Evidence Strong
Power up your game: weightlifting for sports performance - with Paul Comfort
So if we think about acceleration during any task, it's normally for the majority of sports forces produced through the lower body. So if we're looking at sprinting, jumping, changing direction, etc. Rapid extension of hip knee and ankle, that doesn't necessarily mean full extension, but it's rapid extension of hip knee and ankle. Very high forces introduced in relatively short periods of time. The orientation of the body doesn't really matter because when we're sprinting, our body is just leaning forwards a slightly different angle. But it's still that rapid extension of hip knee and ankle. And there's a very strong correlation between performance and weightlifting exercises and jumping, sprinting, change of direction. No, again, it's a correlation. That doesn't mean there's cause and effect. You can get all sorts of weird, wonderful, spurious correlations, which mean nothing at all. However, when we then look at some training interventions, and when we see that if you improve performance and some of these tasks or you improve, even rapid, isometric force production during something like an isometric mid thigh pull, which mimics that second ball phase of the clean, if that improves, we generally improve sprint, jump, change of direction performance. It's not really surprising that these tasks are going to enhance rapid force production. And if you actually have a look at what happens within the lower body, what would the form in these tasks and the nice thing is it's easy to create progressive overload. Welcome to evidence strong show. My pleasure to have you. If you could please briefly engineer yourself. Yeah, no problem. First of all, thanks for the invitation. I'm Professor Paul Comfort. I'm a professor in strength and conditioning at the University of Sulford, where I've been for the last 15 years now. So sort of probably 50% of my time is research, 50% of it is admin and teaching our students predominantly on our master's program in strength and conditioning. And then I also work with a quite a few of the local teams on a sort of consultancy basis as well, whether that's testing and monitoring athletes, whether it's feedback on the sort of training programs and periodization strategies they're using, et cetera. Sounds amazing. I invited you for the interview because you ordered a paper title, National Strength and Conditioning Association position statement on weekly tick for sports performance. Why this paper was needed and a bit of a context. OK, so I got invited to pull a group of experts together to put this position statement together and got invited by the National Strength and Conditioning Association. But I think the need was there because people don't always know how to pay to apply some of the research or they're not aware of the research. There's so much I think this that feeling the manuscripts got over 300 references in it. So you can't expect, you know, the average coach to go away and read those 300 references. This took probably about 18 months, pulled the whole thing together with a group of experts. I think the need was there to try and give something that's very comprehensive and at one stop shop of this is the research. This is how to try and implement it. This may be, you know, the most appropriate approach to doing it, but also leaving it broad enough so that people can apply the findings of this position statement to their individual athletes in the individual sports, et cetera. So the paper is packed with beauty, so I'm super excited to dive into it. So maybe let's start with a bit of a comparison. How weightlifting is comparable to sports and that will answer the question why we should use it and then also how it differs. OK, so in terms of how it's comparable to sports, if we think about acceleration during any task, it's normally for the majority of sports forces produced through the low body. So if we're looking at sprinting, jumping, changing direction, et cetera, rapid extension of hip, knee and ankle, that doesn't necessarily mean full extension. If you look at somebody when they're sprinting, then they don't reach full extension. They start flex and go through the recovery phase prior to that, but it's rapid extension of hip, knee and ankle. Very high forces introduced in relatively short periods of time. The orientation of the body doesn't really matter because when we're sprinting, our body's just leaning forwards a slightly different angle, but it's still that rapid extension of hip, knee and ankle. And there's a very strong correlation between performance and weightlifting exercises and jumping, sprinting, change of direction. Now, again, it's the correlation. That doesn't mean there's cause and effect. You can get all sorts of weird, wonderful, spurious correlations, which mean nothing at all. However, when we then look at some training interventions and when we see that if you improve performance and some of these tasks or you improve, even rapid, isometric force production during something like an isometric mid thigh pull, which mimics, mimics that second pull phase of the clean. If that improves, we generally improve sprint, jump, change of direction performance. It's not really surprising that these tasks are going to enhance rapid force production. If you actually have a look at what happens within the lower body, what would be forming these tasks and the nice thing is it's easy to create progressive overload. If we try and just, you know, how do you aggressively overload a sporting task to produce a higher force? You can't just keep adding load to the individual, because, you know, if it's a jump, suddenly they can't jump because the load's too heavy. And if it's a sprint, you completely change a sprint mechanics. However, you can still use, you know, heavy sleds to push or drag and improve force production characteristics. It's just not as easy as performing some of these different weightlifting variations. So that's the different and similar part, did you cover everything we wanted? And I suppose the, yeah, in terms of similarity, the differences really are the fact that we can load these exercises really easily. We've got a huge variation of weightlifting movements that we can form to emphasize different force production characteristics. You know, we can do something static position, so we can do a clean pull from the floor or from the knee, or we can go for a hang pull where we stimulate the stretch shortening cycle and may actually train something in a slightly more sports specific nature. Because most sporting tendons use the stretch shortening cycle. We can use light loads with certain exercises, some are definitely not sort of best suited to light loads to really emphasize that high velocity movement and very rapid force production. We can also load them very, very heavy, especially with the pulling variations, whether that's a pull from the floor, we can really emphasize. No, even though the button is low, it's still emphasizes rapid force production, because when you're performing any of these lifts, the aim isn't to just lift the bar off the floor like people might do with the deadlift. You know, it may be a control pull to the knee, but from there, even if there's a heavy load, you're aiming to move that bar as rapidly as possible, which ends up meaning you have very high rates of forced development, which are really, really beneficial over long periods of time as well. So in terms of the similarities and the difference to sporting movements, there's a lot of similarities. And I think the problem is when people start thinking about sport specificity and thinking that it must look similar to the sport, they're barking up the wrong frame most of the times. It shouldn't be sport specificity. It's specific adaptations to impose demands. What is the adaptation we need in the athlete, in the muscle, in the tendon, in the neurological system to create the improvement in sports. So if you have an athlete that is really, really strong and really efficient at producing force, the only way to impact them stronger may be actually to go through a period of hypertrophy because they're very efficient at producing force. So we might need a phase of hypertrophy to increase muscle mass and therefore increase the force production capability. We might have somebody else who's quite muscular, but actually isn't producing particularly high forces or not producing them rapidly. So then we've got to think, well, OK, we've got a big muscular athlete, but they can't accelerate as well as we want them to. So we need to focus on rapid force production, possibly reduce bodily factor, some extent. So we've got to think about the adaptations that we're really out, rather than making a movement look sport specific where we then generally can't load it as effectively. We can't make the force time characteristics of the task anywhere near what you can get when you're in that sport. So it's what are the adaptations we need within the neuromuscular system, the tendons, the bones, it's separate to really get the performance benefits that we need for that. Okay. If we could go what derivatives we have available and then we divide them into groups, some examples of specific exercises that would go there and then how we would use them in training and what adaptations we are trying to get. OK, brilliant. So then we start off with the catching derivatives and then we've got any variations of the clean or the snatch where we catch the bar and that can be not for that position. So, you know, a front squat position or a forward at the head squat position for the snatch, or it can be catching in the power position. So that shallow squat position above parallel, normally most people that are non weightlifters will catch, you know, around about a 90 degree knee angle. So any slightly flexed, whereas weightlifters tend to catch that a little bit lower in a power variation and we can perform those from the floor, we can perform them from the knee, we can form them from mid thigh or the hip if it's a snatch because you've got that wider groups of the bars higher, and then we can also perform them where we add a counter movement into them as well. So you can start, you can deadlift the bar, we'll pick it up from a rack or a blocks and then hinge down to the knee, or we can then just form that sort of shallow dip to get the bar in the crease of the hip if we're performing a snatch variation. Or if we are down to mid thigh for performing, forming clean variation, the things to bear in mind. So we start from the floor and catch in that fall that position would perform in more work. So the more we displace the bar, so if you think about the pulling variation, there's more work performed if we start at the floor, compared to starting at the net knee or starting at mid thigh or hip with a snatch. And then if we're catching in as deep a squat as we can go, we have to perform a squat to get back out of that. So there's even more work performed. And that's not a bad thing. However, if we go in season in team sports, for example, we might want to minimize the amount of work that they're performing, close to competitions, you know, if it's matched in minus two. So in 14 hours time, they're competing, we might want to reduce that volume of work. So then we might go with, you know, a mid thigh, our clean. So we've only got a shallow range of motion or small range of motion we go through in the pulse phase. And then we only capture that shallow squat position and then maybe drop that bar back onto some blocks. So we don't have to keep picking it back up each time. We've still then got the, you know, a huge amount of intent, but we've still got really high levels of force production and rapid force production. But we're not inducing as much fatigue, so we're not having to pull from the floor. And round about 50% of the pulse phase is that first pull. It is always slow and controlled. It rapidly accelerates, be it on the knee. And then we don't have to get back out of the hole and, you know, do a full from centric phase of a squat. So we've got some options there. And then we can also adding the counter movement. If we were going to go from the hip, we'd either, you know, slowly squat down to the bars at the hip over the and power snap from the head, or we can stand up, right? Dip into that position quickly, stimulate the stretch shortening cycle and make it a little bit more. So it resembles the sort of jumping in those sort of sport specific tasks a little bit more than we would get if we're going down and pausing or lifting the bar of blocks. So I think, you know, we've got a range of different variations that we can use for these. We need to think about the total amount of work performed and how fatiguing they might be. We can lift more weight if we start from the floor, if we're proficient, because a greater time to apply a force, so we can get a higher impact pulse, and we should be able to accelerate the bar to a greater extent. If we start from the floor, and then that load will decrease slightly if we go to the Navy and decrease slightly if we go to the sort of second pool position. But that doesn't necessarily matter if we're lifting a little bit less load in much varied by 10%. But actually, if we're still moving with maximal intent, that's probably not going to give us a massive difference in terms of the adaptive responses that we get. However, it will turn us to drop underneath the bar and catch quickly if you start the bar and the crease of the hip or mid thigh, because you don't have as much time to apply force to the bar, so you really have to emphasize getting and the bar and catching it effectively. So again, that might be a good coaching variation to do for an individual to improve their ability to catch the bar. What would be a purpose for strengthening conditioning coach to use catching derivatives? Well, the catching derivatives give us that we'd have to get intent. We have to move the bar as rapidly and explosively as possible, so that we can displace the bar high enough if it's a power clean or a power snatched, you know, if it's a powered clean to the sternum to catch it. If it's a power snatch, it probably ran about the height of your chin, so you can drop underneath and catch the benefit is it forces the athlete to put in maximum intent. Otherwise, you're not successful in the lift, so they are a great addition. Now, there's also some discussion over how much that may help with load acceptance, receiving the bar in that position goes from a rapid, repulsive phase, rapid concentric action, relaxing and broken very quickly, so that you can receive the bar over in a power position or that forward position and embrace yourself. Once you go from that rapid, constant protection to relaxation, then it's probably isometric, non-sports athlete, not weightlifters, it will probably be an eccentric phase because the bar will be higher, they'll catch it and then ride it down. They're not catching just near that peak displacement at the bar necessarily, but there are quite a few benefits, but the primary one that I see is the athlete has to move with intent, and they don't always do that with some of the pulling derivatives, some do, but others don't. So the main thing is it really helps to drive intent. We may find it has benefits for that sort of load absorption, deceleration aspect, bracing, et cetera, but there isn't enough research in that area to really tell us what all of those benefits are at the moment. And some are difficult because if you put EMG electrodes onto people's abdomen, let's try and look at the bracing or on the quadriceps, as you perform that lift, the bar comes up close to the thigh, normally takes the EMG electrodes off the thigh, same on the abdomen of a stain close by. So, yeah, whether that really helps with bracing, eccentric muscle actions, isometric actions, which just don't have enough detail there at the moment, and it will vary dramatically between weightlifters who catch the bar near its peak displacement and not in weightlifters. You will see the bar come up and sometimes they're waiting for it to come down so they can receive, but then you will get very, very high eccentric forces, and the bar's dropping from probably 6 to 12 inches above you, and that's not a nice position to be in, which I'm sure anyone that's done any weightlifting is experiencing that, but I did pull out a bit higher, I'll drop too quick. Okay, so how about pulling the river? Okay, so the pulling derivatives can be very, very similar to the catching derivatives, we just exclude that catch phase. Now, that could be useful because then we can use loads greater than your one around, because we're no longer limited by how high we can displace the bar to catch in whichever catching variation we might have been doing previously. So we can go up above that 100% and weightlifters have used these variations for years, you know, you look at some of the published weightlifting programs of very good competitive weightlifters and they'll regularly be doing clean pulls with loads above one RM. It just hasn't really been used until some of the research we published probably 12, 13 years ago, haven't really been used that extensively in not pointlifters. So the nice thing is it means that if an individual struggles to get into a good and safe catch position, and we've all seen people trying to catch in, you know, their elbows are really low and they've tried to use their biceps or their leaning back to catch it. And they're in awful position, so we can then still train the athlete without worrying about that catch component, if they are compromising them themselves and increasing the risk of injury from a poor count position. That doesn't mean we shouldn't train them and coach them to be able to perform all these variations, but you can see it with non weightlifters quite regularly when they, you know, once you're getting up close to their one RM, technically breaks down. So we can't then train those silos unless we eliminate the catch, but we should still be training them to be able to catch where we come. You also end up with athletes who, you know, have been injured. So again, if you go back to people in collision sports like rugby league, rugby union, American football, Australian rules football. A lot of them have got, you know, quite a few injuries to their shoulder, their elbow, their wrist, they might not be able to get into this position or overhead to catch. That doesn't mean we can't do weightlifting variations with them. We can just do them and exclude the catch, but they still get those propulsive benefits. You know, the main thing we're aiming for is to develop rapid force production characteristics to propel and accelerate the athlete or the athlete and the bar back. So we can still do that without catching. And it really allows us to go to those much higher loads. On the other end of the continuum, we can think about things like the hang high pull, which as long as the person isn't doing an upright role that I mentioned earlier, and it is really propelling that bar up with it. So the bar will come up on its own and we're not really adding too much with the upper body until the bar reaches its peak displacement, and then we use the upper body to start the deceleration of the bar. And then we've also got the jump stroke, which Dr. Tim Succomels popularized, where it's really just a hip hinged down to the knee. And then you jump from there. And if you hip hinge down to the knee, the shins are vertical, you've got sufficient knee extension. You have to offer all the transition. That scoop or double knee bend or whatever you want to refer to has to happen. You can jump within the near extended knee. So you naturally perform that. You accelerate right the way through the full range of motion and you jump. Now again, that's great. If we're down at loads of 30% of one or N up towards 45, maybe up to 60% of one repetition maximum. In the research, I know that Dr. Succomels used loads up as high as 80 or 85% of one or N. From my experience, most people want to exceed the sort of 45 to 60%. They don't put in a maximum in 10 because again, they've got to think about it landing, catching it, black thing in the knee and hip. But they're not balancing the bar off the front of the thigh, which I've seen a few people do at times, which doesn't look very pleasant. They're certainly going to leave a little bit of a bruising there. But for the much lower loads, we can be truly deballistic. And we don't really want our athletes to try and perform a clean or a power clean or a snatch or a power snatch for 40% of one or N, because they won't put it maximum in 10. Or the bar's going to go far too high. If you use 40% of one or N on a snatch or a power snatch, that's not going to be very comfortable on your shoulder because the bar's still moving up and it's still going down. So with really light loads, something like the jump shrub and the hang high pull are better. Again, if it's the hang high pull, the really, really low loads, the 30 to 45%. Again, you probably don't put in a maximum in 10 because the bar's going to displace so high. So something like the hang high pull might be better from, you know, you 50% up towards 70% of one repetition maximum, where you have to put in in 10, but it's not so heavy that it encourages the athlete to fall on the bar with the upper body. Again, these are all really useful in terms of training either the velocity end of the continuum or that force end. And we can also use them in a similar way to what I've described previously with the catching derivatives, if we add that counter movement into it. So if we pull from the knee, so you've got no real counter movement in there apart from that transition phase, or if we start stood upright, hinge down to the knee and then rapidly go through that transition and second pull phase. And we actually end up with much higher force, rates of force development power. But the nice thing is we can really go to either end of that load continuum, we can use much high loads with most pulling variations and we can use lighter loads of the jump truck and the hang high pull. Okay, so the advantage of using pulling would be that you can load it more than you could load any other derivative. Definitely, so we can load much higher or most to the pulling variations and then we can use lighter loads, something like a jump truck, but you still get that maximum intent because you're aiming to jump. Also, the advantage would be that you don't have catch, which can be hard in terms of injuries, or also you may want to not engage upper body and therefore use point to force the lower body use for the athlete. Definitely. Okay, pressing now. Okay, so pressing variations and pressing derivatives are great because, well, one, we can fall athletes into thinking non weightlifters. In terms of athletes into thinking that the training or upper body, but it's all lower body, or it should all be lower body. So, again, close to the day of competition, we can get people performing some relatively high load, very sort of ballistic stretch shortening cycle movements without them thinking that they're going to get soaked because you've got such a shallow range of motion with that dipping drive phase. As we go from being stood upright into that Dorsey flex position, keeping the trunk upright, it's only a small range of motion. Because it's a shallow range of motion, we have to produce really high forces because we only have a limited amount of time to produce force. So, it really emphasizes that rapid force production. And the nice thing is, again, we've got to get the bar high enough, whether it's for a push press, jerk, split jerk, whatever it might be. So, that we're not pressing out with the upper body, or we're not emphasizing a press with the upper body. So, it helps to really drive into tent with individuals. So, the nice thing is to put these exercises that, actually, if we use the same load, we get exactly the same force power rate to force development because the propulsive phase is the same. You go through the same range of motion with maximal intent. So, whether it's a push press, push jerk, split jerk, if the loads are same, we get the same acute stimulus. And therefore, should get the same adaptive responses over time. The advantage that we have if we go from a push press to a push jerk, or a power jerk, depending on whatever turn you want to use for it, is that we don't have to displace the bar is high. So, then we can use a slightly heavier load. And then if you go to a split jerk, again, you normally drop your sentence for a mass and capture the lower height, or the barbells are the lower height. So, again, we can take the load up even further. If you can perform the, you know, the push jerk, but it does a squat jerking catch for depth, fantastic. We can use him even higher load. Never met a non-weight lifter that can do that constantly with a heavy load. So, you know, we're probably not going to be using that with our team sport athletes. We've then also got those variations that, you know, have been able to do these overhead lifts from behind the neck. So, it gives us, again, greater variation if the athlete can get into that position safely and competently. So, we've got a whole range of these different tasks, which we can use interchangeably almost. Yes, if we decrease the requirement for displacing the bar particularly high, we can use a slightly heavier load, so we can emphasize four small. But again, these exercises are great because they force you to use a really high intent. They introduce that stretch shortening cycle, that rapid dip down and then drive back up. And they're really easy to coach as well. That's one of the really nice things is that, you know, it doesn't take if somebody can do a front squat, as an example, even a shallow front squat, and they can do a military practice and press the bar overhead. They can do a push press. They should be able to do a push jerk. And if they can go into a split squat position or a lunge, they should be able to do a split jerk. So, most athletes, if they've never done any weightlifting variations, these are really, really easy to introduce and drive that maximum intent. So, let's go with, as a strength and conditioning coach or weightlifting coach working with athletes in other sports, how you would be moving throughout the season and how you would be pulling all these different derivatives to serve the purpose or the other patients you want to achieve. Okay, so, I think, you know, if we're looking at a traditional team sport situation where they've got maybe six to eight weeks worth of pre-season, what we've got to do is be thinking, first of all, what do all athletes do it in season? Which exercise is what lift do I want them to perform to emphasize certain characteristics? Let's make sure we refine that technique. We've given them the strong foundations to the beginning with all these variations so I can use them effectively later on. So, the decision-making for which exercises you use really come from what do I want to use in season? So, let's make sure all the athletes are confident, confident, and can perform all the tasks we will perform later on, but it's really, really crucial. You can perform the higher volume stuff in seasons, so you can perform, sorry, in the pre-season, so you can perform the cleans in the snatches then. Where you've got that greater amount of work performed from pulling from the floor and then catching in a full squat position, you're probably not going to use those in season with most team sport athletes, because they're physically, they're more demanding. If the athletes are a little bit sore on competing in season, especially in team sports, if you look at something like football or soccer in Europe, they might be playing two, sometimes three games a week. So, there's limited time there, so we've got to optimize recovery, still hit them with a high load training stimulus, but something that's not going to be fatiguing, and something they can do if they are a little bit sore in some areas. So, once we go in season then, we're really looking at, well, what do we need to improve with my athlete? So, we have to do the regular assessment in monitoring with the athlete to really identify what they need to focus on. We've been really lucky over the last year at the university, we've tested probably 700-800 football players, soccer players, and apart from the goalkeepers, probably 95% of them just need to get stronger. They're efficient at using the force at all the strength that they've got and producing that force efficiently. So, some of them might be able to produce 90%, 85% to 90% of their maximum isometric force within the first 250 milliseconds. If you look at something like the dynamic strength index, you know, the ratio between their isometric force production and the ballistic force production, they're up at 0.8, 0.9, so they can produce 80 or 90% of their isometric force production during dynamic ballistic tasks. The biggest problem is they're weak. So, for them, in season, we're not going to be doing a lot of or shouldn't be doing a lot of power-based type training with lighter loads. They're efficiently doing that, they can jump high, they can sprint fast, we have to get them stronger. So, for those individuals, it would be some of the high load movements. So, pulling variations, some squat variations within there as well. Whatever squatting pattern benefits them, we might have some higher load overhead pressing derivatives in there to drive that intent. If we're looking at two games in a week, the training session closest to game day or match day, whichever you want to refer to us, we're probably doing those exercises as where we're limiting the total volume of work. So, probably going with things like your push presses to drive intent, but it's only a small range of motion. If it shouldn't fatigue them, maybe something like a pull from the knee or a hand pull and still a squat variation of some type in there, but keeping the volumes much, much lower. And then probably alternating between sort of strength speed, need and speed strength, and regularly evaluating those individuals. The biggest problem that we have when we're working with some team sport athletes, so football or soccer being a good example, is that because they don't generally have a good training history, we have to be cautious and slowly and incrementally add volume and load to them. So, what I mean by training history is training by doing proper strength and conditioning work with high loads with these types of exercises. There'll be playing football in an academy setting normally from the age of nine or ten years of age, but just haven't really done what we would consider high load training. It's generally all the sort of sets of 10 to 15 repetitions. So, we have to make sure we progressively and incrementally load them. What we don't want to happen is them to suddenly become them sore. And, you know, the hamstrings are sore, so they think they've got a bit of an injury, but it's not, it's just delayed onset muscle sore. That's normal. It's just that we gave them a novel stimulus or higher volume than normal slightly higher load, et cetera. When we're implementing these in sporting situations, whether they're not weight lifters, we just have to look at, well, what is their training history? What are they used to doing? And, how do we progressively and incrementally add this into their training? And, how can we do it so that they buy into it? They see some improvements. So, you're probably not going to start with the loads that you would consider ideal. We're not going to be that 70 to 90 percent of water and with a power clean or a cloud snatch, et cetera. It's going to be much lighter, the volumes will be much lower, but will slowly and progressively increase those over time. You'll still get an adaptive response, right? It won't be as rapid as the response we might like, but it prevents the athlete that being sore or demotivated or picking up a little bit of an injury or going into the gaining or the match feeling a little bit fatigued. So, we always have to be a little bit cautious with how we do that, but ultimately, it's normally in season. Certainly for all of this lower body work is rotating between speed strength, strength speed, depending on the needs of the athlete. We evaluate them objectively and identify is it the rapid force production or is it maximum force production, they need to emphasize now. And even if we've planned a block of four, six, eight weeks of strength speed and an inter-speed strength, if they're not as strong as we want them after that four-week block, we maybe go carry on for another four-week block and keep that progressing. But just being mindful then of the total volume of work they're performing with all the other sports-specific training. We can't use a training program we would use with weight lifters where technical and tactical training is lifting. We have to consider that with most other sports they'll be doing all the technical and tactical training, especially team sports. They'll be on the course or on the pitch or hours per day doing all the other physically demanding exercise. So, the strength and conditioning then is to really supplement that and enhance the force production characteristics so they can perform better in their technical and tactical training. So, inter-season time is just rotating between strength, speed, speed, strength and evaluating appropriately. All right, so we could go through, we could go from another angle and try to go absolute strength, how you would go about thinking, well, then strengthen your hands, speed, strength and speed. Yeah, if we want to develop, you know, absolute or maximal strength then we're going to be using some of the higher load weightlifting pulling derivatives. And again, that's, it might be from the floor, it might be from blocks at the knee, it might be a hang variation, whatever suits that athlete and whatever they're comfortable in combat and that. But we definitely use some higher load, you know, above 100% of their warm repetition maximum, probably higher if we're going from, if we're doing an angle from the knee or from mid thigh, then we go from the floor. Because most people will struggle a little bit with that first pull of variation once we get up to the 130, 140% of warm repetition maximum. Some can perform it really, really well, others, the technique starts to break down. And we'd normally start and we can incrementally increase that load, so we might start at 120% of one around and slowly add load each week. If we really am exercising force production, we'll also have some, you know, squatting type variations and squatting pattern in there as well. So make sure we're getting that and increase in force production trend, that full range of motion with the squatting type activity. And again, that will generally be to suit that athlete, whether it's a front squat, back squat, split squat variation, depending on their mobility and their competency, different exercises. But then we'll also have a little bit later on, we might have some more moderate load exercising this. We might have a, you know, a hang power snatch or something like that down at the 70% of water. And so we still, we're emphasizing force, maximum force production, but we still got something slightly lighter low, where it's more ballistic and higher movement velocities. And making sure that when we transition from that absolute or maximum strength, maybe to speed strength, that they're still used to really moving within intent and moving at higher velocities. And it doesn't take the first few training sessions to get them back to, you know, being snappy and moving as quickly as we want them to. Okay. So that's absolute strength when they move to speed strength. So we can go with this one next. Yep. So with the speed strength aspect of it, then again, we've still been using those normal sort of principles that we'd have in terms of the most fatigue or demanding exercises first. So within the speed strength, we might go with some lower load, match barrier, power snatch variations, because then we can really emphasize a moderate load, you know, the sort of 70, 75% of water and just placing the bar higher. So it really helps to get the athlete focused on moving with intent because the bars got to get so high. Again, if they're not competent, getting into the overhead position and catching them, we might use a clean variation instead. At the same time, we can still use something like the overhead lifts, but it's a much, much shallower range of motion. So certainly closer to the day of competition. We might go with something like an overhead lift because then the total amount of work they perform is less because you're only squatting to that sort of shallow squatting position. So we can use a combination of those types of exercises, we can include things like the hang and high pull or a jump stroke. So if we've been doing something, it's 70 to 80% of water on our end with something like a hang power snatch. We might then use the jump stroke down it, you know, you're 30 to 40% of one repetition maximum. So we train much sort of higher velocities there. We're definitely going to have some more sort of ballistic and plyometric type exercises as well to really get that reactive component. And then towards the end of the workout, we're probably still going to have some form of squatting variation in there as well to maintain maximum strength or maximum force production. If we take away that really high load stimulus, we will start to get over a period of weeks, a bit of a decline in maximum force production. But that could be as simple as, you know, during the absolute or maximum strength phase, they might have been doing five sets of five reps at 85% of their watt repetition maximum. Now we might still use 85%, but it might be three sets of three, which is then completely non fatiguing and much lower volume, but a high end of neurological stimulus if we give them something like that once per week to maintain that maximum force production capability. And again, we can decide where that high load squat goes. Do we do it as a complex, you know, you can use some form of complex or contrast training with a high load squat and a plymetric class or a high load squat and a jump truck. We could potentially pair those up depending on the time the athletes got available for training and how efficient we need to be with that type of approach. Though we know that strong athletes get that sort of post activation performance announcement in shorter periods of time of about four minutes, when we craft leads might take longer. But we can still use it for time efficiency, you might not get that potentiation effect if you use a shorter rest period. But if you're constrained with the time you've got with the athlete, it's generally not detrimental. So that's not necessarily a major problem. You'll still get that the high load neuromuscular stimulus. You just don't really realize the full performance enhanced in effect of doing a high load activity first followed by that low and low more ballistic plymetric type activity. Okay, and now how you would change it to achieve strength speed adaptation. Okay, so the string speed is going to fall somewhere in between the maximum or the absolute strength and the speed strength. We're golden to have more of the moderate load type activities in there with moderate to high loads. We might still use some high load pulling variations, just not as high as we'd use the absolute strength. We'll probably have some hang power cleans or clean variations within there. We'll have that sort of 70 to 90% of one repetition maximum from the push press or push jerk in there, and then some high load squatting variations. At this point, we probably don't need too much of the plymetric or the lower load of ballistic type training in there, certainly with the standard training session, because if we're looking at most team sports, you can integrate the ballistic and plymetric training into their warmups before they go on to the court or the picture and they're doing some technical and tactical training. If it is a court, if it's volleyball and basketball, we probably don't need a lot of jumping anyway, because they do so much in their training. So if we do any jumping with them, it's going to be very high intensity, high quality, but low volumes. And again, we, you know, one of the things we can do is then put some of these types of more ballistic and plymetric training when it's strength speed. Keep them out of the gym based session, if we can, and make sure it's included in warmups, technical and tactical training. Most people do rehab sessions, pre-activation sessions for whatever those terms really mean. The best thing to do to pre-activate a muscle is do an appropriate warmup for it and go through these exercises with, you know, progressively heavier loads that will get everything fully active. Rehabilitation, again, I'm not sure what that is because the best stimulus for adaptation and an increased risk of injury is strength and good movement qualities as sufficient evidence to show us that if you're stronger, you're more tolerant and resilient. As long as you move well, but people have those types of things built in, especially within team sports. So if we've got that time, let's look at using that to train landing mechanics. Let's improve their movement quality. And let's use the time that we have available then to really ingrain those movement patterns, landing strategy, et cetera. Okay, so let's move to strength and Uranus. Okay, so for the strength and Uranus, you know, we've got to be using those higher volumes to higher repetition ranges. So this is why we need to be careful of selecting the most appropriate exercises so we're not inducing an excessive amount of fatigue and causing technical failure. Now, again, we can do that with some pulling field variations where we exclude the catch phase if the athlete's technique starts to break down. And again, we can do that so that maybe the first five, six repetitions they catch and thereafter, if they're doing another six repetitions, they just do the pulls for the last six repetitions are a set of 12. Well, we can also include things like cluster sets if we need to with shorter rest periods, especially with some of these exercises, they might need to really apply chalk to the hands as you go and throw a set of 12 to 15 repetitions. You know that you can start to lose grip a little bit, or they may be using straps as well. But we can, we need to be selective over which of these tasks we actually use so that we don't actually start increasing the risk of injury. You use them as cluster sets, etc. Try and use the exercises which don't have the highest level of, you know, technical demands. So we're probably not going to be doing a clean or a snatch at this point. You may get away with power cleans, power snatches if we add a short rest period in between so get it to six reps, ten seconds rest then go again. But the pulling variations are probably the better options. I'd probably even avoid something like the jump shrug at anything more than about 30% warm repetition maximum because we need good landing mechanics each time. However, the one thing to bear in mind is if you, if you watch weight lift as before when these, if you've got a weight lift, a former set of 12, they'll pause in between. They'll regrep, they'll compose themselves, they naturally apply a cluster set of proof. It's not one repetition, two repetition, three repetition, four, there's that pause. That doesn't always happen with other athletes. Sometimes they rush through it because they know they've got to get through the set. So again, we can coach them to try and sort of reduce some of the issues associated with that and give them that bit of feedback. The one thing I really like with adding in a little bit of a cluster set approach with this, we get the high volume in there with whatever the exercise is. But we've got maybe a 10, 15, 20 second opportunity to give the athlete a little bit of feedback. And again, we can, we can almost do that where we can partner people up if we need to be time efficient or we're limited with equipment as well. So you'd normally be doing your sets of anything from 10 to 15 repetitions and just choose some of these more appropriately. So the pulling variations are great for doing this. And as I said a moment ago, we can do some where we include the catches earlier. And then for the later repetitions, we can eliminate that catch phase if the technique starts to break down or when it starts to break down. The push press variations, push press, push jerk, they're really good for doing this as well, especially the push press because it's the least technically demanding. But again, we're still going to be having something like squatting variations, Romanian deadlifts, et cetera in there. Although if we're doing lots of hand pulls and we're hipping down to the knee, you might not want to do a high volume of things like Romanian deadlifts or good mornings on the same day because we've still got exactly the same movement pattern that's happening at that point. And most of it when it comes to the strength endurance, that sort of high periphery ranges, knowing your athlete and working with them closely to make sure that, you know, if technique is breaking down, you're intervening quickly. You're giving them a bit of feedback and then letting them continue. But the good thing is we can really build up work capacity with some of these exercises. And you can even do things at this phase where you might pull to the knee and pulls and then continue the pull from there and give them a bit of feeling black. Check that the posture or control is right and the positioning and the technique is as good as it can be. Not for all 10 to 15 repetitions, maybe the first three or four, or maybe you've got to fire, then give them a brief rest and then they go again. We can go with short rest periods in between sets. But again, for the more technically demanding exercises, we probably want a slightly longer rest period. Let some of the lactate and the acid dissipate so that the technique isn't breaking down because of reduced coordination and movement, et cetera. But some of the other exercises are squatting their variations, hip hinge movements, and the non weight lifting variations. We can use that more traditional strength endurance approach with it. Okay, so we covered the derivatives, what options we have and how to use them. We went to other patients. I think now we should move to coaching weightlifting exercises and what are the rules or the tips you would have. It depends whether you're a complete novice. If you are a complete novice and you've got an athlete, and we see this quite a lot. And athlete, it's great at all, you know, normal sort of strength training, powerlifting type movements, but not very never really done any weightlifting exercises. The best approach to be seems to be, you know, that sort of top down approach. If we know that they can squat, they can hip hinge, they can do the basic movements. It's relatively easy. If they can get in a good front squat position, let's go with, and they can do an overhead squat. Let's go with a mid thigh pull into a mid thigh power clean. Let's go with a snatch pull variations from the hip from the knee and go into that hang power snatch variations and slowly and incrementally work down to the floor. Again, bearing in mind, if they really are struggling with a slow controlled first pull to the knee and then that rapid acceleration and something's breaking down there overthinking it, which is easy to see with, you know, athletes said I'm already done weightlifting before. We can still get all the benefits of doing those other variations using that top down approach gun from mid thigh or the hip or down to the knee. So we don't necessarily have to teach athletes to do all the different weightlifting variations. That would be ideal. And in a long term athlete development approach and that long term athlete development model, hopefully this would have been introduced at a young age and go rub the weight for their training. So by the time they're a senior athlete, we can use everything we'd like to use with them. The reality is that rarely happens. And sometimes you go into a scenario and I've had this numerous times you go and work with a group of athletes and I've been away war by the training a few times and purely been asked to go and assist when I'm not part of a team, but you're asked to go and assist, can you come over the training and every morning we're going to do a load of technique, a load of technique work with athletes. We want them better at the weightlifting exercises. We want them better at all squatting patterns, et cetera. The young athletes, the great, the older athletes, generally quite set in their ways. So for them, it's well, what extra benefit can we get of doing a full clean or a false match compared to some of those other variations, which I can teach them really quickly. And we get increases in rapid force production characteristics from technique training. If all you've ever done is heavy squats, semi-dead lifts, heavy hip injuries, suddenly being really ballistic and explosive with a hang pull. Whether it's with a clean or a snatch grip or whether you actually go into a catch position, that can make a huge difference because you're just used to using heavy loads and moving them relatively slowly. So we get a decent training effect just going through this and that might just be the first 20 minutes or 15 minutes of your training session. Again, where possible, I would say, instead of a 20, 30 minute pre-activation session with bands and lying on the floor while doing bands and all these sorts of things, I would get them to a more dynamic bodyweight series of movement, pastions, then give them a barbell with whatever load is appropriate and get them practicing some of these techniques. The muscles will be fully active by the time you've done that. So we can easily integrate these things into the start of an individual's workout. We're not going to be using the loads, which we would seem to be optimal that we've already discussed. But if we start, you know, a whole squad off with 40 kilos on a barbell today and we do X number of sets, X number of reps of an exercise for a few exercises. That's your first 20 minutes before you go and do your real absolute strength session with the squats and your confidence up. The next time we come in, if we do an extra rep or two per set or if we have an extra one and a half kilos or one and a quarter kilos to either side of the bar, we've got progressive overload. And if we do that week on week on week, we don't need to set a one around. We can't because they're not competent, but we've applied progressive overload. We've done an extra set or an extra rep. We can only increase that so much, but we're suddenly training endurance, et cetera. But we can add a little bit more weight, take the reps up, add a bit more weight, bring the repetitions down and just slowly and systematically do that. Still my athletes, you might stop with something like a hang power plane, hang power, a snatch, others you might go all the way down to the floor and give them that for full array. But normally that's sort of the top down approach seems to work best, giving them efficient and effective feedback. And this is one of the key things is not over coaching the athlete. I see this one, when we coach our students to become coaches and we coach them through weightlifting exercises, you know, they're almost looking at, well, this is the technical model. And then then explaining to their athlete the technical model. No, the athlete doesn't have time to think about what do they need to do? Why did the exercise go wrong? Why was the bar in front of them? Was the start position incorrect? Were the hips too high? Were the hips too low? What was going wrong? Did they just rip the bar off the floor? And they lost posture. And therefore, you know, once they performed the first pull, there was no way of correcting it. So what do we need to do with those athletes? And we need to give them one or two of you something simple to think about. And also not just give them the negative feedback. We've got to give them the positive feedback. What went well? Get them to buy in. As soon as you're saying, right, that's great. That's really explosive. You know, you're moving really quickly. Then you can throw on the however, right not to start at transition phase until a little bit later. You know, your chest in your trunk more upright as you go into that transition phase to start the second pull of the exercise. And also, you know, we're really lucky. Now, most people have got smart devices, whether it's a phone or whether it's a tablet. So it's really easy with athletes permission to film them and show them it. You know, sometimes you're explaining stuff and then just don't grasp what you're saying. And if you can show them what it looks like and what it should look like, sometimes they say self correct. Now, one of the useful things that we find is getting athletes to coach each other and give each other feedback. There's rarely enough coaching staff in the room to coach every individual athlete. So get them to coach each other. That will mean they're more conscious of their technique while they're also, you know, giving feedback and acting as a coach for the training partner or partners. Yeah, that's really good. They're also fun sometimes. So definitely. Yeah. And especially when you've got some athletes who may, you know, may not be so focused and they're messing around a little bit in the gym and you've got to, you know, install it still a little bit of discipline. Actually, they're not getting distracted. They're not getting bored because they're coaching the other person. And if they've criticized the technique of their training partner, they'll make sure that they don't get it right themselves. Otherwise, their training partner is going to start to ridicule them a little bit. And it's also good with youth athletes. It gets the bind with you flat fleets. It helps them as they develop and progress through their careers. Some of them may decide, you know what, I'm not, I'm not going to get to that level. I want to in sport, but now I could go and be the coach. I want to learn. I want to do that because I enjoyed doing that part of it. And it's empowering for them. So important. Anything you want to say about stages of learning? No, I think the one thing to bear in mind in terms of sort of the coaches and the stages of learning for athletes is that we can't just go on, some people will go on chronological age, but we can't do that. Because as I said, you could have, you know, if we look at how athletes learn and how they develop, if we could have an athlete who's 12 years old, who's already had some experience with all these exercises. We can have an athlete who's in their 20s, who's never on them. So we have to go through the same sort of normal stages in the normal process, but accelerate them through that learning process as they develop. That's difficult if you've got a whole squad of athletes because they'll all develop it from rates, but we have to try and even individualize that as much as possible and when possible, making sure we give them the appropriate feedback to write. And I don't progress them too rapidly. I think people always want to. I know I'm not like this with students and with athletes. I want to get to the exciting stuff. But actually, they've got a really good foundation on everything else first, but at the same time, we need to add enough variation and variety to keep them interested at the same time as well. That's true. Thank you so much for going through these ones. Now we have the questions, the two questions I always ask at the end. The first one is, what is your favorite color? I don't really have a favorite color. I suppose it is sort of depends on if I was going to paint my hand. What color do I paint it? I will tell you specifically why I asked. So, evidence strong started with me making infographics for research papers. So, if I would make an infographic for the paper, which I certainly will, what I would like to see on the infographic. It depends on the perfect person. Okay, not it. The infographic will have some red on it. And now the second question is where people can find you or where they should follow you anymore. My work is probably easiest to find on research gate. If they want to follow me, Instagram or Twitter, @porkamford1975, which gives away my age, but that's fine. All right, well, thank you so, so much for tonight. And see you next time. Brilliant. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO]