Alright. What is up, guys? Welcome back to the t h b strength podcast. We have Mike Young, PhD, back on the podcast. We've got a whole list of performance related questions, so we're excited to get into those.

Before we do, my name is John Evans. This is Ben Moxness. He's one of the coaches that I've mentored over the last six years, which makes him kind of like, Mike's grandson and Isaiah Rivera, who I've coached for the last five or six years as well, has 50.5 inch vertical. And together, we co own a business called teach me strength. So today, we're gonna gonna pick Mike's brain a little bit, try to learn some some new stuff.

Mike has put a massive role in my development as a coach and how I coach. And in a roundabout way, also, Boo has kind of influenced me pretty heavily. And so Mike and I have very similar thoughts about things, but I'm always eager to hear, you know, his, his opinions on topics and and different things related to strength conditioning, and much of what I do is based off of what he taught me. So we'll get into it first with a little bit of a word game. Isaiah, we did this yesterday.

Do you have the words or, Ben, do you have some ideas? Can also throw something off the top of my head.

I I have I have a I can get it started. And if you guys wanna throw in some some words, you can. So, Mike, basically, I'm gonna give you two words, and you have to choose one or the other. You can only choose one and then explain your reasoning, and then that word is gonna be the winner. So then I'm gonna give you another word, and you're gonna choose which one

Got it.

You would rather have. Explain your reasoning. So I'll get it started with these two. Olympic weightlifting or plyos? You can only choose one.

Plyos. Why?

I could hit similar similar stimulus without Olympic lifting in the weight room, and I couldn't do the opposite.

Here's one. Body weight, less weight winner, Don.

You gotta use the winner.

Yeah. I will. I will. Body weight, RFD exercises, you know, like picking up a tree, something like that, right, or biometrics. It's, like, the most intense RFD exercises you can do.

Over the or yielding isometrics? Is that what they're be considered, Ben? Biometrics. Oh, same same logic?

Yeah. I I love isometrics. I think they have a great place in the training, but I think they're easily replaceable. And at right right about now, maybe for the past five years, they've been their value has been overstated for performance, not for overall health and wellness. And, again, I'm I'm gonna caveat all my answers here, but I love these kind of thought exercises, but also they're completely contrived, and I don't have to choose.

So I knew you were gonna say that.

Play a huge role in my training. I'm glad to play this game, but, it's a game.

It's a game. It's a game. He uses both. He uses both, not one or the other, but it is fun to place these ideas and thoughts against each other. Alright.

Max effort jumping for jumpers, let's say, because it was for jumpers. Max effort approach jumping or plyometrics that aren't max effort jumping? Aren't max effort approach jumping, like technical jumping, like going and having a dog session.

That's tough, but I'm probably gonna choose the, the latter, not max effort. You're

gonna go

for the

give me an example.

So I'm not fully clear if I'm understanding what you're saying, but we're saying, hey. We're basically doing as as

Thirty you minutes guys of dunks. Thirty minutes of dunking or depth jumps?

And depth jumps is really just a representative of a broader category?

Biometrics of plyometrics.

Yeah. Biometrics still.

Plyometric. Like, you could do depth jumps, bounding, but you can't go out and say, well, jumping doing your technical

We're not

gonna dunk. Plyometric. Yeah. We're not gonna dunk, though. That doesn't count.

I'd still probably take plyometrics. It's a broader gives me way more things to deal with. Again, it's that's a tough one there. Specificity can't be beat, but also if all you do is hyper specific, you're in trouble. So I got way more tools to operate with if you just give me this broad not max effort jump jumping, then,

you know Mike's a huge Plyto guy. Mike's a huge Plyto guy. That's all I got out this.

Alright. So I wanna do a part two now. So those are more like exercises. Now I wanna go more into, I guess, you'd call it program program design. So, John, this will be similar to the ones I gave you yesterday.

So we'll start it off. Gen prep or load management?

Gen prep. Oh. Why? I think it's the foundation. Similar reason as if I can I can do a lot with gen prep?

Some of this comes down to the demographic you're dealing with. But if I can spend a lot of time developing someone, man, we can get a lot of work done. And load management is really just as as a subcategory of programming appropriately. You, of course, have to load manage, especially when you get to the point where you're need to manage fatigue and really see the realization of your gains, but I'd take I'd take gen prep. Yeah.

I mean, I as a coach, I love gen prep phase. I think it's where you make most of your most of your improvements.

Especially in airports.

Yeah. You well, I mean, even in even in track and field, swimming, weightlifting, it's you're not realizing those goals, but that's where they're actually made. I'm a strong believer in that. I mean, you have to performance is the is the product of fatigue and fitness, and you build fitness when you're training really hard. And the only time you can train really hard is in gen prep.

So if we if you I'd tell you I'd look at it like this, and I think we could view all of the my answers under this lens is, will you get really good if you load manage? Probably not. Will you get really good if you kill it on gen prep? You'll get pretty damn good. So I'd I'd look at it from that perspective.

You know, I've I've had guys open up almost not not intentionally, but they've opened up with near PRs in the track and field world, or they've mistakenly had PRs on the weight lifting platform. That doesn't happen when you're just if you try to taper, let's say, or you try to load manage too much, it it doesn't work all that well. And I think I speak of load management quite a bit in in my identity as a soccer performance guy and in working with NBA guys. But the reality is when I talk about load management, it's not from the viewpoint of reducing our load. It's from seeing how much you could possibly do without breaking them.

I don't think that's how people generally look at it, but I'm a firm believer in a bend, don't break philosophy. So even from that standpoint, we're kind of general or we're we're have a lot of the characteristics of general prep even throughout the year. If you wanna get better, you have to train. If you wanna perform better, you have to load manage or taper.

I've got I've got another another one here for you. Specific prep versus gen prep.

If I go

in find specific prep, by the prep. Let's say let's say gen prep. Well, let's view in the track and field terms. Your gen prep first, You have a six month macro cycle, so you're peaking an outdoor. Let's say you start training six months prior to that.

The first three months versus the final three months. Let's just keep it super basic.

Probably take the final three months. If I had to go in a versus battle again, I could probably do more with a specific prep. A little bit of it depends where you're ending your general prep and where you're starting your specific prep. But with the specific prep, I can get pretty damn close to all time PRs with specific prep alone. The the competition phase should really just be, like, fine tuning, whether it's technical or reducing fatigue to the point where you are allowing performance to shine.

Gen prep, you're intentionally, in some ways, overloading on the fatigue. That's gonna be a byproduct of the level of training that you're doing. So I think if it were just about results, I'd probably take a specific rep. Both, I think, you can do some really cool things. I I love even gen prep.

You're you're still in my programs, you're still competing in gen prep. You're just competing in different events, to speak. You know, you're instead of competing in heptathlon, you're now competing in the in this power clean and the overhead ball throw and the standing long jump. So you're just shifting your competitive effort, and the focus of the training is just not specific to what you will focus on in six months' time. It's kind of specific to more generalized qualities that form the foundation and both pedagogically and training wise are essential in the buildup.

Like, you you have a phase potentiation in those early stages. You're not gonna get what you want out of the later stages if you don't do what you needed to do in the first phases.

Right. It's like, obviously, the training to train and things like that. It's hard to pick between those, but because I would I would have a hard time between those two.

I think a good example of where you can go straight to why specific prep might win is because that's effectively what happens every time a high performing track and field athlete does when they transition from indoor to outdoor.

Yeah.

So if you're a high performing indoor high performing track and field athlete and you compete deep into the championship season of indoor track, you're probably having your championship events while the next season has already started for outdoor. They're already in general. Outdoor indoor or indoor championships, whether that's NCAA or world championships or USA's, and somewhere in the country, there are these early season outdoor track meets. And a lot of times what you'll see is these guys immediately finish their taper and their championship period. They don't have time to go back to specific prep because the clock is already ticking to the next championship, and they're effectively behind in that periodization rotation.

So now they have to go right into specific prep for outdoor season, and they do they do really well. Like, a lot of guys will PR right away.

Even when they basically just extend out specific and special prep if you wanna throw that one in there in precomp. Like, you just you just roll right into precomp or special prep. Like, you don't have you're gonna call those all specific prep. For those that don't know if you're if you're paying attention to this, gen prep, you're generally focusing on qualities that are not that do not mimic the things that you wanna get really, really, really good at later on. So for example, as a jumper, you need to have eccentric RFD.

You need to concentric RFD. You have isometric RFD. Maybe gen prep is just getting really strong. It's absolute strength. You're gonna use that to build you're gonna build on that foundation in the specific periods.

And what he's saying is as you go from outdoor to or sorry, indoor to outdoor track and field, you might compete until, like, March, late March, and that's already when outdoor is starting. So if you made it really far, you're rolling right into the next competitive season and basically competing for six months straight, more or less.

So Yeah. You take a step back, but you don't take a step back all the way to gen prep. You just go get a up the volume, reduce the specificity a little bit, do this early specific prep phase work, and then you can ramp the intensity back up again and the specificity back up again as you go to the competition phase again. Yeah. So you're effectively in competition phase or you're in Whole year.

Prep phase while you're competing.

Yeah. Right. You're just training. You're using the meats to train more or less. I did that with high school athletes, and everyone was pissed.

They're like, you're peaking for states? And I'm like, correct. I don't give a shit about these early meets. Parents did not like that. So I have a I have a ton more questions.

This is a really, really good warm up for you, getting your your brain ready to go for these questions. So one of the things I really am curious about is Ben, myself, Isaiah, we've spent a lot of time with Rolf. I got to lecture with him in Seattle. I learned a lot about how they do programming, and I'm sure you're very familiar with with Randy. I know Nick used quite a bit of his concepts.

So you've seen each of these concepts used, and I know I've talked to you about it previously and kind of have an idea on what your lens is, but the volumes are way lower. Volumes are way lower. Specificity is pretty much high all the time. We know with Elite guys, you need more specificity. You gotta you gotta be more specific more of the time.

We see Rolf, and Randy going and working with, Sue Bingtian. We see them working with your really high level long jumpers and enveloping people. And it's similar to kinda what you were saying of, don't have the same clay that those guys have. You know? You get chicken shit, and they get chicken soup.

But what is your lens on maybe some of the pitfalls of doing that, or if you think it's just a better system overall? Do you think you differ in in a lot of different ways? Do you have differing opinions? How would you kind of view that that model or system?

So I've known Randy for a very long time and, tried to pick his brain whenever we would connect and, have had some chance meetups a handful of time more than a handful of times. But his stuff is obviously brilliant. Very, very different from, you know, many other coaches, even some of those who I would consider mentors or closer to my own philosophies, a Dan and a Boo, and Lauren's is Lauren's is different for sure or sorry. Randy's. Randy's is different.

And then, Rolf, I'm less familiar with Rolf's strength training methodology, but know the basic of it. And in terms of Randy, his what you're I'd say, he he was likewise very successful at the elite and super elite level. There's no arguing that whatsoever. So I guess I'd I'd just take a step back and preface this whole discussion by saying early on in my career, I was kinda surrounded by those guys. My probably early twenties, met Randy, and I met worked under Boo, and I met Dan and corresponded with him a good bit and was with Lauren a good bit and had learned from Dan and Lauren by reading their stuff and watching their videos from when I was 14, 15 years old.

And, it was very obvious that all of these guys are geniuses in terms of training theory and technique and periodization, but also very different. And then at the same time, I was seeing other coaches. No one who I'm gonna name here, many of whom many of whom you might be familiar with or not, but I'll just say they're not what you'd call a classic, they're not writing books or anything like that. No one's gonna read their books on training theory or technique or anything like that, but they're also producing some great athletes repeatedly, world champions, Olympic champions, that kind of thing. And part of me is sitting there and going like, wow.

This is like a freaking disgrace to the Dans and the Booz and the Grandies and the Lawrence. You'd hear these guys talk, and it's just eye opening. This is mind blowing, really, you hear these guys talk. It totally changes your conception of what is necessary to coach at elite level. Meanwhile, you have guys out there that, you know, would probably have a hard time following a lot of our early word game discussion about gen prep and specific prep or, you know, you you have a

They're dumb as a box of rocks.

Yeah. You have a discussion about biomechanics, and they're just totally lost. And it was that that was also eye opening. So it was eye opening to see that what the absolute pinnacle of coaching education and language and theory was in those big four there, and then to see that there are others out there who are doing it pretty close to equally well, in some cases maybe even better, with nowhere near that level of technical knowledge. And I think it goes back to a little bit what we talked about in our prior podcast where, man, if you add a great training group and some really bought in athletes, like athletes who are totally bought into what you're doing, they'll run into a wall for you.

Pretty decent coaching, and in some cases, you obviously have pharmaceutical assistance involved there. You can get a lot done. You can really get a lot done, sometimes in spite of the lack of coaching theory. And then even and then when you drill down and look at your Randy's, Boo's, Dans, Lauren's, all of those guys have produced elite level speed power athletes across multiple different multiple different events in track and field. In some cases, you have guys like Boo and Dan, who have produced throwers, like world class junior world champion throwers, that kind of thing.

NCAA champion hammer throwers. And you're going, wow. They've kind of got the recipe for speed and power development. And, obviously, a guy like Lauren, if you're not didn't follow Lauren, Lauren was thought to be a sprint coach. Well, then all of a sudden, he's got, you know, the best long jumper in the world a couple years.

And, you know, Saint Randy. Randy is thought to be a jumps coach. All of a sudden, he's got the fastest 60 meter guy in the world and a guy who's, you know, breaking stereotypes in the 100 meters. So the they've cracked the code in terms of how to develop speed and power. And there are it's easy to focus on the differences in their programs, but it's probably better to focus on the similarities, which is they're all touching on max effort level power expression.

It's gonna look a little bit different for every guy. Some of them are gonna use Olympic lifts pretty heavily. Some of them are not gonna use them at all. Some of them are gonna do a lot of plyometrics. Pretty minimal in others.

Some of them are gonna do your slow grinding strength. Some like a Randy and maybe a Rolf are barely gonna do it at all. So, you know, I think if we, again, think of the performance expression in these events, which again range from now 60 meters, 100 meters, 200 meters with a couple guys from Dan, all the jumping events, including pole vault, the multi events, if you look at Boo and Dan, and then you got guys throwing really well. You're going, wow. There's this is the formula here.

It's not about in my opinion, the way I would reconcile their differences is that it's not about Olympic lifts or not Olympic lifts. It's about is there an expression of fast, moderately loaded power? Because they all have that in there. They all have their 75 to 80% Olympic lifts or a pneumatic jump in the case of Randy's and Ralph's program. Or Dan who can figure out whatever the best exercise is for that athlete.

Maybe it's an Olympic lift, maybe it's a squat jump, maybe it's just plyometrics. You know, you got some guys I think Dan had some guys where they didn't barely ever hit the weight room. So it's just figuring out what those similarities are. It's not about the thing. You don't have to don't have to squat deep.

You could not even barbell squat at all if you really had to. And then you figure out what works for you, and then in the best case scenario or the best results scenario, not only what works for you, but what works what works for you with the athletes that you have. So I think it's very true that we will we will tend to attract athletes that are have some level of buy in, in most cases, to what we're doing. But then also, you look at it and go, hey. If if Randy didn't use Kaiser with, Sue, would he be as, you know, Kaiser sprinters and Kaiser jump squats, would he have been as good?

I don't know. Maybe not. Randy swears by that stuff. I know Ralph uses a lot as well. And it's kind of like but then if Boo had that with Walter Davis, are you telling me he would have jumped 60 feet?

Because he never touched Kaisers. Probably not. So it was it was that cross section of this is the perfect athlete for this perf this was the perfect program into the perfect coach for this athlete, and that's what created the mix together. I think it's a little weird to just go like, oh, Randy's I I prefer Randy's over booze. There's something to learn from all of them.

We have our influences, of course, and then it's always better to look at the similarities of greatness rather than the the things that are different. I think when you start to look at the similarities, even when you look at those kind of less educated, less textbook coaches, say, they're still pretty damn close in a lot of ways to what these guys are doing. They just stumbled upon it or they can't explain it, but they're still doing it, you know, in some way. So that's I that's how I would preface this. I'm definitely a Dan more Dan Boo kind of philosophy, very familiar with what Randy does.

And he's obviously achieved massive success in it, especially with jumpers historically, but even, of course, with Singh done done some unprecedented work. Sue, sorry, Sue done some unprecedented work there as well. So there's no denying that they all work, and I don't know that it's if we argue about the differences, it's just a matter of preference for that preference and what worked for that athlete. You know what I'm You know, he here's here's actually the proof of that. A lot of those athletes a lot of those coaches, they shared athletes at some point, or or they transferred athletes.

Know what I'm saying?

Started somewhere, ended somewhere else.

Yes. With one of the others, maybe two, and they didn't always improve. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. If it were one is better than the other, you'd see a uniformity of progression when they moved away from one to the other.

Right.

You know what I mean? And and you can also you can also find people that moved from those less textbook coaches, the ones that couldn't explain biomechanics, and to one of these super genius coaches, and they likewise didn't progress. They got bad they got worse. So, you know, I think it's

It's like tools in the tool belt. You gotta know which Yes. What you gotta you gotta use a hammer with the nail. You use a screwdriver with the screw. You gotta know you gotta know all the tools and know when to use them.

And I think Ben and I have had a lot of good conversations about this because, you know, I think my personal lens of it is I think everything's good. Everything obviously, like you said, there's proof of concept all over the all over the place. Right? And when you start to think about the similarities, you're right. You know?

They're they sprint fast. They jump consistently far. They do plyos. They do, you know, maybe they do some form of Olympic lifting, whether it's lighter or heavier. They maybe the amounts of those differ.

The ingredients are relatively similar, though. And I think you always gave me the analogy of a chef. You're always like, coaching is like being a great chef. And for you guys that don't know, you should watch the the sushi documentary, which is probably one of Mike's favorite favorite movies of all time. Zero thinks dreams of sushi.

Alright? And if you watch this and you look at a lot of the similarities, they're or even just any any, like, chef's table is another good one. It's different ways to make great food, but sometimes they might char their food. Sometimes they use more salt. Sometimes they use less.

Sometimes they use unconventional ingredients and things like that. But at the end of the day, they all make, you know, a three star Michelin restaurant. So, yeah, that's really good. Very, very good stuff there. I do wanna talk about, this common theme trend that we see in our space.

I think kind of getting back to vertical jump would be good, which is that there are a lot of coaches out there that think that all you have to do and and a lot of our athletes, and we see this constantly in comment sections, is just lift heavy and jump. That's it. That's the best method. You don't need Olympic lifts. They don't improve power.

They will not make you jump higher. It is just an expression of your strength. You get stronger, your power clean is gonna get better. You don't even really need a power clean. It was already there.

You already have the neural backbone to do it. All you have to do is just go power clean a few times, and you'll end up power cleaning more weight. Or you just jump a bunch, and that will drive up the nervous system. Power clean doesn't even matter. It's just you getting better at the exercise.

It actually has no transfer to jumping. It doesn't even matter. Why not just go jump and lift heavy? Why do Olympic lifts at all? That's a very, very common, very common line of reasoning in in our space, and I wanted to get your lens on that as someone who uses the Olympic lifts.

I love the Olympic lifts. There's a lot of research out there that shows the hex bar jump is is demonstrating higher power outputs. A lot of guys will use that as an argument as well. Don't even do Olympic lifts. I think they're great.

I have a lot of reasons for why, but I wanna hear your your lens on it.

So, again, contrived argument, but I love Olympic lifts as well. I grew up doing them. I competed in the Olympic lifts. My daughter's a national level Olympic weightlifter. We have one of the biggest weightlifting teams in the state of North Carolina.

We've been nationally competitive for many years. I coached that team for about ten years. We now have a great coach who's taken over for for me in that role. I'm a I love the Olympic lifts. It was part of my coaching pedigree even before I worked with Boo.

Ethan Reeve used them. He used them a lot with escalating density training. I used them before that, kinda just self taught butchered technique. By the way, John, I told my daughter, Ava, who is that weight lifter. I said, I'm going on John's podcast.

And she says, will talk make sure you talk to him about how to do power cleans because I've seen his technique and it's horrendous.

I think it's pretty good. I learned from you.

So I love the Olympic lifts, and and I think I would say lift heavy, jump, they're on different sides of the that speed power continuum. You gotta fill in the blanks a little bit. I like to kinda what I call surf the continuum, surf that whole force velocity continuum. And I think Olympic lifts provide a lot of things that you can't get from either just your grinding strength work or even a hex bar deadlift, hex bar jump, or barbell squat jumps, and you can't get from from plyometric work. And so Olympic lifts serve a great role.

I think the movement itself is relatively specific to to jumping. You know, the action, the triple extension action, so to speak, especially if you become pretty proficient at it. I think it is, as I mentioned the other night, is a great way of effectively getting a loaded jump without a lot of the impact. Right. I agree.

You're you're jumping in an Olympic lift. That that's my one of my primary cues. You got a guy who's pulling with their arms or doesn't get a Olympic lift, you just say jump. Make the bar float, and that's Yep. Cleans up everything for a total novice.

So you see really quickly that an Olympic lift is basically a loaded jump. For standing jumps, we've all seen the best Olympic weightlifters in the world, many of whom do not jump, by the way. They don't many of whom don't do any plyometric jumping plyometric work. They might occasionally do jumping, not plyometrics, but they have insane jumping abilities.

Standing verticals.

Yeah. Standing verticals. I mean, even things like backflips, things like that. Yeah. Huge huge standing jumps to a box, backflips on the platform.

We're talking about huge human beings doing backflips and and jumping up into the air and probably having, you know, mid 30 inch verticals without really training the vertical jump directly because they're just always doing loaded jumps. Two foot jumping. Yeah.

One of my Yeah. One of my earliest memories my my stepdad was an Olympic weightlifter in Puerto Rico. And when I was little, him and my mom started dating. So I would get babysat by my dad, and he would just take me to the weight room. So I would just be chilling in the weight room as everybody's weightlifting.

And one of my earliest memories, it might be part of the reason I like basketball and dunking, is being on the basketball court while the weightlifters are scrimmaging, and they're just dunking the basketball.

Like, they're just going The Olympic weightlifters were?

The Olympic weightlifters were. Yeah. And I I remember my dad being able to just he's five ten at the time. He's, like, two thirty, two forty, just off vert being able to, like, grab the rim and stuff like that. So, yeah, I think

people don't realize how explosive these athletes are. You know what's funny too? The guy that dunks with Santana. Yeah. His name is slipping my mind.

Oh, yeah. That guy. Colby Ferguson. Colby Ferguson.

I don't

know if

you know about Colby Ferguson. Like Yep. Yep. So he, like yeah. He's posting videos of him doing eSpace and three sixty windmills, and we're like Yeah.

What? He doesn't even have a social media. And he just, like, can jump out of the gym, just wildly explosive. So my biggest rationale, and I've said this many times on the podcast, you get triple extension. You get a extension flexion pattern that's super fast.

You gotta be coordinated. You have to have great intramuscular, coordination. You have to have incredible core stability to be able to pull correctly, stay in the right position, catch the bar. I think the eccentric forces on the catch are really high, actually, and I know that we used to joke with John Grace about eccentric forces in Olympic lifting and dropping the bar down. But on a catch, if the bar crashes on you, I mean, we've seen guys get spit out.

The only way that's possible is if you're at a position or you lack the eccentric or isometric, what you wanna call it, quasi asymmetric strength to be able to stand up from that weight. Isaiah sometimes gets spit out of cleans when he's lacking in that area, and a lot of coaches will say. A lot of time. And, you know, I I've had it happen a handful of times as well and at later loads, obviously. But, and that's in a strong position.

We're talking in, you know, half squat, not not a deep squat. We're talking a half squat that I cannot yield against the bar that's falling a few inches onto my shoulders in a catch position. So I think there's a lot of benefits there to it. I guess more so, do you think you take Olympic lifting out of Isaiah's programming his entire life versus having it in? I argue he broke the world record at one point.

There's obviously proof of concept there. Right? 50.5 inch approach vertical off two feet tested, measured vertex, and measured reach, no fudging. Right? You fudge the reach, you could probably get 55.

So when you look at it from that lens, like, well, here's proof of concept, and we do it all the time. And I don't think you need them. I think you can do it without it, but I'd rather have them in there.

Yeah. Exactly.

I I I think it's better. I I just I had a big there was a debate I had with, another coach, Dan, about it for a while, and he's like, well, that's that's very specific use case, and, like, kinda tried to troll me a little bit. Dan Back. Love you, Dan Back. But, yeah, it's a very common

Really common. To say, basically, you could replace it. And here's what I would say is

Or you don't even need it.

Yeah. The counterarguments would be, one, it takes too long to master. And I think that for me, I would say, you know what? I take people who've never done from other countries to take and you've seen it, John. In our adult fitness populations, they have no physical education or background.

And in about twenty minutes, they're at least doing a power clean competently. And by competently, the standard is they're not gonna hurt themselves, and they're gonna get something out of it. Not gonna hurt themselves, gonna get something out of it. So in twenty minutes, we can reach competence. Mastery will take a long time, but so it does for everything.

So that doesn't disqualify you from sprinting because, you know, you put you take any athlete out there, maybe even some elite sprinters, and they're not mastering sprinting, and that's probably a far more dangerous activity than Olympic lifting. So why do we use that criteria for disqualifying Olympic lifting and not, say, sprinting with anything less than the perfect technique? So it doesn't take too long to teach because I've proven for fifteen, twenty years that you can teach someone with zero physical competency how to do them competently in twenty minutes.

We we see it all the time here. There was a kid that came, high schooler, could power clean 65 pounds. By the time he left, he hit one forty five. Took two sessions. Took me 30 Super

simple. So I think that's almost a tell that, hey, you know, it's okay.

You're just bad.

Yeah. You you're not a good coach. Or, know, to You can't do people will say, hey. I I have what about I've got jump squats, and I've got hex bar jumps. Sure.

But it's a little bit different. I think when you look at an Olympic lift, especially a really well executed Olympic lift, it's not the same as a hex bar jump or a back jump squat. An Olympic lift, a two phase or two or three phase, depending on how you call it, has an event in it.

Called the double knee bend.

It has a double knee bend. You're not trying to explode right off the ground. So there's a level of coordination there and timing and patience, and the event itself creates the the RFD. Right? This instantaneous RFD where you're snapping.

If you look at the instantaneous velocities on a well instantaneous and average velocities on a well executed jump squat, let's say a barbell jump squat, and a well executed Olympic lift with the same equivalent loads, like, say, percent percent base loading or even power output matching, you're gonna see a way higher instantaneous peak in power peak power output on the Olympic lift because it has that event. You'll see maybe a higher average in the jump in the hex bar jumps because you're basically just smoothly accelerating through that entire range. But that's not the case for an Olympic lift where it's a relatively controlled pull from the ground to the to mid thigh, and then you have an event where it's just violently explosive. And it's the only lift the a lift category, the Olympic lifts, where you have that. There is a equivalent of the Bruce Lee one inch punch.

Other lifts don't have that, you know, where other lifts you accelerate gradually over time. You decelerate in a hex bar jump and a back squat or a jump squat, and then you accelerate.

It's like shock loading. Yeah. Yeah. You have a you have a massive spike in that that it's like the acceleration is way higher in that instant for the double knee bend. And I think too, and I said this, if you look at the time frames of the the second pull, right, let's just say the concentric side, it very closely mimics some of the time frames, you know, even with the double, even with the knees repositioning, right, where you're getting that bar whip and you're getting that big acceleration.

It it very closely mimics, time frames for two foot jumping. I mean, it's very similar even at even at heavy loads. And if you do the lighter loads, it's even more specific. And then you can and the other argument I always make is, okay. What in you got a VBT on the on the hex bar?

Cool. Yeah. That doesn't really do it for guys. If I say go max out your power clean, you know what the guys do? They hit in height.

If I say, Isaiah, it's max out day in power clean or I'm maxing out or Ben's maxing out, we're blasting music. We're screwing at each other. It's like the most neural overloaded activity you can do. And I think that there's a lot of utility to that and a lot of benefit to doing it. And I think maybe the last argument I'd I'd like to hear you say is I could get I could get just as good without it.

I don't need to do anything in the middle of the force velocity curve. What is your do you think that there's no utility for the middle of the force velocity curve? I don't need anything that's not super fast, and I don't need and I I'm just gonna be at the tail ends. I don't need anything in the middle.

That training stream. It's like both for the, like, power exercises in general. Like, try, like, trap bar jumps, squat jumps.

And Don't even know. Always I don't need to

be no, like, no power, like, no power exercises at all. Like, no I don't need

to be in the middle of the concentric side at all. What what's your what would you say to that?

I'd my first thought would be where can you possibly progress? If you've only got things on either side of the continuum let's say we take the opposing side of the continuum stance. Right? Where what does your general prep look like if you're doing that? What did what does this speed element?

Max strength for six months. Max strength six It's

gonna take like, an injury like an injury perspective. Like, it's riskier going from gen prep to max specificity, essentially.

It's just not a smooth continuum either. Like, your progressions are so stark. You've gotta go from max effort back squatting for three months. Right? I did four by 10 the first month.

The next month, I did five by five. The next month, I did 10 by one. Then you're just gonna go jump for three months. And that that is a lot of the argument. That is the the strong argument.

And I think it flies in the face of residual training adaptations. I think it flies in the face of rotating through different, like, long conjugate sequence systems. You're not you don't you can't do that if you're only gonna do both sides.

Yeah. I think variety variety alone, even just variety for the sake of variety, has a positive impact on adaptation.

So That alone

bars bars. If you just did the same thing all the time, you'd quickly reach a point of diminishing returns. So for example, I I will squat year round. Like, if if it's a 52 pro fifty two weeks in the year, and I've got athletes in my programming for fifty weeks, we're squatting probably a 100 sessions a year, maybe at 80 sessions a year. It's gonna be a little bit different every time.

You know? Maybe it's just a traditional back maybe it starts with seven rep sets. Maybe then it dips to some faster stuff, or sometimes the squats have a pause. Sometimes they have some weight releasers. Sometimes they have, you know, hooked up to VBTs.

Sometimes they're flywheel squats. But we're squatting all the time, like, all the time. Sometimes it's partial. Sometimes it's full. And you know what?

The variety itself is helping to spur on adaptation, because if all we did was straight barbell back squat all the time, well, guess what? You're not only are the guys gonna hate it, and you lose your desire to train, but you're gonna have maybe have an overuse injury anytime you start to do anything outside of that, and then the gains will eventually drop off. So just small incremental gains over extended periods of time, I think, is the name of the game. And these minor adjustments, like manipulating you know, when I I say, hey. We're squatting fifty weeks of the year or fifty weeks of the year.

You know, how do you squat fifty weeks of the year? Well, it's gonna look different a lot of the time. No week is gonna look exactly the same.

Right. You might get partials. You might get heavy. You might be light. You might move it fast.

You might move it slow. You might go asymmetric. You might go wide. Seen that many times in your in your stuff. So and I we very similarly do the same thing, assuming Isaiah's cartilage is able to do half squats.

I like to, as you say, bend, don't break or in some cases, to kill people because it's

Oh, I bend a lot. I bend a lot.

Oh, yeah. He does. Sometimes he breaks. Sometimes he breaks. Alright.

So here's here's one that Ben had talked about the other day. And I do I do wanna touch on steroid thing because I think, if you're okay with it, I would I I think what you were talking about the other day is absolutely fascinating. I think a lot of people would like to hear that. But before we do that, we're gonna pivot to a little bit of sprinting and how it relates kinda to jumping, and that's this idea of taller individuals and some of the downsides biomechanically that they would encounter. For example, you've got a way longer tibia like Ben.

You've got a way longer femur like Ben. He's six what are you, Ben? 67?

Yeah. 6667.

6667. We're gonna keep the meme out of this, and don't do it. No. So I tried to for I tried to tried to catch that before it happened. So, Ben, go ahead and explain what you were kinda saying the other day.

And, Mike, I wanna get your your lens on this. So Ben said it's a, in short, bell shaped curve, the equation, repurpose definite equals MA, then go ahead and re further elaborate.

Yeah. So I was talking about how torque is equal to the mass moment inertia times the angular acceleration, when you have a longer lever, it's just harder to accelerate at fast enough speeds to run fast. So, like, re so, like, repositioning the limbs or being able to hit the ground with a lot of force. Like, when I've heard doctor Ken Clark talking about speed, and he's and then a a lot of times guys ask him about Usain Bolt. And he's like, well, it's all in the hips, like the, you know, the happy Gilmore quote.

And he's like, the reason that sprinter like, the the the reason Usain Bolt was so fast is is because he was able to overcome these, like, let's say, overcome his weakness per se and actually swing his limbs at fast. Like, he's he's able to reposition. He's able to strike the ground with a shit ton of force despite having a longer lever that has more mast distributed distally and that theoretically couldn't accelerate as quickly because of his very strong hips.

Well, what if not what at what point does that just, like because I've always heard you say as if like, you're like, you always say, oh, Usain Bolt. As if you know, when people talk about the steroid argument, it's like, oh, he's taller than everyone. You're like, as if taller isn't necessarily better for, like, upright running. I've heard you say that before, or we're just gonna pretend like that's not better. But then this caused a

There's a handful of things about Usain Bolt that, at least at the time, seemed to break the break the mold. Right? He's taller. He's heavier, longer limbs. And I'd say every single one of those can be both a blessing and a curse.

So when when it's harder to have angular velocity, which is what you'd see at the ankle, knee, and hip, if you have you don't if you're moving linearly, if you translate what the linear movement of the most distal part of a longer moment arm, even at a lower angular velocity, the linear equivalency of that, say, more distal point from the joint

will be a little faster. Right.

Yeah. It's Like I said, like, 300 driver versus five iron.

Correct.

Right? Exactly. Yep.

So then in jumping oh, go ahead. Finish. And then I wanna say, in jumping, what does that look like?

So and then continuing on with that, like, people say, oh, Usain Bolt was taller and heavier, and he was a bad accelerator as a result. Well, one, he was not a bad accelerator. At the time, I believe he was the second or third fastest to 30 meters and maybe 60 meters of all time at six six or whatever. So he was definitely not a bad accelerator. His by comparison, his top speed was better.

But then what what made him win races? What gave him the ability to have the iconic finish in the two thousand and eight Beijing Olympics where he seemingly ran with his hand up in the air and feet out in front for 15 meters, ten, fifteen meters. What allows him to do that? And what well, that's his weight. He's he's got so much inertia that even when he throws his hand up in the air and puts his feet out in front, he has a greater resistance to a change in state of movement than someone who's five seven and and a buck fifty.

So it's gonna be harder to stop him. It's gonna be harder for himself to stop himself even when he puts his hand up in the air and looks around at his competition.

Pops a bottle of champagne five meters out.

Right.

Takes ten seconds to drink and still crosses before

So then, you know, most guys most guys hit like, Usain's really big difference wasn't that he had the highest top speed because there were guys before him that had similar top speeds. I think Justin Gatlin, Tyson Gay, Ben Johnson all had 10 meter splits equivalent to Usain Bolt. But what Usain Bolt did was unlike the other guys who could only hold it for 10 meters, they could only hold their top speed about point seven seven seven nine, seven eight for 10 meters. He could hold it for 30 meters.

Because he's so big.

Probably, that's a big part of it. Yeah. That he has a resistance to a change in state of motion. And if you he obviously had longer limbs, but once you get that bigger body moving, once you overcome your inertia, you now have an advantage. Now I don't know how much that would apply to jumping, especially things like repeated jumping might be at a disadvantage, but the height the the height part of it and the limb length part of it could certainly play a role in certain types of jumping.

Right? If you're how the how the swing leg moves, you depending on the style of jumping that you do, there could be some advantage to being really long lower leg limp. Right? If you were and you guys are the experts on the setup setup for two foot jumping, which I have not looked at in the with the same depth that you guys have or work with as many guys as you guys have, is, you know, for for me, I've had better two foot jumpers who are a little like, the my best two foot jumpers that I work with basketball guys tend to be a little bit shorter. Yeah.

And then the really big guys, they tend to struggle on both, really, at at least for for me. Like Jay Huff is a guy. He's, I think, seven four, seven three, moves ex excellently well, and he's a two foot takeoff, but he's relatively speaking very light. You know, you're not you're not seeing the old bigs bigs anymore who are seven foot tall and three fifty. You know?

Reminds me of the Shag story from LSU.

Yeah. Every every every single athlete we've seen on an approach two foot jump test 50 is under six foot. Except for Isaiah. Except for me. Yeah.

But it's, like, almost every single time is under under six foot.

Specifically always like, I'm too tall to jump high, I'm like, that's a nice jump.

Okay. But not fifty.

But what's the what about weight? How does weight play into that? What if you had a guy who was, say, six five, six six, but also, a buck sixty? Does that guy have a better chance of jumping? Yeah.

For sure.

Yeah. For sure. He'd have to be wildly strong at that weight, but yeah. Okay.

About being able to, like, accelerate their limbs at faster speeds? Like, have a a larger range of motion, obviously, but is there a point I mean, but surely there's a point where having a longer limb is gonna put you at a disadvantage to being able to actually move quickly on the ground and reach a higher terminal velocity? Or what do you think?

Yeah. I think in the in the balance of things, the shorter guy probably has a little bit of an advantage there still. Think it's also probably worthwhile looking at the fact that the sheer number of people who are as tall as you, Ben, is pretty damn small. So the population dynamics alone could could explain a lot of why you see so many more jumpers who are shorter.

The average height's five nine. We we covered

this topic in a recent podcast, and that's what some of the commenters were saying. They they were saying, oh, the reason you're seeing most fifty inch jumpers at that height is because most people are also that that height. That, like Yeah.

I don't think it's as simple as that, but it's probably not something you can ignore, especially in absolute terms. You know? Yeah. And and I think there's really not any history in the sport of track and field for really gigantic high jumpers. Yeah.

Bobby and his taller. Probably one of the biggest. Like, Bobby and

tall ones.

Right? Six ten. Bobby and six ten. I've been coaching him. I don't know if you know that, Mike.

Six ten to a hundred kilos, and he's jumped two thirty three, right, which is high. That's up there.

Yep.

Right? And it's a constant struggle because everything is more intense. You put your foot out the same let's say, hypothetically, you are at the same hip flexion when you put your foot out in front of you. Right? Well, now the absolute distance of you know, the total distance of that moment arm is greater.

Right? And he's bigger, and he's heavier. Right? So, yes, he might be higher. His center of mass might be higher at takeoff, but the load on your foot is crazy, and that was something that we dealt with.

And then you've gotta be even stronger to handle those external forces on the body because now your foot is further out in front of you, which means you're gonna have greater external torque to overcome. It's like deep squatting. Right? Like, you're six ten deep squatting. Your hip axis and knee axis is gonna be really far away from the line of action.

It's gonna be you're gonna have a big moment arm. If I've got a 100 foot femur, it's gonna be really hard to stand up when

Yeah. Right. And I

mean, generally speaking feet away.

Those guys may not be faster than the smaller guys because the approach run is shorter, so now you're at another advantage. You have to rotate over a greater you have to have greater angular momentum. Over the takeoff foot. You have to have greater linear movement of the center of mass before takeoff occurs, and you're doing it at almost certainly a lower entry velocity of the run. So you got a handful of disadvantages, but the advantage would be that if it were high jump, you're starting with a higher center of mass.

Exactly.

Yeah.

If you're just looking for vertical jump height, now it's probably better off to be in that slightly above average height.

Right? And I think one one thing we talked about is really light guys with really high hips who they're you know, we got a guy, Jordan Sullivan, he's six two, tested a 48 inch vertical off one, probably the highest I've ever seen off one. Joe Kindred might be somewhat similar. Right? And when you watch him and I jump next to each other off one foot, you'll see that it looks like if this is my pencil, right, and then I've got a way longer, let's say, this stapler.

Right? These are our femurs. Okay? This one's obviously longer. This one's obviously shorter.

Rotating to vertical, this is gonna have like you said on spring, I'm gonna have a higher linear velocity of my hip being the distal mass moving over the foot. And so even if you have a lower angular velocity, you could have a lower a higher linear velocity because Mhmm. The distance mass is moving faster. And Ben and I kind of agreed with it's probably a bell curve where the disadvantages it's it's some point of being too tall are gonna take over, right, where, you know, you're too big or, you know, it's probably a bell curve, and there's probably, like, a sweet spot for it. And for one foot, it seems like in high jump, it's about six three seems to be like the a good sweet spot.

I think So to was six four, six five

or no.

I think it was six five maybe. You know? And he's

You know, if you look at your strength based sports, power lifting, maybe, certainly weight lifting, it would provide you a lot of clues. Right? Right? They do the best lifters tend to be in those middling classes, at least pound for pound. The the highest power expressions per kilogram of body weight are in those middling classes.

And even out representing the population data of the fact that these people just exist more. So there's and this is not just true in humans. Right? We see the same thing in animals. Like, you if you scale people that if you scale animals down, they're able to do things that are just absolutely crazy.

Right? The best jumpers in the animal world are certainly not elephants, and they're not humans. They're like, you know, some little cricket or a or a frog that can project itself about that. 50 x, where the the leverage is in their favor, where the, you know, the the tendon to muscle ratios are way better. And and even, you know, you go back, we took we started this discussion about Usain Bolt.

His ground contact times were shorter. His angular velocity at the hip was longer, but his angular displacement of the hip while in contact was greater over the ground. So Mhmm. Basically, his stride length was about and and Ken could probably know this a little better than I could, but I wanna say relative to the shorter guys, it was probably, like, 20 centimeters longer in stride length. You know, I know Usain Bolt's stride length was around 2.7, a little bit above 2.7 meters.

And your average sprinter is somewhere around 2.5, maybe floating around 2.6. So even at the same speeds, they they complete the 100 meters at roughly the same speed. They say you take a nine seven for Usain versus a nine seven for somebody else. Usain's taken two, three more two, three less steps even with longer ground contact times, even with lesser angular velocity. So, but then he's a he's an n of one.

As of right now, he's an n of one. Almost everybody else now has kind of come back down to earth, and the best people seem to be in that five nine to six two range.

Right.

So Do you think it will take somebody like Bolt to break the world record, or do you think someone that's, like, six two, six three could do it?

I think a six two, six three could do it. Yeah.

Like, maybe Noah. He's five ten. Apparently, he is shorter than me. It was weird. He stood next to me, and I was like, you're tiny.

You're short. You're tiny. He's got very high hips. So let's let's pivot here to to steroids. Can we do that?

You're

getting trouble. I'm not naming names, but I can talk about things.

What do you what do you think about no. No. No. No. Not let's say, can you talk about athletes?

Can you name names with athletes or no? Can't talk about what we talked about after the podcast?

Probably not.

Oh, that's unfortunate.

I can talk about can talk about circumstantial positives.

Let's do that.

And without naming any specific athletes, if I were to tell you that there is

You got a script for this? You got a script for this?

I've given this there are so many nonbelievers that I have given this same talking points multiple times because it's something where people need to have their eyes opened on. People like to believe what they feels good, but even when it means that they're letting their own eyes lie to them or they're forcing themselves to lie to themselves. So if I were to tell you that there was an athlete who was better than any other athlete who's ever existed by some wide margin and that all of the other athletes that this athlete was better than, that was close to this athlete, had previously been suspected of or maybe even proven to have taken performance enhancing drugs. The logical explanation would be that performance enhancing drugs actually hurt your performance. That would be the only way to look at it.

Alternatively, you could say, we know that performance enhancing drugs improve performance. We now have something around sixty years of data to say, these things really help you get more powerful, stronger, faster, improve your lean body composition, recover better, even have benefits on bone health and everything else, longevity and even endurance performance. So we know that's really not on the table. You then have to ask yourself, how was it possible that these individuals that are so far at the top, sometimes by a decent margin, are actually where they are? Is it because performance enhancing drugs don't actually do what we know they do?

Probably not. Is it more likely that these individuals maybe just didn't get caught? And in some cases, were assisted in not getting caught. I think that's very likely to, to assume that. In some cases and we we now know this is the this is the case.

This is not like Epstein cover up stuff. This is like we know that these cover ups have taken place over the past fifty, sixty years of the sport. And in some cases, it's because the athlete was too big to fail. We couldn't we couldn't disqualify this athlete because it would take down the sport. You know, I think you saw that with known dopers like Lance Armstrong.

How many years was Lance Armstrong allowed to dope because he was the face of the sport, and he's selling bracelets about Livestrong and this whole narrative of I I can do it coming back from cancer.

And then what happened to cycling and what happened? Now it's

like Exactly.

Terrible. No one cares. Right.

And then this, know, even even the same thing kind of happened with Marion Jones. So people people had kind of known and suspected, and it was in circles, and then I guess I'd say sum it all up by saying if it's too good to be true, it's it's probably true.

Probably is. Alright. So here's a here's a fun here's a fun question. What do you think I can I can with a 100% certainty, and Isaiah himself would tell you that there's no performance enhancing drugs that he's on? So what do you think he could jump if he was on performance enhancing drugs?

I'm actually curious on what your lens on is on this. He's tested 50.5. Ben and I had this conversation. We were like, well, what if he powered clean four zero five? What if he did?

I don't know. What do you think his so right now, he cleans three thirty, backswats four forty. What do you what what do you think his numbers change to if you just put him on a very nice pharmaceutical dose? Because we've always we've always, we talk about this a lot, and a lot of guys in the house are like, I mean, he's already so good. I mean, how can you get better?

You've already broken the world record, like, clean. Is it is 53 possible, you think?

I would assume something around fifty two five is probably possible. That's what a 4%. The the research literature on doping for a clean athlete or relative to known clean athletes is somewhere in that range of two to 6% depending on the activity. So 52 puts you right around four, 4%. I think that's a safe bet.

The thing that you're dealing with both in in, say, sprinting and vertical jumping is that there almost certainly is a finite there's finite gains, right, especially in sprinting. Someone will get fast. Someone will run faster than Usain Bolt eventually, but no one will run faster than zero. Right? So Yeah.

The the faster you get, there the less there is to improve on. You know, when guys were winning the Olympics with 10.9 over a 100 yards or whatever it was, well, now you got we've shaved 10% off of that. So how much more is there to take off? Right? We've already taken off 10%.

It's diminishing returns, but from a performance point of view, you're already so good. Like and that that's Donovan and Olivia in the house. A lot of people a lot of people accuse Isaiah and Donovan of being on sauce. It's hilarious to me. I'm like, oh, what a compliment to my coaching.

What a compliment to my coaching that you think

best compliment you can get.

Yeah. Like, oh, he's on. It's like, I don't I know he's not on, but okay. Like and, yeah. I mean, we talk about a lot, and Donovan's always over the the mindset.

I mean, this is a guy that's six four, two twenty, runs, four four five with a one meter fly on grass, kind of uphill, on on an un deload, no sprinting volume. Right? Jumps. He's officially tested 46, has a flight time of point nine nine seven, which equates to well over 50. Why he can't test it is maybe a question for you.

But, you know, he's like, how much better could I could I get? Like, I'm already at the upper echelon. I don't think it would help that much. And it kind of is a testament to your point is that you're already you really are. You really are really good.

So it it would be hard to get any better. You'd have to you probably have to hire an expert to do it. It's not like you can just haphazardly, you know, do it. And I don't know what Balko and Charlie were like, but I'm assuming that they were dialed. They were dialed with their, pharmaceutical assistance.

Recipe. Recipe.

I think what will be you know, once you start to reach the level that, say, Isaiah is at, what you're more likely to have happen or just as likely, I would say, and I've seen this in in sport track and sports like track and field and weightlifting all the time, is that you have day to day variability, and that day to day variability might be one or 2% already. So when you jump 50.5, were you at your 100% that you've all time ever been, or was it just the closest you've ever been to your hundredth percent?

Definitely closest. I I mean, I had multiple days last year where I would have beat it, and I just didn't have a, like, a vertical jump tester out.

That's what I mean. Yeah. So how fast could people run? You know? Do do the stars align where you're healthy and you have a day where you're hyped and rested and a vertical jump tester?

Or that was your perfect day you know, how many guys could set the world record the day before the Olympic finals or three days later. Right? Like, I think Asafo Powell had a handful of times in his career where he's running great days after the Olympic final. And maybe it's a little bit of a head thing, but also we know that there is day to day variability. You can't always be a 100%.

And when you're talking about breaking the world record, that's the 100%. And and dunking's a a little bit different than your vertical jumps in track and field, but I was actually a little excited to see the potential of having laser bars for the vertical jumps and the long jump. While the purist in me says that would be defeat a lot of the purpose of the sport, and I understand that. I don't wanna kind of speak bad of anyone that would have that view. The the geek show side of me would say, man, how how far could a guy long jump if we just let him jump?

What is this? I haven't heard of the of that.

Jump anywhere? Laser at takeoff, laser at landing.

Or even say avert say, imagine the high jump, and instead of placing a bar, a physical bar up between the two uprights, you just have a series of lasers that are in millimeter increments. Millimeter, not even centimeter increments.

Put the bar up to seven six, and how much more over that do you get? And then whoever gets the highest over it without touching the laser gets the dub.

Yeah. I do wonder You

need a visual variance.

You don't even need a physical bar.

I just think that you would you probably would need the, I guess if the laser was visible, maybe, you'd want it. Right. Yeah. You'd want it. But it's because it's like when you push for those high heights, it's because, you know, you've you've seen the research.

Like, there's a target. You're gonna jump higher.

Target. But imagine you have the imagine the laser grid is not just one laser across, but it is a multiple lasers projecting horizontally like rays of my fingers in half millimeter increments or or yeah.

What as finite as you want?

Yeah. Go as finite as you want. Right. And then just like the VERTECH, it would just be like the VERTECH. Yeah.

In but in reverse. Right? Whatever you don't hit is as high

as you jump.

So then what you do is you have a competition, and instead of it being everyone gets three attempts, you just three attempts, and if you make a bar in those three attempts, you get another three attempts, and then it just keeps going. You just say everybody gets six attempts, and that's it.

It'd be fun.

Everybody gets six attempts.

I'd like that.

Be fun

if you're not sick.

I could probably be, like, more, like, warm. You would have to imagine if everybody's just going. You know what I mean? Like

Oh, it'd be like a circus. Right?

That's what Rolf calls our sport. He's like, oh, you're just like, it's a circus. That's what you do. You teach people to dunk. What a circus.

And I'm like, yeah. I know. It's not tracking field, Ralph. But, to your point, it would decrease the variance. You take the steroids.

You have a higher likelihood of being at your best more. Right? Your cluster shifts upwards. Right? Maybe there's stars lying once every two years.

Now stars lying once every three days. You're you're closer to your best more frequently, and I think that's a that's a really, really good point. So I I have a couple more questions. I know we've been on for an hour. I I Ben, do you have anything that you were wondering or topics, and we could close it out on that or things that you were wondering or Isaiah?

I think we covered my my, I wanted to circle back and talk about back to the power and Olympic lifting section. You mentioned, like, you think you're getting stuff out of Olympic lifts that you're not getting out of plyos or heavy strength work. Could you elaborate on that? Like, what adaptations, you know, whether that's neurally or structurally do you think you're getting from, say, just power work in general, versus just doing plyos or just doing strength work or a combination of those?

I think that simply operating at the ends of the continuum, those are there is work to be done in the middle. And and I think you can even take it further than that. We don't have to just focus on that middle part of the, say, loaded power continuum. We could take it in slow loaded work as well. We could take it in fast, super fast loaded work or unloaded.

We could take it in, I guess, the far end of the continuum would be stuff like assisted jumping. Right? So my idea would be take that continuum as wide as is relevant to what you're trying to do, move up and down that continuum as much as you can, I think that the different elements on that continuum potentiate the subsequent elements on that continuum? So if you are only going from one extreme to the other, you potentially miss out on that potentiation effect that they're so dissimilar that you're not quite getting the transfer from one to the other.

You're it's like a as Burke says, like, transmutation and transformation. You're not gonna you don't have as much transmutation in the middle, and it's not gonna transfer as well because you're missing so much of that. So you're not gonna do the sprints as well because you didn't do anything in the middle. You're not gonna do the plyos as well because you didn't do something that looks more like plyos before it. You know?

It's like just doing a bunch of tempo. It's like doing a bunch of endurance running and then going out and, you know, just springing and then expecting to run a five k well. Probably not gonna happen. You know, you've you've gotta you've gotta bridge the gap somewhere. And maybe this is another follow-up question.

There's a coach out there that said the forced velocity curve doesn't even exist because it happened between two a tensiometer, two little prongs, they put a frog leg on it, or it only happens on an isokinetic dynamometer and not in elastic conditions. So what is your what's your lens on that? Do you think that that we should throw the force velocity curve out the window and that it's not relevant? We shouldn't use it to coach, and we should just train these quasi isometric conditions and get a bamboo bar.

The sport is quasi isometric, technically, you know, you're gonna have sprinting or something?

Yeah. Do you what's your lens on that? So,

could be a longer answer on this, but one, would say force velocity continuum, there's some truth in that. The force velocity continuum when most people refer to the force velocity continuum, especially in the weight room, what they're really referring to is the load velocity continuum, and those are different things.

That's just one tail.

Well, basically, load velocity means that the more load there is, the slower you're gonna move. That's Correct. Yeah. Nonnegotiably true.

Concentrically. Correct.

Concentrically. Right. But and then inversely true eccentrically.

Correct.

So but that's not exactly the same as the force velocity continuum. So I think I like to use the load velocity continuum when I'm in the weight room for identifying what my next step would be. And I can make progressions with different exercises and with different loads and using force platforms or VBT or even just the eyeball test. You can start to make connections there in terms of what that would look like putting weight on or off the bar. In terms of the this example of the, say, force velocity relationship and the I think I saw this argument.

I think I first saw it probably about four or five years ago. And from a we sometimes get lost in the weeds in terms of the physiology and lose sight of the practicality of it. From a pragmatic standpoint, I think it still makes a lot of sense to force the or to look at and use the force velocity continuum. I can give you a lot of examples that in in our world, our the training theory world, that are exactly supported by the research literature or the or even the precise examination of the physiology, whether that's acute to chronic workload ratios or force velocity curve or, you know, say, speed profiling, that kind of thing. But pragmatically, conceptually, there's still a lot to gain from from using them.

So I think I work with athletes, and I'm a coach. I think I have a background in in the science. I think I coach as a scientist. But if you're a practitioner, an academic argument can only carry so much weight. We have the proof of what works.

There's a broad range of things that do work. The big four that we talked about earlier, they clearly have showed us the various options of what work. In almost every case, you're looking you're seeing some element of force velocity influence on their progressions. So to throw it out, it just seems like someone who's trying to be contrarian and overly in overly inventive when it's clearly not necessary.

That's a great way to put it, overly inventive.

They're trying to win an argument versus making a an athlete.

Let's challenge assumptions for the marketing war. Let's reinvent the wheel for the marketing war.

I have, two two questions. The first one, you mentioned the big four. Can you mention them, like like, first and last name? Because a lot of our viewers probably wanna do research on them.

Dan Paff would be one. That's Paff with a p. Bushexnader, b o o. This is, probably the one of the hardest names to spell, but I know it. S e e x n a y d e r, Shexnada.

Y. I never get the y in there.

I think I think it's technically pronounced Shexnada. Lauren Seagrave, l o r e n s e a g r a v.

And what what was he a coach for?

Because he he's the one Sprints. Of the 400

He invented speed dynamics, but he also coached Dwight Phillips to world championships in the long jump. He coached a 400 meter hurdler to a a world championship. He's coached oversee he's coached elite level Chinese long jumpers as well. And who am I missing here? Dan This is more than Randy.

Huntington. And, really, there's other guys who are probably outside of the track and field world, Even anyone outside of, let's say, Dan might not be even they may not even know the name. But there are other guys, who have who have done similar to them and actually followed very similar progressions, some of whom I mentioned on the last podcast. You know, there's, yeah, couple other guys that have done done similar, and it's using the same basic formulas. Yes.

There's some differences there, but the same basic formulas.

Isaiah, what's your second question? I'm dying to know. I'm FrothingTheMouth.

I think I had this question in the sheet, but it was something along the lines of of the elite guys you've trained in whatever practice, ideally speed power, that have improved. What separated them from those that haven't, whether something mental or how they trained, but, like, what, like, what allowed them to make progress? And this is relevant for me because I'm trying to improve. I'm late twenties, and then we're trying to coach other guys to get to that that 50 level. And then I think our listeners could also probably derive something.

I think I think the answer of that question is just the answer just to improving in general. But what separates them, like, from the guys that don't get better?

So the probably the guys that stand out in my head that had the biggest upside are probably two multi eventers. Eric. Eric Broadbent would be one. He came in as not even a decathlete and then ended up being a national champion in the heptathlon, qualifying for the Olympic trials. And then later, Jack Flood, who was d three guy in the decathlon, I don't think I think he scored 67 or something to that effect.

67. He broke he didn't break I thought he broke seven.

No. I don't think so. May maybe maybe super low if he did, but I don't think so. And sorry, Jack, if I screwed that up. But either way, in three years, he broke, eight k, which is kind of a threshold for That's great.

Incredibly fast acceleration. It's incredibly fast progress acceleration. So what I've

had 7021. Seventy twenty one was his college.

Seventy twenty one, I think you went to just, around 81 ish and, had went over eight two or three times. And which in in a decathlon is basically, like, you're probably something like thousandth in the world to top 50 in the world. Wow. And Eric Eric was pretty similar in the I think he actually got a little bit higher than that. And as I mentioned in the last podcast, a lot of my guys are that same kind of origin story, d two, d three.

If they would've listened to their family or listened to their friends or had any common sense, they would have quit. They should had they had no business continuing to train. I had some triple jumpers who were the same, some triple jump national champions, Joe Kindred, who Joe who John mentioned earlier was a elite of the elite guy, but had you know, he was coming from a small school similar. He jumped to 35 or something like that. And I think right away, I'll say, hey, guys.

We're not where we need to be. If you wanna keep doing this, everybody's gonna tell you you shouldn't, so you need to play catch up. And the way that you do that is you don't have to be the best right now, but you have to be the best at getting better. That's the only way you catch up. Get be the best at getting better.

And honestly, these guys are, generally speaking, they're dogs. Like, they will do whatever, whenever, sometimes to their own detriment. They buy into the process. They work hard. And the thing that I've seen over time, and you've probably seen this, Isaiah, as a a guy approaching you said approaching thirty?

Yeah. Yeah.

So is way too many guys hang it up too early. Yep. Way too many guys hang it up too early. It takes a long time, and there's sometimes there's guys who are late developers. You know, when it comes to measured sports, if you guys are talking about vertical jump down to 50.5 inches, and I'm dealing with athletes that are counting milliseconds and centimeters, that you gotta compete long enough to take out that variability that we talked about previously.

Like, give yourself a chance to have a good day. It's probably not gonna happen in your first year of competing.

Because I it's funny you say that because I always always say that. I'm like, you don't train really well, get really strong, get really fast, get really elastic, and then magically get worse. I'm like, that's probably not it. You just Yeah. You just gotta give yourself a chance to do it enough times.

Right? The stars have to align. I've I've always told Isaiah that, and the adage you always say, the haze in the barn. The haze in the barn. Like, we're gonna do our damnedest to get it to happen on this day.

There's no guarantee. Like you said, there's the day to day variance. You don't know, but you've gotta give yourself enough opportunities to do it. And if you

don't have that Yeah. Yeah. Closer you get to your genetic potential. Let's say if if that idea exists, you have a genetic potential, an upper limit that is possible under legal conditions, that the closer you get to it, that there the less buffer there is to improve on where you last were. So let's say, for example, your 50.5 is your ninety ninth percentile of your genetic limit.

Well, what's the likelihood of you having a a day that is better than that now? It gets slimmer and slimmer. And once you get to 99.5 of your genetic potential, it gets slimmer and slimmer still. So you gotta stay at it, I think, for a long time. And some of these things, it takes a while to see the results.

I gave a talk at the NSCA just this past last summer, and the talk was on mostly on developing strength that transfers to speed and power. And I actually had pulled up some great data from the track and field world. Jonathan Edwards, some some world champion hammer thrower, world record hammer thrower, world record javelin thrower. Let me see. Triple jump triple jumpers to Catholics.

I had four or five athletes in there, and I had their longitudinal progression. In some cases, like, fifteen years. All their test marks for fifteen years. And their best event performance overwhelmingly came five to six years years after their best squat performance and something like two years two years after their best Olympic lift performance. So these are guys who are, like, at this for a long time.

And if they were just in the gym and going like, oh, shit. I haven't upped my squat max for a year or two, I'm done, and they hang it up. Well, the gains were maybe a year or two off. So it's kind of

Yeah. That's crazy.

Yeah. Some thing of just, like, staying with it. You you just have to make sure that you've given yourself a chance to succeed, and most guys give up way too early.

That that's crazy because, like, I would say on average, since John started coaching me, it was like a PR every year, like, on my vertical, then it turned into I'm PR ing every other year. So it it was like it was like twenty twenty, it got 48, and twenty twenty two, 50. Twenty twenty four, got 50.5 and then PR on the flight time. And then this is the first time we're we're about to reach, like, the three year mark without a PR. And then what's wild about you saying the squat thing is, like, I just PR ed my squat for the it was like a I hadn't PR'd in two years or something like that.

It was a big PR. It was good. Yeah. Same with my power clean. And in my head, I was expecting.

I was like, oh, in a month, I'm gonna break I'm gonna break my my vertical jumbo record. But you saying that average number of five or six years, I think I need a a reframe. I I feel like I always reframe to shift my times my time to even longer and longer, but it that's like another it's like, oh, I was thinking in terms of one to two years. I should be thinking, like, maybe three to five years is, like, be okay with not setting a PR in that time frame knowing as long as I'm putting in the work, it'll it'll come. Hopefully, maybe not.

Yeah. And what's what's, interesting is, I guess, to kind of loop back on something we discussed before about whether the Olympics lifts matter or their relevancy for for performance, there was a a much closer synchrony with Olympic lift PR and event PR. So it was much closer in terms of the time frame. The the strength PRs came early earlier. The power output came later.

In some cases, they were also doing things like heavy weighted ball throws, a standing vertical standing long jump, stuff like that, which is basically a, you know, a low end power type of movement. And then then the event performance came came last. Yeah. You gotta gotta just stay with it. I mean, I've seen

That's amazing.

My my guy last year, he he Josh Coley, he came in. I think he was I'll I'll butcher their starting progression, but I wanna say he came in

at a seven

fifteen seven fifteen long chopper, if that and that's a number that no one would tell you to continue probably. And he he continued for a couple years without me before before coming to me, and then he's been he was with me for, I think, six years. And it he jumped eight meters last year.

Wow. So That was eight years before he PR ed again.

So I don't hang it up, boys.

He had some PRs in there, but, I mean, he PR'd he went, like, probably two years. Actually, and then a long jumper I have right now, not quite as far a jumper, he had a PR'd for three years. He PR'd last year in the 60. Last his first year last year was his second year with me. He was his first year with me was kinda mediocre, to be honest with you.

I think he was a little bit worried, and I have to tell guys when they come in, like, hey. If we're gonna do this shit that's gonna make you better, it's probably gonna make you worse first, especially if you're coming from a program where you're not training this hard. And his first year was not great. It was okay. Like, he actually struggled to do the training.

He couldn't even hang with the training. It was always modified because he's the guy who's just absolutely blistered. And then by year two, he can get through most of the training, and he PRs in the 60 and the long jump and the indoor long jump and all these and, I think almost in the maybe in the in the 100 too. So that's a guy who's, you know, late late twenties as well. So I think there's something with just staying with it.

People give up too early.

Yeah. When do you think, like, the speed, like, a peak performance would hit for jumping and sprinting? Like, what age Be before you can get to that, quote, unquote, like, maintenance phase.

And Collins did it.

Yeah. Probably a little bit little bit of, depends on how long you've been training, what how far you've take how advanced you've taken your training. You know, if you if you get to the kind of the end of the known continuum, let's say, you're jumping off of six foot boxes for depth

We've done that. We've we've

done that.

What I did, dude.

Have you known that? Did you know we did that? Five foot.

Five foot boxes.

We did five foot depth jumps with a true rebound. Yep. 250. Beautiful.

We've done we've done We've done four foot. Josh would do four foot, stuff like that. I mean, let's say you take it to the end of the continuum, whatever that looks like. You're at five. You need to go to six.

Maybe six is the end of the that known continuum. Like, where do you keep going? Like, where do you keep going? You know? How do you keep going?

So that would be, I think, a big question. There's if the tendons can stay healthy

Mhmm.

If the, you know, soft tissue is good enough to keep keep the knee joints moving, maybe you can keep going till there are certainly examples of it. Guys go into early thirties for sure.

Only one way to find out.

Yeah. I think that another thing I'll tell these guys is you don't wanna end your career and wonder what you could have been because you got the rest of your life to do fuck all. You've only got a really small window to be the best you can physically be. So you can take you can have peace in knowing you know, maybe your maybe your 50.5 is your best, but you don't know that right now. You won't know that until you've tried for another three more years and you didn't get 50.6.

And maybe it's three more years and you didn't get you're still at 50.5. Now you can at least go, you know what? I know I couldn't do 50.6 because I did everything that I should have done, and I didn't get better. Yep. But if you retired in 2021 You never

do it.

Never do it. And you'd probably be thinking, oh, well, I what could I have jumped? So you don't wanna be an old man and wondering what could you have done. You wanna, you know, sit back and go like, oh, I I maxed it out. I wasn't I wasn't a fifty two two inch guy, or maybe I was, but you would know with certainty that you did what you should have done.

Yeah. Well, this is a a really, really good place to to cut this off. I know we've taken a lot of your time, Mike, so thank you for for coming on. If you guys are interested in following Mike, go to Instagram. Go to mike young p h d.

Give him a follow. Hopefully, he'll, continue to post content, continue to, grow his social media prowess. But, yeah, we really appreciate it. Thank you guys for listening, and, we'll catch you guys next time.