014 Transfer of training

with my co-host Rob Nasserie, and we're going to talk about transfer today. So transfer

of training programs to sporting activities. And this is actually one of those topics that

“I think is covered quite badly across a number of different domains, both in the strengthening”

and listening literature, and also in the fitness industry as a wider concept. I think we can actually make it very simple though. So my proposal is that when we talk about transfer requires two separate things. It requires a transferable adaption. So when I talk about transfer of adaptions, I'm talking about things that we can engineer through a strength training program or another type of training program. And the adaption that results from that training

program is not limited to the exercise itself. So in other words, it's not a coordination improvement or something with that nature. It's actually a genuine transferable adaption to something like hypertrophy, which obviously increases muscle force in any activity or it's no-teen. It's increasing cruisers and being like that. So we need a transferable adaption.

And secondly, we need that transferable adaption to be in a relevant muscle group. So ultimately

if we're interested in a sporting activity, it involves the legs. There's no point in trying to develop strength in the arms, unless there's a very clear reason to do so. So you can get even more granular with that. You can kind of go, well, these specific muscles in the leg or whatever are going to have the max runback for reasons that you maybe have to figure out. But ultimately, those are the two elements of transfer. We have to have a transferable

adaption under the surface. And we also have to have it in the correct geographical location. So as I said, I give some examples of transferable adaptions just there. But fundamentally, if we kind of look through the possible adaptions on strength, coordination is not going to be a transferable adaption. Reduktions in antagonist characterization are of dubious transferable ability. It might be a little bit of transfer there. We're probably not something I would

want to bank on too much. Obviously, in contrast, the recruitment increases are definitely

“very, very transferable. And something that I think is very cool to aim for in training”

programs. As regards peripheral stuff, obviously, hypertrophy, circumogenesis, very, very transferable. There might be a little bit of difference there with circumogenesis in terms of attending to shift peak forces to longer muscle lengths. But fundamentally, it's still going to act to increase force production across the whole range of motion. Anyway, tendons stiffness, a little bit. Very buoyant in terms of its contribution because, of course,

it interferes with the stretch shortening cycle if we're trying to improve that. So it's kind of variable impact. And then, of course, lateral force on machine, very much a force producing force increasing adoption, but not great if you're trying to improve speed in that same athlete. As regards speed adaptions, of course, we've got, again, coordination and antagonist characterization probably aren't ones I would be thinking of as transferable,

whereas we can obviously transfer recruitment and firing rate increases. And, of course, muscle fibre shortening velocity increases. So, there's a lot of transferability, muscle

“by muscle, if we want to make use of it. So I think it is absolutely possible to rely on”

a number of strength training exercises, even though they might not traditionally be classified as, you know, kind of the classic athlete athletic type exercises. If they're producing these adaptions, then they should be contributing to improvements in sporting performance, as long as they're in the correct location for these sporting movement though trying to do. So, essentially what I'm arguing here is that we want to get away from the idea that,

I mean, I want saw someone argue, someone arguing on social media that essentially strength training is like a weighted coordination training, and it's literally opposite of that. It's everything not that. That is as far away from my position as it's possible to get.

Ultimately, you know, strength training is not trying to improve coordination, or it is in

the movement that you're doing, but that's irrelevant. You know, that's just for the gym purposes. It's not going to transfer that coordination over to a sporting activity. It's a really nice day to show you that you can increase strength, you know, in something like a squat exercise, and that coordination improvement that you make and something like squat really isn't going to transfer to something like a vertical jump. They're just two different in that regard.

So, ultimately, what this brings us to then is to very different philosophies or approaches to the concept of transfer. Night argument here is that transfer is literally specific universal

in any movement that uses the muscle that we are adapting. Conversely, what you wrote is a lot

“of other people who are arguing things like, oh, this type of exercise, you know, trains the”

body or teaches the body to, you know, kind of work better in unstable conditions or something like that. And that's the kind of magical thinking that I'm trying to get away from and trying to argue is not actually how the adaptions process is are working. Also, it's not how transfer works. You know, transfer doesn't involve us teaching the body how to do stuff in particular ways. That's a coordination mindset. That's going back to this idea that strength training is kind

of loaded coordination training for sport and it's absolutely not. What we're doing is creating muscular adaptions as I say in specific locations and that's then allowing us to perform better.

Finally, what I'd like to just mention is that one of the modules, one of the episodes rather

sorry, my brain is in a course construction mode at the moment. One of the episodes that we've done previously was about a proximal to this or sequence. And that's a really, really valuable tool for helping us figure out how to construct a strengthening program that transfers well to a particular sporting movement. Because that allows us to break the sporting movement down into obviously as it sounds, proximal and distort segments. And the proximal segments can be trained

more so with heavy strengthening exercises, more kind of freely, if you like, because we're not going to be losing very much if there's any negative effects on speed. Whereas the more distort segments tend to have to have a more speed focus. So, in terms of structuring and figuring out

“how transfer can be constructed, I think the proximal distort sequence is a great kind of skeleton”

key if you like from locking those kind of problems. But ultimately, it still comes back to the

same thing which is a transferability of an exercise to a sporting movement is always going to be

because of an adoption that is created and that adoption is in, as I say, the correct geographical location. So, that's enough from me. Rob, talk to us a little bit about how you are introducing transfer into your strengthening programs for, you know, you can give us maybe some specific examples of places or exercises that you've chosen or ways of training that you've chosen to make sure that an athlete is going to improve a particular quality or say athletic performance,

metric like jumping or throwing or something like that, as a result of the kind of training that you're programming. Yeah, definitely, Chris. I think starting off, you know, you just said the proximal distort sequencing, my opinion, kind of makes things pretty easy to then go about designing a pretty quality program. And I think probably one of the easiest ones to talk about for us would be like sprinting, honestly. Some people, I mean, I know a lot of coaches are still the one

they're trying to improve sprint speed and things like that. They don't do, we mentioned before, tons of heavy strength work, sometimes, and sometimes they'll do things like, you know, I've seen, like, flutter kicks for the hamstrings going, you know, as fast as you can. I've seen all kinds of different hip flexion exercises that may or may not work super well. When I'd seen was like doing a, basically, to hip extension on one side, a couple of hip flexion on the other

side. So you're doing simultaneously, would you? I mean, it looks like running, but in the same time, neither, you know, the hip flexors or extensors are really doing much significant in that scenario. So when I'm working at it, you know, I'm working for things that are going to produce a lot of

“force in the ways that you need to based on that proximal distal sequence. So hip extension stuff,”

mentioned a million times, you know, hip thrust, something that's going to be like a shorter

muscle length, especially. So really really like those bilateral or single leg program both, even things like, you know, RDLs, stiff leg and stuff like that, going to work really well for the hip flexion aspect. You know, I think that one, we've talked quite a bit about, but in general, it gets overlooked. So we're having them doing something that's like a bodyweight, simultaneous hip flexion and extension with a one-legged straight. The other leg is bending

as you come up. I'm just doing, you know, easy loading, like a cable hip flexion where you're braced really nicely just against the other side of the cable stack. I'm starting from like a straight leg, more extended hip position and then flexing up, you know, either heavy loaded, you know, while we're actually trying to get more strength increases or recruitment and some hypertrophy there or maybe doing something against a band or something like that, that's going to

give you more of the speed end of things. Although I don't tend to do those quite as much because, you know, I feel like sprinting you're going to go as fast about as you're going to go. So I usually try to focus more on the force end of things there and maybe some hypertrophy. Other hip flexion

like, in that specific muscle, but even if you just train regions of the muscle, you still get

increased recruitment across it as a whole. So there's another reason I've mentioned before. I really like hip flex or isometric. And yeah, you can do those in a few different hip flexion angles. You know, lower, more extended hip for the rect fem and then a little more flexed position for some of the other ones. So as major in that, but, um, you know, really like then I was on the transfer, like you said, is, you know, you can use it for anything that's involving hip flexion,

“and the same thing with the hip extensors there. If you want to chuck in some eye sails, I know people”

really like, um, like the runs, specific eye sails I've seen, where they're doing like a single, like hip extension against a very heavy load, more extended, neat position. And, you know,

I've, I've used those before and I do like those a bit. I'll say those are some of my favorites that

are going to transfer really well in terms of recruitment. Um, and the muscles you need, of course, hypertrophy, bigger glutes, bigger hip flexors. So those are some ones that I really like, uh, just for running, specifically. Yeah, that's really cool, because you've essentially, um, you know, explain the how you're targeting, um, the hypertrophy and moatina recruitment adaptions in the hip muscular to the extensors and flexors, which is exactly the, uh, kind of, um,

paradigm, I, sort of argued for, uh, in the beginning by, I was saying, we look for the adaption, which in this case, you give them two hypertrophy and recruitment, and we look for the location, and you use the proximal to this door sequence to identify that, applying larger, uh, kind of, force producing or creating larger force producing capacities in those hip muscles is going to be really, really useful for the sprinting, uh, gate cycle. So it literally exactly, uh, you know,

the, the, the paradigm that I argued for, you're already doing that in your pros. And just to be clear, to the people who are listening, I didn't actually tell Rob that this was my paradigm before we start at the podcast. So that is genuinely why he was burrowing before I even, uh, kind of came up with

“this way of explaining transfer, um, this afternoon. So, you know, ultimately, it is, I think a good”

way to just describe what good programs actually look like. It's, it's a very quick way, and the proximal to this door sequence does that very quickly. Just to be clear, uh, in this example that Rob is just given, the proximal to this door sequence has allowed us to identify that by being the most proximal segment in sprinting, the, uh, you know, the hip flexors and extensors, we can train those for strength, uh, to a greater extent, and the segments further down.

The chain, uh, we have that ability because they are going to reach slow velocities, and they're therefore going to be slightly more forced on. Now obviously sprinting is not by any means a forced on activity, but the hip is going to be the most forced on the part of it. And as a result, it tends to be able to contribute there for the most power outputs to the entire key cycle. And in fact, some really good data showing that pretty much all of the power output,

the concentric power output is coming from the hip. Everything else is just kind of, um, you know, transferring that onwards. So fantastic example, um, you know, Rob, thanks for that. Can you give us one from the, maybe, you know, the combat sport side of things that you're

“also familiar with? Yeah, for sure. Um, I think the easiest one there, again, using that proximal”

distal sequence, so the core being much more proximal, much more forced to man, um, you know, typically I see a lot of people training just, um, some might loaded, rotational exercises, you know, med ball pros and that, with something like a moderate weight or the goal was, you know, maximizing power outputs, whereas I would prefer, you know, as we've talked about, to be training in with heavy, heavy loaded rotation, um, the bent over like 90 degree cable rotation I've mentioned

before is definitely a favorite of mine. I've been using that more and more. I mean, you can do some standing options, okay, if you can brace against something else, but, um, you know, kneeling and brace against like a box or something like that. I've seen a news, but really just that that been over one, so it's so easy to execute. And I think you and I have talked maybe not on the podcast before, but separately, when you have, you know, comparison of different rotational athletes,

the force demands and, um, you know, type on no karate boxing and all that for the core are really, really highly producing a lot of force. So there was tend to have really, really good transfer, and I mean, I've seen that work time and again with guys and, um, not that I do too much fighting these days, but I'm not surrounded by myself and definitely feeling a better because of it, although I will not be in the ring again any time. So just to be absolutely clear, we're talking

about, um, rotation of the torso, uh, supported, basically being like one of the earliest, uh, segments

in the proxmoid distal sequence of something like throwing, uh, or in the case that you're describing here striking. So, uh, essentially it's giving us that starting point for the upper body,

a great example of the upper body actually also having a proximal segment that we can train with forced, uh, related variables. And of course, again, we're going to be looking for hipoarch VM recruitment, uh, as, you know, kind of two of our major adaptations. And of course, you know, you're described a hundred times before your programming approaches to these, you know, you kind of have the loads where possible, and leaving reps in reserve, one or two rips in reserve here or there,

and doing a couple of sets of those maybe, uh, twice a week, uh, or three times a week, if, um, you know, the, the, the, the situation demands it and the athlete isn't doing a hundred,

million other things at the same time, which they often are. So, um, you know, another fantastic

example. Um, obviously, you know, uh, there are scenarios where we're looking to, um, improve velocity as well as strength and you've talked before about using things like assisted jumps

“for improving, uh, kind of velocity. Uh, can you just talk us through that again just for this context?”

Yes. So, if I have someone who's clearly more, um, forced oriented and they need more velocity, and, you know, obviously, uh, a max ever vertical jumping, all those things are fairly fast, but if we want to get something that is velocity, they couldn't normally reach, then to keep driving up those speed adaptations, I'll go towards something like an assisted jump. Um, I mean, I've had people do assisted sprints and things like that.

The assisted jumping for me usually just more, more practical for the people that I deal with.

So, that's a really nice one. You can use a harness. You can use bands attached to the top of a power rack and they like that. When that was just like you hit higher concentric velocities and you're going to hit other laws, and then be able to trigger those increases and firing rates and that we're going to want to see. Um, so yeah, those are those are favorite of mine. I really like them

“probably throw them into my group program soon as well, because people have been asking a lot about”

them actually. Cool. Now, this is a really, really useful for us to compare this with the previous examples that you've given because when we are stimulating adaptions for speed, we're talking, as you said, about things like firing rates and what's if I was shortening velocities. And the cool

thing about those adaptions is that they're kind of binary in the sense that you either trigger it

or you don't. And that's very different from things like hypertrophy where you kind of have to, you know, get the reps in to get to a stimulus that you're interested in. There's this meaningful that's kind of interesting. Here, as you've said before, when you're doing jump type work, you're literally aiming for like those couple of really high quality repetitions. And that's enough to trigger the adaption because once we hit a, you're using an assistance kind of method.

So, therefore, you're going to hit high velocities, as you say, then any other than you've hit before. And as a result, it's going to be sufficient to trigger that increase in firing rates and the increase in the muscle fibers shortening velocity that's then going to be transferrable to pretty much anything else using those muscles. And again, we've fallen to exactly the same model that I explained at the beginning, which is that we've got an adaption that is transferrable

that we are understanding exactly how that adaption is being stimulated. So, we don't need to throw you know, kind of dozens and dozens of repetitions at it because that isn't going to achieve the goal. We can do a smaller repetitions aiming for above maximum velocity, as in using assistance to achieve a super-maximal velocity. And the geographical location of those, those adaptions is in the right place. I'm trying to, I decided to say geographical location because it's kind of

like, it's different enough to get people to think, okay, I do need to think about where the adaption is happening. You know, I just kind of said muscle or regionals and other people were filled to me out. They were just ignore what I'm saying. So, I'm saying something in a slightly strange way, because I'm trying to get people to lock on to this concept of it actually, you know, we are not computer game kind of sprites that have, you know, sort of eight units of strength

or nine units of speed and whatever. It's like, you can't, when somebody says, "How do I train

“for strength?" I'm like, "Where? Where are you training for strength?" What do you try to improve?”

What do you train for? It's funny. Imagine how, because there was that paper that was just done on high level soccer players. And of course, strength training, you know, show good increases in sprint speed and all these things. And I saw someone discussing that and they said it, you know, it happened because they improved strength and strength is one of your general physical qualities. And then when we'll do that, that's not an explanation for why it happened.

Like, yeah, of course, strength training versus, they didn't, they didn't, they had, like, pliers and sprints and then another group did, quote unquote, functional training, like, body weight stuff. So yeah, the heavy strength training, obviously, and people that had previously been doing it, improved their outcomes and other things more than the other two, but it wasn't because of improving the general quality of strength. I think that's one on the line you either

Yeah, that kind of historical strengthening and this new literature, not way, not literature, so much as kind of ways literature, it's just kind of popular literature or professional literature, sorry, rather than a scientific literature. It does have a tendency to talk about things in those ways as qualities, as I say, as if we're computer game characters and we're not, everything is very specific to the place that the action is happening. It's just moral combat, you just have to

“do that. That's what it feels like when I read some of this stuff, it feels like I'm reading”

a kind of manual explaining how a computer game works and it's not really how things work,

biologically. But no, yeah, course, so basically what we're talking about with transfer is

transferable adaptions that we can identify and understand the stimuli for and then applying those with training methods in the correct muscles, the correct geographical locations in order to create the improvement in sport performance that we're trying to create and I really like those examples you go there because it allowed us to show how the strength training adaptions for maximum strength are going to differ from the speed related to the options that obviously improving

maximum velocity. So with all of that being said, you've mentioned a couple of times some of the things that you've seen that people are doing incorrectly. Can you spell it out for us,

“some of the horrible examples of incorrect transfer logic or incorrect transfer programs that have”

been put forward to create good transfer sport, but obviously they're using methods that they're making a sense. Yeah, I mean my brother and I see him a lot of kind of words that come at sports, stuff all the time, so it's like that's the big one I referenced. Cool, come on. 'Cause there's just so much wrong, but I think one of the big ones you see all the time I mentioned on the punching episode and that is people just doing like loaded punching, resisted punching

other against a band or someone that I've seen. Okay, so before you, you're going to give me a laundry list of our letters. Yeah, I just laid out. So let's grab that one straight away. So do you want to explain why that's wrong and do you want me to do it?

Go ahead take. Okay, cool, I give you a break for a moment. So basically, when we're talking

about punching activity, the force production is coming from the proximal segments, not the distal segments. So this is exactly what we talked about in the theory and punching kind of episodes we've done before. Basically, if you're training force production for the end of the punching

“activity, that's the opposite end that you need to be training force production for because it's”

proximal to distal sequence. So better of training velocity for the punching end of the hand and the wrist end of the kinetic chain really for the force and the kinetic chain. We want to be training tool, so which is exactly what you have already given as an example for. It's the Tulsa rotation and obviously it can put the hip and the little body on that as well.

Yeah, because you train your arms to be slower, the weird thing they're going to be slower.

That's just what happens. Very strange, but yes, give us another one. There's that. I mean, the same thing is out. There's still the punching with weights. That blocks, there's another combat that we'd love to do and they think somehow that is improving strength and endurance and all this stuff. I mean, yeah, you'll be able to hold the wind up for a while, but that's a good thing. You guys have to give us two, two, two

train businesses there because on the one hand, if you're punching against elastic resistance, okay, I can kind of get my head around that to a certain extent. I mean, it's not something I would recommend doing, but you can kind of get your head around it. But punching with an actual weight is like, hang on a minute, gravity's going down. Where is the resistance here? It's like, okay, fine. So you're doing like a group in this boxing class

with just a bunch of moms, punching with weights. But I've seen it in actual gyms all the time. Another one I know I mentioned to you was the whole idea of, I've seen this one over and over actually converting strength to power. With the idea that being, you know, it was around exercise, sequencing, specific one I referred to right now was using initially a snatch group deadlift to get you more power from the hip and then, well, this had power and strength and then transferring

that to your sporting movement by doing, it was like a clean and press because it was getting you just moving the hips and everything at the same time and coordinating, you're just like coordinating under load. This is the idea. I've noticed this in a lot of strengthening and listening circles, people believe that they can transfer coordination from a strength training movement

go out and say it and sometimes in the example that you've given people are assuming it but they're not actually saying it and it's wrong, it just doesn't happen. So, so converting strength into power is impossible, really. I mean strength is already there as a component of power to begin with and you can't convert strength into speed because there's totally different adaption sets.

So, ultimately, any amount of strength that you've already developed already is present in the

“power calculation because power is literally just strength times speed. So, if you want to include”

increase power output and you've already got a decent level of strength, you actually have to train in a completely different way because you need to add speed and thought. So, when people say, "Oh, you can't develop power before you've developed strength." Like, well, strength increasing will automatically increase power because power is strength multiplied by speed. But if you already got a level of strength and you want to improve power, then the only thing you can go

down is to start doing speed training which has absolutely nothing in common with strength training. So, it really is very strange the way that the strengthening of listening abilities develop

these weird ideas that are physiologically impossible. And as far as it's as far as it

appears, now, I suffer from zero grandiosity, I have to say, I don't do it myself remotely seriously, but it does seem like I'm one of the very few people who have not the only person who's pointing his eye out. It's very frustrating because there's so many big time coaches and comrades work out, you know, not just from those thoughts of time. And I was like, "Guys, you're not doing anything you're." Very, very strange. Yeah, the strength converting strength into power or converting

strength into speed or needing to do speed, training after strength training because it builds on the other one. I mean, all of that stuff. I mean, we talked about the improvisation previously,

“but it's absolutely impossible to do. Cool. Can you give us one more before we finish?”

Are you exhausted? Yeah, I've been here away from the combat sports and running in that. So, on the example of powerlifting, because people have asked me about that and I've mentioned that I've coached quite a few lifters before. I've still see the idea that you can train very unstable variations of lifts and have that convert to, you know, something like a bamboo bar bench press is going to improve your stabilizer strength and then drive up your regular standard bar

valve bench press, but there's so many reasons that's wrong. I mean, the recruitment is no or near enough to be training pecks well, to be training. So, you're not going to be training your pecks very well, you're not going to be training your triceps very well, you're not going to be doing anything because so many other things are being activated to stabilize that load when you're doing the bamboo bar bench press. So, if people tend to see an increase in their

bench strength from those things, what I usually think is happening is they've been doing probably too much bench press. They bring in a session that has this instead of a regular bench press and because they're doing essentially nothing on that day, it's a little reps, it's far from failure, they're just giving themselves recovery between the bench sessions then. And so, they think all of a sudden now they're recovering, they're driving up strength. Oh, this bamboo bar bench press

is the reason why strength has got up. That's very likely done nothing. It's too unstable. You've probably just given yourself a program that's more recoverable and the same thing we've like, I've seen hanging banded kettlebell squats and things like that to like work here, your core stabilizer muscles and I'm like the best squatters in the world are not doing these things these not useful, you know, you might as well be just squatting on a foam pad or those who

all that point if you want something super unstable and then that should be in theory then driving your squat up the same and obviously it doesn't. So, yeah, I've also seen one like that. I saw that people were doing something of something like a step up with unstable load. So, I'm not sure exactly what it looked like, I think it was maybe a barbell with like you were describing with something attached to it to create instability and they were doing that single leg step up,

obviously a step up is a single leg exercise but they were doing a step up with that kind of barbell unstable load for sprinting to improve sprinting because the idea was that by using an unstable exercise, well, wait through here, it actually gets better. So, the idea was that by using an unstable exercise, you would have to create a reduction in antagonist characterization and that's

“absolutely true, that's what happens when you do unstable exercises, you start out with massive levels”

of antagonist characterization and what you do them, it improves quickly and you see this very

marked improvement in exercise performance in the unstable exercise because ultimately you start

it out with a crazy level of it but that isn't going to change your character based on sprinting, that's the movement to do. If I get a good balancing with my eyes closed and not going to be

So, the thing is, and why I said it gets better is because if you do train a lot of balance work,

you do start to produce a global effect in, like we've talked about before, in terms of, yeah, phase interface, phase interference. So, you create an inhibitory effect in your brain for producing spikes of motinocrumum to vying rates, which starts to negatively affect your speed. So, excessive balance training, if you don't need and I say the way when I say excessive

what I mean is, training that you don't need. So, if somebody is training balance because they

need to be able to balance in a particular sporting context, then you just have to do it. I mean, that's part of sport. But if you have enough meat that doesn't need extra balance type training or extra instability training and you start giving it to them, you're likely to find that that starts to reduce their speed because the balance adaption that you're programming is going to start to cause the brain to back off on producing that speed-related kind of characteristic, which

“is the spike in motinocvying rates and motinocrumum to the start of contraction. So, I think actually”

they may be creating problems rather than actually or negative adaptions if you like. I mean, it is an adaption. I mean, balance. Yeah. Yeah. It's creating an adaption that is interfering one of the very rare cases where one does. You could argue, I guess, the sort of making must try was super oxidative as a negative adaption for hypertrophy, but I mean, that's a little bit of a sort of minor person to this one. But yeah, I mean, ultimately, even though that exercise

itself is not really transferring very much, as for reasons that you gave, it's actually

“potentially also having a negative impact, which I think is problematic there. Yeah. I can't remember”

a scenario where I've programmed people balance working the gym and someone asked me if I

do balance and still voting myself the other day. I was like, never in my life. I don't understand.

It's done in sports training. That's when it's done. I mean, it's done in the actual coordination of the sporting activity. So, if you're learning a sporting skill, which has a high degree of motor learning involved in it, it requires a lot of practice. You will inevitably

“be doing balance in that training session. And it's necessary for the sport. And that's why”

we do it. But you wouldn't be training that outside of that scenario, because it wouldn't be specific enough really most of the time for the activity you're doing. Cool. I think that's hopefully been a good sort of introduction to the concept of transfer, and also some great practical examples from you. Thanks Rob. So, cool. We will be back next week. And I think we're going to talk about powerlifting. If that is still new. Yeah. Let's do it. Well, the cars. Let's do it. Okay. So, we will be back

next time talking about powerlifting. Thanks for joining us. And we'll see you all next time.