I'm absolutely struck by this stride comes before sprint thing and I'm remembering back to cross country where they say we're going to do a stride workout at the end of a run we get back to the track at school and they do some strides and I'm just chuckling to myself because I always would tell myself in subsequent years you know okay I'm going to sprint but I'm going to sprint at you know 50% of my all-out speed yeah so I always think of all-out speed for me as um somebody's chasing me with a syringe filled with poison okay and I've got to get away okay um that's all-out speed I don't want to die so 50% of that 60 70 you know it's you know and I'm measuring it subjectively I'm not doing this by heart rates or anything like that and indeed anytime I've done 100% all out like in my mind imagining you know someone trying to try to really take my life and I'm running all out I end up with this lower back thing because of the you know it you get hurt yeah um but striding sounds like something that people could work up to how do you know after doing the skip workout that you described that you're quote-unquote ready to stride and start doing a stride workout and I should mention that the these workouts because we did one yesterday um you finish them feeling great this is an aspect of exercise that I think most people don't talk about unfortunately that this leave it all on the mat you know you take every set to failure in the gym or you're you know these long runs where you're just shredded that they're not great for teaching people how to be healthy because people are exhausted afterwards they're tired they over train quickly and then people say there's no such thing as over training it's like yeah if you can sleep all day eat all day and your profession is to do this but there is a such a thing as having a stressful life and wanting to be healthy and exercising and trying to incorporate that in a way that feeds the rest of your life yeah and I think these workouts that we did the workout we did yesterday excuse me um left me feeling you know posturally energetically mood wise it's feeling great I slept great last night felt great this morning I had a great workout in the gym as I mentioned earlier so I want to encourage people to give this a try and in doing that I want to give them a roadmap so a warm-up of 10 to 15 minutes 50 meter or so skip um could they do it on lawn dirt or concrete does it matter no it doesn't great yeah if you've got a really flat grass perfect okay but if you if you don't and do it on concrete no problem okay so basically no cost to this except a little bit of time and attention um 10 to 15 of those you know 50 meters out walk back repeat after a warm-up and if you need a little bit longer recovery than the probably 90 seconds it takes to walk back take it not a big deal the quality here is a term determining factor as you said you're not trying to get really fatigued from plyometric work this is a plyometric session you want to be kind of fresh going into each one and that's going to take you know for most people doing a maximal skip over the course of 50 50 meters it's 90 seconds is about enough but if you're really explosive and you're a really good skipper it might be three minutes that's fine as you said you want to feel good at the end of that you don't want to be beasted at the end of that now if you can do it where you're if we transition say from the skips and you can stride really well and if you can stride really well maybe you can sprint really well really well that doesn't necessarily mean that you shouldn't be tired at the end of the session but the quality of the movement has to be the governor there not the capacity not i got to get the work done and i don't care how that work looks or what it looks like i just got to get it done no with high intense work with sprint work your governor is always the quality of the work what does it look like what does it feel like it's a lot like resistance training in that way 100 always quality so um how does one transition into striding and what what what does that look like this is saying okay i'm gonna i'm gonna sprint but it's not a sprint because i'm gonna hold back a bit but how do you hold back and still have the expressive part because the expressive part it's a little hard to describe in words but yesterday you were encouraging rob and i to get us you know tall with our posture as if we're being pulled up by a string from our heads and it has a profound psychological effect and then you just feel your your body opening up in natural movement you don't have to think about coordinating the hand lift it just you're in you know like this full bowing out it's really wonderful if we describe the difference between all of the gait patterns just through the amount of space that you take up on the planet so when you when you walk it's a small space when you jog you're taking up a little bit more space when you run it's a bit more space when you start to stride it's more space again and then when you sprint you're up here and you're being maximally expressive so just think about it from that perspective the other part is jogging and running typically happens behind your center mass you crash onto the ground and you push back you have this propulsive phase there's not a lot of a break of braking phase here there's a long propulsive phase that happens with the foot pushing back behind the center mass striding and sprinting happens in front of the center mass there's an actually a longer eccentric phase where you drive a lot of force into the ground it's in front of the center mass and then you propel yourself off and it's a very short propulsive phase so think about it that way so it's a bigger shape and it's primarily more in front and it's also as i said this is important you can't sprint and most of the people that are listening to this cannot sprint are you telling us to not sprint no no i'm what i'm saying is you do not have that strategy available to you most of us like everybody who's listening to this almost everybody will be able to walk and if you can walk as you said you could probably jog and most of the people on the planet can walk jog and maybe they can run most people on the the planet can't stride they can't get any faster than 75 of what their capacity is because they will they just can't do that anymore if you're a kid you can do that you can run you can you can stride along all day but you get to a certain point where our tissues and our joint systems and we just do not have the capacity to run that fast safely and we definitely don't have it when we're sprinting and the difference here is when you're striding it's essentially a pretty simple traditional spring mass system the body acts as a spring just whether it's 50 on the front side 50 on the back side you hit and you bounce off you hit and you bounce off where sprinting is a little bit different this is the work of dr ken clark is a good friend of mine that he he published this in i think in 2018-19 it's called a two mass system where it's not the body is not acting as a spring there's a secondary mass of the shank and the foot that's contributing to up to about eight percent of the total force through contact so this elite sprinter is hitting the ground so hard that so there's another mass that's added to the spring and that's what i'm saying that's not available to you because you can't move your limbs fast enough and you don't have the range of motion that's big enough to be able to get that sort of velocity there's a dozen players in the nfl that can do that every elite sprinter is actually a sprinter most every other athlete and most every other sport can't actually sprint they're just they're operating as spring mass they don't have that secondary mass because they can't move their limbs fast enough when dr peter tia was on this podcast and elsewhere he talked about one of the major causes of death mostly in older people is they'll fall they'll be mobile they'll catch some sort of infection related to contact with the bed or you know post-surgical lack of circulation and that's what takes them out i was shocked to learn this right i mean i thought it'd be heart attack or cerebrovascular disease or that instead but that led to this whole notion that i think is gaining more popularity nowadays that part of longevity is maintaining things like grip strength one's ability to jump and land and jumping and landing is eccentric control yeah my mom's turning 80 this year and she's fortunately in very good health my dad's already 80 he was on this podcast and for anyone that saw that he's clearly in very good health but i worry about them and i worry mostly about a step down off a curb a step going down a stairwell that is not controlled and then a slip and then a fall and then the break and then the immobility and then the the sequence that atia and others have referred to would skipping be a good activity for people in their 60s 70s or 80s to undertake carefully as a way to learn eccentric control because i'll be honest i've seen some wonderful inspiring videos of people in their 70s and 80s jumping off of boxes doing plyo type work in the gym i don't know many folks in their 70s and 80s who are going to embark on that yeah but you can skip kind of small skips then you can do larger skips you can skip anywhere it's free if you approach it carefully you probably don't even need a trainer there's some videos now of you having us skip and um i you know here i'm like inspired to start a skipping movement uh with you um for all these reasons uh you don't need even need a piece of equipment probably even do it barefoot on grass if you couldn't afford shoes right 100 what are your thoughts on folks who are um in the 16 up club yeah um skipping yeah i think you've nailed it i think that is so important that eccentric control or the eccentric capacity is the one that we really lose the ability to handle ourselves eccentrically is just it's it's we don't do that work anymore everything that we do is concentric in nature and uh it is it's not just elite sport i said before that the differentiator is always in the eccentric force capacities in elite sport also in us in gen pop we have we lose the ability to apply eccentric force whether it's fast or maximal so 100 i think it's so important my dad um was an elite athlete when he was younger and has probably averaged four days a week running for almost his entire life good for him yeah he's 78 in 2019 he ran the new york city marathon ran 502 so he's at 74 or 73 years old and he doesn't do that anymore but he still runs four days a week and he runs about 20 to 25 miles and two of those days are skipping sessions where he walks 30 seconds he skips for 30 seconds and then he strides as fast as he can as fast as his capacity will allow for 30 seconds and then he walks then he skips and then he strides and he walks and it's it's it's so key it really is like it's it's for me like the ability to express yourself maximally through running and i've already said i don't feel like most people can do this i don't know if there is a better single metric to as a measurement for whatever word you want to use here vitality or health then the ability to safely express maximal speed of you as you as an individual like you choose vo2 max you choose all of these different things that you might come up with i don't feel like any of them are as good as the ability to just run maximally so let's start with that if we feel like that is important and you can argue whether whether it's the most important or the 10th most important we know it's important if we know that's important how do we get there and as you said i think skipping is the way so i'm on board with the skipping movement let's get everybody skipping because it is as i said this is your ability to be plyometric to work on those eccentric force capacities and move in a way in which you can actually express yourself again