Episode #43: Interview with Nick Tumminello – Strength Coach, Author and Founder of PerformanceU

September 08, 2021

Nick Tumminello is highly sought after coach and educator who is rapidly establishing himself as a leader and innovator in the field of human performance training. As a coach, Nick works in the trenches testing, developing and refining his techniques with clients and athletes of all ages and levels. He currently trains professional athletes from the NFL, MILS and UFC, as well as top ranked rock climbers, equestrians and physique competitors.

In this podcast we discuss:

Scheduling strength and skill practices
Basic Movement patterns
Awareness vs Ability
Movements vs Exercises
Load vs Explode
Monitoring Recovery by asking questions
Understanding performance goals
and more!

To learn more about Nick, be sure to visit his website @ http://nicktumminello.com

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with Nick Tumminello

Interview with Nick Tumminello – Strength Coach, Author and Founder of PerformanceU

Corey Beasley [00:00:00]: Hey guys, is Corey Beasley with fight camp conditioning. I’m on the phone here with Nick Tumminello. Nick, how are you?

Nick Tumminello [00:00:06]:I’m doing good. I appreciate you having me and I appreciate what you’re doing to here to give people some good information from a lot of fitness presenters and strength and conditioning coaches.

Corey Beasley [00:00:16]: Absolutely. I think people these days are constantly looking for good information and when guys like yourself say it, I think it just helps everybody streamline and make a lot less mistakes. So Nick, just for everybody that’s listening give everybody a little 2 cents about who you are and what you do?

Nick Tumminello [00:00:40]:Yeah, I’ll try to be brief about know it because everybody’s not listening to hear about who I am. They’re want to hear about things that they can utilize in their training today. So long story short, I am a trainer who went from a full time trainer who trained other trainers part-time to more of a full time and trainer of trainers who still trains clients of all levels. Part time. I owned a gym in Baltimore, Maryland, which is where I’m from for 10 years. I’m currently 36 at the age of 36. At the time of this interview, I started a personal trainer as soon as I could get certified at 18 is really the only job I’ve ever known. So owned a gym starting at before my 21st birthday with a business partner, Mark Spataro trained clients of all levels. And during that time in Baltimore, I currently live in South Florida here now. We moved here a few years ago. But during that time, the early two thousands, I want to say around 2002, 2003, I started working with a mixed martial arts fighter in Baltimore named John Rollo. At the time it was called an NHB, which meant no holds barred. It was not legal in many States. We used to have to go up to New Jersey to have to have fights. And we were a Hanzo Gracie camp. So worked with John for a few years. John was no spring chicken. He was in his early thirties at the time dealt with a few injuries and then he got out of the fight game and as UFC was getting more popular with the tough show, the ultimate fighter in the mid-2000, he grew his school from called ground control, which is under Hanzo. And I was the strength conditioning coach. So at that time I got to work with lots of different fighters from professional Muay Thai to boxing. John actually has his own pro MMA show in Baltimore called Shogun Fights is twice a year. It’s about 5,000 people a year. I think he’s the one is like 14 event coming up soon. So he also has a boxing event called Bangtime boxing. So we had pro boxers, pro Muay Thai fighters obviously lots of grapplers and pro MMA fighters. And I was this conditioning coach for all of them. And so that’s that, we had at one point in thousand 11, if I remember correctly two of our guys fought in for team USA. The USA Muay Thai team fought nettle borough Scotland. So we had a really good program as well as an MMA program.

Corey Beasley [00:03:14]: Very cool. So from your experience, Nick, some new guy walks through the door and coach says Hey Nick, I want you guys to be working together. What are some of the things that you do right off the bat to kind of access, get an idea who this kid is, where his strengths and weaknesses are? Where do you kind of start there?

Nick Tumminello [00:03:35]:Well, the first thing I would say I’m as formalized it with testing whether it be assessments or moving screening or fitness testing that a lot of strength and conditioning coaches do. I’m not saying they’re bad, I’m not Downing anybody who use it. I’m just saying that’s not really how I approached things. The first thing I’m going to do is I’m just going to see, well what is your practice schedule like? Because the first thing I need to do if we’re in our, if we’re going to do any sort of strength conditioning and there really is no in season, preseason and off season for fighters. You basically, you don’t have a fight scheduled or you have a fight scheduled. That’s pretty much how it is. We always want to try to keep those fighters who are pros, who really want to make it a career. Because there’s really no money in that game unless you can get to the highest levels. They always have to stay not far out of at a fight shape. So that changes things a little bit. But in regards to how hard we hit them and how often. But the first thing is what are your sparring days? What are your hard training days? Because we’re going to work around that. The first thing is to make sure the strength conditioning doesn’t make you fatigued or sore so much, where it interferes with your skill practice. That’s number one. In regards to what’s the first things I do in regards to exercises? Well, I’m just going to watch how they move, but without a formalized procedure. Basically my exercise prescription is I look at the basic movements, show me how you squat, show me how you’d do a deadlift. And if it looks like crap, well, we have a little criteria, we just call it awareness versus ability. Is this something that you lack the awareness of what I’m looking for and therefore I’ll coach him up, Hey, keep your back like this. Keep your knees like this. Can you show me this? Can you hold this? Can you do that? Basically, can you get into this position versus that position? And if they can’t do it, if they can’t do it, we go, okay, fine. That exercise isn’t built for you? I don’t buy into the philosophy that there is one way humans should move, this is functional, this is dysfunctional. All the evidence that we see in this is reveals that what we’re really a lot of times labeled as dysfunctional or whatever terms is really more likely variations of normal. And it’s beyond the scope of this to get into challenging a lot of these concepts in corrective this and that. And the other thing. It’s such a open up the deep waters there. It’s beyond the scope of this to do that. But let me just say this, I try to fit exercises to the individual fighter football player, mom or dad and anybody else. I don’t try to fit individuals to exercises. There is no exercise that I feel anybody must do in order to have a good comprehensive strength conditioning program. And I honor that we all have different structures based on our size and shape and structure determines function. Therefore, even though we all have the same basic parts, arms, legs, and the same basic movement actions we Locomote, we rotate, we push, we pull, we change and raise and lower our center of mass or change levels. That’s based off of JC Santana’s four pillars of human movement. The way we do them based on the way our parts are put together, there’s lots of variation. Just like a minivan in a mini cooper, both brand new, perfectly functioning. We’ll drive differently. Same basic parts, same driving functions, but they’ll drive differently based on how those parts are put together. Humans are the same way. Therefore, my programs are variable.

Corey Beasley [00:07:17]: So as you’re going to go on through that, those first initial basic movements, and again, if you wouldn’t mind repeating them, and we talked about locomotion, we talked about rotation, push, pole and then level changes or up and changing level changes?

Nick Tumminello [00:07:32]: That’s JC Santana’s four pillars of human JC Santana not to be mistaken with the guitar player who has been a strength coach for many years. And someone who’s been a big influence on me and I’m also trained many, many fighters and a very great resource when it comes to mixed martial arts training and training.

Corey Beasley [00:07:56]: I think it’s good to have those categories or those pillars to kind of work off of it. Because I think a lot of times people get married to a piece of equipment versus just using movement patterns and out there either a barbell guy or a Kettlebell guy or whatever it may be. And I think that that’s the only tool they need to use when in reality there’s just a lot of variations that we can use within those pillars.

Nick Tumminello [00:08:20]:Yeah, well a lot of people say they’re talking about movements’ mood, train movements, not muscles we hear that. But what they’re really talking about is exercises. So if some, and here’s what I mean. Movement is a broader category than exercises. And here’s what I mean. If I’ve bent over, let’s say you and I were having a discussion, we were just chatting outside of a Starbucks and I dropped my water bottle and I bent over to pick it up. But the way I’ve bent over to pick it up was the exact manner you’d seen me perform an RDL. I kept the arch in the back and I hinged over in this real awkward position. As soon as I stood up, you’d look at me and you go, Nick, why are you moving? What the hell is wrong with you your back hurt, you know? So that’s the difference between movement and exercises. So it doesn’t look weird if I have a barbell or dumbbells in my hand, but it looks weird if I’m just moving normally inefficiently. So I think people mistake exercise technique when you’re dealing with heavy loads for, Oh, that is what dictates good movement. Anytime you bend at your hips. No sir. Lots of more variability. So that’s why I liked those pillars because hip pinching is one, one permutation of a gazillion, of being able to raise and lower your center of mass. Now, some are more efficient than others depending on low in positioning and whatnot. But that’s, again, going back to what I was saying, there’s a lot of variability there.

Corey Beasley [00:09:52]: Yeah, absolutely. Now, Nick, if you in the past when you did have fighters in, like you said you have to keep them in decent shape. You have to take into account our skill practices and make sure that you’re making them better, but not for kicking them to the point where it affects their skill training. What were some of the ways, I guess got the typically training two times a day, sometimes three. How often did you typically see your guys that you were working with?

Nick Tumminello [00:10:22]:Well that’s a great question. I’m going to answer it directly, but I want to say this. The biggest challenge that I had and I know a lot of trainers are going to have this challenge as well, is finding times to work with the fighters where they’re not just blasted the day before or later that day. Because a lot of times this is that kind of, there’s that old school kind of go hard, go home kind of prove that you’re tough kind of mentality and even when the coaches know better and try to tell them to relax, sometimes these fighters themselves go too hard and they don’t know how to back off sometimes. So that was a big challenge is not as much how often I work with them, but basically saying, look, if you’re going hard every day here, like I don’t even want to work with you. You’re not even leaving any room to help you out because you don’t have any recovery and in here. So normally the first thing is to impose the importance of recovery. Not necessarily with the fighter, but with the coaches because just like a position coach in football. But the running back coach only works for the running backs. Well, in MMA you have a striking coach, you got to Jiu Jitsu coach. Maybe you have a wrestling coach, maybe you have a boxing coach. And every coach thinks their stuff is the most important. And it’s like college professors, everybody gives you, nobody considers what the other coach did with you. They all just try to impose as much on you. So by the time that fight are just so overwhelming and fatigued there’s not a lot of room for the strength conditioning coach to come in and get them through a hard conditioning program. So that’s a big problem and it is still even an issue with me, even though the people who ran the school understood that. But it’s hard to get everybody on the same page. Everybody’s got an ego. So if you can get everybody on the same page but a similar page where there’s somewhat of a consistent schedule where you have like a one hard sparring day and then maybe another day where you’d go hard but it’s not as hard and you have days that you’re going to prepare for and you have like little lighter grappling days or timing drills and things like that. Timing, sparring. Well those are the days we do strength conditioning and obviously we’ll I would normally try to work with the fighters if I could. Twice a week if I could, one day we would work on more explosive type stuff. We just called it a load explode model. One day would work on more explosive type stuff. One day we’d work on more strength type stuff. It was pretty basic.

Corey Beasley [00:12:54]: Now from your experience in working with those guys and monitoring their recovery and dealing with all the different strengths, skill and all that type of stuff that they’re doing, what were some of the signs that you would see from your guys that they were cook or they’re over trained or overreaching or that type of stuff. Were there any things there like red flags that you’d see consistently?

Nick Tumminello [00:13:20]:Well, let me say one thing real quick. Just to clarify what I said about that load explode model. That was you when didn’t have a fight. If you had a flight we would train you twice a week or we’d back to once a week depending on if you’re at your other training belt up and you sparred more often or we would do more of a metabolic conditioning type stuff in there. And we can get into the details of why we did that and what was the thought process behind it. So in regards to what were the signs, again, this is where I’m probably a lot less technical, a lot of people I didn’t use heart rate variability or anything. I’m not saying that’s not useful types of things. Just not something I ever really did. What I always tried to do, and I do this with clients across the board is first off, during a warm-up I ask the fighters a lot of questions and it’s always, how you’re feeling. And I use just basic stuff like that in different ways. And then during the warm-up I can kind of get a good idea we’d like to give them some sort of unique challenge just kind of see where they’re at. Let me give you an example. Like sometimes we’d ask them to do this has a dynamic warm-up. Let’s say we’d ask them to do Jumping jacks, but like do jumping jacks in the reverse. So instead of like opening your hands and legs at the same time, your hands close while your legs open, right? And that’s not that hard for someone to pick up within a few reps if it’s a new thing, but it demands just a bit of coordination and thinking, but if they just can’t seem to put that together, somebody who I know is capable of doing those things then that may be a sign, Hey, they’re not necessarily there today a little less coordinated. Maybe they’re tired, they just can’t seem to put that together. That’s one simple little thing just see how focused they are. Also, we built progression into the programs, right? So I always ask you regardless of whether you use an undulating programming approach, you always want to do more than you did previously. So I always had not only did I like to have a theme with workouts and I do this with regular clients as well, I would like to have some performance goal in each workout. So for example, maybe we have a main lift, maybe its trap bar lift on your strength day. And yeah, we will be keep that consistent for maybe four or five weeks. And I’ll ask you to go the other more weight with the same reps or more reps with the same weight that you did previously. Yes, I know that’s linear. I’m well aware the research on linear versus undulating, most of the rest of the program was undulating, but it’s hard if you undulate everything. It’s hard for the athlete to have something that they can look back on and go, yeah, I did more if you’re constantly changing and sets and reps all the time. So I like to have one performance exercise or one main exercise. Not to be confused with how power lifters do main exercise. I just mean a focus for about four or five weeks to get better at each time. So if they came in and then consistently who had a hard time improving then obviously when we have progress built in that we know more likely that I know the programs is viable. So what else are they doing in a lifestyle that’s preventing these adaptions, these positive adaptions from happening? That’s normally a good sign as well.

Corey Beasley [00:16:39]: I mean, that’s just common simple stuff that people can implement and watch for to make sure that they’re not doing too much, you know? And it’s just to make progress, right?

Nick Tumminello [00:16:50]:Yeah. That is the ultimate criteria of evaluation. And like I said, there’s all kinds of things that people can use and every time any trainers try to get into arguments about using this or that or not using this and that, everybody comes with the same thing. Well it works for me. Okay, great that’s fine. But my thing is before we even go down that road my opinion, this is more of a programming thing across the board. What I always say is before you look for solutions outside of general training principals and good program design first and make sure the solution is not within the scope of using general exercise principles and program design. And what I mean is, instead of trying to do all these special breathing drills and hook them up to some apparatus and using this variability and that all that stuff is great. But a lot of these things ha are questionable. And obviously we have to look at each claim at a time, one versus the other. But all these things that are highly debatable to me, I’d rather back away just to look, let me see what it leads focus on the stuff that we know works, not the things that sound pretty good. And we still have a lot of arguments and things and I’ve never found that the need to go out to go beyond those. If you really pay attention to programming and use some basic common sense and try that first, that’s why I’m not really into a lot of these things. It’s just I haven’t seen, there’s no perceived need for me. Because I feel like we utilize basic principles better than a lot of people do.

Corey Beasley [00:18:27]: Now, Nick, you mentioned it briefly before, but a lot of guys are there’s a need for mobility work. There’s need for strength work, power development as well as conditioning. So as you were working with your fighters how did some of those workouts change depending on the need or the fight date or the competition date that they had?

Nick Tumminello [00:18:51]:Yeah. So I’m happy to just to give it to exactly like I said, so basically if you have somebody who’s a pro who’s you think is on the verge of maybe you know, getting a chance to really break into a higher level fight game. And let me give you a great example of what I mean. Let’s say you have a fighter who’s kind of coming up in the ranks, but they still have a few more fights to get under their belt. And by the way one of the things that Joe Silva told me personally cause all of his fighters say, Oh, tell me as Joe what you know, what you can do to get into the UFC and whatever. He said, look, everybody wants to try to get into the UFC as fast as possible. This is my advice is to wait as long as possible to get up as many fights as possible. That way when you get in there, you can stay there. We have a lot more experience. So that’s from Joe Silva’s mouth himself. So but that being said, let’s say you’re not necessarily in the UFC, but you have a few fights away from a title fight, but the person who is getting ready to fight for a belt just got hurt three weeks out of the fight in their camp. Well now they need to find somebody to fill that and you’re in their way class. That’s why they need to be not far out of fight shape, because that could be your springboard. Now, next thing you know, you’ve got you witness fight, you got a belt. So when everybody starts looking at you. So that’s what I mean by that. So in regards to the training, ideally we would train twice a week. Like I said, one day was power focus, one day was strength focused and the power focus day, it was all about explosion different things jumps, dynamic ballistic type exercises. We would do things like speed band presses and no, I don’t mean like power lifters do with a barbell. I mean with like a set of resistance bands where you’re standing up and they’re pulling you backwards and you’re blasting your arms pushing as fast as possible against the bands, like 10 seconds at a clip, things like that. Throwing medicine balls, things like that. The strength stuff was devious just basically under six reps things. And then in regards to conditioning, we would do one of those times where we would do some sort of conditioning. Which always for the most part, pretty general things like 300 yard shuttles, Aerodyne, bike, sprints things like that. I basically tried to divide conditioning into two categories, upper body dominant, lower body dominant. So the battling ropes and barbell complexes would be upper body dominant conditioning. Most of the condition that we’re familiar with sled drags, Air dyne bikes, that’s lower body conditioning. So we would do things like that to maintain some level. Also, I was a really big fan and I still am of for when it comes to the strength and power, doing things like triceps and quad caps to maintain a level of a good level of work capacity. While you’re doing it. So it’s not just do heavy trap bar a set of three heavy trapped bar and then stand there and rest for four minutes. Yes, I know that maximizes strength, but these aren’t power lifters. These are fighters who are using weight training to get a little bit stronger. So we’re going to improve strength but not necessarily maximize strength because then I might have them do a set one-arm pushups three on each side and then go over and climb the climbing rope up 10 feet down 10 feet. And then take 60 seconds break or whatever. Sure. It’s been probably three minutes, but that time since they finished the trap bar lift, so they’re ready to hit that again, do at five rounds of that, that maintains a pretty good solid base of work capacity as well. So with strength training without maximizing strength. So everything has a plus and minus. Just want to make that clear with people. So I understand that doing that is not going to maybe get that last 5% that the power lifter would care about, but it still makes them stronger than they were. So I’m willing to sacrifice that last 10% to build that work capacity. So then we always had a level of work capacity. And then when we went into a camp, then ideally if I had them twice a week we would do a contrast training day. So we would basically take load explode and put them together. So if people aren’t familiar with contrast training or not familiar with how I’m describing it, because sometimes we have different terms, it just you do a heavy loaded exercise and then an explosive unloaded or lightly loaded equivalent. So that would be trap bars deadlifts, trap bar, squats, whatever you want to call it. Paired with you step out of the bar and then you do squat jumps for height, something like that, push up or bench press, dumbbell press heavy and then pair that with like medicine ball, chest pass, something like that. And then the other day we would do conditioning circuits. Basically this would be based on the length of your fight in the round. So if you’re an amateur and you’re doing three minute rounds, then we would give you three minutes circuits and we would try to divide up the movements that you would do again on something at MMA. Here we had different ones for Muay Thai of course. But we would just say, okay, you have something where you level changing something where you’re doing asymmetrics where you’re kind of squeezing somebody, maybe you’re just holding them tight in your guard or whatever. Obviously something that keeps your arms up. And then maybe some general things. So we might do a circuit where you did. And we would try to pick a bunch of exercises. It might be six exercises and maybe seven or eight exercises, but something that can be done if you’re constantly hustling within about a three minute range. If it’s a three minute round, if it’s a five minute rounds for a pro then you’re going to have more exercises and we would make sure that you could do all the exercises if you were really hustling in about four minutes and 20 seconds, obviously as their conditioning wasn’t as good. Sometimes it take them six, seven minutes to finish the circuit at first because they had to rest longer. And as your work capacity gets better in recovery, you don’t have to rest as much and they can knock it out in about four and a half minutes or so. And then what we would do with a fill up that last 30 or 40 seconds of the round was we would either I was there or I’d have somebody in a similar way class there, either holding mitts or grapple and then we would just do not live, but we would do something like, okay, we just do pummeling drills for the last 40 seconds or have them just throw knees. And that way they didn’t get into the mindset, well, I’m just exercising here. I don’t necessarily have to be thinking about things. So what as they were fatigued, then we got them back into the kind of some sort of fight mindset where they had to throw punches or someone was taping them and they had to just move sprawl. We would do just kind of mild situational drills, situational sparkles drills, but not hard. So if you had five minute rounds you were playing for championship flight, then we would build you up to better do that five rounds through a week out of your fight with a minute break. Ideally we’d like to have you do that eight, 10 weeks out of a fight and gradually progress it. We reduce your rests and things. Sometimes we don’t have that option sometimes you have to do it in six weeks and you really got to blast somebody. And yes, I will be honest with you, those are the sessions that a lot of times people puke within them. I didn’t go for that. It’s not that, that mentality, but that is just hard and that’s what happens sometimes. It’s very difficult. And sometimes we don’t have the ideal situation, but the idea there was to give the fighter the same amount of conditioning that they needed to go the distance in that flight without the bumps and bruises of trying to get in shape through sparring so that way. And they sparred, they could focus more on their technique, the tactical timing type stuff, and at least they know going into the flight that Hey, if I lose, it’s not going to be because of conditioning. It’s because I got out fodder and somebody just happened to catch me with a good shot. But it’s not because of conditioning. So they’ll know they can go the distance.

Corey Beasley [00:27:25]: And that breeds a lot of confidence knowing that she had the ability to do that.

Nick Tumminello [00:27:29]:Yes. So it’s not mental toughness, its confidence. They, they’re definitely tough. It’s the confidence.

Corey Beasley [00:27:37]: Nick. The last couple of weeks of that training camp you know, guys are cutting weight a lot of times they have a lot of social media or other engagements that they have to be a part of. As you’re kind of federated into a fight or a competition or tournament, something like that. What are some of the things that tweaked or changed end that camp?

Nick Tumminello [00:28:01]:Well, I want to clarify one thing. Most of the guys that I worked with were not the guys who are the highest level UFC guys that were doing all this media stuff. I mean, I’ve had guys do Bulldog and showXC and things like that. Yeah. one of the limitations that we had at our school in Baltimore being Henzo school is that once you started getting to the point where you were going you were getting ready to go into the next level, you normally had to leave our school and go up to Henzo more and train with some more guy, other pro guys who were much more schooled. So, I’m not saying I worked with bad guys, but I’m saying we were kind of that baseline stuff, which is really cool the homegrown and now the whole sport has grown. So the quality of fighters at every level has improved. But I don’t have this list of like, eight UFC names that everybody knows.

Corey Beasley [00:28:53]: And to be really honest, most of the guys who are sitting are probably in that local circuit. They’re building up, improving their skillset and trying to make it. So I think its fine. It’s completely relatable to what they need.

Nick Tumminello [00:29:04]:I just being clear here so everybody knows I’m don’t want to think I’m misrepresenting myself or anything. But you ask a great question about the weight cutting because it seems like you’re going in different directions, one time you’re tearing your body down and then you’re also trying to improve your conditioning and all these things. So again, what is realistic, what’s ideal and what normally happens are two different things. Ideal situation is if you have a disciplined fighter and you have plenty of time to prep for the fight and full camp. Obviously the heavier the fighter, what I mean heavier is relative to above their own their fight weight not heavyweight fighters. But the further they are above their fight weight, the longer the camp we want to start them training. So it’s a more gradual process. It’s pretty difficult to try to really pull them down quick while you’re getting them in shape. While they’re cutting calories and things like that, that’s always an individual process. And it’s just kind of brutal with sometimes when somebody really trying to cut some weight fast and try to get in shape at the same time. If that’s the case, I really try to stay hard on them on plenty of protein. And then I probably don’t hit them as hard. I probably knock him down to conditioning once a week and I’ll probably talk to the coaches and just say, look, give this guy one good sparring week, I mean one good sparring session a week and then just do a lot more timing and skill type stuff because you know, you’re going to kill this dude. He’s cutting down so much weight at the same time. He’s not going to have anything left by the time he steps in the ring or the cage or whatever the environment is sliding in.

Corey Beasley [00:30:57]: I mean, it’s just good, simple information. A lot of it seems like common sense, but I think a lot of times people get overwhelmed with all the different factors and they haven’t maybe don’t have the experience with themselves, learn how to cut and what works for them and what doesn’t and all that type of stuff. That’s good to hear.

Nick Tumminello [00:31:14]:Because we’re in the information age and I certainly agree that it is good to have your own opinion on things and we all want to hear like unique information, not reinventing the wheel but providing your own brand of wheels. But unfortunately what happens is just using, as you said, common sense and common sense is relative to what you believe. But I would just say using basic exercise concepts, principles, things like that, somehow that’s become less acceptable. Because we’ve bred this, we’ve been sold, this mean that you have to do all these other things which are somewhat fringy and highly questionable all with some special evaluation criteria and something that like this. And we have this whole idea that, well, I’m going to be looked down upon if I don’t use this special method of this are these special exercises or whatever. And that’s really unfortunate to me because all of those things are pretty questionable to a different varying degrees. Like I basically am just trying to say it’s quite okay just to stick with the things that we know work that are universal. I’m trying to bring basic principle-based conditioning is what I call it. And training back to strength and conditioning coaches and trainers.

Corey Beasley [00:32:38]: And I think it’s important because just like with the skill world, like you were talking about earlier, there’s so many different things that they’re working on every week, there’s boxing, Muay Thai , there’s wrestling, Jiu Jitsu, there’s a million things that these guys are putting in their brain. To complicate the strength and conditioning side only makes matters worse, right?

Nick Tumminello [00:33:00]:Yeah. It does that for them. But on the conditioning coaches’ perspective, it also kind of gives us paralysis by analysis. It gives us an identity crisis, because we start thinking that we got to be trying to play physical try to play the corrective therapy game. And then we have to, sometimes we even get scared to do our job because we’ve been sold some sort of orthopedic assessment that’s not based on solid science that tells us we’re reinforcing dysfunctions. And there’s no general definition, object definition of even what that is. You know what I mean? So that’s what I’m saying is we’re sold all these fringy type things that they’re often said in the field, but when you look at the evidence, what those come from, it’s really is about a shaky as a Bosu ball. So it seem to add a lot more confusion than they help. And I don’t mind somebody doing playing that game with 5% of the session, but when you start making, you don’t know how is it to make the session about the assessment or the evaluation criteria. Some people call them screens and then not enough strength conditioning gets done. Or you tell a fighter, Oh, well you’ve got this and you can’t do this. Then they start thinking the broken and there’s all kinds of, again, I don’t want to go down. It’s beyond the scope to go into that. But I’m going to focus what we know works universal principles and just manipulating those variables and focus on individuality. That’s what really all these confusion is about. It’s about using the principle of individuality and specificity.

Corey Beasley [00:34:38]: I think that’s valuable information and I think it’s great to hear again from someone else and hopefully some of the people listening will take some of that stuff to heart. And kind of refined some of their programs and get rid of some of the fluff.

Nick Tumminello [00:34:54]:Whatever people take from this, if they get something that they thought benefited them that great, and if it gets them to think and they disagree and they think I’m full of crap and they start investigating and it makes them more curious to look, then I hope they do that as well. And follow the evidence where it leads and I’m confident you’ll end up coming to similar conclusions. I just want to say one thing real quick, real quick. Just make sure that people understand. When I say evidence, I mean the scientific evidence. I don’t mean with some expert says or some book, some school of thought.

Corey Beasley [00:35:34]: But Nick, if people want to reach out and learn more about what you’re doing, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Nick Tumminello [00:35:45]:Just through my website. Two ways to get to my website. Nick Tumminello .com. It’s kind of hard to spell my last name. So you can go to performanceU.net. That’s the letter U for performance university performanceU, the letter U.net. Both of them will take you to my site, but I’m pretty easy to find man online and do quick shameless plug I have a new book coming out. At the end of this month on human kinetics and my second book is called building muscle and performance and put a lot of hard work into it and to make it a great resource on programming and on exercises and workout programs. And it’s very much will carry over to a lot of the things that we talked about today.

Corey Beasley [00:36:30]: Very cool. Well we’ll definitely check that out guys. I’ll put all the links and stuff like that down below this interview so you guys can just click over. But Nick, thanks again for joining us. I appreciate your time.

Nick Tumminello [00:36:40]:I appreciate all you’re doing for the field. And thanks for your time as well. Of course.

Episode Transcript

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with Nick Tumminello

Interview with Nick Tumminello – Strength Coach, Author and Founder of PerformanceU

Corey Beasley [00:00:00]: Hey guys, is Corey Beasley with fight camp conditioning. I’m on the phone here with Nick Tumminello. Nick, how are you?

Nick Tumminello [00:00:06]:I’m doing good. I appreciate you having me and I appreciate what you’re doing to here to give people some good information from a lot of fitness presenters and strength and conditioning coaches.

Nick Tumminello [00:00:40]:Yeah, I’ll try to be brief about know it because everybody’s not listening to hear about who I am. They’re want to hear about things that they can utilize in their training today. So long story short, I am a trainer who went from a full time trainer who trained other trainers part-time to more of a full time and trainer of trainers who still trains clients of all levels. Part time. I owned a gym in Baltimore, Maryland, which is where I’m from for 10 years. I’m currently 36 at the age of 36. At the time of this interview, I started a personal trainer as soon as I could get certified at 18 is really the only job I’ve ever known. So owned a gym starting at before my 21st birthday with a business partner, Mark Spataro trained clients of all levels. And during that time in Baltimore, I currently live in South Florida here now. We moved here a few years ago. But during that time, the early two thousands, I want to say around 2002, 2003, I started working with a mixed martial arts fighter in Baltimore named John Rollo. At the time it was called an NHB, which meant no holds barred. It was not legal in many States. We used to have to go up to New Jersey to have to have fights. And we were a Hanzo Gracie camp. So worked with John for a few years. John was no spring chicken. He was in his early thirties at the time dealt with a few injuries and then he got out of the fight game and as UFC was getting more popular with the tough show, the ultimate fighter in the mid-2000, he grew his school from called ground control, which is under Hanzo. And I was the strength conditioning coach. So at that time I got to work with lots of different fighters from professional Muay Thai to boxing. John actually has his own pro MMA show in Baltimore called Shogun Fights is twice a year. It’s about 5,000 people a year. I think he’s the one is like 14 event coming up soon. So he also has a boxing event called Bangtime boxing. So we had pro boxers, pro Muay Thai fighters obviously lots of grapplers and pro MMA fighters. And I was this conditioning coach for all of them. And so that’s that, we had at one point in thousand 11, if I remember correctly two of our guys fought in for team USA. The USA Muay Thai team fought nettle borough Scotland. So we had a really good program as well as an MMA program.

Nick Tumminello [00:03:35]:Well, the first thing I would say I’m as formalized it with testing whether it be assessments or moving screening or fitness testing that a lot of strength and conditioning coaches do. I’m not saying they’re bad, I’m not Downing anybody who use it. I’m just saying that’s not really how I approached things. The first thing I’m going to do is I’m just going to see, well what is your practice schedule like? Because the first thing I need to do if we’re in our, if we’re going to do any sort of strength conditioning and there really is no in season, preseason and off season for fighters. You basically, you don’t have a fight scheduled or you have a fight scheduled. That’s pretty much how it is. We always want to try to keep those fighters who are pros, who really want to make it a career. Because there’s really no money in that game unless you can get to the highest levels. They always have to stay not far out of at a fight shape. So that changes things a little bit. But in regards to how hard we hit them and how often. But the first thing is what are your sparring days? What are your hard training days? Because we’re going to work around that. The first thing is to make sure the strength conditioning doesn’t make you fatigued or sore so much, where it interferes with your skill practice. That’s number one. In regards to what’s the first things I do in regards to exercises? Well, I’m just going to watch how they move, but without a formalized procedure. Basically my exercise prescription is I look at the basic movements, show me how you squat, show me how you’d do a deadlift. And if it looks like crap, well, we have a little criteria, we just call it awareness versus ability. Is this something that you lack the awareness of what I’m looking for and therefore I’ll coach him up, Hey, keep your back like this. Keep your knees like this. Can you show me this? Can you hold this? Can you do that? Basically, can you get into this position versus that position? And if they can’t do it, if they can’t do it, we go, okay, fine. That exercise isn’t built for you? I don’t buy into the philosophy that there is one way humans should move, this is functional, this is dysfunctional. All the evidence that we see in this is reveals that what we’re really a lot of times labeled as dysfunctional or whatever terms is really more likely variations of normal. And it’s beyond the scope of this to get into challenging a lot of these concepts in corrective this and that. And the other thing. It’s such a open up the deep waters there. It’s beyond the scope of this to do that. But let me just say this, I try to fit exercises to the individual fighter football player, mom or dad and anybody else. I don’t try to fit individuals to exercises. There is no exercise that I feel anybody must do in order to have a good comprehensive strength conditioning program. And I honor that we all have different structures based on our size and shape and structure determines function. Therefore, even though we all have the same basic parts, arms, legs, and the same basic movement actions we Locomote, we rotate, we push, we pull, we change and raise and lower our center of mass or change levels. That’s based off of JC Santana’s four pillars of human movement. The way we do them based on the way our parts are put together, there’s lots of variation. Just like a minivan in a mini cooper, both brand new, perfectly functioning. We’ll drive differently. Same basic parts, same driving functions, but they’ll drive differently based on how those parts are put together. Humans are the same way. Therefore, my programs are variable.

Nick Tumminello [00:07:32]: That’s JC Santana’s four pillars of human JC Santana not to be mistaken with the guitar player who has been a strength coach for many years. And someone who’s been a big influence on me and I’m also trained many, many fighters and a very great resource when it comes to mixed martial arts training and training.

Nick Tumminello [00:08:20]:Yeah, well a lot of people say they’re talking about movements’ mood, train movements, not muscles we hear that. But what they’re really talking about is exercises. So if some, and here’s what I mean. Movement is a broader category than exercises. And here’s what I mean. If I’ve bent over, let’s say you and I were having a discussion, we were just chatting outside of a Starbucks and I dropped my water bottle and I bent over to pick it up. But the way I’ve bent over to pick it up was the exact manner you’d seen me perform an RDL. I kept the arch in the back and I hinged over in this real awkward position. As soon as I stood up, you’d look at me and you go, Nick, why are you moving? What the hell is wrong with you your back hurt, you know? So that’s the difference between movement and exercises. So it doesn’t look weird if I have a barbell or dumbbells in my hand, but it looks weird if I’m just moving normally inefficiently. So I think people mistake exercise technique when you’re dealing with heavy loads for, Oh, that is what dictates good movement. Anytime you bend at your hips. No sir. Lots of more variability. So that’s why I liked those pillars because hip pinching is one, one permutation of a gazillion, of being able to raise and lower your center of mass. Now, some are more efficient than others depending on low in positioning and whatnot. But that’s, again, going back to what I was saying, there’s a lot of variability there.

Nick Tumminello [00:10:22]:Well that’s a great question. I’m going to answer it directly, but I want to say this. The biggest challenge that I had and I know a lot of trainers are going to have this challenge as well, is finding times to work with the fighters where they’re not just blasted the day before or later that day. Because a lot of times this is that kind of, there’s that old school kind of go hard, go home kind of prove that you’re tough kind of mentality and even when the coaches know better and try to tell them to relax, sometimes these fighters themselves go too hard and they don’t know how to back off sometimes. So that was a big challenge is not as much how often I work with them, but basically saying, look, if you’re going hard every day here, like I don’t even want to work with you. You’re not even leaving any room to help you out because you don’t have any recovery and in here. So normally the first thing is to impose the importance of recovery. Not necessarily with the fighter, but with the coaches because just like a position coach in football. But the running back coach only works for the running backs. Well, in MMA you have a striking coach, you got to Jiu Jitsu coach. Maybe you have a wrestling coach, maybe you have a boxing coach. And every coach thinks their stuff is the most important. And it’s like college professors, everybody gives you, nobody considers what the other coach did with you. They all just try to impose as much on you. So by the time that fight are just so overwhelming and fatigued there’s not a lot of room for the strength conditioning coach to come in and get them through a hard conditioning program. So that’s a big problem and it is still even an issue with me, even though the people who ran the school understood that. But it’s hard to get everybody on the same page. Everybody’s got an ego. So if you can get everybody on the same page but a similar page where there’s somewhat of a consistent schedule where you have like a one hard sparring day and then maybe another day where you’d go hard but it’s not as hard and you have days that you’re going to prepare for and you have like little lighter grappling days or timing drills and things like that. Timing, sparring. Well those are the days we do strength conditioning and obviously we’ll I would normally try to work with the fighters if I could. Twice a week if I could, one day we would work on more explosive type stuff. We just called it a load explode model. One day would work on more explosive type stuff. One day we’d work on more strength type stuff. It was pretty basic.

Nick Tumminello [00:13:20]:Well, let me say one thing real quick. Just to clarify what I said about that load explode model. That was you when didn’t have a fight. If you had a flight we would train you twice a week or we’d back to once a week depending on if you’re at your other training belt up and you sparred more often or we would do more of a metabolic conditioning type stuff in there. And we can get into the details of why we did that and what was the thought process behind it. So in regards to what were the signs, again, this is where I’m probably a lot less technical, a lot of people I didn’t use heart rate variability or anything. I’m not saying that’s not useful types of things. Just not something I ever really did. What I always tried to do, and I do this with clients across the board is first off, during a warm-up I ask the fighters a lot of questions and it’s always, how you’re feeling. And I use just basic stuff like that in different ways. And then during the warm-up I can kind of get a good idea we’d like to give them some sort of unique challenge just kind of see where they’re at. Let me give you an example. Like sometimes we’d ask them to do this has a dynamic warm-up. Let’s say we’d ask them to do Jumping jacks, but like do jumping jacks in the reverse. So instead of like opening your hands and legs at the same time, your hands close while your legs open, right? And that’s not that hard for someone to pick up within a few reps if it’s a new thing, but it demands just a bit of coordination and thinking, but if they just can’t seem to put that together, somebody who I know is capable of doing those things then that may be a sign, Hey, they’re not necessarily there today a little less coordinated. Maybe they’re tired, they just can’t seem to put that together. That’s one simple little thing just see how focused they are. Also, we built progression into the programs, right? So I always ask you regardless of whether you use an undulating programming approach, you always want to do more than you did previously. So I always had not only did I like to have a theme with workouts and I do this with regular clients as well, I would like to have some performance goal in each workout. So for example, maybe we have a main lift, maybe its trap bar lift on your strength day. And yeah, we will be keep that consistent for maybe four or five weeks. And I’ll ask you to go the other more weight with the same reps or more reps with the same weight that you did previously. Yes, I know that’s linear. I’m well aware the research on linear versus undulating, most of the rest of the program was undulating, but it’s hard if you undulate everything. It’s hard for the athlete to have something that they can look back on and go, yeah, I did more if you’re constantly changing and sets and reps all the time. So I like to have one performance exercise or one main exercise. Not to be confused with how power lifters do main exercise. I just mean a focus for about four or five weeks to get better at each time. So if they came in and then consistently who had a hard time improving then obviously when we have progress built in that we know more likely that I know the programs is viable. So what else are they doing in a lifestyle that’s preventing these adaptions, these positive adaptions from happening? That’s normally a good sign as well.

Nick Tumminello [00:16:50]:Yeah. That is the ultimate criteria of evaluation. And like I said, there’s all kinds of things that people can use and every time any trainers try to get into arguments about using this or that or not using this and that, everybody comes with the same thing. Well it works for me. Okay, great that’s fine. But my thing is before we even go down that road my opinion, this is more of a programming thing across the board. What I always say is before you look for solutions outside of general training principals and good program design first and make sure the solution is not within the scope of using general exercise principles and program design. And what I mean is, instead of trying to do all these special breathing drills and hook them up to some apparatus and using this variability and that all that stuff is great. But a lot of these things ha are questionable. And obviously we have to look at each claim at a time, one versus the other. But all these things that are highly debatable to me, I’d rather back away just to look, let me see what it leads focus on the stuff that we know works, not the things that sound pretty good. And we still have a lot of arguments and things and I’ve never found that the need to go out to go beyond those. If you really pay attention to programming and use some basic common sense and try that first, that’s why I’m not really into a lot of these things. It’s just I haven’t seen, there’s no perceived need for me. Because I feel like we utilize basic principles better than a lot of people do.

Nick Tumminello [00:18:51]:Yeah. So I’m happy to just to give it to exactly like I said, so basically if you have somebody who’s a pro who’s you think is on the verge of maybe you know, getting a chance to really break into a higher level fight game. And let me give you a great example of what I mean. Let’s say you have a fighter who’s kind of coming up in the ranks, but they still have a few more fights to get under their belt. And by the way one of the things that Joe Silva told me personally cause all of his fighters say, Oh, tell me as Joe what you know, what you can do to get into the UFC and whatever. He said, look, everybody wants to try to get into the UFC as fast as possible. This is my advice is to wait as long as possible to get up as many fights as possible. That way when you get in there, you can stay there. We have a lot more experience. So that’s from Joe Silva’s mouth himself. So but that being said, let’s say you’re not necessarily in the UFC, but you have a few fights away from a title fight, but the person who is getting ready to fight for a belt just got hurt three weeks out of the fight in their camp. Well now they need to find somebody to fill that and you’re in their way class. That’s why they need to be not far out of fight shape, because that could be your springboard. Now, next thing you know, you’ve got you witness fight, you got a belt. So when everybody starts looking at you. So that’s what I mean by that. So in regards to the training, ideally we would train twice a week. Like I said, one day was power focus, one day was strength focused and the power focus day, it was all about explosion different things jumps, dynamic ballistic type exercises. We would do things like speed band presses and no, I don’t mean like power lifters do with a barbell. I mean with like a set of resistance bands where you’re standing up and they’re pulling you backwards and you’re blasting your arms pushing as fast as possible against the bands, like 10 seconds at a clip, things like that. Throwing medicine balls, things like that. The strength stuff was devious just basically under six reps things. And then in regards to conditioning, we would do one of those times where we would do some sort of conditioning. Which always for the most part, pretty general things like 300 yard shuttles, Aerodyne, bike, sprints things like that. I basically tried to divide conditioning into two categories, upper body dominant, lower body dominant. So the battling ropes and barbell complexes would be upper body dominant conditioning. Most of the condition that we’re familiar with sled drags, Air dyne bikes, that’s lower body conditioning. So we would do things like that to maintain some level. Also, I was a really big fan and I still am of for when it comes to the strength and power, doing things like triceps and quad caps to maintain a level of a good level of work capacity. While you’re doing it. So it’s not just do heavy trap bar a set of three heavy trapped bar and then stand there and rest for four minutes. Yes, I know that maximizes strength, but these aren’t power lifters. These are fighters who are using weight training to get a little bit stronger. So we’re going to improve strength but not necessarily maximize strength because then I might have them do a set one-arm pushups three on each side and then go over and climb the climbing rope up 10 feet down 10 feet. And then take 60 seconds break or whatever. Sure. It’s been probably three minutes, but that time since they finished the trap bar lift, so they’re ready to hit that again, do at five rounds of that, that maintains a pretty good solid base of work capacity as well. So with strength training without maximizing strength. So everything has a plus and minus. Just want to make that clear with people. So I understand that doing that is not going to maybe get that last 5% that the power lifter would care about, but it still makes them stronger than they were. So I’m willing to sacrifice that last 10% to build that work capacity. So then we always had a level of work capacity. And then when we went into a camp, then ideally if I had them twice a week we would do a contrast training day. So we would basically take load explode and put them together. So if people aren’t familiar with contrast training or not familiar with how I’m describing it, because sometimes we have different terms, it just you do a heavy loaded exercise and then an explosive unloaded or lightly loaded equivalent. So that would be trap bars deadlifts, trap bar, squats, whatever you want to call it. Paired with you step out of the bar and then you do squat jumps for height, something like that, push up or bench press, dumbbell press heavy and then pair that with like medicine ball, chest pass, something like that. And then the other day we would do conditioning circuits. Basically this would be based on the length of your fight in the round. So if you’re an amateur and you’re doing three minute rounds, then we would give you three minutes circuits and we would try to divide up the movements that you would do again on something at MMA. Here we had different ones for Muay Thai of course. But we would just say, okay, you have something where you level changing something where you’re doing asymmetrics where you’re kind of squeezing somebody, maybe you’re just holding them tight in your guard or whatever. Obviously something that keeps your arms up. And then maybe some general things. So we might do a circuit where you did. And we would try to pick a bunch of exercises. It might be six exercises and maybe seven or eight exercises, but something that can be done if you’re constantly hustling within about a three minute range. If it’s a three minute round, if it’s a five minute rounds for a pro then you’re going to have more exercises and we would make sure that you could do all the exercises if you were really hustling in about four minutes and 20 seconds, obviously as their conditioning wasn’t as good. Sometimes it take them six, seven minutes to finish the circuit at first because they had to rest longer. And as your work capacity gets better in recovery, you don’t have to rest as much and they can knock it out in about four and a half minutes or so. And then what we would do with a fill up that last 30 or 40 seconds of the round was we would either I was there or I’d have somebody in a similar way class there, either holding mitts or grapple and then we would just do not live, but we would do something like, okay, we just do pummeling drills for the last 40 seconds or have them just throw knees. And that way they didn’t get into the mindset, well, I’m just exercising here. I don’t necessarily have to be thinking about things. So what as they were fatigued, then we got them back into the kind of some sort of fight mindset where they had to throw punches or someone was taping them and they had to just move sprawl. We would do just kind of mild situational drills, situational sparkles drills, but not hard. So if you had five minute rounds you were playing for championship flight, then we would build you up to better do that five rounds through a week out of your fight with a minute break. Ideally we’d like to have you do that eight, 10 weeks out of a fight and gradually progress it. We reduce your rests and things. Sometimes we don’t have that option sometimes you have to do it in six weeks and you really got to blast somebody. And yes, I will be honest with you, those are the sessions that a lot of times people puke within them. I didn’t go for that. It’s not that, that mentality, but that is just hard and that’s what happens sometimes. It’s very difficult. And sometimes we don’t have the ideal situation, but the idea there was to give the fighter the same amount of conditioning that they needed to go the distance in that flight without the bumps and bruises of trying to get in shape through sparring so that way. And they sparred, they could focus more on their technique, the tactical timing type stuff, and at least they know going into the flight that Hey, if I lose, it’s not going to be because of conditioning. It’s because I got out fodder and somebody just happened to catch me with a good shot. But it’s not because of conditioning. So they’ll know they can go the distance.

Corey Beasley [00:27:25]: And that breeds a lot of confidence knowing that she had the ability to do that.

Nick Tumminello [00:27:29]:Yes. So it’s not mental toughness, its confidence. They, they’re definitely tough. It’s the confidence.

Nick Tumminello [00:28:01]:Well, I want to clarify one thing. Most of the guys that I worked with were not the guys who are the highest level UFC guys that were doing all this media stuff. I mean, I’ve had guys do Bulldog and showXC and things like that. Yeah. one of the limitations that we had at our school in Baltimore being Henzo school is that once you started getting to the point where you were going you were getting ready to go into the next level, you normally had to leave our school and go up to Henzo more and train with some more guy, other pro guys who were much more schooled. So, I’m not saying I worked with bad guys, but I’m saying we were kind of that baseline stuff, which is really cool the homegrown and now the whole sport has grown. So the quality of fighters at every level has improved. But I don’t have this list of like, eight UFC names that everybody knows.

Nick Tumminello [00:29:04]:I just being clear here so everybody knows I’m don’t want to think I’m misrepresenting myself or anything. But you ask a great question about the weight cutting because it seems like you’re going in different directions, one time you’re tearing your body down and then you’re also trying to improve your conditioning and all these things. So again, what is realistic, what’s ideal and what normally happens are two different things. Ideal situation is if you have a disciplined fighter and you have plenty of time to prep for the fight and full camp. Obviously the heavier the fighter, what I mean heavier is relative to above their own their fight weight not heavyweight fighters. But the further they are above their fight weight, the longer the camp we want to start them training. So it’s a more gradual process. It’s pretty difficult to try to really pull them down quick while you’re getting them in shape. While they’re cutting calories and things like that, that’s always an individual process. And it’s just kind of brutal with sometimes when somebody really trying to cut some weight fast and try to get in shape at the same time. If that’s the case, I really try to stay hard on them on plenty of protein. And then I probably don’t hit them as hard. I probably knock him down to conditioning once a week and I’ll probably talk to the coaches and just say, look, give this guy one good sparring week, I mean one good sparring session a week and then just do a lot more timing and skill type stuff because you know, you’re going to kill this dude. He’s cutting down so much weight at the same time. He’s not going to have anything left by the time he steps in the ring or the cage or whatever the environment is sliding in.

Nick Tumminello [00:31:14]:Because we’re in the information age and I certainly agree that it is good to have your own opinion on things and we all want to hear like unique information, not reinventing the wheel but providing your own brand of wheels. But unfortunately what happens is just using, as you said, common sense and common sense is relative to what you believe. But I would just say using basic exercise concepts, principles, things like that, somehow that’s become less acceptable. Because we’ve bred this, we’ve been sold, this mean that you have to do all these other things which are somewhat fringy and highly questionable all with some special evaluation criteria and something that like this. And we have this whole idea that, well, I’m going to be looked down upon if I don’t use this special method of this are these special exercises or whatever. And that’s really unfortunate to me because all of those things are pretty questionable to a different varying degrees. Like I basically am just trying to say it’s quite okay just to stick with the things that we know work that are universal. I’m trying to bring basic principle-based conditioning is what I call it. And training back to strength and conditioning coaches and trainers.

Nick Tumminello [00:33:00]:Yeah. It does that for them. But on the conditioning coaches’ perspective, it also kind of gives us paralysis by analysis. It gives us an identity crisis, because we start thinking that we got to be trying to play physical try to play the corrective therapy game. And then we have to, sometimes we even get scared to do our job because we’ve been sold some sort of orthopedic assessment that’s not based on solid science that tells us we’re reinforcing dysfunctions. And there’s no general definition, object definition of even what that is. You know what I mean? So that’s what I’m saying is we’re sold all these fringy type things that they’re often said in the field, but when you look at the evidence, what those come from, it’s really is about a shaky as a Bosu ball. So it seem to add a lot more confusion than they help. And I don’t mind somebody doing playing that game with 5% of the session, but when you start making, you don’t know how is it to make the session about the assessment or the evaluation criteria. Some people call them screens and then not enough strength conditioning gets done. Or you tell a fighter, Oh, well you’ve got this and you can’t do this. Then they start thinking the broken and there’s all kinds of, again, I don’t want to go down. It’s beyond the scope to go into that. But I’m going to focus what we know works universal principles and just manipulating those variables and focus on individuality. That’s what really all these confusion is about. It’s about using the principle of individuality and specificity.

Nick Tumminello [00:34:54]:Whatever people take from this, if they get something that they thought benefited them that great, and if it gets them to think and they disagree and they think I’m full of crap and they start investigating and it makes them more curious to look, then I hope they do that as well. And follow the evidence where it leads and I’m confident you’ll end up coming to similar conclusions. I just want to say one thing real quick, real quick. Just make sure that people understand. When I say evidence, I mean the scientific evidence. I don’t mean with some expert says or some book, some school of thought.

Corey Beasley [00:35:34]: But Nick, if people want to reach out and learn more about what you’re doing, what’s the best way for them to do that?

Nick Tumminello [00:35:45]:Just through my website. Two ways to get to my website. Nick Tumminello .com. It’s kind of hard to spell my last name. So you can go to performanceU.net. That’s the letter U for performance university performanceU, the letter U.net. Both of them will take you to my site, but I’m pretty easy to find man online and do quick shameless plug I have a new book coming out. At the end of this month on human kinetics and my second book is called building muscle and performance and put a lot of hard work into it and to make it a great resource on programming and on exercises and workout programs. And it’s very much will carry over to a lot of the things that we talked about today.

Nick Tumminello [00:36:40]:I appreciate all you’re doing for the field. And thanks for your time as well. Of course.

Episode #43: Interview with Nick Tumminello – Strength Coach, Author and Founder of PerformanceU

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with Nick Tumminello

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