31 Dose response of adaptations

Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology Podcast. I'm Chris Beardsley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Maaseri. I'm going to talk about the dose response of adaptions today. So obviously the dose response idea is very, very common when we talk about hypertrophy. There's been books and articles and just tons of content produced on exactly how workout volume affects the amount of muscle ritha happens. Most people I think now are aware that the dose response is pretty non-linear. In the sense that each extra set doesn't give you the exact same stimulus as the previous one. So essentially your first set is always going to give you the best stimulus and sequential sets. I'm going to give you progressively less and less and less. But what we tend not to talk about is the fact that those responses also exist within training sessions for pretty much every single adaption that you want to talk about. And the exact profiles actually vary quite a lot depending on the type of fatigue that is causing problems and the types of fatigue that you're likely to experience in the training session. So in order to make this manageable, because obviously we're going to talk potentially about just dozens and dozens of different adaptions, to make it manageable. Well, I think we're going to do is walk through a typical athletic workout or at least the framework for an athletic strength training workout and go through each individual line. So generally speaking in the high performance physiology model, we have a workout plan comprising four separate sections. There is a after the warm up. There is then a high velocity kind of movement practice session. Secondly, there is then a heavy strength training section. Then there is a plyometrics section, which may or may not be there for certain kind of situations or times of the year. And then finally, there's a super max on the centric section. So basically what we can do is we can talk about those responses for the adaptions within each of those four categories. So we can talk about those responses of the kind of adaptions that underpin speed, which is the purpose of the first section. We can talk about the dose response with options that underpin maximum strength, which obviously includes hypertrophy. And we can talk about the dose response with options for plyometrics when the straight shortening cycle. And that's an interesting one because actually basically kind of talking about a second order effect is very, very difficult to kind of pin down. And then finally, we can talk about the dose response of eccentric contraction, which we which has some challenges, but actually is relatively straightforward because we kind of have a fairly good model of how fatigue works during eccentric contractions. So we kind of know why limitations are likely to be. Okay, so rather than me talk about every single adaption under the sun in each of those four categories, what we've decided to do is talk through each separate section, separate leach, kind of separate section. I'll give the physiology background. And then Rob and I will talk about how practically that is going to be trained for after each kind of physiological introduction. So rather than giving you all the physiology up front and then kind of you having to remember what I said 20 minutes ago when we come to talk about it in practical terms, I'm going to talk about each individual item separately. So let's talk about high velocities. So to start with, obviously, if you haven't listened to our previous podcast on speed and the underlying adaptions that contribute to improvements in speed, you know, please go and do that. There is an entire episode talking well about that, but very briefly, when we talk about increases in speed, we have a number of new other options and then we have one main peripheral adaption. And then issues will be aware of some stuff that might cause you issues, but that's not really the focus for today's conversation. So in terms of the adaptions that contribute to improvements in speed, if you're talking about a specific movement, you've got coordination and to a lesser extent, reductions in antagonist characterization, both of those are highly velocity specific. Now that's really more of a sports coach issue. So the sports coach is going to be kind of, for example, training a throwing motion or whatever it might be from maximum speed. That's kind of where the coordination and reductions in antagonist characterization are more likely to be important. We're not quite so interested in those from an essence point of view. We've also got increases in motune firing rates and increases in motune at recruitment. Now recruitment, obviously you can get from kind of heavy strength training or isometrics or anything like that, but the recoding, the increases in firing rate really have to come from high velocity movements in relatively kind of relatively stable, not, you know, kind of super stable, but you know, we draw the line between a sporting motion where people go, oh well, if I play my sport, I'm going to improve all the adaptions that are late to speed because I'm moving quickly, I'm like, well, not really because you haven't got really got that kind of controlled environment where you're able to devote maximum effort to the movement because you're too busy thinking about, you know, kind of the actual play that you're trying to make. So we've got to try and increase motune firing rates and that's got to be done kind of in a relatively stable environment or at least a gym controlled environment with a maximum effort and as fast as possible or, you know, kind of whatever assistance we might use when we talk about that in a minute. And then of course, muscle fiber shortening velocity is the peripheral adaption and again, really to trigger that we kind of have to move as quickly as possible. We've got some really nice data showing that heavy strength training doesn't improve muscle fiber shortening velocities while fast movement training does. So really kind of what we're saying is looking for a controlled gym style in kind of exercise, it's going to give us the ability to move really, really quickly with maximum efforts. Now what does the dose response look like? Well, basically the dose response is going to be very, very limited by any fatigue because pretty much every single fatigue mechanism, although metabolites are particularly good at this, but everything with deep mechanism is going to start reducing the maximum velocity that you can move at. So if you start doing, you know, kind of four or five reps all in one set trying to move as quickly as possible, you're very, very quickly going to notice your bar speed starts to kind of drop off where you're jumping out, starts to drop off or whatever it is, you're throwing velocity, whatever it is, you're testing. So basically any kind of fatigue that you experience at all is very quickly going to kind of take the edge off your maximum speed. And ultimately that is going to be the primary driver around the dose response because if you can't hit the maximum speed, you're wasting your time. So ultimately what we tend to find with dose responses in these kind of speed related issues is that you very, very quickly hit a point where you might as well not bother. So in the sense that we talk about dose response as being non-linear in the hypertrophy context, we kind of have a relatively smooth kind of curve. What we're dealing with here is a very much kind of you've got the adoption and suddenly it just drops off. You're just not getting it anymore. So basically what there's very, very limited capacity to create adaptions when we're talking about the speed section of the worker, which is obviously, you know, why we tend to program the low end of the volume things. But rather than kind of steal all the robots thunder completely in that regard, Rob, talk us through a little bit about the way that you're kind of constructing a kind of this the high velocity or the speed section all the work out. Give us some kind of basic details around how you manage that. Yes. So at the beginning of the workout, after you know, temperature-based warm-up, something like that, I'm always doing, you know, max effort jumps like a vertical jump or bra jump, whatever it might be. Maybe some assisted jump, you know, sprints or throws. And I think a lot of people when I, you know, give them a program the first time are surprised how little I actually do. And it's pretty much always going to be single repetitions. You know, like you said, if you do multiple reps back to back, you're going to pretty quickly notice they're not good after the first one, maybe two. So no really use there. So it's always single reps. And it's usually like for a jump, for example, you know, like five or so single jumps up to a max height for the day. And then if you happen to notice heights and not such a drop off before that, you just call it. If they're building, building, building up to that fourth and fifth jump, great. You're probably not going to be getting too much after that. I don't usually see people hitting a max height on jump number, you know, six, seven, eight. It's usually like three, four, and five. It's typically where they hit it. And so I just haven't do that. And then cap it, you know, once they've hit that fifth single or, you know, I guess I wanted to start to drop off. Same thing with throws. If you're measuring velocities, soon as, you know, your velocity starts to go down, if you're doing, you know, a rotational throw into the wall or med ball, you know, chest pass, anything like that. Same thing, just some single reps, single efforts. And then as soon as that speed starts to go down, just cut it because of that point. Like you said, the adaptations are velocity specific. You start going slower. You're not getting anything out of it for the day. So, you know, cut it there. And then same thing with sprints, very minimal sprints. I don't do as many sprints because like you said, it's kind of more the sports coach. I might have people do some short accelerations, sprints or something like that. And pretty often, you know, the guys I'm working with are in a gym, not in some giant space. You know, you might have a track that's a decent length, but nothing crazy. Sometimes not even long enough to get up to a maximum velocity, really. So not so worried about those as much as mainly the throws and jumps and things like that. And just super, super low volumes. Yeah. I mean, I think, um, thinking about jumps and throws. I mean, not so sure about sprints, but in terms of jumps and throws, I think five is a really, really good number. I mean, my experience has been, again, that most people tend to reach their max somewhere between three and five. I've also noticed that it tends to be relatively reliable within individuals. So if somebody is, I mean, again, this again varies a little bit. If you If you're talking about somebody who's not got a lot of jumping or throwing experience, then you're basically doing a coordination issue and you'll find that basically just improving definitely. It's like you've got to draw the line somewhere because you're getting a coordination improvement because they're just learning as they're throwing or jumping or whatever and that's that's completely different. You can do it all day. But if we talk about someone who's got some experience, I do tend to find that it kind of is predictable that if somebody is hitting their max jump high on jump five, then they're probably always going to hit it on jump five or at least jump four or five. But if somebody's hitting it on kind of jump three, then again, they're probably always going to kind of hit it on jump you know three or maybe two or four or whatever. It doesn't tend to be that kind of varied. It tends to be kind of quite sort of predictable in our respect, but I do think the five is a really solid number. I think you know if people were to just think more about doing single repetitions up to five total for their speed work, they'd realize that that is why we tend to always do speed work in a session because why not? I mean, you're not really losing anything. It's like so little to actually do that it makes it makes so much sense. So cool. Awesome. Let's move on because we've got a lot to get through today. Heavy strength training then is the second thing that we program in the high performance physiology framework. Now basically, you know, this is something that most people who we've read familiar with, but the dose response conversations do tend to focus very, very heavily on the high birds. We can talk about that, but also want to note that with the heavy strength training, you're also getting coordination related stuff and and technical characterization related stuff, which again is going to be sports coach related, but if you're kind of starting to talk powerlifting here, then that becomes the sport. So you kind of have to then think about that. And we've done a whole kind of a set of episodes on powerlifting. So that is interesting to you as a listener, then please do go and check those out. We've talked a lot more about this in that context, but essentially, all those and taking this characterization, you've got those again, they offer the losty specific, they are going to be beneficial for improving max strength in those specific lifts to your practicing. You've also think of recruitment again, pretty transferable adaption, no need to think about it too much, but I will kind of talk about it very briefly here. Recruitment basically is going to be one of those things that increases as long as you are hitting max recruitment levels. As soon as you lose some of that because of super spinal, it's in a fatigue, you are not going to be able to create an adaption anymore. So again, it kind of behaves a lot like the adaptions that we talked about in the context of speed. So you get a benefit and then suddenly you're not getting any benefits to. Also, we've talked before about using isometrics for the purpose of increasing recruitment. So you might not have to be chasing recruitment in the context of heavy strength training section anyway. In terms of the peripheral stuff, obviously, hypertrophy takes most of the attention away from everything else. We also have tendons, stiffness improvements and lateral force transition changes. Now, fortunately, we don't know a lot about lateral force transition changes and how it scales. I think it probably scales relatively similarly with hypertrophy, so we can kind of wrap it up with that. Tendon stiffness is a little bit trickier, but generally speaking once most athletes have got to a point where their strengths just improve. And gradually, you're probably not going to see much of a change in tendons stiffness, which is why I tend to think that plyometrics tend to have quite a meaningful impact with relatively low volumes, which we'll talk about again very shortly. So how can we pause this? Or essentially, we're probably going to say that the dose of the response of heavy strength training in terms of gaining maximum strength is in advanced athletes, or at least kind of experienced athletes with strength training experience, meaningful strength training experience, not just playing around in the gym. At least with meaningful strength training experience, are probably going to be thinking in those response terms largely on the hypertrophy side of things. What does that mean? It basically means that your first set is going to give you least half of what you're going to get from the rest of the worker, at least in terms of sort of adding extra sets. So adding the extra second set, maybe it's going to kind of give you, you know, I don't know, I mean, it really depends on what kind of day to you look at, but maybe sort of around 40% of the first set, maybe get another 20% off your third set, something like that. Don't hold me to those numbers. There's just kind of ballpark kind of numbers. So reality is, we're probably not going to get a lot more from doing additional sets, but you know, that second set does kind of have some attraction to it if we're talking about doing two sessions a week, which is generally what we tend to kind of talk about programming. So I think anywhere between one or three is cool, but you know, honestly, the dose response is kind of decreasing with additional sets. Now, you can kind of again say, well, okay, let's think about the routine at crimson side. Well, then you can start thinking, well, do I leave reps in reserve? Do I, you know, kind of give myself plenty of rest between sets? If I want to kind of target those recruitment adaptions in both sets, then I really need to leave decent amounts of rest. It really kind of depends, I think, on the authentic situation, what you're trying to target and how you're kind of constructing it. But that's kind of the way I would look at it. So in terms of how you're constructing the strengthening section of your, of your kind of work, and it's wrong. Can you give us kind of just start with the kind of your basic kind of guidelines and then kind of just go from there? Yeah, when the two times a week full body structure that I'm pretty much always using, it's, it's basically like you said, it's going to be like one to three sets. Three is pretty much always going to be the cap. I'm the only time I would do, you know, like more, I guess than that would be if you're doing more, you're still doing more sets, but if you do like a cost or set where you do something like five doubles or something like that, and that, you know, I still consider that one set, it just maybe get a few more reps. But for like the hypertrophy end of things, that first set is going to give you the majority of what you need. And if you have an athlete, especially like in season playing a lot, competing a lot, a little bit of a gold here. You know, if you do more than just a few sets, a few hard sets, especially close to failure, all you're going to be doing is impacting the recovery for the sports training anyway. So if you want to go with the minimum dose, if you can get growth out of one set twice a week and you can grade, if someone's very busy with sports stuff, do that. If maybe they're off season, they don't have a lot of games and practices going on, things like that. They want to or need to put out a little more muscle than add to maybe three sets, just to really maximize what you're going to get out of that. You know, like you said, it's not like you're getting the same out of the second and third set. You are getting more. So if you have someone who needs to, you know, gain weight and do a weight class and they want to gain muscular body weight, you know, assuming they're eating right, adding a couple extra sets for a few weeks, a few months, a probably benefit them a little bit. Otherwise, and pretty much, you know, always doing one or two sets, keeping a couple reps and reserve. Most strength training stuff, you know, I'm also assuming, you know, I generally want a little bit of recruitment out of that. So I don't go to failure. It's usually one to two reps and reserve and then putting a rest in between so two sets still gives you plenty of time for that. You know, a few singles and speed stuff really on. You do two sets of whatever exercises you need. You probably don't need a million exercises for an athlete. They're not a bodybuilder. So, yeah, it's the way I generally go about it. Yeah, cool. And obviously, as I said, you know, for programming some Motune recruitment targeting, if we thought the increase in recruitment was really important, we would probably add isometrics off on the front of that heavy stroke transition. And again, we talked about the before kind of targeting, you know, kind of much more controlled circumstances. So, isometrics in the context of a machine exercise probably going to be single joint, probably even going to be single limb, really trying to kind of reduce the amount of muscle mass that's working. And, you know, just I think we've talked about this before, but I get questions about this all the time. I would tend to just program, you know, one or two sub-maximal repetitions just to make sure that nothing is going to kind of explode when I actually do the kind of the maximum effort. Yeah, when it is in the. Could it not kind of go straight in, you know, kind of max level from from from from the beginning, but you know, kind of make sure that the the set up I've got is stable. I'm not slipping around. You know, I've got, you know, the ability to exert high force. So, I kind of just do one easy test kind of sub-maximal, which is really just making sure I'm very stable. Another one, which is kind of, I don't know, 78% like I'm actually just kind of doing a second or two to make sure, okay, I've got the ability to exert high force here. And again, I'm not moving around and I don't feel uncomfortable. I don't feel anything's going to kind of snap. And then I do probably a three to four second max effort. Now, if you look at literature, they tend to push max effort my isometrics up to five seconds. Genuinely, I think that five seconds feels like an eternity to me when I'm doing that kind of thing. It is a long time when you're actually in it. It's like, honestly, I think three seconds is great. I really don't feel the need to. And if you look at force, I increase profiles, they're not needing all of that five seconds to get to the max. I think you can easily get to max levels with three seconds. I mean, I didn't know how you feel about it. A lot of times when I've write it, I write it as three to five seconds, only because people tend to count very fast. So, you know, it's one, two, three, four, five, things like that a lot of time. So to kind of build in a little bit of a buffer, and make sure they actually do a real three seconds, I generally do the three to five in my notes, which I, you know, when I watch the video back, it usually ones are being pretty out point. If you do a very like like a purposeful four, five seconds, it feels like in there for a year. It's terrible. It does. I think I think I'd lot to be just treat the isometric is going to always just die symmetric. No, no, no, no. I honestly, I'd rather do dynamics. I really would. Yes. Really hard isometrics feel horrible. I don't feel good. They're really, really do. So and in terms of numbers, I mean, I genuinely would never do more than a single. Just for me, I mean, I find that the experience is quite unpleasant. And I and I think it comes back to something I've talked about before, which is that if you genuinely feel like something is quite unpleasant and the thought of doing multiple iterations of it, I think takes the edge off your first attempt. It's like, I'm talking about my favorite example of this is just like for me, if I'm doing seated leg girl and I don't know why it's this exercise always keep going back to when I give this example, but it is just such a good example for me. If I've been doing multiple sets on the and the seated leg girl and then I go back in and I just do single sets, I immediately win an extra rep or even sometimes too. And I don't know why that is, but it just for me, knowing that I've got multiple sets of the exercise to do, I tend to just hold back on my first set. Just I don't know why it's happening. It just seems to happen. And I think the same thing would definitely be the case with those metrics. I've thought of having to do a second-die symmetric max effort for me would just be just so unpleasant. I just wouldn't do it. So I think, again, I'm always kind of thinking about singles. Are you programming more than singles for this? Usually only one or two. Yeah. Yeah. It's never, I mean, you know, you know, I'd get anything out of more than that. So I get these questions on my Instagram where people kind of say, oh, how exactly are you programming these these are semantics? I'm like, just do one. I mean, it's not just one. I mean, just do. Yeah. You're going to see it. The purpose is to increase your equipment. So if you hit the max level, you've kind of made the improvement and it's not going to go away. So, you know, kind of like you do one improvement this time and the other improvement on, you know, kind of later in the week and, you know, a couple of weeks down the line and you're probably starting to, you know, kind of get some serious progress there that, you know, you wouldn't have had if you hadn't done that. I don't think you can cram all that into a single session unless you really, really space it out and give yourself a lot of room around the rest of the work. I think it's quite hard to do a lot of that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So that is kind of heavy strength training and dose responses. When it comes to plyometrics, this is the really, really difficult one. As I say, the reason that's difficult is because it's a second order effect. What does that mean? It means that you're basically dealing with a net defect of two sets of adaptions. Because essentially the stretch-shortening cycle improvement that we're looking for is the ratio between your tendon stiffness and your eccentric muscle strength. So essentially, if you can get your eccentric muscle strength to increase without changing your tendon stiffness too much, then what you'll find is that your straight shortening cycle improves quite dramatically. In contrast, if your tendon stiffness goes up and your eccentric muscle strength doesn't track it, then you tend to find the straight-shortening cycle gets worse. Typically speaking in the early phases of heavy strength training programs, your tendon stiffness tends to outpace increases in eccentric muscle strength. Typically speaking in plyometric context, the opposite tends to happen. So what you tend to find is that generally speaking, plyometrics is going to cause an improvement in straight-shortening cycle. Generally speaking, at least when you're starting with relatively untrained people, heavy strength training tends to do the opposite. Now, the issue here is that tendon stiffness does, as I said earlier, tend to climb the plateau quite strongly in more well-trained individuals, tend to find that differences in training status don't tend to make that much difference to tendon stiffness in the same way that they would do for same muscle strength or muscle size. So I think generally speaking, if you take a relatively well-trained athlete and you start adding in plyometrics, then the only thing that you're really changing is the eccentric muscle strength because you're not changing tendon stiffness that much, and you tend to immediately see some improvements in straight-shortening cycle. Now I think when we've talked in the past about what you see with your athlete's data is basically what you're noticing, that as soon as you add in any kind of plyometrics at all, even with very low volumes, you immediately see that improvement in the straight-shortening cycle. Yeah, I use very low volumes and really just like you want the intent to be there. The eccentric is the important part. If you have a few, I do maybe like calf hops and things like that, a two sets of five, death jumps and things like that, still not very many total reps. If you're doing as much force into the ground each time as you can, I mean, you're not really going to be getting a ton out of a million reps of those anyway, the force would drop off. You probably, if you do a million of them, just toast your tendons, I don't see any reason to do a lot. So it's like I do a very minimal dose. I see if it's causing the change I want. If it is, I just keep that. If it, for some reason, were to plateau, and I think maybe I need a little more, yet maybe I would add a little more. But generally, I mean, I haven't seen that happen. I haven't ever really seen a need to be doing high volumes of plios with anyone. Like you said, the stiffness is kind of baked into the program. It's already there. If they've been training well for a while, so I don't really focus on that at all. And then you know, just two plios when I need them, if I need them, and definitely see good, very good changes. I think you've picked up two really important points there. I'm going to separate them, just so that people can understand exactly why both of them are important. So the first point, I think you've kind of, well, the first time I'm going to pick out, I don't remember the order that you gave them. The first thing I'm going to pick out is the fact that the important part of the plyometric that stimulates the adaption or such adaptions that we're looking for is the eccentric phase. That means that the eccentric phase has to have a relatively high degree of force application. And that essentially tells us that low impact or low force or low effort is probably the best way of putting it. Lure-fit plyometrics are basically not going to do anything. Now, this is really important because you send me, I don't know how many videos you send me, but you send me videos of lots of people at the moment talking about plyometrics as if they can benefit us in contexts where the efforts are very, very low, where the forces are low, when it's basically just spamming low kind of effort activity in high volumes. Now, come on to the high volume point in a moment because there's a couple of things there that I think are really important. But basically, low effort plyometrics are not going to do anything. I mean, they're literally just like kind of walking around bouncing around. It's playing around not achieving anything. And I think it's very, very sad that there's a huge amount of interest in that at the moment, which is kind of, and I kind of pushed back a little bit when I got some Instagram story questions the other day because people were asking me about kind of these kind of ways of programming plyometrics. And I was saying, look, you know, when I go and look at the materials that are being written and talked about to support this way or these ways of training, I see just like reams of words salad. I just see like paragraphs talking a reactive strength. And like, it's just like absolute nonsense. And I'm like, if you want to get like serious about this, tell me the specific adaption that is happening from that activity. Tell me how it's being stimulated uniquely by that low effort plyometrics because you won't find one. There isn't one. You know, everything that we've taught about is adaptions specific. Tell me the adaption. There is no adaption that can be stimulated by doing, you know, these low effort plyometrics. No matter how you market it, no matter how you do it, no matter how you kind of change it to make it a little different from what other people are doing it, it is still a low effort kind of activity. And it's not going to then produce the adaptions that we're looking for. And you can't make up for the low effort and the low force by doing a million reps of them. No volume can leave that. No volume can do that because you're not actually, we're not looking for a fatigue mediated kind of adaption. That's kind of thinking about hypertrophy. That's not what we're talking about here. The adaptions that we're going to trigger need to have a starting point of a high eccentric force. That's kind of just the sort of the way in which this the plyometric model is working. Now just kind of sticking with that high volume stuff a moment. Again, as you say, high volume is not going to get around the problem of the low effort kind of repetition. But it's also going to create issues for us because essentially tendons move around more when you have a low level of effort. This is paradoxical, but they basically behave in a more compliant way when you're dealing with low forces and they behave in a stiff way when you're dealing with high forces. So if you look at the way a tendon behaves in heavy strength or an exercise, people tend to think all the tendon is kind of being pulled around although it's not. In a heavy strength or an exercise, the tendon is behaving in a really stiff way. In a low kind of force activity like walking or jogging or these low effort plyometrics, the tendon is moving around a lot. And that movement of the tendon, that stretch recall is almost certainly what causes the tendon to get damaged. You get these very small kind of cracks from material science terms, point of view, or kind of tension. there's from a more biological point of view, depending on where you want to call them. It doesn't really matter. You can sort of this very tiny damage accruing inside the tendon with every single stretch and recoil. And if you start spamming loads and loads and loads of those repetitions, you are probably going to end up causing a lot of damage in that tendon. Now, physiotherapists can kind of come in and talk about their points of view on this. And I think it's logical to assume that that damage as it accumulates can lead ultimately to a tendonopathy. That's kind of their ballpark. That's not really mine. I'm not going to kind of argue that case, but I think it's pretty logical that that would be the starting point. But I do know though, even if you kind of ignore the tendonopathy thing, I do know that if you repeatedly load a tendon in that way, very, very high volumes with relatively low forces, you will get a lot of stretch and recoil and therefore you will accumulate that damage and you could then end up rupturing the tendon. Now that's not a tendonopathy, that's actually a tendon rupture. And I think that's actually how tendon ruptures do happen is just the accumulating. It's the way that muscle strain injuries happen. The main violation of damage. But the tendon actually has been studied a lot more extensively in that context because you can basically just put a tendon and a little apparatus and either in vivo or in vitro and you can just kind of repeatedly lengthen and recoil it and eventually it snaps. I mean, that's just kind of work hardening for you. That's how it works. It's a lot of damage or whatever you want to call it, but kind of comforting. So yeah, the two things there, the lower effort is not going to get you adaption and spamming volume on it is just going to end up probably creating accumulated tendon damage, which could cause problems for you further down that road. So really, really not a fan of the way that plyometrics is moving at the moment in essence see, I know you're very, very cross about it from the amount of stuff that you send me. So you know, just wanted to kind of really be very clear about where we are on this today by taking this opportunity. Yeah, I think that was, that was good to mention. Cool. Good stuff. So finally, then super maximum eccentric training, super maximum eccentric training. Obviously, we're getting psych and regenerative. We're getting kind of probably some Titan modifications. We're getting a load and neuro stuff as well. But the really important thing about super maximum eccentric is that you got an incredibly, incredibly non-linear dose response curve. So it got some, especially on the kind of muscle growth side of things, which is probably mostly psychomerogenic, is it really kind of, you get a couple of kind of sets in and you're flat lining. There's does nothing else coming along. So if you kind of look just kind of think of muscle growth, just in general terms, if you look at high perjury from heavy strength training, you kind of go one, you know, two, three, four, five and sort of by six, seven, eight sets in a single workout, you're probably hitting the max when you can possibly extract from that workout more or less. If you look at eccentric training and the muscle growth from psychomerogenic, you're probably hitting that point around about three sets instead of kind of six to eight. So you really, I mean, like, you know, the I only talk about this all the time, but the idea of kind of doing five sets of 12 Nordics is just sort of very, very kind of last decade. I mean, it's got to go. But people sometimes still do refer to it. But kind of at least now we've got some nice studies looking at really nice low volumes in Nordics, kind of one or two sets of four repetitions, which I think is much, much closer to kind of where we want to be personally. I'm lower than that. And I know you're probably even lower than I am on the super max with eccentric volume programming, but just kind of starting point, I think that, you know, three sets of five is probably absolute maximum. You can possibly extract from a workout in terms of stimulus. Now the downside of course, and that's just because the calcium ionic accumulation over the course of individual repetitions, you kind of get to the end of your, you know, kind of third set and you literally cooked to the point where there's no further mechanic retention going to be capable of, you know, doing anything for you. So there's no point in going down that road. But I really do think that three sets of five will be just extreme from a postwork out for deep point of view. You're not going to get any sports practice on the following day, and you're probably still going to be pretty cooked when you come back to do a second workout late in the week. So why would we even go there, especially when we see some kind of really solid benefits in terms of improvements from much, much lower volumes than that. So I think there's some decent data showing that even one set of four reps is good. I think I've talked to practitioners working relatively high levels with athletes all over the world, and they are doing single repetitions a couple of times a week, and they're seeing some really nice kind of slow, but steady progress with that. Now, personally, I'd probably prefer kind of maybe two repetitions, but honestly, it's really fascinating to hear these reports of people, you know, kind of really bringing these volumes of eccentric loading down. And of course, just kind of emphasise this. When we talk about super maximalist metrics, the stimulating rep model must go backwards, not forwards. So the first repetition is always going to be the most valuable anyway. So I think sometimes people will, well, I would never do a single rep of heavy strength training. So why would I do a single rep of super maximalist metrics? Well, if you talked about it, you're actually getting your final rep of the heavy strength training set first. At the beginning. At the beginning. So it kind of shifts the way we think about it a little bit. So I think I'm not saying that I would program like that, but I think I can see the value, not the value so much as the justification as the word I'm looking for. I can see the justification physiologically, and it's just interesting to hear these kind of approaches. I think you're probably close to that kind of point to yourself on your own. Yeah, I like just a couple of sets of most of the time single reps. Sometimes, you know, like you said, like doubles, maybe, but I do, I use single reps more often than not. And it's really just from a perspective of, I want the adaptations. I want to keep them in super consistently in the program. And I just don't want anyone fatigued from it. So the progress, yeah, super slow, a lot of the time, but there is noticeable progress. So it's like, you know, I watch it from the beginning when I first give them to someone, they make pretty rapid gains from the coordination and that. And then those tape are off. And then I just look at the numbers, it's pretty easy and make sure it's actually still increasing over a long period of time. If it is cool, keep it that absolute rock bottom dose. If for some reason it wasn't, again, maybe you know, go up just slightly, but most of the time single reps have been very effective, you know, two times a week, just a couple of them. And I haven't really had to do too much adjusting upwards for anyone. So just keep it there. And certainly nothing like those more papers. And I think I told you the story before of a car and I took over who literally had seven sets of 10 in a program. And I read it. And I just, I was like, is this a typo? Crazy things. So, okay, so kind of just so the people are completely clear what we're talking about here, you know, maybe kind of two to four singles is probably kind of where we're overlapping. I think that's twice a week. I think that's that's really solid. I think that would be justifiable based on the literature. And yeah, definitely in line with what I'm hearing when I talk to other people. Cool. What we've done there is talk through the dose response behaviors of the four elements of the high performance physiology kind of workout framework that we keep talking about. So, you know, fast movements. If there's some isometrics, they can kind of go in there and then heavy strain training, plyometrics and supermax release and tricks. Ultimately, each of those sections can have its dose response. So what hopefully we've shown is that there's no need or actually no benefit from chucking in tons and tons of volume in any of these sections. Now, what we keep running up against is that every time we kind of talk about any of these individual issues separately, we might talk about, for example, the fast movement training in a particular session, we might talk about heavy strain training, we might talk about plyometrics, we might talk about supermax release and tricks. Everybody else is trying to do a billion sets of everything in each of these contexts. Everyone's trying to do tons of tons of speed work. Everyone's trying to do tons of tons of heavy strain training. Everyone's trying to do a million sets of or a million repetitions of plyometrics in silly permutations. Everyone's trying to do five sets of 12 Nordics and it's like the dose response data do not support that approach. The dose response data pushes towards doing a little bit of everything, you know, a couple of times a week, maybe three times a week, if you, you know, kind of got space and you've got, you know, has to play in the sport and whatever, but generally speaking, we're almost always going to start and go back to, you know, two times a week as a, as a kind of a really solid model that progresses every time. And we can fit everything into the workout simply because the dose response is don't justify adding on tons of extra sets in each of those sections. And that's ultimately, I think, why we kind of are able to construct the workout plan the way that we're able to construct it because we don't need and have no desire to do kind of a hundred plyometric ground contacts in a single session or, you know, kind of five sets of 12 Nordics or, you know, kind of eight sets of squats or kind of, you know, kind of, I don't know, whatever crazy stuff people are doing on the high velocity practice. I don't care if someone leaves the gym toasted. I don't care if they look like they work themselves to death and, you know, none of it matters. I'll care about it as a progress. And, you know, you know, you have all these sports coaches and all these people doing like you said just crazy crazy volumes and half the time just because they want to like run people under the ground and make it look like you're working so so hard and it doesn't like that doesn't mean anything working really really hard if you're working badly does not mean anything at all. No, and it actually is going to then be detrimental both for you know kind of training so other things and also for this port setting. So we've covered in an enormous amount of ground today on that so I'm going to call it there. We are going to kind of use this conversation this conversation we've had today we're going to use it to have the conversation hopefully next time or at least quite soon about block puritization and I know that is something that people who are asking us about quite a lot. Something that we've been kind of I've been procrastinating on doing because I know I should get a little bit ranty about it but we will have that conversation soon and hopefully this dose response kind of conversation will be useful for people going into that that block puritization kind of episode that we do because it will be one of the principal building blocks that we start from explaining why we think that block puritization is not really as effective as just doing pretty much the same thing all the time so that is everything from us this time we will be back hopefully next week with another episode.