001 Strength, speed, and power

And we're going to talk about a number of physiological things relating to athletic performance and the strength training and other training methods that go into producing athletic performance.

“Now, I'm going to ask Rob to introduce himself in a moment before we do that. I just want to talk a little bit about the actual purpose of this podcast.”

Because what we've seen in the industry is that there's a lack of physiology backing to a lot of the methods of training that we see of the methods of training that people use. And there's this tendency really for people to talk about outcomes, talking about things like strength and, you know, sort of speed or power and things like that. I'll actually go one step below that and go, okay, well, what actually is causing those increases in strength. And there's an absolute world of information out there in the literature, which I've spent, you know, kind of half a decade, if not longer, gathering and putting together.

And, you know, it's so usable. It's really, really usable for actually helping us understand that.

And the purpose of this series of podcasts, we're hoping to kind of do one a week if we can, oh, short, not only, you know, talking for hours, but hoping to bring you a sort of a bite-sized package of information about how to use physiology to understand training methods for improving athletic performance in a range of different sports. And obviously, I'll bring it's that I've got and I've got Rob here to sort of bring experience from from the sports. He's been involved with actually tough to really really well because we've come from very, very different backgrounds.

So with that, Rob, can you give a quick intro to your background and what you're doing right now? Oh, yeah, thanks, Chris. So primarily, I work as a personal trainer and a strength coach out of Washington, D.C., and Tyson's Virginia, so really serving with the DMV area. And then my brother has one of our ups in New York's best Muay Thai Jins. He's actually considered one of the best American Muay Thai Kickboxers of all time. And so out of that, Jim, we work with tons of fighters and a megaize Muay Thai guys.

I'm some Judea two in that. And then in my own work in person, I work with a variety of Jen Pop clients and athletes football players, soccer players, volleyball right now, some semi-pro. And then some people that are just interested in getting better out, you know, golf anything like that, all those kind of fun like recreational sports.

“Yeah, if you want to start us off, go ahead, Chris.”

Fantastic. And that's that's that. That sports experience isn't really so valuable, you know, here because it's something that I have very, very little contact with. And you know, so be fantastic to get your perspectives on some of those things. So yeah, so the topic for today is going to be a pivotal when we were actually chatting before we came on this recording about how pivotal, how important this is going to be is going to be a real kind of reference episode for us.

Basically, what we're going to talk about is the overarching framework of how to think about strength, speed and power.

So these things are kind of talked about a lot in lots of different sports, because they're adding improved strength to improve, you know, points in this sport. I don't improve speed to improve points in this sport or they talk about power and how power has kind of good relationships with particular sporting performances.

“And just like, okay, well, these three things, how are they related to each other and how can we think about them physiologically?”

So basically, the first thing we need to understand is that when we talk about an increase in strength, increase in maximum strength, it's an outcome we've measured. So I tend to kind of label that as an outcome or output. Now, you won't necessarily see that terminology used a lot in it. In the literature, but I'm just kind of giving it a name so that we understand that it's not a physiological thing. Some people think that the light increasing strength like a computer game character is, oh, my computer game character has 91 points of strength. It's like an increased strength. It doesn't work like that. You can't find strength like that. Is it tested outcome?

No, so if I increase my strength, I test the increase and I show that it's increased fantastic, but how has it increased? Well, it must have increased by a set of adaptions that are sitting underneath that. So if I increase muscle size, that will contribute to the strength game. I improve my ability to recruit motinus, that will improve. And there's all kinds of different adaptions, and we'll do a whole episode I imagine in the future about exactly what improves maximum strength. But just for today, we'll just try to differentiate and say that the increase in strength must happen due to a series of adaptions, because the strength gain itself is not the adoption.

Sometimes you see in literature all kind of assume the strength gain is an adaption, it's not. The adoption is the actual thing that's changing that we have inside our inside our central nose is more inside the muscle attendant. Our as the strength gain is the thing we measure externally to show that those adaptions are happening. You can do exactly the same thing for speed, and just say, okay, well, speed is input, my maximum speed is improved, great fantastic. Well, how did that happen? Well, it must have happened due to these adaptions sitting underneath the surface. So we've got these things like strength and speed, which are fundamentally adaptions.

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

And speed obviously is just the fastest speed that you can move, fairly self-explanatory power is a little bit trickier. And power is the one that we're going to kind of hope, you know, break some people's kind of frameworks by talking about this today because power is the multiplication of strength times speed, a power equals force times velocity.

So the really important thing about that, when you're talking about outcomes versus adaptions, what you can see is that power is actually a second order up from strength and speed.

It's actually only ever going to be affected by more to playing strength. Sorry, by improving on the strength or speed, you can't improve power directly, you can kind of improve power in a test if you kind of get coordination improvements, but strictly speaking transferable power is never going to improve by anything other than by increasing either strength or speed. And that really is kind of one of our big take-homes that we want to kind of talk about today, which is that you can't actually, you know, improve someone's transferable power out, which by, you know, kind of trying to improve power directly, you have to go either down the strength or the speed route.

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

“But just in general, most people kind of probably aren't going to argue with you if you say the best way to improve strength is to kind of train with heavy loads and use high forces.”

It's kind of like that tends to be the best way to do those things. Similarly, actually, again, we'll do another episode in the future about this, but, you know, speed, you tend to get better at speed predominantly by working with those kind of really likely and unloaded situations and just moving as fast as you possibly can. But the really interesting thing about this then is that if you kind of go, well, okay, so power is a, you know, kind of a quality of economy improve by other increasing strength or speed.

You can't increase it directly. Then why do people train with these sort of intermediate loads that maximize power out? Well, when that isn't going to increase speed very well, it isn't going to increase strength very well. And that's, that's one of the, I mean, we talked about this, Rob, a long time ago, and I'm sure you're, your programs of, of kind of reflected that now.

You know, it's like, I do, I do see a lot of people, I'm going to train with 30, 30 percent of one max.

“I'm going to train for maximum power outputs on this particular exercise and might, well, what do you think that's doing?”

You know, it's like, it's not going to increase maximum strength very well, and it's going to increase speed very well. So, and you can't increase power directly because it has to be the product of strength and speed. So, you know, how, how is that, how is that going to work? And it's really interesting because there's this whole part of the research literature which is quite close to the, you know, mainstream view, which is that if you want to improve power, you train with a load of maximizes power output, which typically speaking is more or less halfway in between strength and speed.

Because if you look to power velocity curve, you kind of got this, you know, plateau, the highest point the highest power you can get is roughly halfway between your maximum level, unloaded movement velocity and the maximum is metric force. And that's just kind of math. And as a result, people are training as far as they possibly can away from the thing that will maximally stimulate speed. And all the advantages that contribute to speed gains and the things that will maximally contribute to strength gains, it's kind of like this perverse situation where it's like, if you could figure out a ways training the least effective way possible, that will be it.

You know, from a physiological perspective, and I know, you know, talking with you, talking with other people, you know, who have kind of tried to get people to understand this in the mainstream essence community. And you see, it's a really difficult, you know, heard the driver come because people are like, no, no, I wouldn't improve power. So I'm going to do, you know, kind of 30% to one or nights.

“So like just for a gunpockers, you're telling a little bit of how your program is now kind of moved towards kind of really polarizing you kind of using maximum strength and speed. Is that right?”

Yeah, you're much more working towards just one end of the spectrum.

And then prioritizing just one of the athlete needs of that, you know, given point of time, good example working with fighters recently, you know, you always run into a lot of old school stuff.

And in fights, sports and combat sports, a lot of things people try to improve punching power, punching speed, stuff like that. See, if all these old school ideas, like, you know, kind of around like the power ish end of the spectrum. We're doing like, they're punching with weights and things like that, even sometimes, like high rep punching from endurance, so that people who say you're your shoulders don't get tired of things like that. And then the other end of the spectrum, you have someone who might think, if you just, you know, bench press heavy, you just improve your force production at time.

The that is also going to get you where you want to go. Of course, you know, with punching things like that. Want to technique, a lot of things that go into it, mechanics and all that. But in terms of just like training, one end or the other or doing that kind of goofy thing in the middle where you're punching with very light weights and just making yourself tired. Really, you know, I primarily focus on a lot more for like punching speed in that like the unloaded end of the spectrum, just having people obviously going as fast as possible.

We're avoiding fatigue, good, crisp, like, you know, clean, striking techniques in that.

And then generally, I mean, you know, for fighters in that, the strength then you're going to be doing enough.

“You don't really run into too much where you have to like focus very, very heavily on improving like your maximum strength for the upper body limbs and that for punching.”

So yeah, you see, that's it all the time. Well, and there's there's so many things we could unpack in what you said there. I mean, there's the fatigue aspect, there's the motor there and the aspects and the interactions between those. And kind of proximal statistical sequences, I mean, you mentioned there. Are you thinking less about the upper body, more about the lower body and it's a huge topic for us to talk about in the future.

Or be this idea of proximal statistical sequencing and how that actually works.

In the context of athletic movements like punching, jumping, throwing all that kind of stuff and we'll do that.

Absolutely, we'll do that, but not today. So I just want to kind of pick up on one thing that you said, though, because obviously there's so much there, but I'm just going to isolate one thing. As I did it, you know, while there are some people who are thinking still that they can train for power directly, which as I say, you can if you're trying to improve power in a particular exercise. So like if you're doing Olympic weightlifting and you try to improve a weightlifting performance, then yeah, absolutely.

“You know, the load that you're kind of trying to make as much power if you want to move that to as close as the, you know,”

to your competition weight as you can, but because the coordination related factors are going to make a difference. But if you're trying to treat creep transferable improvements in power output, then you lose that coordination benefit. You can't really make that work. You kind of got to go down the strength of the speed route for the training outcome in order to create the power increase that you're trying to create in the athletic context. You didn't mention that some people think that you can maybe just do the heavy stuff, just train for strength and that will automatically increase speed.

And that's kind of like another thing that I want to tick off in this, in this first episode, which is this idea that, you know, oh, yeah, we can just train for strength.

And, you know, that will actually increase speed automatically because force equals mass times acceleration. So two things, the force times mass, force equals mass times acceleration argument really is quite easy to kind of overcome because basically when people say that, oh, yeah, we're just accelerate. But they're great to force and we can just kind of, you know, obviously, therefore move faster because the acceleration that we're creating is bigger because the force is bigger. The problem is that as you start accelerating and you start moving more quickly, the force you can generate drops according to relationship between your force and your max velocity as a steep line between your maximum force and your maximum velocity.

So we have what's called a very steep force velocity profile. Your maximum amount of velocity is actually quite slow, but you've got this enormous, you know, kind of level of force you can exert it to slow speed. Then as you start to move in your jump, for example, you start to hemorrhage, you know, force products and, because you're moving quicker and you're forced just tanks. It's like, you know, we do it before the podcast, it's like, people think that just because, you know, force equals mass times acceleration that they can produce massive forces at high velocity just because they can produce high force at this low velocity.

But if you produce a massive force to fast velocity, but to jump over a house, it just doesn't work like that. You know, you can't produce high force as a high velocity, you produce high force as a slow velocity. And then depending on your maximum velocity, your maximum velocity is high, then you can keep your force high as you start to get towards high velocities. And that's the interesting bit about having a high speed. If you've got a low max speed, you can't make your force continue being high for high velocity just drops to zero really really.

And of course that means you don't get to do very high velocities because your acceleration just drops as soon as you start moving. Now, then the additional point, of course, is that if your max velocity is quite known, you can't move faster than that. As you cross produce just won't cycle and faster. So you get to this kind of max speed and just kind of stop there. There's some really, really cool vertical jumping resource that I'll kind of cover in another episode, which shows this really clearly.

But people kind of almost subconsciously adjust their counter movement depths in a vertical jump to get their max velocities at the end of the takeoff phase. They kind of move their counter movement depth around a little bit to make sure they reach their max velocity. Because you don't really want to reach a max velocity before the end of your, you know, kind of takeoff period when you're coming up with the constant phase because you just be kind of, you know, burning energy and not really getting any faster.

And you just kind of wasting the time and not really jumping as high. The kind of point here is though that the whole F equals I may argue, which really is dead in the water. It just can't be made. It's not really a thing. However, there are going back kind of 20 years or so, 20 years, what year are we in? Maybe a little bit more than that. I'm getting all, you know, at least kind of 20 years ago, perhaps maybe even 30.

“There was some research came out that showed that maybe intent to move quickly with the only thing you needed to stimulate speed related to the lapsies.”

You could just move a heavy weight and then try and move as quickly as you can. And that would then trigger all the speed related to the lapsies. That was really interesting because it was kind of this day that came out to nowhere almost.

So it was kind of an interesting one. But it kept a lot of people's attention might skip to call point of view as because people kind of went, "Oh yeah, we can just do heavy squats and forget everything else now as I guess." Just do what you want to do and forget everything else. You know, but obviously the interesting thing was it did kind of create a whole sort of training philosophy where people just said, "Well, you just go train heavy and now that actually and as long as we intend to move quickly and train it specifically, that will actually produce speed related to the lapsies."

Now, physiologically and again, we can do an episode on speed later on, you know, but physiologically that's just not what it looks like is going to happen because we can see the stimuli that produce impairments in, I'm not sure what an velocity for example or recoding or any of those things that go into improving speed are very velocity specific. You can't create the stimulus for those the lapsies to happen and they're sure it's moving quickly.

Ultimately, radiology perspective will be how on a minute that study doesn't make sense.

The interesting thing is, the same research group actually did a follow-up study because the original moment was done as a sort of a within subject design. The problem with within subject designs are great for high-piratory studies. So basically, if you're going to within subject design, it means that one arm trains with one training program, the other arm trains with a different training program, and you kind of control the variability within your sample by, you know, kind of sort of, taking the variability inherent to the person out of your study, which is great for high-piratory.

Or a more strength-case though, because you've got the cross-education effect. So you both learn to get stronger in the same way. And so you've got this issue with the cross-education effect in the within subject design that they used in that original study showed intent.

In that second paper, wasn't it?

The second paper actually used?

“Well, I think it was a PhD student of the original research, yes, I think that's what it looks like to me when I read the blurb,”

and the, at this time, she was doing the experiment. So basically, the same thing. And the important thing was the follow-up was done as separate groups. Also, you had no cross-education effect, and they found that the training with a fast movement, and the training with a slow movement, both with the intent, to move through this possible, as to produce totally different effects out, or move the loss to, was a factor that drove the improvements in speed. So, what it can see is really that kind of flashing the pan's sort of idea that just intending to move as quickly as possible would produce to be ready to adaptions wasn't really valid.

The visual, as you never really supported it, data in ISE, Kinetics, never really supported it.

It was, I think, driven really by this, you know, kind of, I think the popularity of that study was blown up or proportioned because people wanted it to be true. Yeah, and it just isn't. So, you know, we end up with this sort of two sort of main arguments, as I say, the whole FAQ was an MA argument, which is literally just silly. And then, secondly, this idea that intent moved quickly, and that's totally valid. It based on a real study with a limitation that, you know, the research team themselves talked about, and actually went away and fixed.

“It's just unfortunate as the delay, I think, for about, figure how many years, maybe even 12 years before.”

Yeah, something like that, yeah. So, it was a big delay before the kind of the effects of the effects, but the kind of the sort of the reassessment of that issue without the limitation of the original study was done. So, you know, ultimately, you know, where we are is that, you know, speed requires generally a fast movement to stimulate those speed rates of the options. You know, strength requires those high force related sort of aspects of the work amps to produce an improvement to strength. The adaptions that drive that improvement to strength.

So, you know, we can see that, yeah, you know, heavy benching, I mean, I'll give you a bit not, because, you know, there's a problem with the digital sequencing to think about. But just take that out of the equation for a moment, you know, if you're just coming at us, you know, from a very kind of, you know, basic point of view. The heavy strength training is kind of doing this, the force aspects of it. You kind of want to add the speed stuff as well. And that will naturally improve transfer of power really, really effectively training for max power just isn't going to do that.

Because, you know, as I say, you know, you're training as far as you wait, as far as possible away from the thing from both things that you actually try to improve at the same time. So, you just wind up with like a nice sort of good strength maintenance program that doesn't really do that. And I think there are, I mean, I do, you know, I do think there are situations where I look a bit of power training can be really interesting, because as you say, you get a maintenance type of an effect, you know,

I mean primarily, you know, I think this is one of those things where I would probably think about using looking at a power training in season, perhaps. And maybe you've got soccer players and they've got really congested schedules that playing all over the place and doing so many things.

“A little bit of a power training probably isn't the worst thing in the world in those situations, because, you know, what else you're going to do is it's really difficult to do very much.”

But equally, again, there's so many things we can do in more detail and unpack all these ideas, but you know, when you look at things like detraining of adaptions, the neural adaptions don't detrain very quickly at all.

So it's like, you know, many of the things that we'd be looking to try and maintain, just won't really be maintaining that well by power training and many of the things we don't need to maintain, because that's going to stick around. It's like, why are we doing this?

“So again, we can unpack some of that stuff for a little bit more in future episodes, but you know, really the purpose today is to talk a little bit around this, you know, this idea of, you know,”

adaptions are different from the outcomes that we're testing, strength and speed, how their adaptions power doesn't. A power is determined by the strength and the speed, you know, you can improve either strength or speed, and that's going to improve power, but you can't improve power directly.

And then, of course, this idea, you know, that, you know, strength can't improve speed, because ultimately it just is one of those things that.

You know, it is dependent on the velocity that we're moving. So if you're trying to, you know, people are arguing this idea that you can, okay, I'm just going to improve strength, and that's going to be faster. But ultimately, they're not remembering that last strength, that where you've got changes in the velocity. Faster they go, the more the strength decreases if they aren't, if they don't also have the high level of speed in the, in the kind of the equation in the training programs. So let's talk a little bit more practically. Let's talk about, you know, swim the programs even right in.

I mean, you mentioned already that you've got, you know, kind of, you know, strength and speed components in your fighters programs. Talk about a different athlete class, give us some other examples. Yeah, I mean, another good example, a guy on work with Lately, an American football player, and, you know, already pretty, I would say, force dominant, big guys, strong guy. When I took over training him, he was, you know, looking at the program, he really didn't have any any relevant speed work. And the training that he did have was so focused on improving size, like just hypertrophy kind of classic.

I got hypertrophy stuff, you know, like even had some like supersets, visuals, things like that, because the whole idea which has got him, I guess, as big as possible. But, you know, he wanted to be faster, he needed to be faster on the field. And so, like, looking through the training, it was not a lot of like sprint exposures or anything to the week. No real job board or anything like that. And definitely, you know, due to the structure and the fatigue from the other things. No time through the week where he was going to actually be hitting, you know, max velocities either just not training it at all or just not capable of actually hitting it.

Like, when he was on the field or, you know, any time in the gyms, practically, I mean, it was pretty easy. First, you know, the focus was long.

It's like, you kind of, those, those kind of clients are amazing because they come to you and they give you their existing training program.

You look at it and I could just ask you to stop doing all of this and you get better on your own.

“I mean, it's like, that was, honestly, that was probably more than half of it was taking all the fluff out.”

You know, no sets of 15 with stretch physician marshals at the end. And just making kind of the most like minimum dose of each thing to start. So starting the sessions when there are some accelerations from work and job work, things like that. That's so important, that's so important. I mean, again, there's so much we can unpack here.

I mean, like, probably have to do other episodes on this, but like, you're putting the speed work first or straight away. That's, that's, you know, that's telling us that, you know, you're valuing that in a state where before we got further into work, I don't want to create a fatigue, so you put that in the beginning where you know that it's going to create that stimulus.

Yeah, just always buy itself.

Not really big fan of contrast training.

“And I know we've talked about that in your not either, you know, just, I mean, not the worst thing you can do.”

But at the same time, if you really want those speed adaptions, you know, you want to be as fresh as possible. And just have that right at the beginning of the session and then everything else after it. And then in terms of the strength work, you know, lowering the rep ranges. A few more reps and reserve taking time to let kind of, he'd run in the other program for, you know, weeks and weeks, months in fact. So kind of letting all that fatigue dissipate and then actually being able to express, you know, his max velocity.

I'm going to kind of went from there adding in a few more things, some more direct like sprint exposures, reforms, get the jumping in, you know, I kind of use that in the warm up also just as a test. Honestly, it was improving, you know, on the right track. If it starts going down, something is not good. Yeah, I mean, as I just can't, you, you, you, you, not only are you valuing the speed by putting it first in session, but you're also, you know, as you say, dropping the rep range to have your load, giving reps and reserve, because you're thinking about the next kind of training session that's going to come later in the week.

And you want to make sure that there's not postbook, postbook, opportunity, still there in that next session, because trying to avoid that presence of fatigue. Because, you know, ultimately, again, as we said, as I was explaining earlier, we would do free trips, so it's on, on things like speed in, in an exact, no kind of hard work. But for teague is one of those things that, you know, really does interfere with speed with data deductions, probably much more so.

If you're looking at this, yeah, you're looking at this thing from like a macro lens, you know, but teague doesn't really create that much. You're a problem, but, you know, she's really being very silly. You know, whereas fatigue, you know, kind of just obliterates the possibility of a speed or data deductions. It just, like, gone, I mean, it just isn't going to happen.

“I think that's a big reason why, you know, especially in the soccer kind of field, you know, like, the EU, especially in Europe, they really into the soccer.”

Have a lot of work being done on this, loads and loads of researchers and essence coaches trying to figure out how to make their athletes faster. And I keep kind of the case and just saying, how do you thought about making them less tired? It's like, no, we don't want to try that. We don't want to try that. We don't want to try that. We don't want to try that.

Okay. You know what is that with athletes all the time too, because they have so many of them love working so hard. Sure. And they think that those programs that, like, just run you into the ground, other programs that are going to make you better. And so often, that is just absolutely, you know, of course, not in the case.

Yeah. And you just, you're trashed and you're training, you're trashed in the season. And then, you know, you want to while, like, obviously, I'm like, overuse injuries and all that kind of stuff creeps up as well. Just don't think less of me. Absolutely. So, so yeah. So, you know, in terms of those programs that you're writing, you're thinking about speed as a priority.

You're putting it first and training session to avoid that. The problem within session, you're also thinking about between session fatigue and accumulation. So, you know, you're kind of looking at the rest of the work.

“I mean, how do you think about easy injury, though?”

So, like, you know, again, we've got an hypothesis we can do on this.

But, you know, like, one of the really big challenges for any essence eco, which is always like,

I got my athlete, I have identified that they probably do need some easy injury loading for maybe, maybe it could just be muscle strain injury prevention. Or it could be that actually, I kind of got a particular framework, and I want to, you know, maybe try and improve a particular physical quality. It could be sprinting, I mean, I think that probably does work. You know, so I do want to put some easy injury loading in there. How are you currently working around that fatigue problem?

So, a good example with the football player, actually, is using, like, any kind of eccentric, like, super maxies and ricks stuff for him, and for anyone really, always at the end of the training session. One of the very last exercises, so that the fatigue there won't interfere with anything else. And then really just kind of, like, absolute rock bottom volumes, just, you know, couple sets, one or two reps, couple times a week. Really, really just the minimum there.

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

And for him, yeah, it was maybe a bit of, like, hand-strain injury prevention. And then, of course, like, increasing sprint speed, it's kind of the goal. So, yeah, but just really just a couple sets of a couple reps.

And then just leave it at that, you know, you don't need more than just those first few reps anyway.

No, absolutely. I mean, and that's, that's a really interesting point. There's so many things where kind of introducing in this episode, I mean, although it would probably go like 30 episodes already planned out now as it resulted just talking about this stuff. Yeah, so, one, two really important things here is that, firstly, the, the dose response of most of the eccentric are related to that.

And so, you know, things like increases in classical length, increases in, you know, kind of, the motif of the improvement, improvements, the curve that are specific to the eccentric phase, which is a really fascinating topic in and of itself. But broader speaking, these intricate actions tend to be, you know, fairly non-responsive to volume. So, you know, we've got this kind of curve that we talk about for, say, high-perrophy dose response in conventional strain training.

You know, and you can kind of go up to, you know, sort of, four, five, six, maybe eight sets in a workout and still get, you know, e-counters would be a bit more benefit from that workout, you know, and that's, that's not thinking about what the week looks like for a moment, which is the singleization. You know, whereas e-centric doesn't work by that, it tends to plateau a lot earlier. So, you kind of don't really get, as you're saying, you don't really get much benefit from bashing, set-up to set-up to set-up to set-up to be centric loading anyway, so you might as well do, you just want to do sets.

And then similarly, within the set, if you kind of, and again, stimulating web terminology, hopefully, it's familiar to people on this podcast, assuming as we were joking before the podcast, probably, nobody's going to listen to this, apart from people who already know where I am. So, it's not really going to be unfamiliar to most people, but just in case it isn't stimulating,

basically, when we're doing a normal strain training set, it's kind of elastic, five reps,

you know, in a set to failure, or if you're doing sets with reps from reserve, you just chop one of the reps off one. Whereas e-centric loading, the stimulating reps are at the beginning, as long as it's a maximum effort,

“because basically the only thing that's happening, you've got max effort, max recruitment from the start,”

you've got a decent level of attention from the start, it's all that's happening, you're getting fatigue mechanisms, and you can just carry on creating more fatigue if that's what we want to do, it's not very helpful, but, you know,

you could just do singles or doubles or whatever, you know, and I do know some people working at reasonably high levels in sport,

in various countries in the world, you know, who've come back to me, having kind of worked with me a little bit, in the past, they've come back every sort, so often they'll be every six months or a year and said, "Hey, you know, we've got that, you know, in order growing down even more, you know, and we're down to like single reps and, you know, two or three sets, and it's still working really well."

“So I think, you know, this is really interesting possibility that we could just really bring those,”

our volumes down to incredibly low levels and get reasonable kind of results. And, you know, the data do support that, you know, some really low volume Nordics studies out there, showing pretty much the same effects as higher volume Nordics studies. Whether what the frequency needs to look like, I'm not entirely certain of this some interesting data out there.

You know, but ultimately, I'd be happy with twice a week, but maybe people can make it well with once a week, I don't know.

And there is some data suggesting it might work with once a week, but ultimately qualitative responses, which is trying to bring the volumes in reps and set down as low as we possibly can, and that sounds like what else we are doing. Yeah, and usually I guess that going twice a week, I don't know, I don't really have an experience doing it with, you know, someone just wants a week, I don't know how well that would work, so I'm not going to speak that. No, exactly.

But on the top of it, if you send your training as well, on the top of it for a future podcast, but some of the stuff we've gone over from proving constraint and grab one strike, would be a fun one.

“Oh yeah, absolutely, and there's lots of, there's lots of very, very cool things we can talk about, but so that's basically kind of the shape of things I think.”

And what we want to do was introduce this idea of outcome versus adaptions, introduce strength and speed and how power is different from strength and speed. And just kind of really talk a little bit to how strength can't improve speed, you know, to the same extent that speak and improve speed.

It's be training can improve speed, it's just because, you know, ultimately strength is just doing something different.

It's improving max for production, which doesn't apply in high velocity situations anywhere near as much as it applies in low velocity situations. And then, really, you know, hopefully we've given some good examples for people to understand how those things might apply in the context of a couple of different strength and programs.

“You know, I think that's, that's been a good episode for us, I think that's a good way to start this project.”

Cool. So, we're at any more kind of rambling that's called it today there. That's been a great experience, Rob, thanks for that. Yeah, well, I'm hopeful. Yeah, and hopefully, to all our listeners, our new listeners out there, hopefully, we'll see you all again next week.