James Ross | Sport Scientist, Kettlebell Coach, Master of Sport

Hey guys, thanks for listening to this episode of the platform podcast. My guest today is James Ross coming in from Melbourne, Australia, and in the course of the conversation, we talk a little bit about the COVID pandemic and the response down there in Australia, and James wanted me to add a little bit of context so people understand how it's different from the US's situation right now, so that his response is maybe a little better understood. Down in Australia, there are only 897 deaths nationwide. They're about 10% of the population of the US, so it is a less populated country, and there's only active restriction going on in two geographic areas, which is Melbourne and Sydney, with the intention of actually getting the total number of cases down to zero right now, they're under five new cases a day, and they actually want to try and eradicate it from the island because then they'll be able to ensure that they have no active cases in the country and be able to fully reopen their economy, so there is a little bit of nuance there because that's why they're doing the very restrictive shutdowns right now to try and be able to fully reopen their economy without any risk of any community spread or any active cases in the country, and that context was a little bit missing from the conversation, so we just want to make sure that you have that. We know this is a hot button issue, it can be very triggering for people, especially those of us who have lost loved ones, who have had people who have been affected by the disease, people who are small business owners, and have had their businesses had to shut down due to restrictions because of COVID, we understand that there's a lot of feelings about this issue, and you just wanted that context added so that his comments were a little bit more clear, so thank you for listening. If you enjoy the conversation, please drop us a review and share it with a friend. Thanks. Welcome in to the platform podcast. I am incredibly excited to bring on my guest today. His name is James Ross. He is coming to us all the way from Australia. Thank you for joining us so early, James. He is a coach, a lifter, and a sports scientist, having both achieved master of sport as a lifter as well as coached an athlete to master of sport. He is very accomplished, and he is going full on down the rabbit hole, actually working on a PhD in kettlebell sport study, so that is very, very rare in this world, so I am incredibly excited to have him on, and I will share some links to some of the actual clinical research he has done on gear voice sport in the episode. So James, thanks so much for joining us. Welcome in. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. I've really enjoyed your podcast listening to it so far. I thought it's been quite an interesting insight into different things going around the world and just different people's approaches and things like that. Thank you very much. I really appreciate that. It's great to see people are actually listening to it and starting to see the listenership grow a little bit, and I always love seeing the report, the analytics on what countries are tuning in and starting to see people from all over the world tuning in, which is just a handful of people, but it's still really cool to see like, oh, got listeners in seven different countries. That's really cool, which is great because kettlebell sport is such an international sport, so it's great to see that. So thank you very much for listening. I really, I really appreciate it. So, you know, you know, you, oh, I was going to say, you know, when you get some people from Eastern Europe listening in, that's when you're really now to, I think I'll have to work on my Russian a little bit for that. So tell, tell us a little bit about how you discovered kettlebell sport in the first place, because you're, you're full on down the rabbit hole as much as anybody I've ever met at this point, but how did you actually come across kettlebell sport in the first place? So I was, I would say I'm pretty lucky in the sense that, well, I should say I got my first kettlebell in about 2005. So when I did my personal training course like a year or two before that, there was a guy who was into this, you know, Russian style of training, which was extremely new at the time. And I was like, it just, I was just quite curious about it and sort of looked into it a bit and eventually got a kettlebell and I eventually got a job at a gym called Iron Edge, which a lot of Australian people would know. But that was basically the company was Australian kettlebells and they had a gym called Iron Edge, which later they started selling equipment to CrossFit and the Army and different things like that and they just became Iron Edge and that's just their branding now. But there, fortunately there was some really experienced trainers there. So there's a couple of guys who trained with this, or Chris and James, they trained with a FIM, who was an ex-Soviet kind of like the Australian version of Pavel I guess. So this story sounds familiar. Yeah, yeah. So like, I was really lucky. So I got to train with them and also a woman who some of your listeners might know Emily Friedel. She competed over, well in America multiple times and she went over to the Ice Chamber a whole bunch of times and I believe she won like a WKC World Championships or two or so. But so it's quite fortuitous. So I got a job there and I saw Emily doing all this crazy training. I'm like, you're doing more than 10 reps like what's going on. So at the time I was very much into strength and conditioning and I was trying to be a sprinter and I was using kettlebells for that purpose, you know, Olympic lifting, blah blah blah. But yeah, just kettlebells were a nice addition into the mix there. But I eventually got quite a few injuries sprinting because I took it up later on in life and I was sick of 15-year-olds running a lot faster than me. So I decided to give myself an extremely advanced program which my body couldn't tolerate and I ended up getting hamstring tendinopathy and TBR or Sposteria tendinopathy and so basically in my foot and hip just lots of overuse injuries because you know I was trying to push it a bit too hard. So basically I think the story of a lot of what I've done is because I've always done sport. I just love playing sport or not even sport just moving around but sort of moving from one thing to another thing once I get injured if I can't do it basically. So I then was like looking at what Emily was doing and you know I'm like okay I'm using you know relatively heavy kettlebells for 10 reps maybe I think I might be able to lift this 12 or 16 kilo kettlebell for something that would be challenging for me and of course it was quite challenging you know like the classic I can you know press a 16 or 24 kilo X amount of time so therefore I should be able to jerk it for that many minutes. It's sort of like a one-to-one ratio right? The linear workout put assumption that we all go in with. Yeah and it's just a classic thing of like once you get over like you know these sort of unknown zone of like more than 15 reps that you've never done you know things just go at the window and it's just this different animal and especially if you have you don't have a good rack position you're just holding this isometric position you know and you're just using your chest and you're just holding these kettlebells into your chest and you're just blowing up basically. So still feel like that 8 years in. So yeah so basically I was like very impressed with what she was doing and that peaked my interest. I should say in Australia we're very aware of like sort of hard style and different things like that but all the RKC but they never actually came to Australia so like I was all set to go and do you know my RKC blah blah blah but people to do it would actually have to travel to America. Yeah so um so that never actually happened and Steve Cotto came and did a workshop and down in Australia and Emily attended that and later on she actually got Valery to come down to a gym that we later started together. So I was just really fortunate to have Emily who was very much she started like the Australian kettlebell club through the WKC and so she was like she sort of took me under her wings so I'm very grateful for that because straight away I got quite a lot of good coaching and she would you know I think she went to the ice chamber three or four times maybe more I can't quite remember but you know so we're getting some really good information from her so she was really putting herself out there. Oh that's awesome that's awesome it's it's interesting so the hamstring thing makes that that puts a piece of the puzzle together for me so for for those of you that haven't read any of James's research one of its one of his papers is hamstring my electrical activity during the three different kettlebell swing exercise variations. So was it was the hamstring tenonopathy and that history of injury that really got you interested in studying how the hamstrings work and how you could better condition them or was is that just happy coincidence. Well at ACU or Australian Catholic University we've got a hamstring research group which is also part of Queensland University and basically I'm the sort of guy although I've sort of it's not really happening this year because I'm not really going into uni but I'll go around picking people's brains and things like that and asking them lots of questions to the point where people start to avoid me so I've sort of dialed it back in a bit it does make it a bit awkward when people like oh no he's going to ask me all these questions but yeah so we've got this hamstring research group and they've sort of developed a Nordboard and different things like that so we sort of collaborated with them and like I said I sort of started with a bit of a well more of a hard style I guess trying to improve sprinting performance and the paper came out with a sort of a nice neat message which was like a hip hinge swing I should say I kind of almost prefer the term hip hinge so we we define the swings as a squat swing so as the name implies more like a quarter squat and some people think that's like the devil and you should never do a squat swing I personally think it has its place as long as you know why you're doing it everything has a place so long as it's a safe movement pattern and it accomplishes the goal that's my that's my position on any movement but absolutely so yeah so that's a really nice movement when when appropriate and a hip hinge swing and a double knee bend swing which we called it the double knee bend swing because it's essentially that GS I'm particularly done in that sort of classic style that the Larry Federenko does but we performed it with two handed which I don't necessarily think is you know considered a kettlebell sport swing I'm happy to be corrected on that but we just opted for that and also I think for readers who probably haven't looked at a kettlebell sport that makes a lot more sense to them. And it's a it's a it's a variable that you have to isolate too right because you can't have a you can't introduce another confounding variable within a scientific research paper where it's like well for these two variations of the swing we did a two-hand variant and then on this one it's a one-handed variant well then how do you know the validity of the conclusions that you're making wasn't influenced by the load and the unilateral loading pattern of a one-handed swing versus a two-handed swing right like they're absolutely you can't introduce that confounding variable or else you know the research I'm assuming the the reviewing body would probably be like and not sure we're going to be able to accept this absolutely I mean that sounds like another great paper that we could do as a follow-up so because we do the dominant leg so if you know it would very much potentially change which hand the kettlebell is in I imagine especially if you look at more of these modern style swings where they go out to the side a bit more versus the ones that go a bit more directly sort of in line with your midline but the really neat story or the take-home message was you know it's not a global thing but I think for most of us would agree that the double knee bend or let's say kettlebell sport swing perform the task more efficiently well in contrast the hip hinge swing um had the highest myorelectrical activity um and I guess you could say it was the least efficient but maybe if you're looking you know again it comes back to why you're doing it maybe that's what you're after you're looking to try and get the highest um activity through there and I should say though like if you perform both exercises with the intention to move it as quickly as possible so with the kettlebell sport swing as it passes your knees you're going to sort of really pop your legs a bit and it's kind of closer to a jump so you basically reposition the kettlebell to be more efficient and actually collect it force plate data at the same time except sadly somehow someone kicked one of the leads out so we could never use that as well which would have would have been a nice story to um so basically just looking at the timing and how the movements are a little bit different and it teases it out a bit more but basically you're repositioning the kettlebell to play force a bit more vertically um uh and just making it more efficient basically with with the kettlebell um sport style compared to that um I was going to say hard style or hip hinge swing and now so with the uh I think we can use those interchangeably you know as part of the vernacular at this point right like I think that's what most people at least in America understand when you say hip hinge swing uh actually that's probably more confusing to a lot of people than if you just say a hard style swing because that's what people are right but I guess over here for myself um I think um for me like because hard style sort of I'm not sure if it's a brand but it sort of seems to have changed but essentially yeah it is a hip swing but there's just variations on that and that's sometimes a lot to say hip hinge um but yeah let's use them interchangeably for today I mean yeah I prefer I prefer the accuracy of the of the clinical terminology that you're using because that's just my nature um I think we're pretty similar in that regard but uh you know I think for for the average listener I think you could probably just say that the hard style swing so I mean it's funny like the research validated the intentionality behind the two different styles and uh and basically said okay these are on brand like everybody's on brand here hard style is less efficient and you know and if the the point is to be less and less efficient because you're trying to do it at you know as hard as possible you know air quotes right you're trying to make every rep as maximal force output as possible then that makes sense and you know the inverse is true for for the sportswing because you're trying to be as efficient on every rep as possible so that you can go longer right that that is on brand and the research confirmed that that is in fact valid methodology essentially right that's kind of a separate message yeah yeah and well also be quite interesting is if we um had a variety of different loads to see if you could actually swing more with the kettlebell sport swing versus the hip hinge swing um more hard style swing um I suspect though as the way gets you know quite heavy you'll probably deviate more to that squat style swing um for a lot of people doing the hip hinge swing just because of that you have to counterbalance that weight when it's pulling you um um for basically um but you know that would be another interesting study that maybe uh someone won't want to give me money to do one day but um I've got four splits in the gym now so that's very exciting so I might try and do that myself um but we'll see how we go if we ever get out of this kind situation that's fantastic yeah that that would be very interesting I think there there there are so many there are so many uh areas that really could be studied especially when it comes to to kettle well kettlebells in general there's not a ton of research out there but kettlebell sport specifically there's not very much research out there at all at least outside of you know Russian papers that that I've seen uh there's just not there's just not much out there so it's really cool to see that at least someone is pursuing it and um you're you're currently pursuing your doctorate right now and that's that's focused on the kettlebell swing correct yeah that's correct so my master's was on the snatch um and uh with that hamstring paper we um that was one of my supervisors on his students and um I sort of pushed that idea through through there and and just helped out with that and we got the hamstring guys to help out and so that was a really nice thing I should just add to that one really nice potentially practical uh thing with that is that the kettlebell swings been shown to really activate those medial hamstrings or the semi tendinosis semi menorinosis which are potentially useful for unloading your ACL so uh so those hamstrings help support the ACL and they also have a rotational or they exert a rotational force on the knee and that can help sort of uh resist against that valgus collapse or the knee dropping in which will really load your ACL so there's kind of might give some S&C coaches or some other you know people a bit of a rationale behind using this the swing so if anybody out there is listening that has an end to the NFL let the NFL strengthen conditioning coaches know that james can help you prevent ACL tears because that's the that's the take on message I got the yet I don't know if you're familiar with how how many ACL tears have happened in the NFL this year but it is a lot it's above it's above the the mean right now already and we're only a few weeks into the season which is unsurprising given the you know the offseason conditions but uh there's there's a lot of high profile players in the NFL that are on on season long IR because they've torn their ACLs already this year uh yeah I mean I'd love to say it was that simplistic but um hey I'm trying to get you hired man um yeah so anyway there's obviously you would do lots of other exercises as well associated with that but that's potentially a nice little one there that you could sort of add in um yeah so um yeah the PhDs sort of on the swing and it's a bit more of an S&C orientation um and just mainly like I was saying to you before you know kettlebell sports also and I'm really interested in that and I sort of with my masters I'm sort of trying to reverse engineer kind of or at least trying to getting a better understanding and share that understanding with the scientific community because a lot of the coaches and stuff kind of had an idea of that stuff and um I was almost just documenting it in a way I mean so at least I had a strong idea of what I thought would happen um and yeah so I was just putting that on paper so for other scientists to be like oh okay oh yeah I can see kind of what's happening or at least the coaches validating um and giving myself because I'm really struggling with snatch a better understanding of that whereas the PhDs probably a bit more S&C orientated because it's quite hard to you know um if you ever want to get funding it's like you know kettlebell swings and diabetes or um my friend Neil in Queensland is doing like kettlebell training and geriatric stuff and he's got some exciting results um my father's 63 years old and had a had a had a bypass surgery this past January I just showed him some kettlebell movements to help him rehab his his sternum and some shoulder mobility and his chest out you know after surgery obviously he's got a lot of a lot of tightness in that area and he was he's starting to take his he's starting to take his little kettlebell to the to the driving range at the golf course to help him warm up so I think there's definitely an interesting area of application there to be interested to see that research when that gets completed I think that's a great population for it that's fantastic so um if you're interested he's the kettlebell physio but um also that's pretty impressive that your dad would listen to you when it comes to training my my father would certainly not listen to me well I had to get back up from my brother and my mom is actually a physical therapist assistant as well so it's it's funny he's got you know he's got a a wealth of knowledge available to him but yeah like most like most of our our parents I think he's a little reticent to to ask for help and is a little a little stubborn but there are some areas he will concede that I that I know more than him about and fortunately at this point he has conceded that I do know a little bit more about physical training than than he does he was he was open to it and it was good night it was it was funny because he tried to tell me that he couldn't he couldn't strength train because uh you know he couldn't get into the gym in their in their town that they live in and I was like uh bullshit I know you've got kettlebells out in the garage let's go I mean that's one thing that's absolutely fantastic about kettlebells um you know in in Australia and around the world you know any contact sport or um so many team sports just can't go ahead but kettlebell sport uh it's not necessarily easy but we can still compete um we just did a lot of things online in Australia and um you know it's not the same but it's still something so we've got to be sort of grateful for that but it's also you can just get so much this so yeah we've been we've been prepared for this for a while I mean you're completely alone on the platform right we we have a saying that uh I think it was Aaron Viville from Texas kettlebell Academy here in America as I said that we're all in this together alone you know because the whole point is you know when you're on the platform it's just you and the bells like even if there's somebody even if there's somebody four feet away from you at a certain point you get to minute seven there is nothing else it's just you and the bells like that's that's always been my experience at least that's well that's actually one of the things I love about kettlebell sport is uh at a certain point everything else just kind of falls away absolutely yeah so I wanted I wanted to ask you about uh periodization and and kind of training load because I just spent the last uh god I don't even I didn't even track the hours I don't think I even want to know um I designed the the the macro program for my team for the next 12 months and then broke that down into meso cycle four meso cycles each of which are three months long and and gave everybody a 12 month training plan and they now have the next three months of their of their training cycle uh in their spreadsheets um took me took me a good bit took me a good bit of time as you can imagine um but I would I would love to hear your approach to how you do periodization and end program design oh firstly that's fantastic I'm sure there's um not that many many people planning into the future but um I think well there's a there's a lot of things and I'll sort of take a step back to try and give some context because I tend to waffle so I sort of try to give myself a framework um so when it comes to improving performance this kind of or typically you want to go after your weakest links and um there's sort of four areas um which you can develop to improve performance which is sort of physical tactical technical and psychological and so when we periodize our program and our training program can affect all of those in in different ways um but if we cue into more of that physical side of things um and for physical stuff we um you know we could say break down things into flexibility um strength or power and endurance I mean these are just very general terms um and then we can cue into um those things and it's probably easier to look at um endurance and strength in terms of programming um of course you can have flexibility throughout your program but with periodization where that comes in or long-term planning um you can set yourself up for success and by planning different blocks you try to potentiate or improve the outcome of the next cycle of training so what I mean by that is if your 12 weeks out maybe the first four to six weeks you might do predominantly a bit more of an endurance focus or I should say for the individual it's really about focusing on their weaknesses and that's the best way to improve um yet improve their performance but you might focus a bit more on endurance um it was like a block periodization and then go to a bit more um more specific stuff and when I talk about um tactical stuff that's to do with your pacing um that was what I was that was what I was gonna ask you because uh you know when you say physical tactical technical and psychological three of those are intuitive to me tactical I was like what's the difference between tactical and technical so now I understand I understand your framework better now so pacing so talk a little bit about that about that component how do you how do you work on the tactical components what are what are those pieces and yeah so basically um I think there's a few different things going on so for myself um I um uh well I'll take a step back also um for say psychological stuff I like to do if you're going into unknown stuff I like to do lots of ten minute sets if you can tolerate that psychologically um because then you get experience and you're comfortable with that experience basically um and so you know where you're at so recently um I was able to get a PB in long cycle and basically what I would do is every week I would do like a 10 minute set or worked up to doing a 10-minute set and last you know every week yeah so well yeah so basically um I've sort of condensed my training a lot I've gone from um last year before um last year yeah I think last year before the world championships in Ireland I was training uh maybe six sessions a week there were two to three hours long and then uh because of uni I had to cut it down so I was like sort of four sessions of 90 minutes and then um this year has been I've condensed it a bit more and um basically if you're training a bit shorter you'll up the intensity now I should say I've been doing this for quite a long time so I'm quite comfortable doing 10 minute sets with 32s um if if you're new to it that's like the worst thing to do and I've kind of got to about MS level just doing interval training because I didn't like doing longer sets and I'd have to really build myself up psychologically that would be if somebody tried to do the 32s for 10 minutes without building to it that would kind of be like your experience with your sprinting work right where you were like I'm tired of getting beat by 16 year olds so I'm going to go after this this super aggressive training protocol and it's a recipe to get hurt if you don't if you don't potentially eat appropriately yeah exactly and I think you also have to be flexible now you can come away from it so kettlebell sport training is all about consistency so you just have to be consistent so if your training is too hard and you're not consistent that's the worst so basically it has to be something that you can do and it is achievable of course we have our bad bad days and our good days so for myself if I you know I might have an eight or a 10 minute set planned or if it's sub maximum load I might do 11 or 12 minutes in the past James would be like that is the worst program for me but when I've got like half an hour to train you know that's that's a pretty good pretty good approach but basically what I would do is you know no stress if it's not if I'm not feeling it today then I just switch to interval training um so I might do say six minutes set or even like a four minutes set and then I would just add a few minutes and just go to like a 30 seconds on minute on uh 30 seconds off minute off something like that like a one to one or a two to one I work to rest ratio and just finish that off so that would also give me a bit more of an incentive because maybe if I added a few more intervals on them like oh if I can get to eight minutes so that's just sort of some of the mind games I use for myself um it's not necessarily appropriate for everyone um so but basically coming back again so with the pacing so once uh so um I like to use like repetitions in reserve um and I use it in a different way so you've probably heard of repetitions in reserve but I kind of use it in the opposite for GS so yeah yeah it's uh it's uh for people that aren't familiar I am familiar with it but it's from it largely comes from the bodybuilding world right I like where it's well that's where I'm most familiar with it where you're gonna leave a couple of reps in the tank essentially and you're never going to fully tax out the muscle uh to its to its full capacity the the theory behind it being that you'll be able to recover from that session uh better and be able to come back and train that same muscle group uh sooner than if you than if you trained every muscle group to its complete uh taxation point every time right is that is that the is that you're understanding as well yeah so it's just a way of measuring um load or um yeah it's almost like a way of auto-regulating as well like um so that might change day to day and some people also use an RPE scale which was originally designed um for endurance training with random perceived exertion we're throwing it we're throwing around a lot a lot of acronyms from the strengthening uh no it's fine I just want to make sure that for people that aren't initiated to the to the acronyms that they know what that means RPE means rate of perceived exertion exactly and how tough do you subjectively evaluate something to be exactly and um so that's also worth recording um so you can have what's called internal and external load um well I'm going off on a tangent here um that's great and this is awesome I love this so much I think Eddie would tell you so say for your internal load you would have like your heart right right whereas your external load would be your RPM or your volume um and a really cool way to look at your training load um especially if you monitor training load is so some people walk it just weekly volume and just kilograms I lifted X kilos this week um you can actually times your RPE by your training um load and that and that sometimes is gives you I personally think a slightly better view of this training stress so why that is interesting that's an interesting theory I like that so if I was to do like 60 reps long cycle with 32s versus 120 with 16s like you know 60 reps with 32s is significantly harder than 120 with 16s or whatever you want to look at but it's the same it's analogous volume but the output the difficulty of the output is significantly different it's a way to capture what we're talking like you know the non the non-linear the non-linear difficulty increase as you go up and load right that's the that's a good way to quantify that and then it also starts to capture some of those uh subjective lifestyle factors right because I'm even on a given day especially right now with COVID and all the craziness that's going on uh one day you know doing doing 24 you know double 24s long cycle for me and saying you know I'm going to do five a five-minute set at eight RPMs that might be fairly easy right I might rate that as a four on perceived exertion but say I have a stressful day at work and I've got to take care of my kids and then my kid got sent home because he's sick you know etc I do that exact same workout the next week and it might be a six or a seven just because of lifestyle factors and you start capturing some of that if you look at load plus or load and um RPE in some mathematical fashion yeah yeah so that that's just a nice thing and I should say with RP if you want to look it up you might find um so like a 10-point scale or you might find something that's like uh 200 or something like that so just with the bigger one a rich in originally you would sort of or sorry a 21 or something like that you would basically add a zero and that would represent your heart rate and again it's designed around more aerobic style stuff and then it was sort of um simplified just as an easier way to communicate it and there's a one to 10 scale um and like five is hard and in aerobic training um for the the normal modes of training such as like an aerobic mode like a running or a cycling typically around a five would be your aerobic threshold which is just a fancy way or I should clarify because there's different thresholds and different names um the aerobic threshold would be the first point if I'm taking your blood lactate um there's sort of a noticeable increase and then um seven out of ten is about your anaerobic threshold which is where that um there's a greater spike and um you would have a greater onset of sort of blood lactate so there's a more rapid increase there um and another threshold which I think is really important for GS is uh what's called maximum um lactate steady state which is basically the most lactate that you can tolerate and continue to work in a steady state yep and that's why that lactate threshold so yeah that's uh yeah we all know that feeling and uh that's also what separates in endurance performance are elite guys so basically they all have great VO2 maxes but the guy who can tolerate more anaerobic um uh work uh and continue to work in a steady state it will typically do better um that's um that's like Lance Armstrong in cycling for for you know to take it outside of GS sport right when he was crushing everyone it was always in the hills it was always in the elps that he beat everyone because he could just suffer longer than everyone else yeah that of course he had the incredible VO2 max but all of the elite you know cyclists had that elite VO2 max but his lactate threshold is uh from what I've heard just you know off the charts I mean he's the right end of the bell curve as far as lactate threshold yeah absolutely and um if we bring it back sort of um so you've you've got your repetitions in reserve in your RPE for strength training um and so some people would say one rep in reserve or nine RPE two reps in reserve or eight RPE so that's kind of um um what so I've sort of taken that and um I find this personally really useful as a coach um all it so what I might give someone as a training program is I might go six minutes set um instead of my constant ten minutes sets but like six minutes set and then just a maximum sprint at the end so I know if if they're like two reps under that um what what I'm asking for they're two reps under that the RPM RPM that I've prescribed throughout the the session I know that that's a very difficult set for them whereas if they're like five or it depends on the exercise four reps over maybe in a jerk they might be like eight or ten reps because they can sort of dig out a bit of a sprint at the end um then I go okay assuming all things are even next week you will tolerate one or two minutes extra so that's a nice way to use uh repetitions in reserve in the opposite way because you um if that makes sense so you're you're like six reps above your um the set RPM yeah by keeping reps in the by keeping reps in reserve you can then go longer essentially right if we're going at sub-maximal pace and keeping some reps in reserve each minute we can then bank we can bank that and then cash in and at the end of the set is that is that the right way of understanding exactly so so for myself going back to this um tactical um approach and there's other ways to do this but this is just something I like to experiment with things on myself before I subject any of my so I probably wouldn't give people as many ten minutes sets as I am happy to do but um so uh I would swear at you if you gave me as many time as you gave me one a week I would be swearing at you a lot I'd still do them but I'd be swearing at you so yeah I was probably doing you know three a week one for jerk one for long cycle one for snatch or at least attempting to um but uh what I would do say with uh long cycle is if I did six RPM and then you know a 10 or 12 reps then I would go um so nine minutes then plus 10 or 12 then I would go eight minutes plus a sprint then work down and then two I sort of find a point um where I can reach the absolute maximum and I was doing this with jerk and I sort of found um with 30s and I sort of found when I'd start sprinting uh well not sprinting just increasing my RPM at a certain point I'd sort of get diminishing returns or actually negative returns so if like I'd personally quite like and it's also how I've trained myself to cruise and then sprint at the end whereas some people like to just find that point then just try to maintain it the whole way through I personally find it you're preaching to the converted that's what I coach my athletes all the time find your cruising speed and then at the end we we go we go the last minute last minute 90 seconds right we sprint yeah exactly and and so basically what yeah and what I've done is basically just go you know 30 seconds sprint 90 a minute sprint 30 90 bit of a so if you repeat that regularly you also um you get an idea of sort of how reliable you are with your training but also um or how you know if there's a huge amount of variance and obviously we do have day-to-day variance but um yeah you sort of get an idea of like maybe I'm feeling good which is all like when you weigh yourself there's always like a couple of kilos difference either side uh especially if you like me and might just indulge one day and maybe not so much the other day I'm like oh I try not to stress too much about it or if you like me and you weigh in at 115 kilos every day you know that there's going to be variance just based on size of frame oh exactly exactly so there's just variance in day-to-day um and um so you kind of find that in performance there is variance as well um and but basically um yeah if you're cruising I personally find like the training stress is a lot more tolerant uh tolerable I should say so if you do most of your sets um or competition sets of course we do interval training and different other things it's a cruising pace and then you can sprint at the end you've kind of got two mindsets and it's sort of like you know working your technique and being in the moment um and then you've got this kind of sprinting being in the moment whereas I feel like if you push um a bit too hard and now everyone is different but a lot of times people sort of it starts to make that psychological thing or training regularly at that RPM you know is quite hard so I got 70 reps um uh a couple of weeks ago and I personally don't like doing seven RPM for long cycle I did six RPM and then I just sprinted or increase my pace for all that sprint in the last minute and so do you ever do do you ever do variable pace training where you go seven one minute six the next minute seven one minute six the next minute or things like you know the up down the up down variability on on pacing to work on that tactical pacing component have you ever tried that? yeah so I love that stuff um so I sort of also like what what you've probably also picking up your eyes look at you know different sports signs things and I try to apply that to GS and so you know in a lot of interval training you'll have a passive recovery or an active recovery and sort of what you're describing there is almost like you've got a um uh you've got your work component and then you've got your active recovery so if you're doing 12 RPM jerk and then you do six RPM jerk you know you're getting you're allowing yourself to recover provided you have a good rack position you know if you don't have a good rack position you might actually be training your um you know a different quality that um is maybe quite useful um getting you used to different things and I think um movement variability and being able to perform things in a variety of different ways it is really important and also giving yourself different contexts and constraints is also really important because um things often don't work out so I like to compete as much as possible because you always learn something and there's always just some sort of factor that's a bit weird um and you sort of learned just something about it maybe it's someone watching how other people go about competition or you know um traveling or different kettlebells just learning to adapt to them all that sort of stuff but um the the other thing that I quite like is say um with say this active recovery kind of model is um changing the exercise and it would of course depend on your phase of training so we generally move more general to specific in um in that sort of periodization and it also depends on when your competitions are in which competition you want to peak for and things like that but you might say do snatches and then go to swings for a minute and you might do that if you're looking to emphasize the grip or you might do a swing and snatch um and a snatch in combination and then you're just changing the stimulus um but maybe you're looking to get a certain amount of time um and just by manipulating those variables um you'll have a sort of different training outcome but basically if you were to do 16 up you and snatch and then you go 16 up you and I'll clean you've sort of given yourself an active recovery um and it's also good to to use that stuff to break up the monotony of training for some people um but that also might allow you to get eight minutes on one side as opposed to if you just did snatch you might get um you know four minutes or something so just uh it's just a thing you can throw into the mix to just um play around with different variables and hopefully I should say with or what's fantastic about kettlebell sport is you can really see where the programming comes out again you have your day-to-day variability and um different things can get in the way of your performance but really you've you've got your test which is your competition and you can do other tests but then you sort of retest 12 week later and provided you are consistent again consistency is king provided your consistent you can assess that programming be like that worked for me that didn't work for me and then you can sort of refine it um and you know maybe that's you need to train more or maybe you need to work on your technique or your flexibility or your um your numbers in snatch are really low when you do biathlon compared to your snatch only numbers so maybe there's a strategy um which might be being more aerobically fit or just doing jerks before your snatch sets you know you might try out something to see if that improves your performance and then as a coach you can go okay they followed what I said and we built up a nice picture so you sort of like your own experiment in a way um you're collecting data points and the more data points you get over time you know again as you said with consistency being the key uh because otherwise you don't know if you don't know if the variable was consistency or not so um so staying consistent is huge because then you can just you can you can test different variables uh over time and you just can get sharper and sharper I think with uh with what you're with what you're working on that's I love that and I think also a really important thing with training is a lot of people beat themselves up if they don't do what's on the paper but they often don't appreciate little variables have huge uh impacts on um their performance so like maybe you had a harder session a couple of days ago or you know we talk about day-to-day stress but there's also lots of other things that might be time of day um if you're changing things around um what you've eaten um different other stress stresses or order of exercise or if you don't pay attention to your rests between sets um you know if if you rest 15 minutes versus five minutes that might have a huge impact on your performance but you might not be aware of that um I'm sure at the time you're aware of it but like when you put it down on paper you might not be like uh you know my performance is actually decreased you know you might get bummed out about it but really you've made that session a lot harder just by manipulating those little variables um yeah so I think that's an important consideration for a lot of people yeah absolutely that's huge I mean and then you start I mean you touched on it a little bit before you know you're talking about the different energy systems you know you have your three basic energy systems aerobic anaerobic and then ATPCP right and depending on which of those you're tapping into at what percentage for the total time you know that you're exercising it's going to really affect uh how you recover how much lactate you produce how glycolytic you are uh you know and and based on that that's gonna affect your nutrition pretty significantly as well so I think one of the big areas that a lot of that a lot of athletes miss especially right now in the US is uh carbohydrates and understanding how carbohydrate fueling correlates to the type and intensity of the training that you're doing because we've been conditioned at least in the US I don't know how consistent the messaging has been in in uh australia but uh that that carbs are the enemy right and that carbs make you fat and that carbs make you store fat and you shouldn't eat them at certain times and you know et cetera et cetera and there's so there's so much misunderstanding and misinformation about carbohydrates um how do you how do you work on you know periodization of carbohydrates and uh periodization of nutrition I guess in general but and how that correlates to uh the energy systems that you're designing for and that you're working with yeah um I think yeah I should say you probably couldn't say me noting then when you're saying all of that um I don't think we get it quite as much uh that much of a strong messaging here but it's definitely a big factor um so um again fortunately at uni I've been exposed to all um probably with that um a big person that's responsible for a lot of that messaging is uh a guy by the name of Tim Noakes who was originally a big carbohydrate advocate and then um so we've got one of his students um uh John Holy who's a professor at our university um and he's kind of uh they i guess they kind of battle a bit in in that respect um but basically um we've there've a few people at uni have run a lot of experiments where they will look at fat adaption and um also carbohydrate loading versus um different substrate or different energy fuel availability and its effect on performance um so yeah I think if you want to go um uh just carbohydrate or low carbohydrate like a keto diet or a low carbohydrate diet basically we need carbohydrates to fuel that anaerobic energy system so if you don't have carbohydrates to fuel that system um you will eventually not use it and your body will reverse some of those adaptations so various enzymes that you use to power or give you that extra gear will get removed so I mean you still have some carbohydrates but um yeah so if you have a long term on a high fat diet you will probably not have that extra anaerobic gear which might make your training sessions feel a bit nicer potentially um but you won't have uh probably as much energy turnover which is really what sports about to to get the maximum output and you might feel like you don't have that extra gear when you only have fat available you have to use your aerobic system which drives greater adaptations within that system so there is potentially a case to do that at certain times so this is where like like you mentioned carbohydrate periodization or um you know um some classic stuff that bodybuilders use like um high carbohydrates part of the week low carbohydrates are the part of the week or carbs so yeah um yeah exactly um that's the word I was looking for but um also you can do some of your training in a low glycogen state or a um refueled state so typically um so I've been lucky enough to test quite a few people um uh particularly mainly snatch um on with the metabolic carts and basically everyone uses carbohydrates so the higher intensity you exercise the more you use carbohydrates because they're just sort of a faster energy um fuel um so I sometimes use the analogy of like creating um it's kind of like your rocket fuel um carbohydrates are like petrol and then um fat's kind of like your uh diesel or something like that I'm not sure I use I use I use the petroleum I actually I actually use a very similar but I say imagine that you're a you're a hybrid car that has electric gas and then you put a noss booster on it you know electric is electric is your aerobic system because it produces the least amount of byproduct and then and then gases your anaerobic system because it starts producing exhaust and then the ATP CP is the noss because it gives you that that that rocket boost but it looks it lasts a very little period of time it takes a long time to replenish and it produces a lot of byproduct like that's that's that's great that's the almost identical analogy that that I use with my athletes so that's much more up to date though I think that's all definitely still at us that's okay absolutely so um I should say and we want our kettlebell training to be quality right so we typically I think um you don't really want to use that um unless it's a lighter session and you're going for you know I'd say particularly like a lighter bell that you're doing higher reps um and you're trying to make that harder so for example if you had say you know your back's not feeling great um maybe you want to do snatch with gloves or um at a really light way and you do a higher RPM and just to make it harder you've changed um your internal environment by not consuming carbohydrates or something like that or um maybe you've depleted your carbohydrates with previous training and you haven't refueled so all these different factors will affect things so basically if you train in that lower carbohydrate state you will get um a stronger like molecular signaling for mitochondrial biogenesis or just kind of basically you have a central adaptation which would be like say your heart or your brain things like that and then you've got stuff that happens in the muscle but the problem with that is you can probably train harder when you have carbohydrates which you probably sort of you'll get the same sort of signaling and and stuff like that um or basically really when you look at it on that sort of larger scale stuff like we we said before um you'll have better performance so I would suggest practically um or for myself sometimes um when I run I would either run at the end of my session or on a uh day where I haven't in much carbohydrates or run in the morning because I'm trying to make my running as hard as possible because I want my heart and um body to adapt with as little dosage of training as possible because I'm an absolutely rubbish runner now because I've got all my injuries so I don't even run I shuffle basically so if if I if I train or run at the end of my session if you have muscle damage that reduces your running economy if I've depleted my carbohydrate stores to some extent that will um help with uh you know um maybe help with some adaptations and and things like that whereas if I want a quality GS session especially if you're not doing like most like if you're not doing like six GS sessions a week I think you just really want them to be quality um six or more I'd say so if you do three or four sessions you really want them to be high quality so you want to be fueled and ready to go because you don't want to sort of feel like you get to a point where you just can't push you know what I mean yeah um and you don't want you a technique to sort of fold down because you want to reinforce um good technique within the context of where you are in that set I guess absolutely hopefully that answers the question not um well it's always a framework right that's the that's the thing that makes it fun and makes it hard as well as because it's there's the the answer is almost always well it depends because we're you know we're just talking about how to optimize carbohydrates as it relates to your training but what if you're trying to change body composition because you need to get down to a lower weight class or because that's your primary goal in GS is just a mechanism for you to reduce your body composition well then how do you train in a in a in a calorie depleted state right you know if you're on a nine a nine hundred kilo calorie deficit you know uh because you're you're you're trying to aggressively lose weight for a period of six weeks uh how is that going to affect right there there's so many there's so many factors to to then tie into that how do you time your carbohydrates uh etc let's yeah and I think when it comes back to that um period uh periodization that we were talking about before we want to implement or try to to find the minimum effective dose so if you've got 12 weeks I mean hopefully you've got a couple a bit longer than six weeks um to try and dial in um all that sort of stuff but I would say um encouraging people to walk more increase their incidental activity um is is a really big one so most people have pedometers on their phone and things like that um so if you can if someone has a relatively sedentary job and they train hard maybe they're only getting a few thousand steps a day but by upping that to ten thousand a day it provided they have time or I think during um um you know where we're kind of locked down in Melbourne Australia whereas the rest of Australia is kind of not and they're free to pretty much do whatever they want um so I would say my um my incidental activity has gone uh it's so low right now compared to what it has been in the past because I would typically working in a gym walk around 20,000 steps lift weights just you know like picking up kettlebells all day or just like loading bars and things like that whereas these days I'm just at home and I'll sort of train myself but I've trained people online um and do things like that so I my energy expenditure is gone down quite a bit so I think you've got to find what works and is most sustainable for someone and again aim for that minimum effective dose and then over time it will change which is a bit sad because you sort of think you've nailed it once and this all goes it also goes for kettlebell training you know maybe you do three sessions a week um you do six minutes to ten minutes of all you meet session and then that produces great results but then you stop getting great results so you really need to up it but I think um learning about your body and yeah it's a tricky one like um lose so I guess also you've got your acute and chronic weight loss which um I constantly hear about um in America people who have a wrestling background do the most ridiculous acute weight loss um I actually did my I actually did my thesis on uh for for my undergrad on on male male patterned eating disorder behavior um and and the etiology of that of that of that of that disease and that's one of the one of the populations that was most evident in was uh wrestlers and former wrestlers because because of that so it's yeah they do some crazy uh wheat manipulation techniques well yeah that's I mean that's really interesting I know for myself um so uh through this time I've sort of gone from being about 83 ish kilos to like I'm around 86 um and typically in Australia we'd compete under 85 um or I would compete under 85 but I've sort of haven't bothered to cut any weight this year but even for myself who I feel like I have a relatively healthy relationship with food um I should say um my wife is uh sort of uh clinical nutritionist and things like that so I usually only give broad stroke advice when it comes to nutrition as it pertains to performance kind of like eat carbohydrates, eat protein blah blah blah whereas um um she she gives more nuanced advice but um yeah I know for myself as like I said I have probably a healthy relationship with food I'd say um just cutting weight it you know if I if I'm trying to lose a little bit of weight um it does do your head in a bit but I would say for performance um I think you need to be strategic in what you're aiming for if you're aiming for a rank I feel like at least in Australia you typically will aim to beat yourself and you'll aim to get a certain rank and if you come into a lot of weight class that that will typically be advantageous but if um if you lose too much weight it's time to finish finishing returns like you said before right there's a point of diminishing returns where if you're if you're not within you know five five-ish kilos depending on I guess depending on how high in the weight you know in the weight categories you are but like if you're not if you're not walking around within you know a handful of kilos of of where you need to be your the cut is probably going to diminish your uh performance on that day especially now where most things are online and you have to weigh in the day of the competition and you don't even have a day to replenish fluids or you know you can't do a water manipulation it it just has to be a legitimate you know uh that's yeah that's your weight you know in some of these you actually have to weigh in in the video before you start lifting so it's like literally your weight at the time that you that you lifted yeah absolutely and you're in your clothes and things like that as well I know um when I went to Latvia for the IUKL World Championships a couple of years ago um we we left Australia and I was around 8380 I think I was 84 kilos so I'm like pretty comfortable with my weight typically um I sort of you know try to eat predominantly whole food um spread time like protein evenly throughout the day and um depending on if you know carbohydrate timing can be a thing but I don't really don't stress too much about I just try to eat lots of vegetables and fruit and some good protein sources etc um but yeah so I left Australia about 84 kilos and we were there about a week beforehand I didn't have a scale um I think we we went and weighed myself at some different scales a couple of times but then I went in for the weigh in and I weighed 80 kilos because I was paranoid about what I was eating and my performance really suffered my long cycle was okay but my biathlon was um pretty rubbish so it does really have um quite an impact on your performance um I should say the long cycle is a following day so I actually wonder even um when I weighed in I you know I got to eat lots of food and the following day I still kept eating and then the so we had the biathlon and the long cycle and even with the fatigue of the um biathlon my long cycle wasn't too far off what I was hoping to do was you were able to replenish some of the some of those calories that you needed but also it's worth noting that they use a ural bell so when you come to um let's say um technical or tactical sometimes using the bells that uh uh you know that that competition uses so that's another important factor that I see some people get really upset that they didn't particularly their snatch goes down the gogler or um I'm not sure if that's a use that uh it's not it's not it I'm I'm familiar with it because of playing rugby and I've met enough Aussies that I know what that means it's not that I've heard in a long time okay yeah so um yeah so you get a marked reduction in your performance but um it could just be the hand the window is a bit different maybe it's like a slightly thicker or thinner bell you can't maneuver your hand around so this is where um something like movement variability or being able to perform um the snatch and adapt to your equipment makes a big difference so um typically now in Australia we use kettlebell kings but in the past we'd predominantly use iron edge kettlebells so we have a kettlebell kings they also also use kettlebell kings as well I just got a brand new one today so uh awesome um I actually think I did as well um so it's pretty cool actually um we got prizes for the the nationals in Australia and they're kind enough to give out a bell um so I think I might have got a kettlebell um so um that's very exciting uh first time I've won anything really so that's that's great but um you know obviously like the first time I used those bells was at the nationals in Aubrey um in Australia sorry um and yeah my snatch went down although I did the bells did feel quite nice I should say um but yeah some bells a bit narrower and like sorry last year in Ireland they had a almost like a thinner handle um and a bigger window and a lot of people really struggled with that um but I was lucky enough that I've got a few we've got like three brands of kettlebells at the gym and one of the brands um that I sometimes train with has a larger um window and a narrower handle and um some of the women that train in the gym really like those bells um and but it really felt like like that kettlebell so I felt like I had a strategic vantage because I trained with that kettlebell um so yeah well wherever possible if you can have the the equipment that is used and also sometimes using different kettlebells might actually be like a novel stimulus to your body to drive some sort of adaptation because it's a slightly different grip or you know you have to think about things in a slightly different way. A slightly different ballistics or even just the placebo effect of you know on the day of training to know that you've picked up a bell like that before uh you know makes makes uh make does make a difference absolutely yeah absolutely like like you said there also the center of mass can be a little bit different if it's a bit more displaced um then that makes a big difference um whereas when it's closer um to to the handle it will feel different and that's kind of what's nice about the kettlebell king's ones is it is definitely closer and the ural bells are well uh like that as well whereas I think now the iron edge kind of do that but previously there they'll just be kind of evenly distributed so the center of mass would be a bit further away so it would feel different um so these are all little factors that affect your performance and some people can get really upset but there might be a reason that they haven't been able to identify or articulate that's really hurt their performance as opposed to their preparation so I think there's some there's some factors there and also if you can just sort of be forgiving on yourself I think that's important with kettlebell sport because it can be brutal and if you don't get your rank one or whatever rank you know it's not the end of the world just sort of have to be consistent and once you've been consistent long enough especially once you can establish a good rack position I think that you you numbers will eventually come good I think absolutely well James thank you so much I actually have to let you go because I've got to go coach my team here at the bottom of the hour I've got I've got 20 20 intervals 30 seconds on 30 seconds off of of long cycle where we're going to be pushing lactake thresholds I don't think the team quite knows what they have in store because we've never done these short sprints before but that's the intention behind tonight's training so we're going to we're going to get some of it here at the bottom of the hour so well thanks so much for having me on um hopefully that was coherent um oh absolutely I thought it was great man awesome thanks to that mate really appreciate it thank you for coming on I really appreciate it James and I love I love all the work that you're doing how do people follow you um you're you're at you're at GS science on Instagram right yeah and on Facebook I actually kind of post different things more of like my blog posts I guess on the Facebook one and also have a website GScience.com I think I probably should know but yeah so they're probably the main places that you can sort of um see what I'm doing I guess and and if I may I think I think once you finish your doctorate you need to change your Instagram handle to uh doctor kettlebell or doctor swing oh yeah well we'll see how we go maybe I'll start another one that's um anyway thanks thanks so much for that mate I'll um I'll talk to you soon I appreciate it thank you so much James have a good night cheers bye but thanks for listening to this episode of the platform podcast I'm Jordan Kunde-Wright if you have a question please email me at twincities kettlebellclub at gmail.com follow us on instagram and facebook at twincities kettlebellclub on twitter at tckbclub online at twincities kettlebellclub club.com and please help us grow our reach and give us a review on apple podcasts spotify stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts until next time