High Performance Physiology

Chris and Rob describe exactly how to combine bodybuilding with athletic preparation training for people who want to pursue multiple goals at the same time. They give three separate options depending on whether the two goals have equal weighting or whether one goal is currently more important.

Following directly on from last week's podcast episode on potentiation, Chris and Rob talk about contrast training from a physiological perspective. They explain why in most cases, a more traditional approach to athletic strength training workouts (starting with high-velocity exercises, moving on to heavy strength training exercises, and finishing with plyometrics) is much better than doing contrast training methods that mix the various types of training up into complexes.

Following on from the previous episode about muscle strain injuries, Chris and Rob talk about the physiology of tendon damage and how it likely leads to both tendinopathy and tendon ruptures. Afterwards, they describe how isometric training is probably the best training method for reducing the risk of such problems and Rob goes into detail about how he currently programs isometrics.

Chris and Rob talk through what the literature says about the relationship between track sprinting performance and the muscle volumes of the hip extensors, hip flexors, knee extensors, knee flexors, and ankle plantar-flexors.

Chris and Rob talk about the popular strength and conditioning idea that there multiple strength qualities across the force-velocity spectrum, from maximum strength to strength-speed to power to speed-strength to maximum speed. They also introduce the High Performance Physiology method for building strength training workouts for athletes.

Chris and Rob chat through what strength ratios between exercises can tell us (and what they cannot tell us) about writing athletic training programs.

In this episode, Chris and Rob continue the powerlifting theme from the previous week. While the previous episode covered the main lifts, this episode is dedicated to accessory lifts to support gains in squat, bench press, and deadlift performance.

How do strength training programs transfer to sporting movements? What is the role of different exercises? Chris and Rob unpack the physiology and then go on to provide both positive and negative examples from existing training programs.

In this long-awaited episode, Chris and Rob talk about periodization. While periodization itself is somewhat overrated, there are some benefits associated with aspects of it that can be replicated in other ways.

Chris and Rob change the format for this episode. Rather than covering physiology and biomechanics and then talking about how that information guides strength training programs for athletic performance, they talk about their own experiences in training for a one arm chin up.

Building once again on previous episodes in which they talked about strength, speed, and power, the proximal to distal sequence, and vertical jumping, Chris and Rob now tackle how throwing and punching work, and discuss how to train to improve performance in those activities.

In this episode, Chris and Rob introduce eccentric training, starting with the underlying physiological adaptations and then going on to provide some commentary on practical programming. Contrary to what you will likely hear elsewhere, the important (transferable) adaptations caused by eccentric training are peripheral and not neural.