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.”

Top 5 Take Away Points:

This blog is a review of the Pacey Performance Podcast Episode 331 – Danny Lum

The isometric peak force on an IMTP is the maximum amount of force you can produce and how much of this force can you translate into a dynamic movement.  The Dynamic strength index provides you with an indication, so I think if it is below 0.65 this indicates that your athlete might need a little more ballistic training like plyometrics.  But if the dynamic strength index is above 0.80 then the athlete probably needs more heavy strength training.”

The disadvantage is that people believe that with isometric training you only gain strength in that specific joint angle that you train at, of course when you look at the literature, this is not true.

Overcoming

Yielding 

At different joint positions you might induce hypertrophy at different parts of the muscle.

This blog is a review of the Pacey Performance Podcast Episode 297 – Cam Josse

1. Cueing to make them realise where their limbs should do in time and space- but it’s very rare that this would fix it alone as they have been doing something a certain way for so long
2. Cueing to develop Force application into the ground – getting the athlete to understand a concept using motor term descriptors such as ”pop off the ground” when you are at top speed.  Another cue is imagine that the ground is getting hotter and hotter with every step you take.  I prefer pop to punch, as the athlete can sometimes punch far too hard, and it wasn’t smooth, fluid and graceful.  Punch is a better for acceleration, as it’s more aggressive.
3. Cueing to think as if you are running upstairs as you move towards the horizon- it seems to promote front side mechanics better as when you run up stairs you have to have great front side mechanics!
4. Drill/cue-  Med ball punch run (4-6lbs) held in front of their body right around the level of the navel and then I just tell them to run and try and contact your quad to the med ball.  It promotes a cyclical high knee activity which is very similar to top speed sprinting (similar to Altis who use the dribble run).  With the med ball you don’t need to go full speed but it just gets them used feeling what it feels like to achieve that front side lift, and it gives them something to aim for.   They may feel a weakness in an ankle when the limb comes down from that kind of height as they are not used to transmitting that much force through the ankle.

This blog is a review of the Pacey Performance Podcast Episode 295 – Jonas Dodoo

Is it only experience that can allow you to differentiate what you need to change?

”No. I think for me, pretension and preparation for the step are key things to understand (Daz comment: that perhaps doesn’t rely on extensive experience if you know what to look for). We definitely want to project ourselves where we need to go, and we definitely need to be prepared for the step. I’ve said this before. So no matter what change we make, we have to make sure that there’s an acceptable bandwidth of projection and preparation. So let’s say velocity goes down because we’re working on something and we’ve interrupted the habitual flow of the athlete.

We’ve maybe given a taboo internal cue, but it was necessary for them to make sense of it. That we’ve played with some drills to give them some context and for them to find a feeling so that internal cue is now poo-pooed because now they understand the feeling of it. And then they’re working on it. Sometimes when you understand a feeling of it, but you’re still working on it, you might decrease maybe your velocity. Your rate of force development might reduce a bit, because you want a bit more control.

So velocity it might go down, but you want to see the classic spatial, temporal variables, ground contact time, step length. You want to see rhythm. That’s what you want to see, even if they get a bit slower and even if you’re coaching something within a session, and you’re having undulations really in how well they’re applying the skill, you want to see flow. You want to see a gradual change. You want to see that if you looked at your step length, that every step is getting a bit longer.

If you looked at ground contact time, every ground contact time is reducing. If you’re looking at initial acceleration, you want to see that the ratio of air to ground is changing and that they’re spending less time in the air, more time in the ground in the first step and that this relationship remains at least for your first three to four steps. And then we start to see a break point, which is essentially where they start to spend a bit more time in the air and less time on the ground.

So there are some rhythms that we expect in running smooth flow, like a plane taking off. You want to see a smooth flow. And there are some rhythms that we want to see in velocity, velocity, gradually getting faster. And once you understand those rhythms and we want to stick to those rhythms, we understand that there are also rhythms in all of the other characteristics. Gradual change really is the name of the game and John Keily, and I think maybe Craig Pickering had a paper on smoothness, and it’s the best paper ever for me. I love John Keily’s work because it’s just a great summary of what we want in our data.

We talk about smoothness and we know what smooth, silky movement might look like or smell like or sound like, but we don’t know what smooth, silky data should look like, smell like or sound like. And actually it’s very similar. It’s very, very similar. You can look at someone’s data and see their step have gradually changing. And suddenly there’s a bad rhythm. You know, suddenly, you know, it was increasing by 10 centimetres each step and then suddenly it increases or decreases by 20 centimetres. There’s something going on. Or it stays the same when it should have been changing. There’s something going on.

So it’s not just experience. I think if you know what to see in good data and good movement, you can figure out and decipher what you see in your environment.”

Can you comment on team sports versus sprinters?  How can team sports go about trying to best utilise the 20 minutes warm-up time?

”I think, this is where like I’ve always talked about projection, switching and reactivity. I’ve always said that these are really important umbrella terms that help me make sense of the world. And I think if I was going to focus on acceleration and I wanted to maximize the learning, as well as the mechanical load or development of specific muscle groups, I’d pull a pulley. I’d pull X-Genies, I’ll pull a sled, I’ll do something resisted, right? And a lot of our clients and teams, especially with this new preparation for preseason, have bought 20 X-Genies. And they’ve linked them all to the walls, players can’t share equipment. If they’ve bought 20 X-Genies, they put them all in a wall and they recognize that the resisted running does lots of the teaching for them.

Projection I really think has orientation. ‘Cause when you say projection, we’re not really saying where, which direction you want to project. I feel like if we’re talking about orientation, we’re talking about some of the summaries from one of the resistance running research, which is RF again, keep coming back to it. Are you able to project a large amount of your force in the direction you want to go? Is that large ratio of force going forward, going horizontal? So for me, that’s one of my first priorities, orientation, and I’m going to use resisted running for it. Another priority is range of motion. If you have a relatively large range of motion on the front and the back side of your running cycle, not just the front side, not just the back side, if you have a relatively large range of motion on both sides of the flexing leg and the extending leg, then that tells me two things:

One. It tells me that you’re extending the leg, you’ve pushed your center of mass outside and away from your center of support. So you’ve had a nice extension of your posterior chain. So great. You’ve got a large range of motion in the backside. Two. On the front side, if at the moment of toe off, when you finish extending your knee is relatively high, even in acceleration (so we’re saying your hip angle is maybe closer to 90 degrees than 110 degrees), then clearly during the step, your thigh has punched forwards. But if at the moment of toe off, when you finish extending your front thigh is actually down here, then clearly during the stride, your thigh didn’t come forward quick enough. So at the moment of toe off is a great time to see, okay, what’s happening with extended leg. What’s happening with a thigh in front?

So finding an effective range of motion in your legs during projection and orienting yourself forwards just describes a lot of things, but for a novice coach, if I just want to make sure all the forces go forward, I’ll use a sled. Are they utilizing their range of motion? If not, then why? Is it because they’re not pushing against the ground or is it because they’re not punching their knee forward? And the nice thing about punching your knee forward whilst pushing against the ground is it pushes your center of mass out in front. It makes it easier to orientate your forces forwards.

So this RF puzzle that’s the all our real goal is, and can be solved by orientating yourself forwards and separating your limbs really well. So once you’ve done that, that’s the projection part done. That’s the pushing part done. Then you got to be prepared for the next step. So then the question is, once they’ve done these actions, and then they swapped their limbs, does their shin land in a position where it’s stiff, the ankle is stiff, the heel doesn’t drop. (Daz comment: this is the reactivity part).  The shin is stiff, is stable and allows the hip to extend early. Or does the shin land vertical, the heel drops, the shin has to roll forwards before the hip can push again. And if you’re in that position, that’s less stiff, that’s less reactive. Do you want some compression, some load before you explode? Yes. As any performance that can have a bigger touchdown distance and during a tiny bit of deceleration on the step and tiny bit of breaking it, they almost use that time to multiply and potentiate extension, right? They’re getting that highest eccentric to then load the concentrate action.

So fine, but there’s a bandwidth. There’s landing too far behind and too stiff and not enough pressure to push and there’s landing too far out in front and almost decelerating too much. So that’s five or six minutes talking about what I would be summarizing for a coach. So I’ll go back to it. If you orientate yourself well and go forward with good range of motion in your legs and then switch your limb so you can be reactive and do it again, then I think nearly all performance can do that. Rugby, football, forwards, backs. There’s a bandwidth to it. Maybe you get a bit less out the back, a bit less out the front. Maybe you’re landing a bit further out in front, a bit further out behind, but I’m talking about centimetres. And, generally the summary is the same for everybody. And so when we look at our teams, well players, if I was in a setting and I had 20 athletes, I would just be getting them to pull heavy things, recognize how to orientate themselves well with a good range of motion. The heavier it is the more horizontal I have to be and actually the better I have to switch because I have no air time.

If more horizontal you are, you don’t have air time. No air time, less time to be prepared. I’ll pull medium things because I still have to orientate myself, but I have a bit more time. I’ll be pulling medium weight because it gives me a bit more velocity. It’s more challenging. I’d be running without any resistance. Same drill, same task and I think that differential loading allows them to explore different strategies to do the same task. So it’s just movement variability. It’s just giving them options.  Are we doing resisted running for the physical, mechanical loading, or are we doing it for the teaching and the differential learning and almost creating a constraint for these guys to make sense of the world and, to explore different strategies?

I think we’re doing both. I think on some days we do minimal amounts of runs and we’re really just using resistance running for teaching and potentiation and on other days do large amounts of resisted running done with variability and combined with plyometrics.  This would allow us to create a massive work capacity to do anything else when it came to speed work, because it meant that we had lots and lots of contacts, high velocity contacts into the ground conditioning the Achilles, conditioning soleus, conditioning foot position, conditioning knee to be stable, the hip to be the prime mover, really locking in lumbar and just making sure these guys push through their bums and stabilized through their feet. And so when we move to either more pre-planned or more rugby related stuff, the guys just seemed to be able to tolerate it more than usual. Lower limb injuries went away, hamstring stuff minimized, and actually we seemed to see that when we dropped some gym work on a specific day and replaced it more with resisted running, that they didn’t just run faster, run PBs and run fast times and GPS. Their next gym session, they also came in and they seem to be wired.

Yeah. So again, long-winded but I think for me the summary is if we clarify that our goal for all our performers is to orientate large forces forwards with a decent range of motion and to make sure we can be prepared for the next step, then our RF will be good, but our DRF will also be good. That’s easy to coach. That’s easy to do in large squad because you’ve really got two goals; if go forwards when you pull something heavy and you don’t orientate yourself forward, you don’t go anywhere. So it’s great for athletes to feel because when they pull something heavy it can suddenly change something about their synchronization of their limbs or sequence of their movement or spine discipline.   Because the priority is really, do you have good spine discipline? Do you have good shin discipline? And the shins would tell you a story about the whole run just by looking at the shins, right.

That’s really easy to teach because if you don’t, if you’re trying to pull something heavy with bad spine discipline and shin discipline, you won’t go anywhere. You just won’t go anywhere. You won’t move anywhere. So the athletes figure it out. And the athlete who don’t figure it out, that’s when you intervene. But if you have tools that teach what you want for you and you just have to provide some feedback, then you can get large changes in acceleration and velocity within large squads. You don’t have to be super coach to make those changes happen.”

Can you finish off by commenting on GAME SPEED, the teaching versus training, and how we ensure transfer from one thing to another?

”I think they’re two different things. Firstly, so ”teaching” and ”training” for me is really down to the fact that just because someone looks pretty doesn’t mean they’re going to actually run fast and then just because they can run fast, it doesn’t mean they’ll do it in a game. So if you want to make sure that technique turns into fast running and physical robustness to do those actions repeatedly, you almost have two tasks there. Can you run fast, great. Can you do that eight times within a eight minute period? Yeah, it’s a different discussion, right? Teaching and training for me is understanding what exercises, what mechanical properties are necessary to run fast.

What does that mean? It means that for me, that if I want to develop someone’s ability to run really, really fast in outright running, I’ve got to make sure they also have the physical tools based on things that I’ve done maybe in the gym with eccentric work, with flywheel work, with isolated versus inter-segmental work. But also I need to probably in team sports, more importantly design running conditioning sessions that develop the technical movements, but under some duress. And you know, everyone’s like if you’re doing speed work and you’re not giving people enough recoveries, then you’re a bad coach. But when you’re training for speed or you’re training speed is two different discussions. If I’m training for speed, I sometimes have incomplete recoveries. When I’m training for speed, I want the movement to look similar, but I also want to create the physical underpinnings, the energy system, the work capacity, the tolerance to essentially mitigate risk when I trained speed.

So that’s a really important concept. Everyone wants to sprint now in sports, but people are now getting more injuries again because they’re doing too much sprinting at the wrong time. They don’t understand phase potentiation. They don’t understand how to drip feed it over time. And when they drip feed it, what else they should be doing on the field with resisted running, with repetitive speed endurance or repeat speed endurance and with your gym work. You do that so that when you need to run really, really fast, you can do it. You can recover from it and it’s got less stress on the body. So movements and muscles or teaching and training, that’s where it comes to.

Game speed is more about once they’re confident and clear and they have repetitiveness, they have the ability to do it almost under fatigue and under some kind of distraction, game speed is more like, can you replicate these movements, high velocity actions whilst being super distracted when you don’t really care about the movement? Where you care only about the outcome. You don’t care as much about thinking about it. You know you need to be in the right position and be there fast but you’ve got a number of distractions. So game speed to me is a big deal. Eddie Jones loves speed work, loves speed training but if it doesn’t finish with some game speed, if it doesn’t look like what they need to know, and if we don’t put them in positions and scenarios and stress test those scenarios for them to be able to run fast and be efficient or and be effective in the skill work, then there is no transfer and he won’t be happy.

I’ve done most of my learning with the great team coaches. Mike Ford, originally at Bath, said it’s great that you do speed work, but firstly, do they stay healthy? Secondly, does it turn into the game? And if is a no to any of those, you failed your task. And so really for team sport coaches, if you do the first stage and you do the right teaching and you underpin it with physical qualities, the likelihood of transfer just increases without even game speed. Yeah, that’s the reality. If your guys have the physical capabilities to repetitively do what you want them to do, and that’s their path of least resistance, that’s probably the most important thing here. That when they’re under stress, that when their body decides I need to get from here to here as soon as possible, the body knows that the most efficient way for me to do is use this movement pattern. That doesn’t happen because they’ve done wickets or pulled the pulley once or twice. That happens because the strongest muscle groups in the most efficient chain for them to use are the ones they choose to use. It’s a chain that you’ve trained. And until it is, then you just have people running fast, running straight lines, running PBs and GPS, great. But then when there’s a break and I have to do a box to box, they completely regress to what is comfortable, what is normal. What is the path of least resistance.

So I think game speed is a complete separate topic. I think game speed, you have to learn and design your game speed from top down. You have to have good skill coaches, good head coaches who are clear about what they want, clear about what their players do or don’t do very well and can teach you. I’ve been taught by some great technical coaches about what they want and I’ve just regressed it, reverse engineered it and gone, oh, that’s just a skips for height. And I was talking about high balls on one of our mentorships the other day about going up for a high ball in rugby and the skill of doing that is just a skip for height. Is really just a skip for height, under lots of pressure on a, maybe an unstable surface because you’re running and jumping but it’s skips for height.

So if you can dissect the perception action from the physical, and you can be clear about the two, you can develop the physical and make sure that they’re clear about the technical as well as have the physical capabilities. And then you put them under more and more stress so that they can connect this new skill under the main skill, then it transfers. Some people, have the perception. So make sure they can perceive it, great. But if they don’t have the wheels or they don’t have the chassis or they don’t have the suspension to do the task, it is great that they make the right decisions, but they’re in a Ford Focus, not in a, I don’t know, Porsche Boxster. I don’t know. I’m not very good with cars. I don’t know why I use this analogy. But hopefully that kind of gives you a flavor of where I would go with things.”