Calcium Sensitivity For Conditioning & Whole Body Vibration w/ Dr. John Babraj (SSOF Ep 147)

James de Lacey2:43

Wait, why? Okay, let's start there because, well, there are other topics we want to cover too, but this is one of them. So let's cover that. So you're talking about doing isometric holds on a vibration plate after you've done sprint intervals. For what purpose?

Dr. John Babraj3:06

Blood flow keeps an oxygen demand into muscle slightly longer and creates a slightly different stimulus. The way whole body works is you get a full activation of the muscle. You recruit a high number of muscle fibers that perhaps haven't been recruited in a cycle as well, but you'll also recruit the ones you don't have to concentrate on recruiting. It's automatically done by your vibration force.

The force of a vibration is probably an interesting point of where we don't know. Everyone has a slightly individual body vibration frequency. 35 Hz might be good frequency for me, but might not be for somebody else. They might be better at 30 Hz or 40 Hz.

James de Lacey4:00

Doing isometrics then without the vibration plate, you wouldn't get this?

Dr. John Babraj4:00

You still get some because you get that stimulation of fiber recruitment.

James de Lacey4:23

So we're talking about just like sitting like an isometric split squat, an isometric squat after getting off the bike. For how long?

Dr. John Babraj4:23

I had an undergraduate student look at this this year. And what we found was if you do it as like a wall squat or supported squat, people kind of keep the isometric. They call it until they're comfortable rather than embracing the uncomfortable. So we did 15-second post holds, but I think you probably need a longer hold. That's slightly too short. We did see some changes that were very small with the 15 seconds. I think a longer hold might be better, probably closer to a minute.

James de Lacey5:10

I can't even stand after the bike sprint, so I don't know how. Even the whole old-school martial arts train of stance holding and stuff like that.

Dr. John Babraj5:10

Yeah, there's reason for that.

James de Lacey5:10

So the idea is you're recruiting potential muscle fibers that you didn't or maybe didn't recruit well on the bike so you can get those adaptations. Basically, you can just get the whole muscle adaptation.

Dr. John Babraj5:33

You're creating an energetic demand in the recovery. So that isometric has to be fed with energy. So your mitochondria are really active. So you're really trying to accelerate or keep the activity of mitochondria higher.

James de Lacey5:33

Gotcha. Okay, that makes sense. Then are you ever thinking about using these as a standalone training method then for, I guess, for the same thing?

Dr. John Babraj5:56

It's slightly different because isometrics on their own probably won't create the same mitochondrial demand if you haven't done sprints first. The same with whole body vibration. You won't get the same necessarily mitochondrial demand. You'll get some good, which is what we're going to talk about eventually. You get some activation in the isometric body vibration, but you won't necessarily get a mitochondrial if you haven't done sprints previously.

James de Lacey6:46

That vibration's interesting. I remember during my undergrad, I think we did like one lesson when we had something about the vibration plate. And I think that back then, this was well, 10-plus years ago, where I think people were doing research on like holding push-ups or squats on the vibration plate using it as like a post-activation potentiation response for using it. What are some other use cases then that you're using the vibration plate for?

Dr. John Babraj7:25

So vibration was developed. One of the main early researchers was an American called Clinton Rubin. This would have been late 1990s. Clinton was posing vibration as a way to maintain muscle function and health in zero gravity. So he does a lot of work with NASA around how can we prevent the sarcopenia of space travel.

So being in zero gravity, your muscles waste. There's no point doing resistance training because there's no gravity, so there's no resistance to actually utilize. So this is why vibration training kind of got popular in the late '90s was around space. And from a health point of view, from long-term patients in bed where cachexia or wastage is going to happen.

And it was done as a standalone intervention. The idea is that at certain frequencies you optimize the recruitment of muscle fibers without having to actually contract them yourself, and you get a greater proportion of muscle fibers activated. And then really how you choose to program it is up to you.

The early stuff was done on static stats such as the squat position because the amount of G-force that's created on these can be up to sort of 7 or 9 G, and you don't really want that going straight up your spine. So the original stuff was just on static. Then people moved into more dynamic things. Hold the squat position but just go up and down once it's vibrating, but not into a full vertical because you again still don't want that 7, 9 G going through your spine.

So it's got a lot of potential. It became quite popular. Commercial gyms were buying them. So you'd go into a commercial gym, there would be a Power Plate there. But nobody in the commercial gym knew how to use them. So it became like a fad thing. They went. Nobody used it because nobody understood it.

James de Lacey9:53

So could that then be used as like a bodyweight maximal strength stimulus? Is that what you're kind of getting at regarding you're getting more motor unit recruitment or more muscle recruitment from doing like a bodyweight squat on there? Then you're able to treat that as a quote max strength stimulus.

Dr. John Babraj10:13

You'll improve force production because what you're doing is getting neuromuscular response. So you're getting both type 1 and type 2 fibers activated, and you're getting a large calcium release which is allowing contraction to occur. And then that has to be married with the ability to give the energy for contraction. So it's quite multifaceted what it's doing. It's slightly different from resistance training.

James de Lacey10:37

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Dr. John Babraj11:24

And it's both type 1 and type 2 fibers, whereas resistance turns predominantly a type 2 fiber-based approach.

James de Lacey11:47

Interesting. Okay, so you could almost, I was going to say ends up being almost a more neural stimulus being on the vibration plate. Okay. And then your strength training can be neural, but it tends to be more muscular.

Dr. John Babraj12:03

Yeah, tends to be much more around hypertrophy and development of type two fiber cross-sectional area resistance train, whereas with whole body vibration what you get is a much more neural response where the extent of hypertrophy is going to be much lower. You can develop hypertrophy, but it's much smaller than you would with a resistance training.

James de Lacey12:03

Interesting. Okay, that's interesting. I'm just trying to think now where that kind of can fit in a training. I mean, if you're going through, if people are doing maybe quote unquote power blocks or speed blocks of training, it would kind of make sense if you wanted to maximize neural adaptations or neural recruitment or whatever you want to throw in there.

Dr. John Babraj12:33

It can have applications and things like grappling where you're in a symmetric condition. Hold that, go into a grappling position, hold that, and then put the vibrations on. Make sure you're in that position. When you then do it without vibrations, becomes easier.

James de Lacey12:51

You mean you'll be standing on the plate and you'll be, say, bear hugging a sandbag or something like that?

Dr. John Babraj12:51

Yeah, if you wanted to.

It has application other sports as well. You could, it could go into things like scrumming in rugby union. Get into that scrum position and vibrate once you're in.

James de Lacey13:13

And are you saying that you say it's easier afterwards? You saying it's easier directly afterwards, or this is a chronic adaptation that occurs, or how quickly?

Dr. John Babraj13:32

Oh, it's hard to say how quickly, but is this a chronic adaptation that occurs where you would notice a difference? Like you would if you were training and you squatted, I don't know, 50 kilos more, you would feel that difference. You would notice it. After a few weeks, when you go to do something that you've been training to improve, you'll notice it feels easier.

James de Lacey13:48

You need to have your own power plate to sell or something, or at least or associate with some kind of company.

Dr. John Babraj13:48

Things like core, it has applications into golf. Core strength and stuff is really important in golf. By going into a plank position on these platforms, you can increase core activation and core activity whilst doing just simple plank exercise, and that has massive impact on things like golf drives, drive distance and go.

James de Lacey13:48

No, you're good. You're good.

And obviously one of the things you mentioned there, which is what I really want to go into on this podcast, you did a cool little guest video lecture talk on in our conditioning mentorship with Dr. Andasha. And for anyone that is interested, the first cohort sold out and we finished that. The second cohort starts, if you listen to this replay, it starts in the beginning of June, so in a few weeks. Make sure you check the description. You can secure that spot now because the first one was banging.

But John did a really cool little talk on calcium sensitivity. Now I'd love to go really deep into this because it's pretty interesting topic. And from my very basic understanding is within the muscle we have calcium that binds to troponin, and that allows tropomyosin to move away. Then it essentially allows the protein filaments to bind to contract.

Maybe for the listener to make it really easy to understand, you have a cover around one of the, okay, you have two protein filaments in the muscle. They slide over each other. They connect together and they contract the muscle. One of them has a little spiral around it that kind of blocks them binding together. But when calcium touches it, then it moves away and that allows them to bind.

So we'll keep it like that. And you mentioned about calcium sensitivity. Do you want to maybe just go into detail about what is even calcium sensitivity? Why does it even matter?

Dr. John Babraj15:49

I'm going to go back a little. So you've got the two proteins. They need to interact. One component is this other protein that's wrapped around one helix. So you need calcium to allow that to bind. And that's a common one everyone talks about. But the other side is the other protein has to be switched on.

So it's just like a light switch. If you're resting, the light switch is off. The calcium acts as a signal to put the light switch on, which then allows the other protein to bind where it's been exposed. So it's a two, it acts on both aspects of the two proteins that are required for sliding. So it's not just exposing binding sites, it also switches on the other protein.

So it's really important. So we can't create force. So important thing to here is we can't create force unless that protein interacts with that protein. And if we can't create force, we don't have strength. So nothing's going to be powerful. Nothing's going to happen. You're just going to stay there like a sack of jelly. So we need that response.

So what is calcium sensitivity then? That's a training response. And what happens when you train, when you train correctly, is you need less calcium to produce the same response and you get a better movement of calcium around the muscle.

So the calcium is stored in the muscle itself. It has its own calcium store. And when we think, right, I'm going to lift this or I'm going to run fast or whatever, we send an electrical signal from the brain which targets this store and gets calcium released. And that calcium release then starts the whole crossbridge cycle. And then energetics become important. Have you got enough energy to keep the crossbridge cycle going?

So what happens every time you contract that muscle is you release calcium, it goes into a crossbridge and it comes back out of a crossbridge and goes back into a store. And every time we have an electrical signal for that muscle fiber to be recruited, so muscle fibers across a movement get recruited a multiple number of times, they contract and relax, contract and relax. So every time we contract it, we need that calcium to come back out at the same level cycle at the same and come back out.

When we don't do that efficiently, we lose sensitivity. So we need to have more calcium come out to try and get the same response. So when we're training, what we really want to do is enhance the sensitivity to that. And that comes down to which proteins are getting changed when we train.

And the important thing about training is it should target the calcium proteins, the proteins involved in that calcium dynamics. Because if we lose calcium out of that cycle, which is what happens when we start to fatigue and stuff, we have less calcium available. Force gets impeded.

So, and in most sports, there's no point in being able to produce force once. We have to produce the same force again and again and again. So we need efficiency in that cycle. We need to be able to release calcium and take it back up, release calcium and take it back up without losing it to the environment and without losing it to the mitochondria.

And the way that happens is the mitochondria becomes more calcium sensitive. Myosin and actin proteins become more calcium sensitive. So we need less calcium release and we get the same signal or a bigger signal or force production.

James de Lacey19:54

You mentioned about obviously the contract relax nature, kind of probably back to the idea the fastest or most quote unquote powerful athletes tend to be able to contract and relax, or tend to be able to relax faster than non-elite. And obviously within generating speed based movements, you want to have an antagonistic muscle relax to allow I guess the maximum force of the agonist. Is that part of calcium with calcium?

Dr. John Babraj20:26

Whether muscle's active or not depends on whether there's a signal in there for calcium release. It's a chemical response though. Calcium is important there. And the other place where it's important is above the muscle at the neuromuscular junction.

So that signal from your brain, that electrical signal has to get converted into a chemical signal. The chemical's acetylcholine. It's not important, but that's what gets released and that's what then triggers what happens in the muscle. But at the neuromuscular junction, in order to convert that electrical signal to acetylcholine release, you need to take calcium in.

So we've got a calcium dependent mechanism for our chemical signal, and then we've got a calcium response to the chemical signal that will create the force.

James de Lacey21:20

Okay, you mentioned about training correctly for this. And just based on what you've said, I'm going to take a stab and say general heavy strength training doesn't help this response.

Dr. John Babraj21:20

No.

James de Lacey21:20

And I'm saying that because of the idea of heavy loads, typically, I'm not say cause, but they develop co-contractions around joints because you want that stability. And that co-contraction obviously is always being active, and then you're not getting the contract relax. And I'm assuming that means you're not getting the improved calcium. I'm just spitballing here. So what I'd be way off.

Dr. John Babraj21:57

Traditional resistance training is, as I said earlier, it's very much based upon cross-sectional fiber growth. So it's a high response. Most of the positive changes with resistance come about because of this hypertrophy response.

So there's no evidence that we get modeling of, it's two transporters. One's called ryanodine receptor and the other one's called SERCA. And the different isoforms have different SERCA. Ryanodine receptor is our transporter for calcium when we want to contract, and SERCA is the transporter to take it back in when we want to take it away from the crossbridges. And all the evidence suggests that resistance train, heavy resistance train, does not change this response.

So what happens with traditional resistance exercise is we create more force by recruiting type two fibers earlier in the contraction cycle. So we create a bigger, a bigger powerful muscle. We recruit fibers that contract quicker so we can move that heavy load, but we can't move it for very long.

So there's no evidence that that calcium sensitivity or calcium response changes with resistance training. With endurance training, you get a calcium sensitivity response that's focused on type one fibers. So what we tend to see with endurance training is we get an improvement in ryanodine receptor and the SERCA isoform that is found in type one fibers, but very little change in type two fiber calcium behavior.

To get both, the only thing that's been shown to do it comes back to sprint. We get both calcium sensitivity improvements in type one and type two fibers, which allows a more sustained contraction and more force, but perhaps not the same amount of force you'd see when you do traditional resistance too.

James de Lacey24:02

What about ballistic movements like jumping, plyometrics, things like that? Does that not play some kind of role at all?

Dr. John Babraj24:24

Problem with that is there's no evidence that it changes anything because none of the studies are actually biopsying and getting in. These are very complex CNS movements and nobody's really looking at them from a structural change in the muscle. There's not really much evidence that they do do that, but they could do.

And again, velocity-based weight training or velocity-based resistance where you're trying to move equipment with resistance or the weight fast, you may get some calcium changes in there. But again, people are doing velocity-based, they're looking at it as very much a CNS tool and not exploring what's happening inside the muscle.

James de Lacey25:09

You mentioned as well about the muscle storing calcium and it kind of cycles in and out or you potentially lose some of that calcium. Does that, I'm going to sound like an idiot here, but does dietary intake or I don't know, milk, calcium supplementation, does that make any difference at all? Does that change anything?

Dr. John Babraj25:26

Not really. Most people aren't deficient in calcium to such an extent that it's going to have a dramatic impact. It can be important if you're working with children when they're going through growth spurts. Are we getting adequate calcium at that point?

With adults, there's less evidence that calcium actually does, because we've got a big store of calcium in the bones that we can break down at will. So it's not that there's not enough calcium necessarily available. The muscle's just not using it in the right way.

James de Lacey26:09

Okay, that makes sense. Then how is calcium sensitivity even measured?

Dr. John Babraj26:25

It's measured from isolated muscle fibers and it's measured chemically. So you look at, you put a chemical on, it requires a calcium response, and it changes electrical current and you can measure the electrical current that's been doing.

So it's never done in vivo. We just can't do it. There's always ex-vivo people or animal models, which again might limit why things like plyometrics haven't been looked at so much, because you can't really get a rough model of plyometrics. You have to drop them from like the top of the thing or something, animal cruelty stuff, just to see what happens.

James de Lacey27:03

So, okay. So, the calcium sensitivity. So sprint interval training is kind of your number one for improving this ability for essentially for muscle to contract. And to maybe make it even easier to understand, we're saying when we're improving the muscle to contract, we're essentially just improving the efficiency of the muscle to contract. And that means you're able to produce force repeatedly for longer durations, which is obviously what everyone's trying to do anyway within S&C.

And then does it have any effect on, I don't think, I think you mentioned it already, but it has very little or no effect on how quickly you can produce that force or how much you'll see force improvement? So if you did train to improve my calcium sensitivity, would force go up, but I can produce, yeah, your overall force would go up, typically around about 10 to 15% in sort of that three, three to four-week window that you normally see.

Dr. John Babraj27:43

Yeah, you do get force. You'll move faster. You'll move better. But the other thing that happens is you need less calcium release and you need less ATP to create the same amount of force. So the energetics...

James de Lacey28:14

Okay. And is this muscle-specific based on what you train? For example, if you're doing bike sprints, is this specific to say the quads and you're not going to get the same effect, say, I know, the biceps?

Dr. John Babraj28:37

You can get the same effects in the biceps. So if we do bike sprints, we know we're going to recruit the gastrocnemius, quadricep, the hamstring. So all the lower body muscles getting used. There's also a small amount of twisting at the hips. So actually with some upper body engagement in lower body sprints.

If I really wanted to target upper body, then I'm in the lucky position. We've got the arm ergometer so we can make the bike sprints for the arms, which everyone loves.

James de Lacey29:22

Everyone loves. I couldn't, I can't even think of a worse thing to do. Like that's probably the most horrible exercise in existence.

Dr. John Babraj29:22

It's pretty bad. It's the one that causes a lot of people to feel a little bit nauseous at the end of it.

James de Lacey29:38

Oh yeah, there's no way. I mean, I've done some grinder, but I ain't doing sprints on the grinder. They're just, I don't need to. I'm happy with the Echo Bike. That thing already has an upper body component. It screws me over too much already.

Dr. John Babraj29:53

So, yeah, you will get these calcium sensitivity improvements in things like the bicep. It'll be predominantly type 2A fibers where you're inducing those improvements rather than around type 2X. So you'll create a less fatigable body, which is important in a lot of sports such as boxing where arms drop as a fighter gets fatigued. You're more likely to take punches to the face because you're no longer in the correct guard position.

James de Lacey30:25

What about pure speed sports then where maybe someone's trying to retain more type 2X? Then you mentioned that obviously you're potentially going more 2A with that.

Dr. John Babraj30:25

Everyone says that, but if you look, if you think about the 100 meters, that's one that people think is a pure power speed, but it's highly oxidative too, right? If you look at where that's won, it's not on any of the early part of the race. It's like 70 to 80 meters. Who can not drop off so quickly? Won in the capacity to maintain force.

All the athletes get to peak force around at the same time. The acceleration rates are pretty much identical. The difference between 9.54 and 9.78 is not in the first 60 meters. There's a clear difference.

James de Lacey31:07

That's a good paper with the Usain Bolt comparing Tyson Gay or something like that, that kind of showed that, broke down the entire race with the average max loss.

Dr. John Babraj31:32

Yeah, that's a really, I really like you. Two world records from 9.4 to 9.58 or whatever it was. And the difference there was again in that last 10, 20 meters. He just doesn't decline as fast.

James de Lacey31:32

Yeah. Yeah. It's super interesting, especially from a dude where, what, doesn't he have scoliosis or some limb asymmetries as well and a bunch of stuff that people would say is bad?

Dr. John Babraj32:00

Probably the worst runner in the world. Biomechanists would have a nightmare watching him run. But what happens is his body's trained for his skeleton. So biomechanically he's probably running as efficiently as he can for his body shape. Which is interesting when you start to look at individual variability and differences.

James de Lacey32:27

And there's a couple different points I want to touch on with sprints here as well. One of them on heat acclimatization. I think you did some papers recently. I think with Audra as well around the heat acclimatization.

Now I remember there was a paper a few years ago. I think the Welsh rugby team did a study on, was it, I don't know, maybe it wasn't, maybe that was hypoxia. Sprints, I think Wales were doing hypoxia. I think it might have been where they did essentially two weeks of twice a week sprints. I think it was in hypoxia in the lead-up for the big internationals and they saw basically big gains.

Now with heat acclimatization, are you seeing similar things there? Why go in heat? I'm assuming you're going to reduce output because it's going to be a more intense environment as well. So is there any place for it, I guess, within preparation?

Dr. John Babraj33:16

What we were looking at really was, we're quite fortunate in Scotland. We live in a what's German class as a temperate climate. It's a cold, dark, miserable climate is what you want to say. But it's like 19 degrees and we think it's boiling hot.

So, in Scotland, temperature varies between about 4 degrees, maybe -2, -3 on a cold day, up to probably 20 degrees on a hot day. So it's actually quite thermal neutral and for sport it's probably the ideal climate for sport.

But what we have is athletes are being asked to go to the USA in the summer, Tokyo, Saudi Arabia, wherever, Qatar, and perform, and we expect our top athletes to perform. And what we know is if you go into heat unaccustomed to it, you aren't going to perform. There's going to be early onset fatigue and there's going to be a drop-off in sprint performance.

So what we're trying to do with the acclimatization studies is prepare the body physiologically to do repeated work in hot, humid environments. So typically 38 degrees, 40, 50% humidity.

These sort of extreme environments that are becoming more common, particularly for America, particularly for Asia. But even in Europe now, we're starting to see summer southern Europe summer temperatures are hitting 40, 45° all the time. We've got these huge hot plants heating up.

We've got this huge heat stress that limits performance and it's can how can we prepare the body to do that? Essentially, traditional heat acclamation is focused on doing an hour and a half, 2 hours of work in a heat tent. But for most athletes, they don't have a 2-hour window to give to a heat acclamation approach.

So what we've done is can we do something different and use sprint based training but in the heat to force aboard the same metabolic stress that will cause the body to adapt to the heat. And then what we find is that we get improvements in performance at sort of 38° but also translates to when you go to temperate conditions as well. There's a knock on improvement there as well.

James de Lacey36:09

Interesting. Does that mean you tend to or want to use heat acclamation, I guess, sprints regardless of where they're going to compete?

Dr. John Babraj36:09

Pretty much. There's some evidence that heat acclamation transfers into altitude performance as well. There's a lot of similarities between the two. It doesn't give you all the climatizing to altitude would give you, but it gives you some that allows you to maintain performance.

So, acclamation for altitude is much harder because what's happening when we go to altitude is we've got a drop in air pressure. So, the oxygen levels are the same, it's just air pressure dropped. And that's really hard to recreate artificially.

So most of the commercial altitude simulators just strip out oxygen. So you've still got the same partial pressure or same pressure, just got less oxygen available. It doesn't quite produce the same changes, but pressure does. You can get a hyperbaric chamber, but they're very expensive. That's just where you change the pressure in the room.

James de Lacey37:08

The rugby league club back home in New Zealand actually got one put into the gym, their hyperbaric chamber. But I think they lost the remote recently and it stuck at one pressure or something like that.

Dr. John Babraj37:35

So I guess you're at one altitude for the rest of the time. It's pretty fun.

James de Lacey37:35

So then how are you balancing the trade-off between power outputs on the bike and sprinting in normal conditions versus in the heat? Because I'm assuming they're leading to competition.

Dr. John Babraj37:50

You typically see first second be enhanced. Like almost you're warmer. So the muscle's warmer. The enzyme reactions happen faster. So we actually produce a little bit more power.

James de Lacey37:50

That's why I'm faster in Texas.

Dr. John Babraj37:50

During my sprints, the ability to sustain the power drops away. So you lose the ability to sustain it in the heat. And then in team sports that's the issue. Team sports don't require you to do one sprint, two sprints. They require you to do 15 sprints, 20 sprints across the course of a half.

James de Lacey38:31

Okay. So then you would use something like this actually leading into the competition. This would be the main thing. Okay. How hot are we talking?

Dr. John Babraj38:46

It's 38° Centigrade, which is I don't know what that is Fahrenheit, 105 Fahrenheit.

James de Lacey38:46

Okay. So, just a normal summer day in Texas then. So, I'm going to be heat acclimated.

Dr. John Babraj38:46

Yeah, you'll be used to heat. We go there and go, "My god, it's so hot," and start sweating.

James de Lacey38:46

So, be walking around. I'm not used to this yet. New Zealand doesn't get above 30. So being here is like being in a body furnace. Can someone replicate this? For example, obviously people don't usually have heat tents and things like that, but they might have a sauna. Now, is there a way you could do something like this if someone's maybe leading into a fight and they're looking to do some kind of heat acclamation training? I mean, without dragging a bike into maybe a tiny sauna if it's not big enough.

Is there something they could do in a sauna? I mean I suppose you could try doing almost like a bodyweight circuit within a sauna. Would it have to be would it have to be intense enough because the duration would be so short like sprints?

Dr. John Babraj39:58

You have to create a metabolic stress. Okay. Yeah. So the point of acclamation is there's two heat sources. You got your external heat source, which is the sun, or your sauna, but you've got your internal heat source, which is a metabolic demand that you're placing on the body.

So, if you just go into a sauna and don't do anything, you've only got the external force. So, you're not actually going to get any adaptation. So, you need that metabolic stress along with the external heat.

James de Lacey40:18

So even just squats, push-ups, sit-ups, whatever, and do like a five minute circuit of that would potentially help.

Dr. John Babraj40:39

Yeah. And then 30 minutes just sitting.

James de Lacey40:39

Damn, that sounds brutal already. I don't seem to get to more protocols. I know. And on that, I actually want to touch on hill sprinting because obviously we can do bike sprints, air bikes, you know, maybe not. I mean, I guess most people have access to them, but you know, maybe people want to do something different. Maybe they don't have access to oil bike. Maybe they're like me and got a spin bike in the garage with brakes that barely work, so you kind of get the resistance.

I was looking through your some of your hill sprint protocols. Through some of your research, I noticed that the rest periods, at least in those papers, were typically longer than you would be on a bike. And I'm assuming that's a practical thing because you can't get down a hill fast enough.

Dr. John Babraj41:27

Is that something practical and partially the quality of the participants. Okay. Some of them were field hockey players, not level football players. They were part-time. They played a little bit but it wasn't their main focus. So partially we give them longer rest because of that and partially getting back down the hill does take time.

So if someone was better trained and they had a longer hill, you could do say 10 on 15 off and they would just stop on the spot and then continue on. Yeah. The important for hill sprints is to try and get a hill that is a consistent gradient. You don't really want it undulating. You want a nice continuous hill.

And the steeper the hill, obviously the higher the intensity it will be. So if it's a small hill, very shallow, the intensity is not going to be that great. If you're on to a 10% gradient, you're kind of matching what we see on a 7 and 12% bike protocol.

James de Lacey42:34

Interesting. Okay. And so for someone who wanted to start using I guess hills, I know obviously the sprint protocols kind of differ between individuals and things like that, but is there a general guideline that you typically use on hills that may differ from what you do on a bike just from a practical standpoint?

Dr. John Babraj42:54

It's fairly similar to be honest. Whatever duration I'm going to get you to sprint for. So, like 10 to 30 seconds-ish or 6 to 30 seconds kind of thing. 6 to 30 seconds. We've done 15s, we've done 30s, we've done 20s. We just play around.

The other way you can do it is to use shuttles if you don't have access to a decent hill. If you can get a 10 meter course and essentially start in the middle and you should have probably about eight turns in about 15 seconds.

And that turn, that stop accelerating, decelerating, increases the intensity of a sprint again.

James de Lacey43:35

And then we're getting that calcium sensitivity.

Dr. John Babraj43:35

Yeah. Okay. Okay. See things like we use what you call it an isometric dynamometer for measuring force production. We can see the rate of force development and maximum force produced go up by about 10, 15% in about two weeks from the shuttle ones or just from sprints in general, uphill sprints and from shuttles.

James de Lacey44:14

Okay. Okay. So hopefully listeners there can take something from that and if they don't want to do the bike for whatever reason, you enjoy running, that's something you can do for your conditioning as well. But that's everything I have for you John.

Where can people keep up with what you're doing? I know you don't post on socials much. I saw you liked one of my posts the other day. I saw so you're on there. You're just not posting.

Dr. John Babraj44:43

They just don't post anything. I'm terrible. I tried to do social media for a bit and I just I'm.

James de Lacey44:43

I'll tag you on some stuff.

Dr. John Babraj44:43

Yeah, I am on Instagram. If you message me, I will get back to you.

James de Lacey44:43

Oh, perfect. I'll link that up then as well. So hopefully people can, let me just quickly pull it up because I'm assuming you probably don't even know your Instagram name.

Dr. John Babraj45:06

No. I actually just tagged you on my story. This was going live. Oh, it's just John Babraj. How easy is that?

James de Lacey45:19

There you go. Simple. Simple. There you go. Perfect. Yeah, there's a couple of bits and pieces on there of people doing sprints, of course. So, make sure I'll link that up in the description anyway for anyone who wants to give John a follow or contact him or anything like that.

But I appreciate you coming on again and answering my questions on various topics and hopefully people got a lot out of it.

Dr. John Babraj45:33

Today's been an important topic because calcium is a bit that people forget about. People talk about energy development, they talk about muscle strength development, but we never link it to calcium as well.

James de Lacey45:53

Yeah, that's something that really kind of opened my eyes as well. Like huh okay, it's not just about actin myosin binding together. There's an intermediary thing that happens that allows that to happen and we can train that thing.

Dr. John Babraj45:53

Yeah, that's a trainable response.

James de Lacey46:10

which become super interesting. But I appreciate you coming on and I'm sure we'll do another one in the future.

Dr. John Babraj46:10

Yeah, definitely. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me.