Overshoot, Changing Muscle Architecture, & Magic Of Speedball Training w/ Angus Ross (SSOF Ep 128)

Angus Ross2:10

And I said, "Oh, yeah, that's the overshoot phenomenon," which is what my PhD was. And the basic idea is that period of strength training, particularly high rep strength training in this traditional sort of high pitch feed into the spectrum, you will down-regulate your 2X myosin, which is your fastest sort of contractile protein, and you get a shift towards at least a shift towards 2A, which is a more fatigue-resistant fast twitch but not quite as fast twitch muscle.

And the overshoot phenomenon is when you cease strength—if you cease strength training after that, you rest, which is a which is a cease to be a stimulus for 2X proliferation becomes normal rest becomes super rest because you've adapted to the period of high volume training, and then so you overshoot the proportion of 2X muscle which is produced.

And so then you get this subsequent effect that you sort of alluded to before. You get this improvement in high velocity power output, and that's most sports, be it running, sprinting, a sport, martial arts. All these things, it's generation of high speed power is often the the that will kill them. That's the stuff that gives you that edge.

And so really interesting area. And certainly I think a lot of certain cycling, they had the sort of inadvertent discovery. And I often laugh, there's a couple of examples that, obviously working athletics predominantly, and there's a couple of sort of famous examples from track and field where people have been injured and/or had a virus, Epstein-Barr virus or glandular fever, took six months off, come out and they break a world record on a modicum of training post that. So not enough training to depress their fiber type back to what it was.

But it's like, and we see this time and time again, the coaches don't know what the hell's happening on. And often times, there are one or two coaches that use this as a strategic policy in their training, if you like. But often coaches just, "Oh, we just strength train them," and it's very basic, and it's not necessarily a progression. But you can do quite drastic interventions in strength training. It's this very potent stimulus for affecting fiber type.

People don't necessarily give it credit for. And it, you're obviously involved in the martial arts world and striking sports. You get this amazingly high speed contractile—I'm not sure how many degrees per second you're getting at the shoulder or the elbow at a punch, but it would be extremely high. And so the ability to generate that quickly, fiber type is one of the precursors to high speed power.

And there are some interesting things to do there, do there, and then try to combine that with enough fatigue resistance not to be a two-second wonder. As you are, you it's a really interesting puzzle. With my—that's what makes sport exciting, I reckon, that you've got to try and mix and match these two different similar—three, four, five different similar—and skill work, endurance work, conditioning, speed, and try and find this ultimate achievement at the end of it, which is—yeah, that's what's great in my mind. I love that stuff.

James de Lacey6:03

I love that you mentioned about the coaches that actually use an overshoot protocol. I mean, I think the old research from—was it Anderson and Aagaard?—it was like complete bed rest for three months. I'm assuming they're not going complete bed rest in there.

Angus Ross6:17

No, I know. But there's a guy—the best coach I came across that was actually using it strategically was a guy called Nélio Moura, a Brazilian coach who's also actually a PhD in exercise physiology. So I was like, "Okay, this guy's—" And in the 2008 Olympics, he had the gold medalist in the men's long jump and the women's long jump, from South America. So I was like, "Oh, this guy's onto it."

And so he uses—he had a protocol where he would—and I've kind of copied a similar, plagiarized some of his ideas—and as far as he would do period of strength training, he'd never go longer than three months of heavy strength training. It was a perfect thing because he didn't want to depress it to the ultimate depression that you get to.

And then he would—he would strength training. So in an athletics season, they have all these competitive events that are Diamond League and all these bits and pieces where they earn money. So these guys are professional athletes. So that he would do—it was basically cease strength training start of the season, and then just do one—I think he had one strength session every two weeks just to maintain those for—I don't know—a low volume strength session, non-fatiguing.

And then he goes through the season doing the—makes money at all these events. And then he might have a 10-day reload in the middle of the season when, after the last Diamond League before the World Champs, and he's still got six or eight weeks. And then he would do two days of reload, stress the system. But again, it's only two days, so it's not going to compromise the crap out of it, but it gives that—builds that strength back up. And so you're trying to maintain those qualities and then taper into a thing.

And he did it very strategically. And he's published some stuff in that space, in the coaching literature at least, maybe not in the hardcore science. But his results in a highly competitive event like long jump speak for themselves. It's quite nice to see a coach with a science background leading the world in that space, which I found really interesting. I certainly have viewed some of that stuff subsequently.

James de Lacey8:02

Did you adapt it for your—or how did you adapt it for your situation?

Angus Ross8:18

Well, so I initially started using it with—I was working in skeleton, which is a winter sport, which is essentially it's a 40-meter sprint with then going down face first down a hill. But the 40-meter sprint dictates something like 40 or 50% of the variance in performance. So that's a really critical part of it. You want to have fast push time.

And so we did exactly that. We basically stole his protocol. We would do lots of strength and get really strong pre-season.

Their early season push results would be slightly compromised because you would be certainly, to my mind, a Type 2A monster rather than a Type 2X monster, and then you get better with season. Then over Christmas there was a couple of weeks off between World Cups and we'd reload 14 days and then get back and taper into World Champs and that would all work out pretty well.

In Junior Champs in Sydney, same thing. I've used it with shot putters as well at a world level, at a middle of the world level. And yeah, again, that's a loaded striking sport you could argue. Because that's throwing a 7-kilo implement, there's quite a high strength demand.

So we wouldn't have done it as dramatically perhaps as they might have done for a long jumper, which is further down that sort of force velocity spectrum. And so we'd keep a little bit of strength in the whole, but we'd drop it dramatically from four or five strength sessions, gym sessions, to our gym sessions a week. So two 30 minute sessions a week.

With an emphasis on high speed power. But it was still, it was relative rest, if you like. And again, I feel like you need to accept you're going to probably lose some force qualities. That the peak strength will decline somewhat once you remove that stimulus. And that's okay, as long as you've got enough.

And so, what we found was as the athlete gets older and stronger—and let's say I'm going to pull numbers out of my backside here, but if you said, you needed to have a, to throw a 22 meter shot put, say you needed to have a 200 k bench press. These are all made up numbers, but 200 k bench press is a minimum, let's say. And so, say if you get up to a 250 k bench press in the off season, well, you might be able to go 12 weeks and still be above 200 kilos without doing any strength training.

But only moderate strength training. But all that time your high speed power is going up while your peak force is declining marginally. And so, at some point there'll be a peak power after X number of weeks, and the stronger you are, perhaps the longer you can go with the slow volume or minimal strength training and still be improving high speed power.

So, yeah, I mean I guess there's always going to be an art in this stuff. As you say, you don't want to be doing biopsies and doing these other bits and pieces and you've got to—and the other training stresses obviously mitigate changes and stuff. Address as you say from the original, so basically you just sit around and do nothing.

So so it's, you're not going to—you need to be in touch with your athlete and see what's happening and keep a track on things and trying to find that perfect time course is, depending on the demands of the sport, the gifts the athlete has, etc., etc. And I think in the in the original stuff, just Brandon Shue, who did the original Andersen paper for his PhD, he found that there were some responders and some non-responders to overshoot in his PhD. And one of the things was the people that had naturally really, really low levels of Type 2X muscle, you know, classic slow-twitch sort of phenotype.

James de Lacey11:47

Yeah. Workhorses.

Angus Ross11:47

Yeah. They didn't really respond to it anyway. So if they had nothing, they didn't—overshoot from nothing to two times nothing is still nothing. But most of the athletes that I work with in the sort of the power sports, I don't see those animals because they don't even get in the door.

I mean, I guess there's, yeah, and then possibly in martial arts you see all sorts because you can have somebody who's got a much more endurance profile that's going to grind somebody down. And so, yeah, horses for courses I suppose.

James de Lacey12:11

It's interesting because obviously the examples you gave, it obviously works well with them, with one-off events like one-off sprints, one-off throws. Theoretically, do you think it could be applied just to say like let's say it's just striking, because that is the fastest of all the martial arts? Like just say I'm a boxer. Is that something you think that could be used there even though there is so much outside influence of having to do the different conditioning and obviously the highly technical training?

Angus Ross12:46

Yeah, I think it's more difficult, much more difficult. And there's some subtleties there that you can't not do the conditioning training because you can't bank on knocking somebody out in 10 seconds, that's unlikely, isn't it?

And so yeah, I think those other things will compromise the whole sort of fiber type adaptations by doing, okay, I'm going for road runs every morning or doing extreme aerobic conditioning or I'm doing 12 rounds of controlled sparring rounds of training, whatever it is.

So the fiber type piece is less, in my mind at least, less useful in those sports. I think you can still deload training and deload training volume, and it might not be fiber type, it might be your nervous system is more compared to express movement and power and high-speed stuff.

And I think the other mechanism which we maybe will get to for high-speed power is sarcomeres in series is another—fiber type is is one driver of it, sarcomeres in series is another. Which is sort of length of the muscle fascicle.

And we know that, so that is, to my mind—and it's possibly the way we want to go and I'm not sure if Bill maybe alluded to this when you spoke to him—that if you add the sarcomeres in series, and there are papers that suggest this is possible in humans, you add sarcomeres in series, you improve the peak contractile velocity of the muscle, which striking is. What happy days, that's what we want.

But you do so without compromising it metabolically in terms of you're not making it less oxidative. So those endurance qualities, but just with the length of the muscle it's for this higher contractile speed. So to my mind that's like okay, win-win, for martial arts, fighting sports, rugby sevens. You need speed and conditioning.

And so to my mind it seems like an obvious thing to do and I'm not sure how many people are—I think very few people are doing it. Strategically going after sarcomeres in series and muscle length. It seems like there's a win-win there that isn't well understood and probably isn't fully researched either.

I'm probably jumping the gun a little bit from what people would say in terms of what you can really interpret from the literature. But I mean I think that's where we need to go as coaches is that you need to go, well, best guess is this, the animal literature says this.

People won't do some of these extreme interventions with humans because it's not ethical. You can't get the university ethics committee to sign off on X, Y, or Z. But as most elite athletes have to be a bit obsessive, and you tell a normal punter to go and do an extreme intervention, they're like, "No, I'm not doing that, sorry." You tell an athlete it's going to get them a gold medal or a million dollar payday and they're "I'm in, where do I sign up?" They're different humans. So I think there are options there certainly that, yeah.

James de Lacey15:34

I love that. That's really interesting. Because my academic supervisor was Matt Brughelli through my masters. Obviously a lot of his research was on eccentric training, especially with hamstrings and increasing the angle of peak torque through various eccentric training modalities. And that's the increase in fascicle length with that.

So I've gone deep into that too. I really love that idea and just idea with, I mean that was put focus on hamstrings, but obviously there's more to it as well. So you talk about increasing fascicle length and I know Bill mentioned you guys are doing some long muscle length isometrics to failure. But are you still using these say traditional super maximal isometrics and is full range of strength training enough to also potentially elicit that? I mean plyometrics as well, right?

Angus Ross16:17

Yeah. Yeah, so yeah, all of the above really. And like the thing is we don't really know enough to definitively say X Y Z. So you throw the kitchen sink at it and see if you get an adaptation. Because as you've alluded to already, people would be doing a multitude of training variables. So if you want to push something, you got to push it hard.

And I like the, and then then you play with the periodization. So okay, well, you measure along the way and what do we get out of that? Okay, well, they improved this, that was compromised, it's—and I think Bill's doing quite a bit of job in terms of measuring a spectrum of things with his athletes, that they're the five athletes that he's working with. And yeah, we're certainly not there yet.

We don't know because it's probably very individual. You do one thing and I do another thing. We did the same thing, we get different adaptations, different genetic makeups or whatever it is, or training histories, or ages, or all these things that come into play, which is, yeah, there's always going to be an art to this stuff.

James de Lacey17:27

For sure. Do you want to maybe go into some detail about these long muscle length isometrics? Maybe just some theoretical background about how you got to this point of implementing this and why.

Angus Ross17:43

Yeah, so to be perfectly honest, it was a—I used to bobsled back in the day as a not very talented athlete that sort of had an opportunity. And so I was always looking for a—and I was a pretty obsessed. Obviously, I was doing a PhD in sports science and a related field and sprint training, detraining, and so this is 25 years ago.

And then the internet sort of came along and all the stuff started becoming available to the Australian. And I watched the guy—there was a guy Adam Archuleta who blew up the NFL combine in about 2001. And there was quite a few stories that came out on this guy and he was a—some guy from Arizona that it was kind of the ultimate story of the untalented guy turns up and he does six years of training with this weird quirky trainer and he comes out and he's Superman.

And he ran a 4.3 40 time and he had a 39-inch vertical jump and he could squat a house and he could bench press 500 pounds. So he's bench pressing 230 kg at 100 kg 6-foot guy, so it was phenomenal athlete. And it was—anyway, part of his training was this long duration isometric work and the guy—I tried to contact the trainer, the guy Jay Schroeder who was the coach, the trainer, and he was very elusive.

James de Lacey19:01

Was it InnoSport, right? Was it InnoSport?

Angus Ross19:01

Yeah, yeah. InnoSport, yeah. A very elusive guy, wouldn't reply. I was all—yeah, and I sort of—but I was kind of—this kid Adam Archuleta was basically exactly the same size at the time. And he could beat me in everything. And I sort of was like, "[expletive]. Both saying football pretty similar in terms of these metrics."

So I started thinking, "Well, maybe he's just on—he's just taking steroids or whatever. Could I do that stuff on steroids?" I was like, "No, I still couldn't do it. I still couldn't beat Ashton Eaton, so I'm sure I couldn't have." And maybe he was just more talented. Great. But maybe his training was interesting. Who knows? And but it sort of was a—it just kept ruminating in my mind and never thought of it up in any level at that point.

And then fast forwards 15, 16 years, a guy shows up at the—so, one of my passions is multi-event training, so decathlon, heptathlon. My wife's a heptathlete. I was a first-world decathlete back in the day. And so I was watching the Olympics. And then I—guy turns up, French guy turns up.

And I was—I'd seen him—watch—I'd followed this guy's career because my wife went to the 2012 Olympics, and he was at the 2012—he was around—if he didn't go away, he was there or thereabouts as a young guy at 2012. But I looked at his score in decathlon. You have to say this a series of events, but one of the prerequisites of being a great decathlete is you got to be able to run fast. And he was like 11.1 second 100 meter runner.

And which is fast in normal people decathlete terms. If you want to break the world record, you probably got to be able to run at least 10.6 in the 100. And so I sort of like he's done a big score, but he's just really coordinated, and he's got all the events sorted in 2012 or 2011 or whatever it—and I didn't think he was going to go anywhere.

And fast forward 4 years, or 5 or 6 years, he comes out and he runs 110.50 from 11.1 at 2012 with it. And generally in athletics, people get to about 22, 23, and they don't improve anymore. They get—they pretty much stay the same. They might improve a 10th of a second here or there, but don't improve. He's taken off 6/10 of a second. I'm like, "What the hell's going on here?"

Anyway, you get on his Instagram page and lo and behold he's doing the same that this guy Adam Malysz was doing 10 years earlier—15 years earlier. I'm like, oh my god, this is the thing. So I went down that rabbit hole. I went and saw his coach. I ended up going to see Jay Schroeder. I just basically emailed him and ended up just turned up and because he was very elusive and sort of deliberately elusive I would say.

And Jerome Simaeon who was the guy that was doing Kevin Levrone the kickboxer—yeah, he was a much more easy to get along with, really good guy, really helpful. He'd actually been mentored to some degree by Jay Schroeder while he was in the States. Now, he was moved back to France and he's going to move back to France.

And so, it's all unraveled and they did they did all these long duration isometrics of five minute isometric holds, which are brutal in these really long muscle lengths. And is there magic in the five minutes? No, I don't think there is. Is there—do you have to go to fatigue? Not necessarily.

But I think the thing with—this is quite interesting. The thing with trying to improve sarcomere in series, it seems to be more volume, more stress, more intensity. More adaptation. Which is unfortunately quite contrasting to the fiber type piece. So I think if you push the sarcomere in series to its natural optimum by stressing the [expletive] out of it for months on end, you'd probably compromise fiber type the other way and then you were your contractile adaptation might be reasonably nil because the two things are counteracting each other.

That's it and in a fight sport context at least you would maintain your contractile speed despite doing all this conditioning work. It also—if you develop—if you're stretching the crap out of something, you develop in length and rotation or flexion or whatever it is.

In a—in my brain—in my context you can—if I can—if I try to generate force from here versus force from back here in a rotational context, obviously I can generate more impulse by going longer. If you're adding range to the system by doing by improving your range while you're doing these long duration isometrics or loaded isometrics or full range eccentrics or whatever it is, yeah, you might improve your impulse just like because you got more time on each impulse.

And one of my mates here is a long drive golfer. So yeah, if you can get extra degrees more of rotation in your backswing, you have more time to produce impulse. Now, is that useful in the flight context? Maybe not when you try to really quickly get in and jet. So again, all these things if you understand the mechanism where you can sort of make an informed decision as to whether it's useful in your context, I suppose.

James de Lacey23:54

And what exercises are you using? Because you mentioned I think it's the long duration like isometric split squat or lunge with the legs. Are you doing one for rotation there?

Angus Ross24:11

So you can—yeah, you can do it for rotation. I just put a bar on the shoulders, full range and then just try to press into it.

James de Lacey24:11

So I assume you got the bar like against—over at against the power rack or something like that.

Angus Ross24:11

Yeah, we do that. Okay. So you can do that for long duration or you can do it for rate of force development, too. So you could do it like one second or you could do it for just holding it holding it holding it.

We do side bends like on a 45 degree back extension bench. We do side bends with maybe with the kettlebell in your hand. You just hang on to that. We do hanging. We do push-up hold through with parallel bars or whatever. Parallel bars. Trying to get full range.

Yeah, I mean you're just kind of limited by your imagination. You can do stuff for your quads. You can—yeah, I—there are some that I think—couple that I that I would warn against perhaps. We've had couple of guy that was doing full flexion sort of pike iso hold for hamstring length. And ended up getting a sort of insertional sort of origin really tendonitis and the hamstring tendon. So that was one.

And I think you'd probably have the same thing if you try to get calf length. When you go to do a full straight leg, sort of dorsiflexion, you're actually pressing the Achilles up against the calcaneus and you're getting—tendons don't like that sort of pressure on them.

And so then you get these tendonitis issues. And so some of them you've got to... and certainly I've topped some of these things up and probably injured athletes by doing the wrong thing when you're trying to do the right thing, obviously. But you don't think through all the implications sometimes. Yeah, so sorry for any athletes that I've done that to, but I think we're... I think we've all gone through that. We've been sacrificial lambs as we go, unfortunately.

James de Lacey25:58

What's the Inno-Sport stuff then? Is it DB Hammer's What the Best Training Book Ever? I was told. Have you applied any of that? Because I read that and I was like, this is way over my head. I can't even understand the damn language he's using.

Angus Ross26:14

Yeah, well, that's right. And I think there was... I've got a copy of that. And it's essentially also auto-regulation was the main principle in that—that you give it X amount of stress and then you have X amount of recovery in terms of days off prior to that stress. And there seemed to be a whole lot of gaps that were filled in in that book in my mind.

And as you say, it was deliberately... yeah. Was it deliberately? I don't know. It's certainly the language was... it's almost like trying to read something in a foreign language, wasn't it? Like they changed all the terms that you're familiar with from traditional sports science literature. And it was frustrating to read.

James de Lacey26:48

Have you tried some of the principles, whether you got it right or not? I don't know.

Angus Ross27:01

You got to give those guys credit. I think they did a bit of stuff. There was the whole Iron Super Training. There used to be a Check Group Super Training that Mel Siff set up 20 or 30 years ago. And the guy DB Hammer, whoever that was, seemed to back up some of his stuff—like training somebody there that was well trained and getting personal bests out of them. So yeah, I think there is something in it.

It's complicated in our environment when you have... if you're not the coach, there's always other competing demands on their time, their energy, technical. If I'm doing the conditioning, somebody's doing the technical piece. Well, the technical piece is not without its loading. Measuring in power sports, particularly measuring load in and of itself is difficult. You can't just... MPV, right or wrong? Well, that's not really the point of strength training or power training.

And so yeah, did we do it perfectly? No. Is it a bad idea? No. It's a good idea. If you can auto-regulate appropriately, I mean, that's the golden goose. So I think AI will help in that space going forward. Yeah, if it doesn't take over the world and kill us all first. And there's some pieces there that, yeah, it would be amazing futurely.

James de Lacey28:14

Awesome. I'd love for you to also go into, I guess a follow-on from this fascicle stuff, is just the idea—well, not the idea, but eccentric training. Because yourself, you're on a paper with Jamie Douglas. Yeah, eight years ago or so now. It's probably one of the best papers on eccentric training—the chronic one. I think it was the Q&A chronic one. Yeah.

Maybe let's go into, if you go super basic, we can just overarching with it as well. Just, why should or shouldn't someone start to incorporate eccentric training into their training as a fighter? And maybe why eccentric training maybe is or isn't... because there might be some misconceptions around, you know, if I'm just slowing down the tempo, is it still eccentric training?

Angus Ross28:47

Yeah, so I wouldn't call that eccentric training if I'm doing, you know, one second up, two seconds down, slowly controlled eccentric for five seconds down. That's just... yeah, I don't I wouldn't call that eccentric training.

I call it eccentric training because, for people who are not aware, with the force-velocity curve—most people are aware of the force-velocity curve—when you move really fast you can't push much load, and when you move really slowly or isometrically, yeah, you can produce a truckload of force. And that's all well and good. And so to work power you need to work light, or to high-speed power you need to work light as you proceed it.

The beautiful thing with eccentric training and why it is a unique stimulus is it's the only way you can simultaneously get high speed and high load. Because if you look online and you see the force-velocity curve, force doesn't go down as you go eccentrically, it goes up and it keeps going up modestly at high speeds. And so you can simultaneously get this high speed, high force, which is this really potent training stimulus. And so for that alone it does give you a unique stimulus and that's awesome.

I guess the other thing in a fight context or almost any sort of running or jumping, loading for a strike—the best athletes usually can absorb force the quickest and then explode out of it really quickly. And we see this. There's a lot of stuff, people have talked about this. Cal Dietz and the triphasic training, all those guys—they slapped this around. The Russians talked about it. But it's a thing.

Like the people that absorb force quickly... and even the sprint training literature from the '80s, Weyand and Cavagna, they showed elite guys—they ran over force plates. They're breaking. The elite guys, versus sub-elite guys in sprinting, they spend roughly the same amount of time on the ground. But the elite guys might spend... so let's say they had 100 milliseconds on the ground. I'm getting the number slightly wrong here, but the elite guys might spend 40 milliseconds absorbing the force, 60 milliseconds producing it. Sub-elite guys might spend 50 milliseconds absorbing and 50 milliseconds producing the force.

So advantage to the elite guys: they absorb force more quickly and had more time to produce it. And so same thing with if you're learning to strike a punch, if you can get in and just come out of it really quickly, it's as hard as... it's probably faster. There's more strength to produce it. So yeah, so you want in my mind you want this eccentric strength because it's kind of the golden goose.

Eccentric training will give you strength gains in series more so than concentric training, it would appear. And fast eccentric training gives you high stress and high load, high velocity simultaneously. And the fast eccentric training in one or two papers has shown a shift in fiber type towards this high-speed contractile protein of 2X myosin. And so it's like, well, holy [expletive], this is the golden goose.

The problem with it—and I'm rambling a bit, so you can stop me if you want—

James de Lacey31:56

Keep going. Keep going.

Angus Ross31:56

The problem with it is it's incredibly stressful. And so in this sort of acute space, you do this eccentric training, and eccentric training is famous for giving you DOMS and muscle soreness, impairing contractile qualities for the next 24, 48, sometimes days and weeks on end that will impair your performance.

And so you jump into it ill-prepared and you compromise your test performance for a week, two weeks. They think it's... and it needs to be done again. Oh, that didn't work. It was... and it was... the problem was because you did too much too early and you didn't give them time to adapt. And so yeah, certainly there are papers when you stress the crap out of people, like 30 days later they still haven't recovered from eccentric loading because the damage. And so this is a legitimate thing.

And so again, it's one of these things where there's an art and a nuance to providing an appropriate stimulus for this given athlete. And yeah, you're going to get it wrong. We've all got it wrong. We overcook it, undercook it, like it's finding that sweet spot where you can get the adaptation.

In an ideal world, if you're trying to make somebody super powerful and then periodize it so that they maintain those adaptations for a period of time in the lead-up to their comp. And the other kind of crazy thing is that if you do this eccentric training, you add sarcomeres in series, you lengthen—maybe improve it over time. And then you start freshening up for a comp so you can actually fully express those contractile adaptations.

If you take it out all together, within about a month, you lose all those sarcomeres in series that you had. You lose them. They're gone. And so it's like, oh, [expletive]. So that... it might take you a month to freshen up. So it's like, oh, can I... how do I figure... yeah, this is... and yeah, I...

But interestingly, there's a paper—I think it's Preslenski 2018 maybe—but they showed that in a Nordic example, which has been a popular stimulus for studying eccentric training, I think it was 18 reps a week. So two sets of four over a week, which is, yeah, three-fifths of not much.

Is it enough to maintain basically? So, you don't need to do much, but you need to tap the wheel. You need to just do a little bit of work in your tapering period. Once you've cemented these training adaptations by high stress, high load base training, then you're going to keep tapping the wheel through to your competition to maintain the physical length, but only do a little bit so you're still promoting fiber type from the rest and the overshoot as well.

And I mean, all these things are interacting. It's a moving feast, isn't it? But yeah, kind of cool how that all interacts.

James de Lacey34:50

So how are you progressing that then? Are you starting with say slow accentuated eccentrics and then moving to faster eccentrics?

Angus Ross35:03

Yeah, so it depends again on the athlete, where they're at in their athlete life cycle. If they've got good control and they've got good movement and they are confident, I would say slow, but I wouldn't go—I don't even do that. I used to, but I don't even do now. I don't see the value in it, the tempo-based eccentrics where it's all overload.

So we'll do some traditional lifting, get through—they might be doing two, three weeks of traditional strength if they've had a break, get back into their training block. This is for a mature athlete. And then we'd go straight into the accentuated piece.

Now, would we push the velocity? Not necessarily from the start, but later on. And we've got a couple of motor-driven devices which can help us drive the eccentric velocity.

And the cool thing with that stuff is it gives you feedback in terms of force, and it's really apparent that that force velocity curve is real, right? You go high speed, force doesn't go down, it keeps going up. And there's like, holy [expletive], this is real. This is this unique stimulus.

And I think my words of caution are that it does do damage and will impact performance in the short term, but it will enhance it in the long term. You need to be prepared to weigh that and not overcook them straight away because you can injure somebody with eccentric training—it's genuinely dangerous.

So yeah, a little bit conservative initially. You're better off underdoing it than overdoing it, and then you sort of learn how they adapt and how they respond.

I had an Exxentric Flywheel in the garage and I was really doing a lot of motorized stuff. The owner lived one suburb over from me back home in Auckland. So, that's how we got connected up and used all the stuff and I was playing around a lot with the motor there, but obviously for most people they don't have isokinetic motors and flywheels.

James de Lacey36:54

So how would you then prescribe say fast eccentric training like drop catch variations or something like that?

Angus Ross37:09

Drop catch variations, you can do that's some of the two up one down stuff in the leg press or whatever it might be—it might be a viable thing, but certainly the altitude drops drop stick, push-up jump, lunge, all of those are really viable options. And I think we were one of the—I worked with a shop—we got all these cool devices in. It helps a little bit, but we were doing all this primitive stuff, manual, somebody pushing the weight load and all this other stuff.

You can do a lot without anything. You don't need all that stuff. So the drop—if you do a drop, altitude drops jump off a 5-foot box and stick in your parallel squat landing, you're going to get DOMS and you're going to get adaptation. And I guess the thing with some of those ones, if you go straight into that without any preparatory stuff, the tendon stress and all that other stuff is probably going to be too high. You're going to get injured. Say goodbye to your knees.

So you have to be—everything is progressive and everything probably takes longer than people want it to take. And we're probably quite Western, we're probably pretty impatient. And you get injured and then it's a setback.

Take your time. Take your time. Do sensible progressions and take a bit longer than you think you should take. I mean I was the worst. I was a Type A idiot, so when I was an athlete I would break myself every two months and then it's a rehab. I was absolute—and I look back at it now and think as a somewhat more mature human, I was largely self-taught for a lot of my time, and you make all these mistakes. And it's probably been good for me to make all these mistakes, and as a coach you don't make them with the athletes then.

James de Lacey38:53

I feel you with that.

And you talked about recently as well, it was on the—I think it was on the Just Fly podcast. I don't listen to many strength and conditioning podcasts, but when you're on these ones I tend to tune in. And you talked about the speed ball making people more explosive and I was like, what the heck? How are you—and I was just letting you go with it.

Angus Ross39:22

So speed ball is not my idea. It came from the Scottish professional sprinters, and they used to do—you live in Scotland and it's freezing cold and you got to shut in a little garage to train in in the winter because it's raining sideways outside and it's 2 degrees or whatever. And so a guy called Jim Bradley came up with this idea that they would—the traditional boxing speed ball, speed bag I think the Americans call it.

They started doing these three-minute rounds, very boxing-like three-minute rounds on the speed ball. And I do think—and what happened, long story short, these guys came out the next season and ran really fast. And everybody's like, how? And so mechanistically what the hell's going on there? And I think they had—I don't think they figured out what was going on. They just knew it worked.

And so I tried it with my wife. She was 38 or so—she decided she's going to make a comeback and do some triple jump just for fun. And she was a head coach at the university, triple jump. She had two kids and she had a bit of a sacrum—pelvic floor wasn't what it was perhaps—and sacrum was playing up. And we got to the bit—she had about a month of traditional sort of strength training, weight training, running, training.

Sacrum gave out, couldn't train. And she couldn't do weights. She couldn't bound, she couldn't sprint, and she wanted to do triple jump. So, oh, this is a bit of a test. And so we thought, oh, let's just go—so we did speed ball.

We did speed ball and isometric holds, long duration isometric holds mainly. And she came out at 38 and ran as fast as she'd ever run in a flying time trial through lights—as fast as she'd ever run, faster than she'd run for 20 years.

James de Lacey40:59

What?

Angus Ross40:59

And on three months of hitting a speed ball. And so—anyway, it's a real long story, but I started playing with the job and there were a few other people doing really well with it.

And there's—I'm not quite sure mechanically. I have some theories. And I think if you're hitting a speed ball, essentially you're going to have a—and your body when you—part of it is fatigue. If you do a speed ball I can literally be very stiff and just hit it with my arms. And it's like—I'm not a swimmer. If I go for a swim and I swim 50 meters, by the time I get to 50 meters my delts feel like they're going to explode and I'm just—I'm very not pretty in the water, just a thrashing machine.

And speed ball's the same. You can hit it for about a minute and then you feel like your delts are going to explode and you have to start using your body. And so you start doing this and you can feel your feet connecting to the floor and you're using your body and it is this connection. And what's going on there? You're training your trunk. You're training connection.

You're doing—in a three-minute round you might be doing 600, 700 hits on the speed ball. So, it's a lot of contractions. And I wonder whether you'll start laying down these fascial slings that take time.

And so, metabolically, six times three-minute rounds is obviously got nothing to do with running 100 meters. Nothing. 100-meter event versus—but but maybe we start metabolic and we look at maybe it's these whole fascial slings, maybe it's the core. The whole idea of spinal engine is another road I went down, which is the idea that the trunk controls the pelvis.

Pelvis controls the legs and you can walk on your pelvis without your legs. You can see those people doing those sort of butt shuffles on the ground. Well, that's walking on your pelvis, driven entirely by a trunk. You're hip hitching, and it looks very much like walking. The legs are just there to increase the amplitude of your hip hitching, which would mean the trunk would be this really key part of running fast.

So all these things are into play and there's a contract relax and speed ball, you're telling your, you're sending these new neural signals on, off, on, off, on, off. So there's a whole lot of things at play. But it certainly makes people run fast. I'm not sure it makes you generically more explosive, but people run fast out of it.

And perhaps even the other thing is, if you think, depends what lens you put on it, doesn't it? This is the side of it. You think about we just talked about overshoot. So essentially, you're a some Scotsman in a superficial spinning in Glasgow and it's freezing cold, you haven't got a winter jacket. You spend three months not running, right, because you did speed ball. Are you getting overshoot in your legs? Probably. And then your prime movers, some of your prime movers maybe are shifting the muscle to a faster contractile protein. I don't know.

There's a million potential ways to interpret what's going on there, but certainly in a speed context, it's just, I don't know, it's kind of interesting.

James de Lacey44:06

That is very interesting. You took the spinal engine, I guess spinal engine may be a little buzzword now or around and around fascial slings and things like that. Do you think that a lot of traditional strength training can almost shut that down, make you quote unquote stiff and rigid, if that makes sense?

Angus Ross44:23

I think so. But I don't, I'm sitting on it bagging traditional strength training in terms of I think having some grunt is a really useful thing. But you still need to be able to move well. You see good athletes and they don't come in moving like a robot. They move with a little bit of swagger and a little bit of bounce, and that whole thing is they're using it, trying to get, and they're using the most efficient system.

And I think, some of it's strength training sometimes. And I know, and I bet it's the same in martial arts, that if you overcoach somebody, "No, you do it like this and it's got to be this specific," rather than just letting them do their thing. And their joints are a bit different than your joints, their movement might not be the same as yours. And I've seen it, you see people that are overcoached in sprinting. It just doesn't look, it looks forced and it doesn't look rhythmic and doesn't bounce.

We're not a robot. We're not a biomechanical model just from a, we have all these different elastic systems within the system. But they need to bounce and be rhythmic. It's cool when it's compounded and that's why it's something. I saw a ton of different answers, but certainly you look at these things and you sort of see different stuff. Especially when you see strength sports athletes and bodybuilders walk around or you go like, what I did.

James de Lacey45:54

I used to, I grew up soccer, tennis, rugby, played it all, and then got into Olympic weightlifting as my main sport for many years. And since then, 100% lost that ability to rotate well. Definitely have that stiffness through the spine, and I was like, "Damn, I actually got to regain it because I wasn't doing it. I was lifting five times a week just trying to get better at snatch and clean and jerk."

Angus Ross46:15

Yep. And I think, that's it. It's advantageous not to move.

So, I mean, it's cool. The thing with people, they all appreciate this too, is that people don't always get that fascia adapts along lines of stress. Babies don't have a plantar fascia in their feet because they don't walk on their feet. We have plantar fascia because we walk on it every day. We put force through this thing and we're trying to get this elastic system that helps us give us some economy.

And so if you're a fighter and you don't do your drills, you don't move much, you won't have any economy because you haven't developed these. I think a very good place to answer to be, fascia develops through repetition. And so the whole idea of Bruce Lee doing 10,000 kicks a day or whatever he was supposed to have done, all those things, there's method in that madness. They are developing not just the muscle, not just the motor pattern, but this elastic system that helps them repeat it.

James de Lacey47:11

That's a good, that connects some dots around the fascia, because I think actually when people, well, I mean, some people talk about fascia, it's almost seen as this isolated thing that you're training. So people talk about it's fascial training versus muscle training, something like that.

Angus Ross47:31

And that's an isolation thing, that's an isolation thing. So yeah, that's the whole thing. And it kind of irritates me that stuff. We're a system, we're a system with a multitude of systems within it, but you can't isolate. You can't move without using your fascia or your muscle or your nerves. They're all engaging in these things.

So yeah, you might slide the emphasis a little bit more. You try to do things elastically, you might be, the fascial stuff might be a bit more of a, but I don't think we know well enough because I think the scanning technology with high resolution ultrasound and all that sort of stuff, I'm not sure it's at a point yet where we can actually discern that, "Okay, we did this program, strength training for six months. What happened to the fascial adaptations? Okay, then we did a one-off ballistic leg swings. Okay, what happened then? Then we did yoga, from, what?"

I don't know that we have that IP to be able to definitively say X causes Y. I don't know that we have that. And I think we may get there, and I think that'll be the next generation of some research, and that stuff is going to be kind of cool. And obviously coaches are playing with different things, but some of these old truisms from sport that have worked have worked for a reason.

And I think a lot of martial arts world, there is repetition as a thing, isn't it? People do a lot of reps. And maybe that's not stupid.

James de Lacey49:05

So yeah, interesting. It is very interesting. Would you say that, that training, they get maybe that's a little more emphasis towards, say, the elastic fascia? I mean, that's just your simple then plyometric training, jumps, throws, et cetera. And then obviously your more quote unquote muscular dominant stuff with squats, bench, whatever. That would be your fascia versus, say, muscular. And can you combine, like, skipping, for example?

Angus Ross49:22

Yeah, you do. Skipping. So I'll almost start with, and I think there's a lot of repetition. Speed ball, speed ball, skipping with the upper body in some ways, isn't it? It's repetition. And so I think those things, the elastic bouncing through high repetition stuff, it could be high force, it could be the plyometric high force stuff, or it could be the high rep stuff. What's the difference in the adaptation? Don't know.

James de Lacey49:50

The higher rep stuff is interesting too, because I had Gary Hutt from GB Boxing on here a little while ago. He said he had guys coming with no formal racing background, obviously there's amateur boxers, just jumping a lot of rope and doing boxing and hitting like 4.0 RSI's.

Angus Ross50:09

Yeah. No background. Just from high, I guess, from high rate bouncing around and just a lot of volume, bouncing. So they're very efficient. They're efficient systems. Their tendons and their fascia is all actually connected and it's like, maybe you give them a load of strength training and the RSI goes down.

James de Lacey50:09

Yeah, you can see that.

Angus Ross50:27

Because all of a sudden, and sometimes it's the, what's, Bobbert, there's a paper, quite a famous paper, Bobbert and Van Soest from like 1994. It was a simulation paper of a jump and sometimes, basically what they showed in it was, again I'll get the numbers wrong, but they had a six muscle model vertical jump on a computer simulation, essentially. And they, you had, they had input all these strengths into all these muscles and they had a vertical jump came out. So let's say, you put all these different strength metrics in there and you came out, you had a 60 centimeter vertical jump.

Now, you improve all that strength metrics by 20%. Put them into the same algorithm and the vertical jump actually goes down. Which is fascinating. 20% stronger, vertical jump goes down. But then you reorganize the algorithm because the ratios are all slightly different now and you reorganize and then it then it improves the vertical jump.

And I think what that said to me was if you don't practice the skill a long time alongside the strength development and you change the engine without changing the motor program, sometimes you can impede performance despite the potential for performance being higher.

James de Lacey51:25

That makes sense.

Angus Ross51:25

And I think that whole the fascia piece is another sort of sub point in that space that you improve the spring stiffness or you improve the elasticity and or you don't, you change the muscle and or you don't change the spring stiffness, maybe performance goes down despite the potential being higher. And yeah, I mean that's what I think is just interesting that you have to figure it all out and get it wrong and then you get it right and it's a cycle.

James de Lacey52:07

I love that. I know you got to jump in and start coaching. So Angus, where can people find and follow you and keep up with what you're doing?

Angus Ross52:18

Well, I'm not very good on social media. I don't really care about it. So you're probably hard pressed to find me, but I'm always happy to, yeah I'm not really on social media at any level. I'm on Twitter but I don't really post anymore. I just read stuff from time to time.

My wife made me an account, I don't even know how to get into it on Instagram. So don't follow me there. Yeah, look, people spend as much time as they can. If you want, if people want to touch base with me, touch base with me.

Yeah, one-on-one is much easier anyway and it sort of sorts out the people that are truly interested or not. So people, yeah, maybe I'll probably answer emails. If I don't reply to an email, email me again. Just means I'm busy and I've read it and I'll get back to that. But my email's easy to find online, I'm probably the one who's going to answer.

James de Lacey53:08

Yeah, I'll link it down in the description too for anyone. But I appreciate you coming on Angus and sharing everything.

Angus Ross53:08

No, because it's always good to talk, you always get ideas from other people so yeah it's good.