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

Huberman Lab

Dr. Andy Galpin outlines nine key components of physical fitness—skill, speed, power, force/strength, muscle hypertrophy, muscular endurance

Key takeaways

• Fitness assessment should balance aesthetic goals with functional performance to support lifelong wellness.
• Self-testing across the nine fitness components helps identify 'performance anchors' that limit progress.

Main topics

• Nine components of physical fitness
• Self-assessment methods for each component

Notable quotes

"We don't want any of these severe constraints because you're going to get limited by that thing."

Conclusion

Assessing fitness across nine key domains enables targeted training th

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. Speaker 2 (0:11) I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Dr. Andy Galpin. Dr. Professor Andy Galpin, super excited to have you here. You're such an immense treasure trove of information on physical training and optimizing for specific goals and outcomes. How should I, or anyone else for that matter, think about their level of fitness in terms of really assessing whether or not I'm as fit as I... could be and should be, both for sake of health and performance. Speaker 1 (0:44) When it comes to exercise, people generally have two major goals in mind. Goal number one is achieving some sort of appearance, right? This is, I want to be big or want to not be too big, or I want to be lean. There is an aesthetic component to almost everybody. They want to look a certain way or not look a certain way. The other one is functionality. So I want to be able to perform a certain way. Now, again, that definition differs per person. So I want to be... better at strength. I want to be better at mobility. I want to be able to have energy throughout the day, whatever it is. So there's some sort of appeal to aesthetic and there's some sort of appeal to functionality. So within both of those categories, we want to be in a position where we can understand where do I need to go with my exercise training so that I can be as fit and as healthy and achieve these goals that I want now, as well as be in a position where I can maintain them for a long period of time. So this blends both immediate goals. So say you're just interested in squatting a lot of weight. Say you're interested in running a 5K time the best you want. It doesn't matter. It blends that with the ability, the desire to have a long wellness span, to be fit throughout life, to achieve all those things for as long as possible. So then the question kind of comes back to saying, well, how do I know which area I need to focus on the most? And why am I not achieving these goals? Or how can I get there more effectively? And if we look at the big picture, we have to understand that there are several major components to physical fitness that are going to be required in all of these categories. And to achieve that, there are a handful of components that have to happen. So what I'd love to do today is, over the course of our discussion, is hit exactly what those concepts are and then cover a whole bunch of different methods. And we could do that for hours. But we'll cover a number of them for various goals. Speaker 2 (2:31) What are the major adaptations that one can create in their body using exercise? The Speaker 1 (2:37) physiological adaptations can be bucketed really into nine areas. So the very first one is what I call skill or technique. This could be running more effectively. This could be practicing a skill like shooting a ball or an implement, swinging a golf club, anything like that. I call that skill development. The second one is speed. This is simply moving at a higher velocity. or with a better rate of acceleration. That's very similar to the next one, which is power. And power is speed multiplied by force. The next one then, of course, on top of that is force or strength. Those are really synonymous terms, right? How effectively can you move something? Now, this is often confused, strength rather, as muscular endurance. So what I mean by that is 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. Number five is muscle hypertrophy. And this is the first time now we're talking about an appearance rather than a functional outcome. This is the first one that's just simply how big is your muscle, and that's muscle hypertrophy or muscle size. After that is muscular endurance. So this is how many repetitions you can typically do of a movement. So think of how many push-ups in a row you can do, how many sit-ups in a minute you can do, things that are typically in like five to 50 repetition. sort of range, and it is almost always local muscle. A push-up test is really how many reps that your triceps and pecs and deltoids can do. It is not a cardiovascular endurance. It is not a global physiological endurance. It's specific to typically one or a few muscle groups at a time. This is why you have to do multiple tests for sort of every group there. After that, now we've moved into number seven, which is what I call anaerobic capacity. This is more synonymous with maximum heart rate. And now we're actually looking at, rather than a single movement or muscle group, it is a total physiological limitation. It is the maximum amount of work you can do in, say, 30 to 45 seconds, maybe even up to 120 seconds of all-out work. Think of your classic interval type of stuff here. So how much work can you do? at a maximum rate where you're going to enter tremendous amounts of global fatigue. The next past that is maximal aerobic capacity. And this is probably something like in the 8 to 15 minute range where you're going to reach probably both a maximum heart rate as well as a true VO2 max. So that is different from the previous one where you can't reach this in a matter of seconds. It simply takes multiple minutes to get to a position to where your VO2 max is actually going to be sufficiently challenged or an indicator there. And then the last one, number nine, is what I call long duration. And this is just your ability to sustain sub-maximal work for a long period of time with no breaks, no reductions whatsoever. This is often called steady state training or a lot of people just think of this when they think of quote-unquote cardio. But your ability to continue movement without any breaks or change or drop is the last and final adaptation. So really, if you look at a kind of a minimal number there, it's generally 20 minutes of what we're looking for. But a more typical would be 20 to 60 minutes. But anything past that would still be limited by your long duration endurance. So your ability to sustain work over time. Speaker 2 (5:53) I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, 8sleep. 8sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity. One of the best ways to ensure you get a great night's sleep is to make sure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. 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If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, go to eightsleep.com slash Huberman to get up to $350 off the new Pod 5. Eight Sleep ships to many countries worldwide, including Mexico and the UAE. Again, that's eightsleep.com slash Huberman to save up to $350. Can you walk us through the nine different adaptations that you mentioned earlier and give us a way to assess our level of adaptation in each of those nine? All Speaker 1 (7:21) right, the very first one we want to talk about is movement skill. Is this really about human movement so that you stay injury-free? And you can continue to train for as long as possible. So what are the minimum requirements? Now, if you can have access to a highly qualified physical therapist or movement specialist, that's the best route. Go to them, have them identify all of your movement patterns, overhead pressing, squatting, running, all these things. That's your gold standard. If you want to do it yourself, though, here's a very simple four-step solution. So the way that I teach this is I go joint by joint. And so I think of this just as the major ones. Your shoulder, your elbow, your low back, hip, knee, and ankle. Okay, now what you can do is do a representative movement for you. So if you bench a lot, use the bench. If you do pull-ups, use the pull-up. If you squat, do that. I would recommend doing an upper body press, an upper body pull, a lower body press, and lower body pull. An example would be a push-up, a pull-up or a bent row, a squat, and then a deadlift. and record a frontal view and a side view. Probably do three to ten repetitions per angle, okay? Slow and controlled, and you want to look for four key things. Number one is you want to look for symmetry. So symmetry is front to back, left to right, and your right limb and your left limb. If they aren't moving perfectly, that's fine. But you want to see, is one moving further ahead than the other one? Is one turning to the side and one's not? Is one fidgeting and... and twitching around differently. So you want to look just to check to see and make sure that they're stable. Number two, you want to look for stability. So key indicators here are things like if you can't control a squat, a controlled squat where your knees don't start shaking, that would be an instability issue. So can you do the movement slow? Can you pause at the bottom, maybe three seconds, maybe five seconds or 10? You should have complete control of that movement and all of these joints. Are your hips sliding to one side when you stand up? Is one elbow closer to your body when you're benching and the other one's more flared out? These are the things I'm talking about,