Dr. Andy Galpin

It can isometrically hold in place.

And so this is really something you don't have cognitive control over.

It's the stuff that regulates kind of your background, physiology, digestion, things like that.

Cardiac tissue, again, when I say that, think the heart.

And skeletal muscle, think everything else.

So the muscles you can actively control, whether they be small muscles like in your fingers, eyes, or toes, large muscles like your hamstrings or glutes, spinal erectors, and things like that.

So kind of everything else is a skeletal muscle.

Now, there's a lot of similarities between skeletal and cardiac muscle, which I'll talk about a little bit later.

But there's also some major differences, and that actually is going to explain a lot about how you need to approach these, interpret, diagnose, and then actually train these things differently.

And so I didn't appreciate that earlier in my career.

I kind of gave all of the credit to skeletal muscle and didn't understand how important and vital something like my respiratory rate is in terms of performance, as well as tracking and monitoring ongoing progress.

And then particularly,

Signs of things like non-functional overreaching or overtraining or general fatigue.

So I hope that suffices as a small apology for all of you heart experts and aficionados out there.

Okay, so let me wind the story back just a little bit so I can set the stage appropriately and you'll understand why I felt the way I did.

Coming out of high school, I knew I was interested in sport performance.

And so I actually wanted to go to college to learn more about the physiology and science of performance.

But those programs really didn't exist.

And so I remember being taken on recruiting visits and they would ask kind of about your academic interests.

And I would say that and they'd say, well, we have an athletic training program, which is really injury prevention and treatment and management and stuff like that.