How To Target Fast Twitch Muscle Fibers + Should You Get Freaky Before A Fight? (SSOF Ep 110)

James de Lacey0:00

So, let's start this around the talk of muscle fiber types, training muscle fiber types, and the shifting of muscle fiber types, and this will have some practical applications to it. So, hopefully we can answer a lot of hopefully your questions that you may be thinking of right now around this topic.

So, when we talk about muscle fiber types, you typically know the main two and then three. So, you have slow twitch and fast twitch, if you want to just keep it as those two. And then you've also got within fast twitch, you have two different types of fast twitch fibers.

And that would be your main pure three muscle fiber types. So, you have type one, which are your slow oxidative muscle fibers. Then you have type two A, and that will be your fast glycolytic fibers, and they do have some oxidative properties that make them more resistant to fatigue.

And then you have type two X, formerly known as type two B, but now known as type two X muscle fibers, which are your fastest muscle fibers, but they fatigue very, very quickly. So, if you think of sports that maybe these muscle fibers are more predominant in, so like marathon runners as an example, would see a higher distribution or higher proportion of type one muscle fibers.

Pure sprinters or I guess track and field athletes that have like one very short event, you'll see them more towards that type 2X muscle fiber type. And then for most other sports that are kind of in that middle, including combat sports, you might see more type 2A.

Now, there are other fibers that are less talked about and they're hybrid fibers. And these hybrid fibers are essentially a combination of these fibers. So, you can have type 1/2A. So, there'll be a type 1 type 2A hybrid fiber together. So, if muscle fibers are say shifting between different types, there's an intermediatory phase between them where you can have hybrid fibers.

The other one is a hybrid type 2A and type 2X. So, instead of just going from type 2X to type 2A, you have this intermediatory area where you have a hybrid fiber. Now, if we're talking muscle fiber types, we want to talk contraction velocity.

This is kind of where a lot of the philosophy around training these fiber types comes up. So, if we're talking order of contraction velocity, from slow to fastest, it's type one, type one 2A hybrid, type 2A, type 2A/2X hybrid, and then type 2X.

And the type 2X muscle fibers contract up to eight to 10 times faster than type one muscle fibers. Now, this is under cold conditions. I think when you start bringing it more towards physiological body temperatures, that gap isn't as wide, but still, you're going to see faster contraction velocities in these faster twitch fibers, which is why they're called fast twitch fibers.

These are the slow twitch fibers. And that's why there's often such an emphasis placed on training fast twitch muscle fibers or not doing too much endurance training to potentially shift fiber type towards these slow isoforms or these slow type one muscle fibers. Now, these muscle fiber types are known as myosin heavy chains.

And within a muscle, we have thick and thin filaments, and they connect together to create a contraction. So, we have the myosin heavy chain would be the thick filament. We then have the actin, which is the thin filament.

And they overlay each other and they connect to create the contraction. They connect through cross bridges. And I would really like to think of this to illustrate it in your head is I've got my fingers here. Hopefully, if you're listening to this, you get this.

But I'm essentially interlocking my fingers with straight fingers, and you'll see the overlap of my fingers, and that will be like the cross bridging of the thick and thin filaments creating that contraction. Another really good way of looking at it, I don't know if you ever watched MythBusters back in the day, the best show on Discovery Channel made, where they tested the phone book friction test.

And essentially, they just overlaid all the pages over each other, and they couldn't even pull the thing apart even with cars and everything. That's kind of the idea. This also goes into the idea of the length tension relationship, but that's a completely different topic, so we won't touch on that too much.

But essentially, depending on the angle of the joint, it'll be how much of these filaments are overlapping, and then how hard the muscle can contract. But that will be a different topic, and I will cover the length tension relationship at some point. Just not right now.

So, people with a larger proportion of fast twitch muscle fibers are able to produce more force and power during fast movements. So, that's compared to people with more slow twitch muscle fibers. That's one of the reasons we find elite sprinters have high proportions of fast twitch fibers, and endurance athletes have high proportions of slow twitch fibers.

Now, the question becomes is it the training that they're doing that causes this or were they genetically predisposed to do well at these sports initially? So maybe they already had this fiber type distribution and the training just added more on top. Don't know.

We don't know. I would in my experience, I'd probably guess a lot of higher level athletes are pre-genetically predisposed and kind of self-selected for those sports and the training on top of that kind of just matches their fiber type and they just continue to get better and faster or be able to go longer.

But back to this fiber type shifting. We can shift fiber type to faster and slower type muscle fibers based on the training. But it's interesting that training tends to do I guess you could say the same thing almost regardless of the type of training.

So we'll run through those but fibers shift between pure and hybrid fibers but to my understanding we rarely or don't see pure type one shifting to pure type two or vice versa. So you're not going to see pure type one fibers change to pure fast twitch type two fibers but you may find you get a hybrid in there as an example.

There's an interesting concept around targeting type two X muscle fibers to preserve them since they are the fastest muscle fibers and this is where Kyle Snyder's training comes into this and his strength coach Neil. Oh man, sorry, didn't get his last name anyway.

Let me just see if I can pull it up because I've got it in here. It was Neil Serafina? Yeah, Neil Serafina. So he wrote this on Instagram a while ago and it was sent through and it was interesting but before I get into that Carl Stahl, if you haven't seen him or seen his training he is built like a brick house.

Crazy physical specimen of a wrestler. I don't know his full training background. I don't know if he's been training like this for like his whole training career, what he was doing maybe before doing something like this, but essentially his training's been centered around one to three reps and all of them close to maxes, super low volume.

We're talking like a few singles per week in a lift. Yeah, again, I don't know if this is all year round or what's going on, but this is an Instagram caption from his coach Neil Serafina. And he states "The weight room is for strength training."

In order to get stronger, your program has to train the correct muscle fibers. These fibers are the fast twitch fibers. The body has three types of skeletal muscle fibers, we've covered those. The only fibers that should be trained in the weight room are the type 2B fibers or type 2X.

Those fibers will only work if the weight is a certain percentage of your current one rep in the lift being performed. I will not give you the percentage, but you cannot lift that weight for more than three reps. If you're performing more than three reps on your strength training sets, not counting warm up weights, you are not training the correct fibers.

The type 2X fibers are white because they do not have blood going through them. Therefore, you cannot get a pump from working these fibers. Unlike the slow twitch fibers that bodybuilders train, these fibers are very explosive. That's why they call fast twitch fibers.

I suggest that your work sets and maxes are for one rep with an occasional two rep lift to help young athletes who are working on perfecting technique. Athletes who want to improve their performance in their given sport need to train for strength. And it's an interesting take on strength training for sports performance.

And essentially, if you read back some of his older, his other, I guess, captions and things he's written as well, it seems to be that it basically has a problem with the insane volume people do in the weight room and the bodybuilding style routines a lot of athletes are doing. Which I 100% agree with and I've spoken about many times in terms of doing too much volume in the weight room.

I'm not going to go down the road of breaking down his entire philosophy here, which, you know, I tend to agree with quite a bit of it. I don't know about doing that all year round, but there is definitely some truth to what he's saying. But, I want to go down the road of targeting muscle fiber types. So, I think that's quite interesting.

And I think the first point we need to cover is do we even want a higher proportion of type 2X muscle fibers as a combat athlete? Because these fibers are highly fatigable and are better suited to pure speed and power athletes. So, in my head and in my opinion, we don't actually want a lot of type 2X muscle fiber. So, that's just something to think about.

Now, I'm going to run through anyway that with training, you're probably not going to retain type 2X muscle fibers even if you were doing, I mean, okay. You potentially going to retain more doing lower volume work like that, like a few singles a week. But, the increased physical activity you're going to do outside of just lifting is probably going to make that shift anyway. And I'm going to run through some of that research now.

So, there's a study that influenced my master's research and it's by Anderson and his colleagues in 2005. It's called changes in the human muscle force velocity relationship in response to resistance training and subsequent detraining. So, they took subjects through 3 months of strength training and then afterwards 3 months of detraining, which I'll cover in a bit.

And 3 months of strength training and they found that type 2X muscle fiber proportion decreased from 5.6%. So, that was their baseline to 0.8% while type 2A increased from 34% to 39.4%. So, this is no one. This is what tends to happen with training. We see a reduction in type 2X and an increase in type 2A. And it's not an isolated finding.

Raue and his colleagues in 2004, they found that 4 weeks of concentric or eccentric only training, and they didn't do a very good job of explaining their methods, but essentially it was four sets of eight leg extensions at 75 to 80% of concentric 1RM. So, it was either concentric only or eccentric only, and obviously doing the same load, eccentric is going to be I guess less load than the concentric in this instance, but either way, it led to a shift. Both of them led to a shift of type 2X towards the hybrid type 2A type 2X fiber.

And obviously, since it's only 4 weeks, that's probably why you only see it maybe towards the hybrid versus a straight shift in pure fibers. Andersen and colleagues, again. So, Andersen is one of the main, I guess, researchers in this space in 1994, and they took sprinters who essentially just did the normal sprint preparation training for competition, which was 2 and 1/2 to 3 hours per day, 6 days a week.

And that included heavy resistance training of 1 to 8 reps with 80 to 100% 1RM. It included their normal sprint-based work, interval based work, hill sprints, just everything they'll do to prepare for competition. And they found that this shifted muscle fiber expression from type 1 and from type 2X towards type 2A.

So, both ends of the spectrum. The slow twitch fibers and the very, very fast muscle fibers kind of came towards the middle to display more type 2A muscle fibers over the rest in terms of the rate of change. Now, they state that essentially, the increased activity from strength training and intervals led to this shift.

Now, there may be less shift towards these type 2A muscle fibers with power based training. Especially according to Plotkin and his colleagues in 2021 in his latest review. It's called muscle fiber type transitions and exercise training shifting perspectives. Now, one of the articles that he mentions in there is ballistic and plyometric training with maximal strength training attenuated the loss in type 2X muscle fibers compared to maximal strength only.

Now, I always talk about that we're never trying to just do one thing, especially with a mixed sport or combat sport where you have so many qualities you need to train. We're never just going to train maximal strength. We're not just trying to improve one rep max and just get as strong as possible.

We're trying to as you can say surf the curve. We're trying to cover all the different loads, velocities, how quickly we want to produce force, but we're also going to touch on that on the maximal strength end, too. So, we want to cover everything.

But furthermore, well-trained athletes may have less fiber type shift from 2X to 2A. And there may be a genetic predisposition for retaining fast twitch muscle fibers, which kind of makes sense if you're one of those twitchy twitchy athletes, like maybe one of the Olympic 100-m sprinters, they probably retain a lot more type 2X genetically, and then the training on top of that probably helps them maintain that.

But from the totality of the research in this area, we see the shift towards type 2A with increased physical activity. Now, I will say that a lot of the research in this area involves higher rep strength training. So, anything from 15 reps or 6 to 15 reps.

We very rarely see a I guess a one to three rep approach, high intensity approach, low volume approach in the research regarding muscle fiber shift. There's one interesting study I'm aware of that implemented a six-week training protocol that didn't see a decrease in type 2x muscle fiber.

And that is by Bogdanis and his colleagues in 2017. And they took 16 university students through a low volume fast eccentric and ballistic training program. So, we're talking a very high intensity training program for the and I guess you could say low volume in terms of the number of reps done.

I'll probably call this more of a moderate volume to be honest. But regardless, essentially three times a week of training. And day one and three were exactly the same. They were fast eccentric squats and it was done in a cluster. So, six sets of one plus one, 30 seconds rest between the reps.

And they did those at optimal eccentric load, which was the load with the highest rate of force development or the load that allowed them to produce force the fastest. And again, they weren't very good at explaining their methods in the paper. I think everything was complex with the plant with plyometrics and it seems that was with a vertical jump.

And it was 18 vertical jumps per session in this example. So, I'm just assuming that they did three vertical jumps after every set. That's what I'm assuming. Day two, which is the middle day, they did ballistic loaded jumps. So, at 30% 1RM and they did six sets of four with that and then I think they must have complex set again with the counter movement jump.

I don't know. They just say they did plyometrics, which is a little frustrating, but anyway, muscle fiber distribution did not change post training intervention in these subjects. And performance measures improved as well as muscle fiber hypertrophy also improved. So, hypertrophy of type fast twitch, slow twitch, as well as them being able to jump higher, display more power, display force, produce force faster, etc. all improved.

But does this matter? Does this matter at all that they maintained these muscle fibers? So, when Schiaffino and his colleagues in 2008, they completed 8 weeks of ballistic exercise. So, they did jump squats of 26 to 48% of of back squat 1RM for three sets.

No significant difference in muscle fiber distribution. So, again, we don't see that shift in muscle fiber type. However, the training group significantly improved rate of force development and peak force. So, this suggests that regardless of fiber type shift, we can still see large increases in rate of force development power, even in this case, peak force on the mid-thigh pull.

And if I was to sum up the research around this shift from type 2X muscle fiber or just maintaining this type 2X muscle fiber, this is how I'd currently interpret it. Lesser-trained individuals, which is the last two studies that I mentioned, they were kind of university students, they end up performing a novel training stimulus, which is these ballistic interventions for short periods, which is 6 to 8 weeks, and they see huge improve performance improvements.

As shown in increases in rate of force development, peak power, etc. And this likely suggests that the time course isn't long enough to see changes in muscle fiber type or maybe at least with the testing methods they used to test for muscle fiber type.

And neural adaptations occurred first. And we know that, for example, in untrained individuals, if they're doing, say, strength training, they get a lot stronger before you see increases in muscle size because the neural changes occur first before the structural changes in the muscle.

So that's just something to be aware of as well when we're looking at the research. Now, if we go back to the original Instagram post about targeting type 2X muscle fibers, we can look at Andersen and Aagaard in their, no, it's an older paper.

I can't remember what paper, but I'll reference it in a little bit. Essentially, they theorized that mechanical tensile load, so essentially just lifting heavy weights, or in fact just lifting weights, may switch off or down regulate the type 2X gene while up regulating the type 2A gene in all of the type 2 muscle fibers.

So they're essentially saying that kind of any form of tension, regardless of, could doesn't have to be lifting weights, could even be some kind of endurance task, right? So it may down regulate this type 2X gene and up regulate the type 2A.

So that's why you potentially getting that shift. But again, the question is does maintaining type 2X muscle fiber, our fastest muscle fibers, really matter? Does this really matter for sports performance? And Andersen and Aagaard make this point in their 2010 paper titled "Effects of Strength Training on Muscle Fiber Types and Size, Consequences for Athletes Training for High-Intensity Sport." And here's a couple of quick paragraphs.

So, from a functional point of view, the disappearance of myosin heavy chain type 2X with strength training may seem somewhat unfavorable, since this isoform has the fastest contraction velocity and the highest power production, and the removal from the muscle should lead to a slowing and reduced power output of the muscle, which tends to make sense, and I'll show you in a bit kind of what can happen when you have a lot of these muscle fibers.

Theoretically, that is the case when looking at the individual fiber, but when looking at the capacity of the whole and intact muscle, this apparent slowing is, in most athletic settings, more than outweighed by the increase in contractile strength, power, and rate of force development of the trained muscle.

And I think that's the take-home, right? Often we see things in isolation, and I've talked about this isolation concept a lot. Is it aerobic or are we targeting aerobic or anaerobic? Are we targeting strength, maximum strength, or power? Are we targeting speed or strength?

None of these things happen in isolation. And just because you may have less type 2X muscle fiber, again, it may not matter because the changes or increases in strength, speed, power, etc. outweigh or occur regardless of what is happening with that shift.

And that's the main take home around it. But there's a very interesting concept. There's a repeatable method for gaining more type 2X muscle fibers past your current distribution. And I want to cover that in just a sec because I'm going to answer this question here.

How do you, if you do use tests, could be the Yo-Yo test and wearables to determine if the athlete is ready for his fight or tournament? Typically, you're not using a test to see if they are ready. Like, for example, just because someone scores a certain score on a Yo-Yo test or lifts a certain amount of weight, doesn't mean they're going to be ready or not.

It's more down towards removing the fatigue from training to get them ready. And I think using things like wearables and things like that can cause more stress and anxiety than not using them. The art of kind of going by feeling coaching is being lost with a lot of this tech and with a lot of this technology.

And I think that's a bad thing, especially if we're relying on things, say, like HRV or whatever else and it's a few days before the fight and you wake up and your wearable is showing that you had poor sleep or some, let's say it's even fight day.

Your wearable shows you had poor sleep and your HRV is very low or something like that. You still have to compete and fight. But if you didn't have that information, it wouldn't be in the back of your head. If you know what I mean there.

So you got to go by feel and you got to structure your training to a point where you allow yourself enough recovery to be ready to go into the final tournament. Yeah, there's no test that will tell you if you're ready or not, at least in my opinion.

But coming back to this type 2X muscle fiber distribution. Now, this method is doing absolutely nothing. And I mean by nothing, I mean like bed rest. No training, no lifting, no running, no technical training, nothing at all. And that is how you increase your type 2X muscle fibers past where they are right now.

So it's an interesting phenomenon. It's called the overshoot phenomenon. And that kind of became my research interest as part of my master's thesis and I'll cover my paper in just a bit. If you're interested, you can search De Lacey 2014 and you'll find it in Google Scholar.

But I'll cover it in a bit. But if we go back to our Andersen and colleagues paper in 2005, they had 3 months of training and then they did 3 months of detraining, which was they just went back to their normal lives. These were just regular people, right?

They didn't exercise. So after that large shift towards type 2A that I mentioned earlier, the 3-month detraining period caused type 2X muscle fiber proportion to shoot past the pre-intervention distribution. So they went from 0.8% after the training intervention to 7.7% distribution of type 2X muscle fiber after the detraining, which is higher than before they even started training.

And then the overall fast-twitch fiber distribution, so that's type 2A and type 2X together, increased from 40.2 to 44.7%. And then with this came a 14% increase in maximal unloaded knee extension speed. So essentially a leg extension very fast with no weight. Greater force at faster velocity, so more power, and greater power at faster velocities.

So be able to produce that quickly. That was one of the papers. That was I think that was their latest one on that in 2005. And then they first did this study, they used the exact same model in the year 2000, Andersen and Aagaard.

3 months of training, 3 months of detraining. They went from 9% distribution of type 2X pre-training down to 2% post-training, then up to 17% post detraining. So again, training and then doing nothing for months will give you these type 2X muscle fiber benefits.

Whereas training will likely distribute your muscle fibers towards type 2A. Now, you might be listening to this thinking like, "Well, I can't just not train and just so I can get type 2X muscle fibers." And yes, I would agree with you. You can't just not train and expect that this increase in speed, etc. is going to be the thing that makes you the fast, powerful athlete.

So what I did with my supervisors, we tried to induce an overshoot within a professional sporting season. So if anyone's familiar with rugby league, the NRL, we did a not a full detraining period, but a pretty aggressive taper for the last 3 weeks of preseason.

So if you're familiar with NRL, it's very long season. The first preseason matches are in February, and then the season runs from March through to September or October, depending if you make the finals. And preseason starts in November, and they have like a 4-month preseason.

So it's long. But the end of the preseason, we did a 21-day taper. And what we did is we took handful of the athletes and they still did their normal technical training and their conditioning. So that's important. They still did all that stuff that they needed for the sport.

But in the gym, they went from three to four days a week of strength training to one time a week. So we did three total strength training sessions through the 21 days. And that was leading to the season. They were low volume, high intensity.

It was just four lifts: power clean, overhead squat, bench press, and bench pull. It was three sets of three to three sets of five-ish. So relatively quick, easy, one lift a week. We didn't measure muscle fiber type because one, that's very invasive and there's no professional athlete that's ever going to want to do that.

Plus, there's no way that you could do that when you're that close to a season. Plus, it costs a lot of money. But we didn't measure that, but we used a force-velocity profile as kind of like a proxy measure. So if you go back a few episodes to the episode with JB Morin, he was one of the authors on the paper because back then you couldn't quickly and easily create force-velocity profiles like you can now.

He was one of the creators of it. So he helped us with some of that data. But the idea was that if we saw a spike in velocity in these profiles after the tapering period, we could assume that potentially there was a larger distribution of fast-twitch muscle fibers after that detraining period.

So when we look at the determinants in the force-velocity profiles, since, at this time, we did jump squats according to body weight. So it was 0%, 25, 50, 75, 100% of body weight. Doing jumps and then essentially getting a profile where you're looking at theoretical maximum force, the amount of force you could generate under zero velocity, theoretical maximum velocity, which is the highest speed or velocity you can reach under no load.

From that, you get maximum power. We get the slope of the curve. And then we get performance variables around the jump. Now, after that detraining period or tapering period, we found significant improvements in force and power and jump height at 25, 50, 75, and 100% body weight.

And it suggests a few things that resistance training volume seems to be more detrimental on force, velocity, and power than conditioning-based tasks. So potentially, if you're tapering into a fight, reducing resistance training volume should probably be the number one on the list.

What training you do or what training is heavily emphasized before the taper or detraining period will likely improve most in a short taper period. So, in this example, we see force basically being restored relatively quickly. And during these preseasons, these athletes do a lot of heavy lifting.

And it's likely that because they were doing so much force-orientated lifting that just removing that stimulus allowed it to recover relatively quickly. If they were doing maybe more velocity-based speed work during that time, potentially it would have been the other way. So, that's just something to be aware of as well.

But, practically, it means that when you're going into a fight, you could significantly reduce strength training volume 3 weeks out. So, typically, a lot of people ask me, "Well, what should you do the week of? When should they stop training?" etc. You're never stopping training, but you could potentially completely lower your strength training volume 3 weeks out and still improve strength and power variables and even jump performance in those 3 weeks because you've taken that out.

So, typically, you might be doing twice a week strength training. Maybe even three. Kind of depends on what you're doing and the kind of sport. But if you remove those and you only had one session, super high intensity, super low volume, could even be as simple as power clean, three singles, squat, three singles or doubles, and then bench press three triples as an example.

That could be enough to give you that break and allow you to focus more on the technical training as well. And then with that, you could potentially create an overshoot to have more fast-twitch muscle fibers. And you reduce the fatigue from lifting and again, allow more time for the technical training.

So, it's an interesting concept. It's something you could definitely use as part of your fight preparation as pretty much completely take out strength training in those last few weeks and kind of do that one session a week. So, yeah. That's my take on muscle fiber type stuff.

Pretty interesting area of research. You can target fast-twitch fibers and they're called high threshold motor units for a reason because you need a high threshold of force for them to kick in. If you're just doing really easy stuff, then there's no reason for them to kind of kick in.

You'll rely on just slow-twitch muscle fibers. So, that's the idea of doing moving things with intent and moving heavy things with intent as an example. But yeah, that was the muscle fiber type stuff and I want to quickly finish with, I had, this is funny.

I see this question a lot, especially on forums and stuff, where people like, is having sex before a fight going to basically cause me to gas out in the fight and have less physical performance or whatever it is?

So, it's a myth that's been around for a long long long time and it's actually been studied. It's been studied in a few different things. I'm going to cover them right. This is an old article I wrote on the website. I'm just going to run through it quickly with you.

But there's a couple of meta-analyses or reviews around this. And they categorize it on performance. So, the first one is the effect of sex on muscle strength. And basically, as easy as it is, sexual intercourse has no influence on muscle strength. Similarly, hand grip strength is not affected by sexual activity the night before the grip strength test.

You can see a 2018 study found that sexual intercourse performed 12 hours before a strength testing showed no difference in knee extension and knee flexion strength compared to abstaining from sex. And this was regardless of sex lasting less or longer than 30 minutes.

So, they even broke it down by time. I don't know how they got all that data, but I'm assuming it was self-reported. So, you had to timer on if you were a subject in this one. Interestingly, a 2021 study, they found that 5 to 19 minutes of sex and yes, they had to time themselves, and it was missionary only, and the male was only, the male was allowed to be active.

So, they really gave details in this. 24 hours before a squat session consisting of 5 by 5 was detrimental to squat strength by 2 kg. So, nothing that crazy. Was statistically significant, but may not be practically significant in the grand scheme of things.

It said there was also a trend showing that the length of sexual intercourse being negatively correlated with weight lifted, meaning the longer you had sex, the less weight you lifted, which is a funny little trend. That means it wasn't statistically significant.

But, the funny thing is you should probably take these findings with a grain of salt because the study design already favored the abstaining condition as the order of the sexual activity or abstaining was not randomized. So, instead, week one was the sex condition, week two was the abstaining condition.

This allows some training effects from week one to carry over to week two. Just bear that in mind. Now, sex and aerobic performance. This would be your conditioning. And they state that it does not negatively impact our road performance on the maximal treadmill test when it takes place at least 10 hours before competition.

A study on high-level males found data to support the potential beneficial effect of sexual activity on cycle ergometer performance. However, potentially negative effect occurs if there's an interval less than 2 hours between sex and cycle performance due to post-test heart rate values.

So, it seems potentially if you're like doing it in the locker room during your warm-up, yeah, that could be a problem, it seems. Sex and testosterone, so two studies reported sexual activity does not affect testosterone levels in the short or long term.

Contrary to this though, testosterone levels increased across the evening when couples engaged in sexual intercourse and decreased when they did not. So, this is something again, acute increases in hormones doesn't mean jack for performance, muscle gain, strength, etc. So, bear that in mind, too.

Sex and sporting performance, so there's no evidence of direct negative impact of sexual intercourse on sports performance. Sexual activity has also been found to have no negative or no effect on physiological, sports-specific or biochemical variables. And this would be things like heart rate, blood pressure, sports-specific would be like an all-out sprint test, strength, reaction time, etc.

Biochemical would be hormones. And then even with psychological aspects, sexual activity had no effect on the athletes' mental concentration in high-level male athletes. Further, sexual intercourse 12 hours before strength testing showed no differences in mental or physical fatigue compared to abstaining from sex.

So, this is where the conclusions come from this. It's suggested that there's no negative effects of sexual activity before a fight. However, sex should ideally occur at least 10 hours before a fight and not within 2 hours as it may have a negative effect on recovery.

Now again, I don't know anyone who's doing it close to 2 hours before a fight, so there's probably nothing to worry about there. And if there's one thing to take away from this review, it's sexual activity has a relaxing effect and the frustration to limit one's own sexual desire is probably more detrimental than to actually engage in sexual activity.

And that's a really good statement there, too. So again, busting those myths. Don't worry about, you don't have to go 7 days out to spike your testosterone or stop 7 days out so you can, I don't even know what people say now. It's just crazy what people make up.

So no need to worry about that at all. But hopefully you enjoyed this podcast. We'll have guests back on the podcast soon and hopefully what I went through made sense to you as well. Again, check the description as well. Sweet Science of Fighting Underground is there.

Then my S&C blueprint. Make sure you also subscribe to the channel. Helps out a lot. Subscribe to the main Sweet Science of Fighting channel. Also Instagram. I've been posting a lot of real content there as well. So make sure you go check out the Instagram.

Again, Sweet Science of Fighting, you'll find it there. But I'll catch you in the next podcast.