25 Potentiation

Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology Podcast. I'm Chris Beardley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Mauseri. And we're going to talk about Potentiation today. So Potentiation are sometimes called priming, I guess there's other terms for it as well. Basically things that we do in order to create positive improvement, immediate positive improvements in exercise performance, often in the context of a strength training workout, but sometimes also in the context of athletic competitions. So we're going to talk about Potentiation this time. I'm going to hopefully follow it up in a subsequent episode talking about contrast training because that's where Potentiation is most often used. Basically contrast involves doing one type of exercise and then pairing it with another type of exercise, trying to get benefits from the first type of exercise on the second type. Potentiation essentially has quite a lot of long and fairly complicated history in the exercise science literature. I'm just going to give a very quick pen portrait and then Rob and I will talk about some of the ways in which he's using Potentiation mechanisms at the moment, just kind of naturally in the course of the programmes that he's writing. And then we'll talk about it a bit about ways that I've perhaps used Potentiation mechanisms in the past that might be different. So basically Potentiation in the exercise science literature has an interesting history because at the beginning all Potentiation study fell under the kind of heading of post-activation, Potentiation or PAP. So you'll find that there's loads of studies in which you'll see the title or in the abstract, the PAP effect or PAP effect. About maybe five years ago, also maybe a little bit more time tends to kind of stretch a little bit as you get old and you start loose track of how many years are passing. But a few years ago there was a really important review paper published and it made the very important observation that the PAP effect, the post-activation Potentiation effect, didn't really cover all instances of Potentiation and therefore what we've got then is Potentiation is like a numeral term and then under that you've got PAP effects and there was a proposed PAP effect post-activation performance enhancement effect and those two have different time courses and then arguably there's a bunch of other Potentiation effects that fall outside of those two time courses as well. So essentially there's a really interesting history going on here in terms of it starting out as a relatively kind of singular idea and it kind of now fragmenting into a bunch of different concepts all under the same heading but essentially different time courses. So what is Potentiation? Potentiation basically is the exact opposite of fatigue. So let me say fatigue is a temporary and reversible reduction in exercise performance as a result of a previous battle exercise. The Potentiation effect is the exact opposite so it's a temporary increase rather than a temporary reduction in exercise performance as a result of a previous battle exercise. So this is something I'll talk about before but basically if you have temporary increases or decreases in exercise performance that are not related to previous battles of exercise technically we shouldn't really call them fatigue. Now in the context of the fatigue literature we do call them fatigue so like if you do a cognitive task like a strip test then you can get a reduction exercise performance and it is caused by the same things that exercise itself produces a supress spinal sinus T. The same supress spinal sinus T can be created by a mental quantity test as it can be by a previous battle exercise. So we tend to group those kind of things into that definition of fatigue. It shouldn't really but we do. The same thing applies to Potentiation. If I do a potentiate about exercise say I do an isometric or high velocity repetition and it produces a temporary increase in exercise performance immediately afterwards that's a potentiation effect because I've temporarily increased exercise performance as a result of a previous battle exercise. We call that the conditioning contraction the thing that creates that potentiate effect. If however I would create it with a motivational technique if I were to shout encouragement at somebody just as they're about to lift and that produced an improvement in performance you might say oh well that's a potentiating effect. Well technically it's not because I haven't done it with about the exercise I've done it with a motivational psychological technique. Is it working through the same mechanism? Well not actually in this case it's not no. So there's some really interesting kind of differences there in terms of when you're looking at fatigue and potentiation being outcomes that are essentially opposite directions from one another. Sometimes you can have a scenario where an exercise bout or a like a motivational or psychological technique might produce the same effect but it might not actually be working in the same way. So anyway Potentiation essentially is a effect where we temporarily improve exercise performance by using a previous bout of exercise which we call the conditioning contraction. Coming back to the PAP and PAP effects, both of these operate inside a single workout. The PAP effect is a very well described physiological phenomenon that involves moving, essentially moving myosins closer to actin. So there's a process that happens in response to the musophiber being activated, probably calcium ion mediated like pretty much everything else inside the musophiber. And so basically what you get is a movement of the myosin closer to actin through the phosphorylation of myosin regulatory light chains. That lasts for somewhere maybe two to five minutes and in that period of time your myosins are closer to actin and therefore you're going to get an increase in mechanical tension of the fiber across the entire force velocity spectrum. So basically if you activate the fiber, you should get for the next two to five minutes, approximately, you should get a temporary increase in the mechanical tension that fiber can produce across all velocities and that will actually therefore allow you to reach slightly high velocities as well. So it basically is completely kind of independent of what you then do. You could do a high velocity repetition, activate all the fibers because obviously the fiber activation is the key factor here. The number of fibers you activate is going to determine the overall muscle potentials effect because you got to get as many fibers experiencing that activation or that calcium ion kind of influx in order to create the effect. And then basically you could then wait 30 seconds a minute and you could do another high velocity repetition and you should basically see the potentials in effect. Now I often say to people when they're doing multiple counter movement jumps, but their second jump or maybe even their third jump will be the highest from the starting point of their kind of attempts. So generally speaking most people will not hit their best counter movement jump hide on the first attempt of a set of three attempts. Most people wait on the second or the third and that's most likely the pop effect in action in that scenario. So basically you can kind of get a pop effect from pretty much anything you know that activates the fiber and it doesn't really need to be a long duration. Some people have started to say things like oh no you can't get pop effects from high velocity repetitions because you have to do you know it has to be calcium ion accumulation for a reasonable duration of time like a you know four or five second heavy strength training repetition. I'm like no literally got two studies one in jumping one in throwing that show you that you literally just need to do a single high velocity rep and it will give you a post activation potentiation papp effect on a heavy strength training exercise. So you don't you don't need to do kind of the kind of the heavy stuff to make that particular mechanism work. So that's the bad effect. The paper effect is pretty mysterious we don't have the same documentation on the mechanisms. It lasts kind of you know off the end of the five minutes most people kind of record it in the eight to fifteen minute kind of period of time and really it's going to be a bunch of other stuff that we haven't really managed to pin down yet. Now some people have argued that maybe there's a central nervous system mechanism there. I don't agree. I think there's some pretty nice data showing that you've got supospinal CNST even when those paper effects or papal paper effects are actually present. So I think ultimately there isn't really a strong rationale for there being a potentiation effect on the central nervous system level in that kind of immediate post conditioning contraction space of zero to fifteen minutes post you know kind of conditioning contraction. But yeah the paper effect pretty mysterious at the moment. We don't really know what's going on. It does say we have got data showing that you can create it even when you are experiencing supospinal CNST as indicated by reduction in voluntary activation. And that just gives me the opportunity to mention something else which is that remember that potentiation and fatigue are the net output that we measure so they're always the outcome, the performance outcome. And that could be net of a potentiation mechanism net of a team mechanism. So you can have a team mechanism present and a potentiation mechanism present and whichever one is bigger will give you whether you are genuinely potentially to door fatigue but they're both present at the same time. So I could have a little bit of CNST but a big potentiation effect inside the muscle fibers because of the pap effect and I could get an improvement in performance. That's probably what's happening in the counter movement jumps that I described a minute ago. Conversely I could do the opposite. I could create a bunch of fatigue, a little potentiation effect and I'm going to be fatigued as in my excess performance. I can only do it down but technically I've also got potentiation effect that I can't see because it's obscured by the magnitude of the fatigue that I'm experiencing. So you have to remember always that fatigue and potentiation outcomes that are net of the other one, the fatigue or the potentiation. So basically that is what's happening inside a single workout. You've got the pap and paper effects. We've also, and as I say, pretty much no sign of any kind of mural kind of benefits there. I think where you do see mural changes is if you get a bunch of like relatively untrained people and you put them through a series of high effort but low fatigue contraction types say like you get them to do isometrics for say five seconds with maximum effort and then you give them a minute or two and then you just do another one. you're going to see potentials in effects that are neural because they're not actually potentials in their actually the options. So one of my favorite favorite studies is a series of five isometric injections with like I think it's three minutes rest between them. I actually I think I sent it to you recently Rob. Yeah. It's a really cool study. We're basically literally goes sort of jumps up in voluntary activation over the series of like five repetitions. Untrained people doing isometrics with decent rest periods, they see these massive what look like potentials in effects. They're actually adaptions. It's motine accruement adapting in real time, which is fantastic. We talked about that right to the very beginning of this series of podcast episodes when we talked about maximum strength and motine accruement increases. But yeah. So I think you could argue if you're kind of so inclined that you're getting a potentials in effect there, but I don't agree that that is what it is. I think that is adaptive. And the same thing with coordination. So okay. So that's like basically saying that generally speaking in a context of a single workout, you're not really going to see potentiations that are mechanisms that are neural in nature, even though the vast majority of the fitness industry will tell you that you're warming up the central nervous system that you're doing other things like that. It's just not really what's happening. So those are the things that have been studied in the context of potentiation is the pamper effect and the pay effect. Again, I said that the history of potentiation is interesting exercise because for some reason, the concept of warm-ups gets completely ignored when people are talking about these things. So the reality is that warm-up would actually give you a potentiation effect as well. And warm-ups basically increase the temperature of the muscle. Increase the temperature of the muscle, and that actually will give you an increase in the rate of cycling of your actin-myocene cross bridges. And that basically does pretty much the same thing as they increase in the phosphorylation of myosinbregulatory light chains, moving myosinclose to actin. It'll give you pretty much a faster rate of cross bridge formations and increase in force production across the whole force velocity profile. What it probably won't do in my opinion, and I don't think there is a good study on this yet, what it probably won't do is increase the number of reps to failure. And I think the reason it won't do that is because basically what you'll get is a greater sort of formation of metabolite relative to T because when you form cross bridges more quickly, you will actually form metabolites more quickly as well. So yes, you'll get greater instantaneous force, but I don't think you'll get greater number of reps to failure for the same using the same technique. So basically a warm-up will do the same thing. Now what do we know about warm-ups very briefly? You kind of have to do 15 to 20 minutes of low-intensity cardio for the muscle that you want to do, or you could just sit in a warm bath of water, or you could use one of those warming blankets that they use. Anything will do, literally we are literally just warming up the temperature of the muscle. Now we can talk maybe other times about the fact that that probably also has muscle strain injury preventative effects. So it's definitely worth considering doing if you are you know kind of worried about that in the context of an athletic situation. But it's not the same thing as doing a couple of what we call warm-up sets before a strength training exercise. That is not the same thing, even though the label is the same, there's one of those things where words need to be analyzed very carefully. You can't just call something a warm-up and it produces a warming-up effect. It actually has to, that sounds mad, but actually we have to say this because some people think so so concretely in terms of words, you know, having power and it's that well, no they don't. They're describing a concept and if it's not describing the concept correctly, then it's not going to do the thing. You have to actually do the kind of kind of low-intensity cardio with the muscle that you actually do want to warm up, or as I say, you can warm it up by putting a blanket on it with the warming facility or you know, sitting in some warm water or something like that and it will do the same thing. That will give you the potentiating effect of the accelerate to cross-bridge formations. It'll also give you a little bit of a reduced injury, kind of risk from a muscle strain injury point of view. So there's definitely worth considering a warm-up set from a strength training perspective doesn't do the same thing. It's not warming the muscle up. I won't do that. What purpose it serves is a separate question, but ultimately that's why I've started to recommend people to talk about warm reps rather than warm-up sets because really, what we're looking for is the feel and the comfort with the weight and the exercise that we're doing rather than anything else, but that's a separate argument. Okay, so we've talked about PAP and PAP effects. We've talked about warm effect. All that's going on inside a single kind of workout. Very, very briefly, I'm just going to then describe two additional potentiations just so we've got completeness inside this episode. Basically, you will also see within day potentiation effects, if you do a little bit of exercise in the morning, you'll generally get a potentiation in the afternoon. That seems to be because of a hormonal effect, testosterone increase, and potentially that, therefore, will increase motone recruitment by increasing motivation. So that is a really, really interesting one. So people are kind of working as professional athletes. I'd definitely be looking at that as a strategy. Most of the rest of us who have kind of schedules that we can't really kind of work around quite so easily probably aren't going to find that beneficial, but that's in there as a as a potentiation mechanism. And then finally, the most mysterious of the more, there is a delayed potentiation effect, which I'm fascinated by. I know that people are still working on it. I don't really know where it's going at the moment, but there is a potentiation effect that lasts kind of about 48 hours. If you do something like power training, kind of workout, and leave it 48 hours, come back and retest, generally there's an improvement. Now, this is another one of those areas where, you know, if you were to show me that sort of literature and it had all been done in untrained people, then I would be like, no, no, no, that's not potentiation, that's adaption, that's just kind of recruitment and coordination improvements. But there are studies in highly trained track and field athletes that will give you the same output. So there is a potentiation happening there. I don't know what it is. If anybody has any new information on that or is working on that as a PhD or anything, please do tell me, you know, what direction you're going in and why you think there are some interesting things happening there, because I'd be fascinated to know, you know, what really is going on there and I haven't figured it out. So there we go. So, potentiation mechanisms, as we say, there's a couple of interesting things going on during the workout. You've got the warmup itself, which is a temperature increase. You've got a path effect and you've got a paper effect. The reason I separate those out completely, I know that some people have argued that paper effects could be temperature increases. I don't agree, because if you look at the things that give you the greatest paper effects, they are not warming the muscle up. They're just a couple of repetitions of a heavy load. So I think there's something definitely different going on there. I also don't agree that it's recruitment related or coordination related, because as I say, I think generally speaking, those things are getting worse, not better, even though you've got the paper and paper effects being displayed. Cool. Okay. So hopefully that is enough physiology relating to potentiation. So let's talk about practicalities. So Rob, loads of things I want to ask you here. Let's start with the most simple question of all, or most relevant question of all, which is that when you're programming strength training workouts, how are you making use of the pap and paper effects to begin with? And then I'll separately after this, I'll ask you about the warm ups, but how are you currently making use of the pap and paper effects? Obviously the answer to this could be, well, it's baked into the way that strength training works, and I'll accept that, but just give me a pen portrait to what you're doing in the moment. Yeah. I mean, whenever we're running a program and whenever I'm coaching people in person or remote, I think you already mentioned it, but one of the biggest things that I'm making sure everyone does in the context of their workouts is just actually get some warm up reps. Like you said, it just warm up a reps. So generally, I do like that. People do other very, very low reps, that's or single reps, and maybe just a couple ramp ups. If it's a more complex exercise, like you mentioned, something like a squat, a deadlift, and things like that, some singles just ramping up to get time to get comfortable with the movement, especially with the squat, with the weight on your back, things like that. But we've talked about it a little bit before machine exercises and stuff like that. I really just like a warm up rep before you hop into the set there. I think where people tend to go wrong is thinking you need like an over warm up style of potentiating single and that you're not getting like a good effect. If you don't do something a bit heavier than your work set and then back off. But you know, like you just described, like I just said, it can be something at least reasonably close and high effort compared to the work set. And then you just go right in. Besides those, really like max effort jumps, another one of the easiest ones, max effort, you know, vertical jump, force, quad or deadlift, even like a broad jump kind of depends on what the person needs. You know, otherwise for their sport and that, but I'll do max effort jumps. I'll do max effort throws, all those high velocity things. Just a couple reps and like you did, I described there. Usually I'm noticing people, yeah, second, third, maybe in fourth jump, they're hitting a peak height. Generally, I'll instruct people to do anywhere from like three to five jumps, just to make sure I give them time to like reach that peak height, peak speed and that. Those work really, really nicely super easy, take no time and all and just rest, you know, just enough between the reps. Talking about jumps, actually, I do remember there was quite a few high level powerlifters. A Brett Gibbs was one who I used to watch a lot who would do ridiculous vertical jumps, you know, just a few seconds before max effort, deadlift and things like that. When he was training, you know, so scream, but you know, that was essentially a way of getting a little potential, you know, fact before the deadlift, yes, all that stuff worked really nicely and it tends to make people, like you mentioned, much more comfortable with the lift afterwards versus just hopping in cold. I think that powerlifter example is, all the powerlifting examples are really valid because often the rest periods are going to take you outside of the and pop effect zone. So, pop effect really is going to be gone. after five minutes and it's probably, you know, kind of on the way down after sort of two or three minutes. So if we're taking kind of powerlifting star-rest periods, then I think having that high velocity path effect conditioning contraction, I think is really, really cool. And incidentally, that's the only scenario that I've ever really programmed specific potentiation conditioning contractions between sets. So as you say, yeah, so as you say, if you're kind of programming for an athlete, you're generally going to be giving them one or two sets for most of the exercises. You're going to do that warm-up rep, which is, or the last warm-up rep, I generally do say two or three warm-up reps of different loads. I start with, because I start with something that's ridiculously light to make sure that I haven't kind of accidentally, you know, kind of lost anything functional during the night before. And I kind of like come to the exercise, I kind of make sure that my body still works properly, which you have to do when you get to this age. And you kind of do your repetition, and then you do another one a bit higher, and then you do your kind of, I do my third one, which is close to my kind of work weight. And I generally push pretty hard on that to make sure I'm getting a PAP effect, because as I said, it's reliant on the number of fibers you're activating is going to be the size of the PAPE for you. You're going to get you want to get the most fibers experiencing that phenomena. And that pretty much gives me my conditioning contraction for that next, for that first set. But if I'm doing a second set, generally in a bodybuilding context, I'm going to be probably doing that second set inside the PAPE effect zone, so I'm not too worried. In this, I think situations you might not be, especially if you're doing kind of, as you say, like a free weight pack squat, something like that. And that's when it's brilliant to kind of just drop in that jump, or in the case of bench press, throw in that medicine ball throw, or fly a push up, or something like that. And the funny thing is that between sets. And that's the pretty much the only scenario I'm going to do something that looks like contrast training. It's going to have a kind of that conditioning contraction between strength training sets. And that sounds pretty much like what you're doing as well. Yeah. And you know, talking about what you do for warm-ups when I do, because someone had asked me recently, apparently, they thought I had a nice squat, and they asked what I do to warm up. If I do mobility, anything like that, I was like, no, I do one plate for one, two plates for one, three plate for one. If I'm working into the 400s, I do three plate and a 25 pound for one. And then, you know, I do just pretty quick rest between those. And then if I need to rest, you know, longer before the work set, I'm going to throw in a jump for the work set. But it's super quick, you know, I don't know. I don't tend to do extended warm-ups. But one thing I did want to mention, you made me think of a lot of times I have people who feel like they perform better on their second work set of an exercise. And I've seen other people mention this, but really, you know, the likely candidate for that is just a potentialization effect. If you do warm-up reps, and you know, maybe at least when I'm thinking about it, you're not really in the zone, you don't really give enough effort and activate enough fibers. And then you do a work set, which reasonably hard. The second one is even better. You know, some people would obviously think that the second one would always be worse because of fatigue. But if you didn't push all the way to failure on that first set and you activated a lot of fibers, you probably just got a potential ization effect for that second set. And that could be why it's better. Because I'll notice clients, I actually have quite a few older clients who their second set is a lot of times the better one of the two. I don't know if maybe, you know, that's what's going on. They just don't really get a good potentialization effect on the warm-up rep or something there. You know, some of them are just it's also some of the more like 6am. Maybe there's not quite a new it until the, uh, this is that concept there. What could just be a fatigation thing? Yeah, now that's interesting. There's definitely more to come on the from my perspective on my contributions to the FAQ. There's more to come on the elderly population. I do, I mean, I found some interesting stuff about adaptions, I found some interesting stuff about fatigue, but they're not like, you know, really different from what most other people would say. I have found some interesting stuff that is kind of a little bit off the wall. I found a little bit of repeat about effect material in the elderly, which is different from how it works in, um, kind of younger populations. Um, so I am, I am keeping my eyes open for these kind of anecdotes about how elderly people experience strength training differently, because I'm definitely wanting to to continue, um, growing that part of the FAQ. So I sure definitely, uh, file that in my brain for future analysis. I'm just an interesting one. Anyway, so yeah, okay, so you've described how you're, you're kind of taking, um, uh, making use of the PAP effect and just kind of making sure to, uh, get it back again if it's lost between, uh, kind of, such along the rest periods. I'm guessing you don't really spend a lot of time thinking about the PAP effect, because there's very little kind of, mechanistic approach behind it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's really, you know, it's just the PAP effect from me, um, yeah, yeah, like you said, there's nothing mechanistic. There's nothing really based on the PAPE. So I can't send in that. If I have, uh, you know, five or eight minutes later, I have a rep that feels awesome. You know, maybe it's that, but I don't worry about why or like how I did it. Yeah, exactly. So, um, in terms of warming up, I mean, this is something really interesting and I asked you this question before we jump to the podcast and you gave me quite a detailed answer. So, uh, can you kind of, um, outline that, um, for us again, uh, you know, kind of describing, um, when you are, or how you're managing that warm process, practically, it's really difficult, especially when you're working with clients in person to kind of get that warm up, uh, to work. So can you just go through that again for us? Yeah. So I'm just going to start with a funny thing that I'll do when I have time, um, because I hate hopping on a bike or anything like that. Um, I rarely will do things like that myself out of laziness. What I will do if I have like a two hour gap and I'm going to train is I will hop in the showers at work and my go-workers will probably attest to this and I'll hop in there and I will just blast the hot water for 15, 20 minutes. And then when I get out, I, I feel awesome. So I'm, I'm trying to get the temperature increase for myself rather than hop on on a bike. I'll do that. Um, but I just thought that was pretty funny. Um, I have had actually people that have done consult with and that I'm like, you, you can do that. You can blast the, you know, heck out of the heat, your car, you can hop on and hot water, you can do things like that. But the, the most common one as I'll just have people, if they have a little time before the session, they want to come in early, just hop on, you know, a bike that they're using all four limbs and just do like 15 to 20 minutes of just some easy cardio, not, you know, going crazy high effort or anything, but just enough that they're definitely getting that on temperature increase. And like you said, uh, warm up reps, a lot of people do come to me thinking that if they do a set of like 10 or 12 instead of like a low rep warm up, the that is going to get, you know, blood flow and temperature increase. So I am always educating them on the fact that that is in that case, you got to do the temperature based things. So if you have a, you know, if you have personal training clients and athletes and you want to have them coming a little bit early, hop on the bike and do something like that, I'm just make sure they're like you said, using the muscles that are going to be involved in the lift and the exercise, um, probably the easiest way to do it. I'm not going to have people do it in the session and just stand next to them, you know, people are paying for the time. I'm not going to charge them 15 minutes out of the hour to just hop on a bike and sit there. It's really important. And it's actually a very interesting observation because generally speaking, the kind of standard approach to warming up will be that people will do like a set of 10 to 15 reps with a kind of a moderately low load. And all they're doing is creating fatigue. They're not actually getting a warm up. And they're not getting a potentiation effect. So they're actually doing something which is pretty much useless and negative because it's creating a fatigue. So what people need to understand is that you've got to kind of think about warming up as a low-intensity cardio thing and then pairing that with a potentiating rep and those two people are going to give you the kind of positive outputs that you're looking for. This kind of very, very, very common traditional idea of doing a bunch of moderate load or light load sets with, you know, higher repetitions is just got to go. It's just not to use positive at all. But it's so popular. You know, so bad boy. Okay, cool. So I think that's very, very interesting like, as you say, recommending the kind of 15 minute or so warm up to people who are either working remotely or people who want to come in, you know, before the session starts and do that, I think that's very, very cool. I have actually seen that done in person. I have seen coaches when I've been going to commercial gyms. I have seen coaches wave across the room at one of their clients who's arrived 15, 20 minutes early, who goes across to the kind of elliptical spends 15, 20 minutes. And then on the hour when the coach is ready to start the session, they pick up and start that. So I think that does happen. I think that's very cool that it does. And I would encourage people to adopt that. I think it's definitely the right strategy. So cool. Okay, so that is well, sweet. So you've described to us how you're making use of the potential factor, post activation, potential factor. And you've described to us how you're using temperature, increasing warm-ups, one of your strategies, obviously, slightly. I actually kind of quite grateful that I, I live, generally living warm countries where I can walk from my flat to the, from my apartment, to the gym. And of course, generally, that generally, and probably can't walk anywhere anyway. But yeah, now and it's, yeah, so sometimes the gym is actually cold as well, you know, it can be very cold first thing in the morning, especially if I'm like raining early in that. So I do really like that shower truck. Yeah, that is really cool. One, two, kind of recommend the insert and certain circumstances, definitely. Cool. Okay. So, so the other question I had for you is there are also other things that you're doing at the moment when you program like high velocity repetitions, like isometrics, that you are getting potentiation effects from, but you're not necessarily doing them to create potentiation effects. So, yeah. So, can you just describe kind of, you know, some of those techniques you're using, so that people are aware that there is a great type of a right, because you obviously, you've got your way of doing things in terms of creating a potentiation effects, but can you just give a quick outline of the isometrics that you're doing to start with? Yeah. Of course. Yeah, I really, really love the brief isometrics and I was actually chatting about those on a call with an athlete the other day. So, one of the ones I do a lot is for quads, I'll do like a single, like knee extension isometric, you know, three to five seconds, very high effort, single unpack fly isometrics, something like that. The hip flexor isos in various positions that we've talked about quite a few times. And yeah, all those, you know, have the interesting, effective, increasing recruitment over time, but also, yeah, like you said, they're going to give a potentially any effect. So, if you want to do those instead of just like a single high velocity rep or a single high effort rep, you know, probably worth using for the recruitment increases. So, yeah, really like those. And, you know, a lot of times, I notice at least if I do them, you know, for example, on the pack fly and that first set feels awesome. Just, you know, whether that's a mental thing, whatever it is, for a set feels very smooth. In terms of like squatting in that, if I do an ISO pre squat, generally if I'm, you know, maybe a little stiff knees, achy things like that, feels great on the squat afterwards. So, I do, I really, really like those actually. The isometrics, probably one of my favorites of my most consistently programmed things that I use. That's really cool. So, yeah, so for people who perhaps want a little bit more flexibility or variability in the, um, potentially conditioning contractions of their programming, isometrics will absolutely do that for you. You know, three to four second isometric. Max, I for again, wait a minute and then do your kind of work set. It's going to give you that potentially effect under the banner of the post activation, potentially, if I pay a pay effect. Probably give you appointments in asthma effect as well, pay per fact, but who knows? Yeah. Um, the, the thing is though, as you reattrated there, you're also going to get an adaption from that. You're going to get a pretty cool improvement in motunit crumeters and adaption as long as you've got that past do that. Um, and I think that it probably is going to be slightly more reliable to get that from a isolated, uh, kind of sort of single joint isometric than you're going to get from a high velocity movement. There's a whole body. So, this is why I kind of say to people, yeah, you know, you can get motunit crumeters from jumps and throws and things like that. And especially with beginners, you're going to do that. But as you get further down the line in the athletic scenario, the ability to create crumeter increases from those big whole body movements is going to get smaller and smaller and smaller. And you are going to have to start thinking about, um, kind of single joint stuff. And that is going to naturally lead you to ice matrix because, um, high velocities with single joints, just not a combination. It's not happened. You know, it's good you mentioned that as well because actually I had a question, um, from a, I believe it was a coworker the other day about using like positions specific isometrics in a lift, um, you know, in the case of like an overhead press, I believe they're asking like an isometric against pins or things like that. And my answer there was that I'd much rather do something more isolated. We can just really focus on whatever muscle you want to increase through recruitment and since the increases will be transferable and muscle specific, you know, the more things you have working at a time, the less you're recruiting in any one of those things for making it much, much more targeted versus, you know, like a bench against pins or an overhead press against pins, which historically I've seen people use quite a bit actually. This is a really interesting point, um, because, um, if you imagine just strategically imagine that you're kind of working with a power lifter and they are at a high level and they're constantly hitting, you know, plateaus and struggling to kind of, push their, um, kind of lift higher and higher. And you identify they've got a sticking point in one particular location and so yeah, you go down the route to saying, okay, we're going to do some kind of isometric just below the sticking point, which is a classic way of trying to make progress in that kind of situation. Okay, fine. Um, and the exact adaptions that are happening in that scenario, I think are a little bit difficult to pin down, but what I think you're going to find is that you probably will make progress on that particular kind of sticking point, but what will happen is you will just end up generating a sticking point somewhere else. And then you're going to go to the same process and do this over the again. Okay, but if you go down the route saying, well, okay, um, if we target the muscle for recruitment improvements, which we can do by isolating and reducing the muscle mass and all that kind of thing, then we're going to get a more kind of transferable adaption. And what you can probably then do is just keep hammering away at that. And it should actually carry you through a bunch of different positions of sticking points, um, kind of, uh, irrespective of where they happen to be. Now, if they move a lot, then you're probably going to start thinking about different muscle groups that you might need to include a different muscle regions or what have you. And that will start to change. But I think the flexibility of this recruitment increase is actually a little bit bigger than the joint angle specific targeting of the muscle. Yeah, yeah. That's it. And that's exactly what I would think. Yeah, just much more, much more reliable. I would say to progress long term with that. Yeah, very cool. Okay, cool. So, okay, that's been a kind of run through potentiations and how the physiology works and how, you know, programming can be done with that in mind. Um, hesitant to ask you if you've seen any, um, horrible examples of people using potentiations because the list could be very, very long. But can you just kind of give us a quick pen portrait of, you know, kind of the ideas and concepts that you're seeing around, uh, potentiations are definitely not valid in the moment in the industry. Yeah, I mean, we'll get, we'll get more into it. And I'll probably the next episode. We're talking about other things. I think people really rely on sequencing of exercises, you know, using things like a, like a, a French contrast method, which is very popular and and stuff like that that we'll talk more about. Sure. I'm in a future episode. But yeah, I think really like, you know, the thing of specific sequencing of exercises to get potentiation effects, um, mention a lot of times like you said that it's a nervous system phenomenon. You're ramping up the nervous system. And that's another reason people tend to believe in the very heavy load singles and that that you need to do like a, an overwarm up and stuff like that. And I, you know, I said before it's not like that's bad. You can use an overwarm up as long as it's not fatiguing. It's fun. But I think the reason people tend to think that that would work is not correct. And then using things like certain contrast ideas and that, um, they get pretty wacky, pretty quick. Yeah. I think ultimately the central nervous system, uh, kind of thing is probably the one life I've seen the most is just, um, often you'll read people or hear people describing, um, that, that potentiation or priming approach is changing the nervous system in some positive way. Um, I've never seen any data to support a transient improvement in the CNS's activity that would give you a genuine potentiation effect. So, uh, remember, the potential should refers to a temporary improvement in exercise performance as a result of a previous bad to exercise. So if you want to justify if somebody wants to argue that the CNS is experiencing a transitory increase in recruitment or a transitory increase in, in coordination capacity, I am waiting for them to send me that data because honestly, what I think they're looking at either is a genuine peripheral potential, in fact, that they are attributing to CNS and it's not, or they're looking at an adaption in the CNS. So, generally speaking, if the CNS figures out a way to do something better, it's going to do that and it's going to keep it forever. It's not going to do it temporarily. You're not going to get the CNS to increase. Okay, fine. You can do it motivationally. You can increase someone's maximum tolerable perception of effort. Fine. Yeah, you can do that. But that's not a presentation effect because it's not done by exercise. So, um, if we, I think that, if you can find an exercise that, that increases, like the recruitment level or the coordination level in the subsequent exercise repetition. So, for example, again, untrained person and you ask them to do a maximum effort counter-moving jump after warming them up correctly and get them to a maximum effort counter-moving jump. Their next counter-moving jump, I guarantee you, will have higher recruitment and higher coordination. It is will. And you could say, well, that's pronunciation, right? No, it's not because they're going to keep those benefits forever. You know, it's not going to go away. So, I think this is the thing that people kind of misunderstand is that if the CNS develops the ability to do something better, it's going to pretty much keep that forever and it's not going to lose it. So, it's not potential factors and adaption. So, I think really what we're seeing here is that for me, when I look at it, look at the industry, the single biggest mistake is people thinking that you can create potentiations through the CNS. And as you said that, I just thought of more examples. that were there you go yeah exactly you increase because of that so like a classic one that people will still use a lot for hypertrophy at least is like like a classic heavy light method where you do you know the heavy strength training compound exercise the isolation exercise is a super set with the old idea that the heavy compound exercise was somehow potentiating the isolation exercise afterwards that's one not potentiating is adapting is creating a critical crimson adaption so you can literally do all you have your stuff first yeah yeah like reimposed exhaust type stuff where they think that like you know you exhaust one muscle and then you get more out of a different one after that you know all those kinds of things are really kind of wrapped in the idea of getting some sort of potentiation and getting some more out of like you know a specific muscle or movement and really those I mean obviously a heavy light method of pre-exhaust exhaust all those things are going to give you more growth or more strength increased than just a normal straight set they're definitely going to give you less you know in my opinion but yes so you see those a lot and I just don't I don't really think those things have any kind of value anymore I mean obviously I'm not using them myself yeah definitely I think yeah um perhaps pre-exhaustion or something like a bit of topic I could cover with Jake on the other podcast it's more of a bodybuilding thing yeah certainly more bodybuilding than it's funny but it is funny though sometimes when you when you tell me send me some routines that people are whether you're seeing in the athletic context sometimes even you know they making use of those kind of routines they do and offseason they use yeah that's when I used to you I I noticed people use things like that for offseason hypertrophy you know quote unquote and use that to they think they're like driving you know more growth in that offseason when they use those kind of I guess advanced techniques they would call them yeah and really you're just tiring yourself out you're getting fiber type shifting making you slower you're not getting any more growth than you would be with just normal straight sets and you're just in the fatigue carrying over into your athletic movements and your athletic training sessions is going to be a very big net negative problem to see after you're trying to focus an offseason on using all these kinds of things I obviously don't agree with it and don't see the value in that at all and I see it over and over and over and I just you know I don't know why it's still hanging around so much yeah I think maybe we should do a I mean not trying to cannibalize what I talk about on the other podcast but I think there's definitely scope for a hypertrophy module for us to do at some point but yeah we'll stick with the plan and we'll do analysis of contrast training I think next week following on from discussing how potential works this time. Cool so let's leave it there and we will be back definitely be back next week with another episode.