Why Your Strength & Conditioning Is NOT Transferring To Fight Night w/ Ed Baker (SSOF Ep 87)

Ed Baker3:01

That's right. There's one or two jobs. I used to work for the English Institute of Sport, called the UK Sport Institute now. I mean, you've got boxing, amateur boxing—that's in Sheffield, great program. I think there's two S&C staff. You've got Taekwondo. Again, I'm good mates with Guy Reese who's just left Taekwondo to go to cycling. But, one S&C coach, and he did that job for I think three Olympic cycles.

So as you say, it's not like there's a ton of jobs at high level combat sport out there. It's more, like you say, guys with a passion and then bringing their skills into that sport when they get the chance.

James de Lacey3:29

Yeah, it's good though because you get a lot of outside looks in there. But I know you're doing a lot of research currently within combat sports. Do you want to dive into a little bit of what you're doing there, and then we can kind of go into some of the findings you have or any practical applications?

Ed Baker3:52

Sure. So this is, again, kind of bringing it full circle. When I did my masters, I did my thesis dissertation, whatever, on punch force. It was a single subject case study—was one of the guys, the Muay Thai fighters from the gym, who had a good record. I think he'd had 50 fights and maybe 46 wins. He was decent.

So we got him in the gym and—I mean, talk about unscientific—we just stuck a force plate to the wall with some screws, and we put a kick shield over it. And then we had another force plate, but it wasn't very big. It was big enough for one foot to go underneath it. So we had one foot—the back foot—under a force plate, and we put a few joint markers on, like the wrist, elbow, shoulder, pelvis. And we just had him whack this force plate basically and turn the camera on and see what we could measure.

I did actually publish the findings of that. We used the kinematic data, so the movement, the joint movements. We showed pretty much what you'd expect. Rear leg moves first, pelvis rotates, and then there's kind of a delay, and then the shoulder rotates but through a bigger arc, and then the hand moves last. So we wrote that up and published it, and that was great. There were some similarities to things like pitching a baseball or throwing a javelin—like developing a forward momentum, then the front foot acts as a break and you rotate over that and hit the target.

So that was my master's. Then I went off and got a job. Over ten years later, I'm now working in university. I've got a bit of access to equipment, and I'd like to say I've got time—I don't really have time—but you find time. The game hasn't really moved forward that much in terms of what's the gold standard to measure punch force. A couple of researchers around the world have done the same thing—they put a force plate on the wall, they put a pad over it, and they got guys to punch it, and they've tested some other things.

But nobody's published their methodology, because the big question is: well, what's the pad doing? What's the glove doing? How much is that taking out of the impact, and how sensitive is it?

That's the kind of question we're trying to answer first. And then we're going to see if we can get a 360-degree view of how you punch. So force at the floor, motion capture for the whole body—we want to put the sensors on the muscle as well, EMG at the key muscle groups—and then we'll get the impact force.

So we can describe and explain the punch, and then we can look at what the underlying factors are that contribute to punch force. And the question is: are punchers born or are they made? I'm pretty sure that you can make them, and that's what we're trying to find out.

James de Lacey6:32

Dude, I love that. Have you—I don't know if you listen to the podcast at all—but I don't know if you listened to Wes Elliott who was on recently, who owns StrikeTec boxing sensors? He's got a lot of good data on there. I have to link you up after this. I love that.

Ed Baker6:55

I listened to a couple of your episodes in preparation—with Boxing Science and a couple of other ones that I'm just working back through them—but I'll have to take a listen to that.

James de Lacey6:55

Yeah, I'll link you guys up afterwards. But he's got some awesome data from analyzing a ton of bare knuckle boxers, UFC guys, with the sensors and kind of getting a lot of force-time graphs with it and things like that. I'll link you guys up. I think you'll get along way too well with it. It's very similar research.

Ed Baker7:19

Sounds good.

James de Lacey7:19

Around that research, I know you mentioned around the kinematic data—I wanted to ask you in terms of practical applications. Obviously you talk about it starts on the rear leg, at least when we're, and then the pelvis turns, specifically talking about kind of like a cross punch. But in terms of practical applications with training, how does that translate into your strength and conditioning program, or does it have any bearing at all?

Ed Baker7:43

Yeah, I mean, all the available evidence would—and kind of a common sense approach would suggest—that it's all lower body power. So strong, powerful legs seem to differentiate performers in pretty much all fight sports, through MMA, any kickboxing-based or any boxing-based sports. And that the more elite the participant, the greater the contribution of the lower body to the movement. That makes sense from a mechanical perspective and from a skill perspective, and I can talk about those if you want.

James de Lacey7:43

Yeah, let's do it.

Ed Baker7:43

About why it makes sense. So firstly, from a—we'll start with the skill perspective. Like the beginner or the novice does an arm punch, and the rest of their body's frozen. They're just punching with their arm. And that makes sense because when you're not skilled at a movement, we know the nervous system restricts the degrees of freedom you have access to. And it'll actually freeze the lower body so that you can punch with the arm.

But the more skilled you become, the greater amount of joints, muscles, and everything you can recruit in a sequence. And so the more skilled you are, you can basically punch someone with your whole body. You're punching them with your whole body weight and all the momentum you can generate. So from a skill perspective, it makes sense that the

Lower body would be involved and you're standing on the ground, that's how you develop force. But then from a mechanical perspective, the same is true, right? So if you're able to initiate the movement with the back foot and push into the ground, which isn't going to move, the world isn't really going to move, it pushes back. And the more you push, the more it pushes back, the more you can transfer into the hand. So being able to rapidly push against the floor, not lose any energy, and then also use that front leg as a stiff break, you'll be able to transfer more.

And this is happening in 0.3 of a second, depending on where you measure the start from. And obviously, again, your more elite guys can disguise or conceal the fact that they've begun the movement with something with their lead hand or a jab or something else. And then the hand's going to move last, so it's really the whole body in motion and the hand goes on the end.

James de Lacey10:21

Because the force generated so quickly, does that influence the style of strength training you're doing? And maybe relying less on maximal strength, more so on trying to improve the ability to produce it quickly? Or is your philosophy around we just got to get strong and powerful regardless?

Ed Baker10:21

Yeah, I think the latter. I think you want to take out the best insurance policy you can, and being stronger is never a drawback, right? And so definitely, depending on where your listeners are at in their career, both as an athlete, like strength trained, and then as a fighter, if you don't strength train at all or you're not very strong for your weight, then getting stronger in your basic movements will always translate to an increase in power as it's the foundation of all of your neuromuscular capabilities. So it's never a bad idea to get stronger in your basic movements.

But definitely, to push things to the max and to train in the correct time frames that we're talking about, then yeah, you have to do explosive training. And so that's jumping, plyometrics, and med ball work, which I think is really valuable. And that definitely forms the second half of a training camp, it's unloading from some of that heavier stuff and really going for the maximum intensity jumping, bounding, and throwing.

James de Lacey11:28

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Nice, we'll dive into that soon as well. I wanted to come back to, as well, obviously the idea of the sequence starts the leg, the pelvis turns, and the shoulder turns after, almost like a whip, as you mentioned, with the baseball pitch or javelin throw. And I mean, if you go down, I guess, Frans Bosch made it popular with the whole dynamical systems theory and his approaches around upper-lower dissociation, basically the upper body being able to do something while the lower body can do something else.

That would be a pretty good example there, having the pelvis and leg rotating forward while the shoulders still behind, ready to whip. I don't know, is there any coordinative approach to training that you take there, or any of those concepts that you apply within your boxing training?

Ed Baker13:41

Yeah, Bosch is an interesting one. I mean, I think I now teach the dynamical systems students here, but it took me, might just be me, it took me like two years to understand that dude. It's tough, man, it's confusing. A lot of is deliberately over-complicated.

I think that, well look, a golf swing is a really good example of what we're talking about. It's an extreme version of what we're talking about, which is club head speed, right, is the underpinning thing for driving distance. And part of that is going to come from the torque, and part of that is going to come from the range, right? So the further you can twist, i.e., the further you can dissociate, or if you like, separate the shoulder from the pelvis, the club's going to travel through a bigger arc, it's going to develop more speed, you're going to hit hard, the ball will go further. And so that's similar to a punch, particularly if you counter and you've wound up. There are obviously some key differences tactically.

But yeah, so that skill is going to be developed by punching, yeah. And I don't think you can necessarily, any other exercise that's not punching is by nature general, yeah. And so I would look at, can I provide the ingredients, if you like, that would go into that?

And so, in no particular order, that would be mobile hips, specifically internal rotation at the hip, because your back hand, the opposite hip, the front hip rotates internally as you twist through the punch. And if you're restricted there, you can't internally rotate and you won't be able to develop as much power. So mobile hips, strong legs, an extremely strong back and trunk, strong shoulders that can also externally and internally rotate, and very strong upper back muscles, healthy elbows.

So can you give a training program that addresses all of these things so that the athlete's got the body that's capable of then performing the sports movement? So the people I work with are already skilled in punching, you can always be better, but it's my job to ensure the, I don't know, the meat-covered robot, if you like, is upgraded to a level where all the constituent parts work as well as we can get them to work so that they can then express that doing their technique.

And med ball's great, and I love med ball throws, I do loads of them, and I think they're really good. But still general, still not, it's not a punch, it's still quite general.

James de Lacey16:16

Nice. Do you have any specific exercises or drills you go to for improving that hip internal rotation or even some of the shoulder external internal rotation?

Ed Baker16:42

Yeah, and it's really PNF stretching, which many years ago as personal trainers we all learned PNF hamstring, it's always the one where you've got your partner's leg straight, they push into you for a bit, then you push back. Now that's been, the whole PNF thing has been rebranded by a bunch of different people. There's the FRC guys, Functional Range Conditioning, all that type of stuff. I think we had a course years ago in the UK on micro-stretching, so everyone's rebranded it, right?

But really the principle, the principle is you take the joint, it's first of all, it's active, not passive. I like the athlete's doing the stretch like they would do a rep in a bicep curl or a squat, they're doing reps. And you take the joint to the position of restriction, so you internally rotate it till it's a little bit tight, and you train it in that range. And so you then isometrically try to go further against resistance, and you'll train both sides of the joint isometrically in the position in which you're tight.

And it doesn't take very much of that to make quite rapid changes. You got to think, what's the restriction? There might be a neural or a structural restriction there, it's mostly neural. And so to do that, you have to be in that position, you have to apply force in that position, you have to do it repeatedly. And isometrics are a great way of doing that.

So on my, I mean, sometimes I share stuff like this on Instagram, like really easy hip rotation warm-ups. And I think you should put it in the warm-up or the cool-down, and you should have some daily hip and shoulder routine of a few minutes that addresses joint health like in the capsule and addresses your range of motion.

And even if you've got lots, if you're 21 and you've got lots of range now, great. Believe me, if you want to stay in the game, you want to carry out daily maintenance on those joints. It's only ever going to benefit you. So it's superior to static stretching in my view, because moving your own joints is quite difficult to do, particular the hips. People are not very coordinated, not very familiar with that part of their body, so it improves your coordination, which is part of mobility.

James de Lacey19:06

No, I like that. I'm with you on the whole static stretching thing too, but I wanted to dive into, because you obviously work with a range of different combat sports: boxing, MMA, Muay Thai. Does your approach to strength conditioning—let's just stay with strength training for now, we can move to conditioning, but just to make the question a little smaller—in terms of differences between MMA, boxing, Muay Thai, does your approach change much, or is it that most people just need the same stuff along all those sports?

Ed Baker19:30

Strength is a general quality, and basic lifting, barbells and other traditional strength training equipment is one of the easiest and most accessible and scalable ways to do it. So in a way, yes. When people have an underdeveloped level of strength, then general strength training is pretty much always going to benefit them. But yes, there are some ways that I would definitely tailor it towards different sports.

Pretty common sense: within MMA, athletes do seem to still devolve into kind of either a striker—they're a striker first, Grappler second—or the other way around, they're a Grappler first and then they've added striking. Even though that sport, the level is just accelerating all the time and there are so many hybrids now, still the case that you either favor the striking game or the grappling game, and they are slightly different.

So being a striker is more about velocity and it's more about more explosive chaining combinations together, moving in and out. Whereas your grappling is more that sustained, almost quasi-isometric contractions where you're working to achieve a better position or you're being defensive.

So you can definitely bias your training more towards one of those if you think that that's going to be important for your next fight or for your game. Having said that, I think that overall for all fighters what I'd call peripheral endurance is underserved. Everyone's looking at more running or more circuits, which are probably addressing heart and lungs mostly, which is great and you need that, but they're all aerobically—I think what the science is telling us is you can have a range of VO2 maxes, a range of aerobic abilities as measured by running, but that doesn't explain endurance in fighting.

It's probably much more about what's happening in the muscle and the peripheral endurance, the ability of the specific muscles to keep contracting. So I'd like to look at that with the gym work. You can look at upgrading the horsepower with your basic strength training, but I think there's a lot of gains to be had in specific muscular endurance.

James de Lacey21:45

Yeah, you just made Andrew Usher's day saying that. He's probably going to message me later on after he listens to this just because of what you just said.

Ed Baker22:14

Now, Andrew is a very smart guy and he's thinking differently as well. He's thinking in a way that not a lot of other people are thinking about this. He's a unit, he's searching, he's publishing as well, so yeah, he definitely knows a lot more about the physiology side.

But I do think, I mean, if we look at VO2 max—is the gold standard of aerobic capacity—and I've tested fighters on VO2 max, you typically do it running, and you're on the treadmill, you've got the gas mask on. It's the most reliable test we know for that, but still, running is very general. It's not specific to boxing or MMA. It doesn't happen at all in that.

And we see elite fighters with a range of VO2 maxes, from amateur boxers in the low 50s—there's a pro I work with and he was 67. Wow. Like, that's a really high score. That's up there with Premiership footballers who do run for 90 minutes or more. But if you took all of those, you wouldn't say any of them were unfit at boxing. They're all—all research from top-level amateur and pros.

So that on its own is not enough to determine whether you're fit enough. It's not just about the heart and lungs, or they are an essential part, it's a lot to do with the muscle and specific endurance. So yeah, MMA for sure—five-minute rounds, the constraint of grappling, being taken down, having to escape—I'd definitely be looking at how to improve the muscle groups that are involved in that, and slightly differently for boxing.

James de Lacey23:39

So do you find most of the fighters that come to you are already, I guess you could say, centrally or VO2 max or aerobically fit, but struggle with that muscular endurance side?

Ed Baker23:39

They're all fit, obviously, when compared to people who don't do that sport or the average or the non-elite participants in the gym. But sometimes it's hard to work out whether that's truly an athletic difference or they're just technically superior, technically intact super.

Because it's definitely—everyone's got a pace—speaking of boxing now is a good one to think of—everyone's got a pace that they're comfortable at fighting at, including all the top pros. And it's when you can push that person outside of that pace that their limitations are revealed. So you don't know which one has come first, but people's fitness almost matches their technical ability to control the pace of a round.

And I find also with a lot of traditional boxing training, if they're not doing strength and conditioning work that's outside of the traditional boxing training, again everything's in a similar physiological zone. It's mostly three minutes on, one minute off, or 30 seconds rest. It's lots of reps, and if it's happening for three minutes, it's not intense. It's just not.

So I think a lot of fighters could benefit from stepping outside of what they're doing—maybe they're in the third or fourth gear—and spend a bit more time in top gear for short periods and really push intensity. So much shorter but more maximal, super-maximal intervals. And that's the same for lifting weights and for energy system stuff.

James de Lacey25:50

So you just briefly touched on it now, but we'll go down that rabbit hole around—we've been talking about the peripheral side of the conditioning—so what are some things that you like to use then to help develop this ability for the muscles to resist fatigue during isometric holds, all that?

Ed Baker25:50

Couple different things. So I'll use some—the context, I'll explain it. Let's say it's an eight-week fight camp. It's actually nine because it's eight weeks of training and then a taper, but talk about typical eight weeks, which is a classic block that we use. And the first four weeks, we'll use some circuit training. It's quite general movements: squats, jump squats, presses, press-ups, pull-ups, that type of stuff. So they're all general movements but continuous rhythmic movements, so there's a skill that athletes learning and has to be efficient.

And we'll have a one-to-one work-to-rest, and it might be 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off, but we'll repeat that for 36 minutes. And the key is to not have a drop-off in output but to be consistent. And typically I'll stagger a lower body and an upper body activity. You pair them one after another, so again the system, the heart and lungs, getting worked really hard there, pushing the blood up and down. But we're choosing exercises that are rhythmic and continuous in nature, and they're using a larger range of motions. So a deeper squat and a deeper press than the athlete would do in their boxing.

And then we complement that with some typical weight training but slow tempo—really horrible, like four to six seconds down, two to four seconds up—and continuous tension. And I do this by time, so a 30-second set, and they stretch those out to 45 or even 50 seconds of time under tension. Yeah, it's horrible. And then complete rest. And that's your muscle buffering. That's almost a bit like old-school bodybuilding training, but that's not the reason that we're doing it.

And in those camp conditions with all the other training and everything else, you don't get—it's not like you get loads of unwanted hypertrophy, it just doesn't happen. But yeah, we're targeting the endurance potential of those muscle fibers. And it doesn't take—in my experience, you don't need much. You need a couple of sessions a week for three to four weeks, and you start to see changes quite rapidly.

Also, that type of training as well is very healthy on the joints, I can imagine. They feel great. Yeah, it's not maximal. It's actually great for the old guys over—I'm over 40—and even though it's psychologically taxing, burns like hell, super healthy, which has, it's very good for your attendance and connective tissue. So it's all part of it as well.

But three to four weeks of that type of training, and then in the second half of the camp, more specific. So by that I mean boxing. So for example, one of the sessions we might do is have a pad man wearing the body shield and the pads, and we would have a combination of three to six punches in length, and we're trying to—

Throw three punches a second, so fast, and we might do 6 to 15 seconds of work at max effort and then 15 to 30 seconds of rest. And it would progress from passive to active rest. So towards the end of the camp, active rest doesn't look very much like rest. It's defensive footwork, and again, depending on the level of the athlete, how good they are, the better they are at breathing through their nose and recovering whilst they're moving.

They're learning a skill as well. They're learning a skill of relaxing and breathing under pressure and then repeating that, and we repeat that for a sequence over time.

So then that's in a specific regime, if you like. Steal that from that Fancy book, which I love. So you move from more general stuff that's just targeting the muscle architecture and the enzymes you want to grow in there to make you recover faster and tolerate more of that acid environment, and then make it more specific towards the end of the camp.

James de Lacey30:17

It sounds like it kind of links up with what you're saying around fighters have a pace they like to fight at. And when they move out of that pace and go faster, that's when you see the limitations. It sounds like, almost, that kind of training—obviously it's classed as sprint interval training or high-intensity training with the pads, maximal efforts—but it sounds like it also plays a role in giving them a new pace to fight at and get used to for when they actually spar and actually go to competition.

Ed Baker30:39

Absolutely. I think, again, this is the more elite you become, the more different things you can bear in mind. This is I'm talking about the fighter now, in terms of what they're achieving, what they're getting out of it. And yeah, I mean, you can't do anything about 3 minutes long and it's 1 minute rest in a professional fight, and 1 minute is not long enough to completely recover if you've emptied your tank in the 3 minutes.

So in other words, if you've maxed out your anaerobic capacity trying to put someone away—you see this all the time—then you can't recover sufficiently to do that again. And therefore you have to know, and you have to have like an absolutely, it can never be clear enough, your own sense of exactly what gear you're in and how much headroom you've got.

Of course, the more headroom you've got in any round, the bigger the advantage you have. So you want to be able to fight at the fastest, highest pace you can, with an extra gear to go that you can always select when you need it. That's definitely the way I look at it. And I believe strongly that manipulating these periods of very intense work-to-rest intervals and keeping them going over time and then progressing by a few seconds the length of time the athlete can sustain them, this really helps, like you said, to educate them about what they've got.

I was watching, I was at a fight on Saturday. Pleased to say one of the guys I work with won the IBO Continental Featherweight title. Round two knockout, stunning knockout. Shabir Ha, so he's brilliant. He's one to watch.

But on that card, there were two guys fighting for a vacant Light Heavyweight Africa title, and it was an absolute barnstormer of a fight. I mean, the two guys were blocking the majority of the punches with their chin for every single, but there was, I think it might be round three, they both stepped on it. Gave it everything, and you can see the physiology in action.

The next two rounds, they were punching, but with, you could see, 50% as hard, and they were both absolutely exhausted. And it was kind of a question of who was going to be able to just recover first. And you can't cheat the physiology, right? So if you push it to the limit, the minute is not enough to recover. So yes, you have to know where am I and how many gears have I got left.

James de Lacey33:09

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That's such a good advertisement as well for really pushing yourself with some of these maximum efforts. Because, as you mentioned, a lot of people are doing these specific, quote-unquote, rounds of 3 minutes on, 1 minute off, like you mentioned. But you're never pushing to the extent you can when you're doing those 10, 15, 20 second rounds. And that, as you mentioned, that lets you know where that ceiling is that you can base the rest of your, whatever, the rest of your fight plan or sparring or whatever it is, off that pace.

So you know, hey, I've done X amount of rounds at this intensity, I know how I feel, and you can gauge by how you feel from those rounds.

Ed Baker34:55

Totally agree. You need the 3 minutes on, 1 minute off sparring, because you have to learn the pace of the round. And you're doing so many other things in sparring. You're trying out new things, testing techniques. It's a gauge. I look at the sparring as if you played football and the Saturday is your match day. So your week is arranged around performing well in sparring, and then reflecting on, right, well, how do I improve?

So there's lots of other things going on there, lots of constraints that prevent you necessarily from going 100%. Like how good the other person is. So you have to find time in the week to physically push to the max, but not every day. Key sessions.

James de Lacey35:19

Perfect. Where does that conditioning fit within a week for you? So I'm assuming, obviously, you're working around technical training. If end of the week sparring is most important, you're probably working back from there. So where do those conditioning sessions fit?

Ed Baker35:44

Yeah, the sparring, it would be great if the sparring was at the end of the week and always on the same day, but it never is. It moves around, so you have to be flexible. And we have, basically, what I have for pros is, the 24 hours before you spar and the 24 hours after you spar is we know what we're going to do.

So whatever day it occurs on, you've rung up another gym and you've arranged some sparring for a Wednesday, it's like, right, so I now know what Tuesday looks like and I know what Thursday looks like, and then we can slot our other stuff in around that. Because I believe it's really important to perform well in sparring, particularly if you go to another gym. If it's with the same training partners at your home gym, it's okay, you can be flat and tired, this is going to happen. But I think if you're testing yourself against somebody new and it's a big deal, you should perform well.

So, but yeah, how does it look? Well, all the pros I know will train boxing every day, and often that's in the afternoon. So they're in the boxing gym doing boxing-specific training. They've got gloves on and punching, and that's in the afternoons. And some of that might feed into, in terms of advising work-to-rest or what to work on. But typically, my sessions will be elsewhere in the day, so maybe the morning. And that might be two to three resistance training and two to three energy system training per week, depending on the person.

And the average might be two lifts and then two to three energy system work. But of course, if you do a Tyson Fury and you just blow up in between, then it's a lot harder. I always advise everybody, you're a full-time athlete and you live like that, right? So when you're off camp, there's specific things you're developing.

And the more you develop your aerobic base off camp, then the easier it is for you to tap into this much more specialized, specific, really high-intensity stuff in camp. And the same with your strength training. If you're an absolute monstrously strong before the 8-week camp and really fit, now you can be much more clinical and targeted about what you do and when in your camp. That's the way to go, rather than having to do it all and worry about the weight cut in 8 weeks.

James de Lacey38:28

About the fight camp itself, you mentioned the first half and the second half, and that second half you mentioned obviously the maximal pad work. But in terms of strength training, what usually goes on within your sessions there as you're leading up to the fight, obviously with the weight cut to deal with and everything else?

Ed Baker38:28

I'm really into kind of block training, I guess. I started this with wheelchair rugby that I worked for GB wheelchair years ago in the lead up to the 2016 Paralympics and then again Tokyo, and it worked for me and it worked for them and it works with our calendar and our month system and everything just seems to tie together.

And there's a lot of good physiological data, scientific data behind this, particularly from athletics and sprinting, right, where they'll do blocks of concentrated loading to do with strength and power and then unload those, as in they don't then lift as frequently but they run a lot more. And then we do see delayed compensation effects kind of weeks after this block of concentrated loading, and we know this. It's the same for marathon training, you do longest run three weeks out, and it's the same for a lot of other sports.

So I like to have a heavy emphasis on general strength and aerobic fitness off camp, so running more frequently or whatever modality you choose, and lifting heavy barbell training, basic three to five reps, three to five sets, compound movement off camp. And then first four weeks, again depends on the athlete and the weight they're going to fight at and whatever else they've got going on, but we will do the sort of circuit training that I mentioned that is much more to do with the peripheral endurance.

And then we'll do some contrast training, so just classic like heavy squat, heavy trap bar deadlift, loaded jump, unloaded jump, low reps, lots of that, and depth jumps, single and double leg bounding, that kind of stuff closer to the fight.

And what I've found, and I have kind of experimented with a couple of guys, is that it depends on the athlete too, but it's possible to not touch a barbell for eight weeks and not really lose any strength when we go back in a gym after the fight. Maybe 5%, if that, in terms of a kind of a daily 1RM or a daily 3RM, provided you're doing other things. We've got hill sprints, we've got lots of jumping, fire squat jumps, maybe like light loaded jumps with dumbbells.

This and the well-planned camp seems to preserve general strength abilities. You don't lose them, which means you can kind of tap into those gains again in the next phase. And that's been true for a couple of years for the people that I've worked with. They've just continually increased in their kind of basic barbell lifts, even if we're coming out of that for four to six, even eight weeks at a time.

James de Lacey41:33

I'm with you on that, on retaining those abilities. Jumping and jumping and stuff seems so far away from I guess heavy lifting, but it tends to retain those qualities so well. It's just kind of like everything affects everything, instead of a lot of people see kind of see everything as real binary, like this only trains my maximum strength, this only trains my power, but it kind of all interrelates.

Ed Baker41:33

Exactly, it's neural, right? The reason it interrelates to everything is because when you're strength training, you train your nervous system to recruit lots of muscles at once. So the stuff that wastes quickly is that buffer, is that muscular endurance that doesn't hang around, which is why you can kind of bring it up quite quickly.

And then you're basically growing a bunch of enzymes that are going to help you in a really acidic environment. But you stop doing it, it's hard to do to keep that going year round. But you stop doing that and you lose that ability very quickly, also because all the other training they're doing, which is very aerobic in nature, is pulling the body in kind of a different direction to that.

So you don't hold on to that stuff, but if you're really muscularly well trained, it's an expression of strength. It's quite general, and if you hold on to that, it does depend on the athlete, because some people are just natural kind of mesomorphic gainers, and there are others that are not. They're kind of that more that hard gainer, and they would need probably strength exposure all the way up to the fight.

If I think back to different cohort of athletes I used to work with, England netball, obviously all female athletes, it's a different hormonal environment and different sport as well. But I was absolutely convinced that heavy strength training, you needed a weekly exposure year round. It had a protective effect, had a potentiating effect, and it had a kind of performance enhancing effect. So they would lower body lift heavy at least once a week all year round, and I think that was absolutely key. So it does depend on the individual.

James de Lacey43:22

Nice. And then regarding the actual fight week, how does your training change and look during that time, obviously with the weigh-in and everything else involved? What does the right, the optimal seven days look like?

Ed Baker43:54

That's a great question. I would love to do some research. I'm planning to do something which we can talk about, about how to optimize that. But going into it, I think there's so many other things going on, certainly kind of in the professional space, where they're making weight, the dehydrating, the check weigh-in, any media, getting your t-shirts, talking to the sponsors. There's all this extra stuff kind of rushes in and all the hard work's done.

So again, depends on the person, but from my experience most fighters love training, and as it gets closer the mind starts playing tricks. And of course they're used to this really high chronic training load. They're used to being in the gym all hours a day, and really in the taper you need to take that load out because you need the body to be fresh and to recover. And so their mind is telling them I need to train, I need to train. And so often it's about pulling them back.

But the advice that I give is, and some of this I've got from Duncan French at UFC, who's excellent, and that's short, sharp. So alactic power, alactic efforts, so six seconds or less, max efforts. And that might be on the pads or takedowns or just jumps or something, or even maybe bike sprints or air bike sprints, but maximal alactic efforts with recovery, long recovery, short sharp efforts to maximize speed and those kind of neural qualities.

And you get a bunch of decent downstream kind of chemical benefits from that without any fatigue or associated stuff. So the message is no fatigue, right? Don't create any burning sensation, don't be fatigued during that week, because you're just adding the stuff you've got to recover from. Let your body recover from the training camp, particularly if you're dehydrating and cutting weight as well, it's extra stress on all the systems.

I think moving your training to the time of day that you're going to fight is an overlooked one. So if you're used to lifting at 11:00 in the morning and smashing pads and sparring at 3:00 in the afternoon, but you're fighting, as one of my guys was, half past 10 on the Saturday evening, I would move the training a bit later every day towards that time starting seven days out to reset your circadian rhythm, so that you are not completely sleepy or whatever.

Even though you're not going to be sleepy because you've got adrenaline going in your system, but you want your body to be familiar with performing at that time of day.

And that might be doing your fight-based warm-up, so getting your pad man, your coach, and going through the warm-up that you'll do in the dressing room. I think that's really key to have these kind of routines, these stable, predictable routines that athletes are familiar and comfortable with.

So yeah, get your hands wrapped, do your warm-up, don't create any fatigue. So yeah, a couple of short sharp sessions, maybe seven days out, five days out, four days out, and then media workout, some light shadowboxing. You don't need much else, and then there's obviously the weight cut to consider. And I think psychologically, lots of visualization. If you can make a highlight reel of yourself, absolutely do that, watch it. I think there's a lot to be said for that, and yeah, some good evidence to support that too.

James de Lacey47:07

I love that. So for any of the listeners wanted to implement that, so four days out will kind of be like the last you would potentially perform a hard alactic training session, six second effort, probably two to three minutes rest, maybe five... Oh, got a bit of a fire alarm. Hold on, folks.

Ed Baker47:40

Yeah, it was a test. It's gone off and I can't see anyone running past the door.

James de Lacey47:40

Burglary live on the podcast. But so so that four days out then would be kind of like last day, alactic effort, five sets of six seconds with two to three minutes rest, kind of thing?

Ed Baker48:12

Yeah, something like that. I might do, depending on the modality, so I have used say an assault bike, and you can do like a six second effort, see how many watts.

Let's say you can make 1,000 watts is your best that you can manage in 6 seconds. So then you got to hit at least 90% of that, you'd have to hit at least 900. Right? So do a 6-second effort, hit 900, 950, and then recover for I would say at least a minute, but you can do a self-selected recovery. Breathing through their nose, heart rate is 120 or below, nice and calm, and then hit it again. And I would say no more than eight of those.

That would be enough. And again, depends on the person. Some people hate training, so you got to make do something. Most of the people I work with, you got to pull them back. So then I might allow them some, maybe a minute to two minutes of shadow boxing. But again, the focus is on speed, is on hand speed and sharpness and feeling good.

And then a pad, maybe on a different day, a pad session. So one minute rounds, but within that, short, sharp, hard combinations with bad intentions, but plenty of recovery between those. So more recovery than the person's used to. It should feel very comfortable and easy, and the person should feel they want to do more. They've only just warmed up and they want to do more, and that's when you cut it.

And this has been done in different sports. I remember a presentation after the last two Olympic Cycles in hockey, field hockey, where we win medals. We're good at field hockey. And they introduce these priming sessions, and they would put them about eight hours before a game. And that would be a 20 minute, Sprint-focused warm-up, really aggressive 10, 15, 20 meter sprints, and long recovery.

Some short passes or a short corner or something like that, get the guys primed, and then relax. And that seemed to have a beneficial physiological effect later on. So yeah, short and sharp is the way to go, not creating any fatigue, and lots and lots of positive visualization.

James de Lacey50:33

Oh, perfect. But that's a perfect way to end this podcast too. But where can people find you and follow you and keep in touch with your research and all the things you're posting?

Ed Baker50:33

So I'm at the fight lab UK on Instagram, and Instagram is probably the main platform that I post and share on. So yeah, the fight lab UK, very happy for people to reach out with a message. And always nice to make content that people want, so if you want to know more about something or a particular post, just drop me a message. I'm on Twitter, or X, Ed Baker Coach. I don't tweet very much. And I have a website, thefightlab.co.uk, where you can get my stuff, programs and stuff like that.

James de Lacey51:28

Perfect. No, thanks for coming on, Ed. I made sure to follow you, and I'll link everything down the description for people to easily find you as well. But thanks for coming on, I appreciate it.

Ed Baker51:28

Thank you, appreciate it.