Modern Wisdom - #446 - Dr Duncan French - The UFC's Cutting-Edge Training Protocols

Episode Date: March 12, 2022

Dr Duncan French is the Vice President of Performance at UFC's Performance Institute. The UFC has some of the world's top athletes, now backed by cutting edge data-driven interventions from some of the most advanced protocols and coaches on the planet. Duncan is using everything from diagnostic tools to recovery, VR training, psychedelic supplementation, scientifically-backed rep range protocols and peri-training nutrition. Expect to learn how Duncan navigates the politics between fighters' gyms and the UFC's central performance institute, how athletes manage the psychological strain of fight week, what key metrics Duncan's team analyse to judge athlete's health, how to maximise muscle growth from two sessions a week and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 10% discount on everything from BioOptimizers at https://magbreakthrough.com/modernwisdom (use code MW10) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://bit.ly/cdwisdom (use code MW15) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out the UFC Performance Institute's Website - https://ufc-pi.webflow.io/ Follow The UFC PI on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ufcpi  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bonjour friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr Duncan French. He's the Vice President of Performance at the UFC's Performance Institute. The UFC has some of the world's top athletes now backed by cutting-edge data-driven interventions from some of the most advanced protocols and coaches on the planet. Duncan is using everything from diagnostic tools to recovery, VR training, psychedelic supplementation, scientifically backed rep-range protocols, and peri-training nutrition to get the most out of his athletes. Expect to learn how Duncan navigates the politics

between fighters gyms and the UFC's Central Performance Institute, how athletes manage the psychological strain of fight week, what key metrics Duncan's team analyze to judge athletes' health, how to maximize muscle growth from two sessions a week, and much more. The UFC is a beast. Man, say what you want, even if you don't enjoy MMA, what they've done in terms of their media, the way that they promote their fights, the way that they are now coaching their athletes with a central performance institute.

It really is cutting edge. And Duncan is the driving force behind what's happening from a strengthening perspective. So yeah, if you're an athlete or a coach or just a fan of strengthening conditioning or the UFC in general, begin to love this. But now, please welcome Dr. Duncan French. Dr. Duncan French, welcome to the show.

Hi mate, how are you doing? Good to hear from you. I know, it's nice to hear a familiar Northeastern voice while we're over in the States. I know, right? There's nothing like home when it comes down to it. Harrogate, right? Originally North Yorkshire, Harrogate Nairs were reaching and then moved to Newcastle for college and I kind of caught a new castle home now. Originally North York, yeah, Harrogate Nairs were region and then moved to Newcastle for college and I kind of caught a new castle home now. Wow.

I'm going to adopt a Jordy, let's say. Okay, yeah, yeah. What the number of times that I get accused of being Australian while I'm over here, was it a big meter of yesterday and I got accused of being Australian more times than I got accused of being British. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. Oh, mate. I get, I mean, what?

I'm in my 50 year, well, four years from a PhD and then now five years since I came back to the States, I get everything from South African to Australian to New Zealand to Arkansas, you name it. Wow. So you've been working with, is it over 30 professional or Olympic sports since you started? Yeah, I think 37, I think, was the last time I counted. So yeah, been

been blessed. It's been good. Lots of a lot of variety and lots of opportunity. But yeah, whether it's pro sport or the Olympic movement, I've been around the block, let's say. And it was three full Olympic cycles with team GB as well. Yeah, through the English Institute of Sport, which is obviously the high performance service provided to British Olympic programs, as well as Commonwealth programs like Netball and things like that. But I was a strength conditioning coach and sports scientists through the English Institute for about 14 years as you say, a variety of different sporting backgrounds. So it's been a bit cool, right, right now.

What's the common thread between all of those? Have you moved into specialties since you've been there? Was it always strengthening conditioning? Was it performance? Yeah, now I mean, I've always been a strengthening conditioning physical preparation coach. And that's kind of what I would call my, you know, my primary area of expertise.

You know, with some sports, we've been to there. My degrees and things, PhDs are in sports science, but I certainly went around the coaching route and then could call upon my spending condition in my sports science throughout that. So yeah, let's say many hats say, many, many hats, many, many strings to the bow when you need it, you know, that's kind of part of the deal. So given the fact that you've had over 30 sports that you've worked with and then you've stepped into the UFC, what is particularly unique about the athletes that you work with there? You've got this broad base of experience in the past, but now you're working with a very broad ranging sport. What's different about the guys that you work with, their preparation, their training?

I mean, listen, every sport's got its own culture and things that you really resonate to and things that you're like, whoa, why are they doing it like that? And you're kind of questioning some of the behaviours. But I think I'm not bold enough to say the success is because of me. It's hopefully a play of the teams that I'm involved with, play a role in that. Athletes are successful before the service providers come online and they'll be successful long after we go. I think when you look at all the different sports,

they all come with different cultural approaches and different kind of dogmatic mindsets in what is good and what is bad. I'm blessed right now to work with combat athletes and obviously MMA fighters here in the UFC. And I think this is the one sport in all of my career where the challenges and the different variables that go into success are so complex.

This community, this group of athletes are, they'll run through a brick wall for you, right? You can harness that motivation and that energy and I think that's one thing which really differentiates combat athletes, it's just a commitment to the grind. Any elite athlete at the highest level is doing things are, you know, different to the normal Joe Blow walking down the street, right? But I think when you look at the rigors of what MMA is and what these guys go through on a day to day basis,

it truly has lots of behold. I don't think that's what's fascinating about this community. You know, they are spitting sawdust and pretty honest as a day is long, but they are, you know, that their commitment and their dedication to their craft and their ethic is, is unfounder in its amazing. Would you say that the MMA fighters are about as ultimate of an athlete as you're going to get at the moment coming out of sport? Yeah, I mean, I get a bias, right, because I sit in this space right now.

But again, I compare and you look at the conditioning levels, you look at gymnasso divers and the skill and the artistry is amazing. You can take any sport and you can pull things from it, but just in terms of true athleticism and what an MMA fight I have to do by combining strength, power, conditioning, skill, the psychological component of being able to execute under what is truly severe and consequential outcomes, really different, Jason. And it's funny because I get a lot of other athletes or athletes have worked with formally reaching out to me and say, oh, you know, big fan of the UFC or I think that's kind of a measure when you have other pro athletes saying like, I love watching them, I'm a man in the UFC and those guys are unreal, what they can do and okay, well, if you're saying that,

then there's obviously something in it, which is pretty cool to hear. Yeah, it's such an entertaining sport. You know, the guys have really, really got this format right, which is it's two guys or two girls in a eight-sided ring, smashing seven shades of shit out of each other for a while. And then, as someone's hand gets raised at the end of it, it's a fairly simple format, but it is so accessible, super entertaining, I think, to build up that they've got now. At first, I wasn't

much of a fan of the cleaning up of the branding, but I think that that also makes everything look a lot more cleaner and professional, which is great. Going back to what you said before about the fact that there has been an influence of your input, the performance institute, on the outcomes that you're getting from the fighters, but because you are dealing with every fighter, the waterline of all of them gets raised up, right? Like everybody has access to you guys. Now not everybody's going to get the same sort of outcomes because not everybody is as coachable,

not everybody responds as well. They might have more dog dogmatic ideologies within their own gym and such like, but how are you gauging the impact that you have across the board, across all fighters when everybody has access? It's not like the UFC beat some other organization in a big battle right out. It's a little bit different to any professional sporting organization where you're judged on wins and losses for all intents and purposes, right? Where can I have the league, let's say? And we'll only have about 500 because we might be working with both athletes that are in the octagon at the same time for a main event. Well you never lost a fight.

Right, we've never lost a fight. We've also won a lot as well, right? I've lost a lot, I see. I mean, I think our evaluation of our success is based on different kind of KPIs and objectives. It comes down to what you said in the header question. Yes, the performance institute is about raising the level across the whole fight community globally. That's a big ambition, right? But it's about slowly evolving the sport to embed better training science, better methodologies,

better approaches for medicine or nutrition or whatever it may be. Return to play rates are obviously a common one, but you know the nature of injuries and the incidence of injuries and how they happen in around a wrestling practice that might have too many athletes on the mat one time and you know a wrestling scramble and someone might roll onto another pair working somewhere else on the mat and you cause a stupid injury that's completely preventable. You type of things we kind of try and keep an eye on looking at how athletes are making weight and the status of their weight making exercises. Is it done in an optimized fashion? Ultimately we're in a weight classification sport, which in

itself is a cultural approach, not every sport requires you to make weight. That brings with it a lot of nuance and a lot of tradition and approaches. So how do we kind of get the athletes into the up to gun in the most optimal way possible around the parameters of making weight and the guys having to cut weight. Technical skills that have been executed, we take a lot of interest in that as well

because ultimately by association whilst we're not necessarily the ones coaching those techniques or the technical side of it, giving people physical attributes or a mental status to go and try a technique in competition or, you know, as I say, optimizing someone's capability during competition, you would say that the probability of the fight

being at a higher level, at a higher standard is also got some influence by the work that we're doing as well. Yeah, one of the things that's interesting is if you look back to the traditions of fighting, you know, your Bruce Lee's, the very much a sort of servant artistic interpretation, you had more Eastern martial arts that would involve things like energy, cheese, such like how are you finding the blend because I'm presuming you can't have completely got rid and there's also, you know, the sort of fight is that are very much flow and natural and artistic in the way that they fight. How are you finding the blend between this artistic element and the data driven in interventions that you need to make with people? Yes, great question. I mean, I think first and foremost, it's martial arts, right? Mixed

martial arts. And whilst it's a competitive fight, and that's chaos often, you'd be surprised the underpinning techniques and tactics that go into the fight any moment in time. And again, I draw on something that's been brought into our ecosystem here, the performances that shoot through our head MMA coach over at Shanghai Academy Dean Amesinger. He talks about the MFA, which is the martial artists, so the martial artists, they are fighters, and then they are also athletes. Right, so FMA, like we look at that kind of trifecta of an influence. So when it comes to, you know, the artistry, the tactics, the technical skill set, and then, yeah, athleticism, we can put a lot of data and objectivity around athleticism. So whether it is martial arts being a fighter, which is

more mental and some physical attributes, but then also the physical attributes of athleticism and being an athlete, we can start to really nail down each of these three factors that go into driving success in our sport. Talking about some of the tensions that might be going on between the way that people typically see fighters, particularly those that do MMA and the new world or this sort of renaissance that you guys are getting with data-driven interventions and stuff and trying to professionalize all of this. How are you finding managing the relationship between your team and the guys that you look after and the interventions that they want and then the athletes, the fighters coach and the gym that they go back to, or the multiple gyms that they might go back to afterwards, they're going to have

their ideas around how they should be preparing, how they should be training, their loading, etc., etc. Talk to me about the tension between those. Yeah, I think you talk about tension. I think you're going to try and remove the tension. And that's any sport, right? Again, I draw on my experiences. It doesn't matter what sport you go into, it comes down to the maturity of people to handle data and handle information. Now, for some sports, I've got legacy and long-term history of using wearable technology,

or handling data, looking at statistics and measuring it. You take a sport like basketball, everything is built and or American football, everything is built around statistics. Baseball is probably the most classic one there. So they're really comfortable in using and talking about numbers and using numbers to direct strategy.

Other sports might not necessarily be as mature in handling data and be comfortable with that type of information. Mixed martial arts being one of them. So what we're trying to do is obviously elevate people's awareness and understanding of the types of information we're giving them. And what it means, just innovating and using anecdotal insights to suggest that a certain tactic or technique is going to be hugely successful. You know, you can look to the recent kind of evolution of leg kicks,

or low calf kicks in MMA, and how it's revolutionizing our sports, and something that's really pivoted this sport and taking it out in a different direction. I mean, calf kicks have always been around, but they've not been used as much as they are now, and they're truly debilitating. So it's become an offensive tactic. You've also got to be defending against that.

So, you know, out there in the community, the coaches are innovating at any moment in time. But what we're trying to do is kind of put evidence and evaluation against it to say, you know, how can we optimize it further? How can we give you competitive advantage and try and come together and meet the rubberware where it meets the road with the maturity

of an athlete or a coach to handle information. Yeah, how do you deal with the fact that typically you have a strength in conditioning or a coaching unit that is looking after one team and every athlete that works underneath them is being pushed forward, whereas you are doing a fight around opponent. Now, obviously there'll be securities around data

and such like, it's not like you're going to be telling each fighter what the other one's preparing and stuff like that. But that must be a very unique environment to work in, right? Like we said before, you win and lose every single fight that you've been involved in. Right, yeah. I mean, we're agnostic to the whole roster. So you're absolutely right.

You know, athlete, the model that we work to is that the UFC fighters are independent contractors. So we can't mandate that they engage with the performance institute and the services that we offer. It's very much an alicate, take it, or leave it, pick what you want, type approach. And obviously that drives individuality from the very get-go. Some athletes want all of our service provision, some athletes want nothing to do with us, because there's a lot of paranoia about

what you're talking about in this question. Other athletes will pick and choose bits and pieces as and when they see fit. You know, if you've got a some kind of injury or historical injury that we're working and treating with you, you know, obviously your opponent, which doesn't, you know, that's, that information is sacrosanct. If your opponent was to find that out, that could truly change the likelihood of your success in the event. So, yeah, we're very sensitive to how we handle information, how we handle data, knowing that we've got this really kind of wild and unique business model that we work to, where we're potentially working

with two fighters that are going to compete in a month's time and we're strategising and working with their coaches, helping them on physical development, etc, etc. I think, you know, the thing that we do to distance ourselves completely for that is that we don't coach and teach technical and tactical work through the performance institute, which is obviously the secret source, you know, the MMA techniques. What we do is obviously support them with nutrition and body composition, with diagnostics, with physical preparation, with mental preparation, all of the supplementary factors. What are the primary metrics that you're looking at over the weeks and months? So my housemate has just been given a promotion at Newcastle Folkins. He's now the junior

physiotherapist team. And since living with him for the last few years, I've been fascinated learning about chronic loads and yardage. And I got to see the back end of one of the spread sheets that they have these readouts. And it's just an endless, endless stream of data who got up to the maximum velocity this week, who's done the most yardage, all this stuff. So what's the equivalent in your world? What do you look at to the maximum velocity this week, who's done the most yardier, all this stuff. So what's the equivalent in your world? What do you look at from the players? Yeah, I mean, welcome to the world of like, world class store, elite level sport right now.

I mean, there's more data than we all know what to do with because ultimately technology has changed the game. I mean, just kind of processing that in a team setting can be overwhelming. But I think when we look at MMA, obviously, we're trying to get to the same questions. We're trying to understand how he optimizes training load, the exposure to a training stimulus to maximize the effect of that training stimulus. So how do we do that? How do we measure people's exposure? What's

the right exposure? It's a Goldilocks effect, right? How much is too much? How much is too little? Oh, Goldilocks, that's just right. Exactly. That a Goldilocks effect, right? How much is too much? How much is too little and oh Goldilocks? That's just right exactly. That's what we need to be There's a lot of research and literature out there that we know connection between the The likelihood of injury or an injury incidence With over training versus under training versus you know wet wear things sit So that's an important conversation but in the sport of MMA it's a little bit different, right? Because we don't have really robust data insights around competition. Not like they wear in heart rate monitors, it's not like they wear in GPS, it's not like they wear in

any kind of accelerometers or those types of things where we can really start to understand what competition is. We're kind of extrapolating a little bit and making insinuations based on what the data we can get in sparring or in training. So yeah, we look at training load, we look at vision assessments and reaction times, we look at cognitive function, obviously it's a sport where you get hit in the head. So how do we monitor and manage those exposure loads, whether it's through instrumented mouthpieces that have accelerometers in them where we can look at it. No way. You can put something in the mouth that's going to measure everything. Oh yeah, yeah, that's kind of the direction we're going now. That's gone already. Yeah, in rugby and Australian rules football has already happened in a little bit,

where we're in web pursu in that with MMA. And then you've obviously got other factors like, you know, just his strength, power, characteristics, heart rate for your conditioning, what's your training zone, what's your biological load with respect to lactate management, things like that. So that's the North Star for us right now is working with different partners and technology and academics to say, all right, how can we really nail down and understand

and of what MMA is? Because we haven't got those in tights. And obviously there's the striking components, but there's grappling components. We're not really moving too much, but there's a huge metabolic demand through isometric hold or isometric contraction that it's really hard to classify what that looks like in terms of ultimately the athletic load that you have to form in the optimum. I went to this meetup that I said, yes, I've got accused of being an Australian. And I met this guy who spends eight hours a day

in virtual reality. So he's at the forefront of developing games. Oh, guys. Yeah, he'd seem to love it. And he was telling me that there is new VR technology that is able to track the body's position in space so that it can accurately represent it in the virtual reality world. I'm wondering whether you would be able to get to the stage in future where all of the different camera angles that you guys have around the octagon may be able to track stuff like trauma and movement

and then be able to reverse engineer that to actually be able to give you some sort of metrics. But the fact that you've got whatever a GPS mouth guards with an inbuilt HRV monitor or a heart rate sensor in it, that blows my mind. You could have something that you just knock into, knock into your mouth and it give you all of those solutions is crazy.

Yeah, it's cool, right? And again, that's one piece of equipment and technology that they wear in training and competition. So, you know, that's something that we're pursuing because it can be universal then. But yeah, I mean, you talk about VR, like anything that mitigates, you know, TBI or concussion or the risk of head trauma in our sport is going to be beneficial and advantageous. So we're actively

pursuing those types of things. And yeah, VR, virtual reality, augmented reality, along with haptic technology, where you look at vibration, so it's coming out of the gaming world, you know, world of warcraft or whatever or cards, you know, those types of things where you, you know, you shoot, you're gun, but you're getting that feedback as well at the same time. How can we apply haptic technology in a augmented reality space where we're using VR, and we're also getting haptic feedback to say it's suggested you're getting hit or, you know, a punch or something, but you're actually not. You know, those are types of training strategies kind of moving into the future. They were all like, it's also exploring.

Dude, this is your 3000 shit. It is. All right, man. Did I hear you once mentioned that you guys were looking at some of the potential impacts of psychedelics as a performance enhancer? Not as a performance enhancer, but around traumatic brain injury. Also, like if you were a protective type thing.

Correct, yeah. And you know, there's been some good work, particularly out of John Hopkins University over in Maryland, certain medical conditions that are going to be terminal at some point. So how do they use psychedelics to relieve pain or remove, you know, and again, in kind of combat populations where they're looked at post-traumatic stress disorders and depression and some of these aspects on a very clinical level, how psychedelics have potentially an opportunity to influence that. Again, it's very early days for the UFC. It's not something that we're completely running down this avenue

right now, but again, looking at working with partners to cover every avenue to see where, yes, we know that we operate in a combat sport, right? There are certain, you know, issues and factors related to combat sport within the parameters of the rules of the sport. Well, yes, it's a collision and it's a contact sport. It's going to lead to certain physical, psychological, social, emotional impacts that might have a detrimental effect. So, you know, I think we're just very

engaged in trying to understand that and take them on so that we can do a better job of keeping athletes in the, you know, in the most safe and healthy space possible. So whether it's a rule change, whether it's equipment that you wear, whether it's interventions like psychedelics or like nutritional interventions or neurotropic, so whatever it may be, to get or minimize those health and safety risks as much as possible. How much do you deal with the psychological strain? So I'm fascinated by the fact that you're asking your athletes, and this is the same with every fights, what is the same with every sport in general, but particularly with a fight sport where there's so much glory around success, there's so much not shame around defeat, but you can see it in

the player's body language, or the fight is body language right at the end of the fight. Plus, there is fight week leading up to it. There's press conferences, there's shit talking beforehand, there's weight cuts, there's such a unique blend of psychological strain, which is precisely designed, at least by your opponent that way, right, to put you in a place where you're not actually all that. Confident, how much of you looked at strategies for how the guys can deal with this,

and are there any lessons that people could take away into their own lives in the build up to a stressful situation or something that they're perhaps a little bit anxious about. Yeah, that's a great question. And again, listen, we're, remember, we're a promotion, right? And these guys are independent contractors. So they're in the business of promoting themselves

to get people to buy tickets to come and watch them. So whether it's shit talking or whether it's promotion, the trying to sell the event and get people interested in their fights. You know, without letting you behind the curtain too much, some of that's obviously real, some of it's bravado. But again, it makes for an interesting buildup to the fight itself.

Yeah, I mean, from a psychological or sports psychology perspective, we're absolutely getting into that space because it's a pillar of performance. So how do athletes manage that? How do they use it? When we first started the performances to tune back in 2017, we didn't have sports psychology as part of our portfolio services. It's absolutely a critical core component now and we offer that to the athletes. But yeah, I think, you know, to answer it succinctly, you know, we do a lot of work around kind of mindfulness and being able to disassociate from all that white noise and being able to internalize what is your game plan?

You know that you've done the work, you know that you're technically and tactically proficient in what you need to do. So how do you remove the white noise and pursue the signal of your mindfulness of being present in the moment? Now, present in the moment in the UFC can be someone kind of seven seconds from choking you out. So, you know, you still got to be mindful and present at that moment. But again, it comes down to, right, what's the technique, what's the tactic I need to actually execute to remove this chalk to succinctly give you an answer when we look at

our psychologists and the way it work that they do with our athletes. It's very much around being present and being mindful and being able to process things effectively. Otherwise, those external signals just overwhelm. Yeah, it's strange to think about the number of parameters that go into someone putting a good performance on in UFC. Like it's so unbelievably intense to balance all of these different elements. And something that I've always thought about is the number of athletes out there in any domain who physically may have the character, physiologically may have the characteristics

to make them an unbelievably elite athlete. They may have the approach to training, they may have the genetics, they may have the work rate, the conscientiousness, the industriousness, the support system, everything. However, they are unable to deal with the stress of game day. And I wonder how many athletes throughout the years have got themselves to the stage where they were,

they could have been a world chat, they could have been the greatest that ever lived, and they were let down by their inability to kind of get out of their own head and allow themselves to perform on game day. Yeah, and the stakes are pretty high in this sport. This is, like I say, it's a sport of consequences, right? And every sport has got consequences.

But in this sport, they can be pretty severe, right? So that just layers on kind of the pressures and the stresses. And we just here at the PI, but we say, the MMA is 90% mental, apart from the 60% as physical, you know, I mean, like it's, it's just everything. You need everything in this sport. And again, coming back to only early questions, like it's really hard to, you know, there's so many variables, right? So it's really hard to say one is any more important than the other. But when it comes to mental fortitude, and that's even before you get into competition, like the

mental fortitude, just to get through the rigors of training on a daily basis, like just the mental fortitude to be compliant and a deer to a long-term approach to technical and tactical development as well as physical development, that alone is challenging in our sport. Now you can liken that to things like rowing or a rugby cone to whatever it may be,

which is also very physical. But then yeah, you layer, rowing or a rugby crown, so whatever it may be, which you also are very physical. But then, yeah, you layer on that psychological piece of you walking into competition and there's millions watching on TV and you're potentially going to get knocked out and people are going to ridicule you and laugh at you whilst you're laying on the couch. They mean me and about you on the Twitter. Right. Which is, you know, shocking, you know, these, these undepam, you know, internet warriors, it's easy to point fingers. That's where I come back to our athletes up there with the best of them when it comes to their ability

to deal with all the variables that go into success. It's truly a decathlon of combat spawn. Have you worked with rowing? A lot. Well, one of the things that I think about there is the, I've done 2K row time tests before and the state of a rouse all that I get myself of fear, basically, that I get myself into before having to do that. What was some of the lessons that you got out of the time that you worked with rowers? Because there's some of the events that they do which are, and some of the training that you got out of the time that you worked with rowers? Because there's some of the events that they do, which are some of the training sessions that I've done.

I always find the Oxford Cambridge rowing event, the lead up to that, where they go through the training montages and they explain what everyone's going through. It looks up there with some of the most brutal training protocols that I've ever seen. Is that what it's actually like? Yeah, absolutely. I mean Rowan can be, yeah, the physical demands of elite level Rowan and the physical and physiological adaptations that you're trying to make to your body and training are massive, right? So yeah, those guys pushed themselves to the absolute limit. So I met a couple of guys who were recently on a reality TV program for a grappling competition that was going on, and it was kind of like

an ultimate fight-style thing to living in a fight house, and they were going out and doing their whatever, and they were playing pranks on each other in between and stuff like that. And they had in order to get through to one of the next rounds, they had a no time limit grappling event, which I had never heard of before, but isn't unbelievably rare, apparently, in that world.

And one of the fights that the dude that was traveling to this event in San Antonio with us had lasted for three hours and 55 minutes of grappling. Three hours and 55 minutes of grappling. Think about that. Think about that. I mean, just processing that is ridiculous, right?

You're essentially grappling and trying to submit or choke out an opponent. The same duration takes someone to run a marathon. It's just almost unfathomable, but that's what these guys will do. The warrior spirit will take them through. Dude, it's unbelievable. I was really, really impressed, but it's one of those things where you realize just how big of a delta there is between everybody sits on the sidelines and talks about, like, oh, well, you know, it should slip that punch and you should do this in a different way, because everybody feels like they have some sort of five pens to add into the discussion around things. And you realize there is, it's a different universe. These people are completely different animals.

So speaking of that, are there some fighters that you've worked with or that you've seen in the performance institute, either sort of current roster or previous roster that are just a total joy to coach or people that have come in with a very particular physiology that you found that's unique or different or impressive that you hadn't seen previously? I mean, I'm talking in, well, I haven't seen questions yet. Yeah, so it's funny, right? Because I've worked with all these different sports, but there's one thing which the armchair expert always knows, and that's fighting and nutrition.

You know what I mean? So it's like, there's a lot of noise and a lot of opinion in this world. But you know, you cut through that. I think, like I said, I come back to the clientele, the athlete population, like, in my experience, you know, whilst there's different polarizing characters in ours for talking generically, like, this is a group of athletes that I just love working with, that are like, they want to get after it, they want to do the work, they're not scared

of the work, they are committed to, you know, the cause and to the arts and all that type of stuff and yeah, I mean, absolute pleasure to work with. Of course, I've got works and traits and I ain't come on, man, I start with the fuck you're doing that, like, why are you doing that? But, I mean, at the end of the day, as a group of athletes, I would work with combat athletes any day of the week, certainly on the physical preparation side, because you're not having to convince them to do the work usually. You're pulling the horses back and saying, you know, what a hold on, like enough is enough. Like, let's just think about this strategically. So, yeah, I mean, I don't want to mention any

particular names, but there's a lot of individuals on our roster who like absolute warriors true first class people whether they come from Olympic backgrounds through freestyle wrestling in the Olympic games or whether they come through collegiate programs or whether they're talent transfers from football and like American football. And whether these guys have been on the fight circuit and journeyman that have been knocking people out, you know, for a year over a year and just like, okay, this is a guy that even those guys, like great to be around because you can learn so much from their mindset and their mentality about their approach life, right? It's fascinating. So going into some of the training protocols and stuff that you use that people at home may be able to take on, I know that you've done a

lot of research around optimal reps, set ranges, rest periods in order to maximize muscle growth and hypertrophy. What sort of conclusion have you come to at the moment with that? Yeah, I mean, the irony is that we don't pursue a lot of hypertrophy training techniques in combat athletes, because usually they're having to make weight. So we're not trying to put excessive amounts of muscle on an athlete. And in the rare chance we do,

if someone moves up a weight class, or if someone's kind of still, you know, chronically underfueled or whatever it may be, we would try and pursue some of those types of things. But yeah, I mean, I think the key things to hypertrophy, obviously, you know, looking at the time under tension that you put the muscle tissue under, also looking at muscle damage, how you consume muscle damage.

You can have the hila's of hypertrophy. So, using different training approaches, whether it be cluster sets, whether it be drop sets, whether it be pause reps, whether it be eccentric, sex下去, to eccentric, whatever, there's a different way to do that. So there's no like perfect method for creating hypertrophy But you know looking at time and attention is a volume conversation It's how much tension can you put through a muscle within a working set? So you know larger rep ranges and set ranges obviously or the number of times within a week so kind of looking at 12 to 30 sets for a given muscle group in a training week

is where you're trying to pursue hypertrophy. Looking at how you damage tissue because then it can regrow and redevelop to a greater level. So rebuild larger. So how do you use techniques like eccentric that are going to promote some tissue damage to allow it to then regenerate and recover?

When you say, when you say eccentric, are you talking about tempo movements basically that? Correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, slow, slow eccentric shortening actions versus eccentric lengthening actions, which we know damage the muscle more. And then also creating a metabolic stimulus. Like what's the internal environment? It's nitric oxide that you're trying to release and that's where some of this, you know, blood flow restriction is now quite vague in hypertrophy training. You know, that's just trying to create a metabolic stress inside the cell. And then obviously the critical thing in parallel to those three factors is nutrition. Is protein and protein synthesis and looking at you know the protein

synthetic rate of muscle how muscle can turn over protein and are you fueling your button excuse me in a rock wrong term are you providing kind of the building blocks and usually that is you know loose in is the key amino acid for muscle growth and muscle hypertrophy that we need to think about but But are you kind of putting your nutrition strategy in a very complimentary fashion with the training strategy and a training stimulus that is going to affect those three factors? I mean, that keeps the kind of way to in my respect to hypertrophy. Yeah, what are the big mistakes that people are making when it comes to that sort of peri-training nutrition strategy? Well, I think a lot of the science-lover research obviously is around nutrient timing.

And I think particularly around a training session, you need to get the protein in as close to the cessation of the end of your workout as possible. Right? Because that's when the protein synthetic rate is going to be at its highest, and the recent diseases of protein and the rebuilding of the amino acids is going to be at its highest level. So providing those building blocks through a nutrition intervention is going to be critical. If you leave it too long, obviously you're just negating or mitigating the extent of protein synthesis. It's going to happen. So that's kind of the key thing. And yeah, anywhere between kind of 0.25 to 0.3 of a gram per kilo of body weight per day is what you're looking at from a protein stimulus or a protein intake for

hypertrophy. 0.25 to 0.3 of a gram per kilo of body weight. Post, what is that just around the workout? Per day. Yeah, I'm trying to work out because surely that would be whatever, 40 grams or 30 grams of protein per day. Correct. But that's not total intake.

No, no, not total intake. Yes. In terms of supplementary protein. Right. It's so funny that there was that sort of back in the day, the bro science around where you need to get your post workout shaken as quickly after a training session as possible. And then again, you're talking to people that get their information

from bodybuilding.com forums, right? And like meme pages from Reddit and stuff like that. But that was something that was, I think, about five years ago, very widely dispelled as if it fits your macros, it doesn't really matter calories or calories. And then when we actually go and speak to somebody that's at the cutting edge of elite sport, it turns out that, well, maybe the the bros in the beginning were right all along. There's evidence-based research and research-based evidence, right? And I think it's, you know, a lot of sports techniques and sports training have been built on anecdotal insights

and people trying out techniques. And then, you know, the science has followed and put efficacy against some of those, some of those original methods. And clearly, it's also, you know, made other approaches and other methods, less inefficacious, and they've been kind of phased out. So yeah, it's what's leading the narrative, the science or the practice is always a question. Talking about something that I never ever considered during training, because it's just, it felt like something that was too complex and too sort of forward thinking about the hormone released effect that you get from different types of training stimulus. And let's say that it's for somebody that's just trying to keep themselves fit and look good and, you know, be healthy and maybe gain a little bit of muscle and keep themselves at whatever body fat level or perhaps even try and recompa a little bit.

I'd never considered the impact of different training methodologies on the hormone profile that's going into my body. Any here about the fact that you get growth hormone release from heavy compound movements and you get testosterone release from such and such. What is for the normal layperson that's just looking to train? What are the things that they should consider when it comes to optimizing hormone release through their training methodology? Well, I mean, I think it's important to understand like this metabolic stimulus, right? As we've talked about time under tension,

we've talked about muscle damage, and then obviously the metabolic stimulus, the metabolic environment that's created within the muscle. So, you know, this is what my PhD work was around. So, you know, this is where kind of some of my messages has come from in this space. But yeah, again, it comes back to how you stimulate intensities of volumes of workload to create that metabolic stimulus of which a endocrine cascade is part of the equation.

It's not the whole equation, obviously. What do you mean when you say endocrine cascade? Well, just the release of hormones consequent to muscle stimulus or you do a program that is five sets of two with three minutes in between each set. It's going to be a very different metabolic stimulus to four sets of twelve with 60 seconds rest between. That's the challenge of training and training strategies, understanding what is it of those three factors that you're trying to stimulate.

I think metabolic stimulus and, you know, hormone responses is a part of that conversation. So, when you're trying to maximize hypertrophy and you're trying to maximize those three particular factors, then potentially there's some legs to consider and what you do to stimulate hormone release as well. So you're looking at intensity as one of the key factors for this? Yes, intensity and volume, yeah, intensity and volume. Because again, if you look at training intensity

and how hard you're pushing a muscle or the contractual units of the muscle, that's going to have a certain stimulus. And then if you do it multiple times in the instant oxygen, you can play on those two factors by creating training strategies by the different workouts within a given week or within a specific workout where you're targeting those two things at the same time. Again, the endpoint is that you're trying to stimulate a stress response that might have or will have kind of some beneficial effects to promote muscle growth within this. I've heard you say, is it six sets of 10 at 80% with a couple of minutes rest in between as one of the protocols that you use. Yeah, I mean, that was very much from my PhD research, yeah, success of 10 with the minutes resting between ultimately, sorry, 90 seconds in between, excuse me, 90 seconds

in between, but do that as drop sets. So you're always trying to retain the, you start at a load of 80% of your 1 RM, but the key thing is to hit the 10 repetition requirement of each set. Take the loads, you might not be able to complete the set of 10, you rack it, you immediately unload and you finish off the remaining repetitions to complete your 10 sets. So yeah, it's a pretty challenge and brutal approach to trying to stimulus. It's fucking absolutely possessed. Like, it does, I can't think of a more disgusting training product because what I hadn't heard the first time that I heard you say that, I hadn't heard about the stripping of weights either like interest set or across sets.

So I'm thinking who can do six by ten at 80 percent? Who can do ten? You can do one by ten at 80%, who can do 10, who can do one by 10 at 80%, especially with the short rest. No, normally you get two sets out at 80% or so, but then yeah, into the potentially second or third or beyond sets, you really start to strip the bar back because then again, I can say,

that now becomes the volume conversation, time and attention type conversation, metabolic stress, it's about using the drops sets of the loads to completely the required volume. And I'm guessing that if you were to do an RP, you'd be looking like an RP 9.5 by the end of each set. I mean, yeah, I mean, because you can't be a ten or else you're not going to have made, oh, I guess it would be a ten, but you're not going to have gone above a ten, because otherwise you wouldn't have made those the repetitions, right?

I mean, a ten on an RPA scale is maximal, right? So you would want maximum, because if you only do four repetitions, you unload, you might get another two repetitions out, you unload again, you might get you in another three repetitions, like that's how you work in the stimulus, right? So it's always trying to be maximal in nature. Okay, and with this, did you find that certain exercises engendered themselves to better hormone release? I'm going to guess larger movements, more muscle groups being recruited. What would be the best exercises? I think that's the secret to all, like hypertrophy type approaches, is that yeah, multi- multiple large compound exercises, crew, muscle and

muscle activation. Okay, yeah, so I mean, I'm well, I might see if some of the lads in the gym fancy doing it tomorrow, but I they're going to take a little bit of it. I'll get them to listen to this first. And I'll tell them about your credentials. And we'll see, we'll see what they can say, talking about recovery between sessions, and especially with your guys, right, because you've got so many different domains that the

fight is need to be able to move through. It's not just technique stuff, it's not just strength in conditioning, it's not just the cardio, all of these different bits and pieces. What have you found is an upper bound that you can get, say the average elite fighter, I'm aware that that person doesn't particularly exist. What's the upper bound in terms of a training volume, you know, duration per day that you can get people through? I mean, I'll ask that a little bit differently. I mean, we recommend kind of anywhere between 10 and 14 training units a week, but those

guys that are absolutely doing upwards of 18 to 20 training units a week. You know, there's a conversation around quality, right? It's a quality and quantity conversation. Some sessions are going to be 60 to 90 minutes long, but there's also fighters that will pull 3L long training sessions and don't think twice about it. So that's where we don't have the answers right now. We don't understand kind of what is the true optimal level, what's the true standard approach that we put in place.

And we're still trying to figure that out through kind of monitoring and evaluating training, kind of loads and people's ability to tolerate that. I've got a bunch of friends who are chasing for a CrossFit Games or a CrossFit Regionals spot at the moment, and I think that there are some similarities probably between your guys. These sports, just that they're very wide in terms of the different domains and the different stimulus that you're trying to get out of all of the different training protocols that people do.

And they're, you know, I'll say, hey, man, send me, because I just like to be a sort of a voyeuristic torturer. And I'll say, but send me what your training week looks like. And you see, it's up at 7 a.m. for hour and a half swim. It's back. I'll go, I'll have a nap until the morning time. We'll do some strength work and maybe some monostructure work. Then I'll go back, have some more food. Then I'll go, you're thinking like this is multiple days per week. And their active recovery days look like just a slightly lower intensity version of a longer workout that

I might try and do. And yeah, it's. Yeah, I mean, if you think of something like, if you think of something like CrossFit, which has got, you know, potentially many different components to it, whether you're working on your strength, or your Olympic lifts, or whether you're working on handstand walks, or, you know, and swimming, you know, that brings swimming into the CrossFit game, what like it? So, you don't know what's gonna happen

in the CrossFit games, right? So, you're always preparing for the unknown by just ticking every single box. That's the same as MMA. You've got lots of different variables that you need to kind of complete the training exposure in. So, how do you distribute that? You're either stacking sessions on top of each other and making very long sessions and then having more prolonged rest periods

or you're doing, you know, distributing of training blocks throughout the day in a very sporadic nature to try and capture some recovery after each workout. It's, you know, again, we don't really have that figured out in its entirety right now. A lot of that down to personal preference at the moment. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And also, the personal lifestyles of the fighter, they night out. We've got to pick the kids up from school or something like that. Some fighters have full-time jobs as pipe layers or electricians or whatever, as well as doing all the training. Demetrius Junter knew obviously 125 in the UFC for a long time now fights in a different

organization but he holds the records for the most defenses in 125. He was a full-time contractor, you know, builder and worked on a building site whilst at the same time doing his ever-made training. So what would you say if you were to try and characterize some of the attributes between the guys that joined the UFC who are obviously elite fighters, they've managed to get themselves an invite into the organization and the difference between the ones that come and go and are unable to have that longevity and unable to really make it to the actual absolute elite of the sport and become not necessarily champions

because that's beyond just their own internal training and approach the sport. But between those guys and between the guys that do make it to the absolute top and then also have the longevity as well. In terms of characteristics, their approach to whatever it may be, maybe training, coaching, all that sort of stuff.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's one of those, well, if you're in the UFC, you're not training harder than anybody else. Everybody trains hard in this sport, right? So the thing that differentiates the people at the top versus everybody else is their ability to truly train at the highest, highest level from a technical, tactical perspective day after day after day after day, at the, you know, for chronic periods of time, whereas everyone else might, you know, reduce their training capabilities and then rebound a little bit. And still training hard, obviously,

but I think that's one thing which we look to in our kind of conversations here as something that truly is differentiating the top guys, just their ability to go again and again and again on a daily basis or session to session, such that the technical import to their training and their skill development is that much greater than everybody else's. Have you had a look at motivation from what you guys do? We get into that a little bit early days, if I'm honest.

And again, people are very motivated for different reasons to be fighters, right? So, you know, we'll think that, you know, the people that just want to, you know, beat up other folk. But that's not always the case, you know, some people are using it as a very meditative type approach to like what, like what, you know, physical pain and trauma allows them to release themselves or the people are coming at it because they just love the martial arts and they're lifelong martial artists or the people coming at it from just financials and I'm just providing money for my kids.

I think the motivation again is very complex and we have a, we stand to look into that but we haven't got that. It's so diverse in the way people arrive at success in our sport. Yeah, it's a question that I think a lot of other people want to have answered as well, let alone just UFC fighters. And it is interesting to think about the fact that a lot of different athletes can arrive in the same sport at the absolute elite of it and yet be driven by completely different things that you and me can both be fighting into UFC and you're doing it because you just

love to scrap and that's what you always did and that's your passion and I'm doing it because it's a meditative experience and the next person that we're going to fight is doing it because he wants to provide for his family or whatever. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, it's another reason to be fascinated by our sport, like the diversity and just the different variables that come into what makes, you know, to define what a world champion is in mixed martial arts is like throwing mud at a wall and seeing what sticks because you know you could have like truly world class athletes that are coming out of Olympic programs

or whatever. You could have a guy that's just been around the streets, you know, like knocking people out for a long time and is elevated to the top of small level promotions through to you know kids today 18 years old, a training MMA from the get-go. So they're just, they have a mixed martial artist rather than I'm a kickboxer or a wrestler. That's kind of the cool part of it. It's just the diversity and the complexity of people's backgrounds and how do you say that this one route is any better than someone else's route to the top, you know? Have you got any idea, I think about this a lot to do with CrossFit because it's the sport that I'm most familiar with recently.

But previously you had CrossFit is like, Matt Fraser, most dominant CrossFit basically ever. He came into the sport from weightlifting. So you have people that did analogous sports, transferred across, still had an unbelievable speciality within the original domain, but then broaden themselves out. And what you've identified here is that you have an equivalent with regards to MMA. Previously,

people would have perhaps come from a very specialized background, be that wrestling or karate or boxing or Muay Thai. And now you're going to have people that are born and bred from the very, very beginning MMA fighters. Do you have any sense or do you do you find it particularly interesting that and then also have you got any sense around whether it is optimal to not specialize in one particular domain versus to become a generalist from the very beginning? Have you thought about this? Well, I think, you know, if you look at the statistics of our sport, I think we, you know, last time,

I need to, this is an accurate numbers. So don't hold me to this. But last time I looked, we had about 87 different UFC champions in history. It's only like 53 of them were from defined specialisms, right, whether they are wrestlers, or do jitsu players, or a kickboxer. Those numbers obviously change now.

It's kind of a couple of years since I saw those numbers. I just need to update those. But I think if you look at where the UFC has come from and look at it as a whole, then yeah, you can still say that there isn't a true generalist that's rising to the top. It's still a sport that is built on specialisms and usually little specialisms are your X factor.actor. So if you take Israel out of San, you're right now. Obviously, he's

much reported as the best strike here ever in the UFC, right? It's a clear kickboxer. So you know, there's still people that you can say, well, that's a specialist. But I think if you compartmentalize, let's say the last three years or the last five years of our sport, then you can start to see where, all right, that guy has come through purely an MMA training approach to success in our sport, because again, it's become more popular as a sport, it's defined as an individual sport, it's not come from all the individual styles themselves. So people is training MMA now. So then yeah, if you look at the history, it still leans towards specialisms,

but if you look at more current day and your compartment lies some of the more recent success, you know, it's probably 50, 50 years where the specialists start to where the generic fighters are generalists are. One thing that's interesting, your difference between CrossFit and MMA that I've just thought of there,

in CrossFit your actual goal is to try and be just good at everything. The goal is to not lose any of the events. That's the way that you win. The way that you win is to be whatever, top five to top 10 in every single different event. Whereas in MMA, the goal is to be acceptable across everything so that you don't have any weaknesses and then to be able to peak within one particular domain that gives you an outsized ability to finish the fight. Right?

You're not going to win. You're going to be at more of a vulnerability if you are good at absolutely everything up against a fighter that's acceptable at everything and can push back most of your advances but has one absolute freak dimension to their game. Yeah, I mean, you can lose the Olympic Games in the DeCathlon by having a crappy javelin, right? And if you can't throw the javelin very far, you can be great, everything else, but that javelin is going to be the one reason why you lose a gold medal or even drop out the medals. Same in our sport, right? If you can't compete off your back in Jiu-Jitsu and someone takes you to the ground like Game Over, you know, the certain styles where you have to have a level of generalism to be able to survive, right? Because the fight

can go to anyway, it can go against the fence, it can go to the ground, it can be stand up in the middle of octagon, you know, you can be in the clinch, you can be, you know, distance, whatever. So, you know, you have to have some awareness of all of those different types of things, but yes, clearly people have got to the UFC because they have an X factor, something that is like outstanding, now whether that is your take down defense, whether it's your take down defense, whether it's your take down offense, whether it's your strike in, whether it's your grappling, whatever. There's something that is just getting you to the top which you need to maximize that potential and that's the next factor which becomes a competitive advantage. So philosophically,

that's how we try and approach our, excuse me, our programming, is that ultimately when you're off camp, when you're not in fight camp preparation, we tailor all of our energies and our efforts to minimise in your limitations, essentially to raising the lowest hanging fruit. What are the things that potentially will lose you the fact? When we move into fight camp, we are sharpening the sort of your ex-factors. So we pursue a, a strength kind of strategy. What are your strengths and what are weaknesses? When do we target those in the, in the

distribution of your training plan? Dude, it's so fascinating to, to see a sport that didn't exist what 30 years ago, 30, like 31, 32 years ago, literally didn't exist. And now, where you guys are taking it to is amazing. Yeah, no, it's cool. It's cool to be around like I said. It's 30 years as a professional sport in 2023. So next year, and there's massive growth opportunities

and learnings and professionalization of the sport and it's taking it to the next level that is a great sport to be around right now. It's it's still growing and still improving If there's someone who has found the stuff that we're talking about here particularly interesting What are some of your favorite resources to keep up to date with work that's in your region that's in strength and conditioning hypertrophy, you know like good accessible places that people can read that's in strength and conditioning, hypertrophy, you know, like good accessible places that people can read. Yeah, I mean, if there's any interest in, you know, MMA in the UFC, the UFC performance institute has released a digital journal, which can be downloaded.

That's there's a link for that on our Instagram pages and Twitter pages and things like that. And again, if you can't navigate that, just reach out through those channels and I'll let you know. But again, I think, you know, just looking at, who are the players who's making movements in the world of strength and conditioning right now? You know, there's some great people out there, Phil Darius doing some good stuff. Obviously, Joe DeFranco has been doing it for a long time

or there's, you know, so it depends where you're coming from, what you're trying to achieve, whether it's MMA specific or whether it's modularic training. Duncan, thank you so much for L.A. mate. No worries, thanks for the chat. Oh, ich bin ja... ...offens.