Alcohol And Performance & S&C Differences Between Grappling Arts w/ Andy Marley (SSOF Ep 118)

Andy Marley2:10

Either in one go, or like I said, you can go down to a daily dose. You can either do 10,000 IU 5 days a week, or you can lower the dose a little bit further and do it daily. It's up to yourself.

James de Lacey2:37

I found that, well then again, I've been so bad with my supplements lately anyway. I haven't been taking any except for my normal protein powder, so I just need to get back into the rhythm of actually taking the damn things and actually trying to get some of those vitamin D benefits.

But recently you published a paper around alcohol and it'd be interesting for you. I haven't actually gone through the paper yet. Would be good to hear from you what you looked at there and maybe some of the practical outcomes from it.

Andy Marley3:00

Obviously, being from Scotland, we liked to drink, so it seemed to make sense to try.

James de Lacey3:00

Like most commonwealth countries, it seems a problem, doesn't it?

Andy Marley3:00

No, I always wanted to see what happens when you ingest alcohol prior to doing submaximal exercise. Because at the end of the day, alcohol provides calories, as does protein, fats, carbohydrates, but we don't tend to consider that obviously when we're doing exercise because people tend to not drink before exercise. You tend to have a loss of neuromuscular function, so, well, at least you're Craig Jones.

James de Lacey3:32

Craig Jones on a podcast recently said he has a couple of beers before he heads out. Well, nose beers, normal beers?

Andy Marley3:32

If that's what you want to do then, then cool. But generally speaking, people don't do that and we don't really know how the body would react to trying to exercise when there's a greater calorie expenditure in the presence of alcohol. Because when we drink, we preferentially oxidize the alcohol because it's a poison. It becomes the primary fuel source.

And, well, I say a primary fuel source, alcohol has a maximum oxidizing rate of 0.1 gram per kilogram of fat free mass per hour. So the actual maximal oxidizing rate of alcohol is quite low.

James de Lacey4:03

Okay, so does that then change how much fat and carbohydrate we use during submaximal exercise?

Andy Marley4:03

So we didn't really know. We wanted to find that out. What we did is we got eight people who drank recreationally, so they weren't allowed to be if they're alcoholics, can't do it. If you don't drink at all, can't do it either.

James de Lacey4:38

Well, just questionnaire, are you an alcoholic? It's one of those sensitive questions.

Andy Marley4:38

Say, so how much do you drink per week roughly, trying to be as unjudged as possible? There was actually one person, I was like, actually, I don't think you can do this study from what the answers you've given me, and here's here's a leaflet, you may want to go and speak to somebody about that.

But what we did was it was a randomized crossover design, so they all acted as their own control. One time they had an alcohol condition, the other time they had a water condition. So they came into the lab total three times. First time they did a VO2 max test, so we know how hard we should be getting them to work.

And the second time they came in and they were told to record the diet the day before and also the sleep. Came in, they gave a urine sample, so we looked at volume, osmolality, that usual measures. Height, weight, whatnot. Fitted them with a heart rate monitor, some, and then we got them to drink either three doubles, so three or six standard UK measures of vodka with diluting juice and water, or...

James de Lacey5:33

In what time frame?

Andy Marley5:33

In a short time frame, an hour. So we had six drinks within an hour, first thing in the morning. So that was actually quite a lot of fun because during that resting period before we had gone through the exercise, we had to take some extra urine samples and whatnot. And I remember taking one of the participants through to the toilet to get the urine sample because he looked a bit unsteady on his feet, and he pulled his head into the office of the Dean of the School and went, "shh," like that, because he thought he was having a great time. He was blazed at half nine in the morning.

So we took all the resting measures and then they cycled at 50% of the VO2 max for 90 minutes. So relatively long time but relatively low intensity. So there wasn't actually a performance outcome to it. So when they were doing it we let them watch a movie on the laptop in front of them as long as they were keeping to that correct cadence and make sure the heart rate was correct and whatnot.

And during that time we would take gas samples in the Douglas bags, blood glucose levels, RPE level as how hard you think you're working. And then there was a two-hour period afterwards where we just continued to take heart rate, blood glucose and urine samples. So the protocol was exactly the same down to the standardized breakfast that we gave them for both alcohol and water conditions.

It's just obviously one time they had alcohol, one time they didn't. But all the fluid that they drank was matched, so it was the same volume of fluid. It's just in the water condition they had more water. One of things, one of the challenges for that was we couldn't blind people to it. At the end of the day, even if I got a funnel and poured vodka down your throat you didn't taste it, you still have the intoxicating effects of the alcohol.

There's no suitable placebo to mask or to mimic alcohol. So it was just one of those things, we didn't tell them what they were going to have when they came in, but as soon as they had a drink they knew. So it was, couldn't really be blinded. But in a lot of ways that doesn't matter because it was a submaximal exercise protocol. We weren't looking at exercise performance, so it wasn't as important for that.

And what we found was that taking alcohol prior to submaximal exercise doesn't change how much fat or carbohydrate you utilize to complete the exercise. And this is probably because the maximal oxidizing rate of alcohol is quite low, like I said, that 0.1 grams per kilogram fat free mass per hour. So obviously people who are larger can oxidize more per hour, people who are smaller oxidize less per hour. But within a 90-minute time period there was no difference, which I thought was quite interesting.

Because people, after they have had a heavy night out the night before, they'll often go to a, a lot of people I know will go to the gym the following day to try and sweat out the hangover and makes them feel better and all that. And it probably does make them feel better, but it doesn't actually change how much fat or carbohydrate you use. And in fact, we also took breath alcohol measures just as a measure of being drunk, essentially.

And during the actual exercise phase, if you look at the paper, it seems that the rate of alcohol clearance in the breath actually seems to slow down a little bit. So you might have heard of people saying, "Oh yeah, you're exercising, you'll burn off the alcohol quicker." That doesn't necessarily seem to be true. However, we didn't measure that. That's just an observation I'm kind of shaming just now, that during the actual exercise, the rate of breath alcohol clearance seemed to slow.

We would need to do another study whereby they took the drink one time with the exercise, one time without, and look at breath alcohol clearance to actually say for certain if that is the case or not. But I thought that was interesting.

Also, there was no difference in blood glucose levels. The blood glucose levels declined in the exercise and then have a small rebound after the exercise, and that was the same for both. The only real difference was during the exercise, heart rate was higher. The average heart rate through the entire protocol was higher, as well as during the resting period. Alcohol caused a rise in heart rate, which then stopped at the end of the trial because by that point a lot of the alcohol had been cleared. So it's gone back to normal.

And obviously the cumulative urine output was a little bit faster in the alcohol condition, but for throughout the whole trial, the total urine produced in each wasn't different. It's just that they produced more urine more quickly at the start, and then this really rapidly dropped off at the end. So alcohol doesn't have as diuretic effect as people might think. People are thinking, "Oh, we go to pub, we go the toilet all the time." But if you have eight pints in 4 hours, you will go to toilet a lot regardless of if that's water or it's beer.

So we showed that the diuretic effect of alcohol with exercise is small and transient. So they were the main findings of that.

But if you want me to expand on this: if you perform intense exercise, then alcohol will decrease performance. I'm not talking about skilled performance, e.g. boxing or anything like that where there's elements of reaction time, muscle coordination, whatnot. There was one paper where they looked at a cycling time trial, one time with alcohol, one time without, and the mean power output was lower in the alcohol condition.

Because the more intense you exercise, the more you rely on carbohydrate as a fuel source. When you drink alcohol, it stops the liver from creating new molecules of glucose, so gluconeogenesis is inhibited in the liver. Also, glycogenolysis seems to be inhibited in the liver as well. There, coupled with skeletal muscle not being able to uptake glucose as well. So when you've been drinking, the skeletal muscle probably doesn't uptake the glucose in the blood as effectively.

So if the liver is releasing less glucose and the muscles aren't taking in the available glucose as well, there's going to be a drop in performance during intense exercise because we're not able to fuel the muscles correctly. But for submaximal exercise, it doesn't really make a difference.

James de Lacey12:14

So in terms of alcohol on performance, directly related to intensity that you're trying to work out. That's why people can smash beers and then do their five or 10K runs as a fun thing. You know, people do that. There's a Beer Mile, you ever heard?

Andy Marley12:14

Oh yeah, yeah, what's that, you smash a beer then run a mile, is that the one?

James de Lacey12:14

Or was it a different, smash a beer then I think it's every 400 meters you smash, then you keep running until each lap.

Andy Marley12:45

I can't think of anything worse. I would spew everywhere.

James de Lacey12:45

That's power chucking. If that makes people happy then great, more power to them.

Andy Marley12:45

Well, I've got your research to lean on now. So say for intense exercise, don't drink beer. But if you have a couple beers and you cycle home, it's not going to really make much of a difference to you. Just be aware that there are extra calories in beer and alcohol in general. So if you are trying to watch your diet, you do need to consider that.

Also, because the heart rate is a little bit higher, if you use heart rate to monitor the intensity of your commute home after having a couple of beers in the pub, I know you might do that, you're probably overestimating how hard you're working. And this is probably because when we drink, there's a small drop in blood pressure and there's more cutaneous vasodilation, which is why when people drink they feel a bit hot, which then means the heart has to work a little bit harder to supply the same volume of oxygen to the working muscles at the same intensity.

James de Lacey13:38

Interesting. Do you think there's a, I know it wasn't covered in the study, but even though there might not be much difference during the actual submaximal exercise, is there potentially a recovery difference between alcohol and no alcohol? Propriety, so let's say recovery between performances if they're going to be able to, I don't know, perform at a similar intensity for the same time after? I mean, for submax, we'll probably, right, because there's not much to it.

Andy Marley14:04

Yeah, you'll be fine. We saw that in the paper. Blood glucose levels were the same in both conditions following. Everything was actually exactly the same following the exercise once alcohol had been cleared. So if you're looking submaximally, just like if you didn't have alcohol, your recovery time will be a lot lower than if you did some massive assault bike sprint interval training session.

Well, no, there doesn't seem to be much of a difference in the way of recovery following again just six standard UK measures. Maximal exercise, if you had more, then it's more the recovery from alcohol poisoning you're concerned about, like a hangover, which is essentially massive dehydration. So there's that side of it as well. But in terms of a little bit of alcohol and a small bit of exercise, there's no real difference in recovery.

James de Lacey15:07

I'm sure you've gone through a lot of the research on it too, but in terms of alcohol after exercise, what are the effects there in terms of, let's, I mean obviously it's going to depend on how much you drink, etc., and everything else, but maybe just a broad general spectrum around that topic.

Andy Marley15:35

The thing is, alcohol consumption, especially in team sports, is so common after a game. You'll know yourself, after playing rugby, what do you do? You go down to the clubhouse and you have a couple pints. Got a couple. Yeah, the first, like the first hand until the beer drafts are brought out and all that. It is part of the game in a lot of ways.

And if you're dehydrated, then drinking beer will help to rehydrate you. It's still water, it's still fluid. Is it as good as having some kind of electrolyte drink? Of course not. But it's better than having nothing as well. So if you're dehydrated, have a couple beers is actually not all that bad a thing.

The problem then comes when people start to binge drink. And then you go into the more dangerous behavior side of it rather than looking at the pure physiological side of it all. And at the end of the day, if you are drinking a lot, and when I say by a lot I mean more than the standard recommended amount every day, then there's going to be problems with liver damage.

If the liver starts to become damaged, it doesn't then release glucose as well, doesn't store glycogen as well, which then means that your overall vat for storing fuel is lower and your ability to get the fuel to the rest of the body is inhibited. So if it's just a little bit every so often, it's probably, it's not great obviously, but it's not going to massively decrease your performance.

But if you're like a George Best type character, but you don't have the natural skill that he did, then there's going to be a massive drop in your performance eventually, because you're not going to be unable to fuel muscle. So people are just going to say, "Oh yeah, I need to drink less because it's going to get me fitter." In some ways that's true, because if you can start to heal up a little bit, once the liver has been damaged from cirrhosis from alcohol consumption, it doesn't really recover from that.

But we can improve the function of what cells are undamaged, which will then mean better glycogen storage and better glucose release into the systemic circulation.

James de Lacey17:27

Got a key thing there because you mentioned as well, obviously within your study, that alcohol isn't more inherently dehydrating than what is thought. So when people talk about, "Hey, one of the reasons not to drink alcohol after exercise, whatever, is because it's a diuretic and it's going to dehydrate you further after exercise," so you're saying that's probably not true?

Andy Marley18:00

No, it won't. If you have a couple of beers afterwards, it's going to help rehydrate you. It's not as good as, as I said, drinking milk or electrolyte tablets or whatever it is. Of course it's not. But it's still better than nothing. It will help rehydrate you a little bit, especially if it's beer. Beer seems to be a better option than like your vodka and cola type deals. Okay, straight whiskey is probably a bad one to go for as well.

James de Lacey18:27

For the high performers listening to this thinking about having beers after their training, still don't do it, but just for learning purposes. But I want to change tack a little bit too. Obviously the alcohol is pretty interesting, but obviously you got sitting there with a couple of good cauliflower...

Ears, so we're going to go into a little bit of strength conditioning for grappling, and it'll be interesting to hear your thoughts around just in—I mean, we can cover your training philosophy maybe to start. We can dive deeper from there, because obviously there's a lot—I think with the popularity of grappling exploding recently, there's a lot of stuff online that is less than ideal, a lot of stuff around, I guess you could say, mimicking jiu-jitsu movements and a lot of, I guess you could say, I still refer to as almost CrossFit 10 plus years ago, when everything was just kind of a small sport of whatever you can do.

So it would be good to kind of run into—let's start with maybe just your overall philosophy around strength conditioning for grappling. We can even start with either just conditioning or just strength training to kind of keep it nice and concise, or go over the whole thing.

Andy Marley19:24

I think it's such a hard question to really answer, despite all the different grappling sets of different rules. The underlying principles are often the same: take somebody down, control them to either pin them or play a lot. The overarching principle is the same.

When it comes to—for me personally, I think that training strength for grappling has to be highly important, because the point of it, for me, doing an S&C session, doing an working with an S&C coach, is exposing the athlete to a beneficial stimulus that they do not get in the actual sport that they're competing. So what I mean by that is when you're grappling or wrestling, even if you're working hard, you don't necessarily contract your muscles to cause knee flexion as hard as you possibly can. That doesn't tend to happen that often, like you would do if you're doing, say, heavy squats.

You then give somebody heavy squats, you expose them to that stimulus, you're then going to get theory increases in coordination, motor unit firing, all that kind of thing, which can then have the transfer to when they're working in their sport. Because if they're stronger and you say put 20 kilograms onto their squat, and they, whenever they perform a takedown, they work at 70% maximum intensity, that 70% maximum intensity is still going to be there when they form their takedown—they're just going to do it a little bit stronger. That kind of makes sense to you?

So for me, for grappling, I think training absolute strength is important, and depending on what the sport, what the rule set is, power should be secondary. Now, for jiu-jitsu, I think absolute strength is the most important, because it tends to be not that powerful kind of movements, whereas for wrestling and judo, power becomes a lot more important. So I think it largely depends, but that's just my own experience.

The problem is that we don't necessarily know what is needed for each sport. Now, what, again, what I mean by that is we've got data that says high-level grapplers in judo have higher Wingate scores, they have this, they have that. We have data which compares high level versus low level within a certain kind of population. But because of the nature of the sport, it is so hard to actually say what is going on.

The only thing we really got is some heart rate data, and from that, people can then go, "Oh well, they're working at Zone 2, so that's oxidative there," or "They're working at Zone 5, that's must be ATP-PCr."

We don't actually know. That could just be nonsense, because especially with grappling, if you got somebody who's really strong lying on top of you putting a knee on belly into your chest, that's going to put your heart rate up, but you're not actually using ATP-PCr. It's just because you're getting crushed and you've got this increase in blood pressure and you're kind of going to try and push somebody off.

There was one paper, it was in 2017, it was from Julio and Franchini, and they actually offered the idea that in a judo match that most of the energy comes from oxidative metabolism, regardless of what stage of the match is, like the first minute or the whole five minutes. They did a one-minute protocol, two-minute protocol, three-minute, up to five-minute protocol, and that as the match went on, greater oxidative contribution, of course.

But even in the first minute, the oxidative system was the predominant energy system during a judo match, followed by the ATP-PCr, with the glycolytic system hovering around about 5 to 10% underneath the whole match.

And if you look at a lot of the blogs and things online, it'll say judo is glycolytic and it uses ATP-PCr. A lot of stuff will say that. But this paper actually says, no, not at all—you need high levels of oxidative metabolism, explosive movements using ATP-PCr, and then high oxidative metabolism kicks in to quickly replenish that before the next defense or attack or counterattack.

So all of a sudden we're going, "Right, so if oxidative ability is the most important system, then should we not be training that?" And then, how is—what's the best way to do that? In my opinion, is of course using sprint intervals, because you get an alteration of boost, but you're also needing to use that ATP-PCr, so more mimics actual energetics of a grappling match.

James de Lacey24:02

It's funny you say that, because when people think, "Oh, it's oxidative, mainly aerobic," they think, "I should be doing more Zone 2." And I'm personally not the biggest fan of that for specific conditioning. The whole—conditioning is to condition somebody to the sport that they're going to be doing. You're not really in that for all that often, especially in an actual proper competitive match. It tends to be a lot higher than that.

I think if you just want to have a little chuckle and go to Zone 2, it's fine if you feel like you should be doing something—because I know some fighters are like that. Trying to get them to take a rest day is a nightmare. So maybe doing a Zone 2 day on a Sunday, for example, they feel like they've done something, and it's not going to overly negatively impact what they're doing in the rest of the week.

But I think doing sprint training is more specific, and you're still getting these improvements in VO2 Max. You're still getting this change in plasma volume, so the blood becomes a little bit more runny, so it can move around a little bit better. You're still getting this increased capillarization, you're still getting increased mitochondrial switch-on, mitochondrial biogenesis. You're still getting all that.

We're also training the body's ability to resynthesize phosphocreatine more effectively, which is then super important for grappling. So for me, like I said, in a kind of roundabout way kind of to answer your question, I think strength must be trained for grappling, especially absolute strength. Depending on the rule set, we can have varying contributions of power training and sprints. That is as simple as that.

Does any kind of long or short, say, high-intensity intervals or aerobic intervals ever play into some of that training, that oxidative processes, say, for example, in that judo context?

Andy Marley26:00

It depends on what they need. So there's a relatively good review that came out, more looking at high-intensity interval training, and it's kind of compiled all the work from various studies together, obviously how reviews work, and it said that longer intervals tend to be better for developing kind of more central adaptations and improving VO2 Max and whatnot, whereas shorter intervals are better for producing power. So it depends on what the athlete needs.

Nine times out of 10 for grappling, I find that actually longer intervals are what they need, because they tend to be quite good in a short burst, but they kind of fade very quickly in a scramble. So I think for me, longer intervals are usually best. And then you can always go down the periodization route for using sprints—start off with the longer intervals, and then start to decrease the intervals and increase intensity the closer you get to competition.

You could go down that route, though it doesn't really get done all that much, because people, people think of periodization, they simply think of periodized weight training, you know, block or conjugate, linear, or whatever type you want to use. But sprints should be periodized as well, if periodization even truly exists, which is a different topic in its own right. But yeah, you could go down that route as well. As you'll do a block of longer sprints, and then start to train things a little bit more sharp, a little bit more intensely with longer rest between, closer towards competition.

You're still getting that high intensity with sufficient recovery to then get adaptations you want, so that they're not overly fatigued coming into competition time, because, like anything, you're trying to balance that fitness and fatigue kind of paradigm, aren't you?

James de Lacey28:06

Yeah. How are you seeing balancing if someone wanted to do, say, those longer high-intensity intervals with the sprint intervals? Because I'm assuming—obviously, there is a philosophy around doing a pure block periodization where you're only doing long intervals, and then you're eventually switching to maybe sprint intervals further down the line. But I think you're talking about doing both together at the same time, in the same training period. How do you see that being done in a training week?

Andy Marley28:33

You can do, but it depends on what they do. Often, especially in jiu-jitsu guys who are competitive, they will often train jiu-jitsu anything between five to 12 times per week, multiple sessions. And if they're doing hard training, hard rolls at the end of each session, which again, a lot of them are—because that's the thing that a lot of grapplers...

You can't have a hard spar in boxing every single session, otherwise you'll have a very short career. You can have a hard spar in grappling, provided you're being sensible, you're not ripping on armbars or you're not yanking people head first into the mat all the time. You can have hard spars, but that then you will have a cumulative load in the body. How much fatigue that is, we don't know. I know Chris Kirk has done some work on this, but there's not a lot of data out there.

So if they are doing a lot of training, I would just tend to get two longer sessions, two longer interval sessions per week. If they are on the shorter, say the lower volume of training Jiu-Jitsu, say five sessions per week, that'll often coincide with them having jobs and whatnot. Then I would still initially keep the sessions a little bit longer and then start to drop them down in terms of duration of work and increase the work rate, increase the rest period, sorry, between each bout of exercise.

So I don't tend to use both in one week myself, because when you're trying to balance out their other training, potentially strength work as well, conditioning, and then off work, family commitments and whatnot, it becomes hard. So I tend to stick to one at a time, because at the end of the day, grappling doesn't pay, not like high-level boxing. So they all still tend to work as well, be that coaching or personal training or working in an office job, it depends what people are doing.

James de Lacey30:40

Obviously because you work with Andre and Dr. John, John Bevan, does a pure sprint approach often come into play with any grapplers you're around to work with or so?

Andy Marley30:40

Trying to convince grapplers to can do conditioning I find a lot more difficult than convincing boxers, kickboxing, MMA guys to do conditioning. They don't feel the need to do it. They think I do enough hard sparring, I don't need to do that. And it's something I would like to try and change, because most grappling conditioning I see is some kind of kettlebell circuit, which is usually done really badly, Tabata style or something like that. Or they do like a CrossFit thing where they're doing, okay, we're going to do push press for a minute.

I'm like, okay, well the point of a push press is to increase whole body power. Why are you then doing this in a circuit style where you're trying to do as many as you can in a minute? You're not then getting the actual benefits of what the push press is designed for. If anything, you're probably going to jack up your shoulders eventually when you get tired and then things start to go all wobbly and you're going to hurt yourself. So I think keeping it as simple as possible for me is the answer.

James de Lacey32:02

I've been helping out a friend back home, Jared Dell, who's competing at ADCC, obviously, well, when is it, in a couple of weeks. So over the past two months I've been helping him with some of his strength training, conditioning. So before, he was just doing Tabata intervals on an air bike, but he had been doing Tabata intervals for months, so the exact same protocol just for months on there. So he ended up switching up and doing some of the more sprintable style stuff.

And the good thing about it, he works full-time, he's a teacher, he coaches Jiu-Jitsu and then trains Jiu-Jitsu daily. So to go in and be like, all right, now you're going to do 45 minute long intervals twice a week, and it's like, well, when the hell is he going to do that? 8:00 p.m. after training and they have to go home, then get ready for work and all that kind of [expletive]? Doesn't work.

Whereas these sprint sessions, like you see in some of the pictures of the screen, it's like four minutes. Four minutes after training and you get that massive hit of intensity. And as you mentioned, you get a lot of the adaptations peripherally that you want, you get some of the central adaptations. And because you're changing protocols semi-often, you're not getting stuck with, hey, maybe VO2 max caps out at three weeks like you've seen a lot of the studies. Because you're changing interval often, potentially you're still getting or pushing some kind of central adaptation on top of it.

Andy Marley33:20

Nothing else, I think it also helps with engagement. I can think of nothing worse than doing Tabata three times a week on an air bike or a rower or whatever it is that people are using for three months. I would get incredibly bored. Changing that stimulus a little bit, I think helps.

I did my sprints this morning. The whole protocol took three minutes, 10 seconds on, 20 seconds off, wash, rinse, repeat as hard as you can for those 10 seconds. It's nothing fancy. And I also think that's easier for people to follow, because if you're looking at pure high-intensity interval training, you've got to then have to figure out maximal aerobic speed, you've got to then have some kind of heart rate monitor on, you need to be monitoring your heart rate to make sure this correct target for X amount of time.

And that could be hard to do if you're running, you're trying to look at a small, from a practicality point of view, it's actually quite difficult unless you've got somebody else there to help you go and pick this up, whatever it is that's going on.

With sprints, it's just so much more simple. It's just, okay, boom, there, you're just going to go as hard as you can for X time. It's much more simple. I think sometimes we try and over-complicate training as S&C coaches. It doesn't need to be that way. Sometimes it's useful to use kind of more complex methods, but only with experienced athletes. Velocity-based training is a prime example of that. Most people will get absolutely nothing from velocity-based training, frankly.

But if you've got an experienced person and you're wanting to look at power, then you could be working with a relatively short velocity loss threshold, the 10% or whatever. And you can work with two athletes working together, can try and beat each other in the speed they lift the bar on the same relative intensity. It can be quite good. But for other than that, but that's again for a very small population.

Try and keep it as simple as we can, I think, is really what we should be doing.

James de Lacey35:42

What's your experience around recovery after these sprint intervals? Obviously it's only five, six minutes of work, maybe up to 10. How do you feel after doing the sprints? Do you feel, obviously you feel [expletive] straight after, but I'm talking an hour later, maybe if you're doing a training session later that day or the following day. Do you feel that it hampers, or do you feel that it has longer recovery times than other methods, shorter recovery times? Do you feel good, bad, et cetera? Maybe just a little anecdote there.

Andy Marley36:08

For me personally, I feel that if anything, there's actually bit of a potentiative effect. I feel I perform a little bit better.

James de Lacey36:08

I didn't want to say it by saying I feel good, but I wanted to hear what you wanted to say.

Andy Marley36:08

I think as long as I do it in the morning, if I was to do sprints and then go straight into a Jiu-Jitsu sparring session straight afterwards, probably wouldn't be the best. That [expletive]. But if I, so I tend to do my sprints in the morning just before I go to work, I'll go into the lab and I'll use the equipment there and do it in the morning, and then I train in the evening.

I tend to find that I'm a little bit sharper. I don't tend to gas really, I feel a little bit stronger as well, a bit more explosive. And so I think there is a potentiative effect.

However, there's absolutely no research to back this up. It's just how I feel myself. I get enough recovery. I would probably say for me to recover properly, probably enough to put in a good session, would probably be about four to five hours to put a good session.

James de Lacey36:56

I'd agree with you there. I feel even after an hour afterwards, I feel fresh afterwards.

Andy Marley36:56

Whereas if you think about some of the grueling stuff that you can do, like if you're doing those 30 minute, an hour long circuits of just ball-busting [expletive], you're done for the day, potentially even 48 hours depending on what you've got people to do. Especially if you're doing a lot of reps, so in other words a lot of volume going through the muscles, the DOMS will be there. You think of the damage that's going to be there, the IL-6 will be released, all that fun stuff. It's not going to be great for your performance later on.

James de Lacey37:52

Then the counter argument is, well, there you could take high-dose antioxidants to try and counter all that, Vitamin C or pomegranate juice or whatever antioxidant. Cherry juice was a big thing for a while, I remember that. We were doing that after rugby matches. We had a nutritionist have tart cherry juice and stuff that.

Andy Marley38:21

That seems to have dropped off a little bit. But at the end of the day, it depends on how you define recover. Do you define recovery as not feeling sore and feeling okay, which is what most people do? But for me, recovery is an ability to repeat the exercise to a similar or higher standard. That is really what recovery is. So just because you got rid of the muscle soreness doesn't mean that you can still complete the whatever exercise.

Of what you're doing to the similar higher standard. If you're still your brain is still fried, you know how it is yourself. You've done a hard session, you're just kind of like, because even then there's changes in excitation across the circle of a muscle when we're tired. It's part of the thing. Calcium dynamics could be altered, which is also what we need for muscles to contract.

So taking antioxidants may help reduce the feeling of muscle soreness, but it's not actually going to help us adapt to the exercise and get us stronger or fitter, and therefore isn't really helping us recover. That's my take on it, because we need that information there to cause the adaptation.

James de Lacey39:23

That's basically the argument against ice baths after exercise and using external recovery methods. It's been my philosophy for a while. Even during hard, I say during, that's kind of what I recommend for most fighters anyway. But even during professional rugby when you have access to things like that, I would during preseason I would make sure that we don't touch any of it, maybe a massage once a week maybe, just because it's kind of more of a psychological thing, feels pretty good.

But ice baths and everything would save purely for in-season, because you don't blunt the recovery stimulus because you've just been doing it every single week. And then it just becomes more effective that way. And then obviously you're not cutting all the inflammation and the adaptive response that you want from the training. So I mean, I guess it's the same thing with antioxidants, same thing with anti-inflammatories, all that kind of stuff.

Andy Marley40:22

Yeah, a paper came out not too long ago and they looked at heat versus cold. It was basically heat versus cold. It's either they went into a nice bath, a lukewarm bath, or a hot bath. And they found that the ice bath and the hot bath improved recovery more than a lukewarm bath, but the best recovery in terms of muscle performance, feelings of DOMS, and inflammatory markers was actually better in a hot bath.

James de Lacey40:22

Is that directly after exercise?

Andy Marley40:50

Yeah. I'll see if I can find it and I'll send it to you.

James de Lacey40:50

Yeah. I remember seeing, I remember I haven't read the paper yet, but I was like, I couldn't imagine doing a hard session and getting in a hot bath. It seems a bit mental, doesn't it? But if they seem to suggest that it was better for recovery, and I mean actual recovery, not just the feeling of DOMS, but the actual ability of the muscle to function.

Andy Marley41:16

Because it's all about the muscle. That's something me and John do agree on. It's all about the muscle. We're trying to get these peripheral adaptations. That's the most important application of the research.

James de Lacey41:16

Yeah, there's some interesting research around saunas as well after submaximal exercise. Sitting in a sauna for 30 minutes improves a lot of aerobic markers as well, so even just being in heat after submaximal. It's almost like an easy way of improving your aerobic fitness is after maybe an easy technical training and just jumping in a sauna for 30 minutes.

Andy Marley41:45

It also seems to, there's some stuff to suggest that might help with heat acclimation as well. So you do your exercise protocol, then you go into a hot environment for half an hour to an hour afterwards, and then you start to get these adaptations which means you're better able to tolerate exercising in heat.

So it has not just fitness, potential fitness benefits, but also heat acclimation benefits. Because the thing with heat acclimation is most protocols take a long time to do, which isn't really time efficient for a lot of athletes.

James de Lacey42:14

Yeah, just going to live in Texas.

Andy Marley42:14

Well, I think I would die if I went to Texas. I'm used to being, you know, maybe 18 degrees Celsius. Texas must be at 40 degrees Celsius just now.

James de Lacey42:14

We're only about 35 or 37 in the next few days. So we're 19 today and I'm too hot.

Andy Marley42:44

Damn. Yeah, it's a mild summer this year.

James de Lacey42:44

But I wanted to come back as well, because we talked about on the strength power side, you mentioned the different rule sets may have you emphasize more power or strength. So we dive into a little bit of that. What kind of rule sets are we talking?

Andy Marley42:44

Anything you actually have to take somebody down. ADCC, wrestling-based rule sets. But even then, for me, we don't have a lot of data on ADCC. Real jiu-jitsu is ridiculous because you've got Polaris rule sets, ADCC rule sets, IBJJF rule sets, EBI rule sets. I'm sure there's plenty of others.

That's why it will never be an Olympic sport. Nobody can agree. There could be no global governing body which everybody will agree to do, which can then go into the Olympics.

Even in judo, I think there's still two, and one of them is recognized by the Olympics. But even ADCC, there's still that takedown, because that could be a big score. But then a lot of it is still on the ground. And if you actually watch a lot of it, apart from the kind of higher level guys, the highlight reel stuff, a lot of it is staying in one position and it's one movement that wins it, be it passing the guard or getting the sweep or even getting the takedown.

So I think in things like Greco-Roman, freestyle, collegiate wrestling, judo, power's a lot more important there. Because you start on the feet and the fight can be finished as soon as your opponent goes to the ground. So power far more important then. Because even in judo, you only got a limited amount of time on the ground before you get stood back up again if you haven't submitted them. So the big thing for me is being able to generate rotational power and power in the sagittal plane. Those are the key ones for me.

Again, it just needs to be simple. Olympic lift derivatives. I don't like full Olympic lifts. I don't see, I think they're far too difficult to teach for most athletes. Also, with grapplers who tend to have jacked up shoulders anyway, I think their shoulders would explode if you got them to do any kind of derivative.

James de Lacey45:10

So even, I say lift derivatives, I actually mean clean derivatives. I think they're just far easier to teach. A countermovement shrug, a jump shrug. That's very easy. It's so much more simple than trying to get somebody to go, "Right, okay, the first pull, we're going to have the transition, the second pull, you're going to catch. Remember, make sure when you're catching that you're meeting the bar, you're dropping underneath, you're catching it below parallel." What athlete is going to have the mobility to do that?

Andy Marley45:36

Grapplers are quite flexible, but they're actually quite immobile. I found, especially in the ankles and the shoulders, which is kind of what you need for Olympic lifting. They have good hips, to be fair, but that's often inherent.

James de Lacey45:36

But even then, basic power exercises. If you can't get them to do that, just get a hex bar or trap bar and get them to do jumps. You still get that triple extension, you're still loading up the movement. That's going to help them with their takedown techniques. Just keep it as simple, again, simple as we can. Doesn't need to be overly complex.

What's your feeling around, so you talked about that judo study. Okay, it's potentially mainly oxidative, oxidative processes fueling a judo match. Do you see that being, there's pretty much nothing in jiu-jitsu since 2012, and it's a completely different sport back then compared to now. And then maybe within wrestling we have some research now. What's your take then on maybe potentially what those sports are showing in terms of maybe energy system profiles there? And then do you think maybe it's kind of similar for all of them? They're all maybe peripherally, most peripherally demanding and limited?

Andy Marley46:40

In fact, on the match, there's nothing there. There is nothing on the actual energetics of what's happening during a wrestling match. The only thing, until we do it, until we do the body of research, that's it. And that's it.

Because at the end, grappling is inherently very difficult to actually get what I would call real life data on. For example, you do NFL, you do Aussie rules, you do rugby, you do soccer, whatever it is, you can put GPS on people. You can have portable gas masks which have been used before. You can use the heart rates. You can use Moxy monitors. You can do all that and it's fine.

But with grappling, you can't have a mask on because that will come off. And even then, all the wires and that would come, would get broken anyway, so it becomes a very expensive thing to fix. Heart rate monitor is okay, fine, you can use that. But then the problem, as I said, is because you have all the skill, isometric contraction.

And that's if you're trying to use the standard equations which have been done in the past to see, right, so this heart rate or this lean body mass, we are predicting that we have X amount of contribution from VO2 max, which is fine for running. Okay? But it's not any good for grappling.

As I said, if you've got somebody who's got your body lock and is squeezing, or you're on the ground and you've got someone knee on belly, or you've got somebody with their arms around your throat choking you, or you're there and you're trying to lift a leg up and it's not going, you've got somebody sitting on you holding down.

Contractions, so that's going to spike your heart rate. So that's going to then actually change what it's actually been shown. There was one paper I think in 2016, and again I tried to use heart rate to see what the relative contributions were during wrestling. And it said that the most intense training in terms of power burned and the most glycolytic was actual wrestling training, but even then that was including the warm-up, the technique, and the matches at the end.

So just put all that into one block. And then using resistance bands was the next one. It's like, whoever does an hour straight of resistance band work? So often a lot of the quality of these papers is also pretty poor in my opinion. So it then becomes very, very hard to say what is it we actually need.

It's got that one paper on judo which says oxygen metabolism is the best. Okay, fine. But we don't know about jiu-jitsu, we don't really know about wrestling. I would argue that it's probably similar in wrestling and that oxidative metabolism is probably the primary system which is contributing to ATP regeneration. But for jiu-jitsu, that might be different because it tends to be a lot lower pace, slower pace, sorry, because there's the takedown, someone's pulled guard or whatnot.

And then you look at the IBJJF matches, how often is an entire match in a guard and people go berserk when they pass a guard or got an advantage point? It tends to be in one static position, so potentially isometric strength is actually the most important thing for those guys. But even then I would say, because it's a lower intensity, it's probably still oxidative metabolism which is fueling most of what they're doing. But again, we don't know.

James de Lacey50:10

Would that change the conditioning protocols you would use hypothetically, say, between wrestling and say an IBJJF jiu-jitsu player?

Andy Marley50:10

In wrestling, again, depends on how far they are from competition. But generally speaking, I would have longer intervals for jiu-jitsu because of the nature. For me, a grind, wrestling is much more of an explosion. And I would have shorter intervals for wrestling with a shorter work-to-rest ratio to try and overly tax them more, because I think wrestling is, my opinion—I've never done judo, I can't comment on that—wrestling is the most taxing of all the grappling sports I have done.

Never done judo, couldn't comment on that bit. So before anyone gets upset and says the judo's harder, it maybe is, I don't know. But I think we need to overly stress the systems which are getting used in wrestling. So given the short work-to-rest ratios, give them the shorter rest, make them work that a little bit harder to really tax their oxidative system and make them have to replenish the PCR system. That's what I would say.

And all of that comes back to sprint intervals in that instance. For me, I think sprint intervals are just so much easier to do rather than doing high intensity ones. The high intensity ones, they can, they are useful, but for me most sprint intervals can range from 6 seconds up to 30 seconds. And that's, and it's simple that way. And then you're targeting more peripheral adaptations within the muscle than the high intensity targeting more of the adaptations at the heart.

In my opinion, it's more important to get these peripheral adaptations. Everything is driven peripherally, peripherally.

James de Lacey52:16

For sure. Because it's interesting, just before we wrap this up as well, there obviously most of the conditioning philosophy, I think, even maybe just within purely in combat sports around the idea of eccentric hypertrophy of the left ventricle of the heart. Hey, we want to improve the delivery system. I think that probably comes from endurance sports where huge VO2 maxes, you're trying to just pump as much blood as possible to the working muscles.

And those, I think, cross-country skiers, those guys are scary. Oh my gosh. I don't know why you would even get into that sport. But within combat sports, is that really the limiting factor? And it seems at least within Andrew's boxing research, no. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on it just even within grappling.

Andy Marley52:49

No, no, I would agree with Andrew. You know, improved pumping will of course be beneficial, but the problem we have in sport science is sometimes we try and make triangles fit into square holes. So just because a triangle works for, so triangle in this case is the stuff we've seen from endurance training, we go, "Okay, that's interesting, we're going to make this work for boxing, we're going to make this work for wrestling, I'm going to make this work for rugby even." It doesn't necessarily work that way.

There, it's more likely to work for rugby than it is for combat sports, sure. But there's always this kind of continuum. For me, the limiting factor in terms of fatigue for most combat sports is an inability of the muscle to recover, to either recycle calcium effectively, to switch on mitochondria to then have everything else that they used to do. So produce ATP, replenish ATP PCR, all that kind of thing. And even then, a lot of fatigue is driven by the muscle sending signals to the brain anyway.

So they got this idea, peripheral fatigue versus central fatigue. I'm in the camp of peripheral fatigue is more important for exercise performance, and central fatigue for me goes more towards the health side of things. We're thinking of daily stress and things like that. But for exercise performance, it has to be peripheral fatigue.

James de Lacey54:21

Can I ask a question? Can that answer the question?

Andy Marley54:21

It's good because it kind of turns the current thought processes on its head, right? As you mentioned, everyone's kind of really focused on adaptation of the heart, exercising at low intensity. I think not just driven by the endurance community and maybe some of the older, I guess, protocols around combat sports, but also I guess around the really push as you mentioned with health and longevity.

And a lot of those big podcasts as well, really pushing VO2 max. And I think that's kind of just laid on top of it to the point where that health span longevity side has kind of intertwined itself with the sports performance.

And now everyone's pushing that train. The pendulum will swing back eventually, but everyone's kind of pushing their train so hard now. Whereas when we look at the data now and what's happening out of you guys's camp, it's kind of like, is that really the case? Is that really is that really the limiting factor? And is that really going to push our conditioning to a point where we're, I guess, maximizing the effects of our training to transfer?

I mean, even then, I know that I've not been involved in that, but I know that we've done studies at ARU where we looked at sprint training in elderly populations. Like six-second sprints. We didn't have them doing the ridiculous things we've got the boxers doing, okay, because that would be highly unethical quite frankly. But they were doing six-second sprints and they were still getting these improvements in VO2 max, they're still getting these improvements in functional ability. And it was just twice a week, I think, as well.

So it can be done. And I think that, especially if you're going down the longevity route, we in the Western world especially are too much like, "Oh, don't worry, Grandma, I'll get that for you. Don't you worry yourself, you're getting older now." Just we're letting people become sedentary, which is not what we should be doing. We should be encouraging people to get up and about moving, because as soon as people become sedentary, all of a sudden, how often have you heard at yourself, people retire from whatever job it was they were doing, and then within a few years their health has massively deteriorated? Because they've stopped moving.

And it's an easier sell to get people to do lower intensity zone two stuff on a wee bike and have a wee leather-bound pile next to you than to get them to do sprints. So for looking for health, frankly, whatever works. If you're more likely to do the exercise with a zone two long slow cycle, great. Personally, I would get bored very quickly, so I like to be done in four minutes.

So I would rather get my sprints in and then go about with the rest of my day and get the other benefits, including improved muscle power and all that kind of thing, which arguably would be better for an older population as well anyway, because the muscle mass drops and muscle function and power which occur with aging anyhow.

But still, that's, um, there's definitely these two different camps at the moment. And I think they both got their merits. I'm not going to say that one is massively superior to the other. I personally fall in the sprint interval camp because the data from what I've seen supports not just central adaptations but also peripheral, whereas the long slow continuous guys only, the people, you're still getting some peripheral, but it's more central.

So for me, because I believe that mostly it comes from the peripheral, that has to be the primary thing we focus on.

James de Lacey57:45

That was a great summary too. And you touch on what I was going to say around not viewing it in isolation, right? Because often we can get stuck, "This is, this trains this thing," but it's like, no, it trains everything, it just trains this thing a little more.

Andy Marley58:17

Because it's being aware of that. I think it's really important to for me to have an overview of everything. I'm not a specialist in zone two stuff, I'm not, but I understand what's kind of going on.

They're saying, so I can then appreciate and go, oh yeah, I see your point here. I personally still think I'm right, but I'm not saying that you're completely wrong either.

James de Lacey58:45

Yeah, that's perfect. That's a good way to end the podcast. Andy, where can people find and follow, keep up with what you're doing?

Andy Marley58:45

So I'm on Instagram and LinkedIn, and if anyone ever does want to chat about anything that I've done, they can of course always send me an email. I'm more than happy to have Teams calls and things, just to talk things through. So my email is a.m.marley@qub.ac.

James de Lacey59:12

Perfect. I'll link everything up in the description as well, but I appreciate you coming on and sharing everything.

Andy Marley59:12

No, great to be on, man. I really appreciate you letting me come here and chat nonsense for things I like to talk.

James de Lacey59:12

Of course, of course.