Essentials: How to Assess & Improve All Aspects of Your Fitness | Dr. Andy Galpin

This Huberman Lab Essentials episode revisits a conversation with Dr. Andy Galpin about physical training. It opens with a broad question: how should a person judge whether they are as fit as they could be, and should be, "both for sake of health and performance?"

The answer starts by sorting exercise goals into two groups. The first is appearance: wanting to be big, not too big, or lean. The discussion says "there is an aesthetic component to almost everybody." The second is functionality, meaning the ability to perform in a certain way. What counts as function differs from person to person. Examples given include being better at strength, better at mobility, or having energy throughout the day.

Both groups also have a time dimension. The aim is to reach goals now, whether that means squatting a lot of weight or running a fast 5k, and to keep them for a long time. The conversation calls this "a long wellness span," being fit throughout life. That leads to the practical questions behind the rest of the episode: which area to focus on most, why goals aren't being met, and how to reach them more effectively. The proposed answer is that several major components of physical fitness are needed across all of these goals. The discussion plans to define those components and then cover methods for different goals, while noting that a full treatment could take hours.

Asked what major adaptations exercise can produce, the discussion says they "can be bucketed really into nine areas." The list moves from skill and fast, forceful efforts to longer endurance. Each category is defined by what limits performance, not by the type of exercise used.

1. Skill or technique: running more effectively, or practicing skills such as shooting a ball or implement or swinging a golf club. 2. Speed: moving at a higher velocity or with a better rate of acceleration. 3. Power: defined as speed multiplied by force. 4. Force or strength: treated as synonyms for how effectively you can move something. 5. Muscle hypertrophy: muscle size, described as the first item on the list about appearance rather than function. 6. Muscular endurance: how many repetitions of a movement you can do, usually in the 5 to 50 repetition range. 7. Anaerobic capacity: the maximum work you can do in roughly 30 to 45 seconds, possibly up to 120 seconds, of all-out effort. 8. Maximal aerobic capacity: efforts of roughly eight to 15 minutes that reach maximum heart rate and a true VO2 max. 9. Long duration: sustaining submaximal work for a long time with no breaks.

Several definitions come with careful distinctions. Strength is often confused with muscular endurance. The discussion separates them: strength "truly is a marker of what's the maximum thing you can move or what's the maximum amount of force you can produce one time." Muscular endurance is about repeated work, such as push-ups in a row or sit-ups in a minute. It is "almost always local muscle." A push-up test mainly measures how many reps the triceps, pecs and deltoids can do. It is not a measure of cardiovascular or global physiological endurance. Because this kind of endurance is specific to one or a few muscle groups, the discussion says you need multiple tests to cover the different groups.

The next two categories are separated by duration and by what limits the effort. Anaerobic capacity is described as "more synonymous with maximum heart rate." It is a total physiological limit rather than a limit in one movement or muscle group, and it is compared to classic interval work done at a maximum rate that brings "tremendous amounts of global fatigue." Maximal aerobic capacity cannot be reached in seconds. The discussion says it "simply takes multiple minutes" before VO2 max is sufficiently challenged, which is why the window is about eight to 15 minutes. The time ranges are hedged throughout with words like "say," "maybe" and "probably," so they read as rough guides, not exact cutoffs.

The last category, long duration, covers what is often called steady-state training, or what many people think of as "quote unquote cardio." It means continuing to move without any breaks, change or drop. The minimum duration given is generally 20 minutes, with 20 to 60 minutes as more typical. Anything longer is still limited by long-duration endurance, which the discussion describes as "your ability to sustain work over time."