Isometrics & Advanced Training Methods For Fighters w/ Dustin Oranchuk (SSOF Ep 91)

Dustin Oranchuk2:37

So I saw that two days ago and you made the point about these American football players and everything they're doing is with intent, not just to make themselves tired or to just put in work and just get the volume in, a lot of fighters and a lot of other athletes kind of do. So yeah, I think if there is an intent and you have training partners, all that kind of stuff, then perhaps you might see better adaptation than just the dynamic.

But I think you're always going to miss out on the concentric portion of things. So again, probably context depending what phase of training you're in. Do you have an injury? Do you have a little bit of knee pain or joint things that you want to kind of work around for a week or two?

But even then, I think in my experience when I hear from you as well and other people, is after a couple of weeks of EQI stuff, you're just done mentally, even if you're a real sort of high testosterone, high drive sort of individual, really driven woman—I don't want to say high testosterone, right—but you're really, really driven. After a couple weeks, you're just like, no, enough is enough.

James de Lacey4:04

Yeah, it's for anyone listening to some of the—I did a whole video on the YouTube channel on it—but one of the ones that's brutal that we're talking about now is you're essentially taking a snatch deadlift and I think you recommended 140% of your snatch max. I don't know how many people know kind of what that is, so I mean you could probably say, could you say maybe like 80% of your max deadlift or something?

And you're going to hold that position above the knee, and then you're just going to stay there as—or at the knee I should say—and then just hold that as long as you can until you end up back down on the floor.

Dustin Oranchuk4:31

Yeah, pretty much. You can do the same thing with a pull-up or something. Lower yourself down partially, so you're not at that super easy top lockout position. Lower yourself down and then you hold it and hold it and hold it and hold it and hold it. You can adjust the weight accordingly. So yeah, it's a challenge mentally and physically.

And at least, yeah, so it would be interesting to get a couple of studies out there. But it again, it is so niche. I think it makes for really cool smaller projects or Master students and things like that. But I'm not sure if there's quite enough there to sort of hang your hat on as a full-time permanent researcher in most systems. But it is interesting and fun. I'm really looking forward to what comes out of that PhD student in Manitoba because, to sing their praises, they're doing stuff nice.

James de Lacey5:28

Have to bring them on once that's all published. And we talked a little bit just before the podcast about some more research you've got coming out soon on, was it holding versus pushing isometrics? Maybe just dive a little bit into that. Maybe just the differences between the two, physically what they actually are, and maybe dive into some of those findings.

Dustin Oranchuk5:54

Sure, yeah. So this was a topic that I sort of, of course, encountered when I was working on the EQI stuff during my PhD because it is highly relevant when you're talking about holding a deadlift position at the midpoint until you just can't do it, you let it pull you all the way down to the floor with max effort.

So the pushing versus holding stuff, there's actually a fair amount out there. But I became a little more interested in this because I think it actually has—it's easier to implement than full-blown EQIs. And we're talking about clinical populations with injuries or neurological issues or even blood pressure, heart rate type problems.

So for the listeners who might not know, if you can imagine holding a 30-pound or 15-kilo dumbbell or something in your arm in a bicep curl position and your elbow's at 90 degrees and you're holding it there as long as you possibly can until you kind of get to task failure, or you're just holding it for about five seconds, doesn't really matter.

But that's a holding isometric contraction. There's no change in the muscle tendon length. You're keeping your arm at 90 degrees, but you're holding an external load. Right? You're resisting gravity or a cable station or a partner that's pushing against you or something like that.

Whereas a pushing isometric contraction, you can do the same sort of joint angle with the 90-degree elbow angle, your shoulder can be at the same point, but you're pushing against a force plate or a squat rack or a bar that is loaded with a weight you can't move. And you're pushing with exactly 15 kilos or 30 pounds of sort of effort or force if you happen to have a strain gauge or a force plate to be able to actually quantify those.

So again, one, you're pushing against an object that is immovable, and the other one, you are holding an object that is movable but you're trying to make sure it doesn't move. So that's a pushing or holding. Other phrasing, terminology would be an overcoming isometric versus a yielding isometric. And there are other sort of ways that these are put in, people talk about them in books or texts.

James de Lacey8:20

Perfect. And then if I'm going to summarize them very simply, and you can dive into it a bit more from your research, overcoming or pushing isometrics are typically better for developing maximal strength, rate of force development, or how quickly you can produce force with that. Whereas holding isometrics may potentially be better for developing strength in certain positions. I think from your paper you mentioned things like joint stabilization during certain positions as well. Maybe just go a little bit further. And if I'm completely wrong, tell me I'm completely wrong on those.

Dustin Oranchuk8:56

Well, you're not completely wrong. That's definitely the overarching thought around them. And then as a little bit of a preview, as you mentioned, hopefully it'll be submitted within the next month or two. I think we're relatively close. I've got a really good team working on a systematic review with a few meta-analyses.

One meta-analyses portion is done and we're just having to go into the figures and actually digitize the figures and pull out the data because the info is not readily available in tables or text. So again, great team. We got a

A couple people from Germany that really like repopularized it because they had a paper that came out in 2017 with a really catchy title. So even though there's been work done on it since 1999, I think was the first paper, the earliest paper we found, we've got about 25 years worth of data here. But there's a lot of little limitations to that data and I'll get into that in a bit.

But basically we have these 53 studies and we've added them all together and kind of gone through and checked them out. And based on those, what you just said James about joint stability and max stuff is very likely true. So when we look at time to task failure, that was the most consistent metric across these studies. So out of these 53, you know, 20 some look at this and 15 look at that, there's some overlap. But the meta analyses are very, very clear for the most part with one caveat that's quite interesting.

In that time to task failure is always longer with pushing versus holding. So holding is a more challenging task, which makes sense. You're not on a guide rail. You have to use your antagonist muscles and your synergist muscles to sort of stabilize that joint angle and they're going to turn on and off a little bit differently. There's that load sharing. It's a little bit more of a complex task for the brain and the neurological system.

And then there's a few little papers that don't even look necessarily at time to task failure, but what is the maximal yielding force or potential versus just—so what is your pushing isometric maximal versus your holding isometric maximum? And the pushing is always higher. You can hold the same load for a longer period of time. So it totally makes sense that pushing is going to be better for maximal strength because your maximal effort is going to be more forceful than a holding type movement.

And then I just mentioned all the synergist stuff and the antagonist stuff and agonist activation. So yeah, holding would probably lead to better adaptations in joint stability. There's also some really interesting ones that might also tie in with the time to task failure, like metabolic activity. So oxygen consumption, restriction, those things being higher with the holding. So we might actually get better potentially better cardiovascular adaptations.

And then if there's adaptations for muscular hypertrophy that are accelerated due to hypoxic environments like a blood flow restriction, then perhaps holding isometrics might also be more beneficial for hypertrophy or even tendon adaptation. So that's kind of our basic findings so far.

I still aim to do more meta components with heart rate, blood pressure and RPE. I think there's enough there, but it's just we have to pull them out of figures which is a little bit time consuming. And then I'll give you the limitations of this right away because I know what they are.

So the big ones are none of the studies out of the 53 are multi-joint. Well that's not 100% true. I'm going to loop back really quick and say that the only caveat with that time to task failure interestingly was that it is incredibly consistent for the appendicular joints. So the arms, the legs, knee extensions, ankle flexions, ankle dorsiflexions, elbow flexions and extensions.

But there's two studies that examined a back extension basically, and they actually found the exact opposite where time to task failure was longer with holding versus pushing. So that might have something to do with just the fact that those muscles are always working in a holding fashion just so we stand upright or we sit upright in our chair.

So they're just completely adapted to that, whereas the muscles of our quadriceps are more for actual propulsion, standing up from chairs, walking up a hill, walking in general, biceps and shoulders, reaching for stuff. They're never—they're very rarely just holding for hours on end, as opposed to our lower back and kind of our glute muscles.

So that was kind of an interesting finding. And to that point, the limitations of what the literature shows and what I hope will be expanded on in the future either by myself or others is none of those 53 studies use multi-joint exercises like squats, lunges, pull-ups, things like that, a pushup position. It's always single joint, bicep curl, knee extension. That's a big one.

There's also no studies that are longitudinal in nature. They're all acute. What's going on during the contraction or immediately before, immediately after? So there's still no real hard evidence that says yes, okay, tendon adaptation is better with one versus the other, strength or power is better with one versus the other, hypertrophy is better. We can just kind of try and extrapolate a little bit.

So those are the big ones. There's other limitations as well. No clinical populations, which I think is actually probably the target for these types of things with pain. And then I think the last thing I'll mention was there was I think three studies that used experimental joint pain. So what they would do is they'd take a saline solution and inject that into the tendon and that would irritate the tendon temporarily.

So the pain would wear off after a few hours, but for a few hours it would feel like you had a pretty rough bout of tendonitis. And then they would have people—they'd measure them beforehand, measure the force, measure the force variability, but then they also had EEG. So that was the, you see these things sometimes usually in scientific ads where they're trying to make science look really sciency and you got a cap with 40 electrodes on it and you're measuring brain activity and all this kind of stuff.

And they found that the difference between before pain and after pain or during pain was not very big with the holding isometrics, whereas it was fairly large with the pushing. So that would maybe lead you to believe that the holding is going to be better tolerated in people with pain, or at the very least that exercising with holding is not going to negatively alter your coordination, your intramuscular and neurological coordination when you have pain.

So those are some interesting things that would make me think that holding might be better than pushing for rehabilitation and pushing might be better than holding for strength, power, performance, athletic development.

James de Lacey16:59

Hope you're enjoying the chat so far. Before we get back to that, I just want to let you know that Sweet Science of Fighting is more than just a podcast. We have a full training app with strength conditioning programs for strikers, grapplers and MMA athletes. So you don't have to think about what you're doing and you're getting access to the latest scientific methods to improve combat sports performance.

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Would you, if you're programming these kinds of isometrics, holding and pushing, is there a way that you typically like to maybe periodize these into a training cycle or you kind of sometimes just doing both depending on what the athlete needs? Is there maybe a progression regression, maybe where you're going from holding to more to more pushing, or does it really matter?

Dustin Oranchuk18:56

Yeah, so that's a fair point, which makes me very briefly look back, loop back to one more limitation of that data. And that's that the vast majority of those studies are using very low loads. So again, out of those 52 or 53 studies, the average, not the lowest, the average load is 36% of pushing isometric maximum. There's a couple that examine very briefly 100%, but most are 20, you know, 30%.

So far too low to really—so that's another one where, you know, other researchers or myself or something we have to look at, okay, what is 80%, 70%, 60%, even 50%? What's going on? So again makes it difficult to base it on the research.

But anecdotally there's people who are doing a lot of stuff with their athletes. So I don't think they'll mind me saying, but we have on the team working on the review, we've got a couple great researchers from Germany that are really all about the research side and the tech and the stats and all that kind of stuff. And then we also have guys like Alex Natera and Danny Lum in Singapore. I don't know if you're familiar with those guys, but those—

Those are two members of that team that I'm talking about, so I pulled them on board for exactly this reason. So we can go to the discussion and talk about this data and say, okay, well how might we apply it, how are we applying it? So they might be good guests for the future. I don't know if you can, if you want, I can give you their contacts.

But from what I sort of understand, because I'm a little bit out of the practical game, I haven't done a whole lot for a little while, but I think where you'd probably end up going with this is more of a periodized approach. So if you're coming back from either a surgery or some sort of an injury, I would probably lean towards holding isos as my sort of first go-to, out past the really early stages where you're doing ankle pumps and just trying to walk normally.

Then you're probably maybe doing some holding isos, maybe advancing to the pushing isos, getting up to close to 100% effort in order to sort of retrain the neurological system and potentially get some blood occlusion effects and build up some strength and maybe even some size, especially if you're coming back from a relatively long layover or layoff after an injury or a surgery or something like that. Maybe then, if you've become detrained in that sense, a holding isometric bout, several bouts of 45 seconds to two or three minutes even, might be enough to give you some stimulus for size for a couple of weeks.

And then I'm probably for the most part getting away from isometrics in terms of athletic development until maybe we get to more advanced stages, in which case then you can start adding in some of Alex and Danny's run-specific isometrics, like hamstring switches, the stuff where you're driving a bar and do a squat rack on a stance-type position if you're a sprinter or a jumper or something like that. But again, those guys are actually practicing that with elite athletes at whether that's in Australia or Singapore. Whereas again, I'm a little bit out of that world for almost a year now.

James de Lacey22:30

Nice. And I'm going to put you on the spot, a coaching spot again then, because we actually had a question live on the podcast. Feel free to pass on it, whatever. I'll weigh in after you as well. But Hion is asking, do you think Muay Thai training is okay to do the day after full body strength training, then also doing a full body session again the day after Muay Thai? So basically going full body strength day one, sorry Muay Thai day one, full body strength day two, then Muay Thai again the following day. What's your thoughts on that?

Dustin Oranchuk22:56

I mean, this is going to depend highly on what kind of intensity and volume are you doing on all three of those sessions. If they're all three super high, then you better have a pretty good recovery period and good recovery practices with nutrition and sleep and all that good stuff.

But I would say in a more sort of general basic sense—and I'd be happy to cede authority to James on this one—but I would say from a sort of philosophical, all-encompassing standpoint that there's no problem with that. Just the dosages are really going to have to be monitored and sort of thought of really carefully.

With anything, you go into a Muay Thai practice—I don't, I've never done it myself—but I'd imagine there's some sort of a conditioning element, there's warm-ups, and then there's a lot of technical skills and drills and things that people are probably doing. And you just want to make sure that when you're going into those skills and drills that you're not so fatigued that you're doing them poorly, because you generally don't want to just practice bad technique because all my quads are so sore.

So when I'm doing this movement now, I'm using more of my hips than sort of proper Muay Thai technique calls for, or vice versa. But yeah, in a general sense I don't think there's a problem with that type of schedule.

James de Lacey24:20

Yeah, no, exactly. That's a pretty easy way to set it out, Hion. In terms of your training, again as Dustin mentioned, it's the dose that makes the poison. If you're doing a full body session that's some kind of small volume routine, hardcore powerlifting-based stupid volume, it's going to be a problem. But if you're doing lower volume work in that full body strength day—which it should be, it definitely should be lower volume—and typical bodybuilding, powerlifting programs won't give you that low volume, you'll be pushing sets of five, three to five sets of five often, and things like that.

And most basic ones you'll find online, which can be, I'm not going to say detrimental, but can be not so great, especially if you're doing Muay Thai days before and after.

So bear that in mind. You will need to do lower volume work on those days. And again, obviously depends on what you need, what kind of what that session fills out as as well. And also depends on what's your main priority. Is Muay Thai your number one, or is kind of lifting and getting bigger and stronger your number one? So it's a few different factors to think about in there. If you're unsure, check the description. Sweet Science of Fighting Underground is there for you.

But carrying on with the isometric stuff, I wanted to come more on, I guess, more the practical coaching side. I know you mentioned you've been out of it for a bit, but that's all good. I know you still have some good insight on this. But isometrics is part of a complex. So obviously, when we're talking about complex training for the listeners, we're looking at a controversial topic, I guess, of post-activation potentiation. But people often do, for example, heavy squats then go into jumps to potentiate that high power movement.

Now, there's obviously been quite a few people, even myself, have programmed this before in terms of doing a hard pushing isometric for say six seconds and then doing, for example, a box jump with that. What's your thoughts on doing something like that? Is there some, is there any research on that, and is there anything beneficial for doing something like a hard isometric as the conditioning activity before a power movement?

Dustin Oranchuk26:22

Yes. So there's definitely evidence out there. I'm not, I won't pretend to know all of the latest stuff and all that, because it's pretty far away from what I research myself. But from what I understand, that yes, there's generally going to be sort of a benefit in the fact that you'll probably be able to jump a little bit higher, practice activating those really high threshold motor units more regularly and more rapidly after you have sort of an activation protocol.

So actually, what a lot of the PAP—whatever other abbreviations they're using right—post-performance enhancement versus post-activation potentiation, and that's really just scientists sort of arguing with each other about, well, do we get more activation or potentiation or just performance going up, right? And not wanting to mislabel things. But as far as I know, for all intents and purposes, they're the same thing.

Where I think it, people need to think about things a little bit more, is that yeah, we generally see improvements in jump height. However, I think there's a pretty low amount of research that actually says, okay, well, does that lead to long-term benefits? I think that's probably the biggest limitation in research. There might be one or two things out there, but it's just so hard to run training studies that are really well done with good sample sizes and all that, good control.

It's so difficult in a lot of senses. So we see that yes, performance acutely improves, but does that actually lead to improvement down the road? It's kind of like, once you get strong, is getting any stronger make you a better fighter? So that's a big one that's limited.

And then the other thing is, well, how can we apply these principles without making our training sessions last three hours or something, right? So how can we make it applicable to sort of everyday life? Because if it gives you two or three percent benefit, that's great, but if it adds 45 minutes to your session, then that's not a great trade-off.

So most PAP protocols will say, okay, push maximally into this super maximally loaded bar that we can't move or something like that. And then a lot of studies will look at, well, how long is sort of the optimal amount of time to wait between the activation and then the jump or the sprint or the explosive effort, the med ball throw? And if I remember correctly, most studies show like three to five minutes, sometimes six minutes, sometimes eight, sometimes ten.

So I think there's a couple ways around that issue, because if you're trying to do six sets and you're awaiting five minutes, that's 30 minutes of just resting. That's not counting the time you're doing the push or your jumps or your throws. So that's 30 minutes. That's, a lot of MMA fighters and stuff, that's how long their weight training session is after a warm-up, right?

So there's a couple ways around it. The cool thing, I think, is to actually do sort of the opposite of what most people think, where they say, okay, I'm going to do my activation and then I'm going to rest five minutes and then I'm going to do my explosive effort.

Going to do my jump. What you do is you do your activation on the first set, you wait five minutes, so you do your jump, and then pretty much immediately after your jump, maybe rest 20 seconds, and then you do your push again. And then sometime within that five-minute period, that's when you can maybe do some correctives or something like that.

You got elbow pain, do your elbow rehab exercises and do your jump, and then do your activation. So I hope that makes sense the way I worded it, but I think you can fit things into that five-minute rest period or six-minute rest period or whatever is sort of determined to be optimal without messing it up.

You don't want to do go and do a max set of bench press or something like that, but do your band pull-aparts, sure. Do your forearm, do your grip work. Yeah, probably. I don't think doing a different muscle at a really low intensity is going to mess up your training.

And then the other thing, the last thing I'll mention that I'm pretty sure is true, is that the benefits are really variable. So some athletes get a lot out of these things, and some athletes get none, and some athletes actually get a detriment, even when they rest the optimal amount of time. So it's probably something to experiment with for one or two sessions if you have the ability to measure it on a jump mat or a Vertec or Force plates or some other sort of resource to help you actually understand, well, does this protocol allow me to jump higher or throw this medicine ball farther than if I'm just jumping and not doing a maximal semi-squat?

And if it does, then cool. And if it doesn't, hey, now you know what doesn't work for you and just save yourself a bunch of time and effort.

James de Lacey31:26

A more research-based question for you, for someone who's far more versed in conducting research than I am. In terms of the actual protocols they use to test these things, they'll do, for example, conditioning activity like a maximal squat, and then they'll do their jumps, and they'll do jumps 30 seconds after, a minute, three minutes, five minutes, seven minutes, etc. But then doesn't each jump then potentially potentiate the next one?

Dustin Oranchuk31:54

I think, and this would be different depending on the research. Because if you were to Google Scholar PAP jumping or something like that, there's probably going to be high double digits at the very minimum.

But what some researchers have done to try and remedy this is many different days of testing and then randomizing it. So, okay, participant one on day one rest five minutes, and then five days later they do it all again. Then that participant rests 30 seconds, and then five days, 10 days later they bring them in, that person rests three minutes, and so on. So they're bringing these people in multiple times, and then participant two, they start with the longest rest first, then the shortest. And participant three, it's all randomized to try and wash out any training effects or extra familiarization or something like that.

So I think that's how those are done, or at least should be done, because you're absolutely right. If they're just doing one activation and then they're doing a maximal jump at 30-second intervals or something like that, you're going to have some sort of neurological washout or additional stimulus that's going to kind of muddy your research question for sure.

James de Lacey33:24

And to go further down research, you obviously, you've been publishing a ton. I searched your name on Google Scholar and just went by 2023, and dude, you have a whole bloody page of stuff. We're probably for sure that you're not the lead author on all of these, but still, you're part of the research on them and you have some good insight on them.

And the first thing I actually want to touch on, relevant to the audience here, is the neuromuscular adaptations through different set configurations during a periodized power training block in elite junior judokas. So looks like you're comparing traditional straight set—so for anyone listening, three sets of five would just be traditional straight set—versus cluster set. So as an example, if you're doing two plus two plus two, you would rest maybe 30 seconds between each double, and then you're able to maintain rep velocity and a bunch of other things. So maybe just dive into, I guess, your findings on that and what kind of practical stuff came out of that study.

Dustin Oranchuk34:13

Yeah, so that was a study—to give you some background—that was done predominantly by a guy named Dale Harris. And Dale Harris is at Victoria University in Melbourne. That's where I met him when I was going through some of my studies at VU. And Dale, for I don't know exactly how long he was there, but Dale's main background is in strength and conditioning. And then as of lately, he's moved into sort of the academic realm, and he's predominantly lecturing at VU with some research.

But for a good while, Dale went to India and worked with the judo teams in India in a strength and conditioning type setting. So these particular participants are relatively young—again, I wish I had the study in front of me. I might just bring it up myself, so if you see me kind of clicking away, that's what I'm trying to find myself.

James de Lacey35:16

17 and a half years on average.

Dustin Oranchuk35:16

Yeah, so 17 years of age roughly, and pretty good. So again, if I remember correctly, they were all pretty solid athletes, relatively high up in the Indian system. And Dale was like, okay, cool, this is a good number of people. Let's actually do some studies. And they were all for it, and they kind of went and did their thing.

So basically, there was two blocks. There was a hypertrophy block and then a max strength training block for a lot of these people. And for the most part, if I remember correctly—I am really struggling to remember, so if you've got the abstract up, you can sort of help me out and run through it.

James de Lacey36:25

Yeah, honestly, that'd be great. All right, so it's eight weeks total, hypertrophy and strength blocks. The final four-week power training block, they were separated into the traditional set versus the cluster set structures. Cluster sets were 45 seconds inter-rep rest every two reps. So two plus two plus two was 45 seconds rest between.

One rep max and peak bar velocities of the back squat and bench press, countermovement jump height were assessed before and after the four-week mesocycle. Do you want me to run through the results here too?

Dustin Oranchuk36:51

Yeah, so I've got them up in front of me as well just now, just from the abstract. So obviously there's going to be more details there. But yeah, after the hypertrophy block, a lot of strength and power improvements were already noted, which sort of makes sense, right? Whereas after the training block, there were also some pretty good improvements. However, for the most part, there were fairly minimal differences between the traditional training and the cluster set groups. So that was sort of the main finding there.

There were a couple of exceptions, but generally speaking, there was not massive differences or huge benefits to one versus the other. Although there's some cool figures down there if people ever want to look at them, or you can kind of look at the general direction that most people go. And again, pretty consistent. And there might be some people that will improve better with one versus the other, but at least in that particular population, it doesn't really look like cluster sets are clearly superior to just traditional loading.

And that kind of leads back to that population of being relatively young—17. They probably haven't done a whole lot of hardcore resistance training. So there's a lot of other studies that show cluster sets are advantageous, and some that show they're not. And you probably do have to break them down by participants and their experience and their age and things like that.

James de Lacey38:24

I actually did break it down a little while ago, and I found the studies that use traditional exercise, like squats, bench, etc., didn't see differences between long-term benefits between cluster set and traditional sets. But when you use ballistic exercise, like jump squats and things, that's where you saw the big differences.

I would say advantageous towards cluster sets versus traditional, which is interesting. So it might just be an intent thing during the cluster sets. I don't know. It's—so I mean, I'm still a big fan of them, especially for combat athletes. Even if there's no difference between them, at least you're kind of reducing some of that fatigue when you're doing some kind of cluster set if you're just doing traditional stuff.

Dustin Oranchuk39:20

Yeah. I think it's also—cluster sets, I think, are also a really good way of maintaining really good intensity and intent with each repetition. You know, a traditional set where you'd say—especially again, if you don't have researchers yelling at you and just trying to train on your own or with a small group of people or something like that—you say you're going to do four sets of eight reps. A lot of times, especially with young people who may or may—

Not even really want to be in the gym. They know it's good for them, but they just want to shoot a basketball or they want to kick a soccer ball around, right? Or they want to fight, kick a bag or whatever your sport happens to be. And you tell them, okay, we're going to do three sets of eight reps in the back squat. And their first three reps, they're not really intent on their technique. They don't really care about velocity, same on the last ones. They're getting tired.

So you kind of have this couple reps are good, a couple reps are bad. But when you say, okay, you're going to do two, rest 20 seconds, then do two, I think there's probably you're probably going to get more intent out of a cluster set. Again, especially if you don't actually have a coach that's really motivating you through that long set of eight. So that's just a thought of mine.

James de Lacey40:16

But that's true. No, I like that. I like that.

Hey guys, it's me again. I just want to let you know that I also have Sweet Science of Fighting rash guards and shorts, so you can represent Sweet Science of Fighting on the mats and within competition. We have the classic, just like the shirt I'm wearing, rash guard, Sweet Science of Fighting on the front, and we have the logos on the sleeves and then X Marsh on the back. We also have that in a shorts variation, same thing with the Sweet Science of Fighting writing on one leg and we have the logo on the other.

But my personal favorite, this is my personal favorite by far, we have this in black and white and it is the Taniwha Protector Guardian version of the Sweet Science of Fighting with the logo on the back. This is designed by a Maori designer back in New Zealand. So a bit of my heritage on this jersey, it represents the acknowledgement of battle and war.

It also represents strength and stability and also has the New Zealand silver fern. But even if you're not a Kiwi, cop this, this is an awesome design. It is a custom-made design. You will not find it anywhere else. So check that, that'll also be down in the description with a discount code. But back to the podcast.

I like the take on that one too. I also wanted to go into a recent review of meta-analysis that you were part of as well on, I guess it kind of ties onto a similar protocol and some of thing around traditional and advanced resistance training on muscle hypertrophy and trained individuals. So basically muscle growth. So for anyone listening, traditional, again our traditional normal sets, three sets of five as an example. And then Advanced Techniques.

So in the paper here they're talking about accentuated eccentric training. So that would be you're lifting over your concentric 1RM eccentrically. So if you're doing 110% 1RM for your back squat as an example. Drop sets, so I think everyone's probably done or knows drop sets, essentially repping out whatever the stack and then dropping down, then repping out again, then dropping down, repping out again.

Forced reps, you've probably seen every bodybuilding YouTuber do forced reps, having someone assist you. German volume training, 10 set of 10 is another one. We've got paired sets, which is I think supersets of the same muscle group, is it? I think it is, or is it?

Dustin Oranchuk42:34

Yep. Yeah. And then also with paired sets, as opposed to a superset, there might be a break in between as opposed to going immediately from one to the other. But yeah, generally that's correct.

James de Lacey42:34

Perfect. Then there's pre-exhaustion, hitting the muscle before, isolating before doing a multi-joint exercise. A pyramid set and rep configuration, essentially going up and typically going down. Rest pause, which has become probably really popular recently because it's not rebranded, but very similar, like the myo reps that a lot of people are talking about now, kind of very similar in terms of that, basically finishing a set close to failure, resting 20, 30 seconds and doing more.

Super slow reps, which is something that I think was popular not too long ago. I think those are all the advanced ones in there. But don't, may just dive into some of the findings or applications out of out of this paper.

Dustin Oranchuk43:29

Fair. Yeah, so it was sort of funny when we were starting to talk about cluster sets, I kind of knew we were going to segue. So I preemptively brought this one on screen and just kind of flick through it really quick because again, when you're not the lead author on these things, they tend to fall out of your brain a little bit faster than their is and their project.

So yeah, again, just a real quick sort of overview. I always kind of tell people who led and what kind of came from it. So this was predominantly done from some researchers that I've known for quite a while from Brazil. So, great guys and they do resistance training stuff, but also some other stuff. Just, I've never met a Brazilian I didn't get along with. So if you want a friendly friend, search out somebody from Brazil. Anyway, so yeah, systematic review with some meta-analysis.

And I will say that the number of studies that conformed to the inclusion criteria was relatively low. So interesting findings, cool stuff, but not quite as authoritative as when we have a meta-analysis that's got like 40 studies or something like that. Although, and then the fact that we're looking at paired sets, pyramid sets, forced reps, all of these things, and we're pooling them together and trying to come out and say, okay, well advanced stuff is better or isn't, it's washed away a little bit.

It's a little bit diluted by the fact that we don't have 20 on forced reps and 20 on super slow or kind of put in the mix together.

So a little caveat for people, especially when they're reading research, I hope that you kind of pay attention to these little things and not just the abstract that's not big enough to be able to say, okay, well what's the problems. However, yes, in general with these studies, there did not seem to be a clear advantage to using Advanced Training methods versus just straight sets traditional training for, again, hypertrophy.

And then the other thing, again, is the vast majority of research studies in these areas are typically on University-age people who are recreationally active. They lift once in a while, sometimes they don't lift at all. And at that point, everything is going to work. So finding something that's going to work statistically significantly better is relatively rare outside of giving them steroids or something like that.

So again, if you're not an advanced trainer, there's probably no need to use Advanced resistance training methods. You can get away with the basics for probably longer than most people are willing to stick with them. Again, there's some benefit to advanced stuff in that it's fun, it's motivating. I've had this conversation, a similar conversation with a few people because at the gym that I go to for lifting, I noticed, oh, there's a big bucket of chains now. Oh, okay, I like that.

And someone's like, oh, do you like chains? And I was like, I like them, but I know that they're probably not going to help me squat and bench and deadlift any better than if I just train really hard without chains, especially because I don't do equipped stuff, right? I don't use a bench shirt or deadlift suit or anything like that that typically helps you out with the bottom. At that point, maybe chains are beneficial, I don't know.

But so chains, for example, they kind of get heavier at the top. But nobody misses a squat right at the top in a powerlifting meet, right? Same with a bench. It's pretty rare that raw bench press competitors miss right at the very top of the lockout. It's usually somewhere in the middle. Same with the squat. Most deadlifters, deadlift may be a little different because some people really struggle with the lockout, some people really struggle off the floor.

So based on all that logic, bands and chains shouldn't really help the raw powerlifter. But from a psychological point of view, if I'm bored with training and I put in a lot of chain stuff on my squats or benches or something like that for a couple of weeks, I might be just extra motivated. Cool, I get to use chains today. It's just going to look cool for my Instagram, it sounds cool. It sounds cool.

I'm doing some hip rehab and I was wrapping the chains around my neck to add a little bit of extra body weight for my single leg step-ups. And it's cooler, it's more fun than holding a dumbbell or something like that. So if you're more motivated, just like I'm kind of jazzed to go into my workout, as opposed to like, oh, straight bar classic bench again or whatever it might be, then I think there's some value to some of those Advanced methods, whether that's chains or, again, rest pause or pyramid sets or something like that.

And just that the person who works hard on a more consistent basis for more years in a row will probably outperform people who are kind of inconsistent. So finding things that are fun sometimes outweighs scientific research or physiological benefits that might be in the research that are really small or for a four-week intervention or on untrained people or only...

James de Lacey49:13

You think there's potentially some benefit for that accommodating resistance in sports performance? I know there's actually not any or much research showing the superior benefits, but in terms of if you're breaking it down just from a mechanistic or logical standpoint, just looking at face value, right? A traditional barbell lift like a squat, you're spending like 50% of that lift decelerating at the end. So adding bands or chains, okay, we can accelerate all the way through, turns it more into a quote-unquote ballistic profile like a jump.

Obviously the devil's advocate is then just go jump. But outside of that, with a band you also potentially speed up the eccentric phase, so you may be getting some more benefits from that eccentric style of training from the band. Do you think there's any benefit in terms of for maybe combat athletes or athletes generally doing something like that?

Dustin Oranchuk49:41

Yeah, I do, and I think it's actually more beneficial for those types of people than it would be for powerlifters or bodybuilders or anything like that. Right? Because for powerlifting, again, like I said, nobody fails at the top, it's always in the middle.

For bodybuilders, there's the whole fairly well-supported now that stretch-mediated hypertrophy, getting a lot of load at long muscle lengths is better. So when you're using bands or chains, you're literally doing the opposite. So I also, real quick, I also look at bands and chains for powerlifting or bodybuilding as being really good for somebody who's maybe got a niggle, like a knee or a hip issue, or using chains for deadlift allows you to actually train deadlift hard, but you're unloading yourself at the bottom when your back is in its most vulnerable position. So again, for injuries or if you're feeling overloaded, maybe bands or chains there.

But for combat athletes or a lot of other, I would call them, I don't want to be—what's the right word?—I don't want to say real sports because that makes it seem like I don't think powerlifting is a real sport, and that's actually not true. I think powerlifting is actually a very good sport. But you kind of know what I mean, more traditional sports. And yeah, yes, I absolutely do think that way because, to your point, you're maintaining velocity a lot longer, your propulsive phase is a lot longer.

But yeah, using bands for shoulder stuff for throwing athletes or something like that, it puts the sort of peak contraction much farther towards the end. When you're throwing an implement, or if you think about fighting, your fist is an implement, right? You're throwing your fist in a certain way. That's obviously different than throwing a ball, but you're moving your lower leg to kick somebody. You're using propulsion to do that with the intent of moving it at a fast velocity to its target or past its target, really.

So yeah, I actually think bands and chains and things like that are actually much more valuable for non-bar athletes than they are for bar athletes.

James de Lacey52:10

Perfect, perfect. Then just to finish this podcast out, one more paper: Dr. Eric Helms, who was on this podcast a little while ago last year talking all things, busting a bunch of diet. You were just on a paper with him recently looking at people who want to essentially get stronger and potentially gain weight and muscle, but with small and large energy surpluses.

So basically going to a calorie surplus—for most people listening, you've probably heard these terms before, understand it—essentially eating more than you're using during the day so you can use that energy to build muscle, ideally if you're training enough, et cetera. Dive into some of these findings in here, because I think I saw Eric talking about it recently that you can be in a pretty small energy surplus and still gain significant muscle mass. I might be wrong.

Dustin Oranchuk52:41

Yep. So yeah, this one I remember fairly well because it's pretty new, and I made the figures and things like that. So because of that, I have a little bit of a better memory on the results for these than some of the other studies where I'm not the lead on them.

So this one took a long time and was still, frankly, probably pretty underpowered in terms of sample size, and that was massively affected by COVID stuff. So this was a study that was started probably roughly about a year before COVID hit. I don't remember when we first collected our first person. But again, you look in that paper and I can't remember exactly how many people we had per group, but it was not that big. However, the study design was a training study, so really, really cool, hard to pull off in the best of times.

And we had three groups of people. They came in to get their body sort of assessed, so we used ultrasound imaging to look at a couple different places on the thigh as well as a couple different places on the upper arm for muscle thickness, and then used skinfold calipers to measure basically fat thickness, which you could actually argue that might actually be better than certain things like DEXA or MRI or something like that in terms of bodybuilding.

Because, you know, the skinfold is going to actually affect how your muscle looks, as opposed to like getting a body fat percent off a DEXA, which also includes like intramuscular, intraorgan-type fat. So, you know, I'm trying to sell us a little bit.

And then out of those three groups, one group was, we took a log of their food and all that kind of stuff, and one group was given essentially maintenance calories. So their body mass shouldn't have changed, or if it did in the study, it was by minuscule amounts. And then we had a group that was on sort of a moderate calorie surplus. What these calorie surpluses were, I can't recall off the top of my head. It should be easy to find. It is an open-access paper, by the way.

James de Lacey55:12

Yeah, I'll pull it up. Keep talking while I look for it.

Dustin Oranchuk55:12

So moderate calorie surplus and then there was a large calorie surplus where the people were going to gain quite a bit of mass. And then they performed resistance training exercise which was supervised a few times a week. And then at the end of it all, they had everything reassessed.

So we looked at how much fat thickness they gained, how much body weight they gained, how much muscle mass they gained, as well as how much strength they gained in the bench press, barbell bench press and the barbell back squat. I don't think we measured strength in any other way, max strength anyway.

And basically, the findings were that a large energy surplus did not really result in substantially more lean mass gain, but it did result in substantially more fat mass gain than the moderate surplus or the maintenance calories. So maintenance gained a little bit of muscle mass and lost a little bit of fat, which was cool, not super huge amounts. Moderate gained a good amount of muscle and fairly minimal fat. And then the surplus basically gained about the same amount of muscle as the moderate, but they gained more fat as well.

So it's just highlighting that, yeah, past a certain point, you're probably just going to be gaining fat because it takes the body time to build muscle and accumulate amino acids and turn them into proteins and all of that kind of stuff.

James de Lacey57:14

So no more dreamer bulks, no more dreams of dirty bulks going on.

Dustin Oranchuk57:14

I mean, if you want to get your fill of food, you want to just say, "Hey, for a while I'm just going to eat what I want," and that ends up with big body weight gains, but you're training hard at the same time, I'm not going to say don't do it. But it probably isn't the optimal way to look and feel your best.

James de Lacey57:39

So it looks like a moderate surplus was 5% increase, and a high surplus was 15%.

Dustin Oranchuk57:39

Okay, so that'll be like if you're on 2,000 calories, what's that? That's like 100-calorie increase.

James de Lacey57:39

Yeah, 5%, yeah.

Dustin Oranchuk57:39

Yeah, and then if you're on, then there's 2,300, that's it. Really damn small. And that's 2,300 if you're on a 15% increase.

James de Lacey57:39

But that would be—if I'm looking to gain weight, I'm pretty much going to bump 200-300 calories. I'll be a little higher to 2,500. What's that? My math is—that's still really small. That high isn't stupidly high. That would fall in line with a lot of people's, I guess, arbitrary guidelines for adding calories.

Dustin Oranchuk58:11

Yeah, so you might actually take less of a surplus than you think to build muscle. That's another good takeaway. And again, when I'm looking at the figures, for the most part, actually, moderate tended to sort of outperform the high group when it came to improving muscle thickness in the arms and legs anyway. Again, relatively underpowered study, so I wouldn't say that it was superior, but I would say that it clearly was not inferior.

James de Lacey58:43

Damn, because I'm just thinking now, like, even if you're on 3,000 calories, that's only a 150-calorie increase. That's all you need. So if your maintenance was 3,000, 150-calorie increase—

Dustin Oranchuk59:17

And that's enough for you to start gaining mass at a similar rate potentially to having a, what's that, 450 calorie increase without the fat. Yep. And in fact, looking at the figures, the only thing that the high group potentially clearly improved at a higher rate or a faster rate was bench press 1RM. But squat was really pretty unclear as well.

And again, in terms of the skin fold, the fat, the higher group gained a little bit more. Maintenance, of course, actually went slightly down—they got a little bit less fat. But yeah, to your point, 150 calories, I mean I don't even know what amount of food that is. It's so small. You know, exactly, when we're talking about generally men—although there was some women in that study as well—but we're talking about larger than average men. Know, 150, I don't even know, that's like a scoop of protein, 120 calories, like a small granola bar or something, right?

James de Lacey1:00:20

Yeah, that makes—it's a good thing for people who can't eat a lot to gain weight and muscle, but sucks for people who like to eat a lot, like me.

Dustin Oranchuk1:00:20

Yeah, you're like, "Oh cool, I'm in a gaining phase. I'm going to eat a big old pizza once a week or something. I'm going to get a Costco pizza slice that's 600 calories." And it's like, yeah, now you know.

James de Lacey1:00:50

Or, I mean, the nice thing is—again, I'm not a nutrition expert per se, but something I read quite a bit about—is that when you have a big meal like that, like a really big meal, we've all probably experienced the meat sweats kind of a deal. Really ramps up. I mean, you must have food challenges galore around Texas, but I've done a couple in my life. And whether that's eating cheese or just eating a lot with a bunch of rowdy men and you're just all eating a bunch of ribs or something like that.

And I remember especially being in Canada, I go and I eat a whole bunch of beef ribs with my friends. And then like that night, it's in winter and I have to sleep with my window cracked a little bit because I'm just burning up. Like, I'm just sweaty and gross and disgusting and I'm like, "I need my window open a little bit," even though it's minus 30 Celsius.

So your body will upregulate quite good, especially the protein. Yeah, where it's almost impossible to get fat on eating too much protein. It's just going to hurt your wallet.

Dustin Oranchuk1:01:44

Yeah, yeah, that's actually a really good study, that one on the overfeeding protein study. But we've hit our hour mark here, Dustin. Where can people find you and follow you and keep up with all your research and what you're doing?

Yeah, so the best two places, I guess, for research are going to be, of course, ResearchGate. So there's researchgate.net. And then if you were just to search Dustin Oranchuk, then I put literally everything up there, even if I'm supposed to or not. Occasionally a journal will contact me and say, "Hey, we need you to take this down because it shouldn't be up there." But honestly, I've very rarely run into any problems where I put up a paper that's not open access and I put up something on ResearchGate.

So if you really want open stuff and you want to read it all, ResearchGate is better than Google Scholar or anything, maybe even better than Scopus, because Scopus might not have everything. But I put as much as I can, and only when I'm threatened by the journal will I take it down, and it's only happened once out of 50 papers or something.

So researchgate.net. And then—I don't post that often, I more just retweet, although occasionally I'll post or we do something cool—is Twitter or X, and that's just Dustin Oranchuk. I can't even remember if there's a dot in there. Let me look. Let's see. No, it's just Dustin Oranchuk. Perfect, easy.

James de Lacey1:03:06

As I'll link those in the description too for anyone who's interested. And yeah, if you need the full text papers, just request them on ResearchGate or message Dustin, and don't buy them. He doesn't get any money if you buy them from the journal, unfortunately. Absolutely doesn't work like that.

Dustin Oranchuk1:03:42

No, no. I mean yeah, I've seen some good memes. Like that was like, "Oh, once a PI publishes 100 papers, they get enough royalties to pay for the..." Oh yeah, I've seen that. I was like, I've published papers before, I haven't seen—no, no, that would be quite something.

But yeah, anyway, maybe we'll catch up in a couple of months. And if that yeah, pushing versus holding, there's some other cool things that are kind of going on, so we can always talk about those again.

James de Lacey1:04:09

Hell yeah, I'm keen. Cheers for coming on, Dustin. I appreciate it.

Dustin Oranchuk1:04:09

Thanks, James. I just got back from New Zealand, by the way, too, so I'm real caught up on my kiwi slang.

James de Lacey1:04:09

Perfect.