Episode #33: Joel Jamieson Talks With Us About Training MMA Fighters, Monitoring Recovery, Prioritizing Training and His Upcoming Conditioning Certification

September 08, 2021

Joel Jamieson is widely considered one of the world’s foremost authorities on strength and conditioning for combat sports, having trained many of the sports best athletes since 2004. He is the author of the bestselling book “Ultimate MMA Conditioning” and is a contributing writer to several top magazines and a frequent guest speaker at conferences and seminars all over the world.

Joel has worked with and consulted extensively for teams and organizations ranging from Navy SEALS to Life Time Fitness and his BioForce HRV system is used by teams in the NFL, NBA, MLS, NCAA and more. He is best known for an individualized approach that is both based on solid science and yet practical to apply. Joel created 8WeeksOut in 2009 to help clear up the misinformation and confusion surrounding energy systems and since then, the site has become one of the authorities on strength, conditioning and performance.

In This Episode We Discuss:

MMA Conditioning DOs and DONTs
Coordinating with Coaches
Prioritizing Training
Monitoring Recovery
Nutrition Pillars
Fine Tuning Training Before a FIght
Mistakes Being Made by Fighters and Coaches
Bioforce HRV
Conditioning Coach Certification

Connect and Learn from Joel Jamieson

1. Ultimate MMA Conditioning – this book will give you a complete A-Z blueprint to radically improve conditioning through a unique scientifically proven approach. Top mixed martial artists stars like Rich Franklin, Tim Boetsch, Demetrious Johnson, Bibiano Fernandes, Chris Leben and many more have relied on Joel to get in shape and ready to fight.

2. Bioforce HRV System – HRV is a quick, easy, and totally non-invasive measure of readiness and fatigue. All in just 3 minutes a day.

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with Joel Jamieson

COREY: Hey guys, this is Corey Beasley with Fight Camp Conditioning and I’m on the phone here with Joel Jamieson. Joel, how are you?

JOEL: Doing great.

COREY: Very good. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. I know you’re a busy man.

JOEL: No problem.

COREY: But Joel, just for everybody that is listening, just to give them an idea of who you are and what you’re doing and all that type of stuff. Can you give everybody a two minute version of what you’re doing out there?

JOEL: Yeah, two minute version. Let’s see, I got into strength and conditioning field back in the early 2000s after I basically dropped out of college football, didn’t last very long in that but still really enjoyed being around training and competing and athletics. So I spent some time working with University of Washington, their football program. Went from there, spent some time at the Seahawks and decided to open up my own facility and kind of originally planned and just continued on with football and strength and power athlete type clientele and lo and behold, I opened up right next to a world famous mixed martial art studio called AMC Pankration with Matt Hume and began working with MMA athletes back in 2003 before most people in US knew what MMA even was, and was fortunate enough to be connected to a fantastic coach, I think the best coach in the world Matt Hume, like I said, and really been working with those guys ever since last 11, 12 years whatever it’s been now.

In spite of that, developed — actually wrote a book on conditioning and kind of principles and methodology we’ve used over the years with combat athletes from every competing pride, dream, One FC, UFC, I mean, you name it, we’ve had guys in pretty much every major organization over the last 10 plus years, developed a piece of technology that helps fighters and other athletes manage their training to prevent overtraining, injuries, all that sort of stuff. So it’s been a good ride and definitely I didn’t start out thinking that I’d be working with fighters but it’s been a great journey to transition from football and those athletes over to fighters. So I think they’re probably the most fun to work with out there.

02:05

COREY: Yeah absolutely. So you opened up your facility come out of school, after you were working with the Seahawks and the University of Washington. I mean, a lot of guys that are working with power athletes like football players and then transitioning into working with the MMA guys, what are some of the biggest things that you noticed, the biggest differences that you’ve noticed between those two types of athletes?

JOEL: Number one, there’s a difference just in the overall training structure. I mean, a football practice is pretty structured, and it’s going to be three or four months, you basically know the exact start of the season, the end of the season, you know the preseason, you know when the games are, everything is very scheduled and very regimented and oriented around that and then the offseason, it’s kind of wide open, all they have to do is strength and conditioning for the most part, but MMA is a year round skill sport, you don’t take an offseason and stop training your skills in MMA the way you do in football. So the first thing is just understanding the difference in demand. The combat athletes, really, if you were to compare them to a team sport athlete, they’re in season year round. I mean, they’re always in season. So you can approach the strength and conditioning program the same way as you would, football athlete or basketball, whatever else whose season last four months or six months or whatever, and the rest of time, all they’re doing is training strength and conditioning.

So that’s the first thing and then secondly, obviously, it’s a totally different sport, there’s completely different needs. I mean, it’s a whole different ballgame, you’re going for six or eight seconds at a time and resting for 30 to 45 seconds versus someone who’s fighting for five minutes straight three times in a row. Those are very different demands. It’s a very different environment and it’s much more unpredictable. And there’s a lot more things that you’ve got to do because your skill set has to be so varied. So, just looking at the basics of the entire sport, demands of it and the way the season and competitions are structured, totally different.

03:55

COREY: Right on. So Joel, I think a lot of people these days, they kind of get caught up in the recent trends maybe they’re seeing on Instagram, whether it be bodybuilding programs or power lifting programs or plyometrics or whatever it is that people see these days. When a new guy comes in and sits down with you and says, okay Joel, I want to work with you, do whatever you need to do, how do you kind of start with your guys?

JOEL: The first part is just the most comprehensive evaluation you can do possible and I think it’s important that evaluation is not purely strength and conditioning. It’s got to involve skill evaluation too. So if you are working with chicks MMA coach, you need to sit down with their MMA coach or their BJJ coach or whatever, whoever’s working with them on the skill side and get an understanding of where they’re lacking on the skill application side and what they’re seeing in terms of actual strength and conditioning performance, like, this guy has terrible conditioning, his strength is really good or his power is great, or his power is poor but his conditioning is great. I mean, you got to figure out at the end of day what does their actual performance look like.

So you got to look at the skills, you got to talk to the skills coach, you got to evaluate those areas, and then you have to have an actual physical evaluation of their strengths and their conditioning and whatever tests you want to use, we do a variety of things, looking at movements, looking at strength in different areas, like at power in jumps and all that sort of stuff. So it’ just basic, comprehensive, physical evaluation, and you kind of put the pieces together and you need to figure out what it is that this athlete needs to get better, where their weakness is where their strength is, what is their training program going to look like for next six months in the skill perspective, and then how can their strength and conditioning program be built around the entire thing.

So it’s one cohesive program, I think that’s one of the bigger mistakes people make is they view strength and conditioning and the skill aspect totally separately, but they’re not separate. They’re intertwined and they have to be put together and they have to be considered as a whole. It can’t be two separate things because then you just end up with programs, putting different demands that don’t necessarily work well together, don’t necessarily result in the best improvements or most often people do way too much in on one area than the other and then they end up over-trained and injured and all this sort of stuff happens. So you are going to start kind of looking at the athlete themselves in as much detail as you can.

06:22

COREY: So once you kind of get a detailed look at what that person is doing, you’re talking with the skill coach. Looking at a week at a glance, I know a lot of people use block style progressions, other people use conjugated systems where they’re varying intensities throughout the week. How do you coordinate with the skill coach and still stay within certain guidelines during those practices?

JOEL: Well, it depends on — that’s challenging. It depends on the skill coach and your relationship with them and how they structured things. I’ll just say in general, you’re going to have to work around them for the most part. I mean, unless you’ve got a really good relationship with a skill coach, most strength coaches are not going to go to a skill coach and say here’s what I want you to do or here’s what things should be done. Like, most times out there a skill coach has already got their idea of what they’re going to do and it’s up to the strength and conditioning coach to kind of work around that and make their plan dip within the broader picture what the skill coach is doing, you can’t force it and I’ve been working with Matt for forever and he’s one of the best in business I know what he’s going to be doing and it’s easy to put that together like that.

But the biggest struggle is for guys out there that go to like four different coaches, right? They go to a wrestling coach, they go to a grappling coach, they go to a striking coach, they go to a Muay Thai coach, whatever. They’ve got so many different coaches all on different pages that their program is so lacking in cohesion that they get, number one, they don’t really improve in the transition area, their transition game. Number two, their strength and conditioning program is usually completely unrelated to all their skill work and that’s the biggest problem I think in the combat game and why you see so many guys hitting a plateau and never really develop beyond a certain point of fight and why so many injuries and things like that are happening these days.

08:10

COREY: Yeah absolutely. It’s the truth too. The guys are going all over the place and just the lack of communication I think is huge one.

JOEL: Yeah, I get it, they feel like they have to have all these different coaches, they want to have these different training partners different gyms, like I get that. But at the end of the day, maybe a little bit lower quality coaching but all on one page is honestly going to get better results for the long term than trying to do ten different things with ten different people.

COREY: Yeah. When you are kind of looking at a program as a whole and you’re looking at, I think like you said people segment skill training from strength work, and even strength work from conditioning type work. And you’re kind of looking at that 10,000 foot view, maybe a four week or a six week plan. How’re you kind of programming that throughout the week so that people aren’t overtraining? I mean, there’s certain amount of sessions that you recommend per day to keep people healthy or are there varying intensities throughout the month? How are you kind of looking at that?

JOEL: Sure. I would say to start out, most people, probably actually all people are not going to recover over the long run for more than about three days at what I would consider true high intensity training. If you think you’re doing four or five days of high intensity training, the reality is you’re probably doing four or five days of moderate intensity training because you’re just not going to recover from more than that. I mean, it’s not possible. So you first start with, what are your higher intensity days? And then higher intensity, we would classify as, a bunch of strength work above 90% of your max on the core lifts, on the cardiovascular and skill side, a bunch of training with your heart rate above 90% of its max, those are what we would consider high intensity areas of training.

So you start out what days are we going to have our sparring, high intensity sessions, and then what days are we going to have our lower intensity work and skill development sessions beyond that. So you start by mapping out a training week itself. And the number of sessions really depends on the level of athlete that you’re talking about. A professional fighter like DJ who [inaudible] for fight, he’s a full time professional fighter, obviously he can do a morning session, he can rest and eat and relax and then he come back into an evening session and do as much as he wants because that’s his job. Somebody else, he’s got a full time job, they’re not going to have the luxury of doing that, they’re not going to have the ability to recover from as much training so you have to scale it back. I mean, you really just kind of have to look at the athlete as a whole. What kind of genetics they have, what’s their training history, someone who has been training for ten years in a sport is going to have the ability to train a lot more than someone who has been trained two years in the sport. So you look at that, you look at just kind of the variety of factors that dictate their schedule and just kind of start from there.

The important thing is monitoring and paying attention. You shouldn’t have to wait until guys are busted up or over-trained and injured to see that it’s coming you got to pay attention to what’s happening today and when the guys start to tank you make change before It goes all the way down the drain and then end up sidelined for a month or have a repo training because they’re always injured. I mean, you got to keep an eye on people. So start low and build volume over time. And you just got to kind of individualize as many different areas as you can.

11:16

COREY: Yeah. Now, when you’re monitoring your guys throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the month, what are some of the ways that you’re monitoring your guys and keeping tabs on their training?

JOEL: Well, the first thing is obviously, I developed a system called BioForce HRV. Using HRV technology, it essentially tells us how fatigued the athlete’s body is so we can see pretty specifically how much fatigue they’re under. Aside from that, you want a good MMA coach who’s paying attention in a gym. You can see if guys are tired or technique doesn’t look like it should it or they’re slowing down a step. And I think the most important part is just having the right mindset of, look, if someone looks poor, it doesn’t mean that you need to yell at them and push them to train harder, it means that they probably are starting to be in that over-trained zone and you need to back things off. You got to have the right mindset from the coaching standpoint. And the same thing with strength conditioning, I mean, you should be paying attention to what sort of lifts you’re doing, what the speeds look like, what the lift numbers themselves look like. And if you see guys starting to decrease, you’re seeing specific indicators of fatigue, well, maybe that bar speed is slowing down, or their explosiveness is obviously worse, or whatever. You see those things, those are all indicators. And you combine that with something like HRV, you get a pretty vivid picture of what the athlete is doing. They’re responding, their numbers are going up, they’re looking sharp, they’re fast at clean, or they’re not, they’re looking fatigue, their numbers are going down or not improving, their concentration at the gym is getting worse, those sort of things. So I think it come down to two things. It’s having the technology and using it and then just coaching, paying attention, being a good coach.

12:56

COREY: Yeah absolutely. So as you are monitoring those guys are going through their camp. They’re getting prepared for a fight like DJ had last weekend, which Congratulations, he looked amazing.

JOEL: Oh thanks, it was great fight.

COREY: Yeah, he did an incredible job. And as that kind of stuff is coming up, I know a lot of times there’s nerves, and maybe people get anxious to get whatever it is, there’s a million emotions that go through with fighters. And as that is coming up, as the weeks you’re getting closer to the fight, typically intensities can go up and you’re kind of feathering into the fight. So you want to monitor these guys but you also want to make sure that they’re doing enough so that they’re prepared. I know that’s a very delicate balance. From your experience in getting guys prepared for fights in those last few weeks before a fight, what are some of the things that you make sure they are doing enough without going overboard?

JOEL: A lot of it just comes down to again, how is the whole program put together. And if you’re spending — what should be happening as you get closer to the fight, more and more and more of your training should be specific to the fight and the conditioning should be specific to the fight. So if you’re three weeks out from the fight, you’re sparring, you pad work, you’re grappling, your rowing, those are the things you should be using for conditioning. The stuff you’re doing outside the gym should not take away from what you’re doing in the skill sessions because that’s the most specific for conditioning and training you can be doing.

So what should be happening is closer you get to the fight, the more specific MMA work you do, and the strength work becomes mostly just maintenance and your goal is to not lose strength, and then some recovery work, so swimming or cardiovascular type of stuff to help facilitate recovery. The problem I think most people make is they start doing more and more conditioning, at the same time they’re doing more and more training, but the problem is their conditioning is totally nonspecific. So they’re doing a ton of running and sprints and hill sprints and calisthenics or whatever, they’re just doing all sorts of super high intensity nonspecific work that’s going to fatigue the hell out of them but maybe not prepare them as best as possible for the fight itself because it’s nonspecific. The fight is not sprinting, uphill, right? It’s fighting. So that’s where your work has to sort of be specific the closer you get to the fight. So that’s why the most important thing like said is as you increase the amount of skill training you’re doing, you have to decrease the other side of things, you can’t increase both at once. And your goal should be to just maintain strength of last few weeks while you’re getting all the skill work in and then again, it’s paying attention, it’s monitoring, it’s coaching. It’s making sure you’re not pushing them beyond that balance. But as long as you’re including active recovery work, and we swim twice a week through most camp, and we have some recovery sessions built into that, you have to include those things in the sessions as part of the training. You can’t neglect the recovery work, it’s important part of things. But again, it’s just understanding the overall structure of the program and not trying to do too many things at once.

16:08

COREY: Yeah absolutely. It can get overwhelming at times for sure. There are so many variables going on and so many different personalities involved, so that’s good advice. Talking about how your guys are swimming and doing a lot of recovery work, I think that a lot of guys just want to go harder go home. You see all over the place no days off, blah blah blah there’s so many different things out there.

JOEL: [Inaudible] injuries too.

COREY: Exactly, it’s just crazy, but I think it’s should ego based style of training and that can do a lot more damage than good. So when you are talking about having a guy swim, you’re doing a lot of recovery work. What types of stuff are you working in there to help those guys stay healthy?

JOEL: Yes, we do different types, swimming with water, just treading water and lap swimming is somewhat of higher intensity than other parts of it. But we try and pick stuff that number one, is low impact on the body, right? Swimming is incredibly low impact. You don’t have a bunch of forces on joints from pounding or the pavement or doing something like that. You can do stuff like riding the bike, you can do different recovery modalities like steam shower or saunas or hot tubs, whirlpools, massage. I mean, you got to kind of just pick different recovery things that your athletes respond well to and they like doing. And then again, part of that transition into areas, like I said, rather than having someone sprint up a bunch of hills, if you want to get in some extra cardiovascular work, you haven’t swam or you haven’t [Inaudible] bike, you just have to figure out how do we remove some of the pounding on the body because ultimately, they’re already spending so much time in the combat gym getting pounded on that you don’t want to contribute to that more by doing it outside of their skill work.

And then secondly, like I said, you kind of just figure out which training modalities and which recovery strategies work best for the athletes given access to what facilities they have and whatnot. But swimming is something that most people can find the pool that they can go and jump into and it’s a great method of training that should be used in every camp really or even for most fighters.

COREY: Yeah. And that’s going to build a good base of a good aerobic foundation too for a lot of those guys as well, right?

JOEL: Yeah absolutely, it does.

18:20

COREY: So on one side, I guess you’re building the foundation of your cardio and on the other side, it’s also recovery aspect to keep your joints and bodies healthy.

JOEL: Yeah, I think you actually develop lung function a bit too just because of the nature of swimming obviously. It’s got a lot of benefits and I think it’s something that is underutilized by far in the combat world.

COREY: Another thing that you kind of talked about that I’ve read a couple times is the importance of aerobic development and different aspects like aerobic power, different things like that. Can you go into that, I think a lot of people have that — just kind of like we’ve been talking about, that high intensity mindset where everything you got to do is got to be flat out as hard as they can, and it’s not always the best way to build up their systems. Can you go into a little bit of detail about just that aerobic system and how you use it and why it’s important?

JOEL: Yes sure, man. I think like you said, there’s been a big focus in the last few years on high intensity this and high intensity that, and this idea that because MMA is fast or explosive or because you hit hard that it’s a really anaerobic sort of sport. But the reality is, we’ve seen a bunch of research over the last I’d say 10 to 15 years now that basically shows you that anything above about 60 seconds in duration becomes aerobically dominant and massively aerobically influenced. So if you’re talking about a fight that’s five minutes long, there’s just no physical way for it to be an anaerobic dominant sport. It’s an aerobic dominant sport that obviously uses a ton of anaerobic as well for the explosive components of it, but you’re not sitting there throwing punches and kicks and grappling nonstop for five straight minutes, three rounds. You gas yourself out in the first round. It’s an intermittent throw punches, back off, explode in, throw punches, grab position, hold, explode; it’s not that go as hard as you can for five minutes nonstop, throw punches, kicks, it’s just not the nature of the sport. You have to have a well developed aerobic system to last, to have endurance from round one to round three or round five. And that means you’ve got to train that system and there’s benefits to train both high intensity aerobically and low intensity aerobically. They contribute to different areas of development. It shouldn’t really be a question of one or the other. It should be a question of how do we do both the higher intensity and lower intensity forms of aerobic work.

And I think the problem is there’s been a lot of the research that’s so short sighted, four weeks or six weeks and no, there’s no question if you only have six weeks to train, you train harder, you can get better results. But if you look at a longer term picture of an athlete’s six months or one year or three years or whatever, you want to have the right foundation, you want to develop the right level of different areas of aerobic system to support training and support competition. And that means you have to include both higher intensity work and lower intensity work.

21:19

Another thing to consider is this difference between the energy systems that you need to fight, three minutes or three rounds of five minutes versus the energy system developed, you need to train which is several hours a day, right? You’re training hours a day and you’ve got to have aerobic development to be able to handle that and to recover from that. So again, if there’s any question that you have to have both higher intensity and lower intensity forms of training in your overall program, it’s a matter of figuring out how to structure that across the week and the month and the year and all that sort of stuff. But the idea that you can just go in and bang day in day out and spar every day and go high intensity every day, I mean, yeah, you can do that for a short period of time before it beats the hell out of you and you end up just trashed. And again it’s unfortunate result that we see right now is every other card practically has an injury cancellation on it and that’s a big reason why that mentality that mindset that, if you’re not going hard you not benefiting, it’s BS and it’s a bad mindset, it’s the bad strategy and leads to bad results.

22:20

COREY: Yeah absolutely. I think that’s blatantly obvious in the last couple of years, like you said, with all the people that are bowling out of fights and getting injured and I think they’re just going too hard too much too often and then their body is given out.

JOEL: Oh yeah, no doubt.

COREY: So some other recovery things that you utilize and I know I’ve heard you talk about simple basics of nutrition and sleep. What are some of the pillars of those aspects of the program that you tell your guys just to make sure that they have that under control?

JOEL: Well nutritionally, it’s just a matter of making sure their base is covered, they’re getting enough calories, they’re eating the right foods, their nutrient timing. The other thing that we’ve seen happen over the last few years, it’s not the best idea people have gotten the low carb kick which if you’re fat and overweight and you’re couch potato, absolutely cut your carbs back, if you’re training four hours a day in a combat gym and cutting your carbs back for your training is probably not the best idea.

So it’s just looking at making sure athletes are getting enough calories and making sure they’re not training a bunch with low carbs, and they’re getting enough protein obviously as well. And then from a sleep standpoint, it’s just making sure that they are getting enough sleep and it’s good quality so you make sure they have — like a lot of people have crappy bed, they’ll spend 2000 bucks on a stereo system and they’ll have like a $2 piece of shit bed they’ve been sleeping on for years. People need to invest in a good quality bed, blackout blinds, not having TVs and stuff and really sleeping, just little things like that they can make a big difference in terms of how they’re sleeping. And again, if you’re using HRV or you’re paying attention and when you start to see guys fall it off and you want to do everything possible then you start looking at, what can we do to improve their sleep or maybe what their nutrition program is contributing to the lack of recovery, and you kind of start diagnosing and figuring out what’s causing it and how to improve it.

24:12

COREY: Right on. And I guess a perfect opportunity too I mean, you mentioned BioForce and HRV program which you’re utilizing and that you developed. Can you give everybody an idea of what that is and how athletes can use it?

JOEL: Sure. It’s basically an app or some technology that was developed back in the 60s by the Russians. And they originally developed it for their space program to monitor the health and the well being of the astronauts that are on space, because the only thing they do is beam down a heartbeat signal. But they essentially figured out that in the heart rate signal, you could pull out a lot more information. It’s kind of like the heart rate itself was just the right number but there was a lot of data behind that or there was a lot of information behind that number that was driving it and that’s what heart rate variability does essentially looks like kind the underlying patterns how the brain is regulating and controlling the heart. And that tells you essentially how much fatigue the athlete is under and we see distinct changes in their HRV and how their heart rate is being regulated when athlete is fatigued versus when they’re not fatigued and they’re ready to go and you also see differences, as someone’s aerobic system and their condition improve, we see changes in their HRV as well.

So it’s just a great tool to eliminate a lot of the guesswork. You don’t have to say okay, do I feel tired? Should I train hard today? Am I improving? You can see these things in real time now. And up until a few years ago the technology was thousands of dollars it was not something that the average consumer would be able to use but with mobile phones and Bluetooth 4.0 and all these things that have come out, we can now for a couple hundred bucks, everybody can get the same technology that used to cost 20 grand they can have access to that same information. It just provides a real time feedback and guidance and the way I described it is if you want to drive a car cross country would you want to look at a map and a compass or you want to use GPS. It’s basically the same thing, you can get there with the map and compass but it’s going to take you longer and you’re going to be lost a few times. HRV is essentially giving you GPS for your body and your fatigue, because it’s telling you where you’re at and giving you directions and advice on where you should be going to get to the next level.

26:21

COREY: Right on. Now is it an iPhone app or a smartphone app that people can download and then they just do a reading every morning or post workout or how does it work?

JOEL: Yeah, so it’s works on any iPhone and the iPad, pretty much any Android device, tablet and stuff. It’s just a two and a half minute measurement you take every morning because you want to standardize the process of when you’re measuring. Because the way it works is it’s comparing your HRV today to kind of your average and we see big changes either up or down. It’s indication that your body’s under fatigue and it’s trying to recover from whatever it is you’re doing through it. So you spend I mean in total to get all set up, you’re looking at three or four minutes in the morning. It gives you a color system, it gives you an amber green and red which tells you essentially how much training is the ideal amount for that day. So if you’re green, it tells you hey your body is good to go. However if it’s amber, it means your body’s probably not ready for hundred percent you should back off a little bit and not have your highest intensity day in those days, and if it is red it means your body is really fatiguing, you’re starting to get tired running down. And then it also gives you a color system or a score that essentially tells you what your overall HRV is, and as your condition improves, your aerobic system improves, you’ll see that number going up. So it uses both in conjunction, you want to use just a color system to manage each day then you want to look at how your HIRV is changing over the long run to make sure you’re seeing the improvements you’re expecting to see in the programs having the results you’re looking for.

27:48

COREY: Right on. And then that in coordination with being a good coach and watching and monitoring, how the athlete is responding to training and stuff like that those two combined is kind of how you keep tabs on your guys.

JOEL: Yeah, absolutely.

COREY: Perfect. Perfect. And then I also know that you have a certified conditioning coach program that you just came out with.

JOEL: Yeah, people have been asking for it for a long time, I get emails almost every day like can you do a seminar, any conditioning workshops, anything — up till now, I’ve had my book and DVD and articles and whatnot, but I hadn’t put together an actual course where people would come in person, go through the methodology work through things. So I put those out there. We have three dates set up one in Denver, one in Seattle and one in Indianapolis, and it’s pretty much all sold out. I think one person just had to reschedule in Seattle because of a wedding. And I think we have a couple more spots left in Denver but in Indianapolis it’s sold out. So there are a couple of spaces left here and there but it’s sold out very quickly. There was obviously a lot of interest in it and I’ll probably be doing some again in the probably spring or maybe summer or something of next year. But if people want to jump on this I said Denver’s the only space now, I think there’s two or three spots left at the moment.

29:06

COREY: Right on. Good stuff. And then the outline for that program is just going to be going over a lot of methodologies and stuff like that that you used over the years, you have [inaudible] DVD and stuff like that.

JOEL: Yeah, so I actually did put together the first seminars in the UK last year, and Ireland. And the way I set up is day one you cover – basically you go over basic methodology in terms of principles, right? So I’m going to talk about what is conditioning, how does it work, how does it relate to energy systems, how does it relate to movement, all these sort of things. The afternoon on day one, we go over all the methods and evaluation. So this where we demonstrate the methods, you get a chance to try them out. We talk about how we evaluate it and what sort of exercises and tools we use for that. And just kind of get a hands-on feel for what the methods should look like.

Day 2 is where we go into programming and the biggest thing I want people to walk away from with the course is, I want them to have spent time actually working out and writing conditioning program because that’s what it comes down to. It’s, how can you put the pieces together to create a program. So, day 2, we start out the morning and we cover again principles of programming, I show you much of Campbell programs and how they’re putting together. And then the afternoon is getting into groups and going through team sports, combat sports, tactical sports and kind of miscellaneous endurance athletes for type demands. And I go through the principles of, okay, you have a combat athlete with six weeks to prepare for a camp. I lay out the overall structure of how things should look, what the basic principles are, and then I give the people in the course a hypothetical athlete that’s got six weeks or whatever you can get some basic information. And then you work together in a group to write conditioning program for that hypothetical athlete because again, I think taking the time to work through the problems that you encounter as you put together program is where you’re going to get the most value and where you can work together with people in the class, you can questions and you can spend time actually doing it. So by the time people leave on the second day, they’ve written out four or five different conditioning programs and they’ve gone through that process, they feel a lot more comfortable with it. And they’ve applied the stuff that we’ve talked about in the rest of the course.

31:15

COREY: That’s awesome. I mean, a lot of times you go to these workshops, and you get overloaded with information, but you don’t have any practical experience applying those principles, making sure and having the person that taught it to sit there and help you do it.

JOEL: Yeah, exactly. That’s kind of what was my thought is, I’ve been doing a ton of courses myself, obviously, a lot of times, like you said, you get a ton of information but you don’t get the practical like, how do we actually use this information to change something by this program and how do we actually implement this? So that’s really what I want to focus on is day 2 is implementation. Okay, take the stuff we’ve covered in day 1 in the morning, day 2, and now write out a program and do what we’re here for is learn how to actually write a conditioning program that’s going to work and just go through that process.

COREY: Very cool. Sounds good, man.

JOEL: Yeah, I’m looking forward to it.

COREY: Cool. Well Joe, if guys are wanting to connect with you what’s the best way for them to reach out and find more info from you?

JOEL: Best place is just my main website and that’s just 8weeksout.com. That’s where I put all of our articles, I’ve got links to the conditioning course, link to BioForce HRV in there and there’s lots of stuff on there. So if anyone’s looking to find more, that’s definitely the best place to find kind of everything we’ve got going on in one spot. Facebook as well we have a Facebook page for 8 Weeks Out where we post all kinds of news and articles and promotions and stuff going on with fighter so that’s another good place. So either 8 weeks out or Facebook are probably the two best places to learn more about everything.

COREY: Very cool. And guys, I’ll put links to those down below when I get this posted up. So they’ll all be ready to go. Joel, thank you so much for your time, man. I appreciate you sharing and we look forward to talking to you again soon.

JOEL: No problem. It’s great to have me on and I look forward to talking to you again soon.

COREY: Thanks man.

Episode Transcript

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with Joel Jamieson

COREY: Hey guys, this is Corey Beasley with Fight Camp Conditioning and I’m on the phone here with Joel Jamieson. Joel, how are you?

JOEL: Doing great.

COREY: Very good. Thanks for taking the time to talk with us today. I know you’re a busy man.

JOEL: No problem.

COREY: But Joel, just for everybody that is listening, just to give them an idea of who you are and what you’re doing and all that type of stuff. Can you give everybody a two minute version of what you’re doing out there?

JOEL: Yeah, two minute version. Let’s see, I got into strength and conditioning field back in the early 2000s after I basically dropped out of college football, didn’t last very long in that but still really enjoyed being around training and competing and athletics. So I spent some time working with University of Washington, their football program. Went from there, spent some time at the Seahawks and decided to open up my own facility and kind of originally planned and just continued on with football and strength and power athlete type clientele and lo and behold, I opened up right next to a world famous mixed martial art studio called AMC Pankration with Matt Hume and began working with MMA athletes back in 2003 before most people in US knew what MMA even was, and was fortunate enough to be connected to a fantastic coach, I think the best coach in the world Matt Hume, like I said, and really been working with those guys ever since last 11, 12 years whatever it’s been now.

02:05

COREY: Yeah absolutely. So you opened up your facility come out of school, after you were working with the Seahawks and the University of Washington. I mean, a lot of guys that are working with power athletes like football players and then transitioning into working with the MMA guys, what are some of the biggest things that you noticed, the biggest differences that you’ve noticed between those two types of athletes?

JOEL: Number one, there’s a difference just in the overall training structure. I mean, a football practice is pretty structured, and it’s going to be three or four months, you basically know the exact start of the season, the end of the season, you know the preseason, you know when the games are, everything is very scheduled and very regimented and oriented around that and then the offseason, it’s kind of wide open, all they have to do is strength and conditioning for the most part, but MMA is a year round skill sport, you don’t take an offseason and stop training your skills in MMA the way you do in football. So the first thing is just understanding the difference in demand. The combat athletes, really, if you were to compare them to a team sport athlete, they’re in season year round. I mean, they’re always in season. So you can approach the strength and conditioning program the same way as you would, football athlete or basketball, whatever else whose season last four months or six months or whatever, and the rest of time, all they’re doing is training strength and conditioning.

03:55

COREY: Right on. So Joel, I think a lot of people these days, they kind of get caught up in the recent trends maybe they’re seeing on Instagram, whether it be bodybuilding programs or power lifting programs or plyometrics or whatever it is that people see these days. When a new guy comes in and sits down with you and says, okay Joel, I want to work with you, do whatever you need to do, how do you kind of start with your guys?

JOEL: The first part is just the most comprehensive evaluation you can do possible and I think it’s important that evaluation is not purely strength and conditioning. It’s got to involve skill evaluation too. So if you are working with chicks MMA coach, you need to sit down with their MMA coach or their BJJ coach or whatever, whoever’s working with them on the skill side and get an understanding of where they’re lacking on the skill application side and what they’re seeing in terms of actual strength and conditioning performance, like, this guy has terrible conditioning, his strength is really good or his power is great, or his power is poor but his conditioning is great. I mean, you got to figure out at the end of day what does their actual performance look like.

06:22

COREY: So once you kind of get a detailed look at what that person is doing, you’re talking with the skill coach. Looking at a week at a glance, I know a lot of people use block style progressions, other people use conjugated systems where they’re varying intensities throughout the week. How do you coordinate with the skill coach and still stay within certain guidelines during those practices?

JOEL: Well, it depends on — that’s challenging. It depends on the skill coach and your relationship with them and how they structured things. I’ll just say in general, you’re going to have to work around them for the most part. I mean, unless you’ve got a really good relationship with a skill coach, most strength coaches are not going to go to a skill coach and say here’s what I want you to do or here’s what things should be done. Like, most times out there a skill coach has already got their idea of what they’re going to do and it’s up to the strength and conditioning coach to kind of work around that and make their plan dip within the broader picture what the skill coach is doing, you can’t force it and I’ve been working with Matt for forever and he’s one of the best in business I know what he’s going to be doing and it’s easy to put that together like that.

08:10

COREY: Yeah absolutely. It’s the truth too. The guys are going all over the place and just the lack of communication I think is huge one.

JOEL: Yeah, I get it, they feel like they have to have all these different coaches, they want to have these different training partners different gyms, like I get that. But at the end of the day, maybe a little bit lower quality coaching but all on one page is honestly going to get better results for the long term than trying to do ten different things with ten different people.

COREY: Yeah. When you are kind of looking at a program as a whole and you’re looking at, I think like you said people segment skill training from strength work, and even strength work from conditioning type work. And you’re kind of looking at that 10,000 foot view, maybe a four week or a six week plan. How’re you kind of programming that throughout the week so that people aren’t overtraining? I mean, there’s certain amount of sessions that you recommend per day to keep people healthy or are there varying intensities throughout the month? How are you kind of looking at that?

JOEL: Sure. I would say to start out, most people, probably actually all people are not going to recover over the long run for more than about three days at what I would consider true high intensity training. If you think you’re doing four or five days of high intensity training, the reality is you’re probably doing four or five days of moderate intensity training because you’re just not going to recover from more than that. I mean, it’s not possible. So you first start with, what are your higher intensity days? And then higher intensity, we would classify as, a bunch of strength work above 90% of your max on the core lifts, on the cardiovascular and skill side, a bunch of training with your heart rate above 90% of its max, those are what we would consider high intensity areas of training.

11:16

COREY: Yeah. Now, when you’re monitoring your guys throughout the day, throughout the week, throughout the month, what are some of the ways that you’re monitoring your guys and keeping tabs on their training?

JOEL: Well, the first thing is obviously, I developed a system called BioForce HRV. Using HRV technology, it essentially tells us how fatigued the athlete’s body is so we can see pretty specifically how much fatigue they’re under. Aside from that, you want a good MMA coach who’s paying attention in a gym. You can see if guys are tired or technique doesn’t look like it should it or they’re slowing down a step. And I think the most important part is just having the right mindset of, look, if someone looks poor, it doesn’t mean that you need to yell at them and push them to train harder, it means that they probably are starting to be in that over-trained zone and you need to back things off. You got to have the right mindset from the coaching standpoint. And the same thing with strength conditioning, I mean, you should be paying attention to what sort of lifts you’re doing, what the speeds look like, what the lift numbers themselves look like. And if you see guys starting to decrease, you’re seeing specific indicators of fatigue, well, maybe that bar speed is slowing down, or their explosiveness is obviously worse, or whatever. You see those things, those are all indicators. And you combine that with something like HRV, you get a pretty vivid picture of what the athlete is doing. They’re responding, their numbers are going up, they’re looking sharp, they’re fast at clean, or they’re not, they’re looking fatigue, their numbers are going down or not improving, their concentration at the gym is getting worse, those sort of things. So I think it come down to two things. It’s having the technology and using it and then just coaching, paying attention, being a good coach.

12:56

COREY: Yeah absolutely. So as you are monitoring those guys are going through their camp. They’re getting prepared for a fight like DJ had last weekend, which Congratulations, he looked amazing.

JOEL: Oh thanks, it was great fight.

COREY: Yeah, he did an incredible job. And as that kind of stuff is coming up, I know a lot of times there’s nerves, and maybe people get anxious to get whatever it is, there’s a million emotions that go through with fighters. And as that is coming up, as the weeks you’re getting closer to the fight, typically intensities can go up and you’re kind of feathering into the fight. So you want to monitor these guys but you also want to make sure that they’re doing enough so that they’re prepared. I know that’s a very delicate balance. From your experience in getting guys prepared for fights in those last few weeks before a fight, what are some of the things that you make sure they are doing enough without going overboard?

JOEL: A lot of it just comes down to again, how is the whole program put together. And if you’re spending — what should be happening as you get closer to the fight, more and more and more of your training should be specific to the fight and the conditioning should be specific to the fight. So if you’re three weeks out from the fight, you’re sparring, you pad work, you’re grappling, your rowing, those are the things you should be using for conditioning. The stuff you’re doing outside the gym should not take away from what you’re doing in the skill sessions because that’s the most specific for conditioning and training you can be doing.

So what should be happening is closer you get to the fight, the more specific MMA work you do, and the strength work becomes mostly just maintenance and your goal is to not lose strength, and then some recovery work, so swimming or cardiovascular type of stuff to help facilitate recovery. The problem I think most people make is they start doing more and more conditioning, at the same time they’re doing more and more training, but the problem is their conditioning is totally nonspecific. So they’re doing a ton of running and sprints and hill sprints and calisthenics or whatever, they’re just doing all sorts of super high intensity nonspecific work that’s going to fatigue the hell out of them but maybe not prepare them as best as possible for the fight itself because it’s nonspecific. The fight is not sprinting, uphill, right? It’s fighting. So that’s where your work has to sort of be specific the closer you get to the fight. So that’s why the most important thing like said is as you increase the amount of skill training you’re doing, you have to decrease the other side of things, you can’t increase both at once. And your goal should be to just maintain strength of last few weeks while you’re getting all the skill work in and then again, it’s paying attention, it’s monitoring, it’s coaching. It’s making sure you’re not pushing them beyond that balance. But as long as you’re including active recovery work, and we swim twice a week through most camp, and we have some recovery sessions built into that, you have to include those things in the sessions as part of the training. You can’t neglect the recovery work, it’s important part of things. But again, it’s just understanding the overall structure of the program and not trying to do too many things at once.

16:08

COREY: Yeah absolutely. It can get overwhelming at times for sure. There are so many variables going on and so many different personalities involved, so that’s good advice. Talking about how your guys are swimming and doing a lot of recovery work, I think that a lot of guys just want to go harder go home. You see all over the place no days off, blah blah blah there’s so many different things out there.

JOEL: [Inaudible] injuries too.

COREY: Exactly, it’s just crazy, but I think it’s should ego based style of training and that can do a lot more damage than good. So when you are talking about having a guy swim, you’re doing a lot of recovery work. What types of stuff are you working in there to help those guys stay healthy?

JOEL: Yes, we do different types, swimming with water, just treading water and lap swimming is somewhat of higher intensity than other parts of it. But we try and pick stuff that number one, is low impact on the body, right? Swimming is incredibly low impact. You don’t have a bunch of forces on joints from pounding or the pavement or doing something like that. You can do stuff like riding the bike, you can do different recovery modalities like steam shower or saunas or hot tubs, whirlpools, massage. I mean, you got to kind of just pick different recovery things that your athletes respond well to and they like doing. And then again, part of that transition into areas, like I said, rather than having someone sprint up a bunch of hills, if you want to get in some extra cardiovascular work, you haven’t swam or you haven’t [Inaudible] bike, you just have to figure out how do we remove some of the pounding on the body because ultimately, they’re already spending so much time in the combat gym getting pounded on that you don’t want to contribute to that more by doing it outside of their skill work.

COREY: Yeah. And that’s going to build a good base of a good aerobic foundation too for a lot of those guys as well, right?

JOEL: Yeah absolutely, it does.

18:20

COREY: So on one side, I guess you’re building the foundation of your cardio and on the other side, it’s also recovery aspect to keep your joints and bodies healthy.

JOEL: Yeah, I think you actually develop lung function a bit too just because of the nature of swimming obviously. It’s got a lot of benefits and I think it’s something that is underutilized by far in the combat world.

COREY: Another thing that you kind of talked about that I’ve read a couple times is the importance of aerobic development and different aspects like aerobic power, different things like that. Can you go into that, I think a lot of people have that — just kind of like we’ve been talking about, that high intensity mindset where everything you got to do is got to be flat out as hard as they can, and it’s not always the best way to build up their systems. Can you go into a little bit of detail about just that aerobic system and how you use it and why it’s important?

JOEL: Yes sure, man. I think like you said, there’s been a big focus in the last few years on high intensity this and high intensity that, and this idea that because MMA is fast or explosive or because you hit hard that it’s a really anaerobic sort of sport. But the reality is, we’ve seen a bunch of research over the last I’d say 10 to 15 years now that basically shows you that anything above about 60 seconds in duration becomes aerobically dominant and massively aerobically influenced. So if you’re talking about a fight that’s five minutes long, there’s just no physical way for it to be an anaerobic dominant sport. It’s an aerobic dominant sport that obviously uses a ton of anaerobic as well for the explosive components of it, but you’re not sitting there throwing punches and kicks and grappling nonstop for five straight minutes, three rounds. You gas yourself out in the first round. It’s an intermittent throw punches, back off, explode in, throw punches, grab position, hold, explode; it’s not that go as hard as you can for five minutes nonstop, throw punches, kicks, it’s just not the nature of the sport. You have to have a well developed aerobic system to last, to have endurance from round one to round three or round five. And that means you’ve got to train that system and there’s benefits to train both high intensity aerobically and low intensity aerobically. They contribute to different areas of development. It shouldn’t really be a question of one or the other. It should be a question of how do we do both the higher intensity and lower intensity forms of aerobic work.

21:19

22:20

COREY: Yeah absolutely. I think that’s blatantly obvious in the last couple of years, like you said, with all the people that are bowling out of fights and getting injured and I think they’re just going too hard too much too often and then their body is given out.

JOEL: Oh yeah, no doubt.

COREY: So some other recovery things that you utilize and I know I’ve heard you talk about simple basics of nutrition and sleep. What are some of the pillars of those aspects of the program that you tell your guys just to make sure that they have that under control?

JOEL: Well nutritionally, it’s just a matter of making sure their base is covered, they’re getting enough calories, they’re eating the right foods, their nutrient timing. The other thing that we’ve seen happen over the last few years, it’s not the best idea people have gotten the low carb kick which if you’re fat and overweight and you’re couch potato, absolutely cut your carbs back, if you’re training four hours a day in a combat gym and cutting your carbs back for your training is probably not the best idea.

24:12

COREY: Right on. And I guess a perfect opportunity too I mean, you mentioned BioForce and HRV program which you’re utilizing and that you developed. Can you give everybody an idea of what that is and how athletes can use it?

JOEL: Sure. It’s basically an app or some technology that was developed back in the 60s by the Russians. And they originally developed it for their space program to monitor the health and the well being of the astronauts that are on space, because the only thing they do is beam down a heartbeat signal. But they essentially figured out that in the heart rate signal, you could pull out a lot more information. It’s kind of like the heart rate itself was just the right number but there was a lot of data behind that or there was a lot of information behind that number that was driving it and that’s what heart rate variability does essentially looks like kind the underlying patterns how the brain is regulating and controlling the heart. And that tells you essentially how much fatigue the athlete is under and we see distinct changes in their HRV and how their heart rate is being regulated when athlete is fatigued versus when they’re not fatigued and they’re ready to go and you also see differences, as someone’s aerobic system and their condition improve, we see changes in their HRV as well.

26:21

COREY: Right on. Now is it an iPhone app or a smartphone app that people can download and then they just do a reading every morning or post workout or how does it work?

JOEL: Yeah, so it’s works on any iPhone and the iPad, pretty much any Android device, tablet and stuff. It’s just a two and a half minute measurement you take every morning because you want to standardize the process of when you’re measuring. Because the way it works is it’s comparing your HRV today to kind of your average and we see big changes either up or down. It’s indication that your body’s under fatigue and it’s trying to recover from whatever it is you’re doing through it. So you spend I mean in total to get all set up, you’re looking at three or four minutes in the morning. It gives you a color system, it gives you an amber green and red which tells you essentially how much training is the ideal amount for that day. So if you’re green, it tells you hey your body is good to go. However if it’s amber, it means your body’s probably not ready for hundred percent you should back off a little bit and not have your highest intensity day in those days, and if it is red it means your body is really fatiguing, you’re starting to get tired running down. And then it also gives you a color system or a score that essentially tells you what your overall HRV is, and as your condition improves, your aerobic system improves, you’ll see that number going up. So it uses both in conjunction, you want to use just a color system to manage each day then you want to look at how your HIRV is changing over the long run to make sure you’re seeing the improvements you’re expecting to see in the programs having the results you’re looking for.

27:48

COREY: Right on. And then that in coordination with being a good coach and watching and monitoring, how the athlete is responding to training and stuff like that those two combined is kind of how you keep tabs on your guys.

JOEL: Yeah, absolutely.

COREY: Perfect. Perfect. And then I also know that you have a certified conditioning coach program that you just came out with.

JOEL: Yeah, people have been asking for it for a long time, I get emails almost every day like can you do a seminar, any conditioning workshops, anything — up till now, I’ve had my book and DVD and articles and whatnot, but I hadn’t put together an actual course where people would come in person, go through the methodology work through things. So I put those out there. We have three dates set up one in Denver, one in Seattle and one in Indianapolis, and it’s pretty much all sold out. I think one person just had to reschedule in Seattle because of a wedding. And I think we have a couple more spots left in Denver but in Indianapolis it’s sold out. So there are a couple of spaces left here and there but it’s sold out very quickly. There was obviously a lot of interest in it and I’ll probably be doing some again in the probably spring or maybe summer or something of next year. But if people want to jump on this I said Denver’s the only space now, I think there’s two or three spots left at the moment.

29:06

COREY: Right on. Good stuff. And then the outline for that program is just going to be going over a lot of methodologies and stuff like that that you used over the years, you have [inaudible] DVD and stuff like that.

JOEL: Yeah, so I actually did put together the first seminars in the UK last year, and Ireland. And the way I set up is day one you cover – basically you go over basic methodology in terms of principles, right? So I’m going to talk about what is conditioning, how does it work, how does it relate to energy systems, how does it relate to movement, all these sort of things. The afternoon on day one, we go over all the methods and evaluation. So this where we demonstrate the methods, you get a chance to try them out. We talk about how we evaluate it and what sort of exercises and tools we use for that. And just kind of get a hands-on feel for what the methods should look like.

31:15

COREY: That’s awesome. I mean, a lot of times you go to these workshops, and you get overloaded with information, but you don’t have any practical experience applying those principles, making sure and having the person that taught it to sit there and help you do it.

JOEL: Yeah, exactly. That’s kind of what was my thought is, I’ve been doing a ton of courses myself, obviously, a lot of times, like you said, you get a ton of information but you don’t get the practical like, how do we actually use this information to change something by this program and how do we actually implement this? So that’s really what I want to focus on is day 2 is implementation. Okay, take the stuff we’ve covered in day 1 in the morning, day 2, and now write out a program and do what we’re here for is learn how to actually write a conditioning program that’s going to work and just go through that process.

COREY: Very cool. Sounds good, man.

JOEL: Yeah, I’m looking forward to it.

COREY: Cool. Well Joe, if guys are wanting to connect with you what’s the best way for them to reach out and find more info from you?

JOEL: Best place is just my main website and that’s just 8weeksout.com. That’s where I put all of our articles, I’ve got links to the conditioning course, link to BioForce HRV in there and there’s lots of stuff on there. So if anyone’s looking to find more, that’s definitely the best place to find kind of everything we’ve got going on in one spot. Facebook as well we have a Facebook page for 8 Weeks Out where we post all kinds of news and articles and promotions and stuff going on with fighter so that’s another good place. So either 8 weeks out or Facebook are probably the two best places to learn more about everything.

COREY: Very cool. And guys, I’ll put links to those down below when I get this posted up. So they’ll all be ready to go. Joel, thank you so much for your time, man. I appreciate you sharing and we look forward to talking to you again soon.

JOEL: No problem. It’s great to have me on and I look forward to talking to you again soon.

COREY: Thanks man.

Episode #33: Joel Jamieson Talks With Us About Training MMA Fighters, Monitoring Recovery, Prioritizing Training and His Upcoming Conditioning Certification

In This Episode We Discuss:

Connect and Learn from Joel Jamieson

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with Joel Jamieson

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