What Makes Athletes Truly Explosive w/ Exercise Scientist Dr. Ben Moxness

Before we get into today's videos, make sure that you guys follow garage strength on Spotify. And if you really enjoy the show, giving us a five star review is not only gonna help us grow on Spotify, it's gonna help other athletes and other coaches develop into those champions. Now, let's get into the show. Five key lifts that every athlete needs to jump higher. You wanna be able to back squat two times your body weight. You wanna be able to power clean one half times your body weight. You need to be able to run a 10 meter fly. And what are the best ways to train ankle stiffness that would enhance the RSI and also sprint ability and jumping ability? Any basic fly, we'll do any single leg founder hop or hurdle hop, any of those are great options. Lifting weights, any sort of heavy resistance training would work really well, especially doing like super maximal eccentric, works extremely well for getting different tendons or like the Bernlin method, which is the biggest waste of time that inhibits someone from jumping higher. In the jump space, it's definitely gotta be the fly workout, man. I hate to say it, but like those, you know, those internet coaches where it's like, if you're 5'8" and can't dunk, do this, you know, fly workout that's like three by 10 pogo hops and a lateral hurdle hop to a box jump. Like that doesn't actually get to jump in higher. And it's been, I mean, we probably have athletes in the hundreds that have come to us and they're like, man, like I was doing these fly workouts three times to week, my vertical will stuck for a year. We're gonna cover everything that you need to know to jump higher and be a more explosive athlete and we're gonna start right now. I had the privilege to sit down with Dr. Ben Moxness. We went into everything related to vertical jump, explosiveness, elasticity and what you need to be the most explosive athlete possible. We dove deep into workout splits. What you can do with isometrics, super maximal e-centrics, even just lifting, heavy, freaking weights. Dr. Moxness gives a specific percentages that everyone can work towards to be as explosive as possible. This podcast is loaded with information. Now, let's get to our podcast with Dr. Ben Moxness. Okay, Ben. So if I'm a water seeer, I wanted to pitch this to you as a theoretical question. I've got a wide receiver. They want to be the absolute best wide receiver possible, but they're struggling to jump and actually get jump balls and to win those battles. What are you looking at from an assessment perspective to improve their jumping ability? And then on top of that, how would you set up their training to optimize that performance in the jumping realm? So first things first, like let's just look at their low hang fruit. Are they strong? Are they powerful? Squat and power clean, very basic. Now given that he's a football player, I'm going to assume that box is checked off. So now we got to look at reactivity. I would probably assess him in something like a depth jump, look at his RSI or his integral RSI, which is where you take the drop height into account. And see where his numbers look like there. I might look at, say, like a one-step approach vertical and look at his RSI, like what's his flight time divided by his ground contact time. Just to get an overall assessment of how reactive he is, you can also look at some of his acceleration metrics. You know what's his 0 to 10? What's his 0 to 20 or even his 40? And that can give you, me at least, an idea of how reactive he is. And based on that kind of basic assessment, I'll see, OK, does he have a strength deficit? Does he have a power deficit? Does he have a deficit in elasticity or reactivity? You know, like a strength deficit for a football player might be, you know, can he high bar deep barbell back squat by 2x body weight? Or can he power clean 1 1/2 times body weight? Or you can even look at relative strength numbers? Like, can he power clean 75% to 78% of his max back squat? And if you can only power clean say 65%, then that would tell me, OK, he is a pretty obvious power deficit. Or for reactivity wise, you know, can you get a 3.0 RSI on a basic 10 5 test or on, say, like an 18 inch depth drop? Or if I was looking at like a max approach jump, like with our dunkers, can you get over a 3 RSI with flight time divided by ground contact time? And in terms of setting up his training week, we usually do Monday, Wednesday, or our pretty big lower body strength and power days, sprinting included. Sometimes we have some multi jump circuits or some plios. Friday, I would still with him. I would still probably do a jump day. One of the easiest ways to jump higher in game for any sport is just to raise your jump ceiling. So if he increases his max vertical, like, say, a four step or a five step approach vertical, off of one or off of two feet, it's going to be way easier for him to access a one step vertical when he's going for a jump all in game. And we've seen that with a lot of guys. I mean, we have dunkers, we have volleyball players, but we even have some like pro soccer guys. And they'll like-- and they'll report, yeah, I jumped higher on this header than I ever had before, because they get a two step approach. Because simply because they have gone out and jumped, had jump sessions for the first time in their life. And if you have a 34 inch-- like I said, you have a 34 inch vertical, you increase it to 40. Well, now accessing 34 is way easier. And so that's kind of like the lowest hanging fruit that we can assess and look at. And then usually Saturday is kind of just up in the air. Some guys like feel good lifts. Some guys just want the weekend off. Kind of depends on how nearly wired he is or how fatigued he is throughout the week. Obviously with football players, you would do some sort of upper body training to get that to increase mass there as well. But from a basic just jump training standpoint, that's probably what we would do. Saturday might be a tempo day. If he's deficient in elasticity, we might do tempo on Tuesday and tempo on Saturday. That's a really easy way to accumulate more elastic contacts. So that would be some basic stuff. OK, so you're mentioning-- I want to go right off of this elasticity. I want you-- can you define clearly? So this is something that Eric Gadsson who coached Thea LaFont and The Triple Jump, Olympic champ in The Triple Jump. He's talked about elasticity. Christian Taylor, who I just had on the podcast, he talked about elasticity. Can you clarify what that would mean from a jumping point from a jumping perspective? Yeah, so when I look at elasticity, I look at how fast are they getting off the ground, but also how high are they jumping. Sometimes your reactive strength index can lie to you where you have a relatively longer ground contact time, but you have a pretty high flight time or high jump height because you spent longer on the ground. But to me, it's like how much force are you taking in? Like how much momentum are you taking in? Which you would take into account like a drop height? I think there's a metric called IRISI, like integral or integrative RSI. It's relatively new. It came out in October, I think, and they'd taken to account the drop height when looking at RSI. So you can use something like that. And how well do you-- how quickly do you amortize? So how short is the ground contact time? And then what is the subsequent flight time? Like when I measure RSI on our guys, I set a minimum jump height just so they don't just spend minimum time, but they don't actually get off the ground. So I'll set a jump height of say, you have to get at least 18 inches or 20 inches, like whatever their ability is. And then from there, I want to see the ground contact time slowly decrease. And then I can also raise the box height so I know if they're getting the same RSI. And they're still meeting the jump height threshold and the ground contact times are decreasing, which would increase their RSI. And then to me, that would show me that they're more elastic. You might be watching this and you're overwhelmed with what you can do inside of the gym. And fortunately for you, our podcast is sponsored by our Strength Training app, Peak Strength. Peak Strength will spoon feed you the exact exercises that you need to do. Peak Strength will also provide the exact reps and sets and even rest periods. 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OK, so basically short ground contact time, but able to still hit solid jump height. Yeah, yeah, don't just spend no time on the floor. Just pick your feet up with your hip flexors, but you get no flight time at all. It's short amortization and actually being able to produce force and jump relatively well compared to your current capabilities. Yeah, so I guess maybe it actually reminds me like going back to the discussion with Aaron who coached the Olympic champion on the women side, Theo LaFond. And he talked about Yulamore Rojas, who's the best triple jumper ever. And he's like, dude, she's the fastest woman probably to ever walk the planet, but she's also elastic. And I guess now that I'm thinking back to that conversation, that makes sense where in the triple jump or even in somebody who, using the wide receiver example, the wide receiver or so based off of your measurable of elasticity really being dialed into RSI, he would be able to run. Let's see, he's in the middle of a route. He can plant, have minimal ground contact and still go up, still sky for a ball with minimal disruption in that height of the jump because he has increased his elasticity. Yeah, yeah, he can like hit the same peak height, but with a faster ground contact time, which means he would get to the ball first. Right. You guys jump faster, you know? Yep. Okay. So you were talking about, you're talking about elasticity and improving it. And you mentioned, you mentioned the concept of tempo, doing tempos or tempo, explain, go further into what you were talking about with tempo training and what that means for you and what somebody could take away from, yeah, I want to improve my elasticity. What does the tempo training mean? Yeah. So with a lot of guys that have a deficit in elasticity or not very reactive, just accumulating more relatively short ground contacts throughout the week is a very low hanging fruit. Like a lot of guys, or you can do some multi jump circuits, it doesn't have to be tempo, like in track and field, they'll do some like extensive flyos type stuff. But tempo is an easy way to accumulate hundreds more contacts throughout the week. And if you're running, you know, and that 70% range, you're not going to get too nearly fried. Usually you'll feel pretty good after it. It'll keep you in shape. It'll keep you lean. If you look at like spring research, your ankle stiffness, like how much your ankle flexes essentially relative to the force reporting out, maxes out at about 70% of your current running speed. That's the same individual. Your ankle stiffness maxed out at about 70% and then from there, the knee stiffness is what increases as you're applying more and more force. So with tempo training, it's a really easy way to train, you know, quote unquote, you know, ankle stiffness or elasticity because you're running at around that 70% threshold. So you have similar coordinated patterns. Super easy way to make it to get more elastic contacts. Like I said before, and usually guys can tolerate it pretty well too. Like obviously you can't sprint five days a week, you know, you probably pull a hammy or your Achilles would hate you. But with tempo, like especially like tempo on grass or like some, or you know, some softer surface, it's pretty, it's a pretty easy add in. Okay. So if I, how far would they be running, let's say, like 10 by 270% effort, nothing crazy. Sometimes we even just do like 10 by 100 is not really like. And then with a 50 meter walk recovery. Okay. Okay. So, so you're saying, I'm just trying to paint this. If we're doing a 10 by 100 with a 50 meter walk, let's say that the person runs a 12 second, you know, a 12 second 100. They would probably be adding, let's say upwards of four to five seconds and they're running a 19 second or yeah, 19 second 100. And they would do that 10 times. Yep. Okay. Is there any other plios? Like, I'm thinking like Pogo hops or mini hurdle hops where it's like your whole goal is the queue is stay on the ground as short as possible. Is that something that you're rolling with as well? Oh, yeah. Yeah. We use hurdle hops a lot in complexies, especially as we get into more kind of specific periods of training. Usually, they're also pretty tolerable. Like a double like plyo is usually a little bit more tolerable than a single like plyo. I mean, single like plows are still great. But double like, if you are going to add in plios on top of your training, usually a double like plios, probably going to be the easiest add in simply because guys can get short ground contact times and, you know, their knee won't flare up, their Achilles won't flare up. Okay. So talk to me if elastic, you know, I'm sort of, I really am quite droopled clicking on this elastic thought process because I think it's an important thing to really sort of educate and I want to learn more about this is like, talk to me about what the role ankle stiffness plays in and that role specifically related because you mentioned this as far as tempo training, you'll see ankle stiffness improves up to 70%. What does that mean? What is the role and what are we seeing, you know, from the outside, went with ankle stiffness? Yeah. So ankle stiffness, like in the context of running, you know, stiffness is just forest divided by deformation. So if you go through the same level of deformation or flexion, when subject to a greater force, you have higher ankle stiffness. You know, sprinters or sprinters or if you have a shorter ground contact time is usually associated with higher ankle stiffness, it does not mean that ankle does not flex. It just means it doesn't flex more in relation to a given force or a higher force. And so with sprinting, you know, I like I know you had Dr. Ken Clark on the podcast and I don't remember if you guys talked about this or not, but you need to, you can have a very powerful hip, like you can whip from the hip, but if your ankle is not very stiff, which usually is indicative of you just don't create enough pretension or can mean that your Achilles tendon is too compliant. Like since your Achilles is what's going through the majority of the M.T.U. length change, your Achilles tendon stiffness is larger going to dictate your ankle stiffness. Like that's why, like I posted a video a few months back of Stefan home. I did like his Achilles was like four times stiffer than the average male or a softwa powles like quad tendon. Actually, it was just quad afer neurosis, but it's basically his quad tendon was like two times stiffer than another Olympic sprinter. So like the difference between a guy running 972 or 975 and a guy running 101 like his his quad tendon was way stiffer. So that would be indicative of like how important tendon stiffness is for in order to be stiff on the ground, fast on the ground and also it also to be elastic obviously like you want to load the tendon and it'll return energy. Okay, so you're saying then based off of elasticity and we're looking at ankle stiffness. If we're trying to increase ankle stiffness, there would be less deformation, especially up to 70 75%. And very clear athletes that have high levels of ankle stiffness, the faster athletes and the ones that jump higher like Stefan home, a softwa pow will have clear greater levels of stiffness in those key joint areas. Now what is the best, you know, so you sort of touched on this at least with tempo and with the with the pogo hops and stuff like that. Are there other ways to train ankle stiffness? What are the best ways to train ankle stiffness and to improve this so that we would see a direct result that would enhance our SI and also sprint ability and jumping ability. Yeah, so like I mentioned, plows usually probably one of the best ones because plows is what teaches your body how to create pretension. You know, if you're going to be taking in a lot of force, you have to create a lot of co-contractions around the joint to have a stiff joint. So any basic plymetric will do, you know, any single leg bound or hop or hurdle hop, you know, any of those are great options. And then we also have to look at kind of the muscle tendon unit itself. You know, we have to get a stiffer tendon, which you do through lifting weights, you know, any sort of heavy resistance training would work really well, especially doing like some sort of two up one down or super maximal eat centric works extremely well for getting stiffer tendons or like the burn lin method, which is the isometric method where you do like three second or four second max voluntary contractions for like four reps or whatever it is, five reps. And you also need to improve just the general strength of your triceps, sir, your calf muscles, especially your soleus. Like I cite this one a lot where Randy Huntington who worked with Sue Bingchin, you know, he saw a clear deficit with sues, soleus strength. And he was, it was like a strong as like one of his like 15 year old sprint, like 15 year old female sprinters or something like that. And that way. And so he had a lot of energy leaks when he was doing acceleration and then getting his soleus more powerful on the Kaiser seated calf, they saw a pretty strong correlation with his acceleration times decreasing. So just getting your calves generally strong and powerful, which will also intern, get your Achilles stiffer and then of course, actualizing it through doing plios. Like you want to develop a reserve, right? Like doing a single like hopper, a bound, you're going to be taken in more force than you would in a normal sprint. So then you develop some elastic reserves, your ankle gets better at handling the force. So it'll either deform less or it'll be subject to the same force or start a higher force and it will deform the same amount. So there's your higher ankle stiffness and you'll be able to, that's how you get your spike in the first half of ground contact. So that's a really powerful whip from the hip and then it's also a very stiff ankle and like lower limb in general. Yeah, I had a podcast. You talked about Ken Clark. We had a podcast I brought this up of Ken where Stuemick Millen was going into ankle stiffness to him is much like a boxer. If a boxer, if a boxer, he's going to be a boxer. Boxer would throw a punch and keep their wrists, if somebody's listening, keeping their wrists limp. But if a boxer throws a punch and they're stiff through the entire wrist, this is very similar to the ankle when you're grounding. It doesn't mean that you want to lose range of motion, but it means that you want to be prepped for that grounding to then when it lengthens to apply as quickly as possible. I guess this brings up because you mentioned pre-tension now a few times and I want to go into pre-tension and what that actually means because I think this is a concept or an idea that can be a bit confusing, muscle slack, pre-tension, so much so that I have even at times been like, I feel almost guided off track, but can you clarify pre-tension and what that would look like or what that means for any given muscle? Pre-tension is simply just, your muscle has a high electrical activity, it's producing force you could say before you hit the ground. If you look at measurement of, like I say, a drop jump, you'll see a high EMG amplitude in the muscle before ground contact. That simply means the muscle is active, it is taking up muscle tendon units slack. You can also create pre-tension by what you were saying with the boxing example of you can flex the joints, so with an ankle you would bring it into Dorsey flexion so you can take up slack that way. That way when you hit the ground, you can produce force right away and of course pre-tension. I know you've read a Bosch's book, he talks about the fusing motor system, the alpha gamma loop where the muscle or the brain contracts the gamma motor neurons and those pull the spindles tot, so the pre-tension also gives you a very sensitive stretch reflex so you can get a very quick stretch with the muscle. You'll get a reflex response and the muscle can switch to a quasi-isometric state a lot faster if you create pre-tension. Pre-tension is largely associated with coordination. It's a big deal with guys who don't jump very high or run very fast. They simply lack that coordination. It's all part of the great exposure to movement and learning new skills. Over time your body will learn how to time the pre-tension appropriately. You want to have pre-tension and you want to have a stiff ankle but you don't want to have your tibialis anterior on throughout the entire ground contact at a high level because otherwise you won't be able to plan a flex. If your hamstrings are always trying to create knee flex or knee flexion to oppose your quads throughout the entire movement with hip and knee extension, then that's bad too. You don't want that. There's an energy transfer component there and the hamstrings have more leverage of the hip hip extension. It usually is not an issue but you'll especially see this with before and after plyometric interventions with the tibial anterior. It will co-contract initially and then it will turn off during ground contact. Before the plyo intervention it had a lot more activity during ground contact but then after it shut off. That's indicative of a better ability to time things. Walk me through the theoretical or maybe it is just the applied point of. I'm just trying to think through the neural actions here of what would be where does the co-contraction change and where is the differentiation between a co-contraction and pretension? I associate them one and the same because you're going to always have co-contraction for ground contact. That's how you keep the joint stable. It's also how you prevent. Because your tibialis anterior is contracting to hold the joint in dorsiflexion, that allows your calf muscles to contract to pull on the tendon without going into planar flexion. It opposes that movement so you can actually take up the slack and that's how you're able to have a much stiffer and a much safer ground contact. Okay. No. By the way, I felt good when you said that you knew that I read the Bosch books. Do you see the Boschians have. Do you think they've gone a riot all in training? Like they've potentially lost a little bit of the application? 100%. Uh-oh. I love his books. I think he has great applied research, but I'm not really a fan of a lot of his training interventions. I mean, the Bosch snatch and stuff is probably okay, but I think it's a lot of it. It's two in the weeds. You can probably get a lot just by simply sprinting and jumping. You don't have to do all of these reflexive training exercises like you see him do. I'm not saying they're like poor. I mean, I've seen way worse exercises than those, but to me, especially being more of a jumps coach is like, I'm not going to do that with my jumpers. Like, it's not going to be a very potent stimulus and they're going to get way more out of just getting really, really strong and really powerful versus like being able to do a flippin Bosch snatch with three different step up variations like whatever the heck he does. Like just climbing up the stairs with a barbell over your head. It's like, I don't really see a lot of use in that. Yeah, I, you know, I've had, I had like three, at least three years of, of really, really playing around with those movements and really hammering them and, and even trying them, like dude, literally, I've tried everything, like anything and everything you can think of. I think some of them can be really good warm-ups for individuals who might have like, I would agree with that one. Yeah, like there, they have a limb that is definitely a, a bit, in a deficit relative to the other limb. And I think there's some purpose if you have someone who's had a limb that's been immobilized and, and it can help with a high speed drop with a light load. On honestly, I played around with them even, even where they're unweighted. But like when it comes down to actual training, I'm like, I, I, I, I, I could front squat and get more exactly. Yeah, just do, do more of that. So I, that's why I wanted to go off of that. Just a little bit. Now, coming back into this discussion, Dr. Fred Hatfield has, I don't know if he ever sold this, he, he has like a lecture and he's talking about plyometrics and he's like, look, you know, he was, I think he was the first guy to squat a thousand pounds if I remember, you know, he did it like a 500 for 20 or something or 600 for 20. But he actually talks about how plyometrics are like essentially, it's high speed muscle actions that are almost completely unconscious. And it's a, it's a, it's a thought process that can be really challenging and especially with younger kids because you are like giving very direct cues with a younger kid. Where do you think the, the, the change occurs from a theoretical perspective here where you have a younger kid or, or let's say just a lower trained athlete and you're building them up to a 40 inch vert. And does it change, and I don't even know if this is a great question from being like this conscious action of jumping higher off of a depth drop or off of a run in or anything like that to then just becoming much more of this fluid action that your body is executing with your brain actively thinking over here and your body is just doing what it's supposed to be doing from a reflexive perspective. That's tough. I don't know if there's any set point, but I think it's like any skill to where, you know, doing it over time with enough reps, you end up getting more and more fluid. And I think the other piece of it is kids need a lot of variety with plyos. Like, yes, we know a drop jump would be effective, but we also want them to expose them to different coupling times and range of motions, you know, plyos that are short ground contact time. Plies that are long ground contact time, plies in the frontal plane and sagittal plane, maybe transverse plane. And I think if you expose the brain to enough variety of like a kind of similar ish activity of like, hey, you want to jump high or be relatively fast off the ground, you know, all of those different movements have different sensory motor packages and it will actually stimulate learning. Like, it's just like, you know, if you want to be a better shooter and basketball, like, you're going to take a variety of shots, you're going to do it off the dribble, you're going to do it catch and shoot, you're going to do it on the move off of screen and different reads. And then being a better shooter and all of those scenarios is going to make you a better shooter, you know, when you're just stand still shooting, you know, a catch and shoot three from the top of the key. Like, it's when it comes to motor learning, you know, variety is king. And especially when you're younger, being able to have like, we're talking with Boosh Hexnader the other day, the track coach and he was like, yeah, we have like, that's why we have all these multi jump circuits is because it's because variety is what builds you know, the bigger engine or a more efficient organism because one movement can carry over to the next movement and it's all one big, you know, movement library that the brain can access. That's a dude. That's a great way to put it in. So my college track coach would call it increase your movement vocabulary. and the movement library that your brain is accessing is essentially that sensory motor package. From what you're saying. - Yeah. Okay, going off of that, if I'm looking at someone jumping, okay, let's pretend I'm watching various sports that involve jumping. I'm watching handball, I'm watching football, basketball, triple jump, high jump, long jump. I'm even thinking about like a boulder and cricket, right? You're looking at all these different actions. As a jumps coach, are you looking, somebody wants to increase their vert, right? Or do you watch all of like specific, I didn't even mention volleyball by the way, but are you watching very specific models and are there specific sports that have very clear jumping models that then you try to dish to the athlete and you see where they react the best. Like, 'cause I'm thinking about this from a throws perspective and from a weightlifting coach's perspective, I'll look at how someone lifts and I use that individual as a technical model. And then I might use that model to teach a specific athlete how to snatch or how to clean or how to throw a shot, right? And I guess that's my question is like, do you watch different sports to see how different sports model jumping? And then do you take a step back further and think about that from a drills perspective and then assess your athletes based off of that? - Yeah, we have technical models for everything. Like luckily, when it comes to like two foot jumping and one foot jumping, it's all relatively the same. Like you mentioned handball, we actually have a pro handball guy and he wanted to learn how to speed jump like where you recover your heel towards your butt. So we taught him how to speed jump, but that speed jump model is based off of high jump. And he eventually learned how to speed jump and then now he's jumping way better in games 'cause you can get off the ground a little bit faster with speed jumping. And but that's based off of high jump. So like one foot jumping is kind of one foot jumping. You know, if you're a speed or a power jumper, you like that's a little bit different but each has their own model, but the goal is relatively the same of being low and fast. You know, with two foot jumping like in volleyball or basketball, like we're gonna look at their penultimate step. We're gonna look at their rhythm. Like are they accelerating into their plant? Are they being aggressive? You know, if you're doing a full approach jump, like say if you're a dunker, then you know, you wanna go so to fast, you don't wanna have short choppy steps. You wanna take big confidence drives going into the penultimate step. We wanna see that back knee get behind the butt. You know, you're actually in hip extension, you're low, you accelerate into your plant, you get off the ground relatively quickly and you're powerful like with volleyball. You wanna take that penultimate behind the 10 foot line. Now of course, there's some variance with the game, but if you have like a good setup, you know, you're in system as they would say, then you wanna take that penultimate behind the 10 foot line. You wanna be aggressive with it. It'll actually give you room to push. Like a lot of guys will plant the penultimate in front of the, in front of the 10 foot line and they have no room to push 'cause like the net's right there. And so they can't accelerate. They'll usually a crappy jump and the ball will be behind them. So they'll get, so they'll lose all of their attack angles too. So setting up the jump is very important. Or in basketball, like if you're coming off a screen, like if you can take your penultimate step from around the free throw line, you can get to the rim and literally like one step, you know, a plant plus a block foot. And then that's how you dunk on people or how you can finish a layup and really gain an advantage over your opponent. - Okay, that leads me to a lot of different questions. I think first one is related specifically to the one foot jumpers and speed or power. Can you expand on how you would look at a one foot jumper and say this jumper is more speed or this jumper is more power. What are some telltale signs of that? - Yeah, the basics of it is really just, where do they recover the swing leg? So with the speed jumper, the swing leg foot goes towards the butt. And then with the power jumper, they almost drag their toe. Like that's really the only way you can distinguish them. Speed jumpers usually have longer ground contact, or sorry, speed jumpers usually have shorter ground contact times and power jumpers have longer ground contact times. And usually a little bit more knee flexion that goes with that. But that's really the only way to distinguish them. The approach speeds can be relatively similar. Usually speed jumpers prefer to have a longer approach. They take more steps and they'll take a little bit more speed going into their plant. But they're the ones like, I don't know if you know Nick Brizz, who's a dunker, but he's like super stiff off the ground. And he just freaking flies. Or you have a guy like Jordan Sutherland, who's another dunker. He's a power jumper. And he's pretty darn low. And he'll kind of like not that he muscles his way up. He's still explosive, but he has a little bit longer ground contact time, but they both still fly. But there's just two different strategies there. So do you see in that regard, do you see that one is stronger than the other and from a traditional sense, if we define strength as like back squat, clean, whatever, I don't know, freaking deadlift or something, that one type is going to be stronger in the weight room than the other. Yeah, power jumpers probably tend to be more stronger in the weight room, but speed jumpers can still put out some crazy numbers. Like a lot of high jumpers are speed jumpers. And you know, high jumpers, you know, they're cleaning one and a half times body weight, maybe push in 1.8 body weight or 2x body weight. A lot of them compare a little back squat like 2x body weight. You know, Stefan Holman was a speed jumper and he's still deep back squatted. I don't know what his numbers were, but I'm sure they were probably pretty impressive. Because like each, because with each of them, you know, you still have to break momentum on one leg. Like you still have to be really strong. You know, I would say speed jumpers, maybe elastasty is a little bit more of an indi-sease than power jumpers, just because they have really short ground contact times. Like I think, like Muta's bar shim has like 0.14 on the ground or something like that. Like it's a very fast jump for a high jump. Whereas like a power jumper might be like 0.2 or 0.18. I think if you watch bar shim, especially because he's bigger, and you see like relative, like when you watch Stefan Holman, you're like, okay, this dude's small and he's just extraordinarily fast. When you watch bar shim, it's like he's so big, like a height wise, he's a bigger dude, but he's also just like freaking flying. Right. Right. I think that's what makes it a little bit easier to judge his to see what his movement would be. You brought up some numbers here. And I think I want to, I want to click through this a little as well in the, in the, in the strength realm. So can we go into what are, are like, and you mentioned this a little bit in the beginning, but I want to, I want to come back around to it. Like let's say five key lifts that every athlete needs to jump higher. Yeah. So I can give you some strength standards that me and John standards are a little, are a little bit different, but I'll give you some basic numbers. Like if you want to have a 40's vertical, this would probably be off of two feet. You want to be able to back squat two times your body weight. You want to be able to power clean, like legit power clean, not catch a full clean, like power clean, one and a half times your body weight. You need to be able to run a 10 meter fly in, with like a 30 meter buildup, like whatever your max speed is within probably about 1.05 seconds or one, or ideally sub one with a 10 meter fly for a 30 meter acceleration. You want to be sub four. And for relative, like relatively with your RSI, you want to be probably in that like three, five range. I forget what we call, but yeah, probably three, five would be some just basic numbers. Like so you have your strength numbers and then you kind of have like your elasticity and dices with the speed and the RSI stuff. Okay. So it's basically power clean and then back squat is what you're looking at as like the high bar deep back squat, quad dominant, not a, you know, stripper squat, hip dominant, quarter squat. Like you see some guys doing this. So I want to share with this case, I did a podcast with Christian Taylor where we spoke about this and I, I had heard in the rumor mill that he from a couple of different jumpscoaches that he's like essentially the strongest, the strongest jumper ever. And people have talked about Jonathan Edwards. I think he had clean either like one 45 or 150 K. So like 330. And I want to say he weighed around just over 70 kilos, which would be around now that I'm doing this math, I actually think Edwards might be maybe he was a little bit heavier though. Maybe he was 75 or 80 kilos. But anyway, Christian informed me that at his peak, he would regularly hit a 1.8 times bodyweight power clean. And I had figured it out to be like just around 375 pounds. And this dude's also tall like he's not short and he's got really long legs. So I'm sitting there like he at the very least was cleaning 375. And in his whole thing, this is where I wanted to go because we got these key lifts. And I wanted to go now off of those those classic lifts is that I think and and and tell me what your thoughts are on this statement. He went into the thing that people get wrong about strength training is they think like you got to train fast to move fast. And he's like the most important part about the weight room is that you're prepping your joints and your tendons to be able to handle the force that you will have from the speed. from the counter movement and from the impact with the ground. And if you want to consistently ignore a squat or a clean or ankle work as well, then you are setting yourself, you're setting yourself up for 100% injury at a much sooner rate. And this is a guy also I want to mention. He jumped 18 meters off his left leg lead and off of his right leg lead. He switched in his career. So I think that's another important thing to sort of take there. Yeah, that's an excellent point. I think it's very underrated. Like, yes, the weight room gets stronger and more powerful, but it's also in a sense kind of therapeutic. Like it improves your integrity. Like, Stefan Holm actually said the same thing. He's like, you know, it took me about a year of lifting, but a few years of lifting and then like a few years of adjustment. I don't remember the timeframe, but he's like, but it helped me handle more jumps and then eventually it helped me jump higher. Like at first he started lifting at like 19 or something and like he was kind of jumping low for about a year and then he said, but then eventually like my body kind of got used to the new muscle mass, like I learned how to coordinate it and then I was able to jump better, like more consistently and then I also started jumping higher. And I've heard that from a lot of jumpers where like when it comes to your soft tissues, like outside of maybe bone, a lot of them don't like fast loading. Like your tendons don't like fast loading in terms of like what's going to set you up for like, you know, a tenon apathy or like a muscle pole. Like your muscles like the slower loading, like the slow four stuff, your tendon same thing, your connective tissue same thing. So just from a pure tissue integrity standpoint, like having that high force slower loading is good just to keep your tissues healthy. And of course, like you can talk about some of the neurological aspects of you know, lifting or power cleaning. You know, I think those are great too, but like in, you know, a Christian's event with triple jump, like that's probably got to be one of the hardest freaking things on a human body on the planet Earth. So I don't, you know, you're getting a ton of neurological stimuli from that, but in order to be able to do that, you know, in a meat or even in practice, like you gotta have very, very strong and capable, you know, whole system, essentially. Otherwise, you're gonna have energy leaks. And if you have energy leaks, when you're, you know, handling, you know, 20 x body weight on the step, well, then you're gonna get screwed with, with some maybe like catastrophic injuries. So yeah. Remember our podcast is sponsored by our own Strength Training app, Peak Strength. If you're a football player, a basketball player, a baseball player, click that first link in the description. Head over to peakstrength.app, go to the Google Play Store, or you can go to the Apple iOS store, download Peak Strength, put your email in and then look for your specific sport. If you're tired of doing a lot of work and not really getting anywhere, we want you guys to get to the next level. All you have to do is download Peak Strength, and then submit your email, click on the specific sport. And when you sign up for one full year, you're gonna get 38% off. And I'm gonna challenge you right now. I'm gonna give you this challenge. If you sign up for one year, imagine where you're gonna be, one year from today, if you're training three to four days a week. Imagine where you'll be, focusing on the things that actually matter. One year from today, all you have to do is head over to peakstrength.app, Google Play Store, or the Apple iOS store, start committing to yourself. Now, let's get back to the podcast. Yeah, I think 100% catastrophic injuries. So this goes into, from your perspective, 'cause you're a DPT and you're trained in this. What do you see in the injury realm versus the jumping realm? And you got one foot, jumpers, two foot jumpers, the training aspect, it's a brutal thing to jump really well. Like it can beat you up, right? Very good. And what I wanted to know is, do you see like a very consistent injury type amongst people who love jumping or wanna get better jumping? And then do you see a consistent chronic injury related to a once, a one foot jumper and a two foot jumper? What do you see in the injury world? Yeah, almost always there's gonna be tendon pain at some point. It's not a matter if it's a matter of when, regardless of what some of the internet coaches might tell you. Like you're gonna deal with tendon issues if you're a jumper, like that's just a given. And usually a pateller, like jumper's name or keelies, there are a lot of our jumpers deal with both. And then the next one would be just regular, just PFP, just regular knee pain. And with that, in terms of managing it, it's when you initially get it, you can sometimes you can just rest for the weekend and then it'll kinda go away, like if you're a little bit younger. But eventually the athlete kinda has to learn load management and how to actually train around it, like sometimes they'll have to go through a hole, eight, 12 week rehab process. If it's been a really chronic issue. But once you learn how to manage it, our jumpers manage it very well. Like doing 10 extra jumps is almost never worth it in terms of health. Like if they're feeling, like if they're feeling their tendon hurting within the session, we tell them just you gotta cut it. Like don't let your tendon get below a three slash 10 pain or a three out of 10 pain. Otherwise you might flare up the next day 'cause tendons had that latent pain response. And in terms of managing it, a lot of guys wanna jump multiple times per week. Like they wanna jump three times per week, but that's just not in the cards for a lot of athletes unless they're pretty pooh-besen. So keep it to one jump session per week. Usually sports won't flare it up, a ton unless you have a lot of other volume on top of that. Like if you're playing volleyball multiple times per week and basketball multiple times per week and trying to lift, like what maybe a high school athlete would be doing in the summer, that can be a recipe for disaster. Or if you're playing AAU and you're playing eight games a week in, like volleyball is really bad with it. Like they play so many games in their tournaments and they get flare ups consistently because they won, they're just not strong. Like their tendons just have poor strength and integrity and then two, they's played way too much and they spike their workload. Like that's the other thing is don't take a month off and then try to come in and just get back to normal training because you've just essentially deloted and unloaded your body and then now your brain's probably hypersensitive to movement 'cause you're in pain. And maybe you're not in pain now because you haven't moved your body, but then you're gonna spike your workload and then the pain will just come right back whether that's PFP or tendon. Like that's the number one thing is you just gotta stay in shape all year round. - Okay, so you're essentially saying from this perspective, injuries are consistently gonna be jumpers knee Achilles issues and Achilles tendon apathy. PFP on the knee, just like sort of normal knee issues that are regular amongst most athletes. As far as management, it's gonna be best if you don't let your tendon pain get above a three to four on a scale of 10. - Yeah, within a session. Within lifting, you can get it to about three slash 10 and it won't flare up, but with like fast, like with fast movements like jumping. And it could. So. - One jump session per week, make sure that you're staying in shape. Is there anything else specifically that you think could be a real quick, not real quick, not that it's like this hack, but like something that people need to do on a regular basis to sort of manage or fend off or deal with any type of injury around the knee, around the ankle. - A lot of it's just consistent strength training, like especially with tendons, make sure you're getting some slow, heavy resistance training, which can just be a normal back squat. Like that to be necessarily slow, but you have the intent to move it fast, but it's still moving slow. Get that two to three days per week. Don't be the athlete that goes into the off season and they're like, I'm just gonna hoop five times a week and I'm not gonna lift. Your tendons don't like that. And so that would be one thing, just make sure you're getting that kind of slow force loading. And then the other thing would be keep your body weight pretty low. Like if you have lower body mass, you're not gonna put as much force through your system. So like sometimes guys will come to us with tendon pain, but they're like 20 pounds overweight, and then they'll drop weight over of course, like three months. And all of a sudden their pain kind of goes away 'cause they're just not fat anymore basically. And so stay lean and relatively light. I mean, whatever your sport demands. And then the other successful thing that I found, sorry, I'll cut you off. - No, no, no, no, you go. You go. - The other successful thing is play around with the frequency of loading. You know, you don't have to stick to a Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, schedule. I found a lot of success with some of our dunkers with PIP going 72 hours. Like I'll lift them on a Monday, I'll lift them on a Thursday. And then we'll actually jump on a Saturday, but with some guys I'll even roll it over. And we'll go like Monday, Thursday, Sunday, and we'll keep doing it every 72 hours. And that extra day of recovery can make a very large difference. And it also enables them to handle a little bit more volume on those loading days, like on those Mondays and Thursdays. So I'm kind of just spreading out the volume throughout the, I'm spreading out the volume in just a different frequency compared to like the traditional Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So I've seen that work really well, as well. Is there any specific stretches or anything you see or is it more like that just might alleviate it in an acute setting? - With PFP specifically, identifying movement impairments can be really beneficial. Like a lot of guys with PFP have super stiff ankles and not in a good way, not in like the ankle stiffness they were talking about earlier. Like they have no ankle mobility. And you know, of course when your ankles are stiff and you have poor dorsiflexion, You're gonna have trouble. bending your knee and a lot of guys with PAP don't want to bend their knee anyways. So now when you bend your knee, you feel very limited. So ankle mobility would be a huge one. Go up to the hip, check external and internal rotation. Can they open their hip? Can they get into a hinge pattern? A lot of guys don't let a hinge and open up that backside of the pelvis. The other one with the ankle specifically would be like tibial internal rotation. A lot of guys have the duck feet and they lack that tibial internal rotation, which is what you need to flex your knee. Like your tibia has to internally rotate relative to your femur. Like in the closed chain, it would be your femur externally rotating relative to tibia. But if you don't have access to that range of motion, you can get a lot of concentrated loading and that can really flare up symptoms. So or even in your normal gate, if you lack that kind of pro-nation and tibial internal rotation mechanics, that can cause some issues down the road. So just kind of addressing just some basic like PST stuff can actually go a long way. Okay, you just mentioned you triggered me because I have duck feet. So when you said a lot of guys have duck feet, what do you mean by that? Like guys that are more explosive have more duck feet or just there's a large amount of people that have that? Obviously, in general, like in relevance to tibial internal rotation, like if you just have your feet kind of pointed out, it's like that's somebody who I would look at and be like, yeah, they probably like tibial IR. Okay. And because it's usually a compensation that you're not able to pronate very well typically, that's that's just more just me just looking at them. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to have pain, but that would just indicate that you probably like tibial IR for me. Right. And now, okay, would you, if you have someone with that type, like with duck feet, how would you have them squat or clean? Like would you change their their their foot position or try and improve their foot position to see if that would help any of that the lack of internal rotation that they have? Yeah. And actually, I wouldn't if they don't have pain, but if they do have pain, then I would. Okay. Like that's usually an indication that something needs to change oftentimes, regardless of what your, you know, your foot posture looks like, just elevating the heels on a back squat or front squat works really well and that can help almost immediately. And you know, I wouldn't probably modify it with a bilateral lift because some guys need that extra external rotation just because of their hip anatomy. But you can try and modify it on single leg lifts. Like that's what I would look at. How can I modify this foot position? Like can you, could you, you can probably do a refer to elevated split squat with a straight foot versus like an out foot or, or, or, or even an input. Um, so that's kind of where I play around with the foot position. But on bilateral lifts, I kind of just let them do what they want to do. I might QM. I'm saying, Hey, hey, let's, let's not rotate our feet out so much. You know, let's elevate our heels and just see if it, and just see if that's comfortable. But if they're like, this is horribly uncomfortable, maybe it elevates their pain, then I, then I don't worry about it. Okay. Um, when, when you're mentioning mass, this is something Christian Taylor talked about. This is something Aaron Gadzen talked about. Uh, I've heard the elephant talk about this. So we're talking about the best jumps, the best jumpers and the best jump coaches yourself included in the world have mentioned mass body weight. What would be, let's say a body fat percentage or what would be like an ideal mass that people can get to and then first go off of that. So it'll vary between two foot and one foot in terms of body fat percentage. Um, sprint, sprint coaches like, uh, Ralph man talked about this in his book. Actually, he's like, if you're seven percent, if you're over seven percent body fat, then you're too fat. Now that's probably a little extreme, but that's like in the sprint world and the jump world is a little bit more lenient. I would say between about 10% is what is, is what we look at. I'll allow guys, I'll allow some of our guys to be at 12% if they have a really hard time maintaining 10% or a little bit older. So kind of that 10 to 12% range is usually a sweet spot. Um, a lot of, but a lot of our high level jumpers are about that eight to nine percent. So they're usually single digit, but I do understand with the general population, it's a little bit harder to be that lean. Um, so 10% is usually a good goal, you know, just see your abs. And then in terms of body mass, I mean, it's just going to depend on your height. You know, being lean is important, but you know, mass is still kind of the ultimate driver. You know, like if you're like, let's see Isaiah's like six Isaiah Rivera, he's like six one six two. And I think he's about 180 ish. And you know, he's relatively muscular in person. So like I would say that's probably, you know, if you're six foot, let's call you one 75, one 80s, probably a good starting point. Okay, that's helpful. I'm going to share with you a little thing with myself. So I jumped 31 inches last year. I'm turning 42 next week. And my goals that I stay above 30 inches through until I'm 50. I haven't been, I've been doing plows once a week. And I'm like, if I lose 10 pounds, I should be able to keep this up. And then as I get closer to 50, if I keep squatting and doing my jumps, if I just slowly creep down to 200, I think I can keep my vertical at this weight, even as I'm aging. So I think it is, you know, fear, fear's quote was fat don't fly. And like I, I don't fly. I love that quote. Yeah, I think it's like, it's just like a blatant reality. I guess how would you set up in this regards like a crash course of someone wants to eat and they want to make sure that they're, they're dialed in. Let's say they're 200 pounds. What are you focusing on so that they feel like they have energy going into a session, but they're not, they're not overeating. Yeah. So in terms of like trying to maintain weight or like drop weight, you know, if you want to drop weight, I would go no more than a 200 calorie deficit. Usually with our guys though, that are like the new guys that come in simply by training hard and just not eating a bunch of McDonald's. Like they end up dropping weight anyways. Like they put on enough mass over the year, like over the, you know, the year or two that they train with us that they end up kind of getting in a, in a, in a deficit just by eating maintenance calories. Like we tell them, okay, track your calories for two weeks. Find out what your maintenance calories are. Let's just try eating maintenance calories, you know, so your mask didn't change over those two weeks, like average per day. And let's eat maintenance calories. Let's just train really hard. You know, maybe we'll add in some tempo if they're trying to drop some weight, you know, let's just increase your weekly caloric expenditure. And then let's just see what happens in six months. Oftentimes guys will start training hard for the first time in their life or the first time in a while. And they'll just, and they'll eat maintenance calories. Like they're not trying to eat in a deficit, but they'll end up eating it in a deficit eventually because they're burning so many more calories throughout the week. They're probably eating a little bit healthier. But you know, at the end of the day, it's just calories and calories out. Like we have jumpers that jump really high and I hate to say it, but they don't eat that great. They don't eat that much either. So they're like, they don't eat great. Like they eat maybe some twinkies, but they still stay at their, you know, whatever their maintenance calories are or the drop weight, but they're so they're still eating less food than what they're burning. And at the end of the day, like that's what matters. Like I can't promise you that that their blood work is going to look great if it probably does it. You know, you still want to eat good for general health or you eat well for general health. But at the end of the day, it's just like you just got to not eat as much. And in terms of practical advice, I tell guys, you know, probably stop eating past 8 p.m. Like usually those late night snacks are killer. Snacking in general is kind of like where the easiest low hanging fruit is to dropping weight and then just have three good meals throughout the day. Be comfortable with being hungry. You know, nobody's starving over here, but like just because you're kind of hungry doesn't mean that you have to eat, you know, intuitive eating can work really well. And just cutting out those little snacks can be an easy way to get it in a deficit. Okay. I wanted to go back and this is that was some real simple great advice around nutrition. I wanted to go back into you've mentioned super maximal isometrics. I think that was even possibly related to knee stiffness in the squat is this, you know, I see a lot like Alex and a terrorist, somebody who's talked about isometrics in the ankle stiffness and I wanted to get your take on how valuable are isometrics? How well do they, are they better for the ankle stiffness or knee stiffness? Are they better for maximum like are they better for your, your nervous system? Have they been overblown or not overblown or are there things that we can take from this? What's, give me, give me the, the doctor mocks this entire run down of isometrics. So with isos, I'm a fan of isos. I'll start off with that. From a tissue standpoint, they're great for increasing tendon stiffness. Like that's incredibly clear in the research. So when you're looking at ankle stiffness, you know, if you get a stiffer Achilles tendon, odds are your ankle is going to get stiffer given that you have the coordination or you're just going to get, you know, more force output from it. Like if you stretch tendon the same amount, the same displacement and as a higher stiffness, like you get a higher force return. So isos are great for that. I know some tendon experts would argue that super maximal isometrics are even better because they're getting a little bit higher force within the muscle for tendon adaptations. They're great nervous system, stimulator and you know, they're great at working on that super maximal or sorry, I'm sorry, super spinal neural drive, you know, there's no reflexive component that's being additive to the voluntary. Like there's no reflexive component that's exciting the motor neuron pool. So you're getting great super max or super spinal neural drive. In terms of why it works for, like let's say sprinting, it's pretty probably less about the specificity and more that they're just not very fatiguing. You see a lot of the really specific stuff, like the ISO stuff with Natera or some of Rolf Almonds, really fast, short range of motion, almost plyometric type lifting in the weight room, his TPPV, 100 milliseconds, TPPV or whatever. That stuff, it's great, it's stimulating, but probably more importantly, and I was talking to Rolf about this the other day, it's not very fatiguing. If you do things in the weight room that aren't very fatiguing, maybe it doesn't put on a ton of mass, which for some sprinters might be good or bad, it's a way to get a lot of high quality sprint volume, so you're getting that 90, 95% speed threshold for adaptation, and you're able to do that over a longer period of time. Natera's isometric, it might take 15 minutes to do a full ISO workout if you're just doing ISOs. So, you're getting a great nervous system stimulus, you're getting good tissue integrity, or tendon stiffness, and at the same time, you're not fatiguing the athlete so they can go out and sprint 48 hours later. I think that's where the magic is, where they see the most gains, is simply because they're able to go out and sprint or jump at a high level while still checking off the other boxes. Now, what I just do, ISO training, forever and ever and ever? No, because with our jumpers especially, it can flare up PFP, it's tough to really get in a ton of variety, and then you also just need to load more, you need to load more range of motion. I would use ISO mora's, if I'm talking about from a jump's perspective, we use it in more specific cycles, like after, as we're nearing our peaks, and it's more of an addition to squatting, we would do say some three by two pause squats, and then we would do some ISOs to kind of complement that afterwards, like at a half squat range of motion. It's more of a way to complement the training rather than being the sole training. Same thing with sprinting, if you want to put on more muscle mass, if you want to improve your eccentric strength, which is still really important, you do have to lift weights normally. I think the same thing, because I've taken this course, and he would say, if you're in season, you can do a 15 minute ISO workout, that's great. I know plenty of coaches that do that, but it's more of a complement to your normal training, because we also know that normal training works, regardless of the science, we know that it works. It's important to have variety at the end of the day. You mentioned something there with peaking the jump, and this is the next thing I wanted to get into, was if you're looking at laying out phases of training, how many phases would lead into a peak? You run a phase for two to three, four weeks at a time. What are you doing? Heavy, heavy max strength work versus, if I have a peak in, let's say, 12 weeks, can you walk us through when max strength would be happening versus more dynamic type lifts would be happening, when would we be doing more of the elastic style jumps versus really, really high intense jumps? You mentioned there how the ISOs you use on the last phase leading into a big peak to complement back squats. Can you walk us through a crash course on that? Sure. Yeah. So, one, it also depends on the athlete. We're going to build out the macro cycle based on the athlete's deficits. You mentioned plyos. We might have more plyos. We might bleed in more plyos in the warm up with an athlete. That's a little bit more deficient in elasticity, or we might add some tempo to their GPP. But in general, let's go to a normal two-foot program. One, jumping never leaves the program. They jump every single week. There is no jump progression to do max effort jumps. Maybe we'll do some jump warmups like the first week or two, but pretty much we're getting two max effort jumping right away. And then two sprinting never leaves the program. So, they're doing sprinting twice per week, probably throughout the entire, like let's just say six months. And in terms of setting up the training, if I have six months with an athlete, I'll usually go a work capacity cycle with a high amount of training density. So, that can be your straight sets of four by ten, four by fifteen, two step squats, or maybe I do some cluster sets or some myoreps. So, I'll do some work capacity with them. Then the next month, that would be probably a four week block. And then the next month would be a progressive max strength cycle. So, we're working up from say, we'll start with maybe eight reps and then we'll eventually get down to say six or four reps by week three or four. And that'll be probably a four week cycle. And then the third month would be your typical max strength or your absolute strength where you're doing your heavy threes. Maybe you're doing some waves or some pyramid sets. And so, that would be the first max strength cycle, that would be four. And then for the, that would be the third month and a four week cycle. The next one, that's when we would do the ISOs after the max strength. So, we would do some stuff like with pauses and some stuff with overcoming ISOs, like we're pushing up against an immovable load. So, that would be month four. And then month five would be our super maximal e-centric. And now, usually, once we get to the specific prep, which is when you get to go with your the overcoming ISOs, that would be a three week cycle because that really blast guys. And then this is when we'll start doing some complex training, like with plios, like I would pair, like say an overcoming ISO back squat with a hurdle hop or something like that. So, then this is when we start to bleed in more plios. Now, if they were deficient in that E-lac-ISTE previously, then we'll probably add in some more plios in those first few blocks. And then for month five, this would be another three week meso cycle. That would be the super maximal e-centric, like you're lowering more weight than you could lift up with one leg or you're doing, like what we call true squats where you have like two guys on each side. And they'll load up some plates. You'll lower, say, 110% of your max, you know, put on the pins, take the weight off, squat it up. Do a few reps there. So, that would be our super maximal e-centric with some plios mixed in there. And then the last month is usually our fast e-centric. And like that's where you're trying to move, you know, say like a drop squat, you'll do like 50% of your squat max and you'll try and drop really quickly and stand it back up or we might do some bands, like if you had access to a Kaiser, you might do some really fast Kaiser squats. And of course, we're still doing plios with that too. And then it's whole time we're jumping and sprinting. So, that would be a whole six month macro cycle. If you just had three months, then the max strength would probably be the GPP. And then you might go strength power elastic. So, you might do max strength. And then just a power cycle. And then your E last 60 cycle would look similar to like one of those fast e-centric or those super max e-centric cycles. Or it can just be where you're going max strength and then the ISO and then the super max e-centric. So, that would be kind of what we'd use for a more advanced athlete if they're like strength efficient. But again, it depends on what the athlete presents with and like deficits wise or where they're at with their development. Dude, that was awesome. That was legitimately a full-blown crash course. I love it. And I also think that it's a testament to your clearly doing this. Like you're clearly in it. So, it makes it easier to be like, oh, that's what we do. Like, blah, blah, blah, just roll with it. Just rattle off. That was awesome. I wanted to ask you, what's the biggest waste of time when someone comes in and you're looking at their training and they're like, they're 32 inch, 32 inch jumper. And you're going, you want to jump 36 to 40 inches and you're doing this. What do you see as like the biggest waste of time that inhibits someone from jumping higher? In the jump space, it's definitely got to be the plioworkouts, man. It's got to be not enough like they do so many plioworkouts and they don't do enough actual jumping. Like they try to rely too much on volleyball or basketball to get in their jump reps, which in season's fine. But like if we're talking off season, like you got to have those jump sessions, like that's what's going to build your, you know, your pretension abilities, your coordination, your, you know, eccentric capacities. And you know, I hate to say it, but like those, you know, those internet coaches where it's like, you know, if you can't, if you're 5, 8 and can't dunk, do this, you know, pliowork out that's like three by 10 pogo hops and a lateral hurdle hop to a box jump. Like, that doesn't actually get you jumping higher. And it's been, I mean, we probably have athletes in the hundreds that have come to us and they're like, man, like I was doing these plioworkouts three times a week. My vertical was stuck for a year. And then I just started like lifting weights and like doing squads of power cleans and jumping once per week. And, you know, I'm getting in my pliow contacts through sprinting or tempo or maybe some basic multi jump circuits. And like all of a sudden they break through the plateau. It's like, wow, it's crazy how that happens when you actually, you know, lift weights and you're, and you're jumping higher, you're actually maximizing your physics. You're producing more force. And I know like a lot of those plioworkouts too. Like I look, I like plioworks. I don't want to hate on them too much, but like at some point you got to make it into the intensive category. Like a lot of those plioworkouts are super extensive. Yeah, that's great for building the base. But at some point you got to build the next level. Like you got to build the first level of the house or the second level. Like, I mean, base building is great. Fundamentals is great. But at some point, man, you got to go out and bound, do a depth jump. That's like more than a 24 inch box. Like an actual intense depth jump, not like a 12 inch depth jump. Or you, or you, you had to do some single leg hops, like those are things that are going to drive the needle or even like a good hurdle hot, like those are things that will drive the needle, not doing like your 60 second, just like bounce up and down type. like those were fine for warmups but like those aren't a workout. Like that's what we would do on an off day. All right. So I want to, this one got one more question before we get into my podcast question is you just mentioned the intensive plios. That was my next one was like give me the top five intensive plios. You mentioned bounding depth jumps from 24 plus inches single leg hops. Maybe a depth drop into a hurdle hop for like two hurdle hops. Anything else top of mind that comes into your head as far as like one or two other ones to add to that list. Well, number one through five would be max effort approach jumping like that's like there's max effort approach jumping. And then there's like, you know, 50 feet of crap and then there's plios like that's I mean, not actually, but. Yes, max effort approach jumping is the number one plio that you need to do to jump higher. I also put sprinting in there like if you're doing sprinting and if you're doing max effort approach jumping, you know, you don't really need to do a ton of plios on top of that. You can but also a lot of athletes can't tolerate that they'll quickly run into near like knee or or Achilles issues. But yeah, max effort approach jumping is the number one thing I probably put sprinting second and then I would go like more of those you know, depth drops bounds or single leg hops. If you have somebody who's like I'm thinking I have a dn right now is a dog sophomore in high school absolute freak he's jumped 37 inches way in 240. Clean doubled 300 last night, come back squat 170 for five, he's six four and a half long someone like him, you're saying max effort approach jumping. What would what would that look like when I have him let's say five step into a double leg jump over a hurdle over one hurdle hop, how would that what would you do in that sense of like a kid who doesn't necessarily need to jump 45 inches, but it is beneficial to jump more what would you what would you take in that in that regard. Yeah, it really any sort of like game or challenge with the context of approach to me can be great like that can be getting on a vertex and trying to touch the high object or like you said like a really high hurdle hop. Like we call that the grass is growing with our high jumpers because our high because our high jumpers will do very similar things if they don't want to do full takeoffs. Like that can be a really easy way basically just just being able to jump off an approach like standing verticals are great one step verticals are great but like learn how to take in some amount of speed you know three four five step. And you'll often find you know as his max approach vertical goes up so does everything else like his one step vertical goes up his two step vertical goes up even his one foot vertical goes up even if he's increasing his profile for two. You want to build those large reserves. It's funny because it's like maybe I think you're skilled enough I know you're skilled enough to answer this where it's like I almost look at it like you got a back squat. So the back squat to a clean right the back squat goes up typically the clean will go up the flying 10 on a sprinter increases or the time decreases if the flying 10 gets faster the athlete will be able to accelerate quicker and then the same regard of a max approach jump will increase a standard static jump or one step jump. You'll see all these as like these simple parallels of pulling everything up high times raise all ships. Yep. Okay. All right. I want to go into the question that I have so every single podcast we do our previous guess poses a question to to the next guest and our previous guess his name is Ross eamai is a boxing coach is from Ross training. And one of the things that he brought up is he's like he wanted to ask you specifically in this regard is like if you've ever had some experience or some hardship that was very, very challenging it's something that set you back and you had to endure and move forward and you became a better person because of that. Would you be open to sharing that that that story or have you endured through something and and and so that other people can hear this to be like okay I can you know do this to overcome it's pretty tough question if you ask me is a tough question actually I do have a story. So I played college basketball just had a local university here in Nebraska I had played like I was a starter for two years my sophomore junior year I got playing I was like six man my freshman year. But my senior year which is also not covid but guys had covid years so we had guys stay for a fifth year and we also had this transfer come in and he was a freak athlete like I'm talking six eight 40 plus inch vertical should have been a division one athlete like I like I only play at an any I school but he should have been D one right but he was from the town that that I was in he was a freak athlete so long story short there I got my spot beat out like I went from being a starter to you know basically being a bench warmer or getting like 10 minutes of game and that was really really hard for me. And but it was also one of the best years of my life in terms of like growing up you know being 22 and you know learning how to deal with adversity which in basketball I had not really dealt with hardly at all. And the other line with that is because he was a freak athlete I was like I need to learn what makes him tick like I mean I love I love the guys a person but I I need to learn what makes a freak athlete so like that experience of me not getting as much playing time my senior of college that led me into I need to study this way more like I was already interested in like exercise science like I was exercise major I've been you know studying jump training since I was like 13 but then that that moment like that year really sparked my study of like exercise science and like the science of how to jump higher and like throughout my entire PT school I would read you know multiple papers a day and you know watch podcast like this or listen to lectures from elite coaches and just trying to study under them and of course I study under john for three years and you know I left PT school having read 1000 plus research papers and I don't think that motivation would have been there if I didn't have that well the draw from like I got beat out by an athlete who was flat out just more athletic than I was and I couldn't compete with how can I get like how can I make sure that my athletes never have to run to that like I never want my athletes to not go you know like play college sport or play professional sport because they weren't athletic enough I can't control how skilled they are the sport but I never want them to ever have to get the night of college scholarship simply because they were not athletic enough like if it's positional size if it's skill whatever like I can't control that but I want to make them that the athlete that they need to be the to play at the level that that they want to play at I also think like what you just said is is a big lesson I think the other the other lesson that you might not even be giving yourself credit for is that you took a negative a negative situation and immediately just turn it into a positive like okay what can I control I can control my ability to learn and to be able to take that information and then apply it and some other positive sense and I think that's a really tough lesson that a lot of people don't think through in that moment because they because it's tough you know and you might just you could crack so you took that ran with it and and the lesson is be positive and the lesson is how can I learn from it and then and then positively impact others so that they don't have or that so that you could minimize that same experience for them which I think is freaking awesome give me a question now to ask the next podcast guest I'm going to leave this one pretty open ended and I'm just going to ask him what advice would you have for your younger self if you were to go back to when you were you know first getting into your field maybe your first like getting the inkling of whatever his field would be or her field would be you know what advice do you have to your younger self anything that you would do differently stuff like that that's awesome and and I want to give you a plug where everybody can find you athletic dot doc on Instagram and then give us everything out everywhere else that people can find you yeah my my Instagrams ad athletic dot doc my YouTube the same name I just started YouTube a few months ago let's go and yeah let's go and yeah those are pretty much the only two platforms that I post on and if you want to sign up for our coaching I'm a coach over at thbstrength.com awesome doctor Ben mox and thank for being on the garage ranked podcast appreciate you have me on peace if you enjoyed today's episode make sure that you follow us on Spotify and give us a five star review that supports going to help us keep bringing on future guests so that we can help people get stronger faster and more explosive and remember if you want to be a champion you've always got to cultivate your power peace