Today’s podcast features Ryan Jackson. Ryan has been the Associate Director of Human Performance/Nutrition with TCU Football since December 2021. His duties include team nutrition education, counseling, and menu planning. As a performance coach, he works directly with quarterbacks, mids, and advanced athletes. Jackson has been involved in sports performance and nutrition on the NCAA DI level for over 15 years.
Tendons and connective tissue are an important aspect of human movement. Yet, compared to muscle, there is relatively little objective data or research on their adaptive processes or key performance metrics. Skeletal structure considerations, such as infrasternal angle, also play a vital role in an athlete’s movement strategy and muscle mass dynamics and are also something we are just beginning to learn and integrate into the training equation. In creating a total performance program, it is essential to understand not just the dynamics of muscle but also of bone and tendon.
On today’s show, Ryan will discuss the correlations found at TCU between the Achilles tendon thickness, Nordboard metrics, fat-free muscle mass, and training season. He will also discuss the differences in Achilles thickness between football positions and the implications for training well-roundedness. Finally, Ryan will discuss the infrasternal angle measurements and how these correlate to an athlete’s lean muscle mass and potential for maximal functional muscle gain in the gym. This episode was an awesome deep dive into cutting-edge information about connective tissue and performance.
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Main Points
6:34– Tendon Adaptation in Response to Muscle Forces
7:51– Tendon Thickness Impact on Athletic Performance
16:54– Achilles Tendon Thickness and Athletic Performance
17:26– Achilles Tendon Thickness and Force Production
19:04– Achilles Tendon Stiffness at Malleolis Measurement
36:59– Calf Muscle Stiffness in Elite Athletes
52:56– Optimizing Athletes’ Performance Through Body Composition Analysis
59:07– Achilles Tendon Thickness and Athletic Jump Strategies
1:00:19– Hip Dip Strategies Impact Jumping Performance
1:20:06– Enhancing Tendon Healing with Isometric Training
1:21:19– Enhancing Athletic Performance with Collagen and Tendon Training
1:31:42– Structural Differences Impacting Athletic Performance in Bounding
Quotes
“Defensive backs, on average had bigger Achilles tendons. Interesting. We have a guy the second biggest, and I think it’s a product of their movement and their position, where if I’m backpedaling, moving backwards more, it’s more eccentric loading. Right?”
“So you get the knee bent to a 30 degree angle, and then you push as hard as you can, push your heel up into the strap as hard as you can, and it’s like an ISO for like three to 5 seconds, overcoming ISO for like three to 5 seconds. There is an inverse relationship between Infra-sternal angle. So what I mean by that is the more narrow, the more force produced in that test”
“But what we saw with that is that, yes, it was very strongly correlated with Isa. With higher. The greater the angle, the higher their fat-free-mass-index is, which in theory makes sense, and that typically that person is going to be wider. So they have the ability to handle more muscle mass on their frame”
“So you would think that a big would have the widest ISA on the team. That was not the case. We had a running back, actually had the biggest 205 pound running back, had the biggest ISA in that upper 25% quartile. There was three bigs, four skill and one mid. And reference ranges. There’s not a whole lot of information on this, but if you refer to Connor Harris, he has some norms. And anything greater than 110 degrees is technically wide, and then less than 110 degrees is narrow. Our smallest ISA was 118, biggest was 149. It didn’t really change, not significantly throughout the year. Usually it was like one to two degrees. If it did”
“My takeaway there is that, especially with the data that we see with 180 pound db having achilles tendons as big as offense and defense alignments, that they probably use their tendons to move more, whereas the muscle driven guy uses his muscle to move more. And so if I’m using my tendons to move more, I should definitely be supplementing with collagen”
About Ryan Jackson
Ryan Jackson has been the Associate Director of Human Performance/Nutrition with TCU Football since December 2021. In this role, he serves as a sports dietitian and performance coach. His primary responsibilities as a dietitian include team-based nutrition and supplementation education, individual counseling, and menu planning. As a performance coach, he works directly with the quarterbacks, mids, and advanced training-age student-athletes.
Prior to TCU, Ryan Jackson worked with UCF Athletics staff from May 2021 to December 2021 as the director of performance nutrition and the head sports dietitian for the athletics department.
Jackson came to UCF after two years working with the SMU athletics department as a sports dietitian and football strength coach. Prior to his work with the Mustangs, Jackson had a similar role at Arkansas State, where he worked as a strength coach and sports dietitian with the football program from 2018-19.
Prior to his time at Arkansas State, Jackson was an assistant director of athletic performance at Tulsa from 2016-2018, where he worked with volleyball and men’s soccer and assisted with the football team and sports nutrition.
Jackson also spent time at the University of Missouri from 2008-2015. During his stint with the Tigers, he worked as a strength and conditioning intern, graduate assistant, and assistant director of strength and conditioning, working with diving and gymnastics and assisting with the football program.
In addition to his current role with TCU Football, Ryan is also an adjunct professor at Logan University, where he teaches a sports nutrition class within the Master of Science in Strength and Conditioning. Ryan has three degrees from the University of Missouri: a bachelor’s degree in nutrition and fitness, a master’s degree in health education and promotion, and a bachelor’s degree in dietetics. He is a registered and licensed dietitian (RD/LD), certified strength and conditioning specialist (CSCS), and is Flex Diet Certified.
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