Ultimate MMA Conditioning & HRV w/ Joel Jamieson (SSOF Ep. 52)

Joel Jamieson0:48

And movement's always been important, but I really dove into how do we build more efficient movement, because the more efficiently you can move, the less energy it takes to do something, the longer you can sustain that. That wasn't too much in the book.

And I've also just gone down the holistic pathway of really understanding the connection between sleep and recovery and HRV and some of those things that weren't in the book back then, because it was mostly just on energy systems. So my approach has evolved just from that standpoint, to branching out into the different areas to make sure that all of the things outside the gym support everything inside the gym. But the basic principles and honestly the methods and the core of the book are still the things I use today.

James de Lacey2:45

Yeah, yeah. It sounds like you're moving not just from a physiological approach, you're looking at, as you mentioned, that holistic approach with movement. Do you want to maybe dive a little bit into that movement area that you're going into? Obviously you talked about efficiency. Are we talking regarding movement efficiency mainly towards the technical aspect of combat sports, or are we talking just absolutely everything that someone's doing in the gym?

Joel Jamieson3:09

No, it's both, right? I mean, I think when I take a step back from training and I look at what is the big picture, right, why do we go in the gym and lift weights, or why do we go in and do some form of cardiovascular exercise or conditioning or skill training? At the end of the day, everything is just to try and improve our movement. I mean, that's it.

If we're trying to produce more force in strength training, it's because we want more force and power in our movement. If we're training more the cardiovascular aerobic side, or even the anaerobic side, it's because we want to produce more force and produce that power and force for longer, sustain it longer. So even longevity, right? Why do we care about training for longevity? Because we want to move as we get old. We don't want to be disease-ridden, we don't want to be immobilized because of that, we don't want to have low back problems or limitations in what we can do in our daily lives.

So if we really take a step back, everything that we do is to try to move better and try to move, particularly in combat sports, within the framework of the skills and the framework of competition, to beat our opponents. So we look at that context. I just go back to, okay, well when we're lifting weights, when we're doing our cardiovascular work, when we're doing everything else—injury prehab, rehab, all that—how does this relate back to the movements we're trying to accomplish in the sport?

And I think as I've progressed down my own coaching and my own just life—I'm 43 now, I was in my 20s when I wrote the book—I've realized you could train to improve movement in the sport, but that might actually cause problems down the road. So we can train for strength and power and be suffering some consequences down the road. We see a lot of athletes do that, right? They beat the hell out of themselves in their sport, and then they get in their 40s, 50s, or beyond, and they can barely walk.

And I think we can do some stuff to help prevent that, and so we need to be mindful in how we approach our movement, how we load our bodies. Just to give you an example, coming from a powerlifting background, I was always very much into just heavy bilateral compound movements. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but there's also something to be said for asymmetrical, unilateral, totally different movements that challenge and put the body into pressures in different ways.

So it's just looking at that connection of how do we build a body in a way that's not just going to improve performance, but going to sustain durability, I would say. And then efficiency is part of that, of course. And then you have to tie in the breathing and the whole nine yards. So once you go down the rabbit hole, I think movement is the connecting piece of fitness.

It is the way that I really think about whether we're talking about any area of fitness. What we're really talking about is taking that fitness and using it to move in some capacity or another. So we can't neglect that movement piece if our goal is to improve it to begin with.

James de Lacey5:23

Yeah, for sure. It actually reminds me of the quote that Verkhoshansky—I'm going to butcher it, but I'm going to try to say it anyway—but essentially, strength training is coordination training with appropriate resistance, if I said that right. So essentially, it's coordination training onto load.

Joel Jamieson5:47

Yeah, that is what we're doing. We're just loading movement in different ways, and we're changing the context of movement to try to get better at one area of it that we then hope obviously transfers into the actual sport skill or into whatever it is we're trying to do.

So again, I think this has been, this is nothing new, right? People have known this for a long time. But I think what happened is this functional training movement came around, which had the right idea—the right idea of making sure your movement transferred and you're doing things healthy—but they kind of butchered it. And it became a lot of circus acts, it became 25 exercise warm-ups, it became doing stuff on balance balls. Like, that's not really functional movement.

So it got a bad rap, and I picked on it a bit because a lot of the exercises people were doing weren't really improving movement. They were just these circus exercises that you could get better at that didn't transfer into anything, because no one's riding Shamu the whale for a contest, so why are you on a balance ball?

But I think, in general, the concept of let's evaluate the exercise that we're doing and the movement patterns that we need to get better at, let's evaluate the chain of neuromuscular patterning and different things are going on to make sure we can do those movements really effectively and explosively and dynamically, and then be able to do them for as long as we need to, which is where the conditioning piece ties into it.

James de Lacey7:03

Nice. And let's dive into that conditioning piece. Within the book itself, and for someone listening to this, maybe they've read the book, they're going to purchase the book, or are familiar with some of the concepts in there, how do they know where to start? Or how do you decide or assess where someone should start, I guess, within the modalities in the book? Because you've obviously got a range of different, I guess we'll call them protocols, within those principles. How does someone know what to start with within their training?

Joel Jamieson7:28

Yeah, I think the easiest place to start is, what am I lacking in my training?

The easiest place to start is what am I lacking in my training? In combat sports obviously requires a pretty dynamic mix of aerobic, anaerobic fitness. You really can't go too far one direction without paying the price on the other side of it. So the first thing I always do is I evaluate the athlete or whoever I'm working with, and if they're not working with somebody they can evaluate themselves and just look at the big picture of how they produce energy and how they perform. And most people are going to fall in a category where they recognize there's an area of their game that needs improvement.

It's the same thing as the skill side, right? Like most people know I'm a really good striker but my grappling sucks, or my wrestling's good but my striking sucks. People have a pretty good handle on the skill side of where they're good and where they're probably not so good. The difference between long-term success is the person who's going to progress over the long term is the one who's going to fix whatever is they're not good at.

The person who's going to put themselves in a position to hit a plateau in their career is the person who's like "I'm really good at this, I'm just going to keep doing this." Eventually they'll catch up with you. MMA has evolved to the point where that's hard to get away with these days or harder than it used to be.

But so it just starts with either having a coach evaluate you or doing a self evaluation, and you can look at a variety of tests. From the aerobic side, you can look at like Cooper's test, you can go to V02 max test done if you have access to a facility around you, you can look at the simple things like resting heart rate, heart rate recovery, and you can get a pretty good idea of what your aerobic side looks like.

And you'll know just from training you either gas out pretty quickly or you don't. That's the best indicator obviously. And then the strength side, right, you can have a pretty good gauge of how you feel when you're grinding other people or how you're lifting weights. You have some idea whether or not you're good or bad in that area.

And then you just prioritize, here's the area I think I really need to improve the most. And as you mentioned, the book, I list out the different methods for different purposes. And you'd want to just always start with the principle of the lowest load necessary to improve, right? We want to only use the minimal amount of stress it takes to get better so we can continue to crank that stress up.

I think unfortunately we kind of live in this "I want results now so I'm going to do the most intensity I can possibly do right now." And that's great for a few weeks and then you just run out of room. Like, of course you're going to improve, you just blast yourself. But then what happens once your body adapts to that level of stress? You've got nowhere to go.

So people just keep cranking the dial up and then they get plateaued and they keep going, they get injured, and just they pay that price. So minimum effective dose is really what it's about. So I would start with the methods that are the most appropriate to what you're trying to do and I'd start at the lowest volumes, the lowest intensity possible, because just adding that new training methodology, that new stress into the system will cause your body to improve.

You will get better just from doing something new, and then once you get better at it then you make it a little bit harder, and then once you can do that you make it a little bit harder. It really is that simple.

And I think if you just kind of take this "hey, I'm going to try to gradually improve each day, each workout, each week," as long as you're taking that mentality you can do it. It's when people see in my book for example, like the highest intensity is like cardiac power, like go to max heart rate, like "oh that's got to be the most effective, I'm just going to do that." Well no, you shouldn't do that because yeah you might improve, but you haven't prepared for it so you're not going to get as much out of it as you can.

And then again, what are you going to do after that? You've already climbed the top of the ladder, you got nowhere to go and you're not that high. So yeah, it's just keeping that in mind. But yeah, start with figure out what you're not good at, get better at it.

James de Lacey10:56

Yeah, I've preached that same message on this podcast and in my writing over and over and over again because people as you mentioned love to get into this hard work mentality, last one to leave the room. I still remember actually when I was working here with the rugby team in Austin, there must have been some baseball players came into one of the gyms we were training at and they were like "oh we're going to be the last ones to leave," so they sat there.

By the time we finished our session, they just done bench press and then they were upstairs hitting baseballs as just part of their work. I think there must have been football or basketball players just so they could be last ones to leave the gym.

Joel Jamieson11:22

Yeah, I mean they weren't even working hard but even so. Yeah, it makes good headlines or YouTube tags or Instagram tags or whatever. No pain, no gain, blah blah blah. But the reality is, I tell you one thing I've learned a lot in this career is quality of training matters a whole lot more than quantity of training. Yes, you need to train at volumes, but shitty training for hours on end is still shitty training. I don't care how long you do it for.

It really does come down to quality because we're training the brain and we're putting information into the brain that's going to help it learn how to control the body better, and we're putting stress on the body in a way that makes it adapt and get stronger and more well conditioned. And that isn't just as much as you can, that literally needs to be very highly quality driven. So sure, workouts will last a long time, but the overriding goal of the workout should be to stimulate whatever we're trying to improve and then get out so we can recover from it.

That's the other thing, the whole other topic, but people need to recognize you don't get better in the gym. You get better in between workouts and when your body recovers. It's when it's actually adapting and improving and making the changes it needs to get better. So the gym itself is the tool to stimulate that process, but you don't get better when you're sitting in the gym. You get better in between the gym.

Like, I'm swinging the baseball bat, I don't get better in my skill right there. I go home, I sleep, my brain consolidates my motor learning, it trims the patterns and it gets more efficient. I come back next day and I can swing a little bit more effectively or read the ball a little bit better or whatever the case may be. So people seem to recognize that it's not the workout itself.

James de Lacey12:56

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

Joel Jamieson12:56

We're even better, it's everything after that.

James de Lacey13:15

Yeah, for sure. And maybe let's dive into some of the training week because I think where most fighters, I mean most athletes in general, but most fighters struggle is trying to fit everything within a week, especially with MMA obviously because you've got so many different technical skills you're training, then you're trying to add strength and conditioning on top of that.

So I think what might be interesting would be let's just take for example someone who maybe is looking to get quote unquote fitter, maybe is lacking on more of the aerobic endurance side, how they would fit that within a training week. And then maybe someone who needs more of the high-intensity work, how they would fit that within a training week.

Joel Jamieson14:04

Sure. I mean, the biggest limitation, it depends on who you're talking to. So I've seen this mistake where you're talking about someone who works a 30 or 40 hour week, one or more jobs, and they're going in the gym and they're training five, six days a week in a combat sport. And they're kind of at the limits of their recovery to be honest with you, like trying to add three more workouts a week on top of that is a challenge, or at least to improve significantly through those areas, because they're already training so much and they're working and they're not getting enough sleep. And their diet's probably not perfect and they've got the stress of work.

So in those types of scenarios, I really try to work in as many things as possible into the combat sport training itself. So someone needs some aerobic work and we see that, maybe they don't have a good foundation and they're going to the gym, they're banging away high intensity, they never really doing anything kind of lower, slower zone two, cardiac output type stuff.

I'll have them go in the gym maybe 20, 30 minutes earlier if they can, or even stay afterwards and spend a little bit of time getting that extra lower intensity cardiovascular work in to build it. Or maybe they can do one day a week where they can do a longer bike ride or a longer hike or

Run or whatever it is that they don't mind doing. But it's really hard, and I think people make this mistake all the time is if you're a full-time career person or working a job and you have a family life, your five or six days a week MMA gym, how much more can you really do? I mean, I would say a couple days a week of lifting, but sometimes you can even build that around the MMA session. Sometimes you can't obviously, but you just have to be really mindful of the fact that your body's resources to adapt or recover are limited.

Now if you're talking a pro athlete who has nothing else to do but train, then the sky's the limit. Obviously we can be very detailed and prioritize whatever is to work on. And typically with our fighters we do two days for four days a week, so we would do Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday would be a two-day. Friday, a little bit of a swing day, so if recovery was lacking, Friday would become a once a day instead of two a day.

And then the other days, Wednesday, Saturday, would be one session and we would kind of change it up as we go. But in those scenarios you have entire extra sessions dedicated towards strength or conditioning or whatever it is that you needed to really prioritize. So again, I just think you really have to look at the individual because it's so different between an amateur athlete, a pro athlete, someone just starting out, and how you can add those things in.

Just be really mindful of recovery. I've seen a lot of people mean well and add a whole bunch of strength on top of their program. They realized they weren't very strong, but they just added an extra two or three hours of training on top of their week, which is 20% maybe more than they're already doing, and they do that overnight. And then boom, they get hurt or they plateau out really quickly, and then six months from now they get hurt because they were just accumulating the tissue and load.

So you just kind of have to be really careful of what your body is capable of recovering from. And if you need to really improve an area, then figure out how to incorporate some of those areas into the combat skills stuff if you don't have time to do it separately. And the other thing I would say is it doesn't have to be an hour or two hours. Most of these things, if you're targeted and you're high quality, you can get it done in 30 minutes.

So if you can do a 30 minute session of high intensity intervals outside of the gym or in the gym, if you can do 30 minutes of Zone 2, that's a good starting point. Strength training can be 30 minutes. You really don't need these 60, 90 minute lifting sessions or 60, 90 minute cardiovascular sessions on top of all the MMA training or combat sport, whatever you're doing, training. You can figure out ways to be much more efficient.

James de Lacey17:32

Do I maybe give a couple of examples for the listeners of how they would integrate some of that shorter conditioning within the MMA sessions if that's—

Joel Jamieson17:32

Yeah, I mean look, you go to the methodology, right? Let's say someone wants to improve their explosive power, their ability. Let's say someone wants to improve their ability to maintain their explosive power, which is pretty common, right? Like, okay, I'm reasonably powerful but I just don't maintain it very well.

So I would start with explosive repeats, which essentially is we're doing something explosively and we're doing it repetitively, but we're giving our body enough rest to make sure those fast muscle fibers are engaged. And we're doing it in a way where it's cyclic, so we're using some elastic energy and getting our body more efficient using that energy elastically. So things like jump squats, med ball throws, pad work, you can do stuff with all kinds of different exercises around there.

So maybe as I warm up, I'm going to go do my shadow boxing, I'm going to do dynamic mobility, and then I might spend 10, 15 minutes doing explosive squat jumps. 10, 15 seconds on, 40, 60 seconds off. I can shadow box actively in between as my active recovery. That's another good way to do this is, a lot of times I recommend active recovery rather than just kind of sitting around.

So maybe I do explosive squat jumps, 10, 15 seconds, and I shadow box for 45 seconds, and then I repeat that 10, 15 times. That is going to develop a good amount of explosive repetitiveness or muscular endurance in my legs. And I can use that shadow boxing in between as part of my active recovery. And I can use that either again kind of as an entry point into my skill workout, or I could do my whole skill workout and at the end I could focus on that.

And there's benefit in that because part of how we want to develop conditioning is when we are fatigued, we want to learn how to address that and still move fairly well. So there's benefits sometimes to, okay, I'm going to do my whole skill workout and then I'm going to spend 15 minutes doing these explosive squat jumps at the end, knowing I'm already tired.

But that's fine, I'm going to learn how to move, I'm going to learn how to deal with that fatigue, and I'm going to be mindful of still maintaining good technique and postural control and everything else at the end of my workout rather than doing it at the beginning.

So I mean, that's a really simple way is you just pick a method. High resistance intervals, you can do stuff like that. If you have elastic power, four, five, six seconds of really explosive work and then 45, 65, sometimes a little bit longer of active recovery. So again, do you walk up, you throw some really hard combos at the bag or kick and have pads, someone hold for you, four or five seconds, just max power, max explosiveness. I back off and I shadow box for 60 seconds and move around, work my footwork, that kind of stuff.

So a lot of these drills, a lot of these methods that are in the book, you can absolutely translate into things you can do in a sport. And that's really kind of, like I said, the easiest to start if that's where your limitations are in terms of time.

James de Lacey20:25

That's great advice for anyone listening as well. And I want to ask you as well, within the pro schedule, what is your perfect training week then? You mentioned obviously two days, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. What how do those days look? I guess how does the whole week look with the sessions placed in it?

Joel Jamieson20:25

Sure, it depends really on if there's an upcoming fight because fight can kind of be your everyday thing. But typically, I said we'll have Monday and Tuesday will be two days. And Monday is usually not a super hard day because that's our Tuesday. So kind of back up. We quantify stuff or just look at big picture of what I call development day or just a hard day, right?

Your hardest, highest intensities, and in combat sports that's sparring at a relatively high pace. That's, you know, really we're going to do two of those a week. I know people love to go and just bang it out every day, but that's just not a good idea. Because if you're doing that, your quality is shitty or you're going to get burned out or injured. It just, your body just doesn't work well that way.

So typically twice a week, and that's usually Tuesdays and Saturdays. So the hardest days where we spar, Tuesdays and Saturdays. And on those days the skill work will be in the evenings, the strength conditioning will be in the mornings. And your mind, well, Saturday is just sparring, but Tuesdays there's a strength session before that sparring session, and it's a bit heavy but it's low volume. So it's not going to take a ton of fatigue or lead to them going into the sparring session just completely gassed out.

So Monday is more of a skill development session. So it's a little bit moderate high or moderate volume intensity, the strength conditioning. And then it's usually like skill practice. So they're going to go in and drill if they're working on takedowns, if they're working on some transition, if they're working on some submission or some flow drill. It's more of a technical type day.

And then, like I said, Tuesday would be the sparring. Wednesday is a bit more of a recovery day and back there, some kind of technical, you get work on specific aspects, whatever the game plan may be or whatever that athlete needs to work on would go there. Thursday is back to a two-day. It's fairly similar to a Monday.

Friday is usually like we swim in the pool or we do something low impact from a conditioning standpoint. Maybe go for a long hike, that kind of stuff. And then the evening session again, it's just more kind of standard skill work. And then Saturday is the single sparring day.

But those days can get a little bit moved, not moved but adjusted I guess as necessary. And each athlete's different, so if an athlete's really working on one particular area, grappling or striking or whatever, then the week might focus on that obviously and shift training days as necessary based on training partners. Because that always impacts things. You can't get a group of guys in on Tuesday, they only come Wednesday, and then okay, well we got to spar Wednesday, now we're rearranging things a bit. So you got to be a bit flexible and you—

You really got to listen to your own body and that's what coaching is. The coaches really have to get good at learning what their athletes respond really well to. That's what Matt Hume is the best at in the world in my opinion. He's the best MMA coach of all time and it's hard to argue, but he's really good at understanding what the athletes need and then watching them in practice and talking to them, their body language, and just being really good at evaluating what that person needs to get better.

And then on my end I try to look at the data, talk to the athlete, and manage things as you go. Because really what it comes down to is the weekly program is a template but it's not set in stone and you have to be flexible enough to make adjustments. If someone looks like they're just completely shot, then we might give them the morning off and they'll just come in and train in the evening.

Or it might be we'll do a morning recovery swim and then they'll have Friday evening off. And that's kind of one of the biggest things we'll do is make those sort of adjustments as we go throughout the week.

Because again, the goal is not to beat the hell out of yourself. The goal is to stimulate yourself to get better and then give yourself time to do it right. That's what you're trying to do. You're trying to get better at fighting, you're not trying to get better at making yourself tired. That's not the competition.

James de Lacey24:31

Not better at exercising.

Joel Jamieson24:31

Not better at exercising exactly. It's not a contest of who can sustain the highest training volumes and not die. It's a competition to learn how to train and win the combat sport.

So that's kind of the general template like I said. And during even during fight camps themselves there'll be two, sometimes three weeks where they'll be sparring three days a week. But even then two of those sessions are higher volume and one is going to be quite a bit lower volume. So we just generally never would spar more than three days a week and most of the year, most of the time, it's twice a week.

And again it's because it comes down to high quality. If you're sparring every day, your quality of sparring is not very high. Or if it is high quality five days a week, you're not going to last very long doing that because you're over-stressing your body's ability to tolerate that kind of stress. Or it's just like I said, it can't be that high quality if you're doing it every day for the most part.

So we just really focus on quality of training, quality of sparring, getting in the gym, doing what you need to do, getting out of the gym. That stuff really matters. That's why someone like DJ, Demetrius Johnson, for people who don't know him, that's why he's lasted as long as he has. I mean he's been in the sport a long time now.

He set the record for most title defenses in the UFC because he's incredibly consistent in his approach. And everything was very consistent in how everything came together for him and diet and training and lifestyle and everything else. It was just always dialed in because he's just that kind of athlete.

But that's what it takes to have longevity. And you see guys in the sport, they blow up, they come out of nowhere, they're explosive, dynamic, and then two or three years later they just fall apart. And they're the same. That's just the result of a very short-term minded approach to training. They take every fight they can. Like, "Oh, I've got to take a fight in three weeks." "No, I don't care." Why would you do that?

I mean I know you want to fight, but you're learning how to train for the fight is just as important as the fight itself and you're not going to learn that in three weeks.

So you see guys kind of make these decisions very short-term thinking and trying to just think about what's right in front of their face. But again, if you want to have longevity in the sport you have to think of it differently and make decisions differently. So you can go bang it out every day if you want to be burned out in a few years, or be smart about it, take care of your body and last a while.

James de Lacey26:50

And I think with the UFC PI coming in it's starting to change some of that culture and mentality slowly but surely. But obviously a lot of that still prevails around. But I think what might also be interesting for the listeners as well is maybe just to dive into...

Joel Jamieson26:50

Yeah, real quick, just because I was down at the UFC PI last fall with Duncan French, who's the performance director, and he's done a phenomenal job. I mean he's created a massive resource for fighters. The education he's put together, the data he's used, the processes in place, I mean it's crazy to me that there's really only a, I don't know what percentage of fighters actually train there and utilize it. But he's a phenomenal coach, phenomenal director. The amount of stuff he's put together for those athletes is insane and it's really impressive.

So it is crazy to me that more fighters don't go down there and take advantage of it. But I want to point out he has put a bunch of resources online for free. You can get like this huge PDF download of basically a book of all the stuff they found in terms of the physical requirements and cutting weight and nutrition and rehab. And there's a huge amount of resources he's just put out there for free for those people who don't know.

So I'm sure you can find it somewhere on their website, but it's incredible how much he's put together and it's really high quality stuff. So for all your listeners who don't know that, go find what Duncan's been putting out at the UFC PI. It's hugely valuable, it's free, you really can't beat it.

James de Lacey28:08

Yeah, I think if you just Google UFC PI book I think it just pops up anyway if anyone's listening. Also, if you go back to episode, I had Gavin Pratt who's one of the directors there at the UFC PI, so you can listen to him as well. And Terrence Kinnell, he's one of the S&C coaches there now as well, is on the podcast. So if anyone's interested in kind of getting a glimpse of what goes on in there you can listen to those podcasts too.

But I think what might be interesting for the listeners as well is maybe just to dive into a little, we don't have to go too deep, but just some of the surface level adaptations you're looking to create through, for example, some of the low intensity work. Where you're looking at the central adaptations versus the peripheral adaptations, what you're kind of looking for when you're doing those things.

Joel Jamieson28:55

Sure. So I mean if we're talking about the aerobic fitness things, right, you've got these two big pieces. The first is the cardiovascular system has to pump blood, right, pump blood and oxygen and nutrients throughout your body. And that's really what we call central. And we can also kind of tie the brain to that piece too. You have to regulate a lot of things, but you got this big heart that pumps out all the oxygen.

And the more oxygen you can pump out and the more blood vessels and capillaries and things you have going into the muscles, the more oxygen you can deliver to those muscles. And that's a big piece of it, right. You have to deliver oxygen because without oxygen you're not aerobic.

Now the other side of that is what we call more of the peripheral side, right. That's how well can the muscles themselves draw that oxygen out and utilize it. And kind of the gross macro, we think about it and people, they'll gravitate towards this, is slower twitch fibers are better at using oxygen than faster twitch fibers. But the reality is those fibers are more like a spectrum.

They're not really just fast and slow the way people like to think about it. And they can change, they can adapt and become better at utilizing oxygen through again more capillaries that can be built into the muscles, different enzymes can increase their numbers, and just the aerobic processes that take place to turn that oxygen into ATP can adapt and get better, more efficient.

So again, if we were to take Lance Armstrong, he spent his entire career on a bike, right. He's got phenomenal obviously central adaptations and his cardiovascular system is just an absolute monster, right. Big lungs and huge heart and low resting heart rate probably in the 30s. Now if he were to swim, right, he would be better than the average swimmer probably, but he has very different muscular adaptations.

He's not going to have the upper body pulling endurance, for example in the water from a stroke, that a swimmer would have because his arms are resting on the bike handles. So he's not developing the same kind of muscular endurance in his arms as a swimmer would.

But his legs and the pedaling motion, quads and the muscles that are involved in the pedal, would have incredible endurance. But that probably wouldn't translate particularly well, or to the highest level at least, in a sport like swimming. So you have to look at kind of both pieces of really, again, it comes down to movement. We want to develop as much oxygen as we can to the working muscles and the brain, which is the central. And then we want the muscles that are involved in the movements we're trying to improve to be really good at that aerobic...

Function endurance, so they can use as much aerobic energy as they can, so that they have to use less on the anaerobic side. That really comes down to again exercise selection and movement patterning, and you want to make sure that again I'm doing specific movements that those muscles in those movements are becoming better at utilizing the oxygen that they're being delivered by the central side.

And you can look at, you know, real crudely: what's my resting heart rate is a reasonably decent gauge of overall centralized adaptations, and HRV. You can do VO2 max, it's still just a general gauge. And then the obvious one is where do I get really tired when I'm doing specific exercises, right? Your legs gas out, your arms gas out, your shoulder. I mean, you feel those muscles that are having worse endurance, and that means they're doing that because the aerobic side is not as good and they're having to spend more of the energy coming from the anaerobic side, so they fatigue faster.

So it really is a fairly easy way to evaluate that: where I get tired first, where gets tired the fastest, that's the area that's probably lacking endurance.

James de Lacey32:25

Yeah, one thing I really do like in the book as well with the cardiac output work is just the heart rate range you give there. It just makes it easy for people to just start doing it because, okay, I need to be between 130 and 150 if I'm standing, or 120 to 140 if I'm sitting. How does that... this might be outside this, obviously you work a lot with the professional fighting population that probably sits within that, but maybe for older individuals or lesser trained individuals, how does that change? Do you have guidelines where you would shift that heart rate up or down, just depending on individual and stuff?

Joel Jamieson32:50

Yeah, I mean it's just a general rule, right? It's a guideline. But the easiest way to do it is you want to go at a pace where you could still have some of a conversation with somebody, and that's kind of the easy, like, okay, I don't have a heart rate monitor, I'm not sure where to go. Go about as hard as you can while still being able to talk.

If you're having this conversation, if you're trying to talk and you have to pause to catch your breath, you're going a bit too hard. But if you can have—I'm not saying you're going to read a novel while you're doing this—but you should be able to communicate reasonably fluently and have a conversation-like pace.

So you want to just find that pace that's the top level of where that's sustainable for you. And for most people it'll fall in that ballpark, but obviously as your age gets up there in years and different people just have different heart rates, so they're capable of doing things that... That's where you want to just fine-tune that.

So I just have them jump on a bike or walk on a treadmill or whatever, have them start talking, and then gradually increase the pace. And you'll find the point where all of a sudden you can't really talk because you're too busy trying to produce energy. And that's the pace you want to go slightly below that.

James de Lacey33:57

Got it. Yeah, that's a really easy subjective way for anyone listening as well to just do the aerobic work. But I also wanted to dive into a little bit on HRV. We've had a few people come on and talk HRV on the podcast, and I know you've got an app and you use it readily. So I wanted to dive into your brain a bit there and how you're using HRV to manipulate or manage training load.

Joel Jamieson34:20

Sure, yeah, I've been using it for 20-plus years now, a long time. So look, the biggest thing is HRV kind of gives us two big pictures depending on which one we're looking at. The first one is, if we look at our HRV on a daily basis and we look at where that is relative to our normal baseline or where that's been relative to the last few days, it gives us this model of the cost of the stress we're putting our body under.

And what I mean by that is we see these big changes, either up or down away from where we are or have been, it tells us our body is expending a lot of energy towards stress. So the bigger the change in HRV, the more our body is expending energy to deal with stress. And the biggest thing is that's not just training stress, it's all forms of stress.

And most people, in my experience at least, overestimate the training stress relative to the life stress. Now pro athletes are doing a lot of training stress, so that might be a bit different, but the average person training one hour a day or 90 minutes a day, that's a small part of your day. It's the rest of the day that adds up significantly.

So, like I said, we look at it on a daily basis and say, okay, where is this person at? And maybe they've been under a lot of stress at work. How much did that impact them? And then you just make decisions. If somebody is already fatigued or somebody's already under a lot of stress, is it the right answer to put them under a lot more? It depends. Sometimes yes, because maybe tomorrow they're going to have a day off or it's a weekend or whatever.

And sometimes the answer is no. It's a Tuesday, already kind of fatigued because they went out all weekend and partied and then trained hard on Monday, and maybe Tuesday they're already shot. So it just helps you make a daily snapshot or see a daily snapshot of what is the body doing and how much stress have they been dealing with. And then that makes some informed decisions about what we need to do.

Now I built the Morpheus app, you mentioned my HRV app. What we do is we give heart rate zones each day. So we have a low zone, which is your blue, a recovery-type zone; a green, which is your moderate conditioning; a red, which is your overload. And those heart rate zones adapt each day based on your recovery and your HRV.

So if someone's HRV is significantly different, it's going to reduce the intensity it takes to get up into their high intensity, because it's all relative. If I'm gassed out, a 150 heart rate feels a whole lot different than if I'm fresh, and it is different. It's more stress on the body.

So it creates this dynamic response where it gives you a better gauge of what is high intensity versus low intensity on a day, based on you're already fatigued. So that's the first way. And then the second way of using it is equally valuable. Together with resting heart rate changes, they give you a really good mix of looking at whether or not your aerobic engine is improving. If we see heart rate variability trending up over time, the average is increasing, that means your aerobic engine is getting better. At the same time, you'll generally see your resting heart rate trending down over the same period of time.

So if we look back over the last 14 to 28 days, you know, a month, whatever, we should see things going up, we should see the averages of HRV trending up, and we should see the averages of resting heart rate trending down, assuming that's what we're trying to improve. So it can help us answer in the long-term: is our program working? Are we seeing the improvements that we want to see, or is something causing that to not happen?

Now, typically, if you make the right decisions based on that daily picture changing over time and you're effectively managing that load of intensity, then you should get better and you should see that happening. So it's just a way to reinforce: yeah, we're making the right decisions, we're managing that training load appropriately, and we're managing lifestyle stress appropriately, and we can see the HRV is going up and things are on the right track.

Conversely, if they're not, then you can step back and say, well, why not? Is this person been under too much? Because look, if you're not improving, there really only two things: it's either too much stress or not enough stress, or maybe just not enough time. Maybe if you're at really high fitness, it's going to take you months. But in general, you're going to have fluctuations and peaks and valleys, but the trends should line up with that story.

And so if they're not, then is it because we did too much and the body just couldn't adapt to it, or is it because we didn't do enough and the body didn't have to adapt to it? That's all the question you really have to answer. You do that, then you can make the changes necessary and keep going.

James de Lacey38:41

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

Nice. Yeah, HRV, it's a funny one because there's some arguments, I guess, against using HRV as well. So for example, maybe HRV is just a snapshot in the morning. By the afternoon they feel better, or maybe leading into a fight, you start to see bad HRV scores close to the fight, and that...

It stretches you out more, or maybe on fight day your HRV might be bad because of other stress but you haven't trained with maybe a poor HRV. You don't know what it feels like. I guess the question would be, is there a time you stop tracking that just for an athlete sanity, or you tracking all the way through to a fight?

Joel Jamieson39:33

Every fighter is a little bit different. Some don't want to do it and I'm not going to force them to do it. There's not a huge benefit because how much can you really adjust on the day or whatever, it doesn't matter.

So it is perfectly normal because you're under high level of stress going into a fight or into a competition. Of course your HRV is going to be down and that's actually fine. You're going to want that. That just means that your body is in a heightened state of arousal, it's in a heightened state of like, "[expletive], I've got to get ready for whatever I'm going to do."

It's more when you don't see that you're almost more worried because they're so burial they can't activate that stress response very well. So if you're going to measure with somebody, you just have to be really clear. Number one, HRV doesn't predict performance. I mean, if HRV predicted performance, I'd look at all our data, being a betting man right now, and retired a long time ago. You can't predict how someone's going to perform.

It's more about predicting how long it will take someone to recover from a given stress is a better way to look at it. So if my HRV is already up higher or real far low, then I put myself under a load, I'm going to take quite a while to recover from that. I'm just digging myself a deeper hole. It takes long to get out of that hole. If I'm pretty close to my baseline and my HRV is good to start with, I'm going to recover from that training load, that stress faster, because I'm not starting from the hole.

So I can predict how long it'll take you to recover. I can't predict how well you're going to perform. I can't predict if you're likely to get injured or things by looking at a single snapshot. Now, if I looked at the last three weeks and I saw you were trash for three weeks, yeah, you're probably not likely to perform really well. But you don't need HRV to tell you that. You probably already know that anyway at that point.

So I think if you're going to use it yourself or with athletes or whatever, you just have to understand what it is and what it isn't. And it's by no means going to tell you whether or not someone's going to win a fight. It's not going to tell you whether or not they're going to go out there and train the day, get injured. And honestly, sometimes it lines up with how you feel really well and sometimes it doesn't.

We're honestly generally not the best at self-evaluation. It's a skill that gets developed and some people put a lot of work into it and they're very mindful and they pay attention to their bodies and they do learn very well what feelings translate into what performance levels. But generally speaking, we're pretty shitty at self-evaluation in a lot of ways. We're really not great. We're not good at how many calories we eat, we're not how many calories we spend. You ask people to judge these things, they're usually way off when you start looking at objective data and the research.

So just because you feel some way does not mean that's what's actually happening. I think people say, "Oh, I feel bad, my HRV should be bad." Well, maybe not. The body's a great compensator. It doesn't quite work that way. So I think we have to take that out of the equation where I always expect HRV to match how I feel or expect it's always going to match how I'm going to perform. No, it's just—it's unfortunately more complicated than that.

James de Lacey42:29

That's a great point too. And I want to change tack just a little bit and go towards strength training because obviously I guess you're probably well known and labeled as the conditioning guy for MMA. But I think obviously the strength training plays a part, or an important role within that training week too. So you obviously mentioned that you have strength conditioning sessions, but potentially with the pro guys in the morning, where does strength training I guess fit within the week?

And what I mean, obviously it's going to differ between out of camp, camp, things like that, but what does your strength training programs—or how do they typically look from a—it's a very general question, but a general layout?

Joel Jamieson42:58

It really does depend because somebody who is just starting out a career is going to need something very different than someone who's been fighting for five years or 10 years. You're also going to look at again, is it a fight coming up where we know that the athlete's going to be fighting a grappler and we know the grappler's going to be taking them down and we really got to develop a lot of the postural and the hip strength and things to resist that?

Or is it someone who's going to go out and they're going to just strike all the time? They need a lot of rotational explosive work that way.

I mean, you really have to again translate. It all comes back to movement as I said. That's probably the best way to get things full circle. We need to look at what movements the person needs to be strong in. And I'm not saying that doesn't include some of the core compound lifts. There's reasons to use the squat and the deadlift and pull-ups, all the stuff that we use. But there's also reasons to use asymmetrical lifts and there's reason to use unilateral lifts. There's reason to use medicine balls.

I think we have to look at what are we trying to accomplish. And again, it's easy if you come from a very strength-biased background—I just think every single person needs a powerlifting workout with some accessory lifts. But unless you're a powerlifter, that's not always the optimal routine. We have to look at fighters are much more dynamic than powerlifters. They're not laying down on a bench or picking a bar off the floor. They're doing a whole lot of different things with that movement and against different resistances, different angles.

So look, you really have to figure out where is this person's movement lacking. Maybe their hips are weak and they get their guard passed because of it. Maybe rotationally they're not very good and that's why they're lacking power in their striking. You kind of have to just address the movements and the skills you want to improve.

And so that's where the one piece of advice I'd really give: if you're a strength coach and you want to help an athlete in combat sports, you need to watch them train and you need to ideally have some relationship with their coach on the skill side if possible. Because if you never watch them train and you've never seen them do their skill, it's really hard to evaluate what is it they're lacking purely from like, "Okay, I'm going to evaluate the back squat, deadlift, pull-up, plank, push-up, whatever." Okay, great, but those don't always directly correlate or translate directly into the sport.

Just because someone's—good example, I guarantee a lot of fighters couldn't bench much of [expletive], but they'll knock you out. It's not always as simple as increase max effort lift, therefore performance improves. I wish it was that easy, but it's not. So you need a base level strength in those lifts, I'm not saying you don't. But once you've got that, that's not going to keep going up and keep translating to higher and higher performance.

You've got to start getting just more granular and specific in the movements. A lot of medball throws, a lot of explosive jumps, a lot of plios, that kind of stuff. Obviously we do some injury rehab type stuff around the areas they do get injured a lot. So you kind of put that piece together and mix and you add the individualization component on and you're going to get a very different program from one athlete to the next. It's not a one-size-fits-all for sure.

James de Lacey46:07

It's interesting you mentioned about being involved with the technical side, of knowing the coaches. I come from professional rugby, working in professional rugby, back home. Obviously spend all the time with the players, spend all the time with the coaches. You know exactly what the players have done on the field, you know what they're doing in the gym, and you can adjust based on what they're doing.

But it's crazy to think within combat sports that's very rare. I mean, obviously logistically it's like that too, but to be able to train someone and not know their training week, not know what they've done coming before coming to you, things like that, it's just crazy.

Joel Jamieson46:31

It is crazy. The biggest thing is I understand why this happens, but you get an athlete who's going to one gym for striking and then they're going to a different gym for grappling, and then they're going to a conditioning coach, and maybe they have a wrestling guy somewhere else. You're getting guys going to three or four different facilities and three or four different gyms, and none of them know what's going on. And none of those coaches want to be the one like, "Oh, we're really easy day, we're just going to take it easy." No, each of them...

Those coaches think their job is to really push that athlete and they have no idea what's going on from one day to the next. There's no coordinated approach and that's the scenarios where, again, guys might develop quickly but then they just burn themselves out, they don't last very long.

So if that's you, if you're an athlete and you just don't have one gym that can do it all, you don't have a single coach-type manager who can take a step back and look at the big picture and put it together for you, then you have to do it yourself. You have to learn how to manage yourself on your own because no one else can do it for you. So if you don't, again, you're going to eventually pay that price.

That's where I was really fortunate. Again, I worked with Matt Hume for most of my career and he's as good as there is, not just because he understands what athletes need but he can coach every aspect of the game. He can coach the grappling, the striking, the submission game, the technical strategy. I mean, he does all of it so he knows exactly what the athletes are doing.

A lot of times he's training them himself in the skill. He's in there grappling or striking with them and he's mimicking their opponents. I mean, he is as good as there is because he can do all of it and he can do it as good as anybody in the world.

So when I have the opportunity to manage the strength and conditioning for someone like that, my job's a hell of a lot easier than somebody who shows up in my gym and has been doing four workouts before me and I have no idea where the hell they were. That's a much more difficult program to build because you're just taking shots in the dark and you have no idea. That's a really hard thing.

James de Lacey48:21

Yeah, the moral of the story it sounds like for anyone listening is try to find a place that does it all under one roof.

Joel Jamieson48:44

If you can, I mean, or if not, maybe you have to go to a couple gyms, but try to find one coach who can work with you. And I hate to say it, but this is what a strength and conditioning coach should be able to do for people. Unfortunately a lot of them don't or can't just because they don't take that approach, they don't have the experience.

But if you're a strength and conditioning coach, you should be able to help that athlete navigate that stress. You should be able to look at some data, you should be able to look at what they're doing, and you should be able to help them do that.

The first thing I always do is write out every workout you do in the week. And I want you to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how hard it was and I want you to tell me how many minutes it was. And then you just look at this picture and sometimes, what in the hell are you doing? You see very quickly, this person is not going to last and this is a very bad approach and we need to fix this.

And sometimes you look at things like, oh, this isn't too bad. Maybe this athlete was fairly intelligent in their approach. But if you're out there listening to this and you've never done that, it's valuable. Just write out each day—you don't have to write set by set, rep by rep or whatever—but just write out how hard is the workout, how long is it, and the basic thing of what you're doing.

You start looking at this big picture, where is the recovery? Where is the management of load? Is it just every day going and doing as hard as you can, going as hard as you can go, and there's no structure to it? You're going to get yourself in trouble.

James de Lacey50:05

Do you ever have any pushback from fighters if you get a schedule like that and you're starting to maybe advise on things to maybe cut or reduce the intensity on or volume on?

Joel Jamieson50:05

Me? No, honestly, just because I've done it long enough. They're probably coming to me because they trust what I'm going to say. That's the reason they're seeking me out.

But yeah, earlier on, sure. If you're an athlete and you're going to somebody and you don't know that person, they don't have much experience and all they're telling you is do less, yeah, as an athlete you might question that. But that's where building trust comes into play and that's where explaining why you're recommending what you're recommending to them is essential.

You have to not just tell someone what to do generally speaking, but why it's going to be beneficial for them. If they understand that, usually they'll want you to take action. And usually the way to approach it is like, hey, I just want you to try this for a couple weeks. Just hear me out, let's make this change for a couple weeks, I want you to do this instead of that, let's see how you feel.

Sure enough, a couple weeks or whatever goes by, oh [expletive], I feel better. My sparring's all of a sudden better, I'm not so tired, or I'm sleeping better or whatever. So you don't have to position it as like, hey, we're cutting half your volume. It's more, okay, we're going to try this approach for the next few weeks, let's see what happens. What do you have to lose? And most people will be receptive to that.

James de Lacey51:17

For sure. And that's a great way to end this podcast too, Joel. But if anyone wants to follow you and find what you're doing and see everything you're up to on the internet, where can they do that?

Joel Jamieson51:41

8weeksout.com is the main site. They can find me, just number 8weeksout. Been around forever, actually. I was sitting at lunch at a sushi place we used to go to all the time with Rich Franklin and George Sotiropoulos and I was like, maybe I should start a website, I don't know what I'm going to call it. And George was like, 8 Weeks Out. And I was like, yeah, I like that, I'll call it 8 Weeks Out.

And I saw George a few years ago, he's like, where's my commission? Because I went with it. It worked. But 8weeksout.com is the best place to find all the resources. And you can go to trainwithmorpheus.com to learn more about my HRV system.

And then if you want to follow me on the old IG, it's just Coach Joel Jamieson with an I-E for the Jamieson. You can find me on there as well. But yeah, those are the best places.

James de Lacey52:03

Perfect. I'll link all those up in the description too for anyone watching and listening. But thanks for coming on and giving us your time. I appreciate it.

Joel Jamieson52:29

No problem, glad to be back, glad to be on. And hope everyone listening finds it valuable and gets to work.