But the most important thing that you can do
as a weightlifter is literally do the motor control,
the motor coordination warm -up. Already lifting
to absolute maximum and going to reasonably heavy
weight. Might not be the weight you use on the
platform, but reasonably heavy. And if you do
something else, you can seriously affect it.
Hi Tony, welcome to Evidence Strong Show. If
you could briefly introduce yourself. Yeah, hi
everyone. Yeah, it's great to be here. Thanks
for the invitation. Thank you. My name is Tony
Blazovic. I'm a professor in biomechanics, although
these days I do quite a lot of research also
in the neurophysiology space. In the biomechanics
space, I guess I work mostly in understanding
how muscles function, and that's why, of course,
we have to have the nervous system involved.
Although in athletes, I also work at the whole
body level, how to run, how to change direction,
how to move, and of course, all the strength
and conditioning aspects to that. So I guess...
Primarily, I'm a researcher and a teacher in
academia, but I'm lucky enough to continue to
work with athletes on the side. All right. And
today we're diving into post -activation potentiation
and post -activation performance enhancement.
So let's define the terms so we are on the same
page. Yeah, good idea. You know, maybe... A hundred
years ago or more, it was already recognized
that if you electrically activate a muscle once,
you get a certain force. And if you activate
it a second time, we get more force. And it's
taken about a hundred or so years to understand
exactly why that's the case. But right down at
the molecular level, when actin and myosin cross
bridges in your sarcomeres are generating these
forces, we seem to get a little bit more force
because we get some more cross bridges between
the actin and the myosin attaching. if you've
already done a contraction before. And we might
call that... classic potentiation that force
is potentiated so it's higher and you can see
that in the muscle itself now there's still some
debate around the exact mechanisms and everything
else but you know we can we can discuss that
if you really really want to on the other side
of the coin you know a lot of people then say
well if the muscle generates a bit more force
after the second or third contraction maybe we
can do that as well in normal human movements
like when we're warming up we might be able to
do these funky high force contractions and then
when we do something after it that requires force
or power, maybe we're going to be better. And
a lot of people call that potentiation as well.
So it gets a little bit confused between real
life, whole human potentiation and this little
molecular thing happening in our muscles. So
maybe about five or six years ago, a group in
Canada decided to call it performance enhancement
rather than potentiation, just to distinguish
it. So what we call post activation. Performance
enhancement or PAPE is really that sort of global
improvement in performance you get if you've
done something a bit tough before it. So most
of the time in weightlifting or in the gym, we're
talking about... performance enhancement, that
P -A -P -E thing. Let's say you're a weightlifter.
Your job is to stand on a platform with a very
heavy weight and somehow get it from the ground
to above your head. That doesn't just require
maximal muscle strength, okay? Because what you
need to do is induce momentum or velocity in
the bar. Because at some point you need to do
essentially two or three phases of lifting. And
in order to, for example, to get underneath the
bar, you need the bar to keep going upwards like
a projectile, like a ball being thrown. To give
it that speed to keep going up against gravity
while you then duck underneath it to do the second
or next phase of belief, we talk about needing
muscle power more than pure strength. As a biomechanist,
I'd say power is a really difficult, complicated,
and often erroneous term. I would say we need
to give kinetic energy to the bar. We need more
energy in the bar. So the question is, how do
you do that? And let's be really clear here.
You need a nervous system that is appropriately,
but as maximally as possible, activating your
muscles. And just remember that in a really complicated
movement, it's not just a case of maximally activate
every muscle. You have to time the activations
and scale those activations to generate very
specific directions of force. It is a hugely
complicated task, which is of course why it takes
years or decades to get really good at it. The
next thing we need is then for the muscles to
do their job. That means, yes, they need to produce
a really high force, but they somehow need to
shorten very rapidly. And by the way, while they're
doing that, they're stretching and then allowing
the recoil. of elastic elements like tendons
to get extra kinetic energy or power into the
system. So we need the nervous system to do its
job. We need the muscles to do its job. Now let's
go back to how we get there besides the fact
that you've now trained for years or decades
to get it right. And let's just talk about in
the lead up to that event, what PAP would say,
like if people said post classic post activation,
the real muscly thing, what seems to be happening
there is if you can activate the muscle really
quite hard, it needs to be a high frequency.
of pulses coming from your nervous system what
seems to happen then is the calcium that your
muscles then release triggers a series of processes
that bends the myosin arm closer to the actin
site that it needs to grab so that it can pull
your muscle so when myosin wants to pull your
muscle it's kind of randomly looking around for
it it doesn't happen just because it happens
it's like a random thing like everything in biology
or physics is random and when you release calcium
the actin is ready to take the myosin, but the
myosin doesn't just automatically attach. It
really helps if the myosin comes closer. And
when you've activated the muscle once, it turns
out that those myosins stay closer. So when you
activate it the second time, they're more likely
to bind and pull. So the current mechanism behind
this classic post -activation potentiation is
that the myosin is more likely to bind when we
release calcium. So they call it calcium sensitivity.
We're more sensitive to the amount of calcium.
And if we take a single muscle, muscle fiber,
we see that. You activate it and you can see
all this happening. It's not just about the myosin
itself. There could be water, there could be
some temperature effects, but mostly that's the
reason. Just a clarification. So when you talk
about myosin and actin, what are you referring
to is the sliding theory. So to contract the
muscle, these two have to come together and kind
of slide on top of each other. That's exactly
right. Thanks for clarifying that. So in your
muscle, you've got muscle fibers. Inside the
muscle, your fibers, you've got this thing called
myo... fibroids, these long chains of motors.
Those motors are called sarcomeres and you've
got literally trillions of sarcomeres in any
muscle. But the rows of sarcomeres are all shortening
at the same time. And the reason they shorten
and therefore shorten the whole muscle is because
within them, you've got these micro motors where
a myosin protein or a filament is attaching to
an actin protein and pulling on it. And this
shortens each sarcomere. And when each sarcomere
shortens, those myofibrils and therefore the
whole fiber. shortens and of course this is where
we get muscle work from and so what we're saying
here is that if you just activated those myosins
to pull on actin once then in the seconds or
maybe a minute or two afterwards they're going
to do it a little bit better it seems to be more
effective in fast twitch muscle fibers than slow
twitch muscle fibers it's almost like an evolutionary
thing where you don't just want a random single
twitch from the brain or something to over activate
you so if you've just activated once and and
it looks like you're going to need your muscles
again it's like this little sensation thing comes
in and allows the fibers to actually do their
work really, really well. Now, I just want to
be really clear here. If you activate the muscle
and get this mechanism working, this classic
post -activation potentiation, it works immediately.
So if you immediately do another contraction,
you'll see an improvement in performance, but
it has a half -life of around about 30 seconds.
So in other words, we lose the ability really
quickly. And by two or three minutes, it's completely
gone. In other words, the classic PAP is happening
early, but the potentiation that most people
are seeing in the research studies is happening
much later so it's almost certainly not due to
classic PAP and in some ways that makes sense
let's go back to weightlifting I said you need
your brain to activate spinal cord to activate
you need massive activation you need whole coordination
you need a huge number of muscles doing lots
of things and lots of things in your muscle temperature
water mass everything will affect how forceful
they are maybe it makes sense that a little teeny
mechanism that's happening in your fiber level
is not as important as we first thought so when
it comes out to your entire weightlifting capacity
it seems really unlikely that this classic PAP
is actually doing much at all, especially by
the time you walk out onto the platform, center
yourself, image the lift and commence the lift.
You've already lost most of the effect anyway.
My opinion is that this classic potentiation
that happens down at that sort of fiber level
is probably not really important to us from a
muscle strength and power perspective. And I
know a lot of people might disagree with me,
but like I said, the peak of that effect happens
in the first few seconds. And by 30 seconds,
you've already lost. half of it yet you know
we're often performing a long time after that
and in the research studies the peaks that you
see which we definitely need to talk about tend
to take minutes to come so it's coming when this
mechanism is completely gone so you mentioned
that the water content in the muscle may play
a role so i wanted to explore this part so of
course the research already shows us that once
you're dehydrated we seem to have reduced uh
neural outflow so your brain and spinal cord
don't won't seem to activate the muscles maximally
once you're dehydrated. So we're clearly sensing
dehydration at lots of levels of the body. It
could be everything from changes in blood pressure
to changes in the pressures within the muscle
that affect some of the sensory information coming
back to us. And that seems to be affecting the
outflow to the muscles. So first of all, if you're
cutting weight and you're weighing several days
prior, you really need to rehydrate from a nervous
system point of view. But we've also known for,
you know, since at least the 19... 60s that again
down at the muscle level certainly at the fiber
level but it looks like even at the whole muscle
level water content matters and it matters for
two main reasons one is during the eccentric
phase if you've got lots of fluid in the muscle
the cells are what we call more turgid just like
if a plant is dehydrated it wilts It gets soft.
Your cells get soft and floppy. The same thing
happens in your muscle. That if you don't have
enough water sitting in the muscle, the cells
themselves get a little bit more compliant, a
little bit floppy. And what that means is when
the muscle is being stretched under load, if
you want to stretch a balloon, for example, it
has to get narrower in its center because the
volume stays the same, right? So if you pull
it out this way, it has to go shorter this way.
Same with your muscle. If you want to stretch
your muscle outwards, it needs to shrink inwards.
got lots of water in there it's harder to do
that there's more pressure there's more resistance
to that which actually makes it harder to stretch
your muscles any of your listeners who've done
really high intensity exercise where we get massive
water flow into the muscle will know they feel
stiff anyone who's had doms you know delayed
onset muscle soreness in the days after a session
knows that the muscle gets stiff and a lot of
this stiffness is the water mass that's sitting
in there and it's being dragged in there by all
these molecules like lactate and all these other
ions that are drawing the water in. Now that
increases eccentric strength because it makes
it harder for the muscle to stretch. So in one
way, just having water seems to be beneficial
for reducing stretch. But when it comes to shortening
the muscle and generating power, we think it
also has two main mechanisms. One is the fuller
and stiffer the fiber is, when the fibers shorten,
they then bulge and that forces the other ones
away and causes rotation of our fibers. don't
just shorten end on like this the fibers within
them shorten and get rotated and they get rotated
because as they shorten they get bulged and that
forces the fibers to push outwards and rotate
that rotation is really good because instead
of just needing fiber shortening if they also
rotate notice the muscle shortens even further
so it shifts your power output It doesn't improve
peak power. It shifts your power output to higher
speeds. So this fiber rotation is really important
for high -speed muscle activation. And one hypothesis
at the moment is you need the water. to get that
to happen. But you know what? Outside all that,
right down at the cellular level, it matters
too. It's been very well demonstrated that again,
when the myosin attaches to actin, it pulls,
it detaches. When it detaches, it's no longer
applying a force. So you either need it to get
back quickly, or imagine if you could just prolong
that stroke a bit more. Then on average, the
myosins would be attached a little bit longer.
And at any time, there would be more still pulling
because they're pulling for longer. That means
if you've got more of them you've got more force.
And it's very well demonstrated that if you put
water into the cell, into the muscle finder,
myosin stays attached a bit longer. And the reason
is, is because proteins have an electrical charge.
You know, they've got a positive at one end and
a negative at the other end. They're charged.
And half the reason why they attach to each other
is like opposite ends of a magnet. You have two
different poles or two different charges and
they attract. And that's what helps myosin get
onto actin. So when it gets to this end, if you've
got more attraction, it's harder for myosin to
pull off so it stays attached longer. Now water,
H2O, also has hydrogen, which is a positive,
and two oxygens, which are negative. So it's
also got a charge. It's got different poles.
So you put a water molecule next to actin and
myosin and it affects that attractive charge.
And it turns out that if you put lots of water
in there, it stops myosin pulling off. The myosin
can't pull off because it's too attracted to
the actin. So the water seems to improve muscle
force. And this has been known for a long time.
We think that maybe things like creatine, and
warm up. When you warm up, you generate a bit
of lactate. It doesn't have to be much. You generate
hydrogen ions. You generate all these other things.
That draws water into the cell, makes it nice
and swollen. And at the moment, we're doing experiments
to see if we can look for associations between
the water and the force. We haven't published
them yet, but we have found those associations.
So I hope to be able to publish those soon. So
it does look like water mass is actually really
important for force, all the way through to higher
speeds of force. So yeah, make sure... you rehydrate
fully? It could be really important. Well, that's
a brilliant explanation. Thank you. Maybe the
most important thing for your listeners is to
start thinking about what's happening at the
whole body level. Water is one of them, but temperature
is a huge one, which we should talk about. And
of course, the neural activation part of it is
also probably huge that we should talk about.
What I want is for everyone to stop thinking
about all these cool things that might be the
0 .5 % and get back to the basics. Always think,
what are we trying to achieve here? Let's go
back to the idea then that in your warmup. Let's
call it a warmup, even though it's not just about
temperature. The first thing that has to happen
here is that we need to practice maximally activating
the muscles. Even if I just do something like
a bicep curl and I do the fastest, hardest activation
possible once. And I look at how fast the force
rises and I look at the peak force. Now, even
if I wait a minute so that there's no chance
of a temperature rise, because I did one quick
contraction and then I sat around for another
minute. So there'd be almost no effect on temperature
a minute later. If I now activate a second time
and I do a wait a minute and do another one,
the only thing I'm really doing here is practicing
the high speed maximal activation of the muscle.
And if I put little electrodes on there and I
record from the muscle, I can see an increase
in both the rate and the height of the activation,
the electrical work. If I use like an electrical
or a magnet to stimulate the very part of my
brain that would cause this muscle to twitch,
I can see a bigger twitch or a bigger. electrical
activity in other words this whole pathway to
the muscle has been upregulated or potentiated
if you like now this what's really important
is that you're practicing maximal rapid activation
it's also important though that we're testing
the same exercise we're training and this is
really important because it's not just that muscle
that gets this brief quick learning. It's all
the supporting muscles because even just doing
this is super complicated because as soon as
I activate this muscle, a whole range of forces
happen all through here that my brain has to
know are about to happen. It has to pre -activate
all this just to get this to work. In other words,
if you practice a task with maximal effort, maximal
rate of effort, you will learn that task and
you will perform it better. And when we test
five minutes later, 10 minutes later, we can
still see that activation. In fact, one of my
favorite studies was done back in 1998 and they
deliberately stimulated the brain. So there was
no voluntary opportunity here. And they recorded
from the thumb muscle. And when they stimulate,
the thumb might twitch like this. And they put
little accelerometer here to see how fast the
muscle moves, but also what direction. Do you
know what they did? They stimulate like heaps
and heaps of times and they see the muscle doing
this. What they then did was they asked them
to activate or practice. in the other direction.
So it's the thumb muscle, but it's the opposite
muscle now works. They leave the stimulator right
here. So when they re -stimulate it, it's exactly
the same place. It should give you exactly the
same outcome, but you know what? It didn't. Instead,
the thumb went the wrong way. So literally you
stimulate the same part of the brain, but because
you've just practiced going this direction, you've
now increased the excitability, we call it, of
that pathway. It's a short -term bluster. minutes
many minutes goes in the wrong direction now
if we were in that study they recorded for the
next half an hour and it took something like
15 20 25 minutes for that stimulation to eventually
cause a much more regular appropriate activation
in other words the practice you do in the tens
of minutes completely affects it now even if
your brain was receiving the correct motor program
from the pre -motor area sending it to the bit
that has to activate the motor motor area even
if it received the right info, what we're saying
is you activate that part of the brain and it
still gives you an inappropriate response. So
somewhere in this part of the pathway, it's changing.
So what we learn from these studies is you have
to practice maximal activation, but you have
to practice it perfectly coordinated with the
skill. Now in weightlifting, you might break
the weightlifting skill down into each phase
of it first and then build it all up and do some
full practice lifts. But the most important thing
that you can do as a weightlifter is literally
do the motor control, the motor coordination
warmup, already lifting to absolute maximum and
going to reasonably heavy weight. Might not be
the weight you use on the platform, but reasonably
heavy. And if you do something else, you can
seriously affect it. So Tony, would you have
some examples of how warmup could be constructed
and how the skill practice could be used to then
enhance performance? Yeah, sure. I mean, within
the limits of the... fact that unfortunately
we probably don't have enough research actually
looking at the whole warmer its construction
and its outcomes right is that we know that Muscle
temperature is really important. And I think
we'll probably talk about that very briefly.
Actually, let's just cover it now because it's
so quick and easy. When you have an increase
in muscle temperature, it comes from two things
mainly. One is you get more blood flow and the
blood sitting deep in your body is really warm.
So when it flows out to your muscles, that blood
is warmer than your muscles because your muscles
are on the periphery. So they're losing heat
all the time. So you get a blood flow and that
warm blood warms your muscles. The second thing
is your muscles are working. And when they're
working, they're generating energy. because all
of your cell processes are not very efficient
and so every time they're happening they're releasing
lots of heat and so everything warms up and the
good thing is between the blood flow and just
that metabolic heat is that that increases the
rate at which some of your enzymes work and particularly
an important enzyme an ATPase which cleaves ATP
apart it gives you energy for muscle contraction
it's really common that most not all but most
of your enzymes work faster under slightly higher
temperatures. And if those enzymes, which are
basically little things that speed up chemical
reactions, if those enzymes can speed up your
chemical reactions, you can cross -bridge cycle
faster. And so it makes sense that temperature
improves performance and it does it mostly by
increasing the speed at which you can cycle or
therefore the speed at which your muscles shorten.
So while the increase in water appears to be
really a force -based mechanism, remember power
is force times velocity, so that helps, the temperature
appears to be more of a velocity -based mechanism.
And this is really important to think about because
in people doing really high -speed movements
or people who have lots of fast twitch fibers
where they should be capable of high speed, that
increase in temperature should be more important.
And just increasing the muscle temperature by
one degree, which doesn't take a lot of contractions,
can improve power by about 5%. I mean, 5 % is
massive, right? Do the math. If you could do,
say, 10%, you'd run 100 meters like a whole second
quicker. So 5 % is a massive gain in power, right?
So temperature is critical. We've already talked
about motor control, so coordination and massive...
top or peak activation, temperature and water.
And they're the three things that we really believe
matter the most. So where does this leave us
for a warmup? Well, you can do a general warmup
if you like. I mean, if you just want to go for
an easy run or sit on an exercise bike or sit
on a rower because it's whole body and going
to actually warm up more of the things and you
just do a five minute easy row or whatever, you
can do that. That will elevate the temperature
of the body, elevate the muscle temperature,
increase blood flow. Perfect. But at some point
you have to start doing the lifting. Because
only when you do that can you get maximal, highly
coordinated activation practice. Of course, an
Olympic lift is really complicated. So you might
start off with just doing the deadlift portion
of it, some press parts of it. You know, you're
walking around and you're just practicing all
the different bits, making sure you feel like
you've got your appropriate range of motion.
If you want to do some higher range of motion
stuff to improve your mobility briefly or do
some stretching, yes, you can. I know that's
another podcast, but you can do some brief stretching.
won't affect your weightlifting performance.
But if it makes you feel like you're able to
get in your positions better, then that will
benefit performance. And then you've got to keep
on. pulling the complex task together and you've
got to keep on getting faster and faster until
you're lifting a pretty good load at your absolute
fastest effort through the full lift because
that's perfect practice. By the way, and this
is where the research isn't so great, we know
that mental imagery is really, really useful.
What we probably don't know is if you do the
mental imagery in addition to the perfect practice,
does it augment performance more? Most of us
who train in the gym say yes. If you're doing
a heavy bench press, The very first rep is always
better if you've just done some mental imagery.
So we think mental imagery could be important.
And that's why I'm sure some of your lifters
go out onto the platform and the last thing they're
doing is doing their internal imagery, right?
So that's what a warmup will do. It will make
you feel better. It will give you the appropriate
ranges of motion. It will increase your muscle
temperatures. a light sweat is a nice place to
be. It will then give you practice at a highly
complicated skill, which by the way, might require
you to build it up from simple movements to the
whole movement. And it will give you maximal
rate of activation of your muscles, which is
completely exceptionally important for weightlifting.
That whole thing could take you half an hour,
45 minutes, depending how much time you leave
between your practice lifts. By the way, in a
lot of research then, if you look at research
looking at PAPE, you're lucky if the warmup lasts
five to 10 minutes, even if they say a specific
warmup was done. So it's really important to
read the research and say, is this actually a
warmup that I would do before a competition?
And therefore, do I know whether this conditioning
activity, this extra cool, sexy thing is actually
going to work on my day? And if you're not sure,
You can test it yourself. Be your own test subject
and see whether it works for you because everyone's
different, right? And things are going to work
differently for everyone. So what you need to
do is replicate your competition in training
and actually see which type of warm -up works
best for you and whether something funky and
cool is beneficial. Sounds good. The other part
in the research is that we talked a little bit
off camera is that research studies have respondents
and non -respondents, but not only that, people
are responding to a different degree. So if we
are running a study, we are usually reporting
means for the group. So this is where, okay,
overall, on average, this is what we are expecting
to happen. But individual may be on this end
or this end or anywhere in the middle or even
can be an outlier. So be somewhere else for whatever
reason. So it is always important to, okay, this
is what we see in research, but this is how it
will relate to you. And you only know that after
testing that approach. protocol or the thing
that was tested for yourself. Yeah, perfect.
So that's really important because it's really
nice to think that your listeners are actually
jumping on Google Scholar and trying to find
the research and talking to people about them
and looking for themselves. That's a really good
thing to do. So when you're doing that, there
are a few things you need to watch out for. One
of them you mentioned is that when we do research
studies, we often tell you how on average everyone
moved. We tell you something about the variability
of that, but we're not always looking at individuals.
say, oh, on average, they did this. And yeah,
there was a bit of variability there. Of course,
what that really tells us is that everyone needs
to actually look at that and go, it appears as
though this might help. But until I test it myself
under the right conditions, I'm never going to
actually know if it helps me because it could
hinder you. And we see this a lot. We see that
with certain strength training programs and certain
endurance training programs, we have what we
call non -responders. And some of them are not
responding the way you would expect. And that's
really important for you to know. it right for
you but there's another problem here in some
research studies Of course, researchers are aware
of this problem and they'll say, hey, look, there
is a variability. I'm going to show you that
there were some people who responded positively
and these people were below the average. They
didn't respond positively. But that's also a
big problem in research because every test has
an unreliability. It's not just the test here
that is a little bit unreliable. It was also
the first test, the pre -test that was a bit
unreliable. So now the change that you're looking
for is doubly unreliable. And by the way, on
the day. you are also unreliable the subject
themselves is unreliable because they might have
lost motivation at the end of the study or they
might have not been as motivated at the start
of the study or they were chatting to the researcher
about something in the pre -testing but at post
-testing they were fully focused and so humans
themselves are unreliable and all that unreliability
is in there so you can't just say look these
people are non -responders because they didn't
go up the only way to know if they were non -responders
or if these people were responders is to test
them more multiple times, at least three, probably
at least four. And if they get the same response
four times out of four, that's probably their
actual true response. So we got to, yes, think
about the individual, but if you read a paper
that just said there were responders and non
-responders, you can't necessarily believe that
that's the case. And even if you test it on yourself,
you probably should test it at least twice. You'll
know whether you were fully motivated, fully
warmed up, same time of day, blah, blah, blah.
At least do it twice. if not three times to find
out whether it is repeatably and reliably good
or bad for you. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay.
One more aspect I wanted to ask you about is
timeframes. So what timeframe would we expect
for temperature, for water content and for skill
practice? How in minutes? So, you know, if you're
trying to make the perfect warmup, how you should
be thinking about how long the temperature will
be lasting for? And how long the water content
will be lasting for or how? This is a really
good question. Do you know, I'm not aware of
a single study that has properly done this, where
we say here is the full proper warmup. It might
be over half an hour of exactly what Olympic
guys are doing, girls are doing before they go
out on the platform at the Olympic Games. Now
let's test and see how long certain things are
lasting. You'd have to get them in several times
because you need a few different tests and they'll
all affect each other, right? So it's not an
easy study. You need good athletes. willing to
give up the time you need to have the ability
to do the tests and you probably need to get
people in multiple times to do different tests
on different days to build up the full picture
i'm not aware of that being done what i can tell
you in our lab is that when we look at changes
in muscle temperature changes in water mass we're
doing it after just a few contractions just a
few contractions are enough to increase temperature
by a degree a degree and a half that's a lot
it's enough to detectably change water we can
see the muscle thickening we look at how a Electricity
passes through your muscles and we see it change.
We know that therefore there's a water change.
And it looks like it's lasting eight to 10 minutes
at least. So it means that if you finish your
warmup and it takes a bit of time to get to the
platform to do your lift, you're probably okay.
But here's the thing. If you do a bigger amount
of effort, so you do a harder warmup than just
the few contractions we're doing in our experiments.
If you're building up temperature over a slightly
longer period of time, we do think that these
effects are lasting even. longer. So 15 or 20
minutes would not be unreasonable. So it looks
like if you do your warmup out the back, by the
time you come out the front, you've got most
of it, but that doesn't mean you've got all of
it, right? So the question is, should I be doing
something in the 30 seconds or one minute before
I... actually stand on the platform the answer
is probably exactly what that is hard to tell
probably it's something that rapidly activates
your nervous system and your water and your temperature
like a few vertical jumps but we don't want it
to be so specific that it can interfere so one
thing you might do is just a couple of quick
vertical jumps to get the temperature and the
water back up but of course when you first get
it out there the next thing you want to do is
the mental imagery to make sure that your motor
pattern is is has just been gone through in your
brain now Now, I have to stress, we have never
done the research and I haven't seen a study
that has done this idea of a few jumps and then
mental imagery and checked how that then makes
you behave. Other things people are doing is
trying to maintain passive temperature and a
bit of water flow by doing the warmup and then
putting hot stuff on them or putting extra clothing
on that you only take off just as you're about
to walk out. So the key is to find ways to maintain
muscle temperature whilst not doing something
that might... interfere with your motor patterns
so passive heating could be really good after
you finish your full warm -up just before you
walk out onto the stage that's very useful thank
you sorry i don't have all the perfect answers
but that's that's science isn't it yeah i think
it's it it gives us something to try so thank
you so i will give you an opportunity to bring
it all together so what would be your take -home
message for coaches who try to prime the athletes
or try to give them the best chance to perform
specifically in power and strength sports, so
one repetition maximum, what would be your take
-home message? Okay. Well, the take -home is
that most of it, of course, is in proper training,
nutrition, sleep, and stress management before
you even get there. All the basics, right? The
basics are the key. Without talking about priming,
just the immediate sort of warm -up within the
hour before competition or so, just go back to
the basics of what a full, comprehensive, perfect
warm -up should have to the best of our current
understanding. And that is muscle temperature,
probably water, maximal activation, perfect coordination.
And of course, the psychology of being in that
perfect state of psychology where you're not
too stressed and not too understressed, which
we haven't talked about. Once you do that and
get that about right, at the moment that the
possibility is that there are some little tricks
and weird conditioning activities we might do
that can enhance performance more. Well, I think
it's a good news because we, you know, you always
look for... tiny things but really if you get
the basics right if you warm up to a certain
temperature and you hydrate it properly you and
you practice skill with intention of being fast
and powerful and explosive at skill like Olympic
weightlifting snatch or pin and jerk where where
these are the very complex but also fast movements
so if you do that you're mostly there so I think
it's a good news exactly and practice that practice
that process over and over again. And once you
like the process, that will also help you with
your psychology, right? You won't get too nervous
because you've been through the process a million
times. You're just repeating it. But you'll be
motivated because motivating is part of your
process. And as your lifters know, when they're
highly motivated but appropriate, that's when
they do their best because you need a massive
activation of the muscles and a lot of muscles.
It's not just the knee extension, right? It really
matters. I interviewed Tom Smiley on imagery
specifically for weightlifting. how to do it
from i want to do it to how to actually implement
it so i think i may pair your interview with
his so that people can get this this full combo
physiology plus the the psychological part i
think yeah no i get the whole package perfect
sounds good Awesome. So I have two short questions
to finish. The first one is, what is your favorite
exercise, you personally? In the gym, that's
a really good question. I have to say bench press
because it's just the one thing where it has
to always come down to a certain point, always
up to a certain point. You can't fake it. It
is what it is. Unfortunately, shoulders are starting
to get a bit sore these days. Out of the gym,
I'm a sprint runner and I love nothing more than
the feeling of flowing during a high speed run.
It feels amazing. It feels like I'm flying and
so I can't better than a... nice sprint run.
Awesome. And the last question is where people
can find you if they want to follow your work,
learn more or ask a question? Well, of course,
you can type in Blazowicz into Google Scholar
and find all the research because there aren't
too many Blazowiczs. My Twitter or ex -handle
is Tony Blazowicz. I think it's one word, at
wherever. And that'd be the same for Instagram,
although I don't use Instagram a lot. So LinkedIn
should be all the same thing. If you search for
Tony Blazowicz, you should be able to find everything.
Awesome, Tony. Thank you so much for the day.
a pleasure my pleasure good to chat to you good
luck with everything cheers thank you