What You NEED To Know About Eccentric Training w/ Alex Ehlert (SSOF Ep 190)

Alex Ehlert0:52

It's just you're working with individual athletes for the most part, so you don't have them all under the same roof. So, you have to really make efforts to track that with each individual golfer. So, we're trying to build that out.

James de Lacey2:25

What would be a volume metric? Is it just number of swings, but obviously you have different intensity of swings. You got if you're walking the course or something like that, how are you looking at volume?

Alex Ehlert2:25

Yeah, it's a tricky one.

I definitely want to like so at the very least you want to track the number of holes played. I try to track general time in different parts of the game. So, short game versus full swings, like how many ideally you get an idea of how many total shots they're hitting on the driving range with full swings, but that becomes tricky.

So then a lot of it comes down to time in each one of those. We might get an RPE and a lot of it is tracking these general trends to then alongside things when lower back pain spikes up. It's more of a conversation starter at this point until we get more data. But just like at least the coach can see, "Oh, I noticed your back's bothering you today." You can go back through their log and oh, you started playing a lot more in the last few weeks and it just leads to better conversations, but

Yeah, it's one of those there's no really great well-established way of tracking volume and practice intensity and things like that in golf, so you kind of have to start somewhere and kind of figure out what works and what trends you see and I think it'll become a bit bigger topic over the next few years. Yeah. How do we actually quantify this?

The problem is what would work and what a golfer will actually track is two different things, so you kind of get some buy-in from the coaches as well as the golfer themselves, otherwise it's all over the place.

James de Lacey3:59

Unless you put like a tracker in the golf clubs or something.

Alex Ehlert3:59

Yeah, I mean there's some out there. It's just yeah, it's getting consistent usage of that type of stuff. There are some sensors that go in the club and track swings through acceleration and things like that, but I don't think it's super widely used.

James de Lacey4:51

Yeah, I can imagine. So, what kind of things are you seeing I guess within your jump data or at least your physical testing data with these golfers? 'Cause obviously the rotational aspect has some carry over in combat sports as well, which would be quite interesting to see what you're seeing there.

Alex Ehlert4:51

Yeah, so the big one is countermovement jump outputs tend to be the strongest physical predictor of club head speed that we've seen over the years. Started off everyone was very jump height heavy, but with golf you can have a lot of different body shapes and sizes and still be successful. So, we've definitely seen more consistent with things like impulse measures. So, I usually measure net propulsive impulse or positive impulse.

And the advantage to that is like a bigger golfer could be putting a lot of force into the ground, but they may not propel themselves as high off the floor as you'd expect from like a smaller golfer putting the same amount of force in.

And in golf it's less about propelling your body through space and more the absolute forces involved and more your force capacity within certain time frames. So, the jump outputs are the go-to pretty consistent indicator. There's probably an argument to be made for the lead leg post up vertical forces are pretty important within the swing, but I also think there's probably a degree of just really good athletes tend to be good at a lot of things and that includes swinging a club fast and jumping well.

It's probably a general proxy for just athleticism in golf as well where you can usually pick up on the athletes that the golfers that have some training experience. Just they jump way better than other golfers for example, but outside of that, we do see the strength measures.

So, mid-thigh pull both the peak force, but usually within like I will do force at 250 milliseconds, which is relatively representative of the downswing of golf swing. We tend to see those be moderate correlates and then we're starting to see more and more with upper body strength especially in female golfers. Maybe 'cause it's less of an emphasis over the years.

But the ballistic upper body side of being able to move fast with your upper body in rotation also. What you'd expect. Powerful lower body, strong throughout the body and then fast upper body and trunk are the main things we look at.

James de Lacey6:33

Are you seeing anything regarding jump strategy? You mentioned obviously like the propulsive impulse. Is there anything like on the eccentric side or the way they're performing the jump?

Alex Ehlert7:23

Yeah, I mean so one of the things I've noticed it's I haven't gotten enough data points on both the golf swing biomechanics side as well as the jump profiling side, but I've started to notice that the golfers that use more of a displacement type strategy. So, the big kind of big countermovement using the time component of impulse to generate that jump output. They also tend to be the ones in general that use distance as their mechanism in the golf swing.

So, they do this big upload in the backswing and then they drop down and use more of a squat pattern to generate that vertical force in the downswing. Where you also have these golfers that use more of a shallower type of jump strategy, probably have more of that eccentric strength and stiffness in the lead leg.

And they make it look a little more like less dramatic in their swing. It's more of that stiffness strategy, really efficient stretch-shortening cycle, just that coil, post up on the lead leg, and just whip it through. So, I'm starting to see some of that where obviously, if you lack that ability to create that coiling type mechanism, you're probably going to have to rely on big movements, using momentum to your advantage to create that speed.

And then in golf, you're not constrained by time in quite the same way as you are in other sports where you don't have a defender. So, you can use big displacement in the backswing to create more time for that impulse versus fighting, you got to land a punch fast or react to your opponent. So, you may not have the time to do this big exaggerated windup.

So, that's what I'm starting to dig into. It's not just the output side, but just how can we understand when you place a constraint on an athlete, how they tend to perform within something like a countermovement jump. What does that tell us about their preferred strategies within the swing as well.

James de Lacey9:02

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That kind of the shorter jump guys, like even in my experience just with the model sports, the fastest guys in the field or the fastest athletes, they're typically the stiffer in terms of we're using the term of flexibility. So they'll kind of be just stiffer and tighter generally, but that's kind of what leads or lends to them being so fast. Do you find that kind of in there as well between these two kind of athletes or golfers?

Alex Ehlert10:39

Yeah, so there's been a finding in a bunch of research studies and I've seen it a bunch with modern golfers where there's more or less tendency to create more of that stiffness strategy, like stable lower body, create that separation, and then kind of post up on the lead leg and whip through with the upper body. That we actually see, like generally golf has been obsessed with flexibility measures.

So they always measure trunk rotation range of motion, which makes sense, but one of the things we consistently see is the lead leg, especially with internal rotation of that hip, really fast golfers a lot of the time will show really low levels of hip internal rotation range of motion.

That probably has something to do with that kind of create that stability in that lead hip. They don't use massive range motion at the hip. It's more create that post up and whip the upper body through with kind of more that stiffness strategy of the lower body. And maybe the other thing is that it's kind of a double-edged sword though because it's also low range of motion in that internal rotation is also a risk factor for low back pain in golf as well.

So it's probably one of those it's not universally positive so I wouldn't say that the message is don't worry about range if you're golfer but there's probably something there where a lot of these really fast golfers create a really stiff lead leg and so they don't rely on range of motion of the hip nearly as much or in the process of creating this kind of stiff really post up in a lead leg they kind of emphasize that over creating a ton of range of motion there.

James de Lacey12:20

How does that information come together to influence a program? Like for example the bigger guys have the bigger range of motion swings versus maybe not so much then obviously with the jump data showing maybe the qualities there. How is that all coming together?

Alex Ehlert12:20

A lot of it in my opinion starts with a conversation with their golf coach as well as their technical coach as well as watching them swing. You'd be surprised how often someone has kind of a misalignment between what they can physically do and what they're trying to do in their swing. They see how Rory McIlroy swings where he has this really fast hips really coils up.

Probably has more range of motion and kind of strength in that kind of end range compared to a lot of other golfers and they try to apply very similar technical strategy and they just don't have the strength or stability or range of motion in those different joints to do it.

So that's usually the starting point is trying to get an idea of what they're trying to do technically, how important is it for them to use kind of a range of motion strategy versus no I'm trying to really keep minimal displacement in that lead leg and use more of a stiffness strategy. And from there, you can kind of go into the assessments with that in mind.

So, even things like if I know that they want to be able to create the kind of stiff, not have to rely on this big exaggerated backswing and then drop hard into the lead leg, they want it to be fairly stiff and kind of coil around it.

If I have them do a jump and they perform pretty well, but they do it with this massive counter movement, sometimes I'll try to cue them on something where it kind of forces them to can you create similar outputs if time is constrained or you can't use this big exaggerated squat depth because they're trying to just get as high as they can off the ground. So, I'll either tell them to jump fast instead of just trying to jump high or we'll go into something like some drop jumps or multi-rebound jumps.

And that can kind of help peel back the layers on do they have the physical pieces for that? The reality is a lot of golfers that I see end up needing a lot of the same types of stuff. They benefit from a lot of the same type of ballistic type work. I'm a believer in eccentric training across a few different areas with most rotational athletes, golfers included. And most of them probably need to kind of always stay on top of trunk range of motion, making sure their hip range of motion doesn't get so stiff that it becomes an issue.

So, a lot of the strategies become the same, but in terms of buy-in and communication and a lot of it is what to take out of program sometimes where they're just trying to put so much into it because they see what other golfers or coaches are doing. And it's like, ah, we just need to emphasize this because it aligns a little better with what you're trying to do technically. So, I don't know if that perfectly answers it, but...

James de Lacey15:13

It was good to hear. I can imagine a lot of golfers kind of similar to combat sports, maybe they don't have much of a lifting background anyway. So, a lot of it kind of comes back to just getting lifting and getting generally strong initially.

Alex Ehlert15:13

100%. I mean, we're still at this point where most of them are doing something, but in terms of I think what I'd always said that we're already seeing club head speeds increase, distance increase in golf, but the biggest leap is going to be when we have generations of golfers that have been training their bodies along with the technical side from the time they're 13, 14 like other sports.

Where right now we kind of have the generation of golfers that picked it up when they were already somewhat established. Maybe they did a little bit when they were younger, but a lot of golfers the first time they really did a structured strength and conditioning program is when they got to college and they had a collegiate strength and conditioning coach or something like that.

I think the big change will come when we've had golfers that have bought into training from the time they're junior golfers through college. They get to college and they're actually ready to maximize what they can get out of it and then kind of just continue that throughout their careers.

James de Lacey16:06

Before I get into the eccentric side because I'm excited to get down that eccentric flywheel side. It's kind of what the title of this podcast is, but we're going down this golf rabbit hole and I'm enjoying it. I want to, I've got two more questions on this golf. First one, asymmetries. So, obviously you're swinging the same way all the time. You're not doing the other way.

How, let me phrase it this way. Do you think there is a strong risk factor for injury just basically just doing the same side all the time? Is it something you address within strength and conditioning training where maybe you're trying to do rotation the other way more often? Is balancing out important or you just kind of hey, if you start trying to balance out the asymmetry, it's going to hurt their performance?

Alex Ehlert16:50

Yeah, it's a bit of a tricky one. I tend to think that asymmetry is kind of a natural part of any sport, especially something like golf where it's a naturally asymmetrical sport. I generally think from a strength and conditioning standpoint. I'm not going to just intentionally train the kind of dominant pattern over and over again just for the sake of doing that. But in terms of adequately preparing them for their sport, I think a lot of it comes down to just a lot of the general foundation from a physical standpoint, but then a ton of it is workload management.

So I worked with that collegiate golf team for about 3-4 years and one of the things I consistently saw is that when golfers would have injuries, it was usually workload related. So a lot of it would be they get a swing change with the coach and so the coach wants them to change their pattern all together and the kind of what they end up doing is I need to instill this new pattern.

So they take the slightly different pattern they haven't had the chance to adapt to over the course of months or years like their normal pattern. They're moving in some different way, probably activating muscles a little differently.

And then they just hammer it with volume trying to make it feel comfortable and then instill it as quickly as possible so they have a different pattern and then later on three, four times the practice volume they normally have and then it spikes an injury. And the other one is actually after injury. They feel like they've lost out on all this practice time so they just jump right back into it.

So I think golfers when they manage volume well, the body adapts to that kind of specific demand pretty well as long as you can manage the workload and some golfers they try to swing in a way that maybe their body doesn't tolerate particularly well. So that's kind of a technical solution. But I've kind of gone back and forth. Like there's this kind of philosophy in golf sometimes do speed training work in both directions, the swing non-dominant swings. With they have speed sticks that allow you to get over speed training or...

James de Lacey18:28

I've seen those.

Alex Ehlert18:28

Yeah, so they, but one of the issues is I've seen had some golfers actually kind of hurt themselves doing the non-dominant swings at times because they're basically swinging in a pattern and in a way they haven't adapted to in the same way they've adapted to their normal swing.

Most of them have years and years and thousands of swings progressively getting faster as they developed, and then they suddenly try to throw into the mix this non-dominant swing as fast as they possibly can with a pattern they're not particularly familiar with. So I think it's probably if we're going to address it, it just needs to be probably a little more strategic than how it's sometimes done.

So long-winded answer: in the gym, from a strength and conditioning standpoint, we're going to train both sides. We're not just going to train dominant throws just because it's pretty low risk and pretty low time consuming to just, all right, we did a few sets throwing a med ball in the dominant direction, let's do it in the other direction as well. So I'm not going to compound that asymmetry very intentionally, but in terms of it being a massive issue, I think in a lot of cases it's somewhat of a blown up one.

James de Lacey20:17

What's your take on those overspeed sticks?

Alex Ehlert20:17

Yeah, it's something I've given a lot thought to. I think again, it's kind of a golf thing that's this fancy new tool that does work and they just kind of went overboard with it. So a lot of it comes down to the programs. They just follow a very standard program.

They have to remember that a lot of these programs that are sold to them are based off of the incentive is getting their swing speed numbers up. They don't really care what happens outside swing speed. These products are designed to make you faster. That's what they're marketed towards. So they'll do really high volumes of these kind of overspeed training tools, and a lot of the time they'll get faster because they're basically putting all of their focus on the feedback is just swinging fast versus swinging fast and making good contact and controlling trajectory.

And I think that does have a lot of uses from both a motor learning perspective of a kind of, especially golfers that swing in a very constrained, accuracy focused manner. When they have this kind of periods where they just focus on swinging faster, they'll move a little more dynamically, they'll use the ground a little differently. So I think it can be really useful when you use it intentionally as kind of a motor learning tool as let's try to open up the swing a little bit and then see if we can work some of that into your swing.

And then I think just on exposure to high velocity stimulus, I think it's a lot easier to move some of these body segments at really fast speeds from a training perspective when you use overspeed training within a dynamic motion like the golf swing, compared to trying to throw a medicine ball. You can get some speed, but not the same amount of speed as swinging a speed stick at 135 miles an hour however fast.

So there's definitely value to it, but I think this idea of all I need to do is swing this thing a hundred times and it's going to make me a better golfer can definitely take you down the wrong road if you're not too careful.

James de Lacey22:02

Yeah, some good points. I want to come to the eccentric portions, so lead us well into the flywheel stuff. But we can start at the very base of why do you favor, why do you like eccentric training so much for rotational athletes?

Alex Ehlert22:02

Yeah, so I think there's a few cases. I'll use the example of golf, but I think it applies to a lot. With golf there's probably a lot of eccentric loading within the swing that people don't appreciate. So a lot of it is stretch shortening cycles kind of sequence throughout the body where you create this stretch across the entire lead side of your body during the backswing, and then you're basically having to redirect momentum back into that direction, and then after impact you're having to decelerate all the segments back to kind of a controlled stable position.

And so for a long time I don't think that was always appreciated that the eccentric piece was playing a big role. And part of it is that I think a lot of people, if they do any sort of strength and conditioning, gets exposed to maybe some eccentric loading for the lower body just by doing things like plyometrics. You're going to get some degree of eccentric stimulus that isn't—which I'm sure we'll get into—that gets messed with in kind of normal strength training.

But then with the upper body and the trunk, which is one of the things that kind of drew me to flywheels in the first place, was just the ability to load up the eccentric phase either kind of high inertia, high force, or fast where you're trying to manage and redirect this momentum through kind of these upper body and rotational patterns is something that I just found that a lot of golfers, a lot of rotational athletes in general, don't get a lot of in their training unless they intentionally seek it out.

From a physiological standpoint, there's a lot of the adaptations that eccentric training brings to the table is useful for speed. So especially the upper body, some of the kind of architectural changes to the muscle. And then the stretch-shortening cycle in general is one of the ways we create speed and power during athletic movements. And being really strong during the eccentric phase of the stretch-shortening cycle allows you a lot more options with how to perform that really efficiently and powerfully.

James de Lacey23:57

What are some examples of a rotational eccentric overload you're using? Because I know even if you're using say a flywheel on a rack and you're maybe doing your traditional rotations or wood chops, it'd be pretty hard to overload and not be pulled back to the device or anything like that, especially if you're just standing. So are there any variations that you really like to use?

Alex Ehlert24:48

Yeah, so with true rotational patterns, when I can, I actually lock the foot in place, have something you can kind of wedge your foot against so that you can really focus on hammering away at the concentric side knowing you're going to be able to handle and focus on just decelerating it without you sliding.

The other kind of option is I have kind of become a fan of at the very least wide stance, maybe kind of hinged at the hips, lowering the center of gravity so it becomes less of a concern about just being pulled over sideways. The reality is I think with a lot of the golfers I've had use flywheels with for rotation is anything I can give them is give me more than what they've done in the past.

And if they can't give true 100% effort, but they're still going to be loading that eccentric phase more than they usually do with kind of their basic type of rotational patterns.

The other piece is I really like the motorized rack flies with Exxentric at least, where it's adding extra kinetic energy during the eccentric. You don't have to use maximal effort during the concentric when you can ramp up that motor. So you can kind of have, put a decent amount of motorized boost in there, and then just have them kind of focus on building up some momentum concentrically and then just brace as hard as they can when that thing pulls them back.

And it's just kind of a useful, it's hard to describe until you try it, but it's a very different stimulus than you get in most of your rotational patterns.

And then the last one is I've become a big fan of things like rotational rows or cheat rows with a flywheel, where you can kind of, you have a little more stability, but I'm just a big fan of pulling based eccentric movements anyways for a lot of athletes. And then I'll kind of have them big rotation and then they just kind of brace and they're having to rotate but also...

James de Lacey26:41

Oh that's so nice. I love that one. And yeah, pulling eccentric is generally hard to do without equipment like that, kind of like maybe drop catch inverted rows, eccentric quasi isometric pull-ups and stuff which can give you some of that. But outside of that, you don't have too much. Do you have any other variations with those flywheel or non-flywheel for pulling eccentric overload?

Alex Ehlert26:41

Yeah, I mean flywheels make it a lot easier, which is good. So obviously you can, even with the motor you can do it to any movement, basically get that eccentric overload. But one of the things I'll do with flywheels, even if you don't have a motorized version, then you do something like pull with two arms then resist with one. I end up having to do, if they don't have flywheel, then you could use a cable stack, you're having to do kind of two one method like that as well.

It's really different where it's kind of load based versus velocity or kinetic energy based, where it's going to be more of that slower kind of accentuated eccentric load, but it's still going to have some of that eccentric benefit. I am a big fan of drop catches. So that's kind of become a big piece for what I do, especially with golfers on the road. It's they travel for tournaments with an eccentric training method they can do if they only have 30 or 40 pound dumbbells at the hotel gym or something to kind of add some velocity component to that.

So those are kind of the go-tos, but that was, I mean obviously the flywheels there's a big appeal was you have to get pretty creative to get eccentric loading through definitely upper body, but even non-vertical movements in general. It just kind of helps add options for eccentric loading through the body.

James de Lacey28:24

For the audience, explain and maybe bust some myths around, maybe just even just start what flywheel training is just in case someone doesn't know, and then go into where people often say hey, flywheel's not eccentric overload because it only gives back the effort you put in concentrically.

Alex Ehlert28:24

Yeah, sure. So with traditional resistance training, and so a lot of the time you'll see them with flywheel turns, it's your gravity dependent methods: barbells, dumbbells, cable stacks, all of those, the resistance is primarily from overcoming gravity's kind of opposition to your movement. So you're squatting and you have this gravitational force on the weight that you're lifting that you have to overcome. And so there's this gravitational component that you have to overcome, and then it's inertial from there in terms of more force in gives more acceleration.

With flywheels, instead of lifting a weight against gravity, we're putting work or performing work or applying force to accelerate these flywheel plates.

They're these spinning flywheel plates, which I have that to see right there.

And then basically the momentum you build into those plates at the end of the concentric range is going to then cause the rope to recoil in the opposite direction, and then you then have to apply eccentric forces to decelerate it. So, I generally talk about it being building up momentum concentrically and then managing or redirecting the momentum during the eccentric phase. And so, by default, if you just perform a standard rep, it is going to be about one to one.

What you put into the concentric phase is going to be what you have to deal with eccentrically. And that alone is going to be slightly higher eccentric resistance than just lowering a traditional weight on with a controlled descent. But, it's not going to be a true eccentric overload unless you do basically one of two things. You need to either condense the time period that you're producing that braking force.

So, this could be something like a delayed braking where you kind of let it pull you back a little bit and then slam on the brakes hard and fast towards the end. Or you have to find a way to add more momentum to the flywheel. So, that could be an assisted concentric is kind of the broad category I put on it. So, this could be things like using two arms to pull with a row on the way back and then decelerating with just one.

Exercise based one, so you use more muscle mass on the way up compared to the way down. Common one is I have that T-bar right there, so kind of a hand support bar. You use your hands to help accelerate you up, and then just your legs to decelerate. Those definitely work. You get eccentric overload for either part of the range of motion, or the big braking demands in something like delayed braking.

And then, with the assisted concentric, you're adding momentum more than you'd be able to create normally, so you do have this cutting eccentric overload on the way back. The only downside is it's somewhat hard to standardize it and be really precise with prescribing it and progressing it. It's very technical, so some athletes or some users will be able to do it better than others, but even rep to rep or week to week, you're probably not going to be able to put this precise number on it of like, "I put 5% extra into that rep, so I'm going to do 8% next week." So, with fly, kind of the solution to that was we have the option to add a motor, which we call it the eccentric motorized boost.

But, you're able to program in a percentage of extra kinetic energy to add on the way back or during the eccentric phase, so you can dictate, "I want 5% extra added." And you still could use those technique-based strategies if you wanted to add additional element, but it's going to automatically apply more speed to the flywheel, so that it kind of guarantees you're going to get that eccentric overload on the way back.

James de Lacey32:14

Yeah, and it's brutal. That is brutal. That works.

I've got when I was using it quite a bit, one of my favorites for the eccentric boost was doing a hip thrust variation. That was nice, but I think you can only do it on the old version. They had the two ropes.

Alex Ehlert32:36

Yeah, the old strap. Yeah, and then it said it had a 30% boost. Man, that thing was [expletive] sweet. Yeah, a lot of people think about when we say 1 to 80%, they kind of fear, "Oh, well, I've done super maximal eccentric loading and it I had an extra 25% extra load on the way down." And that alone is really hard, but it's a very different feeling when it's based off of kinetic energy. So, it just you can hear the motor rev and then it adds this extra speed since kinetic energy is going to dictate how much eccentric work you have to do.

And you can increase that kinetic energy in one of two ways. Add inertia, which is pretty much set unless you do something really funky with adding plates with your set at 70%, but the easiest way is you just add a small amount of velocity to it and that has this relatively large effect on how much work you have to do.

You can do it at really fast speeds. You can put a small plate on there and add 10 lbs to it, it's going to feel really fast on the way back. Or you can do it at really high loads and it doesn't take much extra speed to make it feel like it's really heavy that you have to resist against on the way back. So, it gets applied to every rep and it's always relative to what you put in. So, that's kind of one of the nice things about it is that even when you're introducing it, people find it intimidating at first.

But one of the things I'll have them do is to start with a low percentage boost and submaximal effort because it's still based off of how much you put in on the way up. So, if you just have them start nice and easy and then kind of get used to that feeling of a little extra pull on the way down, and then they can just build up to full effort, 100% max effort, and then you can start playing around with adding boost over time.

And with some basic systems, most people can pick up on it pretty quick. And then as you said, you can ramp it up. We can technically go up to 80% and I don't know if anyone that's really doing anywhere near that 20-25% for most exercises is going to feel pretty intense.

James de Lacey34:20

Yeah, that speed when you have to the one my small blue plate one of my favorites was doing hand supported quarter split squats with the boost. I think I had an 8% boost on. Holy [expletive] man. That was hard. The brakes you have to put on with your quads and your glutes as you hit just a quarter position. You just kind of almost like an oscillatory ISO but way more way more resistance and way more load coming in. That's tough.

Alex Ehlert35:09

Yeah, it's one of those we've actually seen a ton of success with one of my colleagues worked at Major League Baseball for a long time then me with golf. That exact exercise like a hand supported or a Bulgarian split squat split squat. Kind of single leg with having to decelerate against the motor and you can play around with if you get good at managing that momentum at high loads and high speeds, you're going to see a lot of that ability to create stiffness through that post up leg go through the roof pretty quickly.

So, that's been one of the obvious use cases for us is if there's a throwing or striking athlete that they can't quite get that post up or that really strong break into the lead leg. The flywheel can be a really useful way of training that and building confidence in it, too, of just I can handle a pretty aggressive loading into that lead leg and still reconnect momentum out of it. It's a great way to build confidence through that kind of pattern as well.

James de Lacey36:05

With these eccentric overload, a lot of people think all of them default to, "Okay, if I'm doing eccentric overload, it means I'm doing an over 100% of my 1RM on a squat as an example." And it's seen as this heavy slow movement. And so, I guess we could just classify it like slow eccentric and then you've got more fast eccentric we mentioned you could do on the fly, or you could do drop catches, etc. Where do you How do you see them being both applied in a sports performance contest?

There was a paper not long ago. I can't remember who wrote it. He had a few papers. I think it was PhD thesis on I think it was on slow versus fast eccentrics and their transfer to performance. And it would be interesting to kind of hear maybe your thoughts around that. Can you get away with just doing a slow eccentric because you are getting some of those adaptations favorable for speed?

Alex Ehlert36:47

Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the questions I get asked is how do we base Eccentric loading has a slightly different kind of force velocity relationships and concentric where I basically boil it down to that if you're doing some eccentric overload, that's really high force lower speeds, and you're doing some that's really fast, you're hitting two really useful things. There's some that overlap there with kind of the adaptations they promote, but there's some differences as well.

So if you think about the really high load typical accentuated eccentric loading where really heavy, really high kind of tension feels like you're lowering this really heavy weight slowly, you're probably getting a really high total tension cuz you're getting this really big active tension from kind of the contractile elements in the muscle.

You're getting some of the passive tension from this active stretch of all the more elastic tissues. But it's going to be really useful for just driving really tendon stiffness, tendon size type adaptations because a lot of the tendon size and stiffness adaptations is just driven by total tension. So get a lot of tension through that tendon, and a good way of doing that is eccentric overload. You don't need a ton of volume, you don't need a ton of reps, but each rep is going to have a lot of tension involved with kind of those heavy eccentrics.

It's probably also really useful for a lot of the strength related adaptations. So a lot of the stuff that's going on for a maximal force capacity standpoint, you're going to probably some of that lateral force transmission, motor unit recruitment. There's probably a lot of stuff that's valuable from a maximal force side.

On the fast eccentric side though, there's a unique element to it where with the eccentric side, a lot of the elastic tissues and the viscoelastic tissues tighten in the muscle. But a lot of the connective tissue around the muscle responds to the velocity of the strain, not just whether it's strained. So even though there's probably less of the active tension, because there's less maybe a lighter load in the case of a traditional one or a lower inertial load to deal with, you're getting this really fast strain through the muscle tendon unit.

And it seems like that promotes some unique adaptations as well, just because you're going to get this really passive involvement, this big elastic energy storage through things like the tendon that respond to strain rate as well. So you're kind of hitting, there's going to be some overlap that contribute to both speed and strength.

So things like fascicle length are probably going to increase in both cases to some degree, because a lot of that is just putting tension through a muscle when it's under active stretch. There's probably degree of that occurring at both the heavy and the fast side. But there's probably some unique things to a stretch shortening cycle mechanism standpoint that's happening with that really fast loading, where you're having to store the elastic strain energy really quickly and then convert it back as you redirect the momentum in the other direction.

But I think we still have a lot to learn physiologically what's happening there, but there's definitely some unique things each one brings to the table. And you probably want some exposure to each of them over the course of the year.

James de Lacey39:27

Are you typically doing them in phases, kind of using maybe a slow eccentric approach initially, then into fast, or you kind of combining both?

Alex Ehlert40:11

I think it kind of depends. One of the things that I tend to believe with these eccentrics is you can get away with relatively low volume if the quality is really high. So you can very easily work both of them into either a session or throughout a week.

So a lot of the time it may be kind of you work some heavy eccentric squats on the one day where maybe it's more of a strength dominant type day, and then you can work in some of the fast stuff either microdosed throughout the week is what a lot of the team sport coaches end up doing, kind of this smaller doses throughout so that they avoid maybe some of the completely wrecking their athletes. Just of all the other stuff they're doing, just tons of fast eccentrics as well.

But either that or you can kind of work it into a speed day. A lot of the eccentric related adaptations don't take a ton of volume to both build and maintain is kind of the advantage with flywheels. We'll see a lot of coaches do kind of dedicated heavy eccentric blocks and they kind of transition towards more faster as the season gets closer. And then they just kind of microdose a bit of both when they have the opportunity throughout the season.

Because things like fascicle length detrain really quickly, but it also doesn't take much to kind of maintain it. So there's a study with flywheel. They did stiff leg deadlifts on a flywheel device and they had tracked it over a 39-week Australian Football League season. And they had this kind of dedicated preseason and they built up their tracking eccentric strength, fascicle length, and more of a typical three to four sets couple times a week with these eccentric training methods on the hamstrings.

You saw all these muscle adaptations and strength kind of go up. They then had a 4-week break for the holidays where they weren't training with the team. Everything dropped, come back to baseline, but then within a week or two after they returned shot right back up. And then they had a 15-week in-season period where they were just doing this either eight to 16 total reps a week. So it's one session of flywheel on some weeks for one set of eight reps.

And that was enough to actually maintain and even build up some of these adaptations throughout the season. So that's kind of the good news for a lot of athletes where they have long competitive seasons. You can build it up in the off-season, but it doesn't take much to kind of make these incremental gains even in season.

Just dose it when you can, make the quality high when you do it, but you don't have to overdo it from a volume perspective either.

James de Lacey42:43

I need you to send me that paper, actually. I'm going to do a video on that. That's a cool paper. I don't think I've read that one or come across that one.

Alex Ehlert42:43

I'll send it over to you. They compared Nordics and flywheel based eccentric training, but they tracked it basically across a long period and gave a lot of context about what was going on throughout the year. So those are the type of papers that are really useful kind of aligned in, not just a 6-week block, but what happens 39 weeks with all the logistical headaches that come into planning strength and conditioning around a busy competitive schedule.

James de Lacey43:23

Or a 6-week study that compares eccentric hamstring to a group that does no strength training. And you're like, "Okay, well, that was helpful."

I have a question. Tell me just if you haven't gone into it deep enough or anything, then just tell me. Because you mentioned titin in this thing and I was, "Oh, I was actually starting to go down the rabbit hole a bit and just kind of read more on the winding filament theory versus the sliding filament theory." Are you able to go into that at all? If not, just say so and I've got more questions for you.

Alex Ehlert43:23

To some degree. But the idea is that what a lot of us are taught if you do an undergraduate exercise science class or certification, a lot of it is going to be based off of this original sliding filament theory of basically muscle kinetics where you have these two contractile elements, actin and myosin, but your two contractile kind of elements within the muscle and they bind together and they perform this power stroke. And that's how you basically generate tension from an active standpoint.

So that's what's happening with basic muscle contractions particularly during concentric isometric type actions. But over the years they kept basically struggling to bridge the gap with what was explaining the fact that force was so much higher with eccentric training or eccentric contractions. There was less metabolic demand as well. So if you perform the same amount of work with an eccentric action compared to a concentric or isometric, the eccentric action's way more metabolically efficient or is way less energy.

And then they were also basically finding the force velocity relationship where it's this whole component of eccentric actions can actually increase force with speed up to an extent and then it kind of plateaus. So all these kind of unanswered questions led them to eventually start to look into whether there's elastic element within the muscle that was helping explain the behavior.

And it seems like this really primary candidate is titin which is the biggest protein in the human body, but it basically spans half the length of the sarcomere, basically stabilizes the entire contractile elements of muscle fibers. And originally it was thought to be mainly a structural kind of component, probably not as much of an active participant in muscle contractions.

What they found over time is that when the muscle is activated, so you have calcium flowing through the muscle fiber for example, that it tends to have this behavior of a co-regulated stiffness. So the winding filament theory is starting to think that it wraps around that actin, this kind of thin filament, and actually helps stabilize it and actually helps kind of store and then return elastic strain energy.

But it can regulate its stiffness and it helps stabilize and kind of improve the efficiency of the entire contraction process when it's being actively stretched. So there's this degree of titin probably plays this really important role during eccentric actions specifically. If it kind of acts like the tendon does at the muscle tendon unit level where it stores strain energy as it gets stretched and then recoils and releases that energy, but also maybe winds up against these kind of contractile proteins and helps stabilize them during muscle actions as well.

So don't know if that's the perfect answer, but they're starting to basically identify that there's this massive protein within muscle fibers that does more than just hold things in place. It's definitely contributing to why eccentrics produce this high level of force.

James de Lacey46:15

Perfect. Perfect. I didn't put you on the spot with a massive curveball then, so I'm glad.

I'm glad that came through well. But to go back to the flywheel, it's all kind of related anyway. But do you have a general progression that you use maybe with athletes on a flywheel? Because I think some people might, you're looking at a flywheel, you kind of, as you mentioned it's not load, you're not putting in 60 kg or any kg or whatever. You're putting on a big red plate and then a big blue or blue plate or whatever it is. You kind of not sure what does that look for you?

Alex Ehlert47:10

And that's been one of my big priorities so far this year is that what I'm realizing is people are starting to realize that eccentric training is this really useful thing for certain adaptations, for certain outcomes. A lot of athletes are doing it.

A lot of them are seeing benefits from it. And they recognize that flywheels are useful for that perspective. But when it comes to I have a flywheel device in front of me, how do I create a system around it? That's been kind of one of the big gaps that I'm trying to solve right now.

So the problem just to kind of put in perspective is that a lot of people when they think about how they program resistance training, it's based off of gravity-dependent principles like one repetition max where there's a maximal weight that you can lift against gravity. With flywheels, we can't rely on that concept because there's not really a maximal weight you can lift during flywheels. It's more, the example I use is right now I have four large plates stacked on my flywheel device. But my 2-year-old daughter can still go in there and if she kind of spins it, it'll still spin.

She could do a complete rep with it. It's just it's going to be spinning so slow that the force demand of that movement is really, really low. So it's rarely a question of whether you can complete a rep, it's how much force and how well you can accelerate those plates on there against that inertia. And it's one of the kind of unique qualities of it. You can have five people perform the same exercise, same inertial load on there and they're actually going to get a very different resistance that scales to how much they can put into it.

But it also means that you can't rely on these very observable factors like did they complete the rep or how many reps did they complete before technical failure. So what we usually bring into this one is for a complete beginner, the reality is if you look at a lot of the flywheel training research which frustrates me that there hasn't been more of an effort to kind of develop solid frameworks for—

James de Lacey48:38

Just send me your, send me a device, I'll start some research for you.

Alex Ehlert49:36

There's basically a lot of beginners to the training method, it's so novel that you can just basically get them on a load that makes sense and just tell them to try to accelerate it faster over time. And at least in the short term they're going to progress because as they get stronger and put more into it, the resistance is going to increase. The eccentric load is going to scale to that. It's not really the most structured and systematic way of doing it.

So I've also tried to come up with ways where most flywheel devices, including ours, have sensors built into them. And so we measure mechanical outputs like velocity, torque, power, things like that. But even then, I hand someone the app and they're like, "Okay, what do I do with these metrics? It's cool that it measures this." And so I'm starting to develop really simple, very simple methods using just one metric.

Let's just start with velocity. And what I like velocity is that when we think about the resistance that your flywheel training generates, it's building up momentum or kinetic energy, whichever perspective you want to think about it from, during the concentric phase. And then that gets returned as an eccentric resistance on the way back. And whether you think about it as momentum or kinetic energy, the variable that's getting modified is the speed that you're spinning an inertia. More speed means more kinetic energy against the same load or more momentum that you build up.

So in either case, velocity is telling you basically if your velocity at a given load is going up, that's generally a sign that the resistance is going up as well. The other piece, too, is that in my opinion, the major reason that different inertial loads can kind of promote strength versus speed-related adaptations is that they constrain movement speed.

So if you want to target really high force, especially during the concentric phase, you're going to use a higher inertial load because it constrains your speed to where you're putting a lot of effort in, but you're moving relatively slow. So it's going to feel heavy. You're putting this effort in, but you're still going up relatively slow. On the way back, it's this heavy load or feels heavy, but you're resisting it relatively slow. And that means you have more time to produce maximal force.

If you only have 2/10 of a second to produce force, you're going to get a lot of useful stuff out of that, but you're not going to maximize force within that movement. So it just puts you in this kind of mechanical position where it emphasizes really high levels of force. And then if you go the other direction, like a really small flywheel that's going to accelerate really fast, you're probably not going to produce as much mean force.

There's not going to be as much total impulse or work performed, but you're basically applying this really fast eccentric stimulus that we talked about before. So kind of bringing it all around, you could basically just say, "I'm going to focus on velocity. I'm going to find a load for my strength sessions that are basically I'm working as hard as I can, but the speed is relatively slow. So 0.5 m/s or slower maybe is a good starting point." On the speed side, I'm going to do one that I can move relatively fast, but still kind of without getting out of control.

And then with the strength side, we're just going to either basically try to progress the load at that speed. So once that speed starts to creep up, we just add some load. It's going to bring you back down. Then same thing, just build it back up.

All you're tracking is velocity against that load. On the speed side, we're trying to get faster and faster against that load over time. And then we can play around with things like adding eccentric overload methods to get even faster, use the motor to progress the velocity even faster. You could decrease the load to really ramp up the speed, but basically, you could go into it and say, "I'm going to pick a load based off of velocity. I'm going to try to make that velocity go up over time."

And then when it makes sense, add a plate or take a plate away depending on if you want to make it faster or feel heavier, higher force. And then just basically progress that way and track one metric over time. So that's my general approach. And then I'll work with other people. Some people like more of a power-based approach, and generally what we'll do is find the load where they produce the highest power.

Some people want to train at that peak power load or that optimal power load. I tend to like to kind of split it up into the speed component and the strength component of power. So we then just pick a load that's slightly slower than that for the strength day, faster than that for the speed day, and then we want to see that you have power across the entire profile scale up over time.

James de Lacey53:44

Nice. I like that approach. I've one final question for you that actually comes back to golf a bit, back to the overspeed stick stuff kind of. But using the swing in a skill complex. So obviously, so I'm just doing traditional complex training for anyone that's listening, squat and then jump.

But perhaps there's something you're doing in there. I mean, even have the combat sports side, I guess, where people might be doing a squat and maybe throwing combinations on a heavy bag. And for this example, might be a squat and a throw or a throw and some kind of main swing. Is that something you've played around with at all or something that interests you?

Alex Ehlert54:34

Yeah, I mean, I've definitely played around with it a bit. The person that I've seen do a lot of that is I don't know if you know William Wayland.

James de Lacey54:34

He's been on the podcast twice.

Alex Ehlert54:34

Oh, okay. Yeah, perfect. He kind of has this unique background working with combat sports as well as golfers. So he kind of has this unique perspective living in both of those worlds. But with golfers, he works with the DP Tour, the European Professional Tour quite a bit. And he works with some long drive guys that are really, really fast.

And he kind of turned this concept of a kind of a modified French contrast type complex where it's ascending correspondence, but he does a lot with once a golfer has pretty good foundation where it's even worth going into more of these advanced methods versus let's just build some strength and do simple stuff and try swinging fast once in a while.

He'll do something like a squat, a medicine ball throw, and then these overspeed swings. And kind of cycle through that and track velocity. And if velocity drops off in the overspeed swings, then set's over. We're focused on high quality, so it's definitely one of those I've seen some success, especially with a golfer that has a fairly good foundation already. And there's probably definitely something to it where it just kind of makes sense to pair those things together.

James de Lacey55:34

Nice. Now, pivot, Alex. Where can people find to follow you and keep up with all your information?

Alex Ehlert55:34

Yeah, I'm probably most active on Instagram. So I have kind of an Exxentric Fly specific account. I think it's my name _exxentric fly, maybe something like that. And then my kind of main account I post a variety of stuff. A lot of my golf-related stuff is there.

I think it's my name PhD, if I had to guess. I don't forget what—

James de Lacey56:23

I'll put it in the description for you.

Alex Ehlert56:23

Yeah. So that's probably where I'm most active. I'm usually pretty responsive. People message and have questions, so I'll try to keep tabs on it.

James de Lacey56:23

Perfect. I'll leave those links in the description for anyone who's keen to see what he's up to. He posts some good information, good data on his Instagram, especially on golf and stuff, so check that out. And I appreciate you coming on.

Alex Ehlert56:23

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.