How To Use The Overshoot Mechanism To Jump Higher (Fiber Type Shift)
Today, we're gonna talk about elasticity. What is it? How do you train it? Some of our experiences with it. I am Isa Rivera.
Isaiah:I have the former world record vertical jump. I am training to hopefully break it. Worst case, break my own jump my jump PR. This is the guy that is writing all my training. He's also coached, officially three of the six, highest recorded jumps ever.
Isaiah:Four of them, one of them was flight time, and we together, we coach thousands of athletes to jump higher. If you would like to be one of those athletes, click the link in the description or in the pinned comment where you can get six free months when you buy the year plan as opposed to just paying month by month. Alright. Let's get into it. So the reason me and John were trying to decide what to talk about and I was like, let's talk about the sensations I felt today when I was jumping because I am back.
Isaiah:It's just back
John:like you never left, baby.
Isaiah:If you watched the if you keep up with the podcast regularly, you know I had a freak ankle injury, completely trained. It was the first time in years since probably 2017 where I went essentially more than a week without jumping or lifting my legs hard. And I detrained really, really hard. Max strength went down. My power went down.
Isaiah:And the thing we're talking about today, elasticity went down. So last week, when I jumped, it was my first session second session back, we looked at ground contact times. They were really, really high. And sensationally, what I was feeling last week, I described it as it feels like there's tape on the ground under the hoop. The adhesive side, it's like double sided tape, and it feels like I'm just stuck.
Isaiah:Like, I'm planting into the ground, and I am getting stuck. And today and the flight times, I was based on the flight times, I was probably jumping around 45 inches last week. Now fast forward to this week, I have a real had a really hard week of training, Was very fatigued. A power clean two days ago. Power is still down, more so due to fatigue now at this point than my fitness has been really low.
Isaiah:But I jumped forty seven five today. It's probably the estimated vertical.
John:Yeah. It was it was better than it's been for sure. Definitely better than it's been.
Isaiah:And even when I was warming up, I was mentioning to John, I was like, I finally feel elastic. I feel like I am bouncing off the ground. So let's get into it. So let's get into what happened and then how do you train this quality of bounciness?
John:So one one of the things I actually wanna talk about is the phenomenon phenomenon phenomenon, the overshoot phenomenon with Jonathan Edwards because Mhmm. I think this kind of this was something that I was really curious about what was gonna happen, which is essentially
Isaiah:I didn't even think about that.
John:I forgot you noticed that. Yeah. I was thinking about this for a a period of time, and I didn't know what exactly was gonna happen. I didn't know if you were going to, like, super compensate, have this shit essentially, an overshoot is you have type two b fibers turn into type two x fibers or type two a go to type b type two b. And the reason why is because you are incredibly anaerobic when you're not moving around.
John:You're essentially doing nothing. When you train, you actually have a slight shift in those fibers toward from type two x to type two b. So for example, if you were to take a rat or a bird and you were to cast it for, two months or something like that and you looked at the fiber type, you would see that it was type two x. And if you look at, like, paraplegics and stuff like that, almost all of their fibers are type two x, which is the most explosive muscle fiber. So I was curious.
Isaiah:Joke about it. We joke about it regularly during our lifts about What? Getting really lazy.
John:Yeah. Just doing nothing. So we I I didn't think that that was gonna happen. I was, like, pretty certain that it wasn't, but I was curious as to, you know, what what happened.
Isaiah:Can you explain what happened to Jonathan Edwards?
John:Yeah. So And who
Isaiah:he is? Who is he?
John:So he's he's a world record holder for TripleJump. He's a little short white dude from The UK and he's jumped like eighteen sixteen, I think, which is almost or maybe over 60 feet. Crazy, crazy performance. For perspective, most high school kids can't go over 40. So he's jumping 20 feet further than that.
John:And at that point, it's like hard to get any better. Most college guys can't jump 50. D one college guys are jumping low fifties. He's jumping 60. So quite a bit further.
John:I don't I mean, no one's beaten that that jump obviously in thirty years, and it's one of the most impressive feats of human performance ever in the history of the world. So high super high ground reaction forces in triple jump, some of the highest of any oh, no. It is. It is the highest of any sport ever. Like, it is in crazy, crazy kinematics and kinetics happening on the ground.
Isaiah:That sport birth, I mean, a top three to five dunker of all time in Jonathan Clark, mainly because of that, like, how intense the
John:sport is. And that's someone that wasn't dunking all the time, like, in high school and in grade school.
Isaiah:A pro dunker at 27, I think? First East Bay was 23?
John:Like, way later than everyone else, which is incredibly uncommon. Usually, pretty much everyone will have to train immensely, immensely hard, get a lot of reps in when they're young, and then as they get, you know, quite a bit older, they, you know, have retained those those qualities, and they end up just taking it right into their approach and jumping super, super high as is a prime example of that. I'm kinda like John Clark. I didn't really lower him a lot. I didn't jump every single day in in dunking.
John:I high jumped every day for a period of time, so I got hurt. But, yeah, did not did not, triple jump. So that said, he goes into his season. He trains, you know, pretty hard. I think he did a long conjugate sequence system, and he essentially had a period where I don't know if it was a sprained ankle or it was like he got sick or something something happened and he didn't train.
John:I don't know exactly the period of time. It might have been there's actually if you want.
Isaiah:If you wanna
John:Yeah. Let's let me get the facts here. Let me get the facts straight, boys.
Isaiah:We found the hidden scrolls of Yeah. His So The dragon. 1994, he got really sick, and that led to him taking four months off of training. And the goal was to return back to training January 1995. The goal was to just get back to his previous level before the illness.
Isaiah:The season starts early nineteen ninety five, and he hits a PB thing that says 17.58 meters. Then he had one jump, wind assisted, not ratified, 18.43 meters, which is ridiculous. That's point three meters farther than the world record. Then he had one more 18 meter jump, and then later that year in
John:the world championships, set the world record. So what was the target? Did you mention the Epstein Barr thing?
Isaiah:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The only four months off.
John:So four months four months off. And I obviously, Isaiah took not that much time off and he still was training. That was at the beginning of the season, or was that between the
Isaiah:The oh, that was, I think, tail end of season. Oh, so
John:it was between the 18 meter jump and the eighteen twenty five or whatever?
Isaiah:No. No. No. No. The illness happened, and then all his good jumps happened after that, the PE and all that.
John:So pretty pretty interesting stuff. I mean, four months is really, really long time. I would be hard pressed to, you know, tell someone to take off that much time. But the idea behind this is that you let all of the physiological fatigue dissipate and you basically return to baseline and you have this overshoot mechanism where type two b fibers turn into type two x fibers. So Isaiah took off from jumping.
John:I don't know. How many weeks was it? Three weeks. Five? Three weeks?
John:Just three weeks.
Isaiah:Four? If you include playing there was one session I played basketball and I didn't have
John:a session.
Isaiah:So with that, it would be four weeks.
John:Four weeks. Okay. So four weeks took some take takes a month off and then, you know, has kind of his first session last week Two weeks two weeks ago. So, yeah, I guess it really was only, like, a fourteen day, may maybe more twenty one day. Not not really that significant, but that session was so short.
John:So comes back to jumping today and has finally a type two by the way, type two overshoot, type b to x did not happen. I just wanna be explicit here. But I was curious about that. And comes back today, has, you know, a a fairly good session. I would say you're within you're in your cluster.
John:Typically, when you're in the nine fives, that's where I kinda know, like, okay. Under training load, that's where I know, like, you're back to baseline. Once you start to drop below that, that's where I'm kinda like, okay. You're you're getting pretty fatigued. And this week, we hit pretty intense squatting volumes.
John:Last week, he jumped on Wednesday as well. Yoga lift on Thursday, Friday or Saturday, sorry, was his hard lift and went fairly hard. You belt squatted that day. Right?
Isaiah:Yeah.
John:And then Monday came in, power clean was really down, very, very down, partially because his back was a little sore from under boths, but then he was moving the belt squat incredibly fast in sets of four. He actually got up to what, 85 plus percent?
Isaiah:Yeah. On my last set. And it was and it moved really well. Like, I was surprised with how how that moved.
John:Yeah. It it was really, really good. So now we're kinda seeing his elasticity return as we get back to normal jump sessions. And so this is kind of like something Isaiah and I have always said, but even more so now, I think it's just more proof of concept. You have to keep normal jump sessions in.
John:You can't take those out of the training program. Every single time I take them out of a training program for any athlete that I coach, specifically in person because I get to see it every single week, they almost always decline. You know? Donovan, you know, you can maybe make the argument that he's the exception, but even then, like, you take too much elastic work out of his training and he just goes the other direction. He has to do things that are fast and explosive.
John:Dom, same exact way. Anytime you take out, you know, stuff for him, starts to decrease his capacity in stress shortening cycles. You know, you obviously have the same thing. I have the same thing. Josh has the same thing.
John:We need to be practicing the skill, the thing that we wanna get better at, the most specific training stimuli that you that you can do. I I think that's pretty clear at this point for all of us and, you know, especially for you. And then I think too, it's really important to still do a considerable amount of training volume. I think sometimes it's easy for guys to want to just get away from that and have jump sessions all the time, but I also don't think that's the solution. I really, more and more and more, I I just think there's so much evidence for retaining training loads, you know, to a considerable level and and keeping loading and unloading in there.
John:I think
Isaiah:if you jump
John:all the time, it just does not work.
Isaiah:That was so evident, like, the first week of training back. I felt terrible. Mind you, this is, like, two two to three probably two full weeks off of lifting and horrible. Like and that that's when I told John. I was like, dude, this is where I realized I'm not a genetic freak because in the in the pro dunking world, you see so many athletes that only dunk, and they jump upper forties.
Isaiah:And, like, I'm just like, dude, if I don't lift, my vertical goes the other way. It's like, alright. If I'm lifting and not jumping, my vertical goes the other way. And then if I'm only jumping and not lifting, my vertical goes the other way. Like, it had both have to be in place to
John:to perform too, it's it's like elastic volume is specific. It's not just do plyos. It's not just do, for me, step up jumps or sprinting or stuff like that. You have to do both. Like, right now, I'm integrating a lot of running back into my training and really babying my hamstring, making sure that, you know, we really take every precaution to make sure that I'm getting more resilient there and slowly bleeding and hamstring volume, not just hammering it with strength work, building in the the running and stuff like that.
John:And I don't expect to come back with a considerable amount of elastic training or volume and be at a high level. Even though you're gonna get good neuro adaptations, you're gonna get good fiber recruitment, you're gonna get good, you know, neurological signals being sent really, really high frequencies. It doesn't it doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna come out and jump high. You have to practice the skill. It's like it's like if a baseball player were to not throw a baseball for months and months and months.
John:Sometimes I think they do see overshoot, but I think it's because they sit on their ass and take steroids. I think it's a little bit different, but Dude,
Isaiah:you know what it is? You gotta you gotta stack the days, man.
John:Yeah. You gotta stack the days as LeBron says.
Isaiah:Where is your? LeBron. Right there. Shout out to this guy. You gotta stack the days.
Isaiah:Like You
John:gotta stack
Isaiah:the days. I actually told this to Austin a few weeks ago, and it's relevant now. But it was just like, don't expect to jump high because you haven't stacked weeks of max effort jumps. Like, I would and to the to whoever's watching or listening to this, don't expect to be near PB level if you haven't got two, three, four sessions under your belt where you're, like, getting after it. Like, you're getting five to 10 reps at truly maximal intensities.
Isaiah:I think you can get within, you know, 90 to 95% if you're, like, half assing the sessions and you're training hard, but, like, you have to stack the sessions. Like, even in in your case, like, what's probably gonna happen, we're probably gonna get back to jumping, you know, in one or two weeks, and then it's probably gonna be, like, a month straight of consistent sessions, and then you're gonna start hitting near near all time highs.
John:You know what? So I've already seen this happen before. Like, I remember when Nasir came and visited one of the athletes that we coach, him and his dad, and I could not dunk off a lot. Couldn't could not do it on a tempo rim. And then it was, got back to training, started you know, I was I was jumping a lot, but I wasn't really hitting a 100100%.
John:That was the first time I had, like, really tried to, like, push it. Typically, you can tell because I'll start on the baseline, the ceiling is really high, and I can take a full approach. Like, that's how you know when I'm really, like, putting my foot down and going hard. And I hadn't done any of those approaches. It's always where I get my highest jumps.
Isaiah:Yeah.
John:So hadn't done that, tried to jump really, really bad. And then a few weeks later, started to chain together, you know, some good sessions and start getting my vertical back up. But really, it was wasn't until I moved here and I was consistently, you know, getting getting jump sessions and in training that I started to get I'm gonna switch to the other side so we're facing each other. That makes more sense. So I think, you know, you you have to see that stimulus, and it's the coordination is just so specific to the activity.
John:Like, you're pre contracting. You're setting up that movement even before you throw the lob, and people don't realize that. And you guys might not know this, but your brain has it's already sending the signals and preparing for whatever you're about to do to your body before you even take that approach. And I think you start to lose that that confidence, that that Yeah. Feeling if you don't do it often.
Isaiah:Talk about Donovan, what you were telling me on the way to the on the way to the session when he tested versus Duncan.
John:Oh, yeah.
Isaiah:And then even and then even, like, today with the off backboard versus hike checks versus logs, like
John:So I think to get into the rhythm to jump I I mean, this is pretty concretely. I've realized this, and I've known this, but it was more proof of concept. So Donovan is testing his vertical on concrete, kinda like detrained a little bit, no adrenaline. He's someone that needs a lot of adrenaline, and he's always and still struggles with Vertex, and he just does not get the same jump. I see it.
John:Isaiah sees it. You know, we're kinda like, I just don't understand this. So he's trying this, like, 40 inch jump, right, which is 40.5, 41. It's really easy for him. Right?
John:He should be able to do that at 80% effort pretty easy.
Isaiah:So this is what,
John:like eleven five? Eleven seven, eleven eight. So he's trying and just like keeps missing, keeps missing, keeps missing. And then he grabs a ball and he throws a lob and then just slaps the living shit out of the bell. And I'm like, what?
John:Like, you literally cannot recruit the same muscles in the same order at the same rates unless you're throwing a ball. Like, you're so used to doing that activity so many times, hundreds of thousands of times as a kid that that's where you get your best jumps. And it's like some some guys have dunks where they jump way higher on those on those dunks. Like, Donovan's one of those people. And what you'll see typically is, like, in underboth or something like that becomes more comfortable and they jump higher on that dunk or e space for one foot jumpers.
John:Like, sometimes that'll be their best jump. Like, that'll be their best takeoff and or height checks and stuff. But then when they go to a vertex, they're it's unfamiliar. You know? They're not used to it.
John:I think high jumpers more and more, I think high jumpers really struggle with that unless they've done a lot of testing on the vertex where it's just unfamiliar. And so And it it goes up with high jumpers and gunfiend. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
John:Like, vice versa. You know what I mean? I think it goes both ways. When you're a dunker and you go to high jump, it's totally unfamiliar. And then vice versa, if you're, you know, a a a high jumper and you go to dunk or do, a vertex or something, you're just not used to it.
John:You've never done it. And so a lot of the time, like, guys will struggle with it. Like, Mikey Hoffer, one foot jumper, has jumped, like, two twenty in high jump, which is well over seven feet, struggles with dunking, like, off one foot. He can knock off two, but, like, one foot, he should be able to get his head to the rim essentially, and he just cannot dunk a basketball off one foot. It it it makes absolutely no sense.
John:And I think that it again, it comes back to just you you haven't done it. You're not confident in it, and you don't set up the takeoff the same way that you do. Your rhythm is different. Everything is just a a little bit off when you're setting up that pathway. Like, you're not confident coming in, like, attacking it the way that you would have dunked or any of those other activities you're really, really
Isaiah:familiar with. Yeah. And we saw today, I was getting crazy jumps off the backboard.
John:Oh, yeah. I forgot to say that.
Isaiah:Yeah. Yeah. Like, I was getting crazy jumps off the backboard. I was running really fast. Then I go to lob, and the jump was kinda crappy because I can't lob it as high.
Isaiah:And then Dom does, like, self bounce. Like, he just bounces it off the ground and has me catch it and just flying on that. So, yeah, I see it too with, like, just certain dunks jump way higher.
John:Yeah. Like, if the context isn't there, you're not gonna be able to tap into the same effort level. And usually, like, you don't struggle with that because your lobbing is so good, but when the ceiling is too low, that's when you really start to see, you know, you really start to see it and it it becomes, like, a lot more apparent for you because you're you're so dialed with your lobs and stuff like that. Or if you haven't done lobs there for a while, like you lose your touch a little bit and then your lobs are a little off and then your take off's a little off, like it doesn't feel hardwired into your nervous system like it like it does when you do it a lot.
Isaiah:Warm ups. Warm ups, I was trying to self self bounce, dunk, trying to do a one hander. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Isaiah:And then I was like, alright. Windmill. Oh.
John:Punched it. Yeah. Which was yeah. That was fun to watch. But, yeah, that's the episode, guys.
John:If you're interested in coaching, click the link in the description or the pinned comment, which I will remember today because I wish for you guys to do it, and Isaiah told me that he's gonna put the shock collar on me if I don't. So I will remember today. Alright. We'll see you guys next
Isaiah:time.
John:Bye.
Isaiah:Bye.
