Hello everyone, welcome back to Mind Pump. In honor of the opening of the NBA season, we have one of the top strength and conditioning NBA coaches on our show, Corey Schlesinger. Now he's going to talk about some secrets for performance for both elite athletes and for the average person. He also talks about a concept called micro dosing. No that has nothing to do with psychedelics. It's about a way of training that maybe you can even apply to your own training to get good results. Now you can find Corey on his own Instagram at slushstrength. Also don't forget we have short clips over at our other YouTube channel, Mind Pump Clips. Go over there and subscribe and enjoy the show. Off air we were talking about how competitive and I told you Mike, I had a high school girlfriend who went to college, ended up getting her degree and I think recommendation and ended up working for the Staple Center, hanging out with Kobe, Shaq and all this and me like being in my early 20s just dreaming of something like that.  It's like literally it's hard. It's a lot of because it's so competitive is it's like is it all times are there people eyeing for your job that are willing to come do it? Is that what it's like? Oh absolutely. I mean I think there's people that would do it for free if they could. So then I got to create a value system that goes well no Corey's services are worth this. So we need to do this for him. That's the idea is I'm telling you like it's really competitive. It's so cutthroat and that's where I think you see it a lot in industries where there's like this safeguard or there's this very conservative approach to how you do your job to maintain your job. Oh interesting. And that's where it's like you don't see a lot of people step outside the box or outside tradition because if you stick out like a nail you're going to get hammered at some point. You know so that's where you know like you can be a trendsetter but it's dangerous. I think it can be very dangerous. Is there because it's so competitive is is there like because I know in other organizations maybe smaller organizations where you know coaches strength coaches in particular we're all in the strength space I guess a fitness space lots of cross communication this works this doesn't work. I tried this new technique if you apply this but at your level so competitive is it more secretive like I'll keep my tools to myself and you do your own thing. Let's see what happens. Great question. I look at it like this everything works. It really does. It's just progressive overload right but it's so contextual in the person that you're working with and the environment that you're in and I think that's where everybody starts losing their mind. Right. They try to develop these camps and it's like this way is the right way to do it and then you can always fall back on that type of that type of philosophy but in reality it's like my philosophy is so flexible and pliable because of the athletes I walk into my room and they're past you got to remember I deal with athletes it could be there for three months or they could be there for five years. So I got to know their training history and what they're comfortable doing and really it's like neck up oh you're confident with you know a sumo squat or a sumo deadlift and I wouldn't necessarily go out of my way to get somebody to progress on a sumo deadlift but if that's what you've been doing and that works for you absolutely so that's where I don't think you can just lock yourself into like this philosophy to have that secret like oh this is only what we do and that's the reason why it's like I always go I don't care about sharing what I do it's because of how I apply it and in the context that's the secret. Would you say that's something that separates you from a lot of your peers or do you think that most of them think the same way? I think they think the same thing it's just I'm just willing to share more you know and I think that maybe that's it. Because before that I mean you just looked at it I think a lot of strength coaches out there would look at a system as like this is how we're actually like basically like you're the coach of the team like you're creating the system everybody has to do it this way in particular and so then that kind of mentality went into the strength training program so it was almost like the community workout as opposed to the individual focus would you say that's like a different so like think about where strength and conditioning came from like especially in team sport came traditionally through football right but those are the masses like that's a lot of roster spots but when you start trickling down to more like smaller team rosters like 10 to 15 well you can get a lot more individualized and I'm not saying you can't do individualization with large numbers you definitely can but when I look at it from the basketball's perspective I mean look at these dudes like they're huge and they have different biomechanics they have different structure types they have different strategies on how they create their force yeah you can get into the weeds on that stuff all right today's giveaway again because it's launch season for maps 15 minutes it's math 15 minutes you can get it for free this is the everyday workout program which includes an advanced version for those of you that like to work out with barbells and dumbbells you've been working out for a while you work at every day for 20 to 25 minutes check it out get it for free here's how leave a comment below in the first 24 hours that we drop this episode subscribe to this channel click on notifications do all those things if we like your comment will notify you only in the comment section that you want free access to math 15 minutes now everybody else because it's a brand new launch if you sign up you get it for $20 off so the price is $77 plus you get two free ebooks included with this plus the bonus advanced version if you're interested go to maps 15 minutes calm and then use the code 15 special for the discount and the free giveaways all right here comes a show you know it's interesting I remember having a conversation with another strength and conditioning specialist and I said something like and as a trainer working with everyday average people you know we focus a lot on correctional exercise and all their movement patterns need to be changed you know move this way instead of that way or whatever and he said yeah at this level you don't do that and so what do you mean he goes they've been playing for so long with whatever patterns they have if I go and try to change those they're not going to play nearly as well I could not agree more at that statement the only thing I would change is if they had their symptomatic or they have an injury history right maybe they're manifesting that in a way that's not working out for them but other than that when that's the best part about being in professional sports and watching these games night in and night out as you see the best athletes in the world just playing a sport they're still the best athletes in the world they're just playing a sport so when you watch them like their strategies on how they do what they do you see like such individualization and when you see those kind of movement strategies even though everyone's doing a euro step how they do that euro step when you watch it in real time you're like oh back squats don't help everybody you know you can generalize exercise anymore yeah how this has got to be such a hard decision for you or very technical thing to probably tease out like so for example you know you bring up a good point like let's say somebody has like this excessive you know internal rotation on one side like the left side or something right and therefore they're more prone to some knee and hip issues or something so you know that but then it that torque also makes them more explosive when they go a direction like how do you decide because I've seen examples of that of where they will they'll break down like some super athlete or like and I'm thinking of a picture picture right now who's able like throw like just abnormally fast and they find out that's because they have this like little bit of internal rotation that's me symmetry yeah some asymmetry going on but it works to their benefit when it comes to whipping a baseball so how do you decide like okay this is something that I'm gonna leave alone or this is something I want to fix once again it comes back to symptoms but like that you got a reverse engineer special athletes like we used to like in college it was you know get everybody progressively stronger at basic exercises and their athleticism goes up pretty cool but when you're older athletes now you're getting into your mid 20s getting to your early 30s well how much more strength can you rinse out like I don't know how much more strength to go get to increase performance now with that being said when you're watching the them create these forces you go back to your point that's what makes them special now if they're symptomatic then we have to start looking at some other things but when I see quote-unquote valgus which we can argue if it's valgus or not when you see these knees collapse in no that internal hip rotation they have is special and that's what allows them to have like these you can go down the rabbit hole and like pressure gradients and you know the PRI model if you want but these these physics that go into it that allows them to be like a super ball and just pop off the ground using not muscular strategies but using like tenderness and a ligament and then they're so elastic and you're like oh my god like you're telling me weights is gonna make that better like you're crazy it's literally outliers it's funny I had this conversation with my wife the other day because it was we were at this event and there was a person walking by and they had the legs of a six foot tall person but they were like five nine and I said I bet that person performs really well in running sports I bet you they either run distance or whatever so we had this conversation I talked about Michael Phelps and there was a great picture I saw years ago Michael Phelps they showed his leg length next to the world champion marathon runner now the marathon runner was like five nine Michael Phelps like six something but Michael Phelps legs are as long as the guy is super short I said his body is built to swim this person's body is built to run at the level that you train people at that level you have special differences many of them genetic so you can't necessarily apply what I would do for the average person because it's not going to work for the I mean how different is that level because you train at the highest level of college how different is the level going from college to pro I mean in every aspect different but like you still see very similar body types it's just do they have enough skill and that's where that one comes in but to go back to your the point you were making earlier what I find is fascinating is the higher level athlete you work with the more you progress exercises really interesting why is that because I look at it like this if they're creating these forces elastically reactively like you can't create those same forces in a weight room I don't care how strong you are like jump like watching some of these athletes do 360 dunks or backflip dunks basically I mean they're doing the craziest stuff in the air these aerials and being able to drop their shin angle like some of these guards that they make them change direction like their shins are hovering over and when you see those angles you're like and those cuts there's no way I can replicate that force in a weight room scenario that's true I can't add enough load they'll crumble not to mention if you load them outside of that range of motion get them too strong and then you ask them to go do that explosively like then you're taking them so that's the thing I'm learning about myself and my own evolution of training was when I trained to be awesome I want to be big strong you know look the part then I started realizing okay I live an external rotation I live in supination so now I'm doing all the things that's the exact opposite of what you need for jumping and change of direction and you're like so like being cock strong might not be you know in this context of lifting weights might not be the best thing for high velocity high speed sports now with that being said you do need to load and that's where I go back to my point you got to regress these exercises and now it's like okay instead of taking a traditional heavy back squat well maybe it's just a leg press maybe it's a Smith machine squat maybe it's like take the learning curve out because all I want is the stress I need to give them the stress to get a response to elicit an adaptation I don't care what vessel it comes in so to put differently you're taking the skill out of the strength training so they could just focus on the tension just on just on that the mechanical load yes but what I really find fascinating and this is where my my evolution is gone to is now I take that skill component and I take it more to sport so now I want that in movement strategies that's outside of sport got a gray area now I explain that explain that yeah for sure so I'll say the white area is doing the skill like playing basketball right crossovers jumps you know aerials whatever and then the black area is resistance training well there's that gray area that you can increase movement efficiency to increase movement capacity and that's where it's if they lack something for example they don't have a lot of good or they don't have enough IR to allow them to change direction as well as they could well what movement strategies can I build within that that allows them to move better and then get it in high velocities but it also doesn't beat them up because I can't play 82 games in a year right or regular season 3.4 3.5 games per week how are you going to do that without beating them up so now you got to hijack a lot of things and that's where I mean I pull from everywhere I pull from and it's controversial in art in my space but like France Bosch I like a lot of his stuff some of his stuff makes a lot of sense but then I look at ballet I look at freestyle wrestling I look I mean I look everywhere to look at what angles to those guys create because for them to be successful in their sport that I need the same in mind but I can't do what they do on the court because that takes a lot of that taxes them so how do those guys train and then I try to incorporate with our athletes based off their structure and based off their strategies that's really interesting I was I'm just racking my brain on this in terms of like that high level of an athlete like are you a little bit more focused on like decelerating type movement as opposed to you know because obviously they've mastered that that ability to create and generate force and torque and you know get into these explosive movements but the control of it at this level and the stability of it you know is that like even more of an emphasis that you have in your programming that's such a good question the way I look at it is you got to give them what they don't get so for example they already do a ton of plyometrics like let's remove what sport is for a second and like we're not tallying scores anymore and we're not competing against one another let's just look at what they actually do on the court the whole game is playing the whole game is plyometrics and the whole game is hand combat and the whole game is bodying somebody up and then moving in the frontal plane in a certain way like remove all that and look at the sport for what it truly is and go probably don't don't need to do a lot more of that because they already get that so back to your point yeah it makes a lot of sense to do decelerating work now how you do that really depends on the impact that it can have on the athlete so when I say impact it's like high level plyometrics like playing the sport is very impactful like has a ton of impact on the joints ligaments tendons etc so when I do eccentric training like I got to think one or two things am I doing it for high velocities or am I doing it for strength and so utilizing it means like high eccentric drops like I like I got credit for this movement called a kettlebell drop lunge so basically you start with it tall you hold it in between your legs and then you drop down and catch it and then you can do it rhythmically yeah and so what that does it doesn't beat up the joints but it's high velocity eccentric training also there's rhythm and coordination there's a lot of aspects that is sport and so that's where you can get a lot of eccentric load but it doesn't beat them up also on the same token you can do a lot of tempos where you take for example like a Bulgarian squad tempo that three seconds five seconds on the way down one second pause explode up now I'm training the eccentric portion I'm just doing it through a different means there I'm chasing physical adaptations like I'm chasing you know hypertrophy things that you see in body building so now I've seen a bit of a trend in in strength training in terms of like the platforms in the different angles in being able to kind of place the ankles a little more in you know supinated or a different type of a position pronation where you're trying to create and control that kind of force now explain to me like how is that something like you're incorporating now I've seen this in a few different modalities out there for athletes like I think where's the thought process in that so like Polish boxes for example for the audience the Polish box is really simple it's a plyo box except they have slants so in other words it makes like a roof like a house or it makes like a ditch so it goes basically a triangle or reverse triangle and then they have different grades that allows certain responses so what I like doing with them is doing low level plyometrics or extensive base plyometrics where you're jumping on this ramp but your feet are going into supination and then doing the exact same thing jumping straight up and down even though we're jumping straight up and down my feet are feeling supination and pronation so the same things that I get in change of direction the one thing that you see in change of direction drills who does change of direction drills like extensively what type of athlete yeah or I'm just saying like like who trains that extensively that means like you'd be going back and forth cutting for a long period of time most of the time when you see change of direction tennis is yeah you see that in sport but that's like a high level basketball you don't see that in normal persons exactly but when you see it in training then you're like oh no one just goes back and forth and does a ton of change of direction like they don't sets and reps that necessarily so when I think well how is their training their foot and ankle to handle change of direction they don't even build a general base for it they just rely on the sport to make that happen so how do I get like the best way to look at it is like GPP for the lower leg for change of direction how do you get that and a great way of doing it is just jumping on plyo boxes where you have these ramps and it forces your foot to have supination and pronation aspects speaking of which this was very interesting I'm not a huge basketball fan but I'm a huge fan of athletic training and I don't know there's maybe a few months ago we were all watching basketball on TV and I noticed something and only because I don't normally watch it and I said man nobody's wearing high tops like they used to back in the day everybody's got like these mid tops or low tops that seems like a big change because when I was a kid everybody wore high tops why why did that change what was it now my guess was you just have more movement and mobility and it probably although this may sound counter probably reduced injury because you're not so limited but is am I right what was the deal my understanding is it started with Kobe I think Kobe was the first one to that's a prevailing theory that I've heard oh is it yeah that his his injury after that he started the whole trend of the lower lower lower yeah so that I don't know how true it is but he is one of the first that I've ever seen go low top and like and everybody buy it like everybody jumped on that train because they were like oh it's Kobe's and they're cool but from my understanding what went into that was his experience as a soccer player and when you watch soccer there's no high tops in soccer right what like to me like I thought that was fascinating because you got spikes yeah you're planted in a harder direction yeah with a with a fucking ball you don't want to dig into the surface I was like those are the guys that are going to be jacked up the most and then you watch dbs and running back or not running backs but like dbs and wide receivers and those are skill sport or skill positions I never thought they were low tops as well yeah so when you think about it just makes a lot of sense I think it was just shoemakers at the time trends like just things that just at that point made sense but really wasn't validated and that's the thing that I was talking about earlier is like if you step outside the box sometimes I mean it's high risk high reward but sometimes it could fall on your face dude speaking of evolution the evolution of strength training and basketball I find absolutely fascinating I think that's probably one of the last sports to really adopt I mean of course they all use it now but it was probably one of the last sports to really adopt strength training football being the first when they first adopted it versus now what are the evolutions of strength training look like and how's the athletes change because I remember them if I want to I want to say in the 90s or 2000s they were big they were trying to get them real big and now maybe they're much more svelte like what's what what's the deal with the evolution of the strength training man I remember so I played college basketball like the lowest level of college basketball so that was 2005 to nine and so even that small revolution from then like it was almost like don't train in season because it's going to mess up your shot like that was one that I was like Jesus that was a big one and now look back on I'm like that's probably the one of the most ridiculous things that you can ever say but at the same time it also makes a lot of sense because what was adopted it was football training principles yeah they're adopted into basketball so if you go and do a heavy bench press session and then you go shoot immediately after I agree that is not good yeah that is not good at all changes your timing 100% like that feel like there's nothing like the feel and that's when you see like the best best basketball players when they shoot the ball there's something that it's just so special the way it comes off the fingertips I mean I I can still I'll shoot for the next 10 years and I still can't even come close to that kind of touch you know and it's just something when you see that and you go oh strength training like types of strength training it actually makes a lot of sense and so anyways back to the evolution so it was basically don't train in season just only maybe do do it off season but it was that it's like let's get these refrigerators let's try to make the biggest possible athlete that we possibly can because but the sport was that like the 90s was beating and banging down low yeah right and it's now it's so much more finesse so it's not only like and this is the part that we can't compartmentalize you know training it's also style of play hmm what a good point think about football back you know I mean they're still like you put a bunch of heavy linemen up front they can't move really well but they're just really strong and it's run up the gut you know a wishbone or whatever you call it there's all these types of offense and I remember helping out in college football early in my career where they actually wanted more mobile linemen so now that you have more mobile linemen you got to change the way you train I think that's what happened in basketball the style of play changed thus the need 100 percent I mean you're you're explaining look at how many wide receivers in the NFL I mean the part of why we see like the Tyreeks and these guys that are so fast now is they can be petite and small and quick like that you play football in the 80s yeah you play football in the 80s you get jacked up if you're that little 100 plus the game has changed too I mean when you see the rules change like the rules now you know that you can't touch certain things well then what wins speed yeah and so that's where it's like ah maybe I'll put more eggs in that basket opposed to being as physical and so that's when you see now the three-point shot is now like basically from half court it's like that's why some of these guys can get away with it at a super high level where speed really wins I mean don't be wrong stop like there's there's all sorts of tactics that go into it and the development and the structure or the DNA of your team I should say but it's really fascinating to see what really wins it's fast-paced or physicality it's always fun to see when those two teams match up I'd love to hear some some personal experience for you I mean you were already coaching at a high level at at Stanford then you go to the NBA would have been some highlights and moments like watching the game and watching these these super athletes like would have been some cool highlights for you I mean the finals was special yeah like it was probably and obviously we we lost but the coolest thing was watching them celebrate and I know that sounds really weird and it's like untraditional for us to like like but when I watched it it was like dude this is the highest level of achievement we were just on the other side of it yeah but I'm like dude I'm still in this building and I'm like from Redneckville you know USA and I get to just stand here and watch this confetti drop now obviously I would love to see our colors drop but just even being in that moment it's like we're the last two teams and this was achievable it's there it was so special well also what is it like because unfortunately I have never been able to experience playing for or being a part of a team that made a championship run talk about the the culture of it because I mean I even not ever experiencing that there's you know when you have this this dynamic like could did you know early in the season I mean could you could you feel the energy no no it's the best shut up really that's the best part I've been a part of three different championship teams and what's interesting is everyone I can look back on it was like oh we actually did it wow really you don't know it while you're in it I don't think I don't think you know it when you're in it I think you're just this is what we do and it just so happens to go our way I really think like don't even there's that mentality yeah we were built for this we're built different like I get that like there's that facade there's that you know that confidence you have to externally show and yeah we knew this was happening well sure you know but the reality is like can everybody pinpoint that moment where we're like oh it's here I mean you can fascinate some stories but reality I mean we were coming off the bubble the bubbles 8-0 very successful that was our own little championship but we're like hey we belong that didn't necessarily go we belong in the finals like that's that's a big difference like you win eight games in a row great but like going to the finals the next year that's that's a big leap and that was I mean our first round was extremely tough but I would say if I had to like pinpoint a like a fantasy moment to say hey we can do this thing like we were doing it was after the first round when after the first round when that was the first time the organization's been in the playoffs for 12 years I think remind me who you played in the first round the Lakers oh okay so of course so that was where you know that was that was a team that was projected to do it off of course so yeah after we did that one we're like oh gosh like I'm not saying like we arrived but it was like no we're here like we can do this well let's talk about the bubble training the bubble what did anything change or was it just business as usual oh no everything changed like the it was because of the environment so we were under extreme constraints I mean obviously with the testing everybody's in their own hotel rooms I mean when we first got there we had to quarantine in our hotel for like three days straight I think it was something like that so so you couldn't bring family anybody or couldn't you but then they had to also quarantine oh no so by yourself by yourself now I think the finals I think they're allowed to bring family but they still had to quarantine just like how we quarantined you know so but you know to finish off the regular season I mean we had to be there three days isolated in your room and that was bananas but like I'm sending guys workouts via FaceTime you know or text and then I'll FaceTime them like forum check or whatever you want to call it and it was wild times and so when we finally got released you know it felt like hey coming out into the public we finally got released to do things together we were slotted times because we all had to share facilities so I don't remember how many teams maybe like 19 teams were in it or something like that so we had only so many facilities to have practice have weight room access and so everyone was slotted I believe it was anywhere between two and a half to three hours and then you had to get up out of there and so like where are you going to train and so what do you got to do so in most scenario you can do a lot of personal training you do one-on-one training but because of that constraint what we decided to do as a team was you know what we're going to do a team lift and that was where it was like college days now that got me that's my wheelhouse so running that whole program like a college program that was the most fun if I can pinpoint like one special moment in my career like you said that actually that was looking back on that it was dope because you got the best athletes in the world and it's like marching to the same beat and we're all in the weight room and it's like Trap Bar Deadlift Day and everybody's treating it like it's a max day coach is in there all yelling and it's like a football environment we're like yo like this is in the NBA like this ain't college football it was it was cool and then it just so happened to have success so see do you not think that some of that bled into the next season as far as like that camaraderie and everything that you probably built during that time you think how we trained actually transitioned into that and so what we trained before that like I didn't even know what the NBA was like I was just winging it like I mean we're all winging it to a certain degree but especially during that first half of the season before the pandemic hit I was like I think we're going to train now I think do you want to lift today like I didn't I didn't really know how to you know because I'm used to saying I'm right this is what we got we'll be here at eight but at that level it doesn't really work that way you know it's your co-worker you don't like talk to your co-worker that way you're a student yeah it's it's not a full Italian did you have a did you get a like a lesson in that like was there your man no no I got you coming already why I came in I was like you know what like I know what I feel the vibe like just just be cool like be cool and then the moments that you got to like put your foot down just be like yo what are we doing like talk to him like as a at your boy and you're like I'm disappointed in you not like get the out of my space like you can't pull that stuff like I mean you could I mean I think if you're close enough there's times where I'm close enough for the player where I can like be get into old cause you know them yeah because we're cool like and they know that I have the best interest form right if it's not then it looks like it's self-interest and you know at the end of the day like these guys get paid what they get paid and I get paid what I get paid so if there's controversy who's gonna right kick rocks first right so now you you mentioned off-air that you know knowing what you know now you have this this great experience the high-level college now MBA now now you say if you were to go back and do college you do it differently yeah I'll so I would do it so different so one thing that we did in college specifically at Stanford that I really enjoyed was we implemented this model called micro dosing yeah and so micro dosing performance I think we talked about I remember I went up I was gonna bring that up I'm like you're doing revolutionary stuff at Stanford so how would you like change all that it was already next level well the good thing is I got to bring that to the professional environment and so now it was like a comparison it wasn't not a intentional comparison but the difference is I would do multiple sessions in a day that's what I would do very different so explain micro dosing to the audience who didn't for sure listen that first episode great point so micro dosing in a team sport setting and in season training you generally see teams lift one to two times a week and the problem with that is let's say somebody misses a lift then that's 50 percent of your training gone 50 to 100 percent of your training gone for that seven-day period which is a huge problem or you got to make it up now if we're just saying here's a good example in conference play you play Thursday and Saturday so if I miss a lift well I can't make up that lift especially the exact same type of lift to elicit an adaptation because what that's going to do is going to put me in the hole and now I can't have optimal competition right or be ready for competition so then you're now negating and like doing like a half ass job or training stimulus just to get the lift in so that was the problem I had I was like you know what there's not enough opportunity because we try to condense this whole session and so these sessions in season would look anywhere 2045 minutes to an hour long and so when you think about it you probably surf the force velocity spectrum so you start with your warm-up you know your speed or power work your strength work and then your accessory work that's a typical lift well if you layer all these different types of stressors into one lift yes you could get a positive adaptation but with that positive adaptation also is going to be is also going to have other aspects like delayed onset muscle soreness so if we have some of these you know unwanted symptoms then that's going to affect player development that's going to affect skill development that's going to affect practice that's going to affect competition so what I thought about was well instead of doing these like mega dose sessions like an off-season workout length let's do a micro session so now let's split these lifts into anywhere between 15 to 25 minute sessions and then instead of doing all of those stressors in one lift I'm a separate yeah I'm a separate every one of those stressors and what I found out is I can train not only more often but more intense because think about it if you went to the gym and all you had was cleans all right you got 20 minutes to get cleans in you could get as heavy as you possibly could and you could fail you're probably not going to feel it the next day so you're like oh but where did it all come from yeah because there's that cumulative stress it's not just the acute stress right it's the cumulative over time bingo I experienced this myself I did I did these all-day workouts where I'd lift one hour for 20 minutes then I wouldn't work out for two hours and I do it again 20 and I did this all day long when I looked at the total volume like this is way more than I would ever do in one workout but didn't feel like it a thousand percent and where did that all come from well like Olympic lifters yes I trained multiple times and so I found that the Norwegian project are you guys familiar with that no so this was the Norwegian powerlifting team I believe they took on this Olympic lifting coach I forgot where he was from though somewhere eastern block in anyways he's an Olympic lifting coach comes over to the Norwegian powerlifting team and introduced Olympic lifting training frequencies to the powerlifting now this is already an elite level powerlifting group all they did was make more sessions they just increase they doubled their training frequency within a week so instead of doing three or four lifts they did eight to nine lifts and they corrected for volume and all that stuff or it was the same load same workload so in other words like yes yes yes they corrected the volume but they're just in these micro sessions right right right and then all of a sudden boom prs prs prs and you're sitting there like that makes a lot of sense I'm experiencing this right now we we just created a program that we're launching next month and we I basically have taken the three big workouts that I used to do and I've split it up over like six days in these 20 25 minutes and experiencing incredible results and I feel and I feel better than I ever felt my joints feel better I'm recovering faster I feel just as strong the results are as good or better it's it's amazing I think for strength training uh intensity tends to be over overused or abused and frequency in this way tends to not get looked at 100 and I think if you look at frequencies this way you'd be amazed at how your body tends to react and respond how it happened at Stanford was really simple like we come in we're before we got Stanford we're at the University of Alabama Birmingham and like you know it's blue collar and you know that we had success with that so we're trying to bring this blue collar mentality into Stanford which is very white collar and we're like well lifting every day is pretty tough like it's like that's hard you know let's let's do that and so how I pinned it off was let's make it a part of practice so lifting and practice are not two separate events and it was also another aspect was when you look at stress holistically if you have separate sessions throughout the day well logistically I mean that's 15 to 20 minutes of commute time yeah and now like we're wasting their day because they have to more commutes sure so our idea was like instead of doing like that same rudimentary like everybody on the line let's do this five to ten minute warm-up and everybody's doing the song and dance before we go into our practice let's make it a strength warm-up or a power warm-up oh interesting and so now it's a weight room session so our warm-up is actually done in the weight room now we contrasted some sprinting and we did some specialized things where we go from a squat to a jump or trap our dead lift into a sprint you know whatever but they got to experience those high velocities and change the direction to prepare them for sport but then we so we microdosed and so that's where we trained on game day and that was weirdly like revolutionary in college basketball at the time which I'm like I don't think it's that big of a deal but it it caught a lot of credit and so then taking that now to professional sports so what I did there was we only trained one time a day in college what we do in professional sports is we train anywhere between two to three times a day wow and I know that sounds wild it really does but when you're doing these micro sessions it makes a ton of sense so let's just take a game day for example most teams have what they call a shoot around so that's you know around 10 o'clock 11 o'clock during the day they go to the arena get shots up maybe do some tactical stuff or they're looking over the thing that they're about to do to the team that night and so that's an opportunity pre or post that and then you have the game pre or post that so you have four opportunities to get lifts in and so if we break them up into these micro sessions then for instance you can do accessories in the morning wake up then you do your tune up or your you know your turbo like we're trying to get fast before the game potentiation and then post game indigent like this is where we're going to work on tensile strength post game did you get any flex so there was a viral video you were in it oh god you were there was a viral video that was so bad oh yeah that you were in and i was like oh shit there's my boy right there because anyway i think i even made tv everything of you training with the guys i think after one of the play was it one of the playoff games no it was after a season game it was after the the bay area team oh that's why i remember maybe that's why i remember it was after that win so tell me first of all explain to the audience what what what that was and what happened and then i i didn't know if there if you got any backlash from it or anything yeah it was it was catch 22 it was good and bad okay the good part was uh it's exposing the rest of the world that we that you know basketball players lift weights and like we we take care of our bodies and this is how we take care of our bodies we don't do it by doing passive modalities we're not just sitting there and getting massage treatments and getting these spa like you know sessions no we we work like we do our we do what we can to build up our bodies and the best time to do that is technically post game the reason why i bring that up is going back to the example where you play three to four times a week well if you lift heavy to have an adaptation on any of the other days so the rest days well holistically stress is still really high so they never get to recover so the idea behind micro dosing truly is make your high days stupid high and so that your low days are ridiculously low and so that you can recover and that's the idea behind it is when once you build up into this uh or once you adapt then at the end of season you're setting pr's like you're the strongest at the end of season wow that's the whole point of this thing trip i mean we had guys that were being able to express force on our force plates and we have data to support it that they're setting lifetime pr's going into the playoffs wow that's that that's so counter yeah with any because the the old school mentality before the season yeah just peek before season and just make sure they don't get hurt it's just so funny how you look at it and you're like well when does people get hurt they get hurt in the beginning of season probably because there's such a cute response to all the things they've been doing and at the end of season mm-hmm what do you think happened yeah you know what i'm saying so like you peek early all right we're you done a lot of training up into that point then you add on high volume practices and then you add on games boom something happens yep and then you look at the end of season you detrain because you're not training at intensities that you were training so you're actually getting less of an at what an interesting perspective on that and so counter so let's talk uh so here's something that i i noticed with these all day well i wanted to hear the controversy oh yeah oh yeah we hear the shit bro you let him go away with that so what we were doing in that session where we're doing oscillating isometrics so what that is is you go to the bottom range and we're just pulsing at the bottom it's really really good for tendon health okay so then every like you know the internet personal trainers are like oh my god they're not even going full depth they're not even doing full range of motion and i'm like out of all the lifts that's the one you know banging out great looking pull-ups though i was pumped about that i was like yeah yeah we do that but the the pulsing isos got so much controversy and i'm like oh my god this is jazzercise stuff the facts you know and the problem is you see me doing it right beside a guy like i was showing him and it was like oh look he doesn't know what he's talking about i'm like we're all right i think it's going to the internet you know yeah it's it's important for trainers and coaches to know that the the when you start it when you're training the average person there's there's it's very different at what you look at it's very different how you train the person the higher the level the more specific and specialized and when you're training at the highest highest level it's going to look nothing like you would train the average person even if you're trying to fit average person it's going to look nothing like it and this took me 10 years to really learn as a trainer because i would be critical too what is that it's not a full squad or why aren't they doing full range in 10 years in my career i was like oh that's not the same at all it's very different it's very specific i had the exact same when i was in college and i got asked on a lot of podcasts when i was working in those ranks would you ever do mba i'm like no they don't train like i had the same mentality i'm like nah man like i wouldn't do mba and look at my ass now i just try to figure it out so i have a question for you because i i could i can't quite figure out why this happens i'm pretty sure you know the answer to this but when i would do those all-day workouts you know and this is how i'll break it down i do like three exercises two or three sets each bench you know i don't know bench deadlift overhead pressure something like that and i do a couple sets at 9 a.m then again at 11 a.m then again at 1 p.m and i noticed in the middle of that whole thing because i'd finished like 6 p.m by the third or fourth session i felt stronger than i did at the beginning even though i should be fatigued even though i've just done two or three micro workouts earlier i noticed i got stronger and stronger and stronger and then fatigue would set in in the last two or three i start to get weaker is that like a a potentiation thing that's going on is my cns ramping up like what's happening i think there's multiple things going on and i like to pair it with another example so when you talk to any basketball player and you ask them when they got their first dunk they would always say yeah after pickup and you're like ah that makes a lot of sense actually because there's this aspect when we create so much tension to elicit a certain you know movement pattern rather it's slow like a heavy deadlift or fast like a sprint or a jump there's this aspect of uh or this is sweet spot where you turn on the right muscles and turn off the right muscles and there's this coordination to it and so i think when you get into your sets you actually start getting more and more coordinated throughout the day the efficiency is just exactly so that's all expression of force is is efficiency yeah and so and don't get me wrong there's probably opportunities where guys like have their best jump in the beginning well for sure but there's like a lot of other things that could be involved in that as well but most basketball players i mean i'm telling i've asked this question that you just made me think back to the very first time i ever dunked was after you know two hours of a pickup game there you go and you just created so much efficiency and so like when fatigue is actually like a good indicator of efficiency and so that's where i think a lot of people look at fatigue as a bad thing i look at fatigue as a great thing because you look at one or two things like there's movement competency or there's movement inefficiency and so that's where it's like oh do you truly master it can you still express these outputs even though you're under fatigue because that's how you organize and when you see in sport that's when you're like oh that's where like you see crazy fourth quarter performances yeah sometimes you see great first quarter performances but you know it's like your body is fine-tuning and becoming more organized it's interesting i was there was this god there was this old show i think it was a discovery channel where they were they would attach sensors to athletes and haven't performed certain athletic fees i think it was and they had randy couture on there i don't know if you guys know who he is but you know mma yeah where we interviewed the guy from that show yeah and he randy couture he got a like this medicine ball type thing with all these sensors attached to his body in the medicine ball uh registering force and he squeezed it like in a headlock and he compared him to the average person and they found that his muscles were activating and coordinating very differently and so he was able to squeeze it harder and longer than somebody who was actually bigger than he was but it's because of the efficiency his body was it just through training and practice 100 percent and that's really what it all boils down to well i'm so glad you brought up that point or that specific story because i think the most important part of microdosing is how it doesn't compete with other stressors when we look at stressors holistically let's look at okay if i'm developing skill well that's motor learning yeah i mean motor learning exists in lifting as well but let's just compartmentalize it for a second so motor learning skill development um then we look at physical training we're getting the muscles bigger faster stronger right and then we look at the sport itself and that's the reactive component and the actualization of everything well the problem is if train physical training has these negative effects in these mega dosages well how do you think that's going to affect motor learning and skill development so that's the thing i don't want to do i want to increase their physical capacity but i cannot do it to the point where it sacrifices skill development and competition all three of these areas have to coordinate together and be able to be in sync so that's where if you take certain aspects like going back to the example speed and power heavy lift or strength and then accessory work if you just compartmentalize those and you organize it along with their skill development then you'll never compete against those stressors so really the the the benefit the value the the effectiveness of microdosing training is less about what it's doing and more about what it's not doing exactly okay exactly so you're not competing as much you're not forcing the body to adapt or to choose where it's going to adapt and to choose where it's going to move its resources and here's the key with this and i think a lot of people need to realize this is when you're when you're equating total volume total work it's it's pretty similar if you have two long workouts versus four small ones or five or six small ones the difference is in what you're talking about because you're doing those frequent kind of signaling with smaller sessions you're not doing maybe as much damage not fatiguing the body as much and allowing the person to train with less injury less pain less all that stuff i mean it's really just not messing with what they do yeah and i think we get away from that sometimes because it's about what we do like strength conditioning coaches i gotta get them bigger faster stronger well okay but if they're not a better basketball player then none of it was at all it doesn't matter and that's what i had to if i could go back to college i would do different now at the same time they're 17 to 21 year olds they adapt to anything so it really doesn't matter but i would be a lot more more like scalpel than i would like hammer like i was in college so would you have added more workouts then to your college group and then i would take that even just out of my own curiosity from the high school level because i'm working with athletes there specifically just in terms of like creating these micro dosing workouts but then also go moving that same method in season and keeping and maintaining that alongside the stress of them you know the volume of their actual sport itself like that would have been something you would have changed yeah i would have done now back to this the stanford example the last thing i wanted to do is have them come in multiple times a day i would lift pre and post practice pre practice is more speed like motor coordination like things that turn things on turn things on and then like i mean like you're gone like this is a if it's a sprint workout like it's a sprint workout if it's to jump higher i mean we're doing like high high plyometrics because what's the worst thing after that practice like you're not going to experience anything as harsh now there's some reactive components that could get you close but regardless and then post practice as long as practice has done well and now it's more additional strength training than traditional strength training wow now what about isometrics you mentioned the pulsing in that video where does isometrics so isometrics i feel like is one of the most underutilized training methodologies and just general fitness um and the studies on them are pretty remarkable it's uh doesn't damage the body the injury risk is really low activates lots of muscle fibers i mean you can apply isometrics to anybody almost anybody regardless of fitness level so i would imagine that this is something that you utilized with your athletes as well it is the b's knees okay and sport performance right now like oh really everybody's starting to look at it oh man it's like it's an abundance like there's i mean there's courses coming out left and right about how you use it at the highest level it makes us feel good doesn't make you feel good a little bit dude so it is a little bit early adopters are like they are the b's knees right now and for great reason i mean you look at uh you guys from there with frc yeah like their pales and rails is driven driven from 80s research yeah research i was done in the 80s and i was like why don't we just keep looking at that and just apply it in different ways you look at pales and rails and you're like that's just an imtp or an overcoming iso and a yielding iso so why can't we apply those same principles globally or even more specific so i like using isometrics in the frontal plane i know a lot of people like i like i like overcoming isos to potentiate like jesus like you overcome it like so what i mean so you mean like driving against an immovable object correct and so like that's going to i mean there's no more motor unit recruitment in a single lift than a failed deadlift yeah and what is a failed deadlift an isometric yeah so there's your answer like that's the if you want to create the most amount of force and overcoming iso now how we do it is through more of like a uh a more favorable position so it's like a quarter squat position that's when i'm in my strongest you know i wouldn't do it from the bottom unless i'm trying to build a lift which like the powerlifter whose bottom is exactly not a basketball player like who cares right he's never getting in a deep squat so it doesn't matter for sure now what i would do if they are symptomatic like say like patella tendonitis on a knee then you could get them in those ranges but you're doing it for a health spectrum so that's when i use or i utilize yielding isometrics which means for example you start at the top of a squat or a lunge and then you drop into a mid stance or to a full lunge because you're yielding that force so that's where you can utilize like heavy resistance training for that and once again going back to the same example regress the exercise like it doesn't have to be a complicated exercise it could even be a machine it's just what is that's the the vessel doesn't matter it's the stress that we're trying to drive and if it's heavy well let's not make it more complicated especially if you don't know the athlete's training history or you don't have a long time with that athlete get that through motor skill like motor learning like get that through like skill development get that through like sprinting and jumping and change direction don't get that in the weight room yeah okay so with isometrics especially with the uh where you're overcoming right so you're you're pushing against an immovable object or squatting against an immovable object for the average person um it sounds like the best time to do something like that would be if you're going to do a traditional strength training workout 45 minute hour workout would be 10 minutes at the beginning get everything turned on then get into your workout does that make sense yeah i'd say after you're pretty loose and you feel good okay that's when you can start ramping it up like i would never like start the session or even when i'm loose i wouldn't start with like a hundred percent effort rip into a rack you know you can build an 80 90 and then you start hitting your work sets but what i really like doing is i like contrasting that work i like going against an immovable object and then getting that tension this is for an analogy standpoint get the tension out of my body then i go do something rhythmic and coordinate and coordinated after for example like shadow boxing is not a bad example but like little like like low level plios or like box jumps or death drop jumps you know something where it's it involves some rhythm and coordination so i can develop all this tension and i'll go use that tension interesting so i like having both of those aspects i rarely train one without the other interesting interesting so you could do like a high tension in the beginning after you're warmed up and loose and then do something like ice skaters or 100 percent so that's and that's a great example of the change of direction well i do an overcoming iso into a wall except one of my sides is facing it and then i lean into it and i'm only pushing with my back leg so now it's like a ice skater jump but i'm just creating it with a wall and i'm holding that position now i'm specifically training the angles angles is what wins angles is what performance truly is when you see shin angles low to the ground you see speed you see that linear springing and you see and change the direction so i want to train them in those angles and what's the safest way to get them down there but also have a shit ton of load overcoming isometric yeah and and for the listeners who's trying to understand this the reason why angles are such are so important is if you're generating i'm just going to use a number 100 pounds worth of force but your angle is not perfect you're you're going to lose it there's a leak in in that energy that 100 pounds can't be applied directly because it's like me pushing against the wall but i'm pushing from under the wall right i'm not going to push it directly i'm not able to create the angle that gives me the direct force there's also physics involved right the greater the angle and the greater the strength you can have in that angle the greater tension and that's it that you can create on the field or on the court right that's so well i just reverse engineer from the best in the world right 100 meters sprinters are the fastest people in the world yep when you watch them take off how closer their shins to the ground in those first three steps that is the difference between good starters and elite starters look at those shin angles if it looks almost parallel to the ground it's organized falling like your best sprint your best sprint is catching yourself falling it is and so great track coaches they actually encourage falling in their acceleration drills because that's essentially the angle you want to be able to eventually create because that's all it is it's just organized falling our mutual friend paul fabrics does great videos on like where he breaks down the the angles and stuff like that you've seen the most yes the most elite athletes have that ability to like and then now linear is one thing but back to the point you're bringing change of direction yeah when you see like bilateral and then knees are in and they're just shimming left and right but their shins are about to touch the ground you're like how do you guard that like i'm just moral length i just got to use the link i hope i got a seven foot wingspan because grab onto his shorts 100 foul foul hard foul hard so you know one of the one of the biggest travesties in the strength sports and we can even include i guess muscle building in that is this camps like well bodybuilders train like this powerlifter train like this Olympic lifters train likes oh i use kettlebells or i use and you you know i don't know if we said this all fair but you said you know i try to take from everything and apply it and this is for professional sports i think this applies to the average person as well who just wants to build an aesthetic physique you know that they don't take principles from other strength sports or even athletes in those sports like bodybuilders i think bodybuilders can learn a lot from olympic olympic lifters maybe not the olympic lifts but maybe the micro dosing and the frequency so you're driving towards something i wanted to ask kori actually and i if you can i'd like you to take yourself out of your you know mba and basketball mind and actually kind of think like we have to think as like general pop right and what are some things that you've learned during your your your training career that you now would apply to the average person who's just trying to get fit build muscle like how like how would you think like programming differently today with all your knowledge and experience would you omit well like back to sal's point like i think what's like fascinating is truly stealing from all these other disciplines so for example if i want massive quads olympic lifters have fucking quads their quad sweeps are unreal what do they do a lot of front squats boom there you go application you know that's a good example um sprinters sprinters have glutes and hams why because they sprint so i would apply sprinting to general population or ways to create a lot of force now there is skill to sprinting but there is no skill to throw in a medicine ball really hard and so that's where going back to the exam or the points we were making earlier just regressing the exercises to get the adaptation you're looking for that's what matters the most an olympic lifter yes it's a very specialized movement to be able to organize to lift that weight over their head but i can still create that same kind of force with a trap bar maybe i don't rack it so i don't decapitate myself with a trap bar but i can still put that same kind of force at triple extension i'm pulling as rapid and violently as possible to have that same adaptation so things that i would take away from all my experiences in basketball and so apply it to general population is like extensive low level plyometrics so just something a simple skipping rope like i want to see 30 minutes non-stop like if you can work up to something like that then you won't run into the problems that i've ran into in my career with or with my own body is when i transitioned out of basketball i went to be a meathead right i wanted to be bigger faster stronger and so in that process i got away from doing any type of plyometrics i got away from hooping i got away from anything that made me athletic so what i did was i built a body that can write checks that my feet can't catch and then boom torn Achilles speaks right to me and you know what i'm saying and then now and so in my evolution i was like 226 the last time i talked to you guys actually that's so funny three days after i tore my Achilles i came in here and did that podcast with you guys so i rolled in that i was so half pain meds too that was crazy i was worried about that i was really worried about that podcast no you're so sharp though yeah you were good like he's real happy this is super happy but what's happened since that time is my left Achilles is healed everything's great but now my right Achilles and that's generally what you see when you see one go the other tends to follow suit mine is because of a deformity in my heel so my Achilles sits obliquely and so i'm just creating a sheer force all the time but there's a said principle to it where if you train it up it will eventually get stronger and so what i found out is okay i have a 226 body i like being awesome but i can't move now that i'm in professional sports i'm more valued by moving not by looking apart right yeah and when i look at the rest of the league i'm like there's no meatheads here i was like oh that might be a reason and so because i have a background in basketball i can be involved a lot more like in college i couldn't even hold a basketball or else it's a violation which is wild oh interesting so many NCAA rules that's ridiculous that is weird yeah but it's like the reason why they did it is because then you could just make an assistant coach a strength coach and now you have another coach so that's why they did it but in professional sports i can pass i can shoot i can you know set a screen i can do all sorts of stuff so my ability to move is what gets guys to buy in like my ability to handle the ball and one mixtape like the stuff that i cared about growing up like they're like oh yo like kory's got some stuff you know and it's like oh i might actually listen to him in the weight room now so um amy's where we're going low level playoffs oh low level playoffs so the first thing i had to do though was okay you can't be 226 anymore because like let's just say i'm a Ferrari which i'm not but like i'm a Ferrari well i just put a trailer on that Ferrari so what do you think is going to happen to it yeah you know you're just hauling around all this mass and it's not going to let you move better so i've been in this journey over the past like six months of just losing as much like even good mass so that i can have a more efficient body and then man have i been hitting extensive plyometrics like you wouldn't believe this is what i struggle with so bad so part of i want to get back to playing basketball i missed the sport so much but it was an ego dragon yeah i know there's some things that i was able to slay it i was finally able to slay and once i slayed it i took a step back and i'm like all right like this is my new journey my new journey is jason statham ryan gosselin that's my new journey you know i can get there well i mean plyos and that kind of movement's a skill and your body forgets it if you don't you know this happened to me it was like a while ago i was joking about with these guys on the podcast i went to cross the street some cars were coming to had to run and as i'm running i'm like oh i forgot how to run ah you know and it's because i never do right it's a skill again you know back to training um i you know olympic lifting i find fascinating because it's got to be the most studied and scientifically applied programming and strength sports probably because it's been nations competing against nations for a long time did you ever look at the old soviet era studies that came out with it you know i mean a lot of them now everybody knows because iron curtain came down right any interesting things you read out of there that you've applied or is it frequency training yeah that's the biggest one it's the big one high frequency training and you know like speed strength like the aspect of speed shrink so to catch up the audience like you have absolute velocity which is sprinting and jumping strength or speed strength where you're lifting light weights really really fast strength speed where you're lifting moderate weights very very fast and then relative strength or max strength where you're just grinding through a squatter deadlift so i like living more towards speed strength and i think it's going to create a better body like even aesthetically you know for instance like i do lighter cleans but i put so much more force into the ground sure and snatches as well that i'm like oh my upper back feels different now oh i was just trying to grind up a snatch which you're like oh jeez like that's the last thing you should have like i just jumped over that whole value of speed strength but now like i have an upper back that can probably handle more strength speed weight but at similar velocities interesting looking forward do you see any uh do you have any predictions for any strength training trends that maybe isn't so widely utilized right now calisthenics really i think calisthenics is going to make a big splash so like like closed chain movements so like uh like you know like guys that do like the crazy like rings yeah do all the like the bar pull-ups and all these different means like the human flag yeah i think there's going to be a trend towards that now that's what i i'm fascinated with it personally now i could be biased because this is where i think the trend is going but i think accessibility is going to be the new thing and what i'm finding out you know look at covid covid shut down a bunch of gems gems are back open now you guys can speak more to this expertise than i can because i don't understand the general population as well but i mean you tell me did home fitness grow tremendously oh yeah did your guys programs go through the roof our home programs you know what i'm saying and i'm like accessibility is going to be the new thing and that's where it's like what do i have access to more often and if you're doing for instance micro dosing well you don't want to go to the commercial gym three times a day that's right that's a very good point i want more accessibility and i think calisthenics can cover a lot of that yeah so you don't think all the nba teams are going to adopt tonal is that what's wrong bro i okay actually i built a piece of equipment to fight tonal did you really oh man this is crazy actually have you um and you can go through my social i see you i've seen what you built saw that box yeah i think seriously it is i built it because of professional sports so the the craziest thing is my first half season i'm looking around and we travel to you know every city in america basically and we're in these arenas and i'm like we only have access to power blocks and a swiss ball these are the best athletes in the world and this is all they get access to and of course if we're micro dosing that's a big deal because what all can i do with power blocks you know i can do a lot but i mean come on guys like 82 games of power blocks like that's a lot and it's not going to be enough load either so i was like what am i going to do also on that note guys would miss you if they want to so for instance logistics is a big issue so in other words it's let's say we're in the midwest a very specific organization and they have their weight room on the other side of the arena or we're in the north and they have their weight room basically on the third story so you have to go through fans to get to it that's a big problem and athletes are going to go no i'm not doing that and i agree with them there's a safety issue there i wouldn't do that either so when i think about that i go well where can they not miss me and i was like oh on the court and i was like i want to set up the weight room on the baseline and they can't miss me there and so it started off with just a plio box like i was like okay we'll do some some ply metrics we'll do some altitude drops we'll do some concentric box jumps and then it started growing okay we'll have a med ball we'll do some other things okay well i need more load so i need a landmine like a landmine would be a good versatile use well okay i need that well i'm really getting into this france boss stuff so i want to ramp and so after all that time i was like let's build something and so i was able to partner with some people and we built this gym in a box oh interesting it's crazy man it's all these things fit inside the box and we roll that thing in and out put it on the plane like it goes up the conveyor belt comes off and it's crazy so we set this thing up on the baseline guys run through it before their shooting routine so about two hours to an hour before the game they go through their movement preparation we call it our tune-up sessions and some of them actually asked like it there's some stress like there's some high velocity stuff there's some high level plyometrics and then certain guys actually they experience a lot of load and then they go on to the court go through their shooting routine and so when you have 82 of those opportunities in a regular season that's a lot of opportunities to get better and so that's what i look at it as i'm like i'm trying to make a better athlete by the time we get to playoffs so we talk about the strength response adaptation aspect like get stronger as the season goes well i don't only want that i also want a better moving athlete going into the playoffs yeah and so that's where you have 82 opportunities to that and then post game if we're on the road we just set it up in the back and we're training oh so great yeah it's wild no before we got on air uh you were sharing with us just like i mean just how litigious the NBA is and like what you can and can't say and all stuff like that so uh i'm curious and you can say you can't say anything if you can't but you know i see something like and i can say this so i'm gonna say it first and then you can whatever you can't you know i see someone like LeBron James promote total that was what the jab came from right through that jab but that like it promotes that and i this motherfucker is not using that and if he is his coach his strength coach probably needs to get fired for that are those and so what does that put those coaches and then kind of be like can they not comment on that can they can you even comment on that are they like what's the deal i'll say this there's a lot of ways that i want to comment on it i will say i will say two things one uh Mike Mencius which is uh LeBron's guy he's an amazing human being he's probably one of my favorite people in the NBA the dudes like he's been with him ever since he was like he started out but as a like as a human i love him to death um and then second i plead to fifth that's enough for me right there you don't say it but i imagine like how how difficult that would have to be to navigate that because now you're messing with people's money right i mean i mean he's he's heavily invested in that it's not that different than you know these athletes being you know um sponsored by candy and fast food and stuff like that which i'm sure they have some here and there but you know at that level you're not gonna be eating i don't know maybe you are but i'm sure that's not true i mean you i mean they just remember the big old controversy with DK Metcalfe came out because he talked about what he ate like and that was such there was all this controversy about him eating so shitty and stuff like that you guys see that Marshall Lynch skittles yeah i mean yeah you know maybe it goes both ways and yeah it goes both ways i mean i feel like training is like the thing i i think it's more about training that's a little more to me more controversial and maybe that's just because i agree this is our space no no i agree with you yeah i'm just like come on dude because now what happens is like there's a ton of kids that think that if i buy this piece of equipment and i use this maybe i'll bro it's i mean all sport i mean like a bodybuilders you know i oh i'm massive because i take you know super oh yeah Chuck Norris yeah come on i chuck Norris really you know it's the same day what was that the total gym was it called the total gym you ever use one i have i have it's actually interesting it's a Pilates machine and incline it was brilliant number one he correct can you look at Doug how much did he make off that how much did Chuck Norris make off the total gym i mean not as much as the uh thymaster number one you know that's a number one selling piece of exercise equipment of all time i hate my for a spring hey i got like what am i doing exactly i got out of that hole i'm gonna build something business i know what about resistance bands i saw that out of favor totally in favor um you know strength athletes didn't use them and strength that power lifters using a bodybuilder starting to use them yeah what about with you guys you guys do you use resistance bands at all i love bands to create higher stressors okay i hate mini bands i think mini bands should be what are mini bands those are the smaller rubber bands or bands that you put around your knees and you do your thymaster exercises with and that is a plague in professional sports like you see you guys wrap that on like oh i feel my glue and you're like yeah but there's not enough load to do like that's not creating it i'm so glad you're doing the mini model workouts so bad i got to see that stuff and then of course you know athletes boat in both sectors college and professional sports you see like they like this is part of my routine and i'm like that sucks i don't know what else to say it's i mean you see i saw it explode during my years of competing in the bodybuilding world uh with bikini athletes it became like every girl in the gym was squatting with bands around her knees i thought this is so stupid they're better off putting bands on the bar and giving themselves resistance exactly i love that and that's how i would use them i use them in like powerlifting videos man i love reverse bands yes oh my god do i reverse band athletes to the cows come really because it gets them deep yes like sometimes they don't know they can go deep i kid you not there's guys that i've had in the past and i won't say rather is in college or professional sports but they can they put 315 on their back and they're like oh and i go quarter and i'm looking at this guy i'm like dude you're 250 like lean like what are you talking about like and then you give them a reverse band and they're going 450 yeah all the way to the bottom yep and i'm like okay so now you you've experienced this sometimes it's a neck up thing you experience it well let's take off that band all right now you're hitting 405 like word like that was the change i think it's like a neural like it's like almost like your body has to learn the movement or you have to get the confidence i think it's a safety it's it's your it's a governor yes a governor in your story because i look at it and that's why i love altitude drops and for those who don't know what an altitude drop is you're staying on top of a plyo box and you literally just drop down you stand on top of a box drop stick the landing mm-hmm now get higher now get higher now get higher that you get to a point where you get high and you're like i don't know about this but when we're growing up and we jumped over fences oh yeah right we jumped off the second story of our house or off the roof of our house like you can looking at those like uh parkour parkour athletes how they absorb force now in a roll out of it hey yeah that stuff's awesome but in a sports performance aspect if you land in a jumping movement you're just reverse engineering a jump now that is a lot of eccentric load wow what a great way to i didn't even think that you would so how far will you push that because i mean you think of a guy a jammer at who's flying through there i mean that dude looks sometimes like he's six feet off the ground or whatever and training him to be able to drop down from something that's pretty high do you how high would you take somebody i look at knee displacement and so a knee displacement is how much your knee bends okay so and then here's where you get into the weeds how the the structure of the athlete so you look at the guys that look like they barely bend their knees but they fly through the air they look like they're just so stiff but they're off the ground those guys create force differently than say like interesting like the bodybuilder like dude's jack but does the back flip yeah okay he juji uh juji mufu yeah he does that's a different strategy his strategy is muscularly driven he's not stiff when he does it so what he does is he uses a large full range of motion deep squat into that back flip high level athletes do that but with a quarter of an inch bend in their knees and that's the difference because it takes a longer time to create that same amount of force that's what you know tenderness athletes you watch knee displacement so if they bend their knees a lot when they land you're like okay that's a good thing like we want them to be able to do that that's building strength for them since we're going to the weeds um does that mean that shorter muscle belly so in bodybuilding you want long muscle bellies short tendon short tendons long muscle bellies does that mean in sports short muscle bellies is more beneficial i think so i mean that's what i've seen yeah i mean you've seen it before like we're long Achilles small little calves up top boing like those guys are freaks so i just look at it like that okay when now now with back to the resistance bands or or the you know one thing i noticed with those is i can add a lot of load with those does not hammer my body if i use an equal amount of load with just weights yeah do you think there's a different it just feels that way to me i mean i can even use change which is progressive resistance or yeah as i'm lifting the weight but chains still hammer my body more than bands bands if like continuous and i'm not sure i think it's mechanical tension okay right so like chains it's still load on the bar it just deloads with bands it's so much of an exponential decrease in mechanical tension at the bottom like if you got heavy bands up there yeah i mean sometimes it's like up to 200 pounds at the bottom that's off so at the end of the day when it comes to like how you feel you got to look at it's got to be mechanical load it has to be i know adam you you were doing them the other day on the incline yeah had them set up it just feels so different and i think that's exactly why that's why it's different than change is it's it's helping out a lot more when you're all the way at that bottom like that so man does it feel great yeah no it's interesting as much as an ego lift it is i look at it like this but you still experience full range of motion yes and then when do you actually need to feel that kind of strength out of the bottom now is there a health perspective of doing a full range of motion squad with outbands absolutely but when we're talking both ends of the spectrum on health and performance well why do you think powerlifters use it to begin with to overload the top well i also think to your point about the the governors and that they're being from the neck up like there's i remember and it was you know obviously these guys weren't smart enough to probably really know they were just trained it is i lifted with these old this is one of my early 20s and i couldn't even squat uh 225 or bench press 225 at this time real young skinny kid and they would get me under the squat bar with 315 but they just wanted they would say that i want your your body's needs to feel like it yeah unrack it just feel your body needs to feel that weight needs to feel that way and i'm like this is crazy it's like 100 pounds more than i could even do why are we doing this they're right though they were and i remember i totally remember that then i'd go through something like 275 which seems so big for me then i could do it you know same thing with the bench press we do the same thing so there has to be something about that from the head up of just getting comfortable withholding that much weight and you know having the bands to kind of assist in that in that situation i think is is massive right now take that to jumping and that's the point of the altitude drop when you get up high enough you go i don't know if i can land this and that's the moment of okay this is where you need to be and then let's add stiffness to that so let's just say you know let's throw some numbers at it like a 24 inch box all right 24 inch box is like i don't know for whoever is trying this experiment and then they do it and they're like okay i did it okay now let's do it with purpose you're not just surviving it okay let's do it but really absorb like compress as much as you want have a big knee displacement so in other words squat deep when you land it do you have a cue i have a cue for that yeah it's quite feet quite feet quiet feet i like that yeah i like that a lot okay so let's do that yeah i know that's why i use it for sprinting a lot so that's yeah i'm like i i try when i used to tell clients i like try and make no noise i like can you land and make no noise i like just registers for them you know but when they but that is so muscarily driven so like i mean i'm telling you do high velocity eccentrics you are just as sore as if you do like crazy oh yeah i mean bodybuilding so when you're working through that full range i'm just working at at a different velocity than i am with like a traditional lift now the aspect of getting more athletic okay now i want you to be on that 24 inch box same deal now do it with barely bending your knees and then that's athleticism the ones that can stick and stick like stiff now stiffness is health and performance all in one because the stiffness is what's training the tendons like i'm training for tendon and ligament strength and development but that's on the health side but on the performance side that that reactivity that small knee displacement is what's going to allow me to create more force faster everyone can create a lot of force in professional sports who can create it the fastest that's really what matters that's what wins yeah and one thing that i was thinking as you were talking about moving from higher to higher box and say oh can i do that and then be like oh i did that let me go to a higher one there's i think a lot of people forget this there's feedback that goes to your cns that's also you being afraid yes or you feeling confident i mean there's stories of athletes hitting prs because they've misloaded the bar so they thought oh this is my this is almost my max yes that's a true i think they're actually in the olympics that happened where somebody actually hit a world record because and they thought the bar was loaded lighter than it actually was so there's that too that's the best part about like olympic lift or like uh colored bumpers hey don't worry about what it is and that's what i love about kilos yeah don't worry about what you're trying to know it's red blue green no one cares it's red blue green well how much is that red blue green like just just do it i'll take care of the we'll calculate it later and all of a sudden they smoke it and you're like red blue green yeah so that to your point yeah now apply that with sprinting so how would you do that over speed training so that means make them run faster than what they actually can how how the hell do you do that great question tie them to a car i mean essentially yes yes but there's a device that allows you to do that there's two companies one's called 1080 sprint and the other one's called dynaspere but essentially what it is it's it's like tonal believe it or not it's electromagnetic resistance but think of it as like a fishing rod so like a spool so it pulls you it pulls oh that's hilarious device now you traditionally you're using it to go away from the device it's like a speed rocket right so like you're running away from it or like you're running with a sled behind you you're running with chains parachute or whatever right so resistant sprinting well with this particular device now you can run towards it and it makes you run faster so and then you learn that you learn you self organize so now that you're self organizing at faster velocities you now people can run how many athletes have eaten people can run some not many really not many because what you do is you just rip the cord like if you if you're really like that scared or you change your strategy and you actually do what's the name of this i want to dug the dug to pull it up i want to see a visual exam yeah what's it called the there's dynaspere i like how you said pull by your car you were almost on point i was like this motherfucker's not gonna tell me right now he pulls out we're not gonna change we're not gonna do this outside we gotta pull it with their car so lambo yeah we gotta make this look awesome uh but there's dynaspere uh but i think 1080 sprint they actually have more videos that's so interesting i didn't even know what tool existed like this really really cool no so this makes perfect sense of course it makes sense but it sounds crazy from running in pools to i was working with the san jose city like a track team and they had like i mean everything was in that direction that vein of like having a parachute behind yeah resist resist never assisting you to go but what about this direction ain't that reverse bands yes the same holy shit you know it's funny is that oh so it's a oh it's wave yeah it's pulling so so so this makes sense and i feel like this is the last frontier in training where bro this is brilliant it's it's about it's it's less about can i create more force and more strength which we've known and we know a lot about that already but this is more about can i teach the body to organize itself in a better more efficient way than it already is and the way you do it is you assist and you put it in that position so it's forced to we do it in weightlifting why don't we do it so fast this makes i can't believe i didn't even know this existed absolute but that's but that's what we do with altitude drops it's the same idea it's higher than what you could ever land boy how long has this been around oh uh good question i have no idea i mean how long have you known about it then so i've known about it for five years but i've only been in in the position where i can afford it this past two years so that's that there's a difference it's it's pretty expensive wow what well i mean how cool well i mean can you separate the psychology from the physiology i don't think so it's the same you can't the same it's all the same that's another aspect that's like we like especially me like when you're trying to be this guy yeah so long all that compression compression compression well that goes into your psychology too and the thing that i've realized the most is when i got away from that i'm like be more elastic reactive be smooth rhythmic like be able to dance and be able to move like all of a sudden like fast and loose i'm like so much more relaxed like i don't have all this built up tension like i don't i walk smoother i i don't get up in grunt like that's the thing that i notice when i sit down i'm getting older i thought it was old but that is tension and it's like how do you create tension i spend all my time creating tension like this how do you think that you see is we're all going to be all healthy mind pump is now mind lean no you know it's funny when you said make you run faster i thought of uh do you remember the movie kickboxer with john cloud vandam where the the trainer it straps a piece of steak to his leg he's like what's that for make you run faster this will make run faster this how i have you so i have to i want to ask more mba questions because i'm such a huge mba fan so um when you're watching and i love hearing from your perspective because you have a trainer mind like ours and i think that when i look at athletes i uh there's a there's a certain thing that i like even more like take their personality even maybe the how good of a shooter or whatever they are like just i see when i see something crazy athlete for example i dropped ja marant like i just when i watch that kid play i'm like an specimen yeah just in all of this what he what he physically can do on the court how one how often does that happen to you where you're at is every game or do you does your draw drop uh does it always happen when you see a certain player like tell me like that your experience of seeing that and like maybe even some names of people that like just blow your mind when you see him play i'll say this the i always get that every game but i get it in different ways sometimes it's through raw athleticism and you're just like oh my god like how did has the body physical physically capable of doing that and then when you go to the skill side and you just see like oh my god people don't even understand how hard that floater was like when you because when you're there and you see like how the play develops like fly into the side on like i mean like you know the play calling like everyone knows what's about to happen and they still can't stop it when you watch stuff like that or when you're reading eyes that's the greatest part about being so close when you see like lookoffs and you see like they know the play they know these guys are exchanging and they don't even have to watch and all of a sudden that ball goes in that direction hits them right in the chest and you're just like oh my god like i can't even make that like chest pass like directly looking at you out of eye and i can't even be that precise and they're doing it over screens like over their left shoulder opposite hand or non-dominant hand you're just like oh my goodness so that's the thing that it's like it's from a physical perspective absolutely but the skills and now there's certain guys that you see more of that from like when you're like when you've played against certain teams or guys on your team they're like man he's i mean you got chris paul i mean one of the most beautiful passers to ever play the game like he's special yeah i look at like this the technical execution is probably the the most fascinating thing you'll ever witness ever especially from him yeah this the technical execution is just fascinating people that really blow me away i would have to say man would be a really good example and any plays that you saw this year so i i saved because i don't i don't want to lose obviously it'll be on freaking replays forever but i think that chase down block that jaw marant did this year where he grabbed the ball at the top of the square at the top of the square is the most core and they i watched it someone put together a compilation of like all the blocks where someone's done that lebron's done that i think once or twice the world's really i i think his tops everybody yeah the speed at which he came back to get him at his size to be able to at the height that he got i mean the coordination you need to land that everything when you watch it it's i mean i don't know i can't put in the words like that's the greatest part about being in it you get to see that night in and night out just in different manifestations like that one's just through raw physical athletics and that's so cool to watch i mean guys that i look at and i go jesus there's like kawai liner when you see him you're like good god that's a man it's just some my first year in the league it was just looking at people like just physical domination like you just look at them and you're like oh my god like i don't even know what like kind of human that is like they're not human actually they're just a different version like a more advanced version of humanity um i think kawai is one of them i mean that's got to be to that point because he's a big dude right it's well they're all big yeah i that's i remember my being a kid watching basketball both on tv and then never being able to sit like really low to getting older and more successful in my life and actually getting down when you get down there and you actually get a chance to see like yeah like the smallest guys make me look like a little all for sure and then to see what they're physically capable do is just like mind blowing to see them walk around him just whatever he does yeah just anything him durand does is very special right right i have an interesting question uh so they just now allowed in the college level to be able to get like sponsorships and all that and like i just thought that was so disruptive and obviously you're not in in that setting anymore but like i just want to hear your opinion on it and also like how you'd have thought you'd been able to like manage that in terms of like the players and athletes i don't think i would have been able to manage it like i'm i'm i'm glad i'm removed from the early stages of it if i ever revisit it i hope it's like a little bit more organized because right now it's the wow wow like it's unbelievable and the money is ridiculous and the accountability is low like that's the part that it's like it's a little iffy you know like you can get all that money at one time like maybe like unless they do like payment plans or however they do it like you can do like here's $500,000 done and then you know what my ankles hurt there could be like you know they just like you know out of ah ah you know after this season i'm going to go to west virginia you're like what what what just happened so like i don't think there's enough policing in this one because they just don't it's not organized yet it's just a wow wow west i'm glad i'm not involved do you speculate uh that they're gonna use this as a way to still pay college athletes without like old ways of doing it i mean the old ways are just now now legal right this is all it is that's what i mean so it's like basically so do you think you just open that door to basically just like you got in trouble for like you don't think because what's it what's the stop me like let's say i was a uh a duke alumni right i'm loaded and i'm part of the inner circle of you know handing cash bags to players for decades already i'm an old dude i didn't get a picture of you doing it what he looks like now this is open the door so what's to stop me from starting my you know own uh toothbrush line and i'm at my own brand i have an llc i started up and really the only reason why i have it is so i can sponsor right this show company but for real like i think that's what you can do and i think that's what's been done of course i just don't man because i mean if if nikey can do it now if any of what like why can't i that's where i think you're going to find like a lot of independent people come up yeah and start their stuff and it's going to be on you know the backs of of of of talent you know just like in any other industry it's just it's just interesting how it's going to manifest i just wonder especially in the in the college like how the the divisions are now happening like teams are leaving conferences and it's now going to the highest bidder so now i wonder what this shakeup's going to look like it's basically professional sports or it's more like semi-league yeah for like the big 12s now humongous the big 10 and now the pack 12 is now dwindling down so i'm like is pack 12 now i'm going to be like a mid major and it's all about the tv deals and there's so much money into it it's going to get really really interesting well it's you know uh sal and i listen to a podcast called the all-in podcast these these four billionaire dudes and one of the things they're talking about is they believe in the i think i don't think he said the next 20 years did he say like no big brands are going to exist anymore no yeah it's just 20 years yeah it's the democratization of media he says if you want to sell something in the next 20 30 years you have to produce content yeah well an example of influencers like kim kardasheen launching lines a billionaire and for sure that one died mr beast this is a burger shop oh right 10 or 20 000 people showed up and it's opening i mean that's huge i mean it's what we do right yeah like you know it's the same deal it's just you know we're not decentralized well yeah no it's but it's really going to disrupt the space as far as like brands and advertising because i mean imagine if you're and i made i use the stupid analogy of a toothbrush but if uh if i had that kind of pool and that kind of capital what's to stop me from going and getting 40 of the biggest name college kids that are coming up and giving them some of the biggest contracts i could literally take a no-name toothbrush brand and turn it into a like yeah household name out of nowhere like that i mean if you got the capital i mean at the end of the day do you have liquor cash right if you got the capital do it you know it's all about what you want to get out there and that's where sports has always been a leverage point for anything totally you know so now it's just college you can do it you know that's it's now i don't know how you protect brands now like for instance like let's look at an example like an iv league school how do you protect like a like a harvard you know and then all of a sudden like one of your athletes isn't only fans subscribe like you know like i don't know like how does that work they're gonna have to iron it out i agree with you i think it's gonna it will figure it out in the next 10 years or so 10 15 years i think it's going to be it's going to be super wild well good deal man you're a great guest always a lot of fun you know picking your brain yeah one of the things i like most about you is you're you're you're really good at the the science of uh of just adaptation and strength training in particular and you and you explain it very well so really appreciate having you on the show and absolutely learning from you well i really i really think of uh you guys is like our the three horsemen in sports you're like our guru you i think you uh smarzo and uh fabrics are i think three of the best in my opinion uh in the space that are putting out information related to sports training and i think that it's been uh behind for a long time and and i remember coming across all your guys's content i know just introduced us to you first but and then ironically you guys were all friends yeah so that's what's kind of funny it's like we found you guys individually and then find out everybody's all connected of course max loki interned for me for like two weeks just remember good stuff brother good stuff thanks for coming on hey thank you gentlemen appreciate y'all this one's really important and that is to phase your training if somebody trains for a full year doing a bench press and they're always aiming for five reps if you compared that person to a person who did bench press where they did three or four weeks of five reps but then they did three or four weeks of 12 reps and then three or four weeks of let's say 15 to 20 reps and then they'll throw in some supersets at the end of that year you're gonna see more consistent progress from the person who's moving in and out and less injury