How To Plan Training Using Specificity
What's up YouTube? My name is Azir Rivera. I jump really high. This is John. He coaches me to jump really high.
Isaiah:Hello. And today we're gonna be talking about the continuum of specificity.
John:It's a beautiful graph. I oh, fuck. I just erased what I drew yesterday. It's alright. It's a it's a beautiful thing.
John:Before we do that, make sure you go to thpstrength.com and sign up for coaching if you're interested in getting coached by the highest jumper in the world and his coach of seven years. Use the code THP for 10% off. Perfect. Also, if you're gonna sign up for one month and back off, just
Isaiah:don't Actually, let let's tell them
John:alright. Just don't dunk.
Isaiah:If you're someone that doesn't lie awake at night thinking of dunking, don't sign up because I don't wanna coach
John:you. Yeah. It's the worst. Okay. Anyways, don't get our hopes up and then only to be crushed.
John:So this is the continuum of specificity. I use this every single time I am writing training, whether it's for a sprinter, a football player, a basketball player, Isaiah, whatever it is. Right? In this specific example, I've put at the very far end, that's your goal if you wanted to do this for any sport. So we would put a 45 inch vertical off one because that's my goal.
John:For Isaiah, it would be 51 inch vertical. And then over here on the other side of the continuum, we have things that are less specific, meaning they mimic the thing that we wanna do, whether physiologically, biomechanically, terms of kinetics and kinematics, less, right? So Or I guess more or less. So if it mimics it a lot in any of those ways, then it is very specific and it would fall further down this continuum. If it mimics it less in any of those ways, then it falls to the left or further away, meaning it will have less transfer to your given output.
John:So if you guys have you ever heard of the book Bondarchuk wrote?
Isaiah:I have heard that.
John:Yeah. I've heard
Isaiah:that name.
John:You know who Bondarchuk is? Famous guy. Anyways, this this Russian guy, I think he's Russian. Anyways, his name's Bondarchuk. He basically was a shot put coach, and he wanted to know how well certain training transferred to his sport.
John:So what he did is he basically made a correlation graph for different athletes and different activities. If you were a shot putter, he would say, look, you throw the 16 pound shot, but how well does that correlate to you throwing
Isaiah:book that you bought?
John:Yeah. Yep. Transfer of training. Yep. A 14 pound shot or a 10 pound shot or an eight pound shot or a six pound shot, how does that compare to a clean?
John:And he made this massive chart and showed all of the correlation data correlational data. And it was basically based off of this. Right? That that is essentially what he was trying to figure out is how are these exercises, how do they how specific are they, right? How much do these two things correlate?
John:And correlational data is not perfect, right? Correlational data is to say, you know, technically ice cream sales and crime go up, you know, in terms of a correlational data? Well, real reason why is because of heat. In the summer, right, people wanna eat ice cream, and that's also when crime is its worst because it's warm outside. A lot of people aren't gonna rob a bank when it's snowing.
John:It's gonna be hard to get away. So this is not perfect, or I guess his book, this is perfect, but his book is not perfect because of that, although it does offer some insight into what this is. Right? And so on the left side, you'll see general volume, which I talked a little bit about yesterday in my video. But basically, this is the stuff I put swimming to I always say like swimming to dunk.
John:Right? And people are always like, what do mean swimming to dunk? And I'm like, least specific thing you can do is this. Right? But it still offers value on this specificity continuum because of the five biomotor capacities.
John:Isaiah, what are the five biomotor capacities? Tell the Coordination, You got
Isaiah:them strength, speed.
John:You got them all. Alright. So powerful
Isaiah:I was just making a script about this, like, five minutes ago. Oh, I'm really proud of you.
John:Austin, why do you look like Clark Kent? Why? Why are you dressed that way? Austin, step into the frame. Austin just showed up.
John:This is what he's wearing. Say hi to the viewers. Hey. Anything you'd like to add?
Austin:Yeah. Have you ever seen the movie Pretty Woman? Where the girl goes into the store looking like a homeless woman, and she's actually rich and they wouldn't service her. I wanted to do a social experiment today and see if people would treat me differently if my hair wasn't messy and I was covered in tattoos. So I wanted to see I I'm calling this my Clark Kent alter ego ironically.
Austin:So we're trying it
Isaiah:out for the day. I don't know why. I got bored. So here you go.
John:Every Oh, boy. Three days a holiday with the THP team. You never know you never know what you're gonna get. Do you wanna be in this video? You wanna hop in?
Austin:Sure. I wasn't really expecting my hair to
Isaiah:be on camera this
John:Alright. We could you can zoom out a little bit Yeah. I suppose. Could just zoom a little bit. Oh, that's the wrong way.
John:There you go. Alright. So
Austin:I didn't I honestly forgot.
John:That's good. That that should be good. Laughing. Alright. We're talking about specificity.
John:We went over this. We talked about swimming.
Isaiah:So so good
John:for me. When we talk about yeah. About Careful. Don't keep that too close to your mouth. He's very sick.
John:Or you can put it in
Isaiah:your mouth.
John:It's up to you. Dealer's choice.
Isaiah:You're my friend.
John:Okay. So
Isaiah:We all get sick.
John:Yeah. I feel it coming on. Swimming helps endurance, You would agree if I said go out and swim for we were talking about the fibo and motor capacity since you And came into I'm saying one understanding or something that I was taught really early on is that every biomotor capacity really is important. Meaning you can't just be like You wanna be well rounded. If you're less well rounded, your genetic ceiling is lower and so it's very important to make sure that you address each of those biomotor capacities.
John:Endurance for example is less out of those biomotor capacities is less endurance for dunking, right? So if we were to have like a Madden football player or something like that, right? And we had those five biomotor capacities. We'll just I don't know. Put it over here.
John:Endurance is like what do you think endurance is in terms of one to 10? How important it is?
Isaiah:I would say a one.
John:Actually Say a one for the sake of simpleness.
Isaiah:Okay. Okay.
John:Let's say a two.
Isaiah:I'll say a two if you wanna have long dunk sessions.
John:Okay. Alright. And then what do you think speed? What about speed?
Isaiah:I would say are we talking about the speed of the muscle contracting and It's the
John:so many variables. Try to lump them all together and generally determine how important speed is. Right? Yeah. I'd say eight.
John:I'd say eight.
Austin:Depends if you're one foot or two.
John:It does. But we're just gonna say seven to eight, but I'm gonna put eight because I it feels right. We don't have data to support this. You're in the shot.
Austin:I don't think I meant
John:to be. And then we have strength. How important do you think strength is?
Isaiah:Eight. For two foot? Nine. For one foot? Seven.
John:Alright. So let's say what do think? 85?
Isaiah:85.
John:85. Alright. And then we have coordination. What do you think that is? 10?
Isaiah:10.
John:I'm glad we're all on the same page. And when you have flexibility, I'll just put FLX. What do you think that one is? One to 10. Four.
Isaiah:I actually I actually think 10. It's I
John:don't think it's a 10. I don't
Isaiah:think so. If you're talking
John:You're not a gymnast. You don't need to be a gymnast flexible.
Isaiah:But think about Good door. For a two foot jumper. Well, we talking I'm not I'm not I'm
John:talking about if 10 is a gymnast and one is me
Isaiah:Oh, I thought you meant like
John:One is no. Requirements to be a good dunker. Right? If 10 is the requirement, like, you need, like I
Isaiah:see. See.
John:The better the more flexible you are, the better you're gonna be as a dunker.
Isaiah:I'd say it's Yeah. Oh.
John:Yeah. Four to six is what I was thinking, actually. Right? So what this basically tells us, this tells us our needs analysis. Where do we need to spend most of our time?
John:Well obviously you would say you need to spend a lot of time on speed, strength, coordination, and less time on flexibility and endurance, right? So how does this play into this specificity continuum is it tells you how you can identify where certain exercises fall and what their purposes are. So if we are looking at general volume, you see this whole course or upper body circuit that I drew, right? That is to address endurance. Endurance is a two, right?
John:It's a two or three. Maybe one other thing we didn't include is body composition, but that can play a role into your coordination. So it can also play a role into your speed or strength and So your power you do need a level of endurance, Whether it's as a byproduct of what you're doing here or it's because you're trying to have longer sessions or you're able to recover better. One thing a lot of people don't think of is if you have better endurance, you recover better from strength sessions. So that's also a benefit to you.
John:Also you're chopping off his head. No one can see Isaiah. There you are.
Isaiah:We can trade.
Austin:No, it's okay. I don't I'm I'm a little And
John:then as you go further down this continuum, you'll see, right, like as you see this kind of trend of these three things being really, really important, right, squatting is still relatively specific. So that's because it's gonna help you a decent amount as a two foot jumper, right, On this, this is technically a one foot graft, but even for that it helps. Let's let's say it is two foot. We'll even go as far to say this is 50.5. We'll say 50 inch vertical off two.
John:Squatting is probably moving down that continuum, right? So now you're gonna notice that things that are more specific are gonna have a better transfer to training. They're gonna mimic the activity you wanna do more, and when you have high specificity, you have a specific adaptation to impose demands, you're loading that thing, you're stressing that system, and then you're gonna improve at whatever it is that you're stressing.
Isaiah:Wow. You said the hell out of that principle.
John:I sure did. Is that a bad thing?
Isaiah:No. It's a it was a
John:Oh, I get it. I was like, are you saying I'm
Austin:being wordy? I look as smart as you are. If I can't be as smart as you, I will look smarter than you.
John:Wait. I might how long is this podcast right now? Out of that that That was good. Where are we at? Where are we at in terms of time here?
Isaiah:Ten minutes.
John:Alright. I feel like, yeah, we're good. That was a good intro.
Isaiah:Wait. Can I ask you one question?
John:Yeah. Take the dirty one. Take the take the sickened one.
Isaiah:If that stuff makes you better, why are we gonna do stuff here?
John:Because this well, that was kinda what I was saying about the endurance. You still need all of these qualities to be your best possible product, right? Even if you only require a phi flexibility or something like that, like to be a great dunker in this needs analysis, you don't need to spend a ton of time doing this, but there are other benefits that you get from doing a lot of this stuff, and then on top of that, in the lens of a macro cycle, it can be very, very beneficial. Right? So let's say you're a year away.
John:If you work on more of the stuff over here, this will actually pay dividends later whenever you only are doing the stuff from here to here.
Isaiah:That's was what to get get you to do to explain. Yeah. What
John:because this is also on a macro level, like, to month.
Isaiah:This whole thing. Wanna make a point because of what he just said. There technically is no such thing as a bat x. Like, people always ask me what's the best plyos? What's the worst plyos?
Isaiah:What's the best lift?
John:It's more time.
Isaiah:Yeah. It's a it's a it's a tool in the tool belt that you're gonna use at some point. Yeah. And without using it, you will without doing this stuff, you're not gonna get as much out of this stuff.
John:This is not a graph of time. This is a graph of specificity moving rightward. Right? The more rightward you go, the more rightward this the exercises are. However, in training, one of the training laws is your training should go from general to specific.
John:So if you're twelve months out from your basketball season, you can get away with swimming and biking and doing a bunch of other stuff at that time, and maybe it'll help you in twelve months. That doesn't mean it's going to directly help you now, but there are benefits to doing that that will be able to layer or play a role in you'll layer on top of basically as you go through the training year.
Isaiah:Cool. Alright. Alright. You all guys already know where to get training. Like the video.com..com.
