Dynamic Effort Method + Conditioning Tests (SSOF Ep 181)

0:00Right, it was just me today, had a last minute guest cancellation. So hopefully we can organize that for hopefully another time coming soon. But I actually got a bunch of your questions from Instagram. So if you don't follow me on Instagram, sweet sounds are fighting. Make sure you find me there. If I have a solid poll like this, I'll put up something or if you're on the email list, you would have got that too. And so I'm gonna run through these before that. Of course, make sure you check the links in the description, a bunch of free stuff down there for you. Just a few in May, boxing, ginger, skin, blueprints. It should be a seven day free trial and my training app as well. And try fixing nutrition. If you're looking for meals delivered to your house, you don't have to cook, or you just want something that's easy to prepare because they do pre-made meals or a la carte, where you can just kind of buy the single ingredients. There's 40% off down there too for your first order. You can take those. But this is also alive. There'll be questions that hopefully come through as we go through this. So let's start.

1:00Let's get these questions going. Ony, verticella, hopefully I said that right. What is the best way to improve max strength if I can't hinge or squat heavy due to a broken back? Kind of depends on the equipment you have as well. But typically in this scenario, you're looking at more single leg movements. So turns out severe, the back painers. If the back painers very severe, you want to use something like, say like a belt squat working for a lot of body stuff. You're probably going to resort to more so body weight, long duration, isometric work. And then that's honestly, you're pretty, you're relatively limited lot body weights. Otherwise, you have machines. So obviously like leg press. Anything that can essentially take load off your back and make it easier to move, those all work well. So depends where you train and what equipment you're available. Ideally, you're just going to use machines. Machine single leg work isometric's belt squat so you'll be your best friend as well. For hinging, you're just not going to hinge. Put it that way. You'll see as you rehab and stuff, you'll start introducing a lot of that back in. But for now, it's just a matter of doing them, working around the problem

2:02so you can stay strong and still get stronger while it heals. The worst thing you can do is kind of bed rest and kind of like neglect everything, which a lot of people tend to do. You could always work around it. And then you just do it on a focus on a lot of other body work. And people will think that makes you unbalanced or whatever. Trust me, you're still going to make you unbalanced. It's typically what I do now to have injured athletes, we would do like, for example, had guys will say like knee surgery or whatever, we would literally run like a five day a week up on the body program, practicing and there'll be a mix of circuits, max strength training, hypertrophy, work and stuff. So you can still get damn strong and work around injuries. But that would be the main ones that you would do. That would help you to stay strong. Had a question in the chat here. What's the best way to test the level of fitness to gauge what needs to be improved? For example, testing using air bike. So typically we use a wing gate test, we look more at the data from that to determine what needs to be done. Another way you can do is just kind of look at resting heart rate. If you're resting heart rate is relatively high. So like 60 and up, even 55 and up to a certain extent,

3:05then you're probably looking at doing more lower intensity work just to bring that down initially, just because you're probably lacking some of that, I guess the heart adaptations for delivery. So there'll be a really easy ones just to do resting heart rate in the morning. You can look at like 1.6K one mile air bike trying to get under two minutes. That's not really going to tell you much of what you need to do conditioning wise though, because there's probably a lot of ways you can do to improve that. But it's just another little kind of gauge of where you're at. And you can do like an MIS test. So six minute max distance. However, it's going to give you pretty inflated numbers for your MIS. So probably give you like an MIS of like 10 versus when you're running a six minute max distance or like a 1.6K time trial. So it's more difficult to, it's more difficult to see where you are when you're doing say an MIS test, which is just simply the distance you travel in meters divided by the time and seconds. That'll give you a number of meters per second and that is your maximum error speed.

4:06But all of those can be used. The main one that we like to use is that we can get test because we can actually look at the heart rate data more granularly. And if you can get the power data or even muscle austenation data, you can get even more in depth look into what's going on. But that would be the main one. For just random field tests, one mile, one mile a bike is perfectly fine. Try to get under two minutes. MIS tests, and you can do like Cooper tests as well. You find those tests online that kind of estimate VO2 max. Those are all kind of as long as there's something that you can do like repeat it. Something that is repeatable that you kind of see improvement on. But most importantly, it should influence your trading and resting high rates. Probably going to be the easiest one to influence whether you're going to do more low intensity work to start with and more high intensity work or if maybe things change with the resting heart rate whether you're conditioning changes. Hopefully that answers that. Daniel Kudas-Cheves, I've said that right. Energy and training in between weekly or almost weekly fights, strength, boxing, conditioning. This is a nice one because this is basically the problem

5:06that we solve in team sports because we play every single weekend. And we have to juggle everything. Recovery, skills training, strength conditioning and then prepare for the next game. So you're going to basically look at a similar week schedule as you would a team sport. RopeB is probably the best example of it. I guess wrestling to an extent, college wrestling probably has some of this as well. Where you're basically going to go, this is how I like to schedule the week when I said this. So say you fight Saturday, Sunday, completely off. You don't do anything. If you want to do like external recovery stuff, so like if you have an ice bath, massage, any of that kind of stuff you would do on that Sunday, Monday would be like your easier training day. So you come on Monday, you might do your more boxing technical work, you might do some easier conditioning work if you need it just to kind of get moving. And you may do some kind of like feel,

6:08what I like to call feel good circuits. So this would be things like bodyweight movements, higher rep stuff, just things like back extensions, dumbbell work, some of your more kind of prehab or mobility work done instead of good format. And it kind of covers a little bit of conditioning too. And that would be like your Monday. Think of it more of like a, they like to call it an installation day or a learning day. So it might be going over stuff in the fight on Saturday that maybe you weren't able to figure out problems you had during that fight and you kind of addressed it on a Monday. Tuesday then is kind of like your implementation day and it's your harder high intensity day. So that might be some you're sparring. It might be taking what you learned on Monday and skills training and now putting it into a more live, more intense scenario on Tuesday. You might sell in some of your bike sprints in this one too and then you might do your, you could say you're like your full body strength power training as well. So it's a pretty big heavy day on Tuesday, but that's the best day in the week to do it because it is the furthest away from the next fight,

7:11but also far enough away from the previous fight where you're a cub. It's just kind of like your big day. Your low volume strength power on the gym, your sprint intervals and like your, your more sparring based work. The sprint intervals you would do after your heavy technical training in this example. Wednesday you would ideally take off for, you're going to do some really light technical boxing stuff. So it might be like one session on that day and it shouldn't be too intense. Thursday then is another hard day that again, well, I mean, if you're fighting a week to week, you're probably not doing that with sparring, but it's going to be more of your high intensity working in. So on this day, because you're going week to week, you probably wouldn't do another round of sprints of rules, but you might do some harder live training on this Thursday and you might do another round of your strength power work again, lower volume. Friday again, you would, depends also if you're cutting, you're probably not cutting away as you're fighting a week to it. But Friday then is going to be a relatively easy day. It can also be a higher intensity low volume day. Those work quite well on Fridays as well.

8:12Instead of going in and doing an hour or an hour and a half of more like low intensity technical drills, it might be like 30 minutes of high intensity, but it's kind of like, it's not, it's not 30 minutes straight if so sparring. It might be like hitting the pads, keeping sharp, having longer rests, but doing things at speed. And it's kind of almost like a primer for, say, the flight again on Saturday. That's just a general idea. Obviously, a lot of things changed, depends on the skill, all sorts of stuff. But that would be kind of like a general look into how you could schedule, say, if you're fighting every single weekend, same thing goes for grappling, same thing goes for, most people aren't doing MMA every week, but a lot of people are doing a grappling tournaments weekly or most. You can run the same schedule. Friday, you probably wouldn't roll. I mean, you could, in that instance, if you're doing Jujutsu, you just have to take a very light, which is not always easy, but you still do your main strength power, so choose that Thursday is what I really like. And then in this example, Monday might be more of your hypertrophy focused day on some of your single joint movements, stuff that doesn't go to fatigue you as much.

9:13That will make you feel good for the rest of the week. So, you know, a question here, Ricardo Rom, how do you sprint into training the off season and how to progress? I think out to a similar one on the last, on the last pod, on the last software pod, I should say, with sprinter balls, say, out of camp versus in camp, I think I actually did a video on the channel. Check the Switzerland's fighting channel. It should be like how to schedule sprinter balls some minute. It wasn't too long ago. And it covers the question that was asked around, you know, how does it differ between, say, out of camp or off season versus in season or in camp, because often when you're presented with a traditional energy system or periodization model, you're typically told, loan tends to be a real base training outside of camp to build your base and then would you high intensity in camp. Whereas the sprint interval approach is kind of like, year round, you're doing intensity. And the reason you're doing intensity round is because you're trying to elicit these adaptation, mitochondrial adaptations you want that are going to transfer better to your conditioning on the sport. And it comes up and you develop it quickly,

10:15but you lose it really quickly. And it means if you're not doing the intensity outside of camp, you kind of plan catch up as you come into camp. Obviously, some guys are pretty short turn around and you're still going to make gains. But if you're doing it year round, you're just going to get into harder, harder protocols. It's just going to make you better and more efficient and conditioning. So in terms of progress, again, it kind of depends on the individual data. So I can't really say that. Let's just say there's no real difference. It's just based on the data at the time. So if someone needs a certain sprint interval, whether it's 20 weeks from a flight versus six weeks from a flight, the sprint interval would be the same if the data was the same in those instances. If that makes sense. So the progress is based on what we see week to week versus 20 weeks out we do this and then six weeks out we do this. Now, if you don't have that data, you might have to take that kind of approach where maybe, maybe you're doing slightly longer rest periods out of camp. Now, this isn't always the case

11:16because you may be trying to focus on that recovery aspect where you're going to need less rest periods in the off season. In season, then you're probably still going to carry that on. You might be looking at 20 if you want a more power or recovery-based stimulus, typically we're focusing on the recovery aspect because that is where most people are lacking and what is most important because you're still going to get improvements from power even with the shorter rest periods. But the recovery aspect is the important part because you want to be able to recover efficiently or fast between rounds or between efforts or whatever it is and that's where most people are lacking. So that's, I can't really give a concrete answer on progressing it because it's so dependent on that data and what is happening with that particular athlete. Now, let's jump into, I think I'm going to have two more questions. So then you run them in the lives that wants to jump in and ask one, go for it. Peter Clark, he was part of the conditioning industry, which is cool. Your favorite ways to improve peak eccentric velocity and deceleration and pulse on kind of movement jump. So if you're not, if you guys aren't familiar,

12:17I've done a few videos on this based on homemade data. So we have some published in my data around what kind of separates elite versus sub elite MMA fighters and it's basically mainly eccentric qualities that does that and then obviously build smarts and turn all data with his guys out of city kit boxing. Looking at eccentric qualities during the jump as well as separates these UFC guys, top level UFC guys versus non UFC guys who are still pro MMA fighters. And it's the ability to rapidly descend, rapidly pump the brakes and then rapidly turn that around into the concentric action. And we know that fast eccentric actions lead to better concentric performances. So having this quality also is going to allow us to generate more force and shorter time frames. Obviously important for more striking based arts as well, which is why this question has probably come up. So improving peak eccentric velocity and deceleration impulse. So impulse again is just force multiplied by time. So in this instance, you're looking at eccentric overload work mainly especially when you're looking at eccentric velocity and impulse because we're looking at impulse and short time frames.

13:18So it's going to be things like drop catches mainly because of those are fast. So think about like a Bulgarian split squat, like drop catch during the top position, you drop down as quickly and possible and you're trying to pump the brakes as quickly as possible. And then you can reverse that or you can kind of hold it. You can kind of progress from holding to coming straight back up and you can deal with load as well. So now you're getting very high forces at high speeds, especially during eccentric actions where you get simultaneous high forces and high speeds, which is really cool. It's not to say you don't get some of that say when sprinting and whatnot, but that's one option for fast eccentric work. Well, I think you're one of the very few options you can do when you don't have other equipment. You have to kind of do drop catches. You can do say like faster, just faster movement. So if you say you're doing back squats, you just kind of go down faster. So if you've seen like weight lift or some weight lift or squat, they're kind of like dive bomb. You have to do quite good at squatting. You have to kind of dive bomb down,

14:19kind of speed up to the eccentric action. It's another way you can do it. It's somewhat overload in the sense just because you're kind of pushing the speed. Outside of that, obviously fly wheels would be like your number one. If you're trying to really push this because you can modify that eccentric action to nasty levels of eccentric overload because you can overspeed the concentric with the flywheel for anyone who's not familiar. Essentially, how much effort you put during the concentric? It gives you exactly the same back, but it doesn't give you any dead spots. So during a squat, the top half of the movement's easy. Once you get past that sticking point, you can stand up with anything. But the bottom part is where you kind of get stuck. With the flywheel, you get pulled with the same amount of force all the way down. So it's like, I think someone just dragging you back to the floor. And you can, because it's equal, you can modify the way you do the exercise to create that eccentric overload. So as I mentioned, one way is to overspeed the concentric.

15:20So you can use your hands on the way up to really drive it and then no hands on the way down. And you can get someone to pull on the rope on the way up to overspeed it. You can change the strategy during the eccentric phase so instead of resisting from the top during the eccentric, you can kind of quickly drop down halfway and then let the weight hit you and kind of drag you down. So you're only getting all the effort you put on the way up, you're concentrating it all into the bottom half of the movement. So you get in this huge spike and the eccentric overload there. So flywheels would be like the number one thing here. If you're really looking to dial in and improve those eccentric qualities. And then you, I guess outside of that, you don't really have other coming, you don't mean you have weight releases, but that's going to be your slow eccentric work. And slow eccentric work definitely has a place. You can definitely do some of that. And initially, if you really want a big stront stimulus and get some of those eccentric adaptations, but at some point, you're going to need to speed on top of it, which is why the flywheels work so well. And since then, because you can kind of do a bit of both and it's really safe and easy and you don't get beat up like you do if you're going to do eccentric overload

16:20with like the barbell and going numbers over your one arm. You can also use weights during the counter-moving jump. So holding dumbbells in your hands, you, I did a video on this a while back. Accentuated eccentric loading jumping, I guess you'll call it. So you had hold weights in your hands, you would descend rapidly, let go of the dumbbells and then jump. Now, sometimes you'll see videos like I searched this on YouTube a while ago and you'll see like a slow descent with the dumbbells that go and jump. In my mind, you defeat the purpose of the exercise and you're not getting anything out of it then that, sure. You're not getting the adaptations you want from the exercise when you descend slowly holding dumbbells. You need to make a rapid. The whole point of holding the load is to make the descent faster, essentially, or try and make it as fast as possible and overload that descent. If you're doing it slowly, you're not really overloading the descent. You're holding dumbbells, you descend really quickly, you let go of the dumbbells and then you jump. So that's another way you can almost teach

17:22and develop some of the eccentric overload. So that's another way you can do the eccentric overload. You can use, sometimes, you have to make sure you use dumbbells that aren't like hex shape because you don't want them to roll into your ankles. You also, sometimes you can use like chains, if you have chains with handles and things, those work quite well too. You can use bands, bands are a little harder just because they get the right resistance to really nail it down a little more difficult, but they can be useful as well. So all of those can ideally improve some of these qualities and then ideally give you the adaptation of the description for strikers who need to be able to produce force quickly, or at least quickly in short time frames who have more time constraints regarding generating impulse and then changing velocity, which is kind of what we're after in most sports. One more question on Instagram here, if anyone's in the chat or in the live and wants to ask, where do you go for it?

18:23What do you think of dynamic effort work? Actually, I've got two more questions, don't worry. What do you think of dynamic effort work? It's too much volume or appropriate. So I'm assuming Daniel Brotherhood is talking about Westside approach with dynamic effort. If anyone's not familiar, it's basically this quote unquote speed day. Obviously, Westside was heavily powerlifting or created for powerlifting. So you have a max effort day, a dynamic effort day and a repetition effort day and if you're just putting on layman terms, there's like a strength day, a high-period to be a day and a speed day. For this speed day or the dynamic effort day, it was very specific to powerlifting because it has done through the main lifts, squat bench or dead lifts. You're doing typically like doubles, typically singles doubles may be triples, but mainly around the singles and doubles. You're looking at someone like 18, 12 sets. You're doing it around 50% of your 1RM, sometimes with bands, and that's kind of like their dynamic effort speed work.

19:27In terms of that specific approach for sport, I do not think it has a place. I do not think it is useful for most sports. In fact, for every sport, I started powerlifting. Even then, no powerlifting would not use that approach. And there's a few reasons for that. The first one is if you're looking to do speed work or something fast, you need to do something fast. And speed bench or speed squat sets are not fast. They're kind of just slightly faster than you're doing a heavy squat or a heavy bench. You need a bigger contrast between what you're doing and you're saying mainstreamed to work and then your speed work. The second one is when you're doing main lifts or main compound lifts, you're speeding that second half of the lift decelerating. If you're not decelerating, you're just gonna mash your elbows and your shoulders or you're gonna only go to the bar which would be a different exercise altogether. If you're doing a speed work as bench throws, hell yeah. But these are bench throws. These are just kind of like speed bench. So you're getting that deceleration portion. So you're not really getting the accelerated fourth time

20:28if that we want when we're doing our speed work when we're doing jumps, ply matrix throws, et cetera. The other thing is it can really beat up save your doing speed bench. It can really smash your elbows. If you're locking out hard like that because you're moving, it seems light. If you can bench 100 or like 50 kgs, you're just locking out elbows relatively quickly. So that's another problem. Now with that. So and then obviously you're doing eight sets of two, you typically maybe doing 60 seconds rest. It's not hugely time consuming. It's not, I wouldn't say it's too much volume. I would just say it's a miss appropriated time within your training that you could do something else that would be more effective in my opinion. Then taking say a Westside Powerlifting approach to your training. Now that's not to say that everything from these training programs is useless. It is not, but I think that dynamic effort work in particular because it is so geared towards powerlifting. It doesn't really have a place in other sports. Now don't, I don't think I've ever seen

21:28a fishinal sporting setup use a true dynamic effort left like eight sets or two speed bench kind of thing. And I know a lot of different coaches around. And I don't think I've ever seen that. So that also says something. I'm gonna question the chat here. Keeps just getting too mental good. How do you order, regulate sprint interval training? So basically we take the data every week from the sprints. We look at the heart rate data. And then we kind of see how that data is changing from, it's a different week to week and what we're seeing. And we change it based on what the data says we kind of need to work on for that week. So it might be we need shorter recovery times because they're looking really good. Maybe they didn't, maybe it didn't look that good this week. So we extend the recovery times, didn't look a little more rest. Maybe they need more power based work. So they're going to have more rest kind of all changes based on what we're seeing within that data. Now, if you don't have any of that, you're probably just going to go shorter recoveries initially.

22:32And if you feel really smashed, you might then extend the recovery or if you want more power based, I guess, emphasis. It's hard to order it related with that. And she's having the data put it that way. But you can also do less sets versus doing all less reps versus more. So, for example, if you're doing six or eight or 10 sets of 10 seconds on, 20 seconds off. And, you know, like, you've done it for a few weeks. And you're like, man, I need to, I need a break. Like, training's been hard this week. And you might do six sets of 10 seconds on 40 seconds off. And that way you can, you're still going to get the gains because you're still getting intensity. The most important thing is that you're just constantly exposing yourself to that sprint intensity. So even if you have to back off completely and do four sets of 10 seconds on, 60 seconds off for that week, as long as you're smashing that first 10 seconds sprint and then kind of holding on with your life for the rest, you're going to be fine. So that would be my general advice. And another question that you got sent from a friend back home,

23:34around tempo interval training. And what's my, what's my stance on it now? So if you guys aren't familiar, so tempo training, not from the endurance, but from the sprint world to Charlie Francis kind of made it popular. And then I got applied within a lot of team sports and involved a lot of running. And I'll come back to this now and answer this question. If I think to that heart rate data, do you have some kind of, how do you feel rating system? That all going to feel shit, that's the thing. So all the friends are going to, if you're doing them right, they're all going to feel horrible at the time. How do you feel before going on the bike? It's hard to, it's hard to use that as a, as a gauge for what you should do. Because you can feel bad one day and then have an amazing training session or you can feel good and have a poor training session. So it's, it's really hard to, it's really hard to give a, how do you feel before you get on the bike? But if you're doing this sprint's right, they should all feel pretty horrible. And if I come back to the tempo stuff, so it's basically a way for sprinters to essentially do like the work capacity or aerobic work.

24:35So sprinters would obviously typically do acceleration work, max velocity, whatever. And then tempo interval is kind of like 70% of max speed. And you're kind of maybe running a hundred meters takes you about depending how fast you are, 13 to 16, 17 seconds. And you're kind of doing it on the minute. You might add some density by doing push ups and calisthenics after that. So you end up being like 30 seconds total work and then like 30 seconds rest in that instance. And the goal is that you're just building volume. And obviously for a sprinter, you're kind of just building that work capacity maybe in the off season. So you can be more robust on what resilience through all the sprint training they're doing. And then that kind of matters way over to team sports. And I used to, I used to heavily, I mean, we used a big tempo approach when we were in the national championship. I've used to enter national rugby all sorts. I like the modality. I like the modality. But I don't think now for what I know that it would be the main conditioning approach. I think where it has value, at least in running sports,

25:36is you're just accumulating a lot of high speed running. So one of the main things you're trying to do in preparation is you want to accumulate chronic loads of higher speed running because it's not going to say it's protective, but it's going to help you stay healthy through the season. And tempo running is one of those ways you can do that because you're typically running over five minutes per second. So you're running over like maximal rugby speeds. And you're just accumulating volume of those speeds. You're kind of a killing, good running mechanics while you're doing it as well. So it kind of gives you a lot of, a lot of, you just say bang for your buck. That's take a lot of time. So there's one area that makes it harder to do. But you would, you still need, I think, a my opinion to use sprint intervals. And it kind of depends as well with the season. Some people have four month pre-season, some people have four weeks. If you have a four week pre-season, you ain't going to do it. If you have a four month pre-season, it's a different story. But you're still going to do sprint intervals throughout that time because you need those mitochondria adaptations and you need that intensity to be dosed throughout,

26:39I mean, from the early stages of that time for fighters as well. You can, in a sense of tempo approach, doesn't make too much sense. You probably look here more, say, like long intervals, looking more sprint intervals because you're not trying to, you're not chronic loads or high loads of high speed running because running is not the sport. So in this instance, it can be useful just as a tool just to maybe get some work in if you're just doing like general conditioning. But if you want a more targeted approach, then you're probably going to need to go down these. A sprint interval, longer high intensity interval stuff. And then obviously you're sport training as well with that. So hopefully that answers that. Hopefully that answers all the questions. So I don't think I have any more on here. Let me double check. Nope, that was all the ones I got through. Perfect. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed this little shorter, but I'm going to have some guests on hopefully this week and the following weeks. And I appreciate you guys joining me on the live stream. And I'll catch you in the next podcast.