Henry Abbott
speaker
137 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Henry Abbott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
He's a venture capitalist now, but when he was like a Boston University soccer player, I think I'm saying he did it 42 times in eight seconds. Like that's five plus times a second.
They show that video to NBA players and NBA players are like, what? So he's obviously got this really snappy nervous system and good musculature and all that stuff, right? So that's how we start with the plyometrics at P3. And then it just goes up from there.
They do them all different ways. I don't think there's a kind of plyometrics they don't do in there. So it's just, you know, do you know the history of plyometrics? It's so cool. I love this story so much. Please let me tell you the story. Okay, go ahead. Okay. Okay. So in Soviet times, they kind of invented sports science because they just used humans like guinea pigs, right?
They just did tons of testing on like their top Olympians. They just try this workout, try that workout. And they put sensors on them and have them do all this stuff. It was kind of cruel. And there were tons of doping. But this guy, Yuri Verkoshansky, was kind of a heroic early doctor of this. And he did calculations, figured out like when triple jumpers, triple jump is a weird sport.
I've never really, do you know how it works? It's like, Not really. This is going to be wrong. You run and you leap off one leg and then another leg, and then that third leg goes down and you do a long jump. You can do the math of the athlete weighs this much and they travel this far, so that means they're pushing on the ground this hard. This is where the physics comes in.
I would not want to do this calculation. He's like, well, they're pushing on the ground with 300 kilograms of force. But in the gym, none of them can lift 300 kilograms. So like somehow they're magically way stronger when they're doing the triple jump than when they're lifting weights. So he's like, well, maybe if we have them do a shorter lift, shorter lift, right?
Instead of doing a full squat, do like a half squat. And they could lift a lot more, but then none of them came in the next day because their backs all hurt. So there's something about this. And finally he figured out that it's because it's so fast. Like when they push on the ground for the triple jump, their foot's on the ground for like a tenth of a second.
And when you're super fast like that, you have kind of magical ability to access force because you're taking energy from the approach and using it in the explosive jump. Does that make sense?
So in weightlifting, you're not doing that, right? So that was his big aha moment. And he invented plyometrics right then. He called it the shock method. And basically, he started teaching all these Russian athletes to do all these quick hopping things because you can train to be faster on the ground and you're training all these muscles in your lower leg and such.
And if you're faster on the ground, you're moving more force from one step into the next one. And it's like a huge difference. Like I think some runners carry, I think there's some research that like,
Some runners only need to generate 10% of the energy for the next step because they're carrying 90% from the step before, whereas some runners need to generate 60% of the energy because they're only carrying 40% from the step before. So we're all in the middle there somewhere, but it's a lot less work to run if you're really good at plyometrics, if that makes sense.
I think it's all of these things that are like training you to be really snappy on the ground. So they'll do things like step off a box and jump on the next one.
Or hop sideways or they're like, you know, hop three times on your left leg.
Yeah, it's all just kind of, yeah. Quick jumps.
I think we're putting our finger on your issue. I think this may be why your knee hurts.
Totally agree. So they would put you on a progression. There's a million ways to strengthen your lower leg and hopping wouldn't probably be like job one for you. Lifting weight, honestly, I used to strain my ankle all the time. I once had a doctor tell me like never play basketball again because I was like so prone to ankle sprains.
And then for other reasons, I started lifting weights 10 years later. I've never turned my ankle since then.
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