THPStrength

What is THPStrength?

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

John:

What's up, Welcome back to the teach be strength podcast. My name is John Evans, and I coach four of the current six individuals who have a 50 inch vertical. One of those people is Isaiah Rivera. In this podcast, we're gonna be talking about retraining after you have detrained. So Isaiah, how did you come up with this topic?

John:

Because I wasn't sitting there when you Yeah.

Isaiah:

Got it up. And before we get started, if you want us to coach you to jump higher, link is in the description or in the pinned comment, six months for your coaching when you buy the year plan.

John:

Which I will remember. Which I will remember.

Isaiah:

To pin it? To pin

John:

it. Yeah. Ain't correct.

Isaiah:

With the right links?

John:

Maybe. That that's awesome. That's awesome. That's a next step. You know?

John:

It's progression. You know?

Isaiah:

We're just building consistency.

John:

We're building consistency first, and then we're fine tuning the system. Yeah.

Isaiah:

Which is relevant to what we're about to talk about. So the reason this topic came up is because our good friend Lewis just moved down, and he took a month off from training. And today, he was training, injury popped up, some tendon pain at his at his hips, similar to what I what I used to deal with a lot. And it inspired this topic because it's a very common issue that athletes make of you feel motivated, you've had some time off, maybe you watch our videos or something like that, and then you go straight into training hard, long session. And when I was talking to Lewis, I gave him three three mistakes that he made.

Isaiah:

One, the training was hyper specific. He did the cycle that we're doing, which he didn't earn the right to do it, and you can dive into into that. Second mistake, long dunk session. That was the the other thing.

John:

Longer than any of us. Yeah. She done longer than everyone.

Isaiah:

Yeah. Yeah. And then the third session is no buildup. So specificity was high, long session, and he didn't train to train. So if you wanna dive

John:

into What's funny about you saying that is when he came in last week, I looked at him and I was like, Lewis, you're gonna be really sore. You gotta be really careful. You're lucky we have a deload next week because even if you kinda go too hard this week, you're gonna have a down week. And I do think that's one way that you can kinda mitigate the risk of high specificity, high intensity, not potentiating the cycles accordingly. And then too long of a session is you you have a deload week.

John:

The problem with that is sometimes you don't actually build up any significant fatigue because you just keep running these little nagging injuries. So the first one, hyper specificity, we're doing drop squats. You guys probably saw the collaboration with Josh's video. That's the full week of training. So there's drop squats in there, there's accentuated eccentrics.

John:

We did sprints up to 30 meters, which was quite a bit. We did hurdle hops, we did med ball throws, and we did jumps. Depth jumps. Yeah. So the specificity is basically Essentially

Isaiah:

max power clean. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. And like power clean is close to failure. So, you know, the intensities were still high. I'm still kinda slammed, and I didn't even jump on Saturday. So that goes to show you just the intensity of the cycle.

John:

The So goal is to unload, obviously, to to recover. But when you increase intensities dramatically and volumes dramatically, you you essentially went from zero workload to infinite workload because anything more than zero is, you know, is just insane amounts. But let's just say you jump up to what let's say you had a normal intensity that we did or whatever, we probably increased the intensities across the entire cycle. Weight's not so much, but the velocities were max. You know, they're they're probably up 15%.

John:

And then the plyos are probably, you know, infinitely faster. The ground contact times probably went from, you know, a 100 to or one twenty down to 80. So that's like a pretty drastic jump there in the velocities that you're seeing in the forces. And if you haven't had a proper build up to that, you're quickly gonna run into connective tissue issues. And that's the number one reason why we do load management, because load management is meant to offset the risk of those tendon injuries happening.

John:

Because when you overload that tendon too much, it's not used to the load, you don't have a lot of cross links, the tendon's not very stiff, and then you get all these blood vessels that build up in the tendon, and you run into issues. So that's one. The second is the muscles are usually not prepped for those velocities. They're usually not as strong as they need to be, and then you're moving to really high velocity movements, and if you don't use it, you lose it. That is very true.

John:

You're gonna detrain. So the detrain was massive in that period of time. We know that elastic qualities detrain really quickly, so we jumped back into those elastic qualities, really, really aggressive contacts, way too fast, and maybe wasn't prepared. And that's why we often tell guys, you have to train to train. And we always say this, like Keith said it earlier, you have to earn it.

John:

And you really do. If you don't do the prep work ahead of time, and you don't build up your max squat, you don't build up your max power clean. Well, one, your technique might be a little bit off, which on some of the cleans and stuff like that, maybe there was a little bit there. But then you throw jumping into the mix too, and it's like, that alone is enough Yeah. To to like piss off tendons and stuff like that.

John:

But on top of everything else, the whole system is just overloaded. So Yeah.

Isaiah:

And what we did today is we essentially, then the worst thing that you can do is then take time off. Yeah. Because you're hurt. And I was telling him, I was like, the difference between elite athletes and the guys who make progress versus the ones who don't is during times like this, because it's inevitable that an injury will pop up.

John:

Times like this, grind like this.

Isaiah:

You figure out what you can do to train around the injury and then address it in a way that's analgesic. Analgesic meaning feels better after you do it. So how we adjusted is we did slow half squats, take the tendon out of compression. You go slow so you can stimulate tenocytes, produce more collagen, get that what is it? I watched your video today, tendon tendon crimp.

Isaiah:

Crimp. Yeah. Crimp.

John:

Creep tendon creep and and crimp.

Isaiah:

Yep. Yep. And then we did band walks to address address the abductors and then some posterior chain work, calf work. And then ideally, I would place a bet that it's probably not gonna happen like this, but I would tell him to do drops on Friday instead instead of a jump session or a very short jump session, keep a short approach, something like that.

John:

It's the same it's the same exact thing? Yeah. The TFL? Yeah. That's what that's what I thought.

Isaiah:

Yeah. Yeah. It's another one. That's probably probably like five people that I know with the with the issue.

John:

You gotta that that injury is earned for sure. You gotta earn that injury.

Isaiah:

Can you can you describe someone comes into THP, they fill out the form. How does that dictate the first cycle that you program for them?

John:

Right. So typically, that form is pretty inclusive. It includes maxes, it includes your training history, it includes whether you have injuries. So we kinda view it as a needs analysis. That's really what it is.

John:

And if you have a pretty high training age, then odds are that you're gonna be more prepared than other people. Another one we look at is obviously age and weight. So when you are lighter, you can probably handle a little bit more volume. If you're heavier, you gotta be a little bit more careful. So you're definitely not gonna wanna start with a lot contacts and stuff like that because gravity times your mass, you're gonna have a hard acceleration to the ground, means you're gonna have to generate a lot of force and that can sometimes injure people.

John:

So generally when people come in, no matter what, oftentimes they haven't had a significant build up of elastic work. And so the first thing that you wanna do is get people strong. Pretty much irrespective of where they started. And that is multifactorial. It's not just because strength work is one of the easiest ways to increase your ceiling on force production, but it's also because you haven't built up the work capacity.

John:

So regardless of where you come in, you're pretty much always gonna start with that, but you might go into a load management setup if you have injuries. So that's probably the second most important thing is what are what are your injuries like? If you have back pain, we're not gonna load something with a ton of axial loading and contacts because that's gonna immediately flare up your back. We're gonna remove that By

Isaiah:

the way, when I did the the pulls on our athletes, pain was like one of our number one like, people that came in with back pain stayed for the longest. And I think it's underrated how good our,

John:

like Yeah. We're good. Back health programs are. I think a lot of people, when they have back pain, they'll just, like, throw in a belt or keep loading. But the best thing you can do is unload, rebuild stability in the core because I know there's some evidence out there that indicates that the intensities of some of the McGill Big three and stuff like that isn't significant, but that's not always the goal.

John:

Sometimes you're just trying to different.

Isaiah:

Like, we see

John:

Yeah.

Isaiah:

Guys the amount of progress people have made on that, like, you might think like, I don't know. I just see people may get so much healthier when we follow Miguel's stuff.

John:

Yeah.

Isaiah:

And I'd rarely see it not work. Yep.

John:

So you when you you know your goal, your goal is to jump higher. We know you have to increase your force production first, and then we have to pay attention to those injuries. So that's how the needs analysis largely is built. And then depending on like, you know, maybe you're a sprinter, maybe you're a jumper, that's also gonna dictate it. But you pretty much move into like, I would say there's like four or five buckets.

John:

We have Achilles pain, we have tendon pain, we have PFP, back pain, and then probably healthy athletes with not a lot of training load, and then Muscle healthy pulls, so maybe six. And then seven is Condomulated? Like I said PFP, yeah, like cartilage. So I guess there's more. There's six or seven, I don't know, there's a lot.

John:

And then the progression is kind of set accordingly, but then as things pop up, you're gonna have to adjust accordingly as well. So if someone comes in, they have back pain and they have Achilles pain, well, we're gonna have to put them on a load management progression for that, but we're also gonna have to manage the back pain. So you're gonna be using a lot of machines, you're gonna be doing a lot of heavy slow resistance training for the lower leg, and then you're slowly gonna build into the elastic work. And that's gonna double down because you're gonna address the back pain and the tendon pain while also building up your work capacity and strength. So you're able to still check those boxes.

John:

It might just not look like Isaiah's training. And for some of you guys on the training, you might say, well, wanna do Isaiah's training or I wanna do this or that, but

Isaiah:

Don't copy me.

John:

Yeah. Don't don't copy Isaiah. There there is a point to individuality. And you guys have probably seen it in the videos. Even when Dom comes in and he's got a little bit of patella pain or patella tendon pain, we'll do slow squats instead of doing the drop squats.

John:

Or if I have Achilles pain, I'm not gonna do the the hurdle hops or I'm not gonna do the depth jumps. I'm gonna do slow calf raises or something.

Isaiah:

It's part of the that's part of the reason why I don't care about posting full workouts. Because, like, at the end of day, it's my full workout, and you will probably mess yourself up you try to recreate it perfectly. And it's also why we make all the educational content to educate people on that. I have two things I wanna I wanna leave them with. One of them is I think part of the reason our, like, health protocols are so good is actually because of the course that we have inside THPS.

Isaiah:

Like, we've literally, like, we've made entire guides basically on how to adjust the training based on your injury. Because at the end of the day, because individuality is a thing, it's hard to unless you're, like, paying John for one on one, it's hard to have us adjust every little thing and ask you on the day how you're feeling. So you have to know if I'm feeling back health, alright, or back pain, pull from the blocks. Don't do axial loading. Get on a belt squat or a leg extension or a leg press.

John:

Yeah.

Isaiah:

If you have Achilles pain, alright. If there's a jump session, do drops or skip the sprints, but keep the lifts in, stuff like that. So I think having those guys helps a lot. And then the last thing, and it's the thing that's, like, top of mind for me right now is sessions are deceptively intense on the body. And if I had, like, one piece of advice that will make your life easier is when you first start having sessions, start slowly and gradually, whether that's slow rimming or do drops, do short approaches, increase volume week to week.

Isaiah:

One of the worst things that you can do is like a two hour session when you haven't been jumping for a while. Mhmm. And even if you have been jumping a while, one of the worst things that you can do is add an extra session. Or if you normally go for forty five minutes, you go for an hour and a out of nowhere. That's like, you better be very careful the next week after doing that.

John:

Quick anecdote about Dom. Dom has finally learned that skill. And it took a long time for him to be able to understand in a session, look, we go outdoors and yeah you're outdoors versus indoors, but guess what, every time you go outdoors you don't get hurt. Why? Because we started you on a low rim, we built you up for twenty five minutes with easy jumps and you had three or four jumps.

John:

And then the next session you moved to five, and the next session you moved to six, and the next session you moved to eight. Eventually And we got him back indoors and last week was the first session where he was like, yeah I don't feel anything. Like this is the best I've ever felt. And that's with all of the other loading that we did during the week. So it was a massive step for him but it took him a long time to get to that point.

John:

He wasn't going heavy enough on the ISOs. He wasn't going heavy enough on the heavy slow squats. Or he was he was jumping too long where he'd have a, you know, a takeoff where he wasn't necessarily warm. And so it does take time, but ultimately, the more equipped you are, the better you're gonna be at managing whatever pops up in your training. And the reality is, is if you're training hard and you're pushing, you're loading that that tissue really intensely because you want it to adapt.

John:

And injuries are gonna pop up. Whether it's a big one or a little one or nagging, that really depends on how much you push past what you can handle and how ready you were for whatever you're doing. But you have to understand at least a little bit about those injuries and how they happen. If you feel something in a muscle, don't push through that. A tendon, you can go up to about two, two point five.

John:

Back pain, generally not worth doing really, really heavily loaded stuff and pretty much stay out of pain with that. And just understanding those three things, you're probably gonna be able to keep yourself healthy the majority of the time. And Isaiah said this too, he's you know, think about how terrible you feel after an injury. Like day one's always the worst, but you would have been a lot better had you cut that session in the first place. And I always try to keep that in mind.

John:

So I don't know anything else. Anything else you want? Nope.

Isaiah:

Alright. That's the video. Sign up for coaching. Link's in description and pinned comment. Bye bye.

John:

See you guys.