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How To Turn Your Tendon Into A Spring
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Mar 27, 2025
If you want me to coach you personally to jump higher click here: If you want a FREE week of jump training click here: My name is Isaiah Rivera and I have the highest officially tested vertical on the planet at 50.5 inches and am the co-founder of THPstrength, a company that focuses on vertical jump training for athletes. What makes me a little different from most athletes that jump high is that I started with a pretty low vertical and documented my entire journey on this channel. Here is my journey in a nutshell: 14: Started working out to jump higher for basketball 16: Hit my first dunk and shortly after found out about the world of pro dunking 17: Trained like a madman and hit my first between the legs dunk 18: Entered my first professional dunk contest 19: Knee pain almost made me quit dunking 20: Met my coach John Evans, who helped me get rid of knee pain 21: Won my first international dunk contest 22: Tested a 48 inch vertical and started coaching full time 24: Tested a world record 50.5 inch vertical The reason I make so much free content about jumping higher now is because it’s a resource I wish I would’ve had when I was in high school that would’ve prevented a lot of unnecessary mistakes and injuries.
View Video Transcript
0:00
It is 2025
0:02
Welcome to the new year, folks. I hope that you guys had a great New Year's Eve
0:07
Hopefully you guys are recovered if you decided to partake in the nonsense that is New Year's Eve celebrations
0:14
Shout out to the Microsoft font when they dropped the ball. It was absolutely absurd
0:18
I don't know if you guys saw that, but it was like 07 Microsoft text
0:22
And it was really giving, we put no effort into this major important billboard shown to millions of Americans on their TV screen
0:28
that said today we are going to get into eccentric rfd we actually had a long chat yesterday about
0:36
what was it i mean it was just everything what what did we even talk about in that chat for like
0:41
an hour my girlfriend fell asleep and was so pissed at me she's like when are you going to
0:45
be done working and i was like little do you know i'm not actually working i'm not achieving any work
0:50
outcome at the moment other than discussing it's like talking about it instead of being about it
0:55
that's what we were doing yesterday. It's our hobby. I think our loved ones forget that this is our hobby
1:01
Our hobbies are passion. I could have watched TV with you or played video games
1:06
but instead I wanted to talk about jumping ire. So getting into eccentric RFD, as Isaiah says
1:13
he likes to define things. So I'm going to leave this one to you, Ben. How would you define eccentric RFD, eccentric peak force
1:20
How would you define it? uh well at its basic it's it's uh developing force eccentrically very rapidly it's recruiting more
1:31
uh motor units faster it's recruiting them at higher discharge frequencies rate coding
1:37
and um the easiest way to picture this is just looking at like the like a force time curve of
1:43
like on a force plate of a jump and the eccentric rfd would be indicative of like how steep the slope
1:49
is getting up to eccentric peak force. And then peak force eccentrically is just..
1:56
It's the top... It's the peak of where the force is at
2:01
usually at minimum displacement of the center of mass in a jump. Like where you're the lowest
2:07
is usually when the peak of eccentric force hits. So let's just..
2:12
Can you pull it up? Yeah. There you go. I'm not showing anything crazy, right
2:18
You guys can see this? yeah yeah so yeah basically this curve right here this is demonstrating the so you're seeing
2:27
ground reaction forces that's basically going to show you the change in force over a given interval
2:33
so for this one we're looking at i don't know okay left leg leftward left leg or wait first
2:39
leg second yeah blue is your block foot blue is the block foot but why does it say forward grf
2:46
that's just the direction of the ground reaction force just like he didn't he didn't summate it
2:51
oh that whatever um all right so we're looking at we're looking at the these ones i guess
2:56
yeah so we're seeing the rate that this goes up how fast the slope that is your rate of force
3:07
development and eccentrically it means that the muscle is lengthening so during the eccentric
3:12
action, which is pretty much until like probably here, uh, you're, you're seeing the muscle
3:18
lengthening. You were going to see the craziest changes in eccentric RFD here. Uh, you know
3:24
what's, what's interesting that Ben and I talked about this though, is that your knee is flexing
3:28
as you're planting this foot. Right. But at touchdown, it's not really doing anything
3:33
What's actually happening as your tip anterior is doing most of the work and then the foot plants
3:37
And then from here to here is probably where you see the most amount of eccentric RFD in the quad
3:43
But what's hard about that is this isn't going to corroborate that because it's a symphony of joint actions
3:51
There's a lot of different things happening here at the knee, at the hip, at the ankle
3:55
And I think that that makes it a little bit hard to know for sure what the RFD is in the quad
4:00
And that's what I was trying to explain to you yesterday, Ben. That was my kind of argument
4:04
um can you pull up that other curve that we that i put i put in from hawkins dynamics that's a
4:09
little probably easier to picture yeah let me that's from a drop jump so let me let me pull
4:15
this up here uno memento see if i can just open with preview there we go and we'll go here share
4:25
and this is also going to show yeah drop jump will definitely be a little bit easier to yeah
4:29
the c here but it's also important so one quick note so this is once so like if you look at the
4:37
good this is once they start developing force but usually there'll be a huge spike before that so
4:44
it'll go like really spiked up come down and then you start developing the which are you looking at
4:49
left word right word um on the left part of the curve but it it doesn't show us on this model
4:54
because it's just simplified but i just want to make a quick note like so it would it would look
4:59
more like what we just saw on Sam's graph. So when you're looking at these graphs, right
5:06
you see this moderate, that big spike, like what is the, so that's not spring-like they're
5:12
essentially saying on that leftward curve? Yeah, that's so to me, that would be their
5:20
I would call that they came in with good force. They, they, they were able to develop pretty good
5:25
eccentric rfd but they weren't able to stop to sustain it they weren't able to hold it
5:29
and they just yield it what do you think is happening in the mtu at that point i think that
5:35
is when you use muscular tendon as a unit for everyone i was wondering uh i would call that
5:40
yielding as in you're getting stretch on the tendon but you're also getting the muscle fibers
5:45
are actually eccentrically contracting as opposed to being more quasi isometric or slow concentric
5:51
to get more strain on the tendon. Because that's how you actually apply a lot of force into the ground
5:56
and that's how you wind tight. Okay, so two things. One, when you say yield versus breaking
6:02
yielding, you're saying bad muscle lengthening is what you're saying. Yielding, I'm talking about eccentric contraction
6:09
of the muscle. Breaking would be the quasi-isometric or the concentric. Right, so breaking is tendon lengthening
6:15
versus yielding is more so muscle lengthening. Yeah, but keep in mind with yielding
6:20
you're still getting tendon lengthening. So you're getting tendon lengthening and muscle lengthening versus muscle shortening and tendon lengthening
6:25
Yeah. Do you think in this left one, you're seeing the fascicle lengthening a lot, which means that you're going to see crazy peak really good
6:34
Because I would say that the eccentric RFD in this left one is the highest, right? Yes
6:38
But it says poor because it's not spring like, which is interesting
6:43
Yeah. So that's why it's like that. That would be the example of they hit the ground and they like would lower really quickly, but then they quickly realize they can't keep applying force
6:53
And then it just drops. It just plummets. This is what I was saying the other day with Isaiah
6:58
This is what I think happens. And this is. Oh, real quick
7:03
This is a force time curve, right? Yes. So this would be, for those of you guys watching, the area under the curve, basically how big the mountain is on here on each graph, shows impulse
7:18
And the higher the impulse, the higher you're going to jump. So what I'm assuming they mean by good is this good athlete is jumping higher than the moderate and is jumping higher than the poor
7:30
And you can have a high eccentric RFD, but not as high of an impulse compared to other athletes and jump lower
7:40
Yeah. And this is it should I mean, for those of you that are watching this, I mean, it's obvious that the green has the most impulse
7:46
And like that would mean you would have the highest takeoff velocity and jump higher. So the whole point of jumping higher in this context is you need to raise the entire curve
7:56
So the good athlete needs to raise both the eccentric curve and the concentric curve, whereas the poor athlete needs to probably also develop both qualities
8:05
They need to both apply more force eccentrically to be able to handle all that breaking force and then also be able to push out of it concentrically, but not being very spring-like, as John was saying
8:16
So when we see this dip here we got the sharp peak and there a dip and it drops off in the moderate you see sharp peak dip drop off Then this one you see is pretty sharp peak
8:29
less of a drop off. Yep. Good push off. So is that dip, is that where they're just losing all
8:34
the energy in the tendon more or less? Yep. That's where everything is kind of dissipating
8:37
You get that internal friction of all the tissues and that's dissipating. Like once you start going
8:43
into an eccentric contraction, that's when you start dissipating the energy. So that like
8:47
that's why your muscles have to be able to hold their ground, trust the tendon, apply force
8:51
Cause that nice, smooth transition with the good that's amortization. That's like not being
8:57
stuck on the ground essentially. Right. So you could have crazy, like, for example
9:02
I wonder what this would look like if, if you watched it, you know, I would imagine the good
9:08
one looks like a good rebound, like a good jump. And, you know, it's also interesting too, because
9:14
if you look at, if you look at depth jumps, this is a depth jump, correct
9:20
Yeah. It's a drop jump. When you look at a depth jump, you look at a drop jump
9:24
you can have different RSI's meaning you could have, sorry, you could have the same RSI and get
9:30
it different ways. Meaning you could have a long time on the ground and get, you know, a really high jump height where you could spend less time on the ground, not have as high of a
9:37
jump height, but it's a better rebound, quote unquote, more spring-like. So the area under the
9:43
curve doesn't necessarily tell the whole picture when it comes to that, but the shape of the curve
9:48
is probably very important, right? So it would be interesting to see what the shape of that curve
9:55
looks like as you move up or down that continuum and comparing that with what the actual jump looks
10:01
like. Come on up. My dog, someone said this the other day, like it wouldn't be a podcast without
10:06
John's dog interrupting and I'm like you are correct no matter what I do
10:10
Bailey will interrupt and so yeah I would be kind of interested to see
10:16
and I used to have the force plates from Hawkins they lent them to me but the problem was they
10:20
didn't work and they broke and it was really upsetting so yeah that was a big problem with it
10:26
and force plates are great for some things you know it's interesting to look at if you were to use
10:30
them all the time it would be kind of difficult because your
10:34
the setup is annoying the apps are okay they're not great and typically what i've noticed is rsi like one to one
10:43
is related to what you'll see on the force plate so if your rsi is good it's going to be
10:49
spring like you know or it's not something i've found with these metrics is the reliability of
10:59
them can be finicky and it reminds me a lot of when we measure the flight time on my jumps for
11:03
example a lot of it depends on how you land uh and it's better when comparing like uh what is it
11:12
intra intra radar reliability like like the same person yourself to yourself yeah even then like
11:18
when i have the the ovr and i'm measuring my my bar speeds and i'm looking at like power
11:25
specifically in watts me and john were messing around with it the other day i think the last
11:30
time we used it and just getting like wildly not wildly different but pretty significant difference
11:36
in numbers when for example we were doing a clean pull comparing it to a panda pull on some some
11:42
reps my panda initially my panda pool is way better so i was like oh the panda pool is better
11:46
but then there was like a small technique change or how i pulled it off the ground and we got a
11:50
different number off the clean pull um something borderline not repeatable for everyone it would
11:56
It must be like a very nuanced change he made that caused a major difference for him
12:00
It's made me – initially, I was very excited of being able to use that data
12:05
but then it made me kind of not like using that data as much
12:10
because I can get – sensationally, for example, I can tell if I'm fatigued
12:16
I don't have to look at the number on the OVR to tell me I'm not as fatigued
12:22
When John watches me power clean, he can tell when I'm pulling it slow off the floor
12:26
or when I'm dogging it or when it's looking really good and fast
12:32
And I don't know. I don't know how I feel about using those numbers
12:38
I think it's more informing. You need that data over very long intervals for it to be very informative
12:44
I think that's the biggest thing I've always recognized about data is more of it is better
12:50
because if you're looking at it and you're comparing changes, that's when it's meaningful
12:56
Yeah. Like if you just do it every once in a while, it might help a little bit because you'll
13:02
be like, oh, like the data is good for comparison purposes for yourself. That is what I would
13:09
if I were to sum it up, I don't necessarily think it's always good for comparing person to person
13:13
specifically when you're talking about OVR. But I think when you're looking at intra-rater
13:19
reliability and you're comparing it to yourself, it can be really meaningful because let's say you
13:24
do the same warmup every time, which you do, you always go green, blue, blue, green, blue, blue for
13:29
power clean. So if you look at that every time you do the same buildup, you know, two to three reps
13:34
of it over time, you're going to start to see trends. And that's really where the beauty of
13:39
data comes in is it's objective and it shows you trends. The same thing with free lap data. Like I love free lap data because it's pretty objective. It's pretty reliable and it's repeatable
13:48
So if I go out and I'm, I know I'm on the same surface that I usually run on, like you have to
13:54
start to you'll start to make sense of the data as you see more of it you know and you'll be like
13:58
wait like at first you might see something like well i'm running way faster on turf but it's not
14:02
repeatable maybe you did that once in a year but then you're like oh well maybe i did it once but
14:07
i haven't been able to do that i always run faster on the track even though my all-time best times on the on the turf and then you start to realize that why did that happen was it a was it a mismeasure
14:15
was it an error did i get a bad reading like you know and then maybe you're like oh well yeah i did
14:21
only have one rep on the grass that was fast it's like okay it was probably misread like the you
14:25
know the especially when you start to understand how free lap works like it's a bubble you catch
14:29
the front of the bubble you know or you catch the end of the bubble of the zone and then the
14:33
beginning of the bubble you decrease the distance by upwards of like a few feet so that would make
14:37
sense versus like a Brower is a laser so it's perfect basically you know it's always going to
14:42
give you very reliable data that you can trust in unless it's way off sometimes they're finicky
14:48
because they just don't work. Like it just flat out won't measure. But generally if they work
14:52
then you're going to get pretty good data. So, but it's a way worse to set up and it's annoying
14:57
So it's like when you kind of find that balance of things being fast and easy and repeatable
15:04
and you could just throw it on and kind of glance at it. That's whenever, that's why I like OVR
15:08
because if you can't make a mental note of your data and make sense of it, then it's probably not
15:14
worth using. Like if I have to pull up a spreadsheet to look at the data, it's probably
15:18
not worth using. Like I would prefer to have something that in the moment I can glance at
15:24
And in the back of my head, I know, Hey, when I do cleans, my peak power on cleans is usually this
15:31
or my, my wattage is usually this and it's way down today. Okay. That's enough. That's
15:37
informative enough. I don't need any more data. Right? Like, um, so I think that's where it can
15:43
be really useful. When you start to get into these really nuanced ytics, and as I've played with
15:47
them, the more complex the metric, typically the more difficult it is to make it meaningful
15:56
And it sometimes will be nonsensical. For example, if I'm looking at RFD, this is a really good one
16:03
and I'm doing a mid-thigh isometric pull, or I'm doing a single leg exercise or any isometric on it
16:09
and you're using the hawkins force plates if you tap that plate you tap it your rfd could go from
16:16
really low to really high like it can drastically change if you make a seemingly irrelevant change
16:23
in how you did the test and so that's kind of why i don't love force plates is because it's almost
16:28
too sensitive like and it doesn't it doesn't take out the noise like noise is data that's kind of
16:33
not perfect, right? Like jaggedy it doesn do post processing and like remove the noise from the data So like We need AI To get that those variables It like this is non usable as much anymore Now if you just looking at something like peak force then it like that okay cool
16:52
We're just looking at peak force. Right. And even that can be confusing because then you'll look
16:55
and you'd be like, well, and you have to, and again, you'd have to use it all the time and do
16:59
that test all the time for it to make sense. Because if I do, if I look at peak force and the
17:04
first time I do it, I'm achieving it at 300 milliseconds. The next time I do it, I'm achieving at 600 milliseconds and then 800 milliseconds and then we're a second or three seconds it's like
17:12
wait what like this one i'm getting it at a second this one getting at three seconds that's a massive
17:18
difference in my rfd the thing about rfd is you're looking at rfd from zero to 100 milliseconds
17:23
that's like super fast so it's it's not super meaningful to me i'd rather just look at rsi
17:28
like what does your rsi look like is it good or is it bad okay that's going to tell you probably
17:34
more. And same thing with sprint times. Am I running faster or am I running slower
17:39
There you go. Like that's going to tell you the whole picture right there. You know what I mean
17:43
It's, it's more, it makes the data more meaningful. So that's where kind of, when I am looking at
17:49
some of these complex data points like TPV or peak, like I like peak velocity because it's simple
17:55
I like TPV. It can be used. I think TPV is a really easy one to get and it's very meaningful
18:01
specifically EA index. So what is your peak VLO? And I'll just look at peak VLO
18:04
and I'll look at TPV. If TPVs aren't around the ground contact time, as I'm getting more specific
18:09
TPV is time to peak velocity. And my peak VLOs are lower, then it's probably not specific
18:14
Like peak VLO has to be there. I don't care if you're like, you can get crazy high TPVs
18:19
but if your peak VLO sucks, it doesn't matter. So I think when you
18:23
that's what I've realized after kind of looking at these metrics. And maybe we'll do a more thorough
18:29
explanation of this in the future. But I would say for me personally, using this data and coaching
18:37
someone with it and comparing it to an elite high jumper, to a less elite high jumper, those are the
18:42
major differences that I've personally seen. I want you to, Ben, Isaiah, I want your lens on
18:47
what I just said. Ben might disagree completely. I don't disagree with anything you said
18:53
Data is super, I mean, data is super sensitive. Back to the OVR. Yeah, I use it a lot. I think
18:59
number one it just helps my intent like i had a couple weeks where i didn't have it with me
19:02
and i was lifting and just like not knowing like knowing that it's not on the bar tracking me i
19:08
could just i could just feel internally that i'm just not pushing as hard as i normally would it's
19:14
like that's probably the biggest thing it holds me accountable to uh maximize my intent and then
19:19
to kind of what john was saying is i use it a lot for a readiness test like i'll do a 185 clean
19:26
to see how i'm moving that or i'll do a 225 squat or 185 bench and it tracks this was like this was
19:34
your previous peak power or your previous um average velocity yeah and that would and and
19:43
and that'll show me oh okay i'm at near my max strength levels because i'll do the i'll do every
19:48
time i max out i do the full test so i know what velocities i'm hitting for what given percentage
19:55
of my 1RM. I wonder... Sorry, continue. You can finish. I was going to say
20:04
I use it as a readiness test. Like, okay, I can push today
20:09
or, oh, I am a little fatigued. Maybe I'll drop the weight by 5 or 10 pounds
20:13
but still get something out of it, basically, is how I do it. Speaking of
20:19
readiness, I want to talk about fatigue. Wait, are we talking about our friend
20:25
cb yeah well that just in general we've been having a lot of discussions about about fatigue
20:30
uh and we saw a post on on instagram uh i don't know are we saying names or no
20:37
nah i don't think so okay somebody posted research and basically said uh
20:43
you have you don't have to train as often as we train and uh yeah that was basically the extent
20:51
of it and then i've seen other stuff saying that you need to prioritize being fresh essentially
20:57
also i think the other thing we discussed somebody saying you don't need deloads like your training
21:02
should be written so that you don't really need to unload um and then the last one is you can
21:09
we usually use like what four week cycles you can use three three week cycles basically a lot
21:15
a lot of stuff around being more fresh and how we train there's a lot of fatigue that we implement
21:23
we train really hard uh really frequently and i don't know if i agree with what those people are
21:31
saying well i'm curious what you guys take on on the whole being fresh thing and then ben you saying
21:37
like the readiness thing how you'll drop weight if you don't like if you if your velocities aren't
21:42
up to par or your power isn't up to par i me personally i generally just try to do what's
21:48
on a piece of paper even just do what's on a piece of paper dude don't ask questions yeah yeah and
21:53
let us worry about that i saw this last workout that i did on saturday so normally this lift that
22:01
we're doing it's not max isometric cycle and the friday lift is really hard friday is usually my
22:07
dunk day so i dunked on friday did that lift on saturday and that's when i really started feeling
22:13
the effects of fatigue the first two days i was fine i was feeling springy feeling super bouncy
22:18
then it came out of that dunk session into that lift and i was just drudging through that workout
22:23
like it was really freaking hard the clean pulls were terrible or the pot it was paused power
22:27
cleans i barely hit a set of 245 or 225 for three went up to 255 failed the third rep so i couldn't
22:36
even do the three reps dropped to 245 for my working sets did it one time the next time i
22:43
also failed my third rep so it was very obvious that i was just like destroyed uh from from my
22:50
dunk session in the week of training um but i still try to push through those those days um
22:57
and i don't know i've gotten decent results thus far with that but we're always thinking about
23:04
not me and john have been saying this just because you're a good athlete doesn't mean your training
23:09
is good you always want to be asking what can be better um so yeah one thought i have as you're
23:16
talking about this is the difference between sprint training and jump training i think they're
23:21
not the same and i think that that's really important with sprinters i have seen that they
23:25
have to be fresh like that it's just like through and through i've seen that that is really genuinely
23:30
the case, especially the more neural the activity, specifically long jump, speed jumpers, and high
23:35
jump, and sprinters. Those three activities, you really, in my experience, when I have tested
23:41
different protocols or different training on them, they do not respond well, generally
23:48
They generally don't. They prefer to be very fresh. They prefer to have very low volumes
23:53
The problem is they get fat. That's one problem. They don't stay very lean as a result of it
24:00
And it's, it's borderline just riding genetics to the riding genetics to the, to the promised land
24:08
So that I've seen a lot of the time. I do think that the under training and staying very fresh and keeping volumes very low can
24:18
work, um, for sprinting specifically. I've seen it work really well for sprinting
24:23
That's my experience on that. And then in terms of some of the other stuff, like this person had talked about excitation
24:29
contraction coupling talked about rate coding and the supraspinal activity and activation
24:34
And I think there was something else about, I don't remember what the other, other piece was
24:39
but those were like two of the, two of the rationale. So excitation contraction coupling
24:44
is Ben, correct me if I'm wrong. Basically you have the electrical activity that's happening
24:49
across the membranes and the nervous system. And then also down at the actual muscle tissue
24:56
like muscle cell, and that allows, through a chemical process a contraction where the myosin and actin bind and the muscle fascicle generates tension So that process is impeded when you have a significant amount of fatigue
25:14
This person was arguing that there's no adaptation or more adaptation if you're building in more
25:19
training or more fatigue. I personally disagree, and I don't know how he would definitively say
25:24
that that's not the case. I don't know what research would demonstrate that so definitively
25:29
that he could so concretely make that conclusion because he was proposing just do two sets of failure
25:35
every 72 hours. So train twice a week and like squat four by six to fail
25:43
two by six to failure, and then just be done. And yeah, if you're going truly to failure
25:47
first off, that's really freaking hard. If I asked Isaiah to just max out two sets twice a week
25:53
what would probably, he would detrain. He would almost certainly detrain. I don't really have any doubt in my mind. I think people do adapt like their workloads do improve
26:04
year to year. It's not something where like, yeah, maybe initially you could do that. But in my
26:10
experience, the elite athletes will get to a point where they don't improve and they need more volume
26:15
and high quality volume, not just volume, but high quality volume. So every tissue is going to be a
26:26
looking at like the quad and the patella tendon or the Achilles and I'm looking at the hip like
26:31
you know I'm trying to achieve different goals with each of those exercises that I select for
26:38
the clean maybe it is the nervous system that is what I'm trying to address I'm trying to address
26:42
rate coding trying to address um synchronicity right can we recruit all these muscles fast at
26:48
the same time I'm trying to work on coordination and being able to have a quick double knee bend
26:55
and use the quadriceps explosively. Cool. I, maybe I get six sets of that, three of which
27:01
you know, are really, truly intense. And then if I go into squatting, it's like, okay, I'm trying
27:07
to stiffen the tendon. I'm trying to get more, uh, motor recruitment, max peak motor recruitment
27:13
right. Irrespective of time. And, uh, I'm trying to have more type two fibers as a result of that
27:20
and I'm trying to increase the stiffness of the tendon. Fortunately, jumping is not bound by time
27:27
as much as high jump, long jump, and spring. They're much more bound by time, meaning that
27:32
the time component is strongly related to your performance in those activities. So if you're
27:37
spending more time on the ground, you only have 80 seconds on the ground or a hundred milliseconds on the ground if you're an elite sprinter. So if you're doing a lot of activities that are taking
27:44
three seconds, you're going to be limited, right? Yes, maybe you created more reserve or you
27:51
increase the ceiling, but you have to connect the dots just because you can create more peak force
27:56
doesn't necessarily mean you can do it faster in a meaningful way, but there's other reasons to do
28:00
it, right? It's not just for that. So there's other boxes you're also trying to check. And I don't
28:07
know if, yeah, sometimes I just, I look at that and I'm like, I, like his thing is like, you don't
28:12
need fatigue for adaptation and i'm like no but fatigue happens when you're pushing for adaptation
28:17
like you're going to get to a balancing point where you have to train harder to see adaptation
28:24
but you're like but we can't have any fatigue there will be fatigue as you try to push up
28:29
adaptation you can't just do one set it's not enough like what's the minimal threshold for
28:34
adaptation for an elite athlete it's a lot higher than someone with a 30 inch vertical right you need
28:39
to push the threshold in Austin. Yeah. Yeah. That's a perfect example. Austin doesn't push
28:46
Austin does basically what Chris Beardsley says. And he has a harder time improving
28:51
because he can't, he can't achieve like, and it's weird to me because like, okay, cool. On paper
28:57
you said that, and maybe you have some studies that supported it, but like I'm in the weight
29:01
room and I'm not seeing what you're saying. Like I'm seeing a lot of cases across the board where
29:08
what you're saying is not true. And I think that's the frustrating part for me is like, okay, I get
29:14
what you're saying. I see this on paper and I see this in research, but I'm not seeing this in real
29:18
life. Like where I, in the weight room, I'm not observing this phenomena that you're describing
29:23
It's not repeatable. And it's like, well, maybe they're just not recovering enough
29:27
or maybe you need to undertrain them more. And it's like, yeah. Okay. For some guys that works
29:31
but I, if, if I don't train Isaiah hard for weeks and weeks, he just jumps lower
29:35
like we've seen it happen numerous times can i say one thing in favor of your point is
29:41
with the fatigue is okay you're maybe you're not a hundred percent and you're recruiting
29:46
95 like 95 of your fibers but you're still training that 95 so like even if you're not
29:53
getting that extra five percent by pushing you're still training all the other fibers that you're
29:58
working so yeah you're not accessing the highest of high threshold motor units when you're fatigued
30:04
but you're still training every other fiber. And that's, I think, is important
30:08
because you're still maximizing adaptations in the fibers that are being accessed
30:13
that are being trained. And I wanted to kind of recant my first point of
30:18
I do try to hit the numbers that are on paper, but my readiness scores just tell me
30:23
basically, how hard is this going to be? Like, is it going to be easy to hit 90% of my one rep max
30:32
or is it going to be, like, am I really going to have to push it
30:36
So I did want to clarify that. It more or less just tells me where I'm at
30:40
and then maybe how I can modify rest periods. I don't usually actually decrease the weight
30:46
We're also combating with dunk sessions. But dunk sessions also offer a lot of benefits
30:57
So, yeah, there's that. Yeah, because before the podcast started, we were talking about how dunking is different from track and field maybe even if you want to
31:09
take it as far as like bodybuilding and that type of thing and that it's very addicting and it's
31:15
something that is a temptation to do with the boys every day right and guys don't go out and say
31:23
yo let's go sprint for three hours today randomly when we're supposed to be squatting or the day
31:28
after squatting like that that's not really a thing that is a problem in the in the track and
31:33
field world to my to my knowledge um but yeah it's not like they're like just itching to get
31:40
out there and just run some 30s or or if you're running let's say you're a 400 meter runner
31:45
and you have four max or three i don't i don't know what the exact volumes would be for 400
31:52
meter but let's say you have three max effort 400 meter sprints scheduled on the day you're not
31:57
going to be tempted to go do that for how many do you think you could run in three hours like
32:03
uh probably like three you probably need like 40 minutes after each one yeah that's not something
32:09
you'd be tempted to when it comes to dunking what would be ideal like i'm going to use myself as an
32:15
example would probably be like 10 max jumps in a session like go in warm up and hit for an elite guy
32:22
for an elite guy yeah hit 10 10 max jumps but i'm more likely to do 40 to 50 because it's just
32:30
that's how that's how dunking it's fun it really is so whatever it is about it it's really addicting
32:35
and that is something that's going to be affecting training quality it's gonna you're going to be
32:42
way more fatigued and yeah it's i think it's a lot harder it's a lot harder to train with that
32:49
that in mind. Yeah. Well, I feel like this is a good place to cut it off. I like to keep it around
32:53
between 50 and 30 minutes. So a little bit of podcasts tend to be longer in a good way
33:00
more input. Um, but we appreciate you guys. Thank you. All of you guys who in 2024 made it such an
33:07
awesome year. We appreciate you guys so much. We love our job and none of this would be possible
33:10
without you guys believing in us to write your training. So let's make 2025 even better. Let's
33:16
get to newer, higher levels, all of us. And yeah, if you guys are interested in coaching
33:21
go to hbschrength.com. We appreciate you guys and we will talk to you guys tomorrow
33:26
Bye-bye
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