Latest / Cameron's Conversations: The last weight loss podcast you'll ever need. / Episode 107: What are plyometrics?
Transcript
- Cameron: Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Cameron's Conversations podcast. And today's one's a little bit different, very different actually from anything I've kind of covered off before. I'm going to talk about, as will be the title of this podcast, What the Hell Are Pliometrics? So I think it sounds first off a bit like a word that would be frighteningly from the 70s and 80s fitness scene, which is a. ⁓ frightening and scary place, certainly to me at least, but also something that's kind of like quite misunderstood. And the reason that it's important to kind of talk about is because it's far more accessible than people realise and it's far more relevant for most people than they realise too, because a lot of people do things like running or they play a little bit of sport. And if you do either of those things, chances are, you would benefit from doing a small amount of plyometrics. So let's start off with thinking about what the hell are plyometric exercises? Well, typically, if we were to kind of think about the kind of common ones you would see, you're thinking about jumping exercises. So that's kind of the first place we'd start. And the first thing you might think is that I'm not jumping about and stuff that. Completely get that response. And I think a lot of people do think that. But I'm gonna give you a bit of context of why it's nowhere near as out of reach as you think it is. why it might be relevant and appropriate for you, even if you are literally just starting like a couch to 5K or something like that. I'm gonna give you a bit of guidance on some of the basic things that could be useful and helpful with that. So a little bit of understanding about plyometrics is really, good. So the first thing that I would say, I've just been distracted for a second there, I've looked to my right ⁓ and I've realised for some bizarre reason I have a jar of pesto on my bookshelf. this is the type of person I am, like super, super focused during the work a day and I will randomly put things in strange places, because I'm usually replying to messages on my phone. So yeah, anyway, we're gonna gloss over the fact that I've seen some Tesco reduced fat pesto to my right on my bookcase. That's definitely not meant to be there. But the point is is that when it comes to plyometrics, the advantages or the benefit of doing them is that it makes you more tolerant to forces. So. When we think about something like the gym, for example, you're putting a certain amount of force through your joint, through your ligaments, your tendons, all these things, right? When you exercise, and that's a good thing. We are, you could say we're putting stress through, or challenge through those tissues. Now that's nothing but a good thing, because what that means is our bodies are very adaptable, so we adjust to it, which is why someone who obviously does a leg press for a long time, yes, they will build. more muscle mass in their quads, let's say. They'll have stronger legs, absolutely, but they won't just have stronger legs. The tissues around that also adjust and adapt as well. And that's why over time, our bodies become a little bit more resilient through strength training as well. Yes, we are out and out stronger. That is one part of it. We'll have better muscular endurance, all these other things, and that's cool, but we get a bit of adjustment to it as well. The interesting thing about something like running though is, that when you are running, in essence you... are kind of jumping, right? A lot of the time when we are running above a sort of like a reasonable pace, you're going to find if you actually watch, if you're to slow-mo it, at points we are completely off both feet and then the foot hits the ground and so on and so forth. So you're doing like very, very, very, very, very small jumps, right? That's quite common. But certainly we're putting a lot of impact through our joints, through our tissues, our ligaments, our tendons, our muscles. And again, that's not a bad thing. Sometimes people say things, ⁓ but if you run, what will your joints be like when you're 70? Well, the answer is in research is better than someone who doesn't run basically, because actually that stress we're putting on our joints is generally helpful. Now, I'm gonna caveat that if you are a ultra marathon runner and you are doing multiple kind of like ultra marathons or multiple marathons a year, you might be on the other side of that kind of like bell curve. You might be on the kind of like side of like, okay, you know, at the start you're building up couch to five K if that's one side of the equation, then we've got people running like two to three 10 Ks, maybe the odds like half marathon in the middle, and then you may be on the other side of it. So yes, if you were to do like 20 years of battering out marathons, you would probably have a little bit more wear and in your joints. Sure, that's quite possible. But the reality is is that most people's running volume and for the amount of time they've done it, it doesn't really impact them negatively at all in older age in terms of joint sort of pain and discomfort and things like that. A lot of people will experience a lot less by being more active. So actually if anything that swings the other way, it's better for you than it's not. Now, like I say, there's the extreme end of it. If you're doing 100K ultras every, if like twice, three times a year, yeah, maybe because of the running volume, not just in those runs, but you do in between. is a bit much and that might not necessarily, and that's kind of where sports fall. Like I often say this to people, like at the highest level of sports, we've exceeded the point where it's just health driven. Like weight training in the gym three times a week is great, four times a week, great, cool. That's probably the upward limit or like it depends on how long your sessions are intensity. But like when you're getting to like six or seven really intense sessions a week, like if you're a bodybuilder, that isn't really more healthy. You've probably exceeded the top end of health. Like you've already made. all the adaptions and games that you would want to for general health and fitness, it becomes sport driven. They are a bodybuilder. They want to look a certain way. So that is the prerequisite of what they need to do is to train with a much higher frequency. And it's very, similar in the kind of context of kind of like running as well is that you are going to get a big benefit from it. But one of the challenges is, is that when you run, there is a lot of impact through your joints and it's not uncommon for people to develop issues with ankles, knees and hips when they run. because they do too much too quickly. And I've done a previous podcast episode where I talked about this as well. I can't remember which one it was. There's quite a few of them now. But where I talked about building your running up gradually and having this philosophy of not adding maybe more than 10 to 15 % per run per week, right? So if I'm doing 5K twice a week, I maybe think to myself, you know what? I probably don't want to add more than one and a half K in total, right? That probably makes sense. Maybe I do. 10K total and the next week I do 11 and a half, which might look like one six and a half K run and one five, that tends to be sensible. The more gradual and steady your running volume increases, sorry I said that weirdly, but yeah, the more gradually it increases is what I'm saying, the better because you've got less issues and less chance of kind of getting an overuse injury. Now the cool thing is is that a lot of these kind of like overuse injuries are these things that when they do happen, it is because you've ramped up too quickly. It's not necessarily because you've got like, here's one of my clients put it like, a gammy knee. Like they said to me before, and this always makes me laugh, like, oh yeah, I a gammy knee. I always get hurt when I run. And I was like, okay, like we're gonna set a challenge. We're gonna explore this. I was like, I'm gonna get you to follow the running plan. I set you to the letter and we're gonna experiment. And lo and behold, they're now able to run like a really good amount of distance, very comfortably, like 10, 12 K, absolutely fine. Because previously what they've done is they've gone from no running to running three 5Ks a week and they're like, ⁓ but it's only 5K. Think about how many steps, right? Look at your step count or your watch, right? After you do a run, how many steps is that? It's quite a lot, right? It's one of the great things about if you go for a run, your step counts nailed for the day. Well, you have just put a lot of impact, if you think about it, we've done, let's say, as an example, 4,000 impacts, right? That's rather a lot, 2,000 per leg. That's quite a lot of stress to our body when it's not used to it. Whereas the person who's like, do you know what, the first run I do, I'm gonna go and do 2K. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do 500 meters of running, 500 meters of walking, so I can get a decent amount of distance covered. So they may be doing half on, half off, and that means they do 4K. And then the next week, they maybe do four and a half, like a couch to 5K set up. They build up gradually, which gives their tendons or ligaments, these other tissues, a chance to adjust as well. And it's important to remember that cardiovascular fitness will... increase faster than a lot of these tissues can tolerate, right? So what I mean by that is someone will see bigger cardiovascular improvements, they'll be like, ⁓ I feel fitter, I feel better. At a pace that slightly outstrips or sometimes significantly outstrips their body's ability to adapt to it, which is why ramping things up too quickly is likely or more likely to lead to an issue. Whereas someone who's just going very steadily at it and is like, I'm just gonna work on this for the next few months. I'm just gonna turn up, run two, three times a week. I'm not gonna push the volume up too much. I'm just gonna go gradually. We'll get A, much fitter anyway, and B, we'll often as not have the same issues. Now, the point that this is looping back to, and the reason I've gone to a bit of detail about that is the advantage of plyometric exercises is that you can start to get your body used to a little bit of impact. ahead of time or during it as well in a way that isn't quite as stressful. So you're not going out and doing thousands of impacts, but you can do what are called like Pogo hops as an example. Now this is basically your lowest entry plyometric. Now I'm going to take some shots here at a lot of PTs. So I was a PT in a commercial gym for many, many, many, many years, like 12 years. Now one of the things that winds me up is seeing people. get their clients to do a box jump. And I don't want to take away from this achievement. If you've done this and you overcame your confidence with it, this is great. And I'm going to talk about why that's really, really impressive, right? Because it's a psychological challenge, but that is not the best way to enter plyometrics. In fact, it doesn't make all that much sense because it's not even really a true plyometric because when we are doing it, what we want to do is we want to build up gradually, just like I've said with the running. So one of the simplest ways to introduce plyometrics is by doing something like a pogo hop, right? And a pogo hop is where you're on two feet and you just do a very small jump, right? You're not trying to reach the ceiling. You are not trying to do anything wild or exciting. You are doing a hop that might take you two centimeters off the floor. And that's perfect. And this is how I kind of entry level up my clients who are doing these things who do run is I will get them to do some pogo hops. So they'll start off with two feet and they'll maybe do two sets of 15. and then we'll build up to three sets of 20. So they're now getting 60 mini impacts, right? And what that allows our body to do is to start to adjust to the forces being put through it. Now the good thing is, is because it's quite controlled, because we're obviously just doing three sets of 20, the rest in between, we tend to be able to build up really steadily on those and they start to feel a bit better. By the way, the first time you do plyos, if you've not done them in years, they will feel pants. You'll just be like, I look daft. This is why I always recommend to clients like. If you've got a garden or patio, just go do them there just to start yourself off, because you feel daft at first and then obviously you can work your way up to doing it the gym if you need to. But some people just do them outdoors if that's their thing or they do them at home anyway. But the point is is this, is that you start to build up your tolerance, right? That then means you're more likely to deal with impact when you run better. Now, if you're the person running twice a week, it then exposes you to that impact, but not too much of it in smaller doses. an extra two times a week, which means you tend to get a bit of an adjustment. Now, the reason that matters is your tendons tend to start to tolerate forces better. You tend to be a little bit more controlled and coordinated, because there is a coordination element to it as well. And what I get a lot of clients say to me, and this isn't an immediate thing, but after three to four months of even doing some really basic, low impact ones that pretty much anybody can do, they find that they just feel a little bit bouncier, a little bit more athletic. The reason for that is that the first quality of fitness that diminishes as we get older, and I want to contextualize this, I do not mean when I say older, 50, 60, 70, I'm not meaning that. I mean like when you go from being a kid to a teenager because you stop jumping, you often run and jump and play, if you stop playing sports as much, you start to lose that kind of athleticism, that ability to hop and jump and skip, right? I often say this, like people are like, oh, I didn't do a lot of jumping, I'm like, did you skip? And they're like, oh yeah, and they're like, there you go. Perfect example, it is the first athletic quality or that first quality of fitness if you like to go with your explosiveness. Now it's not something we tend to value unless you play sports, but what's really interesting about it is people that then bring in these plyometrics to the running tend to see a notable performance improvement. And the cool thing about it, as you'll probably have kind of like, you'll start to pick up on is I've mentioned doing like even just to start three sets of 15 Poco hops, right? That would take you two minutes maybe. Like it really doesn't take long at all. The great thing is about your plyometrics is that proportionate to the amount of time that you spend on them, they give you a really good return. So I often do them in between exercises or I do them in my warmup. So I spend maybe four to five minutes, three times a week doing my plyometrics. Sometimes I will do some on the basket, but what I actually do do them as a bit of a warmup a couple of times a week as well. Again, for two to three minutes. So I'm probably spending the grand total of like, I don't know, 16, 18 minutes a week or something like that on them. and I notice a tangible performance improvement in my sport. And obviously that's slightly different because I've got a sport specific goal. But the point is this, is that you can start to just introduce those. You just do some really gentle hops on the floor. Please make sure the floor beneath you is clear and steady and stable and like you're not gonna trip up on anything. But that's a great way of starting. And then the next thing you'd progress to is like a staggered stance one. So a bit more in line with kind of the impacts and things you'd see through running, you're not gonna be coming off two feet per se. you're gonna come off with your feet a little bit more separated. So what you do is you have one foot forward, one foot slightly back, only by maybe like six, seven inches. And it's just what we call staggered stance. It's not a single leg hop, which is a little bit harder to do. It's just like one foot slightly in front of the other. You do 10 one way and 10 the other. And you start to build up. And these have a lot of value because they will make you a little bit more athletic over time, but they'll also make you more tolerant of forces as well. And I find for a lot of clients who have a bit of an issue with like maybe like, rolling ankles or they maybe are a little bit prone to kind of like discomfort in their Achilles and things like that. Starting to do this stuff ahead of them increasing the amount of running they're doing often helps because they are just a bit more tolerant of those forces ahead of time. And obviously I've mentioned a lot about this in an injury prevention context as well, but it does also make you a bit more springy, right? It starts to make you a little bit more bouncy because there's different types of muscle fibers basically in your muscles. and the explosive ones start to get a good challenge because some of our fibers are more driven towards endurance, some are towards kind of explosiveness. They start to obviously get a bit of an improvement as well. They tend to increase in size. And what that means is you start to see a little bit of improvement where you feel a little bit bouncier. Now I have clients who, for context, have started with me, have gone into Couch to 5K, we've introduced these maybe a couple, maybe three months in, let's say to their kind of running, for example. and they've started to feel like, oh, I'm getting a bit of a benefit from this after a few months before they're on from that. Then maybe six, nine months on, they're like, I can't believe how much easier I find those little hops, those little jumps, those little things. We're not doing them in a crazy fashion and we're not doing the classic PT in a gym, oh, I'm gonna get you to do a box jump. The actual risk-reward ratio of that exercise in a gym for someone who, for me, cool, fine, I can. go into a jump, right, and jump onto high box, no problem. But for someone who isn't used to coordinating that kind of movement, isn't used to jumping, it's so easy to lose confidence mid-jump and then you end up hitting the box or whatever. It's just a silly, like, I'm not one of these people that's like, oh, you need to be ridiculously careful and worry all the time about everything we do. We're not fragile, we can work around things, but as a kind of risk profile for an exercise, I think it's a bit of a pants option. So we're not talking about that. So when you see those things online of jumping over boxes and jumping on, there is a place for that. Absolutely. You'll probably see a small amount of that on Instagram. I don't share very often when I do those things, but actually most of what I do is the lower impact stuff. And I think that's really, really useful. So that is a little bit about why plyometrics could be useful, right? It's a little bit of injury prevention. It could also be useful in terms of your performance because you start to become a little bit more explosive. You start to feel a little bit quicker, bit bouncier when you run. Your tissues are more resilient to impact as well. So it's also quite helpful in that. Another thing that it's quite useful in is what we can describe as like organization, which is, I suppose, an odd way of framing it. But if you want to get into sports science a bit of this, it's like when you hit the ground, because you're doing these repeated jumps, you're doing this little hop, straight back up, straight back up, straight back up. you become better at sort of coordinating yourself as well, which means that when you're out running, the thing I sometimes notice is like, if I maybe go over a bit of like rough ground or whatever when I'm doing more trail running or the train changes or maybe kind of like slightly move to the side more than a planter, whatever it is, I feel like I deal with that better. Like I'm less likely to like trip and keel over anything like that because my body's probably a little bit better, my appropriate set, my sense of where my feet are and things like that. and my ability to coordinate very quickly is a little bit better as well. So what I'm trying to get across with this is it doesn't need to be something reserved for elite athletes, quote unquote. It really doesn't. It can be used by anyone. Like anyone can do, like assuming they've not got any kind of major injuries, can do some like little polka hops on the spot, right? That's all they're doing is they just kind of ease into it. And at first you'll feel like an absolute wally doing it, just saying. everybody does. When I started doing them about two years back and I kind of got more more consistent with them over that time, I wouldn't say at the start I was amazing at doing them regularly. I just feel better and better doing them like month after month. I'm a little bit more athletic. I'm a bit better. Now obviously for the sport I play basketball that makes a lot of sense but even for a lot of runners it's a really cool thing to do because it's something that most people haven't considered you know. in the running world, a lot of the time it's like, ⁓ strength training, like everyone should strength train. Like it's kind of revolutionary. And I know I don't mean that in that sort of, sounds a bit like negative, but like, mean, evidence has been there for a long time, but we're to gloss over that. But a lot of runners have been quite resistant to it because they kind of had that thing of like, ⁓ I don't need to do it. And it's like, well, you don't need to do it, but you don't need to feel properly for a race. You don't need to strength train. You don't need to structure your running training. You could just go on like two random runs a week and you'll get an okay standard. But if you look after your nutrition too, well, you'll probably get into even better shape and be a better runner for it and be better fueled. If you do some plyos, even a small amount, you'll be an even better runner for it. If you strength train, you'll be an even better runner for it. So it's one of these things where like, you don't have to do these things, absolutely. And it depends how much you want to take these things on, but at the same time, like they help, right? They do help. And it's something that I'm seeing a little bit of an upsurge in social media is the use of plyos. Now not all of it is necessarily. I think fully understood. I've seen a few posts from coaches where I kind of think, okay, I can see what you're trying to do there. Maybe you've not quite grasped what a good entry level would be, what good progressions would be and things like that. But they're probably still getting some benefit from it. But I think it's really, really cool to start to see a little bit more of a trend towards that, especially from an injury prevention. And I have a lot of clients, like for a couple of clients who play like tag rugby and things like that as well, or even just like I have a client that plays a really good level squash. And like we use lots of plyometrics and it makes a difference because they are a little bit more athletic now. They are a bit more explosive, but also I think it makes you more confident in your body because it's just something you've probably not done in years, but it's quite cool to feel like, ⁓ yeah, I feel quite like capable as well. Like I often joke, it's like, if you feel like you look at a carab and if someone said hop onto that carab, you're nervous about it. That's probably a little bit of a reflection of an athletic quality we might want to develop. We should be able to just hop onto a car if we wanted to. It's a weird example, but just isn't an example, right? That's probably a good standard. We don't need to be able to jump onto a 40-inch box in a gym environment in front of loads of people who will see you if you faceplant. That probably isn't the first choice I would have for a client. In fact, it's pretty much the last one, but we'll gloss over that. So hopefully that's a little bit interesting. And if you do have any questions about... plyometrics or anything around the sort of training considerations for runners and that side of things too, or just anything I've talked about in today's episode, then you can jump into the show notes and the link to my WhatsApp is there too. And of course, back to the normal topic next week, we're gonna be talking a little bit, or next episode I should say, a little bit more about weight loss. So if you are struggling with your weight loss too and you feel like you need a bit of guidance, you need a bit of direction because you've been trying to go solo and you are getting bloody nowhere, then that is exactly what one-to-one coaching is for. And the link to my WhatsApp is gonna be in the show notes. You can pop me a little message with coaching as a word, or you can just say hello, and I will give you bit of a run through how coaching can work for you. But otherwise, have a great week and speak soon.