Hypertrophy, Muscle Science, and Eliciting Different Forms Of Stress w/ Dr. Andy Galpin

Andy  00:00

Hey, this is Dr. Andy Galpin and you’re listening to the Airborne mind show.

Misbah Haque  00:36

Hello everyone, this is Misbah Haque. Thank you so much for joining me today. And welcome back to the show. Whether this is your first, second, 10th or 30th episode, I appreciate you tuning in your time, your energy, your attention, and your ears mean the world to me. Without you listening, this show would not be where it is today. So once again, thank you. Before we get started, the biggest compliment that you can give is by leaving a review on iTunes, you have no idea how much that helps in terms of rankings, bringing more awareness to the show, and bringing on more interesting guests. So if you could take two or three minutes, not while you’re driving, but take two or three minutes go ahead, leave a review it would be greatly appreciated. 

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So today my guest is Dr. Andy Galpin. He is a Professor of Kinesiology at the Center for sports performance at Cal State Fullerton. He’s got a PhD in human bioenergetics, and he’s the founder and director of the Biochemistry and Molecular exercise laboratory. Chances are that you have seen his work before. He is making regular appearances on The Barbell Shrug podcast, he hosted his own series of podcasts called the body of knowledge. And he’s also been on the Joe Rogan experience which is a pretty big deal. But his work has been featured in so many places on the side, he’s helped MMA fighters, Olympic athletes, you name it. 

But at heart, he is a muscle scientist who studies muscle at the single-cell level all the way up to the performance, to try to determine what happens in response to high intensity, high power, high-velocity high force exercise both acutely and chronically. Why do certain types of training programs work better than others? Why do certain people respond to certain types of training better than others? He is kind of best known for studying human thriving. Like what do we do to not just avoid being sick? But how do we optimize? How do we thrive? He spends time examining those that do that so we can really understand what we’re shooting for in terms of optimal health and performance. 

In this episode, we chat about things like why we think of science the wrong way, why hypertrophy training is so critical for long-term development, the diabetes of dopamine, what happens when we eliminate all stress and so much more. His book recently came out unplugged, which is taking the bestsellers list by storm. He co-wrote that with Brian Mackenzie, who will be coming on in a couple of months again. But the best thing that you can do to support his book is, first of all, get it and read it because it’s a paradigm-shifting book, and head over to Amazon and leave a review. You have no idea how much that would help spread his message. 

So if you resonate with some of the things that we talked about, regarding unplugged, and some of the concepts around it, you want the message to reach more people. Make sure you go ahead and do that. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did, and more importantly, hope you do something with it. 

Dr. Galpin Welcome to the show. 

Andy 04:33

A pleasure to be here, man. 

Misbah Haque 04:34

I’m excited to have you on because I’ve been following your work for quite some time. And recently I had a chance to attend the talk that you did at Invictus where you talked about genetics versus training, and I found some points. They’re super interesting. And I just found your gift or actually, it’s a skill set. Really fascinating. You’re able to take these complex scientific principles and concepts and then Bring them down to a level where you can communicate it with the average person bring it outside of the scientific community and allow coaches, practitioners, and athletes to make use of it as well. So I’m excited to have you on.

Andy  05:11

I appreciate you saying, it’s actually a very good microcosm for the talk and of itself. So we’ve kind of just gone into like Inception there. 

Misbah Haque  05:21

Let us know a little bit about your background, and kind of how you got to where you are today, where some of your time, energy and attention is focused on at the moment. 

Andy  05:33

So my current job, I’m a professor and director of what’s called the Center for sports performance at Cal State Fullerton, and also run founder and director of a separate laboratory called the chemistry and Exercise Physiology laboratory. So basically, what that means is, I’m a muscle scientist, so my job is to do research. And we examine everything from the whole muscle, all the way down to the genetic level, and everything in between. So we take muscle biopsies, and we study human muscle, at the single-cell level, and all the way up to the performance to try to determine what happens in response to high intensity, high power, high velocity, high force exercise, acutely and chronically, which is all kind of a fancy way of saying, I’m an athlete, I played college football, I played every sport, I could get my hands on as a kid. 

And I always just wanted to know, what are the training questions? Why do certain types of training programs work better than others? Why do some people respond to certain types of training better than others? And so for me the way to answer that question, because so many people were doing it from what we would call the practical side, which coaches on the floor, getting these numbers with their athletes. So I wanted to look at it from others’ perspectives, which is, okay, what are the cellular mechanisms and explanations for why that happens? And then can we actually use that information to help each other. So, in other words, if I can identify, hey, somebody that has more of these certain types of muscle fibers may respond to this type of training. 

And I can maybe have that as a theory and I can send that out to a coach. And then they can actually put that into practice for a few months and come back and say, No, it didn’t line up in your lab, but it didn’t really work in the field. Well, then I know, maybe I didn’t get the right answer yet. But if it does work, then maybe we’ve all learned something. So the gist of what I do as a scientist, and as a teacher is really to continue to help understand human performance and do what we call study human thriving. So I’m not interested in disease prevention, although stuff is clearly important. But a lot of people do that. I hit the other end of the spectrum, what do we do not just avoid being sick? But how do we optimize? How do we thrive? And let’s spend our time examining those that do that so that we really understand what we’re shooting for in terms of optimal health and performance?

Misbah Haque  08:06

When we look at maybe the last few decades, the shift in our culture as to the type of training that we’re doing, and what we’re really seeking for in fitness and in performance, has kind of slowly started to shift and change. And so would you say that the way that you are studying performance is, is something that really hasn’t been done too much in the past on this level?

Andy  08:32

We have the luxury now. Or we have the luxury in our past and basically focusing all of our we’ll call exercise on the sake of sports performance. So in other words when we exercise in the 1970s, it was because we’re trying to get better at sports A, B, C, or D. Well, now we’ve evolved or devolved, and we’re about to really cross the threshold where the reason we do exercise is completely different. There are some that are still there for the sake of sports performance. But the vast majority of exercise research or exercise science is really focused on reclaiming basic human physiology through exercise, which is a fancy way, it’s there to help us overcome the negative things that we have had in our life as a result of technology and abundance and like becoming generally physically far easier. 

We really still have this huge gap in science from the performance side of it with anything besides your very standard 30 minutes or 45 minutes of steady-state, what we’ll call cardio, jogging, things like that. The other spectrum is your very classic hypertrophic, three sets of 10 leg extensions, the last decade or so, in large part because of Marty cabala. And his team. high-intensity intervals have started to jump in. And that’s fantastic. But this is something I noticed at the very, very beginning. of my college career that there are so many other types of training. And there are so many integrations and iterations of this. We don’t have any research on any of these combination training modes, which is actually far more realistic to any athlete. And this is far before CrossFit ever did it. 

I didn’t know a single athlete in the 1980s that only lifted three sets of 10 or only did intervals or did accommodate no one who had done that in decades. So yeah, you’re right, man, we just have a huge gap in terms of understanding anything from the performance side of science outside of the very standard. And there’s a good reason for that. Very good reason. So I don’t blame them. But the hole is there nonetheless.

Misbah Haque  10:43

Something that stuck out to me that you mentioned in your talk. And I’ve repeated this a couple times with when Irene came onto the show, and Calvin came on the show. And you said that our understanding is limited by the technology that we have to measure it, right. It’s one of those things like we need to remain open minded. It really in all aspects, because certain things we may have believed that were deemed impossible, such as that hyperplasia concept that you talked about, now that we have that technology to measure it, we’ve you’ve clearly shown that, it is possible. And that just leaves us to think like, what else is out there that we haven’t tapped into yet solely because the technology isn’t available to measure it?

Andy  11:26

You can pick your example, whatever you want, especially any of you at home that has an exercise science degree, or an undergraduate degree in X rays or something like that. Pick the thing that you love God taught in school, that was the absolute truth, or this never happens, this always happens. And you can basically trace a direct line between improvements and technology and changing of that understanding. So pick your poison, it really doesn’t matter. It’s very clear. Lactate is another very popular one, right? So for decades, we thought this is actually what causes fatigue. And as we improve our ability to accurately and improve the fidelity of the measurements, we realize, not only is that not right, but it’s completely wrong. 

It’s the exact opposite. And then you have really innovative people like George Brooks come along and start saying actually when we start integrating are applying lactate directly to people after traumatic brain injury, they get far better. And the brain actually selects lactate over glucose a lot of the time preferentially. So we couldn’t get to those understandings, though, in the 1920s. And ABL couldn’t figure that stuff out because he didn’t have the chemistry to be able to titrate these things out. So we mean, actually, I’ll go back to that wonderful book. I’m blanking on the author’s name, but Sapiens, that’s made a lot of ways. He makes a very good point in that book about the word ignoramus, which is basically Latin for we don’t know. 

And then his argument, and I tend to agree with him that the single purpose that the scientific revolution occurred is because of the fact that we finally acknowledged ignoramus, which is a way of saying we acknowledge that we don’t know things, because what’s the point of doing research if you know it? So we have to keep in mind that science is not what people think of science the exact wrong way. People think of science as proof. And it is actually, by definition, the exact opposite. It doesn’t prove anything, it does reduce uncertainty. But we are always hamstrung by our inability to measure things at the deepest level possible. 

And that’s getting better, of course, but it’d be pretty foolish for you to think, everyone in the history of mankind was wrong. And we’re the generation. We’re the smart ones that got it all figured out. So yeah, we constantly see this can go back as far as you want, where we believe something for decades or hundreds of years until we get the more accurate technology and realize we were totally wrong or partially wrong at some level.

Misbah Haque  13:56

I would love to dig into one of the concepts that you touched on in your talk, which was about myonuclei and satellite cells, right? And having these more myonuclei and satellite cells would equal bigger muscles. And then there’s a ko relation there to recovery as well. Could you dig into that a little bit?

The way that it basically works is you have to realize that all of your individual muscles are actually millions, if not more, probably more of individual muscle fibers or muscle cells. So the way that a muscle function is the collective expression of those individual parts. So if you dive down into those individual parts, what you find is they are in fact regulated by 1000s, if not millions of little organelle called the nuclei. So if you remember from your middle school or high school biology class, the nuclei are the part of the cell that controls regulation that tells it to grow, shrink, die, repair, etc. It also is what holds your DNA So it’s really the master regulator of any cell type. And so it’s no different than human muscle, or myofibers, as we call them. 

So one of the things that we have started to examine, and that would be the collective, we myself being a very small part, but a lot of researchers around the world for a long time I’ve been studying how many of these nuclei you have, because most folks don’t realize that human muscle fibers are some of if not the largest cells, by volume in all of biology. I mean, they’re huge. I, you can see this, there’s a video I did for a TV show, a while I’ve got, I think it’s up on my YouTube page, but it’s up on YouTube somewhere, where you can see just with a naked eye, I take a bunch of muscle fibers that I took from a biopsy. So it’s from somebody’s quad. And I can pick up one individual muscle fiber with just a set of tweezers with my naked eye. 

And you can see it on the camera at the end of the tweezers. So they’re huge cells, which means that again, like any other cells in biology, human fibers are what are called Myo or multinucleated. So most cells in biology have one cell, one nucleus, because we’re so large, we have to have 1000s, if not millions, of nuclei per cell. And the easy analogy there is if you run a company, and you had three employees, you could have one nucleus, right, you could have one boss or one manager. But as you expand, and you open up another office across the country, and you open up another one in another country, and as you get larger and larger and larger, if you still only have that one manager, it’s very, very difficult when a doorknob breaks at one of your offices in Guatemala. 

And if you have to be there to be the one to approve it, it’s very, very difficult. So it’s easier for you to expand and grow and shrink and repair and increase the rate of turnover. Right, which is a way of saying when there’s slight damage, can you fix it repair really quickly, the only way to do that is to increase the amount of managers of these mon nuclei you have. So that’s one of the major focuses in this area of science is what’s the role exactly of these nuclei. And one of the things that we’re fairly sure of is that stem cells that are laying dormant around the cell, when when the need comes to add more, they can actually kind of, for lack of a better term, go into the fiber, turn into a nucleus, so you can increase the nuclear count. And therefore it can enhance your control of the muscle. Again, the easy example is to think, why is it that your friend recovers faster from this exact same workout even though you both sleep the same, get the same hormones, nutrition, etc?  

Potentially, that person has more nuclei in their fibers. And so it’s just easier for them to tell the fiber exactly what to do in terms of repair. And my friend, Kevin Mirik, just published a really nice paper, I think I threw it up on my Instagram a few days ago. But really nice paper when he examined this, and a very interesting model. Now it was rats, I think it’s not perfect, but it does provide us with some detailed mechanism of the exact relationship between the satellite cells and how they turn into the nuclei. And in fact, his work has actually made me start to question and I’ll probably have to now go back on some of the things I said on a podcast like just a year ago, because I think I was wrong on some of this stuff. And this happens all the time because Kevin does such nice work. Kevin’s actually would be a fantastic guest. 

For the show, as he’s actually done a tremendous amount in the whole idea of concurrent training. I’d love to bring him on, at some point, a lot of myths in that area, that adding aerobic exercise actually compromises or kills your gains. So he’s got a very nice publication, if you’re interested, it’s fairly easy to read, actually. Murack, MURACH as well as Bagley, Jimmy Bagley, BAGLEY, their paper on. What’s scientifically called concurrent training. It’s very, very nice. But nonetheless, that’s kind of what we’re identifying is the relationship between these things. And the fact that counter intuitively, a lot of really high level athletes actually have very small muscle fibers. 

And that allows them to have more nuclei that allow them to have more control and more turnover and regulation of the fibers, which we think and we’re guessing a little bit, we think allows them to enhance their recovery so that they can train multiple times a day and more often than the rest of us.

Misbah Haque  19:39

I guess at this point, the question then becomes let’s say me and you are doing the exact same workout and you’re recovering much faster. Is this something that we were born with? Is it genetics, or is this something that can be trained a little bit, and is there a way to, I guess, increase the number of myonuclei?

Andy  19:57

So the Mamanuca that number can increase because satellite cells can be differentiated and proliferated into a modern nucleus that so the real question is actually is the satellite cell number limited. And I would have to defer to Kevin or some other experts in that area. Because we don’t exactly know a certain portion of that number is genetically determined. But whether or not you can augment that number through training as such, it’s a little bit left to be determined, and it’s most likely thought to be not confounding or confusing the factor a little bit more is the fact that it looks like now, we have potential to increase nucleation without necessarily having to have more satellites. So we don’t know what’s going on there. And so that could totally change what we’re looking at, when we get that in the future. 

Having said that, even back to your original question, that could be one of the examples of why you recover better than I do. And that example, it could be other factors, too. A lot of the molecular factors are outside of genetics, and those other factors are very, very transient. So I just published a paper, he literally yesterday got accepted, where we looked at a particular set of proteins that are called the MAP kinase or MAPK. So it’s a family of proteins. So here’s what they do. And this is not exactly how they work. But I’m going to translate a little bit. So it’s easier to understand for non-science folks. So these are basically proteins that are inside of your cell. And they’re what we call signaling proteins. So let’s say you stretch the muscle fiber, the muscle cell gets stretched, it gets damaged, that activates this protein because it’s on the cell wall, it talks to another protein, it talks to another protein, which starts another one kind of goes down the chain, and eventually one of them, one of those proteins talk to the nucleus and tells the nucleus we’ve been damaged. 

This is all we think you should do about it, express the genes that you have that code for the protein, say muscle to repair the muscle damage. Well, we found it in endurance training. And we’ve actually found this before in a spectrum of people from those that are sedentary, those that are like recreationally active, those that do like circuit training was what we call a scientifically, so some combination of low-level weights, plus conditioning plus a lot of movement similar to a CrossFit workout, all the way up to very high-level powerlifters and all the way through very high-level weight lifters. Now we just published our paper again yesterday on the other spectrum, which is the endurance and the spectrum. So good runners, moderate runners, all they have two very good runners and found a couple of things. 

So these proteins are activated through a process called phosphorylation. Alright, but we can just think of it as are they turned on or are they turned off. So what we see happen in both of those studies, is differential responses based on your training load, which is a way of saying you can either turn up or turn down the amount of that protein that’s activated. Translation means it’s more sensitive or less sensitive. So you and I may have the exact same amount of the signaling proteins, but you are more hypersensitive, more viewers are turned on or turned off. So when we get the same exact stimulus, because your sensitivity is different, you get a different message communicated to the nucleus. 

The other thing that was very interesting, we found is the total amount of that protein, so not just whether it is turned on or off, but how much was actually present, is extremely responsive in terms of the training. So you may increase or decrease up-regulate or down-regulate the amount of that protein that’s around and available, which also plays into your sensitivity. So you have multiple routes, for example, if you increase the amount of the protein, and you have all of it turned on, you are extremely sensitive. And I could do the opposite, which is to regulate or get rid of a bunch of the proteins and have the ones that are available turned off. Now it’s gonna take a lot more activation for them to really get stimulated. And so what we saw happen through the continuum training is that actually, it’s a combination. 

So those of us that really turned down the amount of protein tend to turn on the ones we have more often. And vice versa. So that stuff was teased out. But that would be another explanation independent of the nuclei as to why some people respond more or less than others because they have either more or less of these signaling proteins of which there are hundreds of 1000s. We just looked at three of them. Or they’re more sensitive. So a lot of potential explanations. None of those are going to ever represent the entire equation. Because physiology is very complex, and you have multiple systems that are integrated simultaneously. But at least from our perspective, from muscles perspective, we’re getting closer to some answers we think.

Misbah Haque  24:53

I want to dig a little bit into it and I approached you about this afterward, and it was hypertrophy-based training. And I was at the time thinking, Okay, how does this kind of apply to maybe a Masters’s athlete? And I would love for you to dig into it. And I think in our space, I feel like we’re past the point where we’re scoffing at bodybuilding style training, we realized that it has some value. Could you dig into maybe how that correlates to some of these satellite cells, and even the concept of hyperplasia that you touched on?

Andy  25:27

So a couple of things, the older we get, it doesn’t appear to really inhibit our ability to grow muscle mass, except maybe really closer to terminal age. So 80 90+, maybe you lose that. But mechanisms appear to be the same. Now as you get older, though, you become less sensitive, from every layer from the hormone layer to the cell level, to the molecular level, to the genetic level all the way down. So what that means is, you probably need more of a stimulus to grow at that age for example, we know very clearly that older folks need more protein than younger folks. And they become what we call protein sensitive. So we have to take that into consideration nutritionally, as we start to train these individuals. Now making matters complicated is the fact that they probably need more of a stimulus than younger folks. 

But they also can’t handle as much work. And so that’s, that’s your real conundrum is how do you balance not getting them so sore and trash that they can’t work out for three weeks, knowing that they need more of a stimulus, the mechanisms, the satellite cells do appear to be finite. So that is a problem as well. But again, Kevin’s paper that he just published this week, last week, maybe suggested that the older individuals have an ability to overcome that given enough stimulus. But his stimulus was this thing called certain synergistic ablation. And it’s not possible in humans. So we have to take that with a bit of a grain of salt, but we just don’t know. 

And then alluding to your hyperplasia comment, the way that you grow muscle, you basically have two options, either all those muscle fibers that you have to get larger, therefore, the whole muscle gets larger. So by larger, I mean diameter, right? They get thicker, right? hyperplasia suggests the opposite, which is, well, maybe you just add muscle fibers. So hypertrophy, which is your muscle getting bigger, could be either each individual fiber getting thicker, could be you’re adding more muscle fibers, or it could be a combination. And in Kevin’s model, he showed very good evidence that it’s very, very likely that hyperplasia happened in his synergistic ablation model. And we’ve seen that a lot before in animals. So I think it’s pretty silly to think that it’s not happening or it’s not possible, the real question that we don’t have an answer for is, what does it actually take for it to happen in humans? 

I am of the belief that it happens a lot in humans, you can ask for the scientific data, but it’s one of those things technologically will almost never be able to show it because we would have to take out a muscle fiber, measure it, put it back in your muscle, assume that nothing changed, train, you take that exact same fiber back out and then look at it again. And then that’s just physically feasibly impossible right now. I mean, you’re probably talking decades, if ever, but we have so much in the mechanism understood, we know what happens in virtually every other mammal, or at least as possible. So it’s pretty difficult for me to believe the fact that it’s not occurring, the real question becomes, what’s the actual mechanism and I was literally having a long talk with Brad Schoenfeld, who’s the muscle hypertrophy guy, if you don’t know his work, he’s done more work in the area of muscle hypertrophy than any human on the planet, human muscle hypertrophy. 

And the mechanisms that we could come up with are either gonna have to take one of two things, or tremendous insult. So picture a ton of eccentric work in a really short timeframe or exposure over a very long period. So probably decades or more. Now, the second model is decades more, again, because of the logistics timeline, I can’t do a study that takes 30 years. I hope I’m not still doing science in 30 years. Well, I probably will. But those are just not possible, right. And the other one is also really, really difficult to pull off in humans because of the obvious reasons, it’s hard to do so much damage to a person and make that ethical. So we’re kind of left at this position where I don’t really know how much farther we can go in terms of getting strong evidence in humans. 

But as the evidence continues to mount animals, and we start to understand more about the mechanisms, I think we have to at least acknowledge that hyperplasia is not totally impossible. In fact, it’s probable but how much it actually contributes to normal human hypertrophy is probably minimal. But it’s probably possible. And that’s really as far as I just want to see the conversation go twos, we got to stop talking about it as if it’s physically impossible. It never happens. And so yeah, it’s probably minimal, but it’s probably going on.

Misbah Haque  30:24

And then now you are the guy who’s anti biohacking. But then I remember during the talk, you mentioned like, there is this one hack this one hack? Two, I believe it was more satellite cells?

Andy  30:41

There’s certainly a hypertrophy hack. And it’s not to increase satellite cells that we really know of, although I stand to be proven wrong on that one, that’s fine. But what we do think happens. And this has been shown in a number of papers now that those that use exogenous testosterone, have a dramatic increase and mononuclear account. And it looks like that mound nuclei are preserved, even after the testosterone for years, probably, and the IOC. And you saw Masada caught wind of this a couple of years ago. And a lot of people started making the argument though, that okay, so then what happens if I just do one cycle? 

Or if I’ve been caught one time for exogenous testosterone? You’re suspended for six months, that’s great, but you’re gonna have this benefit, at least for five years, maybe. So is that really fair, and so that’s when you saw them actually really up there, depending on the sport you’re in, but they really upped their, their probation or their punishment period, from being called PDS. So that’s an easy way around it. But that’s nothing new at all. We’ve known for a very long time, exogenous testosterone is very effective for muscle growth, we just have a bit more mechanistic understanding.

Misbah Haque  32:01

So that was the one hack was taking steroids or performance enhancing drugs?

Andy  32:06

You can’t say steroids. Not all steroids do that. And some series are anabolic, meaning they make you grow. And some of them are catabolic, meaning they actually break down muscle tissue. So the collective term steroids are actually unhelpful in this case, and then fairly confusing, because anyone that’s done any steroids are been around that culture can tell you a lot of detail about it does this, this one doesn’t do that this one does this, because there’s a lot of steroids that actually are good for muscle strength, but don’t necessarily add muscle mass. So in this particular case, the only one that we know of specifically is testosterone. I can’t guarantee you other ones don’t do it, they just haven’t been tested yet. So they may do it. 

Some others may do but we just don’t know, this Austin’s only one we’re aware of. Because it’s very hard to get one, a bunch of people together that have taken steroids for a long time, and are training and then healthy, so and then they’re also gonna let you publish this data on them and take biopsies on and things like that. So that’s the best we know of right now.

Misbah Haque  33:13

If we part of what you had answered, when I asked you about that master’s question was that hypertrophy training should be applicable for any age range, it’s, it’s just the dosage that varies. That’s dependent on maybe the goal and the function of that human, what’s more, are you competing in is this just for fitness and things of that nature? We know that in terms of performance there, there are some benefits. We can use hypertrophy based training to train certain types of contractions, and, and involve different planes of motion and tempo training, but physiologically, from your perspective, how does this kind of work in a way where maybe the person just starting out can make use of this type of training and help with like, their long term development?

Andy  33:30

That’s all really good points. We cover this story in my little podcast called the body of knowledge, which is not like a true podcast, it was just a short series. So nine little episodes where I covered the history of the field in some of the episodes and how it got here. And in my mind, it’s very clear that there’s this German philosopher and I’ll spare you his name. But he has a very interesting point about thesis, antithesis, and then synthesis. And I think more to your point, this is another example of that happening. So the thesis came about which was an idea, hey, we should bodybuilding. Bodybuilding is everything and machines and isolation and split routines. 

That was a thesis. Well, then the antithesis came up, swung on years later saying, well, this doesn’t really improve my athletic ability. And here are all the holes basically, if I only use machines, and if I only isolate muscles. The problem Was that it swung to its own end of the spectrum, which is then to say, so then, therefore, because bodybuilding in this sense, isn’t perfect, therefore, it must all be terrible and useless and not needed. And thankfully, most of the communities now have acknowledged, well, that’s equally stupid. That’s just as short-sighted. And so now we’re back, closer to the synthesis of both those ideas and say, maybe we should focus most of our time on the bigger complex movements, but then use the bodybuilding concepts to fix all of our injuries, to fix asymmetries to shore up weak spots, because they’re the best of that area. Like they’ve already figured out from 30 years of how to isolate a muscle and fix it really quickly. 

So I think you’re, you’re dead on there. This is something very, very, very important for a developmental model. And one of the reasons why you see so many people break when they first start one of these high-intensity training programs, or a combination of high-intensity circuit training, call across if you want, but again, for 100 years, we’ve been calling it circuit training, it’s no different across a company, it’s not a style of workout stuff. So that stuff will smash you, if your joints and ligaments and tendons are not ready for that volume at that intensity, you’re going to get crushed three months in six months, and at some point, you’re going to break. And so you do need to invest some time at the beginning of your training age, to build up sufficient ability to handle the volume.

This means you need to be able to control your position. So I love Cal Dietz, his triphasic system, where phase one is building the ability to handle things centrically. Phase two is being able to handle things isometrically. And then phase three moves on to concentric and I believe strongly if you invest in those first two phases, and you build up hypertrophy, you build up position, you build up control, then you can have the freedom to really go into fast Essentrics coupled, concentric plyometrics or whatever you’re going to do, then you start adding volume, intensity and speed, and all that stuff. And you’re going to be much better off. And you’re not going to have these injuries, these massive breakdowns. 

Later in life, you have to realize that if you go from zero to 100, like that, come on, you’re going to be silly to think you’re not going to be trashed. I know several gyms I know we did this affection in Memphis, Doug and Mike and those guys built-in and what a lot of CrossFit gyms will now call them like an on-ramp, or fundamentals or a Foundations Program, or however you turn it where it’s sort of like you got to go six, eight weeks in this program before you can do a CrossFit class. And I think that’s far, far, far, far too short. But I realized this is not realistic. No one’s gonna sign up for a gym, do a Foundation’s class for the first year, the first year of class like it’s not going to happen. 

But I will also encourage you to look into what’s called the LTAD which stands for long-term athletic development. And now this is really focused on that question, but geared towards kids, high school kids, middle school kids, and even early college kids. And there are extensive people, Rhodri Lloyd, Hopatcong Carol, Larry Metters, all these people that have spent decades now investigating, how do we really achieve long term athletic development so that people aren’t broken, and they’re still not, they’re not peaking at age 14. And their model is very, very consistent with what you just brought up, which is to suggest we need to build this infrastructure. At an age, we’ll worry about maximizing speed. Later, and just quickly that model. I think Vern Gambetta said this, but his progression was basically you teach a kid to run, jump, and throw. 

And then you teach that kid to hinge or pole, press, and squat. And then you teach the kid to clean jerk and snatch. And I think if you mean, there’s not that morals are not perfect, like don’t get lost in the weeds there. But it is really good to understand that let’s deal with the basic movement patterns first, let’s do them properly, and let’s build up a foundation, and then we can move on to other training. So I’m not sure if that’s exactly what your question was. But that’s as far as me. So I kind of went off there.

Misbah Haque  39:23

That was perfect. So the one point that you mentioned was, this is a great way to avoid breakdowns. But the other end of that spectrum is also maybe plateaus. Where you hit you hit stagnancy in your development after maybe two, three years. And you’re kind of run around in circles and maybe hypertrophy is a way to increase the capacity or the materials to be able to layer other things on top.

Andy  39:50

You can take it from two perspectives. Perspective number one is total total mass right now, you can absolutely get stronger without getting any bigger muscle mass while totally possible. We’ve seen this 1000s and 1000s of times. But at some point you will reach a critical mass where you just can’t get much stronger within your size. And if you don’t believe me if you want to argue that, why are there weight classes in weightlifting, powerlifting, wrestling, boxing, kickboxing, there clearly isn’t a relationship between size and strength? It’s not perfect. No, it’s not direct. No, but there is a very strong, significant relationship there. That’s why we have weight classes. 

So yes, at some point you’re going to pick out now having said that, most people are not at that point. Most of us have a very, very long way we can get with strength before we really need to add muscle mass. But the other end of the equation is, if you’re not doing any of that stuff, it looks like right now, preliminarily, some fibers are activated more with higher volumes of training, and some of them are activated with less volume. So what’s possibly happening, in this case, is you’re simply not challenging a whole subset of fibers, because you’re sticking too close to the same programming. And you’re not really doing these things. And certain muscle groups are never really getting challenged differently. So you may be thinking, Well, CrossFit is constantly varied. 

But it’s not mean that that’s a lie. It’s varied, a decent amount within its own little sub sphere, right, but never steps out of that sub sphere. So you’re not really getting that much exposure to making different things. I mean, let’s be real, like the vast and I’m not trying to brag on CrossFit. But I got love for that training. And I could talk all day about the good stuff that it’s done. But I mean, let’s be real, almost every workout is some sort of a burpee or a box jump, some sort of squat, and some sort of pull up, maybe some jumper, but like that’s, that’s not that different. You have huge muscle groups that are being used. Very similar, and a lot of that different one, a lot of those different exercises. Now a lot of them use the big muscle groups differently. 

But the small ones get the same exposure every single time. So it’s those ones that need to be treated differently. And if you don’t believe me, I will challenge you. Go do a bodybuilding workout, isolate every muscle group, and do five sets of 10. And wake up tomorrow. And you’re going to be really sore in places that you’re not normally sore. And that’s how you can tell that I’m not challenging these fibers in the certain muscle groups, as well as I thought I would because some muscles aren’t won’t be sore tomorrow, some of them are just gonna be trashed. There are multiple, the tricep has three muscles. It has multiple heads, the pecs, have multiple heads, if you will, right, one sternum, one clinic either. 

So you can challenge it in different positions and get really, really sore and challenge the fibers differently. And so that would be my advice to those that are in a plateau. They say, are you really sure you’ve challenged all of your muscles in a bunch of different ways because of barbell and dumbbell, and certain ranges of motion. CrossFit in particular is terrible with rotation. It is terrible for unilateral stuff, for the most part, like dumbbells aside, but you’re not asking your arm to move in one direction while your other arm is moving in a totally opposite plane. 

Like that never happens in CrossFit. So we just have these big problems with I would say problems. But if that is your problem. That’s one potential explanation. So again, I’m not going to qualify for it. But this is no way for me to take a shot at CrossFit as a good workout system. Clearly, those types of things are very effective for the vast majority of people. But You listed a problem and I just listed a potential solution we put that way. 

Misbah Haque  43:40

And I love this. We could go down an entire rabbit hole just discussing this. But I definitely want to be insightful, and I want to touch on now unplugged. So could you tell me a little bit about maybe the origin of where this book idea came from? Because as soon as I started digging into it, I’m like, wow, this is different. Like it’s taking a stance, it’s zooming out. It’s like a 30,000-foot view of what technology has kind of done to us. And we’re so in the trenches at the moment. I feel like as a society that we don’t really, we don’t realize it. Like we don’t have that awareness at this point. Or at least the vast majority of people maybe but tell me the origin story of how this came about.

Andy  44:19

So unplugged just came out July 11. And it’s a book that Brian Mackenzie and I wrote and you may know Brian Mackenzie, his last book on Rick Runner was a New York Times bestseller. And he knows he wants to start CrossFit Endurance, power, speed endurance is his company. And he’s very famous in the running world, the CrossFit world, and those small spheres, but honestly, what it came about was he and I had no intention of ever writing a book together. I’m a scientist, for the most part. He’s a practitioner for the most part. But he was continually getting frustrated with the feedback he was getting from his athletes that were becoming so dependent upon tracking technology. heart rates, HRVs, GPS, things like that. 

And I was getting extremely frustrated in the science world as well as athletes that I do work with, for similar things. And then we saw what we thought was at least a partial central truth, or at least a central theme between all these things, which is to say like these, we’re only getting more and more and more dependent upon technology, both as a society and athletes. Now, a lot of people have covered the whole idea of technology. And this is not what we do. But no one is really taking it from a physical health and training perspective. And provided ground rules for people, or at least made them aware of, hey, here are the potential problems with these things. 

And here are some of the solutions we see. So that you can develop what we call to be a healthy relationship with technology. We’re not advocating ditch technology and go live in the woods, and I’m not, the book is absolutely not a, hey, 10 steps to check your phone less like we all will need. We know that in that conversation, we need to get off Facebook, we need to stop being on social media, we need to get away from computers a little bit. But other people have covered that. 

But we want to talk about things like, hey, what happens when I’m in a month? You see a news release that says we’ve got a new watch out, and this watch will tell you every time you need to take a drink of water. That sounds great. There’s some benefit there. And there’s some insight, there are some data that you can get from that, especially if you’re training athletes, but there are major problems with that. Eventually, it’s more likely, it’s gonna cause you more harm as a person or as a coach than ever will help. And so we need to establish ground rules of how we’ll use that water drinking technology and how we won’t use that. And the bigger point of the book is really not that you use our ground rules, I don’t give a crap if you use my ground rules, but you need to start developing them as the point because this stuff is about to take over your life. It’s not bad. Now it’s manageable, but your whole life will be data before you know it. And we have to be able to make sense of all of that. 

And it wasn’t until basically now that it actually worked. Alright. But the problem with all that is, is maybe we should have the forethought to think like, actually, is this a good thing? Because what, my life is really, really easy right now relative to our ancestors, even 100 years ago, even 50 years ago. But now have we trapped ourselves into an option of either going we have to completely eliminate our own selves as physical beings, or we have to completely change how we operate as humans because this is not sustainable, we 100% evolved, as molecules that were designed to handle stress are molecules, your cells are optimized when they are stressed. So if you eliminate that stress, you abandon your own physiology, and that’s going to have major physical consequences for you. 

So we have to step back and start to analyze these things and make decisions about how we’re going to use technology and how we want and how we can do what we call reintroducing some suffering because that’s actually going to be paying off for you in the long run. So that’s kind of how the book came about.

Misbah Haque  48:53

I think that’s what you ended the talk with was the talk about stress and how we’ve worked so hard to eliminate it. And it’s actually so vital to our being. And the other thing you mentioned was, it’s common to see us chasing one or two specific modalities to elicit that stress. But there are so many other ways that we can do this. So like ice baths, sauna, fasting, and all these are other methods that we also want to expose ourselves to, and not just kind of living in the gym and using training methodologies to elicit that stress.

Andy  49:33

That ties back into what we brought up at the very beginning of our conversation here was the fact that we’ve got to explore this a little bit differently. And we have to open up the palette to say that we need more variety because we never had to use exercise as a survival technique. It was always for sport, right? But now we’re going to have to and again, it’s not that bad now. But as automation and robotics continue to make your life so easy, I mean, envision this, we are not that far away from being able to use robots to generate all of our food. 

You’re going to be in such a food abundance, it’s going to be unbelievable. If you don’t develop the ability to work outside, everything that’s done physically workwise is going to be eliminated. Really quickly. I’m not talking about the future, I’m talking about our lifetimes, there will be almost no physical exercise jobs, everyone will be working on electronics. So you have eliminated all physical activity from all of mankind, outside of the 30 minutes that you jog a day, that ain’t gonna cut it, you’re toast. So we’ve got to be able to go back in and figure out problems. So these solutions are solutions to these problems. And exercise is one component.

Most of us are aware of, there’s a difference between physical activity and working out or exercising. So we’re where the exercise piece that’s not a problem. Now, the American College of Sports Medicine and a bunch of these national governing bodies have made us aware of the physical activity piece, 10,000 steps a day. That’s physical activity, that’s not an exercise. So even a young healthy person like you or I have had to in the last couple of years, personally have had to dramatically increase the amount of walking I have had to go way up in general physical activity, I intentionally in mowing my lawn, I’m doing yard work every weekend because that’s a basal level of physical activity because the rest of my day is standing in front of my computer for the most part. 

But now that’s a good start. But we also have to think about the other molecules, the other genes, the other cells in our body, that demand stress. And we have to start thinking about what stressors have we evolved to deal with that we have now eliminated from our lives, hunger, thirst, fatigue, cold, real true exhaustion, things like this. And I’m not saying we have to suffer all the time. But we need to be able to establish some decent balance. Because you have, for example, the very easy one that’s been used a bunch, but it’s very good. You have proteins that respond specifically to heat, and specifically to cope. So they’re not turned on unless you get really hot or really cold. Well, it’s a byproduct of them being turned on, they’ll go through a process called autophagy, which basically means they clean out cellular debris, Miss functioning cells, or proteins, dead things. 

This is the stuff that gives us a lot of physical problems. So we don’t really go through or initiate those cascades of cleaning unless we stress those cold or hot heat shock proteins. So if we are in an arid climate controlled by a seed, plus a heated room and a car, and we’re never getting even remotely cold or hot, those things go dormant, they go away, we never clean ourselves. So we need to start exploring these areas. And we are far from really knowing how to best do this. So I mean, take our prescription, again, as just a starting place. There’s a training program in the back of the book, where we lay out all these things, how to get started, if you’ve never done anything like this, easy ways to get in that are so drastic and crazy, my co-author, Brian does. But you guys are building something to replace this or you’re leading yourself in for trouble. And we just want to make the mark now that we build those things now. Because in 20 years, it’s going to be very hard. If you’ve never been uncomfortable in 35 years, it’s going to be very hard to start.

Misbah Haque  53:46

Something else that stood out to me was, and I’ve heard Brian say this, when he was on the show he stressed the importance of feeling right, like feeling is everything. And we’ve doubled. This is a line from the book, we’ve doubled the awareness of what our bodies are trying to tell us through the use of technology. And I think there’s a study that you guys cited in there, where it talked about what we refer to as the rate of perceived effort is just as effective as trying to keep your heart rate in a certain zone for a predetermined length of time. 

So what that tells me is like, having this awareness, mindfulness feeling that however you want to label, is not just some woo-woo stuff, it’s like it’s vital to your existence. Because now, if we were to take away that technology, you have no baseline to kind of operate out of it. 

Andy  54:39

In the book, we lay out basically how to go from using the technology to get you started to get you good information, understanding what’s going on. And then how to be able to mimic that back in sports monitor technology because that’s where true expertise comes. I just posted this I think yesterday on my Instagram, but I was just in a talk with Bob Bowman, who is Michael Phelps, his coach, and last, like 20 years since Phelps was a kid like eight or nine years old, he told this great story about Beijing Olympics when Phelps won gold and broke the record for the 200-meter butterfly. And you see the video and Phelps hits the finish line. First, he wins, he gets up and he looks pissed.

And he broke the world record. And he grabs his like, headpiece thing off whatever it’s called his cap, and throws it and throws his goggles and you’re like, What the hell he just won gold broke world record was so pissed about? Well, I guess what happened in some way or during the middle of the race, the goggles broke and started filling up with water. And he was like, I can’t see, you don’t have time in an Olympic championship race to take off your cap and goggles like, you’re toast right? Especially when you try to break the world record. So he had to finish the race and do I think the last 100 meters or so without his goggles working? Now, if you don’t think about swimming, you have to be the fastest in the world ever, to break a world record. 

That’s by definition. But you also cannot afford to waver and, and swim anything but perfectly straight, that you can’t afford an extra meter because you went a little bit left a little bit right? Well, he was able to do that. Because all the time in practice his coach, since he was a kid, would continually make them swim with their eyes closed or do different things where they can’t see. So that he learns to feel the water and he feels what straight feels like and he feels and knows exactly how many strokes it takes him to get from one end when he has to start the turn, touch it. And when he had to reach for the wall, he knew all these things without being able to see. And so he had to do that the second half of the race to be able to finish and he was able to do it. 

But that’s because he could feel the water, he felt what straight was, he felt a stroke, he knew his body. And there’s a classic story of his coach at one of the smaller meats after this intentionally, waiting till Mike was looking and stepping on his goggles and breaking them. And then when Michael wants to put them on, he’s like what happened, bone was like, I don’t know, I don’t know what happened. But he made him swim that thing with broken goggles to even have this after he’d won a bunch of World Championships and a bunch of gold medals, but he still wanted him to always be in control of how it felt. 

And that’s expertise, you will never, ever, ever be able to rely on technology sufficiently in the middle of a competition to correct it’s too much fatigue, too much conscious choice, too much thinking is going on, you have got to be able to internalize that and feel that and then also be able to reproduce or correct the movement very quickly and have it stay there when you get tired. Or you’re done. So these are problems that you can get with technology, even technology as simple as a mirror, or goggles in this case.

Misbah Haque  57:49

So that story is an example of how feeling really, it’s everything. This is another line from the book. So taking on a physical challenge that pushes your ability requires complete concentration, and eliminates all outside distractions not only leads to the physical performance leaps that flow makes possible, but also offers a deep and lasting sense of satisfaction. And what this brings up for me, and maybe you can highlight is there any scientific or physiological validity to this or is this just kind of me making that connection. But it’s like the same flow and the same satisfaction that I get from being in the gym and training, I get that same rush. 

And that same satisfaction from having this conversation during this podcast with you and other guests. And I have that same exact feeling when I’m doing an improv class where I’m learning and being uncomfortable and being stressed in ways that are outside my comfort zone. So of course, when we think about what we’re doing in the gym, we are physically moving. But in terms of a stress response, and now that flow that you’re experiencing, is there a connection to that like the same thing that we’re experiencing in the gym, we can achieve in other areas, doing completely unrelated activities?

Andy  59:10

It’s actually both sides of the equation. Um, so we can think of it simply as a dopamine response right now, it’s more complex than just dopamine. But in the book, I think we pretty much keep it at that. And I’ll do it now. Not because I didn’t try to write a physiology book. So yes, I realized there’s more going on than that. But we just tried to keep it simple. I think you got that from either Tim Ferriss, Chapter Kotler.

Misbah Haque  59:35

I haven’t read his book, but I heard him talk like on a podcast. And that’s what rings true for me…

Andy  59:41

Tim Ferriss wrote a chapter at the end for us about sort of his guides or his tips to do some of these things that Steven Kotler who wrote the rise of Superman and his new book stealing fire, but he’s the one that really put this whole flow state which was brought up by a researcher checks on me hi decades ago. But you’ve seen it as one of the popularized ideas of flow or being in the zone. And so Siemens, a good friend, and I helped him with his stealing Fire book. And so he was like, I want to do a portion of this because he loved our book. So in that chapter, he talked about that, but you can think of it this way. You can get that same feeling of euphoria from a bunch of different areas if the challenge sits in a sweet spot. 

So the challenge has to be enough to challenge you. But it can’t be so much that it dissuades you. So if I said here, here’s a challenge, I want you to lift five pounds more than your max, that might put you into a nice state of being in the zone. But if I said I want you to lift up 10% of your max, the challenge is too easy, right? I can’t decide or focus on that. It’s too easy. I said, Lift 100 pounds more than your max. Well, it’s too difficult, you’re not going to get excited about that either. Because you just know what’s going to happen. No, it’s not going to happen. So achieving flow is all about putting yourself in that optimal position. And again, this is tickling me with the high work that Steven laid out beautifully in the rise of Superman. But the way I started this answer off by saying it goes both ways is yes, you can get that same feeling of euphoria from the breathing drills we talked about from the ice from fasting from these other aspects. But it can also go the same way where you can rob yourself of that feeling by over-exposing yourself to the dopamine bump. 

What I mean by that is we know of technology that causes massive addiction. I mean, I don’t even need to say it, Facebook, Instagram likes checking your email, those are all activating the same, or at least a portion of the same parts of your brain that are your reward center. So you constantly seek these things, and you’re checking your phone 155 times a day, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of the average, you’re getting all these little drops of dopamine all day, which means what do you have left for when you actually go to do the physical exercise?  

So we become desensitized. It’s much like I think this is if not the same thing, but you can think of it like the diabetes of dopamine. Hmm. So when I abuse sugar too much, my insulin becomes sensitized or sensitive or desensitized. And so now that system collapses, the same thing with dopamine, I continually hit it way more than I should have been able to hit it in our quote, unquote, natural state. So now I’m getting it hundreds of hundreds of times a day, hundreds of times a minute, well, eventually that’s gonna get saturated. Now we’re gonna have all kinds of problems regulating and going up and down. So when we introduce something on the other spectrum, which is a little bit of suffering, it can balance that stuff out.

Misbah Haque  1:02:43

That’s what I was gonna ask, like, how do you balance it out? And so you’re saying, the suffering so could this addiction to that dopamine also kind of happen with something like training? It could be because something comes to mind for me is somebody who can’t step out of the gym who feels like, if I missed?

Andy  1:03:04

Brian is a good example, I think he put it in the book but with the breathing stuff he’s working on, he was noticing just massive euphoria from the breathing. And he actually had to stop doing it. Because he realized,  I have just gone to the exact another end of the spectrum, where my day now was all thrown into a conundrum. If I don’t get my perfect breathing in because it feels so good. That’s not healthy behavior, I have healthy habits. So we had to reestablish why he’s doing it and really question himself about his own breathing drills and breathing practices. 

And to him, because he’s still with athletes, the inverse athletes who have chronically done exactly what you just mentioned, he’s like, I just realized I was doing the exact same thing they were doing, and I was criticizing them for it. So I have to step back and say, I need to form a better relationship when I’m searching for pleasure. And when I’m searching for suffering, and I’m not certainly saying it has to be equal. But if it is pleasure…Even if the pleasure comes in the form of a hard workout, when am I balancing that out? And what am I doing something that’s going to really improve the quality of me and my relationship with that stress?

Misbah Haque  1:04:17

So for somebody who is already training hard, and that becomes a form of, let’s say, that addiction to dopamine, how what would be suffering on the other end of that, because to some people, and I’m sure this is now we have to look at it as a very individualized approach because some people look at that and be that is suffering, right. But to that person who is training and who’s addicted, that dopamine rush is their form of pleasure. So now on the other end, what suffering is there to balance that out?

Andy  1:04:46

You’re gonna have to read the book to find that out.

Misbah Haque  1:04:50

That’s a great place to start to kind of wrap things up. This one part, I don’t know, I think this was Fairest but I want to get your thoughts on this line. It’s a pause. To appreciate the little things like meaningless beauty that has nothing to do with any objective, nothing to do with any metric, and nothing to do with any plan. What comes up for you? When do you hear that? What comes up for you? What is that line?

Andy  1:05:19

So I think that was from the Tim Ferriss section if I’m not wrong, but for me, the first one that jumped out to me was the fact that I had realized I had been living in my house in my neighborhood for about two years or more, and I walk my dogs and we play around consistently. And, and I couldn’t tell you have a single street sign or single name of a street around. So for me, it was just saying, like, let’s be more present when I’m doing these things, either in the dogs themselves, as well as in the trees that are around, look at the houses, look at the water, I have a little water, kind of a river thing that runs by me. 

And now all of a sudden, I found a ton of seals that run around this water, there are turtles all up and down. They’re jumping fish. And so these are just things that I have found centers mean more because what I used to do when I walked them, is continually have my headphones in and I was either taking meetings or I was listening to podcasts, which I thought was a healthy behavior. And it can be but I had taken it to the extreme where I literally didn’t even have my headphones in if I wasn’t doing something else. And so I wasn’t aware of that. And so just appreciating what’s around me, appreciating taking a second to go, man, that warm breeze feels amazing on my skin. Let’s do some breathing stuff while I’m walking. So that is what I have found was the quickest and easiest to implement in my life.

Misbah Haque  1:06:41

Is there something you feel like you don’t get asked enough about something you wish? Maybe people would ask you more? And what I mean by that is like types of questions. I’m sure you get a lot of scientific questions and things of that nature. But maybe in your mind. I just wish somebody would ask this question like this is the right type of question to ask.

Andy  1:07:05

I think that’s a tough one I’m gonna have to pass on. Jumping on my mind right now is writing skills. Don’t ask me much about how to write for a living. So I deal with scientists. And I see the basic communication skills. So whether you’re writing an email, or writing a science paper or writing a blog, it’s very funny, but a very small investment and writing can dramatically enhance your productivity and, and your effectiveness. And an easy example of that would be Rupert Murdoch. And he said this, and I think it was at Columbia in 2009, something like that. But he said, Look, I’ll give you 10 grand, he was in class 10 grand right now. I’ll give you 100 grand for a 10% stake and all of your future earnings. 

And he says if anyone’s interested in that deal, see me after class, I’ll give you 100 grand right now. And if any of you invest any time in improving your communication, and by the sea meet writing and public speaking, your value goes up by 50%. Hmm, wow. So if that’s the case, see me after class for 150 grand. And, you know, of course, the class lasts but that’s the stuff I don’t think people do cuz it’s not sexy. It’s not as interesting as muscle fibers and all this other stuff. But it’s very shocking. I will point you to Scott Dilbert. His blog is fantastic. And it’s very, the comic strip. 

Misbah Haque  1:08:42

Andy, thank you so much for coming on. And thank you so much for putting this piece of work out there. Because I feel like it’s a piece of content that can help us expand our thinking, and anybody or any piece of content that can do that. I’m always appreciative of that. So on that note, I hope people go check out this book. There’s a Kindle version now available, which I have. There’s a hardcover. So support the book by going to get that where can we point people to where we can support your journey and kind of follow along with what you’re doing?

Andy  1:09:12

So you have a bunch of ways the book is up on Amazon. And again, it’s called unplugged. If you just search unplugged in Galpin, you’ll find it. I would actually strongly encourage you to buy the hardback, it doesn’t change my income. It’s not like a money thing, I think I actually make less on it than the Kindle. But because of the fact that we put a tremendous amount of time into the photographs the quality. It’s on sale right now sending is 25% off on Amazon, but it’s not like the normal book that you get. At the same price point. The paper quality is very high, the photo quality is very, very high. So I would encourage you to if you really want to get the true experience of the book, get the hardback version. It’s quite different from just reading a normal book. It’s a lot of pictures and they like that the book is up there, you can visit the website. Outside of buying it, the biggest thing that you can do is leave us a review on Amazon. It’s funny, but a huge portion of the success of any book is determined by getting Amazon reviews. 

So it’s really sad. But unfortunately, if that doesn’t happen, the message doesn’t get out. And it’s not about me making money. It’s really about if you think the message is good, and it’s helpful, and this is something you think people need to hear. No one’s gonna see it if we don’t get those Amazon reviews. So that’s why we’re pushing hard. So you can check out my podcast if you want the body of knowledge, iTunes, all that stuff. Rate it, review it, it’s greatbodyknowledge.com. And again, that was just short, just nine episodes. Storytelling is really quite different. It does not interview, we film 10 hours, 11 hours, 12 hours and condense that to 40 minutes kind of thing to tell some pretty interesting stories. And then my social media, Dr. Andy Galpin. That’s probably where most of my stuff is.

Misbah Haque  1:11:12

I will get all that linked up in the show notes. And once again, Andy, thank you so much for doing this today.

Andy  1:11:18

I appreciate it, man.

Misbah Haque  1:11:20

Thank you so much for listening, guys. Once again, I highly appreciate the time, energy, attention, and support that you give each and every week listening to these episodes, I hope you’re able to walk away with something useful from this one, or at least entertained by it. One request I have for you is to head over to the airborne mind calm and take a couple of minutes just leave a review with your thoughts you have no idea how much that would mean to me. Next, please head over to airbornemind.com to check out the three-day sample programs. You can use this stuff as accessory work to supplement your existing training. Each individual is a little bit different. And so we have ones that are specific to pull-ups if that’s something you’re working on, one that’s specific to handstand push-ups, one that’s specific to pistols, shoulder stability. 

So go see if that is relevant to you. Once again, that is airbornemind.com. If you ever have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out. I love hearing from you guys. But thank you so much for joining me once again. Until next time!