42 Plyometrics versus fast concentrics

Hello, and welcome to the performance physiology podcast. I'm Chris Birtsley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Nasseri. I'm going to talk about the difference between high velocity training and plyometric training today. This is a really, really important distinction. They're often described interchangeably in the scientific literature, which is very, very annoying. And they're definitely confused and mixed up in the fitness industry. So what we're going to do is, I'm going to give a quick, it's not going to be quick, actually, it's quite luck. We're just joking about it before I start the podcast. It's like, this is going to be brutal because basically high velocity is a complete episode on its own and plyometrics are a complete episode on their own. So if you want kind of full introductions to both, this is going to end up being a monster introduction. But I'm going to go as quickly as I can. I'm pretty sure we've done a full episode on both of these topics previously. I think the high velocity topic was one of the very first episodes we ever did. I'm fairly certain that we've done plyometrics as well on its own. But I'm going to kind of try and give brief introductions to both of these today. And then probably one of the differences and then we'll talk about practicalities. And, you know, at the point where my voice is giving out, Rob can take over and talk about exactly how he programs for this stuff. And probably also tell you about some very, very silly things that people are making claims about in the industry. So basically when we say high velocity training, what we're saying is that we're aiming for an adaption, we're trying to stimulate an adaption that is helpful for improving maximum speed. Now, maximum speed is a completely separate concept from maximum strength. Again, we've done a whole episode on that very, very early on. Really, really important to understand that these are separate qualities. So maximum speed, generally speaking, we can improve maximum speed by improving the coordination of the movement. That's the efficiency modifier, not strictly either a strength or a speed kind of adaption, but it will work for speed if we practice the high velocity and other spectrum antagonist proactivation reductions. Motion echo, which is actually a fairly kind of sort of transferable adaption. And then motion firing frequency, which is probably the most kind of generic speed related adaption we've got apart from maybe muscle fiber shortening velocity at the peripheral level. If you practice with a fast movement, you can achieve adaptions in each of these particular categories, each of these specific adaptions will be stimulated. You need both a maximum effort and a actual fast movement speed. Some of the earlier research suggesting that you didn't actually need the fast movement speed was kind of confounded. You actually do need the fast movement speed at the same time as a max effort to make these adaptions happen. So technically, can you do that in the context of a plyometric? Yes, you can. So if you have a landing phase or a counter movement, which is kind of a bit of a blurry kind of gray zone, which is neither sort of, it's neither a plyometric and it's kind of, well, it is neither. It isn't a plyometric and it is a plyometric, depending on who you talk to and what you're looking at at the time. But basically this is kind of gray zone. We've got counter movement, which is not really certain. So I tend to just kind of say, let's ignore the counter movement. But generally speaking, a plyometric can be used to produce very fast concentric phases. But you don't need them to produce very fast concentric phases. You can do concentric only. You can do this counter movement gray area that I was just mentioning, or you can use assisted jumps or assisted movements, which I think is probably the most elegant way of solving the problem. Why is it a problem? It's a problem because the eccentric phase that you've got, especially with a genuine plyometric, and I'll get onto the definition again in the moment, but the genuine plyometric, you're landing phase. As a result, you're creating an eccentric contraction. As a result, you're going to then produce damage and fatigue mechanisms, which are then going to cause your problems for doing multiple repetitions of that particular activity. So you're going to start to create fatigue that's going to impair your ability to stimulate the adaptions that you want. So ideally, what we want with this particular kind of category of adaptions is a really, really fast velocity, which means we don't want fatigue to happen. And that's because that's going to get in the way and prevent it from happening without the adaption for a curry. So generally speaking, you can create the high velocity constantly phase with a plyometer, but you don't need to. You can do it as a concentric only, which is probably the least favorable way of doing it, because you're going to be the slowest end of the spectrum, because you haven't got any of the benefits of the shortening cycle. You're going to do it with a counter-moving, which is moving positively in that direction without having the damaging effect of a plyometric landing phase. Or you can go down the assisted route, which is, as I say, probably the most elegant way of doing it, is to get a maximum velocity, you know, with the minimum kind of fatiguing impact. So that's kind of a very quick intro to the high velocity side of things. Plyometrics side of things, I've really mentioned that when we talk about plyometrics, the definitions are a bit hazy. I work with a very, very strict definition, which some people are going to disagree with, but I think it makes the most physiological sense, which is that you need an actual landing phase. So you have a landing phase to your plyometric, but you have a landing phase is not a plyometric. That basically rules out, obviously, all the concentric only stuff immediately, because you haven't even got a straight shortening cycle. But it also rules out the counter-moving stuff. Essentially, you have a counter-moving, you haven't got an impact phase, you've just got a counter-moving. So plyometrics, you actually have to land on something in order to produce the kind of the straight shortening cycle, definitive straight shortening cycle mechanisms, and kind of then parlay those into a concentric phase. Now, as I said, that can then give you some benefits in terms of the speed related type of things, but the real magic, what we're actually doing when we do a plyometric, or actually the purpose of actually doing plyometrics in the first place is actually to create the eccentric phase related adaptions. What we really want is to create an eccentric strength increase, which can be multiple mechanisms. And again, this probably introduces a third kind of episodes worth of material, but you want an eccentric set of mechanisms to eccentric strength, set of mechanisms to produce an eccentric strength. And you want to do that without simultaneously creating a large increase in the stiffness of the tendon. And this is at the heart of why we've got this agreement for want of a better word, between what we're saying about plyometrics and what half of the internet is saying about plyometrics at the moment, because the point we're making is that the beauty of plyometrics, because we're not opposed to using plyometrics for the right person, the right time, they're fantastic. They do something really, really quite miraculous, but it's not what the plyometrics aficionados are saying is happening, because they think that plyometrics increase tenders stiffness, and that's how they, or other things, we'll get onto that in a minute when Rob's got some examples of silly things that are being said. But I like one of the original claims was that the improving tendon stiffness. Now, what we can see when we look at the literature is that the really miraculous thing that plyometrics do is to actually improve eccentric muscle strength without simultaneously increasing tenders stiffness that much. That then allows the muscle to pull the tendon around a lot more than it was doing previously, which allows the muscle to move through a smaller amplitude during high velocity motions that allows it to then produce much higher forces because of the force velocity relationship. It also allows elastic energy storage in the tendon, which is really, really helpful, because the muscle doesn't do that job very well, but the tendon can do that job extremely well. So you get these two benefits, which are stretch shortening cycle mechanisms. We then allow you, by in plyometric training, to enhance the stretch shortening cycle effect that you can generate, and that allows you to then move faster in high velocity movements that you would pursue in sporting activities. So the plyometric chains that we're looking for is an eccentric phase adaption that nevertheless contributes to speed in practical circumstances. So this is the really confusing bit, because you've got a set of high velocity adaptions, which are literally just related to the concentric phase, which we talked about high velocity training for. And then you've also got plyometric training, which will give you an improvement in your stretch shortening cycle effect, which will then give you an enhancement of your speed in the context of the sporting movement that you are training for, because what it's doing is enhancing the energy storage in the tendon, but it's also allowing your muscle to function slower for the same joint angular velocity. In other words, your external velocity might be the same, but your muscle is going slower. In other words, you can then go faster at your maximum muscle shortening velocity. So it's an enhancement effect on top of your high velocity train. So plyometrics can give you something on top of what your high velocity training is doing. They are two totally separate things. Okay. But the price that you're paying with the plyometrics is this muscle damaging effect every time you hit the ground. And there's some really, really cool studies on what that actually does. Now it works. I've talked about them before. Basically, then, the way we see it is that high velocity is kind of like, you can do that all the time as much as you like almost. And it's not really going to have a negative effect on anything else that you want to do, because it's not having a fatiguing impact. That's why I put it first in the workout. Also put it first in the workout because you want to be able to avoid the fatiguing effects of other things, because as soon as you start getting fatigued, you start reducing that movement velocity, you don't get the high velocity adaptions. plyometrics doesn't be the suffer from that problem, because what we're doing is creating an eccentric phase adaption. So we don't need to be moving quickly. We just need to hit the ground. That's basically how it works. And you can't avoid that because gravity is kind of working for you in this particular regard. So basically but at last. So, but. I don't need to put it any earlier because I don't need to protect it from the fatiguing mechanisms that are going to cause much bigger problems for other things in the workout, so I can put it last. Ultimately, I'm not last last because I'm going to put super max when these injuries last, but fundamentally it's in that same category. So basically, these are two totally different training mechanisms, techniques, sorry, that are doing totally different things in terms of the underlying mechanisms. We've got these two separate concepts. The high velocity stuff is like you can span that if you really want to, a plan that you should cannot, because if the muscle damaging effect that is actually inherent in it is something you can't, you can't just kind of do indefinitely you've got to localize it and do it a relatively small amount of it. Also, you've got to be aware that if you start doing a lot of plyometrics to a point where your tendons are really able to move around a lot relative to the muscle, technically it's the muscle that's pulling the tendon around, but it's inside the point. I'm actually going to find that your tendon is now going through very large amplitude strains in all the activities you're doing, and that is a risk factor for tendinopathy, it's a risk factor tendon rupture as well. So you may decide that that isn't something you necessarily want to be doing all of the time. You may want to block it into specific parts of your training calendar. You know, you may have some particular competition phase where you do that, you do plyometrics and get your structural and exactly in the perfect state for that competition period, and then after that when you go back to the office season, you take them out and you go back to just doing the strength training stuff. So avoiding having that very, very stretchy tendon, the entire two of the year. So essentially, again, when I say stretchy tendon, technically the tendon does increase in stiffness with plyometrics, it's just that the muscle increases in strength more. So it's able to pull the tendon around, practically tendons moving around more, but fundamentally on a kind of like materials from a materials point of view is actually a stiffer tendon. That's probably gone over a lot of people's heads, I would say, but hopefully for those people have been following along with the other episodes, that will actually have pulled a lot of threads together. So Rob, can you, before you go into kind of talking about some of the horrendous insanity you see on the internet. Can you just walk us through yet again the high velocity section of an average kind of workout that you do and just give us kind of the rationale and the exercises that you're doing and how it all works. Yeah, for sure. So like you said, we've been through it on more than a few episodes, but can always repeat it. So typically when I'm starting a session, I'm using things that like you said, don't involve any landing phases, so something like counter movement jumps with the max effort, you know, maybe box jumps once in a while, throws with a very, very light implement. If I'm doing a throw, sometimes a lot of times a lot of people skip into it for, you know, faster velocity, something like that, you know, rotational throws over at throws, all those kinds of things. With the upper body speedwork, you know, I always make sure it's something where the implement can weave the hands, you can actually throw it. Obviously, if you're holding onto something, you can't throw enough to decelerate. So I definitely have people ask me about, you know, typical kind of like dynamic effort work, you know, like with a very light barbell and things like that. And it's just not the same. Yep, just something that can leave the hands with jumps, obviously just going for max height or like a broad jump for a max and distance. And then like you mentioned before, assisted jumping, I love band assisted vertical jumps where you just loop it over through the top of a rack, hold onto it. And I know let you hit a higher speed and a much bigger height than you generally would with a standard jump. And usually the main ones, you know, I keep it pretty basic. Like you said, you could, um, could technically spam those if you really wanted. And certainly, you know, you can do a ton of it without getting fatigued, but generally I do maybe, you know, four or five max effort reps on each, just going for a max speed or height for the day. And then I cap it. Yeah, exactly because you've got other things that you want to do in the work. I mean, that's the context, isn't it? You've got because of the high points for zero to method, which we're going to do a whole series on very soon. Because of the way we program everything in every single workout, we've probably to get through. And so you don't necessarily want to be doing excessive numbers of repetitions or something that is, you know, kind of already giving you a decent stimulus in the first couple of repetitions that you do. I mean, the point I'm making is that it, as you say, not particularly, therefore, if you wanted to spam them, you could suggest him as something that makes any sense. I've seen friends messing around like in sessions and they'll do, you know, 20 something jumps in the air session. And totally, totally fine. Like nothing bad's going to happen. But it's just generally training. Yeah, just the time thing. And if I hit, you know, my protocol right now is maybe like 36 or so. If I hit that once in a session, it's not going to do anything more if I hit it 10 more times, you know, I've already hit my peak for the day. So yeah, just I just do a few. I get up there and I cap it. Awesome. So yeah, basically key facts, then first position in the workout, generally with programming, very, very few repetitions, three to five reps per exercise, aiming for obviously maximum maximum maximum speed, rest plenty of resp between each effort. But technically, as you're saying, if you multiply around and do a few more and just see what happens, then there's nothing really often the time that you're spending doing that is nothing fundamentally going to be problematic for the rest of the work. No. Now, I know that you generally don't do a lot of plyometric programming, but when you do, I mean, I already mentioned that we tend to program it later in the workout, but can you give us a few examples of things that you have have used in that particular context. And any more details that, you know, people might find useful. Yeah. So I mean, obviously, if I have people sprinting, sprinting itself is a plyometric, but generally, I'm not dealing with that as much, you know, it's more like a sports coach and things like that. If I'm using plios, it's usually just things like depth jumps and variations like that, double leg, single leg, various heights, you know, if I'm working for more, obviously force in the landing phase, but I don't really do anything super complicated for ply metrics because obviously I'm just focused on the landing phase. So I don't use like, you know, progressions, necessarily, like some people might not using tons of different exercises. I'm just looking for something that's getting a lot of force into the ground, and really that's that's about it. So in terms of, you know, sets and reps, just a few sets of a few reps, similar to the max effort jump stuff, you know, maybe like two, three sets of five landing, some like that, you know, maybe three on the top end. A lot of times I just do two, so like 10 total hard landing phases in a session, you know, so maybe that'll put me like anywhere from five to 15 or 20 in a week at the top end. I tend to do a ton at all, which is contrary to a lot of. Well, before you say great into that, let me pick up on like three or four things like this enormous amount that you've said there that in a very short period of time. So first of all, let me just pick up on the single leg, arms race, because basically we did an entire episode talking about why single leg vertical jumping from a concentric point. You know, a concentric point of view doesn't make any sense is because basically it's the same as power training, what you're doing is you're moving yourself away from a velocity under the force velocity spectrum towards the force end and you end up somewhere in the middle, which is basically power training, which doesn't really do very much. Not uniquely anyway. The opposite is the case here, because when we talk about the eccentric phase of being an interesting part by switching from two legs to one leg, you are now making the drop landing essentially for the same starting drop height, you're making it more challenging. So essentially, that's an interesting thing that you can do, rather than kind of, you know, running the risk of kind of having people standing on really high boxes, starting to twitch that your insurance might not be able to cover you or something goes wrong. Yeah, I don't need like a head height box. There's actually some pretty cool studies in gymnasts, kind of doing drop landings off pretty insane heights. They loved crazy, crazy death drops. We actually would go from a box that was like we'd stack a bunch of towers like at high and things like that and do probably way too many drops off that. Yeah, that was a very popular thing back in the day. We could revisit those older studies because the joint talk calculations that were done were kind of, you've got these kind of obviously gymnasts to generally not kind of big guys. I mean, I must get them, but they're not like, you know, sort of big people. But the joint talks were pretty much the same as kind of top level powerlifting joint talks. Because obviously, eccentric forces, you can kind of double what you can do concentrically. you know, it just kind of is mad. Well, what you can do that. So, but yes, going back to the kind of practical point I was making, one leg drop landings, drop jumps, give you a lot of flexibility in terms of increasing. If you want to go down that route, of increasing the amount of force that you're hitting on landing, obviously you can do that. Which I think is interesting. It technically is a progression really, but all your breathing is making it more difficult. That segues me into the next point that you raise, which is you're not using a large number of different complicated plyometrics and you're not progressing in the sense that people talk about it. This is an incredibly important point because this brings me to a major criticism I have of training conditioning, which is that people tend to try and play the kind of movement pattern coach. Which fundamentally, as we've mentioned before, I think, is misguided because your client is probably able to run rings around you. They've probably been pretty good at sports since they were like seven or eight years old and they can probably do all of the kind of movement stuff that you're playing on kind of programming. The idea that doing a whole sequence of progressively more complicated plyometrics is going to help them, I think, is misguided. Secondly, the issue of coordination means that a lot of this stuff isn't going to transfer. So trying to say, well, this is more difficult, and this is more difficult, and the difficulty resides in the coordination rather than the actual aspects of force production or anything like that. The difficulty resides in coordination. Then really, they're not connected with each other for a start, because they're with movement as its own motor program. And you're not really going to transfer unless you're practicing something to explicitly use in the sporting movement itself. So you've got to be really careful about what the role is here that you're trying to fill. Are you trying to coach the athlete for their sport if so, then OK. But be very clear that the movement that you're coaching them to be able to do is directly relevant. And when I say that, I'm thinking about specific movements like pitching, or where you've got track and field activity where you can really drill specific aspects for a movement that they're going to be doing a million times over their career. I'm not saying, oh, the soccer player needs to be able to do a sidestep. No, no, no, that's not going to work. That's where it breaks down. So coordination transfer is very, very much more limited than people like to think it is. I've got to be really careful. And again, as I say, what role you're trying to fill here. The reality is that plyometrics are changing peripheral structures where large-- I mean, you can kind of bring some kind of neural aspects into the eccentric injection. That's fine. But fundamentally, what we're doing is generalizable kind of adaptions are going to be predominantly peripheral. So ultimately, that's what we're aiming for with plyometry. And that means that all your complexity that you're adding is you progress someone through a period of weeks making the plyometric program more complicated is not changing the actual core adaption and core stimulus that we're trying to generate. We're trying to generate something that is peripheral. And messing around, I was nearly brewed down. Messing around with the movement pattern is not going in the direction that you want to go. So we're looking for something that is, yeah. Progress, if you want to, by moving to slightly high boxes, moving from two leg to one leg. But again, be careful about the injury risks associated with doing drop jumps because they do exist. Be sensible and make sure that your insurance does cover you. Fundamentally, you can progress in that way. But that's progressing for production. That's not progressing kind of complexity, which is, I think, the single biggest error that I'm seeing in S&C. The people trying to play movement pattern coach. And that's like, well, just put your moment and figure out what your assumptions are before you go down that route because your assumptions may not be valid. Probably I'm not valid. Yeah, I see a lot of ply-- well, they call them ply exercises. And it's usually at the start of a workout. And a lot of reps of very complex exercises, usually-- I mean, you've seen a lot of them hauling dumbbells and these are that kind of just bouncing around, not doing much. So not really any significant force landing and things like that. And you just kind of, you know, you hop around for-- Yeah. It's just creating low-level kind of sort of calcium amount of fatigue with the stretch. So the loaded stretch, essentially, which is not really what we want, if we want to get adaptions out to the rest of the workout. So-- and that brings me to the other point that you made your reference. They're kind of zone of volume that you're working with both inside a session and also across the week. Kind of sort of looking around about 10 repetitions per session, I think, is where you kind of localized on? Yeah, usually it'll be around there. Around there. So I think that's really interesting, because it's a little bit higher than what we were programmed for supermaximal esendrics in terms of number repetitions. But then the supermaximal esendric has that much longer duration. So generally speaking, the landing phases are probably going to be kind of maybe half a second or so, probably less and most scenarios, depending on what the coaching queue is. And I've got a question about that for you in a moment. But generally speaking, you know, you're probably adding up to a similar number of seconds to the total exposure anyway, and that's not very which, from a fatigue point of view, is actually quite other than the kind of matched, because essentially we're creating a similar amount of fatigue as we would do in a supermaximal esendric. And again, we try to keep those reps pretty low as well for the purposes of avoiding excessive post-workout fatigue. So, you know, I think that kind of zone that you're talking about makes a lot of sense in that context. Yeah, 'cause you have three to five second rep or so-- Exactly, exactly, exactly. Head up about the same. Yeah, it adds up to, you know, not exactly the same, but it's very, very similar ballpark, which I think is quite instructive. So, yeah, very, very far away from some of the absolutely bananas, numbers of kind of weekly ground context that I'm seeing in the literature. And, you know, similarly, probably what you're seeing in the fitness industry at large. And that brings me on to another point, which is that, one of the issues or one of the, is it an issue or is it a question, it's kind of like a, it's something that is debated, it's a controversial point, I guess, is the exact cue to provide to people when they are doing a kind of plyometric activity. 'Cause there's basically two extremes and people can kind of pick one of the extremes or they can pick somewhere in the middle. But generally speaking, either the cue is going to be to try and maximize performance in the concentric phase. So, basically, you do the drop jump and the cue, the athlete is, when you hit the ground, I want you to try and rebound as high as you possibly can. I want you to use the landing phase to jump as high as you possibly can. The other cue, which is largely associated with the kind of sprinting community, because for a long time, if not, if I think they're still mired in this era, but the sprinting community has had historically and probably stored us to this day, have a belief that you can somehow run faster by reducing ground contact time, which is absolutely kind of biomechanically illiterate, but they believe this. They believe that if you deliberately try and reduce your ground contact time, you'll go faster, and I'm like, okay, so just in classical mechanics term, tell me how you can reduce your impulse, which is the thing that actually kind of propels you forward, and basically impulse is four times time. So you've got a certain amount of ground contact time, you're going to reduce your impulse by reducing time, and you're going to go faster, really. And you believe that. Doesn't pass lift test. Honestly, but you've got some really high profile research just repeating this nonsense. And honestly, just to lose faith in humanity, when you kind of like, honestly, like 15, 16 year old, I remember being like this, like, I remember doing this kind of stuff in physics class at school. I think like a 15 or 16 year old who's studying physics at school could tell you why this is wrong, literally. I mean, that's very frustrating for me when I see very high profile people in that industry believing and stating that you can somehow reduce the time of Aetherwood to blues impulse and go faster, you can't. It's not going to happen, it's the other way around. What happens is, as you run faster, you necessarily spend less time on the ground because you're on moving faster. Therefore, your foot is coming off the ground earlier than it was when you're running slow. So they've got the direction of causality, the opposite way around. They're like, oh, if I reduce ground conduct, I can run faster, no. If you run faster, you won't necessarily reduce ground conduct time, it's that way around. Not the other way around. Honestly, I mean, come on. It's like, I know we have a better reputation in the fitness industry. If you're not being the brightest sparks in the kind of universe, but this is seriously taking the best get. Um, so, yeah, okay. So the cue, The brief side kind of run on that issue, but basically the queue is coming off the ground as fast as possible because the idea was that, you know, if you trade the athlete to reduce ground contact time, you can make them run faster, obviously, that's just believe in say. And that I am now worried about that. Yeah. That was a question. That's true. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, I just tell people to make sure they're hitting the ground as hard as possible. Yeah. Kind of, you know, for me, whatever happens on the concentric facial is fine, but I'm not focused, you know, on it really all that much. If you're, I mean, if you're hitting the ground as hard as, you know, you can, that's going to get you what you need. And I mean, if I'm measuring, you know, the change in height for a drop jump and things like that, if you're doing it the same, you're hitting the ground as hard as you can and your techniques, the same, and it should be if you've been doing it for quite a while. And then your height's going up. Cool. Well, yeah, that is what I want, but I'm not telling you to focus on being super fast off the ground or hitting that, you know, the height specifically, just kind of letting it happen as a result of what's going on, the adaptations you've made. That's a really interesting point because I think that just as a gut feel, I think that if we want to use a drop jump height to ratio with squat jump height, concentric jump height, in order to track stretch one cycle function, my gut feel will be try and match the concentric phase cues as closely as possible just to try and make sure that there's nothing weird that is causing a difference between those two jump heights. So if I'm, I mean, I'm not, I'm not saying that we would use that cue all the time. I'm just saying that for the purposes of an actual test, if I want to the straight shortening cycle function test, I would probably cue the same concentric phase cue, so just jump as high as you can in both phases. I think generally that's what I mean, I still want them to jump as high as they can, but I'm still like the cue I use as I always say. No, I understand why they put out that. I understand why you're queuing this in the way that you're queuing it in the context of the workout. It makes sense. I'm just adding so that people don't then have two different cues if they want to use this in a measurement context. Just like if you were measuring this once a week or, you know, kind of just as a way to check straight shortening cycle function, I would probably cue both jumps the same way, constantly phases, just to equalize what's happening because it's one of the things that goes wrong when we try and kind of use two different jump. I mean, like counter-moving versus squat jump is horrendous because you've got all kinds of things changing in different directions at some time. So you like, am I cue's help to normalize some of that stuff, but it doesn't perfectly normalize it. So it's like just being aware, I guess, for measurement purposes, if you want to use two different jump variations and try normalize them to each other as much as you can, in order to just see the difference of the straight shortening cycle, yeah, then it helps to make them different. No, I understand what you're trying to do. It's actually really interesting. I've never heard anybody cue that before, but logically it makes sense because we are trying to create our eccentric phase kind of adaption. And arguably, it probably makes more sense for the stated purpose of improving this. So going back to the stiffness, sorry, not stiffness, going back to the sprinting issue, the kind of ground contact time thing tends to get kind of connected to joint stiffness and depending on the way you measure it, legs difference or verticals, because that's kind of the thing that you're looking at in this sprinting context. So logically, the cue that you're using would make more sense for that particular quality or that particular phenomenon than get off the ground as fast as you can, because ultimately stiffness is kind of what you are targeting there with that cue. You'll be active muscle stiffness from systemic stuff, yeah, vertical leg and joint stiffness are all active measures and nothing to do with tendon or anything like that. It's all kind of mostly eccentric strength. So yeah, you're kind of targeting that precise thing that ultimately is the underpinning mechanistic rationale for the sprint community you're looking for. So the reason they would say or you want to get off the ground quicker, what they're really kind of saying is you want to hire vertical stiffness, which people definitely confuse that with tendon stiffness, so yes, totally, yeah, I mean, one of the ways people go so wrong. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you're eccentric strength isn't up to the task, then it doesn't matter how strong your tendon is, how stiff the tendon is, you're just going to collapse, you know, it's a systemic stiffness issue. Equally if your tendon is really, really compliant, you can get some lag, but that plays more into the kind of getting off the ground fast to kind of concept. The reality is if you're able to leave your foot on the ground and produce impulse for a long period of time, that is going to make you run faster, you know, all things being equal. So again, kind of having higher vertical stiffness and not collapsing on every stride is interesting adaption from a sprinting point of view. Again, that sprint by mechanics, and this is taking us a little bit outside of the boundaries of what we're talking about, but yeah, so okay, cool. So the original question really was about what you're preparing in plyometrics and I just kind of wanted to pull a whole bunch of things out of what you said, because they're really, really interesting, so okay, cool. So probably when you got about five minutes left, so can you give us a couple of examples of silly things that people are doing, and then I can just sit and laugh at them? Yeah, so you mentioned one of them, and it was the whole idea that a lot of, we kind of mentioned it, a lot of what's going on in terms of plyometric adaptations is going on in the brain, like super spinal, I've seen people mention, you know, over and over for a bunch, and like you said, everything most of what we're after with plyometrics is peripheral stuff. It's not happening in the brain, the coordination aspects are, you know, if you have someone who's been doing all these things for forever since they were a kid, blank sports, you know, co-activation changes and all these things, they're not, they're not super relevant, you know, if you're taking a totally untrained person, then yeah, you could see some things happening, but with an app, we're really talking about untrained people. No, exactly, but people, they'll look at studies with untrained people and then, you know, say that these things happen when they're not, definitely not very important. The volume issue, so obviously we talked about using pretty low amount of ground contacts, and then all the time you'll see people doing 80, 100, 120, you know, even, even higher amounts than that, in a week, and I haven't even seen it, you know, in a session. And typically, you know, a lot of the times away people are trying to get away with that is by doing a bunch of very low intensity, not just one hour, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So you're, you're just kind of popping around a lot for a long time, and not really, like you're just not really doing anything at that point, like the adaptations are coming from the hard eccentric phase, so if you're doing very light, you know, kind of bouncing around and things like that, you know, you can, it would appear that you can get away with doing a million ground contacts, and that's going to be what's giving you, you know, these adaptations and causing some improvements, when really it's probably the very limited amount of actual intense contacts you're doing, and then some people are doing a ton of hard contacts as well, I mean, there's, you know, there's a paper that everyone loves to reference what they did, like 350 or something, single way, you know, jumps per session four times a week. Absolutely. And it's like, you know, the look at it. And they still didn't want us to get any tenders difference improvements, which is the crazy thing. Yeah. I mean, I still know when you're as much as stretching. I know, I know, it's like, they didn't even create a significant statistically significant improvement in tenders tenders, which is, and I, I guess it kind of, that sort of, you know, one of those important points that needs, needs to be pushed forward, which is that, you know, just the tendons strain in each of these kind of ground contacts, because plyometrics does produce pretty decent amount of tender movement, which is the point I was making earlier. And it's actually a good thing to have that ability. The tender moving around is, you know, kind of pretty substantial. It moves around a long way, much more so than it does in a strength training room. But it's not triggering any adaptions. And this really strikes the heart of, I think, the reason why the tendon kind of obsessed people are really upset with me at the moment is because I keep pointing out the fact that plyometrics, even though they produce tenders strains, are not triggering tendon stiffness increases. And they're in time models predicate, and they idea that tenders strain, you know, irrespective of any other feature, is what drives tenders stiffness changes? And it's not. It's demonstrably not from the very studies that they're exciting. So it would be, it would be pretty easy to tell if it was when I think every 360 jumps possession. Yeah. And like, yeah, sure. bit, but it got you less than five sets of four or reps that were a few seconds long on isometrics? - Ironically, it's exactly the same error, not exactly exactly, but like it's a very similar error to what the hypertrophy research community makes when they go, oh no, you just need high recruitment and then you can achieve hypertrophy. I'm like, okay, so I can achieve maximum recruitment in a vertical jump, so you can jump up and down all day and I'm gonna achieve lots of hypertrophy, obviously not. And then they look at you as if to say, you know, kind of, what are you talking about? I'm like, I'm demonstrating that you're wrong. It's what I'm talking about. You know, it's the same problem that you have with the tendon guys that, oh, no, it's just strain. I'm like, well, no, it's not because look at this study that has a billion repetitions of, we've kind of high strain activities and they're not triggering any tenders to change it. - They get super stiff tenders. - They get really upset with you. I'm just pointing out that you've got this, you know, kind of clear proof that your model is wrong. Anyway, so, sorry, anyway, you were pointing out that lots of low-impact biometrics is wrong for two reasons, high volumes, lots of tea, also low-intensity, no adaptions. So they get the worst possible scenario for both worlds. - Yeah, and you're just, you know, horseing around for 30 minutes at the starter session, just making everything else in the session and less productive. - Yeah, which is, the biggest point we always make on pyos is like, just put 'em later. It's great. I see people suggest them as a warmup all the time. Obviously, they're not a warmup. A warmup is a warmup when you increase your muscle tension. - It's just weird to think of, isn't it? People are like, oh, you know, because I've called this thing a warmup, therefore it's a warmup. I'm like, no, that's not how reality works. You have to understand that human beings are this really bad habit of believing that if they name something a particular way, then they've somehow made it change its nature and it doesn't work like that. Just 'cause you've called it a warmup, doesn't mean it's a warmup. - Anyway. - Thank you. - Let me go. - So many things. - I'll stop there before I run any further. Cool. So hopefully there was some useful threads in there and it wasn't just non-stop, 42 minutes of me running. We will come back next week. I'm not sure if we're gonna start the sequence of high performance physiology method podcast next week or whether we're gonna leave it another week, but very soon we will do a sequence of two or three episodes where we walk through exactly what the high performance physiology method looks like. And we will give specific examples for exactly how each part of the workout structure 'cause there's four major parts of the workout structure with an optional isometric fifth part. We will talk about exactly how that works and give examples for different sports. So if you're interested in getting a really practical insight on how to use this way of training for pretty much any athlete, 'cause I get loads of questions every week people saying, how would you apply this to wrestlers? How would you apply this to soccer players? How would you apply this to? We're gonna give as many examples as we possibly can, but it will be a template based kind of a set of episodes where we walk through exactly how to implement that. So please don't miss that. We'll be doing it very, very soon. But either way, we will be back next week with another topic.