Agile Periodization, Badger Protocol, & Endurance For MMA

Mladen Jovanovic1:04

One is mainly training, doing the physical preparation of the athletes, of the professionals. But also, as with any commercial facility, we have kids classes and then we also have parents who are doing nothing pretty much during the kids classes. So we want to offer them also a place to train.

And I'm in the middle of reorganizing, getting equipment and trying to brand it around something. It's not that easy if you think about it. So how to call it? Like, should it be functional fitness or the grinder, grinder zone, or grinding zone, or something like that?

And also, the current project I'm trying to do is like, let's take these commercial stuff and recreational athletes as an example. So I built some type of a query, like a form, Google form. So if someone wants to join the guided—let's call it like a semi-private—group training.

You are pretty much limited by the equipment. You need to organize things based on the equipment available. But you also have athletes, or parents in this case, who are with different abilities and different objectives, training under the same roof, in the same time with the same limited equipment. So what I'm trying to do now is to come up with some type of a prescription that takes all of that into account.

And I can quickly be more agile on the spot figuring out when someone new comes in and they need to figure out—this guy or girl is not particularly suited to do some type of a, say, a back squat, whatever, but they still need to train with the group. So I need to quickly come up with an alternative.

And also collect the data alongside. So it's a complex problem, but I'm enjoying solving it because it can also scale up. Because it's going to solve the problem of other people and it can help the community and also create potentially a product which can be sold. So I'm trying to do so.

So at the moment I'm building an app, actually Excel, Excel workbook, which can come up as an app eventually to take all of these into account. So what do you do when someone new comes in when you don't have the maximum? So you cannot do, you cannot use percent-based stuff. So how can I quickly adapt to that scenario under, again, constraints? Because we might have on a given block in training we might have a squat rack as a station, potentially hanging equipment, dumbbells, and you need to come up with a particular solution for an individual.

And also, here I'll give you one analogy—so 2010, I was, it's not actual analogy, it's an example, real life, I think I, I was 2010, I was with Mike Boyle in Massachusetts as an intern. And when you sign up for a summer training, particularly recreational athletes also, you get a form. You need to fill up the form. And in that form you enter stuff like your goals, what you want to achieve, like lose body fat, feel good, improve performance, rehab my injuries, and so forth. And then everybody does the same workout, right?

So I mean, you can achieve most of these goals by doing the same generic workout, right? So what I'm trying also to do with this is to organize and segregate people with different goals, or at least something they think they're different goals. And sometimes they just need to start working out. They're going to figure out what they want to do and things like that.

But eventually, let's say someone wants to do rehab their shoulder injuries and someone might want to lose body fat and someone might want to gain extra muscle, and they are training at the same time, in the same, under same roof, with the same equipment. And I have few potential solutions. One is to have a training a little bit modular so you can quickly fork during the workout in the same spot.

So I'm trying to figure out how to do it both in real life with our clients and also come up with a solution that can be later on scaled or sold as some type of a franchise, or pretty much make money out of it.

James de Lacey5:29

Hopefully make some money out of it. It's always nice in coaching because there ain't much incident areas of the profession. But it's actually a good segue into, I believe you must have coined Agile Periodization yourself since you're also doing a school on it. So it'd be good to go into the topic of it and maybe explain for everyone listening, what is Agile Periodization and why does it even exist when there's a billion other periodization schemes out there?

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Mladen Jovanovic8:04

So pretty much came around 2014 when I was in Qatar. And because I code, I write stuff in R, make tools for coaches, and I tend to read literature about software development, like coding books, project management books and so forth. So I stumbled, pretty much Amazon recommendation, on the Scrum book. And it's about the project management, agile project management in software industry.

And I was reading it and I'm like, hell man, this is so applied to our domain. It's, I mean, it's not like I'm the first to pinpoint to the complexities of predicting how the people will respond and so forth. John Kiely was there critiquing traditional periodization. We have different frameworks in different industries. For example, Cynefin or Cynefin framework, identifying simple, complicated, complex, and chaotic domains. That's all pretty much known and everybody's talking about it.

And this Scrum book gave me a little bit more operational stuff that I can actually try implementing. So it's pretty much my implementation of the agile software development into working with in sport performance. And also solves out some of the conundrums that I've been wrestling with over the years. Like, you read stuff in the textbooks in the college and then you come up working with the athletes and then you're like, this doesn't really work in real life.

So I have so many, I call it bottom-up problems. Like as I stated previous, like athletes with different perspectives, different backgrounds, different objectives, but need to train at with the same equipment. You might have, say, in the combat sports, you create like a long-term plan for the athlete and they got bad contact in a sparring, they have a wrist problem, so cannot do any lifting with the wrist, or twisted ankle during a scrimmage in a no-gi. So you need to immediately come up with something that's adjusting as you go. So pretty much planning as you go.

And last few months I've been trying to even more make it more operationalized, make a clearer framework. And I got few ideas from actually working with team sports. So I'll give you one example, which is quite obvious. And initially I saw it as a problem, but now I see it as a solution.

Is that, for example, in traditional sports, let's call it traditional kilogram-centimeter-seconds, so where you actually competing like in the Olympics, track and field, including the combat sports, the competition season is quite short and then you have a large preparatory periods. And most of the knowledge pretty much on physical preparation and planning comes from that type of sports. And when I started working in football and team sports, we had competition every week and sometimes multiple times per week.

And I saw it as a potential problem. So now I call them as multiple—I don't know how to call these sports—like long season sports, something like that. And the question is like, how can we apply that logic to sports such as combat sports? And I think we can.

So similarly, the difference between say preseason and in-season in team sports is not that different. So in season we have few—you have a match, travel, recovery, you have day or two to load, then you taper for the next match and so forth, and that tends to repeat. So the question is like, is the preseason that different than the in-season, particularly for team sports? And the answer is no, maybe a week, but then in week two or week three you already are starting to have some type of friendly matches.

And I think that can be also applied to these short season sports, like combat sports, when you have like a major competition every few months, is to simulate—you don't need to have a competition, but you can as if you are having a competition. So you have these shorter blocks and you use them as tiny experiments. You have some threads of stuff that needs to be inside the program, but then you keep experimenting.

So every week you might have like a harder sparring session where you actually simulating the conditions on a match. So that might involve no stoppages, no instructions, like in a normal skill practice. You have specific duration of the bout, like five sets of five or three sets of five minutes with one minute break. You put people around, you create like an atmosphere. They need to warm up for it. You record it. And then you have—I mean, they don't need to kill each other on that session. It's not a real fight, but you act as it is. And you also use it as a test.

So that has multiple benefits. It keeps athletes on the toes because they need to demonstrate what they learned. So they don't drift into good enough. And that good enough can drift across the time because if you have like four months to prepare for a match, you might drift into good enough. But this keeps you on your toes. It also gives you information immediately where you need to be working on or maybe lacking.

And you can use it as a test, as a de—as a we can also do review of a particular scenarios that happened there and so forth. Again, it's not like you're going to jump bandwagons based on a performance on that, but it's going to give you extra information about what worked, what not.

And then, so long story short is that the idea behind Agile Periodization is having these iterative blocks of time where you have certain ceremonies inside. So you have, say, one iteration in agile development in software industry, they call it a sprint. It's like one, usually seven to 14 days. And in that sprint you have certain time-boxed stuff and certain ceremonies. You need to plan, you need to demonstrate what you have built, and then you need to review, so do a retrospective.

So with the review is like you demonstrate the software, and with the retrospective you are trying to update or improve the processes behind it. So that's a little bit, it's more formal, it's ceremonial, let's call it like that, and it's transparent. So the idea is that, okay, we start with something I call it a Minimum Viable Program, MVP, and through few iterations you come up with something that's pretty stable. So the idea behind Agile Periodization is that plan as you go.

It's not like you have a big chunk of plan and then development and that's it. So this is more iterative. You figure out as you go because you never know what's going to work, conditions change and so forth. So the athlete might get some type of a small injury. We had, usually the combat athletes have at least have issues with the staph infections and other stuff, type of infections, and sometimes you never know how things going to work around. So that's pretty much the long story compressed.

James de Lacey17:30

How does that look with strength and conditioning then in terms of the planning and programming? So is it just kind of like, this is what we're doing this week based on what I think you need, and then kind of just iterating week on week from that, where you're kind of just logically progressing if needed, or something comes up changing things based on what feedback you get from the athlete or injuries or anything like that?

Mladen Jovanovic17:30

I would say you always start with some type of a theory that you believe is going to work. So that can come up with evidence-based practice or practice-based evidence. That's some type of a historical data that it seems to be working. You want to make sure that you cover all the bases and then you keep that thread of that, and then that's pretty much your, I call it left side of the barbell, protecting from the downside. And then you can experiment.

So it's just like when you have this type of a baseline, you are free to experiment, because if the experiment fails, you still have a baseline stuff. So the idea also behind the agile periodization with these frequent and formalized testing sessions is that you can always rely on that. And when you have a testing session, you're always going to be working on all the elements of the fight. You're not going to invest, say, 3 weeks in doing an aerobic zone, right, what I mean, like base. So it's going to keep you on the toes.

But to answer your question is that you can start experimenting. So I'll give you one example, when we work with Alexander Rakic. So we wanted to try to do a micro dosing, and micro dosing is just doing a very short strength session, can be explosive session, or heavier conditioning after the MMA skill session rather than a separate session itself.

And originally that's a good idea. I would say something to to try, but we figured out it takes too long. So it takes like 2 and 1/2 hours to finish a session, and also Alexander said, you know what, I prefer to do it as a separate session. So I was like, fine with me, you just need to figure out.

So I don't think there's like a hard, this is the way to do it. And probably in combat sports, speaking of that testing session, your partners to do that session are not always available at the time you want them. So sometimes it's like, my sparring session can cannot do Saturday this week, he can do it on Wednesday, and then you need to figure out, okay, how can we adjust to that. So I think you need to have these few key workouts planned, and then everything should be kind of more flexible around them.

And when it comes to strength training, I would say you just want to tick it off the box, is like you want to make sure that you hit two total body sessions, something like that. And sometimes that can be a full session in itself, and sometimes can be like a quick micro dosing session after a MMA skill session or something like that. So let's say a skill session was quite easy, the athlete doesn't feel like being worked on, and you might say, okay, let's do one upper body movement, one lower body movement, or some isometric squeezes and something like that.

So I think you just need to be attending to what's happening in the training. And I also think the athletes themselves need to be responsible a little bit, just to be also attending and it's a catchphrase, like listening to their own bodies. But eventually create a framework, and for few iterations you're going to come up with something doable.

James de Lacey21:25

I think for most of us that have worked in team sports, we kind of understand week to week things change, athletes coming from games injured, we have to make changes on the fly. I think where people might hear this and maybe struggle a little, that they may be prescribed or maybe doing their own program, they're like, okay, this week I have squat, three sets of five at 70%, next week it's three sets of four at 75%.

They have this percentage-based stuff, it's all sorted out, set reps maybe for the next four weeks. How can someone maybe take what they're doing there and have this more agile approach to training if they already maybe have, or maybe they're so used to this kind of structure?

Mladen Jovanovic21:25

I would say that's an outstanding question. And I've been kind of struggling to sort that out. I think this type of progression gives you long-term load progression, just a trend, and then you're going to fluctuate around it. So it's just making sure that in the long run you should be increasing your loads, if that makes sense, but doesn't necessarily imply to do it every session, like have a pressure to increase every session. So you probably are familiar with the starting strength progressions, and just increasing every session.

I think that works particularly if you are a beginner or you are only doing that. But eventually after few weeks it can become like, oh [expletive], this week I squatted 150, next week I need to 152, and then you are focusing on the wrong things, if that makes sense, particularly if you're combat athletes. I think the focus is a skill session, is the MMA skill session, and then everything around it should be a little bit more flexible.

So I think you also have some type of combat sport athletes who gain confidence from doing extra stuff, like feeling strong in a squat, in a bench, that gives them a little bit of confidence, feeling being prepared. So I think that's also quite important to address. So from a case to case, but eventually the point is not to become a powerlifter or bodybuilder, right? But also on the flip side is also you want to make sure that you have some type of a trend.

So how I deal with that, I tend to prefer like a three to four week planning blocks, let's call it like that, with strength training. So let's say I use, I call it the training or prescription maximum for, say, bench press. So let's say 100 kg, and you use that to prescribe training across 3 to four weeks. So whatever. So it can be like three sets of five at 75, then next week is 77, and then 80.

And then if everything goes well, then you next 3 weeks, you can bump up that prescription maximum. So it doesn't necessarily need to be 1mm. It can be, usually it's a little bit submax. So next week you might increase it to 102. So you just, and you're going to get this zigzag or waving pattern, right?

So but eventually the idea is to, over the long run, you are increasing your loads. So we can use, you can, we can use this type of percentage-based prescription to give you some type of a ballpark estimate. At the end of the day is that I think it's a subjective feeling that needs to be listened to, or you can use it as a quality quality control. So you might prescribe, say, do sets of five or sets of four to six, let's call it like that, at certain zone, and don't go over two reps in reserve, if that makes sense.

So it's a combination of bias or structure across time and flexibility or variance using a subjective feeling. So you're going to give a wiggle room, and that wiggle room is slowly climbing up across time, but the athlete will be able to adjust on the spot. So again, depends who you're working with there. You can use different types of prescription, right?

And to be honest, I'm slowly moving back to paper. So I try different apps, and I just had a talk with Alexander Rakic about app. Like we just prefer paper. I just want to print him a paper PDF and he can write weights and things like that, rather than looking in a phone. I mean, there are pros and cons with both approaches. Phone is good for if you're working with recreational or selling your workout, separate of your service. So they can download your workout and they can check the exercises and so forth.

So I think the apps are good for that, and also collecting the data. But to be honest, I think we are overdoing this data collection stuff. So it doesn't need to be that damn complex. So, I went off the script, right? A little bit.

James de Lacey26:42

I'm going to plug your strength card builder, because I've been using your strength card builder since you made it. I think in 2015.

I've been a big user with that, with all the teams I've worked with, because it's so handy to be able to plan blocks out of it, drop down menus, add all your different things in there, so it's just all there to be able to refer back to. It's an awesome template, that one.

Mladen Jovanovic26:49

I'm trying to improve that one, because that one is kind of, because it use VBA to save the workouts.

It's kind of stuck to one.

James de Lacey27:12

Yeah, mine would crash because I would fill it full and then it will just keep crashing.

Mladen Jovanovic27:19

I'm trying to simplify it so you can actually create your own kind of style of planning. And also to address the stuff that I mentioned previously. So sometimes with some athletes you want to have a ballpark estimate percentages, but with some you don't know their maximums or you don't have training maximum.

So you need to start with something that's kind of good enough to have some type of a prescription, making sure that loads goes up over weeks. And then at the end of the day it's just coaching on the spot and teaching them how to adjust it, because sometimes even us coaches need someone to tell us to, sometimes it's hard to adjust yourself, right?

Even if you know, so how many times you went to the gym, you're restarting and you feel like, I can lift this, but you shouldn't, right? Just because you can doesn't mean you should. And then something pops up or breaks.

James de Lacey28:21

It's like every coach's life, I think.

Mladen Jovanovic28:25

Yeah. At the end of the day, we are just dumb, right, coaching ourselves. We just need some type of a structure and some type of simple rules, heuristics, to be able to use them on the spot.

James de Lacey28:40

How does conditioning fit into this kind of agile periodization approach? We can go with fighters as well. It's always a good topic to go down with the podcast, but any other examples too of athletes and stuff like that, kind of with how it fits within a plan and then how it's kind of adjusted in the weeks and what dictates what gets adjusted and why.

Mladen Jovanovic29:02

So I would say, similar to previous, I don't have a concrete solution. I have problems that bother me, and I think we need to start with this idea: can we reach high level of conditioning needed for a sport mainly by doing that sport, right? Like how much do you need to actually supplement? And I think we can reach, particularly for conditioning, I think we can reach very, very high levels of condition without doing anything extra.

And I know that combat sports are quite notorious for doing some type of road work, a lot of road work and things like that. But when you start thinking about, I should put combat sport and methodology behind it as our top priority, I think this becomes second nature and can be easily solved. Like you can achieve a lot just by doing your sport, at least from a conditioning perspective. And the question is how much extra stuff you want to do and need to do.

So I'll give you one example. I'll also use Alexander Rakic like in the previous group they focused, I would say, too much on this type of conditioning, like he did a lot of bike work on a grinder work. The objective was to increase the VO2 max and things like that. But now we just focused so much on a skill perspective, just making sure that he does all the skill work with high quality with, pretty much everything was ecological, doing line training with a live opponent.

Unfortunately, he had such a bad performance in a in a latest UFC bout. But the training camp and everything was nearly perfect. But speaking of him is that we tried to do everything through combat sports for conditioning. Like we did some explosive work and lifting weights and so forth, but pretty much everything was dealing with a live opponent.

But eventually if you keep doing that, you come up with, you mentally become a little bit overburdened. So we tend to give him, I use a term from Mike Tuchscherer, I use it like a pivot session or pivot day. You can call it recovery session, but it's not mainly recovery, it's mostly pivoting from your main activity for the sake of being sane, right?

Just moving away from a gym, moving away from the mats. And he likes cycling, so we say what we can do is you can go for a cycle, 1 hour or something like that, that's zone two. It will help with the cardio. It will make him want to come to the gym again.

So I think we need to see a bigger picture from that perspective, not only like am I increasing the threshold of VO2 max or something like that, separate from the complete picture of a session in a whole preparation. But long story short, I was wrestling with that and I actually started writing the manual and I have it in a very, very rough draft. So I was exploring a little bit all this stuff. I have Joel Jameson book here, right, so I keep referencing it, and I think it becomes very complex at the end of the day.

So I think you need to do some type of extensive work. Can be swimming, running, riding a bicycle, or jump rope or something like that. Just making sure that you do 30, 40, 60 minutes of easy work. And then do some type of hard conditioning. And again, that hard conditioning I would say can also be on that non-specific equipment, intervals, 15/15 or 15/30 intervals on a bike or running or something like that, or hill sprints.

But at the end of the day I think you can do all of these also on a say on a heavy bag. We call them punch out intervals, and you can also do some type of isometric squeezes for wrestling or MMA or BJJ.

So I think that will be more specific. And it's a tricky question to answer, okay, do two hit sessions per week or something like that. But also something to keep in mind is that at the end of the day we train athletes. So I think I'll say first you are training the human, then the athlete, and then the fighter. So I think even with the high level we still need to address some type of basic, basic athleticism, if that makes sense, just to, it doesn't necessarily need to improve performance in the sport, but it can act as supportive stuff.

So let's say the cycling for Alex was, will he is he gonna be a better MMA fighter from cycling? Probably not. But is it is like a meditation for him, go for a longer run or a bike ride and then think through, relax, and then come out for the next few days of training fresh, more receptive to actually do that session. So, not sure I answered your question probably.

James de Lacey34:59

No, it's good because it goes through your thought process behind it, and it's good for me. It's good for the listeners as well to, that's what I like about the podcast because you can kind of just talk through things and then people can kind of understand kind of where you're coming from too, versus I don't know, just like—

Mladen Jovanovic35:13

In a in a school community that I started recently, I just, I'm finishing with some type of course on philosophy behind agile periodization. And I think one of the main, I call it mental models or a problem that we all the coaches keep wrestling with, is problem of substance versus form. So substance is underlying traits or qualities, and form is how you combine them.

So if you think about it, you have coaches who might say ah you need to do intervals to improve your VO2 max, and some coaches might say ah you ditch that, we just do everything through sparring. So one is more focused on a substance, one is more focused on a form. At the end of the day we need to be wise to combine them.

So let's say if your training session is very intermittent, which is the case for combat sports, then sometimes you need to overload these underlying traits or qualities, whatever they be. So focus more on a substance. Rather than doing intervals, you might go for three times 3 minutes, something like, call it a VO2 max interval. So it's not specific to a sport, but it's needed to overload the underlying qualities that might be needed for a sport, if that makes sense.

So we can, we need to stimulate, not only simulate the sport. And you've been answering this problem or this conundrum with resistance training in combat sports. You don't necessarily need to always mimic the sport, because you are actually not developing anything. You are not creating enough of overload to target those underlying substances, if that makes sense.

James de Lacey37:00

Yeah, for sure. I've spoken about this recently on a few different things where I just kind of split it up, you have, well at least in conditioning and even strength training, you've got, you're either targeting the physiology or you're targeting technical tactical skill development and movement efficiency.

And then these two things kind of come together. You're doing something probably non-specific to overload to get the physiological change or the adaptation in the gym, and you're doing the stuff on the mats or whatever it is you're doing that's going to overload the movement efficiency. And then this underlying stuff kind of just transfers over and gives you a little bit more to do on the other side.

It's, yeah, I guess as you mentioned in strength training it's kind of been made obvious, but in conditioning it's probably made less obvious. I guess maybe because physiology is a little harder to grasp for most of social media.

Mladen Jovanovic37:49

I just had a talk yesterday with—we have the Brave, I think he's Bantamweight champion, Borislav. He is very good fighter and he also thinks. We spoke yesterday about how we can modify certain constraints in a drill to overload some stuff.

So the problem is, if you want to say overload isometric squeezing, being able to squeeze someone with a specific constraint, or if you want to develop ability to punch hard, to condition your wrists and everything, because you do need to—you cannot use a live human because you're going to hurt him, right? So you need to use a dummy or a heavy bag to do so. So we cannot make everything ecological or echo. You need to isolate it, so move outside.

So that's from a conditioning perspective, at least from that punch-out drills and these specific squeezes, let's call it that for MMA. Sometimes you can do it with the opponent, but also when you talk about this tactical stuff, I think the objectives are slightly different. With the tactical or form, you want to be as economic and as efficient as possible. So, you don't want to squeeze unless you really need to. So, you want to save yourself from burning matches because you never know what's going to happen down the road in a match.

So, you don't want to waste all your—I would say you want to solve the problem with the minimum amount of effort. So, you want to train efficiency, smoothness, with the skill sessions. And with the substance sessions, you actually want the opposite. So, you want to actually burn the matches. You want to actually overload the stuff. You want to be fatigued.

So, sometimes combining them might risk teaching bad kind of tendencies or patterns. Makes sense. So, if you roll with someone, you want to be smooth, try to finish someone with the least amount of stuff. And then if you want to overload some underlying substance, underlying traits or qualities, you want to isolate and say, "Okay, we're going to go for a say 20 second maximum hold on the dummy or a heavy bag." And then you really want to waste that energy to overload.

So I see these as two barbells, two sides of the barbell. You do need both. You cannot just mimic everything with the sport. You sometimes need to isolate to overload, if that makes sense.

James de Lacey40:38

No, exactly. That's perfect. Then to further go down that road, I want to touch on that Badger Protocol too because that's become pretty popular around. Do you want to just explain what the Badger Protocol is and why—I haven't read too much on your Badger Protocol. I haven't used it myself. So interesting to go into why it came about and what you're actually trying to achieve with this particular protocol.

Mladen Jovanovic41:03

Yeah. First of all, I'll shoot you a book. It just came from Amazon. So I'll tell you how it come up. So 2021 season I was doing a lot of hard enduro riding on a motorcycle, and after every bout of that for a few days I feel broken, everything hurts.

So, I go to the gym and I'm like, what the [expletive] should I do? And then I come up with the idea of just making sure to use lower loads and just making sure that I work on again structure substance on the tendons and things like that. So, I would say invented—there's nothing new under the sun. So, I formulated, I call it the iso sandwich.

So, you start with an iso hold, do a few quality reps and then iso hold. So let's say a split squat, you take a load, you go down, hold for five seconds, and then do five reps and then finish with five seconds. So this way you have this built-in limitation. So you don't go hard with a heavy load, right?

And the iso sandwich was the original name. But funny enough, when you ride enduro in Serbia here we call each other Yazawats in Serbia which is badger. We call each other badgers, right? So I was like [expletive] I call it the Badger Protocol. So the name stuck, right? And then it gained traction online and I was like hell, it's just wrapping simple things in a nice box.

It's nothing major. So just this isometric hold is just making sure that you don't do too much too soon, if that makes sense. Just focusing on the quality reps rather than chasing the numbers.

And I think it's similar to the concept, so imagine you do a sparring with someone who is much weaker than you or skill-wise worse than you, say boxing, and then you can actually destroy this individual. But first of all you're going to lose a training partner, he's not going to learn, you're not going to learn. So to create equal playing field, you need to—I keep forgetting the name—you need to put limitations on yourself.

So you might say, okay, I'll only do counter punches or I'll just punch with single punches, straight single punches, or I'll try to create angles. So this individual is learning and you are also learning because you are putting some type of a limitation on yourself.

So I think similarly when you use submaximal loads in the gym, but because most of the time also when we use percent base we want to be more conservative, we probably going to have some type of a wiggle room. So when I use loads that are below my maximum, I need to put some type of a limitation on myself to actually make them useful.

So what we can do, we can go for higher reps or we can slow the tempo down or we can increase the velocity or in this case we can use poses, you can use tempo squat or posed squat or in this case the Badger Protocol.

Just start with a pose, do quality reps and then end with the pose. And then if you feel a lot of wiggle room, the last pose can be slightly longer. So handicapping, that's the word I've been looking for. So you want to handicap yourself to use loads that are lower than your maximum, than your capacity, just to make sure that you are actually targeting capacities, if that makes sense. You're modifying the load.

So similarly to sparring with someone who's much weaker than you, you want to handicap yourself. The idea is similar with the, again in this case Badger Protocol, but can be something else.

James de Lacey42:51

So, are you typically using something like this in a quote unquote general preparation phase or maybe a phase directly after a fight when loads might be typically low? Maybe someone coming out of injury. Is that when you're mainly using this or is this also used maybe within a more peaking style program closer to a fight?

Mladen Jovanovic45:30

I would say it can be used for assistant exercises, can be used as a back off set, and it can be used as a full training phase when you are restarting, if that makes sense. So it's—I mean it's a method that can be applied, holds or something like that. So it doesn't necessarily need to be—it's not a program. It's a method you can play with.

James de Lacey45:54

Gotcha. That makes sense. Yeah. I need to play—I'm going to play around with that probably tomorrow actually. Do a couple of bits and pieces. Maybe try it with some push-ups. Maybe even try with split squats like you mentioned there too. Yeah. Are there any particular movements you found that it works better for or really well for or ones that you typically maybe try and avoid?

Mladen Jovanovic46:04

All the pulling movements are a little bit tricky. Pull-ups can be tricky to hold, but you don't necessarily need to hold at the shortened position in the case of pull-ups. With the pressing stuff, you usually do the holds at the longest length, right?

And according to research, these holding positions, actually performing reps in a stretch position can help with strength or hypertrophy. But again I think it's a minutia, right? So all the evidence-based papers are actually taking a very small stuff and then blowing it up out of proportion.

So I think it's—doesn't necessarily need to improve anything structure-wise. Although I do think for tendons and things like that to adapt, according to the research you do need to have some type of a hold so the tendons can have a [expletive] and then that [expletive] can actually stimulate the processes in the tendon. Again there are different mechanisms or theories about it.

But taking that outside, I think it's also technique-wise. You can be working on a technique and a posture on in the worst position. So see it as a worst case scenario. Worst case training is in Brazilian jiu-jitsu escaping from a back mount. So you put yourself in a shitty situation and then you work your way out.

So I think the badgers are similar. You put yourself in a worst case scenario and then work yourself out. And then if you have problems with the posture, with the technique in a squat, your ass rounds or low back rounds in a bottom position, you can just pause at that position, focus on posture, squeezing.

So, even if it doesn't have any structural effects, it can have these technique effects, if that makes sense. So it can prepare you for upcoming training phases or blocks where you actually use higher loads.

James de Lacey48:31

Nice. And to finish this off as well, you mentioned you're writing a book on endurance training for, I think it was for combat sports you said it was broadly. Do you want to just go into, I mean we touched a little bit on conditioning, but be interesting to kind of go into maybe the whole philosophy around that conditioning for combat sports and what, or it's probably going to be in your book. So maybe just some ideas of kind of their overarching philosophy.

Mladen Jovanovic48:56

So tricky one is that, as I said previously, I think we should save all these high intensity stuff. It depends on the phase, right? So I think we can split, when it comes to combat sports, we can split the season into three different thematic blocks. So one is after a fight, let's call it a pivot block or recovery block, then you might have off the camp, I don't know how to call it, like a normal block. Then you might have a camp block and a fight, right? So you have three like a pivot, developmental, and say peaking, whatever, or camp.

And the way you're going to select the loads and condition methods will kind of tend to differ, right? So I would say with the pivot, the best thing is to move away from your normal activity. Just do practice another sport or something like that, just go for a cycling, go for a swim, travel with your family to another country, take a break or something like that for like a week or two or something like that.

And with the developmental, you want to focus on the skill work and you want to make sure that the skill work is done at the highest level of quality. So all the conditioning should kind of support that. So conditioning will be more, I would say, extensive, but maybe high intensity stuff also, but you mainly going to do it on a non-specific with a non-specific means. So it can be a bike, can be running, can be sled pushing, can be rope, something like that.

Then when you go in a camp, I think then your condition should start to become more specific. But then it's not that easy because with the training camp you might have so many stuff happening in a specific manner. So you still want to make sure that you continue doing some general stuff. So I would say high intensity conditioning should be specific. But in the training camp, you still want a thread of something easier, like go for a swim or go for a walk, go for a cycle, just maintain the pace.

Otherwise, you're just going to create so much specific stress for a specific tissues that might break, right? If you do everything specific, you create specific loadings. So you want to kind of distribute that stress, hopefully to avoid kind of overloading a specific stuff. So if you do everything like you do heavy punch intervals, you heavy spar, your shoulder or your elbow or your wrist might break. So it's always juggling all of these. So again, unfortunately...

James de Lacey52:07

Do you think there's a potentially a trade-off with going say specific high intensity work if there's a trade-off with intensity? So obviously on like off equipment you can just go balls out and you can get max intensity, but say you're doing, I don't know, different like sparring scenarios or something like that, obviously the intensity, there is some potentially some trade-off because you're going to live life opponent. Do you think there's some kind of interaction there or is that something that needs to be solved or that maybe that doesn't matter?

Mladen Jovanovic52:37

I think there's also a language thing, like phenomena. I mean, talk conditioning. I don't think conditioning is only physical. So conditioning is stress inoculation, I don't want to call it being able to handle a competition stress. So I think that's some type of a form conditioning.

So I think first of all we have this language barrier. So we tend to explain or simplify or reduce the complex phenomena of fighting to physiology, and I think it's useful as a substance, right, but it's just only one part of the equation. So I think hard sparrings develop something else, not only conditioning like in a simplistic way like VO2 max or aerobic conditioning, so forth.

And also there are different stuff that needs to be developed like you want to condition your wrists, your nose, your neck, right? So it's slightly beyond the physiology and VO2 max and lactate threshold. So that's why I think the hard sparrings are useful for.

But again, if you go back to the substance versus form, sometimes we want to isolate some type of a component and hit it with maybe non-specific stuff. So it's like a seesaw. You always have a like a two sides of a coin. You have a positive side and a negative side.

So speaking of say punch out drills, punch out drills will be really good if your sparrings are light. So you do like a touch sparring or a flow sparring. It's very good for skill development and everything. But you don't condition yourself for hard hitting. So your conditioning needs to be maybe punch out drills on a heavy bag or like some type of specific conditioning with the pad work because you want to condition your joints and everything for hard hitting, and then in that case that's a good one.

But if you do a lot of hard sparring and then you do extra punch out drills, then you might create like too much load for these joints, right? So it becomes problematic. So that's why I said maybe in those scenarios when you have hard, like when you have hard specific conditioning, you're going to do easier non-specific conditioning. If your specific work is easy, you're going to do hard non-specific work. You're just going to kind of balance the seesaw, if that makes sense.

So I think that's one of the main mental models or principles behind the decision-making. If everything you do is like easy, flowish sparring, which I think is very needed for skill development, then your conditioning, you want to hit the stuff that you don't hit with the specific work. If that makes sense.

James de Lacey55:38

Yep. No, that makes sense. That was perfect. That answered the philosophy question for sure.

Mladen Jovanovic55:42

And I think this will fluctuate throughout the season, right? The specific work as a core, that's going to tend to fluctuate. So and as a result, your selection of non-specific and also extra specific condition will also fluctuate to kind of follow that along.

James de Lacey56:06

Mhm. That makes sense. Now that's perfectly, that was everything I had asked or at least questions written down for you on that. Where can people find you, follow you, keep up with what you're doing and everything with Complementary Training?

Mladen Jovanovic56:19

So yeah, I'm on Instagram pretty often. So Physical Prep on Instagram, Twitter X. I think I tend, I tend slowly going, I would say use of Twitter is going a little bit down.

James de Lacey56:33

Yeah, the reach sucks on there, man.

Mladen Jovanovic56:36

Yeah. So I open on Twitter, I open to check the comments and I get like ads. I'm like unrelated unless you pay or something like that. So I'm on Instagram. I started a School community. It's Agile Periodization on School community, trying to share more like work in progress notes and some type of working projects and stuff. So people can actually jump in and help me and help us kind of develop it more, fine-tune it.

So and also ComplementaryTraining.com, which is my main website where we post kind of finished stuff and blog posts and what have you.

James de Lacey57:20

Perfect. I'll link this up in the description for everyone to check out, but I appreciate you coming on, man.

Mladen Jovanovic57:24

Thanks for having me, James.