We're going to teach you how to train like an athlete with only four keys that every athlete needs. And we're going to start right now. When we're talking about this, every single athlete needs at least one of these four things when we're thinking through the lens.
And I'm thinking about this as a coach. I'm thinking about this as an athlete. There's genuinely only four aspects around training.
Okay? So if we're thinking about four aspects around training, I want to look through and say, okay, if I'm an athlete and I'm in the gym and I'm doing work or I'm at the field or I'm, you know, doing anything as far as training is concerned, my first big aspect is recognizing that this is going to supplement the sports skill. So the skill is done by the sports coach.
Okay. So everything that we're going to talk about in the four key things is building upon that. Okay.
So if we're looking at technique, technique really is what should be done by the sport coach. For an example, I'll use uh throwing. Okay?
So if I'm breaking down a thrower and I'm looking at a shot putter, a discus thrower. Let's use football. This is an example.
That's probably going to be a bit better. If I'm looking at football and I'm recognizing that in the sport of football, there's technique and hand fighting that an offensive line coach is teaching an offensive lineman. What ends up occurring is that the offensive line coach is analyzing weaknesses in the specific athlete and then in most cases will communicate to a strength coach specific weaknesses.
Okay? So the weaknesses that are seen are then improved through physical qualities. Okay?
So weaknesses get improved in the weight room. Now when we go back to the technique and the skill, the skill is improved on the field. Yes, there's some skill work that we can do in the weight room.
In my opinion, it's better served that we dial in these four key areas. Now, if I'm thinking through the lens of how I'm going to lay that out, the first number one aspect, and these are not ranked uh in any specific order, but the first thing that I want to look at is I'm looking at explosiveness. Okay?
And so, if I'm thinking through the lens of explosiveness, it's an ability to generate a large amount of force in a short period of time. Okay? So, I'm going to flash back to two years ago.
I was fortunate enough I was standing on the sidelines when Penn State was playing Michigan. Um, and what I ended up doing is as I was standing there, I I wanted to uh do some research genuinely. I wanted to take videos and I wanted to record uh how much time was going on uh between the start of the play and contact being made.
Okay? So, when the ball would get snapped, I would record and I would I would time from the snapping of the ball till contact was made. Okay?
And I I would notice that the individual who was further across the line and was making contact in an advantaged position would typically win the battle uh between each individual in in each individual battle. And so I di you looking at this we're diagnosing this as explosiveness. What's up guys?
Our podcast and our channel are sponsored by our own strength training app peak strength. The entire focus of Peak Strength is to provide you guys with the absolute best sports performance app that you could ever imagine. We build out the programs on the back end.
We take in all of these different decisions that we learned here on site at Garage Strength so that we can then apply it to you so you can improve your training. So, if you guys want to improve your overall sports performance, head over to peakstrength. app, the Google Play Store, or the Apple iOS store.
Download Peak Strength. you got a free week of training and then you can start getting on those gains, get those reps done so that you can become a champion. Now, let's get back to the video.
Peace. Okay, so you're generating a large amount of force in a short period of time. And this could be uh the scent of uh a you know someone going off the line in when somebody snaps the ball.
Okay, this could be um reacting in a certain scenario defensively in basketball. Okay. So the way that we look at it uh I look at it as impulse strength.
Okay. So impulse is force in time. Okay.
So impulse is literally how much force are you applying in this period of time. And if we look at that and your impulse expression is high, it's going to be explosive. Okay?
This is like a key component behind explosiveness. So I'm looking through the lens and it's explosiveness here. I want to win the battle.
I want to be as explosive as possible. Think about a shot putter. Okay, a shot putter will apply as much force at the front of the circle as possible in a time frame that might be a half of a second.
Okay, so it's extremely explosive. It's a massive amount of force in a short period of time. And if we can develop that over time, then we'll see an increase in things like rate of force development.
Um we'll see people will appear to be twitchier. Uh we've reacted to Mark Henry. um dunking a basketball, right?
So, if he weighs 410 pounds and he does a counter movement and then applies a massive amount of force and is able uh to explode up and achieve a dunk, we're seeing someone who's very twitchy, very reactive uh and has a high level of impulse. So, when we're looking at explosiveness, the first concept or the first key around explosiveness is going to be impulse strength. Okay?
Now I like to break down uh impulse or I like to break down explosiveness into lifting or exercises as well. So if we're looking at this though first the next aspect that we're going to be looking at is uh reactive strength. Okay.
So how quickly does somebody have the ability to react to some type of load? Like let's say catching a clean and getting out of the bottom. Let's say um landing and jumping.
Okay. So there's there's a little bit but but with some type of load because the next the third part that I look at with explosiveness is elastic uh elasticity. How how elastic are they?
And elastic in my mind uh based off of definitions that I've heard from Kristoff Kip is reacting in under point4 seconds. So very very short time frames. So hard that it's it's it's basically like naked eye uh recognition.
Okay. So, if we're looking at um some type of most impulse-based training will also be under a half of a second. Okay?
Most reactive work will be loaded at a lower level than impulse-based training. Okay? But it's still going to be very quick.
So, I like to think about this in regards to dropping off of a box and throwing a medicine ball. Okay? That's going to be more reactivebased.
Okay? and and the impulse movement that we might be focusing on in the weight room might be unbroken back squats. Okay.
And then if we're looking at elastic strength or elastic explosiveness, if we're looking at elastic explosiveness, this is where we're going to see more hops based training and more jumps based training. Okay? So, we're looking at the umbrella of explosiveness is the first key aspect around developing an athlete.
So, every athlete out there has to be explosive. Okay. Then we're looking underneath that umbrella of explosiveness and we're going, okay, first they need to have impulse based strength.
So, they have to be able to apply force in a short period of time. That's high a high amount of force in a short period of time. This is going to help us uh become more explosive.
So, this is where weightlifting variations come into play. Think about cleans, think about snatches, think about their derivatives, the the movements of uh these classic exercises. That's where we're going to see impulse strength developed, okay?
Unbroken reps, speed reps, okay, in a in a more traditional sense, okay? Then we're looking at reactive strength, okay? Or reactive explosiveness.
If we're looking at reactive explosiveness, now we're doing an a weighted movement that's typically will become unweighted, okay? Or a weighted a heavier a higher drop that then leads to a some type of reaction in a specific way. Okay?
So, think about depth drop off of a of a box and then throw a medicine ball. Okay? Think about jumping in place with dumbbells, dropping the dumbbells, and then jumping.
And then elastic explosiveness is where we want to see very quick reactions. So this is where the hops comes into play. Pogo hops, rabbit jumps.
Um this is where um jumps comes into play like uh something like a hurdle hop, a stair jump. Okay, something that that is going to be much more intense. Single leg bounce.
Okay, that's going to be the the key components of explosiveness is that now we're looking at explosiveness is the umbrella. The three areas underneath there will be impulse strength, uh reactive explosiveness, elastic explosiveness and then how do we tie those exercises specifically to those three areas. Okay, so we just created this simple flowchart.
Now the second aspect and again this is not ranked in any specific manner is going to be speed. If we're looking at developing speed okay the first big concept that we have to think through is now we're looking at speed through the umbrella. Okay we have explosiveness here then we have speed.
Okay then we have to break down speed further. Well what are the critical components around speed? We have to look at that and think through all right well the the critical components around speed typically should be broken down into what you know what encompasses a sense of speed right well if we're looking at um a sprint for an example we know that the sprint is broken down into three key areas okay so if we know speed is the ability to go from point A to point B and there's some there's some type of human locomotion here.
There's some type of cyclical pattern, right? To cover ground. So, if we're going from point A to point B, we're going to recognize that in speed, there's a starting point.
Okay? So, we have some type of starting aspect around speed. Okay?
Then, we're going to look at something, you know, along the lines of acceleration. So we're starting at basically no movement and then we have to get to the fastest movement that we could possibly have. And so in between from starting till the end we have to think okay now we have to go through acceleration.
So we're looking at specifically acceleration and then after that uh we're looking at how can we take acceleration and what's the next step? Well, now the next step around that would be we're getting to max velocity. Okay, so if we're getting to max velocity and we're looking at it like, all right, max velocity is going to help us uh with this key component.
This is the top end speed. This is the fastest that you can possibly move. Now, not all sports will require max velocity, but it's a huge component around even improving acceleration.
And if we're training max velocity, we will see faster rates of acceleration. Okay? So when we're looking at key components of speed, we so we go starting strength, okay?
Then we go acceleration and then we go max velocity. And then you're looking at starting strength, okay, or starting speed, however we term this in this case, is going to be the ability to overcome inertia and initiate movement as fast as possible. So, there are going to be technical components here that we learn on the track or that we learn from a coach of some sense.
And then we're going to go into the gym and then we're going to use some type of uh specific movements like let's say a kneeling start. Okay, let's say that we're doing uh a simple static start into uh rapid movement. And really those are the movements that are going to help your starting strength.
So even a pause back squat will help your starting strength. A pause uh clean with some type of auditory command will help your starting strength. Now, if we're looking at acceleration, okay, now under the umbrella of of acceleration, which is under the umbrella of speed, we're looking at uh sports being this is where almost all sports are played is is played in the reign of acceleration.
So, football, soccer, basketball, short bursts of speed that that's the difference between winning and losing, right? And so, we understand that acceleration can improve through uh resisted sprints. We understand that acceleration can improve through speed single leg squats.
Acceleration can improve through uh plyometric work. Acceleration can improve through hill sprints. Acceleration can improve through 10 to 20 yard sprints.
Okay? So, we want to focus on acceleration and then use the mechanics that we learn from our sprint coach to apply towards this realm. Now, we're looking at max velocity.
This would be now we're going to use drills for max velocity. So this would be wickets. This could be oversp speed training.
Uh this could be even flying 10s at 50 to 70 yards. We're going to be measuring your flying 10. Okay.
So that's going to be three areas of max velocity. So when we're looking at explosiveness, it's a little bit easier to identify the type of exercises. when we're looking at speed, those exercises are really part of starting strength, acceleration, and max velocity.
So, that's something that we have to keep in mind when we're when we're building this out. Now, uh when we get into the next concept, right, we have four key areas that you've got to focus on. And if we're going to break these things down, we're looking at explosiveness, speed, the next part of this framework, the next pillar of this framework is going to be strength.
Okay? So when we're thinking through strength, strength would be quantified as the maximum amount of force that you can produce in a single given effort. Okay?
So the maximum amount of force that I can apply on a bench press in a single given effort. uh using the example of Mark Henry, the maximum amount of force that he could apply in the Thomas inch dumbbell race, like he actually executed. He's pretty much I think he's the only I think he might be one of two that have ever done it.
Uh but really it's in my opinion the foundation upon which all of their physical attributes are going to be built upon. Okay? The stronger somebody gets at a early age, the more coordinated they tend to be, the more mobile they tend to be, the more they understand uh force application.
And without strength, a lot of times you'll see a limit to somebody's speed and explosiveness and even to a point endurance. And so in the gym, strength's really going to be developed early on and then over time, we use strength as this this means to target other areas. If we, you know, I'm reflecting back on a podcast I did with a two-time Olympic silver medals world champion coach Ashley Kovac, and she talked about the the stimulation that you get from a from a big strength workout as a hit.
We're going to give the nervous system a hit. and you give the nervous system a hit and then you try to impact it uh for for the latency period like 48 hours, 72 hours later, you try to impact it with specific movements that you want to to pull up based off of the hit that it got to have super compensation occur. And and what I think about when I'm looking at um something like max or something like absolute strength, I look through it and you go, okay, absolute strength is here.
And this is the the strength is the maximum amount of force you can apply. And then we look down, we go, okay, absolute strength, okay, is here. Max strength is the is the first step.
So, if we're taking um this would be the traditional sense of maxing out your bench press, maxing out your deadlift, maxing out your your pull-ups, maxing out your squats. These are classic tools that you would be using to to build that up. Now, we're seeing this and we're actually going, okay, now now I understand, now I see that this is a a one rep max or we might have to do a five RM to push this max strength.
But we understand we are training the quality of maximum strength. Okay? We understand that we are pushing with these traditional foundational movements.
We are pushing max strength because we want to increase that component. Okay? And I'm going to share with you at the end of this a very unique aspect that is going to help bring all of this together.
So as an athlete or as a coach, we can really think through this. Now, the next key component around strength is going to be hypertrophy. Okay?
A lot of people when they think through hypertrophy, they sort of shy away from it. And what's ironic to me is is let's say I I've heard this dozens and dozens and dozens of times. Like honestly, when I talk about the the best female athletes in the world, in the history of the world, we'll hear Simone Biles, we'll hear Serena Williams, like very frequently.
We'll hear Shelley Frasier Price. Um, you know, Katie Moon is one of the best palters ever. How fast she is, how explosive she is.
Um, you know, those are just off the top of my head, right? And obviously I'm favorite. I have quite a bit of favoritism to track and field.
But oftent times people will say, "Well, yeah, Serena was so jacked. She was so fast. She was so explosive.
She was so jacked. She was so much more muscular than than everyone else. " And then the next breath you say, "Well, all right.
Well, so can we get your girl your daughter to come in and start lifting a little bit more frequently? Well, I don't want to get big and slow. But you just said Serena's more was more jacked.
She had more muscle. Well, yeah, but you know, at the end of her career, she started to slow down. She was 40.
She was 40 at the end. Dude, you know how many titles she won? No.
She's the greatest tennis player easily ever. Probably the second best athlete ever, if not the best athlete ever in the women's side. Simone Miles, man, she's jacked.
You see her jump? You see the size of her legs, dude. She's explosive.
She was jacked. She's still jacked. She's incredible.
Yeah. Yeah. That's hypertrophy.
You're seeing in even in Tatumi, you know, somebody who's tremendous hypertrophy. You're seeing CrossFit especially showed what hypertrophy could do for the female athlete. And and I believe yes, there's a point where on the men's side, hypertrophy can be too much.
Okay. I I do believe that there's a point, but it's not going to happen if you're playing your sport enough. So, in the weight room, if we see somebody has their strength and we see that their max strength is good, but there's an issue with certain size areas, and I'm going to actually use an athlete myself, uh, Ryan McDonald.
He has incredible maximal strength. There's some aspects of hypertrophy that we need to work on with him. He needs to get a little bit bigger in his shoulders.
He needs to get a little bit bigger in his elbows. Okay. So, now we're going to try to push the the tricep work.
Now, we're going to see this and say, okay, max strength is going to focus on neural adaptations, but hypertrophy training is going to increase size. And if we can increase size, and then we can intervate the larger muscle so that now it's going to produce more force because we know there's a point here that larger muscle will produce more force if we're training accordingly to this. So, and that's going to lead to that long-term strength development.
And then finally the last aspect if we're thinking about explosiveness and reactive explosiveness I see reactive strength as the third unique component around uh around strength. And if we think through this is the ability to produce force very quickly and then also to rapidly use force out of fast eccentrics and then into a fast concentric. Okay.
So in this case, we would be thinking through the the gap of taking a fast, let's say you take a deadlift, your best deadlift, 700 lb. You take 500 lb and you do a fast eccentric, you touch and go. Reactive strength is an example.
It's shown through that example. It's shown through doing a fast touch and go. It's shown through uh taking a clean and catching it out of the hole and driving up.
It's shown through an unbroken front squat at a very heavy load. It's shown through much more weight on the bar or much more weight in a given uh exercise and then being able to control it from a fast eccentric into a fast concentric. And so through that brief isometric the amortization phase, the reactive strength, we have that tension, we have strength to develop that.
And so if we're looking at, you know, exercises like a a foundational movement of just maxing out a bench press, a back squat or deadlift is going to be max strength. If we're looking at hypertrophy, it's going to be more time under tension, longer periods of mechanical tension. If we're looking at reactive strength, then we're seeing fast eccentric into a fast concentric.
Okay, so those are those those are those examples. And so the thing is with strength training is it's not just about lifting heavy. It's about developing the capacity to produce force in various uh context.
So when we provide context then and then if we're training with speed and we're training with explosiveness and we're looking through the lens, we now can see how this transfers. Okay? And so this is how we set up our training inside of our strength training app, Peak Strength.
We lay everything out. We have one more we have one more aspect here that every athlete needs that we have to build upon. Okay?
And when we when we take those aspects and we build upon them over and over and over again, we also tend to look at sports in the sense that if I'm looking at a sport, I want to break down the sport into how much of each of these qualities do we need to focus on? And so when I train South Dakota State, their entire wrestling team, I'm looking at it going, how much does this athlete need strength or endurance or speed and how much do we need to build out based off their programming to then try to focus on percentage of training? Same thing if I'm looking at a shot putter.
How much needs to be focused on strength, explosiveness, or speed or endurance? And endurance is that fourth key aspect. So, if we're looking at endurance, really the way I like to look at it is I'm looking at endurance is the the ability to to sustain physical and mental stress over and endure that.
We're going to endure that physical and mental stress over a long period of time. You're going to be able to endure and handle it. It's a key component of fitness.
But what we're trying to look at in my opinion would be we're looking at first, okay, muscular endurance. And it's going to sound odd to think this way, but if we're looking at muscular endurance as the first aspect, okay, that's now we know that the four key concepts that we're going to look at are explosiveness, speed, strength, endurance. Those are the four key sort of pillars over top of the umbrella.
And then underneath each one of those, we're laying out the qualities of endurance in this case would be muscular endurance. Okay. So then off of muscular endurance, we have to gauge how much time is this athlete needing muscular endurance?
Is it 5 minutes? You know, if we're a 500 meter swimmer, it's going to be a long period of time. So there's things that we can do in the gym with hypertrophy.
There's things that we can do without hypertrophy. There's things that we can do with isometrics. Okay?
So, we want to try to target the muscular endurance. There's things that we can do with total volume. Total volume can have a big impact on muscular endurance.
And so, if we're looking at repetition, if we're looking at high rep resistance training, if we're looking at isometrics, if we're looking at um body weight training over over very long sets, that leads to a tremendous amount of muscular endurance. And this is the ability of a group of muscles to do repeated contractions for long period of time. Okay, so that's going to be and especially specific to a little bit more strength oriented on that the time continuum.
Now, if we look at cardiovascular endurance, okay, when we're looking at cardiovascular endurance, I like to think about really long slow work. Okay, long slow work where we're going to increase blood volume. Okay.
So, in this case, when we're talking about this style of endurance, okay, now we're seeing that this is going to be endurance that's done over 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 2 hours, 3 hours, running a marathon, being a triathlete. Now, we're seeing that this is this is long, repetitive, slow work consistently done to increase the amount of blood volume, uh sustained moderate intensity effort that can happen for very very long periods of time. uh long swimming 60 to 80% max heart rate.
Okay, 60 to 80% just repeat repeat repeat repeat. Okay, and then we're going to go into anorobic threshold work or or in this case uh highintensity interval work. Okay, just high intensity or high interval work uh in the sense of being able to do specific tasks at a high intensity back off.
high intensity back off. High intensity back off. So this might be um a classic example here would be doing like the Norwegian method.
Running for four minutes, resting for two, running for four, resting for two, running for four, resting for two, running for four, resting for two. Uh a 7 minute time trial on an assault bike. Resting for two minutes, a seven minute trial, rest for two minutes, seven minute trial.
Okay. So now you're seeing here in the sense of endurance it's going to be looking through the lens of muscular endurance uh cardiovascular endurance and then uh interval intensities. Okay.
So those are those three areas and then the sessions or the ways to improve that would be you know repetition work with the muscular endurance. Uh cardiovascular work would be long cyclical work that can happen over long periods of time. And then when we're looking at the interval improvements, we're looking at uh short bursts, repetitive, short bursts that are repetitive.
And that's where the Norwegian method comes into play. And ultimately, as a coach or as an athlete, you have to understand there's really just four key areas. And that's where our concepts around sport depths have come.
All of these concepts are rooted down below. We have a we have a document, a sports depth document. You can click on the link down in our description.
And when you download the sports depth document, you're going to see how we break out the sport depths into five key areas. And then we take those and that's where we designate our sportsbased training. But the sports depths are based off of these four key concepts of or these four key areas.
We take the four areas and then we look at all of the sports that we can possibly think of and we break them into sport depths based off of how much explosiveness, strength, speed, and endurance that they need. And then we put these sports that have similar qualities together. And then we continue to build out the type of training, the type of assessments that they need based off of how much explosiveness, speed, strength, and endurance they have in their sport.
Okay? So this is a groundbreaking concept known as the sport depth system. Explosiveness, speed, strength, and endurance are the key formulas, the key things that every single athlete needs.
And then we use those assessments to try and improve that over time. Outside of this, nothing else is happening in the gym. Outside of those four key areas, nothing else is happening.
Technique happens in the gym with weightlifting exercises. And then when you master technical learning and technical aggression, you can then apply it to the field. But the stuff that you're doing in the field, you're learning in the field.
You're learning from a sport coach. Okay? So these are concepts that are applied directly in our system here at Garage Strength.
We also use them inside of our strength training app, Peak Strength. You can download Peak Strength today. Get inside Peak Strength.
If you want content similar to this, click on this video right here. Because remember, freaks, if you want to become a champion, you've always got to cultivate your power. Peace.
