¶ Introduction to Throwing and Punching
Hello and welcome to the High Performance Physiology Podcast. I'm Chris Beardsley. I'm here with my co host Rob Mauseri and we're going to talk about throwing today. But obviously because throwing is a catch all that covers pretty much any kind of fast rotational upper body movement. And we're also going to be talking about punching'cause that's Rob's kind of speciality when it comes to this kind of sort of activity. So quick introduction to throwing and of course punching.
Essentially,
Throwing is one of those movements that depends quite heavily on the proximal to distal sequence. like vertical jumping, like uh sprinting and that kind of thing. And interestingly though, and kind of um one differentiating factor that throwing has from um other kind of movements is that it really has two proximal to distal sequences. We kinda have
the the initial sequence which starts at the hip and goes down into the ground, then you get a rebound effect that comes up through the r through the body, and then you have that kind of torso rotation, um obviously sort of shoulder movement and then the throwing action itself. So essentially we've got something that really divides itself relatively easily into two sections. We've got the section that involves that looks actually quite similar to a a vertical jump or a single leg vertical jump.
And then the section that is much more familiar to us as a throwing action, which is the rotation of the torso and then the movement of the shoulder and the arm.
Now
As a result, you can kind of sort of split training forethrowing um into those two kind of sections. You can think about it from a
a vertical jumping point of view or you know the lower body section and you can think about it from the upper body point of view which is the rotation and the shoulder movement. Now the set that sort of the first section when we're thinking about the the lower body, the vertical jump analogue Essentially, when we looked at vertical jumping last week, we talked about how the starting biomechanical kind of determinant of vertical jump height
was the impulse, the vertical impulse relative to body weight. Essentially we're trying to create the biggest impulse to get us off the ground and we need to have a lighter body weight in order to maximize that jump height.
Now the interesting thing about throwing and of course other similar movements like um you know striking things and punching is that you actually want to stay on the ground. You don't want that lower body movement to launch you into the air. You actually want to stay on the ground.
And this is interest this is one of those areas that comes out a lot when you start looking at things like racket sports and golf uh golf especially,'cause you're obviously not trying to move around the court. You're actually standing pretty still when you're taking your shot. And the interesting thing about that is that you tend to see that baseball is another great example actually.
But you tend to see that the heavier players, the heavier athletes, have this advantage when they're in those situations and it's because they're able to stay on the ground more easily and produce higher forces because the you know, obviously the body weight is sufficient to keep them on the ground for a higher
impulse that they're generating. So you basically think of the first part of a throwing action very is very similar to that of a vertical jump, except with this critical difference is that you want to stay on the ground, you don't actually want to launch yourself into the air. And that's one of the reasons why heavier athletes are always gonna have that advantage when it comes to throwing uh, you know, golf, uh any kind of uh activity like that, baseball, uh punching, those kind of things.
¶ Lower Body Strength for Power
The second half the and and okay, so in terms of training for that, we can obviously just kind of bring the information we talked about last time in terms of vertical jumping. We can really just bring pretty much all of that into the throwing uh discussion except
we're gonna be training with a more force oriented uh kind of um uh sort of perspective because we are trying to be slightly slower because we don't want to end up in the air and of course, you know, it isn't one of the it isn't quite as fast as it is would be as it would be for the for the vertical jumping situation. In terms of the uh upper body, obviously we've got that rotation of the torso, and then obviously we've got the the shoulder and the arm movement.
And in terms of proximal to distal sequence, we're going to be thinking to ourselves, Okay, so hip and then so in terms of the upper body sequence we're gonna have starting with the hip which is the connecting piece.
I'm gonna have the torso rotation. So our strength work is gonna be more around the hip and the and the and the rotation of the torso. And then pretty much anything after that is largely gonna be more kind of at the speed end of the spectrum. So this is kind of where we start to see why a lot of
strength training programmes that are supposed to support throwing activities or punching activities aren't necessarily going to work as well as people think they are if they're based around things like the bench press because ultimately those are going to be, you know, providing a lot of
strength development w where we don't actually need it. We w we need the strength development at the hip and the torso rotation, not so much at the shoulder and the arm. And I've actually lost track of the number of times I've talked to coaches and and and um Both sports and strength coaches who are working in high level sport
with people like baseball pitchers and other athletes that are throwing and they've said they just don't even bother with bench pressing at this point because the athlete is generating all of the kind of energy from the lower body and the torso rotation. And what's happening at the shoulder and the arm is is literally just kind of that kind of communication of that energy down the chain to the point where they're actually able to release the object that they're throwing.
Really, for me, throwing is completely unlocked by the appreciation of the proximal to distal sequence. Everything else we kind of talked about last week when we talked about vertical jumping because that's kind of the first half of the movement is just pretty much identical. Obviously there's differences depending on the way in which the throw is
performed and you might end up with either two legs or one leg on the ground. It doesn't really matter. Point is it's going to pretty much follow the same kind of it sort of rules as we described last time, with the only difference being we actually want to stay on the ground. And the upper body part is the interesting bit'cause we have that torso rotation, well we have the hip
followed by the torso rotation and then followed by the the shoulder and the arm movement that we're very familiar with when we're looking at throwing. So that's basically all we need to do to cover the kind of basics of throwing movement.
So with that said, Rob, can you talk us through some throwing uh well, some strength training programs that you're using at the moment, both for athletes uh that are, you know, needing to be able to throw and also athletes that are needing to be able to develop punching power.
Yeah, for sure, Chris. So I mean like Chris said, we'll probably stick more to punching for this one'cause that's more my area of expertise. Um bring some other guys on in the future to talk about throwing a bit more in depth. Well yeah, so one of the things I've found when I'm writing programs for improving punching power is a lot of guys are gonna look at the program on paper and think, especially for the lower body aspect, that it
similar to maybe a bodybuilding program, except the sets and reps might be a little different than they're used to. That's because like Chris was just saying, for the hip, you know, similar to vertical jump work, the hip work is going to be very heavy, very strength focused.
So generally there, you know, depending on equipment, focusing a lot on we say it all the time, the hip thrust is a great one. Very minimal muscle damage, not really too fatiguing, can load it up nice and heavy. People don't have access to that or you know, just for some reason can't do it. I do like, you know, maybe a high handle, trap bar deadlift, back squats, different ranges, you know, maybe a four inch squat.
or maybe some kind of like partial range box squats, something like that as well. Uh for the the knee, you know, work around the knee a lot of times using things like leg presses and other machines. I think a lot of guys typically are surprised by that. You know, really like hack squats, really like leg presses, pendulums, those kinds of things if guys have access.
Um, they kinda look at those and think that it's, you know, again, more of like a a bodybuilding thing. But if you're looking at just needing to be very force dominant with the lower body You know, you can get that, whether it's a barbell, whether it's a machine. It doesn't have to look quote unquote functional. I think a lot of fighters especially try to look at things that kind of look
like the action and obviously we know, doesn't need to be that way at all and it probably shouldn't be that way. So if you're doing like hack squat and a leg press versus a back squat, you don't have to worry about the coordination demands of the squat, someone's skill level, anything like that. You can just put them in a machine and load them up nice and heavy. And train exactly the way you need to train without worrying about making them like a great squatter. So I really really like it.
Such a that's such a great point. I mean just this is emphasizing the the exact difference that we see between the vertical jump and the throwing motion, which is that we can think of that first half of the movement as being more force dominant and therefore unlike the vertical jump where you're kind of thinking, oh well, you know, I need to think more force dominant at the hip and maybe the knee is more balanced between strength and speed.
actually for throwing, you kind of thinking, well actually the whole thing is pretty much force dominant really. Very much. So you can kinda lean more and and obviously punching as well. You can lean more into that sort of strength idea, which is cool.
you know, that you've got these kind of uh sort of more conventional, you know, sort of hip and knee balanced uh strength training exercises with trap bar deadlifts and and hack squats and that kind of thing. And also I mean And then the second thing that I think was was pretty interesting about what you said there was just the choice of exercise selection.'Cause, you know, from as you say, from a bodybuilding or a strength point of view
if if if we're not trying to get better at squatting, then largely speaking, hack squat, leg press, you know, kind of trap bar deadlift, they're all kind of in that same zone. They're all kind of doing the same kind of thing. You know, and you know, especially when you've got people who are using their shoulders a lot for throwing or punching, I'm not sure back squat is necessarily
Something I really need. Okay, it's of course there's gonna be some people out there who say, Oh, no, no, no, never had any problems with with shoulders doing a back squat. I'm like, Okay, cool, I I did Yeah, you're not going to be able to do that. I was pretty miserable with my shoulders when I was back squatting a lot. You know, and I think i again it depends on the individual, it depends on their mobility, and you might say, Oh well, throwers
Never have any problems with shoulder mobility. Okay, fine. I don't know. I mean that's just not my area. But I think it's a really important point that you know, it's like if you have those options available to you, which we do in the context of the model we're describing, why not make use of them and then you don't necessarily run into those problems
With the people who experience those problems. So that's that's really cool. I think that's just two things straight away that are jumping out of the programs that you're describing. Can you can you kind of Give us just again I and I ask you this all the time and you've answered the the same way every time, but can you give us a little bit more around, you know, sets, reps, reps in reserve, those kind of ideas, just so that people know them uh who haven't maybe heard you say that before.
Yeah, for sure. Um when it comes to stuff, depending on the exercise selection, if it's something like a hip thrust, you know, a contracted position focus, not very damaging, stuff like that, I may program those for a few sets, you know, two to three, usually two to three, honestly.
'Cause you you're not gonna get too fatigued from those. It's not gonna create a lot of post workout fatigue. And then you use lower reps with it, you know, anywhere from like three to maybe six,'cause I'm generally going for a really high output on those.
really not creating a ton of muscle damage or anything like that. So I like to program those for a few sets. Other things, you know, depending on if I'm using like a hack squat or maybe a leg press that has a little less ROM, something like that. And generally, you know, one to two sets, especially if I'm hitting a bit more like
peak tension and kind of a stretch position with a hack squat or something like that. Same thing, you know, lower reps, low to moderate on those generally. So four to eight is usually a good range. Both both of those, whether it's the hip stuff or the knee stuff. Um a few reps in reserve. We talked on the other podcasts about mitigating the effects of fiber type shifting and all these things.
So I'm not like taking guys to failure. And I think a lot of guys and fighters who are trying to maybe max out a weight class or move up a weight class to help their punching power and things like that. Or to just, you know, because they're not appropriately sized.
they think they need to do this hypertrophy work to failure, you know, even sometimes past failure, stuff like that. And it's just not necessary. You know, you leave a few reps in reserve, still get a a few good stimulating reps per set. And you're gonna grow or, you know, at the very least, probably maintain all your muscle size in these kinds of programs. So yeah, just a few sets, a little bit more with the contracted position focused stuff, and then leaving a couple reps in the tank.
all the time. Like you don't you don't need to be pushing yourself to and pass failure'cause then your sessions for the sport, you know, through the week are gonna be bad. If you're doing multiple strength sessions, they're not gonna be as good. Your progression won't be as good. So really just being being careful with that.
Well. And again, just just picking up on what you said there, in terms of number of sessions per week and being aware of the sports training sessions as well. I'm guessing you're probably kind of in the same zone as we've talked about before. You're programming two sessions a week most of the time. If people have capacity and they really need the extra strength work, you can push it to three, but generally speaking that's kind of the ballpark I'm guessing.
Yeah, and I mean especially fight training is is super, super demanding. I mean it's been a been a long time since I had any of my amateur Muay Tap fights. But, you know, still coaching a lot. My brother was, you know, fighting pro for a very, very long time at the highest level. And those training sessions are just you know, they're grueling.'Cause you really have to be in just incredible shape.
cardio wise and just kind of, you know, mental toughness, stuff of that as well. So if you're doing these sessions, they're usually pretty long and there's a lot of stuff you gotta do in them. You just don't have the time and the the recovery capacity for more than a couple or maybe three good strength sessions in a week. You're just gonna be tanked.
Sure. No, that makes total sense.
¶ Force-Dominant Torso Rotation
So that was basically the kind of the uh if we divide throwing into these two separate halves, that was the lower body kind of half. Now obviously the hips connect into the upper body, so we're kind of starting our um
torso movement with what's happening at the hip. But moving into that, what are you programming at the moment? Well, let me back up briefly because uh let me just intro this before we start talking about this Uh what I want to say what we both want to say actually I think we've had discussions about this, what we both want to say is
Want to thank people who've been sending us videos of their uh yeah, this has been fantastic. We're really happy about this. Please continue to do this. Sending us videos of their kind of invented exercises or the exer exercises they developed, you know, variations of exercises they developed for torso rotation. And when we say that, we're describing the fact that
We want a force dominant torso rotation exercise. Most of the traditional way or the traditional way in which the torso has been trained in S and C is kind of power based. It's kind of, you know, medicine ball slams. It's rotational stuff. You get a little bit of cable work occasionally, but most of it is incredibly unstable.
So, you know, we want to thank people who've been sending us their suggestions for how we could train, you know, the torso in in a in a more sort of force dominant way. But, you know, in terms of what you're doing at the moment, Rob
Walk us through what you know the strength training stuff would look like, you know, just the strength training side of things, not the kind of the the speed end of the spectrum, but just the strength training stuff for the kind of torso rotation and if you're doing anything to the shoulder, what you're doing there as well.
Yeah, for sure. Um for the trunk rotation stuff, uh like Chris said a lot of people have sent a lot of good setups. Um one of the ones that I really liked that I started using I'd seen from a guy not too long ago and it was Basically if you're doing a cable trunk rotation, imagine instead of standing up straight
you just bend over so you're roughly up parallel to the four, cables uh at the side of you. Already then you're gonna get a good amount more stability. You'll notice the load that you can use in the rotation is
quite a bit larger. And then from there you can add, at least if you have one, maybe like a dip belt with some extra added weight on there to keep you more stable down to the ground. And then you'll notice you can use a ton of weight with the cable rotation. It works out really, really nice.
So just just kind of uh asking for clarification on this so that people can visualize it. Obviously when we're when we're uh normally doing a uh a rotational exercise, the cable machine might be off uh to one side of us and we're kind of uh twisting our torso. uh, you know, in that in that kind of um transverse plane rotating to to move the and and obviously the cable is coming from from that side of us.
If we're now kind of uh sort of facing the ground, because we're we're uh bending forwards at the waist. then obviously now the rotation obviously from our torso perspective is exactly the same but that you know from the per perspective of what the cable is doing that's slightly different. Does that change how you're setting the cable station up?
Yeah, I mean usually I'll change the the height of the cable to match so it's just more in line with where I
So it's all all you're doing is just moving the cable down so instead of being like kind of at shoulder height now you're obviously because you're bending at the waist it's more like approximately waist height or is it lower than that?
Yeah, usually usually round waist height.
Okay, cool. Now that's helpful. I think it's useful for people to be able to visualize because we haven't got the...
But yeah, it's uh honestly it's a good easy setup. And even without that, the added stability from the belt compared to just the standing rotation. you know, world's better. The standing rotation you see all the time, standing and even sitting I've seen. And really no matter what you do there, you can stagger your stance, you can bend your knees, you can sink in a little bit. It's just very, very unstable. And you don't wind up using Much weight at all.
I quite like the variation that we got sent where there was a guy who was in a split uh kneeling stance. What he got He's got a yeah, he got a I think it was a jump block next to him. Mm-hmm. And he was using that to create a lot of stability. And you could see that as he as he was moving, he was pushing into the block to keep himself in that that stable state. And I think that that kind of thing is really inventive. So that's really cool when we see those things because it's starting to
get to'cause obviously you could you could argue that it's like, oh what we need is a machine that will do all of these things. Yeah, fantastic. Maybe in three years time maybe in three years' time someone will build something like that based on listening to these podcasts. If I rant about it enough. maybe someone will eventually build it. But in the meantime, somebody's gotta kinda have uh, you know, a way of making this happen.
And I think, you know, your your kind of variation that you described there, the kneeling variation that we've uh just mentioned, those are really cool because they're giving people actionable ways. They can literally right now get a cable stack and get a setup and actually start to
play around with this stuff. And I think, you know, ultimately throwing is just another proximal to distal sequence movement and as a result we need that force much more proximally. Training, force, production more distally like people have been thinking about it from, you know, you know, historically just doesn't make any sense. Anyway, so, you know, kind of carry on. Sorry I interrupted you, but talk about you know how you're programming these these rotational uh exercises.
you know, I keep uh being a dead horse here, but again, same thing kind of sets in reps wise. It's usually two to three sets. Don't really need too many more. Low to moderate reps. I'm generally you know, you know, more moderate. I haven't played around with like triples and things like that.
I imagine it'd be quite difficult just at the moment until we can get until we can get a really stable setup. Yeah. You know, I think it's gonna be really
Like five to eight range is usually I find pretty good with those. So again, you know, don't gotta go to failure or anything. Nothing like that. And I don't I don't know if I'd suggest taking a trunk rotation quite to failure anyway. It's probably not gonna be the most comfortable thing. Yeah, a couple reps in reserve, moderate reps.
But I've I've gotten to quite like those, been programming those with one of my uh one of my boxing guys and then my brother and I will be adding quite a bit of those into some of the the group training programs we run. So that'll be really good working out some cool stuff for this upcoming year for the guys. But yeah, I know you mentioned it, but I think people really do have the idea that especially for punching power, the the speed is so important.
But when when you look at that force aspect, you know, you compare it to like golf and tennis and that. The trunk rotational force, you know, guys who are punching, if you measure the force velocity profile and they have a much higher level force even than golf and tennis and that. And you know, it's just below things like
kayaking and rowing where there's a lot of resistance. So they do they do produce a ton of force. Yeah, they move fast, so the the gradient of the profile is maybe a little more shallow, but the overall force is super high. So you really just gotta focus on that instead of just kinda hucking literally hooking things at a wall.
Oh yeah, we've got to create that kinetic energy somewhere and I think, you know, basically what we're trying to describe here is that throwing and punching is about creating kinetic energy with the lower body And then uh obviously transmitting that through the hips into the torso, adding more kinetic energy with the hips and the torso to the extent that we can. And then obviously the rest of the body is kind of moving more into that velocity into the spectrum. So, um
So that's kind of the the the the strength for lower body, strength for the for the upper body. Obviously, you know, because of your expertise in punching, you have also not only got the s the S and C side of this, but you're also aware of how that kind of bridges into, you know, kind of the the the the sports specific, more sports specific velocity type training. So talk us a little bit about that.
¶ Optimizing Speed and Sport Specificity
Yeah, so the stuff you can do kinda like in the weight room is really I mean, I keep it super, super simple. It's more, you know, just like your standard kind of med ball throws. Um, I do like, you know, kind of skipping into throws of them doing throws at the wall, stuff like that, just to get more velocity. You know, you take a longer stride, take a skip into it, you get a lot more speed out of that.
Uh I always tell people to be careful of the weight that they're using if they're doing like, you know, lying med ball throw and stuff like that. Cause you'll notice re really fast if you go from like five percent of your bench weight. up to even, you know, ten percent or so, the slowdown is is absolutely massive. So just this is a very heavy weight.
Absolutely. This is one of those things that really, really grinds my gears because it's like I think strength coaches are almost programmed to just try and add load to anything that moves. It's like just Just like understand that we're dealing with opposite ends of the spectrum on the force velocity profile here and that kind of adding load is just taking you away from the if if anything, it's like
If anything, we wanna actually do the opposite. You know, like we were talking about last week with
Somehow like a an as assist in you know.
Or or like in terms of, you know when when people are trying to throw implements or they're uh you know, it's like can you find a way to make it lighter than the thing that you would normally you know, so can you throw a tennis ball instead of a, you know, a baseball or something like that? It's like I'm and I'm not the person
I'm not the right person to come up with those this is why, you know, I'm not the guy who's inventing new exercises for people to do. I'm just trying to explain how the physiology and biomechanics works and th there'll be some kind of person with a more engineering type mindset who will come up with some really cool solutions. It's like great, fantastic. And we'll help
you know, popularize those if we can. But yeah, it's just like in terms of thinking about that force velocity uh spectrum, can we make it easier rather than harder to try and move faster at that end of the uh end of the spectrum. So yeah, I mean like I think there's definitely a role for medicine balls, but ultimately um I think we've just got to be aware that uh we're trying to push the velocity of the of the movement rather than uh the the force production. And it's this horrible temptation.
in everything that we do. It's like can we add load? And it's like that's not the point. But in terms of the more sports specific stuff, you talked me through before we jumped on the podcast today you were talking uh about a few kind of drills uh that the guys are doing with with the heavy bag.
Yeah, I mean so a lot of people and I you see this ever and ever, they want to improve their punching power and they wind up doing really, really goofy like sports specific drills, so you know they're punching with weights. They're, you know, maybe punching with weight and sometimes releasing it, which is only slightly less terrible.
Um and really if you look at a way that the way that a lot of the best punchers train, um, kickers, stuff like that, they're in the gym practicing their pad work, their bag work, with just like single hard shots. Or maybe a really crisp combination where it's two punches, you know, maybe three, always practicing as hard as they can.
as fast as they can and taking like, you know, a good bit between to reset. They're not kind of throwing endless shots back to back or tons of combinations all in a row if the the goal was training to hit hard You know, sometimes they'll be doing it for cardio, you know, that's fine if it's at the end of a session. But if you're actually training it like early in a workout to try to improve your speed and that with your punching and try to hit harder, just keep everything
Literally as hard as possible, every single shot. You know, you're just trying to like crush the pads, crush the bag. You want if someone's holding pads or mitts for you, you just want to hit that as hard as you can and make sure that they're feeling it.
through the mit. Um, you don't want to be doing just kinda throwing things, you know, willy nilly and just, you know, whipping punches and whipping kicks over and over. So just be be very careful with that. Don't fall in the trap of thinking like you're gonna get better at punching by improving how tired you do or don't get while you're punching. You can you can do that with other things. That's not gonna help your your punch with power or speed at all.
So again, less is more and the execution uh is is critical and as you're saying, we're putting it actually at the beginning of a workout rather than later on. And that's a really interesting point I think because
Often when you're kind of looking at the way people are structuring strength training programmes, especially in this kind of context, they might be like, Oh, I've got to get all of my strength training stuff in and then I'll throw some punches on at the end and I'm like, No, no, no, no, no. If your purpose was to actually create a speed stimulus, uh you know, you actually want it at the beginning because
Everything else is just gonna kind of obliterate the ability to kind of uh create those adaptations that are gonna help you, you know, produce improvements in speed related adaptations. You know, you know, pretty much all of what we're saying here is directly applicable to um, you know, kind of a lot of the um sort of racket based uh activities or, you know, baseball uh hitting
golf, striking, whatever it might be, throwing, pitching, anything like that. All of those activities are fundamentally going to work in exactly the same template. They're just going to have slight differences in terms of the specific speed movement perhaps.
Um, but largely speaking the lower body strength training, the torso rotation, the hip work's absolutely identical in all of those situations. I think like you were saying at the beginning, you know, people like to really analyse the biomechanics of the movement that they're really interested in. They like
you know, how can I create a movement that replicates that do the movement. I mean, you know, you're already doing the movement in your sport, so it's gonna give you kind of most of that already. You know, what we're adding really is the ability of the core of the body. The hips, torso rotation, and in the case of throwing obviously we've got the knee as well because we're more force dominant in the lower body, to add that kinetic energy that then allows you to express the really high velocities
at the shoulder uh to create either the throwing or the striking or you know the punching or whatever activity is that we're generating. So I think that's that's hopefully been a really useful introduction to this this kind of throwing upper body rotational movement.
¶ Debunking Ineffective Training Methods
I don't think we talked about this before we jumped to the podcast, Rob, but have you seen anything really silly that people are doing at the moment that, you know, we can we can kind of describe to people in the audience?
But when it comes to combat sports, I have to do that.
Yeah.
I'm silly. And uh a good buddy of mine, Adam and I, we have been back and forth on on these things all week actually. So a good shout out to Adam Doothy, who is an awesome coach. You guys should also check out on Instagram. But anyway. We're looking at things the other day and one of the ones we saw was um end range isometrics for improving punching power. So if anyone's seen this, definitely don't do it. I will describe it here in a second.
So basically you stand in the position that the end of the punch would be. So if you know you're throwing a a straight right hand, your arm is extended, you're turned into it, whatever. And then from there the guy had his athletes just. pushing into a pad with that right hand as as hard as they could. Um, same thing with uh with the left arm. He had someone mimicking throwing like a left hook and driving their left hand into the pad as hard as they could and just along isometric
I don't know why anyone would ever think that that was gonna increase your force production in a punch and especially, you know, make you faster or anything like that. And he had a bunch of gobbledygook reasons for why it would work. But it's definitely not gonna work. You don't need to be doing some kind of ISO at the end range of a punch'cause you need to be working out producing force, you know, earlier in sequence.
Approximately not distilling. Yeah, you you're literally at the opposite end of the spectrum.
The poor opposite end. Yeah, it's so silly. That was that might have been the most egregious one I had seen this week. I guess uh quite a few others actually. I had seen people talking about core training for combat sports, for punching and that.
Actually that's a really good point. If we could do one thing with this podcast uh series that we do, if we could do one thing, if we could convert people to thinking instead of thinking about core to thinking about torso rotation. I think that would be an amazing contribution to the S and C community. If you could like get people to think about you're not thinking about this this kind of core stability or
anti rotation, you know.
anti rotation. It's like actually thinking about how do I produce force to create a rotational movement because actually there's, you know, kind of a rotational component in many, many activities that we do.
So, you know, and and the proximal desistal sequence is the skeleton key to understand why it's so um important because it allows us to create that kinetic energy that goes down the chain. So I was just thinking as you were describing that, I was thinking if we could literally just get people to think about You know, using torso as a rotational kind of action rather than just as a a weird kind of this magical kind of core stability anti rotation nonsense that people like to talk about.
The core does a lot of things. It doesn't just, you know, stand there rigid in uh especially in athletic movements. So yeah, another one I've s I've seen in terms of core training, well, a couple of things, all from the same guy who of course we don't name names. The idea that for some reason farmers carries were an incredibly effective core exercise for fighters. And uh the reasoning was just that
They work the whole body. You know, not really very good reasoning. And obviously you're trying to improve punching power, punching speed, things like that. that's not gonna do anything for you. And that was the context that was mentioned. You know, if you're doing a farmers carry, I don't know, I kinda have a thing against farmers carries for the most part,'cause they're an exercise that is doing a million things at once and therefore really
Nothing very well, yes.
Yeah, you just train a billion muscles. None of them really get any high levels of recruitment or growth or you know, the adaptations that are gonna give you strength and that. So you're just kinda walking around with heavy weights to get tired. So if you're if you're training for combat sports and that I probably would suggest other things. Another one on the same lines was it wasn't because it works the whole body, but it was uh training your core to again, you just mentioned resist rotation.
People had you know, guys doing fighters doing pull off presses, half kneeling, so not even with the knee on the ground. And really if you're doing like if anyone's not familiar with a pull off press, You have a cable that's lined up at the side of you. You press the cable out and you just hold it there. So you resist the rotation back in towards the cable stack. Again, just like we mentioned with the standing cable rotations where you're actually rotating.
It's an exercise where you can't use very much load at all. If you do half kneeling, where you're for some reason kneeling down but the back knee is not even on the ground, it's just inherently even less stable. So people for some reason have gotten the idea that like with these incredibly unstable movements that you have to resist that rotation, it's gonna really effectively train your core. It's just a very light loaded movement that's not doing very much at all.
Exactly. Exactly. I'm I'm I'm a big critic of that exercise. I really don't like it at all. I I think if we could just get rid of that and do proper torso rotations would
No intact.
Would be a million times better. It would be really, really effective.
I would not use that. Ev I mean I haven't programmed one in probably eight, ten years and I would not. Trying to think of some others'cause there was there's a few I sent you there was Another one. So I had uh someone mentioning for and I think we mentioned this in the eccentrics podcast actually, but uh mentioning that for fighters to improve plateaus and strength and hypertrophy and improve their power and all these things, they should use eccentric training.
Um, and the idea was that it would give you increases in recruitment. I mean, which it does if it's super maximal, but you can get that plenty of other ways and aren't so fatiguing, and it would give you more muscle size than regular training would, which is not the case for sure. And it's also going to leave you incredibly fatigued for your sports training. There's really you gotta have a very specific reason to use eccentric
for combat sports, for punching power, things like that. I don't really see any good reason if you're worried about increasing motor unit recruitment, stuff like that, to give you access to faster muscle fibers. Those kinds of things. Way better off using just heavy strength training for the muscles that it's relevant and then, you know, really fast movement training or some ISOs, you know, whatever it may be. Stuff that's not gonna leave you just
crushed for the sessions. If you did, you know, for some reason some kind of eccentric training for the lower body, um, you know, you're just gonna be tanked for a whole week if it's super heavy and you do too much of it. So I don't I don't really see any reason for that for punching power at all.
I I th yeah, I th I think eccentric training would be pretty low on my list of things to consider for either vertical jumping or throwing. I think In certain situations, if you have a particular throwing motion that has a really kind of pronounced wind up, you can kind of start to maybe play around with it a little bit for some of your kind of more interesting cases.
But I wouldn't be starting there. It wouldn't be like I wouldn't be building my program around. I think what you've described today with a kind of lower body s sort of classic heavy strength training, you know, some torso rotation stuff. I think that is gonna be ninety percent of what actually helps any of these movements. I think as I say, there might be some specific situations where a little bit of targeted eccentric training could be interesting.
But it's absolutely not gonna be where I start.
As you say,'cause I know I've seen it with um with baseball pitchers and stuff like that. Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. This huge wind up kind of situation. But you know, for punching you don't have that.
I mean, I'm not in that lobby.
You'd be telegraphing kind of so horrendously that people would just be able to walk out of the way, you know.
And I've seen yeah, I've seen the center training for the upper body as well. And in that case, I mean you're just making things slow. Slow, slow, slow. There's no reason.
Yeah, I mean again, people I think get they g they buy into a couple of the minor physiological aspects of eccentric training. where they think that adding sulcomos in series is gonna make them, you know, kind of have a higher muscle fibre shortening velocity. And that's really debatable actually. And we can talk about that another time in more detail.
realistically, when you're adding uh soccer mass and series and you're also adding customers, which is what e centric training does, you're not really getting the benefits that you think you're getting from adding from a fibre velocity shortening point of view. You're not really getting those benefits as effectively as you think y they are. And also you're obviously tending to get fiber type shifting happening more
Easily could see.
A lot of calcium ion accumulation. And so ultimately it just doesn't really work the way people think it works. And that even the motinic recruitment side of things is kind of limited to recentric contractions because of various coordination factors.
So it it's not doing what people think it's doing. Um they they get kind of I think seduced by some of the minor little physiology bits and pieces that aren't actually working quite the way they think they're working when you look at everything in context. So Definitely would always look at things from heavy strength training and high velocity training point of view in both vertical jumping and in throwing and of course as a result in things like punching.
¶ Episode Wrap-Up and Next Steps
as well. But as you said, as we've just been hinting there, we have got a whole bunch of colleagues and friends that we would kind of love to bring on this podcast and get their views on specific things like baseball pitching, golf especially we've talked about. That would be great to have a guest on.
You know anyone who's into like shot put, um, discus, anything like that. I know I've had a couple of messages about people interested in you know, people that specialize in that. Yeah.
would be again one that would be f fantastic to to get some guests done in the future and and just kind of thrash this out with them. Um so but just in terms of the real fundamentals of of this, we've covered that today. I think we've hopefully provided enough information for people to to get going if they're interested in incorporating some of these ideas into their
training programs, whether it's for basic throwing, whether it's for punching, whether it's for anything else, whether any kind of rotational upper body activity. So let's call it a day there. That's been uh a fantastic episode. Thanks for thanks for that, Rob. Yeah. Welcome. And we will be back next week with sprinting. So that will be fun because that really does change the game a little bit. So hopefully you guys will join us