014 Transfer of training

Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology Podcast. I'm Chris Beardsley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Mauseri and we're going to talk about transfer today. So, transfer of training programs to sporting activities. And this is actually one of those topics that I think is covered quite badly across a number of different domains both in the Strength and conditioning literature and also in, you know, the fitness industry as a wider concept. I think we can actually make it very simple though. So, my proposal is that when we talk about transfer, transfer requires two separate things. It requires a transferable adaption. So when I talk about transferable adaptions, I'm talking about things that we can engineer through a strength training program or another type of training program. And the adaption that results from that training program is not limited to the exercise itself. So in other words, it's not a coordination improvement or something without nature. It's actually a genuine transferable adaption, something like hypertrophy, which obviously increases muscle force in any activity or it's no unit, it increases something like that. So we need a transferable adaption. And then secondly, we need that transferable adaption to be in a relevant muscle group. So ultimately, if we're, you know, interested in a sporting activity that involves, you know, the legs, there's no point in trying to develop strength in the arms unless there's a very clear reason to do so. So, the, and you can get even more granular with that. You can kind of go, well, you know, these specific muscles in the leg or whatever are going to have the maximum back for reasons that you maybe have to figure out. But ultimately, those are the two elements of transfer. We have to have a transferable adaption under the surface. And we also have to have it in the correct geographical location. So, as I said, I give some examples of transferable adaption is just there, but fundamentally if we kind of look through the possible adaptions on strength, coordination is not going to be a transferable adaption. Reductions in antagonist correctivation are of dubious transferable ability. It might be a little bit of transfer there, but probably not something I would want to bank on too much. Obviously, in contrast, motine recruitment increases are definitely very, very transferable and something that I think is is very cool to aim for in training programs. As regards peripheral stuff, obviously hypertrophy, psychemergenesis, very, very transferable, there might be a little bit of difference there with psychemergenesis in terms of attending to shift peak forces to longer muscle links, but fundamentally, it's still going to act to increase force production across the whole range of motion. Anyway, tendons difference a little bit variable in terms of its contribution because of course it interferes with the stretch shortening cycle if we're trying to improve that. So, it's kind of variable impact. And then, of course, lateral force transition, very much a force producing, force increasing adaption, but not great if you're trying to improve speed in that same athlete. As regards speed adaptions, of course, we've got, again, coordination and antagonist correctivation probably aren't ones I would be thinking of as transferable, whereas we can obviously transfer recruitment and firing rate increases and of course, muscle fiber shortening velocity increases. So there's a lot of transferability, you know, muscle by muscle, if we want to make use of it. So I think it is absolutely possible to rely on a number of strength training exercises even though they might not traditionally be classified as, you know, kind of the classic athlete athletic type exercises. If they're producing these adaptions, then they should be contributing to improvements in sporting performance as long as they're in the correct location for these sporting movement they're trying to do. So essentially, what I'm arguing here is that we want to get away from the idea that, I mean, I want to saw someone argue, someone argue on social media that essentially strength training is like a weighted coordination training and it's literally the opposite of that. It's everything, not that. That is as far away from my position as it's possible to get. Ultimately, you know, strength training is not trying to improve coordination or it is in the movement that you're doing, but that's irrelevant. You know, that's just for the gym purposes. It's not going to transfer that coordination over to a sporting activity. It was a really nice day to showing that you can increase strength, you know, in something like a squat exercise and that coordination improvement that you make in something like squat really isn't going to transfer to something like a vertical jump. They're just too different in that regard. So ultimately, what this brings us to then is two very different philosophies or approaches to the concept of transfer. My argument here is that transfer is literally specific universal type adaptions that are applicable to or will actually contribute to improved performance in any movement that uses the muscle that we are adapting. Conversely, what you got is a lot of other people who are arguing things like, oh, this type of exercise, you know, trains the body or teaches the body to, you know, kind of work better in unstable conditions or something like that. That's the kind of magical thinking that I'm trying to get away from and trying to argue is not actually how the adaptions process is working. Also, it's not how transfer works. You know, transfer doesn't involve us teaching the body how to do stuff in particular ways. That's a coordination mindset. That's going back to this idea that strength training is kind of loaded coordination training for sport and it's absolutely not. What we're doing is creating muscular adaptions as a say in specific locations and that's then allowing us to perform better. Finally, what I'd like to just mention is that one of the modules, one of the episodes rather, sorry, my brain is in course construction mode at the moment. One of the episodes that we've done previously was about a proximal to this sequence and that's a really, really valuable tool for helping us figure out how to construct a strength training program that transfers well to a particular sporting movement because that allows us to break the sporting movement down into, obviously, as it sounds, proximal and distal segments and the proximal segments can be trained more so with heavy strength training exercises more kind of freely, if you like, because we're not going to be, you know, losing very much if there's any negative effects on speed. Whereas the more distal segments tend to have to have a more speed focus. So in terms of structuring and figuring out how transfer can be constructed, I think the proximal distance sequence is a great, a kind of skeleton key, if you like, from locking those kind of problems. But ultimately, it still comes back to the same thing, which is the transfer ability of an exercise to a sporting movement is always going to be because of an adaption that is created and that adaption is in, as I say, a correct geographical location. So that's enough from me. Rob, talk to us a little bit about how you are introducing transfer into your strength training programs for, you know, you can give us maybe some specific examples of places or exercises that you've chosen or ways of training that you've chosen to make sure that an athlete is going to improve a particular quality or, say, athletic performance metric, like jumping or throwing or something like that, as a result of the kind of training that you're programming. Yeah, definitely Chris. I think starting off, you know, you just said the proximal to distal sequencing. In my opinion, countermexing is pretty easy to then go about designing a pretty quality program. And I think probably one of the easiest ones to talk about for us would be like sprinting, honestly. Some people, I mean, I know a lot of coaches still them when they're trying to improve sprint speed and things like that. They don't do, we mentioned before, tons of heavy strength work sometimes. And sometimes they'll do things like, you know, I've seen like straight like flutter kicks for the hamstrings going, you know, as fast as you can, I've seen all kinds of different hip flexion exercises that may or may not work super well. One I'd seen was, like doing a, easily to hip extension on one side, covered with hip flexion on the other side. So you do them simultaneously. Would you, I mean, it looks like running, but in the same time, neither, you know, the hip flexors or extensors are really doing much, you know, significant in that scenario. So when I'm looking at it, you know, I'm looking for things that are going to produce a lot of force in the ways that you need to, based on that possible, the distal sequence. So hip extension stuff, mentioning a million times, you know, hip thrust, something that's going to be like a shoulder muscle ache, especially. So really, really like those bilateral or single leg program both, even things like, you know, RDLs, stiff legs, stuff like that, going to work really well for the hip flexion aspect. You know, I think that one, we've talked quite a bit about, but in general, gets overlooked. So rather than doing something that's like a body weight simultaneous, you know, hip flexion and extension, whether one leg is straight, the other leg is bending as you come up. I'm just doing, you know, easy loading, like a cable hip flexion where you're braced really nicely just against the other side of the cable stack, starting from like a straight leg, more extended hip position, and then flexing up, you know, either a heavy loaded, you know, where we're reds trying to get more strength increases in recruitment and some hypertrophy there, or maybe doing something against a band or something like that, that's going to give you more of the speed end of things. Well, I don't tend to do those quite as much because. you know, I feel like sprinting, you're going to go as fast about as you're going to go. So I usually try to focus more on the force and the things there. Maybe some hypertrophy. Other hip flexor exercises, you know, you said recruitment, super transferable. And not only, you know, between like, and that's specific muscle. But even if you just train regions of the muscle, you still get increased your recruitment across it as a whole. So that's another reason I've mentioned before. I really like the hip flexor isometrics. And yeah, you can do those in a few different hip flexion angles, you know, lower and more extended hip for the rectum. And then a little more flexed position for some of the other ones. So as major in that. But yeah, really, really like those. And the transfer, like you said, is, you know, you can use it for anything that's involving hip flexion. And I mean, same thing with the hip extensors there. If you want to chuck in some isos, I know people really like like the run specific isos. I've seen where they're doing like a single leg hip extension against a very heavy load, more extended knee position. And, you know, I've used those before and I do like those a bit. I would say those are some of my favorites that are going to transfer really well in terms of recruitment. And the muscles you need, of course, hypertrophy, bigger glutes, bigger hip flexors. So those are some ones that I really like, just for running specifically. Yeah, that's really cool because you've essentially, you know, explain there how you're targeting the hypertrophy and motine at recruitment adaptions in the hip musculature, the extensors and flexors, which is exactly the kind of paradigm I sort of argued for in the beginning where I was saying, we look for the adaption, which in this case, you're given two hypertrophy and recruitment. And we look for the location. And you've used a proximal to distal sequence to identify that applying larger kind of force producing or creating larger force producing capacities in those hip muscles is going to be really, really useful for the sprinting gate cycle. So it literally exactly, you know, the kind of the paradigm that I argued for, you're already doing that in your proves. And just to be clear, to the people who are listening, I didn't actually tell Rob that this was my paradigm before we started the podcast. So that is genuinely why he was programming before I even kind of came up with this way of explaining transfer this afternoon. So, you know, ultimately it is, I think, a good way to just describe what good programs actually look like. It's a very quick way. And the proximal to distal sequence does that very quickly. And just to be clear, in this example that Rob is just given, the proximal to distal sequence has allowed us to identify that by being the most proximal segment in sprinting, the, you know, the hip flexors and extensors, we can train those for strength to a greater extent than the segments further down the chain. We have that ability because they are going to reach slow velocities and they're therefore going to be slightly more force-dominant. Now, obviously sprinting is not by any means a force-dominant activity, but the hip is going to be the most force-dominant part of it. And as a result, it tends to be able to contribute, therefore, the most power outputs to the entire gate cycle. And in fact, some really good data showing that pretty much all of the power output, the concentric power output is coming from the hip. Everything else is just kind of, you know, transferring that onwards. So, fantastic example. You know, Rob, thanks for that. Can you give us one from the maybe, you know, the combat sport side of things that you're so familiar with? Yeah, for sure. I think the easiest one there, again, using that proximal, the distal sequence, so the core being much more proximal, much more force-dominant. You know, typically I see a lot of people training just some light loaded rotation more exercises, you know, Medball throws in that with something like a moderate weight where the goal was, you know, maximizing power outputs. Whereas I would prefer, you know, as we've talked about, to be training it with heavy, heavy loaded rotation. The bent over like 90-degree cable rotation I've mentioned before is definitely a favorite of mine. I've been using that more and more. I mean, you can do some standing options. Okay, if you can brace against something else. But, you know, kneeling and brace against like a box or something like that. I've seen a news, but really just that that bent over one. So, so easy to execute. And I think you and I have talked maybe not on the podcast before, but separately when you have, you know, a comparison of different rotational athletes, the force demands in, you know, Taekwondo karate boxing and all that for the core are really, really high. They're producing a lot of force. So those tend to have really, really good transfer. And I mean, I've seen that work time and again with guys and now that I do too much fighting these days, but I'm messing around with myself and definitely feeling a bit better because of it, although I will not be in the ring again anytime soon. Sure. So just to be absolutely clear, we're talking about rotation of the torso support to basically being like one of the earliest segments in the proximal distal sequence of something like throwing or in the case that you're describing here striking. So essentially it's giving us that starting point for the upper body. Obviously, the hips are going to contribute, you know, earlier on, you know, but here is a great example of the upper body. It's also having a proximal segment that we can train with force related variables. And of course, again, we're going to be looking for hypertrophy and recruitment as, you know, kind of two of our major adaptions. And of course, you know, you're described a hundred times before your programming approaches to these, you know, kind of heavy loads where possible, leaving reps in reserve one or two reps in reserve here or there. And doing a couple of sets of those maybe twice a week or three times a week if, you know, the situation demands it and the athlete isn't doing a hundred million other things at the same time, which they often are. So, another fantastic example. Obviously, you know, there are scenarios where we're looking to improve velocity as well as strength. And you've talked before about using things like assisted jumps for improving, kind of velocity. Can you just talk us through that again just for this context? Yeah, so if I have someone who's clearly more force oriented and they need more velocity and, you know, obviously a max ever vertical jump and all those things are fairly fast, but if you want to get something that is velocity, they couldn't normally reach then to keep driving at those speed adaptations. I'll go towards something like an assisted jump. I mean, I've had people do assisted sprints and things like that. But the assisted jumping for me usually just more, more practical for the people that I deal with. So, that's a really nice one. You can use a harness, you can use bands attached to the top of a power rack and they like that. But that'll just let you hit higher concentric velocities and you're going to hit otherwise and then be able to trigger those increases in firing rates and that they're going to want to see. So yeah, those are those are a favorite of mine. I really like them, probably throw them into my group program soon as well because people have been asking a lot about them actually. Cool. Now, this is really, really useful for us to compare this with the previous examples that you've given because when we are stimulating adaptations for speed, we're talking, as you said, about things like firing rates and massify was shortening velocities. The cool thing about those adaptations is that they're kind of binary in the sense that you either trigger it or you don't. That's very different from things like hypertrophy where you kind of have to get the reps in to get to a stimulus that you're interested in. That's this meaningful. That's interesting. Here, as you've said before, when you're doing jump type work, you're literally aiming for those couple of really high quality repetitions. And that's enough to trigger the adaption because once we hit a you're using an assistance kind of method. So therefore, you're going to hit higher velocities as you say than any other new fit before. And as a result, it's going to be sufficient trigger that increase in firing rates and the increase in muscle five is shortening velocity. That's then going to be transferable to pretty much anything else using those muscles. And again, we've fallen into exactly the same model that I explained at the beginning, which is that we've got an adaption that is transferable that where we are understanding exactly how that adaption is being stimulated. So we don't need to throw kind of dozens and dozens of repetitions at it because that isn't going to achieve the goal. We can do a small number of repetitions aiming for above maximum velocity as in using assistance to achieve a super maximum velocity. And the geographical location of those adaptions is in the right place. I decided to say geographical location because it's different enough to get people to think, okay, I do need to think about where the adaption is happening. I just kind of said muscle or regionals and people would filter me out. They would just ignore what I'm saying. So I'm saying something in a slightly strange way because I'm trying to get people to lock on to this concept of it. Actually, you know, we are not computer game kind of sprites that have, you know, sort of 8 units of strength or 9 units of speed and whatever. It's like, you can't, when somebody says, how do I train for strength? I'm like, where? Where are you training for strength? What do you try to improve? It's funny, imagine that because it was that paper that was just done on high-level soccer players. And of course, strength training, you know, showed good increases in sprint speed and all these things. And I saw someone discussing that and they said it, you know, it happened because they improved strength and strength is one of your general physical qualities. And they're like, well, that's not an explanation for why it happened. Like, yeah, of course, training versus the other groups, they have like, plios and sprints and then another group did, quote unquote, functional training like body weight stuff. So, yeah, the heavy strength training, obviously, in people that hadn't previously been doing it, improved their outcomes and other things more than the other two, but it wasn't because of improving the general quality of strength. You know, one of the line you either got, one muscle is necessary to grow or recruitment increase, or one of those adaptations to happen. Yeah, that kind of historical strengthening conditioning literature, in that way, not literature so much as kind of ways literature, it's just kind of popular literature or professional literature, sorry, rather than scientific literature. It does have a tendency to talk about things in those ways, as qualities, as as I say, as if we're computer game characters and we're not, everything is very specific to the place that the adaption is happening. You just moral calm that you're just acting. That's what it feels like when I read some of this stuff, it feels like I'm reading kind of a manual explaining how a computer game works, and it's not really how things work biologically. But no, yeah, cool. So basically, what we're talking about with transfer is transferable adaptions that we can identify and understand the stimuli for, and then applying those with training methods in the correct muscles, the correct geographical locations in order to create the improvement in sport performance that we're trying to create, and I really like those examples you gave there because it allowed us to show how the strength training adaptions for maximum strength are going to differ from the speed related adaptions that obviously improving maximum velocity. So with all of that being said, you've mentioned a couple of times some of the things that you've seen that people are doing incorrectly. Can you kind of spell it out for us, some of the horrible examples of incorrect transfer logic or incorrect transfer kind of programs that have been put forward to create good transfer sport, but obviously using methods that don't make any sense. Yeah, I mean, my brother and I see a lot of combat sports stuff all the time. So it's like, that's a big one, our reference. It's just so much wrong, but I think one of the big ones you see all the time, I mentioned on the punching episode and that, is people just doing like loaded punching, resisted punching, um, other against like a band or some of that I've seen. Okay, so before you, you're going to give me a laundry list of our letters, just slew down. So let's, let's grab that one straight to a, um, so do you want to explain why that's wrong? Uh, you go ahead, take it. Okay, cool. I'll give you a break for a moment. So basically, um, when we're talking about a punching activity, the, um, force production is coming from the proximal segments, not the distal segments. So, um, this is exactly what we talked about in the throwing and punching kind of episodes that we've done before. Basically, if you're training force production for the end, uh, of the punching activity, that's the opposite end that you need to be training force production for, uh, because it's proximal to distal sequence. So best you're off training velocity for the, um, punching end of the, of the, the, the, the hand on the wrist end of the, of the, of the kinetic chain, uh, really for the, uh, for the force end of the kinetic end, we want to be training the torso, which is exactly what you have already given as an example for is the torso rotation, and obviously it can put the hip and the little body on that as well. Yeah, because you train your arms to be slower, uh, weird thing, but they're going to be slower. It's just going to happen. Very strange. But yes, give us another one. Um, there's that, um, I mean, same vein as that, there's still the punching with weights that boxers and, you know, other combat athletes love to do. And they think somehow that that is improving, you know, strength, endurance and all this stuff. And like, I mean, yeah, you'll be able to hold a weight up for a while, but that's it. That's great. Cause I mean, you guys to give us two, two, two trains, and this is that because on the one hand, if you, if you're punching against elastic resistance, okay, I can kind of get my head around that to a certain extent, I mean, it's not, it's not something I would recommend doing, but you can kind of get your head around it. But punching with an actual weight is like, well, hang on a minute. Gravity's going down. Where, where, where, where is the resistance here is, it's like, okay, fine. Um, so you're doing like a group fitness box in class with a bunch of moms punching with weights, but I've seen it in actual gyms all the time. Um, another one I know I mentioned to you was the, the whole idea of, I've seen this one over and over, actually, converting strength to power, um, with the idea that being, you know, it was around exercise sequencing specific one I'm referring to right now was using initially a snatch grip deadlift to get you more power from the hip and then, well, this had power and strength and then transferring that to your sporting movement by doing it was like a clean and press, um, because it was getting you just moving the hips and everything at the same time and coordinating, you're just like coordinating under load. This is the idea I've noticed this in a lot of strengthening and listening circles. People believe that they can transfer coordination from a strength training movement to a sporting activity and it, it kind of is an assumption that just sits there and sometimes people come out and say it and sometimes in the example that you've given, people are assuming it but they're not actually saying it and it's wrong, it just doesn't happen. So, so that's, so converting strength into power is impossible really. I mean, strength is already there as a component to power to begin with and you can't convert strength into speed because they're totally different adaptions sets. So ultimately, any, any amount of strength that you've already developed already is present in the power calculation because power is literally just strength time speed. So, um, if you want to increase power output and you've already got a decent level of strength, you actually have to train in a completely different way because you need to add speed on top. So, when people say, oh, you can't develop power before you've developed strength, I'm like, well, strength increasing will automatically increase power because power is strength multiplied by speed. But, um, if you want, if you already got a level of strength and you want to improve power, then the only route you can go down is to start doing speed training which has absolutely nothing in common with training training. So it really is very strange the way that the training and listening communities develop these weird ideas that are physiologically impossible. And as far as it appears, now I suffer from zero grandiosity, I have to say, I don't take myself remotely seriously, but it does seem like I'm one of the very few people that not the only person who's pointing this out. It's very frustrating because it's so many big time coaches and combat sports, you know, not just combat sports, I promise you, and I was like, guys, you're not doing, you're not doing anything here. Very, very strange. Yeah, the strict converting strength into power, converting strength into speed or needing to do speed training after strength training because it builds on the other one. I mean, all of that stuff, I mean, we talked about that in periodization previously, but it is absolutely impossible to do. Cool. Can you give us one more before we finish or are you exhausted your supply? So I think away from the combat sports and running and that. So on the example of powerlifting, because people have asked me about that, and I've mentioned that I've coached quite a few lifters before, I still see the idea that you can train very unstable variations of the lifts and have that convert to, you know, something like a bamboo bar bench press is going to improve your stabilizer strength and then drive up your regular standard barbell bench press, but there's so many reasons that's wrong. I mean, the recruitment is nowhere near enough to be training pecs well, to be training. So about that. So like you're not going to be training your pecs very well, you're not going to be training your triceps very well, you're not going to be doing anything because so many other things are being activated to stabilize that load when you're doing the bamboo bar bench press. So if people tend to see an increase in their bench strength from those things, what I usually think is happening is they've been doing probably too much bench press. They bring in a session that has this instead of a regular bench press. And because they're doing essentially nothing on that day, it's low reps, it's far from failure. They're just giving themselves recovery between the bench sessions then. And so they think all of a sudden now they recover the driving up strength. And this bamboo bar bench press is the reason my strength has got up. That's very likely done. Nothing. It's too unstable. You've probably just given yourself a program that's more recoverable. And the same thing would be like I've seen hanging banded kettlebell squats and things like that to like work here. You're core stable as your muscles. And I'm like, the best squatters in the world are not doing these things. These are not useful. You know, you might as well be just squatting on a foam pattern. So all that point, if you want something super unstable, and then that should be in theory, then driving your squat up the same, and obviously it doesn't. So yeah, I've also seen one like that. I saw that people were doing something of something like a step up with unstable load. So I'm not sure exactly what it looked like. I think it was maybe a barbell with a light you were describing with something attached to it to create instability. And they were doing that single leg step up, obviously a step up is a single leg exercise. But they were doing a step up with that kind of barbell unstable load for sprinting to improve sprinting because the idea was that by using an unstable exercise, well, wait until you hear it. It actually gets better. So the idea was that by using an unstable exercise, you would have to create a reduction in antagonist characterization. And that's absolutely true. That's what happens. on stake. exercises. You start out with massive levels of antagonist characterization. And as you do them, it improves pretty quickly. And you see this very marked improvement in exercise performance in the unstable exercise. Because ultimately you started out with a crazy level of it. But that isn't going to change your characterization in sprinting. That's the movements of two people. If I get a bouncing my eyes closed, I'm not going to be better at balancing on something else. Exactly. So no, no, it's transferable. They're not transferable. So the thing is, and why I said it gets better, is because if you do train a lot of balance work, you do start to produce a global effect in, like we've talked about before, in terms of, yeah, phase, phase, phase interference. So you create an inhibitory effect in your brain for producing spikes emotina, chromatin firing rates, which starts to negatively affect your speed. So excessive balance training, if you don't need it. And I say, when I say excessive, what I mean is a training that you don't need. So if somebody is training balance because they need to be able to balance on it in a particular sporting context, then you just have to do it. I mean, that's part of the sport. But if you haven't asked me, that doesn't need extra balance type training or extra instability training, and you start giving it to them, you're likely to find that that starts to reduce their speed because the balance adaption that you're programming is going to start to cause the brain to back off on producing that speed related kind of characteristic, which is the spike in Motu unit firing rates and Motu unit current that start for contraction. So I think actually they may be creating problems rather than actually negative adaptions, if you like. I mean, it is an adaption, I mean, balance. Yeah. It's like creating adaption that is interfering one of the very rare cases where one does. You could argue, I guess, that sort of making muscle fibres super oxidative is a negative adaption for eye purge feet. But I mean, that's a little bit of a sort of minor comparison to this one. But yeah, I mean, ultimately, even though that exercise itself is not really transferring very much, as for reasons that you gave, it's actually potentially also having a negative impact, which I think is problematic. Yeah, I can't remember a scenario where I've programmed people balance work in the gym and someone asked me if I do balance and stability myself the other day. I was like, never in my life, I don't know. It's done in sports training. That's when it's done. I mean, it's done in the actual coordination of the sporting activity. So if you're learning a sporting skill, which has a high degree of motor learning involved in it, it requires a lot of practice, you will inevitably be doing balance in that training session. And it's necessary for the sport. And that's why we do it. But you wouldn't be training that outside of that scenario, because it wouldn't be specific enough really most of the time for the activity that you're doing. Cool. I think that's hopefully been a good, you know, sort of introduction to the concept to transfer and also some great practical examples, you know, from you. Thanks Rob. So cool. We will be back next week. And I think we are going to talk about powerlifting. If that is still, let's do it on the cars. Let's do it. Okay. So we will be back next time talking about powerlifting. Thanks for joining us. And we'll see you all next time.