Today’s guest is Bas Van Hooren, applied sport scientist and strength and conditioning specialist from the Netherlands. Bas has a wealth of knowledge on many facets of speed and sports performance, including muscle slack, muscle action, and biarticular muscle action, and how these concepts apply to training.
Bas Van Hooren is an athlete, applied sport scientist and strength and conditioning specialist from Gronsveld, The Netherlands. He is currently lecturing at Fontys University of Applied Sports Sciences. As an athlete, Bas has won multiple medals at the national championships, including a gold medal at the national championship 3000m indoor in 2017.
As an applied sport scientist, Bas has written multiple peer-reviewed scientific publications about a variety of sport science topics, and has a special interest in the transfer effects of training on sports performance and injury prevention.
It seems to happen regularly that we are reframing the context by which we are seeing and using traditional lifting with traditional up and down tempos. The more we know about the exact physiological and neurological mechanisms that drive movement, the more we can understand which aspects of lifting, plyometrics, and special strength are helpful, and which might have a “reverse transfer”.
In my interview today with Bas, we go into detail on concepts of muscle slack, gearing, and phasic considerations, all with clear applications to how and what we are programming for our athlete populations.
Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.
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Key Points:
- Bas’ background in sport science, athletics, and performance
- How the eccentric phase plays out in sport movement versus explosive isometric movements
- Muscle gearing and muscle pennation concepts and effect on coordination
- Practical thoughts on training the hamstrings
- Using traditional up-and-down lifting in light of coordination
- Muscle slack and its effect on sport movement
- Hamstring length and running/sprinting
”Lengthening of the whole muscle tendon unit does not necessarily reflect lengthening of the fascicles or muscle fibers…. Look at what happens to the muscle fibers, and they may not always have an eccentric component while the muscle tendon unit is lengthening”
“A lot of researchers believe that especially eccentric training has the largest effect on increasing fascicle length, but when you then take a more critical look at the studies, then you can say perhaps it’s the movement velocity or the intensity that has the effect on fascicle length and not just contraction type”
“A lot of people only consider, well if I do this exercise will performance will improve, but they don’t think about possible negative effects to coordination, and on the structural level, pennation angle and fascicle length”
“If you increase strength of a muscle without improving coordination, performance will decrease”
“We defined muscle slack as the delay between muscle contraction, and the recoil of the series elastic elements in the muscle”
“It’s quite possible that doing countermovements during training leads to an increase in muscle slack because an athlete’s ability to produce co-contractions may be reduced as a result of the supporting effect of countermovement… essentially the athlete gets used to the countermovement, reducing muscle slack, and therefore does not create pretension to minimize muscle slack, so essentially, the central nervous system becomes lazy”
“External load is not an appropriate strategy to reduce the effect of muscle slack in an acute way”
“If muscle fibers are very highly activated, they function at close to optimal length where they produce the most force”
Show Notes
Single leg roman chair hold
About Bas Van Hooren
Bas Van Hooren is an athlete, applied sport scientist, and strength and conditioning specialist from Gronsveld, The Netherlands. He is currently lecturing at Fontys University of Applied Sports Sciences.
As an athlete, Bas has won multiple medals at the national championships, including a gold medal at the national championship 3000m indoor in 2017.
As an applied sport scientist, Bas has written multiple peer-reviewed scientific publications about a variety of sport science topics, and has a special interest in the transfer effects of training on sports performance and injury prevention.
Bas has trained individuals ranging from the elite to recreational level with a special interest in sports that involve running. He has a bachelor in applied sport sciences at Fontys University and a master’s Human Movement Sciences at Maastricht University.
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