The RIGHT Way To Improve Your Conditioning For Boxing | PART 2 transcript

In part one, we looked at why zone 2 and long, slow road work just aren't the most efficient ways to condition for boxing and why highintensity means are probably going to be the real game changer for your conditioning. In this video, I'm going to break down exactly what tests to use to identify your limitations and then how you can actually integrate these highintensity means of conditioning into your own training. So, like I said, the first step is to actually do some testing.

And the three simple tests I like to use, each with their own specific purpose, are resting heart rate, a 30 second repeat sprint test, and then a time to exhaustion test. We discussed in part one, resting heart rate can be a really simple insight into this aerobic base that everyone is so obsessed with, but also because it's cheap, reliable, and easy to track over time, which are some key qualities you want in some testing.

Because if you have these very elaborate and expensive ways of testing, then they just get thrown out the window because no one wants to do that. But more importantly, it helps determine whether you actually need lower intensity work or some long hit work or whether you benefit from just jumping straight into some highintensity interventions. Now, I guess to be clear, I don't hate low-intensity training, and it definitely has its place, which we'll see, but I just think it's overused and misapplied to most boxers training.

So, when we're actually looking at resting heart rate, the most simple way to interpret this is as follows. If your heart rate is above 60 BPM, it basically tells us that your heart is less efficient and it needs to beat more often to deliver the oxygen around the body. And this is probably going to mean you'll likely need more centrally focused conditioning like long intervals, maybe even in some cases some zone two or long slow work.

If however you're between 50 and 60, you're kind of in the middle ground. So this could be a mix of centrally and periphyally biased conditioning. And then on the very other end, if you're below 50 BPM, then it means that your heart is effectively pumping efficiently. It can get lots of blood out per beat. So your central adaptations are solid and you should really be focusing on these peripheral adaptations rather than the central stuff.

It means that because your central adaptations are so welldeveloped, you really need to be focusing on how well your muscles can actually utilize and uptake the oxygen that's being delivered by your heart and lungs. So jumping over into the second test, this is going to be our 30 secondond repeat sprint test. And again, I got this one from Dr. Andrew Usher, but basically it's designed to assess how well your cardiovascular system can respond and repeat these highintensity efforts.

And so it's pretty straightforward how the test works. Essentially, you're going to jump on an assault bike. You're obviously going to do a little bit of a warm up just to get the legs moving, get the heart pumping a little bit, and you're going to perform a 30 secondond all out sprint. The key is that this needs to be an allout sprint, then a 60-second recovery, and then followed by another 30-cond sprint. If your bike has power data, which some of the Rogue Echo Assault bikes do, then that's even better because you can export this to actually look at what the power data is doing alongside the heart rate data.

And so, a couple of things we're actually looking for when we're doing this test is from both the heart rate and the power graphs is, do you struggle to hit near max heart rates relative to your training age and training history? Is your recovery between both sprints good? Is it slow? uh does it need work? Does it take time to hit peak power? Can you sustain that power through the sprint and then into the second sprint?

And then can you repeat your first effort or is there this massive drop off in heart rate and then obviously your power output if you're tracking that. So this gives us a clue into what's actually happening at the muscular level and then what we actually need to focus on in the conditioning itself. And so for our last test, we're going to be doing a time to exhaustion test. And whilst the first two are basically diagnostic tests to see what we kind of need to work on, this test is more of a performance-based test.

So this is designed to assess your overall conditioning capacity. And as the name suggests, we're basically going as long as you possibly can and we're progressively increasing the workload until you hit failure or essentially gas out. There's plenty of ways to do this. You can look up a million different ways of doing a time to exhaustion test online, but one of the easiest ways that I found to work is essentially start at 40 RPM or 40 revolutions per minute on the assault bike.

And every minute you just increase the RPM by five. And so you keep going until you're exhausted or until you can't hold the RPM for 5 seconds and that's when you end the test. And typically you want the test to last anywhere between 5 to 8 minutes as this is a sweet spot that will stress both the aerobic and anorobic systems. And like I mentioned, we use this as a performance-based test to basically establish a baseline.

And then we also retest after a training block to see if the training interventions we used actually worked. And so now you've actually done the test, we need to interpret the results. And this is what we're going to look at. Kind of mentioned it before, but for resting heart rate, if you're above 60 BPM, then you should really be focusing on some long hit and that low inensity aerobic work or some zone 2. If you're between 50 and 60, then you want to combine both some highintensity work and some lower intensity work.

If you're below 50 BPM, then you should really be prioritizing sprint interval training and those peripheral adaptations. And I can almost guarantee that most boxers, if they track their resting heart rate, they'll be easily below that 50 BPM. And so for the 30 secondond repeat sprint test, I'll chuck it up on the screen here. You can see you've got the issue on the left that you've identified from your heart rate trace and then the fix for it.

So, if you're lacking the ability to reach those higher heart rates, then you want to use longer intervals around 15 to 20 seconds and work to rest ratios of 1 to 2 to 3. So, essentially what that means, if you do a 15-second sprint, then you'll rest for 30 to 45 seconds. If you have slower delayed recovery, you're going to start with shorter work periods around 10 seconds and your work to rest ratio will be one to one to three.

So again, you might start with a 10-second sprint with 30 second recovery and then over the block, you just start to reduce that recovery. If you have power data and you're seeing that you have low power output or a slow time to peak recovery, then you'll use very short sprints, so around 5 to 10 seconds with longer recovery periods. So this will be work to rest ratios of 1 to 3 to 5. And then lastly, if you have the inability to maintain power output, this is where you're going to use those longer sprints, but because you're focusing on power output, you will also have longer recovery periods.

So this is where the work to rest will between 1 to 3 to six. So now that I've kind of shown you through how to test and then what to look out for, I thought the easiest way to get the most out of this is to actually go through a case study. And this is from one of the amateur heavyweight boxers I've been working with. And basically for some context, he'd been training consistently five to six days per week for years.

The conditioning testing we did was actually at the end of a more extensive profiling session. So I obviously didn't want to take resting heart rate at the end because it wouldn't be reflective of what his resting heart rate actually was. So, like I said, because he's been training for five to six days per week for the last few years, I could safely assume that his resting heart rate was less than 50. So, what we did is we jumped straight into a repeat sprint test, the second test that we just spoke about.

And here's what we saw. He couldn't hit peak heart rates. His heart rate took far too long to recover between efforts. You can see that he's got this long, slow recovery. And and this basically indicated that his recovery kinetics were clearly undeveloped. So for his time to exhaustion test, the third test we spoke about, he clocked in at 5 minutes and 15 seconds. So what did we actually do? Well, this was leading into a national competition, which we had 5 weeks to prepare for.

Obviously, like I said, the crux of this video is about using high intensity and sprint interval conditioning. So this is what we did. We had two weeks focusing on improving his ability to reach and tolerate these higher intensities. So I used low volume sprint interval work. He did 20 seconds of work, 60 seconds of recovery, and just did four to five reps of that. So for the first week, he did four reps. For the second week, he did five reps.

And then weeks three to five, for the last three weeks, we reduced his rest to 40 seconds to specifically target those recovery kinetics that we mentioned. And as you can see on the screen, here's basically what we found. He had higher peak heart rates during this repeat sprints. He had much faster recovery between efforts. And I guess more importantly is that when we tested his time to exhaustion again, he increased to 6 minutes and 27 seconds.

So that's an improvement of 22%. And this was all done with no zone 2 work and less than 7 minutes of actual conditioning twice per week. So rather than going out and doing what most people traditionally would do would be to go for runs, do some zone 2 work, maybe even some longer intervals on the feet, we acrewed a total of 14 minutes of off feet conditioning per week doing highintensity means and saw a 22% improvement in his conditioning.

And if you ask me, and probably 95% of boxers on Earth if they could get the results for their conditioning in literally a fraction of the time, I think they would be going with this offbeat sprint interval work rather than just flogging themselves with running. Because not only are you getting the results in less time, it means you can spend more time actually focusing on your skills, which is boxing itself. So, as you can see, this is how you make your conditioning more efficient, more effective, and what I would consider more specific to the demands of boxing. you can completely forget about wasting hours jogging.

What you really need to do, like we mentioned in this video, is go through some testing, identify what's actually limiting you, and then implement the methods that will actually improve those things. And if you found this helpful, make sure you drop a comment or question below. And as always, all that stuff, subscribe, like. See you guys next time.