Dr. Duncan French: How to Exercise for Strength Gains & Hormone Optimization

Huberman Lab

Scicomm Media

Science, Health & Fitness, Life Sciences

4.8 • 26.2K Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2021

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, I talk to Dr. Duncan French, Ph.D., the Vice President of Performance at the UFC Performance Institute and a world-class performance specialist. We discuss specific resistance (weight) training regimens for increasing testosterone in men and women and how to vary mechanical loads and rest between sets and workouts to optimize hormone output and training results. We also discuss how stress-induced "catecholamines" can increase testosterone or decrease it, depending on duration and mindset. And we discuss specific cold- and heat- therapies for increasing resilience, reducing inflammation, heat shock proteins and more. We discuss nutrition for training and how to match nutrition to training goals and metabolic flexibility. We discuss mental focus and how long to train for skill development. Finally, we discuss how mixed martial arts and the UFC Performance Institute are a template for exploring human performance more generally. This episode is intended for anyone interested in athletic and mental performance: athletes, students, and recreational exercisers and includes both science and many practical tools people can apply in their own training. For the full show notes, visit hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1 (Athletic Greens): https://athleticgreens.com/huberman InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/huberman Thesis: https://takethesis.com/huberman Supplements from Momentous https://www.livemomentous.com/huberman Timestamps (00:00:00) Dr. Duncan French (00:02:27) Sponsors (00:05:44) Duncan’s Background in Exercise Science (00:11:45) How Certain Exercises Increase Testosterone (00:16:22) What Kind of Training Increases Testosterone & Growth Hormone? (00:20:19) Intensity: Mechanical Load; Volume: Metabolic Load; Inter-set Rest Periods (00:25:25) Training Frequency & Combining Workout Goals (00:29:35) How Stress Can Increase or Decrease Testosterone (00:36:55) Using Cold Exposure for Mindset, Anti-Inflammation, Muscle-Growth (00:46:55) Skill Development (00:50:05) Why Hard Exercise Creates Brain Fog: Role of Nutrition (00:53:55) Low-Carbohydrate Versus All-Macronutrient Diets on Performance (00:56:15) Ketones & Brain Energy, Offsetting Brain Injury; Spiking Glucose During Ketosis (00:59:13) Metabolic Efficiency, Matching Nutrition to Training, “Needs Based Eating” (01:05:00) Duncan’s Work with Olympic Athletes, NCAA, UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) (01:08:00) Why UFC & MMA (Mixed-Martial Arts) Are So Valuable for Advancing Performance (01:12:40) Voluntarily Switching Between Different States of Arousal (01:14:30) Heat, Getting Better at Sweating, Heat Shock Proteins, Sauna (01:20:12) Using Rotating 12-Week Training Programs; Logging Objective & Subjective Data (01:24:07) Surprising & Unknown Aspects of The UFC and UFC Performance Institute (01:27:45) Conclusions, Zero-Cost Support, Sponsors, Supplements, Instagram Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac Disclaimer

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
0:08.9	I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and
0:12.4	Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Duncan French as my guest on the Huberman Lab podcast.
0:20.9	Dr. French is the vice president of performance at the UFC Performance Institute
0:25.3	and he has over 20 years of experience working with elite professional and Olympic athletes.
0:31.1	Prior to joining the UFC, French was the director of performance science at the University of Notre Dame.
0:36.0	And he has many many quality peer-reviewed studies to his name, exploring for instance,
0:41.6	how the particular order of exercise, whether or not one performs endurance exercise prior to resistance training or vice versa,
0:49.0	how that impacts performance of various movements and endurance training protocols,
0:54.0	as well as the impact on hormones such as testosterone, estrogen, and some of the stress hormones such as cortisol.
1:00.7	He's also done fascinating work exploring how neurotransmitters, things like dopamine and epinephrine, also called adrenaline, can impact hormones and our hormones can impact neurotransmitter release.
1:12.8	What's particularly unique about Dr. French's work is that he's figured out specific training protocols that can maximize, for instance,
1:20.6	testosterone output or reduce stress hormone output in order to maximize the effects of training in the short term and in the long term.
1:30.5	So today you're going to learn a lot of protocols whether or not you're into resistance training or endurance training.
1:35.7	You will learn, for instance, how to regulate the duration of your training and the type of training that you do in order to get the maximum benefit from that training over time.
1:45.5	So whether or not you are somebody who just exercises recreationally for your health, whether or not you're an amateur or professional athlete,
1:53.1	or whether or not you're just trying to maximize your health through the use of endurance and or resistance training.
1:58.7	Today's discussion will have a wealth of takeaways for you.
2:02.4	There are only a handful of people working at the intersection of elite performance, mechanistic science,
2:08.5	and that can do so in a way that leads to direct immediately applicable protocols that anybody can benefit from.
2:15.9	Dr. French also provides some incredibly important insights about the direction that sport and exercise are taking in the world today
2:23.6	and their applications towards performance and health.
	...

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