Joining me on the show today is, Ty Terrell, a good friend of mine and strength coach for the Atlanta Hawks. Ty’s career path put him in an environment where he was surrounded by colleagues and community who would challenge each other to further their education and experience in their studies. Ty’s drive to learn more about the why’s behind strength training encouraged his passion in understanding what impacts performance.
Our intent for today’s discussion is to unpack velocity based training and how to use it to become a more powerful athlete. We discuss the necessity of strength in order to generate force and understanding how quickly you can actually tap into that force pull, which is all dependent on velocity.
We do a deep dive into distinguishing yourself from being a kangaroo or a gorilla in the training world and how to train the two populations differently. Ty shares the two parts that go into this: understanding what type of athlete you are and knowing what your training is asking of you. He then dives into the idea that if the power that occurs in your countermovement jump is below 50%, it’s likely you are a gorilla. If it’s above 50%, you’re likely a kangaroo. Listen in as Ty explains the importance of where you start on the velocity curve and how to implement and execute velocity based training to succeed as an athlete.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- [04:00] An introduction to Ty Terrell
- [12:50] The force velocity curve and understanding what impacts performance
- [18:16] Distinguishing between being a kangaroo or a gorilla in the training world
- [20:10] Testing the power that occurs in your countermovement jump
- [30:45] The importance of where you start on the velocity curve
- [34:35] Implementing and executing VBT
James Cerbie: Hey there, team, what is going on? Welcome back to another episode of Rebel Performance Radio. Really excited to have my good friend Ty Terrell on board today. Ty is a strength and conditioning coach with the Atlanta Hawks and was pumped to bring him on the chat. More about that chat, more about. But to really dive in and unpack how to use velocity-based training to make yourself a more powerful athlete.
And it’s a multi-step process. But step one is we talk about how to classify yourself as either a kangaroo or a gorilla and then what that actually means for your training. What does that mean for how you should be loading the bar? Where do you start? How should your training progress over time? So really solid episode. Today we unpack all of that for you, it’s great because it takes away most of the guesswork. Right. You’re going to know if you’re a kangaroo or if you’re a gorilla, you’re going to know where you should start your training, which those sets and reps schemes look like.
What should the bar velocity be? What should the loading be? And then how should that change over the course of a training program so you can fill in the empty buckets and become a more powerful, well-rounded athlete. And if you would like to snag some free training samples so you can kind of see this in action that head on over to rebel performance.com/trainingtemplates, we’ll send you seven free training samples from a host of our training programs so you can get a feel for how we actually implement some of this stuff with our athletes.
We’ll put that in the show notes for you as well. But let’s jump into the episode today with Ty Terrel. Ty Terrell, my friend, is so pumped to get you back on the show this year, I feel like we should just do this once a week over coffee. I would really enjoy that working.
Ty Terrell: I’m not quite a coffee connoisseur. You are. I would be. I’m an amateur. You’re in the big leagues. I hear from our customers.
James Cerbie: If I, if I move back east, I’m going to slowly convert you into being a coffee connoisseur slash snob.
Ty Terrell: Perfect. That’s a challenge.
James Cerbie: That’s worth it. It’s worth it. All it takes is one really good cup of coffee and then you can never go back
Ty Terrell: Men, people that drink coffee seem happy. So, you know, maybe that’s true.
James Cerbie: That’s very true. But let’s just jump right into it today because we got about forty-five minutes and we both got to run. And so, I want to get as much out of this as we possibly can. And we’re going we’re talking velocity-based training today and in particular using that to build a more powerful athlete.
And so, you and our mutual friend Tony Juliano wrote like one of the best books I’ve seen on this topic, how long it was a couple of years ago.
Ty Terrell: Now, that’s a good point. It might be five now. It might be five. I was at fast and when I leave 2018. So, like July 2018, I feel like it was in my last two years. There is when that happens. So could be four or five years ago and I don’t even know.
James Cerbie: So, let’s start with why you guys took this project on, because I think that in itself, I think will open up like a can of worms for us. Why this is an important topic to get into.
An Intro to Ty Terrell
Ty Terrell: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of there’s probably multiple layers to this. To be honest, part of it, it was the environment of just being in IFAST and no one says, hey, you got to be learning, you’ve got to be getting better. But there is definitely a bar there and the level of intelligence and thinking about training and it’s just in you’re constantly thinking about training. How does this impact this? What’s really happening there, you know, and not just saying, hey, well, textbook says this, and this is a research article I read.
So, the environment, no one’s stimulates just curiosity and wanting to comment until you’re around a bunch of people who are smart and pushing the envelope and are challenging you and challenging ideas. And so, it’s just kind of part of the culture. You know, they’re the time. And so far, the training was coming out. Read Brian Mann’s book.
I was like, OK, I like what’s going on here. I kind of get my feet wet in there and Tony has a really good mind for just analysis on things and he helped with that and when he gets on a project, he’ll really push, and he’ll dive right in and really commit himself to it. And so, at times I was trying to like, oh, shoot, Tony’s picking up pace on it, so I better go.
I was doing more coaching than him at that time and just the roles and I felt he was new. He was a new coach, interim transitional coach. And because of that I had a lot of athletes and I was like, you know what, like. This is stuff that we’ve known, first of all, like I want to kind of preface this by saying, like, the things that are like a philosophy-based training, like the concepts, principles are things have been around forever, like the technology allows us to measure stuff and enhance our depth of knowledge on it.
We can be a little bit more definitive about our test-retest stuff, you know, cause and effect kind of projections there. So, we know that, like you look at a basketball player, like I’m working with a lot of like field and court sport, athletes of some volleyball, basketball, baseball, tennis, things that require speed, kind of a high-end athleticism. And, you know, do I need my 6’3” basketball point guard to deadlift 550?
And the answer’s probably no. And then you just start thinking, OK, like, well, what happens? Like, why do I see this really strong athlete that’s a little bit slower? They love the weight room and this is more just an observation. And I’m not crapping on anything, but, you know, a lot of like typical traditional high school strength conditioning programs are very football lifting based because that’s typically why the SNC program has started a school.
And football is a sport that you need mass, you need strength. You know, you kind of need that armor on your body. And so, a lot of athletes get funneled that don’t play football into those sports. And so, you see, like the 6’3”, 185 lb point guard, I mean, you’re getting slower. Why are you getting so you know, you’re getting stronger? And so, it just kind of comes to the point of like everything has diminishing returns.
And I have this conversation all the time because in our industry you say, OK, well, this diet is the best for this type of training is the best. Hot yoga is going to cure me in. Fasting is going to do this. And it’s like, yes, yes and yes. No, no, no. Like, the truth is, it’s all pieces of the pie. It’s all pieces of the puzzle. And you just have to it takes the right dose, which I think dosage is a really is part of this conversation is a really cool concept.
Doesn’t you talked about a lot, but it’s hard to figure out. Dosage takes some trial and error sometimes. But this is everything is involved strength. Yes. I think you have to have a baseline level of strength that gives you resiliency. It gives you know; it gives kind of off to power just whether you’re talking mathematically in the equation or you’re just talking just like, hey, this is just what I see anecdotally, you know. So, after seeing some of this these observations like, OK, these athletes don’t necessarily need to be that strong. These athletes are doing a lot of heavy lifting and I see them getting a little bit slower and they’re moving not as well as maybe I want them to think, where’s the balance and all this? And we started making these kind of like just thinking about these athletes as like not like actual profiles, but just in our head, like I idea conceptual standpoint. Volleyball players should look like this. And if you build a spectrum of strength and speed or force and velocity, where would they fall on that?
So then in comes, you know, exposure to VBT, and you’re like, OK, and one of the great things about working in the private sector and with nonprofessional athletes and I’ve actually worked with both professional and nonprofessional, but you can explore with the nonprofessional a little bit and you’re not hurting him, you know, and you just don’t put them in harm’s way. They’re still probably in a window of generalized training that IGP that a lot will help them.
So, we took about six or eight of our athletes. I had like four or five years of training age, different athletes. And they were committed. They were there for a long time. I knew they were coming back when they weren’t in season and some of them trained in season. And so, we had them for a long time and we could do two to three years of experimentation.
And so, we did. And it just was interesting. And we just kind of sat back and implemented some very simple basic concepts. Oh, let’s train in this zone and see what happens. Let’s train in this. And we tried to isolate the training stimulus so we could kind of start to form some ideas about what’s happening. You overlay that on top of just theoretical training science that you read about, whether you pick up a textbook, you know, whether it’s super training or on and on, and you start to form ideas and then you experiment again.
And, you know, at the end of this, you know, as you go again a couple of years into this, the experimentation becomes pretty focal. And now you’re starting to make some again, we’re not in the laboratory. So, you know, this isn’t going to have like a highly valid, you know, like research, you know, very like it’s still training. I’m looking at front of me and like, OK, yeah, this guy had a better output here, but his depth was terrible.
So, like, what happens when you add weight? It changes these other variables. OK, how does that change the output or how kind of the mechanisms of how they’re getting through the movement? So, it’s pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, that’s just kind of like kind of a summary of all that. But that’s where it started and that was our mindset time. And, you know, we were really driving pretty hard on it, reading multiple research articles a day, coming back in, debating and talking about them.
The coolest thing about this is kind of rambling now, but the cool thing about this was learning the relationship of the variables and ball. So how does power how is acceleration in flat impacted by force and the timing of all that kind of thing? And it kind of led me to make this kind of like vertical jump assembly line. So, you know, you’ve got this you know, if we have a timeline from the beginning of the concentric. Race to the Top Off, you know, you have this, OK, well, I’ve got a peak force moment at the beginning of the concentric phase, you know, probably build up from the stress warning cycle, netcentric loading, you know, now about Newton’s laws involved here now.
So that dictates the amount of acceleration and that dictates the speed I can get up to. So, you know, velocity at takeoff and in peak-power, whereas peak-power occurring and all this window, well, it’s going to be the sweet spot of force and velocity when that constant movement. So, OK, so for some people, it was right, a 50 percent. For some it was 60 percent of the way through the concentric. Some of it was earlier.
And so, you that can even start to dictate what kind of an athlete in my if my peak power is happening at 40 percent of the way. Well, I’m probably more of a force-based athlete. You know, I can’t reach the high velocities to impact power mathematically on that. And, well, if it’s happening at 60 percent of the way through, do I have a slow RFD or I have a great RFD and I’m just able to hit higher velocities.
You know what? Now we’re talking about muscle physiology and stuff like that. So really cool things like that would just pop up these questions. It’s just another way to kind of understand the science, the physics and the physiology of what’s going on. And personally, I don’t have like this broad range of sciences that I’m good at or really enjoy. But we’re talking about things that impact performance. I absolutely will fall in love with those things of physics, absolutely in love with physics.
I’m absolutely in love with the most physiologies that, again, I kind of all I know all physiologies kind of impact performance, but specifically from an output standpoint and the traditional stuff, you know, neuromuscular things, really, it was easy to dive in at that point.
Knowing What You Should Be Measuring In Your Sport
James Cerbie: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the really important points out of that is there is still this attitude a lot of times that the goal is just to keep getting our athletes stronger, but the goal is just to keep getting stronger. I’ve talked to a lot of people there, a lot of people listening to this, like, oh, I want to be like a better athlete. I want to be more powerful. And then they’re metric for that is, oh, my squats going up, my bench is going up, my deadlifts going up.
So, this must be working. That’s like well maybe to a particular point on the front end. Yes. But like you said, there’s a law diminishing returns and like just getting stronger is probably going to make you slower because it has to like force velocity curve one on one. If you want to generate maximal force, you got to move slow. Yeah, right. So, there is a point I think we need to give you enough strength so that you have some force in the equation, like you need a force bucket.
But once you’re able to generate force and now it’s a velocity-based question of how rapidly can I actually tap into this force pool? Yeah. So, the game is not just like continuously get stronger, which unfortunately is what you see at even like still really high levels of strength conditioning. Like I’ve seen it at the collegiate level with incredibly high-level athletes. Like the conversation is still like, oh, we did our job this year, guys PR on their bench, their PR and their squat and like, OK, well, what’s their vertical doing?
What’s their project doing? What’s their tenure like? And those are the things that aren’t changing. I don’t know. Well, you’re not really doing like right.
Ty Terrell: One as an industry, we have to choose what we’re measuring as success better. Now, again, I’m just talking like field and course sport athletes because that’s where I live. But like and we can talk in volleyball, basketball, whatever it is. But let’s just say it’s a basketball player. If I have someone who in a training block, it may be that’s designed to increase my squat numbers. Right. It’s OK to train within that or to measure within that training block the difference, the improvement in a squat.
But if we’re talking about, let’s say, an entire offseason program and how that’s going to transfer influence them on the court or in the sport, we have to start measuring things that are closer to their sport. And so, meaning how high they’re jumping, how fast they’re running, how quickly they’re changing directions. You know, and this is a whole different conversation. But how we lift and what we lift impacts movement. And so, we also have to be conscious of that.
Which brings me back to you. Talk about getting stronger and having a force production bucket. What we found was one of the coolest things we found was athletes peak force in a lift was not happening at there. One rep max, almost all the time. And I’ll give you the caveat to that here in a second. It was happening somewhere between 70 and 90 percent of their one rep max. So basically, what that says, it was happening at a weight that was heavy enough to promote a forced production need demand.
Right. And a great one. And it was heavy enough to slow you down enough to where you had time to produce these great amounts of force. But it was not so heavy that it just totally did two things. It wrecked the way you were kind of executing to lift your motion of it. And it didn’t slow you down so much that it negatively impacted the velocity acceleration. Yeah.
And so, the caveat to that is, is when we had something like football, like linemen in there and things like that, do they need to be at the end of the last? No, they don’t. They need to be. It’s brute force, it’s mano a mano, so like their peak force was happening at their one red max because everything leading up to that was already slow. So, they’re five reck. Max was slow. There are three, right.
Max was slow, so they couldn’t generate enough speed in any of their lives to have great acceleration and peak force moment. So, it was happening at the one minute, Max. That’s probably totally fine for a D tackle who needs to shove a guy backwards or shove a guy off of him and just brute force? I’m totally cool with that. He’s moving in this little three or four steps boxier, depending on how far he gets up field or how downfield he has to go. So, you know, that is also one of the big important pieces. This is like identify who’s in front of you and what do they need? So, it goes back to your testing. You’re what you’re measuring. It’s like if I’m a 200-meter sprinter and you think I need to get stronger, yes. OK, my deadlift needs to get the five hundred or whatever it is. Right. But then why would I use the deadlift to measure my success on a sport?
That doesn’t ask me to let you know what it means to an end as opposed to the end in and of itself, 100 percent, 100 percent. And so. That was one of the main driving from just like an actual practical aspect and how we’re viewing our training and stuff like that, that was one of the things that just got their hooks in us because of just that concept right there. Now, I love the technology that’s happening sport.
I also think it’s happening in our industry. But I also think that, one, technology is outpacing our understanding of the science. So, we play with toys a lot of times instead of understanding what’s actually happening. So, if I understand and I’m not saying I do want to say that I work on this on a regular basis to try to further my understanding of things. But like, if I understand performance and the variables and the physics that go into performance, you know, when the relationship of a waiting phase and braking phase or the improvisation phase, what should be happening here and what should be happening at the beginning of the concentrate phase and on and on, then the technology piece is just something that I use to measure what I already understand.
The flip side of that is Tony and I used the technology to learn the training science a little better, which was so while, yes, we wanted to help our athletes, the ugly secret is this was a very selfish time. We were you were 100 percent trying to learn this stuff better. And we used our athletes as guinea pigs for that. And honestly, they all got better. You could say they could have gotten better without using it.
Sure. But like, we implemented this method adjusted where we needed to, and they all got better and a lot of them got dramatically better and was still moving well. And so that’s really important to me.
Distinguishing Between Being a Gorilla or a Kangaroo in the Training World
James Cerbie: Yeah, that’s huge, and so what I would love to do is because I like the distinction that you guys make of kangaroos versus gorillas. So, I would love to get into distinguishing these two populations. Am I a kangaroo? Am I a gorilla? And then what are the implications in terms of how would you then train those two populations differently?
Ty Terrell: Yeah, so there’s two parts to this question here. So, you have to identify who you are athletically and which is the kangaroo with a gorilla. Then you have to identify what your sport is asking of you. Which one do you need to be in if you’re a kangaroo, when you’re living in a gorilla sport, you know you are in the wrong place to relocate?
James Cerbie: That’s similar to the gorilla that lets you go right out for Ty Terrell: For good luck. And I hope it’s downhill because that might be with the wind at your back.
James Cerbie: So, one of the things in the airport, a little bit like I was of my favorite things. I know, but yeah. I’ll run a 40 on this. Let’s go right now.
Ty Terrell: And I think a boost your confidence is like one of those things. And so, yeah, those are the two questions that you have to ask as far as kind of determine the direction that you need to go in your training with these athletes. So, if I have a kangaroo and they play volleyball, they’re probably in the right spot now.
James Cerbie: There are some, but let’s can I back you up just real before we go there, can we back that up one step just to say, how do you actually distinguish, like, someone listening? That’s like I want to try to figure out, am I a kangaroo or am I a gorilla?
Ty Terrell: I don’t think there’s a one way to do it. OK, so they have the power where the power occurs and someone’s countermovement peak power. So that’s one example right now, just if you have a piece of technology that can show you that if it’s below 50 percent, I believe you’re probably a gorilla. If it’s above the 50 percent mark, as far as like the distance in the concentric phase from the beginning of it to toe off, that’s another way to measure it.
You can look at if you’re someone who makes force velocity profiles of force velocity curves, you can look at like where that’s kind of is a more shaded towards the slower side and high force. Well, that’s a gorilla. Is it more shaded towards the velocity side? That’s a kangaroo for field and court sport athletes. If you want a good force velocity curve, meaning we want like you, you’ve got to have speed quickness, you know. So basically, you’re looking at you want like a velocity-based power kind of profile.
You kind of want to be over to the right or as far down the velocity spectrum as you can go with at least a moderate to high force output. So, you’re trying to live at velocities on the horizontal axis, some forces on the vertical axis you’re trying to live in. It’s like upper right quadrant, which would be Earth’s close to this upper right quadrant is possible. That would be like the ideal kind of profile for a field and course for the athlete.
Now, if you’re you know, let’s say you’re a football lineman, you kind of want that upper left quadrant, which is not a high velocity, but a boatload of force there. So, you can look at it that way. Twenty-nine, we have a little calculation from being fully transparent, like it made sense to us at the time. We checked it with a couple of different biomechanics professors, and it made sense to them.
Again, I don’t know if you put it in like validity test that it would. I don’t know how it’s one. I want to devalue what it is. It turned out it proved to be really helpful for us and God and almost always correct. I can’t really think of a time I wasn’t, but I’m sure I don’t want to say it’s definitive, you know. Yeah. Me wrong there. So those are different ways than other really cool ways.
I believe that like the one point zero meters per second point, which is the middle ground between strength, speed and speed strength. So, it’s kind of the centerpiece of power. I’ve always believed that Mark was dividing line. So, if you did a power curve on somebody like it’s a bell curve and depending on where they feel relative to that one point zero might give you an indication, too. I mean, conceptually, yeah, there are a lot of ways you can do it.
When to Fill Your Empty Bucket
But you could you do it doing like a jump and then take away the loading phase and it jumps like. Yeah, like knockwurst jump. Yeah, I do. I could do a vertical jump and then do a seated jump off of a box and then look like a difference between those two, because that’s probably the easiest, roughest back of the napkin way for someone to get an idea pretty quickly.
Old school, you know, if you got a jump mat or something like that or you just even just do height, you know, I mean, if you want to just like jump height or whatever, if you have, like a vortex or something, you can measure vertical jump. And I think like a lot of the stuff. But we need technology. We need to know. The truth is you don’t like kind of the explosive strength deficit or something like that kind of ratio that you’re talking about can be effective for sure.
Any time there’s a ratio, there’s always going to be a little bit of holes in it, because in a ratio to really both sides can change, I guess is what I’m saying. And so, like, you can maintain a ratio, but like both sides can kind of move in the same direction. But that may not be indicative of what you really want to happen or what is really happening. So, but they can do a guiding force more so than anything.
And that’s more like I wouldn’t get personally, I wouldn’t get caught up on. I mean, I want to say, like the validity of things, but like because, you know, you want things to be scientifically valid. But I’m talking about more so like if we’re using these things as decision making guys versus like actually trying to do laboratory research and that’s different. So, decision making guys don’t have to be one hundred percent perfect. They just need to be internally valid.
Meaning like, you know, within your process, they need to be helped, guide you in an accurate way. And so, you could absolutely do that. And there’s a lot of old school like research on that stuff about like if the deficit between the no countermovement job versus kind of a job is greater than 10 percent, then you maybe have a kangaroo and the other way round. So that’s definitely a way to do that. But just, I guess, the kind of Asterix that I just put on it, just use it as a guiding metric or a guiding force rather than a definitive like this is what’s happening.
And I what I mean by that. So, like, let’s say my countermovement jump, I touch 30 inches and then my seat a job, I touch twenty-five inches. And if they both go up to like three inches after the first training block. The ratio is going to be the same, but I got improvement, it’s not like you didn’t go anywhere. But relative to your profile as an athlete. Yeah, you didn’t change as far as, like, relative one versus the other.
So that’s a really easy way concept to do that for sure. And once you’ve decided what you who you are from there, it gets I want to say it’s easy, but like the road map is kind of written for you, then we just get into coaching. If you have a way to actually create profiles, you can kind of get kind of geek out and you can get very specific and accurate. If you don’t, you can ballpark it.
If you don’t want to make profiles and you have technology, you can still ballpark this stuff and just kind of observe and be willing and able to make adjustments over time with where they need to be, what zones they need to be in. But to go back to the you know, if I’m a volleyball player and a kangaroo, it’s like. If we’re talking velocity zones, like do I really need to spend much time and the absolute strength now?
I’m a big proponent of, I think, touching like plus 90 percent from time to time is really helpful for you. I think there’s a lot of good adaptations that come from that. But getting to dosage, how much time do I really need to spend there? And so, if I’m a volleyball player, I’m probably doing a lot of my lifting and my strength, speed and speed strength zone volleyball players, because they tend to be. It could be basketball players, tennis players, whatever, but because they tend to be on the speed, strength side of things, they need kind of what they don’t have.
Right. And that’s a novel concept, right?
James Cerbie: Trying to fill the empty bucket.
Ty Terrell: Yeah, exactly right. And so, I might start if I’ve got a volleyball player there in kind of a speed strength kind of bucket, I might start their spring training, quote unquote, could be strength speed. So, I might start at point seventy-five. Then we slowly work our way down to maybe point five, which is going to be kind of the bottom of accelerated string. And when absolute strength starts to come into the situation. So personally, if I have a volleyball player, I don’t know how much.
Again, the majority of my time would be spent in this kind of accelerate of strength, strength, speed zone, because that’s what they don’t have. And then you work your way back up the velocities to the speed strength stuff. Then you can do all you could do, contrast stuff and kind of do it concurrently in there and get some really good training effects from that. But that’s kind of how I would want you identify any of those ways that you can.
We talked about a couple and then to take what you have in front of you, a kangaroo gorilla, and start moving away from their strength towards their weakness. And what you’ll see is you’ll see. So, let’s say I’m a kangaroo, and if we’re just talking force velocity curves, you’ll start to see a curve that was could go to the right. You could really go to the far end of velocity, but didn’t go very high, meaning they don’t have a lot of force out.
But you’ll start to see that curve lift up. You’ll start to see it get higher after getting stronger. And then if you follow that up with a power phase or you start moving close, back down or back up the velocity sections to some speed strength stuff, you’ll not only see that curve be elevated, but then you’ll see a move to the right. So now you’re going to have higher force output at higher velocities, which for field and caught sport athletes is almost all of them what they want.
Receiver, cornerback, basketball player, volleyball. It doesn’t matter. Tennis, like if you need to be fast lacrosse, if you need to be fast and powerful, like you want to be living up in that upper right quadrant. And what I have found is that. I don’t know how accurate, I don’t have smartphones or whatever, but like force production is the key to all of it. And so, we found that force production had a greater influence on power than Velocity did, even though mathematically nothing says that.
So, I don’t know what to make of that. But I always saw that consistently. And I was like, OK, so basically it kind of came to me like, you have to find a way to account for the athlete’s force production. You have to address that first and then move from there. There are tons of research that show like power phases have better results if they’re preceded by a strength base. So, and there’s a lot of things, science that goes into that, too.
And so, you get the neural adaptations, there’s muscle, muscle physiology, adaptation, stuff like that. So, if you can address forced production on the athlete first, then move towards the faster speeds, you’re going to put somebody in the upper right quadrant. But with the kangaroo or with the gorilla, they already have this force production. They’re really strong, but they need force production at certain speeds, you know, meaning they probably need to produce force that a little bit faster speed than they do already.
So, they still need force production. They just need to be able to produce it faster. So now becomes an R&D issue within the time constraint that the sport puts on it. And so you’re still addressing forced production, but now it’s a time constraint for production this year versus just a total force production.
Yeah, it’s a nice because it’s like if you think of picturing, like, that force velocity curve, but it’s essentially doing is telling you where to start and then which direction to go. Yeah. Over the course of a training block. Yep. Right. And which is like if you’re a coach that’s what you’re looking for because like you just perfection I don’t think is going to be ever a thing in our industry. No. Maybe not for a long time, at least until like we keep uncovering more and more of the science.
Understanding Peak Force Production
James Cerbie: But you’re right. Like as an athlete, if you can understand, this is one of the buckets I fall into. So, I’m going to start here and then I’m going to move towards the velocity side of the curve, or maybe I’m going to start here and move towards the far side of the curve. Just that distinction will make a huge difference. And like the progress that you’re able to make it your ability to become a more powerful athlete, where you start on the velocity spectrum matters.
Ty Terrell: And this is another thing I found. So, if my peak for so let’s say at point seven meters per second. My peak forces produced there, and if I go to point six meters per second, then I get a drop in peak force production. So, what that’s telling me is at point seven meters per second, that’s my kind of ideal place for force production. You know, the combination of I can still move fast, but there’s enough weight to make me produce force.
So, what we did is we started at that kind of peak force moment and tried to move if they were a kangaroo and needed better force production. We tried to move them down the line to slower speeds and higher weights gradually. So instead of just throwing them into the deep in the pool, it was somewhere that where they couldn’t be successful. Why would you put your athlete somewhere they can’t be successful in? In this particular situation? I’m defining success as producing peak force.
So, we just like why would we put them anywhere else, you know, plus from a training adaptation standpoint, like. This is theoretical, but like you’re probably going to get a better training adaptation where you’re getting the greatest stimuli, there’s no greater stimuli in that moment than the place you produce peak force. So, if you’re away from that, you’re getting a lesser stimulus than you’re wanting in that moment. And you’re probably going to get an adaptation that you don’t want.
Yeah. So, where you choose to put them on that velocity spectrum matters and then just slowly, gradually move. The cool thing was we found that the nervous system adapted really quickly, like we could change the velocities every two weeks and so we can move them higher, slower or faster about every two weeks in the athlete would change with it. So, the neural components of this change really fast and we know the nervous system to be quickly adapting system. And so, it was really cool and kind of we talked about those earlier and know we’re kind of pushing up against this here.
But like one of the main things is about VBT is that you don’t have to do the trial and error of dosage to some degree. Right. Like the auto regulation component of using velocipedes training is a massively powerful benefit of that technology. So, I don’t have to guess if I’m loading them too much or if we’ve done too many sets or too many reps. If you can get the velocity that is prescribed by the coach at that load, then you change the load to change the load.
Right, right. Or if you say, hey, I’m hell bent, if you decide I want to stay at this load for whatever reason your reasoning is, then we’re just done. If you got four sets of five at point six, five meters per second, and that’s what was prescribed today. And you got two reps of your fit set to meet that. And you couldn’t meet it the last three reps, then you’re done. So now we don’t overtrain.
We give the right amount of dosage with the right stimuli. And then I literally like I squatted athletes hard, like or whatever we were doing, like we went hard three days a week with, like, lower body stuff on that, which was a lot of times you would find, like the way we traditionally load would maybe bury an athlete over time. But because of the auto regulation component of VBT, you know, I didn’t have to worry about that.
So, you get more training in the same amount of time. You get the desired stimulus; you get auto regulation. So, you don’t have to worry about if you’re overtraining or fatigue or things like that. The technology does so much of the work for you. You just have to want to identify the athlete, identify where to start then the velocity spectrum and then appropriately dose and pay attention if and then just gradually move them in the direction that they need.
James Cerbie: You’re right. Like, I think the conceptually the example of starting at, say, like point seven. Right. Like, I just want to use that as an arbitrary number. Right. If you start at point seven and you have a kangaroo, then maybe every two weeks you’re going to drop velocities because you’re trying to help them fill the force bucket more. Whereas if you have a gorilla and you say you start at point seven again. Right. I’m going to slowly increase velocity.
Ty Terrell: Exactly.
James Cerbie: And it just it helps take the guesswork out of what you’re doing.
Ty Terrell: And this is well, also, too, like if you want to, you can augment these reps here. Like this is where band resisted in band assistance. Stuff can come into play. Right. If you have a gorilla that just can’t quite get out of the mud, assist them, use it. I mean, like, I put the arms, you know, like, you know, the arms on a squat rack come out and so, like you can do rack pulls, whatever you like.
I’ll put a band around both of those arms. They can sit into it. And if someone needs to be assisted, they can still hold the way. They can insert your back small, whatever, and other side to the band. The band pushes them out of there. And if I need someone that can has a hard time coming out of the bottom of a squat or bottom of a jump or even can’t get to the depth that we want them to unweighted them or assisting them in that moment can be powerful to impacting their force velocity curve.
And the same thing for resistive. Like if I’ve got someone who can’t produce force at later stages in the concentric phase, I think band resistance are great option as long as they can produce early because it allows you to, because it decelerate your concentric phase for you. The band is resisting you, so it’s actively slowing you down. It allows you to continue to produce force, recruit high threshold motor units. And so, you get a lot of light, you get a lot of muscle activation later in the concentric phase. Now, if I’ve got a gorilla or anybody really, but I may add a decent amount of band tension and then slowly take the band tension away and then make sure as I’m checking the gym wear dashboard, which I’m partial to gym wear, but like, you know, I just think they have a phenomenal dashboard. I haven’t used others, but I’ve just had a lot of success with that one. And we would look at the dashboard just to say, like, OK, are they as I take the band resistance away, are they still producing that force later in the concentrate phase?
And if the answer is yes, then we know we’re doing it right. You know what the answer is? No. Then maybe they need to be assisted. You know, they still need to. Be able to kind of get out of that mud and get moving through there and so you can play with the physics of all this, I guess was the point that I’m making there and kind of dove into it. And in our manual, I’m not trying to pump this, but like there is some really people should go by it.
James Cerbie: It’s like it’s $19.99.
Ty Terrell: I guess it’s not like there was some really cool like I think Dan Baker. I don’t want to like if I’m saying if I’m giving him credit, they don’t deserve, I apologize. But they did research on even how much band attention should be on there. And it’s, you know, between ten and twenty five percent of the of your career, which are the load on the bar. Or you’re wondering max, I can remember what it was like.
You know, they give phenomenal guidance right there for us and how much to use and there’s some guidance in there on that. There’s I don’t even know how many references, if you guys want, but I think there might be one hundred references in there. I mean, maybe, I don’t know, sixty to one hundred. And that’s a broad range. But there are some case studies and we were very open and honest about the results that cause and effect of what we did.
Well, I got nothing to hide. You know, our intent was not to make money off this, I guess. And I can promise you we’re not getting rich off of that manual. But like, it just the intent was just to put it out there and say, hey, this is what we did. This was we didn’t have a practical guide for VBT, yet that I was aware of. It was a lot of research. It was a phenomenal book.
I felt like this was like a next step for us, or at least that fill that void for us that I mean, Tony.
How to Implement and Execute VBT
James Cerbie: Yeah, I’ll piggyback on that. Like, one of the things that I really like is that it makes the implementation execution far simpler and easier. Like I I’m at a point now where I just I think that just loose theory is really overrated. A lot of people love to live in loose theory realm, but that doesn’t help. That doesn’t help. Like, it doesn’t help me at all because I have to sit around and figure out how to implement it.
Like I’m looking for somebody to say, here’s how to catch a fish. But then I’m also just going to give you the fish like I want both. And that’s what I think you guys do a good job of, is you get the theory. But then there’s also like, hey, here’s how to implement and execute this thing to be really successful, to help yourself become a more powerful athlete.
Ty Terrell: I appreciate that. And honestly, that’s how I learned to like, you know, I mean, we’re not trying to be given the answers, but like, I can’t read a book and immediately apply that stuff like I do. But if I see what it is in front of me and I can experience it, I can learn it. So, like by. I guarantee there’s flaws in that thing, I mean, I guarantee I don’t know what they are, but I guarantee it.
But what it is, it’s like you said, it’s an example of how to apply. It’s an explanation of the science that meets us where we’re at as an industry. I feel and, you know, it’s a guide, it’s a starting spot to platform. And so not to be corny here, but use that platform and then explore because I mean, the next ten years, there’s going to be some amazing research come out and we’re going to learn infinitely more than we did in the previous 10 years.
That’s just the way things are going at the rate. So, I mean, use it as a platform, exploit yourself, add to it, you know, prove it’s wrong, you know, all of it. All of it.
James Cerbie: Battlement Well, I know that I got to run to jump on a Zuman call with some of our athletes and you’ve got to run. You guys got a game today? I’m sure we do and we do. But thank you so much for coming on board. This is fun. Fun as always. It’s always just a conversation with you is never is never a bad thing, never a bad way to spend time. So.
Oh yeah man. For sure. So, if anybody listen to this like wanted to track you down, find what’s the best place for them to potentially reach you.
Ty Terrell: I don’t really use social media.
James Cerbie: Good for you, dude. I hate social media.
Ty Terrell: You can always email me at [email protected] If you want to buy the manual, it’s on. I think it’s a completesportperformance.com.
James Cerbie: Yeah, we’ll throw a link to that in the showcase. If people can find it really easily.
Ty Terrell: That’s about it. I mean I prefer having conversations with people than seeing what it’s being posted. So, if you want to have a conversation, reach out.
James Cerbie: Awesome. Thank you so much. And everybody listens and have a have a great week.
Ty Terrell: Thank you, James. We’ll see about.
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