Essentials: How to Assess & Improve All Aspects of Your Fitness | Dr. Andy Galpin

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Doctor. Andy Galpin. Doctor, Professor Andy Galpin, super excited to have you here. You're such an immense treasure trove of information on physical training and optimizing for specific goals and outcomes. How should I, or anyone else for that matter, think about their level of fitness in terms of really assessing whether or not I'm as fit as I could be and should be, both for sake of health and performance. When it comes to exercise, people generally have two major goals in mind. Goal number one is achieving some sort of appearance, right? This is I want to be big, or I want to not be too big, or I want to be lean. There is an aesthetic component to almost everybody. They want to look a certain way or not look a certain way. The other one is functionality. So I want to be able to perform a certain way. Now, again, that definition differs per person. So I want to be better at strength. I want to be better at mobility. I want to be able to have energy throughout the day, whatever it is. So there's some sort of appeal to aesthetic, and there's some sort of appeal to functionality. So within both of those categories, we want to be in a position where we can understand where do I need to go with my exercise training so that I can be as fit and as healthy and achieve these goals that I want now, as well as be in a position where I can maintain them for a long period of time. So this blends both immediate goals. So you're just interested in squatting a lot of weight. Say you're interested in running a five ks time the best you want. It doesn't matter. It blends that with the desire to have a long wellness span, to be fit throughout life, to achieve all those things for as long as possible. So then the question kind of comes back to saying, well, how do I know which area I need to focus on the most? And why am I not achieving these goals, or how can I get there more effectively? And if we look at the big picture, we have to understand that there are several major components to physical fitness that are going to be required in all of these categories. And to achieve that, there are a handful of components that have to happen. So what I'd love to do today is, over the course of our discussion, is hit exactly what those concepts are, and then cover a whole bunch of different methods, and we could do that for hours. But we'll cover …