Year Two, Block 7 : Eccentric Based Training
Block seven: The ECCENTRIC block.
We got a big eccentric block and when we're looking at eccentric, we want to break it down.
“There are three different forms of contractions: Concentric, Isometric, and Eccentric.”
What we're looking at as we're lowering down to the ground is we're fighting that lowering portion as much as we can.
Naturally we are stronger eccentrically.
If we look at someone who's never trained before they're going to be stronger in that eccentric component relative to the concentric component, and this is massive in terms of protecting us from injury. As we start to fall, or as we start to land or run, it's going to be our eccentric strength that prevents those injuries. For example, in an inadvertent fall, it's going to be our ability to lower our body to the ground that will protect us
As we start training, we typically get a more concentric focused. “What's your bench, what's your squat, what's your pull-up max?”, and I think that's the natural order of things. We start making this natural migration to a concentric ability because it's easier to grasp, and it's easier to explain.
Now, we use that as our focal point in all of our training, but what happens is we always harp and push concentric ability, fighting our natural inclination to be stronger eccentrically.
“The big message within this block is this concept called “strength deficit”, which is the difference between your eccentric and concentric ability. We want more strength on the eccentric side than we want on the concentric side.”
As we start training and as we start getting more years under our belt of all this good squat, bench, dead lift, and pull-ups we start pushing that strength deficit closer and closer so our concentric eventually comes to the same strength level as eccentric.
As we start to train eccentrically, we start training these muscle spindles and golgi tendon organs, which are reflexive parts in our muscle cells, to withstand higher and higher loads more comfortably. We are pushing that threshold up higher and higher.
Systematically we want to incorporate a good amount of eccentric movements and that’s what this block is dedicated and designed towards. That's going to hopefully give us a bigger platform going forward to add more weight in the bar for our concentric movements like squat, bench, dead lift, and pull-ups.
“We’re going to be more resistant to injury, robust, and resilient in terms of the way we land and run.”
Diving in a little bit deeper, one of the things we're getting into is this depth drop exercise that was coined by Russian scientists. We are using an overload of eccentric to create that response, and strengthen that aspect of the contraction. It was called a “shock method” and what we learned through them is that it's one of those exercises you're not going to necessarily feel fatigued while doing it, but it's really going to impact your nervous system.
You start seeing the ramifications of this down the road of people getting tired, people getting irritable, people getting joint soreness, and people getting disrupted sleep cycles.
And it's not something you're walking out of like we did last block in our accumulation block, "oh my god I'm exhausted", it's over a course of a couple weeks like I'm just generally fatigued and tired.
That's your nervous system coming back and saying, hey, you're working pretty hard.
So, we'll open up with that and that's targeting that exact mechanism we were talking about before, that golgi tendon organ and that muscle spindle, it's called the parallel elastic component that exact part where we're trying to create this reflex so we can initiate this response to the nervous system getting cranked up and overall, to take away that inhibitory factor of the golgi tendon organ and create a stronger contraction later.
And then we're going to use that next segment for just targeting eccentrics.
We're going to go 5 by 3 with a 5 second eccentric. The goal is to get as much weight as possible and really accentuate that eccentric. And we're gonna make a way into the next part of this massive component, it's called your series elastic component, and this is the more passive structures around your muscle cell, your tendons, your ligaments, even your fascia.
“The goal is to get as much weight as possible and really accentuate that eccentric. ”
Interesting research comes out now, in terms of fascia is actually not a nerve tissue. There's actual contractile elements to it but it's still getting strengthened and the best way I can analogize this, we're trying to just reinforce our body with these big, strong, resilient rubber band, and the thicker that rubber band is, the more response we're gonna get in terms of this violent eccentric leading to a really, really strong concentric action and the stronger we make that tendon and the stronger we make that ligament, the stronger make that fascia structure around it, the thicker and more dense that rubber band and the more ability we're gonna have to push and exert force, as well as resist force.
We're kinda working two things simultaneously, strengthening that parallel elastic component and strengthening that series elastic component.
Finally, two parts I want to go in to from here are:
1. Training eccentrically and going through a full range of motion. We're going to utilize something, one and a quarters, where we're gonna go all the way down to the bottom range and then actually come out of the bottom in the upper quarter and then come back down and back up again.
And the goal of that is, let's strengthen that end range and let's really use eccentrics that develop conscious awareness as I lower myself down, so I can create more active range of motion. And we can differentiate active and passive range of motion by looking at if I was gonna stretch your legs out, by yourself with you giving no effort, that would be more passive. Active, is you pull yourself into that position. We want active range of motion because it's you controlling your space and as we start to train eccentrically, we can lower ourselves down and be more aware of myself and the positions I have and then get that little bit more range of motion under control which should equate to overall better active range of motion.
And the other component and, as we start looking at why we want to actually incorporate eccentric training in regards to, "hey I want to look better",
2. Eccentric training stimulates this pathway call mTOR. And mTOR is this signaling pathway that actually creates more muscle and that's called, protein synthesis. And you can look at some of the research as it starts diving into why we get more mTOR signaling and it can kinda come down to just the simple fact that we get a lot more soreness and soreness is not always the best indicator, but it's a pretty darn good indicator of you making some sort of response in the body being initiated. And as we get actually get stronger eccentric, that delayed onset muscle soreness actually goes away.
“ And as we get actually get stronger eccentric, that delayed onset muscle soreness actually goes away. ”
Like more all training, but what we can kinda equate that to is we're kind of more tapping into something that we're not hitting that often. Like I said before we're hitting mostly concentric, but also too, we're actually going into this next level of, we require a lot more out of eccentric because we're not utilizing it and loading it as well as we potentially could have structured in terms of that tendon fascia and ligament around it so we're necessitating that by let's create some sort of response to our hormones, ramp up all of these energy substrates around that muscle cell to help it recover so if I ever incur this eccentric load again, I'm better prepared and better equipped.
And over the time of training eccentrically mixed in with some of the concentric stuff, we're gonna constantly stimulate that protein synthesis component and we'll be better equipped to handle concentric loads later, we'll be stronger, we'll be more resilient and the body will actually now start to get this nice process of every time going from a concentric to eccentric, initiating that same mTOR pathway the way that we want.
The normal trajectory of a intensification block is start off around 2 to 3 and then all of a sudden by week four it ramps up to 6, 7 and 8. And I actually want to tie that concept into, we used to do questionnaires on some of the teams we had in college and the questionnaire was a five-question questionnaire of mood, sleep quality, stress, soreness, and energy levels or fatigue. And on a 1 to 5 scale, 5, great, 1 being bad. We started to find some correlations with RPE and as we started dissecting what's impacting RPE, mood and overall sleep quality probably had the biggest impact on that. What that really is is reflective of your nervous system and the more your nervous system's wired, the poorer your sleep quality is and usually when you have poorer sleep quality, your mood kinda reflects that and that kinda also ties into stress.
So if you come in, "I'm really sore, I'm really tired, I'm in a bad mood," you're automatically gonna report a higher RPE. And over the first couple weeks where you're kinda just getting your feet kind of wet with this new concept of eccentrics and figuring out the load, the movement, sometimes we're doing some front-foot elevated front-position split squat, there's a learning curve there where you're not necessarily gonna use your maximum load right away. But as you get a little bit more acclimated with some of these movements, the load goes up and the soreness goes up as well as the response and what's happening outside the gym those RPE's will actually reflect that as more of a reflection of your overall state of your nervous system.
We see low early as we start to get acclimated but we're fully expecting to be really high at the end which I think is a really nice way to utilize your intensification blocks.
We're not gonna do too much too early and we're gonna pay respect to using heavier loads and allow for this nice gradual build up. And then when we get to the end of that block, we've kinda mastered all components of it in terms of the sequence, the technique, what kinda load I should be using, my position, my time and retention. That's when we really wanna push it when our body and everything else is fully prepared to handle that load appropriately. And that's where we're sure we reflect the highest RPE's.
Like I mentioned before, we're using depth drops where the upper body, or lower body, or more reactive type of plyometric in the actual A series. Normally we actually utilize plyometrics in our warm-up. They're kind of just simple jump and landing drills where we're really just focusing on not just the up but the down as well where we're actually pushing into the weight room to get maybe a little bit better focus, a little bit more of a concerted effort. And what we're doing hopefully in preparation for that is what we call a more rapid response drill and the movement prep. By rapid response, more of what is associated with footwork or jump rope. It's this repetitive plyo that's less in terms of height and more in terms of that frequency. And what we're trying to do is really, really address one position so, do we have a good athletic position to absorb force? By athletic position of the lower body, unlocking the ankle, knees and hips, keeping your chest up, a position where you can make a play, or react and you be safe. Same thing for upper body, in a good position you could brace and absorb load.
And what we're doing in our movement prep is hopefully facilitating in that we're coming off of just doing a really good bit about in terms of flexibility, pillar prep and movement, and then we're gonna go finalize that with something where we're gonna really initiate and create this rapid type response to create this nice transition into the weight room and what we always talk about in our movement prep with our coaches is, you should layer your day and the things that you can address in the movement prep, that's gonna be well ahead of the time to hit your training session we absolutely have to do.
And if we can kind of work on landing mechanics, work on getting that nervous system ramped up, if we can see something potentially before we go to a massive movement like a depth jump or depth drop, we got to address it well before it's a problem.
And getting it done in our movement prep segment is our perfect way of creating this nice transition from what we're doing outside as a coach to what we're gonna be able to do inside. Not even queuing or correcting, but potentially seeing a problem before it comes to fruition in the weight room. And that dualistic property of we can't hit these high threshold stuff without a really adequate preparation and we need to make a complete focus on what do we need to do optimally in that movement prep segment to get the most out of our weight room segment?
Q: If you're a new member and this is your first Allegiate team block and you're walking into this knowing semi what to expect, but also not quite sure, from your perspective, Coach, what would you say to that person?
“ Conservative. Listening to your body. Focusing on the recovery aspect.”
A: Conservative. Listening to your body. Focusing on the recovery aspect. It's better to add as oppose to subtract. The method of, “hey I'm gonna give everything I got and just bury myself for the first week and then hope I can piece everything together for the next three weeks” is one that's been proven at this point to not be a very effective strategy and it should never have been an effective strategy.
You're not making up for lost time, you're actually gonna lose time by going a little bit too aggressively too early. So ease into it.
If you go to one of the first training sessions, let's say you come in today and you just get not necessarily worked during the session but at night you feel really tired and beat up or next morning you feel like you're almost hungover, listen to yourself. Come in for mobility class. Go to a strength class. Don't try to bury yourself again in a team class.
Get that 48 hour window of recovery so you can maximize that next session. Cause if you're fatigued or if you're under recovered, you're always gonna be in this deficit and you're never gonna get fully optimized what you're doing in here.
So, if I was a new member, I would say, just be respective of the adaptation cycle and ease into it and listen and just try to focus as much as you can on the recovery aspects as much as you are on the training aspect.