How Westside & Poliquin Principles Shaped Joanna Jędrzejczyk's MMA S&C w/ Mirek Babiarz (SSOF Ep 95)

Mirek Babiarz0:56

And after that, I actually went back to Poland and I opened up a business here in strength and conditioning, which is Strength and Conditioning Education Center. So we have a facility here in Gdynia, Poland, where we train athletes, we educate coaches, we educate athletes obviously how to train. And that's like my main thing. But on top of that, I work individually with professional athletes as well as teams, like you mentioned. I work with Poland rugby, I work with Poland weightlifting, and I usually do some individual professional athletes on the side as well.

James de Lacey3:26

Yeah, that's a lot on your plate, and we should also name drop—I'm probably going to butcher her name too—but Joanna Jędrzejczyk when you used to train her back, and we'll touch on that as well.

So for the people listening as well, or at least a lot of the fighters listening and stuff, there's a lot to go on there. But I wanted to start with some of your research that you published recently. One that was interesting to me just because I've heard and read about brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF for short, and it's probably something that's talked about or cited a lot within like the nootropic and brain supplement kind of area.

But I've never seen it in the strength training area, and I haven't actually read too much about BDNF itself. So do you want to maybe just run through kind of what BDNF is and kind of why it might be important or not important, and then maybe just some idea of how strength training affects that?

Mirek Babiarz4:20

Yeah, well, so brain-derived—it's a brain-derived protein of the nerve growth family. So it affects the brain obviously, is very critical for cognitive performance, but also affects brain plasticity in the long term. So if you want to say like one sentence what it does, so it pretty much controls the survival and maintenance of nerve cells, and this is the most important thing.

So it promotes nerve survival, neuroplasticity, nerve growth. It has impact on learning and memory, controls body weight, blood glucose, decreases food intake. There's so many benefits that it promotes in your body. And it was—research on pretty much how strength training affects BDNF is not that common. So I did a review article that I did, so I found 10 studies where they measured BDNF plasma and blood based on strength training. And I did a review article about a year and a half ago about that.

So based on what I found, if you stick to the training parameters—so what I was looking for, I was looking for studies that had defined training parameters. I wanted to see how many reps, how many sets, the percentage of intensity obviously, and rest periods, which was not that common in research. Like there's only a few studies that actually list rest periods, which is weird because that changes the whole picture of how the training affects your body and BDNF and everything.

So if you rest 30 seconds or you rest five minutes, that's a completely different picture of how the strength training affects what you're doing or what you're trying to achieve. So I was looking for sets, rest periods, and I was also looking for tempo. But none of the studies use tempo training, like you use the four-letter tempo, like a 4-0-X-0 tempo or 3-0-1-0 tempo. So like a three-second eccentric, zero seconds at the bottom, one second up, and zero seconds up top. But there's none. There's no studies listing tempo. So I was at least looking for sets and reps, intensity, and rest periods.

So based on what I found, if you stick to—to get the positive increase in BDNF—if you go above 70% of intensity, you use specific rest periods. So they can't be too short and they can't be too long. So obviously rest period should always be based on intensity. So the lower the intensity, obviously the rest periods could be shorter. The higher the intensity, the rest periods obviously have to be longer because it affects the nervous system more and more and less the muscular system.

So obviously if you do a 70% intensity, you should use about 90 to 120, maybe seconds rest periods and no more than that. But also you shouldn't be using 15 seconds rest periods because that's not enough. So if you use 70% of one rep max but used 15 seconds rest periods, that can't be 70% of one rep max. Something was wrong there. So there were some studies that were like kind of mixed up with the rest periods, like you could just tell it was impossible to keep that rest period at that intensity.

Like there's no way you could do five sets at 85% with 60 seconds rest in between. Like that's not achievable if anyone has ever strength trained before. It's not possible to do that. Maybe one set or maybe two sets, like you do like five reps at 85%, you rest 60 seconds, maybe you get another set in, but not five sets.

So I was looking for good studies obviously. So specific rest periods, intensity, and I found that full-body, multi-joint training above 70% with specific rest periods work best, and they seem to increase BDNF—the brain-derived protein of the nerve growth family—the most. But obviously there's more studies that need to be done. I'm actually doing my PhD now, and I'm looking at BDNF as well on top of increased strength. I'm comparing two different periodization models and its effect on strength, hypertrophy, and cognitive function including BDNF protein.

So I want to see what I found because I actually kept everyone above 70% for the 12 weeks, and I had a pretty good group of over 40 participants.

James de Lacey8:39

Oh wow.

Mirek Babiarz8:39

Yeah, so I want to see how it affects BDNF first of all, and second of all, which periodization style affects it better, if I can distinguish between the two. So we'll see what I come up with.

James de Lacey9:19

Interesting. Okay, so this increase in BDNF, it's interesting because I think you're probably covering this in your new research as well. Obviously you have acute and chronic responses to this, right? So typically you see, you know, people talk about increasing testosterone from weight training and that's beneficial, but you know, that's an acute increase in testosterone. Over the long term, it doesn't really mean anything in terms of gains for strength and hypertrophy. For BDNF, does that potentially fall into the same category where there's acute—

Mirek Babiarz10:22

Yes, I mean the studies are mixed. There are some studies that measured BDF straight after training, like they would do straight after, 20 minutes after and like 60 minutes after, but they didn't measure it long term. But there are other studies that didn't do straight after training, but they measured it before the start of the program, which is what I did. I measured BDF before the start of the 12-week strength program and I'll measure it at the end of the 12-week strength training program.

So I will measure like a chronic increase in BDF if that's possible. But there's definitely an acute increase in BDF after strength training, and it seems to be after heavy multi-joint strength training, especially lower body training. But it's definitely true and it's happening, but we don't know if it stays elevated for a longer period of time. So that's what I'm hoping to find out with my research, at least to some extent.

James de Lacey11:24

Does that mean that if you did strength training before a maybe cognitive demanding task, that if an increase in BDF might help you with that task afterwards, is that kind of the outcome you're kind of thinking of and looking at?

Mirek Babiarz11:24

Yeah, so what I actually also did is a cognitive test, which is a Stroop test. It's one of the cognitive tests that have been used in research for a while. So I will see if it actually translated—if somebody has an increase in BDF and the cognitive test also is better along with their strength increase, then I have all the boxes pretty much checked on what I wanted to achieve.

But I could also get a result of increased BDF but the cognitive test stays the same or gets worse. So we'll see. I'm hoping to get that going soon and start writing and analyzing the results, so it should be done this year.

James de Lacey12:24

Perfect. We'll bring you back on when that gets published too, so we can run through those results. And I know you published one—you weren't the lead author on this one, but it was still interesting to go through. I think this one was more recent: increased intake of EPA and DHA. So for people listening, fish oil would be a very simple example that contains EPA and DHA.

I think there was actually a recent paper that was published around increase—for sure, or at least EPA and DHA—for reducing muscle soreness after eccentric exercise. Maybe just run through some of your findings in here, maybe some of the practical advice that you would give to maybe an athlete or combat athlete or whoever around EPA and DHA.

Mirek Babiarz12:49

Yeah, I mean I was always fascinated with Omega-3s. Obviously I'm a big fan of Charles Poliquin, and he always used Omega-3s with his athletes. But I was just surprised why, because Australian Institute of Sport has the supplement classification list, which is a list A, B, C, and D. I don't know if you're familiar with that. So A supplements are pretty much proven, tested that they work—like creatine would be like a supplement, or beta-alanine would be a supplement. But Omega-3s are in a B group, which is proven but not entirely proven that they work.

So our goal was, or one of my colleagues asked me to help because I'm a co-author on this, to help put together like a review—like again, a review article—on Omega-3s or EPA/DHA and how it can help athletes and what benefits it has. And hopefully we actually did that. We submitted a request to Australian Institute of Sport to move Omega-3s from B group to A group. So that's currently being analyzed. Yeah, so hopefully they'll move that to A.

Because research is, I mean for me it's pretty clear, because we have research saying that it improves—like you said, it reduces soreness after strength training, it enhances resistance training-induced adaptations and improves cycling and running economy. So that's like training adaptations. But we also have the brain function adaptations, which is improved cognitive functions, improved mood, reduction in fatigue. So that's been proven as well.

And what's important for contact sports athletes—so for me would be rugby, for you maybe more like American football, like MMA. I work with MMA too. So for them too, but it's actually prevention—it prevents brain injuries and it can help brain recover after injuries. So it supports recovery periods and it shortens the recovery periods after brain injuries or any like head injuries or concussions and things like that.

So it also actually helps you maintain muscle mass after injury. So if when you get injured, athletes that would supplement with Omega-3s lost less muscle mass than those that didn't supplement with Omega-3s. So for me, I mean there's a bunch of research, there's a lot done on athletes. Hopefully more to come. But as far as dose goes, we don't even need that much, because based on the research we analyzed in the review article, it was between two to four grams of Omega-3s. So that's not a lot.

And we also, I mean obviously for brain function benefits, you need more DHA than EPA. Brain is more DHA. So if you need any brain help, you would take more DHA-based Omega-3s. So that's the only thing I would add.

James de Lacey16:13

Interesting. Okay, does the dose change based on body weight, or is it just two to four grams and that's kind of across the board?

Mirek Babiarz16:13

I didn't see it based on body weight. So it's two to four grams across the board. Usually in studies, the studies that we analyzed, not many had body weight of their subjects that they tested, which is a good question. And I would say if you do a study on Omega-3s, you probably should pick similar subjects and not somebody weighing 120 kilos and another person weighing 50 kilos and he's taking two grams and she's taking two grams.

But usually in studies, if it's a good study, they will tell you to pick subjects that are similar in experience, similar in body weight. If it comes to studies that are like nutrition studies or supplement studies, they would want people that are similar in weight, in age, and things like that. So obviously the effects could be more clear, shall I say.

James de Lacey17:20

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And I want to take this down the road of MMA strength conditioning as well, because you've been in that world. Joanna Jędrzejczyk was one of your fighters that you trained for a while, I think it was. So I don't want to give you a very general question because it might be hard to kind of figure out where to go, so we'll kind of make it more like a case study.

So when you first started working together, let's start with how did you decide what needed to be trained and developed physically for her specifically, just so we can get an idea of kind of your philosophy around training and things like that?

Mirek Babiarz19:11

I mean, I like what you said already because you said for her specifically and not for MMA specifically. And I think I used to think when I first got into strength conditioning that you need to design MMA-specific programs or rugby-specific programs, American football-specific programs, which is okay to some extent. But I always look at, and I always tell the people I'm coaching or training, that I'm not training an MMA fighter. I'm training an athlete that trains MMA or performs MMA.

So I'm looking at an athlete first and I'm trying to make that athlete better regardless of the sport, because each athlete will have different needs and different problems that need to be addressed. So I can't just take Joanna Jędrzejczyk and look at MMA demands and just train her for MMA demands. Obviously I will need to do that, but...

First of all, when I work with any athlete, I just look at them and see what problems they have. So I assess the range of motion, level of strength, level of conditioning. I look at structural balance, I look at previous injuries, I look at training history, training age, specific needs that they will have or they will tell me.

Like, I could look at the speed strength, I could look at the reactive strength, the starting strength, and see where the deficits are. So there's many different things that need to be addressed before I even get into the sport itself.

Obviously, when you look at MMA, you look at your three or five rounds of action with one minute rest in between. You have the standup fighting, you have the ground fighting, you have different type of strength that need to be addressed. So maybe with the standup it's more like a reactive strength. With the ground you need more starting strength and things like that.

So that could be addressed later, but before you address that you need to address the specific needs of athletes. And in this case it was Joanna. So what I did when I first started working with her, I did a structural balance assessment. So I did max strength, I did rotary cuff, I did a trap three test, I did chin-ups, I did lower back test, hamstrings. I just did specific muscle parts or body parts testing to see where the weaknesses are, on top of her working around her injuries.

I actually had pleasure of working—her physiotherapist is my friend, and that's how I started working with her. So we actually was like a three of us, we were like a team. So it was a strength coach, physical therapist, and it was her. So I had all her previous injury history report or any problems that she had or anything.

Because at last it doesn't have to be an injury. It could be like, "After training I feel my shoulder—my shoulder is sore, my right shoulder. I don't know why. There's nothing wrong with it." So it's not an injury really. It's like an overused thing. It could be tendonitis, it could be something developing down the line, it could be structural imbalance that you have to check for.

So I pretty much had everything from him, and all three of us or two of us work together to get her better. So I was trying to make her a better athlete first of all. And for me, my philosophy is a stronger athlete is a better athlete. So I was trying to increase her strength.

And with her being a female MMA athlete, usually not that strong. So I was trying to increase strength first because I knew if she was stronger she would be better, because she was very fast. She was very reactive, she was very dynamic, she could move, she was light on her feet, but she was not that strong. So I was trying to get her stronger, which I think helped her later on, especially in the fight—the first fight with Weili, which is one of the best fights ever.

And obviously Weili is really, really strong, like probably one of the strongest female strawweights ever, if not the strongest. And she went five rounds with her, never didn't get knocked out. Obviously she was beat up, but that's when I was—after that fight I was like, "Okay, we lost." But I, in my mind, I won.

Like, she didn't get hurt, she didn't get knocked out, she felt good, she went five rounds with no really—she didn't really get tired that much. You couldn't tell a big difference between round one and round five. And that's what I always wanted to achieve in any sport, if it's MMA or rugby.

Anyone can go for one or two rounds, but can you go five rounds at the same speed? In rugby, anyone can go for 20 minutes, 40, maybe 60. But can you go for 80? And with Poland rugby now, I'm trying to go for 80. And I think that's the difference with us this year.

Like, we actually—I'm not saying that you saw the game, you probably didn't see the game against Romania. I don't blame you. But the last—Romania scored the last try in the 33rd minute. So for 50 minutes they didn't score a try, and we scored our try in like a 78th minute. Like, we played to the end. And our best rugby is always the last 20 minutes.

So I'm always trying, with her and with all the other MMA athletes and other sports, I always tell them that everyone's going to get eventually tired. We can't get tired. And I think if you're overall stronger, you get tired less. Obviously you need conditioning, you need other things, but if you're stronger, the game or MMA fight is not going to take that much from you. You're not going to get that tired if you're strong.

If you're really weak, then each action, each strike, each ground game, each thing that's happening is going to take so much energy out of you. By the time the fifth round comes around, you're pretty much barely standing up and the punches you throw are not explosive, they can't really do any damage. So that's my take on it.

James de Lacey26:12

I'm going to come back to the conditioning part too, but it sounds like the initial assessment sounds very Poliquin-inspired. Is that where a lot of, I guess, your initial philosophy came from?

Mirek Babiarz26:12

Yeah, I think I always say I'm the mix between Charles Poliquin and Louie Simmons. So I'm the mix between those two. So I use, I say 80% is inspired by them. Obviously 20% is my own spin and other coaches that inspired me.

But I really like what Charles Poliquin did, I really like what Louie Simmons did with dynamic method, the max effort and the reverse hyper and the posterior chain and the conditioning part with sleds. I really like what Charles Poliquin did with the parameters, the variation of sets and reps and tempos and different—and wave sets and cluster sets and slow down eccentric and different pauses, and just being really simple with things and structural balance.

So I mixed all that together, pretty much those two systems and those two philosophies with my own spin on it. But I think those two would be the coaches that inspired me the most.

James de Lacey27:16

Nice. So how have you adapted, I guess, the Westside conjugate system? And maybe we can talk about how Poliquin's kind of come into that. How have you adapted those systems into your philosophy around training athletes? Let's just take, for example, Joanna's, maybe just a typical training week and maybe a typical training day, how it would look and be set up based on those, or based on your philosophy.

Mirek Babiarz27:45

So what I did is pretty much out of camp, if you can say, I used Poliquin, and in camp I used Louie Simmons. So that's what I did. So out of camp I focused on slowed eccentric, on hypertrophy strength, movement, full range of motion, structural balance, and things like that. So I focused on those things.

When we got in camp, which was 10 weeks away, for example—just depending on the fight, it could be 12, it could be eight, let's just say it was 10 to average the camp time—so that's when I jumped into a Louie Simmons philosophy.

So with MMA athletes, I knew a couple things for sure. I knew that the strength that they need to generate in a fight has to be repetitive, so it has to be repeated throughout the round and from round to round. So they can't get tired, pretty much, punching, kicking, and doing wrestling and jiu-jitsu and ground game and everything.

So what I did is I used high sets, low reps, and I used accommodated resistance. So I wanted to speed up the concentric, I wanted to even out the strength curve at the top, I wanted to use many sets because that would require repetitive strength, right? So I used 12 sets of three reps.

And I wanted to use short rests because obviously in between different combination of throwing punches and kicking and so on, you have short rest. Obviously you can't specify the rest because it could be all over the place, and you don't want to be too specific because you can't be—the only thing specific is going to be the fight itself.

But I knew I wanted to have many sets, small amount of reps, and short rest periods, and fast tempo. So I did, for example, first—10 weeks away I did 12 sets of three, like a squat with chains, with 60 seconds rest in between at a 20X0 tempo. So it's a faster eccentric, not as fast, because I wanted to increase the eccentric speed as we get closer to the fight.

So the closer we get to the fight week, the faster the eccentric is going to be. And then the movement itself is going to be faster and the time under tension is going to be shorter. So if I do three reps 10 weeks away at a 2X0 tempo, that's going to be about six, maybe seven, eight seconds of time under tension.

And a fight week, or two weeks away from the fight, I want to do a 10X0 tempo. Even sometimes I will write 00X0 tempo, so—

Pretty much drop, bounce back up, drop again, bounce back up, drop, bounce back up. So pretty much it should take you about three seconds to perform a rep, the time under tension to perform three reps.

I would structure the 10 weeks up the fight by starting with the high amount of sets, so 12, then I would just go down in sets. I would do 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, down to about three sets when we get closer to the fight. But the reps would stay the same, so the volume will go down anyway. So if I did 12 sets of three, that's 36 reps. By the time we in second week I'll do three sets of three, which is only nine reps.

And the weight would fluctuate obviously based on the—I would usually start with about 50 to 55% of weight on the bar and about 25 to 30% of accommodated resistance from chains or bands. I would do two weeks of chains, two weeks of bands, two weeks of chains, two weeks of bands, and then at the end I will decide what's happening based on what I see.

So if I need more strength, I'll probably maybe use chains or maybe strip the chains and maybe do like one day or two days of like a strength nervous system train. If I need more speed, maybe I use bands again. So it all depends how we feel. So I wouldn't plan those last two to three weeks. I leave that open based on what I see and make the decision when I get there.

So I'll drop the sets to about three. The reps will stay the same. The weight would stay pretty much constant. It would be about from adding the chains and bands would be between 75 and 85%, so it would be like a strength speed type of intensity. But it also decrease the rest periods. So I will go from 60 and I'll pretty much decrease five seconds each week or 10 seconds each week until I get to about 25, 30 seconds in between the sets.

So I do maybe three sets of three with 20 seconds rest at 85%, like two weeks before the fight. So I did that initially, but then I found out last her last few fights I was kind of losing strength in those 10 weeks because I didn't do anything above 85%.

So what I did is I actually, when I had 10 weeks, I did two weeks of chains, two weeks of bands, and I did one week when I did like a descending set of 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and I was trying to get a max rep, so 100% in intensity on that one. I wouldn't tell her because she would be scared of maxing out a month before the fight.

So I would just tell, all right, do five for first set. All right, it was easy. All right, add some weight, do four. All right, it was easy. Let's add, I do three now, do one fine.

And when we got to one, so I would max her out without her knowing we just maxed out. And based on that one RM, I could structure the next four weeks percentage-wise. It was more accurate than it was before, because the last, if I, if the last one RM I did was 12 weeks, 12 weeks ago, and then in week two before the fight, that's 10 weeks spread, plus she's losing weight now because she has to make weight, so her strength is going down. So the percentage could be too high at the end based on what you used before.

So that five weeks before the fight, I could like kind of max her out, and based on that I could use the correct percentages for chains and bands for the last four weeks of the fight. And I think that was a better approach that I found because it gave me that one week when I could do like a nervous system strength building week, plus it gave me the correct percentages for the last four weeks for bands and chains.

And obviously that was for A and B series. I would do like a squat, bench, and like a deadlift, or front squat, and like overhead press or incline press. And obviously I would do C series, D series, so obviously neck, single leg stuff, chin-ups, throws, isometrics, overcoming isometrics, and things like that. So plyometrics. So mix all that up. But the main Lou Simmons approach was the dynamic method that I've used in camp with her.

James de Lacey34:57

Gotcha. So within the week then, it'll be two to three sessions maybe, and then they were all full body sessions?

Mirek Babiarz34:57

Yeah, we usually do two sessions. So we found out that two sessions work best for her. So both full body. Obviously, you need when you do two sessions, you got to do full body, because if you do upper body and then lower body, the time between the one upper body and the next upper body, seven days, which is too long. So you got to do full body, full body both days, pretty much two times a week.

So I would pick a lower body lift, which would be like a squat with chains, an upper body lift. Let's say it was a bench, flat bench press. And the next day I would put lower body lift again, so it'd be like a deadlift, so more conventional, and like an overhead press or incline press. And then I'll just go on with the accessories, lower, upper, lower, upper, until I finish up.

James de Lacey35:46

Gotcha. And then you mentioned the overcoming isometrics and the plyometrics and things, were they coming later in the program too, or were they before the main lifts?

Mirek Babiarz35:46

Yeah, if I do plyo's or Olympic lifts, I would do it before. So always, if you do obviously the hierarchy of lifts, you have to start with the fastest lift first. So plyometrics and Olympic lifts would be faster than squats, even with chains and bands, which are pretty fast. So you start with those first to warm up, kind of, which is good.

I always, we always did some kind of jump in warmup or throws. So either jump and throw, or jump and throw together in like a superset fashion for the warmup, before we got into the A series, which would be a squat, deadlift, press, bench press, whatever, with bands or chains. And then after that, it will be iso's, single leg stuff, neck, core, and things like that. So more like isometrics and single legs, single limb stuff, and then accessories for the core, for the neck, and things like that.

James de Lacey36:42

Perfect. And then regarding, before I move on to the conditioning as well, regarding the strength training, so obviously mentioned Westside's a big influence on your training philosophy, and obviously the squat, bench, did those lifts being in there definitely, I guess you'd say, coincides with that. Are you ever thinking about, I guess, quote-unquote specificity or transfer to MMA, or maybe exercises that are seen or maybe deemed more quote-unquote specific, or you just like, okay, we're just going to get strong in these basic lifts and that's all that matters?

Mirek Babiarz37:11

I was always intrigued by Lou trying all that stuff, because it kind of didn't go hand in hand with what [Poliquin] used to always say. Like [Poliquin] was saying you shouldn't be specific. Training is not specific and it shouldn't be. And Lou would do specific movements like adding weight to specific sporting movements, like punching with weight and things like that. Like I'm not a big fan of that.

I don't, I think you shouldn't add weight to specific athletic movements, because those movements are specifically designed to use by that athlete, either in a cage or rugby or whatever. And they're very specific, so it's a very short margin between hitting somebody in a nose and not hitting somebody in a nose. It could be this much. So I don't want to mess up a movement pattern by punching with weight or punching with band and things like that, because obviously there's things that can happen. You can extend the elbow too far, can not finish up the punch and things like that.

I think you're teaching your brain the incorrect sequence of firing and incorrect coordination motor patterns when you do that. So I'm more into like a traditional strength training, weightlifting. And obviously you can, you can, you can, in my opinion, you can do anything you want to do with an athlete based on just manipulating the training parameters: sets, reps, tempo, rest periods, picking the correct speed of exercises—so plyometrics, weightlifting, accommodated resistance—correct order of those exercises, how you put them into plan, obviously the intensity that you're working in.

So there's so many things you can do before you can copy the movements from the sport into the weight room. Like, if you want, the only thing specific about the sport is the sport itself. So if you want to be specific, like you should just, like, what if—like I always laugh at those specific coaches that say you should be specific in the weight room. Like if you want to be specific, just put, strap weights to your ankles and strap weights to your arms and just play your sport with that.

Like if that was the best case scenario, if that was the best approach, then that would be, it would be easy. You just, I don't know, you just run. You just run with a barbell. Like if you're a track athlete, you just put a barbell on your back and just freaking run with, like, and that would give you results. But it doesn't. It actually overloads the same movement patterns. It creates more problems because obviously athletes will have problems, like Joanna would have, around like—

Rounded shoulders. She would have a really tight round thoracic spine which give her pain in her shoulders. So if I, for example, gave her dumbbell and she would punch with those, it would just make those problems worse. So I wouldn't want to do that. I was trying to work the opposite muscles, the antagonist muscles, trying to keep the structural balance so she's not in pain. Because if she's in pain and I'm adding to her pain, that's I'm not increasing performance obviously.

So I don't think you should really do that because the sport itself is so damaging to the athlete. If you add weight to those movements, it could do more damage than good.

James de Lacey40:09

Yeah, for sure. And this is a non-MMA question, but I know Westside they went down the rabbit hole of adding bands for Olympic, specifically for Olympic weightlifting performance. I want to know your take on that. Because I know obviously you're influenced by Westside, so I want to see if that's something that you also agree with, don't agree with, or whatever your thoughts are on it.

Mirek Babiarz41:05

I kind of like that. I like it for couple of reasons. For, I think it could be helpful, maybe not for a snatch, because the range of motion and the specificity of movement is so specific and you have to be so good at that movement. The band could actually mess up the movement pattern.

But with the clean, which is more like a muscle, more like a strength lift than a snatch, which is like a fast explosive lift, it could help. I think adding bands for several reasons. So bands will help you obviously triple extend more. So for people that, for athletes—I don't know about weightlifters, but for athletes. But actually I actually did ask the head weightlifting coach for Poland if he ever saw that and he ever tried it. He never tried it, but he's open to trying it. So I might be trying it in the near future. So I will record it and send it to you.

James de Lacey41:32

Yes, please.

Mirek Babiarz42:05

Anyway, so the band, obviously the more the band stretches, the more tension it has. So if somebody doesn't triple extend or doesn't extend their hips or knees to full out when you're doing a second pull position, the bands could help with that because they will bring, trying to pull the bar down more. So now you have to exert more force. So when taking off the bands after that, should help you extend better and especially with the second pull. So you get better triple extension, better hip extension, knee extension.

Second of all, which I think is a better, actually a better even benefit of adding band, is actually getting under the bar faster. Because actually when you have the bands attached, you triple extend, the bar gets to, I don't know, your sternum, and it starts dropping down. With the bands, the bands will pull the bar down faster than the bar itself would fall down.

So actually the bands increase gravity. So Louie Simmons always said the only thing that increases gravity speed is our bands. So the bar will start coming down faster, so now you have to get under the bar faster than normal. So for people that have problems of getting under the bar fast enough, that could be a helpful thing.

And with working with Polish weightlifting now, there's, I see many athletes—some of them don't have good triple extension, but they are very fast to get under a bar. And some of them have good triple extension, but because they're not getting under the bar that fast and they have to triple extend, so they have to get the bar as high as they can so they can get under it.

But there's this one guy that's, he's 36 now, and he triple extends for clean and maybe the bar gets to his belly button. That's as high as it gets. And he just gets under it so fast. He drops into full squat. It's like a split second. It's unbelievable. As long as he moves it this much from triple extension, goes up this much, he gets under it.

So if you get someone like that, then that's fine. I mean, bands probably don't need to be used. But if somebody has problems of triple extension, they have problems of getting under the bar, I think the bands could be potentially helpful.

James de Lacey44:33

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Yeah. And Polish weightlifting, I used to watch Klokov. Is that how you say his name?

Mirek Babiarz45:27

Yeah, Klokov.

James de Lacey45:27

I used to watch the out of those Poland training videos, man. That was YouTube golden era for lifting back in those days. Do you know Joel Smith from Just Fly Sports?

Mirek Babiarz45:55

Yep. He just, his last Instagram post actually, he posted Polish weightlifting training from the '70s. It's black and white. Yeah, go on his, go on his Instagram. It's there.

So it's funny, because if you go on, if you go on YouTube, you type in Polish weightlifting 1970 whatever, you have this black and white video that's like an hour long of just them doing whole bunch of GPP stuff, just running in the woods, squatting with logs and things like that, doing splits, doing different jumps and gymnastic things. So it was, it's crazy. I mean, I think they were much more athletic back then than they are now, for sure.

James de Lacey46:22

Yeah. And it's funny because my wife was on the international weightlifting circuit and stuff like that. So we did a lot of traveling around different places. And when she was training, doing her Olympic prep in Romania, when we were in Romania, there's, as you mentioned, you talk about a lot of that GPP, there was pretty much none that she would do. The off-season would be literally just pulls and squats, pulls and squats multiple times a week, multiple times a day.

And it was there wasn't much else. Then once you got into close to competition, then it's more of the classical lifts, etc. But there was no, it wasn't much outside of that other than maybe doing some overhead presses and walking with the bar or something like that. So yeah, the GPP stuff is interesting.

Mirek Babiarz47:14

Yeah, there's, I mean, there's so many different approaches now to weightlifting. Obviously, a lot of the methodology from weightlifting comes from the time where obviously drugs were allowed. So I'm not afraid to say that.

So those guys could take a lot of more damage and they could train five times a day. With these athletes now and these weightlifters, you can't do that. With them being clean now, they can barely—we actually thinking about some of them just training once a day. When we train, our split throughout the week is Monday you train twice, Wednesday you train twice, and Friday you train twice.

And then Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday you train once. And for some of them that's a lot, and that's the max that they could do. There is no way they could do more. And that's two, three exercises maybe, plus some one or two accessory movements that I give them to do.

But we really have to be careful with them not to overtrain them. So we actually just designed for the past year, that's what we've been doing with the head coach, designed the whole new periodization model for them, which is more undulating. So they have the specific periods when they have deload and lower intensities. Because before it was just linear, and then they start dropping because they couldn't keep up the intensity.

So now it's better because they have the deload periods, and they seem to be peaking at the right time. So we have the European championships in two weeks, and they seem to be in the best shape of their life. So we'll see.

James de Lacey49:04

Nice. We hopefully, we'll tune in. We typically watch most of the weightlifting events and things like that. So hopefully we can tune into to that. But I want to come back to MMA conditioning before we finish off this podcast. And I know it's late for you, so, obviously we mentioned around strength training, you have two sessions a week. Where is conditioning fit into this? How do you decide what you're going to do? We'll go from—

Mirek Babiarz49:24

Obviously with conditioning it all depends what she does in her MMA. With the classic approach, what I do is obviously look at the Energy System training. So when you have the energy systems, you have the phosphagen system, the lactic, and the oxidative system. So you can split those three systems into a capacity and the strength of the system. If you have the phosphagen strength, which would be up to maybe up to 10 seconds of work, and the capacity of that system is up to 20 seconds of work.

So when designing conditioning programs for any athlete, pretty much you want to actually start opposite of what everyone is doing. Everyone is always starting from long distance and then gradually getting shorter and shorter and shorter and increasing the intensity. But that's all you're doing is pretty much teaching an athlete how to be slow. With athletes, it's much much better to start with short distance maximal intensity and gradually increase the distance.

So what I did with her, we started with short sprints, 5 seconds, 7 seconds, 8 seconds, and you want full recovery on that. So the that would be a minimum 1 to 6 ratio. Even six would be the minimum, but you can go up to 1 to 20 ratio. It depends on how she's recovering. So we start with short sprints and we gradually increase. So I do two weeks in one system, two weeks in another.

So I do strength of phosphagen system, capacity of phosphagen system, strength of the glycolytic system, capacity of glycolytic system. So I would structure those with the dynamic method. So I do two weeks, two weeks, two weeks, and two weeks and start eight weeks away. And at the end, the last two weeks, I will see how she feels and what she needs. If she gets tired fast or if she can't go on for a long time, maybe in that week I will use a specific system that I feel that she would need the most, or an athlete would need the most.

But with her, we did two days of strength training and two days of additional Energy System interval training on top of her all her MMA training.

James de Lacey51:27

So how did the rest periods change then as you went through those blocks of two weeks? You mentioned 1 to 6 would be the minimum work to rest initially. Did that change at all?

Mirek Babiarz51:54

Yeah, so the rest periods, you can do the nervous system recovery or the muscular recovery. So the nervous system recovery would be the longer ratio, which would be 1 to 20. If she's in great shape, she doesn't need that much. She would need more like a 1 to 6. 1 to 6 ratio would be a muscular system recovery. So the way your muscles recover and your nervous system recovers is always different because your nervous system recovers five times, at least five times slower than your muscular system.

But if she's in good shape, we can lower the ratio of the nervous system recovery. So the shorter the work time, the higher the ratio of work to rest. So if I have the phosphagen strength system, would be 1 to 6, then moving on to a capacity system of the phosphagen Energy System will be 1 to 5 ratio, then glycolytic, 1 to 3, then 1 to 2.

Because obviously the longer the work time, the shorter, the smaller the ratio. So if you run for 30 seconds, you don't need to now rest 5 minutes. You can rest a minute and a half or two minutes and then try and repeat that again. But the ratio would drop and be based on how she's recovering.

So what I did, actually, instead of the distance, I would give her the time. Let's say run for 5 seconds and see how much distance can she cover in 5 seconds. And I want her to repeat the same distance in each set. If she's dropping, then I could increase the ratio a little bit. If I'm at the top of that ratio and she's still dropping, then I'm finishing a workout pretty much, because it's turning into endurance training.

So if she can keep the same distance and in the same time at the correct ratio, I could do the required amount of reps. But I never had an exact amount of reps because it was based on how she's dropping. If she's dropped more than 10%, more than 10% tells me that she's not recovering and then it should be finished for the day.

James de Lacey53:57

Gotcha. And that would be quote unquote in-camp conditioning. So when you're out of camp but no fight coming up, how does that change or differ, or does it at all?

Mirek Babiarz54:23

Yeah, out of camp I do one of my favorite things, which is modified strongman training. And obviously I took that from Poliquin. I mean, Louis Simmons did some of that with the sled, but Poliquin has a book on that and I fell in love with that a long time ago. So I do modified strongman training and you can pretty much program that based on Energy Systems as well. So you can have 5 second work ratio, 1 to 6 work ratio for the phosphagen system, and so on. So you can go through all the Energy Systems doing the strongman training.

So I have the sleds, I have the yoke, I have the farmers handles, and I'll do different things with that. So out of camp I do that because she's not sparring that much. When she gets to spar, then the contact is just too much to do the strongman training. So we would move on to interval running or air bike or assault bike training and we just leave the modified strongman training.

So out of camp I did once a week at least, I did strongman training, which I love. I do the same thing I do with rugby. Out of season offseason summer, we do strongman all day. Obviously when they're in season, the contact is just too much for them to do that. They have enough of that, so I don't do that. But it's my favorite conditioning tool, will be modified strongman training for sure.

James de Lacey55:43

What would be an example circuit you would do then with the modified strongman?

Mirek Babiarz55:43

So for example, you have the art of picking the correct exercises in the correct order. So the first exercise should always be either the fastest or the heaviest exercise. So I don't know if you do a tire flip in the beginning or you do some kind of lift, you do a push press with heavy, with the fat grip dumbbells. So that would be the first.

So with her, I do a dumbbell fat grip push press. So you have the required, let's say you work for 10 seconds, you try and get as many reps as you can, 10 seconds. And then you jump into a carry. So the next one would be a carry. So you can carry yoke, you can carry farmers, you can do farmers walk, you can do a Zercher carry. So one of those.

So I love farmers walks, I love Zercher walks, and I love yoke walks. So one of those three is fine with me. So I usually do that in the second station or A2 exercise. And I usually finish up, you either have to push a sled or pull it backwards or drag it backwards.

So pushing would be easier or pulling would be easier when you walk forward. When you drag it backwards, that would pretty much be the last exercise. Because after you do that, the quads would just pretty much not comply with you anymore and pretty much just fall down. So I either push first and then I pull or drag last. So dragging backwards would be the last exercise I would do.

James de Lacey57:00

Awesome, awesome. I hope that's a lot of practical stuff for the listeners to go through as well. But I'm just going to be cognizant of your time there, Mirek. It's late for you there. So where can people find you and follow you and keep up with what you're doing?

Mirek Babiarz57:28

I'm pretty much all over social media, well all over Facebook and Instagram. I'm not on TikTok, I'm not on Twitter or X. So I think Instagram would be the best way to see what I'm up to and what I'm doing. I think I'm on and I'm posting, I post regular stuff on that.

So it's my first name, which is Mirek, M-I-R-E-K, and my last name is Babiarz, B-A-B-I-A-R-Z. So Mirek Babiarz, you can message me on Instagram, I'm sure to respond. You can also email me, it's my first and last name, Mirek Babiarz, M-I-R-E-K B-A-B-I-A-R-Z 11@gmail.com.

James de Lacey57:53

I'll link those up in the description for the listeners who are listening to this, the recorded version. But thanks for coming on, Mirek. I appreciate it.

Mirek Babiarz58:26

Thank you very much. It was great.