Barbell Shrugged - How to Regain Speed and Power to Build Athleticism w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash #770

Episode Date: October 23, 2024

On this episode of Barbell Shrugged, we’re diving into the keys for regaining speed and power—whether you’re coming off an injury, a long layoff, or just looking to level up your performance. Speed and power are foundational for athleticism, and they require a smart approach to rebuild. We’ll explore the science behind explosiveness, focusing on neural adaptations, muscle fiber recruitment, and how to maximize your fast-twitch capabilities. We’ll break down the importance of proper recovery, which is often overlooked but critical for regaining speed. You’ll learn about the best exercises to activate your central nervous system and enhance your power output, including plyometrics, sprints, and Olympic lifts. The podcast will cover progressive programming, designed to gradually increase intensity without overloading your body. We’ll also talk about mindset, discussing how to stay patient during the process and the role of consistency in your training. Whether you're a seasoned athlete or just trying to get back into peak form, this episode will provide actionable insights to help you regain your speed and power faster than you thought possible. Work with RAPID Health Optimization Links: Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrugged Family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, the homies are back! Doug, Travis, and I, we're talking about speed and power, elasticity and muscles, the way that you can be training them. I know this is a hot topic for amongst all of the, let's call them the middle-agers. The people in their 40s and 50s, they're still trying to be jacked and strong and fast and athletic. And this is really like an approach that you can start to take and understanding how we and you can likely start to add strength and power, speed and power back into your training regimen. And then a lot of the pieces of the puzzle that you might be missing and how to start working on them. If you are interested in continuing to develop power and knowing that is one of the largest signs of longevity and just overall health. So as always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com.

That is where you can learn more all about rapid health optimization, how we can take you to feeling and performing better than you ever have in your entire life. You can access all of those resources and schedule a call to learn more over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larsen, Coach Travis Mast. Just the homies hanging out today. Bros, homie show. Homie show. Doug, we were having a really in-depth conversation about the word homie the other day. That's like what I teach my little dude to call his friends. I feel like the word homie doesn't get enough street cred.

Yeah. Like every time we come home, first off, we just last week started playing street hockey and the cul-de-sac and I'm out there just dicing up six-year-olds. Like they just do not have a chance. They've never seen a pair of hands like i still possess at the age of 41 and i have taken more six-year-olds lunch money and talk smack to them every time i score a goal that it really should be uh i shouldn't get this much enjoyment out of it but i when we talk about hands with hockey like yeah you know when i hear hands i think baseball or like football you're catching yeah what is having great hands in hockey um it means that you uh the same thing it doesn't like

basketball or like you just handle the puck very very well you got mad handles i get it i get it yeah okay okay um yeah that's that's like the that was um i'm not the biggest i'm not the fastest but i can i can get around six-year-olds uh oh it's so good i love it um today on barbell shrug friends oh and then doug every time the reason i haven't said that was because every time we try and get a game going now i go anson you need to go find all your homies and get them in the cul-de-sac right now. And that little man, three years old, will run to all of his friends' house and start knocking on doors and tell, when the parents answer, he goes, my homies need to get to the cul-de-sac. I feel like I'm really doing it.

I feel like I'm really exceeding parenting goals here when my little three-year-old's knocking on doors going, homies need to come to the cul-de-sac right now to play hockey. He'll be a future salesman at Rapid. I try to make them ask for everything from all the people. Perfect. Never, never allow me to ask for them. Every time a little kid, every time a little kid comes to my door and says like can riley come out to play and they like come to the door and ask if kids can come play like we used to do i fucking love it i'm like hell yeah they can dude come on inside let's do this yeah

yeah 100 well we live in the country there's none of that going on dude i'm headed to the country buddy where are you going where are y'all going? 17 acres, my man. Lewisburg, North Carolina. Oh, you bought, did you buy that land you were talking about? Yeah, we did. My man, you're awesome. I got an orchard all of a sudden in my life. Proud of you. Proud of you.

Wild. I'm a Starlink person. Nice. You'll be available. When you're out there, you go to Starlink. Nice. Telling Doug yesterday, all these politics people need to leave

Elon alone. If he goes down, so does my internet. I need him. I need Elon. I love Elon. I love any man who says what he thinks. Even if I don't like it, I just love the fact that he's not afraid to say it. Gangster.

Thanks for letting us all hang out in your ears morning uh on barbell shrugged we're actually going to talk about real fitness stuff uh we're going to talk about speed and power and how we are uh assessing training programs and things that we're thinking about because the number one thing that as we all get older now that we're all in our 40s and mash and your fifties. Is that right? Yeah. Yes. Very wise. Gray beard there. 51. I'm the strongest 51 year old that exists. Um,

do you think you are? No, no, no. There's this guy, uh, David Ricks, who is,

um, like he's quite, he's like 60 maybe. And he's still competing in powerlifting at a high level. Like he just squatted 650. Whoa. But I mean, I'm pretty sure I'm positive I could if I wanted, but I'm just like, I have no desire to put 650 pounds on my back.

I saw you pull 700 cold like seven years ago. That was not long ago, pulling 700 without warming up. Yeah, it was crazy. So, yeah, that was my long ago pulling 700 without warming up yeah that was crazy so yeah that was my last that was my last 700 deadlift so probably the last one ever and you saw it that's awesome i didn't think about that farm yeah at the mash strength spectacular oh because some guy said uh he this is young boy said come uh once you get in here with us old man he called me i was like i'll do just that um well let's dig in yeah speed and power specifically power uh really this is i think about this all the time you know uh i don't think about power much until i'm like standing on a box or getting ready to go jump.

And that little thing happens in your brain that goes, maybe think about this. Maybe don't push the limits. Like if you're standing on a swing set and you got to go jump off like one of the little platforms and your brain goes, hold up. We don't really catch ourselves too often anymore.

That's when I know that needs to be added to my training. And I need to keep working on that thing because your brain should not be telling you that, especially for, for people that consider them to be like strong, athletic, well, well functioning people.

It's actually like one of the big points that I think should be brought up today is like, you're talking about landing from jumps. That's like deceleration. There's always higher forces in deceleration than acceleration. So like, as you go from your teens, twenties and thirties into your forties, fifties and sixties, the amount of speed power-based things you're doing that are concentric only versus eccentric, not it would be eccentric only, but versus having a large eccentric component is that that ratio is going to shift instead of

doing box jumps where you jump up and then you jump down you bound back up now you're jumping up and stepping down but you're jumping up and then stepping down so you're doing the east the the concentric components so you're still you're still contracting your muscles as hard as you can against against gravity so so you can jump but you're not jumping down maybe so the the amount of forces you're experiencing on the on the downside are essentially, but you're not jumping down maybe. So the amount of forces you're experiencing on the downside are essentially eliminated, but you're still getting the concentric piece. Same goes for running stair sprints or hill sprints. It's the concentric part or doing sled pushes or sled sprints, full speed sled sprints.

You're doing the concentric only part, but not the eccentric component. So it's a very safe way to still train for power uh with while radically reducing your injury potential 100 and i think that that's definitely where we should all start it's like here's what happens um you see the biggest injury especially at my age you'll see the guy go pick up you know play a game of pickup basketball and boom kill he goes out and kill his. I saw it when my I saw my old high school football coach jump in a pickup basketball game

and I heard his Achilles snap. It was horrible, but it's just because, you know, we don't cross the gym owner just went.

Yeah, but it's so true and you can't you can't just stop doing something and especially, you know, you don't do anything

like that for a decade all of a sudden i'm gonna play basketball and expect your connective tissue not to have been you know to some degrading it's going of course it's going to be some there's going to be degradation for sure so yeah we had that happen our gym we had we had like the the biggest divorce attorney in town was doing box jumps and he was was like, he's a fairly young, fit, muscular dude, but he probably hadn't done like box jumps and plyos in high volume in a long time or debatably even ever. But as he was bounding, you know, jumping off and then bounding and jumping back up, he did.

He popped an Achilles tendon and it was loud and he fell on the ground and like, we ran over there and we were like, yeah, all right. And he goes, I'm not going to sue you. And we go, okay, cool. Thank you. All right. That's really what we're asking get to the hospital here you're good

someone take care of this man don't take me down i have like i have like 17 dollars and 35 cents that you can take from me have you noticed how it's all concrete floors and it's very dirty in here there's a reason for that i just graduated from graduate school i have nothing so i'll give you this box some iron plates that were donated to me no doubt so but it's so true though and like the power like say people who are listening who are our age or aging you know 40 and above you think why do i even care about power but it's so important you know you go out and play pickup basketball football with your children or grandchildren as you get even older and you need to be prepared. And plus think about this. And I heard Andy talking about this. You know, you're, you're going through the house

and you trip and fall. You need the speed to be able to prevent that fall, but we, you know, you lose it. And it's one of the first things of all the things, even over VO2 max, your power, you will lose quicker and more suddenly than any of your other attributes. So it's an important one if you want to live a while, especially if you want function, which all three of us agree. We don't want longevity. I want to live, but I want to be quality life. Yeah. I'd love to hear your guys' thoughts because Cause when I think about the, the, the power side of things, there's obviously like the call it like a one rep max, the, the max vertical. Um, I feel like the thing that I, um, maybe lack the most as I

have not been training like speed, call it like Olympic lifting for man going on like six years now. Um, or, or even CrossFit in general is like the, the bounding and the elasticity side of it. Like when I, um, a lot of times when I'm with the kids outside and I'm always just trying to like do stuff, I'll go over to like just the curb and try to do like just little bounding exercises. And I've noticed that I, the elasticity side of the muscles, it doesn't work like it used to. I hate that too. It drives me crazy because I very much view, um, like speed and power as just general athleticism. Like you don't have fast people that aren't athletic. It's like people that hit golf balls a long ways. They hit it straight. They don't hit it

a long ways to the right or left. It's always straight. But if you can be fast and have the speed and power, but still be lacking that kind of the elasticity, the spring of that musculature. What is that? Why does that part seem to go away? Or is it just because I only train it casually thinking about it, like in a playful way versus like actually getting up and trying to do like rebounding box jumps or things like that? Well, a lack of elasticity is that that's when you're at risk of tearing the tendon. And here's why. It's because a lot of the properties that causes us to be elastic would be our connective tissue, particularly tendons.

We definitely think about, we had Dr. Keith Barr on our show a long time ago, and he talked about it. So when you're losing that elasticity it's a big big red flag to tell you that i'm also now at risk of a big you know major tendon or even you know ligament tear and so it's a it's a red flag and it just to do to improve elasticity especially i mean it's not just tendons there's also also like, you know, titans, a protein molecule inside our muscle that all it does is anchor myosin. And it's the biggest actually protein filament,

but it's really important to elasticity as well. But tendon is the one that puts you at risk of getting an injury. And so there's a couple of ways, normal strength training, you can do just normal squats. One, a good idea to do to improve elasticity at a higher rate would be doing isometrics. And the reason why is because you can do it more often. So let's say that you really

wanted to get ready for, you know, a pickup basketball, or you want, you want to do this 40 and older basketball league. And so you want to prepare quickly. You can do, you could conceivably do isometric work every single day because it only takes like six hours to recover from. The key would be to do it in a lengthened position. And by that, I mean, say, let's say that I want to improve my knee joint. And so think about getting into the bottom of a squat and pushing into a barbell that's loaded so heavy, you can't move it. And so you're, you're improving that patella tendon in a lengthened position, or, you know, when it comes to the Achilles, same thing, getting into the bottom of a standing calf raise and pushing into something

you can't move. You could do that every single day and improve that tendon quality. That would improve thickness. But when it comes to, you know, the, what is it? The matrix, the collagen matrix that you need also, then you need to start doing the bounding. And what you said, Anders, is a brilliant idea. To start nice and easy, just up onto the curb.

Jump rope is a very simple low you know low um low load low risk way of preparing and getting those um connections to happen yes yeah i remember um we took advanced muscle physiology in graduate school i actually took that class with andy there's only four of us in the class and one professor so it's like a super small class but awesome yeah it was great it was just like sitting around the table chatting basically although it was a three-hour class right after lunch and so i would get in there after eating a huge lunch and i would be so i would just like be trying not to fall asleep for a three-hour class you're doing the college nod yeah yeah there's no hiding in that

class but i love i love the, but I was always sleepy. I was training a ton back then and probably not sleeping as much as I should. So I'd always be sleepy after lunchtime. But anyway, I do remember talking about how as you age, the ratio or the relative ratios of collagen and allicin shift over time. And I don't remember to what degree it was because over time you have, again a percentage basis um you know less and less and less fast switch fiber fewer and fewer fewer fast switch fibers and more and more and more slow twitch fibers typically on average as you age you know assuming you're kind of a normal-ish person there but um you know i'm assuming again i don't remember all this um every detail here but i'm assuming as you lose elastin, you're less elastic.

And as you gain more collagen, it's more likely to tear instead of stretch. So those changes over time can contribute to it. But yeah, to your point about the low impulse plyos, on a practical level, if I structure an individual training session with with the template of you know you warm up and then you do speed based things and then power based things and then strength based things and then kind of volume hypertrophy based things and then kind of conditioning at the end is like an easy template for a single training session not the only way to do it but that's a common way to do it and you wouldn't have to do all five um sections you could you could just do speed work strength work and then go home or you could just do yeah you could just do power work and hypertrophy and then go home like but that's

kind of the the order of things on average so usually as a part of my warm-ups i incorporate low level speed and plyos into my warm-ups and that's like that's like you know high knees and butt kickers and lateral shuffles and skips and and all those types of things that you probably used to do when you're warming up for football practice. But most people just don't do it on average when they're, when they go to the gym. Uh, but luckily now most gyms, even regular big box gyms have like a turfed area at, uh, for, for most of the gyms I go to there's, there's somewhere where I can do things like that. And so now when I go train, that's very often what I do in my warmups is I do some type of, um, very easy lateral skips i

mean maybe even like single leg bounding but like it's all pretty low level stuff and then and then maybe on the speed side of it again i might do like full speed burpees is one other way that i do speed stuff that doesn't beat me up too much where i do you know three burpees in a row where i go as fast as i can down you, essentially sprawl like I'm at wrestling practice. And then I, then I stand up and jump as high as I can and sprawl again and stand up and jump as high as I can. I'll do like a triple where I'm not getting tired. Really.

I'm just working on moving full speed. Or maybe I'll do that where I'll, I'll do the burpee and then jump up onto a box and then step down, then do a burpee and jump onto a box and step down. So like doing full speed burpees or, or even full speed assault bike sprints, you'll do an EMOM where every minute on the minute, you do like an eight second sprint where you're not doing assault bike sprints where you're like going to throw up. You're just working somehow, some way at moving as fast as you possibly can, which most people just don't do.

So if you continue to do, you know, if I do assault bike sprints, 100% full speed, I'm not going to hurt myself. I can do that until I'm 75 years old. I'll probably go slower when I'm 75 than I will right now. But still it's the, it's the intention to move as fast as possible that, that I'm trying to do. And I'm trying to do it in a conservative way that will essentially never injure me. You know, that's, that's what I loved about Andy's, uh, even when, uh, he did his podcast on VO two max and he was talking about in his warm-ups, there's power and speed warm-ups just like you're talking about.

Mainly think about, too, because the importance of power besides just, say, basketball, but even if you want to run a marathon, you've got to have those elastic qualities and a strong tendons to be able to do that without injury as well so he at the beginning of all of his um vo2 and even his cardiovascular uh podcast he talked about the warm ups all included some type of bounding um even he had even had strength work in all of them to once again prepare the joints for the beating that you're going to take so it's not just when you talk power you're not just saying i want to train to be the most explosive the beating that you're going to take. So it's not just when you talk power, you're not just saying, I want to train to be the most explosive human on earth. You're really just talking about the qualities and the physiological changes that go along with power training.

Yeah. Kind of adding on to like the bounding and just me playing on the curb and popping up the stairs and things like that. Hey, wait, is homie still aware people still use that word oh i'm bringing it back yeah we're saying we've been we've been saying it lately okay i truly believe that homie like where are my homies is like the coolest way to talk about your bros homies i like mostly because i think it went away i don't know if kids are saying it these days but i'm raising a three-year-old son that only calls his friends

as homies homies i like but also if i was in my bros yet right he's yeah but like you can get him like dude you gotta go knock on the homies doors and get him going homies i'm gonna help you out with this cause yeah get my kids doing it yeah it's better it's these things go away they go in cycles we can bring back homies immediately i like homies what do you say doug i was gonna say if someone from the future came to me in high school and said hey when you're in your 40s you're gonna you're gonna call people homie i'd be like i don't think so man i don't that doesn't sound accurate to me yeah here i am sounds it sounds way better um the um the part of the athleticism that i um i really like the most and i feel like really starts to fade is um you're talking you're talking

about the like if you sign up for a basketball league and that's like the most dangerous thing you can possibly do in your life is go it really is basketball and and that's like the most dangerous thing you can possibly do in your life is go it really is basketball and think that you're just gonna like cross up your friend without blowing your achilles and you're gonna jump like you used to yeah um but is that reaction time um and is is the reaction time kind of the elasticity paired with the neurological side of it? Because I feel like that's the thing that I'm chasing more than do I get to go run and sprint or have I lost an inch or two off of my already pathetic vertical that never was good to begin with? I've lost so much. Yeah, you used to be able to dunk.

The side to side or like that reaction time is really the goal that I'm chasing after. The athleticism of not just being able to hop up and down on the curb and feel good, but I feel like the part of that that I struggle with the most is actually the reaction time of my feet hitting the ground,

the wires going all the way up to my brain and being able to, uh, essentially do tiny little depth jumps back to back many of them in a row. But I don't have that like athleticism and, um, like almost like the neurological side of using the power, um, that has probably eroded the most, um, that back because that's that's my ability to get up and go play like i don't like that's like going and playing tag and not feeling like you can like you can cut there's like three components there's the rate coding side of things which is the signal you know from the brain down the alpha motor neuron to the muscle then there's the stretch sorting cycle which is at the joint um and this is not

this is only when you're cutting you know the stretch sorting cycle only comes into play like when you're talking about you plant your foot change directions um and then there's the elasticity those are the three and all three of them are improved and sometimes they're together but you can target all three of them doing different things so yeah actually would love to see a piece that i really want to um like in in the end the thing that i want out of my whole life is to be an athlete yeah just be athletic you can go play and you have freedom of freedom of function freedom of movement um just freedom in general to to get up and go do what you want to

do right just mentally i want to be consider myself to be an athlete literally until the day i die i totally agree but that piece of it is that like i if you if you measured my my vertical at 25 i bet it's really close to the same, but the problem with measuring my vertical, well, I was, you know, if I get three inches off the ground, like at most in my best day, I was slapping the second row of netting on the basketball hoop. Like not the top second row, the bottom second. That's rough. That's rough. Like it's really, there's not much jumping going on. So like maybe that's reduced some, but I don't care about standing in place and doing it. I want to be moving at full speed and be able to stop.

Wait for it to stop and then redirect. I want to be able to plant and cut. I want to be able to get up and just go as hard as I possibly can without having to worry about one, injury, of course, but two, feeling unathletic in those movements which has to be a a some sort of um erosion of the neurological function at the speed at which those wires are are firing right that make hopping up on the curb for a set of 10 just where i'm only like bounding off of my toes. It's all of it together. It really is.

It's like, it's practicing because, you know, when it comes to rate coding, there's also things like, you know, the coordination, you know, of the signals being sent. There's also like the being able to also cut off things like the antagonist. So when you're doing say when you're cutting you want your your hamstrings to cut off when the quads are working so and that comes down to just doing the things more often you don't necessarily play basketball but you need to do

things like cutting you need to do things like shuffling backpedaling in practice basically you know gpp is what you're talking about but then when it comes to improving your ability to to make that plant then it comes down to you know improving the stretch sorting cycle improving elasticity and there's definitely ways for each and so yeah yeah i remember hearing that about like the most like the fastest most coordinated people you mentioned the antagonist like i remember hearing a while about like the most, like the fastest, most coordinated people. You mentioned the antagonist. Like I remember hearing a while ago, like the, it might even been in that same muscle course that I was talking about where the, the fastest, most coordinated people, the antagonist muscles would be the most relaxed.

So it wasn't necessarily about all the power they could produce. It was the fact that for those people, for whatever reason, I don't remember the rationale, but the antagonist muscles would, would relax the quickest relative to other people. And that way, whether they're playing basketball or running sprints or whatever, they have the minimum amount of resistance coming from their own body, which allowed them to be faster and very, I used to call it being very whippy. Especially when I was doing like, you know, second pull for snatches or whatever. Like you can be very whippy.

You have that kind of of that very explosive uh very fluid look to you pro baseball pitcher i think that's 180 pounds and they throw 95 and i'm like yeah their arms are just whippy we have a guy here that you know science-based i mean but he's right you know i understand we say saying would be and it's another reason why i think weightlifting is so good for athletes is because a weightlifter has to be super good at that coordination between the agonist antagonist. You'll see all the great weightlifters. You know, when their quads are working, their hamstrings are off, and it's just they move so fluid, and there's none of that. You know, a powerlifter, on the other hand, say when he's doing a squat. I'll give you an example.

Nathan Dameron, probably one of the greatest squatters ever. Freaky. Freaky. He used to be my favorite. I love that. Like, how did I do that? The bar used to just wave. Oh, yeah.

It was like you found him a special, like, loose bar or something. But it wasn't. So much weight on there. It was just his coordination. And, like, I used to watch him squat. He timed it so well. Perfect. bar or something but it wasn't so much weight on there it was just his coordination and like i used to watch him squat and like he never timed it so well perfect because he was so good at that movement right and there was no like when i squat it like i still i mean he never was able to squat as much as i was able to squat when i was young ever but it was the way he squatted. I watched him squat when he squatted 705

versus when I squatted 705 was like two different moves. His was just like so fluid and fast, whereas mine was like slow and grindy because my agonist antagonist were both supporting each other, trying to keep that stability. It's just two different ball games. It's super true. He used to bounce.

Whatever he did to time the, the push out of the hole was, it was like cheating. It's like when you watch somebody that's like super good at clean and jerk, they, they stand up out of the hole, super easy effortlessly. Yeah.

It's like the bar does all the work for them. I never figured out how to time it that well. Oh man. Like with, with a squat, that boy, like it never was really a much, does all the work for them. I never figured out how to time it that well. Oh, man. Like with a squat, that boy, like it never was really how much, even though squat is 705. And when that was, when he's like 20 years old,

it was just how he squatted. Like when he would do 405 versus like anybody else in the whole world, it was like two different movements because there was no, there was no agus antagonist working against each other there was the synergist helping out and then there was the agonist doing the work and the boy was so fluid but that is what you know for your answer your question that is what you just need to do those movements more often you need to keep doing some strength

training of course and then you know bounding bounding is really what we need to make sure that we have that good strong you know tendons ligaments and so one thing we don't do too like it crushes me boys when i jumped out like it was a year ago and i went out and played basketball with my kids and i went to jump and it was like somebody turned the off button on you know dude that's what I was talking about at the beginning of the show when you go to jump off like just like a little play structure of some sort your brain's like no no no no no no you weigh 190 pounds and that times gravity means you aren't in good enough shape to do this right now stop your brain just cuts off it doesn't allow to happen i've worked so hard to

improve my jumping you know it's been a year and like i finally this is sad i'm almost embarrassed to say it but like uh so i finally got my vertical to 27 inches but you're talking to a guy who used to jump over 38 inches ongoing it's just 11 inches less right but it But even that took me a year to get back to. That's how bad my power and elasticity had gotten. Dude, what do you think about the quality of the actual tissue, like muscle tissue plays into this conversation? A lot, you know? Yeah.

Because as we grow older like doug said you know the the percentage of slow twitch fibers or even your fat it's not like that your type 2x and 2a fibers all of a sudden turn to one it's just they take on qualities of you know like the slower they become more you know oxygenated versus like that all being all creatine, phosphorus, creatine, or whatever, phosphorus and creatine. They just take on this slow twitch qualities, and Titan starts to get less. That's a big one in our muscle.

It's not just fast twitch, slow twitch looking at the mice, and it's also the quality of that Titan protein filament people don't talk about. If you don't't use it you're gonna lose it that's so dang true you know yeah there's a there's a company that we're kind of loosely partnered with called springbok and we have a guy that we work with that was a physical therapist with them and one thing i've learned from him is that springbok takes mri data and creates a 3d model of muscle mass and one of the things they measure is fat infiltration and if i if i remember correctly fat infiltration

which i don't believe is the same as like having building up intramuscular uh fat from like endurance training i think this is something separate uh but fat infiltration in muscles is like highly correlated to injury potential so even even things like that and i don't know exactly what contributes specifically to the type of fat infiltration that they're talking about but but it is a change in muscle quality that they i believe have correlated specifically to injury potential for hamstring pulls and what have you i mean i i think even like when we start getting those micro injuries throughout our life too, a lot of times that's correlated to increases in that fat infiltration around the muscle. For whatever reason, I have guaranteed there's been a lot of fat infiltration around my muscles.

So it's just a different ballgame. Yeah. I would only assume that fat infiltration around your muscles goes up as you get older. It does. If it's negative, your muscles goes up as you get older it does if it's negative it probably goes up as you get older and we should probably qualify too when people say power it's just that force times velocity that's a big range so anything really is power it's just that i think but what most people think about is that the producing force is that very high rate but then you know that it's been separated by most in speed versus strength um strength you know you got that strength speed

and speed strength you know you got the fast really fast like jumping and then you have like the clean those are those are both powerful but one is much faster. So they're all important. I also want to what degree your involuntary muscle fibers lose their effect in this over time if you're not training them. This ties back into your conversation about stretch shortening cycles where if you have muscle spindles that are only activated when they're quickly stretched, like the easy example, the kind of the classic example is when you're at the doctor's office and, and you're, you're sitting on the table and they, and they, they bonk the front of your patellar ligament. And, and then since that gives your quads a little stretch, you automatically contract your quad muscle involuntarily. So some percentage of your muscles, uh, or muscle fibers, rather, I don't know what the percentage is. Say it's 1%

are involuntary. You can't contract them on purpose. Like you can contract your quad on purpose, but it's only 99% of them or whatever the real number is. I'm not sure what the real number is, but when you're doing a counter movement, jump as an example, you you're standing and you want to jump as high as you can. You squat quickly and then jump. And then because you got a small or rather a fast stretch of your, of your muscles and your, you know, that cross your knee and your hips, you're able to jump a little bit higher than you would otherwise which is why if you just squat down and pause for five seconds and then try to jump you're gonna be like oh that didn't feel good i feel like i could jump way higher if i just start standing go down quickly and then and then kind of quote unquote

kind of like bounce up and so having that stretch shortening cycle allows you to jump higher because you're using both your voluntary and involuntary muscle fibers but i do wonder to what degree as you get older those involuntary muscle fibers become kind of less active or less effective and and how that correlates to just to just general raw even like isometric strength like are you are they losing their effectiveness potentially which i'm assuming they do because you're just less strong or because you do less power work or because there's some type of actual physical structural change with with actin and myosin and collagen and elastin and fat infiltration and what have you. I don't know the research on this, but I'd imagine muscle spindles become less effective as you get older for a handful of reasons. Yeah, totally. And like what happens is not you lose the muscle spindles because muscle spindles run parallel with, you know, the muscle fibers, but they just

get worse at their job. And so, and for a lot of reasons, because when you use the, when you get really good at using the stretch sorting cycle, not only do the muscle spindles cause that passive force production, but they're also a big part of what cuts off the antagonist. That's the relationship they have as well. So they have this passive force. They turn off your antagonist. And then there's the other thing, the Golgi tendon organ too,

is a lot of times what it will do is it's an inhibitor. And so if you're not using that stretch sorting cycle ongoing and continuing to add more and more um eccentric force in there the goldie tendon organ will actually inhibit force production because it thinks you're about to snap your tendon and so that's the thing as well so really what happens when i'm long story short is that your brain, neurologically, you just don't get – you lose your ability to perform that stretch-shortening cycle at higher rates because it's so – because it's really – it's not there. The stretch-shortening cycle is not there to make us great athletes. The body has it there to keep us from getting hurt. So it becomes more and more about that and less and less about you know using passive force to make you a great athlete it starts shutting you know it starts inhibiting force production

to avoid injuries and starts um creating less and less of that passive force from the spindles the goldie tendon organ the muscle spit you know muscle spindles both lose their ability to do their jobs. Athleticism. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Again, I also wonder to what degree the, and I'm going to get all these terms. Not exactly right.

Cause I haven't studied all this in a long time. You're mentioning rate coding earlier, which made me think of this topic. So maybe you can correct me as far as which part of what I'm about to say is actually rate coding and which is something else that I can't remember. But as an example, your muscles only contract 100% or nothing. Each individual muscle fiber only contracts at 100%. But your muscles are kind of like a ponytail. There's lots of little individual muscle fibers. Each hair in this example is a muscle fiber.

And so they don't all contract 100% of those fibers. Say there's 10,000 of them in the ponytail example. They're not all 10,000 contracting all the exact same time. You're going to get an asynchronous contraction where they're all, all 10,000 and they're kind of randomly firing it at different times. And then you get this like smooth asynchronous contraction, but not all 10,000 are going to fire as a single unit, right? The more well-trained you are with speed speed and power the more they will fire as a single unit and the faster they'll they'll uh the faster you will recruit them another way to think about this is if we're doing like a tug of war and the three of us are on the tug of war team

but we have to fire in order where andrews is in front he has to start pulling and then i start pulling and then you start pulling travis the more the the more likely or that rather the the shorter the duration in between when andrew starts and then i start and then you start if it's three seconds in between or he starts and then i wait and then i start and then three seconds later you start we're probably going to lose but if he starts and then a quarter of a second later i start and then a quarter of a second you start within a half a second we're all three pulling we're going to pull a lot harder and so like compressing the time in between the contractions in that example is something that probably changes over time as well, where there's more time in between a max voluntary

contraction of an individual muscle fiber. Whereas if you're well-trained, the duration between is a lot shorter. You're talking about a Heneman size principle. It's a motor unit so a motor unit is the alpha motor neuron and every muscle fiber that it uh innervates it innervates and when when one you know is caught upon it it's all or nothing if if the alpha motor neuron is you know uh if it what is it uh the if it goes past that, whatever. So when it's activated, it gets all of them.

Yeah. Once you pass the threshold, every single muscle fiber that innervates is turned on. And so you're talking about the synchronization. motor units which are the the big ones that have the they're they don't have a lot of like um lasting time meaning they're super strong super explosive they have all the fast twitch fibers but you know they don't last you know like a you know slow twitch fiber those must you can those last forever that's when we walk we're using those low threshold motor units yeah but when you use those high threshold motor units yeah but when you use those high threshold motor units it's like a explosion and the more you use it the more synchronization that's the word that you get all at the same time they they happen at the same time you get

it explodes and that's when fast people like a usain bolt like those things turn on all at the same time and then turn off at the same time. So you're talking about action potentials and refractory periods. I haven't talked about this in a while. Me either. You know, I don't usually use all this terminology on the show. Yeah. So, but I did write a pretty cool article about the, uh, intimate size principle on Jim aware.

And it is the way I wrote it's pretty cool. Cause it's a whole lot more than just um just motor units being recruited it's synchronization it's how you use that principle to improve athleticism and explosion and power you know depending on whatever it is you're trying to do so yeah yeah uh that's a whole lot of uh layman's term physiology on my end and then slightly better terminology on travis's end but slightly better yeah uh back on the practical side of all this like again we're in our 40s and 50s we still should be training for speed and power to try to just hang on to whatever speed and power we uh we currently have for as long as possible here so we talked about um including kind of skips and

high knees and butt kickers and kind of general uh you know like football warm-ups i'll call them in your uh in your training weight training warm-ups uh we talk about doing concentric only hill sprints box jumps uh we talk about jumping rope a little bit um we talk about doing like the assault bike sprints um even like shadow boxing is also very good i find shadow boxing for me if you're like if i'm shadow quickly, also just like check some box of me moving fast in a very conservative way. But what other things you guys have that are very practical that you currently use that are effective for you? I think over time. So when I did this whole year trying to get my power back, I started out very general, like some jump rope, getting my strength training and some cleans and box jumps,

only box jumps, jump up, step down. And then I slowly started adding some depth jumps. So the first thing I did was landings. So you step off a box and land. You want to absorb that force as quickly as you can, decelerate as quickly as you can in a nice position. Then I turned that into more of a box jump into a jump depth jump onto a box and then i started adding hurdles but this one i i mean i let me emphasize

slowly like literally over a year before i'm doing these things then i started doing ael like here's a you know accentuated eccentric loading is such a great tool to strengthen the tendons to encourage type 2 fiber recruitment and it's just a great way to for potentiation to improve power production so i would start here i would start the cycle i would use heavy dumbbells lower them let go jump up to a box step off and then a series of depth jumps over hurls. Like a weight releaser type thing? Like a weight releaser, but with jumping. And all of that was preceded by like a 70% squat as fast as possible.

So for the even more potential. We used to call that complex training we do like a heavy movement and then a speed movement right afterward yeah i love that i love that stuff i love it so much for me as an you know as an older person trying to still be athletic it just yeah it's fun too so you get your squats in you get your jumps in and i don't have a lot of time so it's it's not practical to think i'm going to do this big squad day then three days later i'm going to do my power day so throw it all in there crush it you know like a med ball and kettlebell throws are actually great for this as well we see a lot of that we take kettlebells out like onto a field just metal kettlebells were onto a field where we

didn't care if we made huge divots in the ground but just do kettlebell swings and then just just like strongman style just throw them as high as you can over your head you know do two swings and then throw as high as you can i used to love doing that as a kid i haven't done a long time but um it's a very conservative way to do power training well luckily for us we actually do that with med balls in you know inside rise and with uh sarah is there she's a strong she does strong man strong woman training anyway she's got the person yeah strong human yeah if she throws she has this thing where you can measure the distance of how high you throw it up and over like a super high hurdle so yeah yeah anyway i've enjoyed that a ton throwing med balls over that yeah did i just try and incorporate it all into my life like the

life i uh if if i if i try to think about uh like adding things to a training program there's like the trade-off of what am i going to get rid of and yeah if i'm training like if i'm lifting heavy a couple days a week i do a day of sprints and then I do some like mild time trials. It's hard for me to like, want to get away from any of that stuff. So a lot of these things just get built in. Like if I'm playing outside, I'll go over to the curb and try and do like three sets of 10 and the most

athletic way of just bounding up to the curb. I'll just race the kids up the stairs, but I have to do bounding hops and they get to crawl up as fast as they can. Like I, I tried to trick my kids and myself into training all the time to just make it all fit. Knowing that like, I'm not, I'm in a pretty good rhythm over the last year of, um, like running and sprinting really hard. And I feel like my body absolutely loves it. Like, even if you're just doing it on the air, um, I feel like, um, even, even on like a physiological level of, of this speed and power kind of conversation,

it's like most people I feel like don't do it because it's really hard up front. But if you do it consistently, you realize that your body raves speed and power. It like at the highest level, it desires being very fast and very powerful. And if you can get through the initial like pain of running a mile as hard as you can once a week, you start to like be addicted to it. And if you, if you, uh, can convince yourself for a month to run hill sprints and feel like you're going to throw up at the top every single time you go, like it's a hundred percent as hard as you can, or it's just on an airdyne and you're doing 45 second all out sprints. It totally sucks at the beginning, but about a month into it, your body is in, it gets past the pain and it really starts to crave that feeling. And it's probably the healthiest thing you can do

is to get your body moving powerfully and fast. Anecdotally, I would harvest it. You will feel so good. It's amazing. I'm no longer like chasing a six minute mile, but I never want to be outside of like a 630. Like it's just, I just want to always be running as fast as I can. Like it's so ingrained in our physiology,

probably in our genetics. There's something in there that turns on that just makes your body feel like it's flying that we've probably been doing for an extremely long amount of time. And it was, it was before being lazy was allowed. And we just had to, that was like a function of life that made us feel some sort of like physiological worth that comes along with that feeling. And, um, I think that you should just do it as much as possible. Um, and with that, you're going to get the speed and power when you sprint, when you're doing the VO two max training, you're going to be moving as fast as you can for as long as you can before you feel like you're going to die at one mile. And then working in, it may not be like the most optimal, but finding ways to just jump and play.

It's really how I try to attack all this stuff. Like, I feel like my training is good. It's the it's all the life play athletic things that I feel like I want to continue just getting better on, but I'm not training athletics. I'm training to live a quality life, which means I'm out playing as much as I possibly can. Awesome. Shit. That was good.

Go down on that one. That was good. Smash, mashley.com. Or you guys can read about a lot of this. I wrote an article about power and the size principle

all on TimO'Area.com in the blog section. Doug Larson. You bet. On Instagram, Doug Larson. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner

and we are Barbell Shrugged. Thanks for hanging out with the homies today. The homies. I'm bringing the word back. You can find me at Andrews Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. Make sure you get over to

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