001 Strength, speed, and power

Now I'm gonna ask Rob to introduce himself in a moment, but before we do that I just want to talk a little bit about the actual purpose of this podcast'cause what we've seen in the industry is that there's a a lack of physiology backing to a lot of the methods of training that we see, a lot of the methods of training that people use.

And there's this tendency really for people to talk about outcomes, talk about things like strength and you know, sort of speed or power and things like that, but not actually go one step below that and go, okay, well, what actually is causing those increases in strength? And there's an absolute world of information out there in the literature, which I've spent, you know, kind of half a decade, if not longer, gathering and putting together.

And, you know, it's so usable. It's really, really usable for actually helping us understand that. So uh the purpose of this series of uh podcasts, we're hoping to kind of I do one a week if I can. Very short. I'm not gonna go uh, you know, talking for hours, but hoping to bring you uh a sort of a bite sized package of information about how to use physiology to understand

training methods for improving athletic performance in a range of different sports. Obviously I'll bring experience that that I've got and and I've got Rob Beer to um sort of bring experience from from the sports. So he's been involved with actually Dovetail really, really well because we've come from very, very different backgrounds. So with that, uh Rob, can you give a quick intro to your background and what you're doing right now?

some jujitsu in that. And then in my own work in person, I work with a variety of Gen Pop clients and athletes, football players, soccer players, volleyball right now, some semi pro and then some people that are just interested in getting better at, you know, golf, anything like that. All those kind of fun, like recreational sports. Yeah. If you want to start us off, go ahead, Chris.

So yeah, so the the topic for today is gonna be a pivotal one. We were actually chatting before we came on this recording about how pivotal, how important this is gonna be. It's gonna be a real kind of reference episode for us. Basically what we're going to talk about is the the overarching framework uh how to think about strength, speed and power.

So these things are kind of talked about a lot in lots of different sports. People say how to improve strength, to improve, you know, performance in this sport, how to improve speed, to improve performance in this sport, or they talk about power and how power has

It's an outcome that we've measured. So I tend to kind of label that as an outcome or output. Now, you won't necessarily see that terminology used a lot in in the literature, but I'm just kind of giving it a name so that we understand that it's not a physiological thing.

So some people think that they're like increasing strength like a computer game character. It's like, Oh, my computer game character has ninety one points of strength. It's like I can increase strength. It doesn't work like that. You can't find strength like that. It's a it's a tested outcome. You know. So if I increase my strength, it's uh i I test the the increase and I show that it's increased. Fantastic. But

How has it increased? Well, it must have increased by a set of adaptions that are sitting underneath that. So if I increase muscle size, that will contribute to the strength gain. If I improve my ability to recruit motor units, that will improve that. And there's all kinds of different adaptions and we'll do a whole episode, I imagine, in the future.

about exactly what improves maximum strength. But just for today, we're just trying to differentiate and say that an increase in strength must happen due to a series of adaptions because the strength gain itself is not the adaptation. I I know sometimes you see in literature they will kind of assume that the strength gain is an adaptation, but it's not.

The adaption is the actual thing that's changing that we have inside our inside our central nerve system or inside the muscle or the tendon, whereas the strepkin is the thing we measure externally to show that those adaptations are happening.

Now you can do exactly the thing, same thing for speed and just say, okay, well speed is improved my maximum speed has improved. Great, fantastic. Well how did that happen? Well it must have happened due to these adaptions sitting underneath the surface. So we've got these things like strength and speed, which are fundamentally adaptions.

Sorry, fundamentally outcomes but not adaptions. And then underneath those we have a series of adaptions that actually contribute to the improvements in the tested qualities of strength and speech.

So we've got strength and speed, and obviously they're fairly self-explanatory in the sense that maximum strength can be tested with a very heavy load in a in a in a sort of gym context or in a laboratory with an isometric test. And speed obviously is just the fastest speed that you can move. So it is fairly self explanatory. Power is a little bit trickier and power is the one that we're gonna kinda hope

you know, break some people's um kind of uh frameworks uh why by talking about this today, because power is the multiplication of strength times speed. Power equals force times velocity. So the s th the really important thing about that, when you're talking about outcomes versus adaptions, what you can see is that power is actually a second order up from strength and speed. It's actually only ever going to be affected by multiplying strength.

sorry, by improving either strength or speed. You can't improve power directly. We you can kind of improve power in a test if you kind of get coordination improvements, but strictly speaking transferable power is never going to be improved by anything other than by increasing either strength or speed.

And that that really is kind of one of our big take homes that we want to kind of talk about today, which is that you can't actually, you know, improve someone's transferable power outputs by uh, you know, kind of uh trying to improve power directly. You have to go either down the

strength or the speed route. And that really starts to give us something that we can work with practically. Because if I say, well, okay, well, what are the, you know, and again, we'll talk more detail about these kind of ideas later on in another podcast.

But just in general, most people kind of probably aren't gonna argue with you if you say the best way to improve strength is to kind of train with heavy loads and use high forces. It's kind of like that that tends to be the best way of doing this.

Similarly, actually, uh again and we'll do another episode in the future about this, but you know, speed, you tend to get better at speed predominantly by working with those kind of really light or even unloaded situations and just moving as fast as you possibly can.

Now, the really interesting thing about this then is that if you kinda go, well, okay, so power is a you know, kind of a quality that can only be improved by either increasing strength or speed. You can't increase it directly. Then why do people train with these sort of intermediate loads that maximise power output when that isn't going to increase speed very well and it isn't going to increase strength very well?

And that's that's one of the things I mean, we talked about this, Rob, a long time ago. And I'm sure your your programs have I've kind of reflected that now. But you know, it's like I do I do see a lot of people go, Oh I'm gonna train with thirty thirty percent of one rate max, I'm gonna train for maximum power outputs on this particular exercise. I'm like, Well, what do you think that's doing?

You know, it's like it's it's not gonna increase maximum strength very well and it's not gonna increase speed very well. and you can't increase power directly because it has to be the product of uh strength and speed. So, you know, how how is that how is that gonna work? And I i it's really interesting'cause there's this whole part of the uh research literature which is quite close to the

you know, mainstream view, which is that if you want to improve power, you train with a load that maximizes power output, which typically speaking is more or less halfway in between strength and speed, because if you look at a power velocity curve, you kind of got this

you know, plateau, the highest point, the highest power you can get, is roughly halfway between your maximum un unloaded movement velocity and your maximum isometric force. So and and that's that's just kind of math. And and as a result, people are training as far as they possibly can. away from the thing that will maximally stimulate speed and the or the adapters that contribute to speed gains and the things that will maximally contribute to

Strength gains. It's kind of like this perverse situation where it's like, if you could figure out a way to train in the least effective way possible, that would be it. you know, ph from a physiological perspective. And I know, you know, talking with you, talking with other people, you know, who've have kind of tried to get people to understand this in the mainstream S and C community, it's a really difficult uh, you know, hurrican to overcome.

Because people are like, No, no, no, I want to improve power, so I'm gonna do, you know, kind of thirty percent to warm at max. So like just before we got on the podcast, you were telling a little bit about how your programs now kind of move towards kind of really polarizing, you kind of using maximum strength and speed. Is that is that right?

punching power, punching speed, stuff like that. So you have all these old school ideas, like, you know, kind of around like the power-ish end of the spectrum where you're doing like punching with weights and things like that, even sometimes like high rep. Punging for endurance so that people would say your your shoulders don't get tired, things like that.

Um and then the other end of the spectrum you have someone who might think if you just, you know, bench press heavy, you just improve your force production a ton, that is also gonna get you where you wanna go. Of course, you know, with punching, things like that, a lot of technique, a lot of things that go into it. mechanics and all that. But in terms of just like training one end or the other or doing that kind of goofy thing in the middle where you're punching with

very light weights and just making yourself tired. Really, you know, I primarily focus on um a lot more for like punching speed in that, like the unloaded end of the spectrum. Just having people obviously going as fast as possible, avoiding fatigue, good, crisp, like, you know, clean striking techniques and that.

So then they're working at like an actual maximum velocity to improve that end of things. And then generally, I mean, you know, for fighters and that, the strength end, you're you're gonna be doing enough. You don't really run into too much where you have to like focus. very, very heavily on improving like your your maximum strength for the the upper body limbs and that for punching. That's up all the time.

a huge topic for us to to talk about in the future will be this idea of proximal to digital sequencing and how that actually works uh in the context of athletic movements like punching, jumping, throwing, all that kind of stuff. And we will do that. Absolutely we will do that. But not

today. So um I just want to kind of pick up on one thing that you said though, uh'cause obviously there's so much there, but I'm just gonna I isolate one thing. This idea that um, you know, while there are some people who are thinking still that they can train for power directly, which as I say

You can if you are trying to improve power in a particular exercise. So like if you're doing Olympic weightlifting and you're trying to improve a weight and pick weightlifting performance, then yeah, absolutely. You know, the the load that you're kind of trying to maximize power with, you want to move that to as close as the

uh you know, to your competition weight as you can. But because the coordination related factors are going to make a make a difference. But if you're trying to tra create transferable improvements in power output, then you lose that coordination benefit. You can't really make that work.

you kind of got to go down the strength or the s speed route uh for the training uh outcome in order to create the power increase that you're trying to create in the athletic context. You did mention that some people think that you can maybe just do the heavy stuff, just train for strength, and that will automatically increase speed.

And that's kind of like another thing that I wanted to tick off in this in this first episode, which is this idea that, you know, oh yeah, we can just train for strength and you know, that will actually increase speed automatically because force equals mass times acceleration. So, two things. The force times mass ext force equals mass times acceleration argument really is quite easy to kind of overcome because basically when people say that, oh yeah, well we can just accelerate

with a greater force and we can just kind of, you know, obviously therefore move faster because the acceleration that we're creating is bigger because the force is bigger. The problem is that As you start accelerating and you start moving more quickly, the force you can generate drops according to the relationship between your force and your max velocity. It's very steep.

between your maximum force and your maximum velocity so we have what's called a very steep force velocity profile so your maximum velocity is actually quite slow but you've got this enormous you know kind of level of force you can exert at a slow speed then as you start to move in your jump, for example, you start to hemorrhage, you know, force production because you're moving quicker and your force just tanks. It's like

Now we joked before the podcast it's like people think that just because you know, force equals mass times acceleration that they can produce massive forces at high velocities just because they can produce a high force at a slow velocity. If you could produce a massive force at a fast velocity, but to jump over a hat.

It's like it just doesn't work like that. You know, you can't you can't produce high forces at high velocities. You produce high forces at slow velocities and then depending on your maximum velocity, if your maximum velocity is high, then you can with you can

keep your force high as you start to get towards high velocities and that's that's the the interesting bit about having a high speed. If you've got a low max speed, you can't make your force continue being high for high velocity. It just drops to zero really, really quickly.

And of course that means you don't get too very high velocities because your acceleration just drops as soon as you start moving. Now and then the additional point of course is that if your max velocity is quite low, you can't move faster than that, because your cross bridges just won't cycle in fast.

So you you get to this kind of max speed and just kinda stop there. There's some really, really cool vertical jumping research that I'll I'll kind of cover in another episode, which shows this really clearly that people kind of

almost subconsciously to adjust their counter movement depths in a vertical jump to get their max velocities at the end of the takeoff phase. They kind of move their counter movement depth around a little bit to make sure that they reach their max velocity because you don't really want to reach your max velocity before the end of your

you know, kind of take off period when you're coming upwards in the concept of phase'cause you'd just be kind of you know, burning energy and not really getting any faster and you're just kind of wasting the time and Not really jumping as high. The whole F equals M A argument which really is dead in the water. It just can't be made. It's not really a thing.

However, there are going back kind of twenty years or so, um twenty years what year are we in? Um, maybe a little bit more than that. I'm getting old. You know, uh at least kind of twenty y years ago, per perhaps maybe even thirty, there was some research came out that showed that maybe intent to move quickly was the only thing you needed to stimulate and speed related adaptations. You could just

move a heavyweight and then try and move as quickly as you can and that would then trigger all the speed related adaptations. And that was really interesting because it was kind of this state that came out of nowhere almost, kind of contradicted a lot of the previous kind of isokinetic research that had been done in dynamometry showing that, you know, strength gains were pretty velocity specific really.

So it was kind of an interesting one. But it captured a lot of people's attention. My skeptical point of view is because people kinda went, Oh yeah, well we can just do heavy squats and forget everything else now. It's like yeah.

Just do what we want to do and forget everything else. No, but obviously The interesting thing was it did kind of create a whole sort of training philosophy where people just said, Oh, we're just gonna train heavy and that'll actually and as long as we intend to move quickly and train explosively, that will actually produce speed-related adaptation. Now physiologically, and again we can do an episode on speed later on,

You know, but physiologically that's just not what it looks like is going to happen because we can see uh the stimuli that produce improvements in muscle fiber shortening velocity, for example, or rate coding, or any of those things that go into improving speed are very velocity specific. You just can't create the stimulus

for those adaptures to happen unless you're actually moving quickly. Ultimately perspective will be, hang on a minute, that study doesn't make sense. Now the interesting thing is the same research group actually did a uh a follow up to that study because the original morn was done as a uh uh sort of a a within subject design. The problem with within subject

Within subject designs are great for hypertrophy study. So basically if you've got a within subject design, it means that one arm trains with one training program, the other arm trains with a different training program, and you kind of control the variability within your sample by, you know, kind of sort of meaning Taking the variability inherent to the person out of your study, which is great for hypertrophy.

Horrible strength gains though, because you've got the cross education effect. So you both limbs get stronger in the same way. It showed intent.

training with a a fast movement and training with a slow movement, both with the intent to move as quickly as possible, actually produced totally different effects. The actual movement velocity was a factor that drove the improvements in speed. So what we can see is really that kind of

flash in the pans sort of idea that just intending to move as quickly as possible would produce speed related adaptations wasn't really valid. The physiology never really supported it. Data in isokinetics never really supported it. It was, I think, driven really by this, you know kind of I think the popularity of that study was blown out of all proportion because people wanted it to be true.

Yeah. And and i it just isn't. So, you know, kind of we end up with this sort of two sort of main arguments, as I say. The whole F equals M A argument, which is literally just silly. And then secondly this idea that intent to move quickly and that was totally valid. It

based on a real study, with a limitation that, you know, the research team themselves talked about and actually went away and fixed. It's just unfortunately there was a delay I think of about I forget how many years, maybe even twelve years before

aspects of the work out to produce an improvement in strength, the adaptions that drive that improvement in strength. So, you know, we can see that, yeah, you know, heavy benching I mean arguably not, because, you know, there's approximate to distal sequencing to think about. But just take that out of the the equation for the moment. You know, if you're just coming at this, uh, you know, from a very kind of um

you know, basic point of view. The the heavy strength training is kind of doing this the force aspects of it. You kinda wanna add the speed stuff as well, and that will naturally improve transferable power really, really effectively. Training for max power just isn't gonna do that.

because you as I say, you know, you're training as far as w you wa as far as possible away from the thing that you from both things that you're actually trying to improve at the same time.

season, perhaps. Maybe you've got soccer players and they've got really congested schedules, they're playing all over the place, they're doing so many things. A little bit of power training probably isn't the worst thing in the world in those situations because, you know, what else are you gonna do? It's it's really difficult to do very

have, you know, that stimulus capacity. So it's like, you know, many of the things that we'd be looking to try and maintain just won't really be maintained that well by power training. And many of the things we don't need to maintain because that's actually going to stick around.

It's like why are we doing this? So again, we can unpack some of that stuff a little bit more in in future episodes, but you know, really the purpose today is to talk a little bit around this, you know, this idea of, you know, adaptations

are different from the outcomes that we're testing. Strength and speed have their own adaptions. Power doesn't. If power is determined by the strength and the speed, you know, you can improve either strength or speed and that's going to improve power, but you can't improve power directly. And then of course this idea, you know, that you know, strength can't improve speed because ultimately it it just is one of those things that

Um, you know, it is dependent on the velocity at where I'm moving it. So if you're trying to you know, people are arguing this idea that you can okay, I'm just gonna improve strength and that's gonna make me faster, but ultimately they're not

remembering that that strength value that I've got changes with velocity. The faster they go, the the more the strength decreases, if they aren't uh if they don't also have that high level of speed in in the in the in the kind of the equation in the train burst.

So let's talk a little bit more practically. Let's talk about, you know, some of the programs that you've been writing. I mean, you mentioned already that you've got, you know, kind of uh, you know, strength and speed components in your fighters programs. Talk about a different uh athlete class. Give us some give us some other examples.

on improving size, like just hypertrophy, kind of classic hypertrophy stuff. Um, you know, like even had some like supersets, things like that,'cause the whole idea would just get him, I guess, as big as possible. But, you know, he w he wanted to be faster. He needed to be faster.

on the field and so like looking through the training, it was not a lot of like sprint exposures or anything through the week, no real jump work or anything like that. And definitely, you know, due to the the structure and the the fatigue from the other things.

No time through the week where he was gonna actually be hitting, you know, max velocities, either just not training it at all or just not capable of actually hitting it like when he was on the field or, you know, any time in the gyms. Practically, I mean, it was pretty easy. At first, you know, the focus was on

speed adaptions, you know, you wanna be as fresh as possible and just have that right at the beginning of the session and then everything else after it and then terms of the strength work, you know, lowering the rep ranges, a few more reps in reserve, taking time to let kinda He'd been running the other program for, you know, weeks and weeks, months in fact. So kinda letting all that fatigue dissipate and then actually being able to express, you know, his max velocity.

Um and then kinda went from there, added in a few more things, uh some more direct like sprint exposures, reef ones, kept the jumping in. You know, I kinda use that in the warm-up also just as a test. If it's improving, you know, you're on the right track. If it starts going down, something is not good.

in that next session because trying to avoid that presence of fatigue. Because, you know, ultimately again, as we said As I was explaining earlier, we will do future episodes on on on things like speed in in exact you know, kind of how it works. But fatigue is one of those things that, you know, really does interfere with speed related adaptations, probably much more so in fact than it does

for things like strength related adaptation. I mean, we talk about how fatigue impairs hypertrophy, but, you know, really, in the grand scheme of things, if you're looking at this yeah, yeah. If you're looking at this thing from like a macro lens, you know, fatigue doesn't really create that much of a problem with hyperty unless you're really being very silly. You know, whereas

fatigue, you know, kind of just obliterates the possibility of a speed related adaption. It's just like gone. I mean, it it just isn't gonna happen. I think that's a big reason why, you know, like especially t in in the in like the soccer uh kind of field, you know, like the the the EU especially in Europe, they're really into their soccer. They have a lot of work being done on this, loads and loads of

uh researchers and S and C coaches trying to figure out how to make their athletes faster. And I keep kind of occasionally just saying, Have you thought about, you know, making them less tired? He's like, uh uh n no we don't want to try that. We we do want to try that.

Um, yeah, and you just you trashed in your training, you trashed in the season. And then you know, you wonder why like all of a sudden like overuse injuries and all that kind of stuff creeps up as well.

I mean, how do you think about ease in treat though? So like, you know, again we've got you know episodes we can do on this, but you know, like one of the really big challenges for any S and C coach is always like I've got my athlete, I've identified that they probably do need some eccentric loading for maybe maybe it could just be muscle strain injury prevention. Or it could be that actually I've kind of got a particular framework and I want to

you know, maybe try and improve a particular physical quality. It could be sprinting. I mean, I think that probably does work. You know, so I do want to put some eccentric loading in there. How are you currently working around that fatigue problem?

'Cause otherwise, I mean, you and I have talked about you'll lose those adaptations from eccentric training so quick, you know, a couple of weeks and they're gone. So sure, you know, some people would do it off season, do a bunch of it, build it up for a while, and then just take it out for, you know, the foreseeable future. And then at that point you don't really get any of the benefits.

And for him, yeah, it was maybe a bit of like hamstring injury prevention and then of course like increasing sprint speed is kind of the goal. So yeah, but just really just a couple of sets of a couple of reps and then just leave it at that. You know, you don't need more than just those first few reps anyway.

of most of the eccentric are related adaptions. So, you know, things like increases in fascicle length, increases in, you know, kind of the motor unit recruitment improvements that occur that are specific to the Ecentric phase, which is a really fascinating topic in and of itself. But Broadly speaking, eccentric adaptations tend to be, you know, fairly non responsive to volume. So, you know, we've got this kind of curve that we talk about for, say, hypertrophy dose response.

in conventional strength training. No, and you can kind of go up to, you know, sort of four, five, six, maybe eight sets in a workout and still get, you know, eke out a little bit more benefit from that workout. No, and that's that's

not not thinking about what the week looks like for a moment, but just the single session. You know, whereas eccentric doesn't work like that. It tends to plateau a lot earlier. So you kinda don't really get as you were saying, you don't really get much benefit from bashing set after set after set of eccentric loading anyway. So you might as well do

just one or two sets. And then similarly, within the set, if you kind of and again, stimulating rep uh terminology hopefully is familiar to people on this podcast, assuming as we were joking before the podcast, probably Nobody's gonna listen to this apart from people who already know who I am. So it's kinda like not not really gonna be unfamiliar to most people, but just in case it isn't stimulating reps, basically when we're doing a normal strength training set, it's kind of the last five reps.

you know, in a set to failure or if you're doing sets with reps and reserve you just chop one of the reps off or whatever. Whereas eccentric loading, the stimulating rupture at the beginning, as long as it's a maximal effort,

Um, because basically the only thing that's happening, you've got max effort max recruitment from the start, you've got a decent level of attention from the start, so all that's happening is you're getting fatigue mechanisms and you can just carry on creating more fatigue if that's what you wanna do. It's not very helpful but

You know, so you might as well just do a few reps. You don't have to do like, you know, three, four, five, six, seven, eight re you could just do singles or doubles or whatever. You know, and I do know some people working in reasonably high levels in sport in various countries in the world.

you know, who've come back to me having kind of worked with me a little bit in the past, they've come back every so so often, maybe every six months or a year and said, Hey, you know, we've dropped our, you know, Nordic rolling down even more. You know, and we're down to like single reps and, you know, two or three zets and it's still working really well. So I think, you know, there's this

really interesting possibility that we could just really bring those uh volumes down to incredibly low levels and get reasonable uh kind of results. And and you know, the data do support that. You know, there's some really low volume Nordic studies out there showing

pretty much the same effects as higher volume Nordic studies. Whether what the frequency needs to look like, I'm not entirely certain. There's some interesting data out there, um, you know, but ultimately I'd be happy with twice a week but

Maybe people can make it work with once a week. I don't know. And there is some data suggesting it might work with once a week. But ultimately qualitative response is we're just trying to bring the volumes and reps and sets down as low as we possibly can. And that sounds like what that's what you're doing.

you know, to the same extent that speed can improve speed speed training can improve speed, it's just because, you know, ultimately strength is just doing something or strength training is just doing something different. It's improving max force production, which doesn't apply in high velocity situations, anywhere near as much as it applies

in low velocity situations. And then really, you know, hopefully we've given some good examples for people uh to understand how those things might apply in the context of a couple of different strength training programmes. You know, I think that's that's been a good

good episode for us. I think that's a good way to start this this project. Cool. So without uh any more uh kind of rambling, let's call it a day there. That's been uh a great experience, Rob. Thanks for that. Um Yeah, and hopefully out to all our listeners, our new listeners out there, uh hopefully we'll see you all again.