.
The downside is we don't really have any good Evidence of
normal humans having many if any pure 2x fibers oddly enough. We see it in extreme muscle disused situations things like spinal cord injury or coming back from Extended space flight and situations like that.
And so there's a lot of mystery still behind these two x fibers we could get into that again and maybe more detail a little bit later. So on a Surface why we really have these three distinct unique fiber types type 1 type
2.
Way and type 2 x it is really appropriate to discuss basically the type one and the type two ways from now on
now within any
individual muscle you have on your
body the proportion of
fast, which to slow twitch. In other words the amount of fast or slow twitch fibers in that muscle varies widely from muscle to muscle as well as from Human to human. Now that actually determines a lot about the function of that muscle. For example, if you take say the soleus muscle, which is one of the small muscles kind of behind the back of your
Calf there that goes into your the bottom of your heel that is heavily based towards slow twitch muscle fibers depending on the person it would be something the neighborhood of 70 percent all the way up to 90 plus percent slow-twitch fibers, and that's because the primary purpose of the
Soleus is to keep you standing and moving all
day. It's not meant for explosive power or sprinting or jumping or anything like that.
If you are compare that to the
other major muscle in your calf the gastrocnemius
that's almost the exact
opposite and a lot of folks it is, you know 60
To
70 or 80% fast-twitch fibers.
So the gastroc is there for the
exact opposite it is therefore the explosion for the jumping and sprinting and not necessarily to keep you upright all day.
Now that's not necessarily true of other animals. In fact, this is one of the things that
makes examining research in this area important to pay attention to whether you're looking at a study from a rat or a mouse a cat a bear or any other animal is that is different. And in fact mice the Soleus is almost exclusively if not 100.
0% slow twitch and other muscles like the plantaris might be the opposite 100% faster which
is why there's clearly
important information. We can gather there is not necessarily a direct and equal comparator.
So as I mentioned the amount of
fast which and slow-twitch the fiber proportions in the muscle groups varies within your own body. It also varies from person to person. So if I were to biopsy myself as I have several dozen times,
I would know and see that say in
my vastus lateralis the muscle on the
I'd and which is the most common muscle to biopsy for a number of reasons that has the least amount of nerve innervations. There's no major blood vessels flowing through there. It's easy to access. It tends to be quite large. I don't have to go past any other muscle groups, etc. Etc. So within that muscle I have seen people in my laboratory as high as 90% plus slow twitch as well as up to 85% fast-twitch and everywhere in between and so the quadricep again, the VL specifically here
is meant to really be responsive to
training.
And we'll talk about this more
later all of their muscles like the Soleus spinal
Erectors other muscles say in your fingers or eyes are not necessarily going to change as much it would be very difficult to convert your Soleus into an exclusive fast twitch muscle fiber
because it's really meant to do one job and the overall stimuli that you provide to
it is fairly similar. It doesn't really matter. What kind of exercise or training intervention you put how many Plyometrics are Sprints you do the vast.
Jordy of time that your Soleus is Contracting it still because you're standing and so there's not a lot of change that can happen there.
The VL is quite different since it is so important in all knee
extension and really hip movement. It's going to be a hyper responsive to what you're asking it to do.
So again can very heavily within your body
as well as from person to person and we'll talk about more the stuff later, but you as you've already heard me allude to
Your fiber type again the proportion of fast or slow twitch is hyper
responsive to Lifestyle. We know extensively for decades now that it will respond to both changes in exercise as well as the removal of that. So some of the
classic Dallas
bedrest studies where they put people into bed where their head was something like six degrees below their legs. So you can imagine laying on a bed with a slight backwards tilts your head is a little bit below your feet a little bit above and we've done this
this for up to 50 plus days and what we're doing there is trying to simulate both spaceflight. This was initially done in preparation for thinking humans were to go to the moon or further for extended time
as well as it's actually
representing nice model of Aging you can actually simulate upwards of a decade of Aging in about 10 days of bed rest or so. And so we get a really good grasp of what happens when you go into disuse similar for if you have to go into a cast post surgery or something like that. So we see in those models of enact.
First an activity as well. As any number of exercise training studies looking simply at individuals cross-sectionally. So those that have exercise for long periods of time throughout their life compared to those who haven't
any of these interventions you want to look at and we see
hyper responsiveness in your fiber type profile based upon your physical activity
all their interventions that are less well understood,
but are also actually quite interesting that we will discuss in depth
later things like nutraceuticals
vitamins.
Minerals phytochemicals have been shown to alter fiber type in extreme concentrations. Now while they're not small changes in your diet. Say how much carbohydrates or protein you're eating or any supplementation can actually reach concentrations high enough to alter fiber type is yet to be determined. I'm not really aware of any research showing that but certainly we have seen that in many models again. We can give them non-physiological doses but
even stuff as well as
Hyperbaric or are extensive.
Oxygen concentrations alterations in CO2
intake and things like that have
also again mostly an animal models shown to alter fiber type.
So whether or not this actually
happens in a normal human circumstance is not as relevant right
now, but it's just highlighting the concept of how responsive this muscle is to everything you're doing in your
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so in my opinion the key take home is that things like your
fiber type again, which regulate the contractile nature how fast and Powerful your muscle fibers contract as well as their metabolic properties how effective they are at using fats and carbohydrates as a fuel source how efficient they are at bringing in nourishment and getting out waste products much of this is regulated by its fiber type and your fiber type in general is responsive to
Ages in activity now if we were to have to compare the responsiveness of the fast twitch fibers to the slow twitch fibers, it is very
clear fast. Twitch
fibers are more reactive to things like physical activity changes
whether or not you can increase or
decrease the amount of soldiers fibers in response exercise. I think that evidence is clear but it is of a much smaller in magnitude than the plasticity within the fast twitch fibers now why that's critical then
is unless you do
something about it from an exercise perspective.
You're going to lose many of your fast twitch fibers as uh,
a really nice example of this a paper published in the last few weeks. Look that lifelong strength trainers. Now, this is interesting because while we were just starting
to get data on lifelong exercisers almost all have that has been in aerobic or endurance base exercisers.
We're just starting to come on board with these lifelong strength trainers and what that paper found was that that activity to
strength training basically over your entire
life was able to
to
preserve fast twitch fiber concentrations. However, the endurance training was not so as not to say the strength training is more important or better for your health and all but
it is simply saying these fiber types are lost
you're not able to get them back
but you can preserve that or million rate that
loss by chronic strength training.
Now you're going to care about these fast-twitch fibers for a couple of reasons while I will acknowledge that
both fast and slow fibers are critically important for overall muscle Health. What makes
Twitch fibers unique is a few things. The first is that again, they express the greatest capacity for force and power production. This is obviously critically important for young folks trying to enhance their, you know, Club head speed on their driver when they're playing golf or individuals as they move throughout age think about scenarios in which you need to move your foot in front of you to catch yourself from a fall you want to be explosive enough to go upstairs without a fatiguing. You need to have power to lift something up overhead quickly before it collapses back down and you or
Any number of reasons in which you need to have strength and power as you age now the way that you regulate Force production extends Beyond just what the muscle fibers themselves can do. Unfortunately. I've got to get a little bit of credit back to the neuroscientist folks here because really this is a combination of nervous system as well as muscle fiber
characteristics. All of your muscle fibers
are combined into what are called motor units. So the definition of a motor unit is the motor nerve as well as
All the
muscle fibers within that package now all those fibers within that motor unit will be of the same fiber type so fast which are slow twitch
and they're not necessarily laying next
to each other in the muscle. They are spread out both Superior and inferior their deep within the muscle belly. There are kind of all spread out there and this
allows you to
control and not have
spastic movement. So when you activate a motor unit not only does this
contract all of the muscle fibers in that unit. It contracts them all fully that's called the all-or-none
principle.
Oh, and so when you flip the switch and turn
on that motor unit, you pass that activation threshold.
It activates in
contracts all the muscle fibers in that unit to their fullest potential
what you can't do is
turn a muscle fiber itself on
at 60%
or 70% or
80% So the only way you relegate force production across an entire movement is to actually turn on or off more or less motor units.
The example here say I would like to take my hand and reach it up towards my eyeball and lightly touch my eye. Now. I recognize and realize this is only going to take a small amount of force to move the weight necessary to move my hand to lightly touch my eye. If I were to do that too hard, I would smash my finger into my eyeball and that would hurt and so what I do is I start with what are called Low threshold motor units. So these are motor units are very susceptible to firing or Contracting and they
Wait, in this case very slow
and metabolically efficient muscle fibers the type 1 muscle fibers.
And so what it says is I kind of start with the least amount possible physiology is very lazy like this. And so I'll start with the least amount
of force necessary and this allows me to move very slowly but with a lot amount of control
and now if I realize that
actually I had a 5-pound weight attached to my wrist and I had to lift my hand with more Force than I thought I needed I would turn on me.
More and more motor units and if I realized that I have that five-pound weight and then I added a 10-pound ball to my hand on any more and more Force production. I would slowly turn on more and more motor units
as we continue up this Cascade again. The size principle is telling us we start with the
lowest threshold smallest motor units. So this is
not only tends to be
slow twitch muscle fibers, but it's also often times but not always motor units that have less muscle fibers in them.
Amount of muscle fibers in a motor unit can very highly several of them in your I can be as low as a couple of dozen muscle fibers in the motor unit. And those in your glutes might be several thousand muscle fibers. So even if I activated one motor unit in
my eye, I would get
a small amount of Force One motor unit in my glute might produce, you know hundreds if not higher amount of force per motor unit because I have more muscle fibers in that in addition. The muscle fibers might be of larger size.
And the glute and smaller size in the eye because we need more motor control there and less Force production something like the eye again is meant to be highly precise with its movement very low margin of error. I don't need to get there particularly hard. I need to get their sort of quickly, but I need to be in a control
the glute
in this example. This is your your butt muscle want me any of your large butt muscles.
They don't necessarily need to have a lot of fine tune Precision with the movement. They just need to contract the lot of force.
And so the way that these motor units is set up is
in large part determinant of how they produce force and then again what the function of that muscle actually
is, so to go back to where we were talking about a second ago. If I'm trying to
produce this finger into my eyeball, I need to produce more and more Force. I slowly activate more motor
units if I've realized the point where I need more Force beyond that I will increase start activating the higher threshold motor units that also now start to tend to be faster.
Each motor units and if I
need extreme amounts of
force, I will activate the highest threshold which are the highest and probably where we're going to get into our type 2x fibers if we have any of them at all.
And so what happens in if we're playing the story backwards is any movement at all and a muscle almost always includes the
slow twitch motor units, but only when I start demanding High Force production, do I activate and engage the fast twitch muscle fibers
if
By then go weeks months years or
decades without
doing anything of high Force those motor units just never get activated
eventually what can happen is denervation, which means the nerve stops attaching to the muscle fibers many of the muscle fibers die off we talked about that earlier, right the amount of muscle fibers in a muscle reduces with aging if you don't know nothing about it,
and then also we see changes in motor units. So not only is our ability to produce Force go down, but our motor control
Goes down because we've lost the amount of motor units going into a muscle. Sometimes we can see what happens called muscle fiber type
grouping and so we'll see a nerve innervation an
axon that that is gone. If you will the muscle fibers are still viable and so a neighboring motor unit will actually obtain them and if they were say a fast twitch muscle fiber, but now they're in a slow twitch motor units, they will convert that fiber type over to slow and so you see these big
patches or groupings of slow fibers as opposed to them being spread out throughout the muscle which reduces our motor control and smoothness a muscle contraction.
So going back to our original Point here. It's incredibly important that we do something
to preserve our fast-twitch fibers because if we don't we're going to lose them and that then becomes extraordinarily difficult to bring the back, especially once we've lost the fiber number
returning muscle function say your strength is actually
very manageable the Raging but increasing the amount of muscle.
Burroughs as we age is very difficult. So once we lose them, they're basically gone for life
before we go any further. Let's quickly go back and recap
what we talked about
the importance of skeletal muscle extends far beyond sport performance
or Aesthetics. In fact, it's important for a number of physiological factors across basically every organ system in your body.
We also know that skeletal muscle is uniquely responsive to changes in the
external environment. It
is hyper adaptable to things like changes in physical activity.
Nutrition or various other lifestyle factors. In fact, what I would call the super power of skeletal muscle is its ability to respond and adapt both quickly as well as permanently
we talked about how the muscles fibers themselves are
multinucleated which allows them that extended
adaptability as well as come in various
forms fast, which and slow twitch fibers the fast twitch fibers
being more difficult to preserve and probably require some sort of steady and consistent exposure to
high for
A man's over the course of your life in order to maintain. So what I'd like to do now is walk through the three eyes investigate interpret and intervene for both muscle quality and muscle quantity. And I want to do them
separately and that's because while there is a giant overlap between the two they are independent factors. Let me give you an example while there is a clear
relationship between muscle size and muscle strength such that generally bigger muscles are generally stronger. That's not necessarily always the case we could see know.
Number of examples here take any sport that is a weight class Spaceport Wrestling Boxing weightlifting powerlifting. Generally. The best of the best will
increase their performance in this case say
strength as muscle size goes up. So clearly there is a relationship between if you have more muscle mass you potentially have the ability to create more Force
but that said
if you walked out to the general population or even an athlete's just because you find an athlete who has more muscle that doesn't necessarily mean
Going to be stronger. So again, there's a
clear relationship here,
but it is not necessarily 121
in addition. It's incredibly clear and simple
to increase strength or power without necessarily changing muscle size at all. These are all protocols. We will go over and discuss at the end of this of our episode today,
but there's a relationship here. In fact, I think a really
nice way to highlight this even further is a recent publication of mine. Now, this was led by a colleague of mine. Tommy would a neuroscientist at the University of Washington and what we
Did is we went into the National Database? This is what's referred to as nhanes. So this is a giant National Database of kind of a study that they run every single year. They collect a bunch of data from participants. They put them into these big open source pools and they may do IQ testing strength testing blood work, etc. Etc. And scientists can come in and use these for any purpose
now, they've been running and Haines for
several decades. And so you have many many many years of analysis you can go back into and poke around them.
Well, Tommy and myself and the rest of our team did that
and in our paper we found a couple of interesting things here within the population a
participants that we analyzed
there was no relationship whatsoever
between their physical strength and their muscle mass.
In fact, it was also no relationship at all between their amount of muscle mass. They had and their physical activity background what this tells us is in this population alone. They accrued their muscle mass from non-exercise Pathways, but we did actually find was a strong relationship between muscle strength and cognitive function, but that's something we'll talk about in a further episode.
So my point here is when you
look at the relationship between again muscle mass and strength they can overlap.
They can also not we can see further evidence of this when we look at things like mitochondria Health testosterone concentrations range
of motion. A lot of these things are somewhat linked to muscle size,
but not necessarily in the last example. Think about this as
if you were to take somebody who has more
muscle mass that will tell you actually very little about their range of motion or flexibility.
If that extends to a certain point, of course excessive amounts of muscle mass may start contributing. And so again, there's an overlap there but there's so much distinction between the two. I think it's important that we actually treat them as almost separate variables where to start off with muscle quantity or muscle size. The gold standard here in research would be to use something like an MRI or an ultrasound to get a higher resolution cross-sectional image of an individual muscle or muscle groups think again, the quadriceps hamstring muscles.
Elbow flexors, etc. Etc. The benefit of this of course is High Fidelity accuracy and precision.
The downside is it's really only
telling you about that individual muscle or muscle group.
It's really only covering that
portion of it. So we're the MRI of shot. It may necessarily cover. Say the part of the quadricep that's close to your hip or close to your knee. If the MRI was taken at say the midpoint of it doesn't really allow you to access or compare the right leg to the left leg and less you also image that leg
and then really from
conversation the most challenging part about that is it is
extremely unrealistic for most
people to do this would cost you a ton of money and be very challenging to get access to so it's not a real viable solution for most people
that said new technologies are coming online. There are companies
like Springbok, which allow you to do exactly what I just talked about. So this is a full body MRI and this is quite different than using something to say scan for early cancer diagnosis or something like that. This is really
For the assessment of muscle quality quantity rather and so you can get an MRI takes about an hour or so and they will be able to capture an image each individual muscle you have in your body and give you a visual in three dimension feedback of the muscle volume of them which again allows you to compare say all the muscles in your rotator cuff to each other compare the one of the right side of the left side front side back side, etc. Etc.
These are available
throughout at least America right now in a number of MRI facility.
At ease it is quite expensive still for the average consumer and it's not usable in available again worldwide.
So if you want to go to go
after gold standard, that would probably be your best bet if that's
not available or you're more interested in something that can be used
anywhere. You have a couple of other
options and those would be things like your appendicular
muscle mass measurement or your fat free mass now. Both of those metrics can be used to create what's called an index and a second here. I'm going to tell you what some of those standard numbers are
Those are widely available based on your age or sex to be able to get an idea of where you should be at on those scales. But quickly when I say appendicular what I'm talking about is basically how much muscle do you have in the appendices? So your arms and legs now differs from your fat free mass index and it's important for me to point out that's not necessarily representative of your total amount of skeletal muscle that actually can be measured in other ways and would be a separate idea. So what I mean by that is when you think about your
Body, if you want to globally say, okay, we're going to bucket everything in to the amount of fat. I have and the amount of non-fat I have that's not necessarily only muscle and includes things like water muscle glycogen bone minerals and things like that.
And so it's actually a pretty decent estimate of how much muscle you have but not nearly
as precise and specific as again some sort of MRI imaging could give you
now in order to
appropriately calculate these values the best way is if you can get yourself into a dexa
And or something like that, those are traditionally 100 to 200 dollars or so available in America and plenty of other countries worldwide.
So a little
bit less challenging and certainly more cost friendly than the previous MRI stuff but not free either and so still maybe outside of your cost range.
If you want to take a step below that most
home scales come with the ability to use what's called Bia. And so this is effectively going to tell you your body fat percentage you can
Is that in combination with your height and get a rough estimate of your fat free mass index again. Once you go down in the scale scientific accuracy, you start to lose some Fidelity of
measurement, but for a lot of people
that exchange of cost difficulty accessibility might be worth it, especially if you're just looking to see if your clothes if you're trying to see whether or not you broke a world record. We probably need to go a little more accurate
method, but for those of you that are just trying to get a basic understanding of Mi significantly.
Sold am I? Okay. Where am I roughly at? Those are absolutely fine metrics to take an exam
fat free mass index or FM. Mine is probably the most
established metric to look at here. So I'm going to focus mostly on that one
interesting enough. There is no fundamental
way to calculate this. There's a lot of nuance that can go into this that can alter your numbers and a decent amount of way. So it's important
not to confuse you even more but I
do need to add that that is not a simple maybe as one would would hope you're
hydration status on the day and other factors like that can alter it enough. So again, if you're looking for high Precision, maybe pay attention that but if you're just trying to get an estimate, this is still going to give you phenomenal numbers. There's also hundreds of papers published on this and so you have a great scientific background to give you that context of where you're at as an incredibly rough number when we're looking at that FMI, so that fat free mass index score for men. I generally want to see them coming in at over 20 and for women something like sixteen point five.
Again, this will scale Up and Down based on age and you can look at a
chart to see exactly what your dad I'll give you some examples here in a second,
but that's kind of the collective number. I want to look at now to give you a little bit of context to what some of the gold standards are
here. Total amount of muscle mass. We can have a little more fun. I want to take you all the way back to 1995. There's this classic study that came out and it basically said, all right, the average gym goer is something like the neighborhood of 21.5 222 on an FM. I score
and the
Actually theorize at that point that the only way to
get past a score of 25 was to be to use exoticness hormones and again specifically testosterone. Now another reminder here. I'm not encouraging or promoting the use of hormones, especially outside of working directly with your doctor. But this is what they're establishing what they're trying to identify is. What is the genetic limitation of muscle another how much muscle can a normal human have
outside of using executive hormones and the answer they came up with was 24.8 or what sort of roughly 25 that's
been disputed since then, but that gave us a
ballpark and understanding so when you're looking at your scores
if you realize
that your you know, certainly, you know in the 2425 area this probably
puts you close to what normal people are going to
be outside of again exaggerated hormone
use but there's a lot of
examples where people below way past this of course, we never
Barely know if somebody had used things like testosterone the past but I'm going to make a pretty good argument for you right now that it's absolutely possible to go past that in fact, if you look at someone like Arnold Schwarzenegger and his Heyday kind of at his Peak Performance his FM my score was about 28. Now. We obviously know Arnold has his history and past with exaggerated hormone
use and so that still doesn't really change the case of saying well, can we get past this 25 marker?
Naturally. Well, let's look at some of the evidence here
to give you a little bit of scoring context here. If you're at 23 and a
half. Remember 25 is the established limit what we think to be natural Arnold was at 28 with extensive steroid use if you're at 23 and a half for most men this is going to put you in the 99th percentile. So already puts you in a phenomenal position. However, there are data initially the first set of studies came out in sumo wrestlers.
And now these are individuals that were well over 400 pounds giving them something in the neighborhood of 260 270 pounds of lean body mass. Now again, that doesn't mean muscle mass lean body mass is including bone and water and things like that. But still, you know two hundred sixty or so pounds of lean body mass is a ton to move around in your system
this gave them an FM my score of about 35 now. There's actually a famous case report that came out of one of the best powerlifters of all time Ray Williams.
Now, of course, his name wasn't used in the paper, but effectively everyone knows who that was and he scored a 41
on that metric which is tells you
how enormous and incredible athlete that Ray is again don't know about his story used in the past doesn't matter. What I'm trying to show you right now is just what is the human potential for total amount of muscle mass? We can put on a frame
now the magical number that tends to be thrown around here in
terms of
Amount of lean body mass one can have is somewhere in the neighborhood of 110 to 120 kilos translation
230
pounds or so something like that. The example, I gave you earlier, of course a little bit higher than that, but that tends to be the kind of spot we can be as you start manipulating body weight hydration status what that does to muscle glycogen pulling water. This is something again this can alter this number sort of day-to-day. So it's a little
bit harder to interpret but that's the kind of number
we're going to put in terms of what there was this.
Put you in in terms of absolute muscle mass
probably 60 kilos or so and the reason is maybe we'll back up
one quick second lean body mass of let's just say 120 kilos. It's kind of the upper limit will be thinking about
well about 50 for some between
45 to 50 percent of that will actually be skeletal muscle. And so if you have 120 20 kilos of lean body mass and half of that as muscle, this would give you the stratosphere of about 60 kilos.
Or so of total amount of muscle mass. That's about the upper limit of what you'll ever see a human can have obviously the numbers I'm giving you here are all and men for women that number gets significantly lower but that's just kind of gives you a ballpark of how much skeletal muscle one could have how much lean muscle they would have and then what their corresponding F f/a my score would be there's two other things. I want to point out before we move on
and the first is dealing with a symmetry now, we're going to talk a lot
about functionally symmetries. So when
Muscle is stronger than the other and vice versa. But the actual amount of muscle Size Matters as well. We don't have as much concrete data on
this and it also depends on your activity. So for example, if
you are an athlete of any kind
it may behoove you to have some amount of
asymmetry. This allows you to create things like rotation and torque to be able to throw a baseball 100 miles per hour or to hit a golf ball 400 yards or whatever the case may be,
but that said there's clearly a point in which a symmetry within a muscle
from side to side front to back.
Etc is detrimental
functionality is different in terms of quantity right now. Some folks are going to
say 5% others might cut that line in about 10% So if you were to get an analysis and look at say how much muscle you had from a dexa scan your able to identify maybe your right leg versus your left leg or something like that.
You would want to keep an eye on about that 10% anything more than that is probably going to be a flag that there's some sort of
issue or a potential issue in the future. So total amount of muscle mass.
If I'm eyes a great way to go about it asymmetry pay attention to more than about
10% and a lot in the second thing. I wanted to point out here.
Is what does it look like when I gained too much muscle
and want to be clear here and I believe that we've showed that in the recent paper we
published in that is
excessive amounts of skeletal mass is not detrimental in any way so there does not seem to be an upper limit where it actually starts compromising your physical health.
Now, of course, if you've gained the muscle from
non-exercise venues, like what we saw in our nhanes data based on our recent paper, then that's not great. So an example here would be if you've
It gained a bunch of body fat and because of that some muscle came along for the ride. That would be what we consider be muscle that I got a crude from non exercise habits. This is not going to be advantageous to your health.
But if it is a crude from
exercise there doesn't seem to be any evidence at all. That suggests. This is - there are some papers out there that I think have made mistakes and identifying that after a certain point an increase in muscle mass is actually negative and again having analyzed some of those things myself and our
But I think we found clear evidence that that is not the case.
There are other practical considerations.
If you've exercised excessively you've done it poorly or other things that would lead to injury of course all those things. Were true. What I'm trying to argue is the simple fact of having additional muscle mass itself is not detrimental to Health in any way can be associated with other things that are bad for you that lead to injury and other metabolic problems, but the excessive amount of muscle mass on its surface is only going to Aid
in both your health and
performance. We're going to make a number of these charts available to you in the show knows but again, please acknowledge that they do vary a little bit from
study to study. So depending on which population was in a
particular paper or
how it was analyzed the values might be a little bit different but you're going to get you pretty close nonetheless. I
want to give you a couple of numbers just to get you started though. Now these work on
percentiles what this means is when I say one percentile that means the lowest amount of muscle mass 99 percentile is the highest
Bviously, as we've been describing you don't want to be low in muscle whether you're an athlete or someone just interested in overall wellness and Health and Longevity higher is better. I actually personally prefer people to be in the 95th percentile
or more, but I'm going to walk you through what this kind of
looks like across the 25th 50th 70th, and then potentially up to 95th percentile for men to be in the 25th percentile your fm. My score would be about 17.9 and women that would be fifteen point one.
Now notice how as you go from the 25th
to 50th percentile again, representing right in the statistical average or right in the middle.
You've gone from four men 17.9
up to 19.1 or so and for women you've gone from 15.1 up to Fifteen point nine or almost 16.
And so these numbers are not going to be huge in
terms of what it looks like on paper, but that it does represent a large change in the total amount of muscle mass you have
If you were to go from that
50th percentile to 75th, you've now gone up to twenty
point four four men
and 16.8 for women.
As I said, I
actually prefer people to be in the 95th percentile or higher because the provides no disadvantage whatsoever and overall health and performance
that's going to look like something like north of 22
for men and north of 18.1 for women.
Of course, if you're extremely ambiguous and you want to challenge right Williams and his record of 41 by all means be my guest and please report back to me if you've accomplished such a
feat FMI is not an intuitive number or score. So if I were to give you an F of M my score that puts you in the 75th percentile, you wouldn't really know what that means. So let me explain to you how that number is calculated and run you through a couple of samples and I'll do it both in the empirical as well as in the metric units. Now we know science works and kilos. So we
Start there, globally when we think about body composition we're thinking about how much muscle do I have versus how much fat
but as I said, it's actually a little more
complicated than that. So if you were to get something like a dexa scan done or even stepped on a scale and that gave you your body fat percentage what it's telling you is what percentage of your overall body weight is fat versus what is lean body mass. And remember that lean mass is not just skeletal muscle to skeletal muscle plus bone and water and things like that. So as a sample calculation
Let's try this. Let's say you are 5 foot 10 and weighed 100 kilos now. I'm picking 100 kilos because it makes the math very easy. And for many of you listening you're going to appreciate the fact that I've made the math somewhat simple for you. So if I were to be 100 kilos in weight and my body fat percentage was 25, that means 25 of those kilos are fat and 75 are non fat as I said earlier. Most people that are decently trained anyways of their lean body mass. So
Between 45 to 50 percent of that is actual skeletal
muscle and so if we were to take that
75 divide that by 2
assuming 50% this would mean you probably have something like
thirty seven point five kilograms of actual muscle in your body and again 25 kilos of
fat if you wanted to calculate your
fm my score from there. All you have to do is go back that lean body mass number so in kg, so in this case
5 and divide that by your height. So how tall you are in meters squared. So if you are 5 foot 10 inches tall, this is 70 inches, which would be about one point seven seven eight meters. So you take one point seven seven eight square that and then you take 75 and divide it by that number. This would produce in this particular case and FMI score of 23.7 pretty decent overall.
You can also intuitive you looked at somebody who's five-foot-ten there to or the hunter kilos and 25 percent body fat. This is an individual with a lot of muscle mass. And so this probably makes sense that they'd be on the upper end of the spectrum.
I'll run to that exact same thing
now in pounds for those of you that prefer that method so 100 kilos would be 220 pounds. So just take the kilos and multiply it by 2 point 2 if you run the exact same equation. So again, assuming 25 percent body fat this would leave you with
In 65 pounds of lean body mass. And fifty five pounds of fat Mass. Take that 165 again love Zoom 50% So we'll divide that by two and you would have eighty two and a half pounds of lean mass. But unless will go back up and you would take that 165-pound number you would need then to convert that to kilograms which means you divide it by two point two, which would put you right back into that 75 Kg number take that divide that by the same units in meters squared of your
height and that would give you that same exact FF on my score. So very easy to convert your body weight in pounds two kilos convert your height in inches to centimeters and then convert that to meters go online Google conversion and we'll do it in two seconds for you and you're able to quickly calculate your FMI Arthur died of intervene, which is a fancy way of saying what interventions do I do? What stimuli do I introduce 28 and muscle growth now? I'm not really going to discuss muscle loss. I don't really see.
Any advantage to doing that so we'll focus on simply augmenting or increasing muscle
mass a couple things to get you started while nutrition is an
important consideration here. I need to make sure that it's completely clear here resistance exercise is by far the greater stimuli of muscle growth relative to nutrition really from this perspective. We need to make sure we have sufficient calories which is to be said as high perchloric. So we need a little bit more calories and we're burning does this stay alive and mostly we need to focus on protein.
Here 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight is a great place to start now. I personally prefer a little bit higher to point 2 grams per kilogram, which is about 1 gram per pound. But actually I believe the science is pretty clear here suggesting that going from one point six two two point two is not really going to increase the amount of muscle. You're you're growing and if it is it's not going to be by much now, so if you prefer to be at 1.6, that's fine higher is absolutely okay as well. And it may Aid in some people in some circumstances were going below.
.6. Seems to reduce
the amount of muscle you can grow. So we want to be the
least that number from a training perspective. You want to start by focusing on your big muscle groups. Now if you have a particular
muscle or group of muscles that you want to increase for any number of reasons say you've identified an asymmetry
have a personal preference you enjoy that more
you just want to have a muscle group or larger for some aesthetic reasons. That's absolutely fine focus on those
but you really shouldn't
omit everything else either.
It's critically important.
Portent to maintain posture and Joint Integrity by ensuring we have adequate muscle surrounding each joint which basically means we need to address each muscle at some point throughout the week. We can
certainly emphasize some more than others. That's no problem whatsoever, but we don't
want to leave big chunks of muscles completely unchallenged that's going to present
problems more likely if not now down the road.
So we also want to challenge these muscles across multiple stimuli.
Inning
exercises. So whether you prefer your body weight machines dumbbells kettlebells or any number of other
strategies. Those are absolutely
fine all are incredibly effective and at the highest level it
actually doesn't really matter that much
which of those strategies you
try because at the end of the day, it's just about stimulating the muscle. However
you go about that is absolutely fine. So you have lots of options there perhaps in a future episode. We'll get into the details and spend the entire discussion on that going over pros and
Cons of those different strategies and
tactics, but for now at the again the most zoomed out level you've got a tremendous
amount of options regarding which exercise you select and which modes and methodologies you do to engage that resistance exercise.
The range of motion is
critical you want to use the largest range of motion. You can while still being safe and protective of both the exercising joint as well as the joint above it and below it. So an example here, let's just say you're interested in
On your quadriceps you want to have a lot of activity over both the knee and
hip joint, but you want to make sure that you're doing though that in a
case in which you're not compromising your low back and say your feet and
so making sure we're protecting
the joints above and below the muscle group is important as well.
So we really want to challenge our
muscles as much as we can in a variety of ways there
in terms of how much to do. The repetitions per set doesn't really
matter such that you can have success in a number of
Them anywhere between safe as low as five repetitions per set all the way up to
30 or more repetitions percent can be equally effective for muscle growth. The total amount of sets per week is probably the bigger determinant from there. You probably want to be in the neighborhood of about 15 to 20 working sets per muscle per week. If you were to break that down, let's say
you were focusing again on your
hamstrings muscles if you did three
sets on day one.
Three sets on day two and three sets on day three that would give you a total of nine working sets per week. That's probably a little bit too low, but if you did to hamstring exercises each day three sets each, that'd be six sets day 16 at State 26 at State 3. And now you're up to close to 18 working sets per month per week rather. That's a pretty good spot to be in lots of things. We could talk about there in terms of advanced athletes and leap but structurally, roughly that's going to put you in the ballpark.
Work that's going to be enough stimulus for most people to grow most of the time
last consideration here is frequency as I sort of alluded to here somewhere between two to
three days per week per muscle group is a great way to go about it Maurice fine as well. If you can handle the recovery
less than two days a week is also theoretically possible. There's excellent research showing one day a week per muscle
group is sufficient amounts to grow muscle.
It does become practically challenging though because now you got to fit all those working sets into a single day and that is challenging both in the length of the
Out as well as house or and how
much damage you create. So what I recommend here is what I call the 72-hour rule which is every 72 hours or so
work each of your muscles to a nice pump or contraction. Remember, we want to
stimulate muscle growth here, but we don't want to annihilate the muscle either excessive fatigue and damage and soreness does not Aid and muscle growth and can actually harm our ability to come back and train again in the next session or even the one following
Which would then reduce our overall total volume
so enough intensity enough difficulty to
stimulate growth but not so much that we completely annihilate it we got to we got to be able to repeat that every 72 hours or so. So again the way I say it take it to a nice pump a nice contraction whatever that means to you and that's going to get a lot of people in it close enough ballpark to Growing muscle. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by Maui Nui venison. Maui Nui venison is my absolute favorite thing to eat.
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form to save up to fifty dollars off your subscription. So now that you have a better understanding of how to identify interpret and then modify the amount of muscle you have let's now talk about the quality of muscle. This is not as straightforward. I can't give you a simple equation or run you through a quick math problem.
Quality means different things to different people
in different scenarios. So rather than try to give you an exhaustive list of all of them, I'll start with just a couple of examples and let you infer on past that
the first thing to consider here is really not specific contractile
properties of an individual muscle,
but collectively how you move now. I'm not going to get into this fully but really quickly. It's important to understand
how an individual moves the quality of that which muscles are using for which muscle group their technique how that is.
Portrayed across the joint is important for all of us again, whether we're in a sporting contacts or just general life. And
so when I'm thinking about yeah, how
much muscle do I have and then also what's the quality that muscle I need to
be thinking about how
that muscle is actually used
as a simple explanation here. I look for four basic things when determining
successfulness of human
movement. If you're in a specific sporting context, you're of course going
to add your own unique flavor. So how I made your league baseball pitcher
moves is going to be quite different.
And then even somebody like a
golfer who are both in rotational asymmetrical Sports
how they move you can expand that even
beyond that to somebody like an NBA player or a pickle baller
all of these coaches and athletes in the individual sports are going to
want to have different muscles move in different fashions in different sequences. I can't get into all those details now, so just
stepping back and thinking globally what are the core principles that are true in
all those examples to me. It's really
four basic elements. The very
first one is range of motion.
Are you able to go through a range of motion in all of your joints that is appropriate for those joints as an example. Your elbow is meant to flex and extend it can rotate internally and externally this would imagine taking your palm of your hand sticking it up in the air and then taking the palm of your hand and sticking it towards the ground internal and external rotation. However, your elbows not meant to
To bend left and right if you want to move your hand in closer to your body or away from your body. You actually have movement of your shoulder joint and so an elbow has a few ranges of motion a shoulder though can go up and down in front and back it can rotate and kind of roll itself internally and so each joint has a different range of motion. It can go through. So can you go through all those range of motions in a way that's appropriate without being too much range of motion.
The second thing we want to pay attention to here is rough
symmetry. Like we've talked about a couple of times
already so symmetry means again. Am I okay moving
front and back within one joint or groups of muscles.
And then how does that compare to the
contralateral or opposite side? So if I can lift my say right shoulder straight out in front of me and I can lift it all the way over my head so that it's pointing directly in the sky, but my left shoulder can only go 80% of the way
then I have some sort of
asymmetry. Is it the front and back so my shoulder
Her on the front side of it is twice the size of the backside of it things like that.
So we want to look at
do I have Global asymmetry, especially when we're doing what is called bilateral movements. So imagine doing like a squat picture a basic air squat or a goblet squat where you're holding an Implement in front of you or you're squatting down like you would do to hold a child or a baby or something like
that in doing that. I would want to be
looking at all of my joints and I would do this one by one. So starting at the ankle joint. I would say. Okay
great.
My ankles go through a full range of motion or they
restricted and then the for causing a movement compensation at the knee or hip or some other joint are they symmetrical is one facing a different direction than the other one does one have more range of motion than the other one, etc. Etc. So that's just one example of how we would look at the range of motion and symmetry within one
joint. The third thing we want to look at is stability. Let's imagine that
same squatting movement. So I want to look at now same
My knee I'm going to ask the same thing cut my knee go through a full range of motion. Is it symmetrical? So is the left knee doing the same thing that the right knee is doing
and then thirdly now is it stable? So is the joint able to go up and down under control without excessive wobbling or shaking or any other movement pattern that I'm not intending to do to me that's stability. Really you're talking now a combination of motor control and strength, but we can globally think of that as is the joint stable when I'm asking it to be stable.
When movement is really two things it is asking a joint or muscle or muscle groups to move in a way that we want and also the same time not move in ways that we don't want
both of those are critical to moving. Well the third and final element here is simple awareness.
So is the individual aware of what their joint is doing a lot of times movement dysfunction like this is simply somebody not knowing their foot is not supposed to point in that direction. Somebody not realizing that one side is
aimed at another Direction than the other side. So simply people letting people know that their joint is not supposed to be doing that. That's not a proper pattern. It is a
critical component. So from the onset
and again, we can maybe have further discussions about this in future episodes moving well needs to have those four components at each joint throughout our body
if we can do that we can set aside the injury
risk and stuff and again talk about that later and we
can move on to really perform it
now when I'm
Asking about a muscle or muscle groups to perform. I cared about three things. Can it be fast? Can it be strong and Canada have what's called muscular endurance? This can be expressed over a concentric muscle action and eccentric or an isometric. So generally when we say con Centric we're thinking about shortening of the muscle length. So imagine doing a biceps curl when you're actually taking the the dumbbell and moving it closer towards your shoulder or your
Or face that muscle or muscle group is shortening. That'd be the concentric portion. If you got all the way to the top or say halfway up or any range part of the range of motion and you stop the movement and held it there that would be isometric.
And then if you lengthen that back
down all the way to the bottom that would be the eccentric portion of
it. And so I want you to have the ability to be fast
and any of those ranges emotion or any of those muscle actions, I want it to be able to be strong and of those muscle actions,
but then I want
Tablet ability to repeat that multiple
times this could mean repeating holding the position. So if I could go to say halfway up I can flex and hold it there. I wanted to be able to hold it for as long as I need based on the specific muscle or the movement. I'm trying to do
or be able to perform multiple repetitions. If we're looking at basically any style of human movement. It's going to need to be
fast. It's going to have to be
strong and it has to
display some semblance of muscular endurance.
So if
I summarize all of this the way to investigate whether or not you have sufficient muscle
quality has two unique Parts part
one is understanding. Do you move
well now that definition of moving well really changes depending on the sport or the context the way that your hamstrings need to contract for 100 meter Sprinter are quite different than somebody who wants to just be able to hike all day or are cross-country skier or anything else.
So that is context specific but I gave you an example of four things that are generally pretty
Universal regardless your muscles need to go through an appropriate range of motion. They need to be
symmetrical they need to be stable and you need to be aware of what they're doing if you're where the context
so you have a specific sporting
outcome, then you can lean on a
coach or an individual in that area. If not,
there are plenty of global movement screening tools. So these are different tests. You can do
that. I'll allow you to understand a basic human movement pattern many of them to choose from we could probably put some in the show.
Links for you. There are some nuances within plenty of them
but something like that should be chosen.
You have a lot of options. I would strongly recommend the picking at least one thing from the how do I move column in order to investigate is your muscle functioning
appropriately the second thing then is some sort of performance metric. So this could be something simple like a leg press machine or more complex like a single leg
squat or anywhere in between and within that you want to identify whether or not the muscle is
Capable of moving fast moving strong and can repeat that performance over multiple
repetitions helping you interpret your score on a movement screen is
really challenging without having a lot more individual context.
So what I'd like to do is give you some more straightforward and specific examples
from the metrics of speed power and
strength in sticking with the theme of the show. I want to give you some context as to
what the best in the history of the world look like for muscle speed power and
Strength and my opinion
no one typifies muscle speed more so than 100 meter sprinters.
This is the quintessential best test in the world of maximum
velocity. And so when we look at the best to names jump off the chart, of course from the female perspective. This is Flo-Jo
the American Sprinter and then from the male perspective. No one comes close to Usain Bolt. So how fast were these two individuals? Well a little bit of context here it took about 40 years and
Levin individual men to
drop the world record in 100 meter dash by about two-tenths of a second from 9.95. 29.74
Bolt did nearly the same thing all by himself. He dropped the world record by
point one six seconds all the way down to nine point five eight seconds over the course of his career.
So he himself represented almost the
same progress is the entire field made in 40 years.
That's how much faster he was than
He else ever before him and still to this day. No one's come even
close to matching that feet. In fact, only two
people ever have run 100-meter dash in under nine
point seven seconds, which
means Usain Bolt is over a tenth of a second faster than anyone ever in the
history of the competition. Now, there's actually a lot of interesting people who try to understand and examine why he's so much faster than anyone else. There was an interesting paper that was entirely speculative was not from his team but some biomechanics
Researchers tried to figure out what would be possible for him to do that? And the best that they could estimate was that his fast-twitch fibers, which we talked about earlier in the show are about
17 percent faster than other
world-class caliber sprinters. Again. This is entirely speculation. We don't know if that's true. There's no data or evidence of biopsies. That's public record of Usain Bolt. Although I've been on record for many many times saying I would love to take that biopsy if you're listening you say,
but of course
Some of the magic that goes in a sports performance is we don't
always get to know why people are how they are
now something else. I find extremely interesting about this is what happens to maximum speed as we age
and the reason I'm drawing this out is we talked earlier about how preserving these fast twitch muscle fibers is critically important
and if you look across world
records as we age in speed activities versus strength versus endurance a clear pattern
Pattern
emerges people drop maximum speed
capability way faster as they age then they drew strength and then certainly endurance. In fact the world records in most endurance based activities
really don't change
from folks who are 35 years old to 40 or so and when they start dropping at 45 to 50 plus it is fairly small until we get to Advanced age
speed on the other hand falls off a cliff almost
immediately as an example. I told you Usain.
Record just a second ago. Nine point five eight seconds.
If you go to the first age
category, which is 35 years old the world record jumps up to nine point eight seven seconds, and that's just at 35 years old. If you're an endurance sport that actually might be in your actual Prime
still it gets even further
faster as
we go to 40 years old that record jumps 29.93 and then at 45 it is a whopping ten point seven seconds. So you're talking about now.
Ian of well over a second by just going to the age of 45
to this date. I'm not aware of any human
ever running 100-meter dash in under 10 seconds over the age of 40 years old.
So extraordinarily challenging as we go on
this to Rattle off a few additional numbers
every five years or so you add on to age you're going to look at an
additional half a second or Soul increasing your 40-yard dash time. For those of you that are curious the world record for a 100 year old male
is twenty six point nine nine.
S. In fact the highest number I've
seen was just a few years ago a 105 year old Ran a 34.5 second 100 meter dash.
So I'm not sure where you're at. You're welcome to go out and time yourself on this. Please.
Don't tear your hamstring maybe warm up and try it a few times before you go full maximum speed
but I hope most of you can come in
under that thirty four point five seconds. If not, rest assured. There's a hundred five-year-old out there somewhere. We'll beat you in 100 meter sprint, and that's embarrassing.
Coming back to the female side Florence Griffith Joyner or Flo-Jo as I referred to her earlier still holds the world record at a time of ten point four nine
seconds and to give you a little bit of context of how dominant that was. It is still the record some decades later and I
believe there's only one other female to ever run below a 10 point 6. So
tremendous speed on her
part, we can play the same game here as age goes
on although it is a little bit less dramatic than the men
the world.
Cook for 35 year old is held by a still current and
competing star shelling and Frazier price at ten point six two seconds
as you go up to the 40 year old you're talking about now again a similar half a second or so jump to
11 .09
seconds. And then it continues really on from there all the way to the end there. You've got a 100 year
old coming in at a smoking 39.6
two seconds and then of course a 100 five-year-old a little bit slower at a time of 1 minute.
It and two point nine five seconds. So as I mentioned
if you're a woman out there and you can't run a 100-yard dash in under a minute again. There's a hundred five-year-old out there who will smoke you running 100 meters as fast as you can may not be the best test for many of you out there.
And so while I think
that speed is critically important and it is different than power
many of you could probably get away with
just a simple test of power and you have a lot of options that are more realistic and probably a little safer for many of
If you're an athlete or competitor of some type a lot of ways, you can go about this. Of course,
you can use things like a force plate which is an incredibly expensive and fancy scale that can tell you exactly how much force and how much time it takes you to push into the ground other options are just simply doing something like a vertical jump test or a broad jump test
a very very easy rule of thumb
that I like for the broad
jump and
this is again a horizontal jump. So how far out in front of yourself. Can you jump is can you jump your height? So if you're six feet tall, can you jump six feet?
Feet high level athletes are going to be looking more like 9 to 10 or even 11 feet and that jump but a basic metric for the average person is can you jump your
height vertical jump is actually my favorite way. You can do this easily with this a tape measure and put up
put a mark on the wall tape how high you can jump measure it that way.
As far as I know and actually I checked
around with a bunch of colleagues on this.
There's no scientifically verified world record for this Guinness
has their own records scientific Publications little bit different and so actually called a friend of mine Paul Febreze Paul is a world-renowned basketball trainer has coached and worked with some of the best basketball players in the world and I asked him and he told me basically in his opinion 48 inches or so is a highest he's ever seen. Yeah. This would be a standing vertical jump if you were to get an approach say maybe two
Three steps to run in you might be able to jump into the low 50s, but he doesn't really think anybody has eclipsed the 50 inch Mark in terms of standing vertical jump.
There's not extensive
evidence on vertical jump height by age. And so that's a little bit more challenging to give you.
So what I would say is again focus on something more like that broad jump test.
Another option is to use machines like a proteus. Now you may have this available depending on where you train at your local gym or clinic somewhere and these are machine.
That allow you to test your power in a number of different planes and this is really interesting because companies like this are starting to collect normative data on average people for power testing and I don't have anything like that to report you right now. And so what's going to be hopefully interesting in the coming years as they start to release and publish these results. I will have normative values based on age and sex for things that are not just vertical jump base not all of you can do that. You may have say ankle knee or back injuries that don't
Now that or it's not realistic or for some other
reason and so being able to
identify and test your power and things like rotation and vertical movements that don't require jumping and Landing are things that I hopefully am able to share with you in the coming years once those data become available. Now
technically the highest power output seen in the literature come
from weight lifting or what's more effectively known as Olympic weightlifting. So
both the athletes themselves as well as the movements so the
snatch clean and a jerk and variations of this
Produce extraordinary amounts of power the
problem is if you're not extremely technically
sufficient in these activities. You can't really test your power with them because you'll be limited so much by your Technique, we won't get a true expression of your power. So if you're familiar with those movements, they are a fantastic way to globally test your power. If not, you might want to opt for something more like that vertical or broad jump test. So to round us out here, let's talk about strength. There's a lot of different things I could pull up here, but the most direct plane measure of
Lutz strength come from the sport of powerlifting now not to be confused with Olympic lifting. This is the sport of a one repetition maximum in the deadlift bench, press and back squat.
There's a lot of different federations and rules and all that and so to
not bog down and unnecessary information.
I'm going to give you the numbers that represent What's called the
equipped category, which is to say the highest amount of equipment possible. What's just the most amount somebody's ever lifted. There are subcategories like
Raw which says you can't have certain equipment like belts and wraps and straps and special shirts and things like that. You could debate whether or not you find one more relevant or interesting the other one. I don't really care. I just want to share with you the most amount ever lifted any human without some arbitrary rule that these organizations have set now in powerlifting you get to find your one repetition maximum of those three exercises.
You can also combine them together to get a total. So from the men's perspective there have only been two
ever to cross the
Thousand-pound barrier such that between the three exercises squat deadlift invents. They totaled more than 3,000 pounds
the two gentlemen Danny Thompson and Dave Hoff Hoff
having the current world record at 3103 pounds. Now my longtime friend AJ Roberts actually might have a better resume here. He totaled 2855 pounds, but did it at probably 30 or 50 or so pounds lower than these other two gentlemen, I'll let them all figure that out, but nonetheless
Is almost 3,000 pounds
across three different
exercises?
If you want to go through the
exercises individually we have different people with world records are so the
squat right now current world record
is from Nathan Baptists
at an astounding 1311 pounds
again friends. You heard that right? This is a 1,300-pound back
squat from the bench. Press was this was actually just recently broken Jimmy Kolb did this and this is this is unbelievable. The world record is now 13 hundred and fifty
pounds.
The previous world record. He broke by almost 200 pounds. I don't know if this is more impressive than Usain
Bolt but hard to argue when you beat a world record by an additional 200 pounds, like simply unbelievable that strength accomplishment.
Another actually fun thing to note here is I believe 5th or 6th on that list is a gentleman named Bill Gillespie at a
total of eleven hundred and twenty nine pounds. He actually
also did this pretty recently and the fun.
Art about Bill is two things one. He's 62 years old.
You heard that right 62 years old and just I think last year bench-pressed. Well over 1,100 pounds. The other thing interesting about Bill is he was actually one of my first mentors When I Was An undergraduate
student bill was he had strength initiative coach of the University of Washington. I'm from that area. And so I was fortunate enough to beg build a let me come up and show him one day and he said fine you can do that, but I'm training and so I showed up there probably 30 minutes late was
beyond embarrassed.
I thought
don't even go in go home. This is so ridiculous that you showed up this late for a guy like that. He was the kindest sweetest guy ever put in his mouth piece had his training logs out there and proceeded to do one of the most impressive training sessions I've ever seen while giving me guidance of being a strength additional coach. I'll also never forget. I'm Bill looked at me now in context you can imagine what Bill looks like at the time myself. I'm a five foot eight. Probably 180 pounds of the time college football player, but still incredibly.
Be small compared to him and I will never forget the words. You said to me it made a huge impact on my life. I asked him about being a Collegiate strengthening coaches. I thought this is what I want to do with my life. And he looked at me straight lie and directly and said you're a dime a dozen. You
don't matter.
And he didn't say it with hate or hurt at all. It was the kindest
most direct and helpful thing I've ever heard it changed the trajectory of my life and it made me realize if I wanted to make it as a strength auditioning coach. I was going to have to do a lot more than a just show up with my exercise science
degree the third and final exercise. The deadlift was set by the famous Andy Bolton who I believe is the only person still to this day to ever deadlift more than a thousand pounds at 1008.
Now from the female side of the equation you have some
equally impressive. If not more impressive numbers
the world record total. There's only been two women ever to cross the
2,000-pound barrier. That would be Becca Swanson and Leah reichman
Swanson currently owns that
record at two thousand and fifty pounds the
individual records the squat Lea holds that record at £925. I don't know when she's going to cross a thousand but I keep
watching to see when it's going to happen. That would be
Just absolutely insane to see and good luck to you Lea on that
one the bench, press Rianne Miller currently holds that record at 650 pounds. And then the deadlift is currently set
by Becca Swanson at 694 pounds.
So now that you know what that gold standard really is for strength. What are some more realistic
numbers for the average person
for men. I like to see about a one
to one ratio for the bench press such that you should be able to bench press your body weight. So a 200-pound person should be aiming for something like 200 pounds.
Dress for women it's about .6 upper body strength is significantly less and women in general.
And so you're gonna have to scale that down a little bit
more
now for the back squat. It's hard to give you numbers because it is so technically demanding. I think it's easier to
give you something more like a leg press value for men. You want to shoot for something like double body weight and for women something like one and a half times or so
so that hopefully gives you a little bit of
context of the numbers to go after last thing I want to add here.
Is actually something we'll talk about a lot more in the future and that is grip strength is incredibly important and a great insight into your overall health for both athletes and non-athletes
easy to test. There's a number of
ways that you can grab handgrip dynamometers. They're cheap and available almost anywhere
for men just again a rough number here. I like to see individuals over 45 kg and then for women over 28 kilograms or so another thing to keep
The Mind here is a symmetry really matters. Now. This is the first test. I've given you what you can
isolate, you know your left side from your right side
really important to test your grip strength in both recent papers have come
out suggesting that an
asymmetry of more than 10% specifically increases your risks of sarcopenia
and heightened innervation of muscle groups by 2.6 Sevenfold and
so we'll talk about that more in detail later, but really really important you want to
Understand
whether or not you have major asymmetries in strength between both your sides
again some asymmetries, probably
okay, maybe even advantageous for
some sporting
applications, but asymmetries outside of that are potentially concerning if
you're unfamiliar with that term sarcopenia describes
the excessive loss of muscle mass with age.
We know there's going to be some
sort of natural decline in the amount of muscle mass you have. In
fact on rough average
men will lose about 40 percent of our muscle mass.
From the ages of 25 to
80 so we know it's going to
happen. We've talked about how strength training and are adequate nutrition can reduce that loss of muscle but some of its going to happen. So
sarcopenia really refers
to the excessive or additional loss of muscle beyond the normal loss with aging. So those strengths standards. I gave you our rough guidelines,
but I want to get as strong as possible. I don't necessarily
need you to be squatting or benching 1,300 pounds, but I don't want you to stop it body weight either so
outside, of course.
Leading to injury and getting hurt which is something we don't want to do.
There is no disadvantage to getting stronger. I've tried to make that
argument with muscle mass earlier in the
show, but I can really make that heavily with
strength. In fact, if you were to compare the two muscle mass the muscle strength muscle strength is by far a stronger predictor of both how long you're going to live as well as how well you will live within those years.
That's number one number two getting stronger.
Continues to reduce your risk of developing things like
sarcopenia or late onset dementia. In fact one particular study of note here. This study
had around 500 thousand or so individuals pulled from the UK biobank, which is a similar setup as what we've got here in America that I talked about earlier in our nhanes data base. Now, they study these individuals across nine years and during that time around 4,000 or so, the individuals developed dementia. And so it's interesting as they're able to go back and say, okay what unique
Dr. Essex existed prior to the dementia as well as after the onset and how does that compare to the individuals who didn't have the dementia set in in this one certain study and just one study. So we want to be cautious of over-interpreting here. What they found was 30% of the dementia cases were attributed to having low grip strength, and this was independent of a number of other important confounders.
We will talk about these things more in future episodes and I don't want you to get overly concerned with that specific result or those specific numbers. I just wanted to highlight though, the critical importance of getting stronger really helps overall Global health and what's further more interesting about this paper and many many many others is there doesn't seem to be an upper limit. So when you continue to increase strength you continue to reduce risk of all-cause mortality dementia and similar other things.
And so we don't see this really
even an asymptote. We don't see a tapering off of
benefit. We just continue to see
Rises and improvements in Risk reduction factors Hazard risk mortality risk and number of other things important to overall health when we continue to get stronger whether we're talking about grip strength leg strength or anything else
and so it just right now according to the
data across again multiple areas.
Just continuing to get stronger
seem to continually benefit human health and performance.
At this point we can now move into our final
I which is intervene. In other words.
What do you do to improve your muscle quality? I'm going to give you four big areas to focus on the very first one is similar
to what we talked about for muscle quantity. And that is you want to train all of your joints through all their range of motion.
One thing people fail to realize is it's good to be strong, but you need to be strong and fast and have good endurance over the entire range of the motion. You're going to be put in a position that's likely where the muscle needs to contract.
Shortened when it's extended and many other positions and so we want to train that
somehow across multiple range of motion. The
first is similar to we talked about with muscle quantity and that is all ranges of motion. You want to be strong fast and have great endurance
when your muscles are both shortened when they're
extended and when they're in various positions, as
always we don't ever want to put a joint into a bad position and then we definitely don't want to load that a contract that
but as much as we can we want to force human
movement and a high
quality through a large range of
motion. The second one here is being intentional. So where this
differs then say the muscle size issue
is muscle quality is about eliciting
an improvement in human movement, whether this means we're more efficient whether we're producing more
power or speed we've got to move in a certain way. So now we're talking about a quality that extends outside of the muscle itself and into a human movement. And so we want to be
We intentional about how we're moving our
technique our Rhythm our timing our Tempo.
What should we moving? What should be relaxed? What should be contracting is all critically important to moving better. If you ask any sprinting coach, they're going to talk about things like Rhythm
and timing and Tempo
and what they're really talking
about is this stuff
how this applies to everyone else is simply understanding when I'm trying to
contract say my pecs or my shoulders for a bench press.
What
should my glutes be doing? Should they be contracted on the way? Should it be
totally awesome relaxed to the be
halfway things like that. So paying attention to your movement quality is the fastest way for most people to actually move
faster and move stronger improve technique
first and then chase
after improving maximal capacity of the actual muscle fiber and tissue. The
third is in making sure you're balancing movement planes and posture. So if you want to get a better squat make sure that your
boots aren't significantly stronger than your hamstrings or the your adductors and your groin in the muscles that kind of pull your knees together aren't significantly weaker. You will only ever be as strong and as fast as your weakest link in that movement chain, so ensuring you don't have anything grossly behind something else and that you're training yourself so that the muscles move appropriately think about it this way.
There are some muscles and joints that are meant to be
stable and others that are meant to be movers and they tend to stack in an every other one fashion such as this I gave examples of the knee and the hip earlier
the ankle is meant to be highly mobile and to move a lot the knee is meant to be stable. So if the knee is stable this allows the ankle to move a
lot and then the opposite direction will be the hip so you want a highly mobile hip a highly stable knee so you can have a highly mobile foot.
Going above that since the
hips are mobile. You want the low back and the lumbar spine to be stable so that the thoracic and kind of mid back spine can be
mobile so that your shoulder joints and your neck can be stable. This allows then the shoulders to be mobile the elbows to be stable and the wrist
to be nice and mobile
now, it is more complicated than that. But really at the highest level that is a nice summary of how the muscle actions
are supposed to work if you think about that in general contacts,
It's going to keep you pretty safe and it's going to allow you to move. Well, lastly then
is what I call the three to five rule.
So the 325 rule applies to strength power and speed. What a roughly means is this choose three to five exercises do three to five repetitions
for three to five sets rest for 3 to 5 minutes in between each set and repeat that three to five times per week. So
at the lowest level this could mean three
three sets
of three repetitions three days a week of three exercises. This would be a pretty low volume. But because of that that would allow you to go really really heavy or too really high-intensity. You're gonna have a lot of recovery not going to stimulate a lot of muscle growth won't stimulate hardly any
muscular endurance, but could be used if you're trying
to maximize the recovery ability or the strength aspect going higher on that Spectrum say five sets of five of five exercises five.
Is a week we'll get closer to the hypertrophy or muscle growth and of the spectrum would give you a little bit more muscular endurance and would be a lot more volume for those individuals who are higher training status
for muscular endurance. You can add any number of things number more repetitions per
set and more sets less recovery in between sets or anything else like that
draining do a little bit of fatigue is a pretty
easy way to think about most grand Arts of course exercise science is an
Higher scientific field it gets far more complicated than that, but that is a rough idea of how to
intervene to
change the quality of contraction of which your muscles can go through. So
to wrap everything up today. We
talked a lot about skeletal muscle. We went over how it actually works what it's made of why in my opinion it is the most important organ in the entire body and deserves more credit and attention. We talked about why you want to make sure that it is functioning at the highest level possible. This means both a
quality of
So functionality contractile properties how much force it can produce how fast it is and other things like that as well as the quantity of it how much muscle you have in general.
We went into a little bit of the micro
Anatomy. So the difference between fast twitch fibers and slow twitch fibers and why it's important that you pay particular attention to high Force activities in order to preserve those fast-twitch fibers regardless of whether or not you're an athlete or a person interested just in longevity and overall Wellness. So from there we talked about
The three eyes the first being investigate so identifying whether or not you have enough muscle and how its functioning in terms of power and speed and so on the next I of course was interpretation. So letting you know, whether the amount of muscle and the strength and power you have is good great close to some of our world records whether you're male or female or maybe not quite as high as you think and then lastly to intervene. So what do you do about it? What are some protocols and things you
Do it from a lifestyle perspective to improve the both muscle quality and quantity. I hope you found this initial discussion of skeletal muscle interesting and useful now when I say
initial as for a
reason, I have a lot more to tell you about skeletal muscle, but we're gonna have to save that for future episodes.
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