003 Maximum speed

sort of mix of concepts of strength, speed and power. We then talked last week about maximum strength and the mechanisms or the adaptions that go into developing that. And now this week we're going to talk about speed and the adaptions that contribute to improving that quality.

So essentially I'm gonna run through the adaptations one by one. Um and after each adaptation, after I've described it, I'll throw the ball over to Rob and he can talk a little bit about the ways that he is programming at the moment for actually targeting those specific adaptions. And just to repeat something that I've I've said.

in the beginning and and also last week. What we're talking about here is speed. Improving speed is a improving a specific external outcome, a measurable external outcome. We're actually watching the athlete get faster. Their maximum speed is now greater. That speed is not itself an adaption. The speed that we're trying to improve, the improvement in speed, is caused by changes inside the body or inside the central nervous system. So

that means that there is no unique stimulus that increases speed. There are unique stimuli that improve or create each individual adaptation and we have to know exactly what those individual adaptations are and what those stimuli are. in order to program properly to make those adaptations happen.

So starting at the beginning, we've got something very similar to what we started with with maximum strength last week, which is an improvement in coordination. So when we improve coordination, We are essentially upgrading our existing motor program for a particular movement. We're getting more efficient at it. And that is allowing us to achieve greater performances in that movement, whether it's producing a higher maximum strength or it's moving faster. Efficiency is going to benefit

us whether it's maximum strength or speed. However, when we do talk about improvement in speed as a result of a upgrade in our coordination, that is still a velocity specific phenomenon. We can't practice a uh movement that we want to get faster at, slowly. Say for example we're thinking thinking about a vertical jump, we can't do heavy back squats and expect that to improve our coordination in a vertical jump. That has actually been modelled.

in the uh excited science literature and it was shown that you can't really do that. It just doesn't happen. So ultimately what we're looking at here is uh a stimulus which is practicing a movement very, very fast or as fast as we possibly can. in order to improve our efficiency in that very fast movement. And obviously we need that that high speed to generate that particular effect.

So there are a couple of things that I'll just mention briefly before I pass over to Rob. We can obviously think of things that do make a difference. We can obviously with it being a motor programme, we can focus on the practice element of that. So practicing obviously works by deliberate repetition of a high quality movement. So we want to be getting good feedback. We want to be maybe even taking videos of ourselves to improve the movement.

But also we want to avoid anything that's uh kind of slowing us down. So we want to avoid any fatigue accumulating. A lot of people often ask me and my questions, you know, if I see myself slowing down over a series of repetitions or a series of sets and I'm aiming for improvements in speed.

Um, you know, is that going to be problematic? Well, it it is gonna kinda stop you from maximizing your coordination gains if you're trying to coordinate a very fast movement, because you're no longer moving as fast as you would do if you are moving, you know, at the fastest possible speed.

So we would see a negative effect of fatigue. And of course, conversely, anything that really helps, you know, kind of maximize performance, like an external focus or, you know, experiencing a little bit more autonomy in the situation you're working in, those are going to be great as well. So that's physiologically what's going on for improving coordination. Rob, tell us a little bit about how you might uh improve coordination in these kind of situations.

So when you're trying to improve that coordination, few things programming wise you can implement pretty easily. First one, you know, everyone's probably familiar with is just reps and reserve. So if you're really trying to improve speed, obviously staying, you know, just miles away from failure.

is usually gonna be beneficial. Now the closer you get to failure, you start getting some negative things happening. Especially if you go to failure, you get some things we'll talk about later with fiber tech shifting and that.

So yeah, just keeping like three, four reps in reserve, probably at least on average, is what I tend to do. Um, some great protocols you can use there, also like cluster sets, things like that, you know, making sure your bar speeds are good. You can use velocity-based training. There's plenty of apps these days. Used a few of them.

Uh you can Google different ones and use whatever you like, but you can kinda cap sets at a certain amount of velocity loss. Some great Olympic weightlifting coaches and sports coaches. Travis Mash and some other guys love to use velocity based training. Some of the guys at Kabuki Strength when I used to train there back in the day in Oregon. We're really, really big on that for a lot of their powerlifters.

for managing fatigue and things like that. So yeah, you just avoid all that fatigue, keeping reps in reserve, using clusters, using VBT. And then that way you can ensure that you're actually able to make those coordination improvements in the movement that you're training. Um just trying to go as fast as possible because otherwise you don't get those improvements at those high velocities. As soon as you start getting fatigued in that, you just start missing out on those games.

Yeah. So then using a lot of like unloaded training, jump training. Sometimes I use like very light throwing in that. And then you know, you can even use like over speed stuff with bands, some over speed jumps and things like that. I really like those a lot. And we'll get into them more in depth in another chat.

There's always that idea with sports stuff that you can like learn to train and stay stronger and faster under fatigue. And it just it doesn't work at all in practice. You just don't make those improvements. You don't get the coordination improvements. You don't get the improvements and some other things that we'll chat about later on today.

talk about the light end of the spectrum, the fastest movements. Um obviously we're miles away from failure at this point, no matter really what we do. So um some of the other practitioners that I've been talking to have moved away from this idea of of sets and it's just like we're focusing on individual repetitions because we already know

that the fastest and most well coordinated repetition is the first one or maybe it might be the second or the third one, depending on your situation. I mean you have to kind of if you m actually it's really interesting to measure bar speeds and watch because there are some situations where I mean I know for a fact that when I

if I do a series of a couple of vertical jumps, my third is usually the highest. But you can kind of uh sort of d it de it depends on the person's skill level and experience and practice and all that kind of thing. Um I think the more well practised athletes are the the earlier they tend to hit their maximum kind of performances in those kind of situations, those unloaded situations. But that's that's my personal kind of belief. It doesn't necessarily happen with anyone.

your original kind of max velocity threshold and you're now in a situation where you're not getting much of a an improvement because the stimulus for creating something like a coordination improvement is actually showing the brain something better than it already has. I mean that's my favorite way of describing it.

So if you've kind of done the first couple of reps and you're now starting to experience that fatigue that you described and so you start to drop below your previous best performances, well, the brain's gonna look at that and go, Well Why why would I do anything with this information? How does it help me? I mean, I actually had a better one that I did earlier, so I'm just gonna kind of keep that and and not bother with any of this new information that you're giving me.

And I think that's that's kinda why people are kinda going, Well, you know, we just kind of track the bar speed over a course of a couple of reps or even cluster type situation where you're doing intra repetition rest. Maybe just do the repetition, gather yourself, take five, ten seconds, do another repetition, and we just keep measuring the speed and as the speed

drops, like stop, okay, we'll we'll take a five, do something different, come back, maybe try it again, or maybe not. Because and this is an interesting question. It's like, you know, practice does require repetition, but what I think people miss is that bad repetition is no good. It actually doesn't do anything. So we're better off striving for those

you know, small numbers of of optimal, perfect, best possible repetitions in this situation. And actually not going down the route of chasing volume for the sake of it. I mean, I if if somebody's filming or if they're getting feedback or if they're trying to develop an understanding of what problems might be the case.

Fine. I mean, do whatever repetitions you need to do. Just bear in mind of course that yeah, you know, the fatigue will start to change the way the movement's performed and then you're kinda trying to fix something that's not a problem, you know, or not a problem under under under fatigued circumstances. So

I think that this is one of those areas and I was kind of just curious to see, you know, where you are going at the moment in this respect. But ultimately I think, you know, this is more for kind of coaches who are trying to improve a an athletic movement.

you know, who maybe who are working, you know, with pictures, for example, and actually specifically trying to improve. I've got some really uh cool people we could bring on and talk about that actually. That would be really fun to to get their viewpoint. But you know, just sort of

try and understand how coordination can be, you know, sort of improved specifically as an adaptation. But that's hopefully illustrative for people listening, you know, how how coordination works and how we might uh go about thinking, you know, in terms of training

So antagonist coactivation is our next mechanism, and this really has so much in common with coordination that I almost you know, I have a lot of sympathy with people who just group this together and go, Oh, it's all it's all intermuscular coordination. I'm like, Well, nearly because we do see a little bit more transferability with intermuscular with with antagonist characteration, so it kind of

separates out a little bit from from coordination and makes it so it's harder to just call it all into muscular coordination. I don't think it really is. About antagonist co activation does improve pretty rapidly during fast movement training programs and it does seem to have a little bit of transferability away from the actual movement that was done in training. But the issue is that all of the stuff that we the all of the stuff that improves

Coordination also tends to improve antagonist coactivation. So any time we're programming to improve coordination, we're going to see exactly the same benefits on the antagonist coordination side. Just, you know, probably let me try and be very specific with what I say here. The adaptation probably occurs more quickly as regards, you know, comparing it with

some sorry, the antagonistic coactivation adaptation probably occurs more quickly when when when comparing it with maximum strength training, where the antagonist coactivation change can occurs very, very slowly. But that doesn't mean necessarily that it's going to compete with coordination improvements.

you know, coordination improvements seem to be kind of like, you know, instantaneous and they seem to improve very dramatically in a short period of time. So I wouldn't want to say that just because the antagonist co activation change is bigger in the case of cord you know, in the case of fast movement training. I wouldn't want to say that suddenly it's now something we need to obsess about. You know, it kinda still probably plays second fiddle to

coordination improvements and it pretty much seems to develop in exactly the same way. So Rob, I'm guessing you're going to give me the same answer that you gave me last time, which is that yeah, you just treat it in the same way as coordination.

And to do yeah, do a couple of weeks, kind of a block of particular training block. And then that when they notice that the movement is no longer improving, they switch to another movement and that kind of uh obviously then it displays very similar improvements, uh faster improvements than they

It would have got if they stuck with the same mood. And I think that gives this false sense of of kind of progress because Ultimately, I think most of the time what we're doing when we do that is simply getting you know, a coordination improvement and an antagonistic co activation reduction that really kind of Isn't massively transferable unless you're, you know, trying to improve that particular movement. I mean Yeah.

Exactly. Massive practice effects all the time. And I think it it hides a lot of errors in programming. I think it means that a lot of coaches, you know, whether they're doing it deliberately or or accidentally

can kind of disguise mistakes that they might otherwise be making in their programmes that are causing athletes not to make as fast progress as they perhaps could be doing. You know, and and ultimately it's it's a lack of it it creates a a lack of of honesty in the in the feedback process because If we're always using a um you know, kind of a set of exercises or at least a set of marker exercises, if we're gonna rotate some stuff we'd just keep some marker exercises in the program.

If we can get those marker exercises continuously moving up, then that creates an honest feedback loop and you know makes us feel like it's confident that we're actually making progress. And I guess when we're talking about speed and s separate concept from strength, we should make sure that we always have, you know, marker exercises for both ends of the force velocity spectrum. So, you know, really cool to have, say, you know,

some kind of heavy lift as our strength marker and some kind of jump, you know, or some throw, depending on the focus of the athlete as the speed end of the spectrum marker. So that would be something I think it's uh useful to add.

based on what you said. So let's move on to some of the more interesting stuff. So when it comes to speed, we've got multiple adaptions. We've mentioned the coordination and the antagonist characteration. Let's now move on to my motivated recruitment. So the cool thing about motine recruitment is it doesn't care how fast we're moving in in order to stimulate the effect. We ch literally just need a maximum level of centromotor command. So as long as we don't have any

you know, discomforting sensations, as long as we're properly motivated, we should be able to hit maximum levels of centromotid command in pretty much any concentric stretch shortening cycle or isometric movement. Ecentric's a separate problem, but As we always say, we'll talk about that in a separate episode. We're gonna get absolutely panned because I keep just keep saying that all the time. We're gonna talk about that in the future.

But anyway, so we are going to talk about that in the future. But for today, you know, motivating equipment improvements massively transferable. It's such a cool adaption. It doesn't care even what joint you're using, if it's a two joint muscle. I love that study. I said it before. It shows that you can train the rec fam.

as a hip flexor or as a knee extensor, and it doesn't matter, you're still gonna get voluntary activation increases in that muscle at either joint after training. So very, very cool adaption. It seems to be muscle specific. In the case of strength training. You know, perhaps in the case of static stretching it might be a global phenomenon when we see a recruitment increase, but that wouldn't be through this mechanism because obviously there's no recruitment in the case of a static stretch.

So the mechanism by which achieving a high level of recruitment triggers an increase in our ability to access high threshold motor units seems to be simply sending the highest possible centromotor ground to that muscle. And obviously there's so many things that impact on that. But Rob

Tell us a little bit about how you think about improving recruitment, whether it's for maximum strength or speed, because it doesn't matter at this point. Yeah. What methods are you using at the moment?

than what you previously had access to. So it's a really cool one. And I did mention some of the things I like to do last time. The isometrics were a big one. So the example, you know, we talked a little bit about like sprinters trying to improve like hip flexor, concentric velocities and that. So you can use um I satisfy direct fem would be a good one. And a lot of times I'll use that if I have access to like a you know, good seated leg extension machine.

I can use that. But like you said, you don't have to use you can use kind of either end of that muscle that you're trying to train and it'll still be transferable. So if they don't have one and a lot of people don't, then I'll use something I mentioned last time that like kneeling hip flexor isometric.

just driving your knee into the bottom of the bench works really well. And then yeah, you can still get those recruitment gains in that rec femme and the hip flexors without having, you know, needing access to a leg extension, something like that. Um In terms of like increasing recruitment as well, obviously heavy strength training. So this is where heavy strength training would do a really good job. Low reps, heavy loads.

still staying, you know, shy of failure so that you don't cause those fiber type shifts and that we'll mention in a minute. But, you know, people try to they try to say that heavy strength training is automatically going to make you slower going to make you worse as an athlete. And in most cases, you know Hypertrophy from heavy strength training is gonna be beneficial up to a point. Um, you gotta add a lot of muscle as a natural guy for the most part to really make you slower.

And the gains in, you know, force production and the gains in recruitment from the heavy strength training are gonna be really good and really transferable. And like you said, that is Not just, you know, you don't just squat or leg extension or chest press and increase recruitment in those muscles and then not have it do anything. It transfers directly, regardless of the speed, regardless of the movement. So yeah, really, really cool.

Well yeah, so just to reiterate the main ones, heavy strength training, isometrics work really well. And then you did mention briefly static stretching. So I mean just to get a little into that, since I used to be a gymnast. We did tons and tons of static stretching and you know, very likely works through increasing pain tolerance and increasing your ability.

to access more muscle fibers and more motor units that way. But I've definitely found that, you know, people that do a lot of flexibility training and that generally, you know. Maybe it's just my own experience. More athletic, stronger, just better athletes overall. So I'm actually a big, big fan of static stretching, even though people do try to crap on it a bit in the industry.

Because we know that, because if you do light load strength training to failure, you still hit maximum tolerable protections of effort, but that doesn't actually create an increase in recruitment. The only way to create increase in recruitment is to actually hit a maximum level of recruitment itself. And then what I think is happening is the brain is downgrading that

um kind of perception of effort from the central motor command signal, allowing us to then next time achieve a higher level of motor equipment for the same perception of effort. What you're describing with tactic stretching very eloquently is that I think it's anecdotes are fantastic. It really, really illustrates just how

static stretching is working to actually create an increase in moting occurring. And the reason I say it's global is that we get a crossover effect. So if you I do a static stretching program with just one part of the body, you tend to see strength increases in other parts of the body as well.

And that's you know, there's no possible mechanism that that can be explained by except through motivated comment increases that are global, whereas strength training is is very much more specific. Um, I want to go back to something that you said.

a couple of moments ago at the beginning of your uh explanation of the things that you're doing with isometrics. Because and I'm interested in just exploring this because when we look at the hip flexor complex The hip flexor complex obviously has as the rectus femoris as being the primary hip flexor through to approximately sixty degrees.

of kind of hip flexion range of motion. So we're starting in the standing position as you start to raise your leg, that's mostly the rec femme. When you go past that, it switches to the psoas and some other muscles as well. Now, the really thing the really interesting thing about that then is that If we want to increase recruitment for hip flexion, so I'm s I'm

specifying this here because when I've mentioned that r recruitment is muscle specific, it's really important to remember that it is muscle specific, not joint specific. If we're trying to improve and the same thing would apply for the hip extensors. If we wanted to improve hip extension, Otino accruant levels for sprinting, so we're looking to improve maximum torque but also maximum velocities in those muscles that are working as hip extensors.

you know, we would need three separate parts of range of motion. We'd need the uh the the full hip extension for glute max, we need somewhere around forty five for the for the hamstrings, we need somewhere around ninety plus for the adductor magnus. Now the same thing would apply to the hip flexors. So if we're trying to increase recruitment using these isometrics, w it would be really cool to do multiple uh kind of joint angles at least

Two I think. You know, maybe one a zero and one sort of seventy five to ninety wherever's comfortable. Does that make sense?

If the joint angle range of motion requires different muscles in different parts of the range of motion. You know, uh obviously it's irrelevant for the quads because it's like The quad doesn't care what joint angle it is. No. Whereas for the hips it actually is quite a big deal both

for flexion and for extension. Now that's really interesting. I'd never made that connection in my mind, but as you were describing the excises that you or the isometrics that you were programming, I thought, actually, you know, yes, the recfem is the primary one that I would be interested in for sprinting, but

you know, the other end of the range of motion could actually be pretty cool. And it's a great thing about isometrics is that you're not talking about doing a lot of them and they don't the the the the they don't take up a lot of space in the workout. It's Relatively easy to do. Very cool.

I am training for speed today. And I think that goes back to this idea that speed is a thing, strength is a thing. And it's like, no, the adaptions are the things. Um these are just the outcomes that we measure. So if we're doing some isometrics for max maximum motunit equipment improvement and that actually takes us in two different directions and gets us both

strength and speed gains. Well am I doing a strength workout or am I doing a speed workout or am I doing a warm up? I mean, does it matter? You know, labels and terminologies that people give these things it cease to really kind of make sense anymore because now we're focusing on the adaptions. It it just doesn't it doesn't it doesn't uh track or it doesn't kinda map perfectly onto the to the things that we're actually doing. Anyway, cool. So

The fourth and final central nervous system adaptation that we see happening after fast movement training is an increase in motor unit firing rates. This is something that is super specific to fast movements. It doesn't happen after heavy strength training and it doesn't really benefit slow movements, even high force, high effort slow movements. I need uh, you know, it kinda only really benefits fast.

kind of uh situations. It's again probably not movement specific at all. It's probably exclusively muscle specific in the same way that motinate recruitment, because it is connected to motinate recruitment. So it's probably super useful, super transferable and very valuable in that respect. So this is probably the

Well, we'll talk about the other one in a moment, but this is probably the one the the adaptation that I'm thinking of when somebody says, Why should I do fast movements in the gym when I'm already doing fast movements in sport? That's this is for me, that's kind of this is the adaptation that answers that question. So Are you are you kind of doing this again in in warm ups prior to strength training sessions, Rob?

PVC pipe on the back or something like that. If I want it to be a little more hip dominant, I'm still as fast as possible. You know, just adding more arm swing, things like that. So you can change what you want to target a little bit that way. But yeah, I mean the biggest one with that is just making sure that people are going

as fast as they possibly can. Again, avoiding fatigue, avoiding all those things are gonna make you slower. I d I don't really have it targeted specifically just on its own. It's kinda rubbed in with, you know, the other parts of the warm up and things like that. Um, doesn't take any extra time either.

I uh yep. Not really a ton program wise that I focus on with that one. But there's I mean, there's so many things to make sure you just don't do with it. And you know, we just mentioned so many of them. So many people trying to do tons of volume, so many people splitting up sessions. You do a heavy strength training workout and you go a little overboard and then you sprint the next day or you jump the next day.

and all of a sudden you don't hit that absolute max velocity and you don't get that improvement, then you've really just wasted that session. So yeah, just make sure, you know, programming wise you're splitting things up appropriately or if it's better, just not splitting them.

like you said, starting the session with the speed work. I mean, even if you do sprint work and things like that very briefly at the beginning of a session, if you don't do a lot of it, it's not not it's gonna impact your heavy strength training. But if you do the sprint work and that, obviously afterwards or even the next day you could have a very negative impact and not go very fast. So yeah, more about just being mindful of those things, I would say, to actually hit those fast firing rates.

And then I would also say, uh, you did mention it, but people still think that like motor unit firing rates are an important thing in heavy strength training. I hear that all the time. And I've even seen it in in books and textbooks and It just it doesn't do anything for the heavy strength end of things. Nothing at all. It doesn't increase, like you said, after heavy strength training, because it's not an adaption that's necessary for it.

So yeah, just don't think you're gonna be getting it from that at all, even if you have that maximal intent, like people like to say. And just know that you actually have to make sure you're going as fast as possible, jumping as high as possible. And, you know, like you said, you can measure and track those. super easily with apps, with anything, and then just keep on top of it.

and treating the warm up seriously. So I think that's that's the key element here. It's like if you go into the warm up and like, this is not just a warm up, this is my speed training for this athlete, then suddenly now your vertical jumps are no longer just We'll go and do some jumps and get ready. It's like, no, we're gonna track the speed on these, we're gonna try and get a really high jump as and measure it and write it down in the in the spreadsheet. You know, and that's that's

that warm-up now has not just been a kind of walk through just to kind of tick a box. It's like we're treating that warm-up seriously to get some speed adaptations'cause we're moving really fast And then we're going into every strength training session. And then we're going to not then do a whole load of other useless stuff and mess around.

And we're gonna wait a couple of days, come back and do another really high quality session where again we get these adaptation stimulator for both speed and strength. And that looks like you look at them on the interesting thing is when you write that down on a piece of paper it's like, oh, a couple of jumps and then

You know, similarly if we're doing broad jump for distance, I'm like, I want to know these numbers and I wanna make sure that the numbers are going in the right direction over time. If they just kind of do the jump and I'm like, What what's that? You know, what was that? Is that an effort? You know, it's like, come on.

I want to see movement happening over time. So I want to see changes. We're doing this to track that the speed training is working in the same way that we're looking at weight going up over time or reps going up over time in the strength training part of the workout. So

You look at it on paper it's all a couple of jumps, a couple of this, a couple of that and then we're going into heavy strength training. Oh, you're only doing two or three sets of this and two or three sets of that and like this isn't unlike, yeah it is. It's gonna work

emotion agreement or anything else that they're trying to improve in the strength training context. It's like we're we're not there's a difference between doing a target to work out to achieve goals and just kind of entertaining ourselves exercising, you know. And I think that's the two ends of the spectrum.

You know, I think a lot of S and C programmes are leaning more towards the entertaining themselves, doing a lot of exercising, rather than the targeted, let's get stuff done to trigger specific adaptions that, you know, I think a lot of people look at the program and go, That's not enough. I'm like, No, it really is.

That's everything. Nothing else really matters. So there we go. So the final adaption then is an improvement in muscle fibre shortening velocity. This is a very cool adaption that happens irrespective of muscle fibre type. So we see fast fibers getting faster, slow fibers getting faster, as in, you know, kind of type one and type two A, type two X fibers are getting faster. It's not associated with fibre type shifting in any way, shape or form.

We don't really know much more about it other than heavy strength training doesn't make it happen and fast movement training does make it happen. So really this is identical in in nature as far as the strength accommodation coach is concerned as a motor unit firing rate. Because it's muscle specific, it's not movement specific, and it requires a fast movement speed in order to generate. So it pairs perfectly with everything that we've just been talking about.

training for that particular action. And then the final category then is the motor firing frequency changes and the muscle fiber shortening velocity changes. So you can see that the training considerations separate into these three separate categories.

Even though we've got five total adaptions, we've only got three categories of things to think about. And then finally, something that you've been mentioning as we've g been going through, there are some potential negatives of heavy strength training. There are two that I would highlight. I mean you can kinda get granular with this stuff, but uh the two that I would highlight would be the fiber type shifting from X to A, so type two X to type two A.

Which makes individual muscle fibers slower, quite a lot slower. I think this is the thing that people don't realise. When I sort of say they go, Oh, well the type the change from type two X to type two A isn't that big. I'm like, No, it's huge. It's really, really big. So you might have a fiber that's like capable of shortening at six fiber lengths per second and you bust it down to four fiber lengths per second, that's a lot. That's a really big shift, you know. That's Yeah.

massive drop off of the top end of your movement velocity capacity. Um and then secondly, uh there's this a kind of um effect of adding mass where you don't need it. So like you pointed out earlier, intelligent heavy strength training that targets the muscles you're gonna use in the sport is fantastic. Um starting to add mass in places where you're not gonna use it, mm yeah, that's not great. Especially if you're moving really fast.

So like if you've got athletes who are doing, you know, running jumps or if they're um sprinting, we do not want to be adding mass in distal segments aggressively because you start doing that, they're gonna start getting slower. And there's some really nice data which we will go through in a future episode where we talk about how if you add too much quad muscle mass to a sprinter even over a couple of month period

they will get slower, you know. So in that the same thing applies to the calf muscle complex. You start adding too much calf muscle mass. This is one of the reasons, one of the reasons, there's other reasons as well. But one of the reasons I'm really not a fan of

um doing too much calf work, even if it's you know kind of heavy strength training or isometrics for the calves for sprinters, I'd be much happier just doing the drop jumps um and and kind of working in that respect. I don't like adding mass to the calves. Because if you think about it, imagine trying to run with heavy boots on. Because that's the equivalent. It's like it doesn't work. You've got um conservation of angular momentum means that you are having to massively decelerate.

your lower limb every time you get to the end of the gait cycle. And that is costly and it slows you down and it's not really very effective for sprinting. So um yeah, the two things I would say the fiber type shifting and adding muscle mass in uh incorrect places.

So before I hand over to you on this one, Rob, just want to kind of f finish by saying Obviously, we know that fiber type shifting happens through calcium ion related fatigue. So any calcium accumulation is going to cause a fiber type shifting. So that straight away tells us what we can be thinking of doing in the workout for

or avoiding triggering that particular adaptation, whatever we may be doing. And then secondly, obviously exercise selection is going to be critical for making sure that we focus our muscle mass more approximally rather than more distantly. So can you talk to that a little bit with some examples?

you know, special methods, drop sets, rest pauses, things like that. Half the time they'll exclude any jump work and speed work. And all of a sudden you wind up in a situation where you're getting like significantly slower. And a lot of times, you know, like you were just saying, if you're putting muscle mass on in the wrong places, if you're just trying to kind of, you know, haphazardly put muscle mass on everywhere, you know, the way you would need to if you were a bodybuilder.

That is not really going to be great for your performance. So you start adding muscle where you don't need it, you start making that slower. Um, not gonna be a good thing. But yeah, if you just avoid going to failure, if you just avoid any kind of silly like finishers and advanced techniques that you might usually use. When you're trying to add muscle mass, and you'll really g mitigate that quite a bit. I mean with heavy strength training, you still might get a little bit of it.

But certainly nowhere near as much if you leave a few reps in reserve, you know, you use clusters, you use V B T, use those things we mentioned. Honestly it's it's not dissimilar to the way you would go about. improving coordination, you just kind of stay away from all the silly things that are gonna give you that negative adaptation that you might not want.

So yeah, I think as you pointed out, it's very easy to not trigger this adaptation if you just maintain discipline of keeping the reps in reserve in the right place. Obviously if we start to d drift into training to failure, we probably are gonna end up with some fiber type shifting.

automatically you can know you're probably running into that problem and you can just make sure they back off a little bit. It's also an easy one to address unless you've ran it out super long and then it might take a little longer.

four, five, six weeks later, we should have largely washed that problem back out again. So yeah, and then of course, highlighting what you said there about, you know, not just doing bodybuilding programmes, I'm expecting it to transfer to athletic uh performance. I am seeing a lot more I think it's because some of the um some of the influencers they've kind of got their hypertrophy training programmes, they're now trying to market them to athletes. And I'm Yeah.

That's really disingenuous. You know, they're like they're they're they're not the same thing. You know, w the the training program for b bodybuilder, you know, yes. you know, it f f on a muscle by muscle basis it is gonna look pretty d much the same, like you pointed out last time. If you're training

um, an athlete to improve muscle size and you know that that increase in muscle size will improve performance in their sport. Yes, it will look pretty much the same as a really good bodybuilding programme. designed around kind of what uh what Jake and I would call silver era principles, but physiology is the same answer. Um but uh equally if the bodybuilding program, the generic template includes a whole bunch of calf exercises

You're trying to get Yeah. Well, uh you got a lot of qua lot of calf and a lot of quad, which to be fair, you know, sort of does tend to creep into uh many bodybuilding programs. So I'm like, that is not going to work for my sprinter. you know, my sprinter needs to stay away from that stuff and be focused on the hip. I want extra glute stuff. I want extra hip flex. I mean that's another point. I'm you know, not just about what is in the program from a from some of those bodybuilding kind of

online templates, you know, there won't be much hip flex hip flexor in there at all. It's like I'm gonna need a ton of hip flexor work to get my sprinter to the point where they're gonna be competitive, you know, unless they're just a phenomenon. But ultimately

you know, it's uh something that won't be an a a bodybuilding programme. So it's really, really disingenuous to say that, Oh yes, you know, h here's my bodybuilding program that I use for hypertrophy clients. Oh yes, and it'll work perfectly for you, you know

who want to do, you know, some kind of athletic performance. Because it it's they are different things. Even though the hypertrophy sections f for each muscle is going to be f sort of very, very similar, if not the same, the selection of muscles is going to be completely You know, so that's that's kinda where it comes in. And then of course, like we've just been saying, you know, we are gonna always want to be reps in reserve on the

on the exercises for athletic training, if our athlete needs to move quickly. You can't just be smashing out sets to failure all the time and expect to keep all of your type two X fibres. That's not going to happen. As soon as you get that calcium I accumulation in the fibre, it triggers it to

switch over to a type two A fibre. So that is definitely something that won't work either. So yeah, so just in defense of'cause I know last time we kind of went, you know, sort of really hard to one in one direction saying, look, you know

If an athletic training program is trying to produce hypertrophy, then it will look very similar to a bodybuilding training program as long as that bodybuilding training program is set up correctly. Now we're kind of just like tempering that and saying, look, you've got to be aware that there's stuff that Cool. And I think that was a great summary of um speed

Uh adaptations, hopefully illustrated by the examples that you've given there. Rob, is there anything you want to uh mention before we finish today's episode?