COACHES! Watch This + 6 Week Sprint Interval Fight Preparation

James de Lacey0:00

So, it's a cool little community. There's going to be tools in there that you can use as well for your coaching practice. And then obviously you have the conditioning membership on the back if you want to do that and some other bits and pieces.

We're also going to start adding mini courses in there. So, it's something I've been wanting to do for a while, but haven't really had the I guess platform to really do it in a way that would make sense. So, I want to start creating some mini courses in there for example, an entire mini course just on say cluster set training.

That kind of goes through maybe some of the science and research and cluster sets and then how to actually apply it and some examples of application and things like that. So, that's something that we want to kind of put in together now.

So, if you want to be in on that, you're a coach, I mean even if you're just an athlete and you want to kind of get a little deeper into the weeds, check the description. There'll be a link to sportandresearch.com and it'll be a URL there just for the actual wait list for that.

So, check that out. It's pretty cool. It should launch pretty soon and yeah, it's basically just a monthly membership for that research side and a lot of that. And then obviously everything else on top. So, with that out of the way, I think that's everything I had to announce for you.

Other than that, it's been crazy here. Two kids, summer holidays, so we have no family help here in the US because both our families are either in South Africa or in New Zealand. So, it means it's just us, which means getting things done is pretty crazy, which is why this has been a little bit sporadic because I'm doing a bunch of other things, too.

But I want to answer this question that came through email. If you guys do have any questions on training and things like that, DM me, email me, whatever, because it just gives me more ideas for content, too. Makes it easy. Honestly, it makes it easier for me to create content when you have questions that come through.

So, if you have any burning questions, send them through to me. When the podcast is live most weeks, you can ask questions on those, too, with the guests, so plenty of ways to get in touch. But this one came through about, so, here's a guy at the boxing gym and he has an exhibition fight of three 2-minute rounds and it's in 6 weeks.

They are heavyweights and he needs to help with conditioning. If I hit him with echo bike sprints, 1:3 ratio, like 20 on 40 off, full noise once or twice a week with other workouts of 2 minutes on, 1 minute off just to make the body's ability to buffer the lactate, is that something that could work in such a short time frame?

So, this is one of the common constraints with fighters that often comes up. And it's the short time frame of preparation. In every other sport that has a I guess not even a professional side, just most other sports, you have seasons.

You have like an off season, pre-season, and then you have like an in season. So, you have all this time to be able to kind of build volume, maybe do some longer duration conditioning and things like that. With fighting, you often have these things where it's like you have 6 weeks, 4 weeks, 8 weeks, 12 weeks, whatever it is.

It just kind of springs up on them or maybe someone has hasn't been training that much and then they have a fight in, 6 weeks or whatever it is. And this it's far too common. And these, and this constraint is what makes protocols like as you mentioned with the echo bike sprints, the bike sprint intervals, so potent and pretty much a necessity because you have these short time frames.

You only have 6 weeks this example, so there's zero chance that you can do anything like a low intensity conditioning because you need to make rapid change. So, in terms of the bison approach, yes, that is what you're going to have to do especially at heavy weight.

So, heavy weights typically you're not going to run them just because they are so damn heavy. So, it doesn't make much sense. So, in this instance, the it's hard to give a blanket ratio because kind of depends on what their data shows with the power data or their and or their heart rate data.

So, in 6 weeks, I mean if they haven't done much in terms of ice prints, anything's going to work anyway. So, you're going to be fine there. But typically, you'd want to bring that down eventually. So, if you started with 20 on 40 off, you'd probably do three sprints and then eventually by the following week, you probably want to bring that down to 10 on 20 off would be ideal, but again, it kind of depends on their level of fitness.

So, I'm giving very general recommendations, but the idea is that you probably want shorter work times just so you can repeat that power better. That 20 seconds rest is more than enough typically. Most I found most people with their data kind of sit in that 10 on 20 off-ish based on their heart rate stuff.

So, that's just a very general guideline you could use. You'd do six sets of 10 on 20 off for that for 5 weeks out. You can repeat that again for 4 weeks out. It's still going to be tough, so you could even drop that. You can even drop it down to 10 on 15 off for those last couple of weeks.

Or you can do 20 on 40 off for three for 2 weeks in a row and then drop it down to 10 on 20 off and then that final fifth week you could do 10 on 15 off. But yeah, ideally you'd do that, do your bison twice a week in this instance.

If they are, it's an exhibition fight, so if they are high enough level, you could do an extra session on say the heavy bag where it's 2-minute rounds of say like 10 on 15 off or even like 10 on 10 off of heavy bag intervals.

So, it might be like two bike sessions and then one on the bag. Again, depending, as important though that if you do have say heart rate with them, like the kind of responses match up. Like if their heavy bag work isn't even getting them near the like the max heart rate that they're getting on the bike, then you're not getting out of it what you're trying to with those sprints.

Doesn't mean it's not useful, just means that the intensity isn't high enough to really drive the adaptation quickly. But just the nice thing about bike sprints is you'll see those adaptations fast. And that's exactly what you want because you have 6 weeks.

So, you're basically going to quote unquote blast them. Even though it's, even though the volume's so low, you're not really getting into these issues. Like you'd have a problem if you were doing like people you'll see a lot of prescriptions where it's like 10 sets of like 20 seconds on 40 off.

And it's like, well, one, you're not ever getting sprints of all intensity with that. So, you're kind of defeating the purpose. And two, it's that becomes a lot of volume. And that's when you start to see more fatigue. In terms of the 2 minutes on 1 minute off, sure, there's nothing wrong with some longer intervals.

Again, it just depends on where, like, what are the adaptations you're trying to get from it. You mentioned obviously buffering lactate. You're going to get that at all intensities. The bike sprints are going to give you the high, high lactate levels compared to anything else.

So that it's kind of a moot point there in terms of that. If you're wanting just some extra work, maybe just to try and bias some of that central adaptation at the heart level, sure. And especially with these guys being exhibition fights and heavyweights, you're probably going to get a lot out of that long intervals anyway without that huge intensity hit.

So they're all good. Also depends, you know, is that long interval taking away from some of their boxing? So that's one of the reasons why the sprint intervals works well in this short time frame is because they take 3 to 5 minutes.

So you spend more time boxing. So in this example, they could spend that time, they could spend that session boxing instead of doing that interval, I would do that. And then just use the two bike sprints plus the one heavy bag sprint.

And then you're going to be sorted because they can box more often. They can, you can do 2-minute rounds of just boxing, which you're probably doing anyway with sparring. But regardless, you can spend that time actually doing some more technical work, which will probably have more of an effect anyway in an exhibition fight, if that makes sense, because the base fitness will take care of the rest.

In terms of something that will work in such a short time frame, yep. So bike sprints are something that, or sprint intervals generally, you see within a few sessions massive changes in mitochondrial function. So basically, we can better use oxygen, which means you're more efficient, which means you can refuel and recover better between efforts, between rounds.

That's why we push it so hard here because you just don't get these intensities within training. I'm telling you now, it doesn't matter what you do in training, nothing will hit you as hard as properly executed maximal intensity sprint intervals.

And the problem is I think that people see sprint interval training as it's too intense, you can't keep progressing. Like that's, it's obviously a common thing where people will talk about you only progress for 6 weeks and then the gains stop or whatever it is when you're doing like high intensity training, you need to do a lot of base work.

And it's like, well, no. They stop. Certain markers may stop early in terms of what you're measuring, so the physiological markers like VO2 max, anaerobic capacity, or whatever it is. But there's multiple problems with that research because one, it's the same protocol. So just like if you were going into the gym and squatting 100 kg for three sets of five every single week, at some point you would stop getting stronger.

It's the same thing in conditioning. If you're doing the same bike sprint protocol for 6 weeks, yeah, you're going to stop making progress. And the second thing is a lot of these physiological measures, yeah, they measure maybe changes in your VO2 max, but they don't measure changes in performance.

And all we care about is performance on the other end. So when you're seeing changes in, for example, time to exhaustion on longer term sprint interval programs, or you're seeing changes and improvements in power output during these different intervals, even with shorter rest, you know you're making progress because it's a really easy way to track progress on sprint intervals when you don't have a lot of tech, as you can set custom intervals on your air bike.

Now, I think there are some air bikes that are fully and they don't give you the average power output from just the work intervals. Because you want to set work and rest intervals. For example, say you're doing 10 on 20 off for six.

So you set that up on the bike and you do your six sets. Now, on Rogue Echo bikes, from my experience, they give you peak and average power just from the work intervals. I think some Assault bikes give you average power for all of it.

It's like, "Well, that doesn't make any sense because you have rest intervals. That just obviously brings the average weight down." But if you were going to track it, and what you'll, and when you're tracking it, you're going to see, you know, peak power, average power.

You just write that down every session at the end of every session, and you can see those numbers creep up as you go through the sprint interval programs. Now, what's really interesting and really cool to see is you often, people will kind of lump different protocols as isolation, oh, I guess into different silos, isolation buckets, which is typical within strength and conditioning, right?

Because you obviously have this exercise or service game is purely for hypertrophy. This one is purely for power. This conditioning is purely aerobic with anaerobic. And we know for those of you listen to this podcast often and the channel, you know nothing happens in isolation.

You know, everything happens together. Same thing with the sprint intervals. You can do 10 on 15 off, 10 on 20 off, or 10 on 10 offs. And to the average person, that is purely capacity work. It's not, it's not power. You're not going to improve power because the rest is long enough.

Well, what you'll find is you do these intervals, you will see peak power increase typically almost weekly. When you're doing say 10 on 15 off, 10 on 10 off, whatever it is. Which sounds kind of counterintuitive to this kind of isolationist approach. Where it's seen as just a capacity building.

Yeah, it will improve your capacity because you're smashing a huge stress on the body and forcing it to be better using oxygen. Plus, you're getting adaptations at the heart. But it doesn't mean that you're not improving power just because you're not fully recovering between efforts.

That's why you often see these protocols that are like 30 seconds on, like 4 minutes off. And it's like, "Okay, like if you're just looking for like a pure power stimulus, sure. But you can make power gains with these short rest intervals.

And it's not something that is widely maybe accepted or talked about. So that's one of the nice things about these intervals, you can still make power gains. The other thing is when you're doing your sprint intervals, so for example with these heavyweights, sprint intervals on say an air bike counts as resistance training.

So often we talk about strength and conditioning as these kind of like two separate entities, which yes, they are. Like, it's probably good to have this distinction because one you're kind of focusing more on the energy system development physiology. One side you're focusing more on maybe like mechanical outputs and some kind of structural changes in the muscle and things like that, which is cool.

But there are some things that overlap quite well. Like a bike sprint, so in this example, would be part of a lower body power development. As I mentioned, you are improving power outputs on the bike, which means you are able to generate more force on the pedal, which is exactly what we want.

So that can be factored in as part of the strength training for these heavyweight boxers. And in 6 weeks, it means that you can do a much lower volume of strength training, which you're going to want to do anyway in terms of what, in terms of volumes.

You want it to be very low to complement what's going on and not take away from the boxing and add more fatigue. So in this example, the bike sprints maybe take care of a lot of the power, especially heavyweights. You're probably not going to do a lot of say plyometric-based training and things like that.

I'm assuming they don't have a huge training background. Maybe they do, but regardless being quite big, you're not going to have them jumping off boxes, etc. So it means they could just do a very minimal strength training program. Let's just say they're doing a squat pattern, very low volume, like three sets of three, and then they might do some upper body work, and then for like their other lower body power, quote unquote power stuff, you might have them do some kind of weightlifting derivative because you don't have that impact.

So let's just say a clean high pull, and then the more, I guess, quote unquote not really ballistic, but you know what I mean there is the, as the bike sprint as the power work, and you can even put some throws in there.

And that'll be a pretty well-rounded program for someone like that because you don't want to introduce too much. Yeah, hopefully that answers that athlete who sent that question. Again, if you guys have questions, send them to me because I can cover them on stuff like this.

I have a question in the chat here from Christian. You're doing upper body eccentric overload on the pull-down machine. Nice. I use two handles and pull down with both of them one, let it go up holding just one handle, inspired by your two up one down on the leg extension.

Let go of thoughts. Very nice. I like that. Upper body is very hard to do true eccentric overload because you're kind of limits like for example, if you already had a pull it like a straight bar for the pull-downs like you wouldn't be able to do that.

But because you have the handles, that's a very nice one. You let me know how that actually feels. Obviously, you have to have a machine that has the two cable pulley system to be able to do that. I would say that back training probably is a little more, has a few more options like pulling stuff versus pushing in terms of eccentric overload.

Like you could do like wide arm down push-ups like wide arm push-ups on the way down and then just like use two hands to get back up. That would be one way you could overload that. But I feel like that's quite, I feel like you're probably going to be better off if you're doing some upper body push.

I know this doesn't answer your question, Christian, but it's going on a tangent. Like upper body push, I think you'd be better off just loading a barbell and lowering it down to say the pins versus trying to do like a two-up-one-down for the upper body for the pushing exercises.

And then if you're looking for like a fast eccentric overload in that sense, it would be like push-up variations. For the pulling stuff there, for heavy like exaggerated eccentric loading, I love that. That sounds really good. You could potentially do something similar with an inverted row two-up and then have one arm down.

But the hard thing is the balance. Like you would have to do it on something like rings. You do the same thing like inverted row up and then just kind of let go with one arm on the way down.

The only issue is with the two-up-one-down with the upper body pulls, it's hard to concentrate that load on the back and not have the arms take so much of the load because the grip, the forearms, and the biceps take so much strain on those that it becomes difficult to overload the lats and maybe some of the back muscles if that makes sense.

Doesn't mean don't do it. Keep doing that because that's a pretty cool variation, but I think it's maybe one of the limitations of upper body eccentric overload if you're trying to do it on certain thing, on certain movements versus like getting a dip belt and kind of standing on a high box and holding the top of like a chin up position with like 80 kg hanging off you and then resisting on the way down.

Like, that would be a pretty sick one, too. But, that would just be pure negatives. That's one of the hard things as well with the overload is like if say if you do a bench as well. Like, if you're by yourself and you don't have weight releases or anything like that, you're doing just pure negatives, which nothing wrong with it. Again, just very stressful.

And then in terms of other two up one down for upper body, I don't know if there are that many. But, it's a pretty, there's some cool stuff you could probably experiment with. Other than that, there's nothing you can really do with curls in terms of two up one down.

Nothing really with, maybe with, no, triceps. Oh, triceps you would have to do like on like a rope and you just pull down with both hands and just do the negative portion, but a lot of that stuff is probably not quite necessary. Like to do isolated tricep extension overloads is pretty out there.

But, this kind of eccentric stuff is pretty cool what you could do. So, I think that's everything I did this episode, but tune in. Make sure you check the descriptions. There's links down there for the wait list. All sorts of things going on.

We'll be back next week with episode with a guest. We're going to cover some really good topics, different research stuff. Yeah. So, I appreciate you guys listening in and we'll catch you next episode.