Maximal Strength Training Without The Barbell + Exposing secretofathleticism (SSOF Ep 146)

James de Lacey0:00

So, we're going to give the waitlist the first access to get in, and then I'll send it to everyone else as well. So, make sure you check that link. I will also post it in, I guess, into the live chat here on YouTube.

King the Digital, I'll answer your question now. He's saying he effed up his wrist while snatching, can't do a push-up, what should he do? Doesn't think anything is broken. That is something you need to see a physio for. But, in general terms, just don't do anything that hurts it. So, you will have to modify exercises. Yeah, you're going to have to modify exercises essentially so you're not using your hand. I would still train your other arm.

So, that's, that's probably one of the big mistakes people make is when they say, have an arm injury and then they just say, I don't want to train the other side because I don't want to become imbalanced. That's a big mistake. Train the other side of your body. There's what we call cross-education effect. Actually, I did a video on this very long time ago.

But, the cross-education effect is essentially you train one side and the gains from that one side transfer to the other side even though the other side hasn't been trained. It can also help you potentially speed up recovery on the other side because you are building strength just from that one side that transfers.

So, still train the other side of your body, and obviously avoid anything that causes pain on that wrist, and go see a professional that can help you because I cannot help you with that.

So, while I pull up this page, I have another, Nav, I'm going to say your name so wrong. I'm sorry. Navjan Navi, wanted someone to expose Secret of Athleticism for a long time. Thanks a lot. Yep. Check out on Instagram. Let me also post that for you in there. Sorry for everyone who's just listening to this podcast on replay because you're just getting a lot of me kind of conversing back and forth with people here. But, there's some interesting questions, and I will continue on my little strength training rants in just a second.

Let me get this in there. This my Instagram post for people in the chat on exposing Secret of Athleticism. I'm going to go through that in a bit. And here is the conditioning mentorship sign-up page for anyone who is interested in that. Okay. And another quick question, thoughts on Mario Rios? I don't know who that is. You might have to expand on that, Cheng Nadish.

But, let's go into this because we had a really interesting discussion, and it made me realize that maybe the, I guess what is portrayed on social media, even just through sports science generally, doesn't reflect or I should say maybe the application doesn't reflect what we're trying to get out of training. Hopefully that makes sense.

So, I'm going to go into a little bit of detail. So, when we're talking maximal strength training, we're talking about generating high forces, and typically this is irrespective of time. So, that means, I mean, your classic powerlifting exercises, right? You got your back squat, your bench press, and your deadlift. Many people will call those the cornerstone of training programs for athletes.

And the reasoning is often you need to be able to get stronger because the stronger you are, and when we're talking strength typically in these instances, we're talking typically referencing one rep max, which in my opinion is part of the problem, which I'll go into in a sec. This is just all off the cuff, so my thoughts are going to be everywhere. I'm sorry if this is going to be confusing, but essentially, you have your main lifts, your barbell exercises, and you have infinite time to be able to generate high forces.

The heavier the load, the higher the force generated, because we're talking force equals mass times acceleration. So, we can also accelerate moderate loads faster. Now, there can be problems with that because with traditional barbell exercises, you spend about 50% of that concentric phase decelerating anyway. So, you might start to produce more force through that first half of the movement, then you have to decelerate it.

So, when we come into maximal strength training, we're talking about one rep max. Now, one of the issues with one rep max is it is the maximum amount of weight you can lift in a coordinative exercise, which means that you have to be good at that exercise to be able to display high levels of force.

So, I could, okay, I was just saying I, but I mean just generally. I could be really strong, say in the lower body. Maybe I grab someone in wrestling, and there's no way they're getting out. I can throw them on the head. I'm not saying I can, I'm just saying in general. Or maybe someone's a really good striker, and they're able to move around the ring really quickly, or maybe they can throw vicious kicks. But you put them under the bar, and maybe they can't even squat their body weight.

And you think, you know, they jump to conclusion is typically, this person's weak. We need to strengthen his legs or full body or whatever through these barbell exercises. I don't think that is the right way to look at it if someone is already showing strength in their sport. And you'll see that, that I think rugby is a really good example of that, too.

So, any, I guess, sport where you're involving running into or wrestling other opposition. In rugby, I've seen many guys who don't lift that much in the gym or hate being in the gym, but if you start to wrestle with them and they get their hands on you or they go to tackle you, you know, you're on your ass. And it's a different application of force in this instance.

Now, when as I give, I come back to my initial thought around maximal strength training. So, maximal strength training is built to generate high forces. There are other ways to generate high forces. And in a sporting context, we're limited by time. So, we can move on to the idea of the impulse momentum relationship.

And to really make this easy to understand, it's essentially force multiplied by time, which is impulse. And if you've ever seen like a jump curve that you would on like a force plate and you see these kind of force curves where the line goes up and down. Basically, everything under that curve is impulse. So, you have force times time and that equals mass times velocity and mass times velocity is momentum.

So, typically, you want more momentum. So, a really easy example, if you're running into someone, the more momentum you have, the harder you're going to be to stop. It's like why a heavier car rolling down the hill is going to be harder to stop than a slightly smaller car. More mass at similar or high velocities going to be harder to stop because there's more momentum. So, typically, we want high momentum as a combat athlete.

Now, we can improve the momentum side because through impulse as mass is typically constant. And when we talk about mass, we're talking about just your body weight. So, if you're a wrestler or grappler, you're shooting a power double, you know, you're having to propel your body mass into your opponent.

Now, obviously, once you get your hands on your opponent, then the mass may change. Now, for strikers, the mass is essentially your limbs or your hands or the gloves you're wearing. So, that's typically constant. So, that means, since the mass is mostly constant, we're looking at impulse influences the change in velocity.

Now, this is actually heavily influenced by Dan John Danaher's book on forces. It's actually really good and goes into this in detail. I'm trying to bring him on the podcast to go into it as well. So, I'll give credit where credit is due there with how he explained it.

But, essentially, we're trying to influence the change in velocity. We're all about speed. And speed is influenced by force generated, but not just by peak force or not just by average force of the movement, but impulse. And because time is constrained in combat sports, it means we have to produce that force within a time constraint.

Now, that's not to say that moving a barbell is doing a maximum squat that takes 2 seconds is not valuable. It just means that perhaps there can be an over-reliance there. It also means that perhaps there are other methods that we could use to improve maximum strength without having to even bother with those exercises.

I think honestly, this things is probably more applicable in MMA and striking than in grappling. I think in grappling, because the sport is so grindy and if you are big enough, strong enough, and good enough, you can slow it down to your pace anyway, where your strength can be such an advantage.

I mean, you can just look at what's that striker I can't remember that that ex-professional strongman who's gone into jiu-jitsu and is just cleaning up. I mean, when you're that big and strong, I mean, especially those lower divisions, it's going to be helpful.

So, you can get away with more bodybuilding, powerlifting-esque style training as a grappler in those instances. But, in terms of strikers and potentially some MMA athletes, you don't need to do the traditional lifts to be able to elicit I guess high impulse.

There are other ways to go about it that, honestly in my opinion, if you have access to the equipment, would be more beneficial in the long term. Now, that's not to say that you shouldn't do any of the traditional barbell lifts and you can't do it and it's bad exercise.

You can still do them. Plenty of my programs in the Sweet Science Fighting Underground have them because many people just don't have any base under them, so it's just built for anyone to improve. But, for example, if you have access to flywheels, you can also use other eccentric style exercises.

These are going to allow you to generate high impulse in short time periods and at the same time promote favorable muscle morphological and architecture adaptations that are going to be beneficial to speed. And, let me break that down a little bit. So, typically when we're talking about traditional lifting, you have a honestly it's more of a load velocity or even a force velocity relationship, if you want to call it that, where as you go up in load, speeds go down.

It's an inverse relationship, right? The heavier lift, the slower the lift is going to be, even if you're trying to move it as fast as possible. When you're doing eccentric biased exercises or eccentric actions, you kind of circumvent that. You can get high forces and high velocity simultaneously.

And, which is what you get on something like a flywheel based exercise, depending on how you do it. So, typically if you're say delaying the breaking action, or you're overspeeding the concentric, you're going to get an eccentric overload. High speeds, high forces.

You could do the same thing with drop catch style exercises. So, if you have a bar on your back in a Bulgarian split squat, you essentially lift that front foot and then drop into the bottom position and try to stop the load as fast as possible, that would be another way of doing eccentric overload.

That would elicit high forces and high speeds and under a time constraint, which is perfect for something we want when we were trying to increase impulse in the context of combat sports to be able to increase or maximize that change in velocity. Those two would be two major benefits that you could do and you can do it lower body and upper body both of these which would be highly beneficial for combat athletes.

So, you're able to produce high forces at high speeds in short periods of time and promote the muscle architecture adaptations and muscle morphology adaptations and even the tendon adaptations that you want for speed. For example, lower limb stiffness is one that is often talked about with eccentric training, essentially being able to become an elastic reactive bouncy ball.

So, if you hit the ground when jumping, you're able to quickly or efficiently use that elastic energy to help you generate more force and do it more efficiently versus say more muscularly if you didn't have that adaptation where you would leak a lot of that energy as heat and not use the tendon as much and use the muscles, which if you're about say an amateur boxing and you're bouncing around the ring a lot, that's ideally not what you want to do because you do want to do that.

You don't want to do the other thing where you're more muscularly driven in that instance because you're going to fatigue faster. You want to be able to use that elastic energy.

So, I think there is a disconnect between what maximal strength training is because it's only seen as heavy barbell training. And there's much more to it when we think instead of just heavy barbell training, we can think of we want high force training, now we start to open the book on what we can actually use as a maximal strength training exercise.

Even jumping off say I mean I wouldn't go do this if you're not prepared, but even jumping off something high like a 72-inch box and landing it is going to be high force, high speed, and high eccentric load. It's going to probably beat you up a lot. So, obviously you're not going to do this say 4 weeks out from a fight. But this just gives you an idea of how you can generate high forces without heavy back squats, bench press, etc.

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Yeah, that hopefully that made some sense. With some of my thoughts there, kind of just rambling to myself, which makes it a little more difficult, which brings me to a little bit about specificity as well. Specificity is always an interesting one.

I think because when we talk about specificity or maybe when you see specificity online, it's often and always confused with mimicry. And it's usually someone just adding bands to an exercise or to one of the sporting exercises. So, whether it's ground and pound and someone's got a band pulling the person backwards or banded shadow boxing, dumbbell shadow boxing.

I'm sure you've seen those bands that I go around the legs and the arms or something like that for when people are shadow boxing. Yeah, there's plenty of stuff like that out there which I would class as mimicry. Because for something to be specific, it has to overload something.

And I understand there's always a school of thought as well around anything outside of the sport being GPP or general physical preparation. I get that to a point. But I think specificity exists on a spectrum. So, obviously that school of thought is everything else is GPP, so nothing is specific, so we just do whatever it is to improve the capacities of the person and then the sport takes care of the specificity.

Yes, to a degree, I would say so. I'm not saying that you can do exercises that are so specific that they're going to make you a magic fighter. But I think you can edge your way a little closer out of general training and be a little more specific.

And some good a good example I actually posted on Instagram just today around say a say a snatch high pull that I was showing off the blocks. So, let's just say maybe you're a jujitsu athlete or wrestler, you have a body lock on someone.

You're going to hip in. Because if you have say a body lock, if they if they wizard you, they're going to throw you, judo throw you, or whatever it is. If you have your hips back, you're screwed. And often if someone's hipping in, you're going to you're also going to hip in to prevent being thrown.

So, hips in is going to help prevent being thrown. But you also need to have your hips in if you're going to pick someone up and throw them, or you're going to perform some other mat return. You're essentially going to have powerful hips while you're doing your body lock.

And if we're talking specificity, we can potentially overload something like that, say through a snatch high pull, where you are bringing the hips in, while maybe not to the extent of when you're doing a specific say if you're lifting someone, because typically you have your knees under them too in that instance, and you can also, depending on how you leverage it, you make it easier for yourself.

But just for brute strength, a snatch high pull allows you to accelerate the bar vertically and get into those positions where you're pushing with your legs all the way to the top of the movement. And I think that's really important in that instance if you're, say, trying to be strong in that position.

I would also argue that an even more specific version of that would be, say, like a sandbag load onto a platform, because when you're actually loading the sandbag, your knees are in front and your hips heave it up, which is a little more similar. You're also bear-hugging it, which makes it again more specific. Now, am I saying that these exercises are suddenly going to make you a body lock master suplexing people on the head? No. But I think these are the ones that would overload that type of movement that could be beneficial in that instance.

And in my opinion, would add more value to your training than, say, just doing the deadlift because you think everything is general physical preparation. Deadlift is a fine movement, and getting stronger in the deadlift will definitely help. There's no doubt about it. But you could potentially have more of these, I'm going to say quote unquote, specific style exercises that I think would help.

And if you've ever done, if you're more proficient in the Olympic lifts, you know the difference and the feeling difference between doing a, say, a high pull versus a deadlift. They are not the same movement. I know people like to really bastardize teaching Olympic lifts, and they'll teach you it's a Romanian deadlift at the top, that's the hang position, and it's a deadlift off the floor.

It is none of those. Olympic lifts have nothing to do with the deadlift and have nothing to do with the Romanian deadlift. They're completely different movements. And I think that's where a lot of that confusion becomes where it's like, "Hey, you can just do fast deadlifts." It's like, no, it's the entire way that you do the movement is completely different.

Yes, they both involve the legs, but the push off the floor, maintain the back angle in the deadlift and the high pull, and even from the blocks is entirely different because you are... There's three parts to an Olympic lift, and it's, you can break it down into fast, faster, fastest.

First pull fast, second pull faster, third pull fastest. The deadlift, you're looking at, okay, you're trying to maybe, depending on how you do it, you're either squeezing off the floor, pushing the floor away, or you're ripping it off the floor. But just like all traditional barbell lifts, as I mentioned earlier, you're decelerating through half the top of the movement anyway, because you can't continue accelerating because how would you stop the bar?

So the... And then obviously as you get past your knees, you're really trying to shove your hips through and stand up tall. Whereas you're not trying to do that in any of the hyper movements. You're trying to stay over the bar and then you're propelling the bar upward.

And really driving onto your toes with your legs. And the feeling in the movement is entirely different. And I think that's probably where some of the confusion comes around that kind of specificity versus non-specificity or Olympic lifts versus deadlifts and things like that.

So that is my random thoughts on specificity. Overload something. Also, it doesn't mean that you don't have to progress through, say, general to specific assistance either. Like, if you say, if you just took my example and you were looking at deadlift general, high pull off the blocks is like more specific, and then like the sandbag loading is the most specific.

I still wouldn't go, "Okay, out of camp we're doing deadlift, then like the first half of camp we're doing snatch high pull, and the second half we're doing sandbag loading." You can use the entire spectrum within a training program or training cycle. Bondarchuk's entire system is built around that.

However, obviously it's applied to an Olympic cycle with throwers, which is slightly different, but the idea is that if you actually listen to my interview with Bondarchuk on the podcast not too long ago, he explains it really well because he trained under Bondarchuk. But you have, for anyone who's not familiar, you have like a pyramid.

The top of the pyramid is the competition exercise. Under that is the special preparation exercises, under that the special development exercises, and under that the general physical preparation exercises. The competition exercise would typically be like the hammer throw in that instance.

And then like your special preparation exercise would be like a hammer throw but with different weights. So in my example, I'm going like competition exercises like the mat return in wrestling or jiu-jitsu. And then these exercises that I mentioned would fall under GPP and special development, like right down the bottom.

I wouldn't even cover the special preparation exercise. But that's my point. He would cover all of those categories in the training program in that week or in that even in that day. So you would do a competition exercise, you would do a special preparation exercise, but then you'd also do your special development and general preparation exercise in that same program.

So you can do, say, deadlifts and sandbag loading on the same day. That's actually a pretty solid little session you could do. Or it could be snatch high pull and sandbag loading, snatch high pull and deadlift, things like that.

So these things work together. Now, typically I wouldn't say a high pull and a deadlift on the same day or even within the same training program, depending on kind of what's going on and how much training is being done, because if you're already doing, say, a high pull, you're kind of covering that movement pattern, if that makes sense.

But that was just to kind of illustrate the point. Hopefully all of this is kind of making sense from me rambling. But I want to move on to the final point I wanted to cover. Hang on one second. Just had to wet the beak a little.

So secret of athleticism. This guy is nuts. He has like 200k followers. Actually, I should bring up his page just so I can kind of just reference it. This guy is like, I mean he makes... Actually, I wouldn't say he makes functional patterns look good, but they're pretty much on the same path.

But it's funny enough, it's kind of like all these guys kind of flock together because you see like Joel Seedman's done podcasts with this guy, which is, which is everything you need to know, right? If Joel Seedman's doing a podcast and agreeing with Secret of Athleticism, then I mean, you just got like the most [expletive] up training routines in the world.

But anyway, so I commented on one of his reels recently. He talks about this Great Britain triple jumper, Jonathan Edwards. He hit this crazy triple jump world record, and apparently according to reports, he was sick, and it was basically he was, he didn't train for six months leading into this event and hit this... I highly doubt he didn't train for six months.

What athletes say when they talk about training is not, it usually does not reflect what they do because they don't understand what training is. So maybe he's like, "I didn't do any training." But he probably means he didn't do any of his, say, normal hard training, but he still trained.

If that makes sense. But anyway, so he, Secret of Athleticism goes on to say that it's because he didn't lift weights during this time. So the fascia glided better, and fascia is the reason why that he hit this jump. So that's the only explanation.

So I commented, and I was like, "Actually, I wonder if I can bring up the comments here to make it easier." Oh, I can this time. Okay. So I was like, funny enough, this is a relatively common occurrence with athletes hitting PRs after being sick or extended time off, and that's just purely anecdotal.

And can be explained muscularly. So he talks about it's all about fascia. So I was like, "It can't be explained muscularly. It's called the overshoot phenomenon." And I've talked about the overshoot phenomenon on this podcast before. I don't know if I've done, I have done a video on it.

If you search on the channel talking about doing nothing and getting faster, that is there. So, oh, where is it? So he asked for, I'm just trying to open here these replies. To prove it. So he asked for... So he goes, "It happens, but not due to muscle. Give me one study that muscle adaptations work that way."

So I was like, "Sure, it's been studied pretty extensively," and sent him the first paper by Anderson and Aagaard in 2000 who did three months of training and then three months of detraining and obviously measured muscle fiber type through biopsy and found the overshoot of type 2X muscle fiber.

Now, he obviously didn't read that. He gave a, what you would call in the nicest way possible, a [expletive] response. Honestly, all of them are pretty [expletive]. But it kind of showed his real lack of understanding of performance and just muscle morphology and muscle fiber type, which honestly I didn't expect.

It was quite interesting how little he really did know. So he quotes about paper that resistance decreasing type 2X and increasing type 2A, blah blah blah. Kind of missed the point of the overshoot. He says that keep in mind type 2X is a fast but weak muscle type, which... I didn't even know what to say to that because that's like completely wrong, but I covered that in some of my videos.

And this was the study was only three months. It didn't say anything about after six months. Multiple studies show muscle loss and strength decrease starting at three to four weeks. They don't say six months, which didn't happen here, blah blah blah. Then he results, results insults because he doesn't understand what he's reading.

So I said he missed the entire point of the overshoot phenomena. And so... He says some more [expletive]. Then I said, "If you look inside their two papers, you'll find an overshoot of type 2X leading to greater speed and power." And I'll cover in just a second for you guys.

And I asked, "I was patiently waiting for a 6-month detraining study on fascia and performance outcomes," which of course he dodged because there's no such thing as study on detraining and fascia. Again, more attacks, and he goes, "This was quite funny." He asked me, "Do I know the difference between 2A and 2X? Why do athletes lift weights currently to create 2A or 2X?"

And so I replied, "For pure speed events like this, we're talking about triple jump, type 2X is what coaches are trying to preserve and improve with training. And the fact you think type 2A for pure speed events is the adaptation you want says everything. And I'm still waiting for a study."

And he says, "Are you serious? Then why are you getting 2A for?" He doesn't understand the difference between the different fiber types. And so I was telling him that you can't isolate muscle fiber type, but you can bias types based on exercise.

Part of the training response is the decrease in type 2X and increase in 2A. But more importantly, performance changes can happen irrespective of changes in fiber type. It's the multifactorial nature of performance, which you hate because you can't sell your narrative, which obviously became quite true.

He's basically saying it's illogical and stupid, asking how fast 2X convert to 2A. If you read the study, he would have seen that. If your whole argument is based on Jonathan had more 2X fibers. Now, I just told him I'll spell it out to him on video because I didn't think he can read, which seems to be the case.

So I broke that down in a reel on YouTube. So essentially, what these guys do is they take one potential component in performance, and then they extrapolate that into the only thing that you need and the only reason an athlete can be successful is because of that system and their secret to the system.

So obviously, when I asked him the question on his reels, all the secrets are in his Patreon, of course. Unfortunately, there are no secrets. The biggest thing that is missing from this, other than coming to the muscle fiber type, which I'm not saying is the reason that this performance happened, I'm saying it could explain part of why.

And his fascia take, as I mentioned, I can get on board with. I can get on board with the fact that fascia potentially played a role in what was going on there. But I'm not stupid enough to discount everything else. And you can just look at the three-part muscle model. I think if you just search "three-part muscle model," it should pop up on images.

But you have a contractile component, which is essentially the muscle contracting. I mean, it's called a contractile component, it's relatively self-explanatory. So that's just like actin and myosin cross-bridging, contracting, shortening the muscle, generating force.

You have the passive elastic component, which involves the fascia, which is what this guy's talking about. And then you have the series elastic component, which is the tendon. All three of these work together, just like energy systems. We can't have an aerobic exercise and an anaerobic exercise, or an alactic, or we can't just target strength and just target power in the gym.

Everything works together. You get a bit of everything with whatever you're doing. You might bias certain things, but you cannot isolate. And all he's covering in this instance is this passive elastic component of fascia. It's all he cares about. Everything else doesn't matter.

Yet you have muscle that has to move the limb. That force has to be transmitted through the tendon to the bone to be able to move. So he's just basically throwing that completely out the window. Then we go to muscle fiber type, which he doesn't understand.

And yes, as I mentioned, you can make performance changes regardless of muscle fiber type. Muscle fiber type isn't everything. It's just one part of the equation. At this elite level, having more type 2X muscle fibers is probably a good thing. If you're in the Olympics going for a gold medal, you better be looking to overturn every damn rock and stone to eke out those performance benefits.

And one of those would be trying to have a high proportion of type 2X muscle fibers, especially for an event like triple jump, where everything is a one-off maximal effort. We see that within the literature. Even though it was only 3 months, it gives us an idea.

Now, he wasn't able to pull up anything about fascia with detraining. I mean, I don't think there is anything around fascia and training anyway. But 3 months of detraining kind of gives a little idea of potentially what might happen. So there's overshoot.

So there's Anderson and Aagaard. They did a follow-up paper in 2005. They did the same thing: 3 months training, 3 months detraining, relatively high volume strength training. Again, you see a huge increase in type 2A muscle fiber, a huge reduction in type 2X muscle fiber.

I'm talking going from like 10 to 15% type 2X down to like 1 to 2%. It's just an adaptation that happens with strength training. And for combat athletes that listen to this, it is a positive adaptation. You want that. You want the more oxidative, faster fiber because you want to be more fatigue resistant generally, because you're going to go multiple rounds or one long round.

After detraining for 3 months, and when we're talking detraining, that is kind of return to their normal lives. Remember, these are not sporting athletes in these studies. So they just go back to their normal lives.

And then they see this huge rebound in type 2X muscle fibers. And by rebound, I mean not to pretraining levels. I mean past pretraining levels. So we get this overshoot in type 2X muscle fiber, known as the overshoot phenomenon. Now, anecdotally, I think it was Team Great Britain track cycling team in the 2000 Olympics, I believe, used something like this to clean up the gold medals in 2000. But it's very, very interesting change.

Now, we can talk about the fiber type, but what about actual outcomes? Because we can talk mechanistic or physiological data all we want, but all that matters is outcomes, performance, and sport. And so I tested these guys with unloaded knee extensions on the isokinetic dynamometer.

So essentially, it's like a leg extension that measures, we'll just call it force to make it easier, force and speed. So they're doing unloaded knee extensions against this thing. So basically, they're sitting there kicking as hard and fast as possible.

And what they found was post detraining, they were able to produce higher forces at high velocities, higher power at high velocities, greater angular acceleration, greater peak velocity post detraining. So essentially, this increase in type 2X muscle fiber allowed them to be able to produce force faster and power faster, which, if you think about sports or any kind of high-level sport, that is the number one criteria you're trying to achieve from a strength and conditioning program.

So that could potentially explain why or how this world record was done. Obviously, that gets dismissed. And then we can go even outside of the, let me just double-check if I have everything right. Let me just check I've given all my points for that portion of it. We talked about the muscle fiber type, the fiber type shifts. Yeah, that's pretty much it.

Actually, for combat athletes, it's quite interesting that you could potentially do something similar leading into a fight. I talked about this with Bill Smart on, I think our third podcast, where, if you, so you can actually search, you can search my paper on this. If you just search like De Lacey rugby 2014 or something like that, we tried to do something similar but in the context of professional sport where you have to play 80 minutes. So it's not every one-off event, and you're essentially training for a season.

So we actually took guys 3 weeks out from the NRL season, put them through a 21-day, it wasn't obviously, it can't be a detraining period, so it would be crazy. Like basically like a 21-day step taper. By step taper, it means you're just literally just taking [expletive] away straight away and drastically reducing training volume.

So they went from training in the gym, strength training, four times a week down to one time a week with super low volume but high intensity. So we're talking like three sets of three over four exercises. And they continued all their normal speed trainings, conditioning, field work, everything else.

And we saw big improvements in jump performance, force, velocity, power. Now, of course, in this instance, it's likely recovery from all the hard training they did before. But you can also interpret it as you can do, if you've done all the work beforehand, you can do very little and essentially free yourself up to be able to express the qualities that you've trained.

And it becomes very difficult, I think, because a lot of it's a mental game leading into a competition or a fight where you always want to try and do more. You need to make sure you get ready, so you're doing more. Whereas potentially pulling back even further and how little you can do in the strength training world to be able to spend more time and have more energy for your skills can be a way to potentially do your last few weeks of your fight camp.

Now, that's going to take some mental gymnastics to be able to convince yourself. Maybe you'd try it before a sparring, like a mock peak, but yeah, it's very interesting. Now, to come back to this charlatan of Secret Athleticism, he's done the typical marketing playbook, right?

The one that Functional Patterns always uses and everyone else. They attach themselves to an athlete who's already successful and then they claim that that athlete is successful because of their system. What's sad is like at least with Functional Patterns, Kyle Dake, I mean, he trains Functional Patterns.

I don't know how closely with Naughty does it or not, but he trains Functional Patterns and yes, he was successful when, but at least he does the system. So I can give them that, you know, whatever. But with Zhang Weili, who is, if you don't know or not familiar, is well, she's not currently UFC champion, is she? She was at least UFC champ. Maybe she is currently.

I just haven't kept up to date. But regardless, she is one of the best female UFC fighters. Okay, let me put it this way: he's not her coach. He's not her strength and conditioning coach. He has never trained her. But he has claimed to have improved her performance and uses her as essentially a poster child for his system working, which is honestly pretty embarrassing, disingenuous, insulting to the staff that do work with her.

I mean, she trains at Bangtao Muay Thai with the staff there, with Coach Woody and the team there. She also trains a lot at the UFC PI. I've had plenty of DMs from various coaches and people about this guy and his claims, which are out of this world. So just be aware of people like this, because they're willing to literally lie about what they've done to push their narrative on whatever it is they're trying to sell, which is pretty crazy and pretty crazy to do at such a large scale.

Strength and conditioning is a very small world and his reputation ain't too hot. Obviously he blocks everyone. You can't tag him and things like that. So he'll continue his grift. But if you see his stuff on the screen and whatnot, feel free to drop him a comment. Tell him that I've done this and exposed him on my Instagram Reels.

Let me finish up with this question in the live chat. Do you recommend any supermaximal isometrics for low-volume routines beyond the flywheel? Yep, I touched on that a bit under the eccentric portion I talked about. Like drop catches would be a big one that you can do.

So drop catch would be you're essentially free falling and then just pumping the brakes as quickly as possible. So one example I gave was the Bulgarian split squat. So you can actually load this relatively heavy. Funnily enough, I went through this process. I was doing an experiment with one of the rugby teams I work with and I thought, you know, we just came off the back of, we won the national championship and we're going to this, I guess the first season of the Major League Rugby, and I was like, "Fuck it, I'm going to do an experiment because I don't think we even need to do back squats."

So I was like, "I'll make all my backs just do single-leg work." And I went through this little progression that works really well. So it was like an isometric Bulgarian split squat. So it was like 20 seconds heavy, and then it was into, it was isometrics into the drop catch, I believe. So it was like isometric eccentric. Yeah, so it was almost like a modified triphasic. I don't know, you can just lump whatever names to it you want.

But we moved on from isometrics, kind of built the isometric strength in the joint angles similar to sprinting. So in that instance, everything was kind of geared towards, you can see like a track speed cell program. But in those angles to sprinting, then we moved onto the drop catches and we just kept loading it. And you can load relatively heavy, especially once you get really strong and the strength comes relatively quickly.

So essentially you're standing in the Bulgarian split squat position, bar on your back, and you're kind of going to lift your foot and then kind of almost stomp the ground to get yourself to stop really quickly. So it's kind of like that gives you the pre-tension to be able to pump the brakes quickly and apply force. If you just keep your foot in one spot and drop, it's really hard to create that pre-tension to stop the bike quickly.

So if you move your foot like slightly forward, almost like a tiny little hop, and then just drop as you do that and try stop yourself as quickly as possible when you're in the bottom position, that would be one method of a supermaximal eccentric with the lower body.

Then you can do the same thing with hamstrings. So you can do like drop catch a staggered stance RDLs. That was one of my favorites. You can do that with the trap bar. That works really well. Another one I've done is like on the back extension or glute ham raise, you do your 90° back extensions, but you would do a single leg holding a barbell, and then you'd do a drop catch. So you drop the bar, fall and catch it. That's a really nice one for the hamstrings as well.

So that'd be another supermaximal eccentric. You can also do them slow. So two up one downs also work really well. You do those machines: two up one down leg curls, two up one down leg extensions, two up one down leg presses. Those all work really well, too. And probably where you should start if you're going to start using some of these.

For example, two up one down leg press would be a very good place to start and two up one down leg curl. Bear in mind you're probably going to have soreness, but it will subside as you get used to it from week to week. Also bear in mind that you don't want to run this for very, very long training cycles because as you get better at it, it'll become very intense and very difficult to recover from. So you'd use these in short, I guess, bursts.

For the upper body, you can do very similar where you could say drop catch your push-up. Now, bear in mind with the upper body, it's a little harder because it can be pretty stressful on the wrists if you're doing say push-up style supermaximal eccentrics like with the impacts on the ground. So another way I guess you could say is like the shock method where you're having someone drop a medicine ball.

So you're lying flat on the floor on your back. You have your arms up in front of you, your chest, and someone drops the ball from directly above you, and you're just essentially catching and throwing the ball back up as fast as possible.

That would be another closely related way. Obviously if you have weight releases and things like that, you can do supermaximal eccentric bench press. So you might load like 105% 1RM on the bar, on the sorry, with the weights, and then with the weight releases, and then when the weight releases come off, you might only have 70% 1RM, so you can push it back to the top.

Now, if you have spotters, obviously you can just kind of lower it and then have them help you up, or you can just lower it down to pins, stand up, take the weights off, and put it back. That'll be a full 1RM.

Other ones like for back, you can do like drop catch inverted rows. You can even do drop catch, I guess, pull-ups to an extent, too. But I like the inverted row variation. I think it feels nicer, because you can get a little straighter with the arms. So you can hold the top position. I actually got a video on my Instagram showing it.

I think it's like the five worst exercises for BJJ, and then I just show five good ones. But it's essentially like you hold the top, and then you kind of release with your hands, and you drop, and then catch yourself, and pull yourself back up.

That would be another one. I think that should cover most of them. Yeah, I think that should cover a lot of it in terms of like supermaximal eccentrics that you can do in those without flywheels. Much appreciated the detailed answers. Appreciate the point about single leg squats. Love the channel. Keep going. Thank you very much. I appreciate you tuning in and watching.

That should, I mean, that's almost an hour, so I just ended up rambling for this long. So for anyone still listening, check out the conditioning mentorship with Dr. Andrew Usher. We have that one coming up in June. That's, I mean, the first one was so banging, so make sure you get in on that, because it's not just for combat athletes, it's for any coaches and athletes in any sport.

So we cover, I mean, we went through case studies of boxers, downhill mountain bikers, sure what some of the other sports we ended up covering. Soccer, rugby, yeah, a ton. Because the systems and knowledge and physiology is applicable. I mean, it's the same throughout every sport. Just potentially what you're trying to dial in is slightly different based on the sport and the athlete, which is what we go into.

So you'll get a really nice physiology background, honestly, at post grad level, like post grad level physiology, stuff that, if you went through post grad university, a good refresher and some new stuff for you. If you didn't go through university, you're going to get a crash course on all of it and stuff that no one is talking about.

Then you're going to go through like the heart rate essentially data analysis of heart rate data because that's what most people have. But also through like muscle oxygenation data, power data, things like that. But if you only have heart rate, it's perfectly fine. And then basically show you the nuances of dialing and conditioning based on heart rate.

And we're not talking zones and do more zone [expletive] man. That's all I see on the internet right now. It's kind of like just do more zone two, do more zone two, and then do some other zones. And no, we don't even care about zones. We don't care about zones. We don't care about breathing through your nose and all these other things that don't really push the needle. All we care about in this data analysis for heart rate, how quickly we can get to max heart rate or how we're going to get to max heart rate anyway.

How quickly our heart rate can go up, how quickly our heart rate can go down. And not just in terms of the beats, but the quality of that heart rate. And that's just shown by a mathematical model how well it sits on that curve.

And then we can dial in sprint protocols to change different parts of that curve to improve recovery between efforts. Which is super honestly, there's no one else. Okay, when people say there's no one else in the world doing this and it's like, "mhm," they probably are.

With this, there's actually no one else in the world doing this, which is honestly kind of crazy. And I'm not just trying to market and sell it by saying that. You will not, you can't, you cannot search the internet for this information, and you cannot go talk to XYZ coach about this information because there's literally no one doing it, which is just nuts.

And now, obviously, you've got Dr. Andrew Lock doing the jump air bike. He's been doing it for many years. They're now doing it for not just in combat sports, but they have multiple professional rugby teams, Premier League soccer teams, Olympic athletes, gold medalist Olympic athletes, and various other. Just multiple sports, all using the system, which just no one knows about.

So, you'll get to learn it as part of this conditioning mentorship. So, make sure you check that out. And as always, I never advertise it enough, but the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground the Training App. If you are a fighter, and you want training, your training program done for you, training app is there.

37 bucks a month or 370 for the entire year. It has a private community in the app where if you have any questions on the programs, not sure what to do, etc., you just message in there, I'll reply to you and help you out.

I've helped many fighters out with like fight camp preparation with modifying some of the programs for that. There's programs for various goals in there. I mean, there's an entire year of program for each for striking, grappling, and MMA, which is quite cool.

So, it covers it basically. Everyone is also a specific judo program from Cast de Wit, who is the sports scientist and strength and conditioning coach for the Dutch Olympic judo team. So, yeah. And I'm going to be probably adding some 2.0 variations soon, just kind of as I continue to kind of refine my process to be able to provide more programs in there for you, too.

So, make sure you check those out. Hopefully, obviously, that's if you want to support what I'm doing here with Sweet Science of Fighting, that's the way to do it. Join that training app or the conditioning mentorship. Other than that, guys, I'll catch you in the next podcast. It'll be coming soon.