Why Jump Height Doesn't Tell Us Much + Peripheral Conditioning & Periodization w/ Pierre Austrey (Ep 186)

Pierre Austrey2:51

No, I'd say it's very up and down. It's a bit like a roller coaster here always. So yeah, 2011 is probably the reference year. Yeah, so cool you could live through that bit of success.

James de Lacey2:51

No worries. That was, it was cool just to just to be a fly on the wall. But I want to go straight into some of your random thoughts that you've had on LinkedIn cuz I've enjoyed them. I've resonated with a lot of them. Had you thought through a lot of similar, I guess, thought processes around it.

But I want, let's just start with something that the listeners might find a little easier to understand as well is your post about power versus elasticity. I'd love for you to kind of go into a little bit on that, on how you kind of see these as two potentially separate qualities.

Pierre Austrey3:40

Yeah, look, all those random thoughts anyway, they mostly come from stuff we see on the field. It's not spending time and trying to go deep into the philosophy of things. It's just sometimes we're hit by stuff on the ground and then you're like oh okay I need to make sense of that and start putting some notes on paper.

And that one is simply we try here. So the last few years my approach in the gym's been I want to have some sort of individualization early on. So I do feel, I get it in rugby especially, there is always that fight between it's a team sport. It requires a lot of connection. It requires a lot of relying on each other and stuff like that. And that's good. And sometimes we want it to be a team sport everywhere around the program. On the pitch, in the gym, in what we do in recovery and all of that.

But I feel more and more my thoughts are the gym is the place where you need to address what people actually need and I don't feel you need to wait for it. As early as you can catch it then you can act on it. And it doesn't mean you have to have 35 or 40 different programs but that's why we sort of tinker around and try to play with what we can do.

And last year we mainly did we follow up what the boys were producing strengthwise. And we play around some isometric testing in and around that around what Nata is doing around the speed specific iso stuff. But mostly we track their pure concentric strength. Old school league is still fairly old school. So you need a bit of that, a 3RM squat bench and all of that.

And on the other side we started doing a countermovement rebound jump and we try to look at reactive strength index and then as well to sort of eccentric value going to the jump and try to picture so strength on one side and then reactivity or power on the other side and group people in the gym.

But this year we added one layer which is we started testing at specific velocity on a poor exercise, just a clean pull or end clean pull, and we started seeing some discrepancy. So basically there is no straight correlation between people who can move a certain weight at a really high velocity and people that can produce high RSI on the jump test for instance.

And that's where that idea sort of began to grow is actually we often almost interchangeably use power and reactivity in our line of work especially in rugby. Sometimes we're not very precise with vocabulary and we say oh that guy is very powerful just because he can jump high or jump fast or he's very reactive. But that's two different things.

And what we started noticing is probably the main difference between those two is in the reactive component. People that are very good with being reactive, they are very good at manipulating their own body weight. They have really good timing and they have really good coordination and that's a different quality from power.

Some people can move some set load with producing a huge amount of power, a huge amount of watts. But when they have to contextualize that activity into something that's more running based or jumping based, they are facing sometimes either big problems of coordination or rhythm or just the ability to recycle energy that make them not as elastic as other people.

And the other way around you have people who are extremely efficient at storing elastic energy. So a jump or running they'll be very very good as long as the load, external load, is quite low. And then as soon as you add load on top of it then their issue might be a bit of a strength ceiling limiting them. And those guys won't sprint as well. If you do a clean for instance test or loaded jump, because the external load will trigger some limitation around their actual muscle contractile ability PC.

So yeah, that's sort of where it came up. And then so where we at now is we actually try to have a quadrant where we look at people's max strength. And then on top of that, we look at people power ability. We look at the power they're producing around an clean or clean pull at set weight. So we have sort of a profile here for the players, a few different weights we get them to go through, and then their reactivity on the jump.

And that probably gives us about two to three exercises that will be different depending on the guy's profile at the moment. So yeah that's a bit the idea behind that.

James de Lacey8:37

Do you find certain positions skew to certain qualities within that testing?

Pierre Austrey8:44

Good question. Look, league is a bit strange sometimes when it come to position. People have very very similar needs across, probably there's still some difference. But I would say it's less about position but about people's physiology. You can categorize your lab. People who are your fast guys, they're thin, they don't love the gym work, they need a lot of context around what they do, they're good at the skill stuff, they're really passionate about the game. And often those guys end up being quite elastic but quite low in term of their strength potential.

And then on the other side, when you have guys who are priding themselves on the strength aspect, they're more stoky, wide, wide shoulders, very strong in the gym, and often in league, they are your middles. So that's probably one position group. Most of those guys will tend to be more force or even power dominant, but they'll struggle with elastic energy.

But saying that, we have some of our forwards here that would pretty much fit that description I just gave for more force dominant people and they're very explosive, very reactive, very coordinated. And on the other side of that, we have some of our backs here that do actually struggle with that more high speed coordination, reactivity side of things. So it's a bit all over the shop in league in terms of position really. It's not as easy, it probably as union where you don't expect a prop to give you.

James de Lacey8:44

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Yeah, the game's changed so much now. It's so fast. You've got less interchanges than back in the day. So everyone has to be able to play a lot of minutes. And you can see the body shape changes from like 10 plus years ago to now. You don't have the massive fat dudes coming off the bench who just run it straight from the kickoff.

Pierre Austrey11:27

Everyone, ever since they've introduced that six again rule a few years back, instead of getting penalties you get six again on a big part of the pitch, that just sped up the game so much. You actually need that sort of ability to move all the time. So yeah, the big dudes paying a bit the price for it, unfortunately.

James de Lacey11:47

So you mentioned the timing and coordination and rhythm that some guys possess or some guys don't possess. Say you have one of these guys, they have good numbers on a hang clean high pull, don't maybe have that reactive rebound jump. How are you then building in some of this timing and coordination work? As it sounds, as soon as I hear timing, coordination, I almost brings me to Franz Bosch coordination training or even you could even go more I guess mechanical, you're looking at different things within sprinting. But it'll be interesting to hear how you're addressing some of that.

Pierre Austrey12:19

Yeah. Yeah, that's a big inspiration in Franz Bosch and all that sort of line of theory and that's impacting what we're trying to do with those guys. But we try to keep it quite simple often. It's more okay, if they lack some coordination or rhythm, what are the movement pattern where this might be a performance issue. And still rugby is a running sport.

So at the end of the day you have to look at what you need to do to run, especially run at high speed, because every action that have a meaningful impact on the game result nowadays happen at speed. There is not much low intensity action that are determining factor.

And then taking some of those principle and see how you can help those guys at least regaining or improving coordination around those type of movements. So something that's linked to a limb switch is one we go to a lot. So can you switch with a lot of reactivity in there. So we'll have some step up variation pretty much some inspired from Franz Bosch but can be a mini sort of box and starting one foot above that box ready to attack it and then as you attack that box you have that limb exchange or you can start on the box and have a double limb exchange.

You can add a medball. A medball can be pushed overhead, forward to add a little bit of constraint and perturbation and progress at movement.

So we play a lot with that sort of idea of can you be coordinated and produce power when exchanging the limbs. And then another one will be what happen when you contact the ground. So just make sure in term of that ankle foot stiffness, we can get some improvements. Those guys will go through a fair bit of drop jump variation, for instance steel pogos, hope, running drills, running mechanics, anything that we can add on to their training that will help them just being efficient in recycling energy in a running context, we feel like that's where we're getting gains rather than try to get coordination through movement that are not exactly transferable to the activity straight away.

Nothing extremely fancy, but we're fortunate enough to have output units here as a sort of velocity based tracker. And because you can stick that pretty much wherever you want, it's pretty easy to try to get some objective when you go through low load coordination type exercise.

James de Lacey14:45

Yeah, it's one of the things I really liked. A lot of people will [expletive] on a Franz Bosch coordination approach because it's like, hey, it's not measurable, we can't see the outcomes from the side. No one has been great just doing these exercises. I found similar to you. The night what I really like about it is for me it linked what was happening in the gym to what's happening on the field. So even the queueing will be similar. So it's like your step down switch, you're trying to maintain that stiff landing when you hit the ground and that pop.

And then when they're going on the field and maybe even you're doing some more constraint stuff there, wickets or upload association, you can still that. It's like you've drilled it twice now in a day versus only doing it once on the field and everything in the gym is just separate. It kind of links it together. It makes it a little more sticky, I guess. I don't know if you found something similar.

Pierre Austrey15:37

Yeah, no, absolutely absolutely agree. It's probably where everyone start in our industry around Bosch ID season. There is a lot of interesting things, but when it comes to we need to be measurable, we need to have some objectivity around what we're doing and be able to put progression on paper for people. But I do believe with technology you have around the place, if you know what you're looking for, then you can answer those type of questions.

So in a lot of those coordination exercise coming from Franz Bosch, the one we've applied in the gym you usually look for one of two things where whether you want to increase your triangular velocity whether being in the flexion phase or the extension phase. And that's anything that you will do around switching. That's probably what you want to look at is how fast you can get that thigh to come high to create space so you can attack the ground and apply plenty of force that's going to move you forward. Or oppositely, maybe you want to look at how fast that thigh can come down and create massive ground contact forces.

And once again with technology we have in place now being output or I'm sure there is other one out there, you have ways to play around that. You can measure angular velocity on certain lift and you can start building your own database and your own way of tracking and progressing people. So I think you need to try to look past those limitation. And I know a lot of people are really good with just visualizing stuff as well.

If you record people and you look at how they move and you can see your progression, that's especially true with everything you do on the pitch. So yeah, I don't think that argument of oh it's not really measurable then we leave it on the side is really valid nowadays when it comes to that coordination based stuff.

James de Lacey17:25

So you're almost measuring the speed of a switch then with a device.

Pierre Austrey17:30

Yeah, that's it. You can measure the speed of the switch. The way you would picture it is just your thigh will move and it will move a certain number of degree per second and that's probably your best objective marker to look at. And if you look at the work of all the really high quality speed coaches out there nowadays, people can find a lot of research and argument around that.

What happening from the hip being a key critical factor in preventing injuries on one side but as well in progressing speed. So if you can get that in the gym somehow and you can get some data somehow, I think that's only going to be valuable.

James de Lacey18:12

That's awesome. You mentioned as well with the repeated movement jump and I think you had some random before post on the central qualities too. Are you looking deeper into the eccentric I guess phases on those jumps then?

Pierre Austrey18:30

Yeah. Yeah absolutely that's a great question. Yeah, look what we've started looking at is it's more global around the program is that feeling that a lot of things that cost people readiness or cost people energy or make people fine in a bit of a hole are all around things that produce high eccentric loading rather than concentric output. So you get contact, you have to absorb contact in a sport like rugby league. That's a huge eccentric demand. You have to excel and decel a lot. That's another huge eccentric demand.

So the idea of bringing that counter movement rebound jump instead of just a counter movement jump in the program and doing weekly is we can observe the eccentric marker on the jump and we can see oh they are linked to the eccentric loading we have across a week. So funnily enough, I think we spend a lot of time thinking about output and we spend a lot of time looking at stuff like jump, but that's probably the last marker that is going to show you any meaningful changes. When that changes, you're pretty much in the sheet already, or there is an obvious reason behind it.

What you want to be able to use in monitoring and capture early is probably the variation in your eccentric data. So your eccentric peak forces, your eccentric rate of force development, even the time to go down and initiate the jump. Fast people are ready to go down and catch at the bottom of a jump. We spend a lot more time exploring those and we find them a lot more related to the actual readiness of players than more output concentric based metric like a jump height or peak power or those kind of things.

James de Lacey20:10

How are you tracking that? We do we use like Z scoring it and then looking at kind of like daily averages.

Pierre Austrey20:17

Yeah. So we use individual Z score. We have our sport scientist here. We put some pretty decent dashboard and everything is coded and so we follow we jump every single week. We look at variation at the individual level and at the team level as well, trying to picture what's happening if that goes down on team level as well. Is that because we've lost some of our best jumpers?

They didn't jump for whatever reason this week. Is that because there is a general fatigue across the squad? Did that correlate with a higher number on the pitch of accel-decel or just higher volume for the week? What can we do on the back of that to try to reestablish some neuromuscular readiness going into the game?

But yeah, we would look like any other data here we'll have Z score at the individual level. Any variation that's sort of above one to 1.5 standard deviation, we'll start looking at it. And pretty much our approach to all monitoring stuff here is we're never going to act on a single factor, so we're going to wait to see a bit of a picture. So if that goes down and then couple other things in the training program for the week show warning for the same individual, then we start having a picture and probably going to be acting on it.

James de Lacey21:31

For the listeners, do you want to maybe just describe or explain what you may see if someone is maybe fatigued going into that, like what kind of data you'd see in that eccentric phase?

Pierre Austrey21:44

Yeah. So sometimes you might just see, so if you just looking people go through the jump, usually there is probably two things that happen. First is what is their body language and their chat going into the platform. I find funny, people when people start being over chatty a bit, you've got those guys that coming around the platform a few time and they come have a look but they're not jumping yet and they come back and they have a few words and then they go away and then something is happening here because we display their number in real time.

So everyone can look at the screen and see people's jump. So if you start picking up a bit of performance anxiety around the jump, you already know you might get something in there.

And then I think you can picture a lot in how fast people are ready to go down in that type of jumps. I feel like still with rugby athletes, you deal with fairly powerful more elastic sort of people, not poor lifters. So nobody's ever going to take a long time at the bottom of a jump to try to go really high. They all rely fairly on elastic energy. So if guys do not want to go fast on the way down to initiate the jump, usually when you track the data back after the jump you're going to see some changes here.

But for all eccentric data, usually you have to go through the processing of the data and look into it. Sometime it's not that obvious. You have people who can jump at the same or higher than usual but their eccentric peak forces were lower or their rate of force development eccentrically was lower. So it might tell you that okay people always find a way with concentric aspect of stuff with output.

You can motivate yourself, you can talk [expletive] to some people around you and they talk [expletive] back at you and then now you're pumped, or you can change your strategy or you can find a way to produce output. And they're world class at finding a way through fatigue, through injury, to get good output. That's why they are where they are as top level athletes.

But you cannot cheat your eccentric value. If that's not up to what it is, it tells us something is happening at the neuromuscular level, which is not the easiest one to catch often.

James de Lacey23:53

Nice. Yeah. Actually, I had a LinkedIn post a couple a few weeks ago saying exactly what you said there. It says we focus so much on the outputs like jump height, VO2 max, etc., but we don't focus on how we get there. And understandable that not everyone has the technology and [expletive] to be able to do it.

But if you do then there's definite value like you're doing there for monitoring and profiling and all that and to get a far better picture than just seeing some guy jumps X amount of centimeters and then you go what do I do? What do I do with that data?

Pierre Austrey24:27

That's a very very true comment. I do feel the same. I feel like we became almost data driven in a lot of ways. And I don't know if we dealt properly with the fact that we're still looking at at humans and the body is not a machine. We argue that the body works like a machine. I believe that's a wrong picture in their head.

There's too much stuff going on. Any mechanism that happen so many, if you don't contextualize everything all the time, I think you have a meaningless action on what people can do. So yeah, and to get that context you need to look at movement quality or you need to look at how things are done and just not just the output.

But the output is what keep us in jobs. Everyone increase our strength so I'm doing well, so it's probably tied to another big question which are what are the KPIs for athletic performance professionals? Because if if your KPIs in your organization are on numbers, then those people are not in a place to actually do their job well and and look at quality. They've got to give you numbers.

James de Lacey25:37

Yeah. I'm on board with you there 100%. I actually wanted to go into one of your articles. I just saw you had this article on Simply Fast because I was writing a worst case scenario article recently for Hammer Media and I would love to go through for my own selfish reasons to go through worst case scenario because the way I implemented it I don't think I did it well.

And so basically all I did was I took peak periods in the games of two, three or five minutes and I just had the squad average of meters per minute. And then we just literally just blocks of two, three minutes and we would just run through the structures in an opposed session and try and exceed, essentially trying to exceed that by 30%.

Now obviously you can go way more in detail and go per position. You can look at different scenarios and obviously you can go into more with worst case scenario where hey captain gets sent off now let the team organize themselves, all that kind of [expletive]. So it'd be really interesting to kind of go through how do you approach worst case scenario so I can learn and make my [expletive] better.

Pierre Austrey25:37

I can promise that I'll try. It's a cool I think it's a cool topic. Back then I think I played around a bit of semantic but I find funny how that just it was a few years back and the idea of worst case scenario just popped up and everyone was just talking about worst case scenario.

And once again, when we go back to adding context and stuff, it's probably if you have a very good picture in your mind of what that looks like, it's probably not your worst case scenario. Your worst case scenario is not going to knock on the door and be, hey, that's me. You know me. We've been through this many times before, so let's just roll through. What it is now, if if you take worst case scenario in the military sense or in people what would deal with major emergency sort of situation, you've got to be looking at something that's going to go beyond what you believe is possible.

And worst case scenario for someone looking at world economy and a worst case scenario looking at someone looking at human cost or they're going to be different.

So when it applies to us as well, is your worst case scenario a worst case scenario in term of the physiology of the player? Is that a worst case scenario in term of the psychological pressure? There is a lot of context that can go into it. So I think ever since people got a bit better at being a bit more precise and now we have that idea of ball in play that is quite predominantly the one we go to.

So I think most people when they talk about worst case scenario they actually refer to ball in play in team sports, which is basically what is the longest period of time the ball is going to be in movement without any stoppages.

And the way people look at that nowadays is by going for rolling average of games. You can take a chunk of game being a full season, two season, 10 games, whatever works for your organization and then roll for every game periods of 30 seconds, one minute, two minute, three minutes, whatever you need in your sport until you find that sort of worst case scenario. What is the the longest ball in play time your players might be facing? And that's a starting point. So looking at this one allows easy translation for coaches and it allows easy integration to training.

So now if you want to overload your let's say worst case scenario, you just have to come up with a drill that's going to trigger a similar density and a similar intensity that you find in your worst case scenario ball in play. So that could be let's say for us, I don't have the exact number in mind, but let's say you find out that okay, the worst we're going to ever go through is eight minutes non-stop and that's going to produce about 120 meters per minute and we're going to find about that number of accel-decel in that quantity of time.

Can you replicate that in your training session? And as you said before, do you want to go even above and beyond and overload that? So go not 100% of your worst case scenario, but 110 or 120, 130% of it. So that's probably one way to look at worst case scenario.

But I feel like the other stuff is the other side of it is probably the worst case scenario is going to be individual at the end of the day. My worst case scenario is probably going to be different than yours or different than the third person depending on what we are good at. What we associate psychologically to good outcome or things that might be feeling good and feeling bad. So someone was just loving the defense, love contact, going through for a repeated set or for another sport let's say you are you are stuck on your defensive line and you have to absorb pressure for maybe two, three, four minutes in a row, that might be really enjoyable for that person. It might not be at all the worst case scenario. It might just be where he actually knows that's his time to shine.

And yes maybe the numbers might be his highest for whatever is it that you're looking at but emotionally psychologically and then physiologically at the end of the day because you cannot separate brain and and muscle or brain and lactate level, it's actually not that hard for him. But maybe you go on the other side and the ball is being kicked from one side to another and he has to shuffle in the middle.

That might just be low intensity work for you looking at your GPS, might be something absolutely despises and that might be where his lactate level just blows, where you feel like he's is about to give up pretty much.

So I feel like you have to go and it takes a bit of time to look at not just a GPS but the individual profile, what they're good at, what they're bad at, to actually have a good picture of what is the worst case scenario and then if you're willing to do that.

Then you can overload that part of a game for someone. If you can find a drill where you get a group of people and they absolutely don't want to do that drill, you're probably not far off what you're looking at here.

So yeah, that's a bit like the two sides of a worst case scenario. I don't—I think a bit of semantic, a bit of precision helps if you're looking at a ball in play things because you want a collective marker that you can overload. I think people do that pretty well nowadays. Look at your ball in play and then decide how much you want to overload it and over what time frame.

But if you want to go into actual worst case scenario, you can be a bit more inventive. Stuff like, have you prepared to be a man down and have to defend, or have you prepared to be two man down and have to defend? Have you practiced some drills with limited vision? So back at the Roosters, we play sometimes—we had a fun drill going on where we had some people being eye-banded so they couldn't see and some people having earplugs so they couldn't hear, and they had to find a way to get stuff going.

So between the people who could not hear communication and the people who couldn't see stuff, they still had to go through their line. And I think that's a fun way to explore that concept of worst case. Can you find new resources when you're going to need them?

James de Lacey33:02

No, I love that. I want to start with the collective aspect. Do you find that meters per minute and accels and decels are I guess the metrics—the bit or the better or best metrics to use for quantifying a worst case scenario?

Pierre Austrey33:19

Great question. And I would say that this probably goes back to your sport and what makes sense to you, because at the end of the day, having clarity, alignment, and quality of communication between athletic performance staff and coaching staff is something extremely important. So you need to find something that's going to work for both, and sometimes meters per minute is needed for everyone to understand.

However, I would say people need to understand that meters per minute are not an intensity marker. So if you're using it to try to describe any intensity, I think you're going the wrong way. It's a density marker. It just tells you about the movement happening around a certain unit of time. Or—you achieved, back to context, back to the quality aspect of things—or you achieved that meters per minute can be meaning a lot of different things physiologically or on the neuromuscular level.

If I do 200 meters per minute, did I do 200 meters in 30 seconds and then lie down on the field for another 30 seconds, or did I move at a decent speed to give me that average over a certain period of time? Did I move at 400 meters per minute for some time and then did nothing, or did I stay around 200 meters? Or what's been the deal around that? I think that's important to picture. That's only going to be density. You need to go and have another layer to tell you about actual intensity around what people are doing on the pitch.

Accel decels depend on your sport. For us in rugby league, that's a big one. Players do accel and decel a lot because they have to be back 10 meters to defend. So the way the game goes, you have those shuttles of accelerating to be back in the line, decelerating to be in position, reaccelerating to go into contact.

So for us, that's probably the best intensity marker we can get. If people accumulate a huge load of accel decels, we can be pretty confident that's going to translate into soreness, that's going to translate into fatigue, that's going to have an impact on what the players can do the following week, or we need to manage them more.

So probably more than meters per minute—even though rugby league is quite continuous, once again you're talking about a sport that can easily have over 50 minutes of ball in play time over a game. So if you transfer to rugby union, I would say I would just—I would say that's just a rubbish metric because of the context of the game being a lot more neural, a lot more just short, sharp action followed by bigger periods of recovery.

I don't think that would give me anything. In league, because of the continuous nature of the game, you probably get a bit more from that marker. But I think once again, you cannot go off one. Probably you need to paint a picture. Accel decels on top of meters per minute or accel decels per minute start giving you a bit of an idea of what's going on.

James de Lacey36:07

Nice. And then I guess if you have—if you're on Catapult, I'm sure other systems could probably do it—but I guess their player load might give you a little more just because it's at least three-dimensional. And then I guess, do you also plan to maybe contact per minute, defensive worst case scenario? Is that something else that you also employ there?

Pierre Austrey36:07

I think it would be very good to do, but we don't do it as much. I think the technology in terms of giving you quality data around contact, it's still difficult. So I know player load is trying to integrate some of those contact or collision data, but in a general sense I do prefer to stay away, and I think that's something that's true across the Warriors high performance staff.

We do like staying away from black boxes, something that we're not fully—we don't have a full understanding of, because whenever it's filtered through a specific algorithm, all different things are weighted differently. I think you lose a little bit of context once again. Probably better to come up and do your own stuff, your own marker or your own algorithm that you feel like you have a good control over.

But yeah, the collision side of things, probably you get a lot from just the rugby analysis of what the analysis staff is doing and reporting the number of collisions per people, per player. Their stats around rucks and all of that will give you the picture around that collision component. And then you might focus more on the locomotion component when you look at GPS.

James de Lacey37:43

Nice. Nice. I actually wanted to also go through—I saw you had some interesting stuff on conditioning and we've covered so much on this podcast and various pieces of content around peripherally—I guess peripherally biased conditioning. So we have better oxygen use and oxygen resaturation, because most conditioning I guess philosophies or content is centered around this aerobic-anaerobic bucket, and it doesn't really make sense physiologically.

And I really liked how you put together this idea of what is happening at the muscle is going to dictate that recovery aspect. So it'd be interesting to dive into what you're finding there, how you're using the NIRS devices with your players, and then just some overall general conditioning stuff with how you're taking that data and then I guess using it to individually improve, or what you're seeing from this data to actually influence some of that conditioning.

Pierre Austrey38:40

Yeah, very interesting one. And I think you had in your podcast—I hope I don't—I'm not going to get his name wrong—but Andrew Usher, I think it is. And a lot of his stuff—and I listened to that one, that's really interesting—and a lot of what he said around that reoxygenation and all of that, he's probably a world-class person to talk about it a lot better than I can do. But the idea—

James de Lacey39:05

I love hearing how people are applying it though, so I need you to go into it.

Pierre Austrey39:05

So the thing is, we do not have the technology in-house here. So that's something we want to look at in the future. I did play a little bit with heart rate recovery over in Ireland, just in terms of that heart rate recovery at 60 seconds as a proxy for it. Of course now people have actually NIRS devices—I think Train.Red is one of them, or Moxy—that you can have. And I think there's some detail you can gather through the use of those technologies, but right now we don't have it in-house, we don't have it on the field to try to really drive objective markers though.

The idea around that is, yes, as you said, a lot of time when we talk about fitness, we always talk about the central adaptation linked to fitness or the systemic adaptation linked to fitness—VO2 max, that kind of stuff—but not that much about what's happening on the peripheral level. And in our sport, where the target—for me, the definition of fitness in repeat high intensity sports such as rugby league—are how fast are you ready to produce your next effort, and is that effort going to still be quality?

That's probably fitness. If you can get back in position early, ready to do your job, and do it well with the right level of intent, and do that over and over and over again, I believe you'll be considered as a fit player. And not, you can be running around the pitch for the entire 80 minutes and not struggle—I don't think we're very much interested in that.

And a lot of what's happening to be able to repeat those efforts are going to be happening at a peripheral level, at the muscular level. How much oxygen can you uptake? Because that's going to drive how much phosphocreatine can you use, and some of those metabolic products that are needed to get the action going, to do the muscular action that you need to do.

So in the future, I believe a lot of conditioning is going to be looking at actually what needs to be done to get oxygen back into key critical muscles faster as a way to progress fitness, more so than traditional VO2 max-related or MLSS-related methods.

And if you don't have any technology in place, we found some proxies. Once again, looking at your heart rate recovery over 60 seconds, at the 60-second mark, if you do go through really high intensity effort and you can play around on, say, a bike—let's say 6-second sprints for instance—and then you have someone with a heart rate monitor on and you start looking at where they end up 60 seconds after the effort, or 45 seconds after the effort, whatever works best for your sport.

And then you train them and you see that heart rate coming down at that point in time. There is some reason to believe that somewhere that ability to obtain oxygen is getting better, and by proxy you might think whatever muscle you are involving the most in that effort might be the one benefiting from that adaptation, even though you don't have a way to look into the muscle.

But yeah, to answer your question, I think in a couple years' time there'll be a lot more reoxygenation-driven conditioning methods and technology being in place in clubs. Right now it's a bit of an exploratory period for it. But I would encourage people to have a look at, if they can get those technologies in place, they have their own limitations.

And you probably need to develop a certain expertise looking at it. It's not as easy as just putting the monitor on your quad and then straight away having answers. But what's happening at the peripheral level or at least getting in the habit of training peripheral fatigue is going to be a really huge one.

And I do think another aspect where it's going to be impacting what we do in practice is around return to play after injuries. Sometimes let's say after a hamstring injury you might see people regaining their eccentric strength on the Nordic or regaining their max velocity potential on the pitch. But now if you ask them to repeat those effort, I believe there is some work being done in US right now where in American football where it's reported that when people go through repeat sprinting protocol on coming back from a hamstring injury, the ability of hamstring muscle to uptake oxygen is impaired and stay impaired for a long time.

And now when we get a people reinjury their hamstring late in games and we got all objective marker green lighting validated prior to them getting back into the activity and we just say is that bad luck or what we did wrong or sometimes maybe we're just missing a small piece of that puzzle which is if your muscle is not able to obtain oxygen with the same efficiency anymore. Maybe you're good on the first sprint, you're nailing your 90% plus of speed or whatever, but on the second sprint, your hamstring is already struggling to get what it needs here metabolically to do the job.

But then now it's minute 70 or minute 75 into 80 minute game and you've got to go and sprint or you've got to have a fast decel and there is just no oxygen anymore available in the muscle to do that sort of job and that's where you run into issues.

So I think that's a new additional piece of puzzle that's going to come up on top of what we do RTP wise once those technology are more in place.

James de Lacey44:40

Nice. So currently then with all the technology and everything, how are you skewing, changing, altering conditioning and all then to have something that's a little more muscular bias versus maybe your more MAS, V2 max and tools.

Pierre Austrey44:57

Yeah, very good question. Look, we try to play with some feed sometimes. So what kind of modalities we can put in place to target some specific area and are they going to be able to repeat effort? So it might be, if your concern was upper body conditioning in a way because we always talk about what the legs are doing but in sport like rugby league or I'm sure in combat you need endurance at the shoulder level as well. You need endurance at the upper body level to be able to repeat collisions or repeat grappling action.

So things like protocol that you would do on a wet bike but transferring them to battle rope to actually grappling. So we do a lot of wrestle here. So wrestle conditioning getting people to grapple for sets of time. Looking at things like dumbbell variation of a man maker or a clean into a push, that sort of things where we're going to try to get a huge volume of reps in with limited recovery to try to build up that ability to reoxygenate faster and to produce effort for longer period of time.

So that's one way we approach it. We have some eggs. Sometimes we play with harmony Assault Bike effort, harmony skier if you want to target upper body conditioning. Nothing groundbreaking, out of this world in term of the science, just stuff that you can apply on the pitch when you have 35 people and conditioning or gym is only a small part of their day. Just go straight to the point, keep it simple, I think, is is a good one. And then if you have the technology to back up stuff and be better and progress stuff further then go for it.

But in our reality of team sports environment we try to keep it simple when it comes to conditioning. And then if you want to look at hamstring you might look and find an inclined variation, sled pull variation that is targeting your hamstring and try to deplete your hamstring that way. Even though probably the best way to do that is going through some run interval on the pitch where you can actually go and target that posterior chain. But yeah, in nutshell, that's probably how we try to approach it.

James de Lacey47:08

Nice. You have one of the longest preseasons probably of any sport and in most different leagues it's three and a half, four months. How do you look to kind of periodize that conditioning then through that long stretch?

Pierre Austrey47:08

Yeah, it's true, it's almost, it's a big challenge here when you get 16 week of preseason. I find that the line between how much is meaningful for people to get ready to play and how much is just fatiguing them and it's probably an unnecessary load before going into a season that's still eight months long, it's an interesting one.

Look I'd say, and that's more my vision around things lately in term of conditioning. I do feel like it is time we question how we sequence things throughout a preseason when it comes to running volume. And what I mean by that is lately and a lot of what I'm going to say are maybe more driven by my work with Irish rugby and the sevens over there than it is with league.

And that's more due to some of the things that are part of where I have a lead here are different than when I was at the Irish 7. So in terms of what I could explore personally they're a bit different.

But what I mean by that is probably the number one priority when you get people back in preseason is can you restore coordination reason and can you go back to a decent neuromuscular health level before you do anything else. I find that myself included, a lot of practitioner traditionally always approach preseason as being you come back and you need to get vlogged otherwise this is not a preseason if you don't go the first two weeks

James de Lacey49:00

I have seen some brutal ones and I'm like dude, these guys just came back, you've got how long, why do they need to do this and then you see guys pulling up with injuries and you're like

Pierre Austrey49:12

That's it, that's true. And even if you have shorter preseason like it's the case in union nowadays I think still applies. I think that culturally getting people back and getting them through three broncos in the first week and UMIS work and stuff like that, I I don't think that helps. The reason being they're probably not yet coordinated and they are not yet in a neuromuscular state that will allow them to practice that sort of load safely.

People have been off, people have been on holidays and if you look at the time it takes for different qualities to deplete or to be lost, anything that's more on the quality end of things, anything that's around speed, coordination, neuromuscular efficiency, that is gone the quickest. Your endurance, your strength, you can hold on to that for a lot longer. So I don't know why or where is that rush of pushing on those straight away when you probably should attack first on what is it that you probably lost the most between the end of the previous season and the start of that season.

Getting people through a lots of drilling, a lot of skipping, a lot of running that requires good posture, good ground contact, good pelvic position. All of that I think should be our priority when you return to preseason. Get a lot of that done. Get people suffer through high level drilling, high load sort of skill, running skill, running drill sort of thing. And only when they're getting back to a proper way of moving and a proper postural attitude around running, then you can go and progress your volume.

But even then I think you can ask yourself the question when is that huge volume approach actually needed. I think as soon as you see people changing their mechanics just to get through the volume of running you're asking them to do, you've got to go back and think are those posture what I'm going to look for in a few weeks time when we're back and playing the game?

Is that the way I want to see people behaving and operating? If it's not, then there might be a question here of do you actually get anything from that volume you're trying to build here if the running goes to [expletive] to say it straightly.

So going back to this I would actually structure things the other way around. So try to go from speed development into repeatability of that speed that you now have access to rather than looking at a high volume trimming it down to your speed or high intensity repeated effort over preseason. Drill first then start repeating accel then extend those accel to high speed running, try to get high speed running with quality, repeat those effort, increase duration or increase distance and then you gather some volume that you need in term of getting people fit.

And if you go back through the work of Andrew Usher and other people around that reoxygenation and all of that, we know now.

That you can develop really good aerobic fitness through repeat sprinting and repeat high intensity effort. You do not need to go through the classic high load aerobic sort of thing.

James de Lacey52:47

I wish more people would just take that one thing.

Pierre Austrey52:52

Yeah. Look, it's hard because sometimes when you go and challenge some stuff that have been done in the culture for years and years and years and years, it is hard to extract yourself from that weight and actually go and look, okay, is that actually what's best for people here. And I have to say, whenever I see someone trying to finish an extensive run drill in preseason and they're all bended over, their ground contact time is so long and they're just suffering through, and that guy you're looking at is your fast twitch game changer winger that you want him to be able to be absolutely on from zero to 100 straight away, and you're just like, what are you doing here? What are you doing here? You're absolutely destroying that guy. You're putting in position that he's not made to operate in.

And you're not creating adaptation here that are going to be useful to him. You're better off just, let him repeat sprint. Let him move the way he moves with good positioning and he will give you transfer when it matters.

James de Lacey53:57

Nice. We're on the same wavelength with that. Vern Gam who's a mentor of mine, he always says with his training structures, train speed in, and that's something I always took as well. As you mentioned with the postures, kind of the options running position being able to have options when you're running, so building that into the session and progressing it through the preseason, off-season, however long you have so you're able to just continually drill those good postures while you're doing it.

And again, so not just slogging like this the whole time trying to get through it, like you're accumulating good volume over time and then you're able to actually, it just makes this, it also makes the session more enjoyable for the players. And then they start to think they understand they're not just getting flogged for getting flogged.

There's some players, okay, there's some players absolutely love it. There are some mental [expletive] athletes out there that will love just getting [expletive] whipped down the field. But a lot of them, they want to do things and understand what they're doing is going to help them, not just [expletive] them up. And it's such a big change and players buy into it quite well, especially guys who maybe had previous injuries and they say, I don't feel so beat up anymore.

My knees are, you know, players be like, man, it's like the first season, my knees aren't killing him. He can actually play. It's just a change in volume and things. It's such a different way of looking at it.

Pierre Austrey55:21

Yeah, I think, yeah. And the argument around, well, you might not be able to do a lot of drilling or stuff with your heavier forwards, and so how do you deal with that calf or hamstring load if you want extra conditioning? And that's where I think as well all your off-fit stuff come in the picture as well. We always come from that idea that whatever you do on a bike or it's not transferring to what's something on the pitch.

If we go back to what we talked about before and you have the you target the right muscle and you think in term of that reoxygenation piece, I believe you can get a lot of benefit from what you do off-fit if you do it smartly, and that can contribute to what you do on the pitch.

Where it doesn't work is if you get people to do conditioning off-fit and then you do something that's not high quality driven on the pitch, then you can get into trouble. But if everything you do on the pitch is going to be in the right posture, going to teach people hip extension, going to teach people how to strike midfoot, how to get good posture in running, then I think you start getting that transfer. You get your systemic adaptation or your very local peripheral adaptation for what you're doing on a bike or off, and then you save your neuromuscular potential for high quality stuff whenever you take it into the running.

Because at the end of the day in running sport, you're going to want people to run in good posture, to run fast when it's going to matter the most, not just be endurance machine going around but with no real meaning.

And the cool thing with that as well is, as you say, some people like different things and I think with all that research that's came lately around anaerobic speed reserve, you can look at grouping people when it come to conditioning as well. You don't have to have the same conditioning protocol for everyone. That's what I did. So, all leading into the Olympics with the Irish Sevens, our entire preseason, everything we did conditioning from day one pretty much is I profiled players and then I went, okay, you guys are my fast explosive weapon and I'm going to keep it that way.

And then you guys are the guys on the pitch who are going to travel a lot. We're going to do a lot of that high volume running and you build for it, so we're going to push on this. And then they had complete different running demand from day one.

All the fast guy, very explosive fast twitch, did only some sort of repeat sprinting protocol in very various form. We went heels, we went repeated effort involving collision as well on top of sprint. We progressed it all the way through, but they never ever did anything that looks like MIS or tempo. On the other side, the other guys will enjoy the volume a bit more.

We need that a bit more usually because they're a bit more slow twitch. They probably reoxygenate a bit faster, they have a less high neural inhibition after very intense effort because they're not that fast with that maximal sort of athlete. We did a bit more long tempo stuff, tempo into repeat high intensity effort, a bit longer effort, and then it all combined perfectly.

And there is other factor into this, but to this day I still believe we went 10 months without a single muscle injury. And in my entire career I've never gone 10 months without a non-contact injury. And there's been other stuff, a lot of people doing an excellent job around the program and all our business in the gym being contributing to that.

But I still believe to that day that having just conditioned people through what they are made physiologically and biomechanically to do and not forcing them into the wrong posture just to survive some load that I decided to put through them, definitely was a big contributor of us being healthy for almost the entire prep to the Olympics.

James de Lacey59:22

I love that. I love that. I had, I think I had two weeks to prep our Romania sevens for the Olympic trials straight after a 15 season. It was [expletive], put it that way. But I know you got to shoot off soon, Pierre. So where can people find and follow you?

Pierre Austrey59:38

Look, pretty open. I usually try to reply to everyone. I love conversation. I'm on LinkedIn under my name, so Pierre Austrey. Instagram as well. I do, I have a bit of professional stuff in there as well if people want to reach out. Yeah, so I'm quite easy. I don't really have, I don't have what the other stuff Twitter is. Is that still called Twitter? [expletive] I'm getting old.

James de Lacey1:00:03

I still call it Twitter, but let's call it now.

Pierre Austrey1:00:06

Yeah. Yeah. None of that. So probably LinkedIn, probably the best one. And then Instagram is another one. And it's all my name.

James de Lacey1:00:12

Sweet. I'll link those in description for anyone who wants to catch it. But I appreciate you coming. I really enjoyed this. Even though it wasn't exactly combat sports, I don't give a [expletive] because this is, I enjoyed this and there's always concepts that relate back to all training. All sport kind of shares the same principles. So, I appreciate you coming on.

Pierre Austrey1:00:29

No, thanks for the invite. Yeah. I'm not very much a combat person. I don't know much about it, but I think the main thing for me that you can always apply is look for context. That'll be the main thing. Whatever you do, try to look for context and then once you answer the first question, make sure you have a second question, and once it's answered make sure you have a third one.

And then you start looking at things in a better way. Sometimes we just stop at the first metric that looks cool or the first question is answer and that's where we stopped, and I think there is always more context to put into what we're doing.

James de Lacey1:01:06

Perfect. Appreciate that and we'll stay in touch anyway.

Pierre Austrey1:01:10

Thank you very much. Talk soon.