Dynamic Effort Method + Conditioning Tests (SSOF Ep 181)

James de Lacey0:00

And people will think that makes you unbalanced or whatever. Trust me, it's not going to make you unbalanced. It's typically what I do when I would have injured athletes. We would do, for example, had guys would say like knee, knee surgeries or whatever.

We would literally run like a 5 day a week upper body program kind of thing. And that would be a mix of circuits, max strength training, hypertrophy work and stuff. So you still get damn strong and work around injuries, but that would be the main ones that you would do that would help you to stay strong.

I had a question in the chat here. What's the best way to test a level of fitness to gauge what needs to be improved? For example, testing using air bike. So, typically we use a Wingate test, but we look more at the data from that to determine what needs to be done.

Another way you can do is just kind of look at resting heart rate. If your resting heart rate is relatively high, so like 60 and up, even 55 and up to a certain extent, then you're probably looking at doing more lower intensity work just to bring that down initially just because you're probably lacking some of that I guess the heart adaptations for delivery.

So, that would be a really easy one. It's just your resting heart rate in the morning. You can look at like 1.6k or one mile air bike trying to get under 2 minutes. It's not really going to tell you much of what you need to do conditioning wise though because there's probably a lot of ways you can do to improve that.

But, it's just another little kind of gauge of where you're at. And you can do like an MAS test. So, 6 minute max distance. However, it's going to give you pretty inflated numbers for your MAS. So probably give you like an MAS of like 10 versus when you're running a 6 minute max distance or like a 1.6k time trial.

So just it's more difficult to, it's more difficult to see where you are when you're doing say an MAS test which is just simply the distance you travel in meters divided by the time in seconds and that'll give you a number in meters per second and that is your maximum aerobic speed.

But all of those can be used. The main one that we like to use is that Wingate test because we can actually look at the heart rate data more granularly and if you can get the power data or even muscle oxygenation data, you can get even more in-depth look into what's going on.

But that would be the main one for just random field tests. One mile, one mile air bike is perfectly fine. Try to get under 2 minutes. MAS tests. You can do like Cooper tests as well. You find those tests online that kind of estimate VO2 max.

Those all kind of, as long as there's something you can do repeatedly, something that is repeatable that you kind of see improvement on. But most importantly, it should influence your training. And resting heart rate is probably going to be the easiest one to influence whether you're going to do more low intensity work to start with than more higher intensity work or if maybe things change with the resting heart rate, whether your conditioning changes.

Hopefully that answers that. Daniel Casev, hopefully I said that right. Managing training in between weekly or almost weekly fights, strength, boxing, conditioning. This is a nice one because this is basically the problem that we solve in team sports because we play every single weekend and we have to juggle everything.

Recovery, skills, training, strength, conditioning, and then prepare for the next game. So, you're going to basically look at a similar week schedule as you would a team sport. Rugby is probably the best example of it. I guess wrestling to an extent. College wrestling probably has some of this as well where you're basically going to go, this is how I like, this is how I like to schedule the week when it's like this.

So say you fight Saturday, Sunday completely off. You don't do anything. If you want to do external recovery stuff. So like if you have an ice bath, massage, any of that kind of stuff you would do on that Sunday. Monday would be like your easier training day.

So, you come on Monday, you might do your more boxing technical work. You might do some easier conditioning work if you need it just to kind of get moving. And you may do some kind of what I like to call feel good circuits.

So, this would be things like body weight movements, higher rep stuff. So, things like back extensions, dumbbell work, some of your more kind of quote unquote prehab or mobility work done in circuit format. That kind of covers a little bit that conditioning too.

And that'll be like your Monday. Think of it more of like, they like to call it an installation day or a learning day. So it might be going over stuff in the fight on Saturday that maybe you weren't able to figure out problems you had during that fight and you kind of address that on a Monday.

Tuesday then is kind of like your implementation day and it's your harder high intensity day. So that might be some of your sparring. It might be taking what you learned on Monday in skills training and now putting into a more live, more intense scenario on Tuesday.

You might throw in some of your bike sprints in this one too. And then you might do your, as you can say like your full body strength power training as well. So it's a pretty big heavy day on Tuesday, but that's the best day in the week to do it because it is the furthest away from the next fight, but also far enough away from the previous fight where you're recovered.

So that's kind of like your big day, your lower volume strength power in the gym, your sprint intervals, and your more sparring based work. Your sprint intervals you would do after your heavy technical training in this example. Wednesday, you would ideally take off or you're just going to do some really light technical boxing stuff.

So, it might be like one session on that day and it shouldn't be too intense. Thursday, then it's another hard day that again, well, I mean, if you're fighting week to week, you're probably not doing that much sparring, but it's going to be more of your high intensity work again.

So on this day, because you're going week to week, you probably wouldn't do another round of sprint intervals, but you might do some harder live training on this Thursday and you might do another round of your strength power work. Again, lower volume. Friday again, depends also if you're cutting, you're probably not cutting weight if you're fighting week to week, but Friday then is going to be a relatively easy day.

It can also be a higher intensity, lower volume day. Those work quite well on Fridays as well. Instead of going in and doing an hour or an hour and a half of more low intensity technical drills, it might be like 30 minutes of high intensity, but it's kind of, it's not 30 minutes straight of say sparring.

It might be like hitting the pads, keeping sharp, having longer rests, but doing things at speed and it's kind of almost like a primer for say the fight again on Saturday. That's just a general idea. Obviously, a lot of things change depends on all sorts of stuff.

But that would be kind of like a general look into how you could schedule, say, if you're fighting every single weekend. Same thing goes for grappling. Same thing goes for... most people aren't doing MMA every week, but a lot of people are doing grappling tournaments weekly almost.

You can run the same schedule. Friday, you probably wouldn't roll. I mean, you could in that instance if you're doing jiu-jitsu, you just have to take it really light, which is not always easy, but you'll still do your main strength power work, say, Tuesday, Thursday is what I really like.

And then in this example, Monday might be more of your hypertrophy focus day on some of your more single joint movement stuff that isn't going to fatigue you as much, that will make you feel good for the rest of the week. So, another question here, Ricardo Rom, how to use sprint interval training in the offseason and how to progress.

I think I did a similar one on the last solo pod I should say with sprint intervals, say, out of camp versus in camp. I think actually I did a video on the channel. Check the Sweet Science of Fighting channel.

It should be like how to schedule sprint intervals or something like that. It wasn't too long ago and it covers a question that was asked around, you know, how does it differ between, say, out of camp or offseason versus in-season or in camp, because often when you're presented with a traditional energy system or periodization model, you're typically told low intensity base training outside of camp to build your base and then we do high intensity in camp.

Whereas the sprint interval approach is kind of like year round you're doing intensity, and the reason you're doing intensity year round is because you're trying to elicit these mitochondrial adaptations you want that are going to transfer better to your conditioning in the sport. And it comes up and you develop it quickly, but you lose it really quickly, and it means if you're not doing the intensity outside of camp, you're kind of playing catch-up as you come into camp.

Obviously, some guys have really short turnarounds and you're still going to make gains, but if you're doing it year round, you're just going to get into harder protocols. It's just going to make you better and more efficient at conditioning. So, in terms of progressing, again, it kind of depends on your individual data.

So, I can't really say... let's just say there's no real difference. It's just based on the data at the time. So if someone needs a certain sprint interval, whether it's, you know, 20 weeks from a fight versus 6 weeks from a fight, the sprint interval would be the same if the data was the same in those instances, if that makes sense.

So the progress is based on what we see week to week versus 20 weeks out we do this and then 6 weeks out we do this. Now, if you don't have that data, you might have to take that kind of approach where maybe you're doing slightly longer rest periods out of camp.

Now, this isn't always the case because you may be trying to focus on that recovery aspect where you're going to need less rest periods out of... in the offseason. In season, then you're probably still going to carry that on. You might be looking at if you want a more power or recovery-based stimulus.

Typically, we're focusing on the recovery aspect because that is where most people are lacking and what is, I guess, most important, because you're still going to get improvements in power even with the shorter rest periods. But the recovery aspect is the important part because you want to be able to recover efficiently and fast between rounds or between efforts or whatever it is.

And that's where most people are lacking. So I can't really give a concrete answer on progressing it because it's, yeah, it's so dependent on that data and what is happening with that particular athlete. Let's jump into... I think I've only got two more questions.

So if there's anyone in the live that wants to jump in and ask one, go for it. Peter Clark, he was part of the conditioning mentorship, which is cool. Your favorite ways to improve peak eccentric velocity and deceleration impulse on counter movement jump.

So, if you guys aren't familiar, I've done a few videos on this based on MMA data. So we have some published MMA data around what kind of separates elite versus sub-elite MMA fighters. And it's basically mainly eccentric qualities that does that.

And then obviously Bill Smart's internal data with his guys out of City Kickboxing, looking at eccentric qualities during the jump is what separates these UFC guys, top level UFC guys, versus non-UFC guys who are still pro MMA fighters. And it's this ability to rapidly descend, rapidly pump the brakes, and then rapidly turn that around into the concentric action.

And we know that fast eccentric actions lead to better concentric performances. So having this quality also is going to allow us to generate more force in shorter time frames. Obviously important for more striking-based arts as well, which is why this question has probably come up.

So improving peak eccentric velocity and deceleration impulse. So impulse again is just force multiplied by time. So in this instance, you're looking at eccentric overload work mainly, especially when you're looking at eccentric velocity and impulse because we're looking at impulse in short time frames.

So it's going to be things like drop catches mainly because those are fast. So think about like a Bulgarian split squat drop catch. So you're in the top position, you drop down as quickly as possible and you try and pump the brakes as quickly as possible.

And then you can reverse that or you can kind of hold it. You can kind of progress from holding to coming straight back up. You can do it with load as well. So now you're getting very high forces at high speeds, especially during eccentric actions where you get simultaneous high forces at high speeds, which is really cool.

It's not to say you don't get some of that, say, when sprinting and whatnot, but that's one option for fast eccentric work. Well, it's actually one of the very few options you can do when you don't have other equipment. You have to kind of do drop catches.

You can do, say, like faster just faster movements. So if you say you're doing back squats, you just kind of go down faster. So if you've seen like weightlifters, some weightlifters squat, they kind of like dive bomb. You have to be quite good at it.

They're quite good at squatting though to be able to kind of dive bomb down, kind of speed up any action. It's another way you can do it. It's somewhat overload in this instance just because you're kind of pushing the speed. Outside of that, obviously flywheels would be like your number one if you're trying to really push this because you can modify that eccentric action to nasty levels of eccentric overload because you can over-speed the concentric.

Because with a flywheel, for anyone who's not familiar, essentially how much effort you put during the concentric, it gives you exactly the same back, but it doesn't give you any dead spots.

So during a squat, the top half of the movement is easy. Once you get past that sticking point, you can stand up with anything, but the bottom part is where you kind of get stuck.

With the flywheel, you get pulled with the same amount of force all the way down. So it's like someone just dragging you back to the floor. And you can... because it's equal, you can modify the way you do the exercise to create that eccentric overload.

So, as I mentioned, one way is to over-speed the concentric. You can use your hands on the way up to really drive it, but then no hands on the way down. And you can get someone to pull on the rope on the way up to over-speed it.

You can change the strategy during the eccentric phase. So instead of like resisting from the top during the eccentric, you can kind of like quickly drop down halfway and then let the weight hit you and kind of drag you down. So you're only getting all the effort you put on the way up.

You're concentrating it all into the bottom half of the movement. So you're getting this huge spike in eccentric overload there. So flywheels would be like the number one thing here if you're really looking to dial that in and improve those eccentric qualities. And then, I guess, outside of that, you don't really have other... I mean, you have weight releases, but that's going to be your slow eccentric work, and slow eccentric work definitely has a place. You can definitely do some of that initially if you really want a big strength stimulus and get some of those eccentric adaptations.

But at some point you're going to need the speed on top of it, which is why the flywheels work so well in this instance because you can kind of do a bit of both, and it's really safe and easy, and you don't get beat up like you do if you're going to do eccentric overload with the barbell and going numbers over your one-rep max.

You can also use weights during the counter movement jump. So holding dumbbells in your hands... I did a video on this a while back. Accentuated eccentric loading jumping, I guess you would call it. So you would hold weights in your hands, you would descend rapidly, let go of the dumbbells, and then jump.

Now, sometimes you'll see videos... like I searched this on YouTube a while ago and you'll see like a slow descent with the dumbbells, let go and jump. In my mind, you defeat the purpose of the exercise and you're not getting anything out of it that... you're not getting the adaptations you want from the exercise when you descend slowly holding dumbbells.

You need to make it rapid. The whole point of holding the load is to make the descent faster, essentially, or try and make it as fast as possible and overload that descent. If you're doing it slowly, you're not really overloading the descent.

You're holding dumbbells, you descend really quickly, you let go of the dumbbells, and then you jump. So that's another way you can almost teach and develop some of that eccentric overload. You have to make sure you use dumbbells that aren't like hex shaped because you don't want them to roll into your ankles.

You also sometimes can use like chains if you have chains with handles and things. Those work quite well too. You can use bands. Bands are a little harder just because to get the right resistance to really nail it down is a little more difficult, but they can be useful as well.

So all of those can ideally improve some of these qualities and then ideally give you adaptations, especially for strikers who need to be able to produce force quickly, or at least quickly and in short time frames, who have more time constraints regarding generating impulse and then change in velocity, which is kind of what we're after in most sports.

I have one more question on Instagram here. If anyone's in the chat or in the live and wants to ask away, go for it. What do you think of dynamic effort work? Actually, I've got two more questions. Don't worry. What do you think of dynamic effort work?

So too much volume or appropriate. So I'm assuming Daniel Brotherhood is talking about Westside approach with dynamic effort. If anyone's not familiar, it's basically this quote-unquote speed day. Obviously Westside was heavily powerlifting or created for powerlifting. So you have a max effort day, a dynamic effort day, and a repetition effort day.

And if you just put it in layman's terms, it's like a strength day, a hypertrophy day, and a speed day. But their speed day or the dynamic effort day was very specific to powerlifting because it is done through the main lifts: squat, bench, or deadlifts.

You're doing typically like doubles, typically singles, doubles, maybe triples, but mainly around the singles and doubles. You're looking somewhere like 8, 10, 12 sets. You're doing it around 50% of your 1RM, sometimes with bands. And that's kind of like their dynamic effort speed work.

In terms of that specific approach for sport, I do not think it has a place. I do not think it is useful for most sports, in fact, for every sport outside of powerlifting. Even then, there's a lot of powerlifters that would not use that approach.

And there's a few reasons for that. The first one is if you're looking to do speed work or something fast, you need to do something fast. And speed benches, speed squats, etc. are not fast. They're kind of just slightly faster than you doing a heavy squat or a heavy bench.

You need a bigger contrast between what you're doing in your, say, main strength work and then your speed work. The second one is when you're doing main lifts or main compound lifts, you're spending that second half of the lift decelerating. If you're not decelerating, you're just going to smash your elbows and your shoulders, or you're going to let go of the bar, which would be a different exercise altogether.

If you're doing speed work as bench throws, hell yeah. But these aren't bench throws. These are just kind of like speed bench. But you're getting that deceleration portion. So you're not really getting the accelerative force time that we want when we're doing our speed work, when we're doing jumps, plyometrics, throws, etc.

The other thing is it can really beat up—say you're doing speed bench—it can really smash your elbows if you're locking out hard like that. Because you're moving 50%, it's light. If you can bench 100, it's like 50 kilos. You're just locking out elbows relatively quickly. So that's another problem with that.

And then obviously you're doing eight sets of two. You're typically maybe doing 60 seconds rest. It's not hugely time-consuming. It's not—I wouldn't say it's too much volume. I would just say it's a misappropriated time within your training that you could do something else that would be more effective, in my opinion, than taking, say, a Westside powerlifting approach to your training.

Now that's not to say that everything from these training programs is useless. It is not. But I think that dynamic effort work in particular, because it is so geared towards powerlifting, it doesn't really have a place in other sports. And I don't think I've ever seen a professional sporting setup use a true dynamic effort lifts like a speed bench kind of thing. And I know a lot of different coaches around, and I don't think I've ever seen that. So that also says something.

I got a question in the chat here. It keeps disconnecting. It's all good. How do you autoregulate sprint interval training?

So basically we take the data every week from the sprints. We look at the heart rate data and then we kind of see how that data is changing from week to week and what we're seeing. And we change it based on what the data says we kind of need to work on for that week.

So it might be we need shorter recovery times because they're looking really good. Maybe it didn't look that good this week, so we extend the recovery times, give them a little more rest. Maybe they need more power-based work, so they're going to have more rest. Kind of all changes based on what we're seeing within that data.

Now if you don't have any of that, you're probably just going to go shorter recoveries initially. And if you feel really smashed, you might then extend the recovery, or if you want more power-based, I guess, emphasis.

It's hard to autoregulate it without actually having the data, put it that way. But you can also do less sets versus doing, or less reps versus more. So for example, if you're doing six or eight or 10 sets of 10 seconds on, 20 seconds off, and you've done it for a few weeks, you're like, "Man, I need a break. Like, training has been hard this week." Then you might do six sets of 10 seconds on, 40 seconds off.

And that way you can kind of—you're still going to get the gains because you're still getting the intensity. The most important thing is that you're just consistently exposing yourself to that sprint intensity.

So even if you have to back off completely and do four sets of 10 seconds on, 60 seconds off for that week, as long as you're smashing that first 10-second sprint and then kind of holding on for dear life for the rest, you're going to be fine. So that would be my general advice.

And another question I just got sent from a friend back home around tempo interval training and what's my stance on it now. So if you guys aren't familiar, tempo training, not from the endurance world but from the sprint world. So Charlie Francis kind of made it popular and then it got applied within a lot of team sports that involve a lot of running.

I'll come back to this now. I want to answer this question for athletes without heart rate data. Do you have some kind of how-do-you-feel rating system?

They're all going to feel—that's the thing. So all the sprints are going to, if you're doing them right, they're all going to feel horrible at the time. How do you feel before going on the bike is hard to—it's hard to use that as a gauge for what you should do, because you can feel bad one day and then have an amazing training session, or you can feel good and have a poor training session.

So it's really hard to give a how-do-you-feel before you get on the bike. But if you're doing the sprints right, they should all feel pretty horrible.

If I come back to the tempo stuff, so it's basically a way for sprinters to essentially do like their work capacity, aerobic work. So sprinters would obviously typically do acceleration work, max velocity, whatever. And then tempo intervals are kind of like 70% of max speed, and you're kind of maybe running 100 meters, takes you about, depending how fast you are, 13 to 16, 17 seconds. And you're kind of doing it on the minute.

You might add some density by doing like push-ups, calisthenics after that. So you end up being like 30 seconds total work and then like 30 seconds rest in that instance. And the goal is actually just building volume. And obviously for a sprinter, you're kind of just building that work capacity, maybe in the off-season, so you can be more robust or more resilient through all the sprint training they're doing.

And then that kind of made its way over to team sports. And I used it heavily. I mean we used a big tempo approach when we won the national championship. We've used it international rugby, all sorts. I like the modality. I like the modality, but I don't think now from what I know that it would be the main conditioning approach.

I think where it has value, at least in running sports, is you're just accumulating a lot of high-speed running. So one of the main things you're trying to do in preparation is you want to accumulate chronic loads of high-speed running because it's—I'm not going to say it's protective, but it's going to help you stay healthy through the season.

And tempo running is one of those ways you can do that because you're typically running over 5 meters per second. So you're running over like maximum aerobic speeds, and you're just accumulating volume at those speeds. You're kind of cueing good running mechanics while you're doing it as well. So it kind of gives you a lot of bang for your buck.

Does take a lot of time. That is one area that makes it harder to do. But you would still need, I think, in my opinion, to use sprint intervals.

And it kind of depends as well with the season. Some people have four month preseason, some people have four weeks. If you have a four week preseason, you ain't going to do it. If you have a four month preseason, it's a different story.

But you're still going to do sprint intervals throughout that time because you need those mitochondrial adaptations and you need that intensity to be dosed throughout, I mean from the early stages of that time. For fighters as well, extensive tempo approach doesn't make too much sense.

You're probably looking at more like longer intervals, more sprint intervals because you're not trying to accumulate chronic loads or high loads of high speed running because running is not the sport. So in this instance, it can be useful just as a tool just to maybe get some work in if you're just doing like general conditioning, but if you want a more targeted approach, then you're probably going to need to go down the sprint interval, longer high-intensity interval stuff, and then obviously your sport training as well with that.

So hopefully that answers that. Hopefully that answers all the questions. Let me double check. Nope, that was all the ones I got through. Perfect.

Well, hopefully you guys enjoyed this little shorter, but I'm going to have some guests on hopefully this week and the following weeks. And I appreciate you guys joining me on the live stream, and I'll catch you in the next podcast.