Adarq.org

I am trying to understand what does what for jumping. So I'm putting out my understanding of what's going on. Feel free to correct me. (And thanks for taking the time to read this).

We're dealing with three things here:

1a) How much force is generated
1b) How quickly that generated force can be applied

2) How efficiently that force is transmitted to the ground

1a) is improved by barbells and plain getting stronger in the squat and deadlift for the lower body and bench press for the upper body.

1b) is improved with accommodating resistance, particularly bands, that ingrain acceleration in the lift, or just by lifting more explosively.

2) is increased by things that improve connective tissue quality, things that make the tendons less "squishy" or more resistant to leaking power by deformation. Is this the quality we measure when we talk about how reactive an athlete is?

People who excel at unilateral running jumps but who cannot bilateral standing jump very powerfully: these people are very reactive, i.e. they have "good" tendons/connective tissue that absorbs and transmits force well. But they usually don't have the muscle mass to generate the force quickly in the first place. So they benefit from taking running steps in order to get the energy that their connective tissue then very efficiently stores and transmits back and forth.

Power jumpers, on the other hand, can generate the necessary force themselves without having to run to do it. They have the muscle to do it and ideally have the ability to generate that force quickly as well. BUT if their tendons are "low quality", a lot of that force will be lost. A power jumper benefits when their tendons conduct energy well like a taut string versus a slack one. Right? A lot of power could be generated by large muscles, but then lost by slack connective tissue.

So someone who has increased their squat (and to a lesser degree deadlift) strength a lot may not see as much increase in jump height as you'd initially think because squatting alone doesn't train tendons to be more efficient conductors. That's a large part of what various reactive and shock drills do...?

A high jump requires a good amount of energy on the descent and then not losing that energy on the turnaround, generating more energy during the ascent, and losing as little of that accumulated energy as possible in the deformation of connective tissue before the bones in the feet have a chance to transmit it to the ground.

Pure ability to generate force quickly is demonstrated by the paused jump or a jump from sitting. From what I understand, the rate at which force can be developed has low trainability, somewhere around 5%. Increasing the amount of force you can apply in a small unit of time is much more trainable than trying to apply the same force in a smaller window of time. In short, you're better off getting your squat from 155 to 455 than you are trying to apply 45 lbs of force in 0.4 second instead of 0.6.

So a SVJ benefits more from squat strength increasing. Same with Bilateral RVJ, though reactivity training would help this jump get a bit farther away from the base SVJ than it would naturally be.

Reactivity training would also benefit the countermovement SVJ, however, because that countermovement helps only as much as the connective tissue can efficiently store and transmit the energy provided by the countermovement.

So a 3xBW Olympic style squatter may be able to jump fairly high from sheer strength, but his countermovement jump may not be much better than his paused/from seated jump. Improving reactive strength would benefit both, but maybe for slightly different reasons? The paused VJ because the lower leg becomes better conductors; the CMJ (and running bilateral VJ) because the entire lower body connective structure is more efficient at transmission.

Again, thanks for reading all this. Your corrections will help me design my own training better.

ditch the deadlift. full squat your way to >2BW and good things happen. goodluck  

oh. by >2BW, i mean rep 2BW plenty of times. a 1RM 2BW is not gonna cut it IMO.

This is a good point. Neither will squatting 2xBW in knee wraps! Something I've discovered recently. I like to train with wraps because they keep my knees from being useless on the off days, especially on high frequency/volume like Smolov. But I also warm up without the wraps all the way to one heavy single before wrapping up and adding a little more weight. It's the FIRST number, the weight I get without wraps, that I have to remember is my 1RM for vertical testing considerations.

I found Colin Chung's calculator on HFS to be accurate once I trained with bands. If you play with a few numbers, you find that for every multiple of bodyweight you can full squat (no belts or wraps), you can jump ~16.7 inches. So:

Squat = 1.0xBW :: 16.7 inches
Squat = 1.5xBW :: 25.1 inches
Squat = 2.0xBW :: 33.5 inches
Squat = 2.5xBW :: 41.9 inches
Squat = 3.0xBW :: 50.3 inches

My squat at 180 totally raw was 315 when I trained my vertical up to 28 inches last month. SVJ calculator says that I was within 5% of my predicted jump height of 29.3 inches. I took on this Smolov cycle precisely to get my squat up and raise the ceiling of my predicted jump.

If I can get my totally naked squat up to 365 @ 185 (and my knee wraps squat to 400?), I should expect to jump as much as 34 inches with some practice, though 33 would probably be more realistic. It will be very interesting to see the result. This would be an example of squat strength increases alone clearly and directly improving vertical.


Edit: What I really want to find out is if I have some untapped inches that will be uncovered by plyos...or if I'm at the top of my ability at this strength level and will find more inches awaiting me after I add an honest 40-50 lbs to my squat.

If your knee wraps help you with the squatting, do they help you with the jumping as well?

Knee wraps help in squatting because they cushion the blow at the bottom of the squat, a place jumping doesn't take me. Jumping hurts the knees not from the partial range of motion, but from the impact of the landing when the force travels through my tibia up to the joint.

One other thing that is ultra-important IMO: You have to consider the impact of fatigue.  IMO for the jump trainee fatigue and fatigue management should be looked upon as qualities just as important as your strength, power, reactivity etc.  Fatigue can mask fitness and you have to be aware of that and know how fatigue impacts you and know how to manipulate it.

A lot of times athletes think they need to do this or that when all they really need to do is manage fatigue better.

Your comments on the other thread and your fascination with Smolof are prime examples of this and it's good you're aware of it. You consistently get your vert higher AFTER doing smolof but during the cycle itself your jumps go down.

When you lift heavy weights with any sort of volume you strongly activate both your nervous and muscular systems. You also create a lot of residual fatiuge in the muscles themselves as the activity is prone to create tissue microtrauma. The junctions between your nervous and muscular system become fatigued so a given amount of charge from your nervous system fails to activate the muscular system to the same degree. Where it's most readily apparent is in high speed activities. When your nervous system is fatigued the symptoms will become apparent in faster activities before they become apparent in slower activities. So your lifts may continue going up even though your jumps go down.  So, how do you fix this? There's really only one thing you can do and that's cut down (not necessarily remove completely) the volume of heavy lifting and let your nervous system and muscles freshen up. It doesn't take long - a few days to a few weeks at most. But once you remove the fatigue then you can fully display your fitness (explosiveness).  The same thing occurs in athletes that do a lot of conditioning or cardio work.  Those activities create a chronic strain on the neuromuscular system that will negatively impact the display of high speed explosiveness.

Tolerance to lifting induced fatigue tends to be variable in my experience.  A guy like Raptor is impacted BIG TIME by heavy or high volume squatting. He doesn't jump well with any sorta squat volume.  On the other hand a guy like Adarq IIRC has repeatedly hit many of his best jumps right during the middle of a concentrated strength block. 

Pure explosive training (plyos, explosive lifts) tend not to be all that fatiguing so you can focus on those and allow your nervous system to freshen up.  You can usually simply just cut back on the high fatigue activities but you can go more extreme then that and pull it all out.  I believe when you made your gains with the band jumps you pulled out all squats didn't you?  You probably wouldn't want to eliminate ALL strength work for long, but one simple way to tell if fatigue is masking your jump related fitness is to temporarily pull out all strength and conditioning work for 7-10 days or so.  That's not enough time to lose much in the way of what you gain from those activities but you can then assess your situation and gradually put it back in.

You should also design your cycles with this in mind. Don't expect to hit jump PRs in the middle of a smolof cycle.  Smolof comes close to killing most people in my experience - if you can jump at all in the middle of it you're way ahead of the fatigue management curve.  

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..?

Would you say anti-stress or "psycho" meds (like SSRIs) would help or negate my gains?

Hm, makes sense. Basically as the serotonin is let a bit more in between the neurons to actually help in creating synapses, I think the "normal" way of the nervous system is easily obtained/maintained (basically the main idea with SSRIs).

I'm currently taking Trittico, Neurotop (carbamazepine, this is usually prescribed for epilepsy but I don't have such a thing so WTF?) and a sleep helper (Imovane).