Enhancing Effective Mass & Perfecting Hip Rotation For Punching (Q&A) w/ Seth Lenetsky (SSOF Ep 123)

Seth Lenetsky0:55

So when you think about that, the comment is right—force and velocity is a spectrum. If you're, if this is pure velocity, your hand is here, your hip is still going to be pretty heavy on the force side of things, but it's going to be fast.

I still think that that's the way to do it and I think that fits into kind of Rat's findings, which is again that X Factor, that twist. That's a force that you're driving into the ground which you're then transmitting up the kinetic chain. Research-wise, I don't got a whole lot to back that up.

James de Lacey3:39

You basically went into and partly answered another listener's question on this, which was actually quite interesting when you talked about that. So he's asking, can you describe the role of torso rotation when punching? Some say it's hip-shoulder separation. Stuart McGill says it's anti-rotation, transferring hip power up to the shoulder and not spine rotation.

Seth Lenetsky3:39

Yes. So I think we have enough research, and starting with McGill, that anti-rotation transmission of force tends to produce better strikes for trained people than doing rotary work. There's a lot of research on that from a core training perspective.

Now is that because they just don't tend to work anti-rotation, so you're just tapping them a little bit on that anti-rotation wheel and that little tap is giving them an extra boost? Or is it about the transmission? I tend to sit—again, I'm gonna piss everybody off with this—I sit in both camps, right?

From a core, again, core perspective, all I do is anti-rotation, anti-flexion, anti-extension. I don't do Russian twist and stuff like that. I don't think it really carries over.

James de Lacey4:46

What about medicine ball rotational throws, cable wood chops, all that kind of stuff?

Seth Lenetsky4:46

Exactly. So I train the core very much to transmit force, but then if we move up, just so if we go lumbar to thoracic lumbar and to thoracic, that's all rotation. And so that's where I spend my time doing rotary work. I do a [expletive] ton of that.

But if we go lumbar, I actually go a lot of anti-rotation. And if you think about the shoulder-hip separation, where's that rotation coming from? Is it happening at the lumbar spine or is it happening at the thoracic spine for that rotation?

I would argue that you want your lumbar spine to transmit force exactly like McGill describes, and then you're rotating heavily and you're getting that hip-shoulder separation but through the thoracic spine, not through the lumbar as much. That would be the way I would kind of envision it.

James de Lacey5:40

Kind of like that model where it's lumbar seen as quote-unquote stability, thoracic mobility, and they kind of mobility, stability, mobility, stability. That's kind of works down the chain. That's how—

Seth Lenetsky5:40

See, I still see it that way. I don't know, that's a really basic way to look, but it's made sense to me that joint stacking model does seem to work.

James de Lacey5:40

Okay, perfect. And I started at the perfect place because all these questions kind of stack on top of each other with this as well, and I'll ask some extras on top of it as we get through.

But the same person was asking, do you have any cues or techniques to optimize torso rotation and use of the opposite lat muscle for power punching on the heavy bag?

Seth Lenetsky6:06

Yeah. Okay. So again, I'd want to look at what do I think the person needs, but I'm going to say in the context of this, we're talking about someone who wants to hit harder, right? We're trying to up the punch force, and that the way that they're lacking is through kind of force dominant manner through effective mass and stiffening kind of things.

So the way I would look at that—and this is something I missed early in my career a ton—is just general lat training. [expletive] matters, man. Rocky was doing pull-ups for a reason. Just do your pull-ups. So just getting stronger lats is going to help.

But what I would say is if we're looking for kind of big heavy power, obviously I like the med ball work. I think that a lot of that is going to be the isometrics and cueing appropriately through isometrics and your med ball work.

A lot of people, when you really talk about trying to use that lat and come down on it, it also has an added benefit of actually kind of pulling the head off of line from strikes, which a lot of great coaches do but not everyone actually kind of keeps in mind. But using that lat to pull into that is a really good simple tool to get that contralateral lat to kick in really strong. So I use that a lot.

I like tornado balls. I think a lot of people are—

James de Lacey7:34

Is that the one with the rope?

Seth Lenetsky7:34

Yeah, exactly. See, a lot of people are missing on tornado balls. They're [expletive] great. And everyone wants to swing a sledgehammer at a tire because it looks cool. Tornado balls are where the money's at though. I love those things.

James de Lacey8:01

So what do you like about those more than a sledgehammer? The only two exercises I've seen with that is when someone's back's against the wall and they're hitting it to the side, or you mentioned that almost sledgehammer-like, a side to side slam. Those are the only two exercises I've seen.

Seth Lenetsky8:01

And I don't like that sledgehammer movement too much in general. I don't think it has a lot of carryover. I think that I've seen it too often now—that's twice, but twice is too often—[expletive] people's shoulders up because they're boxers and they just can't get into certain ranges.

But I like the back against the wall tornado, right? Because you're getting that separation, especially you can cue it in different ways. But if you cue it with those hips planted against the wall and you're just rotating through the thoracic, I really like it as a basic cue for how to get that rotation going on. And then you can bring them back down to, okay, now use your hips in that rotation as well.

James de Lacey8:51

Gotcha. You're answering questions that I'm going to ask you before I ask them, but I'm going to continue going down that road for myself here. A question from me anyway, but more exercises like that that you use to kind of cue that hip-shoulder separation and then you kind of answered just what the follow-up you just gave there.

But obviously you can do, for example, a really good example on top of that one would be the way you can do landmine rotations, right? Because you can do a landmine rotation where you stay fixed, hips square, and you're just moving it side to side, more of an anti-rotation. You're not getting that separation. But then you can also do it where you turn the hips in as—

Seth Lenetsky9:38

The lone comes in and then use the hips to help get the rotation back up. And I guess that could be a similar progression. So let's start with exercises for hip-shoulder separation, then maybe how you blend those two.

Okay. So the simplest one I do, and it's a very static exercise, I picked this up. You remember that, and you probably know his name, that back when we were in University there was that Swiss coach who was working with Val.

James de Lacey9:38

Do you remember his name?

Seth Lenetsky9:38

Growing coach?

James de Lacey9:38

No, I don't remember his name.

Seth Lenetsky9:38

Okay. Val Adams. He had this really nasty move where he put an actual stick on someone's back and he would literally just crank them in two basically, and it was nasty. And I do it way, way nicer than he does, but just that actually forcing someone through that range of motion and like, hey, feel and really lean into it is a great just simple motor learning skill.

So I do work on that and then holding those end range of positions and use your stabilization and use your lats to kind of keep you there. Because you can't use your abs to get into that end range of motion there, you have to kick in your lats to get there. So I love using that tool. So I still follow that. I think probably if he were to see me do it, he would be like, this is completely wrong and you bastardized it, but it works for my purposes.

I was thinking about tangent. I'm dropping a lot of names. I'm not trying to drop names. I'm trying to give people credit because I'm not coming up with a lot of any of this really on my own. I'm just pulling it from other people. So I'm going to keep throwing out names. References, consider them references. What's his name, Tom Yankello, on World Class Boxing, really good boxing coach, worked with Roy Jones when he had the Tyson exhibition match. Dude's legit.

Hates strength and conditioning, so he's a boxing coach. But he does a really cool drill with a sledgehammer across the shoulders as well. And so shadowboxing with a sledgehammer. And I really like that because it gets, it's not a drill you're going 100% on. It's very much a drill you're going 60% at, and you're just feeling that rotation and queuing that separation.

And you can feel it move up the chain. You can feel your hip go and then because you're slowed down up here, you can feel your torso go and then you kind of over-reach a little bit. And it's a nice tool for kind of exploring those ranges.

James de Lacey11:48

So how are you shadowboxing? So the sledgehammer on your back like a bar on your back, for a back squat like a barbell?

Seth Lenetsky11:48

So I've got the head of the sledgehammer here, I'm in my stance, and I'm just practicing my punches.

So I like that one. I think that's a pretty cool one. And additionally, I do think that the contralateral lat's going to get some love on that one because you're having to activate that to pull around the extra weight.

James de Lacey12:12

You say he hates strength and conditioning, but that is strength and conditioning.

Seth Lenetsky12:12

No, sorry, this is real strength and conditioning. I think a barbell on someone's back, he loses [expletive]. But you know what, I shouldn't talk for the guy. I don't know. All I know is he seems to really know boxing and I'm a fan.

James de Lacey12:12

Nice. That's an interesting one. Okay. So that was some different, I guess, hip-shoulder separation. If we can go even further down the rabbit hole, I mean Frans Bosch and a lot of his work talks about the upper-lower dissociation, or same thing, hip-shoulder separation, especially within team sports. And it's a concept I've played around with a lot more so in sprinting and running in ball sports. So it might have a different application, but I'm wondering how much of that would even potentially transfer.

For example, those water bags or aqua bags, is that something you've played around with or you would potentially use?

Seth Lenetsky12:59

Or that is an area I want to go with. I want to explore that. So what if we did that same drill, the sledge drill?

James de Lacey12:59

Yeah, I was thinking that, yeah.

Seth Lenetsky12:59

I am very keen to explore that. Honestly, I haven't been there. If you've got a water bag supplier, tell them to send me some water bags. I'm keen to [expletive] around. I'll do some research for them. Yeah, no, I'm super keen on that.

But yeah, Bosch, a lot of Bosch's stuff, obviously, controversial figure. I know you're kind of into him to a certain extent, but other people will this and that about him. I think at a fundamental level though, a lot of the team sports stuff he talks about has a huge carryover. And probably for me, Bosch had one moment that it was a duh moment. It was like, oh, of course. But it really kicked it for me was talking about hip angle and opportunities off of hip angle when he was talking about rugby.

He was doing those drills with the Japanese rugby team. You had the giant [expletive] bands and they're running to keep square so they have all these options. Yeah, I'm listening to him talk about that, and then I see TJ Dillashaw fight. And I forget which TJ Dillashaw fight it was, but TJ's using the squared [expletive] stance. It's like, look at all the angles TJ's using by squaring up that stance. He's giving himself more options, especially in a big space like MMA rings.

And it was like, oh [expletive]. And that was for me the big light bulb moment. It's not going to be a one-to-one carryover, but a lot of these fundamental things Bosch is talking about do go from team sports to Combat Sports.

James de Lacey14:50

Interesting, interesting. Because I learned a lot of it directly from John Pryor at a conference who learned it directly from Frans Bosch at that time from Japan Rugby. And it's been such a good model. And then on top of that, learning all that and then connecting Chris Korfist. He had a whole sprint series done, and it had no mention, or I guess influence, or maybe had some influence, but had no mention of Bosch, anything like that. But it was the exact same principles in place, but different things. And I was like, ah, okay, it's time to take note.

But I like that aqua bag idea on the back while doing the boxing stuff, is interesting, just to give those perturbations and movement and be able to actually navigate that. And obviously you can go too far and that's all you can do and you can get rid of countermovement because of muscle slack and all stuff. But you don't have to go that far.

Seth Lenetsky15:42

I am not buying muscle slack still to this day.

James de Lacey15:42

Yeah, it's an interesting, there's muscle slack and then there's pre-tension when you're jumping and landing. And then they kind of almost label them the same, but different, by the way they're done.

Seth Lenetsky15:42

Yeah. So for anyone listening, what we're talking about is their concept that muscle slack is what they really coined it for sprinting, with that sprinting paper with Bivian Hof, where they're like the hamstrings don't act eccentrically on sprinting. They only act isometrically. So all you need to do is optimum length isometrics because as soon as you do isometrics, like a hanging rope, your muscles are hanging when they're relaxed. And then when you tense they become tight. Now they can produce force optimally. And that was the whole idea around that.

But I think that's kind of been disproven and since, well even before that, regarding eccentric with sprinting and there's many other things there. So it's an interesting, and fundamentally the way they model the muscle, we're getting into nerd [expletive] now, but the way they model the muscle, because I heard you talk about it in previous podcast, yeah, of the small unit, right? The way they actually lay them out that would make sense in the model they're talking about isn't how muscles actually work.

[Expletive]'s not so linear. Everything's, it's messy as hell in there. And there's all these other proteins that we don't talk about often. Like you've taken the same courses as I have. You know what titin is and how it connects. So there's all these other muscle proteins going on that it's far too complex.

But pre-tension totally makes sense. I'm all about that. And eccentric, I'm all about that as well, although still figuring out where that lives in the boxing world.

James de Lacey17:06

Yeah, yeah. It's been playing around a lot with the flywheels for the eccentric stuff because I had a, I got sent a trial Exerfly down in the garage. So I played around with that a lot. They take it back next week though, unfortunately. But I've been doing heaps of different eccentric stuff on that. Like I was doing a half split squat with a small flywheel for speed with the eccentric overload on it. That was brutal with the handle, with holding the handle, just absolutely thrashing that with speed. And I was like, oh, this was harder than I thought. It was like one small blue plate.

Seth Lenetsky17:59

So we have a handy gym at work, and I use, so it's a small flywheel. It's like two pieces, locks on a wall. It's honestly, it's probably not as robust as we would need for S&C. It's great for home. But we use a handy gym. But I use it for another, talking about that contralateral lat, I use it for eccentric loading of the contralateral lat. You do a big row and then it's pulling you back in. Yeah, same idea.

That stuff is really cool. Imagine you put the eccentric motor on it and put a little 10% boost on there, right? The way I get that is the poor man's version of that, and that's the way Angus Ross teaches it. You just use a lot of English in that first movement and then you be real strict on the eccentric portion.

Yeah, exactly. Just overspeed the concentric, then you've got that overload.

James de Lacey18:26

I've got some questions from the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground Discord as well we'll go into. Which one should we go to? See, let's go into this one first on punching mechanics. I guess we've talked a bit about that currently.

So are issues getting the mechanics from more sterile environments like punching bags and pads to show up in a performance context, or the adaptations generic enough that you're just getting faster at punching anything adjacent? I get it. That make sense?

Seth Lenetsky18:53

Yeah, I get it. And it's a question that honestly used to keep me up at night when I was doing my thesis. What was my thesis? It was stand on these plates, step forward, punch once as hard as you could, and we're going to make assumptions about [expletive] off of that. It's like, is that real?

And I honestly to this day I fully don't know. I've seen enough anecdotally to believe that there is carryover. But more than that, I think back to—and you probably had him again—we're talking University times as a lecture way back in the day, Tony Oldham. Remember Tony? Do you ever have Tony?

James de Lacey19:24

Remember the name. I don't know if I had him though.

Seth Lenetsky19:24

Weird guy, brilliant dude. Sports psych, and he was kind of my a bit of an early supervisor in my thesis. And I'm like, I'm gonna revolutionize boxing, right? I'm still in that [expletive] phase because you're young and you're a PhD student. Oh, I'm gonna make up all this incredible [expletive].

And he goes, "But you know it has to work." And I'm like, "Well, why does what boxing trainers do have to work?" "Because they test it over and over and over again over centuries. There's an evolution here, right? If hitting a heavy bag didn't work in boxing, people would have stopped doing it a long ass time ago."

Now do I believe that boxing trainers necessarily know the science behind and can optimize it? No, and I think that's where people like you and I can help. But if it didn't work, people would stop doing it. The moment martial arts saw the Octagon, people stopped doing a lot of martial arts because they realize it didn't work.

If you have a live competition, this goes back to Matt Thornton and Straight Blast Gym. When a martial art is alive, what works is going to continue and what doesn't work eventually will disappear. So I would argue that a lot of this does work because it's there.

The fact that we have been using heavy bags since it was like, you know, you're using a ladder of a [expletive] cow in ancient Roman times or something insane like that, we've been doing it for so long, it works. Muay Thai has been around longer than the English language.

James de Lacey21:25

Do you think—okay, so let's say it does work—do you think there is potentially then better ways that we know now to potentially have better transfer?

Seth Lenetsky21:25

Well, I'm a huge proponent of heavy bags. I think the way we use it—and I mentioned this in the last podcast—I think the way we use it can be perfected. And I think that from—how many times have you seen someone using a heavy bag and they're pushing it around?

And then I was the worst of this back in the day. I'm pushing around, you're chasing the [expletive] heavy bag because you're not snapping your shots off of it and you've got just the wrong weighting. I think that the way we use the bag is more important.

I think it's not always a cardio tool. It's not always a tool to just try and hammer as hard as you can. But a bag to look about how you interact with large masses, just like a double end bag is how you interact with light masses and how you react to that coming back at you. And when you go with that mindset, I think you can get a lot more out of it.

It's easy as [expletive] to just stand in front of a bag and haul ass on it. And I think you get a lot of people—they're still getting benefits off of it even if they're using it wrong because 20% of their training is the right [expletive] even if 80% of it's wrong. But if we can get 80% of it the right—like, yeah, let's just blow someone out on, bang on a heavy bag, you'll probably see a huge difference.

James de Lacey22:51

You said about weighting the heavy bag, so is there some kind of guideline you have there with having that weighted properly?

Seth Lenetsky23:11

I'm not there yet. I'm not there yet. So, but my basis head for bags—Aqua bags, I'm really intrigued by, and I think there's a lot of really good research to come out of using aqua bags. And that's an old technology that's now a new technology, and I'd be really—I have, I think Aqua bags might be money. So I'm really keen on that.

James de Lacey23:11

In what way?

Seth Lenetsky23:42

I think that, much like Aqua bags that you're holding, the perturbation—the perturbation on impact is going to actually improve stiffening. So I think Aqua bags may be an interesting way to improve effective mass. So I only—I think aquabag might give you a little bit extra on that, particularly around controlling shoulder girdle stabilization.

I think a teardrop bag is good for trying to work on fundamental mechanics. And I think then you get a medium-sized heavy bag, and that's where I want snappy punches. And I don't want you trying to dig in as much, right? Because I think you're learning the wrong lesson and trying to push those bags around. And that's where you get the person who's running around the [expletive] space chasing themselves to the bag.

And then when you get a real heavy bag or a wall bag, that's when I think you're leaning into it a lot more. And that's about that transfer of force. But that's only a very specific part of what you're doing in punching, right? That's about, okay, now we're just trying to lean in and really just dump all of that inertia into the target.

James de Lacey24:42

Gotcha, gotcha. I haven't heard any of that before on heavy bag, so I like that. That would be some knowledge bombs for people there. And actually leads into this question here—final question I have, but I've got a couple more as well anyway.

But basically, I'd love to hear about your approach to increasing effective mass. The heavy bag seems to be superior to pads due to impact quality from what I've read, but I'd be interested to hear Seth's take.

Seth Lenetsky25:06

Cool. Well, first off, yeah. I have definitely—and I would say this is a recent thing, we're showing in the last two or three years—I've definitely moved away from using mitts and even shield work for anything involving force production.

And I think that was a bad lesson I learned actually in my early MMA days. And I was involved in MMA in the early [expletive] days, right? So we were doing stupid [expletive]. And it's gone away, right? Again, it didn't last because it wasn't working.

But we used to just haul off on mitts. And one, it's just destroyed my elbows, my wrists—they're just ruined. But two, it's not good for transfer. So I completely agree. Mitts are all about technique, and it's all about fine-tuning and reaction and things like that. So that's been an area I've had to grow and change as I've become more of a boxing coach and less of just a meathead.

As far as the heavy bag, I think that again, there's a lot of different layers to it. How many of us are using a heavy bag with true old school bag gloves, right? Not many people. So for me, that's an area to increase effective mass.

Because what's that going to do? That's going to teach you—it's a constraints-based way of learning to make a really good [expletive] fist that's going to transmit a ton of [expletive] force, rather than a boxing glove and a modern boxing glove that kind of holds you in this weird ass position, right? So it's going to teach you how to brace and transmit force through your arm. That's a simple effective mass tool that you can use.

At the same time, if you want to increase effective mass to the heavy bag, you can do big single shots, especially if it's a real heavy bag or a wall-mounted bag and you're leaning into it, right? That's gonna improve your effective mass. Isometric punches again is another one that I find really useful.

For the most part though, I think one of the trickier things is, in general, punch performance equals effective mass. So if you can just improve punch performance, you're improving effective mass and vice versa. I think we too often think of these as all these separate things. It's really holistic.

It's not like I do this exercise for effective mass and I do this exercise—yeah, I think of it more of, again, that force velocity. This is my more force stuff, this is my more velocity stuff.

James de Lacey27:32

What about an altitude drop, right? When people step off boxes and they're laying with stiff legs?

Just for upper body, like an altitude drop for the push-up and hitting the ground with stiff arms. Is that something that could potentially be used? Lee Brown out of the UK, awesome cat. Do you know Lee?

Seth Lenetsky27:58

Yeah, yep. He was supposed to get him on the podcast a little while ago, but we still got to try to tee that up, get his ass on. He's been doing some great work with reactive strength index and plyo push-ups, and he's finding some really good results.

He's nice enough to let me jump on a couple of those papers. Looking at the contact time from the plyo push-up to the flight time, that's the RSI, and using that to find a lot of really interesting stuff. I think that he may, if he's not there yet, he's going to be there for kind of probably the most useful upper body test in boxing or in punching.

James de Lacey28:24

Interesting.

Seth Lenetsky28:24

Like I'm not fully on board as far as learning everything, so I'm still bringing that all on. But he's teaching me about it and it's interesting. There's a lot of potential there.

James de Lacey28:53

Cool, cool. I'll have to hit him up again. And we actually had a question on the live here asking what's the correct way, in quotes, to train with a heavy bag. So again, if you're on a medium heavy bag, whatever that means, you should not be pushing the bag. You should be trying to snap off the bag. You want it to have impact, but it should be a snap off, not a push, right?

If you want to push, you should have something that's not going to move the same way. That's all because you want to work on your impulse and you need more time to lay that in there. Whereas the smaller heavy bag, the medium heavy bag is about quickly applying that impulse, about changing the time of impact, right? Does that make sense or am I butchering that one?

Seth Lenetsky29:22

No, I think that should make sense to the listeners. Bigger bag, you can lay into it. Smaller bag, don't lay into it. It's about one's about learning how to transmit more force into it and the other's about learning how to transmit that force fast.

James de Lacey29:22

Perfect. And that was all those questions. One more question from me, and maybe there's some more that come up in my head. But around, obviously we talked about ground reaction forces coming from the ground and the legs pushing up through to the hips. But does strengthening the feet directly ever come into the thought process there?

Seth Lenetsky29:50

Yeah, yeah. So my day job is working with triathlon, right? I think I might have told you that in the last one. So I spend a [expletive] ton of time working on feet for the dumbest sport ever, which is let's swim, bike, and then run a [expletive] ton, right? It's just brutal, nastiest thing you could ever do.

So we do a lot of footwork and I've been looking at that at the boxing lens as well, and I don't know about the full carryover right now for feet. Obviously foot matters for ground reaction, but because we tend to not have quick ground reaction times like running, I don't know how much it carries over. Obviously I was talking last time, mobility matters, being able to get into the right shapes to transmit that force. But we still have a lot of time, so I don't know how much heavy footwork matters.

Right now in my practice, I don't do much footwork other than kind of rudimentary hop work. And I spend more time on hands, more time strengthening hands, more time on wrists and less time on feet. Maybe that's going to change. I'm not saying that that's right or wrong, but right now where I sit, foot strengthening doesn't seem to carry as much over to performance as things like hands. So I look more at hands for boxing and general just ability to transmit force, because I think it is very much like the first question back. It's about brute force at the feet, not necessarily super reactive force.

James de Lacey31:19

Gotcha. Don't you think that just the amount of jumping rope and that kind of stuff that goes on anyway is potentially enough?

Seth Lenetsky31:19

From my experience, yeah, I think it is enough. I don't think specific needs to be done. What's weird though is you get weird people who have developed strange patterns to move around limitations, and that's where again if you can't move through your foot, you got an issue more so than your foot's going to not be strong enough.

James de Lacey31:48

And you mentioned hand and wrist strengthening. What are you doing for that specifically?

Seth Lenetsky32:15

Nothing super fancy. Rice, we use rice, we use line, we use fat grips. We do kind of your basic crushing, pinching, all of that stuff. I don't think anything that's really revolutionary there, because just basic grip work is solid. And I mean everyone should be doing it.

And the biggest thing that we add to most people's programs that they don't do is just do your wrist stretches. And most guys are like, "Oh my God, this is the most painful thing ever." It's like, yeah, welcome to some basic mobility in your wrists. And that's a big one.

I'll do, most of the folks I'll work with, I will look at their hands though and will kind of help them with their wraps occasionally. So do need to put in some foam padding. I've definitely helped some wraps with people who've got a bad knuckle here or there, things like that. Because far too often in my limited experience, people still don't take care of their hands and it's just like throw on some wraps and let's go. And you need a little bit more than just throw on some wraps and let's go if you're moving beyond just cardio kickboxing.

James de Lacey33:14

Nice. I've got one final question for you, more of a technical one. I think I asked this on very first podcast, but I'm going to ask it again anyway. On throwing a hook, obviously you have two camps: thumb up or palm down. Is there a preference? Is there a use for either or? What's your take there?

Seth Lenetsky33:43

There's a use for both. So this was informed by, I can't remember his name now, I can't reference properly. The coach from Elevation, sorry, MMA in Denver, worked with Neil Magny, real good coach. And so he would just call this a kickboxing hook and he'd call this a boxing hook, and this was a longer range hook and this was a closer range hook.

And if you're throwing this at long range, you're more likely to land on your pinky, which is more likely to get a break. But if you're throwing this at closer range, you're more likely to land on the correct knuckles and you'll be fine. That's basically the way I look at it. It's just about where you want to get the impact on what you want to protect.

The idea of summation of muscles, I don't buy that at all. I don't buy cutting or anything like that is going to be improved from twisting. So I don't buy that on it for the hook. It really is just range and getting your knuckles, and there's no problem in my mind of punching like this as long as you're going to land on those knuckles. And if you can do this and land on those knuckles great, but it's just about landing on the right part of the hand and range.

James de Lacey34:43

Nice. Different to, not exclusive to the hook, but for say bare knuckle boxing versus just traditional boxing, does anything, does much change for you in terms of punch mechanics or training or anything like that? Or even effective mass principles?

Seth Lenetsky35:06

Good question. So I've never worked with a bare knuckle boxer. I've definitely thought about it and I'd be keen to get in that space. I really like, I don't necessarily appreciate the atmosphere that the production teams are trying to make, like a street fight atmosphere and early UFC kind of stuff. But I actually think it's really interesting because one of the things that intrigues me is the evolution of boxing from bare knuckle to where we are today and watching techniques change and approaches change. So I think it's really cool and really interesting.

The biggest one for me is, much like Andrew mentioned, moving to more body shots, right? Because you want to live there and you want to live in a place where you can really unload on someone safely. But right in the chest and not in the ribs and not in their face where it's way more dangerous, right? That's the kind of fundamental, and that's where you see changes in stance and stuff.

As far as an S&C standpoint though, I don't think I would do a whole lot more other than, like I talked about, bag work. I would move bag work and I'd probably find that person a special bag so they could get knuckle all over it and no one else have to deal with that. But I'd have them do more bag work bare knuckle.

I would have them do unwrapped work more, if not probably exclusively, just at least light intensity stuff so they could work on hand position. Because even with those hand wraps they do, I've done a bare knuckle hand wrap only once in my life and it's not a ton of support, so it's pretty minimal. So I would...

I'd want to have a lot of strength and control through that.

James de Lacey37:29

And I have one more question on the live chat here around the fat grip. So are you just using fat grips for upper body pushing movements and doing carries enough to train grip for MMA? To train grip for MMA, yeah. Oh, okay, that's very different.

Seth Lenetsky37:29

Well, let's start with boxing. Let's start with boxing and then to MMA that one. So I actually use it for some pressing movements. I don't actually use it for many carries now that I think about it, not against it. I just don't. I use it for curls, like do some curls.

James de Lacey37:53

I just did fat grip curls this morning. Yeah, my favorite.

Seth Lenetsky37:53

That's good stuff for your grip. Like as much as like you hate it, so like I super said it was something else, like it's not like my primary exercise, but yeah, do some hammer curls with a fat grip and that'll help your boxing.

For MMA though, I would say the big thing for me for MMA would be my pulling movements and particularly my lat dominant pulling movements. Fat grip pull-ups, right? You want to have the ability to control and bring in whether it's through Thai clinch, whether it's through hand fighting, which is pretty rare in MMA but it does happen, or on the ground.

You want that. And so I would say living in that space is more important than pressing, and somewhere that tends to be kind of underdone by MMA, whereas like BJJ and Judo, you'll see guys doing gi pull-ups all the time, but MMA it's not always integrated as much.

James de Lacey38:53

Obviously done. Perfect. Well, that's all the questions I have for you Seth and all questions in the live as well. So we'll wrap this up then. Other, I mean last podcast, I'm sure people can find you, but you're only on LinkedIn so you got to search Seth LSK on...

Seth Lenetsky39:21

Oh, you got more? I'm happy to do this stuff. Just send [expletive] to James if you want to. If you got questions, if you don't bug me on LinkedIn.

James de Lacey39:21

He's not private on LinkedIn.

Seth Lenetsky39:21

Do more stuff with James if you guys send stuff to him. Otherwise, yeah, I don't want to deal with that [expletive].

James de Lacey39:21

All right, so if you have more questions for Seth, maybe there's more stuff you want to go in depth on, you have very specific questions, whatever it is, maybe a case study, maybe it's something about yourself or whatever or someone you train, send that through and I'll head set up and we can just jump on and do another one of these. Because I'm hoping that these are helpful for you guys asking questions there. So what we'll do is we'll wrap this up, but Seth, I appreciate you coming on and I'm sure we'll have you on again anyway.

Seth Lenetsky40:10

Well, thanks so much for having me here. I appreciate it. And thanks to everyone asking questions. It's really cool to be able to talk to folks around the world and share what little I know.

James de Lacey40:10

I wouldn't say little, but it was a good chat.