I have no idea. I don’t think I’ve ever said anything to truly deserve it, but I guess I’ve rubbed a few people the wrong way. Check all my posts, there aren’t many. The only “confrontation” I’ve ever had was with Daniel, and we immediately corrected our issues with PMs and everything is cool.
I still don’t know how to give out rep points myself. Where is the button? Not that I’d use it. I think it’s silly, because there’s no real control. If the admin’s controlled it that would be one thing, but you get a couple of kids repping each other and they look like gods, even though they babble like children.
I couldn’t disagree with you more. Forget that countless, well controlled studies contradict your statement.
Instead, let me stick to the weight room for a moment, where all of us have at least some experience. Say you’re max squat is 400, and you train dynamically for power at 60%. If you time your reps, in other words, how fast can you explode off a parallel box to do a squat at 240, you will eventually reach a plateau that you can’t move beyond (much). However, if you can bump up your max squat to 500, not only will you be able to squat 240 much faster, you will be able to squat 300 nearly as fast as you could squat 240 before. This is an increase in limit/absolute strength that allows for improvement in explosive strength and power that can then be utilized in athletic events of all kinds.
I have read several things you’ve written alluding to the fact that you believe that improvements in athletic performance is strictly neuralogical. This simply can’t be true. If it were, then there would be no reason that larger athletes could lift more than smaller athletes. The same athlete, if he moves up in body weight, will almost always be able to lift more in the gym. Is this because he “grew” his nervous system or because he developed larger, stronger muscles?
Training the CNS is definitely a must, but improving limit strength, if it doesn’t come with a body weight penalty, does matter, IMHO.
I think we’re generally in agreement, just with different approaches. I get the best results from what Lou Simmons and the Eastern Euro’s call the “conjugate system”. I’m sure you’re aware of it. I don’t like the term, and use the tern “concurrent”. I train for mass, strength and power at all times. I do change my emphasis in any one category from a “building mode” to a “maintenance mode” depending on what I’m trying to do. I do this with my athletes and I’ve seen consistent, steady improvement without any set backs, and not nearly so many sticking points or plateaus as when we used a more traditional ‘western progressive’ style of training.
One question…how do altitude drops build limit strength? ARe you saying if you did nothing but altitude drops for 6 months, you could actually walk into the gym and squat more than before?
It is suprising, but they do. The intensity of the contraction seems to play a major role in strength gains. Both Medvedev and Verkhoshansky talk about this. Now having said that, this doesn’t mean that you should ditch your lifting for all plyometric work. As with anything, the effectiveness is dependent on what role it plays in your overall training. Plenty of people have gotten strong or more athletic with and without plyometrics. It just depends on how you choose to use it.
Possibly not, but the max back squat tests the glutes, hips, hams, quads and low back? If any of these muslce groups are lacking, it will show up in your squat.
What other movement would you suggest can test posterior chain leg strength more effectively as a unit?
Interesting. Do you have a link that shows a vid or images of a proper altitude drop being performed? Is there a difference between depth jumps and altitude drops?
How on earth can you make the presumption that I’m MORE worried about muscle than movement, when I have clearly implied on numerous occasions how important movement is to me. I reserve the right to be interested in both factors.
That’s exactly why I was proposing the idea of wide stance parallel squats being better than medium stance squats.
Becuase HOW you do squats is very important in my opinion. I explained my stance on this fully on a previous page.
Furthermore, it is a given that I will maximally accelerate through the repetition, so as to develope more strength and power. I thought it was so obvious that velocity potential of each movement was important, and that is why I have not asked about velocity of movement.
I don’t want to be miss-interpreted and for someone to say to me…“If your concerned about velocity, then do more jumps etc…”. Yes, I have other exercises in my program and some are very quick. But as far as squats are concerned, I am allready covering the acceleration factor amongst other things when I do them.
Just becuase I’m asking questions and making statements about 1 or 2 things, that doesn’t mean I’m not dealing with OTHER factors in my training aswell.
I have speed drills and basic plyo’s in my program.
I also know that I am somewhat defficient in lower body power compared to Ben, Asafa Powell, Carl Lewis and Mo Green. They = the standard that I measure myself against.
I’m trying to sort out what I believe is a weakness in my physical structure (and yes, I’m trying to attack it from neuro-logical means and physiological means, but allmost certainly mainly neuro-logical.).
I also experimented with glute-hams on several occasions. I have statistical analasys in last years training diary that drop-reactive glute-hams were more beneficial than slowly lowering in the eccentric portion. There was actually a slight improvement in my sprint time from drop reactive glute-ham raises, and a slight decrease in time from a brief cycle of slowly lowered glute-hams. We’ll just have to be in diss-agreement about how long it takes to adapt from an exercise.
first this goes back to the problem with studies. i will bet you a 100 bucks that those studies were performed with novice athletes. i could improve the sprint times of novice athletes by having them jump rope. also if those studies were true all of the fastest men in the world would also be the strongest squaters. as we know there are a wide spectrum of limit strength displayed amongst elite athletes. you assume that because what i have written before that i mean there is no benefit to maximal strength. there is in its training but not its result. lol confusing i bet. training with maximal weight produces a few results when training for athleticism (speed, jumping ability, ect.) one is a high frequncy of rate coding. so there are benefits to training with maximal weights but simply saying my squat increased so now i will run faster is a fallacy and shows that you dont have a clear understanding of physiology and adaptation (no offense).
i never stated that athletics is completly neurological. i only emphasize it because it seems so prevelant these days to not consider its relevance to training. you are right in most cases if you increase your squat you will increase the velocity at which you can move a lighter weight, but not always, and being able to move a weight with a RELATIVLY high velocity has nothing to do with, or very little to do, with moving your body at high velocity. when dealing with weight you dont address the issues of alpha gamma loops, inhibitive interneurons, reflexes in general, or the spring model of human movement in which balistic movements often operate under a very confined range of movement thereby relying on tissue elasticty for the noted rapididty of movement. basically moving fast with a weight isnt really moving fast and your body controls rapid athletic movements and powerfull weightbearing movements in two different ways.
lets take another look at your logic. by your reasoning he who squats the most would sprint the fastest or atleast have the potential too. or allow me to rephrase the person with the best relative strength. relative strength is important but as we both know there are plenty of individuals who weighed less than ben could squat more (in a full squat) and could not run worth shit.
o yea i didnt leave you any negative rep points lol i could care less about rep, ive got more negative points than probably anybody on this site. people dont want to here something that differs from their excepted dogma. like little kids plugging their ears screaming “NO NO NO NO” lol.
tests for what though? you dont seem to understand that just because a muscle is strong does not mean that it will perfrom athleticly (in this case allow you to run fast) if this were the case 170 lb powerlifters would be some of the fastest people in the world. the CNS adapts to the stress placed on it and the stress of lifting a maximal weight is completly different from sprinting fast or jumping high. the motor control patterns are completly different, the forces, ect. ect. sure a strong squat is a good thing but it will mean nothing on the track unless you know how to intergrate it into your training. i see this all to often. people think i can squat alot so now i can sprint fast. they forget that almost any training of a novice will produce a general adaptive effect. understand your body how it works to control forces, then you will understand how standing up with 600 lbs on your back isnt going to make you fast. it is a component, a useful tool but that is it.
a depth jump is a plyometric movement inwhich u step or a box and immediatly upon landing absrob the force and jump. a alititude landing is when you step off a box and absorb the force. be careful with application though a individual steping off a a 3.2m box will experience forces in excess of 20 times their bodyweight. that is a 150 lb person will absorb up to 3000 lbs of force. far more than a person can squat. this is why it is such a great training stimuli, but also the reason people get hurt perfroming them, they dont understand what they are doing to their body.
James, I understand limit strength is a byproduct of athletic training. I say it can be a weakness because one may have a relative weakness in power absorbtion, which may be rooted in a weakness in force absorbtion, which could be cured by a dose of limit strength work. Therefore, in this situation, limit strength work would allow for greater power absorbtion abilities.
Star, as a powerlifter, you seem to think that strength is only expressible in the weightroom. As far as athletes are concerned, this is not true. A CMJ is a good test of strength, as is a sprint acceleration, or maybe an altitude landing. When your goal is to become better as an athlete, you only worry about your limit strength when it is limiting gains in power absorbtion, which is the root of all (speed based) athletic activity.
As for how altitude landings can increase limit strength, the forces encountered when dropping any significant height are enormous. Due to the force encountered, the MU recruitment is huge and due to the nature of the absorbtion Type II fibers are called into play. Tension within the muscles here are many times what they will ever face in a squat, and they adapt accordingly.
i think youve seen what has been done with a wide stance and squating ability and assumed that strength = speed (excuse my assumption) and this is actually correct, but what kind of strength. there is speed strength, strength speed, explosive strength, isometric strength, limit strength, flexability endurance, starting strenght ect ect. and each one is different and the training of each one has a different effect on the neurology. you also have to take into consideration motor learning, the motor learning that you want to take place to be an athletic individual does not occur when your feet are 6 feet apart. it completly changes the nature of the movement. hell it isnt even the same movement. you can call it a squat but its has almost nothing to do with a olmpic squat. when are you going to vertical jump with your feet 6 feet apart or how about sprint.
this is what makes this type of discussion so difficult. this is basic stuff to me very basic but thats only because ive learned it a long time ago. what i take for granted as givens many of you dont even know about. so when i try to discuss higher topics like motor learning feedforward programing, or intermuscualr coordination alot of the things go over many of your heads because you dont have the foundation of knowledge. this is in no way a slight towards you or anyone else its just getting a little frustrating having to remember that most people dont even understand the concept of inhibitory interneurons, rate coding, or motor unit recruitment.
im glad youve had success with reactive glute ham raises. that should tell you something, something that you can apply to the rest of your training. all you have to do is understand what is going on when you perform the excercises. dont simply do an excercise see that it works but not understand why.
one last thing, the isos didnt work for you cause you didnt know what you were doing pure and simple. the excercise means nothing, how you perform it means everything. so saying you did it for a week and found no benefit shows a lack of understanding on your part. i can give you, nor can anyone give you a single excercise to make you improve. it is how you apply those excercises and how you apply them in tandom with other excercises. its all training, teaching your body to respond a certain way under certain conditions. strength is a learned quality, speed is a learned quality, explosiveness is a learned quality. saying you can feel if an excercise is benefiting you within a few days of doing it only shows ignorance on your part (again no offense, ignorance is a lack of knowledge not the inablity to aquire it).
“I say it can be a weakness because one may have a relative weakness in power absorbtion, which may be rooted in a weakness in force absorbtion, which could be cured by a dose of limit strength work.”
there is a flaw in this. force absorption is a completly different neurological control mechanism than limit strength. the big thing being alititude drops produce forces many many many times greater than a squat so how can improving your limit strength in that excercise improve your ability to absorb foce (it actually can my issue is in the way that you said it which can lead others down a path built on a logical flaw). limit strenght has its place. a very important place in training but not as a means to an end. simply getting “stronger” means nothing when it comes to the field of play or the track.
James, I think this may just be a semantics issue here. I term power absorbtion as what occurs when one lands from an altitude landing, or during the support phase of sprint stride. Force absorbtion is eccentric strength displayed at lower speeds, such as a heavy negative squat. The two are different qualities, but are interdependant.
Here is an example of an overspeed altitude landing from the Inno-Sport site. Performed by who I believe is Viktoria Rybalko, a world class female long jumper.
Well, the overspeed is supposed to trick the nervous system into recruiting more MUs. It’s something about the bands causing one to accelerate towards the ground faster than the typical 9.8 m/s you would encounter if you were merely stepping off of the box.
Personally, I’ve used a similar method in my own training only four days ago. It instantly made my CMJ rise by 2". Those two inches didn’t quite stick around to today, but the exercise is a wonderful potentiator.