In this episode, we delve into the significance of grip strength for overall health. Our guest, Dr. Andy Galpin, sheds light on the ...

dr-andy-galpin-designs-the-perfect-20-minute-workout-to-help-you-lose-weight

Dr. Andy Galpin Designs the Perfect 20-Minute Workout to Help you Lose Weight

use them all the time right like okay here you are this is what percentile you're in can and those are very good um in terms of the number you want to typically be at for men like I always want to see over 50 kilos for women 40 depends on age and things like that right so I I want decent grip strength not as egregious but similar to my comments about blood reference ranges I don't love the reference ranges for grip strength I think they're undershot I think you should be more aggressive than that but they're not unreasonable like many of the reference ranges for blood for biochemistry so they're just agrees now a lot of people will talk about grip strength and they're like oh it's not a COR it's it's correlation it's not causation so which is to say like it's an indicator of overall health but it doesn't really matter itself and I would say there is so much evidence to argue that in fact even more recently a colleague of mine Tommy wood at the University of Washington we published a paper this year a couple of them he published one as well um and when you look at grip strength there is a strong indicator here in fact actually another paper came out just recently on symmetry mhm 10% so when you're looking at right hand versus left hand do that Mak sense dominant versus non-dominant we typically have thought of like well your your dominant hand is going to be stronger and it is but the issue they found there is when you have people that have more than a 10% asymmetry this is a potential and it's just one paper which always means like let's see if it's replicated yeah let's see if it comes from another lab as well like you youve published you you're scientist you know so don't be but to me it makes a ton of sense but that 10% difference when you start seeing greater than a 10% you have an early indicator of some neurological derivation happening so it's not just a random like well course you're your grip your dominant hand stronger it is and should be but if you and and we've seen this in our in our practice a lot you know people 20 25 30% differences in grip stke either you have some injury in that hand that you know you hurt your hand a long time ago or something else is going on um you don't want to have that so we pay attention to that number at 10% in terms of training is super easy do anything the challenges grip just a squeezy ball sure if you want yeah deadlift push things drag things carry things hold things use dumbbells um use kettle bells any number of things that challenge physiology is very straightforward in from the perspective of adaptation meaning we always say like look for the physiological limiter the physiological limiter is also the place of adaptation so if you're doing anything where your grip gives out and you're limited by your grip strength it's then challenging your grip strength it will adapt it'll get stronger so it doesn't really matter right again if you're if you're lifting weights and you're doing rows pulling things to you if you're using a machine and you're using straps on your wrist well now you're actually not limiting your grip strength at all great for your upper back great for your potential biceps awesome you're not challenging your grip not challenging your grip what if you wear gloves gloves are fine but now you're taking a little bit of grip away yeah but still could possibly be doing it right I'm not against that entirely although I have to be totally honest with you most of my soul dies when I see somebody using gloves really yeah but like this is this is cultural okay I I'll Grant you that's not logic that's just like you don't wear gloves in the gym you actually you wrote a paper I read um briefly about you could actually epigenetic changes in response to resistance train oh yeah so talk a little bit about that like how does that affect you as a as a as a your phys physiology epigenetics is an emerging field and by that like it's been around 20ish years in sort of its current form which is new in science right like that's a that's a NE thing U and so yeah we we did one particular study and we looked at the epigenetic responses in muscle uh following an acute bout of exercise we did it in very sedentary people compared to people that are well trained and what we're trying to see there is is we know that there's a certain response in muscle or any organ system to challenge but is that uniquely different between the two the paper itself doesn't matter the your better your question was better which is okay like how does that actually matter so epigenetics you have to understand them a little bit when we went back earlier we were talking about genetics genetics are very important for a lot of different things of course in terms of actionable steps though they are the least important part of the process because they only tell you about potential they don't tell you about actualization genes me nothing unless they're turned on that's epigenetics okay so how are they this is a condensed sort of easy version of epigenetics so um you can do a genetic test and there are some things you can glean out of that and there's a bunch of things that don't matter at all because they don't tell you anything about do they actually net result in protein do you actually did you make that enzyme did you not make that you don't know you just knew about sort of unless you find things that are clinical um genetic markers for genetic why they're called genetic diseases right like different things there um or other factors that say Hey your higher chances lower chances of a b and c but unless you actually look at the thing you don't know if that chance made it or not right so epigenetics some of those things can be carried from generation to generation many of them don't most acute things like with exercise are probably not going to carry over to the next Generation in this particular case like none of that stuff would yeah we were just trying to understand if is that response unique and if so how it was one of the first in the field and so it was more of a descriptive than was an actual intervention in terms of someone starting exercise as just let's say General exercise they're doing some resistance some cardio that's actually challenging them um how quickly will they see benefits within weeks within months within years and and what sort of differences will they see yeah so it depends on how we want to Define benefit if you're trying to get stronger how fast will it take before you actually notice changes on the bar can be as soon as the next test session like depending on how trained you are the less trained you are the faster you'll see changes the more trained you are the slower that stuff happens um so like in fact this is in the field we call these newbie gains yeah they're like really they're like oh my God I got yeah it's like you're literally every time you go to the gym you could put five more pounds on and you just continue to go up there if there are other changes you're looking for like when am I going to start losing weight when am when is my pain going to go away when am I going to start having better energy that can be again a day could be a month could be six months it really depends on a lot of things that are going on but yeah you you can certainly see changes in terms of muscle size uh the number you're going to see there and this is just very general science typically the first four or so weeks of training most of the adaptations are neural meaning we can't yet we don't have the Precision of Imaging yet to identify a statistically significant change in like muscle fiber size though it's clearly happening it's just just hasn't reached a threshold where we could notice it and so if you're continuing to get strong at that point or whatever it's probably because yeah you're getting more efficient nervous systems being there after that now we can actually start measuring changes in muscle size but again that said you go do a training session right now muscles can be larger for acute reasons swelling Emon things like that and two weeks later like you could actually have legitimate changes in muscle size again it's mostly water but if you continue at it it'll stay there and you won't be able to tell the difference when it turns from water to contract out proper proteins anyways interesting and is it different I you know they say that it's much more difficult for women to gain muscle particularly after menopause right but is it different is there actually science behind well they say that but they're not right it's not true no we're debunking myth here no you actually know there's another paper came out um in the last couple of months that's the same thing for people over 70 there there's no difference in rate of improvement really no I don't know if you know this or not but women have testosterone oh I know did did you know I'm a urologist I know I was totally joking right like you're all over this one right and it turns out you have a lot more testosterone than you have estrogen yeah weird right yeah people just think like it's nuts to that to say women are completely anabolic just like men are you would be in a bad place if you were not anabolic so there there's just not any evidence to suggest the rate of increase really changes between men and women um you said it earlier perfectly men are absolutely bigger generally yeah so when you're both doing relative changes at the same percent and one is absolutely larger you have absolutely more gening M but the rate of increase doesn't seem to change if you want to look at function too look at the sport of powerlifting look at the sport of Olympic weightlifting look at any of these strength-based oneup Max Sports and you see women continuing to progress in those sports like men are and there's no reason to think that we're continuing to break World Records on both sides of the equation and they're scaling so there's yeah there's no rationale to think that that women just tend to be smaller yeah and that's physiologic totally so that's that's chromosomal like you can tell from chromosones yeah let's say let's just talk about designing this was actually a question from one of my audience designing the optimal regimen for someone who's got 20 minutes a day yeah let's say for fat loss as the primary goal and for muscle hypertrophy as the primary goal 20 minutes a day every day or three days a week or what do we go let's say five days okay great yeah let's just say that let's say they had five days if if I had 30 minutes I would probably do at least one day where that is what we would call like gear one so this is mouth closed and you're breathing in and out through your nose at a controlled Pace I don't care what you're doing this could be walking this could be whatever but we're going to be doing that lower end of the threshold one of those days I would certainly do at least one day that's the opposite gear four um this could be intervals this could be things like that but we are going to burn as many calories as we can possibly do in an up down fashion in there um I would certainly do two days a week without question of some sort of what we call kind of like General hypertrophy range lifting so this is uh sets of8 to 20 repetitions plus or minus something like that um we're pushing the pace on what would feel we're doing whole body every time we're not doing body part splits or things like that right so you're going to do upper body push and pull you're going to do lower body press and Pull and we're going to do whole body movements right we're going to get you moving throughout the day um that gives me four days a week right um the additional day I might add either a continuous so this would be maybe something that's more like gear two or gear three where still the 20 straight minutes um jogging swimming air D something like that it is higher intensity than the previous one um but this is not like fall on the floor sweat throw up things like that right it would probably be something like that as a stamp and then from there we would personalize and individualize it and then walking's not enough you can't just walk for all of your cardio uh for fat loss yeah you could you could the The Exchange is how much ground are you covering in that 30 minutes not much so caloric expenditure is very low so you you could do that but you would have to then pull more calories from food to get that balanced correctly but you absolutely can not the best strategy to just like walk but it's also not a zero strategy if you look at people who are in aesthetic Sports bodybuilders physique and things like that you will see them add a lot of walking because it's the here's here's why when you're thinking about designing exercise programs people tend to think think about the front side the input they don't think about the output which is to say you have to pay attention to what's called recoverable volume so if I in that in that program I gave you if I just said hey we're great we're going to do 30 seconds on 30 seconds off hard as you possibly can for 30 seconds 30 seconds of rest and we're going to do that for all your workouts that's the most calories you could possibly build and you would be smashed after that yeah because once you get past like 80% uh intensity recoverability does not go linear it goes exponential so going from 85 to 90 is way harder to recover from than going from 55 to 60 going from 95 to 100 is way way harder to recover from than going from 80 to 85 so this is this this starts really really digging into recoverability now if you're doing that once or twice a week it's fine you got the recovery capacity this is all you're going after and the rest of your buckets are already pretty full of stress and you're not like empty you don't have much left to go and so it's like okay be careful there if everything is dialed you can get away with that and we're talking little bo fine but if not you don't want to do that because the recovery is so hard to get to you're going to get now super hungry you're going to have a hard time sleeping you're going to get these swings of like oh my God I feel exhausted I finished my workout and I'm completely crashed okay I'm trouble sleeping having falling trouble fall time sleeping at night and my motivation like all these things start kicking in like these signs of the symptom of like this is a stressed physiology respiratory rate like this is the biggest gim me pay attention to resp story right

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