New Research On Sprint Intervals & Heat Training (SSOF Ep 115)

Dr. Andrew Usher1:39

So that was really the impetus to do the PhD, because really I had no interest in doing one. And obviously I was just very lucky that John Barry was super on board about it. He's as crazy as what I am, and we went in this massive rabbit hole of really investigating it. And what we found in study one, which is now published, is that there is a difference in how the muscle responds to those different training stimulus. Okay, so there's a difference of how the muscle extracts oxygen, utilizes it, and that makes sense when you think of intensity-driven substrate utilization.

Okay, so we discovered that there were obviously big differences. So therefore, training implications, maybe we're not training at the right intensity in the pads, or maybe the heavy bag, in order to maximize sparring and competition. So that was really the first big study that was quite well received.

The next study really took that idea and went, well, okay, if we're unhappy with this, how do we improve conditioning? What can we actually do? Right. And John's obviously got years and years of high-intensity training, and I'm a big believer in sprint training myself. So the idea was, well, let's actually look at it. Let's actually see if it actually does what it says on the tin.

So we took boxers, we showed them how to do sprints super maximum level, and we sent them away and they did three weeks of sprint training. And the idea was to look at what kind of changes could we actually observe. So we looked at incremental treadmill tests, we looked at how long could they run for, what was the oxygen level, and then we did this fancy occlusion protocol where you do these rapid inflations on the thigh.

You inflate a cuff up just like a blood pressure cuff, you release it, you rapidly inflate it, and you get all these nice linear regressions. And from that you can map how mitochondria respond to that.

And what we saw after three weeks of sprint training was not only were they able to run for longer at super maximal, but the mitochondrial recovery rate was much, much greater. Which basically reinforced the idea that sprint interval training has got massive, massive bang for its buck. So, and these, we had these athletes only doing three Wingates, so they're basically doing three 30 seconds on, 60 seconds off, three times a week.

But the most important thing about study two is that we were interested in looking at well-trained athletes, because the big question is, you have an athlete you've been working for X periods of time, or they come to you maybe from another gym or another coach and they've already got a baseline. So you know they've got a rough VO2 of say 44 mil, and whatever VO2 max.

So the big question for me was, well, can you still improve them? Or are we just wasting our time throwing extra protocols in place? And what we found was that well-trained athletes still can improve, but they do need to work at a much higher intensity level. Otherwise, you're probably not getting much return on that. So that was study two.

And then one of the things that's been really interesting me for years is this whole thing that, if anyone coaches in corners or knows this, if you have a fighter that's maybe just starting out, they're in a small hall show, you've been in a really cold, damp, mingy, horrible dressing room in some theater somewhere. And then you actually walk out to compete, especially if you're headlining, they've got scaffold rigs, halogen lights, and the temperature is just completely blazing. And then if you're on a big stadium show, the studio lights can be absolutely blazing as well.

And I was always really interested, is there a knock-on effect coming from cold shirt into quick exposure to heat? Does it have a, is there an issue there that we should be really aware of? And what we found with that was that from a muscle oxygenation, there wasn't really any real difference in that short exposure time. But there was the ability to produce peak power, so there's definitely a knock-on effect even in short exposure time, which is something I've been really intrigued by for many years.

And I've changed a lot of our protocols and preparation for going out to compete. So our warm-up is short, fast, close to going out to compete, and we also keep them a bit more warmed. So we may use warming black andgets and things to keep the temperature up as well. So I've been really tinkering with that, and that was really the three studies. And they all got completed, they all, you know, got, two of them in, one's published, two of them in peer review. Takes a long time now. But we have other studies now as well that have come out the back of that.

So we're now looking at male and female Wingates. Is there a difference between female boxers and male boxers in regard to skeletal function and everything else? And that paper's out there in peer review as well. So we did a lot in a small two-year window, so it was quite intense.

So that's the PhD in a nutshell. It was basically, I wanted to see what were the effects of training status, was it really translating across to a spar, and how could we improve conditioning overall, because I think there's a lot of misconceptions on what conditioning really is.

James de Lacey7:22

Yeah, I think we should actually jump straight into some of these misconceptions. And I think I've still got you here. No, you're still there. Yep, I just had some.

I think we should start, jump straight into these misconceptions. We can talk Energy Systems, and we've talked, I guess we've covered it in some previous podcasts, but it's good to go over it again anyway. Because it's something that is still always about aerobic versus anaerobic. And I think many fighters, coaches, including myself at some point, you think everything in isolation, right? You think this is an anaerobic activity, this is an aerobic activity, and we're talking with or without oxygen.

But you know, based on many pieces of research, we see that oxygen is being used, even in these hard 10, six, 10-second sprints. Even you're seeing oxygen being used at the muscle. So do we maybe just run through, I guess, this whole energy system misconception?

Dr. Andrew Usher8:19

Yeah, yeah. So I think what's happened is probably undergraduate level, we've tried to explain the energy systems in a three-energy continuum model, where you see the PCR kicking in, and then you see anaerobic glycolysis kick in, and then you see your oxidative phosphorylation.

I think what's happened is probably undergraduate level we've tried to explain the energy systems in a three energy continuum model where you see the PCR kicking in and then you see anerobic glycolysis kick in and then you see your oxidative phosphorylation kick in. And I think part of the problem with that has been that it's being reduced down into individual states and people are losing track that intensity drives substrate utilization, which is really important. And we'll get to this in a little minute because the intensity that you're working at is going to really dictate what's occurring at the cell level.

So I think that's the fundamental problem there is that we've tried to simplify it without really appreciating that all these Energy Systems cohabit and work at the same time. The contribution is different depending on the intensity level but they're all doing what they need to do in order for the body to function.

So that's led people to say things like "I'm doing alactic conditioning today" or "I'm doing anaerobic glycolytic work today" but the reality is if you're doing sprints or you're doing intervals you're doing all the work, just the contribution is slightly different. So for example if you do a six-second all-out bike sprint, that first bike sprint is probably predominantly PCR and creatine and PCR breakdown, that's probably it.

So the first six seconds of that sprint is probably heavily dependent on PCR. But if you then do a second sprint what happens is you'll see that this continuum where PCR as the main utilized substrate will start to diminish and aerobic, anaerobic glycolysis will kick in and oxidative phosphorylation will kick in. And by the time you've done your fifth six-second sprint you're heavily relying on oxidative phosphorylation.

So when people tell me they're doing alactic and they're doing six seconds on and 10 seconds off for 10, they're not doing alactic training because they can't be doing alactic training because it's impossible. And if people look up the works of say Parolin and look at the original that Parolin paper, you'll see there is a really nice study where he shows you the contribution levels of each of the substrates and how over time that contribution changes and how oxidative phosphorylation kicks in. So even in a six-second sprint there's an aerobic contribution. So it's there.

So I think what's happened in the world of conditioning is we've tried to segregate out all these little energy systems and say we're training this whereas I don't do this anymore. We just do sprint, that's it. We just do sprint training because we're looking more conceptually at the idea of mitochondrial change rather than individual substrate change because it's very difficult to do. I guess if you were powerlifting and you did one big lift and then waited three, four minutes you could have an argument to say yeah we're predominantly doing PCR training.

But that doesn't tend to work in conditioning. Most people are telling me doing anaerobic glycolysis with my athletes this week and I'm like well how are you doing that? Because where does that actually kick in in the state of a sprint or the conditioning method you're doing?

And the other thing that I always find quite interesting is you need to do a Wingate or something maximally to really engage PCR the way that the studies have done them. A lot of athletes are not training hard enough to be saying they're doing PCR and a lot of exercise selection is not driving the body hard enough or enough intensity to really be doing that either.

So I think that's one of the big issues I have with conditioning. So we we scrapped this whole idea of doing alactic and blah blah blah many years ago. We just went right this all just seems nonsense from a physiological perspective all these substrates are being used.

And a good way to look at it especially from boxing is if you put on say a portable gas analyzer, a Cosmed K4, a V2 master or whatever your preference is. You get better mileage for your kit to be fair, some of them are pretty poor. But if you wear one of those and you do a pad session right, and I've done this, I can show the data.

So you start your pad session and what you'd expect to see, because it's a predominantly fat utilization and then as intensity ramps up you start to see the swap over and carbohydrates start to drive a little bit more at the end. But even within that the split is predominantly fat early stage and it only really flips over after say five or six rounds a really heavy pad session.

So that on its own lets you know that substrates really dictate what's going on and the intensity really drives that. And if the intensity isn't high enough you're probably not getting the results that you think you're getting, which is why John and I are massive believers of subjecting athletes to horrible sprints because we know that what we get there is what we're looking for.

James de Lacey13:12

Can you, for example, I think endurance people talk about you can become more fat adapted or carbohydrate adapted than training. So you want to, a lot of people talk about doing more low intensity work, I mean that's just, there are multiple reasons that people will say that. But a lot of people say to do a lot of low intensity conditioning so you can become more fat adapted and use I guess more fat as fuel so you're not tapping into glycogen, glucose, etc. all the time. Is that something that is valid at all at least within combat sports?

Dr. Andrew Usher13:42

I lost a lot of that because you lagged a little bit but I get the gist of it. So I mean cycling a lot. I work a lot with ultra runners, I work on triathletes and there is obviously Fat Max which is your optimal rate of fat utilization from the point of view of metabolism and there is value to that. There is value in people that are maybe doing two, three hour, four hour runs and maximizing fat utilization and maximizing carbohydrates.

And you can do that through classic testing, you can do stage testing, you can do a heap of things, you can look at a whole heap of things. So you can do that and we would do that with cyclists and everything else because that's what the sport demands.

But from a boxing perspective and a combat sports it's slightly trickier and it's slightly trickier for a lot of reasons. One of the big things is this: when an athlete has his opponent and he hits a big combination, what is the intensity level physiologically of that combination? Is that super high intensity, is that a Wingate? No, the intensity level that doesn't match a Wingate.

So there's even questions over how intensive is the sport for a physiological point of view because 95% of coaches are making decisions on perception. They're looking at what are we seeing in front of us. See an athlete go for it but they're taking no metrics or they're relying just on heart rate.

And we know, and there's data from gosh from '95 onwards in the amateur space clearly showing that amateur boxers will reach max heart rate relatively early. If they get good kinetics in the first couple of rounds they will peak. So we know heart rate will peak. So as a metric is it useful? It is if you know what you're doing between the recovery of the rounds, get value.

But during the round I don't think it's got a massive amount of value. But people look at that and go holy [expletive] my lad is, he's red zoning. I hate red zone. He's red zoning and I'm like who gives a [expletive] about red zone? How good can he get out of red zone and how good can he get back into it?

So even from the point of view of perception I think people misunderstand what intensity really is. So suddenly people go this guy, he's a big striker, throws a lot of elbows, throws a lot of back hands, we need to landmine press, press like Jesus Christ we need to because they think that that's an appropriate stimulus but they're not related in any way shape or form. So I think this is part of the problem is that people are not really delving into what does the physiology tell you and what needs adapted in order for the athlete to meet the demands of the sport.

And there's not enough needs assessment. People, very very few coaches do needs assessments other than probably countermovement jump, things more related to strength and conditioning. There's very little on the way of conditioning assessment takes place which is interesting to me because it's my big area.

James de Lacey16:57

So what's intensity for you? How do you define the intensity? Because a lot of people use heart rate as an intensity measure within combat sports. Is intensity something different than that you have measured?

Dr. Andrew Usher16:57

So I guess we have the luxury of years and years on the infrared but NIRS data so we have a lot of good data on how the muscle functions and for me that's the more important thing than than heart rate. Heart rate is obviously important because blood has to get to the muscle so you have to pump it, it goes through convection.

But what people fail to understand is is that the muscle needs to take that blood flow through the capillary. So it comes through the capillary bed and even that is under debate whether the branch model is really appropriate explaining blood delivery or whether it should be a much more longitudinal capillary module Menon talks about. It's a great paper, I should read that one.

But even when the blood gets through the capillary bed it has to get to, you have to get into the muscle. So the blood flow needs to trickle down through diffusion through a slope gradient so it can get into the muscle tissue and there's rate limiters on how much...

That can occur depending on how good the muscle tissue is. So heart rate is important because obviously it's a reflection of some systemic process that's occurring, but it doesn't necessarily represent what's happening at the muscle level. So I said this to athletes all the time: it's about chassis and engines. You need to put the two of them appropriately together in order to get the best results, but nine out of 10 times we're building good chassis but we're not doing good engines because we're not really thinking peripherally about how we use oxygen in the muscle tissue and how well can the muscle recover in order to function again, which is interesting, right?

Because what's the whole idea? Definitely an afterthought. Yeah, definitely thought. But if you think of strength training, what you're looking at is this whole idea of the ability to kind of do multiple reps, but we don't take that concept necessarily into conditioning, which is kind of interesting to me. And this is where the strange dichotomy is for me, that we spend a lot of time in strength but spend very little time in actually fundamentally understanding conditioning.

And it's, yeah, we get really good results because we do both and we marry up everything as best we can. And we do things like incremental treadmill test, we look at how does an athlete perform, we do obviously strength testing, but we also do conditioning testing and we look at how the muscle functions. So for us it's like every athlete is his own little detective story, a hard detective story, because we want to work out, well, what is this athlete needing from us?

And probably 90% of the athletes that come to us, it's because the engine needs work. The strength usually, quick thing actually, usually S&C coaches are doing a good job of building strength. But that's a very, very easy thing to develop, right? I could, I sometimes think about this thing, maybe it's hard to develop strength when athlete than conditioning, because it only takes you sessions to see a massive fistful of mitochondrial change.

So actually I think people just hate doing sprints. I mean, I hate them. I personally hate them, unless you're John Barar and some strange organism from the planet and you can bang 1000 watts 10 on 10 off, then most people actually really hate. But that's insane.

But it's just kind of interesting that the sport is dependent on the ability to continue to work. Combat sports is all about that. And a lot of times we're predicating that down to strength, strength ability to do it, or strength stroke endurance is the ability to do it, but we don't actually consider how the muscle continually functions or recovers in order to do it.

And that to me's always been quite interesting because I'm like, well, that's really where conditioning sits is that ability to continually do work over time. That's, you know, work, strength, time under time and tension. So it's a kind of really interesting one for me.

So I'm not sure why conditioning is an afterthought. It could just come down to the fact that I think at a university point of view in S&C coaches, it's predominantly strength based. We don't massively do a lot of conditioning, although we're in a lucky position at AUT. Shameless plug here, you come to AUT, be exposed to current, up-to-date conditioning methods and up-to-date energy systems modeling. So we've made a big effort to, you know, make sure students are kind of well versed in that.

And I think the other thing that probably is a big lack of education is the applied side, because it's okay to do a Wingate study, but how the hell does that relate to the athlete that's coming in to see you? That's the big thing at the end of the day, which is my big interest. I'm interested in applying it. Can it be applied? It can't be applied, it's a waste of time to me. So exactly. Not sure if that answers that ramble.

James de Lacey22:00

I mean, I've got a billion follow-up questions, so I'm just going to keep going. So I know when you look at heart rate, I mean, you have algorithms that kind of show you, I guess, on and off kinetics, right? And I think I've got a general idea of how the heart rate graph should look just based on talking to you and having that nice kind of wave within your sprint intervals.

And when you don't have that wave, for example, maybe it stays really high and kind of has that shallow dipping back up and it kind of stays up top, maybe you're doing, I don't know, 10 seconds on, 20 seconds off, and you aren't able to recover well between those rounds. Heart rate stays high during that.

And a lot of, I guess a lot of people may look at that and be like, you know, hey, your heart rate's high. Maybe you need to do more, I don't know, lower intensity conditioning because you need to make a bigger heart, you can pump more blood, et cetera, right? But it seems that if the heart rate stays high, it's pumping more blood because potentially the muscles aren't taking that oxygen well. Is that what's happening to keep the heart rate up? So yeah, I'll leave it to you.

Dr. Andrew Usher22:43

So I mean, you need VO2 max, right? So the whole idea of VO2 max, we're not saying that you don't need aerobic capacity because that'd be completely ridiculous. What I'm saying is you probably don't need VO2 in the range of 80, 90 or above. You don't need endurance level athlete-based kind of VO2 max scores, but you do need aerobic capacity.

So I mean, if an athlete comes in and they score very poorly for us, we would do classic, I guess, if you call cardiac output training or left ventricular development, we would do that, right? But if the VO2 max is relatively reasonable for the sport, so around say 40, 41, then we will look to do other things. We'll start to bring in sprint training and all that type of stuff, but we wouldn't bring it in unless they had an aerobic base because that would just be ridiculous.

Okay, so I want to clarify that a lot of people say to me, ah, you're anti this. Well, not, it's just context is everything. We'll get to probably long steady state running later, but context is everything. So from a heart rate perspective, what is more important to me and to people I work with is the idea of kinetics, which is movement. Everything's moving. We're living organisms, everything's moving.

So for us, the idea is how well can the heart rate get to peak heart rate so it can kind of move into a steady state, and how well can it come out of that peak heart rate back down to a base level before the next round starts? That's really what I'm kind of really interested in. So any of the athletes I work with will tell you, quite religious in this, that we use a Polar H10 or H9, and I analyze all the raw heart rate data.

And because it's the easiest way, because most of the athletes, be what, can't afford Moxy devices or Portamons or whatever, they just can't afford them, okay? So but we have enough knowledge and expertise with the two of them that we can make some guesstimates and some good correlations.

So an athlete does a sprint or does the bag session or does a spar session. What I do is I will look at the kinetics of each round, so look at how well do they achieve the peak. Now we will mathematically model what an ideal fit would be. That's basically curve fitting for anyone, anyone in maths will understand this.

And you're looking just to predict what would be the best shape to look at for an easier term. So we look at this nice mono-exponential fit, and then on the other end at recovery end, we're looking at the same thing. We're looking at, okay, so how well did they recover?

Because you could have an athlete that hits 185 beats in 60 seconds, they've dropped 30 beats, and the coach goes, amazing, you dropped 30 beats in 60 seconds. Okay, that's all fine and well, but what the kinetics will tell you is how good a quality of a drop was that? Did they hit like a fast phase? Did they instantaneously start to recover, or was it a very delayed recovery?

Because you may drop substantial beats, but it may be the last five, six seconds of the round that you're fully recovering, and that's not as good when you start to enter the next round, especially as rounds go on.

So we use kinetic analysis to kind of really examine that over different training modalities. So we look at pad work, bag work, sparring, bike sessions, if they go for runs. And I'm constantly pushing the needle where I'm looking at and saying, okay, right, you're not recovering until the last, say, 15 seconds. I want to kind of push that so that that recovery's occurring within the first 15 seconds. And this is how we periodize all our sprint training.

So all our sprint training is, on the surface, looks quite generic because it's like 10 on 10 off or six on 20 off, whatever, but it's not. It's based upon how well the kinetics changing week by week, and that's really the key to our success is that we're really diving into that. If we have the muscle data, it gets even better, because then we can look at how well is the muscle desaturating, how good is the mitochondrial activation, and then kind of how well is the steady state component, which is really crucial, and then how good is the recovery at the end.

Because heart rate will only give you so much, but you can do a lot with it. And on the conditioning course, I'll go into all this, how you data analyze and how you break these things down, because I think this is one of the biggest things.

Issues I see with conditioning when it's being done is people don't understand kinetics. They don't understand the idea that there's slow and fast phases of recovery, there's slow and fast phases of switch on, so they're not changing anything. So they're just doing sprints because they think sprints are good, but they're not periodizing the sprint to maximize how that on kinetic should occur and how the recovery should occur.

And it's a great way for training load. So for example, if we have an athlete that suddenly is really starting to move into a very long phase of recovery, it's taking too long, but normally they're okay, we'll be looking at thinking to ourselves, okay, is there been a higher training volume the previous week, was there higher sparring volume, what took place the week before? That's usually—get a WhatsApp message and go, what did you do last week? And then I'll change sprints now because you got to remember, you have to adapt, you need different stimulus.

The other thing about sprints is you need to change them because those kinetics will plateau. You have to constantly be in the load. And we do it through bag sessions. We do very targeted intervals. So for example, Sunday will come, I'll take say one of our athletes, say Fraser Wilkinson, who's getting ready for another fight. I'll look at his data, I'll look at his bag data, I'll go, okay, we need to push this. And then what I'll do is I will change these intervals based on that, and then I'll reanalyze the following week. And that's basically how we do it.

So there's a lot more to sprints than people realize, and there's way more to heart rate than people realize. It's not just a case of you sit in the stool and you drop 20 beats and everyone's like, amazing, because it may not be amazing. It may be a very poor recovery. And that's the thing because we're living systems, so you have to appreciate what the underlying physiology is really trying to tell you. And I think this is the thing—the more you understand how it all ties together, the easier it becomes to periodize and plan and get feedback. So that's my take on that.

James de Lacey28:44

I've got a lot of questions for you, but before that, Addis Virgo in the chat here, he's asking, is a sprint like a fast 5K? I should know because I make him do them.

Dr. Andrew Usher28:44

So no. So 30 seconds all out on a Wingate or 10 seconds all out sees the muscle move into a really fast desaturation. So the muscle will uptake oxygen much quicker, right? The fast 5K, you'll see that the muscle will dip but it will plateau.

Now when it comes to running and people tell you, I like to do 3K runs, 5K runs, and 10K runs, okay, I like sometimes to break the 5Ks. So I like them to do 2K all out, 60 second recovery, 1K all out, 60 second recovery, 2K. I like to break it, okay?

And we have some phenomenal times. We have, most of the athletes—Ed just will tell you, he's one of our bigger lads, lot carries a lot of muscle, even he's hitting 20 minutes and under 5Ks. And the reason we do these 5Ks is a kinetic thing again. I want fast on kinetics, I want a good steady state component, and I want a fast finish, and I want a good heart rate recovery. And I find 5Ks work incredibly well, and it's not taking out the whole week of the training schedule.

So they are different, and we use them for slightly different things. The Wingates are always about mitochondrial adaptation for us because it's a stimulus load that we can get in a short period of time. Because you have to think about this—and I think this is some of the kickback we originally got with some of the higher level S&C coaches—was you can't do these, the volume's crazy. And you go, well, it's only 60 seconds of work, how can [expletive] this be crazy?

James de Lacey30:37

I do some sprint intervals and I'll do a minute to a minute and a half of work. And yeah, it's tough as, but within an hour I feel good. I could go train, I could go do a bunch of things. The next day, never beat up. And it's like, you think high intensity, I'm going to be stuffed for days, but you do this, then you can actually do it two, three times a week and not beat yourself up.

Dr. Andrew Usher31:05

I think when you start doing them, they're probably a little bit of a shock to the system, I think, because what happens really is people go, I do sprints. And I go, really? I go, come into the lab. And when they come into the lab, they suddenly realize that the intensity they should have been driving for has been severely lacking in their training.

James de Lacey31:05

Addis Virgo, 5K sprints. 5K sprints he does, his 5K sprint pace during his bike sprints, is that what happened?

Dr. Andrew Usher31:35

Ed just made phenomenal, phenomenal changes, absolutely phenomenal changes. His 5K time came down, his power's through the roof on the bike, his recovery is good, the muscle oxygenation is really good. It's a testament to doing the work. And it's crazy if you think about—people rebel. It's like, oh, you can't do this. And our program basically consists of doing three bloody sprints a week, a fast run, and intervals in a bag. That's it. It's just been specifically driven to how your physiology responds. That's the magic really, right? But the actual process is pretty straightforward. They ain't doing anything crazy.

I mean, Gary Hughes obviously was on this podcast with you. I mean, they've introduced the GB sprints after sparring sessions, whatever. The fear of this intensity I always find quite interesting, because people will go in and do a body attack class and go all out, but you say you got to take an elite athlete and make them do a 30 second sprint, and you get a lot of kickback, and a lot of, you can't do that, it's too dangerous. Many times people have said to me what you're doing is dangerous. It's amazing to me. I'm like, really? Clearly have no idea about physiology.

James de Lacey32:41

With the, you mentioned about changing sprint intervals based on say that heart rate recovery on that line of best fit. So then if someone's recovering later in that recovery interval and you want to make them say recover faster, earlier, are you just shortening the rest intervals to kind of force that, or what are you doing?

Dr. Andrew Usher33:13

It just depends. So say for example, we'll maybe get a kid that we want to have a bit more in the bag, then we'll give them basically—obviously it makes common sense—so if you need to develop power, obviously you need a bit more of a switch on and PCR use, blah blah blah, so basically we'll extend the recovery for that. We'll have them do super max work on the bag, say for example.

If I need to push heart rate recovery, then you need to shorten the recovery time because you need to invoke the stimulus to recover. So it's just really common sense values really. So what we'll do is we'll analyze the kinetics, and I may look at it and go, okay, I need this pushed to the left a little bit, I want the fast phase to kick in. So I'm going to put you on a series of six on, six off, or 10 on, 10 off, just depending on how well the athlete copes.

Now you have to remember that we do a baseline, so every athlete goes through Wingate testing. And we use that because it's a good period of time, we can get the power data, and we can tie in where muscle oxygen against this, and we can look at how all the kinetics, and we profile them. So every athlete I work with, I profile them in some kind of capacity. In an ideal world, they'll come up and see me. If they can't come and see me, I may go and see them, but we will profile them.

I will build—I don't want to say metabolic, it's not really the right term—but I'll build a conditioning profile, I guess. So that when they start to move away from the baseline, I can readjust. And that's the key to conditioning: you need to test. That whole joke thing we've got, test don't guess—everyone uses that, and people don't actually really test anyway. But you do need to do some kind of assessment to look at where they sit, and you need to do that periodically. It has to be.

And it can be done super easily. 5K is a great one. Before I used Moxy—before I used NIF for red—when I was coaching more kickbox and based MMA, when I had the SBG affiliate training group in the Highlands, one of the first ones in Scotland, we used to use 5K all the time on a Monday. Because if the time suddenly started to drift substantially, it would tell me that something occurred over the weekend, maybe the athlete decided to go and do some extra rolling. It's a good, it's a really good benchmark.

GB uses a 3K run time. They use them, they like them as a—I like the 3K as well because it is a sprint. So there's good rationale for using them. It's a good testing process. You can get your athletes to—a Monday morning or whatever—a run test, and you can take the heart rate from that, and you can really dial in and use it as a recovery tool. I know a lot of people use heart rate variability. I don't. I think it varies if you get an Oura ring, you got a Garmin watch, you—

Got a WHOOP band, they ain't giving you the same score. So a reason for that: algorithms, the root of mean square deviations, all these values, the variability in HRV is, I'm surprised people like to pedal it. I'm not a big lover of it. I think something like a run tells me everything I need to know. I get that data super easy and I can periodize and plan off it. That's an ingenious thing, periodization anyway. It's a discussion from the other day.

James de Lacey36:32

You mentioned as well around the equilibrium portion of the sprints and how it differs between different modalities, so for example hitting pads, hitting the bag, sparring, etc., and how they all differ equilibrium-wise. So how are you then modifying, say, a heavy bag sprint interval session to almost replicate what it's like in sparring?

Dr. Andrew Usher36:32

Okay, so here's my big thing, and I've been saying this for a lot of years: if you're going to work in S&C, do the sport or do a coaching course, a coaching level on the sport. Know what it feels like to take kicks and punches, miss teeth, bits ache, miss, because you need to appreciate the sport and the context and what you're trying to deliver. Okay?

So I know what it feels like to do 10 rounds. I know it's like the body. I'll even, at 51, I'll do some body sparring stupidly, as my wife will remind me on a week-to-week basis. So I know what the sport feels like.

So it was clear to us when we looked at study one, we were looking at the near-infrared that each of these training modalities—so for example, heavy bag is relatively self-autonomous. The boxer goes in, if it's an old-school Glasgow boxing gym, every three minutes beep, they move on to another piece of kit. So they may go from the maize ball to the heavy bag, they use a top and bottom ball. And what we found in the heavy bag sessions is there's no intensity really. The muscle doesn't kick in. It's slower to move to steady state because there's no real drive.

So if you're doing that thousands of times over a year, you're not training for what sparring is going to give you. You're just hitting the bag for the sake of hitting the bag. And the other big killer for me is—and we are, I have to say, David McAllister up in Northland Sporting Club does an amazing job with this—technique is everything. So even those kids in the heavy bag, they're like technique.

Focus pads, slightly different. Depends on the coach. If you have a lazy coach, you're going to get pads. If you have a decent coach that pushes you and simulates, you're going to get a bit closer to sparring. You're going to see that the muscle's going to move into desaturation slightly faster and then enter this equilibrium or steady state.

Sparring is a completely different animal. Sparring strangely, obviously, has a hormonal drive connection as well. There's a big difference to sparring. What happens to sparring is the opponent is kind of sizing off, there's a slight delay, and then there's a rapid utilization of oxygen. Sparring, we still don't really know why, but it does it, and then they move into steady state.

So what we had seen was that the quicker you can desaturate and move into steady state, the more you're in a flow state or you're just gliding a lot. You're kind of using oxygen at a good rate, you're resupplying at a good rate. When you're deconditioned, what happens is it takes you much longer to move into steady state and it's got a lot more variance. And we analyze it through a mean absolute deviation function.

So you get much more variance and recovery becomes prolonged and delayed. So what I'm looking for in the heavy bag sessions and the technical pad sessions—if I can get the NIRS data—is how well are they moving into steady state and how well are they coming out of steady state and how that's repeating over the rounds.

Now we're always in a luxurious position that I can slap Moxys on people. I can post them down to people, they can wear them, and we get their heart rate in conjunction with it, and I can marry the two of them up. So when I start to evaluate heart rate, I can position off what I've seen with a near-infrared spectroscopy data. And that's kind of how we do it. So that's a bit more advanced level for a lot of athletes because not everyone actually has access to that. But that's kind of how we do it.

It's all based off of, at the end of the day, for me, everyone has to be about sparring and competition. I say this all the time in the gym: the kids, boxers need to be able to box first. I'm a big believer: boxers need to box, my Thai fighters need to do Muay Thai, BJJ guys have to be able to do BJJ, right? That's it. You have to be able to do the sport. If things are complicating the performance of the sport, you need to look.

James de Lacey40:33

I wanted to go into maybe some more misconceptions around conditioning. And we can touch on maybe on lactate. And we've talked about lactate a bit previously as well, how it's a fuel, it's a good thing, it's not a bad thing. But there's obviously still a lot of push around prioritizing low-intensity conditioning so lactate doesn't rise and then essentially trying to avoid the rise in lactate in conditioning, often because high-intensity exercise, you essentially take longer to recover between sessions, etc., etc.

So I'd love to get your take on what's being said around that and trying to train sort of under that quote-unquote aerobic threshold.

Dr. Andrew Usher41:12

So the problem lactate is, one, a lot of times it's taken on, say, like a lactate scout or a device such as that, and they've got massive error ratios on them. So that's the first issue I have with lactate. If you're using blood from the vein, you'll find that often the value lactate present in blood is much different to that taken at the fingertips. You could have, like, one millimolar in blood but 14 on a fingertip, okay? There's a massive lag systemically and how that's coming across on a lactate reading.

So the reason I don't use lactate is predominately down to that, and also the fact that if you go through the research—and we do have substantial amounts of amateur boxing research—you just see the same things, that you need to be able to tolerate relatively, say, around 14 millimolar of lactate, right? So I'm kind of like, so what? Right? So what?

So I don't think this is as important as people think it is. Now, where I would differ on this is if I had a cyclist thing, and then I would do lactate profiling. I would probably look at the onset of blood lactate. I'd look at the accumulation rate, and I would tie that into things like fat max.

I'd be looking at ventilatory threshold, VT1, and stuff. I would do all that for a cyclist because I think it's a bit more important in that sport to me, because I think fuel management is quite critical to success in those sports. But for combat sports, I think it's a complete waste of time.

James de Lacey42:43

You don't think we need to lower that onset of blood lactate to maybe lower heart rates or maybe lower intensities or power outputs so you're not tapping into different energy reserves and whatnot? Because that's often, I guess, the philosophy around a lot of conditioning is based on that.

Dr. Andrew Usher43:08

No, and I'll tell you why. Because if you take athletes that are in camp and you bring them in, we've taken the elite, the starting resting is always way over one. Sometimes it's two. They're starting at two millimolar because they're cutting, they're kind of probably in a catabolic situation, nutrition's been altered and changed. So the reflection of the readings that we're even getting in that domain are probably not really truly realistic.

So I look at it and I think we just need to be able to work hard for longer. I'm a very simple person, right, even though crazy, although we do quite—

James de Lacey43:37

You have your own bloody algorithms and you're a very simple person.

Dr. Andrew Usher43:37

But from a point of view, from a point of view of the athlete, it's like, yeah, go do the sprint, go do the spar, do this in the spar. We need you to do that. That's kind of really my take on it from an athlete point of view.

You can get bogged down and look at the lactate and look at George Brooks's seminal work on lactate utilization and it being a monocarboxylate transporter, transcription factors. You can look at all that stuff, right? But what the hell—the podcast did—wow, Brooks. But the thing is, at the end of the day, what does it really matter?

So, I mean, I think the amateur boxing, I think they talked out maybe 14 to 16 millimolar. I think that was the lactate. When you look at it, the conclusion was that lactate in boxing was higher than other combat sports. So, like, karate was at 12, taekwondo was 13 or whatever. Some kind of good papers out on that.

But I just think as a region and as a system, you have to understand the difference between lactate that's flowing in the blood versus coming out a fingertip. Sweat, grease, time, machine—I'm just like, why are we so fascinated with this? Because the research has kind of moved away from it a little bit in combat sports because it doesn't really yield anything particularly useful.

I mean, I had one coach quite local to me who obviously bought himself a lactate Scout Pro, and he was super enamored with the whole thing. And I had said to him, "You're really going to change your training programs based upon the—"

Fact that this kid has went from been able to tolerate 13 millimoles to 15 millimoles, and he was like yeah, and I was like, "But Tuesday he may only have 11 millimoles, so what are you actually trying to tell me? Like, different training has different lactate production?" No, it's all based on intensity. So why are we going to...

I don't use it as a metric unless, as I said, it's like specific, maybe cyclists, runners. I have done it with special forces guys that are doing maybe like tactical battles, maybe 100 meters and stuff like that. We kind of looked and profiled it, but generally for combat sports, I don't waste my time. It's just not... I just don't.

Not in combat sports. You can shift a needle a little bit in cycling, and you can kind of look at stage testing and take things. But I think from point of view of combat sports, because one of the crazy things of combat sports is—and even this is the big thing caveat we research—is that sparring is a completely different animal. It has cortisol drive, it has a whole heap of biochemical junk swimming around that can change things.

So you're never really going to be able to match it. You're just doing your best to make sure the athlete can go through the rounds and get the engine to take them through the rounds. But that's what makes sports super exciting. You just don't know what's going to happen.

But from even from us looking at how muscle responds in sparring, it's got a sharper utilization of oxygen in sparring compared to bags and pads. And that sharp desaturation is closer to a Wingate than anything else, which makes no sense, doesn't make any sense, because the intensity is not the same. So clearly something there is driving. And I think there's been some studies with the amateur boxers that shown kind of increases in kind of epinephrine, all the adrenaline factors and all those kind of hormones, so it definitely has an effect.

And the problem, the lactate readings that come out of combat sports papers, is a lot of them are post-sparring and pre-sparring where you have a huge amount of hormonal drive. So I'm not a massive lover of it. I can understand why people do it, but for me I just think it's a waste of time in combat sports.

James de Lacey47:59

And now I also want to come to further to the peripheral adaptation side. And you've mentioned, obviously when we're talking about peripheral adaptations from the muscle, we're talking like mitochondria, and you also mentioned capillaries or blood vessels. And I wonder if you're able to clear this up for me because there's a couple... One of them, that Brooks paper on lactate, and he's saying basically lactate enhances VEGF, so essentially creating, being able to create new blood vessels.

But then a recent paper on... I can't remember what who was it, what it was called now, but essentially they're showing that the athletes with the greatest number of blood vessels, of capillaries to muscle fiber ratio, are in like elite endurance athletes because they do a lot of low intensity work, and that sprint intervals may inhibit VEGF. So it's almost like, I guess you could say opposites there, because you talk about lactate is activating it, but sprint intervals inhibit it. So I don't know if there's any way you can clear that up.

Dr. Andrew Usher48:56

So I think it comes down to what you're looking at and the bias and the lens you're looking through. Obviously, I'm very biased in my own work, so I've got my own kind of lens and what I see, and they've obviously got their kind of lens and what they're looking at. But mitochondrial adaptation needs to take place in the cell and it needs to be driven.

So you could have more... You could expand or increase your capillary bed. Say, for talking's sake, okay, go simplistic terms, kind of sudden we do steady state, so we have a massive more increase of kind of cardiac output. We can pump more blood, blah blah blah, aerobic capacity goes up. But you're still pushing fluids through pipes, and your capillary bed is just is just a longitudinal network, the capillary modules. And if you buy into the new model, the MI, I think, is probably more right. It's a much more contour into the muscle than we first believed.

Okay, so you're pushing blood there, but you still need to get the blood from the capillary bed to the muscle tissue. It still has to go through a process of diffusion, and there's a slope gradient exchange which dictates how much comes through. So it could be that you're increasing your capillary bed size, but the muscle is still unable to extract and diffuse the blood from the capillary into the muscle tissue. We don't know, we just don't know.

Crazy thing about muscle physiology is a lot of it we still don't really know. Even things like myoglobin is a kind of... Maybe like, sometimes you think kind of... You can think of hemoglobin, you think of myoglobin. Is myoglobin like a muscle reserve function? Does it sit there as a critical reserve? Is it there to kind of push into the tissue when it's needed?

We don't know. Near infrared spectroscopy is obviously a great weapon of choice, but it's very limited in what it can also see, so you're still kind of making... We're still making assumptions. And that's the big caveat of our research is we're still making assumptions that we think this is what it is, but we could be wrong. You never know.

I don't think so, but we could be. But from a physiological perspective, I can understand why they would maybe say that inhibits. But on the other hand, it doesn't stand true with the research that we've done in the paper that's in for publication, where we see like almost like 160% fold change in mitochondrial rate. And you just look at the work of Mikey Scheurman, all these people as well that have done occlusions, post kind of flexion extension exercises—they see a change as well.

So there could be another mediating factor. So, but personally, my own experience in the last four years of doing this... And I had athletes do sprints 50 weeks of the year for four years. None of these died yet, just make that quickly. We've only seen positive changes. Occasionally we've seen plateaus and stimuluses have been changed, but generally we've seen there is a point whereby you're probably not going to get any more mitochondrial change.

But yeah, so I don't know. I think the the big issue for me is is the rate limiting factor: diffusion to the muscle. That seems to be... And whether that's a physiologically fixed principle that can't get changed, I don't know. Because one of the issues that we have in the research is trying to understand blood flow at the site. It's very difficult.

Me and John chat quite a lot: how can we, what technology do we need? See, the problem is you could probably do it in a lab setting, and you could do it in a stationary exercise, and you could probably get a... You could ask kind of cardiac output in blood flow for... You could probably get that somehow. But applied, it's completely different.

So it's kind of, how do we ascertain blood flow at the tissue level? Because once we get blood flow at the tissue level and we understand extraction ratios and diffusion rates, we could probably answer that question as to what benefits and or what potentially inhibits it. But until it can be done in an applied context, I'm not that bothered about it.

James de Lacey52:46

And in your paper as well, on your boxing sprint interval paper, you talked at the end about... I think it was about amateur boxing being closer to a 1500 meter runner. And I guess my question to you is then, what does that mean for you regarding training? How does that influence training for an amateur boxer if the profiles are more like 1500 meter runners?

Dr. Andrew Usher53:16

So obviously you've got 3 minutes, 1 minute break, so you really get 9 minutes of work and two minutes recovery, because last minute recovery, obviously. So for us, it's really the same type of thing. It's interesting because people are really fixated with the idea punches thrown is an indicator, right? But physiologically it doesn't really stand up, because the muscle doesn't necessarily respond that way.

So for us, it's really, for the amateur side, I kind of train them very similar to how I train the pros, just with the exception of the targeted bag sessions are slightly different. I just want much more explosive movement early on, and we train them slightly different because we want a faster time to peak power. So basically in the sprints, so the other stuff... There's a lot of other stuff we use. It's not just heart rate and near infrared spectroscopy.

One of the really interesting things for us is that using sprints increases time to peak power. That's kind of quite critical, because a lot of times people do sprints on the load bike and or maybe hit, say, 1500 watts for two seconds, but they don't get there for 6 seconds. So the ability to switch on and get to peak is is very delayed. So we spent a lot of time trying to get, especially amateurs, very quick switch on. So it's the time to peak is really fast.

Because over three rounds you don't have a lot of time. Stoppages are very uncommon. You very seldom see big knockouts. So it is all kind of really one on dominance, controlling center of the ring, good attacking, good defensive skills, and just being really active. So for us, the drilling is... The conditioning is similar, but it's a bit more targeted around that idea. Again, time to peak power much...

Much quicker. Pro boxers don't need to get there as quick, so we still want them to get there quick but there's not as big a drive. So the amateurs will be on slightly different split times for the Sprint. So for example, Fraser or Wilkinson might be on 10 on 10 off, but I might have, like, so Grant Mom's fighting this week in the World Sports Cup, so we've had him in shorter sprints, six on 10 offs, and I've been very... that up because I want that fast impulse and that fast drive.

And that's basically it. We don't change it massively, it just comes down to I guess just how well they done inspiring, what the times peaks are looking like, what the recovery times are looking like. And it's the same thing. I want very... because it's only three rounds as well, I want very fast recovery, very fast recovery. So we do push harder probably on the heart rate recovery amateurs than we do in the pros, because pros are going to have a slightly longer time to develop it.

But the amateurs, and the other thing is the amateurs are fighting week in and week out, so they're obviously always training. A lot of times the pros are in for eight weeks and then they maybe take a week's vacation and then come back into camp.

James de Lacey56:03

Okay, which is interesting. So I'll mention this just now because I have quite a lot of questions on this. So I'm a big believer that pro boxers should sit roughly about 7% out of fight weight all the time. And a couple of people question that and say, man, that's just that's impossible.

Now it's not for me, because I only work with a handful of pro boxers because the time investment is too much for me to have a massive... to work with too many pros. Amateurs are completely different because they're usually in weight all the time. But I'm a big believer that those boxers should sit close to fight weight for early opportunities.

And one of the things that kills conditioning for me is if an athlete comes in and they're fighting say super welter and they're at 85 kilos and we have to take 15, 16 kilos off of them. You can't condition at the same time as that. That's one of the caveats I will say: if you're having to cut a lot of weight, conditioning is going to suffer.

It's seriously going to suffer. You need the athlete to be not that far away. It's not like a sliding scale where your conditioning is improving as you're coming off. There's just too much going on in the body, it's too much stress, too much immune issues going on. It's very difficult.

But back to the question: amateurs are pretty much similar, it's just a bit more targeted about getting to the back quicker, pushing off the back foot, driving a little bit more. It's probably a bit more strength work, ironically for us, with the amateur.

Dr. Andrew Usher57:23

I was going to say, are you doing a lot of jumps, ballistic exercise to try and get that time to peak power faster on the bike too?

James de Lacey57:47

So yes. Still, so conscious of what people believe, we do do strength. So I'm big on single leg work, getting split squats, all that type of stuff. I don't do... we don't do Olympic lifting with them just purely because I'm not there to deliver it. So I don't do anything that's too technically involved because I think technical lifts need a technical opponent. We need somebody there to really get them through it. If I was, I might use some Olympic lifts.

So a lot of it is the usual med ball slams, but we spend a lot of time on the biomechanics of the exercise choice. That's the big thing for me. We make sure the knees in the right position, toes in the right position, hips are engaged the proper way, in all the exercises.

Dr. Andrew Usher58:15

And we do a lot of plyo, so plyo will... so now we've got the platform and the rack mounted system. We use a lot of that. I think eccentric overload training is probably one of the biggest hidden gems out there, because you think about the sport, it's about acceleration phase and a deceleration and braking phase. So for me it's less about upper body strength and it's more about how can you propel yourself to the target, how can you decelerate yourself to the target, and how you can maintain a decent base to deliver the shot and then push away again. That's the big thing for me.

So a lot of our S&C is geared around about that whole idea of pushing off the back foot, pushing off the front foot, accelerating and decelerating. So things we don't do: don't do skater jumps, we don't do loaded stuff, don't do that because I think it's too technical. I think it's high risk of injury. So we are very simplistic in methods but we have quite a good result with them.

James de Lacey59:13

Nice. Getting a little bit of lag here, but I'm going to give you one more question as we battle through this lag on here. But you did a study on with a little bit of heat acclimation. Want me to run through, I guess, how someone could do it practically and what heat... what training in heat actually does, or what are the benefits of actually training in heat? There may be none.

Dr. Andrew Usher59:39

There may be none. Yeah, it's an interesting one. So the heat study for me, so we did the heat study, we did Wingates in heat and we did Wingates in obviously normal temperature conditions. And we did the heat study at 35 degrees with 40% humidity and we did four Wingates back to back. It's 7.5% of body weight, that's what we chose to do.

And the interesting thing that for me was, I guess, preconceived ideas, you think there's going to be a massive impact on it. And what we found was that from a muscle physiology, there wasn't that much of a change. The only things that flagged up and had significance was that peak power and average power differed. But not necessarily in any... I mean, there was a statistical significance is what we found, but there was a difference in peak power and average power. So there was a difference in heat, but it wasn't massive. I wouldn't say it was like, you know, I was really that worried about it.

What we did find which surprised me was a massive difference in sweat rates between the left leg and the right leg, because we did sweat patch analysis. So we measured sweat because we're interested in hydration. And there was a difference there. But overall I was left thinking that I think the heat training is probably not giving that much of a physiological change, but my feeling is that perhaps as a recovery tool it's good.

So I now would have athletes do their sprints outside the tent but then do the recovery in the tent. So after they do the Wingates they go in, and because we've seen that recovery was slightly faster in the muscle oxygenation, but nothing significant, but I think looking at it... but then the caveat to that is our test was very short exposure time. So you're only looking at four 30s, so I mean it wasn't a long time, maybe what, 12 minutes tops in the tent.

There is a plan that we may look at time trialing in the tent. What I actually really want to do is do a pad session in the tent and have a look at like a heavy pad session and see how that comes across in heat, 35 degrees. We use a big tent and no one's paying for one, so if we had a bigger tent we would do a lot more applied.

But generally the heat for us didn't really show... there was no differences in hematocrit really or blood plasma volume changes. There was nothing massive there either. The only thing was peak power was slightly different and so was average power, which you kind of expect because you're going to have to work a little bit harder.

But from muscle physiology and from a Moxy perspective we didn't really see... time to peak was a little bit delayed as well in heat, but that was it. But nothing that would make me think we need to do a bucket load of the stuff. There was nothing there I thought was going to impact how I actually coach anyone or do another conditioning. So that was a bit of a surprise for me.

James de Lacey1:02:28

The study to mitochondrial adaptation through the sprint training was the bigger eye opener for us. The mitochondrial rate change was insane just. And the run time on incremental treadmill test, I mean these kids were running almost 60 seconds longer at super maximum levels, a higher level of SmO2 at the bottom end, and the occlusions at the end had changed so radically that it just was crazy to think that three weeks of sprint training was actually creating that kind of change.

We're going to now follow this up, a super cool project. We're going to look at mitochondrial rate recovery changes pre- and post-bag work, padwork and sprints, because we can now model how well mitochondria respiration's going to change, which is pretty cool.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:03:24

But the heat was slightly disappointing if I'm honest, because I thought we'd have seen... you know, because you have a... as much as you're doing the research and you try to remain on the fence, could be this, could be that. But when you actually dive into heat papers you realize there's a whole difference of opinion as to the effects of heat. There's a massive big difference on it, which is kind of interesting. Because obviously part of the thesis going to wade through quite a lot of... we read quite a lot of heat papers.

It was kind of interesting that some showed some benefits, some showed real negative to it. There was no real consensus on whether it would have a place really within combat sports. Maybe acclimatization if you were going overseas, I could argue potentially something there, just get used to the heat. But generally I'd just probably say the same thing: just work harder, never mind the heat tent, just work harder, showing because that seems to be the thing that most people are not training at high enough intensity level, period. That's it, really, in a nutshell.

Going soft, James, we're going soft. Need to bring back the old Bart Rutten days. No, I sound like a dinosaur now there.

James de Lacey1:04:53

Yeah, it's kind of funny because somebody the other day looked at one of my programs I sent them and he went, "Jesus, this is really like really simple stuff." And I was like, "Yeah, what did you think I was going to send you?" And they're like, "You do all this algorithm analysis and you can tell me this, that, and you just send me like 10 on, 10 off, BAMN sessions, some kind of some basic S&C." And I was like, "Yeah, that's probably it."

Dr. Andrew Usher1:05:25

I'm not sure that's it, but more importantly make sure your technical pad work, your technical boxing skills is up to scratch, because without that, none of it makes any difference. And that's a crazy thing about the sport.

I think one of the big differences between what we do and probably other S&C coaches is I coach, so I corner and I do pad sessions and I'll still move around with the kids. So the big thing for us is looking at NIRS data and sparring and being there at the spar sessions and also being there in the ring because we always get a ring in the uni and doing the pad sessions and having a feel for how they're striking as well.

James de Lacey1:05:52

I think that's probably in a lot of ways, I think that's quite a lot and I think probably that informs probably a lot more what I do than I'll probably realize.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:05:52

So I've been doing this since I was early 20s, 20 years, so I know what it's like when somebody strikes, whether it's a clean strike, whether it's off, whether the mechanics is right. And I think that informs probably a lot of what we do as well, and I think sometimes we may lose sight of that a little bit as well.

But I think, I understand, I tell students as well, if you're going to go and be a rugby S&C coach, play some rugby or go do level one, level two certification. Go and feel how the sport actually functions before you try and tell someone what to lift. Have a feel for it because I think that's one of the big issues we have is literally coaches have never done the sport, pick up a client in the sport, and suddenly they're like a guru in the sport and you're like, "Well, but you have no real understanding what that athlete's going through, the trials and tribulations and the struggles of the sport." So also the culture of the sport too, right?

James de Lacey1:07:11

And just a reminder as well, if everyone, make sure you check out the description, there's the pre-sale of the strength and conditioning course for combat sports. We don't have a better name yet, so that's what it's being called right now. Basically, it's going to show, based on how we do the exponential curve fit and how we look at NIRS info, red data, and how we can make that analysis. But we'll be in the course anyway, so if anyone does a course, that's stuff to get to see it.

But I'll be taking everyone through exactly how we look at heart rate kinetics, how we plan training sessions, the importance of peak power, how do you get that data, how do you use it, how do you plot it. And then we'll have some sample data. I'll get some sample data from some of the boxes so that you can download it and you'll be able to kind of play around with all that stuff as well and look at it.

And I'm hoping, it just depends on whether we can bridge this in, that I may be able to have an interactive Python area so that will be there so people just be able to put their own data in and do that. So I was going to show that. So that's the plan.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:07:55

So the idea the conditioning course is really applied. It's really basically how do you actually—what type of data is important, how do you get the data. Obviously we will be covering a lot of the anatomy, physiology as well, so that everyone's got a good base in the physiology behind it. And then we'll segue into kind of data analysis and then off the back of that how you periodize, program, and structure all the training sessions. So it should be a fairly, fairly comprehensive nice little course for those that want to take conditioning kind of to the next level, I guess.

James de Lacey1:08:22

Perfect, perfect. And where can people find and follow you, Andrew, and keep up with what you're doing, dinosaur stories?

Dr. Andrew Usher1:08:45

Instagram, the Andrew Usher. Twitter, Andrew Usher. I am in the process of taking my Vault Performance and Combat Sports Performance sites and just merge them into one so they fall under Andrew Usher, so it's a bit more easier. Because previously I had two separate businesses. Vault Performance was kind of more for your general population client and the Combat Sports Performance is much more. So I'm kind of synthesizing that in.

And I find myself in a lucky position, I have more free time to work with any athletes that are interested as well, which for the last few years I've not been able to take on any real new clients. It's been too busy. So for the first time in ages, I actually get some time, so which is why I can write this course, so which is good.

James de Lacey1:09:14

Perfect, perfect. I'll link those up in the description too if anyone, make sure you check that link down there. And I appreciate you coming on, Andrew.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:09:37

No, any, thank you very much.