Addressing The Conditioning Controversy (NIRS deep dive) w/ Dr Andrew Usher

James de Lacey2:25

I think Ed Lee commented. I think it's the Ed Lee saying, "Two of the greats. Glad I catch this live." Thank you, Ed. If that is the Ed Lee that we know. I can't tell.

Dr. Andrew Usher2:45

It is.

James de Lacey2:45

Okay. Yes, it is. Perfect. The Ed Lee is there. I hope you're enjoying your time in Portugal there with the national team and doing your thing. I see you've had some good success so far. So, appreciate you coming. If you have any questions, throw them to Andrew here as well. But I actually wanted to go on the... Oh yeah, you go.

Dr. Andrew Usher3:04

Yeah. So I'll just say before that is probably Ed is probably one of the most switched on NIRS users I've ever kind of spoken with and kind of consulted with and worked with. Ed's really super super switched on. Probably more than of all the people that kind of initially we spoke to, but NIRS and the kind of different sporting domains, probably Ed's probably most switched on one. So, shout out to Ed.

James de Lacey3:27

There we go. Now his head's too big. So if anyone wants to listen to Ed, check out the Sweet Science of Fighting podcast. He was on a little while ago.

But I know we can start on the on the NIRS topic cuz as you mentioned, it's become very popular, very trendy. The big company's going to come in and make it mainstream and probably ruin a whole lot of stuff. But what will be interesting is you mentioned that there's been a lot of papers recently trying to use NIRS as part of their their studies. And it'll be interesting to kind of go into detail of what they're potentially finding, what they're not finding, what's going on in those areas.

Dr. Andrew Usher3:27

So it was interesting because I was reading Takis's paper which is one of John's former PhD students and they have a 2024 paper where they're looking at sprint interval training and I was just kind of breaking it down today and they were saying that kind of maybe slightly longer but shorter volume of sprints is maybe a slightly bigger adaptation. But they didn't really analyze it the way that we analyze it.

And I think this is the main crux and probably the biggest problem with NIRS is just what exactly is it? I think people are trying to look at how the muscle is performing. So they're kind of just basically looking at this whole idea of how the muscle desaturates, but they're not really considering what does that really mean from a mitochondrial perspective because that desaturation is clearly mitochondria kind of pulling in oxygen. So it's kind of almost into a respiration cycle. It's kind of pulling that that kind of back into the tissue.

So there's an intrinsic connection between how muscle desaturates and what the mitochondria are doing. But I think generally papers are still just using it as a proxy to get a rough idea of how the the peripheral muscle is being used. Whereas I guess myself and John Barry's real interest is much more applied about how do you actually use that rather than just use it from a clinical setting.

Because the reality is we can do hundreds of Wingate sessions all day long, but it's still not really telling us anything about what happens in a scrum, what happens in a 100 meter sprint, what happens in a 400 meter, what happens in a 5-minute round, an MMA exit.

So for me, I'm kind of more inclined now than I've ever been to be in the more much more looking at from an applied perspective. So I think the research is still very controlled environment. I think me and John's papers are probably a little bit more in the edge of the applied side. Slightly harder to get them through peer review because everybody likes everything in a controlled environment. But I think the applied space is where we're actually really going to find out just exactly what it is NIRS does.

The last I'd say probably year I've been building into my online training platform the ability to score peripheral intensity as a training load metric and that's been really difficult to do because we just don't know. But we're at a point now where I think we've got quite a good understanding of how that intensity relates to kind of systemic intensity and how we can kind of balance it out and create an overall internal external kind of workload metric. So to go along with your ACWRs and all that type of stuff, but that's a different kind of that's a different kind of I guess...

James de Lacey6:44

Why is that important for the people listening? Because obviously we can look at training load like as you mentioned you can look at subjective RPE training load take arbitrary units and kind of get acute chronic you can look at heart rate you can maybe look at different zones GPS. Why do we need peripheral load in this instance?

Dr. Andrew Usher7:01

So I think what I would say number one is all the aforementioned metrics are very poorly understood as it stands. GPS is really poorly utilized because people just want very simplified data. So it doesn't really tell you much. It just tells you externally how distance a player maybe maybe you're going to get some kind of velocity based number out of it.

Heart rate is very poorly understood from a kinetics point of view. I think our course is probably one of the few that actually goes into how you use heart rate.

James de Lacey7:33

Not one of the few, the only.

Dr. Andrew Usher7:35

Yeah. So heart rate kinetics is very poorly understood especially when heart rate recovers and the different kind of phase components of it. So that's quite still poorly understood, misunderstood rather. And then you've got other ones as well and none of them really tell you about how the muscles actually performing repeatedly over and over again. So you're not really getting an insight in into that.

And the only guess insights with NIRS at the moment what kind of recovery is probably blood flow restriction, right? It's become a very hot topic wearable units and stuff and a lot of those papers are really poor. I mean I've I've been asked to peer review numerous blood flow restriction papers and they really vary. You get the the odd one that's really well set up.

Like for example recently there was one where they want to look at boxing but they're not measuring anything upper body so all the blood flow restriction is lower body. So you kind of think well how can you quantify punch count based upon that? That doesn't make any sense. It's a different one kind of delivering it. So there's a mixed bag of it.

So I think the field of physiology from applied nature is still pretty much in its infancy in many ways. But I think there's NIRS is opening a door whereby you can actually a slightly better insight into what is happening in terms of the muscle. But more than that, you can start to look at volitional fatigue, fatigue model, and fatigue indexes, and you can start to get a much better idea of how the whole system works as a whole.

Now, I would caveat that by saying that I wouldn't just use NIRS on its own. So I mean, I'm obviously using NIRS pretty much day in and day out with athletes, but I'm still capturing heart rate, the NIRS data, power data, cadence data, run data, all of that. I think NIRS on its own can be incredibly useful if you've got the physiological knowledge to utilize it. Otherwise, you kind of really want to cluster it with a lot of other metrics so you can get the kind of the best out of it.

James de Lacey9:25

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How does looking at NIRS with different activities influence training? So you mentioned obviously you can look at muscle oxygen profiles when you're doing say scrummaging, 100 meter sprints, et cetera. What are you seeing with these that allows you to influence the conditioning program?

Dr. Andrew Usher10:45

So, if we take our last soccer paper for example, and that was a really super interesting one because we had the players do like a 30 meter sprint, change of direction, it's like a 10 or 15 second recovery, 30 meter sprint back. And the super interesting thing is when you look at the GPS data and you look at the heart rate kinetics after sprint one and sprint two, they'll still get to maximal kind of speed. So they'll still get to say 15 km or whatever but the journey to that differs very, very differently peripherally.

So one can get there repeatedly very efficiently and could go again for three, four, five, six, seven more sprints. The other person is not getting there as efficiently and can maybe only go for two more sprints. But you can't get that just from the GPS data because the GPS data typically is just showing you that they're consistently getting to a speed, but it's not really explaining the physiological journey to the speed.

So that becomes really, really super important because if the idea of conditioning is to build the engine to last the duration of a game, then you need to have some way of looking at how that engine's ticking and firing off. And heart rate will give you one sense of the metric, but it's not really going to tell you about delivery of the muscle.

So, and the muscle at the end of the day has to contract in order to create locomotion and movement. So, if you're not really dialing how the muscle is really operating, you're missing quite a big opportunity to look at how that condition is breaking apart.

Boxing is a great example. Boxing is probably one of the most misunderstood sports when it comes to conditioning. Everyone thinks it's highly anaerobic. It's highly high intensity all out action and that's just because it looks like a flurry of things are occurring. But peripherally not a lot actually happens with good quality boxers.

Poor boxers, really poorly conditioned, we see a lot of crazy stuff. Well conditioned boxers will desaturate, move into kind of steady state equilibrium state and then they'll recover really nice and fast and they can go 10, 12 rounds easy. Really poor conditioned athletes or those that may be subject to too much zone two typically have a very, very slow ability to extract and then don't recover particularly too well the rounds go.

So the NIRS is probably the only real way to get a good idea of what is actually occurring from a peripheral. However, you have to be conscious that it depends on what muscle you're putting on as well. So there's a lot there's a lot you need to consider.

James de Lacey13:07

But why would too much zone two lead to that more gradual desaturation versus the more well-conditioned guys that have that sharper desaturation?

Dr. Andrew Usher13:07

Because the only way you're going to encourage high metabolic stress and the ability to extract is through high intensity. Zone two is not going to give you that. Muscles need to go "I need to get oxygen really, really fast into the tissue." It's just not going to do it. It's going to increase VO2, maybe slightly increase that if you want to term it aerobic capacity to a certain extent, although I'll argue that sprint interval training and HIT can do that as well.

But you need to put the muscle under a form of stress and strength training's got it down. We know that you want to get bigger, you need to lift bigger. So what are you doing? You're applying more stress under tension.

But when we think of conditioning we think the opposite. We think you have to go really slow and easy for really super long periods of time, which will give you an adaptation and will give you some. Or if you want really fast switch on, you need to do the equivalent of a heavy lifting session. And that is high metabolic kind of stress demand.

So sprints give you that, but sprints don't need to be big sprints. They can be other things as well. You can do ski, there's a number of things you can do as long as you are consciously aware of what the adaptation is. And that gets back to the whole idea of NIRS. How do you know what the adaptation is if you ain't measuring it?

So NIRS will allow you to go on a ski or to do a row or put your athlete on it and just really look at what exactly is happening with the delts. It's maybe happening with the vastus lateralis and it will just give you that kind of insight that you just can't get anywhere else. And that's basically phase one is elicit the demand.

This is what this athlete is doing. What does another athlete do? And then it's a case of working out well what would be an optimal position for that sport. And then from there you can biologically profile and then use NIRS to direct you into conditioning elements and areas that you need to go.

James de Lacey15:08

We'll continue down this kind of NIRS route too. But I feel there was a couple of questions on Instagram the other day. And I guess they're probably questions that come up very often whenever we post about conditioning or sprint intervals on Instagram and stuff because there's always the usual. But how would a normal conditioning week look? Only sprints or mix it up? It's a very general question, but I think it'll be good to address this idea of sprints.

Dr. Andrew Usher15:36

So, sprints are just one tiny component of the training program. So, no athlete is only doing sprints. So, boxing will be maybe, so for myself, boxing normally starts either beginning of the week on a Monday. We kind of do a baseline capture just because we can see trends over time. So that's either a really fast 5k run or it's the one mile on the assault bike and we've got some pretty tasty times on that and it's an all out effort that allows us to really benchmark oxygen utilization and demand in those real all out efforts.

Then there'll be three bike sprints that'll be spaced out over the week. Some athletes may do them Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Some may do them Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I don't really particularly care when they do them. After they've done a baseline of maybe two weeks of 30 on 60 off where we can get nice spacing and the time recovery to look at all the data.

After that we'll then move in to say if we really need to increase or improve something it could be 10 on 20 off eights. It could be 10 on 8 offs or it could be gnarly 20 on 10 offs. It always changes.

And I think this is probably where people fall down with conditioning. My experience the last six years is conditioning will plateau out faster than strength work. It will and adaptations will cease. And this is why a lot of people go sprint training is good for maybe 3 weeks, but you don't really see anything after it. And that's because they aren't changing the stimulus.

You need to change the stimulus. So you either need to change the resistance on the bike or you need to change the work to rest ratios. And then again, you need to know what am I looking at to see whether those changes are actually having an impact. So everything we do is geared up that whole idea that it's assess and then re-evaluate.

And then at the end of the week I reevaluate all the sprint data and I look at it and I go "Okay, we had good adaptations here. We had very similar adaptations here. Everything's moving the right direction. Let's have a bastard week where we're going to give negative recoveries." It could be return to play athlete that's injured in which case we're not hammering it too hard.

We're just slowly gradually bringing in stimulus and learning that could be a boxer that I've got an 8 week camp and I need to make some pretty dramatic decisions based upon sparring because that's my number one route because I want to look at what is the conditioning in the actual sport before I make any conditioning strategies and that's pretty much the same all athletes.

So, you know, I took on a new Hyrox athlete a couple weeks ago. First thing I asked him, go give me a 5k run, 10k run, give me a kind of 1k into wall balls into 1k and ski. Just give me that data with your NIRS and from there I'll build it out because I can't build conditioning until I've done some sort of assessment test to see where does that athlete really sit. So that's kind of how it works.

But sprints are just a tiny component of it. So for example, I've got athletes this week, more kind of tactical based athletes that are doing what we call a repeat 5k over 1k. So do the fast 1k, 60 second recovery. Fast 1k, 60 second recovery and we're looking at how well can heart rate come up and come off but we're also looking at what the initial desaturation looks like.

Is the steady state component solid? What's the recovery looking like? Is there kind of hyper response? Maybe an overshoot on resaturation. What is the next 1k time look like? These are all the kind of tools you're using.

So NIRS is not just a bike sprint thing and conditioning is not just a bike sprint thing.

James de Lacey18:58

I got to cut a few comments on the chat here. But before that, just quickly on the equilibrium side, what's actually happening physiologically when people are bouncing in and out of this equilibrium? Just for anyone listening, if you just look at a muscle oxygenation graph, I've shared heaps on my Instagram as well, little pictures and stuff where you see this nice little trace underneath. When people are bouncing in and out a lot, what does that indicate to you and what's actually happening physiologically?

Dr. Andrew Usher18:58

So if I'm looking at boxing and I'm looking at the desaturations, I get the initial desaturation or bike sprint or whatever and then we get this kind of steady state and it will fluctuate. You're not going to be in a straight line just like a heart rate is not a straight line because the sensor is measuring changes and subtle changes. And obviously the speed of the sensor, whether it's 10 hertz, 100 hertz, .5 or whatever, is going to dictate how much variance you're going to see.

So what you're really interested in, and my preferred route at the moment with this, is called a mean absolute deviation formula where I look at the variance in the steady state component to see how much is that moving from what I would deem a normalized time frame. Because the thing about NIRS and heart rate is, and it's one of the common things that comes up, looks spiky, it looks this, and that's just because it's going to look spiky and it's going to look like that because the system is live. It's pulling oxygen, it's trying to eat, it's changing cardiac output.

But you will see in all NIRS sessions, you look at the research paper, you look at hours in the treadmill, etc., the muscle will try and move into steady state just like heart rate will try and move into steady state. And those steady states are training adaptations. So once you start to adapt, you will hold those stages under increasing time domains or intensity domains for much longer. You'll have much more reserves and kind of myoglobin and hemoglobin values. So you'll be able to kind of shift them a little bit and that's how you see your adaptations.

But the only time you don't really see it is, well, if you're doing 15 on the bike, 6 seconds off recovery for 10, dude, that's brutal. I mean athletes, you can see two, three beat changes in those small windows.

See the thing is about this is, is like you can read research all day long, right? You get loads of people on, I mean LinkedIn's probably my favorite toxic place at the moment because everyone's like a PhD sport scientist, 20 years in the field, has seen this. I've immersed my whole life in NIRS for the last probably six, seven years, using it day in and day out. I have seen the adaptations that you can get practically applied, not in a lab, but kids in a boxing gym, kids doing 400 meter sprints. I see it.

And I've seen it in loads of teams. You can see these adaptations over time, but to maintain them you need to go to the well quite often. So even on your negative recoveries, which you're only going to be hitting 15 on, six offs, if you're a really super high level athlete and you've been training for a long time and we need a big stimulus change, then we're going to give them to you. But we're traditionally not going to throw a novice person on a bike off.

And the other thing as well is we're talking about athletes that are hitting high power outputs consistently on the bike as well with them. So they're not kind of, they're not for the faint-hearted. I mean, that's one of the probably downsides to sprint train, is it's not for everyone, right? It's kind of, you can do other things like 30 meter shuttle runs, the classic 305s, all these protocols. You can do them and mix the stimulus up quite a lot.

James de Lacey22:28

Boxing sparring is a really good one to look at if you're getting NIRS because boxing sparring will show you it's less chaotic than you actually really think it is. So Ed commented earlier about another adaptation anchor point he's found is resting oxygen levels. Bit of a wormhole to go down, but an interesting adaptation I found in personal use within teams.

Dr. Andrew Usher23:00

Yeah. And I mean, at the end of the day, that's what you're looking to do. I mean the when we did the first NIRS control study that we did, the interesting thing about that was these athletes were all pretty, I guess you would call them relatively fit. So our incremental treadmill test starts at 10 km an hour, goes up one into 18, then it's inclines, and a good athlete will get to about 182, 183. We've had athletes get to 185, 186, and then post 3 weeks of sprints we get to 188, 189.

So you're starting to see athletes getting an extra three minutes on a treadmill test at where VO2's already peaked. But three minutes after VO2 max has been reached, they've still got oxygen high levels compared to what they had pre the 3 weeks. So post 8 weeks you see this big change and you see a higher amount of reserve oxygen because that's that steady state change where they can hold oxygen in an intensity domain, but once conditioning's been built they can hold it for much longer at much higher levels. So these are good adaptations. These are easy to spot.

James de Lacey23:00

I have another question. Femist music. He's asking if you don't have a good way of monitoring progress, but you know what adaptation you're chasing, does it make sense to just progress the work to rest ratio like subtracting a second or two of rest between sprints every couple of weeks for someone who needs to improve the recovery or increasing resistance every couple of weeks for someone who needs power?

Dr. Andrew Usher24:29

It's a good question. Yeah, that's a good basic way of looking at it. I mean, there's lots of times I have athletes who don't have any NIRS devices, but they usually have a heart rate device. So I can get some kind of data. But I'm a massive lover of asking how the session was with the athlete. I'll always say, "How was the session?" Because once you know your athlete, you'll know if they're bullshitting or not.

So you can spot those adaptations. I mean, everyone knows their lazy athlete in the team. It's normally that 35-year-old that's kind of learned how to coast through training sessions but make it look like he's really given everything. We've seen quite a lot of them the last 18 months, predominantly in soccer, I may add. They like the gray man. They just kind of float in the middle assessment days. They do enough but they never go enough. And they're the ones that don't traditionally want to do the big sprints in my experience because that's where they get found out.

So, but no, that's a good way of looking at it. If I didn't have anything, I would just be feedbacking on sparring sessions, track runs, high op times, whatever it was, and I'd be kind of changing things based upon what I was seeing there. A lot of times, especially I'm working remotely with amateur boxers, although I don't really do that much now. I actually don't work with that many now, athletes in general, cutting back.

But generally with those type of athletes, I'm just feeding back from the coaches telling me sparring. And you'll hear the usual terms: they look more explosive, get much more power. They'll get these type of things which we know kind of like it's a bit of a misnomer. But the coach can see something that's different and relay it back and that's useful. But yeah, good question.

James de Lacey26:10

Now on that topic, we had another question. He's got two questions, but the first one that relates to that is how should a training week look when you have sparring Tuesday and Thursday and then how do you fit three sprints and a fast run in that week plus heavy bag intervals?

Dr. Andrew Usher26:27

So if I've got Tuesday, say Tuesday, Thursday sparring, we will do probably bike sprints after sparring. So that'll take care of the two days. And then we'll probably do a bike sprint on probably like a Saturday or Sunday then. So there's no excuses.

So post-sparring, and I actually think that's what Gary Hunt spoke about down at Team GB. That's what they do. They brought in, I think, after sparring is when they decided to do the bike sprints. Because bear in mind intensity is a very relative thing as well. Like even after sparring you're kind of quite vascular. Everything's flowing particularly well. Jump on the bike, that intensity is probably going to be enough to drive that metabolic stress at that particular time. So you'll still get a good return on your investment on that.

Traditionally we do sparring probably Thursdays and Saturdays is when we do sparring. So that gives us a clear Monday, Tuesday, and then Wednesday I won't typically necessarily do it. But what happens with me is I will plan the sprint sessions and I'll just let the athletes pick when they want to do them and they just know it's not done now. It's so much easier.

Once you get your head around the idea that physiologically your body doesn't care about it from the point of view when it's timed. So it's not like the old idea of taking protein in a 20-minute window or a 2-hour gap, all that stuff. Post strength work, conditioning is slightly different. Your body doesn't seem to care about it too much as long as it gets facilitated at some point. So because of that you get a little bit more of kind of, I guess, creative license to kind of play around with kind of when you want to put it into play.

James de Lacey28:05

But every athlete I just schedule it. I typically just go Monday, Wednesday, Friday and they know they can just pick it anyway. I mean it's slightly different for me because I have my own app system. I've built my own backend software and apps and that stuff. So it lists their schedule for them and they know they just take it off market and if they're doing bike sprints they pair it to the app and it all gets synced up and so I get quite a big ecosystem how we do it but generally just do them where you can do them but don't do them pre-spar.

Dr. Andrew Usher28:30

Where would the fast running heavy bag fit into that if they're being done?

James de Lacey28:41

So I always do the runs always a Monday for us just because that then lets me know how they recover from the week before. So it's kind of just like a baseline screen for me. Most of them all get very tasty 5k time. So they will drift maybe 20, 30 seconds above, below perhaps. But if I have an athlete that suddenly drifts 2 minutes, 3 minutes out, then that's a red flag that something's kind of not happened.

So normally I will normally just let the, I'm in a lucky position because I obviously work quite closely with David Mallister up in Abine. So Davey's bag sessions are very much in tune with how I plan stuff anyway, so we've got this nice symbiotic relationship where I don't need to worry about that. I just need to put the stuff in the diary and everything takes care of itself, right? So it works really well.

So typically we have three bike sprints, probably two heavy bag sessions and we have two strength sessions per week and then there's two spar sessions and then the rest time is technical tactical training. So it's a quite a busy week for a pro.

Amateurs it's scaled right back and it depends on where they are in their amateur career. So we're going through a process at the gym just now where we're kind of trying to pick I guess what you class as your podium athletes and really get them at a young age very structured on training. So it's almost like the pro but it's very structured and it's very guided by the coaching staff. So we can really foster that discipline and understanding of what needs to be done at an early point in career. So we're kind of quite big in that.

The typically the other amateurs or pros that I work are in pretty high quality gym environments. So again, I don't have any issue with it. Normally I just say, I need these two bike sessions done. I need these three bike sprints and normally their coaching staff is super cool and like yeah, we'll fit that in here and there and that's it.

So I don't typically struggle to get it in, but I'm also not regimented because they all have lives and families and sometimes sparring comes up. We've had in Aberine we've had the kind of Nigerian team in because the Commonwealth Games. So they've been in the gym for the last three weeks. So that's kind of thrown the whole schedule out because you want to take advantage of having that kind of quality level of athletes in your gym environment.

So at that point, we just dial back a lot of stuff and focus on technical, tactical, and sparring and getting the bike sprints in and we just let other things drift until that window's closed and then we move on. So I think like everything you just need to be quite flexible in what you're doing.

Dr. Andrew Usher30:58

I've got a question that was from Instagram a while ago. It's a very common one that always comes through and it's best ways to measure and implement sprints over time with little or no measuring equipment.

James de Lacey31:12

What type of sprints? Bike sprints.

Dr. Andrew Usher31:14

We can just say bike sprints. Just how good they're recovering when they got off the bike. Because when you start doing, I mean a classic example of this I guess is I've got a new athlete on bike sprints and the first two weeks is pretty hellish for them. They complain that they've been abused.

James de Lacey31:31

And then what happens over time is you've got people like Fraser Wilkins, does 15 on 8 off for 10, does that then does a medball circuit or then goes and does his heavy bag or does his strength work after and it just becomes very matter of fact.

Dr. Andrew Usher31:53

So the key is how well they recover at the end of it. That's probably the biggest indicator because that's what you're looking to do, right? You're trying to build more mitochondria, have more ATP throughput, more oxidative phosphorylation, have a better engine running. So you'll see it. You'll see it over time. I've got you back. Perfect. You're just a little bit of lag going on, but it's all good.

James de Lacey32:19

A followup question from fighter 277. This is a pretty general question. It's probably going to be a little hard to answer, but he's an amateur boxer in the third round and he always gasses. How would you program the bike sprints?

Dr. Andrew Usher32:19

So obviously first thing is you need to have some sort of kind of baseline to find out where you start and then from there dial it in. So because you can't just go I'm gassing in 3 minutes and then jump into like a 15 on 8 off protocol. You need to, you need to look at, there's a whole heap of things you need to do with bike experience.

First, you need to make sure they can set the bike up. Because I cannot tell you how many times I've been to gyms and watch kids jump on bikes and not set them up appropriate to the saddle height and the handlebar distance and they wonder why they can't push really hard on this sprint. So that's the first thing you want to do. And then you want to just get classic 30 on 60 offs. That will tell you everything you need to know whether you are ready to do 10 on 20 offs or whether you maybe need 20 on 40 offs.

So you can't just, conditioning is like any muscle. It's got to kind of be developed. You can't just go in and hit like a 200 kilo deadlift and think, it's so it's the same idea. It's like this is actually the fascinating thing about conditioning for me is that even as far back as like 20 odd years when we were doing our Polar Team 2 and I was going through this whole conditioning thing and looking at whole heaps of stuff and ECGs and stuff it was kind of clear to me even then the conditioning was very much based upon muscle fiber recruitment and everything else.

So it's intrinsically connected. So therefore it has to be treated the same way as strength work. It has to be periodized and planned. Structure intensity needs to be changed. And I'd look around and everyone would just not be doing that. Everyone else would just be like, it just didn't seem to exist. And then we go through this horrible process in time where conditioning gets stripped down to kind of small anaerobic components and aerobic components and alactic components.

James de Lacey34:27

It's always about building volume over time for conditioning.

Dr. Andrew Usher34:30

It's like anything you have to train it. And the other thing you've got is some athletes will get deconditioned because they maybe kind of have a fight camp and then or the boxing season comes to an end. So July August the amateur season ends and it picks back up a month later. A lot of kids in that period of time don't do any work.

Four weeks we know cardiovascular training or kind of sprint training is quite detrimental. There is a, you actually drain quite fast. Strength you can hold it slightly longer but conditioning you lose it. Plus side is you can get it back really fast in conditioning which strength takes a bit longer.

So the whole physiological processes apply for both strength and conditioning which is why they probably should be the same size S and C. It shouldn't be small C I guess. And the more, it's funny because like everything's always changing as well. So obviously me and John Barber have a slight difference opinion on strength work but I think strength work.

So John's less interested. I don't think it's as crucial as many people think for a lot of sports. I think there's an adequate amount sweet spot just like conditioning and when you get those two sweet spots you can then diverge and do a lot more focus on technical and tactical and kind of preparation training and everything else will take care of itself but I think you've still got to find the sweet spot and that takes a little bit of time.

And I think for me it's kind of been interesting, I think the one thing I have noticed a lot in the last year is muscle size and depth and quality can have a massive negative effect on oxidative phosphorylation and kind of recruitment. I think there's a sweet spot in probably hypertrophy size and kind of fiber recruitment. What that is, I have no idea, but I've noticed with some athletes who've actually taken a little bit of muscle off we're getting greater performance.

That's a hard thing to do in boxing as most people know. We've got obviously athletes that sit between weight categories and it's always that whole thing about you want to get the chassis and the engine kind of married up as best you can. And so you got to find the weight class that can do it. And sometimes you find a weight class that you think is really suitable to that athlete and it just doesn't work out. The recruitment's not there. The conditioning can't be put in place on top of it and you kind of then try to either take them up or take them down.

And so boxing is probably one of the best sports if you're a young S&C coach, you want to learn about I guess weight categories, strength requirements, deficits. It just teaches you things that you just probably can't get in a lot of other sports.

That whole idea of making weight repeatedly, making weight. We're in a lucky position in our gym that none of our kids really sit that far out of weight. We've just found that once we find the weight category for them, we can put them in. Worked with female amateur this year and we took her up a weight category and she's done really well this season. You got to find all this out.

James de Lacey37:21

One of the misconceptions, misnomers, maybe common beliefs around conditioning when you're looking at maybe heart rate or even NIRS data is they see heart rate going up really fast to close to max or max, or they see oxygen being used really fast, really quickly and gets bottomed out very quickly. And that's seen almost as a negative to conditioning because it's like, whoa, I'm now quote unquote anaerobic and I'm using too much energy and too much glycogen, whatever else.

And it means now I have less reserves and I'm going to potentially gas out faster. I need to be able to hold that back. Be interesting to go into detail, I think, for listeners, why that may not be the case or why it maybe is the case.

Dr. Andrew Usher38:06

I think a lot of that's probably going to be quite sport dependent as well. I think NIRS is a good insight tool into how well that oxygen is being passed through the slope gradient into the muscle tissue and utilized and then obviously refueled. But there is obviously something on that ability to use substrates as well. There's a strong connection on substrate utilization because obviously that is the breakdown of glycolysis and phosphorylation and all that stuff and the mitochondrial Krebs cycles and that stuff, they're all part and parcel, so they're all entwined.

Heart rate, when intensity increases, heart rate should rise. It then should reach almost like a steady state component and you'd be in a cruise control. There is an inverse relationship because as heart rate rises, muscle oxygen has to come down because it's supply and demand. So with the exception of certain athletes coming back from injury where maybe you've got the sensor on a muscle that's been maybe had some major surgery or there's maybe been a growth removed or whatever and there's maybe capillary bed damage or there's fiber damage, in which case you might not see it, but you will see it but not as fast, it will just be a lot slower.

And what you typically see in good athletes is heart rate rise, desats quick, goes into steady state, everything looks really good, heart rate comes down, oxygen goes up, and you get this nice crossover point. Deconditioned athletes, oxygen is slower. Heart rate is rising, but oxygen is slower and slower and slower because they can't extract the oxygen fast enough to use it.

So then you get into this position where the heart's beating faster, stroke volume, cardiac output, all these values are changing, but the muscle is not capable of taking that oxygen quick enough to utilize it. So muscle then contraction changes, calcium deficiency, all that metabolic stuff is happening.

So you should expect to see in high intensity, any big effort, that muscle oxygen will desat relatively quite quickly and in a quite a either mono exponential curve style format or in a very sharp linear. So you should see that. I don't know why people are so paranoid about heart rate rising. The big red zone stuff is always interesting to me because people were like, "Oh, we're doing red zone training." I was like, "Yeah, but sparring is red zone." Because if you want to go traditionally by segmenting out to zone five, zone four, heart rate is maxed. So what is special about that?

For me always, it was a case of, well, it would make sense to have the ability to get in there and be into cruise control really nice, but come back out of it really fast because that would make sense. Even before I got NIRS devices in there, I thought, aha, this is even more important because when the heart rate is obviously coming down, muscle oxygenation is rising up. So your ability to systemically calm down and relax and kick off all your afferent feedback systems and central nervous system stuff makes sense because then you can resaturate.

James de Lacey41:04

Which is probably why it's important as you mentioned with that early heart rate recovery, because then you get that fast resaturation rate with the muscle or with the NIRS.

Dr. Andrew Usher41:13

Yeah. And the other thing is you have different styles of athletes. So in boxing, you're looking for very fast desaturation, spar into nice steady state and really nice recovery out of it. The recovery is really crucial in the 60 seconds because you only have a small window. Now I've cornered lots of fighters over all these years, loads with fighters. I've done actual cornering and I know I have a very tight window and that bell goes.

If your second ball always is up, putting the stool in and it bounces off the ropes and it's all over the place, or like when we were in Germany, we had just Virgo, we had camera crews, it was a very tight window to get up and get into the ring. So you're losing 10 seconds just baffing around. So you got a very short window to give instructions, to apply any kind of cut work, any kind of Vaseline, kind of adrenaline, whatever it is you're doing, and give quality instructions.

So if you can prime that athlete to recover incredibly fast in that 60 seconds, all that cornering becomes gold dust because you can relay commands, you can do what you need to do. You can put your cooling strategies in place and you can get really good effects, especially when you're hitting title fights. When we hit that sixth, seventh round, it's really super important.

Now, the flip side is when we want to kind of alter NIRS because in those occasions, what we're really looking to do is to have a bit more fat utilization, fat oxidization, and a bit more carbohydrate tolerance. So in those athletes, we want them to go at a pace that is very manageable that they can move into steady state. So we don't necessarily want massive sharp desaturations.

So we want a nice initial global response which is almost like a hyperemic response, and then the muscle will utilize oxygen and then we want a really nice steady state. And we want to stretch that steady state out further and further and further so they can run at faster paces and tolerate the balance between supply and demand a lot more efficiently. And that's also substrate fueling as well.

So it always goes back to this thing for me, the right tool for the right job. So NIRS and what we teach in ESD2 isn't specific to combat sports, is about all sports. And I think that's one of the things people confuse about sometimes. It's about understanding sports and understanding interpersonal physiology first and foremost sport, and then marrying up the chassis and the engine so you can get the best results out of it.

James de Lacey43:33

How does that look with intermittent like team sports like rugby? You mentioned obviously boxing at that sharp, sharp down, sharp up. And then obviously ultra or endurance, you're looking more gradual. So how's that look within intermittent team sports?

Dr. Andrew Usher43:46

So the intermittent team sports is very similar. Now good athletes will have a sharp desaturation and then the decelerate on the end point of the run, of the tackle. And they can back up, there'll be depending how well conditioned are, you see either a slight delay before resaturation or you can see an immediate resaturation. Some of the best soccer players data that I've got on sprints on the pitch match with the GPS can accelerate incredibly fast and get to top speed really quick, can decelerate on a button. And you just see desaturation super quick into kind of micro kind of steady state and then a reset.

And the interesting thing about really high quality athletes is if you're starting oxygen is here, say 60%, and they desaturate to 20%, when they reset it's only probably plus minus 10% from the baseline. So from the 60, poor athletes will maybe desaturate down and then resaturate to 90% of this kind of hyper response.

So the interesting thing for, I'm not sure how much I can talk about this. So obviously I'm doing a lot of work with certain teams and certain organizations looking at intermittent sports and I'm on an NDA, so I need to be careful what I'm saying. But effectively we've been profiling with GPS what do individual sprint profiles look like, run profiles look like, and what does the desaturation and resaturation component look like and how do we then develop for that.

Because what you find is some players are really good for the first half but really poor in the second half. You get players that are really good through both halves.

But you have something that a lot of these team systems don't take into consideration and that's player position, because that desaturation resaturation component is tied to that player's position. If that's a defender and he's a busy defender, you're going to see lots of desats and resats. If that's really like an old school center forward that's just poaching, waiting for the box, you're not going to see it.

But what you will see is a big difference in desaturation, resaturation proponents on it because a defender will be continually run a lot, but the sprint speed is normally slower and smaller. Some of the center forwards, left field player or right wingers, whatever. So there's intrinsic differences between that as well.

So it goes back to that whole thing that everything needs to be individually prescribed. You can do, so in team sports there's obviously this whole big idea where you want to try and get a team through a session. So I've spoken about this elsewhere. Ed knows about this, Sydney knows about this. The idea, we've developed a bucket system where you do your baselines and we put you into one of three buckets to help build the conditioning, layer it up.

But once you get three, four, five, six weeks into bucketed system where one group's doing this, one group's doing this, one does that, then you need to go talent identification. And then you need to go right, what's that player's position? We know they have the conditioning now. Now we need to add on the extra little bits to conditioning.

James de Lacey46:42

And what's interesting is you mentioned obviously the different profiles from these players. Now, a lot of the players that you're profiling, I would assume 99% of them haven't gone through proper sprint interval or really high intensity training consistently. So how much can you develop through quote unquote sport specific? Because you mentioned some guys might be really good, have really good desaturation profiles, able to decelerate well, all that kind of stuff.

We can then develop a lot of that just through the sport or I guess can some athletes have these really good profiles without having this kind of traditional I guess you could say strength and conditioning.

Dr. Andrew Usher47:22

That again is going to really depend a lot, isn't it, in the team. I mean, Edley had phenomenal results in his work. We had some of the best desaturations I've ever seen, really impressed in quite a short period of time. There's been other teams kind of looked at as well that the bike sprints have really changed that whole process.

But the problem you've got in team sports is how do you take like a pre-season condition and then apply it in a very hectic play schedule. So there's a lot of situation run about that as well which makes it quite difficult for a lot of teams to do.

There's a couple of teams I work with that I can't name that I've managed to get probably 40 weeks of sprints through the whole year, minus international week where they haven't been getting done for that kind of fortnight. And they have seen pretty good results, like really really good results. So it depends. I think can you just get the adaptations through sport specific training, whatever the hell sport specific training is these days? I don't think so.

I think it comes down to the whole idea back to the beginning the conversation. In the lifting room you get your great adaptations because you are increasing say load by 2 and a half kilos or 2% or one rep max or whatever you're working towards that all the time. And the strength room it seems really easy for whatever reason to do because people understand lifting, they understand what they need to do.

Conditioning is exactly the same. So you need to change that stimulus by 2%, 1% or whatever else. So you need to improve that sprint one rep max, what the hell you want to call it.

But the other interesting thing about bike sprints that we know, and that goes back to the kind of tacky's paper I was reading earlier today, was you don't need to do a lot of them. That first sprint is probably the most important sprint of the day. If you have a really good first sprint, I suspect that's probably enough.

As crazy as it may sound, that six seconds or 20 seconds might be all you need three times a week. Purely because it goes back to the lifting analogy, you're putting so much metabolic stress on the system that it has to adapt in order to maintain it. Otherwise, nothing's going to change.

And that's why I don't really spend much time in socials anymore. Because sometimes it breaks my heart reading people's posts on conditioning.

James de Lacey49:51

Dude, I went through the explore feed the other day. I was just looking through and I was like, "Oh, there's some conditioning stuff in there." I was like, "Fucking hell."

Dr. Andrew Usher49:58

It's because fundamental of understanding of physiology. So this whole thing that none of them are testing anything. Most people are working with, say a lot of these big Instagrammers, are maybe working, found themselves in a lucky gym where they'll be good athletes that they've inherited. They're not taking anyone from grassroots most of the time. They're not old enough for me. They're taking kids from like 12 right through to national to senior to international everywhere else. It's a long process.

So a lot of times I read it and I just think they've just regurgitated like a Joel Jameson book and they've tried to put their own spin on it. But if you look at that book in a modern context, even out with what I do, if you just take that book in a modern context and pull up Charles Brooks's papers, pull up Perolan's paper, pull up and look at it in context, you can see what Joel will try to do is create a really nice summarized way to develop something, but it's not physiologically, it lacks quite a lot.

But it's a great book. It's a great starting point. The problem is we've moved on. We now understand way more of conditioning than ever and we're just starting to tap into it.

So a lot of these Instagram coaches are very much, I think, just lacking a bit of physiological knowledge as to what they're doing and why they're doing it. So there's a big kickback on it. And I think a lot of people just seem to think that when you're promoting like sprint interval training that that's the whole program, that you must be doing sprint interval training like 10 hours a day.

And it always amazes me that they're very against say four bike sprints a week, but they'll happily do 5 hours per week of zone 2 training. And I'm kind of like, well, if you've got the time to do zone 2 and you want to do it, great. But I don't know of any athletes that can spend that amount of time doing that.

James de Lacey51:50

Except for runners.

Dr. Andrew Usher51:52

Ultra runners.

James de Lacey51:54

And even as an ultra runners, you're at a point whereby they're so efficient and zone 2 you ain't going to stretch VO2 max out anymore because it's where it needs to be. So the whole point of it then is you need to change the stimulus so that you can get a little bit extra out of it. So it's pretty straightforward.

Dr. Andrew Usher51:54

Hang on. I've just got a little Mia here. I'll turn this on soon. Okay. I'm just, oh, she was listening to a music. I had to turn it off.

But I had a question in the chat here around the sprints. So he's saying after his sprints his heart rate gets elevated like 10 to 15 minutes and he's completely exhausted. When should he change the sprints, decrease or increase reps or decrease rest?

James de Lacey52:48

What, 10 to 15 minutes elevated post sprint? So I would be thinking to myself a couple of things. I think what's the age? What's the weight? What's blood pressure pre and post exercise looking like? These are probably the first things I'd be checking out. And then I'd be thinking to myself, what sprints is he doing just now? Does he want to go back to some baseline building? Which cases you want to start maybe looking at, I don't know, a little bit more 10 on, 30 off. It's difficult to tell with that data and seeing the athlete.

But if you're 15 minutes post and you've not got a decrease in heart rate after 15 minutes, I'd find that quite surprising. Because soon to be 54, I'll have, if I do a basement I'll have a heart rate decrease in that time and I'm not fittest at the moment in my chunky monkey stage. So I don't know about that.

Dr. Andrew Usher53:38

So but I mean the principle holds that if you're trying to improve fast kinetics and that kind of quick deceleration of kind of heart rate, that quicker drop, you kind of shorten intervals, you want to encourage that kind of heart rate recovery. Likewise, if you want mitochondrial intensity to change or function change or how you want to label it, you need to create a stimulus that's really hard and that involves both in my experience now the right amount of resistance on an assault bike or earth bike or whatever else and all out intensity to get that or you need to look at ways to try and drive it. But 15 minutes would be quite a long post elevation.

James de Lacey53:38

When would you look to not prescribe someone's sprint stain?

Dr. Andrew Usher54:27

If they're injured or cardiovascular issues, changes in BP, any clinical indicators for us is a no go just because it puts stress on it. Cold flu season, I'm very cautious. If they're picking up a lot of colds and flu, I'll rein them back because obviously it does have quite a high autoimmune stress. So I mean, you are placed in high metabolic stress. Anyone that's on biological medications I'm quite cautious with. So anyone that's on like Simsia or anything for any kind of PA kind of rheumatology based conditions, I'm very cautious. I want to make sure everything's done.

You can do other things. You need to remember that it's a bit intensity. So the bike sprint is a convenient way for intensity. That's all it is. There's nothing magical about it. It's a convenient way to get your intensity in a small period of time. However, you could put someone that's coming back from injury on a treadmill at 10 km an hour on a four incline and that could be having a very similar intensity level as a bike sprint. So the bike sprints are just convenient or feet. There's no skill required in them.

A treadmill in my experience, you would think there would be no skill involved in it, but I can tell you having done hundreds and hundreds of incremental treadmill tests, there's a slight skill to running on a treadmill, if you want to get efficiency out of it, especially if you're dropping on at fast speeds, which we have them do. So the bike sprint is just a convenient thing, but there is other ways of doing it.

So me and John speak out a lot about this, the whole idea of one person's intensity is completely different to another person's intensity, especially if you're working with kind of return to play athletes. You got to be kind of careful. The other thing as well is, and I say this to students all the time, you need to work within your professional remit. What are you licensed and certified to deliver? So if you're not licensed and certified to deliver something, then don't deliver it. I think a lot of coaches are out still stepping out with probably what their remit is.

Like I've had a kid lately that's got an athlete doing some of the most craziest things I've ever seen the planet, including drinking a liter of cherry tart juice per day as well, which I know how to lie to. I'm just like, okay, whatever. So that has to be going into, but intensity is the key to all of this. And again, it gets back to lifting. It's all about intensity. So if you want hypertrophy, you need to lift. You need to scale that up. Condition is exactly the same.

And tolerance levels and that type of thing. And then there's a whole other world of knows on the back of that that I think is where it's going to go is this whole idea of how do you assess mitochondrial function and how do you test it. That's the holy grail that I find myself in a lot of conversations with companies just now about how do we do that.

We can do it. Me, Master Dip, got a couple papers in it and I have my whole app can calculate it. So we know how to do it. But it comes with a hell of a lot of caveats.

My fear is is that people are going to be out there doing rapid inflation protocols and occlusions on people without any real physiological knowledge and telling them they've got poor mitochondria or superhuman mitochondria and not really understand what they're looking at. So I think I get a lot of people asking about this type of stuff but you got to be kind of cautious about what you give the world.

James de Lacey56:51

What's the mitochondrial test giving you that say looking at the bike sprint data wingate isn't giving you?

Dr. Andrew Usher57:54

So the wingate is just showing you the muscle's ability to extract and utilize oxygen. The mitochondrial function test is telling you the ability for the mitochondria to recover. So you're getting almost like a respiration rate. You're getting a kind of change in mitochondrial function. So you're seeing how well can the mitochondria extract the oxygen under a series of progressive occlusions over time.

And that gives you an insight into that muscle's ability to really recover and what that looks like. And it also gives you a scoring system I guess which should be the way it will go of how that muscle is changing over times because back to that lad's question about how you know adaptations are taking place. Very difficult internally very very difficult.

So up until lately, I don't like using the word gold standard but we'll use it here. So the slightly bronze tinted gold standard has been biopsies. And biopsies have got their own limitations, freezing temperatures, duration, that type of thing. Nobody's got enough money for magnetic resonance and just it's still very difficult to do exercising it. So, but that's been kind of the gold standard.

And then way back, Ryan Sar and McCull pioneered this idea of using nerves as a non-invasive way as a proxy measure to look at biopsies and similar things. And that was really I guess for me and John the crux of what we wanted to do. We wanted to first get the baseline of what does muscle do under applied conditions under different supporting positions etc and play and then after that it was once you understand how muscle functions and uses oxygen etc how do you improve it and that comes down to conditioning protocols but it also comes down a way to measure the mitochondrial change and that's the function test.

So, and the function test is going to be the hottest topic that's going to come up probably in sports science the next five years because companies are clamoring and how to do it and how to have it in an app and score it. That'll be like your new kind of Garmin body battery will be like the micro test. However, there's big problems with it.

Big problem is is number one, there's no normative database. So, we don't really know how I defer to you. So, there's no way of measuring that. Then you got to think about how many occlusions do you use? Are you using a partial recovery method? What's your mathematical modeling system looking like? And then you've got to look at what's the relevance of muscle.

Does a rec tell you something completely different to say a basis lateralis or a deltoid or lateral head in the gast or whatever. There's a whole heap of things need to be quantified out of it before you can do it. There's a lot in it. It's not as simple as people think.

Doing the actual mitochondria test is really super easy. Like really super easy. If you get a spare $40,000, you can buy yourself a state-of-the-art inflation cuff. Get yourself two Moxies, two train reds, probably not a couple of grand, and then you can have your own mitochondrial testing system. I believe Roger and Moxy has is going to be releasing something a lot more affordable though that will do it.

So they've got a cool setup that will actually do the mitochondrial function test, but like all of us already doing it. It comes down to what exactly you're looking at and how you scoring it against other people and what does it really mean. So

From what I have seen from our research and the work that we have done, we can clearly see and this is why I'll hang my hat on sprint interval training that we did it and we've also published the paper before 3 weeks of sprint training. We had all the athletes at a base level in their mitochondria function test. It did not match what you see is the classic polynomial fit. It just wasn't there.

And then post 3 week it was there. And all of them even the one athlete that didn't push as hard as the rest still had some of it which was the interesting part. That's why I could tell that this particular athlete abroad didn't push as hard as the rest of the athletes around Scotland because he didn't have as big a polynomial fit but it was still there. But it just wasn't as pronounced everyone else.

So, and we've repeated that test subsequently in other studies. We've got another paper in peer review just now. We're looking at it and the interesting thing is in this next paper that's in peer review, we have taken a wide range of subjects no intervention and we don't have as nice a polynomial fit compared to those that had done in the previous research. So, that tells you something in itself.

So, the question is is why? And that's because post 3 weeks there clearly was a lot more mitochondrial adaptation. So when you start to do your occlusions the respiration linears are much more pronounced. So you get this nicer fit. Whereas those that didn't have a sprint training are still got a nice micro profile but it's not as pronounced as what you would see post sprint training. And that is how you know it works. Science.

James de Lacey1:02:46

It'll be good to round out this podcast because you mentioned it briefly a while ago around calcium sensitivity obviously. So we talked about kind of all the mitochondrial function all that and I guess the big topic of the big theme of this podcast has been muscle function and we know we can't contract without calcium. We need to go to reveal binding sites get proteins binding together all that stuff.

So be interesting to go down maybe just go down the rabbit hole a little bit because this is very rarely talked about this idea around calcium sensitivity, calcium handling rates, all that kind of stuff and how we can improve this ability to improve calcium I guess handling rate, cycling rates, etc. So we can generate well guess so we can actually contract more often longer all that kind of stuff.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:03:35

So I mean obviously Jordan's better city for that than me. Calcium is not my big area of interest, but John will say the same thing. Sprint, anything that's got intensity that forces the cellular level, especially in the psychoplasm to utilize calcium because it's like everything if you don't use it, it's not going to get adapted or defined.

And it's that whole thing I think about this is why infection is really interesting. This is why biological medication super fascinating as well. Like people with rheumatoid arthritis or or conditions when you start looking into 12 and you start look at kind of tumor necrosis factors and you look at inhibition and what occurs when you inhibit those cellular pathways you start see a divergence of other occurrences take place because the body tries to adapt through it and exercise needs to be planned and structured in a very similar way where it's going to encourage contraction rates and changes and therefore utilize calcium a much more efficient kind of ratio than what it is.

It's but it's very difficult to the thing about the calcium side of things is we know that it's an important component for muscle contraction but it's very difficult to quantify it and measure it because that's a real high cellular process so you kind of you are going by I guess research papers say

So yeah so I think it's like anything else you need to do the right type of exercise otherwise going to get. And there probably is a big difference between I guess what you would need for muscle contraction on say slow eccentric concentric work versus much faster moving concentric eccentric work that you see maybe on like a flywheel system.

And I suspect the flywheel system is probably improving calcium flux at a much greater rate than some of the other training just because the explosive acceleration and deceleration and the ability to control the muscle through the range. That's that'd be a research paper. I'd quite like to look in it.

James de Lacey1:05:35

Oh, perfect. It's a perfect way to round this out. So, if anyone is interested, check the description. The mentorship commission mentorship is up there. It is ready. August 24, we start. It's going to be 3 months now instead of two. There's going to be an extra NES component. Dylan Sely had a question as a previous course member asking when you're dropping the NES portion of this course. So, there you go. Out August 21.

So August 24th the new one, I'm still recording the material for the Nars. So that will be I think it's the third kind of modules that sits around about week eight I think before it kicks in. All you guys that have done the previous course we'll sort these out. Don't worry about it.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:05:35

And the thing to remember about these type of programs that we run and Dylan and all these people can kind of testify this. It's a mentorship. So you can ask me anything. You have full access to me during the whole 12 weeks. It's not a case of we're abandoning you. There's just some material and you get the odd bit. We get live chats. We'll look at data. We'll analyze data. We'll kind of go down the rabbit hole with you and kind of hold your hand and then we'll blindfold you and turn you three times and let you go. So we're there all the time.

So, it's I think feedback has been really really good on the courses so far. I think a lot of people have probably changed their opinion of conditioning or re-evaluated how they look at conditioning. And the extra null component will just be that little I guess icing in the cake where you'll have a much deeper understand. We're going to cover everything from the science, the hardware right through to muscle placement where put it, how you get your data off your Moxy devices, how you get your data off your train red, how you pull into that, how you graph it, how you look at it, what the analysis means.

And then for those that really want to go down that rabbit hole, at some point, it's probably going to be next year now, I will release a certification course on nurse, which will be a much heavier course. They'll have an exam component, a case study component and all that type of stuff. So that's further down the line. But for most coaches, the ESD 20, but the NOS component will be enough and you by the end of that course, the heart rate, kinetics, conditional methods, muscle physiology, systemic, you name it. It's pretty in-depth.

James de Lacey1:07:41

Yep. I would say the most outside obviously the material itself, the case studies are definitely some of the most valuable within the live chats and how you break down data and what you're looking at there is probably the I think what people get a lot of value from.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:07:41

I think like anything it's not there's obviously theory in the course, but it's much more geared up to applied knowledge rather than anything else because I'm less interested in just purely theoretical construct of it because we know at this day and age at this point in 2026 what energy system looks like from a molecular and substrate perspective. Everyone should know that minus Instagram, but you can't have everything.

But so now it's just a case of how do you actually apply it? Because I think people are confused. I think people are trying to do these anaerobic alactic sessions and alactic zip zops and all this type of stuff to actually really understand what exactly is going on in that tissue and why it's going on in that tissue.

And I think once you move away from all that and trying to box things up as fancy little terms and you just go it's just a bike sprint and in this bike sprint this is going to happen and this is what it's going to look like and this is how it's going to change over time. If it doesn't change over time, this is how we're going to change it over time. That's how you apply it.

And I think once you get your head in that, everything's super easy. Well, I never say to athletes, we're doing an aerobic session today or anaerobic session. I just go, "Hey, there's your big sprints for the week." And then depending how severe it is, depends on the amount of abuse they send back to me.

James de Lacey1:09:17

Yeah, there's some brutal sessions out there. But I appreciate you coming on, Andrew. Links will be down in the description and make sure you follow Andrew on Instagram. I pretty much tag him in most posts now. So you'll find him pretty easily.

Perfect. All right. Appreciate you coming on and oh, hello. You saying hello?

Dr. Andrew Usher1:09:42

All right.