These Four Timelines Determine Everything About Your Training
Here are four rules, arguably some of the most important rules that you need to stick to if you want to maintain your strength, power, speed, and elasticity. If you don't know what those four things are, it's the four components that you need to jump higher. They all need to be top tier high quality if you wanna achieve your genetic potential when it comes to jump training. My name is Azer Rivera. This is John Evans, and we have coached, I think we looked at the numbers, like 10,000 athletes in the last six years to jump higher.
Isaiah:That's not including all the people we've helped for free, through videos like this. And if you wanna use our brains to jump higher, go sign up at thbstrength.com. Link is in the description or the bio. You can get six free months when you buy the year package. It's crazy deal, guys.
Isaiah:Now's the perfect time to do it. New Year's about to start. New Year. New me.
John:That's right. Also, you guys probably noticed that we've we've upgraded. The we have these fancy mics now. So hopefully, this sounds okay.
Isaiah:We've actually had these fancy mics for a long time, but we found out how to connect them.
John:We found out how to connect them. It only took us three years. Four five years.
Isaiah:Five years. Years to figure out.
John:Six years to figure out how to do this, which is a major accolade. We're super proud of our achievements. So hopefully Our six year anniversary is coming up. I know. Yeah.
John:We're gonna have We're married, guys. A big date planned. Alright. So let's talk about these timelines because these timelines, I was telling Isaiah before the podcast, they are everything. And what that specifically is are detraining timelines.
John:And these timelines largely dictate why you do what you do when you do them. So the first or the four qualities we're gonna talk about is gonna be max strength, power, speed, and elasticity. And and speed and elasticity are somewhat similar, but understanding these timelines will help you understand why the training is the way that it is.
Isaiah:Let's actually define
John:Each of them?
Isaiah:Each of those.
John:Yeah. So max strength just being what is the total amount of force that you can produce either concentrically, isometrically, or eccentrically irrespective of time. So you can have as much time as you want or as little time as you want. What's the maximum amount of force typically in resistance training exercises against an external load. Power is going to be work times or sorry, force times distance over time or work over time.
John:So it's how much weight can you move, how far can you move that weight, and in what amount of time. So if you can move a really big weight really, really far in no time at all, you're incredibly powerful.
Isaiah:Would you lump in impulse in there?
John:As a
Isaiah:it is As a better equation for power, or would you treat it always in its own quality?
John:I think that impulse is That's the goal. Different. Yeah. Impulse is like It's like the goal of those four qualities. Exactly.
John:Yeah. Like impulse is the outcome that you're looking at. Power is what you're measuring as a indirect assessment of impulse is probably how I would Yeah. It's it's It's probably a correlate. It's even a correlate.
John:It's it's it's like causation. Like, power the more powerful you are, you will have more impulse if yeah. You will. So speed is then going to be similar to power. It's maybe in some ways, they're they're the same thing.
John:Right? But when we talk about speed in this context, we're talking about sprint speed. So we're talking about how far can you move in a given amount of time, specifically acceleration, max velocity, sprinting, which is upright spring, and then speed endurance. And then the last one is going to be elasticity, which I would probably define as your ability to use and or store and release energy in the musculotendinous unit either through winding filament theory or through tendons, lengthening, and shortening.
Isaiah:Can you give the people, our lovely viewers, some tests that they could that they could use to measure each of
John:those things? So your strength, the the best assessment for jumpers is gonna be what's your deep squat for max strength. That's probably the easiest way. And then power, I would say get a VBT device. If you don't have one, just look at your max power clean.
John:But VBT is gonna be a really good way to get your peak watts. You wanna always look at peak watts, never at average because in a clean, you don't intentionally pull the bar off the floor fast. If you do wanna look at average power, then do it in a hex bar jump. And then if you're looking at speed, I typically look at two indices that I really care about, which is your 10 meter fly time and your 30 meter acceleration time. And then the last one, elasticity, is going to be your RSI, but that is only a vertical indices of elasticity.
John:So if you wanna look at a horizontal indices or horizontal to vertical, look at your vertical jump off an approach. If you have a really good vertical jump off an approach and your standing vertical is really low, then you know that you have really, really good elasticity.
Isaiah:You you can also get you you need a bunch of data points for it, but if you look at what your ground contact time does over time, you can see if you're getting more or less elastic. Yeah.
John:In in con or I would say in relation to what your vertical jump is, like your flight times are. Yeah. So you you can still get like an RSI metric that's somewhat specific, but it's very nuanced and it's not necessarily insanely accurate. So that's maybe one caveat. But each of these the the biggest outcome that you want is the last one.
John:Right? That's that's the one everyone wants to get better at. It's the one that matters the most, and the other three will help you improve that in Dicey because specificity is not just what it looks like to your eye, to the naked eye. It's and I heard Boo Schechtner say this over the weekend, it's how much does it look like what you're trying to get better at biologically? What what chemical processes are taking place?
John:Rate coding, you're looking at action potentials, how easily those action potentials take place, how fast the rate coding takes place at the sarcoplasmic reticulum, which is like how fast you're moving the calcium in and out, and then you're looking at motor recruitment. So how many of those muscles can you recruit? And max strength is going to potentially improve a lot of those different components. If you're then look and and specifically, when we're talking about jump training, we're talking about the nervous system. We're talking about how quickly can you produce force, and your brain is largely an indicator of that.
John:And I also heard Booshak's name say this, and it was good because this is what I do on Christmas. I watch lectures of world class coaches for funsies. And he said, you can look at two athletes that have similar looking muscles, but one of them might be incredibly powerful or jump incredibly high. At least think about body bodybuilders. You know, you look at a bodybuilder, bodybuilder's muscles are huge and you would, know, put them next to Isaiah and just by looking at it, the eye test, you'd say, well, the bodybuilder obviously jumps higher.
John:Well, that's not true because of the nervous system. So we're always training the nervous system and we always need to keep that at the forefront of why we're doing what we're doing. So when you're looking at each of these components, you need to ask yourself, how does this impact the nervous system? And I think even a step further than that is you're really looking at power development, which is because again, speed, elasticity, they're all kind of functions of power. It's just elasticity.
John:You're getting an eccentric condition, isometric condition.
Isaiah:There's like constraints for Yeah. For each how you express the power.
John:Exactly. Yeah. So like, typically when you're looking at power, you're looking at truly a concentric condition, which is a metric for the nervous system. Right? It's it's how fast can I generate force?
John:How fast does my brain send those impulses to the muscle? How well do I recruit those? And is it synchronized? And maybe that's the third thing is are you synchronizing that force in a way that accumulates a massive output at the end of whatever movement pattern you're doing? So I said that all to say that all of these are important.
John:They just each have different timelines and as a result, have different benefits and pros and cons. So we're really trying to get better at the last one, elasticity, but you can take advantage of each of these different building blocks, max strength, power, speed to build elasticity in your specific outcome you're trying to get better at. So the the detraining timelines, why this matters, it allows you to determine how much time you want to spend on a given attribute and how much you need to do to maintain a given attribute. And so when you hear a lot of strength coaches say, or I guess speed coaches say, you don't need to do max strength if you're sprinting, again, it comes back to the nervous system because if you sprint, you're recruiting massive amounts of force very, very quickly from the you know, the brain is really active neurally, and you'll see guys get stronger from going in the weight room after the fact because they're springing, and spring recruits those big type two motor units, which you need to lift heavy weight. So I think for how I do things is probably a little bit different because as jumpers, I've seen max strength has a lot of benefits that carry over very well to jumpers until they get to a hyper elite level.
John:And even then, it still carries over fairly well. I would say Isaiah's max strength has driven up his power clean pretty much every single time. Every time you get stronger in a squat, significantly stronger, probably 25 to 50 pounds, your power clean will go up. It's interesting because recently,
Isaiah:the catch has limited me. I I think up to a certain point, max strength helped, but now the weights are getting so heavy. And the way they're traveling, like, it's, like, hitting me at the bottom. That max strength alone isn't
John:Well, I think it's like when you say max strength, people think concentrically. Concentrically. But eccentrically
Isaiah:Oh, yeah.
John:Yeah. You've gotten your max strength up.
Isaiah:Yeah.
John:You've gotten your max eccentric strength up, which has allowed you to more comfortably catch Yeah. Those big cleans. But the timeline for max strength, like, let's say you didn't touch it for thirty days. Okay? You're not gonna detrain for, like, twenty five to thirty five days.
John:You're not gonna detrain. Meaning, you can maintain, like, 90 to 95% of probably probably more. Probably like 99% of your max strength for thirty to thirty five days, unless you're mega elite, then you might drop off more. The more elite you are, the more it'll detrain quickly. But for ninety nine percent of people, it's not gonna detrain in thirty days.
John:And if you touch on it one to two days a week, even one day a week, let's say you did one max strength session a week, you can maintain 99% of your max strength. Past like a super elite level, like for Isaiah, if he doesn't do it, he'll detrain faster, but he might only lose five to 10% or maybe less if he did absolutely nothing for thirty days. He probably what? You probably lose like 5% maybe of your max strength.
Isaiah:If I did nothing?
John:I'm saying nothing. No max strength.
Isaiah:Let let me do some math on
John:on my Your best squat is four Four forty.
Isaiah:Four forty. 5% would be 22 pounds.
John:So you'd be able to do four twenty, four fifteen still after Yeah.
Isaiah:I have actually, a good example of this was last year leading up to dunk camp. I remember I failed four zero five when I was able to do it a month before.
John:And we didn't do We didn't do a lot of strength.
Isaiah:Yeah. Yeah. But we we were doing a little bit, but that was probably like a 10 pound So decrease divided by four or five.
John:And that's doing touching on it.
Isaiah:Yeah. So like point 5%.
John:Two per 2.5%. So about two and a half percent for not touching it ever really met. True max strength. We were touching strength, but not max strength. Yeah.
John:So we maintained it super well just by touching on it. So it's super easy to keep strength levels, and that is because it is not a time dependent variable. When you get into power and speed and elasticity, you're getting into things that are constrained by time. And if you don't have enough time to generate force, you can detrain very quickly. You don't have a lot of time to create that force.
John:And so power can detrain in five to ten days. So if you do no power work for five days, you'll see a decrement. You know? And and definitely for ten, you'll you'll see a decrement.
Isaiah:I also wanna put a side point here that we're constantly playing it's a delicate balance between fitness and fatigue. Correct. So your fitness levels in terms of power might decrease, but if you're fatigued, it might be masking it. So you might still like, your power might go up at the end of a week from not doing it just because you're dissipating that fatigue off
John:Right.
Isaiah:At a faster rate than what the fitness is dropping off, the actual power levels
John:Exactly. So we touch on power three to four days a week, but we might see decrements in that output because we're fatigued and we have to touch on it frequently because we don't want it to detrain. And then on top of that, if you were to, you know, be like, okay, well I'm just gonna touch on max strength work once a month and then do power training three days a week, you know, every week and only power training, the quality would go up a lot, but eventually, you're probably going to get to a point where you need more volume because your volume would be so incredibly low.
Isaiah:And max strength is really good for decreasing injury risk. Yeah.
John:The injury risk would go up a ton.
Isaiah:There's a direct there's so many you can literally look up so many studies where your injury risk is related to your max strength levels.
John:There's quite a bit. And so there's a lot of benefit there. And max strength is really a way to get better at stuff without hurting you. Like It's a way to still do stuff that's productive because you don't want the quality and and power work is important because you you want high quality work. You still you're balancing that too.
John:Like, you can't let your power work decline too much or it won't there's no transfer to the actual outcome that you're trying to get better at. Physiologically, you might get better at, you know, rate coding potentially, or you might get better at synchronizing movement and things like that. But if you go too far down that hole and you start to really lose the ability to generate force, then it's gonna be hard for you to adapt because it's a sensitive metric. And this is the other thing is the ones that detrain detrain the fastest are also the most sensitive to fatigue, which makes it incredibly difficult because you can hammer strength and not see it drop. But if you detrain, like if you only if you know that alas or speed takes three to five days to detrain, that means you have to touch on it every three to five days.
John:Right? But it also detrain or fatigues very quickly. So if you touched it three days ago, it might still be fatigued by day four or day five, but you might be getting so if you go out and do something, you might still be fatigued at that point, but you know you have to do it because it'll get worse if you don't. And I think distance runners, you know, they really fall into this habit with the conditioning work because your cardiorespiratory fitness trains super fast, but you detrain super fast. So they feel like they always have to do stuff to maintain it even if they might be overtraining, which I think happens to a lot of guys.
John:So that brings my next point is speed will detrain in three to five days if you do not touch it. It is it it decays very, very quickly, which means you basically, year round for sprinters, you always have to be doing it. And and guys that are very acceleration dominant, I think that it's important to touch on this variable all the time. I think you can get away with doing more acceleration work, max streak or max speed work is a little bit different. That tends to be very dangerous to push up the volumes of.
John:And we won't cover that too much because we put a lot of sprinting in the program three days a week for that reason because we don't wanna see a d train. And then the last one is elasticity. So elasticity is the one that we ultimately care about, and this one has a two to seven day window for decay. So if you don't touch it for seven days, you're gonna start to see it drop off. And I would say, we oftentimes observe that with Isaiah.
John:If you don't jump at least once a week, you can maybe get away with it for one week, but if you're not consistently jumping once a week, we start to see that quality decay.
Isaiah:Also keep in mind, specificity also applies to your intent. So we saw it a couple months ago. I jumped once a week, but it wasn't it was probably at 90% effort.
John:Oh, yeah. It's still detrained. Intent is everything. Intent for all of these qualities because of the nervous system that we're talking about. If you don't have max intent, you're not gonna get better.
John:You have to keep intent as high as possible so that you maximize all of the qualities that we mentioned. So action potentials, rate coding, you maximize motor recruitment, you maximize synchronization. All of those different coordinated qualities have to be pushed by trying as hard as you can. Intent has to stay as high as possible.
Isaiah:And and with the max strength work, like, how the detraining timeline is essentially once a month, you have to touch on it. That means max strength, you're working like, you know, 85% or higher, 90% or higher. Like, that means doing a true 90% or higher effort strength movement, like, a squat. Like, for me, that would be once a month, squat four zero five. Like, you know, for two reps essentially.
John:You've got to touch on it to Like, really maintain
Isaiah:you're not gonna you're gonna drop off if your maintenance is 70% for five reps. You do a couple sets. Like, that's not gonna be enough to maintain that.
John:And I've actually seen this happen a handful of times with guys. If they don't like, I've I've bled this into programs, and if you've if you're on the training, you might have seen this before. There's a specific cycle where I tried to get the max strength volume as low as possible, but the intensity is high or sorry, the frequency as low as possible to maintain the quality, not see it drop off, but allow you to be fresh enough to focus on the power and speed and elasticity work. Oftentimes, for two foot jumpers, it just you just and and you end up jumping lower. And I think it's because when you look at upright springing, the contacts are so incredibly fast, and you're in such a high joint angle in comparison to two foot jumping where if you're not touching on max strength, you just don't have the force generating capacities to really benefit from it.
John:So you need to be in deep reflection with really, really high force activities pretty frequently, and that's why I think that the max strength and power work carries over a lot more to two foot jumping than it would to a sprinter. I I think that a lot of the time, you know, for for truly just sprinters, you know, a little less on the side of max strength work outside of as an injury prevention tool tends to be better. I think that doing less is more with that. And having higher quality sessions, you know, better sessions of that stuff ends up making guys better in the long run. So I feel like this is a good place to cut it off.
Isaiah:Guys Give it quick summary. Quick summary.
John:Quick summary. Quick summary. We have it we have it right here. Max strength decays. You don't touch it for thirty days.
John:It'll start to decline. Power work is gonna decline from five to ten days. So if you don't touch it for five to ten days, it's gonna start to You're gonna get worse at it. Speed is three to five. So that one you gotta really touch on.
John:If you don't touch it for three to five days, you're gonna get slower. And then elasticity is two to seven days in that range. So if you don't touch it for between two and seven days, depending on what you did and how sensitive you are to that metric and how good you are, it'll start to get worse. So you need to touch it at least once a week or so.
Isaiah:And touching on all those things adds fatigue.
John:Yes. And you probably should touch on all those things all the time so that you can always maintain them as much as possible. AKA, where where can they
Isaiah:get that type of training?
John:If you're interested in getting that type of training, go to teachpestrength.com. Long conjugate sequence systems, we've developed this and perfected it over the last ten years or so. Let's see. 16 yeah. No.
John:I started when I was 14 doing long conjugate sequence systems. So we've been doing this for a very long time. Isaiah's been doing this type of training since 2017?
Isaiah:2019.
John:2019? No.
Isaiah:No. 01/01/2017 was load management.
John:Yeah. But that's still long conjugate sequence. We still did. We still did. It's load management, long conjugate sequence systems.
John:But we'll say 2018. We'll round it.
Isaiah:Yeah. Twenty eighteen.
John:2018. Let's round it. So it's about to be '26
Isaiah:Actually, yes. 2038 is when we started.
John:Yeah. It's about to be 2026. So let's say eight eight years. We'll call it eight years he's been doing it, and obviously, he's gotten quite a bit better. So if we can get better
Isaiah:And the beautiful part, I think the thing that sets us apart is we've tested it with Dunkers. Yeah. No one This whole time. We literally run experiments every month.
John:I'm doing one right now. I'm doing one right now with Josh and Ethan. Yeah. It's gonna be interesting. Dom just texted me.
John:Speak of the devil. But that's the video, guys. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you like the audio, and we'll see you guys tomorrow. Happy holidays to all of you.
Isaiah:Peace out.
