Death To The 7-Day Microcycle And Energy System Training w/ Vern Gambetta (SSOF Ep. 44)

Vern Gambetta0:27

We had three medalists in the last Olympic Games and about 25% of the U.S. Olympic team between men and women. And so I, pun intended, am very immersed in swimming right now, coaching dryland anywhere from five or six sessions a week there.

So it's been a long journey, it's been a fun journey across a lot of sports. And my thing, as you know, James, is to make connections—make connections between sports. And there's a lot more similarities than there are differences.

James de Lacey3:47

And that's why it's awesome bringing you on here, even though not from a combat sports background—everything applies to everything. And sports principles are the same, regardless of the sport. And I think with your coaching experience too, you've coached longer than many of us have been alive. And you've been very vocal about a few different topics as well.

But one of the topics I wanted to jump into—it's one I think most athletes, even most, I struggle with it—is the idea of moving away from a seven-day microcycle. And I know you've talked a lot about, "Hey, it doesn't have to be Monday to Sunday, a seven-day cycle of training. You can do 10-day, 14-day, 21-day, even microcycles." Do you want to maybe just go a little bit into your philosophy around that?

Vern Gambetta4:41

Yeah, I mean I call it the Judeo-Christian periodization model. The big guy worked for six days and rested on the seventh, and that was great at creation. But now, I'm a big believer in the 24-hour athlete concept. If you can train—we right now have our international group here training four or five hours a day, some days a week—but there's, what about the other 19 hours? And so you've got to look at that.

And I started thinking about this when I was coaching at Cal Berkeley. We had Sunday as our day off and Monday was our hard day, and sometimes our big emphasis day. And it was just terrible. They came off a complete rest. Monday was a high-stress day. It was a high-stress day for me. All the assignments either are due on Monday or they're getting the assignments, and kids would come to the track just fried. And I go, "Look, we can do this better."

So that's when I came up with the idea of a 14-day microcycle. It actually ended up making Monday an active rest day. So it's where you start the training. And if you're not comfortable with that—and this goes back to classical periodization—there's always a period of preparation within a microcycle, period of adaptation, and a period of application. And with 10 or 14 days, it works out perfect. You have three or four days of preparation, more a little more general work. Then you make the transition to raising intensity, and then you lower volume and raise intensity and get more specific.

So what it solves: it creates, if you can work it around your lifestyle and your life work, I think that's first. And then the biggest thing is it cures the density problem. If you look at seven days, and I don't know how you feel about this, James, or the listeners, but think about it: I think I've got to do this, I've got to do that, got to do that.

There's a lot of boxes we have to tick—not just to tick boxes, but they're important to get adaptation. And it takes away from that. You just go, "Ah," it's like a big sigh of relief, like, "Wait a minute, I don't have—"

And I set things up within that as major emphasis and minor emphasis. So if it's major emphasis, it's got to show up more often in that microcycle. If it's minor emphasis, I know I'm always touching on it. And you mentioned even 21 days: I sometimes, in a real general phase, way far away from competition, use a 21-day. But I would rather, I think of a mesocycle or a block, whatever you want to call it, I think of it as three 14-day microcycles.

And when I'm not competing, the first 14 days are more preparation, the middle ones are more adaptation, and then it's application. And that's about, in terms of the whole planning thing, that's about as long. I have general objectives for six months from now, but that six weeks is really zeroed in.

I think if people are afraid to try it, I think at times, because the first 14 or 28 days, it's a little uncomfortable because you're moving things around. We have traditionally, Saturday's hard day. Saturday probably would be a hard day. And then people, for religious reasons or whatever in some countries, think they shut down on Sunday. But look at what's your highest stress day is outside of your training too and make that an active rest or a rest day. And I usually couple, there's a couple of active rest days in there too. So it was an attempt at a solution.

James de Lacey8:37

Yeah, I really like the concept. I know what you mean about almost like the anxiety of trying to fit everything in for seven days. Because you're going, "Okay, I need to do my strength work two or three days, or I need to do this extra conditioning." But then you've also got how many days of technical training on top, and then whatever else you have in your life. And you go, "Okay, well if I miss the session, I miss it within the seven days," or just the microcycle. But if you extend it out that 14 days, you can almost spread things out.

Vern Gambetta9:04

To a point where you get a little blown out of proportion. Look, this is not a good example, but this is just some notes. I start my planning with just notes. I'm helping a former pro football player that I work with—he's a high school coach here one day a week—and I just write notes, and that's where it starts. Now, the rubber's got to meet the road. I have an hour, and I have to also be careful that I don't try to cram everything into the hour.

And so it's a common dilemma that we face, particularly when people aren't full-time professional athletes. And then the other vein, if they're full-time professional athletes, they try to do too much too often. It's a little bit backwards that way.

James de Lacey9:55

Yeah. For sure. But how would you employ something like this—more of a thought experiment here—but for most people, they have a seven day microcycle because perhaps the Technical Training they do is on certain times of the day, certain days of the week. So for example, every Saturday might be hard session and every Wednesday might be a hard session, so you're almost locked into the seven day mindset within the Technical Training. How do you work everything else around that to be okay, I'm thinking broader in a 10 or 14 day cycle?

Vern Gambetta10:26

Well, first of all, if those are your benchmarks, those are what you build your 14 days around. Okay, so when are you going to start your 14 days? So if it's Wednesday, Saturday, chances are I'm going to have Sunday, Monday my rest day, and Sunday is going to be—if you're talking about—I mean I've not worked a long time, but done some stuff with wrestling and that, and Nick Garcia, who you know, is now doing a lot of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in that.

So you've had a hard technical session, you've had a lot of grappling, a lot of stuff on Saturday. Then Sunday should probably be more of an aerobic day. I don't like to label it necessarily recovery, but it could be aerobic, it can be more aerobic, lower intensity. Yoga type of stuff, Sunday, Monday off.

Then Tuesday you're starting to build up into Wednesday. Then you could theoretically have an active rest day on Friday before your Saturday. If those technical sessions are going to determine how good you're going to be, then everything has to be focused on those and everything else supports those. Does that make sense?

James de Lacey11:26

Yep, that makes complete sense as well. And yeah, I think it's more of a planning area where people get confused or fall into that grinding mentality of, hey, you know, hard session Wednesday, but it's going to also be hard sessions on Tuesday and Thursday and Friday, because they need to feel like they're doing work to feel like they're making progress, but fall into that trap of just beating themselves into the deck.

Vern Gambetta12:30

And it's easy to do that. I mean, I've done that as an athlete. I checked—I put—we all have. I put my training from when I was doing decathlon and I looked at it and I showed it to my wife—I was married at the time—and I said, how did she stay married to me? And she said, I don't know. We've been married five years, it's probably—but I look at that and I go, did I get better? Yeah, because I'd never done it before, but I was tired all on, and the quality, the quality was sacrificed.

Quality and intensity are not the same. Quality is a measure of perfection. Intensity is a measure of 100%. So when you go into those sessions—and I've been around martial arts and Combat Sports enough—those have to be, to fine-tune your technique, you have to—you can't be really tired. You're going to be tired at the end of a match, but that's different. That's later. You're learning moves, things like that.

So, and the other thing, James, that I think is really important—and I don't mean to say that the 10 or 14 day microcycle will bring world peace or cure cancer or something like that—but what it does is it forces you to take a less is more approach. So, and understand the connection between workouts.

So we tend to look at: today was a great workout, it was a great workout, I dug deep, my adrenals are gone. I come back tomorrow, pardon my French, instead of saying, okay, how do I sequence stuff so that I can get the optimal out of the most important workouts and they fit together? So I think of it as one big workout broken into segments.

James de Lacey14:26

Yeah, that's an awesome way of looking at it. You mentioned about quality of practice. I don't know if it was—I don't know if it was you—it might have been—must have been you, and potentially on Gain—about perfect practice. And essentially, not—people will say perfect practice is—I can't remember the saying, whatever it is—but perfect practice being perfect. But you want imperfect practice because you want to make those mistakes and you want to be able to essentially self-organize and self-learn. Do you want maybe dive a little bit into that?

Vern Gambetta14:26

Well yeah, I mean, there's a lot of—I mean it's in vogue now, sort of differential learning, implicit learning versus explicit learning, learning through exploration. And I think, again, I'm an old guy talking here, that came up in the era of very explicit learning: step one, step two. And I know that exclusively that created robots that didn't work. The great athletes stayed great, and the average athletes didn't thrive on that.

So creating opportunities for mistakes and testing the envelope and recognizing that mistakes are learning opportunities and evaluating—and I think a lot of this, James, really comes to your mental, your mindset going into the training session, so that you have a clear objective of what you're trying to achieve, and then you look at what happened, then you debrief it. Can be just in the shower. It doesn't have to be a formal—I mean we do a formal debrief once a week with our high level swimmers and with the athletes.

But just like a little checklist and say, okay, now I have this particular move or this particular thing I'm struggling with. How do I work on that now? And I got pinned five times in a row, because—but the sixth time you might be better. And I think we tend to look at things in a finality. So yeah, perfect practice is—I think that was something that we were hammered in, sort of this Protestant work ethic: it's got to be perfect, it's got to be perfect. And even competition, the perfect competition has never happened yet. So it's learning opportunities is the way I look at it. Chances to learn.

James de Lacey17:03

Yeah. I think I was also drilled into a lot of people when in sports where when you make mistakes, you get punished by the coach doing push-ups or whatever else, and then it exacerbated from there, because obviously then it had to be perfect, you can't make mistakes, and obviously, as you mentioned, you start getting into that robot mentality.

Vern Gambetta17:03

I did back when I was working with the Bulls. We trained at this—there was a sort of—we had our area and it was a public, really fancy health club, and this guy saw—I noticed he was watching and he came up and talked to me, and he was a judo player, a musician, really accomplished musician. And he asked me if I'd work with him some. And so I said yeah. I say, what do you charge? I said nothing. I said I want to learn about you, tell me—I want to learn what you're doing, I'll learn from you.

And that's one of the things that he told me. So he was in Korea, I think, and the sensei would—if he made a mistake—he had a 2x4 and he'd hit him with a 2x4.

James de Lacey17:56

Sounds like Cobra Kai.

Vern Gambetta17:56

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And I'm thinking, oh man, I don't know about that. Real life Cobra Kai. That's funny.

James de Lacey18:26

Yeah, that perfect practice thing, I think we all fall into that mindset too. Like, even for example, wrestling or Jiu-Jitsu, you come on the mats and you're rolling with partners, and you're often looking to almost win the roll, get into positions you're comfortable with, versus exploring some of maybe the newer things and things you're worse at and losing a lot just to figure it out yourself.

And I also wanted to go a little bit into Energy Systems, because I think we have a couple of—I guess we say a couple of schools of thought around—I mean, zone two stuff is just all over the bloody internet now and everyone's obsessed over zone two. Um, outside of that, you've got a pure physiological approach where you're looking at, okay, whatever I'm doing, I'm stimulating physiological adaptations to target specific energy systems, versus maybe a work or power output kind of mechanical model, I guess you could say, where it's more about can I sustain or repeat these efforts at this intensity for these times with these rests and things like that.

And obviously these can be intertwined together in a conditioning philosophy, but I know you've been very vocal around the idea of the interplay between energy systems and I guess not isolating them. Do you want maybe dive a little bit into that?

Vern Gambetta19:25

Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, I just finished listening on my walk this morning to—I should know the name, but I don't—he's the—

Coach of the two Norwegian triathletes that are basically dominating the world. It's fascinating because an engineer as a mindset and they do all this monitoring, but at the end of the day it comes down to really getting to know the people. He's got two of them, they're friends.

One of the things as you were asking the question just made me think about this. First of all, because I was just writing, I'm writing a blog post for next week about this. First of all, you cannot train an energy system. You cannot train aerobic, you can't train anaerobic lactate. You can't train, all of them are working all the time. As we're talking right now, our lactate system is activated. It's almost immeasurable, but it's activated.

And I think this idea that we think that we can isolate out and train an energy system, and in a match that's 3 minutes, 5 minutes, whatever it is, or a game, they're all going to operate. Remember, the goal—and I've read your stuff, you know physiology better than I probably—but goal is to produce ATP. We're going to produce it with oxygen or without oxygen.

And one of the toughest things, I remember taking wrestling class in college and doing some grappling with the rugby players, the toughest thing is just that constant tension that you have. It's just ex—it's painful. It's more painful than, you know. And that so, how do we address that? Well, with a multifaceted approach.

Yeah, you're going to do some absolute speed development work which is low fatigue, very explosive. And on the other thing, and my feeling is, you need to develop your technique in non-fatigue situations and then gradually add a fatiguing environment so you have tough technique under fatigue. And there's a lot of ways to do that.

I think a lot of that is related to sequencing your strength training—whatever you want, I call it strength training because it's not just weight training—along with some of your metabolic work. See, again I'm falling into the same trap of separating, but I know that I can do a 15-minute what we call our GH workout, which is 30 seconds of high-intensity work, 30 seconds recovery. We do 12 minutes of that and you're going to lie on the mat. You're not going to be able to get up for 20 minutes.

Okay, so there's a place for that, and I would sequence that type of work then with 10 minutes of steady-state aerobic work, rather than—and I read somebody said, I won't name this guy—he's a big martial arts conditioning guy and he advocates hour runs, hour-and-a-half runs. And I'm thinking, man, you're training people to be slow.

So start with bouts of work like, stuff like 15 seconds easy, 15 seconds medium, 15 seconds sprint and build up to 20 minutes of that. And you can do that if you want on the bike, you can do it, if you live someplace where you can cross-country ski, you run, things like that.

So this idea of I think training the energy systems has misled us to think that, oh, we got that box ticked, now we got anaerobic lactate. No, it all works together. Do we need to raise max VO2? That's the other one. For—and again I'm talking, I said I don't know about, I've been a close observer—well, yeah, yes and no. But anaerobic threshold, there's a lot of other factors that come into that, and you're going to raise max VO2.

I ran into this with quite a few years ago when I was working with Canadian basketball and they were obsessed with getting the players' max VO2 up. You've ever seen a 7-foot, 230-pound guy go out and try to run for an hour? You don't. It's ugly. I don't even. And it's recorded on a seismograph, not a stopwatch. And he had low max VO2, so his capacity was very low, right?

So we devised a routine where he did three different types of aerobic activity. He started low impact—I mean the highest impact first—so he ran for 5 minutes, then he got on the bike for 5 minutes, and he did slideboard for 5 minutes. And then he gradually increased the amount of time and the intensity of that. He raised his max VO2 almost 10 liters per kilogram when you're 48—but, and you're 22 years old, and stop smoking too. And that too helps.

But so I don't know if that answers the question, but this is a fun thing to talk about because it, again, it's making better use of your training time and making it fit to that athlete's abilities and capacities. Okay, I think that's what we have to do. Everything is dictated in your case by the rules of the game, so to speak, the time, the time limits, and that kind of stuff.

But, and I know in boxing, again, it's always been of interest to me because one time I had a great cross-country team at Cal, and the Olympic Training Center was at Squaw Valley then. It was 1979 and the US boxing team was there. And so we'd go watch them spar, and then the guys would sit around the pool with the girls and they'd say, I can't, we can beat you. They would go an hour in the morning, and it was at altitude at 7,000 feet. And we'd go a half hour and catch up at the end.

And we had these discussions. I had this long discussion with the coach like, why are you doing that? Basically, you're training for three rounds, right, in Olympic boxing. You're not training for 15. Wouldn't you be better off doing interval training more—10 med ball throws, a sprint, 10 med ball throws, a sprint?

I think it affords, I'm sorry, I'm just running off at the mouth here, but it affords the opportunity for a lot of innovation in terms of how you prepare to be more match-like, more game-like.

James de Lacey26:30

I think a lot of the Sweet Science of Fighting coaches I've got on board will listen to that as music to their ears. I know them are very, I guess you could say, against that whole idea of the energy system focus. I think a lot of it is just more kind of labeling to make it almost easier to categorize different interventions as well.

Vern Gambetta27:05

It sounds scientific. It's like, and a lot of—we look, we can measure just about anything now, but is it meaningful? That's the question I always ask. Is it meaningful? And secondly, are you going to use that to determine what you do or inform what you do?

This guy today is really interesting. The podcast was sponsored by Whoop, and he basically blew Whoop out of the water because Whoop puts a big thing on HRV, and he said HRV makes up 2% of our what we look at.

And I have a good friend, Dr. Michael Joyner at Mayo Clinic, who's an ex-world-renowned exercise physiologist, and he's like, HRV? That's a clinical measure that we use in the hospital in the cardiac unit. You can't measure it with a band or a thing on your finger accurately. And even if you could measure it accurately, what does it really have to do as a measure of recovery?

This guy said, and I believe, and everybody I know in this over my 50-plus years of coaching, is you've got to establish a relationship with the athlete and they've got to be honest with you. If I say, James, how do you feel today? And you say, I'm just absolutely, man, yesterday's workout, you said it was a medium workout, it just kicked my ass. Well, I better be smart enough to adjust today's workout, or I'm going to be [expletive].

And I think sometimes that's looked upon as, oh, you're not going to be mentally tough. No, I want you to be mentally tough in the match. So, sorry I got on a soap box.

James de Lacey29:08

No, again, these tangents are perfect. That's exactly why I like doing this because we can go down any rabbit hole. But that, I'm with you there as well. I mean, I remember, like, I'll collect wellness data for my guys and you'll see something that looks a little funny and you talk to them, and maybe in the morning, like if I was tracking HRV, maybe it would be bad in the morning, but then by the afternoon after they've done a little bit of stuff in the morning, they're good and they have a good session.

And if you would just go by the data and not talking to them, you'll be like, okay, you're not doing anything today. And there's so much variation that can happen.

Vern Gambetta29:30

That's interesting about the HRV. I've heard that from a couple of different people about HRV may not potentially be, I guess, the monitoring tool that should be used as it is.

It is at the moment, just because, yeah, I mean, it's only one point in the day too, right? Well, that, and remember, you could look at lactate, you could look at if you want to take biopsies if you're enough of a nut job, you want to take biopsies once a week or something like that. We're looking at one isolated physiological component, and the body is a system and all these systems have to self-organize and work together.

So to just look at that one measure, it's going to be distorted. That's, I think, the way to say it.

James de Lacey30:24

Yeah, I'd really, I can, while we're talking, I'll, it was this guy. I was really, it's really interesting, not because he confirmed my bias, because I was expecting him to say that this is really important and we, you know, and I almost stumbled when I was on my walk.

It's definitely an interesting point with the HRV, but I wanted to come back a little bit to the energy system stuff too. Like, okay, obviously when we're looking at, when people are talking about, okay, we want to do the, we want to target or prioritize the aerobic energy system because we're after these certain adaptations and we want to improve this, this, and this, or we're looking more anaerobic or higher intensity stuff within these parameters, because I want to develop capacity or power or what people will say is lactate tolerance or whatever the buzzword is around those different things, or zone two for the low end.

How do we know, or how would someone know, I guess, what to do in a session? When, I don't know if I'm framing this question correctly, but for example, if someone goes, okay, I'm going to do aerobic work, low intensity aerobic work, steady state, because I know generally I'm probably going to get these adaptations, but if I'm going down the road, okay, 15 seconds jogging, 15 seconds a little harder, then 15 seconds even harder, and then repeat, how would you go about designing something like that?

And how would you know what to put in that session versus something really easy to prescribe, like, hey, this is kind of like the guidelines for aerobic capacity or aerobic power, and I can throw that in there, versus being able to mix something up like that? I don't know if that question even made sense.

Vern Gambetta32:19

No, it makes sense. Yeah, it's the ongoing conundrum that we have in your disciplines in combat sports. It's an ongoing conundrum you have in team sports. And so, at what point do I get diminishing, the way I look at it, maybe negatively in a sense, at what point am I getting diminishing returns by doing too much steady state aerobic work? That's what I have to look at.

And so I would classify that type of work more as recovery, regeneration type of work, or capitalization, something like that. And I really look carefully at the mode that I'm using to achieve that, so it's where I sequence it.

And I could be criticized by this, but if you're going to do a really, see, I would, if you're going to do a technical session and then you're going to fight, you're going to grapple for 15 minutes or something like that, then I would do right after that, I would do a really high intensity interval type of session with a lot of up-down, med ball throws, short sprints, easy jumps, that kind of stuff for three-minute bouts with three minutes recovery.

And then I would end up with 15 to 20 minutes of steady aerobic work after that. And I think that's a mistake, somewhere along the way we've been taught that you can't, oh, don't mix energy systems. Well, how you mix systems, that's huge.

James de Lacey33:49

I fell in that trap too.

Vern Gambetta33:49

Oh no, and I'm going, this doesn't make sense, this doesn't make sense. I'm going to get, yeah. And if you're doing two sessions a day, look at how those two are interacting too.

Yeah, I always, my attitude toward the conditioning part or toward all of that is I always got to live to fight again. I think there's too much either beat the crap out of them, for sure. And you're working in tough, tough disciplines, I understand. But you've worked in rugby too, and rugby league, you worked in Union, but rugby league is both, okay?

It is a brutal sport. I'll stand that up. It's tougher, 20 times tougher than American football. And I watched, I spent in 2000, um, 2010, with Lachlan Penfold and the Melbourne Storm. I was down there for a week, and I've known Lachlan for 30 years. And I'm telling you what, when this is the methodology, it starts out with speed, they go to technique, they go to, and then they go to tackling, live tackling in that way.

And then they'll do conditioning types of really high intensity games, and then some lower, lower intensity stuff. And recognize that they're going to have to come back, usually their pattern is, well, not always, and this was off-season, I mean it was January, so they're going to have to come back and do another quality session tomorrow, and then an easy session. So does that answer the question, I mean?

James de Lacey35:25

I think, especially the idea of, as you mentioned, like three times three-minute hard rounds, followed by 10 to 15 minutes like easy, I guess say, aerobic work, it's almost drilled out of coaches and athletes. I mean, myself included, I, as I mentioned, I fall into that trap too, where, hey, I'm doing pure aerobic work, I'm doing pure anaerobic, whatever work, I can't do the other energy system stuff because they interfere and I don't want to interfere with their adaptations.

But then when you think about what you're doing in the gym, you're starting with power stuff, then you might be doing some strength stuff, then you might be doing some hypertrophy stuff, whatever, and you've got an interplay there and that's seen as fine and all good. But when it's come to conditioning, it's like it's a no-no.

Vern Gambetta36:28

And again, you may have a question on this too, and I have a question for you. Like in the various combat sports, now a lot of them, they have weight classifications, but the role the extensive use of max strength plays, to me I've seen some programs and I go, this doesn't make sense. Do a block of intensive maximal strength work, and then you do more power endurance, more strength endurance to support what you're doing.

And yeah, the idea is the maximum strength will pull that other work up, but I don't think you have to do it to the extent that we've done it in a lot of sports too.

James de Lacey36:54

That's true. Because that's like a pure block periodization approach, right, that you're mentioning there?

Yeah, I've never been a fan of pure block, especially in sports like combat and rugby and things, because it's, as you mentioned, you got to touch on your major emphasis, but you got to touch on everything because you need everything. And when you just go down the one road, you stop touching on everything else, and you got to come back to it eventually at some point, and yeah, it makes things a little more difficult that way, right?

Vern Gambetta37:25

Right, right, right. Yeah, well, that's, you've heard me say this, simplicity yields complexity. And I think if you take a step back and recognize that we're not biomechanical machines, we are living, breathing human beings that all bring different elements and different capacities to our sport. And what we have to do is then we have to fit our capacities to the sport.

And it's a constant process of exploration. I mean, like right now I'm working with some, with a really high level group of swimmers, but they're still teenagers. I've worked with some of these kids now for five years. So you start to know the ins and outs of the person. Always, always, always coach the person first, not the sport.

So some people, some people, I loathe the term, I think, I've heard the term grinding, but some people, because it just, grinders don't last in any sport. But some people need that kind of mentality. They need something, so you have to feed their fantasies a little bit different ways.

I was telling someone the other day, there was a famous Australian swimmer, held the world record in the 1500. And for his whole career, he did the same workout every Monday, the same workout every Tuesday. That's by definition grinding, I mean. Either that, or he had a capacity to just turn his brain off.

But I think that in looking at the sports that you're working in, the various combat sports, there's so much different, varied demands placed upon you, that there's innumerable ways to get better, is the way I look at it. So it's pretty cool.

James de Lacey39:40

How do you...

How do you feed someone's fantasy if someone's listening to this and they love that grind mentality but also need to be smart about their training? What are you doing then to kind of feed that?

Vern Gambetta40:14

Something every workout at a strategic place in the workout, because you know what's coming, where you leave them like where you know they're laying on the mat for something. I'm not arbitrarily picking this time frame, something between two and three minutes that really nails them. And then get going, and then they're the ones that really want that hard, hard.

So yeah. But you know, as the coach, the sequence, so where you can place them, and it's a mind game. And that's one of the, that's a hard one. But yeah, that's what you have to do for sure.

James de Lacey40:47

And go extra stuff after and things like that.

I know you've talked about kind of a rhythm in sport. Something I've thought about for a while. I started trying to write an article for Hammer Media on rhythm and sport, and I think I've only done not too much on it. To me, it's like in sport, rhythm is everything. Rhythm is about, well, sport is about disrupting your opponent's rhythm so you can impose your own rhythm in the sport.

And that's why you see teams or athletes, they have the momentum or they have control of whatever's going on. It's because whatever is being done is being done at their rhythm, at their pace, and they're able to disrupt and stop their opponents doing whatever they want to do at their rhythm.

But I want to, I know you've got various ideas on almost manipulating rhythm and change. I actually used some of your ideas when I was working with Romania Sevens. I had, I do various walking games, but I ended up changing the game where they had to walk like they were at waist-high mud, so they had to walk around with their legs stuck, just stuff like that with changing rhythm. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on the idea of rhythm and manipulating rhythm in training.

Vern Gambetta42:12

Well, I'm going to sound pretty airy-fairy, like a 60s hippie here, but which I sort of was anyway. I grew, I was in California. I discovered the Grateful Dead though a year ago instead of 50 years ago. But okay, look, we have a fundamental rhythm in our body and it's called our heartbeat. And my two-year-old granddaughter was here and I was holding her, and when she gets tired she puts her head right on her mom or dad's heart or her heart. And I thought, you know, that got me thinking about that again. So there's your fundamental rhythm.

And you're right. I like your definition that you're trying to disrupt somebody else's rhythm. And the biggest thing that we have to do in sports like you're working with now, and in rugby and that, is asynchronous. Being able to go one-two, two-one, one-two, two-two-one. I always tell people that we had this discussion yesterday morning at our special core work session about it's a big dance. It's just a big dance.

And I love music. I can't carry a tune in a basket, but I love music. So it's sometimes it's a well-orchestrated symphony, right? It's just, and and there's a certain tempo, or tempo. I even use tai chi tempo. We'll do stuff at tai chi tempo, okay, and then you speed it up and then you slow it down.

So I think, being as a coach, being conscious of it and figuring out opportunities to change tempos and teach rhythm and tempo, is a real good opportunity to get people better. You can do your warm-up exercises in a rhythmic manner, and then you can do something as simple as close your eyes. Now you have to tune in. Now what is that? Can you still keep the same kind of footfall? Stuff like that.

So I, it's there. I don't think we've explored it enough, James. Certain sports have, but you know, kind of the macho kind of sports, American football, stuff like that. I just look at the opportunities, and I think, I said this 25 years ago when I first went to Australia, rugby was ahead of the game in a lot of things like that.

You heard Jimmy Radcliffe talk at GAIN, and when they were, when Chip Kelly was at Oregon, and that's basically Eddie Jones. Well, he's not with, he's fired, he's back Australia, but he took, Jimmy was over there, he took those concepts. Dean took the concepts back to the Storm, and Lain.

We've just got to, we've just got to open. Now you can operate faster and be inefficient, and so the qualifying term is rhythm is the rhythm and tempo that you can control. And dial it up and dial it down. So yeah, it's a fascinating concept, is certainly not new, but we could explore it and use it a lot more I think.

James de Lacey45:43

Yeah, a couple of previous podcasts here, Gary Turner and John Mackey have talked a little bit about manipulating sparring with rhythm. I know Gary talks about, he does sometimes, he'll do super slow sparring, so you can only move very slowly. And that means you have to, essentially you can see everything as well, but it's just manipulating tempo of things there as well. So there's yeah, there's lots of concepts and things.

Vern Gambetta46:15

To me, that would be ungodly hard, as I visualize.

James de Lacey46:15

Exactly. We used to do that. We used to do that.

Vern Gambetta46:15

I did it with a discus where it was tai chi rhythm. They'd have to do two tai chi throws and then full speed throw, and they'd just freak out. I mean, there'd just be smoke coming out of their ears, because they want to go. No, because you're, it's possible to be too fast, James. It's possible to be too fast. And I'm sure you've seen that in fighting where somebody's just hellbent for leather and they're out of control.

James de Lacey46:45

Oh man, that would be really tough.

And I know you mentioned as well American football. I mean, yeah, some of the training you see in American football makes me tear, that you see online. You're like, damn, and these people are getting paid how much money?

Vern Gambetta47:15

But the conditioning coaches are getting paid a million dollars, and crazy. You're stealing, you're stealing. But whatever. I wouldn't trade, I wouldn't trade places with them for a million dollars either. Because, well, I don't know, I might consider it. But you know, it's because the culture of the game is just not, it won't embrace newer training methodologies. And that's what I've seen a lot.

James de Lacey47:42

I mean, combat sports is pretty similar in that regard, but it's changing I think now with the UFC Performance Institute bringing some more information to light and kind of making it a little more mainstream, yeah, with some proper training methods. But man, it's still, it's still rampant. The endless fight-specific circuits till you puke, and random, just random things placed anywhere.

Vern Gambetta48:16

And monkey see, monkey do. I'm sure everybody tries to find out what the champion does, and then whatever he or she does, then they copy it.

James de Lacey48:16

Exactly. And I've fallen victim to that at various times, certainly.

Vern Gambetta48:16

I want to know. I'm fascinated by the Norwegian hurdler who shattered the world record in the 400 hurdles. What, I was supposed to go to Norway end of April and I can't go now because we've got World Champs trials. But you know, I want to know, because is there things that he's, some of it is, and this is when you look at things people's training, a lot of it is looking at what aren't they doing that everybody else is too.

They might do some crazy drill or some crazy workout. Everybody focuses on that, but what aren't they doing? What are they not doing that everybody else is doing too? That's kind of become my thing now, looking at it that way. That's another way to, that's a really good thing too.

James de Lacey49:19

I have never actually thought about it that way. Maybe I'll have to see that next time I look at.

Vern Gambetta49:19

And you know, I was doing this with Chris Webb, who's run, who's in charge of GAIN Swimming. And I said, Chris, we need to have an independent couple of independent people, not swimming coaches, that know, that don't know swimming, to look at our programs right now and see what's there and see what isn't there, from their point of view. I think that as coaches, as teachers, as learners, that's a really important mechanism. So an independent sort of review. And it's, you can do it yourself. I was doing some of that.

This morning looking through some stuff, but you just like anything, right? You fall in love with certain things. My head coach that I'm working with now said to me the other day, he said, "Well, why do you always put..." I've been working with him for 10 years now. He said, "Why do you always put this on this particular day, Vern?" And I said, "You know, Brent, it's a really good question. I don't have an answer for you. I've just always done it that way."

Well, that's a crappy answer. You think of it? Yeah, well it works. Well baloney, if I moved it to another day would it work better? We don't know. So I'm my own roughest critic, but you have to be, right? You have to be.

James de Lacey50:24

So anyway, no for sure. I think I've pretty much asked you everything I had on my list here. But if anyone wants to find you and follow you and see and I guess follow your Facebook rants and tweets and everything else, where can they do that?

Vern Gambetta50:54

Well, I'm on Facebook. Twitter is coach gambetta. I haven't gotten kicked off yet. LinkedIn, I kicked off Twitter. LinkedIn is a lot more professional anyway. Just look up my name, Vern Gambetta. Email is gsts coach gmail.com.

And the website that you should go to is the gain, G-A-I-N and then another N, network.com. Find out about gain Network. We have coffee talks once a month that are open to anybody.

We haven't had very many combat people to gain, and I think it would be, you'd really enjoy it. And you can mention it. I mean, it's a really special experience and it's a network. We've got just some of the... this is, we started in 2007. I just realized that the other day. So yeah, that's mainly where, if you're in Sarasota and you don't want to... I don't drink coffee, but you can buy me an iced tea and I'll sit down talk.

Love, love, love, love sharing ideas with people. You always learn stuff. So that'd be great.

James de Lacey52:34

Perfect. Thanks for coming on, Vern, as well. I really appreciate it.

Vern Gambetta52:34

Oh good, I'm glad we were able to go through the confusion and get on. So it's very good. Thank you.

James de Lacey52:34

Awesome.