30 Single-leg vertical jumping

Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology podcast. I'm Chris Beardsley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Mauseri. I'm going to talk about vertical jumping again today. So I'm emphasizing again because we have done a full podcast on vertical jumping before. So if you didn't catch that, please do go back and listen to it. Again, we're going to focus today on two ideas which are strongly connected with each other. First of all, we're going to talk a little bit about single leg vertical jumping because obviously in the original podcast we did in this topic, we talked primarily about two leg vertical jumping. And secondly, we're going to reiterate what we've said before, another podcast about what power training is actually doing. Now, the reason we're covering both of these two topics in the same podcast today is because they're actually connected. And that is because when you think about what's happening in a single leg vertical jump, single leg vertical jump basically is causing you to perform the same jumping motion, but with obviously any one leg relative to the exact same body weight. Body weight doesn't change when you do a single leg versus a two leg jump, but obviously the number of legs that you are applying force with does change. So you essentially half the amount of force application and you essentially therefore turn that movement into a much more forced dominant activity. Comparing a two leg vertical jump with a single leg vertical jump, what's happening is you're essentially going to be moving a lot slower and you're going to be jumping a lot less high. And as a result, it starts to look like power training essentially because you're not moving as quickly you're moving you're moving down the force velocity profile towards the force end of the spectrum. Now, obviously, similarly, we've talked before about power training power training sets in the middle between maximum strength training and high velocity movements. Now, the really important thing about this is that when we look at maximum strength training, it produces a set of specific adaptions and most of those adaptions, many of those adaptions, many of those adaptions actually require us to be producing pretty high forces using kind of heavy loads in order to maximize the stimuli for each of those adaptions. The opposite end of the force velocity profile, you've got speed work, fast movement training, and again, the actual movement speed is a really critical component of being able to stimulate the adaptions that allows to get faster. Now, yes, there was a kind of hypothesis about 20 years ago stating the intent to move quickly was the only thing that mattered. That exact research laboratory that did that original study came back and repeated it with a different research design to eliminate the problems of the original kind of investigation and actually discovered the movement speed does matter. So that hypothesis really isn't valid even on the terms of the original research and the baritory that proposed the hypothesis. So it doesn't work physiologically, it never made any sense, physiologists would have always told you that, but nevertheless, I'm just pointing out that hypothesis has kind of closed the loop there, even on its own kind of basis. So what we've got then is two kind of types of training maximum strength training, high velocity movement training in the middle as I say is power training. The problem with power training is that it doesn't do anything unique from in comparison with what maximum strength training and high velocity movement training are actually doing. So if you say to me, okay, we're going to do some powertrain and say, I'm going to ask you exactly what adaptions you are actually stimulating. And what you're going to list out are a couple of adaptions, which are already covered off, either by maximum strength training or by high velocity movement training or both. You aren't actually going to be able to find something unique about what power training is actually doing. And the reason for that is because power itself power outputs are actually underpinned by force and velocity. If you want to calculate power, you simply multiply force and velocity together. So the reason to actually away of improving power without either increasing strength or speed separately or in fact at the same time. So you have to essentially increase either strength or speed in order to get an improvement in power. You can't improve power directly. So the whole concept of power training doesn't really make any sense. So if we now wrap that back up into what I was saying previous about single leg training, a lot of jumping programs, also strengthen conditioning programs designed to improve jumping. Which is something we've been thinking about a lot recently because of the group that we've started doing, Rob will talk more about that in a minute. But basically when you think about writing a strength conditioning program to improve vertical jumping, then you are obviously going to be going, okay, well, what happens if my athlete is spending a lot of time jumping. And the natural response is going to be, okay, well, let's put some single leg jumps in the program, like hang on a minute. What are you actually doing biomechanically and physiologically when you do that? Well, you're actually increasing the amount of force you have to generate. You're decreasing the amount of velocity that you are producing and you're moving a vertical jump down the force velocity spectrum. And you're making it a lot more like power training, you essentially going to miss out on any velocity related adaptions that you would achieve if you were to use to like jumping or even better assisted to like jumping like we've talked about in the past. Now, what that means is then you're essentially, if you're doing say some maximum strength training in your program and then you're adding your single leg vertical jumping on top of that, and you're saying, okay, well, I'm spending most of my time doing single leg jumping. So I'm going to do just some heavy strength training because that's what we're going to do. And we're going to add in some single leg jumping and that's everything on that note. No, actually, you've literally only got halfway because you haven't actually got any speed challenge. Any speed related adaptions are not going to happen in that program because basically your power training is really just kind of doing a little bit more maximum strength type work instead of anything related to the speed work. And that really just comes both the fact that maximum strength adaptions are a little bit more kind of flexible in a sense, you can get maximum strength adaptions with a slightly wider range of loads and velocities speed related adaptions is just not going to get at all unless you are hitting really, really high velocities for reasons that we talked about in the one of the earliest podcasts that we did on this kind of thing as an episode number one to or three I forget. So basically then single leg jumping really falls into the same category as power training and therefore it isn't really going to have a large kind of sort of presence in many string and decision programs that are designed to improve vertical jumping even if the sport itself actually predominantly uses single leg jumping. I know that that is going to break some people's kind of ways of thinking because they're going to be like no specificity means I have to do the exact same thing in the gym as I do in the sport and I'm like no you have to figure out what adaption you want that helps you in the sport and if that adaption is better achieved by a totally different exercise than we're going to do a totally different exercise. You've actually got to know what the adaption is a lot of people will keep on saying no no has to look like the sport and I'm like okay tell me the adaption you're creating the gym by this exercise that you're doing that transfers to that same situation in sport and they will look at you and they will just have no answer whatsoever because there isn't an answer there isn't anything you can get from single leg jumping practice you can't get from two leg jumping practice apart from a specific coordination related improvement. So if you're gym vertical and okay this is a really important thing that I'll just kind of clear up before I finish my little intro. If you are training in a sports specific context and you're doing a coordination related practice that's different so if you are practicing a very specific sequence of steps like you might practice in basketball for a say a layup shot. If you are practicing a very specific sequence of steps followed by a final single leg jump that's not the same that sports practice that's not gym practice gym practice of single leg jumping is where we're actually trying to maximize everything else not coordination because that's not our job sports specific coordination practice is separate so if you know that you're going to do a very very specific movement like some kind of say like in basketball or maybe in volleyball and it's an incredibly specific. So you can really specific activity where you take a certain number of steps and then you followed out this would happen in volleyball to be honest but I don't know this what we're all but imagine you're kind of thinking about a sport which you take a very specific number of steps and then you finish with a final single leg vertical jump yes you can absolutely practice that for coordination improvements and it is worth doing that on in that context of single leg because you are practicing coordination on the other hand if you're practicing it in order to create transferable improvements in a wide range of single leg. So in the same scenario then basically you're not talking about coordination you're talking about everything else and the everything else will not really happen if you're using a either power training type scenario or single leg jumping type scenario with the possible exception that you might get a small improvement in if you're using a very stable scenario chances are you probably not because most power training and single leg jumping scenarios are not very stable and you're not going to get the improvement in moat you know, certainly not if you're trained individual we got way better ways to increase moat you know, which are way easier way quicker and involve a lot less messing around so we probably prefer to do those instead of practicing you know the single leg jumping and power training so that was a little bit ranty but this topic has been aggravating me and I think probably Rob as well by the way that he's juggling away in the background as I've been talking about this. So I'll kind of stop there and start you know asking probably a bit about what he's doing but before before you tell us how you're programming for vertical jumping at the moment Rob and you know your thoughts on on single leg jumping and and purging and that kind of thing. Tell us again about the group that we've started. and what that involves, 'cause if the focus of this training group that you're running at the moment does involve vertical jumping. - Yeah, so we finally got around to making a train hero group for the high performance physiology method as we have coined it. Been going great so far. So the first phase is, like Chris had focused on vertical jumping, just normal two leg vertical jumping. And it's gonna be a standard four body, two times a week program with the typical layout that we always recommend. So maximum speed work at the start, followed by heavy strength training, and then plios and then super max work. Over time we'll rotate the focus and that of the group a little bit. But yeah, the first phase, currently has some over speed work at the start, jump practice after that. Standard heavy strength work, hip thrust and whatnot. I'm gonna get a balance of upper and lower body to follow and then some actual templates at the end. And if you join the group, you do get access to me and anybody who's on there currently will test that I am very responsive on there. So always around for questions. If you wanna send videos for feedback, that kind of stuff, substitutions for the program, things like that. So we'll have it if you guys joined and supported the podcast. And obviously it's fun for me to have more people to work with. So definitely, we'll do that. - And I would definitely test that you are probably one of the most responsive people on the internet in the sense that if I message you, you pretty much always respond even if the time zones would imply that you're probably in the middle of the night. So yeah, I think that's a really exciting project. And just to add to that, the, I think it's one of the best at general athletic training programs, as you see programs we've ever seen. I mean, it absolutely, it would be better than almost anything else than anybody is doing for most any other, in almost any athletic context with the exception of come, some obviously very specific ones where you need kind of very unique, kind of a sort of provision. I think it's probably better than what most people do most of the time on the internet, I would say. It's super, super solid training program that will support most people's athletic goals most of the time. So as I say, I mean, unless somebody is pursuing a very, very niche athletic activity and to a high level, they're probably going to find that this program is better than what they currently do. Definitely. Cool. So in terms of when you're programming more generally, not necessarily just in the context of this group that we've been talking about, but when you're programming more generally across all the athletes that you work with and you're thinking about vertical jumping, how much do you take into account the use of single leg versus two leg jumping in the sport that the athlete is doing? Or do you just leave that entirely to the sports coach to handle those specific scenarios that I was talking about? You know, I certainly leave it much more to the sports coach in terms of what I'm doing in the gym. Generally, I focus more than we said on, I've talked a little bit about this for the podcast. I focus more on the four set of things. So if someone has a lot of single leg jumping, I'm definitely worried more about improving their maximum strength in things like, you know, maybe even more so than regular jumping and things like hip thrusts, squatting motions. Generally, I know in our original episode of Vertical Jump, we had mentioned that the knee in terms of the proximal the distal sequence is a bit more balanced, but if I have someone who does a lot of single leg work, I'll lean even more towards the forestand. So definitely focus more than on improving, you know, maybe squat strength and things like that. Work for the ankle and that is still keep on the faster end of things, but programming wise, I mean, it's incredibly similar. Obviously, to the way I go about improving regular vertical jumps. And then, yeah, for the speed end of things, like you said, you're not getting any speed. If you just do a single leg jump in the gym, none at all, it's not gonna be very fast. It's wild that that is kind of something that people don't understand. I think it really does, it really does kind of bear emphasizing that as soon as we switch from two legs to one leg, we immediately move down the force velocity profile towards that more force dominant end. It's equivalent to like putting a weighted vest on and doing two leg jumping. I mean, that's basically what it is. It's really, really kind of substantial change. I mean, like you literally talking about taking away half the amount of propulsion that you had, but keeping the weight the same. I mean, it's wild. But it makes such a huge difference to the entire kind of biomechanical scenario. So yeah, I mean, like super important point. What about if the sport involves like several steps or bounds or kind of, you know, some kind of run up into the jump? Are you thinking about plyometrics in that scenario? - So that's when it gets a little bit more interesting, I would say from a program perspective. 'Cause then yeah, I'm worried more in that case about increasing like eccentric muscle strength. So in that case, yeah, programming, plyometrics, programming, maybe some super maxi centriarchs that we mentioned before for the quads, you know, like using a leg extension machine and things like that. 'Cause then yeah, I mean, you gotta decelerate. You might have to change direction into a jump, things like that. So all of a sudden those things come a little bit more important than when you just have like a regular two leg jump. - And. - Totally. - Yeah. - But I don't think it's important to just kind of very quickly run through what's going on with the plyometric side of things. - Right. - So noticing this question coming up a lot, you've mentioned to me before the podcast, you're seeing a lot of confusion about what's going on with a straight shortening cycle. So let me try and be as quickly as possible. Let me try and encapsulate what's going on here. So basically the purpose of the plyometric part of the kind of workout that we would put together. So as you said earlier, we would always put a workout together with high velocity stuff followed by heavy strength training, followed by plyometrics followed by super maxing release centrics. The purpose of the plyometric part is to improve the straight shortening cycle. That's it. What is the straight shortening cycle? The straight shortening cycle or the straight shortening cycle effect is the observation that if you do a concentric movement proceeded by an eccentric, immediately proceeded by an eccentric, you're going to get a better concentric performance than if you just did the concentric on its own. That's the observation of the straight shortening cycle. Now the straight shortening cycle mechanisms are kind of there's probably five of them, but the most important ones in the context of fast movements, which is what we're talking about here, are things that rely on the tendon moving around more than the muscle. So essentially, if you have a really solid straight shortening cycle effect in a fast movement, like a kind of drop jump, then what's going to be happening is that the tendon is going to be moving around a lot, and the muscle is going to be moving around relatively little. If you look at conversations around sprinting by mechanics, people will talk about how the muscle is essentially behaving quasi-isometrically. In other words, it's kind of just staying more or less the same length and the tendon is going bananas back and forwards. Okay. So in technical terms, or as you mentioned before we start the podcast in materials science terms, the tendon is behaving in a very compliant way. And this really again causes some people to kind of go, "No, no, no, I can't understand. What is it you would talk about because plyometrics make things stiffer and I'm like, no, what plyometrics do is they allow the muscle to pull the tendon around more, which makes the tendon behave in a more compliant way. Does that mean the tendon has got slightly stiffer?" Well, actually, if you measure it in isolated terms, plyometrics do, on a slightly increased tenderness stiffness. But that's not the point. They increase muscle strength, eccentrically too much, great to extent, and that allows the tendon to get pulled around. So it behaves in a more compliant way, even though it has in materials terms, if you isolated it and took it out and pulled it around, you'd find that it was actually a little bit stiffer. But the muscle got a lot stiffer, a lot more strongly centrally. It tends to use that terminology rather than active stiffness, but they're interchangeable. It is exactly the same thing. So fundamentally, two things in series, and the muscle and the tendon are in series with each other and one's pulling the other. And if the muscle is stronger, and one has a group to eccentric strength, it will behave more stifferly as in elongate, which is the next definition of stiffness, and the tendon will. So ultimately, what the plyometric activities are doing is making the muscle stronger, eccentrically, without making the tendon proportionally stiffer eccentrically. So essentially, you've got these two things kind of developing. Now, heavy strength training tends to do the opposite. It tends to push the tendon in the direction of being more stiff without necessarily increasing the eccentric strength for muscle to the same extent. Again, people are going to say, oh, so you're saying that heavy strength training doesn't make muscles stronger eccentrically? No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the ratio is different. So they tend to make tendons stiffer faster than muscles eccentrically stronger. The rates of growth are different on those two qualities. The plyometrics they're supposed to be around. So basically, what we've got then is to competing in the sense that they're pushing the stretch running so I can open up as a directions. If you've got a strength training block in your workout, and then you've got some plyometrics block in your workout, you're actually pushing the kind of ratios in different directions according to which section of the work are you're in. And that really, I think, is where it's super important to be actually tracking the quality of the stretch running cycle, which is, fortunately, super easy to do. we can just literally measure a drop jump height. and a counter movement to a squat jump, probably better, squat jump height, and then just test the jump height. And hopefully, if our stretch running cycle is improving, we should see that no matter what's happening with strength or speed or anything like that, there should be a slight increasing difference between our drop jump height and our squat jump height. Now if that's going the opposite direction, then what I told you is your heavy strength training is kind of obliterating the effects you're getting for the plyometrics, and you're gonna have to kind of start to dial that back a little bit. Now I think this is a really interesting delicate conversation because reality is a lot of the time when you're thinking about moving blocks of training in different directions, the instinct is going to say, well, okay, well if I start doing tons and tons of plyometrics, then you're laughing already. If I start doing tons of plyometrics, then maybe I could start kind of improving my stretch running cycle in the direction that I want to go. I'm like, well, well, not the greatest idea really. You've got some serious fatigue and injury risks associated with doing that. So ultimately what I think it comes back to is monitoring and probably dialing back the strength training block to assuming that you've kind of accomplished your goals with the maximum strength, dialing the strength training block in back in terms of sets and maybe leaving a few more reps in reserve. And then obviously, yes, you can increase the number of ground context you do on the plyometrics side, but I think the numbers that most people are talking about are insane compared to the numbers that we were probably programmed. Yeah, just don't think you need that many and people were really up in arms the other day. When I said I didn't tend to use super high volumes of pliers, which I didn't think would be so, so controversial, but man, I would be more interested in quality of the, of the plyometrics rather than the quantity. You know, I think a lot of people want to just kind of be pogoing around. And I'm like, well, I'd rather kind of progress box height a little bit and do drop jumps off a slightly higher box. I mean, again, there's no need to go crazy, but I think it probably makes more sense to try and focus on getting the quality of that eccentric phase force production to increase rather than, you know, kind of doing tons and tons and tons of low impact plyometrics, which don't actually trigger anything to happen. Because ultimately what we're looking for is an eccentric force related adaption for the muscle. Does anybody think that's going to happen from just kind of bouncing around the room for five minutes? - No. - Otherwise, you can step off a curb and you'd get it going out. - You're not walking the power of walking, I do, right? (laughing) You know, I mean, it would just be kind of crazy. But no, quality over quantity, I think. So yeah, I mean, in the context then, where you are looking at improving, 'cause I'm kind of pushing some niche scenarios here. I know that this is not coming. - Yeah, yeah. - But in the context where you are looking at, you know, training athletes where they're doing, where they're requiring, where the athlete is required to be able to do several steps or, you know, bounds followed by, or even they're running, whatever, followed by a vertical jump of one leg. You know, what kind of plyometrics are you doing in those scenarios? 'Cause I mean, to me, it would probably actually make sense to look at single leg plyometrics in that scenario because of basically the greater force application you can get with a relatively low box. - Yeah, I mean, I have used single leg, single leg pogoes and things like that. I do use different drop jumps and stuff like that, single leg occasionally. I mean, not a ton, honestly, but just, a lot of times people aren't that good at them. - Sure. - Maybe I'm not excused, but honestly, if they're still getting the improvements I want with, you know, the most basic stuff, I just don't worry about it a ton. You know, I tracked the difference, like you said, in regular jumping drop jumps, things like that. If I'm getting the improvements I want, I just stick with it. I'm really impressed. - That's a great thing, isn't it, about plyometrics? I mean, it's like, okay, so sure. It's not quite as easy to mind to progressive overload just heavy strength training, we literally just read them on number. You know, you are just basically reading two numbers. (laughs) And then looking at the difference. I mean, it's really, really straightforward. But I think just emphasizing for people who are kind of listening to this, you know, I think low volumes are still applicable, even in scenarios where we're trying to progress plyometrics. We just have to watch out that we're not obliterating the relative improvements in eccentric muscle strength to tennis stiffness by doing lots of sets of heavy strength training. If we're really concerned about the stretch training, it's like we can dial the heavy strength training back closer to maintenance levels, you know, kind of single set rather than two separate goals, you know, we can leave a rep and reserve. And then with the plyometrics, okay, fine, add another couple of reps. I mean, we're not talking about doing 20, 30 kind of, kind of plyometric ground impacts per session or I think silly like that. You know, we're still kind of much, much lower than that in terms of numbers. But in terms of progressing and trying to get that higher eccentric force production, you've got two options. You can increase the box height, although obviously, you know, that starts to get a little bit messy. If you kind of, if you're not feeling this start getting good at that, then okay, we don't want them jumping off, you know, kind of crazy high boxes. But equally, you can basically get this sort of double the effect that you would be getting off a given box height by simply switching to single leg landings. So essentially, you can get a long way with plyometric stimulus by simply using low boxes, but switching from two leg to one leg. I think that's a really interesting difference because that's where the force velocity profile is working in our favor rather than against us. In maximum speed situations, force velocity profile is working against us. In plyometric situations, switching from two legs to one, that actually works for us because the purpose is the ground contact force production. And that's going to be the thing that triggers the adaptions that we're looking for. So I think that's pretty cool. - I think a lot of people with plyos just tend to assume, like you need those high volumes because they're probably doing way too high volume of strength training. So they're probably getting more and more stiffness improvements and they were really neat. And we don't tend to do, was that or tend to do very high volumes of strength training work at all, you know, to a couple sets per session. So the amount of plyos I then need isn't as high. And I think people also assume you need a ton of different plyometric exercises or I think that comes back to the area that we've identified previously, which is that a lot of people view plyometrics as like a coordination type training effect. And so they're kind of going, oh well, I do this in the sport and therefore I need to have this plyometric and I do that in the sport. Sometimes that's valid. I mean, like, if it's a kind of, you know, totally different part of the body that we're talking about, then yeah. But fundamentally, a plyometric is acting on the tendon and the whole muscles, eccentric force producing capacity. So we don't really need that much variation because it's a muscle tendon interaction and generally speaking, you've only got like one major tendon. It's kind of operating. So it's not going to require us to move in different directions and kind of, all that kind of thing. You probably need maybe, we've talked about this before in general athletic training, but I think you can probably cover most of the body in four plyometrics, maybe five. Yeah. Depending on the 10 and a million ground transactions. And then people start drawing up tables where they're progressing things and they hang on a minute. You know, okay, progression five, you want to talk about, you know, the box heights and, you know, kind of single leg, two leg to single leg. Okay, that's cool. But much more than that, and I think it's people trying to find complexity rather than actual, the challenge that creates a stimulus. It's like, they're making the plyometric harder and it's just harder because it's harder, like technically, it's not harder in the sense that it's creating any greatest stimulus for the adaptions that we want. And again, that all the way back to the beginning is because people simply don't understand what plyometrics are actually trying to do and what the underlying adaptions are that enable the strict, short and cycle to improve. Yeah. Cool. Okay, so we've talked before about how, generally speaking, you're not including any power training in your kind of vertical jump, or even generally athletic related training programs. Generally speaking, you're kind of bookending the force velocity profile, you're kind of doing high velocity stuff with even assistance in some scenarios. And I really like the assistance kind of stuff that you taught by before. So maybe you could just kind of go over that again quickly for people where you've got like velocity resistance assisting people. Yeah, yeah, I love the assisted jumps. And currently, like I said, those are the first thing in the group program, high speed that you'll get. So those you're just gonna take a fairly strong resistance band, loop it around the top of a power rack, a general bar, whatever you can. And then just grab, make sure you grab the same part of the band every time so it's consistent. And then just do vertical jump. The band will shoot you up at a higher velocity and get a better height than you would with regular jump. And we just do in the group program, just a few of those single efforts, just as fast and high as you can at the start of the program. But those have been really, really nice for myself, for my jump heights, for everyone I've worked with that I've implemented them with. So seeing a lot of benefit there. And I know you and I, I think mentioned at least on the first vertical jump episode, how those tend to also help you find a better depth naturally in your counter movement jump after training with them for quite a while. So if you wanna expand on that a little bit on how that works. Sure, I mean, really, it's not something that I would encourage people to do as a transferable adaption, I think when we talk about last time I emphasized this, it's kind of if you want to improve your counter-moving vertical jump in order to impress other people, or pass tests or whatever it is that you have to do. But basically in the literature we've got some nice data showing that. Generally speaking most people do not optimize their counter-moving depth for their vertical jump kind of height. So if you sort of ask somebody to do a vertical jump counter-moving style and they stand there and then they duck down and then they jump up again, if you measure exactly where their kind of lowest point is in their counter-moving phase and you kind of maybe put a elastic band there where they've reached. So the next time they do it they can have a tactile cue so that they reach that point then they jump upwards. You can kind of notice that if you then take that down maybe sort of three or four centimeters there will usually achieve a higher vertical jump in that scenario where they've made themselves kind of duck down to a slightly deeper depth. And it's simply because most of us just tend to underestimate how far we need to go down in order to create the optimum impulse in the counter-moving phase. Because your counter-moving phase impulse is what determines how high you can jump relative to your body weight. So realistically if you are undershooting that and you're kind of stopping before you get to your optimal starting point for creating the maximum impulse over your constant phase then you won't actually optimize vertical jump heights and your takeoff velocity to won't be as high as they could be. So is that something you really want to do in sport? Not really because generally speaking kind of want reactivity, you want to be able to move exactly from the point where you're starting from you don't be thinking about that. But in the context of actually maximizing vertical jump height in order to hit a number and kind of impress the internet if that is even possible anymore then ultimately you probably want to be just checking whether you can take an extra three or four centimeters of depth and generally speaking that will help your vertical jump heights. So yeah that's in terms of power training though if I just very quickly recap. Well I think this is interesting because of something else that you do that I think is cool which is the the motine accruement stuff with isometrics. So yeah power training is interesting because basically if you look at your maximum strength adaptions and your maximum speed adaptions and then you go okay what is power training doing for me? It doesn't really do a lot other than practice the test which could be like if somebody's going oh well I want to get my vertical jump no sorry not my vertical jump. I want to get my jump squat to whatever numbers whatever people are measuring on a force plate or something. Okay fine you can train for that test and it'll be coordination related in large part but you know the only real adaption that is like to be transferable from that power training activity to your sporting context is going to be motine accruement improvements. Now the problem with that is like everyone goes okay fantastic so I can keep the power training in my program and I'm like hang on a minute. Okay the problem with that is that the power training activity you're doing in order to improve your current is probably a quite coordination demanding and so like power cleans vertical jump so keep saying vertical jump power cleans jump squats with barbells that kind of thing or anything with a you know kind of dumbbell I mean you were talking to me about some very strange exercises before we start the podcast today where people are actually doing kind of single kind of dumbbell or you know kind of I mean it honestly my brain starts to kind of overheat just thinking about it. We're going to do it in a minute. The coordination demands sounded crazy. So in the coordination demanding exercise you're going to find that people are very unstable. The brain is overheating trying to do the movement they are not going to be able to devote maximum perception of effort to the motine accruement signal so they're never going to have any chance of improving motine accruement as an adaption. Similarly if there's a lot of body mass involved in the movement all at the same time that again is going to decrease the amount of motine accruement you can send to any one given place. So the reality is the single adaption that you can theoretically achieve with power training is actually really difficult to achieve most of the time most situations especially if you're talking about a trained athlete that already has high level of accruement. So this is one of the reasons why we tend to think about using isometrics in machine contexts with you know kind of minimal muscle mass like knee extension kind of scenarios as way better options and that's something that you tend to put in between the speed and the heavy strength training book is that right? Yeah yeah if those are in there and they actually are for the for the quads in the vertical jump program. So yeah the speed work first and then just some brief single-leg knee extension isometrics before getting into the heavy strength work. Yeah like you said the more focused and isolated you can be on just that specific muscle the higher the accruement you're going to get. So why am I going to use something where it's flying all over the place when I can just hop in a leg extension do a max effort for a few seconds and get way more benefit with you know literally no effort you just hop in there it takes two seconds yeah just so much easier so much faster so yeah it's it's really really kind of win win across the board isn't it I mean like there's so little investment in I like there's very little investment in the speedwork that we put into the end at the end of a warm I mean there's very sort of little warm required to do the actual exercise itself a preparation probably actually that's a really good point we've talked a lot about warm-ups and how actual warm-ups that people think of in terms of I'm warming up for my squat so they go through a sequence of kind of weights and that's not warming up at all it's preparations isn't it I mean it's like I mean I'm not kind of dismissing the requirement to go through a series of weights before you get to your work weight on the next size like a squat I mean I absolutely lived that for kind of two years I know what it involves and I was meticulous about working my way probably over meticulous I mean when I listen to the way you do your kind of preparation sets before you do your work say it's a lot less than what I used to do but I probably was just kind of more worried about getting squashed but the point is that they're not warm-ups sets that I mean I think we should just discard that terminology like I used to talk about suggesting people move the terminology from more upset to talk them up rap because I was trying to get them to think about just doing single reps rather than kind of doing sets of 10 or whatever because there's no warming up effect happening in the physiological sense but warm-up happens in an actual kind of temperature-related way the hot showers you do your hot showers and other people kind of maybe sort of you know walks the gym and attracts you to whatever I mean there's there's a different kind of ways of handling the problem but the actual what we call conventionally warm-up sets or as I've been calling them more reps you know isn't doing any warming up they are preparatory sets I think that's all the preparatory reps aren't they I mean that's kind of the actual thing you don't need any of those for a high-volistic kind of vertical jump maybe you just do one or two slightly less than maximal effort and then you straight into your maximal effort once similarly with an isometric you do kind of a preparatory some maximal effort to make sure that you know your arms aren't legs aren't going to drop off when you do the actual maximum effort and then you well I think about that because I'm an old man but you know I want to make sure that my body is still functioning when I actually get to the gym and no after that you know we do the maximum maximum effort and that gives us the stimulus that we're looking for so minimal messing around minimal preparation minimal equipment it's just straight in do the thing and then move on and I think a lot of people look at that and go well how could you possibly getting all that benefit or even better benefit than what I'm getting from this you know elaborate process of getting ready to do my power cleans and jumpsquats and all the rest of them I will yeah exactly I mean but that's just how physiologically things are working I mean and it makes it like you know people wonder how you can do train every quality in a session and not have a take a million hours and stuff like that and it's because you don't need I mean yeah like you said maybe some people need more or less prep but you don't need all this different warm-ups and all these you know fancy things you keep it as simple as possible and then like I mean like you said in my case and you just mentioned it if I'm doing max effort jumps I do like one jump that's kind of a minimum effort from doing the ISOs I do the same thing if I'm squatting I do one plate two plate three plate four plate yeah I mean okay that that's probably where I draw the line I probably need a few more kind of interior steps but I think that's a lot of you just don't need crazy amounts and certainly not all these complex things like you said like for a clean if I was going to do cleans I've been to cleans and yours you know I probably wouldn't need quite a few sets and that to be like ready for a good solid effort on a clean you know those are those are more technical they just they require more but for the for the basic stuff that's gonna get the job done even better you just walk in you do it then you'll even all of a sudden your session takes 50 minutes instead of two hours and you got more done totally I mean again I think a lot of people are spending way too much time in the gym doing completely unnecessary stuff that doesn't really achieve their goals I mean people often ask me questions on you know when I'm doing my Instagram questions they've asked me about or how long do you spend in the gym what exercises do you do what kind of intro workout nutrition to you and I'm like I'm not gonna answer these because the reality is I'm probably in and out of the gym I joke to the other day that I'm actually I went to the gym the other day and I noticed somebody was chatting with the the guy on front desk go I know and I went in and I just waved and walked through and the same person was still chatting to the same guy I'm like, "I'm out, yeah." They literally not got as far as they're due. They got to the front, they started jetty with a friend, and then they kind of got stuck there, and by the time I'd kind of finished, there was still jetty. I'm like, that's, I'm just like, I get into the thing and I come straight out again, I'm gone. I think there's a lot of messing around, it's done. And I think that's why we're starting to see a lot of people managing to fit some really quite high quality work into very short periods of time, like, now we've been talking about. Anyway, we're running up against time, so tell us very quickly about some of the really crazy things that you've been seeing recently that make absolutely no sense. - Yeah, and a few of these were for athletes that would be using a decent amount of like, one leg jumping and that, so they're pretty relevant. One of the ones I saw lately was a single leg dumbbell clean. So that, just shake in your head. - Just like, why would you do that? I can't imagine. - Yeah, I don't, I gotta be honest. I didn't really read the entire caption to see what adaptations may have been targeted. I would venture to guess none, you know, just something imaginary, but I can't imagine, you know, there's nothing that's doing for you in the context of like improving your performance in any sport, a single leg clean. You're not doing anything, it's so coordination driven that you're getting good at a single leg clean. - Yeah. - Yeah, no force production, no speed. You know, it's another power exercise where you're just kind of hanging out there in the mid-range, but even worse, because it's so unstable. So some single leg squats to a box with a sandbag. - I'll let you carry on because I'm gonna have the same comment for both of you, so carry on. - Yeah, single leg squats to a box with a sandbag. And, you know, we don't really talk about injuries and stuff on here, so like, I will mention that the kids leg flopped all over the place and things like that. So as a coach, I'm not where he's gonna get injured. I don't really care about that. I'm just worried that a guy doing that is not doing anything, nothing relevant at all. If I wanted someone to do a single leg exercise that's good and you're gonna, you know, produce high forces in that, I would put them in a single leg leg press, something like that. And then you're nice and stable, you're getting a lot done, getting high recruitment, getting what you want out of it. If you do a single leg squat to a box where your other leg is just floating in space, again, that's it's targeting nothing. - Yeah, if you wanna get injured. - I'm such a single leg press fan. I think this is a fantastic exercise for so many populations, it's so good. The comment that I was kind of thinking about as you were describing those two strange exercises, I think what this comes back to is that people go, if something feels more difficult for any reason, then it must be challenging in a bird's commas, me to a greater extent, therefore it must be causing me to adapt to a greater extent. And that is just so far away from any physiological or scientific understanding of how the human body works, it's not funny. And I think it just comes back to this, this human tendency to go, it's harder there for us better. And let me know, it's harder because it's more difficult to coordinate. Are you trying to improve coordination as your primary goal in that particular exercise? Yes or no? Now there are scenarios, and I can think of a whole bunch of scenarios that are more specific to areas that I'm interested in right now, that are related to practicing more difficult drills of different variations of the same drill, probably as a better way of putting it. You practice progressively more difficult versions of the same drill, until you get to a point where you can do the hardest version, which is pretty close to what the sport looks like. So you start off with a really kind of basic level and you progress gradually through more and more difficult versions of this kind of activity, drill kind of movement pattern, and eventually get to a point where I say, okay, now I can do the actual thing that the people are doing in sport, fantastic. And if you don't do that, then you won't get that. I mean, it's just kind of like a sports training process. That's the only scenario in which you would actually kind of be pushing coordination to be more difficult and get, and that's why I keep combing out this idea that all of these strange practices, I think come back to the idea that, yes, this is kind of loaded coordination training, and I keep seeing this idea. And it's kind of a bit of a, sort of maybe my generation, maybe the generation before, so kind of boom a Gen X, kind of crossover territory. I think it probably goes back as far as that where people just kept thinking, oh look, what we're doing really is just practicing movement under load and like, no, you're not. That's absolutely what it's not. It's everything but that. It's all the other stuff. The coordination stuff is what's happening in the sports practice, everything else is what's happening in the gym. And we really need to be better, I think, about dividing those two things out, because I think that's when people go, oh well, it's challenging me, it's harder therefore it must be moving me forwards better, no, there's a very tiny number of scenarios where that's true, and they're all sports specific practice, they're not as in C practice. There was something else that you said you'd seen recently, there was a little bit strange, I kind of run through that. - We got in the single leg jumping, and it was actually from, you know, a few pretty style jumpers, but it was saying that single leg jumping has shorter ground cut times and that two leg jumping has more force demands than single leg jumping. So was the complete opposite of what it was? - That's one of those kind of scenarios where you kind of, you applaud the attempt, don't you, Emily? Like at least someone's thinking about kind of the demands of force and velocity, it's just they accent the getting where we run. I have got patients for people who are prepared to go to that level of detail, you know, you just hope that they kind of catch it at some point and realize that they're the opposite of the run. Because obviously at any time that you are kind of requiring to produce more force, you are going to move more slowly. That's the force for lots of lasers here. So you've got to stay on the ground longer, that's just how it is. And then people go, oh yes, but you know, when I'm sprinting, then I have very, very short ground contact times. I'm like, yes, that's kinetic energy for you. (laughing) That's what happens when you kind of build up a lot of speed over a kind of, you know, 20 or 20 or 20 meter distance, you are going to find that you're going to get energy to help you do that. But you know, in sort of single leg jumping scenarios, we are going to be spending more time on the ground than in double leg jumping scenarios, all things being equal. - Yeah, yeah, I think that's very, very good to point out. 'Cause I actually saw that quite a few times. And so they were using, yeah, very short ground contact time, Pios and, you know, kind of like what we said before was while like single leg looking exercises for the single leg jump rather than, you know. - And again, that comes back to the idea that specificity is something that you can just look at and go, well, this looks like this, that's from going to do something that looks like it. And that's the, like again, probably boom a Gen X territory where people were kind of trying to make specific as to work without really understanding how it worked. As people who maybe have known about me for, you know, more than five or six years, I wrote my first book on what specificity actually is and how it works. - Right, this is. - And specificity is adaptions. - It's literally just, these things cause these adaptions, do those adaptions help you in the sporting context or not if those adaptions do help you then it's specific if those adaptions don't help you and it's not specific. And I think as people have started to understand that it's all adaption driven 'cause it has to be, then you start to see people understand why things like hip thrust are, you know, amazing exercises, why heavy torso rotations are gonna be better than a lot of other stuff that people can kind of do in the gym. You know, and historically people will look straight through those exercises and gone, they're not doing anything 'cause they don't look like what I'm doing in sport. You even see people making fun of them going, or when am I going to lie on the ground and kind of do a, you know, bridging situation in sport? Actually, there's a very interesting story there about the origin of the hip thrust exercise as embedded by Brett Contreras, where he tells that story, he will actually explain how he got the idea and it's very cool 'cause it does relate to a scenario where somebody was actually doing a bridge kind of activity. But anyway, you know, they look at and go, "I'm never gonna be lying on the ground in my sport. "I'm a sprinter, therefore, it's a useless exercise to me." And that's again, kind of trying to go, "Well, specificity about how it looks like." I'm like, "No, it's not. "Besifistic is how the adaption you get from it "translates to what you need to do in the sport "to make you a faster runner or a higher jumper "or whatever else it may be that you're trying to do." So yeah, specificity really, really important to have a good model of how it works rather than just going, "Oh, well, it looks like what I'm doing, "therefore, it must be good for me." I think really that's where the problem is with single leg jumping, kind of overall, which is kind of what this podcast has been hopefully about, which is that people get, "Oh, I'm doing single leg jumping "in sport, therefore I need to do single leg jumping "in the gym." And I'm like, "No, you need to work "through how the adaptions work and then you understand "that you actually want to do same "as what you would do for vertical jumping "with a little too leg vertical jumping, "with a little bit more focus on the strength "and the spectrum in order to push the force dominance "a little bit higher, which is what will help you "in those single leg jumping scenarios." Cool, fantastic. So let me repeat again as we finish. If you've got this far, thank you very much. It's been one of our longest episodes ever. Please do have a look at the training group that Rob is administering all about vertical jumping at the moment. I think it's genuinely one of the best athletic training as I see programs for athletes that I've seen cover a wide range of sports, but especially people who want to improve their vertical at the present time. We will try and be back next week with another topic. We'll see you then.