THPStrength

John: 00:01

What is up, guys? Welcome back to the THB Strength podcast. My name is John Evans. I coach many of the highest jumpers in the world, and I'm largely considered to be the best in the world at it. This is actually

Isaiah: 00:10

67% of 50 inch jumpers.

John: 00:14

That's right. And you did that math, mentally? Or Actually,

Isaiah: 00:17

four out of six, baby.

John: 00:19

Yes. And this is Isaiah Rivera. He's one of those four athletes that I've worked with. And today, we're gonna be talking about penultimate step, which Isaiah actually did a really good job covering on his Instagram today. We're gonna talk about Josh and how he's working on it and some of the things we noticed.

John: 00:34

And, hopefully, this is really applicable to you. Before we do that, though, if you guys are interested in coaching, click the link in the description. Right now, if you purchase the annual plan, it's half the price of what it would be if you did the month to month for a year. So if you paid for, you know, a whole year on the month to month plan, you'd be spending double than just buying the annual plan.

Isaiah: 00:52

Spending $1,800 to be exact if you go month to month. If you buy the annual, you'll only spend 900.

John: 00:59

Good deal. Alright. So let's, let's get into it here. Isaiah, talk a little bit about, I guess, I can cover it or you can cover it, some of what we did with Josh, what you've seen.

Isaiah: 01:12

Yeah. So Josh, he naturally has a a short penultimate step. If you don't know what a short versus long penultimate step, we like to look at the knee, and we like to see the knee while the foot is still on the ground be behind your glute, your gluteus maximus, which is tough for THP athletes because we have such giant glutes. We really have to leave that leg

John: 01:37

That's right.

Isaiah: 01:38

Behind it. So we we wanna see that. Now short penultimate guys, the knee does not extend past the glue. They they short it. The benefit of this and the reason a lot of guys short it is because it makes it easier to have a quicker rhythm on the last two steps.

Isaiah: 02:01

And which brings me to the next thing that we look for is we wanna see that long split and then at toe off of the plant leg. So that's the first foot

John: 02:10

Touchdown on

Isaiah: 02:11

the ground. You mean touchdown. Right? Touchdown of the plant leg. That's the first foot that hits the ground after you take the penultimate.

Isaiah: 02:18

We wanna see you need a knee. So your legs, if if you're watching on YouTube, so you you have a long split, then the block foot is coming in like this, and this is the plant leg. As it's hitting the ground, we wanna see this right there, knee to knee. Imagine my knuckle as my knee. And that is a good visual indicator for good technique because that means your rhythm is gonna be really fast if you're knee to knee at that point.

Isaiah: 02:42

However, Josh struggles with this. We can get him we can usually get him to have a long split, but he doesn't have a lot of flight time on his penultimate, and the rhythm is really slow on the last two steps. And it's really hard to do this. Like, you have to take huge penultimate step and you have to be strong enough to amortize quickly enough. That's a whole another topic and it's the the reason we're doing our current training cycle.

Isaiah: 03:09

But he is struggling a lot with it. And in our dunk session last week, John was helping him with that. So, John, you can explain that, and then Mike came in and then all

John: 03:19

all that. Yeah. So a lot of the time, you should be able to do this at low effort. And Josh really struggles with proprioception, meaning he doesn't know where his limbs are in space. And he's very coordinated, but for some reason, I've I've seen this happen a few times.

John: 03:35

Guys really struggle with fixing this, and it's probably just from doing reps and reps and reps for so many years wrong, and then you have to unteach that and reteach it the right way. But it's so close in movement patterns, and then it's very outcome based that guys are tempted to default to what is easy and natural to get the outcome they want, which is a short term gain versus a long term gain. So we've really had to reteach this whole process to him. And so I started out by him being off the court and no ball or on the court, but away from the hoop. Because like high jumpers, when you put, you know, a a high jump apron in the way, you put a bar in the way, you put a hoop in front of them, they just default back to doing the thing that they've always done.

John: 04:24

So you kinda make the context a little easier for teaching. I've done it with cones with him before and outside. This is the first time we've really done it on the court. He was really fatigued, so it was a good opportunity for us to still do something productive, but not necessarily get a lot of high quality reps. And it's something we've been trying to work on with him for quite some time.

John: 04:44

So we started with him doing, like, 10 to 15 reps resting and then 10 to 15 reps of just working on pushing and splitting, getting a push and a split, push and a split. Okay. What cues are working for you? Is it leave the foot behind the body? Is it push?

John: 05:01

Is it wait until you're falling over then push? What, you know, what consistently are we noticing? Can you even hit these positions at slow velocities? Because if we can't hit at slow velocities, you're not gonna be able to hit it at fast velocities. You're gonna default back to the other way.

John: 05:14

And so we did that to warm them up and then teach them positions. And then what we did is we had them go off a dribble where I actually increased the difficulty of the context. So this is called contextual interference, and it helps with retaining motor patterns moving forward. It it increases retention. So you make the context a little harder, and then they're able if they can do it right when the context is harder, and it doesn't have to be perfect.

John: 05:38

Just has to look different in a good way. So is he still leaving the foot behind his body? If he's not doing that, then we're gonna keep repping it in this new context, or maybe we'll take a step back and then return to doing that. And then was able to kinda teach him how to do it off the dribble, doing what we call a PP step, which is a joke, but it is a penultimate push as you dribble. And so he was able to kinda get that down.

John: 06:00

A lot of the time, guys do a good job with that because when your hand is out in front of you, you're able to push longer and it slows things down. And so sometimes I'll introduce that to teach guys how to take a longer penultimate stride. And when the ball's out in front of you, a lot of basketball players like to stay low anyways. So it's an easy way to kind of bridge the gap. And then we said, okay.

John: 06:20

Let's take the ball out of the equation, and let's have you do full approaches. And Josh was struggling to get flight time. He doesn't you need to push up and apply enough vertical force to the ground on the penultimate step so that you can reposition your limbs. And if you don't do that, then it can sometimes short. The rhythm is really, really kinda truncated, and it just doesn't look quite right.

John: 06:40

And it takes a high effort approach to have everything be aligned. So we started at, you know, these lower efforts and just had him pushing. Wasn't really getting much flight time. Rhythm wasn't great, but he was getting a big split. And the cue that worked for him was leave the leg behind.

John: 06:58

You know, that was helping him or feel a stretch in your hip flexor. You know? Do you feel that stretch? If you don't, you're probably not hitting positions. And he started to kinda understand that and and kinda hone it in.

John: 07:08

And then once we got that dialed in, Isaiah, you came in, and you can give your 2¢ on this.

Isaiah: 07:15

Yeah. So I noticed so he started to be consistent with having a long split, but he wasn't getting me to me, and his flight time was bad. And the thing that made me that, like, very apparent is that made it very apparent is that he wasn't going straight up and down on his jump. He was long split, but he wasn't covering too much distance. So then to get to the hoop, he was jumping very far out.

Isaiah: 07:44

So John John was standing, like, where he should be planting at. So I told him I gave him two queues. I told him technically, three queues. I told him, get to John on the penultimate. So that's gonna force you gonna have an outcome, and it's gonna force you to cover enough distance.

Isaiah: 08:02

Second queue, I told him is jump stop, which is my it might make you have bad technique if your penultimate isn't long enough. But if you're combining a long penultimate and then you're thinking jump stop, the rhythm's gonna naturally just fix itself. It's gonna be a very quick rhythm, and it's gonna be a one two. Because it's impossible. It's yeah.

Isaiah: 08:27

I would call it impossible to both have a long spin on your penultimate and then still jump stop. You have to, like, jump, like, really far up and then it'd be Yeah. It'd be hard. Yeah. But it's a good cue if you have a long split down and you're not getting the the right rhythm.

Isaiah: 08:44

And then the third thing is just jump straight up and down. So those three things, once he had the long the long split, he I think he did, like, three jumps and then the third one, it all clicked and we have it on video where he, like, he got up, like, six inches higher and he's literally, like,

John: 09:01

like On the way down, he's like, oh, I did it. Yeah. Yeah. You can tell

Isaiah: 09:05

the jumps feel different. When everything clicks, like, it is completely different. I even felt it, like when I did my two height checks, the first one was, a pretty good height check. Second one, I tried harder and then my rhythm kinda, know, fell apart and I jumped a few inches lower. So it's like a physical difference.

Isaiah: 09:30

It's more effortless. It's faster, and you jump higher.

John: 09:35

Yeah. So key takeaways, you know, I would encourage you guys, take some time to work on this and master it without a ball in front of you. And then, you know, take some of the cues we gave. So if it's leave the foot behind the body, if it's cover distance, if it's putting out some cones, use the jump stop cue. You guys should know visually what that looks like if, you know, you want you're watching it or you've seen Isaiah, you know, jump a lot.

John: 09:59

You wanna be knee to knee at touchdown of the plant foot. And then, you know, jump stop, have the feet come down almost at the same time, so that you're able to break all of that horizontal momentum. And then jumping vertically is gonna take you straight up in the air. So you're converting that horizontal momentum vertically, which is something that a lot of people struggle to do, and Josh Josh himself included in this. So we're gonna keep working on it.

Isaiah: 10:21

I would also add in don't practice bad reps. Yeah. Like, there's so many athletes that try to fix it, but they're not changing anything in their approach. Like, if if you can't do it at high speed, just slow down. Slow down.

Isaiah: 10:38

Forces off to have good technique. Rep it out until it feels natural, then add effort to it. Don't don't practice in a condition that makes you have bad technique, or else you're just you're just gonna be be reinforcing the bad pattern, and then you're gonna frustrate yourself.

John: 10:53

And I think too, like, film it and watch. Do you hit positions or not? Every rep. And if you don't, change something. If you did if you did the same thing wrong, you know, take a step back and see, okay.

John: 11:05

I still shorted it, but my feet were together at the same time. Well, you're not doing it right. I don't care if your feet are together at the same time if you didn't do the thing prior. Right? Because now you're just going based on outcome.

John: 11:15

And we wanna make sure that the the process itself is determining the outcome, not necessarily just jumping to what is, easy and natural. I think it's important to take time to master that and spend a lot of time on it. And then it's gonna take weeks. I think it's gonna take weeks to really get Josh

Isaiah: 11:32

The long split is the priority, and it'll train you. Like, if you if you're forcing yourself to have a long split and you're not strong enough to handle it, like, that is training. You will by doing it a ton, hundreds and thousands of times, you will train your body to handle it, and it'll be easier.

John: 11:52

And it's subconscious. Like, the intramuscular coordination is subconscious. As you practice it more, it gets easier because you've you've done it before, and your muscles and your brain are starting to to learn. We turn on muscles as soon as we start that approach. It's like a ball rolling down a hill.

John: 12:07

It's already preprogrammed. It's already downloaded. It's already uploaded to your brain. And once you start that approach, it should be automatic. And Isaiah can tell you this.

John: 12:16

He doesn't think about anything when he's going for 50. It's just I've done this so many times. And if he's not, then usually, I you know, I'll queue him. But usually, there's a reason why. He's fatigue, space, you know, something like that.

John: 12:29

So, yeah, those are the key takeaways. If you guys are interested in coaching, click the link in the description. Again, if you buy the annual plan, it's half the cost if you were to pay month to month. So consider doing that, and we will see you guys tomorrow. Sure.

John: 12:42

Bye.