Have you ever done a workout that was borderline exhausting, but for some reason you felt great the next day in your explosive movements?
One of the great intrigues of my life has generally been that of counter-intuitive workouts. Those things that don’t really seem to make sense on the surface, but tend to pay off in a big way.
Perhaps my favorite “counter-intuitive” movement series has been that of semi-explosive endurance work as a means to potentiate performance in the short to medium term.
I got my first taste of this doing a 20-minute continuous hill run my freshman year of college. One of the worst workouts I had ever undertaken in terms of difficulty, yet I was jumping as high as ever the next day.
Similar experiences resonated down the line. The highest I’d jumped over 6’11 (A good 3-4” clearance) came 2 days after I had run 3x200m fast in spikes on around 5 minutes recovery, the first time we had done that type of workout on the year.
The first time I picked up kettlebell workouts, I just started doing a truckload of swings and goblet squats for the sake of “getting in shape”, but found out a few weeks later when I went to jump and grab the rim with two hands that I was getting up 2-3” higher than before I started the kettlebell work.
Even on the more explosive end of things, I have found that doing bounding complexes on limited rest (A circuit of alternating leg bounding, left-left, right-right, single leg, endurance bounding, and so on) could acutely increase my jump the next day.
My memory of this was sparked by a workout I did with a few interns this past week, which was in the spirit of the Dan John “Litvinov” work (front squats + 400m sprints), which included tons of kettlebell swings combined with 200m sprints, goblet squats combined with stadium runs and jumps, etc. The workout was seriously exhausting, and I was probably in oxygen debt for at least the next 24 hours. Funny enough, I had my best barefoot double leg jump (the older I get, the more categories I have) since I started measuring 2 years ago the day after that workout.
Here I found myself in another “counter-intuitive” situation, but I am getting closer to the answers as I grow as a coach.
One rather interesting book I purchased several years ago was “Neuro-mass” by a strongman named John Bruney. It was probably over-hyped and when you actually read it, you had some WTF moments, but it claimed big strength gains in a short period of time using a “strongman” oriented French Contrast program that paired an 8-12 rep kettlebell strength movement with 15-60 seconds of fast and explosive movements that finished with isometric holds. As I learn more about training and performance through the teachers of experience and speaking with experts, the more I realize that there is much more to that training system than what lies on the surface.
Potentiation, Inhibition and Neurotransmitters
Whatever the effect of a “long” workout on athletic quality in subsequent days, it is from the effects of either potentiation, inhibition, or both.
How an athlete’s neurotransmitters are set up is a key factor in how well this can be utilized. Working in the world of swimming has yielded some really interesting insights into performance and potentiation through observing athletes in dual meets. I’ve found that neurotype “2A” athletes will often start out a meet swimming a rather slow 50 yard sprint in a relay, then swim a 200 freestyle in the middle of the meet, and finish the meet significantly faster in their final 50 yard free. The 200 “warmed them up” for speed.
In talking with Christian Thibaudeau, it is these athletes who are a mixture of neural and muscular dominance, as well as high in acetylcholine and GABA that can pull this off. (Get 15% off of Christian’s full neurotyping system with the code “justflysports”) A pure neural athlete wouldn’t get this type of benefit from extended power work, so the principle is often forgotten.
Potentiation is a big factor here, stimulating the nervous system across a large breadth of work. Many repetitions will put a temporary imprint to move more explosively, but there is another important factor in extended power work’s ability to facilitate great explosive performance that many don’t think of: Inhibition.
Inhibition may be a more important factor than potentiation in many cases. The human “speed limit” is very much created by us getting in our own way, as computer models that assign the maximal human speed based on the properties of the tendons and our skeleton would put the 100m dash world record well under 8 seconds! Speed itself is the result of muscles being turned on and off in 10-30 millisecond windows. If you can inhibit muscles fast, you can move easier and better.
Tadeusz Starzynski wrote one of the greatest training books of all time in “Explosive Power and Jumping Ability for All Sports” where he discussed how tempo sprints could help a more “muscular” athlete by inhibiting the effect of that muscle working against itself by being turned on for too long.
Charlie Francis also talked about the benefit of tempo training as decreasing electrical resistance in muscle. Great minds think alike.
In my interview with Andreas Behm for the Just Fly Performance Podcast, he spoke on how tempo was loose and free flowing and how some athletes would prefer using that training means the day before an explosive speed session instead of a shorter, more neural driven day such as short sprints and plyometrics. I found similar results for some athletes in my jumps training program at Wilmington College (tempo runs the day before a jump workout). These athletes who find tempo beneficial will generally have to be higher in the acetylecholine and GABA department to protect dopamine to be fresh the next day (another Christian Thibaudeau gem).
Back to my own workout, kettlebell swings are certainly inhibitory in nature, since they require a rapid relaxation into the hinge, and a reflexive explosion back out. If I’ve learned one thing about this type of work over the years, it’s that most athletes can handle a good volume of fast and reflexive work, since it’s self-recovering in nature.
Ideas for Application
In training, there are certainly different strokes for different folks, and not all athletes will respond the same way, but in the world of getting athletes “fit” in an explosive manner, and doing something different in the process, “mixed workouts” can be a fun way to work the human machine in a new manner. This type of work would fit best in a 2-3 week block before the start of a longer power training block, or even in every 5th or 6th workout in a primary training system.
Here are some basic constructs to play with:
10-30 Kettlebell swings + 100-200m sprints or 50-100m hill or stadium sprints
5-15 goblet squats + 100-200m sprints or 50-100m hill or stadium sprints
10-30 Kettlebell swings or snatches + 30-50m of bounding
5-15 goblet squats + 10-15 goblet squat jumps up stairs
20 Kettlebell swings + 100m sprint + 10 pushups + 100m sprint
There is no exact formula (many coaches spend a lot of time chasing the magic and repeatable formula, when in reality, the perfect workouts and subsequent competition is often a one time deal) for this workout, but replacing the standard “8x200m” with 30-40 minutes of this work will build tremendous fitness, and can also have a cool acute explosive impact on athletes suited for it the next training day.
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