Today’s episode features sport scientist Max Schmarzo.  Max is the director of sport science at Resilience Code and the chief science officer at Exsurgo Technologies.  Many of you may know him by his Instagram handle @strong_by_science where Max posts a variety of practical and scientific information that has garnered a large following.

Max is one of the smartest young coaches I know, and I am constantly blown away by the breadth and detail of his knowledge.  If you want to get into the nuts and bolts of human performance, Max is a go-to guy to talk to. Not only is Max well versed in many facets of strength and conditioning, but he also has education as an athletic trainer, and has deep knowledge of holistic markers of human performance in fields such as functional medicine.

Today our theme is the holistic adaptation of the body to stress.  When it comes to getting results, having a good grasp on things that can make or break one’s strength and performance gains, or predispose one to injury can create a broader vision of if one’s strength program is actually effective, or if lifestyle, nutrition and general stress needs to be considered.  

On today’s show, Max and I are chatting about these adaptive processes, the different effects of recovery modalities, nutrition and it’s impact on training decisions, the adaptation of tendons, inflammation and its role in training, and more. 

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.  



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Key Points:

How the body adapts to stress on a muscular and cellular level
How the gut impacts an athletes response to training
How imprecise the general term “recovery” is, and how different modalities can have very different responses
How caloric deficit and nutrition can impact the type of “recovery day” an athlete should perform
The “anti-virus” effect of general strength work to mitigate a large quantity of specific strength training
Concepts for training tendons, and inherent differences versus training muscles

Quotes:
“People call desensitization to epinephrine central nervous system fatigue”

“If I don’t understand my athlete’s adaptive capacity…. how could I blame myself (as a coach creating a program), if I’m not turning over other things to look at”

“If an individual is susceptible to eating (bad carbs) sometimes it’s best to remove all carbs, then reintroduce good carbs to build a good base”

“You don’t get to wreck your muscles and have your blood pressure not change”

“If I sit in cryotherapy, I have a blunting in the inflammatory response… so I could be blunting the muscle adaptations that may occur”

“Performance and longevity do not go hand in hand”

“When you are doing something specific, there is only so much room to do something specific”

“A tendon doesn’t look like or adapt like a muscle”





About Max Schmarzo

Max Schmarzo is the Director of Sport Science at Resilience Code, in Englewood, Colorado. He is the Chief Science Officer at Exsurgo Technologies and the founder of Strong by Science. He has authored two books, "Applied Principles of Power Development" and "Isometrics for Performance". He specializes in multidisciplinary care, sport science data solutions and athlete development. Acting as a consultant, he has worked with professional teams to help develop evidence based, data driven, sport science practices.

Exsurgo.us

StrongByScience.net

MyResilienceCode.com