Aerobic Conditioning, HRV, & Mental Health For Combat Sports w/ Tim Kettenring (SSOF Ep. 14)

Tim Kettenring3:14

So a lot of my interest in aerobic capacity work and aerobic conditioning in general stems from working with endurance athletes and being a failed endurance athlete myself. A lot of the bioenergetics research on energy systems in the endurance community is much more advanced than in field and court sports, for sure. I would say combat sports is ahead of the game, thanks to a lot of Joel Jamieson's work, than most team sports.

James de Lacey3:14

That's the conditioning Bible, that book.

Tim Kettenring3:51

It is 100%. It's been a huge influence on my philosophy as far as conditioning work. But what I realized in team sports is there's this emphasis on outputs, right—speed, power, strength—and there's this idea that conditioning is an output. Combat sports would probably be the only scenario in which conditioning is actually an output. I mean, if you think about a three-minute round, you're working through multiple layers of energy systems in different percentages, if you want to frame it that way, throughout a three-minute round, and then you get time to recover after the round is over.

Where aerobic conditioning fits into that puzzle is that you empty the tank in those three minutes, and aerobic capacity and aerobic conditioning is going to refill the tank more quickly and enable the fighter to be able to get back into the next round as close to maximum potential from an output standpoint as they possibly can.

James de Lacey5:06

That's definitely something that I've emphasized as well within the Sweet Science of Fighting block. It's while aerobic conditioning can obviously underpin performance aspects, help you work essentially at lower outputs, but then obviously between rounds to be able to recover between... If you're in a jiu-jitsu tournament where you're fighting multiple times a day, you need to recover between those. Or if you're between rounds in MMA and boxing, you've obviously only got a minute to be able to recover and be able to come back out and perform maximal outputs again.

So is there... I guess let's start with capacity versus power. So obviously a lot of people use these terms interchangeably and they're like, okay, aerobic capacity versus aerobic power workouts—what's the difference? What am I trying to achieve by doing either end?

Tim Kettenring5:42

So your aerobic capacity end is going to be what would be below what we classify as your ventilatory threshold or your first ventilatory threshold. So if you take running as your mode, your ability to nasal breathe for an extended period of time, let's just say arbitrarily 20 minutes, is what would qualify as your ventilatory threshold. So everything under that is aerobic capacity. That's going to be your ability to, that's going to support your ability to recover between rounds, between bouts, between tournaments, between training sessions.

Aerobic power is going to be the between ventilatory threshold one and ventilatory threshold two, which is when you're forced to start mouth breathing depending on the intensity or because of the intensity of your training. And also there's going to be, from a waste product level in the within the cells, is where you're going to start to accumulate too much lactate that is going to exceed your cell's ability to clear it into the bloodstream.

So if you think about a high-intensity conditioning session, the point at which you start to feel burning at the muscular level from hydrogen ions and et cetera that can't get cleared from the cells into the bloodstream.

James de Lacey7:31

Gotcha. So maybe let's touch on why... I guess you kind of touched on why you're doing the capacity and somewhat the power. Do you have any examples then of maybe those workouts then? How do I determine if I'm in the right range? You obviously mentioned you're breathing a little harder between ventilatory threshold one and two. Is there maybe a generic heart rate range that someone could use, or you just going by breathing?

Tim Kettenring8:06

I like to use breathing because not every athlete has a heart rate monitor, but there are pretty close correlations with the different heart rate zones as well as ventilatory threshold one and two, lactate threshold one and two. And then you can assign or prescribe conditioning programming based on heart rate zone that also correlates with those thresholds.

Really, for aerobic capacity, so below ventilatory threshold one, is going to be your Zone 2 range. So the zone model, which there are several, the one that I use personally is a five-zone, and Zone 2 is basically 65% to 75% of your maximum heart rate. And even without doing a maximum heart rate test, the formula that I use to calculate maximum heart rate is 211 times 0.64 or minus 0.64 times the athlete's age. And that'll usually be within 8 to 10 beats per minute of an accurate max versus using an age predictive or some formula.

So Zone 2 work is going to be all under that ventilatory threshold one. Your Zone 3 or your tempo work is going to be 75 to 80% of max heart rate, which from a combat sports perspective is not particularly important. None of the adaptations to Zone 3 work are particularly applicable.

James de Lacey9:20

You get most of that from skills training too, right?

Tim Kettenring9:56

Well, 100%, absolutely. Especially because, okay, low technical skill skills training, I think definitely would fit into that category. Zone 4, I think, is really the sweet spot for combat athletes in terms of development. You're talking about aerobic power, so that would be right around lactate threshold, which is going to be 82 to 88% of maximum heart rate. And that's where you really start to see the output adaptations take place.

So you may have, take a 10-minute airbike test where it's just a 10-minute time trial, try to cover as much distance as possible in those 10 minutes. Usually an athlete will start to accumulate lactate around three and a half minutes. And then depending on what the programming looks like, they'll start to see that lactate accumulation happen later on during the time trial, but then also they won't feel the effects nearly as dramatically because their ability to clear lactate from that zone work is going to be a lot more efficient.

James de Lacey11:12

Gotcha. So maybe we'll cover as well some of the stuff you've been reading on mitochondrial biogenesis. This is something that I haven't gone, I guess, too deep into literature on at the moment.

So this is extra learning for myself, but I guess from basic understanding, even doing our Zone 1 or our Zone 2 aerobic capacity work, you're still obviously creating mitochondria as well to help with creating more energy. Do you want to maybe cover for the listeners what mitochondria actually is and its importance? And there may be specific training protocols that help develop more of it, and then we can maybe cover some more examples of other workouts in a bit.

Tim Kettenring12:19

Sure. So mitochondria, if you even think back to secondary school biology class, it's the powerhouse of the cell. And from an exercise physiology standpoint, that mitochondria is what gives the muscle cells potential to repeat force outputs by essentially providing oxygen to the muscle cell. And then based on what the oxidative capacity of the mitochondria is, that's what dictates how quickly some of those substrates, those waste products, are going to be cleared from the cell in order to replenish ATP as the primary fuel source for the next force output.

As far as mitochondrial biogenesis, it's a multifaceted process where the first phase would be developing the density or the thickness of the mitochondrial wall. What that does is it enables the mitochondria to basically exist for longer periods of time in an acidic environment. So if you think about lactic acid, which is a precursor to lactate, that's what accumulates in the cell from those high output efforts. And a lot of times, without sufficient mitochondrial density, thickness of the cell wall or the mitochondria wall, those mitochondria can degenerate from that process.

So obviously we want those mitochondria to be as robust as possible in order to resist that acidosis. And interestingly enough, just doing low-end Zone 2 work not only improves the thickness of the cell wall or the mitochondrial wall, but also improves the overall mitochondrial density, which is a little different than volume.

So mitochondrial volume is basically an increase in the number of mitochondria within a given muscle fiber, for example. And obviously the more mitochondria, the more oxygen within the cell, the more ability to clear all those waste products. But a lot of times with speed and power athletes, that mitochondrial volume is not necessarily the most beneficial adaptation because it takes up a lot of muscular cellular space.

Whereas with endurance athletes who don't necessarily need as much hypertrophy, they're going to want both mitochondrial density and mitochondrial volume. With combat sports athletes, it's probably skewed to the density side, but it's not going to be as detrimental for mitochondrial volume to be an adaptation to aerobic as well, because hypertrophy isn't necessarily as much of a priority, being a weight class sport.

As far as the ability to improve both functional mitochondria, developing new mitochondria, developing the density of mitochondria, it all basically happens the same way, is through that low-end aerobic work. Because it doesn't put the cell in an acidic environment, but it increases the demand of the mitochondria to produce oxygen. And because the intensity is lower, their ability to clear waste products is always below the oxidative capacity.

James de Lacey16:16

That makes sense. So I guess what I wanted to touch on as well is, a lot of fighters get caught in the trap of doing random circuits of high intensity work as their conditioning. It's like the old CrossFit days. Would you think that would be part of the reason then that fighters don't feel quote unquote "fit" for fighting, because of that degenerative nature the exercise has potentially on mitochondria? That could be one of the reasons why they don't feel as fit when they fight.

Tim Kettenring16:55

I think it's multifactorial. I definitely think that's one of the reasons. If you think about in team sports, when you were in rugby, there was a lot of sport mimicry, and conditioning has to resemble the sport. And obviously that's still the overwhelming conception of what conditioning is.

And I think with combat sports, again being the outlier there, but at the same time, in a well-periodized and structured combat sport training program, there are going to be times for high-intensity work and there are going to be times for low-intensity work. And balancing out the two, depending on in relationship to where competitions are, I think are probably the most important strategic skill for fighters to develop and coaches who work with fighters, so that they don't end up in an environment physiologically where the stressors are too much for their ability to compensate for them from a conditioning standpoint.

James de Lacey18:01

You maybe give an example of what an aerobic capacity or low-end workout might look like, and maybe the same from the aerobic power threshold side, what that kind of workout might look like?

Tim Kettenring18:37

Sure. So on the low end, I mean it's really almost stupidly simple to be honest with you. 30 minutes on an air bike at 40 to 50 RPMs, nasal breathing. And if you have a heart rate monitor, keep that heart rate under 75% or somewhere around there. And do that a couple times a week for a month, then you've got a pretty decent aerobic base.

It doesn't take a whole lot. The mind-numbing thing is that because it is so simple, coaches and athletes don't think it works. Maybe it's the kinesthetic feedback that they get: "Oh this isn't, I can't be accomplishing anything."

James de Lacey19:10

How long do you ever make those sessions? Would you ever exceed 60, 90 minutes for a mixed sport athlete like a combat sports athlete?

Tim Kettenring19:42

I would probably look at it a little bit more cumulatively to where, depending on the level of competition and how far out or how far away from competition we were, I would say a good goal would be 90 minutes within a week. Now whether that's three 30-minute sessions or two 45-minute sessions or a 60-minute session and a 30-minute session, I think with too much aerobic volume, especially Zone 2 volume specifically, you are going to blunt some speed and power qualities, which I think is the overarching concern for a lot of coaches.

But again, just like anything else, the dose makes the poison. And I think 90 minutes for fighters who are more than three months out is probably a good dose.

James de Lacey20:15

The whole idea of blunting speed and power as the concern for not doing aerobic work, but that often comes from the fact that people block their training. So they're only doing aerobic work and then only doing power work. And none of it's integrated together, so you get these nice gains over here, then you lose everything else, then you get nice gains here but then lose what you've done.

So maybe you touch on that with your military guys. Obviously the military guys have to almost be prepared any time, correct? There's no training for a certain date most of the time, so they've got to be ready.

Tim Kettenring21:16

So a lot of the military personnel that I work with work at what's called a high operational tempo. So what that means is that they are generally in combat specialties, so like infantry for example, and they have to be, some of them have to be ready to deploy overseas with as little notice as 48 hours. And that's how they refer to that as combat readiness.

So what I try to do with my military personnel is try to match combat readiness with physical readiness, which is very similar to what fighters are going to have to deal with, with less predictability. So what we try to do from a conditioning perspective is, from a percentage standpoint, we spend about 70% of our time in a given training cycle on Zone 2 work for all the reasons that we've already talked about, including some other ones that I'm sure we'll talk about in a bit.

And then the other 30% is balanced between some sub-threshold work, so Zone 3, Zone 4, and then some very, very high output, so Zone 5 and higher, basically 95% of maximum heart rate. Because those outputs that they'll have to use in a combat setting, we have to train those in a way that we can't really with from a speed and power standpoint, like you would with a team sport athlete or a fighter.

Because a lot of what they're having to do in combat is covering 400 meters from cover to cover while under fire. So we want them to be able to do that as efficiently as possible, while then once they get there, they need to recover quickly because they're going to probably have to do it again 90 seconds later.

James de Lacey22:59

Maybe think of, because we skipped over the aerobic power example, maybe—

This would be a good spot now the zone three, zone four style workout, how that would look. A zone five, how that would look. And then how would you fit that within a training week? Obviously you mentioned 70% of the time is done in that zone two aerobic capacity side. So where do you fit these higher intensity models within, or modes of exercise, within the week?

Tim Kettenring23:31

So I really like Jill Jameson's model of development, stimulate, recover. So the way that I apply that is that a development style session is going to be that tempo pace. So top end of zone three, so around 80% to around 85%, which again is top end of zone three, bottom end of zone four.

And the way that I usually apply that is with a protocol called 4x4s, which is basically four minutes of that zone three, zone four effort, which when you wear a heart rate monitor there's always going to be a lag in being able to see your heart rate as it increases throughout that work interval. So in a four-minute interval, an athlete may not actually get to all the way into zone four in that first work interval, but they will get there in subsequent intervals.

So 4x4s are basically four minutes of work with one minute of total recovery, or even active recovery if it's a run walk. And generally what I will see is the recovery curves tend to get steeper and steeper. And so what I call recovery curves is basically in those one minute rest intervals, we'll start to see heart rates get lower and lower and lower in order to be able to give the same level of output in subsequent work intervals.

And then from a progression standpoint, usually I'll go 4x4s and that's going to be my development workout, development session in week one. The next week it'll be 5x4, next week it'll be 6x4, and then we'll do a deload week in week four.

And then from a simulation standpoint, so this is going to be your above threshold work, so above 90% of max heart rate, this is going to be your 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off at a nine out of ten on an RPE. And usually the way that I'll block it is 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, repeat for five minutes, so that by the time you get to that fifth interval your heart rate, or the athlete's heart rate, will be in that zone five region. And then they'll get a full three minutes to recover, and usually we'll repeat that for three to five sets.

So it'll end up being week one will be 3x5 with three minutes of recovery in between each set. Next week will be 4x5, three minutes recovery between each set. Week three will be 5x5 with your three minute recovery, and then deload for that fourth week back to 3x5.

And then from a recovery standpoint, that's your back into your zone two work. So 30 minutes under 75%, and that's usually depending on athlete feedback after that high intensity, that above threshold session. We may give back-to-back zone two sessions to kind of bring that athlete back down from an autonomic standpoint, so sympathetic, parasympathetic, and then get them more prepared for the subsequent training week from a conditioning perspective.

James de Lacey27:11

Gotcha. Before we jump into that autonomic nervous system stuff, because I'm assuming we're also referring to HRV in that context?

Perfect. Before that, you mentioned obviously the first interval of the threshold, the zone three, zone four, they don't quite reach zone four. So that means you're prescribing a certain intensity for them to essentially exercise that for all four intervals. You want them to be the same intensity. Okay, is that intensity like seven out of ten?

Tim Kettenring27:53

Yeah, seven out of ten, maybe maybe close to eight. The first interval's probably will feel like a seven out of ten, and each interval after that should be an eight correlating that with heart rate, 80% of max heart rate.

James de Lacey28:25

What was that formula again for max heart rate that you use?

Tim Kettenring28:25

So for male athletes it's 211 minus 0.64 times their age. For female athletes, 221 minus 0.64 times their age.

James de Lacey28:25

Okay, minus, minus 0.64. So let me see if I can win that out for myself live, not live on the record. So 211 minus 0.64 multiplied by... Wait, your age there? It's a minus 0.64, is it divided by? 211, so it's...

Tim Kettenring28:25

211 minus 0.64 times your age.

James de Lacey28:25

Because if I times 210 by 31, I get obviously 6,500. Did I do something completely wrong here?

Tim Kettenring28:25

So 211, 211 minus 0.64 times 31, your age.

James de Lacey29:10

Ah, I did it in two separate equations. Gotcha, gotcha. Yep, so now everyone listening, if you did the same mistake, do it all in one equation on your phone.

Tim Kettenring29:10

Just like Algebra 1, I think.

James de Lacey29:10

Yeah, exactly. Was a bit of a mess with the order of the thing. All right, let's jump into the HRV stuff. Same thing, I haven't done too much deep dives on HRV. I used to track my HRV just for a bit of fun, just to see how it changed from day to day. But I guess anyway most fighters do own a heart rate monitor, so it can be easy for them to do it as well, because you just need your phone app to hook it up. So what are they actually measuring with HRV, and how can they make it useful for them for their own training?

Tim Kettenring30:00

Perfect. So HRV is heart rate variability, which is basically the time between heartbeats. And just kind of using 60 beats per minute as a round number, doesn't necessarily mean that there is a heartbeat every second. It's going to vary based on whether you're inhaling or exhaling, whether you're sitting or standing or lying down. And it's also going to vary depending on how much sleep you got the night before, or how much sleep you had cumulatively over the course of a week.

All that being said, it's a lot of coaches and a lot of athletes use it to assess their autonomic nervous system function. So kind of like I said before, it's the balance between your sympathetic nervous system, which is fight, flight, freeze, and parasympathetic nervous system, which is going to be kind of your rest and digest.

I would venture to guess that most combat sports athletes are what we would call sympathetic dominant, just given the nature of the sport. And I'm sure most athletes are as well, even outside of combat sports. But given kind of approaching a literal fight, even in training and sparring and technical work, there's always going to be a level of, or a higher level of sympathetic nervous system arousal than in general population, and then in team sport athletes more than likely.

So with an app like HRV for Training, which is what I use, in a 60 second measurement it's going to give me my heart rate variability as well as my resting heart rate. And usually that's going to show how recovered I am from a physiological perspective from all the various stressors in my life, not necessarily just training stressors. And using that data, I can kind of guide my own training as well as the athletes who I train, who I collect HRV data on.

And from a conditioning perspective, kind of tying that in, the more, the higher the sympathetic arousal, so this could manifest itself as high HRV, it could also manifest itself as low HRV. So basically the space between each heartbeat could vary dramatically, or it could not vary a whole lot. Either way, we want to be somewhere in the middle of those things, between high and low, to really be recovered and to have a high level of readiness.

Now the closer to competition, the more acceptable a higher HRV is, because obviously again given the nature of the sport, having a little bit higher sympathetic nervous system arousal is going to lead to more readiness for competition.

James de Lacey33:24

Yep, yep, that makes sense. Maybe you want to jump into maybe how to then use that data to essentially influence what you're going to do that day or within your program?

Tim Kettenring34:06

Okay, so let's say I have a military athlete who I'm monitoring remotely. I see their data in the morning and they have their HRV is outside of the normal range, let's just say low for example. The resting heart rate is five beats per minute higher than their like seven day average. And I have a speed and power session with some above threshold conditioning.

So I'm going to basically probably push that session one more day and assign a 30 minute, 30 to 45 minutes of zone two work. Because that low intensity work is going to downregulate whatever sympathetic nervous system arousal they have or they're experiencing. And whatever substrates are still in the bloodstream are still in the cells, it's going to be able to kind of

Clear some of those to enhance physiological recovery for a higher intensity session the next day or two days after.

James de Lacey35:18

Okay. What about in the opposite scenario? So I think that one you mentioned when HRV is too low. Okay, so what about if HRV is too high? Does the prescription remain the same because you're trying to look to maybe downregulate or bring back to the middle?

Tim Kettenring35:18

Yeah, absolutely. So depending on, so usually I'll correlate two things. So if HRV is high, then I'll look next at resting heart rate and what that looks like again compared to the seven-day average. If it's under five beats per minute, so let's just say the athlete's resting heart rate average for seven days is 60, if it's 65 or under, I'll go ahead and prescribe a zone two session.

If it's over 65 and they have a high HRV, I'll prescribe a rest day completely because I think that's usually going to be indicative of the effects of other stressors outside whatever they're doing from a training perspective. And so in that case they need to more than likely sleep. But either way it's going to downregulate that sympathetic nervous system arousal.

James de Lacey36:26

Nice. I've got a couple questions on the HRV thing too. Say someone listened to this, "Okay, I'm going to start checking my HRV for my training," but they have set classes during the week that they have to attend, or maybe they're eight weeks out and they can't just take a complete rest day on a day like that, but that day just happens to be hard pads or heavy bag work or rolling or whatever.

What would you recommend for an athlete like that to do if they come back and they have that, like resting heart rate's a little high and also they're a little on the higher end of HRV? Is there something they can do before, after, during training or anything like that?

Tim Kettenring37:01

Go for a walk. Go for a walk. Biggest thing. That's it. Yeah, I mean it's really, it's simple. I think there's, just being outside in nature is going to downregulate sympathetic nervous system to begin with. Add to that the circulatory effects of walking, even if you wear a heart rate monitor when you walk, you might see your heart rate tick up to 100, which is perfect from an actual active recovery standpoint.

And more often than not you're going to get a little bit of a dopamine release from the exercise because it's not too intense at all. And more than likely the mood-enhancing effects of that are going to make the athlete feel more ready for whatever the training session is than had they not done that. And I prescribe it, I prescribe walks pretty frequently. I don't necessarily know how compliant my athletes are when I do that because I don't, but I know that the ones who do always report back that they're glad they did it.

James de Lacey38:29

So you would recommend then if an athlete woke up and they had this and they had training at midday or later that day, they would go for a walk in the morning and that would help at least offset potentially some of that?

Tim Kettenring38:57

Or even after the training session. Spend 20 or 25 minutes walking as a cool down. I think that the cool down in general is a lost start, but I think definitely when it comes to compensating for stressors outside of training that affect training, walking is one of the simplest and yet most effective implementations for recovery.

James de Lacey38:57

Yeah. One, I guess, personal gripe I have with HRV, maybe you figured this part out: when do you stop testing HRV leading up to a competition? Because I can imagine an athlete maybe relies on this data as their, "Oh, I'm ready to train. I'm not ready to train." And then the week of the fight, all they see is red, red, red, "I'm not recovered." And then obviously that just bleeds into the mental state as well.

So is there a time maybe when you would recommend, "Okay, put that away, just relax and focus on what's coming up?"

Tim Kettenring40:00

That's a great question. So the closest comparison I would have would be like Special Operations personnel who are on a predicted deployment cycle. Usually I will tell them to start, stop tracking HRV two weeks before deployment. And I think that's probably good advice for fighters as well. When they don't stop tracking, they get extremely anxious.

Even though through, like from an education standpoint, we try to explain to them, "Look, this is what readiness actually looks like. When you consistently see an above balance, so a high or maybe a slightly high HRV over the course of seven, eight, nine, ten days, that's optimal readiness for what their job is or for what a fighter is going to do in a tournament."

James de Lacey40:43

Yeah, good advice. Two weeks out, stop tracking the HRV. But the same thing, I guess the other thing as well, like you already mentioned, if you have a maybe a high or very low HRV and you have to train that day, you can walk to kind of offset that. And I think that's potentially a good thing too, because you don't know on the actual day you're competing if you're going to be maybe high or low on the HRV scale, and you're going to have to perform regardless.

So would you then always recommend taking a rest day if you have some of those, if you have the option to take a rest day when your HRV is very high or really low? I guess, how would you determine whether you should take a rest day or you should just push through that, so you can almost get used to or get a feeling of trying to perform under that state which might happen in competition so that you're prepared regardless?

Tim Kettenring41:39

Yeah, I think that's where having the resting heart rate as a second data point is important. And the range that I'll use is 10%. If resting heart rate is 10% higher, it needs to be a rest day. If it's under 10% but it's still high and HRV is either high or low, alright, we'll dial it back a little bit and it could be a zone two day.

But I think you're spot on that athletes need to learn how to triangulate those three data points between HRV, resting heart rate, and how they actually feel, kind of just an actual physical readiness from, even if you call it an RPE standpoint, so that over time they can realize that HRV can be high, resting heart rate can be a little high, but they feel good.

Okay, well they're ready. Like you should be ready for competition or whatever it is that you have that particular day or during that week. And that's where I think the concept of readiness is really important to be able to learn with those three data points, two being objective, one being subjective.

James de Lacey43:09

That's good advice. You mentioned as well, I guess, your military personnel being anxious for going away on [deployment]. That's a good segue into maybe some of the mental health stuff you've been diving into. If anyone's also interested in the idea of sport psychology and mental performance, you can go back to my wife's podcast, number four, and she covers a lot of different practical stuff in there as well for fighters leading up to fights and all that stuff. She's even got a course on the website for basically enhancing working through your mental performance.

But maybe to run through some of the stuff you've been going down, some of the rabbit holes surrounding mental health then, specifically to do with athletes.

Tim Kettenring43:45

Yeah, sure. So a lot of my interest in mental health has to do with my own experience as an athlete and as a coach and dealing with anxiety and depression. I was an extremely anxious athlete, and I did not deal with negative feedback well, and I never knew why. And it really didn't even have to be negative feedback. It could have been constructive, and I just did not take it well because I was always under the impression that whoever I was getting that feedback from did not necessarily have my best interest at heart, when 95% of the time they did.

So through that, and then through learning as an adult that I've dealt with anxiety and depression for the majority of my life, I've learned how to identify athletes who are struggling with similar challenges and then guide them to the resources they need while not functioning outside of my scope of practice as a strength coach.

What I see a lot of is that, and in the military for sure, but also I'm sure combat sports are pretty similar, the mindsets that are required to be successful in those environments tend to be also the ones who prefer to suffer in silence rather than maybe be more open with what their experience is and to pursue some form of therapeutic intervention, whether it's...

Working actively with a therapist or even spending more time with their particular community – whether that's in the military, whether that's their unit, or whether it's if it's a combat, an individual combat athlete working with their training group a little bit more actively, spending more time outside of their training group with the people who are in the group – I've tend to see those are kind of good jumping off points.

I hate to put a percentage on the number of athletes who suffer similar mental health challenges that I did, but I would be willing to bet that it's a majority.

James de Lacey46:34

I think it's very, very high, just with the pressures of, I guess, especially in sports like combat sports where you're not contracted to a team or whatever and receiving a monthly salary. Or even then, obviously, it's difficult because you can get cut anytime. But you're obviously essentially training for one, two, three fights a year depending on the sport, and you're living off winnings essentially. You're fighting to be able to live, and that's one of the big differences between that and a lot of other sports.

I can imagine the anxiety, potential depression, things like that would be huge, huge within that population.

Tim Kettenring47:07

I think you're right. I mean, you mentioned obviously spending time outside, I guess with people and potentially seeing a therapist. Is there anything else that athletes can do, or is meditation something that you've ever found helpful, or is that kind of just like, okay, you can do that, but you still need to be able to go to therapy and things like that?

James de Lacey47:40

Kind of talking about readiness being three data points, I like to think about – I'm not a huge fan of the term self-care – but I think from a mental health standpoint, having multiple avenues to pursue depending on how the person feels in a given moment or in a day or in a week, and then pairing an intervention to that feeling, I think is important.

Tim Kettenring48:11

For me, the number one referral is always to a therapist, and that's primarily because of my own experience in therapy and both learning insights about myself, but then also being able to learn how to manage some of my challenges and then apply some of the lessons from the therapeutic process on my interactions with my athletes, with my family.

Gradually, you learn to identify – we call it cognitive distortion – so basically how your brain changes how you see things from what they actually are. And then once you become aware of those cognitive distortions, then you can work to change your behavior, which is the whole idea of cognitive behavioral therapy.

But specifically asking about meditation, so my therapist is also a meditation teacher, so one of the things that we worked on early was learning how to meditate. As far as evidence-based interventions go, the three strongest interventions are going to be CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy, meditation, and then SSRIs or antidepressants – what are called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, so Prozac, Paxil, etc.

With meditation, it's – I liken it to training in that you don't notice a difference until you do, and it requires a tremendous amount of practice. But it also requires a tremendous amount of acceptance in that you feel like nothing's happening. And I think there are a lot of misconceptions about what meditation is.

Meditation is really sitting quietly and just observing your thoughts. If you've ever stood on a street corner, a busy street corner of an intersection, and been overwhelmed at the number of cars that are flying past you, the ability to sit there and not attach to any one car is kind of the ultimate goal of meditation.

So your ability to sit and see all these thoughts coming in and out without necessarily attaching to any one thought – even though it's going to happen, it's bound to, it's the way the mind works – but gradually over time, that's where you notice the biggest difference.

And that's kind of, I guess, the adaptation to meditation is the acceptance of thoughts being fleeting and moving very, very quickly, but not letting those thoughts affect how you feel or your emotions, but not from a forceful standpoint, from an acceptance standpoint.

I mean, I've been a practicing meditator now for about seven years, and I can say that it's had as much of an impact on my well-being, my interactions, my relationships as actively participating in therapy.

James de Lacey52:15

Wow. Okay. Would you ever recommend a guided meditation app for someone to get started?

Tim Kettenring52:15

Absolutely. I mean, there's – I used Headspace for the longest time, and there are multiple, actually, there's courses in Headspace that address every possible mental health challenge as well as performance scenarios you could possibly imagine.

Insight Timer is another good one. I know Calm is popular. I don't necessarily know the quality of the contributors with Calm. I know that Insight Timer, all the contributors are qualified, incredible. Or Headspace is basically run by one person, which is kind of remarkable to think about. And he was actually a Buddhist monk.

Meditation is rooted in Buddhism, and conceptually the idea of non-attachment, which is fundamental to Buddhism, is also fundamental to meditation.

James de Lacey53:35

And that those are great insights too. We covered actually a lot through that, more than I thought even through that. And hopefully that helps someone maybe struggling on the other end listening to this to seek help or maybe start doing some kind of meditation practice as well.

But we've covered a bunch of performance and mental related stuff in this podcast. Is there anything else you wanted to add? And if not, maybe you can plug where people can follow you – Twitter, website, anything like that.

Tim Kettenring53:35

No, I mean, I appreciate you having me on. My website for my in-person training is valhallaperformance.us. My consulting work is through HPS solutions, and my Twitter handle is Valhalla Perform, where I try to be as incendiary as possible.

James de Lacey54:21

Well, I'll link all those up in the description too, so people can go check out your tweets and see what kind of arguments you're starting that day too. It's perfect.

Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on, Tim. Really appreciate it.

Tim Kettenring54:21

Thanks, James.