Inside The Preparation Of Elite Amateur Boxers w/ Chris Gallagher (SSOF Ep 163)

Chris Gallagher2:12

So yeah it's an interesting system in India because there is that sort of national Olympic sports program that's supposed to sort of fund and direct everything. But then some of the sports like any country maybe they don't have a lot of money in certain federations depending on how successful they are that kind of thing. So there's a lot of kind of private charitable and kind of commercial support with bodies like that inspire institute of sport. So it's great because it helps give a lot of sort of facilities and knowledge and manpower and time and nutritional supplements to the athletes.

But it can also make things a bit messy because then you've just got lots of additional external partners sort of kind of wanting to have their finger in the pie as well. And so it's good but it creates challenges.

James de Lacey3:26

Oh for sure. So what was your exact role then with the Indian boxing team?

Chris Gallagher3:26

So for me I was like head of sports science and sports medicine. So there was a high performance director, there was a head boxing coach who obviously oversaw all the sort of technical coaching stuff and then I oversaw all the support stuff. So strength and conditioning, sport science, psychology, performance analysis. Yeah. All the sort of support services basically.

James de Lacey3:53

Awesome. Awesome. All right. Let's let's dive into it then. Overarching view I guess within amateur boxing. So you released you wrote this paper up I guess kind of sharing some normative data and I guess outlining how you guys kind of planned for major competitions and things like that. Let's just dive into kind of what you found from your time working at India boxing in terms of maybe physical development and maybe even I know you have a lot of normative data and then we can maybe even just go into that into kind of what you see as physical qualities or physical characteristics of elite amateur boxers.

Chris Gallagher4:26

Yeah, good question. Quite a bit going on there. I guess the interesting one for me coming into Indian amateur boxing is as I kind of mentioned before they had those sort of those private bodies and external partners who were sponsoring some of the sport and so one of the big challenges I guess was we had kind of quite a wide array of physical competencies basically.

So maybe like the athletes coming through that Inspire Institute of Sport where they had like a whole multi-disiplinary support team around them before they even kind of graduated to the national program. So they had strength and conditioning coaches, nutritionist everything. I mean to be honest it's one of the top facilities in the country and at times kind of had better equipment better facilities maybe even than we had in the national program.

So yeah, we had some athletes coming in sort of really really well developed in in that SNC piece. And with those sort of modern SNC ideas that I think they're becoming more and more prevalent in boxing and combat sports, but obviously there's still that old school habitual way of training that is prevalent in in the combat sports.

And then yeah maybe some of the other athletes we had coming from sort of quite rural areas and not very sort of affluent areas as is normal in a lot of sports and particularly in in boxing again. So I mean that that was a big eye opener for me actually. There were times we would not have a national camp on so I would leave Padiala I would leave the Olympic training center and maybe go and visit where some of the athletes were training at home.

So there's there's a small region in India or a small town called Bani that actually produces quite a lot of their sort of world medalists. I think their first Olympic medalist came from there. It's quite a famous region in India and going and visiting the athletes there and seeing their boxing ring sometimes was just a square drawn on a mud field.

They're all training at 4:00 a.m. because if they train in the day and it's getting up to 45° and massive humidity. And yeah, then obviously they don't have some kind of fancy strength and conditioning suite with all the latest cardiovascular and weight training and and all the tools and that kind of thing. So, yeah, we saw a big variety with the athletes in terms of where they were at.

I mean I sent that paper to to the Australian Strength and Conditioning Association like not long after the Paris Olympics. So, sort of obviously in preparation for this call, just went back and had a look at my own work, remind myself what I wrote. And one of the big ones that kind of jumps out at me, I guess, is if you read any of those older sort of research papers and things, it always talks about sort of like the low reactive strength qualities and the low level explosive power qualities in boxers compared to other combat sports and that kind of thing.

In the paper I wrote, that's not what the data shows there. But I did kind of specifically choose the guys who went on to represent India at world championships at Olympic games. So it is that very very elite population but that idea that boxers don't have well developed sort of qualities and reactive strength ability and that kind of thing I think is certainly not the case anymore.

And how much that is because of the elite population we were using or how much of that is a reflection of the change in SNC practices across the sport generally. For me in terms of amateur boxing I've only worked in India. Maybe yourself with your background across different combat sports different parts of the world you'll be able to tell me if that's the case or not but yeah I guess maybe it's that people are buying into and utilizing kind of modern SNC concepts a lot more in their training.

James de Lacey4:26

Do you think that maybe the more traditional methods of boxing training maybe play a role in that too like if you just think about how often maybe a jumping rope or even just the style of amateur boxing kind of bouncing around that is kind of what or maybe can explain part potentially of these higher reactive strength index scores in amateur boxes.

Chris Gallagher8:47

Yeah. Definitely that makes sense to me. It's a good argument for that. They're skipping nearly every day of the week in in a lot of cases. So yeah, there's a good logic behind that answer.

I mean, as I say, when I sort of looked back at the reference papers to support what I was writing and kind of do those initial phases, it was always the reference, boxes aren't well developed in this area. Boxes aren't well developed with explosive power.

The other question I had was with the previous research papers, were they then just not using such an elite level of athletes, if you like, then? Maybe that's why they didn't find those relationships that I—

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Chris Gallagher10:21

Yeah, yeah. There's so many variables, eh? If you're putting boxers maybe through drop jumps for these tests, how many of boxers have done box jumps or, sorry, drop jumps through their training, which is a skill in itself. And yeah, there's always a lot of variables. It's interesting to see kind of the different physical quads that pop up and what potentially is important in boxing.

James de Lacey10:38

And it would be cool to go through maybe some of your planning as well. We can always come back to some of the more physical quality stuff, but I think this will start to put at least into context as well what you're trying to develop and see through that. But within the annual plan, I mean, you guys have multiple competitions throughout the year. So how did you end up—I know it's a very long-winded general question because there's a lot of variables—but generally, how would you look to set up the strength conditioning alongside the boxing training?

Say we'll just call it quote unquote out of camp and in camp, just to make it easier, leading into some of these major competitions and maybe competitions that you didn't see as maybe as important that were just there that you had to do leading into bigger ones.

Chris Gallagher10:38

So I guess one advantage we had in India that I understand from speaking to some of the coaches I work with in India who'd come from other programs or gone on to other programs down in Australia: big advantage we had was we were able to have access to the athletes for large parts of the year. So the way the system is structured in India, you get selected for national camp and you have to come and report and spend time with us, whereas some of these other programs, I think they're just getting them for literally that final preparation camp before the major competition.

So yeah, a big advantage for us. We had so much contact time with the athletes and you could have them for two or three months leading into one of those competitions.

In terms of how we set things up, I mean, again, referencing back to the big disparity in what the athletes had when they weren't at national camp. So if we got guys in from that Inspire Institute of Sport, we knew they would have been following some kind of sensible S&C program and overall training program before they came to us, so we could have good confidence that they were coming with a reasonable level of fitness.

There were other athletes who would go back to their hometown, their home state. Depending on if it was a full break or if we wanted them to be doing training at home, we'd send them with a plan. But we didn't always know exactly what condition they were going to come back in.

So yeah, probably that first week or two of camp was just reintroduction to training. In terms of the conditioning, just some continuous running, just get them to start to build a bit of a base again. And I guess more just being cautious and not wanting to throw them into too many new things that they hadn't been doing in the recent weeks or months. Also knowing at the end of the day the head boxing coach, he's the boss. So we don't want to piss him off by doing something in the S&C that's then going to compromise what he's wanting to do in the technical tactical session.

So yeah, just playing it a bit smart, and then for that first week or two just doing almost that real kind of standard periodization. So long slow running and higher rep, low intensity stuff in the gym for probably a week or two. And then yeah, move into probably some general strength work where the focus is just building up those strength qualities.

So I guess that's the other thing with this paper: I went in there and we had a head coach from Argentina who'd been working in Sweden. He left early on. We then had some Indian head coaches for a while until the new Irish high performance director came in and brought sort of a European and again a greater focus on the modern S&C stuff. So we did have some challenges there in terms of how we were setting things up and things varied a little bit at times throughout that.

But certainly the longest periods was with that Irish high performance director, so Bernard Dunne, who was a professional world champion boxer himself and very successful as high performance director for the Irish boxing program. So yeah, working under Bernard, he was very supportive of doing the S&C what I would call properly. So, you know, focus on everything that we were expecting from modern S&C.

I mean, from his own career as a professional boxer, he got quite far and then sort of had a loss that I guess made him question what he was doing and where am I not maximizing. And that was when he said, okay, let's do this S&C thing properly. And then from then he kicked on and became a world champion. So because of that personal experience he had as an athlete, as a player, he was very supportive of the S&C stuff.

So yeah, after that initial foundational phase, then moving into more of a max strength thing. Again, having those guys from Ireland come in, one thing that they told us was what they were aware of working with that highly successful Irish boxing team. So I think in terms of the Olympics, amateur boxing is Ireland's best sport historically, it's their most successful sport.

And for the size of the country, they have won a lot of medals. And just what they told us was the guys and girls in Ireland are on average a lot stronger than the ones we were working with in India. So they were very supportive of pushing that max strength stuff.

Of course, alongside that we were still looking to develop qualities like power and having Olympic lifts, plio, various weighted jumps and that kind of thing. So early on in the program, maybe more of a technical focus on that stuff, and then as we progress towards competition, then obviously there's a bit of crossover, a bit of change in terms of our priorities there. So we're keeping the max strength stuff in, but it's not the main priority as we get closer to competition. We're looking more at maintenance and starting to focus more on those explosive jumps, medball throws, landmine punches, whatever it might be.

James de Lacey16:49

Did you have to almost group your two groups of athletes, the ones that came from Inspire that were maybe better trained versus the ones that maybe came from their different clubs and things like that? Did they have slightly different programs, or you just tried to bring them all up together from the beginning with that kind of, I guess you call it, buildup phase in the first couple of weeks?

Chris Gallagher17:11

Yeah. So another challenge we had in India—I mean, this relates to your point. So we were fortunate in that we had the athletes for long periods of the year, but a challenge we had was the system in India was that they would pick four athletes at every weight category to come to national camp. So for the Olympic weights, there were 12 for the women, 13 for the men, so that's 25 weight categories.

So if you've got four at every weight, that's 100 athletes. So yeah, the guys coming from Ireland or the coach who went on to work in Australia and looking at the number of athletes they're working with, which was maybe a third of that, there were big challenges there.

So perhaps that's something that we could have looked to have done, like you suggest. A smart thing to do, maybe be group those athletes differently depending on where they were coming from. But just the sheer logistical size of the group made that quite challenging. So I guess initially they'd probably come in and have that same two week introduction period, and maybe that was a slight step back or just not pushing on for those guys coming from those places. But even within that, we would maybe push them and expect more within the session they were doing.

But yeah, you make a good point. Being able to separate them out and change their programs based on that would have been the ideal way to do it, but just the coaching numbers compared to the sheer volume of athletes would have made that quite challenging.

James de Lacey18:51

Yeah, that's always tough when you got so many moving parts and players or athletes. Yeah, I've got you back now. It's just a mega lag going on, but we'll make it work.

I guess the follow-up question, because some of the strength stuff and the strength power stuff we can go a little deeper in a bit, but it'll be interesting to kind of go over the conditioning as well. So you mentioned first couple of weeks doing more low intensity steady state stuff, kind of just getting them reacclimated to training. How does that look then? How does the conditioning look going into maybe through this out of camp and then leading into competition?

And then how does that maybe change or not change at all, or I guess reflect what is happening within technical tactical training? Depending on the coach, if they're doing a lot of sparring, etc. So basically just how's conditioning kind of go through within this leadup to competition?

Chris Gallagher19:46

Yeah, so kind of throughout most of the year the head coach would sort of give us two conditioning sessions each week, one early on in the week, one later in the week. This was probably one of the areas I guess where the coach liked to have a little bit more input and a little bit more say.

I think I do like kind of blocks where we're working on specific qualities, and if you're only getting two sessions a week, if we only kind of do one session dedicated to sort of one adaptation, are we getting enough frequency of stimulus to drive the adaptation that we want? So I kind of pushed to sort of have two kind of similar sessions working on whatever it was at that phase. If it was sort of longer intervals or, I mean, that's what we would do. We would do kind of longer intervals progressing into shorter intervals progressing into kind of sprint work in a very basic sense.

But then the head coach kind of felt quite strongly that boxers and combat athletes get bored easily and we need to give them more variety in the running, and so there was a bit of compromise there. We tried to find sort of different sessions that achieved similar outcomes. I don't know how frequently this is used by others in combat sports. I do kind of quite like those Norwegian style of intervals away from the competition phase when we're just sort of trying to build a base of fitness.

And again, to do that, we're kind of zone two work, like we need them to be running for hours, whereas we know we can get them a sort of 30 minute interval session, kind of 3 to 5 minutes on, two or 3 minutes off, four of those, we're going to get them pretty fit with that kind of running.

But yeah, like I say, the coach didn't want us sort of hammering that twice a week for too long. So we would maybe do one session like that, and then he was quite a big fan of things like 400 m, 800 m, 1200 m, again with sort of similar work to rest ratio. So the work period is equal to or longer than that rest period, and ultimately just trying to find a way where we could kind of get similar adaptations and complement what was going on with the boxing training at that time.

And then yeah, kind of within that usual sort of periodization. So going from longer, higher volume, lower intensity, relatively speaking, work and progressing towards towards that higher intensity stuff. So yeah, as we're approaching competition pretty much like maximal sprints with full rest, or, yeah, I don't want to give the wrong idea that I'm completely anti sort of the old style combat training.

So like some of the stuff that the head coach did introduce, for example, so again in that like max sprint phase we'd maybe do like 15 or 20 minutes of a sort of 5 second, 7 second max sprint on the minute and then rest the rest of the minute. And I found that that worked quite well as well, sort of coming in towards that competition phase where we weren't overly fatiguing the athletes, but we were still developing some physical fitness qualities and allowing the coach then to really be able to prioritize and focus on that technical work.

I think the other thing that's made me interested in that paper that again the coaches from Ireland brought to us, which I hadn't seen before, but once they presented it, I thought was quite logical. They were a big fan of doing 3 x 800 m with 90 second rest. And so if you do each of those 800 m, the really really fit athletes like some of the lighter males, they might be doing that in about 2 minutes 30, 2 minutes 40. Some of the heavier athletes they're doing about 3 minutes. So you're looking at sort of three times 3 minutes work with 90 seconds rest.

And what they found with the guys in Ireland was the performance, the ranking in that test, they found kind of correlated really quite highly with their athletes' performance in the ring and the guys who were going on and being successful and winning medals. And so during my time in India, that was something we sort of started doing in that last year or so. But I feel like we needed more time to get more data and really kind of be able to draw the correlations that they did.

But yeah, I like that as a test. And again, if I hadn't sort of been introduced to that from someone who's more of a pure boxing background rather than a sort of modern sport science S&C background, I wouldn't have come across that. So yeah, I like that one.

James de Lacey24:42

That's a nice session for people, or boxers listening to this, to kind of keep monitoring themselves too, just doing that 3 by 800. And even if, I mean, if you look at like muscle oxygenation data, it would be very similar. Like you're doing a boxing round, say, of 3 minutes, you're basically just like leveling out for close to 3 minutes, which is going to be very similar to probably what you're going to see in like a 2 to 3 minute 800 meter run. In that instance you're probably getting very similar, I guess, matching physiology when you're talking about doing those versus actually boxing as well.

So a couple of good things to do in there with people's training, but you obviously mentioned about kind of monitoring testing with that. So what else would you be doing with these boxers to kind of, I guess, profile them or see where they're at or maybe influence your programming?

Chris Gallagher25:15

So the Sports Authority India, they were really keen on sort of set tests that they did across all the sports, and they wanted to push for us to do V02 max test. But again, just like the logistics of our program, trying to put 100 athletes through a V02 max test would take us weeks.

So yeah, we preferred just to do a one and a half kilometer time trial, calculate MAS. Then we can use that MAS number for prescription for some of our running sessions as well. If we want to, we can kind of convert that to an approximate V02 max. So yeah, we just felt that was like a better use of our time.

So yeah, in terms of the testing monitoring generally, we wanted to do things that we didn't have to kind of sort of stop and say, 'Okay, we're going to conflict with the head coach's training program because we're going to have these set testing days.' We would just try and build it into the training.

So yeah, monitoring loads lifted in the gym, monitoring bar speeds with the Gym Aware. You were saying before about maybe a lot of boxers hadn't been sort of exposed to doing drop jumps properly. So we brought in Hawkin Dynamics dual force plates, and we were doing sort of countermovement jumps. So at the end of every gym warm-up, the last thing we would do: countermovement jump. So they're doing something explosive activating the session, but also at the same time we can get that countermovement jump data.

We can use that for readiness and monitoring and see if the athletes are kind of accommodating the training load. So obviously if we see the countermovement jump numbers are down, we're not going to sort of panic and tell the coach we need to stop the session, but it's just another little bit of data that we can use maybe alongside subjective measures, talking to the athlete, what people are observing, those kind of things.

And then the same in those S&C sessions, maybe if we were doing complex training and we were doing like a squat and a depth jump or something, then we can just get them to do the depth jump on the force plate. And then again, we're not having to find extra time or special sessions to go and do testing. We're just collecting and monitoring data based off of training we were doing anyway.

Same with the running, trying to sort of monitor distances if we were doing, I mean, again, that sort of Norwegian running training, the 4 x 4 minutes or whatever, trying to get an assessment of, okay, how far are they running in each rep. So yeah, all the testing and monitoring, well, not all, a lot of the testing and monitoring was done that kind of way.

James de Lacey25:36

Yeah, I like that approach because it's just not invasive and you can actually collect regular data versus having everyone freak out every four, eight weeks and trying to fit something in. Let's start a couple of questions from that. Let's start with the MAS testing and running. Did you have like a maybe a progression from the MAS running that you quite liked from that test?

Chris Gallagher25:36

In all honesty, because of that aforementioned thing with the boxing coach, the head coach where he liked to kind of mix up the conditioning training as much as possible, we didn't always get periods where we could do that. I mean, maybe if we were doing...

Yeah, like three or four minute intervals we were maybe hedging our bets and starting off at somewhere around 90% of MAS and then each session just eaking it up a little bit, 92, 95, that kind of thing. But yeah, just again the nature and the logistics of our program that the head coach wanted more variety and variability in the running.

I do see his point of view from the perspective of the engagement and the motivation of the athletes. If we told the athletes you've got 4x4 minutes coming up they're like "for [expletive] sake," like they didn't like those sessions. So if you could dress it up in slightly different ways and instead of telling them you're doing 4x4 minutes, let's say you're doing one of these 800, 1200 repetitions, you can actually end up with similar volume and similar challenge physically, but just because it's a little bit varied and presented a little bit in a different way they don't really realize they're doing a very similar session.

James de Lacey28:35

No, fair enough. And you mentioned obviously you got the force plates out. So, it'll be interesting to know if there were certain metrics in the jump data that you would look or track, or was it mainly just jump height that you're looking at?

Chris Gallagher29:54

We did start off looking at jump height as the easy one, the obvious one. It makes a lot of sense to the athletes. Yeah, we did sort of try and get a bit more intelligent with what we were doing there and looking at some of the other measures and how much force per body weight they were creating at takeoff and that kind of thing. Because we know if you just look at jump height that's not telling you the whole story.

I mean like I said, for some of those explosive power kind of measures some of the guys and girls we were working with were a lot more impressive than previously suggested in the data. And there's one guy, Nishant Dev, who's turned pro actually, he's had three pro fights and really explosive guy. In terms of that jump height he was jumping well over 40 cm but he was doing it with a tiny little counter movement because he's just such a neurally fast explosive guy.

And then there was another bloke in the team who was getting similar jump heights but needing a really big counter movement, which obviously, if you want that knockout punch in boxing or if you don't want your opponent to see your punch coming, if you can do it with minimal wind up and really deliver a lot of force, a lot of impact, that's obviously ideally what you want.

So we did start off looking at that jump height but yeah sort of trying to look at the other metrics and looking at their jump strategy if you like. And yeah trying to see okay how are they creating, how are they producing that force, because yeah if you can do it with a small counter movement or a small wind up if you will then obviously that's going to be a lot more impactful on the sporting field.

James de Lacey29:54

Did that influence their training at all? Maybe like for example those two different profiles of jumpers in boxing, does that change anything within your program or even just maybe even looking forward, even if let's say you just said like it was just like one person, you had like 100 athletes, but say like maybe going forward would that be something that you would look to potentially train differently, or is it more of a fact that hey if we're just doing our basic strength power stuff anyway it's just going to come right?

Chris Gallagher32:12

Yeah, so I mean I guess we tried to be all-encompassing in terms of our S&C. So yeah, we did try and include things that were working on maximal strength, things that were working on very explosive qualities. I kind of referenced this again in the paper, but like the nature of the weekly structure we had for most of the year we got two gym strength sessions, two running sessions and there wasn't opportunity to sort of run like pure plyometric sessions. It would have been, one we just wouldn't have been given the time and even if we were logistically it would have been very difficult to do.

So we were sort of micro dosing that stuff either in the warm-ups for those running sessions or the gym sessions or doing things like complex pairs like heavy compound exercise and then coming and doing some of that explosive stuff. So we were trying to sort of address it all round. And then yeah like you say the ideal situation would be very much to sort of program for the athletes according to what they needed.

So yeah the other guy I mentioned who could produce a good jump height but he really needed quite a big relatively slower counter movement to do that, he certainly enjoyed doing the heavy stuff in the gym and sometimes it was just trying to convince him that, yeah, not necessarily always loading the bar as heavy as you can and chasing the big numbers, maybe that's not what you need.

Conversely, the guy I mentioned, Nishant, who's a real powerful bloke, he really didn't enjoy the heavy S&C stuff in the gym and it was a constant battle with him sometimes sort of trying to convince him that a certain amount of that was useful, was necessary. He was quite heavily influenced in his formative years by a coach who'd since left India and gone back to the US and it's who he's training with now as a pro, but that guy was very against a lot of the heavy heavy lifting and strength stuff and that kind of thing. So yeah, that was an interesting challenge.

James de Lacey34:22

I was just going to say do you think a guy like that, like just thinking like just general like holistically, like you see it often when you start working professional sports, like guys like that that are just absolute freaks but in the gym they just they hate lifting, they hate lifting, whatever it is. Do you think a guy like that anyway, yes, we know some of the positive things that come from just general heavy strength training, but do you think a guy like that even really needs, I'm not going to say needs, I don't know the right way to do it to say it, but basically like do you think it would be that detrimental to a guy like that if they didn't lift throughout the career and you just gave them more their fast stuff or things that make them feel good or maybe just focus more on the conditioning side.

If you're doing things like I don't know sprint work, bike sprint stuff, it's still strength training. It's just not obviously the very heavy general stuff. So like it's just something I often think about like I don't know, what's your opinion on that as well. If someone like that you would really try and push to be like hey you really got to squat heavy, or if it's something you're like hey he's got the qualities maybe we just try to keep him I don't know healthy and doing the things that are working.

Chris Gallagher35:25

Yeah. No. Yeah. So, completely agree with everything you said there and I guess when I say like trying to get him to sort of squat or bench heavy or whatever, like everything is relative. So, yeah, like he was never going to be putting up the numbers that some of the other guys were.

And yeah, we would sort of, there'd be a bit of bargaining with him and sort of agreeing on small targets and okay, like by the end of this block, let's just get to there because head coach is going to bust your balls less. He's going to bust my balls less. It's not, and I don't think we're pushing it to the point where it's going to be sort of detrimental almost to him if we're heavily focusing on this stuff, because like you say, if he's already got those explosive qualities, which I think a lot of the times that's the reason we're doing the strength work, right, is not for the strength work really, but for how it feeds into all those other qualities that they want to express in the ring in this case or on the field.

I mean just for a bit of context again as well, so in terms of the selection policy in India, so like I say we would have four athletes at every weight category at camp. When I first came in they just used to basically have some sparring, have some friendly competition and decide based off of that who would get picked.

When the new high performance director came in, he wanted to make it more objective and also if you do it that way and the better boxer has a bad day, loses that bout, you select someone else who's maybe not got a chance of winning an Olympic medal and you didn't pick the other guy because he slept bad the night before or he'd been ill or whatever.

So they moved to this selection policy over a couple of weeks where they would of course still have sparring and competition and that would be the primary driver, but they would assess the athlete on everything over those couple of weeks.

And as part of that, there was sort of physical assessments. So if he wasn't pushing himself in some of those physical areas and then scored quite poorly, that might end up being the difference between him getting selected or not. And maybe that's not right or wrong, but out with those freak athlete situations, I think there is definitely a place for having those physical qualities as part of the assessment and they weren't the number one driver.

It was obviously the boxing technical tactical stuff. It was particularly the sparring sessions against the guys in your weight category. But if it was super close, but then one guy is outperforming the other considerably in one of those lesser areas like the S&C stuff, that might be the difference between you getting selected to go to the World Championships and not.

James de Lacey35:25

Yeah, interesting. I was going to say, what's your take on, I know you said it's not like a main driver, what's your take on including physical assessments in a I guess technical sport selection process? Do you, maybe I won't frame it that, I'll just frame it as that but what's your take on that? Do you think it holds a lot of value to do that versus just purely going on skills?

Chris Gallagher38:39

Yeah, I mean it's a good question and as I said, by far and away the most important thing, off the top of my head I forget exactly what weighting was given to the different sections, but by far and away the vast majority of it was pretty much the sparring session. Then it was the other technical tactical sessions. Then it was looking at the other qualities, and I think even including stuff from psychology and adherence to the nutritional interventions or whatever it was.

So I think the idea was twofold here. One, sort of to try and find the best boxer and the best athlete to represent the country, but also it's a way of driving standards and behaviors across the program. Because if they know, okay, I'm going to be getting assessed on my attitude and my approach to my training, am I turning up on time? Am I warming up properly? Am I cooling down properly? Am I listening to the advice from the physios and utilizing all the recovery methods and everything that they want me to do?

So I could see the odd situation where you might end up perhaps not picking the best athlete on occasion, because maybe there's just someone who's just technically [expletive] hot and that's all you should choose. But I guess there is maybe a bigger, wider sort of scale benefit to the overall boxing program in that country and creating the right culture and developing the right kind of athletes and people that you want just to push the whole program forwards.

And yeah, so you might end up with the odd selection here and there where you're like, was that the best choice individually? But the longer-term impact on the culture and the behavior of the athletes across the entire camp might be worth that small sacrifice maybe.

James de Lacey40:24

That's actually a really good point about driving behavior throughout the entire organization. What might be interesting as well is obviously you've worked in a [expletive] ton of sports. I think squash was one you worked in previously as well. It would be interesting to know, are there things that you've taken from these different sports and maybe brought into your training process for say boxing and even where you are now with I think it's track and field athletics? Are there stuff from these sports that you kind of brought across that have helped you develop some of your program or at least influence some of it?

Chris Gallagher40:56

Yeah, good question. I mean, I'm definitely a big believer in that. And I know in the UK, that's where I'm from obviously, I think if you haven't worked in football in the past, then you might have 30 years of experience in sport all around the world, all different sports, but if you're not a football guy, you're not getting that football job. I think rugby is similar in the UK, but—

James de Lacey41:20

I think it's the same in most countries with their big sports.

Chris Gallagher41:24

Well, I'm obviously biased because I have gone and done all those different sports, but I do think there's a big advantage to having seen different things, different coaches, different approaches. Just a small one that's popped into my head now, I guess. So yeah, a couple of times, so as the SNC support staff, we would get almost full control over four sessions a week. So the boxers would probably do somewhere around 10, 11 sessions a week. Four of them, two running, two gym. So that's almost 40% of the program that we're getting to impact and deliver on.

And yeah, so for example, if we were doing running sessions with the boxers, then taking some of the ideas from track and field, and obviously you don't run in boxing. Hopefully you're not running across the ring away from your opponent, but when we're doing those track and field sessions, can we teach them to move properly and create the right shapes and do all the mobility, do all the warm-up stuff properly?

Can we look at how they're running, how they're impacting the floor, what their positions are, and that's not necessarily going to directly influence what's going on in the ring, but in any individual area, if we can maximize what they're doing, they're going to get more out of that session, which should theoretically transfer into them as an athlete and what they're doing in the ring. So yeah, maybe that would be an example.

I just think years and years of experience of seeing different coaches from different backgrounds, different cultures, different biases on the way things should be done. You see whether they were big into volume and endurance and that kind of thing, or coaches who were more focused on quality and technical execution and doing things with intensity. So yeah, I just think being across lots and lots of different programs, different cultures, different cultures not just like for example working in India or China or the UK, but different cultures within sports. So the culture of a combat sport versus a racket sport versus athletics.

So I just think all those experiences working with different people and knowing how to interact with different people. Yeah, I think it's really beneficial then when you move into different sports and different people and being able to find some way to connect or influence or talk to different people. I think it's been really helpful.

James de Lacey44:03

Yeah, for sure. What might be interesting as well is, so you have your track and field guys now. Well, we know the principles of training for sport kind of transcend all sports, but there's always little nuances and things like that. So how does training differ or even not differ between what you were doing with the boxers in India versus what you have now currently in track and field?

Chris Gallagher44:24

Yeah, another good question. So theoretically here, I'm predominantly working with the sprinters and the horizontal jumps. So their sport's very much one and done in a lot of ways. They do a rep and then they have a nice long rest and wait for the next one. So that's theoretically, but then in practice, I've also done work with the throwers, the big heavy guys. At the moment, I'm helping out with the middle distance guys. So yeah, within the sport here where it's lots of little individual sports within track and field really, I'm seeing different things, different approaches here.

I guess maybe a big difference, I mean if I focus on the groups I'm supposed to be working with. So the sprints and the jumps, they're quite nice soft sports compared to the combat sports guys who have to hurt in lots of ways. And I don't even mean just getting punched in the face, but yeah, some of the places they have to go with that running training or with the circuit training and different things, that's something that the track and field boys, they think it's hard sometimes and they're building up lactate, they like to tell me, but their training is quite soft and easy compared to the boxers sometimes. And I don't mean that dismissively. It's just they're training for very different things. So yeah—

James de Lacey44:24

Is there anything, because I can imagine, I guess if we go sprinting to boxing in terms of some of the maybe physical even structural qualities, I mean they need very similar things, right? Obviously sprinting, you need to be on and off the ground relatively quickly. Amateur boxing has a lot of guys are very reactive because of that same principle. How much time then is spent trying to develop that when I guess both these sports have such high volumes of it as part of the sport?

Because at some point you could potentially go too far. I don't know what that is or if you can even reach that point, but is that something in the back of your mind? Is that something that maybe you think about when you're looking at trying to develop some of these—

Chris Gallagher46:40

Yeah. So I guess I'm going to go more into the athletic side here, which I don't know how interesting that would be for your viewers, but so like for example—

James de Lacey46:47

Go for it. We talk all sorts of different sports on here.

Chris Gallagher46:50

The sprints coach I work with now, a guy called Paul Goris, he was the sort of the driving force behind South Africa becoming competitive as a relay team. So he was sort of responsible for setting that up and taking them from a country who didn't really do anything in the relay to winning multiple international medals and really competing with the Americans. And he's very much a low volume, high intensity, just quality work, get the few quality reps done you need and then rest as much as possible. And then even that kind of transfers over into sort of how he sees things in the gym.

So I worked in athletics previously in Hong Kong 2014 to 2018, and again, sort of predominantly was sprinters, jumpers, that kind of thing. We had a long jump boy there who was pretty good. So he jumped over 8 meters and he ran 10.3, which for a long jumper is pretty decent. It's comparable to some of the sprint specialists I'm working with in Saudi right now. Hopefully we're going to push more of them down to that low tens and maybe even below.

But yes, so when I was in that program in Hong Kong, the head coach there, he had a bit more of a different philosophy. So we had a bit more volume in the gym. So not, I don't want the wrong idea, it wasn't a whole high volume program, but just compared to how Paul sees things. And then also we were maybe doing a bit more of that explosive work in the gym with that boy in Hong Kong and some of the athletes there. And then we don't really do much at all of that with Paul.

And that's I guess his philosophy is what you were alluding to there, where what they're doing on the track is such high intensity and so neural driven and so fatiguing for the central nervous system. So then on the gym days, he doesn't want to go and hit that again because he doesn't want to dampen that too much if they've got another sort of quality session on the track coming up in a couple of days.

And then sort of alongside that when I was in Hong Kong, got to spend a little bit of time and get to know Randy Huntington who coached the long jump world record holder and had massive success in China with particularly their long jump program, but various other events. And if you look at how Randy sets up his gym program, he's very much about achieving power outcomes in the gym and a lot of fast stuff and a lot of things that people might see being like complex training or in some respects kind of similar to French contrast and that kind of thing. So he would do an awful lot of that work in the gym.

So yeah, I mean a bit like I've kind of referenced throughout this conversation, but there were a lot of compromises at different times in India in terms of what we did with the SNC and that, because the head coach drives the program and we're there to support him. And so there were things that we maybe did because he wanted to or they were a little bit different to how I wanted to do them based on what I thought the science said and that kind of thing, but that's the nature of working in the field. And so then again with those three different examples in athletics—

And you know, all three of those guys I think have coached sub-10-second 100-meter sprinters. So yeah, they've all kind of produced like that highest level performance in athletics. You know, some of them even more than others, but yeah, they all know how to do that, but they achieve it in quite different ways sometimes.

James de Lacey49:59

Yeah, it's always always interesting when different approaches create similar outcomes. And I always wonder if it's if it's the athlete is just genetically there and is despite the training, or if maybe that training just matched that particular athlete, or you know, it's just so many damn variables. It's it's hard to, it's basically impossible to really nail it down.

But it does give for people who maybe aren't in the professional sporting world, it does give a look into like what you see on social media and stuff and what maybe is told is optimal training all the time, very rarely happens at the highest level because of so much that goes on and different ways of doing things.

Chris Gallagher51:06

Yeah, no, 100%. I mean, we've just had the World Athletics Champs in Tokyo, and I'm sure if you look at that 100 meter, 200 meter line, the men or women, you know, eight different athletes and probably, you know, eight or if not six or seven different ways of getting there. And yeah, in a lot of cases with things like like 100 meters, yeah, they they were probably going to get there whatever they did.

I think you're right. You know, maybe there is a big element of that they got there on their talent and you know, not just their genetics, the hard work and that as well. I guess with these coaches, maybe it's just about helping them get there safely, get there healthy, get there in the most efficient way possible because you do see examples, and they've had this with boxers in India, where they wanted to drive their own program.

You know, they'd done things a certain way in the past or with certain people and so they wanted to have a big big influence on what they were doing, and doesn't always produce the best results.

So yeah, I think you have a good point that a lot of those athletes, they're going to maybe reach that level, whatever kind of program, because that's how gifted they are. But there's definitely people who get in their own ways sometimes and cost themselves opportunities because they weren't willing to be guided by the right people perhaps.

James de Lacey51:27

How do you address that with athletes that are wanting to come in and do a lot of their own stuff? There's obviously always some compromise you have to give, but you know, what are the things that you would be willing to compromise on and what were some of the things that you wouldn't?

Chris Gallagher52:38

Yeah, good question. Again, I'm trying to think of a good scenario for where I would and where, cuz you know if I think back to that example in India that that was quite a tricky one. I mean, I saw similar things with swimming in China, where in some of these countries where they haven't had a lot of particularly Olympic medal success, if they do have an athlete who's you know at or close to that level or already achieved that, they're like rock stars honestly.

And they have so much power, like because their nation has been starved of this level of success and they get such a level of fame that even the sort of the administrators and the very highest people within the sporting federation can't really influence them, and they sort of almost become a law unto themselves.

So what would be what would be negotiable and what would be non-negotiable with me? I mean, I guess we know with anything in life when you're trying to help develop someone and grow someone, and this doesn't have to be in a sporting context but just in anything, if the person's had input into what they're doing, you know, so it's something that they're part of that process and it's not something that's being done to them, you get so much more buy-in.

So yeah, I've had stuff with athletes where maybe you can build time into sessions, whether it's, you know, they go through the group warm-up with you and then they get five, ten minutes to do their own thing in that warm-up, and then they feel like they've had some input, some choice over what they're doing. And as long as they're not doing anything that's like, you know, detrimental or potentially harmful or injurious.

And then you know, even within the sessions as well, you can write out a basic strength training template where maybe they start off with some kind of explosive lift, some kind of heavy bilateral lift, whether it's a squat or a hinge, a single leg, a push, and a pull. And then within that you can maybe kind of give them the choice of, like, okay, which, you know, these are the exercises that fit into that category, which one do you want to do?

And then that's a way to kind of compromise and give them that buy-in and feel like they've had some input, but without them kind of getting away from the sort of the goals and the outcomes that you're looking to achieve.

James de Lacey55:10

Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point on athlete autonomy as well. And I mean, obviously it doesn't work at all all levels to do something like that, but you know, at those levels it definitely does, and when you have that with athletes you can kind of collaborate more on on things, which is, which is, it's always a good thing in the end.

And I think people see, I think just because of the way coaching is portrayed, it's portrayed as such like a authoritar—I can't even say the word—authoritative, like almost like dictatorship with how it's kind of portrayed. Some countries it's like that just because of their, as you mentioned, different cultures, different countries, right, like with the communist background and stuff, it can be like that. But yeah, some of the most successful teams in the world have more athlete-driven versus coach telling people what to do.

Chris Gallagher55:55

So a lot of my career has been in Asia, and you know, I don't want to generalize a whole continent, so I'm just talking about my experience. But you know, quite a few of those countries I've been in in Asia, that is very much that sort of didactic, authoritarian kind of relationship, where you know, the coach tells you what to do and you do it, to the point that sometimes it can be quite detrimental.

So when I was in China with the swimming team, I was working with a guy who had already won an Olympic medal at that point, was already a multiple-time world champion. We were leading into the World Championships that year. He'd been in America training with a coach who was very much, again, like low volume, high quality, speed-based stuff, which is not the main paradigm in swimming. Like, it's growing, but it's certainly against the grain. So we went and did that because they thought this expert coach, David Marsh, can really help develop him for the World Championships.

And then the last couple of weeks, we came to Beijing for the preparation camp before the Worlds. The Chinese coaches panicked because normally we do all this volume and we've not been doing that volume. So they ramped the volume up in that two-week taper period, and the athlete, I say Olympic medalist, world champion, like, this isn't good for me.

It's hurting me. And I'm like, you need to tell your coach, you're not you know, you're not 16. You've achieved more than he ever did as a swimmer. You're an Olympic medalist, you're a world champion. Like, you know this isn't right, you need—and he's like, no, no, no, I can't do that. Like, that information doesn't go back.

And I'm just like, you know, again, in that sort of communist, didactic system, like, it would have probably killed me off if I tried to have that conversation for him. Whereas you know, if I was in maybe you know a Western program, maybe I would have just had a quiet word and just said, look, coach, you know, I'm not saying the athlete's right, but this is the feedback he's given me.

Maybe you need to have a conversation with him. And you know, if he's wrong, then you explain it, whatever, trying you know a diplomatic way. But just in that system I was like, this is a car crash that you know, I can't stop unfolding. And you know, it's it's a real shame that you know, a senior, mature athlete didn't feel like he could have that conversation. So yeah.

James de Lacey58:13

What what what happened at the Worlds then?

Chris Gallagher58:15

Yeah, terrible, terrible, massively underperformed, didn't medal for the first time in years, like he'd been medaling at all the majors for the last few Worlds and Olympics. And yeah.

James de Lacey58:27

Was he blamed for it too?

Chris Gallagher58:33

Do you know, I'm I'm not, not that I'm aware of, to be fair. But you know, a lot of those conversations sometimes are happening in in Mandarin, and you know, I had started trying to learn, but I was nowhere near proficient. So yeah, possibly, but not that I was aware of.

James de Lacey58:53

Yeah, some there's some sad stories like that. It's it's unfortunate that that stuff like that happens, but yeah, I mean, that's that's sport around the world.

This this has been an awesome chat, Chris, and hearing some of these stories. Hopefully the listeners also enjoyed that too. But where can they find and follow you, keep up with what you're doing?

Chris Gallagher58:53

Perfect.

James de Lacey58:53

I'll link those up in the description too, for anyone who wants to drop you a follow or drop you a message or anything like that. But I appreciate you coming on and sharing.