Why VO2max Doesn't Matter & How To REALLY Target Mitochondria w/ Dr. Babraj & Usher (SSOF Ep 137)

Dr. John Babraj2:45

It's been established for a long time that VO2 Max isn't an accurate predictor of endurance performance. So a female could have a higher VO2 Max than a male marathon runner, but she won't run a faster time. She'll be about 50 minutes slower.

So that VO2 Max score's not translating into performance. It doesn't really mimic performance at all. That point of the incremental treadmill test or incremental bike test, how far you go, how long it takes you to get there, for me that's the most important data point you can get from that test.

That reflects the demand that's been placed on the muscle. And at the point of fatigue, that's where you see the muscle has lost oxygen, has lost anaerobic glycogen's depleted. So we're now in a state of inability for muscle to contract efficiently.

How long that takes is really important. That's a really good marker of how endurance fit an athlete is. Does that make sense?

James de Lacey3:59

Okay, so you're using the incremental test as more of just like a performance test then versus actually trying to get a VO2 Max number?

Dr. Andrew Usher4:37

Yeah, I mean obviously from a sport point of view, VO2 Max is the maximum volume of oxygen consumption and it's either a strict number or it's going to measure via kilograms body weight as well to get a derived value.

And it's a value I think that's overused and probably misunderstood by people. And I think because everyone's got it on like a better, they've got it on a Garmin or wherever else. But the crazy thing actually is about those devices is they can be just as accurate as a CP machine.

So that makes you wonder if they're just as accurate as a CP machine, then how good is the CP machine? So my, I don't really have, I don't have a lot of issues with the VO2 Max test. It's a really good test, John said.

My issue really comes down to the fact that when you've got influential people pushing VO2 Max without explaining to people that the device is used to get numbers might not be that accurate, they're in a great area, right? Because people are been given values that are probably not actually that accurate.

I have submerged myself into VO2 Max machines, metabolic carts. I've had Pino, VO2 Masters, Cosmed carts, I've looked all of them and they don't always stack up. It's a value you got to take it with a little bit of caution.

But the test, however, is a very good test because any test that takes up to fatigue is going to really tell you a lot about the athlete. It's also going to tell you a lot about how the central system, the heart and lungs, are really functioning.

It's also, if you know how to get the kit, get how the peripheral, the muscle, is going to function. And you see some really interesting similarities and then you see a lot of disparity between how a muscle actually functions versus how the heart and lungs function.

And this is where I think it's important. And I think this is where there's a big change that we need to understand, the difference between systemic and peripheral oxidation and delivery, because they are very different in many ways.

James de Lacey6:27

What different is there? Because people kind of like concrete guidelines, is there like a minimum VO2 Max or even a minimum time to exhaustion time that you would deem, or like some kind of threshold or cutoff where if you don't meet this, we probably need to do some kind of work targeting central function? We do with athletes.

Dr. John Babraj6:27

Yeah, time to exhaustion, yeah. If we test that, we expect most of the athletes to be able to get to 18 kilometers per hour on a treadmill. We expect them probably to hit 2 or 3% on a gradient. If they're failing to hit that level, we'll then look to improve that.

There's no absolute score. It will depend on how you run the test. So we run one-minute stages. If you run two-minute stages, the time's going to be different. So it depends on how you run the test.

If you're running one-minute stages, we would expect somewhere around about 10 minutes, 11 minutes would be where we'd expect athletes to be. I mean there's always going to be situations where if an athlete's come in and they've come off an injury, then obviously that test is not going to be a true reflection of where they should be. So, yeah.

Dr. Andrew Usher7:30

So I mean we're kind of spoiled for choice though. We don't tend to get athletes that are, so we're tending to deal with elite athletes, so that is probably something that is quite important.

Now in my private practice I deal with everything from general population, so you have to remember that intensity is a very individualized thing. A 70-year-old is not going to run the same way a 22-year-old is going to run.

But the intensity in the linear relationship with the polynomial relationship is still going to be there. You're still going to get the data you need to get. So there is, it's an individual test, but athletes that have a reasonable level, you should be hitting probably 18, 182 occasionally.

I think the worst we had about seven, well no, actually no, I'm not going to name who it is, but we have had a couple of UFC fighters hit very poor scores, like 16, 17 kilometers an hour, and they wanted to bail out, which is shocking.

James de Lacey8:26

What if it's, say, I don't know, heavyweight fighter or maybe someone is over, or heavyweight fighter that doesn't run? Obviously as you mentioned, that's going to not be a true reflection of this score because they're not exactly efficient at it. Is there another test you would do or is that something they just need to build into their routine?

Dr. Andrew Usher8:58

For me, if they've been not running, I would transfer to a cycle-based test. It's exactly the same. All you're doing is increasing the power that we have to cycle against every stage. You can do this loads of ways. You can do this on the bag. You do a heavy bag and just, because remember, you use the test just to elicit some information about capacity.

So there's one way you can do it. And if you sign up to the LG development workshop, we will plug it then. We will cover all of that because it's important to understand that what we are interesting in is what is occurring systemically and peripherally at fatigue.

Because when you understand what occurs at fatigue, you know what's going to come the buildup to fatigue. And that buildup is where you can dial in other things like, where should, for a runner for example, where should fat max sit, for maximum fat oxidation, because you may want to use that in a camp.

But we had to do this with athletes. We go right, he's a bit of a chunky monkey when he shifts in a serious way here. Let's dial in a running zone that's a bit more conducive to fat oxidation, or let...

Stay in an even in session that's more conducive to that. So there's benefits in deriving that from it, but it's just a test at the end of the day. It's really what you do with a test, it's really super important.

So you can get the test, even with a gas analysis machine you got a lot from it, a hell of a lot from. And for anyone else, when he's talking Vol he's talking volitional failure.

James de Lacey10:45

And if you want to learn more I've actually published or put a link in the live chat as well to the mentorship. But if anyone listening, it will also be in the description for the two-month mentorship where Andrew actually takes you through everything—I mean everything conditioning. Really, we're talking about stuff we're going to talk about this podcast: mitochondria, lactate, bust everything down, analyze data, so you can actually take it for yourself and do it for yourself.

So make sure you check that link because that is down there and that is opening. That starts March 1st will be the actual official, official start, but it's open because we'll have the forum open, everything for you.

But let's let's continue on this because you guys talked some really interesting points on your podcast too around mitochondria. And I think it was you, John, I'm not going to misquote you so tell me if I'm wrong, but it was mitochondrial function being more important than mitochondrial biogenesis. Did I get that right?

Dr. John Babraj11:09

Yeah, sort of, sort of. Okay, I'll let you go.

What you got to think of in terms of how everybody adapts, there's two things you can do. You can have more mitochondria, so you create a situation where new mitochondria are formed, or you can remodel the existing mitochondria and get rid of all the damaged proteins within and they can act in an undamaged way.

The point I was making on the podcast is the change you see with generational Highlanders is not more mitochondria. What you see is more efficiency in the mitochondria.

So living at altitude for a long period for generations creates a situation where the mitochondria get better at extracting very little oxygen that's available, and that is where performance is coming from. So I think that on its own means that the ability to remodel the mitochondria there outweighs the amount of new growth in mitochondria that you're going to get.

So it's much better to remodel what's here and make it work better rather than focus on trying to get more in, which might not.

James de Lacey12:56

Is that an isolated thing to train? And just because you're doing high intensity, say Sprints, you're not creating new mitochondria, you are just changing the function?

Dr. John Babraj12:56

No, you'll get some new, some mitochondrial growth. But the other thing you get with Sprints that you don't get with moderate Zone 2 training, which is all about creating new mitochondria, whereas with Sprint training you get a bigger remodeling effect because you could have it on a spectrum there. Lower intensity you're creating more mitochondria, higher intensity you're remodeling existing.

James de Lacey13:32

Just along a big spectrum?

Dr. Andrew Usher13:32

Yeah, the reality is it's metabolism, it's intensity, dose sub realization. So intensity, the human body has to adapt this environment and intensity. So yeah, that. I talk about this quite a lot with students: independent physiology doesn't change that much from person to person. The problem is we just have S&C coaches that don't understand physiology. That's that's the issue.

It's not that they're doing stuff wrong a lot of times, they just don't understand the baseline physiology. Like this whole idea that we can just isolate out a tiny component of the PCR utilization and train it, which is absolute batshit nonsense. You hear all the time.

But the reality is, unless you're biopsying, you get some tool you can see into the muscle, see into the blood flow, you can't really 100% determine what is actually happening. And research is a best guess, the best fit of what's occurring, but there's still a lot of unknown. So nothing is absolute.

James de Lacey14:35

Further on that, I'm not going to turn this into a bashing intensity approach, but I want to go a little deeper on that too on, I guess if we're talking say a high intensity approach like Sprints versus say a low intensity approach where a lot of people don't, maybe doing Zone 2 or even some kind of like long training, are we predominantly then I guess targeting slow or fast twitch muscle fibers when we're talking about mitochondria in this instance?

So for example, if we're doing a lot of say slow steady runs, are we getting most of those adaptations in the mitochondria then in slow twitch muscle fibers versus Sprints where we maybe looking at the fast muscle fibers? Does that make sense?

Dr. Andrew Usher15:07

Yeah, but it'll depend again on this perceived idea of how much muscle fibers are in each muscle. Because you actually look at the research on this and you start to look at, say, you take the rectus femoris and you look at what one research paper has deemed in 1960 over the contribution of type one versus type two fibers and then compare it to a 2008 paper, it can be completely different.

So you're at the mercy again, or try to delaminate out something to say, "Oh, this muscle is predominantly type two, this muscle is predominantly type one," just like people say you're a predominant aerobic athlete, you're a predominant anaerobic athlete. That's another that's happening now, is the categorization of.

So you're in that the mercy. I kind of try to stay, I guess stay away from the muscle fiber thing a little bit because I'm just, I just train the muscle. I'm not obviously fussed what fiber type is more glycolytic than the other because I can't tell and I don't know and I don't know what the fiber split is in the athlete. I've got no way, not.

So I'm not going to waste time assuming that I can train type two fiber, try train type one fiber, because I don't know. I'm just going to train your muscle and I'm going to look at what I do know and what I can see and determine.

Now, steady state training has got a massive place for athletes 'cause we obviously work with a lot of athletes, it's not just combat athletes. Just the combat athletes in time-restricted sports do better on Sprints. But if having special forces guys and they're doing tactical Soul battles, they will do Sprints, but we will spend a lot of time dialing in 100 milers. We will dial in where the fat oxidization is, where the pace should change, where it should rain back.

Same with ultra runners, we will dial in fat max, we'll look at carbohydrate utilization, we'll look at tolerance levels, and we will utilize that training. Training methods are just there, they're just training methods for individual groups.

So, and I am not an anti-runner, right? It's someone that's running a lot of crazy runs. I am, but I'm a time efficient person. So everything in training is about time efficiency to me. It's about what type of adaptation do I need and how quick can I get the adaptation. So, but I have Sprints in everything that everybody does. I mean everyone does Sprints, even ultra runners will do Sprints with me, just because I know I can top up my cardiac capacity, function, or rate, whatever you want to call it.

So I don't want people thinking that steady state doesn't have any benefits because if you're an ultra runner, it has a—there is a benefit to understanding your pace.

It's like just now I work a lot with Hyrox athletes and we are looking at things like the transition between the 1K and the ski back into the 1K. We're looking at what is an optimal run pace for that 1K in the first half versus the back half, we're looking at transitional times on wall balls into other things, and we're looking, trying to break that sport down into the physiology behind what is needed for that sport.

And for me that sport's a Sprint, more than anything else.

That sport to me is making up the time on the runs. If you have a good low three-minute kilometer or below, and then it's picking up the time on say things like the row, a lot of people are very slow, hit four minutes on it. It's so it's about the physiology, how do we get all that to come together so it can be utilized within the sport and domain.

So I don't want people thinking that there isn't a place for steady state because there is, it just happens to be not in combat sports, which is where you probably use most.

Dr. John Babraj18:29

Which is kind of strange, isn't it, because if you look at, say, good runners, they will do fast 1Ks, they'll go to parkrun and smash it, and they will change the intensity up. Instinctively they know they have to go through different intensity domains.

Dr. Andrew Usher18:29

MMA sports in my opinion has fallen to the mercy of strength and conditioning practitioners. Because as a kid growing up, I never in all the days I did Muay Thai, I did boxing, I did MMA, I never once seen an S&C coach. We never come across them until probably 2015, and then suddenly they started to appear everywhere with crazy ideas.

And some are phenomenal, some are really switched on, understand it. And then you have the ones that probably come in with lower level education that have kind of wangled themselves in that are sprouting no end of nonsense. And the sad part about that is is that the really good practitioners are losing out on the credibility and the visibility to the mess that's floating around. And that's kind of my show, but that's just 'cause I've had a lot of them on my back today. It's Monday, just another manic Monday.

Dr. John Babraj19:26

And the other the other issue with that is that generally poorer S&C coaches tend to have a very good social media presence. So guys or athletes will...

See that and go, "Here's somebody who's got a high profile, they must know what they're doing." And it's an association of self-promotion equals knowledge.

Dr. Andrew Usher20:00

Well, I do think we're changing because we've had some really superb conversations with young S&C coaches that are really examining a whole wave of things: elasticity, what's this role, what's its purpose, different methods of conditioning, looking at things like triphasic training—is there anything really there, is it a method that does have validity, doesn't have validity. There's a lot more questioning going on. I think that's a really, really healthy thing, because you need to question.

James de Lacey20:00

And I wanted to touch on as well around—as you mentioned—well, actually, let's carry on with what we were talking about before around the muscle fiber stuff. I think another bucket that a lot of people are currently doing is trying to categorize athletes based on maybe their endurance profile. This one's more of, say, a workhorse, or someone who doesn't have the high power output ending, can just go, go, go, versus someone who's maybe more "twitchy," has power but can't last. And then they're prescribing different things based on that.

It probably comes, honestly, from the strength world where you can kind of bucket athletes based on how well they jump versus how strong they are, etc. So in those instances, you obviously mentioned you just train the muscle, so it's probably not something that you've ever really thought about. But it'd be interesting just to hear your thoughts around: can this, could this be a valid way of actually categorizing an athlete's training, just based on maybe some tests where you're thinking, "Hey, maybe you're more of an endurance profile versus more of a speed-power profile"?

Dr. John Babraj21:25

No, I think it's a reflection of training that we've done and lead-up to a test. So what you'll find is that twitchy, fast, fast guy can't last, has done a lot of work possibly in the gym, possibly outdoors, whereas that endurance guy who keeps going and going has done a lot more long-distance, hard work outdoors. And it's just a reflection of how we've been training up to that point.

There's no real genetic predisposition to be a sprinter or to be an endurance athlete. I know people like to say the Jamaicans have the sprinter gene and the Africans have an endurance gene—there was no evidence of it. And the sprinter gene that they proposed for Jamaicans, you find in 95% of population. So that probably means there's 5% of population who genetically are unlikely to be good sprinters.

James de Lacey22:36

Would there be genetic factors for fiber type distribution, potentially? Then maybe the faster athletes are drawn to those sports because of their genetic makeup.

Dr. John Babraj22:36

I think so. Here's the truth about sport: sport is wealth-orientated. So as a kid growing up here in the Glasgow, my folks didn't have money to send me to running camps or sprint camps, so I did boxing. Why? I've drawn to boxing.

In the UK we have a very poor sporting pathway, so our talent identification is pretty non-existent at times. So a lot of it comes down to what your family takes you to. Your family teaches you, "Do gymnast class," you start doing gymnastics, you start getting through the ranks, etc. You go running because maybe your school's got a running track or whatever. But sport in the UK is very wealth-eliminated, and it still is.

So a lot of kids are not being picked because they went through a talent pathway where they've been identified to have X, Y, and Z ability. It's just that that's the sport they've chosen to do because maybe that's the closest community center. So maybe that community center had a shotput club, so that's why they do shot. Maybe it had an ITF taekwondo club, and that's why they're doing that. I think it's different overseas, but for us I think it's very much just determined what the kid decides they want to do.

So my kid loved long-distance running, my lad, and stuff. But when we moved to this end of the world, there was no close long-distance running clubs, so I made him do Muay Thai kickboxing with me, which he hated. And he boxed, and he boxed at a relative reasonable level, but didn't want to do it. So if I was an overbearing parent, I might have went, "You got to do boxing because you're pretty good at it," but I actually would have rather done—what he would have been—was long-distance cross-country running.

So I'm not so sure. I think genetically you've got what you've got, and our job is to try and leverage what you've got. But the problem I've got is we love to put people in baskets and go, "You're an aerobic guy, you're an anaerobic guy, you're a powerlifter, you're this." But if you look at something like GB, I've worked a lot of GB that have maybe done one sport and the GB program's went and put them in a different sport. Why? Because suddenly they think, "Actually, this sport you're not going to medal in, you're better suited for this one because of your physiological profile."

James de Lacey24:32

Something, yeah.

Dr. John Babraj24:32

A lot of times it's not. I don't think a lot of times it's not. I think because—you have to remember—is that we're not physiologically profiling a lot of people. If you think about it, is a countermovement jump really physiologically benchmarking someone? Is a middle-distance pool really biologically and physiologically—doing it when we start using metrics and we start using terms, we're at the mercy of what those terms mean to one coach versus another coach. And there is no joined-up language between coaches a lot of times.

So one coach may prefer a countermovement jump, one may prefer like a depth jump, and each assess based upon that. And I think this is part of the problem. Whereas my approach is very different: we have an athlete, we will put through a series of tests and look at what the physiology tells us. And then we'll start to squeeze the juice. We'll go, "Right, we can improve this, we can improve that, we can improve this."

That's our approach: our approach is improving, not putting you in a box and saying, "You're going to be a phenomenal 60-meter sprinter." That's not my approach. My approach is to go, "What is the sport that you want to do? Right, how do we leverage it in your favor?" And that's what we do. That's our approach, which is very different.

James de Lacey25:57

Very. I like that. I think on your podcast as well, you mentioned—one of you mentioned—I think physiology trumps the specificity of the exercise.

I want to just—I'll give you an example that probably happens, I think, in poorly planned rugby preseason, right? And it's the idea that they spent eight weeks running their asses off, and they start doing contact, and then they're gassing because contact's involved as well. So they might say that they're running-fit, quote-unquote, but they're not rugby-fit, quote-unquote. I guess you could probably draw the same similar parallel maybe or something.

But I guess at what point does—or can—focusing on the physiology go too far? Can it go too far? I mean, I'm assuming that because you do a lot of sprints and you're talking about freeing up time for technical training, you're just adding more technical training in, so you're probably getting a lot of that exposure anyway. But I'll leave it to you.

Dr. John Babraj27:18

Yeah. I believe that to be good at the sport, you need to do the sport. My job is just purely to accentuate your physiological adaptations to do the sport. I'm very—I'm very hands-off in the sense that unless it's a sport I know intrinsically well, I don't tend to get too involved with the technical side. My job is just to leverage the attributes to make the sport better.

But I'm a big believer that you should be spending more time on the pitch or in the gym doing the sport than doing sport-specific drills for the sport. And I think we fell into this real show of functional training, what, 2000–2010. I could name some well-known coaches that popularized this whole stuff: farmer's carries and all that crap. And they told people, "You're going to be a world-class striker because you're going to lift the kettlebell above your head and stroll back and forward, then you're going to do some duck squats."

And they lost sight of the fact that a striker needs to be able to strike. A runner needs to be able to run. The training should be there to accentuate the sport; it shouldn't be there to try and mimic the sport. And I think it still happens—we see people try to mimic the motions within the sport without realizing that there's a difference between throwing something at a fast velocity versus on their resistance weight and throwing at a fast velocity. They're two different things.

Dr. Andrew Usher28:41

I'm changing, picking up on that. It's we went down this idea that we forgot about the physiology and went, "Play the sport, we need these sport-specific movements, and you can only get them by mimicking these sport-specific movements." So we ignore the fact that the body doesn't care what stress you put on it—all it does is adapt to that stress that you put on.

It doesn't care if you're on a rower, a cycle ergometer, running outdoors—doesn't care. All it knows is you have asked it to move at a speed or create contractions at a rate that is faster than it's used to doing. So in order to do it when you do it again, it's going to create an adaptation so it's easier to do. So what we needed to think about was not what's—

The sport-specific movements – but what are the demands, the movement demands that that sport places on the body? And can we generate them quicker, can we generate them differently? And rugby was a lot of focus now on off-feet: can we do stuff away from being on the pitch?

I mean, we get an inated by rugby coaches, one CPD chats, but if you dial it right back to real simplicity: if a hungry bear breaks into the room and the three of us are sitting, the bear doesn't give a about if one of us is a 100-meter sprinter, one of us a 400-meter sprinter, or one the own sprinter.

The physical body doesn't give a about it either. It comes down: do you have the M here? You have the calcium to create the contractile? Can you move the muscle? Because that muscle is going to make you run, and whoever's get the best juice is leaving that room first. Or I'm going to fight it.

James de Lacey30:15

Well, yeah, and if you leave me last year on your pizza diet, that bear is one well-fed bear.

Dr. Andrew Usher30:39

But we get so wrapped up in trying to justify what we're doing, which is important because you need to justify it, but we're in this whole thing – I see all the time that I can ask you: why are coaches discussing metabolism in a training manner that's not fit and doesn't have a relationship to metabolism? This whole idea: training this alactic stuff, we're doing this, we're doing that.

Why did that happen? Because we all should know the basic fundamentals of glycolysis, kind of glycon genalis, all that stuff. We should know that. We should know how fat oxidizes, and therefore we should know that intensity drives substrate.

So why are we trying to teach strikers that they need to be anaerobic or they have to be aerobic here? Why are – why should an athlete be aerobic for 5 seconds and anaerobic for 55 seconds? It's just all nonsense. It's just language that's used without definition or context, and it's a big, big problem.

And it's like – if anyone is a coach worth their salt, they should go back and read the papers and look at how intensity and how these contributions are derived. Because if you're still telling people in 2025 that you're isolating energy systems, then you shouldn't be coaching, in my opinion. We should be moving on. We shouldn't be adding garbage into the mix. We should be now in a position where we know more than we've ever known, and we should be able to get athletes at much higher level and standards than previously. That should be our job.

I don't wake up every day and go, 'I'm going to devise a new terminology for athletes because it's going to look amazing on Instagram.' I don't do that. I wake up on a Monday and I look at my sheet of athletes and I go, right, who's doing what this week? Okay, what was the benchmark numbers last week?

Okay, what needs improvement? What does she need, what does he need? Okay, that kid's not on the mark this week – I need to spend a bit more time with him and dialing, what's going on. Okay, let's get the logs, let's get this. That's what my week looks like.

It's a constant playing around with the nuances of training and speaking with coaches and finding out what does the athlete really need, and then finding out from the athlete what did they really need. Because there's some big disparity between what the coach is telling me versus what the athlete's telling me. Happens with the soccer players all the time: coach is going, 'I need this, this, this,' and then speak to the player, the player says, 'I was really game, I didn't feel I had a heavy day training the day before, was out, blah blah blah blah.'

So it's a balancing, marrying all up until it comes into a nice cohesive system. I don't think it happens much. Actually, I think things are going, from what I'm seeing, backwards. And I think it's because, in my opinion, I think a lot of S&C courses are not teaching enough physiology about what's actually occurring when people are doing exercise.

Or alternatively, S&C culture doesn't see beyond the biomechanical movement to really understand physiology is an important component of the S&C process. And I'm much more thinking about biomechanics and movement, but what's driving that movement? You get hung on joint angles and a squat, you've got to be down to 90 degrees and stuff like that.

James de Lacey33:19

But is that maybe the way we're teaching? It's really power phase or strength phase. It's very strength-based, right? Is that maybe the issue?

Dr. Andrew Usher34:00

If you take a combat athlete, what does the combat athlete really need? We never really talk about things like spatial awareness: how good that spatial awareness needs to be, and how trainable is spatial awareness, and is there a physiological function behind spatial awareness? But I'll see people do 95 bloody minutes on an agility ladder with no context about why they're doing it. And people get very upset when I talk about agility ladders.

James de Lacey34:00

Is that because spatial awareness is a technical skill that's developed through doing the sport?

Dr. Andrew Usher34:27

Within a sense of S&C, it probably shouldn't be a focus of S&C because it's a technical and tactical component of the sport.

James de Lacey34:27

Got a time component to it, though?

Dr. Andrew Usher34:27

It does, but if you break it down, you've got time to peak, acceleration, you've got time to brake in – that's all muscle physiology. How does the muscle contract? How does it accelerate? How does it decelerate? Where's the eccentric component of it? Where's the braking element of it?

James de Lacey34:27

But you put something on the head there when you said 'how the muscle contracts.' When you speak to an S&C coach, they will talk about a stretch-shortening cycle.

Dr. Andrew Usher35:02

That's not how a muscle contracts. That's a description of a movement process. Muscle contracts by cross-bridge formation. So we're not going deep enough into the muscle. We're stopping at that biomechanical stretch-shortening, lengthening-shortening. So we're not going beyond the biomechanical into what's actually happening.

James de Lacey35:02

The whole stretch-shortening cycle has probably been one of the biggest curses on strength and conditioning, I think, because I think it's become a very Mickey Mouse world of 'what's a plyometric, what's not a plyometric,' and kind of – is it eccentric, purely because of that function? And there's no real thought about why you're trying to create and what's the process behind creating it and where does it actually sit within the actual sporting domain itself.

Dr. Andrew Usher35:27

And I think this is kind of a ramble, but anyway, I think this is kind of one of the big issues for me: this whole idea that we often do too much because we think we have to tick every single box. And a lot of times I won't do that. I'll just look at: what can I leverage, and what needs to be improved, and what can I just go, 'we don't need to touch that, we can just leave that alone.'

My pet hate at the moment is asymmetry, right? Because there's a big tendency with physios to measure asymmetry. And I just have a real issue with this whole idea that we're going to trust a piece of hardware that's used to measure 300 different tests that's got a tiny transducer on it, and we're going to say to an athlete, 'You've got a 12% asymmetry between left leg and right leg, so therefore you shouldn't do a run today.' Because I wouldn't trust a device that does 300 tests, but yet – well, people are actually taking an asymmetry test weekly and then deciding what they're going to do based on that asymmetry.

James de Lacey37:02

Weekly?

Dr. Andrew Usher37:02

No, it's probably just whenever you can pay and see your physio, so it could be three weeks, could be four weeks. But it happens a lot. We get referred a lot of athletes because they maybe are injured or coming up. We actually get quite a lot of – people ask us to take a look at athletes, 'Are they ready to return?' And a lot of times you sit and you look at the notes and you think to yourself, 'This doesn't make any sense.'

And the other thing we see a lot of is physios morphing into S&C roles and trying to apply physiotherapy drills in an S&C context, and that's very rarely any overload.

James de Lacey37:56

Yeah. Or they go the opposite, which I've seen lately, where they go too much overload.

Dr. Andrew Usher37:56

Oh, I've heard some horror stories on that. My God, pure horror-ending stuff.

So I think it's a strange world we live in. I think everyone's clamoring to try and find maybe their own place. But I think we should be stripping things back to really what the athlete needs in order to be the best that they can be for the particular sport, and that's really what we should be doing. We shouldn't be overly complicating things.

James de Lacey38:28

I don't – I think – what are you looking at then when you're looking at what an athlete needs based on, let's just say, some of that nearest testing you've done, and maybe just the time to exhaustion test? Are you looking at, okay, on-and-off – something to do with on-kinetics? I've seen some of your graphs there. Fast-on-kinetics – are you looking at, 'Okay, you're not recovering fast enough, so we need to manipulate what we're doing in the sprints here'?

Or maybe it's not switching on fast enough, so we need to manipulate some of the sprints we're doing here? Is that kind of what you're looking at for prescription?

Dr. Andrew Usher38:51

So the muscle needs to be able to use oxygen in order to –

Function. So it doesn't matter what the sport is: if the muscle cannot utilize—even if it's anaerobic, right? There's no such thing as an anaerobic sport unless it's anaerobic alactic, lactic, if you want to call it. But the reality is the sport is, the muscle needs to contract, okay, for locomotion to occur. Oxygen needs to get into the muscle and the muscle needs to be use the oxygen.

So in order for the muscle to contract at a rate that's applicable, then there's a relationship between oxygen utilization. So what we're looking for with the NIRS is really to determine: how well is that individual able to use a muscle, and how well is that muscle able to recover in order to go again? Because it's very unusual you have a sport where you only do one thing and nothing else. It's very unusual.

And the other thing is that people don't understand as well is that if you have, say, 12 NIRS sensors and you put on vastus lateralis, vastus medialis, maybe rectus femoris, maybe semitendinosus, semimembranosus, none of those muscles are going to use oxygen at the same rate. There's a difference, right? Because they're prime movers, agonist, antagonist. Makes sense, right? We forget that as well.

So what NIRS is allowing you to do is to go, "Well, this muscle is using at this rate, this muscle is using at that rate," or sometimes you go, "Why is this particular one muscle using it at too fast a rate, or why is it not using it at fast enough rate in relation to every other muscle?" So what we're really looking to do is just to look at: how is this person performing centrally and peripherally? And then we're looking to marry up.

So if you come in and you are unable to extract oxygen at a reasonable rate, that's where we will look at things like sprints. Because sprints are going to create enough metabolic stress in order to create that need to extract oxygen. If you don't create a need, you're not going to create a change. You have to create a need for it. The muscle needs to have it.

So one of the things that people misunderstand about sprints is the sprints are there to create a big enough metabolic demand and a cascade and following metabolic demand. The first one is that that is what's creating that need to extract oxygen, and that's why we do it. And we will base prescription off of that. So that's how we prescribe.

James de Lacey41:39

Then, I guess, how are you then determining how long the work interval of a sprint and a rest interval of a sprint based on that data?

Dr. Andrew Usher41:39

There's two things we're really looking at. With NIRS we can delve a lot more into what the muscle, because we've done it a lot. We can also look at heart rate and look at—but what we're looking at is not necessarily the absolute change but the shape of a change. How's that changing? Is it predominantly linear into a nice flat steady state, or is it a slow curve slope so it's not activating fast enough?

That recovery: how quickly is it coming back? Do we get a nice linear, or is it in a different curve shape that means it's taking longer to for the muscle to recover? So it's about looking at shapes, really. I say it's always about looking at the shape. The absolute numbers are just the numbers. It's the shape of how you get to those numbers that's important.

James de Lacey42:07

So you want to really—and you're looking for like a really sharp decline and a really sharp incline?

Dr. Andrew Usher42:43

Correct. So take, for example, take sparring. Around the spar, you've got a heart rate monitor. So the question you have to ask yourself is: what are you expecting to see? Okay? Because red zone gets touted all over the place. But the reality is, you should get to red zone, okay? But the more interesting thing is: what is the variance in your top end before you hit recovery? Okay? Because that's telling you what the heart is doing.

So getting to maximum heart rate should occur relatively quite quick, because that's your on-kinetics. But even within the time it takes you to get to that, the max heart, you'll either be in a linear relationship where you'll be in a straight trajectory, or you'll be in a curved, like an exponential relationship, or you may be polynomial on the sense that you may have a rise, a plateau, and a rise.

And each of those three things tells you something very different. One will tell you that they're able to switch on really fast. One will tell you it's slightly delayed. And one will tell you that there is maybe a cardiac drift occurring because there's an inability to really rise that top maximal heart rate. So that alone tells you how that round is starting off.

Then when you're in the round, the variance between beat-to-beat—the mean absolute deviation—will tell you how much is the heart rate varying the round. So how much is the stress changing during the round? And then when they stop and they walk to the corner, you're looking at: in the duration between fight stop and getting into the corner, how much delay is there before that heart rate starts to recover?

And then you have the opposite side to your on, because then you're looking at, okay, what is the heart rate recovery like? Is it a linear straight line? Is it a curve line? Or is it a wiggly wobbly kind of like polynomial? The polynomial—I think that was mine when I sent you mine a couple of years ago.

So very rarely do you see a linear straight line. Now, the reason I'm super excited: the R-Hubs athlete, James, is not only did our tread not go fast enough, which was kind of interesting, but he's got the sharpest linear heart rate recovery I've ever seen.

James de Lacey44:36

Now we're listening to this, probably.

Dr. Andrew Usher44:36

So you're doing well. But we can push harder, James. We can push a lot harder. We shall be pushing harder. But he's got very interesting recovery, right, which is very unusual.

So even after thousands and thousands of hours of sessions, I'm still able to see things that are very unusual. Okay? But that's how you can use basic heart rate. You have to understand: what do it mean? Just looking at the fact that, which more early-stage career coaches will go, "Right, you're 180 beats when you finished that round, and when you before you went back out to the next round, you've dropped 20 beats. That's really good."

It's not bad, but if the first 15 seconds of that was no decline in heart rate, that's maybe not so good. Because it shows that although you've dropped the 20 beats, you're very slow in how your heart has relaxed enough in order for you to do that. So that could be changes and other things.

So there's a whole way of using physiological data without having fancy tools or gadgets that you can start to dial in. But it takes a little bit of understanding and learning about why you're doing it and what you're actually looking for. The problem is people get shiny new gadgets and they go, "I'm using another device." So what?

And the other thing people like is an absolute number. "Yes, so my VO2 max is—" coming back to what we talked at the start, "My VO2 max is 50. Isn't that good? So a, my heart rate drops 30 beats across a minute. Isn't that good?" So, as anything, because movement's kinetic, it's not—it can't be defined by one number.

So we have to look at the shape all the time. What's the shape of it? Starting the movement. Are we getting up nice and fast into a nice steady state? Because that means the body is working efficiently. We can get to a steady state quickly. We've changed the homeostasis point and the body is now comfortable.

So can we do that quickly? Is there a delay? Does it start and then stop and then start again? So you have to look at the full data set, not just what's the maximum, what's the minimum, or what's the maximum value. Because the maximum value can't tell you very much.

And if you look at VO2 max, then you'll see that VO2 max can look to someone like it's very linear, but it's actually polynomial. And we're going to write a paper on this, that it's not monoexponential, it's a polynomial. Because the VO2 max is a rise, a pause, and a rise. And this is how we determine VT1 and VT2, all those kind of ventilation thresholds and stuff.

So there is no absolutes. Anytime I hear absolutes, I hear Gary Hooten, it will send me a GIF from the Siths, from Star Wars, and say, "We do not deal in absolutes." Always makes me kind of laugh when I think of absolutes in relative numbers. But it's true. It's like the tendency of wanting to deal with absolutes.

It's like we always tell athletes: when you come to the lab, your numbers are today's numbers. They're only valid for today. Tomorrow they'll be different. So let's not get too stressed about it. It's a trend over time and change that you see over time, that's where you make big differences in athletic performance: understanding how an athlete performs over time and being able to analyze and spot when something has went wrong in the week. And that's how you identify it.

And that's—to me, that's when physiology comes alive, is when you can spot these things and go, "Something's happening here. It's very unusual. What's been occurring?" And that's when you can pick up a whole host of things: injuries, flu, immune function compromise. And you can then change the program to kind of really get ahead of it really quickly. So there's a massive application in understanding how you—

James de Lacey48:58

To use to give you more absolutes, then let's talk heart rate zones. Because obviously you mentioned Red Zone before, and I think say someone's listening to this, they're like, "All right, I just want to do something really simple and easy." Is heart rate zone a valid way for someone to start planning, prescribing, and doing their conditioning?

Dr. Andrew Usher48:58

No. Because when I go for a run with heart rate monitor, I know when I'm going. I don't have the heart rate monitor tell me I'm so. So heart rate is useful from my end as the physiologist, but I have my athletes wear the device but take the watch off and leave it on the table so they can't see it.

I don't want them looking at it too much, unless it's like we're doing a big competition for ultra running and we'll try to maintain a pace. Then I'll have them look at it, but I'd rather them understand how their body feels to determine what their heart rate is.

So, for example, with boxers on the heavy bag, part of the training for that is we will have them go all out in the bag to feel what maximum heart rate feels like. I will then ask them, "I want you to take your heart rate down." Okay, and then I'll be able to tell them that's too low, that's you now coasting, right? Take me to a midpoint between where your maximum heart rate is and where your coasting point is, because I don't have the luxury to give them a heart rate monitor in a competition, but I can get the luxury to have them realize how it feels to be in certain zones so that they know when they're pushing too hard and they know what it should feel like when they take a step back in order to get performance a bit more tailored in chaotic environments. Running's a little bit easier because you can dial in a little then.

So there is—the thing you also need to remember with heart rate zones is it can vary as well. So nutritional status, hydration status, dehydration status will all play a big effect.

Dr. John Babraj50:46

So you're using heart rate zones to try and elicit muscle zones. Yeah, because at the end of the day, what you're trying to do is change how the muscle's working. You're saying in this muscle zone or this—people won't understand what you're talking about, so we try and use heart rate because it's an easy concept. But it's a central concept, so it's not really reflecting the demand placed on the muscle. And if we're not placing the right demand on the muscle, we'll get central cardiovascular adaptations but have no influence on performance.

Dr. Andrew Usher51:15

But the other thing as well is NIRS has been done this big group where obviously there's a lot of apps out there that are trying to determine zones. You know, stage one recovery, stage three recovery—I don't touch any of that stuff. For me, NIRS is purely an abstract value of change, and that change is how much hemoglobin or myoglobin availability there is. It's all it is.

And I think obviously when companies produce tech, they want apps so they can sell tech, which is fine. I'm just not a massive believer in this idea of trying to eliminate out what an optimal NIRS training will be, because I can tell you from five years of using NIRS it's not that easy. It's not that easy. Just getting the sensor in the muscle belly at times can be a challenge and keeping it there during intense workouts can be a challenge.

So the fact that people think they can put it on and determine that you're in an aerobic zone is just kind of—I'm like, "Yeah, good luck to that."

Because I think one of the big—one of the big things about sports science and technology is we use it often to really undermine the athlete's ability to know themselves. Good athletes know. I don't have issues with athletes for me huffing up, "I'm going, my heart rate was only 122 today and it should have been at 127." I don't have that issue.

None of them care. None of my athletes give a [expletive] about the heart rate data. They wear it because the old guy asks for it and it shuts him up, so they do it. They wear the NIRS device because he's going to just bawl me if I don't wear it.

Because all they care about is the program they get on a Sunday. "What am I doing?" Because they have enough faith they're getting enough change and they can see the change and they can feel the change that they don't need a heavy prescriptive kind of heart rate zone-style workout. I've never—I mean, I've got people running 227, 237 1Ks. I've got everyone under 20 minutes the 5K. None of them are going, "Oh, I need to push, I need to change." This whole idea of, you know, Red Zone training is just an absolute lot of [expletive].

Because we will get into maximum heart rate because intensity will take us there. What's more important is how do you get out of it and how quick can you get back in it. That's more important. Kinetics is much more important than trying to sell your $99 blueprint on how you're going to get yourself into Red Zone, which seems to me to be quite kind of like scammy, if I'm pretty honest with that.

James de Lacey53:42

So starting a fight on a Monday morning! I mean, you've already been attacked this morning. We're in like a Colosseum, that's what it is. You've already been—you said you usually check your athletes' stuff and do all the stuff on Monday morning, but I think you were checking your DMs today with all the messages you're getting.

But let's touch on that topic though, quickly, to finish up this podcast so I'm not taking all your time. But let's go into lactate, and let's just go into some of the myths surrounding lactate, and maybe why it probably is important for someone to actually do exercise that raises your lactate more than the two millimoles that people are trying to typically avoid.

Dr. Andrew Usher54:33

So the first thing about lactic—I'm going to say, is it is lactate, not lactic acid. I get death threats now. Lactic acid does not form in the body at 37 degrees centigrade. It immediately dissociates into lactate. So at no point do you form lactic—lactic acid just not technically, it's not possible at that temperature to form lactic acid. What we perform is lactate. So it's a really important point.

And then all lactate is is glycolysis happening where being the extent of pyruvate getting into the mitochondria has maxed out and we've got a shift to lactate to allow glycolysis to continue. What happens—the fate of that lactate is determined by the athlete's training status. If you're a well-trained athlete, that lactate will then go into an intracellular shuttle where the lactate produced in the muscle moves to a mitochondria in the muscle and gets used for energy.

As intensity gets up and that shuttle then gets swamped, we start to put it out into a bloodstream and other tissues will start to use it. So it's all about how well we can use that lactate that we produce as a fuel source.

So you would think people understand this, but they don't. Example being, I'm having my dinner last night, I'm sitting, I get a telephone call from somebody I don't know, and he says to me, "Got an athlete, it's really struggling. I've got some photographs, can I show you?" And I'm thinking, as a bit suspect anyway, not the normal, but anyway, I said, "Before you show any photographs, what is the problem?" He went, "Lactic acid. It's everywhere." I'm like, "What do you mean it's everywhere? The demon?"

And he shows me a photograph of this athlete's legs that are green. And initially I'm thinking to myself, "Is there sepsis? Is there like some medical issue here?" And he's like, "No," he said, "we've been really rubbing out really hard." And I'm like, "What the hell have you been rubbing it with?" And he's got one of these really big circular foam rollers, the plastic ones, and he has been doing push-ups on this athlete's leg, so it's just bruised. Oh, it's bruised. It's green with bruising.

And I'm like, "Why are you doing this?" And he's like, "Because of the lactate buildup, it's the way to get it out." And I'm like, "You shouldn't be coaching." But then today I post about it and people still seem to think we have lactic acid, we're like Alien and Predator and kind of we're squirting this stuff. And it gets back to the whole idea of metabolism—a lot of coaches don't appreciate metabolism.

They don't appreciate glycolysis. They don't understand the pyruvate is a byproduct. They don't understand NADH. They don't understand how that stuff comes together in order—the lactate shuffling and the importance of lactate has. And it's a big issue, and it shouldn't be a big issue in 2025 with strength and conditioning coaches.

James de Lacey57:14

But this is why we see stuff like people doing aerobic lactic training sessions.

Dr. Andrew Usher57:43

Mmm. Because they don't understand. Exactly, yeah. Because they don't understand metabolism. Because if they understood metabolism and substrate utilization, they wouldn't talk that nonsense. So I've t-shirts that made up, it says, "Bring back metabolism, make metabolism great again."

Because it's kind of one of these things—it's very important to understand. It's really important to understand, because that's what dictates the intensity level that you're going to have your athlete work at. That's what dictates sprint-enabled training. It's kind of like—it's kind of—it's like, well, is the chicken in the egg? You know, kind of like oxygen is chicken and egg. Now really, can you have anaerobic metabolism without it? It's just a myth.

That has perpetuated. Commentators and sports shows don't help. Olympics will be like, "build up a lactic acid, that's causing burning in the muscle, that's where you get this pain." And it's not like there's been lots of studies done. You put nerves into high lactic solutions, nothing happens. There's no pain reception, there's nothing. Lactic doesn't stimulate nerve activation.

However, swelling in muscle does stimulate nerve activation, causes pain, because what happens when you're doing exercise is you create a lot of contraction and fluid gets trapped in the muscle. So muscle actually expands a little bit, which puts pressure on the myofascial sheath around the muscle where the nerve endings are located. So that's what causes the pain when you're at that intense zone. It's just the amount of contraction that you're having to do and the amount of blood that's pooling in the muscle. It's nothing to do with lactate at all.

Lactate is just a byproduct of glycolysis and it's just whether your body can use it or not that determines whether you're going to fail or not. Because if you can't use it, it's a waste product. There's no longer a byproduct, it's a waste product.

And we know from the boxing literature, if you dive into that, Mitch Finley's got a systematic review out where he's got all that data in it, which I hate to say it, he beat me to it, but his is actually better than probably mine would have been. Fair play, Mitch. So it's a good systematic. He let all, he shows it. But if you look at it, you'll see that boxing seems to have a higher lactate level post-sparring, say, karate, taekwondo and some other combat sports.

There's no answer in that though, because none of that stuff was done at the particular time when these studies were conducted, so earlier studies, but it shows that, and so this is where this comes from, this whole idea of is boxing aerobic or anaerobic.

Because way back in '95, Ghosh did the initial study, which was a heart rate and treadmill correlation test, and he just correlated heart rate, kind of incremental runs, and came up with this ludicrous idea that boxing was 80% anaerobic and only 20% aerobic. And this was conducted in a test that measured no substrates. So how we came to that conclusion, complete mystery. But obviously early in the day, there's not a lot of other research papers there, people go with the idea, it perpetuates the myth.

Then Phil Davis does his paper and he spins it and he comes out with a complete actual opposite number, that it should be 80% and 20%. And I did a pilot study because I was thinking doing a substrate paper originally. Originally this was my, John, my PhD originally was going to be substrate utilization. Wasn't NSE. And I spent a lot of time with the V2 Masters, Cosmed, all sorts, Cosmed K4 B squared. And I did pad work, I did bag work, and you see what you expect to see. Early rounds, fat oxidization. The intense increases, a shift to carbohydrate utilization.

Well, not 80-20 either way. We just are what we are depending the intensity that you put in, importance of working. So lactate is really irrelevant because it has just shown you the intensity level that people participated at that particular point in time.

However, people are using lactate scouts, people are using biosense machines. The accuracy, versions, ratings are vastly different. A lactate scout, I can tell you, I've got two of them in a bag that are gathering dust. The accuracy in those things is very, very debatable and sketchy at the best of times. But people keep telling me, "Oh, I've got an athlete with two millimoles." And I'm like, well, that's probably just because the lactate strips are maybe getting the date, maybe been sitting in a warehouse.

The machine hasn't calibrated and you're really going to go on a device? It goes back to these Valdyne kind of Dynamo machines. Are you really going to trust a machine that does 300? Device measurements, are you going to trust a tiny little lactate scout device that's taking a tiny little strip and making a correlation on a capillary fingertip kind of blood?

If you're going to measure things, you're going to have to measure them right. Otherwise there's no point. But that's the whole issue. So lactate, we know, I think it works out the box, and most research reviews, the systematic shows something about 14 millimoles, I think, post-sparring. I think karate was about 12. So it was kind of like, so they deemed therefore that boxing was much more highly anaerobic. And that's how we got to this messy world in boxing that for a lot of years people thought running around gym halls holding your breath was good training because it was anaerobic.

And I've seen that done at a national boxing camp. A national boxing camp, kids running around holding the nose, because it was anaerobic training. I remember thinking to myself, if I was to staple my testicles to the table, I'd have more fun than watching this. This was like the most painful thing I'd ever watched in my life. High level coaches thinking that they're having making kids do anaerobic training by running around the hall holding the breath.

James de Lacey1:03:53

I've got one follow-up question for you then on lactate and around the idea of obviously the bunk term of anaerobic threshold or lactate threshold, et cetera. Is there any value in training at the so-called lactate threshold? We can keep it to combat sports, we can even go outside of combat sports. Is there something there where people can use that as an intensity measure?

Dr. Andrew Usher1:04:25

Combat sports, I'd say no, because how you determine it? Cycling, potentially, yeah. Ultra running, yeah. Special Forces work, potentially, yeah. So things like ultra running, it becomes important around what pace can you maintain for full competition. But in boxing, if it's amateur boxing, you get nine minutes of work. Is it really that relevant? If you're doing championship fight at 36 minutes of work, is it really that relevant? And how are you actually going to assess it practically when they're in the ring? How are you going to know that?

Because as soon as you step in the ring, there's a big difference between sparring and competition. You've got different levels of cortisol flying around and epinephrine and sorts of good stuff lying around. There's a massive change in vasodilation. There's a whole heap of things that will change that lactate reading. So it's probably, I think it's valuable for a lot of other sports, but I would never do it in combat sports. I just don't see any value in it.

I see it being used a lot. There's two things I really find interesting at the moment because I'm on a rant today. It's Monday ranting. This is therapy itself in check in, post. Gentlemen, I'll send you a, I'll send you the invoice later. Thing that I find the most interesting at this moment in time is the fact there's a lot of S&C coaches buying V2 Master devices, which are good devices, but they cannot ascertain substrates because they do not have a CO2 sensor.

So if you as an athlete are paying good money to get RMR tests and substrate utilization tests, that device can't do it. It physically does not have the components to do it. Okay? What I'm seeing, these guys giving people RMR tests and giving them kind of like substrate tests, "you're using fats, you're using this," I'm like, well, you don't have a CO2 sensor, so how are you even deriving VO2 and VCO2? So that's a big issue.

The other issue you're seeing, people using a lot of different cheap knockoff brands of lactate monitors and trying to elicit threshold change. All you have to do is watch them spar. Go watch them spar. That's what you need to do. You don't need a lactate, you just go into the gym and see them spar. And I can tell you who's working and who's not working. I don't need any fancy technology. Just watch the spar, understand the sport, and watch the spar.

Which is why I always think if you're going to be involved in a sport, at least try and be involved in it in some capacity, because then you understand what the athletes have to actually go through. And then you can really plan and periodize I think a bit more effectively. But yeah, there's a big, big thing at the moment, people giving a lot of physiological advice to athletes. And I look at the kit they're using and I go, that's a near impossibility.

James de Lacey1:07:21

That hasn't hit my algorithm yet. Well, after this, phones will be singing on me and stuff. And yeah, I'm probably going to start seeing a bunch of it. Actually, I had Caleb Henley, who was on the podcast recently. He started sending me coaches talking about lactic acid to screw up my algorithm as well. So I mean, it's going to happen.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:07:21

The thing is, I kind of appreciate that people want knowledge and they want to try and educate athletes. And I think that's wonderful and we need a lot more of that. But please put a little bit of time into going, reading some things that are current, and doing the mentorship, of course.

Well, yeah. So I mean, obviously my vision this year is, it's a shameless plug, folks, the reason for doing the mentorship is to try and kind of help guide maybe those that don't have a university education or those that are working in elite sport into a much more modern context of what they should be looking at. Because we do a lot of CPD for clubs and individuals and the same things come up time and time again.

And it all centers around substrates and kind of intensity and training volume all seem that. So that's the plan. The next thing we're going to launch after that will be the Nutrition 101, which will be a primer for people to

Understand the fundamentals of it, and then the big game later this year will be Sports Science 101. And that is really going to be geared up for people that don't want to go to university, that don't have the funding. So it's not going to be university-styled. It's going to be lower than university undergraduate, but not far off it, to help people. And it should hopefully also serve maybe as a nice primer for people to go, "You know what, I quite fancy going to university learning sport science or exercise physiology or whatever else."

And that'll be a very special course because we're going to have loads of contributors to that, and it's going to be pretty wicked. So good stuff to come.

James de Lacey1:09:03

Yeah, and make sure you check the description, guys, because I've got a link down there. You just check your email on there and I'll send you the details for the first mentorship, and then obviously for everything else that comes out, you'll also get that too.

But I know we've gone over our time and you guys probably have things to do, but I appreciate you coming on. Where can people find and follow you guys? I know, John, you don't do much on social media. Do you do anything?

Dr. John Babraj1:09:26

I do have an Instagram account, but I don't post anything. Just for the podcast we do, Performance Physiology Podcast, we have an Instagram page for that. We don't—I should set that up, actually. That's how really unprepared we are with this stuff. And I just get death threats now, so there you go.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:09:26

If you send me something and I sometimes miss people's messages because I've got somebody dealing with filtering, because I do get a lot of real crazy stuff. It's kind of interesting.

James de Lacey1:09:56

I can't believe you get some—you got so many people coming at you for lactate stuff. I get forever than—I can't believe you do.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:09:56

I get a lot of abuse. People don't like the truth, man. I tell them that they're not flat, you know, and they go back to their mum. It's kind of interesting. I get—I've not had a death threat in a while. I think the last one was the last one that came in that threatened to come murder me in my sleep, and my wife and son and stuff. That was an interesting one.

James de Lacey1:10:22

Well, because of exercise physiology?

Dr. Andrew Usher1:10:22

Yeah, I think because I said something along the lines that boxing was, based upon the research, was a bit more steady state than we perceived. It wasn't—

James de Lacey1:10:22

Oh yeah, based on your paper with—

Dr. Andrew Usher1:10:22

Yeah, yeah, because it is. Because you look at it, from a muscle physiology perspective anyway, once you get beyond that first probably 20-30 seconds, there is an attempt for the muscle to try and go into equilibrium or homeostasis. It makes sense, doesn't it? Because if you're going to be efficient, you're not going to constantly bleed oxygen; you're going to try and regulate yourself.

So I posted that, and somebody sent me a death threat, which is—I mean, I'm gonna be late for my next meeting.

Dr. John Babraj1:10:50

I would say if you're slightly better—

Dr. Andrew Usher1:10:50

So yeah, it's crazy. It's a crazy world out there.

James de Lacey1:11:15

So was it a coach sending you death threats over that? Like a coach or an S&C coach?

Dr. Andrew Usher1:11:15

He—that was an S&C coach on that particular occasion. Yeah, it's kind of like, who would have thought it, that sports science would have been so volatile.

James de Lacey1:11:49

Well, if you see what goes on in the strength and bodybuilding world around the idea of lengthened position training for hypertrophy and stuff like that—my God, that is right now the big thing that everyone is fighting over. And it's legit, people hating on other people just for taking a stance.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:11:49

I mean, obviously me and John have a very—we're quite clear, right, because we're old, we're dinosaurs, been around. We have a very biased view of what we do because we have a very focused—we've been doing it for so long too. But we work—but the thing is, we do work with elite athletes, so we're not theoretical physiologists. We actually do it as a job.

And I do it separately. I mean, obviously John's obviously university-based, everything else, and I'm not. I just go and do research. My whole private practice is really where athletes winning and succeeding. So if I wasn't good at my job, I wouldn't be living in my big house. It's kind of like—so it's very, for me, everything is really, really fundamentally grounded in the ability to actually do it.

But people get very upset, I guess, if you maybe question their viewpoints on things. But it shouldn't lead to death threats. Sometimes I wonder if it's just bots, because some of the language is pretty interesting.

James de Lacey1:12:45

It's probably a death threat through ChatGPT or something.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:12:45

"Please, a death threat—" So this was all because of lactate. It's like, "I'm gonna come and slice your lactic acid open." I do get—it's interesting. It's kind of—and I think doing the podcast, it's opened me up to a whole new world of people that didn't exist.

James de Lacey1:13:14

That's crazy. I didn't even realize that was such a big thing. I've just been posting some memes on that stuff, and people seem to be enjoying them so far. I might have to create some more memes on that and see if I can maybe get some of my own.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:13:14

I mean, you've not made it until someone's started you, apparently, so I'm not quite that level yet, I don't think.

James de Lacey1:13:38

Well, just a random physiological question that I was thinking of now regarding—I mean, we could just carry off a little bit if you got a bit of time. But I guess the use of high-intensity interval training—so let's just say long intervals, short intervals—I mean, a lot of the time it's prescribed off either max heart rate, so like 80 to 95% max heart rate, if you're doing something where you can't prescribe distance or time, or maybe it's just based off a maximum aerobic speed number.

I don't even know where I have a question on this, really, but other than applicability, where do you see that fitting in a schedule where you're really focused on what's happening at the muscle, you're looking at trying to extract as much oxygen as possible and get that thing going to put the stressor in there? These intervals aren't, I guess, as stressful because they're not as intense. But where do you see value in there, or in those modalities for an athlete?

Dr. Andrew Usher1:14:30

Probably maintenance more than anything else. Once you got reasonable mitochondrial adaptation, you want to maintain it, so you need a percentage of stress applied in order to maintain it. So I could factor that in there.

A lot of times as well—so say, for example, I have an athlete in sparring and I just feel they maybe lack just that—have a bit of a lack of ability maybe to have a second phase of attack. So they may be quite good at coming in, they're setting themselves up with the jab, they've thrown the backhand lovely, but they just seem to lack that second phase of attack and that aggression and that power to land that particular strike. Power's not a great word, but you know what I mean.

So a lot of times on the bag, I will drill their intervals to give them a bit more of a rest break. So I may go, "Give me 10 on, give me 30 off." Use that 30 just to really reset yourself, focus on the position, focus on the biomechanics of striking, and then go again. Boom. And I will use it as a technical drill, but at the same time I'm getting an interval out of it. And that's much more kind of moderate-style, kind of moderate-intensity continuous training.

I don't tend to use it that much just because it's too much time. So I will mainly go with supermaximal sprints, or I'll go with kind of high-intensity-style interval training. So it'll be more that style. The bag work is not super-maximal, okay, because it's very difficult to go super-max on a heavy bag. You'd do some crazy [thing]. So that is probably much more high-intensity training than anything else.

Now it does vary as well. So sometimes this week, I think I'll get some lads on 10 on, five off for the whole three-minute round, and it's 12 rounds, and we'll just be banging and hitting. And now I'm really looking at straight-line attacks for those rounds. So that's technically driving as well.

So a lot of times I'll sit with the boxing coach, or I'll sit with Dave, and we'll go, "Do we think this athlete needs this?" And we'll try and lock in good technical components on the bag, but on an intensity level. And one thing we do not do anymore is let boxers control their own bag sessions, because that's where you see this whole drop-off in the intensity level. They just meander in zone two for four hours, and then they tell you they need a shower, and you're like, "You don't need a shower. You're not wet enough for a shower."

James de Lacey1:16:35

No dinner for you.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:16:35

Yeah. I like the bag to be really super-technical. So, for example, say Fraser will come from a competition and he's had a fight, we will take feedback off the fight, we'll look at what things worked, what things didn't work, and we will shape that into his intervals. So we might have him on the bag, he may pivot off the bag, he may hit one-two, half—

James de Lacey1:17:24

Step back, back in, bag hand, follow the lead hook. We'll kind of start building that in a more explosive combination, or we'll drill certain things off of it. Or it could just be we just want in, out in the bag, first phase of attack, second phase of attack, breakaway, center position, come back in. So we will drill that.

I will do that with other sports as well. So I may take a 100 meter sprinter and we will break up the sprints into like 60 meter sprints, and we will look at the kinetics of what's occurring there and devise intervals around getting out the blocks into the upward position and then drive them forward. So there's a whole way you can do it.

You can break them up anyway you want, and that way you're still getting all your technical skills, but you're getting the added benefit. You're getting a lot of heart rate increase and you're getting a little bit more drive and intensity and you can maintain a cardio adaptation.

When it comes to the adaptation, the best way again is bike sprints. That's just because it's the easiest way to create such a big metabolic stress in a safe environment. So that's why we do it. The specific intervals are almost an in-between, almost like a little trans-specific transfer, quote unquote, kind of thing between what you're doing on the bikes then what you're doing actually in the sport. So the bike is—we will do three sessions a week on the bike religiously pretty much.

If an athlete's tight for time when they're traveling and they're not going to have a reasonable bike, we'll maybe do one a week. But generally, on three a week, most of my athletes are on three a week. My high row, every athlete I have is doing experience. It doesn't matter—you're a javelin thrower, you're a high-O athlete, it doesn't matter, we're doing them.

And I do them for two reasons. One, because I want the mitochondrial adaptation. Two, I want the mindset to give it everything.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:19:01

Dude, it's so—I dread every time I got to go to the gym. I haven't done them in a little bit, but I think I wore the brakes out on my spin bike or wore the resistance out. So the top resistance doesn't work as well now, so I need to—I need—it's interesting because once you get that mindset of all out, you start to foster that mind in other areas. That I can go, I can recover, I can push, I can relax.

James de Lacey1:19:23

And I think that's why we use them. But we'll cover this in our own podcast. We do a whole heap of other stuff as well. It's not sprint related. So there's a whole heap of other training that we do. So we're just saying that sprints is one small tool in the toolbox that you can get a crazy amount of return on your investment. A whole heap of other things you can do equally to get return on your investment, but it takes a lot more time.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:19:50

What kind of—I know you want people to bring some data into the mentorship too, to analyze. What is—is there a certain protocol you want—you would prefer someone to do to bring that? If they're bringing their heart rate data in?

James de Lacey1:19:50

So for the mentorship, basically what we'll try and do is that people can get baseline data. Then we'll do probably just easy Wingates.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:20:19

Because we would do a Wingate always. Easy Wingates?

James de Lacey1:20:19

Well, Wingates are easy. I think for us, Wingates are so kind of standard fare that when you get athletes doing 15 on, 5 off, or 12, you're in a completely different world. I mean, that's the thing as well. I will show the data on—when we do the mentorship, people will be surprised when I talk about pushing hard. People's idea of pushing hard is probably not going to be the same as my idea of pushing hard.

And I'll show people hitting 1500 watts, 1400 watts consistently on 12 bike sprints back to back on a negative rest interval. But they didn't get there—they didn't get that overnight. It took some time to get to that. I'll show football data, what steady state looks like in a game. We'll dive into that type of thing. We'll look at 60 meter sprint football players, but change of direction. What that data looks like, and we'll compare it—how it looks from a heart rate perspective versus how it looks from here in forced perspective.

But from the analyzing data, the easiest thing to do is to get a 30 seconds on, 60 off for two or three. Now the reason we want more than the one standard Wingate is you're looking to see what the accumulated effect is on the second one. Because if you only—well, every time I do the second one, my legs stop working after 10 to 15 seconds. If you think about it, and if you only do 30 on 1 and 60 off, you're not really getting a repeated effort, so you're not really seeing what would happen if you did it again.

So we like 30, 60 off for two if we can, and we think the people can do it. Three is even better because then we're looking at the subsequent knockoff effect. And that's when you can dive into more. So you can look at what is the heart rate, is there cardiac drift, is there no recovery between the sprints, what did power look like, how much did drop off, etc.

And obviously there's certain caveats around all of that. If you're using a Watt bike, the data might not be that accurate. If you're using a spin bike, it may not have power, etc. So you kind of have to play with what you've got.

But the idea would be to try and teach people you can find ways of getting things. It's not all about fancy kit. If you get a cheap watch or whatever, a cheap strap, you can get a lot of data from it. But it's more about—you have an athlete, they do XYZ sport. Snowboarding was the hardest one for me. I was like—the snowboarding team were like, how do we condition them? And I was like, I know absolutely nothing about snowboarding. And I knew even less after I almost killed myself in Stobs going to Loch Lomond. That was the most horrific process ever.

But that was a tougher one because you're looking at half pipe and you're thinking, what is the physiological demands of that? What do they really need? So like anything you have, you have to get data. And so we had to get nervous data, we had to get heart rate data, we got some acceleration data because we're looking at what exactly is occurring. And you start to see that that actually has quite a lot of isometric components in it. There's a lot of isometrics in that.

So that allows us to see that muscle is desaturating and some of them down to very low position and not resaturating. And the more higher level ones were desaturating but holding sMO2 much higher. They had a much more, I guess, acclimatization to isometric positions and holds. So from that, that allowed us to create a whole heaper series of things to drill those type of people. So we looked at isometric pulls, pushes. We looked at when we could optimize it. We looked at the flywheel systems, and the flywheel gave us the biggest bang for snowboarders—that was the thing.

Because as you know yourself with the—the good thing with the flywheel is you can make them break at 90 degrees in a squat—just break and go, break and go, break and go. So you can force that whole explosive up hard, break into an isometric position, hold it, and then that whole thing about how'd you come out of an isometric position with velocity. I love all that stuff. And so we get into some of that stuff as well.

So there's a whole lot of things you can do, but it all goes back down to the physiology. How is it happening and why is it happening? Once you understand that, plain sailing.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:23:58

I remember I was talking to Matt Cross back home at hopeful one spot. He did—he ended up doing his PhD out in France with the ski team out there. You were telling me on the flywheel they would do like that quarter squats, but 2 minutes continuous quarter squats on the flywheel for the slalom skiers. And I was like, dude, there's no way. That would be absolute killer to be able to do two minutes straight of quarter squats on a flywheel.

James de Lacey1:24:21

I've kind of revisited the K Box. I did a research project on it. I think it's such an underused piece of kit. I just—I think for me, especially in combat sports, there is a lot of deceleration points in breaking. And I think one of the things I have issues with with combat sports with a lot of S&C is we don't appreciate the need to break and decelerate and change direction.

So everything is very force-based. We need strength, we need strength, we need strength. And I'm like, we probably don't need as much strength as we think we need. Obviously that conditioning to get us through it. But we need acceleration more to generate repeated force and power, and that isn't coming via back squatting. It's not coming through deadlifting.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:25:18

I've been told that a lot.

James de Lacey1:25:18

I still get people coming at me for saying just traditional strength training isn't enough. Or it's like, just getting stronger doesn't do it. For flywheel, you can—

Dr. Andrew Usher1:25:50

Go into a split squat position and you can really generate that whole movement range. And the thing about it as well is you think about it, right? So how often is a boxer going below 90° to throw an uppercut? Maybe if they're doing something like a jumping uppercut. Yeah, that range of motion for the muscle is not actually as much as what people think it is. So people are trying to create acceleration from a very low end point, which is fine because you're training from the low end point and then it's going through that whole range of motion.

The boxers actually have to create that acceleration from a third position point where the muscle is partially contracted, not fully contracted. That's a whole different kinetic experience. And the only thing that I've found that lets you do it is probably the K box or the other of it, because you can—as you know—you can dial in that position to start. Boom, push, go, go back, push, go, boom.

And they can feel that whole chain. So my issue with landmine for striking is stuff at landmine price, and that it's maybe okay for the shoulders. I think it's crap. But it's not really dialing in what you're trying to achieve, because unless you're fighting someone a lot higher than you, you're changing the whole glenohumeral joint position. The force should be coming in these straighter lines. But the flywheel really allows you to dial in, and as you know yourself, put two wheels on that thing—jeez, that's a tough lower.

James de Lacey1:27:12

Dude, I did it with the eccentric overload on the motor with just a small blue plate, just a quarter split squat. Holy man.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:27:12

See, I don't have the motor. And I keep thinking about the Excentrix system, and I'd like to paper on it, because eccentric overload is everything. So we had quite a lot of super bantamweights and bantamweights. And one of the challenges with those kids was: how do you kind of give them a little bit of muscle adaptation without bulking up? Because they were very responsive to change—like super responsive to change. So feed them protein, let them do biceps, and they were becoming monstrous.

So the whole thought for me was: if we lengthen muscle tissue and we kind of take that eccentric component, would we get the same results as classic hypertrophy or power training? And we found we actually get more in the super bantamweights. They just, for whatever reason, just doing a lot more eccentric overload and just lengthening the muscle tissue just seemed to create a lot much more acceleration.

And that's probably the way we're training it. We're training a lot of pushes, a lot of pulls, single-handed with the angle grips, so the forearms are really getting engaged. You've also got muscle architecture changes that are positive to that too.

And the angle grips for me with the K box is probably one of the biggest finds as well, because I just feel just that whole thing about having to grip it and having the forearms a little bit more engaged—it's paid dividends for us. So we had phenomenal results on the K box. And then I took it into the uni for research and it sat there for a long time, and the boxers were kind of complaining about it.

So it's now with someone else at the moment—they're using it for training. But I keep thinking to myself: if I had the money, I'd maybe buy a couple more of them, because I think... Yeah.

The other thing as well is you get through a session on that super fast—like super, super quick. And it doesn't give you the same soreness as other training, which is interesting.

James de Lacey1:28:58

No, no. I think initially some of the boxers were a bit sore after it for a couple days, and then I think once it became quite accustomed to the eccentric overload, I think it kind of settled down quite nice. But the interesting thing was that I decided didn't to use it when I wanted to put some muscle mass on, some hypertrophy work.

And we just went for bigger weights. We took away the eccentric overload component and we just went for pure raw pull of the device, and we got big changes in muscle adaptation in size. Which's going to let me believe you can probably use it multiple ways.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:29:47

And everyone hates squats on it, because that thing is just... Dude, I'm throwing the kids into—I'm like, "Come on, go!" Legs are getting compressed, people are pinned down. But it's a phenomenal piece of kit, especially if you got the data with it, because you got all that nice range of motion. How accurate that is, I'm a bit kind of on the fence with, because it's just a whip in a small dial with cord, so I'm a bit like, "Is it that accurate?" But it's a benchmark of a starting place and an ending place. But I really like it as a training tool.

James de Lacey1:30:17

Strength training with athletes is really stripped back. We do a lot of single-leg work with boxers. We do a lot of dumbbell work. We don't do a lot of barbell work now. That is just surely because I'm not there enough to do the barbell sessions. If I was there, we'd be doing a lot more complex work there. But I'm just not comfortable with athletes doing it themselves a lot of times, because I just think the half hour that they don't put as much effort into it, I think.

And I'm also not convinced that a lot of them are the right size and weight for their category. So I look around a lot of people—they need, "We need to add more strength." And I was think: what is strength? What does that actually really mean in the sport of boxing? What is strength?

Dr. Andrew Usher1:30:41

If grappling's completely different, you need that isometric, you need that hold position. Completely different sport. But striking is about acceleration. The faster you can move your body, the better it is. So I think a lot of time I don't think plyometrics necessarily gives you that either. And the reason being: I think plyometrics are done in the wrong direction most of the times. So plyometrics are all—you mean they're done vertical?

James de Lacey1:31:05

Yeah, they're all vertical.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:31:05

So I'm a big... And I think when you actually think of moving in the ring and you think of position, how often does an athlete make a massive big leap? There's a lot of foot tracking. So there's a lot of micro movement, small adjustments with the foot, trying to get the inside line of attack, the outside line of attack, position shorter position.

So I think the range of motion fits nicely on something like the K box, because you can dial in small step drive, small step drive, small step drive. So I think for me a lot of hurdle jumps and all these things are too—it's too much of a jump. It's the motion is going up rather than rather than across. But I could be wrong.

James de Lacey1:31:56

Is it? I'm not... Well, you got plenty of other ways to do it too, because obviously you got lateral scatter jumps, you got various directions you can do those jumps as well. So yeah, there's a billion ways you can modify it if you wanted to focus on, I guess, what they coin the force vector training.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:32:22

Yeah, I remember being quite obsessed with that years ago and kind of s = ut + ½at² and displacement vectors and looking at all that type of stuff. And I remember just a good wise coach slapping me and saying, "For Christ's sake, just get in boxing."

James de Lacey1:32:22

That's the meme, right? The bell curve meme on the two ends in the middle.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:32:22

It's true. It's like, I mean, I boxed and kickboxed, and I kind of wonder how much of the training I did in my early 20s actually transferred into the sport. And probably not much of it, really. When it came to it, I just—I would have done much better if I'd spent more time sparring, controlled tech sparring, and a lot more wellness.

And a lot more probably regressed sparring, whereby you do a bit more technically orientated, you set up structured with task cues based. I think there's probably a lot more probably benefit. The older I get, the more I realize that it's the ability to do the sport counts more than anything else.

James de Lacey1:32:51

Well, did you see the old Jiu-Jitsu echo versus drilling debate that went on on Instagram and stuff the other week?

Dr. Andrew Usher1:33:14

Yeah, it's funny, because when I started Jiu-Jitsu way back with Matt Thornton out in Portland—and that's originally I was with SBG—everything was like that whole aliveness concept was really there. A lot of it was just drilling, drilling, drilling, drilling, and drilling. And the last few times I've been back to do some SBG work, it's just all been rolling, rolling, rolling, rolling. It's...

I think there's something in being able to drill, then apply it. And I think the SBG method worked because of that whole idea was: isolate it, drill it, know it, feel it, then put it into a live context and spar it out and see if it comes out. And I still think Matt Thornton was onto something back then. I got some good stories back in the day there. I enjoyed BJJ. I actually didn't enjoy BJJ that much for me—it was a sport I hated because I just wanted to punch people. But I appreciated what Matt Thornton was doing with the whole aliveness.

I did a lot with Carl Teville as well back in the day and Anthony Thompson's stuff over here. BJJ took a real strange shift in Scotland. It went down very much to kind of Gracie kind of... but it lost, I think, a lot of the aliveness, became kind of how green, and how became a curriculum. It became a curriculum, it became the pay-to-win model.

James de Lacey1:35:09

Yeah. Is it that that's what... does it become how do we monetize it, how do we make a living out of it? Pay-to-win's kind of probably a good way. It's shifting the other way though; it's definitely gone away from the old Gracie and old, I guess, Brazilian way, slowly.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:35:09

I mean, it's interesting because up in Aberdeen there was kind of Carson Bee kind of BJJ, which was pretty full on back in the day. It was pretty full on. It was drill them, were rolling. Very much like that's what you need to pull off today: get that Paul, get that triangle, get that... that was very much like that. And then down the Glasgow end at Canada, there's some pretty solid gyms that are still that way as well. Grip House and stuff, some really solid, solid places.

But for me, it just wasn't a sport that I loved nearly as much as punching people. Kicking people in the liver, Sanda style, is just a magical thing. Not magic when it happens to you and you're pissing blood for seven days, but it's a magical thing when it lands. Nothing beats a good liver shot. And that's for me why, I guess, even I had my gym and we had people teaching BJJ at the gym, I never really took part much. I just was pure striking-oriented. I still love it.

I still do pads, I'll still do a bit of body sparring with the kids. I still love that whole... I think boxing teaches you distance. I think things like box Tae, that where there's a slightly more elated position on the Fajita kick and stuff, teaches you another appreciation of distance. And Muay Thai gives you even another form of distance. And I think those three together just create a completely amazing striking system where you can move through range and you understand.

But the great thing about it is no box jumps are needed to be successful, no landmine presses are needed to be successful. It's just doing the sport and just having a good conditioning base, relative strength for the weight category you're in. Job's a good one.

James de Lacey1:36:53

That's perfect, that's a perfect way to almost end this two-hour, two-hour podcast. So guys, make sure you check the description. You got to get into that mentorship, $497 for the two months, which is actually pretty insane, how cheap that is for the entire 8-week course plus two live calls a month plus the forum community area plus crunching data and your data that you bring, which, I'm going to bring some data too. I'm going to... I found my heart rate monitor finally, so I'm going to try on my dodgy spin bike and get some new stuff on there.

And then I was talking to a friend who's one of the top grapplers in New Zealand. I'm trying to get him to get a bloody heart rate monitor so he can do some too. So that'll be interesting as well because he's a heavier dude too, so it'll be good.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:37:47

So we're going to cover a whole range of things. Week one will be pretty light. Week two, we're going to do energy continuum, substrate utilization, T2 metabolism. Then we're going to look at things such as heart rate, NIRS, discuss a lot about the GPS and some thoughts about that. I think some interesting things around that. Then we'll look at things such as test and assess: how do we do it, how do you devise your test, what's the best way of doing it.

We'll look at data capture, best practice for handling data, especially if you're using things like, say, if you're using a Train Red where it's like a 10-hertz sample and you maybe doing hours of spotting, sparring session, whatever. There's a lot of data. How do you break that down? How do you process it?

And then we'll kind of just look at what you do with that data. How do you analyze curves? How do you analyze polynomial? What is the effect to them? And then we'll dive into how you put it together. Live chats will be fortnightly, so we'll kind of do that on a poll system, so we'll kind of find out what works for everyone. I'm happy to do two chats, so if we need to do two chats to accommodate time zones, I'm pretty cool with that. That's just going to be a real just dive into what people want to know.

So the idea will be week by week there'll be content. In the live chat we're going to reinforce that a little bit, but it's really more about finding out what people's sports are and what it is they really want to understand. So it should be good. It's not going to have crazy numbers on it because it would be too time-demanding, so it's not going to... you're not going to have... there will be only like 60 people in a cohort.

It's not going to be like that. It's going to be nitely targeted, but it is a first-come, first-served business because we will cap it. I haven't worked out what the cap is.

But it's the same material that we give to rugby clubs. Just to put in perspective how they rate for that type of thing is £115 an hour. So four hours' work is £600. She's getting Andrew at a discounted rate.

James de Lacey1:39:13

Very discounted.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:39:13

I feel like I'm selling myself out. But the reason for doing it really is is to try and make people a bit more efficient with what they're doing and to give a maybe a slightly different approach to it. But it'll be interesting because it'll be interesting to get other people's approach and to see what other people are doing as well, because the way I have learned over the years is by learning from others.

I'm a big believer in mentorship. I'm very lucky that I surround myself with people like John. I love chatting with Gary H at TGB because Gary's got a very level way of putting things in its place, which I really, really like.

I like speaking with yourself. I like to constantly be challenged on what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. So I think that's the best way to kind of learn. And I'm at a very lucky point in my life whereby I don't need to advertise for clients. I'm busy all the time. I can pick and choose what I want to do. And we're being super, super successful. And it's kind of like the biggest pain in my life is probably NDAs, because we sign no end of NDAs with athletes all the time. It's quite painful.

But by the other hand, I kind of like it to an extent because then there's no ego and such. Look, yeah, underground. I mean, we work a lot with different people, a lot of high-level elite people, but we just don't post about it because we can't. And it's... I think it's a double-edged sword. I think if I was younger, that'd be more of a problem, but at this point in the day, it's not a problem.

But I could imagine if I was 27, 28, you'd want to use that for marketing. It's going to be a big issue. Are it 50? To me, I don't really give a [expletive].

It's more about the excitement of taking someone on a journey, finding out what it is you need to know about them and applying it. And that's really what kind of keeps me still in it.

James de Lacey1:41:28

So sign up, find out information below, somewhere, or whatever.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:41:28

Yep, it'll be in the description for you guys as well.

James de Lacey1:41:28

Yeah, hardly worth it. I mean, I get to Dr. Andrew for whack in interview stuff like this and fully change my outlook on conditioning and the physiology side. And I know it will do the same. I mean, it's done the same for a bunch of others that have just listened to the hour-long podcast. So now imagine now like immersing yourself in this. It's just another level on top.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:41:52

I mean, it's been really... it's been strange for me, I guess. Really been privileged with some of the people that have come forward to chat with us about our ideas and stuff, and it's been quite kind of, quite surprising because some of these people we hold in super high esteem as well. I think they're really phenomenal coaches. So it's quite, quite a humbling process that people are kind of... we're not doing anything crazy or anything new.

The NIRS is probably the newest thing because we're probably among the first to do it right, but everything else is just stuff that John's known for 35 years, stuff I've known for 15, 20 years. It's nothing new; it's just, I guess, just need to get it out there. I think I was saying to John yesterday, I think what it is is that me and him are like so antisocial that we've not really been tainted by the whole world of strangeness.

So this is all like... so we're like probably... the end's thought was has just hit the city for the first week. We're like, what's going on here? Why are people saying that, Twig Fire?

So for us, everything's... and it's bizarre, right? Because for me, the...

The whole idea of substrate utilization, intensity and contribution levels of substrates just seems very matter of fact because that's what we teach undergrads. So what people are saying to me, "actually, we're only using PCR for the first 15 seconds," I'm like, "what, what are you talking about?" Surely the people that are getting past that.

Because I swear when I post stuff like that now I get a lot of people sharing it and agreeing with it. Maybe it's just because it's an echo chamber of what my audience is, but it hasn't reached the masses yet. But I think people are starting to come around, I think. Or maybe not the masses.

I think a lot of people bought into this whole idea of kind of like intervals being an MICT interval, being a HIT interval, being this and kind of bought into this whole lactate threshold training off a previous, people, without really questioning, did that actually stack up physiologically? And I think that held ground for quite a long period of time.

James de Lacey1:44:08

I mean it still has and it probably did for me to a small extent until I went, "I want to test this." And I went and go out and paid a lot of money for metabolic carts and portable ones and then was like, "Wait a minute, this doesn't make any sense."

Dr. Andrew Usher1:44:08

Because the craziest thing for me was that I had no interest in NIRS. I just had bought them in a complete whim. I just bought them and I had them on at the time I was doing the pilot research. And I was looking at the carbohydrate utilization and the VO2 peak between rounds in kind of bag work and stuff.

I was looking at the Moxy thinking, "If we're in a purely PCR zone, why the [expletive] is that muscle desaturating and resaturating at the rate that it's doing? Why is that doing completely something very different to this idea of being in a highly anaerobic position?" And that was the catalyst for me.

James de Lacey1:44:55

And then I just put on... So even before my research, I got four years of data from sparring, bag sessions, pad work, grappling sessions, MMA fights, football sessions. Just can't use any of it for research because there's no ethical approval, but I've got legacy data from some of the best fighters on the planet with it. And that was the catalyst.

That's why when I said to John, "I go to the PhD now," and he's like, "Cool." And he was like, "Let's just abandon the whole substrate business and let's just go straight into peripheral, because you've got five years of knowledge there that's sitting and we've got all this provisional data that's shown us that something is happening peripherally. It's very different to systemically. Let's dive into that."

Dr. Andrew Usher1:45:24

Could you publish that data anonymously as like a blog or something?

James de Lacey1:45:24

I probably could actually. I probably could. That'd be interesting. We've got some really interesting data, how we used it for sparring and how one athlete controlled one opponent over the other opponent. And that was a big... that's when I realized at that point you could actually use near infrared for actual game time. And off the back of that you could change a lot of game plans and how the athlete performed. So it was pretty interesting.

But we're in an exciting world. Wearable technology, the most accessible it's ever been. AI is incredibly useful for coding, so it doesn't take much to get AI to write you a decent script to analyze your data. So we're in very exciting times.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:46:23

So yeah, I still want to use the body NIRS. I still want to do some stuff in grappling, wrestling, or jiu-jitsu just to have that data and see what's going on. I'm sure it's not going to be that much different to what you saw in your research, but it'll just be interesting just to see and quantify what's going on. Because all like, for example, the research in jiu-jitsu is like 10 plus years old, which is like a completely different game.

James de Lacey1:46:23

Yeah. We don't know a lot of these things. And even wrestling, there's like nothing, not much going on. It's on our list of things to look at. Obviously, mentioned before, spoken to someone else would potentially get some nice data in that.

I'm going to be interested looking at the transition between striking into maybe the clinch position or into a single leg and just how that differs. I'm interested seeing from both ends. I'm interested from being the attacker and versus being the defender that's actually taking. Or even someone takes a shot on you and then they get back to the fence and stand back up and then start striking again. That transition, how taxing is it really? And how well are people recovering?

We've got some really cool research lined up. One is the virtual reality stuff, which is kind of interesting. But the other is looking at... I had to play with kind of haptic feedback suits, the ones, the taser ones, that really generate a shitload of pain.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:47:35

Wait, the ones like that's like electrodes on your body, so when you get... over body haptic sensor, so they can spasm you up big time. You can just...

James de Lacey1:47:35

Oh, you mean that. That is crazy what you can do with that, dude.

Dr. Andrew Usher1:47:35

Man, but what I'm kind of interested in is, if we can simulate impact, then what is the physiological response to that and what's the accumulated... It'd be very difficult to get ethics through a project like that, but we might get something similar through on it.

But I'm kind of curious about how does muscle function in different environments and things, because we know heat is a slightly different change versus kind of humid or kind of like normal conditions as well, ambient. Impact traumas are really interesting.

So one of the big projects we've got going at the moment is this whole idea, how do we use NIRS to bring it into the gaming space so we can manipulate outcomes in games? So first-person shooters and stuff, how do we actually change up environments and terrains based upon how the muscles are responding through certain things?

The next logical thing with that would be the... you may have seen kind of like Google, that I've got. They kind of walk on what, many haptic treadmills where you can... So we've got someone playing around with them, looking at sprints on them and looking at kind of a whole haptic and NIRS and how does that change.

So the next thing for me is looking at, can you apply that to kind of striking drills and how that... So a whole other world. And that's the thing is, is that we still don't really fully know how muscle really functions under different environments.

Which is why even with the stuff that we do, we kind of caveat by saying, "This is what we know, but there's a whole heap of world that we do not know, so therefore we're not going to make recommendations on things that we're unsure about or out with our expertise." Because I think it's important to stay within your realm.

James de Lacey1:49:17

So, yeah. Perfect. Right, let's wrap this up now. That's it. Yeah, appreciate you coming on and sign up in the link below.