Caffeine Periodization For Combat Sports w/ Craig Pickering (SSOF Ep 60)

Craig Pickering1:56

So I guess 3 to 6 milligrams of caffeine 60 minutes before you start exercise is kind of like the start point. For people who don't take high amounts of caffeine, less than that can work. For people that are heavy users of caffeine, a bit more of that might be required. But yeah, 3 to 6 milligrams about an hour before is a typical start point. Then you probably want to just experiment a little bit around that.

James de Lacey3:03

Does that change based on the type of exercise? Because I think a lot of recommendations are generally towards strength training or—

Craig Pickering3:03

Yeah, there's a lot of variability around stuff. I mean, caffeine's performance-enhancing effect is largest in endurance events that last kind of longer than two or three minutes, but certainly over 10 minutes. So that's where it has its biggest performance-enhancing effects, but typically the dose that you'd use there could be a bit lower and you could space that out a bit more.

If you were doing a gym session, a sensible thing to do would just be to have some caffeine sort of an hour to 30 minutes beforehand. And again, you'd want to experiment based on your own individual biochemistry as to what the best time to be around that would be. Some people might need more than an hour beforehand. Some people would sort of like to have sort of doses split out, so a little bit before training, a little bit during training, stuff like that.

It varies on loads of different things, like how much caffeine you use away from training—that'll have an impact on how much caffeine you should have before a training session. Different people have different genetic variations in a couple of genes, and that will influence how much caffeine they sort of tolerate as well. So it's quite changeable.

But yeah, which is why you start off at 3 to 6—well, you probably start off at 3 milligrams per kilogram 60 minutes before, then you try it more, you try a bit less, you take it a bit closer before, a bit further away. You eventually kind of figure out what works for you through trial and error, really.

James de Lacey4:46

Yeah, for me I'd literally take 100 milligrams, and that's well under 3 milligrams, because if I take more—holy—when I get to that 200 milligram mark, I'm done.

Craig Pickering4:46

Yeah. So when I was an athlete, so my best athletics achievements were whilst I was at university, so I was kind of studying and we had lectures on caffeine, and we were talking about 3 milligrams per kilo body weight. So I tried that and I just vomited, basically. It was far too much caffeine for me. I couldn't train, I couldn't complete—I lost the ability to hear and stuff like that.

So yeah, I was pretty—you lost the ability to hear. There was a lot of caffeine. So I'm pretty sensitive to caffeine anyway. But then since I've retired, I'm just a normal person now with kids that keep me awake, so I drink quite a lot of coffee and I'm not sensitive at all to it now. So I've built that habituation over time, and that will happen to athletes as well. They start off being quite sensitive and over time they'll just get more used to it.

James de Lacey5:38

Yeah, I feel you on the kids part. That's definitely increased my caffeine consumption. But you mentioned about habitual caffeine intake affecting that. I think there was a paper recently that came out showing that habitual caffeine intake does not influence the actual acute benefits of the caffeine. I don't know how true that is.

Craig Pickering6:00

So different papers will find different findings on this, so it's probably a bit up in the air. So there's been a couple of studies that sort of suggest that habitual caffeine use does degenerate the ergogenic effect you have over time, so you'd have to have more and more to get the same effect. There's other papers that say it has no effect at all. Yeah, I think it would again, it would be an individual thing.

It's sort of—maybe 20 years ago the prevailing wisdom was that you would stop taking caffeine for maybe a week before a competition to become more sensitive to the effects of caffeine. But again, that's been reasonably largely debunked at this point.

So with habituation, what you want to not do is you don't want to get towards the point where you have to have absolute loads of caffeine before training or competition to get an effect. Because if you need 600 milligrams of caffeine, that's quite hard to get that through liquid-based things—that would be like eight Red Bulls, for example. Yeah, you could take it through tablets, but some people don't respond particularly well to that form of caffeine.

So you'd probably in your daily life, if you were using caffeine through coffee and stuff, you'd probably want to stick to an upper limit of about 3 milligrams per kilo, which for most people would be 3 to 4 cups of coffee a day. And then a decent dose before you go to training as well. Probably you'd start to get into a bit of trouble if you were having 6 or 7 coffees a day and then having caffeine pre-training as well.

You'd eventually get to the point where you have to have loads of caffeine for competition or training, and that then has knock-on effects afterwards. Which if you're training late in the day, it's probably going to affect sleep if you don't think it is. Yeah, that kind of thing—so that's sort of other things just to keep in mind, really.

James de Lacey7:47

You mentioned about the caffeine type there with the pills and things. So what should people look for? And are there some—are there certain—I think caffeine anhydrous is the pure pill form. I think that tends to be more potent.

Craig Pickering7:47

Yeah, it's really complicated. And also, it's quite prone to individual differences. So basically, there's various ways you can get caffeine. There's caffeine anhydrous, which will be tablets—that'll be the source which is in most pre-workout powders as well. Then you can obviously get caffeine in liquid form, so that would be coffee or energy drinks. You can get caffeine chewing gum, you could get caffeinated nasal sprays. You can get those energy gels that have got caffeine in. There's all sorts of different types of caffeine that you can get.

They'll have different pharmacokinetics, so they'll have differences in how quickly you metabolize that. So if you have caffeine chewing gum, you probably get most that caffeine absorbed in about 10 minutes. If you have caffeine in liquid form or tablet form, it's probably closer to 45 minutes to an hour that you get to the peak aspect there.

But another problem is the amount of caffeine in a supplement or a gel or a liquid is quite highly variable. So there's some good research—

From Australia, where they went to the same coffee shop and they bought the same coffee numerous times and tested how much caffeine was in there, and it differed quite a lot. Then they went to different coffee shops, same sort of thing. They've done that with pre-workouts, they've done that with espresso coffee pods. So basically, you may think you're getting the same amount of caffeine from your scoop of pre-workout, but actually it probably changes quite a bit, and then changes between brands. It's hard to quantify.

So that's an additional sort of issue, which is people might think they're getting X amount of caffeine, but they're actually getting more or less than that based on normal variation.

James de Lacey9:31

Gotcha. Does natural caffeine sources differ from say caffeine anhydrous at all in terms of absorption and things?

Craig Pickering9:31

No, not really. So like the caffeine in coffee is equally as performance-enhancing as caffeine from caffeine anhydrous, for example. Like you can test the research, will test that by giving people decaffeinated coffee and then caffeine anhydrous on top of it, and the effects are exactly the same.

James de Lacey10:02

Got you. Yeah, because you see a few companies, I guess a few supplement companies and things like that, moving towards I guess natural caffeine sources within their formulas and things like that. So yeah, just a check with that.

And then you mentioned about the gene as well. So I read one paper, it was a little while ago, that CYP1A2 gene—I wrote that down because I always forget that gene—and they were showing how I guess people, I can't remember if you have it or you don't have the gene, but either way, the non-responders are the ones that essentially see reductions in time trial performance. Responders see improvements in time trial performance with caffeine. But I think it was a sort of a review that you were on showing inconclusive evidence on that, because there's kind of research both ways with it.

Craig Pickering10:27

Yeah, so CYP1A2, that's a gene which creates an enzyme called cytochrome P450, and that's the enzyme which metabolizes pretty much all the caffeine that you take in. And so people have different versions of that gene, so they can be called fast metabolizers—so they produce more of that enzyme, which means they metabolize caffeine quicker—or they can be intermediate metabolizers or slow metabolizers.

And the research tends to lean towards slightly showing that people that are fast metabolizers of caffeine, they see greater performance-enhancing effects if they take caffeine for training or competition. And people that are slow metabolizers either see no improvement, or in some cases actually get a bit worse when they take caffeine. So they would be non-responders to caffeine.

It's early days in that research, I think, and my personal belief is if you're a slow metabolizer, I don't actually think that caffeine would make you worse. I think you would have to take caffeine further away from the competition or training bout. Instead of 60 minutes, that could be 90 minutes, for example, or two hours. That's probably what would have to happen.

And nobody really knows why this gene has this impact. But one of the sort of hypotheses is that it's actually not caffeine which is performance-enhancing, it's the metabolites of caffeine which are performance-enhancing. And so if you metabolize caffeine quicker, you get those metabolites in your bloodstream quicker, and that's what improves your performance.

So yeah, that's one gene that has that effect. Another one which has been reasonably well studied is called ADORA2A, which is an adenosine receptor. So people have different versions of that, which mean they're a bit more sensitive to caffeine or not. And then there's a couple of other genes which kind of have very little evidence to support them. So yeah, CYP1A2 and ADORA2A, they're the main two at present.

James de Lacey12:23

Aren't there companies now starting to try to come out with the caffeine metabolite, so you don't have to metabolize the caffeine?

Craig Pickering12:23

I haven't seen that, but I don't pay much attention to it these days, so it could be true potentially.

James de Lacey12:50

Yeah, I'm sure I heard on some fitness podcast the other day. That'd be interesting. But how would someone know if they had—if they were a slow responder or slow metabolizer of caffeine—without getting gene tested?

Craig Pickering12:50

So people who are slow metabolizers, anecdotally they would be more likely to be the type of people that if they have caffeine late in the day, it would harm their sleep a lot more. So they've noticed that.

So I'm an intermediate metabolizer of caffeine, and until I had kids and I was so tired I could sleep anytime, anywhere, if I had caffeine kind of after 3 p.m., it would keep me awake at night. Whereas I'm sure you've met people, maybe yourself—some people have coffee after dinner, for example, and sleep fine. They're probably more likely—

James de Lacey13:16

That's not me.

Craig Pickering13:16

That's not me either.

James de Lacey13:16

Okay, that's interesting. I think that might be my wife, actually. She can have caffeine almost any time. She loves it.

But I guess the other thing is, best practices around caffeine or caffeine periodization: how should someone look to use this as a combat athlete, or any athlete really, throughout the year? Is it just taking that same dose before every session that you do every week, and that's just what you do year-round? Or is there some kind of pullback and things like that throughout the year?

Craig Pickering13:43

Yeah, so there's not loads of research into this type of thing. But what I would be doing is I would have a dose that I know that I can take before a competition bout that I know I can tolerate really well. So I've experimented with that, trial and error over a period of time in competitions, to know, okay, this is the amount that works for me, this is how I take it.

So in my track and field career, I figured out that what worked for me was two cans of Red Bull and then two caffeinated energy gels. So that would end up being about 240 milligrams of caffeine, which was just about 3 milligrams per kilo body weight when I was a sprinter. And I would take that over a split period of time, so I'd take that 90 minutes before, an hour and 15 minutes before, an hour before, and 45 minutes before. So I found a split dose worked for me very nicely.

Through trial and error, I figured out that caffeine tablets didn't work for me. It was too concentrated, too high a dose. So that's what I figured out.

Then what I would do is I would try and stay below that amount. Well, in the days around the competition, I'd probably try and reduce my caffeine a little bit, just so that on the day I was a bit more sensitive. Even though the research doesn't support that that's what you need to do, it just sort of—that would be the kind of thing that I would be doing, just to make sure that when I was taking caffeine before the competition, I was ready for it and kind of had nothing competing with it.

And then I guess just during the training year, if I know 3 milligrams per kilo is probably what I need for most of my competition bouts, I would probably try and have 3 milligrams per kilo for my big training sessions. So maybe one training session a week. And then the rest of the time, I'd just have a normal kind of habitual thing.

So if I was training first thing in the morning, I'd probably have two or three coffees before training, and then maybe a coffee in the afternoon just to keep me going. If I was training in the evening and I wasn't particularly sensitive to caffeine, then I'd maybe, again, think about two coffees beforehand. But I probably would be a bit less focused outside of competition. I'd probably be a bit less focused on getting high doses of caffeine in for training. I'd probably just want a normal sort of sensible amount just through daily basis things. That's what I would be doing.

But if people don't want to drink coffee, which is fine, then pre-workout—yeah, so pre-workout would be fine. Caffeine tablets would be fine. Just any kind of dose of caffeine would be fine, so long as you were kind of keeping it reasonably low so you didn't have to sort of step it up a lot as you got to competition.

James de Lacey16:31

Before getting back to the podcast, I want to let you know there's a link down in the description for the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground Community. You can get all the help you need for your combat sports training. You get every single Sweet Science of Fighting training program, online course, and you get access to a range of coaches within the private Discord community. So go check that out, and back to the podcast.

Do you find that some people or athletes maybe don't or shouldn't use caffeine around competition just because they're already so hyped and jacked up that caffeine can put them over?

Craig Pickering16:53

Yeah, I think so. I think that's something that we've got to keep in mind a little bit. So I guess some people would be fine with caffeine in a normal competition, but then if they were competing at the World Championships or Olympic Games, then high doses of caffeine—the same amount of caffeine—might actually drive them into a more anxious state. And again, that's something you can only really figure out through trial and error, really.

So I think it's the thing I'll keep coming back to, which is we know what the general guidelines are for caffeine intake, which is the 3 to 6 milligrams per kilo body weight, 60 minutes before. But then you've just got to sort of figure things out around that. And I think that's probably—when I was involved in caffeine research—

That's pretty much the point I got to in terms of some of the papers I was writing. I was kind of like the message was we know caffeine works, so we don't need to do more studies which show that caffeine works. Actually, what we need to do now is figure out some of the context around how we can use caffeine.

So what's the differences between men and women? Should they take the caffeine at the same amount? What's the differences between genotypes, for example? There's not much research on what happens if you've got two competitive bouts in close succession, for example, if you're a fighter. If you've got one fight and then three hours later you got a second fight, do you take the same amount of caffeine for both of those? How do you sort of stagger that out? And there's not really much research around that, so it kind of has to be driven by trial and error, unfortunately.

James de Lacey18:07

As you mentioned about the competition as well, I remember I was competing at weightlifting nationals many years ago and I had a Red Bull, 80 milligrams of caffeine, but I got hyped before that. And I had that just before during my snatches, crushed the snatches, but then just absolutely drained come the 10-minute break before the clean and jerks.

And I lost my legs, jelly legs. I was just absolutely hit the wall from that caffeine. And I don't usually use caffeine that much with training. At that time I wouldn't even train with caffeine, maybe 40, 50 milligrams on a heavy day. And that thing just absolutely bottomed me out to another level. And I was like, okay, I got to not do that next time and maybe have that in the break or something for the second part of it. But yeah, that's definitely trial and error.

Craig Pickering18:59

Yeah, and that's exactly the type of thing you figure out. So when I was an athlete, I guess I would take caffeine for 100-meter races. But at the major championships you have heats of 100 meters on day one, then you got semifinals and finals 100 meters on day two.

And I would have to take so much caffeine for a heat because I wasn't good enough to get through without it, that I'd only get two hours of sleep after those heats before the semifinals next day. And again, that's not ideal from a preparation standpoint.

James de Lacey19:23

Yeah. When would you typically recommend someone cut their caffeine intake for the day just because of sleep at night? Obviously you mentioned it could be dependent on genes and stuff like that, but are there general recommendations?

Craig Pickering19:50

Yeah, I mean the general recommendations that most people say is sort of don't have caffeine in the afternoon. But for most people that are reasonably tired, you probably would have to have caffeine in the afternoon, especially if you've got training later on.

I think from a competitive standpoint, I got to the point where it was worthwhile for me to have the caffeine for evening competitions to suit my performance, and I would just have to accept that I wasn't going to recover particularly well after that. I mean there's some pretty good research from rugby competitions which shows that if you have caffeine before an evening game, you basically get no sleep.

And that obviously has a knock-on effect for recovery. If you've got a game every week and you miss a night of sleep every week, that's not going to be great. But it's just sometimes it's the price you got to pay for that performance.

James de Lacey20:14

Yeah, I remember we had a lot of players who would get their pre-workouts out and caffeine and stuff. But I mean a lot of time you're traveling after that too, which is even worse.

Craig Pickering20:14

Yeah, it's not ideal. Not ideal at all.

James de Lacey20:36

I actually I came across—I was actually looking up a lot of your research as well previously—and I came across something that I had no idea about, and that was taste as an ergogenic effect. And I was like, this cannot be for real. So you can literally have something that tastes good and you can potentially improve performance without any kind of stimulants?

Craig Pickering20:59

Yeah, a little bit. So I guess a bit of history around this would be there's two things. There's some research which shows that if you put a carbohydrate-based drink in your mouth, swill it around your mouth and spit it out, you still get some performance impact—not quite the same as when you swallow it, but similar.

And similarly, menthol, so the mint-flavored stuff, if you have high concentrations of that in your mouth and you're exercising in the heat, it actually makes you feel cooler and so you perform a little bit better. So there's some evidence that kind of how you taste things may have an impact on your performance.

So yeah, one of the papers I looked at was there's a couple of papers which show that if you have a really bitter-tasting compound and you put that in your mouth, that will improve your repeated sprint ability. So what they used in this study was quinine, which is what's in tonic water, which is obviously quite bitter. But a very concentrated solution of that, they basically put it in the mouth, swish it around, spit it out—and some of them drank it. And even when you just spit it in your mouth, it improves your performance a little bit.

So that's a bit of tasting. Now caffeine is also a bitter taste. So there is the potential that when your body recognizes that you've got coffee in your mouth or something that contains caffeine, that the taste of it in and of itself might improve, may improve your performance. But there's not loads of research on that. It's reasonably emerging.

But also, I guess linked to that is there's really good evidence that a fair portion of caffeine's performance-enhancing effects are placebo or expectancy in nature. So they're not actually true physiological outcomes. It's if you think caffeine improves your performance and you think you've taken caffeine, your performance improves anyway.

So some really clever studies that show this, which is they get a group of people, they say to them, 'Do you think caffeine improves your performance?' They say yes. They give them what they call caffeine tablets, they make them do an exercise. Their performance is better, but it's just a placebo. But if people believe they've taken caffeine and they think it improves their performance, they actually see a performance improvement.

So there's a little bit of recognition of if you're used to the taste of coffee and you know that it contains caffeine, then when you taste coffee you think you've got caffeine, so you're going to perform a little bit better anyway. So that will play into that as well. But it's a reasonably new piece of—or new area of research—but I think it's something which will expand a bit more because there's some evidence that hot chili peppers will improve your performance as well, and that'll be through taste. So it's pretty interesting.

James de Lacey23:21

Yeah, that is really interesting. I guess you could put down the performance thing too—if you wake up and you're tired and you have coffee and you feel more awake, then that just associating that taste or that drink with that over time would would kind of be part of that profile.

Craig Pickering23:42

But in addition to that is most people are so habituated and relying on caffeine that when we wake up we're just in a caffeine-deprived state. So when we have coffee, it just gets us back to the normal level. So I don't know if you ever tried cutting out caffeine from your diet, but for the first two or three days you'll have headaches, you'll feel like crap.

And that's basically most people when they wake up, until they have coffee, which just gets them back to normal. So there's a little bit of reliance on caffeine in a lot of people. It sounds like you're speaking from experience there.

James de Lacey24:09

I definitely am speaking from experience. But you mentioned about the caffeine between—I guess if say you have a tournament and you're fighting and then you fight three hours later—there's not much research on there. Do you have any general recommendations or experience in what you would typically do in that situation?

Craig Pickering24:33

Yeah, so there's no—there is—there's no research on this, or certainly there wasn't when I was kind of paying attention to it a couple of years ago. So what I figured out was I would take—so if we had semifinals and finals quite close together, I would take my normal caffeine dose before the semifinal. And then I'd take a top-up dose between the semifinal and final.

Usually there's about an hour between the semifinal and the final, and that top-up dose, if I was taking say 240 milligrams of caffeine before the semifinal, that top-up would be less than half of that. So somewhere between 50 to 100 milligrams per kilo of—sorry, milligrams of total caffeine. So maybe one Red Bull or a Red Bull and a carbohydrate caffeine or something like that.

I think for even more repeated bouts than that—like if you've got three to four to five fights in a day, for example—there, I don't know what to do. It would have to be trial and error sort of thing again. It seems logical to me to have a large initial dose and then smaller top-up doses just to keep yourself at that level.

But obviously the amount of top-up that you require will differ between people. It'll obviously have an impact if you're a fast metabolizer, slow metabolizer, how much you need to have. That's the kind of thing people could figure out over time. But yeah, that's probably what I'd be doing, is I would have my large caffeine dose first and then...

Have smaller doses just to keep the caffeine levels topped up basically.

James de Lacey26:17

Nice. And then there are other ingredients as well that seem to work well with caffeine, like L-theanine, to help take away jitters and things like that. Do you ever recommend taking those two together? Is that something that you've played around with?

Craig Pickering26:17

I definitely not with L-theanine. There was when I was an athlete, there was some supplements that had other kind of neurotransmitter stuff within there. I mean, taurine is commonly found in training drinks. In fact, it's the main ingredient in Red Bull, I think. Taurine of itself is reasonably well studied and has been shown to be reasonably ergogenic.

There's a couple of studies which show that taurine increases the sensitivity of the muscles to calcium. And one of the ways that caffeine can improve your performance is it causes an increase of calcium into the muscle, which makes you be able to contract your muscles a bit quicker. So there's some theoretical evidence that taking those two together would work.

There is evidence that energy drinks improve your performance, and obviously energy drinks have loads of different compounds in there. But yeah, like I said, I never used L-theanine. But other things I used would have been, I can't remember the exact name, it's something called Alpha-GPC or something like that, which is a neurotransmitter-based thing. And there was a couple of herbs as well, I think it was called Huperzine or something like that, which I've got no idea if they had... I thought they had an effect, and that was the main thing. But there's not research around them.

James de Lacey27:42

Yeah, that the paper I wrote on taurine, it was like the increasing taurine dose reduce the need for the amount of caffeine while improving, essentially improving performance. Like, I want to say linear relationship, but yeah, as taurine dose increased, so did performance. But I think taurine is also used, I think I was talking to someone, as part of a sleep supplement as well. So it has some calming effect. I don't know how that works.

Craig Pickering28:05

Okay, yeah. No, yeah, it's all over the place.

James de Lacey28:05

But you also done some research on exercise non-responders as well. I think this is an interesting topic because people, I don't know if anyone actually classes themselves as a non-responder, but there might be... It might be the excuse you'd... What makes a non-responder, or a non-responder in quotes, to exercise?

Craig Pickering28:35

Yeah, so 30 years ago there was a good bit of research done in the US called the Heritage study, which basically got loads of people. They did some VO2 max tests, they did a training program, and they did some more VO2 max tests. And some people got loads better, some people got a little bit better, and some people got a bit worse.

And then over time that kind of led to the concept of people that were sort of super responders to exercise, normal people, and then people that were kind of non-responders to exercise. And then if you dive a little bit deep into some of the research, you'll see that some people, when they do an exercise training program, they'll see their things like blood pressure get worse, their heart rate response get worse. They actually get less healthy if they do exercise, which is paradoxical. And so that led to sort of a belief for a short period of time that exercise might be bad for some people.

I think when you come down to it, there's been some really good work from some researchers in North Hampton University which basically looks at the statistics behind non-responders. And a lot of it is just normal biological variation. So for example, if you went to the bench press today, and if you went to do a bench press tomorrow, you probably wouldn't lift exactly the same amount of weight. So let's just say you went... I don't know, my bench press PB is 160 kilos.

So let's just say I went to bench today, bench press 160 kilos, I do a training program, and then two weeks later I bench press and I've had a bad night's sleep, I've had an argument with my wife, I'm in a bad mood in the gym, and I can only bench press 155 kilos. Have I actually got any weaker? Probably not. It's just normal variation. So that would have an impact on whether people are non-responders or not.

And then I think as you dig a bit deeper, it's people that are non-responders, if you just look at one variable, you'll see some people that don't get any improvement in that. And that could be what's called false variation, which is sort of the statistical thing or the normal variation. In some cases it might be real, but if you test for two or three variables, you'll find that rarely is one person showing no response in these three variables. And if you test for more, like five, six, or seven, then actually everybody improves on something. It just depends what you actually test for.

So it's probably not true to say that... It's not true to say some people show no improvements from exercise. They just might not be showing improvements in the thing that they're testing for.

James de Lacey30:54

Yeah, it also comes down to the training program, right? Like, some people might just need more volume or more intensity.

Craig Pickering31:24

That's one of the ways to get rid of exercise non-responders, is just increase the volume or increase the intensity. So yeah, really good. Yeah, from 2017, I think it was, where they basically did this thing. They figured out these people were non-responders, then they just gave them more training to do, and they were no... They were not non-responders anymore. They started to respond.

So yeah, I think probably a better word would be sensitivity. So some people are highly sensitive to improvements. Some people need a lot more work.

James de Lacey31:47

Do you think that that's a trait of an elite athlete? I've talked to a couple of people about that before. I think that the top of the top elite athletes are just able to adapt so damn fast to training stimulus and to soak up the learning and basically learn so fast compared to everyone else that that's what sets them apart from a lot of their athlete counterparts.

Craig Pickering31:47

Yeah, I think that... Well, I definitely think that would be the case. I think an important thing, which you can't test for at present, but talent ID, for example... A lot of talent ID is focused on saying, "Okay, this person is fast when they're 15, therefore we think they'll be fast when they're 25, and so let's ID them." Whereas really, I guess what you need to think about is how much can this person improve.

Again, there's no way to test for that at present, but if you get to a point where you could do that, then that would be really useful from a talent ID perspective.

James de Lacey32:41

Yeah, I mean, in soccer, I'm pretty sure they're signing them as young as five or six years old.

Craig Pickering32:41

Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah, I mean, the research on talent ID is the area that I work in now. The research is pretty clear that people that are good between the ages of 12 and 16 are generally not the people that are good between the ages of 20 and 24. So the earlier you're selecting people, the worse you are at making those predictions.

James de Lacey33:05

So what are you looking for then in when you're doing your talent ID? This might be interesting for people listening, maybe have teenagers in the sport or know someone of that age. What are you looking for through those ages as talent ID?

Craig Pickering33:05

So I probably wouldn't be talent IDing them. So I would say that we try not to talent select people until they're kind of 17 or 18, because I think at that point you get a better idea. I think if you want to be a talented athlete and you're working with teenagers, the evidence would suggest that you probably need to be exposing them to different sports so they build up a decent movement library.

And I think the evidence is really strong around sort of psychological skills and being able to develop those in people. I think that's useful for life, but there's a lot of psychological skills that you could develop in athletes which will actually make a big difference for them much further down the line. So I think if you're working with early teenagers, very general sort of training programs are useful. And then focus on psychological development would be really important.

James de Lacey33:53

What kind of psychological skills would you be referring to there?

Craig Pickering33:53

Oh, it's loads of things. But I guess things would be persistence. So when it's hard, do you keep going? And that's obviously a useful skill. Resilience would be good. Some things around motivation, so ensuring that they're motivated to do exercise or sport for the intrinsic reasons as opposed to sort of extrinsic stuff. Just stuff that you see in elite athletes.

How does that kind of filter down to the lower level? So self-regulation, for example. So you don't want to have teenagers that fly off the handle. They need to be able to manage their emotions, which obviously that plays over then when you're 20, 21, 22 and at the Olympics, you can manage that anxiety much better. So it's psychological skills like that.

I think if people are interested in that kind of thing, then Dave Collins is probably the researcher... He's probably most well established in that area.

If you pulled out some of his papers on, I think it's called Psychological Characteristics of Developing Excellence, PCDEs, if you looked at those there'd be a lot of research around that which would be useful.

James de Lacey35:09

Interesting, yeah. That hopefully that leaves people down a rabbit hole there and they can look into that too. But I think the questions I have for you Craig: where can people find you and follow you and see what you're up to?

Craig Pickering35:09

I'm not particularly active on social media anymore, but if people want to follow me on Twitter my user handle is Craig100m, so 100 meters. And if people want to shoot me a message on there, I'll respond through that.

Otherwise if they go to Research Gate they can see all my papers. And if they know where to look on Research Gate they'll be able to find my email address as well. And if people want to contact me there's a small barrier: if you can find my email address and you email me I'm more than happy to answer any questions that people have got.

James de Lacey35:57

Yeah, perfect. I'll link those up in the description too. But thanks for coming on. I know it's a little late for you, but you're probably still awake from your caffeine doses throughout the day.

Craig Pickering35:57

No problem, thanks for having me.

James de Lacey35:57

Cheers for coming on.