Sprint Protocols For Boxing w/ Andrew Usher (SSOF Podcast Ep. 19)

James de Lacey0:00

But enjoy this episode again, but welcome to the Sweet Science of Fighting Podcast. Today we have Andrew Usher. Welcome, Andrew.

Andrew Usher2:32

No, thank you for coming.

James de Lacey2:32

A lot of questions in my head already. And I guess we connected through the Facebook group. So, if anyone's listening to this and they listened to last week's episode with James Ramsey, he's the owner of the Facebook group. Andrew's also in this group. And I guess maybe let's start with a bit of your background and maybe some of your PhD research so then we can go ahead and cover, I've essentially a bunch of random questions.

Andrew Usher2:46

Yeah. So, I'm getting on in years. I grew up in the late '70s, early '80s in the East End of Glasgow. And we basically played fitba, which would be soccer. And we played and we did boxing and boxing and karate and that was really my love of combat sports.

I was never good at it, but I loved it. And then in my teens did Muay Thai, did a lot of boxing and tested that. And just that was it. But it wasn't until my late '30s when I had a strength blast gym affiliate training group that I started to really think about better ways to approach S&C and just basic training methods.

It struck me pretty early on in the MMA world that we were doing things that coaches had done, that had been taught by coaches, and there was no real method or understanding about why we were doing it. So, right around 35 was a big change for me. At that time my wife and I had a medical practice in a remote area. So, my whole life was just became obsessed with anatomy, physiology, and all that good stuff.

And then in my '40s moved away from MMA back into probably more boxing. And still coach amateur and professional. And from probably the last 7 years been really heavy on research. Masters was looking at the underlying physiology of amateur boxing, looking at aerobic capacity and lactate thresholds and things. And the PhD is a world's first look at professional boxing using near-infrared spectroscopy to look at the difference between systemic and peripheral oxygen delivery at the muscle tissue and what that really means from a performance connotation.

So, that's the PhD. We're in a really beautiful position at Abertay University in Scotland because A, they let me do my PhD, which is a good start, and B, they have made combat sports the sole research focus for sports and exercise science. So, we will be doing predominantly our research is going to be done that route. I think we might be one of very few and definitely only university in Scotland that's main research focus is combat sports.

From a private business that I think I also my private is now with Hannah Rankin, who's a world champion female boxer. I work with her my performance specialist. And I work with numerous other athletes as well and we do a whole range of services. I mean, I guess I refer to myself now as probably a performance specialist and nothing else because it's a mixture of everything from sports science, exercise fizz to S&C. And that's it. Generally quite boring, dull, and just live my life in a lab. That tends to be the exciting stuff.

James de Lacey5:16

Do you want to maybe explain because a lot of the listeners that would be your amateur, semi-pro, maybe semi-professional. But mainly fighters that maybe don't have a grasp of the sports science. Do you want to maybe cover, you mentioned your PhD, you're looking at the difference systemic versus I guess peripheral oxygen uptake. Do you want to maybe dive into the details of why that's important, what you're looking at there?

Andrew Usher5:31

Yeah. So, I mean, one of the things that struck me probably watching a lot of sparring and having a lot of athletes compete was trying to get this idea of what's a rate limit or what's inhibiting performance. Because we can get the strength right, we can generally get the conditioning right. A lot of times I think that's one of the main issues.

But the delivery mechanism of how they actually translate VO2 and oxygen through obviously through respiration and everything else into the muscle tissue seems to be to me a limiting factor. And what we noticed when we started putting near-infrared sensors on the legs and things was that when there was a massive difference in what the oxygen profile looked like in a spar session versus pads and bags. So, there was clearly something going on.

And the best way, probably easiest way to think about this is I always explain this to athletes is we want to match the engine with the right chassis. So, if you've got a Ferrari engine, you want a Ferrari chassis. And in that engine there is all the fine-tuning components and that's what our PhD is. It's looking about how do we get fuel to the muscle tissue, how does it extract that oxygen, and how does the muscle respond.

Probably more importantly for me is how does the muscle tissue recover, especially between rounds. So, we're looking at that and then we're looking at does biomechanics affect how oxygen delivery is performed to the muscle tissue via the capillary bed? If that is a boxer heavy on the front leg, so therefore that leg is having to work much harder than the other leg. So, therefore is a difference in symmetrical value.

And what you tend to find is that we tend to think things in systemic terms. So, we tend to think of cardiac output, stroke volume, all these types of things and VO2 max. What we tend to think less about what's the actual muscle doing. Because if you put oxygen sensors or portable sensors on the rectus femoris in the left and the right leg and you do back squats, those two muscles won't necessarily use oxygen at the same rate. There'll be there can be a slight difference in it.

So, that led me to think, well, why would that be? And then when you watch sparring you see some fascinating things about recovery, how quick can the tissue desaturate and use oxygen and how quick can it resaturate. And we'll start to find that athletes that are really well conditioned use oxygen very quickly, a nice homeostasis through the middle and then resaturate really fast. And it the profile is very similar between pads, bags, and sparring.

Deconditioned athletes, it's just messy. It's all over the place. So, yeah, so our whole big thing is really applied science to performance. How do we get recovery to be as optimal as possible? Because a lot of fights are won through that endurance component, especially your 10s and 12s.

You get 36 minutes of work. Often a lot of coaches are doing great work, but they're not actually thinking about the recovery kinetics and how that having a knock-on effect. And we specialize probably on the recovery and kinetics.

James de Lacey8:28

The other day about working on conditioning and strength about potentially not preparing boxers for the demands of boxing. I think there was something like that. Do you want to dive into that? You mentioned there now about pads versus sparring as well. Maybe deconditioned athletes maybe see a big difference in terms of how the muscles use oxygen and their recovery in those two different modalities.

Andrew Usher9:01

So, I think the interesting thing for me was that the idea of the PhD was to get an idea what does the underlying physiology do in the different training methods? Because nobody's ever looked at it. Amateur boxing has predominantly looked at VO2 max and lactate thresholds and that's about as exciting as it's got.

That to me was quite boring. I wanted to know what's the muscle tissue doing because at the end of the day that how that muscle is performing in that kinetic chain is really going to dictate how success and the mechanics are going to be delivered.

So, when we started looking at the pad work and the bag work, we started to see that bag work generally athletes are not really at high enough volume and a high enough intensity. A lot of them are still very old school. They go in, the beeper goes on, the 3-minute round. They go from one bag, then they go to the next. There's no intensity driving it. So, there's no mitochondrial capacity change. So, we noticed that straight off the bat.

Then when you go into the pads, a lot of times you realize they're doing very low-level technical work. They're not actually doing any intensity within the technical component either. So, we start to see a different profile there. And then when you go into the ultimate expression, which is sparring, you see it's a completely different picture.

So, but interestingly for us, and this is the thing that blows a lot of coaches' minds when we speak to them, the thing that probably represents sparring physiologically, and I mean from the muscle tissue action, more than anything else, are 30-second Wingate tests. Because the muscle tissue has to desaturate at a much quicker rate and resaturate. And that is closer to sparring than anything else, which is kind of mind-blowing.

So, it's led us down this path about is my mitochondria capacity the key factor in endurance, and can we increase that in athletes across all three areas? And to do that, that would mean that athletes would probably have to have much more targeted bag sessions, pad sessions, and spar sessions.

Now, that's what I do with Hannah Rankin, and that's probably been the success to her world championship run. And that's what I've done with Dean Sutherland in the preparation for his WBC silver run. And that's what's made the biggest changes is that changing conditioning from just being very ad hoc sessions to very targeted sessions to deliver mitochondrial capacity change. And that's I think where we get the biggest bang for buck.

Because I think when you've got a good pro and you've got a good amateur, they know how to fight. They've been there, they've done it so many times. So, when we get them, we put them through a whole series of tests. I mean, I could explain my whole testing process if you want, because it's probably more of an insight into kind of what you're doing and what you're looking at.

So, the first thing I always - every athlete that comes to the labs, we do a movement assessment. Now, that movement assessment is just years of attending different courses and stripping down what we think represents the best kind of sequence of movements that represent boxing.

But also, from my perspective, I'm looking at movement screening as a way of not only passing tests, but how are they passing the test? What are they doing to cheat the test? Because every athlete cheats it, right? So, it's because what we get a lot of times is you get an athlete comes in, it could be a UFC fighter, could be an undisputed world champion. They bring their S&C coach in. The first thing we always go is when was the last time did you do a movement assessment? And nine out of 10 times, they'll never have done one. They've just never been screened for it.

So, we do a very simple thing. We do like a toe touch, we do lunge test, and we do isometric strength test, we do a whole heap of things, and we basically blueprint are they able and capable to be doing deadlifts from the start? Things like this. Because nine out of 10 times, we see a lot of isometric issues that we can clean up. And so, a lot of times, for example, when they're deadlifting, they're pulling most of the power through one side rather than two sides. Your usual stuff. So, that's the first thing we do.

We then put them through a whole series of tests, and which is basically VO2 max test. We don't tend to do the VO2 components much. We use it in treadmill test quite a lot. We do Wingate testing, we do upper lower body strength testing, isometric chair. We then do force - we look at striking on the force platform, we analyze striking mechanics and biomechanics. We do a bit of 3D movement assessment. And we just piece it all together.

And what we're looking for is the consistency between the tests. And what we tend to find is most athletes come in with very poor, limited movement. They've just never been dealt with in S&C sessions. We tend to find that the Wingates are showing very poor recovery, and there's a lot of cardiac drift between sprint one and sprint two.

And the interesting kicker for us is combat athletes, especially boxers, tend to have more force production in their upper body than their lower body. When we put them on the isometric chair, and we do isometric strength testing, without a shadow of a doubt, upper body is always stronger than their lower body, which blows my mind, right? And then you turn to the S&C coach and go, "You ain't doing legs, are you?" And then you realize it's right.

Now, so people associate me and a big X landmine press, that I don't like landmine press. And the reason I don't like landmine press is I think it's overused. It's not that I don't like it. I just think it's very overused. And I think if you look at Seth's paper on that kind of biomechanics and the mixed methods paper on striking, you can clearly see lower legs all the way up, deltoids last to activate forearm.

So, any athlete we work with, we're probably more heavier on leg work than we are upper body work on strikers. And we tend to find most athletes come into us in the opposite way around. They think everything's coming from shoulders. They don't get they have to deliver it through the chain.

So, that's kind of our testing process. So, we do movement assessment, we do physiological testing, we may do VO2 max testing, we do Norse testing, and we do strength testing and force production testing. Because we want to see is all of it leading to the ultimate expression, which is being able to deliver force on the force plate, and then we'll maybe look at sparring data. We'll go grab sparring data. Because that's where we see is all this stuff they're doing, is it translating to the spar session?

And probably 60% of the time, they're not. They look good, they make weight okay. They're maybe sitting at 12% body fat. They look pretty jacked. But they fall apart under specific - lab testing is a completely different beast. If I make an athlete do an all-out Wingate, and they've never done repeated sprints at super maximal level, they're going to struggle on that.

Which they all do. The back door is littered with the foods from people throwing up over the last 6 months of research. It's like it's a running joke. It's kind of like we can normally identify people who've done it the night before, after the session. They're not easy.

But that's basically testing process. And from that, we create a nice blueprint, and we look at is there a cardiac drift? Is the recovery maybe not there? Are they lacking a little bit strength in the legs? Generally, I don't do as much of the strength work as I used to do. I tend to feed that back to the S&C coach to be changed up. And we'll just give them some guidance on what we're kind of looking for.

And then we'll normally do in a camp in an 8-week camp, we'll do week one, probably week three, and then we'll maybe do week five or six, and we'll just do three tests and sessions. Just to make sure things are actually moving in the right place.

I'm just a big lover of if we test it, we know something's changing. If we don't test it, we don't know if it's changing. So, especially for us, nothing rocket science, nothing really - I mean, the research is a bit more high-end because of what we're looking at, but the actual application makes it distill down into something pretty simple. Because you can't see an athlete go put this monitor on and tell me what their desaturation level is in 15 minutes.

People tell me to [expletive] off all the time. So, it's kind of a - it's a highly physiologically driven route, but really we do all the heavy lifting in the back end.

One of the big things I'm a massive you need to do this for us is heart rate monitor. Now, it's interesting because everybody does red zone training, but I think people fail to understand that the red zones are respective because athletes will get to peak heart rate very quickly, right? That should be the on kinetics we should be getting them there. It's how quick can they get out of it and how quick can they get back in it? So, more interesting till when it comes to that kind of physiological kinetics.

So, I know this day for me is Hannah will do a spar with a heart rate monitor or a MOXy sensor, so I'll get the data. We've written all the Python code. We will run it. And I'll be able to see, right, you're on track for where we need you to be. You're maybe off track, we need to change up some of your sessions. And that's it. It's quite a seamless process.

It's taken years to make it that seamless. To the point where, yeah, because the data is we are very data heavy, and we have like, probably a good 10 years' worth of data now, which is good because we have a nice normalization database.

So we can benchmark most athletes now to where they should fit in with other people. Not that that's a given, because everyone's quite unique. But we have a rough benchmark of where we should be. And that's been it. And the boxing world either likes it or hates it.

Yeah, I mean, I'm a, I'm referred to as a legacy coach, which means I'm an old, because I'll be 50 this year. But we are doing some good stuff. We had a really nice meeting with Gary Hatton from Team GB. We'll be doing Team GB later to discuss the research and a few other things.

So I think there's a nice move towards trying to understand what is performance really, rather than just this label of S&C. Everyone's an S&C coach now, which pains me quite a lot. Because a lot of times they come in, and you just wonder what was actually happening here? Why are you holding your breath doing back squatting?

And the nasal breathing. The nasal breathing is the other big thing. A lot of athletes come in, they'll tell me they'll do nasal breathing. And I'm like, you've got two pipes in your mouth, and one's bigger than the other. But it's, so we are a bit Marmite here, I guess, what we do. Some people like us, some people don't like us.

But we're all about performance. We just, me, my supervisor John Babraj, about to take, John's 52. We just love this. We just live for performance and making people better. That's just, we just love it. Even at our age, we're still not jaded yet. Because we think there's still a lot more to be found.

James de Lacey19:08

So that's a whole lot of questions. I'll see if I can remember them all. But first, you mentioned obviously Seth's research. This is, we know that Seth just did, Seth wrote a blog post on how to throw a powerful jab on Sweet Science of Fighting. You guys can find that. It's really good. He breaks down some of his research there, too. And I break down a lot of it in how to punch harder as well.

And secondly, there's this whole lot of, I'm going to start with maybe your sprint protocols, and I'm going to come back to your oxygen kinetics in terms of recovery. But is this kind of where your sprint power and endurance protocols kind of stemmed from, from the idea that a lot of the boxers aren't getting the intensity in their training, and this is kind of like your way of putting intensity within their training week?

Andrew Usher19:52

Yeah. So, John, my supervisor, has all last 20 years of research has been basically sprints and high-intensity training. That's basically just been John's work for the last 20 years. When I started working with John last year, I was a bit unconvinced by it, to be brutally honest. I was still very much we need a bit more volume in the training.

And then we started applying it to a lot of athletes and looking at the research and looking at what I was aiming to look at from systemic and peripheral recovery. And we started filing them and we started getting really good results. And I think you're right. I think what happens is people think they're doing a high intensity. It's like the old days of the Tabata when it went crazy. Nobody was doing that stuff at the intensity level that people were doing it at.

But if you Google Tabata for fighters on Google, you'll see me talking about exactly that. If you're doing real Tabata, you're by the end of the, to the point where you're going to fall off the bike.

James de Lacey20:36

Yeah, it did probably sell a lot of timers, though. I mean, so from the timer market space, it sold a shitload.

Andrew Usher20:50

So we were, we are pretty much the same. So we know from the research that all you need is about 60 seconds worth of high supramaximal effort probably three times a week. Nine sessions and you're probably going to start to see some mitochondrial change. Now, it's too early to say this, but I'll kind of make a bold claim. One of the research projects we're doing is looking at a non-invasive way to measure mitochondrial capacity through blood flow occlusion analysis.

Doing like a treadmill test and remeasuring, and we're seeing that the sprint training is definitely increasing mitochondrial capacity. So that's a good thing because we obviously have more ability to create ATP, bloody bloody blah. So for us, sprints is integral. Now, sprints that I use is not just running or bikes, but it's how you use the bike.

So, for example, Hannah, we have her on very specific bike sessions. So she might do 20 seconds all out, 10 second recovery, and she'll be able to repeat that for one round. Or sometimes we'll mix it up, we'll do 20 seconds on, 60 seconds off, 30 seconds on, 50 seconds off, and we'll just start to do undulating.

So we mix up the protocols. But basically, the for us, the discovery, if it's not discovery, it's in the research. There's a lot out there. Supramaximal is where you need to be to get those fast adaptive changes. So we, I'm a, so I'm a big believer, which is why S&C world hate me.

I'm a big believer that technical skill is part of it. Boxers need to box. Any fighters need to, that is the, that's the, at the end of the day, that's, yeah.

So that's it, right? So we need to fix everything round about that ultimate outcome. That's what we need to do, rather than spend endless hours doing S&C stuff that's probably got no transfer. So sprints that I use is very sport-specific. It can be, but it's also very low time-wise, so they can come in and do a sprint session and then still in the afternoon go and do their technical pad session. It doesn't really interfere too much.

Because the kickback initially was, you cannot have kids do supramaximal sessions three times a week. And we were like, why not? Nobody's dying from it. Nothing ever has died. And the response was good. And the reality, because the reality is it's 60 seconds of work. It could be three 20-second sprints, or it could be six 10-second sprints with a massive delay between them. You can mix this up any way you want as long as you get roughly 60 seconds of supramaximal work.

So for us, it's very, you can play with it in the schedule. And all the athletes that we have that are doing exceptionally well on recovery metrics are all doing these high-intensity supramaximal...

James de Lacey23:18

You do year-round, then? Or is this kind of like after maybe a, I don't know, GPP phase or whatever it is, and you do this maybe after that? Or are you doing this year-round where we're hitting the 60 seconds in a session or a week?

Andrew Usher23:33

So yeah, so we are big on having athletes train 52 weeks of the year and sitting at roughly out of camp between 5 and 7% above fight weight max. So we like our athletes to be ready for a lot of reasons. One is it's just good self-management. Two, there's no crazy weight cuts. And three, because of COVID, opportunities are everywhere.

So the more able you are to get into fight camp and even a short one, the better. That's going to play very nicely into the sprint protocols because we can get people's conditioning back relatively quickly on the sprint protocols. So what we'll do is, John's been doing these in the lab for 10 years, isn't he? So he's churning out like 1,200 watts at 52 and not stopping and stuff. Maybe not as much as that. I think he's dropped to 800.

But we do sprints all the time. So they'll be in their schedule twice a week. They'll do sprints for me. And they all hate it. I mean, I find it was on the podcast. She didn't swear, let me know that. She absolutely just, I mean, but the interesting thing for her is, and we're talking about this with her the other day, actually, because we had looked to bring in a different kind of protocol to her and she was like, I'm not so keen. I like to change it back.

And she said to me, as much as I hate the bike, she goes, mentally and psychologically, it gives me something that other things don't give me. Those supramaximal efforts really take me to a dark place that I have to get through them. So psychologically, I think it provides the athletes a difficult week every week. But they get through it.

And so, yeah, so we're pretty much, I think we've not seen any detriment to it. We may have, we won't obviously do them in a taper. So the last two weeks of a fight camp, we won't do them. So we will take, so actually, it's not 52 weeks. It'll be maybe 48 weeks or whatever. Or 40 weeks, depending actually I think about it. But pretty much, we're doing them all the time.

But we like to do other things as well. Like I like athletes on a Monday, rather than do long steady-state runs, I like a good fast 5K. So we will have them do a 5K run. So most of our athletes will do a 5K sub-20 minutes, probably anywhere from 16 minutes to about 18 minutes, 12.

James de Lacey25:29

Yeah, they all can do it.

Andrew Usher25:29

And they like it because it's a challenge. We'll get a massive leaderboard of the athletes all in the world doing these 5Ks. I, as a fat old bloke, I can knock out a 5K in 21 minutes.

So, there's no excuse for an athlete. And it's right? And it's like a sprint. And I like to do them on a Monday because it's a nice, cuz we used to use HRV and stuff, and I've gone away from that. But this is a nice wellness metric. Cuz if your 5K is 18 minutes and then one week it's dropping off to 23, you're kind of like, you know, were you partying at the weekend? What's happened? What's changed your status? How was sparring at the weekend?

Cuz a lot of my athletes are remote. So, everything we do is probably about speed and pace on it. We encourage, if an athlete likes to run, I don't have a problem with it. Some of our athletes, like Hannah, Hannah likes being on the AlterG treadmill. She likes to do her runs in there. That's fine. We have no problem with that. I just don't want athletes doing 10 miles every three days. But I want a little bit more sport. I'd rather they be in the gym working on technical work rather than spending maybe an hour on a run.

So we are, we're faster, you've added more questions into my head.

James de Lacey26:45

I'm going to try to remember them all. I guess, let's, I'm like a bigger rabbit. Okay, let's start here where we are now then about the running with intensity. So, are you then banking on the technical sessions to hit that lower intensity, I guess aerobic work?

Cuz I guess in my mind I think, okay, we're doing speed, I guess 5Ks. That's still aerobic and stuff like that. And obviously, you're doing the sprints. But then let's say we're looking at maybe physiology and let's say we're looking at maybe eccentric hypertrophy of the heart. I guess you're still getting a lot of that stuff from the stuff.

But I guess if you're targeting really low intensity work, that's not going to maybe bleed into fatigue for technical training. Does that fit somewhere in your, I guess in your week model? Or is it more, okay, technical training takes care of that. I'm just taking care of intensity.

Andrew Usher27:31

So we started in the research, we started to realize that most of the technical training was in that low, probably 120 to 150 heart rate range. It was really in that slow cardiac output range. So, the problem we identified pretty early on was that that was the issue. Do you know that people are lazy? So, people won't do balls to the wall supramaximal bag session.

So, that actually was the component that was missing. People think that, cuz people think they're working hard until you actually monitor it and actually look at what is the kinetics, how quick are they getting to peak heart rate, and how quick is that peak heart rate coming down, and is it a slow or fast phase of recovery? Until you do that, you don't know. You're just assuming that they get up to 180 beats, they stop. 60 seconds later, they've dropped 40 beats, and you're like, brilliant.

Well, what we've got with Hannah Rankin is she can drop 79, 80 beats at round 10 in sparring and recover standing. So, she can drop massive. And she's got a very really super nice fast phase of recovery and then a slow at the end, which is what we want. So, unless you look at it, you know how you analyze it, a lot of times you're just doing things because it looks good. But you've got no quantifiable way of measuring how hard are they actually training.

So, even in the gym in Aberdeen, Davie McAllister is up at the Don Sport Club who work with the pros and stuff. The bike sessions are all heart rate monitored. So, everything's monitored. So, we know if these kids are not working hard. And they have very targeted thresholds they need to hit in those sessions. Because we know a lot of times when they're in doing their S&C, it's just that low zone. You know, if they're on the Concept 2 rower, they're probably just around. They're not going crazy on it.

So, the issue for me is when we physiologically test them, we can see what their recovery is like, and that gives us an indication of what their VO2 is like, what their VO2 kinetics is like, what oxygen kinetics is like, and how that relates. Because the interesting thing about boxing is you don't need a massive aerobic capacity to be successful. If you look at the research and I did a systematic review of this, which it needs to, we need to publish this at some point.

We need to publish this. But I've looked at the data over the last 27 years and when you look at the VO2 max it goes from 2003 the Kravitz paper pretty low about 43 milliliters per kilogram per minute and the highest end within the same papers about 65. And that's in world class amateurs. So you're looking 25 years worth of data, 43 to 65, 66. That's not massive. Most of it I've been 55 to 60 zone. So that's the aerobic capacity you need to be a world class amateur at Olympic level.

So we looked at that and we thought okay, and then we looked at lactate thresholds in the research and basically just more or less is what you'd expect. Boxers need to tolerate high millimoles of lactate. So that's it. So you look at that you think well how much steady state running do they really need to do then to develop that?

If that's the zone that, and we've had world undisputed champions and they're some of the worst VO2s on the planet but they're still undisputed. Because the reality of the sport is that it's just one of these sports that you can have an athlete that's got the shittiest plan on the planet but they're still knocking people out. Cuz there is a variable you can't factor in which is the actual combat bit in the ring.

So it's a, we don't know what that is but what we're doing is trying best to prepare for all of it. So when we looked at it we thought well all these long steady state runners are probably not giving us any more than what we're going to get.

So what we did to, so to quantify it I thought. Let's take some kids really look at that side and see what the VO2 changes and let's take a percentage of other athletes and we'll do a portable gas analysis. We'll do pads, bags and we'll look at what VO2 peaks and what substrate utilization looks like. And it's just like you expect to see early rounds predominantly fat oxidized heavier rounds more carbohydrate utilization so theoretically it's a mixed substrate. Intensity is driving substrate utilization just basic physiology in a nutshell.

So when we looked at this we thought okay so what is the most important metric we can give these kids to be successful and it's recovery. Cuz if they recover between the rounds obviously they're more cognizant they can take instruction better but they can they can last longer and they can have much more explosive power they can push off the back foot they can drive more.

So for us that was it really and that's why we've been doing that. So less on the cardiac output cuz generally they're lazy and they're not training super maximal so a lot of times they're getting it. But if they want to run cuz they feel like they need to do it which some of them do need to do it cuz they're just like I need to run.

I don't have a problem with it because it's not giving us anything extra but it's not taking anything away either. Unless they're picking up musculoskeletal injuries in the ankles and stuff like overtraining or overtraining. If that's an issue then we'll rein them back.

So contrary to what people believe I'm not anti-running. I'm just, I'm just like, cuz people think I hate running. I mean I've seen it in forums and Facebook posts that doesn't like running blah blah blah. I run all my life. I run a lot. So I mean I run 100Ks and that stuff. I mean I like running.

But I just don't think it's good for performance. I think when it, if you're taking most of your week is taken up with running and you've got no time for S&C or technical then you should be questioning why you're doing that amount of running because at the end of the day you're not an ultra runner. I mean I joke with most of the lads that we have I go like if this career goes south you could probably be a professional park runner and do your 5Ks at the weekend and win some titles.

So that's our approach. Our approach really is more about the delivery and the applied side.

James de Lacey33:09

James Ramsey actually posted my stop doing road work article in the Facebook group and that obviously got a lot of people up. That article was geared towards like I would try and write my stuff more towards the amateur fighter who's maybe only training three, four, five times a week in their sport. My viewers, don't waste your time doing that for conditioning if you're only training three, four, five times in the gym, you need to lay out more technical stuff on it if you want to get better.

So obviously more of things you did but I wanted to dive into as well. Someone listening how can they measure their max heart rate easily maybe with just a heart rate monitor and then looking at those kinetics for example maybe they want to measure after listening to this how quickly they can get to max heart rate then how quickly they can recover.

Is there any protocol, something they can do or use to measure that themselves easily?

Andrew Usher34:02

I would just say just start wearing it in pad sessions, bike sessions, and spar sessions and just start to look at the difference between them and look at the 60-second recovery point. Just look at, rather than just look at you've hit 184 and you're dropping to like 144, look at the curve.

So what we do is we run exponential curve fits. So what we would do is run fancy linear regressions in the background to find out what the true mathematical predicted curve of rate of decay is, and we map off that rate. But you don't need to do that.

You could just look at the curve. If you've got a really nice linear curve and you're doing well. If you get a very long contracting slope, you're not doing so well. What you're looking for at 60 seconds is a nice initial fast recovery, so a nice fast slope down and then a slow slope.

And that's the easiest way of doing it. So we have all the lads at—so everyone does it. Hannah, all the females, males, all our athletes, irrespective of their backgrounds, just heart rate monitor, get on the Polar Flow, and just look at your data afterwards and think to yourself, how hard was that session?

And then look at it and then look at how quickly did it take to get to your peak heart rate. So you look at the curve up. You go, okay, so it took me maybe 50, 60 seconds before I got there in a three-minute round. You're like, mhm, you may want to be a bit quicker. And then look at the recovery and see how long into your 60 seconds were you recovering. And you'll see often with deconditioned, they've not fully recovered.

So look at the baseline of where you start. So if you're starting at 130 beats and then you do your first round of sparring, first round of bags, then look at, well, where am I now? Have I went back to baseline or am I slightly above baseline?

If you're above baseline, how far above baseline are you? Because you want to get within a nice probably 10, 15% margin. So, and that's the easiest way of doing it. And then you can start to trend it and get a feel for how does that compare to a 5K run?

Is a 5K run like a heavy spar session? Is it like a bag session? And start to quantify in the mind. Because one of the things we do a lot with the boxers, especially with the Moxie stuff, excuse me, is use it as a biofeedback tool.

So in between rounds they'll come over, we'll look at the data and go, plenty in the tank. A lot of times they will know there's plenty in the tank, and a lot of times they'll be like, I feel [expletive]. And you're like, no, no, you're just—just been this today.

Just go back at them. You're okay. And the same in bag sessions, we'll do this. So a lot of times if we have an athlete that doesn't know when they're peaking, what we'll do is I'll have them do a bag session and I'll say to them, when you peak and you feel like you're at max heart rate, just step away from the bag.

Okay? If you reach peak without stepping away from the bag, I'm going to tap you on the shoulder and you're going to step back and we're going to get you back to baseline recovery, then you're going to go back in. And by doing that over a period of months, they start to know when they're starting to peak in spar and when they need to back away, when they need to break away, get a little bit of relaxation, let their muscles relax.

So we do a lot of probably sports psychology work as well, and we bring in—but we do other things as well. Like we'll make them do complex mathematics just to hate in spar sessions on the bag. So we'll do, like, we'll say the combinations, one is, two is a jab-cross, a jab-cross, whatever. And we'll go like, 20 minus 17 plus 6 minus 4 plus 2 minus 1 is. And they have to resolve it whilst keeping heart rate.

So we do a lot of that type of stuff as well, a lot of cognitive drilling just because we want in the recovery round, especially the kids that are on elite boxing group level and compete nationally, want them to be able to hear commands and be able to process those commands while sparring. Because I think that's something that's missing from the sport as well, is that corner delivering commands and the athlete being able to recognize the command and then change the game plan and do task-relevant cues.

So we do that with heart rate as well. So they change their game plan. If they feel like they're peaking, they know through all the biofeedback stuff that they need to go back to a much more defensive, take away from center line, just relax. When they feel good, go back in and re-engage. And we just basically always teaching them how to recover.

So there's an absolute load of stuff you can do with a heart rate monitor that people just don't tend to do. They just put it on, go for a run, and go, yeah, I think I did that earlier because they've got—they are, yeah.

Yeah, poor bastard. So the thing is, is when they're boxing, when they hit the bags, if you know what the max heart rate is, you want a really hard session, you want to push into that zone and back away from that zone.

Get yourself back down. Push into that zone, back away. That's how you develop recovery. You develop that kind of response that allows you to relax that diastolic and all that. But if you don't train that way, you're not—if you don't train that, you're never going to get it.

And a lot of boxing, and high-level boxing, in the game plan is really about that. How do you change the game plan if things are going [expletive], which they will go [expletive] at some point? How do you relax? How do you recover between the round? And are you going to be as fresh in the later rounds?

Especially when you look at super-bantamweight, bantamweight, there's not a lot of knockouts in those fights. A lot of them go the distance. And when they start moving through their journey and they go from the four rounds to the six rounds to the tens to the twelves, you want to make sure that they're just as fresh as what they are.

So for us, it's all about just constantly monitoring it. We monitor everything. It amazes me when you get world-class athletes come to us to the labs and you go, did you bring your heart rate monitor? And they go, we don't have one.

I'm like, really? I'm like, you're not measuring anything. They go, we don't measure anything. You're like, it just blows my mind. But then that's my bias. So that's something I have to do.

James de Lacey39:16

Is that what you're saying? Take, for example, say an amateur, an amateur fighter listening to this. Maybe he is only boxing four times, three, four times a week, and he's preparing for local events or whatever. Would you then still—would you go, sprint protocols is what you should do, even though maybe you're not getting that aerobic work from the technical side because you're only in there maybe three, four times a week? Or would the approach slightly change just because they're not training as much as the professional fighters that you have?

Andrew Usher39:34

So amateurs, we will have them on sprints. We would sometimes get them to do the sprints after the technical work. So we'll let them get the technical work out of the way, and then we'll say, just jump on the assault bike. And just, because for us, it's all about what is driving recovery is probably mitochondrial capacity.

And the more mitochondria you can have, the more you're going to produce energy. So therefore, the more you're going to potentially recover, the more you're going to be able to produce more work. So for us, it's all about developing that. And we know that one of the benefits that pretty sprint intervals is it's a very fast way of getting it.

You can obviously get it through other ways as well, but for us, it's just a very easy thing. And it's an easy sell after they've done the pad work and stuff, and just go, right, just jump on the bike. Just give me 20 seconds on the assault bike, 10 seconds off, three of them, and you can go home.

And generally, they're pretty receptive to it because they're like, okay. And it's covert stealth mitochondrial capacity development. And because if they're only in three times a week, then you're very limited. Your exposure time is limited. How do you get your S&C factor then into that?

This is the problems with amateurs a lot of times as well, as I sometimes think we negate some of the strength work as well at times. But it is a challenge. It can be a challenge with pros as well.

A lot of pros don't want to do the S&C stuff. They just want to do pads, bags.

James de Lacey41:12

Yeah, it's the same in every sport.

Andrew Usher41:12

So I think it's a challenge we all face. Yeah, I have a—we work a lot with BMX downhillers.

And they don't want to do the S&C stuff. They just want to do—they're like, what's the point of that? And you're like, well, you could push harder. You could probably, you could kill yourself probably in a quicker time.

Have a bit more power in the legs. So yeah, it is difficult. But how much—I think amateurs is difficult as well. I think amateurs get a lot of other issues as well, like the weight making, the weight, especially fighting multiple times per day.

And this is one of the things that we are really interested in: recovery for amateurs. So this is a lot of our kids when they're at box cups and stuff and maybe fighting twice or three times a day in that format. So we do a lot of carbohydrate periodization with them as well nutritionally to make sure they're fueled and that we're getting that nice recovery as well, because I think there's an intrinsic tie there with another side of the sport that I think is misunderstood, is the nutrition side and the periodization and that as well.

So we do a lot. One of the benefits of having a university that specializes in applied science strength and conditioning, nutrition, and psychology is we have it all under one roof. So it's the gift that keeps on gift giving. The athletes that come to us are pretty lucky.

We have a—we're building a sponsorship program at the moment where if you're an athlete and you don't have funds for all this stuff, you can come to us. We will put a program together and our fourth year students will deliver the program for you. So you can get effectively free S&C and the students are getting free exposure at how to deliver programs multi-disciplinary, and that's something we're doing in the Dundee area which is quite important because we want to bring in athletes and say, everyone can benefit.

Students need to learn what's going to be like in the industry outside uni because it's a completely different world. And athletes need something a little bit more and often they can't afford what we do. So this is a good bridge between both worlds I think.

James de Lacey43:15

Oh, I think you're back. You dropped out for a bit. That's okay. Yeah. Okay, hang on. That drop out—I had so much in my head now, it just now it just disappeared from me. I had how many other questions based on what we were covering there.

Oh man, now I can't even remember what I was going to ask. What were we just covering?

Andrew Usher43:31

We were talking about—I think I mentioned we're going to offer S&C to athletes that can't afford it or don't have access to come to the uni. The fourth years will deliver it which is a good learning experience for fourth year students in the S&C program degree.

James de Lacey43:49

Which is good for that mitochondrial capacity. This might be a little science-y for maybe some of the amateurs that are into this, but I want you—just I guess just myself as well. Do you know the mechanisms behind, I guess, creating new mitochondria in terms of from the sprinting side and even from low intensity side? Obviously, as you mentioned there's multiple ways to do it. So there's obviously potentially multiple mechanisms in there or do they all run through the same mechanism?

Andrew Usher44:26

Your mitochondria has bio-diverse and biogenesis, so it can replicate anywhere, move around. So it's there, but what we know is that that high physiological load creates obviously physiological strength and you get the adapt mechanism. So the body has to adapt to that stress level. And by pushing more blood through into the tissue and we're getting much more—the oxygen's diffusing, coming through the capillary bed, going into the muscle, being extracted—that what happens here is it provides more nutrients.

More nutrients creates biodiversity, allows the mitochondria to move around and regenerate. So you start to get much more development. That's probably the easiest way of thinking about it with thinking of cellular biology. But so to get that, you need a massive stimulus, and the stimulus to create some oxygen change to allow the muscle to go, 'Look, we need fuel, give us fuel,' use the fuel and then refill the fuel tank up.

And just high intensity does that. It just puts the body under enough physiological stress and load that the body has to adapt and change slightly to accommodate that. It's just any training thing. It's like hypertrophy work. So you need that stimulus for the body to respond and then repair, recover, and remodel.

It's similar at the biochemical level—what's happening here is the mitochondria is getting deep enough stimulus. It's getting enough more—so you're starting to create more biodiversity and biogenesis. You're creating more mitochondria, and in turn that obviously can take the oxygen, bring it in and go through oxidative phosphorylation and all that stuff, and we get more ATP generation.

So that's it kind of in a nutshell. So it's just—it just comes out of stimulus. It's just like everything. It's about getting the right load, the right volume, the right intensity. It's just, I guess, in a lot of ways it's just like classical S&C. It's just that whole thing about the right amount of stimulus to provide the right amount of result. Too little, you don't get anything; too much, you start to suffer as well. So it's about finding the sweet spot.

James de Lacey46:07

How much is too much of a sprint? Because obviously as you get into that more acidic environment, you're kind of doing the opposite of what you want in terms of creating new mitochondria. So is there—I guess, is it the interval length that's too long, or is it the total time spent in that heart rate zone?

Andrew Usher46:26

I think it's probably—I think what happens is there's a couple ways of looking at this. One is it's very difficult to maintain super maximal sprints. So you're going to start to see a drop off in power pretty quick.

So we do—in the lab we test classic Wingate, so we do 30 seconds, one minute recovery. With athletes I'll do 10 seconds, 80 seconds recovery. We'll do that six times because we can get enough recovery to get super maximal effort. So the problem would be that it'd be very difficult to maintain super maximal work with the fatigue coming in. And then that would have a massive knock-on technical skill. So you would pretty much spot it.

I think any—we would spot it pretty much quick. So for us it's about 60 seconds of work split over one session. So it's like when they come in on a Monday they're doing their 60 seconds. They can do it any way they want to do it, but they have to do it like they're dying at the end of it. That's it. If they don't look dying at the end of it, it's worked.

A lot of times in the past when you leave athletes alone you find that they weren't probably hitting supra, which is why we make them aware of heart rate numbers. So remotely we can access it and go, 'That was not a super maximal effort. You need to—' And then likewise, a lot of athletes were overtraining, but got greedy thinking they could do six days a week at super maximal, and we had to rein that back and say, 'Why are you spending so much time there? It's like we need to adjust into three sessions. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, whatever you want to do.'

And the other interesting thing is there's no rhyme or reason to it. So you can have a 24-hour separation, you can have a 72-hour separation between it, you can have slightly longer. As long as you get in roughly about three to six minutes of super maximal work per week you're golden. As like, for whatever reason it doesn't seem to impede adaptation too much, which is kind of interesting.

So it can be pretty flexible. So you could do it post pad work, you could do it post bag work. You can fit it in pretty much anywhere. It's pretty easy. We do the bike. I mean, you can run. We use the bike. The reason I use the bike, especially a Wattbike, is I can track the stats, I can track the metrics. But it takes a lot of load—it is just as a load in the joints. So and you don't need a lot of skill to ride a bike.

Hannah Rankin's favorite term is, 'You ride the bike like it's stolen.' So you just go. So it's pretty forgiving, which is why we like to use the bike. Assault bike's quite tricky. I think because a lot of people use the arms more than the legs in subsequent sprints. So you start to see a massive drop off in power on the assault bike.

I like the assault bike, but a lot of times I'll make them put their hands behind their back and make them only use their legs and go for a super maximal to make that happen. But it can be pretty forgiving, but the adaptations are pretty quick and it just all comes down to creating much more mitochondria in the tissue. Once the muscles get more mitochondria, more energy can be produced.

We've not found any issues to do with CO2 or any of that type of stuff or acidosis or all those other things because they're not working that long.

James de Lacey49:28

They're short. It is a very short window. I guess on your—I'm going to link your sprint protocol to the description of this podcast. So if anyone's interested, I just put basically put together a little PDF and it's got all these different sprint protocols for bike, bag work and I think running.

But on there you've got power and endurance examples for each one. I guess the first reading that as someone who's maybe just preparing for a local event or whatever, how do I know which one I should touch on?

Andrew Usher49:49

So if your recovery is not good, you're going to want to do the endurance.

If you're looking to max out power, so say for example you want a bit more power on a sprint, you'll just do the power one. So if you think about you're on the watt bike and you want to increase your wattage from say 600 watts to 700 watts, you're going to want to do the power one.

So you need a bit more time between the sprints to recover. And that just makes common sense if you think about it. If you do a full maximal sprint, the more recovery period between it, the better that next sprint's going to be. So you're going to produce more power.

So that's basically in a nutshell. If you want to recover and the aim is to recover very quick, you want a much shorter interval between it because you want to encourage the body to enter that natural lactic phase and get that recovery.

So if you're looking to increase like a run time, you probably want to do a bit more power work. If you're looking to have much better recovery between sprints, you'll just do the endurance protocol. They're probably not the right names for them to be honest, but we put it together.

But actually to be brutally honest about this protocol booklet, it's been the bane of my life this thing. It came about because we did a two-day conference and people asked for sprint protocols. To be fair to us, we hadn't really thought there'd be that much interest. So I was like, "[expletive]." So it got put together and it morphed and I had to cut it short because we had loads and loads of protocols and I thought this PDF could be 100 pages long and stuff. So we've released it as it is.

I think it's like I can't remember how many pages. It is quite a lot. I think it's like 10, 12 pages of different sprint protocols. But what we probably will do is maybe do a video series or a webinar series or do something and we'll show how we do it in the lab, what the data going to be.

What we're probably going to put some CBD modules or something together because I think it makes more sense when you see it in context, you see the data and you can take an athlete and say, "This is week one. This is week six. Look at the difference in recovery between the two and this is what it's given you."

Because I think otherwise you just look at it and you think, "[expletive], 10 seconds on the bike, 20 seconds off. Really? Is that it?" It doesn't really embody the suffering that you need to undergo in order for that to happen, which is quite substantial. So if you're using a sprint protocol, you have to think it's like your life depended on it.

You are often all out. And it's funny, isn't it, because you go to a gym that's got a lot of watt bikes and I love the watt bike. I've got a couple myself. And I watch people on the watt bikes and I think you're not really pushing that up totally hard.

And then you see somebody that is pushing it really hard and you just feel for them. Because it is something else. We have had some of the best UK boxing to come in and some world class come to our labs and do Wingates.

So we do the lower, we do obviously sprint lower body so the bike for that and we do the upper body arm crank. And the arm crank is worse than the lower body bike sprint. I mean that arm crank is horrific on a sprint.

But when they all come in, they all look at the bike and think it's going to be a piece of piss. And then they do it and then they just look at you like you've just abused them for 60 seconds of their life.

And then you make them do the arm crank one and that sets them usually running out the back door. And it's interesting because you sit them and go, "Look, that's just 20 seconds of work three times. It's just nothing much." And then it's try to get them to understand what they perceive as intensity from a sports scientist's point of view is not what we would class as intensity.

And I know people hate me for saying that, but a lot of boxers think they're training hard, but they're not training hard the right way. And it's when we make that shift, things get the needle gets moved in a really interesting way, which is what I'm all about with it. How do we push the needle the other way? I love it. People hate me for saying that.

James de Lacey53:49

A few years ago with my rugby team, that's exactly how I explained it when we got to our high intensity work in the preseason. It was preseason. It was after the very first rep, you should feel like you don't want to do any more. You should just be done. But obviously we had three reps in that series and that's just has to be that's the intensity it needs to be for us to get what we want out of that session.

And that works when you explain it like that. Like you should be dead after the first one. They go, "Oh, okay."

Andrew Usher54:12

How do you find people? Do you find them pretty compliant working through that or?

James de Lacey54:12

I mean especially in sport, in sports like rugby that often have a tradition of just beating the hell out of them all the time. Like some of the players don't like it, but most players, they enjoy, especially when it's especially when you've got to a point where you've done all the base work beforehand and they understand why and they know, "Okay, it's only going to be for these sessions kind of thing and it's leading into the season now." So for them to get a little bit of that extra stuff and stuff.

That was like they responded well to that. And we'd do it with wrestling and stuff like that. So it was a little different in terms of we'd do it with a partner.

Andrew Usher54:54

It's kind of funny because there's been a couple of quite good name athletes we've worked with that really didn't like the feeling of their heart rate going beyond say like 160 beats. So all their training, well, that's the bizarre thing. I mean some of these guys are really good physique athletes and you're kind of like but your heart rate is probably peaking way higher than that. But when they put the heart rate monitor on consciously for whatever reason, it seemed to be inhibiting them.

They were like, "We had a hard job with some of those to really get them to push the pace because oh my god, I can feel my heart beating." I'm like, "Well, let's not worry too much about that." And it's been interesting because we have had a few that have found it very difficult to push really high.

And we've had a couple of S&C coaches bring these people in and say, "We can't get their heart rate above 170." And I'm like, "Really?" And I, well, who manages that? And then it's kind of interesting. So I mean it for me it's been quite interesting the last few years having UFC guys and Bellator guys and stuff.

You kind of look at just the difference in kind of who's pushing hard and who's not pushing hard and who's coasting. And it would be quite surprising. People would be quite surprised that they were coasting, but who are still doing phenomenally well. Which then begs the question like.

Yes. And that I think that's been the big thing for me with this whole thing is we can do all this research as long as we want, but the reality is we're working with outliers. We're not working with the general population. And those outliers are pretty interesting within themselves because some of them aren't pushing particularly too high, but are world champion level. They just have that ability, the timing, the distance, the awareness, the spatial awareness, the vision.

And then you have the other kids. And I always say to kids it's like you may have two type of athletes, one that may be much more genetically gifted than you, but you can bridge the gap with the right amount of training. Because that athlete is going to be too lazy to take that next step up.

And I think that's where sports science and strength and conditioning can play a massive role with athletes that especially in the beginning career you can accelerate them really fast because you can say to them, "Look, we can give you the underlying foundations to catch you up with a lot of these really high level." And at that point you start to catch up, you need to step up the technical side of it.

That's where you really need to get. So it's kind of things are interesting in sport, combat sports from that perspective. I think the reality is every dog has his day in the ring. So you can prepare someone as much as you want, but they come off the line at the wrong time. Boom. It's, you're, and we're all good.

James de Lacey57:37

I get the sprint protocols coming back to that. You mentioned okay, three to six minutes I guess at close to peak heart rate per week. Do these, do you need to do, I guess you mentioned over six minutes you start to maybe blend too much residual fatigue into technical training, but does it need to be, does something need to be changed in order to spur further adaptation if you say, say you did this for a

Andrew Usher58:03

Yeah, you got to mix it up. So we will play around with resistance on the watt bike as well. So we'll change the resistance. So we'll just really mix up the sprint times as well.

So at Hannah starts camp, so she's back in camp now. I'm just waiting to see what the points going to be. So she's back on doing 20 seconds sprints at 10 seconds, 60 second recovery. So we'll do that for the next two weeks and then we'll start to change it.

So she'll do 10s, 20s, 30s and we'll just play with. Now because she's at such a high elite level athlete, we can increase her sprints a little bit more than a normal athlete. So although we say one minute, we will give her some things a little bit more than one minute just because of the way we want to periodize it out.

And we'll play around with her. So we'll increase the watt bike resistance a lot in her sessions. So she's getting a bit more power generation. So we get a little bit more leg strength. Because one of the interesting things about the bike, one of the reasons I use the bike as well, is one of the interesting things is you do the movement assessment and then you have a bike that can measure symmetrical power and power ratios.

You start to see that crossover. So interestingly any athlete that comes in that has very bad asymmetry and an asymmetrical issue to me is anything that's probably between 11 and 15% of a difference side to side. Under that I don't really care about it, right? Because the sport is asymmetrical anyway.

So but if they have quite a large issue left and right, if there's a massive disproportion on symmetry, you tend to see it on the bike. And if the bike's looking at scale about a really expensive road bike or even a watt bike, you start to see that difference in symmetry quite massively.

And curiously, you start to see it muscle oxygen nation levels as well. The muscle doesn't respond well. So the bike is pretty cool for that because you can educate the athlete how to spin the bike a little bit better, how to drive the legs through, how you can extend and stuff like that and kind of fix that asymmetry kind of nicely on those sprints.

And because they're doing it three times a week, you're getting three sessions where they're concentrating and focus on cadence and pulling everything through. Which has been massive for us then getting back into strength work because it's helping us tidy up a lot of things in a very kind of non-strengthy way.

And then we're finding then we're starting to get a lot more benefits in single leg work. And it's all just coming together for us. So the bike works for us in multiple levels from the mitochondrial side developing that right through to kind of pinpointing hip issues, length issues, strength.

It's just amazing. You can get so much from it. People often say to me, "Do I need an expensive lab?" And I'm like, "No, just go to the gym that's got a watt bike." And you can get so much data from that.

It's insane. Peak power, kind of recovery power, power drifts, recovery heart rate recovery, symmetrical issues. You get a massive amount on that and very simple stuff. So it's one of the main things. That's one of the reasons we like to use the bike as well. It just gives us a lot of opportunities to do other things as well.

But other athletes will do different things as well. So we don't always do sprints. A lot of our athletes that maybe need to have a real high level of our lower body will do more long grindy sessions.

We'll make them do critical power modeling. We'll do make them hold certain wattage for longer periods of time. But because we do work a lot with cyclists as well. So all the combat sports, we get this protocol, this sprint protocol could be used for any sport.

But I would just say that if it was something like rugby, it was soccer, it was kind of something else, we would probably change the protocols around a little bit to accommodate what they are looking for as well. It's not a one glove fits all. It's close.

James de Lacey1:01:35

Where do you fit these, I guess, where do you fit these in the training? You mentioned afternoon training at one point. I think you mentioned in the morning before where they do afternoon technical pads. I guess in terms of week structure, where do these usually fit around everything else? And maybe just an example of how I guess the whole week structure looks with technical training as well.

Andrew Usher1:01:49

So if we take Hannah just now because she's in camp, so she'll do. So we will just set in the Sunday and we will just blueprint it.

So we basically, because an athlete, especially at elite level, things could change. Media days come up, all that type of stuff. So it's a constant battle. But one of the benefits of sprints is it's very easy to fit them in because it's only 6 minutes of work and talk with the recovery time.

So for Hannah, we will just look. So for any elite athlete we're working with, it will be scheduled dependent. We do all our periodization on that Sunday for the week ahead. We have a general overall for the 8 weeks, but because she'll do media days or she'll do sponsorship days or whatever, the people will shift quite a lot.

So Sunday's like the shift day where we sit and go, "What's happening for next week?" And we will plan. So she will do her sprints, one probably beginning of the week, middle of the week, and the end of the week is tends to be when she does it.

She spars a lot on a Saturday. So we avoid sparring day. So sparring day for us, sparring day is a golden day. We don't like to have anything with it. And we want the following day to be recovery as well. So we'll try and probably cluster them Monday, Tuesday and maybe like a Thursday.

So that's the way it works for her. It works different for others. It just depends. Amateurs are pretty religious. We'll just say we know that in their sessions are Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So we'll try and get them in the Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

Friday's tends in sparring for the amateurs as a Saturday as well. So we try and cluster all our sparring around a Saturday to allow us to have the Friday off if need be and the Sunday off for recovery. So we're quite big on that.

And that works well for us. Other athletes, it's a bit of a challenge. Overseas athletes, if their schedule's busy, I'll just be tagging in whenever we can get it. But I'll tend to say to them, "Look, if you can fit it in after a pad session or technical session which not been too crazy, that'll be fine." The other thing will be is if an athlete's cutting weight, then we will also look to bring them in the evening and we'll do like a train high sleep low protocol, which is the our preferred method of weight cutting.

Just because we can deplete more glycogen and get high intensity sprints, get a little bit epoch, and then they can obviously sleep overnight, low carb or high carb and we get that benefit of a bit of a weight cut that way as well.

So we use it sometimes for managing some weight cuts. We don't tend to have a lot of issues with weight cutting with our athletes in fairness. It's not something, it's the first usually the first thing we put in place when your athlete is getting that right under control from day one so that it's not a big issue moving forward for us.

So yeah, so we use it for a variety of different ways. But amateurs pretty regimented. Pro has a bit more flexibility, depending on their level. If they're like a pro that's not that's early start career, it'll be a bit more regimented because most of them will still be holding down day jobs.

So a lot of these sprints end up being at night for a lot of these athletes because it's the only time they can get in. Like most of the UK boxers that are professional probably still holding down some kind of day job. So and not everyone wants to go to a gym to do a super maximum sprint at 5:00 in the morning. So it can be a little bit.

But for us, it's pretty straightforward. We just say when we need to have three of them, you can do Monday, Tuesday, and Friday or you can do Monday, Wednesday, Friday. It doesn't really matter too much.

But do not mix it with sparring days. That's the big rule. Do not do them with sparring. Because we want sparring to be as fresh as possible. We're quite strict on sparring that we want it carbohydrate fueled, ready, and we want a good quality sparring.

It's hard to get good quality sparring sometimes. So we're very religious on that. It's very like, that's the day where everything has to align kind of nice. So we stay away from it as much as possible with that stuff.

James de Lacey1:05:37

Perfect. I could keep asking you questions for another hour or two, but we'll end this here just so we don't go take all your time as well throughout the day. But if anyone's wanting to follow, I guess, what you're doing, your research, anything like that, where can they find you?

Andrew Usher1:05:57

So I'm on, I'm hopeless with social media. I'm not very prolific on social. I'm very good with technology, but I just hate social media. So Twitter is Andrew Usher and Instagram I think is the Andrew Usher and I'm floating around that high performance group now because of James.

She'll blame James. And that's probably the best place you can do. We also have a new website. We're going to start to develop that out and have some kind of educational material. We'll probably link that back to Abertay University as well.

And people can look at Abertay University. There'll be some bits and bobs probably on there somewhere. But I don't post a massive amount.

James de Lacey1:06:29

No, that's all good. But thanks for coming on Andrew and sharing all that knowledge with the listeners.

Andrew Usher1:06:43

No, it's been a pleasure.

James de Lacey1:06:43

We'll be in touch for sure. We'll have to get you on for round two of this as well because there's obviously still a lot more to cover.

Andrew Usher1:06:43

Perfect. Thank you. Yeah, excellent.