Compressed Triphasic, Everyday Max, & Badger Sets w/ Dave Allanson (SSOF Ep 154)

Dave Allanson2:31

But those league boys are terrifying. I don't want anything to do with any of that there. I played union because you could have a rest. I don't want to just run into people.

James de Lacey2:40

And then league you got the 10 meter run-up too, so you got more time to build speed. I'm like, dude, there's no way. And then these big like 120 kilo Polynesian guys and stuff, you're like, I'm good being the trainer. I'm just gonna be the guy with the back in the blue, red, like orange shirt with the water bottles. That's all good for me.

But we'll get the start. We'll leave that alone anyway. But welcome to the Sweet Science of Fighting podcast. Today we have David Allanson from Get Strong Roll More. Welcome.

Dave Allanson2:50

Hi. Thank you for having me.

James de Lacey2:50

No, thank you for coming on. Before anyone listening, I never do this, but make sure you leave a review or share it or comment or something, anything. People who don't create content I think don't realize like that is literally like the currency for content creators. If you do any of that, you help support the out of this podcast and basically any content that comes through.

But we're gonna go straight into, I guess, a jiu-jitsu focused episode here with David. So let's give them a background about yourself. I believe did you learn under the tutelage of William Wayland? Is that like kind of like one of your main mentors?

Dave Allanson3:50

Yeah. So the running joke in my head is I'm pound shop William Wayland, because yeah, I was really fortunate. I don't have a degree in any of this. I did history and philosophy at uni. I did a history degree, sorry, a history masters and then I did a history PGCE and became a secondary school history teacher for eight years.

And while I was doing that, I got back into jiu-jitsu. And at some point along there, everything started hurting. And so I'd been reading Will's stuff since like 2010, back on the Scramble blog. And I just reached out to him. Like I'd followed him back then on Facebook and was reading his posts, and yeah, just messaged him to get in contact and was lucky enough to start working with him.

And then it turned out that I'd done my teacher training with his sister, which was surreal. And I found that out because she was like, "Why do you follow my brother on Facebook? That's weird." And she was like, "Oh, I bet it's the strength stuff, isn't it?" I was like, "Yeah, yeah, it is." Yeah, started working with him.

And then in 2019, I just had enough of the sort of surrounding things around teaching. Like I loved classroom teaching, I loved doing the job, but the admin, the politics, I just, I could... My wife basically turned to me and said, "You can either shut up about it or quit." And I was like, "I don't think I'm going to shut up. I think I better quit."

So I didn't really know what to do. And I had a couple of friends suggest personal training. And then I thought, "Well, I'll just talk to Will." And the first thing he said to me was, "Don't do it." And I was like, "Still going to do it." He's like, "Good," because if that had been enough to stop you, then you shouldn't.

But yes, I was lucky enough to work with Will because he was my coach and just be able to pick his brains, ask questions. I've been interested in all of it since about 2006. So like reading T-Nation, reading like all the Elite FTS stuff. And now going back over it, I'm like, "I didn't understand any of that when I read it first time around."

James de Lacey5:47

That was the golden age of content back then. I just had like an RSS feed on whatever those blog things are and I would literally have like how many blogs or accessories. I'd go through every day and just read articles from all the different things. That was awesome.

Dave Allanson6:00

So I also had a few people kind of ask me like, "Oh, are you doing a mentorship under Will? How did you do that?" I was like, "Work with him for a year and send him really niche history memes." And then eventually you just kind of get this working relationship. But yeah, I'm lucky enough to call Will a friend. I've been down to visit a few times and see what they were doing down at Powering Through and what he's been doing with the golfers and stuff.

So yeah, but that's where I started, which with hindsight now is quite fortunate because I'm really working with probably one of the best coaches in the UK at least. Personally I think in combat sports he is the guy, but of course I'm going to say that because I worked under him and was lucky enough to kind of train under him.

But yeah, I think it's nice to have come in from that perspective. It does mean that I've had to fill in some of the gaps because there's certain things where I ask about it and Will's just like, "Yeah, that's dumb." Usually he will then elaborate on what he means by it, but it's nice to make your own mistakes as well. So there's been times where he's told me stuff and I go, "Okay," and then I go and experiment and I have to come back and go, "Yep, you were right." But occasionally...

James de Lacey7:13

Give me an example of those.

Dave Allanson7:13

So some of the stuff around conditioning, like I was quite interested in the whole zone 2 thing because it became really sexy a couple of years ago. I was like, "Yeah, I'll have a play with this," and then within a week I was like, "I am not doing eight, like whatever, the six to eight hours of zone 2 that you need to be doing. I was like, "This is insane."

If you had the hours and you've got someone who is motivated to do it, great, it is a fantastic method to use. But like that was what Will warned me about and I was like, "Oh, I'm going to have a play with it." And then a week later I was like, "Yeah, I don't think this is the right fit for me." That would be my key example.

I think as well his understanding of the neck and neck training is probably beyond a lot of other people's. I think largely because a lot of the neck stuff that you find is influenced by him, especially in combat sports. I'm sure there are plenty of other people as well that I'm just not aware of, but because he's worked in Superbike and he was bringing some of the stuff that they were doing in F1 and in Superbike along with it to the space.

So I had someone send me something recently about sort of reactive strength for neck strength for fighters. And I know I remember Will playing with that about five or six years ago with one of his superbike riders because that was like the peaking phase just before he went back into season.

So yeah, that's one where I think he's really far forward, but it's taken me a long time to get my head around the neck training because coming from rugby, I've got quite a bad neck. I played prop, I was undersized, I basically just got beaten up by grown men for years of playing at a low level. But it means my neck doesn't cope with a lot of volume. It's all right with intensity, but I generally have to be a bit more careful.

So I'm quite risk averse around the neck just because through my own training I'm like, "Nothing is worse than being up all night because your neck is overused." And one of the bits of advice that Will did give me was like you want to be closer to a minimum effective dose for neck, like even closer to a minimum effective dose for neck than you do in a lot of other areas because it gets so much use in grappling sports that people aren't necessarily aware of.

And I've been doing, I don't know if you know Greg Chaplan, very good physio, had been recommended by Alex, Alex Kresvki, who's, if I'm pronouncing that right, I've only ever seen Alex's surname written down.

He works with Will and he put me on to Greg Chaplan, and he's released something about the neck which is very good that I think bridges the gap between a lot of the really early stage rehab stuff into actually training the neck hard, which is what Will suggests. And it's made the gap between the two make a bit more sense to me. So that's quite good as well.

But yeah, I think sometimes Will is very willing to let you figure stuff out for yourself. He won't give you the answers unless you ask the right questions, which I think is something a lot of people need more of. Coming from a teaching background, I really appreciated that. Sometimes he'd be like, "Well, what do you think?" I'm like, "Oh, okay, I've got to actually do my homework here." So yeah.

James de Lacey10:31

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That's good. If anyone's interested, I've got two episodes with William on the podcast, so you can go back and listen to those as well. I actually wanted to touch on—so you've gone through a lot of that training, and you're currently working with a lot of jiu-jitsu athletes. I've seen a bit on Instagram there. Do you want to maybe just do a quick little list? I mean, you don't have to name drop. You can name drop if you want, but just kind of what you're doing day-to-day now in terms of coaching.

Dave Allanson11:38

Yeah. So day-to-day, I've got a mix of gen pop and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Online, it's all exclusively grapplers and largely Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I've worked with a few amateur MMA fighters, but mainly my bread and butter is grapplers.

I also really—in person—I work with a lot of gen pop, and I enjoy that. I think there's an awful lot that you can learn from working with gen pop that will serve you really well working with people interested in sport. I've got a couple of competitors, but there are people out there with far more competitive level athletes than me.

But the group that probably challenges me the most is the grapplers, because they come in with—I'm sure you know—but they come in and go, "Oh yeah, I dislocated my finger the other day. Oh, I've just popped a rib." All of these little niggles and quirks and stuff that you have to work around, which is quite helpful. But yeah, so if we're thinking—sorry, did you mean in terms of what my approach is as well, or just who I'm working with?

James de Lacey13:01

We can go into that too. Let's go into that.

Dave Allanson13:02

Cool. Yeah, so I was unsurprisingly Mr. Triphasic. I've got both Triphasics down here next to me.

James de Lacey13:11

How was the second book? I read mixed reviews.

Dave Allanson13:16

It's got some nuggets in there. I can't say it blew me away like the first one did, but I think that's going to be quite difficult when you've essentially laid out a very effective training model in your first—difficult second album.

But also I liked Cal and Vlad's point of you can dive down all these rabbit holes, but if your guys are competing at the same level as everyone else or a little bit above, it's probably not doing the things that you're suggesting that it might be doing. But yeah, it didn't really do it for me in the way that the first one did.

There was some really good bits in there about how people get triphasic wrong. I really enjoyed that because I, having had those discussions with Will and having run it a lot myself, it's really nice to see it laid out by the guy who came up with it saying the same thing.

My biggest bugbear is people using triphasic and putting really light weights in. It's an absolute—it does not work if it isn't challenging. I think Cal's point in book two was—he was arguing from a college perspective, but he's like if you don't need your spotters, it's not heavy enough. Now, I probably don't go quite that far because I haven't got three spotters on every single exercise that we do. But I think it's an overlooked point that people think tempo can be used to make up for a lack of intensity, or they don't even understand why the tempo's in there.

They're just like, "Oh, sweet. Yeah, triphasic. I've heard of that." And they just chuck in, you know, we're going to do five count eccentric for sets of eight. Unless you're specifically running a hypertrophy program, I would not—you don't want to be doing something like that because you're just not going to elicit the kind of response you get from three heavy sets of three with an eccentric focus or an isometric focus.

So yeah, I enjoyed the second one, but really, again, because I've worked so much with Will, a lot of it for me is about the way that Will has applied it and kind of changes that he's made. You've got the compressed triphasic for those short of time. You've got—what was really helpful was being able to discuss with Will how he uses it with beginners, because again, it's just a different way of forming.

You can go full triphasic where it's a very intense method, or you can really make it something that helps beginners to learn how to control the eccentric and the concentric well. So it can be a teaching tool. It doesn't all have to be balls to the wall hand-supported split squats and all that—the fun sexy stuff that everyone thinks triphasic is. There's a lot more wiggle room with the way in which he's ordered those aspects of the program. So there's more to play with than I think people realize in that.

James de Lacey16:02

Do you want to maybe go through for the listeners an example of a compressed triphasic kind of training model for something going into competition or just looking for something different to do in their training?

Dave Allanson16:15

Yeah. So usually the traditional form of triphasic is that you do three weeks with a focus on a specific part of the muscle action. So you do three weeks eccentric. So that just means that for a four count through to a six count, depending on how much your coach hates you or how experienced you are, you are focusing on slowly lowering. Or if it's an isometric phase, you are focusing on quickly lowering and stopping dead and holding for that count, that specific part of the movement.

Normally that's a three-week block, and then you have a little what Cal refers to as a download or a deload, which is where you focus on something else for a week. So it's usually aerobic-based circuits for lifting to give you a week to recover. And then you jump back in again into the isometric phase, and then after three weeks you deload.

And then again you jump into concentric phase, and then you move into some peaking. And that's, I think, it's a 16-week program if you run it traditionally—12 to 16 weeks depending on what you cut down. And that's without GPP and all the stuff that you can put in before that, that can make it a full 20, 24-week program.

Will pointed out that for most MMA fighters especially, they haven't got that kind of time to play with. There isn't a traditional off-season like you would have in college sports. So what you can do there is just run two weeks of everything. So it's a two week—let's say you take front squats as the example. You do two weeks of eccentric focus with sort of 80 to 87.5% of your one rep max if you've never run it before.

You then, two weeks later, 80 to 87.5% of your one rep max, run a two-week isometric block. And then you would run a two-week concentric block, and then into some kind of peaking just before the fight, so that you're not annihilating yourself with the fact that that's going to be the business end of camp where the hardest rounds are going to be, and then the weight cut.

You want to make sure that the stuff that you're doing with them is much easier. But it's simply called compressed because you've just removed all of those deload weeks, but you've also cut the amount of work that you've had to do by a third. So it's a lot more manageable.

The other thing that you generally have to do with a compressed approach with fighters, especially if they've got a big weight cut or a lot of weight to lose over the camp, is be more willing to do two to three sets. Much more willing to cut that volume by a third. For me, most of my guys do three sets of three. If they're not feeling great, we'll do two sets of three, because we just want the quality and the intensity to be very high, and we want to make sure that there's no junk volume.

I think that's especially true in grappling because it's such a high volume sport in terms of how much mat time you need to become proficient and then how much mat time you need to become good. We don't want to be wasting your fatigue essentially on things that we could avoid if we still get a massive stimulus in those early stages.

James de Lacey19:18

With the concentric phase, what percentages are you using there?

Dave Allanson19:22

So for the concentric phase, I use the same again, 80 to 87 and a half. Generally, it's 82 and a half to 87 and a half. But I like a little bit of wiggle room just in case anything goes wrong. Someone comes in as I've broken my finger or I haven't slept all week or most of my guys compete and they have jobs. Some of them have got families, some of them have got kids.

They need a bit more space than say a college athlete does where you can start to become a bit more strict because you control more aspects of their life. But with guys who are more experienced, you can play, especially on the eccentric phase, you can play with higher percentages. So Steve, who's literally physically my biggest client, he's just shy of 6'8.

Turned up, he could front squat ass to grass without any effort whatsoever, most mobile guy I've worked with. We've run a lot of triphasic because he was having to deal with big boys and I was like I need to jump him into something that's going to deliver quite a lot quite quickly. And he basically because he'd become so experienced with it, we were able to play with some of the more advanced methods, and literally it's just about more weight on the bar.

For between 90 and 92 and a half percent of your one rep max, but you do it for, it's you can play between one to two reps of four to eight seconds eccentric, which is disgusting. I think Steve thought I'd upset him when I first programmed it for him because he was like, "Are you joking? I have to do this for eight seconds." I was like, "No."

But it delivered and it does a lot for him. But whether he'd want to do that year round, I don't know. I tend to stick to more of a traditional model, especially for the remote guys, unless they're very proficient. I have only really done the more advanced methods in person. So, including hand supported split squats and really ramping up the loading on the eccentric phase for the guys who've done it before.

But he got a hell of a lot out of it in terms of he competes in the ultra heavyweight category and he was just when he's competing against other people he's never had a complaint that they felt stronger than him. He's had a lot of guys complain about how strong he is and he's 110, 112 kilos. So he's going up against guys who are 120, 140 and they come in and have a little cry about how strong he is and then he's like but maybe some of it's my technique because he's a very proficient grappler.

He's got a game that a lot of ultra heavies don't have. Now as he goes up through the levels that's going to change but he's a much broader grappler than you get from a lot of guys especially at blue belt. He's purple belt now, so it's becoming a bit more open in terms of what he has to deal with.

It's nice to be able to play with some of those things, but really I'd say that makes up a very small proportion of the training that I've done with all of my clients. The majority of it is kind of basic triphasic. And then for a lot of my gym pop clients, I've started to move to, because I've got people who come once a week or twice a week, I will use those triphasic aspects of the triphasic program with them, play with tempo or we might do some cluster sets.

But we will also often on sort of one or two lifts especially around bench have started playing with 5/3/1 again because that's the old classic from Jim Wendler that I thought never worked for me and now I've reread the book I'm like I just did it wrong lots. You just go your proper max and too heavy all the time like a complete dumbass.

But it's a nice one in that it allows people to get a lot of volume in on a lift, especially something like bench, but I wouldn't touch that with grapplers because again, it's just too much volume. There's far too much that they need to cope with.

And I think actually part of the issue with grapplers is I think people, especially those who don't grapple themselves, really underestimate the cognitive load that comes from training in grappling. And I think it's, I have less experience of it, but I think it's also true in MMA. I want a very high intensity, very low difficulty in terms of skill development approach for those guys because I want all of their skill development resources to be on the mats.

Personally, I don't have the space to use Olympic lifts. I don't have the equipment to use Olympic lifts. The garage, we'd break everything in my garage if we did that. And I don't have the experience to be able to coach it well. So, I won't generally program it for people. I have for people who are interested and I've chatted to other coaches who've got more experience and got their advice for doing it.

But that for me doesn't feel like a cognitive tradeoff in terms of the amount of effort they're going to have to put into skill acquisition with a coach who is not a particularly good Olympic weightlifting coach in me is going to be, coming from a teaching background think it's just going to detract from where and how much they can learn when they're on the mats because they're just having to think about oh how do I put this over my head or what does he mean by that coaching cue.

Whereas if I can just do front squat, bench press, chin up, RDL, and trap bar, the simplest possible ways of loading them through those movement patterns, I'm going to go for the simpler options. One, for me, and two, just to mean that they don't have lots of things to try and learn and plates to spin while they're also working out how heel hooks work and not blowing their own knees out and playing with the meta of the game.

Because the other sort of point, and I think this is again, it's especially true in MMA for guys who are very good, is they're spending a lot of time outside of training, still engaging with training. They're watching tape. They're maybe watching instructionals, they're watching their favorite competitors. That's a lot of cognitive load. And especially if they've got work, they've got kids, they've got all sorts of other things around it.

I want to make sure that what I do has as much impact as possible with as little fatigue as possible, but also as little impact on the rest of their life as I can. Of course, I've still got guys who sometimes message and go, "Yeah, going down the stairs this morning wasn't much fun." But that's just the nature of the beast.

James de Lacey26:00

I like that. That's an interesting take on the learning aspect as well. And I actually wanted to jump into mentioned at the beginning around your neck training with your bad neck. Might be some listeners as well who have shocking necks too. So what are you doing then that that helps your neck and I guess what are you doing in terms of I guess exercise selection and volume and things like that and frequency.

Dave Allanson26:23

So frequency for me they train neck once a week. I tend to pair it with trap bar deadlift because they've got to sit for me because we're using heavy loads on that. They've got to rest three to five minutes between sets, so they're bored. So, I'd rather fill that time with something useful. So, I generally pair my neck work in there. It's usually banded.

And it's some kind of variant of just a traditional four-way neck. So, nods and then side to side. And then I also really like what and I can't remember the technical name for it. Will has told me more than once and I can't keep it in my head. I just call it whale and neck. But essentially it's you are loading the opposite way to the way you are moving.

So by that I mean if you're going to nod your head up and down into flexion and extension then the load from the band is across your head trying to pull your neck out of position.

James de Lacey27:19

That the quasi isometric one.

Dave Allanson27:21

That's the one quasi isometric. I cannot keep that name in my head. I really like that. That makes my neck feel really good. But I don't do a lot of, I've got a neck harness. We've barely used it unless someone really struggles to keep the band on their head, in which case we'll attach the band with a carabiner and use it that way.

I don't really do any plate neck or anything like that. I am hoping to use the Chaplain neck lift, which is essentially weighted head off the bench weighted neck flexion, but you have to be very precise about your chin tuck and your tongue posture, and that dictates how essentially failure, when you stop lifting. And I that one feels good for me as well.

James de Lacey27:21

So, what do you have to do with your tongue on that one?

Dave Allanson28:17

So, you place your tongue into the roof of your mouth. Kind of like everyone talks about with mewing because that became a meme.

James de Lacey28:22

Oh, mewing. Have you not heard of that? Where everyone...

Dave Allanson28:29

It's not a cool club, mate. It's guys who think that their jawline is going to make them more popular with women rather than being able to talk to them.

Or men. But the—

Yeah, looks maxing. All of that. But the principle is that your tongue natural tongue posture should be your tongue rested and placed up into the roof of your mouth and potentially with a little bit of suction. I like that because that fits into how we do our nasal breathing aerobic work, which again is Cali influence and Will Way influence. I really like the nasal breathing work for grapplers especially because of all the extra benefits that we get from nasal breathing.

Essentially we get conditioning and I get to push them into a parasympathetic state, and most of these guys are always on. I've got to learn, I've got to do this, I've got to—so it's nice to give them something that naturally makes them relax a little bit.

But yeah, with the Chaplin neck lift, it's the same. It's maintaining that tongue posture and kind of keeping the tongue up into the roof of the mouth rather than low down or too far forward pushing into the teeth. And then just with a chin tuck. So you're sort of—I can't think of the name of it again—packing your neck. So again, something that Will pushes for on RDLs and trap bar deadlift and has really drilled into me.

So it's been nice to see someone else approaching it, and I think for Will, a lot of this was—I'm speaking for him here, I don't know—but I assume a lot of it is what he's worked out for himself and then also understands that's where we want those things to be. But he hasn't explicitly told me that, or he has and I've forgotten. That's also potential.

But it was nice to hear Greg Chaplin talk through, right, from a physiotherapy perspective, this is also why we would probably want these positions. So yeah, it's an interesting one. I've only used it with myself. I haven't played with it with anyone else yet, and I've only used it a little bit with myself, but again, it's one that doesn't irritate my neck.

Whereas I find with a lot of the high volume stuff, even body weight high volume, it just irritates and I end up with soreness and pain for a few days that I just can't sleep well and it pisses me off. Whereas I find loading with bands seems to be as much as most people need.

But I don't work with anyone who's taking head contact. When I did work with MMA fighters, I wanted to very slowly introduce it because I think for a lot of those guys—so in grappling and MMA, they spent a lot of their time in this kind of flexed shoulders very high position rounded over. It's why Will's justification years ago for moving to the front squat from the back squat—because often with MMA fighters because of that posture, they're very good at doing a bad back squat, whereas it's very hard to get a front squat wrong in that way.

I essentially start them with just body weight four-way neck and get them used to moving their neck in the different directions, because that immediately tells me if they got any impingement anywhere. Also it gives me something to give them when their neck is bad that they can use to measure how bad it is. So just nodding up and down and then side to side, because I'm sure you've seen this and we've probably all done it, but whenever someone hurts their neck, their immediate reaction is, "Oh, that's really bad." And they kind of hold it and they're careful with it, and then as soon as it starts to ease, their reaction is to move their neck in a way that no one outside of a metal concert has ever moved their neck.

They immediately throw their neck around and go, "Oh, how does it feel? Oh, it feels worse again." And I'm like—and it's told us nothing because I don't know if the throwing your head back did it. I don't know if the circular movement did it.

I'd much rather be able to break it down into them telling me, oh, when I nod to the left, that's uncomfortable, but the right's actually okay. And it just builds a bit of proprioceptive awareness that I think they lose a little bit from being in that defensive posture for such a long time. And then from there we load it with bands, and with my MMA fighters, I never really got to the point where we needed to go too much further than that.

But if I'd had one or two of them in person—because the one that I worked with the longest was remote—I didn't want to introduce too much too soon with him.

If he'd been in person, then I think we would have played with some weighted variations as well and seen how he coped with them. Because I'm aware that it's also my bias. I've got a bad neck, but the last thing I want is for him to have a bad sparring session because his neck is too tired from strength training to then go into a sparring session and actually manage the levels of movement that are going to be required.

Realistically, I'd rather he did it at the end of the sparring session, but who does that? Unless you're there to make them do that. There's very few guys who aren't top tier who are going to go, "Yeah, do you know what? I'll do that extra work at the end that looks like boring neck nods."

And also the realities of where they can fit that strength training in their week. Again, if I could dictate where it's going to be and I know there's going to be enough recovery between the neck training that I'm doing and the hard sparring, then I'd be more comfortable pursuing intensity. But when I know that they might do that and then walk straight into their sparring session because that was the only day in the week they could fit it because their boss made them work late, I don't want to be—I'd much rather do a little bit too little.

And I'm a bit cynical about the stuff around concussion with neck strength. I think that initial study that everyone used to talk about—oh, X pounds of neck strength results in X percent of—

James de Lacey34:10

One pound of neck strength, 5% reduction, I think it was.

Dave Allanson34:13

Yeah. And then you dig into it and you see that actually what they mean is that for one pound of neck weakness, it's a £5 increase in risk, which doesn't necessarily mean the other way around once you've hit a basic level of strength. So yeah, it's an interesting topic and I probably—it's why I'm trying to learn more about it because I appreciate I should probably push my guys a little bit more. But then I've also personally had a lot of issues around sleep apnea from having a big neck.

And if I had to choose between they've got a slightly weaker neck or a slightly less thick neck and they sleep better, I feel like the quality of sleep is potentially going to offset some of the issues, especially if we're recovering from a head injury. Sleep is everything. So for me, I'd rather not be affecting the quality of their sleep by making their necks too big, having been a guy with a neck that was far too big.

James de Lacey35:09

Perfect. For anyone who actually wants to go deeper on the neck stuff, I did an episode with Gary Turner. I think it was episode number three, a few years back, and he goes deep into a lot of different neck stuff and his philosophy around it. Pretty interesting stuff. He's on a similar boat to you regarding neck training. So it's a couple interesting camps on that.

And I wanted to go deep into a couple of other training methods I think you use that you also influence from William as well. Things like everyday maxes. Is that something you implement with any of your guys? Do they lift it up?

Dave Allanson35:42

Yeah. All right, go on to that.

So basically my methods are: if Will uses it, if Mladen Jovanovic uses it, if Cal uses it—I'm trying to broaden my horizons a little bit there, but they heavily influence me. When I first started in my career, I read, off Will's recommendation, Strength Training Manual volumes one and two.

It's a heavy read. Mladen's very kind with his time. If you've got specific questions, message him and he will answer those questions. I'm sure he'll hate me for asking everyone to message him now. But I really liked that everyday max approach and I know that's from one of the weightlifting communities. It's not necessarily new. People have used that for a long time. I forget which Eastern European country used the approach, but—

James de Lacey36:26

Bulgarian.

Dave Allanson36:27

Bulgarians. There we go. Of course it is. We—yeah, I liked that approach, especially. I started with my Genpop clients, to be honest, because what I found was for those guys, cluster sets just didn't work. They dropped off, the quality dropped off too quickly for it to be worthwhile. And probably also because for a lot of those guys, their top end strength hasn't really leveled off.

So it's not necessarily as consistent. They might hit a really good number and we go, "Oh, that's their max." And then when we try and use 90% of that for multiple reps, they just can't cope with the output that they need to be able to do.

So I began with them going, "Right, well, what do we do instead?" And essentially, as Mladen explains it, an everyday max is just a heavyish single. Or I've been told by other coaches and from chatting to people who use this method, it can be a double, it can be a triple. You can shift the back off sets and everything alongside that.

But you don't need to psych yourself up. You don't need an audience. You don't need pre-workout metal blasting in your ears. You don't need to go full Chuck Vogelpohl and start headbutting the bar or any of that. You can just sort of casually go in and do it.

One of my guys likes to send me whatever he was listening to when he does it, and he just listens to love songs and then does everyday maxes. Weird music. But it's nice because one, it gives people a little bit more control over their own training. I find that a lot of my clients assume I am—they're like, "What weight should I use?" And I'm like, "You know." I could play that whole cult leader kind of, "Oh, today it must be 93.2%," rather than just being like, "How does it feel?" Because realistically that's how I train myself.

Will gives me suggestions or percentages or whatever depending on how he's written it, and then he gives me somewhere where it's like sets of five and I just pick what I'm going to do.

And I like the fact that it gives my clients the space to push back and say, "Actually I don't feel like I can do this today." And so I started to introduce it with my grapplers and especially a couple of MMA fighters at the time that I was interested, because those guys—there's the sort of sense of masculinity and identity that's around it and also the sort of tradition of, "Yeah, put me in coach, I'll do it." And you go, "You got to do 92 and a half percent today," and they're like, "Yeah, yeah, it's fine, it's fine, I can do that." And you're watching them going, "You cannot do this," and then you have to intervene and then it knocks confidence of the individual. It's just not worth it.

And one of my guys is a firefighter alongside all of this. So he could have a terrible night. Some weeks he has great shifts and he sleeps really well, and some weeks he has hell and he comes in and he looks like a Vietnam veteran just staring through me. "You didn't see what I saw." I'm like, "Okay, if you want to talk about it we can." But I found everyday maxes for him are really helpful because he'll do whatever I tell him to whether his body is capable of doing it or not.

And it's given him a lot of understanding of when to push, when to back off, and it's even given him the permission to back off.

Now, with some people, it's not very helpful because they'll lowball it forever. But for guys who are very good at getting themselves into trouble by pushing too hard, I really like it as an option because realistically, it's a very easy way of building strength. It's really nice with older grapplers as well because they can push when they feel good and they can back off when they don't feel good.

So yeah, I really like that. I tend to use—for the—so you essentially, you hit that easy but heavy single. You don't want it to grind. You don't want it to be Eddie Hall hitting 300 kilos at World's Strongest Man or 400 kilos at World's Strongest Man, I forget which. But yeah, you don't want to be shaking and looking like you're going to pass out or anything like that. And it just allows you to hit a heavy single and the auto-regulation is already built in.

If it's a good week, you hit a good number. If it's a bad week, you hit an alright number. It doesn't actually matter if they feel as difficult as one another. Your central nervous system knows very little difference between the two. I'm sure if you were an elite level powerlifter, that would be something different, but ultimately these guys are only lifting so that they can do more jiu-jitsu.

So we use that weight and then we take 80% of that and we do three sets of three as back off. The only rules that I've added are if you hit an everyday max personal best or a lifetime best, you're done. You don't do any back offs. If you hit it and you feel really good—because I've got another client who messaged me and was like, "Yeah, sorry. I hit a PB, but I also felt good, so I did the back offs." I was like, "Yeah, that—" He's a strength coach himself. I was like, "You're fine. You can judge that. That's okay."

But the other thing that I stole, which was actually from Jim Wendler talking about working with his high school kids, he wants all trap bar reps to be silent. And I really, really like that concept because the point people struggle with is that bottom position. So not only do they get the eccentric loading nicely because they're slowly descending and finding that point in the floor and touching it, but also they get to own that bottom position, which then improves their setup for heavy singles in the future because they're more aware of what that bottom position feels like because they've spent more time there.

So yeah, silent reps. And then if it's been a rough week or they feel like trash, sometimes we'll just do two sets of two. Sometimes we might do one set of three. It's whatever they feel like, and they can call the back off sets depending on how their week has been, how they felt, what the readiness questionnaire said at the start of the session. And yeah, it just gives them a little bit of ownership but also a bit of freedom to kind of decide things. It's really nice with Genpop because it allows people to set their own goals. I've got some retirees who've—

Because I've introduced that approach, they're like, "Yeah, [expletive] it. Let's roll the dice." And that's a really nice feeling to have with people who've come in and they're quite timid and worried that the gym is not an environment that suits them. So I think Everyday Maxes are fantastic for that, but they have to suit the person.

I've got some clients I don't use them with because it just doesn't work. They either push too hard or they lowball it. So I tend to pick for them or I can eyeball it and go, "Yeah, it's not heavy enough. Put more on the bar."

James de Lacey42:58

To clarify for the listeners, even though it's called an everyday, you're not doing it every day. You're doing it, right?

Dave Allanson43:05

No, you're definitely not maxing every single day. This is not like one of those I squat every day programs that was really popular about 5 years ago.

James de Lacey43:14

That was big back in the day. 2011, 2012 I think.

Dave Allanson43:19

And then it had a resurgence in about 2019. There were a few people like "I've been doing this for eight years." I'm like, "Have you really, have you?"

James de Lacey43:25

Actually, I did see a YouTube recommendation. It was like day, I don't know what it was. It must have been somewhere in the mid hundreds or close to a thousand days or something of like daily max squatting.

Dave Allanson43:40

What do you do at Christmas holidays? Imagine being...

James de Lacey43:45

I always think of this sometimes because jiu-jitsu is kind of guilty of this hardo mentality that people bring in, especially because the sport is not truly professional yet. So you haven't had, it reminds me of rugby in the mid '90s, early 2000s, especially in the UK where we were sort of playing catchup with everyone else.

Dave Allanson43:58

And these guys come in and they're like, "Oh yeah, I'm going to squat every day. I'm going to do all of this." And I'm like, "I train this hard. I work this many hours a week and all of this stuff." And I'm like, "But where's your life in amongst all of this? Where are your kids? Where's your wife?"

I have some of my clients will come and say, "Oh, should I be doing this?" And I'm like, "Do you want to see your mom and dad on weekends? Do you want to..." We have to be realistic about the trade-offs that we're making here. If you're happy with that and you're comfortable with the balance that you've got, that's absolutely fine. Go for it.

But I think there's this expectation that you're supposed to live this sort of aesthetic Olympian style lifeline. And it's like, Olympians don't even really like doing that. They do it because they know the glory that will come with that and the beauty of sacrificing for a broader goal. But living that every day, what are you like to the people around you?

I can't imagine being the husband of one of those guys who's like, "Sorry, darling. Can't go on holiday where you want to go. I need a squat rack." It just smacks of being a little not really self-aware enough. But again, it's going to be personality types, isn't it? I don't want to be that guy, but for other people, they do.

James de Lacey45:20

But it's helpful to kind of have that conversation with athletes because they'll come to you, as you know, like they'll come to you with stuff and you're just like, "Oh, [expletive] me. What is this?"

Dave Allanson45:28

And it's reminding them that like what sits behind that? What do you think that guy's daily life looks like? How do you think other people talk about him? Is that what you want? Do you want people to remember you for the reasons that that guy clearly wants to be remembered for?

And if that's yes, have at it. But for a lot of guys, they kind of sit and go, "Oh, yeah. No, that's not what I want my nan to think of me. I might..." There you go. Problem solved.

James de Lacey45:52

I don't think people realize what goes into...I mean my wife was training preparing for Commonwealth Games and Olympics. I was working in coaching in professional sport and it's just chaos.

She's training once, twice a day and broken because she's got to compete more. She's basically got to do a juicer's competitive schedule in weightlifting because that's what they do, and as a natty. So she's just breaking and then I'm traveling away on camps and [expletive] and it's just, yeah, the schedules are insane. Schedules are insane once you get to that level and it's a young man's game. Not for the faint-hearted for sure.

Dave Allanson46:32

There's a reason that people's Olympic careers are a set amount of time and that's that. And I think it's just a lack of context. People don't look at the, sorry, that's my favorite talking point is people's lack of taking things in context.

Because just because it works for that individual, you are not them. You have not done the training that they have done. You have not lived the life that they have done. You've not necessarily got the support network that they have or be as close to divorce as they are or all of these other factors that we don't see.

So you have to make the best decisions to fit your circumstances rather than trying to just take someone else's cut and dried approach and then apply it to your life. And I think for us as coaches that seems obvious, but for people who've never experienced that, it's easy to be drawn in by the bright lights.

And especially now with Instagram, there's so much more behind the scenes of how people train and what their life is like as an athlete. And you're like, "This isn't behind the scenes. This is borderline propaganda of 'look how much fun they're having while they're training for the Olympics.'" You're like, "Yeah, that's probably the one fun thing they did that week." Because they enjoy the sport, but there's only so much of your favorite thing you can do until it becomes very challenging, I would imagine.

James de Lacey47:53

No, for sure. And I want to round this podcast out as well with another Madden favorite that you like to use, the Badger Protocol. It's one I haven't actually, I haven't gone, I haven't actually read into this one. I've seen a lot of coaches use it. So maybe just give me the rationale of what, when, how, when.

Dave Allanson47:53

So I know Madden, so he created it because he does enduro racing, which is like a form of motorbike riding. And when the season ended he was like, "I feel like hot trash. I don't want to do any of the lifting that I would normally do." And so he didn't want to lift particularly heavy but didn't want to do loads of reps either and was like, "How do I kind of bridge the gap into wanting to get back into the gym basically?"

And it's essentially an isometric sandwich. So you do an isometric, you do a number of reps, and then you may or may not do an isometric at the end because you can do open badger sets or closed badger sets, or he said like open sandwich, closed sandwich.

And that could be, it's usually sort of, I tend to use 50 to 55% of one rep max. And then dependent on the exercise, it will be a five count pause. So five count squeeze, isometric at the bottom position or the most challenging position of whatever exercise you use. Five reps, five count squeeze, done. So they end up doing seven total reps.

The only point where they don't end up doing seven total reps, and Madden has even said you can do either, it doesn't matter whether you do seven reps or you do, you count the isometric reps as reps. So that you do three normal reps with an isometric either side or you do five normal reps with an isometric either side.

The exercises where that tends to be a bit more normal for are like trap bar deadlift and overhead press because you already start from the most disadvantaged position. So when you start with the isometric it's just off the chest or if it's just off the floor, that tends to lend itself better to, I find, including that first one as a rep because it can be pretty brutal if you don't. Now, if people enjoy it or they're particularly strong, make them do the horrible version.

But I tend to use it for two things. I tend to use it as a form of GPP. I really like it for, I've had quite a few grapplers come on board in the last few months. They've all had it. One, so that they can get used to the bottom position of all of the exercises. Two, so that they essentially, I would like them to do a lot of volume, but I don't want to steal that fatigue from them that they could be spending on the mats.

So I like that it almost simulates volume without actually needing to necessarily get the recovery costs of all of that volume. So the isometric makes those five reps harder and makes the total set feel harder without, because of the lack of movement, it doesn't actually force you to do any more mechanical work. So we haven't got more damage or whatever we want to call it to then actually recover from of say doing a 15 rep set.

I then also use it, I've got two ways that I tend to deload people, well three ways that I tend to deload people. I will either use aerobic GPP if they don't hate it. I've got one or two clients who can't stand it so we don't go near it and they're well conditioned as well so they can pick.

I will use badger sets or I will just, if they really like what they're doing, I'll just take a third of the volume off whatever we've been doing and just let them do that and maybe reduce the percentages down a bit for a week. Even sometimes actually I like good old classic three sets of 10 with 50%.

But I think badger sets are a really nice one for that because you can even just do two sets and they still feel like they've done a decent amount of work. And personally as well for them building into triphasic, it makes the isometrics and the eccentrics seem a little less intimidating because they've already been introduced to the concept of tempo.

Because I find most of the guys who've worked with me, even if they've trained a lot, they generally haven't played with tempo. Aside from kind of bodybuilding slow sets and stuff like that, they've never really had to think about specifically making one aspect of the lift have an emphasis.

So it's a nice way of introducing that as a concept quite early. And it's also less brutal than jumping straight, or when you come to an isometric phase of triphasic, which is a very aggressive form of that. So it can be helpful for them to get a little bit of that learning early on in the program and then come back to it later heavier.

James de Lacey47:53

So you can do open, which would be 5 seconds, say let's say you're squatting, you do 5 seconds at the bottom, three to five reps, and then another 5 seconds hold at the bottom.

Dave Allanson52:37

That would be a closed sandwich because you've got the—he calls it, he refers to it as the sandwiches are the—sorry, the bits of bread are the isometrics and then the meat.

I've never done that. I'm sure Madden would say you could play with whatever you wanted, but I've only ever really done it with the reps at the start and then either at the end or not at all. So a big one for me is chin-ups and pull-ups generally because I'll ban them if we have to. I don't really like doing a lot of banded work with those because I don't think it translates very nicely into doing it with body weight and then doing it with weight.

If it's a deload, yeah, fine, we'll do that. But I quite like for Badger sets for that we'll just do a three-count squeeze and then three reps and then if they're strong enough then a three-count squeeze as they get stronger and stronger. We can do the traditional Badger but you have to be pretty good at pull-ups and chin-ups to be able to do that off the bat or very light and I work with quite a few big boys, so figure out how we do it.

James de Lacey52:46

And you can reverse that. You can do three to five reps, then the isometric hold, and then another three to five reps.

Three seconds at the top.

Dave Allanson53:45

Yeah, three-count squeeze at the top and then full rep. So you've already done one rep in the first place anyway. So—

James de Lacey53:51

Ah, so you count that first one as—gotcha, gotcha. Okay.

Dave Allanson53:54

You can do—you don't—that's the point is Madden's like you can be as strict as you want. Try both, see what fits them. And I quite like it for that, especially with pulling exercises where you're using body weight because you can be a bit more fast and loose. You can judge the set based on the quality of the reps.

Because for me for chin-ups and pull-ups, I'd much rather that people were further away from failure. Anytime I tried to develop—personally, when I was doing pull-ups and chin-ups and I get close to failure—the wheels fall off after a few weeks and it just, I always feel like it's one step forward, three steps back. Whereas as soon as—with Will, he was like, "I don't want you failing reps. These shouldn't look like [expletive]." My, it just went through the roof really quickly for me. So I tend to prefer to go off quality of rep, especially for Badger sets with that.

James de Lacey54:42

And was like a Jim Wendler as well. But I mean, I ran so many cycles of 531 back in the day where you just do either band pull-aparts or pull-ups between every single set of pressing. And I would do that. I literally just accumulate pull-up sets of five because I—which was I don't know 50% or lower in terms of total reps. And you just bang out sets of five pull-ups after every single set of pressing or bench press or accessory stuff. And yeah, it was—I mean I like that. I really like that concept. It works well.

Dave Allanson55:15

I don't hate it. I just probably pushed it too close to failure for me. I did Harry Selkow, if you remember him on Elite FTS, he was a strength coach. I can't remember where he was, but he was continually barefoot and he had a—what was it? Like the kind of tank that you put petrol or gasoline into to fill up your car. He had one of those that he just filled with whatever he'd drink for the day and then he'd drink out of it and you're like, "This is quite the persona you've created. This is amazing."

But he would do a progression where it was you do 10 singles and then you'd add a double and then you'd add a second double until eventually you got to 10 sets of 10. Now I don't know anyone who ever got to the 10 sets of 10 and I sure as everything would fall apart for me about when I started introducing triples.

But that, again it's a different approach. I probably just didn't leave long enough between them. But that—having the lack of success that it did and then Will forcing me to take more time made a big difference for me. So I tend to try and do the same with my clients.

James de Lacey56:24

That's a big old-school physical culturist approach. I'm actually looking at my bookshelf. I've got a bunch of the books like old Paul Anderson stuff and Brooks Kubik's Dinosaur Training stuff and there's so much stuff in this training.

Dave Allanson56:34

That's my favorite training book.

James de Lacey56:36

It's a blast from the past. I do remember when that first came out there were some Premiership rugby sides that I think it was Dinosaur Training where they immediately started introducing strongman-style odd implement and awkward lifts and unsurprisingly because those guys hadn't really done much lifting aside from bodybuilding, everything fell apart within—I think I remember James Haskell talking about it like, "We did it once and then we didn't do it again," because it's just such an aggressive fit for such a—

Dave Allanson57:08

Well, if you're not—if you've only been doing bodybuilding stuff, yeah, you're going to—

James de Lacey57:11

Well, and also for—so one of the principles that sits behind—sorry, last night I sat down and wrote my whole rationale because I felt woefully underprepared—but one of the things I think is sports sit on a continuum of chaos or and/or complexity. And the problem that we have as coaches and the problem that a lot of people find when they look online is that most of the stuff that's freely available to you is heavily influenced by either bodybuilding or Olympic-style strength coaching.

And for a lot of the Olympics and a lot of the early research, it was around track and field. And track and field sits on the not very [expletive] complex set. And I don't mean that to say track and field people are stupid. What I mean is there's not a lot going on in that sport. Many of them are you versus you or you get your turn, then someone else gets their turn, then someone else gets their turn. So the rule sets are very, very tight.

You want to run 100 meters. There's very strict rules about how you set up, when you're allowed to set off, and you have to stay in your lane and just run to the end. That's quite straightforward. No one is allowed to grab your arm, pull you to one side, bump into you. They might do it by accident, but they could also be disqualified for that.

So they're very tight and so as a result you can work quite extensively on transfer and specificity because you can just measure it like, "Did the 100 meters go up? Okay, sweet. Bicep curls seem to help with that"—a stupid example. But you could, as a coach, spend four years working out which exercises tend to improve their times and use those.

For the rest of us working at the more complex end where we've got field sports, contact sports, all of those introduce levels of chaos. I actually think that the most chaotic sport that I am aware of is probably jiu-jitsu. And that's largely because the sport is still quite infantile. So there is no strict set definition of what the sport is.

You could do EBI, CJI, and ADCC. They're three different rule sets. And yet they're some of the biggest competitions going. You go to Polaris, another different rule set. I think some of that might change with what Craig Jones is doing at the Craig Jones Invitational and the fact that the UFC have gone, "Holy [expletive] we should be doing the same model."

That could change it because it's going to kind of strictly limit what's valued and what isn't valued within the sport. In the same way that MMA now is a very different beast to where it was in sort of 2009, 2010 where most people don't use a tournament structure, most people use the unified rules. It's a bit more set than it used to be. It's not like you compete in one state and you've got a different set of rules about what a downed opponent is.

Whereas in jiu-jitsu you could—and this is my biggest bugbear—is people go, "Oh, what's jiu-jitsu specific?" Nothing. Nothing can be because even your jiu-jitsu training, which is the most specific thing—sport training is the most specific thing you can do for a sport—that could be wrong because you could spend your entire training camp focusing on a specific game that you want to play and your opponent denies it to you for the entire match.

So the classic example I like to use is Owen Livesey is a phenomenal judoka and a really incredible standup artist in jiu-jitsu. He competed at CJI against—and a couple of other competitions—against Nicky Rod and unsurprisingly he, for whatever reason, was like, "We're going to have a bit of a back and forth. This is going to be great." It would have been magnificent to watch to see two of the best standup artists in the game in jiu-jitsu go against each other. Nick Rodriguez is not stupid, so he just went, "I'm going to sit to guard and wrestle up."

And so that whole game that Owen had been working on was now meaningless because he couldn't get it going because Nicky Rodriguez refused to play that game. And if we can't even get that specific with our sport training, then how on earth are we supposed to know? I did see your point about athleticism won't harm anyone. Absolutely, I agree with that. There's nothing wrong with jumps and sort of developing rate of force development, even though jiu-jitsu is a very slow sport. It's not going to harm them.

But it really bothers me when guys who clearly aren't as experienced as coaches—and I say this, I'm not that experienced—but there are guys out there who are like they've just taken what was an American football training program or something they saw from some Olympian where they're like, "You're going to train seven days a week." Like, "Okay, you've coached anyone? We're going to do hill sprints." Okay. That isn't going to make you better than someone else on the mats. Explosiveness is not the key KPI for the sport. It just isn't.

I remember Will saying to me that probably—because I asked him one day, I was like, "What are the KPIs for jiu-jitsu?" Because I can't see any meaningful ones in terms of ones that I know will consistently result in improvement. So in MMA, you can at least know they need to be explosive because the more explosive they are, the more likelihood of a knockout. In rugby, they need to be able to sprint and change direction because those tend to be game-changing moments when they work or they'll injure you. So you do it from that perspective as well.

But for jiu-jitsu, other than being able to squeeze and having a good capacity to recover so you don't gas out, there isn't really much. Will would argue that actually the strength to have a good base is probably worth its weight in gold because if you can be very difficult to sweep then that will help, but I also know Will trains a lot of gi so I don't know how much that translates necessarily over to no-gi, but it's not a bad point that you can do that sort of thing.

But I also think that's why we get a lot of people getting away with not necessarily being particularly nuanced coaches because you can get away with very, very basic strength training for jiu-jitsu for a lot longer than you can in power.

I've been saying this for a long time. A lot of people I talk to here, a lot of people in DMs and stuff, mentioned the same thing. It's so heavily biased to strength and size that you can literally just run bodybuilding powerlifting programs and you'll still excel at the sport because it's just so technical, but then the strength and size advantage is so big compared to other sports that—you look at what's the strongman's name that started exrofitional strongman competing?

Dave Allanson1:03:47

I know who you mean. Long hair.

James de Lacey1:03:49

Martin Zus.

Dave Allanson1:03:51

I mean, he's—yeah, he turned up at one of the ADCCs. I mean, it was white belt, but he just bullied—it was phenomenal to watch them all panic and go, "Oh my god, I'm being kamurid."

James de Lacey1:04:04

The strength and size is just going to be with him all the way through. Of course, there'll be when you have huge technical differences, but even then, the strength and size advantage shuts down a lot of the different techniques that someone can use on you. So that's why, as you mentioned, you can get away with so many people just doing really—I mean, there's nothing wrong with really basic strength training. It's just for jiu-jitsu, there's just outside of that, there's not so much more that's going to influence what's going to happen other than mat time.

Dave Allanson1:04:33

Yeah. And that is the principle for probably my whole program. I want to make sure people get a decent stimulus, all of the problem areas are covered. We never take arm work out, shoulder work depending on how bad people's shoulders are as well, because I want those areas to be robust. Nothing will stop you in your tracks like elbow tendinopathy. So it's very much worth putting that stuff in, but aside from that, I want them to get in and get out so they can be on the mats.

My worst nightmare is someone having a bad jiu-jitsu session because they're still tired from my training or because they're sore and fatigued, and they're like, "Oh, I skipped training today because my legs hurt too much." Okay, I worked with a guy, Cal, my first ever client, who used to compete quite a lot and he was at Grapplefest—in the build-up to the competition, he messaged me saying, "I haven't been able to get in training this week," because he worked full-time and had been traveling for work.

"Should I do wrestling tomorrow or should I lift?" And I was like, "Which one's going to win you the match?" And he was like, "Probably not lifting." "Okay, we'll lift next week."

One week off does not matter. And I think that probably might surprise some people. It surprises some of my clients when I'm like, "Yeah, don't worry about it. We'll be back to it next week." Because for me, it's that long-term—we want, what was it? Will said, "You want to play long-term games with long-term people." And I'm not that worried if one week is missed or I'm not asking them to squat seven days a week in the hotel room and upset every family member.

James de Lacey1:06:19

Plus, everything is strength training. So even wrestling is still strength training. So that kind of plays into it, too. But I appreciate you coming on, David. Where can people find or follow you? Keep up what you're doing.

Dave Allanson1:06:31

Yeah, online they can find me getstrong rollmore on Instagram. That's basically the only place that I am. I've got a YouTube, but that's mainly for me to put exercise things for my clients on. I did have X and then I deleted it. It just did my head in.

James de Lacey1:06:50

So bad. I had enough people trying to sell me courses and bots talking to me. I was like, "Yeah, I'm good. I'm deleting this."

Dave Allanson1:06:57

No, fair enough. I'll put that down in the description for anyone who's interested in keeping up with you. But I appreciate you coming on. Thank you very much, mate. Boom.