Episode #29: Interview with William Wayland from Powering Through Strength and Conditioning

September 08, 2021

William Wayland is a strength coach and owner of Powering Through in Chelmsford, Essex, UK. Striving for performance that can be measured in success on the field, on the court, in the ring or in the cage. William works with Olympians, UFC fighters and other high level athletes.

He works with some of the toughest fighters in England, including Arnold Allen, Matt Hughes, Sean Carter, Luke Barnatt and others.

Listen to Our Recent Interview with Coach Wayland here:

In this interview, we discuss:

Assessing a new athlete
Common physical challenges and tests
How to Structure Good Workouts
Conditioning vs Strength Training
Developing Power
Correcting Bad Posture
Addressing Weaknesses
and more.

Check out William’s Articles on fightcampconditioning.com

If you’d like to connect with William, you can find him here:

http://www.powering-through.com/

https://www.facebook.com/PoweringThrough

https://twitter.com/wswayland

https://instagram.com/poweringthrough/

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with William Wayland from Powering Through Performance

COREY: Hey guys, this is Corey Beasley with Fight Camp Conditioning. I’m on the phone here with Coach William Wayland. William, how’re you doing, man?

WILLIAM: I’m great, thanks Corey, how are you?

COREY: Very good. Very good. Just so everybody understands, William, give everybody a little two cents on who you are and what you’re doing.

WILLIAM: Sure. I’m a strength and conditioning coach. Obviously, I’m from the UK. I’m based in Essex. So I’m just a little way outside of London. And I have the good fortune to work primarily with combat sport athletes including a few guys in the UFC and a lot of golfers and a few sort of high performing athletes in a few different sports.

COREY: Right on and William, how long you been doing that for?

WILLIAM: I’ve been involved in strength and conditioning probably for around a decade now. I’ve been operating as a full time coach probably for the past three or four years and before that, I used to teach Sports Science at a college but I decided teaching wasn’t for me and I preferred the coaching side of things so I moved forward with that.

COREY: Yeah, and how did you do the segue into strength and conditioning, is that that you opened your place or?

WILLIAM: Yeah, getting in as S&C — I’ve always been involved either on a part time basis I was involved with — in the UK we have a Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme and I was an athlete on the Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme, OSU, Taekwondo at a quite a high level. And that way, once my Taekwondo career kind of packed up, I got into working with TAS athletes in different sports and worked up and down the country. But it’s always been on a sort of a part time basis and never really getting both feet wet, so to speak. And then I got into teaching, taught full time, didn’t like it and then decided I want to do strength and conditioning full time and that’s where I am now.

02:03

COREY: Right on, right on. And as far as aside from teaching and stuff like that, most of the stuff that you’re doing like education wise, experience wise, where’d you get a lot of your experience and your knowledge from?

WILLIAM: So I’ve had the good fortune when I was at talented athlete to be with some really good S&C guys back when in the UK we’ve only really had strength and conditioning as a discipline probably for just about a decade. It was something Americans always did. And I had the good fortune, my Physiology professor who was also one of the coaches for the TAS Scheme, he was excellent, had a good S&C head as well. He was from New Zealand and he was very, very good in giving me that basis which then helped me sort of carry that on to other athletes I was working with further down the line. And just up to date just recently I went to a seminar the other day with Dan John. So I’m always trying to take the time to learn from different people, and Dan John, I’m sure you’ve heard of him, big hero of mine and it was awesome to learn some stuff from him too. So yeah, I’ve been through the way, I’ve run into different coaches from all over the place and picked up bits and pieces from [inaudible] gone.

COREY: Yeah, that’s how it works. Dan is a great coach. I didn’t take a look but I think he’s coming off to perform better summit in Long Beach, he usually attend that.

WILLIAM: Yeah.

COREY: He’s always one of my favorites. He always keeps it pretty simple, right?

WILLIAM: Totally, totally. It’s his ethos to the core and I always try and keep that in the back of my mind when I’m writing my programs and designing things throughout my athletes just how can I keep this simpler, and bouncing off something that — are you familiar with Vernon Gambetta? Ge always says that the simplicity yields complexity. So if you start simple, then you can add on all the extra stuff, but you’ve got to start simple to begin with.

03:58

COREY: Yeah absolutely. So William, with your experience with the combat guys, when you have a brand new athlete that walks through your doors, what are some of the things that you’re asking them, you’re looking for, all that type of stuff when they’re first coming in.

WILLIAM: So I run probably quite a few of the sort of standard screens. Obviously, I sit down, talk to them, find out what their training history is like. A lot of them train but if you know what I’m saying, a lot of them have never trained properly. And it’s more so probably an issue in the UK is that a lot of people choose their strength coaches based on proximity as opposed to how good they are. So if you happen to have a friend in the team who is like a PT or something like that, they are training them or something, come and talk to you and go oh yeah, I’ve squatted, I’ve dead lifted, and then when you get them moving, it’s a whole different story and it’s almost like taking them back to square one.

So I sit down and talk to them initially and then get them moving, I have a pretty standard warm up I run my guys through and it picks up a lot of issues with where they’re tight, where they’re lose. It’s not a functional movement screen that allows me to take a look and see sort of what they’re doing, what’s tight? What’s loose? Can they hit a proper squat pattern? Can they hinge properly? Have they got to push up, have they got to pull? Where they look like when they’re carrying stuff and a few things I’ve taken from Dan John in terms of can they broad jump further than their our own height? What’s their waist measurement like? How are they with eating green veggies, that type of stuff. Just sit and talk to them initially and get that stuff out of them. And then another one I quite like is how many pillows do they sleep on, that type of stuff, pick up any sort of shoulder neck issues they’ve got, are they particularly heavy. The big guys quite often with a lot of shoulder issues, back issues will use more than two pillows, which is something I picked out of Dan John’s intervention book, I think it was – that’s super interesting. Sometimes the guy is like, yeah I slepp on three, four pillows, because my neck or my shoulders are killing me. I’ll ask them that.

And then when it comes to testing, quite often we take a broad jump, we’ll do a vertical jump. I’m quite keen on what can they do with the body weight on a bar, can they bench press that? Can they can a front squat that? And we generally always get them front squatting before we get them back squatting. They kind of have to earn the back squat, that’s one way I always look at it. And generally, I’ve written about it before, if you have standards, I think I did a video a little while ago where I talked about sort of what my standards are and where I want people to be and I have like expected good and great and hopefully when they walk in the gym, they hit all the expected. If they can’t, then we have to regress them further and really go start with the basics. And quite along the time they’re quite motivated and they’re very keen to hit the standard so it doesn’t take them long to come up. But they will run through those tests. If they’ve got body comp issues we’ll sometimes take their body fat. Most of the time, they’re okay and my guys are pretty good because they’ll be on or around their fight way. So that’s generally not too much of an issue.

07:20

COREY: Right on. So you’re talking about that initial assessment and having guys move. Doing those initial tests, the broad jump is just two feet to two feet for distance. Right?

WILLIAM: Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah. We’ll let them have an arm swing as well. And yeah, it’s literally two feet to two feet, no run up from a line and they just happen to do a standing broad jump. I like it as a measure of horizontal power production probably more than the vertical jump if I’m honest. Because I find that the vertical jump is probably a little bit easier to gain with good technique whereas the broad jump again, depends on the sport they play but the broad jump works well for MMA guys, whereas if I had someone who played basketball or volleyball, I’d care more about a vertical jump.

COREY: Right, yeah.

WILLIAM: Yeah, it varies from athlete to athlete. But yeah, I really like the broad jump as its basic, doesn’t take much coaching and generally they can hit it pretty well. It helps if your gym has a nice soft flooring as well. But yeah, I like that test. It’s a good test.

COREY: For sure. And you’re talking about having people front squat with a barbell and just looking that they can front squat their body weight?

WILLIAM: Yeah, so basically, the span is this, can they front squat? Can they front squat their bodyweight? And then how many reps can they front squat their body weight for? And generally being able to front squat their bodyweight I consider good. And then if they can do that at least 10 to 15 times, they’re probably pretty strong already if they can do that. And again, it’s a relative measure. It’s something I think I may well have stolen from Dan John. If they can do that, they’re probably in a pretty good place. Finally off the bench press, [incomprehensible] about the same. And the role is, can they bench press their bodyweight? If they can, good. Then how many reps can they bench it for? And again, it’s just a good relative strength measure I think that’s pretty easy to apply. And again, like if they can hit 15 reps on either the bench press or the front squat with their body weight on the bar, they’re probably pretty strong.

09:23

COREY: Yeah. And as far as the – that’s the squat pattern and the push pattern, do you have a test for hinge and pull and carry?

WILLIAM: Yeah, so for hinge, it’s pretty simple. I’ll look at their — I think it’s called the goat belly swing with a hip hinge where they have the kettlebell held to their chest and just see if they can manage that the first one before that, if they can’t do that, get them to put their hands on their thighs and run their hands down their faces. They first push their butt back and just make sure that they can perform that type of movement, get them next to the wall. Can they touch their butts to the wall?

We get some guys in and they can hardly do that they’re so banged up they quite often struggle even with a simple hinge, they’ll start flexing through their spine to try and help to achieve greater depth. And you have to get that hinge in and quite often they’re not too bad with it. Most MMA guys generally come in and they’ve got a pretty decent deadlift, so it’s not too much of a problem. It’s just more of a case of can they perform movement properly? If so, then we can progress them on.

I have said in the past that I don’t do a lot of heavy pulling from the floor. We do a lot of heavy pulling from a standing position so we’ll do a lot of RDLs. A lot of Snatch Grip RDLs, a lot of Zercher Good Mornings, that type of stuff, and we almost do it top down. So once they can do the movement from the top to the shin, then we’ll get them pulling off the floor thereafter. Because quite often if they’ve not got that experience bracing, they’ll try and pull from the floor and their lower back just rounds or the upper back just rounds and it looks real ugly coming up. So we teach them top down first.

10:58

COREY: Now that’s really good advice. And as far as pulling movement, you have a test that you use for pulling or carrying?

WILLIAM: I quite like the kettlebell. So we’ll do two kettlebells with two dumbbells. They have to be able to carry their body weight split between each hand. So they’ll carry that and just take a look at what happens to them when they walk with it. Is their grip going? Is their form leaving? And quite often you see people do heavy carries, they start to slouch as they start to go. And take a look what their feet are doing. You can tell quite often if there are big imbalances left or right when they’re carrying stuff if that makes a difference. So [inaudible] I think that’s another Dan John one as well. So using that loaded carry to sort of take a look at what sort of shape they’re in as they move and you can figure out pretty quickly where the problems are. Some guys can go and go and go and it’s not an issue and other guys they’ll gasp so their grip strength and it’s just another way of taking a look at all the other qualities.

12:00

COREY: I mean, I think it’s important for people to have these simple tests, ways to gauge their strength. I know we just put up a new post this week talking about what strength is and how to measure it, different tests and different things like that. And yeah, absolutely, those are just very simple basics that I think people can get a lot out of.

WILLIAM: Yeah. And this is the thing — teaching Sport Science, you sat in a room teaching students quite a lot of sophisticated testing that to be honest, they probably never ever going to use in a real world situation. It’s great if you’re in a university and you’ve got a lab and all that stuff, you can do Wingate testing, you can do VO2 Max testing, you can do Isokinetic testing. Most times, you can’t do that type of testing so you have to have something that’s applicable, something that’s repeatable.

COREY: Yeah. Now, you talked a little bit about testing for strength. Are there any tests that you use to test the conditioning level, or how in shape the athlete is?

WILLIAM: Yeah, so the simplest one we use is the heart rate recovery. So we’ll have them get up to around about lactate threshold, so sort of 160 to 170 beats per minute. And then we’ll have them stop and will rest, take their heart rate, and then see what it is a minute after and then see what the difference is. So for instance, if someone’s dropping about 50 beats within a minute from work to complete rest, they’re probably super fit. If they’re taking sort of 40, that’s pretty good. 30 is kind of average and anything lower than that it’s not good enough. So if your heart rate is not dropping by 10 to 20 beats per minute, within that minute, you probably need to really work on your conditioning. And again, it’s a simple test. I know the athletes can repeat it themselves, they’ve got a heart rate monitor, and that’s the simplest one we run. We do a few others, mile run; can they run a mile in less than eight minutes 30, it’s another simple one for them to do and we have a couple others, but those are the two simplest ones.

13:59

COREY: Yeah, I think a lot of times simple is best. Right? So you’ve been dealing with these guys for quite a while. What are some common issues or problems or challenges that you see with the guys that are coming to your gym?

WILLIAM: So with the combat sports guys, I see it all the time. They suffer quite badly from upper cross syndrome. And I don’t know if you notice it, but basically just shoulders are barely internally rotated up thoracic spine is quite flexed very tight through the pec minor. So they wind up with these tight shoulders that have quite wound up quite often accompanied by back pain or headaches, stuff like that. And it seems to be quite a common problem. Because they’re taught to — the chin down, shoulder up, hands in front of the face posture, and it’s taught in wrestling, it’s taught in j-u-jitsu, it’s taught in boxing, it’s taught in Muay Thai and it becomes almost a default walking around posture; that caveman syndrome, elbow is rolled over sort of barreling along. And basically it’s a commonality I see in most of the combat athletes I work with. So we have to do a lot of work, a lot of upper back strengthening, a lot of shoulder mobilizing initially to get them out of that pattern. And that’s the basically the thing I see all the time when they first step into the gym and then other problems, it varies from fighter to fighter, but that’s a real commonality is that shoulder tightness.

15:30

COREY: Yeah absolutely. When you have a guy that comes through, shoulders are super tight, they’re obviously still going to be doing this skill training and stuff like that. What are you telling these guys or are working with them on to help open up those shoulders and upper back strength in that stuff so that it fixes it?

WILLIAM: So initially, we sort of start off with we look at soft tissue work, we look at mobilizations, teach them how to get into the usually it’s pec minor that’s quite tight, get into anterior shoulder, just loosen that stuff off. Because quite often they think it’s the back that’s the problem that’s quite often what hurts, the chest doesn’t hurt and teaching them that they need to loosen off their chest so you have to do stuff to bring the scapular back into the movement and stop it from wanting to come up and over. So we do things like wall slides and a lot of reach type movements, things like that. Lot of single arm wider carries, a lot of half kneeling pressing to try and open that shoulder out, get them really full range of motion on the movement and lots of reaching that type of stuff, thoracic extension type stuff getting through that. And then we reinforce that openness once we’ve got it with a lot of simple stuff, man full of parts, rear delt flies, things like that, rowing, full range of movement, rowing, ring flies, a lot of stuff out just to strengthen the upper back, get everything opened out. And that’s kind of the way we go with that.

16:55

COREY: That’s good info. I think that’s something that a lot of people may be if you bring it to their attention, they’re okay yeah, everybody has that. You know what I mean?

WILLIAM: Yeah.

COREY: But as far as when they actually get into the gym, not really always a focus.

WILLIAM: No, they want to do the glamorous stuff, the big stuff, and sometimes the little stuff counts and that’s why quite often at the start of our workouts, we’ll get all that stuff done, we get out of the way first. If you leave it to the end, quite often it’s high from the session, you’ve done your big lifts, you want to go home. And we get these guys do it right at the start and they do it together quite often I train them in small groups, and then they’re all accountable to each other and they’re all like, oh, come on, get off, you got to do your shoulder mobilization, you got to do band work, you got to do that type of stuff. And I test quite often testing together as well. If you’re familiar with the pencil test, if the pencils are pointing forwards when they’ve got them in their palms, that suggests that their posture is good. If their pencils are pointing towards each other when they’re holding on to them, that’s just – are you familiar with this test or?

COREY: Explain it so everybody –

WILLIAM: So it’s really simple, what we do is you stand up, you hold on to two pencils and relax your arms down by your side. If the pencils are facing each other, that suggests that your shoulder is super tight, however, if they’re facing forwards, that suggests that you’ve got pretty good posture and your shoulders are looking pretty good balance wise. So it’s a super, super simple test that you can run just to – and hopefully people listening to this are picking up pens on the desk now and giving it a try because again, it’s another really simple test and you can do it almost in a moment tell whether someone’s good or bad and that’s what I like.

18:37

COREY: Very cool. So when you’re talking about doing that stuff in the beginning, when guys do come and see you and you’re starting to work out, do you kind of have a rhythm or a template that you’re using with your workouts when guys come in, they start here and they go through certain aspects of working out and then they leave?

WILLIAM: Yeah, so I’m quite fond of something called the Bondarchuk Complex. So are you familiar with Antoliy Bondarchuk?

COREY: Yeah.

WILLIAM: He’s a famous throwing coach, and the Bondarchuk Complex is super simple. You start the workout with something explosive, some sort of low body movement, some sort of push pull, and then some sort of weakness, I think is the simple structure. And pretty much all the sessions, it might not look like it, but they all follow that structure and in terms of — that can be applied to just about most workouts depending on what your aims are. It can be adapted pretty easy, but in terms of the more complicated stuff, the layer that goes on top of that is, I’m quite fond of triphasic training, which is Cal Dietz and Ben Peterson‘s S&C method and I’ve kind of taken that on to really to the core of what I do, and we’ll run through cycles, and I don’t know if you’re familiar with the method at all basically, we’ll run usually a 12 week block. We’d do heavy strength work focusing on eccentrics, isometrics and then heavy concentric work. And then we’ll do some high force high velocity work at about 80% to 55%. And then we’ll do sort of sub 55% lifting for a little while. And we repeat that cycle again and again and again probably about three, four times throughout a year, sometimes less depending on the training age of the athlete. And that’s the rough, rough structure we follow you around.

20:26

COREY: Now, as you’re doing that throughout the year, I know we’ve talked with other people in the past about, especially with if you have a jiu-jitsu tournament scheduled, if you’re a high level fighter, you tend to know that your fights are coming up months in advance. A lot of times people have stuff come up last minute. And they also have their skill training which can vary in intensity throughout the week as well. I guess first, if you do have guys that there’s something comes up last minute, how do you kind of flip on the flyer? Or make sure your guys are kind of halfway in shape so that they can perform if needed, versus that real linear block kind of a periodization?

WILLIAM: Yeah. So our guys are in pretty good shape generally. I find it easy with pros because if they’re sparring, their work capacity is generally pretty good most of the time, not great, but in the end, you need that push to get it better. For instance, we had the shock of our lives when Arnold Allen got called up to the UFC six days’ notice. There’s nothing I can do. Literally that there’s this he has to cut weight and fight. That’s it. So he has to be in shape and he won. He won that fight against Alan Omer. And he stays in pretty good shape year round and we do conditioning pretty much all the time. We run a lot of sprints, and I find that if we run sprints at the end of it sessions and that combined with the work pass they get from doing sparring a couple of times a week, they generally stay in pretty good shape year round. So quite often I get more time than that, or sometimes get two, maybe three weeks’ notice, but six days out, there’s nothing I can do in that scenario. So we have to just put faith in the fact that, thanks for doing the conditioning and all the sparring doing on top of that, because we do a lot of sprints primarily because it’s the sharp end of the stick. It’s under the end of the spectrum that basically their regular training doesn’t target. So they’re getting a lot of sort of aerobic sort of lactic base conditioning, depending on what their coaches are having them do from their wrestling from this sparring, from Muay Thai. And then what can I do? Am I going to grind them out with circuits and stuff or anything resembling that type of training — and doing more lactic based training will not help them. What will help them is we do qualitative sprint work and vary the volume on that because that’s the push, the top end stuff that’s perhaps missing from their regular training. And that way we keep the guys in pretty good shape, I’m not going to say it’s perfect. Like if we have a good run at it, we can really, really pick things but quite often, again, with the six day he has to be in shape, we have to hope his fitness day pretty high. And we pretty good for modeling the stress levels, resting heart rate in the morning, asking them — I’m big on just asking people how they feel, having that conversation with him before they start their workouts and then telling what they need to back off or push things forward because you never know when you might get that call up.

23:38

COREY: Yeah absolutely. So you guys are walking in the door, they’re starting out with some type of mobilization or corrective work.

WILLIAM: Yeah, that’s right.

COREY: And then you’re kind of warming them up, getting them to go through some type of an explosive drill or series of drills or whatever it is, right.

WILLIAM: So we’ll combine — I’m quite fond of Complex training or French contrast, and to save time primarily, we’ll combine our explosive stuff with our lifting. So they’ll do a heavy set, let’s say 80% , three by three, and each set of heavy lift will be paired with a box jump or maybe a squat, jump, or maybe even a band assisted jump, something like that. Or if you’re doing French contrast, it’ll be all three. So it’ll be the squat, it’ll be the unloaded jump, loaded jump and the accelerated jump, and we’ll put that together and we get a nice compressed training effect by combining them together, safe stare.

COREY: Absolutely. Hey, you got to be efficient.

WILLIAM: Yeah.

24:40

COREY: And then after you do your strength work, you kind of got your explosive stuff, your strength, you’re doing a lower body of push, pull. And then typically, you’re doing your sprints just about every session that they’re in there?

WILLIAM: So most of the time I get my guys — and I generally suggest this is like we do maybe two, three sessions a week tops, I find that with the full training schedule, it’s hard to do any more than they — because they’re doing three days, two days anyway. So we’ll get them sprint at the end. And again, it’s a case of how do you feel, what’s your resting heart rate when you came in? Is it where it normally is? If it’s not looking good, we won’t have them sprint, if they feel good we will have them sprint, and it does vary a little bit on how they’re feeling. But yeah, we’ll try and do some sort of sprint at the end of the session. And by sprints, I’m talking like on our heavy lifting days, we’ll do a sprint that’s congruent with that. So if they’ve done a very heavy lift, say 90% on one day, we’ll have them the sprint and we’ll do maybe sub six seconds, we’ll do maybe eight seconds, stuff and we’ll run about 80%, 90%. So we’re not going flat out. We’re going pretty close to it, but we’re having them put some real power into the floor, quality of sprints, focusing on that top end speed, and then perhaps on a different day, when they’ve lifted maybe 70% to 80%, we’ll do longer sprint, we’ll do maybe something that starts to get a little bit lactic 20 seconds, maybe 30 seconds, longer rest periods between those. We don’t do a lot of volume. With the shorter sprints we’ll do more, we’ll do maybe 8, 12 sprints. And then with the longer sprints, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, we’ll do maybe 4 to 6 sprints. We don’t drag it out, we do just enough to keep that sort of, again, that hand in with the sort of quality of high end sprinting stuff. Again, because they’re doing so much other things. I don’t want to push them too hard.

26:35

COREY: Yeah absolutely. That’s important because I think a lot of times people have the intensity thing. They want to just work hard all the time. And not only do they want to work hard, but they want to work hard for hours on end, and unless they’re laying on the floor and feel like they’re going to die, they don’t feel like they got a good workout.

WILLIAM: Yeah, totally. And as you’ve written many times on Fight Camp Conditioning, I think I’ve touched on it, I think you’ve touched on it and other guys have is that seeking that fatigue, qualitative work just goes out the window and bringing in main fighters, combat athletes in general and most collision sport athletes if I’m honest, round to the idea that they need to focus on quality over quantity and get them off the idea that every session has to smash them is the hardest part of our job probably, especially if we’ve got someone who’s particularly stubborn and they actively seek that type of fatigue. Some of them get addicted to them. So I think very possibly they expect that, they want that, they feel that they haven’t trained hard if they don’t get that and sometimes, I’ll get looks when they come in with maybe do put in 40 minutes of work and I’ll say like, okay, we’re done, and they’ll look at me and go, what do you mean we’re done? As I give a done; and they they’re expecting to feel absolutely wiped out. And sometimes the idea that you come in and leave the gym feeling better than when you came in is something is the right thing to do. And that point is missed sometimes on athletes.

COREY: Right on. That’s some killer points, dude. This is some really, really good information that people can not only just listen to, but they’ll be able to hopefully implement this week as they’re going into the gym. I think it’s really, really cool that you guys are sharing like this. Last thing is, William, when you’re dealing with the athletes as well as other coaches, dealing and coordinating with those guys, what are some of the ways that you do that with your athletes and coaches that you’re dealing with?

WILLIAM: So, I’m lucky I have a pretty close relationship with the coaches of most of the guys I trained with or train out of BKK fighters, which are probably one of the best gyms if we’re honest in the UK at the moment and their coach Jack Mason and the jujitsu coach Lee Catling, they’re very switched on and I quite often attend some of their sessions as well. I do jiu-jitsu myself, so I get to see them quite a bit and I’ll talk to them and we’ll sometimes talk about the athletes and stuff. So the communication lines are there and yeah, it does help that we’re kind of all pulling in the same direction. I know some guys kind of almost as if they go in, they do the S&C, and it’s kind of very separate to everything else that’s happening. And I can see that obviously being problematic, but we generally don’t have that problem, like I said, make sure that we sort of step off when we have to, and then put the foot down when the athletes really need it.

COREY: Yeah, that’s very fortunate if you get to talk with those guys and see them on a regular basis. It makes a huge difference.

WILLIAM: It makes a massive difference, and I’m not just saying because they’re my coaches as well, but it certainly helps.

COREY: Yeah absolutely. Well, William, thank you so much for your time, man. I hope everybody gets a lot out of this talk and they’ll be able to implement a lot of the ideas and things that you’re doing over there. You’re obviously doing a lot of great things. You guys are kicking butt, they’re getting better. They’re improving every single month. And if you guys aren’t following him on Instagram and following his site Powering Through, I’ll be sure to put more of those links. William, are there other ways as far as your website as well as Instagram, are there any other ways that these guys can get in touch with you if they want?

WILLIAM: Yeah, so I’m on Twitter, I think it’s @wsweyland, and there’s Facebook page, which is Facebook/PoweringThrough as well. So you can get in touch with me there also.

COREY: Cool, cool. Cool. I’ll be sure to put those links on the bottom guys. And William, thanks again.

WILLIAM: No worries.

COREY: I hope you guys have an awesome day and we will talk to you guys soon.

Episode Transcript

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with William Wayland from Powering Through Performance

COREY: Hey guys, this is Corey Beasley with Fight Camp Conditioning. I’m on the phone here with Coach William Wayland. William, how’re you doing, man?

WILLIAM: I’m great, thanks Corey, how are you?

COREY: Very good. Very good. Just so everybody understands, William, give everybody a little two cents on who you are and what you’re doing.

WILLIAM: Sure. I’m a strength and conditioning coach. Obviously, I’m from the UK. I’m based in Essex. So I’m just a little way outside of London. And I have the good fortune to work primarily with combat sport athletes including a few guys in the UFC and a lot of golfers and a few sort of high performing athletes in a few different sports.

COREY: Right on and William, how long you been doing that for?

WILLIAM: I’ve been involved in strength and conditioning probably for around a decade now. I’ve been operating as a full time coach probably for the past three or four years and before that, I used to teach Sports Science at a college but I decided teaching wasn’t for me and I preferred the coaching side of things so I moved forward with that.

COREY: Yeah, and how did you do the segue into strength and conditioning, is that that you opened your place or?

WILLIAM: Yeah, getting in as S&C — I’ve always been involved either on a part time basis I was involved with — in the UK we have a Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme and I was an athlete on the Talented Athlete Scholarship Scheme, OSU, Taekwondo at a quite a high level. And that way, once my Taekwondo career kind of packed up, I got into working with TAS athletes in different sports and worked up and down the country. But it’s always been on a sort of a part time basis and never really getting both feet wet, so to speak. And then I got into teaching, taught full time, didn’t like it and then decided I want to do strength and conditioning full time and that’s where I am now.

02:03

COREY Right on, right on. And as far as aside from teaching and stuff like that, most of the stuff that you’re doing like education wise, experience wise, where’d you get a lot of your experience and your knowledge from?

WILLIAM: So I’ve had the good fortune when I was at talented athlete to be with some really good S&C guys back when in the UK we’ve only really had strength and conditioning as a discipline probably for just about a decade. It was something Americans always did. And I had the good fortune, my Physiology professor who was also one of the coaches for the TAS Scheme, he was excellent, had a good S&C head as well. He was from New Zealand and he was very, very good in giving me that basis which then helped me sort of carry that on to other athletes I was working with further down the line. And just up to date just recently I went to a seminar the other day with Dan John. So I’m always trying to take the time to learn from different people, and Dan John, I’m sure you’ve heard of him, big hero of mine and it was awesome to learn some stuff from him too. So yeah, I’ve been through the way, I’ve run into different coaches from all over the place and picked up bits and pieces from [inaudible] gone.

COREY: Yeah, that’s how it works. Dan is a great coach. I didn’t take a look but I think he’s coming off to perform better summit in Long Beach, he usually attend that.

WILLIAM: Yeah.

COREY: He’s always one of my favorites. He always keeps it pretty simple, right?

WILLIAM: Totally, totally. It’s his ethos to the core and I always try and keep that in the back of my mind when I’m writing my programs and designing things throughout my athletes just how can I keep this simpler, and bouncing off something that — are you familiar with Vernon Gambetta? Ge always says that the simplicity yields complexity. So if you start simple, then you can add on all the extra stuff, but you’ve got to start simple to begin with.

03:58

COREY: Yeah absolutely. So William, with your experience with the combat guys, when you have a brand new athlete that walks through your doors, what are some of the things that you’re asking them, you’re looking for, all that type of stuff when they’re first coming in.

WILLIAM: So I run probably quite a few of the sort of standard screens. Obviously, I sit down, talk to them, find out what their training history is like. A lot of them train but if you know what I’m saying, a lot of them have never trained properly. And it’s more so probably an issue in the UK is that a lot of people choose their strength coaches based on proximity as opposed to how good they are. So if you happen to have a friend in the team who is like a PT or something like that, they are training them or something, come and talk to you and go oh yeah, I’ve squatted, I’ve dead lifted, and then when you get them moving, it’s a whole different story and it’s almost like taking them back to square one.

07:20

COREY: Right on. So you’re talking about that initial assessment and having guys move. Doing those initial tests, the broad jump is just two feet to two feet for distance. Right?

WILLIAM: Yeah, that’s correct. Yeah. We’ll let them have an arm swing as well. And yeah, it’s literally two feet to two feet, no run up from a line and they just happen to do a standing broad jump. I like it as a measure of horizontal power production probably more than the vertical jump if I’m honest. Because I find that the vertical jump is probably a little bit easier to gain with good technique whereas the broad jump again, depends on the sport they play but the broad jump works well for MMA guys, whereas if I had someone who played basketball or volleyball, I’d care more about a vertical jump.

COREY: Right, yeah.

WILLIAM: Yeah, it varies from athlete to athlete. But yeah, I really like the broad jump as its basic, doesn’t take much coaching and generally they can hit it pretty well. It helps if your gym has a nice soft flooring as well. But yeah, I like that test. It’s a good test.

COREY: For sure. And you’re talking about having people front squat with a barbell and just looking that they can front squat their body weight?

WILLIAM: Yeah, so basically, the span is this, can they front squat? Can they front squat their bodyweight? And then how many reps can they front squat their body weight for? And generally being able to front squat their bodyweight I consider good. And then if they can do that at least 10 to 15 times, they’re probably pretty strong already if they can do that. And again, it’s a relative measure. It’s something I think I may well have stolen from Dan John. If they can do that, they’re probably in a pretty good place. Finally off the bench press, [incomprehensible] about the same. And the role is, can they bench press their bodyweight? If they can, good. Then how many reps can they bench it for? And again, it’s just a good relative strength measure I think that’s pretty easy to apply. And again, like if they can hit 15 reps on either the bench press or the front squat with their body weight on the bar, they’re probably pretty strong.

09:23

COREY: Yeah. And as far as the – that’s the squat pattern and the push pattern, do you have a test for hinge and pull and carry?

WILLIAM: Yeah, so for hinge, it’s pretty simple. I’ll look at their — I think it’s called the goat belly swing with a hip hinge where they have the kettlebell held to their chest and just see if they can manage that the first one before that, if they can’t do that, get them to put their hands on their thighs and run their hands down their faces. They first push their butt back and just make sure that they can perform that type of movement, get them next to the wall. Can they touch their butts to the wall?

I have said in the past that I don’t do a lot of heavy pulling from the floor. We do a lot of heavy pulling from a standing position so we’ll do a lot of RDLs. A lot of Snatch Grip RDLs, a lot of Zercher Good Mornings, that type of stuff, and we almost do it top down. So once they can do the movement from the top to the shin, then we’ll get them pulling off the floor thereafter. Because quite often if they’ve not got that experience bracing, they’ll try and pull from the floor and their lower back just rounds or the upper back just rounds and it looks real ugly coming up. So we teach them top down first.

10:58

COREY: Now that’s really good advice. And as far as pulling movement, you have a test that you use for pulling or carrying?

WILLIAM: I quite like the kettlebell. So we’ll do two kettlebells with two dumbbells. They have to be able to carry their body weight split between each hand. So they’ll carry that and just take a look at what happens to them when they walk with it. Is their grip going? Is their form leaving? And quite often you see people do heavy carries, they start to slouch as they start to go. And take a look what their feet are doing. You can tell quite often if there are big imbalances left or right when they’re carrying stuff if that makes a difference. So [inaudible] I think that’s another Dan John one as well. So using that loaded carry to sort of take a look at what sort of shape they’re in as they move and you can figure out pretty quickly where the problems are. Some guys can go and go and go and it’s not an issue and other guys they’ll gasp so their grip strength and it’s just another way of taking a look at all the other qualities.

12:00

COREY: I mean, I think it’s important for people to have these simple tests, ways to gauge their strength. I know we just put up a new post this week talking about what strength is and how to measure it, different tests and different things like that. And yeah, absolutely, those are just very simple basics that I think people can get a lot out of.

WILLIAM: Yeah. And this is the thing — teaching Sport Science, you sat in a room teaching students quite a lot of sophisticated testing that to be honest, they probably never ever going to use in a real world situation. It’s great if you’re in a university and you’ve got a lab and all that stuff, you can do Wingate testing, you can do VO2 Max testing, you can do Isokinetic testing. Most times, you can’t do that type of testing so you have to have something that’s applicable, something that’s repeatable.

COREY: Yeah. Now, you talked a little bit about testing for strength. Are there any tests that you use to test the conditioning level, or how in shape the athlete is?

WILLIAM: Yeah, so the simplest one we use is the heart rate recovery. So we’ll have them get up to around about lactate threshold, so sort of 160 to 170 beats per minute. And then we’ll have them stop and will rest, take their heart rate, and then see what it is a minute after and then see what the difference is. So for instance, if someone’s dropping about 50 beats within a minute from work to complete rest, they’re probably super fit. If they’re taking sort of 40, that’s pretty good. 30 is kind of average and anything lower than that it’s not good enough. So if your heart rate is not dropping by 10 to 20 beats per minute, within that minute, you probably need to really work on your conditioning. And again, it’s a simple test. I know the athletes can repeat it themselves, they’ve got a heart rate monitor, and that’s the simplest one we run. We do a few others, mile run; can they run a mile in less than eight minutes 30, it’s another simple one for them to do and we have a couple others, but those are the two simplest ones.

13:59

COREY: Yeah, I think a lot of times simple is best. Right? So you’ve been dealing with these guys for quite a while. What are some common issues or problems or challenges that you see with the guys that are coming to your gym?

WILLIAM: So with the combat sports guys, I see it all the time. They suffer quite badly from upper cross syndrome. And I don’t know if you notice it, but basically just shoulders are barely internally rotated up thoracic spine is quite flexed very tight through the pec minor. So they wind up with these tight shoulders that have quite wound up quite often accompanied by back pain or headaches, stuff like that. And it seems to be quite a common problem. Because they’re taught to — the chin down, shoulder up, hands in front of the face posture, and it’s taught in wrestling, it’s taught in j-u-jitsu, it’s taught in boxing, it’s taught in Muay Thai and it becomes almost a default walking around posture; that caveman syndrome, elbow is rolled over sort of barreling along. And basically it’s a commonality I see in most of the combat athletes I work with. So we have to do a lot of work, a lot of upper back strengthening, a lot of shoulder mobilizing initially to get them out of that pattern. And that’s the basically the thing I see all the time when they first step into the gym and then other problems, it varies from fighter to fighter, but that’s a real commonality is that shoulder tightness.

15:30

COREY: Yeah absolutely. When you have a guy that comes through, shoulders are super tight, they’re obviously still going to be doing this skill training and stuff like that. What are you telling these guys or are working with them on to help open up those shoulders and upper back strength in that stuff so that it fixes it?

WILLIAM: So initially, we sort of start off with we look at soft tissue work, we look at mobilizations, teach them how to get into the usually it’s pec minor that’s quite tight, get into anterior shoulder, just loosen that stuff off. Because quite often they think it’s the back that’s the problem that’s quite often what hurts, the chest doesn’t hurt and teaching them that they need to loosen off their chest so you have to do stuff to bring the scapular back into the movement and stop it from wanting to come up and over. So we do things like wall slides and a lot of reach type movements, things like that. Lot of single arm wider carries, a lot of half kneeling pressing to try and open that shoulder out, get them really full range of motion on the movement and lots of reaching that type of stuff, thoracic extension type stuff getting through that. And then we reinforce that openness once we’ve got it with a lot of simple stuff, man full of parts, rear delt flies, things like that, rowing, full range of movement, rowing, ring flies, a lot of stuff out just to strengthen the upper back, get everything opened out. And that’s kind of the way we go with that.

16:55

COREY: That’s good info. I think that’s something that a lot of people may be if you bring it to their attention, they’re okay yeah, everybody has that. You know what I mean?

WILLIAM: Yeah.

COREY: But as far as when they actually get into the gym, not really always a focus.

WILLIAM: No, they want to do the glamorous stuff, the big stuff, and sometimes the little stuff counts and that’s why quite often at the start of our workouts, we’ll get all that stuff done, we get out of the way first. If you leave it to the end, quite often it’s high from the session, you’ve done your big lifts, you want to go home. And we get these guys do it right at the start and they do it together quite often I train them in small groups, and then they’re all accountable to each other and they’re all like, oh, come on, get off, you got to do your shoulder mobilization, you got to do band work, you got to do that type of stuff. And I test quite often testing together as well. If you’re familiar with the pencil test, if the pencils are pointing forwards when they’ve got them in their palms, that suggests that their posture is good. If their pencils are pointing towards each other when they’re holding on to them, that’s just – are you familiar with this test or?

COREY: Explain it so everybody –

WILLIAM: So it’s really simple, what we do is you stand up, you hold on to two pencils and relax your arms down by your side. If the pencils are facing each other, that suggests that your shoulder is super tight, however, if they’re facing forwards, that suggests that you’ve got pretty good posture and your shoulders are looking pretty good balance wise. So it’s a super, super simple test that you can run just to – and hopefully people listening to this are picking up pens on the desk now and giving it a try because again, it’s another really simple test and you can do it almost in a moment tell whether someone’s good or bad and that’s what I like.

18:37

COREY: Very cool. So when you’re talking about doing that stuff in the beginning, when guys do come and see you and you’re starting to work out, do you kind of have a rhythm or a template that you’re using with your workouts when guys come in, they start here and they go through certain aspects of working out and then they leave?

WILLIAM: Yeah, so I’m quite fond of something called the Bondarchuk Complex. So are you familiar with Antoliy Bondarchuk?

COREY: Yeah.

WILLIAM: He’s a famous throwing coach, and the Bondarchuk Complex is super simple. You start the workout with something explosive, some sort of low body movement, some sort of push pull, and then some sort of weakness, I think is the simple structure. And pretty much all the sessions, it might not look like it, but they all follow that structure and in terms of — that can be applied to just about most workouts depending on what your aims are. It can be adapted pretty easy, but in terms of the more complicated stuff, the layer that goes on top of that is, I’m quite fond of triphasic training, which is Cal Dietz and Ben Peterson‘s S&C method and I’ve kind of taken that on to really to the core of what I do, and we’ll run through cycles, and I don’t know if you’re familiar with the method at all basically, we’ll run usually a 12 week block. We’d do heavy strength work focusing on eccentrics, isometrics and then heavy concentric work. And then we’ll do some high force high velocity work at about 80% to 55%. And then we’ll do sort of sub 55% lifting for a little while. And we repeat that cycle again and again and again probably about three, four times throughout a year, sometimes less depending on the training age of the athlete. And that’s the rough, rough structure we follow you around.

20:26

COREY: Now, as you’re doing that throughout the year, I know we’ve talked with other people in the past about, especially with if you have a jiu-jitsu tournament scheduled, if you’re a high level fighter, you tend to know that your fights are coming up months in advance. A lot of times people have stuff come up last minute. And they also have their skill training which can vary in intensity throughout the week as well. I guess first, if you do have guys that there’s something comes up last minute, how do you kind of flip on the flyer? Or make sure your guys are kind of halfway in shape so that they can perform if needed, versus that real linear block kind of a periodization?

WILLIAM: Yeah. So our guys are in pretty good shape generally. I find it easy with pros because if they’re sparring, their work capacity is generally pretty good most of the time, not great, but in the end, you need that push to get it better. For instance, we had the shock of our lives when Arnold Allen got called up to the UFC six days’ notice. There’s nothing I can do. Literally that there’s this he has to cut weight and fight. That’s it. So he has to be in shape and he won. He won that fight against Alan Omer. And he stays in pretty good shape year round and we do conditioning pretty much all the time. We run a lot of sprints, and I find that if we run sprints at the end of it sessions and that combined with the work pass they get from doing sparring a couple of times a week, they generally stay in pretty good shape year round. So quite often I get more time than that, or sometimes get two, maybe three weeks’ notice, but six days out, there’s nothing I can do in that scenario. So we have to just put faith in the fact that, thanks for doing the conditioning and all the sparring doing on top of that, because we do a lot of sprints primarily because it’s the sharp end of the stick. It’s under the end of the spectrum that basically their regular training doesn’t target. So they’re getting a lot of sort of aerobic sort of lactic base conditioning, depending on what their coaches are having them do from their wrestling from this sparring, from Muay Thai. And then what can I do? Am I going to grind them out with circuits and stuff or anything resembling that type of training — and doing more lactic based training will not help them. What will help them is we do qualitative sprint work and vary the volume on that because that’s the push, the top end stuff that’s perhaps missing from their regular training. And that way we keep the guys in pretty good shape, I’m not going to say it’s perfect. Like if we have a good run at it, we can really, really pick things but quite often, again, with the six day he has to be in shape, we have to hope his fitness day pretty high. And we pretty good for modeling the stress levels, resting heart rate in the morning, asking them — I’m big on just asking people how they feel, having that conversation with him before they start their workouts and then telling what they need to back off or push things forward because you never know when you might get that call up.

23:38

COREY: Yeah absolutely. So you guys are walking in the door, they’re starting out with some type of mobilization or corrective work.

WILLIAM: Yeah, that’s right.

COREY: And then you’re kind of warming them up, getting them to go through some type of an explosive drill or series of drills or whatever it is, right.

WILLIAM: So we’ll combine — I’m quite fond of Complex training or French contrast, and to save time primarily, we’ll combine our explosive stuff with our lifting. So they’ll do a heavy set, let’s say 80% , three by three, and each set of heavy lift will be paired with a box jump or maybe a squat, jump, or maybe even a band assisted jump, something like that. Or if you’re doing French contrast, it’ll be all three. So it’ll be the squat, it’ll be the unloaded jump, loaded jump and the accelerated jump, and we’ll put that together and we get a nice compressed training effect by combining them together, safe stare.

COREY: Absolutely. Hey, you got to be efficient.

WILLIAM: Yeah.

24:40

COREY: And then after you do your strength work, you kind of got your explosive stuff, your strength, you’re doing a lower body of push, pull. And then typically, you’re doing your sprints just about every session that they’re in there?

WILLIAM: So most of the time I get my guys — and I generally suggest this is like we do maybe two, three sessions a week tops, I find that with the full training schedule, it’s hard to do any more than they — because they’re doing three days, two days anyway. So we’ll get them sprint at the end. And again, it’s a case of how do you feel, what’s your resting heart rate when you came in? Is it where it normally is? If it’s not looking good, we won’t have them sprint, if they feel good we will have them sprint, and it does vary a little bit on how they’re feeling. But yeah, we’ll try and do some sort of sprint at the end of the session. And by sprints, I’m talking like on our heavy lifting days, we’ll do a sprint that’s congruent with that. So if they’ve done a very heavy lift, say 90% on one day, we’ll have them the sprint and we’ll do maybe sub six seconds, we’ll do maybe eight seconds, stuff and we’ll run about 80%, 90%. So we’re not going flat out. We’re going pretty close to it, but we’re having them put some real power into the floor, quality of sprints, focusing on that top end speed, and then perhaps on a different day, when they’ve lifted maybe 70% to 80%, we’ll do longer sprint, we’ll do maybe something that starts to get a little bit lactic 20 seconds, maybe 30 seconds, longer rest periods between those. We don’t do a lot of volume. With the shorter sprints we’ll do more, we’ll do maybe 8, 12 sprints. And then with the longer sprints, 20 seconds, 30 seconds, we’ll do maybe 4 to 6 sprints. We don’t drag it out, we do just enough to keep that sort of, again, that hand in with the sort of quality of high end sprinting stuff. Again, because they’re doing so much other things. I don’t want to push them too hard.

26:35

COREY: Yeah absolutely. That’s important because I think a lot of times people have the intensity thing. They want to just work hard all the time. And not only do they want to work hard, but they want to work hard for hours on end, and unless they’re laying on the floor and feel like they’re going to die, they don’t feel like they got a good workout.

WILLIAM: Yeah, totally. And as you’ve written many times on Fight Camp Conditioning, I think I’ve touched on it, I think you’ve touched on it and other guys have is that seeking that fatigue, qualitative work just goes out the window and bringing in main fighters, combat athletes in general and most collision sport athletes if I’m honest, round to the idea that they need to focus on quality over quantity and get them off the idea that every session has to smash them is the hardest part of our job probably, especially if we’ve got someone who’s particularly stubborn and they actively seek that type of fatigue. Some of them get addicted to them. So I think very possibly they expect that, they want that, they feel that they haven’t trained hard if they don’t get that and sometimes, I’ll get looks when they come in with maybe do put in 40 minutes of work and I’ll say like, okay, we’re done, and they’ll look at me and go, what do you mean we’re done? As I give a done; and they they’re expecting to feel absolutely wiped out. And sometimes the idea that you come in and leave the gym feeling better than when you came in is something is the right thing to do. And that point is missed sometimes on athletes.

COREY: Right on. That’s some killer points, dude. This is some really, really good information that people can not only just listen to, but they’ll be able to hopefully implement this week as they’re going into the gym. I think it’s really, really cool that you guys are sharing like this. Last thing is, William, when you’re dealing with the athletes as well as other coaches, dealing and coordinating with those guys, what are some of the ways that you do that with your athletes and coaches that you’re dealing with?

WILLIAM: So, I’m lucky I have a pretty close relationship with the coaches of most of the guys I trained with or train out of BKK fighters, which are probably one of the best gyms if we’re honest in the UK at the moment and their coach Jack Mason and the jujitsu coach Lee Catling, they’re very switched on and I quite often attend some of their sessions as well. I do jiu-jitsu myself, so I get to see them quite a bit and I’ll talk to them and we’ll sometimes talk about the athletes and stuff. So the communication lines are there and yeah, it does help that we’re kind of all pulling in the same direction. I know some guys kind of almost as if they go in, they do the S&C, and it’s kind of very separate to everything else that’s happening. And I can see that obviously being problematic, but we generally don’t have that problem, like I said, make sure that we sort of step off when we have to, and then put the foot down when the athletes really need it.

COREY: Yeah, that’s very fortunate if you get to talk with those guys and see them on a regular basis. It makes a huge difference.

WILLIAM: It makes a massive difference, and I’m not just saying because they’re my coaches as well, but it certainly helps.

COREY: Yeah absolutely. Well, William, thank you so much for your time, man. I hope everybody gets a lot out of this talk and they’ll be able to implement a lot of the ideas and things that you’re doing over there. You’re obviously doing a lot of great things. You guys are kicking butt, they’re getting better. They’re improving every single month. And if you guys aren’t following him on Instagram and following his site Powering Through, I’ll be sure to put more of those links. William, are there other ways as far as your website as well as Instagram, are there any other ways that these guys can get in touch with you if they want?

WILLIAM: Yeah, so I’m on Twitter, I think it’s @wsweyland, and there’s Facebook page, which is Facebook/PoweringThrough as well. So you can get in touch with me there also.

COREY: Cool, cool. Cool. I’ll be sure to put those links on the bottom guys. And William, thanks again.

WILLIAM: No worries.

COREY: I hope you guys have an awesome day and we will talk to you guys soon.

Episode #29: Interview with William Wayland from Powering Through Strength and Conditioning

Full Transcription of Our Podcast with William Wayland from Powering Through Performance

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