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I'm seeing two different stories here...

a) Steroids make gains easy and just injecting them will make athletes better without any hard work on the part of the athlete. Just inject them and strength gains will come no matter what you do and help your athletic endeavors...

b) Steroids don't help if you don't include proper strength training in the mix, though it will enhance gains if training is done correctly...

I'm not being sarcastic here. I just want to know which it is.

Well you just demonstrated why we all, as athletes or aspiring athletes, should be allowed to take them. We could focus more on the sport itself and get better at it and not waste time doing stupid repetitions with a barbell. That should be limited to people in that sport - powerlifting, Olympic lifting and so on.

The barbell should be the actual display of sport prowess (with the aid of roids) and not the means to get to that display.

Simply because it's much more inefficient.

If we want to be so "moral" (although I have no idea how that word applies here) we should throw our computers out the window since they are efficient and start working with stone and wood. Do all mathematical calculations on paper. Forget robots, do all work manually. Don't grow food by any means, walk around the planet in search of the proper foods etc etc etc. Endless examples.

It's just a matter of efficiency. Steroids are superior to pretty much anything => the logical way is to use them.

This a really good point. I was reading through all of Kelly's articles again and I was struck by the point about how strength training can impact athletic movement in a bad way. It's a line you have to walk carefully, something I learned the hard way. I'm not a professional athlete or close to it, but I lost a lot of fluidity and "pop" in just a couple of years of making powerlifting my chosen recreational sport. It's also why I get so annoyed at the Rippetards who tell newbs that just squatting will be enough to maintain and enhance balance and agility while the exact opposite is true.

In any case, I can't imagine why we think it makes sense to force athletes to improve baseline strength in the more inefficient way that could negatively impact sports training. Health risks? Ha! These guys sign on knowing that they're at risk for permanent brain and spinal damage and bad knees. Injecting steroids really would be the least of their health worries. This isn't a popular opinion, but there's a lot of mass hysteria that passes for good public policy. Examples: It's okay to own people of African descent and force them to work for below market wages; the violent black market that comes from prohibiting substances that people want to ingest is worth saving a small percentage of the population from wasting away from abusing those substances.

Kelly Baggett:

Manufactured Strength Vs Natural Strength

Before I get into it I'd like to point out that no supplemental training method is perfect and has a perfect transfer to sport. The practice of adding strength and size thru weight training in an attempt to apply the benefits of that strength and size to a sport is effective but it won't ever be perfect. You're basically manufacturing something that wasn't there to begin with - You're allowing your body to adapt to one stimulus and then applying those adaptations to another area. It really is cheating in a way. The only thing that isn't cheating would be actually playing the sport and letting your body adapt naturally. However, we know there are limits to that. But this is one reason why people that have "natural" strength, size, and power will generally have a "functional" strength advantage over those who have to manufacture it. Reggie White, Lawrence Taylor, and Mike Tyson rarely if ever lifted a weight. Compare them to muscled up guys like Frank Bruno, Tony Mandarich, and Vernon Gholston. Manufacturing size and strength isn't perfect regardless of how you acquire it, but it beats the alternative and can allow you to compete at a level you wouldn't have.

I'm not the first to bring this up, but I still don't see much distinction between barbell use and steroid use.

I know that steroids are currently considered cheating and that they're illegal, but neither makes much sense. Steroids help you get stronger, but so do barbells. Steroid use can result in long-term health complications, but again so can barbells as can sports in general, especially contact sports like boxing and American football.

Again, I know that steroids are against the rules. I just don't think it makes any sort of sense. It's like drug prohibition in general. Alcohol is more destructive than just about any other drug that you go to prison for possessing, yet it's perfectly legal; alcohol destroys health, induces aggression, impairs judgment (and leads to horrible life-wrecking outcomes), yet we can buy it and consume as much of it as we want...but can't smoke weed or snort cocaine because they're "bad" for us...

I digress, but I hope the digression underscores the point.

In my own case, I've more than doubled my strength levels from where they were in my early twenties, at least by a couple of measures. I'm far more athletic than I was 15 years ago when I was in my "prime" because of barbell use, particularly the almighty barbell back squat. I've gone from 130 lbs to 180 lbs by taking my unequipped full squat from ~150 to ~350. I've sort of wrecked my knees in the pursuit of squat strength, but I can still do every physical activity better than my 18-20-year-old self could; my knees just hurt a lot more when I do it.

There are those who would argue that I used my "natural" or inherent chemistry in building up my strength. But the fact is I used the assistance of a very unnatural artifact of industrial civilization--the rotating collar barbell--to alter the structure and functioning of my body. I built strength that did not come naturally by "unnatural" means. In the past only natural athletes, those who were big, strong and fast just because that's how they were, had a chance of competing at any meaningful level. Barbell training changed that and gave the naturally small, weak and slow a way to make themselves bigger, stronger and faster than they would have been otherwise, even with diligent participation in their sport. Serious athletes nowadays go outside their sport to acquire strength with barbells (and with steroids) and then apply that new strength in their sport. 

I would not have become so much bigger, stronger and faster just by running, swinging from trees and lifting rocks. It took very detailed programming of the use of man-made objects to get me where I am. The man-made objects in my case were the barbell, weight plates and a squat rack. Would it have really been so bad if I added chemical supplementation to that to take me even further?

Our culture is one steeped in myths about the wickedness of drugs (except alcohol, at least these days). It's not unlike the American South where there are cultural fears that black men are ticking white-women-rape bombs. Steroids are like the lurking Negroes of the world of S&C lily white womanhood in the Old South. Those who would protect the virtue of the S&C world gotta string up them damn steroids every chance they get.

Also, there's this pride in building strength "naturally" that makes me chuckle. I'm a guy who cheered when he got his first 135-lb back squat because that was a hug accomplishment to me when I was a 120-lb adult. I built my strength "naturally" up to a 365-lb squat recently (using loose knee wraps; I'm getting old). But how "natural" was that strength really? "Natural" strength would be the 200-lb 15-year-old who squats 315 deep for a few reps the first time he walks into a gym (I believe Andy Bolton worked up to 405 his first time under the bar).

I'm not writing this to convince anyone. My mind's made up and I'm sure yours is too. I just know that while I acknowledge that steroid-use is cheating under almost all current rules (except untested powerlifting feds), I think that policy is the outcome of hysteria and something like superstition.

Thanks for reading.

Good lookin' out yo.

Nice gains Gary. Andrew is right that depth jumps and depth landings do provide a more intense eccentric stimulus than the power jumper and learning to land like a cat will help you in more ways than one. I am also very happy to hear you are getting some positive results from the LLPJ. I sometimes feel like a bit if an idiot banging on about it but I have lots of feedback like yours from people who have used it and my own experiences echo your sentiments. It isn't a magic bullet but as a fellow member of the beat up knees club being able to get a little overspeed eccentric without the extra impact of depth jumps is a nice option.

One other thing you can try is using a lower box for your depth jumps with a single tube of PJ resistance. It is a reasonable compromise. Also good stuff on dunking the soccer ball. It is the first step to dunking on a full size ring and being able to dunk something, anything, is a better motivator than just running up and touching the rim.

Keep up the hard work. You have found a great site here and you wont get any bullshit training advice from the collective intelligence of guys who post.

I meant to thank you for plugging the PPJ so hard. Yeah, I know what you mean about feeling like a tool for going on about it, but it's worth it. I've gone on a couple other sites and sang its praises.

What I wonder is if it can all be so simple as concentrated squat loading followed by band jumping (the PPJ makes it easy, but plain ol' jumpstretch bands could be used as well).

I got a medium band when I bought the set that included the two light ones. I made all my gains on those. I bought three heavy bands for future improvements. May turn out to have been overkill.

And yes, this site is a great resource. A little slow on the posting activity, but that's okay.

Excellent stuff. The fatigue management info was especially helpful, Kelly, but so were the answers about "tendonicity" with power jumpers. We'd touched on this in conversation already.

I was actually a weird sort of happy that I'd ONLY lost ~2 of vertical jump height in the middle of this Smolov cycle. I hope I find those two inches and a couple more during the switch after I get a new high bar squat PR.

Could sensitivity to fatigue be trained? I think I built up an insensitivity to it by doing all those high volume/frequency bouts. People with a couple Smolov cycles under their belt may have neuromuscular systems that are better able to ward off the effects of fatigue on performance. Maybe Raptor wouldn't find high volume squatting bothers his jumps quite as much if he does a couple Smolov cycles in the next couple of years..?

I've been alternating unilateral cone hops with unilateral tuck jumps to combine unilateral work with some reactive work in my warm ups. I also do bilateral tuck jumps every session.

I find that the day of triples makes me increasingly pumped as I go through the sets. I think that would be a good day to add some standing vertical jumps. Last time by the fifth set I felt like I could jump through the roof. I usually do unilateral leg curls after the squats, but the triples day comes right after the last squat day with no break. May be good to jump instead of doing leg curls again.