005 Stretch-shortening cycle

Siri and we're going to talk about the stretch shortening cycle today. Now this is probably going to be one of a couple of episodes in which we talk about the stretch shortening cycle. So the purpose of this one is to give a overview and explain what it is, what the underlying physiology, mechanisms are, and then just give some general recommendations focusing on the development of the stretch shortening cycle over the improvement of the stretch shortening cycle in high velocity movements. So as you'll

find out as we just talked through this, there are a number of mechanisms that underpin the stretch shortening cycle, some of them are not applicable in slow, heavy current situations, high load situations, others on the applicable in the fast and the spectrum. And because generally

“speaking we talk about stretch shortening cycle most in the context of fast movements, that's what we're”

going to focus on today. So as always, I'll just whizz through the physiology and how this works and then

I'll pass the ball over to Rob and we can start doing matters and forwards about the training programs and implications. So starting at the beginning, the stretch shortening cycle is the observation or the phenomenon where we see essentially an improvement in concentric phase performance as a result of having an eccentric phase directly before it. So we have this thing called the stretch shortening cycle effect and that essentially is the improvement in performance that we get in a concentric phase

as a result of bolting on an eccentric phase beforehand. So if you do a concentric movement and concentric only movement, you'll find that you don't quite get the same bar speeds, you don't quite get the same jump heights, you don't get the same kind of force production, as you would do, or impulse production is probably a better kind of characterization. You don't quite get the same levels of performance as you would do if you had a full stretch

“shortening cycle with both eccentric and concentric phases. So it's an observation or a phenomenon.”

And the same way that fatigue is a kind of a phenomenon. Now, underpinning that, we can have any physiological mechanism that essentially enhances concentric phase performance whenever you've got an eccentric phase proceeding it. Now, researchers have found five separate mechanisms. I'm just going to kind of pause very briefly and add a comment in here and say often in the kind of less technical parts of the fitness industry, you'll find people equating

the stretch reflex with the stretch shortening cycle. So they'll say, oh, you know, the stretch shortening cycle, all the stretch reflexes, no, the stretch reflex is one of the five mechanisms that underpin or create the stretch shortening cycle. In other words, it is a mechanism of physiological mechanism that enhances concentric phase performance whenever you've got an eccentric phase directly proceeding it. So essentially, we've got these five mechanisms,

stretch reflexes, one of them, something called pre-activation is another,

“we've got the residual force enhancement effect and then we've got the elastic energy storage in the”

tendon and finally we've got an interaction between the muscle and the tendon that changes

where on the force velocity, a relationship and muscle fibers are working. So these five mechanisms, so it's very, very quickly, with through those, it's playing all the art and then it's playing two that we're going to focus on for the purposes of high velocity movement. So the stretch reflex essentially is whenever the muscle spindles detect that the muscle is stretching, they will send the signal to the spinal cord, get a bounce back effect and the muscle increases its level of

motor equipment. Now, this is obviously a way to increase muscle force and by increasing muscle activation and it's debatable, though, how much the effect actually adds to overall recruitment at high levels of effort. So what we tend to find, if we look at the kind of increment that you get, the extra recruitment that you get, tend to get a much bigger effect, much bigger increment on the increment at lower levels of effort than at high levels of effort. So the stretch reflexes,

one of those things that probably enhances performance, more so during lunch, if endurance running, that kind of activity doesn't really tend to create much of an impact in the kind of high velocity, high effort movements that we're interested in, like the jumping throwing sprint in our carving. So even though it is a stretch on the cycle, a mechanism, if you like, is probably not one that we need to worry about in the context of the high performance physiology that we're

in the kind of devoting this podcast to. The second mechanism is proactivation, that really just works

all the time in the background, can't really change it very easily. Essentially it's just that, whenever you have any central phase proceeding a concentric, you've already activate the muscle before time zero, which is the start of your concentric phase. So the muscles already activated, it doesn't need to build any activation build force production. It's already there. Doing that at time zero, so you get that extra benefit of impulse at the start of the

concentric contract. Again, I don't think it was particularly modifiable, and it just kind of happens most of the time at most situations whenever you've got a stretch shorting cycle going on. Thirdly, residual force enhancement effect. This is essentially where we're stretching tight in inside the muscle fibers in activated muscle fibers in any single phase. If you stretch them in a past substretched to get into a position where you're going to do a concentric phase,

but without the eccentric active phase before and you don't get the same effect, because tight

force enhancement effect essentially gives you a benefit to the extent that you've got a large number

“of activated muscle fibers, or being stretched in that kind of eccentric phase. Now for reasons”

I'll explain in a moment, that works really, really well in heavy load situations like powerlifting, not so much in the context of high velocity movements where we've got a lot of tendon movement

backwards and forwards. So the fourth mechanism is elastic energy storage in the tendon. This basically

is the first one that now is going to be interesting to us in a context of high velocity movements. Essentially in this situation, the tendon is going to move around and stretch in the eccentric phase and then it's going to recoil and return that elastic energy to us in a form of kinetic energy to aid us in that constant phase that we're going to do. So the more the tendon stretches in that scenario, the more elastic energy we get and the more kinetic energy we're going to be able to

return to ourselves in that constant phase to be able to enhance the movement that we're interested in doing. So you can see straight away that that if the tendon moves around a lot, it behaves in a compliant way, because basically if a tendon is stiff, it doesn't move around, I mean that's the definition of stiffness. If it bears a better beating, but you know,

a compliant and then obviously it will move around a lot in a little storm or energy.

Now the equation for the storage of elastic energy is a half kx squared, so k being stiffness. So yes, if the tendon is stiff, but you do manage to stretch it, move around a lot, then you will store more elastic energy. But x squared x refers to the displacement of the tendon,

“of course, being a squared term much more important. So much more important to have a tendon”

that does actually move around when you want it to, then have a really stiff tendon that doesn't move around a lot. Yes, the perfect scenario will be to have a stiff tendon that you can stretch along way. That will store much more energy than a compliant and then you can stretch along way. But having a tendon that is stiff and therefore does not move around, because you can't stretch it, is not actually very good for storage and elastic energy in the context of high velocity situations

that we're going to be talking to them. And then finally, this idea of muscle and tendon interactions,

if you have a muscle, that is essentially capable of keeping a short length and allowing the tendon to, or pulling the tendon to a long length and letting that tendon then recoil, the muscles itself will stay at a short length, because it's essentially forcing the tendon to do the length and shorting instead of the muscle doing the length and shortening in that kind of stretch, shortening cycle movement. And as a result, the muscle then works closer to, you know, a constant

length, and you actually, in sprinting, we actually talk about quesal asymmetrics, because hamstrings get to a point where they're really kind of just moving very slightly. And as a result, that able to produce really high forces, because they're not essentially the fibers themselves are not shortening very quickly, because you can keep the muscle to relatively short length, so it doesn't really lengthen and then have to shorten again, then obviously the shortening velocity

of those muscle fibers is much, much reduced relative to the angular velocity of the body, or the joint segments that you're actually rotating. So what we see there is the muscle is going to work much closer to the force and the force velocity relationship. And as a result, produce a much higher force. So both of these factors, essentially, just like the elastic energy storage, are relying on the tendon being compliant and moving to a long length, and essentially then

recoiling and giving us either in the case of the elastic energy storage, giving us that elastic energy back is kinetic energy for, in the case of the muscle tendon interactions, allowing the muscle to shorten more slowly and therefore produce a higher force. Now, the reason I said that these two mechanisms are essentially the ones we're interested in from a higher velocity movement point of view is because what we see is that tendons tend to behave

more in a kind of stretch and recoil type way. They behave in a more compliant way. In those fast movements, whereas in heavy strengthening rooms like a powerlifting, they tend to behave much more stiffly and stay to fairly constant length. So you don't get a lot of elastic energy storage in that strength training exercise. You don't get a lot of keeping the muscle at the constant length and the same in the same kind of exercise. In contrast, in like a high velocity

drop jump, you know, our sprint, you will tend to see that the tendons are moving around a lot more and the muscle is moving around a lot less, and therefore you do get these two sort of mechanisms operating whereby we're storing a releasing kinetic energy getting back, and in the case of the

“muscle we're allowing to stay at a relatively short length. Now, that's how all these mechanisms”

are working. The final thing for me to say then for our handover to Rob is just to explain exactly what it is that allows us to enhance the stretch shortening cycle with respect to these two final mechanisms. So again, what I'm explaining here only relates to these two mechanisms in which we're seeing a relationship between the muscle and the tendon, and that's going much more applicable in high velocity situations. So what I'm not saying is this is how I would, you know, kind of see the

because that would be relying on the residual force and that's meant to affect changing,

not reluctant, which would probably require something to do with Titan, whereas what we're describing here is much more to do with, you know, how do I make the tendon, you know, kind of stretching recoil to a greater extent? How do I keep the muscle, you know, to short length, to a greater extent? That's kind of the adoption we're trying to drive. Now, hopefully, if you've been following along with this, you'll be thinking to yourself, well, this isn't an adoption, this is actually

a ratio of effects. It's a ratio of muscle strength in the eccentric phase to tendon stiffness, because essentially what I'm talking about here, if I want to make the tendon behave in a more compliant way in a stretch shortening cycle movement, what I need to do is make the eccentric strength of a muscle bigger than the tendon stiffness. That's my adoption. It's not actually an adoption,

it's the interaction between two adaptions. And that does not mean that I have to make the

tendon more compliant. It does not mean that I have to make the tendon essentially change in any way. What I have to do is make the eccentric strength of a muscle go up faster than the tendon stiffness is going up. And this is really, really important, because sometimes when I tell people that, they've got them's upside down, and they don't want to increase tenderness stiffness for the purposes of improving their planetary performance. They say, oh, so you're saying

“we need to reduce tenderness, no, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that you need to increase”

the strength of your eccentric strength of your muscle relative to your tenderness stiffness. The very best climatry studies we've got that illustrate this point actually have tenderness difference increasing during the experimental period of time when the people are training. But the eccentric strength of the muscle increases faster, and as a result, by the end of the training program, the muscle is pulling the tendon around to a very extreme end and it was at the

beginning. Tender actually got stiffer in those training programs, but that's not what we're interested in. What we're interested in is the ratio of these two improvements. So it's my eccentric muscle strength increasing faster than my tenderness stiffness or is it the other way around. And of course that's in like, okay, well now we know that what types of training are going to create those effects, and the most kind of well kind of described training method in the literature

we have that does that is the plyometric activity. So plyometric kind of training methods are really really good at increasing eccentric muscle strength while leaving tenderness stiffness either largely the same or just increasing it very slightly. And I realize this is going to be kind of counterintuitive to many people who think that plyometric work by increasing tenderness stiffness they actually don't, you know, in all the literature we've got eight to nine studies

in the plyometric training methods at least to last time I checked for a more by now. And generally speaking, the increases in tenderness stiffness are either non-significant in many cases or just significant and actually quite small. And in a couple of studies that are done comparing heavy strength training increases in tenderness stiffness would plyometric increases in tenderness stiffness, heavy strength training or isometric training just below those plyometrics out the water

in terms of increasing tenderness stiffness. And again, we can go into exactly why that is in a future episode but just for the purposes of today, plyometrics are not having any uniquely hugely beneficial effect on tenderness stiffness. They kind of leave it more or less the same increase it very slightly. What they're really doing is kind of creating this eccentric strength increase over the muscle that is relative, you know, without really modifying tenderness stiffness to the

same extent. So that's the magic, that's the kind of physiology underneath the surface, roll, tell us a little bit about how you're using plyometrics in no training programs at the moment.

“Yeah, so I think just about a little bit first I'd actually like to go into what people should”

definitely not do. So, Chris and I were talking just before we came on. And he just mentioned that a lot of people think that increasing tenderness is what you need for improving your stretch shortening cycle. And it's an idea that you'll see all the time, I see it on social media. So, people will be doing lots of isometrics, on duration isometrics, I've seen, you know, some mid-range split squat, ISO holds, calf isometrics, all kinds of things like that. And people will say they're

using it to improve the stretch shortening cycle. And like Chris just said, that is not really going to be the case. And we did mention using isometrics for increases of recruitment in that in the prior episodes. So, we were just saying before we came on today. One of the things to clarify there would be programming was just making sure that you're not using too much of those. We mentioned

very brief like three to five second contractions and really not using very many of them either.

So, you don't have to do very many. You don't have to do them super often, since the adaptations are going to dissipate very quickly either. Once you use them to get those recruitment increases, those are going to hang around quite a while. So, if you are using those in your programming for a hip flexor, as extensors, whatever it may be, yeah, just keep them brief. And you don't have to do

“a ton of them, you know, just usually just do one in a session, honestly. And then gap it there,”

just one max effort. And then that's all I'm going to do. But, you know, moving forward into like

here. I think a lot of people are looking for super special fancy exercises or, like, even complicated sequences of exercises. But I'll just give some basic ones that I use, you know, the first example from proving punching power and things like that. So, some upper body pliers. I mean, you know, big one people have seen a minute times going to apply up push-ups. I really like those, a little bit more of like a drop ply up push-ups. So, you get like one of them more speed and

definitely some more force requirements when you're actually like getting into that bottom and rebounding out of the bottom there. So, I like those quite a bit. You can do the same thing when like a drop, med ball chest pass or a drop med ball throw, really like those. And again, you don't have to do a ton of them. Usually I'm doing like three or four sets of just a couple reps.

“I'm honestly usually like something like three reps. Not very many reps at all. So,”

keeping the volume on those pretty low terms of like some other ones that I've liked, some of my syndrome overhead, you know, med ball slams and things like that. If you're watching like fighters and especially people on the ground, they're throwing, you know, sometimes hammer fists in the ground and pound things like that. And they, you know, terribly clunky and slow,

I found those will help people be, you know, just a little bit faster and more powerful with

things like that. Help them that use just their arms and actually, you know, get more body into it, get more speed and power there. It's well guys I've worked with in the past. Although honestly not, I worked with a ton of baseball players, but just a few, using things like, you know, rotational med ball throws and I would kind of skip into that. So you get a little bit faster velocity, more rotation and then just, you know, more output there. With all those, it is useful to

be able to measure them. Obviously, you know, you want to measure in them, see if people are proving

“but at the same time, if you don't have a lot of equipment and stuff like that, as long as people are”

giving, you know, an absolute maximum effort and you can usually tell whether or not they are, you're still going to get the improvements there. Really like all those in terms of lower body plyometric stuff. Again, you know, probably nothing revolutionary, you know, staying away from the calf things. We mentioned with improving sprinting and all that stuff, probably not a good idea to be doing like calf ones, those things like that. So really everything for the calves is super

super fast. Again, like the calf hops, we mentioned a bunch of times, really like those, you know, not too many in a set, just a few quality contractions getting as much highs as you can,

big fan of some like, you know, a lot of the more reflexive stuff. So you always want like that

man and component. So something like that, a split squat, drop, drop jump there, you know, you just take a feet off the ground, cats will rebound as quickly as you can. Using very, very light loads, you know, with all these focus on their focus on any kind of like weight, people are using very light dumbbells, very light med balls, things like that. You can mention drop jumps. Do you drop jumps a bit? So, you know, various heights there. And I don't know if you just mentioned

that before we came on, Chris had mentioned that the concentric phase generally is not. So, so in one of these things all the time. So, I'm not sure. That's one of those things. I just ask people to think about what the adoption is that we're creating in the context of the structure in the cycle. Because if our purpose is to enhance ecentric strength relative to the tendency of stiffness, how is the concentric phase contributing to that adoption? It's not.

It's like, people literally look at me as if, you know, a grown-in-extra head at this point, they say things like this. As I know, just think about what adoption will try to stimulate here. Now, it's got nothing to do with the concentric phase. No, so, yeah, cool. If we do the concentric phase happen and we can use that from the purpose, you know, for a speed development. And the cool thing is that the straight-shorting cycle effect does give us an enhanced speed

in that concentric phase. So, it will get you to our first velocity. Well, that's fantastic. That's going to potentially trigger some speed related to these actions. But that isn't more of a chasing with the actual drill that we're doing. So, it's like a side effect. It's a benefit. We can kind of take advantage of it. It isn't necessarily the thing that we're actually training.

“So, you know, I think it's cool to do those things. But just kind of like,”

I'm always going back to first principles and saying, what is it about this particular

x on it that I'm trying to derive? What benefit am I deriving from this drill? All this exercise. And if it's an improvement in eSendric strength, the muscle relative to the tendon, then nothing in the concentric phase that I can possibly do will change that. So, it's kind of like, but I do get the potential for that improvement in that speed related action. And that's really then what goes into, then, I think you're

mad. Well, if you are chasing those speed deductions in that concentric phase, you know, does it make sense then to jump or throw or whatever to the exercise for maximum performance. So, typically in pymetric circles, people will say, I'm either going to minimize ground contact time with this particular exercise, or I'm going to maximize performance, jump height or whatever. I'd be in this particular exercise.

But if you're maximizing, jump height or as to improvement performance, you're going to get the speed related to the adaptions. If you minimize ground contact time,

phase. So, you're not going to reach as high velocity as you're not going to trigger the adaptions in speed. And I'm not entirely sure what people think they are triggering by minimizing ground contact times. Because every time I ask them, they give me this kind of reactive strength,

“kind of lecture. And I get that, what's the physiology? What's the physiology underpinning that?”

Tell me the physiological adaption that creates that outcome. And I'm really not certain. There is a clear answer to that. So, while on the surface, I can kind of see the benefits of a maximum speed, kind of drop jump or maximum speed, kind of a plyometric performance to try to trigger those speed related adaptions. And we've got, you know, we did a podcast on these activities where those are. You know, I'm not convinced that there is a reactive strength index

or reactive strength, you know, kind of outcome that you can kind of sort of underpin with a series of physiological adaptions that are unique to minimizing ground contact times. I don't see that that exists. But, you know, someone wants to argue that, "Hey, I'm happy to listen to that." And I can't see it in the physiology of what it is, you know. And if there's something, oh, well, it's really coding because you're moving faster, well, I can do that with a fast

movement phase. I don't need to know my contact times to get. And the interesting thing is read to force development and maximum speed, physiologically, are incredibly similar, because all you're trying to do is build force faster, well, that is a key component of maximum speed. So, they're very, very difficult to disentangle in my opinion. I think, you know, logically, I know we've got a history of, no, like you said earlier, we've got a history of thinking

that tendons stiffness is driving plyometric performance, we have a history of all kinds of upside down ideas. I think this is one of those upside down ideas. I'm not convinced that, you know,

“minimizing ground contact times is the best use of a plyometric. If you want to bolt on the maximum”

speed component of adaptions on to the actual straight shawning cycle component of adaptions and get

two things in one exercise. Anyway, that was, that was, that was the second or the third thing I

noticed while you were talking, because the first thing I noticed was you were talking about the isometric stuff, because I know we've been pushing isometrics out a lot and saying to people, you can use these to maximize gains in recruitment. Two things occurred to me while you were saying that one was that absolutely, as you point out, you don't need to do lots of reps of these to get an increase in recruitment, and because the reps and the total volume is really what's

going to drive the tenant stiffness adaption. If we just do one or two quality reps, I mean, personally, I can't do more than one max f i symmetric. My brain just shuts down, I'm just like, I know I can't do any more of these. Yeah, I mean, my second one is not going to be new. No, no, no, absolutely. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Absolutely, you got a limit to a replacement. It's like I do what I'm in, it's like I don't do them for the day. I'm not doing any more of those,

“but I think that that there are kind of programs where people are doing a stack of the,”

really, the only ones going to trigger a recruitment gain is going to be the one with the max, level of the recruitment, which in many people's cases, I think is just going to be the first reps. Yeah, I know it sounds like not very much, but I think you're probably right that just doing those single repetitions is probably, you know, the best outcome for minimizing tendness, difference increases while gaining the recruitment improvement. Yeah, and I think some of

me just said there, like, people always want to do like a big volume of like these things,

a big volume of everything, and even a big huge, I see huge volumes of like plyometrics, toughened programs, and they're in programs for, you know, really, really long periods of time, and stuff like that. And I don't tend to use, you know, tons of plyo, certainly, tons of volume, or even them, use them for very, very long. You and I discussed before the unstructured and cycle tends to be pretty quickly in athletes, like your abilities with it,

so you don't need to be doing a ton of them all the time. I mean, I'm much prefer to do more concentric based back speed stuff while at the time for more of the training time, the training year, and then, you know, do plyos, and that's stuff to maximize structured and cycle adaptations, like, for, I guess, more brief periods. You can, I tend to find at least people's tendons get beat up, stuff like that. Well, that's just, that's the last thing a lot to people miss because,

generally, we always have this kind of saying, don't we, in essence, see that good SNC is the

same thing as good injury prevention training. And the reality is, it's not in this particular example, because if you've got a tendon that moves around a lot, that's fantastic for strict shortening cycle performance, but a tendon that moves around a lot is going to be a tendon that's more easy to damage, and then that damage potentially could lead to a tendon up with the, so obviously we've got this kind of conflict between wanting the athlete to be as, you know,

kind of capable as possible in terms of the performances, and also as resilient as possible. I think that kind of conflict there that we've got to be aware of, like you say, just having periods of the year when we kind of allow the tendon to become more compliant for the purposes of maximizing performance for some competitions are important, and then allowing it to kind of, or just, you know, kind of doing more heavy strength training and avoiding, or some isometric,

at time. I think it really just comes down to, you know, how you think tendon up is developing,

obviously, I'm not an expert in that area, so don't really kind of claim to have a model that

“screws it, but I think, you know, broadly speaking, from my understanding of the literature,”

generally it looks like, you know, if tendon's are moving around a lot like ligaments, if they move around a lot, they tend to get damaged in there for that damage could then do a problem. So yeah, I think it's definitely a balancing kind of effect. The thing I was thinking of when you mentioned the isometric just go make to that for a quick moment, because I was suddenly realizing that when we look at periodization, and this is obviously something that we can talk about again

in another episode, but when we look at periodization, one of the things that is hugely helpful in periodization, I kind of programs, one of the reasons that people would argue for periodization over non periodization is if you can do something early on in an athletic kind of cycle, the benefits you later on, and one of the only reductions that actually does that is an increasing

recruitment, because if you can trigger an increase in recruitment, you know, first couple of weeks

of training, then you're kind of several weeks later you're going to be reaping the rewards of that, because you can now access more muscle fibers, you can produce more force, you can do more exciting units, which have a lot of these, all kinds of things you can do as a result of that adaption that you trigger earlier on. So that actually fits really well if you're thinking in terms of building a base of recruitment early on in a periodized training program. This simultaneously,

it doesn't matter so much if your tendons are slightly stiff as a result of doing those things, because when you've kind of done it, like you mentioned, you do those things early on, if you've done that, then you can then back off on them, because the adaption or recruitment deduction doesn't go away. Again, this is one of those brilliant illustrations of how, if you think in terms of outcomes like strength and speed and power, then none of this makes any sense,

because people are saying to me, I was building strength in the offseason, and I know you weren't. You're creating certain adaptions in the offseason, which may or may not stay with you, if you stop doing those types of training. You know, I had some questions in my Instagram literally yesterday where people were saying, or we do heavy strength training for sprinters in the offseason, and then we stop in seeing the right. Are you putting my leg? I think I saw that, and you said

you would keep in, you know, a set of heavy hip thrusts and that stuff, because yeah, just make no sense to dig it out, you know? Yeah, that's really cool. Any adoption that the neural adaptions you'll keep, but you could have got those mainly doing high velocity stuff if you wanted to, or as a metric, so a bit, some pieces there, and they don't need to have a strength training, you know, in order to create neural adaptions. You know, but the hypertrophy and the other peripheral

stuff, you're going to lose that if, if you stop doing it. So it's like, we can't build strength in offseason. We create increases in recruitment and hypertrophy and soccer of genesis, and all that good stuff. And then, like, as I say repeatedly, if you turn your back on soccer and our genesis for

“five minutes, this is a pair. It's like, you have to kind of keep that stuff going throughout the”

kind of period of time, and which it's supposed to benefit you. If you do like a whole chunk of three months off season training, and you know, we'll have along the period might be in heavy strength training, and then stop in a month later, it's like, well, you might as well not a bothered really. Yeah. So the recruitment stuff is going to stay, and I think that's just the point I was making, it's like, you get your recruitment stuff, it stays, and then actually,

if the tendon stiffness then goes back a little bit, because you know, and on the doing the ice metrics, you get the benefits of the recruitment, but you don't get the disadvantages of the tendon stiffness. That's just a thought process that I was going for. Well, I think, you know, what they I've noticed too, that where people will go wrong, again, like off season type programming isn't, you know, I guess a little unrelated to apply metrics, but I'll bring it back. So off season,

you know, I still know tons of people that'll go, you just said that hypertrophy, heavy strength training route. One thing that I noticed people doing what still is focus on slow tempos, slow eccentrics, all the extended eccentrics, all these things in the off season, thinking that it's going to build a more muscle, thinking it's going to do all these magical things, and then they don't move fast at all. You know, they don't not all do they not do anything like pilework or anything,

“they don't do anything that speedwork, and I think we said the same thing in the speed episode.”

So then if you do an off season full of five-second eccentrics on your squat bench,

dimlift and things like that, or even machine stuff, and then you all of a sudden go and try to just start chucking in plyometrics out of nowhere, like you've moved incredibly slow for a long time, and I see people do that a lot, and then they'll have an athlete go right into plyos, because all of a sudden now we're in fight camp, we're in going into the season for, you know, soccer for this for that, and then all of a sudden everything starts hurting. If you'll be

up, make sure you're up in a big volume of plyos, and I'm like, you're not very, slowly, slowly for six months, and now you're like, when you're going to move as quick as you can. I mean, really, if we've tried to simplify this down to the kind of the simplest level that I can then go off season and end season training programs, shouldn't be that different, really.

symmetric to a little bit more feasible, and the off season a bit less, you know, kind of

“emphasis on plyos in the off season, because then won't tend to be moving around in almost”

able to potentially. So you can kind of argue that that is a subtlety there that, as, you know, kind of emphasis. But realistically, we kind of say, well, you know, off season, you could kind of get away with a little bit more volume, maybe a little bit more frequency. But really, the same stuff that is working in the off season will work in in season. It's just, you might need to write back to depending on the commitments of the athlete and what else they're doing. If the

athletes hugely committed to a number of events and the practices and whatever you might have to dial the, like I said on my Instagram stories yesterday, I said, you could literally do a single set of hip thrusts twice a week, maybe a single set of hipplakes have a hiplakes work twice a week, maybe a single rep of Nordics and a single rep of, you know, reverse Nordics twice a week. And that could be it. I mean, and unlike that will keep everything that you did in the off season, you know,

completely, you know, more or less intact throughout the in season without having to actually,

you know, kind of create tons and tons of fatigue. Yeah, you'll never get tired when I don't

set every to those. Don't think that people are going to get, you know, fatigue and do single, you know, kind of sets of those heavy strength drinks. I was maybe a rep of Nordics and a

“rep of reverse Nordics twice a week, or whatever it might be. So I think ultimately it's about,”

you know, it's not saying the two trained programs and those two phases shouldn't be that different. It should just be that you're dialing back the kind of volumes, and maybe the frequency slightly as well in that period where you've got more commitments, mathematically. But there's something else I wanted to come back to that you said just to finish on bad apps. You mentioned about tracking performances, and you also in a separate comment you mentioned about the,

missed it now just for the whole 20 seconds. We'll get it. It's like, I'll come back.

In there, it connected the two things together, because you mentioned the tracking of performances,

I know what it was. You mentioned how the structural recycling proves and platos relatively quickly. So you kind of get a period improvement, and really what that represents for the ologically most likely in the context of high velocity movements is just the amount of compliance you get until you reach quasi-isometric. Because when you get to a quasi-isometric, you can't go any further. There's no outcome that you can kind of influence that will make the structural

example better. So if you think about it in those two terms, what you can do then, if you combine those two observations and say, okay, well I can monitor concentrate phase performance and it's it's okay as a kind of a metric of structural and it's like, you know, to just use that. We can say, okay, so I'll measure the difference between my squat jump height and my drop jump height for height, not for gram contact timing and my Z. Look at the differences between those two, and I've

got down a metric of what I would call my structural and cyclical effect. So it my drop jump height is 5% greater than my squat jump height. Very approximately. I know that that's a metric of my stretch short and cyclical effect. Now it's not perfect as a number of other things going on there, but you know, it's good enough. If that improves over time while I'm doing the program that I'm doing, then I know that my tendons are moving around a bit more and I'm becoming more capable of generating

those positive mechanisms that influence the stretch short and cyclical effect in high velocity moves. It's getting worse. It means I'm kind of leaning heavier on strength training stuff and they're ice images and it's kind of, you know, kind of, they're now importantly in both of those scenarios. Jump heights could still be going up. You know, both jump heights could still be up. One could just going up faster than the other. That's the thing that I just keep going back to.

It's like the straight shortening cycle is a ratio of things. It's not actually a thing on its own. It's the ratio of these things happening. So you can get squat jump height going up and drop jump high going up. This is one goes up faster than the other and you'll have an improvement in the straight shortening cycle or a reduction in the straight shortening cycle. It really just depends on which one is going up faster. And then literally you could just monitor that as you're saying,

just track and when it gets better and then starts to play slow. It's like, okay, we're done here.

“Yep. And I think people always look for the fancy tracking, like all the data, but”

that's something that almost anyone can do in any gym. It's so easy. You use a phone app, who's like my jump. One of those, you know, anything like that. And you can just drive it yourself, your coach can track it. Does not require fancy equipment. So that's, I mean, that's a stuff I really like, as most people are not uploading any fancy jokes. It's funny. I get a lot of people coming to me saying, you know, I've got these motion capture kind of laboratory access and I can do all these

words stuff and I'm like, they're actually need a lot about to get some really cool data that hasn't actually been regularly tracked. Because again, most people who are thinking about this stuff are not starting from the physiology and working the way to the end of the implication that starting from kind of, well, this is how things have been done and this is how the outcomes work and we're building strength and getting, and I'm like, no, you're not going to go back to

physiology and start building up, break by break. And then you'll get to a point where you can see what actually should be happening and then you come up with these observations like you're saying, in fact, a very time. And you should see the improvements or, you know, kind of, it gets worse

on you, like, if you've just come off a period of competition, you actually might want it to

get worse. So if you kind of, yes, like, finish the competition. Yeah, finish competition season.

“You can carry on tracking, tracking, structural and historical and then you should see that”

drop jump height relative to squat jump height gets worse because you've cut down it on the

ply matrix. You improve at the increase the amount of heavy strength training and maybe biometric should be doing. And you see a drop away from that really kind of effective structural

“and cycle in favor of a tendon that doesn't move around so much, then you can then do other stuff”

and be a little bit more relaxed about the risks potentially involved in creating tendon damage.

So, you know, actually when you think about it, having that block of isometrics and heavy strength training, immediately post competition season is actually a really interesting idea because it's simultaneously puts you in a state to be able to do it more of all you. As soon as time is actually priming you for recruitment, you know, that will benefit you in subsequent phases. So, in terms of periodizations, actually an interesting physiological rationale going on. Yeah, for sure with that one,

I know we'll get into periodization because I've yet to talk much about it. We've got so many things to talk about. It's actually quite funny. I just got a list and lists and lists of topics

“that we can cover. So, but I think that hopefully is a good introduction to straight short and cycle”

in the context of fast movements. I think that's probably a good place to stop. Yeah, for sure. So, thanks for joining me again Rob and thanks to our listeners for joining us both and we will be here next week with another topic.