Answer this question honestly:
“Have you improved your speed, vertical jump, or quickness lately, or have you just gotten better at moving a barbell, doing a fancy plyometric, or doing drills?”
If your answer is anything but a resounding “yes!” In regards to improving speed, then this article is written for you.
Plateaus are tough mothers. They happen for a few reasons, but a big one is that the human body really doesn’t like to go outside of its’ safe little shell. The brain also doesn’t like to move outside of its’ cave. For the same reasons that we are so often trapped in mindsets developed from our youngest years, we form defensive patterns that trap our brain from wiring more power to our muscles. Facing fears and connecting with the subconscious brain are keys to success in this world.
Although holistic health and well being is a huge area (particularly gut health), with tons of implications for athletic improvement, we’ll keep this article centered more around the direct training side of things, and cover two plateau mechanisms:
- CNS, structural and joint stress
- Psychological limits (Part II)
We’ll start with CNS limiters.
CNS, Structure and Joint Stress Plateaus
The body is made, firstly to survive, with becoming faster and stronger than one’s peers as a far removed priority. If we simply became faster and stronger every single workout, the risk of injury would skyrocket. Think about this:
- How likely is your spine to stay intact squatting 1500lbs?
- Will your hamstrings stay in one piece if you can run a 7 second 100m dash?
Possibly, but since your body knows that your chances of survival on an broken spine, or exploded hamstring aren’t too good, it shuts things down as soon as it senses danger. The nervous system is not a gambler when it comes to you not getting eaten by a hungry tiger or anaconda.
Doing the same training movement over and over again begins to inflict very specific joint stressors on the body. Nociceptors (pain receptors) start to pick these up over time, joint micro-traumas build up, and the CNS will, in turn, power down the drive to the specific muscle pathway that is causing this stress.
It is for this reason that basketball players used to a variety of jumps who go out for the track team to high jump often lose their “springs” within 4-6 weeks of focused high jump training, as the event is a specific and repeated jumping motion.
It is also for this reason that it is recommended to work out on weight machines for a period of no longer than 4 months, because the exact same motion done over and over again starts to produce those specific joint micro-stressors. Good athletes can’t perform maximal 10m fly sprints every single day of the week and expect to recover enough to continually improve and stay healthy. There must be ways to distribute and alternate stress in a way that allows the CNS to adapt towards increased speed and power!
Let’s go over a few ways that athletes can tweak their training to avoid regular plateau’s due to stress limitations, starting with changing the way we think about strength and barbell work.
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Change the reps or tempo in your strength program, drastically.
One of the best things that athletes can do for themselves is to do an overhaul in the mentality behind the set and rep scheme in their strength programs. Don’t just tweak things either, change things big time. Many coaches and athletes have been doing the same thing for so long, they are afraid to leave its’ comforts.
So many people just become comfortable with max-strength oriented lifting, they are afraid of what might happen if it suddenly left their program! It’s often tough to get out of comfort zones in anything, as we relinquish the control and sense of safety we are so used to.
Been doing a traditional “Bigger-Faster-Stronger” “Tier System”, or “5-3-1” inspired strength program for a while? Try some of these ideas, most of which are geared around minimizing time in the weightroom in order to focus more on where it counts, which is building speed.
- Go do some HIT style work for a while
- Give a 1×20 strength program a shot
- Try some super slow barbell and movement work.
- Try Cal Deitz’s Tri-Phasic strength method for a breath of fresh barbell training air.
- Just stop lifting for a while
By incorporating some alternative strength methods that might incorporate higher reps or different tempos, your fast twitch muscles won’t melt, and you’ll often have more time to focus on other things, such as the rest of this list in overcoming training plateaus.
Believe it or not, a lot of good strength coaches use a HIT (one set for each muscle group to failure) style workout for a good portion of their program. If this mentality was yielding boatloads of sissy athletes, I doubt these practitioners would keep doing what they are doing.
I’ve personally seen great results in both strength and explosive measure performance by utilizing 1×20 style sets as a contrast or bookend to traditional strength means. The lower time commitment of the “single-hard-set” movement also allows athletes to spend time on other important training components. Using one or two sets of high rep half squats a few times a week as a bookend to a traditional strength block in collegiate sprinters has been one of the most powerful ways to break a rut that I’ve used in my experience as a coach.
Some other breaths of fresh air in a stale strength program are super-slow movements, and tri-phasic training movements. I learned about the benefits of super-slow work this past weekend at the first “Speed and Activation Consortium” from Wannagetfast owner Dan Fichter. While slow work may often draw on the slow twitch pool, super-slow work (think around 30 seconds per rep or movement) actually recruits everything, fast and slow, due to the fine motor control of the involved joint. No muscle or pattern can escape, where in faster movements, some muscles in the range may get skipped over. I have been loving this type of work lately on the tail end of regular sets, or in bodyweight and physioball versions done for recovery.
I’ve written about Tri-phasic work often, but I’ll mention that it’s use gives you a much longer adaptation response over a period of training time, as well as some great velocity and tension-release specific adaptations in your athletes. The Tri-phasic method essentially represents the shift that most of my programming has been directed towards in the last 3 years, and I’ll “bookend” it with some of the above strength methods.
Finally, a lot of athletes simply need to stop lifting for a while to see improvements in speed. It’s hard to get away from this mentally for some, particularly those who found great early coordination improvements from strength and barbell work, but many athletes out there are “overtrained” from the barbell, and “undertrained” in terms of actual speed, jumping, and explosive work. Athletes simply need breaks from barbell work multiple times throughout the course of each training year.
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Understand the role of the “Ace” in your sleeve for a better understanding of periodization and plateaus
One of the biggest epidemics amongst athletes seeking better performance is that high intensity training means and methods will rapidly lose their potency after being applied for a period of time.
- Depth jumps work incredibly well for improving speed and power, but after 6-8 weeks, their effect is drastically reduced, and the impact on the joints can lead the body to dial down CNS power output to the muscles.
- Over-speed sprinting is a nice way to get more out of the nervous system of an athlete as far as speed is concerned, but after a period of time, it rapidly exhausts the adaptation reserves of the competitor, and can cause subtle disturbances in running mechanics.
- French Contrast may be the best way I’ve found to increase an athlete’s vertical jump in a short amount of time, but even its’ novel stimulus will wear off after a period of time.
This is one of the few videos detailing French Contrast the way it is supposed to be done.
These high-intensity training modalities can be considered “The Ace in your sleeve” as far as peak results are concerned. You don’t want to play these hands too early or too often, or you will lose. Training and “peaking” really isn’t even so much a “periodization” issue, as much as it is an issue to how often each year you incorporate a given modality. Just like the seasons, each high-powered training modality is often most effective for a season, and shouldn’t be leaned on the whole year.
Be familiar with those training means and modalities that offer a maximal benefit, and have a plan for the best time of the year to use them. Using something like depth jumps, or French Contrast around two 4-6 week periods each year is a good starting point. Some coaches will even hold off on the “best” special training methods until the Olympic year in a 4-year cycle.
As a rule of thumb, keep training revolving around the basics of your specific sport movement, and how to improve that, and then use high intensity work as a novel stimulus as opportune moments in the yearly training game. Try not to use them too early! It’s fine to perform at a high level early, and there is no reason to bury an athlete, or dull the knife, but don’t perform well early because you used up all your training tricks! One of my favorite quotes at the recent Speed and Activation Consortium was Tony Holler saying: “Always keep your athletes wanting more!” Keep your athletes hungry for more of the intense training they crave, and you’ll be in the winner’s circle.
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Embrace some training randomness
Training is not a linear, pre-planned venture. As much as governing sport science bodies may like you to believe, there is not an absolute required order for individual training sessions, let alone a whole season of work.
You don’t have to always do Olympic lifts before you squat, and you don’t have to do speed work before you do plyometrics. Think of a workout based on the randomness or chaos of football, basketball, or soccer. Every now and then, it is great to just do a workout on instinct and chaos (every now and then, not always).
Life is a balance between order and chaos. Too much order, and we are robots. Too much chaos, and we fail to get anything accomplished and destroy ourselves. Remember that the randomness found in things like team sports can often take care of training chaos for you. If you have ever seen Dan John’s “Three Dice” idea for creating workouts, you’ll understand that a seasoned lifting vet knows the importance of some chaos, but minimal mental energy in creating a workout based on some variability.
A great mid-week workout I enjoyed in college that was more recovery based than anything was a trail run, or field run where we performed random calisthenics every 100m or so. We got to pick the repetitions for each exercise, which our coach randomly decided on. This mentality towards training was not only physically recharging, but also mentally, and our team loved it.
One of the easiest possible ways to induce variability in your training, is just to play sports in the absence of other training modalities for a while, and particularly, a sport you may be somewhat unfamiliar with. The human brain loves to learn, and gaining some new skills can stimulate the body for further gains down the road.
On an easy training level, just switch the order of your workout up. The great coach Loren Seagrave recommends simply going from: Speed → Plyometrics →Weights to it’s inverse, and lifting first, followed by plyometrics, and then speed training, to get out a rut. Simple enough! The waveload effect created by high magnitude movements has a definite influence on every subsequent training modality. Don’t be afraid to get out of your comfort zone and give this type of work a shot!
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Try kettlebell or bodyweight training as your main strength program for a few weeks (or months!).
Kettlebell focused training is one of the hidden gems as far as a “bookend” to normal strength training. 3 weeks of kettlebell training after a 10-12 week strength push may be the most unknown and useful secret of athletic development. Mix the kettlebell training in with a light sport movement for some great results.
Try kettlebell swings and snatches combined with some hill sprints, and finish the session with some windmills and medicine ball throws, and a few get-ups. Another great bookend/deload idea, do 10-15 minutes of kettlebell movement, and then go play a few pickup games of a sport you usually don’t play. While the spine is recovering from heavy barbell training, and the legs from sprints and plyos, the kettlebell work can help nurture the fascial pathways, and tension-release in athletic movement.
One great aspect of kettlebell work is the shape of the bell, and the way it can be used to build basic balance in conjunction with some strength and mobility. Unilateral and diagonal kettlebell work is one of the best contrasts to traditional strength work out there as far as the sewing together of the human body is concerned!
Much of the work in the kettlebell universe also relies on tension-release principles, balance, and breathing, something many modern strength programs don’t address, and the result from such training is often a breath of fresh air.
Stay tuned for part II in this article series: Overcoming psychological limiters.
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