Q&A: Bodybuilding For Combat, Conditioning Modalities, Sled Training, & More (SSOF Ep 180)

James de Lacey0:00

So, let's go. Asian sweet boy, if you only have access to less skilled training partners, how can you maximize your training? Now this is more of a technical I guess tactical question but I guess where S&C is really effective is when you kind of have a foothold in both within an entire team. But take my answer with a grain of salt of course because that is not my area of expertise.

So if you have less skilled training partners to maximize your training you're probably going to have to set yourself some constraints to make it more difficult for yourself. So if you are sparring, it might be only using certain techniques. If you are grappling, it might be trying to enter into certain positions from anywhere. It might be only playing defensively. It might be having different goals within your rolls so you're not just dominating the entire roll.

Maybe it's letting the other person work and you're having to escape bad situations. Pretty much just going to have to constrain yourself to be able to work different scenarios so you're not, because otherwise when you're going against low level opponents anyway you can do what you want and you don't want to have to do that. You want to put yourself in situations where you have to work a bit. So if you only have low level training partners that would be the way to go.

Now if you are trying to be a competitive fighter then you need to find high level training partners. There's just no other way. If you're just a general practitioner yeah you just have to start constraining yourself. Maybe go to other open mats and open gym sessions where you can actually train against other individuals that you're not familiar with. That will also help. Hopefully that answers that one.

Daniel Brotherhood, why do you think bodybuilding is so popular for BJJ? I think a few reasons. One of them is jiu-jitsu is so, how do I put it? It benefits so greatly from size and strength that you can get away with it. And it's so technical, the sport is so technical that your strength, I'm not going to say strength doesn't matter but it's so technical that you can get away with pretty much doing anything within your S&C if you're good enough.

That kind of rule kind of applies to a lot of sports. But obviously the less skilled you are, the more you're going to probably rely on some of these physical attributes. And I will say that bodybuilding doesn't really have that negative but that potential negative effect on jiu-jitsu like it would on other sports.

So being big and strong and even slow to an extent is still going to help your jiu-jitsu because it is a slower sport. And especially if you play that kind of game anyway, if you play a hard pressure game or you maybe play more old man style jiu-jitsu off your back, you don't need to be fast. And your speed is going to come from your knowledge and anticipation of what your opponent's going to do anyway. So just being big and strong is going to be helpful.

Whereas in a striking context, obviously that's not the case because there isn't that huge, there isn't that strength component where you're having to overcome someone else's mass. Obviously, there's a strength component in the fact that you have to produce force quickly, which is different, which is why bodybuilding or pure bodybuilding style training isn't going to help you. But obviously, having some kind of bodybuilding work is going to be important.

And then obviously the other thing is every single piece of content on the internet regarding health, fitness, sports, women is all hypertrophy related. Everything is about building muscle. I mean, some of the comments I get on some of my videos I just have to call people [expletive] retards every day because it's just everything comes back to oh but this doesn't build muscle or this is no good for, it's like that's not, people think building muscle is the only reason to do exercise and that'll be the other reason why. Answers that.

Will warrior, I think he's asked this question on every single live podcast and in every single comment section on high-intensity training for combat sports. We've gone through it a couple times, but high intensity training, I assume he's referring to one set to failure in the gym training, which has, I guess you could say, has become relatively popular. Especially with the rise of more bodybuilding style content, Mike Mentzer's kind of low volume philosophy kind of I guess it made its way through a TikTok trend or something like that.

I would say I'm not a huge fan of it. I don't think it's bad or wrong per se, but I think you, put it this way, you can only use it on a certain select number of exercises. So, typically within a high-intensity training, I guess philosophy, your entire program is kind of based around this where you're doing one set to failure over all the different muscle groups.

But obviously, you're going to have some form of faster movements. You're going to have maybe ones that you're not taking to failure depending on the time of year you're doing. There's a lot of different factors you're playing around with and just having this one bullet in your chamber that you're pulling for absolutely everything doesn't make sense.

It's the same thing with any training modality. Obviously people often bring up Marinovich and stuff like that. It's great, some of the ideas are great but you can't just have this one bullet in the chamber to solve every single problem. So everything, most things kind of have its place to an extent and that's kind of how these variables are manipulated.

Training one set to failure typically doesn't solve any of the problems for a fighter because you can just run through maybe the different attributes you're trying to address. Maybe someone has relatively, I don't know, needs speed. They're just relatively slow. Well, that's not going to solve the problem. Maybe they're just weak. They need more base strength. This might solve some of the problem, but isn't going to maximize strength development.

Maybe they just need size. Maybe they're undersized for their weight class. Yeah, you could do something like this for sure, but you're going to lack a lot of the volume. So, you're probably not going to add as much size as you would someone else. And then obviously you can go down the conditioning route. Again, you're going to undercook. You'll have extra condition anyway. So, hopefully that answers that.

Got one in the chat here. How would you assess which form of sprint intervals, short or long, high intensity interval training protocols to use for an athlete? Any assessments and testing protocols to use? So, within the conditioning mentorship, we have Andrew's app that kind of runs through essentially how the heart rate is moving through our baseline.

Two sets of 30 seconds sprints with 60 seconds rest in between. And we're kind of just looking at how the heart rate is going on during the work interval. So how it's going up and then how it's coming down during the recovery. Now if you have power data and muscle oxidation data on top of that, you're sweet. But most of us don't. So we just use heart rate. And then we're just looking at how that heart rate comes down. So does it drop 20 beats?

How is that heart rate coming down? Is it taking a delayed time before it comes down? Is it coming down quickly then moving out? Is it kind of all over the place? All these things kind of give us an idea of where we may start these sprint intervals for that particular athlete.

For the high-intensity interval training, similar thing because it kind of comes down to that test and then maybe looking at things like resting heart rate. Do they even have that kind of aerobic base? Because that base is still important. It's just not as important as people make it out to be.

So if someone has a relatively high resting heart rate, okay, well we don't have to go down the sprint interval route. We can start with some longer or shorter high-intensity intervals, even some zone two if they have time, to kind of bring that resting heart rate down a bit and then start smashing with the sprint intervals. But outside of having those assessments, it's very hard to be able to decide what someone needs.

You could start with a simple resting heart rate and be like, okay, is it in the low 50s or below 50? Great, we can probably go into more high-intensity work. If it's not, probably need to do some more base work.

You can look at a simple maximum aerobic speed test, which would be like a mile run, 1.6k, 6k, or a 6-minute time trial on a bike or a rower, which doesn't give you—it's hard to get MAS values to compare on equipment. But if you do it running, I typically like to look at say like 4 meters per second of MAS. That's kind of like threshold, like the threshold for okay, you're relatively fit. And that's just based on my own experience running tests with various athletes and also through a lot of the data we have, normative data we have in team sports.

And then if you're doing on a bike or rower, it's a little harder because the max speed gets inflated a lot. It's almost like double. You get like a 10 MAS versus like a 4, because just obviously you're going further on the bike and things like that. But you can still use something like that.

It's going to be relatively hard to figure, I guess, the quote-unquote fitness. You could use like a 1-mile bike ride or 1-minute like airbike kind of thing, try to get under 2 minutes. These are kind of small little things you can kind of look at, but it becomes very difficult without actually having some of the data, because then you're kind of—you're still always kind of guessing and estimating, but you're like really guessing and estimating when you don't have that. So hopefully that answers something there.

Another question here from Boy Badger. Hey coach, do you think for the sake of longevity, injury prevention, focusing on building size, muscle mass is ideal, or will strength, power-focused, shoulder lifting sessions still do the job? So that kind of depends on are you a competitor in a weight class, that kind of thing, because obviously there's only so much mass you can add if you're in a weight class. In terms of injury prevention, longevity, yes, I still think it's a good idea to do, I guess, more hypertrophy-style training.

Now the way you gain size is going to be dictated by your diet. So you could do, say, your session is strength, power-based, and you finish with some isolation hypertrophy work. You're still not going to grow that much if you're not eating enough in a surplus. So if you're just eating maintenance or even in a slight deficit, you're not going to put on mass. So you can still do that work and I still think it's good to do.

It's just obviously time-related. So for example, a couple of my athletes, they don't have that much time to train. So for me to do that—okay, I've got my daughter running in here now. Hey, I'm live on this podcast.

So if I'm doing—so for them, I don't have time to add a lot of extra isolation work. So that's just not in there. But if it's a focus for you to gain some size and mass, then yeah, I would definitely do some hypertrophy.

Oh, you're going to a birthday. And then if anything else as well, nothing happens in isolation. So your strength work will still, if you're eating a surplus, still enough to gain some size. So it's just not going to be as much maybe as if you were trying to—if you focused on it majorly.

Sorry, let me just send this because—okay, let's go to the next question here. If you have any more, throw them in the chat. From Instagram, from Caris Adams. Cass, my mate from back home. We went through uni together and everything. Creatine loading versus not loading. What's better in your opinion?

So you don't need to load creatine. Works the same whether you're going to load it or not load it. It's just going to be—yeah, it is way outside. So if you're going to take creatine, you just take 5 grams a day every day. And then if you wanted to work faster, then you would load it. But you don't have to. Just take 5 grams every day.

Now obviously there's people coming out now saying you need 10, 15, 20 grams a day, and that's stating brain health blah blah blah, but obviously the research is very preliminary in that instance. So I would, for me, I would still stick to 5. I don't think there's much—I don't think the evidence is strong enough to warrant saying take 10 or 15. That's not to say you can't do it, but I just don't think the evidence is there.

Okay, let's move on to the next one. Northern Grappling Company. Which social media fitness influencers boils your blood the most? Obviously I answered that on Instagram and he's just trying to get me sued again. So let's move on to the next one.

How do you prioritize for the average fighter versus elite? This is from CZ as well. I mean, the prioritization isn't much different because it all comes down to the individual. So if we say average versus—maybe it's more on around training methods. Elite athletes, when we talk about elite athletes, we're typically talking about athletes at the top of the sport.

So we call someone in Super Rugby and English rugby elite. We call someone in the UFC elite. We call someone in Premier League soccer elite. And then we say the division below, they're still maybe professional and very good fighters, but they'll be called maybe sub-elite. But that doesn't tell us anything about their physical qualities. It just tells them about their skill in those sports.

So typically, even say, even if you look at average versus elite fighters, typically it does not mean they are average versus elite athletes in terms of their physical qualities. So again, it comes down to more what's happening in the individual.

I would say most, I guess, fighters come in with similar problems where it's kind of like a lot of it is the conditioning isn't quite dialed in. Maybe the strength training isn't as planned as well and doesn't have, I guess, much intent or structure behind it would be the biggest ones. So it's more just addressing some of the limitations.

For the average fighter, I mean, the thing is typically you look at average versus elite or sub-elite and you're like, okay, full-time versus part-time, so time constraints. But in fight sports, everyone's working full-time anyway. So you still have the same time constraints. You have the same everything. So it's very similar.

So I wouldn't say there is that much difference, because it kind of depends on what their training background is and what they've been doing, what they need. So not much changes, to be honest, between someone at the top versus not at the top.

Again, another one from CZ—you asked four questions. Do long road runs still have their place in fighting? Yes, they can. I think it is way overemphasized, but they can be used.

Let me put this way. There's a few scenarios where they can be used quite well. For example, the more out-of-shape fighter—I mentioned you have a high resting heart rate, don't have that much of a base. Sure, it doesn't have to be road runs either. Just long, slow, steady-state cardio. That would fit there. You don't need too much of it.

Coming back off a competition or a fight, yeah, go ahead. Again, you can maybe do a couple weeks of that kind of just to almost wind down and kind of get back into training and keep it kind of low stress. If you're coming off an injury, coming off sickness, all that kind of stuff, that's where that would all kind of fit. If you just enjoy, or you feel like you need it to perform, or you just like to do it, yes, you can.

But I would not look at it as something that is actually developing your fight conditioning. I would look at it more as a nice to do. So if you are—I don't know, you enjoy just going off for a run once a week for 30 minutes to 60 minutes—then that's fine. Do that. But that's not going to push—that's not going to move the needle, put it that way, for most people. But you can do it.

Another question in the chat here from David. When it comes to speed work, does explosive pushing help with striking power? I heard you say at least punching strength doesn't really help with punching. Well, pushing strength doesn't really help with punching power.

Yeah, explosive pushing help with—it doesn't mean—okay, so we can do explosive pushing work, throws, all that kind of stuff, because that's going to—it's still going to develop the qualities that we want for speed, power development, strength development, etc.

But when we're talking about striking power, we're typically talking about punch impact force. Because it's not how fast you throw the punch or how hard you throw the punch. It's how much of that momentum we can transfer into the target. And yes, there's more than one way to achieve that momentum.

There's more than one way to achieve how much momentum is going to be transferred in terms of it can be a slower punch, it can be a faster punch, but it's that stiffening at impact that is going to allow us to transfer that momentum to the target, which has been coined effective mass.

And Seth Lineski, I would highly recommend listen to Seth Laneski on the podcast. He's been on a few times. He is the leading punch researcher. We're together and everything. He's a good dude and super smart and he took it from, basically took the effective mass from the effective spring model from sprinters.

So if you think about sprinters hitting the ground and they have essentially their leg hitting the ground that is essentially the spring and the stiffer that spring the better the momentum and transfer of force. So he's taken that same model into the hand and the arm when throwing punches to be able to I guess describe this idea of effective mass and transfer of momentum.

So yes, explosive pushing stuff is going to be helpful for general qualities, but the actual striking power is going to come down to technique, timing, and this idea of transfer momentum target. So typically it's more time boxing and stuff like that that's going to develop it the most.

Hitting the heavy bag is your best tool to be able to develop this and then everything else is kind of just underpinning. So hopefully that answers that. This fourth question, does ladder work still have a place in the fitness industry for perhaps coordination drills?

So I guess if we say for general fitness people, they can kind of do whatever the hell they want. It doesn't really matter because it's more for novelty, fun, get moving, that kind of stuff. So that's fine. Obviously talking about ladders for agility, they don't do [expletive]. And that's because we have physical and cognitive attributes or characteristics that underpin agility and the ladder develops none of them.

Not one of the cognitive elements and not one of the physical elements which means that it literally does nothing for agility which is contrary to but could be called an agility or speed ladder. And if you're interested in that, maybe I have to do another video on that.

I'll do another video on YouTube as well. But if you search Warren Young agility maybe he will be the leading, and that's a 2015 paper. He'll be like the leading agility research I guess in that space. He's done some really cool work really breaking it down showing the differences between change of direction speed and agility and how they are two separate qualities.

I have some data in an article. I don't know if I put it in the agility article on the website. I'm trying to redesign the website. It's taking a while because I'm custom coding it. I'm AI code nerd now.

This is taking a while, but I got some cool data from because he came and presented to us postgrad students way back in the day at uni and he shared a lot of stuff that wasn't published in his paper that I wrote down and put into an article showing the differences between the different side steps and I think it was an AFL or rugby and the different time it takes to react to them and stuff. It was pretty cool. I've got that somewhere.

Another question here. Follow up to my previous question from Boy Badger. Assuming calories are in a surplus and macros are met, can I still build adequate size with a routine that's primary consisting of low rep, Olympic, and compound lifts? Yes. Yes, 100%.

Typically in these instances, especially for athletes, I typically like to do that for the lower body and then I'll do higher rep work for the upper body. That's typically how I'll look at it. And I would do that typically because obviously in sports like rugby guys are running all the time and they got to sprint and they got to be fast and there's no way they're doing set to 10 squats then getting out there and running and sprinting, et cetera.

So just like you're saying there I'll be doing your low rep Olympic and compound lifts even low rep upper body work and then as your accessory stuff at the end you may be doing more volume on dumbbell benches, dumbbell rows, arm isolation work, et cetera.

And that will give you like that'll give you a really good solid foundation of pretty much touching everything and allowing you to get the adequate volume in to gain mass. And you'll probably see a lot of like Tik Tok and whatever else is saying like volume doesn't matter.

That's why I guess a lot of the one set of to failure stuff is very popular. But you still need volume. You just may not need to do crazy volume. You can get away with much less. Typically you'll see like optimizing hypertrophy is 10 sets per muscle group per week plus you can do four and still gain good mass.

So, hopefully that answers that too. Corporal Chaos, top three books to learn about conditioning for fighters. Honestly, in the conditioning space, I don't think there are any, which is sad. Maybe I should write one at some point. That's not to say that it's going to be any good, but maybe I have to write one in the space.

So I would probably start with a physiology textbook that'll give you a good understanding. Our conditioning mentorship which just started is probably honestly the best resource that I've ever done for conditioning. Man, I wish there was something that would really go into detail.

Not a book, but obviously the podcast with Dr. Andra and Dr. John Babry were gamechanging for myself. So, I would probably say they'll be gamechanging for you too if you check those out. I think there's five maybe podcasts now with us all over the podcast channel.

So I would listen to those. I just don't think there's any really good up to date conditioning resources. I think a lot of them teach a lot of the stuff that we kind of learned through uni. You know, aerobic, alactic, anaerobic energy systems, this is how you target them, et cetera.

But when you start looking under the hood, it just doesn't work that way. And it makes it, I understand that it really gives the simplicity when you have these little buckets and you can put 20 seconds on, 40 seconds off into the anaerobic bucket and then longer work into the aerobic bucket and then separated by power and capacity.

But it doesn't work like that. It doesn't work like that. And you start to look at the wrong things when you're looking to develop the underlying physiology. Because if I'm doing 20 on, 40 off, that actually becomes a predominantly aerobic stimulus and it's classed as like anaerobic capacity as an example.

So yeah, I would honestly I'll point you to our podcast with Dr. Andra and Dr. John Barry because they're banging. David, thanks for all your work, James. It's really inspiring to watch you showing up consistently and focusing on giving this high level of value for so long.

I appreciate that. I appreciate the feedback and everything. It's nice because YouTube doesn't really like me that much for some reason. Instagram is slowly growing, but man, there's a lot of people out there talking a lot of nonsense, too. And that's not to say some of my stuff is a nonsense.

I probably speak some nonsense, too. But I try to keep it relatively, what would you call it? In line. Let's put it that way. A question here by Aki. So, he is I just actually broke down his training program for a video which will come out this week on the main YouTube channel.

So, if you want your program broken down by me, I'll break down and kind of run through it what I think. You can just send email out to me, DM me on Instagram, whatever it is. He was asking about a sled training program.

So, he was saying as almost as a hypothetical, if you had nothing but a sled and enough weights to load it pretty damn heavy, how would you address a fighter's conditioning or strength and conditioning? He's trying to figure out how to implement them sleds with his fighters because they have zero to low learning curve.

His fighters are allergic to lifting, but he thinks the sled might gamify. Yeah. There's actually some really cool stuff you can do with sleds. So, it depends on the sleds you have. So, you have the prowler, which has like the two upright poles that you're pushing, and then you have the sleeve, which have the straps, which you're pulling.

So it depends which one you have. Prowler can be used as both. Sleeve obviously can only be used as one. I have a few different things or sets that I've used in the past and I actually used to take back in the day obviously when all of us start coaching we run normal fitness classes too because we don't get paid so we got to make money somehow.

I used to run a modified strongman like boot camp class at the gym. It's actually pretty cool and we'll do a lot of sled stuff, like you know general population come and get a sweat going and things but there's a lot of cool stuff you can do.

So let's start with let's start with the sprintable stuff and we'll work our way back. So you can do your sprint intervals with the sleds. The nice thing about the sleds is you can reduce your risk of injury because you cannot go as fast.

So typically when you're doing flat ground sprints, I'm sure you've seen every single team sport where people are popping hammies left, right, and center. And it is the most common injury within sports like soccer, rugby, etc., etc. And people will pin it down to whatever they want to pin it down to, but it's simply because the games now are so much faster, so much more congestion, they're playing more often, the seasons are long, all that kind of stuff, more travel, whatever.

But when you add load to something, obviously you can't go as fast, you don't have that eccentric load, all that kind of stuff. So it's a lot safer. So you can do, say, sprint intervals of your 10 second sprints, 20 seconds rest, six times as an example with some load on the sled.

How much load for the sprint intervals? You still want to sprint fast. You're probably going to have a very light load, maybe even like 10% of body weight. What's cool, I was a subject in Matt Cross's research on optimal power loading with the sled where you can load up to like 70% body mass and get and essentially sprint with that heavy load.

So, okay, let's just keep the sprint rules first. So, sprint rules, lighter loads, you can do the same, I guess, sprint set and reps. And you can do it like that. Otherwise, you would just do shuttle runs without the sled. So that kind of covers you in that aspect or obviously if you have an air bike, but I'm assuming you only have a sled.

And then if you're looking at power development, same thing. That light load sled would work longer rest. And you can do heavier sled work too. So as I mentioned, you could, if I remember correctly, somewhere between 67 and 70-ish% of body mass, I believe, on sled.

Obviously, you got to count for friction as well, depending on what surface you're doing it on. You have to play by ear a bit. But regardless, you can do heavy sled like sprinting and it should be very, very challenging and you'll be doing something like 10 meters hard sprint and then you just rest for a relatively long time and then that way that's like your power-ish work. Obviously you can do jumps and things like that.

And then for your main strength work, I mean I've done this with athletes in the past. They just couldn't squat. Older knees, all that kind of stuff. And contrary to what the internet says, you don't have to do any lift.

Most people haven't worked in any environments where they have these constraints. So, they don't know. But, you know, you don't force your athletes to do anything. They have to play the sport. They're there to perform the sport. So, we don't squat.

He would literally do trap bar deadlift relatively light and heavy sleds. And that was a heavy prowler push. And that was his leg development. He was a beast center, too. He would just run through people. So you literally, that's an awesome way to develop leg strength is through heavy sled pushing.

When I say heavy, I mean like these got to be heavy. Like you're struggling to get one foot to keep it moving in time. Like they shouldn't be running at all. It should be like step step or even slower than that and you're just pushing that thing as hard as you can.

It's harder to do it with the sled drag heavy because you're like, you're so bent over and you have nothing really to kind of keep you balanced and in place. So if you're doing heavy sled work, pushing is the better option than pulling.

We come back to the power work. So we've covered all that kind of lower body pushing and pulling. You can do what I really like, explosive sled full body movements. So you can do, my favorite one is with the sled with the straps.

You're facing the sled and you're almost doing like a heave high pull. So you're kind of leaning forward with the straps forward. You're kind of in this bent over position and you're using your legs and your back and you're trying to explode backwards like you're almost doing a scoop, a med ball scoop toss over your head as far as you can and you're pulling those straps like you're doing a big upright row or clean high pull and you're just exploding the sled and you just walk your way back 20, 30, 40 meters as you just repeatedly explode that sled.

That's a really cool one that would be really good for especially for grapplers and wrestlers in the standup game. I mean, even for Muay Thai to an extent because it's going to strengthen your back and your kind of upper back area, especially with people clinching your head.

You can do the same thing pull throughs with the sled. Now, I will say the pull through is definitely not that effective as an exercise overall, but you can do with the sled and it's almost like an explosive hip thrust, but you can't go as heavy because when it's heavy, you just don't have the leverage to be able to pull it through with your hips.

The other one I like is an explosive like rotation or chop. So you stand sideways to the sled and you just like do an explosive rotation while holding the straps. So that's like your explosive core work or whatever. You can do the same things with one arm rows explosively as you walk back.

You can do a walking explosive chest press. So you'd be in a stagger stance and you go bang, walk forward, bang. So there's like some really cool variations. Actually, you mentioned obviously putting together something. I could, I should actually put together a resource for this.

Because there's a lot of stuff I've done with it that's actually quite cool. You don't actually see around. It's not used that often. What else have I done with it? That will be the main things. Obviously, then you have your lateral work.

So, you can do your lateral shuffles, lateral sled sprints. Those are all epic, especially for combat athletes who are moving side to side. If you want to put it together and you only had sleds, you maybe would maybe do, let's see, depends on what you're focusing on the day.

But if let's say it's like a pure strength training day, you may warm up, you may do like heavy sled sprint or maybe a let's say you do a lighter sled sprint to start, maybe do a few reps of that, then you move on to a heavy sled push.

And then once you've done that, then you may do some of the upper body explosive work or you may even do the actually the upper body explosive work before that heavy sled. Do the heavy sled last, say sprint first and in between you would do like your explosive high pull, rows, chest press, all that kind of stuff.

And that would be a solid program and I bet you it would work. I bet you it would work. So hopefully that answers that. Another question in the chat. I ran out of questions from Instagram now. So if you have any, throw them in the chat.

Boy, again, this channel and the podcast are a gold mine, deserves a thousand times more attention. I appreciate that. Thoughts on accessory training focused on the often neglected body parts such as feet, hands, and neck. How much attention are they worth giving? I'd usually do them every second day on off days.

Yep, that's completely fine. I typically like to do them, depending on what it is, as part of the warm-up in a circuit. Obviously, not the hands because you're going to use them, but I'll use neck in that instance there. Or they can be done at the end of the session in a little circuit or they can be supersetted between your main lifts.

Obviously you're not supersetting grip work with a lot of your stuff and you're probably not supersetting footwork, but for neck you definitely can like if you're squatting you can superset your neck work there. Feet stuff I don't really do. I think plyometrics and things usually take care of a lot of that.

If you're jumping a lot of rope that's taking care of it as well. Doing a lot of lateral movement you're kind of sorted with hands, with grip stuff. I haven't done that much, I don't program that much direct grip work just mainly because you get so much of it in the sport.

It's not to say it's not useful and not necessary. But if you feel like you can handle it then yeah I would 100% do it. Now I will say that a lot of the grip work, depending on the type of grip work, it doesn't seem to transfer that well between the different types of grip.

So for example really common is like a gripper. So, if you play with a gripper, and if you're going to get a gripper, Iron Mind has the best ones. I've got a few of those. Not sponsored, but I love their equipment. Iron Mind sandbags and Iron Mind grippers.

You can get really strong on grippers, but it doesn't translate that well to other types of grip. And when I'm talking types of grip, you've got like crushing grip, which is like that gripper. You got like support grips, which are probably the most common in combat sports where you're kind of, think about like hanging from a pull-up bar.

That will be a support grip because you're kind of, you're isometrically holding a fixed position. So if you grab someone's wrist, that'll be a support grip. Similar to holding a barbell, similar to holding a chin bar, that grip tends to obviously transfer best because it's the same.

The crushing grip strength, like the grippers and things like that, doesn't seem to transfer as well, at least in my experience. Some people might have different experiences, but it's almost like such a specialized movement and gripping tool that you can get really good at maybe doing grippers from doing grippers as often, but you may not feel that difference when you're doing other movements.

Other ones obviously you have more finger stuff like pinch grips which train your fingers and, well, mainly your thumbs and you'll feel like that chicken drumstick part of your thumb. It's the worst feeling. I hate that feeling like it's going to cramp.

And then obviously you got like crimp grips and like more finger style grips like if you're holding the gi, but I don't think you need to do that if you're doing gi work because that gi is already wasting your fingers already. So you're just adding more on top of it.

And then you've got like monkey grips which are your hands basically aren't connected. So if you're carrying a, if you watch World's Strongest Man, you watch them carry those massive sandbags. They're like bear hugging it but the hands aren't connected. That's a monkey grip.

And I think that's a good one to train too, more forearm than hands, but you'll find yourself in these positions if you're grappling a lot. Anyway, the clinch, I guess to an extent is a monkey grip because even though your hands are technically connected, they're on top of each other.

So they're not, you know, it's not like a gable grip or S grip or anything where you have that connection. So that's more of a monkey grip. So you may be doing more monkey grip style sandbag carries like on a kettlebell, doing pull-ups.

These kind of things would be really good grip stuff that would transfer well to say like a Muay Thai clinch, because a gripper crushing strength is not going to transfer to your clinch strength. I'm positive on that front. Yeah. So yeah, just make sure you pick the right movements that you're looking to do within the sport and then yeah, hope that covers it.

That monkey grip one's really nice though. You just need sandbags to be able to do it really well. And then obviously the support grips, you're doing a lot of support gripping anyway if you're doing pull-ups, deadlifts, all that kind of stuff.

Now, I will say that you can use like thicker bars as well, which is really nice if you do that. I would not be doing thick bars as your main pulling movements, but you might do it as like an extra one afterwards or like for example, I used to do like weighted pull-ups or pull-ups on an all bar and then do like fat bar pull-ups afterwards as an example.

Same thing with like deadlifts. You may be doing deadlifts and you might finish with like a couple of like heavier singles of like fat bar deadlifts. I like doing my pressing movements with a fat bar if I can. Even though you're not having to like hold the weight as such, but if you haven't done like fat bar work in a long time or ever before and you start loading it heavy, you'll feel the difference in your hands.

It's definitely there. The main reason I started training hands specifically was to help with gi training where I was always getting my fingers mangled, but I guess arguably could make it worse. Yeah. Yeah. I think it could potentially be overdone. Now, it's not to say that, you know, if you don't have much of a strength training background under you, maybe it's worth doing.

But again, I think you probably get a lot of that just from your traditional barbell training and dumbbells, etc. Like, if you're doing high, Kroc's, one of my favorite back movements, especially for jiu-jitsu, high rep heavy one-arm dumbbell rows, using your body for momentum, and you do it without straps, your grip is going to be smoked after that.

And that can be your grip training, and it's not going to mangle your fingers, but it's still going to make your fingers damn strong because you have to, you're basically holding that dumbbell in the crook of your fingers up here as you're trying to row it.

So that will work quite well. The other thing I didn't mention is doing the opposite movements. So making sure that you do some form of whether it's like rubber bands around the fingers where you're kind of opening them or you're doing kind of like reverse curl style stuff.

So if you're holding a, like I do with the easy bar where you're doing reverse grip curls, that's going to get the top of your forearms too and get some of the I guess the opposite work. And you can do that with the fat bar too.

Like fat bar reverse curls are really nice one as well. And that's also going to train your support grip. It's also going to train your fingers as well. You have to support that bar. And one trick if you're not using a fat bar for reverse curls, I actually saw an old Rich Piana video way back in the day where he would have the thumbs over, thumbs over grip on the reverse curl and then having to reverse that way challenges the grip a bit more.

So that's the way I do those. Don't do the eight hour arm workout, but I do the reverse curls that way if I don't have a fat bar. So hopefully that answers that. I am out of questions. I think this podcast has actually been pretty good.

So if you have any more in the chat, but otherwise tune in. This week I have Morgan Flatty I think, say his last name. He is the S&C for China, Chinese wrestling, the Olympic team. So that'll be really cool. I have Mitch Finlay coming out the end of this month which will be actually banging.

He is one of the leading boxing researchers too. He's published quite a few papers in post activation performance enhancement in boxers with their warm-ups. So we're going to dive into that whether that's, whether it's a real phenomenon or not. And yeah, that should cover everything.

I'm glad you guys tuned in. It was awesome to have you guys asking questions. It's good to be able to just come on. Maybe I should just do lives more often because you guys seem to jump in, which is pretty cool.

But otherwise, please rate the podcast. It helps a lot. Oh, good. One more question. GSP had some interesting blow ankle training using balance boards and foam rollers. What do you think? I think GSP can do whatever the [expletive] he wants and he will dominate anyone.

Balance boards and foam rollers. I believe that it was probably standing on foam rollers. I don't know to be honest. I haven't played around with it enough to know. It depends. And I also think it depends on the why. You know, is he doing it for balance?

Then no, it's [expletive]. But if he's doing it for something else, I don't know. There could be something there. There could be something there. But I will say that most people probably do not need to do it. So yeah, hopefully that rounds us out to strengthen the ankles.

I think actually if you look at the research, balance boards actually show up more in the knee and hip than the ankle. I'm not quite sure. I may be talking [expletive]. So I will defer that question. But I will say if you're looking to strengthen ankles, jumping rope is going to do that for you, which is the most traditional martial arts exercise you could ever do.

Do more of that. Do more of your multi-directional plyometrics. Your ankles will be golden from there. So I'll catch you guys in the next episode.