Mark Bell's Power Project - Isaiah Rivera & John Evans - “Anyone Can Dunk”, Best Dunker in the World Explains How || MBPP Ep. 822

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

In this Podcast Episode, Isaiah Rivera, John Evans, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about everything you need to know about dunking. Isaiah is the highest dunker in the world, John is his coach. We asked them how Isaiah was able to get his vertical so high and how he is keeping it there.  Follow Isaiah on IG: https://www.instagram.com/isaiahrivera1/ Follow John on IG: https://www.instagram.com/johnevans_thp/ Follow THP Strength on IG: https://www.instagram.com/thpstrength/ New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://www.naboso.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 15% off! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject Code: POWERVIVO20 for 20% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://eatlegendary.com Use Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject  ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en  Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #IsaiahRivera #dunk  #PowerProject #MarkBell

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No. He'll be all lopsided and shit when he walks on out of here, right? Yeah, whenever you're ready mark yeah we're ready to go just hit the fucking button yeah all right button's been pushed dude what's up with uh pr i think kind of getting close to uh pr range out there in the gym today huh yeah 10 pounds off uh all the energy was getting me amped in there you did about 285 was it yep yep yeah that's nice, 285-pound clean. You know, we have a lot of athletes come through here.

We have a lot of different people come through here, coaches and stuff like that. And we have had some guys coming through like in their prime. But I think it's really cool when we do have someone in their prime that is actually, you know, practicing, you know, putting into practice a lot of things to not only make yourself strong, but also having the coaching behind you, uh, where you're also making sure that you're not blowing yourself apart because so much of this game,

whether you're trying to dunk, uh, in your case with a 50 inch vertical, um, you know, whether you're, whether you're dunking or trying to sprint or trying to do jujitsu or run or whatever it is someone's trying to get into, it's not really what you can do so much as it is what you can recover from. And like, what could you just brush off and be like, that wasn't that, that wasn't that intense or that hard. At the same time, we have to find something that's intense enough to give us quality training. So it can be really difficult.

For you guys, how do you schedule out some of this stuff? How do you plan out? When you guys are talking about you going into a dunk competition, I mean, everything must be talked about, even just you going to a basketball court and just kind of messing around. It's got to be examined a bit, right? Yeah. Do you want me to take this one? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, it's funny you say that,

like even something as simple as just going to a basketball court can be stressful for me as a coach. Cause I've seen so many times where Isaiah just shows up and he's like, Hey, went out to just shoot around for a little bit. Ended up playing five games of pickup, dunked a lot. And I sprained my ankle and i'm like Go figure like we were we were laughing about it

He just did a contest and like, you know, I was I was telling him, you know This is what I want you to do for the session go in do some drops, you know Depth drops to to work on your landing. Maybe do 10 to 15 jumps. Isaiah's like, oh, yeah. Yeah, that sounds good Right, so i'm getting these texts during the session and I don't think anything of it And then he like comes out of the session. He's like, yeah. Yeah, that sounds good, right? So i'm getting these texts during the session and I don't think anything of it and then he like Comes out of the session. He's like, yeah, man, like check out these videos. Did you see that whatever and he's like, hey, uh, You're gonna want to watch this last landing and I see him just roll his ankle and i'm like, oh you've got to be shitting me So then I see that

Wakes up the next day. He's like, yeah, it's pretty bad. I really can't walk Like you you're like you're supposed to compete in like four days like this is not ideal this was the recent one this is the recent one yeah and then uh and then i'm like how many jumps did you take and he's like i don't know like 55 i was like it was 10 to 15 like that was not a part of the plan but getting into what you were asking like in terms of the planning you know it for me it's always especially in season like the dunk season i mean when when does that realistically run for you dunk season starts in the summertime and then it goes out to like the end of the year january february around there yeah so so it's we got like nine months nine months of

dunk season so not for nine months of dunking like you know if you're a powerlifter or whatever else you guys probably have a set competition you train for every year you know how many times many times a year do you guys peak realistically, would you say, in powerlifting? People that start to get to like a pretty high level just maybe twice. Twice, right? So for him, it's like every competition could have the same value, depending on what the monetary compensation is if you win. And so it's kind of like, you know, what I'm assuming in your, you do combat sports, right? How many times a year would you say you have to be ready to compete when you're a high-level guy in combat sports? Oddly enough, all year long.

I know a lot of jujitsu guys that literally will have a competition every single month. Yeah. And so that's similar to him where it's like you never know when they're going to be. It's just someone reaches out to you like, hey, are you ready to compete? And it's like you always have to be ready.

You can't really do those traditional like, hey, we're going to have gym prep, then special prep, then specific prep, then pre-comp, then comp. It's like, you always have to be ready. You can't really do those traditional, like, Hey, we're going to have gym prep, then special prep and specific prep, then pre-comp then comp. It's like, you're always functioning in those windows of opportunity. And so even coming here, it was like, okay, we know you're going to have this competition on Tuesday. We know we're trying to plan out what days he wants to dunk. If we're going to get on the, on a certain court on a certain day, what we're going to do for you guys. And we were kind of like, you know, asking you guys were like, well, what do you guys want to do in the gym? Do you want to like, and so Zach's here and he's like, well, let's, let's just do a little power clean daily max. And I was like, are you ready for a

power clean daily max? Like everything's a daily max. Yeah. It's like, we'll just have to kind of plan, you know, retroactively a lot of the time. Like I always say, write in pencil because you just never know what's going to come up. You always have to kind of be prepared to make those adjustments on the fly you know especially for him so I guess I don't know if I left anything else if you had anything to add to that no there's also a lot of planning that goes into uh depending on when I have to peak uh if I haven't dealing with any like injuries and stuff like that um but a lot of it is just being in communication with John and discussing like hey my body feels like this on this day. I got to do this tomorrow, this the next day.

And, yeah, just keep going like that and always keep pushing. That's basically it. I saw that you chose to do like a leg extension to warm up. And I was just thinking that's an interesting movement because a lot of people trash sometimes the machines. There's people that are like purists and they're like, ah, functional movements only or whatever that word even means really sometimes. But why were you choosing to do that movement? That is for knee health. Those are called isometrics. We just get on a leg extension machine, hold the weight up with one leg,

hold that for 45 seconds. And that kind of warms up the knee and makes me feel a lot better. And we couple that with like slow squats or drops and that type of warms up the knee and makes me feel a lot better and we couple that with like slow squats or drops and that type of thing in order to warm up and be ready for a jump session if i don't do that like usually my knees can run into some issues um but yeah super important drops would be just dropping down from a box like like standing on top of a box and dropping down yeah uh we call them depth landings when we program them in. They can be anywhere from like 12 inches. And you want to match whatever your vertical is,

go a little higher than that. So I'll go on a 50-inch box, jump off of it. And trust me, you don't know how high 50-inch vertical is until you're jumping off a box that high. You're like, whoops. You feel it everywhere in your body. You're like, oh my God, we're not meant to be doing this. Wait, so do you drop off the box? Do you jump off the box?

It depends on my knee health. If I feel good, I just step off. If I'm outside and there isn't a box that's high enough, I'll literally just jump off, jump up two feet in the air and land into the ground. John, are you aware of some of the work of Jay Schroeder? Have you ever heard of that guy before? I have heard of Jay Schroeder. Jay Schroeder would have people jump off their garage and do all kinds of crazy stuff. Cause

the eccentric that, or that landing, you know, is a big part of it, but it's like, man, like now you're just talking about what can people survive? Yeah. Like a safety hazard. Like, like we used to, it's funny when I first started coaching him, you know, in 2017 or 2018, that was like a big part of the process. And so Isaiah was living in a townhouse at the time in Florida and he didn't have access to the gym that he has now in Florida or had in Florida. And so he's like, Hey, so I, uh, I backed my car up, you know, into like a field or something like that. I don't remember what the story was. And he's like, so I climbed on top of my car and I was jumping off the like trunk of my car because that was the only way I could get to 50 inches.

That's great. Because I like my goal with him was in that kind of ramp up was, well, if you can't even land from 50 inches, you sure as hell shouldn't be trying to jump, you know, apply force in an elastic manner, exploding upward this far and landing in a haphazard position from 50 inches. Like there's we should do a little bit of prep uh so i heard that and i was like damn i was like i thought 36 would be like 36 would be enough and now i guess now you more or less just jump off of like you don't always have access to a 50 inch box so what do you i guess what do you do now jump high off yeah that's pretty good yeah like i literally just jump off off into the air and land on the ground yeah but yeah it just depends on on what i got access to have you guys found anything with like landing on something soft from there like is that helpful or is that like not what you're

after because you want that kind of crash landing yeah i think i think that there's different times where you would want different types of surfaces. So I'm a big research guy. I love looking at data and stuff. And, you know, if you were to put Isaiah on a force plate, right? And force plates are very, very stiff, right? And you can have embedded force plates. You could put a mat over a force plate. You could probably put a fake turf over force plates.

I think in the Middle East, they have literally entire soccer fields where force plates are underneath it. And they're able to look at every contact. And so that being said, you would actually be able to see the changes in those peak forces and how you would distribute that force-time curve and how the forces would change. And there are certain times where I want to take advantage of that. Like an athlete like Isaiah where he's such a high level, I might want a more stiff surface because I want to see higher peak forces

and I want him to be prepared if he's going to jump on concrete, if he's going to jump on plywood, if he's going to jump on something that's less compliant because I was saying this earlier, the surface on an NBA court is souped up. There's two major companies. I don't remember exactly.

I think one is Robertson Flooring Systems and another one that is used by the NBA and they have tiers. You can go on their website and there's like four tiers of these of these courts. The NBA gets obviously the most souped up one that's like going to maximize your ability to safely land. And it's also going to give you the greatest performance improvement. And so for him, it's like, well, obviously we don't have access to that, you know, not

all the time. And he's sometimes he's dunking on what is the shittiest flooring you could possibly think of, right? Like just tiles that slide or, you know, whatever else. And so, yeah, sport court is just not the best. Does it make a big difference for you? Can you notice it when you're dunking? Huge difference. Typically the worst surfaces to dunk on are sport court, concrete, anything where you're like slipping on the floor the best floors

i've ever been on are nba courts like by far they i feel like they literally add vertical um feels like they're springs on the on the ground so that makes a huge difference so yeah in short we definitely use different flooring i think most of the time it's what you have if it is a really soft compliant surface like if he was like i only have sand i'd be like drop off a 70 inch box because sand is more like it's gonna be far more forgiving than is it helpful for like track athletes like they land in the sand pit a lot like is there any research or information on those landings and what that transfers into the body i mean i imagine the absorption is less but right maybe you can do more and because you can do more maybe yeah i think i definitely think there's a psychological portion to it like i wouldn't look I mean, I would imagine the absorption's less, but maybe you can do more, and because you can do more, maybe.

Yeah, I definitely think there's a psychological portion to it. Like, I wouldn't look at the landing in long jump just because the way that they land is almost on their butt or whatever else. Like, you're going to get a pretty cushioned fall. But, I mean, just in terms of how that's changed over the years, like, high jump is, I was a high jumper. I loved high jump. I coached track at Duke, and I coached high jump there. And when I was there, like, you know, I got really into the history of the, of the event.

Right. And so they used to have just sawdust. Well, when they had sawdust, no one wants to do a backflip on a sawdust. Right. And so as the event changed, you know, the technique changed and guys became more confident and psychologically, you know, now I know I'm landing on a mat. If I know I'm landing on a mat, like, yeah, I'm sure a shit going to run, you know, what is equivalent to an 11 second, a hundred meter dash full speed, plant my foot on the ground and do a backflip onto it. Like if I know I'm landing on sand or sawdust, there's no way in hell I'm going to commit to such an aggressive approach. So I think that's probably the biggest difference. Um, in terms of like, as a training stimulus, we don't really use sand too often. Like we passed a dune on the way we were, we were

coming up, you know, from, from LA here and there was a giant dune and he's like, Oh, look at all the footprints. And like, people do that all the time. They do a lot of sand running and stuff. That's really stressful on your connective tissue on your feet actually. And so I think it has a place, but it's like, you'd have to put it at the right time of the year, I think. And at least what I would do, um, like my old mentor, Mike Young, he used to do it with his athletes in the gym prep season because it's a soft surface. As he gets closer to the season, okay, now let's get on harder surfaces, right,

where we're going to see higher peak forces, higher speeds, higher velocities, like all across the board. So I would kind of use the surfaces in that way, like periodizing them, I guess, or planing accordingly. I'm really curious about this because both of you guys can dunk, right? Okay. So Isaiah, I asked you something in the gym earlier and it was kind of surprising. You said you weren't always able to jump like the, like, you know, you didn't always have hops. So what, like, when did that occur for you? When did, what changed in your training that I know there's a lot of things, but that allowed you to get to the level where you're at now. So I actually started off my athletic career playing basketball. Uh, I always

describe it as that was my first love was basketball. Yeah. And I played until I started playing when I was nine years old and then I hit my first dunk when I was 16 years old and I was actually cut from my high school team three times for being too short and unathletic. So yeah, they didn't have a big base of athleticism there. Did you ever finally make the team? So I ended up moving to Florida for my senior year and I finally made the team. Nice. As far as how I got into dunking, I was always dunking on low rims like i'd go to

basketball practice and then i come back home that's more my speed i'd lower the hoop to like eight feet nine feet and i would practice on there and then that just jumping every single day i was eventually able to get my first dunk and then a couple months later i windmilled then i found a couple months later you went so yeah progress was not normal so i found a youtube channel called dunkademics around this time and there was a all these crazy dunkers like jordan kilgannon uh t-dub air up there oh my god was that on a 10 foot rim you went behind the back yeah all over the shoulder oh my god so i found this youtube channel with all these pro dunkers and i started practicing all those trick dunks on the low rims i learned the technique for them and then eventually i was just able to bring him to a 10 foot a 10 foot court um but yeah i was i had to work for a lot of that bounce and when i was around 2017 i met john

and he's kind of the person that took my vertical to that to that next level but yeah i wasn't always uh had this athleticism oh god did when you started working with them in 2017 because you've worked you did you work with other dunkers prior so it's it's actually a funny story how i got into that niche because most people are like how it's funny i i've told people as i like go on can you imagine going on a date and they're like so what do you do for work and you're like oh i teach people to dunk and women are like that's the dumbest thing i've ever heard and i'm like it is what it is but so how i got into the the niche is basically i loved

it myself like i dunked for the first time when i was 14 or 15 wow yeah how tall were you i was 5 10 at the time now you sound like you were a beast when you were a kid i was a monster not that you're not now but you said you were squatting like three plates and stuff and you're lifting heavy and stuff like that at a young age. Yeah. So when I was 13, I was like obsessed with training. So we had basketball. So I switched schools from like this small school to a bigger school. And, you know, I'm like in seventh grade and all the kids are trying to touch the rim or whatever else. And like I was never naturally gifted at anything.

I have a twin brother. He destroyed me in everything. He was a better basketball player than I was. He was faster than I was. The only thing that I ever had on him was jumping like the one time we're like hey could you you know the little orange block under the rim they were like hey do you think like they're like trying to jump and i get really high on the net and then they're like you think you can touch the block and then i was like i don't know i've never tried so i go up at like

13 i touched the block and everyone's like holy shit he touched the block. Like, is it Vince Carter? I was like, no, not quite. That's not going to be the case. That's amazing. So after that, I was like, that was the only time in a sport where I would have like had a little bit of like attention for something I could do. And I was like, oh, like this is kind of fun. So I joined track just thinking like, oh, I just want to do it to dunk. And so I'm like, I'm going to do high jump.

So that first year I jumped like five foot or five two as a 13 year old, which is pretty good. And I was like the next year, you know, I'm like kind of developing, you know, maturing, going through puberty. I go from like one 10, I think it was one 10 at the beginning of my seventh grade year to like one 35. By the end of my eighth grade year, I was one 45. During that time I started doing plyometrics. I started squatting pretty heavily, started dabbling with deadlifts, but I was never good at them. So I remember I was like 14 or 15 and I'm just like, how many plates? It wasn't like for me you know it's like how much do you bench you know

what's your bench bro like that wasn't it for me it was like what's your squat i was like how much can you squat and so i was like i want to get as high as i can so i did three plates like 315 down to like a half squat or something at the time which like you know we were testing my hip mobility it's it was better then than it is now, but I started to have back issues and all this stuff. And I just became obsessed with training to dunk. So like 14, I was getting the ball above the rim, almost dunking 15. I was like at the end of 14, I dunked for the first time in front of practice. Like I was 15, one of the, like you were mixed between eighth and ninth grade. His kid's like, Hey, uh, Evans, you think you can dunk now? And I was like, I have no no idea so i go up and i just like punch one and everyone starts throwing the ball off the wall they're like

holy shit it is it's carter like they were just mind blown and then after that like so yeah i was like a man child at the time and then it's funny because isaiah's like it took me one month to do a windmill it took me literally 10 years to get my first windmill after that i didn't windmill until i was 25 for the first time and isaiah was there he actually saw that session yeah and now like i've just slowly slowly progressed and like dunking as a sport in general has changed like we'll call it a sport now because guys are competing we're we're trying to push into the olympics it's changed so much like when we were in eighth grade there was youtube videos that you could watch you could look up team flight brothers and he would this guy Chuck, who's a friend of ours would just post these videos of

dunking. And so that's all that was my exposure was to it. And so I never thought like, this is going to be a sport. This is going to be something that's going to grow. I'm going to do high jump or track because I could get scholarship money or whatever else. Turns out the sport has grown just progressively over the last 10 years since my first dunk or 15 years since my first dunk almost uh so yeah i mean that's pretty much where i was at at the time and my progression is really interesting it's super slow i'm probably going to hit the first between the legs when i'm 30 and that dunk is a very technical dunk especially for someone that's six foot for me to do it at 30 that's unheard of how old were you when you did your first between the legs i was 16 it

was a year after i hit my first dunk i i did a between the legs dunk for the first time yeah so his progress was like this it was like nothing nothing everything for me it was like pretty good nothing and then a little bit better like over time um just like very very slow progress uh some of that was injuries you know learning a lot of it was learning i think honestly a lot of the you know how i got into the sport was by just trying it and there weren't there weren't people there weren't pioneers that were really teaching us someone that's a huge pioneer in the sport is a guy named jordan kilgannon and he was a mentor and inspiration yeah so jordan kilgannon he's actually the person that got me into professional dunking. He's the first or second pro dunker that I found out about.

The first was Kador. But I was at school. I was able to do like one-handers, two-handers at the time. And I saw a video on YouTube of him doing a dunk called the crown. And it's where he jumps over someone and puts both his elbows in the rim backwards. And I saw that and i was like whoa this guy is a freaking beast and i started like i asked for advice on how to how to do a dunk on low rims and he hits me back on facebook with like paragraphs of advice on how to do the

on how to do the dunk yo i go straight outside to practice the dunk i hit it i text him and then from there he was like yo you have potential to do this at a world-class level one day uh let me let me teach you everything i know from there i started googling everything about jordan kagan and i found an article by just fly sports and in the article it says that he got to the level he's at by jumping every single day for multiple hours a day there were some days he would dunk for seven eight hours he would bring like his food to the to the basketball court and he would just be there dunking all day and then i saw that and i was like okay i think this is the secret to jumping higher let me practice jumping every single day and see see where i can take it

so so actually with your early progression because you do a lot of lifting you're a super strong dude but with your early progression were you literally just going out to the court and jumping and jumping and from from age 16 to 18 i was jumping every single day to see progress i would rest after like two weeks for like a weekend and my vertical would like shoot up a little bit and i just repeated that process for a couple years but the downside to that is I ran into my good friend patellar tendinopathy jumper's knee and I just couldn't keep that pace of dunking up anymore and that's where I met John well I started lifting when when that started happening I met John probably two years after uh I started lifting and had like jumper's

knee um but throughout this whole process I was weight training a lot it's one of my favorite things to do yeah I think the ball right it gives you a distraction you know like it gives you like people aren't thinking about speed when they're going out and just throwing around a football but like to get

under the football you're going to have to speed up a lot and to dunk a basketball like you got to produce a lot of force. Like something has to happen in order for you to dunk the ball. And so I think it's your training for this peak performance without even kind of recognizing because you're just playing around with some friends and stuff like that. So when I first started weightlifting for dunking, it actually started weight training for basketball. I lifted for like two years, I think uh just to get stronger for basketball and i did starting

strength by mark ribbitoe just three by five everything squats deadlifts power cleans and i got to the point where i was squatting like two plates uh i could power clean like 185 i was benching similar to my power clean how old were you at the time uh 17 years old around there and then from there i took a short break from lifting and when my knees got really bad found john and he kind of taught me better methods to weight train how to periodize stuff how to deal with patellar tendinopathy and then now i kind of use like more like load management and stuff like that to get better. What's funny. I never answered your question earlier of how I even got into that. That's how I got into it was Isaiah reaching out to me.

So he was your first dunker. He was my first, my second, actually second. My first dunker is a guy that actually does a lot of sales for us in our, in our business, DHP. The second guy was Isaiah because his best friend is our good friend, Austin Burke. And so Austin, it's funny. Austin was like, Oh man, I really want to, I want to come out, but I'm really nervous. I don't know anything like, but Austin was really like a pioneer for me getting into the sport because I was at the time doing one handers and I was like, why can't I do a windmill? And Austin was like five, nine Austin Burke. If you can look him up, his stuff is really impressive. So he's doing windmills and he's 17 18 years old And yeah, he he was doing dunks better than me

And I was like, there's no way that my 10 plus years of formal education that have taught me how to train Why why is he better than me? So I started talking to him and then he's like man, you know a lot about training and jumping and i'm like, yeah He's like do you want to coach me? I was like for sure So within the first couple months he trains his ass off and makes a ton of progress and then isaiah is his good friend and i guess you can pick up here what happened there yeah so wait where did we leave i was saying i started coaching austin and he was making a lot of progress okay okay and then i guess you saw i don't know yeah so i met i met austin uh in florida and we were just doing like

dunk sessions together, playing basketball together. And then he tells me about this guy that he got on a phone call with. He's like, bro, this is the smartest person I've ever met with for dunking and basketball. You got to talk to him. Like, just, just get on a call with him and you will understand what I'm talking about. And I'm like, all right. And at the time I was really skeptical of anything that's like jump training programs and stuff like that. And I get a FaceTime from this guy. His name's John. And I saved his contact as John Jump Einstein. That's what I put him under. And he starts talking to me and he's like, hey, like I've been training Austin for a couple of months. Like I think Austin ended up getting a college scholarship for a long jump or something at the time. Yeah. Yeah.

So he improved a lot under him and he was my best friend. And I was like, Oh, like, like what's the, what's the secret? Like teach me. And then he started,

uh, John started telling me that in dunking, all the dunkers were so naturally gifted and weren't really training properly as far as like, like track stuff and weight training. And then he told me, he's like, imagine if you got somebody that had a ton of potential someone like jordan kagan and that doesn't weight train

properly if you put them under like proper like sports performance training what would be possible for them to achieve and i was just like sign me up like i'm ready like my knee's a little messed up right now like we'll just take care of that and then it's a non-opathy yeah yeah uh but we'll take care of that and then like like i'm gonna full send it let's see let's see what we can do with that so if you want to give like your perspective on the call yeah so basically like i mean at the time i had no no clout no following i had i had some pretty good internships i did an internship with a group called altus which was previously called world athletic center under a coach named dan path who's like a legendary track coach. Coach Donovan Bailey, my mentor before that was a guy named Mike Young. He's, you know, an unbelievable just scientist, biomechanist, coach

at LSU when they won all these national championships in track. So I'm really formally trained as a track coach. That's pretty much what, you know, what my experience was. I had a lot of experience lifting myself, doing plyometrics, you know, training underneath these guys for years. And so Isaiah is the first big time athlete that I've personally ever coached because when you're in strength conditioning, and I'm sure you guys probably have seen this or know this, you're like a little drone. You just walk around and say, wake up early, set up the cones, set up the weight room clean, and you got to put the time in. That's what you have to do. But I had never had the opportunity to take the reins on a super high level athlete so isaiah i don't even know if you know this coming into the call i was freaking out i was like oh my gosh this

dude is like a 45 inch vertical he's one of the best in the world he's one of the fastest growing pro dunkers he's going to be a freak someday but i had to have that kind of inner confidence to say yeah he's done that but i've also worked with and Andre Degrasse and he's got a silver medal in the Olympics in the 200 meter dash and I've also worked with Greg Rutherford and he's long jumped 832 and you know 8 meters 32 centimeters in long jump and so I think that kind of calmed me down a little bit but going into that conversation I was a little bit nervous and then yeah he starts talking to me and I was honestly I just rambled like I was like well you gotta do you gotta do a powerlifting are you gonna do like all these powerlifters let it not at all so i just rambled and isaiah is super skeptical just in general as

a person and there's so much misinformation in jump training there's guys that are like this is the one way to and this is the one and it's like there's really not one way there's a proper way to train you know but there was a lot of misinformation. And so he's quizzing me basically. It was like, well, what about this? Well, what about this? Well, what do you think of this? What do you think of this? And so I was fielding all of the questions and there was no hesitation. It was like, well, no, it's got to be this way. And it's going to be this way because X, Y, and Z. And Isaiah, I think at that point was like, okay, he's not just a bullshitter. He's not just making shit up or pulling shit out of his ass to be like oh this is what it is like he was very skeptical and then was willing to basically be like look i have one more shoot i gotta do this power right thing and then i'm willing to work with you but my knees are really messed up and so during that time i think there was maybe like a two or three month lull between yeah after that conversation yeah it was uh so every year there's a thing called dunk camp um they it's like the biggest dunk event for every single summer. And there was the first one in 2018.

And I think that was like two months away. And then I start working with John and my knees were really messed up and I had six weeks to get ready for that. So it was six weeks of no jumping, just focusing how how am i going to survive dunk camp yeah because at this point it's like you're gonna have to jump for three days or four days straight our goal is you're gonna jump i would have to keep telling this i'm like if you're in pain because at this point i've partially torn my patella my patella tendon not my not the when i say patella shorthand for patella tendon i'd partially torn it on a takeoff i didn't have health insurance at the time so i was like well, well, I got to figure this out myself.

So I just started diving into all the research. And I'm like, I got to find what the PT would do or find what the doctor would do. And so they're like, oh, well, there's cross massage and there's all this other stuff. So I end up finding, you know, a concrete way of doing it through just diving down that rabbit hole. So I apply it with myself and lo and behold, it works. And I was like, this is amazing. It actually worked. So Isaiah's like end number two, like second subject in this study and he does it.

And we have this buildup, this ramp up and he gets to dunk camp and it's like, crushes it. Like has a little bit of pain. We managed through it. And then after that, it was like, okay, we fixed you. Pop the fuck off. So there was a little bit of a lull between that. And then I started switching from, okay, let's get you from not walking down the stairs without like walking down the stairs with pain. Let's, let's remove that from your life and take you to the best dunker in the world. Like, let's get you to a 50 inch vertical, 51 inch vertical. And he had never trained formally. So for me, it's like, all right, I have this clay.

I have to be careful with it because he has had injuries in the past, big ones, you know, really, really bad ones. I need to keep him healthy, but I also need to train him properly, you know? And I'm sure, again, you guys probably, we were talking about it before the podcast. It's like, you know, you have these power lifters that at 18 years old, they have back pain or knee pain or hip pain or whatever else. Same thing's true in our sport. You know, I had jumper's knee when I was 14 years old.

I ended up tearing my shit when I was 23, 24. And it's been a constant journey to figure out, okay, how do I keep getting better, you know, into my 30s or whatever else, which I'm sure no one wants to get worse, but also stay healthy. So, you know, that was pretty much the journey of how we met. And then when we started training after the first three months, he tested 43 or 44 at dunk camp. Was it 44.5?

Oh, 44.5. Was that just straight standing or was it approach? It's approach. Actually, there's a video, I think. Is it on THB Strength Instagram? Yeah, yeah, it's on THB Strength. If you can find it, you can see his progress video. You can see the first jump at camp when he touched,

I think it was like 11.9 or something like that. He didn't get any taller. His reach didn't change or whatever else i guess you weren't fully reaching maybe at the time when you tested i don't remember what the deal was but he touched 11 9 and then you know next year or within three months we got him touching about 12 feet so it was like that quick he improved i think something that's really awesome about this is that maybe with basketball and maybe in particular when it comes to dunking, it would be very hard to give athletes advice because there's been this long history of people just probably figuring it out themselves. And maybe you never heard about a particular way that Vince Carter trained or Jordan trained or

maybe any of these Jordan trained or maybe any of these guys, or maybe those guys made it really far without any real particular training. It's rare for an athlete to stop or for like, I commend you, especially because at such a young age to like, you know, want to get that help and seek that help. It sounded like you were kind of painted into a corner and so you kind of needed it too, but most people won't do that. Most people won't recognize like, okay, I recognize I have these talents here,

but there is probably someone that can help me get to the next level. It's very rare for someone to be, for someone to have that much humility to do that. And the only thing I can think of that's like remotely close to it is when Brazilian jujitsu got to be really popular. Because when the UFC came around and they had all these guys,

they all thought they were tough. They all thought they could fight. And before that happened, before, I mean, the people in jujitsu, even 2030, however many years ago, you want to go back, that jujitsu has been around for, which is probably a long time. Those people knew, but the rest of the world did not know that jiu-jitsu was a way, like a clear path to being able to defend yourself really, really well, especially against larger opponents.

And Hoist Gracie kind of, he had to show everybody, he had to physically show everybody, like, check this out. This shit really works. As he wiped the floor up with three four or five guys every night for a handful of years was that in the ufc he was doing he was in the ufc and i remember the first two or three ufcs i cannot remember the announcer's name

but the announcer knew what was up because he was a former wrestler i think he did some grappling i think he had some experience with jujitsu. And he kept talking about Hoyes Gracie and how great he's going to do. And I'm like, this guy is not going to do. Are you kidding me? Like this guy is so skinny compared to Tank Abbott or compared to some of these other guys that you see. So in sport, it's like until it like physically happens, a lot of people aren't willing to go and get the help or to recognize there is a better way. And a lot of times when it comes to athletics or it comes to being the athlete, sometimes all that you need is just somebody to kind of pull you back a bit and say, well, let's try to make this a

little bit of a system. Okay, you want to play every day? Okay, if you don't play every day, well, then we got to be careful of how many jumps you do. Or how about you jump as much as you fucking want, but you can only go twice a week or whatever the compromises are that you have to try to make, right? Yeah, that's a really good way to put it. I think a lot of the time we get, with him,

he was one of the people that was saying, I need to jump every day. And I'm thinking, there's no way. I'm sorry. We've got to make a compromise somewhere because if you keep doing this, eventually it's going to catch up to you, or at this point it already has. So we have to pull some of this away, adjust some things, and come back. But to his credit, like you said, the humility to be able to accept the help.

That's incredible at such a young age too. I would have been like, I don't need this coach. I'm already dunking like a madman. To be fair, that had happened to me the help. That's incredible. I mean, yeah, I was, I would have been like, I don't need this coach. I'm already dunking like a madman. To be fair, that had happened to me numerous times. That is currently where we are in our business right now with NBA players. That is currently where we are. We have had NBA players reach out to us and say,

what's the secret? What's the key? And for me, Isaiah is always like, well, what's the next step for, for you as a coach? And I'm like,

that's the next step. I need to get that one NBA player that wants to commit and wants to dive into this and really be great. I can picture you going to like a game or you got a moment with some NBA guys and you're like, you just nod to Isaiah. And you're just like, bam. Hey, go, show them how it's done.

And then they're like, yeah, we have a lot of questions. So it's funny, we were at a facility called OT and Isaiah couldn't go to this, you know, the, one of the outings that we did. And we were working with these OT is like this giant high school facility in Atlanta. They're currently like pro high school players going to the NBA. I don't know if you get, are you guys familiar with OT overtime?

Oh, overtime athletes over, uh, overtime, not those guys, not those guys elite. So there it's, it started as a media company kind of like ball is life or like our front end academics. And then they just kind of molded into doing this now. So they have this huge facility, Atlanta. They, they took all these high school players and they brought them in and they paid them to play. And they're basically like broadcasting this on YouTube and trying to grow it, you know, and, and basically say, Hey, look, high school players should get, should get paid. We'll pay them. We'll take that risk or whatever.

I don't know what the business model is. But we got brought in to help them learn how to dunk. And so we're in the intro kind of talk with all these 17, 18-year-olds who think they're the shit. They're like, oh, I'm the best high school player in the country. These guys should bow down to me or whatever else. And then CJ is this very humble, quiet kind of six foot skinny kid. And like,

you know, he's, he's saying like, you guys can do so much more and we're kind of hyping them up. And then we go into the first dunk session and CJ, CJ champion, you should, you should pull up some of his stuff.

He is a freak. This kid, Isaiah and him used to compete. They both ironically grew up in Florida. Yeah. Didn't know they both live there. They're about the same age. Fuck's in that water,

man. I do. There is something in the water in Orlando. We have said so many times. There's so many freaky alleys got all those gators and they got all those boa constrictors yeah this is cj so cj we've seen him before cj's fucking nasty yeah and cj comes up oh and he punches that so he does that one-hander and literally all the guys their jaw just drops to the floor and i was like that is why we are here so that was probably the closest we've ever gotten but hopefully

someday we'll kind of bridge that gap and be able to to work in that i think people think we're just a specialist at this but in reality it's it's all the same just different directions you know what i mean it's just power displayed in a different direction just vertically versus side to side or whatever else greatest dunk of all time greatest else. Greatest dunk of all time. Greatest dunk. What is the greatest dunk of all time? Yeah. What one, what one, like, I'll answer this because Isaiah can't.

What, what, what gives you guys like chills or goosebumps? Or you get so pumped where you're like, fuck man, I got to get it back out there and dunk. Oh man. It's, it's so individual for everyone. And Isaiah, you can pick more than one. Isaiah doesn't want to answer because he would, I will say this, his he's probably done the greatest dunks of anyone ever so if he says well i'm the greatest

it looks super cocky i like my own dunk why do you guys make him sound like that though beautiful voice it's very soothing so i would say my favorite that he's ever done and the the other thing you have to remember is that the increment of one or two inches on a rim height changes things massively. And it's a current debate and an argument right now in the sport. You know, everyone wants to be super legit. But the reality is if you go to a 24-hour fitness, your expectation, if you're one of us, is that the rims are not 10 feet. You'll measure them. They might be 9, 10 and a half, 9, 11, right? It might be 9, 11 and a measure them they might be 9 10 and a half 9 11 right it might be

9 11 and a half it might be 9 9 and so isaiah and a 9 9 rim versus a 10 foot rim unlocks infinite more dunks three inches really three inches is a lot oh okay so if you that that difference in that rim height it just it unlocks an arsenal of dunks that are their video game level like if you look up 360 behind the back between the legs i would argue this is the greatest dunk that's ever been done ever you know and isaiah you've done it on what height rim have you done that on nine nine and three quarters nine nine and three quarters so he's if to make it like legit legit of legit obviously we want to do 10 and so that's why we're looking at this nba court in sacramento kings like i was saying those floors are souped up we're like oh if it's gonna happen

it's gonna happen there you know and so that dunk it's like on 10 feet i would say the greatest oh this is the nine nine one he's done it on nine ten cents i think well i mean this shit's still this is crazy this is fucking amazing yeah i was freaking out yeah it was crazy there's so much going on that it's like i need to see like a slow-mo you will yeah i think it i think it maybe is the next clip you'll see it slowed down nobody in the gym has any idea what's going on yeah yeah people are just playing horse in the background yeah he got a lot of a flack from someone that we respected for this because it was nine nine so now we always say rim heights we always like you know disclose it at the time it wasn't fully discussed but it's like that's one of the best when they're like oh but it was a it was a whippy bar and he

used straps like god for us it's like getting the same gym try to do the dunk on the same height like that's where i love it that's why we love dunk camp because dunk camp every year it's like look we're all going to be on the same rims we're all going to be in the same session let's see who shows out you know what i mean and it's always a fun competition it's always crazy like to see what guys do in that environment but i personally he's done that on nine nine and three quarters nine ten wait which is 360 behind the back between yeah yeah nine nine and three quarters nine nine three quarters i saw him hit it at dunk camp on the side and finished on the side of the rim i know for a fact that was nine ten so i would say nine ten personally quarters. I saw him hit it at dunk camp and finish on the side of the rim. I know for a fact that was 9-10.

So I would say 9-10 personally. But I've seen him do it now a couple times. He's going to hit it on 10 feet eventually. That dunk's probably one of the greatest. On 10 feet, probably, what do you think? What would you say on 10 feet? If you look up Dunkademic's birthday session, that whole session was like crazy new dunks

that nobody's done. So that's, yeah. I would say lost and found is probably one of the the greatest what what uh what happens when you guys go to like what happens when you're like around like nba players or high level players you'd have to answer that do they do they do they you know what i mean like do they obviously there's a lot of people that know who you are but there's a lot of people that don't right yeah, but there's a lot of people that don't, right? Yeah. With NBA players, a lot of times they're, like, judging dunk competitions and stuff like that. But it's honestly just, like, anywhere you show up,

just try your best to show out. If there's a hoop, like, we're going to show up in there. But you probably get immediate respect, right? They're probably like – or they hate on it, you think think sometimes some hate some hate yeah because they're like i could do that if i tried like oh that would be you don't have to give a shit about it there's no defense or they're like some people kind of view it you know in golf they're like oh it's like long drive like it's the same and i'm like it's not really the same i see your point but it's yeah there's more skill to it and like all of these guys not all of them but a lot of them we can play basketball at a decently high level i've seen isaiah play defense against

one of the best or actually 1v1 against a kid that was going to go or probably will go to the nba in a couple years at ot and it was like a fair match on 1v1 like 1v1 just purely the athleticism that he has and so some of the guys hate on it because it could be a jealousy thing some guys like steph curry like freaked out when one of our athletes brandon rough be rough he did like i don't even know what it was it was like a push-off double up or something yeah he like went over the hood of a car and dunked it yeah and then steph was like steph curry's like freaking out he's like this is the coolest thing ever like whatever else so you get it's a little bit polarizing at least in my guys that are secure and they're already locked in really good they probably don't care as much right so that's what i'd say well how do you actually i'm curious about this your was your goal with basketball to play in the

nba yeah that was that was always my number one goal um when i was in high school around my senior year i didn't have any like d1 offers to play basketball. So it was kind of looking like I was going to be a pipe dream. And then that's when I found out about pro dunking. And I was just like, okay, I have talent for this. I have potential for it. Let me focus a hundred percent of my energy in it and just see how, how far it can take me and go from there. Yeah. And you know, you guys were mentioning when it comes to, to jumping higher, you've mentioned the jump shoes that used to be something in the past, right? There's a lot of stuff you see in the jumping community. So I kind of have a, a two parter here. First off, like you

guys are putting out amazing information and content. So people need to pay attention to you, but who else is putting forward some pretty cool information when it comes to jumping that you think people should pay attention to? And then on the other side of that, what kind of concepts in jumping do you think is bullshit? You don't need to say names, but just concepts that you hear talked about that you think that's not very smart when it comes to this whole game. I mean, I guess you could say who are you most looking at? Whose content do you like other than ours? We like our content. I know. I know. It's great. No, I don't know. As far as who to watch to learn.

I think Paul's pretty good. Paul for Brits, I think is pretty good. Yeah, PJF is solid. Man, that's a tough question. I like any like strength strength training like content on youtube and stuff like that like zach he was teaching us like the olympic lifts that was huge for me in terms of learning how to how to jump higher because strength training is such a big part of it yeah um so yeah his content i watched a lot um shoot i gotta think about that question some more man i mean i

being a coach and like kind of looking at you know they're kind of obviously competitors but there are guys that like i have an immense amount of respect for i think joel smith we were we mentioned him or her him sorry earlier uh and just fly sports he's he's done great work you know for years i think he's great um paul for brits is a really really really bright guy he more specializes on the side of basketball but started actually you know in the vertical jump community i would call it that like he was coaching vertical jump first yeah and kind of was a really good basketball player and stewart mcgill is a another big big one that i like um yeah if we're looking at like everything like what we take is probably different than other people like most

kids are like what's the jump like what's the jump stuff but like stuff that we take is probably different than other people. Like most kids are like, what's the jump? Like what's the jump stuff? But like stuff that we love is we love Stu McGill. We know you guys had him on here and like we were geeking out about, oh, Stu, he's the freaking shit. So he's really big. I love Ebony Rio for anything on Tendon Health and Jill Cook on Tendon Health. Craig Perot. Ebony what?

Ebony Rio. Ebony Rio. So it's E-B-O-N-I-E and then rio is r-i-o okay she has just come off like her and jill cook jill cook is j-i-l-l i know you said your spelling was a little bit slurred yeah uh and cook is just like obviously like you could yeah also any any dunkers that are just like show freak displays of strength uh like jay clark the jumper one of my favorite athletes to watch train uh t flying high my rebound and these are all guys that are just freaky strong like i think jay clark he power cleans like 350 at my my body weight t flying high squats yeah t flying

high he's squatting in the 500s at my body weight so it's just guys that just amp me up to go lift some heavy ass weight. You guys would love Tee Flying High. He is traditionally a power lifter. I like the name. What's his actual name? Antonio Egan. Antonio Egan, yeah. Antonio Egan.

Egan. Putting Andrew to work today. He just joked about it before. He's like, they say the name so fast, and I just can't keep up. Well, because Zach was saying these foreign names, and I'm just like, fuck, dude, there's no way I'm going to spell that. I can't even repeat what he just said two seconds ago. So he is one of the strongest dunkers I think that there is.

I think his power lifting, low bar, sitting back squat, I think, what does he do? He's five something. Low bar onto a box? I don't know. You tell me. You decide. I've seen him high bar, like close to 500 for reps.

Some lifters can jump like crazy. That's Jay Clark. That's Jay Clark, yeah. Some lifters can jump really well, especially obviously there's Olympic lifters, but I want to say like Brad Castleberry could jump really well but I want to say

most I've seen him do is like is jumping on like a box or something you know what I mean so it's like there's also that

I'm just smiling I'm just smiling I smile he can't have a fake like vert dude like that's gotta be real that's why I think that's part of the reason why i don't know i don't know much about him i know he's used to like the fake

plates oh really yeah yeah i mean that's it's funny because like for us that would be like the rim height talk is like oh it's a little bit like a couple inches and like i i don't know what the deal does he use like is it like 25 instead of 45 i don't think we even know no you don't know there is there is on tiktok i saw a bodybuilder who jumped like mario like he like was i know what you're talking about yeah you're talking about the backflip guy yeah yeah backflip guy yeah have you seen that forgot his username he's like big as hell but he can jump yeah he's unbelievable it's crazy so i know uh brad rowe a bodybuilder friend of mine he could jump like crazy sprint really well fucking giant ass legs can't feel phil heath used to love like loves basketball and he can dunk like pretty easily i think mark mark henry did a dunk

contest yeah yeah we saw that yeah he's awesome crazy what about um yeah in that same video that we were watching there's like the longest dunk ever like a dude like I want to say did a dunk from nearly the three point line

that's your guy what? you're talking about James White right? he's the dad the dad of the guy who jumped from the free throw line

that shit was oh not Charles Austin Conley? Mike Conley? Mike Conley yeah Mike Conley is done so Mike there's so many distance there's like a long jumper guy so Mike Conley Mike Conley was conley yeah mike conley is done so mike there's a lot there's

like a long jumper guy so mike conley mike conley was one of the farthest i've ever seen james white is also one of the greatest distance like he did between the legs from the free throw line our friend jordan wessner has done from behind the free throw line he's done one here from behind the free throw line uh another one of our athletes well we used to coach jordan now he's doing his own thing. His name's Jordan Wessner. And then another athlete, his name's Obi Chamberlain,

ironically Chamberlain, but not related to him anyway. He's done, I think he's getting close to a windmill from behind the free throw line. What? Yeah, he's 6'6", and has a 8'8 reach, which Isaiah's is 8 foot.

So he gets another additional 8 inches on his reach. And he is a one foot jumper and they can handle way more speed and so what he's capable of doing if he stays healthy is it's going to be incredible is an eight foot wingspan uh pretty big for his height or is it so uh not wingspan but reach so reaching straight up isaiah would have eight feet uh wingspan i think you're six four six five six five and I'm six six one six two yeah so I'm six my I'm six foot and my wingspan is a six two I think an inch shorter than his yeah this is Mike Connelly dunks behind and hangs on the right yeah I think it might show a couple of different ones yeah insane yeah he's he's insane yep legitimately from behind who's the first guy to dunk from the free throw line do we know that dr j i think was it dr j i don't

know first want to do it on a big display that's for sure isaiah is into all the dunk lore he could answer most of those questions i would have a hard time knowing off the top of my head um but i think yeah i mean james white is probably the best i've ever seen i think they they were trying to, like, eliminate the dunk from basketball, weren't they? I think in, like, college basketball. Yeah, in the 70s, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Would just crush everybody so bad. I think all the little white guys were like, excuse me. Can we potentially change the rules?

You're not wrong. Probably some truth to that it seems illegal there's probably there's probably some truth uh it's like he'll still swat your shit yeah it's like you can't take that what are you gonna take blocking out of the game not gonna happen well then he just started to develop that sky hook that he wanted to stop either it didn't matter what anybody went down a rabbit hole recently studying all of the technicalities each decade of basketball, and that was a big one in, what, the 70s was just skyhook every time or something like that?

Yeah, he was at UCLA. Yeah, they had to ban it. I think they banned it for a couple years. And they won a championship like 10 or 11 years in a row or something crazy like that, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's insane. Yeah.

It was pretty cool stuff. This is great by the way. I'm scared to drink the whole thing. Do it. You're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. I need to try to find something for myself. What's that?

But it just, it numbs your tongue and it calms you down and it kind of doesn't, I'm not, it doesn't, I don't know if I can say this. It doesn't taste great at first. You should drink it with some water, but it doesn't taste good. Take, take a little bit of it't know if I can say this. It doesn't taste great at first. You should drink it with some water, but it doesn't taste good.

Take, take a little bit of it. You'll, you'll like, you'll take it. Shuck the whole thing. You'll enjoy it. Isaiah's going to be like, I can't breathe. Isaiah's like, I do have. I just do have, brother. All right. But, but on this other side, is there any BS in terms of jumping?

Like within, you know, within different types of sports, there's always certain things that people think is going to move the needle but is found out to be that's not that useful right like myths you'd say like just like factor fiction factor fiction i guess kind of yeah just things that you see perpetuated a lot where you're like that's not going to help you dunk you know if there's really tough i mean it's funny because i like to look at things from all different lenses so even when i see something that's complete bullshit, I'm the type that will be like, well, you know, maybe there's a little bit of legitimacy for X, Y, and Z. Like I can see reasons for this and this and this. So if I were to like, you know, remove my, I guess, add my bias in and say what I thought,

it's tough. I think, I mean, there's so much validity for now what is out there. It's so much better. I would say 10 years ago there was just so much just shit to sift through to know what was real and what wasn't. I really don't consume that much content of that stuff because I just think it's ridiculous. I think there's so many different,

so many different types of, of training sessions you would do where I could personally break it down and say, I don't like X, Y, and Z for X, Y, and Z reasons, you know, across the board. And it would be hard for me to say, you know, definitively, this is the key. I would say a funny one that is, that is kind of used to be, or was a joke on TikTok probably a couple of months ago was I got my balance from doing 10,000 calf raises, like body weight calf raises a day. There's no real validity to that. That's kind of ridiculous. I would say. And it's also possible that it may have helped someone that has like zero athleticism and didn't do anything previously. There's also

the scenarios where you probably had the freak athlete that was like going to dunk no matter what. And he was like, I did 10,000 calf raises every day and it worked. I think the VertiMax used to be really, really popular. I don't think it's bad actually i think the vertimax could be used in the right context it's got bands on it or something yeah it's like the bands on like a we've never used it because i'd rather do a you know a barbell jump or i could do a variable resistance squat or something you know i think that that's fine i wouldn't even say it's bullshit but i would rather do other things um i think it could work it's worked for a lot of guys. Mack McClung used it like religiously. Mack McClung is, we want him to come to our side. I know I've heard that so many times. I've also heard I look

like John Cena. He's right here. Can you guys see me? We get it all the time. Like I would, I would do these voiceovers and people would be like, Hey, did you see anyone speaking or did you just hear words coming out? Like I didn't see anything in that whole clip. Like I would, I would do these voiceovers and people would be like, Hey, did you see anyone speaking or did you just hear words coming out? Like I didn't see anything in that whole clip. So I used to get that quite a bit. I've heard Tom Brady before cause my hair would be quaffed it appropriately. You have a very American look to you. Like basic white guy.

I'm like, this is kind of sucks. Perfect for dunking. I've heard so many. We, we, we used to put it on my story and i have an identical twin which is makes it even funnier it's like i have someone that actually is genetically the same that

actually looks like me yeah but yeah i've heard john cena tom brady i've heard just do a steve rogers cosplay like honestly yeah hey at least these are all handsome people yeah thanks man so um i don't even remember what i was saying so bullshit wise i i couldn't really pinpoint any i guess isaiah do you have anywhere you're just like this is ridiculous i just think this is like a myth i guess what do you what have you guys heard maybe you could say some stuff where we could be like that's true or not true there's a verdamax it's not that bad it's jumping exercise yeah i think that's good i really like that honestly so what about just the idea of like maybe since there's certain athletes that are asked to jump so much, like a volleyball player, a basketball player, like maybe the training for it is to not jump. Like maybe the majority of the training, 70%, 80% of the training.

Meanwhile, a lot of guys probably think to jump, like I better just keep jumping. I got to jump, i better just keep jumping i gotta jump jump jump jump but maybe one of the best things they could do is like weight train do lunges train the whole body get better sleep like there's probably other spots they can look at and they can really increase their vertical maybe through a lot of other means yeah i think uh the most important thing is specificity like if you want to get better at something just do it more so that helps if someone doesn't have good jump technique if they have a background in some other sport and they just want to get better in that way that's when i would recommend jumping a lot but for someone that has put in their 10 000 hours and started jumping higher that's when you want to go into like the more like general prep stuff, like lifting and running and warming up, like all that, all that stuff. So I want to hear what I love this. When you talk about this, what is your lens? I love quizzing Isaiah on stuff. Cause sometimes

I'm like, Oh, I didn't have that experience. But one of the things that he did that's very different was jumping a lot as a kid, I guess for you, you know, looking at kind of that and dissecting it, how important do you think that is? And at what point do you think it's like, okay, now I need to start lifting because you, you kind of did that, right? Yeah. It's the most important thing that I ever did to jump higher was jump a lot. That's how I got the technique for literally every single approach that I, that I do today. Um, but the secondary thing was just getting stronger and learning how to balance the jumping and the lifting so that you can be healthy yeah that project family how's it going now we like to

look good in the gym and out of the gym uh that's why you always see mark and i and andrew is stepping up on the short short game wearing shorts from viore and clothes from viore and honestly the number one compliment that i've seen that i've gotten and even mark's gotten is damn your butt looks good and that's because well the clothes we wear make our booties look delicious andrew how can they get it yeah you guys both have pretty big wagons uh you guys can head over to viore.com slash power project that's v-u-o-r-i.com slash power project to receive 20 off the most amazing apparel that looks so good inside and outside it's gonna make your ass look fat and your ass will look fat links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes uh god damn it that's a

good one that was a good one make Make your ass look fat. You know, you were, both of you guys were talking about your tendinopathy. And then inside of the gym, you were talking about isometrics for tendon strength. So I'm really curious about this because I think this can be applied to lifters. This can be applied to jujitsu athletes. How should athletes be approaching strengthening tendons? And actually, how should, first off, how should athletes approach dealing with jumper's knee then tendons in general how how we approach it uh we basically do like a tendon survey every single day so first thing that i do when i wake up is i choose something that's provocative for the tendon so that can be like a body weight squat a lunge

going up and down the stairs and i rate it it from one to 10, 10 being like excruciating knee pain, one being no pain at all. And I'll do like a body weight squat. Let's say I'm at a four out of 10 pain. A four out of 10 is considered too much. So if I did something the day before, if I went up to anything above a three, I know whatever I did the previous day was too much for my knees. So that next day I'm going to do something that puts me at a three or less. So that tendon survey is really important because now you got something that you can track. And if you can track something, you can change it. And then from there, you just literally just follow, you follow the progression. So when I do a squat and I'm at a three now i can do isometrics

and slow strength and i can start loading that up getting stronger at it from there i'll progress to doing the depth landings and then the max effort jumping what do some of those isometrics look like uh the best one i don't know if you guys know what a reverse Nordic is. It's when you're kneeling down on the floor and you kind of lean back. Yeah. So what I do is I kneel in front of something like a couch. You're in like a SESA position, right? Yeah. Like you go ahead.

Yeah. Yeah. So I kneel in front of like a couch and then I put my hands on the couch and it's literally like a leg extension into the ground. I'm pressing into the couch and I'm holding that position. And I find how, like John was saying earlier, there's pain positions. So I might be my pain position might be at 90 degrees. I find that angle where I'm at about a three or less in pain and I'm just pressing into the ground.

Hold that 45 seconds. The pain dissipates a little bit. You know you did it right if the pain went away. And it's kind of, we describe it as like ibuprofen for the knees. I wish we had a visual. Is there anything on like your Instagram? Or should we just look at the reverse? I wonder if he could show us in front of the table.

Yeah, I have on my YouTube channel on one of my lifting videos. I do it as my warm-up. I have it on there remember how long ago that video was when it was was it a month ago that was like two weeks ago i want to say okay that'll yeah i hope a little bit yeah um so that's kind of the guidelines for that uh some more tendon health guidelines um isometrics we do them for 45 seconds the reason we do that is because after 30 seconds there's's tendon creep, I believe. Yeah. So they're viscoelastic. And so tendons can be stiff really when they're put under load,

they can be really, really stiff. And then when they're over a long period of time, you can actually get the tendon to soften. And like you said, tendon creep. Also, sometimes it might hurt a little bit at first, right? Yeah. And then it will dissipate. It'll dissipate. That's because you have nociceptive nerve fibers or pain signaling nerves in there and they're basically desensitizing. And this is Ebony Rio and Jill Cook, like I was saying,

this is their big line of research. And basically what they found is by doing that isometric for 45 seconds, you're able to untrain your pain sensors in that position. So by doing that and holding, yeah, so this is the reverse Nordic. Good job, Andrew. So basically he would hold this position.

Right there, you just hold there for 45 seconds? Yeah. So some people that are listening, or some people that are watching rather, if this seems like it's going to be really difficult, all you have to do is hold a band and attach it to something sturdy and you can have some sort of support.

You could resist it or assist it sorry you could put a towel around uh whatever you want and just hold yourself up and you can also change the the angle of the knee so like leg extension i'm almost parallel with my leg i'm holding that i might do a manual iso where it's like all the way in knee flexion i'm pushing out so. So again, you find the pain position. You find- Just hold it. I've coined it recently as pain position isometrics, because if you don't actually dip into a little bit of that painful range of motion,

you really won't detrain that nerve. I found that just anecdotally after working with thousands of athletes. I would have these really, really difficult cases where guys would come in. There was an athlete named kade karchner Kade karchner could do it between the legs. He's six foot, you know, he's really freaky athlete and he had worked with us But was like, oh I can do this on my own, you know I I got this and then realized maybe I don't have this and started working with us again And so i'm talking to him and I was telling him you need to be in a mild very moderately

Tendon aggravating position, a little bit of pain. Just tap into it a little bit. Hold that for 45 seconds. Over time, that 45 seconds, because of tendon creep, you're able to load the core of the tendon. This is Keith Barr's research, what he studied. I might be misquoting it, but it's almost analogous to if you were to slap water,

it would be really, really like a sharp feeling on your hand. If you put your hand into it slowly, you know what I mean? It's not going to, you're not going to have that stiffness. And so over time, basically the tendon, you're able to load the core of it. So that's one of the, one of the benefits to doing the isometric. The other one is that tendons need to hit a certain threshold. But if you were to do really, really heavy back squats, you might exceed what the threshold or capacity of your tendon is. And it'll make it worse. It's like, Hey, you know, I can handle this much, but if I decide to exceed that, this is the capacity of my tendon. If I decide to exceed that, you're going to have pain probably in a tenant. It's very, very likely you're going to have pain. And I've seen this, I've tracked pain scores the last five

years on thousands of athletes. And I've very consistently, I've observed it anecdotally. We see it in research. I've seen it with him, with myself. If your pain scores are jumping up the following tendons, tendons have a latent pain response. So you might not have pain during the activity, but the following day, and even up to 48 hours after your pain might skyrocket. Like you might, you might pull up after a dunk session and be like, well, let's say you do the dunk session on Monday, right? So it's whatever you're, you're good to go next morning. You feel fine. Now on Wednesday, all of a sudden your knees feel like shit. And you're like, what did I do to make my knees hurt? I did nothing yesterday. It was actually two days prior that really messed you up. And so that's another thing that makes tendons really tricky and why it's really important

to track pain. Not only 24 hours after, not only during the activity, but 48 hours, even as far as 48 hours later, because you might not know that you fucked up and you went too far until that point. And so then you have to retroactively say, okay, what you did was too much. We need to take a step back and go to a, along that progression that he was kind of delving into, take a step back in that progression and then build you back up or stay at that step for a little bit before we take the next step forward uh so with tendons i found that to be super effective i don't necessarily think that's the case for every knee injury i when i've had meniscus injuries i've had a little bit of a different approach but with tendons regardless of whether it was an achilles or i like what are common tendon injuries for for jumpers for him

it's quad tendinopathy he has one in his hip that bothers him and, it's quad tendinopathy. He has one in his hip that bothers him. And then patella tendinopathy and Achilles tendinopathy. Those are the common ones. So basically just all lower leg. For you guys, what are the most common tendon injuries that you guys actually see? We see a lot of elbow. Really? Just like bench press?

We see a lot of elbow and shoulder. Elbow and shoulder for bench press, absolutely. You see that a lot. And then honestly for squats and stuff, you'll see some of that too. Just the patella tendon will kind of flare up. And you'll also see a lot of meniscus stuff that happens. I know specifically with jujitsu, and I wanted to know about the meniscus stuff after because I wanted to talk a little bit more about the tendon stuff. But in jujitsu, you see a lot of meniscus issues.

Really? Yes. Just the twisting and rotating around that. And we have to talk about what you do for that because I have two, I know two guys that are dealing with meniscus issues right now, but going back to the progression of doing tendon work, you're also mentioning that this is something that somebody can attack with frequency. You said maybe potentially three times a day or every six hours, right? So what does that kind of look like in practice? So I would wake up in the morning. I, let's say that I have knee pain and Isaiah has been in this

position before he, you know, did all these dunk sessions, had knee pain and we call it a flare up. So sometimes you'll have, your knee might be totally fine. You've been doing it for six months and then all of a sudden you jumped one too many times or 10 too many times, or in his case, 32 many times and you pull up with a little bit of knee pain. And so we call it a flare up and we're like, okay, how do we deal with this? If he hasn't been doing isometrics three times a day, first thing he does wakes up three sets, 45 seconds of an isometric. In that case, he could do a single, like if it, depending on where it is, you want to pick a movement that's going to load that tendon. So his reverse Nordic, the one we showed that generally loads his hip

and his quad tendon. and so if he's having issues there he's going to pick that isometric if he's having issues in his patellar tendon i'm going to pick maybe a single leg squat where i feel it i'm going to go to that pain position i'm going to hold it and so i would do get my phone pull it out i go 45 seconds along that exercise take 30 seconds rest okay do it again now i i might not have as much pain on the second set so now on the second set i'm like okay let me shift my knee forward a little bit, squat down a little further and find more pain. Now I found a little more pain and I'm doing it right now. I'm like, okay, now I'm just going to hold this for 45 seconds. Okay. I do that. I take

30 seconds, do my third or whatever third set. You could go upwards of five sets. Probably wouldn't do any more than that. Now, six hours later, let's say you wake up, whatever it's 6am when you do that session, six hours later, now it's lunchtime or whatever else, you're like, okay, I'm going to do my second session of that. You do the exact same thing, three sets, 45 seconds, a little bit of rest between, could go upwards of five if you want. Would you mess with adding any load? I know like starting off, maybe not, but over time, would you want to add some load to this tendon work? Yeah, Isaiah does this a lot actually when he's on the leg extension machine, he'll do it. He'll add weight, you know, intra we'll call it intra session, intra isometric session across from the first set to the third or fourth set, he'll go up and wait. And then from

the next session, if his knee feels better, well, his goal is to get into that pain range. So if he's feeling better, he needs more weight to hit that pain position. And so the weight is going to directly correlate in a tendon with the pain because tendons are force transducers. They connect the muscle to the bone and the more force you have on the tendon, the more it hurts. And that's why when you're a jumper, your performance is degrades because the harder you jump, the more pain you feel and the more pain you feel, the less you want to jump hard. And so what you guys are chasing pain, we're chasing it. Yeah. We're, we're just, we're kind of on its heels. We don't want to go too far. We don't want to get to a point where we're bleeding out and dying because that's

going to make it worse. But if you're in that range with isometrics of three to four, that's a sweet spot. You stay right there. And if you do it right across the sets by the third, like I said, you could go upwards of five, five sets of 45 seconds by the, by the third set, it should feel pretty good by the fourth set. Pretty good. Fifth set, you might not even have any pain by the fifth set. And so if you're doing that every six hours, what happens too is collagen, which makes up tendons, can remodel. And so what they've done, Keith Barr basically radio labeled the collagen that you ingest. And he found that, hey, when we ingest this collagen, we're actually seeing this same radio labeled collagen in the tendon tissue, in your knee or your Achilles or wherever else.

And in a Petri dish, he found that every six hours was the fastest. They would have these like tendon cells in Petri dishes, and they would load them, mechanically load them. And they found like every six hours, we can see activity in the tendon and remodeling and whatever metabolic activities take place. This is controversial liver king type talk right here. Oh, sorry.

Collagen per collagen. It's interesting. I'm I, I'm not super familiar with that honestly, but it's cool. I know Keith bars, he's a big time, like, you know, research, basic researcher on that. And so I anecdotally tried it. I was like, well, let me see if it holds water in our field, you know, not in a Petri dish. So we tried it and generally found that that was the case. I mean, I, if I guys use collagen as a supplement as well or not really? Oh, it's more so speaking about the isometrics, but in terms of collagen, see, it's interesting because he's making like applied recommendations with what would be pretty basic science. He's making clinical recommendations based on what's done in a petri dish. So there's a lot of steps between a petri dish and a human, but it's one of those things where it's not going

to hurt you. You know what I mean things where it's not going to hurt you. You know what I mean? Taking collagen is not going to hurt you. What he typically recommends is, I think it's what, 10 minutes before the session, 15 minutes before. I don't remember the,

there's a timeframe. He says, I think it's around 30, like 20 minutes before you do your isometric session, you would take in, I think it's 10 to 20, uh, grams of collagen. Um,

so what he said, I'm going to do it. It's a lot of collagen. It's worth a try. And a little bit of vitamin C. That's the other thing he says. Yeah. Cause it helps absorb the collagen. So what he said is, I'm going to do it. It's worth a try. And a little bit of vitamin C. That's the other thing he says. Yeah, because it helps absorb the collagen. Yeah.

And again, I don't know. That's his, there's a lecture you could find on Keith Barr talking at some kind of symposium where he goes into the details of that. It makes sense. You're kind of like

almost forcing your body to utilize it because of the stimulus that you're giving it via the exercise. Yeah. So it's like you're going to give yourself all of this bioavailability of that substrate. And then you're like, okay, let me just dial into that tendon, stress that tendon, you know. Kind of like we do with our muscles. Yeah, pretty much. Stress the protein and then you fill it in with protein. I heard a really good analogy where it was like, okay, if you're looking at a skyscraper,

the number of construction workers on that skyscraper or how many active tendon cells, tenocytes can repair the tendon, whereas muscles are way more vascular, you have way more availability and you basically can repair muscles far faster, but we actually have found tendons are just slower. You can repair them really frequently and they're good at it, but it's still way slower than what a muscle or something else would be.

So ligaments, meniscus, those are different types of connective tissue. Yeah. They can still repair, but it's just a very slow process. And ligaments are interesting because they're not force transducers between a muscle and a bone, right? Like they're not connecting a muscle to a bone. It's a bone to a bone. So how do you stress a ligament? What are you going to do? You're going to pull your ankle out of socket. And so it, that's a little bit of a, you know, a different scenario that I don't know. I wonder real quick though, when it does come to ligaments,

I do wonder like using a cable machine, right. And using the force from a cable machine to stretch and pull and going against that resistance. I wonder if like doing isometrics that could be something beneficial. You know, honestly, I have no idea with ligaments. It's, it's so difficult to say. I, I have tried a lot of BFR with it and the traditional stuff, like with his ankle sprain, we, we, we've done a lot. He's sprained his ankle a number of times. I guess I feel like I'm doing a lot of the talking. I'm not giving him a chance to speak, but what is your experience with, you know, doing when you do have an ankle sprain with ligaments? Um, how do you approach it in terms of frequency and what you're doing? Cause actually,

I want to also mention, cause I don't know if people know you had your competition and you, a few days before that you sprained your ankle. Yeah. Yeah. So I had a competition on Monday, Thursday, I had a really bad ankle sprain. Uh, the next day after the ankle sprain, um, I could, couldn't put weight on my foot. Uh, but all I did was, was loaded basically. Like I just went on a 30 minute walk that three times per day. The next day I was able to kind of take it through some like range of motion and stuff like that. Um, and then, yeah by by monday i was i was good to go for for the dunk contest um but i i never do any kind of like isometrics or

strength training for any ligament issues um and it's basically just tendons tendons the only thing i do the the strength work for and what about uh blood flow restriction have you guys found that to be effective in some of the stuff that you do or not really? So it's funny. I actually have a BFR cuff in my bag and I have a band because I use it a lot for muscles. But I actually haven't found a ton of efficacy for tendons. I think BFR is amazing. I think the research on it is super robust and we're finding that it's super effective, but it's limited in what you're trying to do with it. Right. So first off, if you're doing BFR, you're probably a 30% load. And so what BFR has basically demonstrated is that, Hey, if you're an athlete who has a sprained ankle or who has, you know, a non-weight bearing

injury, you know, or sorry, you can't bear weight, you know, the injury is so bad. It's like, okay, well now I can't squat because my ankle's messed up. I can do, maybe you do the leg extension or maybe you, for some reason, your knee hurts or your elbow hurts or whatever else. And it's like, I want a really potent metabolic stimulus, right? Well, BFR is going to give you that without loading the joint very heavily. And so, you know, I found really good success

with muscles doing it. I think it's a really good tool for things like a meniscus injury, things like, uh, you know, I'm not a doctor. This is just my anecdotal experience. I just want to make that clear.

And there's a, which is helpful to be honest. Like let's not discount that anecdotal experience. You guys are putting the shit to work. Yeah. We're, we're definitely using it pretty frequently. Um,

so I've seen it work really well for guys like that. I work with a bobsledder named Josh Williamson and yeah, I, I prescribe it for him once a week because he can't squat heavy more than once a week. And so if he can't squat heavy more than once a week because his PFP hurts, my goal is, okay, well, we don't know the mechanism fully behind blood flow restriction, but we know it works.

It does something. It helps with at least hypertrophy. And so with that scenario, it's like, well, I need, you know, bobsled athletes have to be strong as hell. You guys had Ben on here, so he probably talked about it. You've got to be a freak athlete to push the sled. So Josh is our brakeman for the U.S., and he needs to be big, needs to be strong.

He can squat 450 ass to grass, like sitting all the way down. I can't have him do that because that's going to fuck his knee up. So how do I get a good stimulus on that without wrecking his knees? BFR. I can put 125 on the bar have him do a set of 20 20 reps four times his legs on fire he feels he's gonna vomit you know what I mean and like basically the mechanism is that feeling that sensation of that I need to vomit is what is fueling all of the whatever hormone changes are happening in their localized area or all the

stress and so I use it a lot with him I don't usually use it with athletes with tendon issues, to be honest. I think it's good for, I think it could be good for ligaments actually. I don't, we don't really know, you know what I mean? I, it's not going to hurt. He already has so much activity, you know, like there's a lot of things you guys could explore. You could do ultra high reps, you could do the BFR and you could, uh, do a lot of eccentrics. That's what, I mean, I know you're doing them with the depth jumps and stuff like that, but you could hone in on those. But you guys don't have the time for it because you don't have the recovery time for it.

Like, whereas opposed to somebody that goes to a PT, you can throw everything at it because your advice usually is, hey, I need you to stop doing what you're doing. In this case, it's like part of his living and part of what he loves to do. Andrew, what do you got over there, buddy? i wanted to go back to like the ankle stuff so ankle mobility even something like the um the reverse nordic for somebody listening to the show that's not a dunker but they might have knee pain like oh i want to check that out but like you're you're the top of your foot is completely flat against the ground so for some people that's going to be kind of difficult yeah so my ankle mobility got developed through the lifts that i that i do um the reverse nordics right like i'm in complete extension at the ankle uh on my back squats i'm going ass to grass and you need yeah you need ankle mobility for that uh and that just kind of it keeps that range of

motion i don't have to be like stretching all the time and doing anything crazy like that to to maintain that yeah so is there anything extra that you guys do for ankle like health and mobility and strength i've definitely given you some circuits i guess what what circuits have i given you in the past because i've given you a ton of shit ankle circuit uh i have this this stability pad and i just put it on the ground and i'll just oh is that a slack is it called slack is it that thing or is it no it's like a it's like the blue pads the thick blue pads that sometimes people use for hip thrusts okay yeah you could also use a

pillow you could put a pillow on the ground um you can just balance balance on one foot like that uh mobility wise i do like any bent knee ankle stretch. That is really useful. And then I do my ABCs. Like, we do, like, banded stuff. Like, I do the ABCs with my foot. So all that stuff you can do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's cool.

That's pretty dope. For that stuff, I actually think BFR is awesome because it's so hard to heavily load your foot in pronation or supination, right? Like, there's so many tiny muscles there. And one of the things I think happens is if you were to put an EMG unit, you know, and look at the activity of the muscle and you do BFR, well, what we see actually without BFR, you got a failure, you'll see higher activity.

And what happens when you have higher activity is you're going to recruit all of the muscles around that area. And so if there is a tiny muscle that you weren't able to load, right? Well, BFR is going to fatigue you way quicker. And then you can use a way lighter load where you might not have been able to, he's chugging it, where you might not. I don't know why. What is in this? It's just glycerin. Mind bullet. It's a Kratom product. It's cool. So yeah, then, you know, I think it's a good way to get that fatigue really, really quickly at a light load where it's not going

to be super provocative, whereas ankles already kind of messed up and you're going to get the benefits of loading all of those tiny foot muscles or ankle muscles that you're not necessarily going to get if you just do a calf raise or if you do standing dorsiflexion, you know, it's hard to load pronation, which is where your kind of big toes go in town towards the floor, or supination where you're on the outsider feet. So I think that could be a really good stimulus. That is really smart. And I'm thinking of people that have bad wrists.

Yeah, I think that could be really good. They wrap the wrist. I never thought about that before, that mechanically – that's mechanical loading because you got the thing, it's stiff and it's stuck and you got to move it against the rubber that you wrapped it up in. Yeah. So I think those are all good uses. But I have a hamstring, chronic hamstring thing, and I love BFR. I put the cuff all the way up on my hip, pump it up to, you use limb occlusion pressure.

I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. What's the brand, though, of this BFR cuff? Because there's a lot out there. There are a ton. My friend, Thomas Kortenbeck, who, you know, he's one of the – if you guys want to get someone on the podcast, this guy is brilliant. He is one of the smartest people I've ever met. I think his Instagram is like VidInform or something.

I don't know how you exactly say it. VidInform? VidInform? Yeah, V-I-D-E-N-F-O. V-I-D-E-N-F-o-r-m but he uh he's brilliant he coaches the the danish national team for track super smart guy so he has a company called occlude and they the cuffs are awesome um unfortunately i the actual pump i broke so i had to buy a new one to replace it but i would if i were to recommend anyone you could use our penis pump male enhancement pumps right the actual pump I broke. So I had to buy a new one to replace it. But I would,

if I were to recommend anyone, you could use our penis pump, male enhancement pumps right behind him. Want to get a bigger dick? That's your pump, but you don't have a problem. Oh no, Mark. I did used to have a problem,

but I went from four inches to five. How much do they pay you guys to say that? It's been like 200k link in description i wonder how they afford that giant i came in and now i know where all the money comes from yeah these guys slinging some drugs or something? Nope, slinging dick. Incredible. I'm taking it home. I said that earlier. There was a penis pump up there, wasn't there?

There was a penis pump. I have it now. It's the most time we've got to replace that. Did you wash it? I didn't wash it. I leave it dirty. See what cylinder's missing. Like, oh, okay. But on the tendon thing, guys, real quick, I want to know, is this a habit that you guys have every day?

I don't know if it's every day three times a day, but is it something you intermittently do? You stop, you do your tendon work, you do whatever else you were doing. So one of the sayings that I say the most is discipline over motivation. Motivation is temporary, but if you have discipline, you're going to show up every single day and you're going to put in the required work. So with isometrics, we're doing those every single day diligently. Haven't missed a day since we started working together.

Wow. Yeah, you want to dunk or not right yeah you want to keep jumping like crazy i think if you have tendon pain it's it's a no-brainer to me it's like full body isometric there was there was a guy named was his name frank yang frank yang you should look up i think the asian like being frank yang look up seizure hops it's one of his top exercises that you can do on youtube it's a full body isometric anyways yeah so funny story about this briefly fascia guy no he's not now he's like very uh i think he's like very into meditation now but this was like 10 years ago and i say and i reference this all the time we put in the exercises on accident i'm

not gonna lie we have a do you know hamstring tantrums? Do you know what I'm talking about? Where you use the bands and you kick into them? What the fuck is this? Frank King's an OG. I remember this. Yeah. Frank King's an OG in fitness. That's,

some people will do that with bands on the rack. I think. Really? Oh, you're talking about the tantrums? You're talking about the seizure hops? Yeah. Well,

both. Like I've seen, I've seen people, that's like moving around like a baby. Remember Andrew? We're talking about the seizure hops yeah well both like i've seen uh i've seen people that's that's like moving around like a baby remember andrew we were talking about that like try to move around like you're andrew has a boy that's a one years old yeah that's a that's a way look it says a cns primer there you go cns nice you guys are looking for a pr day truly he was doing that to warm up or is that a joke oh phil derue does something with the the bands remember he he moves like a maniac i mean he's not moving as violently as that guy, but something like that.

Honestly, I have no idea. We, as a joke, like our friend CJ, the guy we showed you earlier, the dunker, he was our film guy. So he's filming Isaiah. For our online training, we have to get all these videos. And so Isaiah is supposed to demonstrate hamstring tantrums, which is like a quick on-off exercise where the bands are crossed, the J-hooks. You're laying on your back and your legs are going like this, kind of scissoring against the bands. And so Isaiah didn't know what

that was. And as a joke, he did that exercise. And so we accidentally put that in the training because I didn't, I didn't get to see the video. And so guys are like, we would get texts and be like, Hey, am I actually supposed to do the tantrums that way? And I was like, I was like, yeah, it's a hamstring exercise. He's like, are you sure? And I'm like, yeah, absolutely. So for like a year, we didn't know that for like a year and we were getting like form videos sent to us that's when it came out yeah we got the form video and we're like we're doing it right thp training please do not do that we didn't hamstring tantrum was the exercise oh my god yeah that was that was it was bad we. Hey, but that looks like it probably works pretty good or something. I don't know.

It should wake up your nervous system, but it's too embarrassing to do. In the gym. What's that thing that we have in the gym that you put your body on it and you shake? What's that thing called? You have the vibration plate? Yeah, vibration plate. Yeah, we have that. Yeah, it's kind of the same thing.

I mean, it's not any different. I think it was onto something. Frank Yane had bounce, by the way. He could jump super high. Really? Yeah, it's kind of the same thing. I mean, it's not any different. I think it was onto something. Frank Yane had bounce, by the way. He could jump super high. Really? Yeah. He could dunk. I remember he was fast too.

Seizure hops. That's a really offensive name. So I'm sorry. That's what it's labeled as. But someone, you asked a question? I don't remember. It was about the habit of the tendon work you guys do. I think that's just a really important thing.

Even myself. I do it a lot. Yeah, even myself. I'm going to start doing some type of tendon work for everything, every single day. We don't really think that way normally. Yeah. I haven't thought that way. It's one of those things where I tell my athletes, for the rest of your life, this is what you

need to be. For the rest of your life, three times a day, you will be doing a wall sit isometric to make sure that you're keeping your tendons healthy. And it's sometimes tougher to do. And this is why I think we need something portable to help guys do this a little bit easier where they do it correctly. They have something to help them do an isometric. Because if you're going to do something for the Achilles,

and I was doing this earlier because I had some Achilles pain, I had to grab a safety bar, get on, what is the power lifting rack that you guys, what is that called? The monolift. The monolift. I'm on the monolift with a safety bar, get on, what is the power lifting rack that you guys, what is that called? The monolift. The monolift. I'm on the monolift with a safety bar and I'm loading it and I have a plate on my phone and I'm holding on with 135 bouncing on one leg. Well, if I'm at home, how can I do that three times a day? I don't have a monolift, a safety bar, you know, or the plates to do that. And so one of the issues we've run into, especially with the Achilles, the knee, we've been pretty creative, but it's hard to load your Achilles that heavily at home.

What would you do? You know, you're going to push into a wall. That kind of works. But your foot's sliding. We've tried putting our hands above a doorframe and then pushing into it. Well, you're either going to break the doorframe, even if single leg, because my calves are strong as shit, or I'm going to, like, my shoulders are going to fatigue. And so that's an issue. Compacts, maybe?

Are those helpful, like a complex unit not really because they don't hit the the tensions and then it freaking fries your nervous system we had an athlete who his nervous system got he used those really often uh is that the pressurized uh the little yeah so you remember king he used it he used to be able to dunk okay Okay. Then he wanted to, then he was like, you know what? I want to be a power lifter or a bodybuilder. So he starts doing all this power,

power lifting and bodybuilding and he uses a STEM unit. And within, I think he did it for a year or two, his vertical, he couldn't dunk anymore. His vertical plummeted, dropped so hard. Super strong guy was putting up big numbers in the weight room.

He's like, well, I'll just stop doing all that stuff. Then years after he's seeing this like hangover from what he's like i maybe it was the stim unit and i'm like dude i have no idea i don't know what happened but that was one of the interesting anecdotes i heard so i personally have stayed away from it i used to use them in high school i think if you're hurt like again like an injury like a sprained ankle or you don't want the muscle to atrophy and you can't move i think it's great i think there's good research on that so but no i've never really tried it for i did try it in high school

for tendons and i didn't have any success with it i don't know if you did you use it no i've messed around with eastims like i put i put it on my face with my friend but uh brilliant as far as like a minimum i would say for getting in a routine with the tendon rehab, tendons love load. You never want to have complete rest. But at minimum, you want to be loading every other day, some kind of loading protocol. Yeah. And you're going to see an uptrend in your tendon health that way. Have you guys heard of there's this lecture that our buddy Graham sent me a few – I think last year. But Robert Schleip talked about like flexing the calf muscle and isomers – just like flexing certain muscle groups for a certain period of time. And there was some research that said that it actually helped individuals have Achilles recovery and strengthen their Achilles tendon.

Literally just standing and flexing. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You're talking about and flexing. Do you know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I haven't seen that. You're talking about just flexing the muscle, right? Yeah, literally. If I were to just do a body weight calf raise.

As hard as possible. No, body weight calf raise. Wait, is that what he did? That or literally just like flexing that muscle as hard as possible. And you flex it as hard as you can. Never mind. Just a bicep?

That's huge. Yeah. But there was research. I think either way would work right yeah and i'll try to get you the i'll get you the video so you can see but they they did some research on it and actually helped with achilles increasing the strength of the tendon and also recovery from injury to the achilles tendon um so i wonder if you guys have heard much about that or use that so it's i would have to look at what the actual tension in the tendon is during that

because i don't know that's technically co-contraction right like on both sides it's, I would have to look at what the actual tension in the tendon is during that, because I don't know, that's technically co-contraction, right? Like on both sides. It's not being, yeah, it's odd. Yeah. So you kind of just like squeeze both sides. And so it's, I feel like you'd almost have to do it correctly for it to work, but you could hypothetically do it. If you were to get your tibialis anterior to fire on the front of your leg, and then

you were plantar flexing against that muscle, you'd have co-contraction and you could load the tendon you know isometrically doing that and so i could see it conceivably working especially for someone like post-op where they are can't do shit you know i mean like that actually might be a really really good stimulus i'll send this to you after the podcast i think some people might have a really hard time flexing their calf if it's not loaded just because but But I think that that's a good thing because at first they might not have that great access to flexing it. But over time, it'll probably get better and better. That's also kind of like pre-tension too. Yeah.

Well, that's similar, right? Because like during a plow, you mean? Like before you hit the ground? Yeah, because that could be a reason someone sprains their ankle. You weren't pre-tense and your foot might be pronated or supinated. Have you guys ever heard about, are you familiar with depth drops and pre-tension?

Give it to us. All right, Mark. But slowly. Be gentle. I'll ease you into it. We're going to get it in the comments of this podcast. It's all right. Hopefully. We're going to get it in the comments of this podcast. It's all right. It's all right.

Hopefully they can take a chance. As long as they drop the comments and hit the like button. That's right. So anyways, so what this researcher, his name's Comey. I can't remember what his first name was, but it's K-O-M-I. He was studying basically. And then obviously Verko Shansky's, you guys named your gym super training, which is awesome. It's his book, super training, super well-known, but yeah,

I know I was my favorite books. It's a great book, great textbook. So anyways, what he basically found is what happens before athletes hit the ground, whether it's running or jumping or anything else is you will actually see, you can see it visibly and you can also measure it on an EMF or EMG that the muscle is firing before they even touch the ground. So if I'm running and my foot's about to strike the ground, right before my foot hits the ground, I would have co-contraction and pre-tension on both sides of the joint so that when I hit the ground, my leg doesn't mush into oblivion.

And so it's a way for you to anticipate. Your muscles do it reflexively. You can't really train yourself, quote-unquote, to do it reflexively that you can't really to train yourself quote unquote to do it is is difficult it happens naturally over time just from jumping or that's what like coordination is right and so a lot of guys do movements and they don't realize that this is happening all the time this is like pre-tensing and so it's this you know before you're coming down you have all this tension in your leg And what it does is the muscle we know produces more force concentrically in slow conditions, right? So that's why when you bench press, the bar doesn't

fly off your chest upwards. Downwards, you can do a lot eccentrically, but like it doesn't just pop off your chest. And so to combat that in really fast activities, your muscles turn on earlier. And so by turning on earlier and co-contracting, contracting on both sides, you know, and your, if your calf, I don't know if you can see this, if my tibialis anterior is like contracting, my tibialis anterior is contracting and the calf is contracting on the other side, I could conceivably get a lot of tension in my calf before I even touched the ground, which means I'm not going to take time to generate tension because I already have. And so when I'm on the ground, my muscles, intramuscular forces are super freaking high so for him you know we talk about

proprioception and the other guys like big in a barefoot training i think you guys are pretty big in a barefoot training proprioception is like where are my limbs in space right and so isaiah when he sprained his ankle one of the theories or hypothesis i have is he was wearing a jordan 36 which we love it's a great shoe for jumping it's like a cloud it's my favorite shoe but isaiah was doing a warm-up jump and he landed on the side of his foot. And because that shoe has so much cushioning, you can't feel the ground when your foot touches down. And so there's no pretension because he's doing a, not a max effort. That is the 36. Yeah. My favorite shoes. Sick looking shoes. I love them. They're the best. They're in Isaiah's car. I'll let you try them on after.

I love them. They're the best. They're in Isaiah's car. I'll let you try them on after. So, so I, one of the theories is that without that pretension, you could actually really mess yourself up. That's one of the mechanisms. I think guys get shin splints. Like you'll hear guys like, oh, I've never run. I'm going to start running for the first time and they get shin splints. Well, why do you have shin splints? Well, if you haven't run for 10 years, your coordination's wrecked. As soon as your foot goes to hit the ground, you're like, there is no pretension. There's no stability in that joint and your foot is going to mush As soon as your foot goes to hit the ground, you're like, there is no pretension. There's no stability in that joint, and your foot is going to mush down, your arch is going to flatten against the floor,

and your shin is going to get a huge load axially across it. That's not great. And so I think pretension is something really complex, and I don't even fully pretend to understand it, but I think it's one of the mechanisms for which guys can land safely and jump really, really high. I don't know if you guys have ever talked about that, but

we had a guy on the show named Chris Kodowski a while back, and he talked a lot about fascia and, uh, you know, there's still a lot that's unknown. I don't know how true the statement is that he said or where he got it from, but he basically said that if you just like touch the body, like in any spot that the fascia responds differently, even when touched in the same spot with the same exact force. So that being said, every time you take a step or anytime you, anything gets touched, uh, the response of the body is like a little different. Like the body is like a live living, thinking, breathing thing at all times.

So when you're floating through the air, your body is aware of that, even though you can't really feel your feet hitting the ground and stuff like that, the body still knows like we're about to probably make contact with the ground again. Exactly. And when you're in the air, I've heard that before that you do, you do kind of get tense when you're, when you're running, which is really interesting because you're, I guess you're also kind of trying to relax, especially if you're trying to become proficient at like a sprint or run, you know, if you're really grinding it out and trying to muscle through it, a lot of times that's when you get hurt.

Yeah. And I think, I think that happens exactly right. How I would describe the sensation of jumping a two foot jump, uh, it's relaxed and you're literally throwing yourself into the ground. So I'm like running, running, running. I take my penultimate step, which we might be able to show a jump and I can tell you where the penultimate step is at. But I throw myself into the ground with the penultimate step and then it's like a mini explosion. Like I just one, two, and then that's where all like the tension comes in and you release it.

Tell them about when you went to the Jordan brand event and there was was a sports scientist tell them about the story of what he said they so i went to it's called the jordan flagship store in la and they had a super cool like sports performance lab there and they had force plates on the ground and i was able to like test my vertical and hang time. And they said that Michael Jordan had the record for hang time at point nine two. I went in there and they had like 3D motion capture cameras like analyzing. You could see like the force vectors as I was jumping. And they tested my hang time at point nine six, which is almost an entire second in the air. And the guy, the sports scientist that was there was like freaking out and he was like he's like bro i've never seen something like this

like this is like an animal like literally many explosions are going off um as you as you hit the ground and there's something called uh rsi which is reactive strength index and he said mine was the highest he's ever seen um out of anybody so he's probably seen a lot yeah yeah he compared it to zion williamson he said mine was like because it's how high you jump over the amount of time that you're in the air for so a higher aside you're like you you hit the ground you punch it and you're flying in the air so yeah it was crazy any idea on how much how much the time is that when you go into that transition? It's a third of a second, 0.3.

Is the flight time or time on the ground? The transition step that you take. And then, yeah, I guess from the time that you land with that step and then propel yourself upward. I think that's ground contact. I think it's 0.3 seconds. So it's like on a two-foot jump you're hitting for me personally i'm hitting left right from the time my left heel

hits the ground to where that right there yeah yeah three point point three seconds uh sometimes it can get a little faster depending on your approach speed and if someone is at like point four are they potentially jumping uh not jumping as high? Correct. Yeah, there's potential for it. What's interesting about that is— But it might not make a huge difference. Yeah, because you could—like there's different ways to jump, obviously. And what's interesting, like for him, some of his best jumps—

are you typically the type where the lower the ground contact time, you jump higher? Is that generally how you are? Yeah. So there's other types of athletes where the ground contact time being longer actually helps. I'm actually that way off one foot.'s a like a sweet spot for it i don't want to be too slow but traditionally what happens is how the movement strategy you pick to jump high dictates how long you are on the ground so if you jump off one foot that movement strategy the fact you pick jumping off one foot you're automatically going to have you know between 0.25 and 0.20 of his dunks i wanted to see like what's your one

foot you could go to and then there's i got you john evans underscore thp is my instagram and there's also differences in one foot jumpers there's power jumpers and speed jumpers yep so and it's really common for high jumpers and track to be speed jumpers long jumpers and or basketball players they are usually power jumpers yeah so what does that mean like when you think when you see a power jumper jump versus a speed jumper what is the big difference unless i totally missed it so there's with two foot i wouldn't say there is speed and power other than you could be a guy that's really quick on and off the ground like isaiah's 0.3 there's some two foot jumpers that are 0.35 or 0.4 I would say you're trending more towards power I would say if you're more of a speed jumper

off to like Daniel you know what I'm talking about the coach not this video go to go to scroll up scroll up scroll up go to one more up a little higher that video down right there that's probably my highest jump this is interesting my vertical plummeted

because I was training super hard and then I had like the highest jump I've ever had so that jump i was probably on the ground for about 200 milliseconds isaiah's on the ground for about 300 to 350 milliseconds yeah off two foot jumps and so a speed jumper what they do is on their drive leg they actually flick their foot backwards and it it's really hard to explain i would like have to show you, but their ground contact time is even faster. They would go down to like 180 milliseconds. And they're also going to be planting on the ball of their foot. So a good speed jumper is Nick Briz.

If you look Nick Briz up, super fast and can take off from the free throw line, especially on a fast break in basketball games. You might have to type in NickBrizDunk because we have no idea what's going to come up on his Instagram. John, were you mentioning to me in the gym that you were a decathlete? So I actually, I was trying to be a decathlete. That's probably the best way to word it.

So in high school, I was slated more or less, like I was saying, to do high jump. So I loved high jump. It's my favorite event. I think it's so cool. You obviously saw my hip mobility. You saw how little internal rotation I have. One of the big things you need to do in high jump. It's my favorite event. Like it's so cool. You obviously saw my hip mobility. You saw how little internal rotation I have. One of the big things you need to do in high jump is twist.

And so what happens, how you get your back to the bar is you plant your foot and you twist on the ground so that your back ends up facing the bar and then you flip. And so I have really bad internal rotation. So I wasn't able to hurdle. That's a position you need an internal rotation. I wasn't able to high jump. Well, I was six, four, but like, or six, six was my PR, but I was never going to be great. Sprinting internal rotation, super important. Your pelvis like rotates around and stuff like that.

You know, so that's all of the events pretty much shot put more twisting, more internal rotation. So lacking that really put me at a disadvantage, even for as powerful as I was. In high school, when I was 17, I could half squat 385, like down to a box, down to parallel. I could, which I was 180 at the time. I could power clean 225, and I could bench 230,

and I could run a four. It was like we used 30-meter dash, but if it was like hand time, 40- 40 yard dash I probably would have been like if it was hand time probably like mid four fives or something like that so pretty freaking fast and then my vertical was 36 37 inches off one foot and I could broad jump over 10 feet so you look at those numbers and you'd be like oh and I could also run the 400 in like under 50 seconds which is decently fast and sucks that is the worst event you ever on the 400 no no i didn't we should run one after this it'd be fun all of us can do it it's not fun it's horrible so yeah i was slated more or less out of high school to do the multi you know to do the decathlon um because i was

kind of good at all the conglomerate of what I could do. But when I went to college, I wasn't able to do the hurdle events that I didn't really do in high school that I was trying to do in the decathlon. I wasn't able to do anymore because now to hurdle well, your hip mobility has to be insane. Well, I don't have great hip mobility. Well, you're not good enough to be a high jumper and you're not good enough to be a hurdler alone. But if you can't hurdle well, your score in the decathlon is going to suck. And so, you know, I would have really struggled with the decathlon with the decathlon or the heptathlon if I would have done it.

But I just had such a drive and desire to be good at it because I knew I had a lot of potential that it just – I ended up getting a lot of injuries forcing those positions, forcing those. Do you recall like if you had pain when you were a kid, like when you were 17, 18, like doing these lifts and doing some of these things? In my hips and my back and stuff? Just in general. Oh yeah. I started having knee pain when I was 13 or 14, patellar tendonitis. It was technically tendinopathy, but like the early stages. I started having crippling back pain when I was 14.

I started having hip pain when I was 17. I could never deep squat. I could never deep squat. And when I was a kid, we used to go, you know, to like a daycare facility, you know, cause my parents were both working and to punish us, they'd be like, all right, knees up, head down. And you'd have to like internally rotate and tuck your head down and your pelvis is rotating. And you'd have to tuck into a lot of flexion. I could never do it as a kid. It was the most excruciatingly painful thing that they would force us to do for punishment when we were talking too much, which now looking

back kind of seems fucked up anyway. So, but we do it all the time. And I remember even as like an eight year old or nine year old, I could never get my knees up to my chest. Like it always hurt my hips really bad in my back really bad. And so I'm fairly confident that it's like a, my twin brother, identical as my brother, same exact issues. So my dad, you know, he, uh, he had the same back issues, hip issues issues like same exact thing so my hips have always kind of been shaped that way and it's always especially like we were talking and you were like oh well the they said my toes have to be this way i mean he says it's like or my heels have to stay down by forcing those positions i royally fucked up my body like i

had so many issues by forcing positions my body was never built to really do. Um, and so I positions made up by who? Yeah, exactly. Because someone said so. Who said so? Well, I, Mark said so, or Isaiah said so, or John said so. So I think forcing those caused a lot of issues. And that was kind of why I never really pursued the decathlon. Um, not at a high level. I trained a lot for it and I loved it and I wanted to coach it, but then dunking fell into place. So that was, yeah, that's pretty much how it, how many jumps would you do if you are to be jumping in the gym in consideration of the fact that you're going to be playing basketball as well? If you want to jump higher, I would first cut down on how much cardio or basketball you're doing. I would say the key number of reps for jumping is as much as possible.

the key number of reps for jumping is as much as possible you want to go in there and you want to you want to toe the line of basically like almost getting hurt you want to see how much you can push without crossing that that threshold um for someone like me i might be i might get away with 50 jumps in a session 50 to 70 jumps this is like on a quarter in a gym uh in a gym in a session, 50 to 70 jumps. This is like on a quarter in a gym. In a gym. In a gym. Yeah, yeah. Or no, on a basketball court, my bad. And maybe somebody like myself might need to divide that down quite a bit since I don't have five or ten in a day or something.

And then, of course, you can always build your capacity up. So when I first started, I was jumping maybe for 20 minutes in a dunk session. Now I might be going for an hour and a half or two hours. And the two things that you want to change when you're jumping a lot is the frequency of your jump. So you might start with one session a week and then the next week you might do two sessions that week, move to three, move to four. And then also the volume of jumps. So that like the how many jumps you're taking each session another thing to take into consideration is the intensity so how high you're jumping or how far you're trying to jump so if i'm if i'm dunking on 10 feet i'm putting every ounce of energy i have

into that jump if i'm on an eight foot rim, I can get away with my 60%, 70% effort, effort jumps. Um, so you kind of want to like juggle all those variables, but the number one rule is just progressive overload. Like makes really small incremental jumps every single week. Um, and you're going to be on the, on the right path with that. Also, do you do like, I mean, there's so many things you do now, but are you doing some jumps where you're jumping long and then are doing some jumps where you're jumping high? Yes. What's that look like? Kind of.

I do some distance dunks, but for the most part, I'm just jumping as high as possible. Yeah. But there's different ways you can build variety into it. Like you can go one foot, right leg, left leg, right, left, left, right. That's like the order of the feet that that you're planting in um that's a way to add variety into it also if you're a low rooming you can practice 360 reverse dunks uh sounds dirty i'm sorry but yeah there's lots of ways with to add variety in that regard and also i mean i know there's so

much variety but uh thinking about like approaching versus just doing it straight off do you are most of your jumps with an approach yeah almost like 99 of of my jumps would be a full speed approach jumps and do you think that's doing approach jumps is a better way to build your jump capacity or do you want to have some where you're just standing and somewhere you're approaching it's mainly going to build your jump capacity or do you want to have some where you're just standing and some where you're approaching? It's mainly going to build your coordination. It's going to make you more efficient. As far as like,

well, sorry, can you repeat the question? Just like, just like jumping from a still position versus jumping with an approach. Like, do you mix that up or are you, are you,

when you're on the court, are you mainly training jumping with an approach? It's almost always with an approach like do you mix that up or are you are you when you're on the court are you mainly training jumping with an approach um it's almost always with an approach it's just more like sport specific and you're just going to get more out of your your vertical will you do a like a lifting session the same day you're going to have a dunk session or do you keep those separated i it depends if i'm doing load management or not um if i'm in load management, I'm trying to manage my knee pain, plyo volume, all that stuff. I'll usually jump twice a week and I'll lift twice a week. So a typical load management setup would be Monday, jump, Tuesday, lift, Wednesday, active rest, Thursday, jump, Friday, lift, active rest, Saturday, Sunday. If if i'm healthy i'm lifting three times a week jumping once a week um and then it's rare that an athlete can handle both on the on the same day wait up lift usually

when you're healthy lifting three times a week and jumping only once a week yeah correct wow so you're not on the court every day uh no no not at all is that fun for you no i i hate john sometimes that's what i'm wondering because like yeah i literally i want to just dunk every single day so so this is one thing i wonder because you mentioned that when you were younger that you would you just went to the goal you were jumping every single day but obviously to get to the level you are now you needed to do that so would the beginning phase be get frequency and then as are now, you needed to do that. So would the beginning phase be get frequency? And then as you get better, you need to decrease that frequency? If you're an athlete that hasn't built those motor patterns yet, you want to be jumping as much as possible.

I see it a lot with like power lifters or lifters in general. They'll see us. They want to jump higher and they're strong as shit. But they've never done a full approach jump in their life so someone like someone like you like you would back off the weights a lot and then just build that coordination of jumping yeah there's definitely like a sacrifice to it too most guys don't want to do that you know if you're if you're someone that loves the gym and you love lifting if i you know like he loves dunking if i tell him hey you're, if you're someone that loves the gym and you love lifting, if I, you know, like he loves dunking. If I tell him, Hey, you can't dunk, you have to lift vice versa.

If I tell you, Hey, you can't lift, you have to dunk. Yeah. That's what's going to ultimately make you successful, but that might not necessarily be what you want to do. And so kind of finding that balance is, is a little bit difficult. I've seen guys succeed despite that, that love the gym and they'll just go really hard. But I've also seen it blow people up and they get hurt because jumping is so high intensity and the intensity you're lifting at, really hard to pair those things at the same time. I think what would be cool,

but also maybe too devastating, would be a 100-pound jump. So you got a 60-pound weight vest and a 40-pound med ball. And you got to dunk the 40-pound med ball? You think you'd be able to do that? That vest and a 40 pound med ball. And you got to dunk the 40 pound med ball. You think you'd be able to do that? That's a heavy ass med ball. Well,

I'm thinking, I'm thinking hard. Well, so I'm thinking, so I'm thinking a 40 pound med ball because then you can offload it. Right. So there's less, less landing or you can go with a 20 pound med ball,

but then you got to land with 80 pounds on your, you know, so if I was basically, if I was a hundred pounds heavier, would I still be able to dunk? I think could i could pull some stuff off you think there would be any value to having like that's a ridiculous amount of weight you think there would be any value to having it would be a six pound vest or four pound five pound vest uh just i think it would affect technique too much he's getting anxiety four pound four pound four pound vest 96 divided by no i'm thinking i'm thinking four

pound vest i want i want the four pound vest 96 pound ball um yeah i was i was joking about that uh i wouldn't actually do that but with the so your question is would was just any sort of six or four pound vest to just yeah just some sort of weight uh i mean i kind of want to hear i want to hear what your lens is on this actually what do you think have you been have you been heavier or lighter right now right now i'm the heaviest i've ever been basically uh does it help if you're leaner or something or not really yeah yeah you want to be as lean as possible if you want to jump high uh sports specific muscle mass is what helps me the most so if i put on mass on my quads on my butt my hamstring my calves that's always made me jump

higher the times i've jumped the lowest was when i was like had really painful knees and i was also my heaviest i was one 178 with knee pain i wasn't lean now Now I'm like 184 and I'm a lot more lean than I used to be. But yeah, definitely like just specific muscle mass helps. Yeah. I think you, we might be able to use a weight vest, but like the risk of it is almost not worth the reward. I mean, six pounds, four pounds doesn't really make a difference. It doesn't, well, it may not seem like it makes a difference, but when you're jumping 45 inches and running as fast as you are, six pounds is so light it probably wouldn't matter, honestly.

It would be interesting. What about maybe something like wearing a light-weighted vest, jumping up onto a box or something like that? I think you could probably do it in a context where there's low risk. It's more so on his tendons because he's probably not going to jump as high, and so he's not going to land from as high as a height. So there's that. I think you could probably get away with upwards of 15 pounds.

I think after 15 it might be a little risky. Too risky. So lifting-wise, what are some things that have been really beneficial when you were just talking about straight lifting? We see this guy here. Is that you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Jumping with the trap bar deadlift.

And what are some other exercises that have been really where you guys have been like, this definitely is really helpful for us? Man, there's tons. Let me ask you, what are your favorite lifts that you do that you think have helped you the most? Number one is back squatting uh half squat or deep squat uh full squat like deep like ass ass to grass squat um that would be yeah there's 365 that's helped me a lot um i would say deadlifts. Deadlifts have helped me a shit ton. Jumping, of course, has helped me a lot. That is the exercise. Something that I added training with John that I didn't really do a lot before in the past was calf raises,

especially just really fucking heavy calf raises. I used to go in the gym and you hear about doing like all the compound lifts just for like regular strength training. But, uh, yeah, calf raises, people don't, don't really do them that much, especially with like devastating. They make you so sore sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and I, I love seated calf raises specifically. Um, that helped me so much with my knee pain. Uh, really? uh really yeah because built up that soleus right the outside muscle yeah yeah yeah they they hit the soleus and when you're jumping the soleus is taking so much uh energy or absorbing so much energy and it can kind of take some stress off of off of the knees power project family i hope you guys are enjoying this episode now mark

andrew and myself have been cold plunging for a while now. We actually use the Cold Plunge XL. But the reason why this has become part of our daily routine every single day is because of, honestly, how good it makes us feel coming out of that water. Now, if you want to take a cold shower, that is beneficial, and you need to be doing that if you don't have a cold plunge. But if you do get a cold plunge that goes all the way down to 39 degrees. It's crazy because Andrew Hurman actually talked about the benefits of dopamine post cold plunging. Now, cocaine gives you a 2.5 rise in your dopamine release. Cold plunging gives you that also, but it also gives you a sustained higher level of dopamine throughout your day. That's just one of the benefits as there are many. So if you guys want to get on it, Andrew, how can they? Oh, yes. You guys got to head over to thecoldplunge.com and check out enter promo code power project to save $150 off. And

before we drop off here, I do have to say that this has been the absolute best thing I have ever done for my mental health. Every single day I get in this cold plunge and I come out a happier, more positive and more vibrant human. I can't recommend this enough. Again, thecoldplunge.com promo code power project to save $150 off links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Let me ask you this when, you know, because we've had like, for example, go to, right. And I don't bring them up in a negative way. It's just, there's things that are mentioned where they believe like there's compressive forces with the back squat that may compress the ankles and the spine. And I'm wondering, have you found that after you back squat, do you feel compressed at all?

Do you feel like – because what I'm going to is you mentioned that you were doing a hard training cycle, right? And you had – I don't know if it was right after that training cycle, your jump or your vert went down. And then it took you a while to like out of that for your vert to go back up, but you made improvements. So I'm wondering when it comes to lifting and the athleticism of jumping, are there times where you need to back off the limping so you can actually jump higher that it like lifting negatively affects your ability to jump in the moment, but it pays off later on. Absolutely. This is my favorite thing. A thousand percent.

So with him, we regularly build in deloads, which you guys are very familiar with, right? Your deload week. A lot of guys do their macro cycle where it's, you know, four micro cycle or yeah, four micro cycles, fourth, fourth micro cycles of deload. You know, you progressively build up in volume or intensity or whatever you're overloading. And then you see that's where your best lifts come or you'll do a 14-day taper or whatever else and you see big numbers so it's interesting because we have those general guidelines but just over coaching him so diligently and using him as a little science project and then all the other athletes

we've coached you know as well i was able to really dive into how his body cyclically functions along those, those, you know, stimuli. Yes. And so what I found is, okay, he does this week of loading, right? Vertical might be totally fine. And we lift Monday, Wednesday, Friday, heavy as hell. Starts with a power clean, does some squats, does some RDLs, do some calf raises. Maybe there's five, five-ish sets for each of those. Wednesday you come in, you know, similar type of session, maybe some variety. Friday comes in similar type of session maybe some variety saturday's his jump

day yeah he didn't really see a bunch of a decrement right second week comes in now his vertical is starting to climb down a little bit now that's where i'm like okay now we're doing what i want to do i want to see that vertical start dropping down a little bit because that means we are stressing those specific systems to a point where he's seeing a decrement in his vertical. Why is he seeing a decrement in his vertical? Because I've just blasted his quads. I've blasted his calves. I've blasted his hamstrings and glutes. I want to see that drop. And then third week, it's like, okay, let's do it. Let's increase intensity a little bit more, drop volume down a little bit more. Let's try to rev up the nervous system. Let's redline the nervous system on this stuff. And obviously making sure he stays healthy.

Okay, now we see that vertical climb down a little bit more. You get to that fourth week. For him, he only needs, because he's so well-trained and his work capacity is so high, he's just capable of chewing up weight room volume unlike any athlete I've probably ever coached. For him, it's like you back off, you know, 50% in volume and keep my intensity high or

60 volume by that third fourth day i'm gonna go from maybe my peak was 50 inches when i was fresh or whatever else yeah you know and then through the cycle maybe when i'm 48 and then 47 46 and a half now by the third day you see this sharp increase in his performance and you start seeing it like he always says he's like man i could hit that dunk on a deload week. Like I know by that Saturday session, I'm going to be jumping my eyes. And it's true. He does such a good job of handling those recovery periods and seeing a big super compensation curve, which people sometimes shit on. They're like, well, it's outdated or whatever fatigue fitness model. But I will, I will stand behind that. And those periods of overreaching, you know what I mean? And then the loading or backing off a few days completely,

his vertical will just shoot up. And for me, you know, like it's a little bit different as a one foot jumper, as a one foot jumper, you're way more sensitive to fatigue. I don't know if there's something synonymous in, in powerlifting maybe where like the deadlift is a little bit more fatiguing

because there's more overall weight on the bar versus barbell back squat. But I would think your central nervous system is more wired holding 1,000 pounds as if that's your max deadlift. What's your max deadlift? A 771. 771. What's your best back squat? 1,080. Holy shit.

So maybe the back squat in your case, you might see more of a hangover, you know what I mean, after that. Well, deadlifts were always taxing. I think there's some research and information about the grip. Yeah. Like when your grip gets really fucked up, your body gets really fatigued. I remember after some hard deadlift sessions, coming into the gym two, three days later and just like not being able to grab anything very well. And the 45-pound plates felt really heavy. And then I would sure enough,

you know, just not have a great workout because the didn't seem like there was enough zip or energy there. So I had to strategically, it wasn't really just the deadlift, but the deadlifts could kind of almost kind of paralyze your grip a little bit when you're prepping for it and trying to lift heavier. Maybe that's why for me personally, deadlifts were not fatiguing at all. I could deadlift three times a week without a problem because i'd be hook gripping and with hook grip the bar is just hanging in your hands that's a huge difference yeah if you especially if you start to lose your grip at all you'll start to pitch forward and stuff my form and technique was not amazing either and when your when your technique is off well then we have to account for that too like if you kind of have a

little bit of reckless lifting which my other two lifts were pretty good my my deadlift was like off and so the deadlift i there were times where i paid more attention to it and really tried to be a stickler but it took so much attention away from the other two lifts it didn't make any sense for me to pour any more time into the form so after a while i was just like you know what fuck i'm just gonna bend down and pick it up i'm just not that amazing that's what he did today in power clean he was just like all right grip and rip let's go like that's what you did too eventually probably at 300 yeah we just kind of got to that point so i'd only deadlift like once a month a lot of times right so i think for what we do it's everyone's a little bit different depending on their training history right if i if i've been

jumping my whole life as a one-foot jumper as a one-. There it is. Like, wait, baby. Oh wait. Wow. Is that the, that's the PR one right there. I think that's like, I think on that day I did like seven to 15 or something. Yeah. Yeah.

So with that, I would, I would assume like, you know, under a really heavy training cycle, here's, here's a really good question for you guys. I'm curious on a really,

really heavy training cycle. Let's say you did eight, eight weeks of progressive loading. I don't know what, maybe you only do four, maybe you do six, which lift would take the biggest hit if they were all relatively similar volumes and, and, and intensity, which lift would take the biggest hit for each of you guys? For me, the bench. The bench press would? For me, the bench. Yeah. Like percentage wise, that would be the highest. Yeah. And then what about you?

If we were doing all the same, like relatively similar volumes where it's not like well i benched more of course my bench is gonna go down the most yeah or maybe you have a heavy cycle for each one which one would take the heaviest like three different cycles one was deadlift focus one was squat focus one was bench focus which of those would see the biggest percentage decrement by being fatigued under similar volumes for each cycle yeah it's hard to say i i think it would probably be the deadlift i think it's like it's the mental side of it that's the like the fuckery of the whole thing because even though if even if you try to go percentage based it still doesn't work out the right way because there's like there's something off that is hard to put into words that is overtaxing your body and you still need lighter weight on some of these movements.

So I would argue like he probably needed a little bit lighter weight on the bench press to make progress. I definitely needed lighter weight on the deadlift for me to make progress. Like if you had pushed higher intensities that whole cycle, you would have just fucked yourself up more or less, you think? Yes, because I needed to really hone in the technique more so than anything in the form. And I had to kind of – it would have been really beneficial and it was beneficial. I've done this many times and that's when I got the strongest, you know, four sets, three to four sets, four to six reps. I would just have to live right there. But it's like who the fuck wants to do that?

That shit's really hard. Yeah, that's what I make him do. And today I was like, you got to do back squats. It's five by four or five by six. And he was like, I did three. I'm like, that's not what we him do and he today i was like you gotta do back squats it's five by four or five by six and he was like i did three i'm like that's not what we called for but okay so but yeah i heard him say that in the gym too yeah i think you asked him and he's like i'm doing three and you're like okay all right because we're doing three triples baby yeah so with one foot like you'll it's so much more sensitive because you're on the ground shorter. So it's almost analogous to the 100-meter dash. The 100-meter dash, your foot is on the ground for, I think,

90 milliseconds at upright sprinting, and one-foot jumping, you're on the ground for, best case scenario, 180 milliseconds. So two-foot jumping, you're on the ground for 300 milliseconds. The shorter you are on the ground ground the less time there is for errors or the like you could or the less uh leeway there is right because it's just you have so little time on the ground that any air like you just don't have any room that makes sense for something getting fucked up jogging you know it's way safer than sprinting yeah for a lot of reasons but that

could be one of them yeah and just the well just more so in the performance side of things, like to produce a lot of force in 80 milliseconds is like, you just have no time to produce force. So it's so sensitive to fatigue where if I blow someone up on the weight room, it's almost for certain that the first thing to go, if they're a sprinter is going to be their upright sprinting. And if it's a one foot, if it, if it's a, you know, me, myself, my vertical is going to plummet as one foot jumper more than my two foot vertical. I can do both, but my one foot is going to plummet as a one-foot jumper more than my two-foot vertical. I can do both, but my one foot's going to take a way bigger hit just because it's so

sensitive to weight room volume. And I will still push, but like you said, there comes a point where weightlifting will murder my vertical. And as soon as I back off, it's like every three or four days, I see an inch or two of my vertical come up. And it's like, okay, I touched 10.7, three, four days later, now I'm touching 10.9. Three, four days later of easy lifting. You know what I mean? Just really what I basically did today, which was really easy lift, easy quarter squats, some calf raises, cut it there. Like all at around like probably 50 to 60% of what I'm capable of still lifting, but it's such low volumes, slow lifting to just keep my tenants feeling good. And then it's like, okay, three days later, you know, doing that again, boom, my vertical goes

up again, goes up again, goes up again. That video that he pulled up earlier where I'm like barely doing a one-hander. And then the other one where my head's at the rim, they're both 10 foot rims, right? I was warmed up in both of those videos. They're both on that same cycle. I just had more time to let that fatigue dissipate and really let that fitness shine through that I developed over the last 90 plus days. We'll have guys jump off our program and then all of a sudden they'll be like, Hey, they're like, it's not really working for me or whatever else. They jump off the training. They stopped doing anything other than just playing and their vertical will skyrocket. Why? Well, because you're not paying me to not train you. You're not paying

me to tell you to not lift. But in reality, there's times where that you need to do that. Um, and we do build it in, but you know, if they're not, there's tell you to not lift but in reality there's times where that you need to do that um and we do build it in but you know if they're not there's different tiers so if guys aren't regular communicating with me regularly communicating with me i don't know exactly how much time they might need off with him it's easy like his body's so dialed in we both kind of have an idea of how he's going to do it's very predictable um for me it's honestly been less predictable because i don't usually take 45 days of not lifting heavy. You know, like, can you imagine if I was like, Hey guys, I know you want to get better at powerlifting in your prime, but I was like, Hey, don't, uh, don't lift for 45 days. Like you'd be like, yeah, that's probably not going to fly. And obviously my goal is jumping,

but lifting does help. Um, so yeah, one foot is very different than, than two foot. Is there a lot of differences in the training specifically, like as it pertains to like, So, yeah, one foot is very different than two foot. a case of like just really overthinking but if you jump off your uh i guess off your right leg all the time uh then your left hip flexor is getting a lot of work your right glute is getting a lot of work but the reverse isn't happening right i do think in this is a fun one this is a unilateral exercise for single leg eccentrics where it was 280 on a single leg and it's just lower it down as slow as basically as slow as possible. I think I've done that upwards of 360 on a single leg, kind of like an eighth squat. So I do, I do unilateral work for that reason. And I like to put it in usually for guys once a week,

like Isaiah will usually have one day where he's going to be doing reverse lunges or a split squad, or he's going to do a side squat or depending on what he's, what the, what the time of the year is. So yeah, there's definitely an inherent asymmetry, uh, in my, my legs. He has a pretty big asymmetry as well. I guess for me, I would notice my left leg actually is more fatigued often. So I actually suck at lifting often on my left leg, but it's because I jump off my left leg and use it a lot more often. My right leg tends to be quite a bit stronger, even though that's not my left leg. And it's not because my left leg's not strong. It's because my right leg is not jumping repetitively over and over. I'm not getting all that load through it. So this is weird stuff. Charles Poliquin used to talk about it, how the,

uh, the one, one side can respond a little bit better. Like the side that you think is actually weak, uh, can respond better to training. Yeah. i've seen that as well i mean for you what are the biggest asymmetries you would say that you have yeah for for me my left leg is way stronger way bigger and then my right leg uh is smaller and weaker and that's because i'm a left right jumper uh the right leg is more inherently like like plyometric yeah it's just more elastic it's like stiffer when you kind of bounce off the ground with it it's like on it's like on the velocity side of the force velocity curve and then the left leg that's like the first leg that's planting and that's taking all the force like in the jump and generating all the

force and when you do that every day for hundreds of reps like your left leg's gonna get way way stronger um yeah so if you watch you'll see the block foot is this is the very last contact that's the elastic one it's on the ground a little bit shorter uh that's the the first leg that hits his left leg that's his plant foot also you you mentioned connor barth have you ever seen connor barth's quad or one no zach mentioned do you know conor barth i don't we should pull him up so he uh zach mentioned him actually but his quads are very visibly different sizes because of the asymmetric nature of jumping but just because of like he was saying one leg is so force dominant the other so like speed low force high velocity dominant it's still high force but it's like a shorter time period that his left leg is like, is it his left leg? I think his right leg is stronger.

So he's a right left plant. So his right leg is just like his quad is huge. His whole thigh is huge. And then his left leg is like way smaller. Do you think there would be any benefit in jump like doing some jumps with the opposite legs? Would there or would that take away from the nature of what you do? You wouldn't jump as high because of specificity. It's more general to kind of jump with both plants.

So it's might as well just like max out all your jumps and all the reps you can do with one plant. Okay. Okay. Makes it almost too, too confusing. Yeah. As a,

as an athlete, I mean, as a basketball player, there's, there's benefits to being able to go off all the plants. I mean, if you watch like Russell Westbrook is probably the best you would agree. I mean,

he can do it all. He can go, you know, typically how you do the plan. Like we said, as one leg plants and then the other plants, he can go right, left,

he can go left, right. He can jump off his left leg. He can jump off his right leg. And what that does is it allows him to approach the ball uh sorry the basket from so many different angles because you inherently have a preference on the angle that you curve when you plant with your right foot and then your left foot you like to lean in to the right when you do the left right you like to lean into the left well if i'm trying to lean into the left and plant right left, it's going to feel very awkward.

It's kind of against the direction that you're moving. And so same thing applies with your left leg or right leg. Like I like to lean, you know, inwards, kind of like high jump and curve that direction when I jump off my left leg. To curve the other way is very awkward. It's very awkward for me to jump that direction. It just doesn't feel natural. And so jumping off the right leg gives you that advantage so by doing all those plants your game as a basketball player if you want to be someone that dunks on people opens up a lot and most NBA guys could do that but honestly like you were saying is there a benefit to doing it they don't practice it so it's like you got to practice it

to get better at it but there's definitely benefits and as a dunker it's not something you guys think would be necessary to improve your ability over time. You don't think you need to do that? It depends. More fun. Yeah, it depends in what context. I think to max out the vertical one plant is most important. Yeah.

For developing coordination. My dad actually, he used to tell me this when I was practicing basketball. He said, everything you learn on the court, learn how to do it with your left hand first, and that's going to improve your right hand. And so that always stuck with me and helped with coordination. But yeah, it just depends on the context. I have kind of a dumb question.

Do you guys have big hands? Is it easy for you? Can anyone palm? This is not a dumb question. Do you guys have big hands? Is it easy for you? Like, can anyone palm? This is not a question. We ask this all the time. Yeah. So Isaiah, you can do,

I don't know if you guys can see this for the viewers. Isaiah probably has, I don't know, maybe half an inch at each of his fingers of, of length. And so that does help. I mean, you would know better than I would,

but yeah, cause I was trying to fuck around with like, and I was like, I can't palm this. Do I have to be able to palm it? Yeah, go ahead. Palming is actually a skill. If you look up Jordan Kilgannon's TikTok,

we were at dunk camp and we had a, what was the name that we called it? I don't know. It was something absurd probably. You're already going to get flamed in the comments. We might as well just go all the way with it. We called it like palm off or something like that and we would grab a basketball yeah so imagine a basketball here it'd be like this and then you just try to like pull away

and then whoever has stronger hands can pull the basketball away yeah jordan kogan and had the smallest hands at the camp out of all the dunkers and basketball players and he just shit on everybody are his hands smaller than both of yours yeah okay my hands are like yeah let's see okay so i should be able to palm the basketball you should based on the yeah yeah yeah okay that gives me hope so it's also it's also different too because like most times we're not we're not palming the ball and swinging it like our hands not over top of the ball yeah and swinging it like that's really hard to do regardless of how big your hands are you have to have dinner plate hands but oh this is it yeah jordan jordan

would like mess people up with this um he just literally can rip it out of his hand and travis the other kid travis we coach him yeah travis has his hands are giant he could pull him the hell out of a ball but jordan's hands were smaller but his grip is just so incredible with that ball he could just pull it out of his hands that's so interesting that it's a skill yep you literally just like sit there all day as much as you want just palm palm a basketball yeah and eventually your grip is gonna get crazy but there's also like knowing how to and isaiah taught me this like moving your hand around the ball is really important in doing trick dunks or finishing dunks. Like, so if I'm going to, if I'm going to jump right now,

I want to swing the ball in my arms. I'm going to keep my hands under the ball. If I kept my hand on top of the ball and swung upwards, the ball is obviously going to fall out no matter who you are. Yeah. And so whether it's a windmill or something else, you always want to keep the ball like opposing the direction of the inertia of the ball. Right. Because if the ball is trying to go, you know, backwards and my hands on the other, like on the direction of the inertia of the ball right because if the ball is trying to go you know backwards and my hands on the other like on the wrong side of it the ball is going to fly out of my hand yeah and so it's really important to kind of understand that and there's

drills and things that you can do as well like a lot of people don't know this but when you just want to do a one-hander you have to push the ball into your right hand and keep your right hand on top of it if you're dunking with the right hand use your left hand to push the ball into the opposite hand and that's how you keep your hand on top of it. If you're dunking with your right hand, use your left hand to push the ball into the opposite hand. And that's how you keep your hand on top of it and finish dunks pretty easily. I have a video on YouTube. It's called Learn Dunk Technique. And it's all ball handling type drills.

And you literally just mess around with them. It teaches you how to use momentum, how to move the ball around your body. And it teaches you how to finish dunks super well how to transfer the ball properly and you can get super consistent with those dunks wow that's like something i never understood until you get into those really high level dunks like for me it was natural to do a one-hander but then as i got to like a windmill or an east bay which is between the legs those dunks like are increasingly difficult and so those little nuances that you don't notice when you're just doing a one hander or two hander

make a huge difference when you're trying to go between your legs or in his case, go behind your back and then between your legs, you know, and then while spinning, like having your hand in the right position and pushing the ball the correct way at the right time is really, really important. One of the biggest mistakes people make at dunking off the dribble is that they don't do what he was saying earlier. And that's punch the ball upwards because it's like some guys will walk up and they'll just kind of like keep it between their legs and just jump. And then they, then they bring the ball upward, but it's really important to time that up

with what is his block foot and drive the ball upward at the right time. Cause it's like, it's, it gives you a little jolt of momentum off the floor and it helps you convert your horizontal momentum to vertical momentum so knowing those little nuances goes a long way for someone who might be close or have the vertical or they're like oh but i can't palm the ball you probably can still dunk if you can get what you think your wrist over the rim yeah i would say like most of your hand maybe like a couple inches down on your wrist and that's without being able to think i can do that but i still can't dunk your wrist. And that's without being able to palm it. I think I can do that, but I still can't dunk. That's a skill.

That's where you're lacking. And you're hitting your head on the rim sometimes all the way to the point where you said you've had stitches and stuff, right? Oh my gosh. Yeah, yeah. Do you know which videos some of that might be? Yeah, if you go on my Instagram,

it's one of the videos I have pinned. It's jumping over two people. Hit your head on the rim. Man. It's just, that's different types of problems we really haven't looked at enough of Isaiah's dunks this has to be an incredible feeling you're at a high school

this has to be so cool you can go to any high school in the country and pull this shit off and people are going to flip out right? it's honestly one of the most surreal uh feelings ever like that that experience and especially at dunk camp you have everybody in that gym uh around you and they're waiting for like this one moment it lasts the entire approach

and jump lasts one second but there's so much energy like that goes into it and it's just like you're just ready to go man all the adrenaline and powers did that energy ever kind of cripple your legs a little bit you ever have that happen um in what way like almost like uh i don't know kind of knock the wind out of you a little bit or make you feel overexcited nervous a little bit the transition was probably it probably took a while to build up to where there's this many people fired up but yeah yeah uh it happens like if i'm too overly nervous like my legs will literally like start like like shaking and stuff like that and there's been times where i think i've gotten hurt because it was almost like my muscle too many

of my muscle fibers were like firing at the same time like yeah um my body felt like i weighed a million pounds a couple times when i got in front of some big crowds it was really wild i couldn't barely like move my legs but after i calmed down after a minute i calmed down yeah it was hard to breathe what makes that really tough uh is like caffeine like i remember i did a the dunk contest that i just did on monday i i don't drink coffee i don't drink energy drinks any of that stuff the day of that contest i drank an entire bang energy drink that's why it's 250 milligrams of caffeine in the morning i did the dunks uh went to the semifinals and finals in the afternoon, drank another bang energy drink. Oh, drink that.

You didn't need that. That went down. Then I was in the finals, and I drank a cup of coffee. That was my suggestion. I don't know if I would do it again. I did really well in this dunk competition. They were interviewing me afterwards, and I was literally like, what are they saying to me?

Yeah, and I was like, it took like two days for my adrenaline to finally calm down and i was like you might still be adrenaline from that singular session probably 500 milligrams of caffeine so what was what was the strategy behind drinking all this caffeine when you don't usually do that the more caffeine out of my system the higher i jump like it's literally it's like we were talking about the sensu beam yeah it's like a cartoon character it's like we were talking about the sensu beam yeah it's like a sensu beam yeah you're taking it like it definitely helps a lot stimulants they go crazy there's rumors about like some of the world record holders oh not world record holders but like elite high jumpers like doing crazy stimulants and i'm not gonna

list which stimulant but it involves a line. And their vertical goes crazy because it's just such a super potent stimulant. Like your nervous system is just rived out of your mind. So that was the idea behind it. And these events can be, what, I mean, what was that, 10 hours? The one on Monday was nine to six. Yeah, so you might get there, warm up, you know, dunk for 30 minutes or whatever else, and then you have four hours of nothing, and then you've got to dunk again for another,

you know, whatever, five to ten minutes, and then you've got another four hours of interviews and whatever else, and then you've got to do it. Like, I don't know if you guys have ever, have you ever done a sport where that was, is powerlifting ever like that at big meets? It takes a long time, yeah. Yeah? So do you, like, get there and you do your bench press and everyone goes through their bench press and you've got four hours later, then you go through your squat?

Yeah, you have to be very careful with your caffeine consumption. Yeah. And food and everything. I'm curious, like what is your preference in a meet day like that? Like if you were in his shoes and you were like, I got to drink my caffeine, you know, around these windows, how would you have spaced it out? Would you have taken a little bit each time? Would you have like drank a ton in the morning and then just wrote it out? Like what would be your approach? Normally what I did was just not have caffeine until, until I was like in the middle of the

contest. Oh really? So you'd be like first set of squats, you come back, chug some caffeine. Yeah. I knew once I started moving around some weights and the weight in the warmup room and stuff like that, that I would get excited anyway and be fired up. So I was like, maybe I don't need it, and I'd try to push it off. And then sometimes I would take it a little bit before bench press or something, and then by the time the deadlift came around, I'd be flat. So it was important that I tried to time it to where I just had it mainly for the deadlift just because, you know, just the whole day is like, is draining. And, you know, as much as you like to get sleep for it or whatever, you don't always sleep the best the night before.

And then there's also just the fact that the contest takes a really long time and you don't have anything that mimics anything like that. You know, you do this heavy lift at uh 10 o'clock in the morning and then you do a heavy deadlift at like 7 p.m or something it's just it's just weird you're like i don't have any clue on how to prepare for this something that a lot of people don't see with professional dunking too is traveling in jet lag like i i just recently did an event in romania uh this was i want to say three weeks ago and the entire travel day from the time i left my house to go to the airport lasted 26 hours so 26 hours later i've been up and i'm in romania and i then when i get there you're jet lagged and

then i get probably like three four four hours of sleep at night. And then you're expected to perform your very best to jump as high as possible. So, yeah, that's one of the things that people don't understand when they're watching these dunks that these guys are doing. How do you get judged on the dunks? Like, it's so weird. Like, I can't. It kind of reminds me of like pro bodybuilding at a certain point or some of these bodybuilding shows like your girlfriends get ready for a show when you watch these people it's like that person looks really good and you're like that person

looks amazing oh my god that person has wait i think that person's biceps are big it's like hard to pick apart what was the dunk contest by the way that got totally made fun of i think it was last year the year before dwayne wade gave it a nine that one so like yeah exactly i mean it's so common and this is one of the things isaiah actually for a period of time he didn't want to compete because he would go to these contests and on paper there are dunks that are objectively harder to do right and these judges come in here and they don't have shit it's's like like you have some celebrity or like hip hop artist or something that has never dunked a basketball. And they're like, yeah, that looks cool. It's entertaining. Ten. And meanwhile, that was the easiest dunk ever. He like there's a thing called a push off.

Anytime the balls on someone's back of their neck or their head, you can push off. That is like borderline cheating. Imagine if you could hold on to something and pull yourself up in powerlifting. You'd be like, that's cheating. You should be penalized. But for some reason, because it's entertainment, we need that to be a part of the sport. But finding deductions and things like that, people don't know any better. So they see that and they're like, oh, he jumped over someone and put it behind his head. Like, oh, that should be a 10. No, he pushed off that person and it made a way to make that dunk.

That should be a 7. So Isaiah would go to these events. And, I mean, I don't know how many times we've seen him just get screwed over because of the scoring. Is there anything in place at all to where they have, because in, say, figure skating, in figure skating, you're supposed to give the judges your routine, and then when you don't hit some of those things,

is there any preplanned, like these are the seven dunks that I'm probably going to do. And then you get judged based off of like, oh, that was supposed to be a 360 whatever. Yeah, right. And he fucked that up pretty bad. So he's going to get a five. So I'm actually working with Kador Ziani. Our boy.

Our guy. Oh, we love Kador. We created this thing called the world dunk association and we got like basically all the pro dunkers and amateur dunkers together and we are coming up with basically a scoring system um also my little brother is helping in writing writing all the all the rules for that and the idea of it is that every dunk has a certain complexity score. So if I do a between-the-legs dunk, that might be like a 7 complexity score. If somebody does a behind-the-back, that might be an 8.

Then the other categories are vertical, style, and finish. So finish, you want to be dunking the ball as cleanly as possible with as much power as possible, trying to break the rim. Vertical is how high you jump or how far you're jumping. And then style is how cool does it look as you're flying through the air i think if you do like a half-assed dunk if it's like a little bit like a layup you should just be eliminated no power layups no power layers yeah you got to get the the finish yeah zero goose egg but yeah that's you want to you want to finish dunks as powerfully as possible to get the high score is there any duck that's dunk that's been like elusive for you like a

dunk that you've been trying to get and you're just like this bitch is right here the 360 double between the legs has that been done by somebody or uh no one has done it someone's done it on 9-8 with a small ball yeah without the 360 where is the video of you trying it on 9.9 or is like a joke borderline is it on your instagram 360 double double with french fries is that what he said yeah you in and out oh i can't wait to go to him yo get mr beast burger on door dash mr beast burger yeah just just get the mr beast burger on door dash the patties are fucking good anyway the the steve's, man. We had a great burger the other day in Santa Barbara. Finney's.

Did you guys ever go to Finney's? Never had. You should go to Finney's. It was incredible. Shout out Finney's. Make sure to try that. I was not paid to say that. It was just good. 360 Double Double. Do you know where... I did it on Low Rims, the last video I posted, I believe.

On Instagram? I don't know. Is that? No, it's three. Go back to the main. That is a really hard dunk. I was going to say, it looks like a three. Oh, scroll down, scroll down.

A little more, a little more. Right there on the very left. I don't think I'm a low rimmer. You could be a low rimmer. What do you think, Encima? Am I a low rimmer? Woo! Oh. Oh, shit shit that is coveted

that is this dunk the holy grail for perspective when i was like 14 between the legs was like the hardest dunk anyone could do right so 15 years ago between the legs was impossible there were guys that were doing 360 between the legs but you wouldn't see it it was almost a one guy it was probably uh air up there up there an n1 old n1 dunker and so you know after that became a little bit more popular what what he's doing is called a transfer so anytime the ball moves from one hand to the other that's called a transfer so when you have two transfers the dunk is like basically taking two dunks and lumping them together yeah and then to do that with a 360 is like taking three dunks and lumping it together so 360 is hard between the legs hard a double between the legs impossible a double between

the legs with a 360 is like double impossible that's beyond video game level you wouldn't there i don't know if there's anyone in the nba that would even get remotely close to just the transfer twice you probably dunked two basketballs before right i actually have not there's there's a few other dunkers that have though, but I've never tried it. I remember Gerald Wallace did two balls and then he lost the dunk contest. Yeah, who do you think

is the greatest dunker when it comes to the NBA contest? What are some of the better? I have my pick. Zach Levine versus Aaron Gordon. That's probably the best dunk contest of all time in the NBA. Gerald Green. He's a beast.

Vince Carter. I'll probably put him at number four. Where are you putting Derek Jones Jr.? Oh, my gosh. Okay, top six. Derek Jones Jr. is in there. Derek Jones Jr. is one of the freakiest dunkers. He is one of the freakiest athletes probably

in the NBA that no one really knows about. He can do... Damn, in-game stuff is amazing too. Yeah, John Morant is probably... Oh yeah, this is it right here. He flies. Whoa! They call him airplane mode.

Yeah, he's unbelievable him and our favorite dunker right now is probably john morant right you would say that's your favorite yeah yeah john morant will try to dunk on anybody yes that's isaiah when isaiah plays pickup he's just literally like i love watching jaha and zion because all they do is just dunk on people i call myself the la fitness zion williams have you ever have you guys ever seen him play pickup basketball against people zion no no isaiah no i haven't oh it is incredible if you can pull up a video of isaiah playing pickup basketball i don't know which one it is there's one where he's playing at his i guess like you're where you live in 29 yeah is that the best one where you just dunk every single play

bro it's 5v5 it's 5v5 and Isaiah's just like every single you'll see a shot occasionally but every play is just like drive dunk drive dunk drive dunk it's like what we all yeah here you go it's just so it was a bunch of pro dunkers we all got together and everyone just wanted to dunk at this like 5v5 yeah and it was ridiculous keep in mind like la fitness is not you know college basketball you know where the the highlights of this are oh i have it was just the beginning of the video so okay you're probably not this is most replayed guys probably just avoid letting like letting you drive on them because they don't want to get postered yeah here's one yeah just oh yeah so that's like if you watch him play it's hilarious because that's his entire strategy is

let me get close enough. If he's in the middle of the paint, he's probably going to try to dunk. Within that range, he's going to dunk on you, which is always fun to watch. LA Fitness, Zion over here. What is the highest recorded vert?

How close are you to it and how much more do you think you've got? Because you're in uncharted territory, right? Yeah. There's a lot of unofficially recorded verticals out there. Unsubstantiated claims. Yeah. I think the highest one that's like unofficial would have been Cador, I guess.

Like in the early 2000s, he said his vertical was 60 or something like that. It's never been backed by video evidence or anything. But from when you see his videos of him dunking, do you see that? I don't think. I love Cador. I love Cador. He's one of my favorite people to talk to, but I don't think he, he probably would have tested on a Vertec like 47,

48, 49 in his prime. Yeah, I think so. And so like, I am the most rigorous asshole when it comes to measuring your vertical because, because so many people have made these crazy claims that are unsubstantiated. Imagine if someone was like,

I squat 2000 pounds and there was, and they had a video of them doing it and there's no way to verify that they're legitimate plates or legitimate weights, or maybe they measured one and then cut it and they made it seem like they did something. I'm like, unless I have seen it in person, I don't believe it because anyone can edit a video or claim they touch a certain height or fudge the reach and say that the vertical is something that it's not. Recently, there was a, uh, an athlete from China and he claimed, and this is on my Instagram. He claimed he had a 53 inch vertical and the jump looks insane. It looks crazy.

But to say 53 inches, I'm like, there's no way, like there's no way that was 53 inches because I've seen the conglomerate of the greatest jumpers in the entire world and there's no chance. So yeah, this is the video they, they posted it. He goes up and touches what is 11, 11, or at least he says, but there's no way to know if that vertex leaning, there's no way to know what his reach is. And there's no way to know, uh, if that is actually 11, 11, like we have no way of telling. And so for me, it's like, unless I look at you and I look at your reach and I test your reach, I'm not going to believe you because it's easy to do this. If I reach up like this, I'm like, Oh, that's my reach. Yeah, here, here we go. We won't stand close to the mic for this. Camera can't even see it. So if I'm,

if I'm like this and I'm like, Oh, I'm reaching as hard as I can. There's like no way I can do this. Well, now I'm going to actually reach. Okay. And I'm going to, I'm like, I'm reaching as hard as I can. There's like no way I can do this. Well, now I'm going to actually reach, okay? And I'm going to elevate my scapula. I'm going to elevate my ribs and I'm going to like reach as hard as I can. And then if I stretch. Now watch this. Don't put your hand through the ceiling though. Oh, shit.

So you can like fudge your reach i mean you saw before my reach was lower than his right and out of the start and he wasn't even reaching as hard as he could right so i probably gained a good four to five inches on my reach by like fudging it and so guys are like well my shoulder's really tight and i can't reach and uh that's why so if you're gonna take what they touch minus their standing reach and get it, well, the easiest way to do it is just to fudge your reach. Yeah, just don't do it.

And they, in the combine, they do that. Like, they're just like, if I were coaching an NFL guy, I'd say, hey, DK Metcalf, I want you to say you have shoulder issues and you can't reach for shit. And go up there and just pack that scap down

as hard as you can and don't let them pull it. And they're going to lift you up, but let them lift up your whole body. That's how strong you want to be. And then they go and test and they touch, you know, DK Metcalf, let's say six, four, you know, and he, uh, he touches 11 feet and they're like 48. And it's like, wait a second, you're six, four.

And you touched 11, let's say 11, two, 11, three. And you have a 48. He's six foot. So you're six, four, he's six foot. He touches 12, three, and he has a 50 so he touched what is 10 or 12 13 whatever inches higher than you but you're claiming that your vertical is 48 and his is also 48 someone's not telling the truth here um so in my opinion like that that's why i'm such a stickler i'm like unless i basically pull your shoulder out of socket and i've seen it in person it's not really valid to me and right now your your highest vert is 50 oh 50.5 inches 50.5 what's

the official world record that is the official world record that is the official world record i am i'm gonna say with confidence that that is the official world record the reason that it wouldn't be is because we didn't have like guinness would be like oh well guinness is the world record it's like who said guinness was valid like who was who was testing for Oh, well Guinness is the world record. It's like, who said Guinness was valid? Like who was, who was testing for Guinness or whatever else? The only other guy that's close as a guy named Darius Clark. And he has the potential, I would say to go higher than that,

honestly, but he's never like, I guess tested frequently enough to where he probably would have had it. Cause he would just need one freaky day and you'd probably do it honestly. And I've seen his reach. I've seen him. He's tested a 50. He's tested a a legit 50 i've never seen anyone other than these two test a legitimate i've never seen anyone test a legitimate 48 a legitimate or maybe jay clark

jay clark and maybe kill gannon but like it is so incredibly rare and i've never even like stretched out kill gannon to be able to say like what is your actual reach in your lebron 10s or whatever else that's just out of respect i'll just take his word for it you know but like you know his vertical is super freaking high so we usually what we do to verify it is we'll look at flight time how long are you in the air because that you can't fake that you know what i mean and then look at your height look at what you touched yeah and take all of those conglomerates to get an estimate on how accurate the value they're saying is. And so a lot of the time, as soon as you look at their flight time, out the window, you know for a fact it's not valid.

And so you can obviously land in a lower configuration and fluff the number up. Like Isaiah's had a one-second flight time. That's never been done ever by any athlete in the history of the world. But Isaiah landed in a really low position. And so that makes sense. If he lands in a really low position and so that makes sense if he lands in a normal you know landing position or whatever else it's like 0.97 which is you know 30 milliseconds like that that the difference of that you know in the air and so for me i'm

i'm like he has the high he's the highest jumper in the world yeah he is the highest jumper in the world until someone grabs a vertex and they have on video them reaching the hell out of their shoulder yeah you know and saying on video like this is not me doing this and and then going up and touching what is a vertex that's measured measure the vertex too and then i'll look at the flight time and i'll verify because if i look at the flight time you're like i have a 50 inch vertical but the flight time is 0.8 i'm like you don't have a 50 inch vertical you're not flight time's 0.8. I'm like, you don't have a 50 inch vertical. You're not even close. Um, and obviously I would look at how they land and stuff, but you are passionate about it. I have no idea. Imagine if you had the world record for, for

deadlift and some guys like, uh, no, it's actually me. And like, they're using 35 pound plates instead of 45 pound plates. And it's on video. And they're like, well, I'm actually that guy. And it's like, well, no, you're not like I, I did it in this like competitive environment with all these other people. And so for us, it's like, you know, it all comes out in the wash.

You take someone out to, uh, to a contest or whatever else, we're going to see who the highest jumper is there. We're going to see, you know what I mean? And there's tons of freaks out there. There are probably guys that could test higher.

You would think there's guys that could test higher than 50. I don't think so. Damn. No one has the potential. You don't think anyone test higher than 50 i don't think so damn no one has the potential you know i don't think so that's a good place to end wait wait i i gotta ask one more thing because people watch basketball or people who are interested in dunking are curious about this shoes how like what are your favorite dunking shoes and why why do you like why do you use those specific shoes? My favorite shoes are the Kobe 6s because they have amazing grip. They fit super well, and they're low to the ground. I feel like I can feel the floor as I'm jumping.

And that makes a difference for you? Yeah, big time. All right. Off one foot, Jordan 36. I'll stand by that, even though I'm not the highest jumper in the world. They're beautiful. Yeah. They're also $600.

Fuck. They're not giving them away. Nope. They do look kind of dull. Hey, make sure you like the video. I hope you guys have been sticking around the whole time. I know we talked for a long time. But something like jumping, uh,

there might be some lifters and some people that, uh, maybe didn't respect this as much or whatever, but, uh, to go out and be able to jump is a sign of, of re of someone being really powerful and someone being really healthy. And so, uh, hopefully from this video, hopefully you guys will, or from this podcast, you guys will be encouraged to mess around with some jumping. I'm fired up about it. I'm excited. I'm going to start mixing some in. I've been doing small amounts of it.

And, you know, all I can do is go up from here. Like it's harder for you to make progress than it is for me at this point, right? Yeah, for sure. Because you're already at the top. Andrew, take us on out of here. Absolutely. For everything podcast related, just head over to powerproject.live. That's all the information that you need there. Make sure you guys like

today's video on your way out and subscribe if you guys are not subscribed. At MB Power Project on Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. My Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter is at IamAndrewZNCMO. Where you at? Great review, guys. And that's the Discord. It's in the description. So, at NCMO ending on Instagram, YouTube, and NCMO yin-yang on TikTok and Twitter.

Isaiah, John, where can people find you guys? You can find us at THPS my ending on Instagram, YouTube and see my yin yang on Tik TOK and Twitter. Isaiah, John, where can people find you guys? Uh, you can find us at THP strength on Instagram, or you can go to THP strength.com, uh, and sign up for some of the best dump training on the planet. I stand by that. Time for smelly tip.

You guys ready for that? Wow. I'm so excited. What does that mean? All right. Just let's go go the most important segment of the podcast a little more spit please i don't know what did we sign up for smelly step oh god

uh this morning i ran 11 miles with my buddy Oscar, and you guys have been, some people have been following along with my running. All I have to say is it's only taken me a couple months to get to this point, but I've been running every day. I've been diligent with it, been taking my time with it, and I think much like the progression that we've seen you make over the years and the progression that you guys have made together. You put, what, six inches on his jump. How long a period of time does that take?

Four years? Three and a half? Oh, no, wait. 27? Yeah, six inches in four years. But he's already at an elite level, which is why that's super important. It's super important, and it's important to hear that it took years. Yeah.

People are delusional. Yeah, the amount you increased half a foot is extremely impressive, but I think what's really impressive is at a young age, putting your own stuff on pause for a moment saying, let me explore this. I think it will work out, and you rolled the dice and you ended up being right. So I want people to just spend more time in betting on themselves. Trust your gut instinct as our boy Isaiah did here. I trusted my gut instinct. It led me down a lot of different great paths. This is my interest now is running. So I'm running all over the fucking place.

Follow your interest. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never strength. Catch you guys later. Bye. Woo. There we go. Yes, sir. Wow, that was awesome. Yeah. So, 240.

I didn't want to mention it on there, but I did.