006 Eccentric training

ways uh differently. In the future we'll do more episodes about it, but today is uh really an introduction to what is going on with ecentric training. So As always, I'll just run through some of the physiology and then we'll start talking about strength training programmes and how to incorporate eccentric training for specific goals in the context of specific groups of athletes. So

Essentially, with eccentric training, we've got a number of neural adaptions. Well, first of all I should clarify that basically eccentric training is a form of strength training, so you are going to get pretty much the same stuff. that you get with normal heavy strength training with eccentric training. So essentially you're gonna get the same things that we saw when we covered maximum strength in a previous episode.

You know, you're gonna see increases in coordination, you're gonna see potentially reductions in antagonist coactivation, and potentially increases in motin accrument, although more on that

briefly. And in terms of uh local muscular adaptations, you're going to see hypertrophy, which is an increase in muscle fibre size. We're also going to talk about soccomerogenesis today in more detail. And then of course, you know, there's going to be increases in tendon stiffness and lateral force transmission.

So in terms of eccentric training, what we're really doing is saying what is different about eccentric training? How does y how does it differ from heavy strength training? What are we seeing in terms of the unique

impact of eccentric contractions. Well, essentially there's a couple of differences in the neural side and there's a couple of differences in the peripheral side. So on the neural side, the coordination aspect is a way bigger deal than it is for heavy strength training. And that's because the brain treats uh eccentric contractions differently from concentric contractions and it finds them much, much harder to coordinate. So we tend to find that there is a bigger learning curve.

And we gain more strength from the coordination improvements in eccentric training than we do in heavy kind of standard conventional strength. And so that gives us this kind of that gives us really a period of time, especially at the beginning of an eccentric training program, where strength is increasing in the exercise that we're doing quite quickly.

That can deceive us into thinking that, you know, something incredible is happening. And lots of people will start doing, you know, eccentric training for the first time and they're like raving about these huge increases in strength that they're getting. And you have to kind of throw a little bit of cold water on that and say, uh

Actually it's just that you're getting better at coordinating the exercise that you're doing. It's not as exciting as it looks. And actually that causes problems later on because often, especially in sport, you'll find that people will just do three or four weeks worth of eccentric training, they'll get massive gains in eccentric strength.

And they'll be like, Oh yeah, bank to that now, that's fantastic and then may or maybe the the alternative is they carry on a little bit longer and they start to see a plateau and they go, Ah, the exercise has stopped working and like, No, no, no, it's just started working and that's the point where

You've got the coordination to a point now where it's actually, you know, the exercise is is is relatively, you know, kind of um now giving you um indications of other adaptions, not just the coordination one.

And that really kinda ties us into the motivating recruitment difference between or the gains in recruitment difference that you'll get with eccentric compared to normal strength training. If you're seeing improvements in recruitment in eccentric training, a lot of the time that's going to be tied to a coordination improvement because

The coordination is so bad at the beginning that it actually suppresses recruitment by producing a perception of effort associated with that control process. If you're really concentrating or your brain is devoting a lot of computing power to coordinating a movement

then you actually produce a perception of effort that then suppresses your ability to hit maximal recruitment, which means you can't improve motivat recruitment as a you know, in the normal way that we would do after heavy strength training. So what you're getting really is an increase in recruitment with eccentric training, and this has been observed in a number of studies.

is that what you're actually really doing is just removing that perception of effort associated with the coordination. And so the recruitment isn't actually an increase in recruitment that is transferable. It's just linked to the exercise that you've been doing. So again,

A lot of the enormous increases in in strength caused by neural adaptations during eccentric training are just pretty much limited to the exercise that we're doing in the gym and not very exciting at all. And so we're ultimately we kinda need to get through that first couple of weeks of training. So

This is why I'm extremely critical when I see especially team sports. I'm I'm gonna single these guys out a little bit now. See especially in team sports where they do like a three or four week block of eccentric training and they see these huge gains in eccentric strength in the exercises that they're doing in training.

And they're like, Oh wow, you know, this has been fantastic. I'm like, You haven't done anything, guys. You've kind of just got yourself to the point where you can start doing the work. Now anything you do will have a high level of recruitment, you'll be able to create some interesting adaptions locally. So the neural stuff I'm not excited about, even though it does contribute to massive increases in the exercise, you know, sort of eccentric strength that we might be using.

So peripheral stuff. Peripheral stuff, basically as I mentioned, we've got sarcum regenesis. Now you can get sarcumerogenesis and normal strength training, but it's limited to the lower half of the mote unit pool. Now the reason I say that is because every time we have an eccentric contraction, the eccentric fiber force is about double the concentric fiber force.

And that means that if you're doing a normal strength training exercise, your activation levels are gonna be double in the concentric phase from in the e center phase. That's just basic math. So ultimately if you hit muscular failure in the concentric exercise in the concentric phase of your heavy strength training exercise, your subsequent decentric phase is you lower the weight back down, having reached muscular failure

it's still only gonna be like fifty percent of your maximum level, which is not really anywhere into the meaningful territory of high threshold motor units. So really hard to create meaningful um kind of Sarcomerogenesis in the top end of the motin at pool during normal strength training, we are going to get that much more successfully during eccentric training. So that's the major difference really in terms of the

the hypertrophy sarcomerogenesis segment as far as eccentrics are concerned. As far as uh tendon stiffness is concerned, this is a really interesting topic and I think we'll come back to this later on, but Broadly speaking, contraction mode doesn't make a massive difference to tendon stiffness changes. It might given that the forces of the whole muscle tend to be higher in in eccentric training because you're doubling the fibre force uh you know for the

for the Ecentric compared to the concentric. I think there is a scope for potentially tendon stiffness to increase for a longer period of time than with concentric training, but ultimately it probably doesn't really change doesn't read a more rapid rate in the short term. And then in terms of lateral force transmission, obviously

Uh, I have mentioned this before, but ultimately it does look like lateral force transmission increases a little bit more so with eccentrics compared to concentrics. But whether that is just simply because every time we create a new sulcoma we've got to bolt it into the endomisium. And therefore you have more costumeric addition, therefore you have more lateral force transmission. I don't know whether that's just a side

of effect of having additional soccer meds in series. It might be a unique feature of Ecentrics, it might be the tension that's creating that adaptation, or it might be just that more Soccer Mes require more customers. So but it does look like that does happen. And then in addition to all of that, it does also appear that we can add more titan every time we do eccentric training.

kind of contractions. So potentially we're getting a increase in passive force production in an eccentric uh contraction every time we do blocks of eccentric training or we have eccentric training in our or exercises in our project.

So that's basically the kind of whizzed through as quickly as I can to get all of that physiology in place. That's really the differences that we're gonna be seeing between heavy strength training and eccentric contractions or eccentric training. Obviously we're talking about a situation where we're using maximal efforts here'cause otherwise you're not going to access the high threshold motor units and create adaptions in them. And basically overall I'm what I'm arguing is that we've got to

focus more so on the peripheral adaptations'cause those are the interesting parts. The neural adaptions I think are pretty limited to the exercises that we're doing in training because they are largely driven by improvements in coordination. Even the increases in recruitment

are actually driven by, you know, the the improvements in coordination. And so the only final thing I need to mention then is that we always have to bear in mind that whenever we're doing eccentric Training, we are creating a lot more calcium ion accumulation because we are opening stretch activated ion channels, especially in fast twitch muscle fibers.

So our ability to do a lot of this type of training is very limited and that goes for both intra workout and also post workout. So if we're doing a workout with eccentric contractions, we can't do what I mean, I've I've read so many of these studies and they always make me laugh every time I go back and look at them. And you find this old Nordic curl study where the people are doing like six sets of twelve Nordics and you're just like, That is just impossible.

You've got literally nothing happening after the first kind of like two or three sets. There's just nothing going on because the calcium ion accumulation is just off the charts. But ultimately that is going to stop a lot of these adaptions from happening because you're not going to get the force production, you're not going to get the you know, kind of processes occurring inside the fiber that are meaningful to create adaptations.

Um and all of the stuff that we're interested in is peripheral. So and of course then post workout as well, not just inside the workout we've got a limit to on how much volume we can do, but also post workout. If we do too much post you know th in the workout, then post workout is gonna be a mess.

And we're not going to be able to do anything else for the rest of the week. So that's kind of all the physiology. Let's now talk a little bit about some, you know, strength training programme examples. Rob, talk us through something give us some examples of how you're using eccentric training at the moment.

in clinch work and grappling and that. And so if you want to imagine doing just like any kind of normal narrow grip row, and the way that you do that one is using momentum, whatever it is, to complete the concentric. So that you can actually use a weight that's heavy enough. So that it's actually super maximal on the eccentric phase then. So you just kinda again get down to the finish position and then control the eccentric for roughly three, maybe five seconds for just

couple of sets of a couple reps. You and I had come up with that one, been using it with a lot of success. for improving um, like I said, clinch strength for the grapplers, for the Muay Thai guys. Um, if you're in kind of a a plum clinch and kickboxing and Muay Thai, your arms are gonna be pretty narrow grip, keeping someone from Uh ra raising their head up, raising their body up and pulling out of the clinch.

So that eccentric strength you have there to control is very important. We get in the same kind of positions and grappling and jujitsu and that where you're very dependent on that to keep someone from moving around and keep head control, posture control, things like that. So that's a really cool one. My brother and I have implemented that with quite a few athletes.

It doesn't do that obviously in the concentric phase. So essentially every single fibre in our body is about twice as strong when we activate it and stretch it in comparison with when it's contracting. So you can imagine that essentially if you've got two fighters in exactly the same weight class, then yes, you could have a situation where one of them is ten.

percent stronger than the other. But you can't really have a situation where one fighter is two hundred percent of the strength of the other fighter. That's not going to happen in the same weight class.

So really you shouldn't see a scenario in which people can escape these things unless it's technique related issue. I mean if it's pure strength related issue, people should not be physiologically capable of escaping in that situation.

So if that is happening, then either, as I say, it's going to be a technique problem or it's going to be that the eocentric strength hasn't been developed. Now The the major reason why that's going to happen if the eccentric strength hasn't been developed, either there's going to be a really big coordination issue in that particular technique situation. So the person is just not comfortable displaying their fully centric strength in that scenario, in which case it requires more practice.

Or alternatively it's gonna be the stuff that we're working on in terms of the the strength training side of things, which is trying to get the Titan in there, trying to get the lateral force transmission as well to increase concentric and or isometric and eccentric strength but

If we can get extra tight tighten in that scenario, then each fibre will become even stronger than it was previously. So I think this is just such a fantastic example. As you say, we talked about this loads previously, but You know, just so people understand, you know, realistically if technique is good and eccentric training uh has been done to develop that eccentric strength, there really shouldn't be a scenario where people can escape those kind of situations.

a weight that you can't actually lift normally. Lift it with two legs and then just lower with a single leg. Um again, you know, short duration, three to five seconds, few sets of a few reps done, you know, maybe twice a week, and use that with with good success with guys

um, you know, quite a bit recently. Um, soccer, football, all that kind of stuff. Really, really like that one. It's just so easy. It's a lot easier than uh I've I've seen people do um weight releasers and things like that. And they're just not not practical.

you know, by the eccentric um strength and when biomechanical analysis analysis has been done on those kind of movements of the deceleration, it looks like it's more of a quad dominant movement than it is a hip dominant movement. So we kind of end up needing quad

strength and easy centric quad strength at that that. So that's the short answer. Um, you know, I think there's not really much more to it to be honest, but I'm very cool to to do that with with as you say, any players In team sports that need uh rapid changes of direction, always gonna have that in mind.

Just a couple sets, very low reps. And then for the Nordics, you know, obviously most people have done Nordics, but just using if you have to await where you're actually hardly able to control it for, you know, three to five seconds. I see a lot of people do Nordics and they lower, you know.

six, eight, ten seconds and they're doing a body weight and they're still able to lift their body weight. And if you're able to lift your body weight concentrically, you're not using a load that's heavy enough for it to be like really centric training. Um so yeah, I just always make sure people were choosing

a weight that's actually applicable and getting done what they need to do versus, you know, otherwise they could just bang out reps and they'd just be doing, you know, a full Nordic for hypertrophy or something, I guess.

But yeah, no, uh in terms of sprinting, just to kind of give the the kind of um biomechanics behind that, essentially in sprinting movement, which is a cyclical movement, we are producing power output at the hip and then we're absorbing that at the knee. So we're kind of transmitting a kinetic energy down the kinetic chain. Um and because we're developing a high speed over a period of, you know, ten, twenty metres.

And we're actually kind of getting to a point where we can produce uh a pretty large amount of kinetic energy, we're recycling it at the hip as well. So you end up with a lot of kinetic energy being absorbed at the knee, so you need really, really high eccentric strength for the hamstrings and actually also of the knee extensors in the opposite end of the gate cycle for the same reasons, but

Um, we tend to focus more so on the hamstrings'cause they're the kind of the engine of the sprinting movement. Now we'll do a conversation about sprinting probably quite soon actually because we've kind of covered most of the big big rocks that enable us to do that and but that kind of just gives us an insight into why we would be having eccentric training in those situations.

So Rob, in those examples that you've given us so far, you've you've talked us through the exercises that you're programming, you've given us some really clear details about, you know, kind of um the kind of rough sort of

sets and reps that you might be doing, focusing on, you know, relatively low numbers of sets and low numbers of reps within those sets. Let's come and talk a little bit more about frequency with this because obviously one of the major problems with with as I mentioned physiologically, major problems with the eccentric training is that it really does cause a lot of post workout fatigue and and so obviously it can interfere with other stuff.

in the week. Are you using a specific frequency most of the time or does it vary between programs that you write?

two sets of one single rep each time, something like that. So very, very low in session volume. And then just a couple of times a week to make sure that I'm getting enough of a a training stimulus there. So that there's nothing lost throughout the week, anything like that. But yeah, I really I don't tend to do once a week very much and I think I might have mentioned that in one of the one of the other episodes, but usually stick to twice a week just to be sure that I'm getting enough of it.

Uh yeah, trying to keep it super simple. Mm-hmm, I've never gone three times a week. I don't really see any need for that. That would definitely be way too much, especially if you're in season, things like that.

Um, you know, it's bad enough that a lot of guys are training four, five, six days a week in the weight room when they're in in season, which I had a conversation with a football player who reached out to me yesterday and he does three football sessions and five strength training sessions and he did have some like eccentric stuff and that in there and I was like, you know, mm my God, man, this is not gonna go well for me

shared with me similar views where they've talked about programming eccentrics on a much lower volume. I remember uh even at the start of the mentorship before people really knew who I was, um I'm not sure who I am now but um

You know, kind of like people would say to me they would they would kinda say, I'm really not sure about these training programmes that I read in the scientific studies where they're doing like th you know, sort of six sets of twelve Nordics three times a week and I'm like, Yeah, I'm not really sure about them either.

You know, I had pretrophy for future phases and something like that and I I read it and I was like, My, my, my, my.

you know, just keeping things exactly, you know, where we want them to be and maybe occasionally increasing making small increases over time. And it's it's it's been a really big shift in their programming because they're seeing, you know, a positive effect. You know, I think it's such a contrast from

as I say, the the the some of the silly programmes that we see in the literature, but also the the general tendency in team sports where you g like people often say we're gonna do a block of eccentric training and they do three or four weeks and I'm like Guys, you're literally just getting to the point where coordination is kind of g you know, kind of locked in at this point. So now you've got high ac access to high threshold remote units.

you're gonna be able to create all these nice peripheral adaptions that you're gonna find benefits from in terms of soccomerogenesis and'cause of course that basically functions like hypertrophy if you've got, you know, the customers to bolt at the endomycium, it's exactly the same as my fibrillosin.

in parallel. You do get a little bit of a length tension kind of relationship, uh shift. So, I mean, we were thinking about uh this um when we were sort of setting up the podcast itinerary today. We're thinking, you know, maybe there are certain situations where y you'd have to be a little bit cautious about eccentric training for certain kind of actions. So like the hip extension action in sprinters.

I'm not convinced we want an eccentric for the hip extensors in sprinting because you would move the length tension relationship so that the muscles would be producing force in more stretched positions or peak forces in more stretched positions. and the sprinting movement really depends on contracted position hip extension. So I don't really want to move my

a plateau of my length tense relationship towards the stretch position, I want to keep it pretty much at the plateau. So, you know, there's this kind of I wouldn't want to get you know, kind of do too much stretch position glute training. So like maybe an RDL wouldn't be a great choice. in that context, you know, I kind of want to stick with the uh exercises, you know, like a f maybe a forty five degree back extension for the hamstrings in that context, if I'm going to do that.

And a hip thrust of course, which is of course the king of all exercises as far as athletics is concerned. I was just thinking about this, I was doing my Instagram questions yesterday and people were asking me that you know, what's the single best exercise for an athlete? And I'm like I can only really write hip thrust at this point. I mean it's it's just gonna go

any major gym that they like to go to. So yeah, I think is that length tension relationship is worth just checking if we've got exercises in a training program. You know, do we actually want to avoid doing too much E centric in the case where it's potentially gonna cause. I mean, obviously the the the the normal strength training uh exercises have the same issue, just much less so.

Because you're only dealing with half the the the muscle fibers in comparison with with most of the muscle fibers that you can activate. So ultimately, you know, not something I would immediately go to and go, Oh, we need to deal with this and program our entire workout around this problem.

But just something I would definitely think about, you know, being aware of. Um, but yeah, I mean like those teen sports programs with three or four weeks worth of eccentric training and then they go and do something else. I'm like, guys You've got to kind of just, you know, settle in, take a slower, longer kind of tortoise rather than hair approach and just kind of

Keep the exercise in the program a long period of time, get the coordination sorted and get these peripheral adaptions. And then we'll start to see some interesting stuff, you know, coming through from that, I think.

And I'm like, Well, you're gonna lose most of what you gain from that particular thing that you were doing and it's just not um, you know, kind of going to optimise the more interesting adaptions like you know, adding some extra costumes, adding um, you know, potential sort of tighten uh molecules into the fibers to get e extra eccentric strength from the individual fibers.

You know, I think those are the things that are interesting about eastynic training, the peripheral stuff, not so much the the neural stuff, even though you will see in the literature a lot of people focus on the neural stuff because You know, it's the fastest way of creating a really big increase in the exercise that you're doing in the training programme. Which of course

Ninety nine times out of a hundred is irrelevant for the athletic population that you're kind of working with. Not many athletes are actually competing in eccentric exercises. You could argue maybe there's an arm wrestling kind of component there, but

kind of spends time looking at social media going, horror, the horror, the horror, you know, all these things that people are doing that make no sense. Um, I guess I I would just like to clarify that every time we include eccentric training in a program

there is of course this big fatigue cost that's associated with whatever benefit we're trying to obtain. And that means it's especially important to be really clear about why we're including the eccentric exercise in the in the training programme.

So this goes back to your counterexample of the power lifter who's got a bunch of eccentric exercises for somebody. You know, it's like well what what are they doing? I mean, I can see a scenario where you know, eccentric training might have a small benefit in powerlifting'cause you might add some more customers, you might get a bit of psychomerogenesis that you wouldn't otherwise get, which give you extra force producing capacity.

But ultimately it's not a big deal'cause the specificity isn't there. If I'm talking about sprinting, I know exactly why I've got an eccentric exercise in there for the knee extensors and the knee flexors, because they're absorbing kinetic energy in the gate cycle.

If we're doing change of direction, I know it's giving me the deceleration. If we're with working with fighters, I know it's giving me that clinch strength that I'm looking for. So every single example that we've worked through or you've presented to us has a very specific goal.

in the program for that particular type of training. I think that's the thing I would always start with. All the other stuff, all the physiology is is cool. But at the end of the day, we need a reason to put this stuff in the program because of the big fatigue costs that we're dealing with. Cool. Yeah.

So that being said, let's now turn to uh just give some examples of things that people are doing at the moment that don't make any sense, just to be a hundred percent clear with people, because we see eccentric training being discussed in the industry. And yet not every single case of it being discussed is actually presenting things in the way that is either physiologically accurate or even practically useful. So give us some examples, Rob, tell us what you've seen.

you slow it down to three, four, five seconds, something like that. And people will say that that is gonna give you this big base of eccentric strength to then work off of. But, you know, one of the things that you just mentioned, you know, in that eccentric phase in a normal rep with a weight you can lift, You're getting, you know, maybe fifty percent of the recruitment. You're targeting muscle fibers lower down on that high threshold motor unit pool. You're not really

targeting what you think you are, nowhere near the same thing you're targeting with like a super maximally centric. It's different muscle fibers, it's different motor units. And it's r it's really not similar at all. So I see people doing that all the time and saying of course that you need that as well prior to doing any kind of really centric training. You know, if you have an athlete, like a field sport athlete, something like that, and they've been lifting weights for a while,

You know, one, they're probably pretty decent at lifting. Two, the forces that they're experiencing in their sport are probably pretty high. I don't think you need to do three to four second eccentrics with the weight you can lift.

to be prepared to then do semi centric training. It just doesn't make any sense at all. Um and then people will say they use them for hypertrophy because you're gonna get extra growth and all these things. They use them off season. And I know you and I mentioned that in a a prior episode, or at least I did.

You know, you do these blocks where you're moving very slowly off season, thinking you're getting more muscle growth, all kinds of things. And I mean you're not you're not getting more muscle growth'cause you're targeting.

roughly half the fibers. Maybe the ones that are activated might get a little more passive tension. But if they've already grown quite a bit, they're probably not gonna grow any more. So you're probably not getting extra growth from it. You're just training yourself very slowly

and you're not getting a good base of eccentric strength, you're not getting any more hypertrophy, you're not getting any more maximal strength. Um, if anything, maybe getting less'cause you're gonna limit the concentric. So there's all kinds of things people are doing with slow or at least moderately slow eccentrics that are just

Not useful. Very extended eccentrics I see as well, but again with a weight that you can lift. So it's like a six, eight, or ten second eccentric. I see that a lot. And again, they say the same reason that they're building eccentric strength. And similar to the three or four second eccentrics, you're just not targeting what most people think you're targeting with those.

You know, it's like if if you've got a fifty percent recruitment level because you're lifting a weight or you're lowering a weight that you can lift, then ultimately it's really not going to do anything in terms of um kind of stimulating the top half of the motin at pool.

One question just ties into that, was directed at me and I haven't answered it yet because I keep thinking about it. And I think the answer is I don't know. Um, it th it's about what we would expect to happen if we did eccentric training and what we'd what would we expect that to do to the stretch shortening cycle. Because the interesting thing about eccentric training is it does simultaneously increase tendon stiffness by quite a lot, the same way that any heavy strength training does.

But it's also going to give you a really big increase in the um the act what we call the active stiffness of the muscle relative to the tendon, so the ecentric muscle strength. So I would imagine that we might find that when somebody finally does this, they'll probably discover that eccentrics probably keep the strength shortening cycle more or less where it currently is. So heavy strength training tends to make

make the stretch shorting cycle a lot worse by stiffening the tendon and making it harder to pull around. Apply metrics do the opposite. They don't really change tendon stiffness that much. And um you know, they tend to increase active muscle stiffness by a lot, so they allow the muscle to pull the tendon around. So if you're listening to this and this is kind of, you know, um news to you, then please go back and listen to our previous episode.

we talked about the straight shorting cycle. But um just tying today's episode into last week, I think aesthetic training probably or, you know, the the correct definition, the supermaximal esent training probably more or less keeps the straight shorting cycle in its current state by essentially increasing both things at the same time. But I'm not sure about that'cause nobody, to my knowledge, has ever tested it. So

something else that is is worth bearing in mind. So yeah, so slow slow slow lowering phases and normal strength training is what m a lot of people think is, you know, equivalent to eccentric training. As you described, it's not. Uh you're seeing that a lot. Are you seeing anything else out there? You know, that is truly horrible.

Um, and again for the same reasons that the the normal slower eccentrics are not gonna be doing anything. That is gonna be recruiting roughly half the the amount of muscle fibers and also at that point just creating a ton of post workout fatigue. So I've seen that recommended for athletes when they're going through quote unquote hypertrophy phases. You're not gonna get more growth like that.

you know, you or I know that. And you're not gonna be doing anything good. You're gonna be so fatigued from that if you're doing it multiple times in a week, especially for multiple muscles, or you know, muscles that are pretty easily damaged. hamstrings, chest, things like that. I mean I've s yeah, I've seen it recommended for hamstrings, hamstring curls to start increasing eccentric hamstring strength. And it's just it's not doing anything useful. And it's just gonna make you fatigued.

For the lifting and for the sport training. So that that's a really bad one.

It's a really interesting topic. I think it's one of the most applicable physiological concepts to athletes that doesn't really get talked about in the bodybuilding space. But yeah, e-centrics in that sort of scenario where you're dumping huge amounts of calcium ions into the muscle fibers.

is a really good way of converting all of your type two X fibres into type two A fibres. Yeah. So um that is again, you're gonna make the athletes slow by doing that. It's really not going to be a very effective way of preparing them for pretty much anything that you want them to do.

capabilities for strength and that down the line. And a lot of times what you'll see and what the athletes will see in that is that they get really, really fatigued. Their performance is terrible for weeks and I've seen coaches say that that's because the uh the time to express the adaptations from that block of eccentric

is delayed. And so yeah, it's it's not delayed. Adaptations don't just, you know, happen all of a sudden three weeks later. You're just terribly fatigued and your performance is, you know, awful for weeks and weeks and weeks. Or however man how long it takes to recover from this giant block. So I I've seen that one quite a bit.

Which is that there is no need to devote specific training sessions to one quality, one athletic quality like eccentric strength, and there's no reason to devote specific blocks to one athletic quality like eccentric strength. That really not a good way to construct a training programme. It's really not a good way to construct a single workout.

We can absolutely construct workouts with all the athletic qualities that we're working for, or most of the athletic qualities we're working for. We talked, I think, previously about including high velocity stuff as warm-ups or brief isometrics in warm-ups We've talked about, you know, including

plyometrics into existing workouts. We can include eccentrics, supermaximal eccentrics into existing workouts. We just put them in the end. Because once we've done them nothing else is going to happen really'cause they're too fatiguing. So but we don't need to devote

either single workouts to eccentric strength and we don't need to devote single training blocks to specific types of strength. I don't know why people still do this. I think it was one of those eighties things that people started to, you know, kind of get this idea that Each individual worker had to be devoted to a specific

you know, kind of quality. Or blocks had to be periodised and you had to devote all your time to working on strength or speed or whatever it was. And it's like that's just not how the body works. Adaptions are below the surface and some adaptions straddle multiple uh qualities, you know. So, you know, we want to be looking at it from an adaptive point of view and then going from there. And uh the reality is most of this stuff can just be done.

in the same workout and if we as I say, structure it so you've got your high velocity stuff speed work first, maybe depending on w how you're treating your plymetrics it's either going to go second or it's going to go penultimate before supermaximally centric.

than the heavy strength training in the middle. So I would generally program speed followed by heavy strength training followed by plyometrics because I'm thinking most of the time using plionetrics for eccentric purposes and then finalize I mean if somebody's using a plyometric to gain speed in their concentric phase, then it's a speed exercise.

How are you gonna use it? So if you're gonna use it f if I'm using it primarily to create eccentric strength uh improvements'cause I want a stretch shortening cycle improvement, I'm gonna do it second to last before I do any of my eccentric supermaximal stuff. So it's gonna go speed, strength, plyometric, and then finally

A supermax eccentric. And that's that you can do all of that in one workout. And you can do all of that all the time. You know, this this block idea just needs to go. It it's just not gonna get anybody.

It's not helping anybody and I think it's it's holding people back'cause you end up just really having to reduce your frequency of everything that you're doing across the week. Or you end up doing what you were describing the athlete that you uh were talking about a moment ago, where they're doing like You know, eight training sessions in a week.

you know, a hundred percent detail, you know, all the time. So thank you for being on the call with me again, Rob. It's been great to have you. Uh always a pleasure. We will be back next week with another topic which we haven't decided on yet. So we shall probably decide on that in a moment. But uh we'll see you guys.