003 Maximum speed

Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology Podcast. I'm Chris Beardsele. I'm here with my co-host Rob Mauseri. I'm going to talk about speed today. So this is the third in a mini-series of topics that we've been starting with for our podcast. We start with the mix of concepts of strength, speed and power. We then talked last week about maximum strength and the mechanisms or the adaptions that go into developing that. And now this week we're going to talk about speed and the adaptions that contribute to improving that quality. So then, actually, I'm going to run through the adaptions one by one. And after each adaption, after I've described it, I'll throw the ball over to Rob and he can talk a little bit about the ways that he is programming at the moment for actually targeting those specific adaptions. And just to repeat something that I've said in the beginning and also last week, what we're talking about here is speed. Improving speed is improving a specific external outcome. A measurable external outcome. We're actually watching the athlete get faster. Their maximum speed is now greater. That speed is not itself an adaption. The speed that we're trying to improve, the improvement in speed is caused by changes inside the body or inside the central nose system. So that means that there is no unique stimulus that increases speed. There are unique stimuli that improve or create each individual adaption. And we have to know exactly what those individual adaptions are and what those stimuli are in order to program properly to make those adaptions happen. So starting at the beginning, we've got something very similar to what we start with maximum strength last week, which is an improvement in coordination. So when we improve coordination, we are essentially upgrading our existing motor program for a particular movement. We're getting more efficient at it. And that is allowing us to achieve greater performances in that movement, whether it's producing a higher maximum strength or it's moving faster efficiency is going to benefit us on whether it's maximum strength or speed. However, when we do talk about improvement in speed as a result of a upgrade in our coordination, that is still a velocity-specific phenomenon. We can't practice a movement that we want to get faster at slowly. I'm say for example, I think you might have a vertical jump. We can't do heavy back squats and expect that to improve our coordination in a vertical jump. That has actually been modeled in the exercise science literature and it was shown that you can't really do that. It just doesn't happen. So ultimately, what we're looking at here is a stimulus which is practicing a movement very very fast or as fast as we possibly can in order to improve our efficiency in that very fast movement. And obviously we need that high speed to generate that particular effect. So there are a couple of things I'll just mention briefly before I pass out to Rob. We can obviously think of things that do make a difference. We can obviously with it being a motor program, we can focus on the practice element of that. So practicing obviously works by deliberate repetition of a high quality movement. So we want to be getting good feedback. We want to be maybe even taking videos of ourselves to improve the movement, but also we want to avoid anything that's kind of slowing us down. So we want to avoid any fatigue accumulating. A lot of people often ask me and my questions, you know, if I see myself slowing down over a series of repetitions or a series of sets and I'm aiming from improvements in speed, I mean, you know, is that going to be problematic? Well, it is going to kind of stop you from maximizing your coordination gains if you're trying to coordinate a very fast movement because you're no longer moving as fast as you would do if you're moving, you know, the fastest possible speed. So we would see a negative effect of fatigue. And of course, conversely, anything that really helps, you know, kind of maximize performance like an external focus or, you know, experiencing a little bit more autonomy in the situation you're working in, those are going to be great as well. So that's physiologically what's going on for improving coordination. Rob, tell us a little bit about how you might improve coordination in these kind of situations. Yeah, of course, Chris. So I mean, we mentioned a lot of it in the maximum strength one last week and it's really fairly similar. But when you're thinking of coordination and fast movements, obviously programming that, you want to make sure that your velocity is specific. So like Chris was saying, you're not going to improve coordination and a heavy back squat and have that coordination that are transferred to the vertical jump. So when you're trying to improve that coordination, a few things programming wise you can implement pretty easily. First one, you know, everyone's probably familiar with this is reps reserved. So if you're really trying to improve speed, obviously staying, you know, just miles away from failure is usually going to be beneficial. The coast you get to failure, you start getting some negative things happening. So if you go to failure, you get some things we'll talk about later with fiber type shifting and that. Yeah, just keeping like three, four reps from reserve, probably at least on average is what I tend to do. I'm some great product dollars you can use there. Also cluster sets, things like that, you know, making sure your bar speeds are good. You can use velocity based training. There's plenty of abs these days. Use the few of them. You can Google different ones and use whatever you like. You can kind of cap sets at a certain amount of velocity loss. I'm some great Olympic weightlifting coaches and sports coaches, Travis Mash and some other guys love to use velocity based training. Some of the guys at Kabuki strength, want to use the train there back in the day in Oregon. We're really, really big on that for a lot of their power lifters for managing fatigue and things like that. So yeah, you just avoid all that fatigue, keeping reps reserved, using clusters, using VBT. And then that way you can ensure that you're actually able to make those coordination improvements in the movement that you're training. Just trying to go as fast as possible because otherwise you don't get those improvements up those high velocities. As soon as you start getting fatigued in that, you just start missing out on those gains. Yeah, so I mean, yeah, fantastic. But those are still relatively still moderate velocities, aren't they? I mean, we're still you're still describing situation where they you're using relatively heavy loads or moderate loads. Do you see, do you do anything more at the top end of the velocity spectrum? I mean, are you coming? Yeah, so like jumps and throws and things like that. Yeah, of course. So besides managing fatigue and things like that with the heavy loading and those things, obviously that is more towards a force end of that force velocity profile. Yeah. That using a lot of like unloaded training, jump training, sometimes they use like very like throwing in that. And then, you know, you can even use like overspeed stuff with bands and overspeed jumps and things like that. I really like those a lot. And we'll get into a more in depth on another channel. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Can help with improving your, you know, regular account and movement jump and that as well. Funny, a bit more optimal depth. Be keeping all those unloaded movements in a program at the beginning when you're fresh or it's really really well. Again, you want to avoid that fatigue. So I don't place them later on. There's always that idea with sports stuff that you can like learn to train and stay stronger and faster under fatigue. And it just doesn't work at all in practice. You just don't make those improvements, you know, get the coordination improvements, you don't get the improvements and some other things that we'll chat about later on today. Yeah, absolutely. One of the interesting, sorry, I was just going to add some of the other practitioners I've spoken to have actually completely moved away from the idea of sets when it comes to the high velocity under the spectrum because we're already as you described when you're, you know, talking us through the heavier end of the spectrum and just trying to keep behind those situations. And then when we talked about the light under the spectrum and the fastest movements, obviously where miles away from failure at this point, no matter really what we do. So some of the other practitioners that I've been talking to have moved away from this idea of sets and it's just like we're focusing on individual repetitions because we already know that the fastest and most well coordinated repetition is the first one or maybe it might be the second or the third one depending on your situation. I mean, you have to kind of, if you actually is really interesting to measure ball speeds and watch because there are some situations where, I mean, I know for fact that when I, if I do a series of a couple of vertical jumps, my third is usually the highest, you can kind of sort of it depends on the person's skill level and experience and practice and all that kind of thing. I think the more well practiced athletes are the earlier they tend to hit their maximum kind of performances in those kind of situations, those unloaded situations, but that's my personal kind of belief. It doesn't necessarily happen in the upper part of the time. I know, but good to mention that it's now like so volume dependent. Yeah, it's almost like it's not a set on a rep thing anymore. It's like when no longer trapping ourselves into this mentality of going, we have to do sets and reps because the reality is the stimulus is not in any way shape or form related to any kind of fatigue or progress through a set. You do a couple of repetitions. It's like, well, the reality is it might be the first one or two that made the difference. And after that, you drop below your original kind of max velocity threshold and you now in a situation where you're not getting much of an improvement because the stimulus for creating something like a coordination improvement is actually showing the brain something better than it already has. I mean, that's my favorite way of describing it. So if you've kind of done the first couple of reps and you now start and to experience that fatigue that you've described and so you start to drop below your previous best performance as well, the brain's going to look at that and go, well, why would I do anything with this information? How does it help me? I mean, I actually had a better one that I did earlier. So I'm just going to kind of keep that and not bother with any of this new information that you're giving me. And I think that's that's kind of why people are going to go, well, you know, we just kind of track the bar speed over a course of a couple of reps or even cluster type situation where you're doing intra repetition rest. Maybe just do the repetition, gather yourself, take five, 10 seconds, do another repetition, and we just keep measuring the speed and as the speed drops, let's stop. Okay, well, we'll take five, do something different, come back, maybe try again, or maybe not. Because and this is an interesting question. It's like, you know, practice does require repetition, but what I think people miss is that bad repetition is no good. It actually doesn't do anything. So we're better off striving for those, you know, small numbers of optimal perfect best possible repetitions in this interview. situation and actually not going down the route of chasing volume for the Zegibir. I mean, if somebody's filming or if they're getting feedback or if they're trying to develop an understanding of what problems might be the case, fine. I mean, do whatever repetitions you need to do, just bear in mind, of course, the particular style to change the way the movement's performed and then you kind of try to fix something that's not a problem, you know, or not a problem under un-fatigue circumstances. So I think this is one of those areas and I was kind of just curious to see, you know, where you are going at the moment in this respect, but ultimately, I think, you know, this is more for kind of coaches who are trying to improve a athletic movement, you know, maybe you're working, you know, with pictures, for example, and actually specifically trying to improve. I've got some really cool people we could bring on and talk about that, actually, and really fun to get that viewpoint, but, you know, just sort of trying to understand how coordination can be, you know, sort of improved specifically as an adaption. It's hopefully illustrative for people listening, you know, how coordination works and how we might go about thinking, you know, in terms of training programs. So antagonist correctivation is our next mechanism and this really has so much in common with coordination that I almost, you know, I have a lot of sympathy with people who just group this together and go, oh, it's all into muscular coordination. I'm not well, nearly because we do see a little bit more transferability within to muscular, antagonist correctivation. So it kind of separates out a little bit from coordination and makes it so it's harder to just call it all into muscular coordination. I don't think it really is. But antagonist correctivation does improve pretty rapidly during fast movement training programs and it does seem to have a little bit of transferability away from the actual movement that was done in training. But the issue is that all of the stuff that we, all of the stuff that improves coordination also tends to improve antagonist correctivation. So anytime we're programming to improve coordination, we're going to see exactly the same benefits on the antagonist coordination side. Just, you know, probably, let me try and be very specific with what I say here. The adaption probably occurs more quickly as regards, you know, comparing it with some, sorry, the antagonist correctivation adaption probably occurs more quickly when comparing with maximum strength training where the antagonist correctivation change occurs very, very slowly. But that doesn't mean necessarily that it's going to compete with coordination improvements, coordination improvements seem to be kind of like instantaneous and they seem to improve it very dramatically in a short period of time. So I wouldn't want to say that just because the antagonist correctivation changes bigger in the case of, you know, in the case of fast movement training, I wouldn't want to say that suddenly it's now something we need to obsess about, you know, it kind of still probably plays second fiddle to coordination improvements and it pretty much seems to develop in exactly the same way. So Rob, I'm guessing you're going to give me the same answer that you gave me last time, which is that, yeah, you just treat it in the same way as coordination. Yeah, I just kind of like roll along with the movement for a long period of time, let it ride out and then just, you know, make sure, you know, like you said, the practice is quality, the repetitions are quality and then you're not doing things with worse technique, slower speeds and stuff like that. The abs, that's that. Another really fancy with that one. No, sure. That I just want to pick one that thing that you just said there, the running movements for a long period of time, because I think in SNC, especially in athletic context, there is a strong tendency for people to rotate movements a lot and to do, yeah, do a couple of weeks, kind of a block of particular training, and then when they notice that the movement is not only improving, they switch to another movement and that kind of obviously then displays very similar improvements and faster improvements than they would have got for this start with the same move. And I think that gives this false sense of kind of progress because ultimately, I think most of the time what we're doing when we do that is simply getting, you know, a coordination improvement and an antagonist characterization reduction that really kind of isn't massively transferable unless you're, you know, trying to improve that particular movement. Yeah. You could just switch all the time and you get that coordination gain over and over and over. Exactly. Massive practice affects all the time. It hides a lot of errors in programming. I think it means that a lot of coaches, you know, whether they're doing it deliberately or accidentally can kind of disguise mistakes that they might otherwise be making in their programs that are causing athletes not to make as fast progress as they perhaps could be doing, you know, and ultimately it's is a lack it creates a lack of honesty in the in the feedback process because if we're always using a, you know, kind of a set of exercises or at least as a to marker exercises, if we're going to rotate some stuff, we just keep some marker exercises in the program. If we can get those marker exercises continuously moving up, then that creates an honest feedback loop and, you know, makes us confident that we're actually making progress. And I guess when we're talking about speed and separate concept from strength, we should make sure that we always have, you know, marker exercises for both ends of the false philosophy spectrum. So, you know, really cool to have say, you know, some kind of heavy lift as our strength marker and some kind of jump, you know, or some throw depending on the focus of the athlete as the speed and the spectrum marker. So that would be something I think it's useful to add a base to what you said. So let's move on to some of the more interesting stuff. So when it comes to speed, we've got multiple options. We've mentioned the coordination and the antagonist charactervation. Let's now move on to about motine recruitment. So the cool thing about motine recruitment is it doesn't care how fast we're moving in, you know, order to stimulate the effect, we literally just need a maximum level of centromotic band. So as long as we don't have any, you know, discomforting sensations, as long as we're properly motivated, we should be able to hit maximum levels of centromotic band in pretty much any concentric, straight shortening cycle or isometric movement. East centric is a separate problem, but as we always say, we'll talk about that in a separate episode. We're going to get absolutely pan because it keeps us keep saying that all the time, we're going to talk about that in the future. Anyway, so we are going to talk about that in the future, but today, you know, motine recruitment improvements massively transferable is such a cool adaption. It doesn't care even what joint you're using. If it's a two joint muscle, I love that study. I said it before, it shows that you train the rec fam as a hip flexor or as an knee extent. So it doesn't matter. You're still going to get voluntary activation increases in that muscle at either joint after training. So very, very cool adaption. It seems to be muscle specific. In the case of strength training, you know, perhaps in the case of static stretching, it might be a global phenomenon when we see a recruitment increase, but that wouldn't be through this mechanism because obviously there's no recruitment in the case of a static stretch. So the mechanism by which achieving a high level of recruitment triggers an increase in our ability to act as a high threshold. Motine seems to be simply sending the highest possible centric to that muscle and obviously there's so many things that impact on that, but Rob, tell us a little bit about how you think about improving recruitment, whether it's for maximum strength or speed, because it doesn't matter at this point. What methods are you using in the? Yeah, I always, like you said, this one's a much more interesting one because I think a lot of people don't realize when you're trying to get faster, when you improve recruitment and you gain access to more motor units and more higher threshold muscle fibers, they're going to automatically be faster than what you previously had access to. So it's a really cool one. And I did mention some of the things I like to do last time. The isometrics were a big one. So the example, you know, we talked a little bit about like sprinters trying to improve like hip flexor concentric velocities and that. So you can use myself as well as the rect fem would be a good one. And a lot of times I use that if I have access to like a good seated like extension machine, I can use that. But like you said, you don't have to use, you can use kind of other end of that muscle that you're trying to train and will still be transferable. So if they don't have one and a lot of people don't, then I'll use something I mentioned last time that like kneeling hip flexor isometric, just driving your knee into the bottom of the bench works really well. And then yeah, you can still get those recruitment gains in that rect fem and the hip flexors without having, you know, needing access to like extension, something like that. Terms of like increasing recruitment as well. Obviously, heavy strength training. So this is where heavy strength training would do a really good job. Low reps, heavy loads, still staying, you know, shy of failures that you don't cause those fiber type shifts. And that will mention in a minute. But, you know, people try to try to, they try to say that heavy strength training is automatically going to make you slower, going to make you worse as an athlete. And in most cases, you know, hypertrophy from heavy strength training is going to be beneficial up to a point. You got to add a lot of muscle as a natural guy from the most part to really make you slower. And the gains in, you know, force production and the gains in recruitment from the heavy strength training are going to be really good and really transferable. And like you said, that is not just, you know, you don't just squat or like extension or chest for us and increase recruitment in those muscles and then not have it do anything. It transfers directly regardless of the speed, regardless of the movement. So yeah, really, really cool. Well, yeah. So just to reiterate, the main ones, heavy strength training, isometrics work really well. And then you didn't mention briefly static stretching. So I mean, just a little into that as I used to be a gymnast, we did tons and tons of static stretching. And, you know, very likely works through increasing pain tolerance and increasing your ability to access more muscle fibers and remodeling it that way. But I've definitely found that, you know, people that do a lot of flexibility training in that generally, you know, maybe it's just my own experience, more athletic, stronger, just better athletes overall. So much a big, big fan of static stretching, even though people do try to crop on it a bit in the industry still. I think I should never forget the anecdotes that you told me about your experience as a gym master actually. And the pain, the pain tolerance thing definitely comes out when you tell those, I think there's definitely a fact that it's pretty obvious from the beginning. Yeah, you can't do a sports coach since on your back and screams in your ear until you finally have the ground. And it was definitely not the most fun thing in the world. These days maybe I appreciate it, but not so much. It's really. interesting though how these two types of training are completely different because obviously like I've said before the way that strength training produces this adoption is by us hitting a high level of recruitment the brain recognizes that and then allows us to move higher for the same effort perception. It's like strength training is not working by the same mechanism when static stretching is working so because we know that because if you do light load strength training to failure you still hit maximum tolerable possession as well for but that doesn't actually create an increase in recruitment. The only way to create increasing recruitment is to actually hit a maximum level of recruitment itself and then what I think is happening is the brain is downgrading that kind of perception of effort from the central motor command signal allowing us to then next time achieve a higher level of motor and it couldn't for the same perception of effort or you're describing with a test stretching very eloquently is the I think that it's fantastic it really really illustrates just how static stretching is working to actually create an increase in motor increment. The reason I say it's global is that we get a crossover effect so if you do a static stretching program with just one part of the body you tend to see strength increases in other parts of the body as well and that's you know there's no possible mechanism that that can be explained by except through motor increment increases. It took global whereas strength training is very much more specific and I want to go back to something that you said a couple of moments ago at the beginning of your explanation of the things that you're doing with isometrics because and I'm interested in just exploring this because when we look at the hip flexor complex the hip flexor complex obviously has as the rectus femoris as being the primary hip flexor through to approximately 60 degrees of hip flexor range of motion so starting the standing position as you start to raise your leg that's mostly the rect fem and you go past that it switches to the so-ass and some other muscles as well. Now the really think really interesting thing about that then is that if we want to increase recruitment for hip flexion so I'm specifying this here because when I've mentioned that recruitment is muscle specific it's really important to remember that is muscle specific not joint specific. We're trying to improve and the same thing would apply for the hip extensors. If we wanted to improve hip extension Otunut cumin levels for sprinting so we're looking to improve maximum torque but also maximum velocities in those muscles of the working as hip extensors we would need three separate parts of range of motion we need the full hip extension for glute max we need somewhere on 45 for the hamstrings we need somewhere around 90 plus for the adductive magnus. Now the same thing would apply to the hip flexors so if we're trying to increase recruitment using these asymmetrics it would be really cool to do multiple kind of joint angles at least two I think you know maybe one a zero and one sort of 75 to 90 wherever is comfortable. Does that make sense? Yeah yeah of course yeah I mainly have been programming them for just you know rack them in mind the obviously you could program them do just one set you know one max effort one at each shorn angle to get more the the overall hip flexor complex. Yeah because I mean obviously if the athlete's moving in those high ranges of motion because of course you know even though eccentric contractions do work a little bit differently having the ability to decelerate still in part depends on motine recruitment levels so it would be interesting to see you know whether isometrics in more stretch positions could be really quite valuable if the if the joint angle range of motion requires different muscles in different parts of the range of motion you know obviously it's irrelevant for the quads because it's like the quads doesn't care what joint angle it is whereas for the hips it actually is quite a big deal both a four flexion and four extension. Now that's really interesting I'd never made that connection in my mind but as you were describing the exercises that you know the isometrics that you were programming I thought actually you know yes the rack fem is the primary one that I would be interested in for sprinting but you know the other end of the range of motion could actually be pretty cool and it's a great thing about isometrics is that you're not talking about doing a lot of them and they don't the they don't take up a lot of space in the workout it's rather to be easy to do very cool. I think your breathing of warm up is like the easiest way to do it it takes you like a minute. Totally and that that is just such a good reminder that you know the idea of having separate speed and strength sessions just doesn't make sense physiologically because you know why don't you just do your speed work as your warm up for your strength workout I mean for me that just seems such an obvious thing to do historically people have been like no I am training for speed today and I think that goes back to this idea that speed is a thing strength is a thing and it's like no the adaptions are the things these are just the outcomes that we measure if we're doing some isometrics for maximum motonecrymente improvement and that actually takes us in two different directions and gets us both strength and speed gains or am I doing a strength workout or am I doing a speed workout or am I doing a warm up I mean does it matter you know labels and terminologies that people give these things cease to really kind of make sense anymore because now we're focusing on the adaptions it doesn't it doesn't it doesn't track or it doesn't kind of map perfectly onto the the things that we're actually doing. Anyway cool so the fourth and final central nervous system adaption that we see happening after fast movement training is increasing motor unit firing rates this is something that is super specific to fast movements it doesn't happen after heavy strength training and it doesn't really benefit slow movements even high force high effort slow movements and need you know it can only really benefit fast kind of situations it's again probably not movement specific at all it's probably exclusively muscle specific in the same way that motonecrymente because it is connected to motonecrymente so it's probably super useful super transferable and very valuable in that respect so this is probably the well we're talking about the other one in the moment but this is probably the one that the adaption that I'm thinking of when somebody says why should I do fast movements in the gym when I'm already doing fast movements in sport that's this is for me that's kind of this is the adaption that answers that question so are you are you kind of doing this again in warm up to priority strength training sessions Rob? Yeah I mean I kind of would just throw this into the category of things I'm targeting with warm ups you know if I'm working for like say as fast the movement velocity is possible and I want maybe a little more like knee dominant you know then I would do like a vertical jump with say you know PVC pipe on the back or some all of that if I wanted to be a little more hip dominant still as fast as possible you know just added more arms swing things like that so you can change what you want to target a little bit that way yeah I mean the biggest one of that is just making sure that people are going as fast as they possibly can again avoiding fatigue avoiding all those things are gonna make you slower I don't really have it targeted specifically just on its own it's kind of wrapped in with you know the other parts of the warm up and things like that doesn't take any time either I yeah not really a ton program was that I focus how that one but there's I mean there's so many things to make sure you just don't do with it and you know we just imagine so many of them so many people trying to do tons of volume so many people sporting up sessions you don't have these training training workout and you go a little overboard and then you sprint the next day or you jump the next day and all of a sudden you don't hit that absolute max velocity and you don't get that improvement then you really just wasted that session so yeah just make sure you know programming wise you're splitting things up appropriately or if it's better just not supporting them like you said starting in the session with this speedwork I mean even if you do spring work and things like that very briefly at the beginning of a session we don't do a lot of it it's not like it's gonna impact your heavy strength training but if you do the spring work and that obviously afterwards or even the next day you can have a very negative impact and not go very fast so yeah more about just being mindful of those things I would say to actually have those fast firing rates and then I would also say you didn't mention it but people still think that like motor unit firing rates are an important thing in heavy strength training I hear that all the time I've even seen it in in books and textbooks and it just it doesn't do anything for the heavy strength and of things nothing at all it doesn't increase like you said after heavy strength training because it's not an adaption that's necessary for it so yeah just don't think you're gonna be getting it from that at all even if you have that maximum intent like people like to say and just know that you actually have to make sure you're going as fast as possible jumping as high as possible and you know like you said you can measure and track those super easily with the absolute anything and then just keep on top here absolutely and this ties in really well with what I've been sort of trying to get people to consider the last couple of months which is there for a lot of athletic for a lot of athletic context for a lot of athletes doing two really high quality strength training sessions a week and treating the warm-up seriously so I think that's that's the key element here it's like if you go into the warm-up like this is not just a warm-up this is my speed training for this athlete then suddenly now your vertical jumps are no longer just we're going to do some jumps and get ready it's like no we're gonna track the speed on these we're gonna try and get a really high jump as I measure it and write it down in the spreadsheet you know and that's that's that's that warm-up now has not just been a kind of walk through just kind of ticker box it's like we're treating that warm-up seriously to get some speed adaptions because we're moving really fast and then we're going into the strength training session and then we're going to not then do a whole load of other useless stuff and mess around and we're gonna wait a couple of days come back and do another really high quality session and where we're again we get these adaptions stimulated for both speed and strength and that looks like you look at them on the interesting thing is when you write that down in a piece of paper it's like a couple of jumps and then there's nothing there it's like people going yeah but if when I write down that the athlete's going to do like three to five counter-moving jumps for height that's means that I'm going to write the number down, I'm going to be encouraging them to jump as I as the boss began. We're going to treat that really seriously. You know, similarly, if we don't improve jump for distance, I'm like, I want to know these numbers and I want to make sure that the numbers are going in the right direction of time. If they just kind of do the jump and I'm like, what's that? You know, what was that? Is that an effort? You know, come on. I want to see movement happening over time. I want to see changes. We're doing this to track that the speed training is working in the same way that we're looking up, weight going up over time or reps going up over time in the strength training part of the workout. So, you look down paper, saw a couple of jumps, couple of this, couple of that and then we're going to have a strength training. Oh, you're doing two or three sets of this and two or three sets of that and like, this isn't on like it is. It's going to work really really quickly. No, exactly. Why are we doing it? We're going to do it with intent and, you know, we know exactly why it's going to work. We're not messing around doing 40 different things and then coming back in the next day and doing another 40 different things. They have to be spent the entire week and of TXT, they can't improve coordination in the sport, they can't improve in motor and crew and tour or anything else, they're trying to improve in the strength training context. It's like, we're not, there's a difference between doing a target to work out to achieve goals and just kind of entertaining ourselves exercising, you know. I think that's the turns of the spectrum. You know, I think a lot of S&C programs are leaning more towards the entertaining themselves doing a lot of exercising rather than the target to let's get stuff done to trigger specific adaptions that, you know, I think a lot of people look at the program and go, that's not enough. Like, no, it really is. They just want something so complex and novel all the time and that usually means it's significantly worse. Are they chasing feeling tired or feeling like they've worked hard? And like, we need to work smart and see improvements happening over time. That's everything. Nothing else really matters. So there we go. So the final adaption then is an improvement in muscle fiber shortening velocity. This is a very cool adaption that happens irrespective of muscle fiber type. So we see fast fire was getting faster. Slow fire was getting faster. As in, you know, kind of type one on type two, a type two X, five was getting faster. It's not associated with fire type shifting in any way, shape or form. We don't really know much more about it other than heavy strength training doesn't make it happen and fast movement training does make it happen. So really, this is identical in nature as far as these strength and conditioning coaches concerned as a motine firing rates because it's muscle specific. It's not movements, specific and it requires a fast movement speed in order to generate. So it pairs perfectly with everything that we've just been talking about. Yeah, you don't need to do anything extra. Nothing extra on top of this. So really, when we kind of start to break this stuff down, we can see that there's a category of things that are going to be considered for coordination improvements and antagonist characterization reductions. That's one category. There's the motine crewman category, which is separate way of training for that particular action. And then the final category then is the motine fire frequency changes and the muscle fire shortening velocity changes. So you can see that the training considerations separate into these three separate categories. Even though we've got five total adaptions, we've only got three categories of things to think about. And then finally, something that you've been mentioning as we've been going through, there are some potential negatives of heavy strength training. There are two that I would highlight. I mean, you can kind of get a granular with this stuff, but the two that I would highlight will be the fiber type shifting from X to A. So type two X type two A, which makes individual muscle fibers slower, quite a lot slower. I think this is the thing that people don't realize when I sort of say, they go, oh, well, the change from type two X type two A isn't that big. I'm like, no, it's huge. It's really, really big. So you might have a fire that's like capable of shortening at six fiber lengths per second. Just down to four fiber lengths per second. That's a lot. That's a really big shift. You know, that's massive drop off of the top end of your movement velocity capacity. And then secondly, there's this kind of effect of adding mass where you don't need it. So like you pointed out earlier, intelligent heavy strength training that targets the muscles you're going to use in the sport is fantastic. Starting to add mass in places where you're not going to use it. Yeah, that's not great. Especially if you're moving really fast. So like if you got leads, we're doing, you know, running jumps or if they're sprinting, we do not want to be adding mass in distal segments aggressively because you start doing that. They're going to start getting slower. And there's some really nice data, which we will go through in a future episode. Where we talk about how if you add too much quad muscle mass to a sprint to even over a couple of months period, they will get slower. You know, so in that, the same thing applies to the calf muscle complex. You start adding too much calf muscle mass. This is one of the reasons, one of the reasons there's other reasons as well. But one of the reasons I'm really not a fan of doing too much calf work, even if it's you know, kind of heavy strength training or isometrics for the calves, for sprinters. I'd be much happier just doing the drop jumps and kind of working in that respect. I don't like adding mass to the calves because if you think about it, imagine trying to run with heavy boots on because that's. It's the equivalent. It's like it doesn't work. You've got conservation of angular momentum means that you are having to massively decelerate your lower limb every time you get to the end of the gate cycle. And that is costly and it slows you down and it's not really very effective for sprinting. So yeah, the two things I would say, the fiber type shifting and adding muscle mass in incorrect places. So before I hand over to you on this one, Rob, just want to kind of finish by saying, obviously we know that fiber type shifting happens through calcium amuletivity. So any calcium amuletion is going to cause the fiber type shifting. So that straightaway tells us what we can be thinking of doing in the workout for avoiding triggering that particular adaption, whatever we may be doing. And then secondly, obviously, excise selection is going to be critical for making sure that we focus our muscle mass more proximally, rather than more distantly. So can you talk to that a little bit with some example? Yeah, I mean, especially in the fiber type shifting is one that is really so easy to avoid, you see people programming a lot in ways that are going to make it worse. So if you're going too close to failure, too failure, things like that, you see all the time people programming off-season quote unquote hypertrophy blocks where they do special methods, drop sets, rest pauses, things like that. Have the time they'll exclude any jump work and speed work. And obviously, you want up in a situation where you're getting significantly slower. And a lot of times, you know, like you were just saying, if you're putting muscle mass on the wrong places, if you're just trying to kind of, you know, have hazardly put muscle mass on everywhere, you know, the way you would need to if you were a bodybuilder, that is not really going to be great for your performance. So you start adding muscle, you don't need it. You start making that slower, not going to be a good thing. But yeah, if you just avoid going to failure, if you just avoid any kind of silly like finishers and advanced techniques that you might usually use when you're trying to add muscle mass, you'll really mitigate that quite a bit. I mean, with heavy strain training, you still might get a little bit of it, but certainly no, in here as much if you leave a few reps in reserve, you know, you use clusters, use VBT, use those things we mentioned. Honestly, it's not dissimilar to the way you go about improving coordination. You just kind of stay away from all the silly things that are going to give you that negative adaptation that you might not want. Totally. Absolutely. So I think the literature shows that if we're doing moderate, the heavy load, sort of 8 to 10s, then we relieve two reps in reserve. We can pretty much avoid that calcium amulet of T. So I imagine if we're doing heavy loads, one or two reps is definitely far enough for us to reserve. So yeah, I think as you pointed out, it's very easy to not trigger this adaption if you just maintain discipline of keeping the reps in reserve in the right place. Obviously if we start to drift into training to failure, we're probably going to end up with some fire type shifting. It's also an easy measure as well. So once I give you an athlete who's constantly maybe overshooting a little bit, even though you give them a certain amount of reps in reserve, and then you notice through the weeks that their jump heights are going down, their speed, sprint speed is going down, things like that. Well, then automatically you can know you're probably running into that problem and you can just make sure they're back off a little bit. So an easy one to address unless you've ran it out super long and then it might take a little longer. Yeah, totally. I mean, we will again talk about the detraining and reversal of various adaptions in the future, but yeah, fire type shifting is pretty cool in the sense that it does go in both directions relatively quickly. So as you point out, if we do find that we've made a mistake with the programming, we can just correct it. And hopefully four, five, six weeks later, we should have largely washed that problem back out again. So yeah, and then of course highlighting what you said there about not just doing bodybuilding programs or expecting it to transfer to athletic performance. I am seeing a lot more. I think it's because some of the influences, they've kind of got their hypertrophy training programs, they're now trying to market them to athletes. And that's really disingenuous. They're not the same thing. With any program for bodybuilder, yes, on a muscle-by-muscle basis, it is going to look pretty much the same. Like you pointed out last time, if you're training an athlete to improve muscle size, and you know that that increase in muscle size will improve points in their sport, yes, it will look pretty much the same as a really good bodybuilding program designed around kind of what Jake and I would call silver era principles, but physiology is the same answer. But equally, if the bodybuilding program, the generic template includes a whole bunch of carf exercises. You try to make it work. Yeah. Well, a lot of carf and a lot of quad, which to be fair, you know, sort of does tend to creep into many bodybuilding programs. And I'm like, that is not going to work for my sprinter. You know, my sprinter needs to stay away from that stuff and be focused on the hip. I want extra glue stuff, I want extra hip flakes. I mean, that's another point. You know, not just about what is in the program from some of those bodybuilding kind of online templates. You know, there won't be much hip flakes right there at all. It's like, yeah, usually none. I'm gonna need a ton of hip flakes will work to get my sprinter to the point where they're going to be a competitive, you know, unless they're just a phenomenon. But ultimately, you know, it's something that won't be an A bodybuilding program. So it's really, really disingenuous to say that, oh yes, you know, here's my bodybuilding program that I use for hypertrophy clients. Well yes, and it'll work perfectly for you, you know, who want to do, you know, some kind of athletic performance 'cause it's, they are different things. Even though the hypertrophy sections for each muscle is gonna be sort of very, very similar. If not the same, the selection of muscles is going to be very different. You know, so that's kind of where it comes in. And then of course, I've always been saying, you know, we are gonna always want to be reps and reserve on the exercises for athletic training. If our athlete needs to move quickly, you can't just be smashing out sets to failure all the time and expect to keep all of your type 2x fibers that's not going to happen. As soon as you get that calcium ion accumulation and the fiber, it triggers it to switch over to a type 2a fiber. So that is definitely something that won't work either. So yeah, so just in defense of, 'cause I know last time we kind of went, you know, sort of really hard to one in one direction, saying, look, you know, if an athletic training program is trying to produce hypertrophy, then it will look very similar to a bodybuilding training program as long as that bodybuilding training program is set up correctly. Now we're kind of just like tempering that. I say, look, you would be aware that there's stuff that is necessarily going to be identical. Cool. I think that was a great summary of speed adaptions, hopefully illustrated by the examples that you've given there. Rob, is anything you want to mention before we finish today's episode? I know, I think we're good for us. Fantastic. As always, thanks guys for listening. Please do give us feedback on Instagram, or both on Instagram so you can tell us what you think and we will be back for another episode next time.