Huberman Lab
The Correct Way to Build Strength, Endurance & Flexibility at Any Age | Pavel Tsatsouline
10 Feb 2025
Chapter 1: How can strength training benefit people of all ages?
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 Pavel Satsulin. Pavel Satsulin is considered one of the premier strength training and fitness coaches in the world.
He has pioneered the development of various programs to improve strength, which he calls the mother of all fitness. Indeed, today you will learn about strength as a practice, as a skill that can be applied to sports, that can be applied to general fitness, to getting leaner, to getting faster, and to improving your endurance.
As Pavel Satsulin explains, by building one's strength through body weight exercises, free weight exercises, and occasionally machines, one can develop incredible levels of fitness at any age. We discussed some of the spectacular examples of people in their 70s and 80s performing strength feats like 100 pull-ups per week. And we emphasize that one does not have to be seeking hypertrophy.
One does not have to be seeking getting larger muscles in order to get exceptionally strong. I myself these days am focusing primarily on trying to get stronger and build endurance for sake of health and for general life reasons. And because getting really strong turns out to be very beneficial. in every aspect of life. Today, you're going to learn how to get extremely strong.
You can add muscle if you want in parallel with that, or as Pavel Satsulin explains, you can pursue strength and flexibility for their own sake. And there's tremendous value for doing so. So today's discussion pertains to women, to men and frankly, to people of all ages.
I do think that pursuing strength as its own thing, independent of muscle growth, which we hear so much about these days, everyone wants hypertrophy, grow muscle, this and that. Pursuing strength as its own thing is a tremendously valuable endeavor. Today, you're going to learn how from the world's premier expert in this topic. You're in for a very special episode with Pavel Satsulin.
He is truly in a class all his own when it comes to fitness and strength training. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.
In keeping with that theme, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Pavel Satsulin. Pavel Satsulin, welcome.
Andrew, a pleasure to be on your podcast. I respect your work a lot.
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Chapter 2: What are the essential exercises for building strength?
He'd go back to sleep nine times a day throughout the day. Now, that's a mastery of excitation inhibition. You're on switch and off switch. So part of that is sports psychology. There are tools in sports psychology for that. Part of it is training, is whatever you do in the gym, some of your habits and some of your practices. Like for example, okay.
David Riggert is one of the greatest weightlifters of all time. Some people would say the greatest weightlifter of all times. And when he was discovered by Rudolf Pluckfelder, his coach, who was another Olympic champion, world champion, one of the things that the coach was impressed with is that Riggert would do his set, and then after his set, he would just go completely limp, like a rag.
And he was very impressed with that. Later, in Riggard's career, when he was a world champion already, in the United States, so there's an American coach who writes how he saw him in Columbus, Ohio, or Cleveland, Ohio, competing back in the 70s. He was lying and smoking a cigarette. And then he gets up, he snatches 60 kilos, like 135 pounds or something once.
Then he just picks up something else equally trivial, and then he goes and does his first attempts and then ends up with superior performance. At a different time... Riggert bet a box of cognac that he would snatch 90% of his max, which his max was probably around 370 or something. So he was able to snatch 90% of that, no warmup whatsoever. And so this is this ability of that incredible control.
So part of it is whatever you're born with, part of it is sports psychology techniques, but part of it is developing some habits. As soon as you're done with your lift, just power down. Incidentally, after training, a strength athlete ought to perform a cool down.
And Russians did some numbers on power lifters and they found that the top power lifters, they spend time and cool down and the guys who are not so good, they don't. Because not only it just allows you to bring your excitation down, get your parasympathetic, get you to start recovering. So you do some easy stretching, you do some meditating, you do some breathing exercises, whatever you do.
But even after each set, so you put up that heavy deadlifter squat and you just immediately come down, And then you walk around and you chill. So you just try to tune your switch so much. Breathing exercises come in handy for that. There are breathing exercises to increase your excitation.
There are breathing exercises that are able to very much put you in a state of inhibition, very deep inhibition even. Some of them are hypercapnic, some are hypoxic, which means you try to increase carbon dioxide or you're trying to decrease oxygen. There are some very sophisticated yet really quite simple techniques that can help you do that.
I love this concept of just learning to push on the accelerator, push on the brake, and to play with disinhibition as a First person to come on this podcast, even among the neuroscientists I've spoken with, to talk about disinhibition. Really? Thank you for bringing that up.
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