HIT, Death To Energy Systems, & Over-Reliance Of LISS w/ Usher & Babraj (SSOF Ep. 56)

Dr. John Babraj2:45

Okay. It's, yeah, it's pretty much like you say—it's the opposite approach to zone two low-intensity training. The advantage it has is it's short and sharp. So we're not asking athletes to train for an hour, two hours at a set intensity. From my point of view, that leads to increased training load and risk of injury.

But to what HIT is: all-out effort. I don't use—so lots of people have used it as 100% peak power or 90% maximum heart rate. We—I don't do that. What we tend to do is ask people to go as hard as they can. So it's a maximal or supramaximal effort that we were looking for, but for a very, very short period of time.

Typically between 6 seconds to, maximally, no more than—if it's a training protocol, I probably don't use more than 20-second interval. And then you have the recovery period between, and you ask people to do it again and again and again for—so many is around about the ideal duration.

James de Lacey3:59

Gotcha. Andrew, could you just unmute your mic a little? I think there must be some feedback coming through. Also, not your mic—your speaker there. I think there might be some feedback coming through there. I'm not entirely sure what's happening. You can just press the mute one there. Oh yeah, either that works.

Okay, so the high-intensity approach—I think what's interesting within this approach is the idea that, okay, if you look at the research that you've published there, and then you look at, for example, like the Tabata study, you see similarities where, okay, VO2 max kind of peaks around two, three weeks. But what was interesting with your study is even when you continue through nine weeks, you still see improvements in endurance performance, just not in VO2 max. You see time to exhaustion improve and things like that.

So I guess the question becomes: how important is VO2 max in terms of overall, I guess, sports performance? And then is there a threshold? Maybe that, okay, you hit—does it really matter if it goes up? What are the other—what other things are then factors in terms of improving conditioning?

Dr. John Babraj5:01

Yeah. So VO2 max is obviously viewed as a gold standard measure of endurance capacity of an athlete. And to some extent, that's not right. It represents a central ability to deliver oxygen, and it's limited centrally. And that's why people with low VO2 can still perform to a super high level.

There's a genetic component to it as well that limits how high some of these VO2 maxes can go. But it doesn't limit their ability to perform at the elite level. And as a performance indicator, VO2 max is very poor. It's not the obvious thing you think it would be related to is marathon performance, and there's absolutely no correlation between VO2 max and marathon performance.

So what was the important part about what you were saying there was the second part: that time to complete the test. So if we think about it, VO2 max is really about how much oxygen is coming in, how much carbon dioxide is coming in, how much oxygen you're taking in. Yeah. That time to exhaustion is much more reflective of what the muscles are doing.

So it's a much better indicator of muscular endurance. So how well the muscle is able to work under distress. And for me, that's the most important part of any VO2 max test is that time to exhaustion: how long does it take you to get to the point where you can no longer create enough energy to continue at the speed or the power that we're asking you to?

James de Lacey7:11

Gotcha. So if we were going to really try to dumb this down, we could say that this high-intensity or sprint interval training—we're looking at almost targeting peripheral adaptations within the muscle, and the central adaptations are maxed out within a few weeks when doing these protocols.

Dr. John Babraj7:11

Yeah. So VO2 max seems to hit a plateau. So if you don't change a protocol, VO2 max within a few weeks is—your body is now comfortably delivering sufficient oxygen. But the muscle is still under distress and it's still adapting. So even after nine weeks, I don't think with a nine-week protocol we've reached saturation point in the muscle.

James de Lacey7:45

So does that mean then that you would deem these muscular adaptations more important than say heart or central adaptations in terms of overall conditioning?

Dr. John Babraj7:45

Yes. For me, okay, performance comes from the muscle. Performance is movement. All we're doing when we're performing sport is asking somebody to move in a specific way, whether that's football, boxing, sanda, any sort of sport. There's a sequence of movements we want the muscle to be able to make. And if the muscle hasn't got the conditioning to do it, it's irrelevant what centrally you're delivering.

James de Lacey8:24

Interesting. Okay. This is time to plug some gaps in my brain. I'm really liking this. Andrew, I want you to jump in here around the sprint protocols you guys have developed as well. Obviously, John mentioned about, after three weeks, VO2 max may not change, but you're changing protocols semi-often because you're looking at changes in how heart rate recovers and how heart rate raises during exercise. You maybe dive into a few of those sprint protocols and how you've come across those and how you use them.

Andrew Usher8:54

So I think the first big issue is that people are just doing sprint training for the sake of sprint training because they think they're adapting some alactic-lactic kind of process. But they're actually—they're really trying to ask the athlete with—underlying physiology is doing. So when we do sprint training, everything is based upon the athlete and the response of the athlete.

So obviously, if you're in the lucky position to where you've got, well, you've got your Polar H10 and Moxy sensors, we're able to see central-peripheral delivery and have a good idea of how that's changing through sprints. For those that don't have that, they just have a heart rate, then obviously we are grabbing that heart rate data and then running some maths formulas and algorithms to determine how the heart rate is recovering.

Because there's a lot more to it than just, you peek at 180 and you recover at 160 in 23 seconds. There's a lot more to actually how that recovery actually occurs and how the slow and fast phase occurs. So when we're working with athletes, what's happening is that sprints are changed per week based upon the week's training loads and the response that we're seeing in the physiology.

So we can always maintain and create adaptations at all times. And I think this is the key of what we actually do versus your generic MMA workout that you see where it's just—because the thing is, physiology is a lot more complicated than we think. And even when it comes to peak heart rate values, we know that athletes get to peak heart rate very quick. The on-kinetics is pretty fast.

The recovery is the area that we seem to get trapped into. We're going to measure just solely on heart rate beats that are recovered. There's a lot more taking place than that, and to get the best out of it you need to really understand that and have a look at things like exponential curve fit and linear regression models. And these are the things that nobody wants to do because they're horrible. You need to have some math, you need to have the knowledge.

But you can't just throw somebody on a 15-on, 30-off protocol without understanding why you're actually doing it. We inherit a lot of athletes into the lab that that's what they're on, and you get these wonderful explanations as to why they're on it which is rooted in no physiology whatsoever. So for us it's quite straightforward: assess, test, see where the athlete's at, and then devise your protocols about what you're trying to achieve.

Obviously for some boxers that could be impulse-driven that we need to see them move a bit quicker out the corner. For others it may be the recovery is exceptionally poor and we need to make them recover better between the rest rounds. So there's a whole myriad of reasons of why you're doing it. It's not the cookie-cutter approach that a lot of these conditioning websites are trying to tell you what it is.

And I think this is one of the big issues and why conditioning has never really moved further forward in the last 10 years. We're obsessed with simplicity, and I think simplicity for general population is probably quite good. But elite athlete level, it's got no place. For me it has to be done properly.

James de Lacey11:53

Yeah. That helps. Or not says there is no protocol.

Andrew Usher11:53

There is standard protocols. Obviously the first couple of weeks with any new athlete we probably put them in a classic Wingate protocol. We'll give them a 23-second all-out sprint, 60-second recoveries. If I'm working remotely with someone I can't get anything else, that's a good benchmark for me. If they can come in and see me then I can probably take a week's worth of Wingates and really run everything I need to run mathematically and sciency-wise to then the following weeks get them on different gates.

James de Lacey12:23

Every day?

Andrew Usher12:23

No, just two or three a week. But I mean, good. And then there's the other big issue that nobody addresses, and this is something me and John have been looking at quite a lot: what load should you have when you do a Wingate? Is 7.5% a reasonable body weight percentage on the flywheel?

We've got a student, postgraduate Callum, is doing 8.5%. He's looking at 7.5 and 8.5. For Hannah Rankin's last camp we had her on 9.5%, and she was doing 15-on—was it? I can't remember—had her on a mix, but she was either 15-on, 10-off, or 10-on, 15-off, or 10 at 9.5%, and she was clocking out over a thousand watts. Not as much as John, because John's a machine.

And my old thing that everyone says—and I've said this time and again—nobody's died in the lab yet. And the reason I say that is because in the world of conditioning there seems to be this fear that the heart's going to explode and people are going to mutate into all sorts of things. And the reality is most athletes do not train hard enough when it comes to conditioning, and that's because we are propagating with this world of—I'm going to be political today—of zone two training and making people spend...

James de Lacey13:43

Bring out your Scouse side, Andrew!

Andrew Usher13:43

I've been thinking it's going to come out today. I'm pretty sure your reply to me yesterday was sarcastic and I was like, 'He must be in a Scouse mood yesterday, so he's probably going to be in one today too.'

James de Lacey14:09

So...

Andrew Usher14:09

Zone two is a great thing for deconditioned athletes, people coming out cardiac rehab, general populations who have no idea of cardiac output, left ventricular development, et cetera, et cetera. But the world of elite athletes, especially in high-intensity-based anaerobic sports, there's no room for this. It's too much time in your training schedule. You're not getting bang for your buck, but we're still propagating...

I'm still seeing people heavily pushing zone two training and lactate threshold more, and I'm just like, 'Why?' When we can get the adaptations quicker and allow people to be doing more skill. We are, as sports scientists, we are still very, very big on the boxers need to box, kickboxers need to kickbox. That is the fundamental thing. You're going to have the best VO2 max on the planet, you're going to have the best desaturation and resaturation on the planet, but if you can't box it doesn't matter.

So the reality is sports science is an adjunct to the skill set, but the skill set needs to be trained first and foremost. They need to box, period. So the more we can support that through proper sport science for recovery, recovery modeling, more power output, acceleration, that's what we should be using sports science and strength and conditioning to do. We shouldn't be doing it to put some kid on a bike for four hours a day, three times a week.

James de Lacey15:35

I'm with you on the sport side for sure. I've definitely, I'm moving away from this idea of okay, a lot of low intensity, et cetera, et cetera. I think that's been... I think a lot of people who came into strength and conditioning coaching maybe came from a strength background, or within—you don't get taught a lot of application of conditioning, and I think you find it online and you find the prominent stuff.

And a lot of it is around just the ideas you mentioned: cardiac output, left ventricular, eccentric hypertrophy—bigger heart chamber, pump more blood—more central adaptations and then your higher intensity for better peripheral adaptations and stuff.

But what you guys are doing I think is really, really interesting. It goes right against the grain. I love it. You rethink everything that I'm also doing too.

Andrew Usher16:03

I mean, I think one of the big—I mean, one of the detractors from what I do is this whole idea of central and systemic is so important because without your peripheral doesn't get fuel distributed. And I'm like, 'Well, that's true. Systemic is important, but I can put you in the ring and amputate both your legs. You're still technically boxing, but you just don't have any delivery mechanism to strike.'

So systemic and peripheral is a bit like that. Systemic can deliver, but the big underlying question that we're finding in research is how good is the peripheral side of actually uptaking that oxygen to deliver it to the muscle in order that allows to sustain effort? I think we oversimplify blood flow as well. People think heart rate goes up, blood flow's going up, all is good, so the muscle must be getting enough oxygen. That's not true, because we get into this world of microcirculation which is completely different from the systemic arterial and venous flow.

So heart rate can go up about fivefold during exercise. Microcirculation blood flow can go up about a hundredfold. So there's an extra pump around the muscle that's allowing faster flow and faster extraction that's separate from what the heart's doing.

James de Lacey17:27

Okay, peripheral adaptation.

Andrew Usher17:27

So we oversimplify blood flow. And then we get this whole idea that when the blood arrives down and you're going to go down to the capillary bed and you head into the arterial, and you've then got to get that hemoglobin/myoglobin utilized, and it's got to be extracted and transferred across the mitochondria, and the mitochondria need oxygen, et cetera, et cetera. There's a whole cellular response going on.

But there's potential limiting factors in diffusion and how much can you actually pass through the arterial-capillary bed to the muscle. There's a whole heap of things taking place at the microvascular and capillary level that we still don't actually understand. I mean, muscle physiology we know a lot of—about type one, type two muscle fibers, recruitment, acetylcholine and crossover, all that type of stuff. But when you get to the microvascular world and you look at how the muscle's actually extracting and utilizing blood, nutrient availability, et cetera, it's still pretty limited, especially in sport.

And the other big thing with the research papers—there's been a lot of work with Kevin McCully and all these papers that are looking at models of mitochondrial capacity and all this stuff—it's all with partially fatigued muscle. It's not with fully fatigued muscle. And I think probably our lab's one of the only ones that's really looking at fully fatigued athletes and what that mitochondrial response really looks like and how that recovery takes place.

And I can tell you that is one messy world, because it's not as straightforward as people believe. It's a lot more complicated, and it's given us headaches. And I would reckon that we're pretty switched on on it, but it's still given us headaches as to why it's occurring. Because then you have other interesting issues—for example, the left quad, the right quad may extract and utilize oxygen at different time points. So there's no real symmetry. It's a very asymmetrical system. It's not working in sync.

And then we find things like a boxer may throw, say, within the first six, eight punches but may only desaturate by 3%, and another one may desaturate by 5%. It's such an individualistic thing, how the body...

Dr. John Babraj19:53

Utilizes physiology that the cookie cut approach doesn't cut it at level anymore. You need to have a really good understanding of why you're doing something first and foremost and what you're expecting to get out of it. So it's pretty complex, it's super fascinating.

I mean, we are getting phenomenal results, but it's taken a long time to get there and it's taking a lot of young athletes to be suffered through training protocols to get there.

Andrew Usher20:21

I mean, we are—John and I are not very media friendly and we don't really do a lot of publicizing what we're doing, like two hidden trolls in a basement. But the last year it's been phenomenal for us. We've taken kids to national titles, we've had world champions, we've had WBC champions. We're just losing count how many these kids are winning stuff now, and it's just because the conditioning is so good.

It's when you actually look at it, we start to see that strength is probably less important than conditioning in the world of combat sports and boxing. Slightly it's different than BJJ and MMA, which has a high component of being able to push and press. Anyone that's done BJJ, technically you'll take everyone out. It's not the same when you're nine stone and you've got a sixteen stone guy. Then you realize, actually maybe that was a lot of there. At that point, strength and pushing and being able to get a shrimp and get out is more important.

So everything is sport specific. But we see that it's much more complicated than probably people realize. And if the muscle isn't extracting oxygen and utilizing it at a reasonable rate, then it doesn't matter how good your system is. It doesn't matter how good your central delivery is, which is the big thing that's probably being pushed.

James de Lacey21:44

I mean, that's the big thing being pushed obviously, that central delivery. But to maybe go into or bring it back to or away from the elite athlete side, because I think a lot of people listening to this may not be at that level and maybe they're looking at, I don't know, national, regional, state, in their city, local competitions and things like that. Is this an approach—say someone maybe isn't well trained, doesn't have a good conditioning background, doesn't have a large training background—would this be something you would throw someone into?

Is there a time and place you would still do high-intensity training, or is there a time and place where you wouldn't use this kind of training and opt for lower intensity style training to, I know, elicit benefits that are easier to train for essentially in terms of effort?

Dr. John Babraj22:17

For me, no, because even for sub-elite athletes you're going into a competition against somebody. So if you're fighting regional, you'll be fighting against somebody else. Chances are you're probably working as well, so you're holding down some sort of job. How can you give the time to condition properly if you go low intensity where you're having to do a two-hour session plus develop technical tactical skills required, the ringcraft required for a sport?

You're not going to be able to marry it up and have some sort of family life, social life that everyone wants as well. So this approach, even for non-elite athletes, is exactly the same. You get out what you put in. The harder you push, the more you'll get out because you're going to create more stress in the body to change. But you can do it quickly—that's the benefit. You can do it in a ten-minute session at the end of technical spar, for example. You could put in a ten-minute session at the end and get your conditioning adaptation.

Andrew Usher23:24

Andrew, I think you're on mute. I think about this, and he was on the podcast with Team GB and the GB boxers discussing a lot with them. They have slide-in bike sprints after spar sessions, because you get great flexibility with it. It's one of the benefits of this type of training. But it's great.

Dr. John Babraj23:58

The other thing about it is that even general population, it's great because you got to remember that your supermaximal effort is linked to how fit you are and how able you are. So as long as you're pushing as hard as you can push, you're going to get something out of it. It's a—we always tell our athletes that sessions will never get easier because you only push as hard as you can push. So you're constantly chasing yourself.

So for someone that's maybe really deconditioned, come out of surgery, and they're went through the rehab and the prehab and they're through it and they're back to work, that intensity level for them may only be 10% of the intensity level of someone else, but it will still be enough to start creating physiological change.

And it always goes back for us to the physiology of muscle and adaptations and things, because you've got this thing as well about sarcopenia and muscle loss. And there's a big question in our mind about could you halt that, increasing mitochondrial function. So there's a whole heap of interesting areas about why we do things.

Andrew Usher24:50

But there's always a place for it. I think there's always a place for some high intensity. So I think it doesn't matter. I think perhaps the term 'high intensity' scares people. It has connotations of, I don't know, CrossFit or something like that where people are smashing things and going to puke and stuff. That's not—

Dr. John Babraj25:16

Speaking nice.

Andrew Usher25:16

So that's not speaking nice. But we do high intensity with 75, 80 year olds. They can still do high intensity. The intensity, the power that we're producing, is not what Hannah's producing on the bike, and we wouldn't expect it to be. But it's enough to create adaptation in the muscle to allow them to go about their activities.

So with older people, we're trying to get something different out. We're not trying to make them elite athletes. We're trying to just make life easier, stop that loss of functional decline. And we can do it with high-intensity training, ten minutes once a week, twice a week, is more than enough. But it's very high intensity.

James de Lacey26:27

Is the bike the only way you guys like to do the high-intensity training, or are there other modalities that you typically use as well?

Dr. John Babraj26:27

I like the bike because it requires no skill, you can't really pace it, and then you get the adaptations. But you can do it other ways, such as uphill sprinting. We've got some data like sand dune sprinting will do similar things where you've got a soft surface. So when you push your force in, you've got to actually really generate force back out.

Are they as good as a bike? No, because you lose control and it's easier for people to step back and go, 'This is hard, so I'm not actually going to push as hard as I want.' So for me, the bike is the best way to do it, and I'd always do it on a bike over anything else. But other ways to do it—

Andrew Usher27:31

I mean, we'll do a targeted bag session. I love making the bag sessions very interval based. If I had a bike I would do the bike. I mean, you can do them on the assault bike. A lot of amateurs, that's all they have access to is an assault bike, so we do sprints on them.

I'd stay away from the Concept2 rower. I'm just not a lover of it. I think it takes a bit of coordination, so it takes away that full ability to go really supermaximal on it. Bags are—

So, I mean, I'm just to clarify this because I think people just think I spend my whole life with athletes in high intensity. We don't. There's a whole heap of other things that we do as well. I mean, it's not just high-intensity training. But the reason we do the high intensity is it's easy to slide in, but it's also a phenomenal benchmark.

If you consistently—for example, we have—so I've been very lucky that I've worked with the UK Special Forces on occasion, and we do some crazy stuff with them. Like, how quick can you get to five miles on the assault bike? And these guys can get five miles pretty fast, and I've got my amateur pretty close on the tail of them at the moment.

So we'll do a whole heap of things. But the reason the bike is very useful is, as John said, it's a standardized protocol. Everyone can do it, but it's a benchmark. Even with an assault bike, if you have got a kid hitting a mile in just under two minutes on a Monday and then the following Monday two minutes twenty-five and then the next week though two minutes twenty-seven, something's actually occurring there that you can track and trace. And that's important.

But the other thing I'm going to say is about sprints, bikes, and Wingate tests. The research has been very, very neglectful of what's actually taking place in Wingates. There's a massive amount of data that we have started to extrapolate out that never gets published—like left leg, right leg symmetry, time to peak power, how long that peak power has been held, what the duration of peak power is, when the decline occurs, when the minimal power occurs. Because we started to see some really interesting correlations to time to peak power in relation to time to explosive power.

Within the ring and how quick can someone actually max produce power and push off the back foot. That was kind of instrumental in Hannah's last camp. We spent a lot of time looking at metrics like that on the bike, like how quick was she getting to 1,000 watts, how long was she holding 1,000 watts, what was the muscle doing during that period. And then having the benefit of having her in sparring with the moxies on, having a look at when is she reaching Peak combination values, hand speed values, and then correlate it all together.

You have to say there's some interesting phenomenals around the muscle and how it actually utilizes the oxygen, how it produces power.

James de Lacey29:55

Before getting back to the podcast, I want to let you know there's a link down in the description for the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground Community. You can get all the help you need for your combat sports training. You get every single Sweet Science of Fighting training program, online course, and you get access to a range of coaches within the private Discord community. So go check that out and back to the podcast.

And the bike, so you're using bike sprints almost as a way as like rate of force, rate of power development, like you would in a gym, but you're doing on a bike basis?

Andrew Usher30:20

Yeah, we track everything. So I mean, we are at the moment, I'm actually for my sins, because John has been doing it, we're looking at rate of force development for the next paper. We've been using the isokinetic chair and that's been pretty fascinating, because it's too early yet to say, but Peak power is higher in arms than it is in legs in pro boxers. But yet the rate of force development seems to be higher in the legs. So the time to rate of force at the moment seems to be slightly higher for the couple we've run. The data's early days, but there's some interesting things.

When you compare it to then when the muscle starts to desaturate, you start to see some very interesting things. When the muscle hits Peak metabolic stress and it has to desaturate because it's extracting oxygen, I'm getting excited. That is a magical moment because we see it in sprints, I see it in sparring, I see it in bag sessions and I see it in pad sessions. There's, I think in our sparring data research paper pre-peer review, I think it's between four and six seconds, something, John, when the muscle starts to desaturate.

And those athletes that are not conditioned particularly well have longer times or shorter times depending, and the recovery within the end round. In fact, what we're actually hoping to propose when we get this bloody thing published, it will be the first ever model of physiology within sparring, of a physiological peripheral muscle, which is quite exciting.

So there is a lot of interesting things you can get from things like a load bike, from a Wingate, a Monarch bike, that people are overlooking. Because the research papers are obsessed with Peak values, but they're not interested in how long does it take you to get there and how long can you hold it for and what's the heart rate at that point, what's the heart rate drop off, how does heart rate versus desaturation. So there's a whole heap of exciting things, but not everyone wants to go to that level. That's the other thing.

James de Lacey32:26

What would that holding Peak power, would that be almost how well you can tolerate workload while basically having a high oxygen desaturation in the muscle? So you're basically operating at low levels of oxygen. Or is it more so that it's a less steep decline in oxygen desaturation as you're holding that Peak power?

Andrew Usher32:26

So we are looking for sustained effort and we're looking to repeat sustained effort through recovery. And what you find is when you reach Peak power and the muscle desaturates, there will be a point where the muscle kind of goes into, and John can probably... it's not a steady state, because one of our peer reviewers didn't like that term.

Homeostasis, like the muscle will try to get into some kind of form of equilibrium to be able to function, unless it's completely fatigued. And in which case, if the muscle is completely fatigued and you see O2 drops to zero, then we know from incremental treadmill tests and sprints the athlete is done.

If you were to hit Peak power, it would depend. Most people are not holding it for that long in the sprints, are they, John? Like a few seconds maybe, two, three?

Dr. John Babraj33:27

So on the sprints, if I remember the data correctly, Peak power is occurring before desaturation, slightly. Yeah, because there's a slight delay in how the muscle is catching on.

Andrew Usher33:27

It's a bit of heart rate. You see as you do your sprint, your heart rate slightly, your Peak slightly follows on when you actually hit that Peak value. The muscle is kind of the same. There is a physiological, if you think about it, the time it takes to go through desaturation, diffusion gradients and all that stuff. But you definitely with a moxy or a Porton or any those gadgets, you see some quite interesting things that when the muscle is fully fatigued, when the athlete, when the athlete has maybe believes they're fatigued but they're not.

We had a kid, a boxer, do an incremental treadmill test, and when we start with the protocol at 10, we go up to 18 kilometers and then we just got gradients at that point. At 18, this kid got to 18 and 12. So he's running 18 kilometers an hour, so he's already done. He's 8 minutes of that, then he's right up to 12 on the incline, and the kid's whole oxygenation just bottomed out. He was like zero, and he still ran for about 72 seconds or something before he came off. I mean, he could barely move after it, but it was an amazing example.

When you hit the wall and he goes through the wall, and then it's like there's another wall and he kind of went through the next wall, and then he just had to stop. And the fascinating thing about that was that the more fatigued these athletes seem to get, the better the resaturation value seems to be in the rebound, which is something I'm looking at just now. So interesting.

So there is, I think, and I can't show at this stage because it's too early, but I believe there is something to train into that point of fatigue from a physiological response mechanism. But I don't think many people train to that level of fatigue.

James de Lacey35:17

Well, kind of goes into the fatigue theory models, right? Like central governor model and things like that. Can you train the brain to essentially not switch you off once you get to those levels? And I guess hitting those super maximal efforts and hitting those walls over and over, potentially desensitizes you to it maybe. I'm not sure. I'm just kind of spitballing.

Andrew Usher35:43

It's can you train the muscle not to switch your brain off, to switch off drive?

James de Lacey35:43

Oh, okay.

Andrew Usher35:43

So if you think about the muscle feeds back through type three, four afference what's going on to your brain. So at the point of fatigue, the muscle's under high metabolic stress or high stress load, and type three, four afference will be highly firing, highly charging. So they'll be switching off the actual central drive. So it's not really centrally driven, it's actually peripherally driven.

So what you want to do is to train to stop the activation of type three, four afference before you're truly in metabolic distress.

James de Lacey36:11

Okay. Okay, so everything comes back to the muscle again.

Andrew Usher36:49

Yeah. This is, yeah. I mean it's interesting because before I started working with John with the PhD, my big interest in combat sports was basically substrate utilization. I was quite obsessed with this whole idea, if we can utilize carbohydrate, fats, etc., what were we actually seeing, what is the substrate, etc. etc. And it was at that time I had quite a lot of moxies because I'd been using them for a few years.

But it was at that point I realized that you just see what you'd expect to see. Intensity creates a change in substrate utilization, and essentially you see Peak VO2 values. So the harder they train, the more you see that number goes up and the more the heart rate goes up. And it was quite, from a PhD point of view, you realize it's junk because it's not really giving you anything that's novel, unique, or, it's been done.

And you see in the amateur papers there's been simulated boxing, there's been a whole heap of things, and we know in these amateur papers that VO2 range is from the low end, probably actually from 30 upwards, all to like triathlon level in some of the papers. But then when you bring in world class undisputed champions and you throw them on these things, you suddenly realize that some of the worst VO2 scores on the planet, but they're undisputed world champions right now.

I seen something on Instagram yesterday, somebody going on about VO2 max being the gold standard with taekwondo athletes and, you need to have a good aerobic capacity, blah, blah, blah. And I'm just thinking, you don't understand physiology because you don't need to have the most amazing VO2 max score. You need to have reasonable VO2. I mean, 40s upwards is probably okay, but you don't need to have a triathlete's or a marathon runner's VO2 max because that's not the sport.

So for me, it had to be something else is occurring that's probably limiting. And that's when I noticed when I was looking at all my substrate and I was looking at all my VO2 data, that the muscle was doing something completely different. And despite the fact we're in a totally carbohydrate value and we're above one in our RER and all that good stuff, in an anaerobic state and all this stuff, that actually oxygen was relatively quite present within the muscle tissue.

James de Lacey38:58

It started to remind me—yeah, I was going to say I went down the high volume power training rabbit hole the other day. I did a bit of it last year myself, and it reminded me exactly of your sprint protocols because they also mentioned in there about bike sprints as well. And this idea that most of the repeat high-intensity efforts are different to repeat sprint ability, and they go into the details around the idea that okay, repeat sprint ability, yeah sure you can have a decent aerobic capacity to recover.

But it seems the limit—I think one paper had it as like an anaerobic MAS score of around 4.7 meters per second—and then outside of that, the repeat sprint ability doesn't really relate well to repeat high-intensity efforts when you have to tackle and actually do something in terms of that has a high strength value in there. And it's interesting that you mention just the idea of the muscular work that needs to be done.

And I wanted to ask as well around the peripheral adaptations, because a lot of it we get—I guess we read and get taught as well—around okay, adaptations happen within the working muscles. Obviously within boxing, we know the importance of lower body in terms of punching power, punching volume, all that kind of stuff, and so the bike kind of makes sense within that.

But is there a point where okay, even for other sports, where you would need to do some form of upper body high-intensity training as well? Because the adaptations, do they only happen in the legs? Are you still seeing improvements in upper body endurance even though those muscles aren't being worked on a bike?

Andrew Usher40:18

Interestingly, they are being worked on a bike. Just, my whole—if you think about it, when you're doing a supramaximal effort, so you're going as fast as you can, you're gripping onto the handlebars and you start to bring your upper body into it. So actually, when we've had the Moxy monitors on the deltoids, we get a large desaturation in the deltoid much later in the sprint, but it's still there. It's occurring about 15 seconds in as people are starting to struggle with power. They then start to bring the upper body in to try and help deliver power.

So if you have—if the sprint's long enough, there will be enough upper body component on a bike. And then there's the opposite way around, whereby on the arm crank we see quite a lot of rectus femoris desaturation and changes. And so you start to see that it's not as simplistic as we think, that muscles and prime movers, agonist, etc., they're all playing the role, they're all doing what they need to do. And the level of training is reflected, the type of exercise choice, everything else.

I think this is where it's quite important to actually for people to understand what exercise they're choosing and why, and what's the rationale behind it. And that's the challenge I have. I mean, I still have kids doing split squats and all that type of stuff because there's certain benefits I can get. I still have some of them shoulder press if they need it. It's not that we rule it out, it's just that C is much bigger than S for me in the world of S&C. I think strength has its place, but I think it's been overshadowed. I think conditioning has been overshadowed by strength work.

And I think plyometrics is the scourge of all evil. And I think we are living in a world that is obsessed—

James de Lacey42:21

What do you mean plyometrics is the scourge of all evil?

Andrew Usher42:21

Well, think about it. Every time I see an Instagram clip of a pro boxer, they've got straight leg pogo jumps before they go out and fight in a warmup, and I'm like, why? Why would you do that? We've had athletes in that have bad knee problems, and the strength coach has got them doing crazy plyo, and you're like, why? Why the hell are you doing that? And it's because—

James de Lacey42:49

Okay, so it's the application of it that's the issue.

Andrew Usher42:49

Yeah, I think this is the problem. I think we live in a shiny world, and if someone is posting something and they've got a reasonable level athlete, there's an assumption that it must be good. And I think one of the things I always tell students is you need to be very critical of everything, especially research. More so research than anything else, because if you've got the Scottish elite swimming team in a sample size of 10, that doesn't reflect anything in the world of combat sports. So don't use that.

And I think the other thing about plyo is it makes people who promote plyometrics make claims that can't be substantiated. So often what you hear is people say you do plyometrics to increase tendon stiffness. There's no way you can measure tendon stiffness in the human.

Dr. John Babraj43:44

We can't measure—well, we can't measure what's happening in the tendon, so we're making assumptions that the tendon's getting stiffer, have no evidence for that. The only way to actually look at that would be to take some of the tendon out and put it on a—

On a mechanical strength stress test. And I think this—we can't do that. People don't like to have tendons—

Andrew Usher44:17

I mean, this is the big issue within the world of sport science: is the subjective use of abstract data to propagate a theme. Post-activation potentiation—that's one of my favorites.

Dr. John Babraj44:17

I think you bring this up every time we chat. It doesn't matter what we chat about—we could jump on a random call and it's like post-activation potentiation. I'm like, what? This is just always on your mind, end up here again.

Andrew Usher44:17

And now we have PAP when, in the end, because people have realized actually it's a lot—PAPE is the one.

Dr. John Babraj44:46

Because PAP's been misused.

Andrew Usher44:46

But we have coaches using this type of language that don't really understand the physiological needs of the athlete or what they're trying to achieve, but are banging out all these acronyms and things. And I'm like, we need to get back to—I hate to say this because there's a lot of old school stuff that's a bit shady—but we do need to get back to a bit more pragmatic old school approach.

You have an athlete, they're not performing X, Y, and Z. What's the skills and attributes required to make that better, and how do we build a framework using strength conditioning, sports science, to help propagate those changes?

Rather than this, let's make them box jump 60 cm, 127 meters, 14 feet, flip off a box backwards with barbell. I just think we're losing the way, and I think it's quite distressing and despairing to me at times because you get athletes in that are really lovely kids, come into the lab, and you look at the S&C program and you're just like, holy [expletive], no wonder you're broken.

And you're just like, does your coach not know anything? And then you speak to the coach and you're just like, I'd rather staple my testicles to a table than speak to you, because it's more enjoyable. And it's just like, they don't understand muscle physiology, they don't understand systemic peripheral delivery, they understand how the heart works, they're making all sorts of assumptions and claims with elite athletes.

And now we're in this bad situation where we've got a lot of athletes popping for things. You're seeing it more and more. Athletes are popping for drugs all the time because there's a push and a desire to get better, whereas we shouldn't be in this state. We should be just going back to good solid principles and stop all the shiny bells and whistles and just get back to making athletes able to do the job that they're meant to be doing.

Dr. John Babraj46:39

I think sometimes we like to sound cleverer than we are, so we'll use acronyms, we'll use fancy words that perhaps the general public won't understand because it means that we look clever. And you see it a lot. Strength and conditioning has terminologies that I hate, perhaps one of them. The other one is stretch-shortening cycle. I hate that. I hate that with a passion.

Andrew Usher46:39

Yeah, there's no such thing as a stretch-shortening cycle.

James de Lacey47:11

Don't dive into that. Yes, do. Let's play.

Dr. John Babraj47:11

It's a term that's been made up to try and describe eccentric, so muscle lengthening and shortening. But the process of muscle lengthening and shortening is the same. It's not a special cycle.

Just do it, but people talk about it like it's this special cycle that's doing something marvelous, and it's not.

Andrew Usher47:11

Mine is a ramp protocol, the Jeffrey's ramp protocol.

Dr. John Babraj47:41

That's the one that gets me all the time.

Andrew Usher47:41

Because warmups are not needed. I mean, that's the other bizarre thing that athletes have a hard time is I don't warm up athletes. So Hannah is out for a fight, she might hit the pads just a few minutes before we go out, but there's no crazy warmups. All our athletes, no crazy amateurs, no warmups. They just hit the pads for a little bit, technically warm up, because the problem I've—

I've got is you see world class athletes doing a 40-minute training session that they believe is a warm-up. And that's the other big thing. So the thing is for me is that we do all this amazing work in conditioning and I will sit with a young coach and I will say, "Do not for the life of yourself, if you do not want my wrath, do not take all my good work by making this male or female do a 90-minute warm-up before they go out and fight."

And then I'll watch—I've seen that—and then I'll watch the idiot that was going to, and they're doing their thing. And the thing is because you've done all the hard work, all the prep, the technical, the tactical, the conditioning at the right point, and then they go out and they are fatigued and you're just like, "Why would you even, why would you even, how can you even rationalize that in your mind in the world of high performance that that is a good thing to do?"

And then you start looking at even that hitting the pad for the athlete, it's not about warming up muscles, it's really just to get them into that psychological framework of the fight's about to start, so you better be switched on.

James de Lacey48:56

Well, sadly, that reminds me when I was working rugby sevens, we had an Olympic qualification and the team we were playing first, they were warming up I think over an hour before we were going to start a seventh match. Seven is like 14 minutes long and they were doing all these drills, they were on the field, they basically played a Simmons match before they played us, ended up losing. But I was just like, "How could you rationalize getting out there an hour, over an hour before and just drilling?"

And it was just continuous, continuous, continuous, continuous, like an hour. I was like, "These guys must be wrecked." And then they got to play two or three more games later that day too.

Andrew Usher49:30

That's crazy. It is sometimes beneficial though if you've got an athlete and you see—so it's happened a couple times we've come in and our warm-up's quite late, but I see the competitor warming up an hour and a half before and I just smile and go, "Excellent, just keep warming up." Because I know, keep going.

James de Lacey49:53

So two things. So why would—it's interesting because at least in my experience, if I don't warm up I will hit the red line quickly and it's hard to find that kind of stable ground where you're kind of—I don't know how you call it—just that stable area where you kind of feel good and can kind of keep going without having to breathe too heavy and things like that. How do you mitigate that? Is that just done through the sprint training kind of trains that out of you where you can be able to go in cold and basically cold and perform?

Andrew Usher50:22

Anybody can go in cold and perform, it's getting used to doing it. I think warm-ups for athletes tend to be a crutch as much as anything else. "I need to warm up, I need to do this." It's almost like this is how we become elite athletes, we have to do these warm-ups.

I've run 50k, rocked up, put my trainers on and ran it. I've ran marathons that way, I've run 5Ks that way, I've run 10Ks that way. Your body is perfectly capable of—if it wasn't, we would be pretty easy prey for any animal that wanted to eat us. So we can move, we can move fast when we want to, we can slow it down when we want to.

So I think probably that not getting into the right—finding that you're struggling to start with is probably just you have that ingrained need. For the years that you've been doing sport, you've always warmed up. So it's probably more a psychological feeling than a physiological feeling.

James de Lacey51:18

Do you know you can represent Sweet Science of Fighting while you're training? We're more than just a membership, we also have rash guards and shorts. If you're watching this on YouTube, you'll see that we have the Sweet Science of Fighting 2.0 shorts and we also have the Sweet Science of Fighting short and long sleeve rash guard. There's another design coming soon, but you can get those on XMartial.com and you can go down the description and get that. And back to the podcast.

Andrew Usher51:52

Interesting. Interesting, okay. That's a nice one that goes against the—

Dr. John Babraj51:52

Yeah, I mean there's not a massive amount of research that really supports warm-ups. You look at some of the research papers and the meta-analyses and things like foam roll and all this stuff, you see there's not really a lot of evidence supporting a lot of warm-up protocols.

Andrew Usher52:22

So my big thing is for a boxer that's competing to make the weight: go out, have a nice meal, celebrate the preparation's done. On fight day, go up, chill out. The night before they made, they kind of shake off, shake out, have what they want to call it, maybe hit a couple of pads and stuff, and train, that's it.

On the night of the fight, everything's done. If on the night of the fight an athlete still has to work technical work with me or has a demand and there's something not right in the camp, because at that point everything should be finished. At that point, just before they get fight, it should just be last-minute psychological prep and you're feeling okay. Right, let's get everything sorted. When they wrap up the hands, actually usually we're ready to rock and roll, we don't need to do anything else.

We'll hit a couple of pads just for the sake of it, hit a couple of pads, for a lot of times a lot of times we don't even do that now, we just go. Because the other thing is that you want the athlete when they go out to be primed and ready to go. There's already a lot of obstacles at world level anyway, like national anthems from Mexico that last three days and some Albanian anthem that lasts like another week.

So the idea of having a warm-up and then having a 20-minute session in national anthems kind of negates the whole thing anyway. So there's a lot of things you have to plan. I mean, actually a lot of our things with a lot of high-level fighting is just trying to make sure there is no national anthem, there is no big long speech because we don't want it. We want—we'd rather have that before they came out. There's a lot more to it.

But warm-ups is one of these things I see quite a lot. I see more and more professional boxers doing these really crazy Y's, T's, W's, S-shaped things, band pulls, high pulls, plyos, pogo jumps, and I'm just like, "If they're not ready, they're not ready." But they should be ready, you should know they need to do that.

And then the other thing is, how is a warm-up—what is the relationship of warm-up to the actual skill acquisition and process that's going to take place in the sport? Is it relevant? That's the other thing. I see people do things that are completely irrelevant. Not only just in combat sports, because I work in a lot of other sporting fields as well, I see people do some crazy things and you think it's got nothing to do with your sport.

If the aim is to increase your heart rate, just jump in the spot or skip or something, job's done. If it's a pulse raiser, because in the old days when I was a kid, it was just about pulse raisers. Everyone's like, "It's a pulse raiser," that was the big thing in early days in boxing, it's going to raise the pulse. And then you realize the pulse is going to be raised by the time I walk from here to the ring anyway with adrenaline and cortisol and all that stuff.

So it's a funny thing, sport. I think it's a lot more simplistic in some sides to what people think, and it's a lot more complicated in other areas than people think. And I think it's finding a happy ground between the two of them that ensures success.

It's quite tricky, I think. And the other thing for us as well is we talk a lot about conditioning and methods and blah blah blah, but the reality for the athlete is they just get told what to do. So we just say to an athlete, "This is your protocol this week: 15 on, 10 off for six, go do it."

So we actually have a very hands-off relationship with athletes. So we do all the chat when they're not there and break it all down, and I'll speak to the coach and say, "This is why we're doing this, this, and this." If it's my own athlete, I'll probably have a bit more information, but actually come drilling the protocols, it's very simple.

It could just be a case, "I need 10 seconds on, 15 off for six on the bike, three times a week, and I need you to give me a fast 5K time so I can see where you're at." And then I'll maybe have them in a bag session where I'll be—if I'm looking for power, extending the time duration, so they may do 15 on, 45 seconds off, drilling specific combinations or whatever, because maybe we're looking to improve maybe power production over time.

It could be the opposite, but we have athletes which is kind of crazy that are sparring at elite level that are recovering 100 beats between rounds. That's insane.

I tell you that kid's going to do it. It's like, yeah, you know, and he just went and won the Scottish there. Jimmy, kid's got insane recovery, insane recovery. But it wasn't great when he started, but now it's, yeah, some of the best recovery I've seen.

I mean, I don't really speak to Jimmy that much. I just tell them what to do because they all know they all know that I have access to their Polar data. So they all know that it's getting checked, so they're all waiting for that telephone call that says, "Wait a minute, you didn't do your..." So yeah.

James de Lacey57:14

No, I mean, we want to, I mean you still got to blood clear it with your university Andrew, I mean we want to release some kind of bespoke conditioning on here for sure using your stuff and make you some cash too at the same time. But obviously got to clear that with the university.

But I want to, before going down more more practical side of this too, there was a paper that came out. I'm going to butcher this so bad, so I hope you know which one you're talking. You know what I'm talking about here, John, but something about high intensity conditioning increasing, I think it was arterial stiffness, and the idea that more people should be doing lower intensity conditioning over higher intensity because of that. This is more general population stuff. I don't know if you have any insight into that.

Dr. John Babraj58:01

Did see that one. I think it was a review. What we've found is in elderly, sprints reduce arterial stiffness, okay. And eightfold. Rob Partof, guy at Hamilton, Gabala, mar Gabala's group at Hamilton, again showed arterial stiffness reduced in young people as well, okay.

So it may be the model that they used was cycle-based Wingate sprinting, so it may be the modality of sprinting that was used.

Interesting. In the book, from the stuff I've seen on papers that have actually measured it, is it reduces arterial stiffness because you get endothelial remodeling. So I think the blood vessels are made up of endothelial cells. The high stress of a high blood flow from sprinting, having that really quick early onset heart rate and pushing through a lot of blood, promotes remodeling very quickly of the vessels so it then relaxes more and they become more responsive to things like nitric oxide and relax more.

James de Lacey59:32

Gotcha. And then as well, before going into the more practical side as well, this idea of high intensity training, I guess the reason it's not pooh-poohed but kind of used maybe later on in training and the aerobic or lower intensity side is I guess prioritized, it's the idea that okay, we do these high intensity sprints, we raise blood lactate. By raising blood lactate, in association we raise hydrogen ions, other acidic byproducts and things, and these byproducts may have a negative effect on mitochondria in terms of mitochondrial density, et cetera, et cetera.

Is there anything to this? Is this something that happens? It sounds like from what you're doing you're actually improving mitochondrial function because you're targeting peripheral adaptations. So I guess where does this, where does this come from? Do you know where this comes from? Is this something to worry about? Is this something that happens?

Dr. John Babraj1:00:05

It probably comes from fatigue literature, from the same sort of literature that suggests hydrons causes fatigue and stops muscle contracting. If you actually look at these papers, they are all done at 5 degrees centigrade. Human muscle is 37 degrees, okay.

There was a group in Japan about seven years ago who repeated it at 5 degrees and at 37. At 30 degrees, they couldn't take it to 37, they took it to 30 degrees. And at 30 degrees centigrade, hydrogen ions have no impact on muscle function whatsoever, but at 5 degrees they did.

Interesting. So I don't believe hydrogen ions are a major issue. I think probably a more, in terms of fatigue, there's an ionic imbalance around sodium and potassium, but impacts the ability to release calcium. So I don't think the hydrogen ions are a necessary problem.

Lactate is not a problem. Lactate is a fuel. It's just a fuel source. You either use it or you don't use it. If you don't use it, your body transports it somewhere else and somewhere else uses it. So having high lactate is never an issue. It just shows your conditioning is probably not right and you're over-relying on anaerobic glycolysis showing what you're doing.

James de Lacey1:01:48

I'm not sure if I answered your question. No, it does. I mean, I'm going to like, I literally have to overhaul everything that I've ever read, I swear, after this podcast and try to digest all this.

But the other thing I know Andrew always loves to go down the road on is energy systems, and we're going to touch on this before we again, before we go into the practical stuff, because you keep bringing up things in my head.

The idea of energy systems, the idea of, okay, we know that all three energy systems work together regardless of what we do, but maybe some are preferentially used during, or intensity dictates what is used preferentially. But yeah, I guess the idea is, I don't even know what my question is here on energy systems, but it's just the idea, should we even, should we even bother to think about energy systems when we're doing conditioning? That would be my question there, because a lot of stuff you're doing, sprint interval training, you're looking at outputs. So is energy systems even in your mind when doing this stuff?

Andrew Usher1:02:45

So no, not really. I mean, I think there is a whole industry. Energy systems has become a very nice industry earner to create training programs and modalities. But the reality is you need aerobic, you need anaerobic, you need all these things physiologically.

There's a chicken and egg story we might conjure, because in order to oxidate phosphorylation in non-oxidative pathways you need to have certain oxygen first present in order to get through those pathways. So oxygen is always present, and if the oxygen isn't present then obviously we're hitting hypoxia or death.

So I think, yeah, I understand why in the early days it was easy to go, you know, the first six seconds you're utilizing phosphocreatine, blah blah blah. And I get that from a training point of view, from an education point of view. But I think the problem was conditioning coaches and strength coaches ran away with it in a very simplistic model, and I think this has been the big issue.

I think the reality is, is if you play around with numbers you'll go down a big rabbit hole of how, why is this aerobic, why is this anaerobic if oxygen is always present in the muscle tissue unless you're in really severe fatigue states. So I always say to students and stuff, understand the energy systems model that's presented in textbooks because it's good to know. But the reality is practically it's never going to be like that.

Everything's firing off at the same time. It's just that you're just using different substrates. The goal should just be for the athlete to perform in the domain that they're working in. You should not specifically be training an athlete to be predominantly aerobic or predominantly anaerobic.

You should not have people holding their breath running, telling them they're training anaerobic, because they're not. And I still see that in this day and age, and that blows my mind, that I can go to gyms and kids are like this, running around the room, and the coach is going, "We're doing anaerobic training." I just go, no.

I mean, but it's not the coach's fault. That's what they've been told by maybe a national coaching body by someone that doesn't have any physiology knowledge either, but has learned it from someone else and has maybe missed, maybe somebody's had a bit of banter with them and they've taken it as being real. And it's a crazy world.

So when I'm training athletes now, I don't really think of energy systems as much. I'm just looking at physiological response. So I'm looking at how are they recovering, what's the time to recovery, is it a slow fast phase recovery, how quick can they get into fast phase recovery. That's all I'm interested in. I don't think you need to go out and do LISS.

The only time we see, here's the thing, so steady state occurs naturally anyway because people don't train hard enough. So most people that are doing training sessions are pretty steady state anyway. So that aerobic development that everyone's claiming is just happening as a byproduct of just day-to-day life for a lot of people.

So I don't spend a lot of time, that occasionally with cyclists maybe coming back from injury. I have a lot of downhillers that get pretty mashed up and they're out of rehab, quite reactive and things. I've seen it with snowboarders as well. A lot of times we will do lower volume training is what I now call it, rather than zone two. I don't have them try and keep their heart rate between 120 and 160 beats. That's another one of these crazy fallacies that breaks my heart.

I just seen it today, I sent John something today about a conditioning school doing heart rate zoning in five zones. And I just looked at their zoning and I thought, well, how do you know? Because you haven't done any type of testing to do fat max, and you've not done any testing to do VO2 max testing, you've not done step testing. How can you say that somebody's in zones?

And how can you say at 69% it's this, but 70% this, to so finitely identify that change in intensity? Yeah, it's going to flip to something completely different. And so the other big thing is there's a big push, there's...

There's a big push for this to happen. So you see kids buy VO2 Masters, Pino, and all that type of stuff. This is of interest as well. VO2 Master obviously doesn't have a CO2 sensor, so it can't do gas exchange, so it can't tell you substrate. So the RMR is also fixed at 0.85 because that's how they use the system. So boxers shouldn't be doing RMR testing on that anyway, because if they're in any kind of weight cut, you're not getting a true reflection.

But we get kids banging out these reports at 250 quid a pop. You get kids using Pino, which is probably in my experience, having owned one, the most unstable, unreliable piece of kit on the market as a gas analyzer. And then you have the issue that even in the lab, the Cortex—you have two Cortexes side by side and they'll have two different readings. They'll be out 7% error rate margin. So we live in a world of abstract values, nothing.

In the world of nutrition and sports nutrition, these cats can go, "You are 1.1 L to 2 because the machine tells me it's 1.1 L to 2." And I show this to students all the time because we'll take an RMR on the Cortex, we'll write a nice Python app, run it, and then I'll show all the different mathematical formulas and we'll look at the spread. To say that the Cortex is the gold standard and gives you the closest result, it's not true. And I'll tell all these kids, the other thing you need to remember is physiology is dictated by on the day.

So it is what it is on the day, but it doesn't mean tomorrow is going to be exactly the same because we're a living system. It's a crazy world. So when you dive into energy systems and you look at all these things, RMR is very difficult to really get accurate. It's just the best fit on the day, and everything else you think, "Well, how can you base training on someone?"

Energy systems are important to understand more from a kinetic model because it helps explain kinetically what's happening in the body. To train based on energy systems is a fallacy. If you do two hours of steady-state running, you will be using phosphocreatine, you'll have some anaerobic glycolysis, and you'll have some aerobic metabolism. So you'll be using them all, and they will be adapting to that stress to deliver the performance benefits that you see from doing that type of training.

So the energy systems are always getting used. It's how different training systems will utilize them differently. So sprint will have a very high breakdown of glycogen, which allows super compensation of glycogen to occur in recovery. So they do different things. But for training an athlete, it's not important. What's important is, are you creating muscular efficiency?

But then you get conditioning coaches and S&C coaches that don't actually go to training sessions. This blows my mind. So years ago, in my younger days, if I took on a tennis player as a client, I would go and do the level one national coaching course because I'd want to know, what do the coaches actually need as skills and attributes before I actually coach this person? And then I'd come back and I would go, "Okay."

Did the TPI courses and that stuff and went and got lessons from PGA pro because I wanted to know before I coach this lad just exactly what are the skills the coach is going to be requesting, so that when I did his S&C programming, I could marry it all together. But you have a massive world of nutritionists that think they're S&C coaches. I've seen them rock up when the kid gets the belt, but I've never attended a training session.

I don't actually know what the volume of work is or how much effort the kid's going. Are they doing round-robin spar? Are they not doing round-robin? Is it a bag day? Is it a pad day? And then they're formulating S&C programs that are completely uncoordinated to the actual outcome of the athlete. Because we just seem to think that press is going to do this, this is going to do this, bench is going to do this, this is going to do this.

But my argument since my early thirties, and I'm fifty now, has always been, go in the sport. Doing the sport makes you better at the sport. The S&C is just to make you do the sport a little bit better. So at the very least, go and spend some time in the sporting domain and have a look at it. You don't need to be amazing at it, but you need to have a little bit of an understanding of the sport.

But more so, what I find now is people are so—we don't do, see, in the UK we don't do multidisciplinary teamwork. Okay, I've worked overseas and it's a lot more combined. The team will get together and sit and go, "What's on the board this week? Who's doing what? Okay, where are they at? What's this being done?" But generally over here, it's not like that. So the S&C don't really have any participation in, say, sparring sessions or technical sessions, so they don't really know what occurs.

And I think we need to go back to a much more multidisciplinary understanding. I think that is when we're going to get the best athlete. The best athletes I work with, I'm just part of a team. I do my job. I feed back what needs to be fed back. Somebody else feeds back, "This is what happened." Somebody feeds back, "This is what I'm planning. This is what's happening here." Those are the best teams. Everyone with individual bits of relevance and experience. A lot of times we cross over experience-wise, but everyone's got a role.

But at the moment, it seems to be everything's been Instagram-ified, and it's a Wild Wild West of training. And we're losing track—at the end of the day, our job is to make the athlete successful. That's our job. Our job is not to be in the ring holding the belts and swanning around like we're Muhammad Ali. That's not our job. Drives me nuts, I'm correct. I mean, I'll be at shows and I hate being filmed at the best of times, and you have some nutrition guy that you've never heard of who's rocked up and he wants photographs, and you're like, "Who the bloody hell are you?"

So I was instrumental to success, but really, when I've never seen you at a single training session, how can you be instrumental? The other thing with S&C is, it's very much at the moment a one-size-fits-all. So S&C coaches don't tend to think outside the box. It's, "I've done my NSCA, my UKSCA, whatever. To improve strength, I've got to do this. To improve this, I've got to do that, I've got to do that, I've got to do that." And it's very, "This is the only way you can do it."

Dr. John Babraj1:13:12

I think it's perhaps a problem with how we train S&C coaches. We don't allow uncertainty to come in. It's, "This is the way you have to do it." But actually, not everyone responds the same to the same type of exercise. You may need to adjust it slightly. Some people may need something slightly different.

Andrew Usher1:13:47

I was going to say, I think that one of the probably the big things I see at the moment is the lack of progression and regression in exercise selection for a lot of athletes. Well, I don't do as much S&C now as I do physiology. It's mostly physiology. I still do for some athletes the whole everything from nutrition right through, because I'm qualified to do that. That's the other thing—do what you're qualified to do. That's one of the other big things that cracks me off a lot of times, that people are not actually qualified to do what they're doing. But anyway, it's a different subject.

But a lot of times you get athletes who come in, and it's like they have—they maybe have a good strength and conditioning coach, is generally quite good, but doesn't know how to do regressions and doesn't have to step things back a little bit. That's a big, big issue at the moment. There seems to be this need to always push forward.

There seems to be less going back to, "Right, that's not working for you. You don't have stability in the ankle, so we're not going to load you up. We're going to go back to just single-leg work." There seems to be a lack of that at times.

Which I think—I mean, we had a lucky position because S&C program has been getting changed around quite a lot at the uni. So if anyone's listening, it's in the whole Scotland area, wants to learn really good applied science and applied sport conditioning, Abertay is your place. It's a shameless plug out the way.

I think about our uni is we're obsessed with applied science. So that's, I think, that's probably the big difference for us is that we are very theoretical at the postgraduate side, but it's all about how do we actually apply it in real time in a context. Because that, I think, is the missing value a lot of times. I think that's why you see a lot of crazy programming and people trying to use research to back it up without them actually having went and read the research paper. They maybe read the abstract, but haven't actually read the methods or anything else.

But come back to the original question, energy systems. Yes, I think train the athlete for what they need to do. Be less upset relating alactic-lactic training systems. Exception would be if I did have an athlete that had a very high resting heart rate, 100 plus, and I probably would look to do, I guess you may call it cardiac output training, something along those kind of lines.

But I'd also be looking to do intensity-based work as well. But I'd want to get both sides of the coin happening relatively quick. I wouldn't necessarily want to have them doing 120 to 160 beats three times a week, 4 hours a session, 12 hours a week for the next 10 weeks because I'd be thinking I need to escalate that.

And the other thing is, I don't know whose athletes have that luxury anyway. I don't have that luxury. My athletes come in broken and I've got three weeks to get them to a world championship state. It's like, John, I'll tell you the stress – this is why I'm balding and going gray. They went stop you. You're like okay, I'm fighting next week. Really?

It's like a firefighting job. It's like can you actually get this athlete to the position that they're going to be capable of doing the job? Are the parents on board if it's a young athlete to support what needs to be done?

One of the big issues I have at the moment is trying to persuade all athletes to go up in weight rather than killing themselves going down in weight. I don't know who has a luxury of doing like these 12-week zone two programs. I think what I've seen a few of those come out now. Yeah, 12-week programs on zone two and let's increase your, you know, drop your resting heart rate from 78 to 56. Like wow, okay.

So yeah, I'm very skeptical of a lot of things now. I think I'm not going to throw anyone under the bus, but there's a few people made a good name for themselves in the world of conditioning with very old dated thought processes and physiology and don't seem to have moved forward, done any really any deep learning. We can all cherry-pick research. I mean yourself, James, it's super easy to cherry-pick research. It's like you can go out and be in confirmation bias and before you know it you're making goals for swim at 3,000 meters per hour because three papers said it was possible.

I am always very super cautious. For me it's about results-driven. It's about are your athletes actually doing what you try to get them to do? Is the outcome there? And also when you lose and it doesn't happen, that's sometimes a more exciting bit because then you get that reflection period where you think, well what didn't actually occur and how did we fix that?

I think that's one of the bits that is probably least understood in the world of sport science as well, is like when it goes wrong. It does go wrong. And how do you fix it? It's like it can go wrong, it's not when the way we wanted it to go.

James de Lacey1:18:52

Well, let's bring this practical for the listeners to finish this out, okay? So let's say somewhat they don't have access to your Python scripts, algorithms, way to interpret it, your flywheel, your elometer bike, they have none of that. They have, say, a spin bike and a heart rate monitor. How, where do they start and what do they do in terms of this high-intensity training? How do they progress it, all of that?

Andrew Usher1:18:52

So I would say, John, let's John do it because John's the expert.

Dr. John Babraj1:19:19

So the spin bike, it's super easy. On a 30-second sprint, your heart rate should be getting up to about 160 beats per minute on the first sprint. And that's from cold, like your heart rate pretty much.

Then what you want to do is look at the heart rate data across the sprint session. You don't need to run remars. All you need to do is look at shapes.

So how is that heart rate dropping? Is it going straight down or is there a big delay and then it starts to drop? When it's dropping, is it dropping really sharp or is it a slow, a slower slope? Then when does it plateau out? When does it hit a steady state and does it move on from that steady state or are you stuck in that when you do your next sprint session? So it's really look at shapes.

And again, on the onset, how quickly is the heart rate going up? How quickly are you getting up there? What's the shape of it getting up? It should be a slight delay, very fast, and then into a steady state.

James de Lacey1:19:57

Okay. So get friendly. Do you have anything to add to that, Andrew?

Andrew Usher1:20:30

Yeah, so get a friend, okay, that can turn the dial, the resistance on the spin bike, okay? Because this is the hardest bit. So find what feels comfortably uncomfortable for sprinting, okay? And get your friend to turn it so there's no resistance so that you can just warm your leggies up a little bit and then gradually increase that to a comfortable level.

And then as you start to all-out sprint, get them just to jam that knob up a few steps to give you more resistance. And that's really that's going to give you as close to the load bike or a decent bike experience because you really need someone to ideally dial in if you just set a set that you want.

And you're just going to go all out. You're going to sprint like people have broken into your house and are chasing you, or maybe debt collector coming for their money, just whatever. Just going to sprint like crazy. And then you're going to stop and you're going to repeat it. And that is going to be the base of your sprint.

It should not be easy. It should feel like, yeah. And don't do it upstairs. Ideally doing a bungalow or somewhere where there's no change of levels, because if you do this – I've made that mistake – if you do it properly, it will be horrific, but it will pass relatively sure.

And that's the best way. And when you get your data, it's like John said, it's like you look at the shapes. It's almost like an upside-down U but wider. A good sprint will come up and it'll come down, it'll come up and come down. If you're starting off, it's not going to be like that probably. It's going to go up, you may get a wee drop, then it's going to go up and it's going to drop.

It's going to go up and it's going to drop. You're going to see that – that was me. You're going to see then that you're not recovering. So there's no real recovery there and you got to be a cardiac drift or whatever.

But as your sprints get better, you'll start to see that you'll start to follow these wee kind of mountains. You'll start to go up, you go down, you go up, you'll go down, and that'll be telling you that your recovery is getting much better. And at that point then things get changed.

But one thing we know you can play around with to really change the adaptation you're getting is how much recovery you give yourself between each sprint. So that is one variable where we know if we play around with that, if we reduce it, we can really drive aerobic adaptations. If we increase it, you can really start to drive power adaptations.

James de Lacey1:22:53

Yeah. And the ratio is quite simple. I did some bike sprints. Yeah, so basically from what I was reading was one to eight, 1 to 8 ratio, right? Work to rest is the way to get the best of both.

Andrew Usher1:22:53

But if you're really looking to push the recovery, you want to bring that work-to-rest ratio right down. So if you want recovery, smaller. If it's heart rate recovery you're looking for, smaller recovery between sprints. If you're looking to generate maybe more power, longer recovery. That makes sense, right? Because if you're going to produce power, you want kind of glycogen resynthesis. You want all that kind of stuff to happen, so you want to have a bit more on the muscle.

So this is where it gets really nice for Muay Thai, MMA, boxers, is that a lot of times if we get kids we want to work really specific combinations for an upcoming fight. What we'll do is we will interval it. So if we want a lot more power and shorts, I got a lot. Some I think maybe need a bit more power.

A lot of times we have them do very explosive combinations for like 10 on and then we'll just give them 40 off. And then we'll go 10 on, 40 off, and we'll do that for the round duration. We'll do that for a three-minute round over six rounds and we start to build that.

Others, it could be we need more recovery. So we'll have them work the bag, the top, bottom ball, wherever it may be. 15 on, 15 off, or one-to-one ratio, and they'll do that for three minutes, 60-second recovery, three minutes, and they just start to build. And a lot of it is, they'll know because they – most of our athletes are amateurs – I'll go, how was the session today? And it'll just be abuse they'll give me. They'll just be like, yeah, you're just the most satanic person on the planet. I don't...

Really. So most weeks are like that for them, in fairness. They'll tell you, they'll know how hard it was. A good athlete will be honest about how hard it was. If you get an athlete that everything's okay, that you have a problem because they're not really being honest. One of the key things they need to really be honest, that's where the heart rate data helps, because if you can have access to the heart rate data.

If you're a coach, this is a good tip for coaches. If you're a coach and you have everyone in the Polar H10, then you can access their data through the coach system, which is free and Polar. So there's a Polar coach option, that's what I use, and you can add your athletes to it. They just accept the invite, then you will have all their data, so you can then look at the data.

What I do on a Sunday, Sunday's data day for me. Sundays, when I go through everyone's heart rate data. I usually do a Wednesday, actually, I should say this: Wednesdays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, everyone is your heart rate data day. So I don't want them just thinking I'm only checking on a Sunday, but Sunday's the main day where I tend to look at all the data and I will just take the week's trends.

But I'll look at it, and that's it. It doesn't cost any, you know, you don't need to buy these crazy systems that a lot of companies are using to add your athletes to.

I use the Polar platform. Have done. Doesn't cost a single penny. I can access the data, I can download the data, it's really, really good. And that's a really good way of just tracking your athletes and having a glance and going, once you, because once you get into this and you start to understand what heart rate should look like, you could spot it really fast. You can just see all the time you can see that. Back your athletes and go, recovery wasn't too good that session.

James de Lacey1:26:04

And the big thing, I think, as the person doing the sprints too, I've done a few of them for you as well with the HR data. And I know one of them I did, I was like I don't think I got the resistance right. I didn't get that same feeling as the one when I was absolutely completely, my quads I couldn't walk. I was lightheaded, I lay on the floor, my quads were still sore for like five minutes, man.

That was so painful. That was the most painful I've been in a sprint, like my quads were so pumped. I was like damn, I just, like, almost like I did ten sets of squats and I just, I had massive legs and I was like that's pretty sweet, but it hurts so bad. Hurt so bad.

Andrew Usher1:26:28

It's a funny thing because we talk about this quite a lot and we joke a lot with athletes when they come for athletic testing days. So we do obviously the bike sprint, we do the upper body sprint as well. And we usually, one or other of those, one either the bike or the upper body, is going to be the nemesis. But we have quite gung-ho kids come in and stuff, and then it isn't too long before the vomit out the back door. And they're like that, it's so hard.

Because I think a lot of times it goes back to what John was saying earlier on. A lot of times athletes don't push themselves hard enough. So when they're doing their sprint sessions or they're doing the conditioning sessions, they don't really know what super maximal really feels like. But when you're in the lab or you've got a good coach that can push you to that level, it's a completely different feeling.

And you need to feel it, I think, to be able to then repeat it. Because see, once you can feel it and you can repeat it, that when you get the crazy, that's when you get crazy adaptations, really, really quick.

And obviously we should probably quickly touch on it that the adaptations we're trying to create is a much bigger, I guess, capillarity density for more oxygenation to come in, but also mitochondria. So we're looking to build more mitochondria in order to produce more ATP and energy. So that's why we're doing the sprints, predominantly. It's there because we're looking to get that physiology changed to allow better energy system management, better oxygenation, and just generally better performance and better recovery metrics. That's it.

James de Lacey1:28:02

And for fighters listening, we're talking these super maximal sprints that are only, say, ten minutes long. The intensity or the way it feels should feel harder than the hard sparring sessions. So if you think about it and you look at the data of punches thrown per round and these things, it's not high volume. And actually highly competitive fights, there's not a lot being thrown. So it should feel, it should feel much harder.

Andrew Usher1:28:02

It should be a leg burning, arm crunching. The first one will feel pretty bad. Two and three, if you're unfortunate to be made to do three, but two will feel pretty grim. Two will feel like you've not recovered from the first one. And that's the end, that's two 23 second ones, right?

So I would normally every athlete remotely, I'd probably do, I'd get them do two 2:30s, twice a week for the first two weeks, unless they're in really game and they want to do three. But normally I go just give me two, and that's the benchmark. After two weeks of that, I'd look at that if it's a remote client and I'd analyze the data.

And I'd say right, okay, now we're going to move into this. If after two weeks I don't feel there's a lot of change, I can't see any change, maybe we continue it for another week and do a maximum of three at the 30 seconds.

But usually after the second week, we're looking to change it up. But I'm looking to, and then what I'm doing is speaking to them about what is it they want. And then I usually speak to the coach and ask, what is it you need? And if the coach is telling me, for example, they're just not fast enough out the gate, they just don't engage quick enough, then I will look to create a protocol around that.

If it's like they just seem to be dipping in the third round, they just don't seem to be, or in the fifth round they're just totally fatigued, I will change protocols around that.

And that's because that's the important bit, because at the end of the day you're going to get your physiological adaptation with your sprint, which is fine. But there's a lot of other nuances you can get from it. Like, for example, you can get peak activation much quicker, you can get them pushing out quicker, or you can get them recovering better. You can play around with it.

As I said earlier, we, Hannah, the big thing for us is we wanted to have the last round, there. Last round used to engage right off the bat. I wanted her walking out and hitting, walking out and hit. I didn't want to stand in the middle sizing her up. Just wanted front foot, bang. And we drilled that specifically on the bike sprints. We want, so that's why we changed the weight ratio. So we started adding 8.5% to the flywheel, then up to 9.5, because we wanted that push, that real, real drive.

And we've seen her peak times come down from like 4.5 seconds down to like just under one second. So she had a massive shift in that.

James de Lacey1:30:28

Wow, okay.

Andrew Usher1:30:28

And then we repeated that on the bag. So then went to the bag session, it's the same thing. We took, her boxing coach, Conor, took her slightly further away from the bag and we had her just walk to the bag, move the bag, and hit. Boom, straight away, straight away, straight away. And then we did it and sparred. Then we get top quality sparring partners in, same thing. When you come out the corner, straight, get it. Because that's what we're looking to develop.

And the previous camp, slightly different. The previous camp was just wanted recovery between rounds. So that rest component was really important and we started to, in between sparring sessions, we took it down to 30 second recovery, even in spar sessions. And the bag was the same, we just shortened it down because we were getting that adaptational heart rate recovery.

When you're pushing for impulse, you're looking to generate maximum amount of power straight away. And the other thing is, is her resistance training for the camp effectively was the bike at higher weight and the K Box, and the 300 pound heavy bag.

James de Lacey1:31:17

Oh, nice.

Andrew Usher1:31:17

That was basically it. In Rival, 300 heavy bag. At the end of the camp, that thing was swinging all over the place, hitting with so much power. And that's, to me, is how you get the best of both worlds. You get very specific conditioning, very specific physiological adaptation, but it relates in an applied context.

If you're doing sprints for the sake of sprints and you don't see the results in sparring in combat sports or your discipline, there's something wrong. You're not training the sprints to appropriately match what the outcome is. And my thing is always, boxers need to box, and everything we're doing is to allow them to box better.

So all the stuff we're doing, the S&C and everything, is there to see the benefits in sparring, because that is, that's the closest resemblance to the expression the sport is, sparring, other than competition. So I need to see it in sparring. So I need to see the stuff we're working on. So if an S&C coach is working with, I need to see it.

In sparring I need to see what he's been doing or she's been doing with the athlete. I need to see it in sparring. I need to see what I'm doing, I need to see it in sparring. And for me that's where working with good coaches or being a coach, you can see it. You can go, right, I'm getting this quicker off, I'm getting this push off the foot more, hips coming through a bit more, positioning, the recovery of the hip's good, glenohumeral joints coming in play a lot better, scaps in the right position, I'm seeing the extension. This is how it all comes together.

So it's sprints not only for physiological adaptation but for performance as well. And that's probably something we don't explain enough. A lot of people think we're just doing these sprints for the sake of sprints. Well not, there's a lot of stuff that we now look at that we never used to look at. Like, time to peak power, how it's maintained, minimal values, rate of force development, all that type of stuff.

You can get a lot more out of a Wingate than the research will let you believe. There's a whole heap of interesting stuff and you can get it off of other things if you've got a Concept bike or a Watt bike.

We get an issue with the Watt bike, but the problem with the Watt bike is what I found – I've got my own one next door – is I don't think the power reasons are as accurate as they think. Because we've had a lot, for example Hannah's hitting the Watt bike and she's remotely in London and obviously up in Scotland, and she's hitting 600, 700 watts, banging out 1200 on that thing. And then she comes to the lab and she's bumping out close to a thousand. And you start to go, there's a different, there's an issue with that Watt bike.

So a good Watt bike that's calibrated is worth its weight in gold. But the Concept 2 bike also gives power as well. So even though they're not 100% accurate, they're extra nice little metrics to have if you can get them. So if you're in a pure gym or you're in a boxing gym and you get a spin bike, it's fine. But if you've got a gym membership and that place has a Watt bike or a Concept 2 bike that has a watt reading on it, use that one.

Because you're going to get some nice metrics about how quicker you get into your wattage and how does that relate to how you're feeling. There's a lot of really super nice data you can get which is pretty easy to analyze.

James de Lacey1:34:37

Perfect. I think that's the perfect way to finish this podcast too. An hour and a half of knowledge bombs throughout this. But for people listening, John, where can they find and follow your research? And same with you Andrew. But John, you go first.

Dr. John Babraj1:34:37

I'm actually really bad on social media, so my research will be on PubMed, university web pages. I'm very poor at self-promotion of my research, so I don't tend to post on social media very often.

James de Lacey1:34:37

Okay, we're going to have to help promote your research then on Sweet Science of Fighting for sure. I need to keep going through that. And Andrew, where can they find you?

Andrew Usher1:35:08

I'm not that prick guy on social, but I'm on social. So the_and_user for Twitter and I think the_and_user for Instagram. I've not really been posting that much because we're really busy with a few papers that we're trying to finish off, get published. And then we're obviously prepping Hannah for our next fight with Emma coin in September, so we're quite busy at the moment. But you can get me there.

I'm on the university ResearchGate research thingy-jiggy that I never pay much attention to, but I'm on that. People can just find me at combatsportperformance.com. I'm floating around. If people have any questions, more than happy to email me. I do now have a very strong enforced spam filter full of abuse that I occasionally get, so it will not get through now.

And hopefully soon, I'm obviously thinking – I'm being thrown around as, been thrown around the idea to write a course for quite some time. And I'm a bit closer to thinking that maybe the time is right to put together something that's a bit more modern, a bit more accessible for people and how we do things. Because there's probably a lot of things that we do that are actually probably easier to do than how I explain them.

So a course might be the best way of actually doing that. And I like the idea of creating a course as a toolset app that allows people to run exponential data and teach them the details of sport science and how you actually apply it. So I'm hoping maybe later on this year to really thrash that out, have a chat with yourself about that as well, and put something nice together.

Because we have a very good track record at the moment, we just don't – we're just not very good to publicize. The only time we publicize it is if, for example, a big name fighter's in and suddenly BBC Scotland television or Sky's in and then we get a bit of a hooray around what we're doing. But generally, well not – I think that's the thing is we're not secretive in the sense that we talk a lot and stuff and ramble [expletive] enough.

But I am too busy to be on Instagram posting what I had for breakfast and what Hannah had for breakfast and the amount of macros that were in that and how much potassium was in it, how that enabled her to jump 19 feet. So I'm way too busy for that, but I'm around.

James de Lacey1:37:52

Yep. Andrew is also in the Discord too for any Sweet Science of Fighting Underground members, so he's in there too if anyone wants to ask questions as well. But we'll end this livestream here and if anyone's wanting to ask questions from the community, feel free to. But thanks for coming on, guys.

Andrew Usher1:37:52

No worries. Thanks for having me.

Dr. John Babraj1:37:52

Thanks a lot.