Essentials: How to Exercise for Strength Gains & Hormone Optimization | Dr. Duncan French

The Timing Problem Nobody Talks About

Duncan French has worked with elite athletes long enough to know that the variables most people obsess over—load, volume, exercise selection—aren't where the real gains get lost. Rest periods. Recovery windows. The spaces between the stress. That's where adaptation actually happens, or doesn't.

This episode's core claim is deceptively simple: cold exposure is a powerful tool, but its timing relative to strength training determines whether it helps you or quietly works against you. Immediate post-workout cold—the plunge right after the barbell session—blunts the anabolic hormonal cascade that your training just triggered. You work hard to spike testosterone and create metabolic stress, then you submerge yourself in cold water and dial down the very signal your body was about to act on.

What the Research Ecosystem Says

French's data doesn't exist in isolation. Over in the knowledge base, there's a session from the stacking protocols work—cold water, sauna, breathing combined for metabolic acceleration—that touches on exactly this. Testosterone levels working properly require the full ecosystem: resistance training, adequate protein, intermittent fasting, sleep. Cold is one lever among many. What French adds is the sequencing dimension. It's not just whether you use cold; it's when.

David Sinclair's work on exercise and stress hormetics makes the same foundational point from a longevity angle. Controlled stressors—exercise, heat, cold, fasting—each trigger adaptive responses. But stressors compete. Stack them too close together and they interfere with each other's signaling. Your body can only process so many simultaneous adaptation demands.

Where Experts Still Disagree

This is genuinely contested territory. Some recovery researchers argue that post-workout cold reduces inflammation enough to allow higher training frequency—you recover faster, so you can train again sooner. French pushes back: if hypertrophy is the goal, that inflammatory signal isn't noise to suppress. It's the adaptation signal itself. You want some inflammation. You want the hormonal cascade to run its course. Cold right after training short-circuits a process your body needs to complete.

The honest answer is that it depends what you're optimizing for. Performance athletes needing to train twice a day might accept a blunted hypertrophy signal in exchange for faster recovery. But if you're training for strength and muscle, French's protocol is clear: let the anabolic window close naturally.

The Practical Protocol

Cold exposure in the morning—before training, or well before it—works beautifully as an activation tool. It sharpens focus, raises baseline norepinephrine, and primes the nervous system. Cold in the evening, many hours after your strength session, similarly avoids the interference window. What you want to avoid is that immediate post-workout submersion when your body is mid-cascade.

The Connection That Surprised Me

French's point about rest periods as a programming variable hit differently in this context. He argues that rest between sets is as important as load and volume—most people treat it as dead time when it's actually where metabolic stress accumulates into adaptation. Cold exposure works the same way. The recovery window isn't passive. It's the mechanism. When you flood that window with cold, you're not accelerating recovery—you're redirecting it. Sometimes that's useful. After a strength session aimed at hypertrophy, it's just interference dressed up as discipline.