How to Exercise for Strength Gains & Hormone Optimization | Dr. Duncan French

In this episode, I talk to Dr. Duncan French, Ph. D., the Vice President of Performance at the UFC Performance Institute and a world-class performance specialist. We discuss specific resistance (weight) training regimens for increasing testosterone in men and women and how to vary mechanical loads and rest between sets and workouts to optimize hormone output and training results. We also discuss how stress-induced "catecholamines" can increase testosterone or decrease it, depending on duration and mindset. And we discuss specific cold- and heat- therapies for increasing resilience, reducing inflammation, heat shock proteins and more. We discuss nutrition for training and how to match nutrition to training goals and metabolic flexibility. We discuss mental focus and how long to train for skill development. Finally, we discuss how mixed martial arts and the UFC Performance Institute are a template for exploring human performance more generally. This episode is intended for anyone interested in athletic and mental performance: athletes, students, and recreational exercisers and includes both science and many practical tools people can apply in their own training. Read the full show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://athleticgreens.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/hubermanlab Waking Up: https://wakingup.com/huberman Momentous: https://livemomentous.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Dr. Duncan French 00:02:44 Sponsors: AG1, LMNT & Waking Up 00:05:44 Duncan’s Background in Exercise Science 00:11:45 How Certain Exercises Increase Testosterone 00:16:22 What Kind of Training Increases Testosterone & Growth Hormone? 00:20:19 Intensity: Mechanical Load; Volume: Metabolic Load; Inter-set Rest Periods 00:25:25 Training Frequency & Combining Workout Goals 00:29:35 How Stress Can Increase or Decrease Testosterone 00:36:55 Using Cold Exposure for Mindset, Anti-Inflammation, Muscle-Growth 00:46:55 Skill Development 00:50:05 Why Hard Exercise Creates Brain Fog: Role of Nutrition 00:53:55 Low-Carbohydrate Versus All-Macronutrient Diets on Performance 00:56:15 Ketones & Brain Energy, Offsetting Brain Injury; Spiking Glucose During Ketosis 00:59:13 Metabolic Efficiency, Matching Nutrition to Training, “Needs Based Eating” 01:05:00 Duncan’s Work with Olympic Athletes, NCAA, UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) 01:08:00 Why UFC & MMA (Mixed-Martial Arts) Are So Valuable for Advancing Performance 01:12:40 Voluntarily Switching Between Different States of Arousal 01:14:30 Heat, Getting Better at Sweating, Heat Shock Proteins, Sauna 01:20:12 Using Rotating 12-Week Training Programs; Logging Objective & Subjective Data 01:24:07 Surprising & Unknown Aspects of The UFC and UFC Performance Institute 01:27:45 Conclusions, Zero-Cost Support, Sponsors, Supplements, Instagram Disclaimer & Disclosures Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

• 0:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Duncan French as my guest on the Huberman Lab Podcast. Dr. French is the Vice President of Performance at the UFC Performance Institute, and he has over 20 years of experience working with elite professional and Olympic athletes. Prior to joining the UFC, French was the Director of Performance Science at the University of Notre Dame, and he has many, many quality, peer-reviewed studies to his name, exploring, for instance, how the particular order of exercise, whether or not one performs endurance exercise prior to resistance training, or vice versa, how that impacts performance

• 0:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  of various movements and endurance training protocols, as well as the impact on hormones such as testosterone, estrogen, and some of the stress hormones such as cortisol. He's also done fascinating work exploring how neurotransmitters, things like dopamine and epinephrine, also called adrenaline, can impact hormones, and how hormones can impact neurotransmitter release. What's particularly unique about Dr. French's work is that he's figured out specific training protocols that can maximize, for instance, testosterone output, or reduce stress hormone output, in order to maximize the effects of training in the short term and in the long term. So today, you're going to learn a lot of protocols, whether or not you're into resistance training or endurance training.

• 1:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  You will learn, for instance, how to regulate the duration of your training and the type of training that you do in order to get the maximum benefit from that training over time. So whether or not you are somebody who just exercises recreationally for your health, whether or not you're an amateur or professional athlete, or whether or not you're just trying to maximize your health through the use of endurance and/or resistance training. Today's discussion will have a wealth of takeaways for you. There are only a handful of people working at the intersection of elite performance, mechanistic science, and that can do so in a way that leads to direct, immediately applicable protocols that anybody can benefit from. Dr. French also provides some incredibly important insights about the direction that

• 2:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  sport and exercise are taking in the world today and their applications towards performance and health. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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• 4:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  And now my conversation with Dr. Duncan French. Duncan French, great to see you again.

• 4:45Speaker 07

  Likewise, likewise, thank you. I don't often have many Stanford professors in the Performance Institute, so I'm really excited.

• 4:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, well, this place is amazing and you have a huge role in making it what it is. The reason I'm so excited to talk with you is that you're one of these rare beasts that you have been involved in human performance and athletic performance at the collegiate level. You are obviously very involved in MMA now and the UFC Performance Institute. And you also had the fortunate experience, I like to think, of doing a PhD in, what exactly was the PhD in?

• 5:24Speaker 07

  It was exercise physiology.

• 5:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Exercise physiology. So you're familiar also with designing studies, control groups, all the sorts of things that, in my opinion anyway, are kind of lacking from the internet, social media version of exercise science, which is that people throw out all sorts of ideas about how people should be training, what they should be doing and eating and not eating and doing. And certainly, science doesn't have all the answers, but I just think it's so rare to find somebody that's at the convergence of all those different fields. And so I have a lot of questions for you today that I'm sure the audience are going to be really interested in.

• 5:59Speaker 07

  Well, listen, I mean, I appreciate that. It's very humbling. And yeah, I've worked hard to get to where I am. But I've always tried to be authentic and I think authenticity comes alongside, you know, academic rigor and objectivity and insight and knowledge base, right? At the end of the day, it's about having confidence, having expertise, and being able to deliver that expertise to, in my world, to athletes. And I think that's what I've always tried to do. I've tried to have many strings to my bow. So that I can talk with many different hats on, you know, but one day I'm talking to a coach, the next day I'm talking to an athlete, the next day I'm talking to a CEO, the next day I'm talking to a, you know, an academic professor, you know, so I think, you know, being able to wear those different hats is certainly a skill set that I've tried to,

• 6:45Speaker 07

  to build throughout my career. And, you know, like I said, I've been blessed to work with, I think it was thirty six different professional or Olympic sports last time I've coached. I counted. So, um, yeah, it's been, it's been a wild ride. It's been great.

• 6:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Which of those sports was the most unusual?

• 6:59Speaker 07

  Um, I've worked with crown green bowling, um, which I don't know as an American guy, I don't know.

• 7:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  I've never heard of it.

• 7:06Speaker 07

  Basically imagine a, um, you know, a twenty foot by twenty foot square of turf, um, with a, a small raise in the middle, i.e. the crown. So it's, it's slopes to the edges. Um, and then, you know, you use, you, you, you throw out a white jack, a smaller ball, and then you, you sort of roll out larger balls to, to try and get closest to the jack. It's a, it's a very, uh, European thing, let's say. But yeah, sports performance at Crown Green Bowling. There you go.

• 7:33Andrew D. Huberman?

  All right. Um, wow. And then to, uh, mixed martial arts fighters and everything in between. So, um, along those lines, could you give us a little bit of your background? You know, where'd you start out? Where are you from originally?

• 7:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'm from the northeast of England. Um, so I'm from a town called Harrogate, which is in, in Yorkshire, which is a northern kind of area of.

• 7:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  Nice sunny weather all year long.

• 7:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, you can imagine. Yeah. With the, the two weeks of summer that we get, you know? But yeah, I mean, I did my, uh, my undergraduate studies there in sports science. I, you know, I did teacher training to be a physical education teacher after that. Like most people, I then, you know, worked as a high school physical education teacher, you know, great experience working with kids, you know, developing, um, you know. Athletic qualities, but something in the back of my mind always, you know, I wanted more. I wanted to be, you know, to be at the higher end of elite sport, you know, I was a failed athlete like many people. I represented my country in different sports and things, but I never made it professionally. And so, you know, that, that little seed was sown in as much as I then started to reach out to, you know,

• 8:40Speaker 07

  to different areas to do a PhD, whether it was in the UK or also, you know, chance my arm, took a punt, see if we could get over to the States. And all my buddies were going on, you know, gap years after the finish university or whatever, and going to Bali and hanging out or whatever, travelling through Thailand. And I figured, well, you know, I've always loved the States and can I go and kill two birds with one stone and do something academic? Continue my studies, but also doing a different environment and get some life, life experience. And then many, many rejections, as I'm sure you're kind of aware from different professors, whether it was Rogan or Noka or, you know, William Kramer.

• 9:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  So you just wrote to these folks?

• 9:15Speaker 07

  I just called, called, called and sent out information and said, yeah, so have you got any opportunities? And pushed back from them all, but you know, dogged and kept, kept asking. And yeah, Dr. William Kramer, who was at Ball State University in Indiana at the time, you know, a muscle neuroendocrinologist and researcher in muscle physiology using resistance training. And, you know, he basically said, listen, I can guarantee you funding for the first year of your studies, but not the next three.

• 9:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Sounds like a typical academic response. I can take care of you, but not that well necessarily, right?

• 9:48Speaker 07

  Yeah. So spoke to my parents and said, hey, can we, can we take a punt? And that, you know, they were great and supporting me. And yeah, long story short, came out to, to begin my PhD at Ball State. After a year, Dr. Kramer transferred to UConn, you know, Connecticut in stores in the North East there. And I transferred to him and with him. And yeah, four great years with my, with my PhD and getting my PhD with a, with a really prolific research group that looked at, you know, neuroendocrinology, hormonal work, but using resistance training primarily as an exercise stressor as a major mechanism. And then looking at all the different physiologies off the back of resistance training.

• 10:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, you guys were enormously productive. I found dozens of papers on how weight training impacts hormones.

• 10:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  And your name's on all of them. And it's remarkable. I have a question about this. I'll just inject a question about weight training and hormones. You hear this all the time that doing these big, heavy compound movements or resistance training increases androgens, things like testosterone, DHT, DHEA, and so forth. Does anyone know how that actually happens? Like, what about move, what about, what is it about engaging motor neurons under heavy loads sends a signal to the endocrine system, hey, release testosterone? I've never actually been able to find that in a textbook.

• 11:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, I mean,

• 11:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  And how can I do more of that?

• 11:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, as much as I know, you know, and again, I'm digging out into the annals of Duncan French's kind of brain now. But yeah, I mean, I think it's a stress response, right? It's mechanical stress and it's metabolic stress. And these are, you know, downstream regulation of testosterone release at the gonads comes from many different areas. You know, the, my work primarily looked at, you know, catecholamines and sympathetic arousal.

• 11:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  So things like epinephrine adrenaline?

• 11:39Speaker 07

  Correct. Yeah. Epinephrine adrenaline, you know, noradrenaline, how they were signaling, the signaling cascade using, you know, the HPA axis, releasing cortisol, and then, you know, looking at how that also influenced the adrenal medulla to release, you know, androgens and then signaling that at the gonads.

• 12:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  That raises an interesting question. So in presumably weight training in women, people who don't have testes, also it increases testosterone. And is that purely through the adrenals? When women lift weights, their adrenal glands release testosterone?

• 12:13Speaker 07

  Absolutely. I mean, that is the only area of testosterone release for females. And yes, it's the same downstream cascade. Obviously, the extent to which it happens is significantly less in females. But that's how you, there's good, good data out there that shows, you know, females can increase their anabolic environment, their internal anabolic milieu, using resistance training as a stressor. And then they get the consequent muscle tissue growth, you know, whether it's tendon ligament adaptations, you know, the beneficial consequences of resistance training, which is driven by anabolic stimuli.

• 12:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I have two questions about that. The first one is something that you mentioned, which is that the androgens, the testosterone comes from the adrenals under resistance loads in women. Is the same true in men? I mean, we hear that the testes produce testosterone when we weight train. For for men that have testes, but do we know whether or not it's the adrenals or the testes in men that are increasing testosterone?

• 13:10Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 13:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  More both, a little bit from each?

• 13:12Speaker 07

  The the the field is divided presently, and as much as understanding the acute adri- the acute adrenergic response in terms of, you know, anabolic response to exercise in an acute phase and the exposure to, you know, a stimulus that is stress driven, which might be partly from the adrenal glands, partly from the gonads, versus a longitudinal exposure to anabolic environments, which is primarily driven by, obviously, the gonads and the release, the endocrine environment from testosterone release at the gonads. So this, the field is split in terms of how exercise is promoting hypertrophy, you know,

• 13:51Speaker 07

  muscle tissue growth, and whether that is very much an adrenal stimuli, or if that's significant enough in these acute responses versus the longitudinal exposure, just elevated basal levels of anabolic testosterone, habitual levels.

• 14:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it sounds like in most, like with most things, it's probably both. It's probably adrenals and the gonads.

• 14:12Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 14:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then you mentioned that testosterone can have enhancing effects, growth effects on tendon and ligament also, that you don't often hear about that. People always think, you know, testosterone muscle, but testosterone has a lot of effects on other tissues that are important for performance, it sounds like.

• 14:29Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 14:30Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, what's the story there?

• 14:31Speaker 07

  Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, the testosterone hormone is, I mean, listen, there's androgen receptors on neural tissue, on neural axons.

• 14:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Pretty much everywhere.

• 14:41Speaker 07

  Exactly. So, you know, it, the binding capacity of testosterone and influencing different tissues within the body, I touched on, you know, muscle tissue, but, you know, the ligaments, the tendons, even bone, to some extent, you know, testosterone is potential to influence that in terms of removing osteopenic kind of characteristics, et cetera. So, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a magic, a magic hormone, let's say, with many, many end impacts in terms of adaptation.

• 15:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  I definitely want to get back to your trajectory, but as long as we're on the interactions between androgens, testosterone and its derivatives and different tissues. You know, from the work that you did as a PhD student and and throughout your career, could you say that there's a there are some general principles of training that favor testosterone production in terms of that the that somebody who's not an elite athlete could use. Somebody who's already adapted to weight training somewhat like they know the difference between a dumbbell and a barbell and they know they know the various movements, they're not going to damage themselves. But once they're doing that, I mean, I've heard shorter sessions are better than longer sessions, but in rep loads, there's a lot of parameter space. But if you were going to throw out some of the

• 15:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  the parameters that you think are most important to pay attention to for the typical person who's trying to use weight training to build or maintain muscle.

• 16:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 16:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  Lose body fat, so body recomposition and or stay strong and healthy for sport of a different kind.

• 16:09Speaker 07

  Yeah. So the work that we obviously, you know, I was exposed to back in my PhD. And it was a double edged sword and as much as testosterone is really stimulated by an intensity factor and also a volume factor. Now, growth hormone is a little bit different. That's largely driven by an intensity factor alone.

• 16:25Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh, really? I always thought that growth hormone was driven by volume, which just goes to show you. No, no, no, no, I think you're probably right. It just goes to show you that most of what's out there on the internet is completely

• 16:35Speaker 07

  Right.

• 16:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  Not only not only is it wrong, it's usually backward. So no, trust I no, trust your instinct because because I think people just make this stuff up.

• 16:44Speaker 07

  Right.

• 16:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  Because it's very hard to measure growth hormone and testosterone and and I can't imagine most of the the stuff that I see out there, they're taking drips and and, you know, measuring free versus bound and all this kind of stuff. But that's what you do in in laboratories.

• 16:58Speaker 07

  Right. Yeah. You you look at total composition and you look at how much of that is free circulating in the system, how much is bound? And therefore biologically active bound to receptor creating adaptation. But yeah, coming back to testosterone in terms of the training strategies, it's largely driven by both an intensity and a volume factor. So if you look at many of the exercise interventions. That we use to try and investigate and interrogate testosterone. And it was, it was usually, you know, a, a, a six by 10 protocol. So you're touching.

• 17:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Six by 10, meaning?

• 17:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, si- six sets of 10 repetitions, which is, you know, it's quite a large, you know, 60 repetitions is quite a large volume for a, a, a single exercise. And that was usually pitched at about 80% intense of a one repetition max intensity.

• 17:43Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay. So 80% of the one rep max, six, six sets of 10 reps separated by rest of like.

• 17:49Speaker 07

  Two minutes.

• 17:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  Two minutes, which is actually pretty fast.

• 17:51Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 17:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  At least to me.

• 17:52Speaker 07

  It is.

• 17:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  Anytime you see these two to three minutes, when you're actually watching the clock, those two minute rest periods go by pretty fast.

• 17:57Speaker 07

  By the third, fourth set, you're, you're dying for more. Yeah.

• 18:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah.

• 18:00Speaker 07

  And I think, you know, we, you know, we, we formulated that kind of exercise protocol to really target, you know, the, the release of testosterone and try and drive up these anabolic environments to study the, you know, the endocrine. Um, you know, consequences, but I think that's, that's, that's the type of protocol that is mo- most advantageous for driving anabolic environment.

• 18:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  And that was it for the workout?

• 18:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, we, we would do that in a back squat. So, you know, multi-joint, um, you know, challenging exercise, multi-muscle, multi-joint, 80% loads of, of your one repetition max, and then six by 10. We did play around with, you know, your classic German volume type 10 by 10, um, kind of protocols. Um, but they were just unsustainable at that 80%. The, the key to what we also did was we always adjusted, um, the loads to make sure that it was 10 repetitions that were sustained. So if the load was too, too high and an athlete or, or participant had to, uh, drop the weight on, on the sixth repetition, we would unload the bar and make sure they completed the 10 repetitions.

• 19:04Speaker 07

  Bringing me back to the point of it's an intensity and a volume derivative that, that is going to be most advantageous for testosterone release.

• 19:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's really interesting. And one thing that you mentioned there is especially interesting to me, which is you said, when you go from six re- sets of 10 repetitions to 10 sets of 10 repetitions. You, it's not as beneficial and might even be counterproductive, but to me, the difference between six and 10 sets is only four sets. It doesn't even sound that much. So that sort of hints at the possibility that the thresholds for going from. A workout that increases testosterone to a workout that diminishes testosterone is actually a pretty narrow margin.

• 19:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, and I think it comes back to that intensity factor then, you know, what we saw with that 10 by 10 protocol really sees pretty significant drop offs in the load. And again, we're trying to stimulate with intensity, with mechanical strain through intensity, as well as metabolic strain through volume. And I think that's, that's the paradigm that you've got to look at is that the mechanical load has to come from, you know, the, the actual weight on the bar and the volume is the metabolic stimulus. How much are we driving lactate? How much are we driving, you know, glycogenolysis in, in, in terms of that type of energy system for, you know, executing a 10 by 10 protocol? And what we often saw was just a significant reduction in the intensity capabilities of an athlete to sustain that.

• 20:24Speaker 07

  So we shortened the volume to try and maintain the intensity.

• 20:29Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting. And you could imagine just taking very long rest, keeping the session, being a big lazy bear in training. I sometimes do this, I tell myself I'm going to work out for 45 minutes and then two hours later I'm done, but not because I was huffing and puffing the whole time, but because I was training really slowly. Is there any evidence that training slowly can offset some of the negative effects of doing a lot of volume?

• 20:51Speaker 07

  Well, it's old adage of, you know, two responses to your question. I mean, the first one I would say, you know, there's a difference between 10 sets of six and six sets of 10. And I think that comes back to the volume conversation. You know, six sets of 10 is driving up metabolic stimulus. If you're doing 10 sets of six, you can probably take it to a higher intensity, but you're not going to get the same metabolic load. You're not going to get the same internal metabolic environment that drives the lactate release that they will then signal, you know, further anabolic testosterone release because of the lactate in your body. And that, that's a key consideration. The rest is often the consideration that's overlooked out there in general population and in many sporting environments.

• 21:35Speaker 07

  You know, the, the rest is, is as important a programming variable as the load and the intensity, the intensity, the load, the, the volume, et cetera. And yes, if you remove, if you extend the volume, if you extend the, the duration of your rest periods, what you're ultimately doing is influencing that metabolic stimulus again. You're allowing the flushing of the body, the removal of waste products, you know, lactate to be, you know, removed via, from, from the body and then the metabolic environment is reduced.

• 22:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  So you want, so if I, if I understand correctly, you want to create a metabolic stress.

• 22:08Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 22:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  So, so the way that I've been training, slow and lazy, is not necessarily the best way to go. I could, I could in theory do a forty five or sixty minute session where I pack in more, more work per unit time. I'm not going to be able to quote unquote, perform as well. I won't be able to lift as much. I'm have to, you know, unweight the bar between sets or maybe even during sets if I have someone who could do that. But it sounds like that's the way to go. So it's gotta be, so this, the old adage of high intensity, short duration is probably the way to go.

• 22:39Speaker 07

  Correct. And, and, and you know, in, in layman's terms, if the same objective, the same training goal is just muscle tissue growth. And we're not talking about maximal strength or any of those type of parameters. We're just talking about growing muscle. If there's an athlete A and they do six, six sets of ten with two minutes rest and there's athlete B that does six sets of ten with three minutes rest. Athlete A will likely see the highest muscle gain, muscle hypertrophy gains because of the metabolic stimulus that they're driving with the shorter rest periods.

• 23:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting. For all the years that I've spent exploring exercise science and trying to get this information from the internet and various places. That this is the first time it's ever been told to me clearly. So basically I need to put my ego aside. And I need to not focus so much on getting as many reps with a given weight and keep the rest restricted. Two minutes, about two minutes.

• 23:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 23:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  Get the work in and then I'll derive the benefits.

• 23:34Speaker 07

  I mean, you've absolutely nailed it to be honest. And again, if you think about human nature and how we approached, we're inherently lazy, right? As, as, as, as humans, we want to, you know, we want to take that rest. We want to take the, the time out to recover and feel refreshed. But we're trying to create a training stimulus. We're trying to create a very specific stimulus internal to the body. And that is often driven by the metabolic environment at that moment in time. Now, if we allow the metabolic environment to change by extending the rest periods, we're not going to see as, as beneficial gains at the end of it.

• 24:05Andrew D. Huberman?

  Very interesting.

• 24:06Speaker 07

  It is, it is very much a motivational and ego thing. Rather than saying, okay, I'm gonna push my loads as high as I can and really challenge maximal strength, do fewer repetitions, take longer periods of time. It's a completely different approach to training. It's a different end goal.

• 24:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting. You mentioned lactate. So it seems still a bit controversial as to what actually triggers hypertrophy. You hear about lactate buildup or people, the, the common language is the muscle gets torn and then repairs, but I don't know, does the muscle actually tear?

• 24:36Speaker 07

  I mean, microtrom.

• 24:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay, microtrom.

• 24:39Speaker 07

  Disruption of, you know, the, within the muscle tissue for sure.

• 24:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  Interesting. And, and we're talking now about non-drug assisted, people who's, who's, let's just say, let's define our terms here are that whose testosterone levels are within the, the, the range of somewhere between 300 and 1500 or whatever, 1200. Because it does seem that athletes who take high levels of exogenous androgens can do more work and just get protein synthesis from just doing work.

• 25:07Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 25:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, I've seen these guys in the gym, right? That, that whole tail signs are not that hard to spot where they're just doing a, a ton of volume, not necessarily moving that much weight. They're just bringing blood into the, into the tissue and then they're loading up on, they're eating a ton of protein, presumably because they're basically in puberty part 15.

• 25:25Speaker 07

  Right.

• 25:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right? They've gotten their 15th round of puberty where during puberty you are a protein synthesis machine. I mean, that's, to me, that, that's a, you know, pretty clear about puberty. Interesting. So, and then, um, you, in terms of, uh, because I know the audience likes to try protocols. So that, that you described a protocol very nicely. Um, what about day to day recovery? I mean, can the workout that you described is intense but short? How many days a week can the typical person do that and sustain progress?

• 25:56Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, I think that comes back to your training age and your training history. Obviously there's a resilience and a robustness with, with an incremental training age. So, you know, that's not a protocol that I would advise anyone to go out and start, you know, tomorrow.

• 26:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  They'll be mopping them off the gym floor.

• 26:11Speaker 07

  But at the same time, it's also relative, right? So 80%, you know, of your, of your maximum at, at a young training age is still 80% versus, you know, been training 10 years, it's still 80%. But yes, the mechanical load is going to be significantly, it's just more tonnage, right? But yeah, I think a protocol like that, we would look at two, two times, you know, a week, something that's, that's pretty intensive like that. Because again, it comes back to the point you make is that you really need to be, for want of a better term, suffering a little bit through that type of protocol, both in terms of, of the challenge of the load, but also being able to tolerate the metabolic stress that you're exposed to. It's, it's a, it's a, you know, a bit of a sicko feeling, right? Because of the lactate that you're driving up.

• 26:53Speaker 07

  So, you know, I wouldn't promote as an athlete doing that type of modality, you know, multiple, multiple times, unless you're from the realms of bodybuilding and then you're really, that, that's the sole purpose of what you're trying to achieve. Most athletes in most sports have diverse requirements in terms of outcomes that they're trying to achieve. They're not just targeting muscle growth. Muscle growth is a conduit to increase strength, increase power, increase speed, obviously. So yes, trying to get bigger cross-sectional area of a muscle means that we can produce more force into the ground or, or wherever it may be if we're a locomotive athlete. But usually sportsmen and women are not just purely seeking muscle growth.

• 27:35Speaker 07

  They, they, they look for different facets of muscle endurance or maximal muscle power, muscle strength, you know? So then you've got to be very creative in how you build the workout. If it's a bodybuilder, absolutely, they're chasing muscle growth and they're going to do so with these types of protocols, which sees high intensities and high volumes of workload on a pretty regular basis. If it's just somebody, you know, a, a, a weekend warrior that wants to keep in shape and look, and look good, I would say, you know, two times a week for a really challenging workout like that. And then flex the other types of workouts within the week to have more of a, a volume emphasis, where you reduce the intensity and you might just look at, you know, larger rep ranges from 12 to 15 to 20.

• 28:17Speaker 07

  Another workout where you're looking at, you know, reducing the volume, but increasing the intensity and really trying to drive, you know, different stimulus to, to, to give you more endpoints of, of, of success.

• 28:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Great. No, that's, that's really informative. Along the lines of androgens and. Intensity, when I think intensity, I think epinephrine adrenaline. And since you have a background in catecholamines and testosterone. Last time I was here at the UFC Performance Institute, we had a brief conversation and I want to make sure I got the details right. That in the short term, and a big increase in stress hormone can lead to an increase in testosterone, like a, like a parachute jump. But, so stress can promote the release of testosterone. That was news to me. We always hear about stress suppressing testosterone, stress suppressing the immune system, all these terrible things.

• 29:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  But in the short term, you're saying it can actually increase the release of testosterone. So I have that right?

• 29:18Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 29:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  Okay. And so then the second question is, does my cognitive interpretation of the stressor make a difference? In other words, if I voluntarily jump out of a plane with a parachute, does it have a different effect on my testosterone than if you shove me out of the plane against my will? Or presumably with a parachute?

• 29:38Speaker 07

  Right. I mean, so, so this was what all my PhD work was, was looking at was the, you know, the, the pre, the, the exposure to a stressor and the pre-arousal of how your body essentially prepares for that stressor. And then how it manages it throughout the exposure to the stress. And it was actually motivated from parachute jumpers. There was an older study looking at parachute jumpers into, into, into combat. And then, you know, they, they were studying, you know, the cortisol, the stress response and the epinephrine response of these parachute jumpers. So we, we got us thinking about, hold on, you know, there's certain workouts that you do that are just the daunting. You know, it's like, okay, it's squat, squat Saturday or whatever it may be.

• 30:21Speaker 07

  Oh my gosh, this is going to be a, this is going to destroy me.

• 30:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Or I have to talk to this person I don't want to talk to. Or, you know, right? I mean, something or PhD dissertation exam or something.

• 30:32Speaker 07

  Giving public speaking or whatever it may be. Now, you know, we, we, we used an exercise. We use a resistance training protocol that, that these athletes knew was going to be very, very challenging. It's going to be, there's going to have some anxiety to doing it. They knew there were going to be some physical distress from doing it. And therefore, you know, their, their mindset of how they were going to approach that was already set. So what we saw prior, fifteen minutes prior to the, the start of the next exposure to, to the workout. The, the epinephrine, the noradrenaline, the adrenaline was already starting to prepare the body sympathetically. And to go into what it knew was going to be a very, very challenging workout. So that brings you back to, you know, exercise preparation, competition for certain preparation.

• 31:16Speaker 07

  Preparation for certain competition, excuse me. And, you know, pre-workout routines, the use of music. And, you know, all, all these different things that we know can now, you know, anecdotally in the gym we put into place. But, you know, the data that I presented to show that it was the first of its kind to show that this link between. And, you know, epinephrine and, and norepinephrine release and arousal and then consequent performance. So force output throughout the, throughout the workout was intimately linked.

• 31:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  So what's the, what was the takeaway there? Should, is it beneficial for people to get a little stressed about the upcoming impending event? Whether or not it's a lift in the gym or whether or not it's talking to somebody that you might be intimidated to talk to or a, an exam. Is, is the stress good for performance or is it harmful?

• 32:05Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I think that's a great question. And I think I can only talk to, you know, physical exertion, which is what we were, we were, we were exploring. And I don't want to tread on the toes of the psychologist with flow state and these types of things because clearly.

• 32:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think you're in the, the position of scientific strength on this one. I think you have the leverage. I mean, I mean, most, you know, I have a lot of friends in that community as I'll just say, as, as a buffer to, to your, the answer you're about to give. That there's, there's very little science around flow and there's very little neuroscience related to most psychological states anyway. So I think we've got a lot of degrees of freedom here.

• 32:39Speaker 07

  All right. I can breathe easily. Thank you for that.

• 32:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, I'll take, I'll, I'll be, anything you like, credit Duncan, anything you dislike, send the, send the mean comments to me.

• 32:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think from my data certainly, the greater arousal, the higher the performance was from a from a physical exertion perspective. And I think that was the intriguing part of some of my findings, where there's definitely an individual bio kinetics to some of these hormonal kind of releases. And as much as those guys that had the highest, you know, adrenergic response in terms of epinephrine release, norepinephrine release, also sustained force output for a longer period of the workout than those that didn't. So the individuals that had a lower stimulus of the sympathetic arousal, let's say, certainly didn't perform as well throughout the workout. Now, the intriguing thing then becomes is, okay, and

• 33:33Speaker 07

  I think this really segues into what we're doing here with combat athletes, with mixed martial artists. You know, there's a philosophy, there's a paradigm now for myself in terms of the exposure, repeat exposure, you know, the more you do that challenging workout, do you get the same psychological stimulus? Do you get the same stress response? And the assumption is unlikely. You know, you accommodate, you become accustomed to the stressor, your body will therefore adapt. And that's the classic overload principle, right? You then need to take the stressor down a different route. But I think when you look at, you know, the athletes that we work with here, it's a fistfight at the end of the day. There's nothing more stressful than that. But I think just the exposure

• 34:16Speaker 07

  to the rigors of training, to understand the bad positions, the bad situations, to know that they can get out of certain situations, out of certain, you know, submission holds or whatever it may be. I think that really ties in with some of my PhD work in terms of what these guys do to approach what is, you know, really challenging sport and arena in mixed martial arts.

• 34:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, it's definitely the extreme of what's possible in terms of asking, does stress favor or hinder performance? Because, yeah, like you said, at the end of the day, it's someone trying to hurt you as much as they possibly can within the bounds of the rules, and you're trying to do the same. So that's, you know, I find that your thesis work fascinating. Were you never to be at the UFC Performance Institute, luckily they made the right choice and brought you here. But were you never to come here, I was still fascinated by this because Over and over, we hear that stress is bad, stress is bad, stress is bad. But everything I read from the scientific literature is that stress and epinephrine

• 35:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  in particular is coupled to the testosterone response to performance and to adaptation, provided it doesn't go on too long. So unless I'm saying something that violates that, I mean, that's your work. So it's really important and beautiful work and I refer to it often. So I'm just glad that I we could, you know, bolt that down because I think the people need to know this, that that discomfort is beneficial. Now, there's a, there's another side to this that I want to ask about, which is the use of cold, in particular, things like ice baths, cold showers, or any other type of

• 35:59Andrew D. Huberman?

  cold temperature exposure, you know, in theory, that's stress also. It's epinephrine. And so how should one think about the use of cold for recovery? So if it's stress, how is, if stress, if cold causes stress, then how is cold used for recovery? That's what I don't understand. And maybe you just want to share your thoughts on that.

• 36:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, and I think, you know, it's a great question. And I think the jury is still out there, certainly, knowing some of the conversations that we've been having. But I think, you know, when we talk about stress, it's your classic fight, flight or freeze approach. And, you know, throwing your body into, you know, a cold tub, an ice bath, or whatever it may be, certainly is going to have a physiological stress response. Now, people are using that for different end goals. And again, I think that's where the narrative has to be explained. If you are using the stress specifically to manage the mindset, to use it as a specific stress stimulus, that's the same as me doing six by 10, 80%.

• 37:05Speaker 07

  You know, you're just trying to find something to disrupt the system, to do something that's very, if want a better term, painful, discomfort, whatever. You're just finding a stressor and then being able to manage the mindset. But if you're using Cold specifically from a physiological perspective to promote. You know redistribution of vascular, you know, of blood flow, you know, to different vascular areas of muscle that you feel have gone through a workout that are damaged or whatever it may be. I think there's, we've got to understand what that stress mechanism is. And, you know, the data, the literature is certainly still out there with respect to

• 37:45Speaker 07

  cryotherapy and cold baths and some of these, you know, high, these cold exposures in terms of what they do at the, at the level of the muscle tissue. If that's, if that's the target, if you're trying to promote a flushing mechanism or you're trying to promote redistribution of, of the blood flow. What you've got to understand is that cold is going to clamp down every part of the vascular system. And we've really got to understand how the muscle would be redistributed to areas of interest. So, you know, I think the stress response is, is, is, is a real thing with respect to, you know, cold exposure. But I think the narrative around what are you using the cold for has to precede the conversation.

• 38:28Speaker 07

  Because yes, it's, you know, it's like putting your hand over a hot cold, you know, that, that's a stress the same way as jumping in a cold bath is.

• 38:37Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think most people don't realize that you're going to get the epinephrine release from holding your hand up too close to flame. And you're going to get it from getting in the ice bath.

• 38:44Speaker 07

  Your body doesn't know the difference, right? Your body does not know the difference. It has a, you know, a, a, a primordial kind of physiological response that it's created over millions and millions of years. And I think that, that's, that physiology is, is not changing and it's, it's fixed in a particular way right now. And that, that it doesn't understand the difference between whether it's six by 10, doing a challenging workout over here, whether it's putting my hands on the hot call, whether there's a lion stood in front of me or whatever, that epinephrine response from the, the level of the brain down to the, the whole signaling cascade is, is the same.

• 39:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  And cold, I've heard can actually prevent some of the beneficial effects of training. That it can actually get, get in the way of muscle growth, et cetera.

• 39:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, there's some pretty robust data out there now showing that it definitely has an influence on performance variables like strength and power in particular, but absolutely in terms of muscle hypertrophy. And there's a big kind of theme in the world of athletic performance right now in terms of periodization of cold exposure as a recovery modality. When do you use cold? Should you be using cold for recovery in periods of high training load when you're actually pursuing maybe general preparatory work, where you're actually trying to pursue muscle growth? Well, that's usually where you get the most sore. It's usually where you feel the most fatigued, but it's probably not the most beneficial

• 40:11Speaker 07

  approach to use an ice bath in that scenario because you're dampening, you're dulling the mtor pathway and the hypertrophic signaling pathway. Whereas in a competition phase where actually quality of exercise and quality of execution of skill and technical work has to be maintained, you want to throw the kitchen sink of recovery capabilities and recovery interventions in that scenario because you now, the muscle building activity should be in the bank. That should have been done in the general preparatory work and now you're focusing on technical execution. So you're absolutely right.

• 40:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's interesting. So if I understand correctly, if I want to maximize muscle growth or power or improvements and adaptations, then the inflammation response, the delayed onset muscle soreness, all the stuff that's uncomfortable and that we hear is so terrible is actually the stimulus for adaptation. And so using cold in that situation might short circuit my progress. But if I'm, I don't know that I'll ever do this, but if I were to do an Ironman or something or run a marathon under those conditions, I'm basically coming to the race, so to speak, with all the power and strength I'm going to have. And so there, reducing inflammation is good because it's going to allow me to perform more work, essentially.

• 41:32Speaker 07

  Absolutely. Yeah, you have to be strategic about when you use some of these interventions. And the time when you're preparing for a competition is not the appropriate time, excuse me, is the appropriate time when you want to drive recovery and make sure that your body is optimized. When you're far away from a competition date or out of season or whatever it may be and you're really trying to just... Tear up the body a little bit to allow it to its natural, you know, healing and adaptation processes to take place. Well, you don't want to negate that, you know, you want the body to optimize its internal recovery and that's how muscle growth is going to happen. So.

• 42:11Andrew D. Huberman?

  So interesting.

• 42:12Speaker 07

  There's a time kind of consideration that you need to make with these interventions for sure.

• 42:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  At the UFC Performance Center, are the fighters periodizing their cold exposure? Or are they just doing cold at will?

• 42:25Speaker 07

  Well, it's not just the UFC. And again, I talk about my personal experiences with different sports. I think just education around where science is at and our understanding of concepts like the use of cold exposure for recovery, ice bath, you know, everyone wants to jump in an ice bath. But I think as we've, as we've stepped back and scientists have started to say, have started to figure out and look at some of the data, you know, we're now more intuitive about, well, actually that might not be the best or the most optimal approach. And I think that's, that's any given sport. So yes, certainly here at the UFC, we're trying to educate our athletes around, you know, appropriate timing. And it's the same with nutrition. It's the same with an ice bath intervention. It's the same with lifting weights. It's the same with going for a run or working out on the bike.

• 43:10Speaker 07

  You know, the, there's, there's tactics to when, when you do things and when you don't do things. And I think, you know, stress and cold exposure, we have to have a consideration around that as well. But it's not just, you know, MMA fighters, that's any, any athlete. And I think it's the, the best, the best professionals, the most successful professionals do that really well. They, they listen, number one, they, they educate themselves and then they build structure. And I think, you know, at the most elite level, we always talk about it here at the UFC, but the most elite level, you're not necessarily training harder than anybody else. Everybody in the UFC trains hard, like everyone is training super hard. But the best athletes, the, the true elite levels are

• 43:54Speaker 07

  the ones that can do it again and again and again on a daily basis and sustain a technical output for skill development. Therefore their skills can improve or physical development, their physical attributes can improve. So that ability to reproduce on a day to day basis falls into a recovery conversation. Now, when is the right time to use something like an ice bath and when isn't, is part of the, the high performance conversation for sure.

• 44:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  So really, they're scientists, they're building structure, they're figuring out variables.

• 44:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 44:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  But it sounds like the ability to do more quality work over time is is one of the key variables.

• 44:29Speaker 07

  I mean, it's fundamental. I mean, garbage in, garbage out, quality in, quality out. But in our sport, you know, I talk about, you know, mixed martial arts. It's truly a decathlon of combat. So there's so many different attributes, whether it's grappling, whether it's wrestling, whether it's the transition work, whether it's the stand up striking. So the the different facets of a training program in this sport are significantly large compared to something like, you know, a wide receiver in football. And that's no disrespect for wide receivers, but they run routes. They they they're going to run a route, a a a passantry, and that's all they need to do. These guys have to be on the ground. They've got to be great on the ground. They've got to be great standing up. They've got to be great with the, you know, the back against the fence. There's so many different kind of facets to our sport.

• 45:13Speaker 07

  So managing the distribution of all the training components is one of the biggest challenges of mixed martial arts, and and the best guys get that right. They they allow their body to to optimize the training. And remember, why why are we doing training? We're doing training for ta- technical and tactical improvement. Now, if you if your body is fatigued, or you just can't expose yourself to more tactical development or technical development, then you you you're essentially doing yourself a disservice. You you're going to be behind the curve with with respect to those guys that can reproduce that day in day out.

• 45:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  On the topic of skill development, regardless of sport, we hear all the time, and it certainly is intuitive to me that the person who can focus the best will progress the fastest. But it's kind of interesting. Sometimes I talk to athletes and they seem a little bit laid back about their training sometimes. And yet, they obviously know how to flip the switch and they can really, you know, dial in the intensity. Do you think that there are optimal protocols for skill learning in terms of physical skill learning? Like, could it ever be parameterized like the six sets of 10 reps? You know, and this gets to the heart of neuroplasticity, which is still, you know, it's not a black box,

• 46:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  but it's kind of a a black box with portions of it illuminated, I like to I like to say. But, you know, what are your thoughts on skill development? Is there, for somebody that wants to get better at sport? Do you recommend a particularly long or short training session? It does intensity matter or is it just reps?

• 46:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think, no, it's not a volume driven exercise. It's a quality driven exercise. And listen, my expertise is not in motor learning and motor skill acquisition. I tend to default to Dr. Gabriel Wolf here at UNLV for that. She's one of the leading proponents in this area. But you know, if you look at true skill development, it is about rehearsal of accurate movement, accurate movement mechanics. And as soon as that becomes impacted by fatigue or inaccurate movement, you're now losing the motor learning. You're losing the accuracy of the skill that, you know, people can call it muscle memory or whatever they want, right?

• 47:34Speaker 07

  But essentially you're grooving neural axons to create movement patterns. And they're situational throughout sport, right? You know, whether it's a Cruyff turn in soccer or a jump shot in basketball or a forehand down the line, you can carve out that particular posture and position and skill and you can isolate it and you can drill it again and again and again. Now, as soon as fatigue is influencing that repetition, it's time to stop. And the best coaches understand that. They understand that it's quality over quantity when it comes to skill acquisition. So to answer your question in a roundabout way, I would say, yes, it's shorter sessions that are very high quality.

• 48:15Speaker 07

  And I think the best athletes in my experience are the ones that consciously and cognitively are aware of it at every moment of the training session. They should, they should leave the training session, not necessarily just physically fatigued, but mentally fatigued because they're completely engaged in the learning process.

• 48:34Speaker 07

  The the the problem then becomes, okay, if we just do lots of, you know, thirty minute sessions, we've got to do a lot of thirty minute sessions to get the volume exposure of the repetition and the rehearsal of the skill again and again and again. So it's a bit of a paradox. It's a bit of a double edged sword. But, you know, a three hour session versus a ninety minute session, you know, we'll we'll take the ninety minute session any day when it comes to skill acquisition, because that's going to be driven by quality over quantity.

• 49:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, training and skill learning is incredibly mentally fatiguing. I've often wondered why, when one works out hard, whether or not it's with, you know, run or with the weights, why it's hard to think later in the day.

• 49:15Speaker 07

  Right.

• 49:15Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, it really, there really does seem to be something to it. And I've wondered, is it depletion of adrenaline, dopamine? I sometimes think it's might be dopamine. And here I'm totally speculating. I don't have any data to support this. But if you hit a really hard workout or run early in the day, oftentimes the brain just doesn't want to do hard mental work, which gives me great admiration for these athletes that are drilling their mind and body all, all day, every day, um, with breaks. But so what are your thoughts? What what it what leads to the mental fatigue after physical performance?

• 49:50Speaker 07

  Well, again, I don't want to talk out, you know, I'm talking to the man here, you know, this.

• 49:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, we're we're just two scientists speculating on on this point. Up until now, we've been, you've been giving us concrete, um, peer reviewed study based feedback on my questions. But but if we were to speculate, I mean, I think this is a common occurrence. People think if I get that really good workout in in the morning, I feel better all day. That's true unless that workout is is really intense or really long.

• 50:14Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 50:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then you just, the mind just somehow won't latch on to mental work quite quite as well.

• 50:22Speaker 07

  I I mean, just philosophically, and I think there's there's a there's a coming back to this kind of stress consideration, you know, like a public speaking or taking an exam. I mean, if you're if if if you have an amazing coach who was setting up training in a particular way, it's challenging. There's a strain related to it. And I'm not talking physical strain. I'm talking figuring things out, you know, figuring. Now the skill and I think that can be stressful like the learning process can be stressful. So, um, you know, we've touched on stress. I also think if they, if they, you know, if, if they hit the right technique, you know, that reward center in the brain, that dopamine shot is, is gonna fly up there. And there's only so many times that we can get that before that becomes dampened.

• 51:04Speaker 07

  And I think there's an energetic piece to it, you know, there's the fueling of, of the brain. There's the, there's the, the carbohydrate fueling exercise that actually the strategy around how you fuel for learning and fuel for physical training is, is actually pretty similar.

• 51:20Andrew D. Huberman?

  Glucose.

• 51:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's, it's glucose. It's sugar at the end of the day, right? Um, so, you know, are you, are you, are you fueling accordingly around your training sessions? Be that very physical because everyone thinks, okay, you know, I'm gonna jump on a treadmill and I'm gonna bang out, you know, fifteen sprints at that max effort and I'm gonna, you know, be dropping off and lying on the floor at the end of it. I need to refuel. Well, what about the refueling of the brain in a very demanding uh, exercise or drilling session where you're looking at technique that you're trying to figure out. That's very challenging for your mind to figure out the complexity of it. But still needs to be fueled or refueled afterwards. And I think that's obviously, you know, might be an area where athletes do themselves a disservice

• 52:03Speaker 07

  by not appropriate fueling from what might be considered to be a lower intensity session. But the, the, the cognitive challenge has been significantly high.

• 52:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  So they're doing skill work or drill work and it's taxing the brain. And they're thinking, oh, you know, I wasn't, you know, pushing hard lifts or doing sprints. And so I can just go off and the rest of my day, but then their, their, their mind is drifting.

• 52:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I speculate.

• 52:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, that, that seems very reasonable. I mean, I know that I'm here and presumably with the other athletes you've worked with. Nutrition is a huge um, aspect of that. And I think the general public can learn a lot from athletic nutrition because at the end of the day, the general public is trying to attend to their kids, attend to their work, whether that they're lawyers or whatever.

• 52:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  They need to focus. Nutrition is a barbed wire topic.

• 52:52Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  But if, since we're free to do what we would do if we were just sitting in each other's offices, which is to just speculate a bit, for the typical person, right? Do you think these low carbohydrate diets, typical person who exercises, runs, swims, yoga, lifts weights, maybe not all those things, but some collection of those, is pushes themselves to do those things and to do them well, but isn't necessarily a highly competitive athlete? Do you think that nutrition that doesn't include a lot of glucose, doesn't include a lot of carbohydrates is a problem? Or is it okay? What do you, what do you recommend for athletes? What do you recommend for typical people?

• 53:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, again, disclaimer, I'm not a dietitian, but I.

• 53:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's okay. The dietitians don't know what to recommend to athletes either. And I say that from having spent a lot of time with the literature now. It's a complete mess.

• 53:47Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 53:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's like, I thought we didn't understand anything about the brain. The nutrition science stuff is all over the place.

• 53:52Speaker 07

  Right.

• 53:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  So I think we have, again, a large degrees of freedom.

• 53:56Speaker 07

  Right, right, right. I mean, I think, you know, I, I think it's, it comes down to metabolic efficiency. So we would never, we would never advocate a high, I never say never, okay? But, you know, we rarely advocate a high performance athlete in a, in a high intensity intermittent sport like MMA, being totally ketogenic or.

• 54:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  You do not recommend that.

• 54:18Speaker 07

  No, because at the end of the day, some of those high intensity efforts usually require, you know, carbohydrate fueling for the high and the energy, the energies produced at those high intensities. So we try to navigate around that. Now, listen, there are fighters in the UFC and elsewhere. Matt Brown is a great example, who, who promotes the ketogenic approach, and it works for him. But we, we, we look at the science and the nature, the characteristics of our sport, and we don't necessarily promote that.

• 54:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  Can I interrupt you real quick? What about ketones? For people that are ingesting carbohydrates. This is an interesting area because people always hear ketones and they think, oh, I have to be ketogenic to benefit from taking ketones.

• 55:00Speaker 07

  Right.

• 55:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  But there are a number of athletes and recreational athletes now as well, taking liquid or powder-based ketones on, even though they do eat rice and oatmeal and bread and other things. So are there any known benefits of ketones, even if one is not in a state of ketosis?

• 55:19Speaker 07

  So the, the, the, uh, the, the only, the, the, the use of ketones that I'm primarily aware of is, is, um, in our sport is after the event, you know, in terms of the brain health with, with athletes that take, you know, potentially taking trauma to the brain, et cetera, and looking to maintain the, the, the fueling and the energy supply to the brain. But yes, it's probably a little bit out of my remit, so I, I don't want to talk on that because I'm not, I'm not fully familiar with that.

• 55:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I've heard that ketones, um, after head injury can provide a buffering component.

• 55:48Speaker 07

  Correct.

• 55:49Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's not going to reverse brain damage, but it might be able to offset some of the micro damage.

• 55:53Speaker 07

  Right. So that, that's what, that's how we use it, just to sustain, um, you know, the energy supply to the brain that might be compromised through brain trauma. Um, so that's why we use ketones. Um, to come back to the original question, if it's a, you know, general population, then yes, I think there's, there's a place to argue that actually being on a ketogenic diet at times, and maybe that's a cycling exercise, maybe not, you know, I don't mean cycling a bike, I mean cycling, um, ketosis, um, is beneficial because I think it's going to lead to better metabolic management and, and metabolic efficiency. Uh, those lower intensities where we should be fueling our, our metabolism with lipids and fats. Um, clearly the, the Western diet and, and, you know, the modern day diet is heavily driven

• 56:38Speaker 07

  by processed food and carbohydrates that, you know, people become predisposed to utilization of that fuel source, um, above lipid use, fat use, um, intensities that are very low. So, you know, some of our data with the fighters shows that as well. Um, but I think the challenge for us is that we're working with a clientele that require high intensity bouts of effort. Um, so. Fueling appropriately is very important for that. Now, we use we use tactics here where we essentially have athletes on what you would say kind of is it largely a ketogenic diet. But then we will fuel carbohydrates around training sessions. So we'll do very timed exposure to carbohydrates. So it's not.

• 57:21Andrew D. Huberman?

  Post-training.

• 57:22Speaker 07

  Post-training, immediately pre, during, and then immediately post. And then the rest of their diets, you know, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Are what would look like ketogenic type approaches. So we're trying to be very tactical in the exposure to maximize the intensity for the training and then return to a metabolically efficient diet, which is heavily reduced in carbohydrate because we've fueled the the sessions that need it.

• 57:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm smiling because once again, the this place, the UFC Performance Center is doing things scientifically, which, you know, to me, the idea that and I'm pleased to hear that because to me, this idea that the ketogenic diet is the best and only diet, or carbohydrates and low protein diets are the best diet. It's just, it's ludicrous. Then you mentioned metabolic efficiency. I think some people might be familiar with that term, some perhaps not. But the way I understand metabolic efficiency is that you're you teach the body to use fats by maybe doing long, long bouts of cardio, maybe lowering carbohydrates a bit. So teaching the body to tap into its fat stores for certain periods of training.

• 58:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  And then you also teach the body to utilize carbohydrates by supplying carbohydrates immediately after training and before training. You teach the body to use ketones, and then you use them at the appropriate time, as opposed to just deciding that one of these fuel sources is good and all the others are bad or dispensable. Do I have that correct?

• 58:48Speaker 07

  You nailed it. I mean, from Bob Seabah, as formerly of USA Triathlon, is the guy that kind of came up with the the concept of metabolic efficiency. But yes, you're absolutely right. I mean, at low intensities of exercise or just day-to-day living, we shouldn't be tapping into our carbohydrate fuel sources extensively. That's that's for higher intensity work or, you know, the fight or flight needs of of stress, you know. If, you know, athletes or any individual has a, you know, a high carbohydrate diet, they're going to start to become predisposed to utilizing that fuel source preferentially.

• 59:29Speaker 07

  Now, at low intensity, that can be problematic, certainly for an athlete, because if they preferentially use carbohydrate at lower intensities, when the when the exercise demand goes to a higher intensity, they've already exhausted their fuel stores. You know, they can't draw upon fat because the oxidization of that that fat is just too slow. So they're essentially now become fatigued because they've already utilized the carbohydrate stores. So what we try to do, yes, through diet manipulation and a little bit of exercise manipulation is, as you say, teach the body or train the body to preferentially use a specific fuel source, fat, obviously, at lower intensities and carbohydrate at high intensities. And we look at specifically the crossover point between the two tells

• 1:00:11Speaker 07

  a lot in terms of how an athlete is ultimately, how their metabolism is working.

• 1:00:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, again, I'm smiling because I love this because it's grounded in something real and scientific, which is that we have these different fuel sources. The body can adapt to use any number of them or one of them. I think most people are looking for that one pattern of eating, that one pattern of exercising that's going to be best for them or sustain them. And they often look back to the time when they felt so much better switching from one thing to the next. But the adaptation process itself is also key, right? Teaching the body. And I, so if we were to just riff on this just a little bit further, if if somebody, I'll use myself as an example, since I can only speculate

• 1:00:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  what other people's current nutrition protocols are. But if somebody is eating in a particular way, and they want to try this kind of periodization of nutrition, could one say, okay, for a few weeks, I'm going to do more high intensity interval training and weight training, and I'm going to eat a bit more carbohydrate because I'm depleting more glycogen. Then if I switch to a phase of my training where I'm doing some longer runs, maybe I'm not, maybe I'm training less, maybe I'm just working at my desk a little bit more, then I might switch to a lower carbohydrate diet. Do I have that right? And then if I'm going to enter a competition of some sort, certainly not UFC, or MMA of any kind, to be clear.

• 1:01:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Not because it isn't a wonderful sport, but because it's that wouldn't be good for my other profession. But if I were going to do that, then I would think about stacking carbohydrates, ketones and fats. Is that, do I have that more or less?

• 1:01:48Speaker 07

  I mean, I think, I think, yeah, you said it eloquently. At the end of the day, you're consciously understanding what the the exposure to to physical exertion is, and you're flexing your diet accordingly.

• 1:02:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  So it's need based eating?

• 1:02:02Speaker 07

  Exactly. And for one of better terms, you know, you can call it whatever fancy terminology there is out there. But yes, it's it's needs based eating. But you're very conscious and cognizant of what is my current exercise status. You know, if I'm, you know, if I'm taking some time off, then, you know, don't gorge on the carbohydrates. We probably need to be cut. It's going to be lower intensity work, or even just habitual day to day, walking around, doing your groceries, you know, that that doesn't require massive amounts of glycogen storage and carbohydrate fueling. So you can potentially go more ketogenic in nature. And, you know, oxidizing lipids for that fuel. If you are in a high period of of high intensity

• 1:02:43Speaker 07

  training, then you have to consciously flex your diet to support that. That's not normal. You've you've made a change. You've elevated the demand. So the fueling requirements for the regenerative, not only fueling the exercise, but the regenerative requirements of your body after that type of work is going to be really important as well. So yes, take on more carbohydrates. So I think it's consciously interpreting the nature of your diet against what, where you are at any moment in time.

• 1:03:09Andrew D. Huberman?

  Like that, you know, I think the listeners of my podcast generally are experimenters. They are scientists of themselves, which which makes me happy, obviously. And and and I like to think that they're paying attention to the changes they're making and how they're affecting themselves. And they seem more open to trying things, provide they can do it safely, you know, and and seeing what works for them. And I'm certainly going to try some of the change up. I also am really a creature of habit. And I think the talking to you today, I realize I'm probably doing a number of things truly wrong in my training, but also that I don't tend to vary my nutrition with my training quite as much as I should. I'm just locked into a protocol.

• 1:03:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  We uh, we covered a number of things related to your PhD thesis work and then uh, but I cut you off early on related to your uh, trajectory. After you finished your thesis.

• 1:04:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:04:01Andrew D. Huberman?

  You, I know you were at Notre Dame for a while. Was that your first spot after, after your PhD thesis?

• 1:04:07Speaker 07

  No, no. I um, I basically finished my PhD and I dropped into the British Olympic system for about fourteen years.

• 1:04:14Andrew D. Huberman?

  Oh my.

• 1:04:14Speaker 07

  I was, you know, I was with um, you know, I've done three full Olympic cycles um, with different sports and largely a strength and conditioning coach um, as a practitioner. I was always working in, in universities and academia alongside, you know, in terms of continuing to publish and write um, and, and do research and teach as well.

• 1:04:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  That explains the huge volume of publications. I don't think people realize the work that goes into getting a quality peer reviewed publication. It's not uh, what, what do they call it now on Instagram? Anecdota? Where people do something what, you know?

• 1:04:47Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:04:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  They have this experience and then they put in the world that.

• 1:04:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:04:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's uh, anecdota are, I don't even know that we get to call it data, but uh, so fourteen years in the, working with the British Olympic team?

• 1:04:58Speaker 07

  Yeah. So with uh, you know, whether it was GB boxing primarily with the, with the, the Rio side, excuse me, the, the Beijing cycle, but also lightweight rowers and gymnastics um, for the London Olympic Games, that cycle I was with, I was the, the lead strength and conditioning and physical performance coach for British basketball. So GB basketball. Um, I had about three years um, in the English Premier League and with, with Newcastle United and, and the soccer team. And then for the Rio Olympic cycle, I was with Great Britain Taekwondo. So again, I had another combat sport. Um, after I'd finished there, I kind of moved to the University of Notre Dame um, where I went into more of a, more of a managerial position,

• 1:05:38Speaker 07

  working across all the different technical services, medical, nutrition, strength and conditioning, you know, psychology, whatever, sports science, whatever it may be. Um, as the, you know, uh, the um, Director of Performance Sciences for Notre Dame Athletics. And then after about sixteen months there, the UFC came knocking and they recruited me out of Notre Dame. So um, it's been uh, it's been a great ride. Lots of, you know, I've got, you know, lots of athletes have taught me a lot along the way. Lots of coaches, you know, every day is a school day. I still try and keep that that mentality. And, you know, in this world, we call it white belt mentality, you know, it's, you know, I'm a PhD. I've got 25 years of experience in high performance sport, but I still, I still learn every single day

• 1:06:22Speaker 07

  from these people out on the mats and in the ring and it's impressive to see what they do.

• 1:06:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, it certainly is. I got introduced to MMA just a few years ago. I think the first time I came out here was one of the first times I had heard of MMA because I was kind of in my laboratory, you know, nose down. And it's a really interesting sport because it incorporates so many different types of movement. As you said, you know, it's not just stand up boxing, it's just kicking, it's every, you know, ground game, everything. And I'm still learning about it. But as you mentioned, going in with that beginner's mind, the white belt mentality. What has been the most surprising thing for you in terms of being exposed to MMA in particular as opposed to other sports? Like what's, what's unique about MMA fighters besides that they have

• 1:07:07Andrew D. Huberman?

  this huge variety of, of tactical skills that they have to learn and perfect?

• 1:07:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's a great question. I would say two things. I'm going to answer two questions. One actually reiterates what you've already said, like the degrees of freedom in mixed martial arts are exponential, like no other sport, you know. We've got 11 different weight classes. We have men's classes, we have women's classes. We have, you know, kickboxers, wrestlers, jiu jitsu fighters, judokas, you know, like karate fighters. You know, the stylistic backgrounds are infinite. We have, we're a weight classification sport. There's a whole issue relating to making weight and then rebounding to, to fight about 24 to 30 hours. Like just the variability in this sport, the, the considerations that you have to make are unprecedented compared to any other sport that I've worked with.

• 1:07:59Speaker 07

  And a lot of them go against and are the antithesis of what you would expect for a high performance. You know, in terms of, we, we don't always have a very clearly. Defined competition schedule, you know, once these guys fight, they they don't necessarily know when their next fight is gonna be.

• 1:08:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  What's the closest spacing of a of a fight?

• 1:08:18Speaker 07

  I mean, listen, I think the the the record is around, um, it's it's just over a month, I believe.

• 1:08:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  Goodness.

• 1:08:24Speaker 07

  Um, so, you know, that that's a quick turnaround, but most of these guys are fighting, you know, three or four times a year. Three times a year is is pretty normal. Um, the the the bigger fights, maybe two times a year. But invariably, the guys don't know when that next date is going to be. So we're in this gray area of, okay, what what what do we do? Like, are we are we taking some time off? Are we just gonna do some general prep work? Are we gonna try and keep this, you know, the knife sharpened in case I get?

• 1:08:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  I didn't realize this. In that way, it's a lot like special operations.

• 1:08:54Speaker 07

  Absolutely. You don't know when the call is gonna happen.

• 1:08:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  They have to be ready at all times. There isn't this like, let's get ready for the season.

• 1:09:00Speaker 07

  Right. Yeah, like when when I was with the British Olympic Association, you know, I knew it was the the British Open, the Spanish Open, the French Open, the European Championships, the Israeli Open, the American Open, the Canadian Open, the Olympic Games, you know, I could.

• 1:09:12Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's a circuit in your brain.

• 1:09:13Speaker 07

  Right, yeah, you just you just plan like, you know where all the targets are gonna be. Here, it's a moving target because you might be just hanging out, doing some general prep work, and then you might get a short notice fight. They give you a quick call and it's in six weeks or five weeks and, okay, I've got to ramp everything up really quickly. So that's a real challenge in terms of just managing all these this these different components of mixed martial arts alone. The the other, to come back to your question, the other thing which is truly fascinating about these individuals is their just their mental resilience. And again, we we've touched on it in the talk, but, you know, the ability to do what they do on a daily basis to um, look at all the different skill sets that they have to try and engage in and and and bring into their training.

• 1:09:59Speaker 07

  To do that and and and embrace the grind, embrace the process of just learning. Um, the physical side of our sport is unprecedented, um, but the mental side, you know, we have a funny saying here, we always say it's ninety percent medical, ninety percent mental, apart from the sixty percent that's physical. So, you you know, it's just, it's just more and more and more. And these these guys' ability to um, to just do that on a daily basis is is is is very impressive. Like, their resilience, their their internal drive and their resilience is is is really impressive to see.

• 1:10:31Andrew D. Huberman?

  All the fighters I've met here have been really terrific. It's interesting. Every time I meet a fighter, how often I I shouldn't be surprising where they're often very soft spoken.

• 1:10:40Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:10:40Andrew D. Huberman?

  Always extremely polite.

• 1:10:41Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Andrew D. Huberman?

  And fighting is such a, you know, it comes from a very primitive portion of the brain, right? As a but a large portion of the brain nonetheless.

• 1:10:49Speaker 07

  But I think that's another skill is that switch, you know, and again, that's the recoverability piece, right? Like you cannot be type A or you cannot be like supercharged 24 hours a day because you're gonna just fry your system, right? And I think that's something else where we're really trying to manage this whole process, be it through nutritional interventions, be it through education around sleep, be it through training program management, be it through psychological interventions. You know, you could look at fighters and say like, these guys are go like they're red alert and they they'll run through a brick wall. But actually, again, their ability to turn it on and off means that they can do what they do. You know, they can bring it down and and be very normal, very polite, very, you know, accommodating.

• 1:11:34Andrew D. Huberman?

  Maybe even better than most people because, you know, one of the reasons I'm obsessed with with human performance and high performance and people like fighters and, you know, elite military or or even bodybuilders for that matter is that they they experiment.

• 1:11:48Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:11:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  They find the outer limits of what's possible. But one of the things that they have discovered as you're describing is this ability to toggle between high alert states and calm states. Most typical people can't do this. They see something that upsets them on the internet or something on the news or some external event pressures down on them and they're stressed for many, many days and weeks. And sometimes it goes pathological, right? And and this, I don't say this as a criticism, it's just that most most human beings within our species, most members of our species never learn to to either flip the switch or to just voluntarily toggle between states. I think athletes learn how to do that extremely well. And it sounds like MMA fighters do that even better than perhaps many other athletes.

• 1:12:32Speaker 07

  I mean, yeah, there's the odd one or two that would struggle with. But I think in terms of that chronic exposure, we we see that coming from challenges. Is around cyclical weight cutting and metabolic disruption and metabolic injury, not necessarily from the psychological drive. You know, they do, they do understand that this is a job for them. And the time on the mats, you know, most of them can, can turn it off a little bit and downgrade things when they're off the mats. It's, it's impressive to see because again, like as a layman, just looking at the fight game, you think, you know, it's going to be crazy, chaotic, 100 miles an hour, every hour of every day. But that's not, that's clearly not the case. They, they, they manage their energy and their efforts pretty well.

• 1:13:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  It's a little bit like science, although maybe scientists could take a lesson from.

• 1:13:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, is it that evidence based practice or practice based evidence, right?

• 1:13:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's good. A couple more questions. I can't help myself. I know we talked about temperature earlier when we discussed cold, but I can't help myself. I have to ask you about heat because earlier we were having a conversation about heat adaptation, about how long does it take for the human body or athlete or typical person that's maybe exploring sauna or things of that sort to learn to be a better sweater? It sounds like something none of us would want to do. We all want to stay cool, calm and collected. But one of the reasons to deliberately expose oneself to heat is for things like growth hormone release, et cetera. We talk about this, but a couple of questions.

• 1:14:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  One, is heat exposure stress in the same way that the ice bath or cold exposure is stress? The second one is, is there any difference there that's important? And the other one is, how does one get better at heat adaptation? Or at least what are you doing with the fighters to get them better at dealing with heat? How long does that take? So the first question, just because I threw three questions at you is, was, you know, is heat stress like cold is stress?

• 1:14:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think it is. And I think, you know, heat shock proteins, for example, are driven by that stressful exposure to a changing environment. So I think, you know, it's, we do graded response in terms of heat acclimation strategies. But yes, we've touched on it earlier in the conversation. For me, heat is still a stressor. And if it's managed incorrectly, you can have detrimental responses rather than beneficial responses.

• 1:14:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  So barring like hyperthermia and death, like, I mean, obviously you heat up the brain too much. People will have seizures and die, but you lose neurons. But what's the right way to acclimate heat? Taking into account that people are, you know, should check with their doctor, et cetera. We do all these disclaimers, but you know, but let's say I, let's just say I want to get better at dealing with heat or I want to extract more benefit from heat. Is, I mean, how many minutes a day are people typically exposing themselves to heat? How often and over how, what periods of time?

• 1:15:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we, we, we normally start with about 15 minutes of exposure. Now, if someone's really lacking acclimation to heat, you know, you can do that in three, five minute efforts. Do you know what I mean? And actually.

• 1:15:38Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is hot, hot sauna.

• 1:15:39Speaker 07

  Yeah, hot sauna, take time to step.

• 1:15:41Andrew D. Huberman?

  200 degrees or something like.

• 1:15:42Speaker 07

  Correct, yeah, yeah, 200 Fahrenheit, yes. And we, we, we try to work up to 30 to 40 minutes to 45 minutes in the sauna continuous. Now, we, we have to understand, you know, what, what's the advantage of heat acclimation for our athletes? Ultimately, their ability to sweat and to lose, you know, body fluids is going to be advantageous to their weight cut process. Their ability to make weight. It is a technique that these guys, some of these guys adopt. So if you don't have, you know, high sweat rates, it means you're going to have to sit in the sauna for longer and longer and longer to get the same delta in sweat release. And so the more acclimated you are, the more your body is thermogenically adapted, the more sweat glands you have.

• 1:16:27Speaker 07

  And there's more pores, you, you can sweat more and therefore you'll lose that fluid quicker and you spend less time in the sauna. So that's why we do it, um, to try and promote the, the, to limit the exposure. And it comes back to your first question, is it a stressor? It's, it absolutely, it's a stressor if you've got to spend. You know, two hours over, you know, over a four hour period, two hours of it sat in a sauna.

• 1:16:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  Yeah, where the phone doesn't work. So you can't.

• 1:16:52Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:16:52Andrew D. Huberman?

  You know, people divorce them from their phone and that's a stressor in itself.

• 1:16:56Speaker 07

  Right. I mean, yes, I think, you know, there's, there's a, you know, what we do is we, like anything, we build up in temperature, but we build up in, in volume of exposure. So, you know, we start with 15 minutes and then we just try to add on and add on across the time. And now, now for us, we kind of found about 14 sauna exposures starts to really then drive the adaptations that we're looking for. So it's not a quick fix, you know, a heat acclimation strategy has to happen long before fight week or long before the fight. You know, this is a, this is a process that has to begin, you know, eight to 10 weeks before the fight so that we can actually get that adaptation and that tolerance to the stressor, to the exposure of heat.

• 1:17:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  This is interesting. I, until today, when we talked about this earlier and again now, I didn't realize that, but it makes perfect sense now that I hear it, that heat adaptation is possible, that you're basically can train the body to become better at cooling itself, which is what sweating is. I mean, I should have known that before, but you know, you don't see that in the textbooks and so, yeah.

• 1:17:56Speaker 07

  I mean, listen, it's, it's, it's the same as the ketogenic conversation, you know, you, you're training your body to be more metabolic efficient. You're training your body to tolerate heat more. You're training your body, like the body is a, you know, as an organism, as an organic system, it's, it's hugely adaptable. It's hugely plastic, but I think the skill is understanding the whens, the whys and the wheres in terms of changing the overload, changing the stimulus to drive specific adaptation. And philosophically, that's, that's how we go about our work here. We talk about adaptation led programming. Now, adaptation led programming. Fits into every single category, not just lifting weights or running track.

• 1:18:39Speaker 07

  It fits into nutrition, it fits into sitting in the sauna, it fits into being in a cold bath or not. It fits into so many different things because we're driven by scientific insights. And that's how we really want to go about our business.

• 1:18:51Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love it. I love this concept of adaptation led programming and doing that not just in the context of, you know, throwing another plate on the bar or something like that, but in every aspect of one's training and performance. And I think there's a lot here that's applicable to the recreational athlete too.

• 1:19:07Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:19:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  Would you say that, you know, what comes to mind is 12 weeks? It feels like 12 weeks is a nice block of time for someone to try something in terms of to try something new, see how they adapt, adapt, and then maybe switch to something new. I realize that it's very hard to throw a kind of pan timeframe around something. But in terms of if someone wanted to experiment with heat adaptation or experiment with cold adaptation or change up their training regimen or diet and look at metabolic efficiency. Do you think 12 weeks is a good period of time to really give something a thorough go? And get and gain an understanding of how well or how poorly something works for oneself? Or would you say eight is enough or three?

• 1:19:50Speaker 07

  I mean, that's, that's the how long is a piece of string kind of response, right? I mean, yes, if we're just talking arbitrary numbers.

• 1:19:57Andrew D. Huberman?

  Recreational experimenter, yeah.

• 1:19:58Speaker 07

  Three months exposure, 12 week training, you know, strategy, 12 week intervention is more than adequate to say. For 99% of things that change within the body that physiologically adapt to a training stimulus or an overload stimulus, you're going to start to see either regression or progression. You know, beneficial or detrimental effects within three months. Absolutely, I would say so. Now, listen, I say that in as much as we do training blocks here that are three weeks long.

• 1:20:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  Right. Well, that's because of this constraint that sometimes people suddenly have to, they get the call to fight.

• 1:20:31Speaker 07

  Correct, yeah. So it's like super condensed and you know, in that scenario, we're always conscious of is there body, is there body or this individual, do they have the ability to tolerate that super overload, that like super condensed exposure? Now, we might be doing that purposefully. We might be trying to do an overreaching strategy where we're really trying to damage or flex something, and I don't mean like negatively damage, but like we're trying to damage tissue to really get an adaptive response versus, you know, more drawn out 12 week strategy, which is more coherent, more planned out, more structured in nature. But yeah, for all your listeners, I would say if 12 weeks to engage in a process of, you know,

• 1:21:15Speaker 07

  trying to change and adapt your body or expose yourself to something is more than sufficient to see if it's going to be the right approach for you. And I think, you know, the individual interpretation is always has to be considered. And I think that's where it comes back to be a thinking man's athlete or be a thinking man's trainer, like someone that's going through exercise. You have to consciously understand where your body's at any moment in time. You know, you've got to be real with yourself. You can create a journal, create a log of your training, create a log of your feelings, your subjective feedback of, you know, how you felt, your mood, your sleep. Do your athletes do that? Yeah, yeah, we try to promote that because again, that's part of this process, you know?

• 1:21:59Speaker 07

  Maybe 12 weeks for you, but I might get the same responses in eight weeks, you know? And I think that's, that's another critical theme here is that, you know, we could put 15 guys on the mat and give them the same workout and there's going to be 15 different responses to that same workout because the human organism is so complex and in nature that it's going to adapt differently. You know, some people will tolerate it, some people are going to be challenged by it. Some people have got a metabolic makeup that's going to promote it. Some people are metabolically challenged by it. You know, there's just so many different things that we have to consider and that's what we try to do here. It's the cross we bear is that we try to understand on an individual level how to optimize athletic performance.

• 1:22:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  I think it's terrific and you know the athletes here are so fortunate to have this and most people out there, um, I've, you know, I've certainly been trying to encourage people to learn some science and some mechanism and become scientists of their own pursuits, whether or not skill learning or athletic pursuit, uh, et cetera. Um, as a sort of a final question, what are some things about the UFC or something about the UFC that perhaps people don't know in terms of its overall mission or what you guys are trying to do here? I mean, I think I've, I've become a fan of MMA and I am more and more as time moves on. Some people might be into MMA, some people not into watching MMA, but what are some things that the UFC is interested in and doing, um, that most people might not know about and certainly I might not know about?

• 1:23:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think, you know, we, um, we try to be cutting edge. We try to be super progressive, you know, we, we, we think we've got an amazing platform here, particularly at the Performance Institute to do some really cool things that can inform many different people. And I doubt that doesn't just mean the, the 600 or so athletes that are on our global roster. Um, what we're trying to do is, is influence, you know, global community around optimizing human performance. So, uh, you know, any moment in time, we're engaging in different technologies with different vendors, different partners, you know, exploring opportunities to, you know, learn more, share data, understand what's the best mechanisms for, you know, interpreting your body, interpreting how your body's responding to training, interpreting,

• 1:24:15Speaker 07

  you know, your nutrition or whatever it may be. We, we get, we're in a really privileged position to do that. Um, but we've also, you know, hence you've been here today, you know, we, we're also trying to venture into some really cool areas of science and research that's got applicability, um, that you can take from high performance athletes and apply, you know, to yourself, to you, you know, Joe Blow walking down the street, you know, out there, um, that, that is really interesting. And that's everything from, um, you know, whether it's CBD and psychedelics through to different technologies for, you know, thermal monitoring and Bluetooth heart rate monitoring or whatever it may be through to data management, et cetera, and, and, and anything in between. We've, we've got some great partners on the nutrition side, on the psychology side, on the data side.

• 1:25:00Speaker 07

  And, um, I think, you know, we, we always try to just push the envelope a little bit more. I think we, we keep our core mission with our athletes, but I think a lot of what we do. Hence your podcast and you know, like an amazing platform. You do such a great job of it that, you know, we can all learn and take from, you know, the elite and interpret how it might help us and just in the general population. So I think that's, you know, that's our North Star is to provide our athletes the best integrated service of care. But we also want to influence, you know, just the global community and put the UFC at the forefront of that.

• 1:25:36Andrew D. Huberman?

  That's great. Well, you guys are certainly doing it and we can't let the cat out of the bag just yet, but the things that we're gearing up to do with my laboratory and the work together, hopefully we'll be able to talk about that and share that in the year to come. But that's, we're very excited about that. And Duncan, look, you know, I have this, this filter that I use when I talk to people, academics or otherwise, which is, you know, some people, they open their mouth and it doesn't make much difference. But when you speak, I learn so much. I'm going to take the protocols that I've heard about today. I'm going to think about how I'm training and how I could train differently and better, how I'm eating, how I could eat differently and better for sake of performance and just

• 1:26:19Andrew D. Huberman?

  in general. Thank you so much for your time, your scientific expertise, the stuff you're doing in the practical realm. It's immense. So hopefully we can do it again.

• 1:26:30Speaker 07

  Yes, thank you. This has been a blast. I appreciate it. And yeah, keep doing what you're doing because I know there's a lot of people out there that love the platform. So thanks for the invite. It's been awesome.

• 1:26:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you for joining me for my conversation with Dr. Duncan French. I hope you found it as insightful and informative as I did. If you're enjoying this podcast and are learning from it, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Please also leave us a comment or a suggestion of a future topic or future guests that you'd like us to have on the Huberman Lab podcast. In addition, please subscribe to our podcast on Apple and Spotify. And on Apple, you can leave us up to a five star review. Please also check out the sponsors that we mentioned at the beginning of this episode. That's a terrific way to support this podcast.

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• 1:27:44Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd also like to mention that if you're not already following us on Instagram at Huberman Lab, you might want to do so. There, I do brief science tutorials and offer science-based protocols for all sorts of things that are often separate from the protocols and information covered on the Huberman Lab podcast. We're also on Twitter as Huberman Lab. And last, and certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.