Flex Diet Podcast Ep 410 – James de Lacey – Transcript

Timestamps follow the final episode audio (after the intro). Speakers: Dr. Mike T Nelson (host) and James de Lacey (guest).

[03:35] James de Lacey: So i- it’s good, good to come on here and chat, uh, chat again.

[03:38] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much. My first question is what do you think the biggest mistake people make for training their aerobic system if they’re a mixed martial artist?

[03:51] Dr. Mike T Nelson: And then we’ll expand out to more just kinda general meatheads and stuff- … from there. But I think-

[03:57] James de Lacey: Yeah …

[03:57] Dr. Mike T Nelson: mixed martial arts have gotten, in my opinion as a little outsider watching, a lot better, but then you still… Oh my God, I still see videos where I wanna like face palm myself.

[04:09] James de Lacey: Yeah. There’s been, there’s been some pretty shocking videos coming around recently from high-level, not even- And

[04:14] Dr. Mike T Nelson: these are like high-level people.

[04:15] Dr. Mike T Nelson: These are not like schmucks who haven’t done anything.

[04:18] James de Lacey: Yeah. It’s, and you see a lot of… You still a lot… You see… Well, you still see a lot of like Bosu ball funny th- like squat stuff and all sorts of like tennis ball dodging and throwing and things, and you’re kinda like, “Hmm, this is, uh this is, uh… It’s been a while since I’ve seen a bit of this going around.”

[04:37] James de Lacey: So yeah, it’s, it’s slowly getting there I think as more people kinda come into the space from, I guess, other disciplines and things. But obviously a lot of the old tradition, I guess, still stuck around a lot. And I think a lot of that issue comes down to the fact that- Fighting is not r- for most fighters, is not truly professional.

[05:00] James de Lacey: You don’t have like a professional setup. You go in and you train at your gym and then at your gym you have full-time S&C staff, full-time XYZ- Yeah … to kind of guide your entire training year. You kind of go to a gym and then you go to your local personal trainer down the road to get your S&C done, which makes it that there’s obviously not good things that come out of that too and, and sometimes there can be good things, but obviously social media people can latch onto them, ride their coattails up into the sunset, you know, all sorts of things that go on there.

[05:28] James de Lacey: But, uh, in other sports it’s not really like that. You know, you have… I mean I guess you have some off-season sports in the States where they can kind of go to their local personal trainer, but mostly like in rugby and things you’re in a full-time environment 24/7. They don’t have that opportunity. But coming back to the biggest mistake, I don’t know if I can say the biggest, but we can kind of go down the road of maybe like more misconceptions around- Yeah

[05:50] James de Lacey: man, I’m, I feel like I’m preaching. You have a bloody PhD in physiology so I’m not gonna sit here trying to preach, preach to you on this. Uh, uh, everything I’ve learned I can- I have to credit back to Dr. Andrew Asher. Like he’s been a huge mentor for me in the conditioning space with his research and him and Dr.

[06:04] James de Lacey: John Babraj, what they’ve, what they’ve released around- Yeah.

[06:07] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Good stuff- Uh- … if people haven’t checked it out …

[06:09] James de Lacey: yeah it’s, it’ll completely fl- I know, I don’t know how many people it’s completely flipped their thought process around conditioning because we all get taught the traditional energy system I guess model where we’re like, wow, it goes from anaerobic alactic for X amount of seconds, then you go anaerobic glycolytic for X amount of seconds and then you’re aerobic.

[06:28] James de Lacey: And so you get these funny prescriptions where you’re like, well if I’m gonna do quote unquote “lactic capacity,” I’m gonna do 20 seconds hard and 40 seconds rest or whatever it’s gonna be. If I’m sprinting I’m gonna do 30 seconds on, four minutes off. And then when you look at the research of what’s actually happening within the physiology, uh, you’re not addressing…

[06:47] James de Lacey: well you’re not, you’re not doing what the label says it’s doing- Yeah … in terms of this kind of isolated approach. And a really easy example is like if you look at like 30-second sprints and you see them repeated, you see how aerobic they become as you repeat the sprint even with what would be considered full, I guess full recovery and what most people will say it is.

[07:09] James de Lacey: And- And you also see with even within the first six seconds of that sprint, there is aerobic contribution. Mm-hmm. And then you throw on an airs device on top of that, and then you see within the first 10 seconds how much oxygen is being used. Then you sit there and you go, “Is this anaero- am I doing anaerobic training?”

[07:25] James de Lacey: What am I doing? And, and yeah, ’cause you go anaerobic without oxygen, but all I see is a, a shit ton of oxygen being used during this sprint or whatever it is. And so that kind of bring- takes you down this little rabbit hole of questioning, uh, I guess the way you may have been doing or prescribing conditioning, or at least the thought process around periodizing it.

[07:46] James de Lacey: Because when you think of a traditional, I guess, conditioning periodization, whether it’s for combat sports, rugby, whatever it is, it’s, “Hey, we do an aerobic base block. We do a anaerobic block or an alactic thing,” or whatever it is. And it kind of goes through this, uh, progression of low intensity steady state or aerobic development into what would be considered, quote-unquote, not aerobic development.

[08:11] James de Lacey: Whereas everything’s aerobic. You’re just hitting different intensities, different, uh, fuels being used depending on that intensity, and different adaptations you may be targeting through those intensities. And then you get down this misnomer. But I think, I think the, the biggest… If I was gonna come back to the biggest mistake on that, it’s the idea that, one, you need a huge aerobic base for combat sports, which the research does not show.

[08:33] James de Lacey: If we look at just VO2 max values across the board of, like, elite amateur boxers, et cetera, or even elite wrestlers. And then a second one would be this idea that recovery is an aerobic process, which it is But that typically is limited at the muscle. And when people go, “I need to be able to repeat these efforts,” like I guess when I have to scramble, whatever it is, and for, for me to repeat it I need to be more aerobically fit, so I’m gonna go hit the roads.

[09:01] James de Lacey: I’m gonna go run five miles three times a week kind of thing. And it’s like, okay, cool. Initially, you’re pro- you’re gonna make some gains, like novel stimulus, adding more volume, all that kind of stuff. But if you’re looking to address what’s happening at the muscle, it needs to be stressful enough to change what’s happening at the muscle to be able to, uh, I guess essentially to make it really, really easy to use oxygen efficiently and then just kind of refuel that oxygen efficiently.

[09:24] James de Lacey: And you- maybe if you just slap on a NIRS device, you don’t, you don’t see much change at the muscle if you’re just doing an easy five-mile run as an example, compared to something that is higher intensity, which is then going to target those adaptations at the muscle we want to be more aerobically fit to repeat efforts.

[09:40] James de Lacey: Hopefully, that answers the question succinctly enough.

[09:44] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. So I’ll give you my framework, and you can tell me if you agree, disagree, or that sounds insane. That at some point you need a big enough VO2 max as a rough gauge of the size of your aerobic engine, but you’re not an endurance athlete. You’re not gonna ride the Tour de France.

[10:06] Dr. Mike T Nelson: So at some point, I’ll just throw out a number. You, you hit 50, right? At some point, you’re probably sufficient for you to do your sport where you’re not gonna be completely a puddle after two hours of work. If your VO2 max is like 22, you got some issues. Like, you probably need to do some VO2 max work because your aerobic engine is just too damn small.

[10:27] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Everything you’re doing is gonna be a high cost. You’re just redlining the shit out of your engine to get performance. But at some point, once your VO2 max, your engine is big enough, then there’s no real benefit to take it in, say, from 50 to 55 to, to 60. You would need more specific work related to your sport, and that is more related to the muscle level, and then you would be able to figure that out by using like a NIRS device, which is just basically a, for people listening, a little device that puts a little light into the muscle that says, “Hey, you know, how much kind of oxygen are you using as it goes by?”

[11:07] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Maybe blood flow And there you can look at a muscle adaptation. So you might have someone, like you said, who is doing a five-mile run, but their SM02, right, so how much oxygen they’re using at the muscle level, maybe they start at 85 and they never get past 70. Where if you have them do some really hard, air quote, conditioning or wind gates, let’s say 30 seconds, you warm up, you maybe start at 84, and you end up at, like, frigging 11, right?

[11:36] Dr. Mike T Nelson: The second one, you’re literally taking that muscle and you’re saying, “Okay, let’s deplete the shit of oxygen out of it and tax that at a local level,” because that’s probably now more the limiter now that we have a big enough aerobic engine to kind of make stuff more sub-max. I know it’s, like, a long-winded thing.

[11:57] James de Lacey: No, that’s good. Yeah, yeah. ’Cause I think, I think it gets… Oh, over the years, funnily… I- I’ll start, funnily enough, like, the, the kind of low intensity, everything kinda comes in cycles. I mean, you’ve been in the game a long, long time. Um, I haven’t been in as long as you, but I’ve been in it long enough to see the cycles, you know?

[12:15] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm-hmm.

[12:16] James de Lacey: It was high-intensity interval training, and then it’s kinda went… I would say the kinda low intensity phrase didn’t really take off until maybe closer to COVID with kind of all the big podcasts and stuff.

[12:26] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yep.

[12:27] James de Lacey: Um, but it was kind of brewing through. But it’s funny enough, like if you go through even like, uh, professional team sports, like rugby’s probably the one I know, uh, most or most well off, uh, and the people in it.

[12:40] James de Lacey: Like low-intensity steady state cardio’s never really made it into sports like rugby, and we have- Nope … within Rugby Worldwide, we have pre-seasons that range from three or four weeks to three or four months, depending on where you are in the world. And there’s still… I mean, I know a lot of, a lot of coaches in that space.

[12:55] James de Lacey: I’ve coached it in three different countries, and there’s… I’ve never seen someone go through a low-intensity approach. Uh,

[13:03] Dr. Mike T Nelson: but there’s ca- You mean they’re not doing four hours of zone two training, bro?

[13:09] James de Lacey: Man, it-

[13:10] Dr. Mike T Nelson: I don’t know a single rugby team that does any zone two work, to be honest. And again- No … I’m not an expert in that area by any means, so- It’s-

[13:15] Dr. Mike T Nelson: it’s probably not a fair comparison …

[13:17] James de Lacey: but I think that the, I think the, the way to look at it is endurance athletes, their sport, uh, let’s just say like take a, I don’t know, run a marathon run or whatever it is. Their sport is running, and in order to get their, the volume for the sport, and it’s not just ma- it’s not maybe looking at just energy system development.

[13:35] James de Lacey: You may be looking- Right … like move efficiency, you know, running- Yeah … jumping, all that kind of stuff. To get that volume, like you can’t do it just doing high-intensity work. You’d be training like a few hours a week, and then sitting on your ass for the rest of the week.

[13:45] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm-hmm.

[13:45] James de Lacey: Um, so a sport like rugby, combat sports, et cetera, your volume is built from the technical training, and it doesn’t mean that your technical training is all low intensity, whatever else.

[13:53] James de Lacey: And we, we can even go into that. Like, just because you have high heart rates doesn’t mean that the session is high intensity from a muscular level. Right. It’s high intensity maybe from a systemic level. But either way, like you’re getting the volume from the technical training. So then outside of that, where is your time best spent?

[14:09] James de Lacey: And if you’re doing… Like I was just consulting with a, a UFC guy, uh, this week, and he has, just because of the setup and the way things are with guys who are professional, like they train three or four hours in a row. Mm. Like that’s just, they have to. They just have no other option, and they’re doing about 20 hours a week.

[14:26] James de Lacey: So in that instance, and I would argue that most fighters who are looking to go professional are probably training. Uh, I’ve got another jujitsu guy who’s semi… Well, you could say professional, but sem- no one’s really professional semi-pro. And he trains seven times a week, I think. Seven times a week over six days, something like that.

[14:43] James de Lacey: Yeah. And it’s kind of like, w- like where do you fit more low-intensity steady state cardio in those instances? And then- Is doing that going to give you the gains that you need? If you’re adding an extra hour, two hours of low intensity on top of that, like are you getting much out– Are you gonna get out of it what you are essentially trying to change for the sport?

[15:03] James de Lacey: And, you know, initi- as if everything works initially. Was it Dan John that said everything works until it doesn’t? Mm-hmm. That’s kind of, uh, that’s kind of the thought process around that. And then applying these kind of blind endurance training principles who all they do is essentially quote-unquote endurance to a sport that is more mixed.

[15:21] James de Lacey: Does it make sense? Just like how you don’t app- blindly apply strongman or westside programs or powerlifting programs directly into rugby or combat sports or whatever because things need to be modified. Yeah. You might take some of the principles, but you’re not gonna bring in the, the training structure, if that makes sense.

[15:36] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, and I think that’s my biggest criticism, especially with a lot of the zone two stuff, and I never thought it was that controversial. Now I have people sending me emails all the time that are like, “Oh you’re just posting all this shit because it’s controversial.” I’m like, “Yeah, kind of,” but I, I didn’t, I didn’t initially start posting it because I didn’t think it was controversial at all.

[15:57] Dr. Mike T Nelson: I just read the literature- Yeah … and went, “Oh, doesn’t look like you get a lot of adaptations here.” Again, if you are a runner, and you’re trying to run a marathon, or you’re a Tour de France rider, or these high, high output things, and running is different, like you said, because of economy and impact and pacing, and there’s a whole bunch of other things that go into it.

[16:15] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, okay, maybe you could make an argument maybe for some zone two stuff, although, eh, I think it’s a little bit debatable. Yeah. But for the average person who’s in just lifting weights or doing, you know, MMA or rugby player or whatever, saying that, okay, you need to dedicate three hours a week to this low-intensity thing, that’s a massive ask in terms of I don’t think people realize the time constraints that’s involved in a lot of this either.

[16:43] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And again, maybe you get some blood flow, maybe you burn some calories, maybe you get some benefit from it, but at least from the literature standpoint in a five-zone model, like there’s not many aerobic adaptations that I see from zone two at all. Like I even pulled all the literature the other day on stroke volume increases, because everyone’s like- Yeah, that was the

[17:04] James de Lacey: email you sent out, right?

[17:05] James de Lacey: That

[17:05] Dr. Mike T Nelson: was you. Yeah. And that was a condensed version. I got a 20-slide thing on frigging Instagram that’ll go up today that I’m not convinced even zone two is the best for stroke volume changes. Again, that’s not saying- Mm … it doesn’t happen or that it’s not useful at all. It’s just that a lot of times I think we get stuck with these stories that make kind of sense, that are sort of true.

[17:28] Dr. Mike T Nelson: When we look at the research and the studies, which again are limited, it doesn’t always pan out that way. And if you’re asking someone to add three hours of something into their schedule, damn, you better have a pretty big outcome for that three-hour ask on top of everything else too.

[17:45] James de Lacey: Yeah. And I, I always bring it back to, to stress, because what…

[17:50] James de Lacey: Like how are you imposing enough stress? And I think everyone knows- Right … everyone knows, uh, instinctively, or at least from even from learning, like you can’t go into the gym and squat 100kgs for five reps, week one, week two, week three, week four, week five, and continue on 100kgs for five reps and c- and think you’re gonna continually get stronger, bigger, whatever it is.

[18:11] James de Lacey: With conditioning, it’s almost seen as, hey, if I just do my 90 minutes twice a week of zone two every week, I’m gonna be good. Mm. The, the issue is at some point, initially, yeah, you’re probably gonna be good, but you need to layer on the stress. The only way you can increase the stress with low intensity is more volume, because you’re limited by intensity.

[18:28] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yep.

[18:28] James de Lacey: So now you’re having to add more hours if you want, if you wanted to take this approach, and then obviously that comes at the expense of a lot of other things. As you mentioned, time is a huge issue. Um, more volume typically is not, is generally not good for, you know, speed adaptations and whatever else, depending on how far you’re going and what else you’re doing.

[18:47] James de Lacey: Uh, if you’re doing it, say, running, there is a lot of impact. Again, you know, lighter guys, people adapt, whatever else. But either way, it could be an issue. So you’ve got, like, all these other issues that come about, and then obviously doing a lot of that takes away from something else. Mm-hmm. So you’ve got, like, more issues just right there off the bat of this idea of, hey, if I’m gonna s- continually increase volume, you know, what, what, what’s gonna happen out the other end?

[19:09] James de Lacey: What am I trying to achieve? So, and how am I trying to get that stress when there are other ways that you could attack some of those pathways without having to spend hours doing it and potentially get more out of it? So I kind of just, yeah, uh, just do- it just doesn’t make enough sense for it to be something to use, like, like to throw all your eggs in that basket, if that makes sense.

[19:32] James de Lacey: Like, and I think a lot of the a- like you, you read a lot of anecdotes, like even, even if you go through Reddit, like I sometimes go through Reddit just to kind of get, try and find context- … for this and whatever else. I know it’s horrible. You wanna gouge your eyes out going through there. But- You’re a brave man

[19:44] James de Lacey: you’ll see, like you’ll see stuff about con- about conditioning or like, “Hey, I need to do my cardio.” And people will be like, “Oh, I run, you know, X amount of miles a week,” whatever, every week, and you know, like, their, their, their conditioning’s improved massively, blah, blah, blah. It’s like, okay, yeah, think about the context though, right?

[19:59] James de Lacey: Yeah. Like you probably went from doing nothing to that, or this was an additional to everything else. Um, or you made those gains within the first two weeks, and then all the stuff you’ve just been doing continually is just, it’s just there. There’s like nothing more on top of it. So there’s like a huge context thing as well within the use of different intensities, or at least low intensity cardio.

[20:17] Dr. Mike T Nelson: And I think there’s also, if you’ve ever worked with high-level cyclists, they’re all complete psychos at some level. I think high level any- The fact that I’ve, uh- Say again?

[20:26] James de Lacey: High level any athlete, they’re all psychos.

[20:28] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Oh, yeah.

[20:29] James de Lacey: And

[20:29] Dr. Mike T Nelson: I’ve just wondered with cyclists especially because, yeah, all the top people, do they ride a lot?

[20:34] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yes. There’s even, I’m blanking on the athlete’s name now. He stopped doing zone two and started doing more zone one training. Um, but I just- As a cyclist? For cycling, yeah.

[20:46] James de Lacey: Oh, I don’t know any cyclists.

[20:47] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Which is crazy. But I’ve often wondered with that, left to their own devices, most of them just will absolutely burn themselves out doing higher intensity work.

[20:59] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm. So how much is the, the zone two benefiting on a metabolic standpoint, or is it just the psychology of they feel like they’re doing something, and it prevents them from just torching themselves in zone four and zone five? I mean, I think it, I, I mean, I don’t know how you would… I mean, there’s ways you could get at this with a study, but if you pull most of the literature in that area, it’s saying, “Hey, we did this 80/20 split or this 90/10 split, or, you know, we can’t do so much high intensity work,” which I agree with, “so we did a lot more lower intensity work, and look, we got a better result.”

[21:37] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Okay. Yeah. But that doesn’t mean that’s associative, right? That doesn’t mean that the 12 hours of zone two you did a week is better. It might be, but maybe that just means that you didn’t do as much zone four or zone five and completely lighting your nut sack on fire every single day- … you went out, and shocker, got better because of it.

[21:59] Dr. Mike T Nelson: I don’t know.

[22:01] James de Lacey: Yeah. And then there’s also, like, like even with like with what Dr. Andrew Jasha does and teaches around, like heart rate kinetics.

[22:08] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm-hmm.

[22:08] James de Lacey: And-

[22:09] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, explain that. That’s super fascinating.

[22:10] James de Lacey: Yeah. It’s, it’s super interesting because typically we look at zones and we go, oh, wait. Like, someone will take their, I don’t know, MMA training session, whatever, and their heart rate, and like, “Whoa, I spent X amount of time in this zone, this zone, this zone.”

[22:23] James de Lacey: And they’ll come back and be like, “Well, all my training is middle or higher intensity, so that’s why I need to do zone two,” or, or whatever it is.

[22:29] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm-hmm.

[22:29] James de Lacey: I mean, there’s a lot of things that go into, into the changes in heart rate. But with his, with the way he does his analysis, the way I do my analysis now with, with athletes that I work with as well, is it’s not so much about time spent in a zone, it’s how well you can get into it and out of it.

[22:44] James de Lacey: Because when you look at the sport in terms of, I guess, high intensity efforts, getting to high heart, like getting to heart rates and recovery, even if you look at the research between rounds of different combat sports, like max heart rates every round, like sky high blood lactate. You can’t avoid…

[22:59] James de Lacey: There’s no way you’re g- like, you don’t want to fight at, with low blood lactate and low heart rates. It just means you’re not doing anything. Um, and just- You’re probably

[23:08] Dr. Mike T Nelson: on the ground getting your ass beat.

[23:10] James de Lacey: Yeah. Yeah. But then your heart rate’s gonna be high because you’re gonna be getting smashed. So it’s like- Yeah,

[23:13] Dr. Mike T Nelson: yeah.

[23:14] Dr. Mike T Nelson: That’s true.

[23:14] James de Lacey: Yeah. These things happen in the sport, so you need to be able to handle that. And it’s how well and how quickly you can get to these heart rates and how quickly you can come out of them. So typically what we’re looking at is, like, say, say we do, we usually use, like, a baseline test of two sets of 30 seconds on, 60 seconds off, so repeated wingate.

[23:33] James de Lacey: And- We map the heart rate recovery not just by the total beats, but I guess what you’ll call it, quote-unquote, “the quality” based on like essentially a polynomial, uh, fit, like a line of best fit around that heart rate. And then you can see kind of slow and fast phases of movement within, say, that 20 beat drop, whatever it is.

[23:53] James de Lacey: ’Cause you could have two guys getting 20 beat drops. One guy does it way later in the recovery, like after 30 seconds, and one guy does it earlier. And you’ll see that you want to try and facilitate the earlier recovery within that heart rate. Uh, especially like combat sports, it can be so you can help, you know, take an instruction, start to relax faster, but also kind of have a little bit of an inverse relationship between heart rate and muscle oxygenation.

[24:15] James de Lacey: So if the heart can start to come down quicker, ideally that, uh, muscle should start to recover faster as well. So you kinda have this– You’re looking more at just like how people will be like, “Well, I jump this high. Like I have max jump height of this, one RM of this, max speed of this.” It’s like, cool, but how did you get there?

[24:32] James de Lacey: Because when we look under the hood with any metric, we can distinguish– typically we can distinguish elite versus sub-elite in a lot of different, uh, characteristics or even based on the sport. Like for jump height, you can look at, uh, eccentric duration, uh, eccentric rate of force development, these kind of qualities that really underpin, or at least in MMA, underpin really high-level MMA athletes, at least with a striking background, these high eccentric qualities when they’re jumping versus maybe, I don’t know, grappler or even weightlifters may have slower descents in the eccentric phase ’cause maybe they don’t need so much of that quality.

[25:08] James de Lacey: Um, and that just gives you more of an idea of like what’s going under the hood, how are they getting there, versus both you guys produce X, Y, Z, or both you guys drop 20 beats. Cool, you’re both gonna do the exact same conditioning, whatever it is. But you can kinda dial it in a lot, I guess you could say, more individualized based on that.

[25:26] James de Lacey: And then if you obviously have power data and, and meters data on top of that, you get a bigger, a better picture. Um, but most people only have heart rate, which makes it a little harder, but doable.

[25:36] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. So let me know if this makes sense. So one thing I’ve done is if somebody does for just simple things they can relate to.

[25:43] Dr. Mike T Nelson: If you do a 2,000 meter on the Concept2 Rower, RP of a nine. So pretty, pretty hard. Not a- Mm … not a 10, but pretty hard all out. And I do this for testing on people all the time. I’ll have them measure a two-minute heart rate recovery, and then ideally- Mm … I want the graph of, of that if I can get it, but sometimes I can’t.

[26:03] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. So I’ll tell them, “Okay, give me the one-minute point, give me the two-minute point.” ’Cause usually trying to get anything more than that, their, their head’s just kkhh, you know. This is just not… Advanced people, yes, but new people, they’re just… They’re so cooked, they don’t know what end of the world is up right at that point.

[26:20] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Um, and then I’ll try to look at the change between the first minute and the second minute over time. Mm. And what I’ve noticed is that if their first minute is increasing, and the second minute normally will too because of that, to me, would you agree that that is, I don’t wanna say a better adaptation, but if they were an athlete of some form, I feel better about that.

[26:44] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Because for example, if they’re, uh, mixed martial arts, they’ve only got a certain, the very short rest period between one round versus the next round, or between one move and the next move. Or an NFL player between, you know, they’ve got- Mm … a space between this play versus the next play, or NHL player, this shift or next shift.

[27:03] Dr. Mike T Nelson: That the faster that they can recover to get out of that high heart rate zone, even if they don’t get all the way back down to 100 or whatever mythical number- … they’re, they’re better, right? Because they’re not living as long at an elevated heart rate. So like you said- Mm … they can get in and out, or what I call, like, a human dynamic range.

[27:25] Dr. Mike T Nelson: What is the range- Yeah … at which you can go low and high, and then how fast, just like metabolic flexibility, how fast can you get to that heart rate as needed and get out of that heart rate as needed? Mm. Does that make sense?

[27:37] James de Lacey: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And when you get, like, really… Like, like based on that, so based on heart rate, a lot of the time, like, from all the data I’ve seen, people tend to have similar profiles.

[27:51] James de Lacey: ’Cause most, I would say most people who say they’ve done, say, sprint interval training, haven’t actually done sprint interval training.

[27:56] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Correct.

[27:58] James de Lacey: Because when you, when you actually instruct them or you’re there with them and you go, “Okay, you, like, you need to, you need to go so fucking hard on this first sprint, you don’t wanna do another one.

[28:07] James de Lacey: Like, you have to go from the very beginning, hit peak power as quick as possible, and just hang on for dear life.”

[28:12] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm. ”

[28:12] James de Lacey: And you need to be s- you need to be so wasted and munted at the end of it that you don’t wanna do another one, but you have to do another one, and you have to go just as hard.”

[28:20] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm.

[28:20] James de Lacey: And then when they do that like, there’s no training that can beat that intensity.

[28:25] James de Lacey: You can run sharp tanks at training, you can roll however many rounds. Nothing will, will hit you like that on, say, an air bike, as an example. And most people may have like real janky like kind of heart rate recoveries because it’s such a novel stimulus. So it kind of, it starts to even out over the weeks as they get a little more used to it.

[28:44] James de Lacey: But often you’ll find that heart rate recovery kind of lags initially. They kind of have the slower phase initially before they start to, uh, recover faster. And so to, in order to facilitate that faster recovery, we do shorter rest intervals because now we have to for- it’s that stress, it’s essentially that stress response.

[29:00] James de Lacey: We have to force the body to recover in those short intervals. So say, let’s just take a very general arbitrary data like, hey, we have a little slow phase at the beginning. We wanna move, we wanna make your recovery faster in the beginning. Recovery is an issue. You’re gonna go 10 seconds on, I don’t know, somewhere between 10 to 20 seconds off, depending on if they’re done sprints before, that kind of stuff.

[29:22] James de Lacey: And the goal is In those little time periods, you can sometimes see if they- once they start getting fit, you’ll start to see some heart recovery in these really short windows. Um, which is a really good sign because they’re able to kinda… They’re not … But if you just throw someone in who’s not used to it and you go, “Hey, you’re doing 10 10s.”

[29:41] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah.

[29:42] James de Lacey: And they haven’t done it before, like, the, the heart rate’s gonna look like this. It’ll look like one mountain. It’s gonna keep going up, up, up, and it ain’t gonna come back down. Mm-hmm. And then guys who are more conditioned, you’ll see these kinda little waves. Yep. And you’ll see there’s maybe one, one, two, three beat drops in these kinda 10 seconds, which is really cool to see.

[29:56] James de Lacey: And this is kinda like what we’re trying to facilitate. We’re trying to facilitate and force the body to recover in these short timeframes. So you’re able to quickly kind of, I guess you say, quote, unquote switch on and off, uh, between these efforts to have better conditioning, to have better, quote, unquote, aerobic conditioning from doing higher intensity, or I guess you could say maximum intensity intervals in this instance.

[30:19] James de Lacey: Um, and then obviously if you wanted to target more systemic or central adaptations, hey, you’re probably gonna do some kinda longer intervals or something like that if you, if you needed that for whatever reason. But a lot of it is targeting that kinda muscle level, and we can look at that through that heart rate kinetics.

[30:33] James de Lacey: Well, I should say we can infer kind of.

[30:37] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, and I would actually, I mean, that sounds counter to what I do, but for the application of what you’re doing, that makes sense, right? Because you are doing a sport that has, you know, a few minutes of high output, but within that high output you’ve got ups and downs depending upon the position, what they’re doing, et cetera, et cetera.

[30:59] Dr. Mike T Nelson: So you’re, you don’t have the luxury of having 10 minutes between rounds to fully recover, right? So you have to do something to train sort of the aerobic system overall, like a general GPP type phase, but then you would have, what you’re talking about I would think is more specificity to train it to still have a high output for a period of time.

[31:25] Dr. Mike T Nelson: But within that period of time, if we can get any small amount of recovery, we would wanna take advantage of that as best we can. Is that correct?

[31:35] James de Lacey: Yes, and there’s also… It’s also just making sure that the recovery starts earlier, and then there’s more layers on top of it, like in terms of, say, rate of power development.

[31:44] James de Lacey: So to say, like using a, if using an AirBike, that peak power, uh, can I say correlates or when you hit peak power, muscle oxygenation starts essentially to rapidly plummet. Mm. So the faster you can get to peak power, the f- more efficient you are at using oxygen. So it means that if we’re able to improve your ability to o- even with just using general means, like on a bike, if we’re able to improve your ability to get yourself there, then we can reduce this kind of time, uh…

[32:17] James de Lacey: What, what Andrew, what Dr. Andrew Jashua’s kind of coined as initial delay on his little, uh, NEATS graphs and his analysis. Because what you’ll find is, as the rounds or repeats go on, this extends, this initial delay extends, extends, extends because they aren’t able to recover fast enough or well enough at the muscle between efforts.

[32:33] James de Lacey: So we can kind of reduce this kind of initial delay to be able to continually repeat, um, if we’re able to hit that peak power essentially fast enough, and then we’re able to repeat that peak power as much as possible, I guess, throughout. Um, and then obviously there’s the muscle adaptation on top of that.

[32:51] James de Lacey: So it’s not just like the heart rate recovery, it’s forcing the muscle to recover within that as well. So there’s kind of like a f- a few different layers, uh, again, depending on what you have access to. ’Cause the annoying thing is with power data, only like the V3 Rogue Echoes allow you to kind of connect and, and get that power data, whereas the old kind of displays don’t allow you to connect anything, which is a pain in the ass.

[33:13] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. That’s why I like the rower ’cause you’ll get all your metrics from it- Mm … which is nice. Yeah. Um, but again, I, I use rower, Echo Bike. I think they’re both super useful. And if anyone who hasn’t used them, there is something very different about having your upper body contribute to it. ’Cause a lot of people who are moderately trained, you can put them on a bike and it’s, it’s hard to hit a high heart rate in a short period of time.

[33:40] James de Lacey: It’s, it’s very hard on a, on a spin bike. I would say- Yeah … on a spin bike, like you gotta crank up the resistance, but then obviously you gather momentum as it spins.

[33:47] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah.

[33:47] James de Lacey: And so when you’re going fast it forgets… On the- And

[33:50] Dr. Mike T Nelson: sometimes they’re muscle fatigue then too if they’re not trained in their lower body to the resistance you have to hit to get the the heart rate.

[33:56] James de Lacey: Yeah. Yeah. It’s, uh, it’s tough. That’s why like typically AirBike’s quite good. I’m in the process of now collecting some more data, putting the NEATS on the upper body and lower body to see some differences there. Um, but yeah, like the, the AirBike like is pretty much undefeated in that area, unless you like have expensive lab equipment like you have.

[34:14] James de Lacey: Yeah. Then you’ve got then you’ve got the world open to you to do whatever you want.

[34:19] Dr. Mike T Nelson: So would you… So this is kind of what I’ve done. Again, I don’t have any, I, so I don’t have a ton of data to show this is useful, but- Would you separate training days potentially on the adaptation you want? So what I’ve done is it would be I’ll make what I call a, a cardiac or heart rate day, where I really wanna ping high heart rate.

[34:42] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yes, I still wanna see that there’s good power, but I’m looking more at the heart rate dynamics, where I want that recovery faster, and then we’ll hit it again. I don’t… I’m not as worried about the SM02 data or the NIRS data. But then I may have other sessions where, okay, I’m gonna do the inverse. I don’t give a shit about heart rate.

[35:01] Dr. Mike T Nelson: We’re gonna take your SM02, and we’re gonna try to just plummet it as fast as possible, maybe hold it there for a specific period of time, and then go again. So my repeats on the intervals would be based off of the muscle, the local peripheral SM02 changes, and heart rate would just be a byproduct. Where the other training would be heart rate is the main thing I’m trying to drive, SM02 is just kind of along for the ride

[35:30] James de Lacey: So I’ll plan everything based, literally just based on the limiting factor that I see in the data for that week.

[35:39] James de Lacey: Cool. So it’s literally like, uh, ’cause, uh, well, combat sport’s a little different as well because guys will take, guys they have to be ready all the time. There’s no real- Yeah … seasons. So, uh, for some guys they may be able to have like a four-week, a four-month buildup if they’re maybe at a higher level and they have like legit fight con- like fights- Yeah

[35:56] James de Lacey: in place. But most

[35:58] Dr. Mike T Nelson: guys don’t have- But most of those guys will get pinged at the last minute if someone misses weight and now they have an opportunity to take a huge fight and they’re like, “Oh shit, I’m out of shape.”

[36:05] James de Lacey: Yeah. And now imagine, now imagine all you’ve been doing is six weeks of zone two and hypertrophy training- Right.

[36:09] James de Lacey: because you’re running a block model. You know? It doesn’t make any sense. So for me it’s literally just attacking whatever’s limiting. So m- because they’re training so much already, it might be like two sprint interval sessions in that week as an example.

[36:23] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah.

[36:23] James de Lacey: And then within that, within those two, they’ll probably be exactly the same sessions because it’s just literally targeting, hey, and like say recovery example, like we need to attack that so it’s gonna be six sets of 10 on, 10 off as an example, whatever, and you can do that twice in that week.

[36:37] James de Lacey: Look at the data again, see what’s changing. Do we need to shift it around? Whatever it is. So it’s literally, it’s literally just reactive to what I’m seeing versus… Because you’re gonna get the heart rate response anyway. It’s not, you’re not gonna get the same magnitude of heart adaptations as you would from like a sustained high intensity interval.

[36:53] James de Lacey: Mm-hmm. But you’re still gonna get some. Like nothing, that’s the thing, people think everything’s so isolated, right? People go- Yeah,

[36:58] Dr. Mike T Nelson: it’s not.

[36:59] James de Lacey: If you’re doing, if you’re doing 10 on, like 10 on, 10 off, or 10 on, 12 off, whatever, you’re not developing power because you’re not getting full recovery. Well, I can look at my own data and I can see peak power increasing week to week on 10 on, 10 offs and 10 on, 15 offs.

[37:12] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah.

[37:12] James de Lacey: And these things aren’t isolated. You, everything happens, it just might not happen at the same magnitude. So you’re still getting- Or at the same

[37:19] Dr. Mike T Nelson: rate. Like you’ve

[37:20] James de Lacey: got different- Or at

[37:20] Dr. Mike T Nelson: the same, yeah … it’s all non-linear on top of it.

[37:22] James de Lacey: Exactly. So you’ve got so many different factors at, at play there regarding, uh, physical qualities.

[37:27] James de Lacey: But, uh, yeah, uh, we’re basically just, we’re just targeting the limiter week to week. Looking at that and then obviously playing around like with time. Uh, those, those sessions will be scheduled. Honestly, I’ll try schedule them based on their training schedule, but training schedules change. They just do it when they have time and can do it, and I’ll give them guidelines like after sparring’s usually a good place to kinda put something like that.

[37:49] James de Lacey: Again, if you’re consolidating stresses and things like that, it can be good. Sometimes it’s not possible for whatever reason. They might do it on, I don’t know, earlier in the week, later in the week. It’s just not done like directly before a session. ’Cause anyone who’s done them will know why.

[38:06] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Do you…

[38:09] Dr. Mike T Nelson: So how would you know what is a limiter then? Do you do any assessment initially? Like, like say you’ve got a, a brand new athlete, or do you just kinda-

[38:18] James de Lacey: Hmm …

[38:19] Dr. Mike T Nelson: guess and because you’re- It’s that typical wingate … you’re altering it by day to day. It’s that repeated wingate. Say again.

[38:23] James de Lacey: Yeah. It’s that, it’s that repeated wingate baseline.

[38:25] James de Lacey: That two sets of 30 seconds on, 60 seconds off. ’Cause it gives us a really good idea of like-

[38:29] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, do you wanna go through that? Walk us through, like so I’m a brand new athlete. Yeah. I show up at your place, and you’re gonna run me- Yeah … through the test. Like what, what does that look like and what do you do?

[38:37] James de Lacey: It’s literally get on the bike, you’re fucking going balls out, and you’re gonna be on the floor afterwards. But it’s two sets of 30 seconds on, 60 seconds off. So you kinda get a really good snapshot of, of repeated, I guess, maximal intensity effort. Sure. You get a really good snapshot of kinda that heart recovery between and heart rate recovery after.

[38:57] James de Lacey: And if you’re lucky enough to have power data and Mears data, you have a really good snapshot of how muscle is using oxygen and resaturating oxygen, and then you can look at like ratios between desaturation, resaturation. You can look at fast desaturation rates and how quickly the muscle is using oxygen.

[39:13] James de Lacey: Um, and then you can look at where kinda that recovery comes to compared to baseline, and then we can look at that power data, see if peak power is any good. Like, if someone’s only hitting like 700 watts, then it’s like, “Okay, we’ve got an issue with power. We’re probably gonna do longer rest intervals,” as an example, because we need to bring that up.

[39:29] James de Lacey: Yeah. Um, or if they take very long to get there as well, same thing, probably want longer rest intervals. Hey, we need to make sure you’re hitting peak power faster because we want that desaturation rate to start earlier. Um, we just have heart rate again, as I mentioned, we’re kinda looking at the heart rate, kinda how it’s going up and down.

[39:45] James de Lacey: Um, and yeah, we just… um, basically just taking that. We run that, and then based on that is kinda where the next step is taken. So if their, if their heart rate data still looks super fucked up, like after a couple of weeks, like it’s just their recovery is like instead of kind of coming this nice little wave, it’s like fucking coming way out and coming down und- like everywhere.

[40:03] James de Lacey: It’s like, okay, we’ll start to slowly bring you down. Now we might even do 20 on, 40 off for three. And we’re looking at one to two minutes of total work, and that’s just, um, from Dr. John Babraj, his 20 plus years of high intensity research . That’s kind of what, uh, they’ve found is kind of this, hey, you’re, you’re basically emptying muscle glycogen at that point.

[40:23] James de Lacey: That is kind of the guidelines that he provides. I usually stick to one minute total work time. I’ve found that’s pretty much more than enough for most people. As you get more, quote-unquote, fit, you can do 90, 90 seconds, two minute kind of work in, uh, total work times. But one minute I’ve found is, like more than enough.

[40:42] James de Lacey: Like when you’re pushing the intensity, it sounds like nothing, right? A session will take you three minutes often, and you’ll be like wasted. Um, but not… Let me, let me put it this way, ’cause people will think, people come against this approach and they go, “Well, you can’t do high intensity all the time. You know, you’re gonna be so fatigued,” this and that.

[40:58] James de Lacey: It’s like, yeah, if I’m doing hour-long circuits- Right … like a lot of people do, I’m gonna be effed if I’m doing that every day This is three minutes of work. Again, inverse relationship, intensity, volume. The volume is so low that, yes, afterwards intensity is so high you’re gonna be like, your legs are gone, everything’s gone, you’re like seeing stars for 30 minutes, an hour.

[41:18] James de Lacey: But after that, especially as you get used to them, like you’re pretty good. And you can, you could train later that day, you could train the next day quite, uh, fine. Like, you don’t have the same I would say the same residual fatigue that you would if you were doing what would be a traditional high-intensity circuit of random exercises put together for 45 to 60 minutes done until you can’t move.

[41:41] James de Lacey: Yeah. ’Cause that’s a volume issue. So hopefully that answered something there, but I kind of went on a tangent.

[41:47] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, and th- that’s what I ended up doing in the Flexible Meathead Cardio course too. Like, what I realized was for, for general meatheads, like, I don’t use as many of the 30-second ones because they’re strong enough to completely obliterate theirselves in three to four rounds.

[42:03] Dr. Mike T Nelson: 30 is

[42:03] James de Lacey: so hard. It’s so hard, 30 seconds.

[42:05] Dr. Mike T Nelson: And it’s just so-

[42:06] James de Lacey: Anxiety-inducing …

[42:07] Dr. Mike T Nelson: brutal. And when I do, like, a, a bioenergetic testing, which I got from Dr. Kenneth Jay is you can run them through 100 meter, uh, not all in one day, but over the course of a week. So 100 meter on the rower, 30-second wind gate, 60-second wind gate, 180-second wind gate, 2K, and a 20-minute.

[42:26] Dr. Mike T Nelson: And this is based off of a Kurt Jensen profile, and you accumulate all those over the course of a week. And when you plot them, you’ve got this cool graph of, are you really strong on, like, the strength and power? Do you suck in the lactate? Is your 2K just dog shit, so your whole graph is pulled down? Or is all that good, and your 20-minute, your capacity to hold any amount of output is just dog shit?

[42:48] Dr. Mike T Nelson: And so that tells you kind of where you would need to train them. But what I found was just simple stuff like before your upper body day, do a 500 meter, no warm-up, on the rower, but put an RPE of, like, a seven or an eight. It’s hard. It’s not balls out. You’re not… You, you can’t function for an hour afterwards, but you’re doing a- an upper body day anyway, so you’re not taxing the same muscles, air quote, per se.

[43:14] Dr. Mike T Nelson: And then you can do even a 1K at a RPE of a seven. But I want the duration just long enough that they have to hold that capacity, and what I found was that that accumulates to, especially if their capacity work is a little bit lower, over time, but the volume isn’t so astonishingly high that we’re gonna zap them.

[43:34] Dr. Mike T Nelson: And the duration is just long enough that they can’t-

[43:37] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm …

[43:38] Dr. Mike T Nelson: just completely zap themselves on, like, two 30-second wind gates. Or I’ll tell them, like- Yeah … “Okay, it’s the end of your upper body day. All I want you to do is one all-out 30-second wind gate on an air bike.” They’re like- Mm … “What? That’s stupid.

[43:52] Dr. Mike T Nelson: That’s not gonna…” Dude, at the end of, like, an hour and a half weightlifting session and you’re doing that- Mm … 30 seconds all out, it’s fucking horrible. But I don’t have to worry about it’s not, like you said, enough where I’m gonna completely impair their recovery, ’cause they’re not- Mm-hmm … training until the next day or even 48 hours after that anyway.

[44:11] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. So now I got a little bit of that high-quality work. I didn’t disrupt- Mm-hmm … the main thing that they’re training for, but it’s not enough volume at that intensity where I’ve completely screwed up the rest of their training week either.

[44:24] James de Lacey: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it’s, it’s a, it’s the intensity that’s needed- To drive a lot of those muscular adaptations anyway.

[44:32] James de Lacey: Yes. So you got like… You kinda, you kinda ha- okay, well, I’m gonna say have to. If you are trying to be a pro athlete, pro fighter, whatever, and maximize your performance at whatever level, you have to do the intensity. And I think a lot of people get caught up as well where they’re like, “Well, you can’t just do X, Y, Z.”

[44:50] James de Lacey: Like, “You shouldn’t just do this intensity.” But it’s like, we’re not just doing sprint intervals. Like, the technical training is developing a lot of the other, uh- Yep … energy systems that we need to do. We’re just addressing whatever that person needs, and often it’s an intensity problem because they’re not, they’re not getting it in their training.

[45:09] James de Lacey: Like, even if you’re doing… Take an example, the concept I did ear- uh, those groups are three to four hours of training in a, like in a row. Like, you’re not getting intensity in a three to four-hour session. No.

[45:18] Dr. Mike T Nelson: You can’t.

[45:19] James de Lacey: That’s impossible. Yep. And then same thing with if you’re training twice a day. Like, you’re probably not gonna…

[45:23] James de Lacey: You might have a, a hard session, but there’s a difference between, well, my heart rate was in zone five for X, Y, Z, and my heart rate took 10 seconds to get to zone five and then I had to come in and out of that, uh, because of the intensity. So you need, like, again, it needs to be instead of being obsessed with these different like I spent X time in zone, like how quickly did you take to get there?

[45:46] James de Lacey: How quickly did it take you to come out of there? Can we improve that? What’s the right- what’s limiting your performance in training? And you know, there’s obviously, like, it’s multifactorial, right? Movement and efficiency, technical, tactical is a huge one. That’s why you have guys, especially fighters and things like, who maybe didn’t do strength and conditioning or did very minimal or just did road work 24/7.

[46:05] James de Lacey: It’s like well yeah, but they were like the best fighter on the planet and they could beat you. They could go out all night. Diego Maradona, they can go they can go party all week and be the best soccer player, you know? You can, uh, there’s like cal- you can be Usain Bolt and eat chicken nuggets and still break 100 meters.

[46:22] James de Lacey: Yeah . You know? Like, but you cannot do that unfortunately, right?

[46:26] Dr. Mike T Nelson: The freaks are always gonna be freaks and you’re probably not a freak.

[46:30] James de Lacey: Yeah. I mean, we all wish we were. We all wish we could do that. Yeah. But, uh, the, some of the guys at the top of the top are there because they’re just so damn good at the sport.

[46:39] James de Lacey: They understand the sport so well. They know where to use energy and where not to use energy that it doesn’t really… Uh, it’s, I don’t wanna say it doesn’t matter, but it matters less, uh, at that point because they can do whatever they wanna do. It’s kinda like, um, almost like a, not to say war of attrition, but you- you…

[46:57] James de Lacey: Certain like, uh, sit-ups will be, you know, the best athletes kind of come through anyway. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing. The other ones kinda break. I mean, you just think of like the Bulgarian weightlifting system. Yeah. The ones that didn’t, couldn’t handle the, the stress, they’re gone.

[47:11] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah.

[47:11] James de Lacey: Doesn’t matter.

[47:11] James de Lacey: We got like a couple- The ones that can they thrive …

[47:13] Dr. Mike T Nelson: thousand other people waiting in line. Out you go,

[47:15] James de Lacey: buddy. Yeah, exactly. We’re just gonna find the guys that can handle this, and the ones that can will be absolute monsters, and the rest of you go get a job somewhere. Well, uh, more like we’ll place you in a job somewhere.

[47:26] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think that’s the thing of there’s always gonna be freaks, and the, the people who are really good, I think people underestimate how efficient they are. And on top of that- Yeah … we know VO2 max has an incredibly high genetic component. You can look at the heritage study and things like that.

[47:46] Dr. Mike T Nelson: It’s ironically also extremely trainable, so just because you didn’t win the genetic lottery doesn’t mean you’re doomed. But you can have someone who genetically got a really high VO2 max, is incredibly efficient and extremely high technique, you could probably get away with not being that conditioned.

[48:04] Dr. Mike T Nelson: But unfortunately- Yeah … you see some of those people where they run up against someone who is as technically proficient and does have a bigger, let’s say a developed aerobic system, now they got a problem. But they probably were never exposed until that point.

[48:20] James de Lacey: You can also have a decent v- a, a lower VO2 max, but also really well, quote-unquote, “conditioned” at the muscular level.

[48:28] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Oh, for sure.

[48:29] James de Lacey: So it, again, you can perform better or the same as someone with a higher- Yeah … VO2 max in this instance. So again, comes back to this idea of how, how important is VO2 max? Yes, you should have some kind of aerobic base, of course. Like, you can’t just, as you mentioned, be 22 sitting on the couch, 22 VO2 max sitting on the couch and be like, “Yeah, I’m good.”

[48:46] James de Lacey: “You know, I’m gonna, I’m g- I’m gonna be able to, you know, last my three fighting rounds,” whatever. Like, but a lot of that will be developed through the technical training, especially if you’re training a lot a week. If you’re going to class once, twice a week, yeah, okay. Now we’re talking- Mm-hmm … a different story, a different context.

[48:59] James de Lacey: But you’re probably not trying to bloody fight, I don’t know, in the UFC or whatever it is in, in that instance. So context matters as well. And then it’s in some kind of zone two probably… Well, again, time. If you’re only training once or twice a week, you probably don’t have time to train. Yeah. So you’re probably not gonna do zone two in that instance.

[49:14] James de Lacey: But say if you did, you could. But again, we come back to context, time, adaptations we’re trying to achieve, all that kind of stuff. So there, there’s more… I, I, as much as social media is like- Kind of good for spreading a message. It’s also so horrible for trying to have nuance and context in anything.

[49:35] James de Lacey: Mm-hmm. So if you’re just taking it at face value, everything’s obviously very in your face, uh, absolute controversial because if you don’t, no one’s gonna see what you’re doing. Um, and then the problem is you can start that way. So I try and start a lot of my content kind of in a absolutist controversial way and then explain it more with nuance throughout the rest of it.

[49:54] James de Lacey: But as with social media, only the first three seconds is probably looked at . Yeah. So, so then you’re screwed either way.

[50:01] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. On, on the 30 second, 30, 60, 30-

[50:06] James de Lacey: Yeah …

[50:06] Dr. Mike T Nelson: would you agree that the faster someone can sort of desaturate, right? So- Mm-hmm … for listeners, you’re looking at a NIRS, you’re looking at SMO2, and you’re looking at literally the measurement of oxygen dropping within a muscle.

[50:22] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Would you say that that is in general a good correlate to their peak power and that you would want to desaturate faster because that means you’re, in essence, pulling as much energy through the system as possible to try to get a higher output because it’s the output that actually matters?

[50:44] James de Lacey: Yes. I’m gonna start this.

[50:45] James de Lacey: I am not a NIRS expert, so take what I say with a grain of salt. I’ve lear- again, learned everything from Dr. Andrew Jashua- Yeah … obviously a lot of the stuff. So as, uh, as I mentioned a little earlier, time to peak power because that is when we start to have this kind of, uh, fast desaturation or when- at least when that starts to pull a lot of oxygen.

[51:03] James de Lacey: The f- the faster we can get there… Oh, okay. When we’re looking at the desaturation rate, we’re looking at this kind of fast linear component that’s kinda like, you could call it the glycolytic component of that sprint where you’re kinda pulling oxygen rapidly and energy rapidly. And we’re looking at the slope and then seeing, based on a linear regression, how mu- o- how much oxygen is being used per second during this little timeframe.

[51:28] James de Lacey: And the more oxygen you’re using per second, the more efficient. So you’ll have, like, really poor athletes will have a slope that’s not as steep. On a… When you look at the graph at face value for like on whatever app, it like, everything looks steep ’cause it’s kinda condensed and you’re like, “Whoa, that looks really good.”

[51:42] James de Lacey: And then you zoom in when you kinda break it down and it’s kinda like this almost like flat line . Mm-hmm. That’s how many… So like, if you’re not extracting o- like, if you’re not extracting oxygen very quickly, you’re just not very efficient. And whether it comes down to how much power you can produce, I am not, I’m gonna say I’m not entirely sure.

[51:59] James de Lacey: But what I will say is that it is trainable and- H- and you train it through repeating these hard sprint efforts.

[52:09] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Specificity. Shocker.

[52:11] James de Lacey: Yeah. Yeah. And where versus, versus, as we kind of talked about through this whole podcast, low intensity work, again, not enough muscle stress. Uh, not enough, I guess, not enough stress to signal the pathways we want for changes in mitochondria or whatever else, you know.

[52:25] James de Lacey: The, it’s, it’s a funny one ’cause there’s a, there’s still a huge camp on this kind of low intensity thing where people will go, “Well, we just train all intensities, you know? We need everything.” And it’s like, yes, but we are training all intensities through technical training as well. Like-

[52:40] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm-hmm …

[52:40] James de Lacey: we just wanna, w- we have 30 minutes to 60 minutes maybe extra a week for the conditioning.

[52:45] James de Lacey: What do we need to target? I’m not, I don’t wanna just train all intensities. Yeah. It doesn’t make sense ’cause I’m, I’m probably wasting 45 minutes of someone’s time doing a zone two session, and then I’ve got maybe one or two other sessions. Okay, now I’ve gotta, uh, try and address what it is, and depending on what that is is what they get.

[53:01] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Do you ascribe to the theory that if we stick a moxie on your right quad, your VMO, your left VMO, and then maybe like a air quote, “non-working muscle,” like the left lateral deltoid, that by looking at the air quote, “working versus non-working muscles,” we could get some idea of maybe distribution of blood flow?

[53:27] Dr. Mike T Nelson: ’Cause I think if I remember right from Evan Peikon is that if you see changes then in the sort of non-working muscle, that that would point to maybe it’s a cardiac adaptation that you would need to work on more, because you’re having to redistribute, uh, blood flow within the system. So at the end of the day, you’ve got a closed system.

[53:49] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm-hmm. You’ve got a certain amount of volume. You’ve got the brain that has to keep profusion, otherwise your lights go out, and so your body has to sort of prioritize keeping the lights on at all costs. And if that costs performance to kind of shift blood flow somewhere else to keep you upright, the- it’s gonna make the survival versus the performance choice all the time.

[54:11] James de Lacey: So, so you, you mean like if you’re running, you see blood flow increase in the arms or-

[54:16] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Right, you would see a change there. Yeah … as if, as… I might have got the theory backwards, but you’re using kind of a, a non-working muscle as a, a surrogate to see is it changing in that area as a sort of… The theory is a cardiac limitation that your-

[54:35] James de Lacey: Mm

[54:36] Dr. Mike T Nelson: cardiac system is not developed enough to keep your body perfusing enough blood all the time- Yeah … and sustain that level of performance. Does that make sense?

[54:46] James de Lacey: Yeah. From my non-expert opinion, uh, and through some of my experience as well, so I know Dr. Andras, uh, Andras has mentioned to me, like you can’t measure blood flow with NIRS itself.

[54:57] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, it’s really hit or miss. Which makes it- The NIRS people get mad at me all the time when I say- … blood flow and NIRS. They just send me these diatribes of like, “Whoa, it’s error.”

[55:07] James de Lacey: So, so that, that’s one of the issues. Uh, the other one is if you cycle hard enough on a bike, you will see change, you will see oxygen being used in the upper body-

[55:17] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Oh,

[55:17] James de Lacey: for sure

[55:17] James de Lacey: because it is so hard, so that’s another thing. I have put NIRS on someone’s arm while they are running because they were huge football, uh, offensive lineman, and I couldn’t get any reading on their legs because they were so big.

[55:27] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm.

[55:28] James de Lacey: And so I put it on their arm, and there was no real change. I guess running might be different in that instance.

[55:35] James de Lacey: Um, so I can’t, yeah, I, I can’t say yes, no, whatever, but that’s kind of what I can say to that is you will see changes depending on what the activity is anyway. Uh, and some activities you may not. so I can-

[55:48] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah …

[55:48] James de Lacey: yeah.

[55:49] Dr. Mike T Nelson: That’s what I’ve seen too because I’ve, I’ve tried to do some of the moxie, how some of their, was it 525- Mm

[55:55] Dr. Mike T Nelson: or 515 testing and- with like the three sensor setup and it’s super interesting and the theories and all that stuff makes sense to me. But what I’ve noticed, and again, this is on extremely small numbers I’m not convinced that an athlete will pick the exact same method to achieve an output day by day.

[56:18] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Meaning if we sort of, air quote, “diagnose you as having a cardiac limitation,” I’ve tested some of those people a few days later and they no longer had a cardiac limitation. Mm. I just wonder how much fatigue and other factors affect how you’re achieving performance on a day-by-day basis, and I think it’s more variable than what people realize, which is why I like your approach of let’s look at the live actual training data.

[56:46] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Let’s have a somewhat of an idea after the first one, and that’s kinda more I haven’t done as much one-off testing per se with Moxy, but using it more on a day-by-day basis, but constantly looking at what was the heart rate and what was the output, right? Mm. Because Moxy is sorta like heart rate where it gives us some insight as to what’s going on, but like you said, at the end of the day, if their peak power is going up and is continually going up over time, well, shit, we’re doing something right.

[57:15] Dr. Mike T Nelson: We’re doing more right than wrong- Yeah … no matter what the other data says.

[57:18] James de Lacey: Yeah, yeah. If I’m… Like, uh, when I was doing the more, I’m trying to get back into it more consistently, but sprint intervals can be pr- I’m not trying to be a fucking professional athlete, so Doing those every week is like, woo, trying, trying to overcome the anxiety to do it.

[57:32] James de Lacey: But-

[57:33] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah …

[57:33] James de Lacey: uh, when I was doing it, like, weekly, like, my peak in ep- like, I was doing, I got to the point where my condition was getting good enough where I went from, like, 10 20s to 10 10s for six, and my peak pound average power was going up week to week-

[57:45] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Nice …

[57:45] James de Lacey: on th- on those intervals. And then, you know, heart rate starts, you can see these little dips in heart rate.

[57:50] James de Lacey: So, you know, th- these things change. Uh, we do, as you mentioned, like, the var- the variability. I mean, the easiest example for most people to understand is just jump height. Mm. And if you just measure jump height, you’re gonna have different strategies to reach whatever jump height. Someone’s fatigued, someone’s not, you know, they’re gonna change the strategy, but they can reach the same height.

[58:07] James de Lacey: Um, it’s, you know, same thing with any kind of max variable. Same thing with, like, max speed. I know, um, Dr. Andrew and Dr. John’s, uh, soccer paper, I don’t know if you’ve read that one recently- I have not … where they looked at… It’s a really good repeat sprint paper. They did-

[58:20] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm …

[58:21] James de Lacey: two sets of 36, two, two sets of 30-meter sprints with 10 seconds rest, and they had the nears on the hamstrings.

[58:26] James de Lacey: And- 30-minute

[58:27] Dr. Mike T Nelson: run you

[58:27] James de Lacey: said? Sorry, sorry. 30 meter. Uh-

[58:29] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Oh, meter. Oh, okay, okay, okay.

[58:30] James de Lacey: Yeah, 30 meter. I was like, ”

[58:32] Dr. Mike T Nelson: What?”

[58:33] James de Lacey: Yeah. These are superhumans. Um- So, so what they found is, hey, they reached the same max velocity on both sprints. Mm. But the second one, they took longer to reach max velocity, and if you look at the nears data, you see the hamstrings didn’t actually recover between the efforts well.

[58:49] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm.

[58:49] James de Lacey: So it’s, then you look at that and it’s like, well, how, how much high-intensity work are they, are they doing enough high-intensity work to condition the hamstrings for this?

[58:56] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Sure.

[58:58] James de Lacey: You know? Like, are the hamstrings well enough trained for it? Like, if you just look at the, hey, if you just look at the typical repeat sprint that you’ll see in team sports, well, you hit the same speeds, you ra- maintain speed throughout or whatever, your times are good, you’re sorted.

[59:10] James de Lacey: Or, you know, but when you look under the hood, it’s like, wow, you actually incre- your acceleration took longer to reach that speed as it went on, so there is fatigue.

[59:19] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm.

[59:19] James de Lacey: But if you look at a face value, there’s no fatigue, or very little fatigue I should say. Right. And then you don’t ac- you don’t know, maybe you don’t understand why or you don’t have, you don’t have something that can influence your programming.

[59:29] James de Lacey: Versus when you have that data, you have something that can influence the programming. Now, it’s not to say that everything you get back from this data is like gold, you know? Like whoa, this showed me X, Y, Z. I have the world open to me- … and I’m ready to throw this guy into this intervention. It’s like, um, and I know I, I, I’ve said this in a video recently I did, and I want to make sure that, uh, Dr.

[59:53] James de Lacey: Andrew Shaw doesn’t kill me, is it’s, it’s looking at trends, not just one-off sets of data.

[1:00:01] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yep.

[1:00:01] James de Lacey: Um, because man, there’s a lot of factors that can go into Especially with the muscle oxygenation data, even heart rate data, like what did you, did you train beforehand? Did you warm up? What warm up did you do?

[1:00:11] James de Lacey: Yep. Um, or did you do it cold? Um, all these kind of things will influence what’s happening with the data. So you’re looking at the trend over time. And if you’re seeing the same or similar things throughout the weeks versus take one test or one thing and be like, “Yep, that’s what, that’s your problem there.

[1:00:29] James de Lacey: We’re gonna address that one.” Mm-hmm. So, uh, I just wanna make sure that’s mentioned in there. So it’s trends versus just taking that data at face value.

[1:00:37] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Well, just before this I was doing a, a talk on wearables that I div- gave for ISSM- Mm-hmm … but I was doing the-

[1:00:45] James de Lacey: Hmm …

[1:00:45] Dr. Mike T Nelson: expanded version for my audience and for some other stuff, and that was like my big thing of if your accuracy isn’t nearly as good, then you can still look at potentially some of the trends, because with a lot of wearable data the trends are, are somewhat reasonable.

[1:01:02] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Hmm. But all the arguments I see are based off of this one single data point, which may even be an algorithm- My sleep score … of your, like, sleep recovery score- … that we don’t even use- Yeah … a black box. We don’t even know what goes into that thing. Yeah. And now we’re having this argument about one data point that may not even be completely valid at all.

[1:01:20] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Where if you’re just looking at the trends is, A, is this thing going up? Is it going down? Again, you can still get in trouble with that if your accuracy is just really horrible, but, you know, most of the wearable stuff now, they know that whether they artificially dink with it in the background or not, we don’t know.

[1:01:35] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. But like the old BIA scales, I have one here. I know there’s something in there that will not allow a display of a rate of change of more than like 10%. ’Cause I purposely- … skewed it and tried to skew it as hard as possible, and it, it just, it just won’t, which tells me they figured out that- Mm-hmm … if you get on and it says, “Hey, you’re 22% body fat,” and you get on an hour later and it says, “You’re 8%,” you’re like, “Well, this scale’s a piece of shit.”

[1:02:04] Dr. Mike T Nelson: And they send it back, right? But if it just says, “Well, really you’re at 8%, we’re gonna tell them- … 21.5%,” right? So there’s- Yeah … a risk of all that stuff going on, too.

[1:02:14] James de Lacey: Yeah. And then obviously, like with apps and things, there’s like smoothing of data and whatnot- Correct … that you’ve done. So you can kinda like- You kinda need the raw data to kinda maybe look at it a little deeper.

[1:02:25] James de Lacey: But I guess if you’re just k- trying to look at gen pop, and you’re just trying to look at, wonder what’s going with your sleep every night- Mm-hmm … and you can see some trends, and maybe every time, like, people like to drink alcohol and then see their sleep score go down or whatever, and you see that as a trend.

[1:02:39] James de Lacey: Yeah, that’s probab- prob- potentially an issue. I mean, the thing is instinct- instinctively, I would think people should kinda already know that drinking just before you go to sleep is not a good idea. Like, you know, there’s some things that kind of, uh, are common sense that the wearables kind of maybe just…

[1:02:56] James de Lacey: I don’t know. It’s, uh… I, I’m not a huge fan. I’m not a huge fan of wearables, put it that way. I just don’t think it’s… This whole optimization culture and this idea of tracking everything, like, you lose this, you lose this instinctive… Even with coaching, right? Mm-hmm. ’Cause there’s so much data involved now.

[1:03:10] James de Lacey: And yeah, I understand, like, data can help inform and is good. But then coaching and this kind of idea of the coaching eye is kinda being lost, at least with a lot of- Oh, for sure … online, online social, like, social media coaches and stuff. Like, to be able to just kinda look and see someone move and do a movement, and to be able to see what’s going on.

[1:03:28] James de Lacey: Like, I think most of us coming up before all of this and who got all their information from books and blogs and stuff, like, we can kinda look and you can kinda see bar speed, and you can see maybe how many reps someone has left-

[1:03:39] James de Lacey: Mm-hmm …

[1:03:39] James de Lacey: in their set based on their bar speed and what’s moving. But that’s probably lost, uh, from a lot of young coaches now, potentially with, you know, having to track VBT for everything and, or everything else, and I think there’s a, there’s a lost…

[1:03:50] James de Lacey: there’s a definitely becoming a lost art. Same thing with, like, session designs and planning and warm-ups and stuff. I know we might not have time to d- touch on all that anyway, but even kind of that coaching aspect and being able to understand how to plan a session that flows. Like, you see random club whatever sessions going on, and it’s like 20 minutes of, like, these boring, mindless line drills-

[1:04:13] James de Lacey: and dynamic stretches. And it’s like, you guys have an hour to train. Like, that’s, that’s 20 minutes of it gone doing nothing. Um, and being able to kind of have a session that flows well, that’s engaging for the athletes, where they learn, they… You… They self-organize. You have questions. They have to think.

[1:04:30] James de Lacey: You know, these are things that kind of come with kinda coaching maybe in person versus the kinda, like, the online stuff that’s kinda going on. Again, random tangent. I just kinda threw that out there. I don’t know if anyone feels

[1:04:39] Dr. Mike T Nelson: that way- No, but I, I think it- … before or

[1:04:41] James de Lacey: not …

[1:04:41] Dr. Mike T Nelson: it is lost because I also forget that- God, what is the average turnover in personal training?

[1:04:48] Dr. Mike T Nelson: What the average duration of a personal trainer is, what, like 18 to 24 months or something? I don’t even think it’s two years. Is it? Wow. I don’t know. I’d have to double check that stat, but it’s, it’s way shorter than what I think it is. And then I also realized, to your point, there’s a lot of people who have never coached anyone in person, period.

[1:05:08] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Like, they’ve never watched another person move, they’ve never had exchange- Right. And, and then they’re,

[1:05:11] James de Lacey: and then they’re a personal trainer, you mean? Or-

[1:05:13] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, they just do online. Well, I’m an online coach. Oh,

[1:05:15] James de Lacey: shit.

[1:05:15] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Right?

[1:05:16] James de Lacey: Gotcha. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure.

[1:05:17] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, and I’m like, um, but you… And I tried this in, God, 2008.

[1:05:22] Dr. Mike T Nelson: I tried doing online stuff, and man, I apologize to anyone I took on then, ’cause it was an absolute trash bin fire. I had no business doing it, and eventually I quit after a year because I realized- I don’t know how bad people are screwing up exercise, ’cause I don’t have enough live reps of actually watching humans and making changes- Yeah.

[1:05:44] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm-hmm … and doing all that stuff. And at the time it was almost impossible to get video. You couldn’t do HRV. Like, I couldn’t get any of the metrics I wanted to get without-

[1:05:53] James de Lacey: Yeah …

[1:05:53] Dr. Mike T Nelson: heroic amounts of effort. And so I sketched out my little thing and said, “Okay, here’s how many reps I want.” Went back, worked as a trainer in a club for a while, and then I said, “Okay, I want HRV to be on an app.”

[1:06:04] Dr. Mike T Nelson: You know, I had my little list of stuff that I wanted to do. And then I think it was probably, maybe it was like 13 years ago or so, probably longer than that, I was like, “Oh, okay. Now I can actually do it.” And, and you realize that you can fall back to those reps and someone’s like, “Yeah, my knee kinda hurts when I squat.”

[1:06:22] Dr. Mike T Nelson: And you have this vision of literally all the people you’ve worked with who had knee problems and they’re squatting, and all the different mechanics they’re doing. Mm. But if you’re working online and you’ve only ever worked online, y- you don’t have that, that fallback. Like, you don’t have- Yeah … those reps to even know what you should do, other than what you’ve been told of, “Oh, let’s check your dorsiflexion.”

[1:06:43] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Like, that might be it- … but there could be a bazillion- Yeah … other things going on, too.

[1:06:47] James de Lacey: And then in person as well, you’re on the fly. Like, they can’t do something, “Oh, I need to find an alternative on the fly.” And then you-

[1:06:52] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Right. You can’t look it up on AI and be like- … “Give me 10 minutes. I’ll get back to you.”

[1:06:57] James de Lacey: Oh, dude. I did some videos on AI recent- not recently. A little while ago. And, uh, Jonathan Drummond, who hit me up, he actually did a presentation at, I think at Kentucky. I can’t remember what it was. He did a full presentation, uh, of using my work as well, and basically going through what AI gives you when you ask it for a training program.

[1:07:16] James de Lacey: Oh. And I did, I did four different training programs, like MMA, jujitsu, I think, uh, boxing and stuff like that, and I gave a different context each time. It gives you the same training program.

[1:07:25] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm-hmm.

[1:07:25] James de Lacey: Every, the same periodization. It’s

[1:07:27] Dr. Mike T Nelson: shocking.

[1:07:28] James de Lacey: The same, the same misnomers. So it’s like everything’s split into upper, lower days.

[1:07:33] James de Lacey: Yep. Everything’s split into a block periodization. Everything’s split into aerobic versus anaerobic. And so you get this day, and it’s always the same. And I’ve done this multiple times. It’s the same exercises. It’s like squat, uh, I think a squat, like Romanian deadlift, Bulgarian split squat, like leg curl, something like that.

[1:07:50] James de Lacey: And it’s like, dude, if I put someone through a lower body session like that- … the bad bo- like, they aren’t training. They aren’t training for two days. That’s like cr- even if it’s just three sets, it’s like it’s three sets too many. You’re doing the same … Like, I’m gonna say ex- the same, but similar movement patterns.

[1:08:07] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Very similar.

[1:08:08] James de Lacey: And it’s just like you’re basically bodybuilding or power lifting at that point, running a program like that. Like y- as much as AI, people will say, “Well, AI’s gonna, you know, take all coaches’ jobs,” blah, blah, blah. It’s like, man, yeah, for like the average person who’s looking for a program, fine.

[1:08:21] James de Lacey: Mm-hmm. But for someone who actually wants to, I don’t know, make a pro or do whatever they’re doing, ain’t no way. Ain’t no way you can run something like that and have it be effective

[1:08:30] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. I found that the, again, for, I played with program design a little bit at the AI end. For the average person, it’s okay because almost anything is more and better than what they’re doing now, which is usually-

[1:08:44] Dr. Mike T Nelson: F all nothing anyway, right? Yeah. So y- at the bo- at the very bottom, I think it’s fine. But I put in my exact client parameters, and even sometimes take their name off it, put in their intake sheet and say, “Hey, write me a program for this.” It’s nothing like I would write, because I usually, even for, you know, people who are not necessarily athletes Like a sort of guiding principle is, okay, what are exercises I can get the most load for safely?

[1:09:10] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And then maybe add some accessory stuff. Okay, but then how do I split out the stress over the course of a week? And yes, I may have for some people more of an upper body focused day or a grip focused day or, you know, things like that- Yeah … depending upon their needs. But I’m always trying to, to, to spread out that a- amount of stress over the course of a week ’cause I just found you get much better adaptations, right?

[1:09:31] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Rarely do I ever have an athlete- Mm … where you can do bodybuilding 14 exercises for chest on Monday- … and never do chest- Yeah … again until the following Monday, right?

[1:09:40] James de Lacey: Yeah.

[1:09:40] Dr. Mike T Nelson: But it almost invariably comes back with this very old school, ’80s bodybuilder infused in- Mm … you know, torture the muscle group until it can’t move anymore type programming for almost everything they put in.

[1:09:56] James de Lacey: Well, it’s, it’s trained on Reddit, isn’t it?

[1:09:58] Dr. Mike T Nelson: It is.

[1:09:59] James de Lacey: And so on every mo- It’s literally trained on

[1:10:00] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Reddit.

[1:10:01] James de Lacey: And we know Reddit, we know it’s, that’s the, it’s the place where all the neck beard virgins hang out, and that’s where- And that’s the information that’s given. So it’s, it’s just, yeah, it’s unfortunate.

[1:10:11] James de Lacey: Like, when you look at the training program it comes back, even for combat sports, it’s like three days, maybe four days of lifting. And you’re like, “Dude, no one’s doing three, like no one’s doing four days of lifting-”

[1:10:20] Dr. Mike T Nelson: No …

[1:10:21] James de Lacey: as a combat athlete. Maybe some are doing three, depending on what they’re doing, but-

[1:10:24] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, maybe

[1:10:24] James de Lacey: most people are doing two. And then you like look at it and it’s like split up into like random fluff, and it’s like this is like a strength power day, and this is like a s- and you’re just like, “What the hell is going on?” Then it’s like a random like circuit day and yeah, they just try to… I mean, it’s AI, so it’s categorizing everything, right?

[1:10:39] James de Lacey: But-

[1:10:39] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm-hmm …

[1:10:39] James de Lacey: you know, it’s, it’s not so great for anyone who wants to do their program through AI.

[1:10:44] Dr. Mike T Nelson: No. And the conditioning stuff is even worse, like the amount of-

[1:10:47] James de Lacey: Yeah, the conditioning’s horrible …

[1:10:48] Dr. Mike T Nelson: times I’ve put into the AI that I’ve tried to train of no, don’t recommend zone two for this or whatever, and I’ll just try stuff just because I’m always curious to see where is it actually at.

[1:11:01] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Because I know people who are new- Mm. Mm-hmm … they’re gonna be, this is what they’re gonna be doing anyway, right? You know? Yeah. So I’m trying to get it from, from their perspective. And how many times it puts zone two stuff into a recreational meathead’s program is beyond, and this is the AI that I think I’ve tried to train to tell it not to do this.

[1:11:21] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Right? I’m just like, “This is-”

[1:11:22] James de Lacey: Does it tell you to flush the lactic acid as well and to, uh-

[1:11:25] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. It just- …

[1:11:25] James de Lacey: to avoid lactic acid buildup? I’m like…

[1:11:28] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Oh, man. And yeah.

[1:11:33] James de Lacey: And everyone was saying, “Stop using AI for your programs.”

[1:11:37] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. It’s, and even sometimes I’ll put a program in and I’ll say, “Analyze this,” and it’ll come back with it’s pushing everything back to the same thing again. It’s like, oh, there’s no zone two training here. You’re doing too much high intensity stuff.

[1:11:53] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Why is this stuff split out over, you know, these multiple days? You know, this person can’t do this lift or that lift. And I’m like, this is a program that was very successful for someone who ran it for a year already, right? So this is like- Yeah … retroactively the thing I did that worked, and it’s telling me that this is horrible.

[1:12:11] Dr. Mike T Nelson: I’m like, but it, it worked. It did Yeah. We already did the thing.

[1:12:17] James de Lacey: Yeah. It’s, uh, it’s gonna be crazy because people are obviously selling these programs as well, so.

[1:12:22] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Which I think it- I don’t know. I, that’s why I don’t … So a lot of the program design stuff I do, I don’t put a lot of it online because it’s- That’s what I’m trying to do

[1:12:35] Dr. Mike T Nelson: you have to do like a- … 10 to 30 minute video to explain it. Because if you just put it up without the context, like everything looks- Yeah … stupid, right? Because everyone will infer- Yeah. 100% … the context based on, on their end.

[1:12:50] James de Lacey: And you know what the context always is? It’s always the random bodybuilding bro gym goer.

[1:12:54] James de Lacey: That’s the context.

[1:12:55] Dr. Mike T Nelson: It is.

[1:12:56] James de Lacey: Always. Always. And you’re like, “Dude, like that’s not the only people that train.”

[1:13:02] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Even with my own training you’ll get stuff like, “Oh, well you’re talking about aerobic stuff, like you should be more aerobic condition.” Or there’s just a weird thing in fitness where everybody assumes that if you work in fitness, like your goal is to be as jacked and lean as possible- Yeah

[1:13:19] Dr. Mike T Nelson: at all costs. It’s like, eh, I got some other goals in reality. I have life that happens and, yeah, am I at a higher body weight now than I’ve been before? Yes. Does that come with more fat? Mm-hmm. Yes. But that was also done on purpose. It’s not like I … There’s the assumption of that if you did something it was unintentional.

[1:13:40] Dr. Mike T Nelson: It’s like, no, but for the goal I was trying to do, it was 100% intentional, but it doesn’t mean I’m gonna stay at that position the whole time either, right? Mm-hmm. But that allows you to, to think of context. And I don’t know if you do this, but as I get older I start thinking in, like in terms of training in like blocks of like years, not just weeks or months, you know?

[1:14:01] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Because it’s just, it takes more, I think, intentional effort to get the adaptations you want, and you have to think over a longer timescale than what you’re used to.

[1:14:12] James de Lacey: Yeah. But I’m like, I always get in my own way. I’m like a little meathead and I just- … I want to lift heavy all the time, you know? And that’s how it is right now.

[1:14:23] James de Lacey: With two kids and everything, whenever I get in I just, you know, wanna just like lift something heavy and do some hard stuff.

[1:14:29] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah.

[1:14:29] James de Lacey: Eventually I’ll maybe look to be like, oh, be a little more targeted in my stuff. But like right now I’m just like, I know I wanna hit these specific lifts during the week, and I’m just gonna work up to like heavy numbers, maybe do some back offs, and uh, that’s my plan.

[1:14:45] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. And that works, right? It works.

[1:14:47] James de Lacey: Yeah.

[1:14:47] Dr. Mike T Nelson: I mean, if that’s your, your goal and what you wanna do. Mm-hmm. And I think it’s also sometimes hard for the internet to understand that- Not every session everybody does is for a physical output. Mm. Like a lot of training, especially when I was doing my PhD, was just to try to keep some semblance of sanity.

[1:15:05] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Like was my training- Yeah … really good? No, it was actually a, a shit show, but just to do three sessions a week on an average of four and a half hours of sleep a night took heroic effort, and it w- were mostly just to keep myself sane than anything else.

[1:15:21] James de Lacey: Yeah, that, that’s why every morning I have something like this, ’cause-

[1:15:24] Dr. Mike T Nelson: There you go

[1:15:25] James de Lacey: my son wakes up-

[1:15:26] Dr. Mike T Nelson: What’s up, Chris

[1:15:26] James de Lacey: Lockwood … four times a night. Yeah, four or five times a night he was up every night. So, and so, you know, still try and train and whatnot, but that’s gotta keep me going for the day.

[1:15:36] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, and you, you know, you make trade-offs, right? You know? And, and I think-

[1:15:40] James de Lacey: Yeah. My volume is very low, which is-

[1:15:42] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah

[1:15:42] Dr. Mike T Nelson: make, makes me sad … and you can do intensity then, right? You know, because- Yeah … your volume is, is lower, and that’s-

[1:15:47] James de Lacey: Yeah …

[1:15:47] Dr. Mike T Nelson: that’s the name of the game because you know that you wanna show up the next day and the day after that, so you can’t go- Mm … too apeshit crazy on, on one day because that’s not gonna happen then.

[1:15:58] James de Lacey: Yeah. I haven’t had the time to do it either.

[1:16:01] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, last question as we wrap up, um, I heard you got to train with my good buddy, uh, Dr. Dylan Sealy and, uh, Dr.- Yep … Eric Serrano. How was that?

[1:16:10] James de Lacey: Yeah. It was awesome. It was awesome. Uh, first time in- You went out to their

[1:16:14] Dr. Mike T Nelson: place, right?

[1:16:15] James de Lacey: Yeah, first time in O- well, that’s actually the most east I’ve gone in the US is Ohio.

[1:16:21] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Oh, shit.

[1:16:22] James de Lacey: Now, now it’s Florida recently. Now

[1:16:24] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Florida. Ohio- There you go. …

[1:16:25] James de Lacey: Ohio, Ohio was the most east, so it was kinda cool. Went during summer. Um, got to catch up with, uh, Dylan for a few days, and it was really good. I love

[1:16:32] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Dylan.

[1:16:33] James de Lacey: Yeah. He’s a good dude. Dr. Eric Serrano, we did a couple YouTube videos. He did the- Yeah, Serrano’s

[1:16:37] Dr. Mike T Nelson: great.

[1:16:38] James de Lacey: Yeah, he did the-

[1:16:38] Dr. Mike T Nelson: He’s always a trip.

[1:16:40] James de Lacey: I know he’s a

[1:16:40] Dr. Mike T Nelson: trip. Literally.

[1:16:42] James de Lacey: But we did, uh… what’s that pen? That shockwave pen. I can’t remember what it’s called now. He did it on my keloid on here. That was painful, but it was pretty cool going through the, uh- Was that, like, a

[1:16:51] Dr. Mike T Nelson: STIMPOD?

[1:16:53] James de Lacey: I don’t know what it was called.

[1:16:54] James de Lacey: We have to ask- Is it

[1:16:55] Dr. Mike T Nelson: RF?

[1:16:56] James de Lacey: I can’t even remember. It was- Okay . It was like those little pen that would, like, does electric currents and shit.

[1:17:01] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah. Shout out to Stimpod if it was.

[1:17:04] James de Lacey: Go buy one, guys. Um- And he just, like, did it on my keloid on my chest and, like, literally got rid of, like, half of it, and I was like, “Holy shit, that’s cool.”

[1:17:10] James de Lacey: Oh, ni-

[1:17:11] Dr. Mike T Nelson: oh, it was the Dolphin, I bet.

[1:17:12] James de Lacey: Yes, that one.

[1:17:13] Dr. Mike T Nelson: The two pens?

[1:17:14] James de Lacey: Yep, Dolphin pens.

[1:17:17] Dr. Mike T Nelson: We did a- Shout out to Dolphin .

[1:17:18] James de Lacey: There we go . We did a, we did a video on- I make no money

[1:17:20] Dr. Mike T Nelson: from either one of these companies, but they’re great .

[1:17:23] James de Lacey: Yeah. Yeah, we did a video on it on my YouTube channel, and, uh, he just, like, smashed it ’cause I can’t do, I haven’t been able to do dips since I was a teenager.

[1:17:29] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Really?

[1:17:30] James de Lacey: It was just like… Yeah. That’s why, it’s wh- it’s, honestly, one of the reasons I don’t actually even program dips is because I know there’s a couple other people like me, where the sternum, like, I don’t know what… Like, when I was w- younger, when I was obviously in, first starting and you’re just, like, like, benching all the time.

[1:17:44] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Mm-hmm.

[1:17:45] James de Lacey: I think I benched too heavy, and I went to the physio for it, something, like, in my sternum cartilage, whatever. I don’t know what happened. And they rubbed the shit out of it, and then I have this keloid here, and I’ve had it ever since. I’ve never- Oh … I’ve just never been able to do dips. Yeah, yeah.

[1:17:56] James de Lacey: Every time I, every time I try to do dips, it’ll get to the point where it’s so painful that, it’s not like a clicking pain where it just kinda goes away. It sticks around for, like, six months and, like, annoys my breathing. Mm. Can’t cough, like, all that kinda shit. Can’t bench nothing. Yeah. So I just avoid dips completely.

[1:18:11] James de Lacey: So that was, like, that was pretty cool, and I could kind of do a dip after that, but I’d have to do way more stuff on it to-

[1:18:17] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah,

[1:18:18] James de Lacey: nice … potentially break it or whatever. But yeah, that was cool. It was a good trip. Got to see, uh, Ohio State, uh, with Colton. Um, Razzo out there. H- he’s, like, the S&C for the track and field, uh, guys.

[1:18:30] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Oh,

[1:18:30] James de Lacey: nice. So we got to go s- see the gym out there as well and, and catch up, so yeah, it was a, it was a cool little trip

[1:18:36] Dr. Mike T Nelson: I think people forget that Serrano does some pretty cool training stuff. I mean, I know- Yeah … he’s known for a lot of being a MD in sort of the functional med space and that kind of stuff.

[1:18:46] Dr. Mike T Nelson: But if you look at a lot of old videos with, uh, my good buddy Luke Lehman and other people like that, if you can find him on the internet, like he’s got a lot of pretty interesting training knowledge actually.

[1:18:57] James de Lacey: Yeah. He actually took m- uh, I know Mona, my wife’s been on your podcast, but he actually took- Yeah

[1:19:00] James de Lacey: ’cause Mona’s been suffering with some, from back stuff from her elite weightlifting stuff, and Eric took her through a bunch of different things for hamstring stuff and like all sorts of cool different things, rib cage stuff. Uh, Dylan took her through a bunch of rib cage and other things.

[1:19:14] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, Dylan’s great with that stuff.

[1:19:16] James de Lacey: Yeah. He’s a bit of a, a pro on that end. So o- yeah, it was, it was cool, man. Got to train in the gym and everything and be on his farm and doing it on his own. Yeah. Different life, different life out there. Chilled. Not a lot. Yeah. Obviously in the winter it’s not gonna be as, uh, nice with the snow, but-

[1:19:33] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Oh yeah

[1:19:33] James de Lacey: yeah, it was good.

[1:19:35] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Cool. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for all your time. Anything else I didn’t ask you that I should have asked you so far?

[1:19:42] James de Lacey: No, I mean, we hit all the topics we could go down, but ti- time is of the essence, essence, so it’s all good. We could always do a round two or whatever, but-

[1:19:48] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Yeah, yeah.

[1:19:49] Dr. Mike T Nelson: For sure …

[1:19:50] James de Lacey: um, yeah, it was awesome,

[1:19:51] Dr. Mike T Nelson: man Where can people find, find you? Tell us all your, uh, you got the YouTube- Um … Instagram, you got all the stuff.

[1:19:55] James de Lacey: Yeah, just search Sweet Science of Fighting. That would be my main stuff. It’s geared more towards combat sports, but I’m trying to like branch out a… Well, I say branch out a bit more in terms of like the content being more applic- it’s kind of always applicable, but try and make it a little more applicable, uh, for more high intensity like intermittent sports like rugby and stuff like that too.

[1:20:12] James de Lacey: So it’s not pigeonholed in combat sports. But there’s a podcast, Mike’s been on it. Um, there’s the YouTube channel, there’s the Instagram, all that kind of stuff is there, so check those out.

[1:20:22] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Awesome. And do you have a newsletter list too?

[1:20:24] James de Lacey: Yep, it’s all, uh… If you just go on Instagram and if you just, you’ll see some call to actions on there.

[1:20:30] James de Lacey: If you comment like DJ- Perfect … or whatever, man, whatever, you can, uh, you’ll get sent the, uh, the opt-in page.

[1:20:35] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Awesome. Cool. Well, thank you so much for all your time and chatting today. I really appreciate it. This was great.

[1:20:41] James de Lacey: No, thank you for having me on.

[1:20:42] Dr. Mike T Nelson: Awesome. Thank you, sir.