The Dynamic Effort Method For Strength?: Part II
This is part two of a three part series focusing on Louie Simmons’ dynamic effort method which is typically utilized within a conjugate template. In part 1 we went over why you may be struggling to see any real gains in strength from the dynamic effort method with your athletes as well as why the strength “gains” you do see aren’t necessarily applicable for anything outside of the lift itself, much less to the field of play. Today we’re going to focus on the different adaptations that we can gain from this method, and how to manipulate it to suit your needs.
Increasing Speed Endurance
While speed in athletics absolutely kills, speed endurance is an adaptation you should be chasing as well. When chasing speed endurance there’s really three ways to attain it:
Increase your overall endurance.
This will increase the likelihood of you being able to maintain your speed for longer. The adaptations we get from systemic increases in endurance won’t necessarily increase your speed, but it will create a smaller drop off over the course of your shifts and games.
Increase your speed
If you’re able to get faster, the typical drop off we get throughout play will still happen. The difference is that this drop off will still leave you performing at higher speeds later on. What I mean by this is that if we experience a 15% drop off in speed (completely pulling this out of my ass) from the beginning of a shift/play to the end of it that 15% drop off will still happen but if we’re starting at a higher speed, we’ll finish at a greater speed. To make the numbers easy, if I’m able to run at 10 mph in the beginning, by the end of the play/shift I’ll be running 8.5 mph. If I’m able to run 20 mph at the beginning of the shift/play, by the end of it I’ll be running 17 mph. While I didn’t actually increase my speed endurance, I get a similar net outcome.
Actually Increase your speed endurance
This seems like a no brainer and almost redundant as a way to increase your speed endurance but it’s really the only way to ACTUALLY maintain your speed better over the course of a game. The above two can help, but you’ll still experience a drop off over time. In reality the three of these work hand in hand and a real program that works will contain all three of them.
For this article we’re going to focus on the third bullet point up there, actually increasing speed endurance. That doesn't mean the other two aspects don’t have merit because they absolutely do (the second one more so than the first), but I think any program worth its salt needs to have somewhat of a focus on actually increasing speed endurance. And here in my gym, we use a modified dynamic effort method for this purpose.
So now the most important question: how do we train to increase our speed endurance? There are numerous ways from high volume sprints, to high volume jumps, to high volume olympic lifts and dynamic effort lower extremity work.
High Volume Sprints
Sprints are a high threshold movement skill. High volume sprints are OFTEN used when it comes to speed endurance. There’s a junior hockey program at the facility where I used to work and their coach has this whole presentation on how sprinting will help with this speed endurance. His team sprints with HIGH VOLUME in an effort to decrease the drop off in speed from the first to the third period. While I can absolutely understand his thought process and agree that his premise is not wrong I can say that I whole heartedly disagree with the training stimulus to acquire this particular adaptation. Here are the pros and cons of high volume sprinting.
High Volume Sprints - Pros
It’s 100% specific to the demands of what you’re chasing
While sprinting is higher in movement skill, just about anyone can sprint well enough to train with them
It takes almost no equipment
Many ways to progress from longer distances to higher volumes
Can be done in large groups
High Volume Sprints - Cons
It’s incredibly taxing on the CNS
It’s incredibly taxing on the soft tissue (mainly hamstrings and hip flexors)
Sprinting is a high skill movement skill —> chances of injury are high when fatigued
Eventually you’ll need a lot of space if your distances get high enough
Recovery time between sessions is HIGH so you’ll have to make concessions in other areas of your training
In my opinion high volume sprints are not the best way to tackle the question of speed endurance. Throughout my career when I’ve had athletes open up and sprint anything over 15-25 yards we end up seeing hamstring and hip flexor issues. The demand is just too high and top end/max velocity sprinting really isn’t all that common in sport anyways. Think about it, most sports are played in incredibly small areas and involve accelerating and decelerating a lot more than they involve opening up and covering long distances. Most athletes just aren’t prepared to spend that much time in this position. I, personally, believe that the costs far outweigh the benefits with higher volume sprints. I feel this way because I’ve seen it in real time and I’ve seen how much demand it places on the body and how hard they are to recover from. Again, while I understand the thought processes behind them, I do not agree that it’s even a good way to attain this adaptation, much less the best. Next up is high volume jumps.
High Volume Jumps
Jumps are another high threshold movement skill. They should be done in relatively low volume environments both in reps and in sets. On any given day training here at my gym my athletes may do upwards of 5 sets of 5 reps of any given jump we’re doing for the day. It can be slightly higher for lower intensity jumps like box jumps and slightly lower for higher intensity jumps like depth drop jumps. One thing never changes tho, and that’s that I’ll never have my athletes perform more than 6 in a set. It’s such a high movement skill exercise that when fatigued people will botch them pretty good and get way out of position. We don’t want to trash a movement pattern in an effort to gain another adaptation so we play it safe here and never use jumps as a conditioning tool or anything that resembles conditioning. This isn’t the case everywhere though. I’ve seen high volume jumps or even jumps for time in my stories and reels feed ALL THE TIME from sports performance/strength and conditioning coaches. I understand the thought process behind it because it’s similar to high volume sprints: you’re asking the athlete to replicate a high threshold movement repeatedly in an effort to expand the lactic/alactic envelope. But in reality you’re going to trash one movement pattern and increase your risk for injury in an effort to gain speed endurance. Here’s a list of pros and cons for higher volume jumps as a tool for increasing speed endurance:
High Volume Jumps - Pros
It’s pretty specific to the demands of the adaptations you’re chasing
It takes almost no equipment
It can be done in large groups with minimal space
Easy to progress with volume
While a higher movement skill, just about anyone can jump
Some jumps really aren’t all that taxing on the CNS
High Volume Jumps - Cons
High movement skill + fatigue = increased risk of injury in training
Lots of aspects of jumping are movement cues for other skills we perform on the field of play. Performing them in a fatigued state will change these movement cues and set you up to get hurt not in the gym, but on the field of play
It’s BORING
For the third time I’ll point out that it’s a solid way to incur yourself. This isn’t another bullet point, I just want to emphasize the fact that it’s a solid way to do it
Back when I was woking with the US Women’s Olympic Hockey Team we also worked with the IIHF U18 Women’s national program. They didn’t have quite as many camps as the senior national team, but they would train during the summer in Minnesota and then in Lake Placid and we would see them again for camp before the U18 World Championships right before Christmas. Their head strength coach was a guy by the name of Jeremy Hoy. I really enjoyed my time with him, he’s an incredibly smart strength coach and he did a really good job with the limited amount of time he got with those girls. One of the tests he used was a vertical jump test on a jump mat. They did a single jump, a 3 jump and a 5 jump test. The five jump test ended up being the biggest indicator of acceleration speed on the ice, even more so than the 10 yard spring that we did. The way this test worked was to take the original jump from the single jump test and measure it against the 5th jump on the five jump test. The majority of the girls jumped somewhere between 23 and 25 inches with a few outliers on either side. The girls who were able to see a lower drop off from jump one to jump five were ALWAYS the fastest skaters as long as their first jump was between that 23 and 25 inch mark. This makes total sense because as long as their base levels of power/strength are high enough, someone with a lower drop off is going to be able to replicate that same effort over and over again leading to faster speeds.
With this knowledge how do you think you would work to make these young girls fair better in this test? A LOT of coaches would see it and think since the test was jumps and it had a big indicator of speed we should work to increase their jump height over spans of time. High volume jumps would be the route a lot of coaches would take. HOWEVER, the jump test is just an indicator of their wattage production endurance. They’re not skating faster because they’re able to jump higher for longer, they’re able to skate faster AND jump higher for longer BECAUSE their strength/speed endurance is higher. We should work to expand that envelope but we’ve got to break it down to what it actually is and jumps are only an indicator of speed capability, not the reason. Moral of the story: stop using predictors/indicators of capabilities on the field of play as THE training modality to achieve those capabilities. They can be part of the solution, PART of it. Next we’re going to move onto high volume olympic movements.
High Volume Olympic Lifts/Variations
With the explosion of Crossfit a little over a decade ago you’ve no doubt seen the various WODs used in the training of Crossfit “athletes”. They’re typically categorized with high volume EVERYTHING but where my beef with it lies is with the higher volume Oly lifts or Oly lifts for time (which end up being higher in volume in the end). I’m not going to give you a pros and cons list because honestly there aren’t any pros here, it would just be a list of cons. The only real thing I have to say about high volume Oly lifts is that they’re highly technical movement skills and doing them in a fatigued state won’t only cue you into bad positions on the field of play, but you also put yourself at an incredibly high risk of getting injured in your training. We can control all the variables in your training so you should never get hurt in the gym. Stay far away from high volume Olympic lifts and do them to your own detriment.
Modified Dynamic Effort Method Work
This is where we’ll get into the meat of what you’re here for! But sadly, you’re gonna have to come back later this week to get your answer. The next and final installment of this series will lay out how I use this method with my athletes throughout their training. From volume to intensity to rest periods and even movement manipulations it’ll all be here on your screen for you to see.
The biggest thing I want you to take away from this writing is that indicators of on the field success aren’t necessarily the modalities that you want to use in your training. For example the jumps being an indicator of speed on the ice with the national team. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the cause. They’re both byproducts of strength/speed endurance and they’re both completely separate movement skills. You can think that jump height replication creates faster on ice speeds, but if you can’t also say that faster speeds on the ice creates more jump height replication then they’re not causative of each other. We don’t use on ice sprints to help basketball players jump higher for longer, so we shouldn’t take a jump test and create training to replicate it. We have to break both down and say “what would help increase both of these?” and THAT is where our training should start. We’ll see ya next week!
