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130: Why We Created Power Play and What's Inside the Course
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POWER PLAY is on sale now for $99. The price goes up after May 31st.
Sign up here - https://themovementlogic.com/power-play/
Power training is not just for athletes. It's also not just box jumps, Olympic lifts, or kettlebell swings. Power is for everyone and it shows up all day, everyday in our daily activities. It's the ability to produce force quickly. You use power when you stand up from a chair, climb stairs, get off the floor, or react fast enough to prevent a fall.
This week on the Movement Logic podcast, Laurel and Sarah explain why they created their new course, Power Play. They discuss why power declines faster than strength as we age, why that matters for fall prevention and independence, and why so many people mistakenly conclude “my knees can’t handle that anymore” or “I’m too old for that” after being exposed to way too much impact or explosive movement too soon. They break down how power exercises can be scaled and progressed, why most group fitness classes fail to individualize this type of training, and how Power Play teaches people to start at the very beginning rather than assuming the hardest version is the entry point. They also discuss pelvic floor concerns, type 2 muscle fibers, balance, aging, reactive movement, and why just a few minutes of power training per week can make a meaningful difference in long-term physical function.
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Transcript
Introduction and Philosophy
00:00:00
Speaker
I'm Laurel Biebersdorf, strength and conditioning coach. And I'm Dr. Sarah Court, physical therapist. With over 30 years of combined experience in fitness, movement, and physical therapy, we believe in strong opinions loosely held. Which means we're not here to hype outdated movement concepts.
00:00:15
Speaker
or to gatekeep or fearmonger strength training for women. For too long, women have been sidelined in strength training. Oh, you mean handed pink dumbbells and told to sculpt? Whatever that means, we're here to change that with tools, evidence, and ideas that center women's needs and voices. Let's dive in.
00:00:45
Speaker
Ladies and gentlemen, live from planet Earth. The Milky Way. Sure. The solar system. So I understand. Welcome to the Movement Logic Podcast. I am Sarah Court. I'm a physical therapist. I am here with my co-host, Laurel Beaversdorf. She is a strength and conditioning coach. And- Today, we're going to talk to you all about our brand new course, tutorial, program. I've been having a hard time figuring out what the word is that goes after it. Not a freaking tutorial. But it's also not a course because Live for Longevity is our course. Hi, I'm Laurel and I'm a strength and conditioning tutor. Okay, she's still stuck on that one. So is it a program? No, it's a course. I guess in my head, a course is like, anyway. Course is a course, of course, of course. And this is a powerful course, of course course. And then of course, you know that the course is, it's called Plow or Play. Boom.
00:01:36
Speaker
We're going to make this whole episode basically one long FAQ about the course. So when you listen to this dear listener, it is the middle of the period in which we are selling the course for an introductory price of $99. And I believe you will have four more days to purchase it.
Importance of Strength and Power Training for Women
00:01:53
Speaker
The sales price, pardon me. me me me the sale price goes up after sunday may 31st so you have like three or four more days to grab this tutorial sorry not tutorial god forbid what motivated us to make power play well i think that for me this is me listen i was born on a farm with the famous mr ed of course of course of course of course okay let's get to the powerpoint here Did you pick up on that? That was good. That was good. ah Why? Here is exactly why. i was coaching lift for longevity year after year. And we were working with these women on impact training. And there were some exercises within our course that are more power-based exercises, like the rotational clean to press and some of how I would coach the row and things like that. So I was like, you know,
00:02:46
Speaker
This is a really like secretively good part of Lift for Longevity, which is that we're actually training them for strength, but also power because they're doing broad jumps. They're doing vertical jumps. They're doing these more explosive resisted lifts, right?
00:03:01
Speaker
And I got to thinking, and I was like, you know, this is something that we should talk more about. We should explain it more. And so in the classes, I would often... thread in context around the power element and the speed of movement being especially beneficial and trying to move quickly and powerfully and da-da-da-da-da. And then i think you and i were both talking as we are known to do with each other and constantly. I feel like we started to mention to each other like, oh yeah, and then there's power, which seems to be even more important for fall prevention. And we were big into let's make bones stronger so that if people fall, they don't fracture. But then we were like, wait a second, what if people just don't fall?
00:03:44
Speaker
Right, right. How about we start a little bit further back? Let's back this wagon up. Right, exactly. Right. And I think that's why. And then also having done CrossFit for a couple of years and engaged in various different power-based movements, and then I'm a very durable person.
00:04:01
Speaker
kind of non-injury prone person generally, but like hearing all of the negativity against CrossFit and injury and da da da da. And then also seeing some of the older folks in the CrossFit gym and overhearing them talk about like, oh, you know, this or that part of the WOD, I just can't do da du da da da. And I don't know why I'm da da da dying a lot this episode, but um that's an annoying tick that I've picked up just now. I noticed that there were no entry points is a word I like for folks to start working on power.
Accessibility and Individualization in Power Exercises
00:04:34
Speaker
And this is not everyone, but I think a lot of folks come to classes like CrossFit where there's a lot of jumping all of a sudden or a lot of explosive movements. They're either like, give me an alternative that looks nothing like the exercise, or they do it and they do way too much of it And they're like, holy shit, I can't move. Don't you mean ah a tutorial like CrossFit? Yeah. I wanted to break her. I feel like you and I sort of always have our, what's the expression? Nose to the grindstone, ear to the wheel. Isn't there an expression about a wheel or a grindstone and like either your ear or your nose? Finger on the pulse. I mean, that's a better one, obviously, but- Nose in the wind.
00:05:10
Speaker
What? I don't think that's one. Nose downwind of what's happening. That just sounds like you're smelling something bad. I think anyway, would you do me favor and look up what that expression is while I talk? I think it's ear to the grindstone, but I have no idea why you would put your ear on a grindstone. Oh, it's a popular mix up of two different idioms. Apparently you put your nose to the grindstone. There you go. But you keep your ear to the ground. Ear to the ground makes sense.
00:05:32
Speaker
Yeah. Why would I want to put my nose on a grindstone though? It sounds like I'm just going to like shred my nose. It's literally as bad as putting my ear there. I don't want to put anything on the grindstone. That's like the opposite of what I want.
00:05:42
Speaker
What the fuck was I even saying? I don't know. By the way, this is our best episode trying to sell a course. What am I trying to say? Oh, okay. So, so Laurel and tend to kind of have an eye on like what's going on. What are people talking about? What are we seeing? And also where we're seeing gaps in education. And so like, I'm going to say that tutorial word again, Laurel, I'm sorry. But like when we started Moving Logic, we started making tutorials, continuing education tutorials for movement professionals. And so we did it because we saw like, oh, there's not a lot of great con ed out there. And then we made lift for longevity because we were like, hang on, women are being scared off of using barbells. And they're one of the greatest tools out there for weightlifting. We want to make women less intimidated or less nervous. So then we made lift for longevity. And now I am seeing women in their seventies, eighties, who are clients of mine,
00:06:30
Speaker
And there is a stark difference between the ones who still have retained some amount of power and those who don't. Because it's not just like we think of Olympic lifts and box jumps, like Laurel was talking about these really difficult power exercises that if you don't have an on-ramp to, no, you shouldn't start there. And that's where people get really intimidated and turned off. But What we don't tend to think about is if you're 80 years old, standing up out of your chair is a power exercise.
00:07:01
Speaker
There is a velocity component. If you're not getting that act of pushing happening fast enough, you're falling backwards on your butt. Or using your arms. Something to propel you. And you just fall backwards on your butt. I see it all the time. So it's hard to use your arms on a toilet. Can we talk about that for a second? Unless you get like railings installed, which is yeah often what needs to happen to retrofit a house for an older person. A lot of times you can use your arms to get out of a chair because there are arms on the chair. right But then when you're on a folding chair or maybe a pew at church, bowling chair, i you know you don't want to be pushing on a rolling chair I've seen somebody doing that and I was like, oh, Nellie, please stop doing that because that's not going to end well for anybody. And that's part of the problem is even if you can push, this is what I see.
00:07:44
Speaker
Even if you can use your arms to push off the armchair, you're still now stuck with that angle of force behind you, right? The strongest part of your standing up is your arms, right? And now your arms are behind you and you're like, well, fuck, how do I get my weight onto my feet better? So it becomes like an actual problem for people that I then have to coach them through. And what we're seeing, if we back it up, you know, 30, 40 years is that because we don't regularly engage in activities of power the way we used to when we were kids, the way you played hopscotch. I mean, pretty much any sport. Yeah.
00:08:19
Speaker
Yeah. Right. And when people stop being active. They certainly stop playing sports and, you know, we lose that power capability and then you just kind of like skate around it yeah as a problem. Right. But then it becomes a problem when 30, 40 years down the line, you're having a hard time getting up off the floor, getting out of a chair. Right.
00:08:38
Speaker
picking up something heavy and hoisting it all the way overhead onto a shelf. These are power movements that show up in day to day.
Power Play Course Structure and Benefits
00:08:44
Speaker
And that's where I think the big disconnect is for most people. don't connect the fact that a box jump now seems hard or impossible with what that's going to look like down the road. If they don't start to on-ramp some more of those movements, our friend, Caitlin Casella, practice human on Instagram. I love this so much. She showed a quote unquote box jump of a patient of hers who jumping up onto a fat... um A fat cookie. A fat cookie. 45 pound plate. Thank you. i don't know why the word is... But let's just call them fat cookies. Well, I'm just going to finish the sentence. So i she had one of her patients, one of her clients, jumping up onto a 45 pound plate. That's not a box jump by the purest definition of it, but that was a jump onto probably you know five or six inches. What an awesome place to start because if somebody...
00:09:29
Speaker
is afraid of doing a movement, then you regress it, right? You make it accessible. And that's what we've done in power play. We don't have any box jumps in power play though. No, we don't have any box jumps power play. What I notice about group classes is that it is just impossible to take an individual in a group class and determine exactly what it is about this particular movement that needs to be scaled and to give them the most appropriate entry point.
00:09:56
Speaker
And what I think we've done with power play is that we've really explained clearly all the different ways that a power exercise can be changed in very simple ways. And we've then explained why you would choose one way over another. And we've outlined in a demo video a progression of this is generally less stress until you progress all the way to the end to this variation, which is generally more stress. And, you know, we're not going for the highest amount of stress for every single individual. We're going for the amount of stress that that person can experience
00:10:37
Speaker
and positively adapt to, and then be prepared for that next stage up. And that kind of granular exercise prescription can't happen in a group class because the person leading the class has sometimes 40 people in front of them, right? And so then the person attending the class is given like one or two other options to work with, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I feel like each individual would be able to make progress a little faster and be exposed to different types of power-based exercises if they were shown a map, a more granular map. Yeah. While you were talking, it made me think about how it's the same thing that we did with lift for longevity, right? You could go to a group class where they're having you work with weights, but that weight might not be heavy enough for you to actually, for the number of reps that you're doing, right? There's no individualization, which is what's required to actually make
00:11:32
Speaker
meaningful progress in a category like strength or like power. I think what's probably ending up happening in a lot of these classes where you're doing something that might be considered a power exercise, right? You're moving some external load at speed. either the load is not enough so that what you're doing ends up being like, just like a high intensity cardio move, right? Because for it to actually be power requires some certain like characteristics, which we talk about in the course. So I think a lot of times it's an exercise that could be power, were it scaled properly to each person in the class, but there's just no way to do that. Yeah, I mean, all of these qualities exist on a continuum. like So running does involve power, and even slow jogging involves some amount of power. But if we're trying to maximize this adaptation specifically for a particular activity, like, say, standing up from a low toilet seat, right? Yeah. then the amount of resistance we're working against and the speed at which we're moving start to matter. And so just going out for your run while it is contributing to your ability to move with some amount of speed, right? Like Stu Phillips gave the example of crossing the crosswalk and the time limit that you have or just walking quickly, which gait speed is a marker of sarcopenia, right? So they'll use gait speed to diagnose sarcopenia if gait speed is below a certain level. Speed. It strongly suggests that someone probably has sarcopenia. However, if you are using structured exercise to enhance a particular quality, the good news about power is that it, first of all, doesn't take very much time. And second of all, you want to be prioritizing speed of movement. So once you've hit this ceiling of fatigue in the set, you can go ahead and just stop because what's going to happen after that fatigue sets is is your speed of movement is going to slow down and therefore you're no longer really... optimizing that adaptation anymore. You're starting to drift into, ah you know like you said, endurance. So I want to go back to yes these granular ways that we can alter the exercise stress of a power-based movement, which we teach in PowerPlay how to do this with every single exercise. And we make it very simple because we give you a progression where these ways of manipulating the exercise are basically represented. But we also want you to understand what's just happened. Why is it actually less stress? Or why is it more stress? So number one is volume.
00:13:54
Speaker
Okay, doing more of something is more stress doing less of something is less stress. So that is kind of a separate category what we're going to talk about next, which is intensity. right So how do we alter the intensity of a power-based move? And we give you several different ways to identify this. One is really easy, like just increase or decrease the external load that you're lifting in the exercise. So we do have exercises where we ask you to move a weight through space. It could be a kettlebell, a dumbbell, a medicine ball, right? We give you lots of options and it probably shouldn't be that heavy, right? We achieve maximum power with loads as light as 30% of your 1RM. That's a lightweight by pretty much all exercise science definitions. And it can go up to 70%. But you know for most activities of life, we're probably going to want to live a little bit closer to that 30% standing up from a chair, right, should be a fairly quick movement. We can also involve more or fewer joints. So a lot of the ways that we scale an exercise back is we actually simplify the movement pattern. We take out some aspect
Scientific Basis and Aging Considerations
00:15:03
Speaker
of the movement that is complicating it, right? So instead of doing a skater jump, which is going to require you to abduct your thighs and then adduct your thighs and then abduct your thighs and then adduct your thighs, there's going to be an opening and a crisscrossing of your legs. We'll have you just do speedy lateral squats, right? So now we've really simplified and involved fewer joints and joints in ah a more simple way. You can also increase or decrease intent of effort. This is one of my favorite ways because it can be done to any exercise and it's very simple. it's to just try a little harder and jump a little higher or move a little faster or yeah slack off a little bit. move a little slower, jump a little lower, right? yeah and
00:15:46
Speaker
And you then can kind of turn the dial yeah up on how much force you're going to be experiencing because yeah if you jump faster, you'll jump higher and then you'll land harder, right? But also for something like a speedy sit to stand or a squat jump, right? You can actually just turn the volume down a little bit and give it a five out of 10 effort instead of a 10 out of 10 effort. You'll probably be able to control the movement better to refine your takeoff and landing mechanics a little better. And you're going to experience less total stress so that your body can actually take whatever stress you are experiencing and grow from it. And then eventually you're going to be able to dial up that intensive effort, right? I think an equivalent idea, because I i just love that like one of the things you can do is just try harder. Yeah. It's like you don't need special tools. You don't need extra time. You don't need skill. You just got to put a little more oomph behind it. That's kind of different from lifting weights in that You have to try harder at the end of the set once fatigue has set in to continue to move the weight. But you can try hard right out of the gate in a power exercise. You could do 10 out of 10 jump rep number one. Totally. Right. Or you could do a five out of 10 jump. Rep number one. Like the way I think about training lifting a lot of the time with my clients is like, let's say I have them do a lift and they can only get through four reps of it, maybe three reps of it. But this is not a person where I'm trying to, you know, train the heaviest maximal load kind of thing. So that's when I i reduce the load of their lift so that they get more exposure to that load. Same thing with power. Like if you going your 10 out of town means you can do one jump,
00:17:25
Speaker
Yeah. That's actually not as valuable. Right. to your body and to its ability to learn and progress as if you take, you know, maybe don't do a hundred percent maximum effort. Maybe you do 75% effort and you can do four, you know, something like that. So there is this internal dial that you can turn up and down. Like anything with exercise, you kind of have to feel what it feels like for yourself to, to, to kind of experience it and learn what that's going to feel like in your body when you do it. But that's another really valuable tool that you can learn how to manipulate. Yes. Yeah. Okay. So those three ways that we just talked about to alter the intensity of a power-based exercise can be done for every single power-based exercise imaginable. You can increase or decrease external load, involve more or fewer joints, increase or decrease intent of effort. And these are often... the levers we're going to pull in power play for all of the exercises. But then we have this whole other category of power-based exercises that involve impact.
00:18:25
Speaker
So we have special ways to alter the intensity specific to that category of power-based exercise. One is jump height or drop height. So if you're stepping off of a box, landing and then jumping, which we have that exercise in our course called drop jump, it's one of our highest intensity exercises at the top end. If you jump or step off of a 6-inch box versus a 14-inch box, there's going to be a very big difference in the forces you experience. So this is a very easy modifiable factor to play with. You can also change whether you're landing on one limb or two. And that's a big jump in difference, right? really is. a big plummet in difference, right? You could do pogos on two feet or pogos on one, right? And the one-footed jump much higher intensity. Yeah. So it makes sense then that you would start with the two feet, right? And see how that lands, no pun intended. And then maybe down the road, progress to one, right? You can increase or decrease ground contact time. One example of this is you could do singles or cyclical jumps. A single jump is, let's say I'm doing a vertical jump, right? I'm just standing. I'm going to squat down and jump up into the air and land, take a break, squat down, jump up and land, take a break. Or i decrease ground contact time. I do cyclical.
00:19:43
Speaker
I'm going to jump up into the air, drop down, jump up in the air, drop down, jump up in the air, drop down. A cyclical squat jump is higher intensity. There are higher forces acting on the joints. This is a lesser known but useful way to mitigate stresses in an impact-based exercise. can increase or decrease ground contact time. You can also alter the starting position, right? So if you start a little higher up versus lower down, that's going to change things. But also if you pause at the bottom of that squat jump and then jump versus drop down and then jump, right? That's going to alter the forces. That's going to alter the jump height. It's going to alter the speed of movement. right These are subtle, but when you experience something you notice right that actually, oh, when I add that pause, I don't jump as high, but I have more control perhaps, or I'm more focused on my form at the bottom. right There's a lot of things that you gain from tweaking these exercises in these subtle ways. And this is not stuff you're going to get in like a CrossFit class or an Orange Theory class. like The instructor is not going to come up to you and be like, you know what, instead of doing it this way, let's tweak it in this really subtle. No. Right. So you're going to sit with this course and you're going to learn this stuff and you're going to be able to direct your own experience, which I love that empowerment side of this as well. You can use your arms or not use your arms. You can alter the direction at which you're landing on the floor. You can alter surface stiffness. These are three more ways. But basically, now you've got like nine different ways to alter the intensity of a power-based exercise. And you're going to then experience all of those different ways in the exercise progressions, which Sarah is going to walk us through. Yeah. You know, to Laurel's point about you are empowered to actually do the exercise in a way that fits your body, but you also get to learn what your body's able to do a lot more specifically, not just, oh, well, there's no way I could do cyclical squat jumps. So I'm not even going try kind of thing. Right. So i wanted to give you an example of one of the exercises that we teach. So we teach a vertical jump, or you might know it as like a squat jump kind of thing.
00:21:44
Speaker
But we dial it all the way back. It starts seated. So seated on a box, seated on a bench, seated on a chair. The very first thing you're doing is an explosive sit to stand, which is, again, this goes back to that intent conversation and like you just try harder. So rather than just standing up from a chair the way you would ordinarily in your life, You're going to try to do it as fast as possible, right? You're trying to put some speed behind it. you're trying to teach your body's tissues like, Hey, look, you can do this faster. So that's the first one is this explosive sit to sand. So the next progression, you're still seated on the box or the bench or whatever, but you're going to do your explosive sit to stand all the way up onto your toes. So you're adding a heel raise at the top of it. So now we're introducing a little bit of a balance problem. Then Still seated, you're going to do your explosive sit to stand, but instead of just standing, it goes right into a jump.
00:22:34
Speaker
So essentially what we've done is taken out the challenge of doing it, A, without anything under your butt and B, repeatedly at all.
00:22:44
Speaker
And we're just saying, okay, let's put something under your butt and you're just going to do it once. Right. And so maybe you get to that third level explosive sit to stand that ends with a jump and you're like, wow, okay, this feels like something I could work on for a while. Awesome. Mm-hmm. Whenever there's a vertical jump in any of the workouts that we have in the course, that's the version you're going to do, right? So that's the idea, but there is more. So the next level is take the box away and then do all three of those versions again.
00:23:09
Speaker
So you might find, oh, actually, you know what I don't need to be sitting down at the beginning this. I can handle this without the box. So maybe that's where you start. Then Laura was referring to this as well, a paused squat with the jump. So you go down into the bottom of your squat, you hang out, and then you're going do one jump and then just land. And then we take the pause away for the next version.
00:23:28
Speaker
So you come down into your squat, you immediately propel back up and you just do one jump. And then finally, the full expression of the pose, which is an old phrase from yoga, is that cyclical squat jump where you're just going over and over again and you're not stopping. So hopefully this description of the progression
Addressing Misconceptions and Barriers to Power Training
00:23:45
Speaker
is helpful for people to understand like, okay, something that looks a little too challenging for me in that final version, there's like nine places along the way where I could stop and work That logically will lead me to the next step and to eventually being able to do the cyclical squat jumps. It's like weight training. Like you don't start somebody with the heaviest barbell or the heaviest load and say, go do some deadlifts. Teach them the form, right? With lower load. You get them used to what it feels like.
00:24:14
Speaker
You work on, breathe. Like there's all always these things that you work on. yeah before you then get to the sort of like heavier versions. And so conceptually, it's the same thing. It's just, where we're asking you to do a little bit of that strength work at a much faster speed. Yeah.
00:24:28
Speaker
I find that some of the biggest complaints I hear when we put our nose to the grindstone and our ear to the ground and our nose downwind of what's happening. And our eyeball on the concrete. It's just all these things that sound horrible. Yeah. is It's usually, from my perspective, something along the lines of,
00:24:46
Speaker
My knees can't handle that anymore. Or if it's between women usually, right? I can't handle that anymore because I leak. Right. My pelvic floor slash bladder slash whatever it is. I've had too many kids, right? Or it's just, you know what? I'm too old for that. Right. Right. One of those, you know, yeah and i think what it comes from is that people go through a period of not doing this type of exercise. And this period could be years, right? Decades. And then they get it in their mind that they're going to try something right, whether it is CrossFit or Orange Theory or some group fitness class or even like, oh, I'm going to go play basketball with some friends. Oh, yeah. Running. Yeah. i'm going to return to something that I haven't done in maybe decades. Right. And it's going to be the same. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And then they're like, oh, fuck, like, I can't do that anymore. And right they, I think, misattribute the experience they had to the activity rather than the dose of the activity and their preparation for that dose. And so, you know, when we have knee issues after we do a bunch of
00:25:58
Speaker
power-based movement or we leaked or we just feel like we got run over by a truck. I wish that people had enough background to go, you know, i probably can do that type of stuff, but I went to a 45-minute class and did 100 repetitions of these different types of exercises. And maybe after not doing it at all for decades and then doing 100, whatever it was, jump ropes or box jumps or whatever, wall balls or whatever it was, like, maybe that was just too much. And all of those actual movements and moving quickly, like is completely within my ability, and my pelvic floor's ability to handle it and my knees ability to handle it, if I were to introduce it in a much smaller dose. And so yeah that is also why we created PowerPlay, because what we give you with PowerPlay is we give you the smallest possible dose.
00:26:53
Speaker
We're like, here's where you should start if you have any doubts. And then here is how you very gradually progress when you are ready. Totally. um It makes me think a lot about how for exercise specifically, we all have this kind of all or nothing thinking about it. yes Either I can box jump or i can't. There's no like I could relearn or learn, right? There's no like I could improve. I'm going to start here. i could end up there. It's all or nothing. People see the end.
00:27:21
Speaker
Right. And they think that's the beginning. Right. So they see the box jump and they think, I have to be able to do that to participate in this kind of activity or class or whatever. It's like, no, that's the f freaking end, dude. Yeah. Like back that wagon up. Let's start at the very, very beginning. Right. And that's what we do with Power Play. We give you the beginning and we give you the end. And then we show you how to go from the beginning to the end. I mean, if CrossFit was smart, they'd do that.
00:27:44
Speaker
There's so many people that are turned off of it by billions of videos of people doing incredibly hard things. I know there are exceptional coaches working in CrossFit boxes, but I think a lot of CrossFit coaching is very like monkey see monkey do. I just kind of stick to the script. And there isn't this granular, nuanced tweaking of exercises. Here's the thing as well. If you are one of those people who's listening to this and you're thinking, okay, yeah, but my knees or okay, yeah, but my pelvic floor, if you start to engage in these types of exercises at a dose and a level that is actually appropriate that your body can handle currently,
00:28:22
Speaker
that you can then progress, guess what? Your knees and your pelvic floor and your anything else is actually going to get better. Hell yeah. It's not going to hurt you so much.
00:28:33
Speaker
You're not going to find yourself leaking. yeah right It is this thing. I mean, to your point about people see the end and think it's the beginning. There's just so much basic care that you could do for your body that would take care of these smaller problems now so that they don't become bigger problems later. And especially the pelvic floor one. I mean, a perfect example of that is people who have never dealt with any sort of incontinence issue that they are having. And they just kind of like muddle their way through it. They wear pads, you know, whatever. And then they get older and then they're discovering, oh, you know what? This incontinence has gotten worse. And I am actually...
00:29:09
Speaker
not getting to the bathroom on time and I am soiling my underwear because I lack the power to stand up with speed and get to the bathroom fast enough. Like, yeah, it's such an Ouroboros, right? So Sarah, are you saying that it's possible that your issues managing pressure and timing with jumping are not going to improve unless you actually start jumping a little bit?
00:29:31
Speaker
Well, i need in fact, I am to be fair. And as a PT, I would be remiss if I didn't say this. There are plenty of urinary continence issues that yeah should not start with jumping, right gentle jumping. You might have much bigger problems that you need to be seen by. yeah a gynecologist, a pelvic floor, a physical therapist, something like that. But we're talking about, there's a lot but of people walking around who just occasionally leak a little.
00:29:54
Speaker
And honestly, like that's not that big of a deal. And I certainly don't want people like suddenly freaking, like I just sneezed this morning and like a little bit of pee came out and I was like, yeah, that's annoying. I'm not like stopping my day and having a panic attack about it, but power training, a lot of it is legitimately free. Like it doesn't require a lot of external equipment when we have this ability to work on something like this and we don't, um it's a shame. It's a shame. And I want to also say like, yes, pelvic floor issues involving incontinence.
00:30:24
Speaker
Probably shouldn't all start with jumping like 100%. But here's the thing about every single jumping progression in power play. Not that we're saying power play is pelvic floor therapy. It's definitely not. But guess how every single jumping progression begins in power play?
00:30:41
Speaker
With a non-jump. That's right. Yeah. Like we don't, we also don't start you jumping because listen, that doesn't make any sense. If you need to back up, the backing up is going to take you all the way to the beginning and a jump at the beginning starts with not jumping, but rather just moving through the movement pattern explosively. Yeah. And then working on that because that in and of itself is going to be a challenge to something like the pelvic floor, something like the knees, right?
00:31:06
Speaker
Just being able to manage quick movement through your body. You don't need to be adding impact right away. Like why? Absolutely. Start with the movement. Then once you've got the speed of the movement down and it's gotten a little speedier and it's gotten a little crisper and it's gotten a little, you know, zippier. Yeah. Come up off the floor a little bit. Woo. zip. zip And then do that a little bit.
00:31:27
Speaker
Don't do 100 100? 100. Do not yes. Not Do five. Do five. Yeah. Then wake up the next day and see how you feel. Yeah. right And then maybe try five more. um Let's talk a little bit about some of the science behind this. Yeah. Well, the CliffsNotes are that you lose power faster than strength and you lose strength like five to six times faster than muscle mass. The reason being that these adaptations of strength and power rely heavily on adaptations that take place within the the nervous system, right? So you've probably heard of type two muscle fibers, right? So type two muscle fibers are innervated by a high threshold, fast twitch, right? Motor neurons. And these are
00:32:16
Speaker
Connected to your brain. And so when you need to move with a lot of force, which can involve both moving against a lot of resistance, that's heavy strength training, or moving into those last few tough reps of resistance. a set of moderate or light loads with strength training. So strength training, right, generally.
00:32:36
Speaker
Or if you need to move very fast, so it's the resistance getting tough or the speed of movement getting high, your brain sends a signal through these high threshold motor neurons that connect to these type two muscle fibers that make up in some of your muscles, the majority of the muscle mass, the majority of the fibers of that muscle are actually type two, and it's genetically determined and everybody's different. But just know that a lot of the muscle on your body is these high threshold motor
Impact on Daily Life and Fall Prevention
00:33:08
Speaker
units. And if you're never actually moving against resistance in a high intensity context, Or you're never moving fast. These fibers don't get recruited. They don't get used. And guess what? They freaking go away. yeah Your body's like, guess we don't do that anymore. Don't need this because your body is brutally efficient. And biologically, it only keeps around the stuff that you actually need to survive. And so if you're never sending it the message that we need this, that circuitry goes away. But what happens is that your body's like, well, let's not get rid of this fiber. Let's make it a type one because we're using type one fibers for the activities of our life, which include walking, standing around, sitting around, doing like low level housework, maybe occasionally doing some yoga, some Pilates, right? Not high intensity, fast stuff.
00:33:59
Speaker
So we're just going to take these and we're going to make them a type one. And then what happens is that your ceiling, it drops, right? So your potential starts to drop because the type twos never come back, right? The type one muscle fibers, which are more about low effort, endurance, postural type processes, which you're using all the time, right?
00:34:16
Speaker
Like sitting here, we're using our type one muscle fibers just to not collapse into a puddle on the floor, right? So those don't really need to be maintained because living your life maintains them, right? Right. you You must use these type two fibers for high force, fast movements, right? So we want to be able to continue to do that.
00:34:34
Speaker
And so the way we continue to do that is by doing that. Right. Yeah. um And for anyone who's listening to this and thinking, well, shit. Have I lost too many of my type two fibers? The good news is it's always a good time to start training them using the ones that you have and dusting them off, waking them up, bringing them back online. We still need you. Right. And reminding them that they're still necessary so that they ah stick around.
00:35:02
Speaker
Yeah. Right. And it doesn't actually matter what you've lost or how many you'll never know. No one will ever know. Right. So why worry about it? Just do the stuff that's going to keep them around.
00:35:13
Speaker
Right. So I have a client that I work with who is in an assisted living facility. She is 81 or 82. My mother turns 80 this year. And these two women who are roughly the same age could not be more different in their physical capability. The woman that I work with in the assisted living facility has basically ebbs and flows of her capability. In some ways, it's a safety issue, but she basically does not do much exercise if I am not there. And I am there one hour a week And sometimes she's had a decent week and we can walk down the hall and back. And even though she's feeling okay, ah you know, wobbly on her legs, she makes it other days.
00:35:51
Speaker
We have to do all of her exercise in bed. um And it's, it's gotta be tough to be her because everything is convincing her that inertia is the best place to be everything in her body.
00:36:05
Speaker
She has some neurodegeneration. So a lot of stuff in her brain. but she does know that she needs to be doing more, but she she does not possess the internal motivation of whatever type, whatever might be necessary for her to do it. I contrast that with my mom. I really think the fact that she has played tennis her whole life yeah is the the biggest difference because she's getting some the aerobic-ish activity, but she's getting power training. She's getting impact. She's having to deal with all of these different forces. I also did start her lifting weights, but she doesn't enjoy it very much. So I don't pressure her on that. Although I'm now training a friend of hers. And so i'm trying to use this subtle pressure where I'm like, oh, well, you know, Nancy now deadlift the same amount as you. And she's only been doing this for like three, four months. Yeah. Cause I'm sure your mom's competitive. if she play you In a sort of sporting way. Yes. She's competitive. I don't, I don't know. She may still not care enough about the weightlifting, but, but the contrast between these two women is so stark. There's another woman that I've started seeing more recently on Instagram,
00:37:03
Speaker
I believe her name is Christine or Chris Hudson, who we're going to try to get on the podcast. She's 72 and she's out there. She's basically producing the kind of content that we're trying to produce, but she's living proof of it. She's like, yeah. Right. So that's always their front of mind for me. Like I'm not 72. I have no idea what it feels like to be 70 or 75 or 80, but I just have in my, you know, like vision all of the time, clients who look like my mom, and are having the kind of life my mom is having where she's active and she's out. There's no disruption to the things that she wants to do because of her physical capability. Tell me again, how old is your mom? She's 80 this year.
00:37:40
Speaker
Wow. She does everything she wants. Yeah. There's nothing that's like, oh, I can't do that. It'll be too hard. Versus my client who basically can't do much at all. Most of life is not available to her. And how old is your client?
00:37:51
Speaker
My client is 82, believe. Okay. So basically the same age, yep but a very different historical run-up to that age. And as a result, a very different life at that age. yeahp I have clients who are predominantly interested in the health and longevity side of personal training. And then I have clients who are athletes. I've got climbers, disc golfer, I've got cyclists, and and then runners, right? Like 50% of them are recreational athletes, 50% of them are not. And Something that comes into the programs of almost everybody eventually is some kind of power-based movement. And the prescription has nothing to do with whether or not they're a recreational athlete or a non-athlete. It has everything to do with their...
00:38:36
Speaker
personal preferences, their goals, and their training history, right? And so the reason I share that is that I think that people see power-based movement and they think that's for athletes. And therefore, that's not me.
00:38:50
Speaker
I don't identify as that. But fact of the matter is exercise is exercise and you get out what you put in. And so even though you don't identify as an athlete, you can still develop qualities of an athlete by engaging in the specific types of exercises. right And those exercises are really just general inputs. They're general inputs that can enhance so many different activities. So if you don't think of yourself as an athlete per se, like you don't play tennis or you don't run or whatever, So much of the daily life activities that you engage in are mirrors of athletic
Conclusion and Course Call to Action
00:39:29
Speaker
movements.
00:39:29
Speaker
They might be happening in a slightly less explosive way, or they might be happening in a smaller range of motion, or they might be happening in a not as obvious kind of mirror of the athletic movement, but they're athletic movements. And the more that you go through your day, I think, and ask yourself, what would it be like to actually have to do this slowly? You start to realize how much of your movements are actually done with some some speed, some zip behind them. yeah And that's what we're trying to preserve with power.
00:39:59
Speaker
We're trying to preserve that that spunk, that speed, that zip, that bounce, that momentum that you're able to generate. So just a little experiment for the audience, right? For the next rest of the day, think back to this challenge or this prompt, right? Which is notice how you're moving, not just the bigness of the movement, not just the amount of stuff you're schlepping around or carrying, but notice the speed at which you're moving. And notice those moments in your day where you actually have to pick up the pace a little bit more or heft or heave or hop. We need to be able to do that because you're going to quickly realize you do it all the time. Right. And that's power. That's power. and And one other thing about it that we haven't even brought up yet, I can't believe, is how much power is involved in balancing or recovering from a loss of balance, right? So that it doesn't become a fall. It's reactive. Yeah. The patients that I work with who have neurologic
00:40:51
Speaker
conditions like Parkinson's disease or multiple sclerosis, that's the way that we train power because for them, they have a condition that is getting in the way of their body's ability to do certain movements. And so, especially for my Parkinson's patient, ah one of the things that Parkinson's does to your body is it slows you down.
00:41:08
Speaker
So we spend a lot of time doing the real zippy quick heel raises and real quick knee into the chest kind of movements, because yeah that's the kind of thing she needs to be able to do if she catches her toe on a rug and trips, right? She still needs to be able to move fast. So there's all kinds of reasons why you can and should train power. No matter your age, no matter your sense of yourself as an athlete or not, it's always a good idea. Sarah, do people have to spend a half an hour during the workout working on power? They sure don't. And in fact, they shouldn't.
00:41:38
Speaker
Your ability to generate it goes down very quickly. And so then it just turns into like an endurance exercise. you actually want to capture it while it's still a power exercise. And that might mean three repetitions of something instead of 10 repetitions. Right. To keep that movement sparky yeah and zippy and not grindy and slow. And we talk you through how to do that in the course. yeah We also give you nine or 10 different workouts that are between three and four minutes. The majority, I think one of them is seven minutes long.
00:42:08
Speaker
yeah A lot of these workouts, you're actually resting for parts of the workout, getting ready to then perform the same high quality set of an exercise again. And it's very visually oriented. Basically, Sarah is showing the more scaled back version that we've selected. And I'm usually showing the more scaled forward version that we've selected. But then within the workout description, there's a link to the exercise progression in which you can select a different variation to do. And you know,
00:42:37
Speaker
where it falls on the continuum of lower to higher exercise stress. So if Sarah's version is still a little too much, well, open up that exercise and go back a few steps and start there instead. And then we just have a timer on the screen and we show you for how long to do the exercise and then you rest.
00:42:56
Speaker
And then you might do a different exercise and then rest. And then you might start over and do it all again. And it's very modular in the sense that this three-minute chunk can slot into anything you do, right? You could do your power before you go on your walk. You could do it before your yoga practice. You could do it before your Pilates. You do it before your strength training. We do recommend that you do it first because, again, it's sneakily energy-demanding. And because we're trying to use type 2 fibers, right, those type 2 fibers are hungry, hungry. Fibers, man, they require a lot of energy. And so we want to be energy rich and fresh to create these high quality speedy movements. But three minutes, right, is so not a lot of time. And we also start you with one workout a week. Right. Y'all, do you have time for three minutes once a week to work on power? You do. You do, it turns out. And then from there, guess what you can build? You can start the whole workout over and do six minutes instead of three minutes, or you can do two days a week instead of one, right? And From there, we gradually sensibly build your tolerance for this form of exercise from the beginning. We don't start with the end. We start the very, very beginning.
00:44:03
Speaker
That's right. So right now, the course, we are selling it at an introductory price because it is brand new. It is $99. That price is going to go up after May 31st. So link is in the show notes. If you're on Instagram, it's in our bio or it's on our website. Go get it, y'all. Go get it, y'all. and We hope you enjoyed learning about the course and we'll see you in two weeks.
00:44:23
Speaker
Bye.