[0:00]What's up guys? My name is John Evans, and in this video, I'm going to teach you how to make your tendons more like springs. When we jump, we use the energy from the approach to recycle it and help us jump higher. Ideally, athletes who are super bouncy are able to better use their tendons like springs and don't use their muscle quite as much. So we're going to use a lot of the research from Verko Shansky to fuse what we know about tendons with training so that we're better able to take advantage of that energy to jump higher. So first, let's go ahead and look at what's actually changing when you train correctly. So if you were to look at a tendon underneath a microscope, it's a bunch of collagen fibers and those collagen fibers are typically wavy. However, when you apply load to them, they go from a crimped, wavy pattern to a straight one. This happens segment by segment and the changing in length makes them act like a bunch of tiny springs. So if you guys have ever done isometrics and you push into something immovable or using a kettlebell isometric, if you're at really low loads, it feels soft. But at high force, these align in parallel and all of the springs are turned on and the tendon functions very stiff. So if you were to plot the force and stretch on a curve, you would see it look like a standard S-shape. There are three regions to this curve, the first is called the toe region, the next is the linear portion and the last is the ultimate failure. In the toe region, you're just removing the slack from the tendon in the linear region, you're actually getting a lot of force for each unit that these tendons lengthen. And at the end range of that curve, you're getting to ultimate failure where you're actually breaking those links and maybe causing a little bit of failure. So the one that we're going to focus on is that linear portion. Typically, you're going to see about 6 to 8% of deformation during this period. But once you get past that, you actually get to ultimate failure where you're causing a little bit of damage that could spur on adaptation. This failure can signal the tendon to start remodeling and this ultimately gives you a stronger tendon. For perspective, let's compare tendons to ligaments. Tendons are a bunch of specific collagen that is very, very elastic in parallel that connects a muscle to a bone. Ligaments connect bone to bone and the collagen isn't necessarily directed in one direction, it goes in all different directions to give you a little bit more stability. One important thing to note is that between these collagen fibers in tendons, there are something called cross links. The more cross links that you have in the collagen fibers, typically the more elastic it is going to function. Now, remember, if we want our tendons to act more like springs, we need more of those cross links. So when we talk about being able to recycle the energy that we get from an approach, we have more cross links in the right direction and when that tendon stiffens up, we get a lot of energy out of it. There are tons of examples of athletes who have very, very stiff tendons and tons of cross links. The one that comes to mind is Stefan Holmes. If you look at all of his metrics across the board, he's not insanely strong in squatting, he's not insanely powerful in power cleans or power snatch. And if you look at a lot of his two-foot jumping, it is unimpressive. However, when you throw him into approach, he takes all of that energy from the approach and orient it vertically, which results in some of the highest vertical velocities of all time. The more energy you give him into the approach, the more energy he gets out of it. He is incredibly efficient at recycling the energy from the approach and using it in his jump. So by the end of this video, hopefully, you'll understand how tendons store and release that energy and function more like springs and less like ropes. You're going to understand what true plyometrics are, specifically shock loading and how to implement that in a very systematic way into your training. And I'll give you an exact six week protocol to use to best take advantage of your tendons and get them functioning like those stiff springs. So first, let's go over the muscular tendinous unit. Muscular tendinous unit is the muscle, all the muscles that are innervated by it from your nervous system, and then the tendon which connects to that muscle and then to the bone. You can view the muscle like the motor. The more motor neurons that you recruit, the more force that you get in that muscle and the more force you're going to be able to apply to the ground. The tendon is going to function like the spring. It connects the muscle to the bone and it allows us to take advantage of that elastic energy, reuse it and get more energy when we push upwards. Let's go over what this looks like in a jump or sprint. So using those toe regions, the first thing that happens when you land is that you're going to take the slack out of that toe region. Essentially, your collagen is going from that wavy shape to a parallel configuration. At this point, you're going to start to build up the energy in the tendon and you're going to travel up the linear part of that S-shape curve. Now, the key is being able to reverse that energy really, really quickly, so we get a lot of the energy that we stored during that elongation period and allowing us to jump higher during the push-off. You can view it like we're borrowing energy from the approach, storing it in the tendon and then using it to get a higher rebound. If you guys have ever seen gazelle prance across a safari, you've probably noticed that it looks like they absolutely bounce. And the reason for this is that they have crazy tendons with a ton of cross links. They have very short muscles and those tendons are incredibly efficient during that linear region. They deform quite a bit in terms of absolutes and they get a lot of energy back. They're incredibly efficient at recycling elastic energy. Now, dissimilarly, if you guys have ever seen a tiger or something like that jump off the ground, it is hyper muscular. They don't have much of a pre-load and they are using their muscles to project themselves upwards. You guys have probably seen that video, the tiger jumping upwards for a piece of meat and it looks like he jumps 48 inches off the ground with just sheer power. Now, they still have tendons, but if you're looking at something like a gazelle bouncing across the safari, again, you can tell that they are using the energy after each successive jump to jump higher, farther and faster. So let's dive into a little bit of Keith Bar's research. I find this super interesting and that is the way that there are different regions of the tendon that function a little bit differently. So near the muscle end, there is a lot of potential for adaptation. This is where you're going to see a lot of the shear forces happening. However, as you get closer to the bone, it functions much, much more stiff. So ideally, we are trying to fine-tune these two different segments of the tendon. We need a lot of stiffness at the tendon, but we also need a lot of compliance close to the muscle because we don't want the muscle to not be able to handle a little bit of stretch that happens when we store and release that energy. Now, that said, a lot of athletes do not pick efficient plyometrics to take advantage of this mechanism. We don't want to be really, really long ground contact times and very moderate effort levels because again, this is going to turn into a muscular effort. At the end of the day, we don't really take advantage of the elastic properties of the tendon and it's not really strength work, so it doesn't really serve any purpose in a good jump training program. This is where Dr. Verko Shansky comes in, the father of shock training. Verko Shansky was testing out depth jumps and shock training. He found that the landings had to be incredibly stiff and violent. He wanted an almost unconscious response to your legs hitting the ground. This resulted in a rapid eccentric to isometric to concentric stretch shortening cycle. The goal was to have a rapid rebound with very, very short ground contact times so we were best able to take advantage of the tendon. Now, why this is interesting is because if you've ever done depth jumps and you've fallen off a really, really high box and seen your ground contact times go up, it means you're probably leaking a lot of that energy from the tendon. And even though you might have been able to jump high, it actually turned into more of a muscular effort instead of a tendinous one. Because one-foot jumping and two-foot jumping is an explosive activity that functions under very, very short ground contact times. We want to take advantage of the muscle's effort as well as the tendon's effort, and shock training is meant to train the nervous system to be able to better use that elastic energy in a jump. So Verko Shansky was very clear about how to do these. He wanted relatively lower boxes, 24 to 30 inches, and the goal was short ground contact times. It wasn't necessarily jumping as high as possible, because again, this is going to move the needle towards a more muscular effort instead of a more tendinous effort. Now, all plyometrics have a given place in a jump program. However, if your goal is to train the tendon, you need the ground contact times to be very short, so we're better able to recycle that elastic energy. So let's go ahead and let's classify these into what we would call jump training and then true shock training. Jump training would be those things where we're actually trying to balance out how much energy we get out of the jump from the tendons and the ground contact time and the muscular effort. If we have a really, really long ground contact time, then it's going to inherently move towards a more muscular effort, meaning that the ground contact times allow you to store and release a lot of energy.
[7:44]There's a lot of cross links, the tendon's functioning very stiff, there's a lot of deformation and as a result, you get a ton of energy out of the jump. So it's important to remember that if your goal is to train the nervous system to recruit the muscle really, really quick and get the tendon to function like a spring, you need incredibly high qualities. The reason why is because your nervous system has to pre-tense, recruit a lot of force in the muscle, prepare for ground contact and this allows you to better take advantage of the tendon. If you're just hammering tons and tons of reps, the quality is going to drop, you're going to run out of energy because your ATP to CP system is not super efficient. And then you're going to end up training more of the muscle than the ability to store and release energy. The ability to recycle that energy is heavily related to the nervous system, but it is also related to the number of cross links in that tendon. We need the muscle to turn on really, really quickly, stiffen up that tendon and then we're able to better recycle that energy. You guys have probably heard people say absorb the force, but we do not want to do this. Again, we want to recycle the energy and use it to help us jump higher, faster. You guys have probably seen athletes jump off crazy, crazy high heights and I gave this analogy earlier, but they're not really using the elastic energy in the tendon. All they're doing is landing from that, dissipating all those forces and then exploding back upwards and that is not the goal of depth jumps and why the higher height is not necessarily better. You have to pay attention to the ground contact times and the quality of the movement. One simple way that you guys could view this is just by watching Usain Bolt sprint down the track at maximum velocity. You'll notice that his legs are really, really straight when he hits the ground and he's incredibly efficient at taking that energy and bouncing into the next contact. The reason why is because tendons are way faster at storing and releasing energy than muscles and ground contact during an upright sprint is around 80 milliseconds. This means the muscle is functioning symmetrically. It doesn't really have time to go through an eccentric, isometric and concentric period. So our goal with shock training and plyometrics is to get the system to function more appropriately. We're trying to get the tendons to function very, very stiffly because the muscle is already pre-contracted and as a result, you're able to bounce off the ground and use all of the energy from your approach in your jump. I've seen this happen a ton of times when I have coached Josh. As he tries to perfect his technique, what ends up happening is that he spends more time on the ground. As a result, he ends up jumping lower because his block foot is really late and he's leaking a lot of energy in that plant leg, which inevitably makes him jump lower. So when you watch someone like Isaiah, the goal is to run really, really fast, push off that penultimate step, reposition in the air as fast as possible, so that when you hit the ground, you're already ready to take off again. This is going to help him to utilize all of the elastic energy that he stored from the approach to jump upwards. If you're really, really late and repositioning the legs, the ground contact time is going to go up a lot, which is going to move it towards a more muscular effort, and ultimately, that is not the goal. We want to balance those variables. So what is the six week plan to help you use your tendons more like springs? Well, I'm going to tell you right now, the first is going to be isometrics. And the reason why is because we want to condition the tendons to be able to handle the loads that are to come. Shock training is incredibly intense and isometrics are going to help the function to improve the number of cross links that happen in parallel. Typically, I load these every six hours and this is according to Keith Bar's research because he basically demonstrates that tendons can't adapt faster. And even though this wasn't a petrie dish, I do think it is super relevant and in practice, it has worked for me and my athletes. So to do these, you're going to want to pick an isometric exercise, whether it's for the Achilles or the patella tendon, where you're loading it at about 70% effort for 30 to 45 seconds. You're going to want to rest about a minute and repeat that three to five times because this does appear to be the threshold for adaptation in the tendon. The reason why it works is because you're giving steady tension to the tendon over a longer interval, which allows for the cross links to slide apart and you to load the entirety of that tendon. After about a week or two of this, you can build in slow squatting. The reason why is because jumping does take advantage of the stretch shortening cycle, which is an eccentric, isometric and concentric condition. So the tendons are really tuning those springs, so we're getting more cross links in the right direction, and the heavy slow strength training is going to train the muscle to be able to use that tendon a little bit better, because you still have to be able to apply eccentric force, isometric force and concentric force. If you're doing this for the calf or you're doing it for the quadriceps and hips, typically, I'll load 4x6 with a 4 second down, pause 1 second and 4 seconds up. Again, this is not necessarily just for tendon health, but it is also for performance. We're trying to increase the engine size, we're trying to increase the displacement, so we get more horsepower on our jumps without pissing off the tendon. We're essentially teaching those collagen fibers to handle force a little bit faster, and tuning the muscle so it is better able to handle that force as we progress to the next stage. So after doing about three to four weeks of that, you can then move into storing and releasing elastic energy, typically in the form of landings first. Now, this is a primer for the following step to come. If you just jump into depth jumps, you're not going to be able to store the energy and you're definitely not going to be able to store and release the energy because you're going to get to that failure range and that is not what we want. Typically, you can start by jumping off an 18 to 24 inch box and you don't need a lot of volume here. I typically keep it around 4x6 with long rest periods between each drop. If you look at Verko Shansi's recommendations, he wants athletes to land completely tall with a stiff torso and no give in the legs when they land. So at this point, if you were to view the gazelle that I talked about, it's really just being able to land from that, really, really fast. So you're seeing these big, big spikes in force and the tendon is starting to deform. Now, the difference is, we're letting that energy dissipate and we're not recycling yet, but that happens in the final week or two of this progression. And that is going to be depth jumps or shock training. This is where we're taking all of those previous elements and using them to potentiate what we do in this last week or two. During this period, you're going to want to do this once or twice a week, and the goal is to step off a box with very, very low ground contact times and rebound as quick as possible. This is going to train the nervous system to turn those muscles on sooner, prepare for ground contact, and then explode off the ground using mostly the tendon and not just the muscle. The reason why you have to wait to do this is because if you just jump into it, odds are your muscle is going to hit failure or your tendon is and you're going to get hurt. Remember, a higher box is not necessarily better. If the box is too high and your ground contact times are flying upwards and your jump is not very good, then that means you're not really getting much energy out of that tendon. You want to see a crisp rebound at whatever height you pick with relatively short ground contact times. Prior to doing these, I typically like to have guys do a few drops ahead of time. If you guys watch the previous YouTube video with Isaiah and I, we did depth drops prior to doing our depth jumps. The reason why is because it helps the tendon warm up a little bit and get ready for the deformation that it's about to go under, because you are about to store and release a ton of energy in that tendon. We're essentially asking the tendon when you hit the ground to stretch about 8%, get a ton of energy out of it, and then explode upward using that energy that you stored during that landing. What we don't want is bleeding all that elastic energy and turning it into a muscular effort. So if you're watching this and you're like, okay, I have a pretty good idea of what I need to do to jump higher and implement this shock training. Well, I want to be clear, this is just one way to do it. Inside of the training that we develop for you at THP strength, we're going to write the exact sets, reps and exercises, so you're able to best take advantage of this property in your tendon. We leave no stones unturned and make sure that high tides raise all ships. Even if you follow this progression, there are going to be some things that you miss, and that's mostly going to be the power training and the fact that you're not doing any accessory work. So while this can give you an initial blueprint, it is not a full exhaustive list to reach your genetic ceiling. Whether you sign up for the core offer or you decide to do the four step sit protocol in the challenge, we're going to look at your individual weaknesses and figure out how well you're actually storing and releasing that energy by looking at your jumps and your ground contact time. You'll also be added to a chat with coaches so they can regularly assess the technique of your cleans, your squats, your RDLs and your jumping. So if you're serious about getting better, consider signing up for the core offer, which right now, if you buy an annual plan, is 50% off the month-to-month cost. So you could either spend $1,800 a year or you could spend $900 a year getting the same exact service, and if you want to get better and take advantage of this, it is going to take time. Alternatively, if you maybe are a little bit skeptical, you can also sign up for the four steps it call, and it is a challenge where if you increase your vertical by two inches in six weeks, we will refund you your deposit. And this should be pretty easy because once we figure out what your weakness is, it's probably going to make up for most of those two inches in that six-week period. That's it, guys. I hope you enjoyed this deep dive on tendons. I hope you understand how to recycle elastic energy in your jump, and if you have any questions, please leave it in the comment section below. I try to get back to every single one of you guys. Like the video and I'll see you guys next time.
