The hidden reason your bar speed drops (it's not fatigue)


"We've been using bar speed and vertical jump to autoregulate for years. It's been working great. Why would we change anything?"

The 20 Year Miss

Here's what happened: Cal and his team noticed that bar speed and vertical jump output would drop during training sessions — and they'd shut athletes down, assuming it was fatigue. Standard autoregulation. The kind every good program uses.

But it wasn't central fatigue.

It was something Cal calls tonus creep — a local muscular tension buildup that increases after each set and each exercise. By definition, muscle tonus is the amount of tension (or resistance to movement) in relaxed muscles. ..

..And it creeps up throughout a session.

Here's the part that really got me though — tonus creep doesn't mean the athlete is actually fatigued. It means the coordination of the movement is declining because local tension is masking performance.

Your autoregulation metrics look like fatigue, but it's a different animal entirely.

Cal said it best: "Here I was, a seasoned coach of two decades with a great staff, past and present, who prided ourselves on our attention to detail and thorough analysis of our athletes' performances. Yet this one slipped right by me for more than two decades!"

The Fix

The solution? An intra-set RPR method — using handheld massage guns or just your hands to hit the key spots involved in the muscles they were training between each set. Quads, hamstrings, calf, and glutes. Then retest the vertical jump.

What happened on day one: athletes who normally topped out at four to five sets were completing seven to eight sets — and still hadn't reached a fatigue tipping point.

Several professional and Olympic athletes who'd been training with Cal for almost a decade hit hands-on hip-paused vertical jump PRs on set seven of a Wednesday workout.

And if you're training yourself — same deal. Grab a massage gun or use your thumb (that is what I do), hit the working muscles between sets, and watch what happens to your numbers late in the session.

The tension isn't the signal to stop. It's the signal to reset.

The full intra-set RPR method — including exactly which muscles to target, when to implement it, and how it fits alongside the 5 biometric conditioning methods — is laid out in TP2.

https://triphasic2.com << order here

Keep going,
Mike and Cal

PS - Here is what Michael had to say:

"This is necessary for anyone who is involved in Strength and Conditioning. The information in volume 2 is worth far more than the price of the book and I have already implemented many of the principles and methods into my own work."
-- Michael Sullivan

https://triphasic2.com << order here

Coach Cal Dietz, U of MN
Dr Mike T Nelson
Triphasic Training II: 14 High-Performance Methods to Unlock Elite Athletic Development - out NOW

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Triphasic II

Triphasic Training 2 is an applied performance book showing coaches how to build strength, speed, and power by targeting the eccentric, isometric, and concentric phases of training.

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