Developing Unlimited Work Capacity By Training Through The Intensity Spectrum w/ Dan Howells (SSOF Ep 73)

Dan Howells2:25

Yeah, I think the first thing is we've got a can of worms open, haven't we, with the phrase or term work capacity. It's not actually a phrase or term I would use that often. And I think we've got the term work capacity, conditioning, and energy systems or energy system development used interchangeably, and I actually think they probably mean different things.

If we move work capacity for the moment, which is essentially an ability to tolerate a work demand of a certain task, right? Do I have the ability to match that, exceed that, or am I undercooked in that ability? But I think we use interchangeably the phrase conditioning and energy system development. I think it means different things personally.

And that is that if we're looking at energy system development, it's very pure in nature. We're looking to specifically target specific adaptations in a hierarchy of need or a priority sense. We're either looking at specific central adaptation, specific peripheral adaptation, or a buffering capability or neuromuscular capability, et cetera. So that for me is that.

And I think conditioning dilutes that. I think we think about conditioning and we go, right, we're going to condition for the sport, rugby, or we're going to condition for a fight-type sport. And that's where people start to use the sport to solve that problem. And therefore it covers a lot of bases, but it might not improve, I guess, the work capacity side of things because it's not specific enough.

And I use an example of like tempo runs, for example, in rugby, where people are using that to develop energy systems, but I actually believe that's just a conditioning tool to condition for a specific task of running, right? There are trade-offs for it in other ways physiologically, but I don't believe it's changing the pure energy system components that we can train in other ways.

So it's understanding, am I looking for an energy system development adaptation, or am I doing something that helps me tolerate the demands of a task better? And both those are very applicable methods. It's just right strategy, right time course.

James de Lacey4:34

And so I would see work capacity as an overarching phrase that encompasses those two contrasting views, I guess?

Dan Howells4:34

Gotcha. So it's basically conditioning plus or times energy system development equals work capacity?

James de Lacey4:34

Yeah, I think so, yeah.

Dan Howells4:34

And it's a, yeah, I'm just talking out loud here and sharing thoughts with you, but that's something I've been thinking about the last 12 months is when people are using these phrases interchangeably and I'm looking at the methods they might use for conditioning. And it might be circuit-based work, and I'm like, okay, there's a number of things that could be happening here. And that's the fact that they could be happening, therefore we have a bandwidth of potential variation in the outcomes here.

And small-sided games is probably a prime example of that in the rugby football sense, that we have to accept there a huge bandwidth of not error, or actual bandwidth of adaptations, because different people are going to be solving that problem in different ways. And it's not pure enough for an energy system adaptation in my view.

James de Lacey6:09

Yeah, I've talked on the podcast previously as well. I kind of look at it, you're almost taking an energy system approach and/or you're taking a work or output approach. You're either trying to hit certain outputs within certain work-rest ratios, or you're looking to sit in these specific kind of set-rep ranges or time-intensity ranges to target specific adaptations for whatever you're doing.

You can kind of, but I guess the trick is how do you balance that then? You obviously mentioned different times you're doing different things, so you want to maybe dive into that a little?

Dan Howells6:37

Yeah, I mean, just even hearing you talk there I'm like, yeah, exactly that. It would be, I think, far out from competition or far out from the need to perform you could probably go down this very specific adaptation for specific outcome. But that is going to affect the sporting outcome even indirectly.

So if we look at aerobic capacity, for example, and the adaptive changes that happen maybe at the heart level, right, to improve stroke volume and improve cardiac output, great. That's not necessarily going to help the performance of a fighter in the moment in terms of transitioning or transforming chemical energy, right? It's going to potentially enable them to recover quicker. So it's an indirect benefit to that part within the performance of that task.

So those things for me would come further out from competition. And exactly as you said there around that work capacity work being, I think that's the realization of the qualities you've previously developed. It's using them in the sport-specific way because we have to accept there's a decision-making and cognition component that comes probably within work capacity and choosing the right intent or the right pacing strategy in a certain task to influence performance.

So for me it would be, in terms of balance, it would be further out from competition, building foundations with energy system development focuses in specific areas, understanding what underpins the work capacity tasks of the sport, and then using more work capacity tasks or conditioning tools to solve that problem of performing the sport itself.

James de Lacey7:34

Under duress. Yeah, I think important as well with especially with high level athletes, obviously they know the sport so well, they don't have to expend as much energy to do the task that maybe others would. They're always in certain positions easier, they got timing down, et cetera. So developing that or going after some of those adaptations earlier is going to be beneficial for them because they're probably not getting so much through what we would call that specific, maybe work output or work capacity training.

Dan Howells8:41

Yeah, I think so. I think that there's an intelligence with elite athletes, isn't there, that comes from time and years spent in the sport. But we know what we know about physiology and that foundational physical qualities can be retained quite easily once they've been developed. And I think that's the one thing you see with elite athletes is their ability to return to previous levels after a window of rest or an ability to get to where they were quicker than the novice athlete. And I think that's the same for your strength and power qualities as well.

I look at the Rugby Sevens cohort I worked with and we had to split our cohort between our development athletes and our what we call our elite athletes. Because our elite athletes would hold their adaptive gains throughout the year with ups and downs in terms of intensive volume for competition and whatnot. But if we had an academy player come into that high level schedule, they would decondition quite quickly. And so, yeah, those elements need to come into it as well, very much years in service. What's that training age? How much...

How many years in service have they have? Yeah, actually I just realized now, what year did you finish with the Great Britain sevens? So England sevens I ran 2014 through middle of 2018, end of that season beginning when they went to the World Cup in San Francisco. And then in the middle of that we did GB for 10 with three month period leading up to Rio. And then yeah, so that was my main stint. And then I came back and did the Tokyo Olympics with GB 2020.

James de Lacey10:12

I wonder if we crossed paths because I can't remember where we were now. It might have been because I was with Romania sevens and I can't remember which tournament it was, but England sevens was literally in the rooms next to where I was. So we might have made cross a European tournament maybe?

Dan Howells10:40

Yeah, it was a Europe, it was a European Grand Prix tournament. It might have been, no I can't remember now. It was, I don't think it was, it might have been Amsterdam, no, kind of one of those. We might have actually just crossed paths in the, not real. The interesting thing about the GB Olympics in that period was that we had two teams in rugby Europe. So we had GB two because we were going through selection. So I wondered if it'd been that year, but it sounds like it was a year that England run the circuit.

James de Lacey11:06

Yeah, we would have been in breathing distance with one another, I'm sure.

Dan Howells11:06

Yeah, probably.

James de Lacey11:06

But okay, so we talked about the Energy System development, we talked about you mentioned obviously central adaptations, peripheral adaptations, buffering capacity, all these kind of things. So do you have any go-to methodology protocols that you like to go to for developing some of these adaptations? Because I'm assuming regardless of the sport, these things are developed through specific intensities, etc., and it's not related to the sport itself.

Dan Howells11:32

Yeah. So a number of the classic things. And I guess I've just got, I believe I've got good clarity on how I go about it. And that is I specifically work in a work to rest manner, a ratio manner, and a time based manner. Because otherwise we've got, especially in team sport athletes, right, if I'm working with an equals one, then I could use distance based equivalence.

But the moment you start getting into distance based equivalence, you've got a bit of a migration to the mean in a large group where the fast people will pace themselves a little bit. The guys who are at the back are going to be pushing themselves quite hard. And suddenly you get again the same issues that you get with small sided games, which is high variation in work intensity.

So what I tend to do is work on a specific work to rest ratio and understand how that, basically like a force velocity curve for Energy Systems, right? Much like we have strength and power for velocity curve, we've got a time and intensity curve for energy systems. And so my longer steady state stuff is going to be continuous. There is no rest ratio there. It's continuous work in this classic Zone 2, which is popularized at the moment, but has been around for a number of years. And that influenced me back in 2014-15 when we had a 16-week preseason with the rugby sevens group.

We did a 4-week block of exclusively aerobic work where we did 10-minute pieces on bikes, rowers, and then ran around the Rugby field and did that in 10-minute pieces for up to 60 minutes with music and heart rate monitors and just cap their pace or cap their intensity. And the benefits in the next block were significant in recovery perceptually and performance-wise, and we can probably talk about that down the line.

And then if we've got aerobic power work, then I'm looking to maximize my intensity above that classic 70-75% heart rate, if I'm measuring the output. But I'm working in the one to six minute range, six minute with my guys that can tolerate that kind of work, if not one to four, on a ratio of two to one work to rest. So might be, okay, two minutes on, one minute off.

Then we get into what I call the mixed Energy System elements, where we look at traditionally people using methods like MAS prescription and tempo, right? So your MAS are classically going to be that one to one or through to two, or two to one through to one to one. So maybe 30 on, 15 off, 20 on, 10 off, and 15 on, 15 off, type classic modalities.

You can see how these ratios are graduating down to more rest or up to more rest. And then you move to your tempo work, which would be a bit more of a one to four ratio for me. And then we get into our B Sprint work, and we get into then our Sprint work of one to six to eight and one to 10 respectively.

And so it's a really nice way to organize your thoughts about the types of stimulus you're putting into the body, but also the types of adaptation. We go back to the early start, the continuum and continuous work, we know that's going to be central cardiac in nature and stroke volume orientated, for example. Whereas when we get to aerobic power and that 2 to 1 work to rest ratio, 1 to 6 minute type work, we know we're getting a little bit more peripheral work and getting mitochondrial enzymatic changes as opposed to the proliferation and biogenesis of mitochondria that we get in the steady state work.

So it's all about knowing exactly what you're trying to get in my opinion, and training for that in a pure sense. Now this, where I talked about that mixed Energy System in that middle of that continuum, is also where I see sport coming into play. So our MAS is a method, is a measure not a method, remember. So again, another method is to use small sided games if you want to in there.

But for every method that moves you further away from a guaranteed stimulus, you have to accept there's going to be a larger of people that don't get that stimulus that you want. And then it's a trade-off between the technical tactical side of things versus the physiology. And that's fine, that has its place.

So yeah, so I work on that kind of spectrum of a continuum of understanding what the work to rest ratios are going to elicit, and it helps organize your thoughts. I stepped into a world like baseball that were traditionally running drills, poles from one side of the field to the other, and it would be 10 poles with 30, on the minute every minute.

But you'd have guys completing it in 25 seconds and some guys completing it in 40, yet it was programmed as if it was the same thing because it was an exercise as opposed to an adaptation. So really important to understand what you're trying to get from the stimulus you're putting into the body from an output and adaptation point of view.

James de Lacey16:45

Nice then. And you mentioned in the beginning, for example, you did like a four-week block purely focusing on the steady state, looking for central adaptations. During that time, will you still covering say just pure out-and-out speed power work in that time as well?

Dan Howells17:11

So I really love to polarize the work, right? And that's another principle. So we're laying down like key principles around Energy System development for me. It's to work to a work to rest ratio using duration based prescription. Next principle is to polarize your work for pure Energy System development. So what is always in effect and always there on one end of the spectrum is our speed work. From an on and off energetics point view, completely there all the time is our speed work. How we're training that is going to differ.

So clearly coming in from an off-season, we're going to be working much more on the technical side of running and we're going to reintroduce change direction classically and deceleration. And we're going to expose people to small volumes of speed exposure and we're going to build that over time progressively, whilst currently at the right times of the week stressing the aerobic side of things within the training schedule.

And so yeah, it was there. And then as we work through our 16 weeks, we move and shift the bias and move it closer and less polarized towards speed. So we'd move into aerobic power and our classic what I'd call high intensity interval training, this mixed Energy System side of things as well. And then the sport, speed was, is for rugby specifically, Sprint work is always present because it features as a task within the sport itself, right? But with boxing, for example, or fighting, then the equivalent there might be just power, power for example, I don't know.

So yeah, so it was really layered. And we were fortunate like 16 weeks is untraditional, right? It was between two, it was between Commonwealth and Olympic. So there was an early Commonwealth and a late start to the World Series. So it just gave us this extended period of time. And what was really interesting for me was that in that time I also characterized the Energy System profiles of players.

So we did their max velocity, their average flying max velocity over 6 by 30 meter or 40 meter Sprints, so you get that classic repeat Sprint profile. We did 100 meter efforts, we did 400 meter, 1200, and we did a yo-yo intermittent recovery 2. And so what I did was then converted everybody's performance in those tasks to meters per second, and you had a nice Energy System profile. And what we were seeing

The differentiating factor from our fast players - we have classic players at that notch, the same speed, 9.5 plus meters per second, on whatever unit you're using, is relatively fast or world-class fast for sevens. And then we see the ability to repeat that very different between two people with the same max output speeds. So for me, that's where work capacity comes in: what's my ability to utilize my physical qualities in a task that's specific to the sport?

We were seeing guys who had massive fatigue profiles but had the same initial sprint themselves. And what we were seeing was that the individuals that could retain repeat sprint performance were the ones with the greater aerobic engines, greater aerobic performances. So for me, when I started doing that, I was like, okay, there's more merit in this than probably team sports give credit to.

And I think if you look at the history of team sports, they used to do it a lot. They used to spend a lot of time running and doing aerobic work anyway, and then it died. We sort of became an anti-performance model by comparison, maybe, and trained out of it a bit. But that gave me enough insight to go, there's merit in this, and let's go and test that curiosity. And so that's what I did.

After that, I wasn't expecting to see the benefits so quickly. We did the four weeks and then we moved into, classically, our aerobic power work and tempo work at that point. And I was just seeing guys recover far quicker on the tempo work and the Mateosas time methods as well - they just recovered so much quicker and it was a breeze. So we could just notch the volume up then.

The issue became accumulation of high-speed running volume that they hadn't been. So it was just different problems to navigate. But it was really cool to see the reps of efforts, the heart rate returning quite quickly, just from that four-week dose of dedicated time spent on that aerobic capacity side of things.

James de Lacey21:50

How much would you put down - okay, that's probably not a question that can be answered - but in terms of guys that maybe have the same speed profiles, or maybe really fast guys but have very poor recovery with that, how much would you put down to potentially fiber type down there? Like your fast-twitch, twitchy guys maybe can do that, but they just cannot recover as quick. Are you then pushing them towards that aerobic side to try to develop that, just without trying to hinder that speed?

Dan Howells22:19

I think then you've got to think about the dynamic correspondence and cost, right? Everyone will know the Dan Norton of this world in sevens, especially, and another guy like Tom Bowen - two English wingers, fantastic guys, both very exceptional speed. And pretty much like-for-like on top speed, how they get there is a little bit different, but in terms of ability to generate 10 meters per second, they're both there.

But very different, especially in this particular year we're talking about, very different in their ability to reproduce that effort. And you'll know in sevens that you have 14-minute players and you have ones that aren't 14-minute players, and they gas out. And the moment people gas out is because the work capacity exceeds their ability to recover within it before they have to go again. And that was the Dan versus Tom situation.

So we spent time on something like Tom's aerobic development. And there's this question, isn't there? If you move somebody from a 10 to a 9.8 meters per second, right, they get slower, people perceive that as being sub-performance impact, like anti-performance. But what if he was a 10, 9.6, 9.5, 9.2, 9, 8.5 profile across six sprints, and you put him to be a 9.8 to 9.6 for the six repeat sprints?

Arguably that's a performance enhancement because we're not dealing with track sprinters where they've got one rep, one effort. We've got - and we know in rugby sevens that it's not the first minute of the game that games are won. It'll be who comes out on top under fatigue, like who has the greater work capacity.

So I personally felt there was a benefit to spending that time on that work. However, I was aware of the cost if we made it mechanistically the same as the task itself. So we did a lot of it off feet. We took a lot of it off feet so that we weren't creating a sort of fatigue profile from running, basically. So I think it's just about systematically planning that stuff and making sure that you've got this concurrent training effect. But I haven't seen those guys get slower from it, to be honest.

James de Lacey24:58

Did you play around at all with Alex Natera's high-volume power training stuff to develop work capacity?

Dan Howells24:58

No, and it was something I thought about. But, in any situation you've got cultural things to manage. And as a program, really established World Series players, and we also had an academy structure, and there was just things that we were doing in our development of, I guess, in that work capacity sense as well with the coaches.

We did a lot of what we call transference work. So we would do some contrasting work, like we might do a strength-speed orientated lift like a heavy trap bar pull or heavy trap bar jump into some plyometrics, and then we would get into some stuff on the turf - because we had a gym that had turf in it as well - and do some clear-out work. So we were looking to train those qualities and express those qualities.

And so at that time frame, I specifically remember thinking, is this a place for this? And the coaches wanting to do some what we call rugby transfer work in the gym at certain times of the week, so we replaced it with that instead - completely different type of stimulus, but for the execution of power within the task itself, sports-specific task. So, no. What about yourself?

James de Lacey25:57

I used it myself, I think last year. I was like, okay, I'll try that for a while. Did they kick my ass? That was like one of the hardest things I've done, hardest things I've done. Like doing 15 reps, like five-rep clusters with five-second rest in the beginning, and then working towards like 12-rep sets. Dude, I was...

I was trying to measure just, I wanted to see changes in power, velocity, etc., but the device I was using, instead of measuring just the jump itself, the concentric portion of it, it was picking up the dip and drive as well. Like that changes the peak velocity and stuff like that.

So I had no real change on the data. I was like, ah, I did all that, I wasted my time for four weeks. I was like, hmm, eventually, maybe when I upgrade to a different device, I'll give it a go again. But yeah, I think there's definitely a cost to that type of work.

Dan Howells26:49

What we did do, though, however, which might be slightly comparable, is we used repeat sprint profiles in the two to three weeks prior to competition. So when we know there are some benefits to have really, really super-maximal high-intensity work, right? And the podcast that connected me to you was the one with Andrew Asher. I know you guys talked recently.

And he - that was a great podcast because it did make me think about physiology at the muscular level and the ability to turn, create chemical energy for return performance or such. So that high-intensity profile that he's talking about was stuff that we were doing very close to competition before a taper. But we were doing it very minimally, and it just seemed to have really good bang for buck, perceptually. I couldn't measure it, but in terms of tolerance of activity, intent, and ability to push themselves and work through, as rugby sevens work through, a fatigue perception of fatigue was quite high.

And the reason I went down that route was because of the residuals. Those changes that you make are relatively short-lived from that super-maximal work. So we did like two to seven reps of five to six seconds work with 15 to 20, 24 seconds off, depending on what we were doing, two sets. And it would be done on certain days.

And the reason that I did that was because we were moving to a model within the sport that suddenly didn't give us the stimulus I needed. It didn't guarantee enough for me in that regard. So when we get to these sort of two, three weeks out from competition, we're doing a lot more of the technical-tactical work, right? We're crossing the T's and dotting the I's with combinations and executions. And the coaches naturally want to deconstruct some of the work a little bit, and therefore the ratio of rest extends.

So suddenly you're getting into a period where you could go two to three weeks where you haven't got the volume of work you need in certain zones or certain levels of intensity. So that's why I did that. And when I listened to Andrew's discussion and what he was talking about was happening in their research, I was like, okay, that was an intuitive decision, but it sounds like that would have been replicative of some of the stuff he's done. And that doesn't surprise me that we seemed to still perform.

Well, people in the years we didn't do that versus did, they felt much better going into competition. So yeah, I know Andrew's episodes. It's very popular on here and had him on twice. And yeah, super interesting stuff, opened my eyes to a lot of the high-intensity work.

I think the biggest thing I'm still trying to not wrap my head around but kind of implement into this philosophy of conditioning is the idea typically you're doing high-intensity work. Okay, aerobic or anaerobic capacity kind of caps out pretty early. Anaerobic, I guess, in adaptations in terms of power output capacity, for example, in a Wingate might cap out or in terms of lactate profiles. But then from their research, hey, these things might cap out, but the actual performance keeps improving even afterwards. So you're looking at time to exhaustion tests improving even though these quote-unquote energy system markers aren't.

So it's like, okay, so these things might not be improving, but you're improving the ability or the muscle ability to resist fatigue through doing long periods of high-intensity Sprints. And yeah, that's kind of opened my eyes to being like, okay, maybe you don't have to just stick with—but, depending on the athlete and all sorts of stuff like that—but maybe you don't have to stick with just two, three weeks of high-intensity.

Maybe you can go longer stretches, especially if athletes don't have, I guess, a power game or and they're more like workhorse style athletes. Specifically, because they can tolerate that kind of work too and probably need it.

James de Lacey31:10

Yeah, what I really liked about what that made me think about was you could create these central adaptations that provide you with the infrastructure to bio-oxidize into a muscle and convert to chemical energy. Great. But it doesn't matter if you can't extract it.

And that's the sort of like, you can work this high-intensity stuff. I think would be really cool for people to start thinking about is I'm building a foundation to start with, but that's not the job done. That's why we have running economy, I guess, as an example of VO2 is not determinant of outcome for sports. It's how much of that VO2 you can potentially use.

And if you look at some of the work of, I can't remember who it was now, it might be Sanford, but the ratio basically between different athletes and how you could prescribe certain energy system work based on their results. I'm going to have to think about what that was. Got a mind blank on it.

But yeah, that podcast he did with Andrew was cool because it just made me think about, okay, that makes sense to some of the things I've done and seen intuitively. And so it's got me thinking about, I've got actually a meeting this afternoon with a NIRS device company just because I want to have a play around with some of this stuff and have a little look at what impact it can have.

And I think it's the lesson in that for the listeners who are strength and conditioning coaches is that I actually think people don't give this enough attention on the physiology level. People don't understand it deeply enough, and that's really important. Because when you ask me about prescriptions, not a huge number of people articulate in the field what they do and why they do it on this side of the coin very well.

And I think strength and conditioning, it just, again, the term conditioning, I think devalues what this is. It can be very specific with very specific outcomes if prescribed rightly. So that's just my bias interest.

Dan Howells33:05

No, I like it. I like it. I want to jump in. Well, for example, in-season. So, sevens, you got tournaments, you're playing every week, every couple of weeks depending. There's obviously fighters, for example, especially grappling athletes that might compete weekly or every second week as well. So depending on the sport, some will compete often. Wrestlers will compete often.

So how do you balance then the conditioning in those periods, in the in-season when you are competing often? Because obviously you're not wanting to take away from the weekend's performance.

James de Lacey33:36

Yeah, I always likened rugby sevens to athletics actually. You know, 10 meets basically in a year across five key destinations where we have back-to-back tournaments. And I thought that was brilliant for our physical development needs. It gave us the ability to plan quite extensively and not change too much in terms of the week-to-week model.

The next layer of decision making was have we got individuals that are in a state of elite physical development, or have we got people who are still needing to develop? And we actually had two different programs a lot of the time. So we'd have guys who would be on the classic elite periodized model where we would taper accordingly and taper quite heavily. And we had guys who would be doing a little bit more work off-feet because they were still in the sort of development phase. And they were what we called two-, three-, four-minute men, not 14-minute men.

Dialogue with coaches to quantify where we felt players were at in their work capacity. Were they 14-minute work capacity men? Because that's essentially the utopia. 12, 13 people on your roster ready for a game who can play 14 minutes if needed. So that was always interesting to manage because I'd almost had two programs running at any one time.

In terms of the rules and sort of the decision making that went on, it was we would taper prior to competition and so we would just trust that those residuals were retained. But we would make sure that there was just, like you would classically with sprint work, a micro-dosing component of it. And that always came to intensity, not volume for us. Yeah, it was just, can we touch on a little bit of intensity in this key area to retain these residuals?

Then when we came out the back of tournaments, it was we actually had a model of like at least three weeks before the next taper, if not four, five, or six weeks. So we would almost do a mini preseason in that sense. We would have a week where we returned on feet. You know the drill: jetlag, locked in, jetlag back from a tournament. Then the rest of that week off, and then back into training the following week.

Well, the rest of that week off at home was spent on restoring physical, restoring the body's ability to tolerate load through range because they hadn't done weights heavily for a few weeks. So they would do general weights, GPP type stuff, in preparation to hit the ground doing some work the following week. That week one would be an aerobic focus. Then the week two would be much more of a high-intensity work focus. And then we'd get into the repeat sprint work in addition to the rugby, because the rugby was becoming much more technical at that point before I—

So that was our three types of blocks. It just depended, did we go one, two, three because it was three weeks before our taper, or did we have six weeks and it would be two of each? So we'd play around with revisiting those, touching those physical qualities again in between those competitions. So that was sort of my rule of thumb of how I managed that throughout the year.

For, like you say, for fighters and grapplers, I would imagine that people leading up to big fights with camps could operate in the same sort of way. A very clearly defined periodized model. I think the danger or the oversight would be when technical work is also a stimulus of physical work. Yes, that's probably [the] thing.

And that would be the thing for me with the rugby side of things is when can I let the sport take care of the physical qualities I'm trying to influence? So if I've planned aerobic work with the guys, or aerobic power, and the coach wants to do three by six-minute games and the certain rules that he has is that the ball's never dead, well, that's my dose done. I don't need to worry. And so that's part of the problem, or sorry, that's part of the solution is making sure that you are not hitting—double dipping.

Dan Howells38:09

I was going to say double dipping, but hitting from two directions with the same intended outcome. Sorry, with one intended outcome and one misdirected outcome from, say, the coaches or from you. So it's communication is really clear. Sorry, communication is really critical, and clarity is important in that lead-up. So whatever you do decide, it's ensuring that you're not oversaturating the system, I think.

James de Lacey38:09

Yeah, it's good. That's a good point to make as well, because it's very easy to crank the intensity up and [expletive]. Especially, especially with grappling. I mean, obviously rugby sevens has the element in it too, but when you start getting the grappling, wrestling out there, I mean, going light and easy is a skill in itself. So most people go hard there. Obviously, if you're doing sparring in preparation for a fight, that obviously wraps up the intensity too.

So obviously, depending on what you're doing there, you're going—most, I think most fighters will have to kind of play by ear with how they feel, trial and error and things like that. Because, maybe sparring itself is enough because you have the gas tank. Maybe you need a little top-up through the week as well. So it's, yeah, it's more of an individual basis with that too.

But obviously, regarding the sevens schedule and being in the season, you also have travel to contend with as well. So I mean, some fighters will travel for various, depending on the level they are. So maybe just some of the things—

You implemented to help your athletes acclimatize to maybe new time zones, or even to short travel, even just like a few hours can still be kind of, I guess, say off-putting or coming out of routine?

Dan Howells39:30

It's really interesting because I've had this conversation last couple months with a couple of teams. One was a Premiership football team, and one last week was a corporate company. And the football team are dealing with traveling to sort of like Singapore, Thailand to play competitions, and the corporate world is dealing with meetings in international countries. And their problem was that they were having to cancel meetings at the destination because they were just so messed up from jet lag.

And so there's a real impact on performance world, whatever you're doing, whether it's a fighter, whether it's an athlete in a different sport, or whether it's just you as a person traveling. It really does have a knock-on effect on the body. However, what we did in the rugby sevens world was develop processes to overcome that.

Now a lot of it will be what we're taught and what the evidence shows. However, a lot of it is counter to that evidence because the real world doesn't allow you to do what's in an academic study. So for example, you're defined by your constraints to flight schedules, right? There's, I might be traveling out to New Zealand and I need to focus on getting up earlier, but there's a late flight in the evening and that's the only one we can take.

And that's the number one mistake people make, is getting flights that are cheap, right, or getting the flights and agreeing a flight and then going, adapt based on this being within the middle of the program. And so from the rugby point of view, we learned quite quickly that we had to align up the best flight option to our travel ideal travel schedule. And so that's understanding how you want to shift to start with.

And so naturally you want to advance or delay your clock. So if you're going to go obviously west, where the time zone is behind you, you want to delay your clock, go to bed later, wake later. That's quite an easy shift. Okay? But it's not if you're delaying, getting up later, and then suddenly your flight's at 8:00 a.m. and you have to be at the airport for 6:00 a.m. It just sort of like is counterproductive. You do all this work of shifting for three days and then you get that.

James de Lacey41:48

If we're going eastward, you obviously want to be going to bed earlier and waking earlier. But James, can you, you're just going to need to go to bed at 6 o'clock tonight? It's not that easy, is it? My daughter's not going to let that happen.

Dan Howells41:48

And you bring up exactly the point, which is that life is one of the biggest constraints. Okay? So we would work on this team effort because most of the team didn't have kids, but there's actually a couple of individuals that we would put on different paths because of their children, okay, and their life.

So I can't give you the definitive answer now, but the shifting component is really, really important three days out and having a real specific schedule of sleep within your travel. So that's one thing that I think people get wrong, is they do their adjustment and then they ignore the importance of sleep or rest within the confines of leaving their country and landing.

So we would really define when we wanted people to try to go to sleep and when we wanted people to stay awake. And that would be regimented within the schedule of our travel. We would also use, because we had the grace of a sports physician, in the UK you have to have melatonin prescribed. In the US you could just buy it over the counter.

And using melatonin in a specific way, specific number of hours before what we predict would be your melatonin release time period in your sleep pattern, and so there's all these different strategies that we used. And what we found was that we can really minimize the effects of jet lag. We were going to New Zealand and training 48 hours later, high intensity.

The problem you've got is managing a group of athletes who all have individual responses, both east and west, and also jet lag yourself. So that's where you can have these rules of thumbs. You can do everything you can to minimize it, but you have to be ready to adjust the plan. And that requires a conversation with coach ahead of time to preempt this, so it's a reference point to say that these are the guys that we think are sensitive to jet lag and these guys might take another 48 hours to get where we need them.

So you can, we can either go earlier and land earlier, or you can be happy to accommodate them and that they just have to be ready in 48 hours for competition. These are just performance problems, right? You've got to solve within your team and where you hang in terms of priorities. So I'm not giving you too many definitive things there, but—

James de Lacey44:11

It's good because obviously even within just the US you've got like three-hour time zone differences east and west coast. You talked about obviously, hey, maybe you're delaying your sleep or staying up later, et cetera. So if someone was traveling, for example, let's say going forward, they live on the west coast and they're fighting on the East Coast, three-hour difference. Okay. So you would have them delay their sleep for 3 hours and then wake up 3 hours later, but would you start that two, three days beforehand?

Dan Howells44:38

It would actually be, it'd be the opposite, I think. So if you were 5 p.m. on the west coast, you would be at 8 p.m. on the East Coast. So what you would want to be doing is sort of advancing, going to bed—my bad. So, now, the one thing here is, is it going to have an effect? The three-hour time zone for me is something that I wouldn't focus on shifting too much with.

But what I would do is in the day or two before, just raise awareness of what the time would be, right? So if it's, I'm on the west coast, is can we get to bed a little bit earlier? Can we just start that shift, just a soft nudge? That would be it. Can I get to bed a little bit earlier? Okay. Can we wake an hour earlier? And that might be enough. I wouldn't be looking for what I call a hard shift. For me, it'd be education there.

When we worked in baseball, these were things that were happening all the time. Like a flight from Texas to over to Oakland or Seattle way, and then suddenly we got to go over to New York, right? An advancement of three hours. The idea here for us, we focused more on the consistency of the sleep, right, is that you would try and get to sleep as soon as you can based on what's normal for you.

And because you were traveling through the night like 11, 12:00 at night, arriving at 3:00 or 4:00, for us it would be, let's accommodate the day to get that sleep window in of that seven to eight hours. And that would be where we'd have to work with coaches. So within the three-hour time zone element, it would be a soft appreciation of the time zones as opposed to a hard shift.

The biggest things or the toughest time zones for us or anybody really is that eastward of 6 to 9 hours is pretty brutal. Pretty brutal. Because it's just stuck in the middle of that advanced time and you should be waking up and you're tired, you should be getting to sleep and you're awake. It's just messed up.

If you were in the US, it would just be the delay is easier, just go to bed a little bit later. You've also got the foresight to go, how long am I in that destination city for? Right? Because if you're only there for three days, you could just stay on the normal time zone for you, right? It's not worth it. But if you're there for 10 to 12 days, then that shift is probably going to be worth it.

And so that's something that I've seen with different people in different sports and businesses is, I'm just going to stay on the same time zone I'm on. I'm going to set my meetings or training to accommodate the fact that my UK time zone or whatever, and then just come back. But sport, you're generally there for an extended period of time.

The US is interesting because, especially in US sports, you're hopping every three to four days basically.

James de Lacey47:54

It's crazy, eh? So that's why the consistency of your schedule is probably better than trying to shift to where your destination. Did you ever use fancy blue light glasses and stuff for longer trips?

Dan Howells47:54

So you see the Lionesses who went out to Australia, went out to the World Cup in Australia, were using them, orange light, red light, and blue light. So we would use, there was a, I think they were called Retimax glasses, and the boys used to mock me, but we would use blue light glasses on the flight. So again, having that specific plan of when to use blue light and when to use basically sleep patches, eye patches. So you're just trying to encourage the adjustment.

And the other thing is, people go to a destination city and we say seek light, right, and we go out for a walk, but they wear sunglasses. So it's just counterintuitive and people forget that that has an impact. So yeah, we would seek light and use blue light and red light in different ways. But for me it was that real specific plan of when are we going to try and rest and sleep, and when are we going to try and seek light and be stimulated.

When are we going to actually seek some coffee and when are we going to avoid coffee? Big thing for people on travel because boredom, just "I've got to do something, I'll have a coffee," and then suddenly that's the least thing you want to do at that point. So planning that out for athletes was really critical actually to get things right.

James de Lacey49:22

Nice. I got one more question for you for the pod, but did you use pre-match primers at all within any of the sports? And if so, what was your philosophy around it, kind of how did you look to implement it?

Dan Howells49:47

Yeah. So let's go most recently with baseball from the perspective of PAP, right, post-activation potentiation. We would use that with our pitchers about three hours prior to competition because the sport was classically a 7 PM type of game. And what we know about cool temperature starting to drive down, which obviously has an effect on our ability to neurons and express power, is obviously on its way down and starting to rest before we want that competition. So we would use PAP from that point of view.

And it was mixed results as in how much athletes liked it. And so I think there's a lesson in that, that it's a very individual component. So that's one lesson.

Now in the sevens, you'll be well versed in this concept of what the industry or the sport called blowout runs, right, morning session. So if you're playing at 10, you might do three hours before, you might go and do a really short 10 to 20 minute open up the legs and express some higher intensity work in preparation for the game.

What I learned about that within the sport was that that was psychological as much as physiological, and the players coming into a game hitting the ground running from minute one where they're 150 meters per minute on average plus, irrespective, they didn't want to be underprepared for that.

They didn't want to get their second wind coming into the second half and feel like the game has lost and their place that was because they weren't physically ready. And so, yes, I inherited that. We ended up doing like short blowout sessions, primer sessions as such, some people call them. But then the tournaments started to get longer, men's and women's became combined, more games in a day, earlier games, later finishes, and then you lose your big rocks of sleep. So it's all a trade-off of does this fit?

Baseball, 3 hours minus at 3 or 4 in the afternoon? Perfect. Never get a game at 9:30 in the morning. I'd rather they sleep. So then it was finding other solutions. And one of the solutions we found was like pre-match conditioning sometimes, so occlusion, because we were finding that repeat efforts weren't compromised, they weren't enhanced, but the perception of effort was enhanced.

And so that's, I think, what was happening with the blowout primers, was that people were just getting a maybe an up-regulation of the energy system development or energy system contribution to have a perform task, and suddenly their second wind is reached earlier. I don't know, it's just any waffling on that perception. But when we did the occlusion study, we found that the repeat sprint efforts for no detriment and no benefit were significantly more economical. The perception of them was easier. So we started to use that because we couldn't be getting up at six o'clock in the morning to go do this.

So there's that. But prior to like 24 hours out? No, we didn't do primer work if that's where your question was headed. We just did our captain's run and we just made sure that there was everybody did what they felt they needed to do 24 hours out. I think at that point you, as a conditioning coach, is more about making sure there's nothing in what you're doing that ruins the psychological preparation to express what they need to express on the field.

So in the early days I was resentful to go and do work at 7, 7:30 in the morning because I thought it was a cost to them. But I really tuned into the perceptual benefits of them feeling good about that. And if you couple that with a ball technical, tactical side of things, I think there's a big benefit to it. But people, as you know, people in sport tend to copy what other teams are doing and always fit. So it's ensuring that you know exactly why you're doing what you're doing, what reason, either physiologically, psychologically, or for another reason.

James de Lacey53:56

No, I'm with you on the perceptual side as well. I know with one of the sevens campaigns we were doing, so obviously the second day, we didn't want to go out and do anything physical, especially with the early morning game. So I put the guys in contrast therapy in the morning: cold, hot, cold, hot, finishing on hot, just to be okay, you know, almost like a recovery stimulus slash you've done something in the morning, almost like you're woken up and you're good to go. So that's like, yeah, I know what you mean there. That's something I've done.

Another thing I did was when we played, we had national championships in the states here, and they played for the rugby 15s, they played the semis on Saturday and the finals on Sunday. That's how it works here. And I was like, holy [expletive]. So we won the semis and I was like, okay, we can't do like an actual primer on Sunday. So we jumped in the pool, and basically in the morning in the hotel pool, and we would do like underwater competition, quote unquote, how far you can go.

So same thing: push off the wall hard, hold your breath, be a little bit out of breath. Whether that does anything? I don't know. I mean, we ended up winning. I'll put it down to that. But stuff like that, you're getting a push off the wall, so I guess you're getting quite a power stimulus. You're holding your breath, you're getting a little bit of that going. So no, yeah, I know what you mean, the perceptual side of it. And obviously guys have fun in the pool too, playing around and things like that. So yeah, there's a lot to it.

Dan Howells55:09

I think if you, like, you'll know, people won't know this listening, but you're confined quite drastically in your preparation for a full game. You have maybe five meters, three meters sometimes by 12 meters to a space for 13 people to warm up, two coaches in S&C and physio. And so sometimes you can't get yourself into that high intensity work, or you have to be really creative about how you use that space. And therefore the psychology component becomes even more important, especially if you do have those three hours beforehand.

So yeah, that's why being on a journey with the athlete and thinking about things from their perspective or listening to them, as opposed to doing something, that's where practitioners get it wrong is like, we're going to do this because the research does that, we're going to do this because I've seen another team do it, and this is what's elite. It's like, well, hold on, the context and the environment you're in is completely different here. Make sure you consider all elements.

James de Lacey56:29

This has been an awesome chat, Dan. I really appreciate you sharing all your knowledge and your experience and everything. But where can people find you and follow you and see what you're up to?

Dan Howells56:29

Yeah, I'm on socials. Twitter is Howells_Dan. I just, I tend to engage and it's a try to bring a supportive element to Twitter as best as possible. No, yeah, I'm an observer of the disruption, not a creator.

Instagram is where I tend to put out my sort of added value daily, and LinkedIn as well is where I try to interact with people. So Instagram would be Collaborator Sports, which is the medic business I run. And LinkedIn, you can just search me as Dan Howells. And yeah, I'm reachable and approachable and contactable through those.

James de Lacey56:56

Perfect. No, no, thanks for coming on, Dan. I appreciate it.

Dan Howells56:56

Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.