What's up, guys? Welcome back to the TSP Strength podcast. My name is John Evans, and these are two individuals that I've mentored and coached for the last five to seven years. Ben Moxness has a doctor of physical therapy now. He also works for us and as a coach is Isaiah Rivera.

He is a 50.5 inch vertical and my business partner. And I have coached four of the current six athletes to test a 50 inch vertical jump. In this episode, we're gonna be covering the question, what are the most common problems and issues that arise when you write your own vertical jump program? Before we do that, if you're interested in coaching, go to thbstrength.com or click the link in the description or the pinned comment. So Ben, what is the first thing that comes to mind?

We should all do like one at a time. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And then why? Do got one?

Yeah. I would say biggest thing that I because like I used to try and write my own programs unsuccessfully. And I would I could never get the dosing correctly, because I just didn't have the experience. So I would either under dose myself and not get any gains, or I would overdose myself and then just get hurt. That's like the number one thing that comes to my mind.

I got one. What kind have you got? Lifting too heavy too frequently. That's like a very common one. It's also one that I've Like if I don't have coaching, I tend to deviate to the mean of do triples, like, maybe sets of five really heavy.

And then that tends to you getting hurt, nervous system flattens out, tend to not train to train as well. So, yeah, this is a very common issue that I see.

I think simply people don't know what they're doing. They just put together things that they hodgepodge of exercises that they see on Instagram, and then those exercises don't have a long term plan. They're dosed incorrectly, or people just do what they like to do. I think it's easy to wanna do the things that you like to do and you're good at, but that's ultimately probably what's not gonna make you better. Ralph Mann, the book that I'm reading right now, he talks a lot about how athletes wanna dive, you know, they always wanna focus on the things that they're good at, but in reality, what's gonna move the needle the most is improving the things that they're bad at.

Getting better at those things is what's gonna make them better in the long term. So I think that's one. The second one that came to mind, and we'll cycle back to you Ben, was guys don't train all the biomotor capacities. I think oftentimes people cherry pick a few biomotor capacities, and then as a result, the long term plan is far less effective than had they addressed all the biomotor capacities in varying qualities across the entire macrocycle year, multi year plan. And then they end up not improving because they attribute their success to maybe one exercise or something that they did versus the entirety of the long term plan and the adaptations that result.

Yeah, that's basically what I was gonna say. But I think people default to like block periodization. They Yeah. They're like, oh, my weakness is strength. So they attack strength for like eight to twelve weeks.

And then their power's flash, like, now I need to bring up power. And so they bring up power, but then they detrain some of their max strength. They're not sprinting or doing a lot of any sort of extensive plyos or or or or even jumping. And they just keep like going through these ebbs and flows of trying to focus on one thing, one concentrated block because they read like one Virgochansky article from forever ago, even though that usually people don't even know that Virgochansky didn't even use true block periodization. Like his conjugate system is he used max strength with depth jumps and they were doing extensive plyos like those, you know, his bounding variance throughout the whole year.

Like it was vertical integration or the long conjugate. So that's, yeah, that's what I would

say. I also want to touch on that because we've been talking a lot about addressing deficits. When we address deficit, I've been using this word as a verb, we still long conjugate it. Right? So, like, let's say your deficit is elasticity.

So you start, like, doing upright sprints, longer sprints, plyos. That shouldn't be all that you're doing. So you shouldn't drop the the weight room work completely away. You should still be touching on max strength, on high volume work. The trick is you're doing that at lower volumes compared to when you do, let's say your deficit is max strength.

Now you're gonna be doing most of your volume in those rep ranges that are gonna touch on max strength, but then you still wanna be doing some sort of playa or some sort of running. Yeah. I I have another mistake that I that I was thinking about. The quality of the warm ups and the general days suck when people program for themselves. And I think part of it is what John was saying where you tend to only wanna do the stuff you're good at or that you enjoy.

Most people hate general days and a warm up. The warm up is part of the training, how we how we implement it. Like it's not just there to increase performance and decrease risk of injury, we also see it as training volume. But it sucks. It's boring.

It's usually pretty hard, both the long warm ups and the general days. And people usually only do it if it's programmed and you have a coach telling you to do it and to not skip it.

And I was gonna say too, from a rehab standpoint of like when people run their own program, they do get hurt. And it's like, okay, how do I manage this myself? Like load management and true great exposure rehab progressions can be very difficult if you don't have any experience. Like I like I was telling John this the other day, I was in PT school having read literally hundreds of articles on how to fix jumper's knee. But I did not have the experience to be able to do it myself.

And John used to yell at me all the time like, stop playing volleyball and basketball. It's not gonna get better. And I I I didn't believe him. But now, know, years later, I'm like, yeah, he was totally right. And like that's when I was literally gonna be I was a year or two away from being a professional in that field.

And I still couldn't manage it without a coach.

Yeah. That was that was for me the irony behind it. I was just like, how of all people do you not know that you shouldn't be doing this? I think one that the thing that comes to mind is in my experience and as I've learned a lot about programming is it's it is very, very complex. And If you don't understand those complexities, your program is not gonna be very good.

Yeah, you might have elements of squatting or cleans or all this other stuff, but if it doesn't fit together cohesively in a way that follows all of the training laws, I mean, it it is an entire science. So if you're gonna write your own training program, you're basically saying, I know more than other people about this topic and therefore my program is better. And Or you can't afford it. Or you can afford it. Yeah.

That that's another one.

Like sometimes

Yeah. Some sometimes that's the case. But I think, you know, I so if if you are in that latter group, then I would say you definitely should be watching every single podcast about programming that we've ever done or every single video that we've done on on programming and learn as much as you possibly can because there are a lot of nuances behind it. And then on top of that, watch all of the training videos. And you're probably gonna get a pretty good idea into how those different variables change.

And watch it from all the athletes that we coach, because their programs are different. Watch Ben's training, watch my training, watch Isaiah's training, because you're gonna see different shades of the same concepts, but there might be a slight twist on it. Maybe Ben's doing every third day. Maybe I'm doing something that's load management based for my tendon. Maybe Isaiah's in a block or a cycle where he's focusing on his velocity based training with Olympic lifting, but there's still elements of other stuff.

So I think big picture, you need to remember to train everything. You need to train endurance, you need to train coordination, you need to train speed, you need to train strength, you need to train mobility. You have to do all of that stuff, and then you have to periodize each of those qualities. If I were to give anyone one piece of advice, it would be leave no stones unturned. Make sure you're addressing every single physical capacity.

And then the other one is just do the program. Like I think a lot of time guys write their own workouts, they don't even do it. They write something and then they they don't even finish it. They don't see it the whole way through. And it's really hard to learn when you don't do that.

So if you miss a day, just pick up with the the next day, you know, and and you're gonna learn as you do that, and you're gonna gain experience, that's gonna help you get better. But it is a very slow, long, tedious process, and I think a lot of people don't want to be patient. Which is maybe a benefit to watching this, is you get the outcome of us testing things on thousands of athletes every single day. Right? We get to see the results of a six month study, essentially, on that person.

So that would be big picture, what I would what I would say.

I I think a small one, unplanned sessions, will destroy your jump program. And then the second thing I was gonna say is I think the biggest mistake is just falling prey to human nature. Like, that's literally it. Like, it's most people and and what led to me thinking about this was when, you were saying how, Ben, you were struggling with taking care of your own jumper's knee. It's not just you.

The three of us here have struggled to rehab ourselves. And the only time we really make progress is like, John, for example, delegated the needs analysis to me before every session. And then for me, when I stop trying to rehab, you know, it's like my back no. It's just like tell them how I'm feeling on the day and then ask what should I take out, what should I keep in. And then that way your bias doesn't come in.

And then being able to, like, essentially treat a coach as an authority. Like, I give you the decision, he gives me the decision. And, like, the chances of success probably, like, quadruple when you do that. Because even worst case scenario, let's say, I tell you not to do a certain thing. It's like you could choose to like not listen, but the worst thing worst case scenario is you might not get as much loading as like you would have, but you're probably still gonna trend healthier versus if you're making your own decision.

Worst case scenario, you're probably gonna do the thing that's gonna bother you. Like, you have a higher chance of doing that and you're gonna end up getting hurt. Versus a coach, I feel like we'll on the side of caution every single time. Like, a coach is well, a good coach like us is usually if there's even like a small chance that someone's gonna get hurt, you're probably gonna say skip it or change the exercise.

I one. I have another one. I think a big common mistake that I see is people trying to fuse systems. So what they'll do is they'll look at one person's program, they'll look at another person's they'll look at another program, they say, well, I like these elements, I like these elements, I like these elements. I'm gonna combine them all into my own program.

And that is very, very dangerous because that singular program only works inside of that system. And if you try to blend them all together and create your own new system, things fall apart because it was set up that way for a reason. And you can't just pick and choose what you want to put together. I think another common one is when you look at like bad jump programs, right, And you say, well this is what bad jump programs have, so this is the common mistakes that I see. Doing things like ladder drills, probably not gonna move the needle.

Doing a lot of the exercises online that I see that I don't like, which I'm just gonna be 100 transparent here. If you've got a lot of sled pushes in there, probably not gonna make you jump higher. If you've got, like if you don't see it in our training, there's a reason it's not in there, right? You're not gonna see us pull out a bosu ball, you're not gonna see us pull out a Swiss ball unless it's like for core work. You're not gonna see us do stability training.

Rarely do we do stuff in sand, we're not doing hill sprints, we don't run with chains, like it's, it should be more fundamental and it should look more like the basics. And if you have these complex looking exercises, it probably is less effective than the simple stuff. So I would tell you or strongly encourage you to be careful when you see something online or see an individual make a claim about training or jumping higher or running faster when they're doing things, either they're not an expert themselves or they're doing things that are, look ridiculous. If it looks ridiculous, probably is ridiculous. Unless it's coming from someone that you respect.

The other thing I was gonna say is also you babe, like going off what John said is your is they use complex exercises too soon. Like like most athletes that wanna write their own training, not most, but a lot of them, you know, they're usually not super experienced, you know, they'll they'll watch whatever Instagram reel and and just copy and paste the workout. But like, you know, Virgo Chansky said it himself, you know, you don't cure a runny nose with the world's most powerful ant like antibiotic. Because, you know, you don't wanna do depth jumps when you're 13 or 14, you know, because you can get the same effect, the same training potential like the, from just strength work. So, and then like what John said, having a system.

Like I remember my first year on THP, you you know, I didn't really I don't know if I knew it at the time, but after I looked back at the whole macro cycle, was like that was the most beautiful jump program I've ever seen in my life. Like I was surprised by the simplicity of it, but it was it was simple, but it was just so elegant. Like so elegant, so well progressed. And really any jump program I I did the decade prior, there was progressions. Like they had no progressions.

It was it was random exercises, it was intensifying way too early, things that I didn't need. It was almost always way too many plyos, not enough strength work. Like, I mean, way too many plyos. And and I know it was also that, but also not plyos that will drive the needle. Like, we're talking about like a lateral bound, like a double leg lateral bound over a box to a like a box jump.

Like, and do that 10 times. Like, it was stuff that did not

If work at there was a a court of law for jump training, you should be able to defend every single part of your like, imagine, like, it's in front of a judge and a jury, and it's like, why is this lateral bound to a vertical jump in your training? Tell me why. Like, I think with with us, we could literally every single rep of every exercise, you could you have a why behind it. And then the stuff that like, if you look at early jump programs, they actually sometimes look quite different because we've tested it. Yeah.

Yeah. We've tested it, and maybe it worked for a track and field athlete who's not jumping for three hours on the weekend or, you know what I mean, or over jumping as a as a volleyball player. And now it's changed. And that's the other cool part about our training is that it's always evolving as we learn, as we as we keep learning new things and stuff like that. But Yeah.

Yeah.

Alright. I'll close it out. I hope you guys enjoyed that. Click the link in the description if you wanna sign up for coaching

comment.

Or the pinned comment, which I won't forget. I might have forgot yesterday. We'll see you guys next time. Bye.

Shot collar.