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Right, blame it on ME you naughty boy!

Eat paleo baby!

By the way - I tried now to do a bodyweight RDL vs a bodyweight straight leg deadlift, and I could keep much more tension in my glutes during the straight leg deadlift.

Any idea what this means? Apparently when I flex the knees a ton of glute tension dissapears. So weirdly enough, when I take tension of the hamstrings I also take tension of the glutes... wtf... this occurs even if the knees don't go forward so it's a hip bend only, the only way I can maintain a HUGE amount of tension in the glutes is keeping the knees completely straight.

By the way - I tried now to do a bodyweight RDL vs a bodyweight straight leg deadlift, and I could keep much more tension in my glutes during the straight leg deadlift.

Yeah I completely agree.

You know, for a lot of time (years) I thought the knee collapse occurs because of weak quads. I mean they get loaded eccentrically since they PREVENT the knee to flex (and they fire to keep it extended), so they must be the culprit of the knee collapse right?

Well, it turns out they are caught in the plant in their strongest, completely contracted concentrically (basically shortened) position whereas the hamstrings, because you have the leg out in front of you (all us people going for dunks get our jump leg so far in front in order to gain some more leverage, especially us shorter people) - you are bent at the waist quite a bit so the hamstrings receive all that shock while they are STRETCHED so they actually are very overloaded, much more so than the quads. And the hamstrings have the tendency to be weaker than the quads as well so you get a double-whammy there.

It took me quite a while to accept/understand this, I was thinking "what business do the hamstrings have at all in keeping the leg straight?" and biomechanically, they have none. But the way they function is what causes the knee to faulter and the quad overload to occur in the first place.

Sorry to hijacking vag's thread by the way but I find this fascinating, and could possibly help other people too.

But yeah I totally agree with you, take RDLs, straight leg deadlifts, GHRs, whatever, get them heavy using the right movement and you shouldn't really have reasons to complain about weak hamstrings I guess.

It's gotta be the calves! (and the shoes, to keep onto the commercial line)

I'm telling you, whenever I use basketball shoes, even Kobes which aren't really that heavy or bad quality, I feel like my feet are into cement. I can't move around well, my GCT in moving around, not to mention jumping, is soooooo long it's ridiculous, yet when I take running shoes on, which are light and have a foam sole, all these problems seem to go away. I feel like despite me increasing in bodyweight over the years - I haven't increased in calf strength pretty much at all - I bet I'm at around the same ratio of calf strength to bodyweight or so like I was when I was 40 lbs lighter...

Except those 40 lbs x 10 times = 400 lbs more in a high speed plant so... after "some" point it becomes such a great overload for the calves when you get heavier, and I feel like I'm at that point right now.

When I do single leg bounds I have more of a tendency to collapse at the knee/hamstring, and remember I can't do alternate leg bounds due to my right knee so I'm limited at LLLL ... that's why I'd try backward depth drops...

Another thing that passed through my mind is walking backwards and downwards on a hill slope. It would probably be even better for the calves, that continuous tension in them... sure, dangerous and kinda silly, but still. I think it's worth the try and see how does it feel like. I'm not sure I've ever seen anybody do it yet.

What are your experiences with backward depth drops for calf development?

I'm asking this because I observed something very interesting when I was doing step-ups: I wasn't too tired anywhere because of them but the one place I had HUGE soreness was the calves. Basically every time I put my leg back down from the step-up box I was doing an eccentric calf raise. I didn't feel it at the time but after I finished my sets my calves were fried. Never experienced any kind of calf soreness like the one that occured after those step-ups.

So I was thinking - shouldn't doing backwards stiff leg depth drops help quite a bit on calf training? The TUT would be pretty short with the possible downside of too many landings/landing stress, but as far as the amount of "weight" in that eccentric part - you can't replicate that in the weight room - too much for the back, at least for mine's. Plus you never really do backwards stuff often so they should take that as an "unusual" stress and adapt better to it than to regular calf raises etc.

Any opinions?