Shadowing Practice: Dr. Andy Galpin: Does Cardio Ruin Muscle Growth?. - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Okay, so starting off with exercise choice.

One thing, as soon as we cross into the endurance world, and this is true for all four of those categories,

exercise choice needs to be very concerned with eccentric landing.

So you don't need to avoid it, but you need to recognize it relative or compared against those other strength and speed ones.

The volume is low on those ones, so if you have some eccentric absorption, it's okay.

But as we sort of talked about five minutes ago.

More eccentric means greater chance of muscle damage, soreness.

So if you take something and magnify it across 30 minutes or even five minutes, but of maximal exertion, you have a recipe for blowing up.

You can imagine I haven't run in forever and I've just, I've listened to this Huberman Lab podcast and I'm okay.

I'm going to get into my zone two training, whatever it is, whatever.

And I start jogging.

I'm going to do, I, you know, I remember when I was, I used to be to do 25 and you just do a 25 minute jog.

The amount of eccentric landing that just occurred on every single step because you're never with running, even slow running, you never have two feet on the ground at the same time.

So it is a one foot land, one foot land, your entire body mass plus gravity onto one leg at a time repeated now hundreds of times.

That eccentric landing is going to cause tremendous soreness.

Your quads are going to go, you're probably going to get shin splints, which is what this is.

Those are entirely caused by eccentric landing.

Um, and when the tissue is not ready to tolerate that, if you're not landing correctly, this is when knee pain happens, back pain, shoulder, neck pain, because of movement compensation.

So anytime we start pressing to fatigue, let's be very concerned with there.

So my initial, um, recommendation is start with activities, exercise choice wise that are mostly concentric based.

So think about a cycle.

So when you're riding on a bike, you're pushing the pedal, but you're never landing and absorbing it.

So you could go out and do a 45-minute bike ride, and you're not going to get that sore because there's not a lot of eccentric load.

Swimming, similar thing here, right?

There's some eccentrics when your hand hits the water, but fairly minimal.

It's mostly a push, push, push, no load.

Rowing, similar thing, mostly concentric.

Pushing a sled is fantastic.

Going uphill, running or even walking hard uphill, all good because they're very minimal landing relative to like running downhill, which would be a very,

very bad idea to start.

So if you're first jumping into these things, progress your volume for endurance very slowly if it involves eccentric landing.

A really bad strategy would be to jump in and do, say, a circuit training class that involves a bunch of box jumps, right?

This is not a good way to do your first foray into conditioning.

You're going to get incredibly sore because you're jumping in the landing.

You're now looking at three to 10 X body weight in terms of absorption with a single land, even if you're just jumping.

So be careful of that in any of those endurance areas of exercise choice.

So what to pick?

Pick the one that you are most technically proficient in because you're going to do it a lot.

It's going to be a lot of repetitions, whatever one you feel the most joy in.

If that's rowing, great.

If that's pushing a sled, it doesn't really matter.

You can do this actually with weights.

This is our preferred way, by the way, with our athletes.

So we might do a 30-minute circuit where we do a five-minute farmer's carry with a pretty light weight.

So you're just going to carry some weights in your hand

and you're just going to walk up and down the street for five minutes.

You're going to set that down and then you're going to do, say, a three-minute plank.

And then you're going to pick that up and you're going to do bodyweight squats, like slowly and just tempo.

And you're going to do a handful of different exercises so the athletes don't get super bored.

Or a very simple one, if a 30-minute workout, 10 minutes on a treadmill, 10 minutes on a bike, 10 minutes on a rower.

But for those of you that are like, oh my God, I can't do 30 straight minutes of running.

Cool, break it up into three or four different exercises that are all fairly safe.

So that's how I would do that long duration piece for exercise choice.

And then in terms of heart rate during that period, I mean, how much attention should we pay to this?

The kind of very Very broad prescriptive I've thrown out on

this podcast a few times based on my read of the literature is for most people that are oriented toward health, including people that are working on size and strength gains, hypertrophy and strength, of course,

that getting 150 to 180 minutes of so-called zone two cardio, you know, can just barely have a conversation, but if one were to push any harder,

you wouldn't be able to, that kind of thing.

It's just a, as a kind of a generic recommendation that almost everybody should follow

in order to just keep their cardiovascular system healthy.

But I know there's a lot of nuance there.

And some people would like to be able to run continuously for an hour at speed, right?

Obviously not sprinting, but what are some of the finer points on long distance endurance?

And how often should one do it?

Okay, frequency, you could do it as daily.

Even when doing strength and hypertrophy training.

No question.

Well, that I think is an important point for people to hear

because a lot of people think that they are going to greatly diminish their strength and hypertrophy gains as it's often called, by doing zone two cardio.

Zone two, you have almost no ability to block your hypertrophy.

Zone two, if it's within that category, if you're talking about conversational pace, there is very, in fact,

there's strong reason to think that is not going to influence hypertrophy for the overwhelming majority of people.

It might even help it by increasing blood flow to the various muscles. Does it matter?

Let's say someone's doing primarily strength and hypertrophy.

their primary goals are strength and hypertrophy.

And then they're going to do, they're going to hit that 150 to 180 minutes of zone two cardio per week.

Assuming they're breaking that up into three or four sessions.

Does it matter if they do it in the same workout before or after?

Does that matter?

I tend to do just by way of example for people, certainly I'm just one example.

I tend to do resistance training one day and then I'll do zone two cardio the next day.

I jog because that's the thing I prefer.

Then I'll do strength hypertrophy training the next day and then jog for my zone two cardio.

And then I take one full day off a week.

I've never actually done the zone two cardio on the same day, but were I to do it on the same day, would it matter if I did it before or after my strength hypertrophy training?

Not really.

You're going to be just fine.

The interference effect is what this is called.

So this is all the way back to 1980, Bob Hickman's stuff, right?

And he was actually working in a lab with John Halazi, who's one of the fathers of exercise biochemistry.

And so the story goes that Hickman came in, he was a strength training guy, and Halazi and almost all those initial exercise physiologists were conditioning folks, right?

So it's almost always swimmers and runners.

And that's why a bulk of the exercise physiology historically is shaped in that direction.

It's what those scientists were interested in.

So Hickman was there in the lab, and how much of this is myth or not, who really knows, but so the story goes.

This is sort of chipping back and forth

and you know how from a PI to a postdoc and kind of that razzing works a little bit.

And eventually he was like, you got to start running with us.

And he was like, you got to start lifting with me and kind of goes back and forth.

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Well, you know who wins in that equation.

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It's not the postdoc, right?

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So it's the PI gets in and says, Hickman says, okay, fine.

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So he starts running with Alazi and then eventually starts to realize I'm getting weak.

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I'm losing strength and I just can't, I think it was his bench press specifically was going down or maybe his squat.

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I can't remember.

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Who knows if it's even real, but point is.

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So he's going along.

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And so eventually that starts to create a little bit of animosity.

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And it's like, actually, I don't think this is good for me.

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And then blah, blah, blah.

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And so they did what any good scientists would do and said, well, let's find out, right?

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And so he ran a really famous experiment where he took a group, three groups.

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One group did an endurance piece, right?

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The steady state cardio.

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One group did a strength training piece.

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And then the third group did both of those workouts combined, not like a reduction.

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So both volumes stacked on top of each other.

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And the results are fairly predictable in terms of the endurance group only had the greatest increases in VO2 max

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and endurance markers.

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The strength training group had the greatest increases in muscle hypertrophy.

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But where the interesting part was and where this whole field started was the combined group.

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So this is concurrent training is what it's generally called.

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So you're doing concurrent things.

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And typically that means hypertrophy

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and strength stacked on top of some in steady state endurance

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in the same same same same workout two hour block

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or same like week it doesn't really it can be got

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it kind of all these well the concurrent group saw the same improvements in vo2 max as the endurance group

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and he's like well okay so the strength training did not compromise the endurance adaptations However, they saw much lower increases in strength and hypertrophy.

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And so the conclusion was the addition of endurance work compromised muscle growth and strength development.

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However, the addition of strength training to your endurance work will not compromise your endurance gains.

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Now, that second piece has been shown countless more times, right?

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So if you're an endurance athlete, adding strength training is almost always going to be massively beneficial.

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Very little chance of detriment.

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This is why every endurance athlete is going to have some sort of strength and power component to their training.

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The controversy, though, came in the interference effect.

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So how much endurance training really blocks muscular development?

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And for years, myself included, was we preached hard.

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You know, don't do these two things at the same time.

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My friend, my colleague, Kevin Murak, has a really nice review article.

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Jimmy Bagley, those two guys put this thing out.

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You can go read that, where they cover all these things, and they've got some nice figures in there but the general answer here is interference effect is sort of real,

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but it's probably greatly overblown.

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It matters.

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So are you talking about a 20-minute jog at conversation pace?

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That's probably doing very little with the assumption that are you doing an eccentric-based exercise, like running?

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Well, then you're going to have more of an interference effect than cycling.

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That makes a ton of sense if you think about it, right?

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What's your total energy intake?

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If you're eating sufficient calories, you can still be in an anabolic state.

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If the addition of extra energy expenditure, that's all it really is, mark the cardio, put you in a negative energy state,

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it's going to become very difficult to go through anabolism.

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So those things matter.

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If you're talking about doing like running a few laps around the track as a warm-up, like that's not interference effect.

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What we're really talking about is a big volume performed consistently.

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Now, after Hickman came out with this paper in 1980, people followed it up in the 90s and 2000s with mechanism.

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And we started to look and see, and we started to see, hey, there's this cell signaling pathway that goes down called mTOR, and that's what leads to muscle growth.

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And then on the other side of that equation, there's a thing called AMPK, which is more associated with mitochondrial biogenesis and endurance.

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And there's this little molecule in between, at the time, most people would point to TSC2.

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Well, it turns out AMPK activation is fine.

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If you activate mTOR, it has no bearing on AMPK.

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But if you activate AMPK, it's going to activate TSC2, which inhibited mTOR.

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And so it was like we had practical outcome, i.e. Hickman, you're going to get weaker.

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Now we had mechanism.

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So that story became very, very strong at this interference effect.

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And this is how science should work, right?

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When you see mechanism match up with practical human outcome, it's a strong thing.

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That's what you want.

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Yeah.

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it was still wrong though.

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It just took more science, right?

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And this is why we always have to give science a bit of time.

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And you have to be willing to follow, right?

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And again, even me in the field who has a practitioner background and science, I felt very strongly, this is a big problem.

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It just didn't turn out to be the case.

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Enough studies came out where I'm like, okay, it's probably not that big a deal unless the movement is heavily eccentric based the volume is very high,

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you're trying to maximize muscle growth, and energy is not controlled.

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If that's not all the case, interference effect is probably not something most people should worry about.

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Especially when you compare that against the well-roundedness that you need for total physiological health.

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Probably not a big deal.

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Very reassuring for me to hear because I do enjoy lifting weights and I really enjoy running and I love running outside.

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I believe I used to experience the interference effect when I used to do a very long run on Sundays.

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I would just go out for, you know, two hours or something like that.

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I don't know that I ate enough or who knows.

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I always feel like I eat enough or more.

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I love to eat.

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But that long Sunday run always made it hard for me to make progressive gains in strength and hypertrophy in the gym.

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Whereas when I cut that to 30 minutes, three or four times a week, I don't see any interference effect at all probably very real.

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And I haven't trained specifically for endurance in a very long time.

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So I don't, I haven't experienced the non-interference effect, which as you said before, most, if not all endurance athletes probably are,

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or at least should be doing some sort of strength work just to keep the undercarriage strong as I think.

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Yeah, there's a bunch of reasons.

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Yeah, but yeah.

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So, so what are some protocols that people could explore for continuous endurance training?

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I mean, I've thrown out this 150 to 180 minute zone two cardio, but that's really the, That's really the kind of kindergarten of endurance.

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And there I'm probably being generous.

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It's probably the nursery school of endurance that everyone should do.

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What sorts of other protocols?

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I realize that can be very goal-directed, but is it unreasonable, for instance, for somebody to do four hours of continuous endurance training with

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intervals in there as well to get it kind of all around heart health and the ability to go long distances?

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Yeah, I'll answer this two ways.

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The very first one, to tackle the long duration endurance how I refer to it.

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You asked really about heart rate zones.

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To me, that's almost totally irrelevant.

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It doesn't matter, right?

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If you're moving, you're moving.

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That's the functional piece here.

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If you want to push it and go at a non-conversational pace, that has tremendous health benefits.

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If you want to do it a little bit slower, fine.

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If you're at the pace where you can have a conversation, to me, I don't even count that as exercise.

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That's not a pejorative, by the way.

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That is just general physical movement.

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And it is extraordinarily clear.

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You need a lot of that.

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You need a lot more of that than we get.

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You can do this in a couple of efficient ways.

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Just taking your phone calls moving.

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If you've got a 30-minute call every day or most days of the week and you can do that while moving, you've checked not that whole box, but a pretty good chunk of it.

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And that could even be done inside.

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100%.

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Pacing back and forth.

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I'm a big pacer.

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Yeah, me too.

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Like you probably saw me.

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Like I'm going to walk up and down all over the place.

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Most of the time when I'm in my office working, like I'm shadow boxing, like I'm doing air squats, not even intentionally, I'm just like.

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Do you have one of those treadmills under the dust?

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I don't, but like every lab I ever came through, somebody did.

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We did an episode on workspace optimization and the data on those treadmills are pretty interesting.

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They definitely increase alertness, which for obvious reasons, even a little bit of movement is going to generate a little bit of adrenaline.

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So pacing around, moving, taking calls, moving, getting walks when you can.

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And then in terms of building endurance, let's say somebody wants to, quote unquote, get into better shape.

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They already may or may not already have some size and strength that they're happy with.

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And they just want to get in.

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They want to improve their health.

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Yep.

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So when does that 150, 180 minutes thing tick over into a different protocol?

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Yeah.

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Okay.

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So I think the way that I can outline a weekly schedule just as a conceptual model here,

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that long duration stuff is not even counting, as I mentioned.

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Right.

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It's just a, this is what you need to do as a human.

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Moving forward, we haven't improved.

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If you're extremely unfit, you may see some changes in cardiovascular health.

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But for the most part, this is just knocking out the general physical practice.

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You need to be higher functioning.

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So whatever that time domain is, I don't really care.

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It's not a huge concern of mine.

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What I think you need to hit are these nodes.

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You need to do something once a week that gets you to a maximum heart rate.

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Now, I don't have to literally mean max, but close.

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This means really sucking for air.

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Really.

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like as high as you can possibly get.

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You can wear a heart rate monitor if you want, but maximum heart rate, the rough equation we say is 220 minus your age.

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So if you're 40 years old, your maximum heart rate is probably about 180 beats per minute.

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Now I can tell you flat out right now, my max heart rate is close to 210, which means I'm 10 years old.

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So take that number with a grain of salt.

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I have had a bunch of professional athletes who are in their 20s and their max heart rate's 175.

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And they are in way better shape than I am.

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So maximum heart rate is not a good proxy for physical fitness.

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It's a rough number.

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An easy way to do it is if you have a heart rate monitor or anything like that, do the hardest workout you can possibly do, see what the highest number you get as, and assume that's close.

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That's, if you want to just start at 220 minus your age, that's fine too.

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Do something though where you're like, yep, this is death.

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Like this is really, really challenging.

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For how long?

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However long that takes you that can be a 30 second go on an aerodyne

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or aerosol bike

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that could be a um uh do one of those things

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where you kind of like sprint run as hard as you can during the straightaway on a track

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and then walk the corners kind of an old classic back

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when you and i were kids interval training they don't do

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that anymore i guess i don't know i don't even talk about it in p class we had to change

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and if you didn't bring running shoes you had to do it barefoot oh i love it

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and uh i love teacher yeah it wasn't a we our football basketball baseball teams weren't

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that good but um anything like running cross country just

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because of where i grew up oh yeah brutal brutal coaches

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so that yeah they'd make the all kids do these runs yeah

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so it can be in the the 30 probably seconds at

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a minimum it's hard to get you to a true heart

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rate max in shorter than 30 seconds you can get the total suck in under 20 seconds

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but getting to a true heart rate max is probably going to take more than 30 seconds.

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So it doesn't really matter what you want to do.

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It can be, again, a sprint uphill.

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It could be what you're talking, it could be burpees to death, you know, like whatever, whatever you want to do.

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Those have an eccentric component, right?

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Yeah, they do.

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Yeah.

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No question about it.

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Um, but if you did to actual death, by the way, if you just did, I'm going to do as many burpees as I can for 90 seconds,

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it probably won't take you much longer than that to get too close to.

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And is that the whole workout?

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It could be.

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So once a week, get to max heart rate.

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Touch it.

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I love it.

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Touch it.

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It's not the best, but it'll, it'll work.

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And what are the specific benefits that that provides?

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Okay.

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So earlier in our, in our chat, we were, we outlined the rule of specificity, specific adaptation to impose demand.

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If you're never getting to that high of a pace, you're never, it would be like trying to get stronger, but only going to 60%.

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So every cardiovascular adaptation

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that occurs with cardiovascular training is just simply going to get to the top or end by doing this.

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So if you just start at the heart itself, stroke volume increase.

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So this is amount of blood that's kicked out per contraction, cardiac output, resting heart rate.

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If you go to the endothelial function, you're talking about nitric oxide release, endothelial health in general, capillary, mitochondria, all the way down.

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Like you just walk through the whole system, pulmonary exchange to the lungs, all of those are going to benefit by being challenged to their maximum.

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They also teach you where your vomit reflex is.

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Yeah, there you go.

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Right.

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Let's hope not.

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Stress is what causes adaptation, right?

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So if you push your, okay, here's the difference.

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If you did 25 minutes of steady state, you're not challenging the same thing as what we just talked about.

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The way that I explain this is if you understand the point of physiological failure, then you understand the place of adaptation.

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That's it.

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So if you and I both go run on a, we did a VO2 max test.

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So a classic VO2 max test is going to take 8 to 12 minutes.

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And it's going to look something like this.

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We're going to get in a treadmill and we're going to run.

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And every minute I'm going to just slightly increase that treadmill, either the speed or the grade.

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Most of the time it's the speed, right?

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So we get to a high grade, say 10% grade or something.

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And then we go five miles per hour, 5.2, 5.4, and we just go until you can't go any longer.

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Now, let's say you and I did that and we had the same exact timeframe.

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And so we both went eight minutes.

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The time that you last is not the thing that we care about, right?

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It's the volume of oxygen that you breathe out is what determines it.

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So let's say we went at the same time domain and we had the same VO2 max.

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Let's say they were both 50 milliliters per kilogram per minute, which is like a okay number, but that's nothing to be extremely proud about.

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Just because we have the same number does not mean we have the same point of physiological failure.

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And this matters because it's going to answer the what do I do about it then question, right?

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So if you got off and I started asking you a series of questions and you're like, and I basically said, why'd you quit?

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You know, why did you jump off the treadmill?

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Why'd you stop?

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And you were like, my chest, like I couldn't catch my breath.

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I thought my heart was going to explode.

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Okay, great.

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If you ask me and I said my legs were on fire, like I was breathing hard, but I couldn't take another step.

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This is a very rough indicator of different places of physiological disruption.

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Now, what I've seen a lot with my professional athletes, especially like fighters, they're going to generally fail in their legs because they don't often do a lot of strength training in their legs.

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They don't do a lot of leg work.

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They're fighting on their back, literally a lot, or on top or on their knees.

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So their legs tend to give out before there.

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Someone who fails in the cardiovascular system, like say you did a lot of leg training, typically like an endurance athlete, that's not going to be their issue.

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It's just going to be they're going to reach a heart rate and ventilation threshold that they can no longer handle.

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If I put you on the exact same training protocols, it's not going to be as effective

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because you're going to always fail at your legs and they're going to always fail at their cardiovascular system.

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I need to flip that, right?

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I need to put you in a position to where you can reach a true heart rate or ventilation challenge

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while your legs are still hanging in there or the opposite.

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So the training protocol is based on that point of failure.

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The adaptation is in the same thing.

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So if you are failing because of your legs, then you might see a greater increase in capitalization in your legs.

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Relative to somebody else who's failing in their cardiovascular system, they may see a greater change in something on that side of the equation.

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So it matters how you're failing at all times.

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What I love about this is that it sounds like it's like a thermometer for where one is weak and needs work,

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but also provides a stimulus to improve the very thing that you need support in.

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So to just get real brass tacks about it, it would be once a week, 90 seconds near maximum heart rate.

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Could I do more?

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Could I do five or six of those 90-second bouts?

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No question.

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You can do, as long as you touch that max heart rate, I'm good, right?

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Ideal world, probably four to eight.

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In that single session?

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Ideal.

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Okay.

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Right?

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If that takes you 20 seconds or 90 seconds, it's fine.

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If you want to do 30 on, 30 off, you want to do 20 on, 40 off, 40 on, 20 off, those numbers don't matter.

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And is there an interference effect of this on the other sorts of training that we've talked about?

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It actually tends to be complementary.

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The evidence available suggests that this high interval stuff is more likely to be complementary to hypertrophy training.

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probably because of lactate and some other cool things, which are very beneficial molecules that people don't understand.

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They think it's bad.

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It's actually a hugely beneficial thing.

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It can be interference.

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It can provide an interference if calories are not accounted for, if rest is not accounted for and other things.

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But in general, it's probably okay.

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I wouldn't add it to your equation if you don't need it for maximizing hypertrophy.

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But for the person who wants to just get well-rounded physiology, yeah, I wouldn't hesitate to do these even in the same session or different sessions.

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Let’s Talk About Cardio and Muscle Soreness: A Real-Life Scenario

Imagine you’re chatting with a friend who just started a new workout routine. They mention they tried running for 25 minutes after listening to a health podcast, but now their quads are sore, and they’re worried they’ve ruined their muscle gains. Sound familiar? This is exactly the kind of everyday conversation the video explores—breaking down how different cardio exercises affect your body, especially when you’re new to them. It’s a perfect example of how to discuss fitness, soreness, and exercise choices in English, making it great for IELTS speaking practice or casual conversations.

Useful Chunks & Collocations to Memorize

Eccentric landing: The act of absorbing impact with a muscle (e.g., "Running causes more eccentric landing than cycling.")
Blowing up: Getting extremely sore or injured (e.g., "Jumping into intense cardio without training is a recipe for blowing up.")
Zone two training: A low-intensity cardio zone (e.g., "She does zone two training on her bike three times a week.")
Movement compensation: Adjusting your form to avoid pain (e.g., "Knee pain from running often comes from movement compensation.")
Concentric based: Exercises that focus on muscle contraction (e.g., "Swimming is a concentric based activity, so it’s less likely to cause soreness.")

Your Shadowing Challenge: Practice Like a Pro

Ready to boost your english speaking practice with the shadowing technique (also called shadow speak or shadowspeak)? Here’s your task: Pick a 1-minute clip from the video where the speaker talks about exercise choices (like cycling vs. running). Play the clip, pause, and repeat it out loud—mimicking the tone, pace, and stress. Focus on phrases like "tremendous soreness" and "technical proficient" to nail natural pronunciation. Do this 5 times, then try speaking the lines without pausing. This helps you internalize fluency and rhythm, key for acing IELTS speaking practice or any real-world conversation. You’ve got this—consistency is the secret!

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	haven't run · I've thrown · I've never actually done
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	are oriented · is called · is shaped
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	splints, which is · AMPK, which is · minute, which is

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Dr. Andy Galpin: Does Cardio Ruin Muscle Growth?. - Learn English Speaking with Video

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Grammar in this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?