The New Science of Speed Training For Athletes w/ Exercise Scientist Dr. Ken Clark

Can you walk us through like the easiest way to figure out how people actually run fast? Olympic gold medalists, division one, clear to track and field athletes. This is the track and field model. This is the way that our really elite sprinters run and that that's the correct way to do it and that anything that's not that is not as optimal. It's not as good. Your paper that I've read about sprinting at max velocity actually increases your rate of acceleration. If you're you know whatever lacrosse player, football player, maybe acceleration is the most important thing but hey better have a pretty darn good max velocity and if you're 400, 400 meter runner, well yeah speed and guards is going to be huge but you're not going to be an elite 400 meter runner if your max velocity is not here. How would that week look? Would you be doing a resisted sprint day on one day and then how many days off till they would do like their flies like Excel day would be Monday or is Wednesday recovery day some sort of fitness speed endurance whatever Friday and then Saturday. We're going to go over how you can actually run fast and we're going to start right now. We were privileged enough to sit down with one of the greatest sprint researchers on the planet in the entire world. Dr. Ken Clark. Dr. Clark goes into all things around how do you actually run fast? What can you do in your training? What are you looking at from a biomechanics perspective to increase that overall impulse so that you can get down the track faster or run faster out on the field or anything along those lines? We even cover practicality like training specifics. What you can do on a hill. What you can do with your starts. All of these different aspects genuinely. This is the longest podcast I ever remember doing. This is the most amount of notes I've ever taken. Please buckle down, take those notes and get ready to get faster. My biggest question right off the bat that I think could be and we'll just start rolling that that might be applicable for people to understand speed is like one they might think how do people actually run fast but then how do different types of people run fast. So if we're looking at like the quadrant method of how James Wilde breaks it down or how you've broken it down where you looked at high speed track athletes versus low speed track athletes versus team sport athletes. Yeah, it's a great question and I think one that's fun to discuss I know it kind of includes my own thoughts and how they've evolved over the last decade because I think it's really changed from 2015 when I was first finishing up my PhD till now where I currently you know kind of 10 years away from that and also kind of back in the real world if you will out of the lab onto the track and kind of more working with athletes and seem like okay well how have my thoughts stayed the same versus how they change over that time period. So I think when I finished up my my PhD at Southern Methodist University and we had you know a lot of athletes testing with us you know Olympic gold medalists you know division one collegiate track and field athletes division one all the way down to division three team sport athletes soccer lacrosse you name it I kind of got in the frame of mind of okay well this is the track and field model this is the way that our really elite sprinters run and that that's the correct way to do it and that anything that's not that is not as optimal is not as good basically and so you know the the sprinters are gonna display this classic upright posture and high knee lift and all the things that we know from you know that a soft a power model call it whatever else you want and that anything that is not look like that probably needs to be corrected or if that's what teams where athletes are doing that maybe that's limiting them from running as fast as they could and you know we we had some data that supported that for sure data and videos and a lot of those videos that went viral out of that lab and probably that I use those videos even upwards of three or four years ago even in my own content and it's just kind of like the classic okay well here's the sprinter on the left and here's a team sport athlete on the right and look at the sprinters posture in front side mechanics and look at you know green circle all of that and then red X this team sport athlete on the right and as the the big backside loop and the front side kick out it casts out and you know and what we've gotten kind of into with our more recent research is definitely a lot more of a of a spectrum and of a gray area such as like wolders you know definitely ways that maybe sprinters more classically demonstrate but even within the elite sprint community you're going to see some athletes that stick to that kind of a soft a powel more and then there's some that stick to that a little bit less like even within the women's elite sprinters like if you look at chicari like she's very upright front side high knee lift and then if you look at like SAF P like Shelley and Fraser Price like she has lower knee lift like you know a little bit more backside a little squat here so two female sprinters both of them work extremely elite of relatively similar builds that demonstrate actually pretty different mechanics at least to a certain extent and you can say the same thing on the on the men's side of it right there's just going to be guys that are a little bit more upright front side etc and and guys who are not all of which are you know kind of in that metal contention and so I think even within track and field athletes I start to when I as I was getting out of the lab I started to say well look there's actually a fair amount of bandwidth a fair amount of variation within this track and field model and then you go over to team sports and okay well there's definitely some fast team sport athletes like if you look at NFL wide receivers especially the ones that have a little bit more of that sprinter background yeah they're they're going to be maybe demonstrating a little bit more of that kind of classic track and field model but you're going to see plenty of athletes that are running 22 miles an hour plus on the field that are a little bit lower hips a little bit more backside a little bit longer on the ground that sort of thing so it just became pretty clear to me or the last decade and especially within the last three to five years like okay well there's different models for getting it done different roads lead to Rome and there's a lot of bandwidth within you know even like a track and field model that sort of thing so that's kind of where I like to start the discussion like how how my own views have changed from 2014 2015 to kind of like the present time so what do you see then as like the non-negotiables between the models that are like very consistent of someone who even if this individual has longer ground contact right versus somebody has shorter ground contact what are like the like two three four things that you're like all right these are the consistent aspects that always point towards this person yeah great great question in fact probably the best follow-up question to that answer is like okay well if there's variation but then what next like where shouldn't there be variation so I think like ground contact so how far out it is in front of the the hips I mean yes some athletes might strike out a little bit further in front but you're not going to see too many super fast people at top speed strike like way out in front of themselves like 40 centimeters like it probably has to be within a foot give or take of the center of mass like 30 centimeters on the ball of the foot I mean it's just not going to be too many elite sprinters at heel strike you're just not going to see it under non-fatigged conditions so when people are running and they're and they're not fatigued they're going to be on the ball the foot pretty close to the center of mass to clarify it's impossible at top speed to strike like directly under your hips but just like a little bit out in front of your center mass and then I think you know the knee lift you are going to see variations on how much knee lift people get some really people have a lot of knee lift some you know some have a little bit less but how fast the thigh reverses after toe-off so in other words I guess this is one place it's evolved for me is like okay obviously the thigh is going to be extended behind the body at toe-off but what you don't want to see is it really linger for like a long time behind the body before it reverses and comes forward so it's got to have like a pretty quick reversal after toe-off that's kind of a non-negotiable so even though there's going to be some like backside action like the thighs got a reverse pretty quickly after toe-off and start making its way towards the front side and then when you when you look at like I guess posture and pelvis certainly I see a little bit more postural and pelvic variation than maybe I was thinking when I came out of the lab I still don't think you're going to see like tons and tons of people that are on a net basis extremely anterior tilted you're going to see some that clearly have anterior tilt during certain points of the gate cycle but I think like overall being relatively more neutral is going to be a good good thing kind of on a on a net basis when you're talking about the ground contact relative to the to the center of mass and you're you're like all right somebody no matter what they're going to ground in front of yeah of the center of mass 30 centimeters what's the closest that you've seen yeah it's a it's a good point to clarify because I think like a lot of times in the whatever whether it's social media or just common coaching cues it's like strike right underneath your hips or right under you and initial contact which I actually think is a good coaching cue like as a thing to say that's a a good thing to say actually. 'Cause for athletes, that's usually easy to conceptualize. Like, okay, strike underneath myself. It doesn't actually happen from like a biomechanical standpoint. Typically, people land, so 30 centimeters is like 12 inches is one foot basically. So like one foot length, if you will. Anywhere, like 20 to 40 centimeters in that ballpark is good. If you see people just like sticking their foot, like jamming their foot like way out in front of them at initial contact, and sometimes that's accompanied by like a mid foot or a rear foot contact, that's probably problematic from a top speed standpoint. Probably not what you wanna see. - I was just thinking about Jade and even, Jade and Stuart's one of our runners. When you see someone with running back, actually, when you see someone with that high back leg, like a field, I feel like you see this pretty prevalent with field sport athletes. - Yeah, yeah. - What do you, even though he's still fast, it still comes back to the thigh speed, reversing forward off of that? - Yeah, so probably a guy who's a little bit longer on the ground, I don't know, just 'cause he said he's a running back, maybe he's a squatter build, I don't know that for sure, but sometimes he cares with that. And so maybe it just means he's pushing a little bit longer on the backside, and so his leg is just a little bit further back behind him during ground contact. And so something just like QA and OK, Susie's contact with her ground, trying to get the leg forward again, or like a little bit of a tighter fold, maybe during ground, sorry, during a swing phase, maybe it would help with that. But it's probably again, and we're gonna talk about this like track and field versus team sport, kind of models. That maybe just kind of like the model where he's in, and we're really just trying to make it not too excessive for him, something along those lines. I'm not sure if I answered your question, but. - No, I think that does, I think that's where it's like, even coming back then, I guess, I'm trying to think through when you're looking at these different models, and you're looking at a sprinter versus a field-based athlete, or even, I don't know if you see anything with gender differences as well, but. - Yeah. - If you see, like, I'm almost trying to think through like, someone who is running fast, is it more so the fact that they are, their hip is responsible for coming forward, and then coming back down, is it something that, like, what do you think is more important for athletes to focus on in development? Is it the hip, or is it the lower? - Right, ground up, or a hip down, basically. - Yes, yes. - So, yes. - Another great question. I think you can kind of look at it either way. I was doing a coach in service about a month ago, and I said, well, if you're watching video, you can either look top down or bottom up, but choose one. You can't take it all in, right? So, just pick an approach and go with it, top down or bottom up. I'd say, if you're thinking about it, bottom up, and let's take your running back example for a second, I don't know, maybe he's got an ankle that yields too much, and he's really collapsing during ground contact. And so, that's causing him to need to stay on the ground longer to get like the requisite impulse, vertical impulse. And so, that is causing him to really push off far behind him to over push. And so, because of that, now he's kind of got his foot in his leg way, way back behind his hips at takeoff. And so, that's getting him into this long recovery. So, maybe it is a foot ankle issue, where if you kind of give him the appropriate levels of stiffness and have him be able to better handle ground contact, that actually that's going to clean up the leg cycle. That you could look at it that way from like a bottom up approach, where maybe okay, it is something foot ankle, you clean that up and it cleans up the rest of the cycle. Or if you're taking like a top down approach, maybe you'd say, okay, well, if you're looking at what he's doing from a thigh recovery mechanics, say, well, he just needs to just speed up, like essentially how quickly it's reversing after he gets off the ground. And without, you know, looking at this athlete and without like watching video, I couldn't answer that question. But those would be the two different ways you could approach it, I would say. So, look at, okay, ground up what's going on and maybe start with a foot and ankle and see if that's like checking the boxes or kind of look at what's going down, hip down and saying, well, is this reversing at the appropriate time after toe off? Guys, right now we're deep inside of our sprint based training discussion with Dr. Ken Clark. Fortunately for you, our podcast is sponsored by our own strength and conditioning app peak strength. Inside peak strength, we have sprint based training. We also have training known as athletic fitness that is going to help you increase your speed, your explosiveness, your strength, your muscle mass, okay. It's the first link in the description. If you need help with your programming, click that first link in the description or the pin comment. Head over to peakstrength.app, the Google Play Store or the Apple iOS store. Start training today, incorporate that speed work inside peak strength and you're gonna get faster. Now, let's get back to learning from Dr. Clark. - Okay, if you're looking at field sports, I was thinking about when, if we're out of like the football field, right, and you're looking at, let's say your best track athletes versus your fastest football players. When they're grounding, do you see any difference, like first grounding position on where their swing leg would be, their knee relationship, their thigh relationship, that would be like a very telling difference between those type of models. - And this is a crazy thing about these two papers we published in 2024 and 2025 where we looked at college, track and field athletes and teams for athletes, all males, although we have a similar data set of females that we're analyzing. So, and I'll just take you through the whole story and then I'll come back in another question. So, like our original hypotheses was that okay, track and field athletes would be faster. It wasn't like kind of a no-brainer, we thought. And then it also like display more front side mechanics and everything that goes along with the track and field model. So, the interesting result, it was a little bit counter to our hypotheses was that, so we had like fast track and field athletes and you've already alluded to this and we had like what we deemed slower track and field athletes and we had fast team sport athletes and slow team sport athletes basically. The slow track and field athletes and the fast team sport athletes in our sample, at least, ran at the same speed, but with different mechanics. So that was surprising because kind of coming out of the lab, 10 years ago I'd be like, well no, these guys got better mechanics. They're gonna be faster because of their mechanics. And what like immediately opened our eyes and we tried to slice the data every other way, but the data was just telling us one thing. It was like no, these team sport athletes, they're more backside, lower knee lift, they're landing a little bit further out in front of them. They're swing leg to your answer question is further behind them, whereas the track athletes, their knees are a little bit closer together. They're landing a little bit further underneath them, but their speeds were the same, that slow track athlete group and the fast team sport group. So it was interesting trying to tease out the cause and effect and the conclusion we came to out of the study and then I'll just directly answer your question is, well it's not that mechanics aren't important, but it's like we have to kind of interpret the relationship between mechanics and speed with a little bit of a grain of salt. Still very important to work on mechanics, maybe just as important from an injury and a soft tissue standpoint as it is like a direct effects on improving speed. Still something like as a coach that I work on all the time with our athletes, both team sport and track and field. But like just a little bit of like a, hey, you know, if you see somebody with good mechanics, does it necessarily they're gonna be faster than somebody whose mechanics are like a little bit more backside and we had to essentially challenge that just internally within our own results. Coming back to your question, if you take like a track and field athlete and a team sport athlete, whether or not they're the same speed or not, like the track and field athlete is probably gonna have a little bit more upright posture, a little bit higher knee lift, land a little bit more underneath them, maybe a little bit more in the ball, their foot, teams sport athletes gonna, you know, maybe have a little bit more trunk lean and anterior tail, maybe land a little bit more out in front, a little bit more flat foot, a little bit more in the ground, that's where the thing. So, you know, I think it's interesting to think of like, okay, does my athlete, if this is a team sport athlete, did they run fast this way and should we make a change with their current mechanics? And still on a large number of cases, I'm like, yeah, we still wanna work on this athlete's mechanics, but maybe it's for the reason of saying, hey, this guy's already running fast, but we need to make sure that they can run fast, safe and all the time, basically, so that that has become kind of my why, as far as working on mechanics with team sport athletes. So it's like, hey, he may be able to run a 4, 5, 40 and run it, you know, whatever, 21, 22 miles an hour, but we need to make sure that he's able to do that, like all the time and make sure that he's doing that in a safe manner and when he gets fatigued, that maybe his mechanics are still pretty clean, that sort of thing. - So in that case, what would the, what would be the movement in those mechanics of a field sport athlete that would make them more prone to injury? - Yeah, I think that all the evidence, and this isn't my research, but those of your and my Nguyen and his colleagues, you know, it's still the anterior pelvic tail, It's still the extra touchdown distance. It's still having to kind of casting out and then landing too far out in front and having to essentially pull the center of mass over the foot during ground contact. So the late swing phase or early stance phase. But all of those same, I think, issues are at play here. And so just trying to work on, as Jordan says, not me, but both the hardware and the software. So the hardware being kind of the physical limitations, whether that's flexibility, mobility, that sort of thing. And then the software being the motor programs or the technique elements and just trying to address both of those. But certainly, I think you could see a track athlete and a team sport athlete running with different mechanics at the same speed. But you'd still say, hey, it's desirable to get that team sport athlete to run a little bit more like that track model. If only for an injury resiliency and a soft tissue standpoint, if nothing else, that sort of thing. Is that more of a software versus hardware thing? Because I feel like I'm built similar. I have a big anterior tilt. We've talked about this actually for myself, with the hamstrings and whatnot. Is that something you have to coach more? Or is that more of like, hey, we have an issue strength wise? Yeah, great question. I mean, I think it's probably both with just such a cop out of an answer. But I mean, I think there are athletes that are just built like that, right? Yes. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, that was a small college running back. And I'm a short, squatty body, right? Just built that same exact way. Just like, in anterior tilt, all of the time, basically, and getting up into a good top speed running position was a challenge. My entire athletic career, 25 years ago, trying to find those positions. But I think it is something you're probably trying to address in the way room and the at room, anywhere you can off the track, and then still trying to cue it, coach it on the track, on the turf, whatever that sort of thing. For some athletes, I feel like they just-- depending on their level of training from a speed standpoint, they just can't feel that to a certain extent at first. And then there are certain times where it clicks, at least a little bit, like, oh, OK, well, that's where I need to be. So it's definitely a-- it's not a one and done short-term fix. Here's a cue. It's fixed. Exactly, right? Yeah, for sure. So I know, like, with one athlete I'm working with on the track team this year, and he's kind of-- even though he's a track athlete-- but he's an overstrider, like, a long in the back, long in the front, a little bit more rear foot type of guy. He's fast, but just with mechanics, it needs a little bit of cleaning up. I mean, it is a gradual process. It's just been like the whole fall just trying to get a little bit more-- Baby steps. Yeah, right? And it's incrementally improving to be sure. But it's like, yeah, it's definitely not a one and done life. OK, here's this cue. There are tons of abwheeling in your future. Yeah. If you take running at max velocity-- this is-- sorry, Legend, I'm going off the interior pelvic tilt, because I'm trying to think about the grounding of the center of mass. If we're testing a flying tent, right? And we're looking at the footage after a flying tent. And we're trying to see how to improve this aspect. If we're seeing someone grounding in their center of mass is good, I mean, maybe what happens with that-- or they're grounding 30 centimeters in front. What is happening from the time that foot grounds until it picks up? Can you walk us through, like, I guess that would be the kinetics of it? Yeah, yeah, sure. And walk us through what is actually happening from a physical perspective so that people can-- I think here in almost paint that image, and then we can go into that collision with the ground and how people can improve that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I guess just to make it a little bit easier to digest visually, so 30 centimeters just roughly one foot length give or take, right? So if you're watching that out, they run. And their center of mass can be slightly out in front of their belly button when they land. So their foot-- whatever part of the foot contacts the ground should be roughly one of that athlete's own foot length in front of that, right? If it's too much more than that, then that's probably a little bit overstriping to make that part of it just a little bit simpler. So they should hopefully be landing on the ball of the foot, right? Obviously, you're going to see some that are really flat foot striking or rear foot striking. Clearly, that's not ideal. You will see some athletes that really are planar flexed upon touchdown and like toe strikes. So that's a different challenge which we can talk about as well. But so let's just say that in a good scenario they land on the ball of the foot, so there's going to be some amortization where they heal drops a little bit for some athletes, even the best of the best, like you're saying, you'll see some foot strikes where his heel comes down and touches the ground. And that's OK. You'll see within athlete variation from step to step, we're like on some steps the heel does touch the ground on others. It doesn't. Maybe there's a right to left asymmetry. All of that, and this is again one place where my head is evolved over the last 10 years, like all of that step to step variation is probably somewhat natural. You're going to, you know, you're going to see that heel, I think, collapse a little bit or lower towards the ground a little bit. What I don't want to see in very unscientific terms is you just don't want to see that thing like mush into the ground, right? Like if that athlete contacts the ground and the foot is like to use bad sound effects, that's good. That's perfect. Yeah. So, you know, it could mean that, you know, they don't have, you don't want to use words stiff, optimal stiffness, but they don't have control over that ground contact. It's an out of control contact. Or like on the other side of things, especially a team-sword athlete, it's like football players, you don't want to see heavy feet where they're just, and everyone knows that. But where they're just landing like flat footed and it's just like this, you know, they're not landing ball the foot under control. So, from a vertical force standpoint, if they really have a good swing phase, a good end of swing phase, they're able to, you know, have a pretty high velocity of the foot and a lower limb coming into ground contact, they should be able to deliver a lot of vertical force early in that ground contact phase. And this is going back to some of my doctoral lab work. So, within the first 30 milliseconds, so within the first point, 0.03 seconds, there's upwards of 3, 4, even 5 times body weight of force. And that's kind of where all our research was focused. Like the best sprinters are delivering a lot of force, a really early on in the ground contact. And then, you know, as the center of mass starts to travel over the body, so like right in the middle of ground contact, that is when the foot is going to be relatively flatter. And, you know, there is going to be some bend at the ankle and knee. I think a lot of times people, you know, hear the term like, "Well, stiff ground contact," and interpret that as, you're not going to see any flexion at the ankle and knee. No, clearly, there's going to be like some amount of flexion at the ankle and the knee. We're not running on pogo sticks, right? But so there's going to be some flexion at mid-stance. And then, as the center of mass travels during the second half of ground contact, then you're going to see basically the leg starts to extend. And that's when you're into propulsive ground, horizontal forces. So, let me take that back for a second. When the land puts out, when the foot lands out in front of the center of mass, you're getting breaking horizontal forces. And I talked about this a little bit with less, and I don't know, I'm not sure if you did as well. Those are going to be, in some cases, pretty large, even for good sprinters. And then, when you get into the second half of ground contact, when the center mass is in front of the foot, you're getting propulsive ground forces that are kind of horizontal forces that are accelerating you into the next step. At top speed, those breaking and propulsive horizontal forces are going to be essentially equivalent. When you're upwards at 40, 50 meters, something like that, that's kind of the definition of you reach your top speed when the breaking and propulsive impulses are essentially equivalent. The vertical forces are going to be very large during the first part of that ground contact. So, far away. Well, I'm just seeing, are you looking at that? Okay, if somebody grounds, and when they ground, there's a breaking force that will be extremely high. So, they have to have rapid, I guess it would be eccentric strength to be able to handle that. So, they have to do, like, in my mind, I'm thinking through this. When they ground, it's a breaking force, they have to be able to overcome that breaking force, and then a very brief isometric time frame, which I don't know the, whatever milliseconds that would be, and then have this crazy rate of force development to use for propulsive forces to then transfer that into propulsive forces to go forward. Is that accurate? Yeah, they have to be able to handle those large breaking forces that occur in the first half of ground contact. So, let's put some numbers to it. So, for an elite sprinter for ground contact times, they're typically on and off the ground and less than 0.1. Okay, and then sometimes it's as low as 0.08. But let's just call it 0.1. So roughly, again, for easy numbers, the first half of ground contact is.05 and the second half is.05. It doesn't quite work out that symmetrically, but we'll just get to that. So that means the first.05,.04 to.05, those are from a horizontal standpoint breaking forces and those are going to be, you know, again, quite large and elite sprinters. They have to be able to handle those. And that's also when the highest vertical forces are going on as well. They're decelerating their center of mass, which is traveling downwards and there's horizontally breaking forces acting on the center of mass because the foot is out in front of the center of mass during that first half, during there's.05. So they have to be able to handle those breaking forces, that collision, and they have to be able to get their center of mass in front of the foot into the propulsive phase horizontally, as effectively as possible. So if you land too far out in front of yourself, if you overstrive, that's bad for any number of reasons, but it also means you're like in breaking phase from this long amount of time before you can get to the propulsive side of things. So if you land with a foot in a proper spot, if you're in ground in a proper spot, you're undergoing large breaking forces with horizontally and vertically, but you can get through the breaking phase effectively and get to the propulsive side of things in a good amount of time, and now you're kind of re-accelerating your center of mass forward and you're rebounding your center of mass upwards at the same time. So that's how I would probably describe things kinetically. Okay. And then is that, so this is where I want to go into the hip versus the lower, the lower mass. Yeah. And looking at, like, if you could expand then, and I'm trying to think about how to tie this together because it's like, what role does the, I'm trying to link the hip tour and the whipping from the hip to the foot and what that does at grounding in max velocity. I don't know if you go on. Yeah, no, that's absolutely. So we'll talk about the hip a little bit. So if you think about peak thigh flexion when the thigh is up in front of the body or when the thigh, you know, the other thigh is back behind the body. And let's forget if we're dealing with a track athlete or a team sport athlete or whatever and how much knee lift they do or don't have. The thigh gets to its maximal knee lift. Its maximal thigh block at some point. Let's say that's 70 degrees, whatever. Whoever you are, whatever sport you play, whatever model you're up, you're falling. You got to reverse that as fast as possible. The thigh has to go from flexion, hit that peak thigh block and then reverse it into extension, you know, while you're in the air prior to ground contact as fast as possible. We publish a whole paper on this. That's thigh acceleration because you're taking it from a flexion, a positive velocity into a negative velocity. The faster you can reverse that velocity, well, you know, you're going from velocity to acceleration. So the greater thigh angular acceleration you have, right, basically the more effectively you're going to now be able to transition into the ground contact phase. If you get up to that peak thigh block position, let's say you're hitting 80 degrees and you look great in a Google image photo, but you're just floating there forever. Let's not actually a very effective way to run. So the hip torque, so to speak, and, you know, the whip from the hip means, okay, well, you're getting to that thigh block position. Now you rapidly reverse it and that's what generates like that high lower limb velocity at foot speed. So, sorry, at ground contact. So to give kind of just the scientific background history and then you got another question on the time you were talking. So my doctoral research with Dr. Peter Way and Dr. Larry Ryan in the SMU lab from 2010 to 2015 was working through like, okay, how are these large forces being applied? Dr. Peter had already established in his prior work at Harvard and Rice, like, okay, faster runners apply larger vertical forces, but the how was kind of unknown. And then from 2010 to 2015, where we did our spring mass, sorry, our two mass model and we looked at, you know, how forces did or did not adhere to the spring mass model, like, well, actually these really fast sprinters are not applying forces like a spring mass model that we have this two mass model where they're really striking the ground and the lower limb is really striking the ground with a fast incoming velocity. But we didn't know in 2015, like, how that was occurring. And then at Westchester, what we've done over the last 10 years is kind of like extend that and be like, well, it's really, it's coming from up the chain. So if you have like, hip torque and high thying or acceleration, you can really reverse it from the peak thigh block, that's going to translate into fast foot, shank, lower limb velocity at contact. And that's kind of what you need to really ramp up those vertical forces at initial contact. Okay. So, and then, so that's on the front side and I know I'm going to, oh, no, no, no, no, keep going. But now think about it on the backside. So your legs act like scissors, right? Or just we'll do like this. So if this is your front leg and this hits its peak thigh block and now has to rapidly reverse to come down to apply force, we've also said on the backside, well, this thing needs to rapidly reverse right after toe off and come forward to be effective. But your thighs are in basically perfect synchrony. They function like scissors. They have to be in motor control terms, anti-phase and the better runners are like more equal in opposite basically. So the better you can do that with the front thigh, the better you can do that with the rear thigh and the whole system functions better. So it's like, it's really not possible from a coordination standpoint to have this thigh like come in like reverse like really hard and not have that come in. And this one's just like lagging behind. That'd be like extremely not in, you know, it'd be poor motor control. I'll put it that way. And most of the better the runners, we have another paper this, but the better the runners, not just have faster thigh angular velocity, but they have better anti-phase motion meaning like, okay, as soon as this one's coming down, like reversing, like this one's coming forward, which is a good thing all the way around. Now that's just a top speed. We'll talk about it for acceleration as well. But anyways, so what's the problem? No, no, but when you have someone then at max velocity and they're running and they have that. And I'm just now I'm trying to it's making a little more sense with the with the archetypes. When you look at somebody who is a high speed track athlete and you're going, okay, they get their knee, let's say 70, 80 degrees. And then they come down faster. They have greater hip torque. And then you can see on the force plate, that's where you'll see the the two mass model appear. Yeah, yeah, it's more readily apparent in that situation. Yeah. If you have a field athlete, is that that doesn't have as, you know, their squadier, they don't have as much knee lift. They don't have as much of like the the classic like frontside mechanics of that from like someone like us off a power, Justin Gatlin. Is that is that lack of the knee lift? And then there's there's possibly a lack of like the apparent two mass. Right. It's there. It's just not as observable in your role. For sure. You're saying yeah, yeah. You trying then as do you think it's effective to then try to get that from them to increase their speed to to improve that or do you like lean into their into their style of how they run. Oh, great question. I got four years ago, I would have said, yeah, get them to have higher frontside mechanics. And if you do that, it will definitely make them faster or it should make them faster. Now I'm like lean into their style, but if we can move that needle just a little bit more to the frontside model, but probably more for injury reasons if they're like really anterior and backside and anything else, I think it's kind of TBD, the direct correspondence between changing their mechanics and what that acute improvement in speed is or is not. So I think it was interesting I was talking about this with a few other people. And I think those those acute changes in technique can be good for acute improvements in speed, but it's certainly not a guarantee. Because it can be kind of like in a acute change in technique or a change in technique from the course of the four to eight or whatever cycle. And maybe the speed stays the same, but now they're running the same speed, but with better mechanics that are maybe like less at bad positions or better positions from an injury risk standpoint. Occasionally, maybe it's one step back before it's two steps forward from a performance standpoint. So I don't know. I think it's really interesting. I in my everyday practice because I'm coaching track at Westchester. I help with Penn LaCrosse. I help with Westchester softball and I'll do men's soccer in the spring. So I'm working with both teams for the intracate athlete. In my daily coaching practice, I still do try to work with that. But I'm much more cognizant of the fact that teams for athletes like, hey, they're probably just not going to look like softball. That's okay. just trying to move that needle maybe like a little bit, where I think maybe 10 years ago, I'm like, "No, I gotta look like this." Let's do everything to get them to look like that front side model. - Is there anybody that you've looked at in the research or even like, yeah, maybe proximity geography, I'm not an Eagles fan, but looking at someone like, like, St. Quann running at full speed. Like you look at someone like that or a Randy Moss back in the day. Do you ever look at these field athletes and think like, that's where we could work towards that is like the bridge between, you know, that this is the quintessential field athlete that's very fast and maybe that's the model we should work towards instead of working towards a gauntlet and those other power or whatever. - Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, with the kind of, with the team sport athletes and if you're trying to think like, okay, well, if we're trying to work on their mechanics, but not necessarily going for this super high knee lift or whatever else, but I think that's the first question you asked, which is what we would circle back to, which what are the non-negotiables? So then you say, okay, well, all right, well, if we're not we're gonna get them to have a 90 degree knee lift or whatever, but let's make sure that they're contacting the ground in the right spot on the right part of their foot, you know, that they're not getting too much over pushing back behind them. They were trying to get their hips into a relatively better position. I mean, that's the sweet spot of the answer, which is to say, yeah, you're still working on their mechanics, it's just you're trying to work towards those non-negotiables as opposed to saying like, hey, if they don't want to like a sofa, then they're not doing it, right? You know what I mean? So I think that's probably the answer to that question and maybe even the first question you asked. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that helps me. Do you have, give any other questions on max velocity? - Yeah, yeah, so I had a guy who tried to, for, was it the spring league? - Yeah. - And we were doing some, this is with the 1080. I don't know if you have access to that. I don't know, a lot of people don't have access to like, the assisted, the idea that I have was like, hey, it might be a way for him to kind of feel more of that upright proper mechanics of someone's pulling him. What is kind of like the things you've seen from there? Like is that a way, a good way to go about that? - Yeah, great question. So I don't have access to training with the 1080. I've done one research study with the 1080 and then I have colleagues that have a 1080. So you know, I've kind of seen it in action. I can't speak from super experience as far as saying like, this is what I did with the 1080 and this is what works, et cetera. - Well, your saying it was pulling him forward, by the way. Sorry. - Yeah, so more detail. It's pulling him forward towards the machine. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - Interesting, you know, I have much more experience saying, okay, well we use like light sleds and said, okay, well feel this very light resistance and the belt around your waist as like almost a constrain or a, you know, motor learning reminder of get your hips up and through as you come through the transition phase and get into top speed like that sort of thing. I'm not opposed to anything like 1080 wise, 'cause I think the instrumentation is unbelievable. I just can't speak to it from an experienced standpoint, but you know, I think whatever gives the athlete like an enhanced sense of where their hips are at is a good thing. And with the 1080 being, you know, or muscle lab being so precise as far as the assistance or resistance that you can dial in so that you can do it safely, to me, I'm like, why not? You know, you might as well experiment with it and see if the athlete feels a difference or if for some reason the assistance allows them to get into better positions at top speed than they normally would. So yeah, I can't comment from personal experience on using assistance for that purpose. However, to me, since the 1080 allows you to do so many things safely, if you play around with it and you figure out it works, I mean, maybe it only worked for that athlete or a select few types of athletes that need that type of help. But I have seen, you know, to kind of that same point. So, you know, we use like heavy sleds, heavy resistance for early acceleration, which is pretty common practice. You know, I think lighter sleds, as I just said a minute ago, can serve, I think, you know, an interesting kind of just drill purpose, if you will, to say, hey, you got to keep pushing through transitional acceleration. And as you're getting more upright, don't let the hip, don't let your hips go back with the sled, essentially. Like don't, don't let the sled pull you back. So, it's almost as much like a motor control drill as it is anything else. And of course, you could do that same thing or better with a 1080 or a dinosaur speed or anything like that that has some of the accommodating. Yeah. So, you're saying as well, not just like the start, but also like the later acceleration. Yeah, yeah. Like maybe different, different loads for different stages, if you will. I had questions on this specifically, because I think, selfishly, I feel like we are pretty good through 10. Like, and now full transparency, anyone watching this, we're a very heavy lifting place. And speed has been our, our weakness as far as like training is concerned. So, I've always felt like, and we do a lot of jumps, a lot of plyometric work. I've always felt like we do a pretty good job through 10, at least based off of our numbers. Sure. Now, where I see a weakness of ours is that, let's say, 10 meters through 40 meters, 10 meters through 50 meters. And as you just, you know, that transitional acceleration and getting more upright. So, I was, I wanted to see if first we could go through the mechanics of that part of a sprint. And then, because I also think that's where most of the speed is, is, is seen in football or across, oil soccer or anything. So, maybe, maybe first get into the mechanics of that, of that transitional acceleration, and then we can dig a little deeper. Yeah, absolutely. So, great, it's a great discussion point. So, to the last thing you said, yeah, if you look at like gameplay, I mean, very rarely is like a long sprint initiated from like a static sprint, right? Like, even in football to run it back, we even through first and second levels, and then breaks into the clear and is relatively upright. I mean, maybe it's a good pad level, but, you know, it's not from a four point block start before this up and go, or in lacrosse. It's certainly like more upright, and they're moving, they're either walking, and they're jogging again, and then they sprint, same thing in soccer, right? So, from a team sport, especially a field sports standpoint, like the ability to have good acceleration kind of on the move is a huge thing, a huge ability capability that, you know, is frankly rarely discussed. That's like, okay, mostly accelerations we do are from, or a lot of, in practice, are from a static start, but from a gameplay standpoint, like transitional acceleration, moving accelerations are huge, you know? So, if we look at a static start up to full speed, so to state the obvious, you have zero velocity in your start, whether that's 2.3, 4.4 point, you increase velocity every step, those increases in velocity are large, the first couple steps, so typically people are at three meters a second, four meters a second, upwards of five or six meters a second, after their first couple of steps, and then, you know, by the time you hit, like, 10, I'll use yards and meters interchangeably here, but, by the time you hit, you know, 10 yards, you're at a relatively high percentage of top speed, typically higher than people recognize, maybe something like 70%, 80%, typically by 20 yards, 20 meters, you're at, depending on the athlete 15, sorry, 20 yards of 20 meters is like, 85, sometimes even 90%, you know, you're at 25 meters, you're well over 90%, only for extreme, track and field athletes, you're seeing bolts in the world, are those numbers dramatically different. For most of our football players, you are at a pretty high percentage of top speed. To be sure, your best 40-hour dash athletes are still accelerating, like, the entire race, right? But you're at high percentages of top speed pretty early on. The interesting thing, and the challenging thing about acceleration, of course, every step is different than the last, right? So step one, you have, the first couple steps, you have very long ground contact times, very short air times, state the obvious, you're really leaning in and pushing down and back, every step the body gets more and more upright, the ground contact times get shorter and shorter, the air times or the flight times get longer and longer, as the athlete becomes more upright. From a kinetic standpoint, from a forces standpoint, so the vertical forces are always larger, which is actually sometimes not recognized. It doesn't necessarily mean they're more important, but having an optimum blend of vertical and horizontal forces is important. And I think that's, that's important to acknowledge, because I think a lot of times we think acceleration, just push back. But if you literally did that, taken to an extreme, you had the athlete face planner in the sky. So it's having an optimal blend of vertical and forces in concert, every step that results in that gradual rise. So, relatively speaking, more propulsive forces early on, and then as you become more and more upright, the net anterior posterior horizontal forces become, you know, basically equal, and the vertical forces become larger and larger. So the demands go early on, more of an even blend of vertical and horizontal forces, and then when you're upright, their largely vertical forces. Now what I think is interesting is like okay what do we want to see kinematically from a technique standpoint during that entire way. So we talked about the ground contact times, the flight times, like generally the body positions, right? What do we want to see? So step rate, step rate, and then I bring this up with like what we want to see. A lot of times acceleration gets coached. Now I'm not criticizing this because I think it's a good coaching cue, but it gets coached as a as a crescendo like that, that's how when actually your step rate is almost at a maximum like right from the start. Like if you look at the research, like athletes steps are actually basically going as fast as they're going to go from like the third step onwards. It's the step length. It actually gets longer. I'm not saying you should say that to an athlete. So it's actually, it's actually the step length that's getting longer and every step. So it's just like, you know, it's another one of those areas where it's just like, that's sort of a weird, it's like you're trying to help with rhythm. Yeah, you have to like as a coach, no one's going on bi mechanically, but also know like what to say and what not. Yeah, because the same thing is like land underneath yourself. Yeah, that's not actually what's going on at the top speed, but it might help. But it might help. It's a good thing to say, right? And same thing here, well crescendo, well actually your step rate is basically just going, probably shouldn't coach it that way, but just kind of bi mechanically something to kind of put in your back body. So step rates going to be pretty fast. You still want your athletes to complete their pushes. It gets longer and longer and longer. And I think from a whole body angle, you know, really what you're looking for is just that gradual and progressive rise. So the red flags, this is I think very well known, but like you just don't want to see any sharp rises, like one to pop basically, right? Or where they're doing something funny, like, you know, keeping their head down for like five steps and then they pull it right up because you know, they think like, okay, I should transition now and everything like a properly rises, you know, here and the rest of the body falls. It should just be, you know, in a pre-plan sprint, in a 40-yard dash or 100-meter dash or whatever, this gradual and progressive rise. Younger athletes, weaker athletes, athletes that are strong, but maybe not as strong relative to their body mass, like E at 300 pounds, line men, they are going to have higher projection angles due to their, you know, their relative strength levels, athletes that are, you know, stronger relative to their body mass, you know, your defensive backs, your sprinters, they're going to have lower projection angles that they can handle. But I think the key in either of those cases, clearly like a 6'5, 330 pound left tackle and a 5'10, 190 pound, you know, guy that's strong as an ox in the weight room, in a whatever, 5'4", 140 pound female sophomore and high school soccer player, what those ideal angles are is going to be completely different, but you just want to make sure that it's kind of like this gradual and progressive rise. You may see like a high school female soccer player, she's nearly vertical at 10 meters, right? And you may see like similarly with like a left tackle, they're going to be pretty upright relatively early on, whereas maybe it's not till, you know, closer to 20 meters, something like that, or like a, a deback or a sprinter, something like that. So there are going to be some differences as to when people are becoming more upright. But to me, like what a good clean acceleration and transitional acceleration is it's all about the progression and less about like the absolutes, if that makes sense. So yeah, I was just thinking about when Chopper Robinson ran that, it was like a 14910. I think he ran a 149 or so. Yeah. A lot of people, so this is a D-N. Yeah. Yeah. I think he plays a Miami now in front Penn State. Yeah. And they broke down his 10 and they were like, his front foot was quite far in front of his center of mass for acceleration. Yeah. But if he's achieving, he still wasn't standing upright, if he's achieving length, and he still has that high rate, if he's achieving length and can still handle that high rate, even with that large breaking force, far in front of the 30 to 40 centimeters. And maybe, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's still the key that even if you see someone doing that as long as they can handle the, if they have the, if they can achieve that rate or that length in an early, but they still hold a rhythmic rate, that's the key there. There's also going to be some guys, I don't want to call outliers per se, but they're just, you have that physical capacity to basically overcome whatever we would say is maybe not classic technique, right? So maybe he's landing out a little bit further in front than, you know, he should or we've talked about it or whatever, but maybe he's just got the strength to pull the center of mass over the front of that. And that's okay. There's going to be, you know, occasionally there's sprinters you'll see that maybe you can do the same and get away with it and still perform well, something like that, but I don't know. I'd have to go back and watch it. Yeah, exactly, specifically. So, do you have anything specific? I wanted to bring up, when I think about like that, that 10 to 40 or 10 to 50, like the, I remember my dad growing up, I was fortunate enough where he was this old, you know, we would just lift and sprint and run hills. It was like, oh, you're, you're start, you work, you would, we would run 10s or 15s. Okay, if we wanted to improve anything else, you ran hills. Yeah. And, and I, I'm fairly certain it's your paper that I've read about max velocity, sprinting at max velocity actually increases your rate of acceleration. I want to talk about that, but then I also want to go into what is the difference or the adaptations that you see from hill sprints versus resistance sprints. And I, and maybe those are two or three questions. Yeah, yeah. No, it's, it's great, great, great line of, of kind of discussion. So, yeah, the, the paper we put out on the NFL combine kind of looked at velocity profiles. This is a few years ago at this point, but what we found overall is of course there's individual variability in, in athletes and, in how they accelerate, but we kind of broke down the, the athletes into two groups, the fast and the slow, if you will. And, and overall, they're, their velocity profiles kind of were, were similar from a percentage standpoint, indicating that like, okay, basically if you can raise the seal, this wasn't like a training study or anything like that, we didn't have athletes just like run max velocity and then see if it up there acceleration. But the implications were kind of like, hey, the ceiling is like top speed and if you can bump up that ceiling, then everything else underneath it is, is likely to rise. And I think, you know, conceptually that thought has also been around regarding speed reserve, right? And so like from a speed endurance standpoint, like, max velocity is, is the ceiling. It doesn't mean it's the most important thing because in a team sport scenario, clearly you can argue that like, well acceleration is the most common, you know, dominant action as far as who gets to a ball first or whatever else. But it, I think in a lot of ways, you can think of max velocity as the, as the ceiling and say like, okay, well, it's going to be pretty hard to run a good 40 if you don't like a really, really good 40 if you don't have a good max velocity. Obviously, it's going to be impossible to run a good 100 meters if you don't have a good max velocity. If you look at the elite 400 meter runners though, they all have a very impressive max velocity. Like, you can't do anything at a high level, like an elite level, even 400 meters, unless your max velocity is like really, really good. Like people are always surprised if you look at like the elite 400 meter runners in the world at just how darn good their 100 meter times are, right? So it may not be like the most important thing depending on what your event is, but it's hard to be good at anything 40 to 400, unless your max velocity is at least at a certain level. I think that probably be, you know, at this point, which is several years away from that NFL comp line thing for the weight road, but I think that's my biggest takeaway, which is to say like, okay, you know, if you're, you know, whatever lacrosse player football player, maybe acceleration is the most important thing, but hey, you better have a pretty darn good max velocity. And if you're a 400 meter runner, well, yeah, speed of heart is going to be huge, but you're not going to be an elite 400 meter runner if your max velocity is not here. So I think it's just one of those qualities. And maybe this is obvious, but maybe it's not that it's almost like regardless of your sport event position, like it's great to train. Okay, 350 pound left tackles. Are you doing 50 to 60 meter flies? Maybe not. But should you still be doing some pretty high speed running? I think so. I forget if it's buddy Morris. I don't want to misattribute it to him or Brian Mann or somebody, but basically said, like, yeah, we're still having our bigs do like a lot of these high speed running. I don't want to misattribute it, but yeah, I was I spoke at the NFL comp line like it 2017. I was like, well, maybe you shouldn't have like your your bigs do 30 to 40 fly runs. And I think it was private. I said, no, we do. Big confident in your statement. We have our bigs do fly runs. It's good, it's good training, you know, I think as long as it's done smartly, I mean, it is such an unbelievable stimulus, which I believe is the second part of your your question. So, you know, if you think about the forces every step at max velocity, if you're slow, if you're slow, the peak forces are like three times body weight. So if you're 200 pounds, then that's like 600 pounds of peak force, right? If you're fast and you're 200 pounds, then it's literally like a half ton of peak force, right? So the peak forces are extremely high. The ground contact times are extremely short because if you're an Olympian, they're 0.08 and if you're like, if you're a slow team sport athlete, they're 0.12. So a lot of times what I'll do and the listeners at home can do this if they like, but if I'm giving a clinic talk, I'll have everybody like break out. Yes, exactly. Just say, take out your cell phone, stop, watch, say, start and stop it as fast as you can. And like, you can barely do it in less than a tenth of a second. Like, it's really kind of a really fast finger. It's like 0.10, like 0.11. You're like, well, if you're if you're ground contacts 0.11, you're probably not that fast, right? So it's like how fast it is, it really brings it to life. So now you think about, well, you're loading a thousand pounds of force that's faster than that. Really, yeah. And you think about that rate of force application. And then there's like really nothing else you can do. Plymetra clear, this is not a criticism of plials, lists, whatever we do them all at Westchester's, well, I think they're all great. And if you're just trying to quantify rate of force application, there's really nothing else that can match it as far as how much force, how fast. So in small doses, prescribed appropriately, especially given the population, but there's nothing that can beat it from that stimulus standpoint as far as how much force, how fast. And so if you were just hypothetically to think about it, like in plymetra terms, a lot of times the plials would quantify like ground contacts, right? So if you think like, okay, so a fly 20 to 40, maybe you're taking like 10 steps, like two yards per step or something like that, right? So you're getting five contacts per leg at that unbelievable rate. And you do three or four of those, like that's a great stimulus, even from just like apply a metric standpoint, especially if you combine it with some of the other plials you're doing. So a lot of times I think it's important to keep that in mind. Like if you're doing top speed work, setting few hours is great, you know, from a practice standpoint, obviously if you're a track athlete in a race, it's great, but it's also all about like the stimulus, like just the high quality force application and rate of force application that comes just from running fast. And I know we'll get into this either in the podcast or when we get down to the track, the turf. So with our team sport athletes. It's a really track. Yeah. Me too. Come on, let's just. So like with Penn LaCrosse, particularly we do this a lot, we do speed golf. And I think we still have from Zach Deschandre, somebody else. It's not our turn, but you said a goal time based on their fly 10 PR. And I do this. So Corey Walls is the head strength coach over at UPEN and worked with him for a long time and get a chance to collaborate on this when we train the Penn men's lacrosse team. So let's take an athlete that has a fly 10 yard PR of 1.00 for easy numbers. So we do three or four reps. We say, okay, the first rap you're doing 90%. We have all this printed out. It's on a very simple Excel sheet. So the athletes all know what their goal time is. So like the first rap of the athletes PR is one flat, then 90% of 1.10, right? And so they're not trying to go at full speed. They're trying to hit 1.10, hence the name speed golf, right? It's closest to the whole, if you will. So like 1.11 or 1.09 is good because you're really close to your goal time. We're not trying to have them go 0.99, not on the first rap for sure. And then maybe they're second to the third rap, like, okay, 95%. So like 105 for that specific athlete. And so what's pretty interesting and I think incredible is several fold. Number one, you will have, especially with team sport athletes, several guys or gals, will break their, will set PRs on those days. Even though that's specifically not the goal, like, okay, your PR is one flat. Don't run one flat. Run 1.05 or run 1.1. But for team sport athletes and you guys know this, you know, when they're trying to do a PR like, yeah, they're just muscle it. And the mechanics break down and they totally tense up. And a lot of times the times aren't as good as they could. They're more elastic. The only cues we say is run 1.05, run 95% fast and fluid. And then I'm not saying like all the time, but certainly for several athletes, a session, we'll say, oh, was your time? Do you hit 95%? They're saying, no, I just ran a PR. And they're like, and they're surprised. And I've stopped being surprised because I don't like, oh, yeah, that doesn't actually surprise me. And it comes with mechanics that are actually some of the best that you'll see. And now the second, the second reason I love, I know you got a question is, okay, so say they run like a 1.1 or 1.05, we say this to them after the session. Corey and I, we say, think about that stimulus. If you go in the weight room and you knock out like several reps at 90% 1 RM or 95%. That's not a failure of a day. That's like an amazing day. So you just do that on a turf, you run several reps at 95% like easy. That's an amazing day from a stimulus standpoint. And you circle back to what we just talked about from how much force, how fast, guarantee you that if they're running like a 1.05, 95%, the ground contact times and the forces have to match that biomechanically, that's a fact. So they're getting an amazing stimulus out of that while probably doing it with pretty good mechanics and not going to look like never had an athlete pull a muscle on those days. Because they're not like, ah, well, that's even there. Maybe think about it's like you're getting them to get this flow, this feeling. It's almost like I've related this in we have something similar in the throwing world. And it's almost like batting practice. They're just getting this flow. And I would be interested to see their mechanics if on those days, because they're more relaxed, if they're getting their technique and their movement is more closer to the track model. I can't say anything quantitatively, which kills me because we never documented it. Qualitatively, just with your coaching eyes, like, oh my god, you're so cool. They look better, yeah. Because they're not as forceful. And when you see them being more forceful, they will have them on their ground. They will try, they'll over push, they'll sit down, they tense up, like all of the bad attributes that go along with that. And sometimes can lead to like, you know, in a worst case scenario, like a soft tissue, injury, like those issues disappear when you say, hey, give me 99 to 5% but fast and fluid. And you know, like mindset wise, it takes the pressure off physically, it takes the pressure off. And yeah, like better mechanics come out. And again, you're still, if you're just chasing the stimulus, which is obviously the goal from training, like you're still getting that, that results. So I'll just continue on this path for another minute, if that's okay. So like what Corey and I have done with Penn LaCrosse is we kind of, with our top speed work without getting into all the details of the speed training program. But we kind of are on this, like four, three to four week cycle. So like one week we'll do wickets. We have like this very specific routine. We presented on this at the 2024 NSCA summer conference. We have this wicket for team sport, big, big group setting. So we do that with our athletes one week. We do wickets. Another week we do, like the second week we do what we call like technical buildups, which are actually pretty similar to the golf. The golf. Speed golf, yeah. But instead it's like a 90% fly, but where they're like specifically focusing on an aspect of technique. So we all know from a motor learning standpoint, you really can't think about like more than one thing at once, if that when you're running. We give them like kind of one thing to focus on per rap. Like maybe it's posture, maybe it's ground contact. Like leg recovery. Like a third week we'll do like a speed golf. And then like a fourth week we will do a PR. So like basically once every cycle they are trying to go for a PR. And then like once every cycle they're doing a speed golf, sometimes every cycle we're doing a technical buildup and like once every cycle we're doing wickets, something like that. That we've done after the last two or three years and the credit goes to Corey and the Pendla Cross coaches who allow us to do that as part of their practice. But it's worked pretty well. We've had some pretty solid improvements. Athletes seem to respond a very limited soft tissue injury from that standpoint. And it's like you can see guys who are clearly team sport athletes, you know, shifting over time. Again, I can only say that qualitatively. We've never done like a true research study on the mechanics of it. Definitely you can see guys within the course of a year and then we've had athletes that have done this for several years over time. Like I was just saying to a senior the other day of practice as he was running in our football. So I was like, man, if we only had video of that versus your freshman year, like, does answer. Yeah. What's the best distance on that? Like when you're talking about this going into a flying tent because we've done this, where legends set it up like, I mean, we've done tens, we've done 20, we did 30 buildup. What do you see as like a good distance into the buildup or maybe even the question should be what are the best distances to hit high max velocity? Yeah. I mean, I don't think you can go wrong as long as you document it. And if you want to keep records or monitor it, you standardize it. So I don't think there's a right or wrong answer. What I've typically done and what we've done with the groups I've worked with is for top speed, we either do 20 to 30 early in the season. And then when we're all back, we're going to be back. more comfortable a little bit later on in this, I don't mean the competitive season, I mean the fall offseason or whatever, then we'll go 30 to 40, IE at 30 yard run in with a 10 yard fly. Track and field athletes will start like for fall training this year, we started 30 to 40 and then we'll extend like 40 to 50 a little later. So just a little bit deeper for the rest of the year. So 20 to 30 build up or 30 to 40 build up, then the 10. Yes. Well, no, sorry, let me rephrase that. Early in it for Team Sport athletes, early in the year, a 20 yard build up and a 10 yard fly after that, IE the fly is 20 to 30. Okay. Or later on, a 30 yard build up plus a 10 to the fly, IE a 30 to 40. Yeah. And then for track athletes, we start with a 30 meter build up into a 10 meter fly. So I would do 140 and then extend that out to 40 to 50. So, okay. Do you see then, okay, going back, maybe going back to the transitional velocity or transitional acceleration, do you see anything like, like could you see an athlete who is a, let's say they do train on a hill versus with resisted on a 1080, that's very, very, I feel like the 1080 provides a very consistent feedback. Whereas a hill is like, you don't know the degree, you don't know the incline, some hills are different, you know, whatever. Do you see any technical pattern that that someone who has trained on a hill shows like, are they faster bringing their hip through or is there anything consistent there? No, it's a great question. I can't speak to that from my experience. And I do like hills. We use those like for Westchester track, we use that in our first cycle. So on our September cycle, we used hills as our form of resisted runs and then we transitioned to transitions about where we moved over to sleds for October in November, you know, as far as that. And then, you know, 1080 is an incredible piece of instrumentation. You know, I think there's so many advantages of that if you have access to one, like I have nothing, you know, nothing negative to say about, you know, either 1080 or 1080 speed, that's sort of thing. I mean, I think both the precision, you know, it can give you on the resistance, the feedback it immediately gives you and the athletes. So from both, you know, dialing up or dialing down the resistance or the assistance, the motivation, I'm sure, you know, right? I mean, there's just so many things that are great about it. It's like a straight up competition to right down their numbers. It's like, what would he get? I mean, yeah, all of that is nothing but great. I've just never had one to personally train with. And also, although for USA track and fields, my role there is different as a biomechanical consultant. And a lot of those groups, those training groups do have 1080s. So I'm providing kind of consulting input on how the 1080s should be used like best, or giving them some ideas for like load velocity profiling or things like that. In my own coaching that I do at Westchester and at Penn, we're in very big group settings and we don't have 1080s. So we just find other ways to do it basically sleds or hills. As far as back to your original question, kids say like, oh, this athlete's been running hills or sleds and I noticed the effects of X, Y and Z compared to a 1080 specifically. What the research would tell you is that running hills, which is very general statement because obviously the hill, yeah, just distance angle, all that can be different. But let's say a 30 meter hill of a reasonable and great. Yeah. Two to three percent. I mean, generally speaking, I think the research would tell you that both from like a biomechanical standpoint, a motor control standpoint is going to be very similar to resisted sleds, sprints and also very similar to acceleration pattern. So as far as body angle versus, you know, especially versus the normal ground contact times kind of, I think you could speculate and say muscle action. There has been one that's looked at like the coordination pattern and found that it's all pretty consistent with acceleration phase. So to me, I think there's both literally almost a hundred years or millennia of doing hills to improve acceleration and also just, you know, some common coaching experience and also like a reasonable, a reasonable degree of coaching, sorry, of biomechanical research would say, yeah, like hills are good for acceleration. Sleds are good for acceleration. Not the exact same thing, but probably work in pretty similar manners. So, legend, I know I'm taking all these questions. Do you have anything specific because I just had another one probably just related to the sleds? How do you deal with bigger groups? How do you use the wave, say it more than like 10, maybe 20, 20 people you coach at once, but how do you deal with that? Yeah, get lots of sleds. Caitlin CFO, call you up. No, seriously. So for men soccer last year, it was a 20 guys for track and field. You know, we had, gosh, I don't know. I think we had 30 plus athletes that were doing sleds on a regular. So literally what I did two years ago and I won't mention that. Well, I'll mention the company's names. Any reason not? No, no, no, go ahead. Spud the nylon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We have some of stuff that impacted the spot. Because I needed something that I could do indoors on a gym full of West Chester and I was training a men soccer team. So I ordered 15 of those. So I basically just said, you know, simple math. All right, what's the biggest group I'm going to deal with, which is track, which is like 30 plus you have them partner up or go on groups of three, where you have half of them do the unresistant while the other half's doing the resisted in partners. And now you now you cut your group number in four, right? Because you have half to your unresisted, you have to resist and you flip flop them, but they're always in partners. So if you have whatever 40 athletes for easy numbers, 20 are doing their unresisted, 20 are doing the resisted, but ones working while they're partner rest. So if you have 40 athletes, you only need 10 sleds. Yeah. And then you just figure out what, you know, how much weight you need to put, which is I learned the hard way on a gym floor. Those Spud sleds are amazing, but on a gym floor, man, you got some strong athletes. You need like, it might be flying. Oh, it's, yeah, there's so little friction. I ended up having to load them up with like 180 pounds per sled, but it worked out. But yeah, it's a joking answer, but it's not. So I have 15 Spud sleds, but they're at a reasonable price point. And so it makes it easier to get the job. Yeah. And, and, and you know, with those harnesses, the athletes just step in and step out. So like the rest time as well, their partners going, and it actually flows seamlessly. So in that case, is that where it's just very clear, you know, we've sort of had this discussion where you look at, and I, this is like years ago, I talked with Aaron Feld, who was the strength coach of Oregon, and then at Miami. And, and he would use the, the velocity decrement. And that's just where it's like, look, in the Spud slide, maybe let's just, I'm throwing this out there. 100 pounds is on there. Well, that's way past the body weight percentage number that you would look at. But if you're using the velocity decrement that you lose, well, that's, that would be a better way to do it. Absolutely. So I'll speak to that both from ways, which I've done. I quote, I quote, I quote, very scientifically. And at other times, or it's just kind of like, now we're just putting an absolute load on this sled, because we got a huge group number. So with men's soccer, what's this? A men's soccer last year, we had 20 guys, and we're doing it indoors with the Spud Slads. We had gyms. And so I did load velocity profiling. And so what I did was, I had them each do, we had baseline test numbers. So we had like their, essentially what their unloaded top speed was. For those not familiar in the listening audience, for load velocity profiling, you need like a top speed kind of or a near top speed. And then you need a velocity at two or three different loads, basically. And forgive me if you guys know this, but the listening audience may not. So you basically need to get an unloaded top speed. And then a fastest velocity they can hit with roughly, you know, whatever, 20% body weight, 40% body weight, 60% body weight, something like that. And then you just create essentially a linear regression that amounts to basically like a velocity based training chart kind of 1080 sprint. Now does this for you. But anyways, what we did with, with the Spud Slads and Men's Soccer was we set up the Broward Timers from the 15 to the 20 yard marker and said that's basically going to be the fastest five yard segment that they can hit. We put three different loads on them. We ran the entire team through it at three different loads. I created 20 different tabs in an Excel sheet. And then I had 20 different load velocity profiles. Now the funny thing was like those 20 athletes basically ended up sitting in four different buckets. Yeah, yeah, the velocity of the load that they needed to have like a 50% V deck. But I did have them all work at 50 percent V deck. And they all had their individualized sled loads. It just so happened that that was basically in one of four buckets. But for the Spud Slads on a gym floor, it was like 120 pounds, 140, like 160. And then like the heaviest was like 180 pounds. So it was a little bit challenging, you know, we're breaking all these weights up from the way we were. I was like, "Jay, we're loading them up there." No one squatting that day. Yeah, but you know, but it worked. I mean, it was logistically doable. And to your point, like that was a scenario where you're like, "Yeah, I don't think like a 45 on this nylon sled on a gym floor. I don't know what resistance that offers." Like we have to profile this, to have some idea of how much resistance they're getting out of that so that we can kind of like have a better idea of how to prescribe it for this training session. So that was probably the most rigorous I've ever been about it, both from like a baseline testing and like an actual training side of things. For transparency with Westchester Track, we use those same sleds because they're great. We used them on the track. We had 30 to 40 athletes going at a time, have some at the starting line and some of the 30 meter line just going like this in partners basically. We basically had the guys use one weight like 75 pounds ish plus or minus a little bit and the ladies were using another weight like a little bit less than that. We adjusted as needed. So that was a lot less scientific. That was just like you know an absolute load that we were kind of using for everybody and manipulating a little bit on an as needed basis and then the in between. So if the way I talked about with Westchester Soccer is like the most probably quantifiable you could be without a 1080 and the way I describe a Westchester Track is just like old schools. Yeah. The in between would be doing something like body weight related, something like that. You're just like what do you weigh 200 pounds? Exactly. Let's say 10%. Yeah. Okay. The way I see it, those are kind of like your three big options. You can just say everybody's doing this absolute load. No matter what you got a rock. This is yeah. Yeah. It's somewhat unscientific but we got a huge group we're just going to put in work and we'll manipulate it a little bit as we see fit based on how like what your mechanics look like. In between is like okay we're going to do this based on body mass you know what everyone's running at a similar percentage body weight but and then the most would be like the velocity decrement. There's no doubt that doing load velocity profiling and doing based on a velocity decrement is I would say the most rigorous way of of doing it. Would you do resistant training like this? Would you do this like let's say talk about track or or maybe the soccer team? Would you do this like let's say a resisted day like how would that week look? Would you be doing a resisted sprint day on one day and then how many how many days off till they would do like their flies? Yeah. Is that how you would set up? Yeah I mean I think the classic high low model would just be like resisted accelerations would be on Monday. Accel day would be Monday or resisted accelerated for track for which is the easiest. Yeah. It would be on Monday and then Tuesday recovery day and then flies would be you know top speed or whatever you're doing for top speed flies, speed golf, wake it to be Wednesday recovery day. Some sort of fitness speed endurance whatever Friday and then Saturday off recovery Sunday totally off and then back to add it again. We've done we didn't exactly do that for Westchester track this year. I won't give away all the details but we had something that was pretty similar where our Mondays were kind of like resistance day and are like either hills in September or resisted accelerations in October, November. So I think that works pretty well with college kids. I hate to put it this way but it's just a reality. I don't want them going max velocity on Monday. I just don't know what they've been doing over the weekend. I think in some worlds that's ideal. Like if you had a if you could guarantee that your entire team was in bed by 10 p.m. Yeah, not drinking Thursday night Friday night Saturday night not drinking you knew they were ready to go Monday and say hey do do max V on Monday because it's one year the most fresh but that's not reality and I think you could also frame out like well if you do a low volume but high intensity acceleration on Monday you're just hopefully priming them for Wednesday. Yeah, especially with the Tuesday off. That was essentially what Losey had said to us who was a strength coach at Penn State now he's a Virginia Tech and when we talked to him last year about this setting up our summer training with our speed group it was we would do he would say he would echo that now he would shift the day slightly but he would say okay Monday they might do a heavy clean and then like an upper body lift but they would do a clean and he would he swore he's like I don't know for sure but I don't know what they're doing on the weekend and if they do a clean on a Monday they feel okay but I know whatever happened on the weekend it gets out of them so yeah Tuesday they could do yeah they did their max velocity then on Tuesday. Yeah I know I love that I I wouldn't want max velocity to be Monday but any other day no matter how you're doing and I think it's fine and Monday is a primer I think is a great idea again we're just talking realities in college athletes like you got to deal through literally the culture basically. Yeah exactly right so I'm not you know get up on a pedestal or anything like that that's just like hey let's deal with reality and let's just say okay we want to make sure that they're ready to go to their Wednesday when when they're doing you know V max so yeah I think what you just described is great because you could easily go you know some sort of primer Monday high day Tuesday recovery day Wednesday high day Thursday recovery Friday and then another like speed endurance or special endurance on Saturday and Sunday off. What's up guys our podcast and our channel are sponsored by our own strength training app peak strength the entire focus of peak strength is to provide you guys with the absolute best sports performance app that you could ever imagine we build out the programs on the back end we take in all of these different decisions that we learned here on site at garage strength so that we can then apply it to you so you can improve your training so if you guys want to improve your overall sports performance head over to peakstrength.app the Google Play Store or the Apple iOS store download peak strength you'll go to free week of training and then you can start getting on those gains get those reps done so that you can become a champion now let's get back to the video peace. Would you see when you when you're going through the the the decrements with the different amount of weight that you would have on the sled yeah do you see any correlation where you're like okay once we get to this decrement like this speed yeah drop off that now I can start to make correlations to the weight room or no like like like in the sense of I'm thinking about our guys like if we're doing like a if we have a kid who let's say they're a good cleaner or a good single leg squad or they're good like a Bulgarian squad or a good back squad or like that's where we'll start to see maybe at a much slower speed do you see that there's a relationship or do you have you never seen that. Wow that's that's an awesome question um I don't know the answer to that question because it's been um a long enough time since I've been like a head strength and conditioning coach in charge of like their their weight room program as well where I know like all of their numbers so in my role I'm doing speed development but we have a separate I'm like a volunteer assistant sprints coach I'm doing speed development for several teams and an assistant role but we have a separate head strength and conditioning of Westchester for example who's more in charge and more in tune with what their numbers are I could go back and look at that but I don't know that it might not matter but I have an interesting point I actually didn't want to discuss both as it related to the hills and velocity decrement and then the sleds and velocity decrement and then programming so um so the one interesting thing about hills that I've never done but that you could do is you can do velocity decrement on hills probably more easily than you can measure like distance and and degrees inclined or just as easily or it might have more transfer so you can easily if it's a paved path put up a set of whatever timing gates and measure how long the entire rep takes them or just what the last five or ten meters of that rep is like let's say it's a 20 meter hill like a 20 meter distance and you measure what the last five meters is and then you measure them just on the flat in a 20 meters sprint you measure the last five meters segment so you have like a way of quantifiably relating their performance on the hill to their performance on the flat that now becomes a now I guess actually apples the apples with a sled because think about if they run like the last five meters on the hill at I don't know 30 percent velocity decrement compared to their flat sprint in a vacuum like you don't know like how much you're slowing them down but if you have that number now you can actually relate that back to like a 30 percent velocity decrement that's pretty interesting it's not completely like that that's cool yeah that's cool but at least now there's a way to kind of triangulate where you are right from a programming standpoint there's one thing I'd forgot to mention about hills do as I say not as I do I've never actually done that but it's one thing that looks like yes of homework yeah we it isn't there in one of the research publications I think by chase Delaney where they've done velocity decrement on the hill something like that okay and then I've always thought about that and been like man next cycle we do it hills we gotta do this as much for that also for that motivational piece right like you have with the 1080 right once you start quantifying those sort of things you be like okay well now you're really look yeah okay so that's just one side note piece so as far as using sleds doing load velocity profiling and then again for our listeners you maybe aren't as familiar with load velocity profiling on the sleds or with 1080 or with anything what it allows you to do is it really gives you an individualized really just chart or percentage scheme to say okay you put this much load on the sled or you put this much load on the 1080 resistance on the 1080 and your athlete is going to be able to hit this percentage of top speed so whatever 45 pounds on the sled based on this athlete load velocity profile is going to give them you know a 20% V deck I either going to be able to hit 80% of their top speed right and again I know you guys are familiar with this but so what I think would be a logical way to progress it I have not done this in practice yet but again it's kind of on the to-do list is to say the following well the higher loads lower like 50% V deck or whatever 40% V that you wouldn't have to run it slower. That relates to people looking to research, that relates to initial acceleration. And that makes sense. You're slowing the athlete down more. And then the intermediate loads, which maybe like you say, a 30% V-decker, 20% V-decker. Well, that's going to probably relate a little bit more to that transitional acceleration piece. And then the lighter loads, maybe you're thinking, like, 10% or 20% V-decker. Well, that's probably going to be a little bit closer out to top speed. And also, we talked about with sleds. Well, maybe that's a good little bit lighter sled load for working on almost that motor learning piece of getting their hips with them as they work out towards top speed. So it seems to me-- OK, let's say you have a 12-week training cycle, whether that's summer with a college athlete, or a fall with a college track and field, they're a 12-week training cycle. You could do this. The first four-week block, the first two weeks of that could be habituation. Maybe you're just getting them used to sleds, doing 20% or 30% V-decker, like relatively lighter. But then you're going heavy, 40% V-decker, 50% V-decker, something like that. So you're really working initial acceleration. By the way, short to long training programs in track and field is pretty classic way of progressing your sprints. So you're doing-- for your acceleration work, more work shorter reps, maybe 10%, 15 meter, or something like that. Then your second block, you're working a little bit more intermediate distances. Maybe you're working out to 20 meters. And on your acceleration days, maybe you're doing lighter loads, like 30% V-deck, something like that. So the loads are getting lighter as your distances get longer. And then your third block, so like weeks 9 through 12, now you're going to 10% to 20% V-deck as you're working outwards of 20, 25, 30 meters, something like that. So it seems to me a pretty natural way to marry up the velocity decrement and your load velocity profiling with your training prescription with a short to long training profile or programming for the acceleration day. Again, maybe that's only one day a week. Maybe that's just for your first day of the week, your Mondays, or whatever else. But to me, that seems pretty logical, if nothing else, is a way to kind of integrate that. Because I get a lot of questions. I'm like, not just what is load velocity profiling, but OK, let's say you do it, you do the load velocity profile. Like now what do you do with that information? How do you take that and now implement it along with just the other basic questions of like, well, what's some different ways or ideal ways you can implement short to long or different types of acceleration progressions? So again, we didn't do that this year. We did hills for the first four weeks cycle, which I thought worked well. And we did slabs for the second, two cycles. But I think at least in a vacuum, that'd be a pretty interesting way to kind of implement something. And I think at 12 week cycles, pretty-- you know, it's a pretty common cycle. I don't know. Maybe college is over the summer, like 10 weeks. But somewhere in that nine to 12 week cycle is pretty typical, either for summer or for like a semester type of block for college athletes. So it's just something for the listeners out there to maybe think about. I got one more thing. I don't know what-- I mean, that was great right there. That was a great summation. Better be consistent. Let's just be listening to this again, even though he's in here and be like, OK, this is what I needed. This is what I'm doing. Dane doesn't have any sense. Could sound guys get ready? Yeah. You're training next summer. So I-- That was great though. Yeah, I love that. I have off tangent going back to the hip. You mentioned the 400. OK, you mentioned the high max velocity seen the high speed from the 400. And immediately, I forget if we were even recording at this point, I had brought up off air. Maybe I was on air. I don't know. That ULMR Rojas, the triple jump Olympic champ from 21 from Tokyo, she's been clocked as running faster. Even in that Olympics, when Elaine Thompson won the 100 and the 200, she was clocked faster. It was like 41 1/2 kilometers per hour. I think Elaine was just over 40. And now, Thia Gadson has also been timed at Thia Lafonde, has been clocked close to that 40. She's another triple jumper. And then you said the 400. And I remember Christian Taylor, who's the best American triple jumper, also was a good 400 meter runner. himself. He actually-- I want to say he might have even meddled in the 4x4 the year-- one of the years that he won the World Championships. I could be wrong on all this. But where I'm going with this is also recently, there's a research paper where single leg plyometrics transfer really well to decreasing 10, 20, 30 meter times versus bilateral plyometrics. And I guess where I'm going with that is, could this in theory because of the triple jump and the triple jump or speed, and even anecdotally, you watch Jonathan Edwards World Record, and he's freaking fast. And you look at it, it's like because it's a unilateral plyometric. They're overcoming these massive forces at very high speeds, 10 times, 12 times body weight possibly. And it all seems to be from the hip. So maybe where I'm trying to go with this is, like, does this show that the hip and that the hip might be more important to train than the lower leg? Or does it not matter? You're looking too deep. I'm looking too deep. Oh, great, great train of thought. I'm always hesitant to say one's more important than the other. I feel like this is, again, not my statement, but just a thought that I like is, like, OK, the hip, if you will, kind of generates, like, torque generated at the hip, but the force needs to be transmitted at the ground. So if you have all this torque, just big picture conceptually here with thinking, all this torque being generated from the hip, and like, maybe the thigh can really reverse at the top and at the back. And you can really generate a lot of torque. But at ground contact, you get this mushy ground contact. Then do that dissipate here. It's just not going to be that effective. And so regardless of what the ceiling is here, if it's lost there, it's all probably mostly for not. So I probably wouldn't say one's more important than the other. Likewise, let's say you've got this super stiff springy-- Nothing from the glue. But you can't generate a here. Then you're not working with anything in the first place. So I think it's probably equal parts. And I think they probably need to be trained equally, just from a 10,000 foot view kind of macro level concept. I should say we haven't talked much about the knee. I guess maybe that's my own personal bias coming in. It's not to say the knee is an important. Clearly it is. If you yield at the knee, or if the knee can't transmit, forces up and down the chain. It's obviously going to be problematic as well. But I think generally my thoughts tend to go to the extremes, I guess, you could say of the limb, just the hip and the ankle. Or even the top down versus bottom up. Exactly. And so it's like, oh, you're just-- The knee's a link in that chain. And it's an important one. They're all important. But that's not where my thoughts tend to focus, I guess, you could say. I want to go back to your point just about those different kind of Olympic athletes, et cetera. Look at Mondo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Two steps. Well, I mean, you run a 10,200. So what's the cause and effect? Is he a great pole vault or-- because he's just because he's a great athlete? Or does that great speed can do your damage both? Yeah. You can't say chicken or egg. It's just both. In my work and track and field, and I don't consult for all events. I really, truly consult for the sprints and hurdles. But I've seen a little bit of everything from the different events. Rarely, if ever, have I said, oh, that athlete's top speed was slower than I thought it was going to be. Many more times than not. I'm like, wow. That athlete's got a better top speed than I. If they're not a sprinter, right? If they're like, obviously, 61, too, you're like, oh, it's going to be fast. But if they're of a different-- You look at long or high speed. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you're right. We've long jumpers. Like, oh, yeah. Persons got a fast top speed. I mean, that's a large contributing factor to a lot of those events coming back to earlier partner conversation. Whether you're track and field or team sport, it may not be the most important thing, but it's a ceiling that's going to contribute to raise up a lot of other factors that are important to one's sport or event. So just kind of a point on that. That would just think is funny. Yeah. Pretty rare if you look at an elite athlete or you're like, wow, that's-- Yeah, long jumper. You're like, whoa, he's slow. Like, you never actually think of it. You're not going to probably find an elite long jumper who's got a super slow top speed out. It's going to be pretty rare. But yeah, I think just the training piece-- I don't know. I think, yeah, it's really-- I think it's mostly-- my focus goes to both. I want to bring up one point. This is like parts satire, but not really. So I've talked about this a little bit about recently. It's just an interesting thought experiment. So take like same bowl and Michael Jordan. So arguably, the two best athletes in their respective sports, I mean, both fastest guys have literally ever lived in Jordan, arguably, the Goat and Baskable, right? So their builds are actually really similar. So both 6'5, Jordan 6'6' right? Their body weight was extremely similar in their prime. I think both don't call me on this. Like 205 and Jordan was maybe 2'15. So you look at their BMI. It's nearly identical, actually. And so any of the things that I'm going to do, look at Jordan, you know, like, well, this isn't a guy who's like, lacks elasticity or forcefulness. I mean, guy could apply vertical force at a fast rate with the best of them, right? But why isn't Michael Jordan, like, the fastest of all time? Because a lot of times people look at Bull and they're like, oh, he's so fast because his legs were so long. Yeah, he's just tall. He had long legs. Yeah. So like, well, what a cop out answer that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was like, Bull was so fast because he had long strides and long legs. Well, why wasn't Michael Jordan the fastest guy? Every sprinter would be 6-5, 6-6. Right. Then we just start recruiting from the NBA and they'd all be the fastest. But LeBron would be the fastest of all time. So it's, so again, I say that somewhat sarcastically, obviously, but it's more than that because it comes back to this hip torque question slash concept. Well, Jordan, just if you just think conceptually, didn't have the hip torque to be able to turn it around the way that Bull could. People said, well, Bull's stride frequency is 4.4 steps per second. It's not that great. No for a guy who is 6-5, it is that great. And if the guy's who are 6-5, everyone else in the world had the hip torque to turn it around and apply force at a stride rate of 4.4, they'd be the fastest guy in the world. But they're not. And so like, I bring up those two. I did a coach education in service where I put Bull and, you know, Jordan on a tail of the tape. And I was like, basically the same size. Don't tell me this guy's the fastest guy ever because he had long strides. And don't tell me it's because Jordan couldn't apply vertical force for the picture of Jordan like dunking from the free throw ball. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's actually not the quality he was missing, by opinion, you know, or if you watch him play or dunk, whatever else. So I think it's a very interesting, just like thought question, be like, well, you know, Bull at 6-5, all things considered actually had a pretty good start. And a stride rate for being 6-5 was actually amazing. And if it wasn't, like everyone else who's 6-5 would be in the Olympics. I don't know, just kind of an interesting thought to bring the hip-tour question to life. I think that's the interesting part with Rojas going back to my triple jump example is that she reminds me of Bull. She's 6 feet, 6-1. She's built exactly like him, the female version. And I've always wondered, what if she ran the two? What if she, yeah. But it's like this. And it almost goes back to a training concept. I guess one more thing before we get downstairs was, I'm sure you guys got to go to the bathroom because we're going pretty long here is simply related to hamstring injuries. So I think this is a topic that a lot of people have questions about. It's like, where do you see with soft tissue with hamstring injuries being, what do you see being the most prevalent position that causes hamstring issues? Somewhat in my wheelhouse, although to be transparent, I'm not a hamstring injury researcher per se. I think most of the research would tell you that it's, you know, those hamstring strains occur in the lead swing phase, although some occur in the early ground contact phase. I read one or two research papers recently that kind of indicated that proportionately more were in acceleration than I was expecting, not like versus top speed versus change of direction, but just maybe, you know, I had it in my mind like, hey, they all happen at top speed. Whereas there's some indication that like, no, they're happening some in acceleration as well. And I think, you know, from a, again, from like a kinematic position standpoint, we've already addressed that a little bit, but I do think there's a pretty consistent body of evidence that says like, hey, you're getting into these really extreme, postural positions, pelvic positions, you know, that sort of thing, especially if you're, if you're casting out in a late swing phase where the hamstring is, you know, in the latter part of its flexion, but the shank and the knee are extending. Basically, I eat a hamstring stretch to cause both joints, the hip and the knee. And it's happening at high angular velocities. So you're putting it on this big stretch at a high rate of stretch that that's where the, you know, that's where the injuries occur. To me, that makes sense. And again, it tiny bit outside of my wheelhouse from a, from a statistics standpoint, but there is that old kind of joking saying that you're too slow to pull a hamstring, right? But if you think about it, that's kind of true in the sense that, okay, well, fast angular velocities are associated with speed. So our faster runners, generally speaking, are going to faster angular velocities. So you're stretching this muscle, the muscle, the crossies, you know, the hip and the knee are faster in, oh, by the way, if it's not the late swing phase that's getting used to the early ground contact phase, now we have this whole body of research, a lot of ours, where it's like, oh, the forces early in ground contact are larger as well. So if you're running fast, you probably have high angular velocities and higher forces. So if you're not in great positions to do that, or if you're slightly, you know, overworked or fatigued, then yeah, probably you are getting more likely to pull a hamstring if you're a little bit faster. If you're running slow and, you know, you're running with lower forces and lower angular velocities, I say this half joking, but not really. Maybe there's something protective about that. So I don't know. Again, just something like another interesting fact or interesting thought I should say. Okay. All right. Dr. Clark, thank you for being on here. We're running quite long. So we'll resume filming shortly downstairs. And I hope everybody enjoyed this and all the listeners took the nine pages of notes that I have on my computer. Until next time, peace.