All Time Short Approach Jump PR
What's up guys? Welcome back to the teach me strength podcast. My name is John Evans and I coach many of the highest jumpers in the world like this guy. And before we do that, if you're interested in coaching, click the link in the description. You can currently get six months free when you purchase a six month package.
John:We're the best in the business. We love it. And we're gonna talk about jump training today, specifically Isaiah Tested. So we have many many thoughts about this and we'll share the results with you. So Isaiah, tell the people how the session went.
Isaiah:For context, just did eight weeks of loading. Four weeks focused on building volume. Then we went straight into the second cycle. I don't think we unloaded from the first cycle. Maybe like a small
John:It was brief. Like a small unload.
Isaiah:Month two was high intensity, so built intensity, and then we unloaded during week four. Week three, I PR'd my deep back squat and I PR'd my power clean. Hit 440 pounds on the squat at one eighty five pounds body weight and then 325 pounds on my power clean. So way stronger than I've ever been. And then we unloaded.
Isaiah:I've also been dealing with a little bit of knee pain, but it's been coming down every week, and we felt confident that by the session today, it wouldn't hurt and it didn't. I was able to jump completely healthy today. Proceeded to test. I was warming up for the jump session, felt very good. As soon as I started doing my my warm up jumps, I gave a thumbs up to John.
Isaiah:I was like, I feel good. I can I usually have a pretty good measure of how I'm feeling based on the warm up? I was getting up really high with minimal effort. Once I was jumping around 90% effort, pulled out the vert trainer, and then I think we started at 11 feet and then just built up two inches at a time. When I got and I was hitting it super easy.
Isaiah:I could just tell it was a good jumping day. Got to 12 feet and I missed it. And then I was like, no, I'm feeling way too good to miss 12 feet. So then I'd went literally off of like a walk up and then a penultimate and just crushed 12, 12 feet. I I touched probably like halfway down my middle finger.
Isaiah:So it's probably like a 48.5 inch jump. The flight time corroborated it, point nine five eight. Never jumped that high off a short approach ever. I don't think I've ever even been above 12 or touched 12 on a on a short approach. Then we bumped it up to twelve two, which would be a 49 inch vert.
Isaiah:And as soon as I added speed, I lost like two inches on my vertical. Probably tried 10 more jumps, still trying to run fast, fast, fast the whole time. Couldn't get it. The best I probably jumped running fast was just shy of 49. I was really close to hitting it.
Isaiah:48.5 was best vertical on the day. Technically hit it twice. One during a short approach, max effort jump. Short approach doesn't mean I wasn't trying, like, penultimate and then jumped really hard. And then it touched 48.5 again with way more speed, full approach, max effort.
John:Yeah. So I have many thoughts about this. I've I've kind of gone through when Isaiah was doing the session. I think it's easy to get deflated when you hit all time PRs in the weight room, you all time power clean max, you know You unload. Unload, you all time squat max, you've got ten days of rest and the expectation is to do it, load up caffeine.
John:So it's easy to get deflated, and I always tell the guys this, it's just data. And we don't often have the luxury of testing because the loading is so crazy high on the tendon that I don't like to do it often. And it's usually something that pisses off his knee, makes Donovan's knees hurt, makes Josh's knees hurt. I don't like testing too often, it's just really intense, but there's a lot of benefit in doing it because you're able to hit true intensities, you're able to get the most most specific loading out of it, and max effort jumping is the best way to get better at max effort jumping. You know, if especially early on, but later on it's something you can't get too far away from.
John:Right? So I wanna add more context I forgot about there. The last eight weeks, I don't
Isaiah:think I took a single truly max effort jump because we're technically rehabbing the knee at the same time. So my jump sessions were literally playing basketball and get 10 to 15 jumps in between games. The highest intensities I probably got to were like 90% on the on the jumps. I think I did maybe one or two height checks during that period of time where I was trying hard.
John:Yeah. So we've been hitting, last week was point nine five eight, this week was point nine five eight, and there's a couple other data points that makes this unsurprising. So one, it tells me, okay, unloaded, after hitting all time maxes, you're not hitting your best vertical ever. So the first conclusion that you can make is, well, it could have been fatigue, but I don't necessarily think that's the case because I gave him ten days. There might be still some transient fatigue, but I don't know if it would have been enough for him to hit, you know, crazy, crazy changes in his vertical.
John:So I don't wanna attribute most of the change to that. What I think it is, is when we look at across the board, one is he wasn't max effort jumping, so you're not seeing that stimulus super often. The second is, when we looked at velo on clean pulls during a two seventy five pull and a two forty five pound pull, and I think two eighty as well, his velos were higher than they've ever been at the higher loads. And I had told him this, hey, you're moving heavy loads faster, and that is what you would expect when you've been doing a lot of max strength work. So we then look at his lighter loads and he's not moving those loads quite as fast as he was
Isaiah:They were actually previous really slow. Think I was point four meters per second slower
John:On p
Isaiah:t On February.
John:Yeah. So that told me, was like, oh, you have a velocity deficit. Like, you aren't able to move these light loads very fast like you previously would have. And there's a couple other things to consider. We haven't been sprinting and we haven't been sprinting because one, we didn't wanna piss his Achilles off, and two, we didn't wanna have his TFL get any injuries, and then three, sometimes his meniscus.
John:And the goal was always always always to keep him healthy. So that's one potential variable there. The second is, the focus of the cycle was not eccentric strength. It wasn't fast eccentric strength, it wasn't working on stress shortening cycles. I you guys know this, I don't use a lot of plyos because they're jumping a lot, but And I
Isaiah:do want to highlight the point. I technically jumped my highest ever of a short approach. Yeah. Very low approach velocity. Like, when you guys see the jump, like, I did not run.
Isaiah:And then as soon as I added speed, I which normally when I add speed, I jump way higher. My my my difference between my standing and approach vertical at all times, like 12 inches. Today Should've gone off vert. I should've. Should've gone off vert.
John:Yeah. Probably went pretty good.
Isaiah:Probably. I think forty forty one, 42, or something like that. So keep that in mind when John's explaining the deficit, the the eccentric strength Yeah.
John:Part. And so when you're running into a full speed jump off two feet, even though it's slower than one foot jumping, it's slower than a high jump, it's slower than a long jump, you still need to have very good intramuscular tension that is really fast, relatively fast during the eccentric phase of the jump. The ground contact time is like 225 to 230 for him on his best best jumps. So
Isaiah:We should look at the
John:ground and times. I bet you it's gonna be longer. Yeah. And so right now, he's lacking the ability to produce force in that window of time because in the past, we've seen the higher he jumps, those ground contacts go down because he's benefiting from storing really seeing more energy really, really quickly. So we know that there's some deficit on the eccentric side of things.
John:There's some deficit in this really fast quasi isometric condition in the muscular tennis unit of the quad. Maybe lower leg too, maybe the hips, but definitely in the quadriceps. But we haven't been working on that. So it's not necessarily bad because it just tells us what we already knew. It just confirms our intuition about this.
John:And I was telling him during breakfast, was like, yeah, I mean think about it, there's times whenever early on you didn't respond traditionally to training, but there was a ton of other variables at play. One, you didn't have any injuries. Two, you're testing in highly, highly insanely adrenalized, adrenalated, adrenaline hype environments. I don't know what the word for that is. And so the the not readiness.
John:What's the other word? It's excite excitement.
Isaiah:Yeah.
John:Yeah. The the level of excitement is way higher. And if it goes too high, you go the other direction and your initial But I've actually never seen
Isaiah:I've seen my dunking drop off if I'm too excited, but generally the more hype and adrenaline and caffeine I have, the higher I jump. Yeah. So On a on a test, on a vertical test.
John:Right. And so those those variables were not at at play. It wasn't and two, it's become testing or or dunk session excitement has become more stale than it was earlier on. When you've been dunking for fifteen years or something like that, like he has, you look forward to sessions, but not as much as you did in year three, year four, year five, and I'm sure you can relate to that. Like Yeah.
John:It just don't you don't just don't get as much excitement out of it. I never get excitement out of sessions. You can ask guys, yeah, I never really have. But I've been dunking since I was 14. You know, I've been dunking for what what is that?
John:I don't even know. Almost twenty years? Eighteen years? Eighteen. That's crazy.
John:So for me, it's just like another day at the office. I don't really think much of it. I go in, I collect the data, I look, you know, and I just take it into consideration. Rarely do I get a drone in. It's it's not common.
John:And when I do, I jump way higher. So taking all those into account, it gives us a very clear picture of what we need to work on in the following months. And it's also confirmation of what I've always said is that you can't just do max strength work and jump and expect to be your best. You need to do other stuff.
Isaiah:One thing I do wanna touch on, I've jumped high before post max strength work. First time I tested 50 was after unloading from max strength. But one variable that has been pretty consistent every time I've had my highest jumps ever is I've strung together three, four weeks in a row of being able to get max jumps in a session. Remember, it's been eight weeks since I've gone max approach, max speed, max intent on a jump. And I think doing that in conjunction with the max strength work allows me to have at least some eccentric Yeah.
Isaiah:Capabilities.
John:I think so too. So in the past though or that was, like, really the past. That was, like, 2022, and then he retested 50.5 in 2024. Is that what it was?
Isaiah:2023?
John:2020 So early twenty four. Right? So now we're in a position where we've seen, you know, these all time strength levels unloaded, missing a key variable, specificity and intensity. We haven't done the eccentric work in a long time, mostly for health reasons. We're moving into that this upcoming month, and that's part of the plan.
John:You have to cycle through different types of stimulitis prone adaptation, and you need to get more specific. Intensity has to increase. We're now only two months into the mesocycle, so I wouldn't expect him to jump high, but I've seen him do it before. And so Technically, I did jump high. You did jump high.
John:I okay. I don't I wouldn't expect you to hit So all the time, yeah, I think now he's responding very traditionally to training. I think now we move into this eccentric period, max strength p max eccentric strength period. We're gonna work on the velos and the power cleans at heavier heavy light ish loads. It's kind of like a tweener, like peak power loads.
John:Not necessarily power snatch at 50%, but it's gonna be like power clean at, like, 80% or 85% shooting for VLO. And really the goal is beat your all time best VLO. And I'm not always gonna tell him what that is. Probably just on the top sets, it'll you know, that'll be the case.
Isaiah:And don't yank the bar.
John:Don't yank the bar off the floor.
Isaiah:Yeah. I yanked the bar on Monday because I was trying to get a higher peak VLO, and I just flared up my back because I freaking literally, bam.
John:But, yeah, overall, I think the the big thing we wanted to to do was keep him healthy. And we were able to get Max over jumps in, we were able to keep him healthy, and we were able to find out where he's at right now. So Data. It's data. I always say this to Donovan all the time.
John:I'm like, it's just data. Sometimes you're gonna jump bad. Sometimes you're gonna jump well. It doesn't mean your vertical's gone forever. It just means that during this period, these things happened.
John:You take that information, and you make decisions based off of it. That's what you should do in life in general. You take information, don't repeat the same mistake again, and change moving forward. We had a good conversation about this in terms of life at breakfast. So that's the video guys.
John:If you're interested in coaching, click the link in the description or the pinned comment. Six months free when you purchase a six month package. And we'll see you guys Monday. Yeah.
Isaiah:We're gonna review dunk man. Dunk man.
