How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan

Andrew Huberman:
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 Stuart McMillan. Stu McMillan is one of the world's most sought-after coaches for teaching people how to get stronger, run faster, be more powerful, and healthier. Today, we talk about how to do that using what, for most people, might seem like a rather unconventional set of methods, but for any serious track athlete will be very familiar, because they do it almost every day, and that's skipping and striding. You heard right. As you'll soon learn, skipping, what most of us think of as a kid's activity, is actually one of the best plyometric activities that we can all do at any age to build more power, speed, coordination, and to improve our muscle, fascial, and nervous system function. Stu McMillan has coached over 70 Olympians across nine Olympic Games, and he has coached the players and coaches of every major professional sport. He explains how skipping and something called striding are zero-cost activities that we all can and should include in our weekly fitness routine. They not only will have you moving better and having better posture in all your activities, but they also take minimal time, and they can help protect you against injuries and improve your longevity. We also talk about the best strides for running at any speed. So if you're into jogging or sprinting, we talk about all the best ways to do that. We talk about the sport of track, which both Stu and I happen to love, and why certain groups of people excel in different sports due to genetic and environmental reasons. We also have a very direct and open conversation about the use of performance-enhancing tools in the athletic and wellness worlds. This is a really special episode because if you like or if you don't like things like running, swimming, cycling, or other activities such as weight training or yoga, there's going to be a lot to take away from it that you can apply. Stu McMillan is a true savant of coaching how best to move and how to improve your health. It was an honor and privilege to host him and to learn from him. I'm sure you'll agree. 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 Stu McMillan. Stu McMillan, welcome.

Stuart McMillan:
Thank you. Great to be here.

Andrew Huberman:
We go back a little ways.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And you're the guy that they call in to make athletes or pretty much anybody faster, stronger, healthier, and more powerful, and who wouldn't want that-

Stuart McMillan:
Exactly

Andrew Huberman:
... athletes or otherwise. Let's start by talking about running.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
I think for a lot of people, they hear running and they're like, "Oh, no. Running hurts. Running's painful." But I think most people when they think about running, they think about jogging. They think about running a distance longer than a mile. But even for some people, running a mile is a painful thought, let alone a practice. How should we think about running and sprinting in particular? Because when we grow up, we learn to crawl-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... walk, run.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And kids naturally want to run fast at some point, fast for them. What is it about running that for you is such an enchanting thing? Why do you think that every four years or so, depending on when they're scheduling the Olympics, everyone in this country gets fascinated with who's fastest?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Who's fastest in the world? And then they tend to put track and field aside for a bit, but people can jump, they can swim, they can do all these things. But running is so fundamental to being human. What are your thoughts on running generally? And let's break it up into distances. Why do you love seeing people run fast? Why have you devoted yourself in part to helping people run faster and faster?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, there's a lot in that. First, running fast for me is the ultimate human activity. The fastest human on the planet is the fastest human on the planet, where potentially maybe the best football player is probably not the best football player. The best soccer player is probably not the best soccer player. There might be someone down in Argentina who could be a better NFL linebacker than choose your All-Pro linebacker right now, where sprinting, everybody sprints, as you said. We all run when we're kids, and we figure out, or our teachers figure out, or our coaches figure out, "Well, Andrew, you're a sprinter, so you're going to sprint. Stu, you're a middle distance, so you go and do that." And over the course of time, we kind of figure out whether we're good or not. And the sprinters, the truly elite sprinters, end up being the truly elite sprinters when they are 20, 25, 30 years old. That's what you do. You don't move into something else if you are a super elite sprinter. So I think that's part of it is that for me. It is really truly the tip of the spear in human performance. The fastest person on the planet is the fastest person on the planet. Usain Bolt is the world record holder, and he is the fastest person who's ever ran. There's probably not somebody else who in the Congo somewhere, in Jamaica, that could've been faster than Usain, because they would've displayed themselves at some point. So for me, that is it. And I started coaching kind of 1984. I've been coaching for a long, long time. And I started coaching professional in 1992, and I've coached many sports, many activities, many tasks, and I enjoy most of them. But for me, it is that pinnacle, that true tip of the spear, that interests me the most, and that you only get from sprinting. If you're an NFL football player, most likely you're playing every game at about 80% of your best. If you were 80% of your best and you got onto the 100-meter start line Forget about it. If you're less than 99.9% of your best, forget about it. That's why I truly love the sprinting events so much. And zoomed out from that a little bit, I started off as a strength and conditioning coach. So for me, it was more about the power, the strength, and the speed. It was all of that. And I coached bobsled for a long time, and I really, really enjoyed bobsled because these guys are massive, they're really strong, and they're really fast. So that, for me, was really appealing, and that fed my obsession about this peak human performance for a long time, until I had the opportunity to actually go and work with super elite sprinters. And now I can't do anything other than that. I really can't. It's fascinating to me.

Andrew Huberman:
How do we compare the fastest person in the 100 meters versus the 200 versus the 400? So for you, is it coaching the 100 that's the most exciting, or the 200, or the 400?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, it's a good question. I actually prefer coaching the 200 for a couple of reasons. There's a little bit of tactics in the 200, or there's more tactics than there are in the 100. In the 100, the fastest person is going to win. In the 200, depending on how you tactically set up your race, because it's not an all-out sprint. You can't run as fast as you can for 20 seconds, whereas 100 meters, you can run as fast as you can for 10 to 11 seconds. It's all out right from the start. With the 200, you have to kind of either push out really, really hard and then smooth it out and then try to finish strong, or you start off a little bit easier and you finish strong, or you just go out all out and you're just going to fade and see if you can stay ahead. So that tactical element for that race for me is really interesting. So then you're combining the capacity, the actual ability to run fast and be super incredibly fast, high velocities, with the tactical component. So it's then you're thinking about, okay, if my athlete's in lane six, who's in lane seven? Who's in lane eight? How are we going to determine how we run based upon what the other racers are going to do? So for me, it's the 200. That's not to say I don't love the 100.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
The 100 for me is the one that if I'm just a fan, that's the one that I'm paying attention to the most.

Andrew Huberman:
And every four years, people become obsessed with it.

Stuart McMillan:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
That person is generally the winner, is characterized as the fastest person on the planet.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Because like you said, it's all out.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And at the same time, I think most people can't really conceive in a concrete way what sprinting 100 meters really is about.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And the world record is held by-

Stuart McMillan:
Usain Bolt.

Andrew Huberman:
And the record is somewhere-

Stuart McMillan:
9.58 seconds.

Andrew Huberman:
And yesterday you told me that means it's about 40 strides to cover 100 meters.

Stuart McMillan:
For Usain, it was 40 steps. Correct. Yeah. For many other elite sprinters, it's somewhere between 40 and 45 in the men, and somewhere between sort of 47 and 52 for the women.

Andrew Huberman:
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Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You said, "That kid right there, he's got it."

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
What was it about the way he was running? Kid probably was eighth or ninth grade. Took one run away from us-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... and you said, "That kid's a sprinter."

Stuart McMillan:
Okay, yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
What was it? Was it his speed? Was it the form? What was it?

Stuart McMillan:
First of all, it was not the form. Because most of those kids their-

Andrew Huberman:
Okay

Stuart McMillan:
... limbs are going all over the place, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Stuart McMillan:
It's how they interact with the ground, and it's this qualitative component that is really hard to define. If you watch a elite boxer hit a heavy bag, there's a pop sound to it. Pop, pop, pop, pop. And it's the same with elite sprinters. Or not even elite sprinters, but anybody who's fast and effective and efficient at applying force against an object. And you see that as young as we saw yesterday with what? 12, 13, 14-year-olds, right? Some of them are just thudding on the ground and just pushing back and kind of like Rob, your producer. But

Andrew Huberman:
Which by the way, folks, we were taking a couple of jabs at Rob. He's in the room with us now, although off-camera. Rob has run multiple triathlons. He's an incredibly impressive athlete and, as an incredibly impressive athlete, we can jab at him every now and again.

Stuart McMillan:
100%. But this one kid, he was far more efficient on the ground than everyone else. It was just pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, and you could hear it. And I hear it. Generally, I hear it before I see it. And that, I think, is actually what I heard first, and I looked around and said, "Oh, that's the kid. He's a sprinter." And then you just kind of look at his form, and it just looks better. There's just a quality to that that you don't see with these other kids, and even though limbs are going all over the place, and head is going from side to side, and his feet are going all over the place, and hands are flapping like wings. There's just a fluidity. Even with him looking like that, he just does doing it much more coordinated and fluid than everyone else, who it looked like they were trying hard. And with him, it didn't look like he was trying hard.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Stuart McMillan:
And typically, that is, by the way, the differentiator between all elite and sub-elite athletes, regardless of the sport. The best athletes are always the ones that make it look the easiest, and that kid just made it look easier than everyone else.

Andrew Huberman:
Could you send a kid like that out for a 400-meter run and then meet him at the line and say, "You know what? You're meant to run the 200," or "You're meant to run the 100"? Is it possible to tell whether or not somebody is meant for a particular distance based on how they do in a slightly different distance?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, especially not at that age.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Stuart McMillan:
At that age, you want him to be doing or her to be doing as many different events as possible.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
And let's just trial them all. I don't think they should even, at that age, at 12, 13, 14, say, "You're a sprinter. You're a sprinter, and you're a jumper."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
"And maybe we'll do some middle distance, and we'll do some relays, and then we can do a couple throws as well."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
"And see which one that you're kind of enjoying the most," number one, and then number two, "What are you actually showing some expertise towards?" And hopefully, those two things match.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
And then you can start looking at specializing for the kind of event group a little bit later. And that comes a lot later than what many people outside of track and field think. Even with most NCAA Division I college programs are pretty elite. That's some high-performing athletes. And many of those sprinters do the one, the two, the four, all the relays, and often your best sprinters are also your best jumpers. So you might have your 100-meter specialist also do the long jump and the triple jump. And it won't be until maybe the second or the third or fourth year of college, or maybe even their first year as a pro, where they start actually doing just the one or two events.

Andrew Huberman:
I ran cross country as a senior in high school. I've been running consistently since I was 16, three times a week. I don't consider myself even a runner. I just run for the pleasure of it.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
A long run, a medium run, and a short run. But perhaps it was the movies about Steve Prefontaine, of which there were two. I think one's called "Prefontaine" and the other one's called "Without Limits"-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... that are quite good, that got me excited about track.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And then I started going up to University of Oregon and attending track meets as a fan.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But there's this dramatized moment about Pre, as they called him, and Bowerman, the coach up at in Eugene, where allegedly, purportedly, Pre wants to run the mile because everyone in the country at that time was obsessed with who's the fastest miler. But Bowerman says to him, "No, you're a 5,000 runner. You're going to run the three-mile." And he said, "No one cares about the 5,000." He said, "You're going to make them care." And it turned out to be the right fit.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
The 5,000 was the right event for him. So that was a moment where a coach could identify, you could be a great miler, but you'll be a spectacular 5,000 runner.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Is that based on sort of times and splits and recovery and all that, or is there actually a body type and a gait that is best? Because one of my favorite things to find on social media I promise this is not a digression, is where they'll set out a race, an animated race between a rabbit, a cheetah, an elephant, a human. It's very interesting to see which animals are fastest over which distances.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
They fall out over different distances.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And most people, perhaps, are surprised to find that the animal that wins the long, long, long, longest distance and beats all the other species is us.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. The human.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? So we're not good in the sprint compared to the cheetah, but we are oh so good at the marathon and ultramarathon compared to the cheetah or any other animal.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So do you think it's something special about the gait, the personality, times in various events? I mean, what funnels somebody's understanding of themselves or an athlete to say, "You're meant to do this"?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. I think you nailed it at the end. Their understanding of themselves, I think, is a really important part of it. We find ourselves through movement, and we fall in love with whatever it is because that's what we do, and we tend to do it really well. So I coached a British sprinter for a long time. Her name is Jodie Williams. I coached her for about a decade, starting in 2015. She just retired at the end of last season. She went when she was young, so between, I think, the ages of 13 and 17, she won 150 straight races in the 100 and the 200. Never lost. Was the best at every single age group all over the world for five years. Finally lost, and did not really transition into being an elite 100 meter, 200 meter sprinter. But this was her identity. She'd always been the fastest person. So when I started coaching her in 2015, '16, when she was 22, that was what she did. She was a 100, 200 meter girl. But she wasn't elite. She wasn't world-class. And we kept on pushing her towards the 100 and 200 because this was what she saw herself as, and me external to that, what I saw her as as well, and everyone else expected from her because she was the best in the world for so long. And a funny thing happened sort of five years into that. We did a relay, a four-by-four, early season at Arizona State University, and she ran really fast in this four-by-four relay. And she enjoyed it. And she didn't enjoy getting beat in the 100 and the 200 anymore. And she said, "Hmm. Maybe I can do the 400." And in the 2019 World Championships in Doha, she made the British team in the 200. Didn't do very well, but ran the relay, ran the four-by-four, and ran the fastest split of all the countries. She ran 49.4 on a four-by-four split. And said, "Okay. We're a 400-meter runner now." So sometimes it's just that. Sometimes it takes a long time for the athlete to come to the realization that this is what they connect with. Like, "This is who I am." You know what I mean? It's not as easy as just saying, "Oh, we've got a bunch of tests, and you're a 100 meter, you're a 200, you're a 400." For her, it took her over a decade to come to terms with the fact that, "I can't do the 100 and 200 anymore. But I could be really good at the 400." And then two years later, at the 2020 Olympic Games, which ended up being obviously in '21, she was sixth in the 400 meters in the Olympics. Ran 49.9 twice. So in hindsight, we wonder if we moved into the 400 five years earlier, three or four years earlier, maybe she could've had a medal, but yeah, it's an interesting one. We're always using all of the different pieces of information that we have at hand. Some of it's quantitative, some of it is qualitative, some of it is just a feeling. And with Jodie specifically, it was what did I better connect with? Because as I said, that's why we get into sport in the first place. If we can't connect with that as an individual with why we're doing it, then why are we even doing it?

Andrew Huberman:
I feel like this is a great metaphor for life in general, for career. I've enjoyed different careers, and I'm glad I started in the one I did, but that I've ended up in the one I'm in now, even though I still teach and am involved in research in some ways. There's such an immense pleasure to finding the thing-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... for oneself.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But you can't get there first. This is what I think is frustrating to young people now because of the internet. They think, like, "What's my calling? What's my event? What's my sport? What am I built for?" And then you have all these examples, right? You've got your Shaquille O'Neals-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... clearly built for basketball. And then you have your, growing up when I grew up, your Spud Webb.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? Much, much shorter than most of the professional players in the NBA, but wins the slam dunk competition, and so he's always used as an example that you can bridge these gaps. But I do think that dedicated application to one area is the best lane from which to exit to another freeway.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You can't just get onto the Autobahn, so to speak, for you. You have to sometimes get on Highway 101 for a while and speed a little bit or crash.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm not being literal here. You said something that I think is immensely powerful, I'd like to use as a segue, which is that we find ourselves through movement.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
I think this is so true, and not just for people who are trying to figure out what athletic or exercise endeavors are best for them, but certainly there. I'd like to contrast jogging and running.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
Yesterday, you mentioned a few things that, to me, just feel like gems because, like I said, I'll try and run far-ish for me. I go by time, about an hour once a week, 30 minutes on another day, and let's just say about a 15-minute, not all out, but close to all out on a separate day. I've tried ad nauseam to figure out whether or not it's best to heel strike and roll, whether or not it's best to land on the toe, whether it's best to lift the knee. For the uninformed who goes to the internet, you can get answers about this all sorts of ways. Let's start with the slowest movement possible, which is walking.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Let's forget about speed walking for sake of this conversation-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... for a number of reasons.

Stuart McMillan:
Race walking.

Andrew Huberman:
Race walking.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Excuse me. Race walking. See, I even forgot the name of it.

Stuart McMillan:
No disrespect to race walkers.

Andrew Huberman:
No disrespect to race walkers, but most people don't seek to race walk, I think.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But let's talk about walking.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
When we walk, do we heel to toe roll naturally? Do we middle of foot to toe roll? And then let's proceed to jogging-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... running, and then let's step up through the-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... various gear systems.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
There's probably five separate gait patterns. Walking is the first one, and typically, most people will strike on their heel, they'll roll over, and they'll toe off on their toe. And we do that up to about two to 2.2 to 2.3 meters a second, until we can no longer do that. So we start walking, we walk really, really slow, and if we start increasing our speed, you'll find that you'll almost self-organize into the speed that feels really nice for you. If you were going for a walk, you would self-organize towards your most efficient or your most stable velocity for that walk. And if you're not thinking about it, you will self-organize towards your most efficient mechanical solution as well, that it might be flat foot, it might be right up high on your heel with massive amount of dorsiflexion. It might be a little bit lower on the heel, but that's all contingent upon your individual structure, how your foot is built, how it coordinates with your knee and your hip. If you're not thinking about it, we typically will self-organize towards what is most efficient, most stable for us. And then as we get faster and faster and faster, you'll feel that stability and that inefficiency starts to rock a little bit, and you can no longer walk. And what do we do then? To get faster, we actually have to transition to a totally different gait pattern, and we start to jog because there's so much instability, inefficiency, that that pattern just begins to break down, and we start to jog. Let me back up just a little bit. So if you were to walk with, let's say, your 80-year-old neighbor, and you're doing a walk with her. That's probably going to be pretty taxing for you, pretty uneconomical, pretty inefficient, because you have to shuffle a little bit. You're walking so slow, you're probably going to be bent over a little bit. But if the neighbor went in, and you just continued to walk, you would speed up to your most efficient pattern. So within all of these gait patterns, there is almost like an upside-down U, where you start off really inefficient, unstable. As you get faster and faster and faster, efficiency increases, stability increases, and you keep getting faster and faster and faster. Stability goes down again. Efficiency goes down again before you have to transition to a different pattern. So jogging occurs at somewhere around 20% of your maximum sprint speed, so whether that's 1.8 to two to 2.2 meters per second, and then we start to jog, and eventually, we can't jog at that speed anymore, so we have to transition to a different gait pattern, and we start to run. And that's kind of what we were doing yesterday, in fact.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
We spent some time running. Now, it's important, you asked me about heel strike and where we are within the foot. We're thinking about the same thing throughout, and that's just to move from here to there as efficiently as we can, understanding that we will typically, as I said, self-organize towards our most efficient pattern, and the only time we actually think about doing something different than that is when somebody outside tells us to do something different and messes up the efficiency most of the time. So for me, it's like the big cueing, and we talked about this yesterday, right? We said flat foot contact, and if you think about being flat foot contact and all of the different things that you do, all the different gait patterns you do, the velocity is what determines where in the foot you actually will contact. So if you're walking and you're thinking flat foot, you'll actually go heel strike, you'll roll over, and you toe off. And if you're sprinting as fast as you can, you're thinking flat foot contact, you will actually plantar flex slightly just prior to ground contact, and you'll contact the ground more towards your toes than you will if you were just walking or running or jogging.

Andrew Huberman:
We should clarify for people, dorsiflexion is when your toes come close up towards your shin.

Stuart McMillan:
Correct.

Andrew Huberman:
You're narrowing that angle between your foot and your-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... front lower part of your lower limb, and plantarflexion is the opposite.

Stuart McMillan:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
Pointing the toe.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Think attempting to go ballerina and point, but hopefully, unless you're a ballerina, you're not getting all the way there.

Stuart McMillan:
Which is, to get to your initial point as well, is how many of us were taught to sprint up high on our toes when we were kids? We all were, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
Get up on your toes. Keep your arms at 90 degrees, and get up really, really tall, and that's totally opposite to what we should be doing.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Sometimes kids, when they run when they're real little-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... like three or four, when they're just running around the house barefoot, they'll run on their toes.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So what you're basically saying, if I understand correctly, is the speed should dictate the foot strike.

Stuart McMillan:
Correct.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. I think that's a very important point for people who are interested in running or already running. The speed should dictate the foot strike.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That unless there's a problem to resolve-

Stuart McMillan:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... that a coach has told you need to resolve and how to do it, you shouldn't be thinking about heel striking or toe striking. You should be thinking-

Stuart McMillan:
You should just be running

Andrew Huberman:
... about the speed that you're trying to cover the distance in.

Stuart McMillan:
Yep. And if you're thinking about anything, just think about being flat.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
Just think about being flat, and the foot will take care of itself due to the velocity.

Andrew Huberman:
Let's talk a little bit more about body position and running mechanics. There may be no hard and fast rules to this, but where should my eyes be? I've heard, oh, you want to be looking above-- Assuming I'm not in a race against anyone, I'm heading out for a run, doesn't matter which duration. Does it matter where I place my vision?

Stuart McMillan:
In sprinting, 100%. I feel like the longer the distance is, the less it probably matters because the velocity is so much slower.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Stuart McMillan:
I feel like if you're going out for a jog and it's 10-minute miles, you're probably looking pretty much straight ahead of you. And if it's a little bit darker and maybe you're on a rocky surface or something, or a little bit uneven surface, you're looking down a little bit. But it doesn't seem to really have a systemic effect on how you move. But it does when you sprint, because obviously your body's going to follow your eyes. So if you're running down the track and you're sprinting as fast as you can and your eyes creep up and you start looking up, then the chin is going to follow that, and you just start this extension pattern in the entirety of the system. As soon as you lift your chin up, you get into more extension through the ribcage and the spine, and then the lumbar, and everything gets extended. You end up standing up.

Andrew Huberman:
So more arched back-

Stuart McMillan:
A little bit more arched

Andrew Huberman:
... upright posture.

Stuart McMillan:
Correct.

Andrew Huberman:
For those who aren't familiar with flexion and extension, unless we say otherwise, if we talk about flexion, we're talking about assuming the dreaded C-shaped position that everyone seems so good at these days.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Collapsed toward their midline, versus extension, where your chin is up and away from the chest and you're-

Stuart McMillan:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... upright posture.

Stuart McMillan:
And if the eyes come up first, you're going to end up in what's known as a hyperextended position. There's too much extension, where really what we want the eyes to do is just come with the rest of the torso. So the cue that I use for the sprinters is allow your torso to determine when the chin and when the eyes come up, not the opposite way around.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Stuart McMillan:
Because if the eyes come first, the chin follows, and then we get this disconnect between the head and the thorax and the pelvis, and there's just too much extension. We end up kind of just pushing our way down the track rather than bouncing.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. There's a wonderful movement in yoga that's helped me a lot in my weightlifting over the years. I did a little bit of yoga when I lived in San Diego, because they had good yoga classes, where they have you do this kind of rag doll hanging over at the waist position. Looks like a Jefferson deadlift-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... for the gym rats-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... or the Olympic lifters. Rounded lower back. And then they have you stand up from that position, but you deliberately start at your lower spine and unpeel yourself from that folded over position, never letting the head lead.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So basically like a chain coming up from the spine, and then the head moves last.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
It's moving the whole time, but you're looking straight forward last, as opposed to what you're saying, where you lift the head first.

Stuart McMillan:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
That's been tremendously helpful to me in movements in the gym, which I think have helped me a lot, like glute ham raises, where you're essentially in that position, and then you come all the way up, and then you go into a hamstring curl.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Or a deadlift, or any kind of movement where I'm going from torso bent forward to up. I remembered to move the torso first and the head last. And I'll just say, in my own experience, the strength increases that come from doing it that way as opposed to moving the head first and trying to then pull the weight up, it's remarkable.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
We are all so much stronger than we think if we engage the motor neurons in the proper sequence.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So I think that's what you're referring to here.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, 100%.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Stuart McMillan:
Here's a question for you. When you were first taught how to squat-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Stuart McMillan:
... were you told to look at the ceiling or up on the wall?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I was told the weight will go where my eyes go.

Stuart McMillan:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
But now I-

Stuart McMillan:
Where did that come from?

Andrew Huberman:
I don't know.

Stuart McMillan:
I still don't understand where that came from.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't know. Some of the most useful things that have been told to me over the years that made a tremendous difference would be like this, again, borrowed from yoga is who brought it into the gym, then when I talk to proper biomechanics folks like yourself or Kelly Starrett, they go, "Yeah, of course you have to move your spine and torso before."

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But one of the most useful things for the squat and for the deadlift has been, because it's very difficult to think about many things at once, especially when you're pulling or trying to squat heavy loads, is to move my chest and my hips at the same time-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... together, so that you don't end up doing the dreaded good morning back raise followed by standing up.

Stuart McMillan:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So moving them in unison, so thinking about my chest and my hips moving at the same time, that's been tremendously helpful and tends to put the head in the right position. And the other one is, oh, right, when deadlifting, to not think about pulling the weight off the floor, but rather pushing my feet into the ground-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... while driving back.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And these little things end up making-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... a huge difference.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Not just in terms of the amount of weight that you can pull or squat, but the safety of the movement.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
It's just so much more stable to drive the feet into the ground.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And you think, "Why was I trying to pull a weight off the ground? All I have to do is push my feet hard into the ground and hold onto this bar," and boom, you're up.

Stuart McMillan:
That easy.

Andrew Huberman:
It's wild how we pick up bad habits. It's also wild how quickly those bad habits can be resolved. So in keeping with that, back to running. I believe that everyone can and should run. Most everyone. There are certain people who can't run for various reasons. But that people who can walk very likely can run, and I'm becoming more of a believer with every moment I spend with you that sprinting is more valuable than jogging. That sprinting is more valuable than any kind of distance run. And I'm going to offend a lot of people, but I love long distance running, so I'm offending myself. Yesterday, we didn't sprint, but we did a lot of skipping. Let's talk about skipping. And yes, I'm talking about skip, skip, skip, okay, this thing. I'm not going to sing the rest of that. Skipping is such a natural movement for people, most people, and it feels so damn good.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's actually a bit more taxing than people believe. And I came out of that workout from skipping yesterday, feeling like my hips were nice and open-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... tons of extension. My posture's up. I feel like I grew an inch.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I was strong in the gym this morning. I just feel incredible. What is it about skipping, and why do you have sprinters skip so much? And why aren't more people talking about skipping? And yes, we will return to gait stuff, but I think we have to talk about skipping.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. First of all, we skipped a lot because the reality is you could not sprint, and that is the reality for almost everybody because we stop sprinting when we're whatever age. Some people stop sprinting at 15, some people it's 20, but very few people are actually sprinting through their 20s, and next to nobody is sprinting through their 30s. So we know that the movement of sprinting or running fast, and we kind of know what this does and why this is good for you, right? We know that, yeah, moving our body intentively, with intensity, is probably something we should be able to do for as long as we possibly can. But we can't, because typically, we've still got pretty good engines into our 30s and 40s and 50s, but we don't have the bodies to be able to handle the stresses and the forces that this engine could put into the body. So our tissue and our joints just is not able to handle all of these forces. If you were to go out and sprint yesterday, even if we did, we ended up warming up for how long? An hour and a half warm-up. If we did, let's say, a real proper warm-up and we warmed up for 30 minutes, and then I just said, "Andrew, I want you to sprint as fast as you possibly can for 50 meters," that's not going to end well for most people. Maybe you could get through it yesterday, but for most people, that wouldn't end well.

Andrew Huberman:
You end up with a pull or a-

Stuart McMillan:
Exactly

Andrew Huberman:
... strain or a couple days of just feeling-

Stuart McMillan:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... not well.

Stuart McMillan:
Because we just don't do that, and we don't have the tissue capacity to be able to handle that anymore, or the joint capacity. There's so many people, they have to run really quickly somewhere, and they just didn't know that they had to do it, or they're playing backyard basketball or football, and they tweak a hamstring or tweak a calf or something even worse, right? Happens all the time. We just do not have the tissue capacity anymore to handle those forces. So what do we do instead? And I typically recommend two activities. One is running up hills. There's a lot less stress on the tissue and the joint system by sprinting up a hill than there is on sprinting on a straightaway. But second, and I think more important, is actually skipping. And I'm with you. I don't know why we stopped skipping.

Andrew Huberman:
I think it's associated with only childlike behavior.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But that's like saying jump rope is only associated with-

Stuart McMillan:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... childlike behavior, and I'm a big believer in skipping rope. We'll talk about skipping rope. But I think that's it. Yeah. Maybe this conversation or this portion of the conversation could be titled, "Let's Normalize Skipping-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... for Adults."

Stuart McMillan:
Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
It felt awesome.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You can cover a lot of ground quickly.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Heart rate gets up, but not to an outrageous degree. You're not sucking for air.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But it does feel a little silly if you're not on a track. But you've mentioned, what's the longest distance you've ever skipped?

Stuart McMillan:
10 miles.

Andrew Huberman:
Did you get some funny looks?

Stuart McMillan:
I got a few.

Andrew Huberman:
Nice. And you're a real tall guy. You're 6'3", so-

Stuart McMillan:
Uh-huh

Andrew Huberman:
... you can't really hide-

Stuart McMillan:
No

Andrew Huberman:
... very easily.

Stuart McMillan:
That was in the park, so there wasn't a lot of people.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Stuart McMillan:
But I skip for 20 minutes every morning on the roads. I get a few honks, but that's okay.

Andrew Huberman:
They could be honks of approval.

Stuart McMillan:
Could well be.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, or something else.

Stuart McMillan:
But you think about it. You're actually taxing the coordination patterns and the tissue in the joints in pretty similar ways as if we were going to sprint. We're working on pushing the knee behind the hip, getting into this knee-behind-butt pattern, this hip extension pattern, which is so important. And I know this is a topic of conversation that you had with Kelly when Kelly was on here, the importance of getting your knee behind your butt and finding and searching for opportunities to do that more often, because we lose that so easily. So skipping allows us to do that. Secondary to that is the coordination aspect between how we coordinate the flexion-extension at the ankle, the flexion-extension at the knee, and the flexion-extension at the hip, and we do that in a very similar way as sprinting, where each of them stiffen at this time that is considered throughout the entirety of the system, where it's just like the spring. The leg acts as a spring, where if you think about when we jog or when we run, we're kind of running on our ankles and knees a little bit. We don't feel like we're really using our hips when you're running a 10-minute mile. It's a lot of stress through the foot. It's a lot of stress through the calves. And by the way, I'm not anti-running or anti-jogging. I jog, and I run, and I still do all that stuff. I'm not saying now stop doing all that and just go and skip. I'm just saying find some opportunities to also skip, because skipping, we actually can tax the system in very similar ways as pretty high-intensity sprinting.

Andrew Huberman:
I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, AG1. AG1 is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink with adaptogens. I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast. The reason I started taking AG1, and the reason I still take AG1, is because it is the highest quality and most complete foundational nutritional supplement. What that means is that AG1 ensures that you're getting all the necessary vitamins, minerals, and other micronutrients to form a strong foundation for your daily health. AG1 also has probiotics and prebiotics that support a healthy gut microbiome. Your gut microbiome consists of trillions of microorganisms that line your digestive tract and impact things such as your immune system status, your metabolic health, your hormone health, and much more. So I've consistently found that when I take AG1 daily, my digestion is improved, my immune system is more robust, and my mood and mental focus are at their best. In fact, if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year's supply of vitamin D3 K2 with your order of AG1. Again, go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim this special offer. Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now, I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance. When we aren't sleeping well or enough on a consistent basis, everything suffers. And when we are sleeping well and enough, our mental health, physical health, and performance in all endeavors improves markedly. Now, the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft it is or how firm it is, how breathable it is, all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz, which will ask you questions such as do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Things of that sort. Now, maybe you know the answers to those questions, maybe you don't. Either way, Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk mattress. I started sleeping on the Dusk mattress about three and a half years ago, and it's been far and away the best sleep that I've ever had. So much so that when I travel and I'm not on my Dusk mattress, I really miss it. And when I get home, I just find that I sleep so much better because of that mattress. If you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com/huberman, take that two-minute sleep quiz, and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for you. Right now, Helix is giving up to 20% off on all mattress orders. Again, that's helixsleep.com/huberman to get up to 20% off. I want to hover a little bit on knee behind butt.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
So knee behind-

Stuart McMillan:
Shout out Kelly Starrett.

Andrew Huberman:
Shout out Kelly Starrett. If you think about this, folks, knee behind butt means into extension.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
So the hips are opening, so to speak. I know in yoga they say hip opening means a different thing, but hip extension generally means posture is more elevated, chin away from chest, generally. You could get knee behind butt with your chin down, but it's tougher.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Just the sternum comes up, kind of naturally puts us into external rotation, so think thumbs out to the side like the fauns, as opposed to inward.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And then when you think about the typical sitting, standing, walking, jogging pattern of everybody-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... especially if you're a commuter, doesn't matter if you're on a subway, bus, car or otherwise, or plane, you're folded in. And so what I'm starting to realize is that knee behind butt, ankle elevated, sternum up, these are the hallmarks of locomotion.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And so it's interesting that walking, well, jogging in particular, seems to follow this kind of forward-folded, kind of almost falling forward kind of thing. I'm not trying to beat up on jogging, because I also like to jog, but I wonder if minute for minute, skipping would be a much better activity than jogging for people who want to elevate their heart rate-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... all the standard general adaptations that occur with exercise, improved insulin regulation, et cetera. Do you think for the person who has not skipped in a while to go out and skip for a couple of minutes is the way to do it, or should they skip for a lap and then walk a lap? What would be the way to break into this?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, I think probably the worst thing to do is go out for a 10-mile skip. Don't do that. I think we start off with a 30-second skip, 30-second jog, 30-second skip, 30-second jog, or 30-second skip followed by a 30-second walk. And the difference is, and you'll feel this, if you think about when you skip, and we talked about this a lot yesterday. I was asking you to be expressive, express yourself. Think about what your posture is and how you're holding yourself. You don't seem to think about those things when you jog. You just jog, and as you said, you're kind of closed and small and short, and you're just trying to get through it, right? The heart rate gets up to whatever it is, and yeah, you get some good exercise. But skipping, here's your opportunity to truly express yourself, be big and free and open and bouncy and rhythmical. All of these things that were, at one point in our lives, pretty important to us, and we lose. And that is what we get from sprinting, right? The best sprinters are the ones who can express themselves truly, maximally, like totally let go. And it doesn't have to be massively powerful, like the skips that we were doing yesterday were what we call low amplitude skips, where we're just sort of skipping back and forth. But yet I'm still asking you to be tall and expressive and swing and be stiff on the ground. And I feel like there's, as I said, there's so many different benefits to this, whether it's just in the plyometric benefit, whether it's the fascial benefit, whether because this is such a cross-body coordinative aspect, there's all sorts of brain benefits to that, as you know.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
There's so much more benefits to skipping than there is to just jogging. So the on-ramp for me when I talk to people about the benefits of skipping is just to put it in their jogs. So I was talking to one of your photographers yesterday, and he said, "How do I do this? I usually jog, and I'm going, like, 10-minute mile pace." I said, "Well, next time you jog Just go for your jogs, go for about a mile or so when you're doing a typical jog, and then just go back and forth between skipping and jogging every 30 seconds or so. And I guarantee you that you will feel better with every skip that you do, every single one, because there's this, again, this self-organizing coordinative aspect to it where you start feeling a little bit more bouncy, a little lighter, a little bit more coordinated, a little bit more rhythmic, which feeds your jogging. So for me, that's probably the best on-ramp is just to work it into your current jogs, and then from there, start getting a little bit more powerful with it, a little bit more expressive with it. Now we start driving the thigh up and back and get again a little bit more hip extension. Now we can start talking about skips for distance, where you're trying to say, "Okay, from here to that tree that's 50 meters away, how many steps do I need to take to get to that 50-meter away tree?" So doing things like that.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I'm fascinated by activities, both physical and mental, that facilitate the transition into a more difficult activity-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... physical or mental. I started to think about this when I started working on my book in earnest. It's very hard to just jump into writing. But I noticed that if I did some drawing, listened to a lecture while I was drawing, and I do anatomical drawings, very easy to transition into writing. I enjoy drawing. I'm not trying to accomplish much with it, but it's a very natural activity for me, and just very easy to drop into a deep groove for writing for hours.

Stuart McMillan:
Really?

Andrew Huberman:
And then I started talking to a musician friend of mine. He's a songwriter, very accomplished songwriter, and he does the same. And then I saw a post from Joni Mitchell that she would paint before she would sing. And I think these transition activities that are natural for us that don't feel as constricted by distance over time or sometimes I put my drawings on social media, but they're really for me.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
They're a way of kind of thinking about the biology from a circuit standpoint. It is very personal and kind of abstract.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
As you talk about skipping, it seems a little bit the same-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... where skipping, we're not necessarily trying to become the fastest skipper in the world or beat our yesterday's skipping time. We're just trying to skip with more, as you said, more expression, more enjoyment.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But perhaps it sounds like indeed it can help transition into a faster gait with what we're doing for jogging or for running or transition us right into sprinting. And I think that these transition points for physical and mental activities are very important because these days there are so many tools and protocols, dare I say-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... and people start to feel like, "Oh, I have to do all of these things? How would I do this?" Right? "How am I supposed to meditate and get sunlight and do all-- I'm already exercising a ton, now you want me to skip?" The way you describe it is completely different. It's saying, no, you're still doing your "cardio," quote unquote, but maybe you do your zone two cardio and you incorporate some skipping, which will make your zone two faster for you.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Or your high-intensity interval training, you'll feel more pliable-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... more explosive.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, I think that's part of it. I think step one is incorporating in so you can actually be comfortable skipping. And step two is now can we add a little bit more speed, force, velocity to that skip where it becomes in and of itself a workout, where you're skipping as hard as you can for 50 meters and walking back and doing that 10 to 15 times.

Andrew Huberman:
Would you consider that a solid workout for skipping?

Stuart McMillan:
100%.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Stuart McMillan:
That would be a great skipping workout.

Andrew Huberman:
Skipping 50 meters-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... walking back.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. Doing that 10 to 15 times.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. Because that is safe.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
If you warm up. I'm not saying go out and do a maximal effort skip for 50 meters without doing a warm-up. Do a good warm-up first that includes some low amplitude skips and maybe some jogs and some stretches. Do that for 10 or 15 minutes, and then do some maximal amplitude skips for over 50 meters. That's a great workout in and of itself. A lot of really beneficial plyometric work being done there.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm. Let's talk about concentric and eccentric aspects of running and skipping.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
So folks, concentric generally associated with the lifting phase, although sometimes it's the pulling phase if it's a pull-up, and then eccentric would be the lowering phase of some movement. In running, where's the concentric, where's the eccentric? For the uninformed, if you could just tell us.

Stuart McMillan:
Well, in running, concentric is pretty important because most of running is pretty concentric dominant. You're on the ground for quite a long time, and you push behind your center of mass for quite a long time. In striding and sprinting, which are the two faster gaits, so you've got walking, jogging, running, striding, and sprinting. Striding and sprinting, which is upwards of, so striding if you think about being 75% to 90% or 80% to 95% of your maximum sprint speed.

Andrew Huberman:
That's called striding?

Stuart McMillan:
That's called striding. And then sprinting is anything above that, where actually it's purely, truly maximal. As we said, these are different gait patterns entirely. Those sprinting and striding is almost entirely eccentric. Entirely.

Andrew Huberman:
You're braking?

Stuart McMillan:
It's all braking. It's all braking forces. It's how well do you handle those braking forces? If you do not handle those braking forces well, you're not fast. And any concentric force ability or concentric force capacity is just not a differentiator at elite speed. In fact, it seems to be reverse.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Stuart McMillan:
So we did a lot of testing through the '90s when I was up in Calgary. I was working for the Canadian Sports Center in Calgary, starting in 1994 or so, and was there for a long time. And because 27 different national teams were based there and all of the University of Calgary sports teams were also there, we could test out the yin yang for hundreds of athletes every single day. And one of the things that we tested was concentric, isometric, and eccentric force capacities, and which ones actually related to being actually good at your sport And almost every single sport, the concentric force capacity, and you pick the one, whether it's peak, whether it's rate of force application, whether it's time to peak, concentric force capacity just did not at all differentiate between the elite performers in that sport and the sub-elite performers in that sport. But eccentric did all across the board.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm absolutely struck by this stride comes before sprint thing. And I'm remembering back to cross country where they say, "We're going to do a stride workout at the end of a run."

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
We get back to the track at school, and you do some strides. And I'm just chuckling to myself because I always would tell myself in subsequent years, "Okay, I'm going to sprint, but I'm going to sprint at 50% of my all-out speed."

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So I always think of all-out speed for me as somebody's chasing me with a syringe filled with poison.

Stuart McMillan:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
And I've got to get away.

Stuart McMillan:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
That's all-out speed. I don't want to die. So 15% of that, 60, 70, and I'm measuring it subjectively.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm not doing this by heart rates or anything like that. And indeed, anytime I've done 100% all out, like in my mind imagining someone trying to really take my life and I'm running all out, I end up with this lower back thing because you get hurt.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But striding sounds like something that people could work up to. How do you know after doing the skip workout that you described-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... that you're, quote-unquote, "ready to stride-"

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... and start doing a stride workout?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I should mention that these workouts, because we did one yesterday, you finish them feeling great. This is an aspect of exercise that I think most people don't talk about unfortunately, that this leave-it-all-on-the-mat, you take every set to failure in the gym, or these long runs where you're just shredded, they're not great for teaching people how to be healthy because people are exhausted afterwards, they're tired, they overtrain quickly.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And then people say there's no such thing as over-training. It's like, yeah, if you can sleep all day, eat all day, and your profession is to do this. But there is such a thing as having a stressful life and wanting to be healthy and exercising and trying to incorporate that in a way that feeds the rest of your life.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I think these workouts that we did, the workout we did yesterday, excuse me, left me feeling posturally, energetically, mood wise, just feeling great. I slept great last night, felt great this morning, had a great workout in the gym, as I mentioned earlier. So I want to encourage people to give this a try, and in doing that, I want to give them a roadmap. So a warmup of 10 to 15 minutes, 50 meter or so skip. Could they do it on lawn, dirt, or concrete? Does it matter?

Stuart McMillan:
No, it doesn't.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. Great.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Great.

Stuart McMillan:
If you've got a really flat grass-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Stuart McMillan:
... perfect.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Stuart McMillan:
But if you don't and do it on concrete, no problem.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay, so basically no cost to this except a little bit of time and attention. 10 to 15 of those, you have 50 meters out, walk back, repeat-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... after a warmup.

Stuart McMillan:
And if you need a little bit longer recovery, then the probably 90 seconds it takes to walk back-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Stuart McMillan:
... take it.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Stuart McMillan:
Not a big deal. The quality here is the determining factor.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
As you said, you're not trying to get really fatigued from plyometric work. This is a plyometric session.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
You want to be kind of fresh going into each one.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
And that's going to take, for most people, doing a maximal skip over the course of 50 meters, 90 seconds is about enough. But if you're really explosive and you're a really good skipper, it might be three minutes. That's fine.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
As you said, you want to feel good at the end of that.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
You don't want to be beasted at the end of that.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
Now, if you can do it where if we transition, say, from the skips and you can stride really well, and if you can stride really well, maybe you can sprint really well. Really well. That doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't be tired at the end of the session, but the quality of the movement has to be the governor there.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
Not the capacity. Not I got to get the work done, and I don't care how that work looks or what it looks like, I just got to get it done. No. With high intense work, with sprint work, your governor is always the quality of the work. What does it look like? What does it feel like?

Andrew Huberman:
So it's a lot like resistance training in that way.

Stuart McMillan:
100%.

Andrew Huberman:
Always quality. So how does one transition into striding, and what does that look like? This is saying, "Okay, I'm going to sprint, but it's not a sprint because I'm going to hold back a bit." But how do you hold back and still have the expressive part? Because the expressive part-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... it's a little hard to describe in words, but yesterday you were encouraging Rob and I to get us tall with our posture as if we were being pulled up by a string from our heads, and it has a profound psychological effect.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And then you just feel your body opening up in natural movement. You don't have to think about coordinating the hand lift. It's just you're in-

Stuart McMillan:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... like this full bowing out.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It's really wonderful.

Stuart McMillan:
If we describe the difference between all of the gait patterns, just through the amount of space that you take up on the planet. So when you walk, it's a small space, and when you jog, you're taking up a little bit more space, and when you run, it's a bit more space. When you start to stride, it's more space again. And then when you sprint, you're up here, and you're being maximally expressive. So just think about it from that perspective. The other part is jogging and running typically happens behind your center of mass. You crash onto the ground, and you push back. You have this propulsive phase. There's not a lot of a breaking phase here. There's a long propulsive phase that happens with the foot pushing back behind the center of mass. Striding and sprinting happens in front of the center of mass. There's actually a longer eccentric phase where you drive a lot of force into the ground. It's in front of the center of mass, and then you propel yourself off, and it's a very short propulsive phase. So think about it that way. So it's bigger shape, and it's primarily more in front. And it's also, as I said, and this is important You can't sprint, and most of the people that are listening to this cannot sprint.

Andrew Huberman:
Are you telling us to not sprint?

Stuart McMillan:
No, no. What I'm saying is you do not have that strategy available to you. Most of us, everybody who's listening to this, almost everybody will be able to walk. And if you can walk, as you said, you could probably jog. And most of the people on the planet can walk, jog, and maybe they can run. Most people on the planet can't stride. They can't get any faster than 75% of what their capacity is because they just can't do that anymore. If you're a kid, you can do that. You can run, you can stride along all day. But you get to a certain point where our tissues and our joint systems, and we just do not have the capacity to run that fast, safely. And we definitely don't have it when we're sprinting. And the difference here is when you're striding, it's essentially a pretty simple, traditional spring mass system. The body acts as a spring. Just whether it's 50% on the front side, 50% on the back side, you hit and you bounce off. You hit and you bounce off. Where sprinting is a little bit different. This is the work of Dr. Ken Clark, who's a good friend of mine. He published this in, I think in 2018, '19. It's called a two-mass system, where the body's not acting as a spring. There's a secondary mass of the shank and the foot that's contributing to up to about 8% of the total force through contact. So this elite sprinter is hitting the ground so hard that there's another mass that's added to the spring. And that's what I'm saying, that's not available to you because you can't move your limbs fast enough, and you don't have the range of motion that's big enough to be able to get that sort of velocity. There's a dozen players in the NFL that can do that. Every elite sprinter is actually a sprinter. Most every other athlete in most every other sport can't actually sprint. They're operating as spring mass. They don't have that secondary mass because they can't move their limbs fast enough.

Andrew Huberman:
When Dr. Peter Attia was on this podcast and elsewhere, he talked about one of the major causes of death, mostly in older people, is they'll fall, they'll be immobile, they'll catch some sort of infection related to contact with the bed or post-surgical lack of circulation, and that's what takes them out.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I was shocked to learn this, right? I thought it would be a heart attack or-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... cerebrovascular disease or that instead. But that led to this whole notion that I think is gaining more popularity nowadays, that part of longevity is maintaining things like grip strength, one's ability to jump and land, and jumping and landing is eccentric control.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
My mom's turning 80 this year, and she's fortunately in very good health.

Stuart McMillan:
Good.

Andrew Huberman:
My dad's already 80. He was on this podcast, and for anyone that saw that, he's clearly in very good health. But I worry about them, and I worry mostly about a step down off a curb, a step going down a stairwell that is not controlled, and then a slip, and then a fall, and then the break, and then the immobility, and then the sequence that Attia and others have referred to. Would skipping be a good activity for people in their 60s, 70s, or 80s to undertake carefully as a way to learn eccentric control? Because I'll be honest, I've seen some wonderful, inspiring videos of people in their 70s and 80s jumping off of boxes, doing plyo type work in the gym. I don't know many folks in their 70s and 80s who are going to embark on that.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But you can skip kind of small skips, then you can do larger skips. You can skip anywhere. It's free. If you approach it carefully, you probably don't even need a trainer. There's some videos now of you having us skip, and-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... here I'm inspired to start a skipping movement with you, for all these reasons. You don't even need a piece of equipment. Could probably even do it barefoot on grass if you couldn't afford shoes, right?

Stuart McMillan:
100%.

Andrew Huberman:
What are your thoughts on folks who are in the 60 and up club-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... skipping?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, I think you've nailed it. I think that is so important. That eccentric control or the eccentric capacity is the one that we really lose. The ability to handle ourselves eccentrically, we don't do that work anymore. Everything that we do is concentric in nature. And it's not just elite sport. I said before that the differentiator is always in the eccentric force capacities in elite sport. Also in us, in gen pop, we lose the ability to apply eccentric force, whether it's fast or maximal. So 100%, I think it's so important. My dad was an elite athlete when he was younger and has probably averaged four days a week running for almost his entire life.

Andrew Huberman:
Good for him.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. He's 78. In 2019, he ran the New York City Marathon, ran a 5:02. So he's at 74 or 73 years old. And he doesn't do that anymore, but he still runs four days a week, and he runs about 20 to 25 miles. And two of those days are skipping sessions where he walks 30 seconds, he skips for 30 seconds, and then he strides as fast as he can, as fast as his capacity will allow, for 30 seconds, and then he walks, and then he skips, and then he strides, and he walks. And it's so key. It really is. For me, the ability to express yourself maximally through running, and I've already said I don't feel like most people can do this. I don't know if there is a better single metric as a measurement for Whatever word you want to use here, vitality or health, then the ability to safely express maximal speed of you as you as an individual. You choose VO2 max, you choose all of these different things that you might come up with. I don't feel like any of them are as good as the ability to just run maximally. So let's start with that. If we feel like that is important, and you can argue whether it's the most important or the 10th most important, we know it's important. If we know that's important, how do we get there? And as you said, I think skipping is the way. So I'm on board with the skipping movement. Let's get everybody skipping because it is, as I said, this is your ability to be plyometric, to work on those eccentric force capacities and move in a way in which you can actually express yourself again.

Andrew Huberman:
There's this peculiarity to anything related to health and public health in particular. For instance, a colleague of mine at Stanford, Dr. David Spiegel, he's our vice chair of psychiatry, and he and his father actually founded this area of psychiatry, which is basically hypnosis for the treatment of trauma, for pain relief, for smoking cessation. And there are tremendously good data to support it as a practice. It's actually approved by the American Psychiatric Association, one of only four, I think, behavioral things, EMDR, cognitive behavioral therapy, hypnosis, and I think there's another. In any case, the problem, it's called hypnosis, and people hear hypnosis-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... and their mind goes to balking and squawking like a chicken on a stage. This is why we refer to deliberate respiration as opposed to breathwork in our studies, our clinical trials on that, which David and I have published, et cetera. And it's not euphemism. The issue is the name is a separator often, and that's a shame when there's a practice that's very valuable. Yoga nidra, non-sleep deep rest.

Stuart McMillan:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Right?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I have tremendous respect for yoga nidra and all of its early creators, but the language is a separator. I'm sorry. And there's a public health mission that to me is more important than the naming. Just say that, and I'll take the heat for it with no guilt whatsoever. Skipping, unless it's skipping rope, has this connotation of childlike activity, let's just be honest. And adults doing childlike behavior, while not necessarily a problem in its own right, look at all these adults with social media accounts acting like children, and the children acting like adults, different discussion entirely, but what if we were to give it a different name, not with the intention of pretending it's not skipping-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... but to relieve people's guilt and shame about doing it? Is it bounding? Bounding is a little bit more nondescript for most people.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm having this conversation with you openly in public here-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... in front of many, many people, to illustrate a couple of points. One is that the name oftentimes people are like, "I'm not going to skip down the street." But there's so much value to this that I think it'd be a real shame to lose the opportunity to have it wick out to many, many millions of people-

Stuart McMillan:
It-

Andrew Huberman:
... because it's called skipping.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. It's plyometrics.

Andrew Huberman:
It's plyometrics. Great. Love it.

Stuart McMillan:
And it is a... Bounding is left to right. So you go left, right, left, right, left, right. Bounding is really, really difficult, extremely challenging. Skipping is a regression from bounding. So if you can't bound, if you can bound, great. Go and do some bounding. Chances are, if you can't sprint, you can't bound. It's really, really hard to do real, true, high-quality bounding. We can all skip. So look at it that way. This is plyometrics. This is just your most simple, and probably for most people, your most effective means of giving your body a plyometric activity. How else are you going to do it? You're jumping onto the box, not a plyometric. That's all concentric. It's basically useless. It's a waste of time. Let's find eccentric things to do.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
And what is your best eccentric or the one that is the simplest, the one, as you said, we spend entire childhood doing, it's familiar to us. There's something innate in this. There really is. Skipping.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
So just think about it as being a plyometric. I'm going to do my plyos today. And by the way, this isn't something that I've just made up. There is not a sprint group on the planet that don't skip. Every single sprinter skips, every single one of them, because of the importance of this specific gait pattern. It's really important.

Andrew Huberman:
I love that. Thank you. And you also saved me from trying to find a name that plyometric. I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Function. Last year, I became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. Function provides over 100 advanced lab tests that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily health. This snapshot offers you with insights on your heart health, hormone health, immune functioning, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added tests for toxins, such as BPA exposure from harmful plastics, and tests for PFAS, or forever chemicals. Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors who are expert in the relevant areas. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had elevated levels of mercury in my blood. Function not only helped me detect that but offered insights into how best to reduce my mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption, I'd been eating a lot of tuna, while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC, N-acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification. And I should say, by taking a second Function test, that approach worked. Comprehensive blood testing is vitally important. There's so many things related to your mental and physical health that can only be detected in a blood test. The problem is blood testing has always been very expensive and complicated. In contrast, I've been super impressed by Function's simplicity and at the level of cost. It is very affordable. As a consequence, I decided to join their scientific advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try Function, you can go to functionhealth.com/huberman. Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman Podcast listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com/huberman to get early access to Function. One thing That people will immediately realize when they go out and skip, when they do their plyometric skipping. That's a little bit hard to understand just from hearing us have this conversation, but just trust me on this. There were two things that are very surprising and immensely positive, at least two things. One is this expressive component and the way it reshapes your psychology and your mood. I want to set that aside, but make sure we return to that. The other is the cross-body coordination of movement.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
The fact that one knee is back toward the butt on one side and the opposite arm is raised up, just naturally as you skip.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
In fact, if you're wondering now, "Oh, goodness, do I actually know how to skip?" That occurred to me a couple times yesterday because I had many cameras on me. I thought, "Do I still remember how to skip?" I'd been skipping the night before in preparation. I didn't know we were going to skip, but I've always worked some skips in if nobody's looking. I'm a skip-in-private kind of guy.

Stuart McMillan:
Until now.

Andrew Huberman:
Until now. Now I skip with pride-

Stuart McMillan:
There you go

Andrew Huberman:
... in public.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm. Plyometrics.

Andrew Huberman:
I will. Plyometric in public, that's right. But one thing that was interesting, I would think, okay, we'd get back after walking, I'd think, "Okay, we're going to skip again. How do I do this?" It's basically I would think about lunging, kind of a fast lunge out, and then it automatically would put me into that motion of skipping.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But this cross-body coordination is incredible for purposes of motor neuron coordination across the body, for the fascial component. Could we talk a little bit more about cross-body coordination?

Stuart McMillan:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Because I'd like at some point to talk about sprinting a little bit, because even if people aren't going to sprint, this idea that when we're sprinting, we're not just turning over our legs faster. Of course, the arms are pumping, but the arms and legs are coordinated in a very interesting way, that the forces are actually running like an X from across from one shoulder down the leg and from the other shoulder, which is going to sound very complicated to people, but you'll explain it. So cross-body coordination.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
When we walk, we do this.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Some people don't. They're kind of robotic.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But most people flow their arms as they walk.

Stuart McMillan:
If we were to put a camera above the Earth and look down on everybody, you would see this very distinctly at every single gait, starting with walking. We rotate. So the pelvis rotates up and down, and forward and back. So it oscillates and undulates. And then the shoulders counter-oscillate and counter-undulate. So the shoulders go forward and backward, and up and down. Just pay attention to this next time you're out for a walk. You can feel your hips going backwards and forwards, and also going up and down. If they didn't go up and down, you'd trip yourself every step. And the shoulders do the same. And then you have a spine, which is this column of a bunch of different pieces that connects the shoulder to the pelvis, which also rotates, side bends, and flexes and extends. The whole system is this big torsional system, this cross-body system, and some people take maximum utility of this system, and you can see it. Some of the best movers, some of the best sprinters, you just watch them and you can just see how they wind up, and they coil into every single step, and they just use this cross-body coordination so effectively. And as you said, some others are just, it doesn't seem like there's any rotation going on here at all. What looks better to you? Who looks better? It's the ones that are using this effectively that look, okay, that just looks better. I don't know why necessarily-

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm

Stuart McMillan:
... but that looks way more athletic.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, think robot dance versus somebody who really knows how to move their hips and shoulders in coordination. We'll talk about dance a little bit later.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You have an interesting relationship to music that I think is very relevant here.

Stuart McMillan:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
We'll get back to that, but I'm seeding the conversation. But yeah, when the shoulders and the hips are moving in unison, it's like magic.

Stuart McMillan:
It really is.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
It really is. And just feel this when you walk. When you go out for your next walk, just try to pay attention to what your shoulders are doing and what your hips are doing, and start thinking, "Am I getting my knee behind my butt when I'm walking, and what does that feel like at my hip flexor and my quad? And as I do that, what's happening with the opposite shoulder? And is that getting wound up, and is that coiling properly? Am I taking advantage of these extremely innate, extremely natural movement tendencies that we all have? Or have I, because of the way in which I've lived or some of the things that I've done or maybe even some of the things that somebody's told me, tried to be really square and linear with everything I've done?" Because think about it, right? When we're taught to run when we're younger, any excessive movement outside of in a straight line has been told to us, "Oh, that's inefficient. You're wasting energy. You're bleeding all your force." Not understanding the actual biomechanical mechanism of the pelvis, the shoulders, and the spine that connects them, and how we are actually built to rotate and to bend. And that's not to say, by the way, that more is better. Everything is an inverted U in this world almost. There's a Goldilocks effect to this. It's what is right for you. Some people will use this torsional system extremely effectively, and there'll be a lot of it, and some will be a little bit less, they're a little bit more linear, and they'll still be good. That's all dependent upon their own individual and unique structure, their morphology, their genetics, how they're built and how they're born, and what they do with it as they age. But the bottom line is we are all rotational beings, and we need to try to find ways to take advantage of those rotational forces rather than to constrain them. It's one of the reasons why I really dislike this anti-rotation terminology that's come into many of the exercises that we do in the weight room. "This exercise is about anti-rotation." Why do you want to be anti-rotation?

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
We are rotational beings. You're anti excessive rotation, but not anti rotation. So I feel like that, just as you were saying before with skipping, that's the wrong terminology for me, and that's just sending entirely the wrong message to everybody about the importance of us being a rotational being.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, naming matters.

Stuart McMillan:
It does.

Andrew Huberman:
Especially in exercise and anything related to, dare I call it wellness, anything mental health, physical health, and performance. The naming matters because it can take people's minds off track from the major point. It can be a separator, as we mentioned before. In the best case, it can be an aggregator. I have to wonder, with people walking around looking at their phones all the time, are they losing the cross-body coordination? I snuck in to one talk at South by Southwest. I got a ticket. I got a pass. I don't mean I snuck in. I went there for just one talk the other day, and I was walking through the hallways. This was a big meeting, tons of people, and it was incredible. Everyone was walking looking at their phone. Now, of course, there's a program that's on an app these days, so you're saving paper, so that's good, right? But it was remarkable. People were walking and reading at the same time. So I don't want to make more of this than we have data for, but this can't be good. This just can't be good.

Stuart McMillan:
I think that's a really good point. I haven't thought about that actually, but I think that's a really good point. I have a rule when I'm walking that if my phone buzzes and I want to pick up my phone, I stop.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Stuart McMillan:
I stop, I get out of the way of all the other walkers.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
I push myself up against the building, and I look to what's on my phone if I feel it's important, and then I start walking again.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Stuart McMillan:
I just despise people who walk and look at the phone at the same time, because that's what you see. You see this unnatural, constrained, overly flexed posture, and if you spend too much time doing that, I don't think you need data. That's not good.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
It's not good to walk that way. That's not the way we're supposed to walk. Again, it's all about coming back to let's express ourselves. Let's understand what our bodies are supposed to be able to do and find ways to continue to have that ability as we age. This isn't it.

Andrew Huberman:
Let's talk about expression through movement, and let's use the extremes as a starting point. I find that useful in any kind of scientific conversation. You take the extreme outcome. So the person who is trying to take up as little space as possible, chin toward the chest, folded in, thumbs toward the midline, so called internal rotation, eyes down, trying to make themselves small.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't need to spend another five seconds explaining all the psychological phenotypes that's associated with, and the way it makes us feel. Now, of course, it's possible to curl up in a small ball and think amazing things about the world and oneself, but generally, those things are not happening at the same time. Now let's think about the other extreme and let's talk about him, Usain Bolt. This will also be a fun opportunity for people to learn a little bit more about Usain. Let's start there. What is so special about Usain Bolt, besides the fact that he's still the fastest man in the world, and what about his willingness to express himself do you think contributed to becoming the fastest person in the world? Not just feeling great that he's the fastest guy in the world, and therefore, who wouldn't feel great?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. Usain is unique. If we look over the history of some of the elite male sprinters, there was a time, when I started getting into the sport, the way to be as an elite male sprinter was hyper-focused, hyper-intense. If you think about Mo Greene stalking behind his blocks and licking his lips, getting ready for this, basically he's going to war. And it seemed like so many of the sprinters were trying to encapsulate this kind of feeling, like sprinting is it's macho, it's ego, it's I'm coming here to knock you out. And then Usain came along with the exact opposite, and I think it's just he's out there having fun. As I told the story about Jodie a little bit earlier, right, she was for a long time, she didn't connect herself with the activity. They were two separate beings. She was doing something that she no longer really connected with. And Usain, they're like this. Like he was really expressing his entire being in the way in which he went around about this task of sprinting 100 meters or sprinting 200 meters. And I feel like that is such an important piece with all sport and probably within all things. If you can connect your entire way of being with the thing that you're spending most of your time doing, chances are you're going to be really successful at that thing. And if you look at all the other sports, right, it's the ones that you can tell they're just really confident in who they are, in what they do, how they express themselves. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be Usain Bolt and playing around at the line and doing things like this and jumping around. And that's just-

Andrew Huberman:
Was he always like that?

Stuart McMillan:
Always.

Andrew Huberman:
Does anyone know when he was a kid?

Stuart McMillan:
Oh, no. He's a kid. He's a big kid. He still is. He brings this really childlike intensity to things. Like, he's still intense. He wants to kill you, but he'll laugh in your face just before he does it. I love that about him.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
But that's not everybody. That's not every elite sprinter. I coached a guy named Andre De Grasse for a while, who won three Olympic medals in 2016.

Andrew Huberman:
I remember him, yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
Coming right behind Usain Bolt-

Andrew Huberman:
I remember the name

Stuart McMillan:
... in that famous 200 meters where they were smiling at each other. Andre's very quiet Very kind of tightly, just down here, very insular, on his phone, not really living life, kind of lived life down here, very closed. And that's the way in which he performed. That's the way he practiced, that's the way he trained, that's the way he competed. He didn't feel like he had to be up here and bouncing around, jumping around, because that was not him. And if there's one thing that Andre is famous for, and he's now got seven Olympic medals. I don't know how many big races Andre has won outside of the Olympic Games, but he's got seven Olympic medals. He really stands up when it matters because he is connected with who he is. He knows who he is, and what he brings out to the performance arena is connected like this with that. Where others, and the biggest example that I know is Asafa Powell. So if anyone doesn't know who Asafa Powell is, Asafa was Usain Bolt before Usain Bolt. Asafa's ran sub-10 seconds in 100 meters 99 times, more than anyone else in history. He's by all intents and purposes one of the greatest male sprinters of all time. He's a legend. He's had a world record. I think he's set two world records. He's an incredible sprinter who's choked at every single major championships there's ever been. He's always folded. And he does that because he feels like he came up in the era of Mo Greene, this animal thing, this being really, really super intense. So Asafa tried to be that. That didn't work for him. And then Bernard Williams, who's kind of jumping around and playing around a little bit, that became a thing for a while. So Asafa tried that hat on. That didn't work either. And then Usain came, and Usain is playing with the camera and bringing his personality out. So Asafa tried that hat on. Guess what? That didn't work either. So there's this, yeah. Usain brought this almost, yeah, it's okay to jump around and to dance and have fun, but it's not for everybody if that's not who you are. And I feel like that was an important thing. If I was coaching Asafa, I'd say, "Man, Asafa, just be you, man. You're relaxed. You're Andre De Grasse before Andre De Grasse came along. You're just cool and chill. Just be cool and chill, man. Just be that. Just bring you to this performance, and you'll get a lot more out of yourself." But, to get back to your question, Usain just gave everybody, I think, the permission to have fun. That's why we do this thing is to have fun, and if you're not having fun, then why are we bothering?

Andrew Huberman:
It's so interesting, and his name comes up so often now, and I'm grateful to have him as a close friend. But I've had hours upon hours of conversations with Rick Rubin about why certain musical artists just have that thing.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
And it doesn't matter if you're talking about Tom Petty, Joe Strummer, Johnny Cash, Adele. You ask about all these different people, and the answer is always the same. It's they know how to be themselves in that moment.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And people will say, "Well, it's a constructed..." Rick will be like, "No." This is why he likes to work with artists early on, like a lot of the hip-hop artists he worked with, a lot of the punk rock music artists he worked with. They were just being themselves. They had no success prior to their, like LL Cool J sending him a demo tape, and so there was no self-awareness, or there wasn't enough self-awareness to hinder their expression. They were just being them, and that's always what explodes people to immense success.

Stuart McMillan:
There's something to be said for ignorance, isn't there?

Andrew Huberman:
There's something to be said for ignorance, and there's something of a gravitational pull as a spectator or a listener to the artist, the athlete, the musician-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... who's just being themselves.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And we know we can detect at an unconscious level when it's not real.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
This is one of the things I love so much about podcasting, or at least I'm very blessed to be in the early-ish cohort of podcasters, right? I wasn't in the first cohort like the Dan Carlins and the Rogans, but I came in early enough that none of us really knew what to do except just be ourselves.

Stuart McMillan:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Now it's changing. There's a big flood of commercial entities in podcasting, and some of those are good, and most of them are not, frankly, because they're not real. They're more like a new show. It's produced. It's not real. The person on camera and off camera are very different. But I can tell you that Joe Rogan off camera, that's Rogan.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I was thinking about really expressive people in different domains to compare more or less to this example that you were describing with Usain. So Roganites rather. Muhammad Ali, big-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... boisterous personality.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Huge attractor to him.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
It was not a construction. He might have honed it as part of his craft, but clearly that's who he was.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
He's a fast talker.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. Mike Tyson.

Andrew Huberman:
Mike Tyson.

Stuart McMillan:
Very different.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
But that's him.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Stuart McMillan:
You know?

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Stuart McMillan:
And everyone loves Mike Tyson because it's very clear that that is Mike Tyson.

Andrew Huberman:
Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Even just the size of the paintings-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... and the way he worked and the physicality of it. I think he was Haitian. I'm going to get back to this kind of nationality thing a little bit later. And then we had on here the great Josh Waitzkin, who was the subject of the movie "The Search for Bobby Fischer," and his whole strategy in chess that he learned in Washington Square Park of creating chaos on the chess board. This game that everyone considers very linear and very constrained, and he liked to create chaos because Washington Square Park, especially in the '80s and '90s, chaos. You had drug dealers and crime, and there's people doing pretty much every activity there. And on and on, right?

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I think that when people are just being themselves, this is what you're saying, and this is what Rick has said over and over, That essence piece-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... is so magnificent.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And not just to see, but it evolves humankind. It really does. And, so when you work with an athlete, or for the listener who's trying to figure out, "Well, who am I?" Does it work in reverse? Meaning, and I believe, that movement can actually teach us who we are-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... in addition to allow us to express who we are. And I'm not going to say that skipping is the only way to do that, but it was very interesting yesterday to notice the transitions in my state of mind as I got permission from you to go bigger.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Get bigger, stride bigger.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And we were the adults on the kids' playground, in my mind, behaving like kids. But it is transformative, I think, to move differently makes you feel different.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And when those things line up, I think is what you're talking about.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. I think it's a brilliant question. I really do think it's everything in sport, but I think, as you said, just when you zoom out, it's not just sport, it's all, everything. And I feel like so often in sport specifically, people like me steal the essence away from the athletes because we have our own preconceived ideas of what you should be doing should look like. And it's my idea, but it's not your essence, and it's not your idea. And I always feel like we should be coaching towards what the athlete's best solution is, not what our best solution is. I've got an athlete I'm working with right now who's super gifted. She's a two-time Olympian. She's got an Olympic gold medal in the relay. And she's been coached for a long time to move in a way that does not align with her essence. It does not align with what she is good at. And what will that do to you over the course of time? It's obviously going to negatively affect your confidence. It definitely negatively affects the way you move because you're moving in a way that just doesn't align with you, whether that's psychologically, emotionally, or physically biomechanically. So this is a tall, elastic, expressive sprinter who's been taught to be really small and compact and accelerate with really short, choppy steps. And she's lost the ability to even understand who she is anymore in this sport. So my objective now is try to reintroduce herself to herself. What was it that got you into this? How did you move? Why were you really, really good at this? Let's reconnect with that. And the challenging piece with that is how do you understand what that is? Especially years, if you've been being taught a certain way that is not in alignment with who you are, whether that is sport or anything else, it's really difficult to reconnect with it if you don't have a really good guide. Because so often those guides, and that's whether it's a coach or a music producer, will screw them up. Not purposefully. They're coming at this from a very optimistic standpoint and a positive standpoint. "I'm trying to help you, Andrew. This is what I think. These are my experiences. This is my subjective view. This is how I see you doing the thing that you're doing, and that's based on my history." Rather than where it should be, and that's based on your history. And that's the difference between a Rick Rubin and many other producers, and it's the difference between elite coaches and sub-elite coaches. You always start with the person. What is the unique ability that you have? What is it that you have that makes you better than everyone else? What is it you have that really that you want to show everyone? Let's connect with that. Let's show that. Let's build all of our training around that. Let's have all of our conversations around that.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm remembering the example from that documentary, "The Last Dance" about Michael Jordan. Some of the description of the Chicago Bulls coach encouraging Dennis Rodman, who in the '90s was, '80s and '90s, first of all, very few people had that many tattoos who weren't in prison or in a niche music community, right? Dennis had a ton of tattoos. He had earrings. He dyed his hair.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
He loved to party. He was wild, and his coach understood that it was part of his reset mechanism.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And you don't put a bulldog in a race with a bunch of greyhounds, and you don't have greyhounds tug a rope with a kettlebell on the end. I know this as a bulldog owner who loves all breeds of dogs. So he gave Dennis permission to party-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... what no professional coach would probably do.

Stuart McMillan:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And it brought out his ability-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... to play.

Stuart McMillan:
Brilliant.

Andrew Huberman:
An incredible rebounder, incredible player all around-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... but famous for his rebound stats. So this thing of who am I? How do I express myself? I think the authenticity piece is so key. If you're a nice person, being a jerk in your sport is probably not going to work. But if you enjoy competition and you're a nice person, then it seems like there's a place for that.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And I wonder whether or not a big component of all of this in discovering it for people that are going to try plyometric skipping and these sorts of things to try and better understand themselves and express themselves, which I think would be a wonderful thing to come from this discussion, is the trying to shut down the self-conscious part, the self-critic.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you think the best sprinters are also not thinking about anyone else? They're just enjoying themselves, or at least are they feeling the sprint More than they're paying attention to their form as a, how does this look? So I'm thinking about it. I'm on the track with you. I'm going to run or skip, and I can either just feel where it's more expressive, or I can try and show you that it's more expressive. Two very different things. One, there's a self-conscious awareness piece, the showing you. I'm going to show you this as opposed to just doing it for the feel of it.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Is that the distinction?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, that's a really good way to put it. One really good example of this in the sprints world, and I think you were there for it. This is 2022 World Championships in Oregon.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, I was there. Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
And Noah Lyles won the 200-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Stuart McMillan:
... in an American record 19.31. And that was for me, that's the epitome of just being so lost in what you're doing that you have no idea what you're looking like. And he's just maximally expressing everything that he's got. And he bounds across the line. I said, "Man, that was beautiful." I've never seen that. It was so beautiful. Totally lost in flow. And it doesn't happen as often as many who don't work in sport think it does. Not every single performance is a flow performance.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
But if you're lucky, you'll get one or two of those in your career where you just lose connection with everything that you're doing, and you just, "Wow, what happened?" And in fact, every time that a sprinter sets a personal best, I ask him, "What was that feeling like?" "I don't know. No idea. I don't know how that felt. I just ran." So all of these things that we talked about, all of these incredible coaching cues that I gave you to think about when you were doing this, you forgot them all? He said, "I just ran. I just ran." And almost always, that is the answer to that. I just ran, and I just connected with it. And something in the background, we were able to-- One of the ways, and I'll bring this home a little bit more maybe practically. So we train 20 to 25 hours a week, and my goal each day is not to say a lot. I want the athlete to kind of find a way through things, and I will encourage them and guide them and sort of facilitate this discovery. But often we'll talk about different things, and if they're struggling with something, I'll give them a specific cue. And over the course of time, we build this library of different things that the athlete thinks about, or the different cues. And then my objective coming into more of a competitive season is to try to align these cues with an emotion, what I call, or what are called mood words. So for example, when an athlete is accelerating, they're on the ground for a little bit longer than when they're upright because they need to actually propel themselves forward. They need horizontal force. They need the ground to push themselves forward. So they push and they push, or they drive. So cues could be drive, it could be push, it could be power, it could be pull your thighs forward. It could be all of these different things that are around power. But for me, the mood word that really expresses this better than anything is pressure. I want you to feel like you're applying as much pressure through the first half of this race as you possibly can. And the second half of the race is the exact opposite of that. So we talk about things that we do technically, knees up, thighs up, step off the ground, be vertical, be expressive, be tall, all of these different cues. But really what we're trying to get to is freedom or peace. So that's what a 100-meter sprint is. It's 50 meters of pressure and 50 meters of peace. So I try to align these mood words with these coaching instructions, and then all the athletes need to think about is this emotion or this mood word, and all the instructions come along for the ride. That is the goal, and that is, going back to something we talked about quite a while ago now, probably one of the things that I love the most around the 100 meters is this dichotomous relationship between pressure and peace, or power and fluidity, or violence and rhythm. All of these things that are at opposing ends of the spectrum that every single elite athlete, regardless of the sport, can come together perfectly. If you can have the power, but if you don't have the peace, good luck. You can have the peace, but if you don't have the power, good luck. No chance. It's always both simultaneously. So that's the massive challenge in this sport. And going back to Noah in 2022, that world championship final in the 200, incredible. That's maybe the best example of that I've ever seen.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, amazing race.

Stuart McMillan:
Really was.

Andrew Huberman:
Really feel blessed to have been there. And by the way, folks, if you have never been to a track meet, for many reasons, it's one of the most wonderful things. First of all, it will give you an example of what real coordination is all about, and I'm not talking about physical coordination, although that too. You'll be watching the pole vault, and then you'll shift your eyes to the right, and there'll be another event starting right as the pole vault ends, and then another one. It's a beautifully orchestrated event when done properly, as they do in Eugene and elsewhere. The other piece is that nobody goes to track meets unless they love track, although hopefully a few people who are not familiar with track will try it. And so the amount of spirit there is incredible. And there's also, I don't know, there's a lot of identification with individuals there that even if you've never seen them run or anything, you pick up on the different- ... on the different personalities of the runners and the jumpers and the throwers. And it's really special. Check out a track meet if you can. You won't be disappointed.

Stuart McMillan:
Please do. Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
You won't be disappointed. And I don't work for USA Track and Field. People are like, "Do you work for big track?" No, actually, I don't. I buy a ticket like everybody else. This notion of pressure and peace, it brings me back to this thing about these transition activities, like for songwriters even, who are so skilled, a Joni Mitchell or I was referring to earlier, Tim Armstrong, having these transition activities, trying to get into one's craft and the pressure, and then it kind of opens up-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... into peace. And I feel like any time Rick is talking about working with musicians, and I was like, "How'd it go?" He's in the studio, and it's like they work super hard. They work extremely hard. And then the story I always hear is, "Oh, yeah, in the last two days, it all came together."

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Right?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Because they set real deadlines.

Stuart McMillan:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And I think this is why deadlines are important. This is why writers and artists who have no deadlines oftentimes don't do as well, and maybe athletes as well, that the pressure piece of getting everything organized around an activity, and then the nervous system just kind of takes it.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
The commonalities here are fascinating to me. Maybe we all could approach our exercise that way, too, that it's okay to be rigidly attached to detail at the beginning, but the goal is peace in the final minutes of it, right?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, I think that's a good way of looking at it. Yeah. I think more than that, if we zoom out, I feel like society or the way in which we think about exercise now has become detached from why we actually started doing the things to begin with, movement. Right? We fall in love with finding our way around the world through moving our bodies in space and time, doing whatever, whether that's hiking or playing a sport or whatever. And then we finish school, and we get a job, and now we don't really move anymore. That becomes exercise, and we go to the gym, and we exercise. And I feel like that's so many degrees removed from why we actually do the thing. I feel like we don't ask ourselves, "Is this what is really serving me? Or is this what everyone else is doing so I'm just going to go along with it?" And for me, I lift weights. I go to the weight room. I do that four or five days a week. I skip every single day. I run three or four days a week. I do some boxing. I move my body. I play. I do as many different things as I can do, includes hiking. And I feel like that's what we should be doing. I'm asking myself, "What is it that I want to get out of this practice? Is it I want to go to the gym for 45 minutes a day and get as strong as I can or as big as I can?" Whatever. And if that is it, great. But I need to ask myself that question. I don't feel like many of us are asking that question. And for me, and we've alluded to this a couple times now, is what's important about moving as we're aging and being connected with that and having the ability to continue to be able to express ourselves maximally over the course of our lifetimes. That isn't developed in a weight room. That's developed by doing those things. You might appreciate this. If you were looking for good movement, would you go to a weight room or a skate park?

Andrew Huberman:
Definitely to a skate park.

Stuart McMillan:
100%.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
Because the movers are so much better. The movement there is, wow, this is incredible. Don't you want to be able to do that rather than do a squat? There's some made-up exercise that somebody's told you that is going to be do this and this and this for you, or do a deadlift or do a bench press, all these made-up things. And as I said, those things can be good, can be fun, can be interesting, can be important. But what really is most important is can you still move your body? Can you express yourself maximally for as long into your lifetime as you possibly can? And people, I feel like they have to ask the question whether the thing that they're doing, this exercise, is it actually leading to that? And in most cases, I think it's not.

Andrew Huberman:
I came up in part through skateboarding. That was my main focus in high school, up until about mid high school, and then I got into other things. In skateboarding, everything you're saying is especially true.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
The personality matches-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... the way they skateboard, level of aggression, level of technicality, personality. Sometimes there's a mismatch. Every vert skateboarder, big ramp skateboarder now will attest, everyone from Tony Hawk, because I've heard him say it, to everyone I know that there's a kid named Jimmy Wilkins who does everything faster, bigger, with more technical ability than anybody's ever seen. He's a absolutely remarkable addition to the sport and a super nice kid.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, great.

Andrew Huberman:
His mom's a ballerina.

Stuart McMillan:
Oh, yeah? Amazing.

Andrew Huberman:
And he's got very loose hip joints. He actually guides the board with his back knee, so he can do a lot of things with no hands that most people have to grab to do.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
And his dad is an orchestra conductor.

Stuart McMillan:
Great.

Andrew Huberman:
So if you were to make up a story-

Stuart McMillan:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... about a highly technical-

Stuart McMillan:
Right

Andrew Huberman:
... powerful, precise athlete, it would be Jimmy Wilkins.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
He's won X Games. He's astonishing to watch and so much fun to watch. So skateboarding, it's very apparent. But then I was trying to think of some daily activities, so getting away from sport and exercise for a moment, and I was just thinking in my own life, if you wanted to understand my mom, you just have to see her gardening.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
The way she moves about her garden, the way she tends to it, she loves gardening. It's like her greatest. Well, I don't know if it's her greatest joy. It's one of her great joys. And so if you could just see her gardening for 10 minutes, you would understand her as a person completely.

Stuart McMillan:
Amazing.

Andrew Huberman:
It's amazing. And I think she's a very good gardener, but the garden isn't the point. It's how she moves about the garden.

Stuart McMillan:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
And I think that's true for certain people, how they cook.

Stuart McMillan:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Certain people, how they dance. And I was going to say, if you want to understand people at a wedding or a party, just when the music comes on, you get a lot of insight into people's personality. And the best is always that older guy or gal or couple that look like they're just kind of sitting there like turtles, and then they get up and you're like, "Oh my goodness, they can really dance."

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Or they're just enjoying it completely, even if they're not great dancers.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So let's talk about music and dance for a second. I think we can't avoid this any longer. Your Instagram handle was, maybe still is, Fingermash.

Stuart McMillan:
Correct.

Andrew Huberman:
I thought that had something to do with sprinting, but I learned right before we sat down that you're a reggae DJ.

Stuart McMillan:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
And you grew up around that.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And sprinting has a lot of Jamaicans in it.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
What's the deal? Educate us. How much of how you understand athletes and how they move, and people generally in the general population, how they move, relates to your understanding of music and rhythm because of this pressure piece, right? That's a great song. That's a great concert. That's a great album. So.

Stuart McMillan:
I don't think I explicitly truly understood the connection until in hindsight. Because when you're doing it, you're just doing it. You're just living your life, and you're not really thinking about it. I'm doing these things. They have creative, probably similarities, but I'm not really understanding those. I'm not thinking about them. I started DJing in 1984, so I would've been 15, and I stopped DJing in 2010. I had a radio show in Calgary for 20 years called Level the Vibes. Shout out, Level the Vibes. It still goes on to this day with my-

Andrew Huberman:
Level of Vibes?

Stuart McMillan:
Level the Vibes.

Andrew Huberman:
Level the Vibes.

Stuart McMillan:
Level the Vibes-

Andrew Huberman:
Okay

Stuart McMillan:
... with my old DJ partner, Tullah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
And, yeah, absolutely. I was an artist as well, so when I was in school, everyone figured I would just be the artist. I was an okay athlete, but not great. I wasn't good enough to go into professional sport and make money. It was just art. That was it. And I went to art school. And I figured out, this just isn't serving me anymore. But the entire time, I'm doing this music thing, and I'm doing this sport thing. And I think that all of these creative outlets are just all coming together. I've always been sort of a creative coach. And I think this is how I actually got into sprinting, is I was a soccer player. Most of my friends were sprinters. Most of those sprinters, because I was based in Calgary, there's a big Jamaican population there, so most of them were Jamaican. And I just got into sprinting through that. So I feel like, as I said, it wasn't an explicit connection that I understood at the time, but in hindsight, I could see, okay, me being a DJ and understanding rhythm and putting things together, and how putting these things together influenced other things less than maybe the people that I'm playing the music for, that really served my coaching ability 100%. 100%. As did my art. It's really interesting in hindsight to look at those things and look at those, as you say, you call them the transition events and these other things, the other skills that masters in some of the domains have.

Andrew Huberman:
What athletes nowadays, which athletes are you excited about because they seem to have this essence, we don't want to make them self-conscious, but that you're like, "Wow," there's really something there?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Who are you excited about?

Stuart McMillan:
In track specifically?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Or-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... well, any sport. Sure.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. Honestly, I'm not a massive sports fan.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
I don't watch a lot of team sports. In fact, I watch no team sports other than soccer.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
And I watch soccer because that's the game I play. That's the game my father played.

Andrew Huberman:
Who's your team?

Stuart McMillan:
Manchester City.

Andrew Huberman:
And so who's the greatest soccer player in the world in your mind for you? Not necessarily the one that everyone agrees is the best-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... but whoever.

Stuart McMillan:
Messi is the best player, and I think most people would agree that Lionel Messi, who's now playing for Inter Miami, is maybe even still, at the age of 35 or 36, the best player on the planet. And just-

Andrew Huberman:
Because of his expressiveness?

Stuart McMillan:
Just the way in which he plays his game and expresses himself is just perfect. And in fact, this is a really good analogy to discuss what you're talking about here, because in the GOAT debate, the Greatest Of All Time debate, there's two players that come up in soccer, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi.

Andrew Huberman:
Maradona's no longer in the mix.

Stuart McMillan:
No. And Pelé is no longer in the mix either.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Stuart McMillan:
It's these two.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Stuart McMillan:
Ronaldo is 40, and Messi, I think, is 36. And I'd say probably if you took a poll of all of the millions of people that have an opinion on this, 45% of them or so would say Cristiano Ronaldo, and 55%, it's that close, 55% would say Messi. But both of them are so authentically themselves, it's crazy.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
Cristiano Ronaldo is perfect. He is the perfect Greek god. He's 40 years old. He's about 5% body fat. He's big, muscular, powerful, fast.

Andrew Huberman:
He's always low. He shines.

Stuart McMillan:
He shines.

Andrew Huberman:
He literally-

Stuart McMillan:
100% he shines

Andrew Huberman:
... he gleams.

Stuart McMillan:
He does.

Andrew Huberman:
He gleams. Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
And he plays that way, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
And he's just got a certain personality that he brings to the field. And Messi's just like this. Just glides around and just elusive, and you can't see him, and oh, there he is over there, and just the things that he can do with his feet and the ball, and the interaction between his feet and the ball is just, oh, that's incredible. And for me, I align with more of the Messi. I just love the creativity that a player like that has. Or in a little bit more up-to-date maybe, Steph Curry changed the game of basketball totally while or through being authentically himself. He's totally changed the league. He's changed how everybody plays basketball and how everybody will play basketball forevermore. So I really, really appreciate incredibly beautiful and authentic movers. I don't like sport, but I love the movement part of it.

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm. Yeah. As the son of an Argentine, my dad's a first-generation immigrant to the United States. I really put myself to shame by not being a huge soccer fan, but I've got cousins that listen and watch at the dinner table, and you couldn't distract them if an atom bomb went off. And his kids. Such an interesting sport because of this notion that different teams and different players play it differently, right? Like the Brazilians, the rhythm to their game versus the Argentines are considered a little bit more traditionally more rigid among South Americans as a culture.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, a bit more rigid and a little bit more-

Andrew Huberman:
And a stiff upper lip

Stuart McMillan:
... aggressive as well.

Andrew Huberman:
More stiff upper lip.

Stuart McMillan:
Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
Absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
Argentinians take themselves very seriously.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I can say that as a half Argentine.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
We're taught to take ourselves seriously as people.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And at the same time, to enjoy life, but to take ourselves seriously.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, I think there's a lesson in that, too, right? Brazil has been the most successful national soccer team of all time. And you know, like you just said, you're not a soccer fan, but you know how Brazil plays soccer. Everyone knows how Brazil plays soccer. They dance, and they play.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
And it's just this thing.

Andrew Huberman:
It's a party.

Stuart McMillan:
It's a party.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
And that's how they play. And everyone kind of knows how Argentina plays as well. You just said that. You're not a soccer fan, but you know that. Nobody knows how England plays.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
England hasn't won a World Cup since 1966. They haven't won a major title since 1966, even though this is where the sport originated from. Everyone knows how Germany plays and how Germany has always played. There's a way. There's a German way of playing football. There's a Brazilian way of playing football. There's an Argentinian way of playing football. There is no British way anymore.

Andrew Huberman:
Hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
So I think there's something in that, right? There's a connection where every single person that comes up from the age of four years old, they know the way in which everybody in this country plays. Oh, okay. I get that. And we're all on the same team and all contributing to the same system in the same way. Where in the UK, it's so disparate that no one understands it anymore.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm just soaking this in because my mind immediately goes to art.

Stuart McMillan:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
One of my favorite movies is the movie "Basquiat" about Jean-Michel Basquiat, not the documentary. I mean, the cast is Gary Oldman, David Bowie. I mean, it's Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken. It's just an unbelievable cast. And the fact that Basquiat was part Haitian, he was in New York at a time when New York was pretty gritty and brought that together in his art.

Stuart McMillan:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
It was one part graffiti, modern art, and had this kind of tribal component that people made more of than they probably should have. And you could say the same thing about Andy Warhol or about Chuck Close. When people are just being themselves, but they're also taking their ancestry-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... and they're taking their personal history, which includes their ancestry, and they're putting it into their art or their sport, spectacular things happen.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So along those lines, and this is a somewhat controversial topic, but I'm just going to go right into it because I think everyone wonders about this. I'll say this directly. Why are there fewer white strength and speed champion athletes? In fact, if you hang around track and field long enough, you'll hear, "That's the third fastest white woman. That's the second fastest white guy." People are using very specific language, but we could put it differently. You got a lot of fast Jamaicans.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
What's the deal?

Stuart McMillan:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Is it genetic contribution to fiber type? Let's also talk about calf belly length, which turns out to not be about calf belly length at all. What I'm saying there is people with, quote-unquote, "small calves" tend to be fast runners.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
What's the deal? And I realize why this is a controversial topic, but it's so obvious-

Stuart McMillan:
Sure

Andrew Huberman:
... that it's almost silly to avoid at this point.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. How can you not have the conversation?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Let's have a conversation about it.

Stuart McMillan:
It is obvious.

Andrew Huberman:
It's obvious.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So what's the deal?

Stuart McMillan:
Well, as in all things, when we're having discussions around topics like this, it's both nature and nurture.

Andrew Huberman:
Sure.

Stuart McMillan:
It's primarily, in this case, nature. If you don't have the genetic capacity to run fast, you won't run fast. Sorry. You just don't.

Andrew Huberman:
You don't have enough type 2 fibers.

Stuart McMillan:
Whatever it is.

Andrew Huberman:
Proportion of type 2 fibers.

Stuart McMillan:
It could be limb length. It could be joint structure. Typically, faster people have tighter, smaller joints. Typically, faster people have longer tendons and smaller muscle bellies. Typically, faster people have more type 2X fibers. Typically, faster people are slightly taller. So all of these contributing genetic factors, if you do not have those things, I mean, that's not even talking about some of the hormonal factors, some of the endocrinological factors, some of the neural factors that we may not even understand yet. There's all of these genetic determinants that play a part in what you are able to do. So first and foremost, yes, that is a fact, that statistically, almost every single human being that's ever ran sub-10 seconds is a Black athlete, evolutionarily from maybe, say, West Africa.

Andrew Huberman:
Let me ask you. Sorry for interrupting, but has a white person ever broken the 10-second mark in the 100 meters?

Stuart McMillan:
There's been a few now.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Stuart McMillan:
There's been a few. So it was first Christophe Lemaitre, I believe in either 2017 or 2018, was the first white athlete to break 10 seconds. And then there's been I feel like there's probably five, maybe six Asians now who have broken 10 seconds. Everybody else, and that's close to 200, are Black.

Andrew Huberman:
And of course, there's the nature component too, which is if you come from a country where sprinting-

Stuart McMillan:
Yes

Andrew Huberman:
... is a popular sport, or soccer is a popular sport, or distance running is a popular sport, then there's going to be a selection bias there.

Stuart McMillan:
100%.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
100%.

Andrew Huberman:
So we're taking those into play.

Stuart McMillan:
I would say that if you don't have the genetics, good luck. You're not even in the room.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
The genetics will get you in the room. Once you do in that room, what that nature is, what that upbringing is, what that environment is, that is going to determine what you do with your genetics. So for example, a massive percentage, and I don't know what this is, but it's big, a massive percentage of the male athletes who have ran sub 2:10 in a marathon come from the same little district in Kenya. It's very, very high percentage. And part of that is not only their genetics, but the environment in which they're growing up in. Every single person that they know is a marathoner. Every single person they know are running in excess of 100 miles a week. Every single person they know of, these are all of the things that we need to do to be this, right? So they're seeing that from the day that they're born. So for sure, environment really matters. What you do with that nature really, really matters. But if you don't have the genetic capacity to begin with, just as I said, you don't have any chance at all. And as you said, Jamaica, sprinting is massive in Jamaica. It's really, really important. I would encourage you to do one thing. Go to Champs at one point. If you like track meets-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Stuart McMillan:
... this is the best track meet in the world. Champs is the Jamaican high school national championships, and it's in Kingston, and it is incredible. Absolutely incredible. The stands are packed, so there's 45,000, 50,000 people. It's loud, it's noisy, it's boisterous, and kids are just killing themselves trying to beat each other. It's just an amazing event over the course of three or four days. Go to the last couple days of Champs and just watch that, and you just see, ah, I understand why Jamaicans are so fast. If this is the environment in which many of them are operating within as they come up. So I'm good friends with Donovan Bailey. Donovan Bailey was a 1996 Olympic champion. He was a world record holder in the 100 meters for a while. He's of Jamaican descent, grew up in Jamaica until he was 12. He moved to Canada in 1981, which is the same year that I moved to Canada. So we've talked about this a lot, and he said, "If you do well at Champs, you're set. You're going to do really well as a professional sprinter, because there's nothing that has more pressure in it than actually competing well at Jamaican high school national championships."

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
So understand what that environment does for the ability for your typical Jamaican athlete to succeed at higher levels. And all of those pockets like this exist all over the world, whether it's in Russia or whether it's in Kenya, whether it's in West Africa, or whether it's in, right now we're seeing some interesting things in Norway, in some of the endurance sports, right? So it's for sure, nurture's really, really important, but genetics gets you in the room. What you do within that room, that's up to you and your environment that you create.

Andrew Huberman:
It's so interesting how these different cultures shape the future of a sport or an endeavor. In China, kids are highly incentivized to learn a lot and test a lot in math and sciences.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And they're really big on neuroscience in China. I think these nature-nurture questions are super interesting. It sounds like Jamaica is still churning out a lot of excellent sprinters, because of the huge numbers that are fed to the sport and can essentially grow up, their nervous systems are shaped around sprinting.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Couple that with any number of different features, and you talked about short calf bellies, right? This is the fear of every bodybuilder, right? They want long calf bellies. But short calf bellies make people faster and better jumpers, not because the calf is short, but because-

Stuart McMillan:
Because the tendon is long.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay. Could you-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. Essentially, each muscle is really a muscle tendon unit, and if you've got a longer tendon relative to your muscle, effectively you're a little bit more plyometric. You can store and release energy a little bit more effectively than somebody who has a shorter tendon and a longer or bigger, fatter, thicker muscle. So really if you want to be fast, you want long, skinny tendons and small little muscle bellies. So yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
So what serves aesthetics sometimes doesn't necessarily serve the sport and vice versa.

Stuart McMillan:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
So if you had to pick one, you'd want to be able to jump and run faster.

Stuart McMillan:
Would you?

Andrew Huberman:
Sure. I suppose that having very short calves would be weird, but who wouldn't want to run faster or jump higher for all sorts of reasons? Just be so much fun.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, absolutely.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. I don't have a lot of hops, but this is actually a time to talk about Knees Over Toes Guy.

Stuart McMillan:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Ben Patrick.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
He fought a lot of adversity to encourage people, including a lot of exercise physiologists and the people who do rehab from various aspects, that putting your knees out over your toes is okay. Caught a lot of heat, but I think the fact that he's so skilled at jumping and dunking and back bent and landing and back bends and things of that sort puts them all to shame, frankly. I think most people understand now that Ben is really onto something with this.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
One of the things that he's a big proponent of is a lot of eccentric loading, but also not being afraid to get that knee way out over the toe. What is the deal with Running form, as it were. Is the idea that if you can get your knee higher, you can stride further? And then when we talk about knee back toward butt, how far back? Are we supposed to kick our own glutes when we stride? What is a proper running stride, or is it going to vary by structure?

Stuart McMillan:
Well, that's a big question.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Explain that in five seconds. I'm just kidding. But for those of us who want to run a bit faster, do some-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... stride work-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... should I be reaching with my front leg and pulling myself forward on the ground?

Stuart McMillan:
100% not. Please do not do that.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay, I feel all right. And I shouldn't be just quickening my turnover of a jogging stride. So-

Stuart McMillan:
That's part of it.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
First of all, let's start at the start and understand the way you move is going to be governed by the things that you are moving. So how you move is governed by the stuff that you've got. So you cannot move in a way in which your body will not allow. So if you have a certain structure of your joints, or a certain mobility structure, or a certain genetic makeup, or a certain stiffness, or a certain muscle fiber type, all of those things come together. They all coalesce to sort of govern your motor strategy. So the last thing that I would want you to do, Andrew, is to copy Usain Bolt's sprinting stride. Because Usain Bolt is 6'5", 215 pounds. He's a little bit more dynamic than you. He's probably got slightly longer Achilles tendons than you. He's probably got tighter, smaller joints than you. He's probably a lot more elastic than you are. He's probably a little bit more coordinated than you are. So why would I want you to try to copy that? So my job, first and foremost, is to understand how you should or how you could move based upon the constraints that you have, based upon what are known as your action capabilities. So your force capacity, your mobility capacity, all of these things that make up who you are. Your height, your weight, your joint length, your joint ratios, all of these different things. Your limb ratios. So first, it's understanding that we are governed by the stuff that we have. So we should never be trying to copy someone else, first and foremost. Number two is then we should have some sort of understanding of what is the common way to do a thing. And we can probably simplify this. We kind of know a little bit about what a model looks like for a back squat, or for a deadlift, or for you choose your exercise. We kind of have a model for that, whether that's a mathematical model or whether that model was based upon the average of a bunch of elite movers. We kind of understand what, quote unquote, "optimal" is mathematically. But we also have to understand that we are not math. We are biological beings that will all move in slightly varying ways, depending upon the stuff that we are moving. So yes, we look at that model, but we also look at what we've got, and we try to find somewhere in the middle that serves us. So in sprinting, and probably in most activities, we try to identify what are the non-negotiables. What are the rules here? Like in squatting, we know what the rules are, right? We don't want to bend to one side. We don't want to overly flex our spine. We don't want to anteriorly rotate our shoulders. We don't want to have knee valgus, where our knees come in and touch each other. We don't want to have super wide feet. We don't want to have internally rotated feet when we're squatting. All of these things that we know that we don't do, they govern the things that we can do. So in sprinting, we have something similar. We don't know as much about sprinting as we do in some of the more, or maybe the less complex movements, more discrete movements, like a squat, like a deadlift, like a power clean. The sprinting is coordinative. It continues. It's rhythmic, so it's a little bit harder for us to actually study. But we do know that, as you said, one of the things you said was high knees. And most of the elite sprinters converge upon similar positions when their knee is super high. And that knee gets up to about waist height, just almost belly button height, when they're running as fast as they can. So we know if we want to be fast, we got to try and bring our knees up. And we talked about that before, too, right? The difference between striding and sprinting, and jogging and running, where jogging and running happens behind the center mass, and striding and sprinting is in front of the center mass. So maybe first and foremost, we think about bringing the knee up. Knee's got to be a little bit higher. We have to think about being in front. We know that for sure, every elite sprinter sets up a very stiff spring on the ground by being very, very strong and stiff and rigid through the foot-ankle complex. So you have to be stiff on impact. So think about the analogy that I give all the time is if you think about you're a boxer, or you're boxing and you're hitting a heavy bag, what would you do with your wrist and your fist? You'd squeeze it and hold it rigidly. Because if you didn't, it would really hurt, and if you're trying to hit it as hard as you can, you have to be squeezed. It's the same thing with sprinting. Because the forces, by the way, are pretty similar. An elite boxer hits a heavy bag and somewhere in excess of five times their body weight in less than three hundredths of a second. It's exactly the same as sprinting. An elite sprinting is in excess of five times their body weight in less than three hundredths of a second time to peak force on ground contact. So knees are up, and we're very stiff on the ground. And the third thing is if you do not have an effective hip extension pattern, you just can't move well, never mind run fast. You have to have the ability for your knee to come behind your butt. Now, that's a hard thing to define. It's a hard thing to quantify. People ask me all the time, "What do you mean? What is a good pattern?" If I talk about the hip extension pattern and the importance of that, it's not just range of motion. So that's the one that you alluded to is how far behind. Well, the further the knee gets behind the center mass, the more the range of motion. It's not just that. Because in sprinting, when you're upright especially, you want to almost limit the amount of time that the knee travels behind the butt. Because the longer that the knee travels behind the butt, the longer you're on the ground, the slower you are. So range of motion for you or for me or for Rob or for anyone listening, for running, is going to be very different from a Noah Lyles or an Andre De Grasse or a Usain Bolt. But the qualitative aspect of all of those things is still really important, and the way in which I judge the quality of a pattern is kind of fivefold. Do you have the force capacity to be able to extend your hip? Are you strong enough? Can you actually get your knee behind the hip? And many people just can't do that because they're not strong enough. Do you have the velocity capacity? Can you actually move your limb fast enough to get it behind? Do you have the range of motion? And most team sport athletes, if I'm going in and talking to coaches who work in team sports, that's the low-hanging fruit. They just don't have the range. So number three is the range. Number four is the control. And if you're a kid, if you're a 14-year-old, you probably don't have the control of that pattern. And five is, can you do it over and over again? Can you actually repeat it? So when we're looking at the judging of a pattern, it's force, velocity, repeatability, control, and range of motion, is those five things. So that's a long answer to what I could talk about for literally days is what are the things that we're looking at for sprinting, the ability to get the thigh up high, the ability to contact the ground really aggressively, and the ability to get the thigh or the knee behind the hip with high quality.

Andrew Huberman:
What are your thoughts on skipping rope?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. I think the ability to coordinate flexion-extension at the ankle, knee, and hip is really important. So you're coordinating the movement pattern at the ankle, at the knee, and the hip, and coordinating all of those in space and time. And the ability to do that, as we've talked about, is one of the things that we lose as we age. So skipping is one of those things that can quite simply work on that coordinative aspect. What I see too often, though, is people skipping incorrectly and skipping only through their ankles and not really doing a lot through the knees and the hip, and they just sort of plantarflex, dorsiflex, plantarflex, dorsiflex. So they just push up on their toes, and they come off. Where we need to understand that plantarflexion or going up onto your toes is in dynamic movements, a reflexive movement. It's not a volitional movement. It's not a movement that we should be thinking about or trying to control. All we should be thinking about is just bouncing as if we're bouncing on a trampoline. Just bounce, bounce, bounce. And actually keeping our foot as stiff as we can. Just like skipping for me, I just equate it to hitting a heavy bag over and over and over again. It's pop, pop, pop. You can't do that if you're on your toes. You want to be on the balls of your feet, like right on the base of your toes. Then it's a lot easier to just bounce. Think about it bouncing. So I think it's a great activity from that perspective, is sort of just teaching how to coordinate what's called the amortization of all of the joints of the lower body. And then as far as how to do it, what to do it, I just feel just do it.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
You know what I mean?

Andrew Huberman:
Have some fun with it.

Stuart McMillan:
Do it with heavy ropes. Do it with the light ropes. Have fun with it. I think there's probably too many times that we're constrained by what people like me say to do, what is right.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
Just have fun, man. Just find a way in which to express yourself and enjoy the movement. If you love jumping rope or hopping rope, go do that. Just make sure that you try to understand what doing it well looks like or feels like so you can do it well.

Andrew Huberman:
I like to put on an album and skip for the album, and then somehow just let the music, when I feel moved to skip different, faster or high knees or something, let that dictate.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Because then there's this external coach/rhythm. It's something I like. I'm not thinking about it too much. And then next thing I know, I've got 35 minutes of "cardio" done with a piece of plastic. I don't know, there's something very satisfying about doing that. I don't know why.

Stuart McMillan:
No, I love it.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. As you can probably tell, I'm getting more and more interested in things that draw on more aspects of the nervous system, mind and body-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm

Andrew Huberman:
... for exercise. Because while I love the gym, I think it can be too linear and too rigid.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I think it leads to rigidity in one's thinking.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And that might come as a surprise to a lot of people thinking, oh, all these protocols have to be done. There's a fundamentally correct way to do most things, like get morning sunlight in your eyes.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But if it's five minutes or it's seven minutes, depends on how bright it is and what time of year. I feel like the biology is flexible.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And learning to go by feel can be very helpful.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. I think we lose that, too, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
We got to remember, principles are few and methods are many. There's many ways to do different things, as long as they align with the principles. Just think about what the principles are, and then just be creative in choosing the methods that work for you.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. This is where peer-reviewed science unfortunately can't measure every variable.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
People say, "Well, has there been a study comparing 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes or 30 minutes of morning sunlight?" No.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Because you're lucky if you get 100 subjects. You got to pay those subjects. You got to get them to come in. You're tracking sleep. You use 10,000 lux in one group and control light in another. You just don't have the option to work through every-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... variable in anything. Even a dose-response study of a drug, you can't account for nutrition and the drug, and then people go, "Well, then how can we trust any of this?" Standard science, as it were, reduction of science, is just one lens through these things.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
That doesn't mean that people's experience is necessarily smarter than data. It just means that data have to mesh with experience and experience with data.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, I think data can inform the decisions we make, but they are not the decisions that we make.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
We use that data, but what's most important is how all of these data points, all this information, comes together. It's the relationships and the interactions between the component parts which is more important than the individual component parts themselves.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
So we have to understand what those relationships are. That's the thing we need to focus a little bit more on.

Andrew Huberman:
I'd like to talk about weight training. What do sprinters do for their weight training? And if somebody like me is interested in becoming a faster runner, maybe even sprinting someday, besides just doing skips and strides, what are some ways of doing exercises in the gym that can potentially facilitate our ability to move better outside of the gym?

Stuart McMillan:
First, let's look at the kinetics of sprinting. Sprinting is only really truly about four things: how much force you apply into the ground, how fast can you apply it, the direction in which you apply it, and how heavy you are. And it's just those four things. How much force, how fast, which direction, what is your mass? So yeah, force is important. We have to be able to apply a certain level of force, but there's a threshold to this. Everyone says there's a big question, and has been for a long time, how much "strength" is enough in sprinting? Well, enough is-- It's the same question that we should ask in every task. There's a rate of diminishing returns on all of these capacities that we need, that we require. Is spending an extra few years trying to get an extra five kilos to your power clean or an extra 25 pounds to your back squat as effective as a means to get faster than it would be if, say, you start skipping, maybe do some more explosive work, actually start sprinting a little bit more. So there's always this, from a programming perspective, is understanding where the athlete is, what they require, what they've got, where they are in the rate of diminishing returns on each of those capacities. So first, we have to understand that. Let me zoom out just a little bit. I coached Andre De Grasse, as we talked about. Andre, when I started coaching him in 2015, could barely squat his body weight. Eight months later, he's a three-time Olympic medalist. Eight months later, he was one and a half years into his sprinting career. He'd sprinted for 18 months. He had three Olympic medals in the sprints, the 100, the 200, and the 4 by 1. He could barely squat his body weight. He could clean 60 kilos, so 135 pounds. He definitely couldn't bench a plate and a half. He might've had a 145-pound bench. Yeah, maybe. Super weak. But on the other end of the spectrum, and this is the example that everyone gives, you've got Ben Johnson. Famously, Ben Johnson did this 600-pound squat a couple of days prior to winning in the Tokyo Olympics in 1988, running 979. Obviously, that was thereafter taken away after he tested positive. So you've gone to one end of the spectrum, somebody like Ben Johnson, who applies incredible amounts of force, and on the other end, you've got somebody like Andre De Grasse, who doesn't apply relatively any force, but does it really, really fast. So, this gives you an understanding of the spectrum of capacities and abilities that humans have to do a task in an almost infinite number of ways. So to get to your question, it depends on who you are, and what you're good at, and why you're good at it. There's not one way. When you've got a Ben Johnson who can apply incredible amounts of forces, and that's one of the reasons why he's fast. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got Andre De Grasse, who's weaker than most high school girls, who's incredibly fast. Where does that leave us? That just tells us, okay, there's many different ways to do this, which is great. It's cool. That gives us, again, some freedom to better ask the questions about what it is that makes you, Andrew, really good. You apply a lot of force. Okay, let's lean into that. Let's try to improve your speed by trying to maximize your force. But what are you limited by? Okay, you're having trouble getting off the ground. You're not super reactive or reflexive. So we have to work some things into your program that's going to make you a little bit more reactive or reflexive. So maybe we'll do some jump squats. Maybe we'll do some hurdle hops. Maybe we'll do some more skipping. Maybe we feel like, okay, you've reached the rate of diminishing returns on your force capacity. You don't need to squat four plates if you squat 385. Is going from 385 to 405 going to make you any faster? No. Not at all. So let's keep you at 385, and we'll just do some other things. So first and foremost, it's respecting the individuality of all things and understanding that there's not one way in which I can tell you, "Do this because this is what he did, and that's what's going to work for you." Now, there is, as I said before, there's non-negotiables and there's rules to things. So sprinting is how you transmit that force into the track in a really fast period of time in the right direction. So the transmission of force is typically more important than the magnitude of the force, at least at the elite end, at least at the adult end. So transmission of force means the amount of force that you put into the ground, how do you use it to propel yourself forward? So what are the types of exercises that maybe-- What would you think about if I said this is a force transmission exercise rather than, say, a force magnitude exercise? Is that something that-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Stuart McMillan:
... appeals to you?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, jump squat comes to mind.

Stuart McMillan:
100%.

Andrew Huberman:
You know Jump squat comes to mind. Any kind of push clap push-ups.

Stuart McMillan:
Yep. Correct.

Andrew Huberman:
The ability to double clap or more.

Stuart McMillan:
Yep.

Andrew Huberman:
Yes, that's what comes to mind.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
Olympic lifts is one where a lot of people would say, "Yeah, it's an Olympic lift. That's kind of what we're doing with Olympic lifts."

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah, like a clean. You're kind of--

Stuart McMillan:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
I don't do Olympic lifts, but from what I understand, they're pushing off the ground to get the bar up.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
It's essentially, can we apply high forces fast over a long period of time?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
So that's kind of... We spend a lot of time looking at those types of exercises.

Andrew Huberman:
Sled work?

Stuart McMillan:
We don't do any sled work, I'll be honest. We can get back to that if you want to-

Andrew Huberman:
No sled work for elite sprinters.

Stuart McMillan:
We do resisted acceleration work.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Stuart McMillan:
So we'll sprint. We'll do some specific strength work where we're pulling probably in excess of 10 to 15 kilos, so 20 to 30 pounds-ish.

Andrew Huberman:
Do you use the parachute? That was a big thing a few years back.

Stuart McMillan:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
Remember that?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Where they had the parachutes.

Stuart McMillan:
I used the parachute 20 years ago, absolutely. We don't now.

Andrew Huberman:
Okay.

Stuart McMillan:
We actually have a piece of equipment called the power core, and we use that.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, you use that.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. No, it's really good.

Andrew Huberman:
That's a spring-loaded core unit.

Stuart McMillan:
And the 1080 Sprint, which is this incredible piece of equipment that we use, that we can really dial in the resistance down to a half a kilo. Yeah, it's beautiful.

Andrew Huberman:
Cool.

Stuart McMillan:
So we use that, but that's for different reasons.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
So you talked about the weight room. In the population of athletes that I work with, maximum strength is at the rate of diminishing returns already. We don't spend almost any time working on that. At a lower level of population, maybe if you're a high school kid, or if you're in your 20s, or if you're super weak, just by increasing your force capacity, so your ability to apply force, you will get faster. Because remember what the calculation is: amount of force, how fast, direction, and body mass. So it is important. It just becomes less and less important the faster you get.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
And then it becomes when it's less important, when the ability to produce a high magnitude of force isn't important, what is important? So then we're starting looking at plyometric things, and probably most specifically, I'm looking at specific isometric stuff in the weight room. So let's look at the position in which we're applying in excess of five times our body weight, and that's when the foot is directly underneath the center of mass. The foot is flat on the ground. There's about a 15-degree knee bend, and there's about a five- to 10-degree hip bend. So can you think about that position?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
So we're pushing up against an immovable bar or holding a very heavy bar on one leg with as heavy as we can or as hard as we can for somewhere between three to five seconds times three to four repetitions, and we'll do three sets of that. That's Alex Natera's work. He's one of the premier researchers in what's called run-specific isometric strength training. So it's getting strong in really specific positions to the task that you're trying to become better at. So that's the primary one for me, is that position where the foot is directly underneath the center of mass. There's a little bit of a knee bend, there's a little bit of a hip bend, and we do a lot of isometric work right there.

Andrew Huberman:
Interesting.

Stuart McMillan:
And then, and this is my bias, I do nothing bilateral at all.

Andrew Huberman:
You mean parallel stance?

Stuart McMillan:
Parallel stance. Nothing. Except occasionally, if it is an issue, with neural drive or whatever, I'll do some trap bar deadlifts. So some parallel stance trap bar deadlifts. Because I think that's a great exercise. I think that's difficult to do with a staggered stance. It's very difficult to do with a single-leg stance. But you can load up some pretty good weight on a parallel stance trap bar deadlift, and yeah, I feel pretty good. And you get a good feeling out of that. It's not necessarily to be able to apply or generate more force. It's more about neural drive than it is for anything else. Every single other thing that we do is in a staggered stance, heel to toe, or kickstand, which is kind of the same sort of thing, just a different terminology, or split stance, or a stance where the front foot is elevated or the rear foot is elevated. So we'll do, as we've talked about quite a bit now, find opportunities to get the knee behind the butt. That's a really important position. Can we get stronger, faster, more control, more repeatability, and more range at that position?

Andrew Huberman:
One of the things I learned from you yesterday is... Well, I'll double-click first on the staggered stance. So this is one foot slightly in front of the other. I've been doing this with various lifts in the gym for a long time. I would say the exception would be if I'm belt squatting or hack squatting, I don't do that. But for everything else, overhead presses, anything where my feet are in contact with the ground, that is, not on pull-ups and dips, of course, but curls, tricep extensions, and I make sure to vary the stance so one foot is in front for one set, one is in front for the other. Sometimes even in the middle of the set-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... I'll switch them up after. And I found that to be tremendously helpful for building core stability and a number of other things. And it sounds like it might help running gait as well. The other thing that you said yesterday that I think is really important that I've not thought of before, but now I'm doing, is any time you have a foot elevated in the gym to get onto the toe, front foot can be flat.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. I think the ability to get off your first ray-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Stuart McMillan:
... so for the big toe to bend and flex-

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm

Stuart McMillan:
... is really important. So for me, if that's important, I'm going to search for opportunities to do that as often as I can. So if I have an option to either flex the big toe or not Then we're going to flex the big toe.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
Now, if you can't, and many athletes cannot. There's a lot of athletes that just cannot extend to that big toe, or some athletes have bunions and just can't get over it.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
And that's okay. We can go onto the top of the foot. It's not the end of the world. But I look for opportunities like that, like I look for opportunities to extend the hip. How can I work hip extension exercises into everything I do? I look for full chain or full body force transmission exercises as much as I possibly can. Ideally, from the left foot to the right hand, and the right foot to the left hand, so cross body. So I'm looking for these long fascial chains, ways in which I can bring some function to the work that I'm doing in the weight room, some level of transferability between the things that I do in the weight room and the things that we do on the track. Because frankly, most of the things that we do in the weight room don't transfer to the track. A squat doesn't really transfer. It's a totally different exercise performed in a totally different way at a totally different time, totally different weights. So the transference is very far. It's very nebulous. So I'm looking for ways in which we can find a way to transfer the capacities that we are building in the weight room directly to the track.

Andrew Huberman:
And with respect to stretching, I'm thinking again of yoga because this is probably the first time I'd done this, where one would lunge. So front foot planted flat, rear foot up on the big toe if possible, the knee back of that rear foot, or rear leg, excuse me, back behind the butt-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... and then the opposite arm raised above. That's that fascial sling that cuts across from, in anatomy nomenclature, contralateral across the midline.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And then essentially trying to learn to feel that line that goes all the way from one's big toe that's planting back, up the leg, across the pelvis, up the body and to the opposite tips of finger.

Stuart McMillan:
100%. And if I can add to that stretch, this is something that I really love Kelly about. He's so much on, "I need you to be in control of your body." There is a way to do this, but then it's up to you to find out a better way for you specifically. So you've done a great job of outlining what this stretch looks like. Now, what can I do with my body to actually make this better? Do I rotate to one side?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
Do I side bend to one side? Do I flex the hand as well as doing this? Because this will be a better stretch than that.

Andrew Huberman:
So palm parallel to the ceiling.

Stuart McMillan:
100%.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Of the raised hand.

Stuart McMillan:
Correct. If I push the knee back and try to push the heel on the ground and actually contract, if I rotate my pelvis underneath me posteriorly, do a pelvic tilt underneath me, will that increase it? So it's always this exploratory process. There is a right way to do things, but you are an individual. We're all unique snowflakes, right? We all move in different ways, and it's up to us to explore all of our uniqueness.

Andrew Huberman:
Distant topic from the one that we're on, but one that I, and I think a number of people are curious about is drugs in sports.

Stuart McMillan:
Hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Performance-enhancing drugs. There's a potentially new sports league, track league, which is the Enhanced Games. Who knows if that will go through. But right now, using performance-enhancing drugs, most performance-enhancing drugs is banned in track. But because of the Ben Johnson thing-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... that was '88 Olympics-

Stuart McMillan:
'88

Andrew Huberman:
... where he was jaundiced at the eyes, and it turned out he was taking Winstrol, and he was stripped of his medal. And then the discussion is they're all using it, some just get caught, this kind of thing, or they're using in the off-season. How common is, people usually say steroid use, but androgen enhancement?

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? Because performance-enhancing drugs could be drugs to lower the heart rate for the biathletes. They do that, too. Right? Keep your heart rate lower. There's all sorts of drugs that are banned that are not androgen increasing.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
But things like testosterone derivatives-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... in the men and women. How common is it?

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. Now?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
Not common at all.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
In fact, I don't know of any elite sprinter that I could definitely point to, say, "That person is dirty." None. It was common. '60s and '70s, extremely common. '80s, very common. '90s, when testing started becoming a bit better, much less common. 2000s, 2010s, and '20s, I just don't know how much of it is getting done now or being done across the board. There are pockets. So we obviously know about Russia and what's gone on with the Eastern Bloc and all of the drugs that they've taken that's been state-sponsored. All of that is out there. We know that for sure, if you are an elite Russian athlete, almost certainly you were taking drugs. You didn't have a choice.

Andrew Huberman:
Is that still true now?

Stuart McMillan:
You didn't have a choice. What no one really knows now, because Russia's been banned from all sports, so you don't see Russian athletes almost anywhere.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Stuart McMillan:
I think there's a few sports that you do, but most of them now you don't see Russian athletes. But it's so hard. That's a part of the culture and has been part of the culture since the '50s.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
That's what we do. Because everyone else is cheating, so this is what we do. So it's a state-sponsored system. And I feel like there's 150 or 160, something like that, positive drug cases come out of Kenya over the course of the last decade. So you think, "Okay, there's something going on with Kenyans."

Andrew Huberman:
Is that distance running?

Stuart McMillan:
Distance running.

Andrew Huberman:
And there I should say, because some people might not be familiar with this, that with distance running or cycling, triathlon, it's probably not ... increasing androgens like testosterone, dihydrotestosterone, et cetera. It's probably things that increase red blood cell count.

Stuart McMillan:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
Ability to deliver more oxygen and fuel sources to the cells.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
So this kind of blood EPO, these and things like that.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. But, and this one in Kenya, I understand it, and I understand the Russian thing as well. If you're a Kenyan kid, you're 18 years old, you've got some talent, an agent comes to you and says, "I'm going to give you $50,000, and I'm going to support you for the first two years of your career. And this is what everyone does anyway. And we'll take the risk a little bit, but you can actually make something of yourself, become a star, get a house, feed your family. Do this, do that." That's a hard calculation for a kid to make, as it was in the steroid era in baseball. It's almost logical to take drugs at that point. "All right, these guys aren't testing me at all, so why wouldn't I?" Why wouldn't Barry Bonds take drugs? Now, that's a different calculation for most of the rest of the world, where there isn't these practices going on in Kenya with a lot of shady people, to be honest with you. And I honestly, I do not see drugs at all in the sport anymore. There will be pockets of people, for sure. There will be a few dirty coaches, there'll be a few dirty managers, there'll be a few people doing some dirty things. But I'm very, very confident that the top people in all of the events are doing it clean. Very confident.

Andrew Huberman:
That's great to hear.

Stuart McMillan:
It is.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
And I would not know the first-- I've been in this sport for a long time. I wouldn't know what to do, what to take, who to get it from. So when I look at choose your athlete, I won't name any names, and you look at who they're surrounded by, I know those people well.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
How would they do it? I had no idea. No one really knows, right? Because, I mean, the drug testing is pretty stringent now.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
It's really stringent. It's hard. It's really, really hard.

Andrew Huberman:
That's encouraging to hear, especially for young people who are watching Olympics and it's a terrible thing if they were to think, oh, they're all-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... using. And I think one good trend in the last few years is there's a lot more openness now in the kind of fitness world. Because when I was growing up, of course, those veiny bodybuilder people, they were all juiced to the gills, and they'd say they weren't, but they absolutely were. And nowadays, if people are doing TRT or something, they say it, right?

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I've talked about it.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I microdose every other day since I was 45. Never before then.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But I've relied on other things to keep testosterone in range, and I take HCG, maintain fertility. That's all checked out, but I'm very clear about exactly how much. The internet has it wrong. It's 25 milligrams every other day, by the way. Staggered with 600 IUs of HCG every other day. I said that early on because I was like, "I'm not a competitive athlete. I got nothing to hide."

Stuart McMillan:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
And I'll say that, was it TRT? I'll say, not really, because my testosterone was in mid sevens. But I was getting fatigued a lot, and bumping it up a little bit higher, which is what this has done, has been great for me.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
But it's the people that lie, like the Liver King situation, where he looked at the camera, unfortunately, and filmed himself saying that he doesn't, and then he gets caught. It's like, duh.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And then you've got people that are juicing really hard, and it's tricky in sports because, or in movies, right? Like when an actor suddenly is big and shredded and you're just like, oh. You know the telltale signs. It's probably not testosterone, it's probably oxandrolone or something a little bit, quote-unquote, "lighter." But there's nothing light about oxandrolone on your liver or your hairline, folks. But this is a bigger discussion, but I think it's important to just be open about it.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Because we want to see people run faster than ever before.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
We want to see people jump higher than ever before.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
We want to see people run marathons faster than ever before. And it sucks when we find out that they were enhanced, and that was breaking the rules.

Stuart McMillan:
What sucks more is the reputational damage that those things do for the people who are actually doing this well and clean.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Stuart McMillan:
The 99.9% of the people-

Andrew Huberman:
Right

Stuart McMillan:
... who are trying to do this the right way, that are being colored with the same brush.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Stuart McMillan:
And that's what really frustrates me. It's really frustrating. I've coached one athlete in my career who tested positive. 2001 Olympic trials in bobsled. His name was Pavle Jovanovic. He was, at the time, the best bobsledder on the planet. So tested positive for nandrolone, so Deca Durabolin. Later, it was shown that it came from a supplement. So if you remember, this was 2001.

Andrew Huberman:
Oh, yeah. You could-

Stuart McMillan:
So from-

Andrew Huberman:
... buy GHB at-

Stuart McMillan:
... late '90s

Andrew Huberman:
... at GNC at that time.

Stuart McMillan:
Correct.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
Late '90s up until the early 2000s, there were supplement companies purposefully lacing their protein with steroids-

Andrew Huberman:
God

Stuart McMillan:
... to try to sell more supplements.

Andrew Huberman:
Goodness gracious.

Stuart McMillan:
And there's studies that show this, and they ended up, there was a group of athletes that all tested positive that sued this one company. The company ended up just declaring bankruptcy, and nobody got a cent. And long story short, ruined his career, ruined his reputation, ended up taking his own life.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Stuart McMillan:
So I've seen, and this is just people from the outside just look at that and say, "Oh, just another druggy bobsledder, just another druggy football player, just another druggy sprinter. They're all on drugs." And they're not. They're not. 99.9% of people are trying to do this right. They're good people, not making any money in this sport, especially in track and field. It's a different calculation, as you said, in Hollywood or in the NFL or in baseball, where the testing is Significantly more lax than it is in track and field, or significantly more lax than what it is in almost all amateur sports. Amateur sport is almost impossible to be dirty these days. It really is. And if you just think about this, Trayvon Bromell ran 9.97 as a high school kid. He was 5'7", 135 pounds. You think that kid was taking drugs? Of course he wasn't. So if you can run 9.97 as a 17-year-old, at that age, why can't you run 9.7 six, seven, eight years later, after actually training and being in an elite program? Of course you can. Usain Bolt ran 1984 when he was 18 years old. He ran sub-10 when he was 19 years old. World class.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
Just a kid.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
You're seeing high school kids now running ridiculously fast times.

Andrew Huberman:
In the mile as well.

Stuart McMillan:
In every single event, right?

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
Every event across the board.

Andrew Huberman:
And they're not assisted. This is one thing-

Stuart McMillan:
No

Andrew Huberman:
... where I hear we're cutting between sport and we're talking about fitness.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
The reason I mention the age when I started TRT is that, A, never occurred to me I didn't need it. I felt like I got great results until then. And I think the biggest thing is recovery.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I do think it helps you recover-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... better. No question, actually. But a real shame nowadays is that because of Instagram and people showing their bodies, and this desire for people to get results more quickly, a lot of guys in their teens, 20s, and 30s are taking testosterone when they don't need it.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
It does shut down sperm production, unless they're offsetting that with hCG or something like that. And they may think they don't want kids now, but they may want them later, and some permanent damage can be done. In addition to that, puberty is a very protracted thing for a lot of people. It's not like, oh, you start puberty at 14, it ends at 16. Your brain's still developing. So we don't really understand how all that works. Not this Olympics, but prior to that one, there was a female athlete who tested positive for deca, the deca burrito. She blamed it on a burrito meat. And I remember hearing that, and I sort of facetiously said, and I'll say it again, not facetiously, "If she got caught for deca, I hope she took deca." Because to knowingly take a banned substance and get caught, and then banned from the sport is one thing. But to inadvertently take a banned substance-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... as did this bobsledder-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... and then get banned from your sport, that's a real tragedy for multiple reasons.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. And that's what happened.

Andrew Huberman:
It's dreadful.

Stuart McMillan:
It is. It's absolutely dreadful. She just started competing again last month. Rob and I were actually talking about this yesterday at the track. She's made the World Indoor team for USATF, starting next week, I think. It definitely happens. We look at that, and there's, "Yeah, they're blaming the burrito, they're blaming meat or whatever," but 100%. You run 5K.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
Why are you taking deca? Why are you taking nandrolone?

Andrew Huberman:
It doesn't make sense.

Stuart McMillan:
No, it makes zero sense. You're not doing that.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
That is from the meat.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I get contacted a lot, probably not as much as other people do, by athletes at different levels, professional, amateur, et cetera, asking about ways to improve testosterone, et cetera. I got great results all through my mid-30s until mid-40s, and still with tongkat ali, freeing some testosterone up. My blood charts told me that. Worked for me, may not work for everybody, great. Fadogia, things like that. Subtle effects-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... but meaningful. Subtle but meaningful. And then athletes will ask me, "Well, is it allowed?" I said, "You have to check with your organization."

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You just can't take something. You have to check with your organization. The thing I am well aware of now is all the peptide use.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Right? Peptides are really, really big, and they're in use in the general population more and more. And it'll be interesting to see how those impact sport. I'm not aware of any athletes, at least none have come to me, saying they take these peptides. But it's going to be interesting to see how that shapes sport. I think people overestimate how much these drugs contribute to success at the elite level.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Because what you're talking about with these athletes you work with are just the hundreds and hundreds of hours of work to get a 1% improvement in some metric.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, or 0.1%.

Andrew Huberman:
0.1%.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I think people really overestimate it. Sure, if people just want to be big-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... with a bunch of acne, yeah, you can do that.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Big acne, sterile.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You can get that in the locker room most any gym nowadays.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
Please don't do it. But to get half a second off your time-

Stuart McMillan:
It's thousands-

Andrew Huberman:
No drugs. Drug isn't going to give you that

Stuart McMillan:
... thousands of hours of work.

Andrew Huberman:
Right.

Stuart McMillan:
It is sleeping really well. It's eating really well. It's having a good, proper life.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
There's no shortcut to that. There really isn't. You've got to get really, really fast to be fast.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah.

Stuart McMillan:
And this is even back in the drug era. You didn't take drugs to be fast. You got fast first, and then you took drugs, and that made you faster. That's how people did it.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
You don't take drugs to get fast. You don't go from 10.2 to 10 flat, or 10.3 to 10 flat, or 10.2 to 9.8. Doesn't happen that way. For me, it's like the most important one for me is are you training well? Is it organized properly? Are you sleeping well? Are you eating well? Are you taking whatever the good, clean supplements that you can take? And we take very, very few, by the way. And do you have a good social life? And then all of these things come together and interact in a way that feeds your purpose of running fast. That's it. Honestly, as I said with Andre, I started working with Andre in 2015. He could not squat his body weight, basically. Three Olympic medals, 18 months after starting the sport. It can be done, which shows, yeah, okay, this is being done.

Andrew Huberman:
That's awesome. And it points to the fact that more muscle isn't always the solution.

Stuart McMillan:
No.

Andrew Huberman:
The things that keep coming to mind are the ability to put away self-consciousness.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
To use the body to express.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
To find oneself.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's so interesting because I thought we were going to sit down and talk about running.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, me too.

Andrew Huberman:
But I think these are much larger, and if I may, more important-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... themes, although people should definitely skip and stride and do plyometrics.

Stuart McMillan:
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. I asked you this question earlier. Do you feel like there is a single metric that is a better determinant for overall health and vitality than the ability to maximally sprint? Now, not be fast, but to go out and actually sprint maximally. Think about all of the things-

Andrew Huberman:
That's interesting

Stuart McMillan:
... that come along with the ride with that. Think about VO2 max. VO2 max in and of itself isn't important. It's a proxy for all of these other things that are important. The ability to sprint maximally isn't necessarily important, but it's a proxy for everything else.

Andrew Huberman:
I can't think of anything else, and you're talking to somebody who's now working on grip strength, because I was challenged publicly by Paul Saladino.

Stuart McMillan:
Okay.

Andrew Huberman:
The Carnivore MD, who now talks about animal diet, and people are starting to take him more seriously, by the way, because at first it was all meat.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Then it was meat and fruit. Then it was meat, fruit, and some dairy.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
I do this and I also eat vegetables. The guy has salad in his name, for God's sake. He's a friend. I'm friends with him, I'm friends with Lane, I'm friends with Atia. I get along with all those guys, but some of them don't get along with each other, I'll tell you that.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
But he challenged me to a grip strength contest, which actually was not grip strength. And he said, "This is the marker of longevity." And that little bastard hung from a bar, switching hands-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... for 12-plus minutes.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
In the rain. Now, he had someone toweling off the bar.

Stuart McMillan:
Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
But that is a very impressive grip strength/endurance score.

Stuart McMillan:
Sure.

Andrew Huberman:
As long as we're on this, this has become like kind of an online thing. People want to challenge each other with, "Here are my biometrics." You asked, what are the markers of longevity?

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Bryan Johnson is big on, "These are my markers." Those have become controversial lately because it's unclear the markers were all collected at the same date. There's questions about, for instance, it's weird that testosterone would be elevated, but not showing LH means you're probably enhanced. And if he is, cool, but people need to be very open.

Stuart McMillan:
Yes.

Andrew Huberman:
The nice thing about what Paul showed is he showed the full-length video.

Stuart McMillan:
Right.

Andrew Huberman:
You have to show the full-length video.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah. Uh-huh.

Andrew Huberman:
Folks, Bryan, I'm calling you out specifically. You can't post VO2 max and not show the actual ride-

Stuart McMillan:
Good work

Andrew Huberman:
... and the read off the-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... you have to show video.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
People don't trust it anymore.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
And so the point here is, is grip strength? Is it VO2 max? Is it your testosterone relative to free testo? It's all these things.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
Like you said, if I were to step back and say, "Is there a single physical metric?" I think you got me. I think that-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... the ability to run fast without blowing a gasket-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... or injuring yourself in some way-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... run fast for you, would be it.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
And I did not think about that, and I certainly wouldn't have said that at the beginning of this conversation. So I think it's a very important insight, and that, if nothing else, should motivate everybody to get better at it.

Stuart McMillan:
Great.

Andrew Huberman:
And they can check out the video that we did. What you said earlier has become, to me, and will remain my goal. I think that well-being, physical well-being, mental well-being, is the ability to exert, express pressure mentally and physically.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm.

Andrew Huberman:
Like sit down, to actually generate pressure around doing something hard that takes an organization of mind and body. It could be a physical pursuit. And then to feel peace from the better expression of that cognitive or physical or creative endeavor. I think this pressure piece thing is more than nontrivial. I think it's the essence of what I've been seeking my whole life, the ability to exert pressure and to create things-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm

Andrew Huberman:
... that are meaningful, and then the ability to feel peace.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, I love that.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, it's yours.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah.

Andrew Huberman:
You came up with it. I'm just-

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, but I was applying it to specifically a task, a 100-meter sprint task. And you've taken it and, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I love that.

Andrew Huberman:
Because you got to sleep at night, and you got to train hard.

Stuart McMillan:
100%.

Andrew Huberman:
You got to do your, if you're me, formal education, and then you got to also relax and have a good time.

Stuart McMillan:
And can you do them all at the same time?

Andrew Huberman:
Mm-hmm.

Stuart McMillan:
That's the key.

Andrew Huberman:
Yeah. Can you structure your days in a way where the first two-thirds is just pure pressure, and be okay with that because you know there's peace coming-

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm. Yeah

Andrew Huberman:
... because of some of the things that you pressured upon yourself.

Stuart McMillan:
Love it.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, I love it, and it's all yours, Stu. And I have to say, it's been years, I've been wanting to sit down and talk with you for a very long time. We run into each other at track meets.

Stuart McMillan:
We do.

Andrew Huberman:
And it's a real honor and pleasure. You've taught us so much, and there's much more. So I hope you'll come back at some point and we'll talk about other things as things evolve, but-

Stuart McMillan:
Talk about sprinting.

Andrew Huberman:
Talk about sprinting. And I'll do a dangerous thing, which is to say if folks want to go to a track meet, I'll be at the track meets. And I'll probably be letting people know when I'll be at track meets. I go as a fan.

Stuart McMillan:
Mm-hmm.

Andrew Huberman:
I'm not looking for attention there. I'm actually there to just enjoy the incredible expression of the athletes, both physical and emotional expression. It's a real beautiful thing.

Stuart McMillan:
Yeah, it really is. No, I appreciate you, and I appreciate you showing up to those meets and talking about those meets. It's important for our possibly dying sport.

Andrew Huberman:
Mm.

Stuart McMillan:
So it's important that we get more people out to these meets and support track and field, the foundation of human movement.

Andrew Huberman:
Well, you're a legend, as everyone says, in the sport and outside of it too. Thanks so much for your time. It's been a real pleasure and an honor.

Stuart McMillan:
Thanks, Andrew. Appreciate you.

Andrew Huberman:
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Stu McMillan. To learn more about his work and to find links to resources that Stu provides, please see the show note captions. If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple. And on both Spotify and Apple, you can leave us up to a five-star review, and you can now leave us comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body." This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience. And it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by presale at protocolsbook.com. There you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called "Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body." And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram, X, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science-related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. And if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network Newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three-page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to Newsletter, and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Stu McMillan. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.

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