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Chapter 1: What foundational principles of longevity are introduced?
Longevity ultimately is being able to maintain function as you age. Because again, it's not the number of years, but the quality of the years. So all muscles in your body serve a function. You're training these muscles to get stronger and you're training your balance. These are all skills that can be learned and improved. They're all trainable. If it's trainable, it's fixable.
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Jeff Cavaliere. Jeff Cavaliere is a master of science in physical therapy and a certified strength and conditioning specialist.
He is considered one of the world's foremost experts in training for both men and women to increase the strength and size of their muscles, their overall health and longevity.
Today, we discuss some of the things that are not often discussed and considered the small things, but that are actually the big things, because they allow you to do the big things for your health and fitness and longevity decade after decade after decade, and to do so pain-free and while making continual progress.
We also discuss the typical big things, the specific multi-joint exercises and cardio workouts that create the greatest results.
Today, you'll learn some simple exercises that will strengthen and protect your back, your shoulders, even improve your foot strength, which most people don't think about, but turns out to be foundational for everything, your pressing and pulling movements, leg training, and your cardio, and that will allow you to live your daily life with vigor and ease at any age.
I must say, I'm a longtime fan of Jeff's work, which he's been publishing to YouTube and elsewhere as AthleanX. As you'll soon realize from today's episode, Jeff is far more than just another fitness trainer.
He has deep knowledge of human physiology and kinesiology, and he really understands that everybody's situation and body is different and thus needs different tools to address and solve their specific problems and to achieve their desired results.
I should also mention that Jeff and I went to the legendary Gold's Gym in Venice, California, where he took me through an arm workout, so biceps and triceps and forearms, and he showed me what has become his kind of signature move, which is face pulls, which are essential for improving your posture, for your rear delts, and for general stability of the shoulders.
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Chapter 2: How can we strengthen and protect our lower back?
Another thing I like to do is... we call it a suitcase lunge, right? So you do a lunge where you offset the weight on one side. So you carry it in the, if I'm going to lunge forward, I put it on the opposite leg, right? Hold on the opposite side. What that's going to theoretically do is obviously when I lunge forward, I'm going to want to fall to the side of the weight.
Picture having even like a 50 pound weight or a 60 pound weight in your hand. It's going to want to go that direction. In this lunge position, if I can straighten myself out, and keep my torso rigidly in place the whole time, then I can really strengthen that glute medius on the opposite side. And what's cool about that is it's also done in conjunction with a sagittal plane lunge.
So now I'm starting to train in multiple dimensions and planes at one time. So a lunge in this direction, suitcase carry offset, only one dumbbell, not on the other side, obviously. You're going to get that desire for the body to fall towards the side of the offset weight. And again, that starts to shift the pelvis up. The only way we'll keep it down is by keeping the hip in, abducted, and level.
And that pelvis stays level. So we'll do that with a lot of our athletes and work up to some pretty heavy weights there too. And again, it is a kill two birds with one stone type exercise because you still get the benefits of the lunge, which I love. as an exercise.
So let's say somebody is going to do some hip slide up the wall and or reverse hypers if they're lucky enough to have a gym with a reverse hyper machine or even just a high bench or a hyperextension machine. Right, classic hyperextensions. You just go face inward. Yeah, so the upper body moves for classic hyper heels.
Which I like too, by the way. That's more direct low back strengthening. Mm-hmm.
which is always good like we can always strengthen our low backs so those muscles need to be strengthened but again i i would say more often the time at times the source of the low back pain is coming from the muscles but beneath them that are weak chronically weak like the glutes okay so reverse hypers the hip sliding up the wall approach maybe the dog leash uh with weight between um legs doesn't have to be a dog leash folks but you get the idea to try and minimize the hip sway
Should those be done at the end of a lower body workout when the lower back and glutes are partially fatigued or very fatigued or done separately at a time when they're really fresh?
Two times. I think you could do them on a dedicated day at a dedicated time. So I approach my ab training as ab training and I always keep it separate. I just like to focus on, I'm going to do 5 to 10 minutes of core strengthening right now, here and now, separate from my workout. Because I don't want it to be an afterthought.
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Chapter 3: What small exercises can enhance overall strength and prevent injury?
Essentially the muscles, the flexors, the deep flexors of the forearm that run down into the fingers, It's actually the ring and fifth finger. So the fourth and fifth finger that tend to be the weakest and least resilient to that kind of stress.
If you're gripping through there and that bar gets deep into the fingers, or if you do it where you're doing a curl, even if the bar sits too deep into your hand there and you try to curl heavy. To the ends of your fingers. To the ends of your fingers, yeah. And not into the actual meat of your hand. It's just a lot of strain, more than that muscle's really built for to handle.
And those tendons get a little bit strained and it can immediately feel like a knife in the elbow feel. And it takes a long time to go away. Because how many other exercises do you do where you're gripping and requiring the grip to be in place to do that? Now, if you want to intentionally do this, you can do it intentionally. Let's say a...
an underhand lat pulldown, like they call it a hook grip. Because what people want to discourage people from doing is pulling down too much with the bar, causing too much forearm involvement in whatever back exercise I'm trying to do. But in that case, you're really trying to hook through the stronger fingers of the index finger, middle finger, and even just
you're getting a little bit of assistance on the ring finger, but you're really trying to hook through there. All four fingers might be on the bar, but most of the force is being held through there. And you're still pulling down a lot through your lats to pull that bar down. So it's not like you're just letting it hold all the weight.
But that little hook grip is meant to discourage any meaningful wrist flexion that would take over and take away some of the work of the lats. But if you've got a history of elbow issues, You don't need to use that grip. Like that's just, it's just not worth it. The extra benefit of a little extra form involvement may not be worth it for you.
But for people who find that they don't have elbow issues and they want to get a little bit of that, you can do it in an intentional way, but you really have to kind of steer away from making these fingers do the bulk of the work. How did you figure that out? by having that issue multiple times.
Yeah, I mean, I was just, again, you know, just blown away. It was like, okay, I've got this inner elbow pain and I'm like curling and I'm doing my tricep work and my back work and I'm wondering, okay, what's wrong with my elbows? And, you know, I'm at that time, you know, a young guy, I'm like, what's going on? And then it makes perfect sense.
As you pointed out, you know, ring finger, pinky finger are taking too much of the load near the tips of the fingers. force myself to put the bar or the dumbbell in the meat of my hand.
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Chapter 4: What are the benefits of neck training for posture and injury prevention?
Outside of the gym, got rear-ended in a car I had just bought. My first car, this was many years ago, 2005 CRV. I'm like, driving my first new car. I'd driven used cars before. Parked at the light, or stopped at the light, rather, and all of a sudden, just right. Someone just ran into me.
Chapter 5: How can women strengthen their neck without increasing size?
Person next to me ended up with some pretty bad whiplash and back pain. I was a little sore, but nothing really. And, you know, it's not a controlled experiment, but I credit that. I've been training my neck. Even back then, I learned how to do it properly from you and your video, and we will definitely provide a link to it. I talk about this nonstop. This video is so valuable.
You don't need any special equipment, some standard plates and a towel, but...
this neck thing it's not just for fighters it's your upper spine posturally i feel like people don't like nowadays everyone's posture is so terrible posturally it makes your default posture better it's something we're always all working on but neck training for men and women i think men probably would be okay with having a most of them would be like oh cool i'll get a slightly bigger neck women probably want to avoid that is there is there a way that women
or men, but tends to be women who want to have a great posture, a strong neck, but they want to maintain that kind of elegant neck. They don't want a thicker neck. Is there a way that they can strengthen the neck muscles and achieve that without thickening the neck?
Yeah, I think that women would be less resistant to the idea of having a stronger neck. I think as long as we weren't talking about building massive traps along with it, right? And I think that they think neck and traps because they do feed into each other.
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Chapter 6: What role does cardio play in fat loss and overall health?
The reason why men who train their neck tend to have a better or much thicker look to their neck, better for men, is that...
they're also in conjunction likely training their traps either directly or indirectly through some of the other movements to do it in a heavy way women who tend to train their neck directly and not focused on building their traps at the same time they're just going to have a stronger neck because they're not necessarily the biggest muscles in here that that grow substantially and again when you look at the proportional growth in muscles from men and women
there's already a difference in how big these muscles will grow, male versus female. But now in an area where the muscles themselves don't grow to astronomically large proportions, you really aren't going to get that much size in the neck. And I think women are chronically under-trained when it comes to the neck. I can't tell you how often that you'll prescribe some kind of an ab routine and
I'm not even thinking about the repercussions on the neck, because for me, it's like it's no strain at all. But a lot of people will complain, and most often it's women, that just doing the crunch, because I don't want them holding on to their neck and cranking on their neck during a crunch. They'll say, my neck is hurting. I can't do that. I can't do that routine.
It's only hurting because of fatigue, not because their neck is being held in one position and their fingers are just basically touching back there to just keep them away from cranking. And it's also- That's how you want them, people doing crunches, not cranking, not pushing that.
Yeah. So just touching the back of their head very lightly.
Just touching the back of your head, And what you're getting there also is a little extra weight. The way your arms back there is going to provide a little bit of extra resistance on a basic crunch. But it's also leaving the neck unsupported because so often people are used to holding the entire weight of their head.
And then what happens is they start to fatigue and they're at, here we go again, what is the body's natural compensation? They know that the eyes have to get up When they're doing a crunch, the eyes have to raise up. So what do they do?
They just pull on the head and the eyes come up and they're not doing any more work for their abs, but they've gotten to where they thought they were supposed to be. Natural compensation gone wrong. That's not what we want to do. So when women are encouraged to do it, quote unquote, right, and don't pull on your neck, they don't have the strength in their anterior neck to do that.
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Chapter 7: How can real-life constraints affect training frequency and effectiveness?
Turn on to your stomach at that point, if you like. Put the weight on the back of your head. And then do the same thing. Retract first. Make sure you've got the stable neck. Chin closer to your Adam's apple. Chin closer to that. Good way to talk about it. And then you basically allow your head to sink down forward off the edge of the bench.
And then you're going to extend your neck back up again to neutral, or in this case, a little bit beyond into a little bit of extension. And then you go to your side. And the same deal. You allow your head to just bend a little bit laterally, like ear towards the shoulder. but you're laying on the bench, you do the same thing.
Place the weight on top of the opposite side of your head, and then you're going to lift up against that weight. These are just supposed to be done very slow, very controlled. There's nothing crazy, explosive about these. You're just supposed to feel those muscles.
And trust me, if you have not done these, you start with one round of this and then wait until tomorrow because you don't want to do too much because I guarantee you're going to be sore. Back in the day when I played football, You didn't realize how weak your neck could get in an off season until you put the helmet on for the first time.
And just one practice with the helmet on, and you're controlling all that extra weight of the helmet dynamically, and the neck would be sore for two, three days. We had to accommodate even to the weight of the helmet. So with neck training, it's a long, slow process. You just start very light. You start fast. submaximal, and you start building up your strength.
And then when you talk about a crunch, that's a nothing exercise for maintaining stability and control. When you get into situations like you, where you have accidents and car accidents, you become not only just resilient, but potentially life-saving, you know, by having a stronger neck.
you know, could highlight bold and, you know, and underline this and send it out as far as I can, the neck stuff, men and women, you will be positively amazed at the transformations. Your pressing lifts will get stronger. Your pulling lifts will get stronger. You get stronger.
Aesthetically for guys, you know, I mentioned this in the video yesterday, but I'll say it again, that a lot of guys who work to widen their shoulders, if their neck strength isn't coming up, proportionally. It looks like they got the wrong head on that body. It looks crazy. Guys, you look ridiculous, especially in street clothes.
I'm not saying you need a giant neck, but there's a proportion thing there that's important if you care about that sort of thing. As I say this, I know that most people won't take the time to do it because it looks awkward. It's a tiny play.
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