Are Sprint Intervals Enough For Complete Conditioning?

Andrew Usher0:51

But when you actually look at soccer in the paper we recently published, you realize that who cares about if a player runs 5K or 10K. Some games they want to hold the ball in the second half if they're ahead. They won't make those runs. Sometimes they need to be pushing a bit more. What's way more important is eliciting what does that player actually need and the context of the sport.

And the thing that really hit us hard last year was that we were very lucky. We were getting small-sided games and we're getting actual game data. And that was a big eye opener because I could have two athletes in the gym, one back squatting 1.25 times body weight, one squatting 1.5, doesn't mean [expletive] when it comes to game day. None of that means anything. What all that matters on game day is getting through the game and being physiologically capable.

And it made me really start to contemplate are we bleeding time and things that we just shouldn't be bothering with? How much strength does someone actually really need? How do you know that? How do you quantify what's happening in the weight room, but what's actually happening in the ring if you're not actually assessing it? And that goes back to what we kind of preach, I guess, in the Energy System Development course. You need to know the individual needs and you need to know competition needs because sometimes they are very different and you need to be able to elicit that information.

And you can do it if you're aware of what the sport looks like, how it performs, how the athlete performs, and what type of data to get. And I think that for me was highlighted probably a lot more last year that we still don't really know what happens actually in competition day. And it's very important because we had some great successes last year and some big misses.

You know, we had fighters lose that shouldn't have lost. I had ultra runners not perform as well as they should, but yet every day in training they're hitting PBs, but they're not having it happen on performance day. And the question is well, why?

So this year we're kind of setting out to try and look at how does this all kind of marry together? How do you elicit the demands and how do you put it together as a training program?

James de Lacey4:46

Definitely a multifactorial thing on competition day and you mentioned obviously the physiological demands of different sports. It's actually a common thing that often comes up. It's like, okay, while sprints aren't the only thing that you do, combat sports are relatively short in duration compared to say soccer. So how does that come together then when you're running a say sprint interval protocol for a sport like soccer that runs 90 minutes versus a combat sport that maybe lasts 5, 10 minutes, 15, even up to 30 minutes depending on the actual competition?

Andrew Usher5:04

So the sprints is just a training modality. That's all it is. So it goes back to the same thing. So how do you know if your athlete's flagging in the sixth round? How do you know if your players are not doing well on the last third of the game? That's the data that then informs what the sprints look like.

So there's multiple ways of doing it. One, you can capture sparring data, which is super easy to get even with a heart rate monitor. And you can look at what does recovery look like? What's the components of striking looking like? What's a clinch looking like, what's the breakaway looking like? So that's basically what I do. So obviously I've created my own kind of app system whereby we can film the sparring and we can track all the live metrics and then I can play it back and I can look at set positions and I can look at combinations and when they were thrown, what the metabolic cost of that was, although I think it's a bad term, but kind of what is affecting certain things in order to piece it together.

And then I will reverse engineer it in a lot of ways. And I'll look at and go, okay, so they need to be able to push better. So maybe I want a sprint protocol that's very sharp and very all out, but has a slightly wider recovery period so they can get them to the level where they can start getting these explosive bouts repeated really quick. Or perhaps it's just a case of that they're really flagging metabolically and I need to increase mitochondria for ATP production. Then again, I'll change the sprint protocol about that.

But it's not just that. There's other things as well. So we constantly profile athletes. So if we do an incremental treadmill test for an ultra runner and we say we do one for say a Muay Thai fighter or say a professional boxer, the test is exactly the same, but what you're trying to extrapolate from the test is completely different.

The ultrarunner, you're looking for fat max, you're looking for carbohydrate utilization, you're looking at can you stretch that, you're looking at where's the break point before muscle oxygenation changes and what's that pacing look like? We can put pacing strategies together and we can look at feeding and nutritional intake on those big runs.

A combat athlete, I'm looking at what does volitional fatigue look like? How long does it take to get there? How long is it taking to come out? And I'm less interested in what the run pace would be if they were going to run a 25, 51K because I don't really care about that for that particular athlete. But they test exactly the same. The ultra runner, we may use VO2 max as a benchmark of sorts, but we won't use it in combat sports because it's worthless.

So everything for me just goes back to basic physiological principles. What is it you're looking at? Why you're looking at it and what the hell are you doing with it? And the problem I have with Instagram is a lot of people are posting things and I'm unsure whether it's just clickbaity responses they're trying to get or they just clearly don't have a clue what they're doing. And it's a very muddy place, which is why I don't really spend a lot of time on it.

But the other issue kind of Instagram and stuff is people will listen to someone with 22 million followers who completely may know nothing about physiology versus say someone that's a super high-end coach doing amazing work that's only got 500 followers. Generally, the kid with 500 followers is too busy working, doing amazing work to get themselves to 22 million. And you've got then this whole influence space where you get people proclaiming big fancy gyms and you realize actually they're bankrupt. Somebody else owns the gym. There's all the other crap going on with it.

So I think it's a kind of strange thing, but everything should come back to this whole idea of what does the athlete actually really need. A good example would be for us. So we get a boxer that's kind of shifted down a weight class. So we just, we don't just throw them into that. So basically we give them a kind of like a learning fight even though they're a really accomplished boxer, phenomenal kid, but we still, because we're going from super welterweight to welterweight, we still want to see how they're going to perform at welterweight.

We don't take it for granted that because they cope and perform exceptionally well at super welterweight that coming down 2.5 kilos is going to be the same because there's a difference in physiological need.

So in that particular fight we had, it was a good fight, won the fight easily, comfortably, but we noticed that round six just wasn't performing nearly as well as they should have compared to when fighting at super welterweight where they can go through the whole 10 rounds barely breaking a sweat. So you have to ask yourself why is that and is that going to be a problem? And it's going to be a huge problem for them unless we get it kind of turned around.

So that then begs a question of how do you mimic what it feels like to be in the sixth round and how do you get that physiological stress to be mimicked so you can start to train around it?

And I think that's where people are going wrong, that's not doing that.

James de Lacey10:03

And for that, an example of that would be doing, say, sprints to elicit that physiological stress and then do your sparring rounds. Would that be a...

Andrew Usher10:14

No, so I'll never do sparring after sprints because obviously sparring is the most fatal component for CTE and brain trauma and all that good stuff. So we always keep sprints well away from sparring.

James de Lacey10:28

What are you doing to elicit that stress, that, I guess, sixth round stress?

Andrew Usher10:32

So once you realize that there's an issue, say in the sixth round, you'll monitor some heavy spar sessions or decent technical spar sessions and look at is it coming across into sparring, right? And say it's coming across in sparring and we're seeing as a big issue with muscle desaturation. At that point I then look at what does that desaturation profile look like? What's the slope? What's the percentage of loss per second?

How's it tying into kinetics? How is it tying into what they're actually doing at that particular point? And then I will protocol either a bag session or a sprint session to simulate slope desaturations to try and generate that same amount of desaturation value. So I can kind of mimic the environment because you got to bear in mind there's a couple of things going on here.

One is you've got the environment which is the actual contact nature and technical nature of the sport, and then you got the physiological context, what's actually going on under the hood or the hood. So I'm interested in both as a technical coach because obviously still coach boxing. So I can marry—it's easier for me to marry that up because I could do a technical pad session to them in deep water, get the same type of effects.

Other coaches might not have that ability. So but they could then look at, okay, we're going to ramp up bag sessions. We're going to do intervals during the rounds where we do 10 rounds of the bags where we do 10 on, 10 off, 15 on, 10 off and start to layer it up and look at how accumulated fatigue is occurring and then examine that particular period of time.

And that's no different to what we've done with a lot of soccer players this year. I've looked at where are they breaking apart with our GPS data and the heart rate data. I've isolated out at this particular time, they can't maintain the same acceleration or repeated runs or change of direction. And we've done the same thing. We've done small sided games. We've looked at all the physiological data and we've kind of profiled how we're actually going to go about putting that into play. And that's generally what we do with everyone. So we almost reverse engineer everything.

I want to see the expression of the sport because I know that the weight room and how the athlete is going to perform in that weight room is going to be completely different to how they're going to perform on the day, probably because a lot of social, psychological factors as well. Family, you just have to have a couple of kids to realize they can derail your whole day. So I've been there.

James de Lacey12:50

Tell me about it. Tell me about it. But so if I'm going to try and dumb this right down for that thing, so you'll be doing, for example, some kind of bag sprint interval and then you would take them onto the bike to further elicit that physiological stress as like a round six kind of thing.

Andrew Usher13:13

I just need to get them into a very similar physiological state to where they're fatiguing in a fight or a sport. I don't care how I get there now.

The bike sprints are just such an easy thing to do. You only need 60 seconds to 90 seconds of work. The work to rest ratios is really crucial on how you plan that out. But you need to understand what you're trying to get from them. Okay? And the problem with sprints is most people don't really understand what they're doing with the bike sprint.

They just think, "Oh, we're doing mitochondrial adaptation" because they've seen some videos or, "oh, we're doing this." But unless you're actually looking at data and analyzing data, you may be off the mark because one person's intensity is very different to another person's intensity.

So you need to have an understanding—I hate using energy systems, it's really probably not for the best terms—but you need to have an understanding of how physiologically they perform at certain stages and certain fatigue points or whatever. And that just allows you to dial in. And also, I guess the last year would a good example is something like working with Richard Gadd, right? He is writing, directing, producing, and starring in a huge big TV show.

He is very limited hours in the day to train. He trains like an animal. He's one of the nicest people I ever worked with. Just goes above and beyond. Absolutely superb. But the conundrum becomes how do you fit in what you need to fit in when someone has such a crazy schedule and how do you maximize?

And what you learn pretty quick is all the big ambitions you've got, they ain't going to work. You need to find something that's consistent and something that's going to give you the leverage. If it's hypertrophy, you need to be lifting big. You need to be feeding right. It's basic stuff, right? But people want to wrap basic stuff in unicorn lands. We want to strap this in, we put candy cane here, we're going to do this, we're going to do that because it doesn't look exciting.

And we're falling into this trap that people are trying to appease clients by doing this and by doing this, you're doing that because this person does it. But the reality is none of that really matters as long as what you're doing is getting the end result. And there's a myriad of ways of doing it.

And in the world of energy system development, there's a myriad of ways of doing it. But it has to be underpinned by some sort of physiological understanding. Otherwise, you're just doing sprints for the sake of sprints. When people work with me directly, everything's targeted. All the data is analyzed. I look at it and I go, "Okay, we're changing it next week because you're maybe not pushing as much" or "right, we can push harder next week" or "where are you in your competition cycle, right, we're going to just bring it down a little bit" or "we're going to stretch it out" or whatever or "we're going to run" or maybe "we're going to progressive run circuits for ultrarunners and Hyrox" or wherever.

We're constantly changing it based upon week to week data. It's never the same every week because the body doesn't work that way. And the problem with other sprint protocols I see is people are just candy coating, just delivering 29 pounds. "This will change your life" and it's just like 30 on, 20 off or six and repeat that for eight weeks.

And that is just not how the body works. And we don't do that in strength. We're always looking at changing load, time under tension. And I always look at strength training. I think there's some really good stuff there. But it never made its way in principle to conditioning. I don't know why.

James de Lacey16:28

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Andrew Usher17:23

The physiology is harder to understand than the strength training. And most coaches come through a strength training background into coaching. So it's easier to—there's more information available, put it that way, much more information available in the strength training world than there is in the conditioning world because the conditioning world is so physiologically driven that there's just not as much physiology, I guess you could say, content around it. Most of the condition content is again as you mentioned, do this for anaerobic this, do this for aerobic that. And that's pretty much as deep as it goes.

I mean, I think about this quite a lot. I can understand why people are trying to break down cellular pathways into anaerobic and that stuff from a biochemical point of view, but it just doesn't stack up when you're trying to apply it. And this is where the confusion occurs. People try to take biochemical principles and apply them in a very sport and physiological context.

A good example of that—and I got to say it now, upset quite a lot of people—is our latest paper is going through peer review and the two reviewers are clueless about muscle physiology. The comments are some of the craziest comments I've ever seen in my life. The paper's not going to get through peer review. I can tell that right now even though we've addressed all the comments because the bias in their mind is not going to allow them to look at the research for what it is. So for example it's a Wingate paper. So we've got many Wingate papers published.

So they could actually look at our previous work, but one of them wants us to have done it in hypoxia, which is not the aim of the study because they can't get their head around why wouldn't you do it with hypoxia. So obviously they're a hypoxia-based researcher, right? So you're up against that, which is a real challenge getting good research out.

And then there's a lot of research that's more article-driven than actual proper research that's being used to promote principles, which is a big issue. And then also I just think maybe people don't find conditioning and energy systems and molecular pathways as exciting as myofiber and fiber theory. But that's the other issue, right?

And I think this is another big issue out there as well. You have got a lot of PTs that do phenomenal work, and now you get PTs that don't, just like you get some sports scientists that do phenomenal work and some that don't. And typically it tends to fall in a couple of things for me. I either have somebody working with a PT that's amazing that understands a bit of physiology, even surface, but knows what type of load, what type of tension, blah blah, everything's good.

And then occasionally I'll get the PT that's maybe working with a client externally that thinks they know everything about physiology, that's doing crazy Bosu ball 1985 Batman athletic type stuff, and they're very difficult to work with. Whereas the people that work well go, "Right, I'm going to do X, Y, and Z. You're going to do A, B, and C. Let's make it happen." And I think that's it.

But I think last year showed me that working with a lot of teams, there's a real desire and push to try and understand performance in a much more nuanced way, which is quite exciting. But when I go back to combat sports, it's like traveling back in time. It's really traveling back in time.

And I'm trying to work out why is that? Because there's plenty of education out there on combat sports. There's loads of research papers. You look at amateur boxing, there must be well over 75 papers now published. So there's plenty of it. And but people yet are still defaulting back to jumping over railings, doing long 30-milers, sledgehammer—it's my personal favorite at the moment.

And using up a lot of time in the week that would actually be better being technically utilized: striking mechanics, positional awareness, clinch positioning, holding center of the ring, breaking away off the ropes, rope control, hand control. That would be much better served than in my opinion. And it's just a strange world, combat sports. It's still very locked.

And then you've got people doing testing with people for combat sports that spend a lot of time doing VO2 stuff. And I just wonder, why have those coaches never read any literature on VO2? You just have to look at my work. You could look at Mitch Finley's work. You could look at some of the other systematic reviews and you'll see that the demarcation of where VO2 needs to sit is pretty well defined.

So I just think it's a crazy world. But I think all of us are, irrespective of those maybe not doing as good work as others, everyone is, I think, intentionally trying to move in the right direction. I just think, minus Instagram. I think Instagram has some good content and then there's a lot of people—I don't know what they're doing. There are times I look at Instagram and go, "What is this? Is this like a parallel universe?" But I think we should be moving forward and we should be understanding combat sports much, much deeper, I think, than what we actually do.

James de Lacey22:50

So it was a Hyrox testing session, but I want to apply it back to combat sports for you or ask a question back to combat sports. They were doing just your typical VO2 max test on the treadmill and then looking at lactate threshold with that. Is there any—I say any application—is there much of an application for that within combat sports where you're looking at say lactate threshold, VT1, VT2?

Is there anything in there that would make you change or let's just say not use sprints? Or is there a time and point where you would look to do other, I guess, forms of conditioning: longer, low intensity, more high intensity intervals versus sprint intervals, et cetera?

Andrew Usher22:59

So Hyrox is a good one to take because I work with quite a few Hyrox athletes and actually lost some Hyrox clients, which was an interesting one. Because even though they were smashing PBs and we actually took a good three, four minutes off the run time, they just suddenly fell back into the zone two trap, thinking that that was going to solve all the universal problems in performance.

James de Lacey23:56

Training was too hard for them.

Andrew Usher23:58

Well, I think that was one of the issues a little bit. But I think the other issue was that on performance, they just couldn't perform on the day. But that's got nothing to do with the lead-up. That's just an issue that has to be addressed in performance. And the other thing as well is you can't turn an athlete around in two, three months. You've got to quite a building block.

But going back to VO2, so the reason it doesn't interest me is that that was going to be my PhD. So I had bought numerous metabolic devices, everything from VO2 Masters, Penois, Calibers, you name it. I got them all littered in this room somewhere. And I was really interested in this whole idea of VO2 at the time many years back and looking at substrate utilization.

What you find, what you expect to see, is intensity drives it. So what in my mind became quite apparent was that people fight at different intensity levels: bantamweights, flyweights, heavyweights, they all compete at different levels. So it's not really giving you that much information.

So if someone has got relatively reasonable throughput and can perform at a relatively reasonable level, it's not something I feel like I have to challenge or add in. If it's a new career developing athlete, which I see quite a lot—and these are like younger athletes coming through that don't really do any training, just really go and hit the bags and spar, and we get them occasionally—then yeah, we'll probably look to go, "We need a little bit more base building," but we won't necessarily do it through long runs. It'll be bag sessions.

So I'm very blessed though because I work with David Mallister up in Aberdeen. So I've been working with Dave and the team up there for about six years. And Davey's very switched on both as a coach because he was boxing Scotland's younger receiver coach and he's produced numerous quality boxers over the years. I'm just very blessed that they've got a really good understanding of what I'm doing and I've got a good understanding of what they're doing.

So they will say to me, "Look, we might need to do this or we might need to do that." And Dave will do targeted heart rate sessions if we need them in the bags, put them into certain intensity zones, wait till they come back out. Davey's got so much knowledge. He's more than capable of all of it.

So we're in a very lucky position that younger athletes coming through are exposed to training methods and techniques and sports science very young. Because one of the big issues for us was when you maybe get something new to the stable—I hate that term—but when they come in, they may not have good foundations, in which case you may need to do it. But I have never really—so I was thinking about this the other day. So I think the lowest VO2 max we've ever had in the lab, a combat sports athlete, was 39. That was somebody that was fighting Cage Warriors.

James de Lacey26:51

Cage Warriors.

Andrew Usher26:52

And that's very low.

James de Lacey26:54

Fighting Cage Warriors and winning stuff.

Andrew Usher26:56

Yeah. So you kind of switch that thing. But equally it's the same a little bit with muscle oxygenation as well, because you get some athletes that perform really well—they just don't have very good extraction capability. So it's always a little bit chicken and the egg.

But when it comes to looking at things, I mean, I had put VO2 Masters and Penoy Masters on loads of boxers and did pad sessions with them, bag sessions with them, bike sprint interval sessions with them, and you just see exactly what you expect to see—or you see a rise as intensity goes—but it doesn't really tell you anything. However, on the converse, I have a boxer come around and say to me, "Look, I want to do an ultra run for charity and I don't want to look terrible on it.

So I really need to sort some stuff out." And they had to increase VO2 max a little bit because we need a little bit better fat max and carbohydrate utilization. So that was a challenge and I was like, "Well, we'll probably need to stop boxing for a period of time, go do this and come back." And they were like, "Yeah, that's what I want to do." And we changed training completely.

So for them they were doing something I call progressive runs. So nobody likes these. But the progressive run system is on the treadmill and we run for a kilometer at a set pace, set incline. At a kilometer, we progressively build up to pyramid, looking to extract oxygen as fast as we can along those lines, and then they come back down. And they're pretty grueling sessions.

Or I'll run two, or we'll do an all-out 2K run, stop for 60 seconds at the end of it, do the 1K, stop, do the 2K. That gives me a really lovely profile of set times, set intensity within times, a recovery period, and can they reproduce it and can they reproduce the longer bit at the end. So you get this real nice block system.

And that's paid a lot of dividends for a lot of boxers as well because we can get high intensity with a break, a rerun for the one kilometer, a break, and then psychologically, can they push the pace in the last two? Because the thing about running is if you do a 5K run and you start that run, once you get into that rhythm and cadence, you'll just continue that run. But seeing the run breaks and you have to start again after a delayed break, it creates a whole different set of physiological demands because the body's starting to partially recover, oxygen's starting to recover, muscle tissues maybe cooling down a little bit, and then suddenly you're throwing them back into a maximal effort run and then you're repeating that. So you're getting very similar blocks of desaturation and resaturation to say bike sprints or other things.

So you can play around with lots of different things in lots of different ways. And the bags. Yeah. And the bag's probably my favorite one because I can get the technical side of things.

I can drill a couple of things and they're brutal. Everyone who does bag sessions will say they're incredibly brutal because you could be doing negative recoveries. So we could be saying to you, "Right, we really want to drill this one-two, half step back, back in the back hand, lead hand to body then the head. Let's go. You get 10 on, 5 off, do it for the round, recover, and then we 5 on, 10 off." And the second round I'll have different combinations, or it could just be we just want to kind of keep them in tight to the bag, work a lot in body work.

And I'll do that with MMA fighters. We'll do that with clinch and hand fighting, the same type of idea. Drill it, then into sprawls, back up, back into it.

And then there's some really super cool stuff coming up. Can't really talk about it just now, but research-wise with someone, we're going to be looking at the mechanics and the physiological demands of MMA in the sense of what does it look like when you transition from heavy periods of striking into sprawl, or how you're in the kind of, you're pulling guard in that bottom position, you're trying to transition back on the top and then onto your feet. What does all that look like? Because the thing is we don't really know physiologically what that actually really looks like. We've got data on that.

James de Lacey30:54

It makes you very tired when you transition.

Andrew Usher30:57

Yeah. So we've got a lot of data. I've got quite a lot of data on it now that I'm looking at and it's pretty interesting. But the interesting thing about combat sports is that they're very, I guess, shared similarities on the initial phase where the muscle will desaturate and then move into some kind of equilibrium, and then the context of sport takes over.

So John's done a lot of work with kaans and karate in Dundee. We've got a lot of world-level karate kind of data and sample, and all that stuff has got real super interesting things in it. Like the desats are crazy, the resats are crazy in some of these athletes, but it's very short-windowed, so it's kind of like it's fast and it's over and it's got its own canal physiological profile. Boxing, say, is very similar as well, is very akin to kind of standard boxing. There's a big desat and a steady state and then a reset.

MMA is very broken in the mid-section because it's 5 minutes. So that extra two minutes creates a lot of much more greater variability in the signal. So you start to see different things. And then holding and clinch is, yeah, bleeds people dry that.

James de Lacey32:12

I've actually got a good Instagram post I actually want to read to you here. It's from Chase. He's been on the podcast. I enjoyed it. This is nothing against Chase. I just want to read this to you and get your thoughts on it, because I think it's really interesting what he posted.

And it's basically about conditioning and about basically only doing one modality not being the ticket to a gas tank. So basically saying sprints are great, but they're not the solution to all your gas tank problems. Build a bigger gas tank with low-intensity work. The boring is where the elite athletes get to the top. We use both high-intensity sprints and low-intensity work and let skill training and sparring take care of the middle.

And then on one of the slides was quite interesting. So you need to have a bulletproof aerobic engine, specifically increasing your VT1 prevents you from gassing out far more than pure sprint work. And then goes into some physiological stuff about the aerobic threshold. Your breathing rate increases and your body starts to use glucose as fuel as opposed to mostly fat as fuel. So just substrate utilization, and then just some stuff about mitochondria efficiency and whatnot. So it'd be interesting to know your thoughts around, I guess...

Andrew Usher33:22

So first thing is, why does the research not show any of that?

James de Lacey33:28

In terms of being correlated with...

Andrew Usher33:32

So why, if we look at VO2 max scores across the board from what the UFC's got, from what other organizations got, from the pro boxing data, from the amateur box, why do we not see these massive, massive engines?

James de Lacey33:50

Yeah, I agree with you on that. I've gone through all that research with the VO2 max.

Andrew Usher33:55

Well, you don't see it. So that's a fallacy for a start, because the nature of the sport doesn't necessarily demand to have as big an engine as people believe, right? So therefore, why are you spending a lot of time trying to increase it if there's no payoff at the end?

James de Lacey34:10

What about in terms of shifting VT1 then? I'm assuming that's also part of the whole lactate...

Andrew Usher34:21

Yeah, I mean that's just, so VT1 and VT2, your kind of ventilatory kind of thresholds, are just when there's a rapid change on the signal when VO2 suddenly rises or whatever, and you start to see an accumulation of lactate. So what?

James de Lacey34:33

So I'd be writing a student paper. So tell me what it really means.

Andrew Usher34:37

What does it really mean? We already know that boxing, for example, because we don't have as much intermediate, typically those athletes have to tolerate much higher lactate levels, spend dry mouth, compared to say karate or judo, for example, which is kind of interesting, right? So that tells us something about substrate utilization. It tells you that you're using a lot of glycolysis, you're creating a lot of pyruvate, pyruvate is being created into lactate. That lactate is great because we're going to use it. It's great fuel, right?

Could be argued that we need that lactate for a bit more higher cognitive function. So, because it's brain fuel. So I don't get why you wouldn't want to encourage that over fat oxidization. My opinion, if you're trying to improve fat oxidization, then you're going to miss the big picture when it comes to combat sports. You just want good carbohydrate tolerance.

James de Lacey35:17

You just want someone capable of getting through 25 minutes fighting or 9 minutes.

Andrew Usher35:43

So imagine you get, so imagine you're working amateur box, you get 9 minutes. Do you really need a VO2 max of 77 for 9 minutes of work?

So VT1, VT2 are all tied in that whole idea of looking at VO2, VCO2, and getting that, and deriving those R values and stuff. So what, "bulletproof engine" is just complete [expletive] for Instagram. What's a bulletproof engine? Because all it takes is you have a bad day. Wife leaves you in the morning of your fight, or you've picked up maybe a low-level staph infection. I don't give a [expletive] about your engine at that point. It's going to be compromised irrespective. It's not bulletproof. That's just marketing spiel for the sake of marketing spiel.

I've never said to any athletes, "We're going to build you a bulletproof engine," because what the hell does that even mean? Especially sports like boxing where suddenly you may have kids that are doing four-rounders, suddenly they're taking a step up to six-rounders, then they're taking to eight, and then they're progressively building them up. You've got that time in a pro boxer's career where you're starting to train them and build tolerance and levels through their career path.

So the reality is, how do you know your athlete is in the intensity zone required to maximize all that good stuff he's talking about? How do you know? Because two athletes will have a completely different physiological response to exactly the same sport. So how do you know?

So that's my whole thing with athletes is, when I get students I'm like, "You have this athlete here, and you need to derive how they're actually performing and what's going on. But don't confuse it with fight night or competition day, because that's a completely different set of things that's going to occur. Your job is just to best prepare them as you can."

But yeah, it's a strange one. So I wouldn't say bulletproof, and I don't think changing two points in a VO2 max score means anything to a combat sport athlete. I just don't see it. Plus, we know from the data that we have got in boxing, for example, it's a lot more steady state than you believe. Physiologically, perceptually it looks crazy.

James de Lacey38:00

Perceptually it looks crazy. Yeah.

Andrew Usher38:03

It looks intense, but physiologically it's not doing that much to muscle tissue, really. Context being sport, you know, might be slightly different.

But so I'm not sure why spending a lot of time building that VO2 is really... it's not what I would do. My whole thing is, I know the intensity that a lot of these kids are training at on their own is not that high. It sits in that area. But there is big questions over cardiac output and left ventricle development anyway. And how are you really developing it? How much intensity do you really need? How are you benchmarking your athlete to know they're in that zone that's going to make all that good stuff happen anyway?

So for me, it's just like, make it super easy. Just go, "This kid's gassing around six. We need to fix that [expletive]. How are we going to do it? Let's go and do it." I don't care about buzzwords. I don't care about all that stuff. I just want to go, "There's a problem in the sixth round. Every time he spars, we see this issue in the sixth round. He's not got the conditioning to get him beyond 18 minutes of work. Why is that?"

Then the question comes, well, how do you replicate that, right? We spoke about earlier. So no, no amount of zone two is going to fix that problem.

Because 18 minutes in is a different beast to three minutes in. So it's the same with Hyrox athletes. Am I building a bigger aerobic engine? I'm not, because if they're going to be world ranked, they're going to be under 60 minutes. They're not doing an ultra run.

So what I'm doing with them is looking at breaking down run times so they're quicker, which gives a little bit of time for transitions into the drop box and all that stuff. And also gives a bit of a leeway in the way back out. Also gives a bit of leeway to say the mat's a bit more sticky on the sled pull or whatever. So we get the run times down because we can shave off lots of time there.

And then we look at technique on sled pulls and pushes because there's a big technical component. It's almost like it's almost old school lift and you want X amount of points of contact. So you want that and you want posture and push and then we're constantly looking at how do we maximize all that. We're not doing long, long steady state runs and we've got people's time down by three, four minutes on that process.

So, but everyone's entitled to opinion. Everyone's got their own way of doing it. It's not to say my way is right. But I think what I would say hand on heart is mine is based in solid physiology research in the sport. There's a lot of people, it's not.

James de Lacey40:34

I think what's interesting, obviously you mentioned like six round gas out, most people would resort as you mentioned to low intensity work because okay, recovery is an aerobic process. I need to do quote unquote aerobic work, but not realizing that recovery isn't just how much blood you can pump in. It's as you've shown in your research, it's how well you can actually refuel the oxygen after the whatever when you take a break. And if you want to target that adaptation, it doesn't come, well it can come from low intensity work, but you have to do a ton of it to be able to get there.

Andrew Usher41:12

I mean, obviously a lot of work with military and ultra runners and cyclists and there's a lot of that lower intensity based work is just time in the saddle for the cyclist. It's like the skill work for the sport.

So way back we weren't thinking about that being low intensity and driving all of this good stuff. It just was like we knew that you could spend X amount of times in the saddle and all the, when I was really young I was big into mountain biking and I used to still do big 100 mile rides on the road bike twice a week at the time when I was doing stuff for rally because at that time we believed that's what you needed to do.

But as a mountain biker it just didn't, the race wasn't like that. The race needed a lot more physical prowess and upper body strength and stuff.

And I've seen this as well with working with downhillers over the years and BMX, there's a different set of skills needed for those athletes. So, but going back to earlier on, you have two athletes with totally physiological responses to the same sport. So you can't make both of them bulletproof. So it's not going to work one. And it's just one of these things.

Zone two, there's nothing wrong with it. It's like, but you need to have a lot of time in your schedule to do it. The athletes I work with don't have a lot of time in their schedule to do it with the exception the cyclist, the ultra runners and some of the runners I work with.

But even those we have got bike sprints in there because we want to drive mitochondrial adaptation a little bit with some of them. We've also do a lot of like fartlek and we do a lot of intervals in the run cycles as well because there's times you're going to have to pick up the pace and hold the pace, especially if you're competing.

And there's times you need to know how to rein it back. So one of the big things I'm a big, big believer of is I don't like Hyrox athletes running with watches. I'd rather they instinctively knew what their body was telling them, what the intensity level they're running at is. Because you get into this mess where, oh, I'm 60 seconds behind or I'm ahead, I can slack off.

So same, a lot of the ultra runners, they just don't even wear earphones anymore. They just go out in the run and it's just like a flow state process for them and it's just all intuitive. They know how it feels to push. They know when they're predominantly utilizing fat, when they're switching to mixed fuels or carbohydrates. So yeah, it's different things, but I think I mean was the post in context a particular sport or what was it? Combat sports.

That's just nonsense physiologically because you just, because I mean for a start I would just say well you need to read the research because that's not what the research shows. Even if you discount our stuff and you go back to '85 with Astorino and you go through some paper and you go through all those papers, you see something pretty interesting. All of those kids had VO2 max scores. All those kids, well not all of them, but some of them perform at the highest level of the sport. So why is that?

And it's because of the type of training. The type of training that boxing do is a mix of low intensity and bursts of high activity. So the reason that boxing is probably one of the best training methods is inadvertently it just caters for everything in it.

But what happened was we get into this show of adding in more long steady state and more of this and more of that. But let's not kid ourselves. I'll be 54 this year. I've been involved in combat sports since I was 5 years old and boxing since the age of 13. Long steady state runs were there because you were a chunky monkey and you had to get the weight off.

No one ever said to you, "This is going to increase your aerobic engine." It just was you're fat, you need to go for a run. That's why it was done. It was never done in all the years I've done it. No one ever took me aside went to build your aerobic base, make a little bit more bulletproof, 10 miler, let's go.

It was just done for body weight control. That was it. For the very same reason people skip with sweatsuits on, it's body weight control because they believe they're losing fat. They're losing a percentage of fat, but they're losing more fluids. So that's why and there.

So, but to say you're going to shift VT1 and VT2 a little bit and then maybe push it to the right or have it a bit more delayed, that's fine. But you could add another five points onto someone's VO2 max, it's not going to make a difference if they can't throw a right hand. I'm a big believer majority of combat sports is down to the ability of the technician.

That's why we've got some of the best athletes in the planet with some of the poorest physiological profiles because it's a type of sport is violent and your ability to deliver that violence is probably going to do you okay. That's not to say you couldn't get those people much better, but you have to sit and think about is it actually going to do it?

Because I can tell you for a start, you see a lot of top end athletes shift camps and that camp's got a very heavy S&C focus and they just don't perform as well because more of their time is in S&C and less of it is in the good stuff, the technical training, the kind of that time with the pad guy, working stuff, feeling slipping, feeling position, bringing sparring partners as close to your opponent, drilling the mechanics behind where you need to be. That's the stuff that's winning you the fights.

Everything else we're doing is just helping facilitate that. But I don't think you should ever confuse the fact that if I add six, 16 points of VO2 max, suddenly you're going to become a better fighter. I don't believe that at all. I've just never seen it.

James de Lacey46:55

Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. I think Chase is against, I know he's technical first and I think he was commenting on a lot of the I guess the sprint style content that is being put out now regarding conditioning and trying to bring it back to having both high and low intensity conditioning in a training program versus just low or just high or just XYZ. I think so.

Andrew Usher47:23

But that gets back to you, you should be looking at what your athlete needs. We use bike sprints because we know we can get a return on investment. But unlike the majority of people doing bike sprints, my athletes are doing them three times a week, but only doing probably 60 seconds of work. That's it.

People are doing bike sprints like 3 minutes on fight. And for a start, that's not a bike sprint. People are not really understanding what we're trying to see here is it's about super maximum levels to drive a metabolic state that's going to make the system have to look at that state and put some repair mechanisms in place to improve it. That's it. Just like a pathogen, that's what you're doing. You're just putting stress.

So once you get your head around the fact you're just creating a metabolic stress that makes sense because you need, and then if that isn't what you want and you want neuromuscular adaptation or neuromuscular endurance you need to stretch out the work time, the rest time, but you don't change the work time. So you may go 10 seconds on 10 seconds off and that athlete cannot cope with that. You don't suddenly go 20 seconds on 3 minutes off. You just go 10 on 60 off. You're still keeping the work to maintain the super maximum level.

What I've seen people do is create these really bizarre intervals that have got no real basis behind what they're trying to achieve. So we do it because I'm trying to drive certain things, but those may be different things for different fighters. For example, I may have a very slow fighter that comes out really slow. So I want to improve that, getting them to hunt down quicker time to peak is facilitating that push, that drive, right?

So that I'm working it from that perspective. It's not necessarily my cardio at that point. It's just I want them to be a bit more quicker on the getting to the center of the ring.

Others it could just be other things. It could just be we maybe need a little bit more upper body work for clinch, especially Muay Thai guys. So we'll do a lot of arm crank sprints because we're wanting to develop the upper bodies to utilize oxygen as well because it's not a localized phenomena. There is depletion takes place all over the place but there are slightly different levels. So you have to dial that in as well.

So the sprints are just a tool in the toolbox but you could do bag sprints. There's a whole heap of things you can do. You can do round robin sparring. My big favorite is tech sparring because I can place athletes in certain positions and drill it. And the thing about boxing is you don't see that as much, but you see a lot in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

James de Lacey49:56

A lot.

Andrew Usher49:56

You know what I mean? Because it has a place, right? But old school boxing, you did tech spar all the time. That was what I did as a kid. Now you don't see it as much. But Brazilian jiu-jitsu, I remember training with Matt Thornton years ago, the alive method and stuff, and passing guard drills and stuff, and just repeatedly hammer them just to get technically proficient at them. And I like that kind of approach and I still quite like it to an extent, and you can do it in boxing.

So there's a lot of ways to get what you want, but it has to come back to the physiology of what you're trying to achieve. So it doesn't matter as long as you're saying, right, we're driving this adaptation and we're going to use this skill set to get it. That's fine.

But you can't make sweeping statements saying that you're going to make bulletproof engines by increasing zone two work because aerobic capacity is going to increase and that a boxer needs a higher aerobic capacity. You can't say that because none of the literature backs that up. None of the VO2 scores are showing that, so you're kind of like, well, how are you coming to that conclusion?

So for me, I wanted to know. That was the reason for doing the PhD. I wanted to know if it was true. So I went out and spent a lot of money, and it just happened that as I was doing it and I had all the Moxy data for years, and John was looking at the Moxy data and he was like, this is where it's at.

VO2, it's not there. There's something strange going on with how these athletes are utilizing oxygen. It's completely different. And I was like, yeah, you can see this, you can see that. And that's what formed our work, because suddenly you realize that there's a symbiotic relationship between systemic and peripheral physiology, but equally, they've got their own little caveats and nuances of what they do.

You can have the biggest engine in the world but not be extracting oxygen well, right? So just to prove the point, you can take an ultra runner and put them in a boxing session and you can see them die in a boxing session.

James de Lacey51:52

I think jiu-jitsu people say it all the time when powerlifters come into—

Andrew Usher51:57

Yeah. So if you go back to the whole idea of VO2 and stuff, well, why is that then? Because you've not elicited the physiological demands of the sport. It's different. You have to train different things for different ways.

I see all the time where you get people that are transferring from sports. Years ago, with a girl that was in the Taekwondo team for GB and she moved to Muay Thai, and it didn't go well. Just her whole setup was completely different. Her whole energy system development was completely different. I just tried to slot across.

So if people's aerobic capacity meant they were elite fighters, then ultra runners come and see me and we'll have a couple of world champions in the gym. It's not that simple. You know, that's just to me a very Instagrammy kind of clickbait type thing.

James de Lacey52:49

Hey, you got to do clickbait on Instagram now. That's how I've got Joe Rogan in front of McGregor.

Andrew Usher52:58

My big thing this year is I just want people to get better at the sport. So I was chatting with someone the other day about this. I work with kind of a mix. So for the last couple years, it's been mainly kind of consultancy work for me and a little bit hands-on. But the hands-on that I like to do is more kind of early start career athletes, and giving them the skills. And that's one of the great things about the gym and the sporting club in Grantly Boxing is that's what they're doing.

They're equipping kids with the tools for day-to-day life, and those kids, we get a super talented bunch of kids up there, but some of those kids might never compete at a high level. They might go on and go to uni or they may go and get a laboring job or whatever. And that, to me, still through the process of teaching them physiology and strength and conditioning and sport science, you inspire them to realize that they can do a lot more than they thought they could do in the beginning.

Not everyone has to become a world champion. And I think that's one of the great things about boxing in general. You see a lot of different people through your door.

But the last few years for me, I've always thought about this quite a lot. There's a big difference between consulting for a high level team and what they're looking for for game day versus your 22-year-old male boxer that's just trying to hold down a day job and compete to make some money and to have a bit of success in a career. That's a very different, they're two different things. You can't treat them the same. They're very different prospects, different things you need to do with them.

But I just feel like if we can just help more people have a better understanding and just remove all the [expletive] and just go, right, this is what we can do to get you better to the next level. That's what we should be doing. It's like I go online and I just despair a little bit. I think I get into this because as a kid I was fascinated with combat sports and I did everything from Shotokan Taekwondo.

I went through that bad time with Ninjutsu and Kali Filipino Silat, all that stuff, went back into kickboxing into Muay Thai for a while. I had an SBG affiliated group and then back into pro boxing. And I've always loved the whole idea of making people better and finding out the nuances. And it's the same with all sports.

I was very lucky. I work with a lot of different sports as well. Now it just seems to be who's got the most Instagram followers. It seems completely different, because it's just weird. Like I said this before, I don't really do critique videos and stuff like that because I'm always conscious that you're seeing probably clickbait for a start. Is that person actually doing that? Are they just doing it to drive viewers? How much is that video in context or out of context? I don't know.

So I try and stay away from that because I'm pretty sure people look at some of the stuff we do, they'd be thinking, what the hell are they doing? But I will say we're not using BOSU balls and crazy. We would probably just, more in the, it looks super basic because everything we do is super basic. We don't do anything fancy. Even lifting protocols and stuff, we're still pretty basic. We don't do, we're still, anyone can come in and pick up what we're doing. It's not that difficult, right?

The difference is the conditioning side's probably a little bit different because of the physiology behind it and how we've interpreted that landscape. We could be bloody wrong. Maybe zone two is the way forward. All I'll say is that none of the research in combat sports backs it up. Other sports, it's got a place, but you have to mix up the other things as well because the body adapts so quick and plateaus. You need to know when to change your stimulus.

So yeah, that's one of the issues with low intensity is you got to, to drive further adaptation, you got to do more volume eventually, and that's problematic.

James de Lacey56:31

But I think what will be interesting as well, at least for the listeners, would be, I don't know if you're able to go, if there's much that can go in here, but even just like the physiological difference in physiological adaptation or even response to say a sprint interval session versus, we can call like a long high intensity interval training session, like 3 minutes on, 2 minutes off kind of thing, at not obviously max pace but kind of those, or even like your say your 2K runs that you like to do. What are we looking at in terms of adaptations or different things we're trying to target within those?

Andrew Usher57:10

So the reason we use a bike sprint for say adaptation or muscle oxygenation changes is it's so rapid. You can confine yourself on a bike and push incredibly hard in a safe manner and you can drive that. Okay? So with that, you're getting maximum kind of metabolic stress and breakdown and then you're getting this process of recovery.

And really for me, the first sprint really is the most important. I don't really care about the other ones as much, unless the first one is hitting 500 watts and the last one's 3,000 watts. Then you're like, whoa, it's the wrong way around, right? Because it's the intensity that is driving the substrates and it's the intensity and the mechanism of the motion that's driving the muscle physiology. Okay?

And we discovered this when we did 30 meter short sprints with the soccer players. When a soccer player did a 30 meter run and didn't have a change of direction, you didn't see as much impairment in muscle oxygenation. When they rotated round and come back, you started to see things that told us that it was the acceleration, the deceleration, and the change of direction that was having some sort of implication to that desaturation, resaturation component.

So that's why we started devising certain protocols for those type of runs. So they're very fast, 10-second recovery, rotate round, boom, straight back because we're trying to drive the muscle. So we're always looking at can we take that muscle and can we rapidly desat and extract oxygen, because from our interpretation, okay, and this is just ours, we believe that being able to extract the oxygen very quickly, move into steady state, is a good sign of high performance. So that's kind of what we're trying to drive. You still there?

Can you hear me?

James de Lacey59:11

Yes. Hang on. You in? Let me change this. All right. Talk again.

I got you back. Yeah.

Andrew Usher59:24

Yeah. So basically the bike sprints is just a very condensed way to maximally load the body in order to get that desaturation and to drive that. Now when you do a 2K, 1K, 2K it's a slower buildup. You're not getting that maximal desaturation. It's a much more slower push to the point whereby you get to maximum heart rate.

So what you see is bike sprints you get the rapid desat, but on the 2, 1, 2s it's much more gradually declined. So if you think about that and you think, well, okay, so what's going on there? Well, the muscle is not having to utilize as much oxygen as possible.

So if I make them do a 2K run, it goes back to if you think of this VO2 idea that the O2 will be rising at the end of a 2K run for well seasoned athletes, but the muscle may not have desaturated or any volitional fatigue. So what am I getting out of that? Just a little bit of extra throughput. I'm not getting any real big adaptations. I'm just getting familiarity, mechanics, all that good stuff.

But if I start saying to him, well, I need a really fast 2K as fast as you can go, then I'm going to drive muscle to desaturate at different periods and points. And then if I say I need you to be stationary for 60 seconds, what I'm looking to try and determine is how quickly can we resaturate it back into that? And then I go, right, give me a fast 1K. Then I'm looking to see is that 1K time as quick as the first 1K over the 2K time or what is the degradation value in that?

How is that breaking down? Because that tells me a lot about how the muscle is able to perform, how it's able to maintain throughput. It's telling me how the heart rate kinetics are able to hold that position and then we get the same with the last 2K.

So it's completely different. You're not getting the same mitochondrial drive. You're going to get a percentage of it, but you're not going to get it because you're not getting that rapid onset. The bike is just brutal. It's just boom. You're really driving that. And what you're teaching the muscle to do is under extreme conditions to be able to extract oxygen at a very fast rate, which is needed. Interestingly, what you see is with bike sprints when you start doing a block of them, these 2, 1, 2s start to get much better and the muscle starts to use less oxygen because it doesn't need to do it.

So it's a training status effect. So you start to see it and then that's when you have to change up and then that's when we'll break into 1K repeated efforts for 5K. We don't typically go very long and we're driving it all the time because at the end of the day you just want the muscle to perform.

So boxing is a three-minute round. So bike sprints are going to give you that natural building of ATP. So you're going to have much more energy. You're going to have much more mitochondrial biogenesis. You have more cells. Everything's good. You want that. You want that irrespective of any sport. But off the back of that, that needs to translate into the three-minute round because the muscle is going to desat at a much slower pace. It's going to, depending, boxing typically goes in quite fast and then bounces around. So you're really just using different things to try and elicit different effects.

So typically for me the boxers will do one fast run per week and it's an assessment and it's either a 1K or a 5K. Occasionally I'll do a 3K because I can benchmark it against a lot of other sports. And it's really just there as a kind of Monday morning run just to see how are they, how are they, because I've got years of their data.

So if it suddenly drops off I know something's wrong, but I'm not getting anything really from it other than that at this point. I mean, most of these kids have went down to crazy 1K times. Most of them could be competitive runners if they want. And that just shows you the byproduct you can get from changing the intensity.

For example, the Hyrox I'm working with at the moment is seeing massive gains in running. So how did we get them running more? He's doing bike sprints. So in our paper on mitochondrial function, doing bike sprints saw everyone increase their running stage by at least one minute at super maximum level. And that when you think about it doesn't really make sense if you take a very small model and you go that doesn't make sense because cycling is not the same as running.

But what it's doing is it's building more ATP, so you have much more energy, so your conservation of energy becomes much more efficient. So when you've done bike sprints and athletes are doing negatives, 10 on 8 off or 12, they're hitting that real big boundary. So we'll probably not go beyond 2 minutes of work ever. Most of the time it's just 10 on 10 off or 6.

But what happens over 3, 4, 5, 6 months, 1K runs become nothing in intensity versus that because it's intensity that's dictating everything else that's happening around it. So you're playing around with the ability to tolerate intensity and that's what's making the big changes. Just the same as lifting. You're not going to lift big unless you start to tolerate lifting heavier weights over a period of time. It's no different.

James de Lacey1:04:26

So I have a, this is why I find it kind of weird that people can't wrap their head around conditioning because in a lot of ways it's very similar to strength work. Because people breathe a bit heavier, their heart rate spikes up a little bit more, people get super excited about it. Whereas I can be looking at people back squatting crazy weights and go, oh, we shouldn't be doing that because you're not ready for that.

Andrew Usher1:04:49

Well, where would you go? Because you obviously mentioned you're hitting the wall there. 12 sets of 10 on 8 off. That's, I can't even imagine trying to do that because that's a brutal session. Where do you go from there?

James de Lacey1:05:01

It just depends on how the physiology responds.

Andrew Usher1:05:04

Well, I mean, say they're crushing that session, how do you further push that?

James de Lacey1:05:08

It depends where they are on the competition cycle, what we're trying to do. So most of the people that do negative recoveries is because the desat's very good and recovery is really good. So they're maybe dropping in that 10 on 8 off, in that 8 seconds it might be dropping 5, 6, 7 beats. That's good. I mean, we've got, I mean that's the thing is we've got, obviously we discussed this in the course and I shared it in the course, there's some crazy stuff going on.

People that are smashing things at the park, you get people that are doing these 10 on 8 offs and they're still hitting 1,400 watts a sprint. Boom, boom, boom, boom. They're just [expletive] insane. They're not like that in day one. In day one, they're like everyone else. 30 seconds on, 60 off for 2 times 3 weeks.

Then at the end of the 3 weeks, I'm looking at it and going, slow kinetics, maybe not recovering too well. Right. Okay. We're going to do a 30 on, 40 off for you, and we're just going to change it a little bit. And then when the needle changes and I see the physiology starts to adapt, then I'm like a shark on blood. Then I'm like, okay, next week's really shitty for you. Now we're on 10 on, 20 off for 4. And then I'm looking at the development change. I'm going, okay, that makes sense.

Because I'm not going to just take somebody with 30, 60 for 2 and then go, you're on 10 on 12. Because that is just one, they ain't going to be able to do it. Two, they're going to be demoralized. And three, they're not going to want to have to do it ever again.

And so like I said before, you have two identical athletes lifting the same amount of weight who may have completely different performance on the day. So everything for me is, so the bike sprints are only a tiny bit of what we're looking at. We're looking at that. We're looking at the strength sessions. We're looking at how they're lifting, the quality of the lifts, the recovery. We're looking at technical training, how they're performing technical training. We're looking at the biomechanics of striking, how it's all happening. And then we're looking at sparring data. And all of that is the picture that needs to be built.

So 30 players, we're looking at bike sprints, we're looking at 30 meter sprints, we're looking at small-sided game data. And then we're looking, if we can get it, game day data. And we're piecing it all together. So you can do it with small amount of data. If you just get an athlete with a heart rate monitor, you can get something, but it's not going to be as good as everything else. If you can get power data from a bike, you can get heart rate data from a bike from what you're doing, it's gold dust.

Because you can see time to peak, how they're holding peak, decay ratios, how much power they can hold for how long, what does that look like from a heart rate perspective, what's the lag between maximum heart rate and peak power? What do those two things mean to that particular athlete? Can you shrink them back down a little bit?

So you've always got a minefield of opportunities to shift things around and change the physiological output. But the thing is everything you do has to lead to the outcome of the sport at the end of the day.

Albeit there is a barrier which is anticipated anxiety and all the stress on fight nights or competition days that you can't account for.

Andrew Usher1:08:06

But if you got an athlete that's high performing in competition and you're trying to build more, you start to look at different ways of doing things. So it's like, but you ain't doing 10-on awesome day one. I'll tell you that. So that's a good—

James de Lacey1:08:22

I think I've had two athletes I think where after the 30-60 baseline test and we kind of moved them into 10-on, 15-off pretty quick.

Andrew Usher1:08:34

And a lot, I should probably explain as well. So for a lot of team sports what I've done as a consultancy capacity is we have assessed the whole team and then, because team sports you don't have the luxury that one-on-one typically, we're going to put them in baskets. So there's going to be one group, it's going to be the top group's going to be 10-on, 15-off. The next group's going to be 10-on, say 20-off. And the sin bin, the group that isn't performing too well, is going to be 10-on, 40-off.

And what happens with those groups is depending on coach feedback, those players will move from those bins. Okay? So, but a bin three person will very rarely move to a bin one top position and navigate it. So people move down that system. We do that for team sports, but it's still being analyzed. It's just we're not doing really bespoke nuanced individual stuff that I do one-to-one with clients, but it's still enough to shift the needle a little bit and we've done that with a lot of teams last year, did a lot, there's a lot of data running, which is good for me because you start to see there's a lot of common trends in age, height, weight, demographic, skill, sport, and type, a whole heap of things you can piece together.

But combat sports is the easiest one to do it and follow them because kids are sparring all the time. So you're not short of quality competitive data and from that you can infer quite a lot. That's where you see it and you can go, okay, throws a right leg, does inside, outside, maybe throws check hook, not looking too good, you can address that because one of the other important things about things as well that nobody takes into consideration is biomechanical inefficiency leads to energy deprivation over time. You start to need it.

So, the more you can clean up the technical sides, stop them throwing over, stop them falling over the lead leg, that type of stuff, you can kind of keep energy systems in place. Because what we have seen is when weight shifts, you start to see natural occlusions of the muscle tissue, you start to see desaturations and stuff. And if that's quite inefficient or someone starts really going over the front leg and falling in, obviously compromises from a technical component anyway, but what happens is you start to see the energy systems start to kind of bit of chaos.

So there's a myriad out there. It's not that difficult and shameless plug, if you do the energy system mentorship development course, then you learn deep this and what we do. You don't, yeah, to see a lot of times we, I'll obviously do the data live which is always super interesting for me. No pressure. We've done a lot, making a lot of them where people turn up the data and I'll just do it there and then and break it down and we'll look at how you see it, how you interpret it, what it looks like and how you program for it.

And it's not that difficult I don't think. It's just understanding shapes as John would say, shape of things, and that's it. And I think there's some other interesting stuff we want to work on as well this year. I want to look at, we think a lot about how deep should someone spot as a classic and should they be doing a full range of motion? Should they in partial range of motion?

And I think about this a lot in combat sports. And I'm kind of interested in looking at that and try to solve that once and for all because I'm a big believer that I think deep squatting isn't necessarily given as much from the muscle oxygenation process as people think and it could be that it's more preferential and bit more sport specific if the squatting isn't nearly as deep.

And so there's a whole heap around that because we have found super interesting things with the mid-pull that when you do a mid-pull with MMA fighters, the hamstrings bleed like absolute crazy. Whereas the quadricep doesn't. So you think if that's a quad-based exercise, it might not be for some people as quad-based as you think. Which then begs a question, if you're using as a testing protocol, you're looking at the power output, where's that coming from?

Because that was a bit of an eye-opener for us was, and I've done it subsequent other people and seen very similar things. You start to see that actually muscle, and the paper we're working on actually, the big magnus opus I guess, our big work which we're hoping to throw up, start right up soon, we'll go into muscle physiology in a completely different way where we will break down mitochondrial test and we'll break down the different components and different muscles and how different muscles function in different ranges of motion, incremental treadmill test, and it's pretty eye-opening because you start to see that certain muscles will do certain things at certain times. It kind of makes a lot of sense when you think about it and we have all that VO2 data as well.

So I can assure you we weren't pushing anyone's VT1, VT2 in any other direction, and in that you see quite comprehensively the disconnect between VO2 and muscle oxygenation. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Number one is VO2 data is traditionally sampled at 30 seconds. So it's an average over a rolling 30 seconds VO2 scoring. So straight off the bat, you have to think to yourself, is that truly representative of VO2 max?

Because if you unfilter it and you do it second by second, someone can have a VO2 max of 59. When you filter it to 30, they're going to have a VO2 max of say 48.

So the question I have had for a lot of years is why we post-filtering? We're post-filtering to remove artifacts. But there's easier ways of removing artifact now than there's ever been. You can remove it much easier whilst keeping it on a trend line. So he probably analyzed VO2 max very differently to other people.

The other thing with VO2 max is ambient temperature affects it massively. Human error is massive, the mask is not sealed on right, massive issues with it. And the other big one is if you know how to fudge it, you can fudge that test. So I can rock in and get a VO2 max probably about 69, 70 easy just by using breathing techniques at the right times to do inflection points.

So it's not, for a gold standard test, it's probably a bit more like fool's gold to me in a gold standard test. So it's not really proper gold because every machine's got different readings, different algorithms. Some use a weird modified formula, some don't use them. I mean, I've done deep dives into VO2 max machines to the point no one should ever do them, to the point by stripping the machines down, having a look at the oxygen sensors, the CO2 sensors, the positions in relation to the motherboard in the system, looking at the filter stream, looking at the line diameter. We did all of that.

That was the whole big thing before doing the NIRS for the PhD is we ruled out that VO2 could have as big a pronounced effect in the research as people were claiming it. And I think it's Van Lunen's got a paper out, compares all the devices. That's a must-read for anyone that's thinking about shifting VO2 and VT1s.

You read that paper and you realize some of these devices are not very accurate in the slightest. They're way out, and some companies are giving you like a plus 8% margin of error and saying, "Oh, you have an 8% error margin." That's huge given you're already post-filtering the data by 30 seconds.

A big international brand of kit, we had quite a big project going on and the machine wouldn't work and you're talking a 30 grand plus machine. And I'll never forget phoning technical help and they'll say, "Oh, just test a different day and we'll get it." And I'm like, "I can't, the athlete's here now, it needs to be done now." And their response, "Just use the Mifflin or use the Micardo formula, it'll be on par with the machine." And I'm like, "What do you mean it'll be on par for the machine?" And they're like, "Well, we used a weird modified formula." And I was like, "Yeah, but this is a 30 grand machine.

Surely this should be super accurate." And they're like, "There's an 8% margin of error because you're relying on the VO2 and the VCO2 having really good quality and you're just dividing those values to get your val substrates and then all you're doing is looking at inflection points where things change to get your VT1, your VT2."

It's all it is. So, it's not as crazy. It's not as sophisticated, I don't think, as people believe. It's got value. We still use it. It has value, but only in context. And I think that's the thing about all this is I think you have to take everything in a certain context.

James de Lacey1:17:05

For sure. I've actually got a comment and a couple of questions in the chat here. I'll throw you the first comment is Vincent here. Great adaptation particularly from arm crank sprint training for grappling and choke hold endurance, which is nice.

And then a question here from Will, he's actually asked this a few times in some of these podcasts. It'd be interesting one to throw to you. How does this type of conditioning, sprint intervals, compare or measure up with Project Total Conditioning as done originally? I believe from where I looked at this earlier is high intensity training, weight training like one set to failure. So like if you're doing like rows to failure, whatever, how does that adaptation compare to sprint interval training in terms of the physiological I guess response?

Andrew Usher1:17:18

Couldn't tell you. Not looked at, but never will. That's a good question. So that is a very good question.

So we've looked at things like hold and squat positions and you can see very similar desats almost to say a bike sprint. But when you dial into it, the intensity is not the same. So recovery is quite different. So though you kind of see initial data, the recovery profile is much different. In the bike sprints you don't get nearly as clean cut recovery when you do squats. You get almost like a V shape which is very similar to when you do the mitochondrial test. You have the cuff on, you do rapid inflation, rapid inflation off, you get all this V shapes.

James de Lacey1:18:41

Okay, now which brings up an interesting one that people ask me a lot about blood flow restriction.

Andrew Usher1:18:46

And do I think blood flow restriction does what it says? And I guess my feeling is no, I don't think it does what people are claiming.

James de Lacey1:18:46

And claiming it in what sense?

Andrew Usher1:19:00

I don't think you're getting... I think it goes back to the same thing. So blood flow restriction is an artificial occlusion, like putting a tourniquet on. You're not creating metabolic stress in the same way.

And that is because you're targeting one particular area and you're cutting off and squeezing out and you're just seeing oxygenation desat all the way down. That's very different to a natural occurrence whereby you are sprinting all out and the whole body is going into metabolic stress and you're driving different hormonal changes and you need those hormonal changes to break down substrates and you get a completely different picture of desaturation and resaturation in a lot of ways.

The exception being if you do an incremental treadmill test and then do our mitochondrial process and you take people to volitional fatigue, then you're getting very interesting similar patterns using the blood flow restriction process, but you have to rapidly inflate it with 300 mercury. So most people are not going to do that. It's not something you would use and be able to clamp on and then bicep curl. It'd be impossible.

But that's the only time you're getting something similar. So I suspect that what blood flow restriction is doing is just restricting blood flow, but is that really what you want if you want to optimize muscle oxygen extraction? I'm not so sure.

James de Lacey1:20:15

But it's typically used for a low load hypertrophy stimulus. I think the link more to to increase or getting higher mechanical tension earlier in the set.

Andrew Usher1:20:25

I think it's got its place and I use it and I've used it. But I just don't feel it's the same as saying that it's like a bike sprint. A lot of people say, "Oh, doing a bike sprint." It's not.

It's a different mechanism. It's an unnatural artificial occlusion that you're placing.

James de Lacey1:20:41

Almost like passive versus active almost.

Andrew Usher1:20:44

Yeah, kind of. And even that I'm still not 100% convinced. I think it's got its place.

But the other thing about it as well is I think the issue is what type of mercury center are you putting in the cuff to inflate it and what type of range of motion are you getting? Because that's something that needs to be looked at, is 100 mercury, 150, 225, etc., and look at just exactly what's taking place.

Because I can tell you when you do rapid inflations with a blood flow restriction cuff that you need to jam that baby on really, really fast. I mean that has to be like on within about one and a half, two seconds to get that PCR test to work. And we spent a lot of time developing that process to the point that we can do it with multiple athletes really super quick.

So the bent over row idea to fatigue, you're going to get muscle desaturation. Is it the same as a bike sprint? No, because the bike sprint's creating a much more overall metabolic stress. It's like doing bicep curls. You'll see desaturation, but you're not getting the same as the whole body inference and the whole hormonal change, I think.

And I think probably that's the biggest thing for me at the moment as well is how much does the hormonal interaction and the stress hormones and the catecholamines and all that stuff have an effect on what's actually occurring at super maximum levels in relation to muscle oxygenation as well. There's probably a whole myriad of [expletive] we know nothing about. It's like being under the sea and we don't know what's under there half the time.

James de Lacey1:20:58

Exactly. I have one more question in the chat from Vincent again. And he's saying do you play with change in resistance with sprint interval protocols to create different adaptations in athletes?

Andrew Usher1:20:58

So interesting you say that. Callum at the uni for his master's project, and I think the paper's published, looked at the difference between 7.5% and kind of 8.5% body weight for bike sprints. And I could be quoting this completely wrong. We have to look at his paper again and his work. But I don't think there was a massive difference when it came to muscle oxygenation. Nothing really changed there. Differences in power production which would make sense.

So what I will say is this. I will use it if I have access to the Lode bike or the uni, the Lode bike, the caliber, because you can change that magnetic resistance. And we have done it with female boxers going for world title fights that, going with the literature, you typically are less resistance than males, but we actually had females on 8.5 and 9.5% of body weight on the flywheel, smashing it, killer sessions on that and getting massive adaptation.

So I think there's value in it, but it goes back to how you're programming it and periodizing it and what type of protocols are you using with it. But I'm not sure looking at it that we've seen any massive differences in muscle oxygenation necessarily. But I'd have to go back and look at the data.

James de Lacey1:22:52

Yeah, it's harder to do though, isn't it? With things like air bikes and stuff, you're stuck with the same resistance.

Andrew Usher1:23:52

Very difficult. Even the Wattbike's really difficult to dial in. It's just I have a love-hate relationship with my bike. I like the bike, but it's a lot of [expletive] around to dial it in. It's just the Excalibur and the Lode bikes and the Conical bikes are phenomenal, but you're going to have to pay 35 grand for a bike.

James de Lacey1:24:17

Yeah. Unless you got a lot of disposable income and you probably better buy a car, but those bikes are phenomenal.

Andrew Usher1:24:17

Because you can do... We've done crazy pyramids where we've changed the resistance at different points. So you start off the sprint. So based on what I have done with athletes that can do really well in the first sprint and kind of try and not go max in the first, what I've done to them and said, "Look, if you don't go max, I'm going to jack the resistance up on two, three, four, and five." And they went, "What?" And I've done it and I've just hammered them.

So I'm like, "So give me a good first one and I'll take the intensity off the magnet for the subsequent sprints." It's like the old Pavlov kind of Skinner experiments and it's worked.

The arm crank is the different, complete story. That thing is a beast. So if you do 5.5% body weight and you up that puppy to like 8.5, 9, people are having a very hard time in life. And John's more of a sadist than me because I typically, doing the uppers, I will stick to like a Wingate, 30 on, 60 off. But John will have 10 on, 8 offs and stuff with the world karate kids and these kids are battering that.

But a lot due to the nature of the sport, he wants these really fast hands and repeated striking motions and that's brutal. It's absolutely brutal. These kids that come in morning and that's the life in the build up to world championships with him, three or four times a week. They're rocking up, bike sprints straight into arm cranks and then they leave and go to uni.

And that's the thing. People are always going, "Oh, you can't do sprints." Yes, you can because we have athletes coming in three, four times a week, pop in for basically less than 10 minutes of their life, come in, do their sprints, and continue on with their day. And John's been doing it for a lot of years with Canaan Karate to build up to world championships. Those kids are in there all the time, all times of the day, coming to get bike sprints.

And it's made a big difference on Canaan's. We've got a serious medal tally. Those kids, they're phenomenal. So it's all bike sprints. They don't do any real structured work other than that. It's all technical training and bike sprint and those kids are flying, real super level. And it's because the quality of coaching is so good.

That John's just topping up everything else. But the quality of coaching is what's really making the big difference there. So, comes back to how much do we actually influence? Not as much as we wish I think.

Definitely not. Definitely not. I think most coaches realize that after some time like, huh, you could literally not have an S&C with many teams and if the athletes are good enough, they're good enough. And I think that's the thing. And I think for me it's interesting because I mean I've said this before we had some pretty big superstars in the lab with some of the poorest scores ever.

In fact two top world ranking boxers still have got the lowest scores on bike sprints, arm cranks, vertical jumps than anyone that's come through the door. But one of them, one of them's a former undisputed champion. You ain't get into undisputed unless you've got a natural good gas tank, even though the VO2 was one of the worst I've ever seen. And that's just innate ability and skill. And you're never going to combat that.

So, basically, you have to think about what is it you're trying to do and what you're trying to change. My whole philosophy has changed over the years because now I'm like, there's no point doing this extra zone two if they're getting plenty of it in technical work. What is the point of adding to it? Plus, what's the point of putting more weight in the joints. And I want to minimize injury as much as possible, especially getting your fight week.

So, for me, it's almost like a needs assessment. I'm always just looking going, would making this kid do one and a half times body weight make a big difference to competition? Do I want to spend four weeks trying to get that? Because you need a base level of strength. You need a base level of conditioning. But once you've got them, it comes the game of what do you do next. Does adding on anymore give it the only thing I'll say about from the conditioning side is it's slightly different because conditioning you lose quite quick.

So one of the things about conditioning is when you get that high level of it, you need to be maintaining it and that's where bike sprints will get a massive advantage as well. You can maintain it and drop down to one a week and still maintain a relatively good throughput eye control function because we've done it and we've done the tests on it. Whereas strength I think slightly different. So I think strength will last a bit longer. You get away with a little bit more especially when you're clinching and you're holding you're naturally doing some type of resistance.

The reason condition which could be the reason why condition is so hard for a lot of people to get their head around. You need to because they don't think you need to be doing it all the time but you do because it drops off fast. Like mitochondrial function is use it or lose it. It will disappear really really quick. And so in order to do that, you need to keep changing the stimulus and changing things up a little bit. And that's why we're pretty much mostly all year round minus maybe a couple of weeks here or there.

But we're not killing people on 10 by 8s all the time. I think there's a big misconception about what what's actually taking place in these sprints. I think people think there's people lying in the fetal position and unable to walk for the rest of the day. We've got high functioning elite level athletes that are competing and our amateurs are in a different space because they're competing all the time and there's no detrimental effect to it. So, I tend to think those that are exaggerating it online on Instagram don't have a good enough physiological understanding of what it actually is and what we're doing.

James de Lacey1:30:18

But if they did the energy systems mentorship program, they would. Yeah, I've got data from one of my international jiu-jitsu guys from back in was it September last year or earlier? No, earlier April. April last year. We've been doing sprints pretty much every week. Since April last year and he's had multiple competitions. He's feeling awesome doing them all. We would sprint two to three times a week through all of those.

And now we're well now he's really focusing more on the strength side. So we're kind of backing up not backing off but just not doing three and doing two instead. He gets on the bike he doesn't have much time. He after training boom on the bike smashes them out sends them to me. Simple.

Andrew Usher1:31:06

I think it's a funny thing because I mean they don't feel particularly great but you get to a point where you get quite accustomed to them. They're not that bad. That only becomes a problem and I think this has been one of the big issues is if people are chasing power and it's not something I advise people to do right so there's a big thing when people come in and say they jump on the bike and they only hit 800 watts and they go oh would such and such hit and I'm like different athlete doesn't matter.

But the competitive nature of athletes want them typically to kind of produce more and that's okay in the early days when you're trying to get them to maximally produce like a super maximal effort but once you dial with that is in. I don't have them chasing it more and more and more because then it becomes quite self-defeating and they get quite disappointed and it gets shitty. But generally in the first couple of weeks you should see an increase in power anyway.

Like any exercise familiarization, first timer effect and all that good stuff. But I think what I've seen in the past a lot of people are chasing crazy numbers. And the other thing is is every bike is completely different. The UFC have a set of values that differs from the values that we've got for boxers. I know somebody's got taekwondo data that differs from the value that we've got. There's no set in stone thing on it. Even if we tried to normalize the data, it'd be pretty difficult, I think.

So, for me, it's the bike sprints are pretty much an individualized thing. The only thing that we use for competition is the one mile all out effort on the assault bike. That's one of our best ones. Test that one. And we get some pretty tasty times on that. 1:39 I think is the best time at the moment.

Very quick. But most amateurs are coming in over the 2-minute mark. But a few months of training, you're starting to see them come down to about 1:52, 1:53. So, so sprints is developing that ability to maintain very very high work rate as well, which in the nature of the sport is a good thing.

That's and contrary to what a lot of people seem to understand, you're probably getting a little bit of VO2 max development along the way. But nothing happens in isolation.

But on the other hand, does any of this really matter too much? As long as you're doing something and you're seeing results, does it really matter that much? I think I have athletes that that do bike sprints but don't give me any data, which makes life very difficult for me, especially CD about data. I'm like, uh, but they're still I'm I'm kind of basing it on when I watch them fight or when I watch them spar or I watch them roll and I'm having to kind of try and work at intervals that it's going to work for them.

And we've had quite good success. They're just people that don't want to use phones. They don't want to link apps up. They don't want to do any of that stuff. They don't want to wear a heart rate monitor, and you can still get something, but equally you might get that through doing something else.

So, you know it's an individual thing. I think the key take home for me to conclude is the issue we've got is we're training people without actually understanding what the energy system needs or the metabolic demand is in the actual sport that they do. You get two different things. You get general physical preparation that good stuff and then you've got competition day. It's kind of slightly differently. Everything should lead up to competition day. But the reality is is how do you know, right?

So my my batshit mental way is if I get a new Hyrox athlete, I go, let's do a Hyrox competition and why are you up for it? And then we'll just see how your what your body's doing. And I always say to them, I don't care about the time. It's the same with boxers. If I have a new client coming as a boxer, I be let's get some sparring data.

Then I will reverse engineer it off the back of that because I need to know how do they actually perform in the sport before I actually go the opposite way is we're going to prepare you for the sport. We're going to do this this and this and we're going to lay it up blah blah blah.

I'm the opposite. If it's a competing athlete I go let's get the data from the spar the role the competition or wherever the football game and then let's reverse engineer it and go okay so this is this that this happened here that wasn't so good. All right, that combination was [expletive]. Then I break it all apart and go, "Right, these are the things that we would do. This is the sprint protocol that's going to drive the mitochondria, the ATP regeneration.

Okay, this is the back session. It's going to allow us technically to dial in flurries of combinations and develop some recovery metrics in the background of it. This is the S&C program because we might use a bit more single leg work because maybe there there's an asymmetry between right and leg left." That's how I build my program.

So, it's kind of like a reverse engineer. I never have a generic sign up. Here's a 30-day blueprint. I don't do it just because it's probably should actually do it fairness and make a lot of money. But I don't just because I'm kind of a bit more interested in the performance side. So for me it's like let's do a lab session, testing session, do a spar session.

So in fact the last couple days for people want kind of come and train and it falls in the same thing. I go let's do an assessment session and the labs but I also need a sparring session. and they're like, "All right, cool." That's easy to do in combat sports.

If it's a Hyrox athlete, I'll go, "Do you have anywhere that does a Hyrox simulation near you?" A lot of times go, "Yeah, yes, gym down the road." I'll go, "Can you go do a Hyrox for me?" And then give me the data and then I'll reverse. And for me, that makes sense because they're already competing athletes. So if I've got a new start boxer, that's different because you're going to then just put them in S&C program, get them technical acuity skills up, get them some sparring at some point and then build it.

But when you've got already athletes competing coming to see you, doesn't make sense to do it that way because they probably had four or five different coaches. There's probably nine different S&C coaches. They had multiple online consultations.

So they roughly have a rough idea of what they like to do and what they don't like to do. So my job isn't that. My job is just to go right, that's actually how you perform and these are the things that we would do to fix that. Do you want to do that? Yeah, good. Let's go. And that's it. And I think that's been how we had the biggest success is reverse engineering what's actually occurring in the sport versus what's actually going on in the weight room and is there a connecting path on that?

I hope that makes sense.

James de Lacey1:37:22

Yeah. I have one more quick question for you in the chat from Leo. He's been following Sweet Science Fighting since day one. So he is, and every time you're on the podcast he messages me saying keep getting Andrew and John on the podcast. So he's got a question for you.

Andrew Usher1:37:37

Just ramble a lot of stuff. It's all basic stuff.

James de Lacey1:37:41

He says how would you generally structure a sprint interval protocol regimen for someone who wants to be able to punch all out on say a heavy bag for one minute or two minutes. He's a big, still is, still a big self-defense dude as well. Right. So that's probably why.

Andrew Usher1:37:41

So bike sprints we would just dial, we do the baseline testing, have a look at hurry on, hurry off kinetics and then look at it and go right, this is the program we're going to do. They can do the bike sprints whenever they want to do them. If I wanted someone to do all-out strikes in the bag then I would start gradually building that up and that's where the intervals will come in.

So 10 on, 10 off for round one, 15 on, 10 off for round two, and you can play around with that. There's a whole heap of different protocols and you want to develop because what you want to develop more than anything else is good technique.

If I just give someone and say give me an all-out one minute, it's going to go fairly quick. We'll start off with a nice couple of one-twos and then it'll just look bloody horrific. So to combat that we broke it down and went right, if you give me 10 and we give them specifics. So let's just maybe just give me the one-two, 10 all out, five back away from the bag.

So we always make them come away from the bag because what I'm really interested in is how they approach the bag. So do they push off the back foot and drive into the bag? Do they meander to the bag? And how does that change over subsequent rounds? Right? Because that tells you a lot about the psychology of the athlete as well.

So we'll pyramid it up. So we'll probably do eight rounds in the bags. I like eights or 10 rounds. I don't like two or three rounds of the bag because I just think it's a waste of time because I'm interested in how good is the technical accuracy and acuity in the later rounds when they've suffered a lot and how are they recovering and how much are they switched on.

So a lot of times I'll have certain markers in the flow that I need them to get back to and I'm looking at are they cognizant because you're getting that skill set as well but can they take commands.

So if I wanted someone all out for a minute, I would just start off probably 10 on, 20 offs and start going 10 on, 15 until they get to a position where I could then right, give me 20 on, 30 off. The thing about boxing is if you look at the research and the data and what we have seen, how often do you see a combination last more than 10 seconds?

Just never see it. So why are you training for it in boxing? Okay. So I know this. I know roughly how many punches say Fraser Wilkerson will throw in the clinch or how much he'll throw in the outside position or how much he'll throw. And generally, it's three or four punches as a setup and then he'll come in and he'll push off the back foot and drive. So when I do his bag intervals, there's no point me saying to him, "Give me 20 seconds on, 5 seconds off." Because I know in reality that doesn't simulate how he throws.

So my job is to make sure say he throws say four punches in every exchange for talking sake. He does a lot more than that but let's just say for talking sake I want that to be technically powerful, strong and explosive and all out in the back and then breaking away and going back in. Boom. Because I'm wanting to develop that into position, back step away, clear the position, see the opponent in front of you and then straight back in.

So when I used to do stuff with firearms police and stuff, we used to do a lot of longer round ratios with them, but that was different because they're firearms and we're looking to see whether they can retain a weapon. Can they holster, how quick is the line of sight draw to the weapon coming out? And so we would do a bit more deprivation.

So we do a lot of heavy squat positions and technical positions back into sprints. So there's different ways of doing things, but if I had a fighter that just wants one minute all out in the bag, I would just layer that up and get it. It wouldn't be that difficult.

It just won't look pretty, I don't think.

James de Lacey1:41:36

But it'll get the job done.

Andrew Usher1:41:38

Yeah. And at the end of the day, that's all we're doing, aren't we? We're just trying to get the job done, but we're in a better timing culture than we ever been. We can track metrics. We can look at things. We do have a lot more research. We know the physiology behind combat sports. We know what needs to be changed. There's absolutely no excuses to be doing some of the stuff that I see on Instagram.

James de Lacey1:42:01

Yeah, you need to get your start getting your block, your blog tool going on Instagram soon and then clean up your feed.

Andrew Usher1:42:09

Yeah. Well, people send me stuff, James, and go, "Have you seen this? What is that?" And I'm like, "Oh."

James de Lacey1:42:15

I get it a lot from like CrossFit. I used to work a lot with CrossFitters. CrossFitters would find some other CrossFit coach and go, "Oh, what's your thoughts on that?" And I don't care.

Andrew Usher1:42:27

Because I don't care, right? Because I'm like, "Well, what are you asking me here? You ask me, do you want to do that? Is it okay to do that?" That's really what you're asking me. You're not asking me what do you think about it. You're basically planting a seed that say maybe we should be doing this. In which case, go work with him. If you want to run with an altitude mask, I don't care.

So I get a lot of that people say what do you think of this or would you do that and I'm just I don't know because it goes back to a thing. I don't know what else they've done in the training session, unless it's something absolutely crazy like altitude masks or holding breath in tanks and stuff and punching. I seen somebody the other day was in a pool holding their breath punching.

James de Lacey1:43:08

Oh yeah, that's a classic one.

Andrew Usher1:43:12

That was increasing the anaerobic threshold and I was like, okay. So stuff like that I'm just like don't send me. Or one guy was standing on blocks with a blindfold doing pads and missing them and the pad guy was just slapping them in the face.

James de Lacey1:43:30

Dude, your algorithm is messed up man.

Andrew Usher1:43:33

Yeah, it's because people send me crap, James. That's why. So seeing some crazy stuff. On the other hand, you got some fantastic stuff out there. James Langford, he's got, James got some fantastic stuff out there. They could chat with him today about velocity based tracking sensors. Bill Smart stuff's phenomenal. So there's some absolutely phenomenal stuff out there. You get Caleb and a whole heap of people that did the mentorship that are producing absolutely gold material. So it is being combed, I think.

James de Lacey1:44:02

Yeah, for sure. There's definitely more and more out there. But for anyone who's interested, make sure you check the links in the description. There will be links to the conditioning mentorship. It starts February 9, I believe, if I remember off the top of my head.

Andrew Usher1:44:16

Yeah, so eight weeks, will end up being four live calls over those eight weeks. You'll have course material. You have data you can look at. You have your own data you can learn to analyze as well. Andrew's there to help you with that. And yeah, we've had some really cool people come through that and take it. And obviously I think most people are kind of seeing some of that now on Instagram being pushed.

Yeah, it's good. It's a good chance to kind of link up with us as well and I'm always accessible and more than happy to look at data and help where I can and stuff and it's good sharing environment. We've had some top quality coaches come through that program.

It's always been a learning experience for me, especially the live data sessions, which is always a bit like, oh. But it's good, but I think we're maybe halfway full in this cohort. So if people want to jump in, they should jump in soon. So yeah, perfect.

So thank you for letting an old man ramble. You've made my day. I'm back to the care home for some food.

James de Lacey1:45:19

Anytime, man. Anytime. I always enjoy chatting, asking questions, learning physiology stuff, and always I think a lot of people are trying to go deeper and that's why it's so good. I think, you know, I talk about this in the course because you can go really super deep, but it becomes too deep to the point where you can't apply it.

So you have this dichotomy where you basically want to learn the stuff and learn the deeper aspects of it if it really floats your boat, which it does for me. Then you want to simplify it. You need to simplify for application because application is everything, and there is a skill to that. And I think that's hopefully the thing that we're doing quite well is teaching, I guess, the art and science of bringing it together.

Because it's actually a lot simpler than you think once you have a general understanding of why does the heart do this, why does the muscle do this, what would that be an indicator of, is that a contraindication of this, all that type of stuff. And we cover all that stuff and a lot more, so it's like a crash course in all things conditioning, I guess, isn't it? It's pretty

Andrew Usher1:46:28

It's been good and, you know, so now's the time to join the Fantastic Four cohort. So my geeky bit there.

James de Lacey1:46:37

Yeah, check the description. It's all there. I'll also link up Andrew's Instagram. Make sure you follow him. He needs more followers.

Andrew Usher1:46:42

I try as much as possible.

James de Lacey1:46:44

Yeah. But don't send me things like people in tanks breathing, people blindfolded with knives. You're going to get blocked.

Andrew Usher1:46:52

Yeah, we'll see.

James de Lacey1:46:54

Oh, good. Cheers for the chat, Andrew.

Andrew Usher1:46:57

No worries. Anytime.