High/Low Method, Specific vs. Non-Specific Conditioning, & Strength While Cutting (SSOF Podcast #12)

James de Lacey0:01

Now the issue is, if you're only doing, let's just start with the conditioning in class, you're only really touching that one intensity and, yeah, yes, you're drilling and things like that, which is lower intensity, but the problem is you're not doing enough of it to really make progress. The reason you're doing separate conditioning on maybe a different day or at the end of a session is so you can get the necessary volume and intensity, and you can control it to get what you want out of it.

So if I'm always hitting pads or rolling or anything like that, that's great. I can maybe control the, or try to control the intensity. For example, if I'm rolling with someone, we might roll light, or if I'm hitting the pads, I might take longer rests or not hit the pads as hard or something like that, or even just flow sparring. But the problem is, as you probably know from experience, if you say, "We're just going to flow roll," after a couple of minutes it's no longer flow rolling and the intensity now has increased.

And that's one of the reasons why, when you're doing your conditioning on a different day or a different session, that you can control that and you can target the adaptations that you want. Now in terms of training them together as a combat simulation, I genuinely recommend doing that anyway. So for example, you might do jiu-jitsu solo drills as part of your aerobic conditioning, or you might do shadowboxing and various footwork stuff if you're a striker. Or if you're MMA, you might do a combination of both, or wrestling you might do your shadow wrestling.

So if I'm going to prescribe someone conditioning, that's generally where I'm going to look first, because conditioning is not just about energy systems, right? We can develop energy systems through whatever means that is, but that training needs to transfer to whatever it is that we're doing with our sport, which would be striking, grappling, whatever that is. That's why when you have maybe a non-combat athlete that is very fit, for example, maybe a marathon runner or a long-distance swimmer, whatever it is, and they put some boxing gloves on, they can't last a minute on the pads.

It's not because they're unfit, it's because they're not conditioned and prepared for that activity. And often that comes down to things like movement efficiency, biomechanics, being very efficient at throwing punches, takedowns, whatever it is, and getting used to that.

So that's why I often recommend doing skills as your conditioning. Also, it gives you another chance to practice your skills. For example, if you're doing shadowboxing, that's extra reps of punches and things like that that you're doing. Same thing with shadow wrestling: extra reps on the takedown. That's extra reps that you're doing essentially.

But there's also a caveat with that. If you are maybe a professional MMA fighter and you're training twice a day, every day, and you're doing striking, grappling, whatever it is, fence work, you're covering it all in the week, maybe your extra conditioning might be away from the cage and the mats and the ring, because your training load is already high within the combat sports itself. Maybe you need some just some variation away from the training, and that could be rowing, cycling, whatever it is, where you can target whatever adaptations that you're after.

I would generally advise, for example, you might do out of camp, you might do more specific-style conditioning within the sport itself. And then as you get into fight camp, as you get closer to a fight, I would probably move more towards general conditioning modalities, depending on how much training you're actually doing. If you're only training a few times a week, maybe you're an amateur fighter, you're only in the gym four or five times a week once a day, then I'd probably still do specific conditioning during that period, which would be your combat simulation or solo drills.

And then if, however, if you're training twice a day and trying to fit your strength and conditioning in, then I would still do more, have a more general approach to your conditioning regarding the strength training. You're very rarely going to overload the strength side within combat sports training, especially if you're a striker. There's no real strength component. Grapplers, yes, you will have a strength component in there, but the dose is quite small unless you're really trying to overload it and target it.

So that's the reason why you'll do strength training as a separate session. And generally you won't do the strength and conditioning together, mainly because one, the session will be too long. Two, you're kind of competing for adaptations if you're doing them together, even though that interference effect isn't such a big deal. It's just better to separate those. Your session's going to be too long.

Coming back, I guess, to the combat simulation, I think by combat simulation you probably mean things like sparring and rolling. Same thing here. It is a, you can do that. I really like the idea of flow sparring. So even like flow clinching, flow sparring, things like that. It's harder to do when you're rolling just because things do get out of hand usually.

But you can do things like one-for-one drills or even like sequencing submissions together and things like that, and just flowing that way. There can be other ways you can do it. It's just sometimes it can just be easier to control the intensity of the lower end if you're doing that.

Now if you're doing higher-end conditioning, for example you might be doing hard lactic power rounds or you're just doing high-intensity aerobic work, then for sure you can definitely do more combat simulation. For example, maybe positional sparring is great if you're doing some higher-end aerobic work. For example, you have to escape the back over and over again. That's one way you can do that, or escaping mount or anything like that. These are things that you can do if you have a partner, though. That's the only other problem. And if you have maybe mats at home, you can do that with.

So those are things you can do. Shadow wrestling gets your heart rate up too if you do it hard. You can do your solo stuff to the point where you're doing high-intensity work just with your solo drills. I hope I answered your question there. Shoot me another email if I didn't answer it fully and I'll try to give you a better answer. But that's my take on essentially the strength and conditioning side of combat sports. Combat sports, while they do provide strength and conditioning, they don't overload it to the point where you don't have to do anything else essentially.

Second question we've got, Nil Bro. He says, "Can you suggest me some exercises to strengthen and condition knees and shin, and also exercises to increase my cardiovascular abilities?" He's a BJJ and judo practitioner, and every day during and after training he gases out with knees getting sore and legs getting tired. Okay, this one's a bit of a loaded question because I'm not sure what you mean by knees and legs getting sore and tired.

I'm assuming it's just fatigue and gassing out. We'll just run with that for now. But if it's happening every day and during every training, maybe just get checked up from a medical professional too, because you never

Know if it's something like compartment syndrome and the calves or something like that, or even maybe shin splints. So just be aware of that, and this isn't medical advice what I'm going to give you, but potentially things like extensive plyometrics or jumping rope is essentially an extensive or submaximal plyometric exercise. So pogos, jumping rope, you can even do extensive jumping like squat jumps that aren't maximal continuously. These things can help improve essentially the work capacity of the legs.

I don't know if you're doing any strength training, but it sounds like potentially no. In that case, you probably want to start training your legs as well. So that could be, you know, squats, Bulgarian split squats, all your general, even leg press and things like that, all general leg exercises just to develop some strength within the legs. That'll help you essentially tolerate the workloads within your training.

I don't know if you're training BJJ and judo every day, so it might be a little more difficult to fit in. But you have to start once or twice a week, very low volume. I'm talking like two to three exercises, two to three sets max, and only a few reps just to get used to it. Regarding specific exercises, yeah, I mean you're just going to do your typical lower exercises, your squats, split squats, lunges, things like that just to get started.

There are, depending on, you mentioned sore knees, but that depends on what kind of sore knees you get. If it's tendon pain, there are things you can do like long duration isometrics and really slow eccentric exercises. But if it's not, there doesn't, it doesn't sound like it's there, it sounds like it's just fatigue. So yeah, you probably need to start doing some strength training.

In terms of cardiovascular abilities, again, you're doing BJJ and judo. I don't know if you're doing every day or not. So it sounds like maybe you're just missing out on, you're kind of in that same intensity range. So most classes, as I mentioned before in the previous question, you're going to pretty well sit in that middle range all the way through. So you probably need to touch on some either higher intensity efforts, things like hard bike sprints for 6 to 10 seconds, or take essentially multiple takedowns within 6 to 10 seconds with full rest between, so 2 to 3 minutes.

And you probably need to touch on the lower end as well, so your real aerobic work, you know, going out for a 30 to 60 minute run or, well, probably not for you running because you have that issue with your legs at the moment. But even if it's 30, 60 minutes on the bike, on the rower, whatever it is, just to get a little bit away from what you're doing there and getting some just some really general conditioning and strength training in there. And that should start to make a difference.

Following question, or the next question here, Enrique. How can you get stronger while cutting weight? So this is, I guess this is a bit of a twofold question as well. So when we're talking about cutting weight, there's essentially, I guess, dieting down slowly to bring your body weight down, or we're looking at acute weight loss near the end of essentially the final week before the fight, before weighing.

So the acute weight loss phase, that's so short and so close to the fight, I'm not going to worry about that. That should be the least of your worries there, and that's such a short period of time that it's not really going to matter. So I'm assuming then we're going to talk about essentially dieting down. So for example, maybe you're dieting trying to lose 10 pounds, you know, very far out from a fight, and you're doing that gradually. So there are some things you can do here.

One neat little trick is actually, for example, if you do a typical training program before you start cutting weight, and then you start your weight cut, and the first one to two, three weeks are okay because you're only reducing your calories slightly. As it starts to get harder, what you can do is you can actually change exercises, and that novel stimulus of a new exercise, you then be quickly become stronger at that exercise.

And that's an easy way of almost like, say, tricking your body and getting stronger. For example, if you always do bench press and then maybe three weeks in you do incline bench press, because you haven't done that in a long time, you'll get stronger in the exercise over the next few weeks. So that's one way you can do it.

Another way, another important thing to do when you're losing weight is to maintain your strength training intensity. Obviously strength training intensity is the most important part when you're trying to get stronger. So you don't want to be doing loads of, you don't want to be doing loads of volume anyway, because if you're cutting weight, you're likely coming up to a fight. So your volume's going to drop a lot.

So my typical session might look like some kind of lower body, body weight power exercise like box jump. You might have a loaded power exercise, might be like an Olympic lift or a loaded jump. Then you might have a lower body strength exercise, for example, let's just say trap bar deadlift, and then maybe an upper body superset.

And within that, you'll only do two to three sets, and you might only do anywhere between three to five reps pretty much of all of that. But you want to stay well away from failure as well. So within these compound exercises, you might have three left in the tank, kind of thing.

Remember, when you're trying to maximize force production to get stronger, there are two ways of doing this. There's increasing load on the bar or mass that you're lifting, or increasing the speed that you lift it through acceleration. That's why programs like 531 do work so well. Even though you're programming off a training or even lighter than a training max, the goal is to move the weight as fast as possible. And moving the weight as fast as possible is another way to maximize force development or force production. And that way you can get stronger.

So that's something you can do while, I guess, reducing your calories, and it's just making sure that your volume is reduced because you're going to have less energy, and you want most of that energy to go towards your combat sports training. So those are very, those are things that you can do essentially to get stronger while you're cutting weight. There's no magic to it. It's just making sure you don't cut weight too fast. If you start dropping your carbohydrate, you know, eight weeks out and dropping multiple pounds per week, then it's going to become a problem.

It's also going to depend on how lean you are to begin with. If you're already lean and then looking to cut weight, then you're probably going to lose strength regardless. If you're a little bigger, holding a little more body fat, then you're going to be good to go. So that's another thing to consider as well, how lean you are to in the beginning before you start your weight cut.

If you're already lean and trying to go down a weight class, yeah, strength, overall strength will go. It's just, that's just part of it. It's something you're going to have to deal with within that. So ideally you're cutting weight from a position where you have a little more body fat to lose, and that's going to help you maintain or gain strength as you go through.

Got another question here from Victor Hugo. Applications of the high-low method in fight sports programming. Do you see it's useful? For me it's difficult sometimes to make some days in the high or low category, the medium in fight sports, do you think it exists?

Okay, so I actually wrote about the high-low method in my MMA or how to schedule your MMA training article. I do think it's useful. I think it's a good way to try and model your training week. However, it is not always possible because one, you might not have control over whatever it is happening that day in your class. Obviously, unless you're a professional working, setting your own schedule, it becomes difficult to work around what everyone else has to do within these classes. But I still think it's useful to try adhere to some of the principles.

So if you're not familiar with the high-low method, the high-low method is essentially placing all of your high stress or activity on one day and all of your low stress activity on an alternate day. So essentially you're alternating a low day with a high day. And the whole idea around this is that you avoid this middle ground of intensity, which is generally too low of an intensity to see adaptations in the high, I guess, power outputs, but too high of an intensity to easily recover from.

Now you ask here as well, the medium in fight sports, do you think it exists? Yes, most training sessions are medium in that medium intensity anyway. They go on for an hour long, your cry, just depending on what if you're doing, you're sitting in that medium intensity most of the time throughout, which is fine. That's part of the sport training. There's nothing wrong with that. Most all professional team sports or mixed sports have medium intensity training as their sports training, and that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just a matter of then trying to fit your other activities around this.

Now you're not always going to be able to have a purely low day, probably, or purely high day, unless you have some real technical style trainings that just means you need to be wary of where you slot your training in. So for example, if you have a hard, maximum sparring day, rolling day, and you're doing full competition rounds, then you're

Probably not going to add extra plyometric style conditioning on top of that because that's just going to be too much. What you might do though is you might do a very low intensity power session in the morning beforehand. That's going to help juice you up for essentially that session. It's not going to take anything away from that session.

It probably actually is going to help you make you feel better, plus you get that dose of strength, of that power work, speed and power work in that week. So that's one way you could do things, or you could just do nothing and just do sparring on that day.

So there's a couple of ways you can do things there. Regarding the rest of the week, there are other things you can do. Wherever you can kind of fit, I mean Greydon Marr said this really well on the second podcast that we did here, that sometimes you just need to try to fit things in where they fit.

So if you have a lower intensity day, whatever, maybe you have to do your lower body strength training then, which is fine. If you've planned your strength training well enough, it's probably not going to impact you too much, because the idea is you're not going to train like a bodybuilder or a powerlifter. You're not going to do that same kind of volume.

Your strength training program should be geared towards complimenting your combat sport. Then within the higher intensity work, again, you can try fit that wherever it is. Ideally you want to try fit it on a day maybe you have higher intensity training in the morning and then in the afternoon you can hit that.

It's more of a balancing game and seeing how things fit. Your days might be more medium as such depending on where you fit what, but overall if you plan things well and you go through a bit of trial and error and see how you feel the following day after certain schedules, then you'll know exactly what works for you. Because there won't be a one size fits all for everyone. It's just that the high-low method just tends to be a decent way of trying to schedule your week as the best case scenario.

So yes, it definitely is useful, and I'll touch on some of that strength training stuff too regarding the bodybuilding. That's one of the common mistakes that I see, I mean within all sports and most athletes that don't have, I guess you could say, proper strength and conditioning coaches and programs around them and just doing things themselves or just gone down to a personal trainer, is people will run a bodybuilding or, like, most strength training unfortunately is essentially passed down from bodybuilding, powerlifting, and other strength sports.

It's kind of like the foundation. That's why you have so many college football players and things maxing out, see max out videos of everyone hyped up doing their squats and cleans, which is honestly and some of the dumbest [expletive] that you'll see in sport. And I understand like, yep, being strong, that's important, that's good. But your goal when you're strength training isn't to just be strong in a squat, bench press, or deadlift, or just be big like a bodybuilder.

It's got to be able to transfer to your sport, and it's got to be able to let you train your sport without having so much soreness or fatigue to carry over.

For example, a typical, say, powerlifting program might be, I don't know, five sets of squats of, you know, three to five or more reps depending on where they're on the cycle. Then they might do leg press for some hypertrophy work, for sets of 8 to 10, then they might do leg curls and then whatever else. Doing that and then having to go box or roll or whatever, your legs are dead. And the adaptations that you want for these sports is often geared towards speed.

Now often people will say, well, you know, the myth of weight training, I mean that was a comment in one of my videos, the myth of weight training making you slow needs to die. Yeah, for sure. But the problem is weight training will make you slow if you do it wrong, and by wrong I mean running pure powerlifting or bodybuilding style programs where there is no speed or power component to them. So that becomes an issue when you're looking at strength training programs coming into combat sports.

Now the same thing, the same thing can be said for conditioning. People who just do random finishers at the end of their strength training sessions or random, I guess you could say, circuits as their conditioning. Again, you just, one, if you're just doing finishers, it's not enough volume for you to get adaptations. Two, you're just staying in that middle ground again and just spiking blood lactate and all those waste products that come with it.

That's just going to cause a lot of fatigue or muscle damage, which you don't want, especially if you're looking to train the following day or even later that day. These are things that you want to kind of keep at bay.

And that's why if you have any of my training programs from Sweet Science of Fighting, you'll see that the strength training programs are relatively low volume and they use various methods like cluster sets. Right, so cluster sets are essentially breaking up a set into, I guess, one long, one longer set. It has rests in between. So instead of doing three sets of six of, say, a squat, you're going to do three sets of 2 plus 2 plus 2. And each time you do two reps, you rack the bar, and then you're going to rest 30 seconds. Then you're going to do two reps.

And while this doesn't show a superior change and increase in strength and power in the long term, in the short term you see these reductions in fatigue and you see often better maintenance of bar velocity or acceleration. So you're going to get the same outcomes as you were doing three sets of six versus three sets of 2 plus 2 plus 2, but you're going to get less fatigue from it, and you're going to maintain the quality of the exercise better. So these are small changes you can make within the program as well that's going to prioritize the combat sport versus the gym.

Now that doesn't mean you're always going to do these things. There's a time and place within your training cycle or training year that you're going to do maybe more volume in the gym. Maybe you've just had a fight, you've had some a little bit of time off, you've come back, your next fight or competition's not for another 6 to 8 months. Those first one or two months, if you have some kind of deficit in force production or velocity or whatever it is, you're probably going to address that then, and you're probably going to do a little more volume that might slightly impact your combat sports training. And that is fine because that's the goal of that kind of short phase away from competition before you ramp up more skills training.

The other thing is not to stay away or not to get away from the sport training itself too much. So even if your goal is, hey, I need to get stronger, whatever it is, you might be in the gym only three times a week doing these things, but you still need to do the sport and you need to keep those skills essentially developing, learning new skills, honing the same ones, whatever it is, fixing holes in your game, things like that.

That's essentially all the questions that I've got from these four, but thanks guys for sending those in. What I might do now, we've been 27 or so minutes, I might just touch a little bit more on, I guess you could say, strength and conditioning for combat sports in general. Maybe more, it seems the main two questions are about kind of like scheduling the training week and where things fit together.

So when you're scheduling your training week, obviously depending on the level you are, you're probably, not, well first you're going to have things outside of training that you're going to have, family, work, whatever it is, especially if you're not a professional athlete. These things obviously take priority over whatever you're doing. And then obviously you have your gym's timetable. So do they have morning classes, evening classes, lunchtime classes? You know, which ones can you make depending on these other factors? And that's going to play a role in how you schedule your week.

So the first thing you need to do is schedule out which classes you're going to, or whatever it is you're going to make in the week around your other commitments, and then see where the other gaps are within the week where you could fit in extra strength and conditioning. That's essentially the only thing you can do in these situations.

If you are very short on time and you only have time for the classes themselves, that's fine, that's what you have to deal with. There may be ways you can micro-dose certain things, I guess certain qualities within that. For example, if you have a medicine ball at home or something like that, you can do some throws and jumps as power work before going to class, for example, in the morning or in the evening.

And that way if you do that two or three times a week, you're essentially getting power work done but in 10 or 15 minutes. And that's something you can easily do before going to class without impacting class. It acts as a warmup anyway, and that's essentially a win-win.

To do with conditioning, perhaps at the end of class you might do an extra 10 or 20 minutes of shadow boxing or shadow wrestling or just drilling with a partner, things like that at the end. They can give you that essentially that extra volume of conditioning training. So those are strategies you can use if you don't have the time to fit those in. If you do have the time, again, you're just...

Going to have to slot in essentially where you think is best in your training. For example, if you're training at the jujitsu or boxing, whatever is on Monday, and then say Tuesday might be off from there, so that might be where you do your S&C training and maybe a little bit of conditioning if you need it. And then Wednesday you might be back at combat sports and whatever it is, and kind of just feel it that way.

Another way to think about it is depending on the phase you're on if you're competing, whether it's locally or nationally. When you don't have a competition or fight coming up, that might be where you do a little more physical preparation outside of your combat sport. So it might be like maybe you're training three or four times a week as your combat sport, and then when you are doing, when you're further away from competition or fight, you're doing maybe three extra strength conditioning sessions.

Then as you get closer to a fight, you know you have one coming up, okay, you drop one of those strength conditioning sessions out, now you're doing five or four or five times a week of your combat sports training. And that way you can kind of balance both throughout your year so you can kind of fit things in and get what you need to get done.

If you're very short on time in that example where you can only do your combat sport, again, you're just going to have to micro do those specific qualities. If you have a home gym, even better. You can literally get away with, if you don't have time, you can do one lift essentially in a session.

So if you had a home gym and you're just going to do three times a week, you could literally just do a squat on one day, and then one day you could just do some kind of upper body push, and another you could do some kind of upper body pull. If you're a little more advanced, you could do something like a power exercise, could be like an Olympic lift or some kind of loaded jump and then squat. And then another day you could do some kind of like overhead like push press, and then you might do some kind of pull.

And then on the final day you might do maybe a couple of full body exercises. Really simple, really low volume. It will take you less than half an hour to do. You won't feel beat up because you're not going to do a stupid amount of sets and reps, but you're still going to get stronger and you're still going to develop those qualities. That's another small thing you can do if you have that option at a home gym when you have less time.

So I hope that covers everything there. If you have any more questions, guys, you can throw them through the email. I can answer them for you or save them for another solo podcast if I run out of guests to get on here.

But thank you for watching or listening. Make sure to check out in the description all my programs and courses are down there. If you jump on the Sweet Science of Fighting website, you'll see under the online courses tab there's the bundle there that has essentially everything explained in depth through PowerPoints. You also get a bunch of bonuses with those.

So I've got like a strength training cheat sheet that will help you essentially create your strength training program, which I also run through in the course itself with examples. And also run through all the big, big, big mistakes that people make with strength training and some of the adaptations that you're looking for, so you kind of have a deeper understanding of why you're doing what.

Same with conditioning. I updated that earlier this year as well, so that kind of runs through how you can create your own conditioning plan, why you're doing what as well, some of the adaptations you're after, going a little more in depth. So you have an idea that when you're going to go do your training, you're not just going there randomly putting something together for no reason. Or if you're getting something from someone, a program from someone, they can't explain why you're doing these things, then you kind of have an idea maybe you need to look for someone else.

Also, you remember you have the weight cutting course in there by Dr. James Moran. That's the performance nutritionist for Rocky Fielding. He's been doing his weight cut for many years. He's published research on weight cutting and some of the detrimental effects that weight cutting can have if you don't do it properly, which is actually really interesting.

He shows that essentially if you, each time you weight cut and then rebound hard after a fight, you actually put on more body fat. So over the years, for example, if you're doing over 10 years, each time you're getting fatter and fatter and fatter, so you have more fat mass and less lean muscle mass essentially. And then that just becomes an issue, makes each weight cut harder with that.

So that's actually really interesting, and he's got ways that essentially you can do it properly so you don't run into these problems. Obviously there's always things in the MMA news with fighters cutting weight too hard, collapsing on scales, some people dying. Obviously, if you're going to Rambo it and do it yourself, that becomes issues, so that's a very good one.

And obviously the Unleash Your Inner Beast course, it has the mental skills workbook. Mona runs you through all sorts of different, it's not just your typical goal setting. Oh, I'm going to set some airy fairy goals. She runs you through strategies to help you with your arousal levels before fights. She was a six times karate world champion. She's been CrossFit Games and all sorts, but she's, things about your arousal, bring it up and down, strategies you can use for that.

Self-talk things, visualization, it even comes with some visualization guided meditation things that she's done. And if you want to learn more about that as well, you can actually listen to the podcast I did with Mona. I think it's number four, and she dives into some strategies there as well of things you can do as a fighter to essentially help your mental game.

Because you can be physically prepared, you can be that beast in the gym, but then you come on into the cage, ring, or mat and absolutely flop. Often it's not a physical preparation thing, it's a mental thing. And you see it often where fighters will be too adrenaline dumped and then get that huge adrenaline dump when they start the fight, and it's not conditioning that was the problem. It's essentially that mental aspect that caused them to gas out there.

So have a look at those as well. But next week we can look forward, hopefully look forward to a guest. I've got a couple more guests coming on. John Cronin will come on, I think in June, who's a legendary sport scientist, which will be epic. He was one of the reasons I got into this area. So he'll be talking about all things to do with wearable resistance. We touched on that briefly in a previous podcast with another guest.

He's going to come with things like flywheel training, eccentric training, jumps, all that stuff, because he's published research on all of it. Got another friend who works with adaptive athletes, which would be quite interesting, so he always dealt with that challenge. Then I've got more people coming on who are experts in their field, essentially, in other sports and within combat sports to essentially share their knowledge and share their way of doing things.

So look out for those and keep an eye on your email. There'll be some more newsletters coming out and more content on the website.