Barbell Shrugged - Training for Power with Velocity Based Training w/Doug Larson, Travis Mash & Dr. Mike Lane #846

Episode Date: April 29, 2026

In this episode, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash, and Dr. Mike Lane explain why velocity-based training is a powerful tool for athletes who want to perform better without constantly feeling beat up. Instead of relying on grinders and fatigue-heavy sessions, they show how training with speed and intent can help athletes become more explosive, more efficient, and more prepared for sport. The big picture benefit is simple: you can build strength and power in a way that carries over to sprinting, jumping, changing direction, and competing by focusing on maximizing speed of contraction on every rep. They also make the case that velocity-based training is not just for elite lifters or sports scientists. Used well, it can help athletes make progress with less unnecessary soreness, joint stress, and wasted volume. The practical value is huge: better power production, better recovery management, and a useful and enjoyable way to match training to the real demands of sport. For athletes, that means a better chance of getting faster, stronger, and more powerful over time.  Enjoy! Links: Doug Larson on InstagramCoach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family. Doug Larson here. And this week, I'm Barbel Shrug. We're diving into one of our favorite topics, which is velocity-based training. I had my first experience with velocity-based training back in 2005. I was still playing college football, and I did a 12-week block in the off-season and smashed all of my PRs on every barbell movement from all my cleans, snatches, squats, bench-press, deadlifts, all of it. Some of them I beat, I broke those PRs more than once. So highly effective training and was perfect for college football given I was trying to be. fast and explosive, not just strong, but also very powerful. So if you've never done this type of training, it also is very enjoyable in the sense that it's not that difficult compared to other types of training. You're not throwing up in a trash can. You're not grinding through reps. You're moving fast the whole time and then you're resting until you're fully recovered so you can move fast again. So in my opinion, it's fun training that's easy to recover from and it's phenomenally effective.

So it's well we're trying. If you've never tried it before, it's a lot of fun. If you are interested in any of that. This show is a great show to listen to. Enjoy the show. Welcome to Barbell Strug. I'm Doug Larson here with Coach Travis Mash and Dr. Mike Lane. We're talking again today about velocity-based training,

which we continue to talk more and more and more about. It seems like the rest of the world is really getting more and more on board with all the benefits thereof. But Mike Lane, I'm kicking over to you first. You were just doing some work up at the center college with a guy who was recently on the show. And you have some things you wanted to share here. So I'm going to kick to you first. Yeah, no, it was a great presentation. And one of the presentations was all about the implementation of velocity-based training.

And this was towards high school, collegiate, private industry, strength, conditioning coaches. So it was really applicable. There were a couple things that were just a little bit off, and that's okay. Like, he did a really good job. And when we think about velocity-based training, it makes sense. I want to move the object as fast as possible. Bar gets heavier. Bar slows down.

It makes perfect sense. but the minutia matters because at the end of the day, you know, obviously the three of us have different levels of strength, like our max load. But if we're all to use 30%, 40%, 50%, and we're trying to move as fast as possible, we'd also have different velocities. Yes. And when we're getting into the subtlety there, you've got the coordination of the movement. The inter, so between your muscle coordination and an intra inside of your muscle coordination. Now, same thing. Guys like us, we've been training for a long time.

We've also trained for high power or maximum strength outputs. So those are probably about as leverage as we're going to get. So what's left over with those differences between our velocities is going to be heavily influenced by our muscle fiber type. And then within muscle fiber type, we immediately think fast type 2A, type 2X. And when people really are in good shape, they rarely have 2X unless they're true genetic anomalies. And all the hybrids do. Bingo. But then we also have hybrid fibers, which is great.

That gives us plasticity, which we can change over times of training. Like it happens in like two weeks in female trainees in one of the studies that Starin and Fryeron in the 90s. And also we have myas and light chain, which is also going to influence the speed of contraction. So heavily genetically influenced, like 50% genetics, 50% is training. But this is one of the issues you can get into with velocity-based training is, and I've had a muscle biopsy done on my VL a couple times in my Ph.D. That's when I was in probably, that was the fastest I ever ran in my entire life, you know, really good power output. And I was literally based upon composition like over 70% type 1 muscle fiber to my undying shame. So there's a reason why I never jump 30 inches.

It wasn't because of a lack of effort. It's just congratulations. Fibers only moves so fast. This is where I sent you guys the video of the, like from like the 2010s, an event that Jason Kalipa and a couple of the Crossfitters did where they dragged a police car. And when you see the video, like they had to drag that thing for like a full mile on like a NASCAR track. But what happened is they got near the end and one of the athletes wasn't able to keep up and the rope got pulled underneath the front wheel well

and it threw them into the front of the car, like dangerous. But if you watch the video, it's a good analogy for the way your muscles work, which is Miason, light chain, or sorry, fast switch, slow twitch, it can only contract at a certain velocity, which means once we get the weight heavy enough,

our type ones can help us pull the car. But if the car is super light and we were to think about just the three of us, and maybe we get like Usain Bolt, and we get, let's just say, someone that's not fast, and we sprint against a sled that has no weight. We're going to drag that sled into the slowest person and they're going to get involved over. That's what's happening with your slow switch fibers. They can't contract fast enough to contribute force production to actually help you move that heavier weight.

And that's why velocity-based training matters because we're making those type twos do a fantastic job of producing maximal force. But that's why we can't say everyone should move 70% at this speed. Right. We all have different fiber types. And that's why if you're going to do this stuff, it's all relative to your athlete. Because where my 90% velocity, and I've seen obviously videos of mash lifting weights, they're much cooler than mine, so I don't put mine up there. And you can tell that like our 90%, if you thought, if that was mash doing,

that speed you're like, oh, dude, he's probably close to the finish. But I'm just a slow to which guy. Like, bar stays moving. It's just not very fast. But then, MASH, I'm sure, like, your high level guy, the speed drop off that he has from 97 to 100. Exactly. And also, that's why it also matters. You got to figure out what's the minimal velocity they can finish a rep at.

Right. If you got that type 1 grinder that can move that bar at 0.1 meters per second, and they'll never stop. Hank. I have two, very distinct. One like that, one the opposite, yes. Bingo. And you got the other one. If they get under 0.5, God just staples them to the bottom and they don't come back up. Yeah, yeah. It looks easy or it doesn't happen. And this is where the EBT is great. But we're not working on the average. We're working with the individual. The individual. Yes.

And then it kind of punts it over to MASH. And when you're thinking about the velocity, the percentages of max, how do you know, would I like to structure your application with VBT. Yeah, individual. You know, we do a low velocity profile and then we go by the individual because, like, yeah, we can't say, and then you got more to consider you got the height because like a taller athlete is going to move it faster because they have impulse. They have more time to produce force, so it's going to go faster, especially peak, you know, it's going to be even higher.

But even their mean is going to be higher, you know, so there's more than just fiber times. It's like lints as well, archetypes. So, yeah, so you can't lump it all into one group. And so, you know, you have an average. And see, the cool thing about weightlifting, most weightlifters are about the, you know, most really good ones. They're going to be within a few inches of each other, you know, just like, you're not going to have a six-foot-seven weight lifter unless they're Lasha and they weigh 400 pounds. And like, there's not many of those guys. And so you can get close, but if you really want to use it the way it should be used, you should individualize it.

And like you should do a load velocity profile for several weeks, too, because you got to get a standard deviation as well. Then you can have some good protocols. You can say 80% is probably going to happen around 0.5, you know, or whatever it is. So to give more context, when you say velocity load profile, it's as easy as, we put 30% on the bar and you tell the athlete lifted as fast as you can. Right. Go to 40.

You go to 50, go to 60. And you do that continuum. I was doing that stuff in the early 2010s with Doc Frye with the Kansas basketball team. Because then, as MASH alluded to, everyone's got their normal standard deviation. So, you know, insert, this athlete comes in. They're moving 80% of their max. Like they typically move 90%, pump the brakes.

Something's going on. Right. know what you're doing, audible to training. They come in there, they're moving 80% like 70%. Like, okay, we're recovery to bingo, and we can send it. And then you've got your athletes that have a very, very big variance. Those are also usually the ones that maybe like to drink a whole lot and don't always like to recover very well. Right.

And then you've got your other athletes that are damn you're a metronome. Like they give you the same thing day in and day out. So if the number's bad, it's bad. The number's good. It's good. So, but therein lies the thing. If it's a great tool, it can just be misapplied and or you miss that nuance. And thank you, MASH, for bringing up the limb-length thing.

Yeah. Because then it's still movement by movement. Right. So if you're a long-limbed guy, you've got to hit a higher peak velocity on your in. Or I won't get it. Yeah. In go. Yeah.

But if you're, you know, if you got those T-Rex arms, you can drop under that thing to catch it in the front squat so much easier. Even better, yes. If you've got the longer legs, sore arms. Yeah, that's beautiful because now the bar is super high. It's easy to react. So if you can move, you know, assuming that you could move like everybody else, like life can. Travis, so if you create these profiles where at various percentages of a max, you can see at

which weights you hit peak power and at which weights you hit peak force. Right. Like I remember a long time ago seeing a peak force chart where it was showing between 10%, you know, every 10%, every 10%, 10, 20, 30, 40, all the way to 100% percent, all the way to 100% percent where peak force was like at 90 percent. It was going up and up and up and up and up. And then it peaked at 90 and then kind of dropped off for 95 percent and 100 percent of a one RM,

presumably because the load or the speed rather goes down so significantly past 90 percent where you're actually, we're getting peak force output at 90 percent. And for a long time I was doing fast singles, you know, relatively fast, fast singles at 90 percent. With that knowledge kind of like top of mind,

do you use that kind of approach to, any of your movements or like you find peak power loads and peak force loads and kind of prioritize those loads for for individual movements. Definitely peak power because you definitely, because power is a combination of force and velocity, it can be force swayed or it can be velocity swayed. And like you don't want either, depending on what kind of athlete, let's say you have a linebacker, you don't want either one, you want it to be, you know, as close to the middle, normally around 80, I think it was, it was,

Ryan Mann, it said around 83% is, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, around 63% of your 1% of your 1% is where you want to peak your 1RM, because that's fast and it's, you know, it's fast enough, heavy enough, that's where you want it. Because if it's around, if you're peeking your power around 70, that's slow. You know, that's a slow, it means you're super strong, but you're moving slow. flow. So like, that's the thing. I did a good presentation with him on that. He had like the four categories of people and like, you know, where you want the athlete to be producing peak power. And so, but around that 60% mark is where he wanted. That brings up another, when we think about the continuum, that's hard for people to wrap their heads around. Yeah. Is the strength, strength speed, speed strength, and then straight up max velocity. So, if you think about that force velocity curve, yeah, it's usually somewhere in the bottom

where you've got the best force and the best velocities where people hit the best peak power. Sure. But. Dr. Andy Galpin here. As a listener of the show, you've probably heard us talking about the RTA program, which we're all incredibly proud of. It's a culmination of everything Dan Garna and I have learned over more than two decades of working with some of the world's most elite performers, award-winning athletes, billionaires,

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and looking, feeling, and performing at your absolute best, physically and mentally, when the stakes are the highest. To learn more, visit Arteelab.com. That's A-R-E-T-E-Lab.com. Now, back to the show. The best force and the best velocities where people hit the best peak power. Sure. But, and this is where people can bring up things like sprinting, you have so little time contact on the ground. You can be incredibly strong, but the thing is back to that initial comment on the fiber types, when you hit that ground and kick off again, when you're max velocity, you're talking fractions of a second.

Oh, yeah. They have time to really show your true strength capacity. Instead, it's how strong can you, how much force can you produce in this very limited period of time. So it's power. But that's where you can have those athletes that they go in the gym. and you're like, that guy doesn't even squat 315, but he runs a 4-5. And then, you know, you have another athlete that squats 500 and, you know, he's running a five second. It's like, yes, you're talking about a straight up.

If I let you have as much time as possible to move an object, I'm going to have a bigger, a different outcome on the power production. Where if I say you can't, the heaviest weight you can squat with the velocity has to be at 1.2, some athletes might not get past the empty bar because they just don't have that pop. Now, part of it is neurological skill, but then the other part is going to come down to straight up. If you're just meant to be. Other types. Right. You mentioned Dr. Fry a minute ago.

When he was still at Memphis prior to going to Kansas, he was my advisor. And I took an advanced muscle physiology course from him. And one thing I remember from that course that's related to what you just said was like for ground contact time and ground reaction forces, like the runners that had muscle activation prior to. making foot contact to the ground like they would get gastroxolius activation before they made contact with the ground was like highly correlated to sprinting success so they didn't actually need the physical stimulus by actually making contact with the ground to get the muscle activation they would get it before they made contact with the ground and then therefore we're able to make a faster um um cycle by hitting

the ground and then and then it's kind of springing off of yeah yeah Yeah, Air Creek Stiveness Center, sure. Right. And you can, that is something, you can train that, but like, you know, it's a lot harder than some things. But you can definitely, you know, train that joint stiffness. Even like Berkusinski and those guys were talking about that a long time ago with drop jumps, and lots of variations of drop jumps, which, you know, we do. And also, what is it, what's his name from Minnesota?

Why do I always have trouble? Helvite. Like in his spring, you know, this. bring muscle or whatever he calls it. Yeah. And by like doing that, he does a lot of isometrics at the, especially at the ankle and at the knee and at the hip. And he'll pause at different ranges of motion that relate to specific sections of the sprint.

Because, you know, like a lot of times the sprint coach will only reference max velocity. But, you know, and they'll compare max velocity to what we do in the weight room. But they're forgetting what happens in the acceleration phase and then the transition phase. because those are very different, you know. And so like, just like point one second, you know, ground contact time and max velocity is not what's happening at this acceleration phase. There's so many different phases of the sprint that we must consider to be talking about what can help in the weight room and how velocity-based training can help because every section

of that sprint is different. And like, these things about the sport, how often do people get out of acceleration in football rarely, once in a blue moon, you know? So they need to compare more apples to apples Because acceleration is very comparable to what's happening in the way around And that's where it's a cool thing If you think about when you watch somebody's accelerate You're obviously seeing that velocity go from zero to P velocity

Right Go figure they've got the longest ground contact time on that start And then it keeps decreasing Yeah And first three and four steps, sure Bingo that's got super a great start because they are strong, but then their top end isn't great because they just don't have the legit fiber type. And then you're getting to biomechanics, you're getting into flexibility, you're getting into the stiffness.

Like you've got a lot of different variables there. But hence, yeah, accelerative speed is not the same as top end speed, you know, which isn't even the same as de-acceleration because that's still a skill. Exactly. So hence to go ahead, Doug. I was going to say, just actually, I was sitting here thinking about your comment from the beginning of the show, I never actually really thought too much about the fact that at max load, the contraction speed would be slow enough, where your short-term fibers would then have the opportunity to contribute. It was actually kind of counterintuitive when you said that.

I tend to think that they'd be higher the load and the higher the force production needed, that your slow-truth, special fibers become less relevant, rather than more relevant. but I see the rationale for what you're saying where contraction speed is so low that they actually now can kind of come back online, so to speak, because they have the opportunity to go at that pace. That's really interesting. Yeah. I mean, it's literally, you can, it was botanelli and then like Trappy and a bunch of other folks

did that legit single fiber. Like put that thing in the smallest force transducer I'll ever see and get that muscle to contract and look at the speed of contraction. And the speed of contraction for those type twos are like, like twice as fast as your slow twitch type ones. So hence, you know, I mean, we don't have to run somebody over with a sled and say we're all pushing a car. Like if the two of us are pushing a car and like my daughter's trying to help, she's 16 months. She's going to be waddling behind us when we're pushing that thing unless we're pushing that thing up a steep hill.

And then she's at least going to be able to lean on it. And so again, you know, you're, when you look at your highest level athletes, it's not like everyone's not training as hard as I can. It's not like every reason I'm trying to like try to be the best. And that's where VBT is incredibly useful because you're training them to turn everything on as fast as possible. And that's where your traditional bodybuilding and people making fun of it, there was a grain of truth in there. Because if I never take any of the failure, so I never tap into those biggest, most powerful fibers that really make the biggest difference with sport and I never train heavy enough. Because once you put over 80% on the bar, you're pretty much tapping into every single fiber in that muscle. From the very first row.

Yeah. Bingo. But if we're slower than that or we're lighter than that, unless we're choosing like, I want to murder this bar, I'm just going to use the bare minimum. And the bare minimum is a lot of type 1 and some of your type 2s. But obviously, you know, speed kills in any real sport. So hence at the end of the day, like you don't need to have a lot of type 2 fiber to be a good chess player. But it turns out, you know, that's like the number one of the number one determinants of are you a good Olympic lifter. Like, do you have a great compliment of type 2s and seem to be a sprinter?

When Andy did all that testing, you know, like back in was that 2016, when he was able to test a lot of the weightlifters on the world team at that time. So they found there mostly, obviously, fast-st-st-pick. You know, you're not going to move slow and get up under a lot of weight, man. Oh, I think it was 2006. And then the other side of it is if you look at that as well, because you've got type 1, 28, 2x, sometimes they're sure to it is 2B. I think in that study there's only one athlete that actually had any type 2x. When they biops him, they were mostly 2A. That's because we call those the couch potato fibers.

Outside of your Usain bolts and like your absolute like out there orders of, yeah, way above standard inviations of the mean, once you start training because of those hybrid fibers that match brought up earlier, you convert more to 2A, not because X isn't awesome, but because X has such bad work capacity. Right. And so the athlete that had it was actually, I think, Doc Fry told me that they just come off like a two-week complete delode. Like they just hadn't done anything. I'm talking about Gapin, by the way.

Not Andy. He did. I helped him coordinate with USA Wayland thing. My bad. Yeah, 16. I feel like you were there, Doug, right? Or either in Los Angeles. I wasn't doing the, I remember when he was doing that, but I was not doing those specific biopsies with him.

But I remember, I remember who. we was doing it with and whatnot. I'm not sure we're supposed to say exactly who. I don't think that was. I don't think it was hush-hush for a while there. I'm not sure if it's like public knowledge now who who was on that team. But a bunch of national champion in Olympians, some some great names. Yeah. But Mike, yeah, you're spot on with the concept that you were getting out there. Again, actually with Doc Fry, we did a bunch of muscle biopsies and all of us had zero type 2x fibers. Like we had all, we were all well trained. We'd all converted all 100%, not 100%, but all of our two, our two X fibers, our quote unquote, fastest fibers for like the super layman's terms term for it, we're gone.

And all of the intermediate fibers, those two A fibers were very prominent, except for one person who was like basically the D trained person in the group that was not, you know, not not competing and weightlifting and whatever else we were doing at the time. Mm-hmm. They had two X. They had some two X, yeah. Actually, if I remember correctly, again, I'm not an expert in this in the specific space with all the D's, details and research, et cetera. But I remember Dr. Frye saying something along the lines of like Olympic sprinters, some of those people, despite being well trained, still retain 2x. And like that type of genetic anomaly might be like what's necessary to be an elite sprinters.

Like you can train hard, but you don't lose your, you're quote unquote like fastest fibers. They retain and they don't convert. And that's like a genetic thing that nobody can help. Again, don't quote me on that. But that's, I remember some conversation like that at one point. And again, I was like 20 years ago, so don't hold me on the details. You've got the Act 3N and you've got other literal genetic markers that are related to the fiber type. And at the end of the day, you know, it's cool that we have this plasticity. Most of us are 50-50, fast-low, and then how you train influence. But your best ultramar, your best marathoners, your best sprinters, they just like, you know, your best basketball players, they started off with genetic gifts, you know, for high,

or in the previous example for fiber type. And so it's nice because if you're Yusain Bolt and you're born into the most successful marathon-winning tribe in Kenya, you can at least get in a decent enough aerobic shape that you're not embarrassment. You know, just like if you happen to be, you've got marathon or genetics and you grow up in a sprinting community, you can at least like, yeah, you can sprint,

but you're going to obviously not going to really win much. But that's the nice thing is most of us have the ability if we choose to train in a certain way, you know, you're going to make changes. And that's one of the areas of research that I know one of my colleagues, Jerry Manjean, and some other folks were hoping to do is actually do the same thing with Crossfitters. Because obviously, yeah, you're a good Olympic lifter. It gives you a certain advantage in scoring in that sport, but they still have to have a heck of an aerobic motor.

Yeah. So you're talking about having two A's that also have really good oxidative capacity, which is no easy thing to do. That's why they'll never hit. I mean, they're good, but they never hit, like, the, oh, yeah. So they can do pretty good. And, like, even, like, the girl, what's her name, Tia, who was an Olympian, you know,

her numbers have gone way down from when she was, like, as a top weight lifter. It's just, but they're still pretty good, you know. But you dang, man, I'm not hating on them at all. Like, because someone who's trying to improve my VL2 Max is such a mother for me to, like, try to, like, improve it. It's like, it's fun. That's why it's fun for me because it's like, it's so hard. It's like makes it intriguing to me.

Yeah. And it's, I mean, that's like most, that's a cool thing about a lot of sports is it requires you develop a lot of things at once. Yeah. Powerlifting, Olympic lifting, you know, long distance. It allows you to really specialize in one area. But I mean, look at soccer. You've got to have a great aerobic base.

You've got to have great power production. You've got to have great coordination. Like, you really, you have to be. essentially well-rounded. I'm more and more loving those dudes. Yeah, I totally. The soccer players, where I used to not be a huge fan of soccer, but now, once again,

now I'm trying to run a little bit, like, you dudes are amazing. Travis, I got a question for you. Circling back to velocity-based training, what are the lightest loads that you typically work with relative to velocity-based training? Honestly, I don't go much below 30% of somebody's 1-I-M. Like, it's so it's really hard to get that starting strength number, you know, um, you basically

you guys got to do a barbell squad jump or something to get that number that Brian man talked about. But around 30% number actually is actually the number I had in my head. Like I see that number quoted and cited regularly as like the, the number that you want to use for peak power oftentimes. Um, but I also don't ever really see people focusing on that light of weights regardless of a sprint or sprint or, or whatever it is. But I see quoted in literature regularly.

You know, like, well, like, I think then that, like, Brian, man would say 60%, but I don't know if this peak if he was talking about mean, you know, like mean power. But he said you wanted to be at 60% because 30% was so velocity dominant that it's like, you're not really powerful. Are you, you know, at that point, like, but, you know, once again, he's more referencing football players. So like, that's the thing. You know, talking about a linebacker. You don't want a linebacker peeking at 30%.

He's not very powerful. You know, like powerful as it is related to football. You do want it to be somewhat force. And I think, and that's, it's all about that context. Yeah. And that's why the strength, speed, speed, strength, you know, pure acceleration, all of it makes sense because then you ask yourself, okay, what is the object the athlete is having to meet themselves,

but if you're a football player, especially if you're a lineman, actually we're probably living more of our time in the in the strength speed continuum yeah if alignment ever gets to top speed things are either going horribly wrong or horribly right yeah but you know if obviously the one that can collide and drive the other guy backwards you know there's your advantage and so there's always the perfect lab world you know like that's that's the peak power but am i going to make a guy that squats 500 pounds do jump squats with 30% of his max and put that through his spine, I'll do clean pulse, I'll do snatch poles.

Right. I want him, you know, smack in the ground with that type of compression force. I've been doing a lot of that, you know, I, yeah, I don't think I'm going to do all. I like doing the trap bar. I would rather do a trap bar jump versus the bar being on my spine. It's like, because it can leave my, you know, like, it's hard to keep it from leaving my spine and coming back down. And like, so a trap bar jump is much more conducive. a healthy spine than the bark.

And they already have a really good squat jump exercise, and it's called a push press. Right. Push-jerk. I know, man. You're like, because if you think about the loads, you think about the speed, and you think about the action,

you know, all of these are solvable problems, and then, again, what's appropriate for our athlete? And if I'm dealing with a high jumper, I'm going to do, and I'm sure you've done this with your athletes as well, you'll do band assistive jumps.

So you can even go the other end of the spectrum of do quasi over speed. So that way, you know, we've got the full continuum because where they jump should be slower than obviously if I make you 100 pounds lighter because the band's trying to rip you through the ceiling. That brings me to something like with Ryan that we're doing right now. Like a few weeks ago, he texted me. He's like, you know, I'm feeling really strong, but slow and strong, you know, because, you know, we spent some quality time because we, you know, we spent some quality time. We what the goal was to get some excess strength to like to do him throughout this next quad, you know, and we built that. And so we did, we so I implemented a lot of, you know, real plymetrics, step jumps, and even some of the, the, the, um, French contrast. And so he's doing a lot, even the, you know, the band assisted jump.

And now that plus we started doing a lot of, gosh, this would be a whole show. But he also messaged me one day and said, can we not do snatching cleaners for a while? Can we do variations? Because monotony. Monotony is a thing. It's a real thing. And the more now that I've researched, the more I think we're getting this wrong in America. We're doing snaps and clean jerk all the time you're around.

And all the Europeans who are beating us aren't. So I switched them. And at the time, I thought this is wrong. I'm going to do it for him, but I don't think this is a good idea. I was wrong. He was right. All of a sudden, between the two things, between implementing the plymetrics and implementing the variations, next thing you know, they did a camp, and he hadn't been doing Sanatric Kleendrick at all. You don't been doing variations.

So, you know, and he killed it. And, like, the best he's done in forever. And then it just made me, like, remember so many things. I'd conformed to, like, becoming, like, everybody else in America. early on, I would have never been snack plunger only. I would have been much more conjugate based. And now I'm like, man, monotony is not just a word. It is definitely is something you can track.

And it mainly refers to like, you know, waving volume and intensity. But there is the thing about boredom of like doing it's awesome pleasure all the time. And like, you know, I started even looking at the, well, so the guy from Bulgaria is absolutely killing it right now and he only does that the clean jerk the last six to eight weeks before any competition otherwise he's doing variations body ability like working on his body and i'm like okay i'm back to the original let's be more conjugate without not being exactly that louis but yeah a lot good a good in mind there and i think therein lies it's it's all about that phase which is your two problems.

One, specialization is how you get better at any given skill. Sure, specificity, sad principle, I agree. But the other side is, I think it's important that we think of like the meta skill. So I think a great example of that is learning. Like, don't be wrong, like Doug learning Portuguese, the more of practice Portuguese, the betteries are going to get at playing in something. But a certain point, if he gets a little bored with it, he's going to hopefully be learning something else.

Could be some type of physical skill, could be some type of mental skill, could be maybe not to say another language because then you can kind of get where there might be kind of that learning kind of works against each other because you're kind of the it's similar but different and hence but the novelty is important so hence you're still giving the athlete a physical demand and you're giving them something that at least has some carryover but also is going to cause a negative transference right and I think there I mean you can talk about orthopedic issues with overuse and the other thing I want to throw out there and kind of going backwards a little bit when we think about velocity-based, we're talking about measuring barbells for the most part, but we've always had

some type of velocity-based training because that's how high of a box you can jump to. That's how heavy weight you can clean, how heavy weight if you can snatch. Oh, my, I think we all know that you're going to be snatching a lighter weight than you can clean because you've got to move the bar further, which means it had to go faster. And you're going to clean a lot more than you can lift. Right. And so there's always been kind of a velocity domain in certain movements, but doing bench-press throws like man there's an idiot factor there I don't I don't like that but I don't

either man and you can that's the nice thing about your plight if they're throwing that med ball further cool that's greater velocity greater power which is they're going for anyways like we're moving the right direction if their broad jumps further that means we produce more power relative of their body weight yeah we'll see if their body weights changed the way we want but and especially now that we're going to camera systems for a lot of things we don't have to have tethers for everything Right. Like, it's a great way to make sure that we always have that intent to turn everything on and be as powerful as quick.

That's what Brian said is the most important part of last-based training, the intent. And that's why people were all about isometrics back in the day. Because tell you what, if you can't move that damn bar, you're going to definitely figure out what's the best position to move that bar to nowhere because it's stuck. So you've got all that time to build that coordination. Right. But, again, high-level sport, throwing a punch, shooting, in on a single leg, you know, that is such a fast movement that you, I would love if everyone that ever threw a punch of my face through it slowly.

That would have been far, far much better for my general face. Except our mall. I hope he does it really fast. Oh, yeah. This weekend. Shout out of mom. Yeah, tear it up, buddy. So, you know, with VBT, it's great if we can quantify.

And also, we should make sure we're never getting. to be dogmatic of like, well, we got to beat the number this week. We got to beat the number this week. Yeah, because that will cause a whole different problem. That will cause them. Depth, start sheet technique. Now you're talking about sports psychology. You're going to, now you're being outcome driven.

You're going to be able to lose their mind. You know, right. Yo, real quick before we get toward the end of the show here, I want something very practical, very tangible for someone who's never really implemented any of this stuff before. Travis training for speed strength, strength, speed, wherever you want to take it. sets and reps, progressions, best movements to use, et cetera. Just something is brand new to it.

For weight, let me give you a very simple way to use velocity-based training with either Olympic lifts or like, say, tri-bar jumps. I would take percentages of body weight like 75, 100, 110, 120, maybe 125, monitor those for improvement. There you go. So, like, you know, if you're, if you're, you know, taking 100% of your body weight, weight for a clean or a squad jump and you're moving it at 1.3 meters per second this week and then next week you're moving at 1.4 that's a big improvement and that's a lot of good things are

happening it's very simple that gives you know they're gonna now with the one thing in mind like the good thing about weight lifting is if you throw your technique off you won't get that number so you can do all the jerking you want and like you know as you know Doug has done a lot of weight Oh, you both have done a lot of ways of things. You know, if you want to throw your butt up in the air, do what you want, but you're not going to go fast. So the good thing about, you know, keeping the limit lifts in there is that it's going to self-govern for you. So anyway, so just doing it very simple.

Monitor percentage of body weight. And the thing I can say, those are very like congruent to improvements in like jumping and acceleration and sprinting. Because now I have the numbers. I track it with a shredmill, with every single week. at rise, where I coach, we monitor improvements in speed, both acceleration, transition, and max velocity

on the treadmill. Also, we have the timing gates, so we either measure 10, 20, or 40-yard dashes every week, we measure jumps every week, and we measure bar speed every week. And as percentages of body weight improved, like at the velocity, so do these other things, especially acceleration and jumping.

There you go. Mm-hmm. And I appreciate you having the maturity and not having to bring up the comment about how much experience we have jerking it. You made about Olympic lifting. Oh, yeah, my bad. I would love to have him with my professor. I would love it. Whoever your students are, they're so lucky.

I will make sure that you, I make them listen to that very specific clip and not the one that came before it. Now, at the same time, I think another great use of the VBT, and this is for 50s. figuring yourself out is hook it up to whatever exercise and take that set to failure, whether you're doing that at 80% to 90%, because then you're going to figure out what is the velocity where you miss. And so it's like, hey, as long as the velocity over 0.3, I can hit it. As soon as it drops to 0.29, bars not going back up. So then you've kind of got your hard stop on the end.

But then if you do this with like 70%, you're going to see that velocity come down. once the velocity comes down, that means your biggest, most powerful fibers are, they're fatigued. They're dropped out. So if my goal is to make you a better athlete, that means the following reps are not productive. They still are productive. But once your velocity starts to drop off like 20%, 30, 40% or more, you for sure have checked the box of did I train my biggest most powerful fibers?

You did. And that can help you with training economy. And you're not going to get a sore because you're not going to have to. to take things to failure and it's not going to be as psychologically demanding. I would say one thing we should have mentioned more in our show is velocity lost because like what that is for anybody listening, it's like you take your first rep or two, you know, let's say that say you're starting at 80% on the squat, on average, for the most people would be somewhere around 0.5. And then if at the end of it, if it's 0.25, you have 50%,

you know, you're at almost failure. And so most studies would say if you're not, stay around 25% of velocity loss, you'll get the majority of the hypertrophy gains without a lot of the adaptations that might make you slower. So probably to stay, if your goal is speed and power, try not to go below 25% too often. If you're someone in my age, you might consider that as well, so you can like, you know, minimize total fatigue. Right. And same thing if you're a coach and you're working with an athlete. Some athletes love to get sore because they feel like they did something, but a lot of athletes don't. And so you're still giving them a good, soreness and muscle growth that do correlate, but you can build muscle without getting sore, or at least getting without egregiously

sore. So that's like not a bad way to go about it. And the other thing is not aside from the velocity loss to inset, but set overset. And I know Caldez does this with speed work. I think this is a cool way to go based on athlete work capacity, which is, hey, we're putting 70% on the bar, you got to move with this velocity, triples, and we're going every minute on the minute. As soon as you drop more than 20%, you're done. So if you're

athletes in just rock star shape, they might do like 20 freaking work sets. So you're talking 60 total reps to 70%. I think you check the hypertrophy box and you know, box. But if you're gassing out after five or six sets, like, cool, you're not giving them more volume than they need

because they're just not in the metabolic shape to produce. Work towards that, right. so much man like maybe t you could do like years of this like there's so much to talk about you know very very similar to that if you just if you just said um you know take take 70 percent and do as fast as you can say it's 0.5 meters per second just do as many as many reps as you can where you don't fall below 0.4 meters per second yeah and then and then regardless of a set number you have to do 20 reps above 0.4 meters per second do you ever make prescripts like that where it's like there's no set number of reps per set you just got to stay above like a certain

a certain velocity and then just accumulate volume that's a great idea i've never thought about doing that but that's i mean that's a great idea it really is i'm too lazy i'd rather just say i'm going to do i'm going to do 10 sets of two or i'm going to do five sets of four then have to worthy about doing the math there but again that's a voice and monotony so it's like hey how fast can i bang this out and you know therein lies you know it's the carrot some folks love that of like hey i get to do you know you got to do 30 total reps and most people aren't going to do 30 sets of one some of them we're going to try to do like one set of 22 and one set of eight and be done other folks like me i'd like cool 10 sets three let's go maybe if you do like you say like what you said let's say

that you took 80 and you say you know which is on average 0.5 for the squad on on the bench it's probably point four well on the on the on average and you say as soon as it's at point four stop what a great way to get hypertrophy without you know accumulating too much fatigue you know because especially like if you listen to was that Chris uh Chris uh Chris Beardsley I don't know if you guys you know he has I like him you know everybody you don't agree with everything I like a lot of his stuff but he was talking about like the reps that actually count so if they're not like a certain they have to be

slow enough to where the minus and enacted can actually form cross bridges and you got your intent has to be there so you're you know you're getting all of your high threshold motor units so but like if you're at 80% you're going to be like you said earlier done lane but what a great

weighting like ensure that you get enough of those reps to maximum temperature like without crushing with fatigue I might try that myself for a while just to say and that's and you know what Doug's bringing up for those of you guys that never heard of the prolipin chart,

I mean, you're really talking about, talk about an easy way to like, yep, you're in the 80, 90% range, you got to do 15 total reps. You divide up however you want. And then the nice thing is the VBT is going to make it so you're not just doing three sets of failure and you're torching yourself with more fatigue.

And then if you divided that up into, you know, five sets of three instead of three sets of five. Same volume, but definitely one of those is going to be a far less friendly, way to go about accruing that volume. Honestly, in my opinion, VBT is like, you know, like Dr. Hatfield, friend Hatfield, we'll talk about

compensatory acceleration, which is like trying to accelerate throughout the entire range of motion. Because, you know, once you kind of get through that sticking spot of a squat, you could kind of cruise into the top. He would say, don't do that. But with BBT, that's the only way to guarantee an athlete's going to do that.

Because if you tell them the minute you drop below the speed or cut you off, they're going to do everything they can to keep that from happening. And that is truly the only way to maximize. Like you're going to get gains no matter what. But that's the only way to maximize is to truly push as hard as you can throughout a full range of motion. The only little caveat that I put there is when you come to training, you know, snapping that full extension is going to be that's when we have started a conversation. about accommodating resistance. Yeah, it might be a good idea. Because you hyper extend those elbows in the bench press against, you know,

40% of your max. Like, I don't like that. I definitely wouldn't do it with 40% for sure. I'm talking, yeah. Yeah, you leave your hands. You throw chains on there. So that way, yeah, you might even like kick your upper body off the bench from just the sheer inertia.

But, and that's why that's another piece of that puzzle. And that's another good long conversation. down it because 80% you're not coming off the bench. No, and you're not going to stay anything. You're just going to lock out. You're an extent. Yeah, because we've all done 405. Let's say anyone who can squat, let's say you can squat 600.

Well, that means 405. Anybody, you can squat it or you can squat as hard as you can. Those are two different lists. 100%. Like, I can do 405 for five or I can go 405 for five as fast as possible. Two different, two different deals, two different adaptations. since two different results of like how I'm going to feel when it's over. It's like it's a big difference.

So which is what of all the things, Dr. Mann says is that when he did a lot of the research in Missouri like with the football players, it's that they maximize power because of the intent. Yeah, Mike, I agree with you. At the lighter loads, you need accommodating resistance. Chains or bands in order to make sure that you can keep pushing through the second

half of the movement. You don't have to decelerate. simply because you're going to either hyper extend your elbows or, you know, like, accidentally throw the weight, you know, two inches out of your hands and it's going to on top of you. Or you need to be in a setting where you can actually like, like release intelligently. You can throw the weight. You can do a push press or you can do like a some type of a throw.

It's like truly lighter weights. There's got to be some other, some other component there where you can actually train the top half of the movement. Right. Yeah. Uh, yo, zooming out here. You know, velocity based training is, to me, is this very unique thing where it's it's like fun and dare I say easy training in comparison to

the other types of brutal training you could potentially do or you're pukin and trash cans and whatever else like if you're if you're stopping because you've you've slowed down you're not stopping because you went to true failure you're not stopping because you're like you were just grinding these fucking intense reps like like you went from 0.5 meters per second to 0.4 meters per second and then you and then you racked weight and you're you're not 100 but you're like still like 80 percent 90 percent And it's a fun way to train that is relatively tolerable, I'll say, that also simultaneously, and this is rare to say this, that something can be quote unquote easy, but also extremely effective. I found that velocity-based training for me makes massive progress, and I walk out of training sessions,

like feeling great. I feel good. Like I'm not all beat up. It doesn't give me joint pain. Like my body feels healthier during the session and after the session. and also simultaneously, again, also produces results, which those two things don't always go together. So it's very unique and I love it for many, many, many reasons.

If you don't have any gym wear or a flex unit or anything like that to measure your speed, I highly recommend you get one. They're awesome toys. But also, if you don't have one, you don't need one. Just lift with as much speed and acceleration as you can, use accommodating resistance. And then if you're doing weightlifting snatches and clean jerks, it's all kind of built in. you're doing power movements on purpose and presumably you're you're doing power snaps as fast as you can with whatever weight it is and you'll make massive progress so uh appreciate it fellas

Travis mash where can people find you you go to massively dot com and on there I have all the you know all the stuff from jimware on my website now so you can even use code max five to get a little discount on it too so you bet very cool uh dr mike lane mike lane phd on instagram feel free to say hi we have got Got to get you a website. It's going to be, we're going to keep it classy. This is a family, family-oriented podcast site. Okay.

Don't go to Mike's real website. Don't Google Mike's name. Only air circulation. Anyways. Yeah, I'm going to Mike's only fans. I am Doug Larson at Douglas E. Larson on Instagram. We are Barbara Shrug. Barbara underscore Shrug.

Also on Instagram. If you want to work with Dr. Mike Lane, coach, Travis, Smash, Dr. Andy Yalpin, and the rest of the rapid health optimization team, you can go to a rte lab.com that's a r-r-e-t-e-l-a-b.com friends we'll see you guys next week