Bullsh*t Fascia Training & Agile Periodization For Fighters w/ William Wayland (SSOF Ep 142)

William Wayland2:38

Yeah, I'm still working with a few jiu-jitsu guys and some MMA guys. So I'm still involved in combat sport. That's kind of where my start was. Being Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt and all the rest of it, it's where my heart and soul kind of lives.

So I'm still working with Arnold Allen. Working with less UFC fighters now. A few have retired and other things. But I've had a decade long relationship with Arnold for instance, still working with him. Still working with a lot of jiu-jitsu guys at sort of all levels from black down to sort of blue belt. So still dabbling in that.

But obviously I'm in a position now where I can be sort of very selective about who I choose to work with and picky about the clients, the ones that I know that are really going to make the most of the coaching rather than sort of fair weather clients that will sort of come and go. I'm interested in guys who are interested in long-term athletic development.

So yeah, still involved in MMA. That's one of my passions. So it's not like I've gone, even though golf is kind of my bread and butter now, and that's kind of where I've been able to expand my niche. And I like that split between combat sports and golf. It's a good place to occupy.

James de Lacey3:52

Yeah, I actually we might as well start there as well. There are obviously some similarities both being kind of rotational based sports. So it'd be interesting to know maybe kind of what you've learned and applied maybe from fighting over to golf and even vice versa, maybe what you've taken from golf and brought back into the fighting world.

William Wayland4:06

Yeah. The one, the big comparative I always make between them is that while they're rotational power sports in a sense, obviously the skills involved there are very different. But the general way these guys train is that golf training is, how can I put it delicately, but it's a lot of silliness but a lot of intent but not a lot of intensity. Whereas MMA seems to vary to a lot of silliness but a lot of intensity.

So in the fact that both quite often employ questionable training approaches. On the whole it's getting better, both sports are getting better. But MMA guys like quite often we see them indulging quite silly methodologies as it comes towards approaching their training. Golfers guilty of the same thing, but the intensity is completely different. So yeah, that's kind of about as close as they get.

But in terms of sort of ground forces, rotational power, that type of stuff, there are some common analogies in it. I'm sure if you were to take a golfer, a good golfer, and teach him to throw a decent overhand right, he'd probably be pretty good at it with a bit of practice. The ground forces and the use of slings and rotational power is not dissimilar.

I'm sure there are probably some fighters, if they're not too dinged up, who could probably take up golf and be pretty good at it as well. That sort of top quarter strength out of a sort of semi-flex position, the type of power these guys produce, especially the guys who I work with, a lot of the golfers, they're very powerful.

Their club hit speeds, med ball throws, you can see it in the way they move and the way they throw, the way they project ballistics. You can see, oh, if we were to teach this guy to punch, he probably had to hit pretty hard.

And some of the sort of top end peaking modalities are very similar. A lot of jump work, a lot of ballistics, a lot of throwing. So there's a similarity in that. If you were to see me peaking, say, one of my long drive guys, you didn't know what sport he played, you might turn around and go, that guy must be in a striking sport or something because we're doing a lot of similar top end modalities.

So you'll see a lot of sort of push press jerks, single arm pressing, med ball throws, a lot of med ball throws, slams throws, sort of different variations, then a lot of jump variations, jump squats, barbell jumps, trap bar jumps, staggered work, things like that. So yeah, if you were to divorce the two and take a look at not knowing what sport they're playing, yeah, there would be some definite crossover between the two.

James de Lacey6:41

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I love that. And you mentioned a few things in there like around slings and I know you've done a lot of, you've done a few posts on this idea of fascia training going taken too far. And I really like the term you called, you called it performative training, which is a really good way of putting it.

It'd be interesting, let's maybe just start, let's go there then we can go down some of the actual more nuances of the actual training. This idea of performative training. I did a reel the other day. I've actually still got, I basically did a screen record on my YouTube channel on functional patterns and I get hate comments every day on that still and it's just, it's been like six months. We see maybe just go down the road of this idea of performative training, maybe for the audience what that even is and then maybe why it's rearing its head so much.

William Wayland8:29

So there's this longstanding dichotomy in training between people's perception of what appropriate sport specific training is. And there's this dichotomy between what's appropriate for sport and what's not appropriate for sport. And there's a sort of point at which a lot of athletes run out of road when it comes to general preparatory methods.

So the question then becomes well what specific development exercises do we do? What does that look like? And for some it's going to be performing movements in a way that visually perhaps looks very similar to the sport we're playing. But this is kind of sort of a mimicry of a sort.

And what happens is you end up with loaded sport skills that are often performed at tensions or lengths that are inappropriate. You're actually teaching perhaps inappropriate mechanics or inappropriate approaches. Which is why a lot of the fascial training we see is inappropriate in that it's not ballistic.

It's too slow. And you talk about trying to train fascial slings out of disadvantaged positions at speeds that are not sports appropriate. It doesn't make any sense. The positioning might be right, but the execution speeds will be wrong.

And you've got to remember that fascia only deforms under really either extremely high forces applied very rapidly. We had this debate about fascia in the physio world for a long time. People talking about doing soft tissue work, right? And being able to manipulate fascia. And then it turned out actually I can't remember what the number is but the amount of pressure it requires pounds per square inch to actually deform fascia would break your bones before the fascia deforms.

And this is where if you actually dig into it fascial training only occurs—I would make the argument obviously the fascia is quasi active the entire time we're training. You can't escape that. It's part of the phenomenology of physical training. You can't divorce fascia, you can't take it away.

But to really get fascia to do its job in terms of like the way it stretches and deforms, extremely rapid ballistic movements are going to be what actually gets it to do its job in terms of giving you that sling effect. We know that fascia maybe has a sort of co-contractility. So it does have some contractile quality to it. It's not a dead tissue. It doesn't do nothing. It definitely does something.

But I believe that the conditions that has to occur have to be pretty extreme which is why plyometrics technically if you think about it is a form of fascial training as well. Ballistic training is technically—but then you can make the if you're going to get really big picture all training is technically fascial training in a sense. And this is where people get very upset and I think what happens is people get very reductive right and they try and perhaps isolate that out and that causes problems because you can't really divorce the two things because when you start making an argument for fascia training you're being reductive.

It's like I've said this before it's like imagining trying to say that energy systems training just training I don't know short sprints alone will somehow improve the entire system. We know that's not true. We know that to really optimize short sprint training the other energy systems need to be working sort of at a decent capacity as well.

There's no free ride. You can't just do sprints and expect everything else to improve. In the same way people seem to think oh if I do fascial training that's the key to athletic performance. Let's be honest, it's not just Naudi.

I've seen the guy talk about was it the Hyperarch guy? I can't remember what the Chinese female Chinese MMA fighter—the Hyperarch guy was claiming that merely training this fascia of the lower limb, particularly the ankle and foot, was the game changer for MMA.

And then this guy was marketing solely based on that. So it's not just Naudi. There are other guys who are doing fascial training, but just on in terms of Naudi, some of the stuff he does isn't wholly untrue.

And that's part of the problem is because there's an imbedment of some half-truths and then a little bit of marketing on his part. But he isn't holistic in my opinion in that he trashes everything. Anything that isn't what he does is garbage as far as he's concerned which is intentional because it's smart marketing because it pisses everybody off and any kind of attention is good attention right so the idea is to irk as many people as possible from a marketing standpoint. I can't fault the guy that's very clever because he just gets everybody's backs up kind of like Joel Seedman as well the same trick.

The idea is engagement bait. The idea is audience to capture and trying to get as many eyeballs on what it is that you're doing as possible. And then there are people who will doubt what they're doing, perhaps look for a path. I know plenty of ex powerlifters who are dinged up looking for a way out of what it is they're doing.

But I think the trick is now he pulls at extremes. He was attacking Olympic lifting recently, which upset a lot of people because obviously for a long time Olympic lifting was sort of cornerstone of conventional strength and conditioning practice. Particularly if you come say UK route if you come UKSCA Olympic lifting is a big part of that so it's going to get a lot of people's backs up.

And just on to back to the subject of fascia if you're marketing yourself on one facet of what it is that you're doing, you're basically playing a marketing trick is in my opinion. It's far too reductive and I hope that going forwards a lot of coaches are far more holistic in their approach and this is the approach I've been trying to push now is that holism is utterly important this combination of both sort of structural and phenomenological approaches.

You can't be solely a sports scientist in your thinking. It's very structural. It's very rigid. At the same time, you do need to be open to ideas and potentiality and but not so much so your brain ends up falling out because you're willing to accept anything and everything that comes your way.

So it's learning to tread that middle path. And anyone who's kind of smart will see this sort of reductiveness of fascial training and go, 'No, no, there's that's too simple to be the key to everything.'

James de Lacey14:46

You mentioned obviously fascia—you mentioned it's not completely passive but it's an elastic structure correct so as you mentioned all the ballistic and ply training you're going to get—and as you mentioned a lot of the stuff they do is too slow to have any kind of elastic contribution. You're kind of just making just muscular really with a lot of the stuff they're doing because it's not fast enough there's not enough overload.

William Wayland15:08

So you're gonna get stretch and fascia can contract sorry in a smooth muscle like fashion. The degree to which it's very hard to divorce from conventional muscular contraction, which is what was part of the problem is because fascia and excuse my—the partners, it's so enmeshed into what it is that we're doing is that it's hard to divorce out what's happening at a fascial level and what's happening at a muscular level because fascia is everywhere, right?

We can't separate those things out unless we start chopping people up and that's never going to happen. So we have to accept that it's there. There's a contribution but if we're training in a holistic fashion fascia—eccentric and concentric muscular actions, the neurological factors rate coding all that stuff all makes a difference but we're getting back into into sort of the old-fashioned AMP type arguments of what's actually happening at a structural level.

At the moment we don't have the technology or a way of figuring out well how much is fascia contributing in real terms and yeah that's why getting bogged down in that it doesn't really help anybody. It doesn't help us do better as practitioners if we start getting bogged down in AMP stuff and yeah.

Athletes don't care for the most part they just want outcomes that work for them. Strength coaches can argue between themselves as to what's happening at that type of level. But the idea that just trying to divorce fascial training and train that as a component in and of itself, it's incredibly difficult to do and if anyone thinks they can train in a way that does that, like you say, a lot of the stuff that I see passes fascial training, it doesn't cut the mustard for me in terms of applicability and performance outcomes.

But then what I see people do is they basically bait and switch. So they'll go they'll then start talking about gen pop instead and then they'll switch back to elite performance and so on so forth and they'll jump around and somehow fascial training is both conducive to longevity then it's also the key to sports performance.

Well, one thing, like for instance Mike Bourdango quite often says, is that sometimes elite sports performance and wellness do not go hand in hand. Elite sport performance is a window of opportunity for peak athletic outcomes, whereas longevity obviously is something else entirely.

There are people that try and sell themselves on the fact that oh, elite performance and longevity, the two things should go hand in hand. It's like, trust me, most elite performers there's a clock ticking and they're not going to be able to do it forever.

James de Lacey18:00

You look at the golf might be the exception in the elite golf performance can still be pulled out of guys in their 40s, but a lot of these guys can't. So it's again, it's kind of messy and a lot there's a lot of marketing hype and there's a lot of nonsense, and it's very tricky.

William Wayland18:00

I find the debate fascinating and it keeps going, and I'm enjoying this counterpoint, point-counterpoint. It's like a debate forum, but it's happening all online. Years ago stood up in an amphitheater and just shouted at each other, whereas now it's all happening in comments sections on stupid Instagram posts. So yeah, it's fun to see.

James de Lacey18:39

It's always mechanisms versus outcomes half the time. And it's happening right now in the just in the general fitness, I guess, muscle building world. Obviously, that's even bigger with what goes on there. And it's happening right now, mechanisms of mechanical tension, what maximizes muscle growth, this and that.

And do you have outcome data? Then people looking at mechanisms and pushing that, and it's just back. It's back honestly every day. It's just back and forth, back and forth of different. And it comes back to that, that it is literally, and this is something I've stolen from Miladdinovich and maybe in the same tail, and it's this idea of phenomenology on one hand and the structuralism on the other hand.

And the two things forever, for a lack of a better term, sort of conventional science and esoterism, lived experience, empiricism on one side, and then what the science says, structuralism, them on the other side. And a good coach brings those two things together, whereas it's the guys who pick a camp and argue from one side.

William Wayland19:36

So you've got your Jeff, is it Jeff Nippard? You got your Jeff Nippard, very structural, very evidence-led approach. And then you've got people who have a lived approach, who train based on feel and empiricism, which empiricism is not dead.

And people smack empiricism and say, "Oh, it's N equals one experience." But at the same time, most learning that we've done historically has always been empirical. And we go back to caveman times, people make the joke that at some point there was some guy who tried the berry and died and the other guy learned, well, that's not the berry to eat then.

And unfortunately, that's a lot of how human learning takes place is empiricism. Whether you listen to the biggest guy in the gym or not, and what you can extract from him, that's the tried and tested ancient way of learning what to do and what not to do.

And it has some value. It has some value as a coach, I think, as you have 20, 30 years of experience. There's a lot of empirical knowledge just dealing with the human experience, just dealing with people that will weigh in on the way you do stuff.

There's a study I love which was showing that basically, in terms of assessments and performance testing, subjective measurements still beat objective measurements. So the "how are you feeling today" still kicks your Whoop's ass, unfortunately, which is utterly fascinating, right?

So there is something to that. It's not to be completely discarded. But at the same time, if you come at people with a super structural approach about everything, you approach everything like a sports scientist, your athletes are going to think you're a dork.

James de Lacey21:12

You're going to take in speak in a language they can't understand. And B, when it comes to a debate, you're going to seem like a bit of an ass. So yeah, it's like, I think that's important. I'd argue that a lot of that is missing now. So obviously when you probably started training a long time ago as well, back then there was you probably had maybe the bodybuilding forums maybe, and maybe some T-Nation articles here and there.

But you went in the gym and you kind of just did what you did. You learned from other people in there, you tried stuff, you did stuff that wasn't quote unquote optimal. And then I think now with the overload of information, people are going to their training and everything has to be "I need to do this exact routine, this," and they missed out on just exploring their training and just doing dumb and learning, seeking this kind of "I need to maximize this and optimize that." And you get into this real stale kind of little box versus being able to learn and do a lot of different things when you're younger and just kind of opening that moving box. I think a lot of, I think that's where a lot of it's heading now.

And I don't think it's a good thing as you mentioned. I think there's more to it with being able to learn it yourself and actually figure things out and figure out you did something stupid back then.

William Wayland22:11

Exactly. And it becomes a form of neuroticism, right? Like you start tracking everything, you start accounting for crazy man. And it takes the fun and the flow out of training to some extent. And this is kind of the... And then if things go wrong, it can also be very hard to recover if you're a guy that's super, super into a very structural, very disciplined approach to doing things.

If you're injured, or let's even say an experience I deal with commonly is on tour, we quite often don't have the equipment we were expecting to. So we have to make, in the moment, exercise prescriptions based on the equipment we have, not on the equipment we wish we had.

So you hear stories of people online losing their because they were planning on doing, I don't know, leg press or something. There's a guy who's been on the machine 30 minutes and it's ruined their whole session. And it's like, well, you could have gone and done something else. Is the stimulus going to be that different because you didn't do leg press today because some guy was taking the machine part of now?

And people lose it because they're very, very type A, I guess, and everything has to be a certain way and just so. And that's where I think that evidence-based practice approach is draws the neurotic type of trainee.

I used to be that guy. I evolved over time, and as I've gotten older, I've learned to relax and not worry about that stuff. My training now is very flowy, very bottoms up. But I have spent a long time training in a fashion that was very structured or mostly pretty well structured. Then it gives me the freedom to be able to toy around a little bit. And I think that's the thing.

A lot of these old school guys, they did the hard yards and then engaged in abstraction and mucking around. Whereas I think what happens is a lot of these young guys coming through, they haven't sort of explored things in a sense, and then they're trying to come in with sort of very odd exercise prescriptions or very niche exercise selection.

Videos of them lying down on the ground doing single arm lat rows and stuff, when perhaps, perhaps learn to do a lat pull down or a pull-up first before you start mucking about with that stuff. So we get some great kids come through in the gyms, powerlifters, but it's clear that they're viewing stuff on the internet because sometimes they're doing sort of eyebrow raising exercise variations.

Some of them are good, some of them not so good. But you're like, that's flavor of the month. I can see you picked that up from somewhere or some popular powerlifter is doing it and thus everybody else starts doing it. And that group think is, we're not immune to that, right? So sort of exercise selection comes in and out of fashion.

I think all that human nature can't be beat, right? That's pervades the training as a culture as well. And strength coaches and sport scientists and guys, I might not like it, but we are still involved in the physical culture, and that's a very human thing. That's a very narrative driven thing, people achieving what it is they want to achieve.

That's always narrative driven. I don't think anybody ever sets foot in a gym saying, "Right, what's your training aim?" You sit down, they go, "I want to achieve a VO2 max of 58," and nobody ever approaches from that question, right? The question is "I want to get fitter, I want to look better," or things like that, more narrative approach. Or they come in and be able to tell you what sort of lactate pile they want to achieve during a training session. Nobody comes out even with that level of precision, right?

So yeah, it's always more narrative, and for most athletes, it's "I want to win, I want to win prize money."

I want to win trophies, whatever. And working backwards from that. So, yeah.

James de Lacey25:45

A good segue from that is you mentioned Madden before. I think he's the one who coined the agile periodization. I know you've been a big user. I'll be interested because I think that's very applicable to the audience listening as well as fighters who have crazy training schedules to probably work full-time as well trying to train people like myself who have two kids and is crazy and can barely even get to train, get to jiu-jitsu training right now.

But for people who have these kind of schedules, do you want to maybe just dive into okay what is agile periodization? How does it differ from say traditional periodization? And then we can just kind of go from there.

William Wayland26:21

Yeah. So agile periodization, Madden uses tech language, the same language they use in like Silicon Valley for when it comes for running projects. And he talks about sprint phase and release planning and that's basically another way of rewording kind of micro macro cycles but the sense is different.

So you know how when we build something up from the ground up, like let's say there's a great little illustration I like and it's that picture of it starts off with a skateboard and then someone adds a handlebars and then someone adds a seat and then someone adds and it slowly builds up to end up being a motorbike, right? And it's the idea that we don't start with the motorbike, we start with the very beginning which is like the wheel. And it's this idea of you build training in terms of phases.

So you might have an athlete and have a single metric you need to achieve. So it's like well our main focus here is going to be strength. So you work on low body strength. So you work on a few exercises, a few qualities that try and build that up. You structure training in a way and then start to build up incrementally adding different bits and pieces. This can be increased exercise selection. This can be changes in intensity and volume. And then what you do is you review at the end of your sprint phase. And then you move on to the next sprint phase.

And then what happens is these sprint phases build up into what we call a release. I've lost my train of thought, but it builds up from sprint into phase and then release. And the idea is that you build up training certain physical qualities, certain exercise qualities in a very incremental fashion, but you do it in a way that matches what's happening to the athlete at the time.

So rather than that very top down prescribed here's 12 weeks of training. We start at the very beginning. We go right two sessions this week. What's your schedule like? What training equipment do you have available? You know, all those sort of more important sort of smaller sort of tangible things that can make a big difference to the way someone trains.

And it might be a case of, well, this week we're just going to do some low body focus strength training. We're going to maybe just do a couple of sets of squats, a little bit upper body work. That's it. We're going to do that twice a week this week rather than this top down approach. And the rep prescription can be sort of fairly loose, fairly flowy. Rather than this top down approach of right this week we're gonna do back squats it's going to be three sets of three 80%, the individual in question might not know what their one RM is they might not know.

So and particularly when it comes to athletes like fighters for instance, a lot of them don't have a handle on any of those types of metrics so if you give them a boilerplate powerlifting program for a lot of them that's going to be hard to sort of bolt into what it is they're currently doing. Whereas if you say well look, MMA, the combat sport is what comes first here. The smattering of strength and conditioning we start integrating in around that is secondary and we do it in a fashion that isn't disruptive to the most important thing which is practicing your MMA training.

So yeah so from there the sprint phases build up to release phases and then from there you start building sort of a bigger overall arc of what it is that you're trying to achieve and outcome. So rather than going in and saying, "Look, we've got 12 weeks to pick for a fight or 16 weeks," which is that very sort of reductive camp-based approach to dealing with fighters, what you're looking to do is sort of build up a couple of qualities to a decent standard. And then that's when you choose to have your fight or whatever.

I always found that in the past that like, right, I've got 12 weeks out, I'm eight weeks out. 8 weeks out, I hate that, that's always like 8 weeks out, that's not enough to do anything. And then the training between those 8-week blocks is all kind of all over the place. Whereas if you have a sort of quasi structured approach that fits in with the individual's lifestyle that you can then intensify when 8 or 12 weeks out comes along, that's what you end up doing. And I think that works a lot better.

So yeah, Madden basically just said, look, let's take training from an athlete standpoint. Let's build up things from their purview rather than this very sport science style approach of you remember sport science is built around classically Olympic cycles, right? Soviet blocks, that's where it all comes from. Those are four-year training cycles that doesn't work for most people. Most real athletes that work in sports that aren't like that. But that Olympic cycle, that athletics approach to training still informs a lot of periodization thinking and the way we put programs together and we build programs out.

Whereas I guess what Madden's arguing for is this much simpler meet the individual where they are, find out what sort of is the easiest wins we can achieve and then kind of work from there upwards. Yeah so sprint phase release is the way to think about it. So the sprints are these short sort of meet them where they are, okay we'll do a couple of sessions, start figuring out sort of what it is you need, where you need to go.

Then the phase is a couple of these sprints layered together to make something sort of coherent. So, let's look, we're trying to build strength here. We're trying to build power here.

And then release is when we kind of review everything we've done and then look how we can build it going forwards into more sort of short sprint phases. So, it's built in this fashion that each layer kind of layers upon itself. So it's very bottoms up. So again it's people have sort of said well does it not just lead to people sort of doing random things? Well no you have a rough idea of what it is that individual needs to achieve going forwards. It's just you build the sessions kind of around them rather than being prescriptive from the get-go.

Which I guess is the mistake a lot of training, I don't know if you've ever had a situation yourself where you've written out like a 12 or 16 week training block the athlete gets two three weeks in and they then they ditch it or they come away because it was unsustainable. And that's the difference I guess Mladen's trying to encourage is the sustainability to training.

What's the kind of minimum effective dose we can go in prescribe on a bottoms up basis and then make sure that the thing kind of works? It's not going to be perfect and it's not going to be good from the outgo, but every time we run a sprint, we refine things. So, we then keep sort of either taking away or adding things, building up that way.

So, I had a good situation. So, here's a good example with a golfer just recently had never really done any strength training at all. Had dabbled, done bits and pieces. I'd done golf fitness stuff. I said, "Right, give me two sessions a week." He's okay. I'll block out two sessions. Okay. What equipment you got? Well, I've got them at home. I've got my home gym. I've got dumbbells up to like 20 and I don't have a rack and everything like that. It's okay.

So, we started sort of just goblet squats and jump squats. Not a lot more than that. Some simple push pull. He has a TRX. We did some push-ups, stuff like that. Really low-key setup. And then we progressed to goblet squats. We progressed them to Bulgarian split squats. And then we progressed sort of to dumbbell floor press. We progressed to a few other exercises. Week on week just building up. You know this guy started at nothing. So week on week we're building up that way.

No percentage schemes, no nothing like that, right? Here's the sets and reps I want. Just report back what weights you're using. Just building gradually and obviously progressive overload plays a simple role. Someone who's starting out, it's not very hard. But he then started building the sort of routine and a sense of what I wanted from him session on session.

Now he's progressed up to the point where we're doing barbell work. He bought some piece of equipment for his home. So he's got a rack and stuff now. So just building up that way. And now there's a sort of sense of what it is that I want from him.

Session on session. We still don't deal in percentages. It's still rep-based. It's still feel-based. A lot of reps in reserve type stuff. Again, not perfect, but it does what we need it to do. Clubhead speed is up.

And his jump height is up. So it's all moving in the right direction. But I know if he'd bought one of my cookie-cutter programs, for instance, which does have all right, today you're doing back squats, three sets of three at 80%, then you're doing bench press, four sets of three, 75%, whatever.

He would have taken one look at that and gone, well, this is a waste of my money. Whereas what we did is we started with that very personal, this is how we build up approach. And that's part of the problem with conventional strength training that you got to remember, most athletes don't enjoy the gym as much as we do.

So that cookie-cutter powerlifting program, that cookie-cutter bodybuilding program that they might be tempted to buy, a lot of them buy that stuff and never run it. I wonder, I do wonder how many people have bought popular PDF training programs, they take a look at maybe the first week and never do any more than that. And I should imagine it happens quite a lot.

Because this prescriptive top-down approach, a lot of people just can't get their head around it because their training is so lived in and it's a very field-oriented thing. Which is why historically golf physical training has always been a bit of a clown show, is because the trainers are being a little bit sneaky and they're appealing to the biases and the sense of the athletes what it is that they think that they want, not what they actually need.

So yeah, I recommend people do give Madden's book a look because it's a very intuitive way to approach training people that connects with athletes at their level, not at this sort of abstract sport science level which is where we all occupy, at this very top-down approach to dealing with things. And I'd say that since switching to a sort of, I don't use it all the time, I still love my classic block periodization for the guys that are super serious about training.

But for these guys, for a lot of these guys who are kind of living day-to-day training and stuff, they want a program that sort of fits in with them, not them fitting to the program, if that makes sense.

James de Lacey36:45

Yeah. I want to touch on a couple things you said there. I mean you just basically highlight consistency is the number one thing. And that's the thing, because people, as I mentioned before, the optimal program, this and that.

Honestly, if you just go in the gym and you're lifting something, doing something challenging each time and getting some kind of overload, you're going to continue making progress as long as you're not hurt or have niggles. Like that's pretty much what I'm doing now because we train when we can and stuff like that.

And I just go and I make sure I do, I know within a two-week block there are certain exercises that I want to do at least once. So I make sure I do them in those every 10 to 14 days or whatever it is. I know I'm going to do them heavy, whatever it is. And that at least gives you some framework to use.

And like you mentioned there with your thing, it's more reactive versus, as you mentioned, being prescriptive. And I think that's really nice. I mean, even if you wanted to apply a sports science approach, you could use that and maybe if you did a couple of quick baseline tests or whatever it is, then your block or your sprint could be just addressing whatever it is that deficit is.

Reassess and you kind of being reactive to them instead of being here's 12 weeks of hardcore hypertrophy, here's 12 weeks of maximum strength, here's 12 weeks of this. And it's, as you mentioned, that it can be limiting for especially newer guys or even just people who maybe, as you mentioned, people buying PDFs.

I think it's hard as well along that line, it's a different, it takes them out of the way maybe they're used to training, which can be a good or bad thing. But if it's very different, I think it just becomes hard to get into that new routine of doing different exercises in a different order, different days of the week, different sets and reps, and everything's so different that it's just overhauling your typical training routine.

William Wayland38:28

Yeah. Nothing's ever sold more training programs than novelty. So I'm pretty sure I've sat there and I bought a popular training program and it's the novelty of doing something different or new that gets me through the first couple of weeks. And I'm like, yeah, this is not sustainable. I can't carry on training this way or whatever.

And I'm dogged too. So I'll try and get through a program. But I've done Sheiko and stuff like that in the past where, A, it's monotonous and, B, it's just a grind. Certain people can deal with that, and I'm definitely probably more sort of one of them. But yeah, it's a lot of athletes, they're not wired that way. Some of them get good at the monotony and that takes, that's a learned skill.

But here's the thing. Once the athlete does start to build competence, then a more structured approach can be employed, once you're confident in their ability to repeat what it is that you want them to do. And that repeatability is a quality that perhaps we don't talk about.

So this is where I think a little bit of craft and a little bit of technical practice in the weight room is also very important. Because this is where, particularly from an exercise selection standpoint, I've really tried to focus in on lifts that enforce high levels of technical competency, things I know the athletes can do with a bit of practice on their own without me having to worry. Which has become an increasing part of what it is I do because I work with so many guys now, they're all over the world via correspondence.

I don't want a janky deadlift off the floor to be the reason that a guy couldn't play that week or something like that. And historically, golf was always veer on the side of caution too much, which is why a lot of historic, sort of popular golf fitness programs don't really achieve the performance outcomes golfers need.

On the other hand, getting them to try and train in a strict, sort of orthodox strength and conditioning, heavy squats, deadlifts, bench press, power cleans, so on and so forth, what would be considered kind of convention, also doesn't sort of match their needs either. Because a lot of them aren't well practiced.

So I don't know if they wake up early morning in a hotel room, in hotel gym in Dubai, they're going to go and be able to pop out a set of deadlifts at 80% for triples with absolutely perfect form. Which is why my exercise selection has kind of veered in a way that hopefully they enforce a degree of repeatability that I can be confident in, even if I'm not there.

Because we see some shocking form when the coach is there, and we see plenty of evidence of that on social media all the time. Every time, if I'm going to put up a video of an athlete, I want it to be representative of, unless they're learning at the very beginning. If I put up a video of an athlete, I want it to be representative of the technical execution I tried to instill in them.

But we still see a lot of videos with schlunky form and then people bending, breaking their backs to apologize for, or the athlete actually breaking their back in the video. So yeah, that's why my exercise selection has shifted, because a lot of people are like, why are you so, you don't prescribe a lot of heavy deadlifts, you don't do that much back squat anymore with your guys.

And it's veering towards things like front squat and things like RDL, which enforce a degree of technical execution that I can be confident with. And when I'm not there, most of the time they'll probably be able to do a front squat pretty well.

Front squat is pretty self-explanatory. You do it wrong, you're dropping the bar. Back squats, you can get away with all sorts of tricks to try and grind through a bad lift, and we see all sorts of different expressions of execution. Front squats harder to do.

Same with the RDL. You get someone good at the hinge, that'll stay with them. They'll be hinging in all sorts of forms as long as they get the sense of what it is they want out of the hinge. They'll be able to do all the time.

Whereas deadlifts off the floor, the execution of which can be somewhat variable unless they're really locked in. And we, at the end of the day, we're not training powerlifters. It's the same thing with the Olympic lifts.

Some people disagree and they post examples saying, look, here's my guys doing Olympic lift. You just have to spend 12, eight weeks training them. It's not that hard. I don't know what everybody's problem is. It's like, yeah, but these days I don't have a weight room anymore.

I've got guys traveling all over the world. I can't be there to police their form on a clean or whatever. So if there's a simpler way to do things, let's just do it that way. There is a point of pride and things like that, and I get it. That's just part of the culture we're in, but yeah, as I've matured as a coach, my exercise selection has shifted as well. And I think that's normal, too.

James de Lacey43:08

Yeah, I'm with you on the deadlift, too. For me as well, I've never programmed the conventional deadlift with any of my athletes and that's solely a few reasons. One of them I actually learned, I picked it up when I first started interning at the professional rugby club back home.

My very first internship I walked in, I remember, and I was looking around. When you come in with in your undergrad like yeah, everyone should be squatting to the floor, deadlifting this and that. And I looked around, guys squatting above parallel, no deadlifts. And I was like, what the hell's going on here? I didn't understand. And then obviously as you spend more time in that environment, you start to pick things up and understand why. And that had a huge impact on me going forward where I never programmed, I never programmed to do this.

I didn't see any point and there's a couple of reasons why. As you mentioned, I think you've talked about this for as well, is a true hip hinge whereas deadlift is kind of a pseudo, I guess you can say a pseudo hip hinge. So you don't get that huge stretch. And then if you only got two days a week of training and I'm doing a heavy lower body movement and I'm doing a squat, as an example, which I would probably choose over the deadlift, I'm not going to do the deadlift as well when you're going to get a relatively similar stimulus from both. And it's about training time as well on top of that.

And then obviously I think your risk of injury is, I know people talk about deadlift done properly with the right way, you're not getting injured at this and that. But if you're going to pick an exercise to have a higher risk of injury on, I would probably argue deadlifting is probably going to put you there. That's not going to say everyone's going to get injured, blah blah. It's unsafe. But that's just my take as well on deadlift.

So yeah, I'm with you on on that idea of deadlifting. You can do it. Sure. I mean, I've had guys who do trap bar dead because they couldn't squat. But as an overarching programming thing, it's just something that I've chosen not to use just because of those examples.

William Wayland44:51

Yeah. Yeah, I've caught flack for that on social media before where I've said something I've noticed is that most elite strength coaches don't program conventional deadlifts. And it causes an absolute firestorm, particularly from the guys, again this clown, yeah powerlifters and anyone who follows Mark Ripto or is into starting strength. Dude those guys, those guys. But they're the flip side of the whole sort of Nai functional patterns fashion. So, to circle back, there's this sort of, yeah this, if you're putting your sense of tribalism and sense of identity, since when did exercise selection become an identity? What the hell is wrong with people?

It's the same. I saw a thing, a YouTube video today that popped up on my feed, because sometimes when I'm working I like to just pop YouTube in the background. And there was a guy just talking about how if you aren't doing kettle bell work, you're missing out on keys to athletic performance. And it's like, and I quickly changed the tab to have a look at who this guy was.

And it's like, oh, you can absolutely tell he's a kettle bell guy just by looking at him. So my identity is built around this one particular lift. And which is funny because it's like kettle bell people only do kettle bells and everything's done with a, it's weird. It's self-limiting.

Building identity around a lift. At the end of the day, strength ignition coaches, we're creatures of outcome oriented folks, right? So if the tool or the implement I'm using gets the result I want, that's the one I'll use. And I think fitness enthusiasts do struggle to square that sometimes because the difference for them is that obviously exercise is an outlet for them. It's also an identity for them.

So when a strength conditioning coach who is a pragmatist comes along, we use what works for us. I've always said strength and conditioning coaches are like the MMA fighters of the exercise world because that's how we operate. We use what works and yeah, there are sure there are trends and things that come and go, but the fundamental thing is we're trying to be adaptable.

We're trying to achieve outcomes that we desire. We're not going to limit ourselves to just one piece of equipment, which is why, to circle back to say UK SCA, the focus, for instance, on Olympic weightlifting or guys who are particularly tied to Westside method or whatever it might be, any number of methods, people who tie their athletic program to powerlifting, for instance. And we've seen the blowback of that that we end up with a lot of football players and stuff that are big, strong, but just very stiff and can't sprint.

Then suddenly there's a backlash against that which is suddenly now everybody's sprinting. And then there's an argument, well sprinting isn't enough. We need to do curve linear sprinting. So everyone starts doing curve linear sprinting. Well that's not enough either. We need to do game-based sprinting. So everybody's now doing game-based sprinting and it just goes on and on. And it's like action counteraction so on so forth if that makes sense.

And I've been in the industry just over 20 years. That's long enough to see enough of these cycles come and go. And then one of my favorite ones is oh sprinting is for everyone. I think Huberman's on a sprinting kick at the moment.

James de Lacey47:55

So well he just said McMillan right?

William Wayland47:55

Yeah, exactly. So it's like everyone's on a sprinting kick but it's, if you've not sprinted in a long time it's one of the shest way to tear an Achilles or a hamstring or something. And there are ways and means around it and stuff, but there's nothing more dangerous I think taking a stiff beaten up body and then trying to get it to move at max velocities. That's going to cause problems. So there's ways and means.

And it always circles back to Dan John for me. And I think the fact that there isn't a greater corpus of his work or someone has sat down and and taken the time to really analyze what he's written. But I remember there was a seminar of his, a video one, says basically we spend the first 20 years of our athletic career destroying ourselves and then spend the rest of our lives trying to undo it.

And it's like yeah that's basically what everybody, you pick a modality and kill yourself with it and then you spend the rest of your time trying to undo all the damage you've done.

There are going to be a lot of raw powerlifters in their late 30s, early 40s. I remember seeing it with the guys like Dave Tate, the geared powerlifters back in the day. Those are up. They basically got to their late 30s, early 40s, and then suddenly, oh, I've wrecked myself. I've now got to try and undo this.

Dave was the first guy, I think, that I remember. And then Mark Bell did the same thing. He's just basically since his power. He's sprinting now. Yeah, he's sprinting now. So these guys are basically just trying to undo all the damage they've done for whatever training modality they adopted during their prime years. And yeah, training follows these cycles, but then what they do is they take a very absolutist approach.

So it's like everybody, everybody now needs to sprint. I discovered kettle balls. I discovered this. Everybody needs to do this. And it's just this, the holistic, the holisticness is missing. And that's a big problem. There's this swinging from trend to trend or approach to approach rather than being holistic from the outset.

And hopefully going forwards, that's what we can maybe get more of is just people being a lot more holistic from from the get-go. And that's kind of what I'm trying to work on now is trying to walk this line between being very structural about stuff, but also being more phenomenological about stuff. Maybe do consider some of the odder methods or different things.

And yeah, don't, don't short circuit yourself or cut yourself short by turning a modality into an identity. It's one of the quickest ways just to to box yourself off from stuff that could be useful. And that goes for the sport scientists as well. Just because a method is notable or unusual, don't initially, do your job and actually investigate as to whether you think it's going to be useful or not. And yeah, empiricism plays a role in that.

Observation plays a role in that, and that's the nature of phenomenology in sport. It's very difficult to unpick things sometimes and you just have to accept that sometimes an N1 approach for one guy just seems to work for that one guy.

So it's tough and if you're someone who is, because you got to remember, I can't remember who said it, but it was basically sports scientists are dealing with averages. They're dealing with means, and they pull together data that clusters around average individuals. But a lot of the time when we're working in sport science, we're working with guys that aren't average. Sometimes they're quite exceptional and that's something just to remember as well.

James de Lacey51:18

On those trends of undoing things, obviously the hybrid athlete trend of just running and lifting is the one that's come about, I think, partly because of that. But what's interesting is I'm seeing a lot of, obviously it's always ex-lifters that are going down this hybrid athlete route. Typically, I think now it's bringing in more runners and stuff just because of Hyrox and whatnot.

But it's definitely older lifters that have come into that area and done that because, as you mentioned, undoing some of the stuff that they lost from lifting. But I'm also seeing now a lot of people going back to what they originally did and what kind of either made them famous influencers or what they were originally good at, which is going back to lifting.

So it's almost like, at least what I'm just seeing trending wise in my own eyes, I think we're seeing a trend coming back to people going back into the original side too, which is always interesting. Obviously, you mentioned the pendulum swings as it does, carnivore versus vegan is the classic one, so it's ongoing.

But to finish this podcast out, I want to touch on Arnold Allen. What are you currently doing with his current training? Now, obviously you've been working with him for a long time, so it'll be interesting to hear how his training's evolved and kind of what goes on between fights, because it's been a while since he's fought, right?

William Wayland52:33

It's been a long time since he's fought. So he's dealing with some, believe it or not, playing combat sports is not good for your long-term health. If we go back to longevity, wellness and combat sports, they're longer hand. So he had, he had a periodic hand issue. Just the nature of hitting people really hard is that you break your hand. And he had broken metatarsal and unfortunately that one is recurrent.

So we've managed to get on top of that now. And now he's just got a shoulder issue that we're currently working through. And we had some treatment for that. He's had a few different treatments for that to try and help him get through that. Hopefully we're hoping to get him to have a fight this year. But if you've seen any of his social media content, you'll know that his training is very meat and potatoes.

So he sometimes trains with his dad, which he enjoys. Those videos are the funniest. His dad is such a meathead. It's so good. It's amazing. Absolutely amazing. Obviously Arnold's brother is high level competitive strongman as well, under 90 kilo strongman I think. Although I think it's now going up. But so that does feed into the stuff that Arnold does.

We do a lot of things based on his personal preference these days. We've been training together long enough for him to inform a lot of the training approach. So we go with a lot of what he likes to do. If there's stuff obviously I think that's going to be of value, I'll add that into the program. So one I've cited before is the fact that we don't in camp bench press Arnold.

He'll do a bit of bench out of camp and stuff, but in camp we don't bench press him, for instance. We only overhead press him. So we'll do jerks, push presses, things like that. And that's purely based on he doesn't like the way it makes him feel. So he's suddenly upping the amount of striking he's doing. He's like, bench press just, I don't feel good if I'm doing a lot of sort of bench press while I'm also doing a lot of striking work during camp.

So we'll make a change and we'll say okay, we'll just stick to sort of overhead press and pulsive sort of overhead press work with a good low body contribution, that type of stuff. But with Arnold it's always been very nuts and bolts. He's always had a good aerobic base. So between camps he, he's shown on social media that he likes to run. So he'll quite often go for sort of runs, moderate runs, moderate sort of zone two aerobic work, nothing crazy.

And then sort of lifting a couple of times a week. Again, we'll add in some variety, but it's usually for Arnold, it's usually either trap bar variation or some sort of back squat variation, things that we did early on that he's always kind of stuck with. For fun he'll sometimes deadlift from the floor. I think there's been videos of him mocking about with his brother and dad because, his brother obviously does powerlifting as part of his strongman training.

But for a lot of the time in camp, we make that shift to ballistic work. So we start doing a lot of jumping, loaded jumping, throwing, push presses, that type of stuff. And then we'll switch to sort of sprint interval training during camp as well. So sort of sprint interval approaches, usually using bikes, things like whatever he happens to have to hand.

Because the practice they do at Tristar when he's there is intelligently thought out. So it's very, very good. And I think that's one of the things that makes that gym so much better than other gyms is that a lot of their sparring practice is smartly constrained, but it also has a good training effect in that they're intelligent. Like, if someone seems tired, they'll have them sit out. If someone is fresh, they have them come in. And I think it's just sort of a testament to what they're doing over there in terms of not burning these guys out in the buildup towards a fight.

That's not the point, whereas historically when I got involved in MMA, shark tank rounds, things like that were all still very common. Now training is a lot smarter. It's a lot more measured, a lot more intelligent because these guys have realized that, well, actually my body is a commodity. I can't afford to wreck myself in camp. And when we think about the amount of cards that have been ruined, multiple cards throughout the years have been ruined by guys hurting themselves two weeks out, three weeks out, even recently.

The question then becomes, well, in the two weeks, three weeks before a fight, is there much you're going to be able to do that's going to get you any better in realistic terms? Probably not much. You've done most of the work, right? But it doesn't make sense for you to hurt yourself. Where does the blame lie when something like that happens? If you're fighting for a lot of money, that becomes a question of, well, the idea is to first do no harm, right?

Yes, you're in a combat sport. Yes, accidents happen. At the same time, you've got to be there on fight night in order to make your payday. And that starts to change, well, the culture, the training culture, the physical culture around combat sports starts to shift and preserving the athlete, it becomes a lot more important than any school of hard knocks or anything like that, right? Doesn't mean we don't train hard. It just means we train in a really smart fashion and a measured fashion and in a way that sort of fits the individual.

And I think that's a big thing that's changed now is guys really being intelligent about fight camps that suit their needs and not let teams, again this going back to what we talked about earlier. So rather than the camp having, this is the way we do things here at whatever gym, this is how we prepare all our guys for fights, it's now much more around the individual.

They pick the good training partners for them. They'll pick smart training, sparring partners, stuff like that, and make it kind of work for the individual. Because again, it's a commodification issue. They've got to make it to fight night. They can't afford to get hurt before then.

So back to Arnold. I hope that this year he gets the match up we're looking for. Well, there were a couple he's been offered, but unfortunately he's had to turn them down because his shoulder just isn't there yet. And we'd hate for him to take something prematurely and end up more injured potentially. But hopefully he will get a fight match up very soon and that announcement will go out. But one fight a year isn't enough at the moment. So we need to get him out more regularly.

James de Lacey58:54

For sure. No, I appreciate that insight, William. And where can people find and follow you and keep up with what you're doing?

William Wayland58:54

Sure. So I'm on Twitter, WS Wayland, and then I'm on Instagram.

I've changed my handle because the Powering Through is not mine anymore. It's in the hands of two very good blokes. So I am on Instagram at Coach W Wayland. So you can find me there now. So my handle's changed.

But yeah, either of those places is kind of where I'm pretty busy. I'm currently working on a new website where I'll be putting up sort of blog posts and stuff like that, but yeah, haven't quite got around to doing it. Got too many plates spinning unfortunately.

James de Lacey59:35

I feel you. Perfect. The link's in the description as well for anyone listening to the podcast. But I appreciate you coming on.

William Wayland59:35

Thanks for having me on.