Dr. Andy Galpin

If you think about that in general context, it's going to keep you pretty safe and it's going to allow you to move well.

Lastly, then, is what I call the three to five rule.

So the three to five rule applies to strength, power, and speed.

What it roughly means is this, choose three to five exercises, do three to five repetitions for three to five sets, rest for three to five minutes in between each set, and repeat that three to five times per week.

So at the lowest level, this could mean three sets of three repetitions, three days a week of three exercises.

This would be a pretty low volume, but because of that, that would allow you to go really, really heavy or to really high intensity.

You're going to have a lot of recovery, not going to stimulate a lot of muscle growth, won't stimulate hardly any muscular endurance, but could be used if you're trying to maximize the recoverability or the strength aspect.

Going higher on that spectrum, say five sets of five of five exercises.

five days a week, would get closer to the hypertrophy or muscle growth end of the spectrum, would give you a little bit more muscular endurance, and would be a lot more volume for those individuals who are higher training status.

For muscular endurance, you can add any number of things, more repetitions per set, more sets, less recovery in between sets, or anything else like that.

Training to a little bit of fatigue is a pretty easy way to think about muscular endurance.

Of course, exercise science is an entire scientific field.

It gets far more complicated than that, but that is a rough idea of how to intervene to change the quality of contraction in which your muscles can go through.

So to wrap everything up, today we talked a lot about skeletal muscle.

We went over how it actually works, what it's made of, why, in my opinion, it is the most important organ in the entire body and deserves more credit and attention.

We talked about why you want to make sure that it is functioning at the highest level possible.

This means both a quality of muscle functionality, contractile properties, how much force it can produce, how fast it is, and other things like that, as well as the quantity of it, how much muscle you have in general.

We went into a little bit of the microanatomy, so the difference between fast-twitch fibers and slow-twitch fibers, and why it's important that you pay particular attention to high-force activities in order to preserve those fast-twitch fibers, regardless of whether or not you're an athlete or a person interested just in longevity and overall wellness.

So from there, we talked about the three I's, the first being investigate, so identifying whether or not you have enough muscle and how it's functioning in terms of power and speed and so on.

The next I, of course, was interpretation.