I couldn’t tell you when the first human decided to put a weighted pack, vest, or clothing on in order to improve athleticism. Between vests, sleds, and elastic bands, coaches and athletes have been working resisted versions of movement to improve performance for a very long time.
The LILA Exogen gear takes any form of wearable resistance well into the future, and I’m excited to share that with you.
I first heard of the Exogen wearable training equipment from Dutch coaching legend, Henk Kraaijenhof, and shortly thereafter, by hall of fame USA sprint coach, Chris Korfist. A few years later, seeing how Randy Huntington utilized it with champion sprinter Su Bingtian (fastest 40/60 meter segment of the 100m dash ever) was the icing on the cake for me, with how powerful of a tool the Exogen could be.
Key Features and Overview
Where you feel most external resistance like vests, but even sprint sleds, “clunking” around, the Exogen feels like a second skin, and the way your body processes it from a sensory perspective really gives it a natural feel.
This fusiform shape allows for a more natural feel in how the weights distribute and funnel the force of the movement. It also allows selectively weighting one portion of a limb more than another.
For example, by putting the narrow end towards the mid-line of a limb and then letting the heavy end sit towards the outside, or inside, you can get a “spiraling” action of a limb in whatever direction you choose.
Left: Spiral action towards lateral aspect. Right: Spiral action towards midline.
When I first got the Exogen suit several years ago, it was like being a kid in a candy shop with all of the given possibilities of how to weight and alter not just sprinting, but jumping, throwing, and pretty much any athletic skill you could imagine.
Benefits
Any training tool can promise a lot, and there are certainly positives to other forms of external resistance and loading.
What has made Exogen a different experience for me, is both the highly specific, and then the creative benefits I’ve gotten from using the gear. Here are the main advantages that I’ve found in using the Exogen training equipment, relative to other types of weighted resistance methods:
- The best specific potentiation tool I’ve found for sprinting and explosive athletic movements
- A great way to train the specific strength behind key sports movements in a way the gym cannot
- The ability to understand and use rotation and spirals to become aware of angular momentum, enhance running and sports skills, and understand the nature of the body more deeply
- Using it to train and understand the asymmetrical nature of movement
- The ability to uniquely load limbs in a unique and powerful way for rehabilitation and return to play
I’ll speak briefly on each of these as I’ve experienced them.
Potentiation
If you are interested in sprint speed, or any other explosive athletic ability, the Exogen gear allows for some serious and specific potentiation, to reach a higher level of performance on a given day.
One of the simplest and most repetitively effective ways to do this is to start with a greater amount of weight (such as 2x200g on the thighs and 2x200g on the calf sleeves) and then take a small amount of weight off each repetition.
I’ve also found good results by taking weights off only one side at a time while sprinting, leaving an “asymmetrical effect .”This also works on the level of “repetition without repetition,” where the body is exposed to a subtly different version of the skill in each sprint set.
In episode 282 of the Just Fly Performance Podcast, world-renowned sprint coach Randy Huntington described one of his unique technical potentiation sequences with 4.07s 40-yard dash sprinter, Su Bingtian, which was moving through various forms of resistance, working into the LILA Exogen sleeves and then finally, going into full unweighted sprinting.
In my own exploration with even just the calf sleeves (shorts and forearm sleeves made things even better), starting with two fusiform weights on each limb and slowly removing weights throughout each sprint rep of the training facilitates a ridiculous amount of potentiation, which makes your final sprints with either none or light asymmetrical loading, absolutely blazing.
I’ve used the Exogen this past year at age 39, more than any other year, and even though I ended up doing sprint workouts less in that time than age 38 and below, my sprints felt better than ever, and the times were very good. I even ran a faster 120m at age 39 than at age 38 (the summer of age 38 was one of the best overall training years of my life), leveraging the Exogen to its full potential.
Specific Strength Development
There is no better way to specifically train the chain of muscles involved in any sport skill than to do that sport skill itself. I’ve found using the Exogen gear particularly useful in hitting muscles like the glutes, hamstrings, and even the external obliques.
When we watch good sprinters, we tend to see a strong development in these muscle groups, and the catch is that a lot of that development happened for these athletes by simply sprinting. When a good runner sprints, they achieve a greater engagement of these key muscles than a less skilled individual.
When you set the load in Exogen rotationally, you get an even greater activation of those muscles that have a substantial angular nature (think glutes and obliques) that are difficult to really hit with linear methods and do so powerfully.
The Exogen gear can be beneficial for intensifying that specific strength effect of sprinting or whatever other skill you aim to improve. The amplified angular velocity is a huge reason for that, and you will find that you are developing the muscles associated with angular velocity to an even greater level.
Coaches have found that even basic leg swings can be heavily amplified by the light weight of the Exogen gear to be a powerful stimulus for the hip flexors. High knee drills have a new meaning, even with 100-200g on each leg for 5-15 second bursts.
Skill Learning and Resistance Through Limb Rotation and Spirals
As the Exogen feels like a “second skin”, it’s an incredible learning and teaching tool. Many athletes are more kinesthetic learners (learning by moving and feeling) than they are auditory, or even visual, so realize that helping athletes to feel something they need is often much more powerful than simply telling them something that goes in one ear and out the other.
This learning pattern can be particularly helpful when it goes with the unique nature of the rotations available through arranging the Exogen fusiform weights. Although I’ve certainly found other external forms of jump and sprint resistance useful, one thing they cannot do is facilitate spirals and rotation in the body.
Being able to place the small fusiform weights diagonally, or simply because the weights are heavier on one end, allows you to weight one side of a limb more heavily than the other. What this does is cause that side of the limb to fall with gravity more quickly.
If you place the heavy side towards the outside of the leg, the leg will fall with more external rotation (yielding more “bounce”). If you place the heavy side towards the inside, the leg will fall with more internal rotation (more twisting “down into the ground”).
Left: Orientation to “resist” the ground. Right: Orientation to “put force into the ground”
This doesn’t just work on the level of the legs (or arms) individually, but also in how they work “together” as a spiraling unit.
Some things I’ve learned from the Exogen include improved foot strike patterning in athletes with otherwise “poor” foot function when given facilitation and awareness of more external rotation, or “ER.” I’ve seen athletes with achy knees from too much external rotation of both the femur and tibia feel better when I used the Exogen to give them awareness of more tibial internal rotation.
For the upper body, there is also a great benefit to the unique rotational loading manner that the Exogen gear works through. In a skill such as a javelin throw, where more external rotation is needed, placing the fusiform weights in a manner that allows the arm to rotate externally helps athletes to more easily feel the correct arm position upon release.
“Assisting” the correct arm action in javelin through external rotation
If you place the heavy side on the outside of one limb and the inside of the other, you get a truly awesome “spiral” that twists the legs clockwise or counterclockwise as a unit.
“Spiraling emphasis” Loading
The feeling you get sprinting with an alignment like this is truly powerful and allows for not only some cool play asymmetrically, but also a potentiation that is even more powerful than just “straight” loading. This full spiraling application can be very powerful with respect to feeling the full potential present in accelerating, throwing, and swinging applications.
Asymmetrical Value
What initially intrigued me, perhaps more than anything, was Chris Korfist mentioning that some athletes could achieve their 10m fly personal best times, wearing an Exogen sleeve weights on only a single leg, instead of on both.
Asymmetrical Loading: In this loading scheme, the left leg is loaded more heavily than the right
I’ve also learned a lot about asymmetry and how and why loading a single limb (typically the left limb) works well for athletes when considering our natural asymmetries, as well as the principles put forth by groups like the Postural Restoration Institute and individuals like Bill Hartman. We can see functional asymmetry clearly show up in many elite sprint performers, for example, such as Usain Bolt or Abby Steiner.
In this regard, of being able to spiral limbs, as well as being able to load up limbs in an asymmetrical format, the Exogen has been not only a fantastic training tool, but also a great learning tool. One of the most fun aspects of the Exogen is trying to find a “lock” where you can spiral and load the limbs just right to actually be able to move more easily or better than you could before. Going through this process helps you to understand movement better as well, on both an intellectual and a “feel” based level.
Rehabilitation Loading Ability
As the inventor of the Exogen gear, Joseph Dolcetti, has told me, the micro-weights offer an excellent opportunity to help athletes fill back in the neuromuscular “gaps” that often appear when returning from an injury. I thought this sounded interesting, but at the same time, I wasn’t able to see this in action until I found a loading scheme using the internal rotation emphasis for an externally rotated individual that I mentioned previously.
When we get injured, even after the tissues are ready to return, there is often a gap in the neurological and motor aspects of getting the movement back and up to its full level, and this is where the Exogen gear has tremendous potential.
Drawbacks
The LILA Exogen kit is a fantastic system and is better than any weighted vest or elastic tubing I’ve tried by a long shot.
To make a fair review, it is important to discuss any drawbacks to the system, of which the primary one is simply the sleeves slipping downwards towards the feet/hands, especially when loaded fairly heavily.
To me, this seems inevitable due to the nature of the product itself, but I’ve only found it to be a mild nuisance rather than any significant issue. I find every 2-5 sprints, I may simply have to re-strap the Velcro on a shin or forearm sleeve after pulling the sleeve back up. I tend to use heavier loads when training with the Exogen, which can exacerbate the pull, but lighter loads can be used for many reps without needing adjustment.
I believe Chris Korfist has used long socks pulled over the Exogen sleeves to help mitigate this issue, which makes good sense to me.
Another drawback is if you have a lot of athletes, it’s relatively easy to share, switch, and distribute the calf and forearm sleeves, while the shorts (which are amazing) will be more challenging and more “personal” of a resistance form. If you train groups, the most accessible place to start is definitely a few sets of outer sleeves of some different sizes. If you want a great, more individualized experience, the shorts are a fantastic boost.
Conclusion
If you are looking for a method to:
- Specifically overload your sport skills
- Allow for lots of training variation, exploration, and novelty
- Teach you more about how the body works in sport movement
Then you’ll definitely want to check out the Exogen gear. It’s been a game-changer for me, and I can’t recommend it enough.
As LILA founder Joseph Dolcetti has said, “The future of resistance training is light,” and I couldn’t agree with him more. We have taken “heavy” to the point of diminishing returns on our time investment this past century, and it’s now time to get into the finer details of the beauty of human movement, which means expanding our view of high velocity, lightweight training.
As the world moves forward, I can personally see “resistance training” for athletes evolving into forms much more integrated in nature that respects the true complexity of the body in motion.
The LILA Exogen wearable resistance is a way to do just that.
If you want 15% off of the training, follow this link to lilateam.com or use the code “jfs2023” at checkout.
About Joel Smith
Joel Smith is the founder of Just Fly Sports and is a sports performance/track coach in Cincinnati, Ohio. Joel hosts the Just Fly Performance Podcast, has authored several books on athletic performance, and in 2021, released the integrative training course, “Elastic Essentials”. He currently trains clients in the in-person and online space.
Joel was formerly a strength coach for 8 years at UC Berkeley, working with the Swim teams and professional swimmers, as well as tennis, water polo, and track and field. A track coach of 15 years, Joel coached for the Diablo Valley Track and Field Club for 7 years, and also has 6 years of experience coaching sprints, jumps, hurdles, pole vault and multi-events on the collegiate level, working at Wilmington College, and the University of Wisconsin, LaCrosse, along with his current work with master’s, high school and collegiate individuals.
Joel has had the honor of working with a number of elite athletes, but also takes great joy in helping amateur athletes and individuals reach their training goals through an integrative training approach with a heavy emphasis on biomechanics, motor learning, mental preparation, and physiological adaptation. His mission through Just Fly Sports is: “Empowering the Evolution of Sport and Human Movement”. As a former NAIA All-American track athlete, Joel enjoys all aspects of human movement and performance, from rock climbing, to track events and weightlifting, to throwing the frisbee with his young children and playing in nature.
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