Strength Vs. Power Vs. Speed Cycles
If you want to jump higher, you need to do something called periodization. The most common way to do this is by training in cycles, namely strength cycle, then a power cycle, then an elastic cycle. My name is Isaiah Rivera. Have a 50.5 inch vertical, which is the highest approach vertical in the world. And this is my coach, John Evans.
Isaiah:Together, we coach athletes how to jump higher. And today, we're gonna be talking about the cycles that we use over at thbsrength.com. Which, by the way, if you wanna get coached by us personally, check it out. Use the code THP at checkout for 10% off and enjoy being coached by both of us. Having said that Alright.
Isaiah:What are all the THP training cycles? What are they called? What
John:are they called? I mean, they're just there's endless, endless, endless names. We like to say there's, like, buckets. So we would have, you know you know, an athlete comes to us. And initially when it started, it was, 10 athletes.
John:Right? So it was really easy. I could write very, you know, individualized cycles for each and and each person. You know, that was '20 when did I start? 2018?
John:Yeah. When I start coaching you?
Isaiah:2018.
John:2018. So 2018. Right? And then using that that system, right, you get athlete a, and then you get athlete b and c and so on, etcetera. Well, eventually you get another athlete b or you get another athlete c, meaning they have the same problems, same goals, whatever else.
John:And you're like, I already have dealt with this exact issue. You
Isaiah:already coached a volley play volleyball player who's in season who has knee pain.
John:And shoulder pain and neck pain. And you're like, well, there's no way that it's exactly the same. I'm like, it is the same exact issue. Like, it's like it's like when you have a car that has, like, the same issues over and over and over again. So you know if you buy, a 2003 Honda Civic, the timing belt's gonna go, and you gotta replace that at this mileage.
John:It's like the same thing with with athletes. You know that that's gonna be a problem, and therefore, you find a solution through it for it. That basically Perfect So
Isaiah:example is the hip stuff. Oh, yeah. Getting hip labrum issues. John himself has had hip labrum issues. So he gave me a training cycle that goes according to that.
Isaiah:Yep. And it works perfectly. Perfectly
John:aligned with our goals. Right? You wanna jump off two feet? You wanna higher, you have this issue, you have knee pain, I have knee pain, you have hip labral issues, I have hip labral issues. Like, okay, good to go.
John:Like, so once you do that, you know, ten, twenty, a hundred, five hundred, a 2,000, tens of thousands of times, right, over the course of three or five, six, Six seven years. Seven years, all of a sudden it's like you don't have just one, like you're not writing a thousand programs a week. What you end up doing is writing, you know, or using a lot of the same cycles and making small adjustments, and then you save that cycle, and then you know what to do. So it's more like you're creating this individual, you know, everyone's like, my own individual snowflake. Yes, but you do see the same snowflake, believe it or not, with the same problems.
John:And so once you solve that problem, you can use that program in different scenarios or adjust it accordingly. Like lawyers do a very similar thing whenever they write up legal documents. Like they have individuals who have the same issue and they need kind of maybe some tailoring accordingly, but they can start with this blueprint and then they adjust it or kind of make small adjustments accordingly and then they can save it and use that later on, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So these iterations I've saved over the years. And I also, each week I probably write another three or four different completely new native native programs.
John:And it's
Isaiah:programs at THP that are called z one through 14. I think, technically, one through 15. We just haven't saved number 15.
John:Yeah. Yeah. There's and there's, like I don't even know how many different months of training. I mean, you think about Zay one through 15, that alone, that iteration of programming, there's fifteen months of training right there. Individualized, specific, progressively overloaded, perfectly aligned with my training theory and and training laws that I never move away from, but specifically for his case.
John:So where would this apply to another athlete? Well, I'm an athlete who's well trained. I wanna train ten to fifteen hours a week. I have a 40 inch vertical. My squat number, you know, is something I wanna focus on.
John:I'm proficient in Olympic lifting. I don't wanna sprint, and I don't wanna do upper body. Okay. Easy enough. That's exactly what Isaiah that's basically his archetype.
John:And you have back considerations. Okay, perfect. I have a adjustment for you. Now if you're someone like me and you're like, okay, well, I'm an athlete. I have left knee pain.
John:My jump technique sucks right now, but I'm really strong and really powerful. Okay, well we have a solution for that. We have a progression that I like to put people on that is called load management. So it's not necessarily It's always load management, but that's just what I named the cycle. And so again, you do this one, two, 500, 1,000, 2,000 times, all of a sudden you have don't know what the number of weeks of training I've done, but I think it's in the thousands of different training cycles.
John:And it's just knowing which very specific week of training I want an athlete to do. Because it's a system. It's not like the system is set up so that it doesn't break. So every time I write a new cycle, I have to put a ton a ton of time into making sure that it's systematic. Meaning it's not something that breaks rules or something that's gonna get an athlete hurt or something that isn't gonna make them more powerful or explosive, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
John:So if you're a basketball player and you're in season, like we had a guy today, he's like, hey, I'm a basketball player. I'm in season. I have a showcase on this date, and I want to make sure that I am ready to go. I just came off like an tib fib injury, and I'm getting knee pain. I was like, oh, I've seen this before.
John:Believe it or not. Like, I was like, okay. Easy enough. Made some small adjustments in there, and then it was like perfectly tailored to his needs. And so a lot of the time, like, guys would be like, this doesn't seem individualized, and I'm like, it is as individualized as it possibly can be.
John:It can't be more individualized or or specific. And you know, there might be cases where like guys come to me and then I do have to make a really negative new cycle and I just save it. And like, maybe I only use that one other time in the next five or six months, know, let's say there's a 100 different athletes, I use that one time, but that saves me an hour worth of time. And so if you're really good about keeping track and knowing what cycles are which and knowing what the goal of each one was as a coach, it makes it very, very easy to give athletes the absolute best product that you can because you took the time to do it properly at the start. And I think that's probably why we've been able to grow and why it's so effective, because it's like, well, it's not truly individualized.
John:It's like, it's not individualized because you didn't want me to sit and click through five by five squat last three sets at 75%, because I have that exact program already saved. I don't need to do that again. So it's like saving clicks is maybe a better way to think of it. But getting into that, it has basically led to an infinite amount of individuality specificity that I can tailor for an athlete. Because if an athlete comes to me with a, like again, a really unique scenario, I can go in and 80% of it's right, I can make some small adjustments, and on top of that, I know what the goal of that was, and because training theory isn't changing, as long as I follow the rules and concepts of training theory, I have maybe 10 or 20 different options for the following cycle depending on how that athlete tested.
John:Maybe their squat didn't go up as much as I thought. Okay, well then I need to shift towards working on that deficit. Or maybe the cycle went perfectly, and I know that training has to go from general to specific. So their squat did go up, or maybe, you know, it only went up a little bit or whatever. And I'm like, well, I can't just sit there and work on strength and beat my head against the wall.
John:Like, we've gotta move on to other focuses. Maybe they have to peak later in the year, and then I can use a different cycle. And there are probably, like we said, over a thousand weeks. We've calculated at one point.
Isaiah:I think there's like three or four years straight of like
John:No. It's more than that.
Isaiah:I'm I'm talking like without injury, not including load management cycles, just like hard training.
John:I think there's like 200 and now two hundred and twenty months of Like different training.
Isaiah:Yeah.
John:That you could like individually get where it could be anywhere. Like a cycle could be we're sorry, two twenty cycles. Yeah. So if you don't fit into one of two twenty different buckets, I'll write a new one. But odds are you fit into one of the two twenty buckets.
John:Like we had an athlete the other day that was like, doesn't seem individualized, like blah blah blah blah. That's what people say. And I'm like, well, are you an athlete who's trying to jump higher with knee pain? Well, yeah. Okay.
John:Do you have any other considerations? No. Yeah. That's an easy case. That's not that's like a very common case.
John:You fit into like the same bucket as probably 25% of the people that we coach. Right?
Isaiah:So that's how we came up with our our training cycles. Let's talk about what's in it because 99% of the people watching aren't gonna sign up.
John:So they're not What's in it, you're saying?
Isaiah:Like like, what's reason this? Yeah. Because this could be a a two hour
John:conversation if you'd be.
Isaiah:One, I think, just so we can frame the conversation. One, shatter the belief that they're just max strength, power elastic cycles because we've shifted away from that. I think that's what,
John:me I say it has talked about that for years, and it took until, like, probably a year or two ago for him to finally be like, you know what? You're right. Yeah. Yeah.
Isaiah:Yeah. So let's just shatter the belief of that. And then and then just give a broad overview of what if you're a healthy athlete, no knee pain considerations. Like, take like, for example, like, Zaybe one three fourteen.
John:I got it. Yeah. So the first thing that I would do is I start with max strength as a focus, and we use something called concurrent concurrent periodization. So we're doing a lot of things at one time, and I always try to do it so that the athlete has the highest ceiling possible, meaning they can reach their actual genetic potential and they can do it safely because I've taken time and I've slow cooked it. Now the faster you improve and the more specific you get, the lower your genetic potential is basically.
John:Like not your genetic potential but the lower your ceiling is. The longer you take and the more time you put into your progression, and the slower you do that progression, the higher your absolute ability or potential is. So if you take your time progressing, you're gonna have, you're gonna be better off five years from now. You'll be better than you ever thought possible, and we see it all the time. You look at Nathan George is like the one off the top of my head.
John:Took the slow and steady, and now he jumps higher than I do.
Isaiah:Which is why if you're on THP, we're not gonna start you with, for example, the Bios. That one. Eccentric. Oh, yes. Super maximum eccentric.
Isaiah:Like, one of my favorite analogies you use is the golden bullet. It's like
John:Yeah.
Isaiah:Each training stimulus is a golden bullet that you can only use once. Once you use it, you're never gonna respond to that stimulus the same way ever again. Yep. You So gotta be careful about when you fire
John:your golden bullet. Like if you've done plyos before, they only worked the most effective one time, and that was the first time you did them. That was the that was when they were the most effective. That's when they had the greatest opportunity to maximize adaptation. And if you loaded it, that's even more of like you lost out on the potential of that adaptation over time.
John:And so, you know, if I'm looking at shattering that belief, I don't just base it on strength and say, I'm just gonna go like, if if strength was the whole purpose of the cycle, every day would be five by five squats at 80 to 90%. Like, that would be it. Just do that every day. But that's it's way more complex than that. There's so many issues with doing that that I'm not gonna get into.
John:But the first focus is start at the beginning of the force velocity curve and develop your ability to handle volume. So it's not just strength. That's really what we're trying to do. Trying to build workload and capacity.
Isaiah:What's the force velocity curve and where is the beginning of it? Because I think just that question I was gonna give Okay. Insight.
John:So the force velocity curve has two tails and it represents your muscles contractile force at a given velocity. So we know that training has to go from low intensity to high intensity. So I have to start at a low intensity, and to do that I need to be focusing on concentric intensities, and concentric forces, and concentric velocities because we are the least capable of producing high force in concentric conditions. And then as we move, and this is specifically in resistance training exercise, as we move across that curve, it goes to higher forces during isometric conditions, and the highest forces happening during eccentric conditions, and that's the muscle's ability to produce force. So fast concentric, the muscle doesn't produce a lot of force, but you're fast, so your intensity's a little higher maybe because of that.
John:Isometric conditions, your joint is not changing, so it's at zero degrees. You're producing a shit ton of force, and that was like the cycle that if you guys watched Isaiah's videos, that was when he was pushing against an immovable object. And then the next most intense thing is eccentric, right? And that was when he was lowering weights that were far heavier than anything we saw him lift upwards or even try to move as an immovable object, but he's angulating negatively. So we we have that as a progression, right?
John:We go from concentric focused to isometric focused to slow maximal eccentric focused to then focusing on fast, super maximal eccentric, to then focusing on collisions.
Isaiah:And And that's my training now.
John:Yeah. If you first sign up
Isaiah:for THP, you might not see that.
John:You might not see that till You year might see yeah. You might not see that. It's funny you said two years because you might not see that till year two.
Isaiah:Yeah. So so would you say that a better way to describe instead of max strength cycle, power cycle, elastic cycle is just look at the force velocity curve and we're going from
John:low intensity to high intensity. General to specific. General to specific, yep. Low intensity How you should view it is your cycles are going from general to specific and your intensity is going from low force to high force. It's going from low velocity to high velocity.
John:It's going from no stretch shortening cycles to a lot of stretch shortening cycles and stretch shortening cycles with weights. And so there's a progression inside of the plyometrics. There's a progression inside of the sprints that follows that trend, right? It doesn't mean just because it's a concentric focus cycle, you're not gonna see centric forces. It's just that that is the focus of what we're doing, Like sprinting is more intense than, technically speaking, than like a heavy, you know, squat.
John:But you might not see heavy squats until month two, you were sprinting the whole time. Well, terms of absolutes, sprinting's more intense, you did it the first cycle because we're doing everything all the time at different amounts and different intensities. So I'll build sprinting in, but I'll do it in an appropriate way at an appropriate time so I can build that specific progression out over six to seven to eight months and so on. And so that applies for Olympic lifting. There's like Olympic lifting also is more intense than squatting five by five.
John:But I
Isaiah:But we start do both of them.
John:We do both of them, not at the same time. It's just that I start with the appropriate Olympic weightlifting progression at the appropriate time. I don't just start at the end of the progression. And even Where sprint where I don't wait to add that in until month six. Like like, that's the other way you could say this.
John:Why are doing open lifting right now? It's like, well, because what? You want me to wait till month six after you've done lowers at 600 pounds eccentrically with back squats? Like Mhmm. No.
John:Like not doing that.
Isaiah:With our hardest, most robust training, the setup is basically warm up. You have your sprint and plyos, and that's gonna have its own progression over the course of the
John:zone, and it's Then you're gonna and
Isaiah:the plyos. Do OLIs or loaded jumps. That is gonna have its own progression.
John:And you're gonna have to progression too. Like Yeah. Monday is typically like a power clean day. Wednesday is typically a a unilateral power snatch overhead lift focus Ollie. And then Fridays typically staying as something mostly inertial based like heavy clean pull or something like that, and that has a Each of those days, each month, has a very specific progression, and it typically will stay on that focus.
John:So like Wednesdays are unilateral focused usually. Not always, but sometimes. If I'm gonna put a unilateral lift in, it's probably gonna be on Wednesday, and that unilateral lift has a very specific progression week to week, but also, if we're talking about cycles, month to month, right? Like maybe the first month it's high box step up, and the next month it's reverse lunges. Well why did I go from a high box step up to a reverse lunge?
John:I picked a reverse lunge because you're getting eccentric forces when you step back on the rear leg, whereas on the high box step up, were only getting the support leg getting forces. So you're going from a purely unilateral exercise to an asymmetric bilateral exercise that still has a unilateral focus. And maybe the next cycle, I decide to do hand supported split squats with a super maximal lower. I'm progressing intensity upwards, right? I'm getting eccentric concentric forces on that lift.
John:The total load has gone up considerably and there's not as much of a concentric or even isometric focus. Now we have a super maximal eccentric focus. Mhmm. And then if you go down to the posterior chain work, and this is just one day of So doesn't even get into the general days or anything. Maybe I would go and bleed in what the focus of the next cycle is in the accessory work.
John:So for example, on a Wednesday, like I was saying, we talked about how it's a unilateral day focus, and maybe we're the whole, it's the beginning of the year, so intensity's fairly low, and I know I wanna move into isometric focus in the next cycle, I'll bleed in pause calf raises, and I'll bleed in pause RDLs so I can get some form of an isometric focus that bleeds into the following cycle. So maybe that next month of training, after you did all those pause isometrics on accessory work, the meat of your workout, the squats, the triple extension work, you know, like lunges or reverse lunges or front squat, back squat, maybe now I put a pause there in the following month. So I've actually transitioned in the accessory work. I've used that as a primer for the work to come, and you didn't even know it. And like, that's the beauty of it is there's tons of creative ways when I write cycles, and I'm consistent and I'm systematic so I know what is in a cycle and I can just look at it when I program week to week, know what the trend is of that, and know, okay, when I labeled this cycle power five, what I was focusing on here was, I'll use a different example, maybe it was density.
John:I was like, oh, density, it's power density work, so I need to progress into something more intense and less dense. So maybe now instead of 10 by Yeah, 10 by one or 20 by one on the minute, now it's eight by two work up to 95% the last two sets. So maybe it's the only progression that is the big focus there. Right? And that's how that's the meat of the focus of what you're doing.
John:And so a lot of the times guys are like, well, can you can you tell me why I'm doing what I'm doing? And it's like It's always It's so difficult to answer that question.
Isaiah:And the answer can always be broken down to it's getting more It's
John:getting more specific and more We're going
Isaiah:back to general work.
John:The Or yeah. Goal Exactly.
Isaiah:Stuff is to actualize the general work.
John:Yep. So Well, having said
Isaiah:that, we do need to cut it.
John:Wait. What time is it? Time to leave. Oh, yeah. You're right.
John:We gotta go. By
Isaiah:the way, if you sign up for THP, there's a whole course that breaks down what periodization is and exactly like John literally screen shares, goes through a bunch of cycles, and explains this, and you can see the exercises and all that stuff. Yeah. So if you wanna learn more about that, that's something that is included. Having said that, if you found some kind of value in this, please like the video, share it with a friend.
John:And We'll see you guys tomorrow. Yes, sir. We have a big day today. See you, boys.
