Essentials: Optimize Your Exercise Program with Science-Based Tools | Jeff Cavaliere

In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, my guest is Jeff Cavaliere, MSPT, CSCS, a physical therapist, strength coach and the founder of ATHLEAN-X, an online training platform. We explain the foundations of an effective training program, including how to structure your weekly workouts and recovery to match your goals and schedule. We also discuss effective warm-ups and stretching, strategies to reduce injury risk and practical nutrition principles without strict calorie counting. Jeff's science-based approach offers clear, actionable guidance for anyone looking to improve fitness, physique and overall health. Read the episode show notes at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/huberman Helix: https://helixsleep.com/huberman David: https://davidprotein.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Jeff Cavaliere (00:00:20) Beginner Whole Body Training Program, Warm-Ups (00:02:18) Splits, Time Efficiency, Recovery; Bro Splits (00:05:07) Sponsor: BetterHelp (00:06:18) Cardiovascular & Resistance Training, Timing & Frequency; Blending Strategies (00:09:24) Cramp Test & Resistance Training, "Cavaliere Test", Muscularity (00:11:55) Recovery, Soreness & Variability; Tool: Grip Strength Test (00:14:48) Sponsor: Helix Sleep (00:16:22) Active vs Passive Stretching, Recovery (00:18:46) Recovery, Heal "Shorter" & Muscle; Dynamic Stretching (00:20:55) Upright Row, Shoulder, Posture, Tool: High Pull; Strengthening Hips (00:26:10) Sponsor: AG1 (00:27:01) Tool: Proper Bar Grip, Elbow Pain (00:31:26) Tool: Training Journal & Goals (00:32:03) Nutrition; Tool: Plate Method (00:35:28) Sponsor: David (00:36:47) Post-Training Meal, Protein; Pre-Workout Supplements (00:39:04) Acknowledgements 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 Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Jeff Cavalier. Jeff, such a pleasure for me to have you here.

• 0:23Jeff Cavaliere?

  I'm glad to be here. It's amazing.

• 0:24Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm a longtime consumer of your content. I've learned a tremendous amount about fitness, both in the weight room, cardio, nutrition, things that I've applied for over a decade. One of your mantras is, you know, if you want to look like an athlete, train like an athlete, and I think that's something really special that sets aside what you do from what a lot of other very well-qualified people do. What's the sort of contour of a basic program that anybody could think about as a starting place?

• 0:56Jeff Cavaliere?

  I think it's like a 60/40 split, which would be leaning towards weight training, you know, strength, and then, you know, the conditioning aspect be about 40%. So if you're looking at it over the course of a training week, I mean, five days in a gym would be a great task. And obviously not in the gym, it could be done at home. But three days strength training, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, conditioning, Tuesday, Thursday, you know, two days. It's a pretty easy, roundabout way to split that up. Of course, depending upon training goals, and as you said, the aesthetic goals like that will shift dramatically. But if you want to see the benefits of both, that's probably the effective dose for strength training and the effective dose for conditioning at the bare minimum level. We try to keep our workouts to an hour or less, if possible. Now, depending upon the split that you're following,

• 1:41Jeff Cavaliere?

  if you're on a total body split, there's just going to be more that has to be done in a given amount of time. But in general, when you're not focused on that one aspect, but the overall health picture, then... You can get the job done in, in under, in, under an hour. And again, I always say on top of if, if you want to look like an athlete, train like an athlete is you can either train long or you can train hard, but you can't do both. As you start to get older, it's the length of the workout that actually causes more problems than the intensity of what you're doing. Particularly if you're warmed up properly, like you said, I've found personally that my warm up has had to become more of an integral part of my, my workout than it ever has before.

• 2:17Andrew D. Huberman?

  In terms of splits, you mentioned splits. And so for those who aren't familiar with this term splits, it's really, uh, which body parts are you training on which days? I've seen you discuss, you know, three days a week, whole body workouts. I've heard of splits like a pushing one day, uh, pulling another day, legs another day, a day off, repeat. I mean, there's so many variations on this. What's governing the, the split?

• 2:41Jeff Cavaliere?

  Uh, for me, the first rule is will you stick to it? I don't particularly like full body splits. I don't necessarily like to have to train everything. Now, of course the volumes will come down per muscle group, but if you don't like to do that and you actually don't look forward to your workout because you're dreading having to do everything and feeling maybe too fatigued by the time your workout's over, or the fact that those generally do take a little bit longer and don't fit into your schedule. I don't care how effective the split is, a split not done is not effective. So you need to find one that fits. So maybe you go into an alternative option like a, um, a push pull legs, like you mentioned. That could be done either one cycle through the week on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday split, or it could be twice in a week. So you're actually training six times.

• 3:23Jeff Cavaliere?

  You know, where, where you repeat it, you know, pull, push legs, pull, push legs, or, or, you know, uh, you know, however you want to do it with either a day off in between the three days or at the end of the six days. Um, and again, that actually impacts your schedule. I've broken that down before where it's, you know, if you put it in between the three days, it's good because you're giving yourself an extra rest day in between. But it starts to shift that day off every week as we wrap around. So for those guys that were choosing that seven day schedule out of convenience in our heads, you know, it starts to mess with that off day. So others like to just keep it predictably, let's say on a Sunday and train six days in a row. But that's a, but that's a better way to maybe group similar muscle actions together, which I think I definitely prefer that because if I'm going to be training, you know,

• 4:08Jeff Cavaliere?

  pulling movements, at least there's a synergy between them and I feel like I'm looking to achieve one goal that day. And then, I mean, quite honestly, you can go back to the bro split days and those still work effectively. There's a reason why they worked in the past. Like, I think that science shows that there's smarter ways to do them these days. Like, you can, you can come back and hit a related muscle. So you could do, let's say, biceps on one day and then come back two days later and do back, realizing, again, synergy between the exercises there. Your biceps are going to get re-stimulated again. So you could figure out ways to make that work. But the thing that I think is effective there is that tends to be one of the ones that people like the most because

• 4:50Jeff Cavaliere?

  they can go in, they get their pump, they feel good, it's pretty solely focused on one muscle group.

• 4:56Andrew D. Huberman?

  Is that the definition of a bro split?

• 4:58Jeff Cavaliere?

  One muscle group a day.

• 5:00Andrew D. Huberman?

  I see. So it's very much geared towards strength and aesthetics, really maximizing chest one day.

• 5:05Jeff Cavaliere?

  Probably more aesthetics than strength, yeah.

• 5:08Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing therapy for a very long time and I can tell you that it's a lot like physical workouts. There are days when I want to do it and there are days when I don't want to do it. But when I finish a therapy session, every single time, I come away feeling better and knowing that the time was well spent. And typically, when I finish therapy, I come away with a valuable insight or new perspective on something I'm working through, whether that's with work, with relationships, in my personal life, or simply in my relationship with myself. There's just so much benefit that comes through effective therapy. With BetterHelp, they make it very easy to find an expert therapist who can help provide the benefits

• 5:50Andrew D. Huberman?

  that come from effective therapy. And it works. BetterHelp has an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for its live sessions based on over 1.7 million client reviews. Also, because BetterHelp is done entirely online, it's extremely time efficient. There's no driving to a therapist's office, looking for parking, et cetera. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com/huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.com/huberman.

• 6:18Andrew D. Huberman?

  In terms of the mixing up of cardiovascular training and resistance training, same day, different day, which one should come first, which one should come second?

• 6:31Jeff Cavaliere?

  So again, I think that the bare minimum is probably twice a week in terms of cardiovascular. If you want to have some semblance of cardiovascular conditioning. But I think most people who actually need it more or want to pursue it more than that are going to need more time to do that. So at some point, it can't just be relegated to a day off or a day off from the weight training workouts. So at some point, it has to occur on the same day, you know? And in that case, I just like to put it at the end of the workout because you don't want in any way compromise the weight training workout. The intensity of those workouts is important. I just like to, you know, put that at the end, realizing that even if my effort level

• 7:10Jeff Cavaliere?

  is lower, my output is lower, if it's still placing a demand on my cardiac output to get that conditioning effect because I'm fatigued, it still has a demand on my cardiac output. So it's still achieving its goal, but it didn't interfere with my main goal of being able to increase my performance in the gym.

• 7:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  And in terms of the form of cardiovascular training, I've seen you do a number of, I have to say, very impressive, high intensity interval type work rather than on the treadmill or out jogging for 30, 45 minutes. Is that because you prefer higher intensity, higher heart rate type training?

• 7:47Jeff Cavaliere?

  If we could blend function across these realms and not have such a delineation between this is my weight training and this is my conditioning, but figure out a way to blend them together, I always think that you've got a better opportunity to get that more well-rounded result. And I like to kind of mix up that straight conditioning work and also some of the footwork, you know, drills. Like we have, we have some high expectations for guys that come into our programs, like to just do some footwork drills.

• 8:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Like ladders.

• 8:17Jeff Cavaliere?

  Like ladders or line drills or something. And you know what happens? People become intrigued and interested, like I never, I haven't tried this since high school, you know? They become interested in just the challenge of it. And as we become almost distracted by the challenge, we're now like finding ourselves conditioning, you know? And, and I always think that's an important part that sometimes you gotta draw people in to get, to show them what they might be interested in. And from the output or the effect of it, I just think that when you're able to blend some of some, you know, still maintain some of that strength training into the exercise. So as you mentioned, let's say I'm doing some kind of a push up or a burpee. I mean, there is, there is a, um, an anaerobic component to that that is going to be helpful. Um, that then, rather than just walking or just jogging.

• 9:03Jeff Cavaliere?

  Not to, not to say that that isn't an effective means for strict cardiac conditioning. It's a, it's one of the ways that we've had for, you know, centuries, you know, to do it. But I just think that if we can blend it, then it becomes maybe a little bit more interesting. And you get some of those crossover benefits and it doesn't become so segmented in terms of what we're trying to do.

• 9:23Andrew D. Huberman?

  One of the most important things I learned from you so, uh, over the years was that if you can flex your bicep to the point where it hurts a little bit, like it almost feels like a cramp or a cramp. Or you can flex your calf to the point where it really cramps up a little bit, almost feels like it's nodding up. That's a pretty good indication that you're going to be able to stimulate that muscle well under load. If you're doing the movement properly.

• 9:46Jeff Cavaliere?

  Right.

• 9:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  How did you arrive at this kind of cramp test, the cavalier test, as I'll call it?

• 9:50Jeff Cavaliere?

  During my workouts, even as a, as a young kid just starting out, I wanted to know what was supposed to be doing the work. Once you do that and you start to seek that out and say, okay, well, if the bicep is what's supposed to be doing the work, then I want to make sure the bicep's doing the work, right? So I would seek out ways to make that happen better. And when I was able to do that, I could feel the stronger contraction. I was no visionary. I just felt like I, I knew that that was going to be better for me. If the muscle I was trying to grow was being stressed more. When I was attempting to do this across different exercises, I would notice that what I could do potentially on a curl where my arm is up, you know, where you're asking me to flex my bicep, that position,

• 10:33Jeff Cavaliere?

  I couldn't do if I was, you know, doing a concentration curl, or I couldn't carry over to a cable curl. And that shouldn't really change, right? Cause the function is still largely the same. There's still elbow flexion. There's still supination. Like, why am I not able to do it there? And that's where it sort of clued into me that like, Your mind-muscle connection on not just your mind with one muscle, but on every exercise matters and it varies from exercise to exercise. There's a term I like to call muscularity, which is a difference. It's the level of resting tone in the muscle. That improves dramatically. If you can learn how to just start to engage that muscle better,

• 11:14Jeff Cavaliere?

  the muscularity, the resting tone of that muscle is harder, it's more alive. It's all driven from being able to connect better neurologically with the muscle that you're trying to train. When you're trying to go and create muscle hypertrophy, or even this muscularity that I talk about, you need to seek ways to make it feel more uncomfortable. If you don't feel the discomfort, then you're doing something wrong. And I struggle to this day on certain muscle groups to still do that, even knowing what I'm trying to work. It's very difficult for some muscles and for certain people to do this on certain muscles. But as you mentioned, practice does help. And the more you become consistent and deliberate with what you're trying to do, the more of a result you actually get.

• 11:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  How do you assess recovery at the local level? Meaning at the level of the muscles? So we'll talk about soreness and getting better, stronger, more repetitions, etc. And then the systemic level, the level of the nervous system.

• 12:06Jeff Cavaliere?

  Different muscles recover at different rates. You might have a bicep that's able to be trained, that can be trained again the next day. And then the next day. And then maybe you need a day off after that. That can vary from person to person for sure. And it can vary from muscle to muscle in that person over the course of time. As you mentioned, because the systemic recovery is going to impact all those muscles anyway. But let's say you're systemically recovering. Every muscle itself is going to have a recovery rate. And I think that using muscle soreness as a guideline for that is one of the only tools we have in terms of the local level. Well, that's the one that most people can relate to and easily identify. And then use that as a guideline. And if you're training when you're really sore, it's probably not a great idea.

• 12:49Jeff Cavaliere?

  But as far as the systemic recovery, grip strength is very, very much tied to performance and recovery. And when I was at the Mets, we used to actually... Take grip strength measurements as a baseline in spring training all the time. Now, obviously, as a baseball player, you're gripping a bat, you're a pitcher, you're gripping a ball, like, you know, having good grip strength is important. So if you've noticed somebody had a very weak grip, it's just a good focal point of a specialized training component for the program.

• 13:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Do you do this every day with those guys?

• 13:17Jeff Cavaliere?

  No, we would do, in, in spring training, we'd do sort of a baseline entry level measurement, and then we would, we would measure it throughout the season, maybe once every two weeks or three weeks. And, and, you know, the, the idea there was to measure the recovery. We have found that with, with one of those scales, those old fashioned bathroom scales, it's a great tool for just squeezing the, the, the, uh, the scale with your hands and seeing what type of output you could get. Imagine the last time you were sick, or that where you, or just try this, you know, the next time you wake up in the morning. When you first wake up in the morning, you're still groggy. Try to squeeze your hand. Try to make a fist as hard as you can. You're gonna sit there angry at your fist because it won't contract as hard as you know it can. You don't have the ability to just create the output, and that is because in that state,

• 14:00Jeff Cavaliere?

  you're still sleepy, you're still fatigued, you know, you're, you're not even awake at the, you know, the, the whole level at this point. So when you start to measure that on a daily basis, you can get a pretty good sense of where you're at. And I think when people start to see a drop off of 10% or so, or, or even greater of, of their grip output, um, you really should skip the gym that day, because I don't think there's much you're gonna do there that's going to be that, that beneficial, even if it is the day to train legs, or whatever day it is. I mean, there certainly are more sophisticated tools too, as a, as a PT, you know, we have a, a hand grip dynamometers, you know, we can, and we can measure one side at a time, but that comes at a cost, those are pretty expensive devices. But if it's, listen, if you were an athlete, you know, the, the 200, 300 bucks it costs

• 14:43Jeff Cavaliere?

  to have one of those would be well worth, you know, the added investment.

• 14:48Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now, I've spoken many times before on this and on other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. When we aren't getting great sleep on a consistent basis, everything suffers. And when we are sleeping well and enough, our mental health, physical health, and performance in all endeavors improve markedly. Now, the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft it is, or how firm it is, all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz, and it will ask you

• 15:32Andrew D. Huberman?

  questions such as, do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Maybe you know, maybe you don't. Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Things of that sort. You answer those questions, and Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk, D-U-S-K, mattress. I've been sleeping on a Dusk mattress for more than four years now, and it's been far and away the best sleep that I've ever had. If you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com/huberman, take that two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for you. Right now, Helix is giving up to 27% off their entire site. Helix has also teamed up with TrueMed, which allows you to use your HSA/FSA dollars to shop Helix's award-winning mattresses.

• 16:16Andrew D. Huberman?

  Again, that's helixsleep.com/huberman to get up to 27% off. When's the best time to stretch for particular types of results? And maybe you could define some of the different types of stretching?

• 16:28Jeff Cavaliere?

  In general, the two basic forms of stretching are active stretching and passive stretching. And your passive stretching is done with the goal of trying to create an increase in the flexibility of the muscle. So whether you're actually increasing the length of that muscle, more so what you're doing is increasing the resist or decreasing the resistance of that muscle to want to stay at a certain... Level of flexibility. When we can sort of take the brakes off and allow that muscle to allow us more range of motion, we're inherently increasing flexibility without necessarily having to increase the length of that muscle. That is usually done at a time far away from your workout because there is a period of recalibration

• 17:08Jeff Cavaliere?

  that is needed after doing this because you're disrupting the length tension relationship of the muscle that causes you to not necessarily be able to rely on these, I've talked about before, stored motor engrams in your mind in terms of this is the pattern for how I swing a golf club, say. You know, and now introducing a little bit of flexibility or added flexibility or range because of the stretching I did before, it takes maybe a whole or two or three to match up again. Oh, this is the, this is what he's trying to do, that golf swing thing that I remembered again. Like it's not remembering that every component, like I have to bend my right wrist back 10 degrees and then I have to bend my elbow and I have to bring, like your body stores these patterns for motor efficiency.

• 17:51Jeff Cavaliere?

  So, and when I have to start matching up that stored pattern with what's feeling new because of the increased range, I can impair performance. And again, it could happen even in a gym workout where you're talking about your first, second set, third set, where maybe the repercussions aren't as big because I'll just do a few extra sets. But in performance, if you screw up your first three rounds, you're playing on a PGA tour and you shoot, you know, you're six over after three, you're done, you know? So we relegate that, as I mentioned, sort of towards the end of the day, when it's not going to impact performance, but even maybe have the additional benefit of creating the, the feeling of length or the increase or decrease in resistance to this length at a time when I know my body is going to try to tend to heal and heal shorter, never longer, but heal shorter.

• 18:35Jeff Cavaliere?

  So if I can introduce a little bit of that extra length or decreased resistance to that length, it's a better time to do it. So I think it promotes a A better recovery.

• 18:45Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'm intrigued by this concept of heal shorter.

• 18:47Jeff Cavaliere?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Andrew D. Huberman?

  So part of the healing and recovery process means a shortening of the muscles. This is the tensing up in sleep. Could you elaborate just a bit on that?

• 18:53Jeff Cavaliere?

  Basically, you know, what's been shown is that when, when the repair process, muscular repair from, let's say, strength training during the day, the repair process usually results in a muscle that is slightly shorter rather than increased in length. You know, muscles prefer to sort of ratchet their way down into that, that contraction. So when you're sleeping, it tends to err on the side of shorter rather than longer. When ideally, we don't really want that. We want to maintain as much of that length because with more length, we actually have more leverage. So again, it's just making a conscious choice to do it at a time of the day. That makes a little bit more sense. Dynamic stretching is really not done for that purpose of trying to

• 19:34Jeff Cavaliere?

  create any type of increasing the, the potential length, as you said, of the muscle, but more so the readiness of the muscle to perform. And increasing, you know, exploring the ends of that range of motion in a more dynamic way. So you're not hanging out there and disrupting that length tension relationship. But just sort of touching the ends of those barriers. So that when you feel movement again, it feels looser, it feels more ready. And, and obviously at the same time, warming up, blood flow, all the benefits we get from just warming up in general. So like, you know, that's, that's the series you've probably seen a bunch of times. But like, you know, leg swings and butt kicks and, you know, lung, walking lunges. And those are the drills that people will do prior to training

• 20:17Jeff Cavaliere?

  that are both excitatory in terms of just the nervous system, but also helpful for just the general warm up the body because of the blood flow. But from a muscle readiness standpoint, not impairing the performance while at the same time exploring the increased ranges. When I was working with Antonio Brown, I remember like he would spend 20 minutes, 30 minutes on all dynamic work. And I've never seen anybody spend that long on their dynamic work. But like, he said, he just didn't feel right and ready to go unless he did a lot of that. And I mean, you know, his, his dynamic stretching routine would be a workout for most everybody.

• 20:54Andrew D. Huberman?

  There's one exercise and one particular motion that I'd like to discuss for a moment because I believe that. Learning about this cautionary note from you is one of the reasons that I've maintained steady training for 30 years with no major injury, knock on wood. And that's the upright row. I learned from you that the upright row compromises some important aspects of our shoulder mechanics and can be actually sort of a dangerous movement in some ways. But so I've always made it a point now, on the basis of this advice, to really strive for external rotation. Please tell us about internal, external rotation. Why this is so important, not just for weight training,

• 21:39Andrew D. Huberman?

  but as in terms of posture and mechanics and not looking like a melted candle or partially melted candle.

• 21:47Jeff Cavaliere?

  The shoulder has the most mobility in the body of any of any joint, but it's also got the least stability, right? There's always that trade off of mobility and stability. So your stability comes from, you know, certain muscle groups. And one of the ones that the only muscle group that actually externally rotates the shoulder is going to be the rotator cuff, okay? And unless you are devoted to training through external rotation and exercises that are going to externally rotate the shoulder, you're not training that function. And it's so easy for us in everyday life, especially those that aren't training, to not ever really undergo any of those stresses that could be beneficial to counteracting what happens freely and naturally, which is internal rotation.

• 22:30Jeff Cavaliere?

  So when you think about the imbalance created just by nature and how we live our lives, internal rotation far, far, far outweighs external rotation. So you need to address it. And the reason why you need to address it is because you need to normalize those biomechanics of the shoulder if you want their long-term health. And one of the functions of the shoulder is to raise our arm up over our head. And if we do that from an internally rotated position, we're going to have a higher likelihood of creating stress inside that joint. In order to get normal mechanics and free up the joint maximally inside, you need to externally rotate as you raise the arm up. So if your muscles aren't firing and they're not necessarily as strong as the internal rotation bias that pulls them in,

• 23:15Jeff Cavaliere?

  you're asking for trouble every time you do that. Well, This exercise is literally putting you in elevation and internal rotation. And if you were to walk into a PT office and someone said, I think he's got impingement. Will you diagnose him? There's a test called the Hawkins Kennedy test. And I would put you in the position. I know we're not visible at this point through the podcast, but I'll put you in this position here, where I have your arm elevated and your hand pretty much under your chin, pushing downward on that to create that internal shoulder rotation. Pretty much the exact position that we're in when we're holding a bar in an upright row. Some will say, well, just don't go so high. Go only up to the level of the chest. But you're still in this internally rotated position. The thing that I think frustrates me the most about the exercise is that I have an alternative.

• 24:00Jeff Cavaliere?

  And the alternative does the same thing in terms of helping the muscles grow by simply fixing the biomechanics of the exercise, but just allowing the hands to go higher than the elbows. So instead of the elbows being higher than the hand, which drives you into internal rotation, if the elbow is lower than the hand, the hand being higher here, I'm in external rotation. And I could do something called a high pull and still get the same abduction of the arm and still get the same benefits of the shoulders, the delts and the traps, without having to undergo any of the stresses that would come from the somewhat awkward movement of an upright row. And people will argue, this is the way they argue that, I've done this for 30 years and I've never hurt myself. And I always say, yeah, yeah. Like, listen, the goal is to not hurt yourself ever.

• 24:45Jeff Cavaliere?

  So even if you, it's sort of like, you know, the championship game. You know, you might play the game of your life, but if you lose, you're lost. And when you get into the end of the, you know, the record books, you're still lost. So even if you had the game of your life, you lost. I don't care if you do it for 30 years, no pain, you're still doing it and there's no pain. I'm giving you an option that's going to give you the same results in the exercise that you're seeking. That's why you're doing the exercise without the possibility of having the, you know, the bad outcome come from it. The body is like a mirror image. The hip is like the shoulder, right? The ankle is the wrist. The foot is the hand. Like they're, they're, they funk, the knee is the elbow. They're two hinge joints. They function that way. Well, with the shoulder, you've got that mobility that comes from having all that freedom of motion, but the stability is lacking.

• 25:30Jeff Cavaliere?

  Well, the same thing with the hip. Like you've got mobility, but if you don't fully stabilize it by training all of the muscles of the hip, and if you don't strengthen the external rotation of the hip. Then you know you've you're you're going to have issues like it's that biomechanically going to work the same way. If you think of the body as a series of, you know, bands, you know, pulling in different directions at different levels of tension, you know, you're being pulled into one direction or the other, just by the balance of tension from one weak area to one dominantly tight area. And you need to make sure that you can sort of balance this out in order to eliminate some of the adaptations and compensations that happen.

• 26:10Andrew D. Huberman?

  If you're a regular listener of the Huberman Lab podcast, you've no doubt heard me talk about the vitamin mineral probiotic drink AG1. And if you've been on the fence about it, now's an awesome time to give it a try. For the next few weeks, AG1 is giving away a full supplement package with your first subscription to AG1. They're giving away a free bottle of vitamin D3K2, a bottle of omega-3 fish oil capsules, and a sample pack of the new sleep formula AGZ, which by the way, is now the only sleep supplement I take. It's fantastic. My sleep on AGZ is out of this world good. AGZ is a drink, so it eliminates the need to take a lot of pills. It tastes great. And like I said, it has me sleeping incredibly well, waking up more refreshed than ever. I absolutely

• 26:53Andrew D. Huberman?

  love it. Again, this is a limited time offer, so make sure to go to drinkag1.com/huberman to get started today. One of the great tools that I I picked up from your content, which has benefited, I know, a huge number of people is, I think I used to hold weights sometimes in the in the tips of my fingers as opposed to in the meat of the palm of my hands. And I had elbow pain. Turns out toward the end of my pull-ups or my bicep work, I was letting the weight or the bar drift into my fingertips. And the mere shift to making sure that my knuckles were well over the bar, or that the weight was really in the meat of my palms, has completely ameliorated that for reasons that you point out. And maybe you could just share with us why that is.

• 27:34Jeff Cavaliere?

  When you grip a bar, whether it be through a curl, or whether it be, and this is mostly pulling exercises, because the tendency for the bar is going to be to fall out of your hand, not like with a pushing exercise where it's kind of you're pushing your hand into the bar. So on a bench press, say. That bar can drift just by gravity, doing its thing, or fatigue of the hand grip strength, can start to drift further away towards the distal digits, right? Through those last couple knuckles that we have on our hands. Though our hand can still hold it there, the muscles are not equipped to handle those types of loads. And it could start at dumbbell weight, you know, 40 pounds, 30 pounds, you know, even 25 pounds for some, depending upon their overall strength levels.

• 28:19Jeff Cavaliere?

  But then when you start to apply it to something like your body weight with a chin up, right? Because that's natural for the bar to somewhat kind of float down towards your fingertips. And it actually is a little bit easier to perform the exercise with that sort of like false grip, little hook grip at the end, because you're not going to engage the forearms into the exercise. You're not going to start pulling down. But at the same time, while it could help you to perform them better by getting the back more activated, if you have weakness in these muscles, because it's not a thing that happens to everybody. It's not one of those upright row type things where I think this is happening to everybody. This is happening to people that have these inherent weaknesses in these muscles.

• 29:01Jeff Cavaliere?

  You or haven't done enough of the gripping in the meat of the hand, you know, for long enough. But it starts to put that stress on these muscles that are ill-equipped to do this and to handle this. And it starts to, particularly on that fourth finger, you know, which is part of the muscle we call the FDS, the flexor digitorum, that is just too much for it to handle. And that comes all the way down and meets right at the medial elbow, right on that spot that you can say feels like someone's knifing you right in that medial elbow. And medial epicondylitis, or they call it golfer's elbow, is something that a lot of us deal with in the gym. It's one of the most common inflammatory conditions people get from the gym.

• 29:41Jeff Cavaliere?

  And it all comes from this positioning of the dumbbell or barbell or hand on a pull-up bar over time. So the easiest thing to do is just grip deeper so that what you're doing is you're using, you know, more leverage from the palm to encapsulate the bar or the dumbbell or whatever. And you're not putting that pressure really distally right on that last digit, because that's where that FDS muscle is most strained. So you're just almost eliminating that from the equation. And it's one of those exercises that... The load can exceed its capacity pretty quickly so that like, you know, maybe it's only capable of handling 30 pounds. And then when you're doing a chin up and it goes and it drifts so far that it's now you're, let's say you're a 200 pound guy.

• 30:27Jeff Cavaliere?

  You've got, let's say 100 pounds through one arm and 100 pounds. This is simple, simplified math that obviously is offset by other muscles. But 100 pounds through one arm, 100 pounds through the other arm. 100 pounds off of a muscle that can handle 30 is not going to take many repetitions to strain it. And you're going to feel that maybe by the time that sets over or certainly by the time that workout's over or the next day you wake up, you've got that notable stabbing pain. Whenever someone feels that, the best thing would be to determine, okay, what exercises would I do that were pulling and where the bar could have drifted deeper or into, further from the meat of my palm into my fingers and figure out a way to deepen that grip. When that happens though, the best thing to do with most of these inflammatory conditions is not do any of that stuff for a little while.

• 31:10Jeff Cavaliere?

  There's so many other options that you can do that will train similar muscles or even the same motion and not cause that stress. So, I mean, a cable curl would be much easier to do that on than let's say a chin up where you don't have the control over the weight like you do by moving a pin on a stack.

• 31:26Andrew D. Huberman?

  I do have a question about precision of record keeping. Do you keep a training journal? Do you recommend people keep training journals?

• 31:34Jeff Cavaliere?

  I think that anything you can do to increase your awareness of your performance and also give yourself some objective goal. Whenever we have an objective goal, it's a lot easier to actually obtain it. When you're just there to get a pump and you're just there to lift how you feel that day, you have to be incredibly disciplined in all other aspects of your workout in order to make that effective. Anything you could do to increase your awareness of it and keep you on track with that is like I'm endorsing fully.

• 32:02Andrew D. Huberman?

  We could talk about principles around nutrition. What tends to work, what tends not to work? And how should we think about nutrition?

• 32:10Jeff Cavaliere?

  My approach is like, I've always been sort of a low sugar. Lower fat guy. That is the best approach for, I believe, again, in my opinion personally, for the overall big picture. Because though the people can take exclusionary approaches to nutrition and taking carbs out, or, you know, eating only fats and proteins, or, again, I'm not saying it doesn't work for you. And if it's the first thing that actually allowed you to gain control of your nutrition to the point where you actually saw results and got to a healthier weight, then I always say, then do it, then do it. But just make sure it's something you can do forever and doesn't bring upon other repercussions. I think that non-exclusionary approaches to diets are the most sustainable for the

• 32:53Jeff Cavaliere?

  rest of your life. And when I, and all I'm interested in from a nutrition standpoint is something that's sustainable.

• 32:58Andrew D. Huberman?

  In terms of what you do eat, how do you structure that? In terms of, when you look down at a plate, you've done these, you've described this before, but I think it's just a beautifully simple description, because I think a lot of people don't want to do calorie counting and all this and...

• 33:11Jeff Cavaliere?

  I have what I like, what I call a plate method. And it's just, it's just simple because it works for me. When you have your plate, you just simply look at it as like a, like a clock, right? And if you just make a nine 20 on the clock. So one arm goes over to the nine and one of the arms goes over to 20, because then you're going to make a line towards 12 o'clock too. And the largest portion is going to be your fibers, carbohydrates. So that's the, the, you know, the green vegetables, right? So whether it be broccoli, or Brussels sprouts, or asparagus, those are the ones that give us a lot of the micronutrients we need. They're the ones that are generally, you know, accepted as more healthy. And they're also going to provide the fiber that's going to be both

• 33:51Jeff Cavaliere?

  beneficial in terms of its impact on insulin and also just through filling you up, right? And then I take the next largest portion of that and I devote that towards protein. And I think it's really important, especially for anybody active. The more active you are, the more you embark on trying to build muscle, you're going to need to have protein in every meal. So I have that. And again, You know, we're talking cleaner sources of protein, but like I am, you'll never find like boiled chicken on my plate. I'll have some sort of fish or chicken, but it will be, it will be cooked in a way that's, that's like, you know, it's got maybe some sauce on it, or it's got some, maybe it's tomato sauce, anything to just make it a little bit more palatable and interesting without blowing the value of the meal. And then that last portion is where I put my starchy carbohydrates.

• 34:36Jeff Cavaliere?

  And again, that's the part that some people will say exclude them entirely because they're not healthy, or they don't work for you, or they're not, you know, beneficial long-term. For me, like most people, my body craves those carbohydrates. I choose things like sweet potatoes, which is my favorite, you know, or I'll have rice, or I'll have pasta. I will have those things. I'm not excluding them, but I don't put them in the portions that you would generally find. No plan is going to work if you're eating stuff you don't like. It's not going to work forever. Nothing will. You have to really enjoy what you're eating. As long as these, these variations of this meal are something that you really enjoy, and there are limited versions of them, the reproducibility of that is simple. If everyone listening to this podcast can figure out their nutrition issues, this whole world will be different.

• 35:21Jeff Cavaliere?

  That is like one of the largest sources of disease and, and pain and discomfort because people really struggle with nutrition.

• 35:28Andrew D. Huberman?

  I'd like to take a quick break to acknowledge one of our sponsors, David. David makes protein bars unlike any other. Their newest bar, the Bronze Bar, has 20 grams of protein, only 150 calories and zero grams of sugar. I have to say, these are the best tasting protein bars I've ever had, and I've tried a lot of protein bars over the years. These new David bars have a marshmallow base and they're covered in chocolate coating and they're absolutely incredible. I of course eat regular whole foods. I eat meat, chicken, fish, eggs, fruits, vegetables, et cetera. But I also make it a point to eat one or two David bars per day as a snack, which makes it easy to hit my protein goal of one gram of protein per pound of body weight. And that allows me to take in the protein I need without consuming excess calories.

• 36:13Andrew D. Huberman?

  I love all the David Bronze Bar flavors, including cookie dough, caramel chocolate, double chocolate, peanut butter chocolate. They all actually taste like candy bars. Again, they're amazing. But again, they have no sugar and they have 20 grams of protein with just 150 calories. If you'd like to try David, you can go to davidprotein.com/huberman. Right now, David is offering a deal where if you buy four cartons, you get the fifth carton for free. You can also find David on Amazon or in stores such as Target, Walmart and Kroger. Again, to get the fifth carton for free, go to davidprotein.com/huberman. What are your thoughts in terms of the nutrition science, the training-related effects of the post-training meal? Is it something you think people should pay attention to?

• 36:56Jeff Cavaliere?

  I'm not very dogmatic about what specifically to eat pre or post-workout, but I do think you should have protein surrounding your training, whether that be ahead of time or after. Protein could be a little bit hard to digest for some people. So if you do that pre-workout and then you're finding your workout is slogging because you don't feel good, then certainly you put that after your meal. But this whole concept of the urgency of time has thankfully been removed and we can just learn to eat a little bit more responsibly. And even as far as pre-workout supplements, a lot of people don't take them. A lot of people don't like them, they don't take them, they don't like, they're not necessarily even being used

• 37:39Jeff Cavaliere?

  as the nutritive side of the pre-workout. They're just more used to fuel the workout.

• 37:46Andrew D. Huberman?

  For me, it's water and some form of caffeine.

• 37:49Jeff Cavaliere?

  Yeah, I mean, it's whatever, you know, again, I think it's important. And I do think it's important to maintain a high level of output. So if your pre-workout nutrition requires a stimulant in order to help you do that, or if your pre-workout nutrition is causing you to have a harder time to train because you're feeling full or stomach ache or something else, then that's not achieving what you're trying to do. The ultimate goal is to still be able to perform at the highest level. So whatever your nutrition is required to allow you to still do that, that is probably the most important factor of all of it. I hate to say, but it's a lot less scientific than we want to make it. And as it seems to be coming back oftentimes, like the thing that works for you is really the most important thing because ultimately getting your ass in there

• 38:32Jeff Cavaliere?

  and doing what you do is really the thing that provides the best benefit. I think when you hear things like this that like, hey, that will work and that will work too, and that this will work too, you know, rather than the dogmatic one-way-only approach, which could become discouraging for people. Then I think it becomes a little bit uplifting like, well, I've never tried that. I've actually never tried a total body splitter. I've never tried, you know, that style of eating. Like it, it becomes encouraging. You know, you might want to explore and then you might finally get locked in and say, I really like this. And then you're off and running.

• 39:03Andrew D. Huberman?

  On behalf of myself and all the listeners, I really want to thank you. And what I love about all of this now that you've given us is that there's a, there's a backbone of logic, you know, and some consistent themes indeed about consistency. And but the, the logical backbone, I think, is what will enable people to really show up to the table and stay there for training consistently over time.

• 39:26Jeff Cavaliere?

  I'm happy I was able to make it work because I really, I've been watching your stuff for a while. And I really, I love the science of it. I like the way you think. I'm just really fortunate that I was able to do it.

• 39:35Andrew D. Huberman?

  Well, I feel very gratified in hearing that and honored to have you here. So thank you so much.

• 39:40Jeff Cavaliere?

  Thank you.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Booking.com is the easiest way from a day surrounded by noise

• 39:59Speaker 02

  to a stay surrounded by nature.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  That's nice.

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Go on, book it. It's easy. Booking.com. Booking dot yeah.