Introducing The Elite

I’m going to share with you what I believe is potentially the most important lesson that any strength coach or athlete can learn. I wish I’d learned more about this in school. I wish it had been a key subject.

I wish there had been a whole semester about it at university. This concept is the foundation of athletic performance and the key to understanding why there are so many injuries in sport.

Overcoming tendon issues is a true blessing and gift, and yet many athletes are suffering.

Once you arm yourself with this knowledge only the elite few have discovered, you’ll unlock new levels of ability and free yourself from injury.

A break dancer jumping on one hand is an example of extreme tendon ability!

Strength can't do this.

There's obviously balance and skill involved in this as well but for the most extreme performance, extreme tension is necessary, and the tendons are the body’s tool to deal with that tension.

Stefan Holm, the highest jumper, relative to his own height, measured on a high jump. Though there may be some bigger jumpers in the dunking or parkour world, Stefan has the best bounce among Olympians.

He has amazing fluency! Look at the ease with which he gets over hurdles as tall as him.

No amount of powerlifting is going to facilitate this level of athleticism. Yes, we need to strength train, but the tendons are essential.

Elite-level performance and durability just not possible without extreme tendon ability.

Phenomenal.

Again, this man is the highest jumper in history, relative to his body height.

181 centimeters. 5’11”

He’s not meant to be able to do that!

How can you do that?

Let's take it to the other end of the spectrum, to heavy athletes: enter Werner Günthör. I watched this tape in my early 20s, put onto it by Hayden Knowles. I watched it over and over! Seeing a big guy like this so fluid in his movement was incredible.

Werner was a shot putter, and there's a huge emphasis placed on tendon ability in this sport. Even the slowest & heaviest powerlifters value the ability to store energy in the tendon and release that energy as needed.

At 2m tall and 128kg (6'7", 282lbs), this is a big guy!. This is what we need to be aiming for with heavy athletes. They still should have that tendon ability.

If we can place it as a priority, if we can understand its importance, then we can start to reap the power of extreme tendon ability. Additionally, we need to be considering fascia, ligaments, & bone as well! All of these structures need to be able to deal with extreme forces. They're all adaptable, but they adapt much more slowly than muscles. The majority of people training today only think about training muscles and perhaps cardiovascular performance. They're completely blind to the benefits of focusing on these biological systems designed to absorb and produce massive amounts of force!

Watch the video as he goes through his whole regime preparation for arm wrestling. This is how he trains. He's done more than 80-kilo partial curl and he talks about training the bones in his hand. He talks about getting creaking in the joints, where the bone is literally considered breaking. You can feel it on other wrestlers.

What’s interesting is he's training three times a day in preparation, even when he's got a competition coming up. Sometimes in sets of 50, sometimes in sets of three.

You'll see him even bouncing these weights, when he's got, 60, 70, 80 kilos on these pulleys, and they're jerking and bouncing. In these movements, the momentary force that's there is extremely high and only tendons, only connective tissues can deal with these things.

These are the extremes of tendon loading, ligaments, fascia, and bone. How much can these structures adapt? How should we be training them? More questions than answers.

Finally, lets look at the man himself, Knees Over Toes Guy, Ben Patrick, jumping,

It's all the bones of the feet, as well as the tendons and the ligaments. The jump height is based on the tendons, the ability to receive all that force going through all of those structures.

Someone might be able to squat three times body weight, even four times body weight. Those forces will never equal the instantaneous forces in that jump.

Tendons are where elite performance happens, then how does it all mix together? If tendons are the foundation for extreme performance, how we look after those tendons is what we're also going to answer in this one today. Tendons. Let's think of them as adaptive springs. If you look at the foam on the left, the memory foam, if we look at the natural latex on the right, maybe this is a trained tendon versus an untrained tendon.

With the trained tendon being on the right, the ability to give back and to utilize the force that is being received is what we really need to be able to develop.

It's then muscles and momentum that are going to load these springs. If we accept the tendon as being a biological adaptive spring, then it's muscles or momentum that are going to load those springs.

If we look back to the Stefan Holm example, he doesn't necessarily have to have amazing acceleration and deceleration. He wouldn't have been terrible, but he doesn't have to be amazing in those things because you can slowly build up to the launch in the high jump.

When momentum is allowed even on 100-meter sprints etc., we'll see some of the guys are quite thin, that's because they don't need to be able to stop and start.

For a shot put, more muscle is needed. For weightlifters, more muscle is needed. The tendons are always still the foundation for extreme performance. We need that tendon ability. This is why bodybuilders can't perform much in jumps and weightlifting when the tendons are required because of that tendon ability, they're on that memory foam, and the bodybuilder is the memory foam. The phenomenal athlete is that natural latex.

As a strength coach, like Charles Poliquin, who put a lot of muscle mass on people. He gave them the ability to load these springs. His athletes already had healthy springs because they were already competing at the highest level in their sport. Adding muscle to them, helped them to load abilities that they already had.

Men run faster than women on average. 16-year-old boys run faster than 14-year-old boys. This is because of force. This is because of muscle. This is because of the ability to put load into these springs.

We always want to tend towards those qualities.

Both muscle and tendons are extremely important, and we have to look at how much momentum can contribute to this. If momentum can contribute a lot, then we don't need that much muscle but if the body has to get it done to initiate the loading into the tendons, then we need the muscles.