How Great Britain Boxing Prepare For The Olympics & Pro vs. Amateur Boxing w/ Gary Hutt (SSOF Ep 36)

Gary Hutt1:25

So from the point of view of a strength and conditioning coach, we've got perhaps a lower focus on those kind of those metrics of physicality that leads to stoppages, because the guys are winning in a technical way more often than not. So I know for me, our prioritization within the training environment is very much focused towards boxing being the key training stimulus. But then conditioning of the boxers is fundamental, and I definitely describe our team as like a big C little S kind of coaching team.

And then we bring in the strength piece to kind of look after the boxers from an injury prevention, or as much as we can, point of view, and then lean into some of the performance enhancement stuff. But we really really dive into the kind of the style of the boxer and get dictated to by that how we try and push them forward.

James de Lacey3:39

Do you want to maybe dive into a little bit of that, about the style of the boxer, kind of what the different styles are, and then I guess the differences in preparation between those different styles?

Gary Hutt4:09

So we take a really broad brush approach and think, well, a key judging criteria will be dominance in the bout. And if you've got a front foot boxer who wants to push forward and take space and put somebody under pressure, they'll require a very different physicality than a back foot fighter who's looking to open up space and create opportunities to be able to kind of land really clean shots. One will throw a lot more punches often than the other. One will do a lot more moving around the ring but perhaps throw less punches but be more accurate.

And because when you look across the research in amateur boxing, one of the fundamental things that I think is really important to consider is the fact that we're operating on a proxy all the time. So we never actually, you can see the rings in the background, there's very few ways to actually track what's going on in the ring, as you know, from a pure research point of view. We can't strap a face mask on to a gas analyzer to somebody who's getting punched in the face.

And that's where I've connected with some of your previous guests before, like Andrew Usher, who's doing some really interesting things in the kind of fossil deoxygenation and looking at peripheral conditioning. But also from a mechanics point of view, all of the research is based in kind of sterile max punch on a bag on a force plate, and there's only a certain amount of that that you can really take to applying in the ring. And it gives you a good guideline but perhaps not exactly what's happening all the time.

So the way that we try and approach it is consider that style for the boxer. And I mean I'd be interested to know about your history actually, and with the fighters that you've worked with, when they come into you.

James de Lacey6:09

Often we're dealing with people who are elite boxers but have a very poor strength and conditioning background.

Gary Hutt6:09

Yeah, usually.

James de Lacey6:09

But then some of our guys have got absolutely elite physical qualities before they start doing any physical training with us.

Gary Hutt6:09

So things like, I'm very very fortunate across the last 14 years, GB boxing have been very consistent in their testing battery. So I've got 14 years of world class boxing data to be able to look back on and try and understand and interpret. And something like a drop jump is really interesting because we've got guys that, our average guys will be hitting over 4.4 on an RSI.

James de Lacey6:09

Holy [expletive].

Gary Hutt6:09

Without having trained a physical quality in the gym. So the boxing stimulus must be creating this physical adaptation. I think our strategy around supporting in-gym performance is perhaps a little novel compared to a lot of the normal approaches with S&C, where I know when I first started coaching I would look at a testing battery of an athlete's kind of physical characteristics and look at, well, what isn't quite up to scratch, what isn't good enough at the moment, and then try and fill those holes.

So it's almost like a bottom-up approach, trying to push people forward but not really touching on the things that were already at a good level.

In GB we try and take the point of view of, well, what are the super strengths that those athletes have developed through their boxing style, and how can we enhance those super strengths? Because they must have developed them through their boxing. So if we can enhance those, we can draw a transfer into the sport through specific adaptation to style-based development. And I think that was something that was quite novel initially when I first came into GB boxing.

Now going back to the original question, because we sidetracked a little bit there, sorry.

James de Lacey7:48

Good.

Gary Hutt7:48

The differences actually for me between pro and amateur, perhaps the intensity is a little bit higher in the amateurs, so the tempo of the bout. Because it's only three rounds, they can go a bit harder. The reliance on the strength element is perhaps a little lower in the amateurs than it might be in the pros. But in general I think they're very very similar sports, and I don't really distinguish too much between them. But I mean have you worked with many female athletes James?

James de Lacey8:57

No, I had one back in my academy back home in New Zealand. But when I was mainly within rugby and rugby league, I was working with female rugby league, the New Zealand team there. So that's pretty much my extent with female athletes.

Gary Hutt8:57

And I think it's a really interesting and growing area in combat sport, particularly boxing really, where from a physiology point of view there is a really interesting distinguished difference between 6, 8, 10, 2-minute rounds and three 3-minute rounds. The physiology involved in both of those things is drastically different. And on the female side, they're almost able to keep a higher intensity because of the work-rest ratios involved than in the amateurs.

James de Lacey8:57

Interesting. I actually wanted to come back to your point about focusing on the super strength as well. So you gave the example of some boxers having an RSI 4, so if anyone listening, 4 is damn high for reactive strength, essentially. The measure would you then still be looking to improve that measure, I guess above 4, to continue their physical development?

Gary Hutt9:59

So we'd look at, and obviously this becomes a little bit of a conversation around how we analyze and understand jumping. And one of the sports I previously worked with, and I was fortunate to spend quite a little bit of time with, was volleyball. So we got quite comfortable with interpreting

And looking into jump data, and there's some really good stuff coming from a few Canadian researchers and a few of the guys in the UK around how we can interpret force data to inform decision-making. But I kind of pose the question: how are these boxers going about achieving those really high RSIs? And effectively, we've got one common strategy and one uncommon strategy.

A lot of our guys are really good at creating stiffness around the ankle. So their contact times in their RSI are driven really, really low. The fastest I've seen is like a 120 contact time off the floor, which is ridiculous. On the whole, our guys will get to about 150 and be able to put out some good height with that.

James de Lacey11:06

They're still damn, damn quick.

Gary Hutt11:06

Yeah. And we always discuss around cutoffs with the testing. But it allows us to interpret, okay, these guys are able to create stiffness around the ankle and transfer force around the ankle pretty well. Some of them are then able to use hip and knee torque and apply it to the ankle really well to get a really good jump height. Some of them struggle with that a little bit more, and that tends to kind of split with style.

So we'll have a guy, we'll have a group of guys that we might focus on hip and knee torque. We'll have a group of guys where we might focus on ankle stiffness or creating a better ability to transfer force around the ankle and try and group our athletes in that way.

James de Lacey11:39

Nice. I like that idea of ankle stiffness as well. Maybe dive into it because I know listeners can benefit from some practical tips and advice on that too. So maybe just dive into, just quick, what ankle stiffness is and then how you go about developing that.

Gary Hutt12:06

Okay, so we try and go super simple, as simple as possible, and think around transfer force. So our guys are on the balls of their feet all the time, and what that stimulus, or at least what we think that stimulus provides training for, is being able to transfer force effectively around that ankle in the most efficient way possible. So trying to create efficiency leaning towards more elastic tenderness and force transfer rather than muscular force generation.

The way that we go about training that, we use a few different, not even novel approaches. We try and rely on isometrics quite a lot and plyometrics, and particularly fast rapid eccentrics to be able to build our programming around developing stiffness qualities around the ankle. For some of the guys who were comfortable with their ability to do that, we might then try and build up ability to generate torque around the knee and hip to take advantage of that stiffness around the ankle.

James de Lacey13:19

Nice. Do you want to maybe provide just a couple of, I guess, exercise examples that you would use for that?

Gary Hutt13:19

So we might use like a bent knee or a straight knee isometric calf hold. So single leg or double leg, depending on how we're trying to attack the load. But that'll tend to be more around like a super maximal or maximal isometric, like a pushing isometric rather than a holding isometric. And I know there's like a lot of different terminology that gets banged around with all that.

James de Lacey13:53

Yeah. I listened to your podcast, I can't remember who your guest was.

Gary Hutt13:53

Talked through a lot of isometric training. Dustin Orange. Brilliant, yeah, brilliant. So if anybody's listening, I'd definitely refer back to that one.

But yeah, so very, very simplistic kind of bent knee and straight knee calf raise or calf hold positions. We'll bring the duration of those down pretty low, so like 6 to 10 seconds, and get the loading on those pretty high. We sometimes jump on the leg press to do that as well if you've got facility to do that.

And then lots of hopping, bounding type foot contacts on the floor. We'll do that in gym-based sessions, but I also think we use a lot of sprint training. So we'll get our guys sprinting at least once a week just because of that idea of ankle stiffness and transfer of force through the body into the floor in those really quick contact times.

James de Lacey14:55

Nice. How far do you have them sprint?

Gary Hutt14:55

In a pure speed session, we'll do anything from kind of 20 meter accelerations through to 60 meter race scenario. And we're really very lucky in the training space we've got over in Sheffield where we've got an indoor track which we can have full access to in the morning. So we've got a 60 meter straight, which is very uniform for guys who are training at home outside or in a space where they haven't got such nice indoor facilities.

We use our sprinting in two ways. We'll look at acceleration-based sprints and full speed, high-speed running mechanics. We don't go into too much complexity because we don't need to, and it becomes a very physical focus stimulus rather than technical focus. But what we're hoping to get back from that is purely training the body's ability to brace against the floor through the floor really quickly.

James de Lacey16:02

Nice. I know you wanted to touch on also stimulus versus adaptation when we're talking about training. Do you want to dive into kind of what you mean by that?

Gary Hutt16:02

Yeah. So when we're writing, I know as S&C coaches when we're writing training programs, we focus on particularly in the gym what are we going to get back from the stimulus that we apply. And so we'll write a program for hypertrophy and put the training around what we know achieves some hypertrophy, or we'll put a power program, we'll have an objective of achieving power development or explosive strength development, and we'll write a training program that gears towards achieving those stimulus based on the research findings that we know work and our experience.

I think it's a really interesting context to try and throw that onto the conditioning side. And because sometimes I think there's a real pitfall for people in terms of going along and following an adaptation-based approach to conditioning. So in general, what I'll hear fighters talk about is the type of training they do for conditioning rather than the stimulus that they're looking to get or the adaptation they're looking to get from that training.

And something that we try and bracket all of our training around is the idea of, well, in the ring we're hitting that VO2 max kind of how well does the full system of your cardiovascular and neuromuscular system work. But we don't necessarily always understand what goes into that at any one point. And I think I was really fortunate to, when I was really early in my coaching career, come across Alex Wolf's recent applied practice within GB Rowing. So it's probably 10 to 15 years ago now.

And I always remember a presentation he delivered at an FA conference that I attended where he kind of went through from mouth to muscle the path of oxygen and all of the potential bottlenecks for performance. I think that's really important to bear in mind because we do it really well, I think, as S&C coaches in the gym environment, but perhaps less well sometimes when it comes down to conditioning stimulus.

So we build our programming very much, and Andrew Osher has lent into some of this and some of his ideas, but also the kind of traditional training approach of long, slow, steady miles. Like, why does that benefit the boxer? Why does short explosive training benefit the boxer? What's the stimulus for conditioning that we get just from doing the sport training? And the way as an S&C coach I try and complement the sport training is within our hierarchy of boxing, conditioning and strength is try and fill in the gaps or focus really pure stimulus through a training block.

So what we might do sometimes if we're away from competition is make a decision for a particular boxer: do we want to develop central, kind of heart and lungs based adaptations, or do we want to prioritize more peripheral adaptations? How is the muscle using energy? How is it creating energy? How is it shuttling calcium? Can we make adaptations at a muscular level? And then gear our training as purely around that as we possibly can.

James de Lacey20:04

I think that kind of leads into our conditioning for the amateur boxer topic too. But I wanted to dive into the central versus peripheral adaptations, especially for the listeners as well. How will you, I guess programming and what are you prescribing when you're trying to target these heart and lung adaptations versus when you're trying to target these muscular adaptations when it comes to conditioning?

Gary Hutt20:04

Well, I can reference out the muscular adaptations a little bit because you've spoken to Andrew. So there's really around short sprint intervals, high-intensity work. And we again, sometimes I think we end up talking in terminology with boxers and with coaches that isn't easy to understand. We talk about anaerobic and aerobic, and what I try and link it to is heavy legs feeling or out of breath feeling.

And the training that makes your legs heavy is going to be training towards muscular adaptation. The training that makes you feel out of breath is going to try and adapt towards the heart and lung-based stuff. So long, steady interval-based work or long, steady road work, a really nice low intensity, might cause adaptations around, or does cause adaptations around, blood volume, red blood cell count, perhaps to a lesser extent lung volume, but the way that we're transporting oxygen around the body.

Whatever mode that is, whether it's running, cycling, long steady endurance-based work will give you those adaptations. On the flip side of it, the buffering type sessions where you're going absolutely maximum intensity efforts, lots of recovery opportunity, and then repeat it. I think there's a bit of a mix to middle ground interestingly in the repeated sprint work that the guys might do, where what we've seen with the boxers is a real drive towards aerobic adaptation off of repeated short, high-intensity bursts of exercise, but with lower amounts of recovery.

We've seen quite a lot of crossover with the sport in that area. If you're able to do some long endurance work really well, if you're able to do some high-intensity sprint work really well, the boxers that are really good in the ring and fit in the ring tend to be the ones that are able to underpin their high-intensity work with good quality aerobic and oxygen transport adaptations.

James de Lacey23:05

Yeah, I think we've had a lot of similar messages throughout the different podcasts and on the website and stuff about that as well, which is great to be reinforced by you there. But I wanted to also go into the idea of the guys you work with, the full-time professionals essentially, right?

Gary Hutt23:05

Well, it's a semi-centralized program we run, so they're in with us Monday to Thursday, and then Thursday to Monday they are at their home clubs. So we get to see them three or four days a week, but it's an intense full-time period with that.

James de Lacey23:41

So a lot of the listeners probably aren't privileged to have that kind of setup where they're looked after, even have the week just boxing. So I wanted to dive into just some questions and ideas about guys you're working with versus maybe someone who doesn't have that kind of training setup, where maybe they're only training boxing three, four times a week, but they still want to compete and things like that.

I guess the first one within that is the structure of the week. So where does someone fit in these conditioning sessions? Because if someone's boxing three or four times a week but they also work full-time, you know, can they—and maybe they can fit in one or two extra sessions—what do they do in those sessions and where does it fit?

Gary Hutt24:11

No, that's a really good question. I think the first thing that I think is really important around that is understanding exactly what you're trying to chase at any one time. So again, coming back to that adaptation-based approach rather than stimulus-based approach: what is the thing that's going to make the difference in those two sessions, and then how can you be really efficient around the sessions you're already doing?

So the real benefit of some of the peripheral conditioning work is that actually it doesn't take very long. I think Andrew talked about maybe two 30-second efforts in a training session with a minute in between, so you're looking at a two-minute training session. We've used that exact protocol based on his work off the back of boxing sessions and sparring, off the back of bag work. We've also used it off the back of gym sessions, like lifting sessions. So then being efficient and fitting those sessions in is quite nice.

The difficult piece is perhaps the long duration type sessions, the centrally-based sessions, where you perhaps have to dedicate a little bit more time to developing those systems. But we're really fortunate at GB that we collaborate with the coaches really closely, and we can sometimes with particular athletes make adaptations to their boxing-specific training which will lend towards that type of a stimulus.

So I guess one of the key things is considering efficiency. What is the adaptation you're looking to try and achieve? And can you tag things onto sessions, or can you adjust the emphasis in the sport training slightly? And by that I mean, well, instead of doing five threes on a bag with a one-minute rest, how can we make that more peripherally focused? Well, we could go to—a session we used to run was six 2-second efforts at maximum full intensity with a varied from 70, 50, and 30-second recovery between those efforts.

So you're challenging that muscular peripheral end within the sporting context. Or could the boxing coach move a session from 3-minute to 4-minute backgrounds, go to 30-second recovery, and make it a little bit more of an aerobic stimulant? It doesn't necessarily have to be adjustments based on competition prep and periodization in that way, but physical adaptation goals as well.

James de Lacey26:58

Nice. And I guess the follow-up question to that would be in terms of where it's placed. Let's just take, for example, someone has sparring sessions on a Friday. Where would these sessions fit in the week? Could you do some of these sessions—I think you mentioned you did some of them after sparring—but could you do these after sparring? Would you do them the day before? Is there almost a general guideline that someone could follow where, you know, don't do it at this time?

Gary Hutt27:38

Yeah, I don't think I'd want to do one of the peripheral sprint sessions before any kind of technical training. But the way that we try and—I'm really fortunate, we've got a physiologist that works with us at GB Boxing, J Mitchell, who's excellent—and we talk a lot about how can we ensure that the stimulus we're applying has the longest tail.

So in our week, the boxer might come in and do a gym session on a Monday along with his boxing, couple of sessions on a Tuesday and a Wednesday, and then the final session on the Thursday might be a spar. Now we know if the boxer leaves with a particular stimulus at the end of the week and they've got a couple of rest days, that hormonal state that they're leaving with will have an opportunity to continue on. It won't be interfered with by another training session.

So if we're really trying to prioritize a certain physical stimulus, we'll try and make it the last thing they do before they have a couple of rest days. A good example is we might throw two 30-second max effort sprints on a bike in after the spar at the end of the week if we think that's appropriate, and then that gives a longer tail for the body to kind of stew in the biochemical changes that occur with that training.

Equally, with the longer duration stuff, we'll try and position it away from the boxing work that our guys do on camp by doing it over the weekend where they do have a little bit more time to step back and stay with that training stimulus. Because over at GB, some of our guys on training camp do three sessions in a day. So if we were to position it in the start of that day, the interference of adaptation that they'll get through the day will potentially drown out the adaptation that they experience.

So for your guys, the guys that are working at home, just thinking about when's the opportunity to adapt going to happen and trying to almost take a reverse point of view on how we'd usually perhaps program a week of—the most important session from a physical point of view should perhaps have the longest recovery after, or have enough opportunity to recover effectively after that session.

James de Lacey30:15

Yeah, so if you're training Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Tuesday would be your hard session, then you have Wednesday to recover, and then you might finish with a Friday hard session as well. Gotcha.

I also wanted to get your thoughts on general versus specific conditioning within boxing. I know for your guys, you guys are boxing often, so you probably use a lot of different general modalities—bike, running, whatever it is. You also mentioned heavy bag intervals as well. But I wanted to get your take for someone, for example, the example I gave, who's maybe only boxing three, four times a week.

I guess how much of that time outside of boxing would you recommend they do their conditioning with boxing modalities versus trying to essentially just attack the physiology through something that's easy to do, for example on the bike or something like that?

Gary Hutt31:20

I think part of the answer to that question probably comes from what is your current physical state? What is your current physical fitness level, and what is your approach to trying to be a good boxer or a good combat athlete? If you're more fitness-driven in the way that you try and approach the world you're fighting, then actually you're probably in a good place to be able to get a lot of the conditioning needs met within sport-specific situations.

But I think—again, I'll be interested to hear what your thoughts are on this—one of the contentions that we have sometimes in that setting is sparring is the peak, pinnacle kind of physical stimulus within the sport. But to do sparring well, you have to be operating submax, because there's a decision-making element. And as soon as you're pushed up to your limit, decision-making will always start to fail and you won't be able to be as effective as you could be in the sport. So there's an inherent problem with gaining all of your conditioning needs from sparring, because you never perhaps push to the limit in sparring.

At least in a perfect world, because obviously people do get put outside their comfort zone. But if you're the fittest boxer, you shouldn't get put outside of your comfort zone. So there's perhaps a decision-making element there where it's like, am I a really fit animal? Am I trying to push really hard in this? Am I able to push really hard in the sparring or in the sports-specific training? Or do I need to—am I less fit and perhaps I need to get my fitness hit from other modes to make sure that the quality is there and I'm being pushed as hard as I need to be?

Then for me, I'm always thinking about how can I make the stimulus as pure as possible towards either the central adaptation or peripheral adaptation, because I know that the sport is covering that middle ground of VO2 max. So I'd always be considering, well, the problem with specific conditioning is it can't be pure. It's very difficult to create a really pure anaerobic or peripheral stimulus in a sport-specific setting. It's really easy to do it in a general setting.

So am I trying to achieve a pure physiological adaptation, or am I trying to work on a mixed-mode full system, how does the body function and work together to get the training output I'm looking for? And from a conditioning point of view purely, I'll tend to bias towards making it as pure as possible by doing it as a non-specific modality.

Now the perhaps flip side of that is the strength element. We focused a lot on conditioning but perhaps not so much on strength. But with the strength element, I think the most specific and effective and usable strength training within boxing is being able to hit a bag really hard, hit something really hard, because the coordination pattern, the joint angle specificity, all of the force generation requirements are so specific to the sport. But we'll then build our S&C program around being quite non-specific and building the musculature to be able to achieve that task really well.

So I mean, one question as a non-combat sport guy coming into boxing was, why do boxers have big lats? You look around and every single boxer I've ever met has massive lat wings. But it's a push sport. Okay, so why would the lats get developed?

And it took me a little while to really understand that the lats play a secondary role in stabilizing the spine. So on contact, if we're thinking about double PMG and stiffening on contact, the lats are playing a really important role every shot to be able to stabilize the spine or trunk to be able to apply force.

So if that's the case, if I can develop the muscles in the lats, the strength, their ability to apply force, I should be able to improve the impact forces on a shot. So we'll do perhaps some heavy bag punches in the sporting environment, and the coaches handle that more than I do really. But in the gym, we might spend good time making sure that the stimulus we're applying to the lats is really appropriate to be able to develop that strength characteristic and understand its place within the sporting movement.

James de Lacey36:22

Yeah, before we dive into that strength stuff, that's actually really interesting to hear what you're saying. Because Seth Litzky was on the podcast not too long ago, and he said exactly the same thing as what you did when he was talking about boxers should spend more time essentially doing alactic power work on the bag or something—six-second hard efforts—to develop that strength within boxing.

And then you also mentioned about the lats, and he has his boxers just hammer the lats in the gym because of that reason, but also because of the fact, just that pull back from the punch and being able to throw combinations there. So yeah, interesting you mention the same thing.

Gary Hutt36:59

It's—I've probably based some of my decision-making on some of the research that Seth has done. And one of the difficulties, I guess, is there's no perfect way to measure punch force. And I'd love to see a full biomechanics makeup of ground reaction force, EMG, camera setup. Hopefully one of the—I keep cajoling the reason I operate in all of these circles in the UK is that I keep cajoling all of the researchers to try and get them to link together to do something like that. So if any of them are listening, come and shout me.

But I think that there's a real important piece around strength and conditioners, particularly sports-specific strength training, in understanding what is going on in the sport and what are the key movers and what are the key stabilizers, and how are we then trying to train those muscle groups in that ability to achieve that.

The flip side of it is obviously if we wail on the lats too much, we get postural change that makes injury risk increase or increases injury risk. So you walk a fine line between being able to generate that strength development without losing good quality movement patterns. And I mean, we've got quite a few guys historically that have kind of had real bad shoulder issues in boxing—dislocations from almost nothing within the sport. And making sure that the guy's shoulder is safe while still being able to develop the strength characteristics that we really want is one of the key challenges we see.

James de Lacey39:03

Yeah, I wanted to dive into—it's a very general question—but how does, I guess, a strength training session look for your guys?

Gary Hutt39:03

Okay. So as I say, it's a tertiary priority in what we do. Every single guy in our gym still does two lifting sessions a week, potentially three. So even though it's a tertiary priority, it's only because I feel conditioning has more of an impact than strength does in the program.

So our gym sessions will last between 45 minutes to an hour 15. The guys will come in and do some mobility specific to boxing, looking at ankle, hip, thoracic spine, shoulder. Do some pre-activation work if they've got anything particularly that we feel they need to get a little bit of exposure to. Then they'll go into big key lifts, whether it's—we really value squatting, we really value trap bar deadlifting to get some kind of global loading across the body. And also the boxers that we're working with really value seeing those numbers and the way they feel off the back of the session after doing that.

Then in their ancillary work, we'll target those particular key areas that we feel are really important, whether it's to do with ankle stiffness—and we might put that in before the squatting—or lat development for any of our guys, grip and trunk, ancillary supporting areas that we focus on a lot.

But again, it—one of the things that perhaps is different in my situation to your listeners is that we're programming for 45 boxers at any one time, plus or minus five. So it's a really high-volume scale program, but it's a squad. So it's not necessarily a team where we can be generic. One of the things that we really focus on is making sure that every boxer has an individual support package around them, because boxing is an individual sport.

So hopefully I haven't given too much of a rambling answer on what the gym session looks like, because in my head all of the different boxers have got slightly different structure and pattern depending on what they're trying to achieve.

James de Lacey41:23

Yeah, that's why I mentioned it was a very general comment, because obviously it changes depending who it is, where you are in the year and things like that too.

Gary Hutt41:55

But again, the premise is adaptation-focused. So what does that guy need? Do they need to watch their weight? Do we need to make sure we're minimizing hypertrophy? If that's the case, we might do two or three sets of an exercise, three to five reps, and we never go above five reps. We might prioritize using isometrics and keep positions, because the likelihood of stimulating hypertrophy in these guys is reduced in that way.

If somebody's trying to bulk up because they're changing weight class—and in Olympic boxing at the moment, with weight classes being redistributed between men and women and some weight classes in the men's side disappearing—we've got a few guys we're working with at the moment to support changing weight class. We might do a big bulky—some of the guys have a little play with some German volume training at weekends, which is brutal but really effective. And some of the guys will do a 5x5s, 5x8s, 5x10s, 5x12s type progression through a hypertrophy block with limited rest.

But I think a key underpinning factor to all of the programming is I really believe there's three underpinning drivers to physical change: consistency, frequency, and intent. I'm lucky—our guys, consistency and frequency, they're training a lot all the time because they're full-time. I think a challenge for listeners at home who are managing the training around full-time work is consistency is better than inconsistency. So how can you be consistent with your training? How can you be frequent with your training? And then how do you bring your absolute maximum A-game and intent to everything you're doing?

So James, if you came and had a look in

Our gym sessions, you would think it's an absolute mess because the guys are having chit chats everywhere, they're having a little bit of fun.

James de Lacey44:10

It's how ours look around mine too, so I wouldn't think it's a mess. That's how I like to run mine with the rugby guys. I like to think of it as organized chaos, because the guys when they're not on the bar, they're enjoying the space, enjoying the environment. When they're on the bar and when they know what they're trying, when they've got four sets of five that they need to achieve on a specific rest period, they're on the bar, they're focused, and they're getting the work done really well.

Gary Hutt44:37

I think frequency, consistency, intent in training are those three underpinning things which get overlooked all the time. But actually, the guys that are listening in, guys and girls that are listening in, could really benefit from just giving themselves a pat on the back a lot of the time because it goes overlooked when we're talking about science of stuff and all of the sexy bits that we could add into programming.

James de Lacey45:04

I fully agree with you. To me, consistency is number one. If you're consistent, and even if you do things sub-optimal or whatever you want to call it, you're going to make progress just because you're doing it over and over and over again.

Gary Hutt45:04

It's a really interesting one, isn't it? Because I'm in such a multifaceted, dynamic, changing environment all the time with all the different things going on within the human body that can change at the click of a finger. It's really difficult to say that any situation is truly optimal, for sure.

So one of the things—it's perhaps a little bit philosophical—but one of the things that I battle with a little bit sometimes is, okay, we've got loads of information about averages from research, so the average change in this or that. I end up working with creating unique individuals. The whole point of an Olympic medalist is somebody who is not in any way normal—they're an anomaly. And so how much can we hang our hat on research based on kind of working towards finding an average, and perhaps sometimes cutting off the anomalies, when we're trying to develop an anomalous performance?

James de Lacey46:05

For sure. But anyway, that's a rabbit hole for not today.

Gary Hutt46:05

Fair enough.

James de Lacey46:05

I wanted to continue on that strength training discussion on how it changes as you get closer to competition, because I think a lot of people listening, maybe they follow some kind of strength training program or do it themselves but don't really change it. They kind of maybe just stop two weeks out and just don't do anything. So I'd like to hear how you guys manage that as you get closer to competition.

Gary Hutt46:42

Brilliant. So as a context, we have guys that will box up to 16 to 20 bouts in a year because of the competition structure and stuff, so they're competing a lot. In a perfect world, we'll have a good long time to know when they're going out to competition, but often we might get three to five weeks' notice. For us, for major competitions we'll get a little bit longer and we can put a plan in place, but we have a five-week prep and a three-week prep that we roll out just in case.

What that looks like is on the strength side: the guys will tend to be doing something a little bit more volumous when they're outside of that, unless we're pushing a specific change outside of a competition prep. But we'll follow a really simple, traditional progression of reducing volume and increasing intensity in the gym. We'll go from slow to fast progressions, so in the final two weeks of prep the guys will touch a little bit of max force in a slow movement, almost as a pseudo-potentiation. And then they'll spend a good portion of their session in light, fast, explosive movement patterns.

And there's nothing sexy about what we do. Volume and intensity drop is as much of a textbook approach as we can take. We also periodize the conditioning down on that as well. So as I mentioned, the guys do one sprint session a week. They'll do probably two or three other running-based conditioning sessions if we can. And I'm not necessarily tied to running, but one thing that our coaches hold really strongly is that running is really important for boxing.

And it'd be really easy for me to come and change the system or try and change the system, but I haven't worked out why running is really important for boxing yet. And if I don't understand why it's important, I can't really justify changing it.

But we have a periodization pattern where we'll build in from kind of fartlek work in our intervals down into some kind of short, intense one and three K efforts, because we use one and three K as our testing modes for conditioning. And we do that or tend to do our testing kind of in the final two weeks of camp prep, okay? So that we're capturing an idea of what that athlete is achieving at their best possible state. And we use testing within the training to be able to manage the volume and intensity of what's going on.

So super-duper simple across either a five-week block or a three-week block, depending on how much notice the guys get before they go out to competition.

James de Lacey50:03

It's always a give and take with EIS as well. You can't come in and just change the way things are done as whoever. Then the coaches, you lose the buy-in with the coaches and you can't get anything else done.

Gary Hutt50:34

I mean, let's take the example of: let's say that I didn't value running because we get loads of running-based injuries. So that's a really big problem because it's a non-sport-specific modality and we're creating injuries from it. So I come in and try and bulldoze the running prescription at a program that's been successful across three Olympic cycles and move it onto some other general mode of conditioning, without—if I don't understand why it works or why that running prescription has worked, I'm not on good footing to be able to suggest anything else to be able to be better.

So I might think that my suggestions are the most optimal approach, but if I don't have all of the information that the coaches have or everybody else has, then how can us as sports scientists ever really truly be sure that we're right?

I don't know. I like Star Wars. You watch Star Wars?

James de Lacey51:42

I've watched Star Wars, but I can't say that I like it.

Gary Hutt51:42

Well, there's a line in that that I apply to everything that I'm doing in EIS. And it's basically when—and this will bore you, but some of your listeners might enjoy it—Obi-Wan Kenobi realizes Anakin Skywalker is evil and he's Darth Vader when he starts talking in absolutes. And he says, "Only the Sith talk in absolutes."

And I think that rings really true in a lot of what we do. There's nothing that we can say that we can be absolutely nailed on for every single individual we work with. We can try and offer ideas as to what might be the most likely way of getting better or the most likely way to get a benefit from the training, but I disagree with anyone who thinks they can be absolutely nailed-on certain that they're going to be able to do something.

James de Lacey52:48

And there's always context as well, right? For example, with the running: maybe for some, in the example I gave, who's boxing three, four times a week, maybe running isn't the best option. Maybe they could be doing something like shadow boxing, whatever, and improving their technique while getting the conditioning stimulus instead of running, versus guys like your guys who are training three times a day. They probably need time away from boxing to do something else for that conditioning. There's always context within there.

Gary Hutt53:14

It's the idea of the compromise. What are you happy to compromise? If you're doing conditioning using shadow work and trying to develop technically, then you're always going to compromise a little bit on both the technical and the conditioning side, unless you have a real bias towards shadowing for conditioning, in which case the technique might fall apart and you lose your shape and control.

And I think sometimes it's making the educated choice of: am I happy to make that compromise? If I've only got four sessions a week to be able to do all my training, is that a good compromise for me for one of my sessions because they're so valuable? And is that adaptation that important? It's always a bit of a game of compromise and where we're happy to flex and where we're happy to push forward.

James de Lacey53:48

For sure. That's a great way to end this podcast, too. But if anyone wants to find you, Gary, look at what you're doing, see anything you're posting on the internet, where can they find you?

Gary Hutt54:20

I kind of tend to dip in and out of socials, so I mean, people are more than welcome to email me if they want to. My email address is gary.hutt@eis2win.co.uk. I sometimes drop a comment or two on Twitter, and I watch everybody else doing stuff that's really cool on Instagram, but I'm not cool enough for Instagram.

The boxers take the mickey out of me because I don't know how to—I can't get my head around Snapchat and all those young kids' stuff now.

James de Lacey54:37

No, I'm not Snapchat either.

Gary Hutt54:37

I'm really open if anyone wants to DM or any of those things.

James de Lacey54:37

Perfect. I'll put those in.

In the description anyway, so if anyone wants to get in touch with Gary they can do that there. But thanks for coming on Gary, I really appreciate it.

Gary Hutt55:11

No worries James, thanks for inviting me. And just the little point at the end, like your content is absolutely brilliant mate. I've really enjoyed picking through the last couple of weeks, picking through your back catalog of podcasts. You got some excellent guests, great work mate.

James de Lacey55:11

Thank you, I appreciate it.