Seth Lenetsky On Effective Mass, Punching Harder & Boxing Strength Training (SSOF Ep. 29)

Seth Lenetsky2:16

So I want to provide a carryover for motor learning in combat sports. And there's some really cool research. It started with cricket and baseball, I believe, looking at stroboscopic goggles. So what those do is they cut out your vision and they open it back up. So you have less information coming in, and as such you have to make a decision based off of less information. Right? So you only see the beginning of a shoulder roll, not the entire one, and you have to make a decision off of that if there's a punch coming. So it educates you specifically on the sport.

Basically what we're looking at—and when I was in the States I worked with a pretty cool group called The Resilience Code, and they were led by a neurosurgeon Chad Prusmack, who was always kind of really pushing everything he could on the neurological side, the motor learning side. And he got me involved with Dustin Grooms. He's out of Georgia University, not University of Georgia, I believe Athens. They the names, I didn't realize they had different names like that.

And so that guy, Dustin Grooms, just brilliant. Did amazing stuff on ACL research in neuroplasticity in the brain, and he used a lot of stroboscopic glasses for that. So he would have to ease balancing on one leg post-ACL with the stroboscopic going off, which meant they had to rely less on visual input and more on proprioception from the leg.

So I started working with MMA doing the same idea. And mixed results, to be sure. We never really had the ability to do a full study. We found that some athletes really liked it and improved. Other athletes found that their reaction time slowed when they got into actual sparring. Okay. So I'm not sure on it. I believe it works, and for me that kind of dip in performance kind of makes sense when you're doing some serious motor learning.

Problem is dip in performance if you're sparring means you're getting hit a lot more, and a lot of fighters might not be willing to work through that dip in performance. So that's kind of the idea. Now there aren't any stroboscopic glasses that can take impact that I've ever seen. They're made out of actually really flimsy material. As such, the use in sparring right now I think is null. You just can't do it.

But at least focus mitts and reaction drills is something, and I do think there is some carryover to that, particularly if you're working with someone who's holding mitts who's giving you realistic reactions, right? Rather than calling your pads, they're opening up so you see the shot and you have to take it based off the reaction. They're throwing punches realistically. Maybe foam noodles wouldn't be the best carryover in that case. But it's this idea of just really nailing that specificity.

James de Lacey5:04

Nice. Yeah, it's an interesting thing. And you mentioned about the non-specific juggling and whatever else. Obviously I've seen a fair bit on TV and Instagram, the things that get people entertained to be like, "that must be the thing." But I guess a lot of those concepts also roll over to the idea of agility. Right? Agility is the idea of reacting to a sport-specific stimulus. So doesn't matter what reaction stuff you're doing, if you're not reacting to the sport-specific stimulus, it's probably not going to transfer that well.

Seth Lenetsky5:34

Yeah. I was talking with an athlete I work with and he really wanted to use agility ladders. Now I'm not against agility ladders, but what did I do? The first thing, we're on a Zoom call, I pulled up that great diagram from Young and Shepherd. Right? The best paper on agility probably ever written for sure.

And break down, "Here's agility, but there's two components. There's perception and reaction, and then there's physiological components." And then I was like, "Well, dude, your sport is not through ladders. You have to react to a bunch of different things. I can't really train you as an S&C who's not out in your field on those things. I can make you reactive and stronger and do all those, that whole category."

What I try to do with combat sports, because I actually get in the field with the guys, is create stuff that's going to actually improve their perception and reaction. If anyone's just interested in that, I wrote an agility letter piece on Sweet Science of Fighting you can check that out. That diagram, I think I recreated that diagram anyway, it's in there. So people can go check it out.

James de Lacey6:30

But what was your take on agility ladders? What do you think of them for combat sports?

Seth Lenetsky6:56

I just hate them for everything. I mean, people use them for maybe warm-up and stuff. Even then I still don't see the value. People go, "Oh, we're just using it for warm-up and footwork and whatever else." Regardless of the sport, I'm talking in general. But then my idea is, "What the?" That's a waste of warm-up to me, because that warm-up can be used to drill whatever it is you're doing before class. Drill the basic stuff, reinforce whatever, and get you ready for whatever it is you're going to do, instead of just going through ladders and whatever else.

James de Lacey7:21

I'm with you. I'd say 90%, although, have you seen the Kazakhs doing their warm-up on—it's not an agility ladder, it's more of like a grid that's just painted on the floor. Have you seen them do their warm-up on that?

Seth Lenetsky7:21

No.

James de Lacey7:21

It's interesting because they're having to take different steps and they're punching when they're taking their steps. And I think that the issue is the cool-looking agility ladder stuff is cool-looking. But I, there are ways we can actually, if we think about it, make these things work, use these tools. And like that Kazakhstan, when I watched that video on—I think I found on Twitter or something—it was just like, "Boom. Aha. Now I can really use this." Because they want to use the agility ladder no matter what. Let's use it specifically and in the right context for sure.

Seth Lenetsky7:48

You have to link that video up and I can put it in the description of this.

James de Lacey7:48

I'll try and find it.

And let's change tack a little bit and go into some of your PhD research. Obviously we mentioned at the beginning you're like one of the leading, I guess, combat sports, I guess, punch researchers as well. We could nail it right down to punch researching and a bunch of other things. So you want to maybe dive into some of the, I guess, some of the main concepts from that research?

I know people often now refer to things like effective mass, double peak muscle activation, things on your weight classes and punching impacts. Yeah, it's a bunch of things. Maybe just start wherever and we just go from there.

Seth Lenetsky9:01

So basically my PhD was I wanted to see what was driving impact force in a punch. And I don't say punching power because I don't believe that that's a proper way of looking at it. Getting kind of physicsy, we're not really concerned about the amount of work over time of the actual impact. We're concerned about the forces. Now there's obviously a power component to the punch itself, but we really care about the impact forces.

So I wanted to look at impact forces, what mattered, what didn't matter, and then how do we produce that with the ultimate goal being, well, if we know how we produce those impact forces, then ideally as an S&C we can train those, right?

PhD was kind of in a couple different chunks. First chunk was, well, how do we measure punching forces? So we developed, I had a great engineer supervisor who mentored me, and we developed a way of measuring punching forces and it was pretty simple. And I've got some folks over in Covington in the UK who are using it. I know it's still being used in New Zealand. It's not ideal, but it's really simple and for idiots like myself I can put it together pretty quick and get a good reading. So that was kind of the first chunk.

And while we were doing that, I was looking at this idea of effective mass, like you kind of talked about. And effective mass initially came from sprinting. It was using the spring mass model of a person running and saying, well, because there's dampening going on in those springs, what is the effective mass of each landing? Now they're looking at from a very different standpoint than we are, right?

Because ideally they want, if it's long distance running, potentially a reduced effective mass so we're not getting shock damage and issues like that. If it's sprinting, probably want a higher effective mass because we want good, fast ground reaction forces. So for us, we want high forces moving into someone.

And so I went through the literature and there wasn't a ton. And again, because it's combat sports, there's just not a ton of literature in general. And kind of redefined effective mass for striking. And the basic idea is it's really just the inertial contribution of the punch. And so pretty basic. And at the time, and it's still said now in popular, whatever popular, the us and the guys who read your website, the idea of double peak muscle activation was huge in that, right?

The idea that there's a peak in muscle activation to start the movement, then relaxation to allow it to speed up, and then a peak at impact to rigidify, to make the whole body rigid and transfer forces. And to talk about that a little bit more, but kind of jumping ahead, my research found that the double peak wasn't actually super important.

So I don't necessarily buy into the idea of double peak being the key to improve effective mass. I do think that high effective mass is going to result in a powerful strike, but I think there's much larger forces at play and that double peak is part of it, but it's this much, it's not this much. The basic idea being that when you look at a double peak muscle activation in the context of a punch being a purely ballistic movement, and I use ballistic in the term that we would kind of think about in strength and conditioning, not like the official physics term. I had Tony Blazevich the other day and he gave me a lesson on the term ballistics, so I'm now careful about how...

James de Lacey12:17

Clarifying, yeah.

Seth Lenetsky12:17

Yeah, clarifying. In the odd chance he watches this and goes, what the hell, Seth, I talked to you about this already. But in the term in the way we use it, if you think of a punch as like it's just flying out there, right? Then double peak muscle activation makes a lot of sense because you've taken someone that's a chain, and so all the chain links are collapsing on impact and you're not transmitting that force. Into a rod, so all the force enters the impact.

But that's not the case with the punch. There's continued forces applied by the body through the floor into the target. As such, those forces are so much greater than double peak muscle activation that none of my research found it as having any real value, except in one case in a jab. Otherwise it just wasn't really important when looking at effective mass.

The jab seemed to matter in the triceps. The double peak muscle activation seemed to matter in the tricep, but otherwise it really wasn't a big player because there's so much more force coming from the ground. So that was kind of my journey through effective mass.

Kind of breaking off from that, one of the things that I don't think people really understand right now is the importance of effective mass though. There's a bunch of researchers right now who are looking at punching velocity and they're doing the math off that ballistic model. So if you're just like a fist and whatever attached to it flying through the air, velocity matters a ton, right? Because you're flying through the air and you're making impact, so the faster you move the faster you impact. This is done by researchers who I don't think grasp effective mass and surely don't watch combat sports.

George Foreman exists, man. Never threw a fast punch in his life, but he would knock people out constantly because he was able to drive into the target, use his footwork and use whatever double peak muscle activation, active muscle during impact, whatever you want to call it. Slow punches with a ton of force. So I think there still is this misunderstanding of what a punch fundamentally is, and effective mass really looking into that can help explain really what a punch is, which is that the amount of forces we see during impact that people are imparting into the target, way, way, way higher, way, way more important than anything you can think of regarding velocity or double peak muscle activation.

James de Lacey14:49

Okay. Okay, this is making my head turn now. This is, I love the fact that you came out with a lot of this stuff because it goes against the grain of everything. I'm going to go after this and have to update a bunch of stuff on the site too, because I'm going to take a lot of this and add your quotes. So obviously the speed of the punch isn't as important as the amount of force that you're imparting on a target, essentially. Is that kind of the general premise?

Seth Lenetsky15:14

Yeah. Okay. Now, velocity can lead to that, right? But if you're throwing a very fast punch and you're not able to put that extra weight into it, it doesn't matter. Right? That's a snappy jab. We can throw a fast snappy jab. You're not going to take someone's head off with it. You're going to be using that as a strategic move.

And I think that's the other thing that a lot of people miss, and I am guilty of it myself. So my research was single, hard as you can punches in the context of boxing, because that's what I talk about mainly. How often are you really throwing that? So we have to kind of think about the larger framework. And yeah, high velocity has a place and is needed 100%, but it's not always going to be the tool that a boxer uses.

They're going to throw off-speed punches to try and change the reaction of their opponent. They're going to throw fast jabs potentially to open up and then a slower cross to land damage. So depending on the interaction of the athletes, you're going to get a wide variety of speeds and forces. Now my idea was, well, if we can increase peak force, we should be able to increase the force of sub-peak punches, which means more damage done. Yay. That hasn't necessarily been established in the literature though.

James de Lacey16:42

Okay, so I want to move this towards maybe training implications in terms of effective mass. So the way you talked about how at the end of a punch, making contact with the target, you still got forces coming from the ground through to the hands to the target, which makes me think, okay, in-range isometrics then, almost in-range pushing isometrics of a punch, going to be maybe an effective way of developing that effective mass and essentially transfer of momentum. And then is there anything else, I guess, training-wise that has come to you from that research?

Seth Lenetsky17:11

Yeah. So I think, I wrote an article for you and I showed, I think there's an image of it, of Dempsey way back in the day doing isometrics against a wall. What's his name, Danny with Boxing Science? He has done some great work with isometrics as well and really popularized it in boxing. Do you remember Danny's last name?

James de Lacey17:11

Not off the top of my head.

Seth Lenetsky17:11

He seems like a really great guy. He's way too nice. Get him on the podcast.

James de Lacey17:11

Get him on the podcast. He's brilliant.

Seth Lenetsky17:35

But yeah, I think end-range isometrics are a great way to do that. And whether it's going to be a huge impact for double peak muscle activation, to me that is kind of the ideal, right? That you're that rigid and you're that kind of locked into the ground and into your opponent at the point of impact. So I think they're a great tool and I really like them.

Right now, the only fully established way in the literature to improve effective mass really is to hit a heavy bag more often. And I'm a huge fan of that. And I think that far too often we use heavy bag training as conditioning. It's also power training. And I really think that it's something that should be focused on. I have this crazy audio and it's on YouTube, I think still.

It's on YouTube. It's Cus D'Amato working with Tyson and his bag drills. And it is slow. He's like two-four. He's calling it out. And he's just having Tyson dig into that bag as hard as he can. And I think that that's a fantastic way to improve effective mass, to improve the ability to transmit forces that we don't use nearly enough.

I go to a bag session at a camp and everyone's just wailing on these bags and they're just doing incredible cardio routines. From a camp situation, not always a great idea because if you're in a two-week camp – and when I say camp I mean bringing a bunch of boxers from different clubs together, not like a fight camp preparing for a single fight – doing cardio once or twice during a week or two together isn't probably going to make a huge difference in your performance.

On the other hand, if you sit down and go, "Okay, I'm just going to take time to land these punches hard," that motor learning could carry over long term. Obviously probably need more work, but just hammering that in can make a big difference. So heavy bag work I think is key.

Beyond that, kind of going to strength and conditioning realm, I mean, I think everything I do right now is more of a shotgun approach. I don't sit there and go, "This is going to improve effective mass and this will improve peak force." I don't think that we're that granular yet. So I just think, "How do I improve impact forces?"

And for a lot of boxers – and this is more boxing than MMA I would say – get them stronger. I'm really going out there, huh?

James de Lacey20:02

Controversial, man. You're going to get canceled now.

Seth Lenetsky20:02

But yeah, just get them strong. Just teach them how to apply force into the ground. So that's going to be your basic lifts, that's going to be jumping, that's going to be throwing. I'm a big fan of medicine ball throws. I do a lot of medicine ball throws.

You remember Mike Scoffield from way back in the day? So Mike Scoffield works with New Zealand Sport. He was a throws coach. I don't know if he still is. I think he's still working with – he's still doing his PhD with the throws.

James de Lacey20:32

Still? Wow.

Seth Lenetsky20:32

Or maybe he's finished it, I'm not sure.

James de Lacey20:32

Maybe he's following you because you took forever to finish your PhD, didn't you?

Seth Lenetsky20:58

I was just going to say that. Maybe he's following my pathway and he's going to be done sometime in 2030. But he had this great series of throws going from isometric to isometric, concentric to concentric with eccentric to eccentric loaded. And I use that a lot with my athletes and I use a lot of just regular old basket toss off that rear leg transferring across because in a lot of ways that's all punching is, is just transferring weight from one foot to the other foot.

And so I use a lot of that to train those basic movements, teaching people how to drive off a leg properly, how to transmit that force through their body and how to put it into a target.

James de Lacey21:25

Nice. That's funny because Andrew Usher, who's been on this podcast before – he'll be listening to this, I'm sure, now with you on too here – but he's mentioned the professional boxers he's tested, a lot of their upper bodies are stronger than their lower bodies, which is nuts considering general strength standards.

Seth Lenetsky21:53

Well, what do we train right now?

James de Lacey21:53

Does Andrew agree with that, or does he think it should be lower body training?

Seth Lenetsky21:53

It should be lower body.

James de Lacey21:53

Okay, that's great.

Seth Lenetsky21:53

So good. I'm with you, Andrew. I'm with you. So that's a huge thing. I was doing a consultation with a national sporting organization for boxing and they were developing what's called a gold medal profile, which is "These are the bare minimums you need to hit to get on our national team." And they had an upper body Wingate and they had an isokinetic arm extension and they had all this arm stuff. And obviously I was polite, but I was like, "This is, you guys are on the wrong route."

This is all coming from the lower body. And I mean, that's a major thing that my research found was the forces coming through the lower body are what matters in a punch. Now, there are important things going on in the upper body and it's not necessarily where a lot of people think. But the lower body really is where the key is. So if you can put force through your lower body, you're going to be able to put force into people's heads.

James de Lacey23:13

You mentioned the upper body contributes but it's not what people think. What do you mean by that?

Seth Lenetsky23:13

Yeah, so it's a rotation. We're in a rotary sport as weird as it sounds, potentially. What are our big rotators? Well, everyone thinks, "Oh, I need core," right? Whatever the [expletive] core is. And they think abs. So it's just do millions of side crunches and do millions of sit-ups. One predictor in my research was ab-related and in my opinion that was an isometric contraction. It wasn't a dynamic movement.

So where's that driving coming from? When you've got your rectus abdominis, these little muscles here, got these big giant wings, lats. I mean, look at Tyson. That dude had serious lats. He had a lat spread. So it's all about the lats in my opinion. That's where tons of our power is coming from, that push-pull dynamic.

James de Lacey23:46

Almost exactly. So contralateral lat quite a few times or for preloading same side lat to pull you back and then this whips you around.

Seth Lenetsky24:18

So way more lat stuff. And if you think about what's going on in the lower body, the torsion's going on at the hip, are just preloading that lat to whip you around faster. So I'm a big lat guy. And it's kind of funny early in my work I was like, "I don't need to do lats. These guys aren't swimmers. We'll do, but why am I focusing on it?" And now with boxers I'm like, "Yeah, you're going to do all the lat work you can possibly imagine," whether it's through rotations.

And again, for high-velocity lat work, a basket toss is a really solid movement – you're rotating through there. At the same time, we do a ton of pull-ups just to build the muscular strength in the lats. So I'm a big fan of the lats for that ability and all my research is kind of panned that out.

The other is triceps. Obviously that makes sense, but triceps at the shoulder, bringing that arm back to improve rotation. Now, obviously there's risks with that, but we actually found that the contralateral side – so bringing that left hand down, and we've all seen it in boxing matches, they bring that left hand down too much and open up – bringing that back to produce additional torque matters. So that's a major one as well. Now, if you're training lats, you're usually training your triceps for a little bit of that shoulder.

James de Lacey25:41

Got it. A lot of the stuff you mentioned actually kind of pinged in my head almost that dynamical systems there, I guess you could say Frans Bosch style training. He's got some of literally some of those drills in his book and the concepts of dissociating upper and lower body. So the hips and the upper body turning individually. And then obviously with the contralateral lat, he's got almost like a split stance band, I don't even know what to call it, split stance band explosive row switch with the feet.

So take a stance here and then obviously switch the feet, row, and then back. And it's almost being able to essentially dissociate that lower body but also get that whip of the upper body.

Seth Lenetsky26:08

Yeah, that kind of pings it in my head. And I mean Bosch being kind of from that motor learning, you're right, the dissociation is key. And there's some great throwing drills looking at dissociation, just getting cranked and turned in different positions. I think really useful for teaching people that idea.

But at the same time, you got to take into account whether you want to call them fascial slings or just stretch on a muscle – I don't think there's enough data right now to fully argue any of these points. I think they're really good ideas, but we don't have enough information. That when we rotate our hips one way we're putting stretch across us in the other way basically is the idea, so that we have to keep that in mind in our punching. We want to optimize that and use that as much as possible, and stance comes into that, footwork comes into that, how we're moving.

James de Lacey27:05

Gotcha. You mentioned as well, within – you mentioned to me at least and I think within your research – about being bigger may not equal, I'm not going to say punching harder, I'm going to say what you mentioned with may not equal high impact forces. So essentially when you're hitting someone, I guess, do you want to maybe explain that concept?

Seth Lenetsky27:33

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So this is not well researched again. You need a PhD, man.

James de Lacey27:33

A PhD. Get all this done. Two or three more, why not? Who needs to work?

Seth Lenetsky27:33

I don't need my kids. Full-time student. You know what, if I win the lottery, you're going to see me back in the lab a lot. So there is some research that shows that higher weight classes do punch with more force, but that isn't necessarily significant differences. It's higher, but it's not hugely different across weight classes, particularly when you get over 170. Weight, 10 pounds tends to kind of – it's just not huge differences from what I remember looking back at it.

Then there was a study that looked at measuring punching forces in bouts and they found really no difference in the actual impact forces of...

Two boxers, two heavyweights, two light heavyweights, they didn't see major differences in impact forces. And so this is kind of an interesting idea that, but heavyweights do end in more knockouts. We know that 100%. And we do know that if you're able to impart more mass into the impact, you're able to create higher impact forces, create larger impulse, which is really kind of believed to be the key to knockouts, is impulse going into someone's head.

So why are the heavyweights getting knocked out more often than lightweights? And it's still controversial, but there's an idea, and it's an idea that I think has some merit. I wouldn't say that like big guys are definitely punching lighter than or lighter than the smaller guys, but that potentially big guys aren't able to move with the punch the same way that when a little guy gets hit, his whole body is moving and so some of those accelerations are getting transferred to other parts of the body, basically.

Where if you're large and you have a lot of mass, it's just your head moving. From the idea of the slow effect theory, if your head moves a lot, your brain bounces around, you get some rotation grinding at your brain, you get knocked out. So there's definitely a theory around that and I think that it needs a lot more research.

There has been, so I'm aware of two, two groups that have done this. The Thais have done this, and this group out of Massachusetts, years ago, like we're talking 15, almost 20 years ago, they put in force sensors in the gloves. And I think it's an area that needs a ton more research and a ton more development.

One, just to produce a reliable and valid measure. But two, we need to see what's actually happening in the boxing ring. Because like I said, the research I did, that was a dude in the lab who's allowed to punch once as hard as they possibly can. We need to see what's going on in bouts.

Is the movement of lightweights, just general head movement better than heavyweights? And that's why the impact forces are different. Is it that heavyweights are actually imparting more force? Because we can't really make a huge statement off of one study. But it is enough to go, hey wait a minute, let's pay attention.

So I think that there's something there, and there's something that's potentially trainable in larger boxers. If you can train more moving around the punch and less sitting down on the punch, if that makes sense, when they're getting hit, you may be able to reduce the knockout rates in heavyweight boxers or in heavyweight MMA, heavyweight combat sports. Very, very, it's really in the infancy though. We need a lot more work on that.

James de Lacey31:03

Do I maybe dive into a little bit, because you mentioned impulse as the I guess the key determining factor for knockouts. Maybe explain, maybe just for some of the listeners, kind of what that means?

Seth Lenetsky31:36

Yeah. So if we have an impact curve, it goes like that, usually it's spiky, but we'll just make it like that. Okay, yeah. So impact occurs, we hit peak force and we come down, and this is happening in milliseconds. That's peak force. From the research, peak force is really good at soft tissue damage. You want to make someone bleed, you want to potentially break a bone, that's peak force.

Impulse is all the space under the curve. So high impulse is going to create a change in momentum, right? And that change of momentum is going to make things move. And knockouts are, as much from the research I've seen, about making things move as it is actual forces. So if you have a high impulse, you make the head move, brain bounces around, congratulations, someone's asleep.

Yeah, the research, and again there's not a lot of it, but from instrumented American football helmets, it looks like impulse is more likely to cause concussion, knockouts, whereas peak forces aren't. So again, this is not super well defined across the literature, but I have written about this enough and no one has really yelled at me that I am apt to believe it.

I did a, I supervised a PhD looking at impact forces and boxing using accelerometers, so we weren't able to get actual forces, it was just accelerometer work, and everyone in that paper seemed to agree and they're much smarter than me. So I'm going to go with...

James de Lacey33:15

I guess to make it even simpler as well, to increase impulse you can either increase the peak force or you can increase the time in which that force is applied?

Seth Lenetsky33:15

Correct. Yeah. Now obviously if we increase impulse over too long of a time period, the person can react. They'll hook up. Then you don't get a knockout. So it does have to be relatively short.

And one of the things I looked at was rate of force development. I was never able to get a solid measure. Those of us who use force plates know that rate of force development is a really squirrely measure when you got someone jumping, let alone someone punching. So I've yet to figure that out. And I think though that if I can get a good measure of it, rate of force development, how quickly that curve is spiked, will probably give us more information about a knockout than anything else.

James de Lacey33:43

Nice. So maybe you want to dive into, obviously you've touched on a lot of the training stuff already that kind of goes down this road, but maybe for anyone listening, if someone's looking to improve how quickly they can produce force in a punch, I guess what are your go-to, I don't want to say like best exercises because people love to ask that, but what is your go-to way to do that?

Seth Lenetsky34:09

So I think about training from a force to velocity profile, right? So pure force is your isometrics, pure velocity is your jumps, right? Unloaded jumps. If I want someone to be a little snappier, I sit on the right side, I'm on the velocity side of things. So again, I like throws, I like jumps. I tend not to use a lot of Olympic lifting for that purpose. I do use Olympic lifting for other purposes, but I think that for combat sports, for punching and striking, it doesn't have as much carryover.

I will use banded strikes if I trust the person and they've got good technique. Again, I'll use bag work. What else will I use? And then on the little bit more towards the force side, I will use, again, using snc terms, ballistics. So countermovement jumps with a little bit of weight, barbell throws, a little bit of weight.

Now, normally I've worked someone through, that's the way I kind of go, is I start on that force end. So we're doing our big heavy lifts, and then we kind of move to more Olympic lifting, and then we move to velocity. The idea being that we've, one, trained the muscle and the connective tissue to handle these loads. Two, we've got better activation of the muscle so they can actually be explosive. And then let's be explosive. And I know that's not revolutionary, but that's just kind of the way I progress it across.

And as such, if I want someone to be snappier, I want to do a lot of explosive movements. A lot of jumps, a lot of throws, a lot of med ball throws, bench press throw when I can. And then at the other end of that, there's looking at it from a muscle architecture point of view and contraction type. I think fast eccentrics are an amazing way to do that up. Obviously there's a lot of risk in that, and in my experience I haven't met many boxers, I've met more MMA guys who have the training age to really deal with fast eccentrics.

James de Lacey35:56

So how are you doing, or what exercises are you choosing to do fast eccentrics on?

Seth Lenetsky36:25

So probably my most basic one, and again this is one I got off Twitter years ago but it was great, I like chain countermovement jumps. So you're holding on to heavy chains, dropping down, releasing, got it, jumping up, right? That's a good intro fast eccentric. Obviously depth jumps. So plyos I think are great.

Kind of going back to what I talked about with the med ball stuff, catching the med ball to load the eccentric and then come back. It's a slower eccentric really, but it's fast for a throw.

At the high end, we're talking catching weight or dropping into positions with weight. I honestly, I know of those and I have them as a tool. I can't count the times I've used them. Most combat sports athletes aren't at that level to really handle it. If I had a sprinter with 10 years of weight room experience I'd be like, sweet, but I'm not going to throw that at a boxer who's been in the gym for a year and a half.

James de Lacey37:24

Fair enough. You mentioned something controversial in there as well about banded punches. Obviously there's multiple camps on those. How are you doing those banded punches? And I guess what are you trying to achieve out of it?

Seth Lenetsky37:24

So yeah, you're right, it is controversial. And the controversy comes from a point of view that you're changing the movement pattern, right? That by adding loading to it, you're going to change the movement pattern too much and you're not going to get carryover. I think in the work we've seen with loaded sprinting, some of that argument may not carry over, that a semi-specific stimulus can still get what you're looking for.

Specifically when I use banded punches, I tend to put a lot of loading at the beginning of the movement. So it's not like it's a relaxed band and you're getting more restriction as you come out. You're starting with a...

A lot of loading. So I break punch up into phases, and if I want someone to work on building force early in that, I like band punches for that. So that kind of preload coming around, I like a band punch for that. Almost like a rotational exercise more than an actual punch exercise.

Yeah, I mean you are doing a punch and you are landing on a target. I usually have a shield, but the idea with that is to really preload. So you've got a lot of tension pulling you back and then you've got to work into it. Additionally, depending on what the punch is, if there's a preload phase, you're getting a little overspeed on that. You're putting a little extra stretch on it, which I think can be useful to train.

James de Lacey38:54

Interesting. I think you've mentioned as well banded kicks at one point to me. I don't know if you have used something like that or if there's some rationale for that one.

Seth Lenetsky39:14

Yeah, same ideas. Now the research on kicking is just abysmal. If you think punching is bad, there's no information out there on improving kicking. The best paper I ever saw was like an abstract on using eccentrics for kicking in Taekwondo, and like that was like, wow, this is actually practical and I can use it. But other than that it's bad.

I've used that for Taekwondo and I've used it in a phase that was more force-dominant because I think that there might be some advantages there. But I've used it pretty sparingly and I don't know how effective it is. I still have a lot of questions around band kicking. I've seen really good kickboxers use band kicking, but I've also seen really good kickboxers juggle and do stupid [expletive], so I don't know if it means anything. I think at the end of the day I don't know enough about kicking to really make a solid argument for or against.

I do like the increased pullback though, right? So I have used it well with one kickboxer that we were doing just leg kicks, and the pullback into his combination we found a lot of carryover. Anecdotal, but we found a lot of carryover that the idea of hammering in that fast return did seem to ingrain a good engram in his movements.

James de Lacey40:14

So it's almost like you're doing like an overspeed, essentially on the other side.

Seth Lenetsky40:14

Yeah, so he would land that low kick and then would pull it back, and we found that, again, the combination we were doing into a hook was working really well afterwards because he was just so much snappier coming back. Which isn't what you think of usually when you're loading kicks, right, because you want to. But the best results I've ever found with kicks, again really shocking, get them stronger for most people and then do hard kicks. I mean the Thais are great at this, just bang, bang, not like bang, bang, bang.

Obviously Thais are famous for throwing 10 kicks in a row, but just a single hard strike is something we don't do enough in most combat sports.

James de Lacey41:13

I guess that comes down to just pure power training where almost what's done in combat sports class is more geared towards conditioning outputs, just being able to do as much volume as possible. And then maybe in the gym they might touch on the power, but a lot of the time not anyway either. So it's almost like trying to marry the two together, like, hey, you can do your power work on the mats as well.

Seth Lenetsky41:44

I think it's a requirement at a certain level. You really need to do this if you want to be a powerful striker. There's a, going way back in my education, there was a guy like any idiot can make someone tired. All I need is a piece of tape and an apple. Piece of tape is to have you run up and back from the tape, and the apple's for me. Anyone can do that.

And so a lot of coaches, I think, despite their technical abilities, will default to conditioning because it's easier, it feels safer. Whereas to really look at a guy throwing a single punch for an hour and really get into the mechanics of it is something that few coaches I think do, because it's easier to just tire people out.

And I also think there's an argument that because of the variability in punching that a lot of coaches maybe don't want to make changes, and that's valid, that's really valid. That because every punch is different, to ingrain a lot of technique may not carry over as well. I think that it's a worthwhile endeavor. It shouldn't take up all your training, it shouldn't take up 10% of your training, but it should take up some of your training. And then the power aspect of it can be a larger component.

James de Lacey43:08

Nice. I wanted to dive into a little bit as well, maybe any of your future research that's potentially coming out soon. Is anything in the works, anything you're working on, anything you can share that might be being published soon or is published recently?

Seth Lenetsky43:08

So I've been working with some guys out of New Zealand again, Aaron Coutts, real great researcher Aaron. We've published a couple papers on snc and on monitoring punching forces and striking forces. We have a judo paper on snc that we're working on right now. It's in review though, so, you know, that can be a long process.

Additionally, I am involved with some work right now with some different groups in Canada looking at using, what do they call it, oh shoot, it's machine learning to, yeah, not AI, they call it like, oh my god my brain, like camera learning or something like that. And it's using these cameras to identify positions, so some cool work is being done on heat maps for positioning in the ring to look at number of punches thrown.

Because not everyone is GB Boxing. GB Boxing has this brain trust of dudes who are counting how many punches are being thrown and what type of punches and from what position. Smaller nations can't do that, right? So we're trying to develop some virtual methods of that. Additionally, there's some work going on in VR that I'm very, very peripherally involved with to look at different components of how to train people and how to test people with VR boxing.

James de Lacey44:43

Nice. Wild stuff.

Seth Lenetsky44:43

I have some fundamental questions about it because the idea of boxing is not a visual sport, right? When you think of it as that ballistic thing, it's I throw a punch, I move out of the way of a punch. But because of the constant interaction with your opponent, you're framing, you're clinching, you're doing all these things, you have to have some sort of tactile sensation. Even when you land a punch you have to have tactile sensation. So there's some things there that are questionable.

But if we wanted to test the effect of stroboscopic glasses like we talked about earlier, the best way to do that would be able to develop a true agility to look at head movement when a stimulus is coming that is sports-specific. So there's a lot of potential there. And I think the machine learning around camera work is going to be huge. They think they might be able to pull forces out of it, and if they do, yeah, that's a game changer.

But right now it's just they're teaching the AI to understand what's the difference between a jab is and a cross, and then you have to do all your distances and there's a lot to put in there.

James de Lacey45:41

Dude, that sounds hectic, actually. I think it was you that talked to me about augmented reality many years ago. And I guess you see a lot of the VR now within the NFL, guys reviewing plays with their goggles on and stuff like that. There's huge, I guess you could say almost mental training that you can do when you're not doing the physical stuff.

Maybe it's a day off or what, we can still at least get an idea of what's happening. Maybe you're reviewing whatever footage and being able to be in a position to understand what an opponent's doing, at least in your head, to be able to put into practice physically.

Seth Lenetsky46:30

Totally. And it's trickier with combat sports, but with NFL they're very close to, if not there, to have cameras in helmets and stuff so they actually have like live game footage. It's tougher for us because unless you strap a camera to someone's chest or something, you're not going to get that. And then if you got a camera attached to your chest, you got a camera attached to your chest with someone, right? Not great footage of two cameras rubbing against each other or something.

But the, yeah, like that's a huge component. It goes way back to what we were talking about with agility, that the more we can implement that type of stuff the better. And whether it's AR and you're wearing goggles that give you an opponent and you're in the ring and so you have the natural feel of the ring, or it's VR and it's still giving you some sort of input, that is where sports are going, is how to train people in these manners that are training the brain but not necessarily the body. Because you can get so much more volume in training the brain than the body.

James de Lacey47:25

Yeah, for sure. Have you played around with the wearable tech much at all within boxing? Are you talking like wearable resistance, I should say?

Seth Lenetsky47:25

So I worked with Aaron, a

A bit on that, yeah, and anecdotally as well we found some really cool results working with boxers in New Zealand. She was just absolutely in love with it. I would say overall, as a practitioner, I don't use it much because I'm still in that learning phase—how to load it, where to load it.

I think that, again anecdotally, the reports I'm getting back, people are loving it. A lot of research still needs to be done to really explore it and to kind of figure out the best ways to use it. I think that any inventive coach who has enough time with it can do some pretty cool [expletive] with it.

James de Lacey48:26

It seems like an awesome way to almost do your special strength or your specific strength stuff with it, because as you mentioned, you could do your power training on the heavy bag, add that, and then you've got an extra overload on top of it.

Seth Lenetsky48:26

Much like the band punches I do, if you load in a specific way, you're going to have to start your punch differently. If you load in a different way, you're going to have to end your punch differently. So you can break down phase by phase and make that analysis.

And ideally, again, the dream of what I want to be when I grow up is to be like Dan Pfaff of punching, who can look at someone striking and go, "Wait a minute, this phase, we can make an adjustment X, Y, or Z," and it's likely going to produce a better boxer.

James de Lacey49:17

Because you published a paper on the phases of the punching, correct?

Seth Lenetsky49:17

I did, yeah. And that was kind of my first baby step towards that.

James de Lacey49:17

Maybe dive into a little bit of that, how you kind of define those phases.

Seth Lenetsky49:17

So again, we went from the lower body. We found that there was these—we had these incredible graphs that were like, you would trace and then we would trace the standard deviation across, I think it was 10 boxers or 20 for this one. And everyone was so tight. There was so little variation in the movement. People had more or less force depending on how big they were, but when normalized to body movement, it was so tight.

And it was way tighter than looking visually at what their upper body was doing. So we use that to define our phases. So depending on what the punch is, we came up with three or four phases. Hooks had four because it was a windup phase that we saw. Straight punches had three phases.

And the last phase on all the punches was impact, because we definitely saw in that study there was different things going on during impact than leading up to the punch. And that was having influences on what was going on. And that is kind of what led me down that road of not a ballistic thing—this is interaction with the bag during those milliseconds of contact.

James de Lacey50:39

That's a good place for us, I think. I'm out of questions for you. We've gone through a bunch of your research now. If there's anything else you want to add to this, feel free. But if there isn't, where can people find you? I know you're a bit of a ghost online as well.

Seth Lenetsky50:39

Yeah, I'm not really on that social media thing too much. I do have a Twitter handle, but I think I posted like once in the last year. I'm on ResearchGate and I post my research on there. I'm online. You can find me an email—just search my name and you'll find where I am online if you ever want to get a hold of me.

But yeah, you can reach out on Twitter and I check it kind of monthly, so it might be a while.

James de Lacey51:00

I think you're the only follower of Sweet Science of Fighting on Twitter too.

Seth Lenetsky51:00

Am I?

James de Lacey51:00

Yeah, because I haven't posted on there at all. I just kind of have it as a placeholder.

Seth Lenetsky51:00

Well, I'm your biggest fan, so...

James de Lacey51:24

Well, hopefully we can get Seth into the new Sweet Science of Fighting Underground Community soon, which should be launching in the next couple of weeks. So stay tuned and we'll see what we can do there. I'm going to just put him on the spot here while he's on the podcast being recorded.

Seth Lenetsky51:24

So I'm hoping, as well. There are larger forces at work.

James de Lacey51:50

For sure. But thanks for coming on, Seth. I really appreciate you sharing a lot of your punch research and everything you're doing there.

Seth Lenetsky51:50

Cool, dude. It's been a pleasure and thanks for having me on.