You Need More Rest Than You Think To Jump Your Highest
Have you ever trained really hard to jump higher, but your vertical doesn't budge? We're gonna show you what might be going on. It could be because you are deloading or tapering wrong or not doing it at all. We're gonna get into the differences, when to use them, how to apply it to your training, all that good stuff. My name is Zara Vera.
Speaker 1:I have an officially tested 50.5 inch vertical. This is John Evans. Together, we coach. A lot of athletes jump higher, and we've coached out of six of the 50 inch verticals that have been measured, four of them have been coached by us at THP. And if you wanna get coached by us, click the link in the description to get six free months when you buy the yearly plan or check the pinned comment.
Speaker 1:So let's get into it. What's a deload and what's a taper?
Speaker 2:Alright. So a taper is where you actually take a fourteen day period on I mean, there's tons of different ways to do it, but the best way to do it is a fourteen day period where you drop the volume and keep intensity very, very high. Typically, you wanna do this at the end of a macro cycle, and it's literally the entire purpose of the macro cycle. So if you mess this up, kind of what would you what would you call it? It defeats the purpose not defeats the purpose, obviously, but it can stop you from achieving what your body was capable of, and the purpose of all the training could kind of go to waste, especially if you're doing it for a specific reason.
Speaker 2:Typically, in track and field, you'll peak or taper for whatever the major competition is. So if you're a super elite, like, sprinter or something like that, you're probably gonna taper for national championships or world championships. If you're more sub elite, maybe that's conference like, you know, ACCs or big tens or big twelve or I don't even know what the conferences are anymore. But you'll drop the volumes leading into that about fourteen days out so you can peak at the event and that's what truly a taper is. Now an unload is where you drop off the volume and keep intensity.
Speaker 2:It's like a mini taper and the purpose of it is to allow fatigue to dissipate so that the fitness that you gained in the previous cycle can shine through and you're not stacking too much fatigue on top of each other because that can lead to over training. It can lead to injuries. It can lead to long term decrements in performance, I would say. It's, like, the the easiest way. And a lot of the time, guys will hear, like, you kinda talk about unloads like tapers.
Speaker 2:So what what's kind of your experience with each of those?
Speaker 1:I've messed them up. I've they've worked, and then they haven't worked.
Speaker 2:So let's go through each of those.
Speaker 1:So how I've messed them up is kind of what you were saying is if you don't do it, it defeats the purpose. There's been a lot of times where halfway through a deload, I wanna dunk. And then I go and dunk, and then the session isn't as good as it could have been. I'll usually do that, though, when I don't really care
Speaker 2:for
Speaker 1:the result. Like, this week? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Pretty much. But it does have its benefit for dissipating fatigue, because then I can attack the cycle harder. The session might have not been good, but we still keep the deload going for the remainder of the week.
Speaker 2:And is a deload the same thing as an unload for the people?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Scenario where it's worked, it's almost always when I train really hard. And you can actually make it seem it's like train train so hard that you have no choice but for the deload to work.
Speaker 1:Like
Speaker 2:Yeah. Your jumps couldn't have possibly gotten worse.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Like, if you if I get after it and I'm pushing weights I haven't pushed before, volumes that I haven't hit in a while, chances are the deload is probably gonna work. Worst case, I have my best jumps of the month, maybe not all time, but I can get to within, like, 96 to 99% of my highest jumps ever. So that's scenario where it works.
Speaker 1:As I get more advanced, it also it's specific cycles where they work. Before, like, year one to three of doing long conjugate sequence systems, the the type periodization that we use, every cycle works. I would do I do a max strength cycle, boom, my highest jumps after the deload. Then I'd go power, deload, boom, highest jumps ever. And then we go back to some max strength work or high volume, deload, boom, match my highest jumps ever.
Speaker 1:But as time goes on, it doesn't it doesn't work that way. Yeah. Times where it okay. Times where it hasn't worked has been when I mean, most recently, when you get too far away from specificity and you stop doing the thing. I was actually writing about this this morning, Jumping actually, you wrote about this.
Speaker 1:Right? So jumping, we always wanna keep it in in some kind of facet. You never wanna get away from doing the thing the thing we're trying to get better at. Anytime we've shifted the focus away from it, whether it's, like, trying to replace the jump volume with only plyos, for example, or maybe I'm hurt so I can't get maximum intensity on my jumps, especially recently as I've gotten better. That quality just detrains so so fast.
Speaker 1:It doesn't matter how good my training is. If I'm getting away from that, it's not gonna work. Actually, most recently, I got away from it for two three weeks, I think it was, the actual number. Mhmm. And, you know, during the last session, I was telling you, felt like I was it felt like I was jumping and there was an adhesive on the ground that I was trying to like fight.
Speaker 1:Like like normally, it feels like, you know, I'm a bouncy ball. It is the best analogy for it. But this time, felt like it like you were throwing a bouncy ball on tape. It might still bounce, but it's gonna get stuck. It's lose some some energy.
Speaker 1:So that's something that hasn't hurt or hasn't worked. And then tapers, the I mean, the most common one we use is John Evans special. Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:So John Evans special for the those of you that don't know, this is lore for anybody on the THP training cycle. Basically, training that John spammed for a long time. He spammed it for a long time, so he called it the John Evans special. And it's a way for our athletes to maintain strength, fitness while freshening up, and you can basically jump high every session. So when John was doing it, he was, like, having decent sessions every single Yeah.
Speaker 1:But still maintaining fitness and all the other, you know, and his max strength and all that stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Eventually eventually, you will so, like, one big thing to remember is soon ripe, soon rotten. So, like, if you don't if if you freshen up, you know, and and you're you're really, really ripe, you're gonna lose fitness really, really quickly. So the fresher you get, and this is maybe, like, one of the caveats of the Jonathan special, it it retains just enough volume to maintain qualities, but it's it allows you to freshen up over time and maintain really high volumes of really specific work. So, like, in my case, that might be jumping for an hour on that, you know, Friday session or whatever.
Speaker 2:And then Monday, I'll come in and I'll hit it hard. So I'll kind of build in a little bit of fatigue and try to maintain fitness as best possible. And a lot of the time, that's when my power clean will go up a lot because I'm really fresh and I'm working a lot on really, really heavy power cleans. But I have just enough work in there where I can keep adapting to it. And then my my strength and overalls will kinda maintain because it doesn't take a lot to maintain strength, but I'm always addressing the elasticity in the form of jumping each week, like, seventh day or whatever.
Speaker 2:And if I've done a good job of building up a lot of fitness and a lot of fatigue, I can do that for, like Yeah. Three months before I start That's to
Speaker 1:what happened to me this summer. Mhmm. So I did last year. It was actually around this time from like January to March, April. Longer longer than that actually because we were training hard even before before January.
Speaker 1:But it was basically like, call it six to eight months of some of the hardest training I've ever done. And we literally did John Evans special. I think it was two months, and I was jumping higher every session. And then it basically peaked when I had a point nine nine two flight time.
Speaker 2:How many weeks did that take, you think?
Speaker 1:I wanna say a month. Because I wanna say a month. Yeah. And then I sustained pretty high jumping for probably, like, another month, month and a half, and then and then it started to drop off from there. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it was like a slow it was like a slow climb and then like a slow decline as well. And during that time I mean, my flight time, the peak was point nine nine two, but I was hitting. And for context, my highest ever flight time before this was point nine eight. Nine seven to a nine eight, I had hit maybe four times in my life. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe. Every single week was nine seven, nine eight, like, for, like, two months straight.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Was fun. That was a fun time. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And the and the training was the most basic, like, I would go in, I would either clean pull doubles or power clean doubles, and then I would build up to one heavy set triple, maybe, like like, two reps away from failure on the belt squat. Just one working set. Also, one working set on the cleans, and then, like, two by 10 on accessory work. Maybe two by five by 10 in there in that range.
Speaker 2:On Wednesdays, did you do that as well, or did did you I think you did clean pulls, then I would tell you don't go crazy heavy on the it was just, like, strictly knee health. Like, I I intentionally try not to load the Wednesday session. So it's a little bit different than a true taper because, one, it's less predictable, and you would have to have, like, quite a bit of data to be able to predict when you're gonna peak, like, in this case. And it and it's based on how long you load as well. So that's the other thing about a taper is, typically, this is assuming that you've done at least three mesocycles, but hopefully more.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's whenever, like, you know, and and the amount of time you loaded is directly proportional to the amount of time you need to unload and how hard you need to unload. Like, Bampa, in his book, he'll actually say you need to unload the equivalent amount of time you load, which I think is a little aggressive. Like, I probably wouldn't do that, honestly. But, I mean, that's that's actually what I did as a one foot jumper.
Speaker 2:I pretty much unloaded the amount of time that I loaded, and then I really started to, like, drop off pretty hard. And so, eventually, the problem with the taper is you lose fitness, and that is the the biggest detriment and what you have to be careful of and why I don't do it super often with guys because I'll do it when they wanna jump high. Like, if someone, you know, sends a message in the group chat and they're like, hey. I've been jumping pretty low for a period of time, almost every single time when I unload them, they're gonna just jump higher and higher and higher every single week. Like, Philip Bono is actually one of the ones that really comes to mind because he's like, yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't know what's going on. He's, like, panicking in 2022. And I was like, well, let's just unload you until you jump higher. And this is before Phil, I think, was formally working for us. And so we unloaded him, and every week, it was just, like, a little bit higher, a little bit higher, little bit higher.
Speaker 2:And then I think it was after, like, six or seven weeks, he finally started to decline. I was like, okay. It's time for you to like, when you see two sessions in succession that are bad, that's almost like a clear cut sign that it's time to start returning to to training and, like, improving your fitness. And we're in a slightly different demographic too because we're not peaking for an annual event every year. You know what I mean?
Speaker 2:Like, you look at track and field, they're peaking for one day. You know? We're kind of, like, trying to get the cluster to be really high week to week and and more or less just, like, have fun and try to improve our verticals. And I've seen like, sometimes guys will be like, oh, I really wanna, like, jump well on this day. It's like, well, this this is the best chance that you have for sure to do it, but it's not it's never guaranteed.
Speaker 2:You know? You could there's so many variables that go into whether you're gonna really jump high or not. The biggest thing to avoid is injuries during that period of time. And I would say that's that's the and and training too hard. I think that's the biggest one.
Speaker 2:If you're really gonna un or taper, truly taper and peak, then you you need to back off the volumes. And it's weird because when you're used to training every day a lot, it's so weird to take time off. You feel like you're just, like, getting worse. And I forgot that until, like, some of my athletes, like Mason or Travis or Hyrum will be like, hey. I haven't done anything in a little while.
Speaker 2:Like, what you know, what's going on? It's like, this is part of the training. You know? The the point is to unload during this period of
Speaker 1:time. Yeah. So I have I have data. Oh. That date.
Speaker 1:Exact date. We started so we started so after eight months of training really hard, we started on the taper on April 30. I didn't have my really high jump, like, my first session of, like, point nine seven flight time. It took three weeks to hit that.
Speaker 2:Three weeks. So you peaked in twenty one days?
Speaker 1:No. No. No. Not peak. I just started jumping high.
Speaker 2:Oh.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I would say, like, the fatigue, like Finally
Speaker 2:Yeah. Crossed
Speaker 1:So it took three weeks to hit that high jump. And each session, I was jumping higher. So I wasn't, like, going backwards at all. It was, we started the deload or the taper, I mean, jump higher, or I guess, have a fatigue session. Next session, jump a little higher.
Speaker 1:Next session, I'm jumping really high, like, within close to my all time highest jumps. That's April, May 20. Then my highest jump ever, you'll find this really interesting. How long do you think it took?
Speaker 2:Six weeks? Eight weeks? Eight weeks. Eight weeks. Two months to drop off all the training fatigue.
Speaker 1:Eight weeks.
Speaker 2:And then crazy session.
Speaker 1:And then the drop off, then guess how long that lasted?
Speaker 2:I I think if I remember dropping off really high. I think you had, like, three to four weeks of normal jumping. It was around, like, the fourth week after. So it was, like, it took you know, like, if if week four to week eight, you were jumping, like, from point nine seven to point nine eight flight times, then it, like, started to drop slowly for about the same period of time, and then then it dropped off really hard. Like, I think that's the session where we went to that one court.
Speaker 2:It was like, you could not jump. Like, it was like, I cannot do anything in this session. I was like, okay. So I'm trained.
Speaker 1:So that was three weeks.
Speaker 2:So it's like when you finally got fresh, it took three weeks to peak and then or three to four weeks to peak, and then it was about the same amount of time to lose fitness.
Speaker 1:I just realized, wasn't dunk camp in there somewhere? Yeah. We we dunk camp wasn't there in that eight week stretch. So I think it was actually
Speaker 2:I don't remember. I have, like, no
Speaker 1:No. I think I think the yeah. Duncamp wasn't there. So I I think that's why it's such a long like, I did it twice. But it was basically I think how it actually was was three three to four weeks to climb, three to four weeks to drop was how how it happened.
Speaker 1:Wait. What do you
Speaker 2:mean dunk camp was in there?
Speaker 1:Dunk camp so we started that the John Evans special, and then we were peaking for dunk camp, and then I over jumped at the session with with what's his face?
Speaker 2:With Dylan.
Speaker 1:With Dylan McCarthy.
Speaker 2:Oh, and I told you. Yeah. Because I was getting like, I
Speaker 1:was about to jump really high. And I was like,
Speaker 2:you know, I don't think this is a good idea. You keep trying this dunk. I want you to cut it. And you were like, yeah. One more.
Speaker 2:One more. One more. And I was like, whatever. The consequences are now yours.
Speaker 1:That's why that's why it was like three weeks jump high, and then it was another eight weeks to my highest jump ever. I think, like
Speaker 2:Was it, like, load management Yeah.
Speaker 1:During that time? Yeah. Slow strength.
Speaker 2:Okay. And then you peaked again for Dunk Camping? Two months later. That was Dunk Camp?
Speaker 1:No. We just LA Fitness, the 992.
Speaker 2:Okay. Wait. Wait. So it was you have four weeks where you do it. John and special.
Speaker 2:Dump with Dylan. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You had a little hurt. You're doing heavy, slow strength for and load management for how many weeks?
Speaker 1:Probably three three, four weeks.
Speaker 2:And then that was dunk camp?
Speaker 1:No. Dunk camp happened. Dunk camp was the week after Dylan. Oh. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I didn't get hurt there. It was the flare up, and I didn't push through it. Like, I was still able to train
Speaker 2:At dunk camp, you're saying?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Remember dunk? I did, like, five jumps at dunk camp.
Speaker 2:Because of the flare up with them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:McCarthy, man.
Speaker 1:So so it was it was three weeks three week taper, flare up, three week three to four weeks of slow strength, and then back to John Evans special for four weeks, hit my highest jump ever.
Speaker 2:And then you started to climb. That's a long, long period of unload. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But you had you had mentioned that, like, I was really trashed. I remember at the time, we were having a lot of, like, discussions about that because I had
Speaker 2:We was, like, almost general, like yeah. It was just, like never unloading. Like I kinda told you that you needed you needed to get healthy first and foremost. Like, you were just your body was thrashed, I was like, think you're just under a period of chronic load. And then we backed off for that extended period of time until you hit your peak.
Speaker 2:Because I was like, you don't train more and get worse if you're doing the right stuff, and we know that this stuff works. Like, there's so many physiological reasons why this is effective, so we need to change something.
Speaker 1:And everything was everything was stalled. Like, my clean was, like, not moving. I remember my squat wasn't really moving.
Speaker 2:They were they were, like, kind of bad. Like, you're clean. You were you'd have days where you'd miss 300.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I was trained hard. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. I know. So I was like, yeah. You're you're just you're folded like a lawn chair right now. We gotta back off.
Speaker 2:So that I mean, tapers traditionally, when you really back off hard and you have, like, a considerable amount of training fatigue, yeah, it's gonna be fourteen days for track and field guys, usually. That's, like, what I see. But for some jumpers that have really sensitive nervous systems, if you put them in a massive hole, then you're gonna have to you're gonna have to help them out. You know? You've gotta you've gotta throw the rope down the hole and allow them time to fully get out of that and actually get to a higher level than just, you know, the base.
Speaker 2:Then you then you put a ladder out.
Speaker 1:Which, by the way, as a final plug to our training, this concept that we're talking about is, in my opinion, one of the most important reasons to have a coach. Yeah. Because just being able not to have your bias in and then being able to give your coach data. And I would if you're a THP athlete and you're watching this, don't go don't go spam them. But if you truly feel like you've been training hard and it's been a few months and you haven't PR ed or jumped high and you feel fatigued, that would be a time to give your coach the data and say, what do you think?
Speaker 2:Do you do
Speaker 1:you think I need a taper?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And that can be a lot of fun usually too. So if you're, like, kinda feel stale, monotonous, that's a really good time. One quick thing I wanna say is unloads are usually just a week. I don't usually take more time than that.
Speaker 2:And, typically, I use a week of Jonathan special to to do that. So that's kind of how I do the workaround of it or what I've adopted.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Another thing, the effect of dunk sessions can be it's like a hidden stimulus people don't usually account for. Because, like, in a training program, you know, it'll say jump session. It might say, I think for us, like, as many reps as possible, what we listed as. That means, like, you know, build up to high quality, and then as soon as quality drops off, probably a good time to cut it.
Speaker 1:But in the dunking world, we're we're addicts, and you and guys usually go way too long. And what happens is, like, think about this. You you train really hard, then you have a, let's say, a two hour session, three hour session, or it's it's longer than normal. You might not be recovered enough, like, during your deload week. Like, the session is kind of the start of the unload.
Speaker 1:So what I would do, and I try to be mindful of this is alright. I just did three weeks of training. I know I'm about to deload, is I keep that third session short on purpose. Yeah. That way I can come into the week fresh and continue dissipating my fatigue and then I'm ready to get after it.
Speaker 1:But I've just noticed for myself, if I go hard in in my session, like, it trashes me. I I go into the week so fatigued.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think I think, generally speaking, someone had asked about that recently, and I kinda told them, like, the higher you jump it might have been Presetti. Was like, the higher you jump, you know, the less likely it is that you're gonna jump high during an unload. It's usually week one of the following cycle, you know, usually. You dissipate some fatigue.
Speaker 2:Sometimes I'll even like, if guys are still trashed from that unload, the following week, I might even make that Monday, like, really easy, you know, almost like an introductory week even though it's week one, and I'll carry the cycle out for three weeks. But we're introducing, you know, higher variety of lifts and things like that and, know, kind of getting guys used to novel training stimuli. And then the following week, I'll I'll push out the intensities and volumes and really start to just dump in some training fatigue and stuff like that. So big key takeaways here. Jonathan's special.
Speaker 2:Do it when you wanna unload and you or you wanna taper. If you wanna taper, do it until you start jumping higher and then or your highest. And then once you start to get worse, that's when it's time to go back to training hard. So that's how you can know. And if you're one of the athletes, hope one of our athletes, hopefully, you communicate that to us.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, that's the podcast, guys. I hope you enjoyed it. If you're interested in getting coaching, click the link in the description or the pinned comment. We'll see you guys next time. Ciao.
Speaker 2:You.
