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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.
What's up, guys? Welcome back to the THPStrength podcast. Yesterday, we did a whole episode on the ten eighty Quantum. Unfortunately, I've got a decent network, and that network does include the Rolf Ohlman.
Ben:So if you guys don't know, Rolf has worked all over the world.
John:Probably the most well known accomplishment is helping Randy coach uncle Sue down to the fastest accelerator ever. What was his 60 meter time, Ralph?
Rolf:I believe they clocked him at, what, six twenty nine for
John:Something his first 60. Absurd. And what where was he when they when you started with him in his 60? Oh. Day one, you come in you guys come in.
Rolf:Oh, 06:42, I think.
John:So good, but not the best. Then he gets down to the world world infamous time. Yeah.
Rolf:But in in all honesty, he did that in '21, and I left in '20. I'll wait till nothing
John:to do with it. I mean,
Rolf:if anything Nothing to do with it.
John:Yeah. Our logic concludes you actually made him you actually made him you were holding him back.
Rolf:Yeah. Exactly.
John:That's what that that's
Ben:what that
John:logic says.
Ben:By that logic.
Rolf:No. It's
John:So, yeah, Rolf is, one of the nerdiest people I've ever met, when it comes to sports science, strength conditioning in a good way, like Ben and myself. We all love diving into the physiology and ways that we can try to maximize this. We've had Rolf on here before, so you guys should be pretty familiar with him. But, Rolf, you listened to the podcast yesterday. What were some of the misconceptions or things that we said wrong about the Quantum?
John:Oh, by the way, Rolf created the Quantum.
Rolf:Yeah. Well, it was it was my idea. And then, of course, when it comes to these types of things, you've gotta have you've gotta have people, engineers that can make things happen and and and programmers and so forth. And the story of the of the of the quantum is a is a long story. We won't bore you with that, but it it it all came out of a project which in Sweden was called Breakman.
Rolf:So, basically, there there was a project run by the one one of the pro hockey clubs and the National Institute of Sports in Stockholm that they were gonna do overload eccentric training. So they rigged up a couple of electrical motors, and from the ceiling, they just lowered massive amounts of weights. And then underneath these bars would would jump a hockey player, and they would then attempt to break the the downward motion of the bar. So they were in in fact operating at probably somewhere in the vicinity of 30% above what these guys had ever squatted, for example. So if they had squat 200, were, you know, they were sort of at the two sixty kilo mark and that sort of thing.
Rolf:And I know that they were using well over 300 kilos at some stages.
Ben:Yes.
Rolf:So that project that project ran for for a while, and and there's a guy there that who was in charge of the whole thing. And the data that they got out of it was was extremely interesting because they got massively strong, the whole bunch of them, of course. Everybody that was in that project got massively strong. But, unfortunately, it it sort of didn't they didn't go past that. They they never looked at, you know, like, okay, what happens if we do this and if that if we do that?
Rolf:It was just looking at what what actually, you know, transpires with extremely heavy eccentric loading. No concentric phase, just an eccentric phase stop, and then it would be it would be raised again and the athlete would just, you know, walk out and then they do another repetition. So they did sort of singles, I suppose you could call it, in groups of, if I remember right, three, four repetitions. And then that would constitute as a set, and then that that they do multiple sets. So the data came out and and it was there was no doubt people were getting massively strong.
Rolf:And I got a hold of this data and as being then a a track and field coach and and so forth, I was intrigued. And we talked amongst a few guys in in Sweden about this. And then, of course, my my very good friend and colleague, Kenneth Rigberger, in Malmo, who's the was the the head of the Malmo Sports Academy. He's produced eight nine guys over 8,000 points in the decathlon. Very, very good coach.
Rolf:He and I started, you know, discussing because we were always discussing training, and and we do even to this day, though he's retired since eight years back, that, you know, we we could probably take this to another step. And then sort of one thing led to another, and all of a sudden, we we managed to get a a grant from a university, and we started building what was then called trainee test, which was which is today the ten eighty quantum. The interesting thing is that the the late professor Carmelo Bosco published some papers that Regan, which is what we call Kenneth, and I have more or less used as our bible because it Bosco was way ahead of everybody else when it came to thinking about physiology in their respective especially eccentric training.
Ben:Yeah. The stress shortening cycle and stuff.
Rolf:Stretch yeah. Stretch shortening cycle and the filament sliding theory and so forth. So Bosco's principles and why you test and and so forth, and he'd already sort of started doing things himself by releasing the the first vibration platform, which is called the Nemeth, which was very interesting. But anyway, having that document and in that document, Bosco says a few things which are very interesting. And he first of all, he's he talks about the fact that if you're gonna do something eccentrically, concentrically, you've got to have a a quick turnaround time.
Rolf:And the reason for that is that if it takes too long, which is, for example, what it did in these in the case of these extremely heavy eccentrics, you're going to lose a great deal of the energy that you've built up as heat dispersion because of the fact that you're you're simply not turning the system around fast enough. So Bosco was saying that you need to turn this around in under eighty milliseconds. That was his time frame. And then he made a very interesting comment that which I've it's in my, in on the left here, you can see I've got all these weird and wonderful books, which I never read. He states that he did not think that they were it was possible to build an electromagnetic, as he calls it, system for eccentric concentric movement that could switch between these two modalities.
Rolf:In other words, eccentric to concentric fast enough in his mind to utilize the eccentric phase to its full extent. Long story short, the quantum, it changes between eccentric to concentric in about twenty, thirty milliseconds.
John:Which is under the 80 threshold
Rolf:Which is way under.
John:Carl Bosco decided was sufficient.
Rolf:Yeah. So so we got it to work, and we started with the first people that bought the system was, of course, the Malmo Sports Academy. And Reagan and I have spent the first two years doing some crazy testing. Now what can you do with this thing? Well, if the it it's not a matter of what you can do.
Rolf:The the the question is rather what can't you do? Because the fact that you've got a computer program and you've got a a system that can switch between eccentric to concentric in thirty milliseconds means that you can virtually program it to do some weird and wonderful things. And I said to John that we went to a trade fair and and had one of the towers with us. And as a as a gimmick, I I said to the to my engineer, I said to him, look, let's let's make it behave like a spring. And we did.
Rolf:So we had it set the arm was set up, and you we had a a seat underneath it, and you could sit and you could do lat pull downs. But the thing was this thing behaved like a rubber band. And, you know, people were absolutely you know, freaked out. And one of the guys that sort of spent probably I don't know how long he spent there, probably half an hour was Henrik Dogwood, who was a Swedish record holder, an eight and a half thousand point decathlete. He works for Eleko, a good friend of mine and not and he he jumped in there and he he started pulling this thing and he, you know, you pull it down and it went boing and it went straight back up.
Rolf:You know? It's not not sort of because it was a lot of weight, but just because it was a spring. And, you know, so he played around with this, and he thought it was absolutely like, wow. This thing is crazy. And then, you know, we had different modalities on a switch there.
Rolf:So where it went back to a traditional weight, and then we had what we call a no flying weight, which means that, when you stop the motion, the inertia stops. It doesn't keep going. And that is probably one of the the major things it does is that the is the fact that it's got no flying weight, which means that you in essence, which, I don't think until I sort of made it clear for John yesterday that you can, if you want, you can make the quantum behave exactly like a a Kaiser. So it's it's absolutely 100% isotonic. So to con constant resistance.
Rolf:No matter how fast you go, it's it is 50 kilos away you go. That's it. But Which I think
John:I do wanna interrupt. I think that does answer one of the questions that we had yesterday, which was why do you need a Kaiser if you have a Quantum? Which the reality is you do not. You can do
Ben:You can do everything. Yeah.
Rolf:Yeah. But now comes the but. There are a couple of things that the Kaiser rack does that that is it's extremely interesting. And what we've seen, and I think we are we are probably the ones that have been dwelling on on this problem because we've had the resources in place where we've had all of this equipment, which was, you know, the the major thing that that Randy said to me when I got to Beijing was Randy just told me, you know, get your VBT device, get out in the gym, and I wanna know exactly what every one of those bloody machines and what they do.
John:So we You're saying the Kaiser racks?
Rolf:Well, we not only Kaiser. We had every piece of Kaiser equipment. We had every piece of matrix. We had every piece of techno gym. We had every piece of, you know, four or five of the major manufacturers, you know, and had
John:know concentric, eccentric, what's the fastest you can go?
Rolf:Well, what what you know, if you put on if you have six different types of leg press machines, for example, and then you've got and on top of that, then you've got a Kaiser seated leg press, what are they what are all these things do? What is the difference between them? So that we found out very, very quickly, you know, that a 100 kilos in, you know, in a in a in a certain position and machine is very different depending on what manufacturer you have. It has to do with ergonomics and and, it has to do with some gearing in some some in some cases.
John:Because a lot of them have cams and they're not necessarily vertical. They're cable. They could be at
Rolf:an Yeah. There's a whole bunch of things. So that was what really and why did we wanna know that? Because it was the question that Regan and I had already, you know, sort of asked ourselves, and that is how do we sequence things? What is the best sequence in going from, you know, whatever we wherever we start, how do we progress that on on the scale?
Rolf:In other words, how do we make things faster, have more difficult? How do we mix things up in a way that we are always sort of asking the human body to adapt to whatever we're doing to these modalities? So for the first time ever, I got the opportunity then and we we, as as coaches, got the opportunity to be able to do this because in Beijing, we had everything. So a lot of a lot of the questions that we had unanswered. And to be honest, this is what I think is mostly frustrating having left the company is that they haven't listened.
Rolf:They are they think that they know shit, but they know absolutely nothing, to be quite honest. It is it is it is absolutely beyond me that you go in and you've got the quantum system, and then you get some crazy notion because a couple of the people are doing some cross fit in the company, and you build you build a diesel forklift truck to replace the Quantum. That is ab it's it's absolute complete and utter madness. What makes you
John:think footprint of it is just and the weight of it is ridiculous.
Rolf:You've got something which there are a couple of people and and that has seen and tested the quantum, and they they say straight away, this is probably the most prolific and most advanced piece of equipment that's come into the training sphere in the last thirty, forty years. It just absolutely turns everything upside down and back and up, you know, and back to front because of of what it can do and how it does it. And and you've got a company then that is now in you know, has this technology, and they're about to phase it out. What? Well, they they because they well, to be honest, they don't understand it.
Rolf:They do not understand it because most of their clients I mean, we've got situations where, I'll give you an idea. There's a guy in The US called Derek Schmidt.
John:He Well, you're allowed to fully share all this information. Right?
Rolf:Yeah. Yeah. So Derek contacted me and he introduced himself, and he's got a high performance facility now somewhere in the Midwest, if I remember right. I could be wrong. Anyway, he said to me, look.
Rolf:I've got a NFL club that are gonna sell their machine. And I said, what? You see, yeah, they they they the staff don't know how to use it. So he bought it for $15,000 or something. Ridiculous like that.
Rolf:And now there's the forward. So what I found out from from Derek was that there's a former pro player in Tampa, which means it it would have to have been a pro football or pro hockey player. I doubt if if if there's anybody else that's, you know, buys a quantum to put in their own garage. Mhmm. But, he had a quantum, and when he retired, he has donated it to the university.
Rolf:Now from what I've spoken to to to Derek, we think that it's the unit one of the universities in in Tampa. And I think John and I were talking about this, and probably the only one it could be is University of Southern of Southern Florida.
John:Yeah. That's the only one I can think of. I mean, I don't know too many universities, but that's the only one I can think of.
Ben:Vote a THPSt road trip to USF to try this.
John:That's what we were talking about yesterday that we
Ben:Can we buy it? Can we has the precious? I
John:did ask that.
Rolf:Yeah. Exactly. I mean, we've gotta try to figure out where it is. But this is this is what's happening around the place. I mean, the the one that's in Beijing, for example, coach Rainer Ryder is there now, and Rainer has brought it back to life because after I left, it was virtually unused.
Rolf:It was Randy used it a few times. But since 2021, it's just been standing there. '22, it's been standing there. So for four years. But this is usually what happens.
Rolf:We've got two in Italy, for example. We've got one with the DiNese football club where I was in 1314 and as a consultant. The staff there have all gone, and and it's not being used. It's it's actually it's in storage. There is another system at the National Football Center in Covaccino in Italy, and it's the same thing there.
Rolf:The guy that was using it, he's retired apparently, and it's it's in mothballs as well. And this is what happens because this system absolutely challenges you on every level. And people who are inquisitive enough, they simply think, you know, oh, this is a headache. I don't know how this works. You know?
Rolf:How do I start this thing? Oh, you need two tablets. Oh, where are the tablets? We don't know. So there's a few things that sort of, you know, don't coincide immediately and people just go, oh, no.
Rolf:I don't want it. And they don't realize what they've actually got in their hands, and it just doesn't get used. And, unfortunately, the the the company that, manufactures this I simply not doing enough, proactive work, in the out on the field to to show people what you can actually do with with this system. So they built a a a cheaper version or a a single arm version or a single cable version that you put on to a 50 millimeter was it a 100 millimeter square post that you've got, which is the the the standard frame size of your CrossFit boxes. But this thing is it's it's it's a diesel forklift truck compared to the Quantum.
Rolf:Yeah. So, you know, we'll see what happens. But so the thing the thing with the quantum and what you can do with this, and there's a couple of modalities that we tested very quickly. Back in 2012, we had a world class, or international class hurdler who is one of the best physical specimens that we've ever tested, a very, very talented young man who's retired. And we tested him with a protocol where we were doing fast eccentrics into a isokinetic brake.
Rolf:So, for example, he was doing a single leg at about a hundred and forty kilos down to about not quite parallel, just short of parallel, and then back in into a a concentric. But as soon as he turned around into the concentric, he hit the isokinetic break at which was set at o point three meters per second. So what what we figured out was that if we did something, and this is interesting because when I when Randy and I started working together, Randy had his theory of what he called DIS, dynamic isometric strength, and what happens. And what we now know is this is the filament winding adaptation. And it has two triggers.
Rolf:One is is load. The other one is velocity. Velocity seems to be that you've got to get over about 80% of volitional velocity. So in other words, you've got to move very fast eccentrically, and then this this adaptation then then kicks in. It's interesting because if you do, for example, ten ten fast reps at a at a at a weight that is at the right weight, which is somewhere when we've done this with with bands, we can see that this we can get this to kick in.
Rolf:And Patrick's done it here in Australia before he went to The US, and we were probably using about one and a half times it's about one and a half times body weight, It sort of turns out to be. So for Patrick, it was just over a 100, a 100 and a 105, a 110 kilos, I think, we're we're using. And what you see will happen is that traditionally, you'll do the first rep and it'll be sort of wherever it is. Second rep will be higher because you're now able to use elasticity in the second rep. You don't in the first.
Rolf:So most people, if you do four or five reps, they'll peak out on the second or third rep. Some people, very few will peak on the fourth. Virtually nobody peaks on the fifth. And now it comes the fun part. Normally, because of that, when we see this bang bang, boom, boom, boom, we stop at about four or five reps, and that's what we've always done.
Rolf:So we've kept this going and done multiple sets. But when you actually are moving this fast eccentrically, the filament winding adaptation kicks in. So what happens if if you keep going and you do the fifth rep, it might drop. Six might start to level out, and then something very, very strange happens. Rep seven starts climbing, eight climbs, nine climbs, and 10 goes or eight, nine, 10 goes through the roof.
Rolf:And this is now this calcium deposit that's being wound up, and that is that's where all the magic happens. So the interesting thing then was okay. So when Randy was telling me, you know, I've seen this this this doing with Kaiser on on and on the on the rack, for example, with especially with when you use air EMS mixture. We'll get into that. But the interesting thing was then that going back to the 2012 protocols we were doing with the athlete in Sweden.
Rolf:So we're doing these single leg squats and then smacking into the the isokinetic break at o point three meters per second. So basically, our line of thinking was, okay, if this fast eccentric action and the the turnaround because there is a turnaround, it's being done violently fast, then fast switch fibers are being are being used. That's predominantly what's what's happening.
Ben:Fast So you're you're essentially doing a fast eccentric into what's basically like a one RM type speed squat if you're doing point three meters per second?
Rolf:Correct. Basically. That is
John:awesome. That sounds so fun. The only way you can do this
Rolf:is with Quantum. So what then happens is and and The spicy stuff. You know, when we look at this, what is actually transpiring when you do that protocol is that it is time under tension. So now all of a sudden, when you normally would do this fast eccentric, you would, you know, do something like apply metric or whatever. You might have you know, if you're doing a CMG jump, for example, you you know, your amortization is maybe 250, three hundred milliseconds.
Rolf:But now all of a sudden, we we're, you know, we're pushing 2,000, two and a half thousand milliseconds, you know, because we're only moving about forty, fifty centimeters. So it's taking so much longer, the time under tension. So what we found then was that three sets of four reps was absolutely just totally cooking these guys.
John:I mean Fried.
Rolf:They they were fried.
Ben:I mean And did you do anything beforehand? Like, did you do any, like, cleans or any sort of power work or, like, sprints beforehand, or was it just
Rolf:that workout? No. Just just that. That this that would that was it. And the thing interesting thing was once they did this, they they they didn't wanna do anything else.
Rolf:Yeah. I wouldn't either. They were toast.
John:Now after one rep, I'd be like,
Rolf:I'm done. Well, it was really interesting because with everybody that we did this with, if you we set safety bars, of course, because we were using a Smith machine. The quantum is connected with the Smith machine and you've got safety catches on it. So we would set it at a depth, the safety bars, you know, maybe three, four inches below, where they were going. Now the interesting thing was once they found their sort of ideal depth where they could do this, it was interesting.
Rolf:If they went a centimeter, two centimeters below that depth, they couldn't get out of it. It was like it was it was finished. That was it. They would bottom out. Boom.
Rolf:And then we'd have to reset the machine and start over again. So once they found the sweet spot, they could do four or five repetitions. But if they went one or two centimeters below that, end of story. Now what did we get out of that? Well, the thing that we were interested in seeing, okay, are we gonna get strong?
Rolf:Oh, yeah. We got we got ridiculously strong. Force production went through the roof, but now comes the fun part. Because we also did a well, how we knew what was going on was that we had a test protocol that we've used since, I don't know when, late nineties, where we do a squat jump with twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, and a 100 kilos. So whatever intervention we do, we then go in and test a baseline and then after the intervention, and then we can see which one of these weights has been affected.
Rolf:So if we think we're doing maximum strength work, then we'd expect 80 and a 100 kilos to to have risen, and nothing would happen between
Ben:And what type of like, what metric? Like, jump height, TPV, or four like, are you gonna
Rolf:force Mostly, we're looking at at power and TPV. Okay. What was happening with with with those and and, to some extent, velocity. And so we had, you know, we had a long and extensive extensive knowledge of and understanding what was going on with our test protocol and so forth. So when we started testing, this athlete, we saw that, first of all, his results at at eighty and a hundred kilos, which is absolutely absurd.
John:Yeah. They
Rolf:had to be that'd be
John:the most specific thing.
Rolf:Yeah. But but now comes the kicker. His 20 centimeter, vertical well, his jump jump squat with 20 kilos increased dramatically.
John:What about the forty sixty?
Rolf:It, you know, it went up. But, I mean, the 20 kilos, but 20 kilos shouldn't have done anything with this protocol at this speed.
Ben:Are they dropping fast? And that jump too, like, that that squad jump as fast as you can?
Rolf:Yeah. Okay. So we went into the literature, and we we we went through a lot of literature and and tried to find out, you know, what what what's been done with, you know, isokinetic. And there was not one single mention of isokinetic's increasing power. Not not one.
Rolf:Not one not one study.
John:But that's because they didn't do the fast eccentric part
Rolf:of it. Because they they there was they there was nobody up until that stage that had a machine that could do this. So that, of course, prompted us to to, you know, thought, okay. We've got something here that nobody else has got anywhere else in the world. So what what spurred us on to do this was that Philip was a one ten his name was Philip.
Rolf:He he was a one ten hurdler. He made the European final, and I think he was sixth. He's run seven sixty seven, I think, indoors. He was fourth at the world indoors at one stage. Very talented athlete.
Rolf:He's around thirteen forty, if I remember right, somewhere in there. So a very, very, very accomplished athlete, but physically a beast. And what we then saw with with him and what we were trying to do, because he was gonna have a very long season 2012, was to see if we could keep his power levels up throughout the whole season with as little intervention as possible from, you know, being in the gym. So we wanted a protocol that we could go in, do maybe every ten days, and that was gonna tank him up. And we did that.
Rolf:But the problem was we did it too too well. So instead
John:of Fast.
Rolf:Maintaining his level, his levels went through the roof. And this, of course, poses a great problem when you're a hurdler because the first hurdle, it doesn't move. It stays at 13.72.
Ben:Was he an eight step or a seven step guy?
Rolf:Oh, that's a good question. I think he was a seven step. So we couldn't the thing was that he he changed that much. No. He was an eight step.
Ben:Yeah. I said that he might went tried to go down to seven now that
Rolf:he's powered on that one. Go down to seven. So we had to he had to move his blocks back. But, basically, what happened was he was turning up at the first hurdle at about 40 centimeters too close.
Ben:It's too powerful.
John:Why couldn't why didn't you move the
Rolf:of a sudden, you know, one of the things that I used to joke about, and I've said in a lot of my you know, when I've done presentations, okay. Hands up, the coaches have got the the following problem. Your athletes are too fast and too powerful. Negatory. You know?
Rolf:But all of a sudden, this is what this is the problem we had with with Philip. He was just too powerful. So what we then wanted to know, okay. So this is interesting. So we've done this and we've done that and he gets these numbers.
Rolf:How long does this work? And now came the surprise, which was very, very interesting. And this is this is where now we need physiology, to to get in there, and nobody's done anything about this. That and that's the the sad part. So when you do this protocol that we were doing, it tops out at 10 sessions.
Rolf:If you do two a week, that's five weeks. So, basically, my six week block, you do that and that's it. So once you go past that and keep trying to keep going, nothing happens with this protocol. It's it's it's it's as if the system has said, right. The adaptation that I'm able to do on a cellular level, I cannot handle any more of this.
Rolf:I need a break. So you need to have two, three months break, then you can come back and you'll get you'll get some some leverage again happening.
John:When they came back, were they were their baselines where they left off?
Rolf:They were still I mean, they dropped, of course, but because of the the the increases that we had, they were still well above what they had had in Yeah. Previous
John:And then and then the new macro cycle, their peak was higher than it was
Ben:Yeah. In the previous cycle. Is this what you peak athletes with, this protocol, or is there a different, like, intensification of, like, say, fast up and fast down?
Rolf:Or fast
Ben:fast down and fast up?
Rolf:Well, this is the interesting thing. This is what we started messing around with. So we started looking at exactly these two scenarios. Is this something that we do just to to do for a tapering to peak them, or is this something that we do, for example, for a a max strength phase? So we've we've done both both variants.
Rolf:We've used it either for for tapering or we've used it in in a in a max strength setting where we we are only chasing one thing, and that is we we just need to get these guys stronger.
Ben:Which ones did you find was able to go to oh, sorry, John.
Rolf:Yeah.
Ben:I'm just saying.
John:Which ones did you find was better? Did like, doing both? Do it at the beginning of the year, end of year?
Rolf:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
John:Because then you have that three or four month period of unloading. Yeah. And then you can return to it. So then when you follow it up with the the Kaiser stuff, the mass and airbase loading, did you follow the six week block with that
Rolf:number? When I started messing around with this, in Beijing because then all of a sudden I had I had a a Kaiser rack. Now I'd used Kaiser a little bit, and, of course, I'd I'd met Randy when he was in Exos. I traveled over and and I showed him the quantum back in third two thousand thirteen, I believe. Mhmm.
Rolf:And Randy, more or less, when I got to Beijing, he said, you know, we talked about Kaiser and what, you know, what was the advantages of of using Kaiser. The fact that it isotonically, you can you know, it's the velocity part,
Ben:which Logistically,
John:I think it's good.
Rolf:Yeah. Now with with the with the rack, you've got something that is unique. You can't do with the other Kaiser's, and that is that you can add external weight. So you can if you've got 300 pounds, you can you can have 300 pounds of of air resistance, or you can have 200 pounds of of air and a 100 pounds of mass, or you could have a 150 air and a 150 mass. What's the difference?
Rolf:Is there a difference? Oh, hell yeah. Once you get to fifty fifty mixture, you've got about a 25% difference to the positive in eccentric output because of what's going on. Because now Is not a force plate?
Ben:Or how do you guys measure this?
Rolf:Again, I I was just using my my MuscleLab system and getting collecting data out of that. But, basically, you're getting about 30% more more more wattage. Your TPVs are faster. They're coming much faster, which is is interesting. The acceleration part is, you know, what we've been chasing for years is is TPV.
Rolf:Because as we know, it's sometimes it's it's an illusion to get more wattage, But if that wattage coming at the
Ben:I'm always watching that that TPV, baby. Like, whenever I'm doing, like, cleans or whatever, I'm always watching that. Yeah. Yeah. The wattage.
Rolf:Because otherwise, you know, you you can get a guy who goes from 3,000 watts to three and a half thousand watts, everybody's jumping around the gym doing high fives. And then I come in and spoil the party and say, yeah. Well, this is great. But the only problem is he was producing 3,000 at a 187 milliseconds, and now he's producing three and a half at 266.
John:So
Rolf:it's worse. Is 266 what he does in his sport?
John:Make it a worry.
Rolf:No. If it is, by by chance, if it was, well, great. And this is what and this is what happens. And this is what, you know, the discussion I've had I had with Dennis Kaizen. That's why, you know, Randy and I have been trying for for years to get, you know, Kaizen to put more metrics into their into their screens so that we can get yeah.
Rolf:So we can that people can understand that it's not just about power. Power is great, but it's also how quickly and how steep that acceleration curve is. If you've got a sport that that demands virtually an acceleration curve that looks like that and you're doing that, well, you're leaving, you know, all of this here. You're leaving, you off the table. It's not come you know, that food is still in the fridge.
Rolf:It's not coming out on the table. It's Yeah.
John:And it's funny because jumping, like what we do, we're seeing intervals of two twenty off one, two ten off one, you know, maybe 200. And then off two, you're seeing two fifty. So it gives us a way greater inventory of exercises that we can experiment with.
Rolf:It does. And this is you know? And and, you know, and not not knocking that. And because some of the most of the throws have got virtually the same sort of, time frames and a lot of other sports.
Ben:But it
John:makes sprinting
Ben:a lot harder.
Rolf:Spring sprinting it makes sprinting harder. It makes it very much harder. Long jumping at the at the at the male level, at world sort of world level when you've got guys who
John:are Yeah.
Rolf:You know, tearing in at least
John:ten or fifteen milliseconds. Seconds on the ground.
Rolf:And they, you know, they're exactly they're at, you know, sort of a 120 milliseconds, and they've you know, what they've gotta do there. Yeah. We have a lot of time. Is Highjump is a little bit sort of a it's more it's it's much closer to what you guys are doing. You'll see these guys doing anywhere between one sixties, one seventy to about two fifty.
John:Right.
Rolf:And that's the difference when you, you know, when people talk about, yeah, are you a power flopper or are you a speed flopper? It's very sort of pseudoscience when it comes to are you a a puller or a pusher in sprinting, which, you know, there is really not there's no such thing as a puller and a pusher.
John:I I agree a 100%. You know, I I've heard that in the past with coaches that I've worked with, and I'd be like, really? Because, if you look at the mechanics of it, everyone's on the ground a short period of time. Everyone's in the same positions. You can't throw your foot out in front of you and pull with your hamstring and your hip and expect to run fast.
John:You're just gonna create braking forces. Like, Patrick and I were talking about the other day.
Rolf:It's it's yeah. You, you know, you you do have a sweeping motion, but it's you what you're trying to do is just push straight down.
John:Yeah. You're trying to max out the, you know, the impulse that you get there and get a lot of mass energy out of it.
Rolf:The first six steps is is all about push. Right. Low feet recovery, get feet into the ground as quick as possible, and then push, push, push, push, push. And then it it sort of you straighten out, and then, you know, it becomes a different a different different condition.
John:And then you're
Rolf:The transition is is is very important.
John:It's funny having Patrick here because, you know, like, a lot of this stuff I've over the years, I've heard has heard so many different concepts. And then really diving into Ralph Mann's book, he's like, these are the kinetics, these are the kinematics, these are the you know, this is what you have to do if you want to run really fast. He's like, you can't really get around these metrics. If you want to run really fast, you've got to hit these marks
Rolf:try to do this. Yeah.
John:Yeah. You try to delay the acceleration, you're not gonna run fast.
Ben:People hate that online too. Like, some of the old school coaches just rip me on some of those, like some of a Ralph Mann's data that that I present. I'm like, well
John:And I'm like, dude
Rolf:It was just
Ben:the data.
Rolf:Like I hate to tell
Ben:you this, but you you you gotta accelerate fast.
John:Yeah. Yeah. It's like just transition when you're upright. You're upright. Like, you know?
John:It's he he had an interesting point too about
Rolf:I mean, it's always interesting when you've got these these guys that say, no. No. No. No. No.
Rolf:Okay. That's great. So what data have you got that shows that it that it's that it's The opposite.
Ben:Exactly. It's like,
John:this is like,
Ben:Ross has, like, thirty years of Olympians, dude. It's like, it's the best data set in the world. Yeah. And and Sprint papers all the time, they're they reference Rothman's data all
Rolf:the time. Yeah.
John:Cool. And so they'll they'll look at they'll look at, you know, Carlos and they'll be like, well, look at Carl. It's like, nope. Carl was still really good. Really good.
John:You look at Usain Bolt.
Rolf:He's Oh, man.
John:We're there too. Nope. Nope. He was. He was actually a great accelerator.
John:Like, in spite of his height, he was incredible. He wasn't doing what you're saying.
Rolf:I mean, you've got you've got you've got people that actually say, well, you know, Bolt, you know, Bolt really doesn't get away that that well and blah blah blah. But if you look at when he said he's world record and he's, you know, he's nine sort of 68, he's nine fifty eight times, he's got he's going through the 60 in six thirty six.
John:Yeah. He's
Ben:Yeah. He had, like, he's, like, top five in the in his in his in the all time 30 meter split or all time 30 time. I know. Like, he's freaking fast, dude. Like, come on.
Ben:Yeah.
Rolf:It's like yeah.
Ben:And it's because they compare him to, like, Sue or Asafa or, like, Tyson Gay or,
John:like, Prince Green. Yeah. It's like He's not bad.
Ben:Those are, like, the top of the top accelerators, but both still right up there, dude.
Rolf:Yeah. I don't I know. Yeah. It it's it's yeah. No.
Rolf:It's it's a it's a it's an interesting concept.
John:So, Raul, I I did have a a question about the quantum. Yeah. With this progression, the fast down, slow up, we'll we'll call it fast down, slow up. Some of the other things I wanted to clear up for people because we you and I talked yesterday, and I wanted to reiterate this. One, there are two gears in the Quantum.
John:I didn't know this. So there's a gear one that goes up to four meters per second, and gear two goes up to eight meters per second. The peak force that you can load in gear one is, like, infinite, basically what Rolf is kind of
Rolf:The machine itself without any I mean, the the
John:the Smith any assisted on the Smith machine. With
Rolf:no external resistance, what the the the what the two towers can generate is about 280 kilos. And then you've got 27 kilos, which the
John:The bar.
Rolf:The bar and the the Smiths the actual
John:Whatever. Weights Yeah.
Rolf:What you're lifting. So you you've basically got about 300 and odd kilos And then without without adding, you know, a single piece of And then
John:what's geared to let you get up to load?
Rolf:I think it's Is it a 100? Is that what you're talking about? It's around about a 100. Yeah.
John:Yeah. So that's and that's four to eight meters per second, which is fast as balls.
Rolf:Yeah. And then what what you can do, which is something that, you know, I wanted, to to elaborate more on, and I wanted to have it in in in some custom settings for people doing eccentrics to take the the guesswork out of things. And this was something that, as I said to you, back in 2000 no. When when was that? Sorry.
Rolf:02/2019, we had a deal signed with Freemotion. So Freemotion, we had we had a dual cable cross with the technology inside a dual cable cross, a Freemotion. Now Charles Pollakin came to LACO and Hallmstad and and jumped onto this thing and started ripping in into it. And Charles, anybody who's ever met Charles, Charles was a a and a half, and and he didn't bullshit. If he didn't like something, Charles will just stay tell you straight in the face, oh, this is fucking garbage.
Rolf:That was it. There was there was no qualms about what he thought. And if it if it was good, he would just be, you know, virtually just jumping it around. Yeah. So I was very nervous because I I'd met Charles at at Allego because he was one of the people that was doing part of the Allego education program back in those days.
Rolf:And I was very nervous about what Charles was gonna say, and he he was doing a a class there, and they were filming and all. And then we we reeled in the the dual cable cross, and Charles you know, I said to Charles, you know, I've got this. And we we set it up and away he went. And ten minutes later, after having, you know, broken a sweat and and a little bit more, Charles just turned around and said, this is absolutely unbelievable. And I think that was probably a big milestone for us because, I mean, Charles is, know, a lot of people don't like didn't like Charles.
Rolf:He was too much, you know, but he was very, very knowledgeable. There's no doubt about that. Very knowledgeable. And when when Charles, you know, sort of said that this thing this thing is is awesome, and I saw that the the the then CEO of of Freemotion, Patrick Howl, you know, he saw as well, you know, the response from from Charles and and, know, he just went, yes. We've got a winner.
Rolf:You know, winner dinner chicken dinner. But the the thing was that what we wanted to do with the this technology was to set it up in a way where people could walk in and, for example, if they were gonna do eccentric loading, you could set between a ten, twenty, or 30% increase in the eccentric. So you would walk in and let's say you're gonna do some seated bench presses in the in the in the the free motion line, then you I'd press, you know, button one, for example, and then I'd set my weight and press button one, and then that would add 10% to the eccentric phase. So now I wouldn't have a 100 kilos both ways. I'd have a I'd have a I'd have a 110, and then I'd have a 100.
Rolf:110, 100. And then you could go 2030%. Therefore, people could progressively work up to this. And then you could, of course there was a basic line, and then we were gonna have a high performance line where you then could go in and tweak the what was going on as far as velocities as well. So you could then speed up the eccentric velocity to what it was doing because that's, you know, that's what we wanted to do.
Rolf:Unfortunately, the people that owned Freemotion, which is a massive American company called Icon, they did not understand this, and they said to Patrick, that's it. We're not doing this. Long story short, Patrick quit free motion and said, you guys have got no idea. We've got a chance of becoming, you know, the world leaders at in this field because you can tailor this to whatever you wanna do. Is it rehab?
Rolf:Is it fitness? Is it high performance? It does everything. All you do is tweak the program. And the fact that you're putting it into cable driven instead of a fixed arm, there were cables.
Rolf:So that that was the free motion part of it. You you would get, you know, a a little bit more functionality and stability and joints and so forth because you've you've got those free that free motion. And I think it would have been a a huge success. Unfortunately, that was never never to be. And that is why the Quantum looks like it does.
Rolf:So it it became it became a monstrosity because all of a sudden, from late two thousand nine, we had no chassis. So we had this technology that worked, but now also we had no chassis. So we needed to build the chassis. So we got a an industrial designer that came in together with my engineer, And that was the biggest mistake I've ever done because I I let them have free hands. I said, look, I don't you know, we needed to do this.
Rolf:We needed to work vertically. And we were talking about and so let's let's put it into a Smith machine, and then we'll take it from there. And, you know, once we get things going and get some sales going and because we there's still a lot we can do with the Smith machine. And what they did was create this monstrosity. It's a it's it's a Sherman tank.
Rolf:It it doesn't need to be as big and as heavy and as clumbersome as it is because it's it's an it's an absolute abomination.
John:I'm not So let's go ahead let's go ahead and show up on the things What this thing looks
Rolf:like for you guys. It's it's it's horrible. And then I mean, it it this chassis, it's it's one piece of what is it? Eight or 10 millimeter the towers is actually one solid piece of of steel. And it's actually it's folded by a machine that there's only one machine, I believe, in the whole of Scandinavia and Northern Europe that can actually do this.
Rolf:I understand that. And it weighs a ton.
John:53 deciding to do
Rolf:53.
John:Yeah. So for those of No. You But I I mean,
Rolf:at that stage, I was still benching a 140 kilos.
John:Oh, Patrick told us all the stories about how you and jeans and flip flops walked into the Italian training center for soccer or football and, like, literally or hockey or something. What was it?
Rolf:No. It was football. Football. And
John:you destroyed everyone on the team at, 50 years old and,
Rolf:slammed jeans. That that they had done it, and I, yeah, completely out. I wasn't even warmed up, and I apparently, I broke every record on five or six of their their testing stations, and they freaked out.
John:Those football players, they're just world class athletes.
Ben:That's what the kids call aura these days, Wolf. That's a major aura.
Rolf:It's it was so funny because I I really I I had no idea because the guy who who got me in there, Renzo Casalado. Renzo it was set up from Renzo because Renzo and I knew each other, and so he knew that I was, you know, I was pretty strong for my age. And I I mean, probably more so, I was still pretty explosive. And so unbeknown to me, he sort of just added a bit of weight on a couple of these machines and said, well, you know, why don't you try a couple of reps of this? And I you know?
Rolf:And, you know, I started fiddling around with it, and then he said, oh, you know, why don't you give it a bit of a bang? And, you know, bang. And then, you know, oh, that's a new record, you know.
John:58. I gotta change this better in my camera. Ben, you follow-up the question.
Rolf:Yeah. So what there's one of the Italians, Gattuto. He was he was a defender, if I remember right. And he he held a whole bunch of records, And he was he was up in the cafeteria because at when I was there, they had the world championship winning team from 2006. They were actually at Covachano to do a press a thing because we would you know, I was there to help the the European Cup team for 2012.
Rolf:So one of the guys and the staff, unbeknownst to Renzo and myself, ran up to the cafeteria and tell told Gatuzzi that there's some idiot breaking all his records in the gym. And so Gatuzzi came running down and, you know, was was, you know, sort of waving his arm about and, you know, yapping on an Italian. And then what's his Did he
John:his records back?
Rolf:Oh, he tried. He tried. And it was funny because then there was one machine that they had which you sat down and and then you pushed a a a like a a
John:Like a circular action or something like that?
Rolf:Semi circle action. You pushed it up uphill. And I I can't remember what he had, but I ended up doing the the double what he had done. And
Ben:What kind of a what what kind of training were you doing at that time? Were you doing, like, some of your eccentric stuff that you're doing, like Kaiser stuff that you're doing? What were you doing?
Rolf:Yeah. I was still I was still fairly I mean, it was only a year after I I tore my Achilles. But, yeah, we can yeah. I'll answer that question as well. I was doing a lot of upper body stuff where I was doing eccentrics and doing what what John does with with the jumpers.
Rolf:I was doing different isometric holds. So I would, for example, do I, you know, six or five reps at a 100 kilos in the bench, and I'd go down to sort of just before 90 degrees, and I'd hold it for ten seconds. And then I'd bottom out just just off the chest, and I'd hold that for another five, six seconds, and then I'd push out, And I'd do three or four or five reps of that. And yeah. Yeah.
John:It's no wonder that you destroyed these guys if you're doing five reps with a fifteen second pause in the bench press.
Ben:With a 100 kilos is Yeah.
Rolf:It's like Well, The problem was back in those days, I had a I had a gym in the garage. It's Pat Patrick can can attest, and I only had a hundred and forty kilos.
John:So you can only you can only do
Ben:Only bench 140 kilo. You're underloaded
John:yourself. How unfortunate. And there's no way you could have bought more weight. I mean, that just would have been outside the question.
Rolf:No. It was it was it it's a bit of a pisser accident because I've got a I think what have I done? One fifty two and a half I've done. Yeah. In Sweden, the the athletes, we've got this page, which is called the bench press.
Rolf:Bench press. And all the athletes all the track and field athletes, it's it's the decathletes and the sprinters and and the throwers, of course, They've got a a bench press PB that you you post, but you've gotta do it in front of somebody. You can't just, you know, oh, I did a 160
John:in the in the gym
Rolf:last night. No. So it's gotta be done, and we've got a page where for power cleans, you know, and there's some impressive numbers by some of these guys, you know, like the Christian Christian Olsen, who's won everything in the in the triple jumping, was just shy of 18 meters triple jumper. It didn't look like much more than a string beam, but he power cleaned a 140 kilos.
John:Holy hell. Yeah. What was his name? Christian Ohlson?
Rolf:Yeah. Christian Ohlson. Jeez.
Ben:I had some questions going kinda back to the quantum. Yeah. So if you so if if you had your way with the Quantum, like, what how would you periodize your training with the Quantum? Like, what like, when would you do the eccentrics? When would you do, like, maybe normal type of, like, non super maximal eccentrics?
Ben:Or would you just do eccentrics all year round? Like, I I kinda asked you this the other day. Like, how do you periodize your eccentric training, and how long do you keep guys in that phase outside of, like, you know, their normal plyo volume and whatnot, but, like, just weight room wise?
Rolf:When it comes to if you talk about e eccentrics, if we we call them slow eccentrics, even fast eccenture, but we're doing eccentric loading on on a bar, in the gym. I use basically one, excuse me, one six week block, which I do after general prep. We I do a maximum strength block, And that's where I'm do
John:the high v low
Rolf:That's where I do the
John:high max
Rolf:max. You know, the big the big stuff with the eccentrics.
Ben:Have you ever done have you
John:ever done accentuated eccentrics prior to doing the
Rolf:Yeah. Yeah. We do. Depending on the I had I had a a couple of guys who were shot putters that were doing a bit over 19 meters, one rotation or one glider. And they were they did they did this type of work.
John:And then you'd move into the higher VLO
Rolf:Yeah. Level of contract. And this is, you know, and this is where, you know, it's interesting because once you get out of that that load and then the idea then was that we do plyometrics. Now the thing is, which it it gets difficult with throwers, because throwers, you know, they weigh a hundred and twenty kilos, and they are not the ideal specimen to be bounding around too much because it it really does wreak havoc with their joints. Yeah.
Ben:Same with jumpers.
Rolf:Well, yeah. Almost.
Ben:Lizards
Rolf:jumpers. We've seen, you know, in later years, if you look at the the guys that have been throwing a long way, Dan Daniel Stall, the Swede, and Mykonos Alechner, the world record holder in the discus who that I just found out yesterday, Tory's pick, and has been operated, and it will be out for for probably six months. They they don't they don't do a great deal of jumping at all. The the best trolls in the world today, if you look at Krauser, he doesn't do virtually any jumping. It's it's in the what he does is is very low, as far as
Ben:Yeah.
John:He'll do, like, some hurdle hops, and that's it.
Rolf:Yeah. Very, very little. So they tend to do more stuff in the gym that that that coincides with the time frames that they're actually doing things in the, you know, in the event itself as far as accelerations and so forth and, you know, time to peak velocity and so forth. But what what I've done is that we we will go and this is where we didn't get into that. Why do I use the Kaiser rack?
Rolf:Because the Kaiser rack, once you start getting up to a fifty fifty mix mixture AMS, it it starts doing some very, very interesting things eccentrically. And that is that we get about a 25% increase eccentric.
John:Yeah. Yeah. You had mentioned that earlier.
Rolf:So what what we what I've done then is I've tried to use the so we we build capacity. First, we build eccentric capacity doing slow eccentrics, and and we do whatever works.
Ben:Super maximum weight, or is this just regular slow, like, calorie style?
Rolf:We've done well, it depends on the athletes. So we can do both. It all depends if I've got a shot putter or if I've got a sprinter or I've got a long jumper. What am I gonna do? Where are they?
Rolf:How much of of a of a deficit do they actually have in my in my view that I need to build up? And if it's a big deficit, for example because what a lot of people don't understand is and a lot of coaches get wrong is if you've got a long jumper, for example, and you increase velocity, which everybody wants to do and they should do, that's great. But unless you increase rate of force development eccentrically, they can't utilize that new speed. They won't get off the board.
Ben:The modeling studies confirm this, Rolf. I know I know exact yeah. Yep.
Rolf:So so therefore, we've gotta do both then. So if I've got a long jumper that I can see, look, he's just too weak. You know, giving the forces that we're that he's he's gotta be subjected to, we're gonna have to do we're gonna have to do some some more maximum strength work. And it might mean then that it's gonna take not one block, not one year, but maybe two years before I get into that level. Because at the same time, I don't wanna interfere with the other training.
Rolf:So we we will just add a little bit, and then we will sort of solidify that and let let soft tissue modify itself and comply to what we're doing. Because now all of a sudden, we're doing things a little bit higher in everything because now we've got a little bit more more capacity. So therefore, if you go hell for leather and and try to do, you know, what you, you know, think you can do or what you possibly can do, you're gonna you're not gonna recover. So that's that's where it sort of gets
John:That's what I was also wondering is, like, you know, some of these protocols, I'm like, they'd have to neurally be flat. You know? You you'd have to Like,
Ben:what was the frequency on break, man? What do they do? Is it, three times a week, twice a week, or what what what do do?
Rolf:They had they had a couple of different groups, which yeah. That's an interesting question. They had a group that did once every ten days, I believe. Then they had one group that did it twice a week, in a seven day period, and then they had a group that did it three times. And the group that had the best results was the group that did it twice a week.
Rolf:Mhmm.
John:Yeah. And that's about what we found too. Anything I mean, less, you can maintain.
Rolf:Maintain.
John:Or improve maybe a little bit.
Rolf:But Yeah.
John:If you wanna if you're really fit, like a guy like Isaiah, he's gotta be pushing it hard twice a week, at least. So then you mentioned with the the Kaiser stuff. So when you Yes.
Rolf:So with the Kaiser, what what what we what what Randy and I wanted and the the questions that we had in Beijing was, is there a better way of doing what we do, build capacity, whatever it might be, centrically, if it's force, and then and then power generated? What is the next step? And then what is the next step after that and the next step after that? So we needed a progression that that didn't sort of jump too much and that we had control over. So therefore and when Randy then said said to me, this is this is air mass mixture.
Rolf:This is what I do, and this is why I do it. Well, he actually didn't say why. He said, this is air mass mixture. I'm not gonna tell you anymore because I know you're smart enough to work this out. So you test it.
Rolf:And soon as I got in there and started mixing around with this air mass mixture, I could see what the what the numbers were doing and, you know, it was like, wow. This is interesting. So it became the the the sort of if you look at the capacity building of the quantum, and you can do you can go into the next level what the Kaiser was doing with with the Quantum. But the problem is you've got one system, and and therefore, in a in a gym setting with a team of football players or hockey players or whatever, it's gonna take too long to turn around. You're not gonna be able to have a volume of people through.
Rolf:You know, like a group of five, six athletes, that's about what you can what you can do because of the the rest intervals and everything else. Right. But, basically, we went from doing what we did with the capacity building, and then we we put we added speed to this eccentrically, concentrically with the Kaiser. And then we could modulate that depending on how much air mass mixture we had. So the more air we added, the faster things got.
Rolf:So therefore, we could then take whatever we were where we stopped off with the quantum, we could then go one step, two steps, three steps, four steps. So then we're out here, then we can then start doing plyometrics.
John:Yeah. That makes sense.
Rolf:So then we had a bunch of plyometrics that would then go from here and bring us. And then let's say that maximum velocity sprinting is over here because acceleration is is is down here.
John:It's closer. Yeah. Yeah.
Rolf:It's much closer.
Ben:So plyos were the end of your progression? It's kinda similar to what we do? Like, the end of the curve per se? Okay.
Rolf:Yeah. So depending on then, for example, if you you and then you would have a progression where, for example, if you do a a speed bound, left, right, left, right, left, right, you could do that from standing. You could do it for Run-in? Six you could well, you could do it for six steps where you're just going hell for leather for six steps and jump into the pit. So I was standing six step, for example.
John:Mhmm.
Rolf:But then you could do a five meter start and do six steps or 10 steps.
Ben:So you're starting that progression when are you starting that your your plyo progression? Is that early on and then you're ending with, like, a 10 meter run-in in a six step or what?
Rolf:Yeah. And that that is that's how I've transitioned with with with the sprinters, for example, is that that once we get into competition, we are doing then we're doing a a bit of a running start. Now it gets tricky because some some sprinters, they if they do too much of running starts, they lose their feel for for block starts. But what I try to do then is what I've done is that in my sprint activation with the skip a, skip b, straight leg, which is for distance first and then for for for frequency to to to, work the the posterior chain.
John:Oh, Patrick's been messing that up in the warm up. I'm gonna have to what are you doing? He said for distance on the straight leg balance. You've been you've been nogging it.
Rolf:He said
John:distance distance for straight leg balance. Is that right, Rolf? You agree with
Rolf:that? The first one you do is for distance,
John:to Australia.
Rolf:He's too big.
John:I know. But, so straight leg bounce for big and open. That's what I did. And then Yeah.
Rolf:And then we go speed I
John:was I was I was, like, I was at the 20 meter mark, and Patrick was still at the 10 meter mark. And I was like, oh, I guess I'm supposed to be big open and fast and not moving far. But you're saying I need to be big open and move space.
Rolf:Yeah. Yeah. So and then we do speed
Ben:I was
John:like, I'm just way better at straight leg bounds than Patrick. So then
Rolf:at So then we do speed bounce. So depending where we are in the year, the speed bounce will either be at a a a t start. So you you you know what a t start is?
Ben:Like drop it, like.
Rolf:So you you you weigh over, like, you you're gonna pick something up and the back leg goes up, you're horizontal, and then that back that free leg then pushes through into the
John:first step.
Rolf:Yeah.
John:Okay.
Rolf:Yeah. So it's a bit of a full start, t start. We use that. And then from there, we do a progression where they walk in a little bit more, and then they they get a five meter jog in, and then they get a five, seven meter. And if, for example, like in Hong Kong, we had a three degree 60 meter slope.
Rolf:So we would then go up a certain amount of meters, and then that would constitute that extra speed. And then we do a bound a 10 a 10 step bound, for example.
Ben:And are you doing this before, like, as part of their kind of their extended warm up before the sprints, or is this their plyo volume after they're sprinting?
Rolf:No. This is before.
Ben:Okay. So you're only doing, like, two or three took you through them. Okay. Yeah. That's what I figured.
Ben:And that and that's their plyo volume. Are you doing anything else on top of that? I know Randy does some, like, contrast sets, like, Well, yeah.
Rolf:We do exactly. We do, for example, in the gym, most of the time, it's very few times that we don't. But in between, for example, any eccentric squats that we're doing or Kaiser rack work, between every set, we will do ankle pops.
John:Which if you don't know what that is, then it's literally just straight ankle. I know what it is. Have a
Rolf:contact time. So 668. So if you're doing three sets of squats, you'll be doing three sets of ankle pops. And it's just to to build that elasticity and keep always this feeling with elasticity and and not and not lose the feel of elasticity. It it's gotta be it's it's always gotta be part of the the of the equation.
John:So, Rolf, do you build in the progressions for the speed bounds in your warm up, or do you build them outside of the warm up?
Rolf:I just asked that. No. They they
John:But your question your question wasn't quite that. You were saying, do you do these do you do all of those in the warm up? I'm like, yeah, you do. But I'm wondering if there's an additional if you do additional work outside of.
Ben:Oh, okay.
Rolf:Yeah. Well, both Randy and I use boxes and and hurdles, but now it comes a big but. And I had a discussion with somebody online the other day about this. You know?
John:You gotta get off the Internet.
Rolf:Yeah. I know.
Ben:Hey. Rolf goes to mad for me in my comment section. I don't I appreciate you, Rolf. I appreciate you. Just seeing him comment.
Ben:This has been, like, a world class track coach who agrees with me.
John:We gotta get Rolf a part time job. He's got too much free time on his hands arguing the best comment section.
Rolf:No. So we we don't do any drop jumps basically over 40 centimeters.
John:No. That makes sense.
Rolf:There you go. No hurdles over 40 centimeters. And as we get closer to the season, our hurdles actually drop.
John:Yeah. We're we're actually opposite of what a lot of people say because I think in a as a jumper, you can obviously you can ramp it up until you're at two hundred and fifty milliseconds as a two foot jumper. You could, you know, as a one foot jumper, 200. But Yeah. Once you start to get past
Rolf:that, it's gonna be all know we've we've we've all probably seen our, you know well, my former countryman, part part countryman, Stefan Ohlman, who does his one eighty me 1.8 meter hurdle bounce or high jump forward running hurdles. I mean yeah. Okay. Very impressive. How many people can do that?
Rolf:Yeah. Not not not problem. Probably straight out of the bag, I can probably think of about half a dozen people that have torn their Achilles doing that.
John:Yeah. And the thing is, like, he's getting a full a full run-in, take off, land on the right, full run-in, take off over it. I think, like, you know, when you do the the rebound ones and stuff like that and it goes back to what you were saying about Bosco and and leaking energy, you know, leaking elastic energy. Once you once you the longer you're on the ground, the more of that elastic energy you're gonna you're gonna leak out. So it's gonna dissipate a I
Rolf:mean, if we if we look at sort of what I what I normally do, if we take somebody that you guys have seen now, that's and Michael Kennelly from from Hong Kong.
Ben:The human kangaroo.
Rolf:Oh, I mean, you know by the way, Michael jumped 02:17 in trainee yesterday.
John:Oh, in trainee? Boy. Yeah. I was, you know, 50. Yeah.
John:So if he doesn't jump two twenty next me
Rolf:smoked it.
John:If he doesn't smoke two twenty next meet
Rolf:He, he he took a little bit of the bar, on the way back or down because he's not rotating fast enough around the bar. But at the at the top of his jump, I'm I'm not kidding you. He's got 10 centimeters plus.
John:Yeah. I think too, like, once guys start to like, for him, a guy like him, once he starts to get more flight time, he's gonna have more time to rotate. Yeah. Like, I bet you I bet you what's probably gonna happen is he's gonna see I think you we talked about this. A lot of high jumpers just have this exponential curve at some point in their career
Rolf:Yeah.
John:Where all of a sudden they hit this crossover of I have enough flight time and my rotation hasn't dissipated that much relative to the amount of flight time that I've gotten, and they hit this sweet spot where they'll just start row you'll see because you'll see a lot of guys, they get over the bar massively and then they come down on it because they're not in any rotation. But, you know, you look at guys like So to and stuff like that, his rotation was not that fast. He just had a flight time that was stupidly high. You know what I mean? And, like, yep.
John:Stefan Holmes did something a little bit different because he did have a lot of rotations, so he'd stay really long in flight. He wouldn't lean as much as he had to as, like, some other guys. His curve was really wide. So I bet you, like, he's gonna just keep, you know, mashing bars this season.
Rolf:But if we look at if we look at Michael, when I came to Hong Kong, he was, you know, he was wandering around. He came came over to me one day and said, hello. I'm I'm Michael. I'm I'm a high jumper. And I'm going, well, how how come I don't know about you?
Rolf:Yeah. Well, I I you know, and who's your coach here? And I coach myself. What do you mean? I look at the I look at the YouTube videos.
John:Probably yeah.
Rolf:So he was walking out around inside the Hong Kong Institute. And, of course, as soon as I saw him, you know, doing something, I realized, holy Christ. This guy's got, you know, some serious talent. But, I mean, if we look at, you know, the progression Michael's had, I mean, what he was doing when I first saw him in Hong Kong in '22 and what he does today, I mean, it's it's ridiculous what he can do today.
John:I mean, you
Rolf:I mean, I I I would be at his CNG body.
Ben:It's, like, five.
Rolf:For example
Ben:It's, like, four nine, like, four nine on a on a OVR. It's insane.
John:It's five five. It's, like, five. I think No.
Ben:On the OVR, I mean. It's, four like,
John:No. No. No. I think on the OBR. It's it's 55 on the OBR.
John:I'm gonna pull it up right now because you're gonna be like, what? And I'm gonna be like I
Ben:I I remember he posted it the other day, but I don't I don't know what it was.
John:No. It was probably I don't know when he posted it.
Ben:Because I know he I know he said over five with, like, on a mat, but on the on the OKR, though.
John:Pretty sure right here. O OVR jump right here. 5.2.
Ben:5.2? Oh my gosh.
Rolf:Here you go. It's just insane. Insane.
John:Challenge my high jump prowess? Who are you talking about? Who are you? OVR. Here you go.
John:4.6, 5.2, 5.1. Wow. The last one, he lands a little low.
Ben:Yeah. That's still insane, though. For those that don't know oh, I I haven't commented. Look at me. But for those that don't know, since OVR uses jump height, it's usually gonna be a little bit less than or it will be less than if you use flight time.
John:And that's that's so impressive. Taking a few pages out of our book because I'm pretty sure I saw in power clean a 140. So Yeah. Yeah.
Rolf:Yeah. That's 69 kilos for 20 miles. I think.
John:Yep. Yeah. He's absolutely Sixty nine kilos. I know. When I see kids like him, I look at Isaiah and I'm like, this is why I say that you're not the freakiest genetic, like, outlier I've ever seen.
Ben:Like, you
John:get a guy like Michael, he's fifty how much does he weigh?
Rolf:Sixty nine.
John:Sixty nine kilos. Isaiah weighs It's
Rolf:hundred and fifty a hundred and fifty Yeah. Two pounds.
John:And he cleans a hundred and forty kilos. That's stupid. That is so
Rolf:stupid. Well, that what's more stupid is what he does, acceleration wise on these weights.
John:Single leg hops? Yeah. The single leg hops.
Rolf:Well, not single leg, but if you look at what he does for for a power clean, I mean, the the velocities he's got at at a 100 kilos, they they are the same as what Sue was doing, about 2.7 meters per second.
John:Why why what's his sprint speed like? He just can't reposition?
Rolf:No. Exactly. He's he's sort of just sort of ropes around. What is his best 10
Ben:meter flight? Do you know? Like, with a like, whatever buildup?
John:Probably, like, one.
Ben:He's one. You think?
John:I don't know. What is his 10 meter what's his, like, highest velocity he's hit sprinting? Like, 10
Rolf:I tested him because he he was he was running so so awkwardly with with these big elongated strides, and he was just overstriding and and so forth. And I didn't want him to to pull anything. So we
John:no. You
Rolf:know, I was trying to more or less just getting sort of a little bit more tight with his and a little bit more compact than he's running, but utilizing what, of course, what he had and what we what we have kept building on. Yeah. I mean, the That's
Ben:his random question. What's his hand clean versus his power clean? Does, like, does does he pull from the floor? I don't think I don't think I've seen him pull from
Rolf:the floor.
John:I think I've seen him
Ben:pull Or
Rolf:he does
Ben:or he does do I I I see him hand clean, like, two x body weight. But
Rolf:Yeah. He hand clean he hand cleans a 140, and he's he's very it's very seldom that he does that we do once we get past a certain point, we'll only do from the floor during our GP period. Once we get out of GP, it's either hang cleans or drop hang cleans.
Ben:And your drop hang cleans, is that when you, like, kinda do, like, a little jump and then you go into the hang clean, or is that when you just drop fast?
Rolf:No. Just very quickly down. And then if you look at what, you know, what we've been there's, you know, more and more people are doing these these these short pulls.
Ben:Yeah. John did that with Fabian, I think. Right? You you John, Fabian Yeah.
John:I've I've been doing it. I've actually know, I've been for years.
Rolf:If you look if you look at what you're doing there and if you would if you would look at the numbers, you'll you could probably see that if you kept that going with a few more reps with a little bit less weight, you'll then you'll then Get wind and fill in it? You'll kick in the the fill in winding.
Ben:What's the optimal loading for that since I'm gonna program it? I'm not I'm
Rolf:just one and a half times your body weight.
Ben:One and a half times.
John:For hand clean? For hand clean?
Rolf:No. No. Not not for hand cleans, but for for squats. And in hand cleans, it's probably body weight, around body weight. K.
Ben:Yeah. I agree with that.
John:That's a that's What would that be, like, 6,000 on our enterprise? Like, 55.
Ben:70%? If if you're doing, like, the one, two, threes that that you're just talking about.
John:I've I've done it I've done it a few different ways. I've done it where you've chained them together, so you actually you actually get kind of the way, actually, CrossFit guys do touching touch and go hang cleans. So they'll actually drop it down and then catch it in an RDL and then rip it back up. I've done that way for, like, six or
Ben:three or four.
John:Yeah. Yeah. But I've also done it where you stand tall, push the bar down, and then literally almost jump out of the bottom of the clean. And you feel if you do it right, it feels like the bar is gonna slip out of your hand if you if you don't have straps. Like, if you like, you basically need straps because the the way that the force hits you is so sharp that you almost can't even hold onto it.
John:That's how you know you do it right. But I would I was struggling with I think that I got up to one thirty five, one forty five, and my max was probably two twenty five. So I was probably just shy of 50%. And like Man. It depends how you do it.
John:Because like some people
Ben:Fabian was doing it with like three fifteen or something or like Well,
John:Fabian Fabian is that's the way he's learned to do it. Like, he actually cleans more when he does that. Like, he cleans more weight when he loads the eccentric phase really, really fast. I do not. You have to have a really strong back too.
John:Like, back has to be really, really strong and Fabian, like, I don't know how he does it. Every time I've seen him do, like, three twenty or three thirty in a power clean, he just hammers the weight down and then just put all split cleans. I'm just like, hey, dude. Like, you're getting crazy forces on the drop, I'm okay with that. Your catch looks like garbage, but, he's able to he's able to get out of that position.
John:I mean, it's it's pretty incredible. But we are about an hour and twenty minutes in, so I do wanna close this out. Rolf, anything any last comments or thoughts you have?
Rolf:No. I don't know. Well, I don't know. Well, I
John:like, you know what? I think
Rolf:there's something
John:else I wanna say here.
Rolf:No. I think I think the thing with regards to the to the quantum is that it it is an absolutely whatever technology, if you wanna sort of look beyond the quantum And, you know, I think what what what probably will will happen is that if the company in question phases it out, then I think there'll probably be a bit of a void for a while, and then somebody else will will will pick it pick up the thread and produce a new version
John:Yeah.
Rolf:And then exploit the whole thing. I I think the the thing that annoys me the most is that that I I haven't been able which is, you know, something I'm I'm annoyed at is I haven't been successful enough to to get a a big institution, to throw themselves at the Quantum and really rip it apart with a a bunch of these protocols that that Regan and I have done since 2010.
John:Unfortunately for you, Rolf, we have quite the platform. So if we have the opportunity to test a lot of this stuff and that's what I told Isaiah too. I was like, if nothing else, we can get a ton of data from this. You know?
Rolf:Because Oh, yeah.
Ben:I would. We don't have world class printers. We don't have world
John:class printers, but, you know, we've got we'll have a few guys in the fifties, here, and we'll have a a few guys in the forties that can you know, which is Yeah. Upper level.
Rolf:So Well, I mean, it's like I said to you. I I would, you know, I would virtually be prepared to take poison. I mean, if you get somebody like Isaiah and to do a a couple of protocols with the the quantum, if he doesn't go 55 inches, I'd be very surprised.
John:55? Talked about it. We talked about it, and he
Ben:was like,
John:I just don't see how that's possible.
Rolf:Like, I
John:could see myself getting half an inch.
Rolf:Well, I mean, I'm this off the fact that what if if what I know what Philip was doing and Philip was extremely I mean, he was he was he was a beast. He was a beast of an athlete. And what he did after doing these protocols, the single leg eccentric isokinetic squats was just completely just ridiculous.
John:Was else, the content that we'll get out this will be crazy. I've always dreamed of having a device like this. I had thought of this whenever I was probably around the time you actually came out with the Quantum, and I was reading a lot of research about how important eccentric strength was, and I
Rolf:was like,
John:oh
Rolf:my gosh.
John:And I wasn't even thinking about velocity. I was just thinking about
Rolf:I'll I'll give I'll give you I'll give you a measurement, for example, if I'm just I was just trying to sit here thinking, Philip jumped his best with a 20 kilo bar. He weighed seventy nine,
John:eighty kilos himself. Or Isaiah?
Rolf:He jumped 56, 55.
John:On the force plate or, just using the muscle lab? How'd you how'd you
Rolf:Well, we measured with muscle lab. So
John:he's Okay. So we had to use the OVR.
Rolf:Fifty five centimeters with with a 20 kilos. Yeah. I mean, we've I mean, normally, if you've guys got if you've got guys that do 35, 40 centimeters, they are very explosive and even
John:I think the thing is, like, I wonder I think a standing vertical is definitely gonna skyrocket. There's no question there. It's just when you add an approach, it's gonna be so interesting to see. I mean, to me, I didn't really
Rolf:fully understand where this thing shines.
John:Yeah. I that's that's well, that's what I'm saying too is it should it should. And when I really started to understand it, I was like, oh, shit. We can't do this without a quantum, but they're so expensive. So, Rolf, you work your magic over there in Australia, in the Miami of Australia, you know.
John:Yeah.
Ben:Got a lot
John:of free time. Why don't you why don't you hop off Instagram and and stop defending Ben's, you know, comment section? Let's just Oh, you
Ben:can still do that.
John:No. Don't do that. You don't need to. You know? And and we'll put you to work in a different area.
John:Yeah.
Ben:Rolf, thank
John:you for coming on. We always appreciate having you and all of your We learn so much every time and, yeah, we'll definitely have to do this again. Hopefully, we have new news, good news from you, about getting our hands on this delicate, as you call it, monstrosity. But nonetheless, still effective. So we appreciate you guys.
John:Hopefully, you enjoyed this podcast, and we'll see you next time.