Podcast #112: Aimless Talk: Plyo Edition with Matt McInnes Watson and Tim Riley

By Jake Tuura / April 4, 2024

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jacked-athlete-podcast/id1462537296?i=1000651472314

Sans Plyometrics

Matt: “Let’s say someone that’s back squatting and they get a lot of knee extension before they can get their hips through, that often resides in what they do when they takeoff [in a jump].”

Tim: “People who don’t have any jump history, I do think there is something useful about the safety and the confines of letting them rip it and jump on the box.”

The Landing and the takeoff

Matt: “A takeoff becomes pretty passive in a squat jump… you have really prepared the tendon to be in the safest position possible… and it’s almost the same in a countermovement jump… but you just can’t hide [that tendon] at velocity.”

Tim: “Anytime I’ve ever seen a spike in jumper’s knee, it’s because we brought too much velocity to the party too soon.”

Ugly Pogos

Matt: “They still carry inhibition… You don’t need cues, bro, you need 6 months of training and then you’re gonna break those inhibitions to even handle whipping the leg into the ground and stabilize.”

Tim: “I didn’t know what my mid foot was most of my life… I was just gonna jump and whatever transpired, transpired.”

Lengthening the Penultimate

Matt: “That’s all well and good but you tell someone to just bury themselves and there’s so much inhibition in there.”

Tim: “Being able to learn the skill and build up the qualities… in you adult life, is very unlikely.”

Matt: “If you want jumper’s knee, take too much velocity and try to push your penultimate too much.”

Matt: “You were probably slower [with trying for penultimate length] than you would be if you just chilled, just roll through it.”

Full Foot versus Forefoot in Bounding

Matt: “The likelihood for someone to land on their forefoot and it to be under your hip is so low, it’s always out ahead of you, it’s a form of inhibition… I don’t want to deal with this velocity so I’m gonna slow things down by putting my foot out in front of me.”

Matt: “A full foot landing, I can stack it underneath my hip better, I’m gonna pull through it faster, the GCT is gonna be pretty short, and it’s gonna maintain momentum.”

Tim: “A lot of the pro athletes, their natural tendency will be to want to get to their forefoot… the tendency is always to creep up to the front of the foot.”

Matt: “Real heavy on that forefoot, dumps to the heel, and that motion there is jarring [on the Achilles].”

Matt: “I think that’s the evolution of a high jumping event [being able to maintain it on the forefoot, not having the heel come down]”.

Peasants

Matt: “When you have shin issues, sometimes it feels like your soleus is getting rung out when you land.”

Tim: “There’s an inability to coordinate well… are they even strong enough to be able to resist something from happening… so you end up with this smorgasbord: lack of coordination, lack of efficient movement, tons of inhibition, and just being weak… all those things together make up a peasant pie.”

Tim: “Peak peasantry is the highest expression of a lack of all of those qualities.”

Inhibition

Matt: “You let off. You just put your other foot down. You see that in triple jump massively.. they’re like no way I can deal with that.”

Tim: “If I come in way too hot [to dunk], I’ll naturally slow down and stutter so I can get into the positions that I like to get into to accomplish the baby windmill or whatever.”

Light (extensive) tier and ping (intensive) tier

Tim: “It’s really hard to develop structure with low exposure. You need a lot of reps to develop structure and capacity.”

Matt: “We talk about the support that the light/submax/extensive brings you, if you’re not doing the intense stuff, it’s useless.”

Matt: “The plyometric progression, it sounds too good to be true… just learn the skills straight away and gradually ramp it up… you’ve got to do intensive movements at the same time of year that you’re doing extensive movements, you just do more of one and less of the other, and then just flip it at different times of the year. They have to go hand-in-hand… You can’t run 400s and then expect to be a good 60 meter runner.”