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What it Means to be Strong, How to get Strong, and Why it Matters w/ Dr. Alex Olmos
12 Plays2 months ago
In this episode I sit down with Dr. Alex Olmos and discuss the ins and outs of strength training. The mechanisms behind why we get strong. The benefits of strength training. What he has learned from his recent research and what life is like transitioning from a PhD candidate to a professor.
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Transcript
Defining Strength: Physical and Mental
00:00:01
Tony Montgomery
All right, man, for the sake of taking a scientific interview into the realm of philosophy right off the bat, what does ah what does strength mean to you ah physically, mentally, and why why is it so important?
00:00:18
Alex O
Yeah. So, I mean, physically, strength can be defined in many ways. You have muscular strength, right? Endurance um and then you have absolute strength, which is what I really care about. You know, how much can you actually push, pick up, put down? um And then from a muscular endurance perspective, you have your ability to just keep going. All
Development of Strength: Personal Insights
00:00:39
Alex O
right. As many reps as possible.
00:00:41
Alex O
um But for me, because I have such a huge interest and and strength, I want to know why we, why we get stronger and how we get stronger, right? What's really ah applying to that. And so, ah from a physical perspective, it's really just pushing as much weight as you possibly can, right? Without injuring yourself, of course.
00:01:01
Alex O
um But from a mental perspective, you have this ability to essentially push past your limits, right? Really dig deep. on One of my favorite things to look at or watch is like and MMA fights.
00:01:17
Alex O
or when they're getting into the four of the championship rounds, you can see they're starting to slow down. Their breathing's heavy and they have to dig in deep and really, really try to like push through. And sometimes, you know, they pull off an upset or landing KO and it's also, and sometimes you can see where, where they are mentally, if they can, they can escape.
00:01:35
Alex O
ah I like to take the the quote that could be said to figure out who who is being interviewed by. But he he basically wanted to tell people that, you know, he he brings people and in the deep depths and makes them realize who they really are. Right.
Strength in Life and Academia
00:01:53
Alex O
Those this hardships of really digging deep.
00:01:57
Tony Montgomery
Yeah. Yeah. I remember that they were interviewing him and um they were asking about like, Oh, this person knocks this person out. This person does submissions. Like, what, what do you, what do you do? And he's like, I take them to the deep and see, see what they're, what they really want, what they're really made of. And yeah, that, I think that defines mental strength, um, about as clear as, as anything, anything can, right.
00:02:22
Alex O
Oh for sure.
00:02:24
Tony Montgomery
um But with the idea of like strength being the the target of of your research and and what you've dedicated the last 10 years of both practically of of your own lived-in career and then also within within the lab, within the the research that you do.
00:02:40
Tony Montgomery
um what What exactly does it mean to to live a life that is defined by strength being the priority? like what what does that What does that look like? What does that shape a person into? And is it is it something that people um should look to to strive for?
00:03:00
Alex O
Yeah, actually, it's funny enough, I rewatch one of my favorite anime is called Hajime no Ippu. And it's about this kid in high school who got bullied and ah he comes across this boxer and sees this box to do some like crazy stuff right defends them and everything and so you ask them like what does it mean to be strong and so He embarks on this journey of becoming a boxer and makes it all the way to, you know, rookie championships and then eventually wins the Japanese title. And he's always asking himself, like, what does it mean to be strong? And so he's always striving for that next, you know, challenge, right, never backing away from a challenge. And so for me, ah researching strength, it's it's, yeah, sure, pushing past your limits and lifting a heavy single, but also being
00:03:45
Alex O
willing to take the necessary steps to be the best. right um I think we all undergo challenges and sometimes they are they break us down mentally and physically. For instance, during my last last fall during my dissertation was probably the the darkest life I've ever felt in my life where I was up at 430 until 7 p.m. collecting data, teaching classes, writing papers, just in the weeds of, you know, of what a PhD field is supposed to be like. And, you know, when when it's done and you you finish and, you know, they hand you the diploma. and you publish your dissertation, you can like breathe and then you're like, wow, like that shaped me. And that, that was hard. And I'm glad I endured that because now, you know, whatever challenges come my way, it's and I'm used to it. So now the question is like, how do I progress from there? And and so now the challenge is, is is from being a PhD student to now being a faculty member and then mentoring students, that's a challenge and of its own. And it's, it's a fun challenge for me, but the,
00:04:50
Alex O
The willingness to keep improving, I think really is what challenges me to be stronger, both mentally and and from a physical perspective. ah I was in the the worst shape of my life last fall and now I'm getting back into the, you know, and the the group of things and hitting the weights I want to hit and feeling a lot more ah comfortable in the gym as opposed to last year where, you know, every time I saw a plate, I was just like, I don't want to do anything with that. I'm done with it.
00:05:17
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, yeah. What did it feel like um when you were finished with your data collection and you did receive that PhD? Did it feel like what you made it out to be? Or was it something where you got it and you're like, I thought it would be a little bit different.
00:05:38
Alex O
Yeah, great question. So when I was done, it was like this weird. I remember talking to Dr. Baker and she said like, it's a weird transition because like you're done. And that's just the beginning, right? And like, you feel like this was like the capstone of what it was to do a PhD and you finished your dissertation and you can breathe.
00:05:57
Alex O
And then you you finish and you know get your PhD and then you're like, okay, like I can do this. Like I want to go more, do more. I want to ask bigger questions, do harder studies, you know, publish bigger papers, you know. Um, but the, I think from a personal perspective, the ah fact that I was like a first generation American, like Mexican American, like no one in my family has ever gone to college.
00:06:24
Alex O
And then for me to like get three degrees and then, you know, Atlanta, an assistant professorship here, Christopher Newport. I'm just super happy. That's also kind of surreal because like I'm just like. Deep down, I'm just a dude, you know, I don't consider myself special by any means. I just love research.
Training Adaptations and Neural Mechanisms
00:06:45
Alex O
I love learning about how the body works and more importantly, you know, what makes us stronger and.
00:06:51
Alex O
um I think that keeps me humble, especially when you're surrounded by very smart people all the time, you know, and you think you know something, I think it's called the Kruger effect, right?
00:06:55
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:07:01
Alex O
When you think you're like an expert in the field and you meet, you know, you meet someone actually knows what they're talking about, you're like, Whoa, I know nothing. um So yeah, even though I have a PhD,
00:07:14
Alex O
I'm still learning. I don't consider myself an expert by any means and I hope to keep learning. I think that's the the beauty of getting the PhD is you obviously love science or some manner of that form and you're just a forever student, which I'm comfortable being.
00:07:29
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, there is this beauty of ah being humbled as as often as you can be, right? Like, one of the things I love about jujitsu is, you know, no matter what day you go into role, there's there's always gonna be somebody there that's gonna humble you that day. And you have the opportunity to to learn from it, you know, and try to get better or you have the opportunity to cower and defeat and never go back to that class again and you know you'll see people, and I'm sure you've seen people through grad programs and you'll see people as you teach and mentor like you'll see the ones that.
00:08:04
Tony Montgomery
find that humbling experience as something that they they cherish and they they lean into and others are more looking for, you know, being that big fish in ah in a small pond and and trying not to to be um be the smartest person in the room and let everyone know they're the smartest person in the room and is that something that you've always done? Like, is that something that's always kind of defined you as trying to find the challenge, trying to find people that are smarter than you, as opposed to, um you know, trying to go places where you, you're the lead, you're the you're the smartest person there.
00:08:38
Alex O
Yeah, no, I'm not. I'm not a fan of the idea that you have to flex. Right. Being the smartest person. I feel like you're the smartest person in the room. You're in the wrong room.
00:08:48
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:08:49
Alex O
Right. I'm all about learning. And I mean, when we first met, it was a really cool experience because I think one of our first conversations was about training.
00:08:59
Alex O
Right. And we went down this rabbit hole and I was I came out of that conversation of just like, you know, I thought I knew a lot.
00:09:06
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:09:06
Alex O
Right. And even like for such a small amount of time, I learned a lot from that just small conversation. And I think what's always been helpful for me is knowing that I want to be surrounded by people that know more than me.
00:09:22
Alex O
um I don't like the idea of being the smartest person in the room because I can't grow from that experience.
00:09:28
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:09:30
Alex O
And it's funny enough, uh, you mentioned jiu-jitsu and being humbled. I think wrestling was probably one of those things that really, um, Motivated me to want to be the best, but also know that like, there's always going to be someone better than you. Right. You, you beat the top person in the the region and then you go up to States and you lose in the first round because that person was just wrestling for a longer period of time than you. And, um,
00:09:56
Alex O
in the realm of research, you know, it's funny. I remember being a master's student and i ah reading a paper and I was like, Oh, I can break man. Their methods are crap. This is a bad study.
00:10:05
Tony Montgomery
yeah
00:10:06
Alex O
Yada. I like bashing them on the internet. And then. um
00:10:14
Alex O
Looking back, I was like, man, I was so immature and naive, you know, because you can always do a study better. All right.
00:10:19
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:10:20
Alex O
And it's, I think one of the biggest limitations in studies are like, you just, you can't do the perfect study.
00:10:26
Tony Montgomery
Right.
00:10:26
Alex O
All right. But you can learn from that study how to do a better study. All right. um So, yeah. And during my PhD, having people like Dr. Jason Defredes and Michael Trevino, who are just so, you know, on it and witty and just can piece things together.
00:10:45
Alex O
Super fun, fascinating to listen to him talk. I really listen, then talk the whole time.
00:10:48
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:10:51
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, no, I'm with you on that. You learn so much more from from listening than trying to interject. It's better to say things with a purpose than to try to say things to fill empty space is the way that I always look at it. um So, getting into ah training and your research and the science of training.
00:11:12
Tony Montgomery
um One of the things I want to talk to about is the idea of um training adaptations right we have acute adaptations we have chronic adaptations like
00:11:21
Alex O
Mm hmm.
00:11:23
Tony Montgomery
um kind of go into the weeds a little bit about the the mechanisms of of training, right, specifically strength and hypertrophy and um what are some of the adaptations that that we're looking for from a neuromuscular perspective as well, because that's what your research is on.
00:11:41
Alex O
Yeah, so it's common belief that the early adaptations that someone experiences, which is with resistance training is due to neural, right? What those neural adaptations could be a multitude of things. I think the more common things are increase in cortical excitability. What that means is essentially from the motor cortex, our brain, you know, transcending or sending signals from our brain down to our muscles that ah the signal gets stronger, right? Better connections, the synapses increase. um You have an increase in
00:12:17
Alex O
ah potential increase in motor unit firing rate. so The motor unit is the alpha motor neuron that's located in the spinal cord and it's ah axons are essentially branching out and and synapsing with specific fibers in our muscles and they innervates those fibers to essentially contract. um and so The idea is that with resistance training or some form of training that the muscles essentially contract faster, those impulses, action potentials increase.
00:12:47
Alex O
um There is a reduction in co-activation, which is basically the agonist muscle, which is the muscle that contracts
Muscle Growth and Strength Correlation
00:12:55
Alex O
and the antagonist, which is the one that poses. um There is a reduction in the amount of muscle excitation or activity that occurs between the two, meaning that there's more activation for the agonist and less for the antagonist, which allows you to produce more force. Right. Essentially, they're kind of posing each other.
00:13:12
Alex O
um There's a once something I found in one of my studies recently is a reduction in overall muscle excitation when you do something at an absolute load.
00:13:26
Alex O
So something that seems easier should, in theory, require a less excitation, right less input.
00:13:30
Tony Montgomery
Right.
00:13:31
Alex O
And we were able to actually support that notion in in such a short amount of time. I mean, there's also more of the ah neurotransmitter side of things, right? We have what's known as neuromodulation. You can have an increase in ah serotonin, norepinephrine, which can excite the lower threshold motor units to be a little more excitable, right? So they're more likely to be activated earlier, not only that, but sustained activation. um So those are kind of the the bigger ones, at least the ones I'm more familiar with.
00:14:08
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, and that's specifically um when we're thinking about neuromuscular adaptations to strength training.
00:14:16
Alex O
yeah yeah
00:14:17
Tony Montgomery
So within within that dynamic, right when when you understand those those type of things ah with the co-activation, with the decrease of the antagonists, with the excitability, i you went into your research thinking, what about a muscle?
00:14:36
Tony Montgomery
and its properties and then after research you came out with a different um concept of what that is or did your research kind of solidify what you already knew going going into it.
00:14:39
Alex O
Yeah, yeah.
00:14:50
Alex O
Yeah, so originally, my thought process is so kind of a little backtrack here. um We there's an assumption that a bigger muscle should be able to produce more force, right? So someone who's bigger should theory be stronger. And so ah there's a group um out of Ole Miss, I believe, Lenneke. Lenneke's group, I believe your your previous advisor, ah Sam Buckner,
00:15:19
Alex O
was underneathe underneath him as well. ah They proposed the idea that you can get stronger without necessarily getting bigger and that the fact that you lift weights, the hypertrophy that occurs is kind of a byproduct of that, right? So my thought process going into my dissertation was that if the muscle doesn't get bigger but you're getting stronger, what's actually contributing to that, right? um So I designed a study where we had a group that focuses on getting stronger. So they did heavy singles um with the leg press, three sets of one rep and 90%.
00:15:55
Alex O
And then another group that was focusing on getting bigger and stronger. So they did the exact same thing as the other group, the strength group, but then they have three additional sets at a lower intensity or lower load for as many reps as possible, right? The whole goal was for them to hypertrophy and get stronger. And so my thought process is, all right, from a neural perspective, are the adaptations that occur similar, right? Is it is it a training?
00:16:18
Alex O
ah Is it influenced by training or is it influenced by morphological changes? And so after this study, we found that both groups actually increase in strength similarly, despite one group being significantly bigger, right, hypertrophy more. um But the neuromuscular adaptations were different. So for instance, the strength group, um they didn't experience as much hypertrophy as the the strength hypertrophy group.
00:16:44
Alex O
ah But we found that they actually had an increase in the firing rates, motor unit fire rates, especially for those for the lower threshold motor units without seeing a change in the size of the motor units. Which is cool, right? That's kind of like, OK, that makes sense. so If the muscle wasn't getting bigger, then it has to compensate for the increase in force some other way. And so it was more of a ah change in the firing rates. The hypertrophy group actually had an opposite ah a response where they actually had an increase in the motor unit size so the fibers got bigger and so they have bigger twitch forces and because they have bigger twitch forces they actually require a less excitation to match force if that makes sense and so because they have bigger fibers they actually saw a decrease in the firing rates so they didn't have the fire as often because every time it did it produced a significant amount of force right to compensate for the increase in force
00:17:42
Alex O
And so that was kind of one of those things where people in theory thought like, that makes sense, but no one actually tested that.
00:17:48
Tony Montgomery
Yeah
00:17:48
Alex O
And so it was cool to see the findings in my study where, yeah, sure enough, you know, if someone doesn't get bigger, then the response is probably going to be to increase some type of neural involvement.
00:17:59
Alex O
Right. And if someone does get bigger, then they probably don't need as much neural involvement because the muscle itself can compensate for that now that it's stronger and bigger.
Training Stimuli and Long-term Adaptations
00:18:10
Alex O
Which is super exciting for me because I'm like, oh, cool, like. I guess this kind of shows for the support that the way we produce force and the way that we train, right, the specific adaptations are going to be tailored to the way we actually trained.
00:18:27
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, so with that in mind, then um one why, why wouldn't they And correct me if I'm wrong, but if they're if they're more efficient at the movement, which means they're using less motor unit firing rates, um why couldn't why don't you think they were able to tap into that same threshold output that the other group did? um And is that something that they would develop over time? So therefore, the idea that a bigger muscle would become a stronger muscle with enough time to um
00:19:00
Tony Montgomery
be able to tap into those firing rates and to the action potentials.
00:19:04
Alex O
Yeah, potentially, right? The problem is it was such a short study. So it was six weeks, 16 training sessions, right? All in untrained individuals. And so ah it could be that they were so used to training at low loads, right? So they became very efficient, right? Of doing something that's relatively easy.
00:19:25
Alex O
And so the way we actually examine motor unit behavior is we we have them trace a trapezoid shape. I'm gonna do it backwards. There we go. So they relax, they increase force linearly, they maintain that, and then they slowly come down and then they relax, right? And while they're doing that, we have these sensors, um electromyography sensors that we place over the muscle and we can actually see the muscle activation. And then as it's, ah being recorded while they're producing for us, we can actually decompose that signal into the individual mode unit. So when they were recruited and then their firing rates, right? What I think may have happened is because the hypertrophy group, they did so much low load exercise, right? High reps, low load, that a single contraction wasn't enough to really tap into everything.
00:20:15
Tony Montgomery
Mm.
00:20:16
Alex O
Right. So they didn't need as much excitation because they got adjusted to it. So a single rep is whatever, but the strength group, because they only did singles, they probably still need it. A lot, if not the same amount of expectation to complete the same task that they did before training. Right. So potentially if we did a, and we actually did do.
00:20:37
Alex O
a test for this where they did as many reps as possible. It could be that after, right, when they're getting closer to failure, that they probably did see an increase, the hypertrophy group, sorry, had an increase in firing rates. But their method of essentially matching force or torque is to rely on just recruiting bigger mode units because they just can produce more force. um In the long run, there are a couple of studies now that show that when compared to untrained individuals, chronically trained individuals actually have the same firing rate behavior as an untrained individual. And the reason being is that they just have larger motor units, right? So they rely on just bigger twitch forces. So they don't have to rely on increasing the firing rates because it's not necessary. The fiber itself, the muscle fibers themselves are just big enough to produce enough force to match whatever a task they need to do.
00:21:37
Alex O
um So ah It's it's kind of tough because I do have a colleague Stephanie Sontag was a PhD at um ah ah LSU right now her dissertation actually did a yoga intervention in recreationally active individuals and so the she actually found that Despite people already being somewhat trained um Going under the or under
00:21:37
Tony Montgomery
Okay.
00:22:03
Alex O
doing a yoga intervention actually increased the fire rates for the lower thresh ammonians. So potentially it could be that a novel stimulus without a change in muscle size may once again cause an increase in the fire rates because she saw no change in and in the muscle size after the intervention.
00:22:22
Tony Montgomery
Right.
00:22:22
Alex O
But I did.
00:22:23
Alex O
Right. So I think it's kind of just like, OK, so the change in the fire rates or the increase in fire rates is likely due to the lack of change in muscle morphology, but an increase in strength. and So something has to essentially modulate that force. And if it's not a bigger muscle with larger motor units, then those motor units have to fire more, especially the lower threshold ones.
00:22:51
Tony Montgomery
yeah Yeah, because I mean, one of the ways we ah can create adaptations through a training environment is is the novelty of exercise, right? And um a lot of people with the untrained population think that those um nervous system adaptations occur within the first six weeks, correct? Is that
00:23:14
Alex O
Yeah, four four to six weeks. Typically, you see that hypertrophy is statistically like visible and significant after four to six weeks. So Moritani, which is kind of the first study to showcase this, it's like the first four weeks, four to six weeks is neural adaptations and anything greater than that is probably hypertrophy related.
00:23:35
Tony Montgomery
Okay, so the idea would be that maybe the the novel training and stimulus could be something that could ah potentially occur at like that four to six week range. And then maybe that would be a good time to um think about creating another novel stimulus, whether it be through exercise selection or changing the volume or um the intensity or what What do you think about the idea that um how often do you need to introduce a novel stimulus to continue to get those training and adaptations to occur? um But also we want to make sure that the training is specific enough to where we get good at the exercises that we are doing. So where's that kind of like sweet spot, do you think? What does the research show anything like that? or
00:24:22
Alex O
Yeah, funny enough, we don't have any studies that have actually done that, right? So um I do think that
00:24:32
Alex O
The neural adaptations, my personal opinion, and the the neural adaptations probably don't play that big of a role in the long run,
Challenges in Training Research
00:24:41
Alex O
right? Even if you incorporate a novelvi novel stimulus, you're really only focusing on improving that stimulus or that activity in itself, right? So I think that if you want to get better at doing heavy singles, let's say you're a power lifter,
00:24:55
Alex O
If you want to be better at being a power lifter, then you probably want to be close training closer to a higher load, right? Something that's very similar to what you're going to be doing in competition. um Now, off season and yeah, you can apply some top of novel stimulus or different training method, but I think ultimately you just get better at what you do.
00:25:19
Alex O
right um I don't know there's necessarily a sweet spot when you need to transition to something else, um but there's no study that's actually been able to like showcase how frequent these neural adaptations occur within a training you know cycle.
00:25:35
Alex O
and so
00:25:35
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:25:36
Alex O
It's so tough to do training studies. That's why I laugh when people bash training studies. I'm like, then you do one.
00:25:43
Tony Montgomery
Right.
00:25:43
Alex O
No, they're never long enough. It's so hard to just keep people consistently and trained or training.
00:25:50
Tony Montgomery
Yeah. I mean, when you think about it, right? Like one of the limitations we have as researchers is we have to, we are confined and constricted by the semester and the schedules of the students or the participants of the study, right? So if you're doing a study in the fall, you have to contend with the fall break, the winter break, midterms, finals, things like that, that could increase dropout rate, increase um the longevity of the intervention, right?
00:26:17
Tony Montgomery
So you're constantly trying to find this idea of like, what is the longest intervention that I can create within the paradigm of you only have two years to do your dissertation as well, right?
00:26:29
Tony Montgomery
And it has to fit within the semester so that kids aren't leaving to go home for the winter and then coming back because then that's obviously not going to be a training and intervention anymore, right?
00:26:38
Alex O
Mm hmm.
00:26:38
Tony Montgomery
So it's like, Yeah, what do we want longer training studies? Yeah, of course. Is that actually ever going to be feasible within the confines of academia? like No, absolutely absolutely not. So we have to make do with with what we can. And the best thing we can do is to try to create these training interventions that um answer the specific question, which for you, it gave you the answers you were looking for.
00:27:04
Tony Montgomery
um and then understand that, like hey, like that is going always going to be a limitation because the perfect one does not does not exist. um But in terms of that, like what is the longest intervention study that we've done looking at motor unit adaptations and neuromuscular adaptations um to date? And what do those show that potentially might be different than what you found? Are there any um contrarian ideas of ah this motor unit neuromuscular adaptation?
00:27:35
Alex O
Yeah, so there, so in the motor unit realm, I think the average study length is anywhere between six to eight weeks, um least recent ones. ah And so Sertzala,
00:27:55
Alex O
ah he ah He did a study eight weeks um and untrained individuals. He had a control group and his training group and they did kind of a more standardized, like traditional training program, linear periodization, right? They start off with like 65% and worked their way up to 85%. And they basically found the same thing I found with my hypertrophy group, um except my hypertrophy group actually saw a decrease in the firing rates. They saw no change in the firing rates.
00:28:22
Alex O
um It could be that it's probably a duration of the study, but I think we had the same amount of training visits between the two of us.
00:28:31
Tony Montgomery
Mm hmm.
00:28:32
Alex O
um But they kind of support what I was trying to say, where if someone gets bigger um and they got stronger, then most likely the neural adaptation is that the motor units themselves just got bigger.
00:28:47
Alex O
Right. ah There is a study by Rupodal out of Mike Roberts Labs at Auburn. And ah he it was a collaboration between Auburn and University of Central Florida. And they compared two training protocols, training to failure and being five reps in reserve. um And they found that the group that trained closer to failure actually saw an increase in the Y intercept, suggesting that the lower threshold motor units increase in firing rates.
00:29:19
Alex O
um
00:29:22
Alex O
Both groups increase similarly between muscle size, but it's kind of interesting that the group that click trained closer to failure saw an increase in the firing rates. um So there's kind of equivocal findings when it comes to motor unit firing rates, but I still think the majority of the um changes that we see neuromuscularly are probably due to changes in muscle size.
00:29:51
Alex O
right So if the muscle gets bigger, then there's probably going to be less excitation necessary right to complete a single contraction, which is typically what we do to assess motor units.
00:30:02
Alex O
um And then there are some other studies that they've done overseas in Europe, for instance, that look at motor units, um similar duration, but the results are basically the same.
00:30:15
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:30:15
Alex O
right They don't see a change in firing rates.
00:30:18
Alex O
um And especially in chronically trained individuals, they don't see a difference in firing rates between those and untrained individuals. um And it's likely due to the fact that the trained individuals just have bigger muscles and and have bigger motor units and they can produce more force. They don't need as much excitation or need to increase the firing rates because those that are recruited are supplementing that force easily.
00:30:44
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, so what do you think is going on then um when you have these lifters staying in the same weight class for years? Potentially adding muscle, but probably not as much muscle as they're adding to their their lifts. What do you think is going on there, training adaptation wise, that that's making them stronger, even though they're staying in the same weight class and not putting on a bunch of weight, a bunch of muscle. What do you think that training and adaptation is specifically? is it Is it specifically just they're getting more efficient at the movement pattern and they're just able to
00:31:18
Tony Montgomery
um be more efficient with the way that they recruit in their motor units or what what do you think is going on there?
00:31:26
Alex O
Great question. I actually, I don't know. And that's like the ultimate question, right? And that's something I plan on doing um at some point, but from a, let's say, my personal opinion.
00:31:30
Tony Montgomery
yeah
00:31:42
Alex O
It's tough, right? Because they are becoming more efficient. I mean, you see people who are good squatters, you know, um they do it so, so often and just they get better at it. But I think after a while, like there's not much more you can improve from a motor perspective. Right. um So it's it's interesting.
00:32:00
Alex O
um You know, you can go down the rabbit hole of saying maybe they're, you know, developing more myofibular proteins, right, which allows for more actin and myosin cross bridging to occur, which can increase strength.
00:32:12
Alex O
um And one of the big questions I've had for a long time is, well, what's why is it that there's, you know, you have bodybuilders, right, who are jacked and then you compare them to someone who's a power lifter, who isn't as strong.
00:32:27
Alex O
um Or not strong, but as big yet the the power if there's obviously way stronger, right? And it could be the fact that the power if they're just does heavy singles compared to the power of the body builder. But when you're looking at someone that's in the same weight class for so long, you know.
00:32:44
Alex O
what's what's contributing or attributing to that increase in strength. It's I don't know. It could be the training stimulus. Right.
00:32:51
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:32:52
Alex O
To your point, maybe they have they applied a new training stimulus, so they have probably some brain um plasticity that occurs. Maybe there's better synaptic ah impulses by transmission.
00:33:04
Alex O
uh, synaptogenesis, I think is what it's called. Uh, but it's, it's really hard because we're so individualized, like what works for you isn't going to obviously work for
Hypertrophy Theories and Applications
00:33:15
Alex O
some other person. and um from a ah research perspective, right? If you find one finding in one person, I remember when I used to look at my data, I'm like, oh, this person's data is going this way. Like, this is so cool. and And you look at the next two people and they like go in the opposite direction. and You're like, what? Right. So I don't know. But I do think that potentially, right, it's probably something to do morphologically, because from a motor
00:33:44
Alex O
perspective, it's not like they're getting better at the squad, right? They could change their stance. They can change their biomechanics. Maybe that improves it a little bit. um That could be one way, but for a long period of time, you know, you know what works best for you. And so from a neuro perspective, I don't know how much more that can improve.
00:34:07
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, do you think improving efficiency also improves their ability to recover from training session to training session and
00:34:13
Alex O
Oh, absolutely. I think that's probably one of the bigger things is um your ability to recover plays a huge role, right? Because then you can train more. All right. I think recently it's become really ah ah important to track sleep.
00:34:31
Alex O
Right. we've see We've seen that lack of sleep or sleeping less than a certain amount of hours can actually impact hypertrophy. um And we can see it in motor performance. You know, if you're thinking about specific lifts and some people are just built different, you know, they they wake up after three hours of sleep, smoke a cigarette and just hit a PR and they're just, you know, genetic freaks.
00:34:49
Tony Montgomery
Hmm. Yeah.
00:34:53
Alex O
But I think for the general population, there are other things that play a bigger role with hitting PRS and one of them happens to be recovery.
00:35:03
Alex O
and my personal opinion.
00:35:05
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, no, I agree. I've seen that through throughout the the years of coaching and and training myself is like, um even when they introduce things like like PDs, they think that that's going to allow them to train um more. And so they add more volume, but then they still don't get better because they're still not able to recover from the amount of volume that they did.
00:35:25
Tony Montgomery
um And I always felt like when you add in certain compounds like that, that improves your ability to recover, that there's no need to add more training stimulus because you're recovering better, right? um So when you do become more efficient with the movement patterns by training them over and over again,
00:35:42
Tony Montgomery
you you can have better recovery rates, I think, because there's there's not as much damage going on um because the the firing rates um don't necessarily have to be increased, right? and And you're not necessarily reaching that maximum threshold every single time because you are becoming more efficient. um You did mention something about the idea of acting in myosin either creating new ones or making them more efficient or making them stronger. Has there been research to kind of show that that is something that happens within um training and what kind of training would spark those type of adaptations? Would it be hypertrophy? Would it be strength, plyometrics? Like what are we talking about there?
00:36:23
Alex O
Yeah, so I actually don't really know. Once again, the limitation we have is the duration of these studies, right? Let's say you take a muscle biopsy.
00:36:34
Alex O
So there's a couple of limitations here. You take a muscle biopsy and let's say you do an eight-week intervention um and then you take in another muscle biopsy, chances are to that area that you took that sample from is in the same area.
00:36:46
Alex O
So the composition could be totally different, right?
00:36:48
Tony Montgomery
Right.
00:36:48
Alex O
There's that. um And so We don't know if the eight weeks is enough time for someone to develop um enough actin in my son, right? Increasing the the quantity of that. um That's out of my scope of practice. I don't do that stuff. I do think it'd be cool. And I'm sure someone has done it. I just haven't looked into it ah specifically looking like mice and heavy chain content.
00:37:17
Alex O
um But I don't know how long it takes. And so um Mike Roberts, you know, coined the term or Mike Roberts and Cody, Cody Hahn kind of coined the term um sacroplasmic hypertrophy, right? Where the volume of that muscle gets bigger, but it could be due to just the the sacroplasm itself increasing, right? And not necessarily the myofibular portion of it, which is where we house our actinomycin. And so one of the ideas is that you build this infrastructure, right? You increase the size of the scaffolding.
00:37:54
Alex O
to allow for those myofabular content to increase. um But I don't know, there's a specific type of training. I do think that um the biggest thing that really plays a role in all of this is the consist consistency in training.
00:38:07
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:38:08
Alex O
All right. um That's why I kind of chuckle when people do like maybe two months of training and they just want to get on PDs because they want to get bigger and stronger off the bat.
00:38:16
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:38:18
Alex O
And it's just like you haven't even given yourself enough time to like really train. All right. Get really good at lifting and seeing what your genetic potential is.
00:38:25
Tony Montgomery
Right.
00:38:26
Alex O
um
00:38:27
Tony Montgomery
Not only that, but you don't even know it works for you. You don't even know what program, what rep schemes, what volume.
00:38:30
Alex O
Potentially.
00:38:34
Tony Montgomery
right So yeah, I think that delayed gratification makes for the best lifters.
00:38:34
Alex O
Mm hmm.
00:38:38
Tony Montgomery
And we've seen that. We've seen the best lifters go from um natural to enhanced. The ones that were able to stay natural the longest got the most benefits from the enhancement as well. And they were able to see significant improvements once they were able to to do that.
00:38:53
Tony Montgomery
um With the with the sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. Have there been any studies to to replicate that finding because correct me if I'm wrong but I thought ah Dr. Roberts did a study and found that there was no, like he did a follow-up study and then didn't find any sarcoplasmic hypertrophy.
00:39:16
Tony Montgomery
So isn't there still some contention on whether or not that actually exists and the ability to replicate that has been very, very limited?
00:39:25
Alex O
I'm not sure. um i I'm sure there is and I think that's one of the issues is like, for instance, like my study, right?
00:39:26
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:39:34
Alex O
I found I did something similar to another person design or another and they study design and our findings are somewhat similar but different. Right. And I think that there's always going to be a couple of findings no matter how you go about it.
00:39:48
Alex O
um But I'm not sure. I mean, it's it's still kind of up in the air. And I think they wrote a review. You know, it's the unicorn of hypertrophy is like we don't know if it actually exists or not.
00:39:58
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:39:58
Alex O
We speculate and it's all a a theory. It's a speculation. Um, but it kind of like it's, it's, it's a cool theory if you want to think about it. Cause like in my case, right? We had these individuals that had 20%. I think the difference in hypertrophy was the hypertrophy group had a 20% increase in, um, VL, um, cross section area. So the vastus lateralis or the lateral, uh, quad muscle. And then the strength group had like a 4% increase.
00:40:29
Alex O
So that's a huge margin of hypertrophy difference, right? And so if one group got way bigger, you know, five times bigger, almost. Why isn't that five times increase in muscle size playing an increase or difference in the train or the one arm or increase in strength?
00:40:47
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:40:48
Alex O
So, OK, cool.
00:40:52
Alex O
Well, we've been cool was to do ah continuing obviously, you know, continuing the study and doing it for another eight weeks. All right. Maybe after week 10, that additional hypertrophy now starts to become a little more um involved right and increasing strength. And well that's when policy disparity and the the ah strength increase. um But then I also think what if it's just the training itself? All right. What if you just practice training with heavy loads? You're going to get better at training heavy loads.
00:41:22
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:41:23
Alex O
Right. So I don't know how much of a role muscle or change in muscle size plays a role in all this. um But we know that typically people with bigger muscles are stronger than others.
00:41:35
Alex O
Right.
00:41:36
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:41:36
Alex O
But whether it's hyperplasma hypertrophy is real or myophilia hypertrophy is real, I don't know.
00:41:44
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, I think that's what we're going to be stuck at for a long time with this debate is this it's a lot of correlational stuff.
00:41:44
Alex O
It's.
00:41:49
Tony Montgomery
it's It's very hard to create causation and create these variances of of what's contributing to what because we just don't have the technology nor the time to to actually do those in-depth studies, um which makes for a good rhetoric on online you know of
00:41:49
Alex O
Mm hmm.
00:42:06
Alex O
Oh yeah.
00:42:07
Tony Montgomery
a back-and-forth debate that can't be proven by either cohort of of arguments, but you know I think those are those are the the best debates to get into because you're you're never going to be right or wrong, so it makes for a good ego-building on your own.
00:42:23
Alex O
Oh, for sure. Especially when like, does it really matter?
00:42:27
Tony Montgomery
Right. Does it?
00:42:28
Alex O
You know, because OK, so for instance, I had a 66 kilo lifter, right?
00:42:28
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:42:35
Alex O
Small guy, really strong, great deadlifter, right? Has ah part the the best proportions for deadlifter, that horrible venture, right? No, no, no hate towards him, but he just wasn't a good venture.
00:42:46
Alex O
And no matter how many times we've, you know, we we've tried different ways. We increase volume, we increase frequency, you know, um We just we just cannot get that bench to move. Right. And that can be my limitation as a coach. Right. Maybe I don't have enough experience to find the the perfect technique or the perfect way to improve his bench. Right. But then I have other people who just are good ventures and just have the huge pecs. So I always had the question, what if certain movements are.
00:43:19
Alex O
More dependent on muscle size and others.
00:43:22
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:43:23
Alex O
Right. Because if you think about the bench, some of the best benches just have huge chests and triceps.
00:43:28
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, big ribcages, right?
00:43:28
Alex O
Right.
00:43:29
Tony Montgomery
Big barrel chest, yeah.
00:43:30
Alex O
Yeah. Perfect. And then some of the best squatters, you know, they may not have huge legs, but they may have like strong hamstrings or glutes. Right.
00:43:39
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, or even good like bone morphology that allows them to have really great leverages to have a really good squat.
00:43:39
Alex O
So there's it's multi.
00:43:46
Alex O
Right. So. It's so tough, but it's a fun like questions like does it play that big of a role? If it does, then should we just focus on getting as big as possible? I don't know.
00:43:56
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:43:56
Alex O
Most of the training I like to do is kind of, I think, to determine ah power building.
00:44:02
Tony Montgomery
Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's, I mean, what we like to do in strength sports is like, take these concepts that have stood the test of time of like, let's get stronger and bigger and then coin it, you know, like hybrid athletes.
00:44:03
Alex O
Right.
00:44:15
Tony Montgomery
It's like, you mean you run and lift weights, like every other athlete that plays sports, like, ah yeah, we can categorize it however you want to.
00:44:21
Alex O
Yeah.
00:44:23
Tony Montgomery
Yeah. Get big and strong. Power building.
00:44:25
Alex O
Yeah.
00:44:25
Tony Montgomery
Fantastic. We'll, we'll put a label on it.
00:44:28
Alex O
For sure. And it works, right?
00:44:29
Tony Montgomery
Yeah. Yeah. No, I think, I mean, for me as a, as a coach and as a lifter, it's like you want the program that is the most enjoyable and you want the program that is specific to your sport.
00:44:43
Tony Montgomery
And you want the exercises that don't get you injured. If you can
Training Techniques: BFR and Coaching
00:44:47
Tony Montgomery
do those three things, you're going to be the best that you can be for your genetic potential.
00:44:47
Alex O
Oh, huge.
00:44:51
Tony Montgomery
All the other stuff is just kind of, um, arbitrary at that point, you know?
00:44:56
Alex O
Oh, I agree 100 percent, um especially with the ah funny things that you not only enjoy, but you can recover from. Right. My favorite is I had this athlete.
00:45:05
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:45:08
Alex O
He's a genetic freak. Like, I just don't get it. You know. But he cracks me up because we're we're prepping him for a powerlifting me and he's a already strong kid.
00:45:19
Alex O
And he's like, ah I hit 315 on bench day. I was like, why? He's like, I just want to see how strong I am right now. He can bench 315 easy now. Right. But like during prep is like, why why are you getting close to your max?
00:45:29
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:45:32
Alex O
Like, you know, like it's just follow the program. But I wanted to see. And then like ah before that, me. He says, my shoulder hurts. Okay, cool. Uh, this may be, let's just back off of, uh, on the bench press. Yeah. I hit two 75 or eight. What are you doing? You know, like it just, you can be the best coach come up with the coolest program. And then occasionally you're going to find an athlete that just wants to deviate from the program.
00:46:01
Tony Montgomery
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you're right. There's some athletes that I have to preface with like, if there's any pain in any of the movements, quit doing it because they'll email me and be like, yeah, I did this movement all three sets. I had extreme pain in my, um, adductor muscles and like, and you just kept going like, yeah, I just thought I'd tell you afterwards instead. I'm like, you gotta be, you gotta be kidding me. But you know, sometimes the denser, the athlete, the, the, the stronger they get, it's, uh, you know,
00:46:31
Tony Montgomery
Good for them.
00:46:32
Alex O
yeah
00:46:33
Tony Montgomery
one of the One of the studies we did together, we looked at ah BFR and the role that um blood flow restriction has on motor units.
00:46:42
Alex O
Mm hmm.
00:46:44
Tony Montgomery
One, what what makes the technique of BFR effective in its application? And um what did we see in terms of alterations of motor unit behavior when applying BFR to the training and study that we did?
00:47:01
Alex O
Yeah, so one of the biggest benefits with bluff or restriction is that you can essentially get the same benefits of training with a higher load without necessarily training with a higher load. So what I mean by that is by including the the artery, right? You're youre essentially building more metabolic byproduct, which could cause hypertrophy to occur, um which would then lead um Individuals that think that, well, okay, I apply this tourniquet, right? I increase or induce blood flow restriction. And the adaptation is that I don't have to train with heavy loads, but I do have to train ah lighter loads with more reps, more volume, essentially. Right. um And then you get the benefit of it not only getting bigger, but potentially getting stronger compared to training only with lighter loads. Right. So if you're a bodybuilder.
00:47:49
Alex O
and you don't want to train all day right because when you train with light loads typically you're going to do a bunch of reps okay so if you apply a blow flow restriction you can still train with the lighter loads but your time uh in the gym is probably cut in half or if not you know two-thirds and not only that but you
00:48:04
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
00:48:09
Alex O
experience more hypertrophy and you get stronger. So cool. Awesome. Typically hyper ah BFR was used in like clinical settings like rehab, right, where individuals are immobilized and they can't really go through a range of motion, um let alone like apply resistance or high resistance against themselves. But in our study, you had a publication and I had a publication look at the motor unit stuff. um I'll talk about mine, but I'm more excited to hear about yours.
00:48:38
Alex O
um In my study, we did a single contraction. We wanted to see how soon does blood flow restriction actually influence the way motor units behave. And so our population were trained individuals. So that was that was kind of novel in a sense.
00:48:52
Alex O
And we found that as soon as you applied that tourniquet um and we start to produce force, the immediate increase in firing rates was pretty observant, right? So, um and once again, typically what we see is the lower threshold mode units, the ones that are recruited first and activated first, um have a higher firing rate compared to a later recruited higher threshold mode unit. But we found that with the blow flow restriction um during a single contraction at about 40% of their maximal effort,
00:49:22
Alex O
we saw an significant increase in the firing rates of the lower threshold motor units. Right. And that was maintained during a steady contraction. So even though it's only 40 percent, the blood flow restriction induce an increase in that excitation of the lower threshold motor units without necessarily recruiting additional motor units. So that was interesting. um We have another paper in the works now where when they're doing a 70 percent contraction,
00:49:51
Alex O
It's a little harder, um still just one, um and it's not fatigue inducing, or at least not to failure. ah They not only saw an increase in the firing rates for the lower threshold modeings, but also recruited additional mode units, larger mode units. So something about the effort needed while you're doing bluff flow restriction is probably the reason why we see that increase in hypertrophy.
00:50:12
Alex O
Right. um With the blow flow restriction, you have a parent signals that are going to the spinal cord and saying, hey, ah you know, we have this sensory information that's telling us, one, ah we have mobile byproduct being accumulated. We have chemo receptors and mechanical receptors being activated. So they're going to excite the motor neuron pool. And then you have information from the brain going down saying, hey, your effort seems to be harder or greater. because you're wearing this cuff it's it's somewhat ah discomforting but you want to complete that task you're trying a little harder and so by doing so you're not only increasing the firing to the already active mode units but you're having to recruit additional mode units that are typically larger in size and so we and i say we but i think the general consensus is in order for you to
00:51:03
Alex O
maximize hypertrophy, you have to essentially provide those fibers with some type of stimulus. They have to be recruited, right? They have to be recruited in order to be stimulated and go through the whole process of hypertrophy. And so the benefit of doing blood flow restriction, in my opinion, is that you're able to tap into those motor units doing a lighter intensity contraction. And that's just with a single contraction. Now, ah in your study, we did ah reps to failure, right? And I'll let you kind of talk about it.
00:51:32
Alex O
if you like, or I can take the show. It's up to you.
00:51:34
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, yeah um I can kind of lay the groundwork with the what the study was, but um you're the expert in this in this area. ah I was just happy to to tag along and and help out the best I could. But yeah, we did 50% of their MVC ah So we did the same thing isometric bicep contraction and they trace the trapezoid um and the reason the reason we trace the trapezoid is because that's how we're able to collect the motor unit decomposition data, right?
00:52:04
Alex O
Mm hmm.
00:52:04
Tony Montgomery
So it's not necessarily that we thought isometric contractions and tracing was the best intervention. But that's the only way that we can actually um get a hold of each individual motor unit as it gets recruited. And that's why the whole ramp up process is slow and five seconds continuous. um So we did that. And then they held the isometric contraction for ah seven to 10 seconds and then down ramp back down five seconds. And they did that um for as many reps as they could ah with and without BFR.
00:52:38
Tony Montgomery
um And the overall um kind of key finding that we that we found was that motor unit recruitment was was very similar, i but the BFR group did a total of three less reps, so they were able to get the same kind of training neuromuscular adaptations with less total volume than the group that did did no BFR.
00:53:03
Tony Montgomery
um Within that study, though, we did find some genetic outliers that were very interesting. We had a couple people do more reps with BFR than without BFR, which could be indicative of of of a lot of things, but definitely their ability to sustain and um the variety of repetitions that we saw anywhere from two reps at 50% with BFR to like 30, I think, or 32 was the extreme, shows the inter-individuality of each individual person and maybe seeing where those differences lie could be um create a better understanding of
00:53:45
Tony Montgomery
what training that person could specifically be doing to develop those weaknesses. And maybe that could be that novel stimulus that they're looking for based off of muscle fiber type, oxygen delivery, and stuff like that. But go ahead and add in anything else you want to within the realm of that study and those findings.
00:54:06
Alex O
Yeah, I mean, you pretty much you know ah hit around the head. But I think what you said was most important was the fact that the way we look at motor units is during an isometric contraction. And I meant to say this way long ago. One of the issues that we have with training studies, kind of backtracking a little bit, is that the way we assess motor unit behavior is during an isometric contraction. Now, you might think to yourself, well, when do I ever do anything isometric, right?
00:54:32
Alex O
And so it's very hard to look at motor unit behavior during dynamic contractions for a multitude of reasons, right? Beginning back on the task at hand. So, yeah, what you guys found was basically the rate of a recruitment of motor units was very similar between the BFR and control. However, the BFR treatment ah caused that earlier recruitment to occur, right? they they They did less reps but had
Neuromuscular Research Methods
00:55:00
Alex O
the same response. So it kind of goes back to the whole concept that the benefit of doing VFR is that you have some ah necessity to recruit these motor units, right? That you would have probably recruited later down the road, but you recruited them earlier, right? Because of X, Y, and Z, right? Affair and signaling, um the central nervous system playing a role in all this. And so
00:55:25
Alex O
The big difference between our two studies is that, in my, we found that the firing rates changed between the two conditions within a single contraction. Within your study, the only thing that really differed was the rate of recruitment, right? The actual potential size of the motor unit sizes or where the way we recruit motor units was different between the conditions, but the firing rates weren't, right? And that might be due to a couple different things. Like you said, you have some outliers.
00:55:54
Alex O
who did more reps than the others. um So once again, it's when we produce force, it's ah it's kind of this combination of both firing rates, adjusting the firing rates of active motor units, and then recruiting additional motor units when necessary.
00:56:11
Alex O
And so, in that study, most likely the best and optimal route of maintaining force while you're doing this tracing is probably recruiting additional motor units, right, rather than relying on increasing the buying rates during a fatiguing task, um which is super interesting, in my opinion, right.
00:56:29
Alex O
and um That kind of goes back to the whole idea that if you want to increase the size of certain moda units, right? And I love when people talk about, you got to recruit the moda units, you got to train a failure, this recruits moda unit, blah, blah, blah.
00:56:42
Alex O
It's like, I don't think people really understand how moda units are recruited, right?
00:56:46
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, I think that's a safer function.
00:56:47
Alex O
Like you need enough, yeah, you need enough stimulus, right? to reach a certain threshold for that motor unit to be recruited. And so when people say when you train to failure at light load, you're recruiting the whole motor unit pool. That's not necessarily true. You're recruiting whatever your brain thinks it needs to complete that task. Right. And then eventually what happens when you fail is that you ah fell to for multiple reasons. Right. There's probably too much too much metabolic product, you know, hydrogen ions running around or impeding your ability to ah contract the muscle, the sensory information that's probably decreasing the neural drive. So in order for you to tap into those higher threshold motor units, you have to give it a proper stimulus. Right. And there's a couple of papers now that show that even if you did, let's say,
00:57:38
Alex O
um reps to failure at 30%, you would never really ever recruit the same motor units if you did a 70% contraction or an 80% contraction. So if you want to activate the motor units that you need to do higher intensity exercise, my intensity, I mean like load, right? You have to essentially target those. The only way to do that is to be training closer to that load.
00:58:04
Alex O
So I love when people are like, yeah, if you train a load to failure, you're recruiting the whole motor unit. It was like, you're not. You're recruiting what what you need. And when you stop, that's the ones that were recruited are the ones that were ah stimulated enough to have some type of adaptation.
00:58:16
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, which is why it's important to train out of a variety of rep ranges and get as strong as possible in each one of those rep ranges in order for you to get the adaptations and is that you that you're trying to to reach for.
00:58:27
Tony Montgomery
um Now, one of the limitations we have as as researchers is we're we're limited by the technology that we we use and the technology that we have
00:58:28
Alex O
Exactly.
00:58:38
Tony Montgomery
capabilities of of um using further questions that we that we're trying to answer. um You use mechanomyography, you use EMG for decomposition, you've also used transcranial magnetic stimulation. um Kind of go over what each one of those are, what they do, um what they provide for the study that you're, ah what what you were looking at at the time, and what are some of the limitations that they have.
00:59:08
Alex O
Yeah, so my kind of myography, it's the, we like to say it's the mechanical counterpart to EMG. So electromyography or EMG is the excitatory response, right? The muscle excitation that we record. So when we have a sensor over the legs, as the muscle fibers are being activated, they're being activated because of an action potential that kind of runs across the fiber, right?
00:59:30
Alex O
And so when they're activated, we have these axe potentials that are being read by the surface EMG and then it gives you this giant big burst of just squiggly lines, right, which we then can decompose and differentiate between the motor unit based off the exponential waveform and then how often they're firing based off of how many times we see those waveforms, right, in the time domain.
00:59:51
Alex O
Now mechanical myography is the ah recording of sound waves technically. And so what it's doing, it's essentially picking up the vibrations of those fibers. And it responds very similar, right? They basically kind of tell us the same thing. And it's kind of appropriate to measure both EMG and MMG together because they paint a bigger picture. And so the amplitude of the MMG signal really tells us the essentially
01:00:23
Alex O
unfused motor units that are being activated. Right. So as you start to increase force, right, you're recruiting a ah more and more motor units. So that signal is oscillating rapidly and and in great amplitude. But as you're maintaining, ah let's say you do a 40 percent contraction, you get up to that 40 percent plateau. As you're maintaining that, eventually you'll start to see that that signal starts to diminish and it gets smaller and thinner. Right. And the idea is that those motor units are essentially starting to fuse or tetanize. So it's not oscillating as often as or as frequently.
01:00:56
Alex O
Sorry, it's oscillating more frequently to the point where it's starting to become steady, right? It's tetanizing. So that signal might shrink and we can consider that as like the muscle stiffening. The limitation behind that is we don't know exactly what's happening with the motor units.
01:01:13
Alex O
right We don't know if the motor units did in fact increase their firing rates or on if we recruited additional motor units and so forth. So it's a lot of speculation, but it's a nice speculation because when you pair that with the EMG signal right and the EMG signal, once again, it's that burst that is corresponding with the motor units that are being activated and then their firing rates.
01:01:35
Alex O
And so if something happens in the EMG that's changing, we can actually interpret the MMG and say, OK, I think this is what's happening, right? We see an increase in the burst in the yeah EMG signal, but no change in the MMG signal. Then we can assume that we potentially what's happening is there's an increase in fire rates.
01:01:55
Alex O
And those firing rates are essentially starting to tetanize. Right. And so the signals getting smaller. But if we see an increase in the EMG signal and then a continuous increase in and the MMD signal, the potentially what's happening is we're recruiting additional mode units. Right. Those larger mode units are essentially oscillating. Right. You frequently. So they're not tetanizing. And so that's going to give us a larger burst of fibers themselves are twitching. Right.
01:02:20
Alex O
um So you essentially pair those up. Once again, the limitation here is that you really can't determine what's happening, whether it's you're recruiting more additional motor units or they're increasing their firing rates or they're detonizing completely. Um, so you use methods that you can decompose from the EMG signal to kind of infer what exactly is happening. Now, transcontinental magnetic stimulation or TMS for sure is a method where you, uh, essentially use this device that changed the electromagnetic field, right?
01:02:48
Alex O
that's going to excite the nerves in the brains to essentially activate. And so when you stimulate over the motor cortex region of interest, say your leg muscle, right, there's a specific area in your brain that you can stimulate and is going to cause your muscle to contract or activate. um The big thing here is that when you're doing that, you're exciting both excitatory neurons and inhibitory neurons. And so the net outcome, right,
01:03:15
Alex O
is going to cause a cortical excitability contraction, or or sorry, a motor evoked potential, or MAP for short. And what we do is we apply a EMG signal over the muscle. We can actually see when that signal from the brain reaches the motor unit pool in the spinal cord and activates you know the motor units that reach that threshold that's being provided from that stimulation, we get a ah all at once actual potential. right All those motor units are activated at once, and we get one giant waveform. And we can see that giant waveform, and that's the motor potential. right
01:03:50
Alex O
with my study, I was interested to see if different types of training actually causes that met to change in size. Right. So not only can we see the change in the method and size, but we can actually see what's known as the ah the latency. Right. How long does it take for that signal from the brain to reach that sensor? Right. um So we did that over the the mortar cortex and we found that.
01:04:15
Alex O
the signal did in fact increase in size, but what was interesting was the change for the hypertrophy group was greater than the change for the strength group.
01:04:22
Tony Montgomery
Mm hmm.
01:04:24
Alex O
Both increase in size, and we compared that to the control group, um we saw an increase in the size and it was greater for the hypertrophy group compared to the control ah the <unk> group as well, but the strength group.
01:04:38
Alex O
um So it kind of begs the question, Sometimes when we look at the EMG signal, the amplitude of that signal is probably really dependent on the size of the fibers, right? The bigger the fiber, the greater the X potential that's going to be elicited.
01:04:55
Alex O
So one potential mechanism or rationale behind the differences between the hypertrophy and the strength group is that the hypertrophy group, because they have a bigger muscle, that that larger muscle ah causes a larger X potential to occur. Right. So you're going to see a bigger map. um So we don't know if the change in the map for the hypertrophy group is due to the fact that it's a neural adaptation or if a morphological adaptation. Right.
01:05:25
Alex O
in the strength group, it did increase, but not as much as the hypertrophy group. So we assume that potentially what's happening is that there is more of a neural adaptation, right? It's more of a neural ah involvement.
01:05:40
Alex O
We have other ah variables of interest, right? So we have the short interval intracortical inhibition, which is a really fancy way of looking at inhibition within the motor cortex.
01:05:52
Alex O
right And so it's assumed, and there's a couple of studies that support this, that as we become trained, on we have less inhibition. right um That means that there's more excitatory responses occurring in the brain when you stimulate compared to inhibitory responses. And we found that in both training groups, no difference between the training groups, which is super cool. And then we looked at the ah ah latency.
01:06:22
Alex O
right How long does it take for that signal to travel from the brain to the ah to the sensor? Both groups had a similar change.
01:06:26
Tony Montgomery
Mm hmm.
01:06:28
Alex O
right So it seems like the training itself caused a very similar neural adaptation, except for the MIP aptitude, which is probably derived from the size of the muscle, right the hypertrophy that occurred for the hypertrophy group, which is super interesting.
Practical Applications of Neural Research
01:06:46
Alex O
um and We stimulated over the brain, we stimulated over the spinal cord and over the leg. And what was kind of interesting is at the spinal cord, that's where we saw some differences between groups or more differences. um The MEP, I call it the SMEP amplitude, right? So spinal motor of both potential was actually greater for the hypertrophy group without a change in the strength group.
01:07:14
Alex O
And one potential reasoning is that maybe because the hypertrophy group is doing those like high repetition training at low loads, that there you start to develop more um ah What do they call it? Spinal circuitry, right? the The neural connections in the spinal cord um are essentially increasing. And so maybe that's one of the reasons why there's more excitatory response that's occurring at the spinal cord when we stimulate or the spinal cord and bypassing the brain.
01:07:46
Alex O
Um, so that's interesting and no one's ever done that. No one's ever actually seen if the SMEP itself can change in size. And, uh, it was also the only hypertrophy group was the only one that saw a significant change in the latency when you stimulate over the spinal cord compared to the strength group.
01:08:05
Alex O
All right.
01:08:06
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, that is very interesting, um especially the the differences, the divergence of the brain to the spinal cord and why that would be the case. um I do know that the research kind of lends itself to thinking that the higher volume training is more central nervous system fatiguing.
01:08:24
Tony Montgomery
right So could there be some theory or some concept behind training at those higher volumes to failure? Could be creating better neural adaptations centrally as opposed to peripherally and therefore you're going to get more excitability um within that domain because single reps aren't really taxing the central system as much or is that something that is a little too far-fetched to
01:08:52
Alex O
no i mean it it makes sense right um ah Essential fatigue is such a weird word for me because like your central nervous system doesn't necessarily fatigue, right?
01:09:02
Alex O
It modulates, right? There's going to be more inhibition to control, protect the body.
01:09:06
Tony Montgomery
Right.
01:09:06
Alex O
Um, but yet to your point, yeah, I think that the fact that we're essentially doing more reps, right? High volume rep stuff that there potentially is a neural adaptation that is accumulating at the central nervous system, right?
01:09:20
Alex O
Especially at the spinal cord. Um, It's tough because once again, when we stimulate over the brain or stimulate over the spinal cord, it's a battle between inhibitory and excitatory neurons. So we don't know. Are we are is there more excitatory or is there less inhibition? um it's It's kind of hard to determine, but it's the cool thing about this is like it seems to be affected by training right modality.
01:09:50
Alex O
And so there's a lot and lot of different ways you can approach this. Well, what if you have a group that doesn't do the high-low training, but only does the hypertrophy stuff? Would they have a similar response? Because you got to keep in mind, both training groups did a high-low training, right?
01:10:01
Tony Montgomery
Mm hmm.
01:10:03
Alex O
Both groups increase in strength similarly. um There's a study by Jenkins et al. where they compare low-low to high-low training to failure. Both groups had a similar increase in hypertrophy, but only the high-low group actually saw an increase in the ah one RMS and NPCs. So maximum voluntary contractions. so um And in a greater increase in just raw EMG. Right. So ah it's it's kind of hard to determine, well, if the group did hypertrophy and at doing all this you know extra work is the additional
01:10:39
Alex O
um neural adaptations due to the training itself, or is it a due to the morphological change? um So that's definitely a follow-up study at some point. I just don't know if I have the ah bandwidth to do another giant training study like that again.
01:10:49
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:10:53
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, no, I don't don't blame you. And also, too, there's something to be said about the idea of improving MVC, not necessarily being um having the same carryover as improving your one rep max on an actual lift. right um There's a lot of ah limitations to doing MVCs as opposed to what you did. You did MVCs, but you also did um one rep maxes as well. So we're able to get both of those things. And I think i think that's what One of the things I always harp on with research is um you can typically tell when the researchers doing training and interventions have never really trained themselves because they just miss so many things that people that actually train and train athletes
01:11:30
Alex O
Oh, yeah. yeah
01:11:37
Tony Montgomery
realize are dramatically important. So when you did yours, and when I heard you do in yours, I was like, man, this is, this is gonna be really cool, because it's actually like real world application. It's not just mechanisms, because in mechanisms without function. um To me, we've had this talk a lot is like, it's just very boring. It's just there's, I need to know the function of it. I need to know what the application is, right? Because we've seen many studies where The mechanism is X, Y, and Z. But then when you carry it over to practice application, it has no relevance at all. right And you're just like, well, what was the point of the study? It was like, because you wanted to do something cool for your research friends? Or are you actually trying to do research that's like going to carry over to practitioners and and the training population? And that kind of brings up the the next thing that I want to talk about. is like we we You have all these all these findings and and all this research you're doing.
01:12:29
Tony Montgomery
um How do they support um how does neuromuscular research?
01:12:38
Tony Montgomery
lend itself to practical applications in the real world that practitioners, therapists can listen to what you're saying and say, hey, this is what Alex is saying. How can I apply this to get benefits in in the real world? What are some of the key takeaways that we can think of when trying to apply um this area of research with motor units and TMS and and all this cool stuff that you're doing that actual people can take and and run with.
01:13:10
Alex O
Yeah. Uh, it's tough, right? Because the general population doesn't need to worry about neural adaptations because when you start to training or training, when you start to train, you have what's known as, um, or after a single about, you have what's known as at the repeat about effect, right? You do something, it's hard, you're sore, but the next time you do it, you get, it it becomes easier. Right. Um,
01:13:34
Alex O
But most people don't have to worry. Are my fire or my motor units firing at optimal level? Right. Or is ah is the latency between the way my brain is sending signals to my muscle increasing?
01:13:39
Tony Montgomery
right
01:13:45
Alex O
Probably not. The only people that would probably be concerned about this stuff are clinical patients. Right. People that have lesions in the brains or are undergoing um rehab where you're trying to find ways to assess right the recovery rate without having to go through a dynamic um protocol, right which is why I think and ah doing isometric contractions is really nice because you can see you know in real time um potential changes from a neural perspective.
01:14:03
Tony Montgomery
Right. Mhm.
01:14:16
Alex O
Right. And what I mean by that is you can do stimulation over a nerve. Right. And depending on how that waveform or the size of the waveform, the latency um it's looking pre and post-op, you know, can determine whether they're it's healthy they're healthy enough to return or go to the next stage.
01:14:32
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:14:33
Alex O
Does that make sense?
01:14:34
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:14:34
Alex O
But like for an avid person who's constantly going to the gym, they don't the neuromuscular stuff in my personal opinion. Right. People will probably argue against me and say, no, that's not it's not that's not fair. um it probably doesn't matter.
01:14:47
Alex O
It just helps explain why we're seeing these changes. Does that make sense?
01:14:51
Tony Montgomery
yeah Yeah. So do you think um with the idea that maybe ah in a rehab setting, say say we're dealing with athletes, right? Athletes that tore their ACL. If we could do a pre-post test to see MEPS and latency, could that over time tell us that they're... ready to return to play, less likely to get injured. like Is any of that stuff applicable to that? Or could it potentially be applicable if the research was done? Could that be something that could be used to understand latency and MEPS in terms of like actual reward or application? Or even with elderly population where risk of fall, right maybe latency could be something that could be
01:15:41
Tony Montgomery
something that we could use as a ah test to determine if this person is at greater risk of falls, right? Is that something that we could use for that?
01:15:52
Alex O
Yeah, and I mean, that's a good point, right? it's it's a You're looking at a population where there's potentially harm right that can come their way if they do something and and you're trying to provide a test that is its feasible. right um The hard part is when you're doing a TMS, right stimulation is that you have to have them in a chair, you have to set up this gear, it's it's kind of it's a little process.
01:16:14
Alex O
um But in some way, actually, I thought about doing this here as a potential project and working with the rugby team, the women's rugby team here as a strength coach. And I wanted to do athlete monitoring. All right. And one of the tests I wanted to do is TMS. Right. Does this.
01:16:36
Alex O
Cortical excitability or the inhibition that occurs in the motor cortex, does that change throughout the season? If so, what part of the season are we seeing the greatest decrease, right? And maybe that's when we start to focus a little more on recovery or ah maybe switching the the training to be a little more explosive and emphasis, right? Because we know that the for at least for older adults,
01:17:01
Alex O
um their ability to produce force rapidly or power rapidly is probably the biggest predictor for all cause mortality. Right.
01:17:08
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:17:09
Alex O
Fall risk. So um these tests are great, but probably doing more practical tests is better. Right. So in rehab settings, um you can use a isokinetic dynamometer.
01:17:24
Alex O
Right. And measure torque, because ultimately torque makes more sense than a electrical signal.
01:17:31
Tony Montgomery
Right.
01:17:31
Alex O
Right. But the electrical signal was nice because it allows us to infer what is happening. So, for instance, with ACL rehab, they found that the motor units actually change in. um the I think it's ACL. The firing rates of the VL differ from the VM. Right. Post-op. So what does that really mean? I don't know. Probably that there's more compensation in the VM than in the VL. Right.
01:17:58
Alex O
And so maybe if that's the case and we'll we'll try to focus on improving the ah the VL. But when you train the legs, you're training the whole quad.
01:18:08
Tony Montgomery
Right.
01:18:08
Alex O
So does it really matter?
01:18:09
Tony Montgomery
Right. Yeah, but you could you could train specifically to um
01:18:16
Tony Montgomery
target the the VL as as much as possible, whether it be through like um rotation of the the legs, exercise selection, things like that.
01:18:19
Alex O
Mm hmm.
01:18:24
Tony Montgomery
I mean, that would explain why things like terminal knee extensions and getting the quad, especially the the VL as strong as possible or the, yeah, and that having better carry over to their rehab process.
01:18:25
Alex O
Mm hmm.
01:18:39
Tony Montgomery
i think i mean I think finding ways to create those markers of potential uh, return to play can do, can do a couple of things, right?
01:18:47
Alex O
Okay.
01:18:48
Tony Montgomery
It can, it can let the practitioner know like, Hey, we're making the improvements we need to make, but it can also build the confidence in the athlete because now they have some technology to also indicate like, Hey, we're getting better.
01:18:56
Alex O
Okay.
01:19:01
Tony Montgomery
We're making the improvements that we need to make on the areas that were subsequently like injured or turned off or, you know, whatever you want to say. Um, and that'd be with the, with the female rugby, when you were talking about that,
01:19:14
Tony Montgomery
One of the things that would be really cool is if you did, um I don't know how often you're going to do the TMS if you do do it, but comparing that to also injuries throughout the season as well, and seeing if that a if inhibition is lower, did that did that correlate to more injuries for each individual person?
01:19:25
Alex O
Mm hmm.
01:19:31
Tony Montgomery
And then you could manipulate training volume, um load, things like that throughout the season. um So i think I think there could be potential uses for that. um But when it comes to actually getting stronger and putting on more muscle, you're you're right. There's probably no nothing that we would do differently in terms of training and based off of the research. It does just kind of tell us what's happening inside the muscle and um whether or not those differences really, really matter. And it sounds like there's potential that hypertrophy training could be
01:20:10
Tony Montgomery
beneficial ah in terms of increase in certain motor unit um capabilities. But we don't have the research to know longevity-wise whether or not that actually matters or not.
01:20:23
Tony Montgomery
We would assume it does, because why wouldn't it, right?
01:20:25
Alex O
Yeah, for sure.
01:20:26
Tony Montgomery
um But I don't necessarily know if that would change the way that you you train. I think what we touched on earlier with it like recovery, specificity, and not getting injured and enjoying the process, if you can do those four things, like that's all that really, really matters um unless you have something. What do you think about that?
01:20:46
Alex O
i I agree. um and I talk about my study a lot, but we actually just submitted a paper looking at um the same groups, but we did a test where they did those ah those tracings to failure.
01:21:00
Alex O
um pre and post, but at post we did it at the same target as we did pre, right? And so in theory, because both groups got stronger, they should have been able to do more reps, right? It's at easier load. it It shouldn't be as hard. And what was interesting was that it may not necessarily be interesting. It makes sense is that the hypertrophy group, because they were training at low loads, but like high repetitions, they essentially built some fatigue resistance, right? And they actually completed more reps, at least a minute's worth more reps than the strength group that actually did the same amount of reps. Right. And then you start looking at the ah the EMG side of things. And we found that
01:21:43
Alex O
the it was similar between the groups as far as the activation deactivation process. Right. So going up on the trapezoid shape and down on the trapezoid shape, um we found that they actually had a decrease in the AMG activity. Right. And then during the steady portion, the hypertrophy group that did more reps actually had a lower AMG compared to a relative yeah relatively lower AMG compared to pre.
01:22:09
Alex O
um And so in a way, not only have they become stronger, got bigger, but from a neurocost perspective, they became more efficient.
01:22:19
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:22:20
Alex O
So it's neat, right? Because when we use an absolute load versus a relative load and people might be asking, like, why don't you do a relative load? Well, sometimes when you do a relative load, the performance is going to be the same.
01:22:31
Alex O
All right. If you do if you're one arm is 100 or 100 pounds, you do 80 percent to failure. You do eight reps or five reps, whatever the number of reps you complete. And then you increase your one or up to 200 pounds. If you added or had 80% on the bar, chances are you're going to do the same amount of reps, right? Cause is that a relative relative load that an absolute load, you would expect that the strength group, because they got stronger. They should have done more reps, but because they didn't practice.
01:22:58
Alex O
you know, the fatigue aspect of lifting, they did the same amount of reps, if not less. And they actually had the same amount of excitation necessary to complete the same task, even though once again, it's easier or should we in theory be easier.
01:23:11
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:23:11
Alex O
So to your point, yeah, right. Training, specificity, specificity plays a huge role. Recovery is huge. um I mean, there's so many things that can play a role.
01:23:22
Alex O
You can start going down the nutrition rabbit hole, but
01:23:24
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, yeah.
01:23:25
Alex O
You know, I'm not an expert at that, so I'm not going to speak on that.
01:23:28
Tony Montgomery
yeah Yeah, I mean, I always say like, the biggest knobs you can turn is sleep, nutrition, ah proper programming, right? You can get those three things down and consistency like you're golden, you know.
Academic Journey and Mentorship
01:23:44
Tony Montgomery
um But the stuff that you're doing is is cool because, and especially where you're going, obviously, you're limited by your role that you have to play as a PhD student, but now that you are a professor, you can take your research exactly the route that you want to go, um which I'm excited to to see and and to talk about, um which brings me to the next thing to to kind of go over is
01:24:08
Tony Montgomery
um what was What was your general experience like ah from a master's to a PhD to a professor? like what What are the trials and tribulations that you learned from the most and what could be some general guidelines that you can give to people to um be as productive as possible without going down the rabbit hole of burning out, um which some is something that you suffered with your last year as well?
01:24:34
Alex O
Yeah. So during my master's, it was a really fun experience because um I actually started doing research my junior year of undergrad. I worked with Dr. Garrett Hester at Kennesaw State University. Awesome man. Like to this day, I still reach out to him because ah he is the definition of a mentor, right? who he He walked every step with me. um And then for my thesis, it was a, we looked at um middle age and older adults. And we were assessing ah predictors of walking velocity. Right. So we see that as you get older, you're walking, your date speed decreases. Right. So we're trying to see what are the predictors for that? And then are there differences in neuromuscular parameters? Really, are there differences in strength and power between middle age and older adults that are only separated by 10 years? So our middle age group was 40 to 50, 49.
01:25:33
Alex O
and our older adults were 60 to 69, so I guess 20 years difference.
01:25:36
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:25:38
Alex O
And that process was hard because I had to not only recruit older adults that are inactive, right, sedentary adults, but middle-aged adults who are working full-time, right?
01:25:51
Tony Montgomery
Right. Responsibilities, a life, like all that stuff.
01:25:52
Alex O
And i ah I basically had, yeah, it was three visits, you know.
01:25:54
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:25:58
Alex O
um And, uh, it was tough, but the nice part was when you have a good mentor, he is going to help you and he helped me. You know, I was, I mean, I was recruiting, I don't know how many people I talked to for, but for every hundred people I talked to, I got one participant.
01:26:13
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, sounds about right.
01:26:14
Alex O
Right, right.
01:26:14
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:26:15
Alex O
um But my experience was I was in a really good lab surrounded by really good ah colleagues and I learned a lot. That was the biggest thing was I was involved in every project I could possibly involve it, even if they didn't want me there.
01:26:27
Alex O
I was like, I'm gonna I'm gonna learn I want to be there. um And so ah I think that catapulted me. Well, after my master's, I took a year off. I kind of want to decompress a little bit. I taught at a ah college adjunct and then COVID hit. And then um I was getting bored. So I went to the stimulus checks we got from the government. I bought a bunch of textbooks and I just started reading them. And I was like, oh, man, it'd be so cool. We did a study like this and that, blah, blah, blah.
01:26:56
Alex O
And then ah Dr. Hester reached out and was like, hey, they actually have a PhD position available if you want to take it. And I was like, oh, snap, I have to write. So I reached out to his previous advisor, which was ah Dr. Jason Defratus. I was almost at university who is now at Syracuse.
01:27:13
Alex O
um I talked to him, he said, Hey, we do have positions available. I just don't have any PhD slots for you. But there's one with Dr. Michael Trevino, who was my PhD advisor, Oklahoma State. And ah he does motor unit stuff. And I was like, Okay, cool. Yeah, I have some experience with motor units. um And so when I went to Oklahoma State, um they had all these same equipment that I had at Kennesaw State.
01:27:40
Alex O
So I was like, oh, it's like I never left. And so it was really nice because when I was there, I was teaching all the other PhD students that didn't have much research um exposure to different equipment, how to use everything. So I was you know involved in all these studies I did. We collaborated and on projects. I don't know how many projects I did during my PhD. And ah I was really excited to write.
01:28:05
Alex O
ah Dr. Trevino is really good at writing like so good.
01:28:09
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:28:10
Alex O
And that was my my my weakest. My weakness is writing. um I love data collection. I love talking to participants. As you know, I get carried off with the conversation participants.
01:28:20
Tony Montgomery
yeah
01:28:22
Alex O
But writing was so hard for me and working with him, I've developed that skill set. And I think that was one of the best things I could have done is work with Trevino was practicing writing. And we published a lot together and I'm really grateful for that.
01:28:34
Alex O
um But yeah, ah the best thing you can do is reach out to faculty. If you're an undergrad, try to find somewhere where you can get in a lab, you know, even if it's just pushing buttons, right? Asking questions, really understanding the material and getting involved in projects, going to conferences.
01:28:52
Alex O
um I have four students now that have never had any experience and research that we we just submitted four abstracts and they got approved. And, ah you know, I'm taking to the first conference in February and as a mentor, I'm like, I'm super excited because I was like, I want you to have the same like excitement that I had as an undergrad. Right.
01:29:08
Alex O
um and Once you get to the master's level, when you're looking for a master's program, I highly recommend reaching out to faculty, right? Seeing like looking up to see what you like to do, finding the people that do the same research, right? um And then not only reach out to the faculty, but see if you can find a way to reach out to their students.
01:29:29
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:29:29
Alex O
right, and seeing what their students experience is. Because I have some friends in the PhD that had, you know, they they found ah an advisor that's, you know, well, renowned, liked and everything, and then they got nothing out of it.
01:29:41
Alex O
which super sucks because you're like, man, I just not necessarily wasted four years, but it's a commitment to do a master graduate program, right? You need to benefit from it. um So definitely talk to, ah you know, a professor, whoever you want to do research with, talk to the students, um check out the lab, see what they have and, you know, um ask about projects they're going to work on.
01:30:04
Alex O
um don't be afraid to ask questions. I think that was one of the biggest things I really enjoyed was when I talked to Dr. Dafredas, I'm a ah kid at heart, right?
01:30:15
Alex O
And so I would just like come up with all these ideas and I was like, what is this, what is that? And some of the best conversations I had with faculty was just me being silly and asking ah like what I thought was a dumb question.
01:30:26
Alex O
And they're like, no, it's actually a good question. And then we went down this rabbit hole and I walked out of there like, oh my God, I learned so much.
01:30:31
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:30:34
Alex O
um And to finish it off, you know, when you're doing your PhD, try to see if you can help out with other labs, learn different techniques, different skill sets, you know, you'd be surprised what you thought you were interested in. And that changes, you know, um originally, I was going to do body composition stuff, right, comparing overweight versus normal weight individuals. And but like the mehead I won't say meathead, but the the lifter that I am, I'm not very strong, but I want to know what makes it strong. I was lucky enough that Trevino was like, yeah, do your dissertation, design your dissertation. um Just make sure it includes motor units. right ah And I was super lucky that I got to essentially run the study of my dreams and you know do that. And I highly recommend making as many friends as you can, because you never know when you're going to need an extra pair of hands to press a button for you.
01:31:30
Alex O
um And don't walk into the room just because you've done research in the past or published in the past that you're, you know, the top gun, right? Because just like anywhere else, once you build a reputation for yourself, whether it's good or bad, it's going to follow and it can definitely impact your experience in the PhD.
01:31:50
Alex O
um And then I guess the last, last thing is, uh, have a good work life balance. Um, like ah Tony was saying, uh, towards the end of my PhD, it was, it was brutal. Um, I was working really hard and it was worth it. Yes. But at what cost, you know, um, it's not like I couldn't have done it.
01:32:14
Alex O
It couldn't have been easier. um But knowing when to say no or knowing how to manage your time better plays a huge role. And I'm a overachiever. I want to be the best at everything I do. But the problem is at what cost. And you know that was brutal. But I'm grateful for i'm where I am now. I'm at an awesome university. I have great kid students, not kids, students. and I get to do the research I want to do and then like there's no better feeling to be like, you know what?
01:32:45
Alex O
I'm in charge now.
01:32:47
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:32:47
Alex O
And now that I'm in charge, I'm like, OK, I guess I'm in charge and I can't mess this up. So you're you're paying more attention to like the finer details and things and um It's fun.
01:32:59
Alex O
If you ever get a chance to mentor a student, it's it's definitely worth it because you get to see them grow. And when they have that aha moment and start coming up with ideas themselves, you're like, yes, yes.
01:33:12
Tony Montgomery
yeah Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of the idea that work-life balance. I remember first coming in, one, you definitely taught me the most out of anybody that I've worked with so far, professors and students. So I'm very grateful for that. But yeah, when I first met you, there was this huge level of excitement for what you were doing and what the future held. And then as the time went on, I start to see the life getting sucked out of you.
01:33:45
Tony Montgomery
and um not to over dramatize it, but it definitely seemed like you were going down a path where like you didn't want to do research anymore. It was kind of a darker time for you where um you definitely pulled back and you definitely hid more and you were more more isolated and you weren't necessarily as cheerful as you as you normally were. right and you were really contemplating what did you want to do with the rest of your life? like Was this all for nothing? Do I hate it now? What do what do I do next? what were What were some of the challenges that you went through mentally that you um worked your way through and how did you work your way through those things to to get to where you are now, reinvigorate it, excited to do research, excited to mentor and all that stuff?
01:34:31
Alex O
Yeah. So the hardest part um was, like you said, I wasn't myself. Right. I knew the work had to get done. And that was like all I can think about was like, I got to get this done. I got to get this done. I got to get this done because the next step is finding a job. Right. And so you have the academic version of a resume is the curriculum vitae, which is the CV. Right.
01:34:56
Alex O
And when you're applying to these academic positions, you want to, you want to show that you, do you know, your stuff and you're, you know, you're a capable candidate. And so in my head, I was like, I gotta, I gotta pop out more papers. I gotta show that I'm this, I gotta show that I'm that, you know, I was applying to all these places and my, my dad, um, he's, something has always stuck to me and my mom as well. They always said, you know, my dad would say, never sell yourself short.
01:35:22
Alex O
And my mom would always say, you know, just but laantte just keep going forward. Right. And so some of the things that i I came across towards that last fall, really was when I was on my lowest was I wasn't happy. I wasn't exercising. um I had a rough I was getting heading towards the end of a relationship that I've cultivated for the past five years at the time. um You know, my interests and hobbies were no longer there.
01:35:51
Alex O
um Like I was still hanging out with friends and doing things, but I was just more irritable, you know, because like all I can think about was getting this dissertation done, getting it done, getting it done, finding a job. And then like your last year of your PhD, you're completing your dissertation, you're finishing whatever publication you're working on, you're doing other projects, right? Because you have a lab and your lab is doing other projects besides your own.
01:36:17
Alex O
um you are trying to have somewhat of a social life if you can. And for me, the hardest part was having to say goodbye to you know someone that I've lived with for so many years. And you know we we drifted apart. And I was stuck between trying to fix that relationship or finish my PhD. And I was grateful enough that they never did anything wrong. We just drifted apart and I was grateful that you know she was in support of my PhD. There was moments in our relationship where i just i I was willing to just give it up to to be with her and make her happy, but she knew the man that I am and she would never she would never be content knowing that she was the reason why that happened. and um To this day, I'm super grateful because
01:37:14
Alex O
even after we split, and it was a rough couple of months, um you know, going back to the beginning of the podcast, when we talk about strength, right, mental strength, um I was lucky enough to have such a great support system around me to to motivate me, right, and to push me in. In a sense, there's this expectation of your colleagues that, you know, you they kind of see you at this standard, right? um Dr. Baker cracked me up because she would show her her students, you know, my CV is like, this is what a CV PhD student should look like to me. I'm like, I don't know. Cool. Thanks. Right. But, you know, there's times where people, you know, would say, you know, you you you do a lot. How do you do it? And I'm just like, I don't know. But if I don't have friends that support me, there's no way I could have this done. And um there was kind of times where you and I would have conversations about things and
01:38:08
Alex O
um You're right. I was there was a point where I just didn't want to do it anymore. I was burned out. But I think that has to do with just. You're in the moment, right? You know, you're you're you're wrestling with Khabib. He's taking you to the trenches. You're you're just trying to breathe. And, and ah you know, eventually. You're you win and you're like, oh, my God, I did that. I survived. You know, there were some casualties along the way. um But
01:38:40
Alex O
I'm happy. you know I did it and I think i' I'm stronger mentally. Physically, I'm definitely a lot stronger than I was before. um And so if there's any advice, and I'm sure a lot of social influencers talk about this too, um is I won't say
01:39:02
Alex O
It gets easier, right? um But I will say, if you ever to like, grit your teeth and just keep walking forward, eventually you'll you'll finish, right? You'll get to the finish line.
01:39:13
Alex O
um And I do believe it takes a very special person to do a good job finishing their PhD. You can get a PhD. There are plenty of people with PhDs.
01:39:24
Alex O
I'm like, I don't know how you got a PhD, but you have one.
01:39:26
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:39:27
Alex O
Congrats.
01:39:27
Tony Montgomery
just
01:39:27
Alex O
I'm not taking anything from you. But to do a PhD and do it really well. right You should be able to come out of that PhD and like be self-sufficient. Run your own lab, do your own studies. People are able should be able to come to you and ask questions, and you should be able to, for the most part, answer them. um And I ah came out of there, you know hands held high, you know ah breakfast cup style. I was lucky. And a lot of that had to do with the friends, the mentorship, and then um
01:40:00
Alex O
The mental, mental fortitude, even when things were dark and they were dark, not like dark, dark, but people were like concerned about me, but just dark in a sense of like, I'm normally a very cheerful person.
01:40:12
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:40:13
Alex O
There's not a day where I'm not smiling and just being goofy. Um, but there was moments where I'm just like, man, I just, I don't have it in me anymore to like keep doing his PhD.
01:40:24
Alex O
Like this is rough, but here we're here. So I made it.
01:40:27
Tony Montgomery
yeah Yeah, yeah, does, does doing hard things and this desire to be great at the things that you do come at a price and is that price worth it?
01:40:40
Alex O
man that's a loaded question tony um i don't know i will say it's kind of a double-edged sword right um i like i said before i'm all about trying to be the best version that i can be um And I joke around, you know, I got the PhD, but what did it cost me my relationship?
01:41:04
Tony Montgomery
Yeah. Yeah.
01:41:06
Alex O
I joke around and and and it's a serious matter because you hear some some, you know, people that finished their PhDs and they they're in a relationship and they, you know, there's hardship. My advisor, I laugh because we have such a similar like history.
01:41:22
Alex O
The first day I met him, he told me about his divorce. I don't know if he told you about his divorce, but He was like, you know, there was times where he would check his phone and it would say that work was home and home was work because he spent more time in the lab than he did at home.
01:41:40
Alex O
Right.
01:41:40
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:41:42
Alex O
um And same thing for me. I was more at the lab than I was home and it it costs my relationship. So. Um, it's, it's definitely tough.
01:41:53
Alex O
And there was times or even with my parents, I was just very irritable because I'm like, why are you calling me right now? Like I'm in the middle of work.
01:41:59
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:42:00
Alex O
Right. And it's your parents, you know, there's no reason for you to feel that way. Um, but that was such a small like moment. And, um, the double-edged sword of that or the, the other side of that is, yeah, you're, you know, you did what you needed to do.
01:42:20
Alex O
But you're like, for instance, myself, I'm never satisfied. Right. I can always do better. um And so if I can find someone that's OK with knowing that I'm always going to want to be the best. Right. It's fine. ah But I think that's the hard part is some people don't have that. They don't have that dog in them. Right. So they they can find that kind of intimidating or Maybe they need more attention than you're willing to give.
01:42:46
Alex O
And for me, it's just like, well, I'm in the peak of my career and this is what I really want to focus on.
01:42:51
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:42:52
Alex O
um So it just depends, right?
01:42:53
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:42:54
Alex O
You want to be in a happy, happy, healthy relationship. And it's not that you say you can't do both. Right. um But as I said before, I have. I had pretty bad work life balance and I'm getting better at it.
01:43:08
Alex O
um So.
01:43:08
Tony Montgomery
Yeah. Yeah, I think the I think the disconnect for a lot of people comes with this idea that you want to be the best at the thing that serves you, which is your career. And they see that and they think, well, why can't you want to be the best at relationships? And are you going to be the best at being a father being a husband? Like, where do you draw that line of like,
01:43:36
Tony Montgomery
Can you be the best at everything? Or are you so when you say you want to be the best, you're only talking about your career and that trajectory as opposed to being in the best version of yourself in all capacities of life. Are you the best friend you can be? Are you the best partner you can be? Or is it specifically, are you the best researcher? and i think defining those roles of what that means to you and being upfront and honest about it is the thing that's going to cultivate the relationship that best suits you as the person. But you have to understand those things. You have to think about those things and understand who you are. um One of the things you touched on a lot was mentorship. um What but makes a great mentor to you?
01:44:19
Alex O
oh and hitting hitting home um I think what makes a good mentor is someone that is obviously going to be there for you. Right. Not only from like an academic perspective, but also from like a personal relationship. um I remember it's funny that I have these ways of just like not wanting to do research and and research and stuff, but I remember during my master's, I was meeting with ah my my advisor at the time and I was like in tears because I was just like I can't do this like this is a lot like I was just I
01:44:56
Alex O
Everything up until that point has come easy to be in life. Right. Playing sports, school, it's been easy. And so for the first time in my life, I was being challenged and really challenged.
01:45:06
Alex O
Right. um But he, you know, he was able to be empathetic and listen, because I think a lot of times, too, sometimes when you meet someone and you're kind of expressing your feelings, they kind of downplay it a little bit like, well, I can if I did it, you can do it.
01:45:21
Tony Montgomery
you Yep.
01:45:23
Alex O
You know, and I think that mentality is silly because people deal with things differently. But he was able to be there. And then when he saw I was struggling, he would come up to me and say, hey, what can I do to help?
01:45:39
Alex O
And I was like, well, I'm doing data collection right now, but I need to be recruiting and I can't do both at the same time. He said, say less. So he would actually go to Publix with one of the other professors and they would just hand off study flyers.
01:45:50
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, amazing.
01:45:51
Alex O
Right. And ah you know, he would sit down with me and talk to me and be like, now, Alex. And so it was a lot of like being present. Right. Being direct and not sure coding things, but being like mindful that, you know, I'm in this fragile state of I don't know what I'm going to do with my life. And I'm kind of relying on you to kind of guide me. And so.
01:46:19
Alex O
having to have a mentor that can do that, you know, I'm not saying they have to hold your hand by any means, but when you reach out your hand for help, you know, they're willing to, you know, grab your hand, you know, and guide you. um And I think there's also different types of mentorship, right? um There's mentorships within friends, right? In academia, yes, you have your advisor.
01:46:42
Alex O
But I can't tell you how many times I went to Dr. Dafredas or Dr. Baker or anyone else in the department and asked a question that my advisor doesn't have an answer to.
01:46:51
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:46:52
Alex O
And I think a good mentor is knowing that you have limitations yourself. Right. You can't know everything and be everything.
01:46:56
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:46:58
Alex O
Sometimes you have to rely on other people to help in areas that you lack in. And so if you have a mentor that's not willing to guide you um in the right direction, then I don't think that's the mentor for you, because I feel like the most success I've ever had was because I had good
Inspiration from Anime and Personal Growth
01:47:16
Alex O
mentorship.
01:47:16
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, no, I agree. Everything you said resonates ah very, very close to home. um And now that you're embarking on being your own mentor, right, I think it's important to understand the qualities that you wanted out of a mentor. Are you able to bring those same qualities to your group and just continuing to contemplate that idea of like, am I living up to the expectations that I have for myself and the expectations that um my ah students have for me my my research assistants and all that stuff and constantly evaluating that on a weekly basis like am I living up to those expectations because it can be very easy to fall into the trap of like yeah I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing and
01:48:00
Tony Montgomery
in your reality that is the case but in the reality of your students and your mentees they're like this guy's been checked out for for months you know so i think there is that constant like evaluation process that you have to go through and it'll be fun talking to you about how you're finding that how you're getting the best out of yourself and and out of your students as you progress through your first year and you begin to do your research that you have coming up this next semester um One thing that I know about you is anime plays a ah big role in your life, right?
01:48:32
Alex O
Yes, very true.
01:48:32
Tony Montgomery
what what what What does anime do for you? What does it what does it give you? what Is it just something where you can check out or ah does it does it give you more than that?
01:48:44
Tony Montgomery
Like what does anime, what part does that play in your life?
01:48:47
Alex O
Oh man, this is like the coolest question someone can ask me. oh Well, Like I said before, in the beginning of this podcast, Hajime no Yipu, which is my favorite anime of all time, right, has to do with this kid that when it's got bullied, it became a ah champion boxing champion and in Japan. And I mean, I remember watching Dragon Ball Z as a kid, right, the power ups of screaming, the fighting, right, and like pushing yourself past your limits. And so for anime, for me, right, it's kind of a two, two things.
01:49:23
Alex O
It's inspiration, in a sense, right? Because a lot of these ah protagonists in these shows are these nobodies that overcame adversity, overcame challenges, overcame, you know, so many things when everyone kind of them out, the cool theme song starts to play, you know, they're rising up. And I can't tell you how many times I rewanted certain certain points of an episode because I was just like, damn, that's that's that's what I want. Right.
01:49:52
Alex O
And then there's times when you kind of just watch anime just to laugh and chuckle, but majority of the time when I do watch anime, there's there's really good plot. um And the character development really resonates with me. um So for instance, I actually, my two favorite animes, I got tattoos over this this year, because I was just like, I have to do it. I have the Transmutation Circle ah from Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood.
01:50:18
Alex O
And in this show is these two brothers who essentially lost their body to alchemy, right? The idea of equivalent exchange. And so the whole time, they're essentially trying to find what's known as a philosopher's stone to basically get their bodies back. And so they go through this whole journey. And, you know, sometimes they hated each other and love each other. And it was some some moments when you're just there crying because you're just like, what? And at the end, you're like, man,
01:50:48
Alex O
That was awesome. you know like you you I think we all want to embark on a journey. And when we look back, we're like, I did everything I wanted to do. I did the best that I could do. you know I have no regrets.
01:51:00
Alex O
And now you're like you're living the life you want to live, right? And there's animes where they end and you're like, what?
01:51:07
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:51:07
Alex O
OK, cool, sure. And so for me, anime is, it's it's I think, with the It's funny because it's it's me, in a sense. like I think anime is a big part of my life because there's in a way, there's a lot of mentorship.
01:51:24
Tony Montgomery
Yeah. yeah
01:51:25
Alex O
Right. Like you're not necessarily there, but like when someone's talking and they're saying an inspirational quote or a monologue, you're like, he's talking to me or she's talking to me. I know they are. um But yeah, I mean, it's it's it's I think what um best describes my my geeky side of things and nerdy side of things is and also really motivated me to to want to be stronger and keep getting better.
01:51:51
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, yeah.
01:51:51
Alex O
What a question, man.
01:51:53
Tony Montgomery
Yeah, yeah there's ah there's an emotional connection, right? The the hero's journey ah that Joseph Campbell talks about this this mythology that has stood the test of time of, um you know, the you're you're born and you have life circumstances to overcome.
01:52:09
Tony Montgomery
So this journey, this path that you're on, um this hero's journey is something that everyone has to deal with, right? And and anime, I'd have to assume, never watched it, but I'd have to assume that that journey is prevalent with within that dynamic and that emotional connection that you get by watching it is is a real thing. um I grew up with my dad watching the Rocky, ah you know all five of the Rockies, and we watch him all the time. He loved Rocky. He wanted to name my older brother Rocky. My mom said, no, absolutely not. But um just a couple of weeks ago, I was in Philly and I had the opportunity to run
01:52:49
Tony Montgomery
from where I was at to the Rocky statue and run up the stairs that that Rocky did. And there was... emotions that I just didn't think that I would feel doing that, right? That connection of his journey of what he overcame, doing that with my father, and then running those steps, the same steps that he did, going to see a statue. There was something special about that. And it feels like you get something very similar through anime.
01:53:19
Tony Montgomery
um
01:53:19
Alex O
Mm hmm.
01:53:20
Tony Montgomery
And I think that I think that's awesome. I think that's very special to find those things in life that can make you feel that way and also makes you feel like you're you're being heard and talked to at the same time with inanimate objects or characters that you know um I think that's what's special about religion. I think that's what's special about all these things. right The intimate connection that we can build with that stuff um is great. And you found that and in anime. And
Future Goals and Mentorship Impact
01:53:47
Tony Montgomery
I think that's awesome. I think that's also a great way to um combat some of the
01:53:52
Tony Montgomery
um I would say melancholy that you can get from doing research all the time, like having that to to go back to, to fall back on. I think that that can also be be very special. um You also do Dungeons and Dragons. you do You do all this stuff that allows you to have this creative expression in a world that you've designed to be analytical in nature, right? And I think um for me, that's that's poetry and that's,
01:54:18
Tony Montgomery
um that type of stuff, right? You have to have this creative outlet that allows you to be the truest version of yourself. For you, that's this ah goofy, uplifting, very happy-go-lucky person that's striving to be the best. And I think the things that you put into your life um showcase that quite quite genuinely, which is which is great. I think it's awesome.
01:54:45
Tony Montgomery
um Never gotten into it, but you know I respect it. I like it. I like it. ah So um just to to wrap this up, I know that you are in your first year as a professor. ah You have four students that you're mentoring. You're starting your first research project for um your professorship next semester. um Can you talk about the project? And also, if not, that's fine. and then um Are you looking for students ah in fall of 2025 if they want to go to your lab?
01:55:22
Alex O
Yeah. So, uh, the university, or at least the program is undergraduates only. So I won't be able to take on any grad students, unfortunately, hopefully maybe one day. Um, but if you were in high school, you come across this podcast and you're like, Hey, I want to work with this guy. He seems to be doing fun stuff. Uh, for sure. Um, I work at Chris for you, Christopher Newport university here in Newport news, Virginia, but some of the projects we'll be working on. Uh, I'm still waiting on some equipment.
01:55:51
Alex O
at the moment, so we can't do anything too, too fun or at least what I think is fun. um But one of the first studies, a very simple study, we we were essentially going to look at the um somewhat of reliability of the ultrasound ah during a fasted and fed state. So basically they would come in fasted. We'll do ultrasound scans. We'll give them a standardized meal, wait 30 minutes for them to digest it essentially and then do a scan again.
01:56:21
Alex O
And then six hours later, they go do with their own thing and they come back and then we'll do the scans again. And so the idea is, does it really matter if you do ultrasound scans, whether they're fasted, fed or the time of day? Right. Because um obviously when you do research, you kind of want to make sure that the participants are coming at the same time for each visit.
01:56:42
Tony Montgomery
Hmm.
01:56:42
Alex O
right for various reasons and so one of the follow-up studies we wanted to do is actually go to the local power lifting gym and measures CSA and try to correlate that with strength right and like really strong individuals and so the idea would be to eventually do longitudinal data collection where every two months we'll come back through a scan do a 1RM and see if the change in
01:56:53
Tony Montgomery
Hmm.
01:57:07
Alex O
CSA or muscle size is correlated with the change in strength in strong people. Now, that's not the most appropriate way of doing things. Typically you want it in a nice controlled you know environment when it comes to the lab and everything. But I think there's something cool about going to the gym where they're having the camaraderie of everyone that could potentially influence the data. Sure. But um I wanted to see with this ah fasted versus fed state ultrasound if it really matters when I do the ultrasounds first and foremost. And we wanted to do that in trained and untrained males and females. And so potentially what could happen is if
01:57:47
Alex O
ah you have a trained individual who is fasted for let's say eight to ten hours, maybe most likely eight, um that their glycogen storage just could be, um I want to say depleted, right?
01:58:01
Alex O
Chances are they're not depleted, especially if they ate the day before, right?
01:58:02
Tony Montgomery
diminished now. Yeah.
01:58:05
Alex O
But ah there is a potential that um the water content might be diminished, and that might impact right muscle CSA, or the what we call the echo intensity, which is the quality of the muscle. um So the darker the image that you trace from that um scan indicates that the majority of the muscle is, or the image is muscle. right um And so we know that water content can play a factor.
01:58:33
Alex O
with CSA. So we wanted to see if, you know, when you do your scans, should they come in fasted? And if they do, do you want to keep make sure they're, they're fasted? Or does it not matter if they're fasted or fed or doing some type of physical activity throughout the day?
01:58:47
Alex O
All right, so it's a pretty straightforward study. I think it'd be fun, especially with people that my students have never done research before, let alone ever seen an ultrasound done on the muscle.
01:58:50
Tony Montgomery
Yeah.
01:58:57
Alex O
But I think it's one of the Nice, easy. um Before I get everything that I'm like, all right, this is what we're going to do, you know, five visits, 20 different conditions, sensors everywhere.
01:59:08
Tony Montgomery
Yeah. yeah
01:59:10
Alex O
um But yeah.
01:59:11
Tony Montgomery
No, that's awesome, man. I think you're right. I think that's a great first study to not only get your feet wet, but get the undergraduates some um research time and and understand the dynamics of what research is, recruitment,
01:59:26
Tony Montgomery
all that stuff, how to interact. I think that's one of the things that um anybody that works under you is going to truly appreciate is the interaction with the subjects and how meaningful and special that is so that they have a good time in your lab. That's one of the things that you're you're special at and and you do really well. um so So I think that'll be a great thing for them to observe and and learn.
01:59:49
Tony Montgomery
um And yeah, like I said earlier, man, like you've taught me the most during the PhD program as far as how to use equipment, how to troubleshoot, how to navigate the circumstances of a PhD. So im I'm very thankful for that. I'm very thankful.
02:00:06
Tony Montgomery
and And yeah, watching you um interact with everyone, help everyone has definitely made me want to become better at the things that that I'm doing as well and and interact. And um you definitely show a level of what's attainable and and being a good person while obtaining those things. So um thank you for the work that you do, and I'm looking forward to the work that you continue to do.
02:00:33
Alex O
Thank you for the kind words. I look forward to seeing you defend your dissertation. You got, what, a year left?
02:00:38
Tony Montgomery
A year and a half, yeah.
02:00:40
Alex O
Oh, man. Time flies.
02:00:42
Tony Montgomery
Time flies, man. Yeah, no, I appreciate your time, Alex. Thanks, buddy.
02:00:45
Alex O
Thank you, buddy.