The workout that builds muscle, boosts your brain, and slows down aging with Dr. Andy Galpin

Strength training is often associated with bodybuilding, but its benefits go far beyond muscle growth. Research shows that strength training supports cardiovascular health, enhances brain function, and is a strong predictor of longevity.

In this episode, Professor Andy Galpin joins us to break down the science behind strength training and show how anyone can incorporate it into their daily routine—without spending hours in the gym.

Next, we tackle one of the biggest barriers to strength training: time and access. Jonathan steps in as the test subject while Andy walks him through an efficient, full-body workout that can be done at home with minimal equipment.

Listeners will learn essential techniques, from proper form to breathing and injury prevention.

Finally, we discuss what happens in the body post-workout and the importance of building a sustainable routine. Andy shares practical advice on nutrition, recovery, and how to create a strength-training habit that delivers long-term results.

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Transcript

Jonathan Wolf: Andy, thank you for joining me today. 

Andy Galpin: Oh, it's a pleasure to be back, man, round two. 

Jonathan Wolf: Absolutely. And wonderful to be able to do it in person.

Andy Galpin: So much better. 

Jonathan Wolf: So you hopefully remember that we have a tradition here at ZOE, where we always start with a quick-fire round of questions from others. 

Andy Galpin: I did not remember that, but oh my gosh, let's go.

Jonathan Wolf: Okay. And so the rules are, you can say yes or no or if you have to, a one sentence answer. You’re a competitive person, I know that you're going to want to go for the yes or no. 

Should strength training make me live longer? 

Andy Galpin: Yes.

Jonathan Wolf: Can grip strength tell us how long we will live? 

Andy Galpin: Kind of, yes. Kind of.

Jonathan Wolf: Can I have more healthy years with just one hour of strength training per week? 

Andy Galpin: Depends on your status. Potentially. 

Jonathan Wolf: Can I get the benefits of strength training without leaving my house? 

Andy Galpin: Absolutely. 

Jonathan Wolf: And finally, you have a whole sentence on this one; what's the most surprising thing that you've learned about strength training?

Andy Galpin: How many options you have to succeed.

Jonathan Wolf: So Andy, I love the answer to those questions because I think often a lot of things we talk about all seem a bit depressing to do with health and all the things that might go wrong. 

What I love is that you're saying potentially even one hour of strength training, I'm guessing if I'm doing very little, could make a really big difference to my health. So I find that incredibly positive.

I think we're very lucky to have you here today because when you're not talking to us, amongst many other things, you're using your expertise as a trainer for professional athletes at the top of their game. 

So I think having you here to talk about why does strength training matter and what could you do if you're at the opposite end of that spectrum perhaps, and you haven't really done it or you're maybe doing it at the sort of level that I might be doing, what could you do to make it better? I'm really excited about that.

But I'd like to start at the very beginning. So, I'm not a professional athlete, why should I do strength training? 

Andy Galpin: Well, first of all, you can think about this in terms of, from your perspective. I could drill on about the science and physiology of strength training and overall fitness, by the way and we did that last time. So you can go back and listen for much of the details there.

But I think quickly lets position it back on the individual. So you're at home listening; why do you care about this? I like to think about people really caring about three major things one is how they look, second one is how they feel, and the third is how they perform.

Now people define how they look themselves. So some people want to look bigger or smaller. I don't care. My point is not, and I want to be careful about that, not saying, Hey, it helps you get bigger. It can if you want, it can also not.

You want to be lean, you want to be smaller. I coach many athletes, as you alluded to, but I coach many more non-athletes. Our coaching program we have is 10 or 20 fold normal everyday people relative to athletes. 

You define how you want to look. Strength training can help you get there. It's not the only thing, but it can be a positive place regardless of what that looking looks like. 

Second, you want to perform a certain way. You also want to feel strong throughout the day. You want to feel energetic, you want to feel like you're not in pain. You want to feel a certain way. Strength training will contribute positively towards that.

Then you want to feel a certain way. So again, whatever that means to you. You want to feel sharp, you want to feel cognitively in tune. You want to feel like you can make a snap decision. You want to feel safe if you go take a walk or a hike or any of these things happen.  There's no part of physiology which does not benefit from strength training.

One of the problems we've had in terms of a PR for strength training over the many decades is the disillusion of what that means in terms of what is the practice of strength training and then why am I doing it?

The connotation there is almost strength training, sports, muscle. Fine, all true. What has come out more recently, and by that I mean the last 20 to 25 years scientifically, is all the other benefits you get from strength training and all the other ways that you can strength train.

If you want to do a 15-minute workout in your house with your body weight, that can absolutely be strength training. You want to use strength training as an avenue to crush yourself and feel exhausted, great. You want to use it to feel more energy today, to feel less sore, less tight, and that can be done too. 

Jonathan Wolf: And Andy, is it possible to do strength training and actually feel more energy and as you said, less tight and better in the same day, rather than just the misery you're describing today for some better future, next week?

Andy Galpin: Absolutely. One of the sayings I have, I call it a law of strength conditioning, but the exercise itself, so the thing you choose to do, the dumbbell, the weight, the machine, that doesn't determine the adaptation. What determines the adaptation is how you execute. 

So the technique that you use, the range of motion you use, the time you take per exercise, are you going fast, are you going slow? How heavy you went, how light you went, how many reps you went. 

You can pick the metric that you care about under that umbrella of look, feel, and perform. And I can show you mountains of empirical data, randomized control trials, and professionals that are going to support this. 

My point I'm trying to make there is if we only think about strengthening as something we do for sports and muscle, we've lost the plot.

I hope that in our conversation today we can expand that and then give people direct tools and strategies about how they can get some of these other adaptations with different methods. So I'm very much looking forward to that.

 Jonathan Wolf: I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about what we understand today, the latest science says about the benefits of strength training for our long-term health. 

Because when I was brought up, no one talked about strength training having anything to do with your long-term health. Going to the gym was something you only did if you either were a really serious sports person or entirely about looking amazing in the mirror and that was what it was for.

But I don't think that represents sort of the view of science today. 

Andy Galpin: No. If you go back to the turn of the 19th century. So late 1890s, early 1900s, strength training was actually very clearly something promoted as very bad for your health. 

It switched in the middle of the 1950s, 1960s, and there's a legendary scientist named Dr. Kovich at Springfield University who was this big staunch advocate of strength training as bad for your health. He ended up flipping on that and realizing it was advantageous. 

But at that point you've got bodybuilding basically being the only thing people associate strength training with. Why? Because the people on the scene were York barbells. It was bodybuilders, it was Arnold Schwarzenegger, it was pumping iron, Conan the barbarian, it was Rambo, it was Rocky. 

These are the things that jumped out. And you had a whole bunch of, frankly, young boys for the most part, who watched these things and thought, I can become a superhero. Look at the Hulk, he's a real person. Right. That movie comes out…

Jonathan Wolf:  It's really funny listening to this because I think that is absolutely, you're nailing my time that Schwartzenegger and all of this is entirely what I associated with strength training. And clearly I felt totally unavailable to me and also quite strange. 

Andy Galpin: Of course, right? And then you've got, in the eighties, this gets transferred into sport. So Nebraska football brings up lifting, and then of course intertwined with all this is steroid use, right? And so we just have this entire association with lifting and muscle that we've described. Now, both of us have mentioned that's fine.

However, in the 1990s you have a whole bunch of kids like me that are born, they love strength training, but they don't care about the bodybuilding thing. I was honestly never interested in that world very much at all. 

I'm interested in sport performance. Well, some of us started becoming scientists. Prior to that, there were very few scientists in the field of exercise physiology, exercise science that weren't endurance folks. They were runners, cyclists, and swimmers. 

It was not until my generation, for the most part, where people grew up loving the physiology and the science, loving the strength training, and saying, why is there no science on this side of the equation?

It didn't take long before then the scientific literature started saying, wait a minute, it's not only not bad for you, but now yes, you can become a superhero, but holy cow, look at all these health benefits. 

Enter research on everything from, and there's actually been a handful of studies down the last five years on what are called lifelong lifters. So these are people that have been strength training in various forms for 30 years, 50 years, 60 years. 

They're folks in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, right? There's a series of different studies published in multiple labs on these folks. We've done work in my lab on twins. Those that have lifted weights, those that have not lifted weights, right? We've done a bunch of different studies on this.

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To summarize the entire field, you can look at this from just simply a longevity perspective. How long do you live? Strength training provides a massive advantage. 

You can look at this from the perspective of brain health, and we talked about this last time in our discussion. Lots of evidence showing both causal and correlation. What that means; yes, people that have healthier brains are probably stronger. 

The reality of it is, strength training, the act itself, and the practice will have positive physical benefits for your brain. You're talking about brain matter, you're talking about cognitive function. 

So the actual tissue in your head as well as functionality, memory, word recall, executive function, deterring of Alzheimer's and dementia. This stuff has been shown again in many, many studies across multiple labs. 

Your bone health, cardiovascular health, your functionality. Those that are stronger tend to be more active through aging, right? You're going to be more physically active. Then you get all the secondary benefits simply associated with being more active because life isn't as hard. 

Jonathan Wolf: And Andy, you mentioned lifelong lifters, so that sounds like people who've been doing this all the time in a very serious way. Do you need to be doing that level of strength training to get all these amazing benefits you're talking about? 

Andy Galpin: It's not a matter of do you have to hit a certain threshold to get benefits.

Physiology doesn't work like that. What it works like is the spectrum. So if you did one workout today, you will see a positive benefit from one workout. Now, if you did one and stopped, will that benefit last for 50 years? Clearly not. 

So it's a gradient, right? If you did one workout a month for your entire life, you'd probably be better off than somebody who never worked out, but not by much.

Do you have to work out five days a week your entire life? No, not at all. Do you have to work out three days? No. There's no specific cutoff where all of a sudden it is a benefit, and then there's a cutoff where there's no benefit whatsoever. It's just a gradient. 

So my answer to this genuinely is, sure more is typically better, but that doesn't mean if you can't do five days a week, you should do zero. If you can do one day a week of strength training and you accrue that for 30 or 40 or 50 years, I promise you, and the evidence will support me greatly. 

Here you will be majorly more advantageous across a number of physiological markers than people who lift no days a week. So zero to one will be impactful. One to two, two is probably better, but you get the point. 

So I don't like people hearing this and then thinking, oh, if I can't do the whole thing then I'll just do nothing. Whatever you can get done, let's celebrate that as a win in progress. And if we can then scratch out more later, great, fine, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good here.

Jonathan Wolf: You were describing how there's a lot more scientific literature on this than there was 30 years ago when you're saying there was almost none. 

When you are looking at those benefits in these papers, sort of what is the thresholds of which you're starting to see these sort of significant improvements in, you mentioned, brain health and bone health and heart health, which I suspect for many listeners are the things they're like, Oh, I want that because that's how I'm going to get these extra years.

Andy Galpin: Yeah. To tie it into, you'll see the same amount of benefit for the most part in perceptual markers as well. Mental health, mood, depression.

Almost equal benefits here as the physical side of the equation. So you really, and I hate to paint anything as a panacea here and oversell, but this is one I'm pretty comfortable overselling. I mean, you just basically can't pick a metric that anyone would care about that which strength training doesn't positively contribute. 

Where is that threshold of benefit across all those areas? It's a little bit different depending on if you're looking at the research on mood say, or the research on metabolic health. But in general, you will see benefits at one day a week. 

The only caveat here is that context matters a ton. So, what does your sleep look like? What does your overall metabolic health look like? What's your body fat? All this will conflate these numbers, but I think the truest way that I can say, if I had to accurately summarize all this in my brain, if you can do one day a week, you're better off than zero by a lot.

Two is probably better, three is probably best. As a lifelong average. 

Jonathan Wolf: And so if you're doing three days a week, which is still a lot less than seven, but obviously it's still sure quite a lot. So three is what I try and hit, and truthfully, more than that feels impossible to fit into my life. 

And you would be like, well, of course it's possible, it's a question of what I trade off. But I think I remember you saying from last time that there's an improvement, but a sort of diminishing return as you keep pushing this on.

 So if someone was listening to this and saying like, I'm going to do what Andy tells me to do, I want to optimize for all those amazing gains, is it three days a week they should be aiming for? 

Or are you just being really polite and saying, well, really you should be doing something every single day? And that really, once you fall off that it's much worse? 

Andy Galpin: You have to tease apart physical activity and structured strength training or resistance training. That's the key here. 

If you strength train twice per week and then you accrued five steps a day and sat on the couch the rest of the day, you're not going to be healthy. Point blank. 

At the same token, and there's a lot of research on this, there are a lot of people who lived very long and healthy lives without lifting a single day in their lives.

So it's not a requirement that you have to do strength training to live well. It's just a massive benefit, and it is a huge way to get closer to better health.

So what's this really mean? You have a combination. If you are very physically active, you move a lot, or your occupation makes you move a lot, then you probably don't have to lift as many days per week. Maybe one or two gets you by. 

If your job is more like mine and you are sitting almost the entire day or standing, and for that matter it's not that different, then you probably need to get closer to three to four days or five days of structured exercise. 

That structured exercise doesn't have to be just strength training. That could be split up. It could be different combinations. It could be one day of strength training, three or four days of other types of cardiovascular training, or the opposite, or anywhere in between. 

So think about this really as, in my brain, three big components from an exercise perspective. 

You have to move; low-level physical activity. If you want to think about this, step counts or walking or whatever it is. There, you want basically as much of that as you can possibly do. And there doesn't seem to be a huge upper limit to benefit there in terms of if you walk many more steps, it doesn't have any detriment to your health or anything like that. So lots of physical activity if you can. So that's one component of it, right?

The other component is probably number two, what we call structured exercise from a cardiovascular perspective. This could be long duration stuff, it could be high intensity intervals, it could be VO2 max stuff, or it could be low intensity. There's lots to discuss there. Maybe we can two episode three sometime and focus on that aspect of it.

But that's different than walking. Right. That's different than standing. That's different than taking the stairs versus the escalator. You need both, right? 

The third component would be structured exercise, but it would be closer to this strength training, power training, muscular development, connective tissue, bone health, all that stuff can be kind of botched into a third category.

So, ideally, you have at least one of those components checked every week. Minimum one day where you're, I'll keep calling it strength training or something like that. Minimum one day where you're doing some type of cardiovascular training. Then a minimum of many days, if not all days, call it five days, maybe, you're doing some basal physical activity.

If you do that, most people are only going to be in a really good spot. From there, if you fall in more love with the strength training, you want to ratchet that up, great. 

Or you hate it, but you could just barely get yourself to do it but you can do more of the cardiovascular stuff, and if that comes in the form of sport, pickleball or play. If you want to go to dance class, awesome. You want to go surf? You have tons and tons of options here. 

But what you want to think in your brain is going, okay, you know what? I hate the gym, but I've been hiking a lot, and I've been taking this acro yoga class that I really love. Okay, okay, you're getting a lot of steps, you're getting a lot of cardiovascular stuff that's good, but you probably gotta give me one day a week of true force production. Because that's not getting met really anywhere else. 

Jonathan Wolf: This is part of the key message, isn't it? That is so different from the story that I was brought up with, which is that even if you're doing all that walking and you're doing all that running around, that's getting your heart rate up.

That actually, if you're not doing something that is really sort of a strength, something heavy, you are missing something that we now believe is really important for your health. 

Andy Galpin: Yeah. And in fact, actually another paper came out; my friend published another paper this week looking at muscle health.

So your muscles are comprised of multiple different fiber types. What that means is a fast twitch and slow twitch, right? So any given muscle in your body has a combination of some fibers that are slow twitch, which means they are very fatigue resistant. They have tons of mitochondria, and then they're very metabolically efficient, but they don't produce a lot of force and power.

Then, some other fibers in that muscle that do the opposite, so they fatigue pretty easily, but they produce most of your power and strength. One of the things we know happens preferentially with aging is that you lose those fast-twitch muscle fibers, and that happens because they're only activated during activities like you just said, of higher force production.

So you're always going to do something throughout the day of low force production, standing, walking, using the bathroom, chewing. If you don't do anything that requires higher force production, which in our lifestyles now basically means you have to go engineer something that requires a lot of effort, those fibers don't get intubated or activated for a long time, and then they die and they go away. 

Jonathan Wolf: So, Andy, just to make sure I've got that, in my arm or whatever, it's not all the same type of muscle. And so there's a special sort of muscle that only works if I'm trying to do something hard, like lift a heavy suitcase or pick up my little girl or, or whatever it is.

And if I don't ever use, you know, that muscle, it basically falls away. 

Andy Galpin: Yeah, there's a number of problems that are associated with it, and the paper this week again highlighted, more of those fast switch fibers are the ones that you're going to lose with aging. 

So then you wonder why when you turn 70, when you turned 80, you don't have the strength anymore. You wonder why all of a sudden you're not having the ability to catch yourself from a fall and you trip and you go down, and you can't go up those stairs. 

Those couple of activities of high exertion, lifting the suitcase over your head in the airplane, it takes so much out of you because you've lost the capacity to produce force and power because you've lost the muscle tissue required for it.

So when you think about that, that just simply means you don't have to maximize strength. I don't need you to become a world champion bodybuilder or powerlifter. I just don't want you to do such a minimum dose that you lose those fibers entirely.

With that context, when I say heavy or hard or high force, I'm not saying 100% max effort. I'm not saying a one rep max. I'm not saying deadlifts to failure. 

Hard is relative, right? It's hardish for you. It doesn't have to be 100%, and it doesn't have to be all the time, and it doesn't have to be any movements you're not comfortable with. 

You can get these in some areas of life, you'll get some little bits of maximum force production during various sport activities, but for the most part, the easiest, most time-efficient way is probably lifting some weights.

That's why most people in our field are going to continue to advocate. Again, you don't have to lift weights, but it is just a really good and efficient way to do some of the things you can't get in almost any other area of your life. 

So you just take away holes in your physiology that are going to come back to bite you eventually.

Jonathan Wolf: So Andy, I think you've painted a really strong picture for why you need to be adding something that involves strength, probably involves a weight in order to achieve that in our modern life.

So I would like to take that forward and combine it with what you said at the beginning of one of the quick-fires, which you said that we can get these benefits in a workout at home. You don't have to go to a gym with a hundred different pieces of big equipment to do it. 

So I'd like to imagine that we're at home in a space where we can do something. And so for our listeners, I guess that could be your living room or your bedroom, anywhere with a bit of floor space.

I know you said to me beforehand that what you should do is incredibly dependent on who you are and your experience and your health and all the rest of it. So I'd like to paint a picture that this is my sister that we're helping to guide, and my sister has got into running recently. 

So she's got a lot more serious about her exercise, but she's not doing any weight. She's never done any weight. She's never done weights from the day she was born as far as I'm aware, until today. 

So it's really alien, and I'm hoping she's going to listen to this and be like, you know, Andy, not only were you really convincing, but now you're going to paint me this picture of how it's something that I can do.

And by the way, she's working full time and she has young kids. She definitely doesn't have the time. If I say, you've got to go to this gym, which is quite a long way from her house, that's probably not going to happen. 

Would it be possible to talk through maybe what she might be able to do to start to get the benefits of solving this fast twitch muscle for her.

And probably next time I talk to you, I'll tell you that she's now working out seven days a week and bench pressing more than me. What should she be doing?

Andy Galpin: Great. I'd love to do this. We're going to add some caveats here before we get going. This is all theoretical. I am going to give you a direct example, the most specific I can come up with but I do want you all at home to recognize it's a theoretical one. 

So it's not the only way to do this, but this is just one way, given a whole bunch of information that I actually don't know. If I was really coaching her, I would want to know way more information, but in the desire to give you at home something tangible to go off of, I'm going to skip a lot of assumptions here. 

I'm also going to ask you a bunch of questions that I'm going to ask that you answer directly in her place. So you're going to have to make those up.

My first question is, and this is exactly how I program and coach, by the way, how many days a week do I have?

Jonathan Wolf: I think she'd say, well, how many do I really need to get some real benefit?

Andy Galpin: No, no, it's not the question. The question is, how many do you have? 

Jonathan Wolf: Oh, how many? Two. 

Andy Galpin: Two, great. I want to know the restriction, okay? I'm not going to force you into a situation that's going to fail. Coaching mistake 101: trying to put them into the perfect program, not the program that's right for them right now. I'm not going to do that. 

If you say the answer was one, I'm going to go on one and I'm going to get success with one, and then you're going to buy in, and I'm going to go, let me get you to two. Do you think that was good? Watch what can happen if I get you to two days a week. 

If I'm being honest, most of the time, whatever they number, they tell me I take one off. Okay? They say four, I go, three, I know this, right? We've been on this road many times. 

So she says, okay, I can do two days a week. That's a believable number. I'm going to hold you that two days a week for someone like your sister.

I have young children. I have a wife, I have many company. I know this story. We coach plenty of women. We coach lots of women and moms and CEOs. No problem. Two, I can hold you to. If you're not getting two days a week in, I can say if we're not getting two a week, I feel good coaching you hard to get to two. 

Okay. If you said five and then we got four, I can't really argue with you that much there. We got two. Moving on to the next one. 

How much time do I have per day? 

Jonathan Wolf: 30 to 45 minutes. 

Andy Galpin: Okay. I'm going to go with 35. Okay. Are you doing any other physical training?

Jonathan Wolf: I'm going running a couple of times a week. 

Andy Galpin: Ah, okay. This is even easier. We can do it in 30 minutes now. Okay. Any major injuries we should know about? 

Jonathan Wolf: No. 

Andy Galpin: Alright. Any exercises that you absolutely hate? Any types of training? Any things that when you go into the gym, when you think about exercising, you do not like?

Jonathan Wolf: I have never gone into the gym and used any weight of any sort. 

Andy Galpin: Cool. So fair to assume that you feel uncomfortable with the exercises, not knowing what to do on every exercise. Probably don't want to do complicated exercises. You don't feel a lot of confidence in lifting weights. Correct?

Jonathan Wolf:  Correct. The main weight that I've lifted is my children as they got bigger and bigger and bigger until it's ridiculous how big they are. Now her brother is answering this question.

Andy Galpin: This is Milo, right? Walk the bull up the hill every day a little bit stronger. Progressive overload. That's the original story of one of the most fundamental concepts in our field of progressive overload. 

Nonetheless. Last question for you. What do we got equipment-wise in space? 

Jonathan Wolf: I haven't got anything and I'm happy to buy some stuff if you tell me what I should have.

Andy Galpin: Budget?

Jonathan Wolf: A hundred dollars. 

Andy Galpin: Okay, great. A hundred dollars. We're going to get a couple of kettlebells. If you can get four kettlebells, I don't know if we can do that for a hundred bucks, but we'll try. I want two kettlebells that are, I want to say, five kilos, and then I want two that are 20 kilos. 

Jonathan Wolf: So two five kilos and two that are 20 kilos.

Andy Galpin: Yeah, something like that. And then I might save out actually 10 bucks for some resistance bands, something like that. I don't know if you can actually pull that off anymore, but we'll work with that in that neighborhood. 

So here's what we're going to do. We're going to focus on compound movements. We're going to do whole body, we're not doing body part splits. 

That goes back to the old idea of bodybuilding, right? Where it's arms Monday, legs Tuesday, biceps Thursday. We're not doing that stuff. We're doing full-body movements and full-body workouts, right? This means we're going to get as many body parts working every day, but we're going to get as many of those done in every single exercise that we can.

We're going to do a combination of high-efficiency, high effective, but pretty simple exercises, right? Because you don't have a lot of experience and we have some trepidation there. And we're going to start pretty slow and easy so that we don't get insane amounts of soreness. 

There's actually very little relationship between how sore you get and how effective the workout is.

Jonathan Wolf: Is that right? I have always felt particularly pleased with myself when two days later, I'm really sore. I figured that I really did work hard and do something really valuable. And you're telling me now that's not true.

Andy Galpin: You're pretty pleased in that moment about yourself, but it's not necessarily… how you feel the next day doesn't predict how healthy something was for you. So there's very little association there. 

Now, there's a point when if you don't do anything that actually challenges your body, we're not going to get that many adaptations. But I don't care about that right now. 

Jonathan Wolf: Okay. It's not like you should be feeling really quite like with that sort of muscle soreness the next day. And if you haven't done that, you haven't… 

Andy Galpin: I would say anything more than two or three out of 10 on a scale of sore would be too much.

So if she wakes up the next morning and goes, yeah, that I'm a little tight. I feel it a little bit. We won. If she wakes up anything more than that, I'm probably going to back off.

Here's why. It's not that I'm concerned that if she wakes up at a four or five out of 10, that we tore our muscle or we overtrained her, that would not be happening. But I'm very concerned with somebody who doesn't have a passion for this thing yet that we go, oh my God ugh, I gotta go train again and be so sore and last time that I had to pick the kid up and all that, my shoulder hurt. I slept weirdly because my back was…

I want wins, wins, wins, wins, wins, right? I want to work and I want to feel positive about when I worked hard. It sucked a little bit, but I actually felt pretty good afterwards and I don't have to feel smoked in the workout.

Another thing that you'll see in probably the last 10 years is it's very clear the evidence on going to maximum failure. What that means is if we're doing pushups or pullups, and you take it all the way up to the last possible rep, if you would've stopped one or two reps earlier, you would've gotten probably the same amount of muscle growth.

There's a lot of research on that. It's called repetitions in reserve. How many did you leave in the tank? One to two in the tank is absolutely actually going to have the same amount of muscle growth. 

Caveat there: most people don't really know what true failure is. So, that one to two is probably a lot harder than most people think. It's not like, I kind of felt a little burned, then I stopped. No, that's like six or seven reps left, probably too short there. 

But I'll take that for your sister. I would take, I would rather her stop five or six reps early than two late or than one late for this point, right? We just want wins. We want positive associations. 

We have to train her harder enough to where she sees results. But if you're going to ask me to shed a little bit on, I'm going to that side. Habits, habits, habits, habits, habits, right? Get past that initial fatigue. 

So we're going to pick a couple of exercises. We're probably going to do an active body weight movement. Initially, without the kettlebells just to get her going. 

I'm probably going to pick lower body exercises. I don't know your sister, but on aggregate, women like to train their legs and their glutes and they like feeling that stuff. They don't have as much interest always in upper body pushups and things like that.

Again, not every person's this way, but men sometimes are the opposite. They kinda like to start with bench press and hings like that. So I'm going to pick exercises she's probably more familiar with. We would probably wrap a band around her knees and do something like lateral walks. 

You're just going to kind of walk sideways, if you will. Monster walks or things like that, where it's easy, you'll feel a little bit of a burn. And we're getting a lot of your core, actually a little bit, and a lot of your leg muscles going, right? So you can kind of move up and back. You can literally just walk with them, walk sideways, all kinds of staggered walking.

We would pick one or two exercises like that. 

Jonathan Wolf: And Andy, I think a lot of people listening might be surprised that you're saying that you're using a band, so that's not a weight and that that is strength training?

Andy Galpin: Well, not to get us way off topic here, but what is strength training? What is resistance exercise?

I don't know that I can define them either, right? It's like, okay, does it have to be a weight? No. Pull-ups. Pull-ups are strength training, and they don't involve any weight whatsoever besides your body weight and gravity. Well, so is a body weight squat then? 

So if I had a band that's more resistance than your body, how's that not strength training?

Jonathan Wolf: So the band itself can act like a weight because it's making it harder, and it will have that benefit that you're describing.

Andy Galpin: So is your body. We could do this entire thing if you gave me a scenario and said budget is zero, we can't buy any equipment. I could have done this whole thing with just body weight now.

We would be limited eventually, but for someone like this, we could absolutely start body weight only if we wanted. 

So anything could be used here. There are the old stories of people using milk jugs and filling them with water, which are super effective, right? We could get household implements and items. Lots of ways we can do this. 

Those are not the details that should be overly concerning for someone like your sister. We can get a lot of work done with her with just this minimal equipment or none at all. 

Jonathan Wolf: I'm just thinking that a band already feels less intimidating than using a weight. Because that somehow already seems less outside maybe of what you've done before. 

Andy Galpin: Yeah. You can do some serious resistance training with the proper type of bands. 

So, going back to the direct example, I would probably pick an exercise like that. Then I might pick an exercise that is more like lower body exercise, but a back squat may be difficult because I don't know what her technique and movement is.

So I might pick something like a step-up, and I might do something like a counterbalanced one. So you imagine she's stepping up onto a stool or a bench or anything? She wants something, ideally 12 to 18 inches. 

Again, sorry about using the American units here. 

Jonathan Wolf: I know. I think we've got people all over the world.

Okay, so let's, we'll just do a mix. 12 to 18 inches. So that's 30 to 40 centimeters, depending on which country you're in as you're listening to this. 

Andy Galpin: Let's say when she's stepping up on her left leg, she'll have the kettlebell and we'll probably use the lighter one on this particular case in her right hand. So her left foot is on the bench, stepping up, and her right hand is holding it. 

What that's going to do is her left leg, her left quad, hamstrings, and glute are going to be working. Her core is also going to be working so that she doesn't rotate left to right. It's also going to stop her from folding, bending side to side.

Remember that right dumb or kettlebell is in her right hand. It's going to be pulling her to bend to the right side, but she's going to be keeping her posture neutral. Her shoulders remain perfectly in line with each other. 

I could hang a painting on her shoulders so they don't tilt. So her core is actually going to be doing most of the work so she doesn't rotate nor tilt while her left leg produces force.

We have now transferred force from her right shoulder through her right hand to her left hip, to her left toe. This is going to really help connective tissue. This helps transfer force. This keeps you balanced. This gets you the range of motion, and a lot of muscles get moved there with a very simple exercise.

As long as your knee is staying remotely over the top of your toe. By that, I mean it can go way in front of your toe, but you just don't want your left knee coming way inside towards your midline so that it is 20 centimeters, to be really exaggerating here, inside of your left foot, right? 

It should be up and down. It can go forward in front of it or behind it. There are different options there. Both are acceptable, but generally, you don't want them coming way inside of there. 

So we pick an exercise like that, and we probably are going to be doing something like, let's say two sets of eight per leg. So, eight repetitions on the left leg, switch the dumbbell, switch the foot eight repetitions. We call that one set. 

What I'd probably do based on her time is use a technique called super setting. So you're going to do two or even three exercises in a row so that when you're resting, say your legs, her upper body is moving.

So we did our banded walks. Then we're going to go ahead and go into these step-ups. And she finishes one set, so eight repetitions, one side, eight repetitions, the other side. And then, while she's kinda resting from that, we might go into something like an overhead press, same exact implement. 

In fact, what I would do here is, I'm doing this in real time here. So what you're hearing is I'm literally thinking through something like this. I would let her stay in the same position. She already has her, let's say, left foot on the bench, right? So she's in a staggered stance like that. And now she'll keep that dumbbell in her right hand and she'll press that right hand directly over her head.

What that does is it allows her to press her shoulder, her triceps, are going to get going a little bit and she's going to get working with some pressing, but it keeps her lower back in a friendly position because that left foot is elevated. 

A lot of times, when people press overhead, they tend to arch their back really hard. This can put some undue or unnecessary strain in the lower back. You have to really work hard to keep your ribs down. 

So, don't let the space between your ribs and your hips open way up. That would mean your lower back is contracting kind of backwards. By putting her left foot on the bench, it rotates her hips backwards and it keeps her low back in that neutral position, more likely.

So probably eight repetitions of the step up, eight repetitions of the overhead press and then switch sides, rotate through that whole thing probably twice. And now you're off cooking in a pretty good position. You're probably now easily under 10 minutes into our workout, and we've gotten a lot of stuff done.

The core has been touched a couple of times, legs have been touched a couple of times. We got one movement for our upper body. Then I'd go into another set of two different exercises like that, which I can describe, but I'll pause to see if you have any questions.

Jonathan Wolf:  Just a couple. So, firstly, can you explain to me why you do this so many times?

So why do I do it eight times, and then also why did you say, we'll stop for a little bit and then we'll do this second set where you're going to do it eight times again? What's the reason behind what you've described? 

Andy Galpin: Most likely what your sister wants, I'm guessing here, is probably a combination of body composition maintenance. So maybe wants to lose a little bit of fat or at least not add any more fat. 

Jonathan Wolf: I think she's sold by this first bit; it needs to be around for her kids. Be healthy. All of these things. I think that's the primary part. 

If she feels better about it after a month or two, then that might shift and make it more like she enjoys the benefits from the short term. 

Andy Galpin: Great. Okay, so with that in mind, the amount of repetitions you're doing per set, in this case, I chose eight, heavily determines a couple of things. 

Number one, how heavy you can put on the bar or the implement. And then number two, the adaptation. Generally, the heavier you go, the less repetitions you can do per set.

So if we were to throw her immediately on that 20 kilo, she might not be able to overhead press that two or three times fine. 

That's going to be good for developing maximum strength. But she's not ready for that. She's not confident in that movement. I don't know if she can do it once. She might fail because of technique. A bunch of different things can go wrong there. It's not a good win. 

If I were to give her that five-kilo kettlebell and I gave her three reps, it's light. She's safe, but it's not enough repetition to create enough work. Nothing really got done because it was so light. 

Jonathan Wolf: So she's not going to get the benefit from three. So you need to get to the point where you have strained yourself quite a lot, but you're sort of saying a reasonable amount. 

But you don't want to do something that seems crazy hard because you're likely to hurt yourself or give up, 

Andy Galpin: Or who knows, right? Bad things can happen. 

The repetitions themselves are right in the middle of… you’ll get a bit of strength development. Someone in the beginning and early stage of their lifting career will get a lot of strength development regardless of the repetitions you choose or the sets.

So she'll get stronger from that, and she'll feel stronger from that pretty quickly, honestly. That will happen in the first four to six weeks. She'll feel noticeably stronger probably within two to three weeks. That's a pretty consistent finding. She'll also develop some muscle size.

I brought up the body composition earlier because it's going to be enough physical work that it'll burn some calories. Not a whole lot, not as much as you would burn during her running, but it would burn some, and it's heavy enough to where those fast switch fibers would get somewhat activated. We're not all the way there, but we're getting there. 

The last reason why we want to choose that is, you need to create a little bit of volume. You gotta do some work for connective tissue to really adapt. And so we want to not think about this workout, we want to start thinking about six months from now, a year from now. 

Are we doing the things right now that give her a foundation for long-term joint health, not retracting from it, right? People tend to start getting fatigued with weights right around 6 to 10 reps. 

So I want her to touch that fatigue, but I don't want her to feel hopeless or like, oh my gosh, this was so hard. This was so heavy, but I didn't want her to feel so light, either. And so eight, seven kind of jumps outta the range of that's right around the area where people start to tend to feel fatigue.

And the last component to that, she's trying to learn how to lift weights. Learning is a skill. Skills require practice, which means I need repetitions. I just want her learning how to contract her muscle and control her muscle, she needs reps. So I'd rather keep it kind of light. A little bit of practice.

If we get some metabolic adaptation, we get some muscular adaptation. Cool. I'll take it. But right now, it's wins, burn some calories, and learning how to move and contract your body. 

Jonathan Wolf: My final question is around doing it again. So if you've done eight and you feel tired, so I've pushed myself, why do you go away for a few minutes and then you come back and you do it again?

I'm assuming there's some science that says that you should have this break. 

Andy Galpin: Yeah. Well, it's quite simple. If I asked you to jump as high as you can, and the goal is to jump as high as you can, and I said you're going to have to give me 10 tries, what would you rather do? Jump 10 in a row with no break or jump one, get a two-minute break, and then jump again.

Jonathan Wolf: Oh, I'd like to have a little break. 

Andy Galpin: Of course. So the quality of the movement gets better, that's why we do it. So I want her to accumulate 16 repetitions total. If I had her do all 16 in a row, repetitions nine through 16 are just going to be deteriorating in quality. 

Jonathan Wolf: I feel like that's because somehow I  recover some capacity totally in the short period of time and that's okay. That means for this goal of being healthier through this, that little bit of recovery actually still means that the total benefit is actually better. 

Andy Galpin: I would rather her over recover. Remember, right now my goal is not on maximizing return on investment workout one. I'm not trying to optimize the quality of her workout right now. 

We're trying to make sure that this is sustainable. So I don't want her getting anywhere near injury. I don't want excessive fatigue or soreness, and we're trying to practice. And so if she stops a little bit early, I'm fine with that. 

Over recovering is cool. We can always go heavier next time.

Jonathan Wolf: And if someone was listening to this and they have been strength training for, I don't know, five years. So they've been doing this for quite a long time, and they're saying, well, I'm still doing eight reps and then a break, and then I'm doing it again and then maybe I'm doing it again. Is that still this pattern that you would expect people to be doing as they are sort of more advanced in their training?

Andy Galpin: Probably not for most of your training. If you are five or six years into lifting and pretty consistently, two sets of eight is fine, but those two sets of eight will probably be pretty heavy to quite a bit of fatigue because you're not accumulating that much total volume. 

So you've only still got 16 reps. That's probably not enough unless it gets really heavy, unless you're doing multiple exercises of the same muscle or muscle groups per workout, or you're training multiple times per week. 

So you could do, and there''s literature on this, you could do two sets per day, but you would have to be training probably now six, seven days per week, the same muscle group. 

Or you could do two sets of eight, but you need to do probably three or four different exercises for that muscle in the same workout. So you can do it, but most people are probably going to need more. Three to four working sets per muscle area, at least per day. 

Jonathan Wolf: So just to make sure I've got that, what you're saying is as you're getting more experience and stronger, you're actually having to extend the number of reps.

So your example where one rep is eight, we're talking about my sister, she might do two, but in five years' time she might need to do three or four of that to get the same sort of benefit she's looking for. 

Andy Galpin: These are called modifiable variables, right? There's this big acronym, COVIFRP. It’s the worst acronym sort of ever.

We call these modifiable variables because any of these can be changed, and that could represent progression. So what you're talking about is going from sister to five years. You're saying, Hey, how do I continue to make progressive overload? 

You can progress via intensity. You can progress via load, how much is on the bar, or how heavy it is. You can progress via a number of repetitions per set, so go from eight to 10. You can progress with multiple sets, so go from two to three. You can progress with more frequency; do it more often. You can progress with the complexity of the exercise.

So there are combinations you can progress with reducing the rest. So, your question of does somebody have to do more repetitions as they get more experienced? No. 

In fact, sometimes you go the opposite because you're getting heavier and heavier and heavier. So your progression was low, so you took the repetitions down, and there are infinite combinations of these things.

It depends on are you trying to maximize strength. Are you trying to maximize muscle growth? Are you trying to maximize muscular endurance? Are you trying to maximize calorie expenditure? Those all have different answers in terms of what you're tweaking in your workout. 

So, progression can be found in many ways. Load is only one of them, but it's definitely not the only one that you can choose from.

To finish up your sister there, I gave you two exercises. I'd probably want her to do four per day. Okay. So if you're listening at home trying to put this together, you notice I chose one leg exercise and one upper body exercise.

If you choose two of each, you're probably good. So, pick another one in a different area. We like to use things called push and pull. You can go look that up on your own since we're a little bit short on time. But I would probably realistically choose four exercises total, and I would make those four different exercises on her second day.

So now she's getting eight total different movement patterns throughout the week. Two sets of eight is probably enough in those two set super sets. So, pick what ones you're most comfortable with and go from there. 

Jonathan Wolf: Andy, thank you so much for painting this very concrete picture. I hope that my sister is listening and is going to be saying, Oh, I think I'm going to go and try that.

I think through that also, I think it's made this whole idea about what is a strength exercise, much more real for me, for a lot of people. And I think it also opened up some of the complexity of these choices. 

We get literally thousands of exercise questions from our listeners and from people who are ZOE members talking about how they combine that with nutrition.

Since I'm lucky enough to have you, I would now, if it's all right to jump to some of the most frequently asked questions, would that be okay?

Andy Galpin: Sure.

Jonathan Wolf: We get a lot of questions about supplementation and particularly creatine. There's quite a lot of debate in general; many of the scientists involved with ZOE are quite skeptical about many of the supplements that are available for people just trying to support their traditional health.

But here, we're talking about something very specific to do with something you might add to strength training. What is your view? What does the science say? 

How would you think about it and how might you think about it if you were eating a sort of heavily plant-based diet without very large amounts of meat in your diet?

Andy Galpin: Nobody needs to ever take a supplement. You're talking about mountains versus pebbles. I don't think any scientist could argue otherwise. Whole Foods, sunlight, relationships, purpose, water. This is everything, right? If you want to go past that, we can get into supplements. If you're going to pick one, creatine is probably the easiest to argue for.

Specifically creatine monohydrate. It has extensive evidence across many, many, many years. Many laboratories, many populations including special populations or at-risk populations, kids, women, elderly,  menopause, cancer, cachexia, traumatic brain injury, leaving past the strength training muscle people.

There's more work being done in the areas of brain health. There have been several studies now looking at really high doses. The typical dose of creatine is about five grams per day. I know of several studies that have used 20 grams per day and looked at it for bone health and postmenopausal women. 

So it is one of the ones that most scientists in this field are going to stamp all over their sign of approval because it's been shown so well in so many populations. The side effects are very minimal on a population level. Really no scientifically established downsides. 

There's, if you react poorly, then hey, sure don't take it at all. But all those things are there. No supplements have a massive benefit. So creatine will not increase your testosterone by 600%, right? It doesn't double your muscle. Nothing works like that. 

You're talking about percentages, you know, 3 to 5% improvements, something like that is a pretty normal thing. And so if 3 to 5% to you means it doesn't work, fine, 3 to 5% to me means it does work. It's just about managing expectations. 

Does it work more than nutrition? No, of course not. But that doesn't mean it doesn't work. Those are the reasons it doesn't have any negative feedback loops. It's not a steroid that's going to then shut down your production of creatine, anything like that. 

If you are in a population, whether you are full vegan or vegetarian, or just simply consume low amounts of protein or specifically meat because of financial constraints or availability or any unknown number of reasons, you're probably looking like on average a better benefit from consuming creatine than the people that eat high amounts of creatine.

We actually published a paper recently, my colleague Tommy Wood and Federica Conti, and we reviewed the literature on a whole bunch of nutraceuticals revolving around preventing and reducing symptoms and severities of TBIs [traumatic brain injury] and concussions. 

Creatine came up on that list as very well supported and in that paper, and by the way, that paper is free, open access, so we actually paid a bunch of money to make sure it was open. You can download that and why I'm bringing it up is that  Federica went and took the amount of creatine found in the studies and then provided whole food equivalents for it. 

I believe she put in meat and vegetarian options for those. So you can get the amount that you need. I know that the meat one's in there, I think that the plant-based one is in there as well. You can get them from whole foods, but kind of to your point a little bit, it's really hard. It is really, really hard.

I don't think you have to have creatine if you're vegan or vegetarian or low meat. I do think it'll make your life probably a little bit easier to hit those targets. So choose what you can, what you want to do, what you can afford, and what works for your body.

Jonathan Wolf: So Andy, my takeaway from this is if you are doing a lot of this and therefore getting  5% better, you're really going to see the difference and care. Then you're quite positive on, you feel like this works. The evidence behind it is good. It feels safe, which I suspect are not things you would say about many supplements.

Andy Galpin: Correct. 

Jonathan Wolf: On the other hand,  even if you're me, and I do go to the gym two to three times a week, I don't think I'm going to notice that level of difference.  

Andy Galpin: I actually think it would work out the opposite. You would be more of a responder than not. 

Jonathan Wolf: You think I would get that benefit?

Andy Galpin: Sure. You would probably feel a substantial difference. 

Jonathan Wolf: I feel like I wouldn't notice a 5% change. You think I would? Absolutely. 

Andy Galpin: Because remember, you're actually starting from a pretty low spot, so you probably wouldn't be 5%; you'd probably be closer to higher than that.  I can't guarantee it, but I would imagine you'll feel pretty pronounced.

Jonathan Wolf: That's a strong sell. I'll report back. 

Next question. Many of our listeners spend a lot of time at a desk on their computer all day. Actually, I'm one of those people. Are there any particular exercises that you think about to help people improve posture and stay healthy or any things in particular that they should be trying to do sort of during the day to deal with?

What I think we all know it’s really bad for us, not how we're designed to be. 

Andy Galpin: Yeah. In terms of actual exercises, it's probably not going to be the place where you correct your posture. Because you can go to the gym and you can do two sets of eight of a bent row or something like that to strengthen your back. Which might help some people. 

But then, if you then return to poor posture for the remaining 12 and a half hours, those 10 seconds of contractions are not going to necessarily do a lot. So getting yourself in a better position. I personally love, I actually stole this from,  a guy named Kelly Starret, who's a mobility movement sort of king.

He and his wife have these fidgety bar things. So it's a standing desk with a little bar underneath you. What this means is you can kind of have one foot up and one foot down, and you can rotate back and forth. And when people started advocating a lot for standing desks, we saw a lot of knee and back problems, right?

Because posture was poor and you're not standing great. And now you're standing for 5, 6, 8 hours, and all of a sudden backs started hurting a ton. 

Jonathan Wolf: So standing desk is not like this wonderful health improvement compared to sitting down. 

Andy Galpin: It's good. It's better if you can, but if you're doing standing desk all day and your knees are hurting a ton and your back is hurting, then I would recommend Kelly and Juliet's fidgety desk thing where you can have one of your feet up.

Why are you doing it? So you can sit, you can stand. Initially, the big push was that standing desks are better. What we've now realized is it's not a standing or a sitting desk thing. Because both of them are pretty stable. You're not moving either way. It's a movement thing. Standing isn't really great because you're still just static.

It's generally slightly better than sitting, but movement is the better way. You will see more improvements by standing and sitting, walking meetings if you can, treadmill meetings, a fidgety bar thing, movement around. 

Do you have to necessarily be sitting for all your Zoom? Can you be standing? Can you be stretching? Can you be moving? I'm saying that because if you've ever been on a Zoom with me, you'll notice I'm very rarely sitting at my desk. I'm going to have headphones or whatever and if I can, so you can hear me, but I'm going to be moving and pacing and walking back and forth. Because I sit for most of my day.

That's how you create back these thousand, 2000, 3000 extra steps. I'm still fully engaged, but it doesn't mean I have to just be sitting the whole time. 

Jonathan Wolf: Another question, and I'm going to ask you for a quick answer because it's its own entire podcast. I want to talk about protein. I'm interested in your position on how much we need, and maybe let's think about, for example, my sister again, because here you're saying, well, she's now started on the two days a week you're describing. What's your view on what the science says about how much protein she should be eating 

Andy Galpin: Around two grams per kilogram ish.

We could give a lot more context to that. We could talk about plenty of scenarios, but if you want a quick, short answer, something in the neighborhood of a gram per pound of body weight or 2.2 grams per kilo, and I'm just saying heavily on the ish there, and not even necessarily every day.

Jonathan Wolf: Do you know someone who could improve their health with strength exercises but isn't confident how to do them? Why not share this episode with them right now? Empower them with expert advice for developing consistent habits and finding workouts they'll truly enjoy. I'm sure they'll thank you. 

Recovery: we had a lot of questions about recovery, as in taking time off from training and what you should do to make sure that you are doing the best things you should do after a workout.

Andy Galpin: Really, the big thing we're going after here, the two highest priorities would be sleep, number one. So, making sure we're getting good sleep - great sleep would be better, but anything below good is probably going to compromise your results in a noticeable fashion. 

The second one would be overall caloric intake, right? If we are way under our caloric need, then we are probably going to be running into similar issues of under recovering, underperforming and now potentially losing progress because of those. 

Where does that caloric deficit need to be to see negative detriments? Hard to give you a number on that, but I'd probably say something like more than a 10% caloric deficit is probably going to put you in a spot where you may be seeing problems with recovery. 

You can certainly lift weights and be in a caloric deficit. We've been doing that for decades now. That absolutely works. But at some point, if it's too aggressive, the problems will kick in.

So 10, maybe 15, maybe some people are okay there, maybe some people aren't. But certainly probably a 20% deficit you're going to really struggle to recover fully from.

Jonathan Wolf: Andy, we're almost outta time. Just to end, is there one step that someone should take right now if they've been listening to this, they're not currently doing any strength training that you would say to them, if you're sold on this, this is what you should do to get on the bandwagon that you have sold so successfully over the last hour.

Andy Galpin: I hope we've given multiple answers to that throughout. I gave a different scenario at home body weight. I would strongly encourage people, buy some sort of program. If this is your first go, rather than making a bunch of mistakes, wasting time, and wasting six months, try it, right? You'll probably get further faster.

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That would probably be my starting place. But if you can't even afford that or you don't want to do it, or whatever the case is, I would really go back to something I've said multiple times now and don't let perfect but the enemy of good. 

I know you don't know what you're doing. Here's the reality. If you walk yourself into a gym, the overwhelming majority of employees have seen 50 of you that day. You think you're the only one in there that doesn't know what you're doing, but everyone else in there is just seven days ahead of you. 

I know it's easy for me to say, but try not to be intimidated. Try not to be worried, and I would honestly walk right up the front desk and just say, hi, I am whatever, and this is my first day ever. I have no idea what I'm doing. 

If you walk in and say that, a huge percentage of those people are going to go, oh dude, I got you here. Let me just help you get started. 

Jonathan Wolf: So don't be intimidated. Actually, in a way, they're all set up to look after you. You feel that they're all for bodybuilders, but actually that's not the reality of it.

Andy Galpin: It's not the reality. And they have heard that 20 times that day already, and they're very good at helping people get started. So, hopefully, you can find a gym that has that culture. If not, maybe try another one. But I don't think it'll take you more than a couple to find that spot. 

Jonathan Wolf: Amazing. Andy, I'd like to try and do a quick summary and correct me if I got it wrong.

I'm definitely not going to try and summarize my sister's training schedule because that was quite complicated. She's going to have to listen to the whole thing through. 

I think the key thing I took away is, you said there's a rather amazing thing, you said strength training is a panacea. It improves everything, which is amazing.  We almost never hear this on this podcast, the sense that it's everywhere.

I think it's particularly interesting because you also said that my experience is the same as everybody really, which is that, you know, a hundred years ago, people thought strength training was bad for you.

Even 30 years ago, people associated with bodybuilding, which didn't really seem like a very healthy activity, but actually, the science now shows that. 

You can live longer, it will improve your brain, your bone health, you know, your heart health. It will also amazingly improve your mental health and mood, which I can definitely speak to myself. I definitely feel better after the training, even if during the training it always feels a bit painful. 

The next thing that I really remember, which I had never understood before, is there's actually more than one type of muscle, in our muscles. And if you don't work out these, was it fast twitch? Is that what you said? So, if you don't work out these fast twitch muscles, you basically end up losing them, and they don't work. 

If you're just sort of walking around, you gotta do something that's hard. And so you have to do something that feels heavy and difficult in order to work them.

And you want them when you're older, or otherwise you can't get out of a chair or any of the rest of the things. So I thought that because it's really clear idea why just maybe doing something that raises your heart rate isn't enough to solve everything. 

You then gave us a bit of an idea about what are the core things that you need to put around your week if you want to be getting all of these health benefits.

And it was interesting, you started with something really simple, which is just move every day. Just start with the first thing. If you're just walking every day, that would be the start of your pillar. So make sure you do that. 

I think many of us will be like, eh, particularly if maybe you're working from home some of the time or any of the rest of this, you realize suddenly, you know, doing a lot less walking than you realize.

The second is cardio. You said a minimum of once a week, something that's really raising your heart rate. And if it can be fun, how much better is that than something that's painful? And you talked about all these things, some of which actually sounded quite fun to do. So try and find something that you would actually enjoy.

And then you said that's not enough. You need to think about strength training as something different and make sure that that is a minimum of once a week that you're going to get all these benefits that we talked about that you can't get elsewhere. 

My takeaway was, you know, once a week, you're definitely going to see benefits.

If you could do three days a week, that's probably best. But you've gotta manage that with the fact you've got these other things that you need to make happen. So the more that you're doing other stuff, probably the more that you're telling me that twice a week is fine. If this is much less than I think three.

Is that sort of fair playback? 

Andy Galpin: Yeah. Pretty close. 

Jonathan Wolf: And then I heard you mention towards the end, make sure you're sleeping. Because when you're talking about the recovery and the benefits out of this, it sounded as though you're saying I throw a lot of this away if the sleep is very poor.

Andy Galpin: Oh yeah. I mean, if exercise is arguably the number one or most important factor to overall health, sleep would be the inverse you could make. If you wanted to argue one or the other, you could make arguments, and we could have long debates about that. But perhaps sleep is for another show.

Jonathan Wolf: Absolutely. And I know that we have other guests and people who may argue about exercise versus nutrition in their order, but I think no one, in fact is disagreeing about any of these as being core and clearly together.  

Andy Galpin: Yeah. I mean, fighting between nutrition, exercise, mental health/stress management, and sleep is fine.

Jonathan Wolf:  But I feel it's with your child where you know, they both have to brush their teeth and go to bed and you don't really get into an argument about which. You’re saying, I would like to see both. 

And the final thing I think I left with was when you were describing this for my sister, firstly it didn't seem that scary. It felt like a quite simple…what you're describing was quite simple movements were having all of these complicated benefits, which I half understood. You finished with that within two or so weeks she could be feeling stronger.

So you're getting a return out of this incredibly fast, which is very different, I think, than in a lot of things we talk about where you may not see the benefits for many months, you know? 

So that was sort of my finish was, you can start to feel this fast, so you only need to be willing to put up with it for a few weeks and you should start to feel some benefit.

Andy Galpin: Yeah, I think that was a tremendous summary. I'll add one thing to think on top of that.  

Imagine if I said you can make a dollar today, or you can make $0 today, which would you pick a dollar? Great. If I said you can make one or 10, pick 10. Right? I want you to think about all of these health practices as that analogy just because you didn't make 10 today, it doesn't mean you should go make zero. 

What does that practically mean? Today, I am on the road. I flew in this morning. I've got had a bunch of meetings this morning. I'm going to do this.  I got more meetings when I leave, then we've got dinner and I got a whole slew of media tomorrow and blah, blah, blah.

I'm not going to get half of my normal health practices in today, but that doesn't mean I go to zero. That also doesn't mean I'm going to wake up at three in the morning to get all my stuff in. I don't personally make that choice. So, today, that's probably going to look like a sauna for me. 

Is sauna the same thing as strength training? No. But if I can go, great. Sauna is a dollar when normally, I'm going to get zero. Why? Because I found one in the hotel. That's great. It's in there. I can pop in there. I can sneak in 20 minutes, I'll probably move a little bit while I'm in there. I'll stretch. I'll do some other things, but I'm going to be jam-packed and my sleep is going to be very minimal today, and I don't want to sacrifice another hour of my sleep to get my training in.

I'm just not going to have the juice to do it tonight anyway. So I'm going to choose to make a dollar, which to me is hopping in the sauna. 

That's what I want people to think about this stuff is when you're in the right scenario, in the situation, make the 10, that's great. But when 10 is not an option, make five. You can't make five; give me three. Nope, can't make three. Give me a nickel if we can make a nickel over nothing. 

Reward yourself for those positives. Don't punish yourselves for making $1 when you could have made 10. So, focus on the one you made, not the nine you lost. 

Jonathan Wolf: I love it very much. In line with, I would say ZOE's general philosophy, which is always about what you can add in that you don't need to be perfect,  80% is great.

And I love that you're saying that with exercise also, you know, this is not just nutrition with exercise also, I think you're saying you don't need to be perfect. 

Andy Galpin: Yeah. I'm going to get my heart rate up a little bit. I'll do some things or some cardio. I'll get something physical in today and I didn't give any steps in. I'll get my heart rate up a little bit, and that's going to be better than zero. 

Jonathan Wolf: Andy, thank you so much. I really enjoyed that and I hope we can get you back because I feel there's a podcast about cardio that we are going to have to do in the future. 

Now we can do that. We could do sleep, we could do it all.