Latest / The Layback Podcast / Nick Katz, Impulse Researcher and LHP at Lawrence University

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Nick Katz, Impulse Researcher and LHP at Lawrence University · The Layback Podcast

• 0:00
  What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Lay Back
• 0:02
  podcast. Joining us today is left-handed
• 0:05
  pitcher and senior at Lawrence University, Nick Katz.
• 0:09
  Now, the reason we're talking to him is not because he's a senior
• 0:12
  left-handed pitcher at Lawrence University, but rather Nick has
• 0:18
  taken an early dive into a form of exercise that really hasn't
• 0:23
  been researched much or at all for that matter, in our world.
• 0:28
  Many people have heard us talk about impulses on the Lay Back
• 0:31
  podcast before. We just talked about it last
• 0:33
  episode with Dylan newcomer. So everyone go check that out.
• 0:36
  We talked about it with Anthony Cassiola cast performance.
• 0:39
  I think that might have been back in December.
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  At this point, I really don't even remember, but we we talked
• 0:45
  to Cassiola about it. And for anyone that follows
• 0:48
  Cass, you would know that he is maybe not #1 impulse guy, but
• 0:53
  probably #2. We have.
• 0:57
  Of DAC performance would probably be considered the
• 1:00
  number one impulse guy on the planet, but Nick took on a
• 1:05
  research project this year as I guess senior capstone.
• 1:08
  I, I apologize if I'm getting the words incorrect, but more or
• 1:12
  less a capstone project doing preliminary research on the
• 1:18
  effects of impulse training specifically for the forearm to
• 1:22
  assess elbow health. So with that, and before I
• 1:26
  butcher anything else, I'm going to kick it over to Nick to pick
• 1:29
  up the pieces of this bio and I guess kind of intro what we're
• 1:34
  going to be talking about today. So, Nick, thank you so much for
• 1:36
  coming on. Thank you for having me, Adam.
• 1:40
  Yeah, I originally kind of got into this world of impulse data
• 1:44
  by trying impulses myself. As you know, DAC and Cassiola
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  both love to put out some fun stuff online about what they do
• 1:51
  with impulses and how they use them.
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  And I've seen kind of a little little bit of nothing with them
• 1:56
  in the sense of guys don't really know what they're doing.
• 1:59
  They pick up a strap and they're kind of flailing around.
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  And the Internet has a lot of different things to say about
• 2:03
  whether they work or they don't work.
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  And I kind of wanted to figure out the main 2 questions.
• 2:09
  Let's go back there are, can we quantify an impulse in the sense
• 2:11
  of, can we figure out some kind of apparatus or set up to do
• 2:15
  impulses with that mimics what Brady and Cascola do, gives us
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  some sort of force data component that we can track?
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  Because a lot of the times with impulses, because there's a lot
• 2:24
  of this kind of arm care stuff, like intensity is the biggest
• 2:27
  question mark. And are you doing it hard
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  enough? Are you doing it soft enough?
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  Are you doing it in between? And so the first question was
• 2:32
  like, can we at some way at some level kind of quantify that?
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  The second was, can we actually do this in a setting that allows
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  for changes to be made to the body in this form was grip
• 2:43
  strength. So, so started because I'm
• 2:45
  blessed to work at Connect Performance Institute.
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  It's a training facility out in Silicon Valley.
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  Worked there for about 4:00-ish years off and on in the summers
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  and winters when I'm not there, but have gotten a lot of freedom
• 2:57
  and a lot of trust with the athletes and the owners of the
• 3:00
  facility. And so had a really big athlete
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  pool of really excited guys who want to get better.
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  And I'm Obama major, so I needed a senior capstone project.
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  It's a big thing you got to write a long huge paper on.
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  Could be really boring. Watched a bunch of teammates do
• 3:13
  really boring ones that they hated.
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  And I was like, I don't want to do that.
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  So started actually it started more than a year ago now, but
• 3:20
  last March I submitted my IR BS, which is Institutional Review
• 3:24
  Board approval form, which is asking the school to basically
• 3:27
  acknowledge me and say that I'm allowed to conduct human
• 3:30
  research. And so that takes a bunch of
• 3:32
  different forms. You need consent forms, you need
• 3:33
  facility recommendations. I needed trainers to sign off on
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  that to make sure I'm not going to kill anybody's arm and smooth
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  that to the school. They said, yes, you can do this
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  research. You can do it with our
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  authority. You could publish it with our
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  authority eventually. And so then came to the actual
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  work on the ground, which was last summer at KPII.
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  Ran ended up being about 12 athletes that research.
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  The data that we used was 11/12 athletes through four weeks of
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  two different protocols. One of them was an impulse
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  protocol, One of them was just a dumbbell isometric protocol,
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  kind of your more basic arm care for the forearm.
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  And we were really, really simple.
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  I think that the first thing people kind of think about
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  impulses is they're crazy shoulder, super complex, right?
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  You're tearing out UCL and like, this was the simplest thing you
• 4:13
  can do is pronation supination in the forearm.
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  You're literally flicking your wrist in and out.
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  Not super hard, not super hard to learn, not super damaging,
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  right? Pretty small.
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  And the main thing we want to look at was what are the
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  strength changes between someone holding a dumbbell for 10 to 15
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  seconds? Someone's upwards of 20 and some
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  are doing impulses in the exact same joint positions for four
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  weeks. Are we going to see any
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  differences? Are we going to see them both
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  get better? We're going to see one group get
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  better. What's going to happen?
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  And so the first couple of caveats here, right?
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  Like in the research setting, first thing is this was a pilot
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  study and I did it by myself as Adam kind of noted, did it by
• 4:48
  myself over the summer while trying to work at KPI with the
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  normal athlete population and pitch design and warmups
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  etcetera, the weight room floor as well.
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  So you're. Also training yourself.
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  Well, I'm also training myself and trying to get back from my
• 5:01
  senior season. Yeah, so there's a lot going on
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  at the same time. Ended up being 4 weeks.
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  Wish it could have been 8 because we know 8 to 12 is
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  generally the beginning of the range for those tenderness
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  adaptations. No strength adaptations, but got
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  the four week window. And the first cool kind of piece
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  that we tried to that I tried and came up with with the help
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  of Cascola was this ten deck impulse setup.
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  So impulse strap hooked up to stable anchor and in between the
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  end of the strap and the anchor is this little device that was
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  about this big called the 10 deck processor, which is made
• 5:32
  for climbers, but it's just a dynamometer.
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  The 10 held connects the Bluetooth, really easy to use,
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  really easy to save, really easy to access as well.
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  You can it's super light and you can kind of set it up with
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  anything. So it almost acted as like a
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  heavyweight for the impulse strap.
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  So you got a little even extra resistance on the recoil there
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  because of the little 10 deck in it.
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  But what this allowed me to do was have someone going through
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  impulses on my phone, have a live force time feed of exactly
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  how much force they're putting into the strap and train them
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  based on thresholds. So Expo Grip uses plenty of
• 6:03
  thresholds in their training as well and kind of got the basis
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  of that idea from you guys. But we tested MVIC, maximum
• 6:09
  voluntary isometric contraction strength in those specific joint
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  positions, the beginning of the trial, as well as grip strength
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  and a couple other arm care metrics.
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  And then use that number to then program these resistance
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  thresholds. So an example today would be,
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  all right, you're 70 to 80 NVIC today for your impulse group.
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  You get a little red band on the app that's showing you where the
• 6:27
  force needs to be. And you're ripping, you're
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  ripping reps. So I'm telling you, you go
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  harder or softer, right? The set would end.
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  And this was kind of a novelty part that I wanted to test.
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  The set would end when we drop below the threshold.
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  So as long as we maintain that level of force, the set
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  continued. So we had guys, some guys would
• 6:43
  do 100 reps, 150 reps at the beginning of the study.
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  Some guys would do 50 at the end when they're really, really
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  trying as hard as they can and they taper off super fast.
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  But it added this kind of changing modality within the
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  stimulus where each day of training was a little bit
• 7:00
  different and the athlete kind of had a different challenge
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  each day of trying to hold this threshold exactly where it was.
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  And it kind of worked. And that's the best way I think
• 7:09
  I can describe it. So the sample size is low,
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  right, Which means that our statistical power, so the P
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  value that everyone is chasing does not look phenomenal.
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  And that was expected. That's OK.
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  It's a pilot study. But the cool stuff was kind of
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  the observed effects. So the impulse group on average
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  increased their grip strength in an arm care grip strength test,
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  which is that one knee, one arm up, just the first three
• 7:32
  fingers. Yeah, first three fingers on the
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  sensor, but impulse group improved by about 2 1/2
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  kilograms in four weeks. And again, this is not saying
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  that impulses will make you 2 1/2 kilograms stronger in four
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  weeks, right? That's not the conclusion we're
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  drawing. But the conclusion is something
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  happened there and the isometric group didn't really change at
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  all. And that was kind of the main
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  difference. The asymmetric group stayed
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  about the same. Nothing was significant in sense
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  of stuff going up or down and the effect sizes.
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  So the perceived, how should I say this importance of the
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  intervention, right? How much is the intervention
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  actually causing a change in this variable?
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  We're really high for the impulse intervention.
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  So what we got from this study in this data that was pretty
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  small is impulses might work. They do something in four weeks,
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  which is interesting because that's a pretty short amount of
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  time for general training and output metrics.
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  And we have some sort of set up to kind of quantify the force
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  going into them. And that was kind of the goal of
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  the study. And so been working on that.
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  That was all data was collected last summer.
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  The stats were all written up last fall, and then the last
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  5:00-ish months have been writing a journal manuscript to
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  submit, which was successfully submitted a couple weeks ago to
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  the International Journal of Exercise Science with the goal
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  of it getting published and having some research out in the
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  world on impulse data. So I know that was a lot, but
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  that was the spiel right there on the project.
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  No, that's it. That's the podcast.
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  We're done right there. Thanks, Nick.
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  No, no, I really appreciate you breaking that down.
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  I know it seemed like a lot and you probably felt like you were
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  standing on a soapbox and preaching to us for a little
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  bit. But.
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  Now we can actually break it down.
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  That describes everything at the bird's eye view and where we're
• 9:09
  going to start breaking this down from.
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  You made one specific comment which to you and I is a little
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  more humorous and probably to others who are really deep in
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  the weeds on this specific topic.
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  You talked about the pro nation supination impulses not being
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  very damaging or people talking about impulses as being
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  something that are just going to speedrun injury.
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  And I made that joke on the podcast with Dylan just last
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  week. Impulses certainly can look
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  pretty aggressive when we're going from no resistance to
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  banging into full resistance at whatever range of motion we're
• 9:47
  allowing for. I want to, I guess first and
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  foremost just talk about impulses in general.
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  I know you're not number one expert, but hey, you're the only
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  one that's done getting. Closer.
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  Research at this point. So I guess you are our industry
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  expert now. Why do you think like?
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  Why do you believe impulses may be impactful in the training
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  space? OK, I got, I got 2 lenses.
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  I'm thinking about them being helpful.
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  So we'll start with not a hurt athlete.
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  You are a healthy baseball player and you want your arm to
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  be healthy. Why should you do an impulse?
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  That perspective, I think the first thing we got to start with
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  is what is an impulse, right? A lot of the times it gets kind
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  of misconstrued, I think in social media.
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  But from what I've seen, from what I've researched, it's a
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  ballistic isometric. So it is ballistic intent, which
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  is trying to move as fast as you can into a very short, albeit
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  very short, some of the time isometric, where you are
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  contracting as hard as you can and not moving the actual length
• 10:44
  of your muscles or your tendons. That sounds super complicated I
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  think to some people, and it doesn't seem that way when
• 10:51
  you're watching it because it's so rhythmic and fast.
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  But at the end of the day, like throwing is a ballistic
• 10:57
  movement. You're trying to move as fast as
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  you can. You're flailing your joints
• 11:00
  around. They don't really know where
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  they're going except that they're trying to move really,
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  really fast. And so make the main, main
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  calling to me from the impulse was nothing else in training
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  looked like the throw to me. I think that's the best way to
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  say it. When you watch a lot of arm
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  care, it's slow. It's isometrics, which are, as
• 11:16
  you know, very helpful. It's controlled.
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  It's very much isolated in the sense of you're staring at your
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  wrist doing something, you're staring at your fingers doing
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  something, you're staring at your shoulder doing something
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  slowly that you can kind of process all at once.
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  And the impulse is not that. The only thing I can control is
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  intent really at the end of the day is how what intent am I
• 11:33
  putting into the exercise? What am I trying to feel?
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  How hard am I trying to do it? And am I and trying to maintain
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  some sort of rhythm? And I think that gets into the
• 11:41
  real goal of the impulse, and that is rhythm and the ability
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  to generate force repeatedly in ways that we need to.
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  Impulses are weird. You've done them, their shelves,
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  anyone who's actually tried them.
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  And it's hard to get a steady impulse going for the first time
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  doing something you've never done before.
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  And that to me is the beauty of it.
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  Because we actually have to figure out not just a way to
• 12:01
  produce force in this tight constraint with these kind of
• 12:05
  movements and these kind of patterns that are similar to the
• 12:08
  demands of the throw. But we also have to figure out a
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  way to do it over and over again.
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  And we get a little tired when we get a little fatigued.
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  Maybe it's the we're bored because it's Rep 100, because
• 12:17
  you can do 100 impulses, right? But you got to figure out some
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  way to keep both the intent, the rhythm, and the speed applied to
• 12:24
  the exercise. And I think I found that that is
• 12:27
  pretty nice standard of training for a lot of baseball players,
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  especially guys who have done a lot of arm care and done a lot
• 12:33
  of isometric holds or banded work or stuff that they have
• 12:36
  kind of conquered in their mind, I think is the best way to say
• 12:39
  it. We're like, especially as a
• 12:41
  college baseball player, right? Like you do the arm care that
• 12:43
  works for you. You do your ERIR stuff, your
• 12:46
  pack opening stuff and it feels great.
• 12:48
  But a lot of the time you know exactly what you're going to
• 12:50
  feel and you know exactly how hard it is and you're not really
• 12:53
  getting challenged by it in a lot of ways.
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  And I think impulses give us a modality that can challenge
• 12:58
  people and players in the arm care kind of vector of training
• 13:01
  that isn't necessarily as prominent right now.
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  And I think could help out a lot of people, especially those who
• 13:08
  are kind of looking for arm care.
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  And the arm care they're doing feels kind of boring and kind of
• 13:12
  the same because a lot of it unfortunately is the same and is
• 13:15
  boring and doesn't progress itself that much.
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  So that would be myself for the athlete.
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  The return to throw side, as we both know, I think is honestly
• 13:23
  the bigger seller and that is returning to throw after a
• 13:27
  surgery, especially in the arm requires a lot of both neural
• 13:31
  proprioception and trust in the ability to move really fast,
• 13:34
  right? We can think about it in the
• 13:35
  sense of like knee surgeries with jumping or running or gait
• 13:38
  with ACL. But I think about it very
• 13:40
  similar in the arm. And I think that's kind of the
• 13:42
  main connecting point that a lot of the Impulse guys online refer
• 13:46
  to is that like your body doesn't know what it's doing
• 13:48
  when it's trying to move fast again after surgery.
• 13:51
  It might have some baseline levels of strength.
• 13:52
  You might have aligned some of the collagen fibers again, right
• 13:55
  in your tendons. They've gotten stronger.
• 13:57
  cross-sectional area has grown. Like that's awesome.
• 14:00
  You have an atrophy. That's all awesome.
• 14:02
  But if I tell you to move your arm as fast as you can, can you
• 14:04
  actually do it over and over again?
• 14:06
  And a lot of times the answer is no.
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  And that's where I think Impulse has really come into play.
• 14:10
  That was again a lot, but I mean that in the best way possible.
• 14:14
  I really do. And for those of you that
• 14:17
  haven't tuned into the previous episodes, this should provide a
• 14:21
  pretty good look at the purpose behind impulses like like Nixon.
• 14:26
  Why are we doing them? Right, exactly why do we do
• 14:29
  them? So anyone that doesn't know what
• 14:31
  they are or can't picture him, I encourage you to go on
• 14:34
  Instagram, go on YouTube, Twitter or whatever and actually
• 14:38
  give these things a search or reach out to Nick.
• 14:41
  I'm sure he'd be happy to provide.
• 14:43
  Some plenty of videos on what? These things look like heck.
• 14:46
  If you scroll through my personal Instagram, not as much
• 14:48
  of the Flex Pro Grip one, but Adam Morrow's personal
• 14:51
  Instagram, you'll see a little bit of impulses start to creep
• 14:55
  in there with some of the training I've been doing.
• 14:57
  And on the day this recording, I was doing some knee extension,
• 15:01
  knee flexion impulses. To your point about being able
• 15:06
  to create and sustain rhythm, I can tell you that that was the
• 15:11
  single hardest part, especially for the knee flexion.
• 15:15
  So basically doing a repeat hamstring curl, that was
• 15:19
  incredibly difficult for me to maintain that rhythm.
• 15:23
  One of the things that I feel is a major unlock personally with
• 15:27
  the impulses is I begin to notice differences when I do
• 15:32
  left versus right. I don't know if that's something
• 15:34
  you looked at it all in your study or maybe that's something
• 15:37
  to look at in the future. But here's a little side quest
• 15:41
  we can go down in conversation is impulses for me since I'm
• 15:46
  doing them unilaterally in performance, but I am training
• 15:49
  both left and right side. I've noticed very significant
• 15:54
  responses to 1 range of motion to repeatability in my ability
• 16:00
  to recreate rhythm and follow a beat.
• 16:03
  I know you've talked about metronomes in training and being
• 16:07
  able to match up your impulse or match up your movement to a
• 16:12
  metronome. I'm curious if one, that's
• 16:14
  something you looked at in the study or two, maybe, I guess the
• 16:20
  effects or why things might not match up from limb to limb.
• 16:25
  Yeah, did not look at different arms necessarily in the study,
• 16:28
  but what I can tell you is make the average velocity for
• 16:31
  throwers in the study right across the board was like 86.
• 16:34
  And this is high school and college arms.
• 16:36
  So we got some pretty good baseball players, right?
• 16:38
  We got some pretty hard throwing, very solid data set.
• 16:41
  Every study is like an average Velo of 79 to 82.
• 16:44
  Yeah, like most of these guys are. 86 you're you're doing
• 16:47
  well. That seems like this elite
• 16:50
  training pool and probably 2/3 from the first two days of
• 16:53
  impulses look like clowns on their dominant sides because
• 16:56
  they just never done it before. And to me, like the baseline
• 17:00
  difference I would chalk up to, you know, what have you done?
• 17:02
  What kind of proprioception do you have?
• 17:03
  What kind of sense of this movement do you have right
• 17:05
  there, all of those pathways, but the left and the right for
• 17:08
  sure, I think and if anyone wants to try would be do it in
• 17:12
  shoulder flexion or shoulder internal rotation.
• 17:14
  Like go to your dominant side, bang out some internal
• 17:16
  rotations. It'll feel money feels like
• 17:18
  you're throwing and then try and do it on your non dominant side
• 17:21
  and it will not feel good because you have no idea what
• 17:24
  you're doing and you don't really know what you're
• 17:26
  activating because you don't do it that often, right.
• 17:28
  And so I think that is definitely a factor that comes
• 17:31
  to impulses. I think the rhythm that you kind
• 17:34
  of brought up too is, and we could tangent off into just
• 17:38
  training for baseball in general in my mind, but impulses
• 17:41
  specifically like they, they are a speed and a capacity based
• 17:45
  movement, right? You are not doing an impulse to
• 17:47
  do 35 impulses over the course of 25 minutes super hard, right?
• 17:53
  You want them to be consistent. You're trying to do them for a
• 17:55
  certain amount of time or a certain amount of sets or a
• 17:57
  certain amount of force like we did in the study.
• 18:00
  And so the rhythm element to me allows the athlete to kind of
• 18:04
  begin to feel what we want them to feel.
• 18:07
  If you, if you want to put it that way, like I think the best
• 18:09
  example I have is a PEC impulse. So think if it's tight right
• 18:14
  here and you're slamming right into that inner PEC.
• 18:17
  So a chest fly. Chest fly, basically a chest
• 18:20
  fly. Cascuola first put me on to
• 18:22
  these. I started doing them and first
• 18:24
  time you do them, you know, bicep tendon right at the top
• 18:25
  doesn't feel great. You feel your trap kind of roll
• 18:27
  through. And then the more and more you
• 18:29
  do them or the more and more that you get coached on them and
• 18:32
  you literally are touching your PEC or you want it to feel and
• 18:35
  you're touching the exact area you want to feel.
• 18:37
  Maybe you're listening to music and you're trying to match a
• 18:39
  beat, but like you said, you feel different things the next
• 18:43
  Rep, you feel something a little bit different and then a little
• 18:44
  bit different and a little bit different.
• 18:46
  You kind of add as you go throughout a set, throughout a
• 18:48
  workout. And I think that's the rhythm
• 18:50
  element is really kind of what brings the impulse together.
• 18:54
  I would say is in like you can do it without a metronome or
• 18:56
  music, but you should be trying to keep some sort of tempo or
• 19:00
  rhythm. You should not be flailing
• 19:01
  around to flail around as fast as you can, right?
• 19:03
  Like that. We know that there's tempo in
• 19:05
  pitching. I think that's the other thing
• 19:07
  that like you're talking about, it's hard to keep a consistent
• 19:10
  tempo and impulses. I don't know how many pitchers,
• 19:12
  including myself, it's hard to keep the consistent tempo
• 19:14
  pitching and find one that you actually need and can be common
• 19:18
  and relax the right things and contract the right things and
• 19:20
  stay consistent in your movement patterns.
• 19:22
  And I think that kind of translates really well to a knee
• 19:25
  flexion impulse where you're going to feel a bunch of
• 19:28
  different things. But hopefully by Rep 300 of the
• 19:30
  day, you've started to figure out how you can feel the same
• 19:33
  thing over and over or keep a certain rhythm or maybe both.
• 19:37
  And then to me that day has been successful, right?
• 19:39
  And we have developed some something that day in the
• 19:41
  impulse sector that we can take for the next training
• 19:44
  application or for the next time.
• 19:47
  I swear you were in my backyard training with me today because I
• 19:50
  did 3 rounds of 100 and when when I finally got to those
• 19:56
  final 50 reps of the day, reps 251 to 300, I finally felt like
• 20:03
  I figured out what I want to feel, where I want to feel it.
• 20:07
  And kind of unlocked it now that that goes to something I've
• 20:11
  shared on the podcast before. I guess it's my personal use of
• 20:16
  impulses or where I find them impactful.
• 20:18
  I'm just going to share it again.
• 20:20
  So I've apologized to anyone that feels like I'm just
• 20:24
  regurgitating and just hitting rinse and repeat here.
• 20:27
  But my use of impulses or when I present them to an athlete,
• 20:32
  generally the question I ask is how much total time do you spend
• 20:37
  in exposition during a single throw?
• 20:40
  And usually the answer is between, I don't know, a couple
• 20:46
  milliseconds and 1/10 of a second.
• 20:48
  It's not going to be much shorter, longer than either one
• 20:51
  of those things. But regardless, the answer I'm
• 20:55
  looking for is not long at all. Something incredibly short,
• 20:58
  faster than a snap of a finger. Great.
• 21:00
  Now let's extrapolate that out. How many times does that happen
• 21:04
  over a day? How many times does it happen
• 21:06
  over a week? How many times does that happen
• 21:08
  over a season or even a year? And then maybe we're getting to
• 21:12
  a point where an athlete comes back to me and says, over the
• 21:16
  course of a year, I think I spend a grand total of 1 to 2
• 21:23
  minutes in that position. If you combine every single
• 21:27
  moment over every single throw, over every single action during
• 21:31
  the year, I say great, OK, now if you set up for an impulse,
• 21:37
  you can match that exact same time under tension or exact same
• 21:42
  Rep total that you amassed over a year, a year in one training
• 21:47
  session. And now you can do that however
• 21:50
  many times a week. Of course, intensities are
• 21:52
  different, speeds are different, but going back to that rehab
• 21:56
  side with that being so often the athlete that I'm working
• 21:59
  with, what you're doing is often giving an athlete an exposure to
• 22:03
  something that either previously caused trauma or something that
• 22:07
  was previously difficult to them.
• 22:10
  Just an easier path into acceptance of a movement or
• 22:15
  acceptance of a range of motion or a force producing action.
• 22:21
  I know there's not really a question in that, but.
• 22:23
  That no. I have kind of preached the
• 22:27
  importance or the use case for an impulse.
• 22:30
  Where where I would go with that is a little bit of the harder
• 22:34
  bio stuff, but what I really looked at after this study and
• 22:37
  kind of in the discussion section of the results was like
• 22:40
  why? Why do neurologically
• 22:42
  neurological based training, so trying to move as fast as you
• 22:46
  can, trying to move as slow as you can, like things that are
• 22:48
  not necessarily a mechanical load thing, but more of a intent
• 22:52
  based training exercise. Why do they work?
• 22:55
  Like what is the neurological connection to like this will
• 22:58
  make you increase RFP faster. This will get you maybe a little
• 23:00
  bit stronger. And a lot of it comes down to
• 23:03
  discharge rate and action potential based stuff.
• 23:05
  And so when we do movements at a ballistic intent, we're trying
• 23:08
  to move as fast as we can and we have that range of motion of no
• 23:11
  resistance to really almost explore how we can generate the
• 23:15
  force to execute the movement, the rate in which our action
• 23:18
  potentials get sent to the motor unit, right?
• 23:21
  And then to the actual fiber muscle contraction change.
• 23:25
  And so the intent that we do them with changes what literally
• 23:28
  is happening from our brain down to the motor unit down into the
• 23:31
  muscle. And so with an impulse, right,
• 23:33
  with an RTT setting kind of like you're talking about, like
• 23:36
  there's the famous stack example I love to use is like you have 4
• 23:40
  sessions today of 500 reps and every Rep is going to feel like
• 23:44
  barely anything like you're, you're maybe you're tapping,
• 23:47
  maybe you're just tapping like this.
• 23:48
  He also uses joint moves a lot. I think that's another example
• 23:51
  in this kind of realm intro. To an impulse.
• 23:53
  It's kind of the intro to an impulse, yeah.
• 23:55
  Impulse without resistance or exactly the overcoming
• 23:59
  isometric. Feature without the overcoming
• 24:00
  ISO and the banging, you know, aspect of it.
• 24:03
  But the idea of you don't need to bang this as hard as you can,
• 24:07
  you just need to do it over and over again so that your body can
• 24:10
  recognize the space is allowed. You're allowed to be up there,
• 24:14
  you're allowed to move this area at a certain speed.
• 24:16
  Maybe it's not full speed, but it's a certain speed.
• 24:18
  And we're going to tell your brain over and over that that's
• 24:21
  OK and that that's acceptable a lot of the times to meet.
• 24:24
  Then other movements that are coordinated become just part of
• 24:28
  that algorithm a little bit, right?
• 24:30
  And so like, for example, for a shoulder IR right, like we even
• 24:33
  just hanging up there for some guys post surgery is tough just
• 24:36
  holding their arm up there in the 1st place.
• 24:38
  And so it's like, well, you're going to give them some crazy D
• 24:41
  cell movement or tell them to do something, or are you going to
• 24:43
  tell them to move two inches for a bunch of times?
• 24:47
  And then maybe we'll, we'll grab a baseball or we'll grab a fly a
• 24:50
  ball or grab a football, right. And like that, I just the trust,
• 24:54
  like you said, like hundreds and hundreds, thousands of reps
• 24:57
  accumulated to cross an RTT process, especially then go into
• 25:01
  the 1st 30 reps that you throw of a ball and all of a sudden
• 25:04
  it's 30 reps, It's not a two sets of 200, it's 30.
• 25:08
  And from a mental capacity just in processing.
• 25:11
  And also, I think a little bit subconsciously in terms of
• 25:14
  fatigue and worrying about protection, right?
• 25:16
  Like neural shielding of an area that's been damaged.
• 25:18
  Like that opens up a lot of pathways to be able to throw a
• 25:21
  baseball 30 times and kind of feel nothing because you just
• 25:24
  did an impulse 10,000 times, right?
• 25:27
  Or you did 4 impulses for a combined 10,000 times.
• 25:30
  And of course, like, and I think we'll get into this later, but
• 25:33
  there are, there are a lot of things kind of prerequisites, I
• 25:36
  would say like a checklist almost you want to have before
• 25:38
  you have an impulse protocol or with an impulse protocol is
• 25:41
  probably the better way to put it.
• 25:43
  Impulses don't magically fix arms.
• 25:45
  There are a bunch of other important S&C principles we got
• 25:48
  to kind of check off first. But in terms of that
• 25:51
  proprioception, right, because that's like the best word we can
• 25:54
  kind of use in this sense. I think that's probably the
• 25:57
  biggest open box of an impulse, right?
• 25:59
  You could be at phase one of RTT and doing barely any movements.
• 26:04
  You could be at 17 weeks out, 18 weeks out, and we're ripping 50
• 26:09
  impulses and that's it for the day.
• 26:11
  Because now we're actually getting back to the mound and
• 26:12
  we're maybe we're throwing again, right?
• 26:14
  And that, that big kind of gradient and how they're used to
• 26:18
  me is also why we want to study and why they haven't been
• 26:21
  studied. I remember it's funny shout out
• 26:24
  Brady, I remember reaching out to DAC at the beginning of this
• 26:26
  and being like, hey, like, do you have any research on this?
• 26:28
  There's some chain shock Russian stuff.
• 26:31
  It's kind of out there floating around like maybe that.
• 26:33
  And he was like, no, because they're so versatile.
• 26:37
  Like I don't even know how I would study them.
• 26:39
  You can use them for so many different applications, RTT,
• 26:41
  lower, upper, whatever it may be.
• 26:43
  And there's so many different application and use cases that I
• 26:46
  haven't studied them because I just use them so much.
• 26:48
  And I found that kind of profound in a lot of ways
• 26:51
  because I don't, I feel like a lot of times with arm care, it's
• 26:53
  so specific and so niche. Like you got to do it in this
• 26:55
  exact slow lower in this exact kind of Rep scheme for it to
• 26:59
  work. And it's like this is one of
• 27:01
  those things that kind of breaks that mold a little bit and has a
• 27:03
  lot of potential for growth. I was originally going to take
• 27:07
  us back to the study to kind of break down another piece, but
• 27:10
  you mentioned something that you said you thought you might cover
• 27:13
  later, which is kind of the whole gradient or spectrum of
• 27:18
  things that you want to check off before introducing.
• 27:20
  Yes. I think it makes more sense to
• 27:23
  go into that now than. Go no, I'm study.
• 27:25
  I'm good with that now, Nick, go ahead, take that away.
• 27:29
  Well, I'll start with shouting out you Adam and flex for our
• 27:32
  grip, because my basis for arm care kind of started started
• 27:36
  processing my own head when I first introduced arm care.com,
• 27:40
  which right when it came out our facility KPI, we had a great guy
• 27:43
  working there who grabbed it up and started testing it out and
• 27:45
  using it and seeing how weak a lot of these really elite
• 27:49
  athletes are when it comes to our care metrics and when it
• 27:53
  gets to impulses. I, I think we almost have to be
• 27:56
  super not strict, but super smart in terms of like we need
• 28:01
  our baseline stuff. We need our tendons to be
• 28:04
  healthy. We need our muscles to be
• 28:06
  healthy. We need to be able to exude
• 28:09
  force at long lengths, right? And vulnerable positions.
• 28:13
  We need to put a lot of load on them.
• 28:14
  And an impulse is putting a lot of load in one type of way, but
• 28:17
  it's not necessarily a mechanical tension time thing,
• 28:20
  right? And so we need our sustained
• 28:21
  isometrics, we need our eccentrics.
• 28:23
  We need all of those kind of more classic, you would say,
• 28:26
  like check boxes for this and the real kind of hybrid that
• 28:31
  would be a future research project, but it will happen
• 28:33
  someday. Is and DAC and Cass both do
• 28:36
  them, but I like to call them kind of impulse ISO pulses, but
• 28:39
  it would be holding an ISO, so an overcoming ISO in a certain
• 28:42
  position or maybe it's a pulse of an ISO for a certain amount
• 28:45
  of time and then immediately doing impulses after.
• 28:48
  And so I think that's a good way to kind of explain the idea of
• 28:50
  like prereqs. We're like yes, the guy banging
• 28:53
  the shoulder strap online should not be you tomorrow.
• 28:56
  You should not pick it up and start just doing that right
• 28:58
  away. But we probably want some sort
• 29:01
  of isometric in the joint position that we're going to do
• 29:03
  an impulse in. I think that's like the first
• 29:05
  one, at least in the training or maybe before the impulse because
• 29:09
  it builds both, right, the physical properties, but also
• 29:11
  kind of that proprioceptive side of I know where I am, I know
• 29:14
  what's turning on and off. I know I'm not in danger in this
• 29:18
  position. And then you could progress to
• 29:20
  maybe a light impulse and an isometric and maybe you're
• 29:22
  having eccentric kind of thrown in the mix too for an accessory.
• 29:25
  And then finally you arrive at your ripping this all out.
• 29:28
  Let's see how much force you can put into it.
• 29:29
  Like let's go. But that to me, like we kind of
• 29:32
  talked about, takes a lot of steps, right?
• 29:34
  Takes a lot of steps, similar to I'll use Flex Pro as an example,
• 29:38
  like the first flex procession for a guy out of TJ is not going
• 29:41
  to be the hardest thing for him to do ever because it shouldn't,
• 29:45
  right? Like it should be pretty easy
• 29:47
  and it should be. And it needs to build up to a
• 29:49
  certain point where you can even say, hey, like put the foot on
• 29:52
  the gas, go ahead. I think that's probably the
• 29:54
  biggest. I wish we could blast the
• 29:56
  Internet and say like, don't go and RIP impulses for your first
• 30:00
  time ever doing them. I'll repeat it throughout the
• 30:02
  entire podcast because that's not the point of the exercise as
• 30:05
  much as it looks like it is. It's just not the point.
• 30:07
  And I feel like a lot of times we see it as the pointer people
• 30:10
  see, especially athletes, like a guy on my team.
• 30:13
  I train half the guys on my team anyways, right?
• 30:16
  And they see me doing impulses for warming up.
• 30:18
  They're like, can I try this? They'll do a couple and they'll
• 30:20
  be like, yeah, that didn't feel very good.
• 30:22
  And it's like, all right, well, like, let's let's coach through
• 30:24
  it a little bit. What are you trying to feel?
• 30:26
  I don't know. OK, what temp are you trying to
• 30:28
  be at? Are you trying to be fast?
• 30:29
  Are you trying to feel the relaxation phase?
• 30:31
  Are you trying to really stick it?
• 30:32
  I don't really know. And that's no discredit to them,
• 30:35
  right? That's they're just exploring.
• 30:36
  But it is a little bit harder of an exercise to just pick up and
• 30:40
  do right. It's a little bit more gritty
• 30:43
  than that. I would say there.
• 30:44
  There's a little bit more nuance to that than just I can go bang
• 30:47
  this out as much as I want. And so it kind of starts with
• 30:50
  the basics, starts with your Isos, it starts with your
• 30:52
  eccentrics. And from there, we can get to
• 30:54
  our fun ballistic isometrics. It is kind of odd with it being
• 30:59
  both so simple when you look at it, but incredibly nuanced.
• 31:03
  You wouldn't want someone with 0 training age to go in and pick.
• 31:07
  This. Up and I, I like that you kind
• 31:10
  of broke that down. You want someone with a high
• 31:14
  enough level of general preparedness, general physical
• 31:18
  prep behind them where you know you can go do a ballistic
• 31:23
  overcoming isometric, which is really the breakdown of what an
• 31:26
  impulse really is, a ballistic overcoming isometric.
• 31:29
  And that can be incredibly straining or stressful both on
• 31:34
  the individual from the mental component of actually trying to
• 31:38
  endure that many reps over time and truly physically straining.
• 31:43
  Tissue on. Be just because you are having
• 31:46
  to do an overcoming isometric on repeat.
• 31:50
  That's a lot, over and over. But also you kind of provided
• 31:54
  the perfect segue for where I wanted to go anyways, as you
• 31:57
  talked about the gradient or the spectrum, because the next piece
• 32:00
  that I wanted to talk about in your study were the two
• 32:04
  exercises that you selected or I guess kind of the four exercises
• 32:09
  that you selected, but the two different realms.
• 32:12
  So we had the isometric training group, which more or less did a
• 32:17
  yielding isometric trying to hold a dumbbell in place, which
• 32:22
  mimics kind of a lot of kind of common arm care that we see for
• 32:26
  people that are trying to do quote UN quote isometrics in the
• 32:31
  arm Care World versus kind of the new age with the pronation
• 32:35
  and supination. I think across the board
• 32:38
  everyone would accept pronation and supination are great for arm
• 32:43
  health and really performance as well.
• 32:46
  There are ranges of motion that we need to be able to access as
• 32:49
  a pitcher or thrower. And also if we can do certain
• 32:53
  things with pronation and supination, we can impact the
• 32:57
  ball in a certain way to generate new avenues for ball
• 33:01
  flight or different avenues for ball flight.
• 33:04
  Enter the pitch design world. I know that is kind of leaps
• 33:08
  away from what you were looking at and that's of course future
• 33:11
  study is can impulses impact what we're seeing, right?
• 33:17
  Yeah. Whether it's spin rate, whether
• 33:19
  it's arm side movement or induced vertical break, the
• 33:22
  different things like that due to the speed at which we pronate
• 33:25
  or can delay pronation by holding supination.
• 33:28
  I know that's getting way down the line and I don't want to
• 33:31
  lose the point of what I was getting into here, which was the
• 33:36
  spectrum. So we have kind of the intro to
• 33:40
  isometrics in a sense with the dumbbell, you did a yielding
• 33:44
  isometric more or less versus again, the ballistic overcoming
• 33:49
  isometrics with the impulses. You could have kind of a novice
• 33:53
  reader pick up your study and think these yielding isometrics
• 33:58
  are ineffective or I shouldn't do them and I should go do these
• 34:03
  ballistic overcoming Isos. It's not that the yielding
• 34:07
  version is necessarily bad and it's not that the ballistic
• 34:13
  overcoming or the impulses is the Holy Grail.
• 34:18
  So I'd love if you could kind of break down, maybe spend some
• 34:21
  time on the yielding isometric exercise selection and why you
• 34:25
  think there wasn't a positive training adaptation noticed in
• 34:31
  the study. Yeah.
• 34:32
  So I'll start with kind of kind of like the, the facts that we
• 34:36
  know, right? And then break into the why, why
• 34:39
  it happened that way. The first is kind of first, the
• 34:42
  yielding isometrics. And from looking at how kind of
• 34:45
  sustained isometrics work in general, right?
• 34:46
  Any kind of hold that's for a set of time, the latter half of
• 34:51
  that hold tends especially with the yielding isometric tends to
• 34:54
  be kind of the bread and butter of actual adaptation right, to
• 34:57
  both the tendons and the muscles themselves.
• 35:00
  But it's really in the latter half of the tension that we
• 35:03
  start to see, like the fatigue of those fibers and tendons and
• 35:08
  the eventual growth and strength and stabilization.
• 35:11
  And I use dumbbell holds because they were the easiest to kind of
• 35:15
  quantify within this kind of space I was working in with the
• 35:19
  impulses. I'll put out the caveat now.
• 35:20
  I think I wrote it actually in the discussion.
• 35:22
  Like, we know some stuff. Tendons usually take 8 to 12
• 35:25
  weeks, right? True tenderness adaptation 10 to
• 35:28
  12/8 to 12 weeks if not more. They put they usually require a
• 35:32
  pretty high amount of mechanical tension and load on the system.
• 35:35
  They usually require a pretty long amount of duration under
• 35:38
  the ISO right and time literally within the Rep with the load on
• 35:42
  that wasn't really possible in this study and so that was kind
• 35:45
  of where we got with all right, we're going to do some yielding
• 35:47
  isometrics. We're going to use the same MVIC
• 35:49
  kind of parameters of hey, we're going to look at how how strong
• 35:52
  you are in this position. We're going to give you a load
• 35:54
  that's based off of that. But, and this is, I can admit
• 35:58
  this fully, like when you're calculating dumbbell loads, I'm
• 36:00
  sure you've probably dug into it a little bit, right moment arms
• 36:04
  come into play of exact muscles. How much force is getting put on
• 36:07
  this versus this joint? Well, where's your grip
• 36:09
  positioning exactly? Does that change the
• 36:11
  distribution of the dumbbell force?
• 36:13
  How big is your hand compared to the dumbbell?
• 36:15
  Is that changing what muscles were activating?
• 36:17
  Because as any listener to the Flexflow Grip Podcast, Lay Back
• 36:21
  podcast knows, right? Like the FDSFDPFCU, all these
• 36:24
  little muscles in our forearm interact very differently
• 36:28
  depending on our grip and depending on where our fingers
• 36:30
  are placed, it changes the outcome.
• 36:33
  And so with the dumbbell group, like just for some anecdotal
• 36:36
  data, the smaller guys had more problems doing the holds.
• 36:40
  Like if you had a smaller hand, you had a harder time
• 36:43
  maintaining that drum position, feeling what you wanted to feel.
• 36:45
  And I'm asking you what you're feeling, what cues you got.
• 36:48
  It was harder for those guys to pick up on it simply because of
• 36:50
  morphological constraints, right?
• 36:53
  And that's not to say you can't do a good dumbbell yielding
• 36:56
  isometric and get stronger. You totally can.
• 36:58
  If you do it for enough amount of time, you do it with heavy
• 37:00
  enough weight, it will work, right?
• 37:01
  It's not one of these, it's it's fooey, right?
• 37:04
  Like it works. We know these things are pretty
• 37:06
  traditional strength and conditioning principles, but
• 37:09
  especially in the arm care sector.
• 37:10
  And I think part of the point of this research was this was done,
• 37:13
  right, with a bunch of throwers who were not necessarily
• 37:15
  pitching like in game, but we're actively training throughout the
• 37:18
  week and we're actively lifting, we're actively playing catch and
• 37:20
  doing all these things. And I really want to see with
• 37:24
  one exercise, right, what we could do.
• 37:25
  And kind of back to pronation supination, part of the reason I
• 37:27
  selected it is because of how limited it really is, right?
• 37:31
  You are tucked up against your shoulder, you're squeezing and
• 37:34
  you're really moving your wrists and your fingers.
• 37:36
  There's not a lot of other moving parts.
• 37:38
  And so it was pretty simple to design both an isometric and an
• 37:41
  impulse for whereas, right? The more degrees of freedom you
• 37:44
  have, the more range of motion you have, all of a sudden it
• 37:46
  starts to get more complicated. So that was kind of the
• 37:48
  reasoning. Like I said, like you said,
• 37:51
  there's a gradient. It is not that they didn't work.
• 37:53
  If I had those guys doing for another 10 weeks, I'm sure they
• 37:55
  would probably also show grip strength improvements, right?
• 37:58
  And we kept upping the dumbbell load.
• 37:59
  They would probably show some decent improvements as well.
• 38:02
  But part of it that I kind of wanted to add was that at least
• 38:06
  in my study, right, and this could get recreated many times,
• 38:08
  the dumbbell asymmetric guys didn't find the dumbbell holds
• 38:11
  that challenging. From an anecdotal perspective,
• 38:14
  if you asked them all after like how hard was this training one
• 38:16
  to 10, the answers were always lower than the impulse guys.
• 38:20
  And so that kind of to me speaks about the results a little bit
• 38:23
  where those dumbbell holds would have worked if they were a
• 38:26
  little bit harder and we kept on doing them.
• 38:29
  The impulses show that kind of cool effect because they really
• 38:33
  challenged the actual tissue and they challenged the athlete in a
• 38:35
  way that they had not been presented before.
• 38:38
  And so we started to see some of these changes, right.
• 38:40
  And grip strength are in effect size that again, are not
• 38:43
  concrete. I made this guy's fingers
• 38:45
  stronger, but are we're giving him a stimulus that he's never
• 38:49
  had before and it's changing some way that we interact with
• 38:51
  that tissue, right? And so they took to the world,
• 38:55
  right? Like these isometrics,
• 38:56
  especially even like yielding isometrics, they're not, we know
• 38:59
  that they're better, sometimes better options, right, for
• 39:02
  isometric based exercises, but they can still work, right?
• 39:05
  A lot of this kind of stuff can work when implemented right, but
• 39:08
  it needs the right kind of load and the right amount of time and
• 39:12
  right. And those are like the two real
• 39:14
  quantifiers of will you actually see some sort of result?
• 39:18
  And of course, you know, by week two of the study, I'm like,
• 39:20
  Dang, I should have given them heavier dumbbells like, you know
• 39:23
  what I'm saying? Like right away I could think
• 39:25
  that. And that was kind of the beauty
• 39:27
  of the impulse group as well was that I didn't have to really
• 39:30
  consider that because these ranges were much more individual
• 39:34
  in the sense of within a set, you know, they're hitting all
• 39:37
  these kind of, they're hitting within a range, 10 percent, 15%
• 39:40
  range. But that's a bunch of different
• 39:41
  numbers. That's not 20 lbs in a dumbbell,
• 39:44
  right? That's a bunch of different
• 39:45
  individual contraction force numbers that are sending
• 39:47
  different stimuluses to the tissue.
• 39:49
  Whereas A dumbbell hold with 20 lbs or with 25 lbs is a dumbbell
• 39:52
  hold with 25 lbs for 20 seconds. But again, in the future, it can
• 39:57
  work. Do not discount it.
• 39:59
  These things are still valid training.
• 40:00
  Protocols, right? That kind of last synopsis is
• 40:05
  exactly why I wanted to have this conversation and break down
• 40:08
  the study with you because that goes way beyond even what is
• 40:13
  going to be published in the literature.
• 40:15
  This is where application of the study actually gets into the
• 40:20
  training space and gets into the performance space.
• 40:24
  Because although you looked at the effectiveness of impulses,
• 40:29
  what you also showed is what we know is an industry that tried
• 40:34
  and true approach that at the end of the day, your load, your
• 40:39
  intent, your time under tension are generally going to be the
• 40:43
  things that most move the needle in training.
• 40:47
  Now there there might be certain exercises or there might be
• 40:50
  certain contraction styles that are most effective or impactful
• 40:54
  for an individual trying to achieve a certain thing.
• 40:58
  But it's kind of like the classic meme that I know you're
• 41:02
  online enough to picture what I'm saying, but you have your
• 41:04
  complete dunce on one end of the spectrum.
• 41:07
  And yeah. Higher being monk on the
• 41:10
  opposite end of the spectrum and then in the middle is like the
• 41:14
  dweeb nerd hard yes, that like tries to do everything perfect
• 41:19
  and optimize and it's just the the complete dunce way over on
• 41:24
  one end of the spectrum is just ha ha, lift heavy weights.
• 41:28
  Lift heavy weights. And then the elevated monk is
• 41:32
  just like lift heavy weights. Lift heavy weights right?
• 41:35
  It's it's not hard to force expose force high forces.
• 41:39
  Exactly like phrase slightly differently, but effectively the
• 41:42
  same thing like train hard high forces.
• 41:45
  And that's, that's more or less what you showed, right?
• 41:47
  That's that's the like secondary or tertiary finding in all of
• 41:51
  this. The group that was exposed to
• 41:53
  higher loads over potentially longer durations or had more
• 41:58
  experiences with higher effort bouts was the group that saw
• 42:03
  more positive results. Yeah.
• 42:06
  And that's, I think, I think the best testament to is that the
• 42:11
  the impulse group especially and I mean both groups for that
• 42:14
  matter, but the impulse group like that last week of training,
• 42:16
  right. So it'd be week four of their
• 42:18
  training and that's 90% and above for MVIC, right?
• 42:22
  And so these are getting into heavy dumbbells, right?
• 42:25
  Hard to hold for longer than 15 seconds.
• 42:27
  And the impulse guys like we'd, we'd have 15 reps and the dude
• 42:32
  was burnt out and he was below the threshold and it was over
• 42:33
  that day. And it'd be like, all right,
• 42:35
  next I'm going to try and get to 30.
• 42:37
  I'm going to see if I can get to 30 with that threshold.
• 42:39
  I'm going to see if I can get to 50 with that threshold.
• 42:41
  And all of a sudden it kind of gamified a little bit the actual
• 42:45
  training itself and allow the athlete to kind of get to that
• 42:48
  point that we're talking about of, oh, I can actually put a lot
• 42:51
  of force into this thing, right? So that doesn't need to be the
• 42:53
  most optimized thing ever. They might be kind of not as
• 42:56
  rhythmic as the 70% ones, but I can trust my body to put a lot
• 43:00
  of force into this thing over and over.
• 43:02
  And that's the training I have for the day and I'm done and I'm
• 43:05
  going to go through. I think that's kind of like you
• 43:07
  said, the insight into this is it is really that simple, right?
• 43:10
  At the end of the day, like you need force, you need a lot of
• 43:13
  it. You need to consistently and you
• 43:16
  probably need some good joint positions and like you'll get
• 43:18
  some cool stuff. So here's one that maybe you
• 43:21
  haven't spent too much time on, at least I hope you haven't,
• 43:24
  because I would love for you to go through the thought
• 43:26
  experiment right here. Have you considered the
• 43:29
  psychological factors in training that athletes are most
• 43:35
  likely to want to chase down? Because you have your, you had
• 43:39
  your yielding isometric group that did the dumbbell holds and
• 43:43
  those athletes are, or they're chasing down a longer time.
• 43:46
  Like how how long can I sustain this hold, which yeah, I guess
• 43:51
  you can push yourself. It is still technically an
• 43:54
  objective measure. Like how much time am I holding
• 43:57
  this? Yeah, but it's like on the side.
• 44:01
  It's for the impulse group, it's how much force, how many reps
• 44:06
  it, I don't know. Although those are both both
• 44:10
  sides were dealing with counting, they feel so
• 44:14
  differently to me and I, I can't put my finger on it, but I, I
• 44:19
  can tell you like I hate doing time under tension work when my
• 44:23
  goal is how long can I sustain this?
• 44:26
  But if I'm trying to chase down a new Rep total, I think that's
• 44:31
  really fun. Or like I've had the fortunate
• 44:34
  experience of getting to train on a Kaiser machine before at
• 44:39
  like spring training complexes because they have all that fancy
• 44:42
  stuff in any time I can create a new like peak force, IE like on
• 44:47
  Flexpro grip. Which truthfully is why we have
• 44:50
  to be kind of careful with guys doing Max effort work on Flexpro
• 44:55
  grip all the time, because then they want to PR constantly when
• 44:59
  it when it's a new force number, guys always want to PR but when
• 45:03
  it's holding for a new time duration.
• 45:05
  They don't like it. They don't really care.
• 45:07
  I, I don't know if you've thought about that at all, or
• 45:09
  you you even put any consideration into it, but I'd
• 45:13
  be curious of how you think that psychological piece can even
• 45:17
  play into the motivations of training and then the
• 45:20
  effectiveness that comes from it.
• 45:22
  Yeah, I'll start with kind of my senior college pitcher.
• 45:27
  I'll start with that perspective of like what do I like to do in
• 45:30
  training, experiment with and I think the best way I can
• 45:33
  describe it and the listeners I'm sure will know what we're
• 45:36
  referring to. But the kind of DAC a little bit
• 45:40
  of like some triphasic, some other stuff, but the whole idea
• 45:43
  of like a 5 minute slow lower or a 5 minute ISO.
• 45:47
  And I think there are benefits those that's a whole other
• 45:49
  conversation, but I'm bringing up because that is one of the
• 45:51
  hardest things to do ever is to get to 5 minutes, right?
• 45:55
  There's this whole if you could do a file, do a 5 minute slow
• 45:58
  lower ISO or five minute reverse lunge.
• 46:00
  And I find a lot of enjoyment in trying to get there right,
• 46:04
  because I'm a training nerd who loves to do weird stuff and try
• 46:08
  out stuff. But your average athlete is not
• 46:10
  going to enjoy getting told to sit in a position for a certain
• 46:14
  amount of time, right? Like, we are athletes, we are
• 46:16
  young, we like to move, we most of the time have terrible
• 46:19
  attention spans. And sitting in something for a
• 46:21
  period of time we're trying to even increase the time can get
• 46:25
  just tedious. It is hard to stay concentrated
• 46:27
  on it. And I think that kind of works
• 46:30
  also into why stuff like Impulses or even like Plios
• 46:33
  really took feel and grasp. And the idea of like plyo vilo
• 46:37
  is like the best way I can quantify it because plyo vilo in
• 46:41
  my mind. And some of these other kind of
• 46:44
  outcome based velocity or force results like you're saying with
• 46:47
  a flexible grip or a Proteus, Like we have a Proteus in KPI
• 46:49
  and guys are doing trunk rotation, trying to beat their
• 46:52
  trunk rotation power PR from last week.
• 46:55
  It allows for like a self challenge in a lot of ways.
• 46:58
  When you're doing a time based constraint, a lot of the times
• 47:02
  you can't increase the time or it's very hard to in the sense
• 47:05
  of you're doing a hard hold exercise or you're doing a
• 47:09
  sustained ISO. Unless you're really
• 47:11
  concentrated in a perfect mental state, not that fatigued, your
• 47:15
  time isn't going to go up that often.
• 47:16
  I think that's the first part I would kind of throw in there,
• 47:18
  right? Like time constraints generally
• 47:19
  in my mind have been harder to increase as easily and as
• 47:23
  competitively, if that makes sense, as force constraints And
• 47:27
  force constraints also give you to me a little bit brighter of a
• 47:29
  kind of warning light like a force play jump because we have
• 47:33
  our guys jump a lot of the time, right?
• 47:34
  Counter movement or squat jump. And like guys will notice I'm
• 47:37
  down, I'm down right now. What's going on?
• 47:40
  Why is my jump height down? And not saying jump heights the
• 47:42
  end all be all, but it gets them thinking right in the same way
• 47:45
  of an arm care test gets you thinking at all.
• 47:47
  Dang, that felt good. But I didn't produce as much
• 47:49
  force this week as I did last week or oh, I'm trending up and
• 47:52
  I didn't even feel good and I'm trending up.
• 47:53
  Like that must mean my trainings working in some sort of way.
• 47:56
  I think the force being a little bit more variable, I think it's
• 48:00
  the best way to say it week to week or day-to-day in training,
• 48:03
  gives the athlete that little extra sauce in interest.
• 48:07
  We're like, I think the best way to say like when you walk into a
• 48:10
  grip strength test, like or a jump or an impulse, it's like,
• 48:14
  all right, like we're going to see, we're going to see what the
• 48:16
  body can do today. Like is it going to be higher?
• 48:18
  I feel kind of weird, but maybe I can get a higher output or
• 48:21
  maybe I feel great and maybe it's a little lower and now I'm
• 48:22
  pissed off for a week and I'm going to go do it again and try
• 48:25
  and get a higher output for that little bit of variability that I
• 48:28
  just feel sometimes with time based things, you don't get as
• 48:31
  much of it. Like I failed.
• 48:33
  You could fail the same split squat week to week to week in a
• 48:36
  hold, or you could do the same dumbbell hold with the same
• 48:38
  weight for a couple of weeks and be like, all right, this still
• 48:40
  sucks at 20 seconds every time. Like I'm not getting any better
• 48:43
  at it. All of a sudden with force, it's
• 48:46
  much more drastic. It's wow, I'm down today or I'm
• 48:48
  up today, or maybe I'm right where I am today.
• 48:50
  Maybe I could put a little bit more into it and be up next
• 48:52
  week. It's kind of a mystery in that
• 48:54
  way where you step into a force based outcome metric and it's
• 48:59
  really more of a mystery of what it's going to be and that gets
• 49:01
  you interested in trying to be better at it.
• 49:03
  I'm caught stuttering because I am in agreement with you and I'm
• 49:07
  just kind of breaking it down on my end.
• 49:10
  Yeah, do you? Think you stated it really well
• 49:12
  when especially when you begin to bring up the time investment
• 49:17
  that it takes to beat a time threshold.
• 49:20
  Yes. I think about again my training
• 49:23
  today. You bring up a 5 minute ISO
• 49:25
  lunge. I did my first set today, I did
• 49:29
  90 seconds. My second set I did 90 seconds
• 49:31
  and then I did three more sets of 60 seconds.
• 49:34
  I don't necessarily feel like I can even engage for a second
• 49:39
  beyond that 90 right now, and that's less to do with physical
• 49:43
  capacity. And it's more to do with.
• 49:45
  I have been in this for long enough and I'm ready for
• 49:48
  something new yes. It is way more enjoyable to try
• 49:51
  to produce a ton of force than to average amount of force.
• 49:56
  And I think you then take the next steps and you you think
• 50:01
  about not just not just readiness and I guess this goes
• 50:07
  into what we've researched with flex grow grip.
• 50:09
  Yeah, there's there are some positive things that can come
• 50:12
  from yielding isometrics. But then when you look at the
• 50:15
  real kind of I guess it factor that can come from overcoming
• 50:20
  isometrics where you can get true objective data and you can
• 50:23
  look at trends, you can look at force.
• 50:25
  I feel like you can just make so many more judgments of where you
• 50:31
  are and that that drastic change.
• 50:34
  I think you stated really well. I I think that's a great point
• 50:37
  that the question mark or the enigma that comes with every
• 50:42
  single test is something that one, provides excellent feedback
• 50:47
  and two, kind of gets your heart racing in a good way.
• 50:49
  It gets you excited for the Oh my gosh, what am I going to be
• 50:53
  today and how will this impact me?
• 50:57
  Yeah, I know 100%. The last one I had, I just was
• 50:59
  thinking about this the time. I think that the strategy to PR
• 51:04
  too is an interesting thing to talk about here.
• 51:06
  We're like, right, a lot of times in time based or dealing
• 51:09
  isometrics, it's like, well, if you feel XYZ right, you might be
• 51:13
  able to hold it a little longer or try and feel this right.
• 51:15
  And those are to me, like in a rehab setting.
• 51:18
  I've done, I've had knee surgery, did a bunch of stuff
• 51:20
  like that for quad activation, hip stuff that works when you
• 51:24
  need to turn on a so as again, right, or something's been off.
• 51:27
  But in the sense of actual training, it is a lot easier to
• 51:30
  be like, all right, figure out a way to produce more force in
• 51:33
  this than it is to say, feel this thing and then feel this
• 51:37
  thing for a minute, right? And just kind of hold and linger
• 51:40
  in this one feeling for a minute.
• 51:42
  That's a very, that's a hard, both mental and physical task to
• 51:46
  give someone, especially a younger athlete, especially a
• 51:48
  high school or novice athlete, right?
• 51:50
  Whereas, all right, do you figure out a way to do this
• 51:53
  right? Like maybe your feet are a
• 51:54
  little offset at that time. I don't care.
• 51:56
  Try and get more force out of this one, right?
• 51:57
  And like that by itself just opens up the field, I think to
• 52:01
  guys believing in themselves a little bit more to be able to
• 52:04
  actually do it and PR or at least figure out a way to not PR
• 52:08
  right, like I did that way. And that was lower.
• 52:10
  So that doesn't work, you know, but at least now we're now we
• 52:13
  got the the gears kind of clicking and we've started the
• 52:16
  journey of kind of progressing. I feel like once again it goes
• 52:19
  back to the meme. It's just closer to sport, like
• 52:22
  the way you. It's just closer to.
• 52:23
  Something it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, success
• 52:28
  is success and failure is failure.
• 52:30
  So the the position doesn't necessarily matter.
• 52:33
  Of course, now when we tie it back into a study and we're
• 52:36
  trying to look at. The very specifically.
• 52:38
  Sure it does. Yeah, it does.
• 52:39
  But when we go out on the baseball field, it wouldn't
• 52:42
  matter if you threw the ball. I don't know.
• 52:45
  You weren't facing the batter ever if you didn't see what you
• 52:48
  pitched. It wouldn't matter if you tossed
• 52:50
  the ball underhand if you had a zero era like.
• 52:53
  No, and it doesn't. And that's the thing with the
• 52:55
  impulse thing that was so funny to me is that it doesn't matter,
• 52:59
  right? You're trying to get a force
• 53:00
  metric. It doesn't matter if you relax a
• 53:02
  little bit longer, you let the strap go farther back or if you
• 53:05
  held it a little bit longer, like the only thing you're
• 53:07
  looking at is how much force did that go?
• 53:09
  How much force that produce? And so you, you, I think you,
• 53:12
  you discover all these kind of new strategies and we could get
• 53:15
  into a whole motor learning conversation that I've dive very
• 53:18
  little into. But I'd love to read more on of
• 53:21
  like the ability to create variation in training and then
• 53:23
  how that translates over to a sport where it is so variable,
• 53:27
  like all sports are, right. And so I think that's definitely
• 53:30
  another aspect of it where it's just it legit gives you more
• 53:33
  opportunities to do different things in a kind of realm of a
• 53:36
  joint position we want to be in. Right, with the kind of constant
• 53:41
  being the load that you cannot overcome.
• 53:43
  Yeah, that you cannot overcome. So now at this point in the
• 53:47
  discussion, I think a decent spot to go is where would you
• 53:52
  want to go next? Forget about where you think the
• 53:56
  industry should go next, because let's face it, the simple answer
• 54:00
  is do it with more people. Do it with.
• 54:04
  Simple answers do it with more people.
• 54:06
  And over a longer period of time, those are the two simple
• 54:09
  ones. So I'm going to pluck those out
• 54:11
  of the decision making tree and challenge you a little bit.
• 54:15
  So given that those are kind of the obvious, where do you want
• 54:20
  to take it? So the first first like thought
• 54:24
  I had in mind and I researched a little bit out this for the
• 54:28
  discussion that's in the study, but it's figuring out especially
• 54:32
  I want I would want to do shoulder based impulses, right.
• 54:35
  So this was forearm and it was pronation supination.
• 54:38
  You could have also gone flexion, you know, deviations
• 54:42
  extension, but move it to the shoulder.
• 54:44
  Like that's the first one because everyone loves the
• 54:47
  shoulder and loves training and change the kind of ability
• 54:51
  change both the setup and the programming around the impulse.
• 54:55
  So like in this study, it was only an impulse, right or only a
• 54:58
  yielding ISO. I would much rather have kind of
• 55:01
  a baseline more traditional strength exercise in both
• 55:06
  training groups have a control group as well that is not doing
• 55:09
  any arm care. They are just throwing baseballs
• 55:11
  and lifting and having our more our kind of general.
• 55:15
  You could say I'm going to use forearm, for example, but like,
• 55:18
  let's say it's banded forearm work, right?
• 55:21
  Something very basic, very kind of traditional arm carry and
• 55:24
  then have one group that does these kind of impulse isometrics
• 55:28
  and then another group instead of doing yielding, does
• 55:31
  overcoming just basic isometrics.
• 55:33
  And so if we kind of talked about overcoming is kind of the
• 55:36
  golden ticket in that Moat. Like I would just say
• 55:39
  contraction regime, right? In the sense of we know that
• 55:42
  they can do a lot of cool stuff, but I'd want to combine them.
• 55:45
  I think that's the best thing going forward.
• 55:48
  Like I don't want to just isolate an impulse and isolate
• 55:50
  an isometric. Like we want to see how these
• 55:51
  things work in tandem and we want to see how they work and
• 55:55
  interact with each other, right? And so to do that, we have to
• 55:57
  have, first we have to have more groups.
• 55:59
  So you have to have a control, which I just didn't have access
• 56:01
  to. And we have to have a couple
• 56:02
  more guys and just more groups of, all right, I'm going to have
• 56:05
  an impulse and a shoulder isometric, and then I'm going to
• 56:08
  have band work and a shoulder isometric, and then I'm going to
• 56:12
  have just the shoulder isometric, right?
• 56:14
  For example, and see really like what is the interaction going on
• 56:17
  there in terms of like the nitty gritty This is, I don't even
• 56:21
  know if this is possible, but I wanted to throw it out there
• 56:23
  just to really see is there's a thing called high density EMG.
• 56:27
  So it's like EMG analysis, but it's more pads and they're like
• 56:31
  really, really small. It's been pretty recent in like
• 56:34
  this and forum engineering research to measure ballistic
• 56:37
  based tasks. So like typing and moving and
• 56:40
  like look at EMG analysis of how your fingers move and what's
• 56:43
  getting activated and what motor units are getting activated, all
• 56:46
  that good stuff. But hooking that up to an
• 56:48
  impulse of some kind and seeing what kind of EMG activity we
• 56:51
  could get from a flexion or for pronation or supination or
• 56:56
  shoulder if it's possible, right impulse.
• 56:58
  Because the main thing that I really kind of want to discover
• 57:02
  is like we know that in theory what these kind of ballistic
• 57:05
  overcoming isometrics can do, but what is actually happening
• 57:07
  at their neurological level? And what is happening to the
• 57:10
  electrical current getting sent to this place to do this task
• 57:13
  over and over again? Is it different than squatting
• 57:16
  or is it different than a 2 second down to second up?
• 57:19
  Is it different than a eccentric base contraction with like a
• 57:22
  three to one tempo, right? Like are these change literally
• 57:25
  changing the way our electrical signals and the way action
• 57:28
  potentials are reaching the motor units?
• 57:30
  Are they faster? Right?
• 57:31
  The idea, the hypothesis would be that impulses are going to
• 57:35
  give you really, really fast action potential discharge rate
• 57:39
  numbers. We're gonna see a lot of them
• 57:41
  pop up at a very specific time stamp in the exercise, but we
• 57:44
  don't know and I'd love to investigate that a little bit
• 57:47
  more. That's super intriguing.
• 57:50
  Yeah, I'm certainly I I say I'm on the edge of my seat.
• 57:53
  That's a that's a phrase because as I say, and I'm leaning back
• 57:56
  in my. Chair, but I.
• 57:57
  Promise you, I am excited. You might need to reach out to
• 58:00
  Doctor Brolinson again over at Virginia Tech.
• 58:02
  Yeah, put you guys in a text chain.
• 58:05
  But the reason I say that about Doctor Brolinson is he set us up
• 58:10
  at Virginia Tech to do fine wire EMG.
• 58:13
  Now I'm not gonna claim to be an EMG expert, but fine neither my
• 58:18
  fine wire involves actually sticking a needle or a node into
• 58:22
  the muscle belly to see how a contraction is happening.
• 58:26
  When I hear the high density EMG with the stickers you're talking
• 58:30
  about, it sounds like it is still surface level.
• 58:32
  Now I'm not going to comment on the efficacy of one versus the
• 58:35
  other, but I know fine wires to my understanding kind of the
• 58:40
  gold standard because it is actually in the muscle belly
• 58:43
  muscle. So so you can see the actual
• 58:46
  electrical like in within the muscle.
• 58:51
  That's so cool. Daryl, my my partner with
• 58:54
  Flexpro was our Guinea pig because I am afraid of needles.
• 58:58
  So Daryl volunteered gracefully to train on Flexpro while having
• 59:05
  or while undergoing the fine wire EMG.
• 59:08
  That enabled us to make some of the claims that we do with the
• 59:11
  preferential targeting of the FDP or the FDS or the FCU
• 59:15
  depending on the movements that we are making on Flexpro.
• 59:18
  It sounds like that is something that could be undertaken with
• 59:22
  these impulses. Granted, it kind of boils down
• 59:25
  the same system of I guess at the end of the day for the
• 59:29
  shoulder, it doesn't necessarily matter what muscles are
• 59:33
  producing the force if the body can handle and produce more
• 59:37
  because that's. It's yeah, that's kind of the
• 59:39
  dynamics are a little different than the elbow and the forearm,
• 59:41
  yeah. Right.
• 59:42
  Of course, it's such a broad system that's working to
• 59:45
  stabilize or produce force in that joint space.
• 59:49
  Regardless, it would be pretty awesome to know what muscles are
• 59:53
  doing what, and if then we could develop a more specific training
• 59:58
  regime for an individual based on the way their muscle tendon
• 1:00:02
  units are firing. Yeah.
• 1:00:04
  I also think kind of the future directions kind of broad goal if
• 1:00:09
  we get away from the very particular more to the actual
• 1:00:11
  application. It's like there isn't really a
• 1:00:14
  good system out on how to use impulses or programs.
• 1:00:17
  There there there are people you could talk to right, And if if
• 1:00:21
  you if you have them, but it's become such a fad.
• 1:00:25
  I want to say in a way where like most college baseball
• 1:00:28
  players who have Instagram have seen someone doing impulses and
• 1:00:30
  they're like may have a teammate who tries one, or maybe I'm
• 1:00:33
  going to deal with the TRX strap in the gym, like whatever.
• 1:00:36
  And I think the main thing is we can do as much of research as we
• 1:00:40
  want, but there is a baseline level of kind of education that
• 1:00:43
  I kind of hope to push out in the next couple of years with of
• 1:00:46
  course, like Casciola and DAC, I think have done a good job of it
• 1:00:49
  within their own personal brands and what they do with RTT,
• 1:00:53
  right? Especially Casciola has, and he
• 1:00:55
  has old guides you can go for anyone who wants to know, like
• 1:00:58
  Casciola has all these random videos saved away locked on his
• 1:01:01
  link tree. Go look at them.
• 1:01:02
  They're good. They explain a lot of the stuff
• 1:01:04
  that we're talking about here too.
• 1:01:06
  Kind of the big goal is that we can actually start recognizing
• 1:01:09
  this as a real training modality that can actually get programmed
• 1:01:12
  in a specific way that's not random or off the grid or
• 1:01:16
  pseudoscience. And that people can actually
• 1:01:19
  understand how to do it without having a biology degree, right?
• 1:01:22
  Like that's the other, I think big aspect of it is that this is
• 1:01:25
  it is complex in some programming ways.
• 1:01:28
  It also is pretty simple, but we need to clarify those things and
• 1:01:31
  get them to the right space and then into the right people's
• 1:01:34
  minds so that guys can actually implement them well and people
• 1:01:38
  can actually start using them for what they hopefully can
• 1:01:40
  bring to everyone. What are some other areas that
• 1:01:45
  you? Think the study could have been
• 1:01:47
  improved. So again, going outside of the
• 1:01:51
  have more people, have a control group which comes from more
• 1:01:55
  people and do it for a longer period of time.
• 1:01:58
  If you had endless funds and endless supply of people in 2020
• 1:02:05
  hindsight, how would you have changed your setup?
• 1:02:08
  I would change. I would OK.
• 1:02:10
  Well, of course there are a million things it's going to
• 1:02:12
  make the study look terrible, but it's that's why we do these
• 1:02:14
  things, right. First thing I would change is
• 1:02:17
  definitely the both MVIC test and grip strength test.
• 1:02:21
  So like the grip strength protocol we use was just arm
• 1:02:23
  cares on one knee with their finger positioning, which I
• 1:02:27
  think was I mainly use it because guys were familiar with
• 1:02:29
  it. So it did not the variation was
• 1:02:31
  lower. It's easy to implement and so I
• 1:02:34
  didn't want guys. Doing it for the first time for
• 1:02:36
  this study. Right.
• 1:02:37
  And not knowing and like having completely different results
• 1:02:39
  just from a practice standpoint, but change that to both that
• 1:02:44
  grip, like both these two fingers but also other grips.
• 1:02:48
  I think that's the first thing I would do is add more grip
• 1:02:52
  strength tests that change the muscles we think are getting
• 1:02:54
  activated to see like what's actually happening.
• 1:02:57
  So we could have a grip strength test depending on positioning
• 1:02:59
  with arm care or even with Tendek.
• 1:03:01
  If you did a MVIC set up in a certain way, right, That maybe
• 1:03:04
  isolates 2 fingers, three fingers.
• 1:03:06
  Maybe the thumb is involved, maybe the thumb isn't involved.
• 1:03:09
  Maybe we're a neutral versus non neutral supination pronation,
• 1:03:12
  right? Like all of those little aspects
• 1:03:13
  of grip. I want to adjust a little bit, I
• 1:03:15
  think and add some more nuance into.
• 1:03:18
  I'd also adjust the MVIC setup because I, I mean, I could say I
• 1:03:22
  Jerry rigged it right around a pole with A10 deck and these
• 1:03:27
  connectors and carabiners and a, you know, a cuff that we use to
• 1:03:31
  pull. I ideally would want to use, I
• 1:03:33
  don't even know what it's called, but it's basically like
• 1:03:35
  a wheel with a very specific handle at a certain angle on it.
• 1:03:39
  And you can attach it to a setup in a similar way.
• 1:03:42
  And then all of a sudden the actual degrees of freedom of
• 1:03:44
  where your fingers and wrists are go down a lot more.
• 1:03:48
  And so could give us probably a more true MVIC number to then
• 1:03:52
  program off of. I think that would be the first
• 1:03:54
  thing. And also I would change the
• 1:03:58
  exercises. I would change for a nation and
• 1:03:59
  supination. I would go with wrist flexion
• 1:04:01
  risk extension and deviations on the radio simply because of like
• 1:04:05
  general, I'm sure you know it better than I do, right?
• 1:04:08
  But general literature pointing to muscle activation regimes and
• 1:04:11
  stuff like that, they would give it a little bit more clarity.
• 1:04:16
  I use grip, right, because it's relevant.
• 1:04:17
  But pronation and supination have these kind of other effects
• 1:04:20
  that we talked about that I didn't really get to touch on or
• 1:04:23
  really dive in on because we were really just trying to see
• 1:04:26
  like, did it do anything to grip as our one objective, you know,
• 1:04:29
  measure that could be in the study if we had some better MVIC
• 1:04:35
  data or some better MVIC setups to really test those things.
• 1:04:38
  Those would be the main 2. And I think the last one would
• 1:04:41
  be my like, again, if I were to do it again, all the dumbbells
• 1:04:47
  would just be harder. I would take the calculations I
• 1:04:49
  have and I would just add 2 1/2 lbs to each of them.
• 1:04:51
  Because a lot of those guys, I think just the dumbbell for
• 1:04:55
  whatever reason, like that position with the wrist in a
• 1:04:59
  certain way, with your shoulder in a certain way wasn't
• 1:05:02
  challenging enough. And we could explain that in a
• 1:05:04
  million, a million scientific ways, right?
• 1:05:06
  Which I had to in the results to explain these things, but comes
• 1:05:10
  down to like mess with that some more and find a yielding
• 1:05:13
  asymmetric or a more traditional isometric position that almost
• 1:05:17
  gets the same response of difficulty or the response of
• 1:05:21
  this is hard, this is tiring. Then the other groups do so that
• 1:05:25
  instead of well, we know that this group might have probably
• 1:05:27
  worked better because it was objectively probably harder.
• 1:05:31
  There's more of this kind of constant.
• 1:05:32
  These were both hard, which one actually did something.
• 1:05:35
  So, yeah, that would be among a million other things because
• 1:05:38
  these things, these things always pop in your head after
• 1:05:41
  you write the 10 pages of the study.
• 1:05:42
  Those would be the main components.
• 1:05:44
  Well, if you would have switched it to Flexion Extension.
• 1:05:47
  Or ulnar deviation? Radial deviation?
• 1:05:51
  No, I'm a little biased, but flex.
• 1:05:53
  Pro grip probably would be the. Ideal testing tool for For grip
• 1:05:56
  it might be. The ideal might be.
• 1:05:59
  Another piece here, this one. Popped in my head and I
• 1:06:01
  apologize. It feels like I am poking holes.
• 1:06:04
  Not the intention, it's more go ahead.
• 1:06:07
  Where where does your brain go from that last question?
• 1:06:10
  It really got me rolling so I'm proud of myself for asking it,
• 1:06:15
  but let's go. Do you think that the positive
• 1:06:20
  grip changes were caused by the actual improvements in pronation
• 1:06:27
  supination action or the intensity at which the
• 1:06:32
  individual had to hold the strap while they were performing the
• 1:06:36
  pronation supination action? Oh, that's a good question, I
• 1:06:40
  would say. I would say the intensity, but
• 1:06:44
  the intensity with the rhythm, I think would be like, why?
• 1:06:47
  Like why did this work in the sense of not like every Rep that
• 1:06:51
  was in the force threshold, right?
• 1:06:54
  And the idea of, oh, that improved pronation action from
• 1:06:57
  that Rep being in the force threshold, like that's not
• 1:07:00
  necessarily why grip strength saw anything.
• 1:07:03
  It was like we're activating muscles that get used in grip
• 1:07:07
  strength really fast over and over again.
• 1:07:11
  And whether it's directly to the, you know, to the FDP muscle
• 1:07:15
  belly tendon or not, the entire complex is getting stressed in a
• 1:07:19
  way because of that acceleratory factor, right?
• 1:07:23
  So like I would call it almost the, the guy in, in the study, I
• 1:07:26
  call it the acceleratory phase into the overcoming phase.
• 1:07:29
  But the, the combination of those two things is in my mind,
• 1:07:33
  the main driver of any sort of adaptation, right?
• 1:07:35
  It's not necessarily that it was a number of reps or it was this
• 1:07:38
  specific joint position, like did the perfect thing for that
• 1:07:42
  muscle. It's more like we're probably
• 1:07:44
  turning on those muscles and we're turning them on hard
• 1:07:46
  enough that we might see something happen.
• 1:07:49
  And like you said, like I say, rhythm because a lot of times
• 1:07:52
  guys would kind of lose that overcoming section.
• 1:07:55
  Like if I had to say the biggest trope, like if she was like
• 1:07:58
  bang, bang, relax, bang, relax and not actually able to like
• 1:08:02
  sit for that half second to a second in the actual overcoming
• 1:08:05
  isometric. Once guys did that, the test got
• 1:08:09
  harder every single time. Like once there is an ability to
• 1:08:12
  sit in that and then rhythmically come back to it
• 1:08:15
  right into that position, actually pulling, not pulling to
• 1:08:18
  figure out kind of where the joint is.
• 1:08:20
  Because I think that's, it's like a preliminary phase of
• 1:08:22
  every impulse set, I would call it.
• 1:08:24
  That's just where the hell is my joint in space and what is it
• 1:08:28
  doing? And once you kind of get past
• 1:08:29
  that, as you, as you felt you get into this.
• 1:08:31
  OK, I, I can feel what this is doing.
• 1:08:33
  How much can I feel it? How much intensity can I drive
• 1:08:36
  through that half second? And that to me is really the the
• 1:08:39
  gold underneath it all. Yeah, that's, that's an
• 1:08:42
  interesting 1 and I think. That kind of stuck with me when
• 1:08:47
  I read your study initially and for whatever reason it escaped
• 1:08:51
  me for a bit. So I'm I'm glad it came back in
• 1:08:53
  the discussion because I do find it so interesting, even the
• 1:08:57
  selection of assessing grip strength, but performing
• 1:09:01
  pronation supination. And to be fair, that is kind of
• 1:09:04
  similar to the action of a throw.
• 1:09:07
  Pronation supination obviously is something that impacts
• 1:09:11
  performance, but the muscles of pronation and supination, the
• 1:09:17
  pronator teres, the pronator quadratus, and then your
• 1:09:20
  supinator don't really have an impact on grip strength.
• 1:09:25
  However, when you throw or when you're gripping something, IE
• 1:09:29
  the impulses that you did, or when you're whipping a ball
• 1:09:32
  through, we said we weren't going to talk about it, but
• 1:09:35
  through early acceleration, late acceleration, arm cocky, full
• 1:09:40
  release, maximum external rotation in.
• 1:09:43
  The ball release into deceleration.
• 1:09:44
  When you're doing those things, the pronator Terry's and your
• 1:09:49
  supinator like those things are fired up like they they are
• 1:09:53
  having to work that. That was just an observation
• 1:09:57
  that I had. So I I'm sure that's why now
• 1:10:01
  when you look at like the 2020 hindsight, why you'd prefer to
• 1:10:05
  do flexion extension versus all new deviation no that.
• 1:10:10
  That and also. Is funny because I.
• 1:10:12
  Initially I was like I'm going to do this Jerry rigged MVIC
• 1:10:15
  test and that's going to be the primary outcome and all the arm
• 1:10:18
  care is going to be secondary. And what I realized is that
• 1:10:21
  unfortunately, the guys who are doing impulses with the strap
• 1:10:26
  that conveniently is very similar to the strap that you
• 1:10:28
  use for pronation and supination MVIS.
• 1:10:31
  We're way better at it than the guys who held dumbbells for four
• 1:10:34
  weeks in the research world, right?
• 1:10:35
  Like you don't want to give any group an advantageous position
• 1:10:39
  on a like pre post test because it gives them that advantage and
• 1:10:43
  the impulse guys. And again, that's why I kind of
• 1:10:45
  mentioned that bar set up being different.
• 1:10:48
  They were they were gripping. It was a little bit different,
• 1:10:50
  right? They're doing an overcome,
• 1:10:51
  they're doing an overcoming ISO. It's not an impulse, but they're
• 1:10:53
  gripping the same thing that they were gripping for every
• 1:10:56
  single set of impulses in a pretty similar way.
• 1:10:59
  And you saw that in the numbers and I, I think I, the numbers
• 1:11:03
  are in supplementary material. Like there's some guys who had
• 1:11:05
  like 20 LB increases on this overcoming isometric, not
• 1:11:08
  because they actually changed anything about their tissue
• 1:11:12
  quality, right? But probably because they were
• 1:11:15
  doing impulses for four weeks with the same strap, got into it
• 1:11:18
  for the second time ever. And we're like, oh, sweet, like
• 1:11:21
  let's go. I can RIP this.
• 1:11:23
  And for that reason, like I didn't include that in the data
• 1:11:25
  analysis because it would have skewed it a little bit and been
• 1:11:28
  like, Oh my gosh, the impulse strap works so well.
• 1:11:31
  Look at all these guys improving.
• 1:11:32
  And it's like, that's just not realistic.
• 1:11:34
  And that's kind of, I remember shout out the episode last week
• 1:11:37
  with Dylan. But the idea of like research
• 1:11:40
  for these things and practice not really confiding in terms of
• 1:11:44
  timeline because of how hard it is to really do good clinical
• 1:11:48
  research on training modalities for arm care and how long it
• 1:11:50
  takes for them to actually work or get published or whatever
• 1:11:53
  that process may be. And like kind of the example in
• 1:11:57
  this case where that experiment probably realistically might be
• 1:12:01
  do it again. But if it's happening in a big
• 1:12:03
  lab, that's like 2-3 years of trial and error, pretrials, post
• 1:12:08
  trials, pilot studies. And then maybe we get to an
• 1:12:10
  actual study that is really funded, right with data that
• 1:12:13
  works. And so I think it's a good
• 1:12:16
  example of kind of that that system and that flaw that we
• 1:12:19
  have in the application versus the testing and the verification
• 1:12:24
  and how like I kind of said, like there's it'd be awesome to
• 1:12:27
  get published. I hope I do, but I want guys to
• 1:12:30
  do impulses, right. Getting published can hopefully
• 1:12:32
  help with that. But I want guys to do impulses
• 1:12:34
  and do them right and get better at baseball.
• 1:12:36
  So there is a little bit of fallacy in that.
• 1:12:40
  We're like, especially in this kind of setting, I'm sure you
• 1:12:43
  know, like you can nip, I can nitpick, I could design a whole
• 1:12:46
  another study and then nitpick that apart in two more weeks and
• 1:12:49
  find four more different things I could try.
• 1:12:51
  And we I'm trying to find myself next year ish in the last couple
• 1:12:54
  of months, trying to find a way to take the clinical and the
• 1:12:58
  applicable and kind of give an actual reason to someone like we
• 1:13:02
  are today. Because it is kind of construed
• 1:13:05
  in the data and down in the testing strategies and human
• 1:13:08
  research objectives and all of those kind of good clinical
• 1:13:12
  things. And it kind of clouds the real
• 1:13:15
  stuff that you can actually take away.
• 1:13:17
  After nitpicking for a little bit from my side, I'm not going
• 1:13:20
  to come. Back in in support of even what
• 1:13:23
  you alluded to on the podcast with Dylan, the separation of
• 1:13:27
  what's good research versus what actually has effects in the real
• 1:13:31
  world. And although you said in
• 1:13:34
  research you never want to give a group an advantage on testing
• 1:13:40
  and basically something that would cause a problem in the
• 1:13:44
  data analysis. Yes, Although your group who did
• 1:13:48
  the impulses had the advantage of being better at the testing
• 1:13:52
  because it was very similar to the training that they just did.
• 1:13:56
  I want to also look at this from the other side of did they get
• 1:14:02
  2020 kilograms? Yeah, 20 lbs.
• 1:14:06
  It's £20.20. Pounds.
• 1:14:08
  Did they get 20 lbs stronger? Although you said no, they
• 1:14:11
  didn't, from a certain lens you could say whether they did or
• 1:14:16
  didn't. It doesn't.
• 1:14:16
  Matter because what? They what they were able to
• 1:14:19
  access is a neuromuscular pathway to create the amount of
• 1:14:23
  force that they didn't have previously.
• 1:14:26
  And although that might not be something that you can publish
• 1:14:29
  on, that still matters tremendously when it comes to
• 1:14:33
  real world application. Forget about getting it
• 1:14:35
  published. That's when it matters to
• 1:14:37
  coaches and that's when it matters to players because
• 1:14:41
  coaches don't care about clinical trials.
• 1:14:44
  They care. Did it work or did it not work?
• 1:14:47
  And if the testing looks like the training and the training
• 1:14:49
  looks like the testing, for all they care, that's actually
• 1:14:52
  probably better because then it's easier for them to
• 1:14:54
  reproduce and they know that their guys can't screw it up.
• 1:14:57
  So my God, this is easy. Yeah, I just wanted to make
• 1:15:00
  sure. That we address that point.
• 1:15:03
  Because although we talked about it just minutes ago as a
• 1:15:06
  negative or a potential like sticking point to an extent also
• 1:15:11
  can be looked at as an extreme positive for our baseball
• 1:15:15
  performance world. And I, I would say personally
• 1:15:18
  like I'm 20. One right, and I'm a senior and
• 1:15:20
  I play baseball and I try and help my teammates, but it, it
• 1:15:24
  feels it's, it's like 2 different realms of being yeah,
• 1:15:28
  in, in terms of what what is actually happening on the field
• 1:15:31
  and what can get my boy's shoulder to work.
• 1:15:34
  And what I'm writing in Page 10 of 6 months in, it's a struggle.
• 1:15:38
  And I I commend the people who balance it.
• 1:15:40
  And I'm trying to learn that myself.
• 1:15:42
  It will be very, very difficult for someone who.
• 1:15:45
  Gets it because they play and coach versus someone who has to
• 1:15:50
  apply it to get published. Those are two very, very
• 1:15:54
  different things and we see that time and time again.
• 1:15:57
  It's one of the things that I struggle with when I do all the
• 1:16:01
  monthly journal clubs with ASMI and I'm hearing all the
• 1:16:06
  discussions are about how well was the study performed, not
• 1:16:11
  what can we garner from the research.
• 1:16:13
  I don't know. No, I don't care.
• 1:16:16
  I'm I'm a coach at heart. And I want.
• 1:16:18
  My players to be better, so that's always going to be where
• 1:16:21
  I hang my hat. It's also as a player, it's
• 1:16:24
  like. Sue me, man, these dudes loved
• 1:16:27
  impulses and they felt like they got stronger.
• 1:16:29
  So maybe they did get stronger. Like that's, that's the other
• 1:16:32
  element. Exactly.
• 1:16:33
  That's why I, I brought it up so much in the podcast and I, I
• 1:16:36
  even wrote it in the study, which is funny because you're
• 1:16:38
  not supposed to write this in studies, but I did anyways
• 1:16:40
  because it was important. It was that guys reported
• 1:16:44
  feeling more challenged. It was genuinely harder.
• 1:16:48
  And it was like, fuck, this is hard.
• 1:16:51
  This is a hard thing I'm getting told to do.
• 1:16:53
  And it's in a study and it's, I signed a, you know, waiver for
• 1:16:56
  intent, but it's actually hard and it's challenging me.
• 1:16:59
  And that is by itself a result, right?
• 1:17:02
  Like without any numbers in any direction.
• 1:17:04
  Like do you do impulses the right way they can be
• 1:17:07
  challenging your athletes. That's a good take away that you
• 1:17:09
  can have and actually apply as opposed to the Cohen's D
• 1:17:13
  efficient after a home spawn Feroni correction, right?
• 1:17:16
  Like why does that matter? Why does that matter to pick
• 1:17:20
  your coach? At Mid America University.
• 1:17:24
  Exactly. Exactly.
• 1:17:25
  It doesn't and from experience. At Mid America University, it
• 1:17:28
  really doesn't. You need to.
• 1:17:30
  You need results and you need things that guys can see and
• 1:17:33
  understand in the level that isn't some complex academic
• 1:17:37
  hooey. Phooey, right, right.
• 1:17:40
  So Nick, now before I let you. Go.
• 1:17:43
  Did we miss anything? Is there anything else you need
• 1:17:45
  to get off your chest? We've talked about this for now,
• 1:17:48
  over an hour. We've been crushing it and time
• 1:17:51
  has absolutely flown by. At least it has on my end.
• 1:17:54
  I don't know. It has here too.
• 1:17:55
  I guess. I don't know if it's final.
• 1:17:56
  Question, but is there anything we haven't?
• 1:17:58
  Covered that you feel like we need to I would say, and you're
• 1:18:02
  going to you're going to be like.
• 1:18:03
  Stop. But I just need to shout out
• 1:18:05
  Adam and Cassiola and Dylan, all these three specific guys,
• 1:18:10
  because I kind of use all of them as a resource throughout
• 1:18:13
  this process. And I told Adam before, but
• 1:18:16
  there is a single professor at my university who is really
• 1:18:19
  anatomy, Physiology based. And I love my school and I love
• 1:18:23
  all the professors I have, but these guys have been my resource
• 1:18:27
  in that sense. I didn't have an advisor or
• 1:18:28
  someone I could bounce ideas off of or tell me I'm wrong.
• 1:18:31
  I had Adam over text or Dylan over text or Kaskiola calling
• 1:18:36
  and yelling at me on the phone. That was why I could do this
• 1:18:38
  project. That's why I am still working on
• 1:18:41
  this. And it took me that long to do
• 1:18:42
  because I want to do it right because of all these people
• 1:18:45
  influencing me. But I just wanted to extend a
• 1:18:46
  thank you out to all of them, including you, Adam, for helping
• 1:18:50
  me out. Well, thank you so much, Nick.
• 1:18:52
  It really does mean. A lot.
• 1:18:54
  And it was awesome to be a part of the process from the first
• 1:18:58
  time you kicked the idea my way to.
• 1:19:02
  I don't know, I'm sitting in the room right now where I just
• 1:19:05
  paste back and forth on the phone with you trying to figure
• 1:19:09
  out what you could look at, how you could do it.
• 1:19:11
  And of course, I'm. I'm not the brain behind this.
• 1:19:13
  You just hit me with ideas. You tell me how you want to
• 1:19:17
  measure impulses. Like, wow, gosh, like nobody's
• 1:19:19
  done that, dude. That's going to be
• 1:19:21
  groundbreaking. Yeah, let's do it thing I said
• 1:19:23
  on the. It's the same thing I said on
• 1:19:25
  the. Podcast last week.
• 1:19:26
  It will not matter what your results are because you are
• 1:19:30
  going to be the first person, you are going to be the pioneer
• 1:19:33
  that sets the pathway for future research.
• 1:19:37
  So I, I commend you like crazy man for taking this on it.
• 1:19:40
  It really is awesome. And whether you get published or
• 1:19:44
  not, to me that that's not where the success is.
• 1:19:47
  Where the success is, is that you did something that nobody
• 1:19:51
  else has done and you are setting the framework for how
• 1:19:53
  the industry is going to look at this forever.
• 1:19:56
  Yeah. And I guess it's perfect final
• 1:19:59
  point because. I've been been working at KPI
• 1:20:01
  for a long time and I'm going to continue working there after I
• 1:20:04
  graduate in the spring. But it's exciting because we had
• 1:20:07
  some openings. I'm going to be pretty much
• 1:20:09
  strength rehab full time coordinator there.
• 1:20:11
  And so goal is to try to apply some of this stuff into tangible
• 1:20:15
  actual training practices in the next 6:00-ish months, 6 to 10
• 1:20:19
  months and share it and get it out there to people.
• 1:20:22
  So I'm looking forward to that as well.
• 1:20:24
  I know the study isn't officially.
• 1:20:28
  Out there yet, but if people have questions, can they reach
• 1:20:31
  out to you? Yes, I would love questions
• 1:20:34
  about the study. Feel free to reach out, it
• 1:20:36
  should be on some sort of either personal website, sub stack
• 1:20:40
  medium in the next like week or so just for people to see it.
• 1:20:44
  I kind of wanted to attach it to this podcast so people can
• 1:20:47
  actually read what I'm writing, but it's also there's some stuff
• 1:20:50
  about it on my LinkedIn that I posted about over the last like
• 1:20:53
  6 months. If if you want to read some more
• 1:20:55
  about it there. But yes, please feel free to
• 1:20:57
  reach out e-mail, phone number, whatever.
• 1:20:59
  Instagram doesn't matter. Yeah.
• 1:21:01
  So what are the the social? Yeah, you just so.
• 1:21:04
  Your new performance training I did.
• 1:21:06
  Just create created a. Performance training account
• 1:21:08
  called. Cats dot performance normal
• 1:21:11
  Instagram is Nick with two KS dot Katz Katz.
• 1:21:15
  Feel free to hit me up on either.
• 1:21:18
  But yeah, I'm, I'm excited to start pumping out some stuff,
• 1:21:20
  man. I've been inspired.
• 1:21:21
  Adam's been doing all these training compilations, training
• 1:21:24
  compilations on the personal Instagram.
• 1:21:25
  I got to start pumping those out.
• 1:21:26
  So yeah, I would love to answer questions and should be out
• 1:21:30
  there soon. That's the other thing.
• 1:21:32
  Should be out in the world pretty soon.
• 1:21:34
  Well, this has been amazing, Nick.
• 1:21:36
  I appreciate. You breaking it down and doing
• 1:21:38
  it for the baseball performance community, not giving us the
• 1:21:43
  information on the Cohen's D and all the other fancy things that
• 1:21:47
  I go to sleep whenever I read. 100%.
• 1:21:49
  Thank you for having me of course man.
• 1:21:52
  And I'm glad the layback community.
• 1:21:54
  Finally got to see you and hear from you as you've been
• 1:21:57
  mentioned a couple Times Now. But of course, to the layback
• 1:22:00
  community, thanks for laying back with us.