I had a high school athlete this summer who made some incredible improvements. Started with an EUR assessment and found he was fairly symmetrical, 40.2cm compared to 39.6cm (EUR of 1.01). Pretty clear that the lowest hanging fruit to increase eccentric strength. The plan was to attack with Eccentric loading all summer. We had three phases, each one progressing from more isolated eccentric to eccentric-concentric to concentric. We wanted to peak for a pre-season he had with his hockey club.
The most important aspect of this program was to increase body mass. We took him from 178lbs in May to 190lbs by the end of July. This is all for not, if he felt as though you couldn’t move on the ice.
Jump height went up throughout the summer
RSI-Mod went up throughout the summer
Peak Power per Body Mass (my favorite metric) went up throughout the summer
P1 (Concentric Initiation) went up throughout the summer
The take-home is I can say that an almost myopic focus on eccentric loading led to improvement in CMJ. I have talked about this in a Previous Blog: Applying Strength Deficit to Mixed Sports. There can be a bit of indecision on where to go with an athlete that does not have a clear eccentric or concentric demand in their sport or position. With an athlete who plays a ‘mixed sport’ and is clearly very concentrically biased with a 1.01 EUR, the plan is clear – FOCUS ON ECCENTRIC.
The message when you do not know, pull them toward the middle. Here is an athlete who has plateaued in gaining weight. I hypothesize that this was clearly a low ceiling problem – he could only go so far concentrically. I was going to be judged primarily by gaining weight, so focusing on increasing TUT with eccentric contractions, which has the longest time to failure rate at a given intensity, was going to help. The other component was P1 and RSI-Mod, not being where it should be for an athlete of that caliber. Bottom line, he was not using an eccentric load effectively before a concentric action.
Of note, he was not able to do a pull-up before coming to me. He finished the summer doing a chin-up with 27.5lbs. Add that to his 12lb weight gain, that is 40lb improvement. I find eccentric strength is incredibly important for relative strength exercises like dips and pullups. You cannot adjust weight as easily as you can TUT, which makes time a more valuable variable to toggle.