What Is Specificity? New Research On Ecological Training + Lifting With Long Legs (SSOF Ep 99)

James de Lacey0:00

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But moving on from that, yeah, I've been doing a lot of stuff on Instagram recently on Reels. Seems to be where a lot of fitness stuff goes on. So I think this past week I've done like one every day, just finding my groove on there and stuff and collaborating with bigger accounts. So yeah, check those out if you like some shorter form stuff. Otherwise, I'm doing a lot of long form on the Sweet Science of Fighting YouTube channel.

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So you can watch it, understand the concept and the technique, and then apply it versus going through an entire system in one video that you might not even watch, and it's free. So make sure you check that out.

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So let's go straight into what we are doing here. So the first thing I wanted to touch was this idea of specificity. So I'm just going to bring up some of my—I've got some notes up here as well. So you often see people doing kind of combining a bunch of different exercises into one, and while not maybe seen as specific to combat, things like where people are doing bench press while doing leg raises, so hitting pressing chest, shoulders, and also hitting abs or something like that.

Or they're doing stuff on balance boards. I mean, you see a bunch of stuff on Instagram. I'm sure you've all seen something. People doing like isometrics while holding rear naked choke guard and stuff like that. Yeah, maybe have some value, but we need to understand what specificity is before we can put landmine punches in this category too, right?

So there are a few ways I guess you can judge specificity through different criteria. There's Verkhoshansky's model of dynamic correspondence. So if you might have heard of Verkhoshansky before, but a late and great Soviet sports scientist, he wrote many books that have essentially shaped strength and conditioning, I would say. Things like Super Training, Special Strength Training. Special Strength Training, if anyone is a coach listening, you don't have that book, I highly recommend getting that book. It is very, very good. So Special Strength Training is a really good one.

But essentially, dynamic correspondence is a way to judge how specific an exercise is to the sport and whether it will transfer as a specific exercise to that sport. Because remember, the number one thing we're trying to achieve with our strength and conditioning is transferring whatever the adaptation we're getting from that training to our sport. That's the number one thing we want: transfer. And that doesn't mean everything has to be specific to the sport. There are different ways of getting transfer, right?

So when we're talking about specificity, we can run through these five different criteria. So the first one is the muscle groups involved in the exercise, so they must be the same as the competition exercise. And let's run, let's do the landmine punch as an example, because landmine punch gets a lot of hate and also gets a lot of love. For me, I don't mind it. It's an exercise you can use. I just don't think it's that one thing that's going to suddenly make you this hardcore puncher. So we'll use that as an example.

So muscle groups involved in the exercise must be the same. Muscle groups are the same as punching, right? You're doing the exact punch motion, all lower body's involved, rotation, etc., and the barbell is being thrown like an implement. So we can probably tick that one off.

The second one we have is the amplitude and direction of the movement. So this means that the range of motion and the direction of the movement should be the same as the competition exercise. So if we're talking on a punch, a punch is typically horizontal, unless maybe you're fighting someone really, really tall or something like that. And the range of motion is typically from, let's just say, directly in front of you to arm's length.

So in a landmine punch, in terms of the range of motion, yep, we have that same range of motion. In terms of direction of movement, might not quite meet that because you're having to throw the barbell in an arc, almost like an incline press. So slightly vertically. So we kind of half tick that box.

Then we go into the third criteria: the accentuated region of force production, which means it shares similar regions with the competition exercise. So similar regions as in the punch, where the greatest forces are produced within the range of motion. So are we overloading essentially, are we overloading the punch through higher force generation? Yes, you're using some load, so you are getting some of that in there.

Now it's saying, do you overload it where it matters most? Now you could say that, do you need a lot of force generation in the beginning or in the middle or at the end? Regardless, you are loading the movement. It is projectile, so you are accelerating that bar through the entire range of motion. So I would say it shares similar regions with the punch in that prism.

Now, the magnitude of force effort and time of its application. So the amount of force and the time to produce it is similar to the competition exercise. So it means that if a punch occurs, I'm going to use random numbers here, let's just say 250 milliseconds, the landmine throw in this example should match that or be slightly shorter for that overload.

It could even be slightly longer if you're looking to potentially enhance force production, but it might not transfer as well. So in terms of the time to produce them, it's probably a little longer in the landmine throw. You have a little more time because it's loaded, which means impulse has increased through the time factor.

It's force multiplied by time. Time is typically a constant that stays constant in sporting actions. You have limited time to perform a maneuver, so force generated in those short time frames is one of the more important pieces. Does the landmine punch do that for you? It's debatable, just because also it depends how heavy that landmine is, right? If you're using just the bar, you're probably still going slower than you're going to throw a punch. So does that mean it's going to transfer as well? It's hard to say.

And the last one is the regime of muscular contraction. So does it replicate the same muscular contraction as the competition exercise? Yes it does, because it's a concentric punching action. So we satisfy basically three of the five, maybe three and a half or four of the fiveish of the dynamic correspondence. Does that mean that the landmine punch is completely specific to punching? Probably isn't a fully specific exercise, and we know that punching is probably a very specific exercise.

I would put medicine ball throws like punch throws as another one, just because it's so similar. The speed, you're projecting the ball, it's light, so you have that same time to produce that force. So that would be to me a more specific variation instead of the landmine punch. That's not to say the landmine punch isn't useful. It could be maybe a more of a force overload in that example. Let me just check if there's any questions going on in the live stream or not. Got Gareth in there. Hey Gareth, good to see you in here. If anyone's watching, feel free to ask any questions.

Let's come back to our specificity. So that's just one way of looking at specificity. There's another way we can look at Bondarchuk's transfer of training. Bondarchuk is a very famous throws coach, famous for his books called Transfer of Training. But his model is much harder to apply to chaotic and mixed sports like combat sports. A lot of the models that came out of that were in throwing, where it's very, you have one competition exercise and it's very easy to measure if something is working.

Whereas your competition exercises in combat sports are striking, grappling, and all the different variations in between with those, which makes it a lot harder.

But if we go down the pyramid, at the very top of the pyramid you have competition exercise. That's what I was mentioning before, striking and grappling. Then you have special developmental exercises, which would be a little more, I guess, removed from that, and I'll give you some examples in a second. Then you got special preparation exercises, and then you got your general preparation exercise, which is kind of like GPP. So if you've probably heard of GPP, General Physical Preparation, where people talk about you need to do your GPP before going to more specific exercises, that's kind of where it comes from.

So when we talk about competition exercises, training your competition exercise under this model would be sparring, rolling live, essentially live situations. That would be the most specific you could get. You couldn't do anything in the gym because it's not a competition exercise. So then we go down to our special developmental exercises, and that'll be kind of like one more removed, I guess you could say. So that would be like drilling, bag work, pad work, anything that involves drilling.

I guess you could say a closed chain exercise where you're not having to react to anything. You're just kind of going through on the mat against the bag or pads or anything like that. So it's not live, but you're developing the potential techniques and skills to transfer to those competition exercises or to use during those competition exercises. Again, nothing in the gym really comes into the special developmental exercises under this model for combat sports.

Then we have special preparation exercises, and this is where the first line of gym stuff comes in. And this would be things that I would say are more, I guess, velocity, speed, or power orientated. Jumps, throws, plyometrics. You could probably put some kind of Olympic lifts in there potentially as well. So things that are more likely to directly transfer to the special developmental exercises of striking, grappling, etc.

Then your general preparation exercises. That's your typical squats, bench, your traditional chin-ups, your traditional strength training exercises. And in this model, you see that there isn't really anything in the gym you can do to be specific to the sport. It's more everything you do in the gym is a preparation exercise, whereas the sport itself is the developmental or the competition exercises. So you have this clear separation of what you're doing in strength and conditioning and then what you're doing as a combat sport.

Now in terms of my opinion on that, I think there is some truth to that. I don't like to have that clear separation as much though. That doesn't mean I'm doing all these, I know, sport-specific exercises in the gym, because I think they should be married together. But I don't like having that separation that's so distinct. I want some things for the athlete to feel like, okay, this is going to improve XYZ because it's overloading some specific part of whatever movement.

And it also makes the strength training or the conditioning work a little more relevant for the fighter to be able to think in their mind how that could work.

Because you can drill technical things in the gym with some of these exercises. Like if you're doing medicine ball punch throws, you can still drill having that hip move first kind of thing. Obviously that's more for potentially beginners, intermediates, but you're still getting that sequencing, and I think it's still a good thing.

We can also go into the force vector theory, which is more like strength is developed in the directions that you're training. So typically when we're doing traditional strength training, it's axial loading, which means top down. So think like your squats, power cleans, deadlifts, bench press, etc. All those are pretty much axially loaded because it's top down, so loading the spine. And that means everything's vertical, which again, that's pretty much how most of your training is going to be. Nothing wrong with that, that's all well and good.

But you probably want to do some kind of training that is outside of just this axial loading, because combat sports are chaotic and you're not just going in the vertical direction. So you probably want to do some front to back exercises, you probably want to do rotational exercises. You want to move side to side. So these are the things you also want to train within your strength and conditioning to prepare you for a lot of the movements that are going to happen within combat sports.

So just bear that in mind, because if this is kind of why I don't like the idea that saying everything is GPP in the gym. So basically everything is General Physical Preparation and only the sport is specific. But if everything's just GPP in the gym, then you could literally just, you just do get stronger, right? On your powerlifting-based movements: squat, bench, deadlift, etc. You should be fine because it's just GPP.

But we do need to do movements outside of maybe just some of these general things and get a little more, I guess I'll use it, a little more specific in terms of being able to move side to side. Are we doing lateral lunges to strengthen that lateral movement? Are we doing lateral shuffles, doing lateral jumps, etc., etc.?

So it's just my take on specificity. I am a fan of having some form of specific exercise, but in the way that where you see people have bands around their waist and then they're like ground and pounding the dummy, that doesn't make any sense because you're not really achieving anything in that scenario.

But I do want to go into some of the latest research around the ecological dynamics of MMA training. It sounds like a bloody, what do you call it, a word salad. So this paper was done by a host of authors, but some main ones that have been on the podcast: Shea Misa and Scott Sieite. I actually just recorded a video breaking this down in pretty good detail.

It will get edited soon by the editor, I think, so hopefully it should go up in a couple weeks, and that should be a little more in depth as well on the actual YouTube channel, not just the podcast. But for those of you just on the, who listen to the podcast, this is for you as well.

So the paper is titled, it just got published the other day, Applying an Ecological Dynamics Framework to Mixed Martial Arts Training. And you'll see that this approach has kind of made its way through grappling recently and become, I don't want to say it's a fad, it's always come across as a fad in grappling, but it's legit. It is legit. You just don't want to go too far. Like you don't want to go too far with anything, right?

So just to break it down to make it really simple, ecological approach: the entire goal of this approach is to make you a problem solver. And there's a stark difference between how a lot of, I guess, teams and athletes are coached in this problem-solving fashion versus maybe a more traditional fashion where you're kind of told what to do. And there's cultural influences in a lot of us too. And countries that have communist backgrounds, a lot of them, in fact all of them, the coaching style is telling athletes what to do and they do it.

They're not thinking about what to do or trying to solve a problem. In countries that don't have those backgrounds, it's a little more problem solving, but there is still a lot of that instruction given. There's nothing wrong with some instruction, but at some point you have to have the

Athlete think for themselves and be able to solve issues, and you'll see the best fighters in the world are able to do this, right? They're able to solve whatever issue is in front of them. It doesn't matter the style of the fighter, it doesn't matter the size, the weight, the reach, etc. They're able to figure that problem out.

I think I've done a video on this previously as well on the YouTube channel on Sean Strickland and the way he trains. He inadvertently almost does an ecological approach to training if the reports are correct about him sparring almost every day. So that's just, I went to think about it. He is right now one of the best MMA fighters. He was able to shut down Israel Adesanya. And is that because Israel had a bad day maybe? Is it because Sean Strickland, he's able to solve a lot of problems that people haven't seen before because of the way he trains?

So I want to dive into a little bit. So they had an older paper, some of these authors. It was called Reconceptualizing Movement Behavior in Sport as a Problem Solving Activity. This was Sean, he was the lead author on this one, a year or two ago. And they have this awesome quote in here from Bernstein, and it's basically about this ecological approach I mentioned is about you becoming a problem solver. And once you become a problem solver, they call it, they labeled it that you have dexterity.

And Bernstein in this paper, he defines dexterity as "the ability to find a motor solution for any external situation," which means you're able to find a movement to solve anything, basically whatever is happening in front of you. And that is "to adequately solve any emerging motor problem." I missed that part reading that there, but I just explained it just before now.

So he also added, "Dexterity is not confined within the movements or actions themselves," so it's not confined within just punching, kicking, grappling, "but is revealed in how these movements behave in their interaction with your environment, with its unexpectedness and surprises." And I think the best way to represent this part to make it really easy to understand is maybe, someone in your gym or you just generally that is really damn, looks really sharp on the pads, really sharp on the heavy bag, really sharp on the drilling. And then you start live sparring, play sparring, whatever, and they turn to shit.

That is the exact definition of what this is stating here. You cannot, what basically what they're saying is you cannot refine a technique in a closed situation where you're maybe punching a bag or pads and then apply that suddenly into a sparring situation because of the unexpectedness and the surprises. And this is the premise behind this approach. I'm a big fan of this approach for fighters. I used a lot of this philosophy with my time in professional rugby with the sports and skills coaches, and I think it, I'll say it's permeated quite a bit in there many years ago and is still used somewhat today.

But essentially you want to be exposed to as many different situations as possible. And they use this term, degrees of freedom. Degrees of freedom in the ecological world is basically how many tools do you have in your toolbox. So could be different types of jabs, movements, etc. And degrees of freedom open and close based on many, many factors.

For example, if you had a really bad weight cut, a fight with your family, whatever it is, can reduce your degrees of freedom psychologically. Physically, you could be with the weight cut, etc., like that. But the goal is to have a wide degree of freedom of tools, but also have that degrees of freedom within your training.

It's hard to be in control of that depending on your coach, because some coaches don't like seeing failure or mistakes in training, which is a mistake by the coach in my experience and in my opinion. If coaches don't like failure during training, you should probably actually find a new coach, to be honest, because it's stupid. The idea is you don't want to create athletic robots that are scared of making mistakes. You'll never develop.

And I use this analogy a lot. It's from an old podcast. It's really good. It's about the idea that the coach provides the canvas and the athlete is the artist. So you get given the framework potentially from the coach of what maybe how the fight should take place based on the opponent, etc., but with your personality, with your skill set, you paint on that canvas and you solve the problem how you see fit.

So they have these ideas around aliveness and repetition without repetition. I really like these. And I'm sure you've all, as I mentioned, I gave the bag and pad example. I mean, I could even give grappling examples where you're doing, hang on, sorry, I'm just trying to check if there's any comments. Where you're doing, I don't know, you're drilling whatever technique, maybe it's a guard pass, and your uke is just going really light and allowing you to pass guard.

And then you suddenly go, you do that for 45 minutes and then you suddenly go positional and you can't even get past the first step. One, because your opponent knows exactly what you're doing because you've been drilling it for a while. But two, you haven't actually seen any of the looks that your opponent will give when you do certain things.

So now you're having to reprocess all this information. You've been drilling this one way of doing it for 45 minutes, but you now realize that one way doesn't work because your opponent's giving you different looks. So there's different, you're going to have to do different things based on the looks your opponent gives you. Then you're also going to have to maybe layer in some kind of feint, misdirection, or something so you can get to a different position to make him give you a look that you can expose.

And these are the things that you only learn through what they call aliveness. Aliveness in training. And I'll give you some examples of that too. I'm just going to go quickly. I've highlighted a few things in there if there's anything else I need to add to that before I go into more about that.

Let me scroll down here. So when I talk about this is what I want to add to that around this idea of refining technique through drills, bags, pads, etc. It's seeking to isolate a technical skill thinking that it's going to transfer to fighting, sparring, whatever. But it's all integrated. It's an integrated process.

And I like what they gave here. In the paper it's "an integrated process of perception," which is information detection, so what you perceive in front of you, "cognition," so intentions and decisions, so essentially what you're going to do with that information, "and then action," how you act on that information. And that is the problem solving process. And this is the idea around perception and action are always coupled, always, always together.

And when I say perception and action, it means the information given to you and then the action you take, as we were just talking about. And when we talk perception in terms of drilling, in terms of hitting the pads, hitting the bags, there is always perception there. You're perceiving the pad holder holding up whichever hand it is and you're throwing whatever punch or strike at that pad. The bag is there. Based on the distance you're standing, you're going to throw whatever strikes.

Same thing with drilling. I mean, drilling is not much really to perceive, but your opponent giving you the exact look that potentially or essentially the best case scenario that you may have to get that submission or guard pass or whatever it is. Now the issue is because perception and action are always coupled together, now as I mentioned, you go into a live scenario, the perception or the information you're getting is different.

That is, I wish I mentioned this in the damn video I did. I don't want to re-record it. But I guess if you're listening to the podcast, you might get a better version. But the information is different, and so you're relearning the skill all over again while trying to do it live. This is the idea that aliveness drills are probably more, or at least in my opinion and my experience, live drills are far more effective than just drilling the movement.

And I know our jiu-jitsu recently has changed. We just do essentially live drills for the entire class. So much better. You can, the best is you can try things and not worry about what's going to happen. You're just going to keep restarting over and over again. So we might do four or five minutes. Someone starts in bottom, someone starts de la Riva guard, someone's standing. The guy in the bottom has to just try sweep. The guy on top just has to try stand there and not get swept. Very simple.

Bottom guy has lots of options. The top guy is defending with his hands. Bottom guy's getting a lot of different looks from the guy on top. Are you changing guard? What are you doing in these situations? And you're going to do that for a good four minutes straight and just seeing different looks. You're learning also how your opponent's defending against you, so you can also use that against him.

And having all that information in within 10 minutes versus, say, drilling a de la Riva, I don't know, sweep or going into like x-guard or whatever like that, you have far more, far better learning than just drilling the movement. And I want to talk about fighting speed here. I want to talk about, we talked about the problem solving, perception, actions, and I also want to cover some of the actual, like what I gave you, some one example there, but I want to give you some

More examples of kind of how this can actually look in training. So good, within at least within MMA, I want to cover I'm going to cover striking and grappling. So I'll just give some examples. They give a really good example of how—Scott, I think Scott Scheidt wrote this part of the paper because I can kind of tell by what he's talking about. We talked about it a bit on the podcast as well.

But a warm-up game, for example, for strikers, you may have touching the shoulder or the torso in a boxing fashion. Now, people, it doesn't matter what level you are, you start to self-organize, which is one of the main tenets of this ecological approach. And self-organization is essentially you are learning as you're doing it. And they're saying that you actually get relatively good footwork and a defensive guard just from doing those games.

And the idea is that the sport is chaotic. We don't need to be able to throw a perfect jab against a bag or pad before doing something like this, because you're going to get into that scenario, you're never going to be able to throw the quote-unquote perfect jab. And to lay on top of that, what is the perfect jab in these scenarios?

So essentially, you're able to learn through failure in these things and learn from what your opponent's doing as well. And that's one of the main tenets as well, just learning through failure. Now, another idea is maybe a good example they give in here where you allow your opponent to throw various attacks at a fighter, but the fighter that is defending isn't allowed to strike but can only defend through blocking, catching, parrying, slipping, and evading the opponent's attacking attempts. So basically through footwork.

So you're basically removing a degree of freedom to, I guess you could say, enhance a certain skill. So you've basically taken out an answer to the problem, and now they have to answer it with something else. That's kind of the general premise there. And another way you can change the way games—you could play the same games over and over and they can be different every time. There's kind of this idea around repetition without repetition.

But you can even make them more different by asking—if coaches are able to ask questions, and this is a really good one here, I really like this—is can you act in a deceptive way that would invite potential openings to your opponent's targets? So if someone asked you that and you were the attacker in the situation, instead of being like, you're going to be like, you should feint here and then throw this and then move here, and you start and you try to think of doing all these different steps while you're doing it, it never works.

But if someone comes to, okay, how can you act in a more deceptive way to basically hit the target, and then you get an idea of, okay, maybe I should start throwing more feints, maybe I should do some misdirection, whatever it is, and that's how you start to explore and find answers yourself versus just being told what to do. Because you start getting into these robot modes and trying to apply things that don't apply in certain situations. You kind of learn what applies and what situation is in front of you.

And that's this idea of aliveness drills. So that would be an example of, say, an aliveness drill. Another one we're doing in classes, really nice, is for example, starting in single leg X or ashi garami position, and the person on bottom is just trying to sweep the person on top. Well, not trying to sweep, sorry, trying to get the person standing on their butt. And then the person standing is just essentially trying to stay in balance and not pass, not do anything offensive, just kind of defend. And it's such a simple way to kind of get a feeling of misdirection and moving your opponent.

The guy on top gets to really try and work on essentially defending these positions. That's an aliveness drill, right? Versus just drilling, say, a single leg X into trying to get someone down on their butt, which wouldn't really give you much. Because as soon as you go live, then you realize that your opponent's giving you a bunch of different looks and different information, which we touched on.

So with MMA, it could be an example of, here's a really good one: so one athlete, timing, sparring, boxing, striking, so soft sparring, they call it. Coaches assign one athlete of striking while offensively shooting takedowns. The other athlete will also strike, but they can only defend the takedowns. So traditionally, you would kind of separate those and get the quote-unquote fundamentals down on them.

But the idea is that in MMA, those things are always together. So typically, it's better to have them together within these aliveness drills, because how you strike or how you defend these strikes is going to be different when someone's potentially going to shoot on you.

Another one is in the clinch. So it could be clinching with knees, just light, hopefully light, playful stuff. But then you're going to add in the ability to do upper body throws and foot sweeps. So now you can't just try to defend the knee in anywhere possible. You got to defend the knee while trying to maintain balance and potentially have someone throw you or trip you. And these are things you can do on different drills.

I think that covers most of the things in this paper. I think I gave you the premise behind it. If there's any more you do want to know, feel free to throw it in the comments. And I've got a video coming out soon on this stuff, so that should give you some more insight as well. So definitely check that out when it comes out. And yeah, I'm going to go on to the last question here. It's already been 37 minutes just me rambling.

But it was the idea on, would you consider making a video on lifting advice for people with long legs and a short torso? I find that this gets in the way of virtually all of my bilateral lower body lifts: front squat, deadlift, snatch grip deadlift, et cetera. So my quick and dirty advice on this would be to just ditch bilateral lifting and only do single leg work. And there are a lot of—I know a lot there's a few NBA teams that do this and kind of just do single leg stuff.

Mike Boyle is a prominent strength coach that only does single leg work. I'm not going to say bilateral work is anything wrong, but if you're really struggling to get into these positions, maybe because of your anthropometry in terms of your long legs and short torso, single leg work will get you where you need to go.

Now, you can, if it's a mobility problem, that, okay, long legs and short torso doesn't mean you can't do these things. It just makes it potentially a little more difficult. If you have mobility problems, maybe ankles, hips, something like that, so potentially want to work on some of those things. For the front squat, yeah, I could see that potentially being a problem, especially with ankle mobility, because your knees are going to have to travel so far forward.

Typically, you can shorten the range of motion to make it—if you did, sitting and doing bilateral work—so even just box squatting or squatting to a box is a good option if you're looking for bilateral stuff. But I would get you single leg for your deep squatting work. So like for your Bulgarian split squats and things, that would be, I think, a better option than your front squat. And then if you're looking for something that's more, say, heavy loaded, maybe more partial range of motion, you would go to like a squat to box.

For the conventional deadlift, 100% would raise the bar and plates on blocks. So remember, the conventional deadlift, like the height off the floor, it's just a powerlifting standard and you're not a powerlifter. So you don't have to adhere to these standards. So I would raise the plates and bar on blocks to a height that is comfortable for you. And that would typically be like halfway the shin, like where most people have the power, that have normal leg length.

For snatch grip deadlift, yeah, I can see that would be an absolute nightmare for you. So I wouldn't even bother with snatch grip deadlift. I would do some, my snatch grip Romanian deadlift instead, so it was top down. So you can still get the benefits of using that snatch grip. But yeah, that hopefully gives you some practical things to do.

So make something like Bulgarian split squat your main lower body squat lift. Raise your bar and plates for the conventional deadlift. Don't snatch grip deadlift, do snatch grip RDL. And I mean, that pretty much covers everything there. If you are dead set on squatting heavy, then I would just squat to a box or reduce the range of motion or even use plates and squat, squat off the plates. Anything like that works as well. So hopefully that answers your question. I will, maybe I'll check this link in the reply to you on the thing.

But yeah, that's everything I had for the solo pod there. I've got, there's some epic guests actually coming up soon. So I've got Iñigo San Millán back on to get into more detail on training for central versus peripheral adaptation. So remember, training for improving heart function to deliver the oxygen, and then training for the muscular portion to use that oxygen.

I've got Jake Tuura coming on this coming week as well, that'll be live. He's become a tendon master, so talking about training the tendons for pain and for health. Geoffrey Chiu is coming back on. I'm really big fan of his philosophy, which is around really sense around the sport first.

That follow him on Instagram as well, he's a good person to follow on there. And then we're going to bring Asghar Asgar back on. He's just, I think he's just finished up his PhD, so he's got some awesome, awesome, awesome new research to talk about, all on heat and more on his stuff on the mitochondrial function from his last boxing paper on sprint interval training and the idea of essentially not needing to do a lot of low intensity training, basically similar to how Inigo talks about Energy System training. It's outdated, it's not a thing.

You can't just, there's no such thing as anaerobic or alactic training because the muscles will use oxygen regardless in those scenarios, meaning that it can't be anaerobic or alactic. So yeah, so we're going to dive more into that too for your understanding but also for mine, because I think most of us coaches come from an energy system, some learning, I guess, learning background. And starting to learn a lot of the stuff is very useful for just ongoing education and our conditioning there.

So I think that should cover everything. Make sure you tune in for the next podcast. Make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channels and the follow on Instagram, and I'll see you in a week.