Huberman's Seven-Day Week

For dinner, my mom made stir-fried celery with chicken breast, with very little oil and salt. It was delicious, and I really enjoyed it.

I asked my mom: don't you get sick of eating this every day?

She said right away: it doesn't taste good at all. There's no salt in it whatsoever.

I laughed: I'm enjoying it, though.

It seems that since I started working out, my eating habits and my taste have changed a lot. Food I used to find bland and saltless now tastes great to me.

I'm always telling my parents I never get tired of chicken thighs and chicken breast, and they never believed me. Now I think they're starting to.

Working out is an amazing thing. Without you noticing, it changes your habits, especially your eating habits. What you eat, how you cook it, how you eat it: everything gets thought through.

And over time, your taste naturally changes too.

It's the same in daily life. You have to make time to go to the gym, warm up, train and stretch. It's a very orderly process, and it gradually gives your life a sense of order too. I guess that's what "self-discipline" feels like.

But I've always wondered: is exercise a hobby or a habit? Thinking about it now, I'd say the latter. A hobby is for certain people, and if it's not your hobby, you can skip it. But exercise should be something everyone takes part in. It shouldn't be seen as something for a special group.

Take one of my riding buddies. Heart disease runs in his family. Through cycling he's greatly improved his cardiorespiratory health, and that's eased some of his worry about the family history.

I think that's what exercise means for ordinary people. You enjoy exercise and improve your body and your life at the same time. It's a wonderful thing.

So I've been thinking. Exercise should be just like eating, drinking and sleeping, woven into every day of your life, as ordinary as anything.

That raises a question: what should that everyday routine look like? How should people arrange their exercise so it fits naturally into their lives, and is still a healthy, effective plan for their bodies?

Recently I read Andrew Huberman's new book, Protocols. In Chinese it's something like "Practical Protocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body."

Andrew Huberman is a neuroscience professor at Stanford School of Medicine. He has a podcast called "Huberman Lab," all about health.

This book is basically a big summary of his podcast, covering sleep, mood and energy, focus, physical performance, learning and more. What makes it stand out is that the theory is solid and it also guides practice really well. You can pretty much follow it as is.

So I studied the section on exercise and training and summarized how Huberman lays out a seven-day week of exercise.

1. Walk as much as you can every day

Seven thousand steps a day is a good goal, and ten thousand is even better.

As Huberman sees it, walking at least an hour a day (it can add up over the day, no need to do it all at once) is one of the best ways to protect yourself from disease and improve your overall health.

So how fast do you need to walk to get the health benefits?

The answer: any walking beats no walking, and brisk walking beats slow walking.

I once learned something from Mr. L's content: sitting for long periods makes the activity of LPL (lipoprotein lipase) in your body crash by 90%, and exercise has a hard time making up for that effect.

LPL breaks down fat. When its activity drops, the direct result is higher blood lipids, along with lower insulin sensitivity, which hurts your ability to regulate blood sugar.

The fix is actually very simple: just stand up and move around for a few minutes.

Huberman also strongly suggests that people who sit at a desk for long hours consider a sit-stand desk. He says it's a good investment.

2. Resistance training three times a week

You do resistance training in the gym, and you do resistance training to trigger specific adaptations in your nerves, muscles and connective tissue.

Huberman splits his strength training into three days spread across the week.

He lays out the three days roughly like this:

Day 1: lower body, including quads, hamstrings, calves and glutes

Day 2: chest, back muscles, abs or core

Day 3: shoulders, biceps and triceps, abs and core.

There's a good reason for this layout. Anyone who works out regularly and trains legs knows that after leg day, you're usually sore for several days.

In Huberman's protocol, you only train legs once a week, so by the time you train them again the next week, they're mostly not sore anymore. That's great.

3. Cardio three times a week

In other words, for vitality, health, longevity, aesthetics and all-around fitness, you need to do both resistance training and cardio.

Huberman slots his cardio into the gaps between strength days, so the day after a gym session, you do cardio.

His cardio plan is very sensible too. He sets the three sessions at low, medium and high intensity.

Low-intensity cardio means long and easy: heart rate at 60% to 70% of your max, for 45 to 75 minutes.

Medium-intensity cardio means, after a five-minute warm-up, 25 to 30 minutes with your heart rate in the 75% to 85% range. It's a lot harder than low intensity, but not quite sprinting.

High-intensity cardio means going all out for about 6 to 16 minutes, with your heart rate at about 90% to 95% of max.

4. Short mobility and flexibility work 2 to 4 times a week

They can't guarantee you won't get injured, but they can help enormously.

Huberman takes stretching and flexibility fairly seriously, but in his plan this part only takes a few minutes of a day, 2 to 4 times a week.

I think that's great. I'm someone who doesn't like stretching, but after years of skipping it, some things my body is doing have slowly made me realize I should.

Huberman made stretching feel easy to start. And a few minutes of stretching each time is already far better than no stretching at all.

Professor Huberman also recommends a few moves, roughly like these:

5. One rest day a week

Huberman also leaves one day of the week for rest.

Looking back over it now, three cardio days plus three strength days plus one rest day, and that's a sacred week done.

Here's the whole week in one chart:

Huberman's protocol weaves exercise into daily life in a very low-key way.

Even the longest session is only about an hour.

And with three cardio days and one rest day in the week, for most people those can pretty much count as low-intensity training days.

Add it all up, and you're exercising no more than six hours a week. That's less than a single workday.

Yet those unremarkable bits of time each day, which only cost you an hour less of scrolling short videos, can buy you a better body and a better state of mind.

If you haven't yet learned to keep exercise in your life as a habit,

Protocols is absolutely worth reading. In it you'll also find practical guides and theory on sleep, stress management, learning and more. It's a rare, excellent book.