006 Eccentric training

and we're going to talk about eccentric training today. Now before we jump to on the podcast today

“and we were talking about how to make this topic manageable because essentially it is such a huge area with loads to go out.”

So there's going to be some parts of today where we're going to skip over things relatively quickly and but we will come back and treat this topic in a number of ways differently in the future. We'll do more episodes about it but today is really an introduction to what is going on with eccentric training.

So, as always, I'll just run through some of the physiology and then we'll start talking

out, strengthening programs and how to incorporate eccentric training for specific goals in the context of specific groups or athletes. So essentially with eccentric training we've got a number of neural adaptions or first of all I should clarify that basically eccentric training is a former strength training. So you are going to get pretty much the same stuff that you get with normal heavy strength training with eccentric training. So essentially you're going to get the same things that we saw when we

covered maximum strength in the previous episode. You know, you're going to see increases in coordination, you're going to see potentially reductions in antagonist charactervation and potentially increases in protein at a moment, although more on that. Briefly and in terms of local muscular options you're going to see high-perch fee which is an increase in muscle fiber size we're also going to talk about soccer mechanisms today in more detail and then of course you know there's going to be increases

in tendons stiffness and lateral force transmission. So in terms of eccentric training what we're really doing is saying what is different about eccentric training? How does it differ from heavy

“strength training? What are we seeing in terms of the unique impact of eccentric contractions?”

Well, essentially there's a couple of differences in the neural side and there's a couple of differences in the peripheral side. So on the neural side the coordination aspect is a way bigger deal than it is for heavy strength training. And that's because the brain treats eccentric contractions differently from concentric contractions and it finds them much much harder to coordinate. So we tend to find that there is a bigger learning curve and we gain more strength from the

coordination improvements in eccentric training that we're doing and heavy kind of standard conventional strength training. And so that gives us this kind of that gives us really a period of time especially at the beginning of an eccentric training program where strength is increasing in the exercise that we're doing quite quickly and that can deceive us into thinking that you know something

incredible is happening. A lot of people will start doing you know eccentric training for the

first time and they're like raving about these huge increases in the strength that they're getting

“and you have to kind of throw a little bit of cold water on that and say actually it's just that”

you're getting better at coordinating the exercise that you're doing is not as exciting as it looks and actually that causes problems they to run because often especially in sport you'll find that people will just do three or four weeks worth of eccentric training they'll get massive gains in eccentric strength and they'll be like oh yeah banked to that and now that's fantastic and then maybe the alternatives they'd carry on with a bit longer and they start to see a pattern and they

go ah the exercise is stopped working and like no no no it's just started working and that's the point where you've got the coordination to a point now where it's actually you know the exercises is is relatively you know kind of them now giving you indications of other reductions not just the coordination more and that really comprises into the motif of equipment difference between all the gains in recruitment difference you'll get with eccentric

compared to normal strength training if you're seeing improvements in recruitment in eccentric training a lot of the time that's going to be tied to the coordination improvement because the coordination is so bad at the beginning that it actually suppresses recruitment by producing a perception of effort associated with that control process but if you're really concentrating or your brain is devoting a lot of computing power to coordinating a movement then you actually

produce a perception of effort that then suppresses your ability to hit maximum recruitment which means you can't improve motion equipment as a you know in a normal way that we would do after heavy strength training so what you get in really is an increase in recruitment with eccentric training and this has been observed in a number of studies is that what you're actually really doing is just removing that perception of effort associated with the coordination and so the recruitment isn't

actually an increase in recruitment that is transferable it's just linked to the exercise that you've been doing so again a lot of the enormous increases in strength caused by neural adaptions during eccentric training I just pretty much limited to the exercise that we're doing in the gym and not very exciting at all and so we're ultimately we're kind of need to get through that first

couple of weeks of training so this is why I'm extremely critical when I see especially team sports

I'm going to single these guys out a little bit now it's here especially in teams sports by they do like a three or four week block of eccentric training and they see these huge gains in eccentric strength in the exercises that they're doing in training and they're like oh wow you know this has been fantastic I'm like you haven't done anything guys you've kind of just got yourself to the point where you can start doing the work now anything you do will have a high level

of recruitment you'll be able to create some interesting adaptions locally so the neural stuff I'm

so the eccentric strength that we might be using so peripheral stuff peripheral stuff basically as

I mentioned we've got soccer mergences now you can get soccer mergences and normal strength training but it's limited to the lower half of the motion it pull now the reason I say that is because every time we have an eccentric contraction the eccentric fiber force is about double the concentric fiber force and that means that if you're doing a normal strength training exercise your activation levels are going to be doubled in the concentric phase from in the eccentric phase that's just basic

math so ultimately if you hit muscular failure in the concentric exercise and the concentric phase of your heavy strength training exercise your subsequent eccentric phases you lower the way back down having reached muscular failure is still only gonna be like 50% of your maximum level which is not really anywhere into the meaningful territory of high threshold motor units so really hard to create meaning for kind of soccer mergences in the top end of the motinit pool during normal strength

training we are going to get that much more successfully during eccentric training so that's the major difference really in terms of the high-purchary soccer mergences segment as far as these centrics are concerned as far as attendance stiffness is concerned this is a really interesting

“topic and I think we'll come back to this later on but broadly speaking a contraction mode doesn't”

make a massive difference to attendance stiffness changes it might given that the forces of the whole muscle tend to be higher in any eccentric training because you're doubling the fiber force app you know for the for the eccentric but the concentric I think there is a scope for potentially tennis stiffness to increase for a longer period of time than with concentric training but

ultimately probably doesn't really change it doesn't rid to more rapid rate in the short term

and in terms of lateral force transmission obviously I have mentioned this before but ultimately it does look like lateral force transmission increases a little bit more so with eccentric compared to concentric but whether that is just simply because every time we're creating a new soccer mode we've got to bolt it into the end of the museum and therefore you have more costumeric addition therefore you have more lateral force transmission I don't know whether that's just

the side of effective having traditional soccer mergences in might be a unique feature of eccentric it's by the attention that's creating an adaption or it might be just that more soccer mergences require more customers so but it does look like that does happen and then in addition to all of that it does also appear that we can add more tight in every time we do eccentric training kind of contractions so potentially we're getting at increase in passive force production in an eccentric

contraction every time we do blocks of eccentric training or we have eccentric training in our or exercises in our program so that's basically the kind of wisdoms quickly as I can to get all of that physiology in place that's really the differences that we're going to be seeing between heavy strength training and eccentric contractions or eccentric training obviously we're talking about a situation where we're using maximal efforts here because otherwise you're not going to

access the high threshold mode tenets and create adaptions in them and basically overall I'm arguing is that we've got to focus more so on the peripheral adaptions because those are the

“interesting parts the neural adaptions I think are pretty limited to the exercises that we're”

doing in training because they are largely driven by improvements in coordination even the increases in recruitment are actually driven by you know the improvements in coordination and so the

only final thing I need to mention then is that we always have to bear in mind that whenever we're

doing eccentric training we are creating a lot more calcium and accumulation because we are opening stretch activate the land channels especially in fast-witch muscle fibers so our ability to do a lot of this type of training is very limited and that goes for both intro workout and also post workout so if we're doing a workout with eccentric contractions we can't do what I mean I've read so many of these studies and they always make me laugh every time I go back and look at them

and they find this old Nordic curls study where the people are doing like six sets of 12 Nordics and you just like it's just impossible you've got to literally nothing happen after the first kind of like two or three sets there's just nothing going on because the calcium and accumulation is just off the charts but ultimately that is going to stop a lot of these adaptions from happening because you're not going to get the force production you're not going to get the you know kind of

processes occurring inside the fiber that are meaningful to create adaptions um and all of the stuff that we're interested in is peripherals and of course then post workout as well not just inside the workout we've got a limit to on how much volume we can do but also post workout if we do too much post you know in the workout then post workout is going to be a mess and we're not going to be able to do anything else for the rest of the week so that's kind of all the physiology let's now talk

a little bit about some you know strength training program examples Rob talk us through something give us some examples of how you're using eccentric training at the moment yeah for sure Chris um so there was one that we I think you and I might have mentioned I one of the previous podcasts a really cool one that I've been doing lately with some of the kickboxing athletes and the combat athletes and that one was related to improving out eccentric strength in clinch work and grappling in that

“and so if you want to imagine doing just like any kind of normal narrow grip realm and the way that you do”

that one is using momentum whatever it is to complete the concentric so you can actually use a

kind of getting it down to the finish position and then control these centric for roughly three

maybe five seconds for just a couple sets of a couple reps a U and I had come up with that one but using it with a lot of success from improving on what you said clinch strength for the grapplers for the Moitagas if you're in out of a poem clinch and kickboxing and Moitagas your arms are going to be pretty narrow grip keeping someone from raising their head up raising their body up

“and pulling out of the clinch so that eccentric strength you have there to control is very important”

you get in the same kind of positions and grappling in jujitsu in that we're very dependent on that keeps someone from moving around and keep head control posture control things like that so that's really cool one for my brother Nadja and woman to that with quite a few athletes I'm really very single result. That's fantastic news so this is really interesting and just to kind of

highlight the physiological aspects of this for people who have been listening to the explanation

because we have muscle fibers that are stronger essentially because eccentrically we have the elastic element tight in which is activated and allows us to generate this passive force as the fibers being stretched it doesn't do that obviously in the concentric phase so essentially every single fiber in our body is about twice as strong when we activate it and stretch it in comparison when it's contracting so you can imagine that essentially we've got two fighters in exactly

the same weight class then yes you could have a situation where one of them is 10% stronger than the other

“but you can't really have a situation where one fighter is 200% of the strength of the other”

fighter that's not going to happen in the same weight class you know you can have you know meaning for differences or 10-20 maybe even 30% but you know if we're looking at the difference so obviously if you're trying to avoid the person pulling away from you but you're essentially therefore using eccentrically strength you are essentially twice as strong as they're going to be if they're doing that concentricly so really you shouldn't see us in our own which people can

escape these things unless it's technique related issue I mean if it's pure strength related issue people should not be physiologically capable of escaping in that situation so if that is happening then either as I say it's going to be a technique problem or it's going to be that the eccentric strength has been developed now the major reason why that's going to happen if the eccentric strength has been developed either there's going to be a really big coordination

issue in that particular technique situation so the person is just not comfortable displaying that for the eccentric strength in that scenario in which case it requires more practice or alternative it's going to be the stuff that we're working on in terms of the strength strength side of things which is trying to get the titan in there trying to get the lateral force transmission as well to increase concentric and what isometric and eccentric strength but

if we can get extra titan in that scenario then each fiber will become even stronger than it was

“previously so I think this is just such a fantastic example as you say we talked about this”

low it's previously but you know just so people understand you know realistically you've technique is good and eccentric training has been done to develop that eccentric strength there really shouldn't be a scenario where people can escape those kind of situations yes it's been didn't very useful really cool so give us another example yeah I mean one of the other things that you quite a bit with what I'm going to feel to poor guys and that has just changed the

direction stuff so mainly focusing on like eccentric strength of the quads there honestly I really like extension from that super practical easy for most people access and so for that you're just going to lift the load with two legs and then you know similar to using the momentum to get away that you can't actually lift normally lift it with two legs and then just lower with a single leg again you know short duration three or five seconds few sets of a few reps

done you know maybe twice a week and use that with with good success with guys you know quite a bit recently I'm soccer football all that kind of stuff really really like that one it's just so easy it's a lot easier than to actually people do with really serves and things like that and they are just not not practical no you can spend a lot of time messing around with that yeah really it's just like that yeah but it's just a useful one practical but yeah just for people

again who maybe are listening to that going hang on minute how do we get from you know change your direction to eccentric the extension strength yeah you can you can dive into that one

basically do it we'll do an episode on change of direction we will do that but very very briefly

change of direction is largely determined by disseleration so essentially for looking to improve change of direction we want to disselerate as quickly as possible so that we can get turn turn direction and then go off in an obviously a new direction so ultimately the disseleration is going to be created you know by the eccentric strength and when bam chemical analysis analysis has been done on those kind of movements of the disseleration it looks like it's more of a quad

dominant movement than it is a hip dominant movement so we kind of end up needing quad strength and eccentric quad strength of that so that's the short answer you know I think there's not

in teams sports and need rapid changes direction always going to have that in yeah really go on

“and I think probably one of the the other more common ones I do that we've mentioned another”

episode already is just Nordics or some panel leg curl not be mainly for just sprinters first I'm improving you know hamstring yeast hundreds strength reducing strain injury and things like that when the leg curl variation they're same protocol you just pick away that you lift with two legs you lower with one super easy same time same number sets reps just couple sets parallel reps and then for the Nordics you know obviously most people have done Nordics but just using if you

have to away where you're actually hardly able to control it for you know three to five seconds I see a lot of people do Nordics and they lower you know six eight ten seconds and they're doing a body weight and they're still able to lift their body weight and if you're able to lift your body weight concentrically you're not using a load that's heavy enough for it to be like really

centric training I'm so yeah I just always make sure people are choosing a weight that's actually

applicable and getting done what they need to do versus you know otherwise I could just bang out reps and they just be doing you know a form order from I'd put your videos something I guess yeah no absolutely I mean it just becomes a kind of a normal heavy strength training set but with slow slow lowering phases which is not as we'll talk about in a minute and when we cover off some of the things that we shouldn't really be doing but that's that's kind of not the idea

but yeah no I in terms of sprinting just to kind of give the kind of um biomechanics behind that essentially in sprinting movement which is a cyclical movement we are producing power output of the hip and then we're absorbing that the knee so we're kind of transmitting a kinetic energy down the kinetic chain um and because we're developing a high speed over a period of you know 10 20 meters and we're actually kind of getting to a point where we can produce a pretty large amount

of kinetic energy we're citing it to the hip as well so you end up with a lot of kinetic energy being absorbed at the knee so you need really really high eccentric strength for the hamstrings and actually also of the knee expenses in the opposite end of the gates cycle for the same reasons but um we tend to focus more so on the hamstrings because they're the kind of the engine of the sprinting movement I would do a conversation about sprinting probably quite soon actually

because we've kind of went most of the big big rocks that enable us to do that and but that kind of just gives us an insight into why we would be having eccentric training in those situations so well in those examples that you've given us so far you've talked us through the exercises that you're programming you're giving us some really clear details about you know kind of the kind of rough sort of sets and reps that you might be doing focusing on you know relatively low

numbers of sets and low numbers of reps within those sets let's come and talk a little bit more about frequency with this because obviously one of the major problems with with as I mentioned physiologically major problems with the eccentric training is that it really does cause a lot to post workout fatigue and and solve it can't interfere with other stuff in the week are you

“using a specific frequency most of the time or does it vary between programs that you write?”

I'm on average I would say most people are doing a twice week and Chris and I agreed we're not going to get into detraining stuff we won't but just you know I just like to have a very low dose per session sometimes it's even just two sets of one single rep each time some more that's a very very low in session volume and then just a couple times a week to make sure that I'm getting enough of a training stimulus there so there's nothing lost throughout the week anything like that

yeah I really don't tend to do what's a week right much and I think I might have mentioned that and one of the one of the other results but usually stick to twice a week just to be sure that I'm

getting enough of it yeah don't give it to resemble was no I've never gotten three times a week

I don't understand any for that that would definitely be way too much especially if you're in season things like that you know it's bad enough that a lot of guys are training for five six days a week in the weight room wondering in season which I had a conversation with a football player who reached out to me yesterday and he does three football sessions and five strength training sessions and he did have some like eccentric stuff in that and there and I was like

you know my god man this is not going to go well it's amazing this idea of just doing more and more and more is like the answer to everyone's progress yeah yeah no that's cool I mean interestingly and I've been very fortunate with my with my mentorship that I've been running for the last few years where I've been teaching physiology to a number of people who are working at relatively high levels in sport and many of them have shared with me similar views where they've talked about programming

“eccentric on a much lower volume I remember even at the start of the mentorship before people really”

knew who I was I'm not sure who I am now but you know kind of like people would say to me they would they would kind of say I'm really not sure about these training programs that I read in the scientific studies where they're doing like you know sort of six sets of 12 Nordics three

sets of 12 because I I can imagine this to declin when we were chatting years ago I took over a

client from a usually a I took them over from a to cover over from a pile of to goch and when I first

looked through her old program she had seven sets of 10 and you know keep them on this was for a a pile of stuff at the time and she had said he had told her it would improve you know I'd produce you for future phases and some of that and I I read it and I was like my my my my it's yeah so I mean I but again these guys who I've gone through the mentorship they've often kept in touch women and they kind of come back occasionally and they say I'm doing you know kind of as exactly

what you said to me just now it's just two single three singles you know kind of twice a week and it is just perfect for you know just keeping things exactly you know where we want them to be and maybe occasionally increasing making small increases over time and this is just been a really big shift

“in that program because they're seeing you know positive effect you know I think it's such a contrast”

from as I say that the some of the silly programs that we see in the literature but also the general tendency in team sports where you like people often say we're going to do a block of eccentric training and they do three or four weeks and I'm like guys you literally just going to put my coordination is kind of you know kind of locked in at this point so now you've got a higher access to high threshold motor units you're going to be able to create all these nice

peripheral adaptions that you're going to find benefits from in terms of soccer mode genesis and

because of course that basically functions like hypertrophy if you've got you know the customer

is the bolt at the end of this year it's exactly as my thrivals in in parallel you do get a little bit of a length tension kind of relationship shift so I mean we were thinking about this when we're sort of setting up the podcast itinerary today we're thinking you know maybe there are certain situations where you'd have to be a little bit cautious about eccentric training for certain

“kind of actions so like the hip extension action in sprinters I'm not convinced we want an eccentric”

for the hip extension says in sprinting because you would move the length tension relationship so the muscles will be producing force in more stretch positions or peak force in more stretch positions and the sprinting movement really depends on contracted position hip extension so I don't really want to move my plateau of my length and relationship towards the stretch position I want to keep it pretty much at the plateau so you know this kind of I wouldn't want to get you

know kind of do too much stretch position group training so like maybe an idea wouldn't be a great choice in that context you know I kind of want to stick with the exercises like maybe a 45 degree back extension for the hamstrings in that context if I'm going to do that and I hope for us of course which is of course the kingdom of exercise sports. I was just thinking about this I was doing my Instagram questions yesterday and people ask me you know what's the single best exercise

for an athlete I'm like like can only really write hip to us at this point I mean it's just going to go. It really is that it's really it's so good and I used to hate them images because I personally hate to do in them I was too lazy to load up a bar on that

now I have access to that. That was always I mean because of course I was I'm not going to say

I was there when Brett invented the X-axis I wasn't but I was I was kind of like you know within a year or two after which I was kind of there so very much was a situation where we were all just loading up bar bells on the on the gym floor and I'm trying to make it work now of course that one's got machines that they can do it in any any major gym that they like to go to so yeah I think is that length and stimulation should be worth just checking if we've got exercises in a training

program you know do we actually want to avoid doing tomati centric in the case where it's potentially going to cause I mean obviously the the the normal strength training uh exercise have the same issue just much less so because you're dealing with half the the muscle fibers in comparison with with most of the muscle fibers that you can activate so ultimately you know not something I would immediately go to and go oh we need to deal with this and program

our entire workout around this problem but just something I would definitely think about you know being aware of but yeah I mean like those teen sports programs with a three or four weeks worth of eccentric training and then they go and do something else I'm like guys you got it kind of just you know settle in to take a slower longer kind of tortoise rather than hair approach and just kind of keep the exercises in the program a long period time get the coordination sorted

and get these peripheral adaptions and then we'll start see some interesting stuff you know

“coming through from that I think I think we keep saying that in every episode is just you know”

as many times as keep it in your program a long time don't yeah don't keep changing things because that's that's the single thing that aggravates me most about when I review some of these programs and they've got like you know four to eight weeks of a particular exercise and then I look at the next block and it's gone yeah you lost it and I'm like well you're gonna lose most of what you gain from that particular thing that you were doing and it's just not you know kind of

going to optimize the more interesting adaptions like you know adding some extra customers

from the individual fibers you know I think those are the things that are interesting about

“eccentric training the peripheral stuff not so much that the neural stuff even though you”

also in the literature a lot of people focus on neural stuff because you know it's the fastest way of creating a really being increase in the exercise that you're doing in the training program which of course 99 times out of 100 is irrelevant for the athletic population that you're kind of working not many athletes are actually competing in easy to get exercises you can argue maybe there's an arm wrestling kind of component there but yeah you'd have to you'd have to really go looking

for this stuff it's not like it kind of jumps out of you you know it's it's definitely unusual for that to be the case so and that really has to pose before we just give some people some examples of what not to do although we have been took no one to do and we get some really clear examples of what not to do and what doesn't work and what we're seeing or what you're seeing especially because you're the one that kind of spends time looking at social media going or the horror the

horror the horror you know all these things that people are doing that make no sense I guess I would just like to clarify that every time we include eccentric training in a program there is of course this big fatigue cost that's associated with whatever benefit we're trying to obtain and that means it's especially important to be really clear about why we're including the eccentric exercise in the in the training program so this goes back to your counter example of the power

of who's got a bunch of eccentric exercises for somebody you know it's like well what what are they doing I mean I can see a scenario where you know eccentric training might have a small benefit in power lifting because you might add some more customers you might get a bit of soccer emergency that you wouldn't otherwise get which give you extra force producing capacity but ultimately it's not a big deal because the specificity isn't there if I'm talking about sprinting I know exactly

why I've got an eccentric exercise in there for the near distances and the flexors because they're absorbing kinetic energy in a different cycle if we're doing change of direction I know it's giving me the distilleration if we're working with fighters I know it's giving me that tinge strength that I'm looking for so every single example that we've worked through or you've

“presented to us has a very specific goal in the program for that particular type of training I think”

that's the thing I would always start with all the other stuff all the physiologies is cool but at

the end of the day we need a reason to put this stuff in the program because of the big fatigue cost that we're doing cool so that being said let's now turn to just give some examples of things that people are doing at the moment that don't make any sense just to be 100% clear with people because we see eccentric training being discussed in the industry and yet not every single case of it being discussed is actually presenting things in the way that is either physiologically

accurate or even practically useful so give us some examples or I'll tell us what you've seen. I think one of the easiest ones that's just all over the place is still slow these metrics and just normal strength training reps I'm a lot of people saying that you add in instead of a normal speed you just keep a control of the centric and a deliberately fast concentric you slow down to three four five seconds I'm like that and people will say that that is going to

give you this big base of eccentric strength to then work off of but you know one of the things that you just mentioned you know in that eccentric phase in a normal rep or the way you're left you're getting you know maybe fifty percent of the recruitment you're targeting muscle fibers lower down on that high pressure whole motor unit pool you're not really targeting what you think you are nowhere near the same thing you're targeting with like a super max more eccentric

I'm a different muscle fibers that's different motor units and it's really not similar at all so see people doing that all the time and saying of course that you need that as well prior to doing any kind of really centric training you know if you have an athlete like a field sport athlete somewhere that and they've been lifting weights for a while you know one they're probably pretty decent lifting to the forces that they're experiencing and their sport are

“probably pretty high I don't think you need to do three to four second eccentrics with a”

weight you can lift to be prepared to then do some eccentric training it just doesn't make any sense at all and the people will say they use them for I've purchased three because you're going to get extra growth and all these things they use them off season and I know you and I mentioned that in a prior episode or was that did you know you do these blocks where you're moving very slowly off season thinking you're getting more muscle growth all kinds of things and I mean you're not

you're not getting more muscle growth because you're targeting roughly half the fibers maybe the ones are activated might get a little more passive tension but if they've already grown quite a bit they're probably not going to grow anymore so you're probably not getting extra growth from it you're just training yourself very slowly and you're not getting a good base of eccentric strength you're not getting any more hypertrophy you're not getting any more maximum strength

the funny thing maybe getting less because you're going to limit the concentric so the result kinds of things people are doing with slow or with moderately slow eccentrics that are just not useful very extended eccentrics I see as well but again with a weight that

you could lift so it's like a six eight or ten second eccentric I see that a lot and again they say

the same reason that they're building eccentric strength and it's similar to the three or four second eccentrics you're just not targeting what most people think you're targeting with those

you know rather than muscle fibers I mean this is a problem that we just keep seeing again

“and again and again people don't understand that the muscle itself is comprised of these”

hundreds of thousands of muscle fibers and if you don't switch to fibers on they don't get trained so you know it's like if you've got a 50% recruitment level because you're lifting away by lowering away that you can lift then ultimately it's really not going to do anything in terms of stimulating the top half of the motin at pull one question just ties into that was directed at me and I haven't answered it yet because I keep thinking about it and I

think the answer is I don't know it is about what we would expect to happen if we did eccentric

training or what would we expect that to do to the strict shorting cycle because the interesting thing about eccentric training is it does simultaneously increase ten of stiffness by quite a lot same way that any heavy strict train does but it's also going to give you a really big increase in the act what we call the active stiffness of the muscle relative to the tendon so the eccentric muscle strength so I would imagine that we might find that when somebody finally does this they'll

probably discover that eccentric's probably keep the strict shorting cycle more or less where it currently is so heavy strengthening tends to make the strict shorting cycle a lot worse by stiffening the tens and making it harder to pull around ply metrics to the opposite they don't really change ten of stiffness that much and you know they tend to increase active muscle

stiffness by a lot so they allow the muscle to pull the tendon around so if you're listening to this

and this is kind of you know um news to you then please go back and listen to our previous episode we talked about straight shorting cycle but um just tying today's episode into last week I think he's indicating probably or you know the correct definition of super maximally eccentric training probably more or less keeps the strict shorting cycle in its current state by essentially increasing both things at the same time but I'm not sure about that because nobody

to to my knowledge has ever tested it so yeah I'm not running but that just my physiological expectations based on what I've seen happen after ply metrics and heavy strengthening the literature so yeah that would that would be you know kind of just something else that is worth bearing in mind so yeah so slow slow lowering phases and normal strengthening is what a lot of

people think is you know equivalent to eccentric training as you described it's not you're seeing

a lot are you seeing anything else out there you know that is truly horrible yeah I've also seen

“it suggests that you should do start adding in you know eccentric only reps once you hit failure”

on the concentric and an exercise can start increasing your base of eccentric strength so yeah here you set of eight to ten reps the last one is zero reps and reserve and then you lower eight to ten seconds on the eccentric after you hit failure and again for the same reason that the the normal slow resentrics are not going to be doing anything that is going to be recruiting roughly half the amount of muscle fibers and also that point just creating a ton of

postwork out the take so I've seen that recommended for athletes when they're going through quote unquote hypertrophy phases you're not going to get more growth like that you know you're right now that and you're not going to be doing anything good you're going to be so fatigue from that of you doing multiple times in a week especially for multiple muscles or you know muscles that are pretty easily damaged hamstrings just things like that I mean I've seen it recommended

for hamstrings hamstring curls to start increasing eccentric hamstrings strength and it's just it's not doing anything useful it's going to make you fatigue for the lifting and for the sport training so that that's really that one yes no that is at this absolutely the worst one that you've told me so far that is terrible yeah please don't do that please don't do that it's really not a good idea yeah there's nothing nothing good is happening when when that's getting done and

and actually you know and we'll talk about fiber types and fiber types shifting and the loss to base training and avoiding fiber types if smaller stuff in a future episode probably quite soon

“it's a really interesting topic I think it's one of the most applicable physiological concepts”

to athletes that doesn't really get talked about in the bodybuilding space but yeah he's Hendrix in that sort of scenario where you're dumping huge amounts of calcium ions into the most fibers is a really good way of converting all of your type 2x fibers into type 2a fibers yeah so um that is again you're going to make the athletes slow by doing that it's really not going to be a very effective way of preparing them for pretty much anything that you want them to do yeah not a good one so if you

got anything else that's going to make my skin crawl or can we start eating I mean probably plenty if I really thought about it I would say the other one is just I see really high volumes of eccentric work and I mean even this can be I've seen super max more work once a lot of sets a lot of reps during you know like you talked about people do blocks of eccentric training and I've seen really high numbers of sets and reps and people think that I see the main

reasoning is that it's going to give you you know more hypertrophy and more you know

the athletes will see in that is that they get really really fatigued and performance is terrible for weeks and I've seen coaches say that that's because the time to express the adaptations from that block of eccentric is delayed and so yeah it's not delayed adaptations don't just you know

haven't always done three weeks later you're just terribly fatigued and your performance is you know

awful for weeks and weeks and weeks or however many things to recover from this giant block so I've seen that one quite a bit and yeah yeah that's worse that's worse yes no don't do that

“actually that that does bring us to an important reminder which we mentioned I think either last”

time all the time before potentially multiple times which is a good place for us to kind of conclude I think which is that there is no need to devote specific training sessions to one quality one athletic quality like eccentric strength and there's no reason to devote specific blocks to one athletic quality like eccentric strength that's really not a good way to construct training program it's really not a good way to construct a single workout we can absolutely construct workouts

with all the athletic qualities that we're working for most of the athletic qualities we're working before we talk I think previously about including high velocity stuff as warm-ups or brief ice metrics and warm-ups we've talked about you know including plyometrics into existing workouts we're can include eccentric super max police tricks into existing workouts we just put them in the end because once we've done them nothing else is going to happen really because

they're too fatigued so but we don't need to devote either single workouts to eccentric strength and we don't need to devote single training blocks to specific types of strength I don't know

“why people still do this I think it was one of those 80s things that people started to you know”

kind of getting this idea that each individual worker had to be devoted to a specific you know kind of quality blocks had to be periodised you had to devote all your time to working on strength or speed or whatever it was and it's like that's just not how the body works adaptions are below the surface and some adaptions straddle multiple qualities you know so you know when we're

looking at it from the adaptor point of view and then going from there and the reality is most of

this stuff can just be done in the same workout and if we as I say structure it see you've got your high velocity stuff speed work first maybe depending on how you're treating your plyometrics it's either going to go second or it's going to go penultimate before super max police entry and then the heavy strength training in the middle so I would generally program speed followed by heavy strength training followed by plyometrics because I'm thinking most of the time using

plyometrics for eccentric purposes and then finally I mean if somebody using a plyometric to gain speed in their concentric phase then it's a speed exercise how you're going to use it so if you're going to use it if I'm using it primarily to create eccentric strength improvements because I'll want a straight shortening cycling improvement I'm going to do it second to last before I do any of my eccentric super max monster so it's going to go speed strength plyometric and then finally

a super max eccentric and that's that you can do all of that in one workout and you can do all of that all the time you know this this block idea just needs to go it's just not going to get anybody and

“I think people I think people really think that within a single workout they need just such a high”

amount of time people have said to me I'm doing a speed workout and I'm like what so you in there for 10 minutes and you go I mean okay yeah it's not very much just yeah honestly this idea of qualities needing to be isolated has really got to go because it doesn't make any sense it's not it's not helping anybody and I think it's it's holding people back because you end up just really having to reduce your frequency of everything they're doing across the week or you end up

doing what you were describing the athlete you uh we're talking about a moment ago whether doing like you know eight training sessions in a week yeah you're getting you're getting worse every week why am I so horrendous okay well I think that was hopefully a good introduction to the issues associated with these endocrine we've necessarily gone quite superficially across a whole bunch of that stuff so if there are elements of that that you know you don't think make

perfect sense and we will be going into more detail in some of these areas in the future we'll do specific episodes on aspects of this we just can't do everything in you know and percent detail you know all the time so thank you for being on the call with me again Rob it's been great to have

you as always pleasure we will be back next week with another topic which we haven't decided

on yet so we should probably decide on that in a moment but we'll see you guys next week