Dr. Andy Galpin

I've come since to learn that that was the wrong approach.

And I'll tell you more why about even if you're into those types of activities, you should care deeply about the functionality of your heart and how that can absolutely improve your performance, even in situations and scenarios like that.

Okay, so as a quick reminder here, remember your body has three main types of muscles, smooth, cardiac, and skeletal.

Now, there's a number of structural and functional differences between these three.

And just very quickly, smooth muscle lacks contractile properties.

And so some of the things we're going to get into later, the microanatomy of smooth muscle, it doesn't have.

And so it lacks the ability, again, to contract.

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.