Barbell Shrugged - 120- When To Go Hard and When To Rest w/ MMA Strength Coach Joel Jamieson

Episode Date: May 28, 2014

This week on Barbell Shrugged we chat with Joel Jamieson, leading expert on combat sport training and founder of 8WeeksOut.com.    If Joel’s name rings a bell that’s because he’s the author of Ultimate MMA Conditioning, which made ourtop 10 list of books that every Crossfitter should read. He’s also the creator of the BioForce HRV Training Management System, an awesome tool that uses heart rate variability as a measure of fatigue and training readiness.    If you’re interested in performance then you really should be considering HRV. Why not?   Great programming is all about balance. You have to know when to push forward, and when to back down so you can live to fight another day. Keeping the balance that makes extraordinary results and sustained progress possible. But that’s easier said than done. Without a clear measure of readiness it’s really easy to push too hard, too soon.    Any coach or athlete worth their weight in chalk expects to see great results. They are driven to succeed, they are quickly drawn towards high intensity and fancy tools because that’s what the best use, right? Right, but rushing towards that result is the easiest mistake to make. The only thing it gets you is a weak and unsound foundation, poor mechanics, probably injury, and inevitably, a quick and messy exit from the sport you enjoy.  We can do better than that.  The coach and athlete have to communicate and understand all the gaps in the game up front. They have to take the time and cultivate the base before things get intense and the fancy toys come out. From there the push can build and build, but not without careful monitoring.  Every stress has to be considered, every addition to the training program must be accounted for. That’s what makes measures such as heart rate variability so damn useful. It’s an early warning to correct course before the rush takes hold, before the wear, tear and bad habits really start to set in.  Without that data programming is only educated guesses and serial assumptions. Be honest, assess status, progress slowly, get all the data you can, then regulate the plan. Be honest, quantify it. That’s the quickest path to improved performance.  Cheers,Chris Moore

This week on Barbell Shrugged, we interviewed Joel Jameson, MMA strength and conditioning coach, and a blogger on 8weeksout.com. Hey, this is Rich Froning, you're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged, I'm Mike Bletzer here with Doug Larson. We have traveled down to Austin, Texas for Paleo FX. It's a convention where a bunch of people like to run around barefoot and make fun of people eating sandwiches and then go out drinking beer at night. It's the only time of the year that no one's paleo at the Paleo Conference. That's right. We have with us standing in for Chrisris moore connor moore from

austin texas uh he is standing for chris moore because chris moore is at home awaiting the birth of his second child so he actually was pretty brave and he came in for a day and then uh he got back i mean the woman's already dilated quite a bit. Janie is. Definitely could have had that kid while he was out of town. Yeah, definitely could have happened. So he had to go home, and Connor Moore's taking his place. The biggest CrossFitter in the sport. I'm doing the best I can. Yep, and so you're in charge of dick jokes.

Last time you screwed up and didn't say one dick joke the whole time. Did I not? No. That's all I was thinking about the whole time. Get down your game. Our guest today is Joel Jamison. He runs the blog 8 Weeks Out, or website, I guess you could say. A little bit of both.

A little bit of both. You blog, and you also have a voodoo app to tell you. I say it's like voodoo. It's an iPhone app that tells you if you should train hard today or not, right? That's the idea, yes. Yeah, so you should go hard or not. You train primarily MMA athletes. That's who you work with.

But I think a lot of CrossFitters are interested in what you're doing because there might be some transfer over there. You did tell me that you weren't really, maybe not. I wouldn't say I'm not going to put words in your mouth, but not interested in working with CrossFitters, but you're pretty focused on MMA and some of the ideas might transfer over. Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say I'm not interested in CrossFit per se. It's just not my expertise.

I haven't worked enough of them to give you my experience as a CrossFit coach. So I get a lot of people saying, how do I do this with CrossFit? I'm like, I'm not going to tell you the answer because I haven't done it. So you basically handle strength and conditioning for MMA athletes. I read your book. It was fantastic. And what athletes have you worked with that we might have heard of? Yeah, I mean, it's been about 10 years I've been in the sport. Anyone from Rich Franklin to Demetrius Johnson, Chris Liebman, Matt Brown, Bibiana Fernandez. I think we've had eight or ten world champions

come through the gym in the last few years. I've fortunately worked with Matt Hume, who's, in my opinion, the best MMA coach in the world. And he's been in the sport for as long as the sport's been around, probably longer. So I've had a great opportunity to work with a lot of the sport's biggest names. Very cool.

I think Doug and you might get along quite a bit doug fights mma or has in the past at least haven't fought in over a year but maybe maybe uh when i was talking about some training i'm always fucking beat up i'm always hurt and that's what's kept me from fighting lately is i've been having a bunch of chronic neck pain and whatnot so uh maybe i'm doing to myself or maybe my neck's just screwed up for life. I don't know. Probably do it to yourself. I'd probably do it to myself. More than likely. We'll have to talk when we get done.

Maybe you can fix me up and give me a back out there. Or you could probably talk on the microphones and that would make for a good podcast. Potentially. The biggest thing, you know, I think we see in combat athletes, and I don't know how much this applies to CrossFit, but we see so many segmented coaches because there's so many different skills. So you have a striking coach, you have a grappling coach, you have a wrestling coach, you have a strength and conditioning coach.

You've got all these different people doing all this different shit, and no one's communicating and putting together any sort of comprehensive program, and everybody's trying to do their best to work you hard, and you just get this giant, disorganized, discombobulated overtraining for however many years it goes on until you fall apart. If you don't work the athlete hard, they're not going to come back because that's what they want. They may not know any better. Especially in combat sports, and I'm sure CrossFit's very similar.

The guys that want to get to the top think that the way to get to the top is to kill themselves to get there. And so they go in the gym every day, I want to spar, I want to spar, I want to spar, I want to get beat up or beat somebody else up. And then a year or two, five years down the road, they're destroyed. Yeah. It's too late, but that sounds familiar. The approach in your book is pretty enlightening to most MMA athletes, I imagine, because a lot of those guys, they think of cardio, they go put in some road work, they go jogging, and then they just spar and fight.

And they might lift some weights, but, you know, they probably get their workouts out of Muscle & Fitness or Flex Magazine or something. They may not be getting them, or they might just be going to CrossFit.com or something, but that might not be, like, the ideal way to train. And you broke it down to basically training energy systems. Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest misconception out there is that conditioning is like an afterthought or it's something you just kind of do on the side.

Whereas what I try to get people to understand is that conditioning and energy systems is the big picture. I mean if your body can't produce energy, it doesn't matter how strong you are, it doesn't matter how skilled you are, you can't fight if you don't have the energy to function. Yeah. And so looking at conditioning energy systems

from a big picture standpoint, it needs to be more than just, I'm going to go run for 20 minutes or half an hour or do this stuff on the side. It needs to be look at the big picture of your program, individualize things to where you need to get better, and then put together a comprehensive program that's all one. It's not just strength and then conditioning and then scale work. It's one program where it's everything put together in the right way. How have you found, because you were talking about different athletes have different coaches for different skill work, and they have a strength and conditioning coach, and nobody's talking to each other. I've seen that in MMA.

I've seen it in CrossFit. They have a weightlifting coach over here and an endurance coach over here, something like that. No one's really talking. No one's handling the comprehensive program. How have you seen success in the past with MMA athletes and managing that? Well, the biggest thing for me is I was fortunate enough to work with Matt Hume, and he and I are literally right next door to each other. We're great friends.

We've been working together for years. So for us, it's a dialogue. It's a continual dialogue. When the new fighter comes in, there's discussion about what they need, what the program's going to look like. There's constant communication back and forth. Matt comes to their strength and conditioning sessions a lot of times. I go over there and watch their skill sessions. So it's not just two guys doing two things.

It's one program that we're both discussing. He's been in the sport for so long and he knows what he's looking for. He communicates to me what he thinks the guys need. We just have a constant dialogue. We're a team. It's a team effort. It's not just a couple of guys training guys. It's an effort that both of us have to put in and there has to be dialogue. And so I think any coach that's working with an athlete, if you don't know what somebody else is doing with them half the time, you're not a very good coach. Yeah. I mean, you can't be a good coach because you're just guessing what they need because you have no idea what else they're doing.

Yeah. And when looking at MMA fighters, these guys have to be really well-rounded, not in just their skill work, but the energy systems as well. How do you, is there like a testing phase that you go through with these guys to figure out where they might have gaps? Yeah, absolutely, and we do it on both ends.

So Matt will, let's say we work with a new fighter. Matt will roll with them, he'll spar with them, he'll watch them spar with other people, He'll watch them train and pick up on the skill set of things, where they're good, where they're bad. And he can tell in a few minutes whether a fighter has any skill or can make it to a world championship level or not. And then we do a comprehensive physical evaluation. And I've worked with so many fighters over the years, we have physical standards for what their different test scores should look like, what their overall performance looks like. And then he and i will sit down and evaluate

and say okay here's where this guy's good this is where he sucks and what's the plan going to be so anytime it's it's about a week process to be honest with you it's not like they come in and two minutes later we tell you it's don't plug them in to anything no i mean it's literally a week of watching them train evaluating them putting through different drills and then and then sitting down and looking at what they need to get better. So you're watching them, like, doing a jiu-jitsu session and a Muay Thai session, but also getting them in a strength and conditioning arena

and then testing them there, too. What kind of tests are you putting them through for the strength and conditioning side of things? So for the conditioning side of things, we'll look at their heart rate variability, their HRV score. We'll look at their resting heart rate. We'll look at their mile-and-a-half half run i've got a conditioning test that i put actually if you guys want to watch it james fitzgerald the original crossfit champion came to my gym and

we filmed him going through the fighter conditioning test that i have yeah kind of see where he would fare which is pretty entertaining he came in 10th all time which is actually a good time he thought he was in another record but he he still did well yeah so we'll run him through that and then just kind of some basic strength and power tests, you know, squat and pull-ups and just basic stuff like that. And like I said, we look at that. I also go, like you said, and I watch them train and Matt obviously watches them train and we'll kind of look at the big picture of where they're at and then make decisions

about what their program needs to look like. Yeah. And you mentioned something that I've read a little bit about, but I don't think I've got my head completely wrapped around it, is the HRV stuff. Yeah, I mean, in a nutshell, HRV, it's been around since the 50s and 60s. The Russians developed it to keep track of their astronauts and figure out what kind of health they were in, you know, thousands of miles up in space. And really what we're looking at is the brain talking to the rest of the body. Because at all points in time, the brain is responsible for keeping you alive, not just for thinking.

It's responsible for keeping every organ functioning properly. It's responsible for energy production, managing it. So as we fatigue, as we train, as we're stressed, the brain understands that there's changes in the body as a result of that. And so we're reading the connection between the brain and the heart, which transfers into a lot of other areas, obviously. And as we're overtraining or as we're doing too much, we see specific changes in how the hearts functioning because the brain

is trying to get itself back to normal so we're essentially trying to manage it's the best analogy I think is if you were gonna drive from you know Austin to Dallas and you didn't have a GPS and you had no map you pretty take a long time to get there I'm guessing you might know the general direction you probably get lost a few times if you had if you have a GPS telling you where you're going or at least telling you where you're at, it's a hell of a lot easier to get there. And it's basically the same thing with HRV. If we know where our body's at in terms of fatigue, in terms of energy production,

we have some feedback. We can now make better decisions about what the training program needs to look like. So how does that work? Are you reading beats per minute or how does that work? So what it's actually reading is the heart rhythm. People tend to think in general that the heart's like a metronome. They think it beats very evenly, but it actually doesn't because there's a constant influence of the autonomic nervous system

pushing and pulling and speeding up and slowing down the heart rate kind of through respiration. And as we breathe, it's constantly changing speeds. So what you see if you look at the heart rate, the heart rhythm, I should say, is a very uneven pattern. And that pattern changes based on stress levels. It can even become more or less even in different pattern. And that pattern changes based on stress levels. It can even become more or less even in different directions.

And so we're just looking at the pattern of the heart rate or the heart rhythm to ascertain what the brain is doing to it because it tells us what the nervous system is doing. You can tell if somebody may be experiencing too much training or too little training? Both. I mean, if someone's experiencing too much training, we're going to see the body respond to that too much. So people tend to think of overtraining as the body's dysfunction. It's not dysfunction. It's the body's way of protecting itself against further levels of too much training. So for example, they did a study where they literally had guys do 10 sets of one RMs every single day for like two weeks. Like basically a lot of heavy work, right? Yeah. They did that at University of Memphis, actually. Yes. That sounds right. I can't remember exactly, but I'll take your word for it. Yeah. I did that at University of Memphis, actually. Yes, that sounds right.

I can't remember exactly, but I'll take your word for it. Yeah, I remember, yeah. That was Dr. Fry's study. Our professors, yeah. So basically what they showed was that the receptors and the muscles for adrenaline and different catecholamines decreased by like 47 or 37-something percent in like a two-week period.

And those receptors decreased because they were just constantly bombarded with so much of these stress hormones that the body's natural response was to pull back. And since it pulled back, it was less able to generate force and power because it didn't have as many receptors in there. So you might say, oh, the body's dysfunctional. It decreased receptors. It's not dysfunctional.

It's the body's way of protecting against all this excess of stress. So we basically just see changes in the heart rhythm, which also are going to be reflected elsewhere, that happen as a result of too much stress. It's the body's way of trying to get you to stop doing what you're doing. I mean, in some ways, injuries are the same thing. Your body gets injured because what you're doing was too much for it. It's almost this way of getting you to stop doing that. But obviously, we want to manage that process that doesn't get to that. And that's really what HRV is for.

I was talking to a guy. He was saying he was using your... It's an iPhone app? Is that correct? It's iPhone or Android, either one. Okay. So you've got some of the measures. It's basically tracking your heart rate. Yep.

Is this different than a regular heart rate monitor? No, it's actually using a heart rate monitor. So we use a Bluetooth heart rate monitor now with most devices. It's just sending the heart rate signal, and then the phone is basically pulling the signal apart to look at the variability of it. Gotcha. And yeah, I was talking to this guy.

He said, I find that my HRV is optimal if I have two beers the night before. Does that sound like something that would be accurate? Have you ever seen anything like that before? If he's used to drinking two beers every single night, then maybe his body just runs on beer. But in general, no. It's generally not the most effective strategy. I'm glad I didn't mention his name then. If he's used to it and his body likes it, then maybe it's the case. But generally speaking, we don't respond as well to alcohol as water and other healthier drinks. What about snow cones? Snow cones are the best.

I wouldn't say not have those. Yeah, there's some right around the corner. I don't know about two every night, but... Those ones around the corner are enormous. They're like this big. They're the biggest snow cones we've ever seen. I was going to about two every night, but. Those ones around the corner are enormous. They're like this big. They're the biggest snow cones we've ever seen. I was going to get a snow cone, but the line was way too long. Everything in Texas is big and the line is long.

That's right. We went out to the donut place down the street. I always forget the name. Gordo's? Gordo's, yes. Came to Paleo Faction, went to the donut shop. I got credit for that one. Great, great donut.

Was it gluten-free donuts? No, it was not gluten-free donuts. It wasn't even gluten-free donuts? No, it was not gluten-free donuts. Not one even gluten-free donut. No, it was a gigantic donut with lemon, no, it had raspberry filling, cream cheese icing, strawberries, bananas, and cake batter. Yeah, they're insane. They have like bacon. They have bacon.

Bacon, yeah, yeah. They have all kinds of delicious stuff. We had someone who had bacon. It was crazy. The best damn donut I've ever had. Oh my God. Why didn't we go there for lunch? That's the deal about Austin though, man.

Everybody runs around all the time so they can eat three pound donuts and they're cool. They're all around the lake with their dog and shit. That's what they do. So I'm actually curious with all these high level MMA fighters, they get to you. Oftentimes they're probably already pretty good. They've trained at a bunch of different places that had other coaches and whatnot. Like with these guys that are already at a pretty high level, what have you found are kind of like the top three weaknesses that you're always repeatedly fixing with fighter after fighter? You know, I think a lot of them have just been

so beat up over the years that 90% of them come with you with some sort of chronic repetitive injury. Like my shoulder always does this. My back always does this. They always have some sort of injury that just never quite goes away that we're always having to work around. So, you know, step one is just looking at mechanically what needs to be addressed, what needs to be improved. Step two, a lot of them, since they've been to so many skill coaches, this isn't really my area to work with, but Matt's, they'll have a very

disjointed game. They won't know how to put the pieces together very well because the wrestling coach doesn't know how to really go for submissions. The striking coach doesn't really know how to go for takedowns. The real thing that Matt brings to the table is that transitional game, putting all the pieces together because he's's not an MMA coach, or he's not a jiu-jitsu coach. He's an MMA coach. So he'll look at guys and say, okay, his takedowns might be good, but he has no idea how to go from

a takedown to a guard pass transition. So transitionally, I think Matt makes a huge improvement in the guys just by working with their transitions. And then third, it's totally variable, but some guys have conditioning weaknesses. Some guys have strength weaknesses. I mean, we kind of, I wouldn't say I found like it's always this or it's always that. At the highest levels, there's so much variation and there's so much variability about what guys,

you know, what they really need to work on and what they're really good at. It's hard to generalize, but just looking structurally, there's always some sort of negative injury. There's always some sort of hole in their game that they need to improve and transitionally they need to improve. And then from there, it's just a sort of negative injury. There's always some sort of hole in their game that they need to improve and transitionally they need to improve. And then from there, it's just a lot of individualization.

So you say weaknesses in strength or conditioning. Are you breaking down maybe energy systems within conditioning where they might be weak and really targeting that? Or is it more of usually like they just need more general conditioning? It depends on the fighter. Again, some guys have come in with a lot of background in some sort of endurance work, and they've got pretty good conditioning, but they're weaker. So we work more on the strength, more of the explosive, anaerobic, elactic power side.

Some guys are the opposite. They've just done a shitload of that, and they hate doing anything longer than a 10-minute run. So they've never really developed the system the way they need to. But it varies so much from fighter to fighter, especially these days. A lot of those guys have been around in the sport for 10 years. They've been doing the same thing for 10 years. So it's caused problems that we need to address.

You spent a good part of the beginning of your book talking about LSD, long, slow distance, and why it might not be so bad. Yep. I mean, the reality is people are, in this country in particular, we want results now. We want, we want more, better, faster, stronger, work our ass off harder. And a lot of the research that's used to support that is, uh, you know, literally the Tabata study

was six weeks. Most studies are three to six weeks. So it's common sense. If I take two athletes and I work one harder for three or six weeks, I mean, obviously the guy that works hard is going to get better results. But if we look at the big picture of a year of two years, you can't do that day in and day out without running the people into the ground and you, and you do need lower intensity work and you do need more volume. And a lot of the people that emailed me after reading my book said the same thing. Look, I cut out all my high or cut out all my low intensity. I stopped doing it. My conditioning never really got better. I started getting hurt. I read your book and I started incorporating it back into my program.

We did less high-intensity work but more volume, and all of a sudden I started to feel better. My conditioning got better. And I think empirically, if we look at the history of combat sports, wrestlers, boxers, they've run LSD and road work since the history of the sport. Are you going to tell me that Muhammad Ali and Frazier and all these big heavyweights weren't in good condition? Yeah.

I mean, to me, they were going 12 rounds, 15 rounds. We see heavyweight MMA fighters gassing out in one. I mean, literally, the top of the sport, you see guys gassing out in one round. So I think we've seen people try the, let's get rid of all the low-intensity stuff and do nothing behind intensity, and it doesn't work. Yeah, I mean, I've seen the argument both ways. You know, some guys were always doing the, the long,

slow distance stuff. And then they got introduced to more, you know, high speed interval training and then saw a big boost in their conditioning as well. Well, sure. If you,

if you go from never having done a high intensity program to add in, and it's, it's the icing on the cake. It's, it's, if you have the solid base, you add that in. But if you've never built the cake to begin with,

and you were missing that solid foundation, you're missing a piece of the puzzle. You're only going to be able to develop so hard. So 90% of the athletes I've seen in combat sports, resting heart rates, 48 to 53, 54, somewhere in that range. Some guys just genetically can develop that without really doing as much as they probably should because some guys are genetically aerobically gifted, just like some guys are genetically gifted for strength or power. So we've seen, I think we've seen some guys just kind of get by without doing the right things and they can just train. And maybe some MMA gyms, combat gyms train inherently better than others. Maybe they do lower intensity drilling and they do lots of volume. They don't realize they're doing a lot of low intensity work already.

Whereas you go to a different MMA gym and they're just sparring, sparring, sparring, high intensity, high intensity. So you got to kind of look at the athlete their genetics you gotta look at the gym and what the overall training picture looks like but i can tell you more often than not guys that have chronic conditioning problems benefit from including some sort of lower intensity volume into their program okay very cool so i know there's no such thing as a typical training day but if there was a typical training day what what might that look like for an MMA fighter that's kind of at the top of his game, maybe six weeks out from a fight?

So with our guys, at least, most of them do two days at that level. And we'll do probably four, two days a week. And then we'll do another two days a week that are just single train sessions. And everything is really focused. And if you're six weeks out from a fight, the goal is everything is focused on that particular fight.

So the conditioning we're doing at that point is very specific to the fight, even specific to the opponent. So if we know we're fighting a grappler or a wrestler, the conditioning-related drills, the drills in the MMA gym are all going to be related to what the game plan is, to what we think the opponent's going to do, and we're really making things as specific to the environment that we're in because essentially part of conditioning is being used to the environment you're in. You could take a marathon runner, a world-class marathon runner, and have him go ride a bike and he would suck,

even though it's still largely aerobic, it's still the legs, because his body is not used to that at all. So the more we can prepare them physically by simulating the aspects they're going to face in the fight, the better. So typically we'll do our conditioning sessions in the morning. It'll depend. We'll kind of either have our harder days where we'd do more intense drilling or some sort of conditioning sprints, whatever we're doing.

Or we have our easier days where we'll typically do a lot of swimming and stuff that's basically lower impact and not going to beat them up because we want the majority of their work to be in the MMA gym. So my job, the conditioning and strength side, is to not take away from that. If they're too gassed out or too beat up to go in and get good quality sparring and good quality training in the MMA side of things, I didn't do my job. I think people have this misconceived notion

that you should just run yourself in the ground every day to get in shape. The reality is, if you're so beat up from your conditioning that you can't actually train your sport very effectively, you're missing the point. Six weeks out, most of the conditioning is very specific, very MMA specific drills to the opponent, to the fight, to the game plan, all that. And we're typically getting

in, like I said, eight to 12 sessions a week, kind of depending on the fighter themselves and what their recovery is and everything else. But it's a full-time job. I mean, there's film and we watch film and study film. There's morning sessions, there's evening sessions. There's a lot to it. So I know a lot of professional strength coaches like in the nfl or the national hockey league like part of their evaluation for them at for them in their position on the team is basically judged on how how many games the players play and how much time they spend off the injured list so with mma fighters the whole sport is beating people up, so naturally you're going to be beat up all the time

if you're fighting all the time. So one of the main things that you're saying that you do is you try to keep them in a lower impact environment oftentimes to just keep their joints healthy and make sure that if they are going to get hurt, they're getting hurt on the mat or sparring and not in the weight room. Absolutely. I mean, I think you have to take into account, number one, these guys do beat themselves up for a living.

And number two, there's no offseason. So NFL, six months, all the major sports aside from combat sports essentially have a giant offseason where guys can rest and recover and get healthy. There is no offseason in MMA. Even when guys aren't fighting, they still have to be training because there's so many skills. There's so many things they have to get better at. They can just stop training for six months they would never get anywhere yeah football players there there's never going to be a time where they're like hey uh do you want to play a football game in two days yeah exactly they're not going to get called out like out of nowhere like so happens to MMA fighters all the

time it does exactly so you've got to stay training and you know if you don't stay on top of things if you guys let guys just run their ass in the ground they're going to be shot and they're not going to get in the ring or off the gun or whatever, ready to fight. So yeah, a big part of our job as my job in particular is keeping guys in shape, but doing a way that's not going to add to that repetitive, you know, destructive nature of their sport. So like I said, we do a lot of swimming. A lot of the conditioning stuff we do is very low impact. So we have stuff like the Jacob ladder, the rope, the row or stuff. It's not just bike, you know, and stuff's not just constant pounding on their joints and try and do that as much as we possibly can for the you know duration of fight camp to let the mma specific

stuff you know handle the majority of their conditioning because that's what they're going to be doing for a fight now if they're not gaming for a fight we might do more you know more impact stuff but it's because their intensity and their mma stuff is going to be far less so they can manage that but you know again it's got to be one big picture. You can't just have a strength coach doing one thing and then the MMA coach doing another and no real communication or connectedness between the two. And I think that's the biggest thing that's missing in our sport for sure. I mean, football coaches have football teams have a head football coach. He directs the show and tells people what's going on. You wouldn't never have the

strength coaching coach doing something that the head coach had no idea what it was. It's one big program. The head coach is on the line. His ass is on the line if he loses. But with MMA, these guys have 10 coaches sometimes and no one's really accountable for putting it all together. On a football team, their coaches are a team.

And in MMA, you may not have a team of coaches that are all the same people working together all the time. Oftentimes, not a strength coach at all. Right. He's left out completely. That's really a pretty recent development. Not that MMA's that old.

That's the last guy to get hired. Let's take a break real quick. When we come back, I want to talk about how you break up the different energy systems. Barbell Shrugged is brought to you by you. To learn more about how you can support the show, go to barbellshrugged. brought to you by you. To learn more about how you can support the show, go to barbellshrugged.com and sign up for the newsletter. All right, we're back with Joel Jamison here. And we're talking about energy systems,

what I was wanting to talk about. So I guess that's where we'll go. We discussed one a little bit, which was long, slow distance, and that was kind of like an aerobic capacity type training. A lot of times when I think about energy systems, I think about aerobic training, like lactic training or glycolytic, and then creatine phosphate training, just kind of breaking up in those three, uh, in your book, you split it up and like, you know, lactic capacity or we'll say aerobic capacity, aerobic power, lactic capacity, lactic power. And then, uh, and then you have to refresh me on the other stuff. Same thing for the other ones. Yeah. Yeah. So you, you break it all up in between power and capacity and, uh, usually it doesn't get discussed like that. It's kind of like, oh, these are like the ranges of intervals that work for this type of training.

But you got pretty specific and laid it all out there, and, yeah, that was pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, I think you can either complicate energy systems to death or you can try to figure out a way to keep it simple. I tried to find some middle ground. But really, in my mind, it comes down to either one or the other. Either you're working rate, you're working how fast one of the energy systems can turn over ATP and produce energy,

or you're working basically economy and how efficient and long it can produce it for. And really, that's kind of the focus, either one, because you can't really do both. If I increase the rate and I'm burning through more of it, obviously my endurance goes down because I'm producing more of it faster. So if I double the horsepower of my car, I'm probably not going to get better gas mileage. So I tend to look at energy systems from that standpoint. Are we trying to increase rate and energy production, the speed of it, or are we trying to increase the economy and the efficiency of it? Because those are two different goals. So we're going to tend to approach the improvement from that standpoint.

When you're testing athletes, are you trying to figure out if they need more capacity or power in the different energy systems? We tend to look at it as a whole. I mean, so when someone's sparring or doing their specific stuff, we'll have them wear a heart rate monitor. We'll look at, you know, what are their heart rates at. We'll look at their heart rate recovery,

which is kind of my biggest marker for guys to be in shape. So we'll basically, and I think this would actually transfer. The quicker they recover, the quicker their heart rate gets down to a certain point. Yes. The better shape they're in. Yeah, we'll basically look at how many beats their heart rate can drop in a minute after their intensity, whatever they did with high intensity.

And basically, the bigger that drop, interestingly enough, what it shows us is the bigger the drop, the greater percentage of energy came from the aerobic side in that preceding activity. Because anaerobic energy contribution is produced through sympathetic activation, basically. So you have to drive up adrenaline and cortisol, all these things, to increase energy production. So the more anaerobic something is, obviously the higher the heart rate is because of adrenaline and all these things basically going through the bloodstream to increase the speed of energy production. So when someone's got a whole lot of these hormones flowing around their bloodstream, the heart rate comes down a lot slower after their activity. So if we have someone's dropping heart rate of 20 beats per minute and we have athlete B who's dropping 40 beats a minute afterwards, we know that athlete B did more of that work aerobically. They're going to be able to maintain it for a longer period of time.

So, you know, we'll look at their heart rate profile. We'll look at their heart rate recovery. And then we'll kind of look at their overall performance to figure out what needs to be improved, whether it's, you know, this guy's endurance was great, but his power sucks. So we're going to work more of the power end of things. Or we're going to say his power was great, but he totally gassed out here in minute three and he took, you know, after 60 seconds, his heart rate only dropped 20 beats. Now we're going to work more of the capacity and the endurance side of things.

So we tend to look at it from, you know, are we improving strength, power, rate performance, you know, power, or do we want to improve more of the endurance capacity? And again, you have to watch them train. You have to look at some metrics and some feedback from their activity. What are, I mean, you'd have to really generalize here. What are some, you know, if you see a big deficiency in capacity across the board, you know, what type, what does their training look like after that? So if we see capacity being the biggest thing, we're generally going to do a lot of volume,

but lower to moderate intensity, just lots of reps, lots of lower intensity stuff. Just we want work capacity. So we want volume, but we can't obviously have so much intensity that they can't maintain that volume. So typically it's going to be a couple days a week of the higher intensity stuff, four to five days a week of the lower intensity work, and just building volume, building work capacity. So if you were to see that on the CrossFit side, I would say the same thing.

You can get lots of reps with the lifts, but I'm not maxing out. I'm not going for time. I'm just getting in reps. I'm working on technique to be more efficient in my technique so that I'm not being inefficient in my movement. I'm just building work capacity through volume. If we see the other side of the equation, power, then it's the opposite. Now we're working really high-rate movements.

We're working long rest intervals. We're working purely speed and power. But we're not really working fatigue at that point. We're working more just getting in that strength and power, and then we start to transition more towards the capacity side of things very cool so crossers have a lot of shoulder problems boxers wrestlers they have a lot of shoulder problems too like if someone has a shoulder issue specifically what are some things that you guys still do to make it where they can still train kind of kind of full force full bore in the weight room and maybe even on

the mats too where they can train hard and not further exacerbate any shoulder problems that they have yeah i mean you definitely see it we had uh a fighter had to have labral debridement and a lot of issues just from just from the thousands of repetitions of the movement i mean it's a it's a very repetitious sport so first and foremost you know we try and do an overabundance of pulling measures and and you know rotator cuff work to strengthen and we do a lot of supplementation trying to keep keep everything moving. We manage our program to try and keep them happening, but shit happens. Guys get hurt. So at that point, a lot of stuff we'll do is in the pool. A lot of stuff is

changing exercises to try and alleviate some of it. You just got to kind of work around what you got to work around. We have shoulders, knees, elbows. I mean, shit happens in MMA. So you're always just kind of looking at how to mitigate that. And again, that's why we do a lot of work in the pool because you can do a lot of in a very low impact environment. You can get guys moving and conditioned and get blood flow in the area

without furthering it. So we'll, we'll try to avoid the eccentric side of things as much as we can. And literally it's just a matter of figuring out which exercises you can do to, to work around it until it gets better. But the biggest thing is just staying on top of it. I think you can't wait until they're just destroyed to address it. You've got to kind of, as soon as someone starts getting hurt, someone starts bothering them, you know, they need to communicate that. And then we start working with it and try to prevent it from getting too far down the road to where they can't do anything. So CrossFit has a lot of movements that people outside of the CrossFit world view as very risky. You know, kick and pull, so we just talk about shoulders, very hard on your shoulders, especially if you're not ready for it. Olympic weightlifting,

a lot of people think is more risky than is necessary if you're a football player. Like, why do you need to be snatching if you hurt your wrist? You're going to be out of the game or something like that. Do you guys follow that path at all? Like, there's no reason to snatch if you have a fight coming up in two weeks because what if you fucking hurt your elbow snatching? That'd be stupid. I think the biggest thing is I'm not going to do anything the athlete's not prepared

to do. That would be stupid. So obviously we see Olympic weightlifters can weightlift their entire career and not fall apart. I mean, those guys that have done it properly are in relatively good health. Powerlifters, we see some of them just completely destroyed. We see some of them fairly healthy. It depends on how their overall program is put together. It depends on how they were prepared.

Would I take a fighter that I never worked with that's got three weeks for a fight and throw him in a bunch of snatches and never done them? No, that would be stupid. But if we've had a chance to build that ability, to build that capacity, that movement reserve, however you want to look at it, then there's no reason you can't do all those things. It's just a matter of preparing the athletes for it. I think the problem is, you know, when you have your average guy walking across the gym and try to do all these movements

he's never done and is watching him, you know, do them as fast as he can and just has never really built the technique and he's trying to rush it in the first place, I think that's where you obviously run into injury problems doing movements you've never done or have never been done properly. But I've never wanted to say this is a horrible exercise. You should never do it.

Exercises are just tools. And for one athlete, it might be the greatest tool in the world. For another athlete, it might be the worst tool in the world. It comes down to what is the athlete prepared for? Is it one that's going to benefit them? Is it not? Who knows? So I think if you have the capacity to do the exercise and it's beneficial to sport then then absolutely

do it if it's not going to benefit the sport and you've never developed the capacity to do it take the time to develop the ability to do it properly before you start doing it five days a week do you have your your mma fighters read your book is that something that they want to do or that they do do crossers are into exercise and energy systems and all that shit it's a part of the sport but it's just like a part of the culture they like reading about that stuff i've really gotten that from many fighters most fighters that i've worked with don't care they just tell me what to do and i'll go do it but obviously i've the book's been read by thousands of many people so somewhere they're reading it just the ones i work just the ones i work with to say what do i do tell me what to do they don't they don't particularly

care about why as much as just tell me what to do. So that's what we give them. Do you have any other resources like videos that are complementary to the book? Yeah, actually I have a DVD called The Conditioning Blueprint, which just kind of goes over the material in the book in a little bit simpler fashion. We demonstrate the methods that are in the book so people can see how they're actually done and kind of go through some programming. I'm working on some new stuff here coming out next four to five months. We're going to start to put together some more video course

material that should help people kind of understand how to put it together. But, you know, the books and DVD are pretty complimentary and, you know, the book's very comprehensive and goes through, I think, 200 pages or whatever it is. And the video shows and demonstrates a lot of stuff in there. So there's both available. I thought you were going to say no. I didn't know about that. I thought that was a selfish question. I was hoping you had some videos, but I thought you were going to tell me no, and I was going to be like, oh, bum him.

But I'm glad you have some. I'm going to go watch it now. You got it all. So are you guys testing on the HRV with these athletes daily? And how are you adjusting training based on what you're reading out that day? So, yeah, to really get the most out of HRV, you want to see a daily measurement because we want a moving picture of how the athlete's changing. And if we only have data points on two days a week, we kind of missed everything in between. So it's a three-minute process.

If somebody's career is on the line and these guys are fighting for $200,000, half a million, some of them are making pretty decent money these days. If you're fighting for that much money and you're not spending three minutes a day to improve your program, then something's wrong. So, yeah, we have them do it every day. We'll get back three colors, basically a green, amber, red, which tells us kind of how much fatigue they're under. And the biggest thing is people have this idea that, oh, if I'm amber, I can't do anything.

No, we just want to manage the program. So if they're green, it basically means it's a green light. They can train. They can do whatever we had planned. If it's amber, we'll scale back a little bit. So it depends on the day. It might not have even been a high intensity or a high threshold day. We might just have already planned a low day anyway, so we'll scale back a little bit so it depends the day it might not have even been a high intensity or you know a high threshold day we might just have already planned a low day anyway so we'll just do that but if we did have a higher intensity day it's just scaling a little bit back

so if we were going to do five rounds of something we might do three rounds of something if we were going to do an hour of something we might do 40 minutes of something so it's just about a little micromanaging if they're red uh you know typically we do more active recovery or kind of figure out what's what caused that in the first place but In the case of red, we really would scale back quite a bit, but you try to manage things so you don't really get to that point. Then what we'll basically do is you can look back over the week. You probably ignored amber for a few days if you go red. Yeah, exactly. If you got to red, you did something, drank more than two beers before you went to sleep.

You try to prevent that as much as possible, but we can also look back over the week and say, okay, here was the program last week. Here's the results of it. What should next week's program look like? So the idea is you want to learn as you go. You want to say, okay, what did last week's program do to us? What do we need to change moving forward for next week? So you want to help not just get feedback as you go,

but also help you to plan the following weeks as well, the following periods. Right on, right on. And you see a lot of lifestyle factors that play into that too as far as the response in the next day? Yeah, absolutely. Like food profile, sleep, et cetera? People vastly underestimate the impact of life and sleep.

Those things, if you think about training an hour, two hours a day, some of these guys three hours a day, it's quite a bit. But life is 24-7. And the impact of all those hours add up. Even though you're not lifting weights or sprinting or fighting, there's a lot that goes on in your life to run around, to deal with family, deal with kids, deal with job stress and all these other factors. It takes its toll on you. Yes. Traveling.

Stress is stress. Exactly. Whether it's emotional or physical. Yeah. It kind of manifests, and the same hormonal responses occur. Exactly. And plus, like I said, it's 16 hours of stress versus one or two. Right.

Yeah. I see a lot of Microsoft employees where I work at, and you'll see before a big product launch, you'll see just people tank. Or you look at college students who are finals and they just tank. And a lot of times the worst part is college strength programs will be testing for end of quarter or end of semester or whatever. At the same time, the kids' finals are going on. So the kids are not getting sleep.

They're burned out from stress from studying and everything else. And then they're going to get max effort tested in the weight room and their numbers are shit. And they wonder why. It's just... Take it into consideration. If you're an accountant and it's, you know, April 15th, today's probably not the day to max out on your back squat.

Yeah, exactly. Or if you're a business owner. Yeah, so people definitely that start using it, they see the impact of all this other stuff and they're like, oh shit, I had no idea how much missing a couple nights of good sleep had or I had no idea of certain people. I've seen people eating certain foods

that just completely destroy them and they had no idea that it had such an inflammatory role. I think most athletes they kind of auto-tune themselves, or most great athletes. You see an athlete that it seems like a lot of things come to them easy or they're effortless. For instance, like CrossFit, you have a guy like Rich Froning.

He's like, oh, yeah, I don't really have a strict plan or anything like that. But a guy like that, I think he kind of already has the internal HRV thing going on. He's kind of so tuned into his body. He knows when he's supposed to push that day. He knows when he's supposed to take it easy. Do you see MMA athletes with the same, that are tuned in like that? Some yes, some no.

I think the culture of MMA has ingrained a lot of them to over-train the shit out of themselves because they think that's the right answer. Train hard no matter what. You see it because they almost feel like, Oh, if I tell the coach I'm, I'm tired or if I tell them that I'm going to be looking like a pussy, so they won't do it.

Yeah. But in general, yeah, I think you see the better athletes, uh, at least in other sports I've worked with, you see them more accepting like, Oh,

I can take a day off. Who cares? Like, I don't feel like I don't feel it today. I'm gonna take a day off and they, they, they know it's okay. It's a lot easier in an individual sport,

but even MMA, even though it's an individual sport, you're training with a team. There's just that expectation that you've got to show up. Yeah, if someone else is getting ready for a fight and they need sporting partners or training partners, then absolutely. But I think a lot of times the athletes know. It's just listening to their internal instincts that are telling them to stop doing it. It's the tricky part. A lot of them will just do it anyway.

So something like using the HRV technology would be maybe a great way to learn how to tune into your own body. Like a lot of people may not be, you know, understand what the daily life stress is doing to them in regard, you know, along with training stress. But if they start using something like HRV, they see it. And then, you know, it's a, you know, it's objective, you know, then go, oh shit, there's really something wrong going on here. Maybe they, over time they tune in. I think maybe someone could use it for a few months and then kind of like see what it feels like. It was like, okay, I hit amber, and I also felt like that that morning. You'll definitely get much more in tune with your body like you're talking about. I don't know that I ever should just stop using it.

I mean, you're never going to guess. You should never stop using your product. There's no subscription fee for what it was. You should pay what it was you should pay one but I think the more people use it absolutely they start to gauge what's going to happen and become

much better at evaluating what the effects of all these things are so the result is they just either make the choice to do it anyway because they know it's going to happen

they don't care or they take the high road and don't drink that third beer before they go to bed and they're fine yeah I made a mistake once I'll tell the story

real quick Doug was getting ready for a fight I felt like I should be there on Saturday morning to help him prepare that 30-beer before they go to bed, and they're fine. Yeah, I made a mistake once. I'll tell the story real quick. Doug was getting ready for a fight. I felt like I should be there on Saturday morning to help him prepare. But on the night before, I got wasted. And I showed up to train anyway, and I should have slept in. It was back in the college days.

And he beat me up so bad that blood was everywhere, and my nose exploded. And I couldn't touch my nose for like three months without crying and all that mess. And you know what? I'm pretty sure the HRV would have told me. It would have given a red light and said, no, stay in bed, Mike. Don't go get punched in the face by Doug. You don't need technology to tell you that.

I obviously did. I barely do. I'm not the smartest athlete you know we've had fighters who shall remain nameless but we've seen some stuff happen and guys wake up for

training after being slapped in the head with a chair by their girlfriend or ex-girlfriend in the middle of the night that really did happen that's a real story and he had a fight two weeks later oh no Yeah That really did happen That's a real story That's a deeper set of problems And he had a fight Two weeks later

Oh no So it's We've seen it happen Those are the lifestyle factors You're talking about That affect the HIV Slaps in the face With a chair

By your girlfriend Fighters do not always Make the smartest choices When it comes to To women I would say They like women With daddy issues I hear They like strippers

That's what he said That'll move That'll move for sure I would say. They like women with daddy issues, I hear. They like strippers. That's what he said. That'll move, that'll move for sure. All right, let's... Hey, Marcy. Thanks for never hitting me with a chair. Preferably one that's folding if you're going to do it. A folding chair, yeah.

All right, Joel, thanks for joining us today. Anything you want to promote? Is it true you have HRV Pro is that been out or is that coming out so the

the HRV Pro Trainer basically the idea is you want to give coaches you want to give people that own gyms and business owners a way to manage it you know

a large group of people so they can have all their clients in one database they can look online and see where everybody's at and they can manage everyone's program

so the simple way to use it everybody gets the system. They come in today. We have our green workout. We have our Amber workout and then we have a red. So you just make, make those little scale changes.

So, you know, I like that. Yeah. You can individualize stuff a lot easier. So we've had, uh, you know,

the Philadelphia Eagles, I would say the most technologically advanced team in NFL by far. They've used it for last year. Uh, we've had Gonzaga university, a bunch of their teams, Anaheim Ducks, Angels, a whole bunch of different teams we've had

use an Olympic ski team. So this is something like a coach would go buy, not an athlete. No, a coach or trainer would buy it for all of his athletes or all of his gym clients. So this is like a big bulk thing. Exactly. So basically we have 20 video modules that come with it. People go through the 20 video modules, become certified, and now they can resell it. So they can purchase essentially

in bulk at wholesale. They can sell it to their members, incorporate it in their packaging, whatever sort of programs they want to offer. And now they can individualize large groups. I mean, that's really the idea is we want to give coaches tools to say, yeah, this business model works for me. It's great. But here's a tool now that can individualize stuff on another level. That sounds like it would go great in a CrossFit gym. It would, actually. Has it been tried in a CrossFit gym yet? Yeah, we've had a few CrossFit gyms using it.

I mean, James Fitzgerald used it with his online clients. He was one of my first beta testers, and I got great feedback from him just looking at all that stuff in conjunction with all the stuff he's doing. So, yeah, we've had a few CrossFit gyms try it, and I know Rob's got another gym he's working with. And I think once they start to get how easy it is, like I said, it literally can be as easy as green, amber, red. So you don't have to spend hours programming. You just make small changes, and you're able to give people better individualized work in the same sort of group environment.

You've convinced me. I'm going to do more than think about your stuff. I'm probably going to get one. Maybe the pro. I don't know. Give it a shot. Yeah, we'll check it out. Once everyone that's using it starts winning CrossFit, then we'll get one.

There you go. You need those testimonials. The CrossFit testimonials. Absolutely. Anything you want to promote? Websites? Twitter handles? Sure.

You can go Facebook.com slash 8weeksout or slash Joel Jamison. Twitter slash Joel Jamison. I don't ever tweet, so don't follow me there. 8weeksout.com or bioforcehrv.com is where we have all the HRV stuff. Excellent. And then we'll actually have the pro trainer coming out here in a couple of weeks. Cool. Thanks for joining us.

Awesome. Appreciate having me. Thanks, Joel. And don't forget to go to barbellshrug.com, and sign up for the newsletter. And maybe we'll let you know how the HRV test went.