Exercise Science on the Joe Rogan Experience
6 fact-checked claims across 2 episodes · Jan 2018 · updated Jul 16, 2026
Each is a receipt: the exact quote, its timestamp, what published evidence says, and who benefits.
Most claims
- Dr. Andy Galpin (4)
- Ben Greenfield (2)
Related topics
Logged claims
“So the average person's like at 40, 45, just to give you some context of that number. Anyone past about 60, if you continue to go up, it's not going to really …”
Galpin states the average person's VO2 max is around 40-45 ml/kg/min, and that pushing an MMA fighter's VO2 max past about 60 yields no further fight performance benefit.
“So the reason why we didn't think fiber type changed 20 years ago is because we didn't have the technology to actually have the fidelity to measure all the one…”
Galpin claims that muscle fiber type was previously believed to be fixed only because measurement technology lacked the fidelity to detect changes.
“there was a guy named, um, Peter Karpovich, who was a scientist and he was extremely, he was the guy who started the idea that lifting weights causes you to lo…”
Galpin claims scientist Peter Karpovich originated the mid-20th-century idea that weightlifting causes loss of flexibility and is bad for health, later disproven in a public demonstration against Bob Hoffman's lifters.
“Every single person got substantially better, like 20% to 30% better under one of the conditions. But they also got worse under one of the conditions as well.”
Galpin describes an internal study finding that blood-flow/breathing-restriction training (using devices like the O2 Trainer) improved every subject's performance by 20-30% under one restriction setting.
“the prevailing research and the literature suggests that you can burn about 1.0 grams of fat per minute during exercise. Like that would be about how much fat …”
Greenfield cites a named 'FASTER study' as showing high-fat dieters can burn 1.5 to 1.7 grams of fat per minute during exercise, versus a supposed 1.0 g/min ceiling in the general literature, with no loss in performance.
“your spleen compresses and you produce more erythropoietin, more red blood cells. Same thing that you produce, actually, if you sauna, like if you do a workout…”
Greenfield claims that post-exercise sauna use for 30 minutes triggers erythropoietin (EPO) production equivalent to using the banned performance-enhancing drug EPO.