New Paradigm In Combat Sports Conditioning + New Priming & Hypertrophy Research (SSOF Ep 104)

James de Lacey0:10

And I think what's most important is, out of the UFCPI data, is 77% of all UFC fights ended in this 8 to 14 second high-intensity work period. Which means that you have to possess the speed and power to finish a fight, and it's most likely finished in these high-intensity periods, but you need to be able to repeat it. Because even if it's the third round, you still need to have that ability to finish.

What's interesting is a recent meta-analysis by Bueno and his colleagues in 2022 – they state that MMA is primarily oxidative phosphorylation, and if we're going to talk in traditional energy system terms, it means MMA is primarily aerobic. So does that mean we must hit the roads for long, slogging miles, or is there a different or better approach to go about it?

Now, when he says it's primarily aerobic or oxidative phosphorylation, basically because it's 3 to 3 by 5 minute rounds, you're primarily, I guess, having energy supplied from aerobic processes using oxygen. And we're going to dive into some of this now and essentially why the traditional energy system model might not be helping, and I guess a new way of looking at it. If you listen to the previous podcast, you already have an idea. If not, I'm going to break it down a bit for you now, too.

So the best way to look at this is we start by looking at the physiology of one single sprint. And if we're looking at the traditional energy system model, we're talking about the alactic or ATP-PCr energy system, which is quoted to be 0 to 10 seconds. So this is when we're talking maximum intensity work. Anaerobic glycolysis, or anaerobic lactic energy system, is like 10 to 40 or 10 to 60 seconds. And everything else from 60 seconds onwards is predominantly aerobic. And that would be the traditional energy system model we're taught regarding conditioning.

Now, this traditional energy system model assumes that energy systems work in isolation. So it's assuming that if I do a 6-second sprint, everything is alactic, only using this one energy system. Or if I'm doing a 30-second sprint, it's purely anaerobic. Now, the issue is all energy systems work together all the time. And the other issue is it assumes that being anaerobic or aerobic is that the energy supplied is with or without oxygen, which is a false statement, because nothing is ever without oxygen. It just the processes are independent of oxygen.

So even if something is using anaerobic processes to provide energy, you still have oxygen being used during these aerobic processes. So there's still oxygen present. It's just that that pathway doesn't use oxygen. So there's a really good paper that I would highly recommend checking out. It's by Hargreaves and Spriet – I think I say his name Spriet – in 2020. It's in Nature Journal. I don't have the title up with me at the moment, but that's okay.

And it's a graph that shows muscle energy metabolism during intense exercise, and it's basically sprints, a 30-second sprint, but it has time intervals – so a 6-second, a 15-second, and a 30-second sprint. And that's basically showing ATP or energy muscle energy turnover rate, which gives us an idea of, I guess, which energy system or which energy pathway is being used.

And what you'll see in this graph – if you watch the video once I publish it, you'll be able to see the graph there, too – but essentially, you're looking at one single maximal 6-second sprint, which would – what you would see as, "Okay, this is pure ATP-PCr or pure alactic." It's performed with approximately half the energy originating from the ATP-PCr energy system, while the other half is originating from glycolytic pathways, which means that it's about, you know, 40-ish percent between both of them.

So it's not purely ATP-PCr or alactic. There is still a large anaerobic lactic – if you're using traditional energy system terms – contribution from it. This kind of gives credence to the idea of, as well, take creatine. If you listen to the previous podcast episode with Dr. Eric Helms, it's actually the only supplement he now takes because of the efficacy. Obviously, we talked about contamination with supplements as well, but in terms of efficacy, creatine is the most effective supplement you can take.

And if you're adding more creatine within the muscle, you're adding more PCr or phosphocreatine, which means you have more readily available energy during these hard sprints. But that's an aside there. We're going to continue on.

So what's interesting is there's still ATP production from aerobic energy pathways or oxidative pathways in this short 6-second sprint. Now, it's not much, but it's present, and that's something to be aware of. Also, if we go in all-out 30-second sprints, once we hit – it looks like, honestly, once you hit past 15 seconds, you're reaching 70 to 100% of your maximal aerobic capacity in these sprints, which is pretty crazy because typically you're doing, I guess, maximal graded tests that take a lot longer than 30 seconds to reach these peaks. But you're getting it in a 30-second sprint.

And as I mentioned, with the short 6-second sprint, little energy is provided from aerobic processes or oxidative processes. But approximately 50% of the energy contribution in the last 5 seconds of a 30-second sprint is from oxidative processes. The last – so 25 to 30 seconds of an all-out sprint, approximately 50% of that energy is from oxidative processes.

So if energy is from oxidative processes, it cannot be a purely anaerobic sprint, if that makes sense. So bear with me, because this is – I'm not just saying all this stuff just for no reason and just to give you random information and confuse you. It's all going to kind of line up as I go through this.

So that kind of gives us an idea of what happens during one sprint. But obviously, with MMA, you're not doing one high-intensity effort. You're doing multiple high-intensity efforts. So if we look at the physiology of multiple sprints, this is where it gets interesting.

So there's a paper by Gaitanos and his colleagues in 1993, and they do – they did brief sprints, 10 by 6 seconds with 30 seconds recovery. I actually did this on the spin bike two days ago. It feels damn good. It's a very nice protocol to use, and it is part of the sprint protocols that Dr. John Beebe talked about on the podcast recently as well, if you check that out.

But essentially, they found that glycolysis, or in traditional terms anaerobic lactic, contributes 44% of total anaerobic ATP energy during the first sprint, only 16% by the 10th sprint. So essentially, energy contribution from that energy system drops during each subsequent sprint. And it's theorized that aerobic metabolism takes over the regeneration of this energy.

So we go further into the research, and we see Mark Glaister in 2005. He wrote a really good paper called "Multiple Sprint Work." You can check that out as well. And he states that the sprints are predominantly phospho-ATP-PCr, and recovery processes are exclusively aerobic or oxidative. And as each repeated effort occurs, more oxidative processes regenerate energy as muscle glycogen is used. So essentially, as we get further and further down the repeated efforts or repeated sprints, it becomes more oxidative.

More and more aerobic or oxidative to supply that energy to be able to do these sprints. And then our recovery is dictated by how well we can essentially use the oxygen being delivered, which is very important and we're going to come to that in a second. The idea is that I'm going to touch on kind of how well I guess we're generally taught to improve these qualities and maybe what the research is saying now.

But it's important to note as well that this can differ based on your training background, so it's not the same for everyone. So already good paper by Hamilton and his colleagues in 1990, so they had team sport athletes in one group and endurance athletes in another group. And team sport athletes were kind of sprint-based sports. I guess you could think like soccer, rugby, basketball, etc.

They did the same protocol, 10 by 6 second sprints with 30 second recovery. Endurance athletes had the greater ability to resist fatigue and was associated with higher rates of oxygen use during sprints. So they were basically supply more energy from oxidative processes during these sprints than the team sport athletes, and they were able to essentially maintain performance better throughout the 10 sprints than the team sport athletes.

And this is reinforced in a 1995 study by grania with the Wingate test. They had one group of 50 to 200 meter sprinters, so these would be like short, twitchy, short sprint distance, twitchy, fast athletes versus 800 to 1500 meter middle distance runners. They found the same thing. While energy contributions from aerobic anaerobic processes were similar between the groups, the sprinters had far greater contributions from the anaerobic processes, while middle distance runners had greater contribution from the aerobic processes.

So your background will dictate kind of where you fall in that. Now obviously you can shift that with training and that's kind of important because there's one big caveat with these studies. And you might see this and be okay, I just need to be more quote unquote aerobically fit so then I can maintain my work efforts better from sprint to sprint to sprint. And because it's coming from aerobic energy, it's easier to recover from, etc.

However, the sprint-based athletes in these studies had greater power output during the sprints. And that's something you need to really nail in on, because we talked about 77% of all MMA fights or UFC fights end in the 8 to 14 high-intensity window. So we need that ability to have high power outputs.

And it kind of brings me to what I've talked about a lot within combat sports, and it's the ability to repeat high intensity efforts. I've talked about this quite a bit, but I'm going to dive into it a little deeper. And I think there's a quote, I'm going to paraphrase very very badly from a, I think it was from an earlier Soviet sport scientist, but essentially it's, I don't care how many times you can't dunk the basketball.

So in the studies I gave the examples of before, the endurance-based athletes in those studies, they don't fatigue as fast. But in my little scenario just created, they can't even dunk the basketball on the first rep, and it doesn't matter how many times you cannot dunk the basketball. You need to be able to have that power output first. I think that's a really good way of kind of just framing it.

So it's not, hey, I just need to get really really quote unquote fit. Instead, I need to be able to, I need to be able to dunk the basketball over and over again, even in the final minute of the third or fifth round, even if there's, even if a five round fight. But even in the third round in the final minute, still need to be able to at least get close to dunking the rim.

But what's been I guess ingrained in us as coaches, as athletes, as to improve this ability, typically it's through repeat sprint ability. It's typically what is used and it's typically what is researched because it's so important for team sports like soccer, rugby, etc. It's one of the more well, one of the more often researched quality within these sports because it's so important to the success of the sport.

But we're taught to improve repeated sprint ability by one, getting faster, which is good. We need to be able to sprint faster in these sports. But two, build an aerobic base of slow steady state cardio to enhance recovery between efforts. And that's because recovery is an aerobic process as I mentioned before, and aerobic capacity or VO2 max tends to correlate well with repeated sprint ability or essentially being more fatigue resistant.

Now they're kind of on the surface level, it makes a case for, hey, maybe I should just be hitting the roads more often and doing 30 to 90 minute runs or bikes or swims or whatever it is, so I can recover faster between rounds and high intensity efforts. But I think there's more layers to this than that, and that's not to say you shouldn't do any of that stuff.

I just, I've come to a point now where I think potentially we might be overdoing it in that domain, and I've been guilty of it of talking about that stuff before really diving deep and learning a lot of this stuff. Now so I'm trying to give you more information on this.

So when we look at repeated sprint ability, we can also look at repeated high intensity efforts, and these things are two different things. Repeated high intensity efforts, repeated sprint ability, not the same thing. When we're talking repeated high intensity efforts, it can include sprinting, but it also includes things like tackling, grappling, striking. Essentially anything that's not sprinting, that's a hard, high intent effort is considered a repeated high intensity effort.

And there's a really awesome paper in rugby league, which would be the epitome of repeated high intensity efforts, having to entally run into brick walls and wrestle people, especially sprinting with wrestling put together. If you're not familiar with rugby league, much more intense and I guess you could say the game's much more dense in terms of what's happening in the game, like the ball isn't in play a lot more, there's more tackles made, etc., than rugby union.

So a paper by Johnston and Gabber in 2011, they took 12 rugby league players, they made two groups. The first one just did repeated sprints, 12 by 20 meters with 20 seconds of rest. The second group did the same protocol, but they also added a tackle at the end of each sprint. So the tackle was someone holding a hit shield or, for combat athletes it would be like a kick pad almost.

They're going to tackle the guy, almost like a double leg, and then they'll wrestle a little bit on their feet for 3 seconds while holding the tackle. So it's about a 4 second tackle sequence, never went to ground, it was all standing.

And they found that repeated sprint ability and repeated high intensity efforts showed a poor correlation together, with repeated high intensity efforts having significantly greater heart rate and rate of perceived exertion, so felt harder, which I'm sure you can imagine. And then there's another study that isolated these components further, of repeated hits. They found that there was a greater decrement in tackling/collision performance than speed. So essentially as they went through these efforts, tackling and collision performance was the one that declined the most, where sprint performance didn't decline as much as that.

So to tie this all together, I think it's important to look at rate limiters within conditioning versus just the energy systems. Because if we go down the energy system route, we would just look at, okay, we need to improve aerobic abilities and then we need to improve our power output, okay, cool. But the greater reduction in the tackling performance in those studies is potentially due to a greater peripheral demand or greater muscular demand.

And obviously in MMA, when you have a grappling component on top of the striking component, you increase the peripheral demand more than just being a striker. Now that's just, that's not to say that striking doesn't have peripheral demands, and it's evidence that it does have a very I guess high level peripheral demands based on Andrew Jans' and Dr. John Badd's research, which we're going to dive into in a second. I did a video on that.

But if we look at central and peripheral limitations, it becomes difficult to assess where you're limited and what you're doing if you don't have a sport science background. I mean, even if you have a sport science background, it can be a little confusing, and if you don't have the equipment, etc. So that's why I didn't really include it in the MMA strength conditioning blueprint down below, because it's going to be hard to be really practical for you. So I'm going to try and make it practical on this video though.

So when we're talking about central function, we're typically talking about the heart, and we're talking about the heart pumping blood and therefore oxygen to the working muscles. That'll be the delivery component. And then we have peripheral, which would be the muscles, and that'll be the utilization or essentially using the oxygen component. That's typically things like blood vessels to be able to diffuse that oxygen into the muscle, and then we have mitochondria which use that oxygen to create energy.

Now can we address these limitations? Essentially can we address the limitation, or do we just blindly try to target energy systems? Now the traditional energy system approach, the thing is it's around because it's almost like things just work regardless in a lot of cases, which sounds kind of like, what's the point in knowing all this? If everything just kind of works, to be honest, things just worked. I know those models have worked because you're kind of just going across the system. Really good athletes that are really good and very good at their sport are going to be the best regardless.

It doesn't even matter what you do. But for us mortals, like most of us, it's always nice to be able to know the reasons behind doing something and trying to get the best out of your training. But if you go back and listen to the Evan Pon episode after this on the podcast, he has some trends. He gets some observations from the athletes he's worked with on who are generally centrally limited and those who are generally peripherally limited.

And peripherally limited athletes, they tend to have a range of loads. Your maximum lift, so let's just say a 1 RM, 3 RM, 5 RM, 10 RM, they tend to be closely coupled together. And or they have a strong endurance training background. So if you've been running marathons and things like that, where longer and shorter race paces aren't much different.

So if you're running ultras, the example he gave is you run ultra marathons and now you suddenly want to run say half marathons, but your half marathon pace is pretty much the same as your ultra marathon pace, it's probably a utilization limitation or peripheral limitation. Centrally limited athletes tend to come from strength sports backgrounds. And I know there's a lot of strength sports athletes, powerlifters, bodybuilders, et cetera, transitioning over to combat sports.

And they tend to have obviously larger discrepancies between maximum load. So if your 1 RM is 200 kilos, then your 5 RM, you know, 150, et cetera. So if you are coming from a combat sports, from a strength sports background, you know, doing some kind of low intensity, say steady state cardio stuff, is probably a good idea initially. Especially if you haven't, especially if you're really specialized in those sports, because you've done nothing. So bear that in mind.

What's important to potentially understand or at least think about is combat sports are most likely limited peripherally or muscularly. This is an opinion backed by the research and application of Dr. John Badd, Andrew Usher, and I'll go to their protocol soon. Ed Baker, who was on the podcast, also mentioned this exact same thing, that combat sports are more likely peripherally demanding than centrally.

You can also think about obviously when you gas out, how your muscles are burning and, you know, that's the thing that really fails you. And if we go into Andrew Usher and Dr. John Badd's newer research in professional boxing, they've got more coming out too, which we'll cover on a podcast soon once Andrew defends his PhD.

But essentially this is going to sound like a whole jargon of words, but I want to explain it hopefully as we go. So they found that impaired mitochondrial activation, so again mitochondria is using the oxygen to create energy, so impaired mitochondrial activation, so that's on the onset of exercise, decreased rate of muscle oxygen desaturation across rounds, which indicates poor recovery between rounds, and then a decrease in the rate of muscle oxygen saturation, which indicates incomplete muscular recovery. So it's just kind of like a vicious cycle between rounds.

And they had professional boxers do heavy bag, pads, and sparring, and they had a NIRS device, which is a near infrared spectroscopy device, that measures muscle oxygen saturation. And essentially it's just telling us how well the muscle is using oxygen during those activities. And basically what they're saying is that these boxers, these professional boxers, weren't recovering between rounds even though they were throwing the same amount of punches.

So their work rate was still the same, but obviously the quality of that work rate might not have been, might not have been that good, because the muscle, the oxygen within the muscle, was not recovering back to baseline and it was essentially decreasing after every round. So that means you're basically starting each round in a deficit, basically becoming more and more fatigued as the rounds go on. And that means in this case these boxers were limited muscularly or peripherally, and that's just the muscle ability to resist fatigue essentially.

And in this case, would more road work or low intensity steady state cardio help these fighters? Debatable. Because typically when we're talking about central improval adaptations, lower intensity cardio or conditioning is predominantly targeting central function. Higher intensity, you're predominately targeting peripheral function. Again, nothing is in isolation. So just because you're doing low intensity steady state cardio doesn't mean you're not getting any peripheral adaptations and vice versa.

And there's a newer paper I covered it on a previous solo episode around the formation of new blood vessels, one of the peripheral adaptations. And I don't have the authors up here now, it's on one of the previous broadcasts I did. But essentially the highest blood vessel to muscle fiber ratios are found in elite endurance athletes who spend most of their time at low intensities, and that high intensity conditioning blunts the formation of new blood vessels.

So again, they don't have definitive answers on blood vessels. I guess on forming your blood vessels and improving that, but it's just something to think about and maybe something, maybe an idea that maybe you shouldn't abandon all of that. But maybe an overzealous optimization or overzealous work done in that area may not be needed, especially because you need more volume, i.e. more time, to be able to continually make progress training at say Zone 2.

And that can be an issue, especially if you're training, I mean you've got a lot of skills you've got to cover in MMA. And if you're just going out and trying to fill a lot of your time running, et cetera, maybe your time is better spent doing the skills. Just something to think about.

So we'll get back to the preferred target exercise. I've actually got a question here in the chat, so I'll come back to this. I'll do the question first from who knows. "Wants to train his endurance with kickboxing with burpees. Should I do three minute sets with one minute pause like the sparring rounds, or is 30 on plus off better? I hate Zone 2 training, too much time." Good timing on the Zone 2 stuff I just talked about time, but regardless, yeah.

Burpees is not a good modality or not a good choice of exercise, in my opinion. There's a couple of reasons why, especially if you're going for higher, a couple of reasons why, especially if you're going for higher intensity. One, the cadence isn't high enough. I mean, you're getting on and off the ground, so you're pumping the heart rate, but the cadence isn't high enough to be super maximal if you're doing higher intensity work.

As you get through, say you're doing a three minute round of burpees, as you get closer to the first minute, you start dropping onto your hands pretty hard, and that can potentially cause some wrist issues, wrist or shoulder stuff like that. There are better options if you're going to train your endurance through. Is doing three minute rounds, one minute off, or 30 seconds on plus off better? Honestly, it depends entirely on what you're trying to achieve from your conditioning, how close you are to a fight, et cetera.

So you can do, let's just say you could do both within a week. Three minutes on, one minute off, and you can do 30 seconds on plus whatever it is, the rest intervals off. So one will be more of your sprint interval style training. It will be targeting more of the peripheral adaptations. Your three minutes on, one minute off, probably targeting more of the central side, depending. And again, this wouldn't be three minutes maximal intensity, it will be around 70% effort kind of thing.

So there's no better, it just depends a lot on your training schedule and things. Also bear in mind that depending on how much kickboxing you're doing, or in this video as well we're referring to MMA, how much you're doing is going to cover potentially a lot of your low intensity work. So if you're training kickboxing six times a week, is doing more on top of, is doing more low intensity work on top of that, going to benefit you potentially?

You know, if you're very far away, if you don't have a fight coming up, you're just kind of looking to build some volume, yeah, the three minutes on, long off, could be an idea. But you do need to do some high intensity work, and that 30 seconds on is pretty good. You can also go six to ten seconds as well. I kind of like that.

If you're very far away from a fight, I like the, I like the complete recoveries initially, so it's more power quality based. And then as you get closer, you can reduce those rest pairs. Hopefully that answers that question.

But we'll get back to the peripherally targeted exercise stuff. So that boxing study that I was referencing shows that that cohort lack the ability of the muscles to resist fatigue and recover between rounds. So what could they do instead of more road work, et cetera? Well, they could do the, like what I mentioned before from that question, they could do super maximal sprint work that allows near complete muscle oxygen desaturation and subsequent resaturation.

So what does this look like? If we look at some of the range protocols that Dr. John Badd gives, six to thirty seconds of work at a 1:2 to approximately 1:8 work to rest ratio, and your goal is to aim for one to two minutes of total work. So ten by six seconds would be sixty seconds, so that'll be perfect, just like the protocols. And that's the states I referenced before. Two to four times thirty seconds would be one to two minutes, et cetera. You get my drift.

Some examples that I just mentioned, the ten by six seconds, one. Six by ten seconds, say with 80 seconds rest. That would be a 1:8. Four by thirty seconds with 60 to 240 seconds rest, that'll put you in your 1:2 to 1:6, I think. I probably got that wrong. 1:5, I think. So those are some examples.

And the modality you choose is important, because like for...

For example, I like the roam machine, I like roam, but you can't get cadence high enough to make 6 or 10 second sprints worth it. You need something where you can really push super maximal, which means past maximal. That makes sense. So things like hill sprints are really good.

I typically wouldn't advise sprints on flat, which I've talked about a lot, because the risk of hamstring injury is so high, especially with people who don't run. So hill sprints you can do for those times, or, you know, 50 meters, etc. Dr. John Braby talked about on the podcast 10 meter shuttle runs give similar peripheral demand as the bike sprints. So if you don't have a bike at all and you have a 10 meter field—I don't know what that is in feet for the American listeners, you can do the conversion—but 10 meter shuttle going back and forth for that time, similar demands.

Now just bear in mind that the mechanical demand essentially on the tendons, muscles, etc., is very, very high doing a lot of change of direction to speed. So if you don't run or you don't do things with change of direction often and things like that, don't just jump into that and just go hard because you'll be so sore after something like that for days.

Potentially start giving yourself shin splints and things like that too, so ease into something like that if you're not used to it. The bike sprints, and then also, interestingly enough, jump squats—and the question there was about burpees before—but jump squats is an option, and I'm going to discuss that in a bit at the end of this as well.

But one of the, I guess, things against doing these high intensity sprint intervals all the time is that the adaptations—well, the question is, don't the adaptations stop quickly? Because when we look at some of the research around high intensity intervals, we see adaptations occur very, very quickly, and they occur very quickly, especially in those with a strong aerobic training background.

And I guess a really good study to kind of look at that is the original Tabata study. And most people who are doing Tabata don't do Tabata, because to do Tabata it needs to be 20 seconds on, 10 seconds off. In this case it was at 170% of VO2 max, which is around a 50 second—basically a pace that you'd exhaust yourself after 50 seconds, which is damn fast—and you're doing it for 7 to 8 reps.

And you're still doing steady state cardio and a few easier intervals, but essentially, if you look at, I think it was the follow-up study they did, 66% of the subjects couldn't even complete the protocol because it was so damn hard. It's brutal. It's a brutal thing to do four times a week.

But essentially they found that aerobic capacity maxed out at 3 weeks and no more improvements to week 6, and anaerobic capacity peaked out at 4 weeks with no changes to week 6. So it's kind of like, okay, well if we're just going to do this all the time then doesn't make any sense because we're going to cap out after 4 weeks in terms of these adaptations physiologically. But there's a couple of things we need to look at a little deeper in terms of making progress. And one of them is that these aren't the only metrics that matter.

And there's a really good study by Takaki and John Braby in 2017, and they essentially had groups do either 4 to 6 times 15 seconds on, 2 minutes off, or it's the same 4 to 6 with 30 seconds on, 4 minutes off, twice a week. And they found the same thing as the Tabata study, that aerobic capacity peaked at 3 weeks—so exactly the same—but to the final week, which was week 9, time to exhaustion during a graded exercise test was the greatest at the final week.

So they kept improving their ability to resist fatigue as they went further into the study, and it indicates that these sprint intervals improve the muscle ability to resist fatigue, even though the, I guess, aerobic capacity capped out at 3 weeks.

And when we talk about VO2 max, potentially limited by central function, which means that the muscle ability to resist fatigue was improved. The other major problem is that at least in the Tabata setting, nothing changed for the 6 weeks. They were doing the same protocol over and over and over and over again. And if you just think about just basic training principles, if you go into the gym and you're deadlifting 60 kilos on week 1 for 3 sets of 5, and you do 60 kilos for 3 by 5 every week for the next 52 weeks, do you get stronger? Do you get bigger? Do you get faster, etc.? No, nothing changes after a while.

And it's just the idea that if you're going to be doing sprint intervals and you're going to be doing them longer term—which I think now there's definitely a case for doing them longer term, because typically we're like, okay, we should just kind of do this intense work maybe 3 to 4 weeks out because the adaptations occur so quickly—but it looks like we can just keep getting adaptations if we just change the protocols to continue spurring progress.

So that's just something to think about. And again, I refer back to Dr. John Braby's video, podcast, where he kind of gives you an idea of how you can change the protocols just by going on feel, which is really important for people who don't have the equipment.

So when we're scheduling this conditioning, again, I still like to think of it as a funnel system, raising the ceiling, deepening the well. And out of fight camp, honestly, you have a couple of options. It depends on what you're trying to achieve. But again, we're never just doing typically one thing. We're never just trying to target peripheral adaptations. Again, everything, nothing's in isolation. But it's good to always still have some low intensity work or, I guess, centrally targeted work within these periods.

So you could be doing things like, as I mentioned, pure sprint intervals on your first hard day. So let's just say Monday, Wednesday, Friday, your hardest days. Again, we want to consolidate our stressors in the week, so our hardest days should all have the hardest activities, our easier days should have all of our easier activities, and it gives an undulating pattern throughout the week.

And let's just say Friday sparring, say Monday, Wednesday is, let's just say it's harder work, Tuesday, Thursday is easier MMA training, just as an example. And let's just say you're training all those five days and maybe you got an easier day Saturday as well.

So you'll do your sprint intervals on Monday, say after your strength power training in the gym, and these ones I would do full recovery. So I might be 6 to 10 second sprints and you might be doing 2 to 3 minutes rest. Then you might do on, say, a Tuesday, on an easier day, you might do either easier zone 2 stuff, depending, or you might be doing some long high intensity interval work.

And that could be things like if you're doing MAS, or maximal aerobic speed test, you could be working at, say, 90 to 96% of your MAS, and you could be doing 2 to 5 minute intervals, or even 2 to 8 minute intervals at those paces, with, say, a 2 to 3 minute rest between each set, or it could even be a 2 to 1 or 1 to 1 ratio there.

Those are options. Or you can do that on a rower, on a bike, whatever it is, whatever you did the test on, even running if you wanted to do it more sports-specific. Maybe you're not training as much MMA. You could also do that. Heart rate's not the best way to go about it, but sometimes the only way you can do it in these situations.

You might be doing the same work interval length, but you might be looking at, say, 80 to 95% max heart rate, as an example, just sustaining a generally high heart rate through those intervals. You could be going back and forth with a partner drilling something.

And then obviously you have Wednesday, just do normal strength power stuff. Thursday you have nothing extra. Friday sparring, and then potentially Saturday you could do another centrally targeted session, another long high intensity training, or zone 2 as almost a recovery thing. Or you could fill that week with just two sprint intervals. So it could be Monday, Wednesday, or even honestly even after sparring on Friday, you could do your sprint intervals there too. So it could be Monday, Friday.

In camp would be more like that. In camp, when your technical training is already ramped up and your sparring is already ramped up, you would do your sprint intervals with less rest, say on Monday, and then you'll do it on either Wednesday or Friday. And that would just leave you more time and, honestly, more energy for technical training. While the sprints are hard—like, for example, on a bike—but you recover damn quickly from them.

They take you 5, 6 to 10 minutes to do, and yeah, it's hard, you'll feel it, but it's not something that leaves a residual fatigue going to the following day. So give them a try, and you'll be able to kind of feel where they fit within your training.

And in that scenario in camp, you could even do some kind of light 30 minute zone 2 recovery stuff on Saturdays, as an example. There's a lot of ways to work it. It just depends. Now there are some other unique methods of sprint interval training that I do really like. There's actually, it's called high volume power training. I have cycles of that in the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground, which is the...

Training app – it has all the MMA program, MMA grappling, striking programs, but also has the 365 programs which is the entire year of training for MMA, grappling, striking, etc. And one of the cycles in those is the high-volume power training cycle, and it's done with jump squats. And I've done this and it sucks bad in a good way, it sucks bad. But essentially you're going, you're essentially just doing repeated high-intensity efforts with jumps, and it means that you are combining your strength, your strength and initiating thing together in the gym.

So one, it saves time, and two, you get some pretty crazy results out of it. So regarding loading, you're talking approximately 30 to 40% of your back squat 1RM for the jump, so this typically loads you maximize peak power. You can also use weightlifting derivatives if you're well-versed in them, so 60 to 75% of your power clean 1RM. So you could do hang high pulls, clean high pulls, etc. But essentially you're looking at two to three sessions per week – I recommend two – and you use anywhere from 12 to 20 reps per set with anywhere from 90 to 200 reps per session.

So it's pretty brutal. The cycle in the SSOF Underground training app has it, but just to give you a three-week example, this is all Alex Natera's work on this – Natera – if you search Alex Natera HVPT you should find this paper on a lot of the stuff. But essentially, week one as a cluster, so you're doing one series of four sets times 5+5+5, and we're talking that means five reps, rest, five reps, rest, five reps.

And the rest in between those is five seconds – you're just standing there with a bar on your back – and then you're resting two minutes between those sets, and you're doing four of those.

Week two, you're going to do four sets of 12, so 12 in a row, one minute rest between those sets. Once you've done four sets, you rest two minutes and then you repeat it again, and that's two series. And then the third week, you're going to do three series, but you're going to do four sets of 10 in a row with 30 seconds rest between sets, and then one minute rest between those series, and you do three of those series. Absolutely brutal.

Just obviously bear in mind, if you have funny knees, ankles, whatever it is, don't do jumps. If you're not used to jump with load on your back, again probably not the best option. If you're doing the programs within the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground, you have probably been jumping with loads on your back, or at least jumping with loads, so you should be okay.

But yeah, in terms of how you structure that within your strength training, you would start your session with maybe some upper body strength power stuff, could be even some rotational work. So one combo I really like, it's like a heavy landmine rotation superset with a medicine ball rotational throw. You might do something like that, then you might do some kind of upper body complex, pressing complex – it could be bench press into explosive incline push-up you might do – and then you might go into your jumps and then done.

The second session, you might do more of a pulling complex or pulling variation, et cetera, then you do your jump squats and done. So your sessions will be, the stuff you do before the jump squats will be very short strength power-based, and then that would be your main work, and that'll be all you do for lower body. Because trust me, that's all you'll need to do. But your legs will thank you for it.

But there's some factors to consider as well before you just jump on and start doing a crazy amount of sprints, etc. Muscle fiber type: so there's a really good PhD from Lind and her colleagues in 2020 – essentially they found that athletes who are predominantly slow-twitch recover faster after high-intensity exercise, whereas fast-twitch dominant fighters may take over five hours to recover. So this is where your planning comes into place, right?

If you're doing sprint intervals, say you're a very fast-twitch – most people are a mix – but if you say, I, I used an example, Edson Barboza is probably a really good example of someone who was very twitchy and fast-twitch. If he was doing, say, sprint intervals after a morning session and then going to the gym in the afternoon and doing hard MMA, and then the next day doing hard MMA, and then Wednesday doing more peripheral and hard MMA, you're going to run into a problem.

So obviously you have to have the undulating aspect within your training. And then if you're a slow-twitch fighter, which I'm not going to say someone like Khabib doesn't have any power, but he'll be considered more of, say, a grinding-style athlete, someone who can push through and loves that grinding nature. Like, could say slightly slower and more just drowning people in work capacity, right? Those types of fighters can probably handle this kind of stuff a little easier than the faster fast-twitch dominant fighters.

Now again, as well, how often you're training MMA is very, very important. If you're training MMA three times a week, there's a couple of ways to look at it. If you're training it three times a week, then what you do outside of that probably isn't going to matter too much – depends. If you're looking to compete and you're training three times a week, potentially you might be better spending the extra time incorporating more skills training into your conditioning.

It could be shadowboxing, shadow wrestling, things like that, something that at least is potentially going, or even just drilling with a partner or something – it's something that's going to give you the conditioning effect while developing the skills.

Now that doesn't say don't do any of the other stuff, but it's just something to think about. Also, you just train MMA for fun? If so, then all of this does not apply – you just kind of do what you like outside of the sport. If you're doing, say, MMA six times a week or even double days, then that's when you've got to really start looking at your schedule and what you're trying to prioritize, and that is where I think sprint intervals are most applicable.

When you're doing a ton of MMA, you're getting a lot of the low-level stuff done in the gym just from time on feet and moving around a lot, and then you're just supplementing with the high-intensity work, which is going to give you the benefits of those.

So yeah, that covers everything that I had to say on that. Damn, it's been almost 50 minutes, or at least on the stream here. But I wanted to cover a couple of small things around some of the newer research that's come out recently – one that I, one topic that I really, really like and enjoy – and it's the idea of primers.

I did a video on this on the channel a while ago on basically training on fight day, and I actually did this. So I actually have all my rugby athletes do this on game day. I did it myself before a couple of my super fights a year or so ago, just to show that it can be done.

But it's a personal preference, and I just want to run through one of the newer papers and maybe a way not to do it, based on what they're doing. And funnily enough, it's in soccer, and soccer is a very good place to look at where, how not to do things, often.

So they basically did – does a low, oh no, that was my title – but anyway, they did Influence of a Priming Session on Match Performance and Competition in Competitive Elite-Level Soccer. And a priming session is essentially a high-intensity, low-volume speed power-based session used six to 48 hours before a competitive event, whatever it is. And the idea is that what you did then enhances performance or enhances power output or whatever it is in the following activity.

And what they did is they had – lapsed, then – first division professional soccer players, and they performed either a 15- to 20-minute primer or a 15- to 20-minute warm walk or rest, six to nine hours before each match. So six hours was kind of seen as like that minimum, the closest time you should do it. And then they did it basically throughout the season, so they did 32 matches, and the primer was performed before 12 of them.

And they looked at – oh, the primer consisted of dynamic stretching, bodyweight core exercises, bodyweight strength exercises, and agility drills, which is like the shittiest primer ever created, to be honest. Physical and technical variables were measured basically through GPS, so they looked at total distance covered, different speeds, accelerations, decelerations, etc. And then looked at match outcomes.

And they basically found that when performing the primer, players covered greater distance – not by much – they did more moderate-intensity meters, more high-intensity running meters – not by much – and had more high-intensity accelerations and decelerations. Again, there's not much you can take from that because it's like the chaotic, the chaotic nature of team sports. Like, in 12 matches, the sample size isn't really big enough, so for me it doesn't tell us much in terms of that primer.

But what I will tell you is that primer is horrible, and if you want to elicit a change, you need to do something with intent, at speed, and potentially with load. And it depends – again, with MMA and stuff, it's a different beast because you have weight cuts. But say you've rehydrated fully and you're feeling pretty good, and it's a personal preference thing – there's stuff you can do to make your afternoon or evening training or fight better. Again, I wouldn't just do this in your next...

Fight. You would do it before, say, on a sparring day to test how you feel when you do it. But you'll be doing things like throws, jumps, plyometrics, potentially heavy lifting if that's something you're used to. But it's got to be stuff that you're already doing, so you're not going to get sore. It's not new.

And you do the same thing pretty much every priming session, so you're used to it. And the goal is that the volume is super low, and I'm talking like, let's just say a session could be some kind of jumping rope, like two 50 skips, and then let's just say you're doing a box jump, three by six, or two lots of rest in between.

Let's just say you're used to doing Olympic weightlifting. So after the box jump, you might do clean high pull, something like that, or even hang high pull. Something like two set three or three set three at a relatively heavy load. And then honestly, that could literally be it. That could literally be it, just doing those two things.

But, depending on, I guess, if you say a grappling-based MMA athlete, you could potentially do some heavier strength training, but again, highly dependent on what you've been doing before. The idea is that you're doing high intent movements with very, very little volume, and that's going to carry over potentially well to fight day.

Here's some other examples. Actually, you got some written down there. So ankle pops, like the jumping rope, three by six of 20. Then you do like a jump variation, so it could be vertical jump, box jump, three by six of three. A throw variation, it could be like a scoop toss, three sets of three, lots of rest.

And then finished with maximum isometrics, say three sets of six seconds. And they could be like a split squat pull against the pins. It could be a squat pull against the pins. It could be a maximum push, anything like that. And that would be like, that would be a very simple and easy primer.

Another one, you could do like a plyometric variation, could be like hurdle hops, two sets of five. Olympic weightlifting derivative, like I mentioned, like those high pulls. An explosive upper body exercise, it could be some kind of body throw. And then a 10 to 15 meter sprint, although I probably wouldn't sprint. You could do like a quick head out on a spin bike, something like that, like six-second sprint, two of them.

For heavier primers, say you're doing, you're probably not going to do it the day before with weight cuts, but just as an example, three by six of three of back squat, three by six to three bench. Both are like 85% one rep max. As an example, those are just examples. But that's just something to think about potentially to try out before, say, a Friday evening sparring session if you're able to do something in the morning. You'll find that it's easier to warm up as well for those days.

Just to round this out, new paper that came out, actually with Eric Helms as the second author, who was just on the podcast, on the last podcast. And they looked at hypertrophy, so muscle building, after eight weeks of resistance training, either training to failure or with essentially leaving reps in the tank. So if your goal is to maximize muscle growth and combat sports maybe isn't your number one, this will be applicable.

Essentially, they took, looked at 18 subjects with three years resistance training experience. They performed unilateral leg press, so one leg leg press, and leg extension twice a week for eight weeks. Basically, they did one leg performed, went to failure, and the other leg stopped two reps left in the tank. And they used an 8 to 10 rep max load for the leg press and a 10 to 12 rep max load for the leg extension.

And they found that average volume load and repetition volume was similar between the groups, but the failure group had a larger decrease in lifting velocity than leaving the reps in the tank. But both training protocols resulted in similar increases in quadriceps thickness, which is approximately 7% increase. So even though the failure group had a larger decrease, it could say in performance or speed because they did end, and they did essentially because they went to failure, they had the same essentially growth in muscle, which means that do you need to train to failure? Potentially not.

And the opportunity cost is, if you're training to failure, the fatigue you carry over into the following day if you're doing MMA or any other combat sport. So typically I like to see like these heavy compound movements, you're going to stop two to three reps shy of failure typically. And then your lighter isolation exercises, things like biceps curls, triceps, calves, isolation shoulder like that, you can go to failure or anywhere from zero to two reps in reserve. So failure or two reps in reserve is a general, I guess, guideline.

Now, what's interesting is potentially, at least for maybe more grappling-based athletes, it might be beneficial taking some sets to failure, not compound movements, but isolation, because there may be some benefits to peripheral conditioning adaptations from that. So the authors actually speculated that training to failure may enhance fatigue resistance from that type of training. So, perhaps training your bicep curls to failure, obviously not every single week, but maybe once or twice a month within your training, training those to failure might help with your, say, squeeze endurance, maybe if you're going to choke someone in the gi. So that's just something to think about, too. I thought that was interesting, at least, to pass on.

But it's pretty much everything I wanted to cover. So if you enjoyed this, let me know if you enjoy these solo episodes. Also get the MMA strength and conditioning blueprint below. I'll be doing one for jiu-jitsu, wrestling, boxing, kickboxing, and Muay Thai probably soon, eventually, as well. So keep an eye on those as well. But I'll see you in the next episode.