Aerobic vs. Anaerobic Conditioning For Combat Sports w/ Dr Andrew Usher (SSOF Ep 159)

Dr. Andrew Usher2:02

And it's been kind of fascinating. So it doesn't matter whether it's high-level guys I'm working with or whether it's kind of high-end rugby consultancy or soccer. It's all the same stuff. It's we have x amount of weeks to get this done. How are we going to do it? And it's

So it's been quite a fascinating what we're eight months now. It's been quite a fascinating eight months working with so many diverse sports. And you just see it's just the same fundamentals across the board. So, it's pretty fascinating.

James de Lacey3:09

Yeah. Well, I'm going to hit you with the Well, I think what will set the scene is a I guess what you would call a relatively basic question, but it's one that often pops up. One I've been getting recently, one I'm going to do a video on because it keeps bugging me as well. And it's I I mean, we've covered in previous podcasts, but it'll be good to go to it again around aerobic versus anaerobic.

Because every time I post something on sprint intervals or high intensity conditioning, I get messages and they're like, "Well, if I'm doing all this anaerobic training, shouldn't I do some aerobic work along with this in the week?"

So, it'll be interesting for you for you to maybe dive into, you know, what that what that actually means, what why doesn't that kind of hold weight?

Dr. Andrew Usher3:48

So, I think the first thing you got to think about is what do we mean when we talk about aerobic and anaerobic? Because these are kind of interchangeable terms been kind of thrown for quite a long period of time. This whole idea that you're training with oxygen, you're training without oxygen. But when you're thinking of kind of aerobic, you're really thinking much more of a kind of biochemistry kind of cellular breakdown or substrate than with or without oxygen because you're always breathing oxygen because you always need oxygen otherwise you'd die, right? So we are always aerobic.

And when you actually look down at the breakdown of substrates, you look how you're breaking down maybe through fats through lipolysis or you're looking at you're just maybe breaking down that initial PCR or you're breaking down glucose and that stuff through glycolysis. There's still oxygen exchange taking place. And in order for mitochondria to really function, you need oxygen.

So we are always oxidative. We're never really not oxidative. Maybe there's a few cellular occasions where we kind of maybe don't need oxygen to fulfill a pathway per se, but generally we are always aerobic and we are always I hate the term anaerobic, but we're always kind of playing around with these.

But the reality is is that when you think of an exercise, the intensity is dictating how much lipolysis are you using, how much of glycolysis you're using, and how much of the PCR, but they're all being used. They're just like different levels is depending on the intensity. So, always that the It always just comes on the factor whatever intensity you're at is going to predominantly drive a substrate play.

So if you are doing very low intensity based work you're predominantly could be much more those low intensity zones you're going to rely much more on lipolysis and fat oxidation. You'll be much more in aerobic kind of zone per se. And then as you move into high intensity interval training and you start to ramp up the intensity, then we get into this really super interesting world where it is not one of one. It's just one of three things.

So in the course we do the course we cover this in a lot more detail and we go into Michelle Perolan's work and we look at the Burgomaster work and we really delineate out what you see is is that in a high intensity effort in the first six seconds PCR may be the most contributing factor to that from a substrate but glycolysis is there and oxidative phosphorylation is there but after you do your next sprint even if you give yourself 20 seconds you start to see the PCR start to drop down, glycolysis moves up, oxidative phosphorylation moves up in that first six seconds and then by time you do your third, fourth, fifth, sixth or seventh sprint actually oxidative phosphorylation is the predominant or main kind of driving force in it.

So we are always using these substrates. So, so people always say, well, if that's the case, why don't we just do sprint interval training, you know, and just abandon aerobic work. And the reason for that is is that you need to have a good quality of everything. But it's just time efficiency.

So, the reality is is that most athletes doing any skill based sport will be predominantly using a lot of lower intensity. So, that zone 2 in bunny quotes and aerobic stuff is is well cared. Okay. it it's just well catered for because we're getting enough of it. So it's like anything, right? So one of the good things about strength conditioning is is we know what the effect of resistance training is. Okay, we we see it quite clearly. You lift heavier, you break down protein, you eat inside protein, you start to get hypertrophy, you start to see muscle growth. Okay, conditioning is exactly the same.

So in the world of conditioning, your hypertrophy is really that high intensity work. That's what's kind of breaking down the levels and letting you rebuild it. So, it's a very similar thing, but strangely strength condition coaches don't see that, which is which is kind of strange. And I think it's because we've been we've been sold this whole idea that the only way to develop the heart is through like cardiac output training whereby we're going to do left ventricle thickness, which we're going to get.

But the argument is is that most of the athletes you're probably going to work with, especially if they're pretty developed and they've had a few competitions or whatever, probably have that covered for in skill training.

So why why can I spend all your time? So my job when I work with athletes is is really time based. So I'm always looking at so I have a new athlete comes up says I have a competition in six weeks. For me, the job is about what what do they have that we can leverage and what things do we just not care about because I can't get everything in six weeks.

I respect you could be the most awarded conditioning and strength conditioning coach in the planet. I have plaques in the wall, but the reality is in six weeks is a quite a tight time frame to develop all the attributes an athlete needs. So for me a lot of times it's looking at well what do they actually need in that six weeks?

It could be a case often that they need more technical training and less S&C or it could be that conditioning is really really poor and they need a lot more emphasis in that or it could be they get a lack of power differential and power production so they need a little bit of that.

So the job is always leveraging things in order to maximize what the outcome's going to be. So, so yeah, but I think the reality is is people are confused, I think, as to where everything fits into the jigsaw puzzle.

You need aerobic work. I mean, that kind of low intensity. You kind of need that because that's where you're going to get your skills because bike sprinting isn't going to give you time to throw jabs, crosses, uppercuts, and overhands unless you're throwing them while bike sprinting.

Well, we have seen people with javelins and stuff and some crazy Instagram videos. So, who knows? There probably is someone out there doing that. And there will be after this probably as well. Somebody out light bulb moment. We need to be doing swaying off punches and stuff on the bike.

But I think the problem is people think it's one thing or another. They don't realize you are building a whole blueprint of what you need. And sprint interval training is just a highly effective way of getting a very specific form of training that gives you so much return on your investment for such little time that it's a no-brainer. Why wouldn't you use it?

James de Lacey10:07

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I think it's also because it's novel for most people too. Like the thing I found with putting a lot of people through just the generic baseline like two sets of 30 seconds on 60 off is pretty much most 99% of athletes haven't actually done that intensity in their conditioning because you just don't do it yourself unless someone tells you to do it and pushes you to do it and then when they do do it you see the glaring holes in that recovery because it's just so damn hard.

Dr. Andrew Usher11:10

I think the issue for me has been people just don't look at recovery period. Right? So before I even get involved in sprint interval training super maximal when I had my Straight Blast Gym affiliate training group in the highlands of Scotland going back oh 18 years ago. One of the things that was really interesting to me was how did some athletes recover better in their MMA fights than other athletes?

And why did the fitter ones sometimes flag more than the ones that looked less fit? And that was really the catalyst for me to go, well, something isn't really making sense in training because they're all doing at that point. We're doing what most people are doing. You're doing your runs, you're doing this.

And it took me to acquire and I was very lucky Stephen Hall from Polar at the time. Graciously got us a Team 2 system and that was the start for us where we started using the same heart rate monitor system Manchester United Football Club was using. But what I was interested in was well what do we actually see from the data and what does it mean? And what I started to see was that certain people had very different recovery profiles.

So they may drop the same amount of beats. So two athletes may drop 45 beats say after some sort of kind of spar session or whatever. But the quality was often very different and that the ones that weren't recovering as well in quality typically were the ones that were flagging in later rounds. So that was the thing for me that thought well why is that and then you start to realize is that recovery is a very individualized thing and it's not as clean cut is looking at your fact you've got to 180 beats and after 60 seconds you're back down to 140 beats.

There's a bit more to it and that is only really telling you what the heart is doing. It's not actually telling you what the muscle is doing. So I think for me the big issue has been over the years is this attempt to compartmentalize conditioning to aerobic lactic tier 1 16 15s blah blah blah but they're just going reality is that all these intensity efforts are driving substrates to different ratios.

So let's forget about all this APCR derived lactate. Let's just bin all of that all that nonsense and just look and go what is the body actually doing and what does this individual's body actually need and let's plan and build something in relation to that that that's the key. So there's nothing magical about it. I just think people want cookie cutter generic super easy programs that they can cut and paste all their athletes and don't want to take the time to actually look at what's needed and that's that's a big issue.

James de Lacey14:16

And I think when you when you just look like when you show a sprint with your NIRS graph and heart rate and you see the sharp drop and muscle oxygenation and then you you look at that and anyone who's maybe come from a background where maybe you've read Ultimate MMA Conditioning or a lot of your I guess conditioning knowledge comes from university or traditional energy system model. You look at that and you go, "That makes no sense." Because you you're thinking, "How was a sprint using that much oxygen when it's supposed to be anaerobic alactic or anaerobic lactic or whatever it is?"

Dr. Andrew Usher14:51

I think me and John Barber have conversations and coffee with this quite a lot about how are we teaching undergraduates and our undergraduates are taught the energy system continuums and the different levels of contribution that everything is at play. I think the problem isn't that. I think the problem is when they move into the real world and they start working with other coaches, they start to try and level up knowledge and they get fed no end of [expletive] from unscrupulous Instagram marketing.

And what happens is they look they forget to critically appraise things and look at it and go, does this actually make sense for what I want to achieve? And I think for me that's the biggest thing.

I think everything should go back to what's your athlete doing and what are you expecting the outcome to look like and how are you positioning what you're training to do it right and it always amazes me that people will go into the depths of undulating periodization linear programming French contrast methods and they'll spend a lot of time in that area but yet they won't do the same from the engine side of things the heart and the lungs and the muscle tissue and and I think it's fascinating that we become very big S and very small C and yet it's the C that drives the big S at the end of the day.

So if you're not marrying those two things up then how do you expect to get a good performance outcome? So it's kind of strange. It's strange to me and it's and I guess it's maybe a fear of wanting to spend time reading and learning. I mean, we've just spent two years collecting data on a project looking at how individual muscles respond under different training intensities. And I don't do that because I get paid because as a research fellow, you don't get paid any money for that, right? So, all the research I do is self-funded.

So, I pay for all my own research, okay? And I have done since day one pretty much. I bought all my own kits, all these red sensors and stuff behind me, all purchased by myself. I don't do this because I'm bored and I've got nothing to do. I do it because I still want to know what the hell is going on at fatigue. What happens when an athlete does this?

That's why I do it, and it I'll be 53 next week and it's like I'm still hunting down to try and understand what the hell is going on because the more I do this, the more I realize we actually don't really know that much about elite athletes and applied physiology and what actually takes place. But I'm [expletive] fascinated to know why.

And then I see young coaches that have get no interest in knowing why and they wonder why they're not getting results. And it's like you need to have curiosity. You need to have that real curiosity about what is occurring. A good example is Hyrox for me. That sport had no interest. Was never on my radar. Like it just wasn't really my radar until I started working with a couple athletes. And my mindset's very different. And so event to me is like an engineering project.

So when I started getting Hyrox athletes into labs and we started testing looking at muscle physiology, you start to see some really super interesting things. You start to see that the issue in Hyrox is not having more strength to pull the sledge, but it's having a better understanding how you transition from a 1k run to the ski erg back into the 1k run into the rower into the wall balls.

There's a whole technical component around how fast should you run, how slow should you break down, how should the muscle function at that particular point in time, how should you reset the muscle so you can get it.

And we have this year's has been a good building year in Hyrox bar. Well, we shaved off 9 10 minutes of people's run times. Those were maybe the kind of like the 67 68 minutes. We've shaved it right down. Has that been because of NIRS in part? But no NIRS is just a tool we acquire the muscle physiology. What it's been about is breaking the sport apart like we did for boxing and going what's this bit what's this bit what's the correlation between the two of them would if we do this with this athlete will it improve this component what does the sport actually need and then piecing it all back together so it's almost like reverse engineering we just break every sport apart and then we just build it back up.

And I think that's how you become really successful with athletes I think you take them you strip them down you go okay this is cool this is [expletive] This is really atrocious, but we ain't going to touch that enough time. So, let's build the stuff we can leverage and get the results and then over time address the other stuff. And I think that's how you do it, but I don't think that's how most people do it.

James de Lacey19:44

I want to go into a little bit of that N stuff too, but before that, I have a personal question I want to throw to you on heart rate monitors. I had a wrestler reach out. He got a, was it a Polar Verity Sense or something? I think it's the armband one.

What could I or someone expect in terms of heart rate readings or analysis from the armband versus the chest strap?

Dr. Andrew Usher20:06

So the chest strap is like an ECG. So it's picking up kind of electrical signalings whereas the armbands and even like these ones.

James de Lacey20:13

Like these ones optical, the Zep one because I'm trying.

Dr. Andrew Usher20:15

You wearing one right now?

James de Lacey20:17

Yeah. So I, so this is the other thing that the depth that we, I'm probably slightly different. And so I have an athlete comes to me wants to use a Zep band rather than a Whoop band because there's no subscription. So I'm kind of like, well, what does it look like? What's the data look like? They are technically illiterate. So they can't really explain it to me.

So I just bought one and I've had it for four weeks now. I've done runs where I've done 10k runs where I've done sprints because I want to know, because at the end of the day I'll be the person analyzing the data. So if I'm not comfortable with the data, then I'm not going to give them proper interpretations.

And this is the other thing that drives me bananas online with people with a clickbait and there's titles on this. If you're going to offer a service and do the service, then spend the time learning about the service. Otherwise, it's clickbait for the sake of clickbait. And it really drives me nuts all that stuff.

Dr. Andrew Usher21:08

So anyway, so go back to the heart rate. So heart rate will always be more accurate, but there is always a lag, okay? And different heart rates will sample at one second, they'll sample at 10 seconds and all that good stuff. The optical are okay, but they can't see the rapid change because if you think about your heart, it's pumping blood, you're going to the muscle, so there's a delay. So, what you'll typically find is they're not good for sprints, but they're okay for other things.

So, we will use the arm ones, the Polar for sparring just because it doesn't get knocked off the chest as much. We don't have to finger tape it. But I would say the data is not as good. So we are using in sparring for athletes where we have heart rate data from the monitors from the Polar extension. So once we get the baselines, a few spar sessions with them, we'll swap them to the armbands because they're easier to use. But the quality of them in steady state and the quality of them as you move out a rapid intensity is pretty good.

Actually, this Zep is actually as accurate as the Polar one. So, in fact, it may actually be slightly more accurate from what I've seen on my take 10k runs and I've been doing like dropping on the treadmill at 20 km and doing 20 second shuttle sprints and stuff and it's on the money for the Polar. But it's not as good as the H10 or the H9. So, Polar are releasing a new one in September which I think is going to compete with Whoop. So, we'll see.

But, they're a lot better than they used to be. So my advice would be if you're not interested in sprints and you're not looking at changes and rapid changes in heart rate then you could do an optical with any problems. But if you want that real granular data then you can't beat a Polar 9 or Polar H10.

Having said that, what I will say is I think the build quality of them is shite compared to what the build quality used to be on them. So, I've got over my room here, we've got the old Polar. We've still got the old Polar HDM Bluetooth. We've got some of the ones that came with our previous watches, and those things still work. And we have, they've been rolled around in jets. They've been battered in white eye sessions, and they still work. But we go through probably one of our athletes might go through four Polar H10s in an eight-month period.

So, what's the difference? And the difference is the build quality is not as good. And the old systems didn't use Bluetooth light. So they used the full power of Bluetooth. So you have a much better connection rate. Whereas the Bluetooth light is a little bit more kind of flaky. I think it gives you the benefit you can have more devices attached to your phone, but the payoff I don't think the quality is nearly as good.

So but that's the main difference just intensity recovery wise. I would say you're still getting faster recovery at the end of your sprint on the H9 H10 than what you are on the Verity or the Zep. There's still a delay and that's the big issue for me is that you're going to see that delay in the initial recovery phase, right?

And for the type of work that I do, the type of athletes I work with, I really need to see the kinetics of the off component pretty fast so I can make a judgment call on what I'm seeing. So for me, they're not great for baseline testing. So a lot of the athletes I work with, I've got both and we just interchange them from sessions. And obviously a big thing I've been doing the last four weeks of my life, as you know, is writing my own app where I can pull all that data and sync it all up and put it straight into my life platform and stuff.

So yeah, but that's the main difference, but they're coming on. They're a lot better than they used to be. I mean, they used to be atrocious, but now they're pretty good.

James de Lacey25:00

Well, it's good to know for everyone, get a damn chest strap then if you're going to start doing your sprints and tracking it.

Dr. Andrew Usher25:07

I mean, what I would say is I like this Zep device because you're not tied into a yearly subscription. You can wear your wrist and it's pretty accurate. The wrist for general activity on the arm it's really good. And now, Zep actually brought the armband specific for it, which we purchased. And I actually quite like the device. I think if you're wanting something to track sleep and all that stuff, and you don't want massive amount of money spent on it, and you want something that still can do reasonable heart rate data, it's a no-brainer.

But if you're really want that real fine granular data, then then the Polar H10 is probably still better. The issue is that it will come off in sparring a lot easier. But if you get, for any boxing courses, get the small finger tape and you take your Polar and you can just weave it so you don't, it doesn't affect the contacts and it stays on it and you can still get really good data and heavy spar sessions that way. So we've had quite success that way.

James de Lacey26:08

Perfect. Talk to us a little bit about the N stuff. I know you want to touch a bit on, I guess maybe some of the data that comes from NIRS. Maybe what you're doing with it, what it actually means. I mean, maybe even just start from the very basics for most people who maybe don't know what we're even talking about.

Dr. Andrew Usher26:23

Yeah. So, NIRS is near infrared spectroscopy. And effectively, what you're doing is you're taking a small sensor light. Where's my camera? Like that, which is the Train Red. And effectively, you can see it's flashing because I'm rocking it. It's got a little sense at the back. Those that are listening won't want to see that. It just made sense to me there. If you're on this thing, it's a square small box device that's quite small, about an inch and a half big.

So, basically what you do is you put it on your muscle and all it's doing is it's sending scattering light into the muscle. And then it's working at the time the light comes back. And from that it's giving you a rough idea of the amount of kind of hemoglobin and myoglobin that's at the capillary bed and that is giving you this kind of proxy value of amount of oxygen availability. Okay. Now the caveat here is that it is a proxy value. So people get very hung up on this. It's not telling you blood flow because it can't tell you blood flow.

It's just telling you at this very localized spot we are seeing say an SMO2, a muscle saturation index or a TSI, tissue saturation index, of say 55. And then what will happen is if you contract a muscle or occlude it or prevent blood from getting to the muscle or you rapidly exercise and the muscle needs to use oxygen, that value will drop. And therefore that gives you an idea of the amount of localized oxygen that's being utilized. And then when you stop like you'd expect, it should fill back up and the number should go up high.

And that's the basic premise of most people when they're using NIRS. They strap them on, they go, "Whoa, 80% oxygen." Do a little bit of squatting, down to like 22% oxygen. Job's a good 'un. That should improve over time. And then when they see that that doesn't actually improve over time, then they go, "NIRS is a waste of time. Isn't doing what it's doing." And that's not the case. It's just that they have a complete lack of understanding of peripheral physiology and what you would expect to see over time and completely misread it.

And I'll be brutally honest, I don't think manufacturers have done a good enough job educating how you actually use these devices because I have high level coaches buy them. And I end up doing consultancy calls all the time trying to explain to them that what you're actually looking at with NIRS is muscle profiling over different activity sessions and then looking at the trend of how the muscle uses oxygen and how it recovers. And that's a better indication of how muscle is changing over time.

Because you could be sitting having your morning cup of coffee, put the NIRS on your rectus muscle and your quadricep and that could tell you you're sitting at 78%. You could go up to the toilet, come back and it could be 65%. Or you could be sitting at the exact same spot the following morning and it's giving you 92%.

It's an abstract value at that particular point in time. So the only way you can really use it is to have some analytical approach to look at it. Now I obviously all my research, my PhD was in NIRS so I think I'm pretty well versed in it. Debatable some days, but I still think I'm kind of slightly versed in it.

James de Lacey29:38

People don't trust people with PhDs anymore or experts. It's all about the conspiracy theories.

Dr. Andrew Usher29:41

This is it. I'll be 5G and yeah, I'll be doing there'll be something. But I've done enough of this with big, you know, a lot of big sport teams on international athletes and stuff and I've done enough to know that NIRS is a good tool, but it's a difficult tool to use. It's difficult to really grasp the data, make the changes. You need to have things in play.

I'm very lucky that obviously I put all the tools in play for us so we can run all the analytics pretty fast. But it's a very powerful tool and I'll give an example where its power lies. So I've been doing a lot of consultancy with team sports.

And when we say have two teams, one team that has the NIRS devices and one that doesn't and we do the baseline test and for us that's typically two weeks or three weeks of Wingate. So a 30-second all out bike sprint, 60-second recovery. In mostly well-established teams we do three, so 30 on, 60 off for three.

And then what I usually do is analyze all the power metrics, analyze all the heart rate metrics, et cetera, et cetera. And then I'll make a report to a team whatever and say these 10 players need to do this protocol, blah blah blah, right? So standard standardized periodization. The determining factor what athlete goes into what bin is based upon heart rate, power data, recovery metrics, consistency over time, decay ratios and all that.

But with NIRS, I have a little bit of extra understanding because I get all of that stuff, but I also get an understanding: how quick can the muscle extract oxygen? How quick can a muscle then put the oxygen back in? And then I can see time frames.

So I can say, right, bike sprint all out, first six seconds, nothing's happened. Oh, muscle only now using oxygen, but it's only maybe using say minus 6% per second. And I can go, that's pretty good. Or I can compare it to another athlete and it's not so good.

So basically I can have two athletes maybe hitting say a thousand watts with very similar heart rate recovery but may have two completely different muscle responses. And that's really super important because when you work in the world of conditioning, 95% of the stuff you're being taught is based upon stuff like VO2 max and heart rate recovery, which is a systemic thing. It's not a peripheral.

And at the end of the day, what drives the body to move is the peripheral side of things: joints, ligaments, tendons, and muscles. So the more you understand how muscle functions, the more you can get into the nuances of how you really shift stuff. And this obviously we cover all this stuff in the ESD course because this is the crucial stuff. You'll get so far with systemic work, but the peripheral will give you a completely different world.

Give you a good example. Had some of the lads in the lab a couple weeks ago came in. So we do incremental treadmill test, starts at 10 km an hour, goes up one kilometer every minute until we get to 18. At 18 we then go inclines instead of speed changes, right? And it just makes it a bit safer.

And we get these two really good athletes in. Both of them get to 18 and 8. So that's quite a good run. So that's 8 minutes from 10 to 18. It's a 60 minutes of running, four or five minutes of super maximum. It's pretty good running. One of them has a VO2 max of 66. And one has a VO2 max of 42.

James de Lacey33:12

42.

Dr. Andrew Usher33:13

Yes. 42. This is a brand new Cortex. The interesting thing is the lad with a high VO2 max has incredibly poor muscle oxygen desaturation, whereas the lad with a lower VO2 max has much higher ability to extract oxygen and resaturate it.

So that tells you fundamentally there that there is an issue by using VO2 as the sole marker. There's nothing wrong with using it as a marker, but as the sole marker it's not telling you anything. And the other thing is is that VO2 max will occur way before volitional fatigue will occur.

So when you're wanting to know and understand about conditioning, you need to know what your athlete looks like at volitional fatigue, at the point whereby they have spent all their resources. What does that actually look like? When you have that, you can then backtrack on that and reverse engineer it because you know this is what this will look like.

So we do it's funny thing is we do VO2 max testing, not that we do VO2 max testing, but we do an incremental treadmill test. This particular research I wanted to prove the point that VO2 max is a soulless marker, right? It's devoid of any soul. It's been abused.

But the interesting thing about it was when we had like say there was two individuals in that came in together to do the test, they could see it on the graph when the muscle oxygenation started to break. So they might get to 18, 18 and 1, 18 and 2, 18 and 3, 18 and 4, muscle is desaturating but relatively steady state or dip.

James de Lacey33:13

And then you see the break part.

Dr. Andrew Usher34:55

This is where you see the muscle starts to break apart. And there is something really superbly beautiful and fascinating about that whole point where a muscle breaks down and then how long does it take before that muscle will actually resaturate. And that position of fatigue tells you an incredible amount about the athlete because you've went beyond a VO2 max score at that point.

You went beyond what conventional sport science will tell you and you've went into the world of performance and what it's going to feel like at the 10th round of a championship fight. And you truly unlock that. So when you unlock that, a whole new world of batshit craziness opens itself up because suddenly you realize this kid should just be dropping on the treadmill at 20 km an hour and then 20 second all out sprints.

Because doing sprints at 10 km an hour is a complete waste of time because it's getting no adaptation. So the point is is that until you actually unlock your athlete's physiology and you have an understanding, even a rudimentary understanding of what you're seeing, you're doing. You're not doing anything because we all know somebody doesn't lift, bring them in for four weeks, you're going to see gains.

Somebody that's never done a couch to 5K thing, give them an 8-week program, they'll get through their 5K. We know these things occur because you are adding extra stress to the body and the body has to compensate and overcome stress. Elite athletes are no different. They're a higher tier, so at that point you need to change stimulus to a level where their body's going to accept that stimulus. Otherwise their body's just like, wasn't that tough.

James de Lacey36:38

Which is why the zone two narrative, I mean, you're going to have to do hours of it to get that same stress. And in one session, you're going to have to do hours of it.

Dr. Andrew Usher36:46

So, I've been working with some pretty high level cyclists and time trialists and they spend a lot of time in the saddle. That's it. But they spend a shitload of time doing hill sprints and all out breakaways.

James de Lacey36:59

Their training isn't just purely zone two.

Dr. Andrew Usher37:03

And that's what people forget because all training has to have everything in it. You can't take a boxer and only get them amazing by doing sprint interval training. It's not going to work because the reason cyclists do really well is because the sport is cycling. So everything they do is in a cycling domain.

The problem with a lot of other sports like combat sports is we have unscrupulous Instagram-driven, world-renowned coaches doing S&C that is so removed from the sport, it's like watching some 1910 ballet, ballerina show. It's just bands and people over and you just think to yourself, what the [expletive] is going on here?

Do you know, why do you have no accountability for that athlete? Because I tell you in the job that I do, if I put anyone in a ball, hang them upside down with kettle bells attached to bands, I've been getting serious questions about what the [expletive] I was doing.

James de Lacey38:02

Sounds like you've seen something recently.

Dr. Andrew Usher38:02

Oh, I've seen some batshit stuff come to me lately where I had a very high level athlete's management team approach me and this is what they said: Is her coach a [expletive] idiot? And I went and I put to the power of, I put to the power of 80. So this, I'm not going to mention who this is, but this poor girl is being subjected to kettle bells on bands and she's swinging the kettle bells with the resistance, the stretchy

James de Lacey38:37

What do you mean by swinging them like in circles?

Dr. Andrew Usher38:39

Yes. She's swinging them. Swinging them. So, she has got, I mean, she can't even swing them because they're too heavy. But she's attempting to swing them and you just think to yourself, well, you mean you just look at it and go, why are you even asking me? Because common sense would be this is incredibly stupid.

James de Lacey39:08

You're asking for a reason.

Dr. Andrew Usher39:09

I mean, so effectively, they're just wanting some of me to go, yeah, so they can fire the individual or try and persuade her. But there's this thing, I mean, and one of the, I tell you one of the fundamental things I'm going to rant here now, this is not the intention today, Friday.

One of the things I have learned probably in the last year using NIRS is the quality of movement is really super crucial because if you think about it, what is the muscle doing? It can only shorten, lengthen or hold position. So, we can go concentric, eccentric or isometric. And then you get some variance between it.

In those positions, if the muscle is contracting at the right rate, myosin occurring at the right rate, calcium's being derived and utilized at the right rate, everything's good. And when the muscle contracts in the right position, you see really nice desaturations and resaturations.

But commonly when people come to the labs, we now do what I'm calling the shits and giggles movement screen. And the first thing I ask them to do is just to squat to a chair, nothing easy, nothing difficult rather. There's a chair. Can you just squat to the chair for me, please? And you just see some crazy like feet getting to wide sumo position, inversions, external femoral rotations, and you just go, what the [expletive] going on here?

I do that. I then make them do a lunge and then put their arms out. And I'm looking to see how easy can they, you know, make them fall over. And I'm starting to see that a lot of people are not training quality of movement. So the lunge position isn't the right position. And so you get a little bit of femoral deviation which is creating a little bit of substructure weakness.

When they're squatting, there's not enough attention to detail. And the one thing I'm learning about NIRS is that if our aim and our intention is to improve muscle oxygenation or for the muscle to function for longer and for more repeated events, we sure as hell better get that range of motion right.

So if you're an S&C coach out there, do an athlete a favor. Abandon all the band-y bollocks and all that and just concentrate on good old-fashioned lifting but with good technique, really good technique. And what I mean by that is if someone is squatting, they shouldn't be spraying out, hips shouldn't be going too wide, everything should be locked in.

Less is more, especially in muscle physiology. And it's been fascinating, it's been really fascinating the last six months as a research project looking at the importance of muscle quality. Now, that's not to say we go back to the [expletive] 80s, 90s functional training malaria.

But what I mean is if you've got people doing lifting, could be a hex bar deadlift, I don't give a [expletive] what it is. Make sure the basics are there. Before they even lift, that they're in the right position. The feet's in the right position. They're racking the bar right. Everything's in the right place. They're driving from the heels and that muscle's actually going through the range of motion that it needs to go through.

And then that brings me to the next thing is like, so then you have to start thinking about sport-specific movement, right? Which question is, does that actually really exist? You know, if a boxer is expected to throw nice straight jabs and crosses then you want to make sure that when your S&C is being applied that you're not changing hip position or shoulder position and creating a slight change of line of attack.

Because a lot of times I'll see kids do really well, suddenly go into some sort of program or hook up with some superstar conditioning coach and then suddenly as they come back, suddenly the hip is not rotating to the right position. It's maybe going slightly higher. It's hiking a little bit which is changing the line, changing the backhand and we're getting a power drop off just because that coach paid no attention to what actually had to occur in the ring.

And then that's when you see oxygen desaturation and all those values start to drift away as well. And then we have a whole job of trying to put it back in place.

So, run over.

James de Lacey43:06

So, one of the interesting things you've been looking at within NIRS is kind of that desaturation and then resaturation and those ratios. So, you want to maybe explain that? What are you actually looking at there? What is that? What does that actually mean for the athlete and their conditioning?

Dr. Andrew Usher43:22

So, if you think about it, let's take a boxer for example, they're sparring. So, round one, bell goes, they go to the center of the ring. What typically you'll see, and you can see in our first paper that we published that we modeled this, and what you see is there's a slight delay before, say, the quadricep muscles will actually go, we need, we're actually doing some work, we better use some oxygen.

And what you'll see is you'll get this kind of curve, this desaturation curve. And in that desaturation curve there's a lot of other things within it. There's like a fast phase of kinetics, which is the fast or the higher metabolic demand ratio, which is where the muscle is using oxygen at its highest rate because it needs to use it, and then it moves into slow.

And then what will happen is in events that are maybe like 3 minutes long or 5 minute rounds, the muscle will move into an attempt to be into some sort of equilibrium, whereby it's going to try and regulate oxygen utilization. So what happens is you see a big drop off, like a big curve, like a C, reverse C drop off, into the steady state.

And then the bell goes, or buzzer goes, and that's the end of the round. And then what you're really interested in is how long does it take the muscle to move back into recovery, which should be the opposite curve to the curve that came down. Right? So you got the sweeping downward curve for utilization of oxygen, so resaturation would be a sweeping upward curve.

Okay? So what happens is you kind of wait to see how long that is before that happens, and then in that curve you'll find that it's not purely, this is a big debate, I'm not going to get into polynomials and sigmoidal factors and stuff like that because we enter a whole world of [expletive] for the stat geeks.

But basically in there there'll be another fast kinetic. So you have a, so you have the ratio of how quick are they desaturating versus how quick is it resaturating. And between that you can get yourself a nice little kind of metric, an oxygen recovery metric, because you've got a ratio of utilization and recovery.

So you have a minus three, you have like a 0.9, you could ratio them together and it will show you they've got maybe like a, you know, like a 32% recovery ratio, whatever. And that gives you a real insight into it. Now, what you need to understand is that we are biological living systems. So, we have massive amount of variability in what occurs. And I'm going to talk about this, but this will probably confuse a lot of people.

But when you look at something like VO2 max, for example, VO2 max is this constant rise in oxygen consumption over time, right? And it has typically been modeled as an exponential curve. Okay? Which is this just this kind of like point A to point B in this curve and it maps it. That is a completely inaccurate way to measure VO2 max because VO2 max is actually much more polynomial or sigmoidal or double exponentially fitted than that. So a lot of how we've—

James de Lacey46:08

Just meaning it has like more waves basically.

Dr. Andrew Usher46:10

Yeah. So if you think about it, anything that goes from A to B is linear. It's a straight line. Anything that has a curve in it is probably exponential or monoexponential. But anything that has maybe a curve, a plateau and a rise and another curve becomes either polynomial or becomes sigmoidal, becomes a logistic model or whatever else, a kind of double exponential kind of sigmoidal. And these are really important things to understand.

Now on the ESD course I will teach monoexponential curve fit and I will teach linear fitting. But in the actual research world when we do higher end research, we actually model slightly differently. So NIRS, for example, is a signal that contains normally a straight line component, a linear component, and a curve. So in the curve there will be a straight line and that's the important bit. Because anything that's getting a linear within a small-sided curve shows you that there's a component of fast utilization, and that fast utilization is the highest point of metabolic stress.

This is why when you do an all-out bike sprint, you will see the oxygen will just rapidly desaturate because the intensity is so high, the body needs to utilize oxygen. And this is why the Wingate, for those that are interested in my rambles, is a beautiful thing to explain energy substrate utilization. It's a whole picture of all substrates at play. And you can't hide from the fact it's all in there.

You may want to believe the [expletive] that people have told you about aerobic, anaerobic, lactate and whatever else. But if you look at a Wingate and you take heart rate data, you take NIRS data, you take blood flow data, you take power data and you map it, it is a beautiful explanation of energy substrates at play.

Because you see the delay before the muscle has data. So you see that PCr take up, then you see that really fast desaturation, that glycolytic component and contribution value, and then you see that really beautiful oxidative phosphorylation. And then repeated sprints, you start to see the change over time. So you can map it. So it's all in there. It's one of the reasons why the Wingate is such a good test, because it will let you see everything in a snapshot that is hard to get any other way.

So, yeah. So, the ratio thing is basically us looking at utilization versus resupply, and it just allows us to look at how good is the muscle not only utilizing oxygen and recovering. Because you can have a muscle that's really good at extrapolating oxygen but is not necessarily really that great at recovering oxygen.

And the other thing come back to quality that's super important is if you've got sensors, and we're lucky enough to have like 12 Recs and like 12 Moxys, whatever. If you have sensors on, say, vastus lateralis, vastus medialis, rectus femoris, hamstring, maybe if you hit maybe kind of semimembranosus or semitendinosus, these areas, and you have oxygen sensors on these, and you do say an incremental treadmill test or you do a three, you do like three 3-minute rounds of sparring, you will see all these muscles will desaturate at slightly different points.

And what I can say from our research that we're about to write up is that we have noticed even when you occlude the muscle, or you cut off oxygen supply to it, there is a statistical significance between how each of those muscles utilizes oxygen and recovers oxygen. Okay? So that tells you something very important about quality of movement because—

James de Lacey49:35

Interesting.

Dr. Andrew Usher49:36

Because if you're not training muscle, right, you're going to start seeing rates that differ from how it quote unquote should desaturate.

So we started, I started seeing this probably about two, three years ago with some athletes that that muscle was desaturating at rates that were really quite unusual compared to other muscles. So a lot of prime moving muscles, like the rectus femoris, for example, was not desaturating nearly at the same rate as, say, the vastus lateralis medialis. And I, at the time we didn't really understand why it was, until we started using ultrasound.

And we now religiously use ultrasound and we started looking at fiber contraction and fiber quality. And we started to see that when muscle is damaged or there's a precursor towards damage, that you see big differences in oxygen utilization uptake. Okay? That makes sense because you're damaging tissue or maybe rupturing capillary beds or whatever, other capillary beds are not maybe as developed as well as they should be, weaker muscle groups.

So my whole big thing has been really hitting home the last six months to athletes is that I don't care if you're just doing a medicine ball slam, please do the medicine ball slam right. Because I think people's understanding of anatomy and physiology is shockingly bad. Most people would even be pushed if you started pushing them insertion and origin of a muscle and how—

James de Lacey51:06

Probably it's like year one, year one university kind of thing.

Dr. Andrew Usher51:09

Yeah. So, so then you think about when you're putting a muscle under load, what exactly is occurring to that muscle and what is its relationship to maybe agonist or antagonist muscles and stabilizer muscles. And what does that really mean from the sport context? This is why I'm a big believer that to get better at your sport, you do your sport.

I'm so, I mean, I'm, for people that kind of know me, I had changed my role in the British Boxing Board of Control for a while. I had went and been like a kind of inspector thing, and I've went back full circle back to coaching hands-on, because I was kind of missing it a little bit. And unlike a lot of researchers, we are applied.

So, my day job is the research is only a tiny bit of what I actually do. My day job is actually working with athletes. But I've went real back to coaching with this real vigor on making sure technique is done as well as we can do it.

So my big takeaway for boxing is, I guess my experience, and I've worked with some pretty good fighters over the years and been very lucky to coach them, is that I always say to them we're aiming to get technique as close to 100% as possible. Because on competition night you're going to lose probably 40% of it just by the very nature of the sport and what occurs.

So if you start camp and end camp with sloppy technique, there is no hope for you. Doesn't matter. So it doesn't matter how strong you are. It doesn't matter if your coach has now got you jumping over 90 cm of Bosu balls and back flipping and tuck inverted jumps at the end, or you've added an extra 26 cm to your counter movement jump.

I don't give a [expletive] if you can't hit a one-two with good technique and half step back and evade, because none of that counter movement jump is going to save you from the sport. So one of the things that's become really super important to us is getting data in the sporting context. So getting heart rate in spar sessions, getting heart rate in football games, getting heart rate in rugby, getting NIRS in scrums, getting NIRS in lineouts.

Because it's only when you actually understand the demands of the sport, which we cover on the course as well, do you actually understand what you should be prepping your athlete for.

Because a lot of times I'll see boxers doing a heavy amount of strength work when in fact they should be doing a lot more technical training. And the beautiful thing about energy systems is you can manipulate technical training to get your energy system work at the same time.

That's the beauty of understanding the physiology behind conditioning. You can slide things in. So you can do all out bag sessions, 10 on five offer three minute round, rotate it back to 5, 10 good technique. Or for those kids who need a bit more power, you can hit them maybe hitting one twos, taking a 10-second break, hit a one, two, etc., etc. You can do it in the pads. You can change the pace, the tempo.

You can ride things up a little bit. Then drive them down a little bit, drive the adaptations whilst getting the technical side and getting a bit of sports specific to it. You can do the same in rugby as well. You get some absolutely phenomenal people out there like Ed Lee and all that stuff doing phenomenal work in the sport because I think we're hitting a change where there is a bigger investment at the high end to look at what actually occurs physiologically to the individual and how does it relate to actually what they do in the pitch or in the ring.

I think those that are doing exceptionally well with athletes that's typically their mindset is very engineering based. It's like how do we solve the problem? But yeah, so NIRS is a good tool from that perspective. You'll get a lot of good information, but you'll be swamped and a lot of data that doesn't—

James de Lacey54:56

I would actually come back to your V2 max example of that 40 42 V2 max guy versus I think it was 66 and how does the conditioning prescription change between those two? Are you targeting some of the more systemic adaptations for the lower V2 max because that is the say the limiter but it is lower?

Dr. Andrew Usher55:17

No. No. Because he's quite capable of doing 18 and eight or nine on the treadmill which is a substantially amazing run and he's got plenty of oxygen and he's muscle. So the reality is for me it's another indicator that the reason of V2 is often a waste of time is one, how you look at your data is important.

Okay. So people that don't know this when you do a V2 max test what typically occurs is the test is averaged at 30 seconds. Okay. So a 30 second average might give you a 41 V2 max, but a 1 second raw data might show you at 49. So you'll lose eight points. Okay, so that's a traditional thing that's that's taken, that's in the sport science literature and you can't really find any rational for it other than that's what happened was there was a 30 second roll in median average taken.

So when I analyze V2, I typically do the 1 second and then I'll average the 30 second. I'll look at the difference. The other thing about V2 is we have a brand new cortex. You could argue it's not burdied in. So maybe the mixing chambers are not really burdied in as well as it should be. So it could be an erroneous reading to certain extent. So you always have to be cautious of that.

Equally, you could be using a cortex that maybe the oxygen cylinders coming near the end of its life and therefore it is not picking things up as well. It could be that the infrared sensors in the turbine are maybe out of date as well and therefore not picking up flow as much. Or it can be in the case of what you find at the uni quite a lot is people have get hair in the turbine. So it's not retained as much. Right?

So I'm probably one of the few people on the planet that has done a deep dive into the hardware side of V2 machines and looked at all the specifications, looked at mixing chambers, looked at the ratios, looking at the algorithms and I did that as a kind for an old master's project. I was really kind of fascinated by why these machines were so often differing in value and you realize that effectively all these machines are doing is obviously taking oxygen and carbon dioxide and racing them against each other but how they do it differs.

So for example, you can be running along and then just suddenly you touch the mask which is not uncommon and the mask changes position and machine suddenly sees you have a much more larger intake of oxygen and exhale of oxygen. So therefore changes it. Okay. And a lot of times people don't want to live with raw data. So they'll just take what the cortex gives them. So they won't dump the raw data and manually look at it.

Okay. A lot of times they'll let the machine automatically dictate kind of VT1 or VT2, kind of entry kind of threshold markers and inflection points without actually doing the hard work themselves. One of the joyful things about attending a small university like where I am is we don't have the fancy bells and whistles. So you have to learn manually to do everything.

I think that's a superpower that the university I'm attached to has that the students have to learn the reason why things are occurring because I think we live in a big culture and I've seen it with big names superstar physiologists as well. They're using devices and just taking the value the device is giving you. And I can tell you having had conversation with some of these companies when the kit doesn't work they've just said to me just use the weird formula. That's what our kit uses. And you go well okay.

So in the case of those two individuals, the more interesting thing for me is that both have a very similar incline position.

James de Lacey58:56

So, both similar performance.

But the drop off occurrence at say 184 upwards is completely different. So, the muscles are doing slightly different things. And the other interesting thing about that part test this week just because it's fresh my mind is in one of them the vasis lateralis was way more engaged than the other the other had quite a similar ratio of muscle oxygenation but the one that had the better muscle oxygenation had that nicer ratio whereas the other one who had the higher V2 had a real disruptive oxygen pattern in the sense the lateralis was doing most of the work for a lot of it

Dr. Andrew Usher59:36

then it's, higher desaturation values than the other two muscles. So that was kind of interesting. So

James de Lacey59:42

So how would the sprint interval protocols differ between those two?

Dr. Andrew Usher59:46

Off the back of an incremental treadmill test, we won't I won't typically protocol them.

I'll take it off the wing gates. Fortunately for them, they did the wing gates. So so typically for us, they'll do the incremental test for us. That's the research project we want to capture. Then after it we did lower wing gates and upper wing gates. And then we used the power plate rev bikes to look at vibration and nonvibration. So we looked at that.

So their wing gates. So for me because the larger V2 chap has poorer oxygen extraction, he'll be on a slightly more brutal protocol than the other lad will be in. So, I'll probably go 10 20 for six and they'll add I'm still milling out what I want to do with him. Because it also depends like they're not combat athletes.

So, I need to think about competition schedules. So, one of them's get something coming up September, one's coming October. So, I'm going to try to rational and I'll do it this weekend. I'll sit with the date and I and I'll look at it. But what will happen is the sport that they're in will need sprints, but it will need some other components thrown into it as well. So that's how we do it. So, it's not it's not a cookie cutter generic

approach. The funny thing with me with athletes is so when an athlete typically comes to the lab in a lab week, I don't program their week for them, right? So, it's a common complaint. They'll go, "My week is looking pretty lean." And I'll be like, "Yeah, I haven't seen you in the lab yet." And it's then that's usually a reminder to them that we don't cookie cutter.

Every Sunday or weekend, I run the data and then their following week is predicated on what I see. Their strength program typically doesn't change massively because we will block it. So, we'll do two or three weeks of work, but their actual conditioning and their technical will change most weeks and time durations of some sort and that's it.

So my service is relatively bespoke I guess but that was a reminder to one of them when he was moaning about he didn't have a he had a lean week and I was like yeah but I had to see your data from the labs and then we will decide next week kind of what we need to do cuz I had to take in consideration this change of competition you're swapping one out for another one.

And and that's the other thing, one of the things I like about working especially like kind of ultra runner people and stuff is that a lot of their schedule is very ad hoc. So a lot of times some just go I want to do a three three peak challenge or I've decided I'm going to do like a super ultra I do whatever.

And I love that cuz I love that whole challenge of suddenly we're throwing a bit of a curve ball and it's like right I've got five weeks and I'm going to be going to kind of Africa to do like 200 mile. So how we going to get ready for that? And that has its own challenges and contrary to what a lot of people believe our ultra runners all do bike sprints

because people are like but why it's a what however many hours event but it's like dial it back to the physiology and what are you trying to

The reason with the ultras, a lot of time what they're doing is they don't really spend any time in super high intensity. So why would you do that? The reason we do it is we want to look at mitochondrial change.

We do not just recklessly go, "You're going to do bike sprints." There is a lot of method behind it. So, for example, those type of individuals, ultra runners, will come in, do a test. We will do an occlusion test, which involves putting the blood pressure cuff on the leg, rapid inflations, and we will look at mitochondrial respiration rate change on that. And I'll have a look at how well does the tissue perform, and that's one set of data.

The incremental treadmill test will also let me look at issues in position, such as when is there a muscle break off, what is the run pace looking like, and how will we match this up. And then a lot of times I've done stuff previously as well for military style groups where we've wanted to optimize maybe a tactical assault. So we want to look at what the optimal ratio is for fat oxidization versus muscle desaturation and the relationship between it. We've done all that type stuff as well.

So it's kind of like, I think for me when you're looking at athletes, you're looking at all that. You're looking at, well, how do they perform currently? What does a legacy performance look like? What does the physiology say, and what do they need? So a lot of the times with ultra runs, we just want to give a little bit more mitochondrial throughput. So we will do specific very targeted bike sprints for them.

But we will also change run paces a lot of time in the back end as well. And I've been doing a lot of work with track athletes this year as well, which has been, we've got, which is super interesting as well. A good example, that's like high jumpers and long jumpers. When you do physiological testing them, you discover the V2 max is pretty non-existent. It's not great.

You don't need it. So generally what you find is muscle saturation can be pretty hit and miss, and no plyometrics is going to fix that. I've had a couple of run-ins with some pretty big athletic coaches this year on that topic, where an athlete is maybe hitting a height on a high jump and not getting any better or hasn't really improved over two seasons, and the answer obviously is they need to do more plyos. That's not the answer, folks.

So in those cases, you look at it and you're looking at the run-up, you're looking at the position, and there's some really super cool [expletive] in that. Like when they make the run-up and they make the turn for the high jump, the body almost goes into like a micro occlusion. So you see a real change in oxygen value.

And we've been looking at ironically, in those cases, we've been looking at flywheel training to try and look at dialing in those positions and optimizing muscle. Quite big success with that this year. That's been quite a big eye-opener. Again, what does that tell you? Quality of movement. Quality of movement dictates everything. So if you can get the muscle in the right position and maximize its ability to use oxygen, you're on a winner straight away. Absolute winner.

I suspect a lot athletes could probably improve by being a bit more diligent in training. It's like 100 meter sprint, super interesting as well, because you've got what, under 10 seconds. But a good athlete—so what are you trying to improve that's going to facilitate an improvement in that time zone? So these are the more fascinating challenges of these smaller time duration based sport, because clearly when we're getting the athletes, it's because they're plateaued.

I typically don't get athletes at the beginning of their career. I get them when they plateau. That's usually when the telephone rings, or what's that? It's because something's not working, and then it's the job to find out why is it not working. That's the really super interesting bit.

And a lot of what we find more and more times is that the technical coach is doing a great job. Nutritionist is usually doing the job that they need to do. I'm highly suspicious whether nutrition changes a lot for a lot of people, unless you're on fish and chips a lot. But a lot of times I see a massive disconnect in the understanding of the physiology behind S&C to the technical side.

The technical guys know they need knees up, they need hand position, they need that shuttling position or they come at the blocks, need a change in angle and all that stuff and kind needs to come up at a high point to get the peak. They understand all of that. And then I look at the S&C and I go, none of this seems to marry up physiologically and how that looks.

So if you can put 100 meter and have them in the blocks and you get the muscle saturation stuff, you see some really interesting patterns on forearms, lats, there's real big changes and stuff. But the reality is it's the drive and the push off. So the time to peak is the thing that needs to be improved, but most of the S&C coaches are not looking to improve time to peak, which is kind of interesting.

So there's a big world of other stuff out there that we will cover on the course that probably other people just don't even really think about, which is it's an eye-opening course.

James de Lacey1:08:18

I know all the ones that have gone through it have said the same, I mean, same things to you, same things to me about it being easily the best conditioning course I've gone through, just because the information in there is so different to what is typically taught.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:08:32

It's not rocket science. I think the thing is, is what we're trying to hit home is, one, you need to know the athlete. You need to know exactly what is the expectation of the outcomes. What is it they're really working towards? Two, what is the demands of the sport? That isn't just watching the sport.

I think people just think they're going to sit trackside and that's them eliciting the demands of the sport. "All right, so they ran 400 meters in X amount of time. They ran 50." It's not it. What I mean by eliciting the sport is really diving into what does the physiology look like? How are you measuring it? Are you getting trackside data? Are you getting non-trackside data? What does that look like? Are you looking at change of direction? What's the knock-on effect and repeated efforts subsequent to that? That's what you're looking for, right?

And once you get that, that's just a small couple bits of the jigsaw puzzle. And then you got to do your testing. And from your testing, you're not sport specifically testing, because people get confused. Because I've had superstar Instagrammers this week message me about, "Should I be doing this test?" I'm like, "Well, should you? I don't know. It's not my athlete. Why are you asking me should I test this? I don't even know who you are."

So people just think they can just test, whereas people are again confused by the wing gates, that the wing gates are not a sport specific test. They are a physiological test. But once you understand that, it makes sense. Once you go, "Right, this is how this person's physiology is functioning. This is how it functions in their sport." And it's like, "Aha, these are not marrying up. So why they're not marrying up?"

So then that is where you start to analyze training. So you start looking at S&C protocols. You start measuring physiology in S&C sessions. You start measuring it. And then what happens is you start to build this really cohesive blueprint of how all this shit's coming together.

And then that's where you go, "Okay, this is happening, that's happening. What do we need to change? Do we have time to change for both? Probably not. So what one's going to give us the biggest bang for our buck? That's the one we want to leverage. We'll get to that other one when we can get that one." Because I can tell you, in elite sport, you ain't fixing everything. You don't have the time.

And if you have a coach that's telling you he's going to fix all of it, you want to fire him because he has a real poor comprehension of time and he's a real poor comprehension of priority. Because everything comes down to priority. What do you need? This yourself from Robbie James is like, you can't fix everything. You just don't have time.

James de Lacey1:10:52

You don't have time. The amount of [expletive] I had to do day-to-day and cover, there's just no way with 30 to 40 athletes plus running the speed, the conditioning, the strength training, the rehab, the GPS, the data, all together by myself. There ain't no way.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:11:10

And this is where it differs as well, and you need to understand that as well. I think I've done a lot of consultancy in the last two years, and a lot of it is saying, "Look, you can't do that much. You need to just find a test that you can repeat that's physiological markers that we can run data on and make some informed physiological decisions about." You can't, because there's just no way you can do it.

I mean, it's like it's just a near impossibility when you get 47 athletes and you're like, "Oh yeah, we got to test them three times a week." You're not testing them three times a week. You might get a test in preseason and then you might be lucky to pick up snippets of things, but you're not going to be testing three times a week. I mean, that's just [expletive].

Preseason is the gold mine opportunity to get what you want to get and you have to accept even within that three weeks, some will be injured, some will be this, some will be that. You're not going to get it. So, you're always in the best fit approach.

But again, as long as it's informed on physiological principles, you can't really go wrong. But I guess the thing is, I'm just constantly amazed that people are doing things with the principle behind it in the world of strength and conditioning.

James de Lacey1:12:37

Why is it, James? Because there's a billion marketers coming into the space now with no formal education, no real world coaching experience and they just parrot whatever it is on Instagram that will give them the views and then the online clients, then that's the business.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:12:52

It's worrying. And there, I mean, thing as well is there's so much out there as well knowledge that's available and that's the other thing I guess you need to sift through it and understand what's—

James de Lacey1:13:03

But the way people get information has changed. I was thinking about this today. It's not about back in the day, we used to actually search for things, read articles on websites, follow certain coaches, and then you'd basically find the information yourself and then take it all together and come up with something.

Now it's information comes to you. So whatever information comes to you, and then you start consuming that, and then that is how people are now finding information. So it's not a curiosity thing going deeper into something. It's just I'm spoonfed this answer from AI or from this person. That's the answer to whatever that question is. So, it's completely changed.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:13:36

It's weird. I mean, I say this to a lot of students. The best thing you can do is set up your Google Scholar account and set up your notifications and just tag certain words and get those research papers. I mean, I read research papers religiously. So, with small and interesting paper come in, I don't always agree with the research papers, but they're worth looking at.

I'm not a massive lover of which would not really typically say me do that much online unless it's I've really vetted through the paper of just slapping up a paper and saying this study suggested such and such because a lot of times it's an isolated study. Our own research has to be real got take our research a lot big pinch of salt because we're working with very elite athletes in a very small core of availability. So it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to stack up.

Our next paper will be interesting because it's different sports. We've managed to get quite high level athletes for different sports on this paper. But again you got to take it with a pinch of salt because it's NS, it's heart rates of a specific demographic. It's UK based athletes. They'll differ from European athletes. Polish athletes are completely different to South American athletes. So a whole myriad of different things. But you got to take the—

So I am always super cautious to just try to push research include my own because I look at my own and think could have done it better, could have done it a lot better than the way we did it especially some of the earlier work. But the LA work was the first at the time it ever been done and looked at in that sport and field.

But I don't know, I think we're in an exciting time. We know more than we've ever known. We're discovering things all the time about capillary beds, the structures, the Menson work, all that stuff. It's really interesting. And we need to get away from this oversimplification of the energy systems and just appreciate that when you do a bike sprint, all those energy systems are at play. How hard you send that bike sprint dictates how hard one is over the other. That's it. Simply.

So when people tell me they're doing a bike sprint and they send me their data and it's 400 watts—

James de Lacey1:15:46

It's not a super max bike sprint.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:15:49

Oh, in the case of a new athlete they sent me and it went 200, 300, 400, I think a thousand. I was like, "All right, so you saved the best for last." And they were like, "Yeah, gosh." So, I don't want to send save the best for last. You got to do the last they got to the best one first. And obviously, we discussed that in the course, the rationale because there's a big reason behind that first sprint needs to be everything.

James de Lacey1:16:12

That's what I'm always trying to tell everyone. That first one has to be death. You have to not want to do another one and then you're doing it right now. I want you want to round this out. Wait, one more question on those specific I guess quote sprint intervals because obviously you mentioned the heavy bag intervals for boxing.

Is there grappling examples of that? Because I assume grappling doesn't have that same frequency of movement where you can't really get that intensity unless you're doing multiple suplexes with the dummy or some [expletive]. But—

Dr. Andrew Usher1:16:39

So in the old days of BJJ we were kind of the SPG system. One of the good things about that Alive method that Matt Thornton had was a lot of times you'd just be doing pass drills.

James de Lacey1:16:50

Just positional sparring kind of thing.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:16:52

I mean that so you get it. I mean hand fighting against the cage wall, old school tie box and we used to hand fight all that stuff for 10 seconds all out and then rest. So you can bring, but it's not going to be the same as a big spin.

And that's probably one of the big things I get asked a lot is can I do this? And I'm like yes, you can do it. But the question you have to ask yourself is what you try to get from it.

The bike sprint is there purely because it is a super easy way to drive that metabolic distress or stress in a very short period of time and measure it and it's off feet. So chance injury is incredibly low unless you fall off the bike or something I guess. But it's a test that's so easy to do. Is it the only test you can do? No, you can do 30 m sprints. You can do 20 m sprints. You could do 60. But you need to have a change of direction in it because you need to change direction to force a different stimulus that you can observe.

And you'll see that. But the bike is just super easy. The incremental treadmill test is a phenomenal test, but not for V2 max. The incremental treadmill test has got so much in it if you're using NIRS that it's a playground for data. I mean just absolutely phenomenal.

You see this when the treadmill starts you see this hyperate response, it's rise in oxygenation, this drop off, this plateau. You see the time domain change. You can see how all changes. You can see the valitional point. You can see the time to recovery. You can see the slope change. Slap in some occlusion on top of that, you start getting respiration rate change from the mitochondria. You map it to PCR from McCully's work. Beautiful thing. Absolutely beautiful. Everything's in it. Everything you can want.

And that's the thing for me is my athletes, I don't always see them that often. A lot of my work is remote. So I have to have tests that they can do that will give me all of that data and a small window of opportunity that I can analyze and then best structure. And that's why you're doing it. And that's why you're doing any testing protocol.

James de Lacey1:19:00

So, you know, and people will find that bike sprints initially are the shittiest thing you can do in your life.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:19:08

Not initially. Always.

James de Lacey1:19:11

No. I mean, most I think most athletes enjoy them now. So, I don't have that many that complain. I mean, I was actually looking at myself. So, I wrote, well, obviously, as you know, I've written my own app because I'm going to do a lot more remote work. So if anyone wants a coach, I'm out there.

But I've obviously coded my whole back end. So the app's there and the log the session and I've just went for very simple rather than doing an RPE scale. I've just went for a smiley face, shitty face, neutral face. And I have to say the sprints generally come back with smiley faces. There's very few combined shitty face except for the I think the 15 on five or for 10 combined with a lot of shitty faces and a lot of—

Dr. Andrew Usher1:19:53

I can imagine, a lot of abusive notes in the text bit. Why you doing—

James de Lacey1:19:57

I got a message in the chat here from Peter Clark who was in our first cohort. He's saying that he does 30 second rounds at his gym. Feels nothing close to bike sprints though. I've thought about it a bit but I think I don't think you can mimic the intensity of sprints in a jiu-jitsu context. Have I tried it at all?

And yeah there's just no way. I was thinking about this as I was like, you could maybe figure out a way to scramble for 30 seconds, but even then it's just so variable. You're just not going to get it. Nothing you'll do will beat it.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:20:25

So the thing as well is that there's value on, say, I mean this is something me I spoke with Bill Smart about I suppose comes on Monday. So I guess be to Bill a lot about this about this whole idea of how do we measure things in the MMA context and I've got provisional data from years ago. But we obviously need to get ethics approval and stuff to get something that's going to go forward.

But I think there's something in the whole idea of doing striking into scrambles and sprawls, striking to sprawling back up as a test. I think you can look at acuity. You can look at technical drop off and drift. And then I think there's other things you can probably look at that have got some value. But mirror on the bike trying to think mirrors the bike really, probably not.

James de Lacey1:21:19

No, I haven't found... I mean we've done some things. I mean we did a lot of this. I've got the— I keep meaning to put it up in the community page. I've got the old data from when we did the 20 minutes in the assault bike with your hands under your bum. You had to kind of only use your legs. And so I think it was like 57 minutes I think most people, some of them were hitting on that and stuff. So there's ways you can stimulate certain things, but the bike is the bike.

The other thing about the bike is it's a great leveler. If you've got a sport science lab and you've got like an Excalibur, a Lode bike, they're just so good because it's such a level playing field because everyone— it's a clinically calibrated bike. So you can get everything from pedal stroke position, you know, similar to the Wattbike does with the Pez score. You can get a symmetry index. But you get the best information from the Lode bike is the time to peak power.

That is the more I do this, and me and John were talking about this this week, the more you look at time to peak power for combat athletes, the more you realize how crucial that time is because it's an impulse time.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:22:31

You can't get it any other way. You can try and do like we've got the wall plate for measuring strikes. It's just garbage.

James de Lacey1:22:42

Yeah. You know, like I was chatting to someone about this the other day. Someone asked, "Why do you never publish the data from the striking study we did?" Because we had a lot of athletes come in, top level athletes, boxers, force plate striking. And the reason being, and I've said this to Gary the GB before as well, is that it's a waste of time exercise because it's a static throwing shot. It doesn't—

Dr. Andrew Usher1:23:01

Impulse changes because you can wind up and everything.

James de Lacey1:23:04

Yeah, and interestingly, there is something interesting that you do get off the force plate is how much does somebody sacrifice the jab for the one two. So, if you isolate it out, you get the jab, you get the cross, you see your wattage, your newtons, or whatever your plate's measuring. It should be, it should be a standard force plate. It shouldn't really be watts like a power cube. That's just nonsense. But that's a different story.

But what you typically find is when you set force plate in the ground and you set the force plate in the wall and it's reset in and you count for frequency changes, you see the jab's usually quite good. The cross is slightly higher, but not dramatically more. It's not as dramatic as you would think. A lot of people think the backhand's gonna be like twice the power of the jab. It's not really. It's not that much of a differential.

But where you see the difference is when you ask them do a one two. You see that suddenly a lot of people's jab speeds and power drops off because they are concentrating so much on landing the backhand. And this is where it's got a technical place because then you can look at that and go, okay, the reality is the jab is setting up the strike to set up the space for the backhand to come through and to prime the optimal range of motion for that internal hip drive.

So we can take it from that and it's a great tool for that, but from an actual research, a quantifying pillar, it's absolute garbage.

Just absolutely useless. But we have done it and I mean the big thing for us is we were really interested between males and females. And there is a big difference and what we found. Statically, good amateur females were hitting just as high as good male pros. So, but when you actually went dynamically, that is when it completely fell to pieces.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:24:52

So that tells you something about that, about movement again, quality of movement. That statically with good technique you should get a good score, but dynamically can you maintain that good score? Because your body's going through a different set of positions and changes and weight distribution.

So yeah, it's good, it's a good way to end this pod. I'm going to tell my wife she's got CrossFit training soon. She decided to compete in a CrossFit competition again from—

James de Lacey1:25:14

Nice come back from her 2011 CrossFit Games back in the day. So she's—

Dr. Andrew Usher1:25:20

Yeah, she's been doing for sure.

James de Lacey1:25:23

Her recovery is insane. She barely does, she's like elite weightlifter who barely does any conditioning, but her recovery is so fast and the quality of it is actually quite good even between the sprints. And I'm like, the [expletive]. You don't even do this stuff and mine looks like [expletive].

Dr. Andrew Usher1:25:39

I mean, it's interesting. You get some nerves. Be interesting to see the difference. I mean, the paper that we've published lately looked at the male and female Wingate, was kind of really interesting because there is a difference. Obviously hemoglobin levels are different and stuff like that, but female desaturation was very different with one exception.

And this isn't part of the study because this was a separate thing we were doing, but we discovered that, for example, one of the female boxers I was working with, initially NIRS map was very similar to what we reported in the research paper. But after spending eight weeks with us in the lab, she had better desat than most high quality professional male boxers.

So that really reinforced to me that what we seen in the research paper was a byproduct of females being told they had to train differently, which they do, but not at a lower intensity.

So because you actually— and I work a lot with female athletes— a lot of female athletes you can push much harder than males and get much greater returns on investment on physiological change. And it was kind of interesting and it's just we just don't have the option to do a mass intervention with males and females over an eight week period to look at it.

But I suspect a lot of time female boxers are not being trained appropriately for what they actually need physiologically, which was the big take home from that paper. Which was kind of really interesting because the ones that after the research has finished kind of went into our protocols, you see massive, massive changes in muscle oxygenation use and everything else.

So that kind of told me a lot of times, I think, and I think it's just different as well. I think interestingly the females that I noticed did particularly well were still in that old school gym environment where they were sparring with the lads and they were getting really pushed. Whereas some of the other females were in more female-based environments and I think there was a tendency to train them back a little bit in those occasions, which I think was quite detrimental to them.

Because my experience with female combat athletes is they are deadly assassins. So—

James de Lacey1:27:58

Same in when I was coaching female rugby league. You tell them, "Okay, we're just going to just shoulders on, no massive contact," and then like the first two minutes is just light touches and then after two minutes, they're just [expletive] smashing each other and you're like—

Dr. Andrew Usher1:28:11

I enjoy working with, I really enjoy working with female combat athletes. I think I probably enjoy that probably more to a certain extent. Most my career has been with females like karate, Muay Thai, and stuff like that. And they've done incredibly well and there's no drama. It's just good solid training.

There's good bloodbaths and spar sessions and kind of there's no excuses and stuff like that. You get some kind of alternative males that are a bit more primadonna.

James de Lacey1:28:39

Awesome.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:28:41

So I guess we have obviously Performance Law Education if you want to do— if you're interested in the mentorship. It'll be September the 15th I think we'll start. This will be the last one this year. So just go sign up. Places have started to fill up already. General feedback's been pretty good. If you ask around, we've not had any complaints, which is quite nice.

And just the usual, usual socials. Not that I'm on that much, but if anyone is interested in the coach, I am taking on clients, first time in a while. In the new system. So yeah, but the course will be good. We're going to cover everything from the basic understanding of substrate utilization and metabolism right through to how you look at heart rate data, how you look at NIRS data, how you look at bike data, how you piece it together.

I will have four live interactive chats which have always been quite good. And we will analyze data as we go along as well. So people get data and they want to share it and whatever, we'll kind of do it live, just keeps me on my toes.

James de Lacey1:29:48

It's kind of like, so if you're kind of like, oh my god—

Dr. Andrew Usher1:29:53

Which has been quite good, but it has been good. James has been really good. Community is good.

James de Lacey1:29:58

Really people, people loving it, get their data done live on the air, kind of really dive into case studies and stuff. Yeah, it's invaluable for anyone who's looking to actually improve their conditioning knowledge. So make sure you check the links in the description. They'll all be there. Sign up. Obviously, I'm posting it on Instagram and emails, all sort of stuff. So, you're going to get hit with it anyway regardless.

But yeah, we'll see you guys in there. Hopefully.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:30:24

Hopefully.