006 Eccentric training

Hello and welcome to the high performance physiology podcast. I'm Chris Beardsley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Mousary and we're going to talk about eccentric training today. Now before we jumped on the podcast today and we were talking about how to make this topic manageable because essentially it is such a huge area with loads to go at. So there's going to be some parts of today where we're going to skip over things relatively quickly but we will come back and treat this topic in a number of ways differently. In the future we'll do more episodes about it but today is really an introduction to what is going on with eccentric training. So as always I'll just run through some of the physiology and then we'll start talking about strength training programs and how to incorporate eccentric training for specific goals in the context of specific groups of athletes. So essentially with eccentric training we've got a number of neural adaptions. Well first of all I should clarify that basically eccentric training is a form of strength training so you are going to get pretty much the same stuff that you get with normal heavy strength training with eccentric training. So essentially you're going to get the same things that we saw when we covered maximum strength in a previous episode. You know you're going to see increases in coordination, you're going to see potentially reductions in antagonist co-activation and potentially increases in mo-tunic recruitment although more on that briefly and in terms of local muscular adaptions you're going to see hypertrophy which is an increase in muscle fiber size. We're also going to talk about psychomogenesis today in more detail and then of course you know there's going to be increases in tendon stiffness and lateral force transmission. So in terms of eccentric training what we're really doing is saying what is different about eccentric training? How does it differ from heavy strength training? What are we seeing in terms of the unique impact of eccentric contractions? Well essentially there's a couple of differences in the neural side and there's a couple of differences in the peripheral side. So on the neural side the coordination aspect is a way bigger deal than it is for heavy strength training and that's because the brain treats eccentric contractions differently from concentric contractions and it finds them much much harder to coordinate. So we tend to find that there is a bigger learning curve and we gain more strength from the coordination improvements in eccentric training than we do in heavy kind of standard conventional strength training and so that gives us this kind of that gives us really a period of time especially at the beginning of an eccentric training program where strength is increasing in the exercise that we're doing quite quickly and that can deceive us into thinking that you know something incredible is happening and lots of people will start doing you know eccentric training for the first time and they're like raving about these huge increases in the strength that they're getting and you have to kind of throw a little bit of cold water on that and say actually it's just that you're getting better at coordinating the exercise that you're doing is not as exciting as it looks and actually that causes problems later on because often especially in sport you'll find that people will just do three or four weeks worth of eccentric training they'll get massive gains in eccentric strength and they'll be like oh yeah banked that now that's fantastic and then or maybe the alternatives they carry on a little bit longer and they start to see a plateau and they go ah the exercise has stopped working i'm like no no no it's just started working that's the point where you've got the coordination to a point now where it's actually you know the exercise is is is relatively you know kind of um now giving you um indications of other adaptions not just the coordination one and that really kind of ties us into the routine recruitment difference between all the gains in recruitment difference that you'll get with eccentric compared to normal strength training if you're seeing improvements in recruitment in eccentric training a lot of the time that's going to be tied to the coordination improvement because the coordination is so bad at the beginning that it actually suppresses recruitment by producing a perception of effort associated with that control process if you're really concentrating or your brain is devoting a lot of computing power to coordinating a movement then you actually produce a perception of the effort that then suppresses your ability to hit maximal recruitment which means you can't improve motion recruitment as a you know in a normal way that we would do after heavy strength training so what you're getting really is an increase in recruitment with eccentric training and this has been observed in a number of studies is that what you're actually really doing is just removing that perception of effort associated with the coordination and so the recruitment isn't actually an increase in recruitment that is transferable it's just linked to the exercise that you've been doing so again a lot of the enormous increases in in strength caused by neural adaptations during eccentric training are just pretty much limited to the exercise that we're doing in the gym and not very exciting at all and so we're ultimately we kind of need to get through that first couple of weeks of training so this is why I'm extremely critical when I see especially team sports I'm going to single these guys out a little bit now see especially in team sports where they do like a three or four week block of eccentric training and they see these huge gains in eccentric strength in the exercises that they're doing in training and they're like oh wow you know this has been fantastic I'm like you haven't done anything guys you've kind of just got yourself to the point where you can start doing the work now anything you do will have a high level of recruitment you'll be able to create some interesting adaptations locally so the neural stuff I'm not excited about even though it does contribute to massive increases in the exercise you know sort of eccentric strength that we might be using so peripheral stuff peripheral stuff basically as I mentioned we've got sarcoma genesis now you can get sarcoma genesis and normal strength training but it's limited to the lower half of the moat unit pool now the reason I say that is because every time we have an eccentric contraction the eccentric fiber force is about double the concentric fiber force and that means that if you're doing a normal strength training exercise your activation levels are going to be doubled in the concentric phase from in the eccentric phase that's just basic math so ultimately if you hit muscular failure in the concentric exercise in the concentric phase of your heavy strength training exercise your subsequent eccentric phases you lower the weight back down having reached muscular failure is still only going to be a light 50 percent of your maximum level which is not really anywhere into the meaningful territory of high pressure of moat units so really hard to create meaningful kind of sarcoma genesis in the top end of the moat unit pool during normal strength training we are going to get that much more successfully during eccentric training so that's the major difference really in terms of the hypertrophy sarcoma genesis segment as far as eccentrics are concerned as far as tendon stiffness is concerned this is a really interesting topic and I think we'll come back to this later on but broadly speaking contraction mode doesn't make a massive difference to tendons stiffness changes it might given that the forces of the whole muscle tend to be higher in in eccentric training because you're doubling the fiber force you know for the for the eccentric compared to the concentric I think there is a scope for potentially tendons stiffness to increase for a longer period of time than with concentric training but ultimately probably doesn't really change doesn't really do more rapid rate in the short term I mean in terms of lateral force transmission obviously I have mentioned this before but ultimately it does look like lateral force transmission increases a little bit more so with eccentric compared to concentric but whether that is just simply because every time we create a new sarcoma we've got to bolt it into the endomysium and therefore you have more costumeric addition therefore you have more lateral force transmission I don't know whether that's just the side of effect of having additional sarcomas in series it might be a unique feature of eccentrics it's probably the tension that's creating that adaption or it might be just that more sarcomas require more costumers so but it does look like that does happen and then in addition to all of that it does also appear that we can add more tighten every time we do eccentric training kind of contractions so potentially we're getting an increase in passive force production in an eccentric contraction every time we do blocks of eccentric training or we have eccentric training in that or exercises in our program so that's basically the kind of whiz through as quickly as I can to get all of that physiology in place that's really the differences that we're going to be seeing between heavy strength training and eccentric contractions or eccentric training obviously we're talking about a situation where we're using maximal efforts here because otherwise you're not going to access the high threshold motor units and create adaptions in them and basically overall and what I'm arguing is that we've got to focus more so on the peripheral adaptions because those are the interesting parts the neural adaptions I think are pretty limited to the exercises that we're doing in training because they are largely driven by improvements in coordination even the increases in recruitment are actually driven by you know the improvements in coordination and so the only final thing I need to mention then is that we always have to bear in mind that whenever we're doing eccentric training we are creating a lot more calcium on accumulation because we are opening stretch activated ion channels especially in fast twitch muscle fibres so our ability to do a lot of this type of training is very limited and that goes for both intra workout and also post workout so if we're doing a workout with eccentric contractions we can't do what I mean I've read so many of these studies and they always make me laugh every time I go back and look at them and you find this old Nordic curl study where the people are doing like six sets of 12 Nordics and you just like that is just impossible you've got literally nothing happening after the first kind of like two or three sets there's just nothing going on because the calcium on accumulation is just off the charts but ultimately that is going to stop a lot of these adaptations from happening because you're not going to get the force production you're not going to get the you know kind of processes occurring inside the fibres that are meaningful to create adaptions and all of the stuff that we're interested in is peripheral and of course then post workout as well not just inside the workout where we've got a limit on how much volume we can do but also post workout if we do too much post you know in the workout then post workout is going to be a mess and we're not going to be able to do anything else for the rest of the week so that's kind of all the physiology let's now talk a little bit about some you know strength training program examples rob talk us through something give us some examples of how you're using eccentric training at the moment yeah for sure chris um so there is one that we I think you and I might have mentioned that one of the previous podcasts um a really cool one that I've been doing lately with some of the kickboxing athletes and the combat athletes and that one was related to improving uh eccentric strength and clinch work and grappling and that and so if you want to imagine doing just like any kind of normal narrow grip realm and the way that you do that one is using momentum whatever it is to complete concentric so you can actually use a weight that's heavy enough so that it's actually super maximal on the eccentric phase then so you just kind of like yank it down to the finished position and then control the eccentric for roughly three maybe five seconds for just a couple sets of a couple reps you and I had come up with that one been using it with a lot of success for improving um like I said clinch strength for the grapplers for the Muay Thai guys um if you're in kind of a plumb clinch and kickboxing and Muay Thai your arms are going to be pretty narrow grip keeping someone from uh raising their head up raising their body up and pulling out of the clinch so that eccentric strength you have there to control is very important we get in the same kind of positions and grappling and jiu jitsu and that we are very dependent on that to keep someone from moving around and keep head control posture control things like that so that's a really cool one my brother and I implemented that with quite a few athletes so you really want to see good results that's fantastic news so this is really interesting and just to kind of highlight the physiological aspects of this for people who have been listening to that explanation because we have muscle fibers that are stronger eccentrically because eccentrically we have the elastic element titin which is activated and allows us to generate this passive force as the fiber is being stretched it doesn't do that obviously in the concentric phase so essentially every single fiber in our body is about twice as strong when we activate it and stretch it in comparison with when it's contracting so you can imagine that essentially if you've got two fighters in exactly the same weight class then yes you could have a situation where one of them is 10 percent stronger than the other but you can't really have a situation where one fighter is 200 percent of the strength of the other fighter that's not going to happen in the same weight class you know you can have you know meaningful differences or 10 20 maybe even 30 percent but you know if we're looking at the difference so obviously for if you're trying to avoid the person pulling away from you but you're essentially therefore using eccentric strength you are essentially twice as strong as they're going to be if they're doing that concentrically so really you shouldn't see a scenario in which people can escape these things unless it's technique related issue I mean if it's pure strength related issue people should not be physiologically capable of escaping in that situation so if that is happening then either as I say it's going to be a technique problem or it's going to be that the eccentric strength hasn't been developed now the the major reason why that's going to happen if the eccentric strength hasn't been developed either there's going to be a really big coordination issue in that particular technique situation so the person is just not comfortable displaying that full eccentric strength in that scenario in which case it requires more practice or alternative it's going to be the stuff that we're working on in terms of the strength training side of things which is trying to get the titan in there trying to get lateral force transmission as well to increase concentric or isometric and eccentric strength but if we can get extra titan in that scenario then each five will become even stronger than it was previously so I think this is just such a fantastic example as you say we talked about this loads previously but you know just so people understand you know realistically if technique is good and eccentric training has been done to develop that eccentric strength there really shouldn't be a scenario where people can escape those kind of situations yeah it's been been very useful really cool so give us another example yeah I mean one of the other things I do quite a bit with um automatic field support guys and I just change the direction stuff so mainly focusing on like eccentric strength of the quads there honestly I really don't like extension for that super practical easy for most people to access and so for that you're just going to lift the load with two legs and then you know similar to using the momentum to get a weight that you can't actually lift normally lift it with two legs and then just lower with a single leg again you know short duration three or five seconds few sets of a few reps done you know maybe twice a week and use that with good success with guys um you know quite a bit recently um soccer football all that kind of stuff really really like that one it's just so easy it's a lot easier than I've seen people do um weight releasers and things like that and they are just not not practical nor you can spend a lot of time messing around with that yeah really is just a cool idea yeah but it's not useful in practical but yeah just for people again who maybe are listening to that going hang on a minute how do we get from you know change of direction to eccentric um near extension strength yeah you can you can dive into that one basically do it we'll do an episode on change of direction we will do that but very very briefly change of direction is largely determined by deceleration so essentially if we're looking to improve um change of direction we want to decelerate as quickly as possible so that we can get turn turn direction and then go off in a obviously a new direction so ultimately the deceleration is going to be created you know by the eccentric um strength and when biomechanical analysis analysis has been done on those kind of movements of the deceleration it looks like it's more of a quad dominant movement than it is a hip dominant movement so we kind of end up needing quad strength and eccentric quad strength at that so that's the short answer um you know I think there's not really much more to it to be honest but I'm very cool to to do that with with as you say any players in team sports that need rapid changes direction always going to have that in yeah really cool and I think probably one of the the other more common ones I do that we've mentioned on other episodes already is just Nordics or some kind of leg curl and that'd be mainly for just sprinters for improving you know hamstring eccentric strength reducing strain injury and things like that with the leg curl variation there same protocol you just pick a weight that you lift with two legs you lower with one super easy same time same number sets reps just a couple sets very low reps and then for the Nordics you know obviously most people have done Nordics but just using if you have to a weight where you're actually hardly able to control it for you know three to five seconds I see a lot of people do Nordics and they lower you know six eight ten seconds and they're doing a body weight and they're still able to lift their body weight and if you're able to lift your body weight concentrically you're not using a load that's heavy enough for it to be like really centric training um so yeah I just always make sure people are choosing a weight that's actually applicable and getting done what they need to do versus you know otherwise they could just bang out reps and they just be doing you know a full Nordic for hypertrophy or something I guess yeah no absolutely I mean it just becomes a kind of a normal heavy strength training set but with slow slow lowering phases which is not as we'll talk about in a minute when we cover off some of the things that we shouldn't really be doing but that's that's kind of not the idea but yeah no in terms of sprinting just to kind of give the the kind of biomechanics behind that essentially in sprinting movement which is a cyclical movement we are producing power output at the hip and then we're absorbing that at the knee so we're kind of transmitting a kinetic energy down the kinetic chain and because we're developing a high speed over a period of you know 10 20 meters and we're actually kind of getting to a point where we can produce a pretty large amount of kinetic energy we're cycling it to the hip as well so you end up with a lot of kinetic energy being absorbed at the knee so you need really really high eccentric strength for the hamstrings and actually also of the knee extensors in the opposite end of the gait cycle for the same reasons but we tend to focus more so on the hamstrings because they're the kind of the engine of the sprinting movement now we'll do a conversation about sprinting probably quite soon actually because we've kind of with most of the big rocks that enable us to do that and but that kind of just gives us an insight into why we would be having eccentric training in those situations so Rob in those examples that you've given us so far you've you've talked us through the exercises that you're programming you've given us some really clear details about you know kind of the kind of rough sort of sets and reps that you might be doing focusing on you know relatively low numbers of sets and low numbers of reps within those sets let's come and talk a little bit more about frequency with this because obviously one of the major problems with with as I mentioned physiologically major problems with the eccentric training is that it really does cause a lot to post workout fatigue and and so obviously it can interfere with other stuff in the week are you using a specific frequency most of the time or does it vary between programs that you write um on average I would say most people are doing it twice a week and Chris and I had agreed we're not going to get into detraining stuff and we won't but just uh you know I just like to have a very low dose per session sometimes it's even just two sets of one single rep each time something like that so very very low in session volume and then just a couple times a week to make sure that I'm getting enough of a training stimulus there so there's nothing lost throughout the week anything like that but yeah I really I don't tend to do once a week very much and I think I might have mentioned that in one of the one of the other episodes but usually stick to twice a week just to be sure that I'm getting enough of it uh yeah try and keep it super simple almost no I've never gone three times a week I don't really see any need for that that would definitely be way too much especially if you're in season things like that you know it's bad enough that a lot of guys are training four five six days a week in the weight room wondering in season which I had a conversation with a football player who reached out to me yesterday and he does three football sessions and five strength training sessions and he did have some like eccentric stuff in that in there and I was like you know my god man this is not going to go well for me it's amazing this idea of just doing more and more and more is is like the answer to everyone's problems yeah but yeah no that's cool I mean interestingly and I've been very fortunate with my um with my mentorship that I've been running for the last few years where I've been teaching physiology to a number of people who are working at relatively high levels in sport and many of them have shared with me similar views where they've talked about programming eccentrics on a much lower volume I remember even at the start of the mentorship before people really knew who I was um I'm not sure who I am now but um you know kind of like people would say to me they would they would kind of say I'm really not sure about these training programs that I read in the scientific studies where they're doing like you know sort of six sets of 12 Nordics three times a week and I'm like yeah I'm not really sure about them either it's funny you mentioned the six sets of 12 because I actually mentioned this to Declan when we were chatting years ago I took over a client from uh he was actually a I took him over from uh took her over from the power of the coach and when I first looked through her old program she had had seven sets of 10 and you know keep in mind this was for a power lifter of the time and she had said he had told her it would improve you know hypertrophy for future phases and something like that and I I read it and I was like my my my my it's yes I mean but again these guys who have gone through the mentorship they've often kept in touch with me and they kind of come back occasionally and they say I'm doing you know kind of exactly what you said to me just now which is two singles three singles you know kind of twice a week and it is just perfect for you know just keeping things exactly you know where we want them to be and maybe occasionally increasing making small increases over time and it's it's been a really big shift in their programming because they're seeing you know positive effect you know I think it's such a contrast from as I say that the some of the silly programs that we see in the literature but also the general tendency in team sports where you like people often say we're going to do a block of eccentric training and they do three or four weeks and I'm like guys you're literally just getting to the point where coordination is kind of you know kind of locked in at this point so now you've got high access to high threshold motor units you're going to be able to create all these nice peripheral adaptions that you're going to find benefits from in terms of psychomeregenesis and because of course that basically functions like hypertrophy if you've got you know the costumers to bolt at the endomisium it's exactly as my football's in in parallel you do get a little bit of a length tension kind of relationship shift so I mean we were thinking about this when we were sort of setting up the podcast itinerary today we're thinking you know maybe there are certain situations where you'd have to be a little bit cautious about eccentric training for certain kind of actions so like the hip extension action in sprinters I'm not convinced we want an eccentric for the hip extensors in sprinting because you would move the length tension relationship so that the muscles would be producing force in more stretched positions or peak forces more stretch positions and the sprinting movement really depends on contracted position hip extension so I don't really want to move my a plateau of my length tension relationship towards the stretch position I want to keep it pretty much at the plateau so you know there's this kind of I wouldn't want to get you know kind of do too much stretch position glute training so like maybe an RDL wouldn't be a great choice in that context you know I kind of want to stick with the exercises you know like maybe a 45 degree back extension for the hamstrings in that context if I'm going to do that and a hip thrust of course which is of course the king of all exercises for athletes I was just thinking about this I was doing my Instagram questions yesterday and people were asking me that you know what's the single best exercise for an athlete I'm like I can only really write hip thrust at this point I mean it's just going to go it really is though it's it really is so good and I used to hate them mainly just because I personally hated doing them I was just too lazy to load up a bar on that now I have access to things that was always I mean because of course I was I'm not going to say I was there when Brett invented the exercise because I wasn't but I was I was kind of like you know within a year or two afterwards I was kind of there so um very much was a situation where we were all just loading up barbells on the on the gym floor and I'm trying to make it work now of course everyone's got machines that they can do it in any any major gym that they like to go to so yeah I think is that lengthens your relationship is worth just checking if we've got exercises in a training program you know do we actually want to avoid doing too much eccentric in the case where it's potentially going to cause I mean obviously the the the normal strength training uh exercises have the same issue just much less so because you're dealing with half the the most fibers in comparison with with most of the most fibers that you can activate so ultimately you know not something I would immediately go to and go oh we need to deal with this and program our entire workout around this problem but just something I would definitely think about you know being aware of um but yeah I mean like those team sports programs with a three or four weeks worth of eccentric training and then they go and do something else I'm like guys you got nothing you've got to kind of just you know settle in to take a slower longer kind of tortoise rather than hair approach and just kind of keep the exercise in the program a long period of time get the coordination sorted and get these peripheral adaptions and then we'll start to see some interesting stuff you know coming through from that I think I think we keep saying that in every episode is just you know many times just keep it in your program a long time don't yeah don't keep changing things because that's that's the single thing that aggravates me most about when I review somebody's program and they've got like you know four to eight weeks of a particular exercise and then I look at the next block and it's gone yeah you lost it and I'm like well you're going to lose most of what you gain from that particular thing that you were doing and it's just not um you know kind of going to optimize the more interesting adaptions like you know adding some extra costumers adding um you know potential sort of titan and molecules into the fibers to get extra eccentric strength from the individual fibers you know I think those are the things that are interesting about eccentric training the peripheral stuff not so much the neural stuff even though you will see in the literature a lot of people focus on the neural stuff because you know it's the fastest way of creating a really big increase in the exercise that you're doing in the training program which of course 99 times out of 100 is irrelevant for the athletic population that you're kind of working with not many athletes are actually competing in eccentric exercises you could argue maybe there's an arm wrestling kind of component there but yeah you'd have to you'd have to really go looking for this stuff it's not like it kind of jumps out at you you know it's it's definitely unusual for that to be the case so I'm not really I suppose before we just give people some examples of what not to do although we have been to know what not to do and we'll get some really clear examples of what not to do and what doesn't work and what we're seeing or what you're seeing especially because you're the one that kind of spends time looking at social media going yeah horror the horror the horror you know all these things that people are doing that make no sense um I guess I would just like to clarify that every time we include eccentric training in a program there is of course this big fatigue cost that's associated with whatever benefit we're trying to obtain and that means it's especially important to be really clear about why we're including the eccentric exercise in the in the training program so this goes back to your counter example of the powerlifter who's got a bunch of eccentric exercises for somebody you know it's like well what what are they doing I mean I can see a scenario where you know eccentric training might have a small benefit in powerlifting because you might add some more customers you might get a bit of sarcomere genesis that you wouldn't otherwise get which give you extra force producing capacity but ultimately it's not a big deal because the specificity isn't there if I'm talking about sprinting I know exactly why I've got an eccentric exercise in there for the new extensors and the flexors because they're absorbing kinetic energy in the gate cycle if we're doing change of direction I know it's giving me the distillation if we're working with fighters I know it's giving me that clean strength that I'm looking for so every single example that we've worked through or you've presented to us has a very specific goal in the program for that particular type of training I think that's the thing I would always start with all the other stuff all the physiology is is cool but at the end of the day we need a reason to put this stuff in the program because of the big fatigue cost that we're doing cool yeah so that being said let's now turn to just give some examples of things that people are doing at the moment that don't make any sense just to be 100 clear with people because we see eccentric training being discussed in the industry and yet not every single case of it being discussed is actually presenting things in the way that is either physiologically accurate or even practically useful so give us some examples Rob tell us what you've seen I think I think one of the easiest ones that's just all over the place is still slow eccentrics in just normal strength training reps a lot of people saying that you know you add in instead of a normal speed you just keep a controlled eccentric and a deliberately fast concentric you slow it down to three four five seconds something like that and people will say that that is going to give you this big base of eccentric strength to then work off of but you know one of the things that you just mentioned you know in that eccentric phase in a normal rep with the weight you can lift you're getting you know maybe 50% of the recruitment you're targeting muscle fibers lower down on that high threshold motor unit pool you're not really targeting what you think you are nowhere near the same thing you're targeting with like a super maximally centric and it's different muscle fibers it's different motor units and it's really not similar at all so I see people doing that all the time and saying of course that you need that as well prior to doing any kind of really eccentric training you know if you have an athlete like a field sport athlete someone like that and they've been lifting weights for a while you know one they're probably pretty decent lifting two the forces that they're experiencing in their sport are probably pretty high I don't think you need to do three to four second eccentrics with the weight you can lift to be prepared to then do semi-centric training it just doesn't make any sense at all and then people will say they use them for hypertrophy because you're going to get extra growth and all these things they use them off season and I know you and I mentioned that in a prior episode always I did you know you do these blocks where you're moving very slowly off season thinking you're getting more muscle growth all kinds of things and I mean you're not you're not getting more muscle growth because you're targeting roughly half the fibers maybe the ones that are activated might get a little more passive tension but if they've already grown quite a bit they're probably not going to grow anymore so you're probably not getting extra growth from it you're just training yourself very slowly and you're not getting a good base of eccentric strength you're not getting any more hypertrophy you're not getting any more maximal strength if anything maybe getting less because you're going to limit the concentric so there's all kinds of things people are doing with slow or at least moderately slow eccentrics that are just not useful very extended eccentrics I see as well but again with the weight that you can lift so it's like a six eight or 10 second eccentric I see that a lot and again they say the same reason that they're building eccentric strength and it's similar to the three or four second eccentrics you're just not targeting what most people think you're targeting with those you know really I guess the misunderstanding there is is this idea that you can train a muscle you know yeah rather than muscle fibers I mean this is a problem that we just keep seeing again and again and again people don't understand that the muscle itself is comprised of these hundreds of thousands of muscle fibers and if you don't switch the fibers on they don't get trained so you know it's like if you've got a 50% recruitment level because you're lifting a weight or you're lowering a weight that you can lift then ultimately it's really not going to do anything in terms of stimulating the top half of the moat unit pull. One question just ties into that was directed at me and I haven't answered it yet because I keep thinking about it and I think the answer is I don't know it's about what we would expect to happen if we did eccentric training and what would we expect that to do to the stretch shorting cycle because the interesting thing about eccentric training is it does simultaneously increase tendon stiffness by quite a lot same way that any heavy strength training does but it's also going to give you a really big increase in the active what we call the active stiffness of the muscle relative to the tendon so the eccentric muscle strength. So I would imagine that we might find that when somebody finally does this they'll probably discover that eccentrics probably keep the stretch shorting cycle more or less where it currently is so heavy strength training tends to make the stretch shorting cycle a lot worse by stiffening the tendon and making it harder to pull around plyometrics to the opposite they don't really change tendon stiffness that much and you know they tend to increase active muscle stiffness by a lot so they allow the muscle to pull the tendon around. So if you're listening to this and this is kind of you know news to you then please go back and listen to our previous episode we talked about the stretch shorting cycle but just tying today's episode into last week I think eccentric training probably or you know the correct definition the super maximal eccentric training probably more or less keeps the stretch shorting cycle in its current state by essentially increasing both things at the same time but I'm not sure about that because nobody to my knowledge has ever tested it so yeah I'm not running that just my physiological expectations based on on what I've seen happen after plyometrics and heavy strength training the literature so yeah that would that would be you know kind of just something else that is is worth bearing in mind so yeah so slow slow slow lowering phases of normal strength training is what a lot of people think is you know equivalent to eccentric training as you described it's not you're seeing that a lot are you seeing anything else out there you know that is truly horrible yeah I've also seen it suggested that you should do start adding in you know eccentric only rep once you hit failure on the concentric and an exercise and to start increasing your base of eccentric strength so yeah you hit your set of eight to ten reps the the last one is zero reps and reserve and then you lower eight to ten seconds on the eccentric after you hit failure and again for the same reasons that the the normal slower eccentrics are not going to be doing anything that is going to be recruiting roughly half the the amount of muscle fibers and also that point just creating a ton of post workout fatigue so I've seen that recommended for athletes when they're going through quote unquote hypertrophy phases you're not going to get more growth like that you know you or I know that and you're not going to be doing anything good you're going to be so fatigued from that if you're doing it multiple times in a week especially for multiple muscles or you know muscles that are pretty easily damaged hamstrings chest things like that I mean I've yeah I've seen it recommended for hamstrings hamstring curls to start increasing eccentric hamstring strength and it's just it's not doing anything useful and it's just going to make you fatigued for the lifting and for the sport training so that that's really bad one yes no that is that is absolutely the worst one that you've told me so far that is terrible um yeah please yeah please don't do that please don't do that it's really not a good idea yeah nothing nothing good is happening when when that's getting done and and actually you know and we'll talk about fiber types and fiber type shifting and velocities training and avoiding fiber type shifts and all that stuff in a future episode probably quite soon it's a really interesting topic I think it's one of the most applicable physiological concepts to athletes that doesn't really get talked about in the bodybuilding space but yeah eccentric in that sort of scenario where you're dumping huge amounts of calcium ions into the most fibers is a really good way of converting all of your type 2x fibers into type 2a fibers yeah so um that is again you're going to make the athletes slow by doing that it's really not going to be a very effective way of preparing them for pretty much anything that you want them to do yeah not a good one so have you got anything else that's going to make my skin crawl or can we still eat I mean probably plenty if I really thought about it I would say the other one is just I see really high volumes of eccentric work and I mean even this can be I've seen super maximal work where it's a lot of sets a lot of reps during you know like you talked about people do blocks of eccentric training and I've seen really high numbers of sets and reps and people think that I see the main reasoning is that it's going to give you you know more hypertrophy and more you know capabilities for strength and that down the line and a lot of times what you'll see and what the athletes will see in that is that they get really really fatigued their performance is terrible for weeks and I've seen coaches say that that's because the the time to express the adaptations from that block of eccentric is delayed and so yeah it's not delayed adaptations don't just you know have it all of a sudden three weeks later you're just terribly fatigued and your performance is you know awful for weeks and weeks and weeks for however long it takes to recover from this giant block so I've seen that one quite a bit yes that's worse that's worse yes no don't do that um actually that that that does bring us to an important reminder which we mentioned I think either last time or the time before potentially multiple times which is a good place for us to kind of conclude I think which is that there is no need to devote specific training sessions to one quality one athletic quality like eccentric strength and there's no reason to devote specific blocks to one athletic quality like eccentric strength that's really not a good way to construct a training program it's really not a good way to construct a single workout we can absolutely construct workouts with all the athletic qualities that we're working for and most of the athletic qualities we're working for we talked I think previously about including high velocity stuff as warm-ups or brief isometrics in warm-ups we've talked about you know including plyometrics into existing workouts we can include eccentrics supermaximal eccentrics into existing workouts we just put them in the end because once we've done them nothing else is going to happen really because they're too fatigued so but we don't need to devote either single workouts to eccentric strength and we don't need to devote single training blocks to specific types of strength I don't know why people still do this I think it was one of those 80s things that people started to you know kind of get this idea that each individual worker had to be devoted to a specific you know kind of quality when training blocks had to be periodized you had to devote all your time to working on strength or speed or whatever it was and it's like that's just not how the body works adaptions are below the surface and some adaptions straddle multiple qualities you know so you know we're going to be looking at it from an adaptive point of view and then going from there and the reality is most of this stuff can just be done in the same workout and if we as I say structure it so you've got your high velocity stuff speed work first maybe depending on how you're treating your plyometrics it's either going to go second or it's going to go penultimate before supermaximally eccentric and then the heavy strength training in the middle so I would generally program speed followed by heavy strength training followed by plyometrics because I'm thinking most of the time I'm using plyometrics for eccentric purposes and then final I mean if somebody's using a plyometric to gain speed in their concentric phase then it's a speed exercise yeah how you're going to use it so if you're going to use it if I'm using it primarily to create eccentric strength and improvements because I want a straight shorting cycle improvement I'm going to do it second to last before I do any of my eccentric supermaximal stuff so it's going to go speed strength plyometric and then finally supermax eccentric and that's that you can do all of that in one workout and you can do all of that all the time you know this this block idea just needs to go it's just not going to get anybody and I think people I think people really think that within a single workout they need just such high volumes of each thing people have said to me oh I'm doing a speed workout and I'm like what's are you in there for 10 minutes and then you go I mean okay yeah it's not very much just yeah honestly this idea of qualities needing to be isolated has really got to go because it doesn't make any sense it's not it's not helping anybody and I think it's it's holding people back because you end up just really having to reduce your frequency of everything you're doing across the week or you end up doing what you were describing the athlete you were talking about a moment ago where they're doing like you know eight training sessions in a week yeah you're getting you're getting nowhere you're getting worse every week why am I slower I'm just horrendous cool okay well I think that was hopefully a good introduction to the issues associated with eccentric training we've necessarily gone quite superficially across a whole bunch of that stuff so if there are elements of that that you know you don't think make perfect sense we will be going into more detail in some of these areas in the future we'll do specific episodes on aspects of this we just can't do everything in you know a hundred percent detail you know all the time so thank you for being on the call me again Rob it's been great to have you yeah it's a pleasure we will be back next week with another topic which we haven't decided on yet so we should probably decide on that in a moment but we'll see you guys next week