Hello, and welcome to The Progress Theory, where we discuss scientific principles for optimising human performance.

I am Dr. Phil Price, and on today's episode, we are joined by S&C coach and hybrid athlete Jamie Scott. Jamie came to me a few months ago discussing the possibility of him wanting to do a PhD in the area of hybrid training. So I thought, well, this is a perfect opportunity for you to on the show, and we can discuss all of the types of areas that we can look into. So in this episode, we discuss the misconceptions around the interference effect, what kind of factors we need to be really focused on when it comes to hybrid research, and he discusses his own experiences as a hybrid athlete and gives us three tips for our hybrid training.

In this episode, we discuss:

0.55 - Introduction
8:23 - Becoming sub-elite in many sports
13:44 - The misinterpretation of the interference effect?
27:47 - Where hybrid research needs to go?
33:44 - The importance of progressing slowly
42:02 - Jamie’s Training goals
46:31 - What’s the hardest hybrid challenge?
52:42 - Advice for hybrid training

Key Findings

Sub-Elite Performances and the Management of Time: "When we talk about hybrid approaches and being sub elite, that fascinates me because essentially you have people that are in these kind of mismatched conditions or sub-optimal conditions inherently and they're still performing exceptionally well and being able to kind of spin those plates I think is fascinating. So, yeah, I think that when you have an athlete that is maybe not as appreciated because those performances aren't kind of like world class, you're not going to have someone run like a sub ten second, 100 meters, but let's say someone's able to run like a Sub 11.5 and then it also is able to snatch 130. Then even more divergent than that is be able to run like a Sub free marathon. I think I said it in the post, you probably have one of the very select humans on Earth. And I think that's fascinating to really appreciate that actually from a genetic point of view, but also from the management of time."

The Fascinating Question of Human Potential: "I find that very interesting. That's something that we just probably don't know how high that ceiling is."

The Impact of Basic Physiological Needs on Performance: "When you look at potentially the reasons for fatigue from a peripheral perspective, from a central perspective, I think even the desire to drink might downregulate your force production, for example, because that's your primary need."

The Importance of Physiology in Performance: "And I think Jerome Dempsey spoke about physiological redundancy. So essentially, systems within systems, ultimately, you need to stay alive, and it doesn't really care about your five K time or whatever."

Training and Fatigue Management: "And I think that the idea that people in general probably just have to train a bit more, right? We just have to increase, we have to get people out training, have to get people moving. And I think that there's this idea about maybe overdoing it, pushing it or overtraining and managing fatigue."

Adaptations and Fatigue Management: "We see that the stronger signal of adaptations get sent, and hence why interval training is so powerful, right? Because by enabling rest, we're enabled to spend more time at high intensity, but the cost of that is more fatigue."

The Challenges of Improving Weightlifting and Endurance Sports: "The interesting thing that I probably would say from an anecdotal perspective is that when I have done weightlifting, so I particularly enjoy sort of the snatch stuff, I definitely feel like I have to be very sensible in where I place that session. Because if I have a little bit of fatigue or whatever, I just don't feel like I've got that kind of snap and kind of neural drive."

Iron Man Training: "He talks about how he just tried to muscle through swimming and kind of just applied the same mentality as he did for his bike and his run and just realised that he was just getting beat up because he was pushing himself so hard, because he was trying to muscle through it and not understanding, perhaps the time spent."

The Importance of Training Volumes in Swimming: "When you look at the literature in swimming, if you look at the training volumes, it's an incredibly high amount of training volumes like elite swimmers do."

The Importance of Skill Acquisition Sessions: "I definitely didn't when I was doing CrossFit years and years ago, I didn't appreciate the importance of skill acquisition sessions actually having an okay mental load, but we're going to just focus on just movement and just trying to improve efficiency of a certain task and not necessarily have to kill myself in doing that task."

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The Science of Hybrid Training

It was originally thought that you could not effectively train for both strength and endurance at the same time because they required different adaptations which were not compatible with each other. It was claimed that ‘an interference effect’, blunted the adaptations for strength if you simultaneously trained for endurance. However, recent developments in sports which require both strength and endurance have really challenged this idea, with hybrid athletes producing impressive performances in both strength and endurance sports together. This had led scientists, coaches, and athletes to rethink what is humanly possible and suggests the interference effect is not as influential as originally thought. But what is a hybrid athlete? What is the ‘interference effect’? And how can we maximize our training to improve at the same time our strength and endurance performance? In this book, Dr Phil Price provides insight into the misconceptions surrounding strength and endurance training by distilling the past 50 years of research and drawing on the conversations he had with great scientists, coaches, and athletes on The Progress Theory podcast. This book is essential reading for hybrid athletes and coaches who are looking to understand the key training variables and their effect on the simultaneous development of strength and endurance performance.

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