The Evolved Science of Strength and Conditioning w/ Exercise Scientist Dr. Bill Kraemer

Let's say we're far out from the season, really just focus on that specific weakness that they have. And then once the season starts, we can train strength and we can train cardio and they won't go back to having a pathetically weak grip. Or they won't go back to having this pathetically poor endurance concept. - Well, a lot of athletes for a lot of reasons just aren't strong enough. Here we've done, been doing strength training and for over a century and strength was the major feature that we needed to focus on. And I think that that becomes really a priority is that if you're a male athlete, you should be able to squat two times your body mass. - These are specific numbers that you can see in overlay. This sport versus this sport and you take an athlete and when you test that athlete, you can almost look and see where they would fit the best and how you compare these assessments. - We have a ton of different testing protocols that we do, the list. I can tell in football easily if that guy is NFL level or not. I mean, right away, we use the boy, the Eplea index and we know with that index of the three test exercises, you can pretty well know at the level of athleticism needed for an NFL team. - Isometrics, plyometrics, you only get to pick one. Which one are you gonna pick? Which one are you rolling with? - Everything is highly specific to the ad deputational aspect. So when you pick one, you pick the isometrics because you're trying to get tendent stiffness. If you're trying to get more powerful, you know, if you're doing power cleans, plyometrics can add to that forced velocity on the concentric side or with the stress shortening cycles. So it comes down to. - We're gonna go over the science of strength and conditioning and we're gonna start right now. I was privileged enough to sit down with the absolute legend, Dr. Bill Kramer. He is genuinely known as the quintessential pillar of strength and conditioning research. Basically, this dude is the man in the world of strength and conditioning research. We went over everything from overtraining to bare minimum strength standards, to the importance of recovery. All of these things, he dives deep. The first part of this podcast, sit down with your freaking notebook for 20 minutes and listen, just listen to what he has to say. Let's dive in to Dr. Bill Kramer. - Okay, Dr. Kramer, one of the first things that I wanted to ask you is actually based off of one of your earliest research papers. And it's where you were researching military cadets if I remember correctly. And this is back in the late 80s. And I think it was released in the early 90s. I'm just jogging my memory right now, but we're going through this. And you're looking at cadets who were running and cadets that were also lifting and running at the same time. And my big thing is somebody who does like to run and lift. What were the interference effects that you saw from this? What were all the big takeaways? What are things that we could apply? And how could we look at this paper? Can you walk us through this paper and let us know exactly what you found out from this really, really cool research? - Yeah, well, it's a great question. We were interested in that in the military. And I was utilizing soldiers from the 101st and 82nd Airborne groups. So they were fit men. And we were actually interested in it because there have been a study early on about compatibility of excise protocols that was done by Bob Hickson at University of Chicago, I believe, in the 1981. And there was, by the certain period of time, the group that was doing both actually went down in their performance capabilities. So we knew that the military at the time, when we did this study, which was the early 80s, we published it years later, but it was really in the early 80s that military training was predominantly running. And one of the roles I had as a captain in the US Army was to look at soldier fitness and help develop that whole phenomenon during my active duty work as a captain in the US Army. So we wanted to understand that. So what we did was we kind of took a cue that Dr. Hickson had shown that realistically, many times it could be the fact that it's a type of overtraining. You just got too doing too much to really manage the different stimuli, et cetera. So what we did in this particular study is that we decided to use what would be a manageable program where we'd lifted, we trained four days a week, Monday and Tuesday and then Thursday and Friday. But a Wednesday, a rest day, up at the Eucerium at the Navy Clubs that I was stationed at. So we had really an ideal situation because all of our war fighters were there and they were stationed there so we could pretty much control things to try to get a feel for it. So essentially, if I remember right, what we did was we typically would run in the morning and then lift in the afternoon each day. And we had different type of different groups too. So we had one group that did everything. They did the running and lifting. They did everything, the total programs on the 48-week. We had another group that just did the running portion so did all the running and I'll get into that in a minute, all the running. And then we had another group that just did, you know, upper body lifting and running. So that it was very common for a lot of guys just to do upper body lifting and no lifting on the lower body. And we wanted to see that. And then we had another group that did pure lifting, no running at all. You know, and that's really the way we looked at it. So what we did with the workouts is that on Mondays, the weight training workout was a strength training workout. So those who basically they did heavy loading, you know, the three to five, eight, they were in the heavy loading with regard to the rep zone. So they were doing the heavy lifting on Mondays. And then on Tuesdays, the lifting in the morning was really more of a type of we called at the time a bodybuilding, really. You kind of took it from what we did with bodybuilders in the cut phase where you would do moderate lifting, you know, eight to 10 and you would be then doing short rest, you know, two minutes or whatever between sets and you know, going from there, where is, you know, where so you were really doing, you know, short rest type of workouts and yet some supersets and there, et cetera. Wednesday they rested and then what happened on Thursday and Friday, we repeated the Monday and Tuesday workouts. The run training was done on Monday when they were doing the strength workout. The morning running was in fact the very much of an interval training program. So we did, we went to the track in nearby NADIC and we did, we did interval training. We did interval training on the track, you know, we're from 100 to 200 meters. We were doing intervals and high intensity intervals, you know, what's called hit training now, okay? And then on that Tuesday, the morning was a long distance run at about 85%. You know, we would run for 30, 40 minutes set, you know, pretty much 85% of the max. So it was a relatively high intensity run that they'd be used to from all the two mile training they did because the army at the time was testing for two mile run and this type of thing and so that's what we had. So we had, we had really kind of what I customized as a type of protocol that could be utilized, if in fact whatever we learned from it, I didn't want to be random and it was very organized. Everything was, you know, actually, you know, validated and we had all of our training coaches there that I had in my group in my platoon. And we ran it really well, probably one of the best studies that in my career that I've ever done. Unfortunately, there's a mistake in one of the tables in the publication, but here in New Well, that's the study we did. So, you know, there was a combination of people that were already, you know, probably aerobically fit, you don't get into the airborne groups unless you're aerobically fit and they had, you know, some background but weren't highly weight trained at that time because weight training wasn't something, that's something that with my goal, I was given the role of having to promote resistance training in the military at that time. And as a part of soldier fitness, because there was a big need for that for a lot of different reasons for adaptations related to functionality, et cetera. We know more about that today, but at the time, that's kind of what we had going on. So, what was interesting was the compassion had ability question. What happens when you do both types of training protocols together and you're doing everything? And we were doing it at relatively high demanding workups. So it wasn't like we were resting on Wednesday in the weekend. So that wasn't a problem. Some athletes today don't know what a day of rest means. But I think from the standpoint of what we found was the biggest discovery that we found was we did muscle biopsies. And we wanted to see, well, what happens to the muscle fibers when in fact they are having to deal with recruitment to do the both types of things or just singularity or both types of things. And what we found that had been, you know, at the time was a little controversial and then other people devalued it with animal studies and everything else. It turned out we were really right. We had a great group and I was very thankful for the late Degarry Dudley at University of Georgia and basically at Ohio University, rather. And then also the my good friend Bob Starran who really put our as just a chemical technology and assays in the highest level. And so the data from that was really amazing with regard to the people that we I worked with to make sure we had all the biopsy analyses in it. HISTICEMISTRY all done right. So what we found was really we were kind of fascinating. We found something that people don't think about often. But that if you remember that the size principle that's so important to functionality of I mean Vladimir Zaskyrsky and I talked about this a lot. You know, Heneman's whole lifetime was looking at how size principle recruitment on demands of the of the activity was really basing basically telling you what you get when you do a workout. And I thought this is really interesting and we knew that the demands would be quite different. But in some cases you'd have fibers that would be doing both. And if you look at if you look at size principle when you have a particular demand what happens is that activation of muscle is an electrical phenomenon. And that's where you have the you know, the threshold for all or none recruitment of a particular motor unit. That's a hurts. That's that's an electrical signal that basically comes out. So the higher you go in the from low to high in the array of motor units you have in your body the higher force production as a higher hurts versus lower force production like running maybe has a little bit lower hurts depending upon its intensity and what your motor unit configuration is. So what we were very interested in was what happened to the fiber sizes because you know, obviously hypertrophy of the fibers are one of the main objective of understanding you know, adaptation size changes. And what we found was really interesting. You know, it was a fact that when we did the the guys who just ran alone didn't do any lifting all they did was just run. What we found was if you think about it they're not recruiting even with the interval training which surprised us they're not recruiting that many high threshold motor units and there's not in guys that are relatively fit to begin with there's really no hypertrophy that occurs you know and you'll hear a lot of different people you know, if you're out of shape you're you're so out of shape you're you know, we we call couch potato. Maybe you get some stimulus to change some of the constant size but in this group what we found was interesting. In that group we were the first to show that heavy duty oxidative challenges you know, grow big stress of intervals and high intensity long distance running it really caused the type one fibers the slow twitch fibers early in the recruitment phase to get smaller and we go well this you know, we did we looked at it over and over and we you know the fibers are actually getting smaller and and and that we figured after a lot of thinking about and looking at the data for a long time and finally getting approval to publish it years later we found out that oxidative stress we knew from work that was done I might just you know, change later on that there's really it's really obviously thing important that fact that the distance that oxygen has to travel if you reduce the size of the type one fiber all the transport distances for the mitochondria that worms now we know worms through the muscle is basically shorter you have more you have more capillary capillarization of that of that fiber and it's made to produce you know, it's made to produce optimal oxygenation of the of the fibers that are when they're actually working primarily just to produce endurance capacity and that's that's what we now know happened so you got a you got a reduction in type one fiber size in the low threshold node units of type one fibers nothing happened to the type two fibers because they're just sitting around doing nothing you know, so if you just go out do running even sprinting your high threshold muscle motor units and muscle fibers the type two fibers they don't do anything so they didn't decrease in size it didn't increase in size it's just these are the vastest lateralus muscle we're talking about just to be specific this is the leg muscle so they were they were basically doing really nothing and nothing happened so that that's what you found now when we if we go to the other extreme and we say okay well what about the guys that did all the lifting only okay they just lifted and what we found there was kind of what we expected when you have that high hurts to get at those high threshold motor units with heavy loading you got to go up the ladder okay you got to go up the ladder from low to high recruitment and what happened was the the the the muscle size increased across the board with regard to the type one and the type two muscle fibers everything got bigger and they increased in size and this is over you know three month workout three months of workout 36 workouts so and you know pretty like I said pretty pretty well structured and tense volume wise everything we knew at the time and so it it basically all got bigger okay now that shows that hey the type one fibers got bigger too and they don't like to get big by the way we learned often is that the type one fibers fight getting big for the same reason that they shrunk in the in the high intensity endurance guys because they they want to optimize oxygen kinetics and and movement patterns and distances so they optimize oxygen capabilities they don't like to get big but they got they increased in size and that that's very regular and found nothing surprises there and and that's the two extremes so then we said well what about the the group that that did what about the group that just lifted upper body I'll take that one next they they didn't do any lower body you know lifting it all and what happened there well obviously you know we did all strength tests obviously if you trained a muscle it got stronger more you know this type of thing but what happened there was a fact that that those leg muscles did something interesting because when you do upper body exercise you stabilize yourself a lot right you're sitting there and you're using your your thighs you're doing isometric holds you know so nothing happened to the type to the type one fibers or the type two fibers except the fact that they they basically in the thighs they didn't see any decrease due to the aerobic endurance factors that went on so they they basically that that isometric stabilization and the different things you do when you're doing a variety of upper body lifts you know cause the to nullify the reduction in the size of the fibers when you're just doing pure high-intensity aerobic training and it went from there so then we finally got to the we finally got to the the combination group that did that did everything and we we just review we just remembered we we we we saw the different responses so well what what's going to happen well what happened is that the the the the dual training in our study found in these relatively fit guys they found that the type one fibers didn't get big at all member in the weight training only group the type one fibers got big they increased in size and increase in mass the type two fibers got big so you know it it basically what we found is compatibility goes to those fibers especially the aerobic fiber that are trying to do both because they have to be recruited for both. So we now know that basically if you're trying to gain size and you're doing a lot of high intensity of aerobic running simultaneously and you're kind of going to nullify gains in size for a lot of your motor units that are the type one in the lower threshold. So that was the interesting thing we found. We found also that power output in the combined group was also not as good as it was in the only lifting group. So power can be and Gary Dudley, Blake Gary Dudley found that with his isochonetic work later and basically we found that. Now if you look at John McCarthy who was at Wisconsin at the time did a similar study with kind of average people that were just going for fitness things. He didn't have the same. He went with a three day week program and he didn't find any incompatibility because of the fact that he backed off on the prescriptions where we were going with full bore, maximum strength, power size and full bore sprinting and everything else together. And so basically backing off the prescription, you know, basically was was showed that the compound pat ability maybe goes back to what Bob Hickson said, the late Bob Hickson that said that hey, it really gets to be an overtraining. My our study of bar group showed that the overtraining is really a function of those lower threshold motor units that got to try to adapt to high hurts and low hurts and they got to get good at both. And it's difficult. And basically if you're trying to get size, you basically if you if you don't back off your aerobic or periodize that properly, you're you're going to you're going to get size as certain muscle fibers, but not others just because of this this battle that's going on when you have to do both. So that's kind of what that study was all about. And I think it showed some unique physiological adaptation aspects of muscle fibers and motor units. And it tells you that you got to be careful as you know, now decades later, you got to be careful on how you periodize and how you wide, wide rest and that basically know what your targeted workout is for. I mean, if it's targeted for what phase you're what you're trying to do and you don't want to you don't want to you know offset a target by doing something with what you what we call now non functional overreaching because you did something that was just stupid on top of something. So the body is very careful to try to optimize what it does best at the each level of the motor unit recruitment for the primary muscles. And you know, strength and testing or you know, if you trained it, they got they got a little bit stronger. You know, we also saw that that if you when you when you test certain exercises, it basically are going to if you train and properly, you're going to get stronger. But but the read but how it all works with regard to the total programs integrating and are different. So that's that's in a nutshell of what that study did at that point in history. Our strength training podcast is sponsored by our own strength training app peak strength. You guys don't have to be an athlete to train like an athlete. When we're training like an athlete, we want to focus on strength endurance, explosiveness, speed, all of these factors come into play and even as someone who's aging and we want to keep our health to a high degree, we have to make sure that we're developing and maintaining all of these different strength characteristics. That's exactly why we have training plans so that you guys can optimize your total fitness. All you have to do is click the first link in the description, head over to peakstrength.app, the Google Play Store, if you've got an Android or the Apple iOS store, download peak strength, make sure that you submit your email. Once you submit your email, then you can go through and you can select the exact program or sport that you want to train for. In this case, I recommend training for total athletic fitness. And when you sign up for a full year, you're going to get 38% off, commit to your fitness for a full year, especially in that athletic fitness path. Now let's get back to Dr. Bill Kramer. Okay, Dr. Kramer, the next question I have is going to be, I'm trying to go through this and really think about the question I have is really the group that ran and lifted. Did they have more strength than the group that just ran alone? And what I'm trying to think through is from a periodization perspective is that if I have a wrestler or a crossfitter, let's say, and they have a very weak point in their performance or a very weak point in their assessment. Let's pretend we got a wrestler who's got a pathetically weak grip, but also low cardio. Does it make sense that we should focus, like, let's say, further out from the season, let's say we're far out from the season, really just focus on that specific weakness that they have. And then once the season starts, we can train strength and we can train cardio and just know that that's going to help us maintain both of those attributes and they won't go back to having a pathetically weak grip. So even with a crossfitter point, maybe it's like they can focus on one specific lift further further out. And then once they get closer to the competitive season, you can add in cardio and continue to strength training, just know that they're not going to be put, they're not going to lose a ton of those gains. Does that make sense? I think that's where I want to go with this next question. If you can break that down. Yeah, I mean, I think the advances in how we look at player development, our own whole book on this, how we look at player development and looking at each individual athlete complex and how we're going to train them by sport and by individual athlete within the sports is gotten more highly specific to that individual athlete, what they bring to the table. In general, what you're saying is, but typically what we end up doing is say, our biggest thing in collegiate athletics right now is regardless of the sport is that it kind of runs the gamut of talk. I'll give probably in July is that basically they're not, well, a lot of athletes for a lot of reasons just aren't strong enough. They haven't, we've kind of here we've done, been doing strength training and, you know, for over a century and strength was the major feature that we needed to focus on. And I think that that becomes really a priority is that, you know, at Ohio State, we talk about the fact that if you're a man, you should be a male athlete, you should be able to squat two times your body mass. We don't have to go higher than that, but that's our cutoff for really fit into, you know, somebody that strength his or strength fitness at the level that we now can maintain. If you're a woman, you should be about 1.85, you times your body mass and you'll find many athletes that, you know, you can say to focus on all these other things, they're just weak. They got what a friend of mine called their highly skilled athletes with recreationally fit bodies. They have recreationally fit bodies, but they don't really have the strength. So a lot of times we start periodizing and working on target goals and we have to do the testing and assessments to realize, well, what are they really defec- what's their deficit at? So many we get too sophisticated where, you know, we're dealing with things that are really great, but how they're weak. What the hell are we worrying about this or that for when they're so weak? It doesn't matter. It's like I was telling some of the other day, if you're going to periodize a guy who only, you know, I'll use a guy for males here a second, if you could only lift about one time your body mass in a squad, why am I worrying about heavy light days? I just going to be lifting heavy. I got to get you up to about 1.5 before we worry about what you need to recover. You got to look at another friend of mine dead, he's got different quadrants. So every quadrant of fitness has to do with the different focuses that you can focus on, but many times you have to understand, for example, what you're up to really good strength levels and then you get into all in just in that quadrant to high strength, you're adequate. So I'm not talking powerlipters, not lifting lifters. I'm talking people are just adequately strong enough as a male or female, that basically now you're in that quadrant, but now sleep is so important, nutrition is important. It's important for everybody, but now you're starting to need things that are very much vital for your adaptational aspects. So what we end up doing is from this study, we found that, yes, most athletes that are not really good at it. really a strength fitness wise are starting out because these these warfighters were just they hadn't really been high resistance training they were primarily focused on aerobics so they were likely fit but now we had to bring in to the strength training aspect so you'll find people like that and some people are so aerobically fit that they're actually a week you know we see that in wrestling now the tendency is not to do as much lifting in the collegiate wrestling because of the fact it's crazy how much it's going the other way now in wrestling well I think the reason be the reason that's stimulated in my mind is the former college wrestling coach and wrestling you know and high school from a wrestling perspective I think it's gone that way because now it wasn't legal to wrestle during the off seasons NCA opened up the the floodgates you can wrestle year-round so they're already getting high amounts of glycolytic and angular forces and wrestling that type of thing and I think a lot of the coaches believe and and probably rightly so that the musketeers getting trained it goes way back to the Greek origins of wrestling and how it developed the body you know this type of thing but I think ultimately what what happens is there eventually it all falls back to fact if you're really fundamentally weak your muscle and your muscle stiffness and tendance stiffness is are going to suffer and you're going to become probably a little more breakable on some of these areas just because the strength level while it's very good within the mechanics of of what you're doing on the mat it may not be as good you know to take the break level of these different tissues high enough so you don't get a you know an injury from from just not being strong enough again back to break points of muscle and connective tissue but I think the you know there's a lot of stuff like that that's going on and everything does as in phases you know and there's reasons there's things that stimulate it and you know it you know I think that that's that's what happens you know that's historically I've been in this business long enough to know that everything ebbs and flows with all the different cultural you know things but I'll say one thing that that I think we got to go back to what we knew a hundred years ago maybe maybe we got to focus on are you really strong enough and in the major muscle groups you know and that and then like I like to say then you can go and start looking at you know we have a whole shoulder program for this or that or you got your your ankle you got your injury prevention stuff that you fold in but it's got more player development's got more sophisticated I you know as a senior advisor for you know performance and science at Ohio State I work with all the different teams and coaches and you go through a plethora excuse me you go through a plethora of different things I think for the most part I don't see that with the performance coaches or the strength coaches at Ohio State they're all right on but then you got to translate it through the the lens of a head coach the lens of a sport coach and that's where that's where you have to you know that like Meg Richie said many years ago in a speech in an NCAA coaching education is really vital and keep teaching the sport coach what it's about because they don't get that type of education so it's something that did you work through we're very fortunate when I was at UConn in Ohio State have really great performance strength coaches and people that could communicate that with it but you still see that that happening to a certain degree everywhere and you try to make sure that it doesn't affect player development okay Dr. Cramer I'm thinking through this lens this is you know talking on assessments talking on and any specific research on assessments do you have any you know top of mind or even research out there that you could look at let's say because we're talking about wrestling we're talking about football let's say for football specifically you're looking at okay these specific types of assessments of 40 a broad jump a vertical maybe maybe we even talk about you know a clean and then you're looking at wrestling and you're going okay wrestling we got a 5k we got pull up rep test we got again maybe a clean or something like this do you know and then going further is there any evidence or is there any research that would show like okay the two times body weight back squat maybe for an offensive lineman 600 plus pounds that might be too much but in regards to wrestling that same number you know you got a 184 pound wrestler they probably should be doing you know that that amount of a two times body weight back squat you know is there specific numbers that you can see in overlay you know this sport versus this sport and you take an athlete and you when you test that athlete you can almost look and see where they would fit the best and and how you compare these these assessments with the research out there where almost two you could be able to look at and be like you know this is too strong we don't need to go past this point I guess if you could talk on this and let us know about what these assessments mean and and and and breaking that down even further well I think you know that's where all the programs and the stuff I'm working with with analytics at Ohio State and working with other you know with my old Yukon data and you know the bottom line is is that we have a ton of tests that we can do and you know you we look at you know we have a ton of different testing protocols that we do realize to inform us as to what that athlete composite as I say in my book and there's an athlete composite that basically is made up of a whole bunch of different things and then you have to make sure the athlete composite is gonna fit the level of competition and what they're doing and and you can pretty well tell that I mean we got prediction models that that basically I can tell in football easily if that guy is NFL level or not I mean right away you know we use the the boy the Eplea index that we developed that I helped develop and he worked with you know years ago and we know with that with that index of the three test sector sizes you you can pretty well know at there at the level of athleticism needed for an NFL team it's being extended down again but we we've got I mean I look at you got to look at the bottom line of what's a breakable and unbreakable athlete and that means that we have strength so we we test them you want to test the major muscle groups so we you know you do the the squat just because it's in the athletic position you do the bench press and the seated row you do the power clean and then you may be doing our DL as well and we know you know if you look at all the data out there on you know with regard to what we know out there is that you know that there's a certain hell but Biorna who I when I was a young coach back in an intern back up and student teacher back up to Twin Cities and in in in 75 you know he had he already had a book out in 1975 at Bundi Art a systemized weight training that had what all the strength levels for levels of excellent good bad for boys and girls in you know high school etc and I hurting give a speech you know on that and you know to this day I have that little book and I'm ever using that when I started to get into college into coaching in high school college coaching so there definitely is levels you know but we found we found along with the work I did with Tom Newman at Yale University and he did a tremendous amount of of work with me you know for number four number four years or so we pretty much got cut off said you know it's about 2.0 is about the top now are they going to get that right away no but that's what you got to be going toward and women's about 1.8 to you know 1.9 of the squat it's about 1.5 for the for men for the bench and about 1.5 for the power clean about it's the same for the rock pull from the robboids and when you hit those levels you pretty much can see that that basically the the return is is great now if you're a powerlifter Olympic lifter though I mean that has none to do with anything because you're you're going to get more so we got into the point where at a certain point if a lineman is is you know doing is 600 pounds at a 300 pound lineman which I've seen many many do you know they're good they're not the better but then you monitor it so you can maintain it so are you building in a developmental program or are you maintaining to make sure you've got the other facets of your of your position have you got this if you got all the other injury prevention stuff if you got the movements capabilities you have enough aerobic capability you know that's the other thing too you can do beep tests we're not most athletes you know except for maybe some offensive lineman are pretty fit and today's world you don't see it like you did in the old days they're aerobically pretty fit you know so you know you've you've got to decide right now We do cycle testing, we do a lot of bike testing and cycle testing. You know, for certain athletes, one of my former doctoral fellows that Yukon is now the head of the VIP out at the UFC out in Vegas, you know, and wheels with MMA type things. You know, it's the same thing. It's taking ideas of what's, here's a test profile of strength. Here's a, we do force plates, we take power testing, you know, or we can do it. If I'm high school, I'm going to do a vertical jump, but a piece of chalk. I mean, you got power testing. You can get more sophisticated if you're using, if you're using force plate, obviously. And then you have different speed testing and agility testing. Your aerobic testing can be one and we try to stay away from long distance running for all athletes, unless that's our sport, you know, the challenge we get into, for example, in soccer, they're already running like crazy a lot. So now the testing is used to make sure you're not, you know, the training you're doing in, in, in for the sport. It's not depleting you or making you slower or making you less powerful. Can you tolerate the decelerations that are going on? So it takes a, it takes an array of different tests and then you have the prescription for each segment of each mesocycle because you only have so much time with each athlete and that has to do with scheduling with the coach, et cetera. And you have to look at all these things and then you put the program together to say, well, where's that, you know, we used to spider graph, you know what I'm saying. We have, here's, here's the goals for each of these different elements. And there's where you are. So where you, here you are in August and we, that's why testing is important. In the old days, he used to yell at you say, well, we don't train to test. Yeah, you do. You're trained to test because testing reflects what you can do, you know. So the bottom line is we take spider graphs and you can see the spider graph of that. Individuals are very different than one over here. And then you have to focus or individualize what the program is to really try and get at making the weak things better. When I say weak, I mean, what it be strength or power. And then you monitor things over the season. That's a big thing we've done with what is monitoring over the season in the workout logs that I, my top newman is really the workout log king, you know. I mean, if you talk to a coach and you say, hey, give me your six months of workout logs and you don't have them. What the heck you, what I'm going to do, you can't, you don't know you, you know, when I was growing up. You know, getting into weight training back in grade school. The first thing I learned is you keep the diary workout log. Everything you do is got to have a workout log. If you don't have workout log, what good is it? You don't know what to do. What you're doing. So that's the other thing. You know, you monitor workout logs. You basically know you're testing. You know, you try to individualize as much as possible to get them better at what they're not go so good at my, my friend and colleague for years Steve Flex as well. What are you trying to get good at, you know, this type of thing. So it's, it's really a comprehensive process now. And you sit within the dearth of understanding there. You know, a study isn't going to take you every step of the way, but it's most big ones are going to point you in the right direction. Hopefully you're good at reading papers and I'm not getting taken away by meta analyses. It basically use algorithms that throw you away from what is consistently known fundamentally. And it's a, it's a challenge. So there's the science and the art of strength and conditioning. And that's kind of where everybody's stuck in. And that's why, you know, the computer now with computers and AI and all things you can do analysis of, you know, Coach Martin, my late friend coach Martin at Connecticut, he used to take all the paper workout logs and then go fill them in on the Excel sheet pipe of men. And we didn't have the mobility to do things and it was really tedious. But now you can get that all in on a on a, on a iPhone or an iPad all goes in. It goes to a program and you can then analyze it and see what's going on. And you can predict, well, I'm a big promoter of flexible non-linear because there's so many disruptions. I over a given mesocycle of eight to 10 weeks. We got to make sure that you're doing something that makes sense. And by the end of it, your testing doesn't come out. Then we know we made a big mistake or something like that. So it's, it's a phenomenon of training technology today and training utilizing technology. But not letting technology overview some of the simple facts that I learned when I was a little kid is, hey, you got to get stronger there, buddy. You know, the sponsor for our podcast that keeps it rolling is our own strength training at peak strength. If you're a general athlete and you're trying to get an edge on your opponents, peak strength sets you up perfectly. We're going to help you get stronger, faster, more explosive or even increase your endurance. If you're in a sport that maintains worn endurance like wrestling or swimming, anything along those lines, we have dozens of different sports that also focus on in season training and out of season training. All you guys have to do is click the first link in the description. Head over to peakstrength.app, the Google Play Store or the Apple iOS store. Once you download peak strength, submit your email. Okay, submit your email and then go through find your specific sport or your specific position. Once you fill that out, we're even going to ask you where you're at in regards to your season. We want to help you train in season or off season. We want you to peak at the right time when you're training for a sport. It's not just a season by season thing. It's a year round commitment and that's exactly why we also offer 38% off when you commit to your training for a full year. Bill Kramer. Yeah, that's great right there. One thing you're talking about strength standards and I wanted to bring up, do you have any numbers on clean and vertical jump specifically in relation to women that you could share with us? Like that you've seen in the research and that you've seen done as far as those strength standards are concerned towards the female population? Well, you know, there's, there's, you know, we don't do a lot of relative stuff because sports not relative. You know, we all are, you know, like you mentioned before, yeah, if you're, you know, you better have the lean body mass. If you're a 300 pound, 20 pound alignment. And because I really, you know, you really need to have the lean body mass with your training, you know, it's not like the old days where guys were 300 pounds, you know, and we're just a big fat guy that doesn't work anymore. They got to build the moves. So are are basically, you know, from what we did with Tom Newman, what I've looked at in our data, which again, there, there can be. I'm trying to remember my, my, my, I'm trying to remember names and everything right now, but you can go look at you can pretty much find what that, you know, for us, we found that with all the work we did on sport teams and things we pretty much said, well, we want, we want a male to be able to do about two times her body mass in the squat. Okay, it's going to get in that in that, but it's it's good if it's there. If you get bigger, higher, you see done YouTube's, you know, they do. Well, that's great. But it's if you're, if you're wasting that much training time to get over 2.0. It probably is not the return for tendon and muscle stiffness isn't that great anymore. And that stuff we didn't or the pedics back in the old days. But the idea is that, you know, if you look at a power clean, I said it before, I guess, you know, our spot is is at one point, you know, our, our line and again, it's from our work we've done in a herodly in house, the Yukon and Yale and at Ohio State. It's at about 2.0 for men for squat and about 1.8, 5 or 8 for women that we'd like to see them at that level to be not a recreational body. Okay, they're an athlete body. You want the power clean to be about 1.5 for men and about 1.25 for women. Okay, and I saw that a lot with the Yukon women basketball players back in the early 2000s when I was there with coach, Judy and coach Martin. And over that time, you know, that that's important. And if you look at a we want a bench at about 1.5 for men and about 1.25 for women. And then the seated row should kind of equal the bench because we want the rhomboids and we don't want you over developing the front when you got to take care of the back. Now you got to remember limb lengths play a big role in everything like that. So this is also buffered by the fact that you have body dimension changes and things like that. Now these are just things we found as kind of standards where we can assure that we're having the tendon stiffness and the muscle stiffness that we need to so that you aren't breakable. That's really what it comes comes down to a lot of times. So again, a lot of internal data, a lot of this stuff, you know, it's things that we've just found through analyzing work out logs. It's really what Zasky Orskian I talked about many times. How did the Russians, they said what was the training logs? Well, what they did is they took successful out of it. athletes and they looked at the algorithms with regard to how they progressed and that's kind of how different standards and different types of programs came. That's where you got, you know, with Verushacki's shock programs and you got the Tudor Bapo with some of this stuff and the Conjugets and everything like that. I use flexible non-linear because you can do anything you want. You can be linear and then you get in sometimes and you can go, you know, you can do whatever, block later on with, you know, that stuff. So, you know, it really is irrelevant. It's really what you can get in quality. It's quality over quantity type thing. So those are the type of things that actually kind of inherently have to be looked at. Going through the motions is the biggest enemy right now for anybody who's training. I'd rather have you do a short, really high quality workout. I'd like to have you, how do high quality rest. I'd like to have you high quality recovery. So many recovery technologies now that we utilize that so that basically you can get recovered and ready to train the next day and that peak in most one, most important is sleep. So the aura rings become really important using HRVs and aura rings and then good nutrition too, you know, you know, you got to take care of yourself. You're your own company now in the world of collegiate sport in the United States and you win Olympic sports and everything else. This is something where, you know, and then you fight misinformation too. That's the other thing. I mean, I can't believe it. That's the hardest thing. When I started doing this stuff as a graduate student and back in by 1976, I mean, I was just a, there was nothing out there. Books. Couple papers. I remember reading about three papers in '74. I mean, it just wasn't a lot of information on anything I was made training and my goal in life was to become the best scientist I could. I probably turned down football coaching jobs or I mean, making a lot more money today. That's for damn sure. I could have went that route. I got friends of mine that went that route and making big, big salaries. Now I coach summer camps with guys that are, you know, legends down home nine yards. But the bottom line is I was so interested in studying, player development, studying, strength training that I went on to graduate school and it's sort of an interesting journey that I ended up going on with regard to getting a PhD in physiology and biochemistry to study the underlying cellular aspects. It just wasn't planned. It just, it happened and, you know, from opportunity. It's like Zasky Orsi is a physicist. He was a, he was trained in physics, physics and math. That's why he was in biomechanics. So, you know, I just have the interest in the applied player development and that type of thing. And so somebody always says, well, give me a program. Well, that used to, you know, that in 1975, that would be easy here due to the Lormy program, three sets of 10 to 8 to 10 and go for it. But, you know, even, even he was misinterpreted. Thomas the Lormy was an advanced lifter and what he was putting out was stuff he did in rehab rehabilitation programs is one of the three sets of the tenor am and the percentage of tenor am or all parts of rehabilitation programs he did as an orthopedic neural orthopedic person that ended up finding a spalled in clinic and in Boston and everything else. But yeah, you gotta, you gotta be really, and that's the thing. I give lectures to our sport performance at Strenkhoch's usually each semester and we cover a lot of different concepts relative to this or that. So you kind of underlying science that can kind of direct you in a direction, but you as a professional, then have to be cognizant of that direction and then cognizant of a decision making that you're doing. And ultimately, individualization is the hardest thing to do today because not everybody, you know, I always kid people. We do studies and we have standard errors on everything we do. That's because, you know, we show points on a bar now. Here's, you know, what some guys appear, some guys down here, guys, he's numerically. Basically, what that tells you is that any given stressor is affecting one body to a little differently than does another body. And that's why you have to have individual testing to see if in fact you need to individualize more for a particular individual that's going on. So it's, it's fun now. I mean, it's fun. I am able to see it decades in behind, but also looking at what currently is there and what we're doing. So it makes a big sense. So much that we're doing doesn't get in the literature because it's too early and it's not packaged right yet. You know, and I like to say I wrote a player, a family development book and tried to give a whole step by step view of that, which is the tips of a lot of icebergs, but goes from there. Dr. Crayman, the next question I had is actually even further research is like concurrent training. Do you have any research off the top of your head really where you would look at concurrent training and strength training with, so strength training with sprinting that you could look at like the 20 or the 20 meters sort of up to the 100 meters where you would see, you know, any possible interference effects or any type of degradation from strength to speed and vice versa. Yeah, I would, I'd have to, I'd have to look, look at up. I haven't seen anybody. The problem with studies is that, you know, the things that need to be done aren't sexy enough, excuse me, to get into a lot of journals because you say, ah, you know, you did a bunch of this or that. I think the fundamental thing is is that we now know things like you don't do static stretching before a 100 meter dash. You know, we know that if you do a lot of long distance running and you're a spinner, you're going to get slower, okay? And that goes back to what we found back in '95 and knew earlier about the compatibility. So I think a lot of it is based on the fact that here, here's a physiological basis of it. If you're going to do a lot of aerobic running and then the, you know, that's where certain sports like soccer, field hockey and different aspects, you know, have to realize that, and the only way you realize that is if you test them, you know, so when we get it, we put all our, we get our athletes on force plates, we can tell right away, hey, your power is down, you know, so if I was a strength coach today, I would buy myself a dual set of power plates. And I get a lot of information from the celebration on, on your kinetic chain just based on force plate testing. And then we test you in the weight room, we use the Eplea equation to monitor your lifts, you know, as a person, as what, what's your squat today? Well, you did three sets at, you know, 285, which was a 3 RM zone, okay, well, how does that relate to your 1 RM? And, you know, that can all be done with, you know, with electronically right off the bat. So I don't, you know, I tell people, if it, in the world we live in today, you have to know what are the good studies, the bad studies, you got to understand what's solid and what's not solid. You got to look at the physiological principles and basically you're not going to have a study take you every step of the way. But, you know, so, but if you, you know, that's the problem, you get some soccer coaches historically that I worked with, you know, they've run them to death. But now, but if I do force plate testing and you run up to death, I could see their power dropping. So, you know, and I could see their deceleration capability going down because their ability to, you know, if I look at the landing forces on a force plate, you know, there's a whole bunch of metrics we can use. You can see on the different systems, you know, we use for a lot of hawk and plates and stuff that, you know, look at some of these things, you can just tell what's going on. So, you don't really need a study. You say, hey, your, your athletes are, you know, are losing this. And then it's up to the, it's up to the, the performance or strength coach to be able to have to tell the head coach and the coach that head coach says, well, I don't care. Well, then there it goes, you know, you're, you're just part of the staff. I'm a consultant. I learned what that word is. I can give my information to you and if you like it, fine, if you don't, you know, it's kind of like your doctor. You can say, well, I think you really should do this and this, but you might say, I don't want to do that. Well, you have the right to do that, you know? And I think today we're getting into part of the world of athlete first. Athletes want to know what their testing is. They want to know what their programs are. They want to know the reality of it. They want to know so that they can know if, in fact, they're being optimized for their own purposes and the days of not explaining to athletes are not giving athletes testing and all this stuff. That's slowly shrinking away because athletes now are their own, that, it's me, you know, so you're doing something at your professional. I want to get as good as I can get to compete. and do whatever and win. And Tom Newman has another good statement of my old buddy. He says, you know, we all have the right to lose, you know? So if the coach does whatever, and if you don't want to do it. So it's gotten to the point where we really know kind of what we need to do. We have monitoring systems that tell us. And we know how to get strong. I mean, I could say, okay, you gotta lift heavy. You gotta have heavy phases, heavy lifts and that type of thing. - Okay, one of the other questions I have, Dr. Kramer is going off of this related to the force velocity curve. And we get a lot of questions about this specifically. And whether or not some people will ask us, if we feel it's an outdated model. And I wanted to pick your brain and see what you think, is this actually an outdated model or not? And the reason being is like you look at something like squat, which is high force here. And over on this side, and you look at sprints would be on this other side of the curve that would be high force or high velocity. But you're sort of looking at sprints or also high force as well. And so, what do you have to say on this? - No, I don't think it's outdated. I think what it is, it's the interpretation of it. You have the concentric force velocity curve, which goes from the isometric force at a given point. Okay, and then as you increase the velocity concentrically, the force drops dramatically. Okay, and that's just part of it. That's completely correcting, completely fine. One of a former student of mine, at least one of the masters is Jeff McBride down at AppState. Dr. McBride came up with the idea, well, if you're training, you gotta know what part of the force velocity curve you're training relative to the velocity. Now then you get into velocity specific training, which is a little too complicated for me. I mean, I have power exercises. And well, anyway, so the force velocity is fine. And then you have to realize there's an eccentric force velocity. An eccentric, the lowering of it goes from the isometric and as you increase the velocity, the force gets higher and higher because you're elongating and you're trying to break yourself. Okay, and here's, there's a whole story that I tell about Matt with regard to what breaks you. What's the Titan molecules that are now really part of the act in mycent Titan structures and muscle. But basically what's happening is you're breaking yourself. And then if you look at our early Kanutkin and I did a paper back in 1987 on this, if you look at power, if you do power measurements, power is intermediate. So you got the force velocity curve and the power curve goes kind of up and down in the meat. So here's your force velocity curve like this. And the power curve starts relatively here and goes up like that, like a parabola and within it. So your peak power is gonna be at different percentages of your force velocity curve depending upon who you are. And we can look at it that way as well. And that's why we don't worry about that as much. We get force-played data. We know what your peak power is. We know what your rate of force development is. We know what your landing forces are. We, for decelerations relative to your eccentric loading. We can get a lot of that right from the force plate. And it takes, and I always tell, I remember my first talk at the NSCA was probably somewhere in the early 80s. And I used to say, hey, you guys, and that's what our guys all do. You gotta study. You gotta look and understand and think. And when you don't, not sure you gotta ask questions. So that's why I do these podcasts. I know people won't do podcasts. They should pay me $5,000. But the idea is, is that I'm a teacher, coach, educator, my whole career from day one, as my undergraduate was in physical education, health education. I was trained as a coach, and that's what I got into. And then for whatever reasons it spun out, somewhere in the 1980, but for whatever reasons. Like I said, I've lost a lot of money, but that's staying with my football coach and career. But that's all another thing. But anyway, yeah, I mean, I think those things are fundamental that exist. And the hard part about training, velocity, training, I've got a new article I just wrote, on how do you train velocity without a technology that's coming out in probably String-Golistic Journal? And you gotta do a lot of things, and you can do it, but it's mostly related to power exercises, and plyometrics, and jumps, and things like this. And so the bottom line is, is you need strength, you need power, they're not. Now, oh, here's this, this is a real neat trick here that I tell people. Look at the power equation. I break it down for all the students and coaches. I don't care, I'm scientists. I use force times velocity divided by time, okay? And then it's easy to show that when you're strength train, you're training the force component, okay? So you're doing heavy lifting, you're getting more powerful just because you got stronger, 'cause it's force times, time, time distance divided by time, force times distance divided by time. So the time distance is your power training. Time is a denominator, distance is in the numerator, and you got force times distance divided by time. So when you got untrained people that are really terrible, and then you go start trying to do plyometrics and think, I got trained power. Shoot their weak, just strengthen them up. They're gonna get more powerful just because they're really weak. But when you get your, when that force component that variable is up there pretty high now, then you do have to train more, you know, specific power training, you know, plyometrics, combination stuff, that basically is gonna help move the power up a little bit, because you can't get it by just being stronger. And that's where the idea is, I said a lot of people worry about things before they're really ready to be worried about. So, you know, you know, it comes up, you know, that so take that equation and the force philosophy curve, concentric yeast concentric are both correct. But the yeast centric is all about the celebrations, you know, how well does your connective tissue, your tendon stiffness and your muscle stiffness tolerate the ability to decelerate your body. And with that, that's one bit, we look at that a lot. We were very worried about the landing forces. That there, is it their connective tissue slowing them down, or is it their musculature? You know, Tom Newn told me that, you know, looking at some of the stuff he did with Hawking, you know, if you look at the defense events in the combine, they land softly where's a lot of the offensive lineman land hard. And maybe that's, I don't want that. I don't want to see that with OSU football players or anybody because it means you're not, if you're landing hard, that means your body is not, your musculature is not controlling your landing, your connective tissue is hanging out for deer life and you're banging it all together. So anyway, that's kind of the idea. - So that leads into, I wanted to go over like a quick question around how strong you, like, do you want to build, let's say somebody to a 1.5 or 1.6 times body weight and then once a week add in plyometrics, or would this be, like, is there anything research wise that you can think of top of mind where it's like, - Well, I think, you know, it gets back to, sometimes, what we try to do is you can't just train, okay, some people say, well, we'll just train heavy squats and this will just do early hours and we won't do, no, you gotta have power cleans in there. You know, in the flexible non-linear, you say, okay, over these workouts, today we're gonna strength day, but you're gonna play with power too. You're gonna make sure they know how to do power cleans, you're gonna use that and train them in that too simultaneously, except you're gonna be really focusing on making sure they have all the technique available to do power cleans, hang cleans, whatever. I haven't gotten into, maybe Bob and Takata, some of my Olympic friends would probably not like me saying this, but we do certain snatches with, you know, Coach Morotti has really been really great at how state working with me, you know, we do certain snatches like kettlebell or whatever. I typically deal more with the hang cleans and the power cleans than I do would really snatch work. And at the bottom of that has to do with structural issues, et cetera. But the other thing we do, we always do with the power cleanses, we do the catch to make sure that we're training our disoleration, which is really important as well. So, you know, but I think what we're saying here is that, yeah, you know, when you're at, when you're low, really low, then it doesn't matter. But again, it's those quadrants, you know, you're 1.0 time your body mass are lower, it's quarter and one. Now you're 1.0 to 1.25. Now you're 1.25 to 1.5 and the fourth thing, you're 1.5 to 2.0. You know that, that as you go. through the different quadrants, you can add more and more capability because think of that force, think of that power equation again. Though as you increase the force capability, you have to add more power because of the fact that you're not getting it by just getting stronger anymore. The force component has a ceiling, okay? So that's kind of the whole issue there as well. So I had an important question because I do have my original copy of this book here and second edition. Yeah, this is second edition true. So you you work directly alongside with Zatziorski and I wanted to ask just a question is like, what do you think is like the most important or pivotal thing that you might have learned from Zatziorski and that that you learned throughout the years teaching alongside of him and also watching with his research and listening to his experience in the Soviet Union? Oh, that's like a seminar week seminar in itself. I think what it is is that it was really the translation of how the terminology from one group to the next group and you got to realize that in strength training there's a ton of terminology and when you got to Eastern European and Soviet Union type of thing, you know, they had a list of about this long, you know, all the different terms and what it meant. They had dichotomized things so dramatically. So the biggest thing we worked on together is to see where is the commonality of the decodamization of the terminology to what we're really talking about as far as fundamentally being important as a principal. I learned with him, I just learned to really appreciate the whole aspects of biomechanics. You know, he's really the father in many way of biomechanical principles from development of the EMG to looking at different, we worked on a study together on spinal compression in an MRI and what happened to all the different vertebrae when the body is compressed, you know, different aspects. But when you talk about learning, it's when you work with people like I've been very fortunate to work with a lot of good scientists with a lot of different perspectives. I think Z and I really communicated to understand the different aspects of strength training that you can see in all the, you know, second and third edition. And we extended some of his theories and kind of translated them into western type of aspects. But he was just great with regard to understanding the math behind the biggest thing I learned about the whole area of strength and conditioning is really a mathematical modeling. And it's really about math modeling and that's what I do now. Analytics, math modeling, performance, math modeling, of progression, math modeling of how people progress over time. And that's really the thing that hit me home back in the 90s is that we're really talking about, you know, modeling aspects, of math modeling aspects of and quantitizing what we're doing. And now the technology such we can quantify, we can do workout algorithms, analysis, we can do so many different things. So, you know, so he was basically, and one thing I, you know, Z is really great because he was very, you know, it was just the atmosphere of collegiality and understanding and support and all that. So I really got to say it was a joy, honor to work with him over the time, 10 years, that was a Penn State. Okay, so I wanted to go into some of this stuff around isometrics. We talked about this earlier, talked about Henneman's size principle earlier in the, in the podcast. And is there research or, or even, you know, if we're looking at like relating isometrics and Henneman's size principle, looking at, you know, what is essentially too long for hypertrophy or too long for power. And I was actually thinking about, you know, Dr. B had this study where he would, he would have these athletes pull into a pin. Let's say it was like seven to ten seconds, they pull, pull, pull it with a power clean. And then they would remove the pins and he, they would hit a power clean. And they would see an increase in that power output from an acute perspective. And I guess when we were talking about the isometrics stuff, this, you know, just sort of jogged my memory and I wanted to see like, what is your take on that? What is too long? What is, what is just right as far as these concepts are concerned? Yeah, well isometrics really is a, is a point by point to point activation. And I think there's about a, you know, from the point that you stimulate on each side, it's about a five or 10% range of, of, of, of span. Okay, so it's a point to point thing. That's the reason why it'd be hard to do isometric curls and hit everything because you'd be spending all day doing, you know, to get the three sets of 10 with all the isometric points, you'd be spending a lot of time. What, what's used, what really we use it for now, it just like everything else is that, it's, it's a, it's a derivative. It's a hybrid. When we want to get at muscle, attendant stiffness, okay, we want to get a ten in stiffness and I think that's what he's referring to. We'll do, for example, isometric, you take the squat, we're going to be at the parallel level and we're going to do isometric squats, okay, and it can be anywhere and it can be a rapid rise, you know, right away you hit it and then you're six seconds. Some will start peat training people with a slow rise so they don't, you know, rack themselves but, you know, the bottom line is after that isometric, that's what's, what's stimulating the attendant stiffness that we want to get. So then we'll go from there and we can pair it with a plyometrics. Now we're going to do max vertical jumps and so you'll do, you'll do, you'll do hybrid type of things. You're going to do max isometric at the parallel thing and then you're going to go do and start with your jump at that jumps and do jumps that are going to need the same kinetic movement of the kinetic chain. So, you know, the historically isometrics was really done to get that weak points in the range of motion. So, you know, the idea of functional isometrics with power lifters we're doing that for years, you know, you're, where your sticking points are, that was the word translated to some of the basic type of movement translations. We got to get over a sticking point and we've looked at that too but right now I think isometrics are utilized at different angles to get at attendant stiffness more than anything in addition to if you're doing a do sticking point type of training as well and then you can combine it with power. You know, that's the, you train the, the attendant stiffness then you train the muscle stiffness and, you know, with the power exercise that type of thing. So, it's, you know, explosive jumping or whatever. So, that's really where it is but I think isometrics as, you know, it has a role as a choice that you can make to do certain things with it to train the different aspects of attendant and muscle, attendant stiffness and sticking points. So, that's really functionally where it's at now and people with, with tendonitis know this, people with, you know, different aspects of trying to make sure that they're increasing their, their density of their connective tissue, their, their collagen densities. That's really where you're trying to get at with isometrics and, and, you know, if you're trying to get better at a lifting of a sticking point here, here, it really kind of came out of bench presses really or people were sticking in the bench, you know, and they would do functional isometrics on the, in the rack too and then, and then people can expand it to whatever but those are the two fundamental areas that are, are, are, are time efficient and, and effective in, in what you're going to end up doing with it. Okay, Dr. Kramer, I got this question to be somebody listening right now like, ideally non-negotiables were looking at, you got to squat more, you got to bench more, you got to do more rows, RDL more, all those things. Let's look at isometrics, plyometrics. You only get to pick one. Which one, Dr. Kramer, which one are you going to pick? Well, that's like picking apple and orange, by the way. Fair, fair. There's two, there's two different things. It's like, well, do you want to, do you want to, you know, it's apples and oranges? Do you want to eat meat or do you want to loaf of bread, you know? It's, it's, it's, it's like the choice is, if you pick one, you're going to get knocked by the other, it costs you're on a ketogenic diet, obviously, that's what I'm going to study. But if, you know, the bottom line, if, if you pick one, everything is highly specific to the adeptational aspects. So when you pick one, you, you, you, you, you make a choice and maybe you pick it because, because basically you need to get tendonitis. So you pick, you pick the isometrics because you're trying to get tendon stiffness. And that's where I would say your lifting will get you a lot of muscle stiffness. So, point. biometrics may not play a big role. If you're trying to get more powerful, you know, if you're doing power cleans, biometrics can add to that forced velocity on the concentric side or with the stress shortening cycles. So it comes down to, you know, Jerry Martin and I had a thing where we said we got a toolbox here. We got a toolbox of testing toolbox of choices of exercise. What are we using to build this athlete, you know, and that's where, you know, got rest his soul. He was really great. We put a little Yukon football team. We made, brought them all the way up to a BCS bowl game and unfortunately coach, the head coach, we never understood that. We did it kind of the certain dips sleep because we were doing it, did it and they win and then he goes to Maryland and doesn't understand that his engine was Jerry Martin and he didn't take him. So it's kind of, you went without your, you left your cylinders and you left your engine behind and, you know, and then, you know, et cetera. But anyway, the bottom line is is that you got, you make choices based upon what is the need, what is what you're trying to get better at as Dr. Fleck would say, and then, you know, and at certain point things make, you know, make sense. And, you know, and like I say, isometrics make sense to me for tendin stiffness. Okay. I want to know what is Dr. Bill Kramer's best deadlift? Oh, I don't know. I was terrible at deadlift. You got to remember, I'm a T-Rex. I'm a T-Rex. I was a venture. I could bench more than I could deadlift. So I think my best, my best deadlift was probably somewhere around, oh, I would say 39,400, or maybe around that. I was so bad back then. We didn't have sumo's back in the 70s that I was really aware of. And I wouldn't wear. I got arms that are so short, you know, it's little short arms. And I was made for a big chest, big bench. And I would, you know, that's the lift I could do really well on excursions. So it goes back to Dr. Zasky Orsi's. I wasn't built for a deadlift at all. I mean, if you look at, you know, the great powerlipters that could do all three in a row, you know, one of the guys that came to mind, I'm just trying to, the other day, is that you got a perfect biomechanical limb length. And you could be able to do really great in all of them. And so my deadlift was, shoot, I've got, I've got women that can deadlift more than that. That's not the list. No, that's the problem at all. Okay. And on that note, there, the next person who's coming on the podcast, his name, his name is Dr. Lane Norton. So he's a big time powerlifter. He's big in the space of nutrition. Once at University of Illinois, we got his PhD. And I wanted to ask you, do you have any specific questions that you would want to ask Dr. Lane Norton for his specific podcast? Well, that's a good question. Trying to think of a knee jerk reaction to some of them only seen in print. The nutrition is really, really vitally important. And I think a question I would have is how do you individualize in today's world of so many different options? How do you really individualize the diet for a given athlete? Is there any, you know, we actually try to do that as well. How do you individualize diets for athletes? Is really one question I would have for you. Okay. I know I said this off the air, but like I genuinely want you to know, like, this is 100% like a dream come true for you to be on our podcast to get to talk to you and to pick your brain and have this conversation. I can't thank you enough for coming on our podcast. I appreciate it and hope that provides some educational ideas for people who think about and just realize that there's, it's really a challenge to individualize it to make an athlete first and to really understand that you know, we know a lot, but it's proper implementation and that really works. And that's still a challenge today with the number of people that we have to train unless you're doing it one-on-one with as a company type thing. Okay. Thank you, Dr. Kramer. Peace. [Music]