002 Maximum strength

Hello and welcome to the high performance physiology podcast. I'm Chris Beardley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Mauseri and we're going to talk about maximum strength today. So this is the second episode in our series, I'm hoping to run for as many episodes as we can, but this is the second episode we're talking about maximum strength today. This is building on our conversation from last time when we talked about basically maximum strength and speed and power. So obviously by you know kind of definition of covering all those things in one episode it was it was pretty high level. So the plan today is to talk about maximum strength and just focus on that thing, just focus on that outcome and talk about all the adaptions that go into it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to kind of chat through the kind of mechanisms, but instead of me talking for like 20 minutes and then giving Robert down to talk again. What we're going to do this time is we're going to do this time is I actually split it up. So we're going to talk about a mechanism and then we're going to kind of go and discuss some of the ideas of training programs and how that might work. So I'm very quickly going to describe my mechanism and then I'm going to throw the ball over to Rob and he's going to kind of you know sort of illustrate that and go back and forth a little bit and see how that works you know for you guys. But obviously you know we'll be looking for feedback as we go through and these episodes so hopefully you know we'll get some audience ideas of how we can make this better more useful for people who are training athletes or even athletes themselves. So basically today talking about maximum strength we're going to go through you know sort of 5 or 6 mechanisms and we're going to go through the central nose to most first and then the peripheral ones. Afterwards that's just kind of that's might been my way of explaining it for a number of years that kind of works for me. So we're going to start out by talking about coordination, move on, talk about antagonist, correct deviation and finally motine recruitment. And then as far as the peripheral structures are concerned we'll talk about obviously hypertrophy and you can get a rap sarcoma radenesis into that for the purposes of today. And then we'll talk a little bit about lateral forward transmission inside muscles and also tendon stiffness changes very briefly because that's something that will probably have to punt to a separate conversation because it's just a bit difficult for athletic populations to talk about tendon stiffness in one kind of isolated way. So starting the beginning we've got obviously a way all of these things are ways of improving a maximum strength test. So if we're doing say for example a back squat or a bench press as our maximum strength test which is pretty common in a lot of S&C studies then what you might find is that that improvement in that back squat one right max or three right max whatever it is that you're doing will actually improve simply because of the practice effect. So we'll actually see an improvement in what we call the motor learning of that athlete in respect of the exercise they'll get better at coordinating it. So ultimately it's not because the muscles have got stronger and it's not because the brain is sending you know more central motor command to the muscles it's literally just because the overall coordination pattern is better. So in other words kind of think about is being an improvement in efficiency. So they're actually we're making the exercise easier so that weight lifted is bigger but the reality is the athlete hasn't actually got you know kind of a stronger muscle or a bigger level of activation of that muscle it's literally just that the movement that we're practicing is getting you know kind of better in the respect of the efficiency or as I say the motor control of that exercise. So basically this is a fairly well studied area there's actually an entire body of literature devoted to motor learning and generally speaking of course we're looking for a practice effect so we're looking for ways to maximize the efficiency of the movement and of course practicing is one of the best ways to do that but of course getting coach input into the movement to fix small problems small errors and getting obviously things like the visual feedback in the form of video a great way to improve the motor learning situations and then on the negative sides you know kind of we would probably want to avoid a fatigue situation because that would you know kind of degrade the quality of the movement and fail to then allow the improvement to happen. The reason that all of that works is because it's the quality of the movement in the moment in the actual repetition that drives the improvement so if I you kind of think about it is like if I've got a particular level of skill in a squat and then for whatever reason maybe because I've got a good coach working with me or I've seen some feedback on a video that I can see what error I'm making or I'm you know kind of just in a particularly un-peted state so my movement quality is high. Any of those kind of situations I might just manage to do a slightly better quality repetition on one particular day. My brain will notice that and it'll then upgrade my existing motor programs to kind of reflect that superior performance. Now there's other stuff we could also talk about. There's kind of external focus of attention and things like that but ultimately all of them kind of work the same way they all work by improving you know kind of motor performance. Rob are there any situations in the kind of programs that you're writing at the moment where you're actively thinking about improving coordination? Can you kind of walk us through any of that? Yeah for sure Chris so really you know coordination is really interesting especially when it comes to power lifter is on even like calisthenics athletes you know you got to improve your dip, your chin up like very specific movements and motor patterns. So if I'm programming X-A for a power lifter and I've worked with quite a few over you know the last three years one of my girls actually was top 10 all-time in their weight class really great lifter. So if I'm trying to improve coordination obviously you're going to place exercises first in a session you know you're talking a little bit about fatigue and avoiding that. So when you're in that fatigue state your brain is not going to be able to adopt that better motor pattern. So you don't want to place an exercise later in your session when you've done other things prior you know starting off with it obviously pileders are starting with your bench squat. Deadlift depending on the session whatever it may be and then if you want to improve the the coordination specifically at you know that load you're going to be working with and that kind of bar speed using heavier loads staying a bit shy failure. Don't want to be getting too close and grunting out too many reps. That point you'll kind of wind up and grin and maybe a worse motor pattern. So just staying a bit shy you know two to three reps is kind of like the sweet spot I found for spending a lot of time as I'm going through a program. I don't tend to have people go super super heavy you know unless they're like peaking for a test for a competition and at that point maybe some heavier singles you know closer to a max things like that to get even more specific load specific coordination than that. Yeah that's a pretty good point because that's a really good point because there is a load specificity of coordination patterns so one of the really cool things that we've been able to kind of pull out the biomechanics research in the last few years is that if you look at the ratios of different joint talks for example in a squat and any multi joint movement but the squat's probably been the best studied. You can actually see that the ratio of hip to knee just as an example the ratio of hip to knee kind of moments talks changes as we increase the load it tends to become slightly more hip dominant as you kind of increase the weight in those exercises. So there is definitely a load specificity associated especially with you know kind of power lifting performance which I think is really interesting idea for that kind of practice prior to competition with those heavy loads things a really really good point that you are kind of just kind of sailing straight past the jump in it. No no no no it is a really good one and then you know a lot of times like old school I guess when I was coming up lifting and initially coaching people would use like much higher volumes and things like that and letter loads sort of like 8 10 12 on those exercises and if you know you're trying to improve coordination in that you're going to be much better off using those lower rep ranges and not going as close to failure and things like that. And then of course also that effect you've described there that that issue that you just described there also impacts on the overall program. So if people are doing a high of all you just sets but also if they're combining that with say higher repetitions if you do that then you probably not going to be arriving at the next training session in a sort of an unphotute state. And of course that then means even when you put your kind of exercise that you're trying to improve the coordination of the beginning of the workout it's still not going to get any better. And I think this is it's just so important that we communicate to people that this this coordination improvement is probably kind of a hit or a miss. It's like you know if you if you don't quite get a superior motor program than the one your brain has already got programmed it's like well why would the brain bother changing the one it's already got. So you kind of got to kind of arrive in that almost perfect state really to get coordination improvements which I find it so strange when we see a program that are designed to improve coordinate or intended not designing intended to improve coordination. And there's just a billion reps in there and you're looking at it and going honestly this is not going to work. It's not possible. Yeah you do you know you do your squat per four by ten and then you do a leg press for three by twelve and things like that you see it all the time. And yeah it's not going to improve coordination like you said and then the next session like you're saying you're going to be toast nothing's really going to happen. So yeah just really I mean I guess programming wise there's so many things that you should avoid you know not so much sometimes what you should add in it's pretty easy to you know work with lower reps every loads be careful about going to failure. It's one you know if you want to do too much and then it really will take away from that session the next sessions and then you're mentioning coaching as well. So obviously you know if you're working with a coach good chance you're working with a coach because your newer your technique is not as good or maybe you just aren't more experienced like if you want to just keep improving it. Someone watches footage of you you know they adjust bar path slightly on a deadlift they adjust bar path slightly on a squat or a bench something like that and then you immediately learn that pattern. Brain and you know takes it in and then the next sessions are automatically going to be better. I mean I know I analyze a ton of footage when I have competitive power affairs even like my gym pop clients you know they want to get good at a dip a chin up whatever it may be. They always think it's weird initially when I'm filming exercises but it's to show them so they can see it and then obviously to review myself afterwards you know see what when well what not but yeah definitely showing them helps quite a lot. with people I find that are newer when it comes to training? Yeah, no, I think there's some really, especially now that we're all walking around with a video camera in our pocket. I mean, I think there's some amazing applications. I show my age a bit here because obviously I didn't grow up with that. But, you know, it's such an amazing tool in those kind of situations. But yeah, so, you know, obviously the flip side of this is that, you know, we don't need to do these things if the client isn't trying to make those improvements on the coordination side. So, obviously all of that stuff is fantastic for the power of the person looking for the one arm chain, you know, for the person just wanting to improve a particular exercise for their, for its own purpose, you know, but obviously an athlete who's using a squat or using a bench press in order to support a totally different athletic activity, we don't need to do any of that. It's actually not going to help. I think this is one of those really interesting things that I think I've seen change in the last kind of few years in the industry. I mean, I remember maybe sort of 10, 15 years ago, there were people who were saying that, "Yeah, strength training is like weighted coordination training." And I'm like, "No, that's not a thing." So, it's really, really interesting to see, you know, how has physiology is kind of infiltrated the SNC community, which kind of used to be running around blinkers on completely avoiding thinking about anything physiological at all. Now, it's kind of integrating it to a certain degree. And people are losing the idea that, you know, you can transfer coordination from a squat to a vertical jump, for example. It's just not possible. They're totally different things. So, you know, I think that's been a useful or a beneficial outcome, really, of the movement. But really, yeah, basically there's going to be two totally different categories who got the athletes who are using that coordination stuff and all of those techniques that Rob's been describing. And then secondly, we've got the group of athletes who's not really needing any of that stuff. A really nice example of this will finish on before I move on to the next mechanism is that a lot of the time we talk about using an external focus of attention for athletes all the time in everything they do. And that movement, again, still has quite a big following up even now. But the reality is the way that external focus of attention in proved performance is by improving coordination. And, you know, that's, they don't actually kind of do the other things that people think they do. So, that's really important because it means that we don't want to use an external focus of attention with an athlete in a strength training exercise that is not something they are competing in. So if you've got a power lifter, then an external focus of attention is fantastic for them because it's maximizing the coordination of the movement itself and that then is likely to trigger the adaption after the worker. In contrast, you give a soccer player, you know, external focus attention in their squat. You're going to end up in getting better at squatting, but not actually going to be transferring that improvement in squat strength to the activity they actually need, which is, for example, sprinting or jumping or whatever it might be. So it's really, really important that we kind of understand the mechanistic basis that is underpinning our change in maximum strength. So this is really what this entire podcast is all about. It's like understanding what is it that's driving the quality that we're trying to achieve. We'll talk about qualities in another podcast, but you know, kind of like the quality of maximum strength that we're trying to achieve the outcome, you know, obviously is underpin by adaptions and coordination is just really important in some situations much or actually relevant in many other situations. Cool. So to keep us moving, let's move on to the next one, antagonist, correctivation. So every joint has agonists and antagonists and generally speaking, and antagonist will always have a certain relatively low level of activation, but it can be further reduced with training. Now, there's a couple of interesting things here. We were actually talking about this before the podcast because it's one of those areas that's a little bit more of a great area than it might have first appear because on the surface, you look at it and you go, the way to improve antagonist's correctivation is pretty much the exact same way that we would improve coordination. So is it therefore highly specific to the movement and therefore we can kind of bundle it in with coordination? And that's how I've actually taught it for a number of years. Yet, if you look at some of the studies, there are a few indications where it looks like it might be less movement pattern specific and a little bit more joint specific than at first might appear. So it's kind of like a sort of halfway house. It might be movement specific or it might be somewhat movement specific, but it could also be, you know, like a bit joint specific, but ultimately it's just benefiting mainly from the stuff that we kind of would use to improve coordination. So if we're using it, sorry, sorry, sorry. If we are doing a training program to improve coordination, it will automatically improve. But if we are thinking about a, for example, a situation where we want to improve performance in, you know, kind of low, say, for example, again, the same example, the soccer player try to improve a leg strength for sport. We could actually get a little bit of an antagonist's correctivation reduction transfer from say a score if we were to use some of the techniques that we would use in coordination improves. So I actually guess really messy. So it's like the issue is though that the improvement in coordination is gigantic in comparison with the improve or the strength induced improvement in, but for other, yeah, the improvement in maximum strength that we might measure as a result of a coordination improvement to huge, the improvement in maximum strength that we might measure as a result of a reduction in antagonist's co-actuation is a lot smaller. So the reality is anytime you're doing any of those things we talked about just now with respect to coordination improvements, yes, you're also going to get a reduction in co-actuation, but they're just not of the same scale. So Rob, do you have anything to say about this? Because I know when we were talking about it beforehand, you said that you kind of, you know, wrap this in with coordination. You never really see it as a separate thing very much. Yeah. I mean, mostly I wrap it in with coordination. Since those, since the changes, like you said, are so much smaller and they, they go on for so long, you know, in my mind, then programming wise, it just means keeping exercises in the rotation for a very long time. You know, especially when it's like an exercise for a pilot who's not that squat, bench press, and not ever, you know, deviating too far from that main lift. The other thing I would say, I see this all the time of programs, it ties in with reductions in antagonist co-actuation is people will program like incredibly unstable variations of exercises. You know, the classic, he was like bamboo bar bench presses hanging band squats and things like that. And they get a huge gain in those exercises due to obviously coordination, but also much, you know, bigger and faster changes in co-activation. And it's like they think that this giant gain they've seen in that variance table exercise is going to drive a gain in the main lift. And it's just, it's not going to happen. The recruitment pattern is not the same. The fibers you're accessing are never going to be the same. I see it over and over and over and over and I've had clients ask about it. If I would program them, you know, like that bamboo bar bench pressing these things to enhance stability and help drive the main lift. And I'm like, it's not really going to work out the way you think it is. So we're not going to do that. These stability specificity of strength training is really, really precise. There's very little transfer between movements with different stability levels. It's very much a unique, as you were saying, a unique pattern of activation in each of those situations. So yes, I've seen it also actually in sprinting. There's a very popular sprinting exercise that people do with an unstable surface. They think that's going to reduce characterization. Now, when we talk about speed probably next time, we will talk about the importance of characterization in the sprinting activity because yeah, you do kind of want to reduce characterization if you can. And it does actually reduce a total greater extent in fast movements than it does in slow movements. And so there's that, but an unstable surface activity can't replicate or an unstable load activity and kind of same category really won't replicate that effect. So yeah, I mean, again, it's a really interesting area. And it's probably more relevant for talking about in the speed context and as in the strength context, as you say, probably the only thing we would kind of be able to do that's separate from a coordination issue is just to keep those exercises in the program because yeah, as you're saying, activation does take pretty long time to actually reveal itself, the reduction in characterization does take a long time to reveal itself. So probably is a really long grind of a process. Cool. Did you have anything else you wanted to say on that or is that probably enough for that one? No, I think we can move on to you want to monitor a crewman next. Yeah. So this is really the big one because recruitment is amazingly transferable because it's muscle specific. So it's like, well, in most cases, it's muscle specific. I mean, there's there's two tiny exceptions, one in relation to static stretching, which we will talk about in a future conversation. And the other in relation to eccentric kind of training again, we'll talk about that in the future conversation. But just in kind of general situations, you're going to find that recruitment increases are muscle specific. So if we improve the ability of a brain to send a centromote to the muscle, we can act very more. Musso fire is produced more force. So this is a real kind of muscle force in prove it doesn't change the structures really, but it is changing the ability of those structures to get switched on. And yeah, muscle specific. I mean, one of my favorite ever strengthening studies showed that if you train literally the rec femils of hip flex, so it actually improves voluntar activation, mochi, no cune in the rec femils of knee extensors. So fantastic out of data. So yeah, massively transferable, you can literally train it however you like and it'll improve maximum strength in any sporting situation as long as that muscle is being used. And basically really the trigger for this kind of sort of adaption seems to be just hitting as high a level of mochi recruitment as we possibly can. So you know, this I sent you a note before the podcast with the SCOM massive list of things that we're kind of loving about. But basically there's so many things that we can do. So, you know, let's not go. We could probably go through that. do a whole episode on just that, but rather than kind of going to into too many, rather than going into too many details now, why don't you give us a few examples from your programs of the kind of things that you're programming with this idea and mind of increasing with? Yeah, I mean, some of the easiest ones that I use a ton, especially in a, you know, a lot of my clients aren't training in like ultra fancy gyms, they don't have fancy equipment, anything like that. So more singing in the easiest ways to kind of get these things done. Including a lot of stuff in warm-ups, like some very brief and isometrics to help you hit a very, very high level of recruitment. You can do, you know, any kind of like example, like maybe before bench press, a peck fly, isometric before squatting. I just see to knee extension isometric, things like that. Just very brief, just, you know, one or two reps in your warm-up for squat, deadlift, things like that. Maybe doing just like a vertical jump prior to the lift. You know, again, you're going to get really high levels of recruitment from those very, very fast movement speeds as well. So something like that. And that would give you transferable improvements in plod, hip extensors and those things. In the context of like athletes eating to run faster, definitely some like hip flexor isometrics. One that I like to use a lot is we kneel on a bench and just drive one of the legs, you know, into the bottom of the bench, just like three to five seconds again. That one works really nice. But if you don't like the isometrics a lot, really like the jumping in that. And then in terms of just like general programming, you know, similar honestly to the way you're doing about the coordination improvements, kind of similar things like heavy loads, lower reps, you know, not using those very high reps sets. Because I think people tend to think about the end of that set of 10, 12, 15, you're getting a very high level of recruitment, similar to what you would get at the beginning of a set of three to five. And you know, realistically probably by the end of it, you're not getting quite that same level. The word similar is doing quite a lot of work in that. It is working on it. It's kind of similar is yes, the word similar is probably accurate, but similar is not the same. I mean, the issue is that, you know, as Mark Korra's model tells us, you know, any time we've got a discomforting feeling or sensation, that's going to start suppressing the level of motina recruitment that we can achieve at maximum effort. I mean, I think one of the greatest disservices that was ever done to hypertrophy science was when people said that, you know, recruitment is the same, you know, at the end of a light load strength training set and a heavy load strength training set, because effort is the same. And it's like, well, no, it's not. There's no effort is the same, but recruitment is not the same, you know, because your effort has to also deal with the discomforting sensations that you're kind of incurring as a result of using that light to load. So yeah, I mean, that's fantastic. So yeah, just kind of number of things there, heavy loads, you know, kind of respires between sets, all that kind of stuff is going to enable us to hit higher levels of recruitment and improve. Also, it's interesting that you're kind of using the entire, well, not the entire force velocity spectrum obviously, because you're not, you're not described as entericks, but you're using a very wide part of section of the force velocity spectrum. You're using very fast repetitions like jumps, maybe throws or whatever. You're also using maybe heavy loads in the context of the workout itself, and you're using brief, five symmetrics, you know, so you're actually covering the entirety of the concentric part or isometric and concentric part of the force velocity spectrum. And I think some people might be surprised by that is like, well, you know, is recruitment really the same in all of those contraction modes and it absolutely is, you know, is just literally keep the fatigue down, keep the sensations down, and hit maximum effort in any of those contraction modes and it's or velocities and contraction modes and it's going to work just fine for improving moti unit crewman levels. So that's a pretty cool way that you illustrate to that. So that's moti unit recruitment. And as I said at the beginning of that section, massively, massively transferable. So we can do, you know, such an improvement on an athlete athlete's performance by pursuing that particular adaption. And as I say, we just have to aim for the maximum level of recruitment. So, you know, all of the things that Rob was saying, going to be totally applicable, we could add in some other bits and pieces like, you know, the way that we're coaching, for example, we could focus on giving, you know, some strong encouragement during each of the repetitions that we're aiming for to improve that particular adaption. So we've got a section at the beginning of the workout where we're trying to improve moti unit crewman with some isometric so we can be giving that strong encouragement. If we've got the ability to measure and provide numerical actual feedback, the athlete of those isometric, so that's even better, but you know, obviously that requires some equipment, you know, but there's lots and lots of things. And as you know, we were saying, we've probably do a whole episode on a wrapping all of that up at some point in the future, but massively transferable, massively modifiable as a coach and as a person writing the training program. Cool. So moving on to the peripheral side of things, we obviously got high-purchase as a, you know, kind of an important category of adaption that improves maximum strength. It does that by adding, you know, kind of myfibrils and it adds myfibrils, obviously in parallel. We can wrap sock and regenesis up into this. Now some people don't like it when I do this and let me just very, very briefly explain. If you're adding sock and mesin series and those sock and mesin series are added in a way that has costumers attached to them, they will function like sock and mesin parallel. So essentially the way that lateral force transition works is it sends the sock and mes force to the endimissium, which then sends the force down to the tendon. If you have that costumeric force direction, so literally then long you tune. It is literally exactly the same thing as adding myfibrils in parallel. So some people have got really, really excited about sock and regenesis and they've argued that it can never improve muscle fiber force because it's in series and it's like one no lateral force transition means that it can. So if you've got that costumeric addition and we do see very high levels of costumeric addition with eccentric training, which is when you've got the most sock and regenesis happening, ultimately we are going to see that improve muscle fiber force in exactly the same way as we would see, you know, kind of hypertrophy of an increase in the diameter of the muscle fibers. So when I say high hypertrophy today, I'm kind of not really respecting the strict definition of hypertrophy as a fiber diameter increase. I'm kind of wrapping up sarcomorogenesis into that. So we're doing muscle masses increasing and that's going to increase force production by increasing the number of cross bridges that were capable of forming. So ultimately, you know, it's something that we all talk about all the time, hypertrophy, you know, but in athletic context, it actually has some really interesting applications and problems. Now we're going to go into some of the issues with the problems next time when we're talking about speed and we'll come back again. I mean, everything is connected in athletic performance. So I just keep saying we're going to talk about this again, but we will talk about it again when we talk about proximal to distal sequencing because one of the aspects of proximal to distal sequencing that really kind of once you've seen it, you can't unsee it is that most of the time your athletes are going to benefit more from proximal muscle mass improvements rather than distal muscle mass improvements. And that's just because of the way that kinetic sequencing works. And as I say, you know, I keep saying this, but we will talk about that later on. But, you know, I guess really the thing that we can latch on to today and point out is that there will be a specificity of muscle mass to an athlete's performance. There will be certain muscles that benefit athletes in specific sports much more than other muscles of the body. So like, you know, you can I mean, obviously for powerlifting, you can kind of be very, very granular about it and be like, well, you know, this, you know, kind of muscle is going to help do this particular lift. And it's specific people, you know, different muscles are going to help them move forward because they've got these weaknesses, all these problems. But in terms of other sports, can you think of any example where you've targeted specific muscle mass for athletes to help them with a particular sport? Yeah, for sure. I mean, so I mean, the example of grappling sports and even in Moitai, get boxing to an extent, strong lats, strong back, really, really helpful, you know, jujitsu wrestling, all those, I've wrestled, you know, trained jujitsu a bit, although I'm not very good, but I have plenty of great jujitsu competitors as friends. You need massively strong arms, massively strong back strong hips, things like that. And big, big muscles all over there are very helpful. I know people tend to tend to think in all these sports, like technique is going to be the driver of, you know, whether you win, whether you lose. But if you have two people whose technique is the same, one guy is stronger and has much bigger muscles, and you know, maybe less body fat, that guy is probably going to mull you. So whenever I've coached grapplers, whenever I've coach kickboxers, I do quite a bit of back work, that work, you know, something like wide grip pull downs, wide grip pin ups, obviously for the arms direct arm work, which people tend to freak out a little bit when I first started coaching them sometimes, they're like, this seems like a bodybuilding program. And they're like, well, this portion of the program is bodybuilding. You're trying to grow your muscle. So yeah, use a lot of that. That's such a good point though. That's such a good point because it's I think that's one of those. Yeah, but it's such an important point because, you know, like when you were the erotic bodybuilding program, people are totally expecting you to say, look, here's all the physiology of how the hypertrophy kind of processes work. And this is how it feeds into the program design. And you know, I've talked about that for last couple of years and people have probably at this point sick of hearing it. But in the context of an athletic training program, that stuff doesn't change. I think people kind of go because I'm an athlete now I have to train differently. It's like, well, yeah, but if the if the goal is the same, how will you fit your muscle doesn't know that you're an athlete is like, no, it's like the call is if you're trying to improve this adaption in order to improve your maximum strength. And I think it comes back to this same criticism that I had last week. And I'm probably going to see people can probably play a game and see if I mention this every single episode. But basically it's like You know, people, I think, in essence, see believe either consciously or subconsciously that their athlete is a computer avatar with a little strength number next to it that tells you how strong they are. And it's like strength is something you can kind of improve directly as like a little number. It's like, no, it's not. It's a series of adaptions like we've been describing today. They all are affected by different stimuli and therefore require different considerations in the context of a training program. It's like, you're trying to improve the coordination of your back squat to get better at back squatting. You're going to do these things. If you're trying to improve high-purchase for you to do these things and I would look, that's identical to what the bodybuilders are doing over there. You know, it's like, well, why wouldn't that be the case? You know, it's really crazy when you kind of break it down like this. But it's not what I'm doing. But yeah, it's going to be doing the same. So that whole idea about like it has to look functional, be functional, just like persists in athletic coaching so much. And if I'm trying to get someone bigger, you know, bigger muscle, it's going to look like bodybuilding. You know, the main difference, I would say, for me, when I'm running programs is where as people would maybe still go about like classic bodybuilding style training, high reps, the pump, things like that. I don't do any of that. Obviously, I know you're not into that. So it's more, you know, full body sessions, heavy loads still, you know, load a moderate rep range is, you know, 4-8. It's always going to be a great range, as long as you can execute the movement well. And then keeping for athletes at least generally a few reps in reserve. You know, when I'm trying to go about good hypertrophy training and programs for athletes, I'm always also looking at how it's going to impact their sport training. So usually it's two full body sessions a week, maybe three load a moderate reps, a little bit of a child failure, more stable, constrained exercises, you know, if I want to grow quads, it's going to be a leg extension pendulum squat, leg press, things like that. If I want to grow arms, it's going to be a curl, you know, say you want curls, something like that. And then you're not relying on like other people might need big compound movements to get the muscle mass increase. This is not going to get the job done, you know, if I want someone to arms to be as big as they can be, and as strong as they can be doing maybe, you know, just to chin up or just to wide grip pull up, probably not going to cut it. If I want someone's quads to be as big as they can be or they're glutes to be as big as they can be, you know, maybe just doing a deadlift, a trap or deadlift, something like that is not going to cut it. So it was a being, yeah, essentially just bodybuilding style training, but with better rep ranges, I would say that are going to get you stronger and leave you less fatigued and less impact on your sports sessions and you're training it through the week. Yeah, I mean, I guess whenever I think bodybuilding training, I kind of think about the style of bodybuilding training that I'm trying to put up to the rise a little bit, you know, kind of going back pre, you know, pre 1950 to look at the routines back then, you know, kind of Jake talks about, you know, on my other podcast or the other podcast I do with Jake. And, you know, it's very much like I think the negatives that come with conventional, you know, kind of mainstream bodybuilding are negatives that shouldn't be there. You know, they should never have been put into bodybuilding in the first place. If we kind of train in a way that makes sense physiologically to do bodybuilding, it would actually be identical to the way that you're putting athletic programs together anyway, I think. Yeah, so that was actually really interesting. I mean, I would kind of add that, you know, there's some really nice data around sprinters, put a whole kind of, we'll probably do a podcast on it. A whole kind of series of studies showing how specific muscle areas in the lower body are really helpful for improving performance in sprinters. And some are actually negative. And I really, really like that because it illustrates the kinetic sequence that we'll talk about. It illustrates the progress speed or how speed works and what's the determinants of speed. But ultimately, if you start adding muscle mass, say, for example, in the calves or the quadriceps and trying to get better at sprinting, it's not actually going to play out the way you think. You're actually one that must have been much more proximal around the hip area to make that improvement work. Again, I'll explain that fully later on. But yeah, just a nice example of how, you know, I think sprinting is probably the best example of how, you know, we know for a fact because we've got data showing that you can add muscle mass in this area and it'll help you add muscle mass in another area. And it actually doesn't help. In fact, it can actually make the athlete slower. You know, it's not one of these things where you can kind of just go, oh, well, we're going to do massive hypertrophy programming for every athlete when you just let them play the sport like some people are saying, there's like, no, no, no, no, that doesn't work. It's like, you know, okay, if you're going from nothing to something, okay, that probably is going to work. But if you're already doing strength training, you're already doing athletic training, you're already pretty good at what you do. Then don't just do a strength training program that somebody's written for a bodybuilder and expect to improve your sporting performance because it probably won't. You do actually need to kind of target the muscle mass in particular areas like the examples that you've given and the example that I just gave there was printing. Cool. So let's wrap up with these final two adaptions. Basically, I mentioned lateral force transmission earlier. We know that customers do get added to muscle fibers. We know that that does improve lateral force transmission. It improves the efficiency of the fiber force transmission to the tendon and makes the fiber produce a higher force for them what it was doing previously. And that makes people stronger relative to their size, even in an isolated single muscle level without thinking about the CNS or anything that the neural side of things is doing. So really, really cool adaption. And I always kind of like get to this point and I'm excited just talking about this. And then I realized that we don't actually know how to make it actually happen because we've got so little data on the adaption. It's like, you know, wow, this could be fantastic. If we could make this happen all the time, then wouldn't this be so cool? And it's like, well, yeah, but nobody knows. So, you know, we just got data showing that it does improve strength in, you know, kind of first couple of months of strength training. Does it kind of plateau with maybe sarcoma identities around the sort of two or three month point? Very possibly. Does it plateau later on or does it carry on? I mean, nobody knows. And how do we trigger it? Well, you know, not really sure. There's some data suggesting that eccentric loading might be slightly better than concentric or asymmetric loading for improving this adaption. But for me, that just kind of makes me think, well, if I add more sarcoma medicines series, then I will actually need more customers because I've now created a whole bunch of sarcomas without customers. So you're going to need that adaption anyway, just because you're creating a kind of a requirement for it. So that doesn't really fill me with confidence that it's a genuine trigger for the adaption, but that's kind of where we are. But yeah, so let's try to imagine, I imagine there's probably nothing in your programs where you're doing specifically to increase the adaption. No, it's kind of like if it happened, lost it. It happens. Like you said, you don't know what triggers it. I'm not going to speculate. Not that's fine. I just don't think there's anything to be smart about. There's no data that we could kind of look at and draw lines between and try and find the correlations. It's just so little there. It's such a shame. But yeah, so Lattrophores Resolution definitely is improving strength, probably in one of those things that maybe is why, you know, kind of historically, people were thinking that there's a way to improve my affordability density or something like that. I would imagine that Lattrophores transmission increases probably due contribute to that kind of effect. But, you know, equally, my affordability density does drift upwards over time. It does kind of, you do time and sort of get increased my affordability to sag plus them just as a result of time spent strength training. Now we see that in the cross sectional data, but not really properly an adaption in and of itself that we can kind of train for, unfortunately. So that's Lattrophores transmission improvements. And then, of course, finally, we've got tendons, stiffness changes. This is technically mechanism of maximum strength. If you make the tendons stiffer, you will improve isometric and concentric force production, because what will happen is the tendon will move less. And that means that the muscle will shorten less quickly for the same joint angular velocity. As a result, force-volustal relationship tells you you will end up with the higher overall muscle force production. And it's not really because of anything that you've done to the muscle. It's just because you've allowed it to shorten it to slower speed. Now, the problem with that, as we were, you know, again, talking about very briefly before we came on today as we were deciding how to describe tendons stiffness to you guys today. The issue is that when you use the straight shortening cycle, everything flips around and you kind of want a more compliant tendon and not a stiff tendon if you want a high straight shortening cycle performance because the tendon actually then allows the muscle to stay short the whole time. So we're going to have to kind of do a separate episode on the straight shortening cycle and explain how that works because ultimately whenever we're thinking about tendons stiffness, we're always kind of going, do I want tendons to be stiff or because my athlete is exposed to situations with really heavy loads and slow speeds like powerlifting, in which case tendons stiffness is a win or is my athlete kind of spending most of the time moving around really quickly, in which case I probably want tendons stiffness to be on the lower side, more normal kind of physically active person category side rather than that sort of super stiff tendon sort of category that you would have with a powerlifting or something like that. So ultimately though, if we wanted to increase tendons stiffness, it's extremely low specific. So broadly speaking, we kind of need to be in that kind of ten-wret max, twelve-wret max kind of territory if we want to produce an improvement in tendons stiffness. So really all that means is that if we're working with an athlete like a powerlifting who is aiming to improve maximum strength, then tendons stiffness gains or improvements are going to happen automatically. We don't need to worry about that. Conversely, if we are working with athletes who are spending a lot of time moving around very quickly, soccer players, track and field athletes, anybody who's trying to use a straight-shortening cycle regularly as part of their sport, then we actually want to be cautious about kind of triggering large improvements in tendons stiffness, especially if we're not doing the necessary training techniques to improve the muscle. ability to pull up tendon around because ultimately any time you've got a muscle tendon unit in sequence you're going to have the muscle pulling on the tendon or the tendon pulling on the muscle and ultimately one is going to pull the other to a kind of sort of longer length. If we want ultimately to decide how that process works we're going to have to start with analysis of the sport and then just decide whether we want a stiff tendon or a more compliant tendon and then work from there and but as I say we'll cover that in much more detail in a future episode we don't need to we need to go into detail on that today and we can kind of part that. So ultimately that is everything that we wanted to say today maximum strength you know six adaptions we've got three in the central nervous system three in the periphery hopefully with roms example we've been able to show you how we might go about you know or illustrate not necessarily show in detail but illustrate because this is a fairly short podcast illustrate how we might go about targeting specific in our adaptions for specific purposes for specific athletes and just kind of give you an idea of how you might be able to do that in your own programming. So we're going to leave that there for today. A roms had to go he's got something else to do so he won't be available to say goodbye to you guys but thank you for joining us really appreciate it please do give us feedback on social media we'll be back next week talking about speed and hopefully that will start to build a picture of how these qualities can be improved over time.