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:

Alright. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the teach free strength podcast. My name is John Evans, and I help athletes run faster and jump higher, and I can help you do the same thing. This is Isaiah Rivera.

John:

I've coached him since 2018, I wanna say, '17. So about almost ten years now. And I took him from a 43 inch vertical to a

Isaiah:

42.

John:

42 inch vertical to a 50.5 inch vertical, hopefully soon to be 51. And in today's podcast, we are gonna be talking about eccentric versus concentric rate of force development. We cover this topic a few different times. Today, we did a really interesting cycle. So we'll talk about what we're focusing on, how we're differentiating that, and how it fits into a long term plan.

John:

Before we do that, if you guys are interested in coaching, go teachmestrength.com. The link is in the description as well as the pinned comment, which I have not forgotten, and I will not get shocked.

Isaiah:

Because of our reinforcement training. Reinforcement

John:

training. So let's let's talk a little bit about what we did today. And actually, let's define concentric and eccentric RFD.

Isaiah:

Yeah. RFD stands for rate of force development, and it's essentially how quickly you can produce force. So there's a I'm gonna hold that a little closer because it's windy. Yeah. So how much force you can produce is dictated by max strength.

Isaiah:

That's essentially how strong you are. But with jumping, it's constrained by time. You only have a very short window of time that your foot's on the ground that you can produce all that force. And for most athletes, they can only produce a very small amount compared to the max that is possible in ideal conditions. And then eccentric versus concentric.

Isaiah:

Concentric is when your muscle is shortening under load. Eccentric is when it's lengthening under load. Particularly we're looking at the unit of your muscle and tendon. This is probably a topic for another podcast, but for elite athletes, can actually have isometric and concentric conditions in the muscle during the down phase. Okay.

Isaiah:

The eccentric phase in a in a stretch shortening cycle. So we like to refer to it as the whole unit is lengthening under load. And they are eccentric RFD is very correlated to your performance in jumping. So as well as concentric RFD, but eccentric more so. But there's a time and place for both, and that's what we're gonna get into today.

John:

Yeah. So the current focus of what we're doing was to get Isaiah back, myself back, and even Dom back. And Dom We

Isaiah:

had we had the whole crew

John:

The whole crew training together. Was actually so much fun. We haven't done a cycle together, maybe ever since that guys moved in. And the reason being is that each of them were very different. It took a long time to Individuality.

John:

Teach individuality, but it it was also working towards the mean. So a lot of the time when I get new athletes in, I need to teach them how to hinge, I need teach them how to squat, I need to teach them how to clean, and make sure that their tendons are healthy as well as work on their technique. So right now, myself, Dom, Isaiah, and Donovan all have checked those boxes. Donovan just finished up some load management. Isaiah just came out of his ankle kind of being messed up in some volume.

John:

I had a little bit of a hamstring strain. Now that's good to go, so I'm good for training mostly. We'll see if my coach allows me. And Dom is also coming out of an event that he did at I don't know if I can disclose it, but he did an and his knees were pretty sore after that because he did a lot of jumping and especially a lot of drop steps, but he's good to go as well. So everyone's relatively healthy right now.

John:

Donovan, I think today his wrist kinda hurt on one of the cleans, but we're we we talked about how Thumb. Thumb. Yeah. And we talked about how this is like what what do you call it? Like a like a reality TV show?

Isaiah:

Yeah. Or or it's a reality TV show combined with the Bulgarian weight lifting method where you get a bunch of guys together. They all do the exact same training program and whoever survives all the all the campus.

John:

Thing. Like, what

Isaiah:

they used to do. So what we're gonna do is if you drop from this training cycle, you have to sleep outside. You have to, yeah, move out of the your food. You have

John:

to eat lizards. Eat frozen lizards. Yeah. So yeah. Right now, we've all finished a decent amount of volume.

John:

Myself, Dom, Isaiah, Donovan as well is kind of like building into it. And we are currently focusing on concentric rate of force development in this cycle. But that said, we're not neglecting other parts of the force velocity curve or you call it dynamic isometric strength. So the way that we're doing that is by doing very short acceleration. So we're doing five by 10.

John:

We have a very extensive warm up that we've been testing out that I've adopted and adapted from Patrick and his dad Rolf when they were here, which I love. How'd you feel

Isaiah:

after that warm up? Do you feel good? I feel good.

John:

Yeah. I liked it a lot. Yeah. We so we did some 10 meter sprints. Dom and Isaiah did a few races against each other.

John:

They were in spikes, and their concentric RFD is a lot better than mine. So if you were to watch them go from a standing vertical or a broad jump or some of these other indices, they're gonna crush me, and I guess I'll get into that a little bit. We also did bottoms up squats and standing broad jump and standing triple jump. Now the reason that standing triple jump is in there because you could look at the broad jump and you could look at the bottoms up and you could look at the sprints as being very concentric RFD dominant, is that all of those will still have an element of eccentric forces. We're not perfectly isolating them, and that is by design.

John:

We have an emphasis on those parts, but we don't wanna neglect anything. We leave no stones unturned. So we're still making sure to address the eccentric RFD in the form of standing triple jump and standing double double. Now if you guys don't know this, there's a book called Power Plyometrics. At the end of the book, he goes through some of the best bounding progressions and plyometric progressions for elite athletes, has a bunch of indices or not indices, but metrics that guys should hit in each of those respective performances.

John:

And so the circuit is basically standing broad jump. There is a three hop, which is three broad jumps. We didn't do that one. And then it's standing triple and standing double double, which is right, right, left, left, and landing from a stand. Now when you go from a stand, you don't have a run-in.

John:

So there's gonna be inherently less eccentric forces or you could say quasi isometric or dynamic isometric strength. You're not getting as much of a stress shortening cycle. The muscular tennis unit is not lengthening as much, and so it is inherently more concentric dominant. And because it's a power exercise, we are focusing on concentric RFD. So we're gonna build this out over the next three weeks, maybe two, depending on who can handle it and who can't.

John:

Donovan's probably gonna do two and two weeks off because he needs a lot more time to recover. Even from just watching him today, can tell he's incredibly wired. When he was doing the double double, he inherently wants to reposition his limbs really fast, be on the ground very short periods of time. He doesn't like spending a lot of time on the ground even when you watch him jump. He's relatively quick on and off in his approach and everything else.

John:

So he'll need a little bit more time to recover. The rest of us are hopefully gonna get three weeks through this. We'll see how Isaiah does. He might also do two weeks on. What do you think?

John:

Do you think he can go three?

Isaiah:

I think I could. This is less intense than when we were doing eccentric RFD, actually. Yeah. Like, my joints handled the workout pretty well. I think I'm also adapted from when we did eccentric RFD.

John:

Like, you've gotten some adaptations from that?

Isaiah:

Yeah. Yeah. So I think I could handle four weeks. If I wanted to guarantee being healthy, I think two weeks on, one week off is smarter. But I, yeah, I think I could.

Isaiah:

And then obviously, it's dictated by the session. Yeah. Like if I keep a short session Friday, then for sure I could do four.

John:

Yeah. We'll see. I I I don't know if I even want you to do four. I'm still kinda thinking about it. I wanna see how you handle the week.

John:

So the other thing that we or I wanna mention is the force plates and how they kind of can give you metrics about these sorts of things. So if you were to do an isometric mid thigh pull, you would basically lock yourself in, be on the force plate, and push up for as hard as you possibly could during that period of time. Technically, you're isometric in that first period, but it does tell you a lot about your con concentric RFD. You can also do bottoms up squats on the force plates, and basically the shape of that curve will tell you how good your RFD is. Now in jumping, we're very, concerned with the first, I would say, between two and three hundred milliseconds, but also even upwards past that, your ability to keep generating power and not necessarily just for well, guess force as well, but definitely power.

John:

So when you're looking at the curve, you're gonna see it shift upwards and then it kind of flattens out at the top. And essentially, what better two foot jumpers will do is they will have a sharper rise and that is a greater slope and therefore a higher RFD, which is really what RFD is. It's a forced time curve and you're looking at the And then over a longer interval, they'll still be at a very steep slope. And even later in that, everyone kind of tails off. But the less you can do that and the higher you can go to your peak force, the better off it is.

John:

So that's kind of what we're focusing on. We could have looked at that on the force plates, but it's a hell of a setup. Maybe afterwards when we finish the cycle, if the guys are up for it and healthy enough, we could do that. And then eccentric RFD will still be maintained during this because we're doing the sprints, we're doing the standing double double, we're doing the standing triple jump, and we're doing power cleans, which ultimately is gonna help.

Isaiah:

And we're long conjugating.

John:

That's right.

Isaiah:

We're long conjugating because we did three by six deep squats and then long conjugating

John:

With the plios.

Isaiah:

Eccentric RFD as plios. Yeah. But the main bulk was the concentric

John:

Even the plios are still concentric dominant. Yeah. Yeah. Shout out Donovan for moving the truck in the middle of the podcast. That's good.

John:

But, yeah, that's pretty much all I have. Do you have anything else you wanna add?

Isaiah:

No. If you wanna us to apply these principles to your training, again, click clink. Click the link in the description or in the pinned comment. You can get six free months when you buy six. And then if you wanna sign up for the challenge, you can do a free diagnosis on a call with one of our sales guys to look at your technique, all your metrics in the weight room and RSI, and then find where your deficit is.

Isaiah:

And then during the challenge, they're gonna give you a cycle to fix that deficit. So go check it out. Links are in the description. Yeah. Alright.

Isaiah:

.Com.

John:

That's awesome. See you guys next time. Bye.