Episode 54 Dr. Andy Galpin on the Science of Muscle Growth and Dietary Supplements

Ever wonder how your muscles adapt and grow through exercise? Join us as we embark on a journey into the depths of muscle physiology with the insightful Dr. Andy Galpin, a renowned professor and human performance scientist. We're going to get under the skin of muscle hyperplasia, a topic that has sparked fierce debates within the scientific community. Get ready to challenge your understanding of muscle growth, as we also discuss muscle hypertrophy in relation to muscle damage.

Timeline:

3:22 Muscle fiber fusion versus splitting? Which is it? We discuss this paper by Grith Hojfeldt et al. Fusion of myofibre branches is a physiological feature of healthy human skeletal muscle regeneration (nih.gov) – Folks need to read this paper:  Muscle fiber splitting in stretch-enlarged avian muscle : Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise (lww.com)

10:34 – Are muscle biopsies a true representation of what happens in a whole muscle?

11:33 – I don’t buy this fusion stuff

12:20 – How does skeletal muscle fibers hypertrophy 

13:37 – Fiber type profiles can differ within the same fiber

14:12 – Muscle fiber hypertrophy is never uniform from proximal to distal 

15:47 – Skeletal muscle damage or injury – is it required for muscle fiber hypertrophy?

20:49 – Why would you waste your time doing 30 reps vs 3-6 reps if they both induce the same level of hypertrophy? Here are the exceptions.

32:54 – You can’t do an RCT on elite or professional athletes

36:17 – Why is sports nutrition advice held to a different standard than training advice?

37:25 – Pragmatic supplement advice for the general fitness enthusiast

39:06 – Vitamin D

45:06 - Adulteration of supplements – much ado about nothing? Do these trace amounts cause a positive drug test? Or do they have a physiological effect? For most consumers, this is more important than the first point.

50:06 – How do you educate students on what is good advice online?

58:38 – Product-specific trials – Galpin’s Momentous partnership

61:19 – Alligator and python hunting in Florida

Andy Galpin is a tenured full Professor at California State University, Fullerton, where he is also Co-Director of the Center for Sport Performance and Founder/Director of the Biochemistry and Molecular Exercise Physiology Laboratory. He is a Human Performance scientist with a Ph.D. in Human Bioenergetics and over 100 peer-reviewed publications and presentations. Dr. Galpin has worked with elite athletes (including All-Star, All-Pro, MVP, Cy Young, Olympic Gold medalists, Major winners, World titlist/ contenders, etc.) across the UFC, MLB, NBA, PGA, NFL, Boxing, Olympics, and Military/Special Forces, and more. He is also a Co-founder in Absolute Rest, BioMolecular Athlete, Vitality Blueprint, and RAPID Health & Performance.

About the Show

We cover all things related to sports science, nutrition, and performance. The Sports Science Dudes represent the opinions of the hosts and guests and are not the official opinions of the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN), the Society for Sports Neuroscience, or Nova Southeastern University. The advice provided on this show should not be construed as medical advice and is purely an educational forum.

Hosted by Jose Antonio PhD

Dr. Antonio is the co-founder and CEO of the International Society of Sports Nutrition and the co-founder of the Society for Sports Neuroscience, www.issn.net. Dr. Antonio has over 120 peer-reviewed publications and 16 books. He is a Professor at Nova Southeastern University, Davie, Florida in the Department of Health and Human Performance.

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to the sports science dude. I am your host, Dr Jose Antonio, with my co-host, Dr Tony Ricci. If you're a first-time listener, hit the subscribe button and like the show. You can find us on YouTube, Rumble, Spotify and Apple podcasts. Our special guest today is Dr Andy Alpin. He is a tenured full professor at Cal State University in Fullerton. I'm not even sure where Fullerton is, Maybe Tony knows.

Speaker 2: 0:27

I know exactly where it is.

Speaker 1: 0:30

He's also the co-director of the Center for Sport Performance and founder slash director of the Biochemistry and Molecular Exercise Physiology Lab. He is a human performance scientist with a PhD in human bioenergetics and over 100 peer-reviewed pubs and presentations. Dr Alpin has worked with lead athletes, including All-Star, all-pro, mvp, cy Young, olympic gold medalist, major winners, world titleist contenders, et cetera, across the UFC, mlb, nba, pga, nfl, boxing, olympics and military special forces and more. I feel like I'm at a Texas auction.

Speaker 3: 1:06

You could have gone half-night out or more.

Speaker 1: 1:10

He's also co-founder and absolute rest bio-molecular athlete, vitality blueprint and rapid health and performance. So, dr Galpin, welcome to our wacky podcast.

Speaker 3: 1:23

Man, it's a pleasure and honor. You guys are to just giants in the field man, so it's been fun to follow your footsteps, if you will, in the high performance field, kind of this blending of science and application and communication. So I appreciate all the work you guys have done. It's an honor to be here.

Speaker 1: 1:42

Thanks, andy. It took me a while. I've known Tony for many, many years. I always I talked to him into moving to Florida. He lived in New York for quite a while. I know he never he was sad to leave it, although he's not so sad now. Actually, since you're in California, you get the same weather. It's like beautiful, there's no snow, I mean, it's like perfect weather here. So you know, the three of us were spoiled when it comes to weather. We don't really have winter and I would imagine, andy, there's not a winter where you are.

Speaker 3: 2:15

Yeah, not really. It's the same every day here.

Speaker 2: 2:18

No, but you go hunting in that cold weather a lot. Andy, I see you do that right.

Speaker 3: 2:22

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, my big jam. I'm a mountain guy man. I prefer to be in the mountains. No offense to anybody here who prefers the beach. I don't know anybody maybe who's listening or potentially sitting in a chair who likes to be in the water most days or on boards. I think that stuff is a waste. I'd be on the beach any day, over top of the beach.

Speaker 2: 2:43

We are beach boys, but I've been wasting most of my life anyway, so it wouldn't matter to me.

Speaker 1: 2:51

Hey, let's start with this. Andy, I know you, the skeletal muscle physiology stuff is fascinating and Tony and I had Mike Roberts on the show, I think a week or two ago, and we had some really great discussions about muscle physiology. It tends to be an esoteric subject because for most people, particularly in our field, it tends to be very applied. So you don't really get into the details of muscle fizz, although I love the stuff and you know Tony loves it. He may not get into the nitty gritty detail but it's super cool stuff.

Speaker 1: 3:22

And there was a paper that you had mentioned on social media which sort of made the rounds, and just so I let the audience know what the title of it is so it'll jar your memory. It was fusion of myofiber branches is a physiological feature of healthy human skeletal muscle regeneration and it was by a group in Denmark. I can't pronounce their names, but basically this group claims that fusion not not splitting, but fusion explains the branching of small muscle fiber segments. And I want you to explain basically the nuts and bolts of it to the audience, who may not be, you know, muscle physiologists, what they found and then I actually have some questions, not doubting their conclusions, but I think there are certainly things that could be asked where the methodology, which again is quite esoteric, may not actually answer the question based on their conclusion.

Speaker 3: 4:19

So yeah, well, it's actually interesting to talk to you of all people about this. I don't know if the listeners know your background in this particular area. It's quite funny, given what you do with your career you know most probably infamous for, but people don't realize you know your contributions to this part of the field. So, again, interesting to have that conversation with you. But here's some very quick background, you know. Going back to your I think it was your dissertation, yeah, there was.

Speaker 3: 4:46

Right, there's. There's always been this thing, and I've been an outspoken advocate my entire career about the fact that I think muscle hyperplasia happens, and so there's no question that it happens in people. The real question in contention is does hyperplasia happen in the presence of normal, healthy people with things like basic exercise Like that's? That's the area. We know what certainly happens with decades of anabolic steroids, specifically testosterone. We know what happens in overused or stretching models like things like that. That's just beyond reproach. So if you're unaware, hyperplasia really means do you add additional muscle fibers? We know they grow, that's hypertrophy and we know lots of things about them malphilaments and malfibrils but to the actual muscle cells, you increase the amount and so all that aside, we're really talking about this. It's kind of what you started the conversation Like. This is a pretty niche little thing here. I've always been convinced that it does happen. It certainly does not happen within the first like six days or six weeks of training. It's not the first thing. It's not explaining newbie gains, not explaining you know things like that. Other mechanisms are the play there, and so really this is a challenging area because you probably have to look many, many, many, many months, if not years before you're going to have a chance to see something that happens. So you're not going to be able to do really longitudinal study on people None of us. And so more recently, probably in the last seven or eight years, people have said okay, it's not necessarily that you grow new muscle fibers. What happens is they branch, and so we have this new terminology that's kind of conflated a lot of times with hyperplasia, which is muscle fiber branching, and so instead of a growing a new muscle cell out of nothing, what you have is an individual fiber branches off and creates a new segment, and so that will actually looks, that that research looks somewhat promising.

Speaker 3: 6:29

And the reason you're getting this I can tell you behind the scenes it's because when you take a muscle biopsy of somebody, which I've done hundreds of times of, it's very, very challenging to image that muscle fiber without some distortion. So you take that muscle fiber out of a human being, it gets smashed with your tweezers, it gets dehydrated. Even in mile, mile, mile amounts changes of conflection. So you're not going to get these perfectly cylinder, like perfect. You know objects to image. So when you're trying to identify size, it's not this perfect circle, it's smashed in one corner, it's like it's all. It's like a four year old drew a circle, like it's just all over the place, right. So now you're trying to make inferences about actual diameter with this, this weird or cross sectional area. The way you're doing it Now, when you do it with histochemistry, the old way which you guys did, it's sort of like you cut a slice and you image hundreds, hopefully, of fibers to get like an average.

Speaker 3: 7:22

But the new ways is you actually put individual muscle fibers themselves, one by one, into high powered microscopes, which is what we do. And so now, because that you're, you can't do hundreds of fibers like you have commonly studies that have done, you know five, 10, 20 fibers like per time point, per person, like okay. So you're making a lot of judgments based on one biopsy of one part of one muscle and a few you know a few fibers that are hundreds of thousands exist in that muscle.

Speaker 1: 7:49

And which? Which muscle? What's the muscle of choice when you do this?

Speaker 3: 7:53

Almost always the vestibularis, so the outside quadricep muscle.

Speaker 1: 7:57

You're talking hundreds, hundreds of thousands of muscle fibers and you're using a few grams. Oh yeah, two milligrams. I mean you're really down there.

Speaker 3: 8:08

I mean literally you'll find papers that have used five, five, eight fibers like that's not 20, 20 is super common in the field.

Speaker 3: 8:19

Again, perhaps another day into that conversation. I can certainly tell you have many labs and I'm like man. I don't basically trust anything that comes out of the lab because they'll use those things Like, and so there's just so much manipulation that can happen there overtly or just because of chosen, validated methodologies is just, you know, everything has a pro to con right. So it's not scientists is making things up. So that's kind of the foundation and background of the story. And so what Abigail's paper found Abigail Mackie is the I think it was out of her lab that had this stuff and she's great, does a ton of good stuff out of there and she basically found was the conclusion of that paper was it's not actually growing and splitting a muscle fibers outward. What you're seeing is fibers are fusing together and that's the fusion part of it. And so she basically saying you're seeing the wrong time point. You think you're seeing them branching and creating more muscle fibers. What you're saying is them coming together after damage is effectively. It's effectively what she found and there's been a little bit of like hint about that stuff coming.

Speaker 3: 9:19

But hers is a first real paper. And last thing I'll say is I actually appreciated the title and I appreciate. Actually I don't even fully agree with it. I'm sort of on your side, but I appreciate the fact that they came out and made it like really clear and direct what they were trying to say, and so the readers weren't just like left in this confusingly awful title and like not what's going on. It was like oh, okay, great. And so she put a little stamp on it which I think I tweeted at the start of time Like oh, my gosh, like another blow to my heart and hyperplasia.

Speaker 1: 9:49

But it was more like an adjuster, because it's not.

Speaker 3: 9:52

It's not the end of the story for sure.

Speaker 1: 9:53

Right, he in that paper. Okay so, and I remember Mike Roberts, when he was on the show we talked about this that when you look at these you know what we're trying to do is paint a a show of we're making conclusions on a video. We're looking for video, but it's really still picture, still photos are looking at.

Speaker 1: 10:16

So it's a dynamic process and and I think that's that's one of the sort of drawbacks of you know the technology as it is. The other one is, you know, and to your point of we're looking at so few muscle fibers for a given muscle that you know it would be like plucking, you know, three people out of 1000 and making generalities about that population of 1000 and actually might be worse than it is way worse than that, yeah it's way worse than that.

Speaker 3: 10:46

It's more like 300,000.

Speaker 1: 10:48

Right. And so what? What I did and a lot of people aren't familiar with this with the I actually dissected every muscle fiber of the anterior latissimus dorsi and it's and it's a small muscle, I mean, it's like the tip of my pinky roughly, you know, 1500 to 3000 muscle fibers, but I manually dissected each and every one of them and it's a painstaking process. That's why nobody wants to do it, and the control is the other side of the animal. So you have a stretch side, a control side. The control side had no split fibers.

Speaker 1: 11:23

Yeah, the overloaded side had, I think if I recall the data was like four to five percent were splitting. So I don't buy this fusion stuff because I I visually saw muscle fiber splitting. I mean there's no fusion. And also the splitting was concomitant with it with a total increase in muscle fiber based on direct, you know, nitric acid digestion, direct counts. So the problem with the fusion stories that it would mean muscle fiber number doesn't go up and may actually go down, which again teleologically doesn't even make sense. So what are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 2: 12:00

So I'm sorry, andy, can I just ask you so? In fusion you're talking literally almost a bonding than it's a single soclema from two. I mean, are we becoming one cell? Is that the physical construct of what we're talking about here?

Speaker 3: 12:16

Yeah, so you have a bunch of different ways of muscle. Can I perforate? The most traditional way is what you'll hear in like a textbook is the circle, right Circle mirror, just sort of extending right.

Speaker 3: 12:26

And actually I think there was another paper I just saw, like maybe last week Thursday, something like super recent kind of putting a stamp further down on my alfibrils, just like going up. So my alfibril account is going to go up. So the question is like, how are we getting there? So, yeah, what you're probably seeing are things branching out.

Speaker 3: 12:46

Now what's also interesting is like you have a time point issue, right. So it's like there's a little bit of a problem there, like not necessarily a problem, but it's an interesting thing to think about in terms of, well, where are you catching this thing at? You know what part of that phase and part of that cycle you're getting it at. So, really, in order to get this, you would have to have a lot more biopsies to figure out what's going on. The other like huge, huge, huge, huge issue is I can tell you right now if you take and there's data, there's lots of data on this if you take a muscle biopsy of one muscle, even a tiny one, like even if you were to do that in the cats or whatever, because yours wasn't a cat- right, we did birds, cats and rats.

Speaker 3: 13:27

We're doing a birds, cats and rats, yeah, okay. If you do this in a human, though, you're going to see very different fiber type profiles. Just from two biopsies in a row Right in the same muscle to biopsy in a row, you're gonna see different fiber type profiles. So the fact that you're unlikely to see like different things, like amount of fibers, a Brant, like those characteristics that are that down and prone to what's the biopsy itself doing, what was the tissue manipulation doing? Now, again, they're controlling for a lot of these things they're not just, you know, young science.

Speaker 3: 13:57

Again, the lab is very, very good, but but you're gonna have all kinds of problems, right, and then lasting to consider is we also? We also have enough evidence right now at this point to realize that Muscle hypertrophy in the whole muscle does not happen uniformly across the proximal to dorsal, so it does not happen at the same point on your hip as it does towards your knee, and if the VL towards the middle, towards the belly, it's not the same everywhere. So when you're taking a sample like that, you're getting one picture of one spot, and we know that that doesn't happen. In fact we know actually. To add on one more thing the fiber type of an individual muscle cell isn't even the same throughout the entire cell.

Speaker 2: 14:34

It's not even the same.

Speaker 3: 14:36

So like there's just a lot of stuff to go on. So I love the paper, I thought it was super interesting and fun, but I'm not. I'm not ready to get rid of Hyperplasia at all based on that, and nor should you with one paper. That's not the point of science, right? It's generally not what works.

Speaker 1: 14:49

Well, what do you think of the idea that if there is fusion, then fiber number would go down?

Speaker 3: 14:53

What depends on how fusion is occurring, right? So now you're getting into nuance. But yeah, just run basic math To goes into one. What happens? Right, we know that it goes down with aging generally, right? So we look at 25 year olds versus 65 year olds. Now 85 year olds, that number is gonna go down. We also, again, know that it goes up in those other instances, in specific cases. So I I would believe that there is some amount of damage and Then there's some amount of like, hey, this fiber is Salvageable, but not ready to function on its own anymore, fused to another one, maintain resources, maintain ribosomes, maintain nuclei, things like that. I 100% believe that seems like a very smart thing to do, to not just give up all the resources out of a fiber To recycle things, but to be the pure explainer. I don't like. I don't know if I would give it that much either right right now.

Speaker 1: 15:47

Um, the issue of damage, skeletal muscle damage or skeletal muscle injury, um, and muscle muscle fiber hypertrophy, um, mike robert says it's not needed. You don't need to necessarily damage, render injure skeletal muscle fibers to induce growth, although it seems to happen. Coincidentally, the a lot of the animal work we did way back when we we actually saw visual evidence, I mean we didn't even have to buy out, we didn't even have to do a cross-section. You could look at a muscle and you could see it was damaged. I mean there was, you know, bruising and whatnot and it accompanied quite a bit of hypertrophy and in some cases, you know, increase in muscle fiber numbers. So, the idea that you need damage for hypertrophy, what are your thoughts? And if it's not needed, does it, does it help? I mean because we know eccentric loading, you know you know, causes damage and there's a stimulus there for hypertrophy. So thoughts on that.

Speaker 3: 16:48

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 16:48

So, um, a couple things. Number one, mike, might start a ton of work in this area. Um, I deferred a lot of this stuff, but I think it's clear at this point. Both those things you said are true. It is absolutely clear muscle damage, especially from resistance and tension based damage, is going to result in hypertrophy like that. That relationship is clear.

Speaker 3: 17:07

What I think people miss the boat on here and I'm probably guilty of this is saying, yeah, okay, but we pushed back too hard on that, such that, yes, there's no linear Relationship here between slightly more damage equals slightly more growth, slightly more damage, more growth. It doesn't go up that way. So more growth does more damage is not equal more growth. That's the top of the curve, though that's not the bottom of the curve. So the bottom of the curve still means like, some damage means growth for sure. It just doesn't scale perfectly up there. So that's the part where I think we've confused people a little bit and I'm thinking, oh, I don't have to have any damage at all, or if I have any damage, it results in no growth. That's not at all true. It clearly is there. Clearly. It's just that once you get especially to moderate or high Uh, you know, annihilation is not necessarily more effective than stimulation, right, I think that's. That's very clear, true?

Speaker 3: 17:53

I also think now you're getting to the point which is really cool with what Mike's been able to do with some of these new assays and saying, okay, there's probably different Depending on when you measure the muscle fiber. You're probably seeing different methods or modes rather, of hypertrophy. This is a sarcoplasmic stuff, they saying. Is it a fluid issue? Does it demon? Like, do we have contract I units there? And I think you we're getting closer to going all this. Like his review paper a couple years ago, like, oh, this makes a ton of sense, right, earlier changes, first, couple of weeks versus six months, versus six years in All, that model starts to look like it makes intuitive sense, it makes teleological sense. Like that makes sense that a lot of water early and then, hey, like more contractile proteins built a little bit later. So I think, I think you have to consider where out on that curve those people are when they're getting that stuff done.

Speaker 3: 18:43

Um, so, that being said, I was actually just I was trying to glance for a fast. I literally was reading a paper this morning and it's totally blanking my. It'll come to me in five minutes or something. But there was a new thing that came out on a new protein identified as being important to you, the molecular mechanisms associated with mechanical tension. Um, it particular protein opens ion channels to get it moving, and I was like I'm like now, what is it called? I'll start to pee, this is my mind. But point is there is, like again, hundreds of papers and tons of mechanisms known with simply mechanical tension.

Speaker 3: 19:13

If you stretch these cell membrane, specifically resistance exercise, do it on a hanging stretch, just hang them there for weeks and days, like it's gonna induce muscle growth in almost every case. Per everything else is appropriate and yada, yada, right. So, uh, I think to me that's the best way to think about that is, um, some damage Is not necessarily required, but it's gonna result in some growth. But excessive extreme to the max is not necessarily gonna be that much more advantageous, especially if you consider the practical implications of Did you get so sore that? And then results and reduced training, the next session, the session after that. Now You're gonna compromise a lot of stuff. So now you're gonna have problems, but at the same time you got to work Like something has to be challenged here, and so if you're not doing enough to insult any any sort of Right, yeah, insult, then we're not gonna get growth either, unless we're again doing other things.

Speaker 1: 20:09

Yeah, because there are. I mean, because there are sports where Um most of the movement is concentric. You could take rowing, you could take cycling, and they get hypertrophy. So oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 20:19

Yeah, so, uh, I mean, there's so much. It's sort of like you know all, you know, many roads lead to Rome. There's so many ways to induce hypertrophy. Definitely, you know the, the, the high rep, low load versus, low rep, high load stuff. Now sort of a pragmatic question. I'll ask both of you, um, if they both induce similar hypertrophy. So high reps, low load versus and let's take the extremes, let's say it's 30 reps versus three to six reps, why would you waste your time doing 30 reps? So, tony andy, I who does that?

Speaker 3: 20:55

There. There are some cases. Um, I will. I will play the other side a little bit here, the what you're getting at for background for everybody. Um, let's just assume it is equal muscle growth. It's clearly not going to have equal muscle strength, right? That's that the lower repetition range is going to massively favor strength gains and so you can make the argument that it'll get similar growth. But if you're at all concerned about strength, then the lower upper range is clearly favorite.

Speaker 3: 21:21

Now that said, there are unique cases, so there are different times of the year. Um, there is of training so long. I just need variation and there are major things that we're dealing with right now. I've had a handful. One of the NFL quarterback side, coach uh, had a massive, massive injury this year, lower body and, um, we're gonna have to go to some really high repetition stuff.

Speaker 3: 21:42

To try to get hypertrophy because loading is not going to be an appropriate or smart thing. Right, and we have, and we've done that right and I think we're gonna, I think we're gonna blow some people away with with his return to the game, all right. So there are situations like that. Um, there are situations we've done in things like I'm not myself but colleagues of mine, with the astronauts going up in an ass, and we don't have load, it's not available, it's not around. So we can now get some stuff done where preserve preservation of muscle size it's critically important. We can get there through higher repetition ranges, and so there's some other like. I could rattle off a bunch more, but there are definitely some use cases where that's really cool information to know. Um, but if you were to stack them up and you're just like, no, I'm just kind of working out or I'm just I'm in general physical preparation, then yeah, like, why not do the same work and get the strength canes as well? Yeah, that's what I need to do with the thoughts.

Speaker 2: 22:31

Yeah, I'm exactly the same I to me there are gonna be instances if you cannot load, and then the increase in repetitions would be preferable for blood flow too. They're some advantages there, right? If particularly to uh, dr Andy's point about recovery from an injury, and if you have to induce hypertrophy and you have no other option, great. Otherwise, uh, I would avoid it. You know, with athletes training at super high volumes, because it's just it's. I want to decrease the total duration in which they're training. One thing too. So I think it has its use.

Speaker 2: 23:04

I would never rule it out. I think those were excellent examples. But if I can restrict the set, uh, you know I probably the way I would work, that is probably, and I know you're a fan. Any of this more in a cluster set fashion would be my way of potentially approaching that high repetition volume If needed. But I think it has its place If the athlete is healthy, if the athlete is already under Very large training volumes and intensities, then I want to limit the total time and duration Of the workout if I can. So I'll stay with the heavier loading, get the strength, and in the sports I work in, hypertrophy is not necessarily an objective anyway, but if it were to be, I like the volume training. I think it does have a place at times, yep.

Speaker 3: 23:46

I'll be candid. I mean, I do it a lot when I travel.

Speaker 1: 23:49

Just so that I get like the largest, biggest pump.

Speaker 3: 23:52

Like You're gonna go on give a taco, whatever this is. Like you're just cranking out as many push-ups as you can in your hotel room because you got nothing but 15 pound dumbbells. You're just like all right, I guess we're going for sets of 40. Like here we go, we're just gonna get after it.

Speaker 2: 24:07

Uh so I will say yeah, anecdotally I'll say this when I was younger and used to train hard with weights, man sets of like 20, would I the next day my legs? Literally I couldn't get my pants on. Now that's super compensation from the glycogen, you know the water fluids, but it I gotta tell you, man, you're gonna do some hypertrophy with those loads for sure.

Speaker 1: 24:28

Yeah, you know the ironic part. You know, andy, you're a bit younger than Tony and I, but it sort of goes back to PE class, tony, remember we did calisthenics.

Speaker 3: 24:37

It's basically just high volume Calisthenics, that's good because that answers like I hope I wish we could clip that out. I could give that to half the people on my social media, because I get those questions all the time about like, whenever we talk about weights and I get this the inevitable. Oh, my friend only does yoga and look how jacked he or she is. I'm like, oh god, like it's still like you're doing a hundred push-ups.

Speaker 3: 25:00

You're doing a hundred push-ups like it's still gonna work like your body weight is still, of course, it's effective, absolutely it's effective. Yeah, those things.

Speaker 1: 25:12

Yeah, so uh, let me ask you this in terms of staying on the, the muscle damage, muscle fiber injury, uh, topic vis-a-vis supplements. So there are supplements out there that can decrease delayed onset muscle soreness. Maybe they have an effect on decreasing inflammation. What are your thoughts on? And let's focus first on performance sports, then we could do bodybuilding.

Speaker 3: 25:36

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 25:37

Do you want to well, decreasing doms and decreasing inflammation. What are your thoughts? Performance sports and bodybuilding.

Speaker 3: 25:45

Right, I can handle the first one for sure. That's what I spent my entire career on. I have almost no experience training personally or coaching anybody in a physique sport. I don't think I've ever done that. So, yeah, we'll make some jumps of assumption there. But I can talk to you about my personal experience in this side.

Speaker 3: 26:03

We book this into two phases. Right, are we optimizing, are we adapting? That's the very, very key question we're after, right. So if we're trying to optimize, what I mean by that is something like I want to peak performance. Right now I am in season. Nfl guys are in season right now, baydreak baseball players on the off season, or PGA guys are in the off season.

Speaker 3: 26:22

So we have different setups here. Some of our fighters are in or off, like camp whatever. Right, if I'm in fight camp, if I'm in football season right now we are optimizing. Right. So if we are sore or tired or fatigued, I don't care what it takes. We're going to try to reduce that back off because we have to peak right now. And if this compromises some muscle growth, I do not care at all. Do not care at all, because stiff and tired and sore in competition we only have so many of them like not going to work right Last six weeks before a fight, or three weeks or whatever you want to do it like we're peaking, we're optimizing. Pga guys, baydreak baseball guys are just getting back and started. They're just getting going right. So in this case we're causing adaptation, we're trying to overreach, we're trying to overstretch. A little bit sore and tired. Good, can I get something to recover? No, you can't. We're not blunting that signal at all.

Speaker 3: 27:13

We are not letting anything compromise the long-term aspect of this, which is, in this case, muscle growth or endurance or marmot and connery or whatever the heck we're trying to train for right? So the general answer is, when we're far away and we're trying to create adaptation, we stay away from any supplementation. For the most part, this is any antioxidant, this is anything in that ability to blunt muscle growth signals Like we're just walking away from it. All right. The only caveat would be, if you've really, really overshot it and this happened one time to my wife she did the old read the sets and reps backwards thing. You know what I mean. When you're like, you're right.

Speaker 1: 27:55

You're right. Oh, instead of three by 10, she did 10 by three, yeah exactly right, but it was more like it was something crazy.

Speaker 3: 28:04

I think it was like four by 15 or something. So she did something like absurd number right, and she's just like. She made some ass up and she came like I'm working and she comes out of the gym, which is our garage, and she just was like shaking, she's just like I did a boo-boo and I'm like what. And then she told me and I was like, oh my gosh, so she did like German volume training on accident with her normal like four by four load and so she's just like a disaster. And it was like probably I don't even know a week and a half before she was in a mess.

Speaker 3: 28:34

Wow, in other cases, like all right, we've way gone overboard here, you're gonna miss too much, et cetera. Like we were talking earlier, we're gonna, we're gonna ice bath, we're gonna go ahead and do whatever we need to do. I mean, en said at that point like it's just, like we're not like who cares, right, we're backing off. So I think kind of all those scenarios are how we think about it Again, really, really overshot it and you're just really struggling.

Speaker 3: 28:57

Okay fine, in that case, honestly, go to like go to pharmacy. Don't go to like not going to rodeo, Like we're going to something that's gonna really work Like a massive amount right now. Outside of that, though, or if we're trying to cause adaptation, we're staying away from it for the most part, or if we're trying to peak, then we'll potentially use something.

Speaker 2: 29:16

So yeah, quick question on that is and that makes great sense too the way you're treating it individually and what the priority becomes. Do we have an idea on the window of how long that inflammatory process must you know? So, let's say, if hypothetically it's there on Tuesday, you had your golfer and a PGA tour guy work real hard on Monday and they had something to do on Wednesday, maybe just in practice, and they didn't want to be too short for that. Could we blunt it 24 hours after? Is that sufficient? Or do we know if there's a duration in which most of the primary signaling mechanisms have been achieved, or we're not sure?

Speaker 3: 29:55

yet that's a very question. If you think about the mechanisms of how muscle growth works, the very first thing that has to happen past the stimuli and the stimuli is either, let's say, exercise or a testosterone, something right Like, let's just say stimuli, it doesn't matter. Okay, Immediately, and I'm talking within seconds, you've got signaling proteins getting fired off, right, so you can get that within seconds. That's happening there, Depending on which one you look at, they're gonna be optimized again within seconds to minutes of exercise, right. So why you have to biopsy at super specific times post-exercise? You're gonna miss the signaling cascade window. That all said. Some of them aren't peaked.

Speaker 3: 30:32

That's a set of hours. Okay, then that signaling protein has to tell the nucleus to replicate DNA Ribosomes gotta get going. That whole cascade has to happen. That genetic process is peaked somewhere in the four to eight hours. But that's like a super easy thing to say to undergrads. The honest reality is that is a giant window. That is a big, big window and there are so many genes involved in that and we don't have that much data.

Speaker 3: 30:57

That's actually, honestly, one of those things where it's based on a couple of studies. We're like, oh the awful times, four hours, and it's like everybody does four hours because they can do the same studies, but like I don't know that that's true in trained men. I don't know that that's true in trained women. I don't know that that's true at all. Like I know it's with training, like those couple of studies, but like that's not, like I just stamped 100%, that's just physiology, how it works. It's like something I always say, but that's not like a at this level is like I don't know if that's actually true. Third part, then, is it has to go through protein synthesis.

Speaker 3: 31:26

Now that part again, you can look at the data there and you're gonna see what guys. Four hours to 48 hours, that process is still alive. Is it optimized? No, is it still alive? Yeah, so do you really say we're not gonna introduce anything until pass up 48 hour window? Again, we're just putting round kind of numbers on it. It doesn't literally mean.

Speaker 1: 31:44

it's like that's how it is for everybody.

Speaker 3: 31:46

So it is really, really tough. I think it is a. To summarize all that I would say if you wanted to do a cold hard number and just say 48 hours, it's like pretty reasonable, but at that point you're two and a half days out now, like okay, like probably back to training again, anyways, hopefully, and of course all the behavioral factors would impact that.

Speaker 2: 32:10

Are they sleeping? Are they eating? Are they fluid?

Speaker 1: 32:12

Of course, I knew it.

Speaker 3: 32:14

So that ability, stress management globally and sleep at the time yeah, I mean, I could go for hours on sleep data. That's what I spent a lot of time on right now, but yeah, anyways, that's the answer I'd give to that really good question.

Speaker 2: 32:25

That's great.

Speaker 3: 32:27

You have to coach. Here's the honest. You gotta coach Like every such as evidence-based, is not just like what did the one study say in a one-to-one troll group of six old people eight years ago? It's like take your situation.

Speaker 1: 32:41

No, what's interesting about the whole evidence-based? I guess the word community is it. Maybe that's the wrong term, but there are those in our field that treat quote the evidence-based. You gotta be evidence-based, gotta have data almost like a cult like. Unless there is a study on it, you can't make the recommendations and you know working with fighters.

Speaker 1: 33:07

I mean, tony, you know you're never gonna have a study that's an RCT, on professional fighters. It does not exist. So it has to come from coaching, it has to come from, you know, trial and error. That's the only way you'll get this information, like the data. Andy, by the way, thanks for posting that paper. We did with the UFC PI.

Speaker 3: 33:27

Oh yeah, that was totally an accent. By the way, I forgot we were doing this. It wasn't on purpose. I just went back into it.

Speaker 1: 33:34

It's one of those where they have data and it's just data they've collected. We helped put it together, you know, did some stats on it, but at the end of the day it's trial and error, for, particularly for elite athletes, all of it's trial and error, I mean there's. You're just not gonna run an RC. Imagine running an RCT. You know, Tony, you're getting someone ready for a fight. You know, working with Chris Weidman, you know, Imagine, hey, Chris, can we do some to you? And we're gonna have a control group here and we're gonna see which works better. I mean, it's just not gonna happen.

Speaker 2: 34:05

Yeah, and then we're gonna cut you calories and fluids while you're getting punched in the head, and you know, see what? Those are my thoughts.

Speaker 3: 34:11

Yeah, no, like we were on. We just submitted a paper over the weekend on sleep data for combat fighters around the world and so that's part of why I was like. I was like I don't want. Corey published the paper on this and went back and I don't know. I was like man, this was so good Like I got. I think I posted about it when it first came out but I just want to throw it back out there because it was so, so nice and it's so hard to do studies like that it is With those people.

Speaker 3: 34:34

If you look at the sleep research in general, there's very little research on high performing athletes in sleep. It's very hard to do for a bunch of reasons. And if you look at even like you guys probably remember Sherry Ma's like sleep extension research out of Stanford, right, this is the classic. If they gave, they had the Stanford basketball team sleep in two hours extra a night for like six weeks during the season and it was like 9% improvements in three point accuracy, free throw percentage, like reaction time goes up like this is massive improvements across the board by getting these kids to sleep a couple more hours, right. And then people over the years have like criticized it, which is fine.

Speaker 3: 35:13

Like every paper has a limitation. That's just again, that is the nature of science. But people are like, oh, there's no control group. It's like, okay, great, which control group was the coach gonna let them go in? You're gonna be in the group who doesn't sleep as much. Exactly, no coach is doing that ever. Right, like so in the paper. She's like, yeah, we couldn't blind them either. What are we gonna do?

Speaker 1: 35:35

You pretend to sleep, you actually sleep.

Speaker 3: 35:38

Yeah, like, what are you gonna do here? It's like, of course there's placebo effect here, of course, but like you want data on real performing athletes in real life situations. To me, like that's not a bigger flaw than there is with the flaws associated with, you know, bigger clinical trials, cause now you just have the ecology argument backwards. Okay, great, well, how do we know that word? Well, you don't. So like yeah, the whole point of science is that we do all of it, and then you take the aggregate of what is there, and then you coach based on your experience.

Speaker 3: 36:13

What's crazy about this, dude? You guys, sports science dudes, think about this If you do anything nutritionally recommendation, whatever supplementation lives and it's not extremely documented in a paper, you're gonna you get fried for it, right, everyone goes after you, but no one does that for training. If you do something like you know four sets of sick, like it hasn't been documented, nobody cares. It's like well, yeah, that's reasonable, like, but if you just like recommend something slightly like, not completely thing, you're just like fraud. It's like all right, like, have you ever worked with somebody ever? Oh yeah, I work with athletes really. Oh yeah, you had like a 16 year old kid one time playing soccer, exactly. That doesn't count.

Speaker 1: 36:54

Well, you know, andy, to that point. I once walked into the lab. I saw Tony doing back squats, but he was holding a flower pot on his head and he was saying, hey look, I can balance this. No, I was kidding.

Speaker 3: 37:06

Yeah, I was leaving every part of that story. I'm really happy part of it.

Speaker 1: 37:10

Those are the kinds of videos you see on Instagram. I'm like what the hell are these people doing? It's funny as hell. Funny as hell, by the way, your dog seemed to be wanting to get the hell out of your office.

Speaker 3: 37:19

They're like, yeah, she's stuck in here right now. There's people out there and she's sorry.

Speaker 1: 37:25

Hey, pragmatic question, cause people will want to know supplements other than creatinine, caffeine and, let's say, protein that in general you recommend for the general fitness enthusiasts. They just work out, they feel better, they want to get better shape, so anything not including creatinine, caffeine and protein, since that's sort of the go-to for most people.

Speaker 3: 37:46

Yeah, I mean the one that's going to jump out of this next would be Omega threes Right, like again, nothing's perfect, but mountains of data there, when I'm answering this question, I'm thinking cost versus likely to have positive effect versus likely to have negative effect, right Versus amount of evidence. So something like Omega three pretty high in cost, relative okay fine, but likely to have lots of benefits in a lot of different areas, unlikely to do anything bad, like it's just like not going to do anything bad unless you get to really high levels and we're in this like hypertrophy situation right now or maybe block hyper, okay, like sure, but an aggregate there, not a ton of downside. That'd be on the list. You probably throw a vitamin D for the same exact reasons. You could go very high levels of vitamin D with almost there are some. There's actually a couple of papers that have showed the. So vitamin D is interesting. It is. One of the major points of vitamin D is that it is a storage molecule.

Speaker 1: 38:46

Do you get it for supplementation or from the sun, Andy?

Speaker 3: 38:49

Of course, Anything from the world that you can Like, always get. The most things you can get from the world from air, from water, from being around friends to eating whole foods like this is always, always, always, the win.

Speaker 1: 39:06

Right.

Speaker 3: 39:06

But vitamin D is nuts. There have been a couple of papers on looking at heavy metals and vitamin Ds, and so one of the things that can happen and I'm intentionally telling you this, this is an extremely unlikely scenario, but this is like kind of fun to think about is vitamin D will help you store things, and so if you are exposed to high levels of heavy metals, vitamin Ds staying low in your body is an intentional way of your body trying to keep vitamin D low so that it can actually rid the heavy metals. So if you are in the presence of a couple of different micronutrient insufficiencies and high heavy metal and low vitamin D, it's trying to keep it down. So you smash yourself with 10,000 IUs of vitamin D a day and your vitamin D level doesn't go up. Well, one of a couple of things is happening. One most likely you're probably getting it from a crappy supplement provider and there's probably like not that much vitamin D actually in it.

Speaker 3: 39:56

That can happen, or your body's intentionally trying to keep it low because it's trying to rid yourself of toxins. Now, that said, you're talking about like. I think there's like two papers on that, so almost surely there's like a 99.9% chance to taking vitamin Ds. Fine, that's like only in those like extreme situations, and that's only been shown a couple of times and not like super recently, so it's never been followed up with us. It was always to me like a sign of like. When the research doesn't follow a field doesn't always mean it's nothing's there, but a lot of times it means like and maybe nothing's really there. So, outside of that, though, you have almost no issues with vitamin D. So I'd go on the list, and the last one would maybe be like a multi vitamin, but you actually want to maybe be a little more careful there, kind of depending.

Speaker 3: 40:41

But yeah, those are on the kind of general list of probably fine to take.

Speaker 1: 40:46

Tony any thoughts?

Speaker 2: 40:48

No, I probably would go the same way, you know and I think the key thing is cost and limiting and the most what you're gonna get for the dollar or potentially what that person may need most, because getting people to take six, seven different supplements a day becomes impossible too.

Speaker 2: 41:05

So you got to make those choices based around where the potential deficiencies may be. But I'm a big Omega three advocate and vitamin D I mean, those are foundational. So I don't think I could offer anything to the general fitness population that would be novel from there. And again two and two get outside, get some real air, get some real sun, see some nature and do the best he can on. You know the foods that actually were alive at one given point and you probably cover. You got a good foundation from there on in.

Speaker 3: 41:35

Yeah, I mean, I'll be honest, we use a lot of supplements for our performers, but performance, you know, we don't have any budget on these people. So, like our pro athletes, are the people on our rapid health performance program Like it's not a budget issue and in fact we're in the hey. If you can take me something that is likely to affect me two or 3%, I don't care if it costs $1,000 a month, I don't care at all. They're making 30 to 40 to 50 million a year. Like that's not a relevant number at all. So, but that's a different question, right?

Speaker 1: 42:05

Yeah, for high performing athletes we get with no, where budgetary concerns don't matter. I usually recommend everything, even if it has a minor, minor, minor chance of helping.

Speaker 3: 42:19

You know, what I wanna say something here because I specifically and will never forget you saying this on stage. Probably 20 years ago this may have been at and it had been an issue and I remember you saying if it has a neutral or positive effect, we're gonna take it. And I was like, and it was like so different than anything anyone had ever said before and I was like, wow, and it totally flipped my mind. I'm like what if I?

Speaker 1: 42:47

thought like that why not?

Speaker 3: 42:49

But as a potential to help limit the damage, and all I'm losing is money. And some people like that's it right, like yeah.

Speaker 1: 42:57

Yeah, I mean, I think you know taking a pragmatic approach to a lot of this stuff will. I think, particularly for the high end athlete works quite well, because for them they're looking even for a 0.1% improvement. I mean, in some of these road races, whether it's cycling or running or whatever you're talking about, difference between first and second place oftentimes is not even a second. So I always ask people well, how do I train to be one second faster? Well, you just keep doing what you're doing and hopefully you'll beat that person. That's all you can do.

Speaker 3: 43:33

Yeah, that's the margins man. That's what we're at, that's the game we're playing at. So, yeah, if we got a potential to do that for something that's fairly easy to get done Now there's no free passes in physiology. Everything is doing something. But you know you're taking the shot based on the best available events you have, and that's just what we call coaching.

Speaker 1: 43:54

Yeah, now, changing topics, I want to talk briefly about a paper that you guys you're the senior author or last author. The title of the paper, just so the audience is aware, is prevalence of adulteration and dietary supplements and recommendations for safe supplement practices. And I really have just two pragmatic questions and I'm gonna first read one of the sentences in the abstract. It says analytical studies have found anywhere from 14 to 50% of samples analyzed from dietary supplement products have tested positive for anabolic agents or other prohibited substances. So I have two questions. The first one is are the levels high enough to test positive so that it affects your ability to perform, to participate in the sport? That's the first question. And the second question really applies to the 99.99% of people who don't give a shit. Their question is will it make me better? Yeah, are the levels high enough that it's actually anabolic? So 99.99% of the population are like, oh, if it's adulterated, I'm gonna take this stuff because I might get bigger. The professional athletes like oh shit, I can't take this stuff because I might test positive.

Speaker 3: 45:08

Yeah, okay, yeah, so thank you. I wish we could have gone back and added some sentences to that paper. As always, you do right Couple of things. When you hear numbers like that, you're talking about research from studies across the globe, that's not just studies in America. If you look at the data of adulteration in America, it is significantly lower than those numbers, right? So you're talking about studies and supplement providers and samples and labs in India, in China, in Ireland, in South America, like all over the place, right? So some of them have stronger or less than intervals.

Speaker 3: 45:45

There's another major misnomer here and that is that, like, supplements are not FDA regulated. People say that stuff all the time like it's completely the wild west, right, which is objectively not true. Like it is completely false. They're not regulated the same way, but there is a ton of oversight. Trust me, I have a relationship with conflicts of interest. I have a relationship with momentous supplements. You guys have both worked deeply, deeply in those worlds. There is a lot of money in oversight on those things. It's not the same as a pharmaceutical drug, but it's not just a free pass either. So that's the first point.

Speaker 3: 46:18

That number is probably larger and more alarming than we should have wrote it right. That's probably what it's saying. Two, is it technically adulterated versus? Is that even enough to cause you to fail a drug test, right? So there's two levels there, right, if you go into a lab and you run a sample through a mass spec and we've seen some small amount of an anabolic agent or something, if you then ingest it, well, then you flag of a certain. So there has to be a lot of levels up there before it gets that level of you failing a test, and so that falls down a lot as well. Again, the ability for you to go in as a third party certifier or something, find some level at a very small amount of any number of adulterated components, actually getting a new failing test is a lot lower as well. So the likelihood of you buying a high quality, reasonably large brand in America and failing a drug test because of it is very small. It certainly has happened, but it is very, very unlikely. You're almost surely fine. When you go to other countries, I can't speak to that. It's different, of course, but here, like, you're probably fine. So that's the first question.

Speaker 3: 47:28

The second one was like, is it enough to give me a boost? I don't know, because the bigger problem with supplementation is dosages and this is the real issue. I feel like we probably drew the story out and you're going to get tamed of supplements too much and didn't draw the story out enough on, are you sure you're getting the active ingredients in the amount you think you are? Sometimes high, sometimes low, like the melatonin. One is the easiest example Plenty of data showing any origin of 10, 100x or more high or low amounts of melatonin than you think you're in your melatonin, and so you think you're taking 3 milligrams of melatonin.

Speaker 3: 48:02

You could be taking a 10th of that, 100th of that or 100x that, and there's a ton of papers on that. Again, you're probably fine if you're buying these things from any number of big companies, but when you get outside of that it becomes a problem. And I can tell you right now, having done tons and tons and tons of urine samples of people, we'll see melatonin concentrations 50x reference range the next morning and you're like, oh, what the hell happened? Like, oh, you take melatonin, yep, I take one milligram, some small dose, and you're like, no, you don't, because unless you don't have a half life like any normal physiology nine hours later, this is absurd amounts. So that, I think, is probably the bigger concern. So will it benefit you? It depends on if the active ingredient is actually in there or not, or what taint is actually in there.

Speaker 1: 48:49

So yeah, what's interesting is, I don't know if you even know this, but I used to own a coffee company, so this is my idea For the early 2000s and we grew it, managed it and we sold it out in 2009, I think. But I learned the coffee business in that even within coffee and actually this applies to all foods there was a certain amount of poop, literally that was allowed per pound of coffee.

Speaker 1: 49:18

Obviously, it didn't make you sick, or I remember there was a certain amount of mold and mildew, it's like, and that's all food. So when I see articles about adulteration, I'm thinking but that's food, food. It happens to food as well, exactly.

Speaker 3: 49:35

You just made Dave Asprey smile. He's the guy that's all about the coffee mold. And then it's not actually real, right, like?

Speaker 1: 49:43

very uncommon. It's not enough to matter, as I would say.

Speaker 3: 49:48

You have a whole bunch of things in your physiology that are meant to take care of those things, and at super small levels occasionally.

Speaker 1: 49:55

Yeah, doesn't matter, doesn't matter. Ok, we're running out of time. Just a couple of topics to cover One. As you know, the social media has made it very democratic to you can get information out easily for many. Now, the good part is there's so many people giving advice, and the bad part is, well, there's so many people giving advice. So what do you tell students in terms of, hey, dr Galpin, so-and-so said I need to sit in a cold tub and so-and-so said I need to do zone two training so I could live longer? How do you tackle that, knowing that oftentimes this is a misinterpretation or a weird extrapolation of data?

Speaker 3: 50:41

Yeah, super challenging. The way that I always say it is you start with humility. If you go back through my career even just take within that course that you're in and you go back to enough slides and enough exams and enough years, you'll see I've changed some things. So I can't promise you anything that I'm saying right now is 100%. It's going to be wrong.

Speaker 2: 51:06

So I'm wrong on something.

Speaker 3: 51:07

I don't know what it is I'm wrong about yet but I'm going to in five years or 10 years from now. So number one we always have to approach some humility here. We're learning, we're progressing, we're changing right. Any number of examples there. That's a start. So secondly, stop then assuming things are blanket rights, yeses and noes at all times. We keep that little flag for humility there, whatever, maybe when you don't know what to do. Then we start with basic under-arching approaches Like is this something that is generalizable against human race?

Speaker 3: 51:41

Is this a normal human thing? Does this make teleological sense? Does this make evolutionary sense? Does this make biological sense? Does this make ancestral sense? We don't want to fall into the fallacy of nature here, because this is natural doesn't mean it's right or good. That's a huge logical fallacy. But we can start inferring things from there. The examples of an ice bath okay, great, I have a giant ice bath right out there. I've had it for a decade. I love this stuff, right. But that said, it's not a panacea like anything else. You really think all humans have to be in an ice bath to live a healthy, high-performing life? That would be absurd to think, right, you do not need anything like that.

Speaker 1: 52:20

That's why we moved to Florida.

Speaker 3: 52:26

I have a whole garage that's nothing but weights and training equipment. Right, you don't have to live weights to be healthy, but like, okay, sure, but then there are things that do that have provided general things. When you look at the case of exercise, it's not a natural thing. That said, look what's changed in our lives compared to before, when we never exercised. And now there's a clear logical relationship that says we had to insert something back in our lives because it got taken out. So it makes sense. So exercise is natural. It's not natural, but it actually was way more natural. We were way more physically active. Since that's got down, this is our replacement, so like we're just sort of filling a similar gap. The ice wouldn't make that sense, right? You can make it a little bit argument. You used to probably get a lot colder. You're not like you're doing some stretching, like pretty heavy here. So think about it from there.

Speaker 3: 53:17

The second one is evidence-based. Should and always should be interpreted as a combination of multiple things. Again, what's the research? Say, what are the experts applying in that field? Say, and then, what is your own personal experience? Say, so, terminal degrees and related fields. And you're not mean anything, right?

Speaker 3: 53:38

Again, you got a dissertation in muscle physiology, technically, but yet pretty well-versed in nutrition. Okay, that can happen, most definitely, but there's no guarantees there. There's no guarantees that even know much about your own individual field. So it's a hard thing. You're never going to get perfect. It's the easiest way to think about it, right, you're going to make some missteps there, but there's clearly a pattern between, let's just say, terminology or degrees, or certain concerns. In fact, I how do I say this? Like I recently became aware of somebody who I thought was doing really great work in this field and realized that individual does not have the actual academic background that I actually thought Not even close and was like dug in and I was like, oh my God, this person doesn't have a degree and like I just thought they which doesn't mean anything.

Speaker 3: 54:33

But it was like that's why that person makes all these mistakes all the time on social media. It's always putting stuff out there. I'm like, really, you should know better on this. But I'm like, oh, they don't actually Right, stunning. Okay, great, great, great. So it happens, probably more than you think. Again, a PhD means nothing Like per se, on its face, like doesn't mean anything. You could be a total nitwit with the PhD nutrition, like we've seen a billion of them.

Speaker 1: 55:01

Oh yeah, I always tell people don't, don't fall in love with your letters. Too many people they fall in love with their letters and I think their letters guarantee omniscience. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 55:13

It's a step in the right direction, for sure, but like it's not, it's not anything. So, yeah, it's hard hard to again. I'm tango even because I'd say, if you go back to things I've said on podcasts enough years ago, I might call yeah, actually, yeah, may all agree with that anymore.

Speaker 2: 55:30

So it's a moving field. But you know, in essence, it's kind of like what you said when you both of you said with nutrition, right, if it isn't doing any harm and it's a modality that has some potential benefit and you enjoy it, or you want to integrate it such as a nice path, or why not? Right, we don't. So I mean that's where I am with it. Take a few things, we. It isn't a panacea, as you noted, but it certainly isn't going to. You know, it probably is not going to limit performance again as long as we're not doing it eight seconds after our training session, as you said any adaption phase will probably be okay, so the only thing.

Speaker 3: 56:06

Maybe I'll answer this better question. The only thing I generally get irritated with is when people are doing the oh okay, here I have. This morning I got a series of text messages from one of the athletes I coach. You're talking all pro is an all pro NFL player, like the highest current right now, and I was asking a bunch of questions about water fasting, right, and I'm like all right, I'm not going to give this the time of day, but like those are like very genuine questions, right, and it was like is it true about the cancer? And I'm like, man, you're Jewish, like this is really, really hard.

Speaker 3: 56:41

So when people do things like that, like to me that's extremely irritating, that's irresponsible and there should be like right, professional, credential blowbacks for saying things like you know, fasting for whatever water you know reduces cancer by 80%, like, like that's extremely irresponsible. Yeah, if someone wants to go something more of like, hey, I like a lot of zone two training for my athletes for bubble. Okay, fine, now we're like it's a little bit of opinion. I don't agree with it as much for like it's not like. So if you are massively deceiving people, yeah.

Speaker 3: 57:13

If you are intentionally lying and manipulating, like like the quacks we generally have, like we could list them. We don't need to. I don't give the people any more credit, right? But there's a handful of people we could always list every couple of years who you know. The three of us will go like that person's, like a genuine fraud. They're like they're saying things like fast for two days and you'll reduce cancer by 80%, like that is it. There's no justification for that saying like the complete fraud. And then there's more of like you know, you hype this up too much, okay, okay, there's real things there, like an ice bath, but you're hyping it up way too much. You're whatever, but that's not the same level as like the other one, like no, you're just a straight up, gary tops. Like you're just a straight up for like you don't know anything, like just completely making things up, right. So there's levels there, I guess.

Speaker 1: 57:59

Yeah, there's a guy on Instagram who said he did not eat or drink for 30 days. I'm thinking that's usually called death.

Speaker 3: 58:10

Yeah, not the water. Part you can't get pretty is not water. You can do it without food, but you're not. Yeah, yeah, the water part.

Speaker 1: 58:18

you need water. We've got to let you go soon, maybe. One more question you mentioned your supplement line with momentous. I haven't had a chance to look at all the supplements, but I have a general question about anyone who has a supplement line in terms of whether or not you feel the need to do any randomized controlled trials on the products, doing product specific trials versus making third party claims. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker 3: 58:47

Yeah, totally. So I don't have a product line there. No, no, no, no, I wouldn't. I wouldn't, certainly never do that. What I just have is like, like we have a bundle that's like an athlete recovery bundle and it's like creatine, omega threes and multivitamins, but if you buy all three is a bundle, you get a small kind of discount on this thing. So there's no products we have created and that's not a game I want to ever, ever, get into, because you would need many trials. You need mechanism trials, you outcome trials, all those things. So the momentous partnership is been a really solid one. I've been really impressed with those folks. But that was just a way to say hey, like if somebody wanted to do like a baseline general performance which put together and it is all the stuff you would get is it's omega three, it's creatine, it's that kind of basics.

Speaker 3: 59:38

It's a very, very basics yeah, like maybe some glutamine for, like, extreme endurance, training, recovery, like some other things like that. But yeah, that's pretty basic there. It's just a way to get a little bit of a discount.

Speaker 1: 59:51

Hey, any plans to come to this side of the country instead of being stuck on the left coast?

Speaker 3: 59:56

Yeah, I try to never leave my house, if at all possible.

Speaker 1: 1:00:02

You sound like me.

Speaker 3: 1:00:05

Especially these days, and it's going to get. It's only getting worse. Yeah, it's cool. I don't think I'm going to be out there Anytime soon, unless we get a fight rescheduled that gets moved. But now I don't think so.

Speaker 2: 1:00:18

I got a couple of speaking engagements dolled up next year, but Joey, why don't we get my SSN or Neurosports for the following year?

Speaker 1: 1:00:27

How's that? We're organizing a. This would be, I think it's October. I forget the exact date. Tony, it's third Saturday of October. We're actually organizing an ISIS and fight camp one day seminar. Oh cool yeah.

Speaker 3: 1:00:44

So, Tony.

Speaker 1: 1:00:46

I'm going to be there. Corey Peacock, we're going to bring some UFC fighters in just to chit chat with everyone.

Speaker 2: 1:00:52

I know if you are, but maybe we drag you out for a day or two.

Speaker 3: 1:00:56

That just depends on how close to hunting season you get your chances.

Speaker 1: 1:01:03

Is there a hiking season?

Speaker 3: 1:01:05

Hunting season Hunting season. September to December, depending on what you're drawing, what you're going after.

Speaker 2: 1:01:15

You like Elk hunting right.

Speaker 1: 1:01:17

No, no, no, Andy, you could hunt for alligator.

Speaker 3: 1:01:21

Oh, that's a good time, python's man, if you can facilitate, I will certainly come. If I can get a tag, I could double up an alligator on there, because I yeah, October.

Speaker 2: 1:01:31

I know a guy who might be able to tag. I'm dead serious on that. I'm sure you are, I'm not only that, we might be able to take your Python hunting and ready ever going to those.

Speaker 3: 1:01:43

I know you're like that. I hate that I love wildlife so much. I spend so much time reading like various state publications on wildlife updates, podcast, like legislation stuff going on, so I know exactly what's going on through Python's and I'm never.

Speaker 2: 1:01:59

All right, good, good, the Glades are fascinating, but you guys are here.

Speaker 3: 1:02:03

There's some deer down there. Oh yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:02:07

I only one last story about the wildlife. Here I was paddling and not not far from my house, maybe a half mile, because I live right on the water and I saw a large alligator, I mean one that would. That's scary, because if you see the head and you see how big it is, it's like Holy, it's just all yours, gotta be 10 feet, 10 feet long. So I called Florida wildlife I think it's called gaming and wildlife or something and I said, hey, there's a large alligator. I said the address where it was, and they said, well, we can't really do anything about it until it becomes a nuisance.

Speaker 2: 1:02:36

I'm like but it's a big alligator.

Speaker 1: 1:02:39

Like, yeah, but it's not a nuisance yet. So I said so a nuisance is it kills a pet. They're like, yeah, it kills a person. Yeah, I have to actually wait for something to happen before they remove the alligator and I'm like, oh shit, I don't know if I like that.

Speaker 3: 1:02:58

Yeah, I know, I'm aware of my sister in law, who was just got in town last night, lives in Tampa and they got two little kids the same age as our two little kids and they have like a little cul-de-sac there in Tampa ish area and in their little pond and little cul-de-sac like not a giant one, but like a big enough to eat your food for sure. Yeah, they are, yeah, and they just can't really about it because it hasn't eaten anything yet. Wow.

Speaker 1: 1:03:28

So basically got a sacrifice, like a little dog or something. Oh my, god. Okay, now we'll get the alligator 100%.

Speaker 3: 1:03:35

I don't know. That's why I stick them out and I like those things in the water at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every time you post your little GoPro stuff, I'm just waiting for something to pop up and I'm like no way.

Speaker 1: 1:03:46

Oh hey, dr Andy Galpin. Thank you so much for being on the Sports Science Dudes, tony.

Speaker 2: 1:03:51

Any final thoughts to Great and I want to say thanks because you also put out a lot of great information and you do it for free. You do a lot of great and I use it for my students a lot and it's very appreciated. It's really great stuff and not a lot of people willing to do that, so I thank you for that. You share a lot of great information and very educational resources, so it's appreciated. Guys, a bit of pleasure, guys. Thanks so much.