Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
How can you make progress without access to weights? We explore how you can still make progress with only bodyweight exercises.
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 another episode of THPStrength. On this podcast we will be discussing body weight training. Specifically we're going to be talking about what types of loading there is without equipment. We're gonna be talking about what the benefits of that are, some of the results, is it effective, is it not effective, how should you go about it, how do we go about it.
Speaker 1:Gonna be discussing all of those things. But before we do that, we just want to let you guys know that this week's podcast is brought to you by Legion Supplements. One of the biggest questions we get asked how can I improve recovery? One of the only ways to do this is to give your body more of what it already needs. Increasing bioavailability of these micronutrients can help you.
Speaker 1:In other words, it lets your body do what it's already trying to do during recovery but better. I say this every time but right now I'm religiously taking my fish oil and my multivitamin. I've noticed specifically this weekend that when I didn't take it my mood was really screwed up and I partially think that's because of the vitamin D in it. I think that I know for a fact that I have a vitamin D deficiency. I have my blood panel done and it's a supplement that I definitely need to take more of.
Speaker 1:So taking that definitely benefits me. Also my free test is also a little bit low and the ashwagandha root, the vitamin D, the fish oil, all of those things are really beneficial for improving that as well as decreasing SHPG and helping my DHT be a little higher. It's totally safe. It is safe and effective. It's research reviewed and there's a research board for Legion and I always say this again but we approach them and even if they weren't sponsoring us I would still buy their supplements.
Speaker 1:So highly recommend doing that. Think our code is THP that will be in the description if you are looking for supplements. Getting into it here. So bodyweight training. I guess maybe I'll turn this over to Isaiah and Hunter.
Speaker 1:What are your experiences with bodyweight training? Have you done it? Do you like it? Do you not like it? Isaiah, you can start off.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I just want to start it off by explaining how our bodyweight training came to be. I feel like it's one of the biggest benefits of THP training is our bodyweight training. We started THP back in March which is nine months ago, I believe. And as the whole planet knows, there happened to be a global pandemic that hit.
Speaker 2:Made it so that a lot of people couldn't train in commercial gyms. It made it really difficult to access home gym equipment because everybody was buying home gym equipment and that led to a lot of our athletes asking what they were going to do because they no longer had access to a gym. John actually predicted everything closing down back when you would be considered a madman to to say that if you say that the world's gonna shut down, people would look at you crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So remember took it down now. I was like, who knows? We don't know what's gonna happen. Girls resorts are closed.
Speaker 1:You don't know. Could be tanks rolling down the road like there is in Italy and people are like I was like, we don't know. Yeah. Like
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we have a lot of international clients and one of our guys is from Italy and Italy was like the first place to get really bad where everything shut down.
Speaker 1:Yeah. China. We have a guy from Hong Kong. So China as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So John basically predicted that gyms are going to close down and nobody is going have equipment access in a couple of weeks. So he went ahead and wrote out pretty much an entire at home body weight program and we started basically marketing it, pushing it out to people saying we have it available. And people started doing our body weight training and everybody started getting results, like crazy results.
Speaker 2:Basically everybody that's done it has improved a lot. So that's the takeaway with that. As far as my personal experience with it, I've never really done too much bodyweight training when the pandemic first hit. I did it for about a month, but I was also recovering I was coming back from a really bad ankle sprain. So I used body weight training to get back in shape.
Speaker 2:Then I went to North Carolina, trained with John. Other than that, I've only ever done it if I randomly don't have access to a gym to at least get some work in. But yeah, that's my personal experience with it. Hunter, do you have any experiences with bodyweight training at all?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I have actually a significant amount of experience with bodyweight training. I've had, four knee surgeries and, rehab for those knee surgeries is just a ton of bodyweight training. And so a modality that I came across and have utilized in the past when body weight training is or mostly with body weight. And body weight training is the only activity that I can do is I use BFR bands.
Speaker 3:It's just nothing particularly special about them, but they can reproduce a lot of the benefits of heavier weight training with very low loads and in some instances, just body weight. So that's been my experience in the past, but, you know, you can get away with it. If you have smart training and and you know what you're doing, you can still make, you know, some progress depending on how advanced you
Speaker 1:are. Mhmm. That said, I would like to make a addendum to the term bodyweight training because I think it really should just be no equipment. No access to equipment. Because when you think bodyweight training it's usually some sort of resistance training and it is put into a neat box of pistol squats and push ups and pull ups.
Speaker 1:Sometimes people say calisthenics or these bar bros or whatever. You'll see stuff like that Which is all cool and whatever else. But I think saying it's equipment free loading and types of equipment free loading is a much better way to describe it because it's not just pistol squats and Nordics and reverse Nordics and single arm push ups and stuff like that. There's so many underlying principles that let you improve or there's so many underlying physiological things happening that if you understand you can manipulate those different exercises, the means and methods to achieve whatever goal you're trying to achieve. And we'll definitely get into that.
Speaker 1:But like Isaiah said, the progress is undisputed when athletes have done the body weight programming. I will say going into it, I was like, this is gonna be tough. This is gonna be a doozy. I've done body weight training on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays for the last ten years as a part of my general strength work, but having no access to a barbell, bumper plates, things like that, and trying to get a really strong stimulus on high intensity days is very difficult. That said, I did it for years when I was a kid with plyometrics and sprinting and all these other stimuli, which brings me back to that point of it's equipment free loading.
Speaker 1:You can get a lot done without equipment. You don't need it by any means. And at times, I've seen athletes improve more without equipment and myself included improved more without equipment than I did with equipment. So you definitely don't need a weight room. If you understand the underlying principles, you can get the exact same adaptations to the human body without a barbell, without a fancy pin squat, without a pitch shark, without all those things.
Speaker 1:They logistically make it easier to get the loading that you want and there are certain things that you can do with a barbell, with a pitch arc, with pins and a mid thigh pull machine and force plates that you can't do that you can't achieve without that equipment obviously. But you definitely can see a lot of improvement and sometimes more improvement. Like I said, guys off the list that I wrote down even before this podcast, I think it's Reed Harris was his name, went from not dunking to doing two handers and one handers and there was another kid that had a very similar response to it. He was on it for six to eight months. I can't remember his name right now but he went from not dunking to doing two handers off one foot and two feet I think as well and then decided he's like I'm gonna do my own thing for a little while and we were like cool if you want to come back go for it.
Speaker 1:And Clifford Russell was another one. Clifford was an ultimate frisbee player. Saw massive changes in his his 30 meter sprint and obviously his 40 yard dash as well. I want to say his improvement in the 30 meter was like point three seconds which is disgustingly fast. That means like in a 100 meter dash, he probably improved a full second just from just body weight training.
Speaker 1:His vertical went up, I wanna say four plus inches, maybe more, maybe five plus inches. Body comp changed drastically and his the whole reason for that happening is his compliance was crazy. Antonio Ampardo was another one off the top of my head. Tomer Mayer, he did it on and off with a dumbbell, just one dumbbell or maybe two fifteen pound dumbbells. And the programming for those guys was it had everything that you would need to improve as an athlete.
Speaker 1:One of the biggest issues is that guys don't want to do it because it's hard. It's really hard training because you have to try to take advantage of other mechanisms, internal physiology to get the same benefits, the same adaptation, to push progressive overload, to push the threshold of what that athlete needs to adapt. So like I said, it works. It definitely works. It's just hard.
Speaker 1:It's really hard. That's probably the most important and pressing issue with it is that it's not easy. And I've seen it work over the last year to year and a half because we have a ton of guys that will have to jump on that programming for a little while or have done it for an extended period of time. And the majority of the time guys are like this isn't what Isaiah is doing in his videos. Isaiah is doing cleans.
Speaker 1:Isaiah is doing squats. Isaiah is doing whatever else. Or John I see you doing this fancy stuff or whatever. First off you're not us and you don't have access to that equipment. And even if you did we still might not give you that loading because you're not ready for it and you're gonna see more progress doing this than you would having had access to that and your ceiling is gonna be way lower if we throw that at you right now as opposed to in the future maybe whenever you're more prepared for it or when you've trained to train.
Speaker 1:So all those things said, it's hard. People don't like to do it. Undisputed. It definitely works. It's not the same as Isaiah's videos which people want to see.
Speaker 1:They want to see them it's motivating for them to do the same type of workouts, to have the same movements in their training that Isaiah has in his training. But that all said it works and it's super effective if you're willing to do it and if you have the balls to stick it out and you can handle it. Bringing it back to how do you set this up, what are the different types of loading, why does it work, I think that is gonna help you guys if you're a listener as or as a coach set up programming for your athletes, understand why our programs are set up the way that they are for those athletes that are on bodyweight training from a more intimate level at a more intimate level, at a more detailed level because I don't go into it's not stuff I'm gonna post on Instagram. I'm not gonna talk about and it's really unconventional sometimes some of the loading that I do, but it definitely works and under a force plate under EMG units you would see the loading is very high in a lot of the activities that are in that in the training for body weight.
Speaker 1:That all said we'll get into it here. There are different types of equipment free loading and I'll just give a brief overview of what those are. The first one I would label partner based loading. So it's not body weight because you're using more than body weight. You have a partner there.
Speaker 1:Have you ever seen guys with nothing but a plastic bag or a rope or a PVC pipe doing curls or something like that. You'll see one guy pushing down and the other one pushing up. One guy pushing down the other guy pushing up. That's a great example of partner based loading for the bicep and tricep. It's actually almost impossible to get a good body weight stimulus without a pull up bar, without dumbbells, without a barbell, without anything else, just for your biceps, without a partner makes it infinitely easier to load the bicep and not just a little bit.
Speaker 1:Sometimes I would pick the partner based loading for bicep hypertrophy over traditional load loading schemes with a barbell or dumbbell or anything else. Reason being, you get fatigue induced overload. Meaning, as you go through that set, you can get fatigued so that your force output is lower. But what the partner is able to do is actually decrease the force relative to how hard you're pushing. And so if you've done that exercise, if you're the person doing the curls and one person is doing the triceps, the guy doing the curls gets to a point where they can't it feels like you're just pushing up the whole time.
Speaker 1:But as you're being lowered, you're trying to resist the person that's pushing you down. And so you get a massive eccentric load on the way down. Eccentric loading, and I'll get into this a little bit more deeply now, eccentric loading is great for neural as a neural stimulus. It's great for the tendon in terms of load. It's great for the collagen fibers in terms of load and the adaptation that you see.
Speaker 1:It definitely works. It definitely works. So when you're looking at partner based loading, you're not just looking at it like, this is lame. I could be moving a barbell or this isn't as controlled. Yeah it's not as controlled, but that's some of the benefits.
Speaker 1:It's actually more controlled in the sense of being able to push further along into that fatigue continuum. If you're getting fatigued with 95 pound curls at the fourth rep, you can't decrease the weight during the set. You can't do that. But if Isaiah is resisting me in these manual curls, he can push less so I can get five, six, seven reps and that's one type of part that's one type of exercise or sorry equipment free loading that you can do without any equipment and is still super effective. So that's one and we'll go into again some of the specifics of that.
Speaker 1:Another one is barrier based loading and I'll cover these a little bit more briefly and not in super depth so I can go into them a little bit more in the podcast. But barrier based loading would be moving an immovable object. You have mega high isometric measures or I guess you could say you would see very high force outputs in these types of activities. The last or the last two would be modified lever based loading, meaning you are putting your body in a at a mechanical disadvantage or more of a mechanical disadvantage or giving yourself poor leverage by moving deeper into a movement, by changing where your hand position is, by changing where your foot position is, by changing your body position during movement, you are able to increase the difficulty of that exercise and increase the internal intramuscular forces that you would observe. The last type is unilateral or asymmetric loading.
Speaker 1:So this would be like a single arm push up. It would be like a single arm pull up. It would be going from a split squat to a pistol squat. You're making it increasingly harder as you go from two feet to one one foot. And then within that, you can change the speed.
Speaker 1:You can change the range of motion. You can change to some extent. All of those things will change the load as well. And then those would be the resistance training ones. Add on top of that plyometrics and sprinting and running and you have a very robust program that you are able to manipulate, add variance or variability, add individuality, you're able to increase the intensity over time, you're able to decrease the volume, you're able to get all of the types of stimuli that you would need to get all of the max adaptation that you would need, and it can be really robust.
Speaker 1:And that's what the THP program includes that I don't necessarily explain all the time. So that all said, Hunter and Isaiah, have you guys ever heard of any of those things or what are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I've I've heard of all of them just because of having to program for everybody, especially the, like, manipulating levers. I think that's one of the most effective. If let's say somebody was, like in a cave by themselves or something like that or in a in a in a wide field plane where there's nothing to push against and no no partner, manipulating your levers is one of the most effective ways you can make an exercise harder. And yeah, I pretty much heard of all of them and they're all really effective stimulus to get stronger.
Speaker 2:I think one of the really important things to recognize is training, like in order to adapt, it's all principles based. If you can constantly be making the training load go up, progressing upwards, your body's gonna be adapting. If you're constantly introducing variety into your training, you're gonna be adapting. And the methods that you mentioned are always to add training load into add more training load into your program. So yeah.
Speaker 2:So those are my thoughts on it.
Speaker 1:Hunter, have you ever heard of it that clearly can precisely mourned it?
Speaker 3:No. I gotta give props to both of you for putting it in such eloquent language.
Speaker 1:I was trying not to breathe into the mic. I had to turn my gain down. That's why I kept turning away and breathing. I don't wanna be a mouth raiser.
Speaker 2:Nothing, man. I appreciate it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I don't really have much to add there. One one thing that I will say that I don't think enough people can appreciate is, like, a lot of people just stick their nose up at body weight training. I can't get bigger with that. I can't do x, y, or z with that.
Speaker 3:Like, always my favorite example is always to point at gymnast and just say, just go look at them. Just go look at them. How athletic are they?
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 3:then another thing that I think body weight training can be very good for people to understand is sometimes like athletes, they just are chronically over trained. And if you don't have access to a weight room and all of sudden you to do body weight exercises, that also might not be the worst thing for you just in general. Yeah. Reduce that reduce the strain on on your joints and on your body. Let that de load like really clear you out.
Speaker 3:And by the time you go back to weight room, not only will you have a physical like renaissance if you will of energy, but you'll also like mentally just be that much more like ready to go once you have access to weight. It's just some additional stuff that I was thinking about when you were
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think explaining in detail how you do each of those loading would be really beneficial so that you guys listen to this and leave the podcast with some really usable information, some applied information. So when you look at partner based loading, again, I talked about the the bicep tricep push down example. Some of the other ones that I really like are just doing Nordic or Nordics, regular Nordics. You could even do it reverse Nordics and have someone push on your shoulders.
Speaker 1:You could do pistol squats where someone's pulling you downwards. You could do abduction adduction where someone's pushing on the knee or you're holding the leg and you go up and down. Thomas Kortenbeck put together a bodyweight program at the beginning of COVID, and when lockdowns were going on, he put five or six different examples of upper body and lower body partner based loading. And as I previously mentioned, there are a ton of benefits of doing that. The biggest one being you can get huge eccentric overloads.
Speaker 1:And when I say eccentric overloads, you get massive eccentric loads so high that they're actually higher than what the concentric force you could produce is. It's not you're not eccentrically you're not overloading your ability to produce force eccentrically. You're just pushing your ability to produce force eccentrically higher towards what the the max capacity of that is. For those of you that don't know, eccentric contractions are when the muscle lengthens. This is the down phase of a squat in the quads, glutes, specifically probably those ones would be the easiest.
Speaker 1:It would be the down phase in a bicep curl. Your bicep is lengthening. It would be the if you're doing a tricep pushdown it would be whenever you're bringing your hands back to your chest the tricep is lengthening over that period of time. That's the eccentric muscle contraction. We've talked about this a couple different times on previous podcasts but eccentric muscle contractions as they apply to training are very different than what actually happens in the activity that you're doing.
Speaker 1:In sprinting you would definitely see eccentric contractions all over the place especially during unfolding and things like that, and you would see intermixing of isometric and concentric contractions in terms of pre activation when the foot's hitting the ground and all those different things. They're all very important, but specifically eccentric muscle contractions give you a lot of benefit in type two muscle fiber and the neural drive that you see from the brain. In eccentric loading, you are able to produce a lot of force. And as a result of that, you're better at producing force eccentrically than you are concentrically. Further, you get the benefit of increasing the length of the fascicles which means you're not gonna get muscle tears because the fascicle, the actual muscle fiber is longer and that's a major benefit of doing them.
Speaker 1:So you have massive neural drive from the brain as we know before any muscle contraction happens there's an electrical and chemical process that happens in the brain and the nervous system and at the muscular level that precedes that muscular contraction. The greater that response is, the greater the electrical chemical response, the greater the muscle contraction is gonna be or the potential for that muscle contraction to be high force. Eccentric muscle contractions where you're pushing it towards the limit of the force that you can generate eccentrically, the more neural drive you're gonna see, which is really good if you're a sprinter or a jumper because you need the nervous system to fire on all the cylinders. It's like putting a v six or v eight in your car that was a v four previously or a flat four. You increase the capacity for you to provide a stimulus to the muscle by taking advantage of this muscle contraction.
Speaker 1:So if Isaiah is in the example of the push down where he's pushing my hands down at the bicep just because it's an easy analogy, my biceps are producing more force eccentrically than they would if I was doing a curl at 95 pounds that I could lift up and down. He's able to push down with say 135 pounds of force that is just pushing me down. I'm trying to resist it with everything I have inside of me, but he's just pushing me down. Internally, if you had EMG units on your muscles and you were look at the activity inside the muscle, it would be crazy high. Way higher than it would be with a barbell in your hands where you might get stuck on the up phase at 95 pounds or whatever because the down phase are so much stronger.
Speaker 1:So it's still 95 pounds on the way down. Easy. On the way up, really tough. So he's able to push down with 135 pounds of force and then as I go to lift back up, he's able to let off his hands a little bit, maybe say go down to 85 or 90 pounds. Now I'm produce I don't need to produce as much force concentrically to lift my hands all the way up.
Speaker 1:I get the full range of motion. I'm close to that upper tier of the the force that I can produce. I'm at the upper tier of my the activity in the brain that I can get, but I get the benefit of a massive eccentric load on the way down and my nervous system being revved up to the max on the way down. But I'm also getting it revved up to the max on the way up, and I'm not feeling. So I can go through 25 reps and Isaiah just pushes less and less as I get more and more fatigued, still getting the the super high EMG activities.
Speaker 1:If you were to put or electrical chemical activity in your brain. If you were to put EMG units on your bicep and you did a bunch of curls, like thirty seconds of curls, then you did another one that was a couple minutes later you did forty five seconds of curls, then you did sixty seconds of curls, as you got more fatigued through those sets and you made the sets longer and longer, towards the end of the set, you would see greater and greater EMG activity. You would see greater and greater neural drive from your brain and your central nervous system to the peripheral nervous system, to the muscles. You would see more and more neural drive because it's harder and harder and you have to try harder and harder. So your brain, because you're not good at producing forces, you get fatigued, you have all this metabolic all these metabolic byproducts build up, have all this guck build up in the muscle and fatigue build up, and we don't even fully understand fatigue, but it gets harder to lift the weight.
Speaker 1:Your brain has to produce more and more electrical drive to lift that weight up. That's the only way you could get the weight up is if you have more chemical signaling, more electrical signaling in the brain to tell the muscle to keep pushing. That's the benefit of going to failure. That's the benefit of pushing into further and further fatigue throughout a session. You're able to overload this underlying principle that is dictating whether you produce a lot of force or not a lot of force.
Speaker 1:And you're also getting the benefit of the local level at the muscular level, all the adaptations and reaping all the adaptations of very potent stimulus. So while I have these manual resisted abduction adduction exercises where someone's pushing down on the outside of your knee or they're holding your leg and you're going up and down or maybe someone's pulling your the back of your heel and doing an eccentric contraction and pulling your heel down to the floor and then they have to pull back up, you get so many benefits at a neural level, a muscular level, and a force generating level. Just in general, you get better at producing force. Locally with the tissue, you get them to adapt better. The tendons are seeing massive loading as well.
Speaker 1:And correspondingly, you get better at producing force and you could probably jump higher as a result. And that's what we've seen in our athletes. That's what we've seen in forever. People do equipment free loading all the time. Nordic hamstring curls where, and I'm not talking about the kipping ones where you arch your back a ton and cheat it, but the really strict ones where you have posterior pelvic tilt and you can't possibly pull yourself up as you get to the very bottom, you don't touch your chest down, you don't use your arms, you don't kip or generate momentum anyway, just come down.
Speaker 1:People have been doing that for years. Ten, twenty years people have been doing that because of the benefits of it. You can take advantage of all of those underlying principles across the entire body. Just understanding what exercises and how to do them. For example, you could do a quad extension.
Speaker 1:You could sit I could sit in this stool right here, and if Isaiah were here and he were sitting out in front of me, he'd put his hands on the the front of my my foot and push down as hard as he could, and I would try to resist him, and he would push me down as hard as he could, assuming I wasn't gonna flip and topple over. Maybe I'm holding on to the bottom of the stool so I don't topple over, and I would see a massive eccentric load in my quadricep. And then as I get to the bottom, I get to push up concentrically. I'm not as strong concentrically. Isaiah lets off his hands a little bit, seeing a massive load concentrically.
Speaker 1:There's a ton of benefits there. So I think in general, maybe one other thing I would add to this before I say in general, you get a ton of type two muscle fiber recruitment when you do eccentric loading, really high eccentric loading. Type two muscle fibers are super freaking important. Your intent is so high in those activities. You're trying to stop him from pushing your leg down or your arm down or whatever else, and then you're pushing up as hard as you can to to lift his or resist him or push against him and go on the up phase.
Speaker 1:So you're getting massive loading and massive fatigue and thus massive adaptation as a result. So in general, partner based loading is probably, in my opinion, my favorite type of load based training that is equipment free. Meaning non traditional load based training or resistance training. What do you guys think about that? About that rant?
Speaker 1:Were you listening?
Speaker 3:Very nice. I concur. No. No. Sometimes you just gotta let John go.
Speaker 1:Don't know. Man, I don't what's up with the road today. Maybe I got the got the vid. I
Speaker 2:really hope not. I really
Speaker 1:hope not.
Speaker 3:No. It makes the partner base loading is an interesting one to me in that I would imagine a lot of listeners be like, but I don't have a partner to help But I think it does go to show that if you do have a partner, you can get a very intense workout with that partner. And, like, the number one exercise that I like to point to in this is go do some Nordics. Go do some Nordics. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I saw a
Speaker 3:guy in the gym the other day looking at doing this. He's, woah, what what are those? I've been seeing people like, is that hard? I was like, why don't you just give it a go?
Speaker 1:Just try it.
Speaker 3:And he did. And he did like half of one rep. Was like, oh my god. I've never felt my hamstrings like that before. I was like, yeah.
Speaker 3:Not easy.
Speaker 1:Because you're pushing to the end range of that muscle's capacity to produce force. They're like, overall, not concentrically or isometrically, like, total force. So definitely a lot. Isaiah, do you have any thoughts about that? Are you interested in doing manual partner based loading now?
Speaker 1:I guess you do it because you do Nordics all Yeah. The
Speaker 2:I do. I I love Nordics. Probably my favorite hamstring exercise. But yeah. It's a really good way to to add load.
Speaker 2:What comes to my mind is just prison workouts.
Speaker 1:I think Basically. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I think it's a really good way if you don't have equipment and you have anybody. You have your mom, dad, brother, friend.
Speaker 1:COVID made it tough because people were like, I can't find a partner because of COVID. And I'm like, really? The person you live in the same how house with isn't willing to do this? Are
Speaker 2:you sure?
Speaker 1:It seems like you'll transfer the virus probably other ways, but okay.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Mean, I literally have my 13 year old sister, like, just laid out on my ankles to do Nordic sometimes.
Speaker 1:You still lift her off the floor.
Speaker 3:Hey, Catherine. Come here.
Speaker 1:Still lift her up the floor. It's obvious yeah. It works. I think the other two, the other three that I talked about in terms of load based training or resistance based training is barrier based loading. Meaning, you're moving an immovable object.
Speaker 1:If you're doing a wall isometric where you're just pushing in, you got I do it on field goal posts, for example. I got the field goal post on my shoulder and I'm just extending plantar flexing as hard as I can with a bent knee position. That's more loading through my the fascia on the bottom of my foot, the plantar fascia, through the Achilles, through the entire posterior chain up through my knee than it would be if I had a pitch arc or if I had a single leg calf raise or anything else just because of the angles, the positioning. It's super specific for sprinting, super specific for bounding where you're in this bent knee position and you're pushing with the lower leg. You get huge forces internally, intramuscularly that you would probably be hard pressed to get anywhere else.
Speaker 1:Same thing's true of the one I have a isometric hold where it's RFD activity and you put your hands on the top of a door frame, your leg is totally straight and you your arms are basically totally straight and then you just do a push up on your calf. You just push up as hard as you can on your calf. I have, I think, bent a door frame doing this and potentially almost broke because the forces are so freaking high when you go into that position.
Speaker 2:Different.
Speaker 1:What's that?
Speaker 2:Built different.
Speaker 1:I'm built different. The forces are so high when you go into that activity that you get huge neural drive, like I was talking about the electrical and chemical signaling in the brain, spinal cord, all those things. You get massive loading. You get massive loading through the tendon too. Muscular tendons unit gets a ton of loading in all these activities obviously because the electrical chemical precedes the force that you would see in the muscular tendons unit.
Speaker 1:Very valuable. If you're doing, mid thigh isopull, you know, the thing where you tape your hands to the bar and you push up as hard as you can, it's basically synonymous to that. That's a great training stimulus. That's a great training stimulus, especially if you understand pre activation. It's gonna help your stress shortening cycle.
Speaker 1:It's gonna help the elasticity. It's gonna help you apply metrics. It's gonna help your tendons. Isometric contractions are super important in anything elastic. Super important.
Speaker 1:That's barrier based loading. Then you have modified lever based loading. For this one, it would be taking advantage of the axis of rotation moving away from the center of mass. So if you're in a pistol, your knees and hips are moving away from the center of mass. It's getting making the exercise way harder if you're doing a reverse Nordic as you lean back.
Speaker 1:Your center of mass is shifting away from the axis of rotation. I always give the analogy it's like pushing, holding a book bag in your hand as you push that book bag farther away from the axis of rotation of your shoulder, it feels heavier and heavier. It still has 15 pounds in it whether you held it close or you moved it far away, but it felt heavier when you moved it farther away. So you can take advantage of this modified lever based loading to see super high intramuscular forces that would help you overcome this inefficient lever and then obviously help you the muscle adapt, help the tendon adapt, the nervous system produce more force or help you produce more force by getting more neural stimulus or neural drive. And then the last one is unilateral asymmetric loading.
Speaker 1:Pistol squats harder than a double leg squat. Balance aside, even if you're holding on to something, it's still harder. And you're able to see all of the benefits that I just talked about and all of those load based examples that I gave. The body weight training that I prescribe, sometimes it seems repetitive because it's hard to find a good alternative for a pistol squat that's gonna be equally as hard. It's really hard.
Speaker 1:That's a hard freaking exercise. That's a really hard exercise. How are you supposed to make it like how are you supposed to find a stimulus that's gonna be that difficult at the quadricep? It's it's very difficult to find a more difficult exercise. And then further, you can load that even hard you can load that higher by increasing the speed, increasing the rate or where you stop along the way down, putting a pause in there, whether you have a slow descent or a fast descent, whether you have a fast raising period or a slow raising period, there's so much variability you can build inside of even just that pistol squat.
Speaker 1:And then on top of all of that, the thing that is probably the most beneficial of all of the equipment free non loading or not resistance training is plyometrics and sprinting. You can get so much benefit from just doing sprinting and plyometrics and running and it's hard as hell and I think people that have done the bodyweight training will tell you It's hard. I make the running workouts hard because I want you to adapt and I want you to push further to being a better athlete and I want you to be more aerobically fit and more anaerobically fit and I want you to have the a better capacity to transport oxygen and produce force when you're fatigued and build some of the central portions of just trying hard. Being able to try hard, being able to push, being able to push through pain. That's there's benefit even there.
Speaker 1:Just learning how to work hard and the effort levels and not having a governor on, oh, I gotta back off. I'm just gonna push through pain. I'm just gonna push as hard as I can. Intent. It's training intent.
Speaker 2:And The benefit of like sprinting and plyos but specifically sprinting, I feel like it's very underrated when it comes to jump training because I feel if you can, most people, even if they have lack of equipment or like they're injured and stuff like that, most people are able to sprint. I think the one exception is like hamstring or Achilles issues. And just with the sprinting alone, like your body composition is going to improve. You're going to get more elastic and you're going to jump higher as a result. Cause I'm thinking back to last year when I was having a lot of like quad tendinopathy.
Speaker 2:Sprinting was one of the things I was able to do and I sprinted a lot and I was jumping really freaking high around that time. I was able to stay in shape. So yeah, think when it comes to the bodyweight training or if you lack of equipment, that's one of the most important things that you can do, and it's gonna get you a lot better. Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I definitely agree. That was all my points essentially. I just rattled them off as fast as possible. So I know, Isaiah, you have some stuff here discussing just how the training came to be, which we talked about, and then differences and similarities in training with weights is the next one here, I guess.
Speaker 1:Maybe the Yeah. I don't know. What do what would your answer be for that?
Speaker 2:A lot of it was already already covered. I think one thing that I do have to mention is that, and this is my I I would say it's pretty objective opinion, but training with weights is superior to to bodyweight training is basically you have a big constraint and you just have to be as creative as possible to continue making things harder and adding variety to the training. And the reason that weight training is superior in my opinion is because you can always just add more weight. They made this really nice contraption where you can just keep loading it up.
Speaker 1:There's reason people use the weight room. Yeah. No. I think there I think there are a lot of benefits and it's tough to argue for body weight being necessarily better. I think that you can make an argument either way is maybe what I would say.
Speaker 1:But it's Yeah. I think it's easier. I don't think it's better. I think it's easier. That's what I would say.
Speaker 1:I would say it's better in the sense of long term. Right? You're giving yourself the capability to have more means and methods, but ultimately there's infinite amount of variability or variance that you can build into a program with just body weight. There's infinite amounts. You go from pistol squats to slow pistol squats to stopping in the middle to stopping twice along the descent to stopping three times.
Speaker 1:Mean, you could stop infinite amounts of times. You could hold it
Speaker 2:for The different the difference is that if you have weights, now you can do all of that but just add more weight.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, you can positive
Speaker 3:for it.
Speaker 1:Like, I really think
Speaker 2:that's at
Speaker 3:the end
Speaker 1:of the day, like, there's more there is more there it is easier to build in variability. It is easier to build in specificity. It's easier to do all those things. You can do it with bodyweight training, but you have to have someone guiding you that knows a lot about what you're trying to achieve and a lot about the types of stimulus that they're putting in. And it's not just like any bodyweight training can work.
Speaker 1:What's that?
Speaker 2:And someone that's creative. You have to be creative. You guys have no idea. I've seen John write all the body weight cycles in our program. And every week, it's like, how the hell am I gonna do this?
Speaker 2:Then you and then you pull some crazy exercise like and a lot of it is stuff that like that you've there's a lot of original like exercises in there that we've come up with. It it was it came from being creative. Like, you have to be creative to to keep writing a good body weight program Yeah. A week. Because everybody anybody can make, like, a a one week template and just do the same exercises over and over again.
Speaker 2:Where it becomes really difficult is where you just have to make it more intense.
Speaker 1:You gotta increase progressive overload, individuality, specificity, long term increases in intensity, it decreases in volume and building and plumbing jobs.
Speaker 2:And it's periodized. That's the
Speaker 1:other That's where it gets hard. And and I definitely agree with that. There's definitely times where I just wanna claw my eyeballs out and I'm just like, I am on week 58. I'm on the the 15 cycle of bodyweight progression. Like, these
Speaker 2:I always joke. I always joke. I'm like, John, you haven't added the the sissy squat the one leg sissy squat depth landing in there.
Speaker 1:Come on. Kinda like that is the end of the progression, but no one can do that. The level yeah. There there are levels to this, and that one, I I don't have a progression for yet. Like, at what point do you start building that in?
Speaker 1:But, yeah, it definitely it it does get difficult. And I think at times for my athletes, probably gets a little monotonous to just do variations of pistol squats and variations of sissy squats and variations of reverse Nordics. That has to get old at some point, I feel. But if you guys have done it for any extended period of time or you've been on it that long, if you've been on it for a year and a half, please
Speaker 2:Yes,
Speaker 1:I'm just go
Speaker 2:Start a go
Speaker 1:for it. COVID has over enough. Alright? Just go get yourself I gave you a year and a half to figure it out.
Speaker 3:GoFundMe page. I'm trying to dunk, guys. Come on. Help brother out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I'm trying to help you. Help me help you by just getting a weight room access after a year and a half.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Even honestly, minimum, because there's guys that have literally been on it for a year and a half. Minimum, you can buy a
Speaker 1:dumbbell. Some dumbbells.
Speaker 2:And now and we can do dumbbell training now.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I have probably fifteen to twenty weeks of dumbbell training written as well. And, specifically, it's so hard to do load management on body weight. It is so difficult because Yeah. At that point, it's
Speaker 2:That's one of the points I wanna
Speaker 1:bring up. At that point, it's so hard because it's sensory based. I can't measure how many degrees of flexion you're in if I'm doing lever based loading. I can't measure that. And what am I you want me to do?
Speaker 1:Put a fucking goniometer up to your kneecap every time you do a pistol squat? Like, that's not gonna happen. Like, it's not gonna happen.
Speaker 2:Yo. The super ice age is gonna is gonna mean that.
Speaker 1:It's not gonna happen. I'm not gonna put a goniometer up to your kneecap and be like, hey. I want you to go into 25 degrees more reflection today. Like, you can't even quantify that. Like, how are you gonna quantify that?
Speaker 1:By degrees? No. There's no way of really telling what the intramuscular forces are unless I put a fucking tensiometer in your muscle, and I'm like, yeah. Great. I measured it.
Speaker 1:No. It's just really difficult. At the Achilles, it's even harder. Because guess what? Your calf is strong as shit.
Speaker 1:It's a type two lever. You know what that means? That means it's great at producing force. That means that it is like a seesaw in which the seesaw is slid over such that the one side is a super long lever and it's easy to lift up. Like, it's just hard as shit to load.
Speaker 2:It's definitely load load management on body weight is definitely possible and doable, but you need an athlete that's very in tune with their body and very aware about how they feel.
Speaker 1:I think it works because if you're
Speaker 3:yeah.
Speaker 1:It works. Like you said, it's just fucking boring too. Like, you wanna do piss okay. Guess what your progression is for the patella in the terms of the strength work? It's gonna be a pistol squat.
Speaker 1:A single pistol squat. So yeah. You're just gonna be working your way down in-depth until you can do a full pistol squat because a full pistol squat is proficient. If you can do a full pistol squat without pain, you definitely have the capability to move on to drops and some of the elastic work and stuff. But and it's a great slow strength exercise.
Speaker 1:But people don't wanna do that. Like, they're hard. It's hard to balance. You need great hip mobility. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyways, sorry. Go on.
Speaker 2:And it gets progressively harder too. Let's say you add you you only have one dumbbell, then you it's a little easier to make things harder in a load management program. But again, it's just it's really hard to measure how much That's you're progressing because one
Speaker 1:That's hard.
Speaker 2:One of the most important things when you're doing load management is being able to track how much progress you're making in terms of weight, in terms of making things more intense. So I had a question on WhatsApp this morning. Some guy asked me, oh, why has my training looked the same for the last four weeks? He, like, he gave me a date. It was, like, December 3 to to January 1, something like that.
Speaker 2:We're in around the eleventh. Was, like, December 20, January 1. And
Speaker 1:then I was I think I text I actually messaged him back and I'm like, I have to check, but you're probably on
Speaker 2:load management. You regressed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I sent him a voice message. I so I was like, oh, let me look at his training. What is he on? Oh, it was load management. It makes
Speaker 1:perfect sense.
Speaker 2:And then I was like, oh. And what I told him was it looks the same because and right now, we're just doing drops. So the one variable that's changing in his training is drops. They're progressively getting more intense over time. During load management, if you are dealing with a lot of different variables, it's hard to single out what specifically is causing you pain and if that's progressing.
Speaker 2:So if you're doing jobs, but then you're also changing the rep schemes for your for your weight training and then you're sprinting at the same time and all this stuff. And let's say one day you wake up and your pain went up, we have no fucking clue what exactly that was.
Speaker 1:So And then I'm like, wait. Did you play basketball? Wait. Did you go for a run? Did you walk upstairs?
Speaker 1:Did you help a friend move? And usually, it's one of those. Like, oftentimes when people's when their knee pain goes up, I'm like, did you read the note that said, don't do anything except the training? Don't load the tendon? They're like, I did stretch it for twenty five minutes because I did see this one video.
Speaker 1:And I was like, I put in the note, don't stretch. Or it'll be like Yeah. Yeah. And that just is compounded when you get into bodyweight training because there are so many little places where the athlete can make mistakes in terms of the progression. Even if I say go a little lower than last week and use pain as a gauge, don't go above a three or a four, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:The athlete might still screw up. They might go an inch deeper than they were supposed to on a pistol squat and then their knee hurts. They might change the how fast they were going down and then it it just it gets really difficult.
Speaker 2:And it's I'll reverse Nordic. I'll use reverse Nordic as an example. I wanted to start using that as a gauge to to see how my quads doing. But I would do it one day and it it'd be like a four and then the next day I'd go and then it felt better, but I was like, wait. Did I go as this deep last time?
Speaker 2:Am I like, I have I have no fucking clue. So yeah. You have to use something that's the easier it is to measure it, the better.
Speaker 1:Hunter, what's it saying about measuring? What do you say? If you can't measure it?
Speaker 2:That's a
Speaker 3:no. It's if you can't if you can't measure it, you can't manage it.
Speaker 1:There we go. Yeah. That's what load management is. Load management. If you can't manage that note.
Speaker 1:Can't manage it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I think we've pretty much covered every
Speaker 1:So in in closing, guys, I covered, does it work? Yes. Covered types of equipment free loading. You have partner based loading, which is where a friend helps you. Barrier based loading where you try to move an immovable object.
Speaker 1:Modified lever loading modified lever based loading where you're moving the axis of rotation farther away from the center mass. And unilateral or asymmetric loading where it's going from two legs to one legs. On top of that, you have plyometric options, you have sprint options. All of those can definitely make you better. Downside, it's harder to be creative.
Speaker 1:It's harder to get it done. It's harder to progress and need a shaman, a guide to take you from point a to point B and make sure that you're following all of the underlying training principles. As always guys, make sure that you like the podcast, rate it, share it, put it on your story, tag us, and we will reshare it. If you're listening on Apple or Spotify, make sure that you like it and comment there as well because we are trying to move to the very top of the health, fitness, basketball, sports training podcast categories, and get it recommended to as many people so we can help as many people as possible. That all said, guys.
Speaker 1:Peace out. We'll catch you on tomorrow's episode. Peace.