THPStrength

What is THPStrength?

Isaiah Rivera, pro dunker, and John Evans discuss anything related to maximizing athletic performance, and in particular, jump training. Strength and conditioning, jumping technique, weight room practices, and general fitness and health tips and advice are shared on this podcast.

John:

What's up, guys? Welcome back to the teach me strength podcast. Today, I have my dear friend, Ben Moxness and Isaiah Rivera, two of the people that I've mentied mentored my mentees over the last six or seven years, give or take, between the two. And we're gonna be talking about overloaded eccentrics, accentuated eccentrics, whatever you wanna call them, doing really, really heavy loads eccentrically and what some of those adaptations are and the benefits. And we have our dear friend Ben here, the biggest jump training nerd other than myself I've ever met.

John:

It's a beautiful work of art when our brains late at night end up in deep debates about force plates or center of mass movements, and it's really great. Before we get into it, if guys are interested in jumping higher, go to teachmestrength.com. Currently, right now, we are running a challenge. Isaiah, elaborate on the challenge because there's been many changes.

Isaiah:

Yeah. You get on a call, we see your deficit, and then we offer you a way to fix that deficit with a six week program. You have to put a deposit down. It's $3.99. And if you increase your vertical by two inches in six weeks, which should be easy because we're addressing your deficit, you get the money back, essentially making the challenge free.

Isaiah:

So if you are able to stick to training, I highly recommend that you do that.

John:

And if you're, like, gung ho and you just wanna get better, just sign up for that core offer. You can currently purchase the month for a 150. Or if you were to do a year, it's 50% off. So consider doing that. Sign up for the year.

John:

Month each month would be 50% cheaper, and it's gonna take a long time to get better. So if you've been watching the podcast for a while, you know you gotta put the work in. We did a lot of work today. Today was hard. Today was was today hard, Isaiah?

John:

You would agree with that?

Isaiah:

Yeah. How's your brain doing? Brain feels okay. Body feels maybe my brain isn't okay, actually.

John:

I don't think your brain's okay. I'm not gonna lie. It's sounding

Ben:

a little off.

Isaiah:

I was trying to explain how I feel when I can. I'm like, okay. Maybe my brain isn't okay.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. So, Ben, talk about what some of the

Isaiah:

Wait. Let's explain what we did. Explain the whole Oh, yeah.

John:

Let's let's explain what we did. So I'm also a little neurally.

Isaiah:

Your brain's not okay either.

John:

No. I'm good.

Isaiah:

I see the only brain that's okay.

John:

I'm fine. Ben's the only Ben he's the only brain Ben that's working. So we went to the the field, and we did some accelerations. We actually got up to 30 meters today. Isaiah is currently working through a little bit of an ankle sprain.

John:

That was the dumbest injury I've ever seen. He literally landed on a one foot jump, and his foot got grip beyond what is we thought possible, but the leaning gammas are the craziest grip we've ever seen. Roll does

Isaiah:

a lot of factors. A lot of factors.

John:

There's a lot of factors, but I'm I I'm pretty sure it was super grip, super mega grip. That's what it looked like, and I was watching. So that happened, and he's finally back to springing and full training loads, which has been a lot of fun. So we went to the track. We did ten, twenty, thirty, thirty, 30, three thirties at close to max intensity.

John:

I was a little bit capped just to stay safe because as you guys know, I'm always managing the hamstring. And then we did some hurdle hops. So the hurdle hops were sets of five, four sets of five. So neurally, already very, very intense. Then we did three by three power cleans up to 82.5%, then a set of four at 85% three by two.

John:

Sorry. Three by two at 82.5. Then a set of four at 85%, then another three sets of two at 85%. And I ended up going a little bit heavier, missing my last set. Isaiah tried three fifteen.

John:

It was bonkers. By this point, you might not imagine this, but we were very, very, very, very, very tired. After the set the set of four was already, like, close to max intensity. A set of four at 85% is heavy. That's really heavy.

John:

And then to come back and do, you know, three doubles at 85% is is very, very hard. So after that, we then hopped on the belt squat, and we did three by three or four by three up to about 85 or 90%. And then we did eccentrics, which is an accentuated eccentrics. So we put a 105% on the bar, lowered it over a three to four second lower, and then stood it back up with an assistance. So someone else was helping lift the bar up or belt squat up, and we did that for three sets.

John:

So nine reps total at a 105%. So we knew this was gonna be hard. It was very hard. The workout took a long time. We had a lot of guys in the gym.

John:

It was a lot of fun, though. I did really, really enjoy it.

Isaiah:

So Oh, no. No accessory work, which is important to me. Work.

John:

Yeah. No accessory work. And the session took us we probably started at 12:20, and we didn't finish till 02:30. It was a full two hours of training, and there wasn't seemingly that much volume, but the intensity was so high that every rep, you had to be dialed. Every rep, you had to be ready to go.

John:

Like, when it was time to power clean 85%, I was like, oh, dude. I I don't know if I'm ready for this. And you probably relate to that a little bit. You you did end up jumping this week because you can't go a single week without jumping, which was, interesting, but you were fresh early and then faded fast, I would say.

Isaiah:

Yeah.

John:

That's kinda what it looked like. So, Ben, talk about what some of the physiological adaptations are. Why are we so brain brain juiced? So I was explaining to Isaiah kind

Ben:

of why guys get brain fog after specifically doing supramaximal eccentric work. So, essentially, what happens is your muscle spindles, your reflexive support is inhibited, which we see through decreased h reflex responses when you do What's h?

John:

What's an h?

Ben:

An h reflex is when you stimulate the one a aference, the muscle spindle afferent fibers, and you get and you record the response, the subsequent response in the muscle after, like, whatever, forty milliseconds or whatever the time frame is.

John:

You load these afferent

Isaiah:

We can't hear you, John.

John:

We load these afferent muscle spindles. Correct, Ben?

Ben:

During the atrial flex response, yeah, you stimulate them. And then we

John:

get Let's responding contraction.

Isaiah:

I wanna I wanna bring it back. What's the difference between afferent and efferent?

Ben:

So afferent, you're going it's a sensory. You're going towards the spinal cord. Efferent is the motor response away from the spinal cord.

Isaiah:

And

Ben:

where was I? Okay. Yeah. So, essentially, during eccentric contraction so normal during a normal contraction, like an isometric contraction or a concentric contraction, you will have reflexive support. Think about, like, when you bounce out of the bottom of the squat, you get a little stretch reflex, and you'll get some sort of response to help you lift the weight up.

Ben:

But on eccentrics, for whatever reason, a lot of people have decreased reflexive responses even though we see increased spindle activity. So when they measure the spindle activity directly of the aference during eccentrics, they they see a high activity because, obviously, you're going through you know, there's a lot of force that the muscle's lengthening, but the subsequent output, the h reflex is depressed. And the scientists have theorized or founded that there is some inhibition happening at the spinal cord, both pre and post synaptically. So this would be through mechanisms like some apron feedback, some recurrent inhibition from the Renshaw cells, or potentially some, inhibition from the Golgi tendon organs. So and there's probably some other mechanisms there, some other interneurons or some descending pathways that we don't quite have established yet, but that's just some of the things we see in the research.

Ben:

So, essentially, because you have decreased reflexive support, now your brain has to compensate by upregulating supraspinal neural drive. So you get really, really like, basically, maximal brain activation in order to compensate for the lack of reflex of support, and that's why you experience brain fog because you've essentially activated your motor cortex to a level that it's never been activated before or at least to a level that's never been activated before for a duration it's not used to. Like, maybe you get very, very high activation during a plyo or doing a jump, but not for four seconds. Right? So it's a so it's a high intensity and a longer duration than what it's used to.

Ben:

So that's why you get the brain fog. But on the bright side, after you complete a cycle of eccentrics, we see this the decreased reflexive responses. We see the inhibited reflexive responses decrease as well as which is so your h reflex would increase in amplitude after training and as well as a increased v wave response, which is reflective of, like, supraspinal descending drive. So there's some heavy signs for you guys.

Isaiah:

Two two questions. First, what's the h reflex?

Ben:

That's what they measure for like, what they measure to as an indication of reflexive excitability. It's like when you stimulate the a for a nerve, then it goes to the spinal cord and comes back, and then that subsequent response, it's measured relative to the m way, which is the which is the the direct stimulation of the the motor neuron.

Isaiah:

Okay. Yeah. And then and then second question, when you say there is a more inhibition in terms of, like, the reflex response, That's compared to what? Like, a concentric action?

Ben:

So you see less inhibition. So, like, I made a video on this and there's I I pulled up some graphs. Like, you'll see basically less or no inhibition with the isos and the concentric, but for whatever reason, the eccentrics do have inhibition.

John:

And the inhibition that you're seeing is coming from the Golgi's head and organ. It is a sensory well, the sensory organ in the tendon that senses stretch and shuts down force to protect the muscle muscular tennis unit. Right? So you're saying that correct me if I'm wrong. This inhibitory sensory organ is downregulated.

John:

So its job is to pump the brakes when there's too much tension. And, basically, you're saying, no. I'm gonna put so much tension on the muscles, so much tension on the tendon that this thing is actually just overridden. It's just overrided, shuts down, shuts off. But, likewise, the reap the the stretch reflex, which is the h reflex and then you're saying the m wave and things.

John:

So that's also totally off. And to compensate for the fact that you now have less force from the stretch reflex, but you've also got less inhibition, your brain has to compensate and say, I've gotta send more neural drive from my brain to this muscle during the down phase to be able to handle these loads, which I think what I my first initial response would be, why would I wanna downregulate the stress reflex? That'd be the first thing. Right? The benefit is that you get more motor recruitment from your brain, and you get less inhibition from the golgi tendon organ, which if you wanna jump high, this is one of the ways that you get more coordinated and more output is your GTO downregulates the agonistic inhibition.

John:

So if your quad is sensing that stretch on the eccentric phase, it says, okay. I'm good. I can handle the stretch. And then you now have more cortical drive. Is that what we called it?

John:

Cortical neural drive from the brain through the spinal cord into the muscle, and that's gonna give you more motor recruitment. Is that correct or incorrect?

Ben:

Yeah. You're, pretty close there. What's interesting with the GTO specifically, the the Golgi tendon organ, they the researchers think that it's not the inhibition's not primarily from the GTO because they still see like, it's it's it's still firing as you're lengthening the muscle. So the inhibition's probably coming from or I should say that I think that maybe the firing might be decreased. I I had to look back at the research.

Ben:

But they think it's coming more from something more local in the spinal cord, like the Renshaw cells or some other neurons or or perhaps some descending pathways that are causing this presynaptic inhibition. But I'm sure there'll be more research coming out in the next few years that corroborate more of this. But

John:

Let's define Renshaw cells in presynaptic versus postsynaptic for the boys.

Ben:

So Renshaw cells perform what's called recurrent inhibition. Essentially, when your motor neuron's super excited, the Renshaw cells act like a gate, and they can essentially shut off or not shut off, but decrease some of the excite the motor neuron excitability, some of the motor drive. I believe they act postsynaptically. And presynaptic inhibition is, like, when you're arriving at the spinal cord, and then postsynaptic inhibition or postsynaptic pathways are after the at is after the response of the spinal cord. So you can either gate it as it's coming in or you can gate it as it's coming out.

Ben:

So you can modify the excitability and the drive. Basically, yes.

John:

Yeah. I said it's precin or it's afferent versus efferent. A efferent is sensory on the way into the brain. Efferent is on the way out. So presynaptic before the synapses happen at the brain.

John:

Postsynaptic would be after the synapses happen in the brain. We're probably is it Oh, it's pre and post at the at the spinal cord. A spinal cord. Okay.

Ben:

Yeah. And I was gonna go was gonna make

John:

a different point. But what was your other you

Ben:

you said something at the tail end of your I

John:

said define presynaptic and define postsynaptic, I said, define the Renshaw cells. And you were saying I was saying, oh, is it the Golgi tendon organ that is primarily being shut off, so there's less inhibition? And you're saying, well, it's the Renshaw cells. They're open.

Ben:

Yeah. So the the the researchers think I I I forget how they measure this. I could probably post about it later, but they think it's not primarily coming from the GTOs in terms of the the increased inhibition. They think it's from a different source more locally within the spinal cord, but it's a pretty safe bet that by doing very high tension activities such as eccentrics that you're still going to desensitize the Golgi tendon, and you'll see less inhibition over time. I mean, we see this with plyos.

Ben:

We'll see this with eccentrics. We'll see this with normal heavy strength training. And you'll also get, of course, really, really sore from eccentrics because you're lengthening your your muscle, your fascia, and you're gonna get, like, an inflammatory response that will cause a lot of soreness of connective tissue. I love that. Oh,

Isaiah:

quick question.

Ben:

And you'll get oh, the other thing is you'll get stiffer tendons. So eccentrics are way better, like, significantly better than just doing regular, like, HSR than for getting it stiffer tendons.

Isaiah:

I have another Clarify. Question? I have question. Golgi tendon organ, does that's inhibiting the muscle spindles from stretching too far. Correct?

Ben:

Or is

Isaiah:

it tendon?

John:

Muscle it's muscle of tendon as a unit. It's in the tendon, senses stretch, and if there's too much stretch, it says shut off tension to the muscle before we tear.

Isaiah:

So it's sensing tension in the tendon, and then it sends a message to the muscle to chill before you Mhmm.

John:

Before you tear the tendon or you're gonna snap city. It could be anything, but I mean, the goal is to protect you. It's a protective response. Right?

Ben:

Yeah.

John:

If we were cavemen and cave women and we have our tendon tear, we're being chased by a dinosaur, we're probably gonna be in a lot of trouble. And we're really, really good endurance runners. We're not very good at speed power, and so our goal is to override our natural tendency to shut down force in the muscle because we want the performance benefits of it. So what happens on the eccentric, you know, of a jump, you want a lot of force. But if there's if you you start to neurally send, you know, messages, whether from the Renshaw cells or the GTO to say shut down force, they're gonna jump as high.

John:

So we wanna take advantage of shutting down that pathway by using eccentrics to, one, give us different tenants, two, give us ability to potentially break faster and get into this quasi asymmetric condition. We also have the benefit of the brain recruiting really, really high levels of neural drive, which is also gonna help us jump higher. So it's multifaceted in the benefits. Now the one question I do have is when it comes to the stretch reflex, we're shutting it down on this super maximally centric. Right?

Ben:

Yeah. You're less than it.

John:

So but we see it. Do you see, like, a super compensation when you go back to plows and sprinting stuff?

Ben:

Yeah. That's what I was telling Zay later was, you do see a decrease in the pre synaptic inhibition, and you will see an increase in the h reflex after training. So it it's essentially it amplifies the response. It it it it improves your reflexive responses.

John:

Like, it increases the sensitivity.

Ben:

It it will you will see a you will see an increased h reflex after training with eccentrics, which is indicative of any any you would see less pre synaptic inhibition, which is indicative of a more you can have have a more efficient stress training cycle. Yes.

Isaiah:

When when I think of the stretch reflex, in my head, I imagine the muscle stretching and then and then it's a reflex, so it's, like, shortening again. Is that what is happening? So is is the reflex only concentric, or can or is it happening does that make sense? Like, is it happening eccentrically as well?

John:

It is. The the muscles the muscle spindle, basically, it's like a nerve that's wrapped around a muscle cell, essentially. Right? So it senses stretch. And instead of, it can shut down the muscle force if you're really untrained, but it can also go the other direction and it can shorten.

John:

Right? So if the muscle spindle senses that stretch, it says, oh, contract. That's good. That's what we want. We want more contraction.

John:

Is this correct, Ben?

Ben:

Yeah. I can get timelines if you want.

John:

There's timelines. But, yes, you sense it on the East it's really any force. It's really any force the muscle senses, but you wanna use that excitability, sends a signal back to the spinal cord and says, contract more energy, more power. Like, you're a very efficient stretch reflex. You have a very efficient stretch reflex.

Isaiah:

And we can be con it can contract while lengthening. Right? That's an eccentric muscle contraction. Correct?

John:

Yeah. The muscle is under load stretching.

Isaiah:

Okay. So just because it's stretching

John:

You could get it on an isometric condition, technically.

Isaiah:

Yeah. Just because it's contracting doesn't mean it's shortening is what I'm trying to say.

John:

Correct. Yeah. Eccentric is a contraction while lengthening. Isometric is while same length. Concentric is a contraction while shortening.

John:

They're all muscle contractions. The muscle's not off. It's just it's sensing stretch, and then it's saying, okay.

Isaiah:

Contract.

Ben:

Do I wanna do

John:

with this information? Right? We wanna just say contract.

Isaiah:

Like, it's the protective It

John:

is it is protective. What's a little bit interesting about this is you would think, why would you wanna it it it's to stop the muscle from stretching too far, more or less, is the goal. Right? And the GTO functions to shut down force when there's too much tension. So that would be my understanding.

Ben:

Yeah. To kinda bank off what, John said. Yeah. So with the stretch reflex, it provides it will provide support during eccentric contractions. The stretch reflex is about forty milliseconds long, the short latency, and then you have a long latency, which is eighty milliseconds.

Ben:

So short latency would provide breaking, and then you'll have the long latency, which goes to the spinal cord and pathways in your in your motor cortex that will come back down in eighty milliseconds. So that will probably help with, like, amortization. And then you have your voluntary reactions, which are about a hundred milliseconds. So they kinda superimpose on one another. So you'll get yeah.

Ben:

You'll have, like, you'll see, like, little blocks. They measure it. They've they've measured it in the upper limbs with, like, different perturbations. And actually, when you have more pretension, you get a a bigger reflexive response because of the alpha gamma loop because the gamma motor neurons will contract and make the spindles more sensitive to stretch, which is why I just did. So gamma motor neurons are what contract the muscle spindle and and pull it taut.

Ben:

So imagine a rubber band. The gamma motor neurons will contract, and it'll pull the the rubber band taut. So now the spindle is very, very sensitive to stretch. This is how you get a very quick reflexive response so it can aid in braking. And then if it aids in braking, then you'll get more of that quasi isometric condition.

Ben:

And then you from there, you'll stretch your tendon while producing force. And then once the internal torque exceeds the external torque, you'll can you'll do a concentric contraction and jump really, really high and release all that energy.

John:

Okay. So key takeaways here. We are trying to desensitize the parts of our body that say shut down force. We're trying to shut those off so we get more force. We're trying to increase the sensitivity of the things in the body that say turn up force.

John:

Right? And we're trying to augment force production by getting them on stretch, loaded, ready to go, preloaded gamma motor neuron. Right? Stretching the muscle spindle. Because spindles are sensitive to two things, tension and rate of loading.

John:

So we wanna have the by stretching it ahead of time, now you've increased the sensitivity, which is good. And then you're gonna have a really fast stretch, like in a jump. You hit the ground. Your muscle has a brief period where it stretches. It tugs taut, and that gives you sends a signal back.

John:

Right? You get all three of those different neural responses. You get the short, you get the long, and you get the voluntary, and they stack the neural loading and and co and big picture. Right? Here's the thing.

John:

Why do I jump higher? This is why you jump higher with an approach. This is why. This is why you jump higher with an approach off one foot, why you jump higher with approach off two foot, why you sprint faster versus a standing squat jump. Standing squat jump, not gonna get you're gonna get it a little bit, but it's not gonna be to near the extent that this stuff happens in a full approach jump.

John:

And better athletes will have higher sensitivity to that. They'll yeah. Go ahead.

Ben:

Before John closes it out, I I did wanna say so they're they're in an eccentric cycle. Right? And better athletes have more eccentric strength. Like, there's a researcher, doctor Phil Gram Smith, does a lot of research in Olympic triple and long jumpers, and he found that the what differentiates what differentiates an Olympic long jumper or triple jumper, maybe high jump or two, from, like, a college is they can produce way more force eccentrically. Specifically, with their quads, they can produce, like, 5.5 x body weight in a dynamometer.

Ben:

And, you know, usually, the common argument is like, well, what came first, the chicken or the egg? Are are they stronger eccentrically because they did a bunch of jumping, or are they stronger eccentrically because they've trained, you know, eccentrically through, like, specific means? But I think we've kind of found with our training that it doesn't really matter. Like, we you can still get to the 5.5 x, you know, e eccentric quad torque in different ways. You can jump for fifteen years, or you can do some eccentric cycles, and you can get really, really strong.

Ben:

And you can still get to that specific and dicey to jump higher. And you also see a lot of residual effects. Like, sometimes it takes, like, six weeks after doing eccentric training to see your concentric metrics actually go up because it you you can have a lot of residual fatigue because it's very, very intense. But that's why we usually only only load it for three weeks, but it's very, very effective, and that's why we put it at the end

John:

of our macros. Correct, Armando. So this will take a long time to recover from. We cannot just do these fancy training stimulus put on death device and have Isaiah drop 405 pound to DeepSquot without some sort of negative consequence. Negative consequence being neurological fatigue.

John:

But we will return to improving power indices after this concentrically and using this effectively. We also did build in some stress shortening cycles really, really fast in the form of sprinting and hurdle hops. So we are trying to mitigate some of that a little bit. We're only doing one day of this. We're long conjugating as Isaiah uses as a verb.

John:

And we're trying to mitigate it mitigate the downsides of this as much as possible by keeping the dosage low, keeping the density low, keeping the frequency low. So we're still getting the benefit of it, but we're not trying to bury people. That's the reason why there's no accessory work because And it's

Isaiah:

a three week training cycle.

John:

And three week training cycle. Two weeks of loading, one week unloading. So anything else you wanna add, Ben?

Ben:

Nope. That was it.

John:

Thanks for that beautiful soliloquy. If you guys got confused, go ahead and listen to three times over on 1.25 speed. And if by the third time you can explain it yourself, you understand it. Also, don't be afraid to look up images. That all said, if you wanna take advantage of this fancy, beautiful training, we call it the sexy stuff, the complex stuff, the fun stuff.

John:

Isaiah wouldn't say it was fun today. Isaiah, would you say it was fun? No. He's shaking his head no. He looks to be searching for something This

Isaiah:

is how my my brain feels right now.

John:

After doing this very complex training mechanism where Isaiah saw these positive adaptations, his brain, after talking about these complex training mechanisms, is absolute musheruni. No. We are gonna get Both Both sides.

Isaiah:

The training and the learning.

John:

Yeah. A little bit of a In a good way.

Isaiah:

Like, I like it.

John:

A brain Eiffel Tower, if you will. Alright. We will see you guys on the other side. Ciao.