Andy Galpin, PhD
@DrAndyGalpin • 162,946 subscribers
Professor & Scientist of Human Performance PhD Human Bioenergetics & Muscle Phys Perform w/ Dr. Andy Galpin Co-Founder @BioMoAthlete @Absolute_Rest @Vitality_BP
Videos
Why wouldn't you want your testosterone as high as possible? Dr. Ben House has a good answer. High testosterone upregulates EPO, which tells your body to make more red blood cells. More red blood cells means more viscous blood. You're not pumping blood anymore, you're pumping oil. Now add left ventricular hypertrophy. The heart wall thickens, and it's pushing against more back pressure with every beat. As Ben puts it, your heart is pumping ketchup against a bunch of extra muscle. You don't want to run that for decades, assuming you get decades.
Andy Galpin, PhD57,814 次观看 • 4 天前
Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin is back. New episode: How to Build a Strong Core & Abs 0:00 Core Training Myths 4:22 Why We Train Abs Wrong 7:27 Abs vs Core Explained 11:17 Look Feel Perform Goals 15:04 How Core Muscles Work 20:26 Stability and Anti Movement 24:00 Do Abs Need Daily Training 29:12 Spinal Safety and Crunches 31:37 Sponsor Eight Sleep 33:08 Testing Core Strength 41:42 Interpreting Test Results 47:02 Choosing Core Exercises 50:18 Isolation vs Compound Core 52:31 Contraction Intensity Rules 53:23 Size Principle Explained 56:16 Loading the Core Safely 1:00:14 Core Moves by Pattern 1:06:35 Program by Muscle Groups 1:08:01 Abs for Aesthetics 1:15:47 Aesthetic Programming Split 1:18:49 Core for Performance 1:21:15 Core for Back Health 1:24:17 Sample Week Template 1:29:22 Five Step Progression 1:35:54 Exercise Order Priorities 1:36:56 Rapid Fire Q and Belts 1:42:35 Final Wrap and Support Includes paid partnerships.
Andy Galpin, PhD1,718,001 次观看 • 6 个月前
Joel Jamieson did everything right and was still walking around with a 50% blockage in his widowmaker artery. He’s a world-renowned cardiovascular expert who doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, sleeps well, manages stress, trains consistently, and has a VO2 max probably north of 55. He got screened at 40 and found it. He had zero symptoms the entire time. This is the core problem with cardiovascular disease in well-trained individuals — it doesn't announce itself the way we expect it to. The markers we typically use to flag risk don't apply. No excess body weight, no poor lifestyle habits, no reason to think anything is wrong. What actually predicted Joel's risk was his family history. His mom had a stroke at 60. His dad and uncle died early. His brother had a triple bypass before 50. Every signal was there, just not one he could feel. If that kind of history exists in your family, get screened. The CT angiogram runs around $1,200 out of pocket — not cheap, and hopefully that comes down over time. But if you can justify it, it's worth it.
Andy Galpin, PhD1,071,452 次观看 • 4 个月前
How to undo hours of sitting in 60 seconds: Physical therapist Dr. John Rusin uses this tool with clients as a reset between long stretches at a desk or on a phone, and it requires no equipment. Get into what he calls a Superman position: 1. Stand up, put the phone down, take one step away from the desk 2. Extend the upper back, open the chest, lift through the sternum 3. Arms out and back, rotated so the palms turn outward 4. Pull the shoulder blades down and back 5. Look up, letting the neck extend 6. Take a deep breath in 7. Squeeze the glutes hard (Rusin calls this the most important step) Hold, release, and run it a couple of times. That's the whole thing. Why it works is mostly what it's the opposite of. Sitting flexes the spine, rounds the shoulders, drops the head forward, and shuts the glutes off. Every piece of this position reverses one of those. Rusin's framing is that it resets both the mechanical system and the nervous system in under a minute. The practical result is the same: you stand differently afterward, and the next hour at the desk starts from a better place. The best mobility tool is usually the one you'll actually do at 2pm on a Tuesday. This one takes a minute.
Andy Galpin, PhD70,021 次观看 • 18 天前
The 60 second tool high performers use to keep themselves in peak condition: Performance coach Dan Garner has taught this to Olympic medalists, pro athletes, and military operators. It takes 60 seconds and costs nothing: at the end of the day, before you fall asleep, review what happened. You hit snooze. Because you hit snooze, you skipped breakfast. Because you skipped breakfast the morning felt rushed and you were more stressed than usual. By lunch you were starving, hadn't packed anything, and ate too much of something you wouldn't normally choose. The afternoon brain fog hits. You finally recover around dinner. Look back at that day and the brain fog, the overeating, the stress. All of it started with the snooze. One decision at 6am set the entire day. Ask yourself, "What did I do right, and what did I do wrong?" You can answer that in 60 seconds, and the answer is usually something specific enough to fix tomorrow. It’s especially useful when your schedule breaks. You’re on the road, just had a new kid, or your business is getting busy. Your routine quietly stops happening, and everything downstream of it starts to slip. Instead of just sliding into the next day, use this tool and get back on track.
Andy Galpin, PhD77,596 次观看 • 25 天前
Training smarter doesn't mean lifting less. It means better programming. Physical therapist and strength coach Dr. John Rusin says "longevity" has become a reason for people to back off. Someone hears the word, drops the load, drops the intensity, and slow-rolls into a program that's safe but doesn't do anything. The client stays healthy in the sense that nothing hurts, and loses the exact capacities they hired a coach to protect. Power starts declining somewhere around your early thirties, roughly 1 to 2% a year. Muscle is the same story. If you aren't actively building or keeping it, you're losing it. You still have to lift. What smarter looks like instead: - Train what declines. Muscle, strength, power. If it leaves on its own, it has to be actively kept. - Every block should work now and still hold up years from now. - Keep the challenge, change the dose. The stimulus stays. How it's loaded, sequenced, and recovered from is what gets more careful. - The principles that make someone strong, capable, and resilient don't change with the sport or the age. What changes is how you apply them. Longevity doesn't mean back off. It means be more strategic.
Andy Galpin, PhD30,370 次观看 • 10 天前
Your abs recover faster, so you should train them every day. That's the logic. It sounds reasonable until you actually check whether the premise is true. The "train abs daily" belief rests on two assumptions: that core muscles are predominantly slow-twitch, and that slow-twitch fibers recover faster and therefore need higher frequency. There's something right about the second part. But the first part is where the reasoning starts to fall apart. So here's the question to ask: if you don't actually train your quads every day, why would you assume your abs need it? Autopsy data going back to the early 1990s shows that most core muscles are roughly 50/50 fast- and slow-twitch — almost identical to something like your vastus lateralis (your quads). The muscle you'd never dream of hammering seven days a week. And when you look at the actual literature, there's no evidence that the training principles for your abs should differ from those for your quads.
Andy Galpin, PhD462,808 次观看 • 5 个月前
New Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin episode: How to Think Clearly in an Age of Distraction | Sam Harris 0:00 Introduction & Sam Harris 2:30 Intelligence, Smartness & Wisdom 16:13 Outsourcing Cognition: AI as Tool vs. Competitor 21:19 The Death of Boredom & the Inner Voice 30:07 Mindfulness & Three Paths to Mental Freedom 42:20 Overcoming Resistance to Meditation 1:01:25 Psychedelics vs. Meditation 1:09:01 Emotion, Reason & Handling Criticism 1:28:06 Process, Expertise & the Scientific Crisis 1:50:44 Restoring Trust in Institutions 2:02:29 Consciousness, AI & the Hard Problem 2:16:18 Uploading, Teleportation & the Revenge of the Humanities 2:25:14 Closing Includes paid partnerships.
Andy Galpin, PhD222,117 次观看 • 4 个月前
Nice abs and a strong core are pretty high on most people's wish list. But when it comes to training the core, we somehow throw out the fundamental, science-based exercise principles that govern skeletal muscle exercise adaptations. Think about it. If you wanted bigger quads and I told you we were only doing wall squats, you'd look at me like I was crazy. That's exactly what’s happening with your core when all you’re doing is planks and 3 sets of crunches. The size principle matters here. If you're never generating high levels of force, large portions of your motor units never get recruited — and what doesn't get recruited doesn't get stronger. Fatigue and burning are not the same as force production.
Andy Galpin, PhD254,646 次观看 • 6 个月前
Most people trying to bring up a lagging muscle group reach for more volume, heavier load, or both. Dan Garner's method is neither. He calls it a hypertrophy cluster: - Pick a load you could do for about 12 reps - 6 sets of 6 - 10 seconds of rest between sets The math is the point. You just did 36 reps with a weight you could only have moved 12 times in a row. And because the load is a 12RM instead of something heavy, you can prioritize a muscle without punishing the joint that moves it. That trade-off is usually the tax on bringing a body part up. Here you mostly avoid it.
Andy Galpin, PhD57,340 次观看 • 1 个月前
How to properly do a face pull (and why they’re beneficial): Dr. John Rusin's case for the face pull is that it puts you in the exact opposite position of how you text. Texting is shoulders up and rolled in, upper back rounded, head dropped forward. A face pull done well is upper back actively extended, arms out and rotated back, head up. Every joint reversed at once, under load. The technique: 1. Cable stack with a rope or handles 2. Overhand grip, palms facing down 3. Pull toward the face, rotating from thumbs down to thumbs up as you go 4. Return slowly. The way back, thumbs up to thumbs down, is the part to emphasize The rotation is small. A few degrees each direction, not a big sweeping movement. The mistake Rusin sees everywhere: underhand grip, huge exaggerated rotation at the end, then a long hold, pull, crank the hands back, one-two-three-four. It turns a loadable pulling exercise into a shoulder stretch you can't progress. Overhand, thumbs down to thumbs up, slow on the way back. That's the version worth doing.
Andy Galpin, PhD24,521 次观看 • 16 天前
Many shoulder and knee injuries don't come from a single bad moment. They come from a training program that's been quietly unbalanced for years, usually way more pressing than pulling, until the joint runs out of room to compensate. I learned this one the hard way. Tore my labrum at 14 with no fall, no hit, nothing I could point to. Just woke up one day and it hurt. Years of bench and shoulder press with almost no rows or pull-ups to match it. I didn't get hurt that morning. I'd been building it for years. The Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin episode out now gets into when asymmetries are actually something to worry about and when they're just normal, why the old "under 10% and you're fine" rule is shakier than people think, and how to actually test for and fix the ones that matter.
Andy Galpin, PhD111,120 次观看 • 3 个月前
Most strength programming advice sounds complicated. Percentages, periodization blocks, readiness scores. And some of it is worth knowing. But the framework I always return to for strength, speed, and power has been around for nearly a century: the “3x5” protocol. This is how it works: 3-5 days per week 3-5 exercises per session 3-5 sets per exercise 3-5 reps per set 3-5 minutes of rest between sets The range is not a prescription. At the low end, it’s 3 exercises, 3 sets of 3, 3 days a week; you're looking at roughly 20 minutes. That is the entire program, and it works. At the top end, 5x5 at real weight, you're doing something genuinely brutal that most people shouldn't, and probably can’t sustain for long.
Andy Galpin, PhD71,439 次观看 • 2 个月前
New Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin episode: What Drives Muscle Growth & What Doesn't | Dr. Mike Roberts (Mike Roberts) 0:00 Introduction 3:15 How Muscle Grows 17:39 What Drives Growth: Tension, Stress & Damage 24:08 Responders vs. Non-Responders 29:54 Hormones, Receptors & Genetics 48:01 Cell Signaling, mTOR & Myostatin 56:32 Can Some People Not Grow Muscle? 1:01:34 Training Volume for Hypertrophy 1:08:34 Loads, Reps & Stretch Under Load 1:17:13 Range of Motion, Partials & Hyperplasia 1:31:31 Injury, Unloading & Muscle Banking 1:39:32 Muscle Memory: Detraining & Retraining 1:47:42 Aging, Menopause & Anabolic Resistance 2:01:21 Concurrent Training & the Interference Effect 2:08:54 How to Combine Strength & Cardio 2:24:03 Strength Training & Mitochondria 2:25:21 Closing Thoughts Includes paid partnerships.
Andy Galpin, PhD85,395 次观看 • 2 个月前
Sam Harris makes a point here that's hard to dismiss: most people can't stay undistracted for 30 seconds. Not because they're lazy — because they've never built the capacity. And that's not a trivial problem. If your emotional state is just a byproduct of whatever thought randomly surfaces next, you're not really steering anything. The fix, according to Sam, is learning to notice thoughts as appearances in awareness rather than being identical to them — and mindfulness meditation is the most direct way to start building that skill.
Andy Galpin, PhD104,469 次观看 • 4 个月前
Most people associate carbohydrates primarily with fuel for training, and that is an important part of the story. But they also serve another important role: carbohydrates provide carbon, one of the basic structural elements your body uses to build tissue. Instead of being used only for energy, some of the carbon from glucose can be redirected into amino acids and other molecules involved in adding muscle. Put simply, carbs can help power the workout and provide raw material for the adaptation. I don’t recommend everyone consume carbs during training. Most people already have enough glucose and glycogen available for a typical session. The amount and timing should depend on whether you are trying to maximize performance and recovery or simply complete the workout while managing calories.
Andy Galpin, PhD33,023 次观看 • 1 个月前
New Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin episode: Hardship, Resilience & Competing at the Highest Level My guest is Ken Rideout, a former Wall Street trader turned elite masters marathoner who battled opioid addiction for 10 years before becoming the Masters (50+) Marathon World Champion and winning the Gobi March, a 155-mile self-supported stage race across the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. We discuss how running became his path to sobriety, why suffering is his source of peace rather than a cost to endure, the "clean vs. dirty fuel" framework for motivation, and the mental tactics he uses mid-race to keep going when his mind has already quit. Ken is proof that it's never too late to become someone you're proud of. 0:00 Ken Rideout 2:15 Book Tease and Tears 3:27 Gobi March Race 38:23 Relief After Winning 40:29 Why Choose Suffering 47:30 Drugs Versus Discipline 1:01:10 Quitting And Redemption 1:05:00 Malibu Half Turnaround 1:09:29 Racing Tactics Mindset 1:16:03 Train Fear Compete Fire 1:17:58 Clean Versus Dirty Fuel 1:24:00 Health First Baby Steps 1:27:09 Morning Routine And Discipline 1:32:48 From Sports To Running 1:35:31 Triathlon Lessons And Kona 1:38:16 The Mental Grind Of Suffering 1:40:31 Try Harder Mindset 1:49:06 Comfort With Discomfort 1:52:48 Parenting Toughness And Losing 1:56:41 Setbacks Into Strength 1:58:20 Money Doesn't Fix You 2:00:09 Family Pride And Purpose 2:00:47 Coaching With Edge 2:06:57 Ask For Help 2:09:52 Romanticizing The Suffering 2:15:55 Grit Beats Talent 2:19:38 No Roadmap Just Effort 2:23:54 Marathon Progress And Coaching 2:28:01 First Marathon Fueling Plan 2:31:28 Service First Content 2:32:25 Wrap Up Includes paid partnerships.
Andy Galpin, PhD73,378 次观看 • 5 个月前
Most people think confidence is something you build over time. Stack enough reps, enough wins, enough evidence, and eventually you just... have it. That's not wrong. But it's incomplete. There's good evidence that what you're thinking *in the moment* is a bigger predictor of how you feel and perform than almost any external factor. More than your preparation, your environment, even who's standing next to you. So yes, the reps matter. The experience matters. But if the voice in your head is running a different script during the actual performance, none of that preparation has anywhere to land. Most people evaluate their self-talk as "positive" or "negative." That's the wrong filter. The better question is, does this thought *help me right now*, or does it hurt me? Because sometimes a "negative" thought is actually useful. And sometimes a "positive" thought is just noise dressed up as encouragement. You wouldn't judge a coach by whether they were nice to you. You'd judge them by whether what they said made you better in that moment. So why are you grading your own internal voice on tone instead of function? Your mindset isn't the background music. It's the operating system.
Andy Galpin, PhD75,126 次观看 • 5 个月前
Most people treat self-talk like a pep talk — you tell yourself you've got this, you stay positive, you push through. That advice isn't wrong. It's just incomplete in a way that matters more than most people realize. The research on positive self-talk is real. Encouraging internal dialogue does improve performance. But the field has largely moved away from framing this as "positive vs. negative" because that's not actually the right question. The right question is whether what you're saying to yourself is *effective*. And negative self-talk can be effective. Positive self-talk can be useless. The valence isn't the variable. What actually drives effectiveness is something most self-talk advice never mentions: psychological distance. Here's the thing: you're probably already an expert at this, just not for yourself. Think about a scenario you find stressful — an exam, a tough conversation, a high-pressure week. Now picture a friend in that same situation texting you about it. You know exactly what to say back. You're not scrambling. You're not spiraling. Because you're not inside the emotion of it. That clarity you have for them? That's the same clarity psychological distance gives you for yourself. Your inner voice isn't your best coach. It's your most reactive one.
Andy Galpin, PhD70,643 次观看 • 5 个月前