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

Andrew Huberman opens by establishing who Jeff Cavaliere is and why the conversation is framed as science-based. He identifies Cavaliere as holding a master of science in physical therapy and as a certified strength and conditioning specialist, trained at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, described as one of the top five programs in the world in physical therapy and sports medicine, and as having served as head physical therapist and assistant strength coach for the New York Mets. Huberman says he discovered Cavaliere's online content over 10 years ago and that it covers training for strength, for hypertrophy (which is muscle growth), for endurance, rehabilitating injuries to avoid muscular imbalances, nutrition, and supplementation. He characterizes that content as incredibly science-based, incredibly clear, sometimes surprising, and always incredibly actionable, and credits it with one of the largest online platforms for fitness, nutrition, supplementation, and injury rehabilitation. He also stresses that the podcast is separate from his teaching and research roles at Stanford and is part of an effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.

If you want to look like an athlete, train like an athlete

The substantive starting point is Huberman's first question, which asks for the contour of a basic program rather than a prescription. Speaking of the typical person who would like to maintain or maybe even add some muscle mass, probably in particular areas rather than overall mass, who wants to maintain a relatively low body fat percentage and be in good cardiovascular health, he asks whether people should be doing 50% resistance training and 50% cardio, or maybe 70/30, or maybe 30/70, and requests the sort of contour of a basic program that anybody could think about as a starting place. He anchors the question in Cavaliere's mantra about looking like an athlete and training like an athlete, and notes it applies to the use of weights and resistance, whether body weight, weights in the gym, or pulleys versus cardio, in terms of overall health, aesthetics, and athleticism. The framing is deliberately conditional: typical person, maybe, probably, starting place, and he explicitly defers the discussion of overall mass to later.

Huberman also maps the territory the episode intends to cover, which shapes how the later arguments should be read. He says the conversation ranges over how to split up body parts across the week, how to integrate strength training and endurance training, when to stretch and how to stretch, nutrition, a bit about supplementation, avoiding imbalances in muscle and in neural control over muscle, and the mental side of training, including when to bring specific concentration to the muscles being trained and when to think more about moving weights through space and the movements overall. He praises Cavaliere's understanding of how muscles, bones, tendons, and ligaments work together and how the nervous system interfaces with those, and states that everything is grounded in science, everything is clear, and everything is actionable. He also mentions the goal of setting up a lifelong fitness practice.

Cavaliere's answer to the ratio question is a qualified 60/40 split leaning toward weight training, or strength, with the conditioning aspect about 40%. He illustrates it over a training week of five days in the gym, which he calls a great task, with three days strength training on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and conditioning on Tuesday, Thursday, two days, describing this as a pretty easy, roundabout way to split it up, and adds that it could be done at home rather than in a gym. Crucially, he frames the figure as contingent: depending upon training goals and aesthetic goals, that will shift dramatically, and he calls it probably the effective dose for strength training and the effective dose for conditioning at the bare minimum level, noting that being a much better performer, conditioning-wise, you are going to want to do more than that. The claim is thus a starting heuristic, not a fixed rule.

On duration, Huberman offers a personal self-report as evidence. He says he has been weight training for about 30 years and running for about 30 years, mainly for health, and has found that if he works hard at resistance training for more than 60 minutes or so, recovery becomes very hard, with colds and getting weaker from workout to workout. By contrast, keeping workouts to about 10 minutes of warmup and 50 minutes of really hard work for resistance training, and keeping cardiovascular work to about 30 to 45 minutes, leaves him feeling great and seeming to make some progress, at least some place in the workout from workout to workout. He flags this as amazing, at least to him, so the numbers are offered as an individual observation rather than a universal standard.

Cavaliere affirms those as good numbers and the kind his team usually preaches, saying they try to keep workouts to an hour or less, if possible. He qualifies this with exceptions: on a total-body split there is just going to be more that has to be done in a given amount of time, and training primarily for strength could prolong the workout because of longer rest times in between sets. In general, when the focus is not one aspect but the overall health picture, he says you can get the job done in under an hour. He also reports that, particularly as you start to get older, he thinks it is the length of the workout that actually causes more problems than the intensity, provided the person is warmed up properly, and that his warmup has had to become more of an integral part of his workout than ever before.

You can either train long or you can train hard, but you can't do both.

The personal rationale behind the maxim is explained rather than asserted as law. Cavaliere says he wants to go hard and get out, that his body responds to that, and that he thinks a lot of guys' bodies respond to that; he contrasts being 20, when he could go right to the working sets, with now needing a warmup, after which the intensity is not what bothers him as long as he is very much in control of the weights. If a session goes pretty long, he starts to feel achy or have problems, so depending upon age, length interacts with recovery. He closes with the qualified generalization that everybody, on a standard program, can achieve the results that they want within an hour.

Huberman introduces the topic of splits by defining the term as which body parts are trained on which days, and immediately raises a physiological objection to the convention: almost everybody follows a weekly workout schedule, although the body, of course, does not care about the week, and there is no reason to think that once every seven days or twice every seven days makes sense physiologically. He lists the variations he has encountered, three days a week of whole-body workouts, and splits such as pushing one day, pulling another day, legs another day, a day off, repeat, and asks what governs the split, what the rules and the logic that dictate a split are, while deliberately avoiding the huge matrix of possibilities by pointing to Cavaliere's content and the show notes for specific designs.

Cavaliere's first rule is adherence, not physiology. He states it as will you stick to it, and explains that he does not particularly like full-body splits and does not necessarily like having to train everything, because the volumes per muscle group come down, the person may dread having to do everything, feel too fatigued by the end, or find that those sessions generally take a little bit longer and do not fit into the schedule. His summary is that he does not care how effective the split is: a split not done is not effective, so you need to find one that fits. He offers push-pull legs as an alternative that could be done either one cycle through the week, on a Monday, Wednesday, Friday split, or twice in a week. The reasoning is pragmatic and preference-based, and he marks it as his own view with for me and maybe.

a split not done is not effective

The split options surfaced here are presented as possibilities rather than a ranking. Whole-body workouts three days a week; push-pull legs run once through the week on Monday, Wednesday, Friday; the same pattern repeated twice in a week for six training days as pull-push legs, pull-push legs, with a day off either between the three days or at the end of the six days; and the bro-split of one muscle group a day. Cavaliere's stated criterion for choosing among them is which one the person will actually stick to.

On the six-day version, Cavaliere notes a scheduling wrinkle: putting the rest day in between the three days is good because it gives an extra rest day, but it starts to shift that day off every week as we wrap around, which messes with the predictable off day for those who chose a seven-day schedule out of convenience. Others prefer to keep it predictably on, let's say, a Sunday, and train six days in a row. He says he definitely prefers grouping similar muscle actions together because, if training pulling movements, at least there is a synergy between them and he feels he is looking to achieve one goal that day.

Cavaliere then rehabilitates the bro-split. He says you can go back to the bro-split days and those still work effectively, that there is a reason why they worked in the past, and that he thinks science shows there are smarter ways to do them these days, for instance coming back to hit a related muscle, such as biceps on one day and back two days later, with the biceps stimulated again through synergy between the exercises. He says it tends to be one of the ones that people like the most because they can go in, get their pump, feel good, and it is pretty solely focused on one muscle group. When Huberman asks for a definition, Cavaliere gives one muscle group a day, and agrees it is probably more aesthetics than strength, with Huberman tying the label, hence the bro, to aesthetics and strength.

I think that science shows that there are smarter ways to do them these days.

Cavaliere, describing himself as a science guy, says he could appreciate the benefits of a bro split and poses the question of to what end, and whose goal are we trying to achieve here, theirs or ours. He argues that if he applies his standards, his goals, or even athletic ideals, but the person just wants to get in shape, then it is perfectly fine to do a bro split in that instance, if the person is sticking to it and seeing the results that they want to see. He adds a learning rationale: a lot of times people struggle with the way an exercise feels and do not have that proprioceptive ability to kind of lock in on an exercise, so spending a few sets on the same exercise and then another exercise for the same muscle group helps them dial in a little bit better and get more out of their training. The defense is explicitly conditional on the trainee's goals.

whose goal are we trying to achieve here? Theirs or ours?

The exchange then turns personal and historical. Huberman recalls that when he started resistance training at 16 in high school he learned from Mike Mentzer, that there was no internet at the time, and that he paid by a Western Union-type arrangement from the back of a magazine before Mentzer called his house. Cavaliere says he only read Mentzer's book and did not get to meet him, and calls the resulting plan a variation of a bro split too, where body parts are broken down as chest and back, or chest and bis. Huberman says the plan worked very well for him, but qualifies this by saying he probably would have grown on many different programs because of his age and because he was largely untrained, and that he eventually made it an every other day thing, noting that if you hit legs right, at least for me, he is not training the next day. He contrasts this with a six day a week push-pull legs program, which seems excruciating to him both for recovery and for the psychological experience of being in the gym more than four days a week, whereas three or four days with a day off in between leaves him wanting to be there with a lot of fire. He says he loves Cavaliere's point about the split you will stick to and can bring intensity to.

On two-a-day training, Huberman reports he has done it twice in his lifetime and got sick two days later both times, then immediately cautions that this is correlation, not causation, before asking whether two-a-day weight training ever makes sense for the non-drug-assisted, typical-recovery-ability person. Cavaliere answers that he actually thinks it makes sense in some scenarios, but that it does not make sense practically for a lot of people's schedule. He sketches splitting an upper or total-body session so the anterior chain or pushing portion is done in one session and the pulling session later at night, if the opportunity exists, and says the benefit is the freshness of focus, because toward the latter half of a workout, as you approach the 50 minutes, an hour mark, you are either losing focus, losing energy, losing contractile ability, or losing something.

That's correlation, not causation.

Cavaliere develops the focus argument and then limits it. If the pulling portion is relegated to the end, something suffers, and he suggests switching the order next time so the pulling portion goes first; splitting the sessions could give freshness of focus again and a better effort, because he thinks effort drives the results, so if the effort is not compromised you should be able to do that. But he asks whether it is a problem systemically and says he thinks it is a problem for a lot of people, that it is just hard to rev the engine up a lot of times in the day, using the image of a car in the winter that is hard to restart once put back in the garage, and concludes that young people can get away with it a lot more than older people could. Huberman replies that he has never had a strong recovery quotient but seems to be okay with one day off in between and occasional two days in a row of training when travel requires fitting workouts in.

Huberman sets up the cardio question by stating the goals he assumes, with explicit hedges. Most people, he says, would like to either maintain or gain some muscle, and he does not know many people that want to lose muscle, usually in specific locations on their body. Most people would like to be a bit leaner or a lot leaner, while a few are either naturally lean or actually just want to gain weight. Assuming people want to get leaner, put on or maintain muscle, and have a healthy heart and a healthy brain, which basically requires a healthy cardiovascular system, he asks how to incorporate cardiovascular work into the overall weekly regimen, specifically whether same day or different day and which should come first or second.

Cavaliere gives a two-part answer. He says the bare minimum is probably twice a week in terms of cardiovascular if you want some semblance of cardiovascular conditioning, but that most people who actually need it more or want to pursue it more than that are going to need more time, so at some point it can't just be relegated to a day off from the weight training workouts and at some point it has to occur on the same day. When conditioning is not the primary goal and the person wants the overall picture, the aesthetics, putting muscle on in certain areas, he would put it at the end of the workout, because you don't want to in any way compromise the weight training workout. The reasoning is that the intensity of those workouts is important and there is a strength component that is going to be a helpful stimulus for growth.

So the conditioning, the cardio, that stuff done prior to any strength training workout, is likely going to impair your ability to perform at your best.

Cavaliere refines the sequencing with a physiological rationale and a caveat. Cardio done before strength training is likely going to impair performance unless it is just a quick little warmup, in which case it is not sustained long enough really to be of benefit for cardiovascular conditioning. Placing it at the end, he says, means that even if his effort level or output is lower, it is still placing a demand on cardiac output to get that conditioning effect because he is fatigued, so it is still achieving its goal but did not interfere with the main goal of increasing performance in the gym. The argument trades on the claim that conditioning can still work under fatigue while strength performance cannot be compromised beforehand.