Is Wearing A 200g (7oz) Weight Better Than Lifting For Combat Sports? w/ Joe Dolcetti (SSOF Ep. 37)

Joe Dolcetti0:32

And that started me now on a two-decade journey of learning and understanding and creating wearable resistance.

James de Lacey2:45

Yeah, it's seen as, at least to me, it's almost that bridging that gap between what we're doing strength training or in the gym and then what we're doing actually with the sport itself. So I wanted you to maybe dive into, okay, wearable resistance, let's just start with what is it?

Joe Dolcetti2:45

Yeah, a simple question. And we were talking about this as well. It's resistance. And we use the word resistance, and as you know, resistance is synonymous with weight and load, right? So if you're doing weight training or loaded training or resisted training, they're all the same thing.

So wearable resistance, or wearable weights, or wearable loading, is exactly that. It's taking some level of a garment—this is one of our full-arm sleeves. The reason I brought this one out today is because the combat guys love this. It was specifically made for striking and throwing sports. You put that on your body, you can apply weight to your body so that you had weight during movement and sport-specific or activity-specific movement.

And the bridge, the gap you're talking about, is what we call something between the difference between equipment-defined training versus user-defined training. So traditional resistance, and what separates wearable across the gap from traditional, is all forms of traditional resistance force the user to adapt to the equipment, whether it's a 1080, whether it's a vertical jump, whether it's a squat, whatever it is. You're building yourself around a resisted device, a loaded, a weighted device that you have to somehow technique yourself into to get value out of.

Wearable resistance is user-defined resistive training. You put it on, you don't change what you do, you just change what you wear, and then you have the load there where you need it in your sport or your activity. And it's a massive change because we've got a whole field of strength and conditioning that teaches exercise technique. Now we're not teaching exercise technique anymore. We're putting the weight on the body and we're working on the sport technique while loaded.

And that was the biggest shock for me, working with the best programs in the world, from the All Blacks to Paris Saint-Germain, how nobody understood what we did when we had weight in sport. And we'd had traditional stuff like a weight vest or an ankle weight or a wrist weight, and what those things did was they added weight in a similar attempt, but they were bulky, they were uncomfortable, they were unsafe to some degree. The loading parameters were too high for what we call microloading or proper dosing for movements.

And so we've just extended this now into a version that I think is much more relevant and certainly at a level that's valuable to the kind of sport movements we're seeing today, because sport is just getting faster and faster and faster.

James de Lacey5:18

It sure is. But how much weight then are you loading with the wearable resistance? Just give, for example, just general combat sport exercises.

Joe Dolcetti5:46

Well, yeah. And so this is one of our educational loads. It's got this arrow on it, and it's got a really unique shape. So this is one of the weights, right? And these weights look pretty simple, but they took almost seven years to figure out. And this is a 200-gram weight. 200 grams is about 8 ounces.

And the weights right now in our range range from 50 grams, 2 ounces, up to I think 1 to 26 ounces. So that tells you something right off the bat, that the weight, the load we're using in movement, is a lot lighter than we use in the gym. But then you think of a baseball player, or you think of a martial artist—and one of the ones we work with a lot is full-contact karate, which I think has possibly the fastest hand speed in sport, one of them.

And it only takes anywhere in the range of 2 to 8 ounces to affect or challenge a high-speed movement. And we're seeing this universally across the board. So we're not talking about putting pounds and kilograms on anymore. We're literally talking about ounces and grams.

A little funny story on that. We have a very small weight, the 50-gram weight, the 2-ounce weight. And I was going to discontinue it because everything on this product is expensive to make because we use only the best, safest, environmentally friendly, recyclable materials. And those little loads cost us a lot. And I was talking to a speed coach, and when I was telling him, "Yeah, we're going to get rid of the 50s," and he said, "Don't." He said that 50-gram weight, that 2-ounce weight, is probably the perfect load to put on the body to create a movement perception that can be used specifically for tweaking or what's called coaching cueing.

Which means if there was a specific movement you're trying to work on, we can cue the body by putting light loads on it just actually to accentuate what the coach is trying to do verbally. And so I think that was the second big discovery for me. Number one was that nobody knew how to weight the body. And two, lightweight was the new heavy.

The biggest challenge I had, I was trying to create a 10-pound weight vest at the start. And then I realized when we put it on people, athletes were taking the weight off and saying, "I don't want more." We'd hear things like, "No, I don't want the gym while I'm on court. I don't want the gym while I'm on the track. I want to move."

And so the average load is somewhere in the range of about half a pound, a quarter of a pound, half a pound up to maybe 1 to 2 pounds. And we see this across the best athletes around the world. And it's like I said, they're using a weight to challenge and then reinforce technique and achieve that last 5 to 10% of speed that makes the difference between winning the fight or just being another also-ran.

So that was really the exciting thing for me, is how lightweight is so important in sports-specific movement.

James de Lacey8:25

It's crazy because I can imagine a lot of people trying to wrap their head around only using a few hundred grams to overload the movement. You go, "What's the point? Like, there's nothing on there. It's not going to do anything for you." But I know if anyone goes back to the John Cronin episode, he gave a really good example. I cannot remember exactly what he gave, but essentially comparing like 100 kilos squat at a certain velocity versus running fast with 500 grams.

Joe Dolcetti9:22

On the thighs, and then that running fast with the 500 grams had more work and a greater physiological response than the 100 kilo squat at that velocity. And that example kind of cements it a little in your head. That's the other thing we dedicated ourselves to: as a high performance sports scientist myself, the very first thing I did was I went looking for the best research institutes in the world to start studying this, because we knew this was just a whole different leap.

And John, when he first saw us in 2015, he was out here. Him and I were speaking at a conference. He saw the kit. The first thing he said is, "Do you guys have a research partner? We'd like to take it on." And I was like, "Let's do it." We shook hands over a meal and a drink that night, and we started six, seven years of research. And now with over 30 published papers around the world, we've learned a lot.

But one of the things stood up was exactly that case study. The case study was on kinetic energy, and we did the work on that. And kinetic energy tells us a lot about specificity, as you know. The kinetic energy for a loaded thigh run is higher with a 1 kilo or 2 pound load than it is for 100 kilo squat with Exogen.

And we were, the interesting thing was I was always telling JC, they were finding funny things in the lab. But the subjective data from all our athletes, the RPE scores were off the chart. You'd put on a few hundred grams on your forearms, specifically for combat, and a guy would do a three-minute round. And as a boxer, I know this. You'd do a three-minute round and you would come back and say, "Dude, that's like 50% harder with just 4 ounces," which didn't make sense.

Because golfers, boxers, and combat guys think in terms of ounces of gloves, right? They'll say, "Well, I've used a 12 ounce glove. It's no different." I say, "It's not the same thing." And we were getting these crazy RPE scores. And it was only when we started looking at things like kinetic energy and rotational workload that we started to understand what was happening. And the key to that was: the weight is always there.

So all the movements, it's not just on the punch. It's sitting here, it's sitting here on the blocks, it's sitting on the defense. Or for sprinting, it's not just when they're in the ground, it's like a weighted vest. When you touch point to create force, it's there through the air management and the airtime mechanics. And so, it was just part of that learning experience of why this thing was feeling so heavy.

And yeah, that example blew us away. And there was another one that he did. He looked at taking a proximal load to a distal load on the thigh. And we can increase rotational workload just by moving a load from the hip to the knee by over 25% increase in workload. And you imagine what a 25% increase in workload for a squat is. If you have 100 kilo squat, that's now 125 kilo squat, and that takes people a long time to get to. So yeah, the science got really exciting on why this was working and how it was working.

And again, we came up with that term: light is the new heavy. When you're moving at high speed, things get pretty important.

James de Lacey12:35

For sure. And I wanted to dive into this and make this as practical as possible. So maybe we start with strikers, MMA athletes in terms of striking. So I guess, maybe let's start with the practical side of how would you use this to enhance punching power? Or how would it differ if you're going to look at maybe muscular endurance of the shoulders and arms while boxing?

And there, maybe I know one thing you talked about before was also as a teaching tool. How would you use it as almost as its own coaching tool? That's three things there, it's a few, but we'll come back to them all.

Joe Dolcetti13:09

No, no, and we talked about that. And I was saying there's sort of in all sport, but because we're here talking about combat, and again, I've worked with combat athletes throughout my career, been involved in martial arts, now currently a competitive amateur boxer. After rugby, the rugby fights and the rugby combat was different, right? You practice beforehand. Yeah.

So there's three things that we really focus on with something like combat. And that is speed. Without a doubt, we've probably built the best pure speed tool in the market. So in combat, I've never in 35 years had a coach walk in or athlete walk into my office and say, "Joe, we just got to get slower. We need to slow down." That doesn't happen.

It's always more speed and squeezing everything out from breathing techniques to whatever. So what we can do now is put that little bit of weight into your movements to create speed. And again, we know resistance training works. We just never had a tool that was this designed for the body.

The second area, which you mentioned, is coaching. How do you actually coach technique? We can add load, and I'll show you that in a sec here, and things, patterns that we call like assistive and resistive loading to create the right feeling of correct technique. And that's probably what I think is the most exciting part.

But the third one is the one you mentioned here. And that's, I'll use the term from Joe Rogan and the guys at the UFC: weaponizing pace. Guys like in MMA, Kobe Covington and other fighters, and they do it across sport, right? They weaponize pace, which means they create a specificity of endurance that simply allows them to do more at a higher percentage for longer. And so weight training can do all those.

The first thing from a speed perspective is putting weight on the body. You get that now. The standard in martial arts would be something like the dumbbell, right? We use something like a dumbbell or a tubing or a cable to try and create speed. But a bunch of negative things happen when you use dumbbell, and I don't think a lot of people realize.

First off, it's too heavy, as you know. If you throw a dumbbell heavy, the first thing your body feels when you pick up a dumbbell is weight. And if it's a heavy weight and it registers over a few grams or ounces, the body's first thought is not speed or power. The body's is protection. So it stabilizes everything. And that's why you'll see a person with a dumbbell, the first thing that happens is the shoulders lift, the shoulders contract.

Everything's designed to pull that shoulder in because they're like, "What are you doing to me, man? Why are you throwing that heavy thing? I got to stop that. I got to decelerate this." You don't care, but I care about that shoulder.

And people don't think about that. But in combat, the number one thing you're trying to do is not get tight here. As soon as this tightens up, you're in trouble for speed. So staying relaxed, being soft.

The second thing is when you put, when you grip something in your hand, dumbbell, whatever it is, that creates a grip response. And you immediately flex muscles that you don't want flexed while punching. And that's why your coaches will talk about keeping your hands soft, and you spend hours on bags working the timing of the contraction, of the squeeze of the hand at contact, at contact, at contact, so the forearm and the shoulder doesn't fire and slow down speed and you stay soft.

And so there's a lot of things working against you, whether you're holding a cable or a tubing. Now you take that weight and you just put it on the body so you don't have to think about it, and it stays under the radar of injury or too heavy. And we've seen the loads that apply. And we already know that a striker, across the board, as in the most elite in the world, at those speeds will show a negative decrease in performance variables related to technique somewhere in the range of 2 to 10 ounces. So think of what 2 to 10 ounces is, somewhere around half a pound.

So think what's happening to you when you put on a 1 pound dumbbell and you think that's light. Your body's already wiring itself to change your technique.

The second thing we can do is we can load proximately, and this is a really important part. If we take a load like this, I'm not going to go into all the loading mechanics, but it just applies on the body, right? Seamless, nice and easy. Now I've got this load, 200 grams, 8 ounces, up at the shoulder. And what's happening now, my terminal end point is still loose.

I don't have any of the reaction response of sort of traditional resistance, plus it's quite protective because it's at the shoulder. And if you know your lever systems, you know the amount of force taken when the load is close to your point of rotation is a lot different than if I put that 200 grams here.

And one thing we get fighters do a lot is they'll start their loading up here because that creates your moment of inertia, right? That gets the movement going, accelerating really fast. So once the body starts to rotate and that shoulder comes forward, this weight creates a momentum. The hand moves fast and you increase speed. And what we do is speed loading is proximal. But power loading, and what we call knockout impact, that gets more distal. That's when we take a load and we say...

Well, if you really want to work on impact power, now we'll do something like that heavy dumbbell, a lot lighter, less worry on the body, and we'll start loading more towards the wrist. And now you'll feel that as soon as somebody punches with that, they're like, "Yeah, if I wore that in a fight, I think I'd knock somebody out." And so this is the first type of loading that we talk about: loading just something like the arm with a proximal and distal load in a way that doesn't trigger the same sort of safety and negative responses on technique like a dumbbell or cable or handle.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying a dumbbell or those things don't have value. I still like to use it. I like it for how it makes my shoulders feel. Sometimes it's just easy—you pick them up and do a bit of warm-up. There's a bit of movement in there. But once you—you can't tell me you're working speed with that, because as John would say, first principle physics always apply. Your body's going to wire it for something else.

And so this is a really cool area. But one thing I'll tell you is most of the higher level fighters that we work with, there seems to be two schools. Some of them love the loading on the arm for combat striking or legs. Others, and technical coaches, will say, "Well, the power is not from the arm. The power's from the body. The power's from the core." And so I was talking to you about Alexis Pritchard, one of the New Zealand boxers, Commonwealth Games champion, talking about that knockout punch against her USA counterpart when she walked knocked out the Team USA girl.

And all their loading was cross patterns on the top of the shoulder because they were working those rotations, right? That rotation is where your power comes from.

So I don't want to go down the school of thought and say I believe it's this one or that one. There's probably some good research to be done. But at the end, we have a tool you can do both with. So if you have an athlete that doesn't get the rotations in their body and they need to get more length and they need to know how to drop the shoulder back, you can load to create that.

But if you're just looking purely for hand speed—and this is one I use a lot—as soon as I feel my hand speed dropping at sparring or training, I'll spend a week or two on with my Exogen arm sleeve, just working on the bag. And I just notice speed just comes up, when you're 56 fighting 25-year-olds. That happens a lot.

And so yeah, that's just on the sort of speed and power area. And you can wear this all day. You can also put your gloves on. You can wrap, put in your gumshield. You could go on the pads, go on the bag, because nothing's interfering with that movement.

James de Lacey21:22

So how then would you use it within a training session in terms of a structure? Because would you then use this as part of maybe your strength training stuff in the gym, or would this be more geared towards your technical training? And then within either session, how would it fit within the training? Are you warming up with it, or are you warming up normally, then using it for a certain amount of time and taking it off, or doing the whole session in it, etc.?

Joe Dolcetti21:50

Yeah, that's a question we get asked all the time: "Okay, I get it. I've never loaded during my training like this. So if it's not just S&C, where does it fit?" And there's a bunch of areas it could fit. We sort of talk about three.

Any training session generally follows the same pattern. You've got some level of warm-up activity, then you'll have some sort of technical aspect, and then at the end you'll move into something that's related to what you call a team run or sparring, or putting it all together in the actual sort of competitive environment or mindset or physical set of the sport.

And so you can use Exogen in all three of those. And this is the beauty of it and why a lot of teams and people are embracing it, is because they're not having to do more training. They're just, like we said, don't change what you do, change what you wear.

And a really good place to start in combat would be the warm-up, because you want to acclimatize your body to the load, just like anything. And anybody who's ever done any weight training knows this is still weight training, because a light weight moving fast is just as heavy as a heavy weight moving slow, like a squat. So you want to acclimatize and learn about it.

And what we suggest is, at the start of your training, universally across the board, you're somewhere in the range of 10 to 30 minutes of warm-up drills. And in combat, you're going through all your exercises, whatever it is—those are conditioning exercises for the body to turn the mind and body on and reinforce the specific conditioning needed for that activity.

So if you take a look at something like striking and you're working on striking and you've got a good, solid technical coach, you generally have a fairly structured warm-up routine. Putting light load into that at the start—like, again, we do this with athletes around the world from the NBA to combat—they'll put on their sleeves. And it's generally the sleeves, because the sleeves are really simple, right? You just put on a calf sleeve and you go kick, or you put on an arm sleeve and you go through.

You load up a fairly light weight, and our guidelines on the app and online are pretty clear: it's usually not more than about—this is a pound, right, that's half a pound and half a pound—so usually not more than this. You put it on in the patterns we'll talk about in a minute, and you go ahead with your warm-up.

Now, your entire specific conditioning for that sport is being challenged with an additional load. So just imagine this simple scenario: six weeks before a fight, you take these Exogen sleeves, put them on, you add that weight to those arms, and you do 20 minutes a day of warm-up loaded. And that generally starts low to high speed with some speed work, whatever it is.

And you strip that off and you go to training. How do you think those arms are going to be responding six weeks later? They're going to be firing. Everything's going to be different. You're going to feel speed and movement and balance and control and things you didn't feel before. And that's because weight training works, right? There's no secret there.

So that's generally where we say to start, starting that warm-up. We've had people win world championships just by introducing light load into their warm-ups, set world records and things like the 100 meter. We just had eight gold medals come out of the world championships in Eugene, Oregon, with Team USA 4x1, Team Canada 4x1. And a lot of them just started putting it into their warm-up protocol. I mean, they were already there. We just help them get over that last 1%.

The second area you mentioned is about the technical coaching, and this is the exciting part you and I were talking about earlier: during your technical training, when you're working on a specific skill, maybe it's something as simple as keeping your elbows in the right position, getting working on more length in a punch and distance—because distance is controlled both by the feet and the body movement—and we can load technically to help improve technical aspects of the sport.

And that's where the product gets really cool. And it's less complex than people think. But we can put that weight on the body to correct a movement error or a problem specifically in technique. And I'll show you one in a minute.

And the third place is that last one, what I call weaponizing pace, right? What I—sorry, it's not my term, but it's an awesome term—and that's when you say, "All right, you guys are going to do five rounds of light sparring or partners work with controlled sparring," and you just put the weight on there and you gut-wrench it out. Now you have extra load. Your cardiovascular system, specific neuromuscular system, and your specific endurance areas of the body are being taxed, and again, it just ups your overall pace of conditioning.

So it's those three areas, right? Your warm-up to give your body an overall general higher level—what we call increasing your baseline in sport. Two, the technical area, and that is improving actual techniques. And then three is just really focusing on weaponizing that pace. And the general pattern's the same. You sort of load it in your training somewhere in the range of about 20 to 40 minutes, and that's about enough.

We get some people that put it on for two hours, three hours straight. We don't recommend that. We say get a block, 20 to 40 minutes, three to four times a week. Do that for four to six weeks in a specific area, and watch and learn how your body responds.

And after you've done that and you've felt the product, it all just makes sense. Every athlete's the same. One session, they don't know what's going to happen. Once they put that—that weight on, they're like, "Wow, I know exactly what I want to do with this." And it was like, it's just like a new exploration with a new tech. And so those are the three areas we see, and that's the same whether you're a rugby player, whether you're a sprinter, whether you're a combat sport, whether it's kickboxing or striking or grappling.

Grappling was an interesting area too that you and I were talking about, really on that weaponizing pace when I was talking about loading. You look at the Dagestani wrestlers and wrestlers in general, how they use body to control pressure, and that takes a very specific type of conditioning. We were talking about how Khabib and the boys, he did a video on how they ride people like a horse, how they squeeze with the hips both to drain you and control you.

We can actually load for that. We can put you in a pair of shorts and you could grapple, full grapple loaded, with the muscles of the inside of the thigh and the hip and the lower back all working to apply pressure. It's limited by your imagination.

James de Lacey27:57

I love that. I'd love to dive further into the grappling and wrestling too, but first on the striking side, do you want to show us how you load for the arm for say a technical correction for the rotation of the punch? And then maybe dive down some applications with the grappling and stuff too.

Joe Dolcetti28:21

Sure. If you're watching and you get an idea, you realize this is weight, but the first question they'd be asking is why is it shaped like that? That's an important point to explain. This is actually based on a muscle. Everything in the product was designed up the body.

We call this a fusiform load or a fusiform microload. What that means is you've got a belly and insertion point just like a muscle, so that we could wrap the weight and disperse it rather than it sit as a chunk that you were aware of. The second thing is that belly is controlled by gravity. Most of the weight is here, and if you watch, if I just hold that lightly, gravity pulls that down.

That arrow can be used to cause inertia or momentum or rotations or movements that we never had before. If you take a look at something like a punch, and for coaches out there, if you're hearing something that's different than what you teach, I'm not trying to argue with you on the right way to teach it. Take a look at the overall concept that we're trying to explain.

In boxing, we were talking about this in striking, a lot of people that come out to strike, there's a lot of things they do wrong. They usually flare their arms out. They punch from the side before throwing a jab, the arm comes up. You got to get used to sitting in these positions and they don't understand rotation. The rotation isn't just the hand, it's the shoulder, it's to create length and speed.

One of the things we found was, as an example, if somebody doesn't rotate, they come to the club, they get on the bag, they start punching like this, and you show them how you want them to rotate. "I want you to twist, I want you to turn that over." And as soon as you take your hand off and stop talking, it just goes back to this.

We can take a load and we can actually apply it on the arm without any coaching to rotate the arm. What we do is that belly is going to be controlled by gravity, so we use that arrow to explain. If I put that load on the inside of my arm, just like that, wrap it around, now about two-thirds of that weight is on the inside and I could already feel it.

You can literally see where my hand is sitting. My hand would sit like this with that load, it's rotating me. In the moment I throw that punch, gravity starts working on that arrow and it naturally pulls that in. We put the load on in this position on somebody who has trouble feeling that rotation, and the first thing they say is, "Oh, my hand's rotating." We're like, "Yes."

If I take that load off, if that cue's gone, can you repeat that? Most of the times they can if they don't have a structural or a higher level of underlying motor development issue. But the first thing you have to do is make somebody aware of a problem. What happens here is this is an assist of load that is assisting rotation.

Anybody who's ever throwing a punch, you feel that. When I want to feel really crisp punching, I go in, I load on the inside, and I get on the bag. It accelerates speed, feeling, everything just flows. I open that up, go out there for a pad or spar session, and things are crisp.

But if they're actually weak, if they don't have strong internal rotators and they want to really work that, we actually have to put the load on the other side. Now I put that load out here and it's as simple as this, with a massive effect. I'm not doing this. This is actually the feeling: that load is pulling that hand out. You can see my hand was sitting here before, and now if I just sort of leave it, I can feel it's pulled out.

Now this is a weight training tool. This is resistance. I'm stopping rotation. If I want to rotate, I have to work against the weight. I have to turn, and that weight provides the resistance just like a cable or a tubing or any exercise would.

This was one of the really cool areas. Most of my loading for striking is here because I want to be forced. We always talk about correction to self-correction. When I go to the bag like this, it's awkward. Nothing's turning over. You have to force this. You have to really get your body and your shoulder and everything involved in rotation, and especially if you start loading up a few pieces. Now you have a significant amount of resistance to rotation.

But when you take that weight off and you go to throw that punch and all those rotators and the whole movement are firing, that thing just flows. It goes back to Alexis, what she said after she had her first knockout. Team USA and Team New Zealand had training camp before the Commonwealth Games and she knocked out the American girl. She came back and she said, "Joe, I can't tell you what happened with that punch, but that punch just flowed."

That's the kind of cool thing about what we're seeing now. We're not talking about speed and power anymore, we're talking about "I'm way more stable, I'm quicker, my movements are flowing." And it's a terminology related to sport movement, not strength and conditioning. That's the exciting part. I think this has filled that gap that we always had for a long time. We had the heavy tools to create the strong body.

We've got some of the medium tools and the tubing and the cables and some of the general wearable resistance stuff. But now we have the specific tool at the far end of the velocity curve that really rounds out what you're able to do in terms of applying the right tool for the right purpose.

James de Lacey33:37

I love that. That's such a technical primer basically before you start your session.

Joe Dolcetti34:02

We get athletes who do that a lot. They'll prime the accentuated movement at the beginning. They'll use it for movement preparation, even before a fight in the background. You get it in there, you load it up, you get everything feeling short and fast and quick. Then when you're finished, you just simply strip it down, strip it off, tape up, get ready to go, and you're all set.

That was some of the things we really wanted to work on. It had to be functional for athletes. We spend our life in those situations, so we know you don't have a lot of time, you can't take hours getting ready. It has to be pretty simple and of course have value.

James de Lacey34:32

I love that idea, but I wanted to also take this towards the grappler and the wrestler as well. Obviously that's my area that I enjoy dabbling in with jiu-jitsu and that. Obviously there's always technical errors that can be addressed, especially with standup wrestling, for example posture, keeping an upright posture, you're not getting snapped down or taken down or whatever that is.

Obviously you mentioned there with the Dagestani wrestlers using their hips to ride their opponents so they have their hands free. So how would you use the Exogen in that scenario? Because obviously you showed the sleeve there, but you've got other vests and shorts and things too. So how would you load for those things? And also, I guess to expand on that as well, how would you load to improve performance within grappling sports?

Joe Dolcetti35:26

Again, the first thing to remember is, arguably, I think the hardest conditioning that I've ever seen and been part of is just the grinding of grappling. We talked about seven's rugby, we talked about combat. The grinding of grappling is a different level. Unless you grapple to some degree, you don't know just how hard that is.

The simple answer is, especially on the body core, if your arms are weak, put on those sleeves, put your guard shirt over top, and go and grapple. This stuff is not coming off. This stuff is not coming off. It's bulletproof. That was one of the designs. We had to incorporate this velcro and plush system.

They use on space suits. So if you would just want to add load into your training and get that cardiovascular and that specific muscular endurance, you're going to get that boost. You decide which product would be the best. If you're working on the hips, put on those shorts, load on that inside of the thigh, and if you want to learn how to create and squeeze and be tuned into those muscles that are working to create that kind of pressure, whether you're wrapping the legs, whether you're shooting, whatever it might be, or whether you're floating and chain wrestling on top control, all those kind of things, you can accelerate that to an extent.

Same thing with the top. For female wrestlers who have a little more problem with just strength, we actually recommend for them a lot of the upper body stuff because that's where they tend to get weak. They're quite obviously they've got strong dominant hip power and oftentimes even comparable to men's, but in the upper body is where they lose out. And so we get some of the female grapplers who really like things like the arms and the upper body because it's a sense of strength that they didn't get, and it's not the same as dumbbells in the gym.

But specifically taking a look at that hip and that sort of top control, because that pressure comes from the hips, we always say load the part of the body you're focused on. We call it loading the problem, and I think it was in the deck I sent you. And so if you turn around and say, "Well look, I'm working on wrestling, I'm trying to work on pressure from the hips, I want to get better at control, whether it's wrapping the legs so you can keep the hands free, whatever it might be, or even from the ground when you're looking at a jiu-jitsu position of a guard," and you think a lot of people sit very passive in a guard, right?

And one of the reasons people sit passive in a guard is it's very hard to exert control in that position for long because you fatigue. And so they use that position to rest, right? And you'll hear coaches talking about all the things they want them to be doing to move and forward their position. And in something like MMA, to actually get back to their feet and putting the Exogen in those shorts and creating that specific endurance in the muscles around the hips from either position for five-minute rounds of grappling just accelerates the specific development of all those muscles, whether it'll be an abduction or adduction movements or a slip or a control or rotation through the core. And it really has to be felt.

But again, you would just focus on the piece you want. And if you're working top pressure or chain wrestling or posture, and this is the exciting part, with the top you can load that. We do a lot of posture training for athletes in general, and it's exactly like you said, all athletes in all sport have the same fatigue breakdown process. It doesn't really matter where.

And the body sits when it's tired, whether you're an elite endurance runner or a grappler or a wrestler. And you can see the person who's in this position now trying to do some sort of a movement, whether it's a strike or a block or a shoot, it's not functioning. And so when you take something like the top and you load, say, to the front, and now all that weight is being pulled forward, you have to actively work to keep your posture back.

And we do this in tennis, sports where people sit in this position and we want them to sit a little straighter. And it just becomes, it's specific, right? It's specific postural control.

But most important, when we talk about this thing of weaponizing pace, this is something else I discovered. If you have a specific fatigue issue, you have to target that fatigue problem at the moment that fatigue is actually occurring. And what I mean by that is this: you can do all the road work you want, and that will build a great cardiovascular pace, and that's part of the process of weaponizing your pace.

But grappling, you don't just break down in your central system. The muscles of the body physically wear down, and all the running in the world isn't going to stop that. So we have to get into those muscles in the fifth round, in the third round.

And one thing that was nice about the design of the product is that you can wear it for 25 minutes. So when you, if you're doing five five-minute rounds MMA fights, you can have that loading there, or you can even load it in your fourth, fifth, and sixth round at the moment you're actually getting the fatigue. So when everything's breaking down, we're going to load it, make it worse. Now we have to work on those specific muscles in training.

Because we do a lot of stuff for endurance, but it doesn't apply unless you can target it at the moment it's actually fatiguing in the same way it would in a fight. And this is like we found, we found this out with marathon running actually. So if people are weak in the marathon or endurance running, they always go down, they go to the gym and they work on strength, and they do sets of 10 or 15 or endurance reps, sets of 30.

When you've been running for three hours, none of that applies. That fatigue at three hours, how do we have a load on the body at three hours of fatigue? Well, that's the answer right there.

It needs to be a load that's there the whole time and is fatiguing in a way with you. So you're working at it at that level, and it's a really important concept in specific endurance. And it's why a lot of what we do in strength and conditioning in endurance doesn't translate directly to the fight. Fighters generally feel better, but we can do a lot better in terms of really weaponizing that pace.

And so something like grappling, when you see the body start, because it's all technique, and the moment any part of that body fatigues, technique is going to be compromised. And so taking a look at grappling primarily with the top and shorts, because there's so much body control involved, can do, I think, and we've seen, especially in things like wrestling and jiu-jitsu, a lot of boost in that overall endurance.

James de Lacey42:14

Have you done, or you probably explored this, but in terms of just neutral loading, almost like using it as a weight vest during grappling, jiu-jitsu, wrestling, whatever it is, so it's almost like you're having to train at a kilo heavier than your normal body weight, essentially condition the body that way?

Joe Dolcetti42:14

Yeah, and you and I were talking about this in the process of making weight and cutting weight, whether it might be for an endurance event or a combat sport. 100%, what's really interesting about the product too is the first thing people ask is, "I don't know where to load." Well, nobody did.

But the truth is, put your top on and start loading. Do a five-minute round with the load on the front, strip it off, put it on the back, and then put it balanced front and back, and you will immediately know where you would want that load for a certain type of training.

And so one of the things we do is, yeah, treat it just like a conditioning tool. So you take a top, put it, and generally with the top loading, we load up around the shoulders there, and that's because that's a distal load to where what's rotating, right? Because the point of rotation is down around the hips. That's where your spine starts, your main rotation. So anything up here really puts a lot of pressure on the body and is ultimately harder. Loading down by the core will feel a little easier because it's not compressing the body.

And so putting some load across the chest, across the back, really sort of emphasizes all that postural fatigue and just that ability of the body to apply pressure. And so neutral loading is just put the load in a balanced way where you're not trying to create any specific technique feeling or awareness, and use it as a loaded implement. But again, one you can actually use in grappling. That stuff wraps around you when you have this stuff on the body. You don't feel it.

So put the top on, load up, put on your guard shirt or your gi or t-shirt, whatever you want. Nobody's going to reach in and grab that load and tear it off you. And that was kind of cool, and that was like I said, that's why these loads are four millimeters thick, and we want it, had to be slim, it had to be lean so that it didn't interfere with those types of activities.

James de Lacey44:31

But I know you have a guideline positioning. I know you have a guideline obviously for weight for strikers on the arms, obviously you don't go too heavy there. But for the grappling side, in terms of loaded on the body, is there a weight that you found that's too heavy? Because I know you've got a guideline for the striking, but I'm not sure if there's one for the wrestling side.

Joe Dolcetti44:31

For sure. Now on a top, you can start loading up a few pounds. Obviously our top is a sleeveless top or shorts, and even the load itself comes with somewhere in the range of five to 10 pounds. So you can put a fair amount of weight on that. And one thing you see with grappling is it's always relevant to body weight, but grappling is also about getting into the grapple, right? So your shoot, your takedown, whatever that might be. And we say you can load as much as you...

Want as much as you can get on the kit, and some people just like the heavy load. Maybe if you're working just on pressure on the ground, put on heavy load because you want to feel that, you want to work that. But if you're also working in the full component of grappling which means starting from stand up and trying to work to the ground, scrambling, getting up and working to the ground again, speed is still an important component. So we generally say don't use anything usually in the range of 5 to 10% of body weight is kind of a max.

So if you were a 50 kilo small fighter you'd probably be using 4-5 kilos. If you're a heavy fighter, 80 to 100 kilo, or say 175, 200, 210 lb fighter, then you might put on 5, 10, 15 pounds of full load on the body. And there's nothing wrong with that so long as you feel your speed and the overall effect on your training isn't compromised by more than about 10%. And that's because otherwise then it's just really heavy weight training and that's not what it was really designed to do.

But yeah, you can get some pretty heavy weight on the body as long as you feel you're still in control. And this is the key part: we already have all this traditional stuff that controls you, don't make this tool that same thing. If you feel like you're in control of the weight but it's making you work on the things you want and you're being challenged, then the weight's right. But if you realize I can't even get off the ground after 3 minutes, you're getting up like this, nobody in a martial art in a combat fight is going to let you get off the ground like that.

They're going to come in and uppercut you, they're going to come back on top. And so you have to be smart, don't just make it another heavy tool because now what we're doing is everything we did with traditional tools: we're training to be slow again.

James de Lacey47:01

That's good point. And I wanted to come back to the shorts as well with the idea of being on top and using the hips. So you would load the inside of the legs for proprioception to almost be like okay, this is what it feels like to squeeze. And then you would load outside to then create the resistance for the squeeze to essentially train the strength of that squeeze.

Joe Dolcetti47:30

And then the problem says just put the weight exactly on the muscle group you want to feel. And this was a really interesting thing, goes back to that spot training, spot reducing mindset where you put, take EMS, right? Somebody's got a weak bicep from an injury. I've trained tons of NFL and CFL guys and a lot of those big linemen get complete bicep ruptures and tears because of that awful force they go through in those positions. And so the first thing you have to do is you got to rebuild the awareness of the muscle.

So if I take a load and I put it on my bicep and we do this a lot, it's just like the, we call it the coach's hand, right? If I put my hand there and say I want you to use that muscle, oh, I can immediately connect to it because there's a proprioceptive stimulus or cue that's making me aware. But ultimately the bicep control the lower limb, so the resistive load has to be here to create the resistance.

But we always say if you're trying to feel something first, get aware of it, put the loading directly on the muscles you're targeting. And that's why if you're working on an internal squeeze through the hips, you get yourself loaded inside here. First off, that weight is going to be there, you are using real weight, so the conditioning aspect is there. But now all of a sudden everything you do you're going to be like wow, I can really feel that inside of my thigh working.

But ultimately if you want to get the resistive side, then you switch that load all around that outside part of the hip. And now every time you squeeze that's being pulled in, it almost feels like someone's trying to pull your thigh out and you're squeezing against it. And remember, it's not weight training, you're not doing five sets of band exercises where you think oh I didn't feel the resistance.

No, you won't, go and grapple with it for 30 minutes and then you come back tomorrow and then you tell me how the inside of your thighs feel. And you'll be like dude, I don't think I've ever felt them like that before.

And we hear this all the time because it was there for every micro contraction in that 30 minute period. And so again, it's sort of you have to trust that feeling on it. But exactly like you said, if you're working on that top pressure, that control, that squeeze, you could put it on the inside of the thigh at the start of the session for a round or two and then move it to the outside and start to get a feeling like how much extra you're working on that.

James de Lacey49:38

Yeah, does sense. I love this concept and I know I've talked about a lot in the podcast. And for anyone listening, if this is something that potentially sparked something in your brain or makes you think like something that you'd add to your training, definitely check it out as well. But I think we covered pretty much everything in this podcast, Joe. Is there a way that people can find maybe you, the company, whatever it is, the product, all of that? And I can check it down the description too.

Joe Dolcetti50:01

For sure. And one thing I would say is now we've got partnerships with a lot of the combat people around the world. We've been approached by many of the best, even the famous Irishman's team reached out to us. And we've been there with Duncan there at the UFC PI, we've got a research partnership undergoing with them specifically on striking. And it's really cool the interest that the high level combat world is now getting in this.

And that kind of validates all this stuff that we've been learning in the process. And so I think there's real value not additionally to the athletes that are training with now, but that some of the best research people and at the highest levels of the combat world are starting to try and explore more about it. And we're still answering questions on it.

But anybody who's interested to learn more, look at the research, find a bit more about the product, go to lilateam.com. And lilateam.com is the website, everything's there. We've got our Lila Team, our Lila Athletes Instagram. And my YouTube channel, which we just started, Joseph Dolcetti.com, is specifically targeting training in sort of three areas: high performance, general health and wellness, and then very specific conditioning and training with Exogen.

I think I didn't even realize it but I think there's several hundred videos out now in the area of sports, sprinting, combat, striking. We've got some great fighters that have put up videos, people like Marlin, Chito Vera, Cory Beasley's group out of the US does some really interesting stuff in the fight area if you know him from online. He's a very good S&C, does lots of unique stuff. But yeah, if they check out lilateam.com, our research is there, our guidelines are there.

And the app, the app is coming out this month. Our first guidelines, yeah, you can get the app, you'll be able to find it on the website through the website and the App Store at the end of this year. And we're specific programming for sports, combat is one of them.

And starting place, and this is the other thing people ask, is which piece would I buy? Because you're right, we have tops and shorts and calves, several arm pieces. You start with the piece that's needed for the place you're working. But generally we say a really good smart way to start if you're looking at combat and striking or kicking, the arm and the calf sleeves is a great kit. You're going to have that for years, it's the new ankle and wrist weight, and it's going to fill 90% of your needs for improving movement and speed and foot speed and endurance.

If you're into grappling, then you want to get probably really the hips are your core piece there because that's controlling everything. And then the top becomes really good for everything you're trying to do as we explained. But I generally tell people pick one product, focus on the area, get that in, try it. And we often see people start coming back for their next piece, their third piece. And every sport has kind of one, two or three key pieces that are important.

So for striking with the upper body, start with the arms. If you're Muay Thai and you really want to get those legs going, the calf sleeves. And then getting into more explosive movements, full rotation to the body, your shorts and then your top.

James de Lacey53:15

Perfect. Perfect. I'll link all that up in the description too for anyone who's interested. But thanks for coming on, Joe. I really appreciate you sharing everything to do with wearable resistance.

Joe Dolcetti53:41

Mate, I really appreciate it. And it's always nice to meet a fellow rugby who became a combat guy. Isn't that the whole space out, everyone's leaving rugby? And it was funny, I looked at all those guys, Sonny Bill and Quade Cooper and the whole gang, all boxing. And I was like I went right down that road. And it's crazy to-

Stop full contact rugby for full contact boxing, you know? And I was like, but I still prefer the boxing because mostly they're just aiming for the head. In rugby, you don't know when you're going to get hit by who.

James de Lacey54:07

That's fair enough. Awesome, thanks for coming on Joe, I appreciate it.

Joe Dolcetti54:07

Thanks so much. And keep up the great work. We love listening to your podcast.

James de Lacey54:07

Cheers.

Joe Dolcetti54:07

Cheers.