Special Strength Training For Fighters & Bondarchuk Periodization w/ Martin Bingisser (SSOF Ep 133)

James de Lacey1:16

So maybe you want to jump in there and just, okay, what even is specificity or special strength training?

Martin Bingisser2:07

Yeah, I mean, it's a bit of a rabbit hole. And when you have these terms like specific training or functional training, and they're all slightly different definitions, but you have also within those complete bastardization of the term. So people can really go off the deep end and lose sight of what the original intent was.

And I know Vern's been a mentor to both you and me. And he's, quote unquote, the founder of functional training. And most things done in the name of functional training nowadays would drive him crazy.

And Bondarchuk, who's really one of the—I wouldn't say founding fathers of specific strength—but he's one of the ones who really helped popularize the concept and importance there. You know, if he looks at a lot of the stuff people are doing in the name of specific strength now, it would drive him crazy.

So for me, I think how I look at specific strength is really trying to focus on the movement of your sport and trying to overload some element of it. So you're basically trying to break down your sport a bit and overload it.

And the difference between traditional strength training and specific strength training is that it's going to start to bring in some of the technical elements of your sport, some of those specific movement patterns, whereas general strength training is not. And we can talk about Vern Trogg's exercise classification if you want, but at a high level, that's how I look at it: is trying to really hone in on some of the specific movements and trying to overload those in specific ways.

James de Lacey3:19

When does it go, or when does it go too far? When you're just not overloading anything, is that just how you're seeing it?

Martin Bingisser3:43

Yeah, I think a lot of people focus on things that look similar, so they focus on that movement part, but they lose sight of what they're actually overloading. And on the one hand, there might not even be any overload. You know, a lot of band exercises they look cool, but are you really getting much of a stimulus from a small band or something like that, enough to really drive any type of change or adaptation?

But the other thing is, movement is complex, and what part of the movement you want to overload, how you think about that is going to be a key driver in whether it's actually going to affect performance.

For example, in the hammer throw, we have several different elements. It's a closed skill sport, so it's relatively simple when you compare it to rugby, which is a sport we've both been involved in and talked about a lot, or martial arts or something like that, where you have a hundred different movement variations that could be combined a hundred different ways, and you have basically infinite types of movements.

The hammer throw, we're basically doing one type of thing, but within that you have the starting movement, you have the middle phase, you have the release phase, and all these different things. And you might look at something and say, "Okay, this looks really close to the starting phase of the throw, so we're going to overload that and we're going to use that in training."

But if you take a step back, maybe the start of the throw only contributes 3% to the performance. So you're overloading a part that's not really that important. So that's something I think people can lose sight of. Or what does the athlete really need to work on? Maybe the start of their throw is already in the top 1%.

Overloading that probably not going to get them much benefit. They need to work on some other element to actually get better. So doing that analysis and figuring out, okay, what part of the movement do we want to overload? What are the athlete's strengths that we want to build on? What are the athlete's weaknesses that we need to work on? Those types of things.

And doing that analysis and then seeing where do we want to develop some exercises, instead of just saying, "This looks pretty similar, let's do that," and we just assume it's going to get better.

James de Lacey5:37

When people hear overload, they may think, "Okay, overloading exercise, that means we're just going to add weight to it." Is that all you're thinking, or are you thinking further? Hey, maybe we can overload the speed or other aspects?

Martin Bingisser5:37

Exactly. I mean, that's part of it. You can overload the weight, you can overload the speed, you can overload the intensity. So, for example, in a fighting sport or something, maybe you're doing a block of sparring, but with, let's say you throw five punches every 30 seconds—I'm just making up numbers here because I know nothing about this—but your goal is going to be, okay, in a 30-second block we're going to throw 10 punches.

So you're overloading there, also on a fitness component as well, trying to get more movement within that block of time. In the hammer throw, we throw a 16-pound hammer, so 7 kilos. We can also throw a 5-kilo hammer, so that's going to be overloading the speed element because we're going faster than we would normally. We can throw heavier.

There's a lot of different elements you can impact to get overload. But the thing is, you're trying to get some variation. If you're just doing the same thing over and over, you're probably not going to get better. So trying to figure out how you can get that variation.

And I guess to take a step back, too, there is an element in specific strength of looking like the sport, but it's a fallacy to assume the more it looks like the sport, the more it will help. It has to have some connection to the sport, but in here, the concept of dynamic correspondence is great to help coaches dive into detail about what are the elements that make an exercise an exercise.

But you can get lost in a rabbit hole there a bit as well and lose sight again of what the athlete really needs. I don't remember all the elements of dynamic correspondence, but it's talking about the amplitude of the movement and the intensity and all these types of elements.

And it's a great tool for understanding, but it's not a very good tool that a coach can pull out on the spot and use. A good example of that, like I say, in the hammer throw it's a very rotational sport. We're generating a lot of strength from, quote unquote, core, from the middle, and rotating around.

We have to keep good stiffness in the middle so we have a good center of axis of rotation that we're pushing around. And so we do a lot of just simple plate twists. You hold a plate out in front of you and you twist back and forth. I mean, very old school training.

The old Soviet videos from the 50s, they're doing the same exact thing. But that's a key element of our training. It's nothing special, it's nothing sexy. But when you look at a plate twist, there are probably 50 different variations of a plate twist. And two examples would be you can have your arms fully extended out in front of you straight front and twist back and forth, or a different variation would be you have your elbows enclosed to your body and just have your forearms straight out in front.

And if you look at the dynamic correspondence point of view and even if you use the eyeball test, it would tell you okay, the arms straight out in front of you is going to be more like the hammer throw. The hammer throw length is super important. We're always fighting the resistance to pull, and the more you pull the implement closer to you, you're slowing it down. So you want to let it be free, let it get further away, and that's going to increase the speed.

So if you use all these measures of what is more specific, everything would tell you the longer version. The only issue is with the arms extended version, your limiting factor is not your core strength, what you're trying to build. It's your shoulder strength. These big strong guys doing a 25 kilo plate back and forth is nothing. I've seen some of the top hammer throwers, they'll hold 2, 25 kilo plates. I can't even lift that up. But the reason I can't lift it up is not my core issue, it's a shoulder strength issue and a shoulder stability.

So your limiting factor when you're holding your arms out is your shoulders. And then so you start to think, well, if we're really trying to train the core, maybe having the arms closer is a bit better because then we're really focusing more on those muscles instead of on the shoulder muscles. So that's just one example of you have to look and see okay, what does the athlete need?

If they have that shoulder strength, great, put the arms out straight. It's going to look more like the hammer. But if not, don't be afraid to take something that looks maybe a little bit less like the sport but is better isolating what you actually want to train.

James de Lacey9:29

That's a good point. I've got a few things written down. I'm going to probably do them in a random order that won't make sense. But I want to come back to the special strength exercises, and we talked about overload. And you mentioned about obviously you're trying to, there's many different factors to what you may be looking to overload in the exercise.

One that comes to mind for me is where you might be overloading, say, the wrong thing or maybe the thing that you don't want to overload. For example, you've probably seen it in rugby when they have the bands around the hips and they're trying to go into a ruck and someone behind them's pulling them. You see it in grappling as well. You see sometimes people doing exactly the same thing. They're trying to pass guard and they have a band behind them pulling them back.

But in reality there's no one pulling you in those positions, and it's changing the position when you go into the ruck. I'm turning to your thoughts around, I don't even if I had a question on the back of that, but your thoughts around using those things where it might not make sense in the grand scheme of things.

Martin Bingisser10:37

I agree. I mean, in a rugby scenario too, pulling someone back is going to shift their weight forward. And that's exactly the opposite of what we want because in a real life ruck situation, if you're too far forward you're going to be off your feet and you're going to get called for it. So you want to make sure that your balance is back a bit so you can enter the ruck in a strong low position but balanced.

And so that's part of it. And if you're going to take a shock, it's going to be coming from the front. So you want to be aware of those factors and take those into place. In a ruck type of scenario, trying to clear out heavier athletes or again trying to think about the intensity part of view, you set up rucks typically if you have basic ruck cleaning technique.

The issue is not necessarily the technique, but it's getting in position soon enough to be able to clear the ruck and being able to recover enough for the next. So you're cycling to the next ones over and over.

And so trying to figure out okay, what's the limiting factor there and how can we emphasize that? So maybe that's working on the specific fitness point of view so that you're up off your feet quicker. As Eddie Jones just always says, the longer you're on your feet, the longer you aren't playing the game. Get up on your feet, you can play, you can view the field, you can get in position better, and then you can clean out the next ruck a bit better.

Trying to create scenarios where you have to get a quick reaction time to get to the next one is probably going to be an overload in a different way but maybe more specific. Also putting the smaller guys against the bigger guys so they really have to have a challenge to work and get low. If you have a big guy against a small guy, it's easy to clear out the fly half when you're a prop. But if you're a prop trying to clear out a fly half, you really have to get the right position. You really have to get low and get that leverage.

So trying to find those types of things I think are probably going to be more effective. But it takes, first of all, you have to define okay, why is my team struggling in the rucks if that's the issue, and then develop some drills around that. And also it's going to be a lot of talk with the sport coaches who understand the game and how to do it.

I think that's another thing with specific strength, we hear the word strength and we think weight room, and a lot of these solutions are going to be coming from how can we manipulate the game on the field a bit. Or even, you know, even if it's with the bands, you're still out on the field. You're in a more live environment.

There's a rock climbing coach here in Zurich I was talking to a while ago this summer. We were talking about specific strength. And it's a perfect example. Specific strength for rock climbing in the gym, you can do all kinds of pull-up variations, and you're good. Yes you can. That hopefully, if you're in rock climbing and you're trying to replicate that in the gym, you can do all kinds of pull-up variations.

You can do one arm pull-ups, you can do one finger pull-ups, you can do all this kind of stuff. But in the end, you're kind of limited and it's a lot of upper body overload type stuff. And the legs are quite involved in actual climbing and you're not really integrating those.

And so I was asking him how does he do specific strength, and it's how he sets up the routes on the wall. If an athlete is having trouble doing overhangs, he's going to have them train extra overhangs and harder overhangs. If they're having trouble getting really fine grips with their hands, then he's going to integrate a lot of those. If they're having trouble getting heel holds or something, he's going to integrate those a lot into the route.

So he's trying to identify okay, where's the athlete's weakness here? Some athletes are good at power moves, some athletes are good at ones that require a lot of mobility and these types of things. It's trying to figure out what the athlete needs to work on and designing routes for them to use in training based on that. They do a ton of general strength training, they do all that kind of stuff too. But the specific strength stuff is not going to be found in the gym for them.

And for majority of sports, not to discount what we do in the gym because that's also important and that's not to be overlooked, the general strength stuff is a huge element in all sports. But the specific strength stuff is more likely to be found outside the gym.

James de Lacey14:11

No, it reminds me of exceeding game speed and all sorts of stuff in rugby we used to do. And then you reminded me as well of the ruck thing. We actually designed something with the sport coaches a while ago where we were hitting rucks. But the other element is the decision making of what type of clean out you're going to do based on what their person's coming in.

Not to turn this into a rugby podcast, but essentially the guy coming in has to make one of three decisions: clean the ruck and then get to the next one. So it's a specific fitness component. You're overloading by hitting a certain number of rucks in that time period, but then you have to make the decision for each ruck as well. So there's probably things you could take from that to potentially design some, like in combat sports.

There's one thing that's one thing I still want to do so bad, but I'm not sure how it would be possible yet unless you had someone. I need to link...

I need to link you up with Dr. Andre user as well for his conditioning stuff. But he's got like 3D bloody cameras and that going on so you can analyze what's going on, find the peak periods and what's happening in sparring or a match, and then design actual sparring sessions or whatever to exceed the work rate in the peak periods of those fights or whatever is happening.

There's so much that could go on there, but it is complex because you can't just wear GPS or you can't just wear wearables because they're going to, or often because they come off, or if it's competition you can't wear their stuff. But there's some cool stuff that could come out of something like that.

And then I did want to touch on—we talked about the hammer throw with the plate twist and I wanted to come back to overload. Because when, as we mentioned, we overload, we're overloading maybe the load, that load itself to overload force, overload velocity. But what about, for example, a coordination overload, AKA Bosch style? I know we've both gone down that road as well through various people, and the water bag is probably synonymous with that. So for example, doing that same exercise with the water bag, where and why would that play into a special strength exercise?

Martin Bingisser16:03

We do use the water bags quite a bit. I mean, I feel like those have gone in and out of fashion, and also in my own training I've used them more or less, but they're still a constant and we still cycle them in. Mostly to add a bit of variation because I think there's something that can be—I mean, I use them in a similar way to a lot of the medball stuff for my hammer throwers, but it's just a little bit different stimulus.

One, a couple of ways I like water bags in training: one, if we're just doing a simple twist with the arms out, you get a nice auditory feedback. So you're getting a feedback loop to the athlete about whether they're doing well or not. The faster you're moving back and forth, the louder the water's sloshing back and forth, and you can hear that. So if you're just going through the motions going back and forth—which, that's one of my pet peeves with medballs, is a lot of people just go through the motions—it's just a soft sound.

But if you're going back and forth it sounds like, a big storm's coming in on the beach. So first and foremost, you get that feedback for the athlete. But also one of the things I like is it's not a constant load. The faster you go, then the harder it is to change directions. So it's a bit like a flywheel type of situation where the faster you're going on the flywheel, the harder it is to stop, and the more eccentric or the more acute eccentric phase you have there.

Same thing with the aqua bag. Once you get that water moving from left to right, if you want to switch and go from right to left, instead of being—the water might weigh 5 kilos, it's going to have 10 kilos of force. Again, I'm not a biomechanist, so I'm just making up numbers here. But you not only have to stop the implement, you have to stop the inertia of the water inside of it and go back. So that's an advantage there.

And what we might do, for example, is in the hammer throw we use four turns, and to do four turns well you have to have a nice center of mass, a good axis of rotation. You want to be in the middle. If you're too off on one side or the other side, you're going to be thrown off. If you pike forward too much, for example, it's going to make it hard to accelerate.

So what we'll do often is we'll do one turn in one direction and then have the athlete stop on a dime and go back the other direction. To be able to do that, it's really forcing them to have that core stability and the chest up posture as they hit that zero position and go back the other way. If they're not in that position, you'll notice it as a coach—they're not able to turn on the spot and stop on the spot.

So again, you get the feedback as an athlete and as a coach: are they able to accomplish that? Because the coordination demands are a bit harder. If they don't have the strength to hold that position, they're not going to be able to execute the coordination.

So for me, that's one example. That extra stimulus really exposes an athlete if they're out of posture. And same thing, Bosch uses that a lot more in the sprinting environment as well too. And the idea is, if you're focusing on keeping your posture or something like that and you're not in that position, you're not going to be able to hold it. So it exposes it because it puts a bit more coordinative demand on that. So it really exposes your weaknesses.

So that's one example we use on the rotational side. It's the same type of movement, but you're getting a slightly different stimulus. And really, it depends: are we really focusing on the force generation element of the rotation, or are we focusing on the posture element? So once we get to the posture elements and that more coordinative type of thing, then we'll put in the aqua bags a bit more.

James de Lacey19:29

It sounds like there's a lot of, say, trunk or quote unquote core work with these movements. So when you're doing more general strength exercises, are you still attacking the trunk or core through more general means, like a lot of people will default to like planks, side planks, dead bugs, whatever else? Does that stuff make up a large portion of that training, or is it just, hey, we're doing all this other stuff, we don't really need to do all that?

Martin Bingisser19:53

I mean, we're doing a lot supplemental. I'm not a big fan of the real basic plank, sit-ups and stuff like that. So we're typically making it a little bit more—I don't have to go into detail why. I just don't—the plank, for example, again, it's not very specific because typically the only way you're—the way most people continue to overload a plank is just more time, and that's the time element is not really relevant to our sport. And it's also in a very controlled environment. You're not moving. I mean, every sport we're doing, we're moving, and it's just holding an isometric position.

So we'll do plank-like movements. We do a lot of stuff with rings, so ring extensions or barbell rollouts where you're trying to hold that core stability throughout a range of motion. So like I said, we'll do a lot of plank-like movements in that regard, or with the rings, extensions or one-arm extensions or Iron Crosses or things like that. We're really working a bit more dynamically through a range of movement, holding the core stability. So similar area, but maybe like one step more advanced.

And we do a lot more also eccentric type of stuff with the core. I think I talked about medballs—a lot of people go through the motions. You tell someone to do a chest pass back and forth 10 times, and it's just you're not getting a lot of stimulus because it's not a super heavy load.

But for our shot putters, for example, I basically just have them go toward each other and say, take it—instead of a chest pass, have it up by your neck two-handed and do a two-handed shot put back and forth. And you get these big strong dudes—just to catch the ball is a huge stimulus. And so you're getting that eccentric component for one person to catch it and throw it back. And you see how many seconds does it take you to get 10 reps. So you're really getting them to force it back and forth a bit more.

And that's a bit more upper body, but we can do the same thing with like a side throw. So, you sling it from your hip to your partner, crop across to their other side, back and forth 10 times. You're getting a huge load just from catching it, and then it's a lot more elastic movement as well, where you have to catch—or plyometric, you could say—from catching and then throwing it back.

So, trying to take those basic exercises—instead of just a standard medball, would be a chest pass or a Russian twist—back and forth to a partner. And those—not that those don't have benefits, but I think you capture the benefits of those pretty early stage in your career. And so trying to find a stimulus that'll keep pushing the athlete forward, you need to amp it up a little bit. So that's where we try to make it a bit more reactive throws, a bit more plyometric in that regard.

James de Lacey22:40

That's a good segue into the exercise classification you mentioned earlier, Bondarchuk's exercise classification. Don't—maybe just run through that and how that works I guess within the sport and within the program.

Martin Bingisser22:40

So I alluded to it a little bit already, and he tries to break...

Things down into four categories. The first is the competitive exercise. That's your sport. In the hammer throw it's throwing the hammer. In complex sports it's a bit more difficult because, as I said, you have so many different movements and stuff, but essentially playing your sport.

Then he has specific developmental exercises, which are breaking that sport down into its parts. So into specific movements, trying to overload those. That's what we've been talking about here, the specific strength type.

Then he has specific preparatory exercises. That's where you're using the same muscles and energy systems as your sport, but in different types of movements. So as a hammer thrower, doing a squat or a clean or something like that, I'm using the leg muscles, I'm using them explosively. All that, it just doesn't look like the hammer throw. So they're specific in the regards we're using the same muscles and we're developing them explosively, but it looks different.

And then you have general preparatory exercises. That's going to be the work capacity work we do, or things that are used in different energy systems, different muscles, the warm-ups, all that auxiliary stuff on top of it.

So that's the four categories. It may be less precise than some of the other exercise classification systems. You could sit here all day and debate, is this—is some small-sided game, is that a competitive exercise or is that a specific developmental exercise? And in the end, it's a tool to help you better plan your training, and you don't need to really nitpick on the details.

What's important for Bondarchuk and what's important for me is you understand how much work you're doing in each category, and you need to be doing work in each category. If you only—you might think the more specific stuff is more important, but if you only do specific stuff, you're going to hit a ceiling.

You see this all the time with the 12-year-old tennis phenomenons who just play only tennis. They don't have that athletic potential to reach the next level. So they might have the best technique in the world and the best game sense, but they're just slow and they don't have the endurance for five-set championship matches.

So you need all those categories, but you need a balance of them, and you also need to realize the priorities of them. With Bondarchuk, we would often train 10 times a week, so we'd have 10 sessions, and we would throw 10 sessions a week. But we would also squat 10 sessions a week. And so people—they forget, they focus on all the specific stuff.

We might do two sets at 60%, it might not be super heavy, but we're doing that general work every single session and it accumulates with volume over time. So he really placed importance on that. But like I said, you need all of that, but you want to keep your priorities the same. You want to understand your priorities.

And the priority is going to be the competitive sport. If you want to be a better fighter, that's your goal, and you can't lose sight of that. And you can't get so wrapped up in the weightlifting that you're doing five heavy gym sessions a week, two or three times heavy squat, you get on the mat and you're just dead, you can't grapple. And that's a situation where your third priority, let's say—if you categorize them by priorities—your third priority is overweighing your first priority.

And by taking an inventory of what work am I doing in what category, am I doing something in each category—because I need to be doing it—and are the priorities still there, you can get an overview of is my training plan in the right direction. So that's, I think, the real usefulness of that tool, is to get an overview of are you doing the right type of work and are you doing it in the right type of quantities and priorities.

James de Lacey26:31

You mentioned you're throwing but you're also squatting in those 10 sessions as well. So does that mean every session you're always touching on every single one of the exercise classifications, and you don't even have a day where it's we're just doing specific stuff or just doing general stuff, et cetera?

Martin Bingisser26:31

You can do it in different ways. What we would typically do is do a little bit of everything every session. So we'd warm up 10, 15 minutes, we'd throw for 30, 40 minutes, and then we'd do 15, 20 minutes in the gym to close it out, and we'd do that every session.

You could also do, if you had two sessions a day, you do a morning session the specific stuff, an afternoon session the general stuff. You could do two sessions specific, one session general. You can split it up however you want.

His preference was, especially in a highly technical sport where you're really trying to refine small—like a centimeter or two of difference in technique can be huge difference—and we've taken tens of thousands of reps, so you need a huge number of reps just to make a change. More short sessions technically was benefiting us because we were fresher and we had a better feeling for it. And so he chose to break it up that way.

But in another sport you might do it differently. In a team sport you might have to do it differently just because of player availability. So it's not necessarily that's better or worse, but that's just how we set it up in our training environment.

James de Lacey27:44

How do you think it would—I guess if someone wanted to go down the Bondarchuk route for combat sports, like a more chaotic version, or even rugby—I guess they're both pretty similar in terms of setups in terms of number of trainings people are doing a week, et cetera. How does that fit together? Could someone take the system and potentially use it quote-unquote successfully in that, or is it just—the sport is so, there's so much to do in that sport that it's very hard to implement something like this?

Martin Bingisser28:05

I think you could definitely do it. I think what you would need to look at is how much time you have to prepare for each match or fight, or whatever you want to say. And what I see sometimes from afar in combat sports is you might have an 8-week buildup or 12-week buildup, and then onto the next one, onto the next one, onto the next one. So there's not a lot of long-term planning involved there because you're just looking at the next fight in front of you.

But I think if you're able to take that long-term outlook, even across three, four blocks, I think it could work well. It's hard to really work on everything at once. I'm not a proponent of block periodization for the most part, because how block periodization is traditionally sold is you work exclusively on one thing, or predominantly on one thing, to the exclusion of others.

And in a sport like yours, you need to work—you can't just neglect one area, especially if you have a fight coming up. Like if your ground-based work is the focus, you can't just neglect your other stuff. Like if you have to have a little bit of everything in there.

But I'm a big fan of themes or focus or putting overweight. So it's like this training block we're going to do—70% we're going to really put a focus on this one skill we want to improve, and then we have other stuff in there to hold those other skills as well, but that's going to be the real focus for this block. And then maybe the next block it'll be something else. And if you have it over three to four blocks, you're covering a little bit of an overload on all those types of areas. I think that could work.

And even in the hammer throw, our competitive season is quite short. We might have three, four, five months a year where we're competing, so we have a pretty long buildup. But if you look at our training blocks, we might spend four weeks working on heavy hammers, so that's more of a strength emphasis. Then we spend four or five weeks working on light hammers, which is a speed emphasis.

So the training looks similar block to block, and we have one skill we're training for, but we're trying to pull out those specific elements and build on them at different times. I think you could do that too in your sport. You'd have to look down and see, okay, what are the three, four critical success factors, and look around those. Is it work capacity? Is it power? Is it technical skills in different positions or these types of things? And just try and build blocks around that.

And I think the benefit of Bondarchuk's programming is you really—it's a bit repetitive, but that's the goal—is you're really trying to emphasize a skill or a strength or whatever, over and over until you get better at it. You're trying to get enough stimulus that you improve at it.

And Bosch you mentioned earlier. I asked him once, because he's very focused on motor learning and you never hear him talk about periodization, and I asked, well, how would you periodize over a longer term? How would you put together a training plan? And his answer, I think, applies to Bondarchuk as well. He goes, well, you work—

On one thing until it's better and then you work on something else. So I mean you can't improve everything at once. If you want to improve ankle stiffness, okay, let's put some drills together for a block and work on ankle stiffness. And once that's a bit better, maybe we improve force production for the next part and then it's block by block and trying to figure out how to put those elements together into a better athlete.

James de Lacey31:48

I'm with you on the block periodization stuff. I'm not such a huge fan of focusing on the especially when it starts with hypertrophy as well. It's like do you need to do essentially almost like a bodybuilding style block before going into your strength work? Is that going to already benefit you? And then by the time you had the power block you haven't touched the other stuff.

Martin Bingisser31:48

That's also the difference between like block periodization in theory and in the books and then when you look at the top practitioners are using block periodization, they're doing what we're talking about now. They're mixing it. So I think it's just a gap between the theory and practice because I mean most practitioners realize, okay, well we can't do only hypertrophy for 6 months and expect the athlete after that to still be able to sprint. You got to move in some athletic stuff. You got to put in some other stuff. You can't do one thing to the complete exclusion of others.

So the top practitioners are already making those adjustments, but I think the young coaches, they don't see those. They just read the book and they see that and not realize some of the nuance there and putting an end to play.

James de Lacey32:34

You mentioned as well around work capacity. I like this topic just because I think a lot of people, they rather think about it as strength training or conditioning training, and when they think conditioning it's like running or whatever. But work capacity I like just because I feel like it encompasses more things than just traditional quote-unquote cardio.

And you mentioned things like medicine ball throws. You got things like medicine ball circuits you can use. Nick Garcia has an awesome presentation in your Hammer media with the jump circuits. It's probably, I've basically stolen that completely and used that forever now because it's so damn good.

Maybe just just dive into how a work capacity block would look and what you're trying to achieve. I know what you can actually do with work capacity exercises versus just traditional running and rowing, et cetera.

Martin Bingisser33:25

I mean like anything, the endurance part of sports has to be specific. I saw this all the time in rugby where in the offseason people are going around 5K. They'd run 5Ks, they'd run around the track, maybe they'd even do some intervals or something. And then you get to your first game and everyone's posted great Bronco times, but everyone's gassed by the 60 minute because they don't have the contact conditioning.

Like being able to take hits and place hits over and over and get up from the ground and down from the ground, all that has a metabolic cost and it's different than just going out for a 5K or 10K run. The top players are probably only doing 10K over 80 minutes or something if that, and it's all those things in between that are really what's fatiguing the athlete.

So trying to figure out ways to condition the athlete that are going to be a bit more specific. In some sports, it's adding some contact into that, adding some wrestling elements. It's also then looking at are you in a steady state for all that time, or are you doing fast movements over and over. So do you have to punch, like do those powerful movements and have the endurance to recover and keep producing power instead of just having that steady state.

Same thing in rugby. It's not about who can run medium speed the whole game, it's who can put another fast sprint in in the 80th minute. So it's the ability to recover and then produce a non-aerobic type of performance in the end.

So that's going to come back here. I mean we typically, and even a sport like the hammer throw, our sport lasts a couple seconds. So in the competition itself we have like zero aerobic or fitness component. But the fitter we are, the more training we can put in. So we want a certain level of fitness because if you're going to get fatigued after half an hour of training, you're not going to be able to accumulate the reps you want. But if you can put in, be able to do an hour and a half, 2-hour training of good quality and not have that quality suffer.

So we do a lot of circuit type stuff. But again, we're trying to take 20, 30, 40, 50 explosive throws. So what does that mean? Like we're doing a lot of dumbbell circuits where we're doing explosive movements, maybe 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off. But it's weighted, it's moving weights, it's being powerful. And maybe gradually trying to reduce that recovery time or even reduce that work time by giving a set number of reps. Does that take you 30 seconds to complete or 25 seconds or 20 seconds? So being able to increase the cadence, increase the repetition speed there.

G Betts' leg circuit is another example too.

James de Lacey36:00

Dude, I still haven't been able to complete that. That's so damn hard. I, we always, we included the first month or so of training to get athletes back in shape.

Martin Bingisser36:00

But then, once we can get a baseline there, as I said we're not an endurance sport, so we don't need to go all in on that. But it's again, it's more focusing on repeating fast movements over and over than just doing a steady state slow movement over. So that's something we look at on the endurance side. But also again, you can look at that in fighting sports and strength sports.

You probably, doing some steady state stuff is not going to hurt. But if you think that's going to be the key to your endurance, you're missing an element there. You also need to have that more specific element. And if your rounds are 2 minutes long, well, do some sparring with three-minute rounds, do some sparring with four-minute rounds. Really put yourself into that red zone and see does your technique suffer, are you no longer able to keep your guard up? Those types of things to really challenge your specific work capacity in the match time.

And then also, if you're able to get, as I said for a lot of sports it's about developing the work capacity so you can get the training in that you need to get better.

James de Lacey37:04

How much of those, I guess, specific work capacity drills like your dumbbell, you mention like 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, how much are you worrying more about say output and performance versus maybe trying to target some kind of specific physiological adaptation with these?

Martin Bingisser37:29

It's more, yeah, as in like if you're getting better at doing the thing and you're able to complete it faster, et cetera. Like that's more what you're worried about versus are we targeting this specific adaptation within this energy system, et cetera, et cetera.

I mean this type of stuff is typically used in more of our foundational phase, and so it's one or two steps removed from improving sports performance. So I'm less focused on specific outputs and are we creating more watts of power, are we doing it one second faster, one second slower, and more looking at the general trends. Are we, if we're using the same weight in dumbbell circuit, are we getting better at it? Or are we able to add two or three more kilos and still keep our cadence and keep our time?

I also use them typically, like the first couple first phase of the year we're not doing a whole lot with the barbell, but we'll do barbell-like movements with the dumbbell. So it's a segue for me. So we might do dumbbell snatch as a movement in a dumbbell circuit or something, but for me it's, okay, when that's looking good and it's ready to go, that means okay we're ready to pick up a barbell and move on to normal snatches. We'll do dumbbell goblet squats or things like that, and that's a segue into normal squatting the next phase too.

So it's just trying to see are you able to hold the posture and the techniques throughout, are you slowly able to increase the load. And then once you're at a certain point, then we'll move over into the more traditional type of lifting. Other sports are going to have that element year-round because the work capacity is going to be front and center of your sport. But for us, because it's a smaller role, it's more just doing that minimum bit to make sure we can get the work in and then moving on to the quote-unquote real training or the more standard training.

James de Lacey39:04

Do you have those dumbbell circuits in your Hammer media library?

Martin Bingisser39:04

Yeah, we got some different versions. So I like, Nick's like, again from Nick Garcia a lot of this is coming from him. But he'll do, trying to think here, like a clean high pull to front squat, maybe...

James de Lacey39:36

Six reps each. So six reps dumbbell high pulls, six reps front squats with the front rack and the dumbbells, alternate press six reps, and then a gorilla row or some type of bent over row for six reps. So they're kind of all body workouts too there, but it makes it a, rather than a standard bodybuilding phase, you're adding in the work capacity a little bit too and you're getting those preparatory movements to prepare you for the weightlifting down the road.

Instead of, a dumbbell high pull is a good preparatory for a clean. You might do a one-arm snatch like I said. You might do a goblet squat instead of a front squat. I mean, you can play around with it, but typically some type of pulling movement, some type of leg movement, some type of pressing movement, and some type of rowing or pulling movement and cycling those through.

We'll use a 1 to 1 ratio. So if it takes you 40 seconds, then you'll get 40 seconds off, that type of thing. And then week to week, we'll maybe in the preseason add three sets and then four sets and then five sets and still trying to maintain good quality. And then eventually if that is working, then we'll add weight to that. Or if they're out of shape and they're just doing slow times, then we'll start focusing on the times a bit too. But most athletes, if they can get a decent time, then we'll focus more just adding up a little bit load.

Martin Bingisser40:41

It's just you're starting with just a moderately loaded dumbbells. Yeah, we're a bit limited because we don't have a huge dumbbell range at our gym. So it's never super heavy on my side, but it's still when you're doing four movements after each other, that's also, you do 6 to 8 reps of movement, so you're talking 24 to 32 reps, which ends up being even if you're at a moderate movement and you're alternating exercises, that's you're getting a good sweat on.

James de Lacey41:09

Connecting some dots in my brain. I was talking with Bill Smart the other day, he'll be listening to this on the replay, out of New Zealand. He's trying to work, doing a lot of sports City Kickboxing. We were talking about peripherally biasing conditioning, and I'm thinking now these dumbbell circuits and stuff, you're going to be biasing the peripheral adaptations. Well, it's with the added resistance versus doing a late run or row where it's going to be, you're still going to get peripheral adaptation, but you're mainly tying central adaptation. So it's an interesting potential way someone could start to do that with their low level work.

Martin Bingisser41:37

I think that's right. Something came up and it just fixed itself, I think, on Reverb side, but I think that's everything.

James de Lacey41:37

I think that's everything I had for you there, Martin. Where can people find and follow you? You still there?

Martin Bingisser42:02

I'm here, sorry, my mic cut disconnected. Like I said, on my site, hmmrmedia.com, there's a ton of resources. We're on Instagram too. I'm not posting as much as I used to, but you can still DM me there and reach out. But those are probably the best avenues to reach out.

And a lot of the stuff we talked about is up on the site. We have a member section, obviously, so more information available to members. But we got a lot of free stuff up there as well, but the dumbbell circuits, the leg circuits, the special strength. We got a couple presentations explaining the exercise classification and specific strength exercises, med ball circuits and things like that.

So there's a lot of resources talking about a lot of these topics, not just for throwers, because we've had a lot of questions for people like you looking to apply these other sports. So we try to keep an open mind and help coaches connect the dots to other sports.

James de Lacey42:51

Yeah, there's some really good combat conditioning stuff on there too for people who are looking to maybe add some stuff to their training too. But I appreciate you coming on, Martin, and sharing everything, and hopefully we'll catch up soon.

Martin Bingisser42:51

No problem, thank you.