007 Vertical jumping

I'm Chris Beardsley, I'm here with my co-host Rob Marcerry, and we're going to talk about vertical jumping today.

“So I think this has been the topic that people have most asked for and here it is.”

We're going to do the most basic version. We're just going to talk about vertical jumping, can't move and jump in a standard kind of two-legged jump test that you might do in a sporting situation or in a, you know, for a sports test situation or just in a gym just to kind of monitor your progress over time.

We will talk about more complex situations like one may jump in and jump in with some run ups and that kind of thing later on. We're going to limit ourselves today just literally to make sure that we kind of only talk for, you know, kind of 34 minutes because if we start introducing variations, we will be here all day. So that's the plan.

As always, I'm going to do a little bit of physiology intro.

“It's not going to be hopefully as long as the previous intro is that I've done because we can build on”

all of the stuff that we've already talked about and then obviously we'll start talking about programming straight after that. So starting at the beginning, biomechanically our ability to do a vertical jump in the context that I've, you know, kind of described is essentially defined by the impulse that we can generate in the vertical direction relative to body weight. So straight to an impulse obviously is four times time. So straight to where that tells us that when we're thinking about the vertical jump,

we've got to be aware that a heavier body weight is going to be disadvantageous in that specific situation. So and I'm not saying that that means we all need to go on a diet. I'm just saying that, you know, you know, for the purposes of a vertical jumping test, body weight is going to matter. So if body weight is going up for other reasons, so for example, you know, in a, in a context sport like rope B or in an American football, there's been a request by the coach that a certain

player in an increase is there. No muscle mass, you are probably going to find the vertical jump,

“height doesn't improve, you know, naturally over the course of the training program, even though”

the training program might be working pretty well. And that could simply be because they're adding mass and that's is then making it harder to, you know, kind of, you know, achieve the same jump heights as previously. So straight to where we just look at the basic biomechanical determinants of the vertical jumping. We've got this, you know, relative, relative, relative to body weight. The vertical impulse, that's telling us obviously that the weight of the athlete is going to

it going to go into matter. So after that, basically, we're going to say, okay, so we've got this

force times time, what is time in this scenario? Well, time is basically the period of time and the concentric phase from the point, the bottom point of the countenbeau. So essentially, the athlete is going to sort of dip down in the countenbeau and then launch themselves upwards and the space of all the distance that they've got from the start to that countenbeau to the, to the takeoff point, is really like the runway. Now in that runway, obviously takes a period of time and that

force times time is going to give you the impulse that determines the jump height at the end of the, you know, the takeoff phase. Now, what's really cool is that what we see in certain, um, uh, after certain types of training like assisted jumping, is that those, uh, countenbeau depth tend to drift downwards in order to give the athlete more, um, runway in order to take advantage of the speed gains that they've achieved that haven't arrived, you know, in accordance with

increased strength gains. So if we just do assisted, uh, jump training, what happens is our maximum speed improves and of course we've talked about maximum speed in the previous podcast and how it works. If you're maximum speed improves, but your maximum strength doesn't, what's naturally going to happen is that you're going to start to dip lower in your countenbeau to take advantage of your new maximum speed that you can't reach in the same period of time's previous or the same distance is previously.

Because you haven't got a greater acceleration capacity. If you have a greater acceleration capacity and the greater maximum speed, then you're probably not going to adjust your countenbeau depth because you've got the ability to get your new higher maximum speed, you know,

uh, more quickly. So ultimately, we can see some interesting stuff going on where by maximum speed

improvements, which are kind of going to allow us to reach a higher speed up takeoff and allow us to reach that greater, you know, kind of, jump height, ultimately, you know, all the, the two things are separate. So accelerating faster, so improving strength, but not improving speed. What's going to happen is we're going to just naturally accelerate to our old maximum speed and then just carry on at that old maximum speed. So probably your countenbeau depth will start to get slightly

shallower, but you're still reach the same maximum speed at takeoff and you're still end up with the same jump by just previously. And I was saying that I'm not saying that's going to happen because naturally when we do heavy strength training, we tend to improve motor unit,

So you generally find that with heavy strength training, it's not just uniquely producing an

“improvement in strength. It is producing a little bit of improvement in speed. So naturally what tends”

to happen with heavy strength training is you tend to get improvements in strength and speed at the same time, but much bigger increases in strength than in speed. You really depends on which adaptions are being generated. With speed training it tends not to be quite so kind of generous in terms of the spillover from speed back to strength. So we tend to see a much more marked improvement in speed and therefore you get this strange and securing where the athlete starts to

adjust their countenbeau depth to take account of the new maximum speed without the greater acceleration that would ideally go with it. So it's got to be aware that these two totally separate characteristics that are kind of being improved through separate sets of adaptions. There's a little bit of spillover with motor unit crewman, but we've talked about that as I say improves podcasts. So please go back and check those, the intro one we did at the very beginning plus the maximum speed and maximum

strength podcast individually. So that's kind of the overview of the, you know, from the outside,

looking at the system from the outside, looking at the system from the inside, we've always

got the proximal to this little sequence, the hip is kind of working initially and then the knee and then the ankle. When we look at the vertical jump, it's actually a lot slower, a movement than many of the other sort of movements that we see in the literature like sprinting, especially as a result, we do have their ability to produce quite a meaningful contribution to the vertical jump from the knee extensors. And in fact, when we look at percentage terms, the knee

largely counts for about 50% of the vertical jump, the capacity with the hip and the ankle largely making up, or essentially making up the other the other 50 between them. So the, the

“knee extensors are a really, really important component, but of course, they are second in line”

after the hip. So when we go back and think about how the proximal to this little sequence works,

reminds us that with the hip being first, we can essentially get much more out of heavy strength,

training when we're trying to improve vertical jumping because it is much more force oriented, even in the context of a very fast vertical jump, the hip is still going to reach slower maximum speeds than the ankle. And the knee is going to be much more balanced, largely going to improve as a result of, you know, strength training and speed training. The ankle is going to be at the speed and the spectrum. And as I generally just don't bother with it because

you kind of most of its contribution is happening due to kinetic energy passed down the chain from the hip and the knee. So ultimately what we've got then is an interesting kind of set of kind of, or a framework here, interesting set of parameters that tell us that we're going to gain

“our benefit for vertical jumping, both from a greater acceleration from the heavy strength training,”

improves force production therefore the acceleration. But also the maximum speed, and that allows us to reach a faster maximum speed at takeoff points, you know, at the end of each and kind of constant phase and therefore achieve, you know, greater jump heights. So taking all of that together, what it tells us is the vertical jump is actually a very, very balanced, you know, kind of movement that actually benefits from a number of different types of training and a number

of different muscle groups being trained. And this is one of the reasons, if not the reason why vertical jump height is one of the most improvable sporting metrics or athletic opponent's metrics that we can actually test. Because ultimately it can be improved by heavy strength training for the hip. It can be improved by both heavy strength training and, you know, our fast movement training for the knee and it can be improved ultimately by a combination of those factors and

some of them even spill over, you know, kind of to affect each other. So there's a lot that we can actually do in context of vertical jumping that is actually, we're much more limited in terms of other activities by comparison. So that's the kind of basic framework that's the physiology, as I said, we've leaned quite a lot on previous kind of podcasts. We can now kind of jump in and talk a little bit about how programming might look based on these observations. Rob,

talk us through a couple of training programs that you're writing at the moment that are designed to improve, you know, specifically the, you know, the kind of the standard vertical jump test,

if you'd like the counter movement jump test. Yeah, for sure, Chris. I've always really loved

jumping training myself. So I mean, years ago, sponsored skateboarder and I originally got into a lower body training because I wanted to allow a higher, and I was just like if I squat more, I'll allow a higher, you know, at the end of the day, not really a perfect way to go about it, but it actually worked pretty well. So I've always loved jumps and tons of people I work with knee to improve jump lights. I guess one of the, one of the ones I can give you an example of currently

don't, that I'm working with is a semi-pro volleyball player. Oh, I mean, with her, you know, like you just said, really important to have that heavy work for the hip. Previously, you know,

of like just squatting movements in that which were bad, but so we added in, in her case,

“hip thrust, you know, the gym that she has access to. I see you laughing. You know, really nice hip”

thrust machine, and, you know, that's been kind of her like main, heavy work. She's also in the past and so my textbook or dead lives and stuff like that. I do have her back squatting as well.

So just because she enjoys them and she wasn't terribly strong to start. So for her, it was basically

hip thrust, um, barbell back squat, and then she has some speed work like early in the session, just kind of the normal stuff we mentioned, um, unloaded jumps and very light loaded jumps, in her case, if she does them with any kind of light load, just holding like dumbbells, bires hot, similar to that, very, very light. Um, but, you know, a lot of unloaded stuff. The heavy hip work is definitely done a good bit for her. Um, hip thrust strength has gotten way

away up. You know, she started maybe, thing was, two 45 band plates and or so per side, two or three. Now, she's doing four points in a 25, um, with good technique and the vertical jump has really shown a good increase, um, squats, strength, same thing. She's gone from maybe 165 pounds for some decent reps to a well under the 200s. Um, so that's both of those things that proven really, really nice

for increasing her jump height on their own. I would say, and then for the speed end of things,

like I said, the unloaded jumps early in the session, just a couple of reps as fast as she can, you know, tracking it with the mod jump back from the max height. And then you said, you know, and we talked about it before. Not really doing much for the ankle. She does do some calf hops, just trying to, you know, do some flights as hard as she can in the air. Kind of hit the ground as hard and fast as she can with the involved for foot pretty much,

but nothing really too much for the calves. No real heavy work for the calves. Again, we mentioned a couple of other episodes of boarding that. Well, that's, uh, that's kind of the way I've got about for her jump height is really, really increased. Awesome. Well, to this point. Fantastic news. Let's just, um, sort of go back over a couple of those things for people who might have missed a couple of the details. This, I think there's, there's that really interesting out observation

you made, which is that, um, the athlete, when they started didn't have, um, really high levels of squat strength. And obviously, because they'd not been doing any hip thrust at all, they didn't

“have very high levels of hip thrust strength either. Um, and I think it's really important that, um,”

I think it's a fairly well documented observation, um, at least amongst strength coaches that, um, when somebody has a relatively low level of, of kind of squatting strength or, you know, kind of any lower body strength, they do tend to see pretty big improvements in vertical jump height as a result of doing those heavy strength training movements. And then, um, the improvements start to get smaller and smaller and smaller, um, you kind of get to that,

sort of intermediate, higher intermediate level with, with lower body strength. And improving takes a lot of effort to kind of move forward on those things, but it doesn't seem to transfer quite so much into vertical jump heights. Now, I'm not, I'm not saying that that's going to be this case for everybody. It just seems to be kind of one of those things that most people are kind of, yeah, that's more or less how things have gone for me or how other gone for my athletes.

And I think really, that's, big, that place perfectly in line with the physiology that I was describing earlier, which is that when we see, um, you know, when we look at the transfer ability of different exercise or training types to vertical jumping, everything kind of looks on paper, like it's going to transfer. The issue is that if the limiting factor becomes the speed aspect, then there isn't actually any amount of heavy strength training that's going to change anything,

because ultimately, the take of jump height, sorry, take of jump height, the take of jump

velocity, sorry, is the determinant of your ultimate jump height. So if you have, you know, a certain maximum velocity that you can't get past, then ultimately increasing acceleration, as I said earlier, all it's going to do, you know, every because I may, all it's going to do is get us to a point where we reach our maximum velocity earlier and then just carry on traveling at that same velocity, and we reach the top of the concentric phase at which point we're kind of just wasted, like, you know,

kind of turns into meters worth of runway. What we need to do is have a higher velocity that's, you know, high maximum velocity and then use a greater acceleration to take us to that new

“maximum velocity. And I think what happens with, you know, people over time is that they do”

a bunch of heavy strength exercises, like the hip thrust, like squat, and what have you, and they're like, yeah, this is fantastic. I'm improving it's brilliant, and then they sort of notice it stops working and they're like, oh, I need to double down and do this harder and like, no, you actually need to look at the opposite end of the spectrum and go, why is it that I can't reach and high maximum velocity is because I'm actually, I've stopped focusing on the speed aspect

of things because it's so seductive to get kind of into the numbers with hip thrust numbers and and kind of squat numbers and with that, oh, if I can just push those numbers up then my vertical or gap, and it might do, it might do, but it might not. If the velocity and the mutation is

of acceleration that's going to get you, you know, past up particular point. Do you have any

our programs at the moment where people are doing assisted stuff? So we talked before about how, you know, there's like, you know, the vertical jump itself obviously is a fast movement, but it's not a really fast movement like sprinting is. So we've actually got this interesting capacity to actually talk about, you know, maybe looking at improving the speed by doing a

“assisted type training. Yeah, I think I mentioned in one of the previous episodes, one of my”

football guys who, you know, wanted slash-nated to jump higher than that. He actually has been doing quite a bit of band assisted jump work for a while now, and that's proven very, very useful. You know, he was a big guy, a strong guy, had done tons of strength work for years and years,

and then had in proud of working when they'd been doing really any specific speed work. So initially,

it was just unloaded jumping, and then after that, we had moved actually to some assisted jumping with the bands and that. So like you were saying that, that really had a big impact. And definitely, you know, when it came to his jump, like you were saying, it improved his kind of movement depth, and definitely made a big difference in the jump height overall. He's been running this for quite a while now. Same set up. That's the beginning of the program, you know, for the speed work,

and then the heavy strength work in that is after that. In his case, had also moved to a more concentric only squat, just from pins. So pins more up, you know, towards the top of the range. There didn't really feel like he needed so much in the bottom end of the movement, and he

does a lot of support training in that as well. So didn't want him getting overly tired and fatigued

from full range squatting and working to a longer muscle length, some things like that. So I think for him, at least that combination has proven really really useful. And, you know, of course, in the jump too, you're not at a super long muscle length, you're not squatting all the way down, even when you're hitting that kind of optimal counter movement depth. So then necessarily need the four range squatting at this point, I felt like. Cool. So I'm sure there's going to be people out there

who have not done any assisted jump training before. Can you give us a brief description of how you're setting this up just so that people can, you know, think about how they might implement it? Yeah, usually just loop a light band, you know, is not having to be anything super thick around the top of, you know, you can use a 10-up station power rack and they like that. And he kind of bar that you have that's pretty well above hand, grab both hands on the bands, and then,

say give it into the, you know, counter movement jump, to music in, and then use the bands to propel yourself upward, significantly faster than you'd otherwise be able to go super easy to set

“up honestly. That's why I typically do it. But yeah, never thought to do that. I mean, I guess the,”

the advantage is it's so easy as you describe as long as, as long as the athlete isn't jumping directly underneath the bar. Yeah. Yeah, you're going to stand on one of it out. You want to want to know nice minimal equipment. Our racks, power racks are probably going to be pretty much perfect for that, as they're, as they're bolted to the floor and you can kind of loop the bands either side of you, and that gives you some really good, you know, kind of a really

good zone in which you can work, where you have nothing above you, but you've still got the support and your hands. Yeah, so if, so I guess this requires a little bit of a safety audit before you start. Yeah, I'm here, huh. But then equally I suppose on the downsides, it might be a little bit tricky to control in terms of making sure that you get the same amount of resistance every time. I guess you could mark the position on the bands with a, with a kind of a mark, a pen.

“You know, that's what I have somebody who just makes me think of the grabbing. Yeah.”

Yeah. That's the same place every time. Um, of course, even then the arms can move slightly the bend in the elbow and that kind of thing. So it would be probably the kind of thing that I wouldn't track the height of, um, because it's probably going to be too variable from, from our rep to rep in session to session, but in terms of ease of use, it sounds fantastic. That's like a really, because a lot of people kind of look at assisted jumping as a training method. They go,

there's no way I can do that. It requires a harness and you know, you look at this setups in the literature and they've got these people in these bungees with, you know, climbing harnesses on and they're flying around like, you know, trapeze artists, having a great time. And they're like, okay, so that's not really feasible to do my gym. It's actually, it might be. If there's, if there's scope to do what you've described there, that could be really, really valuable. I think

to a lot of people. And with those, I'm not tracking the height on those specifically. Obviously, you just have just tracking the improvement in the actual jump. And then totally. Totally. Totally. Totally. I think the, you know, one of the, the most common questions I get is from, from, from coaches working with team sports athletes, like, you know, rugby and, and soccer and that kind of thing. You know, is, you know, can we just use a vertical jump, unloaded

generally speaking, my answer is yes, an unloaded vertical jump is going in the direction of speedwork, you know, but the assistance is just going to be so much better, because you're actually

providing a stimulus that they're never going to get anywhere else. I mean, the athlete is not

going to get those stimuli from any other scenario other than, you know, when you provide that assistance, because it's just not a, it's not something that happens, you know, gravity doesn't change around us as we're walking around, you know, because it's nip over to the moon to do some training for a bit and come back. It's not like, you know, altitude training where you can go to, you know, 3,000 meters and do some, you know, different types of a rugby exercise. This is

kind of really a unique stimulus that, as you've described, is quite easy to implement in certain situations, as long as there's a bolted down power racket, it could be doable for most people.

“So that, I think, is really important. It's like, yes, an unloaded vertical jump is potentially”

going to give us that, you know, speed under the spectrum training, but to be honest, most athletes

will have already done, as you've been saying, years of that kind of stuff, they're in

two years of heavy strength training, years of, you know, kind of unloaded vertical jumping. You know, what can we do that's different? Well, I think, you know, really on the, on the strength and inside the hip thrusters, you know, obvious thing that we can do, that's very balanced, but we say this every single week, don't we? It's like, you know, but, you know, it's like, there's this kind of things that we can do that aren't really going to have any negative impacts to all,

and, you know, hip strength training is one of those things. But equally in terms of us jumping, that assistance, that assistance, because jumping only is fantastic, as a way to provide a unique stimulus that also works directly on what is probably the limiting factor in most strong athletes. Right, and athletes already got a decent squat, you know, for that athlete class, you know, I think, I see that because there's so many

straight coaches who kind of like have doubled in power lifting or even competing in power lifting, and they kind of look at anything that's not their numbers as being weak, and I'm like, no, hang on a minute. Yeah, I mean, no, because it just be realistic. Yeah, it's unrealistic about what soccer player might need, you know, if they're kind of in that strong zone for that athlete type, and it's quite likely that doing more strength training, you know, just for the, for the

knee expenses and squat type variations, is probably not going to be the thing that makes a big difference, whereas some assisted jump training, I think could be really cool as could the hip strength training, you know, and things like that have to rest. And then the other question, which again you've already answered, which I get so many times is, you know, and then, for after our, after my run last week, I had even more of the questions, which is, can I really do speed training in the same

“session as strength training? Yeah, and you should. Why would you not? I mean, just like,”

it's such a fantastic warm-up for the strength training you're doing anyway, and you can't really do much of it. You know, I mean, tell us about how many, how many of these assisted jumps you programming at the moment, and maybe it differs between athletes, but you know, give us a array. It's not a time, it's like, you know, five to ten jumps total, and it does not take long, you know, even if you're resting pretty adequately between the jump reps, because you're not doing,

you know, back to back at all, it's just single jumps, you know, you're not going to need much to be fresh from a single jump. So you just do it for a few minutes at the starting session, and then move on to the rest. And yeah, like you said, it's a great warm-up takes like no time, no reason not to do it. It's really no reason to periodic it out of your program purposely, you know, when you're, when you're off season, just stop jumping. Because yeah, I mean, I've seen people get their jump

better, not jumping, you know, you know, great, great work, you know, whatever, however, what happened,

“doesn't matter, but that doesn't mean that I'm ever going to take it out of someone's program,”

just doesn't make any sense. Because I guarantee you're going to prove you jump way more if it's in you're around, and if you take it out for a few months at a time, because it's going to go off season, it's on the other side. Totally. So in terms of structuring your workouts for people are improving

that vertical jumps, you're doing your speedwork first, you're going through heavy strength training,

talk us through a typical workout that includes all of those things. Yeah, um, so I guess the good example of the volleyball player. So her current program, she does just her unloaded jumping, um, fall by those little calf hops, then she does hip thrust, just, you know, one of us fatiguing to start off with, and that's more than the main focus back squatting afterwards, which I've, I've had people ask me about when I program before, you know, while when I squat

out after the hip thrust, but squatting first is going to take a lot more out of the hip thrust, then vice versa. So, you know, even keeping some reps and reserve on both, that tends to work really well, um, and then after that, she moves on to her upper bodywork, which is not, you know, so constantly consequential here, just basic stuff, and then I'm in her case, she finishes up with some eccentric quad work, we'll get into, uh, the reason why, you know, future episode,

sprints a lot, runs a lot, but yeah, the main jump work and everything that's trying to drive that

“up is in her case just at the start of the program, so that's the most important, you know,”

when she's fresh, um, long rest and all that between. And you're kind of targeting a sort of heavy or moderately heavy rep range in those and those, uh, all those heavy strength training exercises. Yeah, usually like, um, currently she's working around like three to five reps, and it's usually going to be anywhere from, from three to six on those that don't tend to get too high, um, usually not above six from the most part on those when it's someone who, you know,

she's trying to get stronger and improve her jump point, not really using those so much for hypertrophy. I mean, she'll get a little bit of a workout of that, you know, obviously, being a couple of repshot failure, but not too much, um, so yeah, just primarily low reps, and then just increasing very gradually maintaining reps and reserve and kind of the quality and the speed that I want. Fantastic. And that's a really good illustration as well

of something that we haven't mentioned before, but again, I continually get questions on this,

“you know, how are we structuring a workout, you know, with fatigue mechanisms in mind? So you've”

started out with your speed work, which is the thing that is most sensitive to the presence of almost any fatigue mechanism. Um, you've then moved on to your heavy strength training and contract to position, uh, kind of exercises with the hip thrust, uh, which is going to at least a negative impact on other things afterwards. Then you go to squat, which is a stretch position exercise, so it's going to have some more negative impacts on everything that goes after. And then you

finalize the workout with that. There's eccentric, uh, only training exercises, which are basically

just going to completely kind of present and further benefits from being achieved, you know, once they've been done. Um, you know, when we talked last week about, you know, set some much for those kind of things, so we don't need to dive into it too much here. Um, and in terms of when you're working with somebody who's doing assistance, does it change at all or is it basically just your kind of replacing the, kind of the unloaded work with, with, with assisted work? Yeah,

really just replacing the unloaded work with the assisted, um, for, you know, brief, brief period of time. And sometimes I'll do a assisted one day and then regular one the other day. Okay. Kind of depends. Um, and that gives you, I guess the opportunity to track more, uh, kind of, yeah, just more consistent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I belong here. Most times I'm pretty

confident that the assisted job being is going to do what I need to do. So I'll have people do a

twice a week, but I have definitely used one, you know, one one day and the other another guy. But in terms of that frequency, you've just mentioned your training these athletes twice a week. Oh, there's that because they're doing sports practices as well, or are they? Yeah. Usually, yeah, usually they're doing sports practices, um, volleyball play, for example, currently, you know, playing a ton of games. So she's definitely only doing two sessions a week. Very rarely, it's,

it's one, you know, just have to do super low volume twice a week. Um, off season might be three. But that's the most I'll ever go. And that's more just, if someone likes to train more often, I don't really tend to find you need much more than that. But, um, yeah, if someone really, really enjoys it, I'll do three for sure. But two, you get pretty good improvements consistently. You know, get too fatigued, it doesn't really impact the sports training and the games and that.

Cool. Awesome. Well, hopefully that has simultaneously provided people with a very clear, you know, picture of what some good training programs might look like based on, you know, the physiology and the biomechanics we've explained. But also answer some of these common questions that we keep getting about, you know, how to structure work out, you know, why are we doing things in the order that we're doing them in, you know, and how will that make sense?

So to finish off today, um, can you, uh, and I deliberately asked you not to tell me before you, okay, well, the podcast today, so please don't tell me there's silly things that you've seen, you know, in the industry about training for vertical jumping. Just throw them at me and get my honest reaction to what you've managed to, you know, find. So tell us, tell us some mistakes that you're seeing, you know, out there at the moment in terms of vertical jump training.

“Uh, I did see again one today actually, um, just this morning. So again, I say that the best way”

to improve your vertical jump was high volume barbell back squatting. Uh, and his example was six sets of eight foreign back squat workout. And he, he referenced, uh, a guy not in his specific program, but he said, you know, Isaiah Rivera, who has one of the world's best vertical jumps has a great back to what? And he does. I think he backs once, you know, really nicely around my 200 kilos. So this guy's, you know, example, then was if you want to improve your jump, just going to do a ton of

back to what? And yeah, if you're doing six sets of, you know, six day whatever was on a volleyball back squat, um, yeah, like you said, maybe a beginner or someone who's not very strong yet. It might give you something, but someone who's already been straight training or even doing those things for quite a while. That kind of program is not going to give you anything for your vertical jump.

really not really not a police. I would want to go to. I mean, um, I mean, even doing that twice a week

“would be brutal, I think. Um, yeah. I think that would, I would start to accumulate some fatigue.”

And it certainly would make, you know, kind of any jump practice really tough to do. Um, you know, just to kind of reinforce that point, you know, speed training, um, you know, requires us to for pretty much all of the adaptions. We'd describe them in a previous podcast, but for pretty much all the adaptions on, uh, the underpin speed improvements. We need to be hitting really high levels of speed. Um, if you kind of turn up a today workout, when you're going to do some speed type work,

where vertical jumping practice, and you've got fatigue making it in a place, pretty much impossible to trigger any of those adaptions at all. So, you know, when, what, what I think a lot of people wouldn't realise is that when they push the boundaries of what's recoverable, um, in the strength training side of things, it really does obliterate our ability to trigger any other adaptions that we might want, related to the sporting coordination patterns, related to the speed aspects of

the adaptions that we're trying to achieve. And it just kind of isolates everything down to being literally just about the strength training. And even then, not very good, because, you know, kind of six us of eight is really not going to be the best power lifting program in the world for improving maximum back squat strength. So, I mean, we will do a podcast on what we think that kind of training,

“you know, should look like if you want to improve your back squat as quickly as possible. But,”

you know, I think, uh, certainly, you know, in any body's book, six us of eight is not it. So, give us another one. Are there any more that you've just got? I mean, there's one. Yeah, I've seen very, very heavy jump squats where people are, and, you know, I kind of get the idea and want people to keep accelerating through the whole movement, but it doesn't really pin out the way they think it's going to. So, I'm talking, like, people who can maybe squat through 15 for one

RM, doing like 265 pounds for, you know, quote unquote jump squat, where they, you know, basically,

like squat into a little bit of a calf raise and their toes get a little bit off the ground. I've seen that, I've seen ridiculously heavy work like that. It doesn't really make much sense. I guess not. I mean, the interesting thing is, yeah, there's like there's the technical component which is challenging. I mean, you could literally just say, well, put the weight up a little bit more, and then you won't go off the ground. Yes. It's kind of, it's kind of, there's kind of

all those strange territories where you kind of look at it and go, actually, you could just make it look a bit heavier and then you wouldn't have the problem to worry about, or you could just train, you know, speed properly, which is, you know, kind of unloaded or assisted type work. And this

kind of just references back to the very beginning with our first podcast, which is that you can't

train power directly, you know, and so many people are running around going, oh, we're training power. I literally had a question on it today, people are going, how do I train power or can I train power at the same time as something else? I'm like, power is a second order effect. It literally gets trained whenever you train strength or whenever you train speed. It's an automatic output of increasing either strength or speed because it is literally strength multiplied by speed.

You know, there's no other terminology in there. It's like if you look at power, it's literally

“forced on the losty. So people go, I can train power directly and want, how are you getting there?”

If you're not getting there via strength or speed? So it's very, very frustrating for me when something can be so simple as to be like basic, you know, kind of math and people are looking at it and going, this is complicated, I'm like, no, it's not. It's actually really simple. And so yeah, I think there's heavy jump squats or any jump squats really are massively overrated. I think we've been much better off training either under the spectrum with speed or

or with strength as we talked about in the very first podcast of this series. So with those, with those, with those the most degree, just examples or do you have anything

you'll sleep? We're probably the most degree just and one more that I always see all the time from

from tons of people. So actually is the idea that like a four inch emotion split squat is going to be great for your jumping, for your sprinting, for basically anything athletic. I mean, there was a big you may not be so aware because you're not really on Instagram following people. There was a big group of coaches for a long time and still actually as far as I'm more promoted like a long stance deep split squat as like the cure all for everything athletic. I'm just going to cure your knee pain,

make your hips better, make your jump higher. And when they're talking about improving your jump with that I've seen guys say, because it, you know, trains your quads, trains your glutes, trains your adopters blah, blah, blah. And that one's here for the exercise to do that. Yeah, exactly. And they're going to do better and more specific through the jump. Oh, more specific. Okay. I think, you know, that's one of those things isn't it. Try and

and suddenly you kind of like people are kind of, you know, bewitched by this whole kind of narrative

“that's going on around it. And when you look at it biomechanically and physiologically, hang on a minute,”

as soon as you introduce a stability element, I'm losing stuff physiologically. I'm losing, you know, a routine improvement, you know, because I'm devoting effort,

perception to this stability requirement. So now I've got, you know, and that's the most

really well established in the literature and people just don't want to hear it. You know, and also the coordination improvements that you might get in those situations is just unfransferable to our sporting activities. So again, it's really not something that I think makes any sense. Much better to train, you know, kind of, sort of muscle groups in specific contexts.

“I mean, that's why we just keep coming back to the hip, for us, it gives us such an amazing,”

you know, kind of loop training stimulus that transfers to so many things, you know, people just connect because they think it's, you know, not functional because it doesn't look like a athletic thing. And it's the thing is a crazy thing is, you know, if anything, I think, you know, obviously Brett can traverse his famous for, you know, I guess inventing the exercise as a hip thrust rather

“of the blueprint. And I think if anything, he has undersold it for sporting performance. I think”

it probably has a lot more mileage in so many situations than we give it credit for. I think it is pretty much the only exercise that we could put into almost anybody's program and it's kind of an hour positive. In fact, if it's not already been put in there, you know, I think it's, you know, just in terms of the biomechanics of many of these movements, it has enormous potential to contribute. So yeah, thank you for that, Brett. It was a great contribution here. Indeed, thank you,

thank you for conditioning. Well, let's end on that positive note, you know, kind of moving away from the criticisms of what other coaches happen to be doing at the moment. Let's end on that positive note. Hopefully, that's given people a good introduction and some practical applications for vertical jump training. Thanks for all of that. You given us that today, Robert, it's been brilliant.

And we will be back next time talking about throwing in the kind of the second major movement

that we kind of group together with vertical jumping. And then we'll finish this little mini series by talking about sprinting, you know, the week after. So we will be back next time. Hopefully, you guys with all join us, I'll see you then.