Isaiah Is VELOCITY Deficient
What's up, guys? Welcome back to the TSP Strength podcast. My name is John Evans. I coach many of the highest jumpers in the world. This is Isaiah Rivera.
Speaker 1:He is one of my best friends, business partner, and I've coached him for seven years, and he now has a 50.5 inch vertical. He's also one of the head performance coaches here. If you guys are interested in getting coaching, go to the website. It's in the description. And if you buy six months, you can get six months free.
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Speaker 2:No. Main main thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Biggest thing is you get access to us, our big brains, all the training cycles that I've written over the last ten years, and that continue to to get better. And this is for people that are serious about training. So if you're serious about training, you're serious about getting better, you listen to this. Obviously, you're probably one of those people.
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Speaker 1:So consider doing it. I guess now we can get into what we're gonna talk about today, which is Isaiah's, I guess, could say force velocity curve, and essentially where we're seeing adaptations after he's just completed the last two months. So if you guys don't know, he just is on the deload week of his eighth week of training, but the end of the second mesocycle or end of the second month. The first month was volume, and it's a cycle that wrote for myself. Worked incredibly well for him.
Speaker 1:And then he did his max outs in the second month, and his numbers went up quite a bit considering how strong he already is. So as you guys know, when you get better, there's diminishing returns. It's harder to get better when you're already really good. And he was trying to get healthy while also pushing up his adaptations and strength and power, which is the major focus of the last month. So his force generating capacity went up a ton, squatted four forty, which is 200 kilos.
Speaker 1:Looked like a paperweight. And his power clean went up five pounds from three twenty five to three thirty, which is always a really good sign of your nervous system's readiness. Now this gets us into what is very interesting and what many coaches will look at and say, oh, that's why strength work doesn't matter because of this thing. And that thing is going to ultimately be your power output. So when you look at VBT, it's a good indices because it's very indicative of your your nervous system's ability to generate force at a given load.
Speaker 1:So or the muscle and the nervous system. So when you're looking at something like a clean pool, for example, simple. There's not a lot you know, there's pretty easy movement to learn. There's not a lot of variables involved. There's not a catch.
Speaker 1:It's just push the knees back at the end of the first pole, get the knees forward, double knee bend, big explosion through the ground. Right? Very simple movement to maximize the outputs on the ground during. So it's a good exercise when you're doing BBT because of that. It's very simple.
Speaker 1:There's not a lot of other variables. You don't have to worry about the catch. You're just moving the bar really, really fast. It's another reason why I like BBT with the X bar jump. Same reason.
Speaker 1:So we go to, you know, Isaiah's week. He's loading up on a Monday because we're gonna unload a little bit on Wednesday, and then we'll have a jump session on on Friday, and hopefully it'll go really well. So we're kinda front loading the I wanna maintain some training volume in there because I don't want him to detrain, and I also don't want to taper him fully because we're not in a full taper. So coming to the session, Isaiah, you can go ahead and tell the people how it went.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So decided to put the v a VBT device on on the bar while I was doing clean pulls, And I have data on my best ever wattages doing a clean pull with VBT device. And as soon as I did my first couple of sets, I realized, you know, it wasn't I was pretty fatigued, which was surprising to me because my jump session wasn't that long on Friday, but I did test. And testing tends to be pretty intense, I guess, even if you don't get to a 100% effort. Although forty forty seven out of 50 is
Speaker 1:pretty decent. Pretty good.
Speaker 2:So 95% of my maximum jumps. And when I'm dunking, I'm probably not even at 47. Maybe. Maybe I am. Who knows?
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I was a little flat. Not as flat as normal, but still not not super flat. And then I did my the first clean pull that I did with the VVT device, it was two zero five, and it was really slow. It was, like, two point was it 2.12? Maybe 2.14.
Speaker 1:No. It was, like, two point it was, like, 2.3, but you've hit 2.5 or something at that load?
Speaker 2:That's what it was. Yeah. My my all time best was 2.52, and then I think I was in the in the two threes or two fours. And then I went to two forty five, and I think that's the one that was really low from my previous best. I think my two forty five was, like, 2.45 or something like that.
Speaker 2:Like, it was still
Speaker 1:Yeah. Was, high two threes or low two fours, and you hit Yeah. 212.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Then John, he he made a he was like, oh, I think you're still gonna have high velos at the heavier weights because you've been training max strength. And then I was like, might be on to something. So we put two seventy five on and I did I PR? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I went I went higher than my max velos.
Speaker 1:I think your best was two one five, and you hit two one two again. And I was like, this is what I expected. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then he then he then he threw on two point fives, I went two eighty, and I hit the exact same max velo at a heavier weight.
Speaker 1:And that one, I think, was the best we'd seen, which this this aligns perfectly. And there's a story that Rolf told me about a shot putter, and they had VBT, you know, on bench press. And they had one guy that threw, I think, like, 18 meters, another guy that threw 16 meters. These were world class shot putters. So they're doing a bench press test, and they go to the bar.
Speaker 1:Right? And, you know, the one guy bench pressed, like, five fifty or something, and the other guy benched, like, 400 or something like that. The guy benched 400 could throw 18 meters. The guy who benched 500 could throw 16 meters. And so they're on the VPT device, and they go, you know, 40 kilos, 100 kilos, one one twenty, one forty, one sixty or something like that.
Speaker 1:Right? And what they saw is when they tracked the velos at each of those loads on the concentric portion, the guy who benched 500 could not, for the life of him, move the lighter loads fast. He he would get the same, you know, average below at those really high weights. It was just, like, you know, point four every time. You You know, you go to one sixty, you go to one eighty kilos, go to 200, go to two twenty kilos or whatever, and it's still the same average VLO.
Speaker 1:But then when you looked at the other guy, he couldn't get any VLO. Right? He'd zero meters per day. He can't lift the weight. But when you looked at the velocity of the stuff that was lighter, it was considerably considerably higher.
Speaker 1:And so that indicates that he has more ability to accelerate a weight that's lighter. He can move something that's light really, really fast and significantly faster than the guy who benched far more than him. And this makes logical sense because when you're a beginner, that curve will shift upward into the right every time. Okay? What that means is you're gonna get more more VLO, and you're gonna move more weight better as you get stronger.
Speaker 1:And this is why strength is such an important metric that you wanna develop really early on. It's not that we that I don't think power is important. You still we're still doing clean pulls. We're still doing power clean. We're still doing snatch pulls and and jumping once a week and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:But when you get really, really strong, I'm talking where Isaiah is. Right? You're squatting how many times body weight are you squatting at this point?
Speaker 2:Two point four?
Speaker 1:Two point four times body weight in a deep squat.
Speaker 2:Let me see. One eighty five.
Speaker 1:Two point Or 200
Speaker 2:by 85. 238.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So 238. Right? And and your clean is is what?
Speaker 2:It is 1.76.
Speaker 1:Yeah. 1.76. So the heavier the clean gets, the more that it becomes like a strength movement. Like, the best Olympic lifters in the world, their velos are gonna be relatively low compared to, like, a power clean. Right?
Speaker 1:Like, full clean and jerk, they're not gonna see the same velos that they're gonna see on a power clean. We predominantly only do power cleans. But as you get really, really good at power cleans, it's gonna start looking like a full clean. And that doesn't make it not valuable because there's other benefits. Like, the catch is so forceful, and that's still really valuable.
Speaker 1:You're still gonna get really good eccentric forces on that. It's gonna be really fast eccentric forces. But in terms of propulsive force, concentrically, what we're seeing is Isaiah can't move the lighter loads as fast as he used to be able to move the lighter loads for whatever reason. I think there's two reasons why you're seeing that. One, we didn't touch those loads at high v loads.
Speaker 1:So Isaiah jokingly was like, oh, look at that. I didn't do this, and I got worse at it. The thing I did, I got better at it, and I was like, correct.
Speaker 2:But But it's almost like adaptations are specific.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. And I was like, that makes perfect sense. And this is part of the reason why you wanna move loads fast at light at lighter loads. I don't necessarily do that when that's not the goal.
Speaker 1:But if I had in a perfect world, I would have Isaiah rip those weights. It's that there's other, there are other things that are bigger focuses during those cycles. Like, we wanted to see a power clean PR. We wanted to see him stay healthy. Well, if he rips those loads off the floor when he's not fully warm, you know, and he does his darndest.
Speaker 1:He spends twenty minutes warming up. You know, it's still relatively high risk for him, his nervous system gets waxed. So we can look at this and we can say, cool. We moved the curve to the right, and we moved it upward at the far end at the far tail of it. But now we need to move the curve upward in the middle.
Speaker 1:And so it gives us a good indication of where the training needs to shift the following month. Right? Because we wanna see the whole curve shift upward. So max strength increases the ceiling, which we saw. Right?
Speaker 1:The ceiling went up. Okay? At the heavy loads, he's moving more weight. Okay? But the acceleration is worse.
Speaker 1:And so we need to improve his ability to accelerate those lighter loads this next month and also work on we're also gonna shift towards some eccentric dominant stuff as well. It's the pairing is not perfect, but I think it'll they'll they're complementary and compatible enough. You know, eccentric loading is really intense. It's will shift the eccentric generate for sharing capacities up, but it doesn't mean your propulsive skills get better. So we're gonna try to tackle those two goals at the same time this upcoming month.
Speaker 1:So he's gonna be moving power cleans, clean pulls at lighter loads, but we're gonna be tracking it probably on the top sets of specifically the power clean on Wednesdays so that we can see, okay. Are we getting better at 02:45? Are we getting better at two twenty five? We know your max is three thirty, but now we need to move we need to generate force at these at these layer loads here. And even more so, you could shift that all the way down to, like, what sprinters do, which is just body weight, right, on a single leg.
Speaker 1:Like, how fast can you accelerate that? So we're getting more specific as we move now into these really fast, powerful concentric forces where we're trying to actualize the adaptations from the previous cycle, which is that now he has better motor recruitment at high loads. Maybe we're lacking some some rate coding or some intramuscular coordination. We can kind of address that stuff with the the speedy power cleans or maybe power snatch or something like that. And then we'll I'm not gonna I'm not gonna give away what we're doing the following month because Isaiah doesn't even know yet.
Speaker 1:But I think this will be a very productive cycle for you. And we got a lot of data from this cycle, which is is good. And you're relatively healthy, which is also really good. So, yeah, do you have any comments about that?
Speaker 2:I'm excited. It's a it's a reminder on how these, like, training principles improve your performance. Because, like, if you look at historically, during max strength cycles, I I jumped well after I unload, but not my best ever. And then if you look back at some of the highest I've jumped in the last two years, it's been after what I call the fancy stuff. The fancy stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That's what I that's what I call it, this this stuff. But there's also, like, a window. Like, it's like the fancy stuff allows me to actualize my strength, but then if I go too long, then, like, the strength drops off, and then I just, like, flatten out.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. So it's it's very interesting, but that's why we do, conjugate and maintain maintain, you know, some semblance of max strength work, some semblance of, like, higher rep schemes and and that that type of thing. But and then, like, underlying all this is, like, you have to be healthy enough. Because, like, I think a lot about, you know, when I was when I was hitting point nine eight every session, point nine nine every session, I was, like, unloading. Like, my training was so freaking hard for so long, and then I unloaded, and then I had basically, like, a month of, like, extremely high jumping.
Speaker 2:But you like, I was healthy enough to take advantage of that stuff. So it's a lot of variables. It's just I'm just getting reminders of, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's definitely windows of opportunity. And you saying that kind of reminds me that we'll probably only load for two weeks in the eccentric work. I probably won't take it to three even after just finishing it myself. I think it's you start to start to fall off a bit. Like, dirt.
Speaker 2:Like, you're not, like you're not gonna make dessert your main meal. Like, you're not you're gonna eat a little bit of dessert.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Mike always used to say, like, you know, he's like, this is the that's sprinkles. He's like, that's sprinkles on top. You gotta you gotta bake the cake. You gotta put the ice you know, the or even icing on top.
Speaker 1:He's like, you got icing on top of that, but you gotta do the stuff first. You gotta Yeah. Make the batter.
Speaker 2:What's funny is I look at a at a lot of other, you know, vertical jump trainers or programs, and I think the reason we haven't seen a density of other people making freaks in elite performances is because they're missing the sprinkles and the batter. Like, anybody anybody can go out there and program strength work and jump a lot. Like, that's so easy. You can probably get pretty good doing that. Like, in my case, I could probably jump 48 all year just doing the strength work and and once a week jumping.
Speaker 2:But to get those, like, you know, outlier performances and to actually, like, break the limit of what's, like, possible for you, like, you have to do that. So you have to touch on the eccentric or isometric stuff, the plyos, the sprinting, the power work. Like, even were just talking about the, you know, fast power cleans and stuff like that. Like, that stuff like, it all helps. Like, it helps, like, actualize all all that potential that we just that we just built up.
Speaker 2:So it's a it's a reminder of that. It's also a reminder to not set expectations too high during the this type of cycle. I think part of me thinks like, oh, PR, squat, PR, power clean. I should PR my vertical, but it doesn't work that well. It's probably a good guarantee that you'll jump high.
Speaker 2:You might.
Speaker 1:You might PR, but I think it's it's part of the reason why I'm I'm hesitant to have you test because it's not specific enough at the moment. And I can't even guarantee that you're gonna be feeling great during the next cycle. You might feel great after week one. I think week two, it might start to hamper you a little bit. And one of the things you said was, like, you know, while you're doing all that stuff, also have to maintain health.
Speaker 1:It's like, well, you can do this other stuff and, oh, fine. We'll just hammer max strength on Fridays. Can't do that. Why? Because you're gonna get hurt.
Speaker 1:Like, anyone can add, you know, six by or 10 by one back squat in there at a 100% or, you know, seven by three. But can you do that when you did true squats on Monday and you did, you know, single leg lowers on Wednesday and then come back and do it on Saturday after you jumped on Friday? Like, probably not.
Speaker 2:Be smart. So Yeah. Sessions have to get shorter. Have to add up the the discipline to shorten them or even cut them if needed. Like, we did that a lot when we were doing plyos last year.
Speaker 2:Like, we just I think we mixed them into the jump session, and the jump session was short. And there's random stuff, like, during isometric cycle and there are my plyos, like, PFP was an issue. Like, that's another like, my tendon adapted during that, but then, like, cartilage did it. So there's so many there's so many things. Why you should sign up for so we can juggle it for you?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's, that's my job. It's what I like to do. But, yeah, thanks for watching, guys. If you're interested in the coaching, click the link in the description.
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Speaker 1:want any fair weather fans.
Speaker 2:Was about 90% thing. People were going in and then quitting, and we
Speaker 1:hate you. Yeah. We don't hate's a strong word. It really it's it's just not fun for us. But thanks for listening, guys, and we'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Hope you had a good holiday.
