Hardcore Speed & Power Development Using Olympic Weightlifting & Keiser

James de Lacey1:51

I actually enrolled in an osteo degree here and then the day of like the orientation I just didn't sign up. So I just committed to the gym and we've been at this place for the last nine years and it's just it slowly changed over the time and up until I'd say maybe the last 18 months or 2 years we've really committed to weightlifting. I used to offer a lot of just gen pop sessions. Well, originally a CrossFit affiliate just to get more members in the door.

And then I just, it just didn't really fit with my philosophy around training. So I just wanted to just focus on weightlifting and do that. And then I suppose here we are. Just collected a few athletes over the years and developed them.

Brandon Accardi4:01

Yeah, that's awesome. And yeah, I know what you mean on the gen pop side. It's soul crushing to—

James de Lacey4:09

Some people love it and I don't know and I just it's not me and a lot of people are really successful with it and it certainly attracts, like it's the option I think if you want to make money.

Brandon Accardi4:22

It is, yeah.

James de Lacey5:25

I think it works really well and I think they've proven that it does that but I just I just can't fit into it. I don't understand it. I couldn't even write a program like that for a month and just I feel like every week they need something new or like they get a dopamine hit out of doing the same workout in a different order or I don't understand. I just it's not for me. We want to actually get good at something and yeah or be very good at something and that requires coaching.

Brandon Accardi4:53

Yeah, exactly. And I actually wanted to go through some of your weightlifting. I know this is a combat sports podcast, but there's a lot in your weightlifting philosophy that carries over, at least from what I've seen from your Instagram. So if anyone's interested, just search up Brandon Accardi on Instagram. You'll find his stuff.

I mean, you get a few reels have like over a million views, which is pretty crazy. And I have a feeling it's probably because in the Olympic weightlifting world, the things that you're saying and doing go against most Olympic programs or I should honestly probably all Olympic programs at least from what I've seen and with my wife and us traveling around the world with different weightlifting countries and things like that.

So it'll be interesting to kind of go into your philosophy around that and what you, what how your training for Olympic weightlifting specifically is maybe different from maybe how others approach it or at least maybe a more traditional approach.

James de Lacey5:45

Yeah. Absolutely. So I suppose my perspective isn't, my purpose isn't to be, I'm just filming work. I'm just filming my job. So that's essentially the content that I put up is just what we do at work. And the purpose isn't to be like contrarian for the sake of it. It's just to sort of maybe show what we do.

But I did the very stock standard weightlifting program for a good eight or nine years. And when I mean the traditional one, I've got my coach's program from 1980. It's in my cupboard. And it looks, we, I did that program. So I literally did his program from then and so he'd send me a new program. He'd go look through his files and then he'd sort of reproduce the same sorts of things that he did at the Australian Institute of Sport and that was inspired by a lot of Russian Bulgarian coaching and just whatever I had—

Brandon Accardi6:52

Is that a lot of squat and pull volume?

James de Lacey6:54

Yeah. Yeah. Like, but it's essentially how I like to think of it is it's just the same program every day, every session, just the—

Brandon Accardi7:04

You go on, I've got, I'll say something after.

James de Lacey7:08

No that's okay. But it's essentially it's the same session every day so it's the same things. It's just snatch, clean and jerk in some form whether it's, you know, maybe you don't jerk that day but you did pause the day before, it's cleans, but it's the same thing.

So I tried that, didn't really work for me. And I just kept getting lots of injuries. So it's just a matter of problem solving those injuries and those require more varied training. So we still do some of the things that the traditional method is. Like our weightlifting is, probably our weightlifting programming is very basic. So they go heavy snatch and clean and jerk majority of the year every week.

But that's just one day in the program and then there's five other sessions or four other sessions where they're trying to develop the qualities that are necessary for that. And that sometimes means not using a weightlifting exercise or not using a barbell to do that. And often leads to a really high level of stimulus to be produced on the targeted tissue or the targeted adaptation that we want. We can be very specific because we are not looking at it through the lens of always using a weightlifting exercise.

Brandon Accardi7:08

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All right, I've got two things for you. One's a question, one's a comment on the nutritional programs. When we were in Romania, my wife was, she was training for the Olympics and she obviously went, she was training it full-time at one of the weightlifting clubs there and just like you mentioned with the kind of repetitive and same thing, like she would know the entire week off by heart for the next week because it would be exactly the same.

So certain days it was squats and pulls in the morning. In the afternoon it was maybe I don't know some of the classical lifts or powers or whatever. And it was just exactly the same every day but just like a ton of volume, like eight sets of five kind of volume. And it was just, it was, I mean it was tough for her cuz she's, at the time she was an older lifter in her career. She'd been competing for so long but yeah it's brutal.

Your wife went to the Olympics.

James de Lacey10:10

She missed out by one spot.

Brutal.

Brandon Accardi10:15

It's amazing.

James de Lacey10:17

Just amazing at this point.

Brandon Accardi10:19

Exactly. I mean, she won the Commonwealth medal in 2018, bronze medal in 2018, and then was going for Tokyo, missed by one spot because they had that stupid rule where you could just weigh into another weight class and take all your Robi points over.

So one of the, I think it was a Turkish athlete, just weighed into her weight class and then took all her points from the lower weight class up.

James de Lacey10:42

Okay, that's tough.

Brandon Accardi10:44

It's brutal. Now, the other thing I was going to say on what you were saying back to your programming. So typically when I guess in weightlifting when people are talking, people use weightlifting exercises to develop, I guess, the qualities you mentioned, how you do other things to maybe develop some of those qualities and be more targeted.

I guess within a typical weightlifting program, people going, "Hey, I need more speed, so I'm going to do more power variations or whatever it is." So then what are you doing then that's maybe a little different or how are you targeting some of these qualities then for these weightlifters that isn't just doing more weightlifting?

James de Lacey11:18

To go back to the comment earlier of, your wife knows the program off by heart. A lot of my athletes know the program off by heart as well. Every week it's the same thing. It's just each session is a different type of session. So every Monday they do hang snatches, every Wednesday they do Keiser and so on. But there's structured variability, I suppose, how I look at it.

So then with how we're targeting it, sometimes it's just as simple as doing weightlifting but just doing it faster. So just putting a speed or a metric on there so that we're just establishing we need to move this weight quicker or we need to maybe we want a slightly faster eccentric. And our goal here is not to progress the load.

It's just to, we're just going to try and progress how fast we can move this exercise. And sometimes it's as simple as that. And that's for people who maybe don't train with me in person. So we don't have access to me being there for them in person.

But for when it's in person and when I'm at the gym, I have access to, we've got 10 Keiser machines and we've got a Smith machine. We can do a variety of exercises in that as well. So sometimes it's, a good example is say a pull for example where I just want you to change direction really quickly with certain load, say 80%. Sometimes we can get higher speeds and fast eccentric speeds and just produce more power and be more targeted with an exercise like a box squat. So sometimes it's as simple as that. We're just subbing exercises out.

So that might be just one way that people can reframe the way that they're looking at it. Well, maybe I would use, if I'm constrained to doing snatch pulls, I'm trying to get faster, more explosive second pull. How long am I applying force for? Maybe 300 milliseconds. Well, I can do a box squat to the same time frame and I can lift more load at a faster velocity in that same time frame and produce more power under those same conditions. So maybe that might be a better exercise.

And the track and field world does a lot of those exercises. So we know that that has, there's a lot of rationale for using those. There's a lot of efficacy for it. And those exercises produce really good results in that world. So we've just been doing, that's essentially how a lot of these, how I've ended up using the Keiser is I just started, well, okay, well, why don't I just start with fast partials, fast range of motion exercises, short range of motion exercises, and progress from there.

So that's one simple example of how we just problem solve. Well, what are we trying to actually do here? How long are we applying force for? That's, I suppose, the first way that people can think about it.

Brandon Accardi14:27

Are you using certain tools to measure the stuff and prescribe?

James de Lacey14:32

I think the benefit of measuring things initially is that eventually you never have to measure it again, because you sort of understand what your training is doing. So we've used a variety at this point now, a variety of tools. So different LPTs, the linear positional transducer. So the cable velocity device, accelerometers as well. Even tried to make my own accelerometer, still working on that.

But a variety of those tools and essentially just tested a number of movements that we would use in our training, all the ones that I would use currently, and just wanted to find out what do they do and what are the sort of minute details or differences between the exercises.

And then from there we've just said, okay, well, based on what we want to achieve in these type of sessions, this exercise is best suited to that, just using the data as a lens. It's not the only lens that we use, but it's this is a good starting point if we want to try and think about how we can get people stronger or more powerful.

So if I want to essentially, if I want to get someone really, really fast at a jerk or in their second pull, well, it's going to be a lot of exercises in that range of motion. So a lot of short ones. If I want to get someone strong, I probably need bigger range of motion. Very straightforward, but it's just a matter of looking at those exercises through that lens.

So one of the metrics that we use, which we were using, was time to peak velocity. It's not something that we use now, but essentially it's just how long you're applying force for. It can just be a good filter for, well, is this exercise transferring to some of the time frames of your sport. It's just one perspective, and then just peak power. So we just want to look at peak power and peak velocity.

So if we just know the exercise that we want to use and we stick to that for about a training cycle or a training mesocycle, are we seeing improvements in that exercise given that we set out to improve speed or given that we set out to improve peak power? Just having those metrics integrated into the training system, we can just make sure we're progressing and developing those metrics just by tracking it.

So those have been some of the tools that we've used, and then ultimately it's led to me transitioning from that to just integrating Keiser into the program which just has it all integrated into a user, into a screen, and it just tracks your peak power and the resistance that you use. And that was the final, I guess, piece for me in simplifying the training process and making it possible for a person who's not clued in about what we're doing to be able to just train hard.

So my general pop members, moms and dads, just come in and I say, I want you to do, I want you to increase peak power. I want you to try harder next set, beat this number. And they do. But if I say to them, why does a person, mom and dad, need to track the velocity of their lifts? They don't at all. That's waste of time. So that's dumb.

But having the Keiser there, it gamifies it, makes it fun, and it sort of caters for everybody at all levels. So that was where I am at now, after a couple of years of looking into that world.

Brandon Accardi17:51

Nice. I do want to go down the Keiser rabbit hole, but before that, I've got a few other questions on that, what you were talking about. So you mentioned you used to use time to peak velocity. Is there a reason you don't look at that anymore?

James de Lacey18:26

Because it's just tracking the range of motion, and often that number doesn't really change.

It's not a metric for adaptation, if that makes sense.

And so if when you track metrics over time, you might find that that number there doesn't really change much because, well, it shouldn't because the range of motion is relatively similar. So it's more like a tech, we call it a technique index. It's just telling you the range of motion, telling you if exercises are similar.

But it's a bit of a rabbit hole. I think if you just look at it through the lens of, well, this is, sometimes I don't like to bring it up, but I brought it up in this scenario because people talk about ground contact time and they talk about how long you're applying force for. So it's a good one to bring up, but it's ultimately not a measure of adaptation.

That's why I don't use it.

Brandon Accardi19:24

Gotcha. And I would assume as well maybe different styles of the way people pull from the floor might influence that as well. Some people might be slower off the floor maybe. I don't know if that's

Yeah, exactly. And I think that's where it's useful. So if we're looking at just that number, it needs a lot of context. So looking at the force trace, the velocity trace will tell us more.

So just looking at the velocity trace, we'll just see, is it a nice smooth build? Are we building velocity throughout the rep, or are we really, really slow off the floor and then there's this enormous spike? So do we, are we not coordinated in that first part or in that transition from first and second pull?

So that's how I think it's more valuable, just to look at the curve or just look at the athlete and go, you're so weak in your first pull. Do exercises that are going to develop that. Get strong quads, get strong in your hip extension. So yeah, there's many ways you can look at it, but I find the velocity trace is just interesting for the first time whenever you're explaining to someone.

James de Lacey19:34

Yeah, it's interesting. And you talked about, so we talked about some of the qualities I guess. I think peak power sounds like a really strong metric you like to look at. But what are the qualities you're typically looking to target and change, whether it's muscle structure, physiology, anything like that, even just outputs I guess, within some of these we'll call them accessory movements, things that are outside of weightlifting? What are you looking to really change for these athletes to transfer back into their sport?

Brandon Accardi19:34

Yeah, exactly. I think, as we said, as we established earlier, weightlifting programming, people can assume it's very, very basic. It's very simple. It's just snatch and clean and jerk, that's it, stock standard. And then maybe there's a hang snatch, and that's it. But essentially, it's very, very simple program.

And so the things that we're trying to target outside it, a big one has been just trying to increase work capacity. So their ability to produce an explosive movement multiple times. So we're calling this like power capacity, and that quality is really well developed when we're working at those submaximal loads. We're performing some volume there.

So it's almost like CrossFit. So whether it is, people might have seen throwers train, they do lots of high volume, fast, explosive reps, but it's quite heavy as well. So how can we build our body up and our athlete up to being able to move such a heavy weight for so many repetitions and at such a high training density? So how can we actually achieve that?

So that's a really important quality that we need to develop, because ultimately it allows us to be able to recover from hard and intense training, but then we can also intensify our weightlifting. Because we're not just looking for one more kilo, we're actually able to continually look for progress in our lifts. So the power capacity is really important, and often that's lots of volume at these submaximal weights. And people might look at it as junk volume, but it's actually how we develop power in the first place.

So that's a really important quality for us. And then we can also develop that with our sprint training as well. So the sprint training that the athletes do, so the national ones and some of the athletes I coach down here, there's a lot of sprint drills. It's a very standard speed training session. So sprint drills, jogging, lots of submaximal jumps, but I wouldn't really call them stimulative plyometrics. They're more just, it's more rhythmic and for conditioning, really.

So ultimately, we're just trying to make these athletes a little bit fitter and develop their conditioning so that they can just continue to train weightlifting hard. Because often that's what they, that's often where people suffer and where people get injuries, is they're just not fit enough to do their training. Their body continues to break down in the same sorts of ways. So we need to condition their legs, hips, to be able to do that.

And yeah, we can develop a lot of hip extension from the sprint training. So a lot of the short sprints that we do are really effective, and obviously those exercises have a fast eccentric. So there's a lot of good qualities that are coming from those exercises.

So a lot of the adaptations that we want, so we can develop a lot of passive structures which are necessary for changing direction fast, can all be done with our fast power work, decrease inhibition so that we can actually start to move our body a little bit faster. But those things can all be targeted from when we're performing this lighter weightlifting and our sprint training. So we're getting a lot of benefit just from shifting our training to this lighter, faster speed stimulus.

And we sort of maintain that year round, and we tend to just turn it up a little bit more in our off season. So they're sort of like, a lot of them now, I was just talking a bit of [expletive], but they're all just doing this fake throwing program. None of them are doing any throws. They maybe have a behind the head throw, but yeah, and they love it. So, and that's the goal. Try and get really powerful, try and build capacity, and it helps sequence nicely into making them fit for when they're ready to compete.

James de Lacey25:07

I don't know if that makes sense.

No, that's perfect. I love this idea of work capacity, because it's not often talked about. Maybe it's not often implemented very well, and there's so many different I guess training methods and different things you can do with it within the gym. Because often people think with capacity they go, oh, I'm just going to do more conditioning or do more long runs.

But you can do, as you mentioned, like a lot of submaximal stuff like barbell complexes, clusters, I got more leg circuits, all sorts. And these things can all help work capacity and do it in mode and application for grappling was huge. You know, if you're able to even do like bigger weightlifting complexes like for grapplers and wrestlers, that's huge carryover onto the mat.

So I'm interested to know, like, you obviously mentioned submaximal reps, but do you have any I guess specific examples or typical methods you like to use during like a work capacity block?

Brandon Accardi26:05

Yeah, definitely. So just sets of four or five on clean pulls, and they just got to hit a certain velocity target. So it might be just like a clean high pull, four sets of five, and they need to hit around 2 meters a second or just progress peak power at those loads. It might even be, we just do a lot of high rep, short range of motion power snatches. So they're just like bounce power snatches, sets of five.

Then there's just like complexes. The complexes I do are very straightforward. There's one I do, it's just like two plus two, two hang clean pulls, and they pretty much, they have to pull it to their chest or almost touch their throat. So that's the type of speed that we're after. So I'm just being very specific about how I want the power developed. I don't want it to be slow.

So a lot of people try and develop capacity at a slower speed, which is not what I want to do. So they're really good at training slowly, and that's often how weightlifting capacities develop. So people will look at it through, okay, I want to develop work capacity, so I'm going to do 5x5 squats, and you, that might work for about 6 weeks, and then you might get sore knees.

So how we try and develop capacity is just like sets of 15 or 20 on a leg extension, sets of 15 in an adductor machine, a reverse leg press, just sprinting. Just there's an exercise that maybe has a lower cost to the system that you can develop quite a lot of endurance or quite a lot of capacity in that muscle.

So just sometimes means being a little bit more specific and trying to not shortcut the athlete and shortcut the progress. Because people just want to go straight to the end goal, which is like they see this thrower doing 160 kilo power cleans. So then they'll just want to power clean 160 kilos. And some of my athletes can, but only for one rep, but this guy's doing it for five. So you're better off just doing it at 120, and you're going to get the same stimulus he is.

So I think it's just a matter of maybe sometimes dropping the ego a little bit and thinking, well, I'm not at this level that I want to get to. So how can I get to this point? How can we, what's the vision for the athlete and what's the vision for our long-term development? What are we trying to achieve? Ultimately, it's a very powerful athlete that can continue to progress training.

So a lot of people look at weightlifting as this 1 kilo a year sport, where you never really get better. He just had 1 kilo. That's not at all how I look at it. That's not really progress to me. So we want to try and continue to develop the athlete each year, and that means factoring in like the specific stimulus that we want.

So muscle physiology is something that really interests me as well. So what do the different contractions do? What are the benefits of these exercises and how can this benefit the weightlifters? So our sport doesn't really require much physiology. Apart from the work capacity, we don't really have any energy system requirements. It's a very basic sport. So problem solving it should be very simple. So we need to pay a lot of respect to the muscle physiology as well.

James de Lacey26:05

I like that. I've seen your videos of like your hip snatch high pull into like power snatch. I think you do like two plus one or two plus two or something with it.

Brandon Accardi26:05

Yeah, I did that a little while ago. I'm going to do that again this afternoon after this podcast. It's such a fun complex.

Yeah, it is. It gets people to move fast and it's relatively easy for most people to pick up.

Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the things that keeps me attracted to this type of training is just how simple it is for beginners to get into hard training. A lot of people talk about, you do weightlifting when you first start and you're almost, if you're say if you're a powerlifter or you've come from maybe doing bodybuilding and training hard in the gym and you switch to a weightlifting program, the first six months you might drain yourself because you're just not lifting with much intensity. You're trying to focus a lot on technique, which ultimately it's important for establishing some sort of coordination.

But there is these exercises where you could just jump into from pretty much day one or the first month and get a really good stimulus and get a really good sense for what it feels like to be powerful in your second pull. So just having that in the program year-round is, it's scary what we've been able to achieve for some of them in a short time.

James de Lacey30:52

Yeah, it's a cool little combo. If anyone, check out his Instagram, anyone listening, you can see an example of that. But I wanted to come to your Keiser work. You do a lot of Keiser squats. We've talked about some of the metrics you're looking at with peak power. My question is the way the squat is performed or how you typically like your athlete to perform the squat.

Because on the videos you have some guys that come down fast, some athletes that come down slower. Is there, are you instructing that at all or do you, all you care about is just do whatever you need to do to get a high peak power score on that concentric?

Brandon Accardi30:52

Good question. It depends, it depends on the person and it obviously depends on what we're trying to achieve. The contraction speed is really important. So there's certain people where I don't think they're ready to do it really fast in a full range of motion, particularly on the belt squat.

So if we talk about the belt squat, that is the one that we mostly use multiple times a week with the athletes. So some of them just do that. They don't back squat at all. They just use the belt squat. And there's one athlete I have, she's a lot younger, she's 19. So I don't really see the need for her to be back squatting. She can just continue to just do Keiser and maybe later on we can worry about that. But the main thing is there's just a lot of compensations when she does her back squats.

But as far as the speeds of the eccentric, so some athletes, if they can drop fast, they will. I'll recommend that. But the thing is when we do a lot of fast eccentrics, you're using a lot of passive structures to change direction. And that's not always good because we want to make sure that we are training at different speeds to target different muscle groups.

So I sort of believe in the theory that muscles are sequential. So at certain speeds certain ones will take over. So there's a bit of work from Frans Bosch. It talks a little bit about soleus and how when you're walking it's contracting passively and then when you sprint it's contracting actively. So I think a lot of these things play a role in just squatting as well.

So I think I see the adductors being an important muscle group for weightlifters to train. But when we do a lot of fast eccentric squatting, I think we're just getting the contraction is just passive. So a lot of them are quite strong passively but actively quite weak. So if there's a need for them to, we need to train all speeds essentially. So the answer is we train at all speeds, fast and slow and medium I suppose.

And the benefit of the Keiser is that we can do all those speeds as well. So we can do bodybuilding, slightly slower speed. We can do sort of like strength work where they're maybe being more controlled. And then we can do our power training, which is quite fast and explosive, which is our fastest.

And then there's obviously the squat pro machine, which is what I think Keiser, most people think Keiser, think about this machine, which is the one with the shoulder pads, so the standing squat. And for the most part, that one I always recommend that one to be done fast for my athletes. But often if they can't produce the right technique, so it's usually a lot of lower back that machine if you do it poorly.

So people will just shoot their hips back and struggle to flex their knee to a certain load and it just becomes a lot of lower back. So a lot of the really good athletes online, a lot of the sprinters that use that machine often, they get a high wattage and they usually just max the machine out to the heaviest resistance and then they just do a fast good morning with not really much knee flexion.

So it's not really the adaptation that we're after. But we're sort of starting to now bastardize the exercise, or at least sort of what I think we need to get out of it. So I often get them to just go lighter and they can just work on dropping fast and changing direction quickly. So yeah, that's essentially how we like to use it. It's great because you can use it for a variety of applications.

James de Lacey35:17

I want one. There's a, at the weightlifting gym we train at, the gym, it's in a warehouse and the one next door has Keiser machines. I'm always jealous when I see them. But have you used that?

I haven't. No, I haven't used Keiser much at all. So it's at a different gym so I haven't used those ones. But every time I see them I'm like, I just want to go jump on them and—

Brandon Accardi35:42

You definitely need to get in there. You need to get in there and use it. Experience it for yourself.

James de Lacey35:46

Now, what kind of resistance are you setting on these? How you determining what resistance for the athletes?

Brandon Accardi35:55

Yeah, that's a question I get asked a lot. And often I'm not cryptic about how I say it, but it's more so when you use it, it's a question that everybody asks who maybe doesn't use it. So, and that's fair, and that's a fair question to ask.

I often prescribe it as there's some certain constraints just like all of the weightlifting that we do. There's conditions that need to be met in order for us to go up in load. So whether it's technique index, you're no longer doing exercise correctly, so you can't go up in load just like you would for any other movement. If you're doing RDLs and they start to look a little [expletive] and you're using just all lower back, but the goal is to train your glutes, the load needs to go down in load.

So it's no different with using the Keiser equipment. It's the same thing. So if we want a fast eccentric and I want knee flexion, but your peak power could go up, or you could add more load, but your technique isn't good, then you can't go up in load. It's too bad. So that's the resistance I would use.

Or if the, if we're doing sets of three and the percentage of peak power drop below 90%, then we don't go up in load. If it's a set of five and it goes below 85%, then we don't go up in load. There's just these, they're not hard rules. It's more just so like, okay, it was 83%, just try next set, try and get it up a little bit higher.

We tend to do a peak power profile. So on our first session that I'll get with an athlete, we'll just, which is essentially how we train anyway because each rep, each set we take small jumps, and just like any other training, and you build up. But you can record your peak power. So I'm always logging it and always recording it. And there'll often be a point on the first session where we'll keep adding load and the power will start to drop off.

And we might only do two sets after peak power just so we can get, imagine just like a nice bell curve of a spectrum of loads. And typically we will train on the lightest, maybe one set lighter than peak power. And that's just because we can get a lot of capacity at that load. If we train just above peak power or we're always trying to improve peak power, often the technique isn't great. It's just too heavy.

So I think maybe people think just because of the speed of movement that Keiser is light. It's very, very heavy and when done poorly it's just, it can be as damaging to your body as mass. It's just that it can be maybe slightly more forgiving because of the lack of inertia.

So just for example to give numbers. So say if anyone's using the Keiser squat machine, my peak power is at 250 kilos, but the weight that I choose to use is 180. I use 180 pretty much every session. That's the only weight I use. And I find I can get a good speed stimulus for what I'm trying to achieve with that exercise. So I don't train at 250 even though that's my peak power because it's slow. So yeah, that's essentially how I use it, how I use it. I would say just do a peak power profile and then you can go from there.

James de Lacey38:49

I'm going to ask a question about peak power in a sec, but I've completely skipped for the audience. Do you want to explain what the Keiser machine actually is and how it differs from traditional weights?

Brandon Accardi39:37

Yeah, that's fine. I think there's a lot of assumed knowledge when you have a guest like myself on and people probably know if they're going to listen to this episode, they probably know who I am or they follow us.

The Keiser machine, a lot of people think it's hydraulic and it's pneumatic. So it uses compressed air. So there's an air compressor with a line that runs into the machine and that fills the air tank on the machine which goes into the cylinder and then you just have buttons to increase and decrease the resistance. So it doesn't use weight. It uses pressure and the first time you use it, especially at light resistances, it feels like nothing. It just feels like pressure. It's hard to explain.

And then what it really exposes as you go heavier is just where in the range of motion and in what structures you are strong because you'll find a sticking point. And typically with mass-based training, you'll have momentum. So because there's no momentum, it's the same resistance regardless of the velocity and the speed of movement that you use. The air just provides this constant pressure.

So there'll just ultimately be this sticking point where you'll just fail the lift or it just gets very very hard and you might recruit other structures where you are quite strong. So it's a really good proxy for just showing people where they need to develop or where they're already quite strong.

So on the belt squat, people usually can't extend their hips. So majority of my athletes at the top of the rep, their hips are still flexed. Or they use their lower back quite a bit. So their neck is extending, their thoracic spine is extending, their lumbar spine is extending out of a belt squat, which is obviously not what we want, but those things tend to emerge as we get heavier.

So it exposes people because of that constant resistance. And that could just be the type of athletes they have. And it also could be the long-term implications of training with just weights. You don't train the whole range of motion and you often have momentum. So there's these flat spots in resistance that you're using.

So if you only train at really slow speeds like a bodybuilder, you might be fine. But if you are a weightlifter and you're squatting all the time and you've got a bad squat, chances are you've got a—and when I mean a bad squat, it's slow or there's like part of in the lift where you compensate or break down, there's probably some sort of energy leak there and the Keiser will just expose that further.

James de Lacey39:37

Would you say it's similar then to like flywheel in terms of how resistance—

Brandon Accardi42:26

I haven't used the flywheel so I don't know how a flywheel feels but the only thing is yeah I don't know how you can sort of keep progressing it and I think with the flywheel it's like whatever energy you put into the flywheel you'll sort of get out, it's like one to one but again I don't use a flywheel so I don't know.

James de Lacey42:50

All good. So you mentioned about peak power and obviously there's different schools of thought around using power as a metric. Typically you'll hear people say like they don't bother about maybe optimum power load or peak power because it's in the middle of this force velocity spectrum. So it's not high force, it's not really high velocity. So they don't bother with that and they kind of train either end because the product of those is power.

So you mentioned obviously you train a little bit under your peak power anyway. But it'll be interesting to kind of hear your thoughts around I guess maybe that school of thought, what you subscribe to around developing power and training at these power loads versus maybe other schools of thought where it's like I'm just going to train really heavy, I'm going to train really fast.

Brandon Accardi42:50

So it's funny that that graph there is a graph that's been used to explain a muscle, an individual muscle's force and velocity behavior. So I think it then it's been adopted to show a—to fit exercises along that curve where perhaps it was originally designed to show behavior of individual filaments and to explain this is what this muscle is designed for. Glute is designed to produce large forces. Its contraction speed is maybe slightly slower. So it's a curve maybe looks slightly different to another structure.

But yeah I don't really use that concept. I don't really sort of—I don't know, I forget that that concept exists, the force velocity curve. So anyway, so then it's difficult to say how other people might feel about the power metric, but as we've established in this podcast already, there's conditions around how we're developing the power.

So it's not essentially like—we're not trying to bastardize the exercise to continuously progress power. So it's not, it's—then that would be a means to an end. So we have these specific conditions that we want to try and meet so that it means that whenever we improve power we are definitely adapting because we've got these set conditions around the exercise.

And then ultimately you just have to do it and just see if you're getting better. I think like we—this is a couple of exercises amongst a program of 30 exercises a week maybe more. So this is two or three exercises that are slotted into this power framework.

There's lots of exercises fit under this power framework I have but this is just three of them where we're using on the Keiser squat to develop this quality. So if we're jumping higher, if we're lifting heavier and faster and we're progressing in our—if they're a sprint, if they're a short sprinter, if they're sprinting faster, less steps in 10 meters, whatever the metric is, if they're getting better, then great, that's a good concept that's got efficacy to it.

So I think you got to use these concepts and see if they work for you. But yeah, I don't subscribe to the curve thing.

James de Lacey46:14

Yeah. As you mentioned, it is based off single muscle fiber studies. So and then obviously it's just been kind of extrapolated out and given these labels of speed strength, strength speed, etc. And—

Brandon Accardi46:25

And I use those terms to systemize my coaching. So I use like we have speed strength in our program. There's certain exercises that are for speed strength. There's certain exercises that are for elastic power which is the short range of motion. Then we have disc which is the consecutive reps.

So we use a lot of the terminology but ultimately it's just so we can—there's a coach Dr. Chris Dale, we share a lot of ideas together and we do workshops together. So we've just tried to create a system so that we can both keep communicating and we're both on the same page when we're talking about training. And yeah, these terms are ultimately meaningless but they mean a lot to us because they're how we systemize our coaching. So I think—

Perhaps people have gotten a little bit too far with like rejecting sort of the terminology where the terminology is actually really important. Like we started calling exercises like coordinative strength, like what, obviously that's ridiculous, everything is coordinative strength, like everything is coordination. But there's a certain bucket, there's a bucket that we've created and these exercises go under there because it suits how we've organized things.

So ultimately like you have to be a little bit reductionist when you're actually coaching but for a research perspective no, you you have to be quite specific about the language you use but we're not researchers, we're coaches so I think that makes it easier.

James de Lacey47:49

Yeah. Perfect. It'll be interesting actually because you mentioned organization to go through maybe what a typical week structure may look like because people might listen to this and be like, "Oh yeah, sweet. I'm going to blast all of these Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday." And obviously people can like to get overzealous with certain things. So interesting to hear kind of how you plan this out through the week so basically you're continuing making progress and maybe not blowing people up at the same time.

Brandon Accardi48:14

Absolutely. Yeah, that's a very good point. We actually put a lot of this information out and then I had a friend of mine Jack Edwards do a presentation for my coaches portal to talk about long-term athlete development and power training and how, you know, just this isn't the whole program. This is just a part of it.

So our typical week is about a five session program. So there's Mondays which is our power session. So this is where it's typically a heavier power session. So they do a heavy hang power snatch or a hang snatch and then they have their Keiser work and some jumps on that day.

Day two they typically sprint. Then there's a strength session that follows that. So this is their speed strength exposure. So it might be heavy step-ups, squats with a velocity cutoff and then any other accessories that go well in there. So like a good strength session for us is typically like a throwing strength program. So squats or box squat, close grip bench, and then it's usually RDLs, split squats or whatever other upper body accessories they need to work on, reverse leg press or whatever.

So we can be a lot slower than say a track and field athlete. They probably don't need that slow of a session. They might have, you know, sort of the heavy power might be as slow as they go, depending on the season.

So that's for our weightlifters and then they've got one more power session to go which is the faster speed work. There's a bodybuilding session which is usually a bodybuilding circuit and then there's their comp session which is snatch and clean and jerk. So it's just a 5-day structure.

That's how I've systemized it. In season they do the comp session. So snatch, clean and jerk heavy pretty much for about eight months of the year, six months of the year. And then if they're not competing, I like to split the lifts up. And the organization is slightly different. It's a little bit more I suppose GPP style.

So just really a throw, honestly how a thrower would probably train or if I was to train a thrower that would be the program that they would have. So that's how a weightlifter is trained for about four to six months of the year.

James de Lacey48:14

I love the outlook on it because it goes so against so much of the traditional weightlifting with the lifts. Are you just doing like the snatch and clean and jerk once a week there most of the time like the just the full lifts themselves and the rest are just variations?

Brandon Accardi50:47

Yeah. And it might be like a complex like clean, hang clean, jerk, or it might be, you know, power snatch, snatch if they've just come from a comp so it's not too heavy. But I still want them to practice the lifts and often they're still progressing in them anyway.

But I think the main thing to understand is as long as, especially if the athlete's very coordinated at weightlifting—so a lot of people that I coach, they're very good at weightlifting. Like they're actually good at weightlifting but they're not very powerful or strong or muscly or good athletes. So I think that's where these concepts have been needed to develop, where the best weightlifters are also the best athletes.

If you can clean and jerk 230, you're a phenomenal athlete. Chances are you can probably do a back flip. You can probably jump very high. You're probably very jacked and muscly regardless of if you've had, you know, support, pharmacological support or not. You're a very, very good athlete and you're probably a very good athlete to begin with before weightlifting.

Whereas some of the people that I work with, they're very good at weightlifting but they lack a lot of the qualities that are necessary to continue to intensify their training. And it just so happens it's just too bad that they needed—like we needed to train like this in order for them to make long-term progress. So ultimately it's just a long-term development framework.

So they train like this. The idea is that they train like this for about five or six years and then after about five or six years then we probably have a really good base and then we can focus more on weightlifting. So the training can become slower after that time. So a good example of this, of someone who hasn't had as many pieces skipped in his development, is Locky the bobsledder who will obviously initially try to do—

James de Lacey52:51

Beast man.

Brandon Accardi52:53

He is a beast. He is a beast. Yeah. And so because he has a background as a decathlete—he's also a phenomenal human. So he has a lot of these natural gifts, but he trains very hard. So he's able to develop these natural gifts that he has.

And because he hasn't skipped pieces in his development from being a decathlete and having very varied training as a younger person, he's gone through part of a long-term development pathway already. So now in his mid-20s when he's wanting to develop his weightlifting more, the program is very simple and the program can actually be a more basic, quote unquote, traditional approach with those other elements alongside.

So it's not as necessary for him to be—for us to be focusing always on the power training because he's got that sorted. Whereas many others are not him. But in order for us to progress, we need to first get to that point.

So I think the way that I've just gone about it has just been to create the long-term development framework for weightlifting. And then ultimately I think people are scared to do that because maybe they are worried about what the athlete's going to say. But ultimately it's like, do you want to get better or not? Are you constantly getting injured? Well, this is the fix. You need to address these problems that you have and then you can actually progress.

James de Lacey54:23

It's almost like you're just trying to get them into a point of like chronic hard or high intensity loading over weeks and years and that's just giving you a solid base to continue training from and not run into so many issues.

Brandon Accardi54:38

Yeah. And the issues are like, you know, constant injuries, tendinopathies which are very easily resolved. And you know, varied training is only one part of reducing those tendinopathies. Often it's just the muscle filament is not elastic enough to handle those large forces so that the tendon and the other joints take the load. So if you can develop the elasticity in the muscle it can be protective against that.

So I think it's more of a rationale to get the athlete to sprint. Or if they can't sprint there's a serious problem—means your athlete is not fit. Your athlete, you know, if you can't just deploy sprinting into the program for your athlete then your athlete is not conditioned enough, they are not of high enough quality, they need to be better, they need to be more athletic.

So it's very simple if you look at it through that lens. It's like, oh, they're maybe you could say they're a very fragile athlete if they're not able to deploy that. Obviously you could do it safely and slowly when you're first starting, you know, slow pushes, slower work. You could spend a lot of time doing low intensity jumps and whatnot, but ultimately yeah, I think it's necessary for their development.

James de Lacey55:58

Nice. And to round this out, you mentioned Frans Bosch earlier. Is there any other—and you mentioned coordinative strength as well—so is there any kind of Frans's influence that's made its way into your program at all?

Brandon Accardi56:11

Recently, yeah, very recently. Well, I've always been a fan of the Rob Gray sort of the coordinative lens.

And I often—I suppose people think I maybe ridicule the technique lens or whatever it is, but it's more so problem solving performance through technique is obviously what I'm—obviously after people listening to this podcast they'll get a lot more context as to how we train. If we were to just look at, "Well, okay, your technique is bad so we need to keep working on that," that's not a long-term development lens. That's just a reductionist way of looking at training.

And a lot of—and obviously Rob Gray is very—I believe he's been mentored by Frans Bosch and a lot of the concepts are shared. So I've been familiar with his work but just recently Chris, Dr. Chris Dale, has been, you know, in my ear about certain things. So we've just been wanting to adopt some of these principles, but those things are probably, yeah, they're less important as far as like training harder. And sometimes they're about not training hard.

But often it's just a matter of, you know, do you feel the key muscle group working? Like if you do weightlifting and you never—if you have small quads and a small ass and you've been doing weightlifting for 10 years, chances are you might need some Frans Bosch to activate and bring some awareness to those tissues so that you can train them harder. So yeah, I think it's great information.

James de Lacey56:23

Perfect. And one last question because we had one in the live chat just now. He's asking, he recently found panda pulls—I guess paniples, fast pulls, power pulls, there's like a billion names for them now. I guess your high pulls—are they a good replacement for power cleans in your opinion?

Brandon Accardi58:11

Yeah. Well, I don't really think of them as a replacement. I think of them as you know, you do this for a few—ultimately, we just—okay, if we just want to be honest, we just want to power clean all the time. Just want to power clean heavy all the time.

But sometimes that exercise becomes stale and we can't progress it. So we have to do other things because the stimulus is too similar. So the body stops adapting. So you know, you can do pulls for a few weeks and then you get better at power cleans. It's just that simple. So I don't see it as a replacement. I just see it as we got to do this so that you can keep doing weightlifting. Ultimately we want to clean and jerk and snatch really heavy weights. So how can we just keep doing that is sort of my perspective.

James de Lacey59:02

What about for sporting athletes, like you have Locky there who, I mean, he's weightlifting now, but maybe if it was just on bobsled as an example? Would you ever see maybe those pandles being a replacement for power cleans? Maybe if, I don't know, maybe someone can't rack the bar, I don't know, something like that.

Brandon Accardi59:19

Yeah, obviously. Yeah, if someone can't rack the bar, absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Often we don't do many pulls anyway. I'd rather just get them to do a box squat and then they come back to it. So I cycle a lot of the progressions. But yeah, I think they're fantastic.

It's a—I think it's fairly obvious at this point, you know, if you can't rack the bar, do the pulls, be explosive.

Yeah, pretty—I think it's fairly straightforward. Hopefully this person, if you can't do a power clean then yeah, do pulls. If you want to get better at power cleans, yeah, do the pulls. Why not?

James de Lacey59:48

Nice. Perfect. That brings us to the end of this. Brandon, where can people find and follow you, keep up with what you're up to?

Brandon Accardi1:00:08

Yeah, people call me Brand Donna, which is quite frustrating. It's Brandon A on Instagram. But yeah, that's the main place I'm active on. I've been having a bit of a break from social media for the last—I'll just spend a little bit less time on it the last month after nationals. But I should be putting out some more consistent stuff over the next couple of months. So yeah, find me there. That's where most of the stuff's being posted.

James de Lacey1:00:08

Perfect. I'll link that in the description as well for anyone listening. But I appreciate you coming on and sharing all that, Brandon. Thank you.