How To Properly Train Speed & How To Make Lifting Specific For Combat w/ Sam Portland (SSOF Ep 114)

Sam Portland2:53

Yeah, yeah. It's funny you say this because I was thinking about the way that we could talk. I actually worked in track and field for 18 months. I got fired there as well halfway through a preseason planning meeting. I've been fired from pretty much every job for putting the athletes first, every time. Put the athletes first, you end up getting fired.

So recently I've had a really bad hamstring injury. I had two grade three tears, both 8 cm long, from playing American football. I got hit in the air, flipped, and as I hit the ground someone tackled my leg.

James de Lacey2:53

That video, actually? Yeah.

Sam Portland2:53

It's wild. My semitendinosus is literally hanging on by its thread. So I am reluctant to never get surgery and we'll just have to see about that. But, and this is, I'm getting somewhere with it, I was able to still run over 8 and a half meters per second with that hamstring as it is.

James de Lacey3:17

Oh, wow.

Sam Portland3:17

And so we're going to talk about lifting and the reasons why that's all possible. But I actually started boxing recently. Yeah, I've had to take a break because I've been writing my book. But I was like, I need to do something and I love Rocky, grew up on Rocky. And I was like, I'm going to, I need a fight. I need to learn more about myself and get exposed and do the right of passage of boxing.

I've never really played in individual sports, so I started doing some pad work. And I started to think about actually how do we create velocity? How am I going to create punch speed? And the way I just quickly turned it on in my head is the fist is the foot. Fist is the foot. And it's the terminal extension that you're able to create at high speed will create punch momentum.

And the way you reenter to the ground, say if you're doing a jab for example, that's a loose flick. You can get it out and you can sting with it. Whereas you're throwing a cross, you have to sink into that shot to create movement, but let it go, unravel the body to create the speed. You know, anytime I've worked with all the athletes that I've done, we did blocking with Alex Gray when he was a tight end, and some of the American football, those specialized exercises and those specialized means, they're all velocity determined. None of it is done at slow speed.

And the way that I categorize training, you know, stolen from Bondarchuk, all those guys, is before you considering the most specific general element of training is speed. So if you are understanding and if you create an understanding of the general physical qualities of training, then everything below speed must feed speed. And everything above speed must be fed by speed.

So every technical constraint of the competition just has to be fed by speed, which is underpinned by recoverable abilities. And I fast learned from boxing that I'm very alactic aerobic. I am not anaerobic, which then shaped the way that I would do rounds and do stuff like that. It taught me so much.

And in terms of that general philosophy of speed for any sport, of any discipline, if you can understand that the thing that interacts with the ground or the thing that interacts with the opponent is a result and effect of everything that happens above it. In order to create it, you have to let it go. It's an involuntary resultant effect. And that's it really, that's kind of where I sit with it.

James de Lacey7:06

I've got a good question here that I think we'll continue this same, I guess, topic as well. I got something I just wrote down too. But from Wilson, sorry Aratua, sorry there Wilson. But he's saying, "As I understand, speed is just a manifestation of skill and strength. If you are stronger and practice the movement you will get faster, be it a punch, a kick, or a sprint." So this is live. This is live conversation, live question coming in just for you, just for you man, that's it.

Sam Portland7:36

So I think it's a great question because we in contact sports, and you know rugby, field sports, everything is driven by strength. The early progress is driven by strength. And what we have to understand is the thing that gets us there is not the thing that's going to get us to the next place.

You know, you have to imagine you're on the London Underground. You have to leave one station to get to the next, and it's called something different and it looks different. That's the role of specialization. And if they can see me now, what you'll have is you'll have this upward curve and it will flatten out.

So what happens when we first start training is, and if we take the premise that, as Wilson said, you create adaptation by two things: technical. So you get strong and then your technical capacity will help take that strength and use it. So it is correct. You create adaptation by motor learning, motor control, motor potential, but then you also do it just by building that horsepower.

So what happens when we first start? I'll take a recent example of learning to box. I progressed really quickly because I had a very extensive history of speed explosive power training. And the adaptation came from me understanding the technique. So strength actually wasn't the thing that was creating progress, technique was, motor learning.

However, if I had entered that situation and I was just strong, I would suffer. Because my ability to produce speed in the context of striking, for example, would be inhibited by my ability to recruit motor units from an involuntary. This is where we're thinking, "I am, the things that I do create the speed, the things that I do create the power." As I said before, the result and effect of letting it go.

So we get this upward trajectory straight away and we get this early progress. And we're like, "Oh my, I've just been squatting, I've been trap barring, and then I'm hitting." And it's like, oh, because everything's starting to work. We just opened up a new door of motor unit. But that's...

All we've done with it. If we keep doing that, and this is the role of specialization and stuff that I, it's very simple rules: if you want to improve your squat, eventually you have to become a powerlifter. And if you want to improve your sprint speed, you have to become a sprinter.

So what are we doing? I say with rugby, I'm like, or football field sports, everything has to be done to become a team sports sprinter. So everything in fighting has to become a better fighter. And strength doesn't make you a better fighter.

Strength will create a higher what we call adaptive reserve that will give you a capacity to be able to practice fighting more and also specifically apply more progressive means. And that's when we're thinking about doing it. The difference between specialized exercises in fighting would be different weights of gloves, doing isolation work with different weights of gloves will actually put, if you think of what you've got, our hand, the segments of the upper body: we've got our hand, we've got our forearm, we've got our humerus, and we've got our shoulder thoracic girdle.

When we throw that punch, it's exactly the same with speed. It's the ankle, the shin, the thigh, the hip flexor, the lower back. When we throw that punch, if we put more mass on the end, the faster it will release at the end because it will pick up its own level of momentum. If I'm too strong, I won't be able to create momentum because I'll be inhibited because the brain won't like to let go.

And it's the same as for Wilson: if you pull an elastic band, you pull it fast, you have no control of the speed of which it will snap back. The rate at which things snap back is actually the punch.

James de Lacey11:51

It written down for you too from this? So yeah, do you straight in here?

Sam Portland11:51

Yeah, I know. It's good, I love it.

James de Lacey12:24

I think we have pretty similar, I think, strength conditioning philosophies around the speed stuff. But wanted to jump into, you've mentioned a lot about, I guess, at the beginning, okay, strength training, getting stronger, you're going to have that transfer, I guess, to skill already because you're newer to either. One of these things kind of come together.

But at some point you're going to have to do something different. And you've talked a lot about specialization or specific training, and there's obviously different philosophies around this. One of them is that whatever you do in the gym or strength training is always general, it's always GPP. It doesn't matter what you do, it's just about improving outputs, that's all it is in the gym, versus being like, hey, maybe there is some way we can improve transfer from the gym to the sport through various exercises or the way we do things. You want to just jump into that, where that fits in your philosophy?

Sam Portland12:52

Yeah, 100%. And this is where I think it's a great question because, again, if you're preparing for a fight, you've got eight-week camp, for example, eight to ten week camp. Same for a preseason, you got six to eight weeks in field sports. It's not a lot of time, and in an off-season.

And so the misunderstanding that is created around exercise selection in relation to training cycles is when we don't know what one exercise lends itself to the next. So the role of specialization is to take something that has been developed by one exercise and used in the next exercise.

So for example, in the easiest one for me is acceleration in sprinting. I would use my most general exercise, and this is where we have to think about the double tier system. Remember, everything's to develop speed and then fed by speed. So the first tier is develop to create just general speed.

So I would use a trap bar deadlift, a standing broad jump, and then a five meter acceleration. And that would be my base specific stack. It's just a stack of three exercises: one strength, one power, and one of our specialized.

James de Lacey14:36

Done in the same session, or has this progressed over?

Sam Portland14:36

So this is what we will be weighing things against. Because if my strength goes up, my broad jump comes down, now, well, I've got a problem. Because if my ability to, this is the physics, my ability to put my center of mass as far forward as possible is, remember that curve is flatlining? Well, we don't need, it's not a strength problem anymore.

And so I know if I can't do the thing fast in an isolated context, my speed's going to struggle. So in relation, look at a lot of the early Soviet periodization stuff. It's, if we were able to create, for a trained athlete, if we're able to in a general phase of preparation, if we were to realize three to four percent on a general strength lift in our general phase of training, that's a win.

We then get rid of that and then we start using it. But when people say, oh, we always got to stay general, always stay general, the reality is is that it's all general until you got the pads on and you're getting hit in the face. Everything's general.

So the extent of which you can understand general training will be the most successful that you get. And knowing that if you do one camp and you take your trap bar from 150 to 170, you're clean. That's easy. You can, then you're good. That will hold you through camp.

And then the next time you go around, maybe within two to three workouts you're already at that 170. See if you push up to 180 and see the effect of that as an upstream consequence. Whereas, as we say, if you want to keep improving your strength, you've got to become a powerlifter. If you want to be better at fighting, you have to fight more, and the role of general training is to allow you to do that. Does that make sense?

James de Lacey16:49

Yeah, that makes sense. And you've also talked a lot about, I guess, this letting go, or I guess the switching off. Or we could just say, let's just say, being able to relax. And it's a really interesting concept.

There are various ways we can go into maybe some of the training. But I wanted to start around, I guess, the idea of maximum strength training in this role. And is there a way that someone could potentially do too much? Because a lot of people will say, hey, you can never be strong enough. And I think when you say you can never be strong enough, we can't just refer to squat, bench, deadlift, because strength is not a technical lift. Strength is an expression of force doing whatever you're doing.

So let's maybe dive into, okay, if I'm doing a [expletive] ton of maximal strength training, am I potentially, if I'm not doing other speed stuff, ruining or stopping this ability to be able to rapidly switch on and off? And is this a quality that I need to have as maybe a striking athlete?

Sam Portland17:41

Yeah, 100%. It made me laugh, you saw Eddie Hall in the octagon, right? Dude, fighting two midgets as well, bro. I was like, this can't be real. Honestly, at that point when I saw that, I was like, we are on the downslope as a civilization. We peaked before.

But so when we look at the general training effects, and that's, I guess, what we're talking about, and I'm glad that you said strength is a task-specific expression, it is. And so if you, we've got the structural effects of training and the functional effects of training, super training 101, isn't it?

And the structural effects is going to be increasing muscle size and structure. Functional effects are everything: intramuscular, intermuscular coordination, reflexive inhibition, that switching on and off that we really need to talk about, and the amount of muscle units that we can recruit.

So what happens was, if we're doing too much strength training, for example, but maybe let's just define what too much strength training might actually look like.

So if we're doing too much barbell lifting, 85% range, 75% range, doing five, do windows, 531, too much basically, five by fives, or any number by number that just sounds good, that type of training. What we're going to be doing with that, as we're moving the bar and the external load too slow, our body's going to adapt to that rate of force production and force recruitment.

Remember, we've got structural effects and then functional effects. And what we have to do is be coercing the functional effects of training more as athletes, because it's really easy to get bigger. Just lift things faster because you turn on more motor units. And also in fighting, size is not always a good thing. You're weight classified, so you've got to do the, it's not like Rocky versus Drago.

But we're in a place where when you have to think about training as a language, as you're feeding your body and you're instructing it to do something. And that's where we create the voluntary versus involuntary action. And I said to you, we're talking about, Louie is actually the whole Western civilization has really, really forgotten and misinterpreted a lot of the original Soviet work because it was, we understood it to be around voluntary.

Action, whereas if you think about the original Soviet stuff with Yuri and the shock method, it was actually to create involuntary responses. The whole idea of training was to work towards involuntary action, so the consequential effects of the modality that we're using. That's what was measured.

It obviously started with weightlifting, the Bulgarian methods, and then all the drugs came in and all that stuff, because the context was to win medals in weightlifting. Then it was gymnastics, then it became more Olympic sport disciplines as we know, track and field and stuff like that. But everything was, we just need to find a little bit of strength so the body is capable of creating the opposing release.

So what we can prime the body with is what it can then give us output from. And that's the simple analogy is Newton's third law: you drop a bouncy ball and it will only bounce up to the mass times the velocity it hits the ground, whereas if you throw it, it's going to bounce higher. But the key differentiator between both conditions is the ability of the ball to become rigid, because no one ever talks about, well actually, what's the structure of the ball? If one ball's flat and one ball's hard, they're not going to actually bounce the same.

So when we think about creating voluntary action, it's the way that the brain works called reflex inhibition, and it comes from the brain. And what it does is it tells your body to relax to then find velocity, because you can't—any of the guys watching, the girls watching, they'll know they throw their best punches when they're not tight. And all of the general strength training means require you to be tight. They create the complete opposite feeling.

So why with our chimp brains, A plus B does not equal C in that scenario? We need to find that by actually training in the way. And that's where the submaximal loads—you can do strength training, you need it, but I don't think people realize how little of it they actually need.

James de Lacey23:41

Volume is the real killer in it, right? Because most people will go on, as you mentioned, say like a 5x5. I'm going to start strength training, so they do 5x5 and they go squat, bench, barbell row, and there's no actual jumps, plyometrics, throws, rotation, nothing done. Maybe a little bit, but the majority of the program is something like a 5x5 over three lifts.

And then that's where I guess what you're talking about there. But if we're training this reflex, this ability to have this inhibition, how—I mean, I guess one way that I've talked about, we talked about a long time ago on the podcast and haven't revisited it, so it'd be good to revisit it now, was oscillatory isometrics. Do you want to maybe jump a bit into that, and maybe if there's something else that you typically like to use or have found useful for developing this skill?

Sam Portland24:38

Yeah, it's cool. I like this stuff because it's really challenging and it challenges so much of what we believe. And I think one mistake I believe a lot of strength and conditioning practitioners do is they try to extend the significance that the gym has within their training.

So there's a well-known popular coach who wrote a book and he just really much sticks an [expletive] band on anything and creates crazy ways to extend the window of gym time, because in the context of that place, that is the place where they do their work. So it's about the importance versus significance tradeoff.

So what we need to understand most importantly in how we create, like oscillatory isometrics for example—when we talk about speed, there isn't a joke with the guys that I work with: who can tell me what run-specific isometric is? Okay, so when we think about that was the joke, it was meant to be funny. Yeah, that was the joke, right? Terrible joke.

But that in itself is the example of doing something that really doesn't contribute to the other. It may look like a duck, but it's not a duck. And when we think about the rates of force we're trying to produce in the times of which we're trying to produce them, it can't be voluntary. None of it's voluntary. It's a consequential effect.

So one of the ways that's really unlocked this for me is using Exogen, using Lila, so the micro loads. But before I had that, I used to basically have a paradigm in my head. I was like, when do I let him loose? When do I let her loose? Because in all that time before it, we were doing everything to prime the body to turn off, to turn the conscious brain off.

So when we're doing all of our speed work, it would be, I just want you to feel light, I want you to bounce. We do long accelerations, so up to 50 meters, last 10 meters you're 8 out of 10, and I need you to fly. But all the time building up to it, you're trying to be quicker off the ground, bigger in your steps, faster in your leg movement.

And that is, from a structural point of view, is putting energy in the tendon, so it's putting energy in the elastic component of the body, which it needs. It needs to juice up. And if any of your listeners throw a three-punch or four-punch combination, the stored and released energy as you're building through your last shot is probably faster and heavier and has more power than your first, because the way you're twisting and coiling the body, and that's all subconscious.

Because what's happening—and this is when we think about oscillatory isometrics, go back into Super Training—what they do is you use them in a weak range, use them in a weak range, and to then teach the brain that weak range to be fast in that range, essentially overloading through very, very short to create multiple contractions.

And when we are, in the context of training, when we think about that—great for late-stage rehab, great for putting the tissues under stress—but it's not going to unlock the door to performance that we think it was. It turns the handle. What unlocks the door is actually doing the thing that we want to train from, and we create the impulses that we want.

And think when you're hitting a bag, the impulse is the contact. You're creating that impulse, and the whole idea—and this is, there's probably very more experienced fighters on this listening to this—but when you throw one, you pull back with the other. The one-two: you throw and you pull it back, because getting it back, it's that stretch reflex that's going to allow you to release the other one. It's the same with running, it's the contralateral effect.

So the faster I can throw this, the harder I can throw this. And you don't think about the force that you put in, you just drop and let it go. And you've seen so many boxing coaches—there's a really good boxing documentary on BBC called Stables with Shane McGuigan, BBC UK. Really, really good.

Because he's got an old boxing stable, they got about four or five world champions. It's very different, they train as a team rather than individuals. But all the time it's like, just let your hands go, let your hands go, let your hands go. Because stop trying, stop being so rigid in that approach. You turn the conscious brain off, we create speed.

And that's what Lila does by putting small 100, 200 grams on the distal segments of the body to start off with. You can use them—they got torso, we use them on the hips and the legs. What it does is it's the compounding storage and release of elastic energy within the tendon. That's what builds the speed, and that's what builds the power and builds the velocity that everyone wants to create.

And over time, when he spoke to me on the phone about this, he was like, mate, I got something that will make your rugby players faster and they can wear it in training. I was like, sign me the [expletive] up, because I've been waiting for such a long time for something like that.

And the fact that you can train the—and here's one for everyone to consider: one of the most freeing things that I ever decided to do in my training was to identify the competitive exercise or the competitive task that I wanted to train. So when everyone says, how do we improve speed, strength, power? No, you're not. They're the subcomponents of training.

You want to identify the competitive task, so whether that be your cross, whether that be your left hook, your right. You are going to run a stream, a thread, through your program, through your training, that develops that one quality, and it has a language all the way through. And we do that with acceleration and top speed running.

If my guys can't go forward, well we think of it—and I take so much influence from the way Louie Simmons developed powerlifting and the JM press, for example. Guys that couldn't lock up, he developed, well let's—

Put them in that position and let's make task specific strength. Okay, so what do I need to do if my athlete can't go from a two-point start, lean forward, and then create power off of that front foot extension? I have to put him in that position. I have to load that, and I have to load it from a general strength consideration. But then also what I have to do is I have to load it fast and I have to overload it.

So we do lots of single leg, like 45 degree quarter squats, basically bang that thing up as heavy and as hard as you can and you push like there's nothing left in your body. And you tell me, can you get 8 to 10 out? Because your 10th one's going to be your fastest one.

And the same, Ross Training, the coach for Katie Taylor. She's the Irish girl, isn't she? She's the beast. He's old school. He's like when I first started, watching like Zach Even-Esh on YouTube and Elliott Hulse before he lost his mind and did all that.

James de Lacey34:02

Yep, for sure. We all go through that. I think I've lost my mind like four times already, so it's absolutely...

Sam Portland34:02

But he would literally do single banded repeat elastic punching. Why? Because he understood the role that actually the recoil is the most important part, because if it wasn't, we'd only just throw and we wouldn't rebound out of it. The R is in the rebound, and we don't control it. We just have to use and rely on our body's structural integrity to tolerate it.

It's when I talked to athletes, said no one tears their hamstring at top speed. They'll tear it getting there, you know what I mean?

James de Lacey34:36

I know what you mean. I know what you mean. For anyone who's wondering what he's talking about with Exogen, if you go back many episodes, I had Joe, the owner, on the podcast. We did a whole episode on using Exogen, the micro-loading things. Also, John Cronin was on the podcast a while ago as well. I think we talked about it there too. So these guys have all been on the podcast. You can go back and listen to those as well.

But so, you talked about isos. They're not going to give you that ability to switch off during the task because that's maybe specific. Could you potentially complex those two together, like ask the isos to kind of get that feeling and then maybe go into something like the banded punching or something like that?

Sam Portland35:28

Yeah, without a doubt. I think complex training, absolutely. What I found, and I learned a lot from starting boxing and understanding task specific strength, because I was sore in my body where I'd never been sore in my life. I'm 36 and lots of decent level rugby in England and so on, and I was like, well, what can I experiment with? Experiment is the best thing. What's going to allow me to unload quicker? What's going to allow me to work things differently?

So I would use heavier med balls one side of the hip and across the body to the wall, just somewhere to put it to get the hips to flip in the way that I needed them to flip to throw a lead hook. Then I would do that, I'd hit the bag. And then because it's just that hitting, turning on the muscles in the way that we need them to behave, and then showing them how they need to behave.

And knowing I have to stop punching with my hands and start punching with my body, the same way of sprinting, you don't run with your feet. You don't run with your feet, because as soon as you start punching with your hands, you see that. And then all of a sudden it's a whip. It has that recoil.

James de Lacey37:19

So what you'd be able to do... and I don't think French contrast training, I think if it was any good there would be a lot more books on it. There would be a lot more on French contrast training. And I understand the premise of it. It's just a variation of complex work.

In most settings, it's way too complicated and it's way too intense for people. Use it with your national level long jumpers, absolutely. Don't use it with your beat up boxers and your rugby players because they, your body gets hit for a living.

Sam Portland37:48

So I would find variations, and this is what I like to do even with rugby, is you would have our specialized developmental exercises or our specialized preparatory exercises, then go into the skill, and just flip between the two and then hit things full flight.

So in a boxing session, in your warm-up, you would be doing the strength training movements to warm the body up.

James de Lacey38:26

Almost like a form of micro-dosing, your power work too, right? Or strength to power work?

Sam Portland38:26

Absolutely. And then working with your coach going, has my body moved? Has that helped move my body in the right way? If it hasn't, we need to get rid of it. Are you a fighter that needs to fight a specific way? And then you build the language. You build the language around it.

James de Lacey39:03

Absolutely the comp.

Sam Portland39:03

And then you put the micro-loading on, and the thing, the magic with the micro-loading happens when you take it off. Because once you have that upregulation of the body, and then all of a sudden you are just moving, you are just moving.

And that's what I said to you at the beginning about with my hamstring. It removed so much pain inhibition. I was just doing A-skips, B-skips with it and just some gentle buildups. And I took it off and I was like, oh, let's give this a go. And that was 28 centimeters higher because of the way that the body turned itself. It was all subconscious.

James de Lacey39:38

It sounds counterintuitive as well, because it's like for anyone listening, it's literally like 50 to 200 gram weights, grams, not kilograms, not pounds, like grams. And you're literally placing the little strips on your arms or your legs or wherever you're doing it.

And the idea is that because the formula for rotational inertia is, can't remember what the first symbol is, but then it's radius squared. So essentially, the further away you place the load from the pivot point, you're literally adding a square value of rotational inertia on top of it. So it goes a long way when you're adding these small things.

It's a very potent way of, I guess you could say, I mean, specific strength training, really, right? Because you're putting it on your arms while you're punching or your legs while you're sprinting, different places. You can overload certain muscle groups based on where you put it, how you put it. It's such a cool piece of technology. I'm surprised it hasn't made its way more into combat sports with how much people love, I guess, overly specific exercises. I guess it will eventually.

Sam Portland41:05

Yeah, 100%. And with that, the formula, the faster you get, the faster it goes. So the best example of the effect of it is Sha'Carri Richardson at the moment in the 100 meters. She's been loading with it for about two years.

James de Lacey41:05

Oh, wow.

Sam Portland41:05

Yeah, that girl is flying. She's unbeatable at the moment. And when you, if anyone wants to go, she ran last weekend, her video will be online, and you watch that 100 meters and the way that it builds, you can just see it against anyone else. It's like she's half the size of everyone and she is on a different, she's on a different level, because she's been training the brain the way that it wants to behave. And so exactly, it's that specialized.

And I think rather than even strength training, it's almost, it's technical overload coordination training, right? Like you could say Frans Bosch to an extent.

James de Lacey42:13

Oh, wouldn't go that far.

Sam Portland42:13

We've gone too far. And that's, and I think the Frans work, like he was on to something. I love it. You can go so far down the rabbit hole.

James de Lacey42:13

You can definitely go too far.

Sam Portland42:13

And I think what we need to understand, the most important, and that's why I reject a lot of the HAP ideas and stuff like that, because they're consequential effects of training, consequential effects of movement. They're the things that happen that we don't need to focus on because they're going to happen with or without us. And the way that you teach the body's awareness to it is not, it is worse. And that is such an important part of training.

When we understand that technical overload, that we're creating that coordinative element, and then we can use it in a way that's so important. And I feel one of the things that I was so privileged to be able to do was work in professional sport and be able to produce, and I don't take this the wrong way, but produce the outputs of a professional athlete, just knowing when they're good enough at the game.

The challenge was, well, if I can out broad jump these wingers and out-ten them and hang in there at top speed with these professional rugby players, well then we've got a problem, because I need them to take on players faster. I need them to move more effectively on the field. You think about fighting, you need to work the ring better. You need to have the speed to be able to work the ring.

That's that next level of preparation. And I really started to learn and understand by watching training, watching people, even Christian Wade, one of the best finishers that rugby's ever seen, do his thing in training, and start to understand how do we do this, what are those things. They're all subconscious, they're all trained. You think about some of your favorite fighters and you think about some of your favorite athletes and why they're your favorite. None of it is because of their ability to train in the gym.

They've developed a style around the way that their body is designed to work. We at Wasp at one time, we had Christian Wade on one wing and Tom Varndell on the other. They were both the top try scorers in the league that year. One was 6'4" and built like a racehorse, it was 105 kilos, shredded, could pull 10 meters per second. And then Christian Wade, who was 5 foot 10 and jinky. They both played the same position but they played it in a very different way.

And you could try and replicate their training or do the 20 years of them figuring out how to be effective in what they do. And I think Laya, I segue back into Laya, Laya speeds up that process for people. Are you using it, are you just wearing it and doing rounds on the bag or pads or something like that?

James de Lacey46:16

Yeah. So I, when I first tried up at 16 ounce and after we did two on, one off, times nine, so three of them, I couldn't lift my arms up because it was just so heavy. And I came at my first sparring session with a bruise above my right eye because I just couldn't keep my hand up. So what I was wearing them, right, I just went at it.

Sam Portland46:46

But what I use them to do is the technical elements of the striking. So I'd wear them to practice on my own and get the hands moving in a way that they had not moved before, just to speed up that relationship with things. And you'll find that one of the biggest things that, when you're thinking about learning a new skill, and this could be for any of the fighters, think about developing something into their game plan.

For example, what I found, which would be very arbitrary to a lot of people, I'm just sharing my experience, is I found the ability to decrease the time between punches so difficult on combos, trying to decrease the time. It was so easy to increase the time because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. But I recognized it was like, right, well this is the relationship between steps one and steps six in sprinting. I have to continue to increase my speed through.

So how am I going to do that? Well, I have to learn to speed up my body. How do I do that? Well, let's just strap on some loading tools and practice for half an hour. But in that half an hour, only do, I mean I would do probably one a minute or so, because it was all about skill, motor learning, motor control, and output, rather than conditioning.

Because if I could effectively utilize the combo, then I would actually be more efficient in my own fighting. It's the same as anything. You can replace that with anything you're trying to do. And that's where everything can be fed by speed, because it's the thing that everyone trains for.

James de Lacey48:23

I just want to touch on the conditioning as well, regarding how does your conditioning look, I guess, to work with training speed? Because obviously you can do conditioning to work against it if you're doing, again, volume is a killer. So you want to dive into how that conditioning may look for the situation for trying to maximize power and speed?

Sam Portland48:56

Yeah. So remember, you made a great point really early on for listeners, is that everything we're training is measured by its ability to express it in the conditions we need to use it. So that's the most important part. Always remember that. If any listener to a strength coach tells you to run a mile, because that is what preparation is about.

So when you are thinking about, well, how do I create repeatability of my most effective things? Number one, you've just got to be able to recover. So just having a very good engine. Now, that engine, and remember, you don't have to accumulate tons of volume to develop an engine. You will get a benefit from aerobic capacity by just training four times a week, just by doing any training, whether it's gym training or whatever, because it's, go lift weights for an hour, your heart rate's going to do all right there. You're going to be hitting the certain thresholds.

And then it's low and slow, low and slow, just building that engine very slowly. The challenge that we face all the time is trying to replicate the intensities of competition in practice. Competition is competition, practice is practice. You prepare to compete, practice is preparation. So when we understand that as a principle, you're either going to be able to endure speed or power, or have endurance. So it's two very different things.

So we use it from a sprinting example. For someone to hold a velocity from flying 30 and that not dip, that is the ability to endure speed, especially for a team sport athlete. Imagine a team sport athlete being able to hold 10 meters per second for 30 meters. They're fine, but they don't need to do anything ever again.

So within fighting, is the ability to endure high velocity movement, and however that is constructed in your practice. And it's the ability to produce that in absence of metabolic waste. So if you do a workout way, literally we're just going to do punching speed and punching power for today, you shouldn't feel gassed coming. You will feel like an idiot the following day because you've taxed your nervous system in that way.

You'll get sweaty, you will get sweaty, obviously you're going to train. But it's the ratio, it's going to be fast and rest until to maintain speed. So that's when we don't want to get too much, we're not cross-pollinating our conditioning. One of the things I found over here is so much of boxing, they just do everything off two on, one off, times nine. And that's it.

I did one session. What did I do? Did about eight, no, it was an hour. And the clock, everything was two on, one off, for an hour. And I was, I mean, I threw up a few times. But that was the whole thing. And they're expecting you to be strong, explosive, powerful. I was tired. I was tired by the end of it.

And the same with rugby. You don't need to prepare to the extremities of where the competition is going to take you. Your training will allow you to survive it. And that's the endurance side of it. Does my heart rate drop quick enough? Can I recover in between from training session to training session in my program? And can I maintain a high output? And those are the fundamental questions that we would look at from a conditioning scenario, because I'm sure you've got fighters that are absolute workhorses versus fighters that are very not that way.

James de Lacey54:09

Yeah, no, as you mentioned, some good examples, Khabib in the UFC would be the workhorse, and you'd have maybe someone like Edson Barboza who would be that fast-twitch absolute beast there.

But I had a question earlier I want to try to phrase it so it fits into the conversation to finish off. But he's basically asking around for specificity for, say, sprint intervals. So we've had guys like Dr. John Balic and Josh on the podcast. They talked a lot about sprint intervals with bikes and heavy bags. And he's asking, basically, would you recommend heavy bag sprints for power plus speed development that transfers directly?

So basically, doing heavy bag, as you mentioned, maybe six to 10 second intervals with full rest, develop power and speed. I think you just answered that. But the second follow-up question to that was, are these ideally paired with gym work that focuses on neural adaptations, plyos and Olympic lifts, or hypertrophy, stronger, bigger relevant muscles, essentially within the session? So I guess if you're going to pair, if you're going to do some kind of power-based conditioning on the same day as you go to the gym, is there a preferred day that you would do those on?

Sam Portland55:08

Yeah. It's really, that's a good question, because that's how are we structuring our training? And the biggest mistake that people...

Will make, coaches and athletes alike, is that they believe everything has to happen in seven days. We talked about this with Vern Gamba about 50 episodes ago. We talked about the death of the 7-day microcycle.

It's mad because it's only for—it's the way that our brains work because it's what we've been conditioned to, and it's so hard to try. If you think 10 days, you're just like, how? I don't know if that's possible.

And so the way that I—[expletive], 10 days, that's Monday to Wednesday. You're like, no, this can't work. Wednesday, it's my rest day. No, it's not.

So when we're developing our training cycle, I think one—for those, I don't know if you've ever had him on, but Joel Jamieson's Ultimate MMA Conditioning book—it's so good. It's the—I've read Science of Running and stuff like that.

James de Lacey56:09

Yep. Yeah, that's good.

Sam Portland56:43

For energy system focus stuff. But for someone like me, that book's great. It's all in tables and it tells you exactly what to do, so now then go and apply it.

So if we think about, first and foremost, from this condensed period of time that we're looking at of our preparation cycle, what overall goal do we want from the training? I think that is the number one mistake a lot of people make: they don't clearly define what they want out of a training block.

People—the people who define it the best? Bodybuilders. They know exactly what they want out of that next week, six weeks. Am I putting a centimeter on here? Am I putting two inches on here? Specialization for six weeks or something.

They are strategic because they're animals. It's not my jam, but I respect it. Arnold's the goat, right? So I do respect it. And the ability to clearly define—right, my first, if I'm going to prep...

For a fight, my first 10 workouts—okay, I in theory need to take me 40 days. Okay, I got 40 days to hit 10 workouts. And within those 10 workouts, I want to try and achieve this, this, and this. These are my three main objectives.

And when I'm classifying training, if I'm doing double days—if you're doing a double day, right, if you're doing gym in the morning and then fight work at night—you will be in a general preparation block because...

The accumulative effect of that training will result to increased work capacity because you're just doing lots of training. You're not going to peak out of doing double days. You can't. The body can't. I don't care who you are. You have to take a lot of—got the special needle?

James de Lacey58:37

Yeah, [expletive].

Sam Portland58:37

There's some good drugs out there. But I don't advise taking them. I think the irony with performance-enhancing drugs is that they work. So they work. You can't argue with them.

If they work. But, you know, it's my tongue in cheek, cetera. But so when you're structuring that type of training, you could, if you wanted to do—you could get three workouts in 48 hours because you could do a.m., p.m., following day.

If you do that, if you hit that trifecta, so you do power in the morning, you do your fight work in the night, and the following day you could do some hypertrophy, then you must recover because that battery bank needs to charge.

And here's a really good test: if you're a fighter and you're listening to this and you're tired and you go to the gym and you can't lift the...

Weights that you're used to lifting, is that because you got weaker or is it because you're tired? It's the easy litmus test. And you are never going to adapt from being tired. The higher quality motor potentials and those higher training abilities, you never adapt when you're tired.

That's why sometime, I want my 36, I'll go to the gym, I'll start warming up, go [expletive] this, I'm out. I'll go in the sauna instead because what's the point?

I'm not going to do that today. And so when we're clearly—I'm very aware I've bounced all around the place when I talk. So to clearly define from our current training cycle that we're going into: what is the goal of that? What is the—and then the training density, volume, and intensity must replicate that.

And the consequence of the preceding cycle of training will be only as effective as the one prior to it. If you have a [expletive] first...

Block, you are [expletive] in the second block of training. So you need to make sure that you understand the metrics that you're chasing. And a general first block of training will probably look something like: increase in compound strength of two movements, increase of explosive strength in one movement, maintaining body weight whilst increasing workouts and resting heart rate. That would be it.

If you come out of that block and your resting heart rate's all over the place, you're just [expletive].

You're just in the ringer.

And also the thing—think of some of the other things, and we're running over time, but think of some of the other things that are going to be representation of readiness for your athletes. Like, if you're a guy, are you waking up with a hard-on or not? If you're not, you're tired. Because it's the biggest central nervous system indicator of freshness for a gentleman.

I think we can all agree we all knew what it was like when it was 16: fresh and good to go. But it's a—I always say that to coaches and to athletes. For them, it really jars your thought process around how fatigued we are.

And then, but what about if you're carrying tension in your body? The only way you can understand that is: do you do yoga? Do you train? We talked about training the reflexive response of...

Movement. Are we training the parasympathetic nervous system? We have to. We can't yin without yang. So you have to think about the other things: are you going—are you just angry? Are you irritable? There's going to be so many other indicators that aren't anything to do with training, but they're to do with you, and they're really important to understand as well.

So I hope that helped. I wanted to try and give another...

Yeah, some context to that because people at the end of the day as well...

James de Lacey1:03:37

Yeah, that's perfect. And, man, this was an insightful chat. Time—I thoroughly enjoyed this and I hope the listeners as well got some of their questions answered too. This will go up in a couple of weeks, but where can people find and follow you and keep up with what you're doing?

Sam Portland1:03:37

Oh, Sam Portland, anywhere. Anywhere you consume your media, Sam Portland.

I learned that the hard way the first time. It was like, right, my Twitter's this, my this is that. And I was like, no, just look for me and I'll be there. But yeah, I love that. I didn't know there was going to be people live. That's sick.

James de Lacey1:04:01

Yeah, man, that's so good. Every now and then people jump in and ask questions, so it's awesome having you guys here that are listening because I mean, it helps bring questions and helps direct...

The conversation towards what you guys need as well. So for anyone listening to the podcast recording, make sure jump on the Sweet Science of Fighting YouTube channel because I scheduled the lives ahead of time so they're all there. But I appreciate you coming on, Sam, and yeah, we'll stay in touch.

Sam Portland1:04:24

Yeah, thanks, man. Great to reconnect with you. You're doing awesome, awesome.

James de Lacey1:04:24

Appreciate it. Cheers, mate.