LIVE Q&A: Marinovich vs. Westside, Muscle Fascicle Length, & Upper Body Plyos (SSOF Ep 188)

James de Lacey0:00

But not particular on that topic. So I'm going to go straight into the first one from Instagram here from Beelic Keenan. Thoughts on upper body players and examples? Yes. So typically when we talk a lot of us focus on the lower body which is understandable.

A lot of it's done I guess for more locomotive sports. So just running. So you tend to see a lot of plyometrics done there. But upper body plyometrics also have a role. You're just more limited in what you can do in terms of plyometric upper body.

So if anyone's not familiar plyometric, it's just a very fast eccentric to concentric I guess muscle action. So if you think about hitting the ground when you're running, you have an eccentric component and then into a concentric component. Same thing with jumping. You dip down then jump.

You can do the same thing with the upper body. So you can do explosive push-ups. Now, whether it is truly, I guess quote unquote truly plyometric, if you're doing say clap push-ups or explosive push-ups, which would be probably the most popular versions of upper body plyometrics, is up for a debate since you have long ground contact times.

But it's kind of like the trade-off with upper body. You can't really get these really quick ground contact. Now, I've done a reel a while ago. I should post it again of doing really quick ground contact drop push-ups. It's pretty brutal on the wrists and elbows and stuff and shoulders, but it could be a way you do something.

Obviously you have medicine balls you can do plyometrics with. And you can even do the same thing with the barbells. So, let me run through some examples of some body ones. So, starting with just body weight, you've got your and we're just going to assume that anything kind of explosive quote unquote falls under this plyometric umbrella because I think when most people talking about plyometric upper body, they're talking just more explosive training.

So again, the I guess the explosive or clap push-up would be the classic. I tend to not use the version on the ground that much because for me, at least from my experience, I think it's too heavy, especially if you're going into a or training for some kind of striking art. I prefer to deload the body weight.

So that's either having a band under you tied across the squat rack to deload the bottom position. You can have a band tied around your chest while it's hanging from the top to deload the bottom position. Or the easiest way is just to do it on an incline to have your hands on a bench so you're incline position explosive push-ups that way.

I think those are better options than on the ground typically. Because you're going to be really damn strong and really damn fast to be able to get. It's not saying you're not going to get something out of it, but I just tend to I like the contrast.

I like to contrast the velocity more so you have something that's a little lighter and faster versus being flat I guess horizontal to the ground and since you have more body weight there. Then you've got the rowing variations. So because you're not really being quote unquote ballistic in a sense but drop catch variations are plyometric.

So, if you hold the top position of an inverted row, which is also known as a fat man row, or essentially just being horizontal to the floor on a bar, you hold that top position, you let go somewhere and you kind of fall and you catch yourself at the bottom and then reverse the movement back up.

That would be like an upper body pulling plyometric. You can do the same thing bent over with a barbell where you're holding the barbell against your bottom top of your top two abs and you kind of drop the bar and catch it and reverse it back up.

You can do the same thing on a bench pull or known as a seal row where you're holding that top position, dropping, bringing it back up. So, you have that quick reflex at the bottom and what creates that upper body plyometric pulling action.

You can do the same thing on a pull-up bar if you're holding a chin-up or a pull-up and you're letting go, you're dropping yourself back down and pulling yourself straight back up quickly. Those would be pretty tough, but those would be examples of upper body pulling plys you could use.

Do I think that they are that important? I think for striking arts, you should do some. I really like the drop catch inverted row as my main one. Outside of that, typically just nailing your main strength work with your back move and stuff tends to be enough.

But these can always be worked in. Then you've got medicine balls. So with the upper body, you're not really going to do much pulling in terms of plyometric with this. But in terms of having plyometric actions, you've got like the shock method.

Veransky is kind of using gravity as your way to increase the intensity of exercise. So, if you're lying flat on your back on the floor and someone's standing above you with a medicine ball and they drop the medicine ball and you have to essentially catch and reverse and throw that back up as quickly as possible, that would be a classic upper body medicine ball plyometric.

Obviously, the higher the ball's dropped from, the more speed is going to come down, the harder it is to reverse, and that means it's more intense. So, you're going to play around with that. Ideally, with the medicine ball stuff, I like to keep them relatively light because I want the speed out of them.

And then obviously you just increase the drop height for that. And then you've got ones where people can throw you the medicine balls to create that more plyometric action. So if you're doing say rotational throws, if someone throws a ball to you and you have to decelerate the ball into a rotational position and then come straight back out, it would be like a rotational plyometric for your upper body.

You can do the same thing with overhead, which technically would be a pulling exercise since it more targets your lat. So if someone threw it over your head and you had to catch it and kind of slam it back or overhead throw it back, that could be another option there.

And you can do the same thing with the medicine ball punch throw, which would just be you see most people doing that one. Someone can throw it to you and you can decelerate it and reaccelerate it in a punch manner. So that would be another one.

So you got a few things to play with with medicine balls, but the main thing is you have to have either someone throw it to you if you're going horizontal or if you're using gravity, someone can drop it to you. And you can play around with those two concepts.

I think was there one more that I wanted to cover there? I think that was the main plyometrics body weight and medicine balls. Then obviously with the barbell as I mentioned. So the other barbell one you could do upper body is like a drop catch bench press.

So we talked about that drop push-up variation where you maybe have your hands on like plates or elevated. You drop down in between and jump back up. That would be one you've probably seen online. You can do the reverse where you're lying on your back holding a bar like bench press position.

You're going to drop the bar basically to your chest and reverse it up as quickly as possible. Obviously not stable. Smith machine would be better. But, you know, depends on what you have. So those would be some examples of upper body plyometrics you can use.

Yeah, that can essentially cover those aspects for you. In terms of, I probably need to go into why. I've covered a lot on why in plyometrics. Check out the SSOF YouTube channel too. I've done a bunch of videos on plyometrics as well that cover a lot of that.

So let me jump into the next question. We have Tom Barr here. I had to bring him back on the podcast. Actually, if anyone's not familiar, he's a strength condition coach with the Carolina Panthers NFL team. You can actually listen to him. Must have been one of the early like single-digit episodes. You know, we're almost close to 200. So I probably have to bring Tom back on.

But he's asking, minimum effective dose for muscle fascicle length increase. What if athlete is also sprinting? Now I actually have to do some preparation for this question because there's nothing out there that will give you a concrete, how little can you do and see increases in muscle fascicle length.

A good thing to note on this is if an athlete is sprinting, if you are sprinting, and in this case this would be overground sprinting since it's American football, that in itself is a positive signal for increasing muscle fascicle length. So that's already touching on a lot of it.

Now I had to go through a couple of papers. Let me actually full screen. I'm going to go... damn, my computer's lagging so much. Okay, I had to go through a couple of papers just to get a little idea of what was going on. Obviously, there isn't too much on it, but if I start with this, I've referenced this in a few, one of my videos, by Anthony Blazevich. He's done a lot of training studies on the basically the effects of muscle fascicle and other muscle architecture changes.

But this one's titled Training Specific Muscle Architecture Adaptation After Five-Week Training in Athletes. So this one was eight females and 15 males. They performed four weeks of training and it was essentially a squat lift training group, a forward hack squat. So basically it was two strength groups and the third group only did sprint and jump training.

So you could almost say this is an isolated study and one that is more higher volume in terms of the high velocity work. And what they found was in this four weeks that the sprint and jump group significantly increased muscle fascicle length while the other two groups did not. That was the squat group and the front hack squat group and they were doing more traditional strength training work.

Now, there's probably some caveats that you have to have with this particular study. The strength training groups didn't train a full range of motion on those squats. If they did, you may have seen some potentially increased muscle fascicle length. That's, I'm just fully speculating there, compared to the sprint and jump group.

Now this is relatively high volume because it's just sprinting and jumping and nothing else. But what's really interesting is that even though there was that change in muscle fascicle length in the sprint jump group, there were no significant differences between the group's performance. And performance we're talking speed with sprint, vertical jump, and some strength tests during the squat and things like that. So muscle architecture change is part of, is a piece of the puzzle and obviously not the only piece. So that's an interesting finding out of that one too.

And then if we go into this next paper, which is a meta-analysis by Romero-Moraleda, Effects of Plyometric Training on Lower Body Muscle Architecture, Tendon Structure, Stiffness, and Physical Performance. And if you go through here, you'll see plyometric training has an effect. But you don't get, let me just scroll through. I had some stuff up in here.

So you have plyometric training increases muscle fascicle length with a moderate effect. So, you know, it works. And you go into some of the papers and it's relatively highish volume. If I just jump to some of these papers. So just trying to find this one. So this one is, no, we don't want young and older men because it's an age thing as well.

This one here, recreational soccer players, they were doing 800 jumps, 656 jumps in that group. So 16 sessions, 2 days a week, 20 to 25 minutes a session. So moderate volume on that one. So you're still, you're getting changes just from the plyometric training itself.

And then one really good paper is by Matt Brughelli, John Cronin. I need to get Matt on the podcast. He was my academic supervisor. He's done some really cool work in that area of obviously training and this shift in angle of peak torque. I've got some questions in the chat I'll hit soon. Angle of peak torque with eccentric training.

So what's interesting is increase in muscle fascicle length in this instance is one of the theorized components of why we see an increase in the length tension relationship, which just simply, if you say you're doing a bicep curl and 90 degree elbow angle is where you're strongest because that is where you get like that maximum overlap, we can shift that to longer muscle lengths which is going to essentially help us reduce the risk of injury because we are stronger at longer muscle lengths.

And then the outcome of that ideally is that we're also faster because if we see increases in muscle fascicle length, we see increases in contractile velocity within the muscle. Now you can increase the length tension relationship without increases in muscle fascicle length. It's just one of the theorized ways of doing it. I'd have to do a little digging to see if there's more on it updated.

But if we jump into some of the time scales on this one. So this is only immediately post-training though. So it's not really going to give us definitive long-term outcomes. So this is like seeing the shift in length tension directly after these exercise protocols. But what you do see in these acute studies is that higher intensities and higher volumes lead to greater change, which I guess you could probably understand from pretty much any kind of exercise.

But it's just something to note that in terms of we're talking like minimum effective dose. Now if we look at this one study that's cited in here by Clark et al., they use Nordic hamstring, two to three sets of 5 to 8 reps, and that would be then considered low volume, which I would probably consider relatively lowish volume.

So that low volume is probably, at least in that study with the Nordic hamstring, was like two to three sets of like 5 to 8. So the minimum effective dose for increasing muscle fascicle length is probably going to depend on the intensity of exercise and then with that is going to be the volume.

So I can't really give a definitive answer on that. I would say the sprinting alone is probably minimally effective and you can probably layer on some kind of intense modality that you want to do on top of it because you're going to want to do that anyway. So while sprinting alone is good, you may want to essentially just really try and push muscle architecture adaptations and the other adaptations associated with, I guess, heavy eccentric work anyway that's going to give you that shift in the length tension and then on top of that is probably going to give you that shift in muscle fascicle length.

So yeah, hope that answered that. This is probably a really shitty answer from a practical programming perspective. If you're thinking in terms of a non-block model. So people often think this is a hypertrophy phase, this is a strength phase, et cetera.

If you think about it more like, okay, I'm trying to build the foundation. Everything comes back to speed or change in velocity and then we can bring that all the way further back into impulse. And if you're programming from that perspective where you're like, okay, everything I'm doing in this particular phase is building that foundation to be able to further increase the change in velocity, you're probably not going to go through a traditional hypertrophy phase.

You're probably going to go through a slow eccentric training phase, some kind of heavy overload, some maybe some of your basic strength work, maybe even long duration isometrics at longer muscle lengths, maybe even things like eccentric quasi-isometrics. That's going to be another way you can get eccentric overload.

In that sense, you're ticking all the boxes there because you're getting the high force movements for your strength development, but you're also getting very potent adaptations for some of these muscle structural changes and muscle architecture changes for speed further down the line as you get into faster movements too.

So I think from a practical programming perspective, you're looking that way. Obviously, I know Tom, you work more with the return to play guys, I think, if I remember correctly. So in those instances, yeah, you're probably hitting them or pushing the boundaries every so often or trying to see what, trying to make sure you improve the ability to tolerate the workload anyway.

Even for you guys sprinting. Yeah. I mean the minimal, if we're talking in season, if you're doing your main sprint work one day and you're doing your full range of motion lifting, or maybe in partial range, and then you're doing maybe like, let's just say it's focused on hamstrings, you're doing say one eccentric iso hamstring movement, you're probably going to be fine. Even like, I've very rarely through the program done with in-season work, I've really very rarely done full...

Eccentric overload for hamstrings. And what would be considered things like Nordics and even RDL's. And that's mainly been a scheduling problem. Like there's no way I could do Nordics and [expletive] on a Tuesday morning and then we have to do field in the afternoon and do speed. It just doesn't work.

So I went down an approach of iso hamstrings which in my opinion worked really well. I really like those. I had all progression on that and then we do a lot of glute stuff. We'd sprint of course that kind of took care of a lot of it. How was all integrated? I don't know if that hopefully that answers it.

I got put off by this damn computer crashing. I got a question in the chat here which is nice, some people came back before I get back to the questions from Instagram. So Matteo, he wants to know the science behind increasing his vertical jump.

It depends on the context of the vertical jump, too. So, we're just talking like a standing vertical. We're talking like vertical jump in an actual sport like volleyball or basketball where there's actual context in place.

If it's just purely like stand and jump as high as you can, it's all going to be dedicated to how much force you can put into the ground and how quickly. And there's a few different strategies for it. Obviously, if you're in a sport, you have constraints.

So, in basketball or volleyball, well, [expletive] even soccer and rugby, if you're jumping for balls, there's a constraint of time to be able to get off the floors. So, you need to have fast essential qualities in there, which is going to change the way that you train for if you're just going for a maximal vertical jump.

If you're going for a maximum vertical jump, time doesn't matter. Time isn't a constraint. You can spend as much time on the floor as possible. So, you're probably going to dip as deep as possible so you have more time to apply force on the way up.

So, in that instance, you're literally just getting strong as [expletive], heavy full squats, just your typical heavy leg work, even some kind of eccentric overload down there, and then you're jumping and you're refining the timing and the technique of your vertical jump and even some Olympic weightlifting on top of that.

That's pretty, like vertical jump is not a hard thing to train when you don't have to worry about time. When you're just doing a one-off jump, you're literally just trying to get as strong and powerful as possible. So, your squats going up, if your cleans and snatches and loaded jumps and all that are going up, your vertical jump is probably going to go up as long as you are still practicing your typical arm swing vertical jump.

With that now you can do other things in there. You got more advanced protocols, cluster sets, you can start complexing things, French contrast, all that kind of stuff you can do to kind of further spur progress. But a lot of times you won't even need to go there.

It's just keep improving all your other numbers and that'll increase your vertical jump. Now if it's sport involved, then it's another story because now you got to start thinking about how you can change that strategy and how you can make, how you can stimulate adaptations to help you generate that force with those time constraints because then now isolation might be a little different.

Maybe your training strategy might be a little different. But it will involve a lot of the similar stuff. It just might be skewed a different way. So if I come back, if you guys have any more questions, throw them in the chat.

I have a couple of questions on Instagram that are pretty much the same, which is quite interesting. Something must have gone around recently on, as social media content does, but thoughts on Nick Kersonen's philosophy pros and cons by Madden. But then a similar question on the pros and cons of each method like Marinovich, Schroera, etc.

So I have a general understanding of Marinovich and Schroeda and stuff like that in the method. I don't have a full deep understanding, but I have the general gist. I'll cover that in a second. For Nick Ken's philosophy, I don't have a good insight, but I believe it's based on Marinovich, so I'll just kind of go down that road in terms of pros and cons.

With any system, with any system, there are some pros and there are pros and cons. And my belief is you cannot just go all in on one system because all systems are lacking something. And if we look at opposite ends of the spectrum, if Marinovich is one end of the spectrum, you probably have Westside is like the other end of the spectrum where you got one that is more I guess you could say anti-barbell in a way.

Anti-barbell, more fast movement I guess fluidity. And then you have Westside which is on the other side which is like full output, how much load you can lift, full barbell training, that kind of thing. Both methods or both systems have merit.

But going all in on one system, in my opinion, is not a great idea because you miss out on a lot of things. And you're kind of, you're trying to borrow from a lot of different systems to kind of create a complete system for yourself or for your athletes or whatever it is.

And often that system is going, it has to be flexible because it has to fit the athlete that you're training or yourself. And you're just trying to plug gaps. So you'll see success in certain systems which is cool. And you'll see some athletes will get more success than others.

So if you came from say a Westside or powerlifting or strength sports background and you went purely into a Marine system to become a fighter, you're going to see amazing results because it's the exact opposite training style. You're touching on things and qualities that you've likely lost from your strength balls background that you're gaining back and you're going to gain it and you're going to start making gains quickly because it's a completely novel stimulus built on the base of what you've done before.

Taken the other way, someone who's just done same render style training, they get under the barbell, they're also going to see crazy gains because now they're actually building that baseline strength that they may not have had from that other system. Now, that's not to say that you can't get strong, you can't get powerful, you can't become a great athlete just doing one of the other system.

I'll just say that some of them are potentially lacking what you may need or your athlete may need as an individual. In terms of the actual benefit, what I really do like about say that Marinish style training is the really big emphasis on the fast eccentric work.

So a lot of their movements are kind of based on that with that, I don't know what that machine's called. It's almost like a modified jump squat Hascot machine, which I really do like. And then a lot of emphasis I guess on rotational stuff I believe. I think that's part of Nick Kirsten's philosophy as well, which I do really really like.

Now what I don't like is the kind of real, it's not really avoidance. It's more of the negativity towards say general strength training. Now general strength training is not a, how do I put it? General strength training has been overemphasized and is made to be more important than it is. I will say that far, but that's not to say that it's not useful and that's not to say that it's not important, especially for certain athletes and especially as developing athletes.

Once you get into a stage where maybe you're further into your career, yes, still important to do and you should still do it, but pushing it potentially isn't, it's so dependent, but just generally potentially isn't going to be the thing that pushes your fight performance or sports performance to that next level. But it is something that you should be doing as a general, you could say catch all, as a way to just keep you generally healthy, as a way to continue holding on to performance and continue to potentially improve performance depending on how your strength training is structured.

So all I can say is most things have pros and you're trying to just pull from everything. If you just look at any sports performance training programs, you're looking at modalities and you're looking at exercises pulled from all the various different disciplines.

You got Olympic weightlifting is being pulled in from, you're looking at bodybuilding, you're looking at powerlifting, you're looking at strongman. And then on top of that, you may be looking at other things from the track and field. All these things are kind of being pulled in and mixed and matched into training programs.

And kind of taking a lot of those concepts and then they're being I guess you could say modified for the sport. There's a reason that you typically don't see, well you actually do, you do see athletes do it but they shouldn't, where they take pure powerlifting programs or pure strongman programs whatever it is to train for MMA, boxing, rugby, whatever it is where yes those programs are built to train that quality really well but you miss out on a lot of others.

And that would just be my take on kind of that pros and cons of different systems. So I would incorporate various elements of certain maybe systems and kind of bring them together that will give you kind of that broad spectrum versus just jumping all in on one that's kind of missing a lot of different things.

And then I had a question today from Gabriel: new trainer here, where can you learn more about training with grappling athletes? I'm assuming about training grappling athletes. Well, you can just follow this channel and all that stuff. That will help.

Outside of that, man, grappling athletes are probably the least complicated of all the combat sports to train, I would say, in terms of if we're looking at the strength training side, because you can just do your basic strength and hypertrophy work, and that is going to get you pretty much most of the way there, especially in a sport like jiu-jitsu.

In terms of conditioning, we got a ton of podcasts on various conditioning stuff that would be worth listening to as well on that. And I've got a ton of videos on the various types of conditioning that will help, but there's not really any other, not many other resources out there.

Most of the resource kind of YouTube videos and that kind of stuff. If you want to actually learn more about actual kind of not so much just grappling because everything applies to everything and you want to really expand as a coach, there are some much better books out there, older books and older articles that you can read depending on what rabbit hole you wanted to go down.

If you're looking at strength training, I do really like Verashansky's Special Strength Training Manual. That has been one of my favorites. Governing Dynamics of Coaching by James Smith is a good book too. It kind of covers a lot of everything.

If you're looking to get into more of the coordinative side, France Bosch's Strength Training Coordination book is really good as well, but I probably wouldn't start there if you don't have a foundation. Then you got all your basic textbooks, Tudor Bompa's periodization stuff. Yeah, there's a ton. Transfer Training, whatever else. Those are all kind of classic books in this kind of space.

High Performance Training for Sports is a really good one, too, because it's kind of like a compilation from a lot of different coaches put together with their articles. So, those are good options, too, to kind of really dive deep.

But that was all the questions that I had. So, make sure you guys please like the podcast, leave a review, all that kind of stuff. It helps. We'll be back with guests in the coming week and I appreciate you guys tuning in.