This blog is a review of the Pacey Performance Podcast Episode 362 – Matt Van Dyke

While I was getting my Masters I did two summer internships and six months full time working for Cal Dietz at University of Minnesota.  Then I moved to University of Denver as Head of Strength & Conditioning for 2.5 years, where I also met Dr Nick Studholme (he runs a system called FNOR – Functional Neural Orthopaedic Rehabilitation).  I transitioned to more of a sports science role at University of Texas looking at the athlete through a holistic lens.

I now work in an NFL setting and being part of a sports performance team where I sit in the middle of Strength & Conditioning staff, Sports Medicine Staff and Nutrition & Wellness, and from my perspective providing the best insight that we have available from the testing and monitoring into athlete availability for our coaches and management.

• What aspects do we feel are valuable linked to on field performance?
• Link between positional demands and physical preparation
• What is our end goal of change and did we create that change?
• In season is really about fatigue management, and that’s where auto-regulation comes into play
• We have to be able to have actionable data- we don’t just want to collect data
• Create buy in, which ensure that the athlete gives effort in their testing.
• How can we help them recover more and create that unbreakable athlete?

Would you mind taking us through the six pillars of athletic performance?

”I would say that those six pillars in some combination or other create every single athlete movement goal or process that an athlete can produce on the field.

(taken from article: Athlete assessments: evaluation of more than just athletes)

Now it’s all about fitting the training programme that you are going to implement based on the context that you have available; so if you talk to Cal he is going to use block periodisation for all of these; well he is going to have his athletes for 40 something weeks of the year potentially so that’s going to be a different model than a group that potentially has 8-10 weeks with their athletes out of the year, and obviously as you progress through different levels of sport the availability to them changes pretty drastically.

Repeat sprint ability is truly your end goal for the majority of team sports.

This would look different for a cyclical sport like track & field or swimming etc.  The speed component is ultimately what we are chasing after but if we are only going to see our athletes at certain times throughout a year and they are get a lot of that from on field then we are going to focus on the pieces that will move the needle that they are probably not getting. But again, it entirely depends on the context of the situation that you are in, of how you would programme to achieve each of those.

In terms of the energy system work for repeat sprint ability the oxidative system is not going to be specifically trained like it would in a block periodisation system, but it’s going to be more like a repeat sprint ability, we’re not going to go out and train the glycolytic system and run 300 yard shuttles because that’s not beneficial to them.  They need to produce intense amounts of force and energy in a matter of 4-6 seconds, sometimes as short as 2-5 seconds, and then recover from that.  So in the couple of weeks we have with them we are going to make sure that we are preparing them for those demands and not just necessarily the long slow aerobic work.”

How would you programme for those demands of the key 3-4 second bursts before the sub when you have those constraints?

”The more I look at it, the more I’m going to err on the side of quality training.  If I’m looking at velocity drop off in the gym or the field we don’t want to see ever greater than a 10% drop, then we are training in a fatigued state.  There are times in a game when you are going to need to do that, but if you use the analogy of the heavy slow back squat versus the drop jump, the impulse is going to be significantly higher in the drop jump even though the total force over the two jumps may be similar.  So we want to look at the impulse and the quality of that foot strike with limited time, and once they can do it once, can we get them to do it  repeatedly.

Early on in the off-season will have days designed specifically for acceleration, change of direction, some type of volume training so it’s going to be a little bit more the conditioning side of things and then as we gear towards the season it’s going to be more of a repeat sprint ability. It’s almost like a high to low approach but then as you get closer to the season it’s going to be more like a high to moderate approach as the lows aren’t really lows anymore, as if you are going to practice for 3-4 days in a row the athletes have to be prepared for that.”

Let’s dive into the strength pillar.  Tell us a little bit more about the triphasic method and your take on it

”The big pieces of it are the 6 physical components that we have spoken about already, but then really it’s about how can we take the work that Cal has done and then restructure it slightly to fit into the context that we were in at Denver.

The most important take away is that people want to talk about just the eccentric, the isometric and the concentric and say okay well that’s the triphasic system, but the way I look at it is, yes the muscle action is a component of the triphasic system but when you really get into it there is also that modified undulated block within the week that he is going to do, and the block periodisation.  Cal has undulated the programme in order to ensure that there are never too many training qualities trained in the same block.  And so that block periodisation piece is going to break up each of those physical performance qualities and train them based on how long they are retained within the athlete’s body.

The eccentric, isometric and concentric pieces are obviously key and people understand that and implement that the most.   Realistically it is shifting into that power and speed, creating more of an elastic tensile system and now can I do that under high velocity conditions which are going to be required in sport.  Now the majority of time is going to be spent in that strength component because you never really know what an athlete has done when they come to you, and the motor learning from eccentric and isometric is going to play a key role as well.”

Daz comment- Matt wrote a fascinating article as a guest post on Max Schmarzo Blog ‘Programming Application to Match Desired Adaptations, (October 2017).’

He talks about how he integrates the Joe Kenn Tier System to improve basic strength and then uses the Triphasic system to peak his athletes and improve reactive strength  (what Matt calls his ”Tierphasic” system).

1. Increase fitness and function
2. Improve basic strength (Tier system)
3. Improve reactive strength (Triphasic system)
4. Increase power and speed
5. Maintain physical attributes throughout competitive season

The Triphasic system takes the newly developed force producing capabilities and increases the use of that strength in a reactive manner. It is in this phase the three muscle action phases are individually trained as this continues to allow adaptation to both the nervous system, muscle tissue as well the biomechanical efficiency of that movement.  The stretch-shortening cycle is the focus of Triphasic training, and the goal of triphasic training is to train and optimise each component of the stretch-shortening cycle separately.  In the final concentric phase timed sets become particularly important (around 55-80% 1RM, mean bar velocity 0.67-1.0 m/s).

The final off-season primary goal consists of training that improves the athlete’s power and speed.  I believe this is the most critical aspect for the transfer of training onto the competitive field in many sports as they are completed at the highest velocities (around 55% 1RM or less, mean bar velocity 1.0 m/s).  This is known as the ‘below 55’ method.  It can use light weights, at body weight, and accelerated speeds.

Oscillatory training is utilised in this block to prepare your muscles to fire as rapidly as possible, and also train your antagonist to relax more quickly, allowing an even faster contraction.

French contrast training is utilised throughout all of the triphasic blocks.  These series of styles of plyometrics, including weighted, body weight and accelerated, prepare them for the below 55 training block.

How did you programme oscillatory training into the triphasic method?

Oscillatory (OC) training is implemented throughout the Triphasic Training Method.  To the untrained eye, these brief, 3-4 inch movements applied with well trained athletes can appear gimmicky and useless, this could not be further from the truth.  The OC methods utilised are able to improve strength within specific movement ranges, and involve a rapid ‘push-pull’ motion in an attempt to maximise the ability of an athlete to reverse the muscle action phase at high velocity.

When we actually get into the strength it does depend on how many days you have to train but typically about 2 days or so of eccentric training is going to give you a good stimulus, and same for isometrics.  Based on the context of how you are implementing it whether you have 3 or more days training, if you had three days then we would typically implement it in the strength block.  So if you have 3 days of training, days 1 (medium intensity-medium volume) and 3 (lower intensity and high volume) would be whatever muscle action you are in (eccentric, isometric, concentric), and then that middle one would be the reactive day (high intensity low volume) so we are going to potentially do timed sets there to match the weight room to the demands (such as 5 seconds get as many reps as you can).

Tissue tolerance using OC

Tissue tolerance is created through the use of 30 second OC work in the general preparation training block.  In this phase the athlete is introduced to the OC methods through a moderate intensity and increased volume.    It is through the increased volume that strength and skill learning within specific ranges of motion take place, while also maximising the metabolic requirements of the general preparation block.

Strength and power blocks

You are typically going to train that in a disadvantageous position so you are going to train that in your weakest range of motion with high loads above 80%.  Bear in mind 80% 1RM is only 80% of your strength at your weakest position, and so that oscillatory method puts you at that sticking point for the entire 5 seconds so now you are talking about training strength at their weakest position.

Speed phase

As you progress through the blocks you can switch that oscillatory into more of an advantageous position now its about more about speed, or a critical joint angle that you might be in during acceleration or top speed.   With the goal of maximising neural drive in the speed phase the advantageous position can be utilised, with moderate loads of 45-55% 1RM.

The ultimate goal of the entire system is this thought process of contraction and relaxation agonist and antagonist working together, and there is a huge component of motor learning.

That’s why eccentric to isometric to concentric (reactive), and then power and speed (which are commonly left off because we are focused on the strength component) is important to remember that the firing patterns are most changed by the high velocity movements.

So with this skill learning of this speed training programme did we create a change in that relaxation- as the only difference between Matveyev’s fourth and fifth level classification of athlete was how fast they can relax their antagonist.

Progress throughout the Annual Cycle

As increased data is collected within the annual cycle, the time of year also becomes important in the evaluation process. With the understanding of athlete progression from general to specific throughout the annual process, it should be accepted they will not perform at the highest level on all testing metrics throughout the entire year. Rather, there should be key milestones within the annual training process that an athlete should aim for based on their individual results from the previous year and the positional baseline requirements.

If each group (sports coaches, medical team and S&C team) has a different goal for an athlete that does not work in synchronisation, the athlete will not experience the full benefits of the program being implemented. This misalignment could happen anywhere in the organisation and create a situation that could have easily been avoiding with communication.

This becomes particularly important in transition periods within the annual cycle. All groups must understand the goal and outputs required of athletes when a new phase begins. The example in the Figure below represents those phases and how the consistent building for “what is next?” is critical for athlete performance and reduced injury risk. When this pattern is understood by everyone involved, athlete assessments and progress become increasingly important as the ultimate question is asked “is this athlete prepared to tolerate this new training/practice/competition phase?”

Top 5 Take Away Points:

Episode 372 Jeremy Sheppard & Dana Agar Newman

Episode 367 Gareth Sandford

Episode 362 Matt Van Dyke

Episode 361 John Wagle

Episode 359 Damien Harper

Episode 348 Keith Barr

Episode 331 Danny Lum

Episode 298 PJ Vazel

Episode 297 Cam Jose

Episode 295 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 292 Loren Landow

Episode 286 Stu McMillan

Episode 272 Hakan Anderrson

Episode 227, 55 JB Morin

Episode 217, 51 Derek Evely

Episode 212 Boo Schexnayder

Episode 207, 3 Mike Young

Episode 204, 64 James Wild

Episode 192 Sprint Masterclass

Episode 183 Derek Hansen

Episode 175 Jason Hettler

Episode 87 Dan Pfaff

Episode 55 Jonas Dodoo

Episode 15 Carl Valle

This blog is a review of the Pacey Performance Podcast Episode 359 – Damien Harper

So in essence there are two key components when we look at deceleration; one how well they can control the braking forces and two is how well they can attenuate and distribute those forces throughout the lower limbs. Therefore braking force control and braking force attenuation are the two key components that I look at.

Bill Knowles first came up with the mantra ”Don’t speed up what you can’t slow down.”

If an athlete hasn’t got that deceleration ability alongside that acceleration and top speed capability, then they are going to take a longer time and longer distance to slow down.

It is perhaps more accurate to say an athlete will not speed up what they can’t slow down, and there is probably a self regulatory mechanism there which is the athlete will reduce their speed knowing that they have got a deceleration at the end of it.  So they won’t speed up what they can’t slow down to try and protect them from potential tissue damage which could occur in deceleration, which consumes some of the highest mechanical loads on the lower limbs.

Athletes who can decelerate more rapidly can enhance their COD ability so in essence they can hold off their brakes for longer because they can reduce their speed over shorter distances and times, so they can access a greater percentage of their top speed potential during the COD task.  That deceleration capacity becomes absolutely critical in terms of enhancing overall speed potential.

In addition to performance enhancement with COD, an individual who has got better deceleration ability can actually reduce the amount of mechanical load that is going to be exposed on the plant step where we see all these ACL injuries and potential lower limb injuries.

You wouldn’t get in a super car that has amazing top speed capabilities if you knew that the brakes were warn and not working very well, you just wouldn’t put the accelerator down because in any set distance you know it is going to take longer to brake.

The problem with the super car analogy is that until recently we haven’t really been able to get a good indication of an athlete’s deceleration capability, so we don’t know how that interacts with the acceleration and top speed; we don’t know how good the brakes are as such.

What are the options for testing deceleration capability?

One of the problems we have had with advancing deceleration has been linked to the difficulty we have in measuring it, as it is much harder to measure than your acceleration and top speed capability but the good news is I can now see more options that can be applied on the field, which is great.  In terms of measuring deceleration there are two options; one to measure it during a change of direction task (such as a 5-0-5 test) which requires the athlete to bring their momentum to zero before changing direction so there is a really big deceleration demand within a 5-0-5 test.  Generally angles less than 60 degrees are no good because they are focused on maintaining speed.

The other option is Horizontal acceleration to deceleration in a linear path; you could get the athlete to stop at a pre-set distance- where the athlete has to sprint and then come to a stop at that [20m] line.  The other option is to commence deceleration at a pre-set distance.  So at the [20m] mark they have to put on the brakes and try to stop as quickly as possible; we refer to that as the Acceleration-Deceleration-Ability (ADA) test.

So then the question is how do you measure deceleration during those tasks?  It took me about 12 months to arrive at the conclusion that we need to have instantaneous velocity throughout the task using radar, or laser or high speed video or electro-motor devices like the 1080 sprint.  It surprises me that even today there are only a couple of studies that have attempted to capture instantaneous velocity during a change of direction task.  I refer to these as ‘direct methods’ of measuring deceleration.

There are also ‘indirect methods‘ of capturing deceleration such as the ‘change of direction deficit’ and the ‘deceleration deficit, but they are only an estimation, we don’t know at the minute if they actually give you an indication of an athlete’s deceleration capacity which in essence is metres per second squared (m/s 2).

We selected 20m at the time because we wanted to select a distance which allowed the athlete to get near to their maximum velocity, so therefore we challenged their deceleration capacity.  The greater the speed they approach the deceleration the greater the demands on their deceleration demands are going to be.  We wanted to ensure we capture their maximum deceleration ability.  You could adapt that distance to the demands of the sport.

You can look at AVERAGE deceleration (taking all the instantaneous values over the entire deceleration phase and getting an average of their deceleration values) and Peak deceleration (which is a single value), but I’ve tended to think that this isn’t the best measure of an athlete’s deceleration ability as this doesn’t really account for the entire deceleration phase.

There is a possibility that athletes with high peak deceleration may be obtaining them because they are not able to spread the deceleration across the entire deceleration phase.  Therefore there are high peak values occuring particularly near the back end of the deceleration.

What tech do you need to be able to capture those measure?

”I used a radar gun (Stalker) but you can also use laser devices, which have a higher sampling frequency such as ergo test laser speed device, (which I believe has the ADA test built into the software).

But you could also obtain instantaneous velocity with high speed video such as dartfish or some of the newer devices such as 1080 sprint.

If you don’t have a budget for high tech equipment there is an option to look at some indirect indication of an athlete’s deceleration ability by looking at some of the underpinning qualities connected to the physical qualities that are needed to decelerate.  This could include drop jumps and counter movement jumps, and use some of the specific metrics within them.

With the drop jump reactive strength index (RSI) was proposed as a key physical quality for deceleration, originally proposed anecdotally by Marc Kovacs.  Recently we found quite large associations with RSI from either 20cm or 40cm and deceleration ability.  When we broke the deceleration into early (50% Vmax) and late deceleration phase (50% Vmax to zero) we found that drop jump RSI had a greater association with early deceleration phase- shorter ground contacts and really high impact peaks when there is perhaps more of a heel strike and there is a transition from that top speed to the first few steps of deceleration phase.

Athlete’s who could put the brakes on quicker could achieve greater deceleration ability across the whole deceleration phase.  So greater drop jump RSI could be important for tolerating the higher forces during the early deceleration phase, and ability to reduce the mechanical loads in the final foot contact and have better change of direction.  This could also be linked to ability to pre-activate prior to ground contact, and therefore pre-tension prior to hitting the ground.

Can you speak to us about strategies to actually improve deceleration?

I have already mentioned about reactive strength as possibly one key quality.  The other qualities that Mark mentioned at the time was:

• Eccentric strength
• Dynamic balance
• Power – which includes rate of force development (RFD)

Eccentric strength is quite a wide area.  By identifying some of these specific eccentric qualities we can help then to target our training strategies.  Of the eccentric qualities we looked at during a counter movement jump, it was the ones linked to eccentric deceleration phase – eccentric peak force and eccentric RFD which had the biggest difference between those who had low and high deceleration abilities.  Now that gives us a little bit better insight and these qualities have been linked to an athlete’s stretch load tolerance or limb stiffness capabilities.  They are also under reasonably fast joint angular velocities- the downward phase round about 200 degrees/second- so they are having to produce those forces pretty quick- with highest rates at the ankle and knee as much as 500 degrees/second.

In terms of eccentric maximum strength we have seen most evidence to target the quadriceps which is perhaps not surprising as the quadriceps are absolutely critical in terms of resisting that knee joint flexion/controlling that yielding during the braking step and also critical for attenuating the forces when we brake.  The knee and the ankle will attenuate (dampen) about 70% of the force during deceleration so before it gets to the hip the majority of force has already been dampened and reduced.  You could also look at muscles such as the rectus femoris which because of the trunk position, places quite a big demand on that muscle, so you do see exercises like a reverse Nordic being used with an upright trunk.

A lot of my ideas about means to develop solutions, a lot of these ideas have come off the back of the work I did with the Football Association looking at development of a braking strength framework to prepare international footballers for competition demands.

1. Braking ELEMENTARY exercises – have highest level of tissue/neural overload (single joint, unilateral)
2. Braking DEVELOPMENTAL exercises
3. Braking PERFORMANCE exercises – have highest level of coordination overload (small sided games or utilizing unanticipated decelerations to target really high forces that are highly specific to what the athlete is going to face in competition).

To increase the players damage resistance to high deceleration loads.

An example of a method such as ‘rapid eccentrics’ would probably fit in the braking developmental exercise category.  We are increasing their eccentric peak force, eccentric RFD and also ability to switch off quickly to unload the centre of mass quickly and could include exercises such as squat drop, or snatch drop and then arrest that movement at the bottom.  You can look at a fast eccentric squats which is an eccentric only exercise, where we emphasise the speed of the downwards phase (40-70% 1RM).

Drop jump type activities- and activities which may accentuate that component.  You can also do activities such as dropping from a relatively low height with an additional load, and then the concentric phase has a lower level of load than the eccentric phase.  It can be done with dumbbells, hex bar, elastic resistance (loaded on the downwards and then explode on the upwards phase).  He bar is preferable to dumbbells as the athlete is not worrying about landing on the dumbbells.

How can you manipulate SSG in order to target deceleration?

I’m finding the 4 vs 4 and 5 vs 5 (smaller SSG) really stresses the frequency of decelerations, high frequency of velocity changes which may help develop the enduring nature of decelerations.  It may be larger SSG that are needed to develop the maximal deceleration capabilities where there are opportunities to attain higher movement velocities, which has important implications for managing the microcycles, particularly in the competition phase.

A constraint is whether you utilize goals or not, and with the goals in place research suggests there is more linear running and transitions whereas the possession only SSG doesn’t achieve that as much.  You can also use different numbers such as a 4 vs 5 to offset the numbers could be another option.

Where is the research going in the future?

• Resisted/assisted concepts with 1080 motion device  to develop deceleration and COD
• Advancing the assessment of deceleration including limb to limb demands across a period of time
• Training interventions to develop deceleration capabilities – very little research been done here

Top 5 Take Away Points:

This blog is a review of the Pacey Performance Podcast Episode 348 – Keith Baar

Keith completed his PhD at the University of Illinois looking at the mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1 (mTORC1) in the maintenance of muscle mass.

Daz comment – here is quick overview on the role of the tendon and the process of remodeling, before we dive into Keith’s podcast talk with Pacey Performance.

• Tendons have the ability to store and release energy like a spring, and to be stiff with standing loading.  These attributes allow efficient running and jumping.
• Tendons need tension to adapt and cartilage need compression.
• When a tendon is loaded appropriately it adapts by strengthening, and becomes stronger by increasing ‘stiffness‘, NOT by becoming thicker.
• It is also possible to relatively unload a tendon, either when returning from injury or in the case of athletes who vary from being relatively unloaded, having appropriate load, to excessive unloaded.
• The unloaded tendon becomes stress shielded, whereby the superficial portion of tendon bares too much load and the deep portion too little.
• The stress shielded tendon under normal or even excessive load can become reactive.  The reactive tendon will try to ‘thicken‘ to reduce stress.

Taken from Andrew Walker, Physical Therapist.  You can see the full video later on in the blog

”So the first thing is anytime you load the tendon, isometric, eccentric, concentric muscle work, the tendon gets the same signal if the tendon is happy. If it’s a healthy tendon, it doesn’t matter how you train it. The muscle, the genetic response varies based on the type of load, the tendon it doesn’t vary. So all that means is that you could do any of them on a healthy tendon. And so that’s the important thing. If your tendon is perfectly healthy, no problems at all, you can train however you want. You can do lots of ballistic movements. You can do whatever, whatever isometric, eccentric, concentric movements you want.

The difference appears when you get some sort of injury to the tendon because when you have an injury to the tendon, now what you get is that section of the tendon doesn’t get loaded when we do normal dynamic loading. We have a paper that should be coming out in the next little bit where my PhD student Danielle has put a biopsy punch to put a hole in the middle of a rat patellar tendon. So right in the middle, just like you would see in a lot of, kind of chronic patellar tendinopathy, it’s a central cord tendon injury right up near the patella. And then what she’s done is we’ve waited 15 days for that to form this tendinopathic tissue. And interestingly, the genes that we see expressed in that tendinopathic tissue are the exact same ones that we see in human tendinopathic tendons.  So the rat tendon is modeling that human tendinopathy.

Isometric vs. Dynamic Muscle Contractions for Tendon re-modelling

When we then do either four isometric loads, and these are overcoming isometrics that are held for 30 seconds. So they’re very long isometrics with two minutes of rest in between, or we do the exact same time under tension matched and length of time of loading matched using dynamic movements. So they’re one third of a second and we give one third of a second dynamic contractions to the muscle or to the tendon. When we take out that tendon, we look at the genes that are expressed…………

The one that did the isometric loading has the expression of tendon.

So we see tendon specific markers go up. We see collagen Type 1 go up. In the one that had the dynamic contractions on it, so it’s dynamically loaded and it’s a central core tendinopathy, we actually see genes going up that are more similar to what you would see in fibre cartilage (compression like genes);  because as you pull it really quickly, what we get is we get stress shielding around the injured area.

Figure – Stress shielding key concept to understand why partial damage to the injured tendon can prevent rupture. How do you get load through the area though? Tension (not compression which creates cartilage).

We get that stress shielding, because the tendon it’s what we call an ISO-volumetric tissue. That means as I stretch it, I’ve made it longer. So in order to make it longer and keep the same volume, it has to get skinnier. So as I pull it up, if there’s a hole in the middle, the sides are then compressing the middle. And if there’s no tensional load, because it’s been disconnected from the tension above and below, now you’ve only got a compressive force. You’d no longer have a tensional force. So the reason that isometrics become important in that situation is because as I pull and I hold at that longer, skinnier length, what’s happening is the sides of the tendon where it’s still healthy are relaxing, just like we said, with creep or with stress relaxation.

And now what happens is the whole tendon becomes less stiff because I’m holding it there and there’s a decrease in the tension within the tendon. And as it becomes less stiff, I actually get tensional load through the injured area of the tissue. And when it feels that tensional load, now it knows, oh, I should be a tendon and I should express these genes and it starts making those genes. But when we just dynamically load and we do these faster movements, we don’t see that. And so that’s when it becomes important to use isometrics for a tendon. You can use, and I know track athletes who use what they call isometrics for very short, like 0.2 second isometrics, where they’re just going to go up as hard as they can hold it and drop. For me that, that doesn’t really count as an isometric because yes, the joint hasn’t necessarily changed its length, but the muscle has shortened because it’s taken up the tension within the tendon.

So there’s beautiful work out of the University of Calgary that shows that if you do an isometric load, which means that you keep the joint at the same angle, the muscle is shortening, the tendon is lengthened. And that makes sense to most of us because yeah, you can see if I go and I isometrically load my bicep, my bicep becomes bigger. That’s what a bodybuilder does. Isometric and they flex their biceps. Well, if it’s happening that way, that means that the muscle is shortening, even though the elbow joints in our bodybuilder example, isn’t shortening. So you’ve got a shortening of the muscles. So it’s, the muscle is still contracting concentrically, but the joint isn’t changing. So the really short isometrics as people call them, aren’t necessarily isometrics in the way that we’re thinking of muscle and tendon.

Long isometrics to induce stress relaxation of tendons

What I’m thinking of when I say isometrics are long isometrics, and I use them as a way to induce what’s called stress relaxation, which is basically as you pull on the tendon, the strongest parts of the tendon relax, and you see that as a decrease in the tension within the tendon. And that decrease in tension within the tendon gets to its low point around 30 seconds. So about 30 seconds of an isometric hold on a tendon, the tendon’s tension will have gone down about 45%. So that the tendon will have stretched and the tension within there has gone down a huge amount. If I go all the way up to three minutes, it won’t have gone down much more than another 5%. That’s why I use that 30 seconds.

When you’re doing a 10 second isometric, you’re going to get some of that, but it’s not going to be as complete a relaxation. You can get other things that are really important. People use them to overcome, like when people have issues with where they feel like they can’t increase the weight and they’re a strength athlete, they can use isometrics as a way to kind of take advantage of the fact that we’re stronger in the isometric than we are in the concentric. And now we can slowly overcome and build through stopping points within our progression. So people can use them for a whole bunch of other things, but for the tendon component, we’re using it for that stress relaxation at that 30 second time point.

What does overcoming mean in terms of an example of an exercise and what alternatives are there to overcoming?

Overcoming isometrics

”Perfect, so what a lot of people do is the classic leg extension machine, which I know people, those are the machines that people have to go and find them on eBay because nobody’s used them in 40 years. But a lot of people just take it, put the weight at the bottom, kick out as hard as they can, and basically hold it for 30 seconds. What I tend to do is I tend to give people a yoga strap. I gave them a handheld dynamometer (there are some that are sold from San Diego that are like a hundred bucks). So it’s a really good tool because basically now I can have you kick out against that yoga strap onto that handheld dynamometer, it’ll go to your phone and it’ll show you how hard you’re pushing for 30 seconds and it’ll time you for 30 seconds and you just keep it that way. Or you can do like a hamstring curl. And all it is, is that you’re in a position, you are trying to overcome the weight and you’re not, and the weight is not yielding. So basically the weight is more than you could lift. And as a result, an overcoming isometric is you’re always trying to overcome the weight, but it’s never possible, you’re not strong enough to do it. And usually you do it from the longest position of the muscle, so from the greatest muscle length.

So if you’re thinking of a hamstring curl, it’s a straight leg position where you’re about to pull in. If you’re doing a leg extension, the knee is at 70 ish percent and you’re trying to push it out as hard as you can. And so that’s the overcoming isometric.

Yielding isometrics

The yielding isometric what we’ll do with this one is we’ll push up a weight on leg press with two feet, and it’s a weight that you can lift with two, but you can’t lift with one and it’s really heavy for one. And then you take away one and you’re just trying to hold it there and you’re not trying to yield.

Technique: Low Jerk isometric

Okay, so you’re basically, like with most of our isometrics when we’re trying to get tendon and muscle working optimally is that we found that if you can get to high force without a lot of jerk, which means that you’re not moving the weight abruptly. So when you’re doing an overcoming isometric, you don’t kick out as hard as you can immediately. What you’re going to do is you’re going to develop force over about a two second period where you’re slowly raising force. You’re going to hold that maximum force and you’re going to let it off easily.

If you’re doing that, that’s what we call a low jerk isometric and that’s really what we’re looking for isometrics. We want them to be in a long muscle length because it seems like, and again, I have a PhD student who’s going to specifically look at what the muscle length should be during these isometrics for optimal tendon health, but from some of the clinical work that we’ve done, we’ve found that a longer muscle length actually has a better outcome for both the muscle and the tendon. And again, you just think of it as that’s usually where when you’re at a longer muscle length that means that the stretch on the system is going to be the greatest.”

Is there any differences in terms of adaptation and muscle tendon in the two types of isometrics that you just described?

”Nobody’s done the experiments yet, to be honest. So we’re early days with this, as far as experimentally, how these types of loads actually affect both the muscle and the tendon. The tendon, what we’re focusing on is this stress relaxation component, but it could be that there’s other things happening there because the other thing that we’re doing is we’re actually producing a very high force movement, or high force contraction with the muscle. And that’s going to stimulate the matrix of the muscle as well as the muscle to get stronger.

One of the reasons that we use heavy strength training in our training, for every single athlete that we work with, is because that heavy strength training is going to make the muscle stronger. And if you go back to the beginning, we said that injury to the muscle happens when the tendon is stiffer than the muscle is strong. So if I make the muscle stronger, now the likelihood of me getting a muscle pull is going to go down. And you saw that, you know, last year after the Champions League final, when they showed all these pictures of the guys from Bayern Munich, and they were all these big hulking people. A lot of the reasons that you’re doing strength training is to make sure that the muscle is stronger than the tendon is stiff.

You talked about fast and slow training and the benefits of both, why it include both. Would you mind just touching on that for us? 

”Yeah, sure. So what we’ve got is that, as I said, a tendon is what we call a variable mechanical tissue. That means on the muscle end, it’s stretchy and on the bone end it’s stiff. And the way that we maintain that muscle and compliance is through our activity. And we know this because we did a study in rodents where we actually cut the nerve to the muscle, so the muscle couldn’t contract anymore. So that’s the same thing that would happen if you put yourself in a boot or if you had a lot of time off or you’re sitting for a long time. And then what we found is that, whereas on a normal animal, we see the muscle end of the tendon’s really compliant and the bone end’s really stiff, after we cut the nerve and we let them not be able to load it for five weeks, the muscle end of the tendon was just as stiff as the bone end of the tendon.

And so what we think is happening there is that there’s some beautiful work by Talia Voke that showed that if you look at the muscle end of the tendon, you have fewer cross-links than the bone end of the tendon. And so what we think is happening is that as you load with a heavy weight, and when we say a heavy weight, it’s not about the heavy weight, it’s about the slowness of the movement. Again, when we’re talking to athletic trainers they are always like , ”we have to do it slow lengthening contractions because that fixes tendinopathy.”. It’s not about the slow lengthening contractions, it’s about the slow. And when we do a heavy concentric work, that by definition, a heavier weight force velocity relationship means you’re doing it slower.

So we want a heavy weight for two reasons. One is it’s going to make the muscle stronger. The second reason is that it’s going to allow us to break cross-links within the muscle end of the tendon, because as you move more slowly, because it’s a viscoelastic tissue as we talked about before, that means that the collagen molecules within the tendon are going to actually slide past each other. And it might not be individual molecules. It might be fascicles because the interfascicular area’s really active within a tendon. And so a tendon has this really interesting organization where it goes from fibrils to fibres, to fascicles to the whole tendon and those fascicles can slide past each other as well as some of the fibres sliding. And when that happens, we break cross-links between the adjacent fibres, fibrils or fasicles. And as we break cross-links, the cross-links make it stiffer, so when we break them they becomes less stiff.

So we do heavy, slow training, what we’re doing is we’re getting the sliding of the collagen molecules at the muscle end of the tendon. That’s going to allow us to break cross-links at the muscle end of the tendon. That means the muscle end of the tendon is going to be a little bit stiffer. Doesn’t mean the tendon or the muscle or the muscle tendon unit is going to be less stiff because as you’re doing the heavy strength training, you’re also giving a stimulus to the matrix and the muscle that’s going to make that stiffer. So overall, if we took out the whole muscle and tendon, you might actually see an increase in stiffness, but the muscle end of the tendon’s going to decrease in stiffness just a little bit, and it’s not necessarily enough to decrease performance, but it will potentially impact that.

Now, when we do fast training, what’s happening is because it’s a viscoelastic tissue, the collagen in the tendon is stiffer. So instead of having that sliding because the collagen molecules are working like individual molecules, what you get is that as you move faster and faster, the collagen molecules work together as a sheet instead of as individual molecules. And when they’re working together as a sheet, you’re not sliding them past each other, so you’re not breaking any cross-links. When we do any type of exercise, concentric, eccentric, fast, slow doesn’t matter, you get an increase in the enzyme that makes cross-links. So when you do slow exercise, you break cross-links and then you start making new ones, but you don’t make as many as you’ve broken, so your overall stiffness over time will decrease.

When you’re doing really fast movements on a low weight, now what you’re doing is you’re not breaking cross-links during the exercise, and then you’re adding more cross-links afterwards, so over time you’re going to get stiffer. Okay. And the other thing that happens, because when we’re doing fast movements, by definition, those fast movements are against the lighter weight and that means that our muscle, if that’s the only thing it’s exposed to is going to get less strong over time. So now we’ve got a stimulus by doing these fast, fast movements where we’re increasing stiffness of the tendon, decreasing the strength of the muscle. Now we’re going to get into a point where the muscle is not as strong as the tendon is stiff and that’s when we get our muscle pulls.

That’s why when you get into the Olympics, if they happen as scheduled in a hundred or so days, when we get to the track and field in the men’s 200, 400, you’re going to see these guys pulling up with hamstring problems, pulls, because basically they’ve been trying to go as fast as possible so that they can maximize their performance for this one opportunity. And then they get a little bit tired. They over stride a little bit, they hit the ground and the muscle isn’t strong enough to stretch that tendon. And so instead of the tendon stretching, now the muscle stretches when it’s at full length and that’s when we get those hamstring pulls.

And again, it’s going to happen in the men’s because the women, because of the effects of estrogen, estrogen can directly inhibit that enzyme, which adds cross-links. That’s why they get more lax in the knee and fewer muscle pulls. So we wouldn’t expect it to happen as often in the women’s 200, 400, but we’d expect it to happen more often in the mens.”

Another thing you spoke about was the multiple hits per day. Is that something that you do in terms of encouraging people to do that? And is there a time limit or maximum time, minimum time that you’d recommend?

”Yeah, so we definitely do that when we’re coming back from injury.  The research comes back to some things that we did in our little engineered ligaments, and that’s translated really nicely into the human recovery work that we’ve been doing. And so what we found was that we’ve got a minimal effective dose of loading, which means the tendon stops feeling load after about 10 minutes. So the cells, because it’s like the tendon cells, or maybe a 13 year old kid, because they’ll listen to you for a little while and then they stop listening to you entirely. And it takes them a while before they’re going to listen to you again. So they’re more like 13 year olds who still listen a little bit, 16 year old, doesn’t listen at all. So now that 13 year old is going to listen to you our tendon cells for about 10 minutes of activity. And then after that, you can continue to be active, but it’s going to not pay any attention.

So it got all the signal it is going to get from that 10 minutes. And then what we showed is it takes about six to eight hours to recover that ability to signal again. And so, yeah, you can do two bouts or three bouts a day if you’re in recovery and you’re really dead set on recovering as fast as possible. What we do is a morning session, which is five to 10 minutes of activity, and it could just be range of motion activity, where you’re just getting basic load through the tendon. We’re going to wait six to eight hours, so around noon then, we’re going to do another 10 minutes of activities, wait six to eight hours at night before bed. And all of those three bouts are going to give you that minimal effective dose, which is going to give you the signal to adapt as quickly as possible without giving you all of the extra mechanical load that comes with longer periods of training.

And then what we do is we go from those three bouts, we’re going to progressively increase the length of one of those bouts because we have to increase cardiovascular fitness and muscular fitness, so endurance capabilities. And as we do that, we’re going to keep the initial two other bouts as protective for the connective tissue and then as we progressively increase the length of that main session, what we’re going to do is we’re going to then slowly go into a two session a day period where one is a protective session for the connective tissue. The other is a session for tactical, for cardiovascular, for muscular fitness. As far as healthy individuals training, yes, you can do that as well. If your sport is really about performance, about really high intensity, really quick movements, you can do short periods of high intensity movements that are going to last a very short period of time between, you know, even just a 10 minute session is going to have enough to give you the signal that you need.

So what you could do is you can easily, say you’re a sprinter and you need to be as explosive as humanly possible. Now what you’re going to do is you’re going to do one really explosive session in the morning, 10 minutes, bang, you’re done, that’s it, we’re done. Then you’re going to come back and you can do your track work in the afternoon. It’s going to be a little bit more, but now that’s six to eight hours later, the cells are able respond again, but we’ve had two sessions instead of just one big session. And we do see that that does provide an extra stimulus for adaptation.”

The importance of nutrition. I think I found this fascinating, importance of nutrition in the return to play process based on your work and your thoughts, can you give us a bit of an overview of that?

”So there what we’ve seen is that and this again comes back to our engineered ligament work, where we noticed that when we increased the amount of proline and we increased the ascorbic acid in the media of our cells, they actually got a whole lot stronger, the ligaments did. And so we, I just went and said, okay, what’s a food that’s rich in proline and glycine? And of course, collagen or gelatin comes up. And so we did the first study on this in humans with the Australian Institute of Sport. And what we showed is that when you had 15 grams of gelatin an hour before you did six minutes of jump-rope, again, minimal effective dose of loading to load the bone to give us a stimulus for adaptation. What we found is that when we did that every six hours, we saw an increase in collagen synthesis just by doing jump rope every six hours.  And then we saw a further increase when we had the 15 grams of gelatin.

So it does look like that, the collagen synthesis component can be stimulated by collagen or hydrolyzed collagen or gelatin. We’ve just finished the study that we’re trying to get published. We’re in the second revision in the paper and what we’ve done there is we’ve given hydrolyzed collagen or a placebo control to our American football team here at the University of California, Davis when they were doing their strength training. So this is the off season, they’re doing heavy strength training. And like we’ve said, heavy strength training actually decreases rate of force development because all you’re doing is moving slow. And so even when you try and include some ballistic movements, that’s still a dominant thing when you lift really heavy for a number of days.

But when we included the gelatin in there, what we saw was that we actually didn’t see as big a decrease in rate of force development. And the rate of force development recovered much, much faster to the point where at the end of the study, the group that was in the hydrolyzed collagen group had actually improved performance as far as their eccentric rate of force development for counter movement jump. For a lot of these performance measures, their maximum isometric strength, they actually saw an increase in their rate of force development there as well. So you can see a performance benefit potentially to the collagen as well.

Caffeine can inhibit collagen synthesis

One of the things we’re working on right now- we went back to some of the old research we had done and sure enough we’d found that caffeine can inhibit collagen synthesis. So what we had been telling people to do is because you’re taking the collagen an hour before you do your training, you can just put it to your pre-workout supplement, which often has, is a big dose of caffeine and it about three mgs per kg. But it seems like that caffeine potentially could be inhibiting collagen synthesis. And so I don’t know if it’s enough where that caffeine is actually going to circulate enough to have that effect in vivo, but at least in vitro studies, we can show a dose dependent decrease in collagen synthesis with caffeine. And our engineered ligaments are actually, you know, some of the work that I did a few years ago showed that they’re actually about half as strong as the ligaments that were grown without caffeine.

So now what we’re doing is we’re maybe shifting how we’re doing the pre-workout supplement. So we’re trying not to give it directly with caffeine, because again, we’re trying to target the nutrition to where we’re going to be using it. So we take it an hour before we do the loading. That’s a way that you can kind of deliver it into the areas that are going to be loaded, where you want the extra glycine and proline and all of these collagen essential amino acids to be. And so we don’t necessarily want to have caffeine together with it at that time, because we don’t want them going together to the tendon because we’re going to see less collagen synthesis than if it was just the collagen alone, or even if, you know, the caffeine seems to be inhibiting it below baseline levels.”

The principles of rehabbing a tendon, is that different for different tendons?

”It’s a great question. We haven’t seen any difference between the tendons we’ve looked at. We’ve actually even used a similar protocol to regenerate the patellofemoral cartilage. So we had an NBA basketball player who had eroded the patellofemoral cartilage to the point where there was obvious MRI data that said that there wasn’t much left, but we were able to regenerate that pretty fully using kind of a compression, relaxation, compression, relaxation, an hour after we had given some hydrolyzed collagen and vitamin C. And so it’s a way that if you can get the load through the tissue and you can get the nutrient in there and you can kind of get it to flow in through so the cells are getting the stimulus they need (in the case of cartilage it’s compression, in the case of tendon is tension) and then you’re giving that in association with providing the amino necessary, you can see increases in collagen synthesis, whether it’s cartilage, whether we’ve seen it in bone, and we’ve seen it in tendon as well. And it doesn’t seem to matter which tendon we’re looking at.”

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