How I Lost 13lbs In 6 Weeks, New MMA Research, & Advanced Training Concepts (SSOF Ep 88)

James de Lacey0:01

And I will say it's a very simple process. It's not always easy, but there are some things that can help you if you're looking to do the same. Obviously not everyone is potentially looking to be a competitive martial artist. Some people just want to get in better shape. Regardless, it applies to both if you're trying to maximize performance while losing body fat and getting into maybe a lightweight class or whatever, maintaining muscle mass.

First one, we'll talk about training. Around training, my training was exactly the same, basically doing strength training in the gym to maintain or get stronger and to build or maintain muscle mass, which means no crazy circuits, no crazy cardio, etc. It's in the gym to build muscle. And by building muscle, you're signaling to the body to keep that muscle so when you're dieting down you're not losing a bunch of muscle mass on top of the fat mass you're losing.

Initially you'll see a pretty steep drop in body weight. That just tends to be water, as water weight and gut residue starts to drop a bit as you're eating less calories. And typically with less calories, it's slightly less carbs, so less water, etc. I'm not saying to cut carbs, but that's just a byproduct of as you start to eat a little less. So that's pretty much training. It's relatively simple. Be consistent in the gym, train like you're trying to build muscle. That's pretty easy.

Dietary-wise, keep my carbohydrates high, keep my protein the same as it always is, because you're always aiming for around 0.8 to 1 gram per pound of body weight. Now there's an argument to be made you can go higher in protein, especially when you're starting to lose weight, especially if you're getting into more aggressive, I guess you could say, weight loss phases or fat loss phases where you want to keep your protein even higher to spare muscle mass. There's some good research around that. However, if you just stick to that 0.8 to 1 gram per pound of body weight, you'll be pretty good.

Fats, I typically keep relatively—I won't say low, but moderate—at around 25% of total calories. That way you still have enough for normal hormonal function, etc., but it's not so much that you feel sluggish. Problem is, people go and drop carbs completely and then they'll go on high fat diets and they'll feel sluggish and not energy for training. You need carbohydrates for training as a combat athlete, especially for high intensity training.

So carbs will be typically high and they'll make up the rest of the calories. So if I was going to do like a breakdown of how those macronutrients looked percentage-wise, it would be like, I think it was around 30 to 35% protein, and then ends up being like 50 to 55% carbohydrates, and the rest being fats. And that tends to work best for most high-intensity athletes. You, as a combat athlete, fall into that category.

So don't fall for the trap of these carnival [expletive], this keto [expletive], all this other [expletive] fad diet stuff. It's all down to basic principles of being in a calorie deficit but eating the right foods to fuel your training. You're not there just to crash diet. And you're not just a normal, I guess you could say, fitness weekend warrior gym-goer where you could potentially get away with some of these drastic dietary changes because they don't have to perform.

They don't have to do anything except waddle into the gym and sit on something, sit on some machine. You've actually got to go and train and do well within a combat sport, so you need the carbohydrates, you need the protein. I'll try to flash some pictures on the screen from this photo shoot maybe.

But yeah, and then around that, in terms of supplements, same as usual: protein powders, creatine. That's pretty much it. I forget to take half my other stuff. I need to keep sticking with the vitamin D. Obviously with the Andrew Marley podcast, if you check that out, again on the other podcast channel, he talks about the 50,000 IUs of vitamin D, taking that to help with conditioning performance. So that's something to listen to as well.

But that essentially covers in a nutshell everything you need to know around dropping those 13 pounds. It's so simple, relatively easy, in terms of, I guess, mindset. It's about not being all or nothing. So obviously there were days, I had cookies every now and then, we were out to eat every now and then. That's cool. Make small changes, adjust how you eat in the day to cater for potentially more calories later in the evening if you're going out to eat. Know that having one cookie or eating a certain food isn't going to make or break your diet. Just carry on as usual.

If you have the mentality of all or nothing, you have that cookie or whatever and you go off the rails and you blow all the progress you've made in the past week. So if you adopt a mentality where it's not all or nothing, you will be successful with this. And that's just really, that's just basic, I guess, just a basic way of doing it, and it works.

So I'll move on now to the current research that's recently come out just this month. So this one from a couple of days ago and this one from today. So we'll start with the one couple of days ago. It's a nutrition, and it's about, or it's titled doing the rounds, "The Anabolic Response to Protein Ingestion During Recovery from Exercise Has No Upper Limit in Magnitude and Duration In Vivo in Humans." So this is a study by Trolin and colleagues that just dropped a couple of days ago.

It's doing the rounds because essentially it was thought that you can—well, okay, it was thought—is obviously the myth they can only digest so much protein at once in one setting. That's been debunked many, many years ago. We all know that there is no, I guess you could say, this 20 to 30 grams of protein per setting is [expletive], and we've known that for a while. But as with all things in health and fitness, myths just stick around forever and they'll never go away because there's just [expletive] idiots basically saying the same [expletive] every single month.

Now, this study was interesting because what they did is they gave participants, after exercise, protein infusion. It was either 25 grams of protein or 100 grams of protein. And then what they found was that the 100 gram of protein group had a greater and more prolonged anabolic response than the 25 gram protein group. Now I haven't been able to dive into the full study yet, but by anabolic response, it's typically an elevation in muscle protein synthesis, or maybe the molecular pathway mTOR, for promoting anabolic activities, aka growing or building muscle.

Now the real question about this: okay, firstly, the study suggests that, okay, there's no upper limit, or potentially no upper limit, to the amount of protein you eat and then how you use that protein, essentially. This went for over 12 hours, this anabolic response, from that one dose of protein.

Practically, the question is does that matter long-term and in the grand scheme of things? Because one, typically you're not just having one meal after training, you're eating protein multiple times a day, so would that not have a similar effect? Two, we know that over the long term, as long as you're hitting your daily protein targets, everything else seems to be secondary. For example, as long as you're hitting your, say, one gram per pound of body weight of protein per day, it kind of doesn't really matter the sources of that protein.

For example, if you're getting 80% of that from vegetables or vegetarian or vegan sources, it doesn't seem to matter as long as you're hitting that one gram per day. Now with this, obviously you're getting 100 grams straight after training. Does that really matter if you're still hitting your protein targets in a day? I don't know, we don't know. I'm going to assume that it doesn't matter, at least logically.

The other thing to bear in mind is does this increased anabolic response over time actually lead to building more muscle versus, for example, if you had 25 grams after training and you split your protein throughout the day versus having 100 grams after training and then having less throughout the day? Is that going to make a difference? Again, we don't know. So there's a lot of questions coming out of this study.

I think practically, I think where this works well or at least this can be applied is if you train in the evening, for example, you finish 8 or 9 p.m., potentially having a larger protein meal then might be beneficial since you won't be eating again after, you'll be going to bed. However, obviously there's the trade-off: if you're having a massive meal, it's going to be hard to sleep, so there's going to have to be some kind of balance with that.

Another thing would be if you train in the morning and you have a massive breakfast, then maybe you're not eating much or eating at all throughout the day because you're busy with work meetings, etc. That's another application where this could work. But outside of that, yeah, there's just more questions on top of these findings if it really makes a difference long-term in terms of muscle growth, because these acute anabolic responses typically don't translate to long-term or chronic changes in muscle mass.

And a good example is this idea of people always trying to spike growth hormone with this and that, or they're trying to do workouts that maximize the testosterone response. None of that [expletive] matters. It's been proven over and over again that these acute responses and increases in hormones from training, etc., don't lead to increased long-term gains in strength and muscle mass. So just bear that in mind. You'll probably see this shared around if you're interested in the space.

And then a study today that dropped from Dr. Chris Kirk. He was on the Sweet Science of Fighting podcast a while ago. I'm going to bring him back on to talk about it, because he's done a lot of, I guess you could say he's kind of niched himself into this idea of MMA training schedules. So he's studying this deep, deep.

They just released a paper. I'm still waiting for him to send me the full text, but he's done a little breakdown on Twitter, so I'll run through that and I'll be updating some articles with his findings, and I'm going to bring him on the podcast to describe them too.

But essentially, they are looking at the external loads of MMA training compared to internal loads and durations. Now, some of the stuff might be a little confusing if you don't have any kind of background in sports science and things, but I'll break it down for you just relatively easy. But essentially, external load is something that is objectively measured, typically with a GPS device.

So if you watch rugby, soccer, any kind of team sport, and you see these little devices on the back of their jerseys, kind of in there, these little lumps at the top, those are little GPS devices and they track many different things such as the distance covered, change of directions, accelerations, etc.

So you can actually use them during MMA because they have some indoor ones. And what the study did is they tracked the different external and internal loads. So that would be external loads. Internal loading would be subjectively how you feel. It would be rating on a scale of 1 to 10 in an RPE, 10 being the hardest workout you've ever done in your life, crawling out of the gym, 1 being you went for a walk to the mailbox.

And you're just rating the session based on that, and you're multiplying that number by the duration of the session. So if it's 60 minutes, you rate it a five, that's 300 units. And those arbitrary units can be calculated as training load or internal training load.

And then external training load, you have different measures, but for this study they looked at player load from the GPS, which is a patented, I guess it's a patented metric they came out with and labeled. It's a metric from Catapult, which is a GPS company. And essentially, it doesn't just track, say, for example, distance. It tracks through whatever the formula or algorithm is, different direction changes. So it's almost like a 3D, I guess you could say, load tracker where it's not just measuring, okay, you went from here, you went up and down. It will measure side to side moves, side stepping, for example.

So in MMA, obviously that's most of the movement. So it gives you more data than say just distance covered, because distance covered isn't going to tell you [expletive]. You want to know the different changes and intensities of those accelerations and decelerations from those change of directions. So that's what they looked at.

And they looked at that from basically for all the different parts of training in this one: striking drills, wrestling drills, jiu-jitsu drills, sparring, etc. Now I have to dive into this a little more once I have the full text, but essentially they found that all the different training modes, so as I mentioned there, striking drills, wrestling, whatever, they're all distinguishable by external load and by internal load. So it means that subjectively you can tell the difference in what is easy and what is hard.

And I think deep down just from your own training, you probably know that. You probably know that doing hard striking sparring or hard MMA sparring is much harder than basic jiu-jitsu drills as an example. And then same thing as that: internal load of being able to distinguish that seems to match the external load to some extent. But the external loading from the GPS also is able to decipher between those different categories.

What makes this interesting and the applications of this is that because you're able to relatively accurately decipher what is hard training, it means you can plan your training week hopefully around those hard sessions. So if you know that MMA sparring is one of your hardest days, or some kind of wrestling drills are some of your hardest days, or positional sparring, then the days before and after that you would ideally make those easier days, and that would be ideally jiu-jitsu drilling, whatever it is, or hitting the pads, or it would be your easier conditioning, etc.

Then on your harder day that you know it's going to be hard, maybe you can do your very high intensity conditioning or whatever that is. That allows you to create the undulation.

Now what he also found, and what they found I think in their previous paper too, was that the daily training loads, the intensities, and the durations tended to not change within the week or between weeks. Now if you've been listening to this channel for a while or the podcast, you will know that I preach often about this undulation within a training week, and I just talked about it before now. So like a higher day, for example, let's just say you're sparring, etc., and then your lower day, which would be your easy conditioning, your more drill-based work, etc.

So having this undulation in intensity and in training load throughout the week, it allows you to maximize the output you're doing on the harder day, but it also lets you recover on the lower days but still get some work in that's going to benefit you. Now within the, I guess, the subjects they had in here, that just doesn't seem to change.

It seems to be relatively monotonous throughout the week and then throughout the month, which is not ideal because essentially you're just, you're missing out on a lot of, you could say, adaptation, but you're also missing out on a lot of ability to recover and get the most out of training.

And what I mean by that is you're missing a lot about adaptation because you kind of sit in this middle zone all the way through the week and month when you don't really hit that very top end. And by very top end I mean super maximal efforts. You, I guess, do get a bit of the bottom end to an extent, but you kind of sit in this middle zone. And there's nothing wrong with being in the middle zone, that's just part of the sport, but it means you still want to be able to hit above and below sometime within the training week.

And if you're always flatline within the training week, it becomes a problem with monotony, and then with training monotony becomes increased risk of injury. So that's just something that's going on within MMA right now, which is interesting, because obviously Dr. Chris Kirk and his team, they're trying to potentially change that with coaches and fighters and try and provide better training schedules that fighters can adhere to and for coaches to be able to help prescribe versus this kind of every session

is just going to be hard because obviously you run into issues there as I mentioned. So ideally you have the undulation, you might have weeks that kind of build, you might have a down week, having a plan. And obviously it's not always easy if you're just running an MMA gym, you have some pro fighters in there. It's hard to be able to schedule for this one who has a fight here, this one who has a fight there, and then some amateurs over here that aren't competing, just looking to get a workout.

So it's not clearcut like a professional sports team that has everyone in the one place towards the same goal at the same time. You're juggling a lot of different things going on. So either way though, it provides a pretty good insight into the current landscape of how MMA is being trained. But it also provides value for you if you are able to add or be more in control of your own training, whether that's your strength and conditioning or your technical training.

You're able to use this data and your subjective knowledge about what is hard and what isn't to be able to plan your training week. And it means you can do longer, harder sessions on certain days, shorter, easier sessions on other days, just to provide that undulation. But yeah, so that covers two of the latest research papers that are quite interesting coming out of the nutrition in MMA space.

I also wanted to cover quickly this idea. We've touched on flywheel training a few times on the podcast. John Cronin touched on it, Cody Roberts, we did a whole episode dedicated to it. I think Aaron youth off, we touched on it a bit too. If you search those there. But I will be having a flywheel device from xfly being delivered. It was supposed to actually potentially come today, but I don't think it's coming today unfortunately. So hopefully it will be coming next week.

And I'll have a flywheel device. I'm going to do a bunch of videos for you guys to show you how it works and why it can be so beneficial for a combat athlete, and how it differs from traditional strength training. Because you don't have to use the typical barbell, dumbbell approach. Obviously with the barbell, a lot of things get pulled from strength sports, powerlifting, strongman, bodybuilding into combat sports and other athletic sports.

But you're not a strength sports athlete. You don't have to use the barbell, you don't have to use these things. You don't have to deadlift from the exact height of the plates. That's just a powerlifting standard as an example.

With the flywheel, you have endless opportunities to do super maximal strength training, which is hugely beneficial, develop a ton of speed and power with it, and also train different movement patterns with it. So I'll be doing some training log vlogs with it. I'll be doing some breakdowns of it, showing different exercises, how, what, why. But just to give you a little intro on that, if you have any questions in the live, just throw them in the chat there.

But essentially when you're using flywheels, it's not built on traditional weight and resistance or not building traditional weights. So it was actually designed for astronauts in space to be able to strength train. So the actual resistance is from rotational force or rotational inertia of the flywheel. So the faster the flywheel moves and the wider diameter radius, whichever one, the flywheel disc is, the harder it is to get spinning and then the harder it is to stop spinning. And that's where the resistance comes.

Now what's unique about it is it only gives back. So on a flywheel, for example, let's just say you're doing a bounce squat. This would be an easy example. And you push up to the top, and then the tether that you're attached to will kind of end, and then it will pull you back down. So the flywheel will spin and the axle, I guess we'll call it like a car axle, will spin. It'll get to the top and then it'll spin the other way and it'll wind the tether back down. So you're unwinding the tether and then winding the tether. There'll be an easy visualization.

So once you get to the top, you accelerate to the top, it only pulls you back down the same effort that you put in on the way up. So what that means is if I pushed with X amount of force up, it's only going to give me X amount of force back down. The applications of that depend on the population, but for you guys as combat athletes, it means that you can make, well one of them is you can make every rep maximal.

And by maximal I mean if you put in 100% effort, maximum concentric effort on the way up, it's going to give you maximum concentric on the way down.

And if you do that rep after rep, it means that every single rep you perform in that set is maximal force, power output. Compare that to, for example, if you're doing, let's just say, a squat at 70% one rep max, or let's even say make it even easier, squat at 90% one rep max. 90% one rep max is typically a three rep max.

The only rep that becomes maximal is potentially, it was definitely number three and potentially number two. Number one is not a maximal effort rep. Same if you go down to 80%, which is typically around eight rep max or eight to ten rep max. Same thing. The first six, seven, eight reps aren't maximal, and then only the last couple are maximal reps or maximal effort.

So when you're on the flywheel, every single rep you perform can be maximal in terms of power outputs, force output, etc. Now people will say or people will use flywheels specifically for eccentric overload. And when we talk about eccentric overload, there's a lot of different benefits around true eccentric training. Eccentric training is not to be confused with tempo training.

So when people often think of eccentric training, they think of, okay, I'm going to slow down the negative phase. So I'm going to squat 70% of my one rep max, but I'm going to do four seconds down. But that's not eccentric training. That's just tempo training. You've changed the tempo.

Eccentric exercise has to be performed above your concentric one rep max. So if you can, let's just say you can squat 300 pounds, that's your one rep max. Anything under that is not a true eccentric exercise because we can produce 120 to 150% more force eccentrically than we can concentrically. So to truly train the eccentric portion of a lift, it means you have to load an exercise greater than your one rep max.

And that's difficult practically. It's also difficult if you don't have a strong lifting background. It can also potentially be, I guess you could say, a little more unsafe. Not that it is going to cause you injury, but having greater weight on your back while you squat, yeah, it can be a little more iffy.

So what flywheels do is they allow you to perform true eccentric overload without having to have these damn heavy loads. And people will say, okay, you just said now that it only gives back what you produce concentrically, which is true, which means it cannot be a true eccentric overload, which is true. However, there are things you can do to turn it into a true eccentric overload exercise with the flywheel.

And one of them is changing the, I guess you could say, the eccentric braking action of how you're going to do it. So if I maximally squat up and then on the way down I don't resist until I'm halfway in the squat, now I have to stop that eccentric force in a very short time frame. Now I've peaked peak eccentric force or rate of force development in that one movement, and I'm overloading the eccentric at the bottom position of the squat because I haven't had to resist all the way down. I've now concentrated that one little bit of force into this small part of range of motion, creating an eccentric overload.

Another way you could do it is if you're doing single leg, you can do two legs up and then one leg down. That way that's a very simple one that I think a lot of people know, even just on general gym machines. You can use a concentric assisted version. So if I have my hands on a handle and I push myself up and use my upper body on the way up, and then I don't use my hands on the way down, I've sped up the concentric phase and now I have that coming down eccentrically without my hands helping me. Just another way.

xfly is very unique where they have an eccentric motor, which I will also show you once I have it in the garage. I'll do a whole breakdown of that and show you how that works. It's damn scary the first time you use it. But essentially you can put on an eccentric boost, and that will just give back, depending on what you set it on, 10 to 80% more, I guess you could say, resistance than you produce concentrically.

So I mentioned everything you do is if you do something that's 100% concentrically, now if you add a 10% boost, it's going to give you an extra 10% on the way down using a motor, making a true eccentric exercise.

And when we're talking about eccentric exercise, we're talking about benefits usually around increased lower body leg stiffness, or essentially the ability to rapidly change from an eccentric to a concentric muscle action. And you think about the most explosive people on earth, they're able to do this very well. And they don't deform when they hit ground. Sprinters are a great example. Sprinters will hit the ground and then their hips don't drop, their knees are not, their legs are stiff and allow them to propel themselves forward. This is

Still beneficial for fighters, strikers for example, having to produce force quickly from the lower body to gather momentum to their hands. Same thing with MMA wrestlers having to take shots, being able to transfer that force from the lower body through to the hand. So having this explosive ability developed through true eccentric training can be very, very helpful.

Now the other benefit around using the flywheel is this idea of variable resistance. So I mentioned that everything you do 100% concentrically comes back 100% eccentrically. Now the variable resistance means instead of a load, instead of failing at a load, the flywheel just adapts to your fatigue level. So if, let's just say for example, for easy numbers, 100 Newtons of force up gives me 100 Newtons of force down.

Next rep, I'm a little fatigued, I do 90 Newtons of force and then 90 down. Next rep I do 70, because as I fatigue it comes down, making it a very safe exercise for as you fatigue to still produce maximum outputs.

So can be used for, you could say, power strength endurance, whatever you want to call it. It's just a way to be able to always do maximum efforts and it's relatively safe. It's actually been used pretty regularly within, I guess, elderly or seniors as well, flywheel training for strength development because of that feature, because it's only going to give back what you do concentrically. And because you're stronger eccentrically, you're never being overloaded. If you put someone under a heavy squat, could be a different story. So that's where you have a lot of that safety as well.

If you have any questions, throw them in the chat too. But I'll be doing a whole breakdown on flywheel stuff. I'll probably do a little case study showing some of the benefits. I'll do something like, I'll do a few couple of strength tests and jump tests, and then I'll probably do like three weeks of just twice a week eccentric overload squats with the Exerfly, maybe a fast version and a slow version, because that's another thing you can do depending on the flywheels you put on.

You could do a slower eccentric. So like I mentioned before, if you went 110% of your one rep max squat on the way down, that would be a slow eccentric. But you can also do fast eccentrics. That just means almost like, well, faster speed. There's other ways, some ways you can do it with traditional strength training is just a little harder. But with flywheel stuff you can actually just load less plates on it and then you can just go faster speeds, which is going to be brutal. So I'll show you some of that as well and some of the results out of that stuff.

It's also really good for building muscle too, because you don't have these dead spots within an exercise. And a really good example of a dead spot, and I think everyone knows, I'll give you a couple examples. Everyone knows that when you're doing squats, the bottom position is the hardest, and once you get past like that quarter squat area, you can lock anything out, you can stand up with it.

It's just that sticking point that's difficult. So means the top of the range of motion doesn't get as much love in that area. With flywheels, you don't have that sticking point. It's always pulling you down and it's constant. It's not tugging, it's just a constant pull that you're having to resist.

Same thing with, for example, a lateral raise, a dumbbell lateral raise. When the dumbbell is by your side, there's no resistance on your shoulders and no resistance on your side delts. And obviously as you raise the dumbbell, you have more and more stress and contribution from the shoulders because the arm gets perpendicular to the line of gravity, which means that you have more, I like to think of it as lines, right?

So if I have my arm out straight, I have more lines of gravity pointing into my arm. If I'm here, I have less lines, so there's less resistance, etc. And obviously if it's by your side, there's no lines.

But with the flywheel attached to a cable, it's always pulling you through the range of motion, so you're always having to resist, which makes it a very, very potent muscle builder on top of that. So I think that covers most things with the flywheel and some of the applications there. I think it's actually a damn good piece of equipment that just hasn't made it mainstream yet. But who knows, maybe my channel can blow some of that up and you guys can get involved with some of it.

But I'll show you the results of that flywheel style training and kind of how it works and how beneficial it can be, especially for combat athletes. But there is some interesting applications for strikers as well around, I know Andrew User and Seth Linu were looking at potentially doing something around almost like an eccentric punch, I could say, and seeing how that translates to punch force. So there's some interesting aspects around there. But yeah, that covers everything with flywheel.

I do want to say it is, when this actually drops, the recording, it'll be Christmas Day. So if you are listening now, if you're one of the many, I guess, loyal people who listen to all these episodes and you're not part of the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground, I will have a discount code in the description that will run just Christmas Day and Boxing Day that'll give you the $1 trial for the month.

There'll be another code for 30% off the annual subscription. If you're already a member and you want to upgrade, just hit me up in a message and I'll give you that same annual discount even if you're a monthly user. So make sure you check that out.

But that should be everything covered in this podcast today. And I'll see you, ideally, hopefully we should have a guest for the following week. I'm going to try to bring on Dr. Chris Kirk and a bunch of others. I've actually got some good ones lined up in January. I've got JB Marin coming on, who is one of, I guess you could say, one of the godfathers of the force-velocity profile.

I published my master's research with him many years ago, almost 10 years ago now. So he's going to run through a lot of different things there, and I've covered the force-velocity profile on the blog and within the strength training course and the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground and how useful it can be. So it'll be good to hear from him.

And then I also have Dustin Oru coming back on the podcast too. He is the isometric training king, but we're going to cover some of his new research as well. So there should be some really good stuff coming on with some of the latest research being, hopefully, made practical for you guys. So I will see you next week.