Richard Graves (00:01.116) Well, James, it is great to have you back on the Science for Sport podcast. Regular listeners will know right at the start, several years back now, you appeared on an episode or two back then. You've done plenty of work to help us on the Science for Sport platform as well. But there's been an absence. So when you got in touch with us and said, have you thought about exploring the argument of a new paradigm shift in the way we talk about aerobic and anaerobic training methods? It seemed a natural. James (00:17.644) Mm-hmm. Richard Graves (00:30.586) response to say, yeah, absolutely. Let's get you back on the pod. So welcome along. James (00:34.488) No, thank you. It's been it's been a while. I've been I think next year will be ten years doing research reviews for science for s science for sports. So it's been a while. Put it that way. Richard Graves (00:45.104) It's been a while and a lot's changed over that decade or so. For those that are relatively new to the podcast and may not be so familiar with your background, in a brief version, tell us a little bit about your experience and your journey to where you are now, which, incidentally, you're joining us from Austin in Texas. James (00:48.141) Mm-hmm. James (01:01.544) Mm. Yeah. Well, main background is in rugby and rugby league. So rep in here. The rugby league World Cup actually starts this coming weekend. So I get my main background's in professional and international, both rugby and rugby league. So done a bit of both. hold a master's in sport and excess science, published some research there, etc. Done that most of my career, then since COVID, kind of moved mainly online and now work I guess mainly in combat sports now. got a couple of fighters, international jiu-jitsu, UFC fighter, things like that that I work with. I try to keep that relatively small in terms of one on one, but and then a lot of I guess more coach education side on top of that. And that's pretty much most of it summed up very, very quickly. Richard Graves (01:48.209) Very, very quickly indeed. Okay. Let's get into this because as an amateur sportsman, myself growing up, I was quite good at long distance running, never a very good sprinter. You were always taught that the two things were completely different, different facets and you needed to train very differently to excel at either discipline. So what is it that you've seen over the years in your research that said, right, hang on. let's challenge this whole concept. The paradigm in it is shifting and the conventional way of thinking might not be the best way forward. James (02:25.419) Yeah. I'll I'll st I'll start this. Every everything that I've learned and applied over the last I don't know how many years has come from Dr. Andrew Usher, who I'd say is I'm happy to call like a mentor in this space with his research and then obviously his research with Dr. John Babri, if anyone's interested, please go read those papers as well. and I think that I'll I'll caveat this as well, where when I talk about this, I'm talking primarily for high intensity intermittent sports. So rugby, you know, soccer to an extent, combat sports, that kind of stuff. I'm gonna leave the extreme ends out of it where you're to talk about like ultra endurance and like strength sports and things like that. just to make it a little easier and a little more applicable. But yeah, as you mentioned, this kind of aerobic anaerobic is seen as these two little isolated things we do. So traditionally I think where most people are Or how most people apply conditioning, at least within these sports, is hey, we go through quote unquote anaerobic phase. Anaerobic phase typically means that you're doing low-intensity, steady state cardio, typically. at least that's how it's typically thought. And then you go and progress to more quote unquote anaerobic work where you may be doing more high-intensity intervals. obviously, there's a lot of space in between there. Now, the issue is one, nothing we actually do is anaerobic. So everything we do uses oxygen, even at the highest intensities and I'll I'll expand maybe I'll go down that road first. So even if we look at a short Wing gate 30 second sprint, or even look at a six or ten second sprint, we see that there is aerobic contribution. So if you check out Perolin's paper in 1999, which is a really cool paper, where essentially they did three wing gates or three 30-second bike sprints with four minutes rest in between, and but they basically showed the contribution of energy systems throughout that. And you see, even by that third sprint, even with that quote unquote full recovery, it becomes predominantly aerobic on that last 30-second sprint, but James (04:27.871) if we're going by a traditional state energy system model application, that would be considered quote unquote anaerobic power. We'll be training anaerobically. Well becomes mainly aerobic by the third sprint, as shown in the paper. And even the first six seconds of the first sprint, there is aerobic contribution. Then, if we look at what's happening at the muscle, we put on a NEAS device or anything that's able to look at scalator muscle oxygenation. We see even within the first 10 seconds of a sprint, you'll see a drastic drop or desaturation in scalator muscle oxygenation, which means oxygen is being used. So it is not anaerobic. Again, now I understand, yes, we typically talk aerobic anaerobic when we're talking about pathways, but it's being applied to exercise, which becomes, at least in my opinion, and in terms of prescription. becomes an issue because you end up prescribing things that don't make sense physiologically and then don't give you the outcomes you want from that session. It ends up being more guessing and I guess misapplying versus trying to target whatever that physiology is and that limiter. Richard Graves (05:30.288) Well, I was going to say, if we've got some instances where we're doing aerobic and anaerobic things simultaneously, why are we still using separate terms? Because that doesn't seem to make sense. James (05:45.282) Yeah, it's everything that's the thing, 'cause we have we love isolating things in strength and conditioning, right? We isolate this is a hypertrophy block or hypertrophy style training session or strength versus power. Everything's always happening. It's just obviously skewed to a different extent depending on what you're doing. And it's the same thing with with conditioning. Just because something is high intensity does not mean that it is not aerobic. And the issue is You go down this road of, okay, high-intensity intermittent sports. We need to be able to recover between efforts. Obviously, most sports like soccer are obsessed with repeated spreadability. you've got repeated high-intensity efforts, repeat power, all these kind of turns being thrown around. And to under this kind of traditional model, under traditional, I guess, energy system learning, you're told, okay, recovery is an aerobic process, which it is. Completely is. But then it leads down this road, okay, then I need to develop the aerobic energy system. And so what that does is they go, okay, if recovery is aerobic, I need to go now start hitting the roads five miles a day, whatever it is. I need to do my low intensity, steady state cardio to build my aerobic engine. But what you'll find is that recovery between these high intensity efforts is not often limited by the heart or oxygen delivery. It's often limited by the muscle. And if you look at I'm just trying to think of the best road to go down to explain this 'cause there's few different ways, but If we break down conditioning to make it really easy to prescribe and understand, we can look at what's happening essentially at the heart and then what's happening at the muscle. So essentially oxygen delivery, oxygen use. And we can kind of skew conditioning to target not either one, but skew it to what more towards one side or the other. So typically lower intensity, you're gonna skew more towards heart adaptations, higher intensities, more towards the muscle adaptations to make it really simple. James (07:33.8) And in that way, when we look at recovery between efforts, because it is mainly typically a muscular limitation, it means that you often need to do higher intensities to drive that recovery response between hard efforts. And you can see this like really simple, if you throw on a NIS device and you do low intensity work or you do an incremental tribunal test like a t a typical VO2 max test or you do I don't know whatever high intensity intervals and sprint intervals, you'll see the difference in the muscle response. And The low intensity work, you'll see kind of really steady state of the muscle. Heart rate will probably continue going up into wherever it goes, but the muscle will stay relatively steady in the oxygen that is actually being used. Once you start getting into higher intensities, that's when the muscle starts to actually pull that oxygen and it needs that energy. We need the oxygen to produce more energy quickly. And that is why that is when you're getting into quote unquote more aerobic adaptations at the muscular level versus at the heart level. So to promote recovery between these higher intensity efforts, you need to target the adaptations at the muscle, and that often comes with these higher intensity. Now it's not to say that, hey, you you can't have no aerobic base, you can't be sitting on the couch and be sedentary and then just, yeah, I'm just gonna do whatever intensities and I'm gonna be good for the sport, whatever. But it's just this idea that hey, just because recovery cover is normal process does not mean that low intensity is the answer to address it. Richard Graves (09:00.12) Okay, well let's just clarify something here. What do we mean when we say new paradigm? Because from what you've just told us there are a lot of known markers, entities in what you're saying there. So what is actually new? What is it we already know which is now shaping a new philosophy? James (09:03.307) Yes. James (09:20.417) I wouldn't say I wouldn't say anything's really new. It's kind of just maybe it it wasn't I don't I don't know. I think it was try it tried to be oversimplified and then got made more complicated versus like as I mentioned that prolonged paper in nineteen ninety-nine has been up for a long time. Showing energy contributions. I would say what is relatively new now is the ability to analyze what is happening in much more detail at the muscle level. that would be newer which gives us a little more insight into how we're maybe looking at prescribing intervals or prescribing conditioning from an athlete based on individual physiology but the actual physiology is not new if that makes sense Richard Graves (10:02.268) that does make sense and I think it's important to clarify that rather than just say look this is a new way of thinking and you rip up the paper and start again because that's not what we're getting at here. If we look at practicalities then let's take sprint performance for example. How much of a repeated sprint performance comes down to the sprint itself and how much of it is what happens in between those sprints? James (10:08.833) Yeah. James (10:28.641) So if we're gonna break down, let's just say, I mean yeah, we can use any of the high intensity, I guess, intermittent sports here. W when people look at when we look at repeated sprint forms or repeated high intensity efforts, of course, you need to have the ability to produce that power produce has to be whatever it is initially. can't remember what the quote was. It doesn't matter how many times you can't dunk a basketball, that would be that would be a g a good example. So you have to have that horsepower. And you develop that through I think most people listen to this, especially who are well versed within the gym and all that kind of stuff, they understand speed training, strength strength power training, etcetera. Then the recovery aspect is one where is probably more overlooked because typically when say a repeated sprint test is done, you're looking at total time, decrement of the time, and maybe even max velocity of your GPS on and stuff like that, and just seeing kind of changes in fatigue index. And it's the It's a good it's a good general look at what's going on. But just like most other metrics that are measured, it doesn't tell you how or why. And it's the same when we look at say just jump height, VO2 max, one RM, max speed, all these kind of things. They give us these top end ceiling numbers, but they don't tell you how the athlete got there because you can have two athletes that jump the same height but have completely different jump strategies. Same max speed, but one takes longer to get there. All these kind of things kind of come into play. And the same thing can happen within repeat sprint tests. And there's a really good new paper, Dr. Andreash Dr. John Baby's soccer paper they did a 30 meter sprint, 10 seconds rest, 30 meter sprint. James (12:10.681) And they essentially measured your typical repeated sprint max velocity or that kind of stuff. But they also looked at what's happening at the muscle. And what they found was, hey, they hit the same max velocity on both sprints. But the second sprint, they took longer to get there. And if you actually look at what's happening at the muscle, the hamstring actually doesn't recover. So if you're starting to layer more on top of that, you're just burying yourself into a hole, potentially increasing the risk of injury. Maybe those hamstrings aren't conditioned for those to repeat those high speeds in that specific cohort. And it just gives you a really good understanding of what's happening at the muscle and how and why they get into that number. Richard Graves (12:46.882) Well that's really interesting because I promise you and I know this from colleagues and friends who have been sprinters in the past or continue to do sprint training now that they will focus on intermittent running and it's about bursts and it's about power and acceleration but from what you've just said there is there a place for longer less intense running to build fitness so you can hit those high intensity peaks? Is this where we see the crossover and you start saying, well, hang on, these aren't two separate entities. James (13:20.149) I think where people may get confused or misinterpret is this idea that everything should just be one or quote unquote intensity or we just hit this one thing. When talking about sports performance, I should probably cover cover this in here now anyway, but it's a it's a holistic approach. It's always holistic, right? Everything you do. comes together from the sport and the complementary training. So it's not just doing XYZ. It's picking whatever the athlete needs to complement what is happening within their sport training. So I think a lot of people get worked up with this idea that hey you shouldn't just do say sprint intervals or you shouldn't just do XYZ. And it's like, well it just depends on what's going on at that time with that athlete and their sport. Because even if you look at Mo okay. We'll take most sports in terms of their tra professional sports and their training schedules, right? Two n often training two, three times a day, multiple hours a day, and then obviously because it's such a high volume of technical training, a lot of that is generally lower intensity. Now when I say lower intensity, people may say, Well, my heart rate is XYZ. It's like one, you don't know your heart rate zones, two, a higher heart rate does not necessarily mean high intensity or at least stressful at the muscular level. So there's like more there's more at play that goes on than just looking at Richard Graves (14:41.73) Well, again, I want you to just delve a little bit deeper into this because one of questions that I had coming into this conversation was where does low intensity training still earn its place? If we're talking about training regimes that involve burst, quick acceleration, power, there is still a place, you say, holistically for everything. And if you don't have part of the picture, you don't necessarily have the entire answer. James (14:47.947) Yes. James (15:08.269) Yeah. If we're gonna go if we're talking specifically in these sports, and I'm talking more at the profish the professional level, that's kinda where I spent most of my time 'cause I think when you're looking at hobbyists and recreational guys, it's a different story again because it's all based on like total training load and total technical tactical training load on top of it because as I mentioned pro guys yeah training hours a day every single day maybe one day off they're getting a lot of that exposure already and we're trying to compliment what's going on. Hobby as recreational guys maybe training three times a week for an hour. So it's kind of a different story there. But kind of all leads down a similar road and a lot of that is is one time constraints and two what is the physiology you're trying to target so Time constraint would be the biggest. And pro sports, I think most people know who work there understand you don't have much time to be able to implement whatever condition you're trying to do. Coaches want do their thing, you've only got so many hours in a day, all that kind of stuff going on. So you've got limited time windows. For the recreational guys, or even shit, even in combat sports, pro guys aren't pro. They're working most of the time too. But recreational guys, work, family. If you're only training three times a week in your sport, it's probably because you don't have time to do more than that. So tongue constrained is a huge one in that. Now, in terms of the actual low intensity work, if you're coming off like a long injury, a long layoff, you've been sedentary, yeah, like do some low intensity work to kind of build that. But if you've been training consistently, you have what I'd say, quote unquote, a general level of fitness, just layering on initially, yeah, layering on some low intensity work will probably help. Just like adding anything would probably help. But at some point, you need to James (16:54.689) Just like everyone knows in the gym, there has to be some kind of overload. The only overload you can gain from low intensity work is more volume because you're you're limited in intensity. So then it becomes a volume game. And then obviously that has its own drawbacks. So you there is a place for it. It's just if you are trying to target the physiology you need to be able to say repeat high-intensity efforts, you're in a sport that trains a lot already, it doesn't make much sense to layer more on top. And especially because, as I mentioned, we're potentially not limited by what's happening with delivery. Like you look at VO two max values, which is highly influenced by oxygen delivery. Well, look at that. You look at like elite combat sport athletes, you know, fifty low f or mi low to mid fifties, similar in say sports like rugby. Then you look like elite endurance looking at seventy plus. It's like, okay, well VOTMAS probably isn't the limiter in a lot of these. And again, it's a very poor predictor of performance regardless, but it's probably not the limiter. So what is the thing limiting performance? And then when we're looking at things like complementing what's happening in the sport, that's when we start looking at more targeted things to be able to drive these adaptations. And even if we go look at some of these adaptations, I'll just continue rambling, sorry. with yep. Richard Graves (18:07.718) Well, no, not at all. I will cut in there because, like you say, you look at targeting things. Your experience has covered rugby union, rugby league, combat sports. We've spoken about football during the course of this conversation. Then you've got American football, which has different demands, unique demands to that sport as well. in your experience and in your role, how would you go about differently working with athletes, conditioning? rugby league players differently from a football player, from a combat sports martial artist. James (18:41.045) A g I think a good way to kind of frame this is when people talk about strength training, they they often say, well, you shouldn't be able to tell the difference between a program between X athlete and Y athlete and this sporting athlete because we're just trying to train that quality. Richard Graves (18:56.22) I will tell you right now that sentence alone will have everybody listening in uproar because they'll say, they clearly haven't worked in my discipline or my profession because it's unique and has different demands. James (19:03.245) Yeah, so the the programs like it's for strength power, right? You're trying to train that quality. It's relative I would say it's relatively similar. It's not exactly the same. You may have some different demands. So really s like even within combat sports. If you go on one end, say grappling, one end is striking, you're one that is has more time to generate force. It's relatively slow and more grindy. Striking, more velocity-based, you could say. So you've kind of got two ends of the spectrum there. The programs are somewhat different because of that. And you can do the same thing with Ruppy and everything else. But it doesn't mean that everything's thrown out just because the sport has I don't know. Looks different, if that makes sense. Conditioning, again, it's It's just targeting the physiology for the athlete for that sport. And these sports kinda encompass again, as I mentioned, like high intensity interminute sports. So typically what what we'll do, we'll run like a baseline test. And the baseline test would be two wing gates. So bike sprints, 30 seconds, max effort, rest 60 seconds, and do another 30-second effort. We track heart rate, power data if we can, depends on the model of usually like the airbike or something, which only the newer models tend to give you power data. And then if you're really lucky You have a near's device or dude, I can't even I can never say the bloody word, I get tongue tied. Near infrared spectros spectroscopy, if I can bloody say it. Yeah, I know. I just bloody embarrass myself on here. But regardless, we chat that on, usually put that on the rec fim. And that gives us a really good snapshot. Richard Graves (20:21.766) You've done a better job than me. James (20:31.711) into how an athl into it's into an athlete's physiology regarding central so the heart we see power data which is like an external measure and then we see what's happening at the muscle we can take other measures like resting heart rate get a general idea of kind of like quote unquote fitness and then we can look at even like a time trial kind of thing just to get a general idea of performance there too. And we kind of marry all that up and we can look at how essentially It's broken into phases and then we get now again, I'll I'll come back to Dr. Andrash's research on how they break down that kind of data in different sections, which is slightly which would be newer, I guess, if we're talking about newer stuff. but you're essentially looking at this is the heart. You're looking at not just the re how many beats someone recovered or how many beats someone went up, you're looking at the at How the heart rate moves. So, again, as I mentioned earlier, like one RM, all that stuff gives you a peak value, but doesn't tell you how. When we look at the heart rate, we can look at the kinetics of the heart rate and see how the heart rate recovered to that number. Because we can get two, say, 30-beat drops from two different people. One may take 15 seconds to start dropping, the other one may start dropping after five seconds, as just as a crude example. Typically in sports, say you have 60 seconds recovery, you have to repeat a lot. You want that recovery to come sooner in that kind of curve. So that's one thing we're looking at there. Then you're looking at say power data. If you have it, you're looking at peak power. You're looking at rate of power development or time to peak, which is very, very important, not just from a performance standpoint in terms of being able to generate it quickly for whatever movements, but it's correlated. Should I say correlated? Whatever. Either way, at the top of peak power. is when skeletal muscle oxygenation starts to rapidly drop. So we have this like initial delay initially. You start sprinting, takes a few seconds, and then the muscle goes, shit, this is stressful. But that point where the muscle starts using oxygen quickly doesn't start until you hit peak power. So the longer you take to get to peak power, the less inefficient you're gonna be at a muscular level in terms of conditioning. So we're looking at something like that, if we have it. James (22:47.915) And then if we have the NES device as well, we're looking at the rate of oxygen use coming down that initial sprint. And then we're looking at the rate of re-oxygenation on the other side. And typically, at least what I've seen for myself and other people I've looked at, the typical thing is one, most people who say they've done high-intensity intervals or sprint intervals haven't actually done sprint intervals before. And you see that in the data because it's a mess. To really push like a 30-second sprint. With six seconds rest. And I mean like, I don't mean I gotta do two or three or four of them, so the last one's the best one. I mean like the first one, you hit it so hard, you don't wanna do another one. You gotta hit, you gotta get to the fastest point as quickly as possible and hold on for dear life and then be then fall off the bike after that, then have to do it again. That is a true sprint interval to be able to get that data from that test. And when people actually feel that, they realize, okay, this is actually the hardest thing I can do. No, there's nothing in sport that is harder than doing that. It's it's it's crazy. but you but you're essentially taking that data and actually I'll come back to what I was saying around what I typically see. Typically you'll see heart rate is slow in the beginning and then may come down a bit, but depending on how quote unquote fit they are, they'll get a obviously a larger drop or smaller drop. But typically the heart rate is delayed. And then what you also find Is the desaturation rate, the slope isn't as steep for most people who aren't as well trained. And then in terms of the resaturation rate, it doesn't seem to come back, it doesn't resaturate as fast as what is coming down, which is typically a problem. And it doesn't typically come all the way back up to where we were in their baseline, which means incomplete recovery. So what you'll find is most police format, most people tend to have a recovery issue. within these high intensity intervals and then we can address whatever is in that through targeted intervals from that data. So that gives us like a bit of a central. Hopefully that sense. Richard Graves (24:57.752) Yeah, absolutely. And I promise you in what you've just told us there, at the very least, you'll have provoked a response and perhaps a different thought process and hopefully a different way of looking at things from many of our listeners and viewers in our Science for Sport YouTube channel. But the whole premise of having this conversation is to challenge the conventional way of thinking. And that works both ways. So let me turn that on its head to you, James, and say fellow professionals, practitioners. James (25:21.303) Mm-hmm. Richard Graves (25:26.108) might disagree with what you've said. In what areas do you think that would be and where will they have a point? James (25:28.907) they they do. I'm well I'm well aware. I'm well aware because there's always lots of stuff posted against it. And I think the well the issue is the issue is it's the misinterpretation of what is being put across. That is the main issue. It's not that you shouldn't do X, Y, Z. It's the fact that people think it's all or nothing. It's just this. But it's not just this one thing. Because of often I'll talk about sprint intervals as one of the main things. And that's because one Takes you three to five minutes, you get crazy returns on investment at three to five minutes. It's very low volume. So while it is again, we all know the inverse relationship intensity volume. Because it is such low volume, the intensity is so damn high. You're getting a lot of the adaptations we want. And we talk about these adaptations, it's stuff that you're not gonna gain from say low intensity, steady state cardio. As I mentioned, talking about rate of power development. talk about increases in peak power yes you can increase peak power even on 10 seconds on 10 seconds off people will say well it's capacity work dot enough recovery i can show you data that shows increasing peak power week to week it's again nothing's in isolation we're talking about better lactate transport and lactate use yes lactate is your preferred high intensity fuel source if you're not increasing lactate during training that that's not to say like everything has to be like that but what I'm saying is you need to be able to train this ability to be able to use it as fuel efficiently because again If you look at any data, say in combat sports after rounds, high blood lactates, high heart rates, all that kind stuff. We're looking at improved calcium sensitivity. Again, without calcium, muscles don't contract. You've got to reveal binding sites. So if we're able to increase the sensitivity to calcium through things like spritz intervals, then we're able to produce more force, more prolonged force, and be able to do it with less calcium coming in and out. And then obviously you've got the mitochondrial changes, like huge mitochondrial changes in terms of function, being able to use oxygen more efficiently, et cetera. So you've got all these adaptations you gain out of something in three to five minutes that yes is stressful at the time because of the intensity, but the volume's so low that you can kind of fit these in and not screw up the rest of your training week. So this is where they fit so well into so many of these sports. You've got high more high intensity intervals. Like you did you want to go and jump in there or okay, yep. Richard Graves (27:41.786) No, no, you finish before I come back in. James (27:44.216) Then you've got the more high intensity intervals, I guess more traditional. I guess you like MAS and maybe your longer intervals, one, two, K repeats, whatever else. Those are great too. At those in there, you still get some kind of muscular response, maybe more of a centroadaptation if you're looking for that. Perfect, you can fit that in your week if you need it. And then I think most people have a problem with, hey, you need to do low intensity because you need to, you need eccentric cardiac remodeling. We need to deliver more oxygen, blah, blah, blah. But again, I've kind of addressed a lot of that already. VO2 max values aren't exactly that high. delivery is not often the problem. And even if you want to go down that road, like high intensity intervals give you similar responses. So why do you need to do a shit ton of volume on top of that? So there's so many other different rabbit holes and shit that goes on with with a lot of that, but yeah, a lot of that pushback would just be this idea that you have to do low intensity for this and that. But again, holistic approach, what's happening in the sport, how many hours are they training, how much time do you have? What are you trying to target with the physiology, with the conditioning? What data you have to show that this person needs this in particular? And people will often go on the road as well. Well, if we look at substrate utilization, free fatty acids, carbohydrate use, but it's like, man, like if I'm in if I'm in a fight or running into people and rapping, whatever, like I don't give a shit about trying to be low intense like it's just not happening. If I'm trying to be low intensity and using mainly fat as fuel, there's something going on and I'm I don't know. In the sense it it's not working. Richard Graves (29:09.5) Yeah, and look, this is across all forms of science, not just as relates to sport. Progression only comes with challenge, and that's why it's good to have these conversations. I'm conscious that we're up against the clock. So before we let you go, James, coach the listening now. If they were to change just one conditioning session a week, what would you recommend they examine first before doing James (29:23.009) No, you're just James (29:34.478) that's a hard one. kinda depends what you have available to you. 'Cause I know most if you're in a team environment you probably don't have a shit ton say heart rate one of those, you maybe just have GPS or whatever. So it makes it a little more difficult. But I think the main thing would be starting to think outside this box of aerobic anaerobic. Understand that you don't need to build this voluminous base, say and say you 'cause preseasons differ. I mean in rugby you got preseasons as short as four weeks to as long as four months or longer in some leagues. So the approach you take may differ slightly. If you only have four to eight weeks, there's no way in hell you're spending time doing low intensity work. That would be the worst waste of time of in my opinion. The worst waste of time that you could do. And I've s I've I mean I've I've worked in rugby in three different countries. I've seen what goes like a lot of time goes on where Preseason starts. we're on the track. We're doing multiple repeats and like the entire week is basically track running. And it's like, well, when we get into actual periodization program planning design, week one, you should be starting contact. Contact should be week one in there. I know that's controversial, but I'm not talking about running into people. I'm talking like literal contact preparation be week one. Speed training, week one. A shit ton of technical tactical training. That's gonna build a lot of your base and you E and same thing with the high intensity, say sprint intervals. You can do these year-round. I think a lot of people have issues where, hey, I can only do high intensities or sprint intervals for six weeks because that's when gains cap out. I don't get any further from it, which is completely false. Yes, if you're looking at say VO2 max anaerobic capacity, how it's measured, you look at Tabata Study, yes, it does cap out. But these are just values that don't tell us anything about performance. So if we look at Yamagi and Babrian twenty seventeen, you see On the same sprint interval protocol, time to exhaustion continues to improve all the way to nine weeks. And that's without changing. That's the same thing. It's like going to the gym and squatting 100 kgs for five week after week, but still improving. You know, nothing's changed. There's been no extra overload. So you can do these because the whole idea is you're just matching it to the physiology. You're just prescribing things and reacting to the physiology. And you can continue improving with these. You can get it done in a short amount of time. yeah. Hopefully I've covered everything before confusing anyone and going down another round. Richard Graves (31:58.716) You have covered a ton in this conversation and I defy anyone to listen to it and not take at least what if you can't take one thing away from this you'll never do so I promise you before we let you go James (32:10.829) Hey, and I could be completely wrong. I could be completely wrong. And I'm sure I'm gonna get some someone messaging me or whatever. Cool. That's all good. I can be completely wrong. If I'm wrong. Yeah. Richard Graves (32:18.774) I was going to say on that note, where can people find you in social media? Get in touch, stay across what you're doing. James (32:24.897) sweet science of fighting will probably be my main place to find. So sweet science of fighting on YouTube, Instagram. I've got a bunch of stuff on this on some of these topics and whatnot. and then we do host a conditioning mentorship with Dr. Andrew Usher. to TBD, what's what's happening with that going forward with how we do that. but that is like a gold mine of information in terms of what's happening within the physiology, how how how we're prescribing intervals based on that physiology, what we're trying to target with. based on the individual's physiology, what's happening, all that kind of stuff. So I share a bit of that round there. But yeah, again, I'm not right about everything. I'm just sharing what I've been learning, what I've been applying, what's happening, and what makes sense in terms of physiology versus I guess what well you I mean I used to that's how I used to think too, this kind of aerobic anaerobic. So we've all all been down that road and I just want to make sure that hopefully we can start moving further from that. 'Cause I don't It makes it conditioning so confusing when you're trying to figure out aerobic or anaerobic list. Am I doing too much anaerobic stuff and yeah, it gets crazy. Richard Graves (33:32.484) He absolutely does. Listen, James DeLace, it's been pleasure having you back on the Science for Sport podcast. We won't leave it so long next time. James (33:39.777) Perfect. I appreciate you having me on.