002 Maximum strength

I'm Chris Beardsley. I'm here with my co-host Rob Marcerry.

“And we're going to talk about maximum strength today.”

So this is the second episode in our series.

I'm hoping to run for as many episodes as we can. But this is the second episode. We talk about maximum strength today. This is building on our conversation from last time when we talked about basically maximum strength and speed and power.

So obviously by, you know, kind of definition of covering all those things in one episode. It was pretty high level. So the plan today is to talk about maximum strength and just focus on that thing. Just focus on that outcome and talk about all the adaptions that go into it. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to kind of chat through the kind of mechanisms.

But instead of me talking for like 20 minutes and then giving Rob a chance to talk again, what we're going to do this time is we're going to do this time is actually split it up. So we're going to talk about a mechanism and then we're going to kind of go and discuss some of the ideas of training programs and how that might work.

“So I'm very quickly going to describe the mechanism and then I'm going to throw the ball over to Rob”

and he's going to kind of, you know, sort of illustrate that and go back and forth a little bit and see how that works, you know, for you guys. But obviously, you know, we'll be looking for feedback as we go through and these episodes. So hopefully, you know, we'll get some audience ideas of how we can make this better more useful for people who are training athletes or even athletes themselves.

So basically today, talking about maximum strength, we're going to go through

you know, sort of five or six mechanisms and we're going to go through the central nose to one's first and then the peripheral ones. Afterwards, that's just kind of that's my, been my way of explaining it for a number of years. It kind of works for me. So we're going to start out by talking about coordination and move on, talk about antagonist

characterization and finally, moaching equipment and then as far as the peripheral structures are concerned, we'll talk about obviously high perch feet and you can go to rap, soccer mode, dentuses into that for the purposes of today and then we'll talk a little bit about lateral forehand machine inside muscles and also tendons stiffness changes very briefly because that's something that will probably have to punt to a separate conversation because

it's just a bit difficult for athletic populations to talk about tendons stiffness in one kind of isolated way. So it's talking to the beginning. We've got obviously a way all of these things are ways of improving a maximum strength test. So if we're doing, say, for example, a back squat or a bench press as I'm

maximum strength test which is pretty common in a lot of best and C studies, then what you might find is that that improvement in that back squat, one right max or three right max, whatever it is you're doing, will actually improve simply because of the practice effect. So we'll actually see an improvement in what we call a motor learning of that athlete in respect of the exercise they'll get better at coordinating it.

So ultimately, it's not because the muscles have got stronger and it's not because the brain is sending more central motor commander muscles, it's literally just because the overall coordination pattern is better. So in other words, you can kind of think about it as being an improvement in efficiency. So they're actually, when making the exercise easier, so the weight lifted is bigger,

but the reality is the athlete hasn't actually got a stronger muscle or a bigger level of

activation of that muscle is literally just that the movement that we're practicing is getting kind of better in the respect of the efficiency or as I say the motor control of that exercise. So basically, this is a fairly well-studied area. There's actually an entire body of literature devoted to motor learning.

And generally speaking, of course, we're looking for a practice effect, so we're looking for ways to maximize the efficiency of the movement. And of course, practicing is one of the best ways to do that. But of course, getting coach input into the movement to fix small problems, small errors, and getting obviously things like a visual feedback in the form of video, a great way to improve

the motor learning situations, and then on the negative sides, you know, kind of we would probably want to avoid a fatigue situation because that would kind of degrade the quality of movement and fail to then allow the improvement to happen. The reason that all of that works is because it's the quality of the movement in the moment, in the actual repetition that drives the improvement.

So if I kind of think about it as like, if I've got a particular level of skill and a squat, and then for whatever reason, maybe because I've got a good coach working with me or I've seen some people back on a video that I can see what I'm making, or I'm, you know, kind of just in a particularly on fatigue state, so my movement quality is high. Any of those kind of situations, I might just manage to do a slightly better quality repetition

on one particular day. My brain will notice that, and it'll then upgrade my existing motor programs to kind of reflect that superior performance. Now, there's other stuff we could also talk about, there's kind of external focuses of tension and things like that, but ultimately all of them kind of work the same way. They're all worked by improving, you know, kind of motor performance. Rob, are there any situations in the kind of programs that you're writing in the moment where you're

“actively thinking about improving coordination? Can you kind of walk us through any of that?”

Yeah, for sure, Chris. So really, you know, coordination is really interesting, especially when it comes to power lifters or even like calisthenics athletes, you know, you got to prove your dip, your chin up, like various specific movements and motor patterns. So if I'm programming

one of my girls actually was top 10 all-time in a weight class, really great lifter.

So if I'm trying to improve coordination, obviously you're going to place exercises first in a

session, you know, you're talking a little bit about fatigue and avoiding that. So when you're in that fatigue state, your brain is not going to be able to adopt that better motor pattern. So you don't want to place an exercise later in your session when you've done another thing's prior, you know, starting off with it. Obviously, power lifters are starting with your bench squat.

“You don't live depending on the session, whatever it may be. And then if you want to improve the”

coordination specifically at, you know, that load you're going to be working with and that kind of bar speed using heavier loads, staying a bit shy failure. You don't want to be getting too close and grinding out too many reps. That point, you'll kind of wind up and grin and maybe a worse motor pattern. So just staying a bit shy, you know, two to three reps is kind of like the sweet spot I found for spending a lot of time as I'm going through a program. I'm going to tend to have people

go super, super heavy, you know, must be like peaking for a test for a competition. And at that point, maybe some heavier singles, you know, closer to max, things like that to get even more specific loads of specific coordination of that. Yeah, that's a pretty good point because that's a really good point because there is a low specificity of coordination patterns. So one of the really cool things that we've been able to kind of pull out to the biomechanics research in the last few

years is that if you look at the ratios of different joint talks, for example, in a squat and any multi-joint movement, but the squat's probably been the best studied. You can actually see that the ratio of hip to knee, just as an example, the ratio of hip to knee, kind of moments, talks, changes as we increase the load. It turns to become slightly more hip dominant as you kind of increase the weight in those exercises. So there is definitely a low specificity associated especially

with, you know, kind of powerlifting performance, which I think is really interesting idea for that kind of practice prior to competition with those heavier loads. I think it's a really, really good point that you are kind of just kind of sailing straight-bast at the jumping end. No, no, no, it isn't really good one. And then, you know, a lot of times like old school, I guess when I was coming up lifting and initially coaching people would use like

much higher volumes and things like that and learn and loads, sort of like eight, 10, 12, and those exercises. And if you know you're trying to improve coordination in that, you're going to be much better off using those lower rep ranges and not going as close to failure and things like that. And then, of course, also that effect you have described there, that issue that you've just described there also impacts on the overall program. So if people are doing

a higher volume of just sets, but also if they're combining that with, say, higher repetitions, if you do that then you're probably not going to be arriving at the next training session in a sort of an unfitied state. And of course that then means even when you've put your kind of exercise that you're trying to improve the coordination of it, the beginning of the

“workout, it's still not going to get any better. And I think this is just so important that we”

communicate to people that this coordination improvement is probably kind of a hit or a miss. It's like, you know, if you don't quite get a superior motor program than the one your brain has already got programmed, it's like, well, why would the brain bother changing the one it's already got? So you kind of got to kind of arrive in that almost perfect state really to get coordination improvements, which I find it. So strange when we see a program that's designed to improve

coordinate or intended, not designed, intended to improve coordination. And there's just a billion

reps in there and you're looking at it going, honestly, this is not going to work, it's not possible. Yeah, you do, you know, you do your squat per 4 by 10 and then you do a leg press for 3 by 12 and things like that, and you see it all the time. And yeah, it's not going to improve coordination, like you said, and then the next session, like you say, you're going to get to be toast. Nothing's really going to happen. So yeah, just really, I mean, I guess programming

“wise, there's so many things that you should avoid, you know, not so much, sometimes what you should”

add in. It's pretty easy to, you know, work with lower reps, every loads, be careful about going to failure. It's wind up, you know, if you want to do too much, and then it really will take away from that session, the next sessions. And then you're mentioned in coaching as well. So obviously, you know, if you're working with a coach, the chance you're working with a coach because your newer, your technique is not as good or maybe you just aren't a more experienced lift for you.

You want to just keep improving it. Someone watches footage of you, you know, they had just barpaths slightly on a deadlift, they had just barpaths slightly on a squat or bench, something like that. And then you immediately were in that pattern, right, and, you know, takes it in, and then the next sessions are automatically going to be better. I mean, I know I analyzed a ton of footage, when I have competitive power, if there's even like my gym pop clients,

you know, they want to get good at a dip, a chin up, whatever it may be. They always think it's weird

initially when filming exercises, but it's to show them. So they can see it. And then obviously, to review myself afterwards, you know, see what, when well, what not, but yeah, definitely showing them helps quite a lot, especially with people I find that a newer when it comes to training.

a video camera in our pocket. I mean, I think there's some amazing, now applications, I show my age

a bit here, because obviously I didn't go up with that. But, you know, it's such an amazing tool in those kind of situations. But yeah, so, you know, obviously the flip side of this is that, you know, we don't need to do these things if the client isn't trying to make those improvements on the coordination side. So obviously, all of that stuff is fantastic for the power of the filter, for the person looking for the one-armed chin, you know, for the person just wanting to

improve particular exercise for the, for its own purpose, you know, but obviously an athlete who's using a squat or using a bench press in order to support a totally different athletic activity,

“we don't need to do any of that. It's actually not going to help. I think this is one of those”

really interesting things. I think I've seen change in the last kind of few years in the industry. I mean, I remember maybe sort of 10, 15 years ago, there were people who were saying that, yeah, strength training is like weighted coordination training, and I'm like, no, that's not a thing. So it's really, really interesting to see, you know, how has physiology has kind of infiltrated the SNC community, which kind of used to be running around my blinkers on completely

avoiding thinking about anything physiological at all. Now it's kind of integrating it to a certain degree, and people are losing the idea that, you know, you can transfer coordination from a squat to a vertical jump, for example, is just not possible, they're totally different things. So, you know, I think that's been a useful or a beneficial outcome, really, of the movement. But really, yeah, basically there's going to be two totally different categories we've got

the athletes who are using that coordination stuff, and all of those techniques that are obviously been describing, and then secondly, we've got the group athletes who's not really needing any of that stuff. So a really nice example of this, we'll finish on before we move on to the next mechanism, is that a lot of the time we talk about using an external folks' attention for athletes all the time in everything they do. And that movement, again, still has quite a big

following up, even now. But the reality is, the way the external folks' attention improve performances

by improving coordination, and, you know, that's, they don't actually kind of do the other things

“that people think they do. So, that's really important because it means that we don't want to use”

an external folks' attention with an athlete in a strengthening exercise that is not something they're competing in. So, if you've got a power lifter, then an external folks' attention is fantastic for them, and because it's maximizing the coordination of the movement itself, and that then is likely to trigger the adoption after the worker. In contrast, you give a soccer player, you know, external folks' attention in their squat. They're going to end up in getting better out squatting,

but not actually going to be transferring that improvement in squat strength to the activity that they actually need, which is, for example, sprinting or jumping or whatever it might be. So, it's really, really important that we kind of understand the mechanistic basis that is underpinning our changing maximum strength. So, this is really what this entire podcast is all about. It's like understanding what is it that's driving the quality that we're trying

to achieve. We're trying to achieve, we'll talk about qualities in another podcast. But, you know, kind of like the quality of maximum strength that we're trying to achieve, the outcome, you know, obviously is in the pin by adaptions, and coordination is just really important in some situations much, or actually relevant in many other situations. Cool. So, to keep us moving, let's move on to the next one, antagonist, correctivation. So, every joint has

agonists and antagonists, and generally speaking, and antagonists will always have a certain

relatively low level of activation, but it can be further reduced with training. Now, there's a couple of interesting things here. We were actually talking about this before the podcast, because it's one of those areas that's a little bit more of a gray area than it might have first appear. Because on the surface, you look at it and you go, the way to improve antagonist co-activation is pretty much the exact same way that we would improve coordination. So, is it

therefore highly specific to the movement, and therefore we can kind of bundle it in with coordination,

“and that's how I've actually taught it for a number of years. Yet, if you look at some of the”

studies, there are a few indications where it looks like it might be less movement patterns, specific, and a little bit more joint-specific than at first might appear. So, it's kind of like a sort of halfway house. It might be movement-specific, or it might be somewhat movement-specific, but it could also be, you know, a little bit joint-specific, but ultimately, it's just benefiting mainly from the stuff that we would kind of would use to improve coordination. So, if we're using it,

so, if we are doing a training programme to improve coordination, it will automatically improve. But if we are thinking about a, for example, situation where we want to improve performance in, you know, kind of low, say for example, again, the same example that the soccer player trying to improve a leg strength for sport, we could actually get a little bit of an antagonist co-activation reduction transfer from, say, a score if we were to use some of the techniques that we would use

that the improvement coordination is gigantic in comparison with the improvement, or the strength induced improvement in the improvement. Yeah, the improvement in management strength that we might measure as a result of a coordination improvement to huge. The improvement in management strength we might measure as a result of a reduction in antagonist co-activation is a lot smaller. So,

the reality is, anytime you're doing any of those things we talked about, just now with

respect to coordination movements, yes, you're also going to get a reduction in co-activation,

“but they're just not of the same scale. So, Rob, do you have anything to say about this?”

Because I know when we're talking about it before, and you said that you kind of, you know, wrap this in with coordination, you never really see it as a separate thing very much. Yeah, I mean, mostly I wrap it in with coordination. Since those, since the changes, like you said, are so much smaller, and they go on for so long, you know, in my mind, then programming wise, it just means keeping exercises in the rotation for a very long time.

You know, especially when it's like an exercise for power, if there's something like that, squat, you punch press, and not ever, you know, deviating too far from that main lift. The other thing I would say, I see this all the time of programs, it ties in with reductions in a tagist co-activation, is people will program like incredibly unstable variations of exercises, you know, the classic, I've seen was like bamboo bar bench presses hanging band squads and things like that.

And they get a huge gain in those exercises, do it obviously coordination, but also much, you know,

“bigger and faster changes in co-activation. And it's like they think that this giant gain they've seen”

in that variance table exercise is going to drive a gain in the main lift. And it's just, it's not going to happen. The recruitment pattern is not the same, the fibers are accessing,

you're never going to be the same. And I see it over and over and over and over and I've had clients ask

about it. If I would program them, you know, like that bamboo bar bench pressing these things to an instability and help drive the main lift and I'm like, it's not really going to work out the way you think it is. So we're not going to do this stability specificity of strength training is really, really precise. There's very little transfer between movements of different stability levels. It's very much a unique, as you were saying, a unique pattern of activation each of those situations.

So, but yes, I've seen it also actually in sprinting. There's, there's a very popular sprinting exercise that people do with an unstable surface. They think that's going to reduce co-activation. Now, when we talk about speed probably next time, we will talk about the importance of co-activation in the sprinting activity because, yeah, you do kind of want to reduce co-activation if you can. And it does actually reduce to a greater extent in fast movements than it does in slow movements.

You know, so there's that. But an unstable surface activity can't replicate or an unstable load activity and kind of same category really, won't replicate that effect. So, yeah, I mean, again, it's, it's a really interesting area and it's probably more relevant for talking about

“the speed context and there's an strength context. As you say, probably the only thing we were”

kind of be able to do that's separate from a coordination issue is just to keep those exercises in the program because, yeah, as you're saying, activation does take pretty long time to actually reveal itself the reduction in co-activation. Does take a long time to reveal itself. So, probably is a really long grind of a process. Cool. Did you own anything else you wanted to sound that or is that probably enough for that one? No, I think we can move on to, well, you want to

motivate a criminal next? Yeah, so this is really the big one because recruitment is amazingly transferable because it's muscle specific. So, it's like, well, in most cases, it's muscle specific. I mean, there's there's two tiny exceptions, one in relation to static stretching, which we will talk about in a future conversation and the other in relation to eccentric kind of training, again, we'll talk about that in a future conversation. But just in kind of general situations,

you're going to find that recruitment increases are muscle specific. So, if we improve the the ability of a brain to send the center mode to current to the muscle, we can actually pay more muscle fibers, produce more force. So, this is a real kind of muscle forcing period. It doesn't change the structures really, but it is changing the ability of those structures to get switched on. And yeah, muscle splitting. I mean, there's one of my favorite ever strengthening

studies. So, that if you train literally, the rec ferms the hip flex. So, it actually improves voluntary activation, motinucruent in the rec ferms and the extensors. So, you know, fantastic and of data. So, yeah, massively transferable. You can literally train a highly like and it'll improve

maximum strength in any sporting situation as long as that muscle is being used. And basically,

really, the trigger for this kind of sort of adaption seems to be just hitting as high a level of motinucruent as we possibly can. You know, so, you know, I sent you a note before the podcast with the Scott Massive List of Things that we're kind of loving about. But basically, there's so many things that we can do. So, you know, let's not go. We could probably do a whole episode on just that. But rather than kind of going too into too many muscle. Yeah, rather than going into too many details

programming with this idea in mind of increasing. Yeah, I mean, some of the easiest ones that I use

a ton, especially in, you know, a lot of my clients are training in like ultra fancy gyms. They don't have fancy equipment, anything like that. So, most things are the easiest ways to kind of get these things done. Including a lot of stuff in warmups, like some very brief and some metrics, to help you hit a very, very high level of recruitment, you can do, you know, any kind of like example, like maybe before bench press a peck fly, like some metric before squatting. I just

see the knee extension, like some metric, things like that. Just very brief, you know, one or two reps in your warmup for squat, deadlift, things like that. Maybe doing just like a vertical jump, prior to the lift, you know, again, you're going to get really high levels of recruitment from those very, very fast movement speeds as well. So, some of the way that, and that would give you

transferable improvements in plauds, hip extensions, and those things. In the context of like athletes

getting to run faster, definitely some like hip flexor, isometrics. One that I like to use a lot is when you kneel on a bench and just drive one of the legs, you know, into the bottom of the bench, just like three or five seconds, again, that one works really nice. But if you don't know, like the isometrics a lot, really like the jump being in that, and then in terms of just like

“general programming, you know, similar honestly to the way you would deal about the coordination”

improvements, kind of some more things like heavier loads, lower reps, you know, not using those very high reps, because I think people tend to think, well by the end of that set of 10, 12, 15, you're getting a very high level of recruitment, similar to what you would get at the beginning of a set of three to five, and you know, realistically probably by the end of it, you're not getting

that painful. The word similar is doing quite a lot of work in that sense. It is working on

it's got as similar as, yes, the word similar is probably accurate, but similar is not the same. I mean, as she is that, you know, as, as Mark Horrors model tells us, you know, any time we're quite a discomforting feeling or a sensation, that's going to start suppressing the level of motif of a crewman that we're going to achieve at maximum effort. I mean, I think one of the greatest diservices that was ever done to hypertrophy science was when people said that, you know,

recruitment is the same, you know, at the end of a, like those strengthening set, and a heavy load strengthening set, because effort is the same. It's, I won't know, it's not. There's no effort is the same, but recruitment is not the same, you know, because your effort has to also deal with the discomforting sensations that you're kind of incurring as a result of using that lighter load. So, yeah, I mean, that's fantastic. So, yeah, just kind of a number of things that have

your loads, you know, kind of respires between sets, all that kind of stuff is going to enable us to hit higher levels of recruitment and improve. Also, it's interesting that you're kind of using that the entire thought, well, not the entire force for lost inspection, obviously, because you're not described eccentric, but you're using a very wide part of section of the force for lost inspection. You're using very fast repetitions like jumps, maybe throws or whatever. You're also

using maybe heavy loads in the context of the workout itself, and you're using pre-fice metrics, you know, so you're actually covering the entirety of the concentric part or isometric and

“concentric part of the force for lost inspection. And I think some people might be surprised by that”

is like, well, you know, is recruitment really the same in all of those contraction modes, and it absolutely is, you know, is just literally keep the fatigue down, keep the sensations down, I hit maximum effort in any of those contraction modes and it or the lost decent contraction modes, and it's going to work just fine for improving motor unit crewman roles, so that's pretty cool way that you illustrate to that. So, so that's motor unit recruitment, and as I said at the

beginning of that section, massively massively transferable. So, and we can do, you know, much and it makes such an improvement on an athlete athletes performance by pursuing that particular adoption. And as I say, we just have to aim for the maximum level of recruitment. So, you know, all of the things that Rob was saying, we totally applicable, we could add in some other bits and pieces, like, you know, the way that we're coaching, for example, we could focus on giving, you know,

some strong encouragement during each of the repetitions that we're aiming for to improve that particular adoption. So, we've got a section at the beginning of the workout where we're trying to improve routine recruitment with some isometric, so we can be giving that strong encouragement. If we've got the ability to measure and provide numerical actual feedback to the athlete of those isometric, so that's even better, but, you know, obviously that requires some equipment, you know,

but there's lots and lots of things, and as you know, we're saying, we've probably do a whole episode on a wrapping all of that up at some point in the future, but massively transferable massively modifiable as a coach and as a person writing the training program. Cool, so moving on to the

“peripheral side of things, we obviously got high purge feet as a, you know, kind of an important”

category of adoption that improves maximum strength. It does that by adding, you know, kind of my eyebrows and it adds my eyebrows, obviously, in parallel. We can wrap soccer

very, very briefly explain, if you're adding soccer medicine series and those soccer

“medicine series are added in a way that has costumers attached to them, they will function,”

like soccer medicine parallel. So, essentially, the way that lateral force transition works is it sends the soccer effort force to the endomissium, which then sends the force down to the tendon. If you have that custom-maric force direction, so, naturally, then, long-eternally, it is literally exactly the same thing as adding my eyebrows in parallel. So, some people have

really, really excited about soccer mode genesis, and they've argued that it can never improve

muscle fiber force, because it's in series, and it's like, one, no, lateral force transition means that it can. So, if you've got that custom-maric addition, and we do see very high levels of custom-maric addition with each centric training, which is when you've got the most soccer mode genesis happening, ultimately, we are going to see that improve muscle fiber force in exactly the same way as we would see, you know, kind of hypertrophy of an increase in the diameter of the

muscle fibers. So, when I say hypertrophy today, I'm kind of not really respecting the strict

“definition of hypertrophy as a fiber diameter increase. I'm kind of wrapping up soccer mode genesis”

into that. So, we don't muscle mass is increasing, and that's going to increase force production by increasing the number of crosspages that were capable of forming. So, ultimately, it's something that we all talk about all the time, hypertrophy, you know, but in athletic context, it actually has some really interesting applications and problems. Now, we're going to go into some of the issues with the problems next time when we talk about speed, and we'll come back again,

I mean, everything is connected in athletic performance. So, I just keep saying we're going to talk about this again, but we will talk about it again when we talk about proximate to this or sequencing, because one of the aspects of proximate to this or sequencing that really kind of, once you've seen it, you can't unsee it, is that most of the time your athletes are going to benefit more from proximate muscle mass improvements rather than this or muscle mass improvements. And that's just because of the

way that that kinetic sequencing works. And as I say, you know, I keep saying this, but we will talk about that later on. But, you know, I guess really the thing that we can latch on to today and point out is that there will be a specificity of muscle mass to an athletes performance. There will be certain muscles that benefit athletes in physics sports much more than other muscles of the body. So, like, you know, you can, I mean, obviously for power lifting, you can kind of be very,

very granular about it and be like, well, you know, this, you know, kind of muscle is going to help do this particular lift in specific people, you know, different muscles are going to help them move forward, because they've got these weaknesses or these problems. But in terms of other sports, can you think Rob of any example where you've targeted specific muscle mass for athletes to help them with a particular sport? Yeah, for sure. I mean, so, I mean, the example of grappling sports and even in Mojtaic,

it talks to an extent, strong, lats, strong back, really, really helpful. You know, due to wrestling all those, I've wrestled, you know, train due to a bit, although I'm not very good, but I have plenty of great due to two competitors as friends. You need massively strong arms, massively strong back, strong hips, things like that, and big big muscles all over there are very helpful. I know people tend to tend to think in all these sports. So, like, technique is going to be the driver

of, you know, whether you win, whether you lose, but if you have two people who's technique is the same, one guy is stronger and has much bigger muscles and, you know, maybe less body fat, that guy is probably going to mull you. So, whenever I've coached grapplers, whenever I've coached kickboxers, I do quite a bit of that work, that work, you know, something like Margaret Pulldowns, Margaret Tinnops, obviously, for the arms direct arm work, which people tend to freak out a little

bit when I first started coaching them sometimes. They're like, it seems like a bodybuilding program,

they're like, well, this portion of the program is bodybuilding. You're trying to grow your muscle. So, yeah, you use a lot of that. That's such a good point, though. That's such a good point because

“it freaks, I think. That's one of those, yeah, but it's such an important point, because, you know,”

like, when you write to your bodybuilding program, people are totally expecting you to say, look, here's all the physiology of how the high-perch fee kind of processes work, and this is how it feeds into the program design, and, you know, I've talked about that for last couple of years, and people are probably at this point sick of hearing it, but in the context of an athletic training program, that stuff doesn't change. I think people kind of go, because I'm an athlete,

now I have to train different things, like, well, yeah, but if the, if the goal is the same, how will you fit, your muscle doesn't know that you're an athlete, it's like, not, it's like, the goal is, if you're trying to improve this adoption in order to improve your maximum strength, and I think it comes back to this same criticism that I had last week, and I'm probably going to see people can probably play a game and see if I mentioned this every single episode, but

basically, it's like, you know, people, I think it doesn't see, believe, either consciously or

subconsciously, that their athlete is a computer avatar with a little strength number next to it, that tells you how strong they are, and it's like strength is something you can kind of improve

like we've been screwing today, but all are affected by different stimuli, and therefore, require different considerations in the context of a training program. It's like, you're trying to improve the coordination of your back squat to get better at back squatting, you're going to do these things. If you're trying to improve high-perch, you do these things, and I look, that's identical to what the bodybuilders are doing over there, you know, and it's like, well,

why wouldn't that be the case? You know, it's really crazy when you kind of break it down like this, but you know, I just couldn't be doing the same. So, that whole idea about like, it has to look functional, be functional, just like, persists, and athletic coaching so much, and if I'm trying to get someone bigger, you know, bigger muscle, it's going to go like bodybuilding, you know, the main difference I would say for me when I'm writing programs is whereas people would maybe

still go about like classic bodybuilding style training, high reps, the pump, things like that. I, you know, I don't do any of that. Obviously, I know, you're not into that. So it's more, you know, pull body sessions, heavy loads still, you know, load a moderate rep range is, you know,

four days, it's always going to be a great range, as long as you can execute the movement well,

and then keeping for athletes, at least generally a few reps and reserve, you know, what I'm trying to go about good high-perch or free training and programs for athletes, I'm always also looking at how it's going to impact their sport training. So usually it's two full body sessions a week, maybe three load a moderate reps, one of a child failure, more stable, constrained exercises,

“you know, if you want to grow quads, it's going to be a leg extension, pendulum squat,”

like press feels like that. If I want to grow arms, it's going to be a curl, you know, so you want to curl something like that. I'm not relying on like other people like these big, compound movements to get the muscle mass increase. This is not going to get the job done. You know, if I want someone's arms to be as big as they can be and the straws I can be, doing maybe, you know, just to chin up or just to wide grip pull up, probably not going to cut it.

If I want someone's quads to be as big as they can be or they're glutes to be as big as they can be, you know, maybe just doing a deadlift to trap or deadlift, something like that, is not going to cut it. So it was a being, yeah, essentially just body-building style training, but with better rep ranges, I would say that I'm going to get you stronger and leave you less fatigued and less impact on your sports sessions and your training through the week.

Yeah, I mean, I guess whenever I think body-building training, I kind of think about a style of body-building training that I'm trying to popularise and look at the kind of going back pre, you know, pre-1950 to look at the routines back then that you know, kind of Jake talks about, you know, on the other podcast, all the other podcast I do with Jake. And you know, it's very much like

“I think the negatives that come with conventional, you know, kind of mainstream body-building”

are negatives that shouldn't be there, you know, they should never have been put into body-building

in the third place. If we kind of train in a way that makes sense physiologically to do body-building, it would actually be identical to the way that you're putting athletic poems together anyway, I think. But yeah, so that was actually really interesting. I mean, I would kind of add that, you know, there's some really nice data around sprinters. I put a whole kind of, it would probably do a podcast on it, a whole kind of series of studies showing how specific muscle areas in the

lower body are really helpful for improving performance and sprinters. And some are actually negative. And I really, really like that because it illustrates the kinetic sequence that we'll talk about, it illustrates the probably speed or how speed works and what the determinants are speed. But ultimately, if you start adding muscle mass, say for example, in the calves or the quadriceps and trying to get better at sprinting, it's not actually going to play out the way you think.

You actually want that muscle mass to be much more proximal around the hip area to make that improvement work. Again, I'll explain that fully later on. But yeah, just a nice example of how, you know,

“I think sprinting is probably the best example of how, you know, we know for a fact because we've got”

data showing that you can add muscle mass in this area and it'll help you add muscle mass in another area, it actually doesn't help. In fact, it can actually maybe have the slower. You know, it's not like these things where you can kind of just go, oh well, we're going to do massive hypership programming for every athlete when just letting play the sport, like some people are saying. It was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, that doesn't work. It's like, you know, okay, if you're going

from nothing to something, okay, that probably is going to work. But if you're already doing strength training, you're already doing athletic training, you're already pretty good at what you do, then don't just do a strength training program that somebody is written for a bodybuilder and expect to improve your sporting performance because it probably won't. You do actually need to kind of target the muscle mass in particular areas, like the examples that you've given in the example

that I just gave there was Brenda. Cool. So let's wrap up with these final two adaptions.

Basically, I mentioned lateral force transmission earlier. Well, we know that customers do

get added to muscle fibers. We don't know that that does improve lateral force transmission. It improves the efficiency of the fiber force transmission to the tendon and makes the fiber produce a higher force for them what it was doing previously and that makes people stronger relative to their size, even in an isolated single muscle level without thinking about the

And I always kind of like get to this point and I'm excited just talking about this and then I

“realize that we don't actually know how to make it actually happen. We've got so little data”

on the adaption. It's like, you know, wow, this could be fantastic. If we could make this happen all the time, then wouldn't this be so cool? And it's like, well, yeah, but nobody knows. So, you know, we just got data shown that it does improve strength in, you know, kind of first couple of months of strength training. Does it kind of plateau with maybe soccer emergencies around the two or three month point? Very possibly. Does it plateau later on or does

it carry? Oh, I mean, nobody knows. And how do we trigger it? Well, you know, not reassure. There's some data suggesting that eccentric loading might be slightly better than concentric or asymmetric loading for improving this adoption. But for me, that just kind of makes me think, well, if I add more soccer measured series, then I will actually need more customers because I've now created the whole bunch of soccer measured without customers. So you're going to need that

adaption anyway just because she's creating a kind of a requirement for it. So that doesn't really film me with confidence that it's a genuine trigger for the adaption, but that's kind of where we are. But yeah, so left for forced ambition. I imagine there's probably nothing in your programs, Rob, that you're doing specifically to these left-rails business. It's kind of like, if it happened, lost it. It happens because like you said, you don't know what triggers it. I'm not going to

“speculate. No, that's why. I just don't think there's anything to be smart about. There's no”

data that we could kind of look at and draw lines between and find the correlations. There's just so little there's such a shame. But yeah, so a lot of forced ambition definitely is improving strength, probably, and one of those things that maybe is why kind of historically people were thinking that there's a way to improve my affordability density or something like that. I would imagine that Latra Force transmission increases probably due contribute to that kind of effect. But you know,

equally my affordability density does drift upwards over time. It does kind of you do time and sort of get increased my affordability to salt plasm, just as a result of time spent strength training. Now we see that in the cross sectional data, but not really probably an adaption in and of itself that we can kind of train for unfortunately. So that's Latra Force permission improvements,

and then of course finally we've got tendon stiffness changes. This is technically mechanism

of maximum strength. If you make the tendon stiffer, you will improve isometric and concentric

“force production, because what will happen is the tenement move less, and that means that”

the muscle will shorten less quickly for the same joint angular velocity. As a result, force velocity tells you, you will end up with the higher overall muscle force production, and it's not really because of anything that you've done to the muscle. It's just because you've allowed it to shorten it to slower speed. Now the problem with that, as we were again talking about very briefly before we came on today, is we're deciding how to describe tendon stiffness

to you guys today. The issue is that when you use the stretch shortening cycle, everything flips around, and you kind of want a more compliant tendon and not a stiff tendon. If you want a high stretch shortening cycle performance, because the tendon actually then allows the muscle to stay short a whole time. We're going to have to do a separate episode on the stretch shortening cycle and explain

how that works. Ultimately, whenever we think about tendon stiffness, we're always going to do

I want tendons to be stiff because my athlete is exposed to situations with really heavy loads and those beats, like powerlifting, which case tendons stiffness is a win, or is my athlete spending most of the time moving around really quickly. In which case I probably want tendons stiffness to be on the lower side, more normal kind of physical active person, a category side, rather than that, sort of super stiff tendon, sort of category that you would have with a power lift or some

one either. So, ultimately, though, if we want to increase tendons stiffness, it's extremely loads specific. So, broadly speaking, we kind of need to be in that kind of ten-ret max 12-ret max kind of territory if we want to produce an improvement in tendons stiffness. So, really all that means is that if we're working with an athlete, like a power lifter, who is aiming to improve maximum strength, then tendons stiffness gains or improvements are going to happen automatically.

We don't need to worry about that. Conversely, if we are working with athletes who are spending a lot of time moving around really quickly, so I could play as tracking field athletes, and everybody's just trying to use a stretch shortening cycle regularly as part of their sport, then we actually want to be cautious about, you know, kind of triggering large improvements in tendons stiffness, especially if we're not, you know, doing a necessary training techniques

to improve the muscle as a ability to pull that tendon around. Because ultimately, anytime we got almost a tendon unit in sequence, you're going to have the muscle pulling on the tendon or the tendon pulling on the muscle, and ultimately one is going to pull the other to a kind of sort of longer length. If we want, ultimately, to onto decide how that process works, we're going to have to

compliant tendon, and then work from there. But as I say, we'll cover that in much more detail

“in a future episode. We don't need to go into detail on that today, or we can kind of part that.”

So ultimately, that is everything that we wanted to say today. Maximum strength, you know,

six adaptions, we've got three in the central nervous system, three in the periphery. Hopefully,

“with Rob's examples, we've been able to show you how we might go about, you know, or illustrate,”

not necessarily showing detail with other straight, because this is a fairly short podcast.

Illustrate, how we might go about targeting specific, you know, adaptions for specific purposes,

“plus specific athletes, and just kind of give you an idea of how you might be able to do that in your”

own programming. So we're going to leave that there for today. Rob's had to go. He's got something else to do, so he won't be available to say goodbye to you guys. But thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it. Please do give us feedback on social media. We'll be back next week, talking about speed. And hopefully, that'll stop to build a picture of how these qualities can be improved over time.