One Of The Best Strength And Conditioning Coaches EVER (Rolf Ohman)
Alright, guys. Welcome back to the t h p strength podcast. My name is John Evans, and I help people jump higher. This is Isaiah Rivera. He is my business partner, and he has a 50.5 in vertical.
John:And we currently have a new guest, one of my favorite people to mess with, my favorite old person in the entire world, Rolf Oman, and we'll get into that. I'll I'll tell you guys a little bit about his accolades in a second. But before we do, if you guys are interested in coaching, as always, click the link in the description if you wanna learn how to jump higher. We're gonna get into it here with mister Rolf Oman. So, Rolf, tell us a little bit about your background for those that don't know because you fly under the radar.
John:A lot of people don't know who you are.
Rolf:Yeah. Who am I? Well, I'm gonna be I'm gonna be a bit bit brash and say with all what's going on today, I am the original founder and inventor of the ten eighty technology. Yeah. So what have I been doing?
Rolf:I I've predominantly worked in track and field, but as I just mentioned, in professional ice hockey, I I quit track and field probably or somewhere in the vicinity of 2006, I think. I had three, four Swedish athletes. I had a 20 meter shot putter. I had a girl who was in the national team in long jump and short sprints. I had Sweden's first what is it?
Rolf:Nineteen foot pole vaulter who competed at the Sydney Olympics. He retired and yada yada yada. And then I got into pro hockey. Also, was head coach s and c coach of a pro hockey club for three years. And then I started working with some other hockey clubs.
Rolf:And then when the quantum came online, a couple of the big the really big teams in Sweden that are that sort of the well, they produce players that go to the NHL on a yearly basis. They bought systems and then I became very closely connected to one of them, which is probably the powerhouse in Swedish ice hockey has been for over a decade, which is Koleftia hockey way up the North Of Sweden. I was sort of hovering along back in 2000, what, '14, I think it was, '15, when some investors came in. So I ended up leaving, and Randy Huntington then said, look, I've got a job for you in China, which was that was not what I'd expected. But yeah.
Rolf:Okay. So I spent, what, two years in in in China full time, and then I spent another year and a half in Hong Kong as head coach of of their sports institute in in Hong Kong. I resigned in 2020 late twenty three, I think it was.
John:Were you working for them when we met or no? You had resigned?
Rolf:No. I'd I'd resigned just when just be just before going get going to Seattle, I had resigned. Mainly due to due to politics. Just a lot of people running in and out, you know, telling you what to do. You've got no idea what high performance is.
Rolf:They couldn't spell it in in their own language or in English. So, you know and when you when you get results, you know, you get guys who's, you you know, know, sort of being stuck at seven seventy and the long jump seven thirty and they jump seven seventy and the other guy jumped eight zero eight, had a quarter of a millimeter foul at eight twenty eight, which is what, 27 and a half feet, you know. It would've qualified him directly to the Olympics. And yet people, you know, are are in there saying, you know, they've got their 5ยข worth and it just becomes a an, you know, an intolerable position where you're sort of wasting so much energy, you know, telling people you're just getting getting people off your back. And and that they shouldn't be be on your back because you're, you know, you're there to do a job and you're doing the job.
Rolf:So yeah. So I I resigned, and then I was sort of feeling around at home. And then, of course, Patrick had already moved to Australia, so and playing football. And my wife and I were set to to move to Portugal because I've been to Portugal a long a lot of times for training camps and love the area. But then Patrick said he was gonna stay in Australia.
Rolf:So we decided, well, you know, this is where I grew up. So we said, okay. Well, you know, let's pack up our bags, sell the house, and let's move to Australia, and and here we are.
John:Here we are. So for those of you that don't know, Patrick is Rolf's son. He actually stayed at my house, my humble abode, for two weeks, so give or take ten days. And, we had we had good fun. I'm sure you've heard all about it, Rolf, hopefully.
John:Yes. We didn't get in any trouble. We didn't get arrested. So we've, it was good. It was a good time.
John:And, yeah, for those that also don't know how Rolf and I met, we lectured in Seattle together. It was the first time I had met Rolf, and I was very confused if he was Swedish or Australian because it didn't make any sense. He's a Swede with sorry. Or He's an Australian with a Swedish passport, I believe is what you and Patrick say. And, yeah.
John:So now he's back in the in the motherland, the Queensland of Australia, doing a bit of coaching. And Rolf has introduced to me a lot of interesting concepts and probably to a lot of you guys who are listening to this, a lot of interesting concepts. Specifically, the ones that stick out the most is gonna be time to peak velocity. It's one of the things that I one of the biggest takeaways. I believe it's EA index, I think is what you call it, which is another huge takeaway.
John:And then some of the concepts around eccentric RFD and winding filament theory. So if you guys have heard us talk about that, that comes from Rolf as well. And then I would say the other one, the big key takeaway that I've learned is using those metrics to assess fatigue over time. So those are some of the big, big takeaways that I've I've learned and and gotten from you and tried to implement a lot of the times with with our guys and and stuff like that. So one of the things that has been coming up pretty frequently with what I've, I guess, been realizing with guys like Isaiah, Donovan, you know, these really sensitive organisms to fatigue is that those very high power, high speed, high elasticity, you know, high and early demanding activity days, they take a good amount of time to recover from.
John:Right? And I think we had talked about it with Fabienne and things like that. So kind of elaborate on how you came to the conclusion that you kinda need, what would you say, like, seventy two to ninety six hours of rest between or reasonable amounts of rest between those sessions. Is that is that accurate? It's an accurate assumption?
Rolf:Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, sort of the quickly to sort of understand where I'm coming from, I was a broken down decathlete. I I competed internationally, and I I had the tools of of doing, you know, a lot better than I did, but I had eight operations. And the reason why I had eight operations is I I was a javelin thrower, and I buggered up my arm as many javelin throwers do.
Rolf:But I was I was fairly well moving athlete, so it didn't take me long to sort of get into the decathlon and scoring pretty well. But I had no background in in in a lot of these different events. So the fact that you then go I mean, I was a 75 meter javelin thrower. So when you then sort of take that sort of physique and just go straight into another thing and you've got no background, there's no tissue compliance, there's there's been nothing that's been built up over time to to handle the forces that, you know, all of a sudden, it's not just javelin throwing, which is bad enough as it is. But then you've got pole vaulting and you've got, you know, discus throwing.
Rolf:You've got long jumping. You've gotta run a 100 meters. You've got a high jump and all the and all that compounds and then all the training that you do. And then when you don't have people who've, you know, who really didn't didn't know what they were doing. So what, you know, what did what did we do back in the eighties?
Rolf:Well, we went over to the screeners and then we did sprint with them. Then we went over to throws and we did throws with them. And then, you know, then we did something in the middle. And then, of course, that was always too much. Long story short, one I can't remember what year it was.
Rolf:We gotta think. Yes. I do. It was '87. So the year before Soul, I ran into Charlie Francis.
Rolf:At that stage, had done a whole bunch of coaching clinic you know, coaching courses in Sweden and in Hungary. So I had, you know, all of these elite training, high performance badges and certificates and all this. And I'd sort of gone down the rabbit hole with all traditional periodization and all this. Then I met Charlie. And that was probably the biggest wake up call of all time because I I I realized in a matter of I mean, I I bug Charlie.
Rolf:I was I was chasing him. I'm I should've been arrested for stalking because I chased the guy for two weeks. I mean, he was Charlie Francis, you know. And then I mean, I wasn't gonna let this guy walk out without me getting, you know, everything I could get him get out of him. And I just just asked him and asked him and asked him every question I could imagine.
Rolf:The to sum it all up, what I realized after two weeks of badgering Charlie Francis, I realized that what I've been taught by professors in Sweden and and and to some extent in Norway, but in Hungary as well, you know, that I could virtually put that on the, you know, on the on the beside the toilet and use it for toilet paper. Because it it was just it was just rubbish, you know. I mean, what Charlie was saying was just I mean, it made perfect sense because I I you know, I'm a fairly intelligent human being and I have a very good eye for detail. And I've been questioning and asking lots of stupid questions with a lot of people who have been lecturing in Sweden. Like Randy, for example.
Rolf:That's how I met Randy. Because he was touring Europe, of course, with Mike Powell back in the day and Willie Banks and these guys, and he'd hold, you know, seminars and, you know, and I'd be the guy that would be sitting there asking all the stupid questions. So Randy Randy remembered me actually from a seminar that he did in Stockholm. Said, yeah. I remember you actually.
Rolf:You're a pain in the ass. And I said, yeah. That's right. But yeah. No.
Rolf:So Charlie sort of just turned everything completely on its end, you know. I mean, the first thing he said was, well, you know, we we don't do any running between seventy, ninety percent. Like like, say what? Like, you serious? Oh, yeah.
Rolf:Why? I said, well, you know, we do, you know, like three by three by a 150 at 85%. Oh, that's lovely, he said. I said, yeah. And he goes, yeah.
Rolf:Would you raise it 85 percent? And, you know, when you you knew straight away that, you know, it was sort of, you know, self explanatory like, you know, what what's the next comment gonna be? You raised it a 100%. So, you know, if you run around doing 85% stuff, you actually think that's gonna transfer? I got news to you, son.
Rolf:So that was sort of like boom. And then, you know, when he came and he and he threw his periodization up and that really that really, really got me. I mean, that was I think that was the one of the biggest things because his so called vertical integration, that just it blows normal periodization out of the out of the water. And this is something that I was always questioning in my education in in Europe about classical periodization. And I said, look, you know, it was that, you know, a light week, a medium week, a heavy week, and then it was fourth week was was a a recovery week and away you went.
Rolf:And then the question was, is that the optimal? No. It's not. And when you're doing things like maximum sprints, and that was the other thing. In Europe, in Sweden, when do you actually run fast?
Rolf:About six weeks before you start competing. That's when you start running fast. Is there a is is there a correlation then to why you have all these tendon injuries, hamstring problems, and and everything else? I mean, I tore everything apart from my hamstrings. I've got bulletproof hamstrings.
Rolf:They just they just not
John:Oh, lucky you. Lucky you.
Rolf:Yeah. But I've torn everything else and and operated everything else. So, you know, I I just sat sat there every time I, you know, got out got rolled out of the operating theater. Okay. Well, that was another one.
Rolf:Chalk went up for the, you know, periodization. Classical periodization. It don't work, you know. And then I'd go back to the thinking board, you know, and I'd elaborate and why we'd go again. And six months later, eight months later, bang.
Rolf:There's another tendon gone. Right. Well, it that didn't work either. So when Charlie sort of said, like, you know, well, this is what what we do. And, you know, he just laid it out.
Rolf:And it just it was I don't know. It was just so self explanatory and so overwhelmingly keep it simple stupid. And it just it just spoke to you. At least it did to me anyway. And it was Mhmm.
Rolf:I was completely and and utterly solved from that moment on. Because, I mean, what Charlie in in essence is saying that you've the only way of getting the system to adapt is is giving it enough stimulus to to adapt. And then you've got it's gotta recover. Now if if your recovery isn't optimal and thought out and and planned, then you're not gonna survive. It's as simple as that.
Rolf:It's you you're gonna run into trouble sooner or later. So I started something that I call accumulation intensification because what I found with myself and I was I think I learned so much from my own things that I did because I was able to to tolerate enormous loading. I mean, some of these gym sessions that we were doing, I mean, it was just ridiculous. I mean, we'd we'd be in the gym and lift, like, thirty, forty tons three days a week. Mean
John:Isaiah, how much how much are your load volumes, Isaiah? Do you know? I think
Isaiah:we when I tracked it, that one session, it was when when we used the the app, it was 12,000 pounds, like six tons.
Rolf:Yeah.
Isaiah:It was probably
John:like You're doing 30 tons?
Rolf:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, our weight sessions, honestly, they were two and a half, three hours.
John:Yeah. That's a good that's a we don't we don't quite get to that long, but we have some long ones, but we we the rest periods are longer. You know, I was listening to a lecture with Boo this past weekend, Shexnader. And Yeah. I and you probably crossed, you know, paths with him a handful of times.
Rolf:And,
John:you know, he was saying, oh, our ours last long, but the rest periods are really long, you know, and things like that. And I think and more so that's why ours would be. But, yeah, three hours, I mean, you're if you're going to the track and you're gonna come back or maybe the neck I mean, that's just that's so much volume that it would be near impossible to run fast. Feel like doing that much work.
Rolf:Well, I mean, when I was active, I mean, we there was no muscle lab systems. I mean, what I found very quickly with together with my colleague, Kenneth Rigberger, at the who was the head of SNC and he's produced nine guys over 8,002 over eight and a half in the decaf. He was an international class decaf lead himself. And we've we've worked together for what, thirty odd years. He's retired now, but we still sort of speak two, three times a week and we've got about a 150 projects that we've done on the ten eighty Quantum, for example.
Rolf:And one thing that we saw very, very early was that TPV, time to peak velocity, was an enormously good indicator of neural fatigue. Because we we we saw very, very quickly that with athletes, for example, like myself, but it didn't transport translated to everybody else, That if you sort of have the the sort of the background or the the chemistry that I've got, when you start getting fatigued, so the neural fatigue, you you can still actually produce some pretty big force numbers. But when it comes to doing things quickly, that's completely gone. It is absolutely and utterly wasted. So the thing that we saw then was and we started doing and we still do the same test even to this day.
Rolf:So we do a a squat squat test a squat jump test in in a Smith machine. A lot of people bagged us for that. Oh, Smith machines are useless, you know. They're you're locked in a position. Yeah.
Rolf:Exactly. That's what we wanted to do because all we wanted to do was see how much horsepower could we generate vertically without any technique, without any, you know, having to worry about balance or anything. We just wanted to see. It's it's like taking a a car and and putting it on a on a on a a On track.
John:Yeah. A dyno. Yeah.
Rolf:Yeah. You you strap it down.
John:Just pull it up, baby. Just pull it up. See what we got.
Rolf:Rip it. Yeah. Yeah. You see exactly what have you got rear wheel horsepower? So then we started doing that.
Rolf:And we stuck with that because it gives us extremely good data. It's very, very reliable. And we did a cross section. So we do twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, a 100 kilos. That's it.
John:Wanna hear something funny?
Rolf:Kilos is light enough to to to show us what you can do with a light object. Now the the most difficult thing for the human body to do is is to move light objects fast. That's the the the the the most difficult thing for the human body. I mean, if you think about it, try to throw a a ping pong ball. It's impossible.
Rolf:Tennis ball, you can throw. Okay? Cricket ball or baseball, you can throw a lot further and so forth. And then you sort of get to where, you know, the the the what do you call it?
John:Force velocity curve?
Rolf:Force velocity curve, which doesn't actually exist. It it's because that force velocity curve is is drastically flawed because Hill didn't take into account anything with fascia or an elasticity or and and anything that has any elastic component to it at all.
John:That's what I've I've I've said that too is I'm like, this is true inside of Yeah. A, like, tensiometer where you take a muscle fiber and you connect it to two little probes, then you Yeah. You know, whatever. But as soon as you do an elastic collision, it's different. I still think there's, like, some bloody
Rolf:Well, you look creative
John:stuff with it. But
Rolf:If we started with with the force velocity curve, if we throw in one thing, for example, that Randy was talking about, which is what we proved and that's why I built the quantum. And that is what Randy called DIS, dynamic isometric strength. Because we would we would we've been saying for probably twenty years, Randy and I, that when you load and move very quickly and that's 80% of volitional of speed eccentrically, you then get into what we now know is the the filament winding adaptation. Now what happens is that throughout that movement, let's say the movement is 20 centimeters. The last three, four centimeters, there is no more lengthening of fibers.
Rolf:It's it's it it's elastic components that are moving. So what happens and now we know that from professor Sato and professor John Croney in New Zealand. What happens is that myosin and actin get locked and you've got this bungee cord called titan, which is a protein and it it it acts as a bungee cord. So myosin and acting can move, but they move together. So they are they are actually locked in an isometric state, but they're able to to move because of there are components within that structure that that have elastic capabilities.
Rolf:So therefore, the system is moving. Mhmm. And that and that sort of made everything sort of, you know it it flips out. So when you look at then the force velocity curve, and then we take, for example, what Patrick did here in Australia is that we used about one and a half times his body weight, but we because we didn't have a Kaiser at that stage here in Australia, we used rubber bands. So we've got about 30 kilos, 40 kilos of load from the rubber bands that is forcing him down.
Rolf:So the eccentric velocity increases, And he's got the total load is about a 100, a 105 kilos. Now normally, when you do power training and you're going flat strap, first rep, you'll get whatever you get out of it. Second rep is better. Third is is mostly better for most people. Then four starts to dip off, five dips off, and it just keeps going.
Rolf:The first one, of course, you've got no elasticity that you've used in the first rep. That's why the second one and the third one's better. But basically, after four or five reps, it's it's all over. It just starts, you know, dropping drastically. So Randy and I were saying that, okay.
Rolf:But if we use this type of loading where we've got about one and a half times body weight and we do things very, very fast, we were seeing that people were all of a sudden when we got the fourth, fifth rep, it will stall out and it could drop a little bit, but then all of a sudden, all hell breaks loose because that now all of a sudden, the the figures just go the other way. They go straight, you know, skywards. Patrick will hit 8,000 watts with a 110 a 100 I think it was a 105 kilos.
John:You know, I I do not how how how where is that what's the distance at which that's is that at the very bottom that he's getting that? Concentric? No.
Rolf:It's well, we look they were doing we were doing a a soft box. So there is a little bit of, you know, you know, I wouldn't call it Yeah. We're not trying to bounce, but you you do come you do to get a bit of a recall. But you still gotta push those those bands out to the so they're they're giving about fifteen, eighteen kilos per side in in resistance. But the the the thing what's happening is that the filament winding, that that calcium deposit has started.
Rolf:And it starts at about five, four, five, six reps, and then you can just keep going. So you'll see that that all of a sudden everything it it it dips and then it goes back up again. So if you then go back into what we're talking about initially with Hill and the force velocity curve, well
John:You're not gonna have that.
Rolf:You've got force up here. You've got velocity down here. Now all of a sudden, I take that set, I can move that way up here. And it it it does there's no chart for that. There's none.
Rolf:Zip. Zero.
John:Yeah. And I think that's when you start looking at elastic collisions, it changes completely. Right? Because I mean, if you look at even the forces on I mean, that's really what's happening. You're getting you're getting elastic collision where you're storing, releasing energy in the the Titan and maybe, like, moves approximately to distally.
John:I know we talked about that with the tendon because you're gonna get some contribution there. Like and you're gonna increase the the, like, the sum of the or, I guess, the whole the sum of the parts is greater than the whole or whatever. You're gonna get something that's way higher output in terms of velocity. So Yeah. You know, when we
Rolf:The thing that's interesting is that we also have found we we did some testing with a guy in Sweden that was he was, I I think, a co world record holder in the bench press. I think he bench pressed, like, 360 kilos or whatever it was. And we tested him against a guy who was a Olympic finalist in the discus. He's trying 66, 67 meters.
John:I've told this story
Rolf:in exam. He and he had about a two twelve p b in the bench, and this guy had, you know, like a three sixty. And we started him at twenty kilos, and then we just kept going. Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, hundred, hundred and twenty. By the time we got to about a 140, you know what mean?
Rolf:We we had to sort of go to this guy, the power lifter. His name was Johnny. And we said to him, Johnny, look, mate. You know, either you stop moving as quick as you can or we're gonna have to, you know, get the the the electrical cord out and hook it up to the to the to the main system and get you firing because, mate, there's nothing happening. And he goes, oh, I'm going flat out.
Rolf:Interesting. Anyway, we kept piling on the kilos, and by the time we got to about two hundred, he's still moving at exactly the same speed. There's there's no difference, you know, between up a hundred and two hundred. No difference. Of course, the discus thrower, he was tapping out at this stage, and I think he made two twelve or two ten that day because we had to we had to instead of going 200 to two twenty, we went two ten.
Rolf:And he got that and he missed two twenty, if I remember right. And, John, did
John:you
Rolf:just You're talking about
John:the discus thrower hit two ten? Okay.
Rolf:Yeah. But the crazy thing is even at 210 kilos, which was the maximum for the for the discus thrower, and it's virtually what? 65% of the power lifters PR? The discus trial was was beating him in every metric at two hundred and ten kilos. He was producing more force, more power, higher velocities than the power lifter was doing.
Rolf:So we did a few other sort of projects along those lines. And what we've then when I spoke to Randy, Randy then said to me, well, I've I've got this theory. And I said, you know, I'll shoot. And he goes, the filament winding is triggered by two things. One is velocity, the other is load, which means power lifters can actually get get into this.
Rolf:But the problem is these guys and if you look at weight lifters, for example, now there's a classic one. I mean, you'll get weight lifters especially in the lighter weight carry categories, sort of seventy two to eighty, ninety kilos. They are extremely agile and powerful. I mean, they can do some very impressive, you know, CMG jumps and and and that sort of thing, and even just box jumps. And they are very, very quick out of blocks.
Rolf:If they know how to start, you you'll see them getting out sort of normally, we look at at at velocities at at three, six, and 10 meters. That tells us a great deal about what's happening with strength and and conditioning for a sprinter, for example, in the acceleration phase. Now weightlifters, they can they can get out very, very quickly. But the thing is they don't have any movement velocity. Their limb velocity is just so so small compared to a sprinter.
Rolf:So by the time they get to, you know, sort of six, eight meters, they're already tapped out. It's there there's nothing. There's no there's no more gears. It's like they've got a, you know, they've got a 500 horsepower, you know, Dodge Chrysler engine, but they've only got a a two speed gearbox. That's it.
Rolf:It's like I'm say one. Yeah. Well, exactly.
Isaiah:It's funny. My dad, he was an Olympic weightlifter. He was, like, one of the best ones in Puerto Rico, and they would train with the track team. Like, when they would do, like, the block starts, and he said, his Olympic weightlifting team, they would dust everybody on the starts.
Rolf:Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Rolf:Yeah. We've seen that time and time again with Russians and and Bulgarians and and the Hungarians that I knew very well. Had a couple of world champions, and they just smoked every day. Nobody had even a you know, we
John:we had a guy here not to to interrupt because this is cool. He weighs a hundred or what I think he weighed a hundred kilos Hundreds. Or a little less. Hundred kilos. He power cleaned four, what was it?
John:It Yeah.
Rolf:It's a Canadian guy.
Isaiah:Four? 405.
John:This no. This this guy was US. His name was Okay. Derek Bochamp. Yep.
John:Yeah. Patrick probably told you about it. He did a $4.04 $0.05. It was a 185 kilos power cleaning.
Rolf:Yeah.
John:And he tried to do four thirty and, like, narrowly missed it. Like, caught it on shore. It's one ninety five kilos. And we looked at the wattages because I had the VBT device on it. It was the OVR, so, it's a little bit different.
John:And we compared it to Isaiah, and it was just super interesting to see the differences because he could move like, his his watts were were high. Like, he could move a light load really fast. He moved one fifty five, like, four meters per second or something like that. Mhmm. Like, it was just, like you know, which is 70, and he just ripped it.
John:But if you looked at the peak watts that they were able to generate, you know, his were a little higher, but relative to his body weight, Isaiah's wattages were they're actually higher, which I was really, really shocked to see that, especially at his height because well, I think, generally, you'll get higher VLOs if you're taller. So I guess that helps a little bit because, like, I guess in terms of what you can produce, you'll be able to move an external load to a higher peak VLO if you're taller because you can pull it for longer. And so, like, it was interesting to see the differences. But, yeah, I think if it were a power lifter, I don't even think it would have been it would have been no contest.
Isaiah:So I I also relate to what you were saying about the discus thrower. How about how when he was reaching maximal weights, he was still getting good velos. That happens to me anytime I max out on a strength exercise. Like, it's like it's on until it isn't. It's like an on and off switch.
Isaiah:Like, it's moving fast. It looks crazy. Then I might add five pounds to the bar, and then it's nothing. Yeah.
John:Is that
Rolf:Well, that yeah. That's interesting because what we we had a couple of guys at the Melbourne Sports Academy. One was a one ten hurdler who's probably one of the most physical specimens that we've had. I mean, the he he ran a thirteen forty hurdles, which is upper world class. He made the European 110 meter.
Rolf:He I think he was sixth back in 2012 or whatever it was. And he could do some really, really crazy stuff. And the interesting things is when we loaded him up in the quantum and we were doing rapid eccentric and concentric movements, If we set the the stop bars, we're talking, like, a centimeter one and a half centimeters, like half an inch, three quarter of an inch deeper than what he'd done in the previous rep. He didn't get out.
John:He just couldn't do it.
Rolf:No. Was It's like me. Yeah. The the the the difference and and the crazy thing is you set it at what he was doing, and it was like, bing bing. It was like watching Sue, you know, with when he's standing there with two hundred kilos in the kaiser in the kaiser squat.
Rolf:It's just and then you set him down another, like, an inch and it just goes boom and stop. He he didn't get out.
John:Couldn't stand
Rolf:it up. And you think the how the how the hell is that even possible? So you then very, very quickly realize that, you know, you as as, you know, we always say, you get good at what you train. If you are, you know, in this position, then that's why it's so important. And that's why, for example, that and a lot of people were saying, you know, to to Reagan and and Melbourne and to to myself that we were doing things completely wrong.
Rolf:Because what we were doing as we got out of the GP max strength and then into the sort of transition into max velocity competition phase, our exercise range of motion would shrink. Mhmm. But the acceleration would increase and time peak velocity would decrease. So we're getting closer and closer to reaching the same sort of speeds that we were doing, you know, a hundred and twenty milliseconds on the plane for a long jumper, 90 odd or whatever for for the sprinters. By doing exercises like, you know, going from a 20 centimeter like Randy does, he goes thirty minutes when he starts with step ups, it's first 30 centimeters, 20, and then 10.
Rolf:Now 10 centimeters is with, you know
John:No time.
Rolf:Single leg. We don't actually call them step ups. We call those step downs because it's such a short explosive movement that it it there is no step up. It's just a step down.
John:That's the one where the box is to the side. Right? And you stand between Exactly.
Rolf:Your your box is off to off to a little bit to the to the left and and you you're working your left leg and then you move it over to the right and you do your right leg. So And what we found with that is we've we've had one of the Swedish girls who was who's the Swedish record holder at 200 meters, and she's I think she will grab it this year in in a 100. And she was a girl that was running she was stalled out as a 24 year old at about eleven seventy eight and twenty four seconds. Fast forward two years after having her coach came to to Riggan and said, look, we've gotta do something with strength and conditioning because we're stuck. And he said, okay.
Rolf:We're gonna do this. And they completely revamped it to, you know, what we're doing. Two years later, the girls run she's run eleven fourteen and twenty two six.
John:Wow. Yeah.
Rolf:That's Now the crazy thing is Julia, she's a little blonde girl. She has the fastest ever recorded what we call step downs in the 10 centimeters. She's got thirty five milliseconds.
John:For the total time or the TPV?
Rolf:That's a TPV. And she's got a low Point
John:you're saying point o three five?
Rolf:Yeah.
John:Or point three five? Point o three five?
Rolf:That's How's that even
John:possible? Concentrically?
Rolf:Yeah. The And
Isaiah:you said that's on a step down? So that's
Rolf:it's centimeter board, and she stands to the side of it, lifts her left foot probably about eight centimeters above and just goes bang, and then just straightens out her leg.
John:What was the load? What was the load on it? Like, 200 kilos or she do it? Oh, one and a half times?
Rolf:Yeah.
John:So she's probably at, like, one twenty or something or less than that. She's probably, like she probably weighs, what, like, fifty kilos to seventy five or something like that?
Rolf:I think she weighs about sixty, so it's probably about ninety kilos.
John:Ninety kilos.
Isaiah:Yeah. So I'm assuming this is close to competition time when you're when you're doing the 10 centimeter.
Rolf:Yeah.
Isaiah:How would the exercise change based on the event? So I'm thinking, you know, for us
Rolf:Yeah. Spend more
Isaiah:time on the ground than a sprinter. Would you try to match the TPV to what the ground contact times are?
Rolf:Both yes and no. That that is that is the I mean, it's it's like Randy always says, you know, if you're gonna go into four minute one, don't build a, you know, don't build a stock car. So you if you you've gotta you've gotta understand your event. What does your event, you know, tell you? But we we are huge believers because we see it time and time again that whatever event metrics dictate to us that this is what we need for this event, we always go a little bit better.
Rolf:We want we want a little bit of of of reserve, if you wanna call it, overcapacity. Because what we've seen, if if I sort of backtrack and, as you know, I used to used to train an Australian sprinter who, you know, I no longer's coach.
John:He should not be in
Rolf:the Jacob had run twenty one four, I think, was his best, and he was barely able to run that consistently. We got down to 20.5, which is not bad, but we did no well, not I'd say no, but we did extremely little specific 200 meter endurance speed endurance work. Why is that? Because the thing that we wanted I wanted to do was to increase his max velocity, which we did. We were just under 12 meters per second.
Rolf:What is his max velocity, which is extremely fast. It's much faster than what Sue ever ran, for example, as as peak velocity wise. But Sue, of course, was the whole race was built upon his acceleration capacity. But still, he he was up at eleven forty nine, I think, meters per second at at his at his peak. But what happens when you increase peak velocity is that you can then operate at a higher percentage below that, which means that now all of a sudden, you're only if you're running at 11.4 meters per second, you're only taxing what?
Rolf:97%. So if you're You'll be out you'll be out to run further before fatigue sets in. And it's exactly the same thing in in 400 meters. If you if you're gonna run a fast 400 meters, you've got to be able to run sub twenty forty. If you can't do that because if you're gonna run as, like, a 44 and a half or better, you've gotta open up at under twenty one seconds.
Rolf:Now if you've got a 20.8 p b and you've gotta open up in, you know, in in in virtually that, then you're running at maximum, which means by the time and everybody gets lactic acid in about the same time period. It's about thirty seconds, thirty two seconds. So the question is how far around the track do you get in thirty two seconds? Now if I can run 10 meters per second and you guys can run eleven and a half, well, guess what? You guys are gonna be how far?
Rolf:You're gonna be 30 meters ahead of me before your lactic hits, which means you've only got, what, 50 meters left to the finishing line. I've got I've got the whole straight. Well, good luck with that. And as a decathlete, I can tell you it's not a nice feeling.
John:No. I can tell you definitively it's not. I used to run the four house Tom Patrick. That's my bread and butter.
Rolf:Overcapacity, it gives you and it it always it also gives us resilience. And that's the other thing that we're interested in. It it gives us resilience against injuries if it's done properly. Because now even though we're we're asking, you know, what we're asking out of the system, but the system has more capacity, if if that makes sense. So there is a a it acts as a as a sort of a a safety buffer.
Rolf:And if I look at my athletes, I've had virtually no injuries. I mean, I've never had a hamstring injury, for example. Never. But we don't do Nordics. We don't do a lot of the stuff that a lot of people do.
Rolf:But what we do do is things that are relative to hamstring. We do hamstring sliders. We do two two types. So this is and this is where when I met you, a lot of the things that you were saying, I got I was very, very curious as to how you guys go about things because we do we use isometrics or we use very slow eccentrics with ISO holds when we do hamstring sliders. But that's in the GP, and then things go gets quicker and quicker.
Rolf:But the way that we work the hamstring is completely different than what it is in a Nordic in a Nordic hamstring, for example. So therefore, what we're asking and it's the same if you use, you know, the if you use flywheel technology. A lot of people say that flywheel technology is great. My good friend and colleague, Rainer, who's produced some he's had guys running nine seven seven. He's had girls running ten seven.
Rolf:One Olympic Games, World Championships. Christian Tyler jumped eighteen twenty three, second best triple jumper lengthwise, triple gold medalist, blah blah blah, so forth. Rainer tried flywheel training for one year. Doesn't work. Doesn't work.
John:I've never I've never had success with it either. No. So
Rolf:And it's you know, so is when when you say things like that, a lot of people jump down your throat and say, oh, blah blah blah blah blah blah. Yeah. But okay. Hang on. I I I haven't said that it's useless.
Rolf:What I've said is it doesn't work for us. We're building we're building formula one cars. And in formula one, flywheel training doesn't work. I'm sorry. It's it's it's no different than, you know, if if all of a sudden I walk out to the Mercedes team or the McLaren team, you know, and I've got, you know, some component that comes straight out of, you know, a 03/20 BMW.
Rolf:Well, I'm sorry that you might get half a lap, but you might even get, you know you might even not not even get out of pit lane before that that part blows up because it's not designed for Formula One. So if if if you're looking at what, you know, what Isaiah is doing and what you guys are trying to do and doing, I mean, you you're doing things which it's it's like, what, 0.00001 of the population that are doing it. So in other words, it ain't easy because if it was easy, you'd there'd be people doing it all the time and they're not. So Right. That means that, okay, there's a bit of thinking to this.
Rolf:And I mean, this is, again, this is why I built the Quantum because I realized very quickly that the concentric phase, everybody was talking concentric concentric concentric. And I just couldn't get over that. And the reason why I built the Quantum is because in Sweden, they did a project which I probably mentioned when you and I met in in Seattle. It was called Breakman. What they did is they just did super maximum loading eccentrically with hockey players.
Rolf:And as soon as they got to the position where they were at 90 degrees depth or just under, they would stop the the the the the descent of the weight and they would then move it back hoist it back up again. And the the athlete would just move out of the way. And they would do, you know, single reps, What we found out of that and what they got out of that was that these hockey players got ridiculously strong at force production. But but acceleration capacity diminished, junk junk capacity diminished because they weren't doing anything at all to transfer it going up, which is the difference that you guys are doing. You're doing this loading, but you're you're trying to get off the ground.
Rolf:The hockey players didn't. They were just going, uh-huh. So Right. If we look at somebody, for example, like Sue, which, you know, I've asked this question to Hawkeys Dynamics, and they they thought I was a nut job and didn't wanna talk to me after this. So I said to
John:him I'm not a big fan of them, by the way.
Rolf:No. There's a bunch of us who are not who who aren't. So I asked him. I said, you you guys have got the premier, you know, force plate. I've got a force plate with my muscle ad, but it doesn't it doesn't do it either.
Rolf:So I said, I wanna measure the eccentric phase and the concentric phase. And I said, oh, you do that now. And I said, no. No. No.
Rolf:No. No. And he goes, oh, yes you do. And I said, okay. So it's showing me.
Rolf:And he goes, oh, there's there's the eccentric phase. There's a concentric phase. And I said, good. But you've gotta stop. There's a stop there.
Rolf:In the eccentric phase, there is a stop. What's the time? Oh, no. No. There's no stop.
Rolf:I beg your pardon? So Randy and I said, no. No. No. No.
Rolf:No. We're not buying that at all. It there is a stop. There is most definitely a stop.
John:They're saying there's no isometric condition? Is that what they're saying?
Rolf:I don't know what they're saying, but they they just would not have a bar of soap on it. But here's our here's our our working theory, and we see this now with athlete after athlete that we test. If you got somebody like Sue, what Sue can do? Let if we look at the the time that he is in the ground when he ran his his PB race in in Tokyo, about eighty two milliseconds, I think, is it's one of the fastest that Ralph Mann was actually in in Beijing just before, and they measured him. And Ralph said that it was the fastest ground contact that he'd ever measured.
Rolf:So the the question then is, in the phase of amortization, when Sue actually gets contact with the ground and he starts compressing that spring, how long does that take? What we know then is that as soon as he gets contact, which is just slightly ahead of center of mass, and then he will leave somewhere there. So you've got a v, which is the time that he's actually in support and when he gets total off over here. So the question is then, okay, how long is this time? We know that his ground contact time is eighty two milliseconds, but what is each phase?
Rolf:We think, Randy and I, that Sue is one of these eighty eighty odd percent genetic freaks that can compress the spring, load the spring, ready to shoot in about twenty five to thirty milliseconds, which means that the tow off takes about sixty milliseconds. So in other words, if you then get another guy like like this, let's just say, Jacob, who's run a ten eleven. His ground contact times are about eighty five, eighty six milliseconds. So not very far off, but it takes him much longer much longer to load. So therefore, that's why it takes him longer to get off the ground.
Rolf:So the the whole thing, it's it's not about the concentric phase. The concentric phase is a is a is a byproduct of whatever you do eccentrically. You cannot get more out than you put in. It's it's as simple as that. It's like going to the bank.
Rolf:Mhmm. So Going to the bank when the bank has no interest. You put a $100 in, six months later, you got a $100. But if you get 3% interest, well, now all a sudden you've got $110 or whatever. So that that that's what that's what we're sort of
John:That's a really good analogy. So you so you guys obviously load eccentric super fast. I have we have, like, three or four more minutes before Isaiah and I are gonna get yelled at by, well, him, his wife, and me potentially a girl that I met who Patrick didn't get to meet. But He's sitting here
Rolf:with me.
John:That's funny. Okay. So I have two two questions that came to mind as I've been
Isaiah:I also have a a question.
John:Okay. Quick one. Yeah. So, Rolf, you have five minutes to answer these three questions. Okay?
John:They're around a clock. So what number one. Alright. When you do your very crazy loading in the weight room, right, let's call it, you know, these quarter rhythm squats, which I do have Donovan doing today, and I wanted to share this. So because, you know, I I filmed this for for you, old man.
John:I call Rolf BC just so you guys know. Actually, he calls himself BC. So we got the bands. We're doing this. Right?
John:He this would be after he did some sprints, and I don't know if you can see this here. Maybe. We're going roughly two twenty, so it's about one time body weight for him. Doing doing something similar. We didn't get quite the velocities that, that you guys did, so we didn't see the same power outputs that you saw with Patrick.
John:And I don't know if it's our device. Like, our encoder is different potentially or something like that, but we weren't even close to the VLO. So, nonetheless, that's a that's another question for another day. But doing something like that, doing something like the hang counter movement cleans, things like that, you do that typically on the same day that you sprint because you want things to be neurally compatible. Right?
John:Or no? Do you do it on the following day?
Rolf:No. We this is where it gets it sort of gets a bit tricky. Different athletes, they sort of have different sort of responses to these types of stimulus. So for example, with Jacob, if I did certain things on Monday, if we did an acceleration accelerations and and strength training go very well together.
John:Yeah. Like they pair nicely.
Rolf:Maximum strength and and anything that has to do with force production because you're just simply not getting to the the the velocities that you're doing in max velocity. But if we, for example, did a a session on Monday with the acceleration, then then we did weights on Tuesday for to rest on Wednesday to run max velocity on Thursday, fully rested. Then what we did on Tuesday had a huge significance. And his nervous system and this is what happens. When they when when he was first with me, this was no problem.
Rolf:He got tired, but but it was a different type of fatigue. Once they start running fast, they become much more hardwired for for neural fatigue. It it it changes dramatically. So what and this is where a lot of people think that screeners actually get more tolerance to work as they get older. It's the opposite.
Rolf:They actually get less tolerance. You've gotta give them more recovery and you've gotta be a lot more picky with what you give them because they simply just don't I mean, we know that takes about forty eight hours for testosterone to peak after we do something with with a velocity sort of aspect to it. So if we do something on Monday at 04:00, which has a velocity aspect to it, if it's if on the track or if it's in the weight room, then we know that at at about Wednesday at 04:00, it's gonna peak. So we use we use that, and that's what Charlie was always, you know, talking about it, that how long does the testosterone level take before it peaks? Because testosterone is the most important quality or substance when it comes to running fast.
Rolf:A lot of you know, if you look back to throwers, you know, if if we're talking about drug taking, they were using testosterone and they thought they were getting big and strong, but they weren't getting big and strong. They were just getting faster. And that and now that very quickly, that's the other thing. A lot of people say, well, you guys don't do any max strength work. I beg to differ because what we found is the more high quality power work we do, the stronger they get.
Rolf:I mean, we we don't know how strong Sue was. I mean, we never did any maximum, like, rep one, twos, or threes or whatever. We're moving anywhere between four and eight reps as fast as we can all year round. What changes is the range of motion.
John:I told I told Isaiah that today. I was like, neurally, you're gonna get stronger if you do power. Because the it's not like the nervous system says, oh, you know what? This super high intent activity, I'm just
Rolf:One of the You know, I'm gonna recruit
John:all these motor units. Now I'm not gonna do it on squats. Like, that's not gonna be the case.
Rolf:Probably one of the best documented cases of of what happens when you train correctly is is a a Swiss shop put it by name, Van Gunther. Gunther has a twin brother, and they tested these guys and it showed that Gunther had 60% slow twitch fibers. Now this is a guy who threw 23 meters in the shot, but won everything. Won everything. Yeah.
Rolf:When when because of the way he trained, I mean, he was big man, heavy, but extremely powerful. And he high jumped like two zero six when he weighed a hundred and twenty kilos. Some ridiculous, yeah. You know Oh, yeah. He he long jumped apparently seven meters, which is what Dion Williamson.
Rolf:Yeah. I mean, it's just ridiculous. So what they did and what they saw is what happened with his training was that when they went in and looked at his fiber during his the peak of his career, what they found was extraordinary. His fast twitch fibers had virtually tripled in size.
John:Yeah. Look at this. This guy right here. Oh,
Isaiah:yeah. I've seen him.
Rolf:Yeah. Is Werner. So now now it sounds the real interesting part. When he finished, he was very sensible and he had three years of detraining in his body. And then when they did a muscle biopsy on him again after he did the three years, his fibers were back to where they were prior to him starting his his shot good career.
Isaiah:What? That's crazy.
John:You know what's really you know what's really funny?
Isaiah:I have an
John:identical twin brother that is a distance runner. So we and and I'm a jumper. So we gotta do the biopsy. We gotta cut me open.
Rolf:So So they this so therefore, that just tells us extremely, you know, straight on. You again, you get good at what you're trying. If you train fast and not three months of the year, but nine, ten months of the year, but you do it within the boundaries of being able to do that, which means you can't do crazy amounts because you're gonna spread it out over ten months now instead of, you know, three months and you go gung ho away you go. It's virtually like walking the plank. You might as well just, you know, just walk the plank every once in a while because nobody survives that.
Rolf:And that's the other thing that I saw with myself and athletes that I was looking at and and working with in the beginning. Virtually nobody inclusive Sue, they can't handle more than two two maximum intensity days on a seven seven or eight day cycle. That's it. We've tried three and you they can do it for maybe two, three weeks, finished.
John:So that's what was saying. Can you pair can you pair the, like, fast cleans and because if they only have two days, you have to pair the sprint days with the Kaiser days. That'd be the only way you could do it.
Rolf:Right? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah.
John:So So, like, when Jacob was not as good, you could do four. But now when he as he got better, he couldn't. He needed to pair
Rolf:And the thing is he didn't he I don't think he quite understood what we were doing and that we were we were slowly changing his his whole sort of physiology towards what we needed to be. And and that is that you you, you know, you go in and you do an activation session in the morning. That's bang, bang, bang. Short, sweet, get out of there. You go and have have have dinner, lunch, have a bit of a sleep, come back at 4PM, and, mate, you are rearing, ripping to go.
Isaiah:I have two too many questions. The first one is, are you doing that like, does the GP and all all the training cycles leading up to the highly specific stuff, is it still a similar setup with the seventy two to ninety six hours in between high intensity days? And what are you doing in between the high intensity days to, like, stay in shape? You have to be more mindful about, like, your diet and stuff so that you don't get fat while not training as much. Yeah.
Isaiah:Those are, the two
Rolf:Well, what we I mean, if if we look at sort of the normal program, we we do for example, when we do start running what we call maximum velocity is that we start at 90%. And let's say that we the season here starts at about now, December, and it culminates in in in April when the Australian championship. So we've got four months. So we would then start probably in November. We're we're probably running at about 90 if we're doing sprint endurance.
Rolf:And then it'll go 92, 94, 96. If we can get to 98% in training, that means we're virtually running flat strap because the the the up those 2% is the 3% is the difference between competition and training for most athletes. So therefore and what then happens is that the volume in the beginning at 90%, it could be, like, a one fifty, a one twenty, a 90, and a 60. And then in the next period, the the the one fifty might be stay. The one twenty drops and we go one fifty, ninety, sixty.
Rolf:And then a little bit further down the road, you've got a one fifty and a 60 or a one fifty and an 80. And, basically, what happens is that we speed things are speeding up. Recoveries are at first, they're they're they're they're virtually the same. We're building this capacity of of of speed endurance. But once we get to about four minutes of recovery, that's when we stop the recovery time as far as how much we're getting or how little we're getting.
Rolf:So the aim is to for example, the end result is trying to get a spreader to run. I'll give you some figures. It we know, for example, that a guy who has won I'm not gonna name any names It's the respect of that coach. But a guy who won the Olympics just before the Olympics, which is in 2021, I believe, ran a one fifty, which was equivalent to 19.7, had four minutes recovery and then ran an 80 at the equivalent of 10 flat. Now when you can do that, you're ready to run multiple rounds.
Rolf:Now that's the problem with a lot of the spreaders that we've got here is that you can go to Europe and you and a lot of American sprinters as well and and European sprinters. You can take them to a Grand Prix and they'll run a very fast time, but that's it. They've got no there's no there's no endurance.
John:To come back and do it again.
Rolf:No. And and in championships, I mean, if you're if you're running fast and you're doing individual, a 100, you're gonna be most probably running realize as well. So all of a sudden, it's not three races or four, it's five, six, seven races. And and god forbid, if you're running at 200 as well, which a lot of them are, like Bolt, for example, how many races does he run over an Olympic games? I mean, we're talking some serious amounts of running.
Rolf:So you got the hundreds of hits, 200 hits
John:Four by one, two hundred hits.
Rolf:And four by one. Yeah. So you're looking at about twelve twelve, 13 races. Yeah. It's not.
John:That's crazy. So so between those sessions, though, like, let's say you're sprinting on that Monday, Thursday, like and you're, you know, you're you're very elite. You know, you're talking super elite guy. Like, Donovan's kinda like this. Mhmm.
John:You know, like, he can crazy accelerator, really narrowly wired, flattens out really quick. You know, Monday, I can hit him hard. Thursday, I can hit him hard probably. Well, I've got seventy two hours between high intensity sprint sessions. K?
John:Maybe I can get some tempo work in that isn't too fast. It's gotta be slower than 70% or around 70%. And then the other one is gonna be, you know, it's interesting you say that, the 70% thing because a boost had something that was somewhat different but somewhat similar, and I'd be curious to talk about another time with you. So, like, are you just doing upper on the day after? Like, are you you can't really touch max strength and because you don't wanna narrowly flatten yourself.
John:Right? No. So is it just accessory strength work on that that following day? Like, just you couple sets of some exercises in and out?
Rolf:Yeah. It's Yeah. It's usually I mean, that's that's the thing when, you know, people see what we do in the weight room. They they freak out because, first of all, how much weight we're using, how fast we're moving it, but how little volume we have. Right.
Rolf:Because there is this there's this this notion that, you know, you need you need huge amounts of volume, and that's that's that's so
John:I think with sprinters, yeah, you can't you can't. No. No. You just detonate them. Their nervous system looks too sensitive.
John:Yeah. So then but then what do you do on the easy days? Days? Like, the general day, like a Tuesday after you destroyed them on Monday, not destroyed them, but neurally, they are taxed. You know, what are you gonna do on a day like that or Friday?
John:You know? Like, do you just two sets of six reverse lunges, some bench press, and call it a day?
Rolf:Like Yeah. For example, on Tuesdays, that that's one of the things that we've done. We we do we do some lunges, and then we'll do hurdle mobility work. And we will do some just means the thing when you when you work in China, you've gotta make sure that you you're training x amount of hours because they they perceive everything as if you do lots of hours, that's good.
John:What if you actually
Rolf:do during that time, that that's that's not, you know, that's not that
John:Don't matter.
Rolf:As long as you do, like, you know, twenty five hours of training a week, that's that's perfect. So what we had to do is we had to come up with things like, you know, hurdle mobility sessions, and Randy does a lot of pool work, for example, with the sprinters. And that's something else that we do. For example, after a day where they've done some very, very hard accelerations, they've also done a wait session either on the Monday. Then Tuesday can be, for example, that we do we do a lot of the sprint activation drills with a vest in the pool.
John:Oh, interesting. So you would do the a skips, the single leg a skips, the dribble And
Isaiah:that's the
Rolf:mini load is fine.
Isaiah:Right. If if hypothetically politics weren't a thing though, would you just do nothing, in that case, or would you still do, like, the activation drill and and stuff like that?
Rolf:No. I think it's interesting. You know, that's it's a it's a very interesting comment, And it's yeah. I thought about that myself. And I, you know, I must say that, you know, I I sometimes I wonder whether or not Randy's you know, when he used to say that and say, oh, we have to do this because otherwise, you know, they'll come out of the office and say we're not doing enough training.
Rolf:If that was just sort of like something that he has sort of it was just this, you know, this jargon that they had between him and the office. And me as the assistant head coach, I never had to, you know, take any deflag. As soon as anybody got upset, they came out. It was Randy that they got upset at, and I could run away. You know?
John:I had that happen to me today, actually. I got yelled at. Yeah.
Rolf:Which was great. You know? Like, oh, shit. They're upset. You know?
Rolf:Here comes here comes the big boys. No. They they look happy today. And I could just go, I'll see you I'll see you at lunchtime, Randy.
John:Have fun.
Rolf:And that will be you know? So yeah. No. It's it's an interesting question, but I think, you know, we Randy does do a lot and it's, you know he sometimes he says that, you know, if I was guilty of anything, it's probably undertraining. But having worked with him for two years, I don't think we've had any guys that have been undertrained.
Rolf:I think we've been opt I think they've been optimally trained. I think which I think is perceived as being under trained because we're not we're not taking risks. And if we do take risks, they're extremely well thought out and calculated. And that's why we use a lot of tech.
Isaiah:I mean, a testament I'd
John:be so fat if I did that. I'd be such a fat fuck, pardon my language, if I just trained twice a week. That's why asked the
Isaiah:that's why I asked the you know, what do guys do to stay in shape? But, I I mean, I think a testament to that training theory is that you didn't have many injuries.
Rolf:No. No.
Isaiah:Which I think, you know, if a guy if I got if a guy can't compete, then are you, like, doing your job? Like
John:Yeah. No. Exactly. I mean, that's that's the one that is availability.
Rolf:Yeah. And we and we see that the fact that Randy's been back four times in 2025 consulting, you know, sort of like a month, six weeks at a time is because since he retired and left China, that's the whole program has just fallen apart. I mean, they're they're, you know, they're not jumping well. They're not spreading well. You know?
Rolf:So, you know, they've they've got this knack of sort of falling back on on sort of bad routines very quickly. And, you know, we could spend a whole program talking about about that.
John:But Well,
Rolf:I would love to do that. You know, at at the end of the day and, I mean, it's sort of going back to what what I think is and we should have another chat about that because
John:I was gonna say, I need a part two. We have to have a part two now.
Isaiah:Have more questions.
Rolf:Think, you know, what you guys do with all your, you know, long duration eccentrics and and super maximum eccentrics and so forth. Because very quickly, as you know, I've I've coached the young fellow by the name of Michael Kennelly in in Hong Kong, who is one of the most gifted
Isaiah:The freaking gazelle.
Rolf:Oh, he's he's incredible. Look him up
Isaiah:on Instagram. He's a gazelle.
Rolf:It's crazy. I mean, he beat in the in the clean the other day in a in a power clean. He did a 140, and he weighs
John:sixty nine. Sixty nine kilos, Isaiah.
Rolf:Yeah. So he it's over double by weight.
John:That's like one And
Rolf:he and he hit two point six what did he do? At a hundred and twenty kilos, he hit two point six six meters per second, which is what Sue was doing
John:at five. How what was the VLO? What was it? 2.66 at one twenty? Two
Rolf:yeah. One twenty kilos.
John:What's yours, Isaiah? Do you have yours, Isaiah? 2.54?
Isaiah:I have it I have it here, like, ready.
Rolf:It's insane. I mean, I'm completely blown away by what they the problem is with All time with that he's just never learned how to high jump.
John:Yeah. We gotta work on that.
Isaiah:Well, well, your twenty twenty is 2.4.
Rolf:Yeah. I mean, 2.4 at that low. That is that's upper upper upper world class. There's no you know, that's people who do that, they can move and they can jump.
John:Seriously. 65. You did you did 2.4, though it is. Yeah. I see a deficit, Ralph.
John:I see a deficit. We gotta fix this deficit. So, you know, mean crazy is the the deficit was worse. We made it better, actually. It used to be worse.
Isaiah:I think there's definitely room to make. I mean, if you think about it, we only did two weeks
John:Yeah. That of the true Villa. Rolf, we have so much So many questions. I have so many questions, but I I really have
Rolf:to take on.
John:I'm gonna miss a date.
Rolf:Guys do with with your eccentric because I I was gonna say when I took out that with with Michael is that he had chronic patellar tendonitis, tendinopathy. And that is I wouldn't say it's completely cleared, but it is 95% better than it has ever been.
John:So We've got
Rolf:so much so much to do. With the isometrics.
John:Oh, we we've got I've got it all unlocked, Ralph. I've I'm I'm a 99% 99.999% successful when it comes to that. That's easy that's easy slim pick is
Rolf:and and this is interesting because I've got contact with a couple of guys in Europe that are professors in in physiology and and, their doctors and the whole thing. And I've talked about, you know, this to them, and they they they're just looking at me as I say, what? You're doing what?
John:Oh, darn. Oh, I have news for you, doc.
Rolf:Yeah. I know. We're we're we're
John:we're ahead of the curve here. Why? Why? I'm excited to talk about it. So, Rolf, here's the deal.
John:Next week, same time, same place
Rolf:Yep. Cool.
John:Monday Monday morning for you, fifteen hours ahead Yes. Because I've gotta I've gotta go. Like I said, I'm gonna miss this date. Sorry, Stephanie, if you're watching this. I can blame old man.
John:You can blame the old man.
Isaiah:I have, yeah, I have so many questions. Yeah. Bringing a notebook next time.
John:Yeah. Next time, we're bringing a notebook. We're gonna light the world on fire with Rolf. But, yeah, Rolf, thank you for coming on. We're where can they find you on Instagram?
John:Your Tilwen Squad? Is that that's the name of the Instagram?
Rolf:Yep.
John:Yep. So you guys can look him up on Instagram. He's, doesn't post often, but when he does, it's high quality. So check it out. You might see, some pictures of some bird watching he does, but, you know, Rolf's a seasoned veteran.
John:He's, he's got he's got other interests outside of track.
Isaiah:But we'll see
John:you guys next
Rolf:trying to find parts for my Victory motorbike, which is
John:Oh, yeah. You were gonna ask me to do that. So Patrick's gotta come back so we can get you the parts.
Rolf:Yeah. But it then the problem is how long is it gonna take before he gets back over here? So I I might as well
John:Oh, well
Rolf:a robo.
John:I didn't think that one through. That wasn't my problem. Alright. We'll see you
Rolf:guys
John:next time. Thanks for watching.
