This One Change Will Help You Reach Your Genetic Potential

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:03]All righty.

[00:00:05]What's up, guys? Welcome back to the THP Strength Podcast. My name is John Evans.

[00:00:08]I coach many of the highest jumpers in the world like this guy and Dom behind me. We're actually going to be talking about the fastest way to improve and it's something that we haven't talked about. It's semi-related to training and that is going to be competition. So, if you guys don't know this in track and field, competition is probably the best way to train and the reason why is because your intensity is infinitely higher in competition. One because of adrenaline, the environment, you're competing against other people, you're in your absolute physical prime as you're coming in, and oftentimes the intensities and the focus paired with the intent increases the adaptive stimulus or the stimulus of jumping and it gets you jumping higher in the long term. So, we've I've actually seen this in real life with my dear friend Isaiah here. Is your mic on?

[00:00:57]Nope.

[00:00:58]So, Isaiah, I want you actually take this one. Tell the people what's changed since you've Or I can talk about it.

[00:01:06]>> Yeah.

[00:01:07]Um >> [clears throat] >> Okay. And by the way, I do want to like frame this for you guys. If you're not playing some kind of competitive sport, you can recreate this by the most common way, if you're a dunker, is plan a group session in another state.

[00:01:25]>> Mhm.

[00:01:26]>> Like go go meet some friends online, DM random dunkers, what whoever it is, and then plan a group session, rent a gym out in advance, and then have someone pop have something probably like 3 months away that you can look forward to. I think every 3 months is probably like a good uh time frame.

[00:01:45]And you can recreate that sensation and the benefits of competition. Um and then if you're an athlete, volleyball, basketball, it's already built in into into what you do.

[00:01:56]Um but yeah, if you're doing this recreationally, it's the best way to do it.

[00:02:00]So, having said that, every time we say competition, put that big thing in the future in place of the word competition.

[00:02:07]>> Make that substitute.

[00:02:08]>> The [clears throat] benefits I've seen cuz I am competing. I actually just got to announce it the Turkey >> Oh, is that what that was?

[00:02:16]>> Yeah.

[00:02:17]>> Let me make sure the audio's recording, but keep going.

[00:02:19]>> So, I have a really big dunk contest coming up in Turkey and it's my first dunk contest in 2 years that I've done.

[00:02:29]Uh in the last 2 years it has been like the sessions have been kind of like bland and they they they've lacked purpose cuz I can go in, I can hit a bunch of different dunks.

[00:02:43]Um haven't tried creating new dunks cuz that can blow my body up cuz of the attempts required. So, I've kind of just been going through the motions in terms of jump sessions.

[00:02:52]Um and then every now and then there's a big session that I'm excited for.

[00:02:56]Um but I don't need a prep for that cuz there's no competition that I'm I'm trying to do, hit most of my goals. But now it's been probably It's been probably 3 months since I found out I was going to compete.

[00:03:09]Uh the biggest changes I've seen is one I'm way healthier. This is probably the most sessions in a row where I'm hitting high-level dunks without a knee flare-up that I've had in a long long time.

[00:03:22]>> The last one I can think of is when we were in California.

[00:03:25]>> Yeah.

[00:03:26]>> That was probably the clan and that rim was low, it wasn't you know >> You guess what I was doing around that time?

[00:03:30]>> Competing.

[00:03:31]>> Um Uh previous period of time where I competed a lot was pre-COVID 2019.

[00:03:36]That's also some of the longest string of sessions and crazy dunks I was hitting uh because you don't want to take a risk. We we mentioned it after our session today. I was like normally today cuz I was trying to hit a 360 under both at the end of the session, kept backrooming.

[00:03:53]We cut it. Normally, I would have been like, let's try that dunk till I hit it.

[00:03:57]If I get a small knee flare-up, so I I can do drops for a couple of weeks. We can do slow squats. We can manage it. We know how to manage it. But, now there's actual stakes involved with every decision that you make. So, health is a big one.

[00:04:12]And then John touched on this, is my focus level and the intensity that I'm attacking the jumps with and my training with is way higher.

[00:04:21]>> It's discipline, too.

[00:04:22]>> Um yeah, I have I have reason to like even my upper body days.

[00:04:27]Uh I'm more prone to do every set of every exercise, to not cut corners, do ball handling drills, which I haven't done in years, uh to do that on my general days.

[00:04:39]Um even things like diet.

[00:04:42]As I >> sip >> sip on his >> freeze. Two freezes.

[00:04:46]>> It's my reward after every session. It's the only time I get >> [laughter] >> It's the only time I get >> with it. Yeah, you >> need some carbohydrates afterwards.

[00:04:52]>> uh yeah, even my diet, like I'm I've There's been a lot of times subconsciously I'm not like eating as much candy as I normally would or like I'm choosing healthier options. So, that uh sleep. Last night was the Spurs game.

[00:05:07]Turned it off at the beginning of the fourth quarter so I can get a extra half hour's sleep.

[00:05:10]>> out Spurs.

[00:05:11]>> So, it's just like these little like details that just add up over time.

[00:05:16]Uh kind of like the unmeasurables is the other place I've seen benefits.

[00:05:19]>> I've noticed it a lot coming into sessions. The discipline, the attention to detail, the way that you make decisions about things that otherwise you wouldn't necessarily think about.

[00:05:30]It's more well thought out and analytical, which is good. And then it forces me to be a better coach, too, which is always enjoyable. I always love when guys are coming into competition because it challenges me and as a coach to try to get them as prepared as possible. And Boo said this, you can't go out and do the jumps or sprints for them.

[00:05:50]Ultimately, that's their that's their responsibility. That's their performance. But as a coach, your job is to give them the best chance to prepare them as much as possible. Your job is to prepare them, not perform. And I think for me as a coach, it's it is shown in different ways. One way is the way that we had treated the session on Wednesday and Monday. It's like, okay, we're going to we're going to train until this point, we're going to microdose here, we're going to back off here. And then you come into today, there's a there's a hard cut off, but on top of that, you get as a coach, you get the luxury of higher training stimuli or better adaptation cuz the intensity is so much higher. When you look at a sprinter at the world-class stage or when they're running in college for example, and they're competing a lot, sometimes that's when guys run their absolute fastest their entire career because they're getting a significant dose of training load each week. In the college scene, you're competing one to every two weeks at a high level. As a pro, you might only compete once, maybe twice a year, and sometimes they're not as good as your college marks. Now, sometimes guys will come out of college banged up, but their fitness level is super high. And I saw that with Andre De Grasse when I worked with him. In college, he was running faster times consistently than he was at the world stage as a pro. And part of that is because he wasn't competing as much. Now, he did leave college pretty banged up. And when he got to the pro scene, they intensified he ran pretty fast, was doing well, and then recently of the probably last well, I guess I was there in 2016, so I think he was in a new training group in 2018, 2019 with Rana Reider, he was running way faster. And he's competing more. They're putting more competitive people in in sessions and stuff like that, and they would still do that at practice, but it's the same thing with dunk sessions. The neural drive that you get whenever you have to compete, your focus level and yeah, the stakes are just so much higher. And guys will they'll rev up their nervous system. The the excitatory whatever I I again, I always say this, I'm not a biochemist, so don't come in the comments and freaking grill me.

[00:07:59]But it's my understanding those excitatory I think they're ions technically, but it causes like a synapse and action potential. There's way more excitatory synapses happening. And as a result, those frequencies are higher from the brain to the muscles, and then you get really good adaptation. You start waking up motor units that otherwise wouldn't have fired at to the same degree. And I think when you stack that with a lot of competitions and high-level sessions, guys end up getting better faster. And I've seen it with you when you go to dunk camp and there's a competition, you get to test your vertical, or you go to, you know, compete with other pro dunkers and test your vertical, guys do extremely well. You know, it's like even even to a certain extent, Dylan McCarthy going in and knowing he's going to test his vertical, it adds a level of pressure that can for a lot of people lead to better jumping in the future.

[00:08:50]So, if you're an athlete and you want to improve the quality of your sessions, just plan Yeah, plan a big session. Plan Go to dunk camp. Plan, you know, to hit a new dunk or something like that on a certain day. Your focus level's going to go up. Your adaptations are going to get better, and you're going to end up jumping higher and improving more in the long term versus someone that doesn't.

[00:09:08]I've even seen it with my brother. When my brother goes out, wasn't competing, wasn't running fast. He was still running, but he there was no purpose.

[00:09:14]When you put a purpose behind it, and Andy Nicholson has said this, too. Train for something big, and you're going to end up being way better than you would have been had you not had something serious to train for. So, that's pretty much the podcast, guys. Do you have anything you want to add?

[00:09:27]>> Um >> [snorts] >> I think we're also seeing it in the jumps.

[00:09:31]>> You're jumping higher.

[00:09:32]>> Yeah.

[00:09:32]>> Every week, yeah. I mean, every week the session quality is very, very high.

[00:09:36]Quality over quantity.

[00:09:37]>> That's what today surprised me cuz I was so trashed.

[00:09:41]>> Yeah.

[00:09:41]>> From the week. Like I'm like >> the Wednesday Thursday podcast? The Thursday podcast yesterday, he's like, "Yeah, I feel like Like I feel banged up, but I had a feeling you were going to jump well. Like soreness isn't the best indicator." So I was like, we backed off the squats a little bit. We had high quality on the clean pulls.

[00:09:57]We're still training. We're coming off a little bit of an unload. Technically, it's like a week one. We're still carrying fatigue. And we want to carry fatigue probably until like Monday next week and then it'll be a hard drop off and that's in line with Iñigo Iñigo Mujika's research on tapers. Which as a coach, you've got to you've got to master that. So I hope you guys enjoyed this. If you're interested in coaching and you want to get better and you want to train for something big, go to tsbstrength.com. You can sign up for a vertical jump deficit diagnosis call where we'll look at all your metrics and figure out what you need to focus on to jump the highest you can in the shortest amount of time by fixing that deficit.

[00:10:29]And if you jump 2 in or more higher in that 6-week period, you get a full refund on on your deposit. And if you want to do the core offer, you can sign up for the annual plan and it is half the price that the month-to-month coaching is. So we'll see you guys next time.

[00:10:44]Ciao.

[00:10:44]>> Peace out.

[00:10:46]I am sweating