THP 157: How To Turn Your Tendon Into A Spring
It is 2025. Welcome to the New Year, folks. I hope that you guys had a great New Year's Eve. Hopefully, you guys are recovered if you decided to partake in the nonsense that is New Year's Eve celebrations. Shout out to the Microsoft font when they dropped the ball.
John:It was absolutely absurd. I don't know if you guys saw that, but it was like o seven Microsoft text, and it was really giving we put no effort into this major important billboard shown to millions of Americans on their TV screen. That said, today, we are gonna get into eccentric RFD. We actually had a long chat yesterday about what was it? I mean, it was just everything.
John:What what did we even talk about in that chat for, an hour? My girlfriend fell asleep and was so pissed at me. She's like, when are you gonna be done working? And I was like, little do you know? I'm not actually working.
John:I'm not achieving any work outcome at the moment other than discussing. It's like talking about it instead of being about it. That's what we were doing yesterday.
Isaiah:It's our hobby, I think. Yeah. Our loved ones forget that this is our hobby.
Ben:Our hobbies are passion.
John:Like, I could have watched TV with you or, like, played video games, but instead I wanted to talk about jumping higher. Yeah. So getting into EastEndure Garfi, let's, as Isaiah says, he likes to define things. So I'm gonna leave this one to you, Ben. How would you define eccentric RFP, eccentric peak force?
John:How would you define it?
Ben:Well, at its basic, it's developing force eccentrically very rapidly. It's recruiting more motor units faster. It's recruiting them at higher discharge frequencies, rate coding. And the easiest way to picture this is just looking at like a force time curve of like on a force plate of a jump. And the eccentric RFD would be indicative of like how steep the slope is getting up to eccentric peak force.
Ben:And then peak force eccentrically is just it's the top it's the peak of where the force is at, usually at minimum displacement of the center of mass in a jump, like where you're the lowest is usually when the peak of eccentric force hits.
John:So let's just let's just You pull it up? Yeah.
Isaiah:There we go.
John:I'm not showing anything, crazy. Right? You guys can see this?
Ben:Yeah.
John:Yeah. So, yeah, basically, this curve right here, this is demonstrating the so you're seeing ground reaction forces. That's basically gonna show you the change in force over a given interval. So for this one, we're looking at I don't know. Okay.
John:Left leg leftward left leg or wait. First leg
Ben:Blue second. Yeah. Blue is your block foot.
John:Blue is the block foot. But what why does it say forward GRF left?
Ben:That's just the direction of the ground reaction force. Just like he didn't
John:he didn't summit it. Oh that whatever. Alright, so we're looking at we're looking at these ones I guess. Yeah, So we're seeing the rate that this goes up, how fast the slope that is your rate of force development. And eccentrically means that the muscle is lengthening.
John:So during the eccentric action, which is pretty much until, like, probably here, you're you're seeing the muscle lengthening. You're gonna see the craziest changes in eccentric RFD here. You know, what's what's interesting that Ben and I talked about this, though, is that your knee is flexing as you're planting this foot. Right? But at touchdown, it's not really doing anything.
John:What's actually happening is your tib anterior is doing most of the work and then the foot plants. And then from here to here is probably where you see the most amount of eccentric RFD in the quad. But what's hard about that is this isn't gonna corroborate that because it's it's a symphony of of joint actions. There's a lot of different things happening here at the knee, at the hip, at the ankle, and I think that that makes it a little bit hard to know for sure what the RFD is in the quad, and that's what I was trying to explain to you yesterday, Ben. That was my Gotcha.
John:Kind of argument.
Ben:Did you pull up that other curve that we that I put I put in from Hawkins Dynamics? That's a little probably easier to picture.
John:Yeah. Let me
Ben:That's from a drop jump.
John:So let me let me pull this up here. Una Memento. See if I can just open with preview. There we go. And we'll go here, share.
John:And this is also gonna show yeah. Drop jump will definitely be a little bit easier to Yeah. To see here.
Ben:But it's also important so one quick note. So this is once, so like if you look at the good, this is once they start developing force, but usually there'll be a huge spike before that. So it'll go like really spiked up, come down and then you start developing the easy Which curve are
John:you looking at? Left word, right word?
Ben:On the left part of the curve, but it doesn't show us on this model because it's just simplified, but I just wanna make a quick note. Like it would look more like what we just saw on Sam's graph.
John:So when you're looking at these graphs, right, you see this moderate, that big spike. Like what is the so that's not spring like they're essentially saying on that leftward curve?
Ben:Yeah. That that's to me that would be their I would call that they came in with good force. They they they were able to develop pretty good eccentric RFD, but they weren't able to to sustain it. They weren't able to hold it. They What just yield
John:do you think is happening in the MTU at that point?
Ben:I think that is when you The MTU
John:is muscular tendinous unit for everyone I was wondering.
Ben:I would call that yielding as in you're getting stretched on the tendon, but you're also getting the muscle fibers are actually eccentrically contracting as opposed to being more quasi isometric or slow concentric to get more restraint on the tendon. Because like that's how you actually apply a lot of force into the ground and that's how you wind tight.
John:Two things. One, when you say yield versus breaking, yielding you're saying bad muscle lengthening is what you're saying?
Ben:Yielding, I'm talking about eccentric contraction of the muscle, breaking would be the quasi isometric or the concentric.
John:Right, so breaking is tendon lengthening versus yielding is more so muscle lengthening fast.
Ben:Yeah, but keep in mind with yielding, you're still getting tendon lengthening. So you're getting tendon lengthening and muscle lengthening versus muscle shortening and tendon lengthening.
John:So you think in this left one, you're seeing the fascicle lengthening a lot, which means that you're gonna see crazy peak really good. Because I would say that the eccentric RFT in this left one is the highest. Right? Yes. But it says poor because it's not spring like, which is interesting.
Ben:Yeah. So that's why it's like to that that would be the example of they hit the ground and they, like, would lower really quickly, but then they quickly realize they can't keep applying force and then it just drops. It just plummets.
John:This is what I was saying the other day with Isaiah. This is what I think happens.
Isaiah:And this is
John:Go ahead, Isaiah.
Isaiah:Oh, woah. Real quick. This is a a force time curve. Right?
Ben:Yes.
Isaiah:So this would be for those of you guys watching the area under the curve, it's basically how big the mountain is on here on each graph, shows impulse. And the higher the impulse, the higher you're gonna jump. So what I'm assuming they mean by good is this good athlete is jumping higher than the moderate and is jumping higher than
Ben:the sport.
Isaiah:And you can have a high eccentric RFD, but not as high of an impulse compared to the other athletes and jump lower. Right?
Ben:Yeah. And this is it should I mean, for those of you that are watching this, I mean, it's obvious that that that the green has the most impulse and like that would mean you would have the highest takeoff velocity and jump higher. So the whole point of jumping higher in this context is you need to raise the entire curve. The good athlete needs to raise both the eccentric curve and the concentric curve, whereas the poor athlete needs to probably also develop both qualities. Need to both apply more force eccentrically to be able to handle all that braking force and then also be able to push out of it concentrically.
Ben:They're not being very spring like as John was saying.
John:So when we see this dip here after, like, we got the sharp peak and there's a dip and then it drops off. And the moderate, you see sharp peak, dip, drop off. Then this one you see is pretty sharp peak, less of a drop off. Yep. Good push off.
John:So is that dip, is that where they're just losing all the energy in the tendon more or less?
Ben:Yep. That's where everything is kind of dissipating. You get that like
John:internal
Ben:friction of all the tissues and that's dissipating. Like once you start going into an eccentric contraction, that's when you start dissipating the energy. So that's why your muscles have to be able to hold their ground. Trust the tendon apply force because that nice smooth transition with the good that's amortization. That's like not being stuck on the ground essentially.
John:Right. So you could have crazy, for example, I wonder what this would look like if you watched it. You know, I I I would imagine the good one looks like a a good rebound, like a good jump. And, you know, it's also interesting too because if you look at if you look at depth jumps, this is a depth jump. Correct?
Ben:Yeah, it's a drop jump.
Isaiah:When you when you look
John:at a depth jump, you look at a drop jump, you can have different RSIs, meaning you could have, sorry, you could have the same RSI and get a different ways. Meaning, you could have a long time on ground and get, you know, a really high jump height where you could spend less time on the ground, not have as high of a jump height, but it's a better rebound, quote, unquote, more spring like. So the area under the curve doesn't necessarily tell the whole picture when it comes to that, but the shape of the curve is probably very important. Right? So it would be interesting to see what the shape of that curve looks like as you move up or down that continuum and comparing that with what the actual jump looks like.
John:Come on. Up. My dog someone said this the other day. Like, it wouldn't be a podcast without jaw John's dog interrupting. And I'm like, you are you are correct.
John:No matter what I do, Bailey will interrupt. And, so, yeah, I would be kinda interested to see and I used to have the force plates from Hawkins. They they lent them to me, but the problem was they they didn't work, and they broke. And it was really upsetting. So, yeah, that was a a big problem with it.
John:And force plates are great for some things. You know, it's interesting to look at. If you were to use them all the time, it would be kind of difficult because your the setup is annoying. The apps are okay. They're not great.
John:And, typically, what I've noticed is RSI, like, one to one is related to what you'll see on the force plate. So if your RSI is good, it's gonna be spring like. You know what mean? If you're gonna say poor, it's not.
Isaiah:Something I've found with these metrics is the reliability of them can be finicky, and it reminds me a lot of when we measure the flight time on my jumps, for example. A lot of it depends on how you land. And it's better when comparing, like, what is it? Intra intra rater reliability.
John:Like Like, the same person
Isaiah:Yeah. Even then, like, when I have the the OVR and I'm measuring my my bar speeds and I'm looking at, like, power specifically in watts, me and John were messing around with it at the other day. I think the last time we used it and just getting, like, wildly not wildly different, but pretty significant difference in numbers when for example, we were doing a clean pool comparing it to a panda pool. On sun reps, my panda pool initially, my panda pool is way better. So I was like, oh, the panda pool is better.
Isaiah:But then there was, like, a small technique change or how I pulled it off the ground, and we got a different number off the clean pool.
John:Something borderline not repeatable for everyone. Exactly. Like a very nuanced change he made that caused a major difference for him.
Isaiah:It's made me initially, I was very excited of being able to use that data, but then it made me kinda not like using that data as much because I can get sensationally, for example, I can tell if I'm fatigued. I don't have to look at the number on the OVR to tell me, I'm not as fatigued. When John watches me power clean, he can tell when I'm pulling it slow off the floor or when I'm dogging it or when it's looking really good and fast. And I don't know. I don't know how I feel about use using those numbers.
Isaiah:I think it's more informing.
John:You need that data over very long intervals for it to be very informative. I think that's the biggest thing I've always recognized about data is more of it is better if you're looking at it and you're comparing changes. That's when it's meaningful. Yeah. If you just do it every once in a while, it might help a little bit because you'll be like, oh, the data is good for comparison purposes for yourself.
John:That is what I would if I were to sum it up. I don't necessarily think it's always good for comparing person to person, specifically when you're talking about OVR. But I think when you're looking at intra rater reliability and you're comparing it to yourself, it can be really meaningful. Because let's say you do the same warm up every time, which you do, you always go green, blue, blue, green, blue, blue for power clean. So if you'd look at that every time you do the same build up, you know, two to three reps of it, over time, you're gonna start to see trends.
John:And that's really where the beauty of data comes in is it's objective and it shows you trends. The same thing with free lap data. Like, I love free lap data because it's pretty objective. It's pretty reliable, and it's repeatable. So if I go out and I'm I know I'm on the same surface that I usually run on, like, you have to start to you'll start to make sense of the data as you see more of it.
John:You know what I You'll be like, wait. Like, at first, you might see something be like, woah. I'm running way faster on turf, but it's not repeatable. Maybe you did that once in a year but then you're like, oh, well, maybe I did it once but I haven't been able to do that. Always run faster on the track even though my all time best times on the on the turf and then you start to realize that why did that happen?
John:Was it a was it a mismeasure? Was it an error? Did I get a bad reading? Like, you know, and then maybe you're like, oh, well, yeah, I did only have one rep on the grass that was fast. It's like, okay.
John:It was probably misread. Like, the, you know, the especially when you start to understand how free lap works. Like, it's a bubble. You catch the front of the bubble, you know, or you catch the end of the bubble of the zone and then the beginning of the bubble, you decrease the distance by upwards of, like, a few feet. So that would make sense versus, like, a brower is a laser, so it's perfect, basically.
John:You know, it's always gonna give you very reliable data that you can trust in unless it's way off. Sometimes they're finicky because they just don't work. Like, it just flat out won't measure. But generally, if they work, then you're gonna get pretty good data. So but it's way worse to set up, and it's annoying.
John:So it's like when you kinda find find that balance of things being fast and easy and repeatable and you could just throw it on and kinda glance at it, that's whenever that's why I like OVR. Because if you can't make a mental note of your data and make sense of it, then it's probably not worth using. Like, if I have to pull up a spreadsheet to look at the data, it's probably not worth using. Like, I would prefer to have something that in the moment, I can glance at and in the back of my head, I know, hey, when I do cleans, my peak power on cleans is usually this or my my wattage is usually this, and it's way down today. Okay.
John:That's enough. That's informative enough. I don't need any more data. Right? Like, so I think that's where it can be really useful.
John:When you start to get into these really nuanced analytics, and as I've played with them, there's the more complex the metric, typically, the more difficult it is to make it meaningful, and it sometimes will be nonsensical. For example, if I'm looking at RFD, this is a really good one, and I'm doing a mid thigh isometric pull where I'm doing a single leg exercise or any isometric on it and you're using the Hawkins force plates, if you tap that plate, you tap it. Your RFD could go from really low to really high. Like, it can drastically change if you make a seemingly irrelevant change in how you did the test. And so that's kind of why I don't love force plates is because it's almost too sensitive.
John:Like, and it doesn't it doesn't take out the noise. Like, noise is data that's kind of not perfect, right, like jaggedy. It doesn't do post post processing and, like, remove the noise from the data. So, like We need AI. To get into that those variables, it's like this is nonusable as much anymore.
John:Now if you're just looking at something like peak force, then it like, that's okay. Cool. We're just looking at peak force. Right? And even that can be confusing because then you'll look and you'll like, well and you have to and again, you'd have to use it all the time and do that test all the time for it to make sense.
John:Because if I do if I look at peak force and the first time I do it, I'm achieving it at three hundred milliseconds. The next time I do it, I'm achieving it at six hundred milliseconds and then eight milliseconds and then we're a second or three seconds. It's like, wait, what? Like, this one, I'm I'm getting it at a second. This one getting at three seconds.
John:That's a massive difference in my RFD. The thing about RFD is you're looking at RFD from zero to 100 milliseconds. That's like super fast. So it's it's not super meaningful to me. I'd rather just look at RSI.
John:Like, what does your RSI look like? Is it good or is it bad? Okay. That's gonna tell you probably more. And same thing with sprint times.
John:Am I running faster or am I running slower? There you go. Like, that's gonna tell you the whole picture right there. You know what I mean? It's it's more it makes the data more meaningful.
John:So that's where kind of when I am looking at some of these complex data points like TPV or peak like, I like peak velocity because it's simple. I like TPV. It can be used. I think TPV is a really easy one to get, and it's very meaningful, specifically EA index. So what is your peak below?
John:And I'll just look at peak below, and I'll look at TPV. If TPV's aren't around the ground contact time as I'm getting more specific, TPV is time to peak velocity. And my peak VLOs are lower, then it's probably not specific. Like, peak VLO has to be there. I don't care if you're like, you can get crazy high TPVs, but if your peak VLO sucks, it doesn't matter.
John:So I think when you that's what I've realized after kind of looking at these metrics, and maybe we'll do a more thorough explanation of this in the future. But I would say, for me personally, using this data and coaching someone with it and comparing it to an elite high jumper to a less elite high jumper, those are the major differences that I've personally seen. I want you to Ben, Isaiah, I want your your lens on what I just said. Ben might disagree completely.
Ben:I don't disagree with anything you said. Data is super sensitive. Back to the OVR. Yeah, I use it a lot. I think number one, it helps my intent.
Ben:I had a couple of weeks where I didn't have it with me and I was lifting. And just like not knowing, like knowing that it's not on the bar tracking me, could just feel internally that I'm just not pushing as hard as I normally would. Like that's probably the biggest thing. It holds me accountable to maximize my intent. And then to kind of what John was saying is I used it a lot for a readiness test.
Ben:Like I'll do a one eighty five clean, how I'm moving that, or I'll do a two twenty five squat or one eighty five bench and it tracks. This was your previous peak power or your previous average velocity.
Isaiah:Yeah, average VLO
John:is the one I was
Ben:talking And that'll show me, okay, I'm at near my max strength levels. Because every time I max out, I do the full test. So I know what velocities I'm hitting for what given percentage of my what RM.
Isaiah:I wanna
Ben:Sorry. Continue.
Isaiah:Oh, you you can you can finish. You can finish.
Ben:Yeah. But I was just saying, yeah, so I just use it as a as a as a readiness test. Like, okay. I can push today or, oh, I am a little fatigued. Maybe I'll I'll drop the weight by five or 10 pounds, but still get something out of it, basically, is how I do it.
Isaiah:So speaking of readiness, I wanna talk about fatigue. Wait. Are we
John:talking about are we talking about our friend CB?
Isaiah:Yeah. Well, that just just in general, we've been having a lot of discussions about about fatigue. And we saw a post on an on Instagram. I don't know. Are we saying names or no?
John:Nah. I don't think so.
Isaiah:Okay. It's never worth it. Somebody posted research and basically said, you have you don't have to train as often as we train. And, yeah, that was basically the extent of it. And then I've seen other stuff saying that you need to prioritize being fresh, essentially.
Isaiah:Also, I think the other thing we discussed, somebody saying you don't need deloads. Like, your training should be written so that you don't really need to unload. And then the last one is you can we usually use, like, what, four week cycles. You can use three three week cycles. Basically, a lot a lot of stuff around being more fresh.
Isaiah:And how we train, there's a lot of fatigue that that we implement. We train really hard, really frequently. And I don't know if I agree with what those people are saying. Well, I'm I'm curious what you guys' take on on the whole being fresh thing. And then, Ben, you saying, like, the readiness thing, how you'll drop weight if you don't, like, if you if your velocities aren't up to par or your power isn't up to par.
Isaiah:I me, personally, I generally just try to do what's on a piece of paper even if Yeah.
John:Just do what's on a piece of paper, dude. Don't ask questions.
Isaiah:Yeah. Yeah. And But I was worried
John:about that.
Isaiah:I saw this last workout that I did on Saturday. So so normally, the this lift that we're doing, it's a max isometric cycle, and the Friday lift is really hard. Friday is usually my dunk day, so I dunked on Friday, did that lift on Saturday, and that's when I really started feeling the effects of fatigue. The first two days, I was fine. I was feeling springy, feeling super bouncy.
Isaiah:Then it came out of that dunk session into that lift, and I was just drudging through that workout. Like, it was really freaking hard. The clean pulls were terrible. Or the paw it was paused power cleans. I barely hit a set of two forty five or two twenty five for three, went up to two fifty five, failed the third rep.
Isaiah:So I couldn't even do the the three reps, dropped to two forty five for my working sets. It did it one time. The next time, I also failed my third rep. So it was very obvious that I was just, like, destroyed, from from my dunk session in the week of training. But I still try to push through those those days.
Isaiah:And I don't know. I've gotten decent results thus far with that, but we're always thinking about not I mean, John have been saying this just because you're a good athlete doesn't mean your training is good. You you always wanna be asking what can be better. So yeah. One thought I have
John:as you're talking about this is the difference between sprint training and jump training. I think they're not the same, and I think that that's really important. With sprinters, I have seen that they have to be fresh. Like, that is just like through and through, I've seen that that is really genuinely the case, especially the more neural the activity, long jump, speed jumpers, high jump, and sprinters. Those three activities, you really, in my experience, when I have tested different protocols or different training on them, they do not respond well, generally.
John:Not all, they they generally don't. They prefer to be very fresh. They prefer to have very low volumes. The problem is they get fat. That's one problem.
John:They don't stay very lean as a result of it. It's borderline just riding genetics to the promised land. So that I've seen a lot of the time. I do think that the undertraining and and staying very fresh and and keeping volumes very low can work, for sprinting specifically. I've seen it work really well for sprinting.
John:That's my experience on that. And then in terms of some of the other stuff, like this person had talked about excitation contraction coupling, talked about rate coding and the supraspinal activity and and activation, and I think there was something else about I don't remember what the other piece was, but those are like two of the rationales. So excitation contraction coupling is, Ben, correct me if I'm wrong. Basically, you have the electrical activity that's happening across the membranes and the nervous system, and then also down at the actual muscle tissue, like muscle cell. And that allows through a chemical process, a contraction where the mias and actin bind and the muscle fascicle generates tension.
John:So that process is impeded when you have a significant amount of fatigue. This person was arguing that there's no adaptation or more adaptation if you're building in more training or more fatigue. I personally disagree, and I don't know how he would definitively say that that's not the case. I don't know what research would demonstrate that so definitively that he could so concretely make that conclusion because he was proposing just do two sets of failure every seventy two hours. So train twice a week and and, like like, squat four by six to fill two by six to failure and then just be done.
John:And then, yeah, if you're going truly to failure, first off, that's really freaking hard. If I asked Isaiah to just max out two sets twice a week, what would prob he would detrain. He would almost certainly detrain. I don't really have any doubt in my mind. I think people do adapt.
John:Like, their workloads do improve year to year. It's not something where like, yeah, maybe initially you could do that. But in my experience, the elite athletes will get to a point where they don't improve, and they need more volume and high quality volume, not just volume, but high quality volume. So every tissue is going be a little bit different, right? And if I'm looking at like the quad and the patella tendon or the Achilles, and I'm looking at the hip, you know, I'm I'm trying to achieve different goals with each of those exercises that I select.
John:For the clean, maybe it is the nervous system. That is what I'm trying to address. I'm trying to address rate coding. I'm trying to address synchronicity. Right?
John:Can we recruit all these muscles fast at the same time? I'm trying to work on coordination and being able to have a quick double knee bend and use the quadriceps explosively. Cool. I maybe I get six sets of that, three of which, you know, are really truly intense. And then if I go into squatting, it's like, okay.
John:I'm trying to stiffen the tendon. I'm trying to get more, motor recruitment, max peak motor recruitment, right, irrespective of time. And I'm trying to have more type two fibers as a result of that. And I'm trying to increase the stiffness of the tendon. Fortunately, jumping is not bound by time as much as high jump, long jump and spring.
John:They're much more bound by time, meaning that the the time component is strongly related to your performance in those activities. So if you're spending more time on the ground, you only have eighty seconds on the ground or a hundred milliseconds on the ground if you're an elite sprinter. So if you're doing a lot of activities that are taking three seconds, you're going to be limited. Right? You're you're yes.
John:Maybe you created more reserve or you increased the ceiling, but you have to connect the dots. Just because you can create more peak force doesn't necessarily mean you can do it faster in a meaningful way, but there's other reasons to do it. Right? It's not just for that. So there's other boxes you're also trying to check.
John:And I don't know if, yeah, sometimes I just I look at that, and I'm like, I I like, his thing is, like, you don't need fatigue for adaptation. And I'm like, no. But fatigue happens when you're pushing for adaptation. Like, you're gonna get to a balancing point where you have to train harder to see adaptation, but you're like, well, we can't have any fatigue. There will be fatigue as you try to push up adaptation.
John:You can't just do one set. It's not enough. Like, what's the minimal threshold for adaptation for an elite athlete? It's a lot higher than someone with a 30 in vertical. Right?
John:Need to push
Isaiah:the threshold. Me and Austin.
John:Yeah. Yeah. That's a perfect example. Austin doesn't push. Austin does basically what Chris Beardsley says, and he has a harder time improving because he can't he can't achieve.
John:Like and it's weird to me because, like, okay. Cool. On paper, you said that, and maybe you have some studies that supported it. But, like, I'm in the weight room, and I'm not seeing what you're saying. Like, I'm seeing a lot of cases across the board where what you're saying is not true.
John:And I think that's the frustrating part for me is like, okay. I I get what you're saying. I see this on paper, and I see this in research, but I'm not seeing this in real life. Like, where I in the weight room, I'm not observing this phenomena that you're describing. It's not repeatable.
John:Mhmm. And it's like, well, maybe they're just not recovering enough or maybe you need to under train them more. It's like, yeah. Okay. For some guys that works, but I if if I don't train Isaiah hard for weeks and weeks, he just jumps lower.
John:Like, we've seen it happen numerous times.
Ben:Can I say one thing in in favor of your point is Yeah?
John:Go ahead.
Ben:With the fatigue is okay. You're maybe you're not a 100% and you're recruiting 95%, 95% of your fibers, but you're still training that 95%. So like even if you're not getting that extra 5% by pushing, you're still training all the other fibers that you're working. So yeah, you're not accessing the highest of high threshold motor units when you're fatigued, but you're still training every other fiber. And that's, I think is important because you're still maximizing adaptations in the fibers that are being accessed, that are being trained.
Ben:And I wanted to kind of recap my first point of, I do try to hit the numbers that are on paper, but my readiness scores just tell me basically how hard is this gonna be? Like, is it gonna be easy to hit 90% of my one rep max? Or is it gonna be like, am I really have to push it? So I didn't wanna clarify that. It more it more or less just tells me where I'm at and then how like maybe how I can modify rest periods.
Ben:I don't usually actually decrease the weight, but
Isaiah:We're also combating with dunk sessions.
John:But dunk sessions also, you know, offer a lot of benefits. So yeah. Yeah. That's that.
Isaiah:Yeah. Because, we before the podcast started, we were talking about how dunking is different from track and field. Maybe even if if you wanna take it as far as, like, bodybuilding and and that type of thing. And that it's very addicting, and it's something that is is a temptation to do with the boys every day. Right?
Isaiah:And guys don't go out and say, yo, let's go sprint for three hours today randomly when we're supposed to be squatting or the day after squatting. Like, that that's not really a a thing that is a problem in the in the track and field world to my to my knowledge. But with
John:the It's like they're, like,
Ben:just itching to get out there and just run some 30.
Isaiah:Or or if you're running then let's say you're a 400 meter runner and you have four max or three I don't I don't know what the exact volumes would be for 400 meter, but let's say you have three max effort 400 meter sprints scheduled on the day. You're not gonna be tempted to go do that for how how many do you think you could run-in three hours? Probably,
John:like, three. You probably need, like, forty minutes after each one.
Isaiah:Yeah. Yeah. But you wouldn't that's not something you would be tempted to. When it comes to dunking, what would be ideal, like, I'm gonna use myself as an example, would probably be, like, 10 max jumps in a session. Like, go in, warm up,
John:and hit For guy. For an guy.
Isaiah:Yeah. Yeah. And hit ten ten max jumps. But I'm more likely to do 40 to 50. Because it's it's just that's how that's how dung it's fun.
Isaiah:It's really is. So whatever it is about it. It's really addicting. That is something that's gonna be affecting training quality. It's gonna you're gonna be way more fatigued.
Isaiah:And, yeah, it's I think it's a lot harder. It's a lot harder to train with that that in mind.
John:Yeah. Well, I feel like this is a good place to cut it off. I like to keep it around between fifteen and thirty minutes. So a little bit
Isaiah:of podcast tends to be longer. Yeah. I like it. Do. But in a good way.
Ben:You like
John:to chat.
Ben:More input.
John:More input. But we appreciate you guys. Thank you all of you guys who in 2024 made it such an awesome year. We appreciate you guys so much. We love our job, and none of this would be possible without you guys believing in us to write your training.
John:So let's make 2025 even better. Let's get to newer, higher levels, all of us. And, yeah, if you guys are interested in coaching, go teachmestrength.com. We appreciate you guys, and we will talk to you guys tomorrow. Bye bye.
