Dr. Duncan French

Likewise, likewise.

Thank you.

I don't often have many Stanford professors in the Performance Institute, so I'm really excited.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a 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.

You know, my work primarily looked at, you know, catecholamines and sympathetic arousal.

Yeah, epinephrine, adrenaline, noradrenaline, how they were signaling cascade using the HPA axis, releasing cortisol, and then looking at how that also influenced the adrenal medulla to release androgens and then signaling that at the gonads.

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

know females can increase their anabolic environment their internal anabolic milieu um using resistance training as a stressor and then they get the consequent muscle tissue growth um you know whether it's tendon ligament adaptations you know the the beneficial consequences of resistance training which is driven by anabolic stimuli yeah i have two questions about that the first one is something that you mentioned which is that the

The field is divided presently in as much as understanding the acute adrenergic response in terms of anabolic response to exercise in an acute phase and the exposure to...

a 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, 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 habitual levels.

Yeah, absolutely.

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

Exactly.

So, you know, the binding capacity of testosterone and influencing different tissues within the body, I 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 kind of characteristics, et cetera.

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

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.

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

So,

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 percent intense over one repetition max intensity okay so 80 percent of the one rep max six six sets of 10 reps separated by rest of two minutes two minutes which is actually pretty fast yes at least to me it is anytime you see these two to three minutes when you're actually watching the clock

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

Yeah.

Yeah.

We formulated that kind of exercise protocol to really target, you know, the release of testosterone and try and drive up these anabolic environments to study the endocrine

you know, consequences.

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

Yeah, we would do that in a back squat.

So, you know, multi-joint, 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, you know, 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.

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

Yeah.

And I think it comes back to that intensity factor then.

You know, 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 the paradigm that you've got to look at is that the mechanical load has to come from the actual weight on the bar and the volume is the metabolic stimulus.

How much are we driving lactate?

How much are we driving fat?

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.

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

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

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.

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 gains because of the metabolic stimulus that they're driving with the shorter rest periods.

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.

So 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 is that you really need to be, for want of better terms, suffering a little bit through that type of protocol, both in terms of the challenge of the load, but also being able to tolerate the metabolic stress that you're exposed to.

It's a

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 you really, that's the sole purpose of what you're trying to achieve.

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 end points of success.

I mean, so this was what all my PhD work was looking at was the pre...

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.

We use a resistance training protocol that these athletes knew was going to be very, very challenging.

It's gonna be, there's gonna have some anxiety to doing it.

They knew there were gonna 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, 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.

That's a great question.

From my data, certainly the greater the arousal, the higher the performance was from a physical exertion perspective.

There's definitely an individual biokinetics to some of these hormonal kind of releases.

And 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.

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 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, 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 cold specifically from a physiological perspective to promote, you know, redistribution of vascularity of blood flow, you know, 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 the data, the literature is certainly still out there with respect to cryotherapy and cold baths and some of 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.

So 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.

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, but absolutely in terms of muscle hypertrophy.

And there's a big kind of theme in the world of athletic performance right now in terms of periodization of cold exposure as a recovery modality.

Interesting.

you use cold?

Should you be using cold for recovery in periods of high training load when you're actually pursuing, it might be general preparatory 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 you now, you know, the muscle building activity should be in the bank.

That should have been done in the general preparatory work.

And now you're focusing on technical execution.

So you're absolutely right.

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 the appropriate time when you want to drive recovery and make sure that your body is optimized um you know when you're far away from a a competition you know 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.

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

Well, it's not just the UFC.

And again, I talk about my personal experiences with different sports.

I think just education around where scientists are 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 you know 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 you know the the there's there's tactics to when when you do things and when you don't do things and i think you know stress and cold exposure

We have to have a consideration around that as well, but it's not just MMA fighters, that's 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 high-performance conversation for sure.

No, it's not a volume driven exercise.

It's a quality driven exercise.

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 motor learning.

You're losing the accuracy of the skill.

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.

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, 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.

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.

I'm talking figuring things out, figuring out the skill.

And I think that can be stressful.

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.

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

Yeah, it's glucose.

It's sugar at the end of the day, right?

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

But I think it comes down to metabolic efficiency.

You know, we rarely advocate a high performance athlete in a high intensity intermittent sport like MMA being totally ketogenic.

Because at the end of the day, some of those high intensity efforts usually require carbohydrate fueling for the energy produced at those high intensities.

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.

To come back to your original question, if it's a general population, then yes, I think 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 diet 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.

So 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.

Now, we use tactics here where we essentially have athletes on what you would say kind of 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-training.

During and then immediately post.

And then the rest of their diets, you know, breakfast, lunch and dinner, 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.

yes you're absolutely right i mean at low intensities of exercise or just day-to-day living we shouldn't be tapping into our um carbohydrate fuel sources extensively that that's that's for higher intensity work or you know the fight or flight needs of stress you know um if you know athletes or any individual has a you know

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 and 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 is ultimately um how their metabolism is working

Do I have that more or less right?

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.

better at dealing with heat barring like hyperthermia and death like i mean obviously you heat up the brain too much people will have seizures and die but um you lose neurons but uh what's the right way to acclimate heat yeah so we we normally start with about 15 minutes of exposure now if someone's really lacking acclimation to heat you know you can do that in three five minute efforts do you know what i mean and actually take this hot hot sauna yeah hot sauna take time to step out 200 degrees or something 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 delta in sweat release.

So the more acclimated you are, the more your body is thermogenically adapted, the more sweat glands you have.

So we start with 15 minutes and then we just try to

add on and add on across the time.

And 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.

The body is, 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.

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.

And I think, you know, 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 know, you've got to be real with yourself.

You create a journal, create a log of your training, create a log of your feelings, your subjective feedback of, you know, how you felt, your mood, your sleep.

Do your athletes do that?

Yeah, yeah.

We try to promote that because, again, that's part of this process, you know.

It might be 12 weeks for you, but I might get the same responses in eight weeks, you know.

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.

you know 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 you know there's 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

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.