Dr. Duncan French: How to Exercise for Strength Gains & Hormone Optimization | Huberman Lab

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Today, I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Duncan French as my guest on the Huberman Lab podcast.

Dr. French is the vice president of performance at the UFC Performance Institute.

And he has over 20 years of experience working with elite professional and Olympic athletes.

Prior to joining the UFC, French was the director of performance science at the University of Notre Dame.

And he has many, many quality peer reviewed studies to his name, exploring for instance, how the particular order of exercise, whether or not one performs endurance exercise prior to resistance training or vice versa, how that impacts performance of various movements and endurance training protocols, as well as the impact on hormones such as testosterone, and some of the stress hormones, such as cortisol.

He's also done fascinating work exploring how neurotransmitters, things like dopamine and epinephrine, also called adrenaline, can impact hormones and how hormones can impact neurotransmitter release.

What's particularly unique about Dr. French's work is that he's figured out specific training protocols that can maximize, for instance, testosterone output or to reduce stress hormone output in order to maximize the effects of training in the short term and in the long term.

So today you're going to learn a lot of protocols, whether or not you're into resistance training or endurance training, you will learn, for instance, regulate the duration of your training and the type of training that you do in order to get the maximum benefit from that training over time.

So whether or not you are somebody who just exercises recreationally for your health, whether or not you're an amateur or professional athlete, or whether or not you're just trying to maximize your health through the use of endurance and or resistance training, today's discussion will have a wealth of takeaways for you.

There are only a handful of people working at the intersection of elite performance, mechanistic science, and that can do so in a way that leads to direct, immediately applicable protocols that anybody can benefit from.

Dr. French also provides some incredibly important insights about the direction that sport and exercise are taking in the world today and their applications towards performance and health.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

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And now my conversation with Dr. Duncan French.

Duncan French, great to see you again. Likewise.

Likewise. Thank you. I don't often have many Stanford professors in the Performance Institute, so I'm Really excited.

Well, this place is amazing and you have a huge role in making it what it is.

The reason I'm so excited to talk with you is that You're one of these rare beasts that you have been involved in human performance and athletic performance at the collegiate level.

You are obviously very involved in MMA now and the UFC Performance Institute.

And you also had the fortunate experience I like to think of doing a PhD in, what exactly was the PhD in?

It was exercise physiology. Exercise physiology.

So you're familiar also with designing studies, control groups, all the sorts of things that in my opinion anyway, are kind of lacking from the internet, social media version of exercise science, which is that people throw out all sorts of ideas about how people should be training, what they should be doing and eating and not eating and doing.

And certainly science doesn't have all the answers, but I just think it's so rare to find somebody that's at the convergence of all those different fields.

And so I have a lot of questions for you today that I'm sure the audience are going to be really interested in Well, listen, I mean, I appreciate that.

It's very humbling. And yeah, I've worked hard to get to where I am.

But I've always tried to be authentic. And I think authenticity comes alongside academic rigor and objectivity and insight and knowledge base, right?

At the end of the day, it's about um having confidence having expertise and being able to deliver that expertise to to in my world to athletes um and i think uh And that's what I've always tried to do.

I've tried to have many strings to my bow so that I can talk with many different hats on.

You know, one day I'm talking to a coach, the next day I'm talking to an athlete, the next day I'm talking to a CEO, the next day I'm talking to a, you know, an academic professor and you know, so I think, you know, being able to wear those different hats is certainly a skill set that I've tried to, um, to build throughout my career.

And, you know, like I said, I've been blessed to work with, uh, I think it was 36 different professional or Olympic sports last time I counted.

So, um, yeah, it's been. It's been a wild ride.

It's been great. Which of those sports was the most unusual?

I've worked with Crown Green Bowling, which I don't know, as an American guy, I don't know how well you know that.

I've never heard of it. basically imagine a, um, you know, a 20 foot by 24 square of turf. with a small raise in the middle, i.e. the crown.

So it slopes to the edges. And then you throw out a white jack, a smaller ball, and then you roll out larger balls to try and get closest to the jack.

It's a very European thing, let's say. But yeah, sports performance at Crown Green Bowling.

There you go. All right. Wow, and then to a mixed martial arts fighters and everything in between.

So along those lines, Could you give us a little bit of your background?

Where'd you start out? Where are you from originally?

Yeah, I'm from the northeast of England.

So I'm from a town called Harrogate, which is in Yorkshire, which is a northern kind of area of the UK.

Nice sunny weather all year long. Yeah, you can imagine, yeah, with the two weeks of summer that we get.

But yeah, I did my undergraduate studies there in sports science.

I did teacher training to be a physical education teacher after that.

Like most people, I then worked as a high school physical education teacher.

You know, great experience working with kids, you know, developing, you know, athletic qualities but something in the back of my mind always you know i wanted more i wanted to be to be at the higher end of elite sport.

I was a failed athlete like many people.

I represented my country in different sports and things, but I never made it professionally.

So, you know, that little seed was sown in as much as I then started to reach out to know to different areas to do a phd whether it was in the uk or also you know chance my arm took a punt see if we could get over to the states you know all my buddies were going on you know, gap years after the Finnish university or whatever, and going to Bali and hanging out or whatever, traveling through Thailand.

And I figured, well, You know, I've always loved the States and kind of go and kill two birds with one stone and do something academic, continue my studies. but also do it in a different environment and get some life experience in them.

Many, many rejections, as I'm sure you're kind of aware from different professors, whether it was Roger Anoka or, you know, William Graham.

You just wrote to these. I just called, called, called and sent out information and said, yeah, so have you got any opportunities? pushed back from them all but you know dogged and kept kept asking and um yeah dr william kramer who was at ball state university in indiana at the time a muscle neuroendocrinologist and researcher in muscle physiology using resistance training.

You know, he basically said, listen, I can guarantee your funding for the first year of your studies, but not the next Sounds like a typical academic response.

I can take care of you, but not that well necessarily. right yeah so spoke to my parents and said hey can we can we take a punt and that you know they were great in supporting me and um Yeah, long story short, came out to begin my PhD at Ball State.

After a year, Dr. Kramer transferred to UConn, Connecticut in stores. in the northeast there and I transferred to him and with him and yeah four great years with my PhD and getting my PhD with with a really prolific research group that looked at neuroendocrinology, hormonal work, but using resistance training primarily as an exercise stressor as a major mechanism and then looking at all the different physiologies off the back of resistance training.

Yeah, you guys were enormously productive.

I found dozens of papers on how weight training impacts hormones and your name's on all of them.

And it's remarkable. I have a question about this.

I'll just inject a question about weight training and hormones.

You hear this all the time that doing these big heavy compound movements or resistance training increases androgens, things like testosterone, DHT, DHEA and so forth.

Does anyone know how that actually happens?

What is it about engaging motor neurons under heavy loads sends a signal to the endocrine system, hey, release testosterone.

I've never actually been able to find that in a textbook.

Yeah, well, I mean... And how can I do more of that?

As much as I know, you know, and again, I'm digging out into the annals of Duncan French's kind of brain now, but...

Yeah, I mean, I think it's the stress response, right?

It's mechanical stress and it's metabolic stress.

And these are, you know, the downstream regulation of testosterone release at the gonads comes from many different areas.

My work primarily looked at catecholamines and sympathetic arousal.

So things like epinephrine, adrenaline. Correct.

Yeah. Epinephrine, adrenaline, noradrenaline. and how they were signaling that signaling cascade using the HPA axis, releasing um cortisol and then you know looking at how that also influenced the adrenal medulla to release um you know androgens and then signaling that the gonads That raises an interesting question.

So in presumably weight training in women, don't have testes, also it increases testosterone.

And is that purely through the adrenals?

When women lift weights, their adrenal glands release testosterone?

Absolutely. I mean, that is the only area of testosterone release for females and yes, It's the same downstream cascade.

Obviously, the extent to which it happens is significantly less in females, but there's good data out there that shows you know, females can increase their anabolic environment, their internal anabolic milieu using resistance training as a stressor.

And then they get the consequent muscle tissue growth whether it's tendon, ligament adaptations, the beneficial consequences of resistance training, which is driven by anabolic stimuli.

I have two questions about that. The first one is something that you mentioned, which is that the the androgens, the testosterone comes from the adrenals under resistance loads in women.

Is the same true in men? I mean, we hear that the testes produce testosterone when we weight train. for men that have testes, but Do we know whether or not it's the adrenals or the testes in men that are increasing testosterone?

More of both, a little bit from each? The field is divided presently in as much as understanding the acute acute um adrenergic response in terms of you know anabolic um response to exercise in an acute phase and the exposure to um you know, stimulus that is stress driven, which might be partly from the adrenal glands, partly from the gonads. versus a longitudinal exposure to anabolic environments, which is primarily driven by obviously the gonads and the release of the endocrine environment from testosterone release at the gonads.

So the field is split in terms of how exercise is promoting hypertrophy, muscle tissue growth, and whether that is very much an adrenal stimuli, or if that's significant enough in these acute responses versus the longitudinal exposure, just elevated basal levels of anabolic testosterone at a habitual level.

So it sounds like with most things, it's probably both.

It's probably the adrenals and the gonads.

And then you mentioned that testosterone can have enhancing effects or growth effects. on tendon and ligament also.

You don't often hear about that. People always think, you know, testosterone muscle, but testosterone has a lot of effects on other tissues that are important for performance, it sounds like.

Yeah. Yeah. What's the story there? Absolutely.

I mean, I think, you know, the testosterone hormone is, I mean, listen, there's androgen receptors on neural tissue, on neural axons.

Pretty much everywhere. Exactly. So, you know, the binding capacity of testosterone and influence in different tissues within the body had touched on you know, muscle tissue, but you know, the ligaments, the tendons, even bone to some extent, you know, testosterone is potential to influence that. in terms of removing osteopenic characteristics, et cetera.

So yeah, it's a magic hormone, let's say, and with many, many end impacts in terms of adaptation.

I definitely want to get back to your trajectory, but as long as we're on the interactions between androgens, testosterone and its derivatives and different tissues.

From the work that you did as a PhD student and throughout your career, Could you say that there are some general principles of training that favor testosterone production in terms of that somebody who's not an elite athlete could use? somebody who's already adapted to weight training somewhat, like they know the difference between a dumbbell and a barbell, and they know the various movements, they're not going to damage themselves.

Once they're doing that, I mean, I've heard shorter sessions are better than longer sessions, but in rep loads, there's a lot of parameter space.

But if you were going to throw out some of the the parameters that you think are most important to pay attention to for the typical person who's trying to use weight training to build or maintain muscle. lose body fat, so body recomposition, and or stay strong and healthy for sport of a different kind.

Yeah. So the work that we obviously, you know, I was exposed to back in my PhD, um, it was a double-edged sword and as much as testosterone is really stimulated by an intensity factor. and also a volume factor.

Now, growth hormone is a little bit different.

That's largely driven by an intensity factor alone.

Oh, really? I always thought the growth hormone was driven by volume.

Which just goes to show you. No, no, no, no.

I think you're probably right. It just goes to show you that most of what's out there on the internet is completely fake.

Not only is it wrong, it's usually backwards.

So no, trust your instinct because I think people just make this stuff up. because it's very hard to measure growth hormone and testosterone.

And I can't imagine most of the stuff that I see out there, they're taking drips and, you know, measuring free versus bound and all this kind of stuff.

But that's what you do in laboratories. look at total composition then you look at how much of that is free circulating in the system how much is bound and therefore biologically active bound to receptor creating adaptation But yeah, coming back to testosterone in terms of the training strategies, it's largely driven by both an intensity and a volume factor.

If you look at many of the exercise interventions that we use to try and investigate and interrogate testosterone, It was usually a six by 10 protocol.

You're touching at about- Six by 10, meaning?

Yeah, six sets of 10 repetitions, which is-

You know, it's quite a large, you know, 60 repetitions is quite a large volume for a single exercise.

And that was usually pitched at about 80% intense over one repetition, max intensity.

Okay, so 80% of the one rep max, six sets of 10 reps separated by rest of like two minutes, which is actually pretty fast.

At least to me. Anytime you see these two to three minutes when you're actually watching the clock, those two minute rest periods go by pretty fast.

By the third, fourth set, you're dying for more.

And I think, you know, we formulated that kind of exercise protocol to really target the release of testosterone and try and drive up these anabolic environments to study the endocrine consequences.

But I think that's the type of protocol that is most advantageous for driving anabolic environments. for the workout.

Yeah. I mean, we, we would do that in a back squat.

So, you know, multi joint, um, you know, challenging exercise, multi muscle, multi joint.

80% load of your one repetition max and then six by 10.

We did play around with your classic German volume type 10 by 10 kind of protocols, but they were just unsustainable at that 80%.

The key to what we also did was we always adjusted the loads to make sure that it was 10 repetitions that were sustained.

So if the load was too high and an athlete or a participant had to drop the weights on the sixth repetition, we would unload the bar and make sure they completed the 10 repetitions.

I see. Bringing me back to the point of it's an intensity and a volume derivative that is going to be most advantageous for testosterone release.

That's really interesting. And one thing that you mentioned there is especially interesting to me, which is you said when you go from six sets of ten repetitions, to 10 sets of 10 repetitions.

It's not as beneficial and might even be counterproductive, but to me, The difference between six and 10 sets is only four sets.

It doesn't even sound that much. So that sort of hints at the possibility that the thresholds for going from a workout that increases testosterone to a workout that diminishes testosterone is actually a pretty narrow margin.

Yeah, and I think it comes back to that intensity factor then.

What we saw with that 10 by 10 protocol really sees pretty significant drop-offs in the load.

And again, we're trying to stimulate with intensity, with mechanical strain through intensity, as well as metabolic strain through volume.

And I think that's That's the paradigm that you've got to look at is that the mechanical load has to come from the volume... the actual weight on the bar and the volume is the metabolic stimulus.

How much are we driving lactate? How much are we driving glycogenolysis in terms of that type of energy system for executing a 10 by 10 protocol.

And what we often saw was just a significant reduction in the intensity capabilities of an athlete to sustain that.

So we shortened the volume to try and maintain the intensity.

Interesting. And you could imagine just taking very long rest, keeping the session, being a big lazy bear and in training.

I sometimes do this. I tell myself I'm going to work out for 45 minutes and then two hours later, I'm done. but not because I was huffing and puffing the whole time, but because I was training really slowly.

Is there any evidence that training slowly can offset some of the negative effects of doing a lot of volume?

Well, it's an old adage of two responses to your question.

I mean, the first one I would say, there's a difference between 10 sets of six and six sets of 10.

And I think that comes back to the volume conversation.

Six sets of 10 is driving up metabolic stimulus.

If you're doing 10 sets of six, you can probably take it to a higher intensity, but you're not going to get the same metabolic load.

You're not going to get the same internal metabolic environment that drives the lactate release that they will then signal further anabolic testosterone release because of the lactate in your body.

That's a key consideration. The rest is often the consideration that's overlooked out there in general population and in many sporting environments.

You know, the rest is is as important a programming variable as the load and the intensity, the load, the volume, etc.

And yes, if you extend the duration of your rest periods, what you're ultimately doing is influencing that metabolic stimulus again.

You're allowing the flushing of the body, the removal of waste products, lactate to be removed from the body and then the metabolic environment is reduced.

So you want, so if I understand correctly, you want to create a metabolic stress.

So the way that I've been training, slow and lazy, is not necessarily the best way to go.

I could in theory do a 45 or 60 minute session where I pack in more work per unit time.

I'm not going to be able to quote unquote, perform as well, I won't be able to lift as much.

I'm gonna have to unweight the bar between sets or maybe even during sets if I have someone who could do that. but it sounds like that's the way to go.

So it's gotta be. So this, the old adage of high intensity short duration is probably the way to Correct.

And in layman's terms, if the same objective, the same training goal is just muscle tissue growth.

And we're not talking about maximal strength or any of those type of parameters.

We're just talking about growing muscle.

If there's an athlete A and they do six sets of 10 with two minutes rest, and there's athlete B that does six sets of 10 with three minutes rest, athlete A will likely see the highest muscle gain, muscle hypertrophy gains because of the metabolic stimulus that they're driving with the shorter rest periods.

Interesting. For all the years that I've spent exploring exercise science and trying to get this information from the Internet and various places that this is the first time it's ever been. told to me clearly so basically I need to put my ego aside and I need to not focus so much on getting as many reps with a given weight and keep the rest restricted, two minutes, about two minutes, get the work in and then I'll derive the benefits.

I mean, you've absolutely nailed it, to be honest.

And again, if you think about human nature and how we approach, we're inherently lazy, right?

As humans, we want to take that rest. We want to take the time out to recover and feel refreshed. we're trying to create a training stimulus.

We're trying to create a very specific stimulus internal to the body.

And that is often driven by the metabolic environment at that moment in time.

Now, if we allow the metabolic environment to change by extending the rest periods, we're not going to see as beneficial gains at the end of it.

Very interesting. It is very much a motivational and ego thing.

Rather than saying, okay, I'm going to push my loads as high as i can and really challenge maximal strength do fewer repetitions take longer periods of time it's a completely different approach to training it's a different end goal Interesting.

And you mentioned lactate. So it seems still a bit controversial as to what actually triggers hypertrophy.

You hear about lactate buildup or People, the common language is the muscle gets torn and then repairs, but I don't know, does the muscle actually tear?

I mean, microtrauma. Okay, microtrauma. Disruption of, you know, within the muscle tissue.

Interesting. And we're talking now about non-drug-assisted drugs.

People whose, let's just say, let's define our terms here, whose testosterone levels are within the the range of somewhere between 300 and 1500 or whatever, 1200.

Because it does seem that athletes, who take high levels of exogenous androgens can do more work and just get protein synthesis from just doing work.

I've seen these guys in the gym. The telltale signs are not that hard to spot where they're just doing a ton of volume, not necessarily moving that much weight.

They're just bringing blood into the into the tissue.

And then they're loading up on they're eating a ton of protein, presumably because they're basically in puberty part 15.

They've gotten their 15th round of puberty, where during puberty, you are a protein synthesis machine.

I mean, to me, that's... pretty clear about puberty.

Interesting. So, and then in terms of, because I know the audience likes to try protocol so that you described a protocol very nicely.

What about day-to-day recovery? I mean, can the workout that you described as intense, but short, how many days a week can the typical person do that and sustain progress?

Yeah, I mean, I think that comes back to your training age and your training history.

Obviously, there's a resilience and a robustness with an incremental training age.

That's not a protocol that I would advise anyone to go out and start tomorrow.

They'll be mopping them off the gym floor.

But at the same time, it's also relative, right?

So 80% of your maximum at a young training age is still 80% versus...

I've been training 10 years, it's still 80%.

But yes, the mechanical load is gonna be significant.

It's just more tonnage, right? But yeah, I think a protocol like that, we would look at two times a week, something that's pretty intensive like that, because again, it comes back to the point you make, you really need to be, for want of better term, suffering a little bit through that type of protocol, both in terms of of the challenge of the load, but also being able to tolerate the metabolic stress that you're exposed to. it's a bit of a sicko feeling, right?

Because of the lactate that you're driving up.

So I wouldn't promote as an athlete doing that type of modality multiple, multiple times, unless you're from the realms of bodybuilding.

And then that's the sole purpose of what you're trying to achieve.

Most athletes in most sports have diverse requirements in terms of outcomes that they're trying to achieve.

They're not just targeting muscle growth.

Muscle growth is a conduit to increased strength, increased power, increased speed, obviously.

So yes, trying to get bigger cross-sectional area of a muscle means that we can produce more force into the ground or wherever it may be if we're a locomotive athlete.

But usually sportsmen and women are not just purely seeking muscle growth.

They look for... different facets of muscle endurance or maximal muscle power, muscle strength, you know, so then you've got to be very creative in how you build the workout.

If it's a bodybuilder, absolutely. They're chasing muscle growth and they're going to do so with these types of protocols, which sees high intensities and high volumes of workload. on a pretty regular basis.

If it's just somebody, a weekend warrior that wants to keep in shape and look good, I would say, two times a week for a really challenging workout like that, and then flex the other types of workouts within the week. to have more of a volume emphasis where you reduce the intensity and you might just look at larger rep ranges from 12 to 15 to 20. another workout where you're looking at reducing the volume, but increasing the intensity and really trying to drive different stimulus. to give you more endpoints of success.

Great. No, that's really informative. along the lines of androgens and intensity.

When I think intensity, I think epinephrine, adrenaline. since you have a background in catecholamines and testosterone.

Last time I was here at the UFC Performance Institute, we had a brief conversation I want to make sure I got the details right, that in the short term, a big increase in stress hormone can lead to an increase in testosterone, like a parachute jump.

Correct. But So stress can promote the release of testosterone.

That was news to me. We always hear about stress suppressing testosterone, stress suppressing the immune system, all these terrible things, but in the short term, you're saying it can actually increase the release of testosterone.

So I have that right? Correct. Okay. And so then the second question is, does my cognitive interpretation of the stressor make a difference?

In other words, if I voluntarily jump out of a plane with a parachute, does it have a different effect on my testosterone than if you shoved me out of the plane against my will?

Well, presumably with a parachute too. i mean so so this was what all my phd work was was looking at was the um you know the the exposure to a stressor, and the pre-arousal of how your body essentially prepares for that stressor and then how it manages it throughout the exposure to the stress.

And it was actually motivated from parachute jumpers.

There was an older study looking at parachute jumpers into combat, and they were studying the cortisol, the stress response, and the epinephrine response of these parachute jumpers. we got us thinking about hold on you know there's certain workouts that you do that are just the daunting you know it's like okay, it's squat Saturday or whatever it may be.

Oh my gosh, this is gonna be a, is going to destroy me.

Or I have to talk to this person I don't want to talk to.

Right? Or a PhD dissertation exam or something.

Giving public speaking or whatever it may be.

We used a resistance training protocol that these athletes knew was going to be very, very challenging. that's going to have some anxiety to doing it, that knew there were going to be some physical distress from doing it.

And therefore, their mindset of how they were going to approach that was already set.

So what we saw 15 minutes prior to the start of an exposure to the workout, that the epinephrine, the neuroadrenaline, the adrenaline was already starting to prepare the body sympathetically to go into what it knew was going to be a very, very challenging workout.

So that brings you back to exercise preparation, competition for certain preparation, Preparation for certain competition, excuse me, pre-workout routines, the use of music, You know, all these different things that we know can now, you know, anecdotally in the gym we put into place.

But, you know, the data that I presented showed that It was the first of its kind to show that this link between epinephrine and norepinephrine release and arousal and then consequent performance So force output throughout the workout was intimately linked.

So what was the takeaway there? Is it beneficial for people to get a little stressed about the upcoming impending event, whether or not it's, a lift in the gym or whether or not it's talking to somebody that you might be intimidated to talk to or an exam.

What, Is the stress good for performance or is it harmful?

Yeah, and I think that's a great question.

And I think I can only talk to physical exertion, which is what we were exploring.

And I don't want to, tread on the toes of the psychologists with flow state and these types of things, because clearly- I think you're in the position of scientific strength on this one.

I think you have the leverage. I mean, most, you know, I have a lot of friends in that community, as I'll just say, as a buffer to the answer you're about to give. there's very little science around flow and there's very little neuroscience related to most psychological states anyway.

So I think we've got a lot of degrees of freedom here.

Yeah. Thank you for that. I'll take it.

I'll be anything you like. Credit Duncan.

Anything you dislike, send the mean comments to me.

All right. Yeah, I think from my data, certainly, the greater the arousal, the higher the performance was from a physical exertion perspective.

And I think that was the intriguing... part of some of my findings where there's definitely an individual biokinetics to some of these hormonal kind of releases in as much as those guys that had the highest adrenergic response in terms of epinephrine release, norepinephrine release, also sustained force output for a longer period of the workout than those that didn't.

So the individuals that had a lower stimulus of the sympathetic arousal, let's say, certainly didn't perform as well throughout the workout.

Now, the intriguing thing then becomes is, okay, and I think this really... segues into what we're doing here with combat athletes, with mixed martial artists. you know there's a philosophy there's a paradigm now for myself in terms of the exposure repeat exposure you know the the more you do that challenging workout, do you get the same psychological stimulus?

Do you still get the same stress response?

And the assumption is unlikely. You know, you accommodate, you become accustomed to the stressor, your body will therefore adapt.

And that's the classic overload principle, right? you then need to take the stressor down a different route.

But I think when you look at the athletes that we work with here, It's a fist fight at the end of the day.

There's nothing more stressful than that.

But I think just the exposure to the rigors of training, to understand... the bad positions the bad situations to know that they can get out of certain situations out of certain you know, submission holds or whatever it may be.

I think that really ties in with some of my PhD work in terms of what these guys do to approach what is a really challenging sport and arena in mixed martial arts.

Yeah, it's definitely the extreme of what's possible in terms of asking, does stress favor or hinder performance?

Because yeah, like you said, at the end of the day, it's someone trying to hurt you as much as they possibly can within the bounds of the rules.

And you're trying to do the same. So that's, you know, I find that your thesis work fascinating.

Were you never to be at the UFC Performance Institute, luckily they made the right choice and brought you here.

But where you have never to come here, I was still fascinated by this because Over and over, we hear that stress is bad, stress is bad, stress is bad.

But everything I read from the scientific literature is that stress and epinephrine in particular is coupled to the testosterone response to performance and to adaptation, provided it doesn't go on too long.

So unless I'm saying something that violates that, I mean, that's your work.

So it's really important and beautiful work and I refer to it often.

So I'm just glad that we could, you know, bolt that down because I think People need to know this, that discomfort is beneficial.

Now, there's another side to this that I want to ask about, which is the use of cold. in particular things like ice baths, cold showers, or any other type of cold temperature exposure, you know, in theory, that's stress also, it's epinephrine.

And so, how should one think about the use of cold for recovery?

So if it's stress, if cold causes stress, then how is, cold used for recovery.

That's what I don't understand. And maybe you just want to share your thoughts on that. yeah no and i think you know it's a great question and i think the the jury is still out there certainly um knowing some of the conversations that we we've been having but i think When we talk about stress, it's your classic fight, flight, or freeze approach.

And throwing your body into, a cold tub, an ice bath or whatever it may be, certainly is going to have a physiological stress response.

Now, people are using that for different end and goals.

And again, I think that's where the narrative has to be explained.

If you are using the stress specifically to manage the mindset, to use it as a specific stress stimulus.

That's the same as me doing six by 10 at 80%.

You're just trying to find something to disrupt the system, to do something that's very, if you want a better term, painful, discomfort, whatever. you're just finding a stressor and then being able to manage the mindset.

But if you're using using cold specifically from a physiological perspective to promote, you know, redistribution of vascularity of blood flow to different vascular areas of muscle that you feel have gone through a workout that are damaged or whatever it may be.

I think we've got to understand what that stress mechanism is.

And, you know, the data, the literature is certainly still out there with respect to cryotherapy and cold baths and some of these these cold exposures in terms of what they do at the level of the muscle tissue.

If that's the target, if you're trying to promote a flushing mechanism or you're trying to promote redistribution of the blood flow, what you've got to understand is that cold is going to clamp down every part of the vascular system And we've really got to understand how the muscle would be redistributed to areas of interest.

I think the stress response is a real thing with respect to cold exposure.

But I think the narrative around what are you using the cold for has to precede the conversation because yes, it's like, putting your hand over a hot cold.

That's a stress the same way as jumping in a cold bath is.

I think most people don't realize that. You're going to get the epinephrine release from holding your hand too close to the flame. and you're going to get it from getting in the ice bath.

Your body doesn't know the difference, right?

Your body does not know the difference. It is a, you know, primordial kind of physiological response that it's created over millions and millions of years and I think that that's that physiology is is not changing and it's it's fixed in a particular way right now and that that it doesn't understand the difference between whether it's six by 10 doing a challenging workout over here, whether it's putting my hands on the hot coal, or there's a lion stood in front of me or whatever, that epinephrine response from the level of the brain down to the whole signaling cascade is the same.

And cold, I've heard, can actually prevent some of the beneficial effects of training.

That it can actually get in the way of... muscle growth, et cetera.

Yeah, there's some pretty robust data out there now showing that it definitely has an influence on performance variables like strength and power in particular. um but absolutely in terms of muscle hypertrophy and there's a big kind of theme in in the world of athletic performance right now in terms of periodization of cold exposure as a recovery modality.

When do you use cold? Should you be using called for recovery in periods of high training load when you're actually pursuing, you know, maybe general proprietary work.

We're actually trying to pursue muscle growth.

Well, that's usually where you get the most sore.

It's usually where you feel the most fatigued. but it's probably not the most beneficial approach to use an ice bath in that scenario because you're dampening, you're dulling the mTOR pathway and the hypertrophic signaling pathway.

Whereas in a competition phase, where actually quality of exercise and quality of execution of skill and technical work has to be maintained, you want to throw the kitchen sink of recovery capabilities and recovery interventions in that scenario because the muscle building activity should be in the bank.

That should have been done in the general preparatory work.

Now you're focusing on technical execution.

So you're absolutely right. That's interesting.

So if I understand correctly, if if I want to maximize muscle growth or power or, you know, improvements and adaptations, then the inflammation response, the delayed onset muscle soreness, all the stuff that's uncomfortable and that we hear is so terrible is actually the stimulus for adaptation.

And so using cold in that situation might short circuit my progress.

But if I'm you know, I don't know that I'll ever do this, but if I were to do an Ironman or something or run a marathon under those conditions, basically coming to the to the race so to speak with all the power and strength I'm going to have and so they're reducing inflammation is good because it's gonna allow me to perform form more work, essentially.

Absolutely. Yeah. You have to be strategic about when you use some of these interventions and, you know, the The time when you're preparing for a competition is not the appropriate time, excuse me, is the appropriate time when you want to drive recovery and make sure that your body is optimized.

You know, when you're far away from a competition date or, you know, out of season or whatever it may be, and you're really trying to just tear up the body a little bit to allow its natural healing and adaptation processes to take place.

Well, you don't want to negate that. You want the body to optimize its internal recovery, and that's how muscle growth is going to happen.

So interesting. There's a time kind of consideration that you need to make with these interventions for sure.

At the UFC Performance Center are the fighters periodizing their cold exposure or are they just doing cold at will?

Well, it's not just the UFC. And again, I talk about my personal experiences with different sports. just education around where science is at and our understanding of concepts like the use of cold exposure for recovery, ice bath, you know, everyone wants to jump in an ice bath.

But I think as we've stepped back and scientists have started to figure out and look at some of the data, you know we're now more intuitive about well actually that might not be the best or the most optimal approach and i think that's that's any given sport So yes, certainly here at the UFC, we're trying to educate our athletes around appropriate timing.

And it's the same with nutrition. It's the same with an ice bath intervention.

It's the same with lifting weights. It's the same with going for a run or working out on the bike.

There's tactics to when you do things and when you don't do things.

And I think stress and cold exposure um we have to have a consideration around that as well but it's not just you know mma fighters that's any any athlete and i think it's the best professionals, the most successful professionals, do that really well.

They listen, number one, they educate themselves and then they build structure.

And I think... At the most elite level, we always talk about it here at the UFC, but the most elite level, you're not necessarily training harder than anybody else.

Everybody in the UFC trains hard, like everyone is training super hard.

But the best athletes, the true elite levels are the ones that can do it again and again and again on a daily basis and sustain a technical output for skill development. therefore their skills can improve, or physical development, their physical attributes can improve.

So that ability to reproduce on a day-to-day basis falls into a recovery conversation.

Now, when is the right time to use something like an ice bath and when isn't is part of the the high performance conversation for sure.

So really they're scientists, they're building structure, they're figuring out variables.

But it sounds like the ability to do more quality work over time is one of the key variables.

I mean, it's fundamental. i mean garbage in garbage out quality in quality out but in our sport you know i talk about you know mixed martial arts It's truly a decathlon of combat.

So there's so many different attributes, whether it's a grappling, whether it's a wrestling, whether it's a transition work, whether it's a stand-up striking.

So the different facets of a training program in this sport are significantly large compared to something like a wide receiver in football.

And there's no disrespect for wide receivers, but they run routes.

They're going to run a route, a passing tree, and that's all they need to do.

These guys have to be on the ground. They've got to be great on the ground.

They've got to be great standing up. They've got to be great with the back against the fence.

There's so many different kind of facets to our sport.

So managing the distribution of all the training components is one of the biggest challenges of mixed martial arts. and the best guys get that right.

They allow their body to optimize the training And remember, why are we doing training?

We're doing training for technical and tactical improvement.

Now, if your body is fatigued or you just can't expose yourself to more tactical development or technical development, then you're essentially doing yourself a disservice.

You're going to be behind the curve with respect to those guys that can reproduce that day in, day out.

On the topic of skill development, regardless of sport, we hear all the time, and it certainly is... intuitive to me that the person who can focus the best will progress the fastest.

But it's kind of interesting. Sometimes I talk to athletes and they seem a little bit laid back about their training sometime. and yet they obviously know how to flip the switch and they can really dial in the intensity.

Do you think that there are optimal protocols for skill learning in terms of physical skill learning?

Like, could it ever be parameterized like the six sets of 10 reps?

And this gets to the heart of neuroplasticity, which is still, it's not a black box, but it's kind of a, a black box with portions of it illuminated, I like to say.

But what are your thoughts on skill development?

For somebody that wants to get better at sport, Do you recommend a particularly long or short training session?

Does intensity matter or is it just reps?

Yeah, I think, no, it's not a volume driven exercise.

It's a quality. driven exercise and listen my expertise is not in motor learning and motor skill acquisition I tend to default to Dr. Gabrielle Wolf here at UNLV for that.

She's one of the leading proponents in this area.

If you look at true skill development, it is about rehearsal of accurate movement, accurate movement mechanics.

And as soon as that becomes impacted by fatigue or inaccurate movement, you're now losing the the motor learning you're losing the accuracy of the skill that you know people can call it muscle memory or whatever they want right but essentially you're grooving neural axons to create movement patterns and they're situational throughout sport, right? whether it's a Cruyff turn in soccer or a jump shot in basketball or a forehand down the line, you can carve out that particular posture and position and skill and you can isolate it. and you can drill it again and again and again.

Now, as soon as fatigue is influencing that repetition, it's time to stop.

And the best coaches understand that. They understand that it's quality over quantity when it comes to skill acquisition. to answer your question in a roundabout way, I would say yes, it's shorter sessions that are very high quality and I think the best athletes in my experience are the ones that consciously and cognitively are aware of it at every moment of the training session.

They should leave the training session not necessarily just physically fatigued but mentally fatigued because they're completely engaged in the learning process.

The problem then becomes, okay, if we just do lots of 30-minute sessions, we've got to do a lot of 30-minute sessions to get the volume exposure of the repetition and the rehearsal of the skill again and again and again.

So it's a bit of a paradox. It's a bit of a double-edged sword.

But a three-hour session versus a 90-minute session, you know, we'll take the 90 minute session any day when it comes to skill acquisition, because that's going to be driven by quality over quantity.

Training and skill learning is incredibly mentally fatiguing.

I've often wondered why when one works out hard, whether or not it's with a run or with the weights, why it's hard to think later in the day.

Right. Yeah. There really does seem to be something to it.

And I've wondered, is it depletion of adrenaline, dopamine.

I sometimes think it might be dopamine, and here I'm totally speculating.

I don't have any data to support this. If you hit a really hard workout or run early in the day, oftentimes the brain just doesn't want to do hard mental work, which gives me great admiration for these athletes that are drilling their mind and body all. all day, every day with breaks.

But so what are your thoughts? What leads to the mental fatigue after physical performance?

Well, again, I don't want to talk out, you know, I'm talking to the man here, you know.

Well, we're just two scientists speculating ourselves.

On this point, up until now, you've been giving us concrete peer-reviewed study-based feedback on my questions.

But if we were to speculate, I mean, I think this is a common occurrence.

People think if I get that really good workout in in the morning, I feel better all day.

That's true. Unless that workout is... is really intense or really long.

And then you just, the mind just somehow won't latch on to mental work quite as well.

I mean, just philosophically, I think there's a coming back to this kind of stress consideration, like a public speaking or taking an exam.

If you have an amazing coach who is setting up training in a particular way, it's challenging.

There's a strain related to it. And I'm not talking physical strain. figuring things out, figuring out the skill.

And I think that can be stressful, like the learning process can be stressful.

So we've touched on stress. I also think if they hit the right technique, that reward center in the brain, that dopamine shot is going to fly up there.

And there's only so many times that we can get that before that becomes dampened.

And I think there's an energetic piece to it.

There's the fueling of the brain. the carbohydrate fueling exercise that actually the strategy around how you fuel for learning and fuel for physical training is actually pretty similar.

Glucose. Yeah, it's glucose, it's sugar at the end of the day, right?

So, you know, are you fueling accordingly around your training sessions?

Be that very physical because everyone thinks, okay, I'm going to jump on a treadmill and I'm going to bang out 15 sprints at max effort and I'm going to be dropping off and lying on the floor at the end of it, I need to refuel.

Well, what about the refueling of the brain in a very demanding exercise or drilling session where you're looking at technique that you're trying to figure out that's very challenging for your mind to figure out the complexity of it. that still needs to be fueled or refueled afterwards.

And I think that's obviously might be an area where athletes do themselves a disservice by not appropriately fueling from what might be considered to be a lower intensity session, but the the cognitive challenge has been significantly high.

So they're doing skill work or drill work and it's taxing the brain and they're thinking, Oh, you know, I wasn't, you know, pushing hard lifts or doing sprints.

And so I can just go off the rest of my day, but then they're, they're, their mind is drifting.

Yeah, I mean, I speculate. Yeah, that seems very reasonable.

I mean, I know that and presumably with the other athletes you've worked with, nutrition is a huge aspect of that.

And I think the general public can learn a lot from athletic nutrition because at the end of the day, the general public is trying to attend to their kids, attend to their work, whether they're lawyers or whatever. um they need to focus uh nutrition is a barbed wire topic oh yeah but uh if since we're free to do what we would do if we were just sitting in each other's offices, which is to just speculate a bit for the typical person.

All right, do you think these low carbohydrate diets, typical person who exercises, runs, swims, yoga, lifts weights, maybe not all those things, but some collection of those, is pushes themselves to do those things and to do them well, but isn't necessarily a highly competitive athlete.

Do you think that... that doesn't include a lot of glucose, doesn't include a lot of carbohydrates is a problem.

Or is it okay? What do you recommend for athletes?

What do you recommend for typical people?

Yeah, again, disclaimer, I'm not a dietician.

That's okay. The dieticians don't know what to recommend to athletes either.

And I say that from having spent a lot of time with the literature now, it's a complete mess.

It's like, I thought we didn't understand anything about the brain.

The nutrition science stuff is all over the place.

So I think we have, again, a large degree of freedom.

Right, right, right. I mean, I think it comes down to metabolic efficiency.

So we would never advocate a high... I never say never, okay?

But we rarely advocate a high-performance athlete in a high-intensity intermittent sport like MMA. being totally ketogenic.

You do not recommend that? No, because at the end of the day, some of those high intensity efforts usually require carbohydrate fueling for the energy to be produced at those high intensities.

We try to navigate around that. Now, listen, there are fighters in the UFC and elsewhere.

Matt Brown is a great example. who promotes the ketogenic approach and it works for him.

But we look at the science and the nature, the characteristics of our sport, and we don't necessarily promote that.

Can I interrupt you real quick? What about ketones for people that are ingesting carbohydrates?

This is an interesting area because people always hear ketones and they think, oh, I have to be ketogenic to benefit from taking ketones.

But there are a number of athletes and recreational athletes now as well taking risks. liquid or powder based ketones on even though they do eat rice and oatmeal and bread and other things as So are there any known benefits of ketones, even if one is not in a state of ketosis?

So the use of ketones that I'm primarily aware of in our sport is after the event. in terms of the brain health with athletes potentially taking trauma to the brain, et cetera, and looking to maintain the fueling and the energy supply to the brain.

But yes, it's probably a little bit out of my remit.

So I don't want to talk on that because I'm not fully familiar with that.

Well, I've heard that ketones after head injury can provide a buffering component.

Correct. It's not going to reverse brain damage, but it might be able to offset some of the micro damage.

Right, so that's how we use it, just to sustain the energy supply to the brain that might be compromised through brain trauma. and so that's why we use ketones and to come back to the original question if it's a you know general population then yes i think there's there's a place to argue that actually being on a ketogenic diet at times, and maybe it's a cycling exercise, maybe not, I don't mean cycling a bike, I mean cycling ketosis, is beneficial because I think it's going to lead to better metabolic management and metabolic efficiency. at those lower intensities where we should be fueling our metabolism with lipids and fats.

Clearly the Western diet and the modern day diets is, heavily driven by processed foods and carbohydrates that people become predisposed to utilization of that fuel source. above lipid use, fat use, intensities that are very low.

Some of our data with the fighters shows that as well.

But I think the challenge for us is that we're working with a clientele that require high intensity bouts of effort.

So, you know, fueling appropriately is very important for that.

We use tactics here where we essentially have athletes on what you would say is largely a ketogenic diet.

But then we will fuel carbohydrates around training sessions.

So we'll do very timed exposure to carbohydrates.

So it's not post-training. post-training immediately pre during and then immediately post and then the rest of their diets you know breakfast lunch and dinner are what would look like ketogenic type approaches.

So we're trying to be very tactical in the exposure to maximize the intensity for the training, and then return to a metabolically efficient diet, which is heavily reduced in carbohydrate because we've fueled the sessions that need it.

I'm smiling because once again, this place, the UFC Performance Center, is doing things scientifically, which to me, the idea, and I'm pleased to hear that because it to me, this idea that the ketogenic diet is the best and only diet or carbohydrates and low protein diets are the best diet.

It's just, it's ludicrous. Then you mentioned metabolic efficiency.

I think some people might be familiar with that term, some perhaps but the way I understand metabolic efficiency is that you teach the body to use fats by maybe doing long, long bouts of cardio, maybe lowering carbohydrates a bit.

So teaching the body to tap into its fat stores for certain periods of training.

And then you also teach the body to utilize carbohydrates by supplying carbohydrates immediately after training and before training. teach the body to use ketones, and then you use them at the appropriate time, as opposed to just deciding that one of these fuel sources is good and all the others are bad or dispensable.

Do I have that correct? You nailed it. I mean, from...

Bob Sibahar, formerly of USA Triathlon, is the guy that kind of came up with the... the concept of metabolic efficiency.

But yes, you're absolutely right. I mean, low intensities of exercise or just day to day living, we shouldn't be tapping into our carbohydrate fuel sources extensively.

That's for higher intensity work or, you know, the fight or flight needs of stress, you know.

If athletes or any individual has a high carbohydrate diet, they're going to start to become predisposed to utilizing that fuel source preferentially.

Now at low intensity, that can be problematic, certainly for an athlete, because if they preferentially use carbohydrate at lower intensities, when the exercise demand goes to a higher intensity, they've already exhausted their fuel stores.

They can't draw upon fat because the oxidization of that fat is just too slow.

So they're essentially now become fatigued. because they've already utilized the carbohydrate stores.

So what we try to do, yes, through diet manipulation and a little bit of exercise manipulation is, as you say, teach the body or train the body to preferentially use a specific fuel source, fat obviously at lower intensities and carbohydrate at high intensities.

And we look at specifically the crossover point between the two, tells a lot in terms of how an athlete is ultimately, how their metabolism is working.

Well, again, I'm smiling because I love this because it's grounded in something real and scientific, which is that we have these different fuel sources.

The body can adapt to use any number of them or one of them i think most people are looking for that one pattern of eating that one pattern of exercising that's going to be best for them or sustain them And they often look back to the time when they felt so much better switching from one thing to the next.

But the adaptation process itself is also key, right? teaching the body.

So if we were to just riff on this just a little bit further, if somebody I'll use myself as an example since I can only speculate what other people's current nutrition protocols are.

But if somebody is eating... in a particular way, and they want to try this kind of periodization of nutrition.

Could one say, okay, for a few weeks, I'm going to do more high intensity interval training and weight training, and I'm going to eat a bit more carbohydrate because I'm depleting more glycogen.

Then if I switch to a phase of my training where I'm doing some longer runs, Maybe I'm training less.

Maybe I'm just working at my desk a little bit more.

Then I might switch to a lower carbohydrate diet.

Do I have that right? And then if I'm going to enter a competition, of some sort, certainly not UFC or MMA of any kind, to be clear. not because it isn't a wonderful sport, but because it's, that wouldn't be good for my other profession.

But, um, If I were going to do that, then I would think about stacking carbohydrates, ketones, and and fats, do I have that more or less right?

I think, yeah, you said it eloquently. At the end of the day, you're consciously understanding what the exposure to physical exertion is, and you're flexing your diet accordingly.

So it's need-based eating. Exactly. For want of better terms, you can call it whatever fancy terminology there is out there, but yes, it's needs-based eating. but you're very conscious and cognizant of what is my current exercise status. you know if I'm taking some time off then you know don't gorge on the carbohydrates we probably need to be cut it's going to be lower intensity work or even just habitual day-to-day walking around, doing your groceries, that doesn't require massive amounts of glycogen storage. and carbohydrate fueling.

So you can potentially go more ketogenic in nature, you know, oxidizing lipids for that fuel.

If you are in a high period of high intensity training, then you have to consciously flex your diet to support that.

That's not normal. a change of elevated the demand.

So the fueling requirements for the regenerative not only fuel in the exercise, but the regenerative requirements of your body after that type of work is going to be really important as well.

So yes, take on more carbohydrates. So I think it's consciously interpreting the nature of your diet against where you are at any moment in time.

I think the listeners in my podcast generally are experimenters.

They are scientists of themselves. which makes me happy, obviously.

And I like to think that they're paying attention to the changes they're making and how they're affecting and they seem more open to trying things, provided they can do it safely. and seeing what works for them.

And I'm certainly going to try some of the change up.

I also really a creature of habit. And I think the, uh, Talking to you today, I realize I'm probably doing a number of things truly wrong in my training, but also that I don't tend to vary my nutrition with my training quite as much as I should.

I'm just locked into a protocol. We covered a number of things related to your PhD thesis work, but I cut you off early on related to your trajectory.

After you finished your thesis, I know you were at Notre Dame for a while.

Was that your first spot after your PhD thesis?

No, no. I basically finished my PhD and I dropped into the British Olympic system for about 14 years.

Oh, my. I was with... I've done three full Olympic cycles with different sports and largely a strength and conditioning coach as a practitioner.

I was always working in universities and academia alongside in terms of continuing to publish and write and do research and teach as well, because I enjoy teaching.

That explains the huge volume of publications.

I don't think people realize the work that goes into getting a quality peer-reviewed publication.

It's not a, what, what do they call it now on Instagram?

Anika data where people would do something, what, you know, they have this experience and then they put it in the world that it's a, it, Anic data are, I don't even know that we should call it data, but so 14 years in working with the British Olympic team.

Yeah, so with, you know, whether it was GB boxing, primarily with the Rio, excuse me, the Beijing cycle, but also lightweight rowers and gymnastics.

For the London Olympic Games, that cycle, I was the lead strength and conditioning and physical performance coach for British basketball, so GB basketball.

I had about three years in the English Premier League with Newcastle United and the soccer team. and then for the rio olympic cycle i was with great britain taekwondo so again another combat sport After I'd finished there, I kind of moved to the University of Notre Dame where I went into more of a more of a managerial position working across all the different technical services, medical, nutrition, strength and conditioning, psychology, whatever, sports science, whatever it may be, as the Director of Performance Sciences for Notre Dame Athletics.

And then after about 16 months there, the UFC came knocking and they recruited me out of Notre Dame.

So it's been a great ride and lots of, you know, I've got, you know, Lots of athletes have taught me a lot along the way.

Lots of coaches, you know, every day is a school day.

I still try and keep that mentality. In this world, we call it white belt mentality.

I'm a PhD. I've got 25 years of experience in high performance but I still learn every single day from these people out on the mats and in the ring and it's impressive to see what they do.

Yeah, it certainly is. I got introduced to MMA just a few years ago.

I think the first time I came out here was one of the first times I'd heard of MMA because I was kind of in my laboratory and, you know, nose down.

And it's a really interesting sport because it incorporates so many different types of movement, as you said, you know, it's not just stand up boxing, it's just kicking, it's ground game, everything.

And I'm still learning about it. But as you mentioned, going in with that beginner's mind, the white bedroom, white belt mentality.

What, what has been the most surprising thing for you? in terms of being exposed to MMA in particular as opposed to other sports?

What's unique about MMA fighters besides that they have this huge variety of of tactical skills that they have to learn and perfect.

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say two things.

I'm going to answer two questions. One actually reiterates what you've already said.

The degrees of freedom in mixed martial arts are exponential, like no other sport, you know.

We've got 11 different weight classes. We have men's classes, we have women's classes. you know, kickboxers, wrestlers, jujitsu fighters, judokas, you know, like karate fighters, you know, the stylistic backgrounds are infinite.

We're a weight classification sport. There's a whole issue relating to making weight and then rebounding to fight about 24 to 30 hours.

The variability in this sport, the considerations that you have to make are unprecedented compared to any other sport that I've worked with.

And a lot of them go against and are the antithesis of what you would expect for a high performance, you know, in terms of We don't always have a very clearly defined competition schedule.

Once these guys fight, they don't necessarily know when their next fight's going to be.

What's the closest spacing of a fight? I mean, listen, I think the record is around, it's just over a month, I believe.

Goodness. so you know that that's a quick turnaround but most of these guys are fighting you know three or four times a year three times a year is pretty normal the bigger fights maybe two times a year.

But invariably the guys don't know when that next date is going to be so we're in this gray area of okay what what do we do like are we are we taking some time off are we just going to do some general prep work are we going to try and Keep the knife sharpened in case I get it.

I didn't realize this. In that way, it's a lot like special operations.

Absolutely. You don't know when the call is going to happen.

They have to be ready at all times. There isn't this like, let's get ready for the season.

Right. When I was with the British Olympic Association, I knew it was the British Open, the Spanish Open, the French Open, the European Championships, the Israeli Open, the American Open, canadian open the olympic games you know i could it's a circuit in your brain right yeah you just plan like you know where all the targets are going to be here it's a moving target because you might be just hanging out doing some general prep work and then you might get a short notice fight they give you a quick call and it's in six weeks or five weeks and Okay, I've got to ramp everything up really quickly.

So that's a real challenge in terms of just managing all these different components of mixed martial arts.

To come back to your question, the other thing which is truly fascinating about these individuals is their mental resilience.

And again, we've touched on it in the talk, You know, the ability to do what they do on a daily basis to look at all the different skill sets that they have to try and engage in and bring into their training. to do that and embrace the grind, embrace the process of just learning.

The physical side of our sport is unprecedented.

But the mental side, we have a funny saying here, we always say it's 90% medical, 90% mental apart from the 60% that's physical.

So, you know, it's just more and more and more.

And these guys' ability to... To just do that on a daily basis is very impressive.

Like their resilience, their internal drive and their resilience is really impressive to see.

All the fighters I've met here have been really terrific.

It's interesting. Every time I meet a fighter, how often I shouldn't be surprising where they're often very soft-spoken. always extremely polite and fighting is such a you know it comes from a very primitive portion of the brain but a large portion of the brain nonetheless.

But I think that's another skill is that switch.

And again, that's the recoverability piece, right?

Like you cannot be type A or you cannot be like supercharged 24 hours a day because you're going to just fry your system.

Right. And I think that's something else where we're really trying to manage this whole process, be it through nutritional interventions, be it through education around sleep, be it through training program management, be it through psychological interventions.

You could look at fights and say, like, these guys are gold.

Like, they're red alert and they'll run through a brick wall.

But actually... Again, their ability to turn it on and off means that they can do what they do.

They can bring it down and be very normal, very polite, very... you know accommodating maybe even better than most people because you know one of the reasons i'm obsessed with with human performance and high performance and people like fighters and elite military or even bodybuilders for that matter, is that they experiment.

They find the outer limits of what's possible, but one of the things that they have discovered as you're describing is this ability to toggle between high alert states and calm states.

Most typical people can't do this. They see something that upsets them on the internet or something on the news or something some external event pressures down on them and they're stressed for many, many days and weeks, and sometimes it goes pathological.

I don't say this as a criticism. It's just that most human beings within our species, most members of our species never learn to to either flip the switch or to just voluntarily toggle between states.

I think athletes learn how to do that extremely well.

And it sounds like MMA fighters do that even better than perhaps many other athletes.

I mean, yeah, there's the odd one or two that we'd struggle with.

But I think in terms of that chronic exposure...

We see that coming from challenges around cyclical weight cutting and metabolic disruption and metabolic injury, not necessarily from the psychological drive.

They do understand that this is a job for them and the time on the mats, most of them can turn it off a little bit and downgrade things when they're off the mats.

It's impressive to see. Because again, as a layman, just looking at the fight game, you think it's going to be crazy chaotic 100 miles an hour every hour of every day.

But that's clearly not the case. they manage their energy and their efforts pretty well.

So it's a little bit like science, although maybe scientists could take a lesson from it.

Yeah, is that evidence-based practice or practice-based evidence, right?

I like that. That's good. A couple more questions.

I can't help myself. I know we talked about temperature earlier. when we discuss cold, but I can't help myself.

I have to ask you about heat because earlier we were having a conversation about heat adaptation about how long does it take for the human body or athlete or typical person that's maybe exploring sauna or things of that sort to learn to be a better sweater.

It sounds like something none of us would want to do.

We all want to stay cool, calm, and collected.

But one of the reasons to deliberately expose oneself to heat is for things like growth hormone release, et cetera.

We can talk about this. A couple of questions.

One is heat exposure stress in the same way that the ice bath or cold exposure is stress?

The second one is, is there any difference there that's important?

And the other one is, how does one get better at heat adaptation?

Or at least what are you doing with the fighters to get them better at dealing with heat?

How long does that take? So the first question, just because I threw three questions at you, is was, You know, is heat stress like cold is stress?

Yeah, I think it is. And I think heat shock proteins, for example, are driven by that stressful exposure to a changing environment.

So I think we do graded response in terms of heat acclimation strategies.

But yes, we've touched on it earlier in the conversation.

For me, heat is still a stressor. And if it's managed incorrectly, you can have detrimental responses rather than beneficial responses.

So barring like hyperthermia and death, like I mean, obviously heat up the brain too much.

People will have seizures and die. But you lose neurons.

But what's the right way to acclimate heat? taking into account that people should check with their doctor, et cetera.

We do all these disclaimers. But let's just say I want to get better at dealing with heat or I want to extract more benefit from heat.

I mean, how many minutes a day are people typically exposing themselves to heat?

How often and over what periods of time?

Yeah, so we normally start with about 15 minutes of exposure.

Now, if someone's really lacking acclimation to heat, you can do that in three five minute efforts do you know what i mean and actually this is hot sauna yeah hot sauna take time to step 200 degrees or something like correct yeah yeah 200 fahrenheit yes And we try to work up to 30 to 40 minutes to 45 minutes in the sauna. continuous.

Now, we have to understand what's the advantage of heat acclimation for our athletes.

Ultimately, their ability to sweat and to lose body fluids is going to be advantageous to their weight cut process, their ability to make weight.

It is a technique that some of these guys adopt.

If you don't have high sweat rates, it means you're going to have to sit in the sauna for longer and longer and longer to get the same in sweat release.

So the more acclimated you are, the more your body is thermogenically adapted, the more sweat glands you have, there's more pores, you can sweat more and therefore you'll lose that fluid quicker and you spend less time in the sauna.

That's why we do it, to try and promote, to limit the exposure. comes back to your first question is it a stressor it's it absolutely it's a stressor if you've got to spend you know, two hours over, you know, over a four hour period, two hours of it sat in a sauna.

Where the phone doesn't work. So you can't, Not just, you know, people just force them from their phone.

And that's a stressor in itself. Right. I mean, yes, I think, you know, there's there's a you know, what we do is we like anything we build up in temperature but we build up in volume of exposure so you know we start with 15 minutes and then we just try to add on and add on across the time.

And now now for us, we kind of found about 14

Sauna exposures starts to really then drive the adaptations that we're looking for.

So it's not a quick fix. A heat acclimation strategy has to happen long before fight week or long before the fights.

This is a process that has to begin eight to 10 weeks before the fight so that we can actually get that adaptation and that tolerance to the stressor, to the exposure of heat.

This is interesting. Until today, when we talk about this earlier and again now, I didn't realize that But it makes perfect sense now that I hear it, that heat adaptation is possible, that you're basically can train the body to become better at cooling itself. which is what sweating is.

I mean, I should have known that before, but you don't see that in the textbooks.

I mean, listen, it's the same as the ketogenic conversation.

You're training your body to be more metabolic efficient.

You're training your body to... tolerate heat more, you're training your body.

Like the body is, you know, as an organism, as an organic system, It's hugely adaptable.

It's hugely plastic. But I think the skill is understanding the whens, the whys and the whereofs in terms of changing the overload, changing the stimulus to drive specific adaptation.

And philosophically, that's how we go about our work here.

We talk about adaptation-led programming.

Now adaptation-led programming fits into every single category, not just lifting weights or running track.

It fits into nutrition. It fits into sitting in the sauna.

It fits into being in a cold bath or not.

It fits into so many different things because we're driven by scientific insights.

And that's how we really want to go about our business. love it i love this concept of adaptation-led programming and doing that not just in the context of you know throwing another plate on the bar or something like that but in every aspect of one's training and performance.

And I think there's a lot here that's applicable to the recreational athlete too.

Yeah. Would you say that, you know, what comes to mind is 12 weeks.

It feels like 12 weeks is a nice block of time for someone to try something. in terms of to try something new, see how they adapt, adapt, and then maybe switch to something new.

I realize that it's very hard to throw a kind of pan timeframe around something, but in terms of If someone wanted to experiment with heat adaptation or experiment with cold adaptation or change up their training regimen or diet and look at metabolic efficiency,

Do you think 12 weeks is a good period of time to really give something a thorough go and get... gain an understanding of how well or how poorly something works for oneself?

Or would you say eight is enough or three?

I mean, that's the how long is a piece of string kind of response, right?

I mean, yes, if we're just talking arbitrary numbers.

Recreational experimenter, yeah. three months exposure, 12 week training strategy, 12 week intervention is more than adequate to say, for 99% of things that change within the body that physiologically adapt to a training stimulus or an overload stimulus, you're gonna start to see either regression or progression, you know, beneficial or detrimental effects within three months.

Absolutely, I would say so. Now, listen, I say that in as much as we do training blocks here that are three weeks long.

That's because of this constraint that sometimes people suddenly have to, they get the call to fight.

Correct. Yeah. So it's like super condensed.

And in that scenario, we're always conscious of Is their body or this individual, do they have the ability to tolerate that? super overload that like super condensed exposure.

Now we might be doing that purposefully.

We might be trying to do an overreaching strategy where we're really trying to damage or flex something.

And I don't mean like negatively damaged, but like we're trying to damage tissue to really get an adaptive response. versus a more drawn-out 12-week strategy, which is more coherent, more planned out, more structured in nature.

Yeah, for all your listeners, I would say if 12 weeks to engage in a process of trying to change and adapt your body or expose yourself to something is more than sufficient to see if it's going to be um the right approach for you and i think you know the the the the individual interpretation is always has to be considered and i think that's where it comes back to be a thinking man's athlete or be a thinking man's trainer, like someone that's going through exercise.

You have to consciously understand where your body's at any moment in time.

You've got to be real with yourself. create a journal, create a log of your training, create a log of your feelings, your subjective feedback of, um you know how you felt your mood your sleep your athletes do that yeah yeah we we tried to promote that because again that's that's part of this this process you know um maybe 12 weeks for you, but I might get the same responses in eight weeks, you know?

And I think that's, That's another critical theme here is that we could put 15 guys on the mat and give them the same workout and there's going to be 15 different responses to that same workout Because the human organism is so complex and in nature that it's going to adapt differently.

Some people will tolerate it. Some people are going to be challenged by it.

Some people have got a metabolic makeup that's going to promote it.

Some people are metabolically challenged by it.

There's just so many different things that we have to consider, and that's what we try to do here.

It's the cross we bear, is that we try to understand on an individual level how to optimize athletic performance.

I think it's terrific. And the athletes here are so fortunate to have this.

And most people out there, I've certainly been trying to encourage people to learn some science and some mechanism and become scientists of their own pursuits, whether or not skill learning or athletic pursuit, et cetera.

As a sort of a final question, what are some things about the UFC or something about the UFC that perhaps people don't know? in terms of its overall mission or what you guys are trying to do here.

I mean, I think I've become a fan of MMA and I am more and more as time moves on.

Some people might be into MMA. Some people not into watching MMA.

But what are some things that the UFC is interested in and doing now? that most people might not know about and certainly I might not know about.

Yeah, I mean, I think we... We try to be cutting edge.

We try to be super progressive. We think we've got an amazing platform. particularly at the Performance Institute to do some really cool things that can inform many different people.

And that doesn't just mean the 600 or so athletes that are on our global roster.

What we're trying to do is influence global community around optimizing human performance.

So any moment in time, we're engaging in different technologies with different vendors, different partners. exploring opportunities to learn more, share data, understand what's the best mechanisms for interpreting your body, interpreting how your body's responding to training, interpreting your nutrition or whatever it may be. we're in a really privileged position to do that.

But we've also, hence you being here today, we're also trying to venture into some really cool areas of science and research that's got applicability that you can take from high performance athletes and apply to yourself, to Joe Blow walking down the street out there that is really interesting.

And that's everything from whether it's CBD and psychedelics through to different technologies for thermal monitoring and Bluetooth heart rate monitoring or whatever it may be. through to data management, et cetera, and anything in between.

We've got some great partners on the nutrition side, on the psychology side, on the data side.

I think we always try to just push the envelope a little bit more.

I think we keep our core mission with our athletes, but I think a lot of what we do hence your podcast and then I'm like an amazing platform.

You do such a great job of it that, you know, we can all learn and take from, you know, the elite and interpret how it might help us and just in the general population.

So I think that's our North Star is to provide our athletes the best integrated of care.

But we also want to influence just the global community and put the UFC at the forefront of that.

That's great. Well, you guys are certainly doing it.

Can't let the cat out of the bag just yet, but the things that we're gearing up to do with my laboratory and the work together, hopefully we'll be able to talk about that and share that in the. year to come but that's we're very excited about that and um duncan look you know i have this uh this filter that I use when I talk to people, academics or otherwise, which is, you know, some people, they open their mouth and it doesn't make much difference.

But when you speak, I learn so much. I'm going to take the protocols that I've I've heard about today, I'm going to think about how I'm training and how I could train differently and better, how I'm eating, how I could differently and better for sake of performance and just in general.

Thank you so much for your time, your scientific expertise, the stuff you're doing in the practical realm.

It's immense. So hopefully we can do it again.

Yes, thank you. This has been a blast. I appreciate it.

And yeah, keep doing what you're doing because I know there's a lot of people out there that love the platform.

So thanks for the invite. It's been awesome.

Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you for joining me for my conversation with Dr. Duncan French.

I hope you found it as insightful and informative as I did.

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[Optimizing Performance: Science-Based Protocols for Training, Nutrition, and Recovery with Dr. Duncan French]-[Dr. Duncan French: How to Exercise for Strength Gains & Hormone Optimization]

📋 Summary

Maximizing Human Performance: Insights from Dr. Duncan French

The Physiology of Resistance Training and Hormones

Stress and Performance

Strategic Use of Recovery Modalities

Skill Acquisition and Mental Fatigue

Heat Adaptation

Conclusion

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript