What's up guys, Coach O'Hare here at EliteFTS with the Legend of Self-Defate. And obviously you guys know I've been following my journey that I coach a lot of athletes for high school across, high school strength and conditioning, kind of fell into that, that realm really enjoy it. But one of the questions that a lot of the kids and even coaches come and ask me is how do I build explosiveness? Once again, big topic, a lot of ways we can go with this. So when you get his input, if you're talking to a coach who's trying to explain that with his athletes or an athlete who's watching this, some other variables and things to consider when you are trying to get quote unquote more explosive. And like what does that even mean, right? So let's get into it. Alright, so when you're talking explosiveness, right? And then that can also mean change of direction. Can we hit a lot of those things? So if it's coach or an athlete and it's explosiveness, then the first place I'm going to look is, well, what are they doing? What is this for? How much of the explosive plyometric type training is just happening in practice? Right? Because a lot of the things that may already be doing in practice, they have drills in practice, they have skipping bounding, some of this could be part of the warm-ups, some of the part of the drills, some of them can just be part of what they're doing. Right? So if they're already doing a lot of that bounding type of stuff, there's no need to put it in. Right? Now if you're talking explosiveness that's in the weight room, you know, explosiveness strength, or people would call it dynamic effort type of strength, then there's other factors that kind of fall into that as well, where if it's somebody that's been training for 10 or 15 years, they have a solid base, this is a little bit easier to implement. If you're talking kids or beginners and stuff like that, they may not even have enough eccentric strength to be able to load, to be able to have that static, too dynamic contraction from that. So if I'm going to use the box, while as an example, you know, you would sit on their rest, not completely rest, right? So there's the first caveat, do they, can they understand what that means? Right, right. Right, to sit there, but still keep 50, 60 percent tension, then go from that static into that dynamic. Do they even have the skills in the muscle coordination to do that? Do they have the muscle coordination to actually eccentrically sit in that position? Do they have the eccentric strength to sit into like a pause squat, then it come out of the pause squat? So that's the first factor, because some don't, because they're just weak, they just need to become stronger. If they become stronger, they naturally become more explosive, stronger persons more explosive, to a certain point. After you get to that point, then you start to deal with intention. Like what is their intention when they're doing the lift? Are they just lifting it, or are they using compensatory acceleration, or are they applying their maximum force as that comes up? They may or may not know what that means, because it's never been coached to them before. So you can say, up faster, they don't know what the fuck that means. Or you say, up faster than their technique, kind of like goes to shit. So if you take it way down to a beginner, the easiest way that I've found to be able to get their mind to connect with what we're talking about is to put a little bit of, say if it's a squat, put a little bit of band on the bar. Not a lot. We're talking like a mini band. Micro mini band probably won't work, because it might be less than what the bar weighs. But like a mini band. Then as soon as it can be a box, have them on a box. Have them stand up with a mini band. The first thing they're going to do is get tight. As soon as they walk out, they're going to be tight, because the bands, kind of like wiggling them around a little bit, that's the first thing and one of the hardest thing that is to teach an athlete how to get tight before they actually do the lift, how to make sure they're coarse tight, they're backstight, they're lats tight. You can say lats tight, oh you want, they don't have lats, they don't know what that means. They haven't developed a mind, muscle connection to be able to know. You can say abstight, they don't know what that means. Now you put that on there, everything's tight. Then you can tactfully kind of say, see how this feels, see how this feels. Then if you have them sit on a box, you know, statically sit there, and then if they try to stand up as they normally would, they may not be able to stand up, because the tension that's pulling them back down. So let's say they come up halfway, they sit right back down. The next time they go to stand up, they stand up with more force. There, you know, that's what we're talking about. So just as a teaching tool, the bands can greatly teach that, because it's like, oh shit, I need to push. You're on the option, with force, right? So then you can think of how you can implement that in. The compound lifts that you have in your training, that you want to be able to build that compensatory acceleration with. Probably shouldn't be every lift in the training, but I do believe it should be some, because there is correspondence that's going to vary over to that. If anything is still going to teach them that tightness, and the difference between lifting something with force compared to lifting something with more control, and there's benefits to both. They should know the difference between the two. Now, so being a high school strength and conditioning coach, would you recommend doing something like that at a high school level? It depends on a lot of shit. I mean, if it's like one coach and 50 kids, and it's a cluster of fucking the weight room, that's just going to make it more of a clusterfuck. Because they're going to be using the bands to snap each other with. This is their high school kids, man. You got to think through. That's true, right? So you got to think it through. So on that one, it may fall more into what's being done on this field. Do they need the explosiveness in the first place? That's simply the cornerstone of everything. There's the needs analysis. Do they need this, or do they just need to be stronger? At that level, in most cases, they just need to be stronger. They don't only have body weight strength. They can't do chin ups. They can't do push ups. They can't do all this other shit. I would focus way more on that, but then I would dynamic strength, explosive strength. They don't even have fucking relative strength. So I would build that relative strength, which then can be implemented in a group, a little more so than that. Now, if there are further along, then I would segment the grooves. And here's the higher end lifters that are going to be over here. Teach them how, really teach them how to dial this in right, and then the other kids are going to watch, and they're going to see, then they kind of, you know that you've worked with high school kids. So they have certain degree of aspiration, and they look up to some of the other kids that are stronger. They're going to see what they're doing, and then they're going to mirror what they do. So if you can get the best ones to do it the best, then there's a trickle down effect that kind of comes from that. Which makes it easier. The worst thing you want to do is to try to go to the bottom end and try to implement there. Right, because that doesn't trickle up. It's kind of how we have it with the weight room at the high school. It's actually just separated by, we have some of the older kids, you know more advanced lifters for that group over on one side. And there's like the intermediate and beginners, but I'm just thinking in the back of my head, you know maybe some of these older guys I can introduce some of these more advanced concepts to in their training journey. And have, you know, like you said, three groups kind of set up, and then the younger guys looking around what's going on for that environment, kind of eventually I can get there. I can nail this down, but yeah, I wouldn't recommend like you said, probably just take it high schoolers and throw in bands. And like you said, they're probably just going to be whacking each other with them first and it's going to be. It's hard enough just to get them training groups. Yeah, oh, it's, yeah, it's like Hurtle and Cat all day long. But I do see some of those kids, and I work with some of them outside who want to get after a year round, who want to really put effort into those types of training. So it's good to kind of have in the back of my mind I really like that band concept, just like you said, because that forces them to have to do that pretty quickly versus trying to just say to them and they don't have some sort of band resistance. Well, you're teaching them body awareness and body control. Right. So in some sports, they may need that fast explosive start, you know, in some alignment coming off the line. But not all the times. They may not need it every time. Sometimes they need to have more controlled static position from the start. They need to know technically they're going to be taught that by their skill coaches or whatever that is. But muskarily, if they can learn how to control that, you know, then it's going to make what they're doing there tactfully, even more efficient, because then they understand here's tights to explore, you know, here's static to stay static. You know, they don't, they need to understand the ability to display force. And I do like the example used where it assess what's going on in practice and make sure you're not either doing the same thing in the weight room. Sometimes I feel like we get a little blurred vision as coaches where we almost blend the two together, where we have to look at, okay, what's being done here, what's being done in the weight room, and how we can complement each other more that way. Because I've seen, and I've been a part of his and athlete, right? Well, we're doing all these drills and then we replicate the same thing in the weight room. And you're wondering why you're not getting any better. So you're trying to find in that balance and assessing everything holistically versus almost maybe separate, not separating it too, because we kind of want to do that in a sense, but complementing each other better. Yeah, 100%. Because it's this worst case scenario, and it won't happen. Let's say you teach a kid that everything has to be explosive, you know, everything that they do. And then, you know, if it's a wrestler, sometimes it needs to be explosive. Sometimes they have to use the opponent's force against them. So it's absorbing their opponent's force to be able to have the advantage, to be able to spin or move or whatever it's going to be. And they need to know the difference. Right, right. You know, when you use it, when and not use it, and leverage it. But yeah, hopefully that helped you guys. If whether you're an athlete or a coach, I really like diving more into the concepts of being explosive, what that actually means, and how to either coach an athlete by using what we talked about here, or even yourself. So there's way more than just the three exercises or five exercises you're explosive. It's a little bit deeper of a topic. And I know for a fact that I'm going to be utilizing the stuff that we had said. So thanks for just giving me your two cents on it.