so maybe we just start with kind of where you see the value of strength training do you think that there is a diminishing return at some point do you think that there is a diminishing return in the amount of muscle I've said very tongue and cheek um that the list of 90y olds out there complaining that they uh wishing they were not as strong and not as muscular is a very short list very short list right so but again why am I saying that I'm saying that to say that most people at the end of
life are saying the exact opposite right yes I wish I was Stronger I wish I had more muscle um but from a practical standpoint Mike what what is your view on muscularity and strength um at the expense of what it might take to achieve them are there extremes that people should be mindful of it's a great question if you have to be mindful of extremes in almost every case you have already been on a multi-year long very immersive very infatuated very disciplined journey of resistance training and focused nutrition and the organization of many variables and
parts of your life around that task it's unlikely to be something you pick up a lifting Hobby and just find yourself excessively muscular oops um so that's probably my best answer for that it's just insanely realistic in most cases to wander into that sort of thing you know the the um the myth of accidental muscle yes well you know people say More Money More Problems first of all I on various philosophical grounds I think that's absurd but um you don't accidentally become ultra wealthy and by God I wish you the best if that happens to
you I'll cry a tear for you but in much the same way almost nobody accidentally becomes hypermuscular to the extent that they're on that side of the spectrum that trade-offs are starting to become apparent probably the biggest trade-off in the short to medium term is um opportunity cost things you could have spent doing outside of being in the gym but the way that the science of resistance training works is for almost all of the health benefits and the longevity benefits and the quality of life benefits the amount of time you need to be training per
week is measured in the 1 to 3 hour range with three being like you're really full sending it MH one to three hours per week if we took if you went on chat GPT and did like a Time use question being like can you list all of the things the typical American does for X number hours a week and throw in you know you just look read down the list top 100 time use cases you may find that 1 to three hours a week is somewhere in like the 50 or 60 Rank and there's so
many things people do that are way more than that I mean social media consumption television watching uh and the list goes on there are dozens of things you do that take way more time and so if you really fully invest yourself like I'm relatively fully invested into getting as jacked as possible it's going to take some time it's going to take it could take eight hours a week which is still like this not forever you know people will jog for 40 minutes every morning think nothing of it um and then when you present to them
the idea of resistance training they're like well now that's going to take some time like well yes actually does not take nearly as much time because the intensity of the efforts so grotesquely high and the recovery demands are so high that you have to be very pulsatile with it it's not even something you have to do every day as a matter of fact people get incredible benefits probably the biggest return on investment the average person can make is to train for roughly half an hour two times a week Monday and Thursday if you do it
properly it can comport an unbelievable amount of benefits just across the board and so for most people the consider that they can begin to do this successively it's just not something realistic until and unless they're really into it like a huge hobby like if you are watching Formula 1 for 30 minutes a day every other day on your phone realistic considerations of this is taking up too much of your time kind of out the window now if you start like canceling podcast guests because you're following the circuit around the world and staying in festar hotels
and booking the the hyper rich guy suite for all the races yeah like someone could could say oh you're really into this you're like No Nonsense it's only costing me 3 million a year so then yes but it's it's obvious when you're going to be so involved you don't just walk into that sort of thing so let's unpack this a little bit because um well there's there's actually two things I want to go into but one of them I think will be a better entry into it which is you talked about how boy if you
were going to put eight hours a week into your strength training you're kind of at the upper limits of what a person might do um conversely if your goal is to be a really good endurance athlete you're not getting you're not at that level yet if you're only putting in eight hours a week right a a worldclass cyclist is I mean God they're probably on their bike 30 hours a week something like that easily now of course not all of that is at maximum intensity a lot of that in fact probably 70 to 80% of
it it also varies a little bit by gender but let's just say 70 to 80% of that time is going to be at Zone 2 um and they're really only burning matches in 20% of the time yet there's something very different about strength training which is are you really getting benefit at the equivalent of whatever we would call zone two in the gym like if you're at that far of a submaximal effort um what is the training stimulus and is this just where the comparison between cardiopulmonary training where there's a clear benefit from submaximal efforts
and strength training don't uh Jive that's definitely the case strength training um I I like to use the term resistance training it's the general term for going into the gym and applying things to your muscles right because that that's why you know you would say hypertrophy and strength are outputs of resistance correct yes um so you can get some benefits from very submaximal efforts but resistance training is based on applying High forces and high levels of fatigue as its primary modality of how it makes you better and so it's kind of when you get into
that world that's what's going to happen it's like if you um if you're trying to be a special operator eventually you know Navy SEAL type of person but you don't like uh the sound of gunfire freaks you out you're kind of in the wrong place so uh we get almost all the benefits from pushing either very heavy loads or lighter loads but very close to muscular failure which people have described as unpleasant uh a burn in the muscle um a lot of pain uh the weights slow down so it takes a lot of psychological effort
to keep going there is not really an equivalent of just getting on the bike and putting in the miles getting to a pace where zone two you can breathe you can talk a little bit still that's not weight training but precisely because weight training is so intensive you need lots of recovery time between sessions and you can do lots of disruption and damage in each session and also the total yield and how much it changes your physiology is very high for each session and actually per unit time and that means if you're not working super
hard PR one unit time you're going to need a lot of work that's endurance training if you're working insanely hard per unit time you won't need a lot of work nor can you recover from that much work which is why the top end is eight or 10 hours or something you're even professional bodybuilders of time spent in the gym every week but for people that just want the basic benefits yeah we're talking about an hour or two hours a week and that's really all you need if you're pushing sufficiently hard that's both all you need
and realistically like you can recover from more if you make time in your schedule and really prioritize recovery but yeah any much more than that and gets to be like oh wow I'm kind of sore and tired a lot more and Mike do you think this is simply um a consequence of the fact that endurance training relies more on type one muscle fibers and strength and hypertrophy training more dependent on the actions of type two fibers is that why I mean I I don't know why philosophically I just think this is such an interesting contrast
to make of how optimization of one is a totally different philosophy than optimization of the other and the only reason I'm harping on it is I just know that when you take people who are very used to doing endurance training it's a hard switch for them to adopt what you just said in the gym sometimes sure it's it's not the way they're wired but do do you think it's is the best way to explain to that person the why that like that's the difference between a type one and a type two fiber that is probably
the core difference I would say there are two other things that can be put into that equation one is the physical forces are just much higher in magnitude um you know you're going to be putting a lot of tension through your connective tissues and through your muscles when you're resistance training than you are when you're doing like bicycle work for example and so with high absolute forces the approximate damage and disruption to the body is graded exponentially and not linearly it's like if you uh if a whiffle ball flies past you you might not even
hear it if a 50 caliber bullet flies past you it's going to tear parts of you off and it's never even touched you very very different amount of damage from much much higher forces and the other one is some combination of neural and psychological Drive the kind of drive it requires to be good at endurance at least the base building part the aerobic base work that you do is kind of being in a state of calm equinity you get your flow going you get your music going you get your breathing going you look at the
road ahead of you and you can just crank but in lifting you have to turn up the juice to really feel the the maximum kind of situation another quick analogy off hand is if you are are a trillionaire like I am and you have a fleet of Cessna private aircraft at your back in call I never fly the same plane twice I always crash the thing um you know you fly a Cessna you can fly it for some time it requires a decent amount of Maintenance but decent amount of Maintenance and it'll Fly for a
long time it's just never getting up to velocities that are really crazy now you take an SR71 Blackbird out for a spin at Mach 3 you have to do like 10 times the number of maintenance hours per flight hour on that thing or something to that magnitude because at Mach 3 what's happening to the plane is just like it's actually just running through subsequent brick walls like that's what the sound barrier is like three times faster than the sound barrier you're just rattling that thing into into dust that's what you're trying to do to it
when you're pushing your body really hard and the weights are slowing down and there sets of five or sets of eight or sets of 10 your body is very close to its limits so both uh your faster twitch muscle fibers which are required they take way more damage they're also not as well proliferated with blood supply and they heal faster or sorry they heal slower and the amount of absolute force is higher and the amount of neural Drive it takes like you can hop on a bike for an hour at Zone 2 every day and
afterwards people like are you tired you're like a little bit I kind of feel like a little also a little bit refreshed in a sense um you don't really feel refreshed after like grinding the leg press for five sets of 15 you feel like someone beat the crap out of you and you even owe anyone money what the hell is going on so that intensity that absolute intensity of lifting and high relative intensity that's what tends to make the big big fatigue cost [Music] w
