Speaker 1Hello and welcome. This is the High Performance Physiology Podcast. I'm Chris Beardsley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Mouseri. We're going to talk about contact sports in the context of team sports today. So I'm going to be coming at this from the perspective of rugby and Rob's going to be coming at it from the perspective of football in the US. So we're going to bring slightly different viewpoints and the way we think about these things, but ultimately it's all going to be kind of working on the same basis, the physiology that we've talked about before. So obviously we've covered, we've done episodes covering sprinting multiple times I think now, we've covered vertical jumping and we've covered throwing. So ultimately those are going to be three key elements of what we're going to talk about today. But rather than me rehashing any of that, I'm just going to direct you guys back to those episodes in the past and say, if you want to pick up more about sprinting, there are episodes about that clearly labelled. If you want to pick up more about sprinting, there are episodes about that clearly labelled. If you want to pick up more about sprinting, there are episodes about that clearly labelled. If you want to look at vertical jumping or throwing again, there's episodes about that clearly labelled. We're going to try and just have a discussion today about how we would go about programming for these athletes and hopefully also give you some insights in terms of what not to do as well as what to do. Because we see a lot of things being done in the industry that don't really make a lot of sense at the moment. So we'll cover that. So all of this is going to be in the context of the high performance physiology method, which is basically a four or four and a half kind of section workout plan, starting with high velocity stuff. And then if you want to put isometrics in for recruitment purposes, you can stop them in there. That's the half. So high velocity stuff, then moving on to heavy strength training, then plyometrics, then finishing up with super maximal eccentrics. Again, if you want to slot isometrics in for tendon stiffness, you can kind of put them in, you know, sort of after the heavy strength training section, if that's what you want to do. So isometrics can kind of move in and out depending where you want to put them. But fundamentally, the four blocks are high velocity, heavy strength training, plyometrics, and then super maximal eccentrics. So having said that, we've also just updated the trainer group and the program for that, moving it slightly more in direction of throwing and punching. So if you're interested in getting a really, really solid athletic strength training program for either what we're going to be talking about today, which is contact sports in the context of team sports, but also combat sports or throwing for the purposes of, you know, track and field. And that would be a great platform to start from. So please do go and check that out. You can find it either by searching for Rob Mouseri on TrainerOak or the High Performance Physiology Method. Cool. So Rob, let's just jump straight in and talk about this stuff. We were just kind of chatting before we jumped on the podcast today. Run us through kind of, let's, how do we start with this? Do we start with off season? Do we start with in season? What do you think? I start with off season. Off season, let's start with how you're currently programming in the context of the High Performance Physiology Method. So let's always reference back to that kind of template. Let's talk about how you're currently tending to program in that context in the off season for football in the US.
Speaker 2Yeah. So most of the football guys that I tend to work with are primarily off season. And I generally get them for, you know, not a huge amount of time. I've had some college guys in that as well. But, you know, I've had some college guys in that as well. And I've had some college guys in that as well. But in terms of programming, it's always sticking to the pretty standard two sessions a week. Occasionally, if they're not doing much practice, you know, maybe they want a faster rate of hypertrophy. I might do three workouts a week, but two is certainly much more common. Definitely starting with high velocity work and excluding quarterbacks, which I've actually never coached a quarterback anyway. So, you know, I don't worry as much about throwing with the high velocity stuff. It's not, you know, as much upper body speed work, but I still keep in a good amount of vertical jump work, horizontal, you know, broad jumps, things like that. And occasionally, if it's in the gym with me, I have a shorter track area, maybe some acceleration sprints, very short ones where you're not really reaching a max speed, but just for a little bit of, you know, practice essentially.
Speaker 1And let's just emphasize for people who haven't maybe listened to all of our podcast episodes so far, two things. You've already pointed out you're working primarily off a two times a week frequency. And I know you're working primarily off a two times a week frequency. And I know that the general tendency in the fitness industry is to try and do more, more, more all the time. And we keep trying to pull them back and say quality is much more important than quantity. And so it's really important to emphasize that you're starting from a two times a week because of the other practice stuff that the athletes have got. If they're coming into the gym and they're already tired, that's not going to help. And if they're going into their practice sessions already tired from the gym, that's not going to help. So we've got to kind of balance this stuff across the week. Really, really important point there. Secondly, in terms of that high velocity stuff you're doing, the jumps and the short sprints, you're not doing tons of reps of those, are you? You're just doing kind of maybe three to five kind of reps to get to the maximum kind of performance.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah. Usually when the jumps and if throws are in there, things like that, it's like three to five reps up to, you know, hopefully the fastest one they can get for the day. And, you know, the vertical jump work and that. I mean, I really like that, obviously for a training stimulus and then for just, you know, essentially a really good readiness test as well. Because it's if you're you know, speed work is going down pretty consistently. You can be pretty sure that you're fatigued and the rest of the program, probably your sports practice and that is not going to be as useful as it could be. So yeah, a little bit of a double use there and it just works really
Speaker 1nicely and gets people ready to train. And it's really important to point out, I think, to people that the stimulus for improving pretty much all of our high velocity related adaptions is going to as hitting a really, really high velocity. And I think that's what people miss. They think, oh, no, no, I need to do kind of 20, 30, 40, 50 reps of this thing to kind of force an adaption. I'm like, that's just not how this works. If you come into the gym and you kind of do a load of half-hearted repetitions, you're not going to hit anything close to the threshold that causes a stimulus in most of our high velocity adaptions. So limiting ourselves to a smaller number, getting to a, you know, most people are going to hit their max vertical jump. We talked about this before within kind of three to five repetitions. I tend to push the top end of that. Some other people hit it earlier, but it doesn't really matter. I mean, essentially, you know, we're looking for that fastest repetition, which is also, I guess, why sometimes your program assisted jumps.
Speaker 2Yeah. Yeah. Big fan of assisted jump work. Especially if someone's been doing, you know, regular jumping in that for quite a while, maybe they might need some sort of a faster movement, you know, a bit more of a stimulus there. I'll chuck that in. And then, you know, in the context of improving your jump specifically mentioned on the jump podcast, help you reach a little bit more of an optimal counter movement depth and get a better
Speaker 1jump. So, you know. Yeah. I mean, if you're trying to show off to other people, then yeah, you can, not to be confused with improving, improving, you know, kind of team sport athlete performance, but yeah, absolutely. So just kind of, I'm just kind of highlighting some of these points here that I think a lot of people will skate over when you're referencing them, because, you know, they won't necessarily understand the full background in the physiology of why you're programming that particular way. So awesome. So you've got those kind of jumps and maybe a short sprint, some throws depending on the athlete as your high velocity block. And just before I kind of let you move on to the next bit, I just want to emphasize one more thing, which is that the amount of work being done in this section is really, really small. And it allows us to then do that every single time. If we want to do that as part of the warmup. A lot of the criticism, a lot of the pushback that I see to the method that we're proposing is that people can't possibly do all of that in a single session. And just the small amount of it that we're talking about, which is exactly the amount that's required to trigger the best possible improvement. We do not want a lot of other repetitions. If somebody's walking into the gym thinking that they've got to do 20, 30, 40 repetitions of this particular exercise, they are not going to give maximum effort earlier on in that sequence. It's not going to happen. So a smaller number is actually better than a larger number. It's not that you're just wasting time by doing extra repetitions. You're actually making it worse. So I think that's really, really important to emphasize, allowing us to program it in this way. Cool. Awesome.
Speaker 2Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1So do you do any isometrics at the moment with your athletes in this particular regard?
Speaker 2Depending on the person and like the overall amount of time they have available. If I'm going to do isos for someone for football, usually going to be something for the hip flexors and that. Depending on the setup, I mean, the equipment and everything they might have available, to really train the hip flexors well. You know, if they don't have anything good, I'll use that more for like, you know, kind of a few more, maybe for like a primary training stimulus. I'm trying to just increase recruitment, which, you know, I'll often do. And even if they're training hip flexors later in the session, then like we mentioned in the last episode on isometrics, just, you know, one or two brief ones in different positions, more extended hip position for the rect fem, then a more flexed hip position for the psoas muscles because really trying to get as, you know, access to as many muscle fibers in the hip flexors as you can to help drive sprint speeds increasing. Awesome. I think that's, that's really important
Speaker 1because the increase in recruitment is massively transferable, not just between movement patterns. So it really is one of the primary things we want to be thinking about in a gym context, because it gives us that ability to train a muscle in the gym and actually have it improved better in a sporting context, doing something completely different because coordination does not. Transfer contrary to the beliefs of large numbers of the S and C community at the moment, but coordination. doesn't transfer um motino recruitment absolutely does so we're gonna go for that now um in the context of the hip flexors again you know we've got two uh kind of muscles here now obviously they are different muscles so they're not going to be uh kind of necessarily receiving um high enough levels of recruitment if we're training them in the position when they don't have good leverage so we want to be uh training it's different from kind of like i know that sometimes people look at uh one of my favorite studies shows that you can improve recruitment in the quadriceps by training as a hip flexor uh okay fine it's like that yeah it's the same muscle so these are great families so you know kind of like that's a slightly different thing if we're talking about um training uh you know different muscles at different uh joint angle ranges of motion then we are going to need to do that in order to max recruitment out in both of those um really really important point and recruitment transfers across velocities so it gives us that improvement in the high velocity uh action of sprinting which is again exactly why you're programming in this particular population so really really important stuff this is this is great this is really cool so um so you're thinking mostly about the hip flexors any other muscles that you tend to come across as being important in that um population recruitment um hip flexors in the
Speaker 2main one i'm going to use just because i'm most worried about sprint speeds um i don't tend to do it but you know you could do it for glutes and that as well you can do it for anything i mean absolutely
Speaker 1it's just like i'm just interested in what you tend to to kind of most most of the hip flexors
Speaker 2and it's you know of all the muscles around there it's the one that people generally have had the least um exposure training and training well over time so it's one that i tend to focus on the most you know a lot of people have done some decent work for the the hip um you know the quads hamstrings upper body whatever it may be hip flexors pretty neglected for a lot of people
Speaker 1definitely cool okay let's move on to the heavy strength training section then
Speaker 2yep so definitely the lower body focused around the hip um primarily for increasing sprint speed so hip thrust say it a million times i'm gonna be the the top pick there so you can load it super heavy super you know short position bias it's very recoverable and it's pretty much all glutes so you know as opposed to some other hip extension stuff you know knees are very bent um you're getting some knee extensions so you're getting a little bit of quads you're really not getting hamstrings out of it um not getting any of that hip extension stuff so you're getting a little bit of quads getting as much adductor and things like that so really just primarily a glute stimulus and then in terms of other you know lower body motions i do tend to have more squatting um for a lot of american football guys just because it is you know gonna get a great quad stimulus but it is more focused around the hip than something like uh you know seated knee extension or something like that so hip thrust and squat are gonna be my two primary lower body movements um after that i mean i kind of group the hip flexors in with lower body stuff even though they're you know more in the middle of the body um hip flexor work like a lying leg girl inflection or uh cable hip flexion you can do them standing or you can do them on all fours you know depending on the setup you have um anything you know any of those are really
Speaker 1going to be a pretty nice variation cool and so you tend to because i'm kind of jumping ahead a little bit here but because we're going to be talking about hamstrings in the super max eccentric context you tend not to have so much of a focus on that
Speaker 2in the in the main heavy strength yeah they're they're in there but you know a lot of times it's just a couple sets of seated or lying leg curls something like that um okay cool nothing nothing too major but i don't you know of all the things i focus on more i focus more on eccentric strength for the hamstrings yeah but yeah they are in the heavy strength training section so hip thrust squat hip flexors some hamstrings but you know to me the hamstrings eccentric strength is certainly more
Speaker 1than like trying to get them very large and in terms of um you know kind of sets reps that kind of thing we're talking about say maybe if we're talking about two times a week i guess you're probably working with two sets on this two sets yeah and then kind of heavy heavyish loads so depending on tolerance and what's comfortable that kind of thing yeah usually like rep range you
Speaker 2know uh the classic uh four to eight yeah i was going to say you're going to say um you know obviously i dip down in some lower ranges and that on hip thrust and squatting a case occasionally you know triples fives things like that but on average you know things are sitting around four to eight reps pretty much everything in that section understood so again just kind of
Speaker 1emphasize this point i started making with the high velocity section um and i guess you could also make for the ice for the isometrics for recruitment because they're literally just a couple of efforts um you know three to five super brief super brief so then again heavy strength training wanted to talk about two sets of heavy loads um you know not going to be taking hours and hours doing you know kind of loads and loads of work at all it's it's going to be very very manageable uh to do that after the high velocity stuff and again before what comes afterwards um this is interesting i guess um i guess really the um the thing that some people might see as being missing here would be a stiff leg deadlift or some kind of deadlift variation um i can see how you're making it work with the leg curls i mean i could also see how it would work with the leg curls i mean i could also see how it would work with the leg curls i mean i could i guess it depends on the kind of uh preferences of the the person i mean i i would say that from a physiological biomechanical point of view the squat is doing the adductor magnus work already so a stiff leg is probably only slightly less effective to you know kind of balance things out um but equally you know kind of um stiff leg is also giving you kind of that sort of slight upper body uh kind of effect that you might you know consider to be important but i guess it
Speaker 2like deadlift variation or even back extensions you know i personally love sure back extension variations um i just tend to you know operate under the assumption yeah that the squat is getting me a lot of adductor magnus yeah exactly the hamstring work and isolated getting you know just hamstrings and i'm getting glutes from the hip thrust so i get you know kind of everything there i mean yeah you could do a separate exercise for the rest of the adductors um which occasionally i'll do but you know a lot of times it's more of a time thing not trying to cram even in the context of using like two sets per exercise you know they're not bodybuilding they don't need every single muscle typically so i don't use a million exercises i'm trying to keep them in the gym for you know all that long exactly cool um now moving on in terms
Speaker 1of um plyometrics i'm guessing you probably don't program a lot of plyometrics for this group
Speaker 2no and you know they tend to be doing just so much running in that anyway exactly that i'm just i'm not really of the opinion that it's going to be super useful if i were to test someone you know like the easy test like difference between like a squat jump the pause and then like a depth jump um you know and it looks like their stretch running cycle is not good at all i might chuck some in beyond that you know most of the time i'm not i'm not noticing that it's something i really
Speaker 1need and that would probably just be drop jumps wouldn't it i mean you just yeah something super easy yeah um yeah and again not like thousands like some of the kind of uh practitioners are
Speaker 2recommending at the moment no just you know a few sets of you know maybe like five reps something
Speaker 1like that and conversely if you've got someone who's got a history of some kind of tendinopathy so you think about maybe dropping some isometrics in there um yeah then you code for you know heavy
Speaker 2isos for the achilles things like that um which i mean i've definitely used those way more with distance runners but yeah obviously there's a case for them in anyone any athlete who's having those issues
Speaker 1yeah i think it's when when the athlete's been it's coming to the end of their career maybe they've had sort of a lot of exposures to to kind of that that those running distances and those impacts i think sometimes they do tend to develop those problems and obviously then it's uh it comes upon the snc coach to make sure they've got something in the program that is at least you know helping move things in a positive direction yeah which is going to be the isometrics really isn't it i mean we did a whole
Speaker 2episode on that last week no we didn't have a body did we um for plyos oh no but for um
Speaker 1strength training stuff oh and of course i rushed you straight on i rushed you straight on sorry yeah let's go back to heavy strength training so you had you had a hip thrust you had a heavy kind of hip flexor in there you had um some uh leg curls um and you had a squat i think that's basically kind of the four that you you sort of started with okay cool so yeah sorry upper body stuff to complement that
Speaker 2um i mean usually upper body i try to keep and this is just my personal preference i try to keep at least if you know someone can do it and most most decent football guys can do it pretty well some kind of like pull-up wide grip pull-up in rather than a pull-down um and my only reason for that is that it's also a good measure of whether or not they're getting too fat so if your pull-up strength um weighted pull-up strength is going the wrong way um and your body composition is not looking great it's a pretty good way to assess you're putting out fat too quick um so i like that for the majority of my lat work um in terms of pressing you know normal like very standard um bench presses overhead presses um you know it's it's very very simple i try to keep you know something for delts something for pecs something for lats and then you know maybe like a narrow grip row for um a little bit of traps and lats but it's nothing nothing super complicated if someone wants or needs you know bigger arms for some reason chugging some direct arm work but again you know i'm not trying to have them it's a full body
Speaker 1session yeah yeah i mean yeah i think um two presses and two pulls is already pretty toppy
Speaker 2that would be the top end a lot of times it's even just like you know like a steep incline press and then the wide grip pull-up or something um you know you get more overall back i guess with a narrow grip row but then i don't get to see if someone's getting too fat so yeah i mean
Speaker 1yeah i mean i think at the end of the day it's a useful metric i think there's a tendency for a lot of the contact uh team sports athletes to push towards bigger body weights because it makes them feel like they've got more protection in those collisions but at the same time you know having the ability to move faster is going to depend on your be dependent on your body weight so it's a it's a kind of a very delicate balance there you know totally separate and we don't have
Speaker 2to get into it but also like you know from a tendon perspective if you're you're eating like shit and your health is not really where it maybe should be you know you do tend to have more issues and i don't um i don't want to deal with that so i try to make sure people are you know managing that end of things well and if they're getting too big it's more likely that they're not
Speaker 1yeah i mean it's yeah that's that's the kind of balance in the teams well not just team sports i guess it can happen in track and field but i think those guys tend to be a little bit more focused on the speed tellings so um cool anyway you we already did plyometrics so i rushed you through the heavy strength training section um and so yeah that leaves us with super maximal
Speaker 2uh eccentrics yep um i you know i really generally have a big focus on hamstrings for preventing you know strain injuries sprinting and then that'll be your typical like a nordic or i prefer like a two to one um seated leg curl is my favorite option true because it just as you know muscle specific as you can be and getting a little bit longer muscle length than a nordic would um see a little bit more of the hamstrings by the hip and things like that so that'd be my option that's just you know you curl down with two legs and then you resist the weight up for um with one for about three to five seconds and just a couple of weeks and then you're ready to go and then you're ready to go and do a couple reps of those in each session um you know maybe like two to four total reps um in terms of sets you know again maybe like two sets and then for the quads some eccentric work for the quads for change of direction and depending on the equipment available you can use same thing with a leg extension so you know up with two down with one or you can do reverse nordics which um i've actually used a bit more often lately just because not everyone has like a decent leg extension and a lot of times guys are very strong you know a lot of football players are very big so you got to figure out how to do that and then you can do a couple reps of those in each session loading a ton of weight yeah
Speaker 3i think that's important you know adding plates with um what do we call like a gym pin and stuff
Speaker 2it's like at a certain point a lot of them will struggle with much less on a reverse nordic and they're still getting a good stimulus there so it's you know a little more practical than chucking two plates on top of a machine with a gym pin it's kind of annoying awesome cool um anything
Speaker 1else you wanted to say to kind of round out that that program
Speaker 2you know i'd say that's that's the bulk of it um the only thing we didn't mention that we did mention before the podcast that's in there occasionally and more and more lately is um heavy torso rotation um got to be more and more of a fan of it for more and more people um not just people that are trying to throw and punch harder and stuff like that but we can get a little more into that when you talk about yeah i mean i can i can just overlay
Speaker 1on top of what you've just gone through i can overlay and say from from my experience of working with rugby players and rugby teams um what you've described be very very close to kind of where i would where i would go uh it would just be that in the high velocity section right at the beginning i would have more emphasis on throws because probably just has more throwing in it than than american football so um yeah it would be light medicine ball work um both vertically upwards vertically downwards and also uh rotationally and then that rotation then gets mirrored in the heavy strength training section because um straight away when i'm starting i like you i would start with hip thrusts and then i would probably go from there to as like my priority will probably be heavy torso rotations um yes i'd still have that emphasis on the hip flexor work yes i'd still have squat yes i still have hamstring work but and again i'd have a press and a pull in the upper body but i probably wouldn't have two presses and two pulls um because i'd want that heavy torso rotation to have you know kind of space in the program i think starting to push to the point where the program gets a little bit unwieldy probably no plyometrics um and again i'd probably have the exact same two um super maximally centrics um isometrics one of those things that kind of drop in um according to requirements like you pointed out if somebody's got very very little history of working with hip flexors it's a great way to get them up to speed really really quickly uh pun intended and in terms of uh yeah in terms of tendinopathies it's a great way to try and help avoid those if you've got somebody with a history of tendinopathy then having the ability to put some isometrics in there and then in the program again we talked about these in the episode last week so i'm not going to do it again now but yeah you can drop those in between the heavy strength training section and the super maximally centrics at the end um really sets reps all that kind of thing pretty much exactly the same place as you um not really changing anything there so and again um whether it's two sessions or three sessions a week in off season is going to depend on what else is going on if the athlete's doing a lot of conditioning if the athlete's doing some practice they're doing a lot of skills work three sessions a week and i know we're absolutely pushing against the trend here with people wanting to do three four five six sessions a week i'm telling you you are you're wasting your time and you're just ending up prejudicing the other work that you're doing because you're going to be too tired uh the idea that you can work through being tired is is lunacy it's not possible not not for the kind of skill related and uh kind of speed related and you know kind of other you can't
Speaker 2improve your skill under fatigue you cannot
Speaker 1improve skill under fatigue and speed you can't improve under fatigue either so yes you can build some muscle mass under fatigue but that's about it and okay tendons you can kind of um move those in a positive direction but volume again is not their friend so you know you're probably going to be kind of losing the battle at the same time as winning in that particular regard so i would say really this this kind of uh hypertrophy is probably the only thing you can really push a little bit in that in that state um there's a lot of other stuff we can do much more positively if we're not in a fatigue state so cool um and i know that you don't tend to get the opportunity to work too much with um these athletes when they're in season but um how would you go about changing this program if you were responsible for uh you
Speaker 2know kind of uh that that in-season program yeah i mean really nothing would change very much um certainly any pile work if it was in there would be removed um super maxi centrics you know take down the absolute bare minimum okay what's the bad minimum then uh me it's like you know two sets of
Speaker 3maybe even like a single rep so two singles twice a week yeah that's kind of where i am as well yeah
Speaker 2it's like so so minimal once they've actually you know had some adaptations built in um in terms of the sets and the heavy strength work i'll generally go one i would go one set twice a week um with you know rep two and reserve again you know from a time perspective you can blow through it and then you know one set twice a week still gonna at least maintain your muscle size if not increase it a little bit maintain strength um heavy speed work always stays in it's not fatiguing and it'll be a good measure to see if they're getting just trashed okay so that's kind of where i have a
Speaker 1slight difference to you because because speed work is is generally quite resistant to um losing the adaptions i mean i'm not saying it's completely resistant but it is fairly resistant to losing you can take it out you can start to drop it out occasionally now would i want to drop it out permanently throughout the entirety of the season no i would not but i would be sympathetic if the coach was saying my athletes are really starting to struggle i can see the athletes are really starting to struggle i'll be sympathetic dropping it out of one of the two sessions a week um maybe even both sessions for a week or so but i wouldn't want to leave it out completely for the whole season because muscle fiber shortening velocity is a peripheral adaption and it will go back to normal if you leave it long enough yes the neural adaptions will stay forever but the other stuff is going to stay forever so i'm not so um i think that's kind of one of those very very small things because you want even if it's not okay so this is an interesting point even if we think that taking the high velocity stuff out of a workout won't actually change the athlete's experience because they're not fatiguing things they're not they're really not fatiguing um reps that we're talking about doing even if we are going to take them even if even if taking them out wouldn't really do anything from a um physical point of view it might be something that we could do but i don't think it's going to change the way we do to show willing to the sports coach to demonstrate that we are actually taking something out of the program as well as him having to take something out of the program yeah because that is
Speaker 2i can i can get the rationale for removing it um you know i can see both ways yeah i would keep it
Speaker 1in i would keep it in but i'm just saying from a psychological point of view whether it's the coach that we're trying to persuade that we are actually moving in the direction that you know kind of is it is somehow helpful uh but also from the athlete's perspective they think they've got fewer things to do if they're really getting kind of beaten down by the by the season then having a few less things to do in the um actual workout is is nice so that's but again you know like we we're already taking the heavy strength chain things down to a single set maybe even leaving a rep and reserve taking the super maximal stuff down to one or two repetitions this is getting really really trimmed down i mean they are going to be getting in and out of the gym very very quickly and it's not going to feel like a you know a really horrible kind of experience while they're in there.
Speaker 2- Yeah, and like exercise selection wise, I mean, if you really wanna take taper it down as much as you can you know you can make everything very machine focused and make it
Speaker 1so that you don't have to that's a really good point now that's a super super important point i think that's that's really really valuable to to emphasize that because yeah if we don't have to spend ages warming up on the squat that is going to make a big difference if we can move to a you know some kind of machine-based uh squat pattern you know whether it's some kind of cantilever squat or even even if it's a leg press i mean that is going to move things in a much easier job totally move things in an easier direction um yeah now that's a really really really really good point and again i think that's one of the reasons why um you know working on the leg curl and the extension machines can be better than sort of sort of doing the nordic and the and the reverse nordics less setup time um it feels like a less demanding exercise i mean like for me nordics there's always that kind of um stabilization that stabilization issue of the of the kind of the hip um you know i don't like the fact that that's there you know it always feels like it detracts from the overall exercise for me yeah so yeah having those in a machine context definitely going to work a lot better um but yeah i mean again uh in terms of um overlaying the rugby sort of side of things onto this i honestly wouldn't really do anything different from what you've done uh except for the changes that i already made in the off season with including more throwing related stuff the heavy torso rotation really not going to have much in there when i transition to the the in-season stuff um yeah i mean that's that there's really this they're really quite similar sports i think in many ways definitely again sorry sorry talking from the snc perspective yeah yeah well just strictly speaking the strength training perspective conditioning is going to be slightly different um you know from from the rugby point of view the conditioning is probably going to play a bigger role uh there's a lot more running a lot more distance covered in rugby than there is i understand uh comparison with uh you know um american football um but yeah from the strength training point of view i think it's going to be relatively similar yeah very similar um okay so let's now risk asking you what silly things are out there that are being done at the moment and we probably don't have time to like talk about this forever but kind of give us some highlights i mean off season um i forget which
Speaker 2episode i mentioned it but i have mentioned it before so obviously we talked a little bit about things like that so when you get guys uh off season a lot of people will try to do some giant hypertrophy block put on as much muscle as they can using you know more things like extended sets drop sets all those kinds of methods that they think are growing so much more muscle um and i've seen it justified with dexas with in bodies with all these things that are not really very accurate measure a lot of muscle swelling yeah yeah you'll you'll see a guy who they say put on you know 12 pounds of muscle with like a four week uh four weeks of the off season and things like that and you know whatever is skewing the reading great um just don't pay attention to it don't think you can build like a ton ton of muscle in just a few weeks um before you go back to doing something else and then you would encourage people
Speaker 1to work off the basis of the lifts um and say okay okay if if lift performance has jumped up by an insane amount then okay fine then the muscle growth probably was real and it probably wasn't caused by strength training it's probably caused by something else but let's not talk about that yeah um you know but yeah if the lift performance is not going up commensurately with that insane
Speaker 2body mass change then it's probably not real no and then um a really popular one that i've seen in football and in talking to some rugby guys actually is still using you know a lot of olympic lifting variants for either power development or the other rationale and i've seen a lot of is to be able to absorb a hit so you know like having to receive that heavy weight they say would be beneficial in helping you you know take a hit collide with someone uh etc so we can dig
Speaker 1into a little bit of why that does not really well i mean we've we've talked about why power training doesn't really make sense i mean i know that it's hugely hugely popular but it doesn't have any unique adaptions that are transferable that you can't get from heavy strength training and fast movements and fast movements and heavy strength to do do those things far better really the only thing that power training does uniquely is get you better at the power training exercise that you're actually training which is the coordination improvement which is why there's this big tendency for people to talk about strength training is loaded coordination which is not you know that doesn't transfer is nonsense um and i know that's hugely hugely popular but it is nonsense and this is creating a a really a big misunderstanding of how strength training actually works which i find quite annoying um but yeah the power training side of things but i just yeah i've got no idea where that idea comes from yeah that i was just it's funny i
Speaker 2was just thinking about like you know because i i skateboard if i was to do just waited ollies for a year and see what happened nothing would happen nothing you get worse actually yeah yeah i'd get
Speaker 1worse because when you tried to go back it would sort of like you'd be a little bit off balance when you try to think about it you'd be a little bit off balance when you try to think about it
Speaker 2about like the loaded coordination idea but then the taking a hit thing yeah i mean if you think
Speaker 1like you think yeah stop stop from the absolute physiological rock bottom point of view like what structures are we talking about that are going to be negatively affected by that taking of a hit we're saying we're saying okay so you're going to get a contusion at the muscular level if you get you know you get a bruise if somebody bangs into you okay can i change that propensity in any way shape or form by doing any kind of strength training or any kind of exercise training whatsoever no no it's going to do what it's going to do you can't you can't i mean like once you've passed the repeated bound effect and you've kind of got to a point where your muscles are muscle fibers are handling calcium ones to the degree that they're handling them there's nothing really that you can change after that point bruises are going to form because you rupture blood vessels and you break the damage you damage the cell membranes of muscle fibers that's it that's all happening um there's nothing really you can do to change those things once you've gone past the repeated bad effect that's that's kind of it really so that's that's not going to change um bone density okay fine i mean like if you're thinking about fractures and stuff like that yeah you but strength training does that i mean there's nothing like strength training will do that really really well um power training is not really very good very good at that at all yeah okay and like somebody's completely untrained and exposed to that kind of thing like like if you look at elderly people they they've got this kind of whole thing where they do plyometrics and elderly people and they see kind of improvements in in various different measures i'm like yeah that's a sedentary elderly person you're going to see improvements like that but heavy strength training will do that just as well if not better and as you move into a kind of more active populations and even into strength training for athletes that we're talking about today um you're going to need heavy strength training really to kind of create those those bone density improvements if you want to go down that or not so much bone density because it's more about um structural integrity and strength of the bone because you can get improvements in um the the ability of the bone to resist impact that aren't actually density related they're actually uh fundamental restructuring of the uh of the way that the bone is working but it doesn't matter the point is that heavy strength training does all of that stuff really really well yeah power training is not so good at that stuff um so okay and then he's like okay well does more muscle mass around the bone give you more protection very possibly never seen anything on that but logically you would infer that it probably does so you could say okay well yeah but that's a high pressure just power training do that no no heavy strength training will do really well so and then it's like okay and now if you want to talk about connected tissues what's the best way to improve the stiffness of a connected tissue okay it's isometrics and heavy strength training so like i literally i i didn't know rob was going to ask me that question or raise that issue i had literally no clue that that's what he was going to ask and he's literally just giving me the opportunity to walk through physiologically why it makes absolutely no sense the power training would be good for that i didn't prepare for that i just kind of walked through that
Speaker 2step by step by step yeah it just it's so nonsensical it's like and if you're if you're sprinting at someone on a field you're both you know 250 pounds and you're going to crash into each other what on earth would make you think the forces of that are anywhere near the same as the forces of just catching a clean like you know no matter how heavy your clean is it's not it's not going to be in the same universe no so i think that's
Speaker 1that's that's that's really really uh kind of interesting to see that that belief has started to develop around i think ultimately it comes back to people want to do the exercise or train in that particular way so they start making up reasons why they think it's important the the the error that i see most in um rugby is to overemphasize eccentric training in the off season and then neglect it in the end season so what happens is they'll do like a four five week block of eccentric loading they'll spend loads of time and effort and energy on it the athletes will just get really really fatigued because as soon as you start throwing more than a few reps a few times a week of the supermax eccentrics of people they just can't recover from that in time um really really kind of um waste a lot of that training time because you can't really then do very much on anything else in terms of skill development like we already pointed out and then as soon as they hit the in season so no no we can't do this in season because it's too fatiguing i'm like well two weeks later you've got no sarcomerogenesis you've probably lost all the titan that you kind of improved and you're back to kind of square one really with everything so very very very annoying when you see that being programmed same errors that we see in block periodization um you know we talked about block periodization why it doesn't really work as a thing but really good illustration of when this is happening and this absolutely does get programmed i'm i'm i'm confident this is still getting programmed oh yeah
Speaker 2yeah yeah you see the biggie center blocks you know for four weeks six weeks madness and then yep with the idea that it's going to improve in a lot of the argument i see as well is that it's you know you increase your eccentric ceiling it'll increase your ability to you'll have a higher capability for maximum strength as a result and it's like i think people are trying to you know if if you're increasing your ability to accrue more motor units like yeah you can accrue more muscle fibers you can have a higher ceiling but you can do that a million other things ways um you know you're going to get coordination gains when you start the eccentric training and improved recruitment on the eccentric phase but doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have
Speaker 1some like higher ceiling for strength not on the concentric or isometric no i mean it's very it's very connected to what's happening in that in that specific exercise or that movement pattern i think yeah um but yeah i mean also related to that there's this tendency for um strength coaches to think that they can just do away completely with super maximum eccentrics and just do the lowering phase of a normal strength training exercise i mean one of the most uh common questions or um rebuttals i get is that i'm not going to do nordics or i'm not going to do um kind of sort of two legs up one leg down on the um eccentric uh kind of uh knee extension or leg curl i instead of instead of that i'm going to do a slow lowering phase on my on my deadlift variation often it's an ardia which is one of my kind of least favorite exercises now i think but let's assume it's either a stiff leg or you know kind of some kind of deadlift variation they're going i'm just going to do four or five second lowering phases that's enough to get my eccentric benefits my physiologically that's nonsense because it is just mad that people think you can do that in this day and age they don't understand how recruitment works you know the lowering phases can be like 50 of your recruitment in the in the in the lifting phase so the top half of the muscle which is where most of the good stuff is coming from is just not going to get any kind of stimulus whatsoever
Speaker 2initially yeah sure you have someone brand new that's never really lifted and they do slow lowering phases on rdl like yeah things are going to grow they're going to have some things happen and then very quickly you know you're going to have not much happening it's exactly it's not a
Speaker 1super maximally centric um and it's not going to give the same benefits um if you want to do a
Speaker 2super max eccentric rdl like be my guest i i wouldn't yeah please sign the appropriate forms
Speaker 1beforehand yeah i'm not going to do that i'm not going to do that i'm not going to do that i'm not clear you you you know the risks involved and don't blame don't blame anybody else for your own silliness because yeah it's silly but no i mean like um yeah it's it's not um they're not the same thing that's the point so the two the two kind of errors i tend to see i mean for my limited uh kind of interaction with the space now because i tend to kind of not expose myself too much to what's going on in the industry because it just depresses me but um yeah he's doing two much eccentric in the off season they're not doing any in the season error number one uh error number two is thinking that you can you can get an eccentric benefit from you know slow lowering phases of normal strict training exercises which is not not not physiologically possible so those are the two really errors that i've kind of uh seen but again i'm sure there's low to others
Speaker 2yeah those those are definitely the big ones with eccentrics and that you know the idea that those would then prepare you for things down the line and yeah like you said like magically you know you have some benefit after taking them out for weeks when you don't have a benefit you just
Speaker 1have a loss of anything yeah the adaption just goes away and they bring it back again cool well we've run on for quite a long time is there anything else you wanted to add before we finish today i think that pretty much covered it good stuff now i think i think that was a really um hopefully uh useful practical episode insight into the way that programming can can be done for this uh particular athlete type um if you guys would like to see more of this type of episode please do give us feedback and let us know and we'll uh think about doing one in the future um similarly if you're interested in having a training program that actually works um for these kind of sports then please do look at uh the high performance physiology method that rob is administering on train heroic um be a really really good starting point um for any um athlete in team sports i would say but especially for athletes in the sports we've talked about today so with that we will stop there and we will come back next week with another topic
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