36 Random Thoughts & Musings For My 36th Birthday

James de Lacey0:34

I think it ended up being like 35 instead of 36, but who knows? Whatever. There'll be more that will come as I come through this. Now, funnily enough, a lot of these I actually wrote on my 30th birthday 6 years ago that I had in an old Science for Sport coaches group and a lot of it is pretty much relevant today, which is quite funny.

So what I'm going to run through these and if you have any questions in the chat, throw them in. First one, career and coaching. Have a source of income outside of your career job. If you're S&C coach, you're going to make [expletive] money.

There's just no doubt about it. You're going to make [expletive] money and you're probably going to be moving around a lot, which means you have a lot of expenses and you need to have something to sustain you whether you're at your career job or between jobs.

For example, I've had periods where like waiting for visas and stuff where I've been, let's say how many months was it? It must have been five or 6 months like not contracted, not working in another country. So having a side gig helped, money at least like I continue flowing in, and then during COVID I was stuck in another country for another eight months, seven or eight months.

Again, no contract, but luckily side gig had money coming in. So it's important that you have that. It also, depending on what you're doing, can keep you, I'm not going to say relevant in the field, but at least start to get your name out there.

So if it's to do with, if it's a side gig regarding strength and conditioning, maybe it's writing for certain platforms. Places will still pay you to write, especially for expertise. So that's something you can do and it also helps process your own thoughts.

Writing is something actually that can be my 36 point. I'm going to do it right now as a number, as a number two or one. I'll call it 1B. And that is consume information in written form and not just information from today but definitely information from over 10 plus years ago.

It's lucky. I was actually just talking to Bill Smart yesterday and we were saying, well, I'm inferring from what we were saying and my thoughts, how lucky we were to come up through an age where you had to learn everything from applying in the field, reading books and reading blogs and other journal articles, because learning from what is written is so much different than a 30-second clip on [expletive] TikTok.

From some random person who doesn't actually have a coaching background. They're just really good at marketing. And I can't imagine coming through as a new coach today, having to decipher all the different information, being bombarded at you for different things as everyone's trying to sell their way to try and get some high-profile clients to ride their coattails into the sunset.

I highly recommend reading your way into information. And then I highly more so recommend writing. There is nothing that will distill your thoughts and bring them together like writing an article about something and it could be like a literature review style of, say I don't know, a topic that you're really interested in, because you will go through and you'll read all the papers about it.

You read other things about it, maybe other blog posts about it, and that will start to bring your thoughts together about how the mechanisms of why this works, how to apply it. You can go and apply your experiences to the article as well and you'll be able to bridge gaps between things that you just, you can't do without really putting it on, well I don't want to say on paper, on a computer and writing.

It helps me immensely get kind of get my thought processes together. Kind of why I like doing these long form YouTube videos, because it's just another way of, because I kind of plan out the script. It's another way of getting my thoughts onto the page and organizing them in a way that makes sense.

So if you're a young coach, I highly recommend writing. You don't even have to, well I would still recommend publishing it. Just publish it on your own website or blog or something. You can come back and update it, whatever. But just writing, I'm telling you, is a game changer.

So do it. Number two, because that was 1A, 1B. Number two, your career will very rarely be linear. So when you come out of university or you're going to university or trying to be a coaching certifications, you often think like this.

First year I'm going to do an intern role. Second year I'm going to work with the academy. Third year I'm going to work as an assistant with the first team. And then fourth year I'm finally going to be a head strength and conditioning coach for XYZ.

Never. Okay, I'm not going to say never. Very rarely is this going to happen. It is very undulating, your career path. You'll go from different roles to different teams to potentially different states or countries or cities as you try and find your way through.

Now more than ever, I guess you could say the market is, I'm not going to say saturated, but there are a ton more graduates coming through these programs and there's a ton more competition for jobs. It is nuts. So you basically got to move wherever there's work.

Now in the States, the system, I'm going to say system, is different. I guess it is a little different with the way they have graduate assistant roles and they have intern roles and they kind of churn, like a lot of these universities kind of rely on unpaid intern work, and they kind of just churn them out.

That's not to say other countries don't do that too, because I know of teams that also do that because of quote unquote budget, which is [expletive]. But you're going to move around, up, down, whatever. You're going to be everywhere.

Number three, are you ready for the inevitable? This is one of my favorite quotes from Ashley Jones. If you don't actually, he doesn't really have a social, he doesn't really post on socials, which, I mean I told him to start posting on social media, but he doesn't want to.

But if you reach out to Ashley Jones, he does everything for free. He is like the most helpful, nicest strength conditioning coach. If you don't know who Ashley Jones is, legendary rugby strength, strength and conditioning coach. He's been the All Blacks head S&C, the Wallabies head S&C through Japan, all a bunch of NRL teams like I think the Raiders, Knights.

Yeah, he's been there, done that with everything. He's been over in Premiership Rugby. Anyways, if you hit him up, he has a really good file of like conditioning small-sided games and conditioning games. And if you check elitefts.com and just search Ashley Jones Elite FTS, he has a ton of free content and articles on there too.

He's a really good resource for strength coaching stuff. But here's, this is one of his quotes. There are two types of strength coaches. One, those who are looking for work, and two, those who are about to be looking for work. And this comes back to my first point.

Your source of income outside of your career job is going to save you. You are either looking for work or about to look for work. I know it's a very negative look on the profession, how it is, but I mean, reality is reality.

I moved countries every two years for a while for different roles and different jobs. A lot of it was club structure fuckups, being offered new positions. Yeah, all sorts of random [expletive]. So either way, be prepared.

Number four, the strength conditioning profession is relatively new. And when I say relatively new, think of, I don't know, finance and [expletive] has been around for [expletive] years. S&C is maybe the 80s, maybe only formally recognized. Professional rugby was only started in 1995, and that's rugby, but obviously it's an old sport.

So again, you're still looking relatively new. And because of this, well, I wouldn't say because of this, but it is not taken very seriously or is not very well understood by upper management and some sporting coaches, which means that you're typically fighting an uphill battle.

A lot of the times people get hired based on, you know, not on performance, but on other things, which is another whole thing altogether, because how do you even judge the performance of a strength conditioning coach in an environment where all that matters is wins and losses? But regardless, that's just something you're going to have to face throughout.

Number five, you will work or you will have to work for free for many years. This is something that is probably not well understood by many new people coming through. I worked for free for basically four years.

I know when I was talking to Bill just yesterday, he also went through for however long to get through his stuff. It's just your only way to get your foot in the door. I know there's other professions that are more established where they actually pay you to intern, which is probably normal.

I think in Australia now, they forced it now where you have to pay interns. US, there's definitely not a—there are some places that pay, but it's very rare. So yeah, you will have to work free, which is tough, but it's your way to get in and learn what happens in that environment and also get to know different coaches.

Number six, I'm still yet to land a job through application. My CV has essentially been useless. Now, I will say I've landed interviews from my CV, but all the jobs I've landed has been through different connections and people I've known and worked with and all that kind of stuff.

So again, back to the interning thing. You need to really get to know different coaches, kind of show what you're doing. Obviously you add it to your CV and your CV is there, but it's not as important as probably made out to be.

Number seven, it doesn't mean all of your formal education is a waste of time. If you manage to find a role overseas, you may be required to show you are a level above what they can find in their own country. So a lot of people will say university—oh, when I say a lot of people, you'll read some stuff online—university or college is a waste of time, blah blah, you need to just go apply.

Formal education was one of the best things that I did. And I will tell you, formal education will set you apart from a lot of the shitty coaches that are on social media because you have a better understanding of what goes on, better baseline knowledge of understanding, especially if you go through a master's program. So formal education is great.

Now, it's not the be-all-end-all, of course. And if you find a role overseas—so I guess this is more geared towards coaches outside of the US trying to potentially come to the US, because this is where it really gets tricky.

The US is tricky because the US doesn't want to hire outside of the US typically. And I'm not saying the organizations don't want to, I'm saying the government doesn't want to. So they—and this is before all the current administration, everything—you got to prove, or the organization has to prove, that you are—basically they can't find anyone in the country that has the level of expertise that someone outside does. And obviously this is easier in certain sports than others.

Like if you're trying to come in as a foreigner into American football, yeah, you're probably not going to be able to show expertise over. But for things like, for example, I came in on rugby, it was relatively, I'm going to say easy—it was easier because rugby is not as an established sport here.

So there are less—there aren't people with rugby expertise. But to fulfill that kind of expertise, if you're looking to come to the states as a coach, you need to have some kind of online presence. They're literally looking at online presence.

So that shows expertise. That usually means published academic research, awards, what else? Mainly things like that. I think that's what helped me, was published academic research and stuff. Obviously having a postgraduate degree helps.

Then you got to show that you've worked internationally as well, also helps, which is a pretty big bar. So I'd done some international work and that helped as well. We had a player as part of our team—he couldn't get a visa because even though he had played overseas and everything, he didn't have a basic level of—I think he didn't have a university degree and they denied him. Crazy [expletive] like that.

So you have to show those two, and then there's one more thing and I cannot remember off the top of my head now. I'll have to find it later. But regardless, you have to show that you're a level above what is in the country. So it's just something to bear in mind if you're looking to come here.

Number eight is about the language of coaching, and I'm not talking external, internal cues and stuff. I mean the actual language that is spoken. So if you can't relate to the players or the coach doesn't speak the language well at all, player buy-in becomes very difficult. And that includes if you have translators and stuff like that.

It's not easy to ingrain yourself in another culture in another language. You know, think about, even just think of different cultures around different countries or different continents. Australia and New Zealand is very laid-back, completely different colloquialisms and sayings compared to somewhere in Europe or the US.

At least the US and Australia and New Zealand, you know, both speak English, but you get my point. I've been part of teams where the coach, the head coach, barely spoke any English and that was a very hard buy-in in an English country too.

Number nine, if you have the opportunity to work overseas, do it without hesitation. Do it. It is the best decision you'll ever make, is to move out of your hometown and work somewhere else. Trust me, do it.

Number 10, you'll only be happy in your job if you have the freedom to do and implement what you want and know is best for the athletes. You will hate every single hour of every single day if you are in a program, team, position, whatever, where you're hamstrung by what you can do because of a head coach, chief performance, or whatever, that wants to implement their random way of doing things that doesn't make any sense and you don't have the freedom to do what you need to do.

I've been there. It sucks. The best jobs and the best times I've had are when you have the freedom to be able to collaborate with coaches and implement what you know is best for the athletes. By far, those jobs are very hard to find.

Number 11, read, apply, read, apply, read, apply. It comes back to my 1B. Read and apply. I'll add write, but read. Please read. That's the one thing I want you to take from this. If you're a coach, I say this: read, read, read, read.

Number 12, train, even compete in something. Now, I understand when you work in sport, your weekends are taken up, all that kind of stuff. It's very hard to find time to actually train and compete, but it doesn't have to be at a high level.

But you, like for example, Olympic weightlifting, you can still compete in stuff like that when there's meets on certain weekends, or you can train Olympic weightlifting, strength sports, whatever it is, just something, because the interest and the buy-in and trust you'll build with your athletes is huge because they can see that you also have skin in the game.

13. Don't be in a rush. Many people in the high pay, okay, quote-unquote high pay, high level jobs, are in their late 30s and 40s. I've been around a long time. They know a lot of people, conferences, been with a lot of teams, a lot of experience. Takes time to build that.

Number 14, no team or organization is your family. Your family is at home, and you're expendable at work. Teams will love to throw this around, how they're family, this and that, all these values. But whatever is done day-to-day, how the team is run, upper management, it's all [expletive]. You're expendable, especially as an S&C coach. You're going to be the first one to be blamed for results because it's always put down to fitness every single time. It's never anything else that's done.

The only reason that your team or athlete loses or is losing is because of fitness, so bear that in mind. Number 15, join our conditioning mentorship for the latest real-world conditioning application. Guys, I've told you at the beginning, I'm telling you again now. Join that conditioning mentorship.

And that's the perfect bridge into our strength and conditioning thoughts and musings. So, let's go to number one. Injury prevention sessions are a myth. That's a holistic approach. Standing on one leg on a wobble board doing some random expletive isn't going to magically prevent knee and ankle problems.

Now, I've been into setups where the team had, I must have been 30 minutes in the morning. I think it was every training day. It was multiple times a week. They go into a room and go through a circuit. Expletive wobble boards, Bosu expletive bands, basically all the low-level expletive physio stuff that does nothing.

And when I say nothing, there's no overload. What's actually being achieved other than 30 minutes of just going through this random circuit? It's a waste of time. Injury prevention or reducing the risk of injury is a holistic problem. It's matching or managing training load across all physical, mental, stressful demands.

It's well-regulated volume and intensity and exercise selection throughout the training weeks. It's progressing things in a gradual manner. All comes back to that kind of training load aspect. Having a large movement variety, coordinative exercises, all these kind of things come together to help reduce the risk of injury.

Doing some random 30-minute wobble board circuit ain't going to do it, unfortunately. Otherwise, I would be doing it. Number two, getting strong on the basics. What does that even mean? What are the basics? And are they the same for every sport?

So when we're talking about basic movement patterns, sure we should squat, push, pull, etc. But there are many great athletes that are complete expletive at all of them yet excel at their sport. So I guess the roundabout of my thinking process around here is yes, we should probably do those movements, but they're likely overemphasized.

There are many, many athletes that are expletive squatters. In fact, I would say the best athletes in the world will be expletive lifters and you'll find really good lifters in a lot of teams that are not the best athletes.

So, that's not to say you shouldn't do these basics, but is it the same for every sport? How much does it matter? I'll also argue that context is also part of this. Just as an example, random example I've given on the podcast a lot, there are guys that if you just wrestle them they're absolute monsters but can't lift much in the gym. There's something there and I don't know what. So number three, are we doing too much?

Is the heavy emphasis on strength training dampening our athletes' outputs? And this kind of ties back to the second point here about the basics. Now, I will say that just to expand on point two, once you get to the very high levels of sport, no one is just doing the basics.

I know you'll see all over social media online that you just need to focus on the basics to get strong and then you're good, the sport will take care of itself. No one does that once you get to a very high level, the high, high levels of sport. And I mean organized sport.

I guess you could say established, maybe think Olympic institutes, AFL, NFL, NRL, Super Rugby, all that kind of stuff. No one's just doing the basics. There's a lot more you're trying to get out of the training, not just trying to pump numbers on the squat, for example.

So this kind of heavy emphasis on strength training, in my opinion, dampens outputs. So, I'm not talking about training. I'm talking about this kind of real big push to keep pushing numbers on the squat, deadlift, bench, etc., without really considering the potential. I don't want to say it's negative, but there are adaptations that we're trying to achieve for athletes for certain sports, and just pushing numbers doesn't achieve that, unfortunately.

And the heavy emphasis on the strength training takes a lot of that away. Doing less is often better than trying to do more in this instance and pushing more to, I don't want to say moving away from just this purely mechanical approach, which I'll touch on in a second, including more of a contextual coordinative style training I think kind of finds that nice middle ground.

Which kind of brings me to number four, which is the age-old question. How strong is strong enough? And I've done an entire video on this. I think I've done a podcast on this, too. And this holds true to what I wrote six years ago, and I still believe it's much, much less, much, much less than we think.

And we also have to remember strong at what? Now to answer this question very briefly, if you're having to do more volume, more frequency, or more work to add numbers to your lifts, you're probably strong enough. If you're just doing an average minimal to average dose of say heavy lifting or strength training and you're progressing, perfect.

Once you stop progressing, yeah, you probably use some more intense techniques, cluster sets and stuff, which is completely fine because you're getting different adaptations out of it. But if you're just trying to push, push, push and you're adding more and more fatigue, then that's probably a problem.

And then the second part of this is strong at what? Because every exercise is also a skill and a coordinative exercise. That's why when you look at a powerlifting cycle, for example, typically they're going from say high reps and as they're close to competition they're doing more heavy lower reps, maybe lots of singles, lots of doubles.

They're training the skill of the lift with that load and that strength or that movement. It's a skill in itself and some you develop from doing a lot of that skill. It's why when you're typically lifting only light weights, or it's one of the reasons when you're lifting say light weights, that your one rep max doesn't really move.

That's obviously if you're not a beginner and it's other than the adaptations, you just haven't trained the skill of doing that lift under heavy loads. Is that a true representation of your ability to produce force? Because it's under a skill.

It's a good proxy way. It's an easy way to measure, which is fine. But again, coming back to these phenom freak athletes that can't squat expletive but are absolute freaks on the field or in a cage or whatever, kind of makes you rethink what, strong at what?

Obviously, not everything can be measured. Squats and stuff are easy to measure. So, that's kind of where the conundrum comes. Number five, is momentum a better KPI for collision sports than pure maps velocity? This kind of comes into team sports and running sports, less combat sports.

Although, well, we can't really measure it, but momentum, obviously the transfer of momentum to the target is our effective mass and that's how we maximize punch impact force, knockout power, all that kind of stuff. Did a whole video on that on the channel.

But for collision sports and running into people, it's the exact same thing but with your entire body instead of just your fist. Momentum does in my opinion give a better KPI because it takes into account body weight. So if you have a bigger guy versus a smaller guy, the smaller guy is probably always going to be faster, but who has the most momentum?

And then into collision itself, ideally that momentum is transferred and you're able to have more line breaks. So momentum is something that's relatively easy to calculate as well since it's just mass times velocity. Number six, the most important aspect of an athlete or team's performance and success isn't down to physical capabilities.

It's down to the technical and tactical knowledge and the skill of the athlete. So, I'm not going to downplay, yes, having physical qualities is important. It's what we kind of do as strength and conditioning coaches. It's probably what you're listening to this podcast for.

But there are many athletes that succeed without a good physical preparation, say background training program for many years. They're just really damn good at the sport. They understand, they have good movement economy. They understand the sport well enough to know when to use energy, when to not.

All that kind of stuff. That technical tactical is the number one. So everything you do in the gym or outside with your strength and conditioning should revolve around what's happening within the sport. And as much as possible, try and get some of these physical qualities out of what you're doing within technical tactical training.

So join the conditioning mentorship. There's actually a lot of stuff on that too. Number seven, on preseasons. I guess you could say somewhat related to combat sports, not as much, but regardless, many organizations they run this approach within preseason. Say you've got, I don't know, 4 weeks, 8 weeks, 12 weeks, 16 weeks, there's different ranges of preseasons. They run an approach of mainly strength and conditioning at the beginning and then it's usually the sport or technical training only starting to make an entrance a few weeks into the preseason.

So some leagues only have 4 to 8 weeks where the sport will kind of come in relatively early. I think a lot of them will still run a transition approach initially for the first couple of weeks. And there are some leagues that do 3 or 4 month preseasons where the first half is all strength and conditioning based.

Huge mistake. The biggest mistake and I can't believe this is still done. It blows my mind. The technical tactical, the contact work, everything should be done from the first week. That should be the priority. The strength and conditioning can be laid on top.

You don't need fulltime training just strength conditioning. It makes zero sense. Skills, contact, everything the very first week instead of this. Usually you get the structure model where you have, I'm sure you're all familiar, high volume, low intensity, and then it kind of crosses over.

So as the volume comes down, the intensity comes up. And that's kind of like a traditional model for preseason or preparation periods. In my opinion, dog. Low volume and or low moderate volume and low intensity together is how you should start a preparation period.

And they should both go up together. And then eventually they start to diverge as volume starts to come down and intensity continues to go up. That is how you should do it in my opinion and experience.

Number eight, we have energy system development horribly wrong and it's hurting athlete preparation. Now, if you've watched any my content, Instagram, YouTube podcast, you'll kind of get where I'm coming from here. But, and if you're a part of conditioning mentorship, you'll definitely know. But energy system development still misunderstood and is being sold. Let's just say wrong, physiologically wrong because we had this kind of idea where we do aerobic work, anaerobic lactic work, alactic work.

And it's like these three systems, you're not doing anything special by trying to target these systems individually based on some protocol. Because you look at some of the protocols they given, they're going to do, well, we're going to do alactic work now.

We're going to do 10 seconds on, 10 seconds off. And it's like, what makes that alactic? Nothing. Because it's not alactic. It becomes very highly aerobic very, very quickly. Same thing with anaerobic lactic, 20 seconds on, I don't know, 40 or 60 seconds off.

Again, that becomes aerobic very, very quickly. And then you got the aerobic based stuff. Again, probably not intense enough to make the changes that you want, especially as a fighter. Obviously athlete dependent and situation dependent, but regardless, it's just a lot of these things don't make sense and it can sound like well, it's just semantics. If you've listened to some podcasts a while back with Scott Seight, a lot of the constraints approach crew, I know Scott, it's still ingrained in my head, Scott saying words have meaning.

And this was in reference to a lot of people kind of [expletive] on constraints, like CLA and games because the terminology is like it feels so pompous and it feels so uptight and I'm using all these big words.

But it's because these words have meaning. These words you can try and replace the words but doesn't quite mean the same thing if you understand what I mean. So, saying there's an affordance for movement, like that really that really ingrains what that means versus saying like maybe there's an opportunity for movement.

I mean, that's probably a pretty good swap to be honest. So, maybe that was a bad example, but you catch my drift. Words have meaning. And when we say we're doing an anaerobic workout, then we're not understanding what the adaptation we're trying to get out of it.

And if we don't understand the adaptation we're trying to get out of the session, then we might not be doing the right thing for that athlete. And that's where the issue comes in my opinion. Number nine, physiology is important for conditioning. Coming back to energy system stuff, but there's more to conditioning than just physiology because conditioning in my mind means preparation.

And my kind of conditioning or preparation triangle also includes movement efficiency and technical and tactical, technical and tactical ability. So, oh, I've got a question there in the chat. Sorry, I missed that because I had the Q&A thing on it didn't do anything.

But I'll come to that now. So movement efficiency technical tactical kind of come together and then the physiology piece that kind of underpins all of that just to come to this question. Hello how long fighter 277 how long should a block of the same sprints last specific number of like every two weeks depends on the data.

So can change weekly might change every two weeks. It just kind of depends what's coming through. If you don't have any data to go by every two weeks is probably fine. Number 10. My number one method, again, this is probably not related to combat sports, but for sprinting, my number one method for reaching max velocity in training without worrying about hamstrings.

So, I had this problem. We were in training camp in the middle of winter. We were changing fields often. So, we were going from grass to turf. And if you've ever been part of world play sports, like grass turf, like guys would pull up with funny shin like shin problems, all sorts of stuff.

It was more of winter so it was like icy and snow as well. So it was cold as f outside and we're about to go do some speed stuff on an artificial turf and I was calling Vern Gambetta about this about what the hell I can do without worrying about hamstrings and [expletive]. And he gave me this really cool thing that I've been using to this day with a gear change.

So basically you have the athletes work out from say they kind of come out from the try line they're running 50% and they increase their speed gradually and you just give them this block say in this 50 meters. So in this 50 meters you have to work up to 90 95% and then when you feel ready you do 8 to 12 steps at 100%.

So they kind of build their way up so you don't have the sharp acceleration. Once they get close to max velocity you have them do 8 to 12 steps at max speed and then they just coast out. That has been money never had problems.

So if you're trying to do sprint work maybe for combat sports things like that or speed work is something you can do as well. Number 11. Can block periodization for team sports and I guess for combat sports just disappear? I hate block periodization in the traditional sense of we're going to do a hypertrophy phase then a max strength phase.

In combat sports, it's horrible because you have guys taking short notice fights, waiting for opportunities. For example, one of my athletes just just fought. He had a nine day nine days notice. Imagine if we were going through a hypertrophy block, high volume, you know, hard sets closer to failure, very little of everything else.

And then we get a nine-day call up. You can kind of see the issues there. Number 12, traditional overload versus a coordinative approach. Don't sway too far to the side. This comes back to my strength stuff of too much heavy resistance training and that kind of stuff.

I'm bang smack in the middle of this one. I know there are people that are just like purely, so coordinative approach would be things like Frans Bosch style. How would you call it? I mean, it's just called a coordinative approach, I guess.

If you looked at if you looked at some of the exercises, it would just look like a bunch of dog [expletive] online, but there is use behind it. And traditional side would be like your typical squat bench deadlift. Basically trying to like improve physical capabilities through more force, more speed.

Coordinative is like contextual trying to, trying to deepen the movements that are present within the main movements of the sport. So for example sprinting if I'm trying to improve sprinting in a gym context within a coordinative approach I'm trying to strengthen the movements that always occur regardless of the environment what's happening in front of me.

So, foot from above is one that I would use within team sports, and that is trying to have the foot kind of strike down. And that needs to happen regardless if I'm holding a ball, whether I'm passing, whether I'm turning, whether there's someone in front of me, someone not in front of me, different surfaces, all that kind of stuff.

And that's just one of the requisites of speed within that model. So you can train that with certain things in the gym. You can train that kind of pre-tension. Same thing with this idea of hip lock, trying to get one hip higher than the other.

You can strengthen that within the gym. And I think it provides a really good bridge between your general warmup and your main like say lifting stuff in between. It also gives a nice bridge between what's happening on the field or within training and what's happening in the gym.

So athletes kind of piece it together and you're giving the same message on the field and in the gym. So it's reinforced all the time. That's what I really really like about it. It doesn't, it makes sure that you don't have these isolated things like this is just gym and then this is just fighting.

No, kind of comes together. Number 13, don't be afraid to experiment. You'll learn a lot more about a topic trying to apply it with your athletes than thinking about it. And this is for coaches and athletes. I'll always experiment. You know what the meat and potatoes of the program are.

That's always in there. But you might experiment with a few different things, a few different movements, a few different ways of doing things, maybe a different session structure. Always keep experimenting because you will find stuff that you like or don't like or your athletes like.

And it's far more valuable doing that than kind of seeing something and being like, I wonder if that will work or not. Just try, see what does. Number 14. Games are still horribly underrated. You need to play more of them. Games are everything in sport.

Athletes are like little kids. You can play little kids games. I play little kids games with professional international level athletes and they love it. Love it. And I'm talking think foxes and rabbits. You have a burp or a t-shirt hanging out the back of someone's shorts.

That's the rabbit. And the fox is trying to catch the rabbit. And if they catch the rabbit, that rabbit now becomes a fox. That's a kids game. Awesome. There's like a ton of them.

You can play different ball games. You can use different balls, different grid sizes, walking, jogging, running, a ton of them. You can play so many different games. And then combat sports, your typical ones, knee touches, toe touches. I guess a lot of the CLA games are now kind of coming in now, those are all great, too.

There just needs to be less structure in a lot of different things and they make great warm-ups. Less structure is awesome for morale, developing general physical qualities, all that kind of stuff. Upgrade in the chat. Happy birthday, mate. Thanks for all your replies and goal content from New Zealand. Thank you very much. I love that there are some Kiwis on here. Isn't it late as for you?

Number 15. Strength finishing can be implemented with sport coaching a whole lot more. Working with skills and sport coaches can help design drills that has the coaches involved in the sessions. Now, I guess this is more geared towards coaches again, but strength conditioning is not an isolated thing within sport. This is the hard thing in combat sports though because a lot of there's no in-house team like you just got up to train.

Damn it, it is early for you. There's no in-house team. So think of like rugby, Olympic sports, anything, NFL, whatever. You're all in house. You're all with the same people all the time. You plan everything together. Everything's kind of put together.

Even though all of organizations still do a job of bringing it together, but at least you're all there. In combat sports, it doesn't happen. There's no money. So there's no full-time S&C coach at the place working with the head MMA coaches or whatever to design proper structured training because most places don't have just a whole stable of pro fighters that are fighting full-time and that kind of stuff.

So but for other sports that do you need to design and work with skill and sport coaches to get the outcomes you want. For example really easy example is agility development. Agility development is dog [expletive] in a lot of places. Random cone drills running through ladders, all that kind of [expletive] does nothing.

Agility is contextual. It has to be imposed from the environment because it's a decision making process. Now the physical qualities obviously there physical qualities underpin agility which you can develop through the gym stuff even some change of direction stuff whatever but it's contextual which means you can work with skills coaches to design scenarios that are situational to the game that they want to also work on and they can be combined together and that's like perfect.

You get your speed, you get your agility stuff done and you get your contextual stuff done different scenarios. It's like the perfect blend. So in rugby might be different counterattacking drills, three on twos, two on ones, people entering grids different ways. You might even pair that with pure speed chasing games within that.

There's a ton you can do. You could probably do the same within combat sports. You could have areas that a fighter is maybe not so does not perform so well in. So, it could be being against the cage in MMA or being against the corner in boxing and having to work your way, designing rounds and games that forces an athlete to have to fight their way out or find a way out from different scenarios like that.

And these can be planned with the sport coach. You can do different round times. You can look at different constraints. All these different things kind of come together to make a well-rounded strength training program that involves the sport. Number 16, the hyperfocus on aerobic base and MAS intervals is under cooking athletes.

And this kind of comes back to this traditional energy system model. Again, I don't know many if any teams pro teams that actually do like pure low intensity zone 2 work that I know of. I know I've never put athletes through that and I know a lot of other coaches that haven't either.

It seems to be more of a health and wellness podcast thing that's kind of coming through lately. Even though and I guess a con thing, but depending on a lot of different things, the training schedule, all that kind of stuff, you're likely under cooking yourself if you're just trying to do a ton of rubber base work.

Now, MAS intervals, yeah, it's a good way of just getting some high intensity work in, but again, we're missing the very very high end that's going to give us these sharp gains and the peripheral adaptations that we're after. So just bear that in mind.

Number 17 to follow on from that, you can do high intensity and sprint interval conditioning year round and continue to make gains. And this is against conventional wisdom that will tell you that gains cap out after 6 weeks if you're doing high intensity and you need an aerobic base to make sure that these I don't know that you make good progress.

Yes, you should have a relatively decent base. Now I'm doesn't have to be great. Just have to have a decent level of general fitness and then you can layer on these high intensity modalities and you can do it year round. This the kind of capping of six weeks of gains is only when you're looking at things like VO2 max, anaerobic capacity, anaerobic power, all that kind of stuff, which I don't really give a [expletive] about.

I don't care if that's capping out if performance keeps going. If performance keeps going and we're still seeing changes on physiology, who cares? It doesn't even matter. That's the kind of whole point this kind of where this misunderstanding is of intensity. And it kind of brings me to point 18 is you need intensity during conditioning to continually drive adaptation especially in high-intensity intermittent sports which combat sports will kind of fall under.

And it's this intensity as you become more well trained you need the intensity to continue pushing. It's when you become more well trained in the gym I can't be I can't be squatting 100 kgs for five for eight weeks in a row. You know I need more. Same thing in the kind of conditioning world. And you'll find it a lot easier to understand conditioning when you kind of bring it back to the strength world.

Like am I just going to keep adding volume? And in the gym you're probably not going to keep adding volume, but within conditioning we often just look at adding more volume. And this is something just to kind of think about.

19 coming back to this kind of momentum idea. Well, momentum into contact is important for dominating the collision. So that would be same thing with your fist into someone's face. The forgotten aspect is the transfer of momentum. Effective mass is what delivers the knockout boy. So again, effective mass, Seth Laneski's I guess you could say seminar work in this area.

Definitely the leading punch researcher in this topic. Go listen to the three podcast with Seth, the gold mine on this stuff. But it's just transfer and we can develop effective mass. It's a skill and that skill can be developed usually from hitting the heavy bag is the best, most specific, most efficient way of developing effective mass.

And it's just years of experience doing it. That's going to get you there. So, go make sure you do that. Another question from fight to 277. How would you progress from 10/10 or 10/15s? Would that be the limit? That is not the limit.

There are more disgusting protocols if you're looking to further improve recovery. If you're doing those and you're maintaining over 1,000 watts on all 10, then you're probably looking at like 12 on 8 offs, 15 on 8 offs, 15 on 10 offs, that kind of disgusting [expletive] I do not wish that on anyone.

I have not even gone that far myself because I've had one athlete that I had do I think one or two sets of 15/8 and then into just normal 10 cuz I was like I don't think I'm going to be able to get them 6 15/8s cuz their data looked really good.

Like they were crushing 10/10. It's like I got to make these I got to make these harder to keep getting adaptation which is one of the horrible things about sprint intervals is that as you get better at them they just get worse.

So yeah, you can progress like that. Two more. Number 20. Zone 2 is doing sweet [expletive] all and well trained in intermittent sporting athletes. Kind of touched on this already. I did an entire Instagram carousel on this. There's an entire Instagram carousel on this recently.

You can go check that out. It's the one of Bonnie Blue spitting in a dude's mouth. If you're not familiar, just go check it. That's such a good that's such a good picture, I had to meme it because it just it gets the engagement every time and then I can get the message across.

But this idea that doing more and more zone 2 is giving you more mitochondria and whatnot. Well, when you look at the research, it's probably not. And then when you look at the muscle data during zone two, you'll see that it's not stressful enough to really do anything. So, yeah.

Follow question here. And if the 10 is the magical number, what would be like 6/6 or with things like 6/6 being more beneficial? The problem with 6 seconds is that takes often take depending on the equipment you're using, it often takes too long to kind of get going.

Even though you have a lead in, you still want more time and you want to be able to hold on to some of that power. So 6 seconds you get to peak and then you maybe have a few seconds after peak. Whereas at 10 seconds you got much longer after peak to kind of hold that on.

So 10 is, 8 seconds maybe as low as I go, but usually 10 up to about 15, 20. How often for 158? Depends what you've been doing, but usually I sit in that one to two minute of work range. That will give you an easy guideline to use. You can play around on there.

The final one on my 36 musing or thought: train for the adaptation you want. The external output is the side effect. Funnily enough, this kind of ties everything together really well. I don't know how I put this together in this format, but here we go.

So the adaptation, we pick the exercises, the set and reps, the intensities, structures of the sessions, whatever. We put that all together for the adaptation stimulate. We use that stimulus for these particular adaptations.

Now, of course, it's never going to be black or white. It's not like I do this, I get this. It's like I do this, I get probably predominantly this and then I probably get a ton of other things. But the idea is that as we do this, the external output or the weight on the bar, the metrics that come back, they're the side effect of that training.

So instead of worrying about we need to do these numbers, we need to push to these numbers, which comes back to the strong thing, we just want to be like we want this stimulus, we want to use a relatively heavy load, and then over time this will go up or this will get faster or this will get more powerful, like in sprint intervals as an example, as a side effect of the consistent loading that we're doing. And if you're doing something consistently, these things will improve.

And same thing, sprint intervals, this idea that 10 on 10 off is a lactic capacity and because there's not enough rest, you're not developing power. Wrong. All of that is wrong. All of that is so wrong. It makes me mad.

One, if you've done a bout of heart sprint intervals when you're doing 10, 15 or 10 for weeks, you will see your maximum power increase weekly. Weekly. And you'll also see that your average power also increases weekly. How? How if I'm doing, if I don't have enough rest?

Well, because it's [expletive]. Yes, if you want to maximize power development and that is your main goal, you should have more rest. But this idea that you're not developing power because you're not resting long enough is [expletive]. Every, you always get everything. You're just not going to get all of one thing, if that makes sense.

And then I forgot my train of thought from there because that made me mad. Regardless, the numbers that you get, the weight on the bar is the side effect of the training you're doing.

So that should bring me to the end. If you enjoyed this, leave a comment. I don't know. Get in the bloody conditioning mentorship, you guys. Holy [expletive] man. There's how many of you on my email list that I've been emailing that and a bunch of you that watch this?

You're literally getting to learn from Dr. Andrew Asha and Dr. John Badry's work in a way that is being applied. Okay. When I'm talking to every professional sport, I'm talking MLB players, NFL players, Premier League soccer players, obviously the combat sport side, [expletive] Premiership rugby players.

I'm talking every major sporting league has Andre Ash's footprint on it somewhere in some way or form through, I guess you'll say, consulting. You can literally access that and learn directly from him all this stuff and more and how to use it yourself with your own athletes or your own conditioning.

And it is a gold mine and is a bloody bargain. Holy [expletive] man. Some of these courses that you see out there are stupid expensive and they give you nothing. This is ridiculous what you get. The stuff you, I don't know.

I can't, it's almost like I can't say it without sounding like a [expletive] salesman person, but I can't tell you how much I believe in it. That's why I partnered on this. I can't tell you how much this has changed my views on conditioning and the way I do things.

I can't, there's just no words for it other than the content I put out I guess, and it's done the same for so many others in how they put together, and not just guys working in different pro sports and Olympic programs and things like that, but also we've had guys come through that have no sport science or coaching backgrounds pick this up and use it. That's how simplified it gets.

Yes, some of the physiology can be heavy, which is just there to kind of hopefully give you a little bit of background understanding, but you don't need to remember and know it all. You just need to understand what's happening with heart rate and why and stuff like that.

Trust me. So make sure you get in there. I'll have links down in the description. And if you have anything else, just hit me up on Instagram and everything else. And I'll catch you guys in the next podcast.