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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 TSP Strength podcast. On this episode, we're gonna be talking about what Isaiah is doing to get him to a 51 inch vertical, which is a very realistic goal in the coming months. Before we do that, my name is John Evans. As I said, this is Isaiah Rivera.
John:He has a 50.5 inch vertically. He, at one point, had the world record, and, hopefully, he soon will reattain that accolade. Before we do that, if you're interested in coaching, go to teachmestrength.com. Right now, if you purchase the year plan, it's equivalent to what six months would be if you did it month to month. So you can get six months free if you purchase the annual plan.
John:Alright? I think I covered everything, Zay. Let's Link in the description and pinned comment. Exactly. Alright.
John:So let's talk about briefly, let's just give some background on what happened last cycle and why we're shifting into this.
Isaiah:I get strong. I know produced all that force and fast enough.
John:I think, we do entire podcast in Russian accent today and talk about science and how we use the new research evidence to provide elite recommendation for athlete. So athlete a
Isaiah:I jump very high short approach, not very high fast approach.
John:This is bad. Mentor vertical Shansky, he tell me this. He say, Lee syndrome. When you get to America, you need to make sure that your athlete provided appropriate eccentric stimulus. He has not had appropriate eccentric stimulus, so we must, we must work on this deficit.
John:Yeah. So I would love to do the whole podcast in a Russian accent, honestly. I think it would fine.
Isaiah:Type of training. I feel like it fits this training.
John:Should we try it? Maybe. Maybe I'll do a YouTube video where I do the whole thing in a Russian accent. I think that would be funnier. Alright.
John:So, yeah, he has a deficiency of eccentric eccentric strength. So mentor, Vertigo Shansky, he creates a thing called shock loading. He did with the athlete in hallway. He throw them off books. He develop eccentric strength.
John:They jump high. So Isaiah, it needs to develop this quality to a great degree as well as improving his propulsive forces at later loads. So if we were to track his velocity at given weights, so progressively increasing them, we would see that he is significantly slower in the midrange. So what he would usually move, like, two twenty five or two forty four two forty five at and the wattages he would hit would be, like, 300 watts higher than what he's hitting right now. So it's a considerable drop off, but his wattages stay relatively high as he moves up to the higher loads.
John:And this was even evident today when we did the the jump squats. So we had a session today where it was a force velocity profile of his concentric wattage during barbell squat jumps. So we started with 20 well, we use pounds, but it's roughly equivalent. Actually, I'll just give the pounds. So we did 45 pounds with just the bar.
John:You guys might have seen this on his Instagram, then 9135, 225, 265? 275.
Isaiah:275.
John:It was 275. Yeah. And then we went to 315, 365, and then 405. This was not a part of the plan. This was in no way what I expected.
John:So talk about what happened when you did the hex bar jumps because I think this will create some context for why you had to go so heavy.
Isaiah:I think the same thing happened. We reached peak power at 82.9% of my max.
John:On the hex bar jumps? On the hex bar jumps. Yeah. So it was very, very, very heavy relatively speaking. And similar
Isaiah:to today. Today, I hit peak power at 73%, I think is what Yeah.
John:Roughly 73. So, I mean, this is somewhat what you'd expect, but you wanna see the curve shift to the you wanna see the peak shift upwards and to the right. So, I mean, really, what you'd wanna see is it shift leftward, upward, and then as it is on the downslope, it's it's higher overall. So you want the peak to be higher, and you want it to happen relatively early. You want the numbers to be higher earlier, is what I would say.
Isaiah:Yeah. Because the peak can technically stay the same. Right?
Speaker 3:But if there's more area?
John:Yeah. So, like yeah. Exactly. Yep. So the peak could go up.
John:Right? Like, let's say at March, your wattages go up. That's still really good, but at the lower wattages, we also wanna see. We wanna see the whole curve shift upward.
Isaiah:And by the curve, just to clarify for the viewers, we're we're talking about the impulse curve. Right?
John:I what that
Isaiah:no. No. Or are you talking about It'd
John:be the force velocity curve. Over Yeah. So, really, I mean, it's power I mean, it's it's power on one axis, load on the other. So it's not really like
Isaiah:Yeah. Oh, power is it's velo times distance. Is that what it is?
John:Power is force, times distance over time, work over time.
Isaiah:Gotcha.
John:So it it gives us basically an estimate of how much power you're producing at each load, which is really important. So it's it's force velocity profiling in a more specific way. It's not like we're just getting the weights. You know? I I mean, I guess it probably is truly force velocity profiling because we do have a metric for speed Yep.
John:Meters per second, how fast is the bar moving, but I'm also tracking watts. So depends on how you wanna do it. I'm actually looking at watts because I've seen a very strong correlation with peak wattages and jumping. And this makes sense because wattages is power. So when we were comparing
Isaiah:You You can see
Speaker 3:that with me and Josh. That's what I was
John:about to say. Yeah. When you compare Josh to Isaiah, you see about a 200 to 300 watt discrepancy across the board. But on top of that, Isaiah was able to get a four zero five, and that's where his drop off was. Like, he finally dropped off.
John:Josh dropped off at three sixty five. So you'll see if you were to, you know, graph these, you would see his wattage drops at that point. So we want the whole curve to shift upward. And the reason we did this today was to figure out what load is he actually hitting, you know, peak wattages. And it obviously is not perfect.
John:I mean, maybe three thirty five or something, you know, would have been better. Maybe we'll play around with that next next week.
Isaiah:What's the difference in vertical between me and Josh right now?
John:I think Josh is is probably on his best day, 43, 44.
Isaiah:Five inch difference?
John:Yeah. So and it's pretty considerable, but you're also talking about across the entire curve. So meaning Yeah. At slow velos, you're moving it faster than he is. Or big weights, you're moving it faster than he is.
John:I you can't move very fast. You're still moving it fast, relatively faster. At light loads, you're moving it faster. So across the entire board, your entire curve is shifted upwards, and that's not what you always see. Some guys are really, really strong, and they can move really heavy weights relatively fast.
John:Like, let's say we went up to 500 or something like that. Like, some guys would be able to move that faster that have a higher peak VLO, but it doesn't matter because it's so nonspecific at that point, which is what we're starting to see with you is as you get to these really, really, really high loads, you know, we're talking cleaning three thirty or jump squatting with four zero five, the specificity is relatively lower.
Isaiah:So stupid.
John:Yeah. So he did a jump squat with four zero five. It was Wait. That's actually, like,
Isaiah:I didn't really process that.
John:It's ridiculous. Some people can't even squat that.
Isaiah:Yeah.
John:Most people can't squat that. Most people can't squat through 15 Jeez. To parallel. Hell. You're jumping with four zero five.
John:And did it move slow? Yeah. It moved slow, but it but it still was better. I would've I should've looked at average VLO. I should've looked at average VLO too Yeah.
John:And average wattages. But maybe I don't have that many. I would need, like, two VVT devices. Dom's calling me right now. He just did an event, and he's messed up.
John:So I'm gonna have to fix him. I have to build him back up. Yeah. So that's really what we're focusing on here. And if you're listening to this and you're like, I don't know what any of this means.
John:All it means is that regardless of what weight you're moving on a power exercise, you need to move faster. You gotta move faster. You gotta have more intent. And this maybe another key takeaway is this is what you do before you move really, really fast, like light loads. The more weight on the bar, you're not gonna move it as fast.
John:The less weight on the bar, you're gonna be able to move it as fast. Generally, with power work, you wanna look at peak VLO. The difference is with a jump squat, you can still look at average wattage and average VLO because it's not like a clean where you're intentionally pulling slow. You're kind of trying to push out of the bottom fast. But you wanna see those metrics go up over time, especially longitudinally.
John:So year to year, we wanna see those things get better, which for Isaiah, we've seen the the right side of the curve, the big, big weights have gotten better. But now we need to see the middle part of this graph get better.
Speaker 3:And I think that's when I'll jump higher.
John:Yeah. I think so too. And we were also talking about max ever jumping. So give some insight into what we talked about the last couple days.
Isaiah:Yeah. The last eight weeks, I haven't had a lot of practice doing max approach jumps with max intent, which is normally where I would train my eccentric RFD. So I essentially did not none of it. I I I was doing, like, 90% effort jumps that this whole eight weeks. And we saw yesterday, we looked at my ground contact times, and they're up they're, like, point three seconds right now on my best jumps, just slow.
Isaiah:Which is terrible. Yeah. For reference, my 50.5 inch jump was, like, point two five seconds, maybe point two four, high point two fours. So huge, huge drop off.
John:And what was your fear about not doing max ever jumping this cycle?
Isaiah:Which would not be was
Speaker 3:that it would detrain it even more.
Isaiah:And for more context, the reason I can't do the max effort jumps is because we're doing all this high intensity work. And I would blow up if I were to max approach jump, max effort, and do this training cycle. So I asked John. I was like, hey. Like, I'm not gonna be doing the thing.
Isaiah:What's gonna happen here? But what we saw and, you know, I've looked back at the data and stuff like that. Leading up to that test, my best my highest jump ever, at least recorded jump ever, I was doing sim very similar training. I did isometric, overcoming ISOs, then we did super maximal eccentrics, then we did fast eccentrics. I only survived, like, two weeks because I had gotten bad PFP at the time.
Isaiah:And then we just did John Evans special. And if you don't know what John Evans special is, it's feel good lifting, you know, slow squatting, clean pulls. Kinda touch
John:on some power work.
Isaiah:Yeah. Try not to max out on cleans, and then you jump. And what we saw is I basically jump higher every single week while I'm on John Evans special, and then I'll hit these ridiculous jumps. We saw that this summer. I had half a year of really good training quality, and then I did John Evans special for literally two months.
Isaiah:And for, like, maybe five to six weeks of that, jumping higher, higher, higher, higher, highest flight times ever, was my was my peak. Then you drop off pretty pretty freaking hard. So what the strategy is gonna be here is, okay. We have this huge deficit. We can address it with this training.
Isaiah:We're not gonna expect the jumping to PR or anything like that because we're not gonna be practicing the jumps. But then we're gonna unload the high specificity stuff in the weight room and then put the highest specificity thing back in.
John:The real question is hypothesis.
Isaiah:My my guess on what's gonna happen, I'll probably jump around the same, maybe a little higher end of this cycle. I think week one, John Evans special, I'll jump higher, maybe 49, forty nine five, 50. I think week two, week three, really, really good jumps.
John:The the real question is do we wanna do another cycle before we do that? Because you could conceivably do the fast eccentrics. That is what would come next, and we are somewhat bleeding that in for those of you who don't know. Yeah. He's also doing plyos.
John:That's right. Plyometric training at BHP. And they
Speaker 3:killed me. My brain feels tired right now.
John:Isaiah is very gnarly wrecked because not only did he do that, but we also did accentuated eccentrics at end ranges, which will give you circumere genesis. And one quick point on this. I'm gonna go on a rant. There's a lot of people out there doing Nordics, reps in Nordics. And Nordics are not they were never designed to be a concentric dominant exercise.
John:I e, if you can go up, you're either cheating or you're you don't have enough weight. So probably one of the only people that I see that can do this are, like, super elite sprinters, Tony Crosby. Josh can do a couple and people who kip. And what kipping is is where it's where you shorten the you shorten the moment arm. I move your body closer to the axis of rotation, which is your knee joint to get it up.
John:You generate a little bit of momentum by throwing your butt backwards, and it puts the hamstring in a more optimal position to generate force, and then guys are able to stand all the way up. So what you wanna do is keep the pelvis neutral, and you wanna go all the way down very slowly as much as you can to where you can't come back up. And if you can come back up and you keep the pelvis forward and your your belt line is touching first, not your chest, that's how you know, then you're gonna probably get sarcomereogenesis if you've accumulated at least forty seconds of load in a given sec session. You could probably jump that up to, like, eighty seconds of of load at close to end range or long lengths. So I wanted to say that because today, we did that for his quad.
John:And a lot of people don't do that because they don't know. We also did it on Monday in the form of deep squatting. So we're at end ranges at eccentric, maximal close to ease maximal eccentric loads at that given velocity. Eccentrically, the muscle's stronger as you move faster. So I'm actually overloading it by forcing them to go slow, meaning that's gonna be harder.
John:They're weaker when they go slow eccentrically, but I'm telling them to go slow despite that. So not only do I have more than their concentric max on the belt or the leg extension, I'm then asking them to do something that is not natural and not easy. It would be easy for them to just drop the weight. But I'm telling them, no. I want you to slow this down as much as you possibly can so we can push up your eccentric capacities, you know, kind of towards the tip of the eccentric or negative joint angle degrees per second.
John:And then the goal is you move up that curve and get higher forces in shock loading. But there's but wait. There's more. Because then we're using the eccentric eccentrics because you get more type two motor recruitment, and we're supersetting those with the eccentric work. So we're waiting five to six minutes.
John:The more elite you are, you need a longer rest period. And we're actually complexing those, meaning you're waiting five minutes after you do your eccentric overloaded exercise, then or, I guess, eccentric dominant exercise, then you're coming over and you're doing a plyo. And these plyos are also at long lengths. And the benefit of that is multiple things. One, you're gonna get sarcomereogenesis.
John:Two, you're gonna get tendon stiffness because you're gonna break the cross links. You're gonna load the living hell out of the tendons over long intervals, which means you're gonna get more tendon adaptation, more tendon stiffness, which is what we want. We're loading a stretch shortening cycle, so we're getting a true stretch reflex. We're getting a true stretch shortening cycle because the ground I mean, maybe not true, but we're storing releasing energy in the tendon. Technically, you'd have to be under two hundred milliseconds.
John:So the double dip allows us to increase time and retention, which increases the load on the tendon, which is good. Increases load on the muscle at long lengths, which is good because we know that that's gonna allow for sarcomereogenesis. And we're getting high motor recruitment because it's maximum intent. So we're getting not only high motor recruitment, we're also getting high rate coding. And we're jumping, and jumping is specific because what affords us the luxury of doing that is the fact that he is not doing maximal effort jumps.
John:Because we took those out, we can put these in. And that's often what I say is I don't do mac I don't do plyos because they're always max ever jumping. This is a rare case, and I always say I do plyos twice a year usually. Two months of the year, I'll do plyo. Maybe maybe four tops.
John:Right? This is when we do it. This is the time when I do a proper, you know, integration of some plyo. And even in this case, we're doing long ground contact plyos, so they're mushy. They're not very stiff.
John:And, you know, and and the double dip sometimes can get a little stiff because, like, Isaiah's still in, like, quite a bit of flexion, and he'll kinda bounce out of it. But they're still relatively not intense. The time under tension is crazy, though. And I think because you're in such a mechanical disadvantage in that low position and you're having to, like, handle momentums and generate force in those positions, it just offers you a lot of room for adaptation. And so I I have a question for you.
John:You usually tell me when you feel like something is gonna help. Do you feel like this will help? Yeah. Does it feel like, yeah, this is the stuff that'll help me jump higher?
Isaiah:I told
Speaker 3:you on the on the right back. It's like a different type of hard. It is very different. It it put in perspective how much specific fitness I was lacking because volume sucks. I hate volume.
Speaker 3:It's really hard. The workouts are crazy. And then max strength is like it's like a different type of difficult and a different set of adaptations. And then in my head, it's like, okay. I'm gonna be jumping super high after this.
Speaker 3:But then I do a session like today, and it's like, this is even another it's like in another realm of specificity, and it brings with it its own challenges. Like, I haven't the way my quads were burning today, it just it was different. It's different from high volume, and it's different from max strength. And there is a very vivid sensation of there is something here I was missing. Like, I suck.
Speaker 3:Visceral sensation, are I suck at yeah. It it's like, I need to get more fit with this. Now I was gonna say I suck at this. Compared to a a normal your average athlete, I probably don't suck at the stuff I was doing today. But, like, me versus me, I'm definitely not in the in in the best shape when it comes to the plyos and even the stuff with, like, my tendons and stuff like that.
Speaker 3:Like, I would I would want to be able to handle jumping and this. Like, even that, like, I'm like, oh, I need, like, more capacity, and we're and this is building the capacity. This is probably a good bridge from, like, to back off the jumping. My capacity is gonna build with this, and then the jumping comes back in, and we build that up. But, yeah, there's like, I can't state enough how much I feel like I was lacking in in these qualities, these eccentric RFD stuff.
John:Like Yeah. Crazy. And for those that don't know, Isaiah said, you know, we talk about this a lot, but this just is so convicting of, like, the proof of concept. Like, this is the stuff that people don't know. They don't know what Specifically they don't
Speaker 3:seeing the data. Seeing and I'm very happy I tested now even though the test wasn't what I wanted. I I wanted the data. Yeah. It's I mean, it's the old facts don't care about your feelings, but these facts are so important.
Speaker 3:Like, we we always say the the best salesman is the most convicted salesman. Right? Like, if you truly believe in something like, conviction is how much you believe in something. If you truly believe in something, you will travel to the ends of the world to get people to do the thing that you're trying to get them to do. And, you know, I I had high conviction with our training.
Speaker 3:Obviously, it'd be hard not to with how much I've improved, how healthy I've gotten. But you see so many things on social media about just different trains of thought on how to train for your vertical. Right? And you see all the time in in comments and stuff like that, oh, just there's a guy, every video I post, he's like, you know who I'm talking about, John. He's like
John:The certified leader.
Speaker 3:These guys just jump just jump and lift heavy and and stick with it and like that. That's it.
John:And You're wrong. You're wrong.
Speaker 3:That's what I did. That's what I've been doing
John:Vertical went down.
Speaker 3:The last two months. Yeah. And seeing my vertical drop off, then we see the power has dropped off at lighter loads compared to when I was jumping my best. Now and then we see that oh, and then I PR. My max strength is at an all time high.
Speaker 3:I unload, still doesn't go, you know, still p r isn't PR ing on the vertical. Then we see the numbers today. Oh, and then the ground contact times, then we look at that compared to before. And it's just like there's so much data
Isaiah:now supporting what we do. Like, it's
John:The only the only last missing piece is you have to jump higher. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. He's gotta jump higher.
John:I don't think he can jump lower.
Speaker 3:I don't think so either.
John:I don't think he's gonna jump lower. So yeah. Because I think any given day, forty seven five is, like, easy for you at this point, which is crazy. Like, Prasadio was, like, he tested forty seven five, and he's pissed or forty eight five and he's pissed. And I'm like, yeah, dude.
John:Yeah. He's pissed. Coach is pissed.
Speaker 3:Not a happy camper. It was it was funny when Ethan called you, and then he and he was saying that. I was like, it kinda put it. I was like, oh, my my, measuring stick has changed a little bit here.
John:He always Isaiah is the king of moving the the goalpost, but that's that's the video, guys. I hope you enjoyed it. If you're interested in coaching, like I said, if you purchase a one year plan, the equivalent of that one year plan is half off the normal month to month cost. So 50% discount if you purchase the one year plan versus the month to month. Just saying.
John:It's gonna take a long time to get better. So dial in.
Speaker 3:Do it. Commit. Put on your big
John:boy pants, put the seat belt on, and just put your head down and get to work.
Speaker 3:You train harder when you invest in it, baby, for the long run.
John:Alright. We'll see you guys next time. Ciao.
Isaiah:So