20 Strength qualities

kind of where this information comes from. It goes back a very, very long way. There's been a lot of interest in um the way in which we produce force across the entirety of of the force velocity relationship all the way through from the very slow end where producing very, very high forces, through to the very, very uh kind of fast end where obviously producing very, very small forces.

Now, basically what we want to talk about today is the idea that has been popularized for a very long time, as I say, there's there's a lot of history here. Um, the idea that you can divide the force velocity curve in two sections and then describe strength qualities in each section. So we've been kind of um behind the scenes gathering a little bit of information and we're going to give you two separate uh kind of

um illustrations that people are using today. I think one of them uh the first one I'm gonna give you is the more historical one. Um we didn't actually go away and and track it all the way back to the source like I would uh want to do, but um it is I think We see this all all over the various different places on social media, so we think it's probably the the original one. Basically it's starts with maximum strength.

at the uh kind of f force end of the force velocity curve. So um around about sort of ninety to a hundred percent of one point max. And then it goes to uh something called strength speed. So this is your kind of second uh kind of strength quality on the force velocity curve. And that's around the eighty to ninety percent of onward max strength speed.

Um the next one in the middle is a very large bracket. It's power. Uh it goes from anywhere between uh kind of thirty up to eighty percent of one root max. And then after that you've got uh speed strength. Which overlaps with um kind of power output. Um, so anywhere between uh kind of it says here on the chart I'm looking at right now, thirty to sixty, but I would guess, you know, maybe it has a sort of slightly uh kind of lighter end than that, but I don't know.

And then finally you've got maximum velocity, uh, which is anything less than thirty percent of one route max. So that's just the chart that I've got in front of me at the moment. I think probably varies a little bit across other places, but fundamentally I think the terminologies are probably fairly kind of consistent across the uh social media uh kind of sites that I've seen. So maximum strength, strength speed, power, speed strength, and then maximum speed or maximum velocity.

Um, the other one that uh we were talking about before the podcast um has slightly different terminologies. They have absolute strength as maximum strength. They then have uh acceleration strength in there. And then after that they then go to the strength speed that I've already mentioned, but then they go straight to speed strength instead of having power.

and then finally they finish up with starting strength instead of maximum velocity. I don't like those terminologies quite so much. I think they're less descriptive of what we're actually seeing on the force velocity curve. But fundamentally the point is that what we are describing here Is ultimately just um that the strength that the force velocity curve has been divided into different strength qualities. Now

In terms of terminology, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with giving names to stuff. I mean like I don't have an objection to naming different parts of the force velocity curve if you want to do that. what's a problem is then claiming that we can then train each of those strength qualities.

independently and implying that there are essentially therefore different adaptions underpinning each of those qualities. And that's fundamentally untrue. So Basically the bit that I'm gonna do before we uh start talking about practical stuff is just to explain why physiologically it's not possible to say that each of these strength qualities are different in any way, shape or form.

because fundamentally they actually all rely on exactly the same underlying adaptions. And they are basically the adaptations that underpin maximum strength and the adaptations that underpin maximum speed. Now just as an illustration of this

Uh and if you've already uh kind of listened to our episode on power, you will know this already. In fact, we mentioned it in the very first episode that we did on strength, speed and power. Basically power is the multiplication of strength and speed together. So by definition, mathematically

you can say that you can't improve power without improving strength or speed. It just can't do it. So when somebody says, Oh, I'm gonna improve power, I'm like, okay, well which way are you gonna do it? Are you gonna improve it by strength?

Or are you going to improve it by speed, or both? Because ultimately there isn't a way that you can go, I'm just going to improve power directly. I'm like, well, mathematically, that is clearly impossible. So ultimately we can see straight away that in the middle of the force velocity curve you've straight away uh strike out power. But fundamentally all the other elements on the curve are suffering the same issue because there aren't any more adaptions. It's like

I'm like, which adaptation do you wanna go for? Like persuade me that you've got another adaptation that's happening, you know, and we can talk about it. But fundamentally we've got a list of maybe sort of six or so adaptations that underpin improvements in maximum strength.

Um, you know, things like coordination improvements and antagonist coactivation reductions, recruitment increases, you've got hypertrophy and psychomogenesis, you've got cost mare addition making natural force transmission better.

And you've got tendon stiffness if it's relevant in the stretch shortening cycle variation of the exercise that you're doing. Um now if you then look at speed, you've got stuff again like coordination and technical activation, you've got recruitment, you've got firing rates.

And you've got mussifier shortening velocity. Um so ultimately all of those things underpin the gains in either strength or speed, and any point along the force velocity curve is going to depend on any of those adaptions to m uh, you know, greater or lesser extent. But fundamentally, the only way you can actually make an improvement at any point along the force velocity curve is by changing things uh in those two categories under maximum strength adaptions or maximum speed adaptations.

Um and then obviously that means that there aren't actually independent sections of the force velocity curve because there aren't any other adaptions that only influence each section of the force velocity curve. Now, I would argue that this is a absolutely fundamental uh kind of observation in physiology that implies that strength and conditioning professionals should go back to saying, Okay, so we're gonna focus on strength adaptions, we're gonna focus on speed adaptations

And everything in the middle kind of is going to take care of itself. But there is this focus, as we say, that people are starting to uh kind of get caught up in the idea that you can divide the force velocity curve into sections and train each individual section separately, with the result that people end up training in a whole bunch of different kind of uh say rep ranges, but you know, kind of percentages of one rep max.

you know, in order to obtain all these different qualities and essentially end up doing a lot of training that they don't actually need to do. So um that's basically the physiology that I wanted to run through. That's the introduction. So I'm gonna throw it to Rob now.

Basically, Rob, you're obviously not training kind of all of these different speed strength or strength speed or power or uh you know kind of acceleration strength qualities. And what are you actually doing instead?

I I hate to tell everyone, it'll probably be v uh very boring, you know, super simple. But if I'm trying to target um an increase in, you know, power that's transferable, not just coordination specific to the exercise and the load or the or the movement, whatever it may be. Um we'll say I'm starting off from the speed end of things first. Um if I'm trying to tackle improvements at maximum speed, it's gonna be the stuff we've always talked about.

Unloaded jumps, you know, unloaded movements gonna be the the best there. Um the chart said, you know, maximum speed up to about thirty percent ish of one rep max, which obviously if you're working with thirty percent of one rep max. you're not capable of hitting a maximum speed. So that's one of the first things I really like to push, you know, really drive home to people.

is that above an unloaded or, you know, assisted movement velocity, you're not hitting a maximum speed it's impossible. And you know, 30% sure it feels light to you. It's gonna feel light to your athlete. But it's never gonna be max speed. Just not at

tool that we've got of actually making a difference to a tr an athlete that's already familiar with unloaded movement training. You know, I mean I think assistance is definitely massively underrated. I've been talking about it a lot um kind of with my uh mentorship programme um kind of um clients recently. I think it's really, really important.

So um absolutely critical importance to have that maximum speed. And that then ties in with what you uh mentioned just when you started out your kind of description a moment ago, which is that you put the speed stuff first.

You actually start out the workout with the speed stop because the any kind of fatigue that you develop any point in the workout is going to immediately stop you from reaching high levels of velocity because velocity is the most sensitive kind of outcome we've got to fatigue being present. And so suddenly you see that reduction in speed, you're not now going to stimulate the adaptations you want. So unless you're putting the speed stuff first in the workout, you might as well not do it.

they wanna use it, they think it's gonna work. But you do something like a like a French contrast where you have all these different things in a quick sequence, and really the only thing that's giving you any adaptation at all is very likely the first

you know, everything in that sequence and then everything afterwards, you know, jumps, over speed jumps, whatever it is, is just too fatigued to do anything. And even if you know, people will always tell me obviously that they'll still see some improvements. Well yeah, if you have someone who for whatever reason hasn't been training appropriately and they're and they still have some room to make

you know, improvements in power outputs due to increasing strength and all these things. I'm not ever gonna tell someone that it's like impossible to make some kind of an improvement. But if you wanna make really good progress and you wanna actually train the adaptations and make, you know, the most progress. you can't just be hanging out doing kinda weird things like that.'Cause at a very, very early point you're gonna hit a point where you're not gonna develop further.

directed strength training workout. So I was thinking about how do you really simplify for somebody um the process of building a strength training workout to support athletic performance. And I basically said, look, there's just four things that you need to worry about

And actually only one of them is gonna need volumizing. So the other three are really, really easy to program. This ties into what we were saying previously about how you can train pretty much every quality that you want to train for athletes in any any strength training workout you do. you want to do. You don't have to have a speed workout and a power workout and a strength speed workout. Yeah, whatever else work out.

You can actually just basically say, Okay, I'm gonna do my speed stuff, which is gonna be a couple of reps of each thing because you don't really get benefits from the other repetitions that you're doing. Again, this idea that, you know, we need some kind of fatigue to be present to stimulate an adaptation is absolutely The opposite of true when it comes to Absolutely opposite of true. So um we're gonna do some speed work to start with and it's gonna look like a warm up.

We're then gonna do some uh of the maximum strength stuff,'cause that's the stuff we're gonna volumize if if we need to. So okay, fine, there can be m more stuff in there if it's necessary. Then you're gonna do some plometrics. Now people really bag on me when I say this and they say, No, no, no, no, you don't do plymetrics.

that they're in the workout, you want to do them early. I'm like, hang on a minute. You haven't walked through how plyometrics work. Pliometrics work by creating eccentric strength that pulls the tendon around. So it's an eccentric training exercise. It's just a fast one.

So you have to put it later'cause you're going to get that fatiguing effect and you're not going to suffer so much from what comes previously because you're not getting that same negative fatigue impact as you would, you know, in a fast movement situation. You don't have to worry about that. So basically we've got the speed, then the strength, which is the volumized bit, then you've got plymetrics, then you finish off with a couple of reps and again

bracketing like we did with the high velocity stuff at the beginning, your eccentric stuff at the end is again just gonna be a couple of reps of each thing. You're not gonna be doing like um, you know, crazy volumes.

Five by twelve. Five by twelve is it That was the one that used to I know that was the one that used to come up in the Nordic studies at the very beginning. I was like I'd still be I'd still be suffering from that if I'd done that. Um So yeah, basically that is the high performance physiology kind of um workout template for athletes. Basically four things. Or you can do. Really, speed.

there, then strength, maximum strength, which is all of your strength qualities really. So speed is a separate thing, then you've got maximum strength and then separately, then you've got a stretch shortening cycle. If you want that, I mean you don't have to have that. I mean it's one of those things drop in and drop out and

It doesn't matter. And finally, you know, ma maximum eccentric strength,'cause then that is its own um quality on its own. So um that would be there you go. Uh people now have the hype. Physiology method of strength training for athletes.

Um, so I mean one, it's pretty fun. And two, I've been doing a bit myself for my own vertical jump, so I figured I'd chuck it in with the group, see how the gains are. Um but yeah, I mean my own jump very good at the moment, so I'm pretty pleased with the result.

uh could benefit from in order to maximise the have you ever played around with that? Have you ever kind of used like for example, you use a uh you s you sort of do your vertical jump in a squat rack? And you can put an elastic resistance arc or or a string or something and just give you tactile Q for your counter movement depth.

And then give yourself a tactile cue like five centimetres lower um and just see if you h see if it actually helps you beat your actual current counter movement jump height.

You've changed your technique and therefore you're now producing uh you're lifting heavier load for the same hip extension torque or whatever. So technically from a strength definitions point of view, yes, you have got stronger, so don't kind of yell at me. But from a kind of transferable strength point of view, nothing's changed.

Um, this is the same thing. So if like you kind of do use this hack and you f find that your counter movement jump goes up a couple of centimeters or whatever, then don't go around going, Oh wow, suddenly I'm now a better athlete. Well no, it's just You taught yourself how to do the test better.

But uh before that we were kind of just talking how you are currently programming, instead of programming um training for all these different strength qualities, you're just programming speed and strength. And so far you've described to us How are you programming speed, you're doing assistant stuff, you're doing at the beginning of the workout, you're not doing tons and tons of reps. Um and then you go on to your I guess you go on to the maximum strength stuff.

Um, maybe some clusters. Actually have the guys doing clusters at the moment. So again, using a five rot max load. Singles or doubles, leaving, you know, quite a bit in the tank, so you're not hitting super slow bar speeds, avoiding fatigue, all those things. And just all that geared towards, you know, improving coordination, getting you the strength gains you want, and a bit of hypertrophy.

'Cause I've I know you and I talked a bit especially about clusters lately, some weird protocols where people aren't using um really heavy enough loads. So if you're using like a twelve rot max load and things like that for for clusters, which I've seen, it's like

you know, even if you get a little bit of strength pain, like a little bit, um if you're trying to drive strength and hypertrophy and all these things kinda at the same time, you know, you still gotta have a close enough proximity to failure. So if you're using a five rot max load, few repres you know, free reps in the tank, you're always gonna get that. When you start pushing clusters and strength work and that stuff into the in the territory of like eight, ten and twelve rot max loads,

you know, at a certain point, even if you're getting some coordination improvements, they're not gonna be as load specific in that as they would be with the heavier loads. And then you're gonna be dropping off on the hypertrophy end of things. So if you run that kinda too long term

you know, at a certain point you're either gonna be not increasing muscle size at all, or you know, very likely losing it if you're just not stimulating it much in in the first place. So you really just gotta get the loading right and then from that point just a few sets. few reps progress it slow and don't uh you know plateau yourself by trying to add arbitrary amounts of weight each time. Um just keep your reps in reserve where you want.

And you're really minimizing the fatigue. And it really does not matter if your rep if your rest periods kind of move around a little bit because every single rep is valuable. You know, as soon as you start using a load that is lighter than that. Then absolutely the wheels come off. I would say do not do clusters with moderate loads or or even light loads.

um, really not a good idea'cause um the only way you're gonna get the stimulated gramps is by getting into the fatigue territory and then you're basically gonna try and stay there. Because as soon as you come out of that team territory, you're then gonna be losing kind of the ability to create the stimulus in really

you're not getting a bunch of other stimuli that you would get from heavy loading. So honestly, I think uh I would have a very hard and fast rule. I would say do not play around with clusters unless they're using heavy loads. It just is not worth it. Um I'm sure that some people can make uh it work with, you know, very diligent kind of uh you know, kind of watching of rest periods and monitoring and tracking and all that kind of thing and but why? Why go to all that?

So you're just doing a ton of work, which obviously some people kind of really get excited about, but you're doing a ton of work that isn't doing anything good for you. It really isn't. Um, you know, you're just burning up uh energy that you could be devoting to other places. And these are the same people probably then turn around to us and say, Oh no, no, no, we don't have time to do don't have time to do all four kind of things in the same workout. Can't do stream.

And strength and and and and straight shortening cycle and eccentric strength all in the same workout, there's not space. I'm like, and you're the guys who are doing like all this cluster stuff with moderate loads and getting really tired doing nothing of any value.

So yeah, don't don't don't do clusters with moderate loads. Anyway, yeah, so cool. So you're doing a lot of heavy load stuff, repsing reserve or clusters and trying to avoid the fatigue. Um I guess you're focusing on and this is actually another point. I guess you're focusing on the more kind of proximal muscle groups to take advantage of the proximal to distal sequence and then getting that benefit for speed as well from your kind of uh

ha you know, if you actually look at the biomechanics for sprinting you'll see that it's limited by maximum hip flexion angular velocity. And ultimately your engine is ninety eight percent of your engine is Um the combination of strength and speed in hip flexion and strength and speed in hip extension. So then you ask them what they're doing in the training programme. And like okay, you could kind of get your head around a hip.

sort of hip extension strength training bit. They're like, Oh yeah, we're doing some maybe it's kind of okay, um, but it's probably not right for us to But even if it has, like, okay, cool, well you you've ticked you've ticked the hip extension box. What about the other three boxes? And they like they look at you as if to say, Well, mm, that's difficult and I'm like, Yeah

find out how to do something that gets you in the direction uh that you're going. So like with the torso rotation, you were, you know, kind of looking at ways to create really strong, you know, heavy torso rotation exercises in a gym that doesn't have that kind of sort of

you know, torso rotation machine. That's so that's kind of a very, very easy thing to do. Uh if you've got one, but if you haven't got one, then suddenly I oh okay, now we've got to get creative. Or okay, great, let's get creative because that's the only way you're gonna solve that problem. Um But I think it's not really valid to say, Oh well, it's difficult, therefore we're we're not gonna do it and we're gonna do kind of medicine ball kind of throws into the wall and train

Otherwise you're not going to get the result that you want. It's that's that's true of life as well as of strength training as well. You know, that's just how it is. So cool. Okay. Um so yeah, I was just mentioning that proximal to digital sequences because um you kind of get is a way to again hack the

kind of movements that we're doing because the proximal segments will always be working closer to the force end of the spectrum than the velocity under the spectrum, uh they are going to hit their maximum angular velocities at a much slower velocity uh in the movement context, a much slower velocity than the more distal segments. So we can

throw more heavy strengthening stuff at that particular part of the body and still benefit across a wider chunk of the force velocity curve close to uh the maximum speed movement that we're trying to do. Cool. Um okay. Um basically that was the speed and the strength elements of the two ends of the force force to cover. That's what you're doing. So you covered the entirety of the force force.

velocity curve in two sec sections of the workout of the two sections of the four section method that we've outlined today for people.

trying to, you know, train with the idea that you're accelerating through the lift and hitting some exact kind of arbitrary percentage in that, uh, you know, in total for the lift. And that is gonna, you know, inherently improve whatever range on the force velocity curve you're working in. And like we just said, you know, it's it's not. It's not doing anything really, you know, at best if you're Somewhere in in the in the middle ish it's giving you some kind of maintenance issue.

Stimulus of strength and not really much else. Um you're getting good at moving that exact load.

bench press from a pin just starting there or, you know, start from the bottom of your squat or something like that, you'll you'll notice pretty quickly you're not moving quite as fast. So if you're trying to stimulate speed, not really gonna happen. If you're trying to stimulate max strength. You're not using a heavy load or anything. It's not really gonna happen.

You literally don't need to do any of that stuff at all. You can literally just train for maximum speed, get the same adaptations with no fatigue really going on at all. No loading, no worrying about all of the kind of setup and all the fuss. literally just train for maximum speed with a bit of either assistance or, you know, kind of unloaded uh sort of movements if you don't uh want to go down that route.

Um and actually get exactly the same stuff. So again, yeah, totally uh totally true. The the stuff in the middle is really uh not really doing it.

Showing me the adaption, and everyone just keeps repeating the names of the outcomes or the names of the quadrants, the speed strength, the strengths of being like, okay, but what's sitting underneath here? What's physiologically changing? And there isn't a

It's just such a amazingly strange situation. It's it's I think it's one of those enormous blind spots that the industry has where they've kind of like repeated the same things so many times that they think that it's like representing real adaptations.

Even with power, I mean like power for me is the really big one because everybody kind of assumes that power is something you can actually directly manipulate. I'm like, guys, it's literally written like in the definition of the word power that you can't.

Um but transferable power outputs have got to come from strength and speed because it's written in the definition. Force times velocity equals power. So you can't improve it through any other method. And I really just don't get this kind of idea that people have got that you can train it separately. It's absolutely astonishing to me. But

of exercise science. And but now I'm starting to see uh kind of this movement of people who are talking more about ma mechanical tension and not kind of um always resorting back to this idea that muscles are broken down and built by bigger. So I'm starting to have hope that I might actually

reach, you know, kind of uh my deathbed you know, and the idea has gone away. But certainly I don't think that we're gonna see this idea that power, you know, can be trained, you know, separately from strength and speed going out. I think that's gonna be

Um, and ultimately you can do that all in a single session because most of it only requires very, very low volumes. So the complexity there is that you've now got a complex workout to kind of train. You're not training single qualities in individual workouts, so it does involve some complexity.

Really, um, you know, kind of other than that, there's not really um much more to say. I guess we do introduce the idea of approximatistal sequence, that makes things a little bit more complicated. So I guess those are the complexities that we would argue are important. Because everybody's got complexities that they think are important. It's just These are the complexities that are important rather than, you know, kind of other ones like dividing the force for us to go.

Seventeen different sections. Fantastic. So um Okay, that's probably good for today. So um hopefully that was all interesting. Um we will be back next week with another topic.