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Hunter Eisenhower: Force System Training Methodology
646 Plays1 month ago
Hunter Eisenhower, Associate Head Coach, Sports Performance, for Arizona State men's basketball, breaks down his "Force System" training methodology and introduces his Archetype Quadrants.
See how Hunter challenges traditional strength training by focusing on four pillars: High Force (deceleration), Fast Force (speed/elasticity), Slow Force (tendon health), and Human Force (fundamental movement). Learn practical strategies for profiling athletes and designing programs that optimize performance—with or without force plates.
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Episode Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction & Hunter's background
01:06 - Creating the Four System
02:15 - Fast Force: Speed & elasticity
02:42 - Slow Force: Tissue health & injury prevention
03:14 - Human Force: Fundamental movement patterns
03:38 - Archetype Quadrants explained
05:24 - Four System exercise examples
1:10:20 - Case study: Patellar tendinopathy
1:12:33 - Building normative data
1:13:21 - Simplifying force plate metrics
1:13:59 - The simplicity principle in coaching
1:15:14 - Practitioners adopting the system
1:16:40 - Closing thoughts & future episodes
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Transcript
Introduction to Hunter Eisenhower
00:00:04
Speaker
Hunter Eisenhower, the man. This is one we've been waiting for and everyone's been asking for. it's something that we were talking about literally like three days ago.
00:00:15
Speaker
were like, let's just hop on a podcast and talk through all of our questions and issues together. So yeah, I mean, I appreciate you coming on and and Danny and I have been literally just trying to dive into your force system for the past couple weeks. And it's been <unk>s been incredible.
Hunter's Role and Passion Projects
00:00:32
Speaker
um you know, maybe we could just start with like a ah quick, like, what are you currently working on and and what's your role for people that haven't been introduced to you yet? Yeah. So my, I mean, my nine to five day job is at Arizona state with men's basketball.
00:00:47
Speaker
And that keeps me fairly busy obviously. And then the, the side projects kind of like the passion projects that have started um and they've been going for a while now back to when I worked for the Kings where,
00:01:00
Speaker
just like the creation of the force system. And to be honest with you, when it first became an idea in my mind, it wasn't, it did. I had no plan of it becoming like a system as it is now and how I think about programming and doing everything.
00:01:13
Speaker
um But it's kind of just ballooned to that as I've like added layers to it. So it started with this notion of like, why are we so obsessed with concentric outputs and strength?
Exploring the Force System
00:01:30
Speaker
And starting to mess around with force plates and look at ground reaction forces of different movements. And I won't go through this whole thing step by step. I'll make it quick. But um I just began to ask myself, like, we talk about strength being one rep maxes traditionally.
00:01:48
Speaker
And it's like, is that the end all be all? And then I started messing around on force plate, looking at ground reaction forces of different things like drop catches and depth drops. and kind of like redefine what strength meant to me. And that just became like one of the pillars, a high force. And now there's a deceleration aspect to it.
00:02:03
Speaker
Letting your speed is obviously something that's extremely important is you guys know, and you guys deal with a ton. And then this idea of elasticity, which is kind of obscure and, and hard to define, but it it it was something that I think is important. And if you look at some of the best athletes in the world, they rely on connective tissue for movement primarily.
00:02:20
Speaker
Um, and it makes, but it's what makes them elite. And I was thinking like, what if we could feed every athlete, athlete, a little bit of this. So linear speed, elasticity became fast force. And then was thinking, man, like athletes get beat up and tendons take a, take a beating and musculature needs some sort of health promotion aspect to it.
00:02:42
Speaker
Um, and that really like tissue, focus training with slow force training, slow force training, All the other things that
00:02:54
Speaker
I was missing. I'm getting an echo. Yeah, Danny, meet yours.
00:03:02
Speaker
And then like the the other aspects of training that i think are important. The crawling, the crouching, some of the human stuff that I think is missing a lot of programs from a general perspective became human force. So was four pillars. They all fit together. And that's how I think about programming. and Now recently,
00:03:18
Speaker
I've been trying to, because the way I think about programming um a lot of the year is on this kind of like superpower spectrum of of muscular movers to elastic movers um and trying to quantify that. And typically when I thought about training, it was it was kind of just a subjective approach to what I felt.
00:03:38
Speaker
And now i'm I'm working on a project with what I call the archetype quadrants. where it's a pretty simple way to quantify the spectrum, look at the effectiveness of the spectrum. And there's four quadrants, obviously, that I've named and putting together a little project about, hey, this is this is where your athletes sit within the quadrants.
00:04:01
Speaker
These are the steps you take within four-system perspective to move them around the quadrants where you think they should move. Because I know we'll talk about like James Wild stuff and his quadrants are strategy based. So it's not necessarily to say that a bounder is better than a driver or a driver is better than a bouncer.
Archetype Quadrants and Athlete Effectiveness
00:04:18
Speaker
But my quadrants, there is a there is an effectiveness component because we're looking at jump height on the y axis. So it's not just strategy based. And we ideally want to want to move athletes left or right, depending on their their structure their makeup and then we do want to move them vertical because the the goal would be put them in one of the top two quadrants either a whip or a cannon um why i've coined them so um that's been my latest thing because i think it really ties the force and force system together it's not just like a
00:04:51
Speaker
Hey, these are some training things, throw them at throw them ah on your athletes and see what sticks. It's like, no, this is like how you evaluate your athletes. This is how you profile your athletes. And then these are strategic ways to move them within the quadrants where you want them to go with the four systems.
00:05:05
Speaker
No, love it. And there's a lot there a lot of follow up there. yeah i think first first question for me is going back into the four system and just those four quadrants. and um and and just generally overlay like what it is. Like we we understand high force and fast force and slow force and human force. So maybe be like some exercise examples and kind of how you came up with those just for people who have never heard of it before. And then we could dive into specifics on on what those things are.
00:05:35
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So fat I'll start with high. So high force, if you were to break it down from like a principle perspective, it's it's deceleration and high ground reaction forces.
00:05:46
Speaker
So you're out on the field or a court, I follow a similar model model to the the breaking performance framework that Damien Harper and those guys came out with from a research perspective. and they talk about breaking elementary exercise, breaking developmental exercises.
00:06:02
Speaker
And that's ah that's a pretty clean way for me to kind of consolidate things. Unfortunately, I don't have a 1080 or some type of motorized resistance. So a lot of like the overspeed decels are happening with bands and just got some PJs bands, which are dope.
00:06:16
Speaker
Um, yeah shut on pj yeah, for sure. So we'll be on the court. Um, from an evaluation standpoint, we're looking at like a lateral 505, horizontal 10, 0, 5, um, horizontal ten zero five um And then once we get to the weight room, there's a progression through high force. So I think a lot of the potential naysayers of the force system are like, well, it's still important to like lift heavy and there's still qualities you can get from a heavy trap or deadlift. And yeah, there is like, I'm not saying you just throw that out.
00:06:47
Speaker
So the first portion of high force training is traditional high intensity loading. I just get away from it and progress from it like a lot faster than I think most people do.
00:06:58
Speaker
So we'll hit traditional high intensity loading, whatever exercise you want to fill it like, tri-board, I look for little bit, split squat, whatever. And we'll do it for a while. But once guys get to the point where it's like, i have a basketball player who's 190 pounds and he puts 105 pounds in each hands and hits three reps on rear foot elevated split squat it's like okay i am i going to continue to give him the 110s the 115s no i'm not so the next layer to that is moving to uh super maximal eccentric loading which is new typically it was straight to
00:07:33
Speaker
um drop catches, but I messed around with some super maximally centric loading this off season. And I think it's really, I think it's really potent. So we go super maximally centric loading and I do that some different ways with trap bars, with pit sharks.
00:07:48
Speaker
Then we transitioned to drop catches. This is where we get. How are you doing with the trap bars? So I didn't know how I felt about this, but I was like, you know what? We're going to try it with a couple of guys and see how it works. And me and ah my GA and a couple of interns,
00:08:05
Speaker
They'd pick up when we first tried it. It wasn't very heavy. So it wasn't truly super maximal. We got to that and like a few weeks later, but it would be pick up. We'd be standing with plates on either side.
00:08:17
Speaker
And we just created this system of like words we said to initiate the slide words. We said once the slide was good and then the athlete started lower. So in all, they had to stand with the top at the top of the trap bar hours.
00:08:29
Speaker
probably two seconds longer than they would if they were not, if we weren't putting plates on, but it was smooth. And at first I was like, well, what if we like hit the trap bar, it starts to sway, whatever, but it was smooth every time we did it. So it was cool.
00:08:42
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. The pitch shark actually is like my favorite way to do it because obviously that's not going to move. And you can put like a hundred pound on a hundred pound plate on each side and get like truly super maximal. And then you just pull it off at the bottom.
00:08:54
Speaker
Yeah. Pull it off. I love that. And then you go drop catches, which I'll just transition whatever exercise we're doing from a traditional loading perspective, whether it's roof and elevated split squat or trap bar or pitch shark, which I use a lot, use a lot. And we just transitioned drop catches.
00:09:10
Speaker
So typically that's like 60% of whatever you project their maximal strength level to be. And now- And this is still in high force? This is still all in high force. This is just yeah through high force.
00:09:22
Speaker
I think a cool thing that that I started, ah I know you've said this, but I didn't realize it at first, but you you produce such high forces in rear foot elevated split squat drop catches and and maybe explain just why and and how you came to that.
00:09:37
Speaker
i mean, if you think about force, it's just mass times acceleration. And I think that like people say ah heavy, whatever, back squat produces a lot of force.
00:09:49
Speaker
But does it really? Because, yeah, the mass side of that equation is extremely high. The acceleration portion of that equation is extremely low. Mm-hmm.
00:10:00
Speaker
So a way to manipulate that is just like take some from mass, add some to acceleration because if mass is so high, you're not going to be able to accelerate unless you're doing a drop catch and, and, and manipulate that equation. So both
Common Misconceptions in Strength Training
00:10:15
Speaker
sides of that are optimal and then force does go up. So yeah, you're right.
00:10:18
Speaker
you do a rear foot elevated split squat on play, it's super heavy. And then you hold 60% of that stand the top and drop as fast as you can and slam on the brakes. The peak force is going to be drastically different.
00:10:30
Speaker
Yeah. So we'll do drop catches and then we'll transition. Last, last piece is just transitioning depth drops and doing depth drops.
00:10:41
Speaker
Anyways, Danny, do you have a question? hearing Hearing you describe all of that, like kind of takes me back to when we first got introduced and and when we first kind of started talking, whatever that was two, two and a half years ago.
00:10:55
Speaker
And like, Certainly, and in in no way am I taking credit for any of this. What you have done has been like taking that initial idea and conversation that I remember us talking about and you just really put a lot of objectivity to it and have done a really, really great job with this.
00:11:15
Speaker
But this is kind of the the you know pedestal that I've been beating the drum from for a long time now is like, We have misrepresented what the effect of strength training is as it relates to sport.
00:11:30
Speaker
And because we have been so myopic to the measurable component of strength, we have been just glued to outcomes. And it it kind of gives us this blind eye to all of these different types of contractions and these different expressions of force that where the the measurability of strength in my mind is some combination of what you can express and then also what you can endure.
00:11:56
Speaker
And this is, you know, again, like a selfish little bias plug here, but the endurance part or the ability to endure withstand forces to me speaks more to the health side. It's great if you're really robust and you can produce a lot of force, but if you can't do that over a continued period of time, well, then what's it for?
00:12:13
Speaker
And so when I hear you describe your force system, the main thing that sticks out to me, aside from being a brilliant organization, is that we are doing a better job accounting for the distribution of forces rather than just stacking on those outputs.
00:12:28
Speaker
And I think that's a really critical thing. Yeah, no, i I completely agree with
Protective Nature of High Force
00:12:33
Speaker
you. And when I think about the the four pillars when i think about like health i think about slow force but whenever i think about the rest of it high force really is like a protective pillar for the force system because i i expose my guys to to more high forces more high forces more eccentric loading
00:13:01
Speaker
at different speeds than I've ever exposed any athlete to over the course of any time period. And now with those guys, when I'm watching them like play, I'm like supremely confident that they're going to be fine. Now, knock on wood, like stuff happens, but I'm like supremely confident that with the exposures I gave them and continue to dose throughout this preseason in season period, like, i don't want to, so I don't want to like it bulletproof and all this shit gets thrown around so much, but like, I'm just supremely confident when I'm watching them play that like,
00:13:30
Speaker
I know that the forces they experience and the amount of D cells and eccentric contractions that they experience in their sport, I'm like, they've been exposed to a lot more.
00:13:41
Speaker
you know, and then the last piece is you begin to layer in some of the 10 by 10 stuff with, with, um, Derek Hansen stuff. And I manipulate a little bit at the end of the off season, right before the preseason where we're like shortening the deceleration portion. So it's still a 10 yard Excel into like a six yard decel and we're hitting 30 to 40 of those. And it's like, I feel, I feel confident with the exposures we gave them just from a high force perspective that they're going to be ah robust.
00:14:09
Speaker
And, um, it's so far so good. but What's the, what's the first year that you did this?
Fast Force Training and Methodologies
00:14:18
Speaker
Like, when did you start the four systems?
00:14:22
Speaker
Well, I started when I got here, it's just improved and but been improved and refined the whole time. But I, but my first year of like, at this point, looking back, a very bastardized version of it was with the Kings when I was there.
00:14:35
Speaker
And that was like full time with the G League. And then i had two NBA guys that I was working with. And looking back, like it was, it was horrible and it's nothing like it is now, but that would be, so this is my fourth year using it on athletes.
00:14:53
Speaker
love it. What, um, How did the sport coaches buy into it? i How's your head coach feel about it? I would say that like I've been very blessed because you hear like horror stories of of coaches, sport coaches, being like very hands-on, too much so, and trying to dictate a ton.
00:15:12
Speaker
And I've just, I guess, gotten very lucky throughout my career that I haven't dealt with coaches that – dictate things and I've never worked for a coach that's like I need to see their one rep maxes at the end of the summer go up.
00:15:26
Speaker
um So I've been fortunate, but I also feel like with the loading that I do, you could ask me to, i don't know, pre-test, post-test, some type of maximal strength movement and they probably perform pretty well.
00:15:44
Speaker
So yeah. i'd bet almost out of times. yeah Yeah, I'd feel very confident in that. For sure. Now, the i'll just go I'll just go through the other because that was just high force. So I feel like that's what gets all the love, and it's it's great, but there's also fast.
00:16:01
Speaker
So fast is going to be linear speed. I'm not going to go into that.
Training Splits and Scheduling
00:16:05
Speaker
You've had people way smarter than me on this podcast talk about linear speed, so I'll save that for them. um But then in the weight room, it's there's a focus on the foot because I think the foot is like the –
00:16:16
Speaker
the the the starting point for developing more elastic athletes. And Danny, you probably know more about the foot. You probably forgot more about the foot than I know. so I'm not even going to dive into that either. And then there's a rate of force development, early emphasis, and then we transition to oscillatory movements.
00:16:33
Speaker
And then in the accessory portion of training, we get into every rep, different movements, reciprocal movements, rotational movements, um to kind of like round all that out. You'll never see like a bilateral push or traditional horizontal row on a fast force day and accessory movements.
00:16:51
Speaker
Um, and and is this full body typically with you or do you, yeah, we're, we're, we're hitting full body every day we train. Um, I've never really liked the upper lower splits.
00:17:06
Speaker
Um, there's a lot of other splits, but I think that because the dose and the stimulus is vastly different on every day, I've never had an athlete get blown up from, from training that way.
00:17:20
Speaker
Like we'll hit D cells on high force, but it's also structured through the week to where like in an off season, it's strategic to where it's not like I'm just punch them in the face the first two days and then they're screwed the rest of the week.
00:17:32
Speaker
Like we'll hit fast force early in the, in the week. And like, Running fast at the dose that I give my team sport athletes and then hitting some oscillatory movements and reciprocal movements and rotational movements, it's not going to blow you up. It's probably going to like almost potentiate you for the next day. Day two is going to be our high force day where we're like slamming on the brakes. This is a day where you might have a little fatigue, but typically day three is off. So they get to recover from the first two.
00:17:59
Speaker
Day four is going to be either high or fast again. And then day five, the last day of the week is slow. So by the time we get to the week, everybody's beat up anyways, but it's, it's slow force.
00:18:11
Speaker
It's, it's, I mean, it's not going to feel good in the moment, but it is kind of rejuvenation from the week of what they've just been hit with. So it's structured in a way that like you can, at least from what I've experienced and done, you can train everything every day because it's the the stimulus is very different.
00:18:28
Speaker
Yeah.
Development of Slow Force Training
00:18:29
Speaker
on let's Let's dive into slow force and just like how you came and what you You briefly touched on it in the beginning, but how you came up with it and where you put it in the week. So high and fast were first.
00:18:40
Speaker
And those like included all the all the principles that I felt were like most beneficial from a performance perspective. um but then i was thinking like okay i can't just dose basketball players because that's what i work with primarily with a bunch of hard d cells a bunch of eccentric loading linear speed oscillatory like all this stuff and then have them go play basketball like they at that point they will get blown up so i just felt like there has to be a way to offset this and i've had really really smart people mentors of mine like kyle sammons that you i know you guys know like
00:19:18
Speaker
yeah he He, to me, is somebody that has helped build this like slow force pillar more than anybody. um And his work and the way he's like taught me and made me feel like an idiot in a very healthy way about like the same hey yielding isometrics and eccentric quasi-isometrics and different ways to load tissue as a way to create robustness and health.
00:19:46
Speaker
it was like the perfect marriage to high and fast. And then when I was with the Kings, I worked for, for a short period, ah a guy named Jesse green who now works for 10 80. He worked for the Kings, then the penguins for a while.
00:19:57
Speaker
They had ah they a pillar within the training when I was with the Kings that makes total sense. But for some reason, I never thought about it was a focus on local tissues.
00:20:10
Speaker
And that's, that's a big pillar of slow force training because everything else throughout the week is global. Like, I'm loading guys from a global perspective, but then it's like, okay, well, if you're loading globally, there's probably ah distribution of stress and load to a bunch of various tissues. And you're probably not loading one specific tissue directly as potent as if you were to just put them on a machine or put them in a, in a constraint where that local specific tissue is getting load.
00:20:41
Speaker
So that's a huge pillar of, of slow force training where it's like, okay, for me with, with my basketball players. And I mean, this probably fits with most sports. You probably throw in a couple of things for different sports, but it's the lower leg cafe QI's it's the adductors is the hamstrings and it's patellar quad tendon.
00:20:57
Speaker
So on, for example, on a slow force day right now in the preseason at the end of a week, the guys come in and we'll hit a like loaded walllide wall slide wall sit through an EQI right now. We're in like this EQI phase, which is something I took from,
00:21:15
Speaker
Eric Mira, who was the guy doing Damian Lillard's Achilles rehab. We had him on the podcast and we were just talking about different ways to like load different tissues. And he's like, i was like yeah, I love like wall sits. I think they're underrated. And he's like, use a, use a wall slide and have them slide down the wall and turn it into like an eccentric. And I was like, okay, i love that.
00:21:31
Speaker
You put their, their feet closer to the wall and have them slide. And now their knee gets further over their toe, creating a bigger moment arm. And there's pretty dramatic load on the co-op toe tendon. So that's one that we'll do, just a couple exercise examples, wall side, wall sit, patellar quad, and then we'll do like full kneeling adduction.
00:21:50
Speaker
Well, really you're going into abduction, but it's for the adductors obviously you're you're in a full kneeling position on a sore neck roller with one one knee and you're just allowing yourself to move into adduction. And you're getting to the point where like guys have gotten out, like the first time you you do that exercise, you see how like reluctant guys are allowing themselves to get into abduction because when you're moving through that EQI, like there's a lot of length and stress on the adductors.
00:22:17
Speaker
So I really liked that one. And then we'll do like a safety bar calf EQI where they're loaded on plates and they've got to really get into like a length and position.
00:22:28
Speaker
And then finally for hamstrings, it's just some type of sore neck roller. Right now we're in a single leg 30 second EQI. So, The local tissue loading is just something, especially from like an in-season and health perspective that I think is just, it's so potent. It's so important because most things that people do in a weight room, it's going to be globally loaded.
00:22:50
Speaker
So that's huge for slow force. All
Universal Speed Rating System
00:22:52
Speaker
right. We got to take a second to talk about the universal speed rating. Cause I literally just found this out and it blew my mind. We just hit over 500,000 verified speed tests inside the USR software, half a million.
00:23:06
Speaker
That's coaches all over the country testing, tracking, and proving athlete progress with this system. It's not just data. It's giving athletes confidence and giving coaches real proof of results. I remember running our first speed lab test back in 2019 in a closet that my uncle helped me build, now half a million.
00:23:23
Speaker
If you're not testing speed yet or you're doing it without a system, this is your chance to check it out. Hit the link in the description, book a free consult, and see how the USR could work in your program. Yeah, that's actually exactly the question that I was going to ask was like, from a return to play standpoint, i all this makes perfect sense. I know exactly where it fits.
00:23:44
Speaker
when you When you're talking about just the in-season, well, off-season to in-season programming, this stays pretty consistent throughout the year, or does this become a little bit more prevalent in-season?
00:23:57
Speaker
Like, do you take on a little bit more of a quote-unquote preventative approach or focus as you get deeper into season like how does that trade-off work from high fast and slow let's say from pre-season all the way through to the end of season really good question and i've been i've been thinking about this a lot recently and i'll answer how i currently do it but the archetype quadrants kind of flip it not flip it on its head but add another element to it so early off season guys take a break after the season, they come back. There's not much of a local tissue prep emphasis.
00:24:32
Speaker
It's very general. It's just slow and, and, and, uh, human loading, but the slow is just kind of like strength at length, getting tissue from a global so perspective at long lengths and training it there. And then human force is just very general and we'll play different games and, and do different things. But,
00:24:48
Speaker
As we get throughout the off-season, as we get closer to the in-season, yeah, this local tissue prep specifically becomes a lot more of an emphasis. And they especially with high-minute individuals in-season, like that is – When I think about every stimulus that I'm going to give an athlete throughout a week, I have to, i feel like I have to touch them with local tissue prep at some point.
00:25:13
Speaker
Now that progression that i talked about earlier, where I, where I strategically plan it like fast high, and then we go day off faster, high, slow, it flips once we get in season. So like we'll play a game and then game day plus one, we'll go slow because guys are beat up. They just played however many minutes. We'll hit with slow.
00:25:30
Speaker
And then midpoint of the week when practice volume is at its highest, we'll hit them with high. And then right before we play, we'll hit them with fast. So it flips and there's a huge emphasis on slow force loading for high minute individuals and for all individuals within that preseason period.
00:25:49
Speaker
Makes perfect sense. Yeah. Where do you put the human force piece in it? Is that, is that all year? Yeah.
General Physical Development
00:25:57
Speaker
So everything's present all year. It's just that the, the, well, high and fast actually aren't present in their earliest off season block because they just got done playing. we were like strategically objectively applying high and fast for stimulus throughout the end season period. It's kind of like a residual,
00:26:18
Speaker
a residual perspective of like, how can we maintain these qualities throughout and hopefully nudge them in the right direction? So once we get to the early off season, let's say we have four training days, I alternate between slow human, slow human.
00:26:31
Speaker
um And the early off season, if we think general to specific throughout an entire year, the early off season is obviously most general. So that is going to be my most general loading. And the most general portion of the four system is human force.
00:26:44
Speaker
So there's a huge dose, two full days dedicated to, crawling and partner combatives and playing different games and, and climbing and carrying things.
00:26:55
Speaker
And then as I transitioned throughout that off season period, and once we get to like the middle the off season where I'm like really going to be focused on like the archetype quadrants and things like that, it doesn't phase out, but now it's fast, high, faster, high, and then it's slow and human kind of stacked together on the same day. So there's still a general element to the training that I think is important.
00:27:18
Speaker
regardless of the phase you're but it just gets shrunk a little bit. And then once we get to this preseason period, it's really just warmups for some of the other days. Like we'll just have like a crawl, carry, ah climb, warmup just to keep a general element. And then that kind of stays consistent throughout the end season. They'll come in on a high force day and I'll hit them with just a quick human force warmup because I think it's great to get ready for any other type of training.
00:27:47
Speaker
And then they'll go into it and then we'll translate transition right back into the early off season where it becomes a huge focus. I love it. What is, uh, what are you working on now? Like the, the depth in the, in the height part.
00:28:02
Speaker
Can you explain that? Yeah.
Movement Strategies and Athlete Archetypes
00:28:04
Speaker
I somewhat understand it, but I need more clarity with the quadrants specifically. Yeah. Yeah. quadrant Actually, going to send you guys this after I put together like a ah a presentation that I think will be helpful for the stuff that we're going to do in the future um to kind of understand it a little bit. I put together like 28 slides that I'm going send you guys that kind of lays this all out, but um to to try to keep it as clear as possible. So really, i was thinking about the ways to create this spectrum that a lot of people talk about from like elastic to muscular perspective.
00:28:45
Speaker
And I've looked so much into counter movement depth as a metric. And it seems like it's like the redheaded step top stepchild of like force plate metrics, because everybody wants to talk about like RFD and relative peak propulsive power and, and the strategy metric of counter movement depth, I think just tells you so much.
00:29:10
Speaker
If the, cueing and constraints you put around the movement in this terms of cmj on a force plate is in a way that an athlete expresses what they naturally want to express like they're innate and what i mean by that is i think that like on a vertex the only goal is to jump as high as humanly possible yeah so athletes are going to change their strategy to achieve that outcome Now, on a force plate, athletes are still trying to jump as high as possible.
00:29:42
Speaker
I tell them to jump fast and high. Fast and high to ah your, I'm trying to think of a, I use basketball examples. Like the person I was thinking about is Al Horford.
00:29:54
Speaker
Fast and high to Al Horford is going to look ah look a lot different than fast and high to John Moran. Right. So now they're going to self select what depth at which they want to move through to accomplish the task of jumping fast and high.
00:30:09
Speaker
Now, if we think about what happens at different depths of movement in a CMJ, if you move through a huge, huge depth of counter movement, it's probably because you want to spend a little bit more time on the ground, create a little bit more impulse.
00:30:24
Speaker
And as we get into deeper ranges of motion, we're probably leveraging musculature. We probably want to harness the power of like big movers of the lower body. Now, if we think the opposite end of that spectrum and we think of a very shallow counter movement depth, can you guys hear a shit ton of feet like background in mine?
00:30:43
Speaker
My daughters are going crazy. Yeah, it's all good. Okay. um So you think of the opposite, shallow counter of counter movement. It's probably because that athlete athlete doesn't want or doesn't need to leverage those big musculature that the deep counter movement is going to give them.
00:31:03
Speaker
And they really just want to create a really rapid stretch of connective tissue and use it to, to get off the ground really fast.
00:31:13
Speaker
So I think you guys hear that? My daughters are fricking nuts. It's all good. So give me one second. and
00:31:29
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:31:34
Speaker
My mom's here babysitting right now. So I just texted him. Hopefully she'll quiet him down. I wish I had that. Yeah, it's clutch. She's here for a week and it makes my life so much easier.
00:31:45
Speaker
um Okay, so like that's that's the X axis of the quadrants. It goes from shallow counter movement depth to deep counter movement depth. And now the why ah messed around with looking at like modified reactive strength on the Y. And I've talked to a couple of people like Drake at Hawken and different people that really understand metrics and plates really, really well.
00:32:09
Speaker
And what I didn't like about using modified reactive strength in version one of this is that modified reactive strength is kind of skewed toward time to take off. If you have a really, really fast time to take off and like a very average to to below average jump height, your modified reactive strength is going to be really good compared to the guy that has a solid time to take off in a really high jump height. His modified reactive strength isn't going to be as good.
00:32:36
Speaker
And that to me kind of like skews data and pulls it to the top left, shallow counter movement and high modified reactive strength, which I didn't like. So then I was like, okay, let's just look at jump height.
00:32:47
Speaker
Like you can look at counter movement depth and jump height. Now that might skew things to the top, right? Because guys that spend a little bit more time on the ground, are probably going to end up jumping a little bit higher. But what I saw whenever I did that is that it didn't.
00:33:01
Speaker
There was still, ah honestly, a majority of the guys in the top two quadrants in that top left quadrant. So shallow counter movement depth, high jump height. So i was like, okay. And the the distribution of the data just ah looked a lot cleaner.
00:33:13
Speaker
It wasn't pooled, which I appreciated because i know the range of movers that I've had over the last three years when I did this. Now, the last piece I added to this, and you can do all that, what I just talked about, like on Hawkins Quadrant Charts that they have, which is high level. You can pick any metrics you want. Boom, boom, X, Y. But then I was thinking is like a layer to this. I still wanted to include some sort of modified reactive strength because...
00:33:39
Speaker
If you're just looking at jump height and only quantifying it that way, well, then you you don't think about like, okay, how long is it actually taking them to move through that range of motion and achieve that jump height?
00:33:52
Speaker
So then yeah using, it'd be cool if I could code all this, but I definitely can't. I used ai created another graph that included time to take off based on the size of the dot.
00:34:05
Speaker
So now, X counter movement depth, Y jump height, size of dot relative to time to take off the bigger the dot the faster the time to take off the smaller the dot the slower the time to take off.
00:34:17
Speaker
So that just adds a whole nother element of like go ahead. Sorry to interrupt. Do you feel the time to take off is is correlated with the center the kind movement depth? Yeah, at all? Yeah, it is for sure.
00:34:28
Speaker
um But what's what's really helpful is now whenever we start talking about movement, left, right, Up, down.
00:34:39
Speaker
Now I can look and I can think, okay, if, if, cause you got, and I'll just say this just so I can begin to speak in this, in this, um, in the, the names cause it's easier.
00:34:52
Speaker
Top right, uh, would be high jump height, uh, deep counter movement depth. That is what I call cannons shift over one high jump height, shallow counter movement depth is what I call whips.
00:35:08
Speaker
Bottom left, small jump height, small counter movement depth is what I call rubber bands. And then bottom right, deep counter movement depth, low jump height is what I call anchors.
00:35:20
Speaker
Okay, so now if you're working in the top two quadrants and you have a whipper or cannon and you're trying to optimize them, they already jump really high and they've already probably settled into a strategy that's best for them. And you look at somebody maybe as ah as a cannon top right and they they're very vertical, maybe the most vertical athlete on your chart.
00:35:38
Speaker
but they have a tiny little dot it's because they're relying on jump height. So the thing that you could potentially give them to enhance their qualities, to make them even better. Like if a guy in my world is jumping 60 hands on hips, 60 centimeters, hands on hips on the plates, like, okay, jump height is not what I need to to add to that individual.
00:36:01
Speaker
But if he's getting off the ground slow as hell to do it and moving through, don't know, 45 centimeters of counter movement depth. Okay. The thing I can give that individual is time to take off. And I realized that now with, with the size of the dot and the horizontal placement on the quadrants. And to the question you just asked, like, yeah, there is correlation there.
00:36:24
Speaker
Guys on the right side are probably going to have smaller dots than the guys on the left side, but you can look at the extremes. And an example I just gave like, okay, that guy has a tiny dot. He's way far in the right. let's try to move him left and try to keep him vertical.
00:36:36
Speaker
Cause then I'm maybe just, just a shortening up his counter movement depth a little bit. I'm getting him off the ground faster and he's still jumping 58 centimeters. Cool. That's a win for me.
00:36:49
Speaker
you know i mean? Do you, do you find any like injury or soreness patterns that are unique to their quadrants? Like kind of like how we do James Wilds and all that. Yeah, that's a really good question. I haven't, I haven't been able to,
00:37:02
Speaker
dig into that one with my data specifically but something that so i since we started talking i've like looked into the james wild quadrants more than like i ever have in my life i just listened to him on just fly yesterday when we were coming back from houston just to like understand it better and i've texted you guys an annoying amount about like different things about it um and just like looking at what he's laid out I don't think the quadrants overlay perfectly one-to-one. Like, I don't think you can just put the archetype quadrants on top of his because what I said it earlier, I feel like his is strategy-based 100%.
00:37:39
Speaker
one hundred percent Mine is output and strategy-based. But I do think there is slight correlation. And me and Danny talked about this. And the his quadrants, unless you can confirm or deny this, that are probably going to have the most elastic athletes would be bounders and bouncers. Do you agree or disagree?
00:38:05
Speaker
For sure. Okay. So if you overlay these quadrants, James Wild and the archetype, the bounder bouncer are his top left, bottom left.
Injury Patterns and Quadrants
00:38:17
Speaker
My top left, bottom left are whips and rubber bands. Now I think spinners gets a little bit different compared to anchors. Like I don't think that lines up. Cannons, I think, can line up a little bit. But one when I look at James Wilde quadrants, and you guys know it a lot better than I do, but you can confirm or deny this as well.
00:38:35
Speaker
If we move from drivers to spinners to bouncers to bounders, so we just kind of make a circle around them, it kind of goes from proximal to distal from an injury pattern perspective.
00:38:52
Speaker
So when I'm thinking about mine, that injury pattern makes sense as well. Because if I'm working with well, I just zoomed in. Hey, I can watch this, make a little
00:39:07
Speaker
we're in the alien, it's supposed to zoom out, but now it's not working. there we go we go. $3,000 to see Danny do that. Now i'm just gonna be zoomed in on my face all the time.
00:39:18
Speaker
ah That's a really interesting point, though. Yeah. So like if you if you think about the quadrants that I have. And if you move in that same sequence, you go from cannons to anchors, to rubber bands, to whips in my head. And I can't, I can't proof this with the data I have yet, but if you move in that same sequence in mind, I think it makes sense to move from proximal to distal.
00:39:44
Speaker
Like you're moving from your explosive deep counter movements. Now the anchors is, is the one that gets a little bit fuzzy because that's still deep counter movement, but it's poor jump height. So these are just like your, bad more muscular driven movement movers but then you move to your rubber bands are you're not as uh potent as impressive elastic movers and then you move to like your elastic best movers and to me that proximal to distal injury sequence kind of makes sense so it's something i began thinking about because again the quadrants don't overlay perfectly
00:40:19
Speaker
But I do think that there's some correlation. So if I were to answer this question right now without having proof, I would say that I think about it from like a proximal distal distribution.
00:40:30
Speaker
Les, can I jump in on that real quick? Yeah. So kind of a kind of a two part question here. But the the the first part of this is what's the goal?
00:40:44
Speaker
And I'll give context by saying, keeping the comparison here, the the James Wild quadrants are, in my mind, more interpretive.
00:40:56
Speaker
where we're looking at spatio-temporal qualities, we're looking at strategy-based you know differences in movements to just give deeper descriptions of how athletes are effectively doing the same tasks, right?
00:41:10
Speaker
In the combine, it's pretty simple. Got 25, 30 guys. All of them do it uniquely or differently or and with an individual strategy, but they're doing the exact same task. So the outcome of those for me, especially on the health side is having a deeper analysis of where we may see vulnerability as we go through this, this training process.
00:41:32
Speaker
But with yours, it's
Optimizing Athlete Profiles
00:41:33
Speaker
a little bit different. So again, I reiterate, like, is this to help with programming decisions? Is this to help, you know, convey information to staff? Is this to, you know, just have a better proxy on the individual archetypes within your group? Like, what is the utility of this for you?
00:41:52
Speaker
Great question. And um obviously the most important thing. It's cool to make a quadrant chart, but like, how the hell are you going to use it? This is it to me. So
00:42:04
Speaker
you have this spectrum of athletes, you have Alaska movers, you have muscular movers. And I think that like, whether people want to say that's like voodoo science or not, like there's archetypes of athletes. You look at, kind you look at, I don't know,
00:42:16
Speaker
the The football example i like to use, because obviously if you talk about offensive linemen or receivers, you can point that out easily. But even in the same position group, you look at like Xavier we Worthy and A.J. Brown. like Those dudes are so incredibly different.
00:42:30
Speaker
Now, to relate it to my quadrants, I think A.J. Brown is probably a cannon, and Xavier Worthy at this point in his career is probably a rubber band. He's a very fast rubber band, but he's probably a rubber band. okay so Now, and i'll I'll use this as example to to my population because I actually have data on them.
00:42:46
Speaker
is I create my quadrant chart and I look and I think, does the quadrant that this person representing right now makes sense? And the way that I like proof makes sense is i think about the the structure of that athlete and then the quadrant that they represent in.
00:43:06
Speaker
Now I'll give you an example. I have a kid on this year's team who is 230, the epitome of the epitome of a muscular or driven movement mover.
00:43:19
Speaker
ah He doesn't really love the weight room, but that's that's a whole nother story. But like, if you were to measure his probably 110 plus for sure. Like, ah I like to look at like the lower leg structure, calf to Achilles, like elastic movers probably gonna have a really long Achilles, short muscle bellies, opposite for muscular. He has a long calf, short, like just the epitome of a muscular driven mover.
00:43:42
Speaker
And he's a rubber band. He's almost as far left He's the furthest left dot on the initial assessment. And I think, to any and he's ah he's low, obviously. He's in that third rubber band quadrant.
00:43:54
Speaker
And I think to myself, that is not an optimal movement strategy that he's choosing for himself. Now, if I were to just look at him and think, okay, all I were to say were like, let's look at your jump height or let's like look at some other metrics.
00:44:12
Speaker
And I didn't necessarily plot it. and I didn't have the comparative power of like a quadrant chart, I would say like, okay, he doesn't jump very high. Let's have him jump higher. And I would dose him with things to make him hopefully jump higher. But he is self-selecting a strategy of 26 centimeter counter of movement depth that is never going to be productive for him.
00:44:28
Speaker
Now you take it a step further and i add a layer to this whole equation. And this person who had bilateral patellar tendonitis injections a year ago,
00:44:39
Speaker
So then you add the layer of injury history and you're like, okay, this this individual is self-selecting a ah ah movement strategy here in a very like controlled environment of a CMJ on a force plate that is not optimal for his structure.
00:44:53
Speaker
And the structure piece is huge to this whole thing. Now, why? Because of his injury history. Okay, so now what can I give this athlete to shift him right because...
00:45:08
Speaker
People could argue like, well, you want him to have a short counter movement depth. You want him to get off the ground super fast. Like, yeah, that is a goal, but everybody's going to have an optimal strategy. And his optimal strategy, in my opinion, is leveraging bigger musculature.
00:45:19
Speaker
And at 26 centimeters of counter movement depth, you're not doing that. So I need to expose him to things, some high force loading, some slow force loading for the the tissue that's been so damaged in the past, some deep tier plyometrics,
00:45:35
Speaker
to remove the inhibition from his previous injury and get him moving into a bigger counter movement depth to leverage the tissue that he innately is gonna be better at leveraging to then move him vertical. Now, the only other example I'll give is some individuals who are, and i you don't see this necessarily as much, but I think maybe in football you could, is the opposite.
00:45:58
Speaker
You have this really elastic individual who's been trained like a power lifter for for four years. And now they're assuming a strategy that's a deep counter movement depth and they're not very effective with it. Like if you're choosing a deep counter movement, you be better have really good output from ah from a jump height perspective to make up for the time that it takes you to move through that counter movement.
00:46:17
Speaker
And if they're moving through a big counter movement and they're not achieving 55, 56, 57 centimeter jump height, which they probably never will because they're not innately leveraged to to to produce a lot of of movement with big musculature.
00:46:32
Speaker
Then we need to to get them back shifted left, allow them to rely on the innate superpower of getting off the ground fast and moving through a short counter movement. And then maybe they're not, they're probably never going to jump 58 centimeters, but maybe they're jumping 50, 51. And that's really good for them.
00:46:46
Speaker
That's a, yeah, that's a great answer. And Les, I know I'm going a little bit off script here, so I apologize. No, keep going. I just, I just think this is a really important point, man, because, you know, we're, we're, we're at a really,
00:46:58
Speaker
We're at somewhat of an inflection point of human performance in my mind, where you know we we we need to kind of keep perspective of this, where we really are the first gen of heavy tech, heavy software, heavy data, biographical collections within this field, right? And we all know that this is still...
00:47:18
Speaker
in its infancy and its, you know, kind of frontline frontier stuff. And so whenever I'm putting stuff like this together, because Hunter, what I think you've developed objectively and and honestly is really, really incredible.
00:47:31
Speaker
You know, Les, I can i can speak for hours on on all the work that you've done and and how much you've, you know, incorporated and influenced me with all of this systemization and and tracking stuff. But when I'm putting these things together, when I'm reviewing them, I almost put on like my Buddy Morris hat.
00:47:47
Speaker
um my alvar meal hat you know and i'm like okay what would what would these guys say and at what point are we overly complexifying or getting too granular with things and how can we keep that superficial surface level purpose very vivid and clear for why we're going through all of this you know and i struggle with that you know again honestly like i kind of go back and forth on like There is sophistication to our work. We do need to continue to get deeper. We do need to utilize the tools that are available to us.
00:48:21
Speaker
But at what cost? and And how can we still relate that back to an overarching purpose of why we are going through what we're going through, apart from just loving this stuff and and loving to get lost in it? You know, and I think that applies equally for all three of us.
00:48:35
Speaker
Yeah, and I agree. Quick pause here. and want to talk about the universal speed rating.
Efficiency of USR Software
00:48:40
Speaker
So many coaches I meet are just overwhelmed. They're running sessions, programming, dealing with parents, and trying to prove their athletes are actually getting faster.
00:48:49
Speaker
One of the reasons why we built USR was to take some of this stress off the table. One software solution to help coaches test, track, and show improvement without adding hours to your week. If you feel like you're guessing with your speed training or drawing, trying to make sense of your data, hit the link in the description.
00:49:06
Speaker
Schedule a free consult and see how the USR can help. I guess the follow-up to that is, is this your primary pro profiling system for your players? Like you you get a new player, comes in tomorrow.
00:49:19
Speaker
Like, is this what the first thing that you're doing with him? I would say yes, honestly. i think I think my – now, I'm not saying this is the only thing, but it's the most effective and efficient thing if you marry those two things together.
00:49:36
Speaker
um Because I get – I don't know. I've had guys for 16, 17 weeks, and I've probably gotten 50 to 60 jumps on all of them.
00:49:52
Speaker
So like it's something that I'm getting early and often. So now I can create this and look at plots throughout an entire year. Now there's other things I do. Like we'll run fly tens. We'll do four jumps on the plates. We'll do a lot of different things. We'll run a 10, 0, 5, 5, 0, 5.
00:50:11
Speaker
But all of those have like a small cost and there's a time and place that they fit. There's a time and place they don't. I can bring plates anywhere. I can do it now. I like to try to, I'd like to try to create the same testing environment every single time. So ideally it's after our speed, speed stuff, or it's during a fast force training session.
00:50:33
Speaker
Now, if we're training after practice, that changes the kind of like the the environment, but I can do it year round. And it's the one thing that I know without fail, I'm going to get at least one data point all year.
00:50:48
Speaker
So to me, it's like, Is it the only thing I do? No, but is it the most consistent thing I do? Yes. And I think, Danny, to your point, I, and this isn't necessarily answering that question, but just to to touch on what you said, Danny, is the complexity piece, like, are we doing it for ourselves because it's cool? Are we doing it for the athletes because it actually helps them?
00:51:14
Speaker
And one of the the small things that I, like, debated with myself, and it's going to sound dumb when I say this out loud right now, is, like, when i was when I was choosing the way to represent this on a quadrant chart, I knew counter movement depth was going to be my X. And I was thinking about the metrics for the y I was like, jump height is like too simple.
00:51:30
Speaker
Like I need something fancier, like peak relative of propulsive power, modified reactive strength. And I was like, wait a second. Now, if you add the time to take off qualifier, just use jump height. You know, like it's so simple, counter movement depth and jump height. It's like the the I don't know.
00:51:47
Speaker
the The ego inside of me was like, no, you got to choose something cooler. So it like pops more, but it's like, no, it makes total sense. Like kind of in depth jump height. Yeah. I mean, did do you, like go ahead. Yeah, go ahead Do you, do you see it as a stable metric? Like, does it change over, you know, the course of the season week to week? And like, do you have rubber bands that are whips on week two and then anchors on week three?
00:52:11
Speaker
Yeah. It's a really good question. And what I've seen for doing this now for,
00:52:17
Speaker
I don't know, a month of like actually like looking at it progressively. Now I've, I've backlogged data for three years. So I've been able to kind of see where guys represent over three years. But what I've noticed is that the counter movement depth bandwidth is pretty small.
00:52:34
Speaker
The, the jump pipe bandwidth is a little bit larger, but it's not as noisy as like a rate of force development metric. Rate of force development metrics are going to be all over the board anytime you test. But like those two metrics, counter movement in depth is, is,
00:52:47
Speaker
very stable. Jump height is fairly stable. So what I've seen is I'll see a guy who's like fringe anchor cannon move up into the cannon category because he has a really good jump that day.
00:52:59
Speaker
um Or a rubber band move to a a whip. And then unfortunately, sometimes I see whips move to ah rubber bands and vice versa.
00:53:10
Speaker
The one thing that's cool, and I think it makes sense for every performance coach to talk about improving performance, especially it's easy once an athlete's settled into a strategy that you know works for them or that's going to work for them.
00:53:23
Speaker
The one that's cool is that that example I gave earlier of the individual who's dealing with that. He's, he's had a host of lower body issues. He's kind of dealing with a lower body issue right now. And he's had that bilateral patellar tendinopathy in the past. That's been pretty severe.
00:53:41
Speaker
Um, is, Now having the project of trying to shift him right. Vertical shift is what we do. Like, especially with an athlete that settled into a strategy that works for them, like vertical shift. Yeah, cool.
00:53:54
Speaker
Like make people jump higher. Change their strategy from like a subconscious perspective, not just like, ah like I could get anybody on the, I could get this kid on the plates and say like, Hey, just like spend a little bit more time on the ground or really sink into this jump.
00:54:10
Speaker
And it would obviously change his counter movement depth. But what I want to try to do is expose him to, to stimulate stimuli throughout the week, throughout a training cycle, throughout it whatever where now his innate subconscious movement pattern is moving in a direction that is more optimal for him.
00:54:28
Speaker
And I think it's awesome when guys move from rubber bands to to whips or anchors to cannons. But what I think is like the more challenging thing and more rewarding thing is getting people to shift horizontally.
00:54:40
Speaker
because that is now changing a movement strategy, not just adding output to a system.
00:54:48
Speaker
Danny, get a follow up on that? No, I mean, I just I think this is a really good conversation. I think it's a really important one. And, and you know, I relate it back to what I said a moment ago where like, you know, we're we're on the front front line of this.
00:55:01
Speaker
and And there's so many people in our industry that, you know, again, quite frankly, are doing really brilliant work. And I think, you know, the the ultimate goal of any systemization or any kind of, um you know,
00:55:14
Speaker
unification of metrics and and things like this are always going to be designed from the standpoint of how do I optimize my personal work situation. And then it's always followed up with, okay, now how do I take what I've developed for my situation and then would likely be helpful for others in the field. And I think that's exactly what we're all really trying to do.
Evolving Utility of the Force System
00:55:36
Speaker
But, you know, to Les's point on this, it's like we we have to understand that we have the capacity to do more now. So it's um it's kind of on us to figure out what that alignment is and what it looks like.
00:55:53
Speaker
And I can continue to just kind of give you, you know, compliments on this all day long. But like, I think you've done a really, really good job of that. and this is really interesting to me. the The question here is, do you feel like the growth or evolution of this is going to be driven more by the reception of how it exists in other settings or that maybe the input or data that you get from others in this in in in your field or in similar fields?
00:56:22
Speaker
Or do you think it's going to continue to develop as a utility for what you're doing in person in house and kind of how do you evaluate that?
00:56:32
Speaker
So to the first part of your question, I think that the systemization of things is is obviously very important. And it's just the way my brain works.
00:56:43
Speaker
Like I'm just a systematic type thinker. And i I have to remind myself to add some subjectivity, to add some just like general observation. And Stu is somebody that I know you guys talk about all the time on this podcast, but he's somebody that I look at.
00:56:55
Speaker
And like, I've never seen Stu jump a single person on plates ever. But his eye of just like, subjective evaluation and so good at subjective evaluation. It's probably objective at this point, which I don't know if that kind of like, ah is like a bad or a bad thing to like say subjective is moving to objective and just let it live in the subjective realm. But with that being said, whenever I, before I had kind of like this framework of the quadrants, it was such like a
00:57:31
Speaker
I think this makes sense. This, like some of these variables I'm looking at look this way. Like I'd be looking at four jump modified reactive strength and jump fight on a, on a CMJ. And I think that this just gives a system to work with it. Now to the second part of your question, I think because of that, and now I don't have data from 40 different sports to, to know if it looks this way.
00:57:57
Speaker
But what I would say is that I think that this is, a way to systematically apply the force system in specific ways to shift athletes in the direction that you think they should be shifted.
00:58:17
Speaker
Now that part is going to be up to the practitioner to like understand their athlete, understand the movement strategy that you think is going to be best for that athlete. But Once you decide that and you know, like, okay, I have a rubber band who probably should be a cannon.
00:58:32
Speaker
How am I going to shift them right and up or just diagonal diagonal to the right? Boom. Like, okay, now I'm thinking in the force system. I'm like, okay, if i have a if i have a wide ISA individual that's acting like a rubber band, they need to move through deeper counter movements and ultimately produce higher output in the CMJ. And hopefully that change in movement strategy, that increase in output,
00:58:54
Speaker
contributes to other things on the court, on the field, because now they're self-selecting subconsciously movement strategy works for them. I think that like with the three years of data I've, I have and the movement I've already seen, i think like to me, and obviously I'm biased, but to me it checks out in basketball.
00:59:14
Speaker
Like I'm very comfortable with the counter movement depth of the basketball population. I'm very comfortable with jump hype bandwidth. Now to me, it's getting a whole other host of data and being like, whoa, these are very different counter movement depths.
00:59:27
Speaker
These are very different jump heights. This is what the distribution of data looks like from, I don't know, volleyball, you know, like, okay, does it make sense to shift these individuals? What are the structure types within, ah baseball?
00:59:41
Speaker
You know what I mean? So I think that there's, there's some nuance there that the practitioner has to understand, but it doesn't take a brain surgeon to look at, uh, ah offensive lineman and Xavier worthy and realize that there's different structures in sport and be able to apply that model to your setting.
00:59:59
Speaker
so No, no. Yeah.
Applying the Force System to NFL Combine
01:00:01
Speaker
The one, the one thing I will say, and ah something I've thought about throughout this process, a decent amount is the Katarina Macario case study that both you guys yeah laid out for me and Mike on the podcast, Danny, when we were in San Diego live, and then less when we had you on the podcast a couple weeks ago,
01:00:20
Speaker
When you guys, unless you were talking about the way she was kind of like presenting and yeah how it probably didn't work for her because that's not like innately how her structure and body is built.
01:00:35
Speaker
And you wanted to like shift her to different, like I was just imagining her in the quadrants and probably presenting as an anchor and probably needing to be a whip. And what you guys did. Exactly. What you guys did, if you were to look back at the data and look at these simple ah metrics of counter movement depth, jump height, and then overlaying time to take off, is I bet you if you had normative axes, you probably just moved her from from anchor to whip.
01:01:02
Speaker
And that's yeah like the innate movement preference of her system. And now she's probably dealing with less because she's leveraging the tissue that she's like predisposed to be able to leverage well and getting away from being an anchor and just leveraging. Yeah, I'm gonna give you I'm gonna send you our login. So you could just go through cat and all our football guys. yeah Yeah, yeah.
01:01:26
Speaker
Alright, so final piece. If you were working with our NFL combine group, how would you apply the force system? Great question. So I think it's, I think it's a microcosm of everything we've just talked about.
01:01:44
Speaker
And I think that the one thing that I continue to think about on the front end is when you create the quadrants, do you create the quadrants based on kind of like what I just talked about, normative, but solidified axes?
01:02:03
Speaker
Or do you create the quadrants based on the population that you are working with? It's the population we work with. But I mean, I guess when i say that, I mean specifically the group, like just this combine group or all of combine groups you ever had.
01:02:21
Speaker
it's It's all of our professional football players. Yeah. Breaking into like skill mids and bigs, but they're compared to professional skill mids or bigs. Yeah.
01:02:33
Speaker
And I think it's a pretty large group. And I think that's the best way to do it is you take a backlog of data of the same slash similar populations and you create the quadrants and then you overlay the current group that you're currently working with training to see where they fit based on histories and his history of data.
01:02:56
Speaker
So then you do that. You see, you've got, you're going have some whips. You're going to have some cannons, rubber bands, anchors. Now, if you're working with rubber bands and anchors based on historical data, you understand that from an output perspective, at least from a CMJ, not very good.
01:03:16
Speaker
But then you have to ask the question, does it make sense for them to be a rubber band or an anchor based on their structure? Okay. So some, some ah very elastic individuals are probably going to end up being anchors because they've been trained like a powerlifter for four years in college. And it's like, okay, we need to allow this individual to harness connective tissue better again because they don't do it very well right now because they've been pulled away and on the opposite side you have some wide ass individuals that are short counter of movement depth hey is there an injury history here what are we doing in the lower body like what's what's the issue one thing that i've seen or thought about is an individual that is presenting in one of the two lower quadrants that are not structurally
01:03:58
Speaker
it doesn't structurally make sense for them to be in there is there an injury history because i think that movement strategy is going to be altered a lot especially from a counter movement depth perspective based on some type of injury history okay so you have your quadrants you know that the athletes in the bottom are supposed to be there or aren't supposed to be there okay if they're not supposed to be there you dose them with what they need you have a wide ass individual who is presenting a short counter movement depth that's kind of like the case study i presented earlier we need to figure out why from an injury history if there's no injury history just expose them to deeper counter move or uh yeah deeper counter movements um movements through a full range of motion deeper into motion and get them shifted right now if we're talking about the other we need to expose them to things like short counter movements and more elastic movements to get them shifted left now if we're dealing with
01:04:51
Speaker
cannons and whips this is where and danny you were talking about like from a health perspective this is where i've kind of thought ah a little bit differently about cannons and whips is especially like the athletes that are most vertical with big circles so very high jump height very high time to take off they wouldn't be up there if that wasn't the movement strategy that makes sense for them so i'm not thinking left or right i'm thinking about optimizing where they're at and one of the things that i've thought about is with those athletes like the most impressive of the group with the highest outputs they come in running a four whatever four two it's like okay yeah you want to make them run faster but if they run a four two they're probably going to get paid and get drafted in a high position dose them with a little bit more slow force because now we're just trying to kind of like protect outputs now i'm not saying you don't do the stuff that you're gonna like you do on the field less like you're still
01:05:48
Speaker
hitting Excel sitting max velocity stuff, whatever. But from a weight room perspective, I think you're just very precise with the dose of fast and high force that you give them and continue to layer on like a robustness of those outputs with more slow force.
01:06:04
Speaker
So if I'm dealing in the bottom quadrants, okay, I'm not saying that you just like blow these guys up and don't dose them with slow force. But I think the distribution of like health to output changes when you're on the top versus versus the bottom.
01:06:16
Speaker
So quadrants doesn't make sense. If not shift them, if it does increase outputs, once they get to the top and they're vertical hot or a big dots, a little bit more dosage of slow force. Cause we've got to protect the outputs that they have and allow some of the specific stuff that you're doing on the field to be one consistent. So they don't deal with something throughout the summer or throughout the the training process.
01:06:46
Speaker
And Be very precise with the dose of high and fast that you give them.
01:06:53
Speaker
Danny, I know you got some follow ups on that. I mean, not that not anything beyond I agree. i agree 100% on all that. That's, that's exactly how I've been kind of thinking about it throughout this talk. And and when we talked over the weekend, because you know, again, like my lens is obviously biased, like that's, that's my job. That's my role is is what is the risk stratification um based on whether it's quadrants or it's raw data or whatever, right? where We're that time always evaluating it. But to me that that makes a ton of sense.
01:07:23
Speaker
and And I think to tie that back to the previous question that I had asked is like, to me, that's the reinforcement for why we get this granular or why we have these different organizations or we're we're you know modeling things in this way is because ultimately it comes down to protecting the assets.
01:07:42
Speaker
So in the combine sense, it's we need to preserve health along the way of improving performance Because if you can't run in Indy, it doesn't matter how fast you can run, yeah right?
01:07:57
Speaker
You take that exact same context, you apply it to the basketball season, you apply it to a football, it's the same thing, right? So to me, that's the purpose behind it. And I think that, you know, the way that you have this designed is is very intuitive.
01:08:09
Speaker
And it, you know, it again, it it just really applies well, in my opinion. And I think that like the last thing I'll say, and to the to your point, Danny is like, Athletes presenting with pain, aren't going to be able to produce the outputs they'd be able to produce if they weren't in pain.
01:08:24
Speaker
So when I say like whips and whips and cannons, let's, let's prioriti prioritize some slow force loading to offset compliment the stuff that's happening on the field, like excels, decels, max velocity, whatever.
01:08:40
Speaker
I also think like, if you're dealing with an anchor or you're dealing with a rubber band that's in pain. Okay. Well, like, yeah, there's maybe they're slow. slower relative, but like they also are going to probably just run faster if they're not in pain.
01:08:57
Speaker
So I think that if you're dealing with a rubber band or an anchor that is presenting pain, let's dose them with some more specific local tissue prep, some more slow force loading yeah early on to try to get them out of pain because once they're out of pain, they might present completely different.
01:09:13
Speaker
Like the example I'll use, and this is, this is something I didn't mention earlier.
Addressing Pain in Movement Strategies
01:09:18
Speaker
If you're dealing with like a like Xavier worthy build that's presenting as an anchor, maybe they've been trained like power lifter and their natural Nate strategy has shifted or, and this is the case that I've seen is I have some very narrow elastic individuals that present in the, when I look at the the the quadrants, and this is something that I wish I would have thought of earlier to help me. And it's, it's it's something I also should have realized real time, but I, I didn't really think about it enough.
01:09:48
Speaker
is I have these narrow elastic individuals than that now when I look in the quadrant, they're presenting as an anchor. And I think about that individual, specifically that thinking about, he was an anchor, he was super low, his dot was super small, but he should have been a whip, like the epitome of it.
01:10:04
Speaker
6'6", long, when he plays, athletic, moves extremely well. And I'm like, man. And then you remember back, oh, this dude dealt with maybe the worst potential patellar tendinopathy of any athlete I've had over three years.
01:10:21
Speaker
And i was so like, I don't know, naive, dumb, whatever at that point, because it was my first year and just trying figure everything out. It's like, I should have just dosed the hell out of slow force because if I would have just got his knees feeling a little bit better, he would have probably been a whip without increasing output at all.
01:10:40
Speaker
So I think that's an important part to the equation as well is like, why are they presenting in the quadrant that they're in? If they're completely healthy and it's like, no, I feel good. This is like, what are you talking about? Okay, well, maybe we need to shift left or right.
01:10:53
Speaker
If they're like, yeah, I'm dealing with this chronic, acute, whatever injury. Well, let's get that to the point where they're not thinking about it and they don't have to think about it and now see where they they present.
01:11:07
Speaker
Because if a guy comes in with patellar tendinopathy, like I deal with in basketball all the time, he's not going to present as a whip because that is the last movement strategy that you want to choose.
01:11:19
Speaker
If there's a hot tendon in your lower body, especially at your knee, you do not want to load that tendon. You want to stay away from it. so you're going to, you're going to assume like a hip flexor strategy, which is eventually, or which is probably going to move you into an anchor category. Cause you're going to spend more time on the ground.
01:11:36
Speaker
You're not going to present in a stiff flexor strategy where you're like loading tendon. So I think that's an important aspect of this whole thing. And, I don't necessarily know how beat up the guys are that you get right off the bat, but I'm assuming there's a lot of them that aren't feeling hundred percent.
01:11:50
Speaker
So I think that that is important is like, let's load them in a way to get them feeling better to then see where they represent in the quadrants, as opposed to just like taking the initial assessment. And that's the only assessment and that's where they live. And now let's choose make decisions off that because once they're feeling good, they could present completely differently.
01:12:11
Speaker
Brilliant. No, it's brilliant. Let's do it.
Future Collaborations and Refinements
01:12:15
Speaker
Let's figure it out. Yeah. No, I think that the most informative process is creating the normative then normative quadrants to then be able to compare current classes to.
01:12:33
Speaker
Yeah. we have We have a couple years. think we got four years in our system right now. So probably 100
01:12:43
Speaker
So it's good enough. And then would be interesting, maybe as a follow-up podcast, i know you got to run soon, but i'm good we go through some of the the problem cases.
01:12:54
Speaker
We'll hide their names, but just go through the problem cases. And I'll give you what we did. And then you tell me kind of like, hey, if you had done these these three things. And that way like I can understand it. and I think also for our listeners, like they're going to understand how they could take a simple strategy. Because this this is simple. like If you think about it,
01:13:12
Speaker
there's 100 force plate metrics. And people talk about ah RFD, talk about impulse, talk about all these things. I think finding a way to simplify it, even if you don't have force plates, you can start to look at it through that lens.
01:13:27
Speaker
Because i'm I'm imagining like my coaches that deal with youth athletes, they're not jumping them on force plates every week. But if they did a jump, you could see, do they have a shallow depth and do they jump high?
01:13:38
Speaker
Like it's it's pretty easy to understand. You could archetype somebody just from just from watching how they move. um And then you back into, okay, what where should I focus on you know your your training program and how do I move you?
01:13:51
Speaker
I think it's brilliant. And I think you've you've put a lot of creativity into it. And if you've heard me talk about creativity, I think it's just connecting connecting a bunch of things. Like Steve Jobs was the most creative person of our generation. Not even our generation, but like of our time because he connected the phone an iPod and a messaging app into one thing called the iPhone.
01:14:15
Speaker
and And that created so many other creative things. And I think what you're doing is bringing a lot of the research and things that have been done over the past couple of years and saying, all that's important, but here's the easiest way you can access that and start to look at this.
01:14:29
Speaker
And Danny and i talk about this all the time. Like, how do you find the simplest way to move forward? There's a lot of complex ways to move forward, but what's the simplest way? Because the complexity comes in our decision-making process. It doesn't come in the profiling process. like The more complicated the profiling process is, then the harder it is to get the actual intervention at the back end of it. so This is awesome, dude. and I appreciate you coming on here and giving us this because...
01:14:56
Speaker
it's relatively new for me to hear you talk about this. Like I've, I've heard a little bit, but just getting that, that past hour. mean, that was incredible. yeah Honestly, no, I'm well, one, I appreciate you guys because it's been helpful for me to have somebody that's kind of like,
01:15:12
Speaker
using these ideas, which is an honor for me. And I told you that less on our podcast, like whenever you're talking about using it, I was like goosebumps because it's crazy to have like something that you've tried to create and other high, high level practitioners are starting to use it.
01:15:24
Speaker
And like to your complexity pieces, you should have seen me trying to write out a decision tree for this process. And the first one I wrote, I like <unk> confused the hell out of myself. I was like drawing arrows, drawing boxes. And I was like, okay, i need to slow down and like make this simple because to your point,
01:15:42
Speaker
and I've run into this before is like, you have this complex decision tree with like different things. If this, then that, yes, no. And it's like, then when you actually go to apply it, you're like, well, this is going to take me 45 minutes for each guy because this is the most confusing thing of all time. So like taking a step back, swallowing my ego, it doesn't need to most be the most complex, flashy thing ever. That's going to look cool when I talk about it, because that's probably not applicable when you actually try to apply it.
01:16:10
Speaker
So yeah, the simplicity piece is something I'm continuing to refine. And honestly, I want to i want to go from complex to very, very simple. And it's something think you guys do do well when you're conveying messages. So no, I appreciate it. And it's been super helpful for me to be able to get on here and and try to explain it and and talk to you guys about it Because it's just been so many thoughts and ideas and presentations and notes written down that it's nice to be able to kind of refine it from ah from a conversation perspective.
01:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, and I love it. Send me that presentation. Danny, we got to have Hunter back on soon. Follow up. Don't threaten me with a good time. Yeah, anytime, fellas. I got mornings free, so let me know.
01:16:53
Speaker
Awesome. All right, Appreciate you. Yes, sir. Appreciate you, bro.