Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast, hosted by me, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. In this episode, I introduce our new Triphasic 2 training book, co-authored with Coach Cal Dietz. The book condenses nine years of advanced athletic training methods into 14 high-performance techniques. I provide a rundown of the book, covering its principles of Triphasic Training, which integrates eccentric, isometric, and concentric phases of exercises. I also dive into innovative training methods like the GOAT warm-up, dynamic neurology drills, and the Tri Block System for strength, speed, and power optimization. I also highlight the importance of the aerobic system in performance, the structure of the training session, and practical applications for elite athletes and general clients. Tune in for a comprehensive guide to unlocking elite athletic development. Now available on Amazon! Go to https://triphasic2.com/. To preview of a small portion of what is in the book at no cost go to https://miket.me/tp2-compensations
Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast, hosted by me, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. In this episode, I introduce our new Triphasic 2 training book, co-authored with Coach Cal DIetz. The book condenses nine years of advanced athletic training methods into 14 high-performance techniques.
I provide a rundown of the book, covering its principles of Triphasic Training, which integrates eccentric, isometric, and concentric phases of exercises. I also dive into innovative training methods like the GOAT warm-up, dynamic neurology drills, and the Tri Block System for strength, speed, and power optimization.
I also highlight the importance of the aerobic system in performance, the structure of the training session, and practical applications for elite athletes and general clients. Tune in for a comprehensive guide to unlocking elite athletic development.
Now available on Amazon! Go to https://triphasic2.com/. To preview a small portion of the book at no cost, go to https://miket.me/tp2-compensations.
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Dr Mike T Nelson: [00:00:00] Hey, what's going on? Welcome back to the Flex Diet Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Mike T. Nelson. On this podcast, we talk about all things to increase performance, add muscle, improve body composition, all without destroying your health and in a flexible framework. Today, it is just me yammering at you since I am super excited.
You probably guessed by the title. That after nine very long years, ha. The Triphasic 2 training book, 14 High Performance Methods to Unlock Elite Athletic Development, with my buddy Coach Cal Deets, is out! You can get it now. I am holding the pre print copy here because, for whatever reason, Amazon printing, when you order author's copies, takes them forever to print.
To get to you. So I'm going to have to get those copies until next year, but I wanted to do a [00:01:00] podcast and give you a rundown of the book. I am working to get Cal on the podcast here to talk with him about it for everyone. I'm not a hundred percent sure when that will happen, but we're trying to do it as soon as possible, but.
In the meantime, I wanted to give you some information about the book. And after the Triphasic One was published, probably was like maybe, I've been out for about one or two years, Cal approached me about being a co author on the book. I've known Cal for, man, I think it's over, it's coming up 16, 17 years, something like that.
I actually knew him before I went back to school at the University of Minnesota. Well, actually, I did know him. I was doing my PhD work in biomedical engineering for a while before I dropped out of that program and then went over to the exercise [00:02:00] physiology department, which then took me seven years to get my PhD in that.
But when I was doing that, it was in Mariucci Arena at the University of Minnesota and his office next to the weight room was literally just around the corner because we're both in the same building. And so I would. Go down there when I had a few seconds over lunch and just pester him what's going on.
And once in a while he would wander through the lab to see what we had going on. So no one called for a long time. Really like all this stuff that he's done. There's a lot of great string coaches that are out there now, but I think he's one of the rare, probably a handful of people. I know that does actually read research as always running some crazy experiment in a very creative way.
Not all of them work out and some of the things he presents to me, like the first time I saw the goat method, I was pretty sure he had completely lost his mind. But then when I started looking into it more, I was [00:03:00] like, Oh, this does make sense. So the goat trail, if you're not familiar, it is in the triphasic two book.
It is a warmup, but the goal of it is to increase your brain ceiling of performance. And at a simplest level, what you're doing is imagining there's two big hula hoops on the ground, and you're the athlete running through it. So you would do the figure eight pattern around these hula hoops. But, you would keep your head and your eyes focused on one singular point.
Therefore, your body's going to have to move around. As you're doing this, you're going to be passing a tennis ball around your waist. And then you're going to be counting backwards by some type of prime number. And if that sounds insane, that was my first thought too. But, when you think about it, you're having to coordinate all sorts of input.
Visual input, vestibular input from inner ears and balance, [00:04:00] proprioception, where your body is in space and time. And there's even more advanced drills with three hula hoops and people chasing you. Pieces of what looks like garbage on the ground, things you have to hop over. It gets pretty crazy. So things like that, even at first blush, it was probably anybody else.
I didn't know, I would say they were completely out of their tree and they should start over. But Cal stuff in general definitely seems to work. And he's definitely tested on, both the college D1 athletes and a lot of his professional athletes. I've been able to take and apply a lot of the concepts to my own clients, even general population.
It may not even look like it's the same thing because I've changed it, but a lot of the principles that I use with my own clients are actually quite similar. So, this book is all brand new stuff. That's like I said, it's 14 new methods that were not [00:05:00] covered in the Triphasic One book. The Triphasic One book now, I want to say has been out for over a decade, maybe 11 or 12 years.
And great book, I remember reading it back in the day, read it several times since then. If you're not familiar with the concept of Triphasic Training, at its simplest level, you're taking an exercise and dividing it into three different phases, a la the name Triphasic. If we use a squat as an example, The first part you're going to do as you unrack the weight is the eccentric, or the lowering component.
You'll have a slight pause at the bottom, so the isometric. And then you have the concentric phase, standing up with the weight on your back. This will be the same for a bench press. You would unrack the weight or get a spot. You're going to lower the weight first, so it's going to be your eccentric.
There's going to be a slight pause at your chest, isometric. And then the concentric, pushing the weight back up. Some exercises, like the deadlift, are a little [00:06:00] bit reversed. In the deadlift, the case is the weight, as the name suggests, is on the ground already. So when you go to pick it up, you will do the concentric phase first.
There's going to be a slight pause at the start of the lift and actually when you change directions to eccentrically lower the weight back down. But basically all lifts have these three components. And what Cal found many years ago is that if you separate them into training specifically The eccentric component, training specifically for the isometric component and then training specifically for the concentric component as best you can, which gets into all sorts of different methods and ways to emphasize those phases.
He saw much, much better results and much faster results. Now, this was especially true for his athletes. You may have some athletes that are pretty darn good in the weight room, but are [00:07:00] not the best on the team on the field. So, one question I love asking strength coaches, which I've been asking them this now for like two decades, is, are your best athletes in the gym or in the weight room the same as your best athletes on the field?
And pretty much across the board, the answer is no. That's always intrigued me. Now, this doesn't mean that your star athletes are going to be super weak, but at some point, just making them stronger is probably not going to be enough. Yes, weight training is beneficial. Yes, getting them stronger up to a point will be beneficial if they're very weak.
But at some point, like all things, that's not a linear return. That curve is going to start to flatten out. So at that point, what happens then? What do you do with them? So to me, that's where I got interested in the Triphasic system. So that's Triphasic in a nutshell. The book is written as a standalone.
Meaning that if you just understand that. [00:08:00] principle of Triphasic. It is all based on those principles, but has expanded out into, like I said, 14 different methods there. So the books are both a standalone. You can get the second book if you don't have the first book. Obviously, if you have the first book and understand it, it will help you a little bit, but we wanted to make the second books stand alone on its own.
And what we did is also a little bit different in terms of the writing style. We went with more concepts in the second book and not quite as many sample programs. That's not to say that there isn't any sample programs. There definitely are. And when you buy the physical book, we'll put a secret link inside that will allow you to get an exclusive PDF that has a ton of links.
Like it'll have full links to multiple programs, multiple videos, YouTube videos that go. In depth. It'll have all that stuff in a separate document you can get once you purchase [00:09:00] the Triphasic book. But we wanted it to like we said, stand alone. If you got stuck on a desert island or you're stuck in the airport and your Wi Fi craps out, you can still get a lot from the book.
That's all I, and maybe I'm just old now because I'm 50, but I like being able to sit down with a book and get most of what I need out of it. without having to go to anything electronic. Now, again, one of the common questions we get is, will you have a Kindle version of this? Most likely, yes. We're in the process of working on that.
We will have a few more hyperlinks in the Kindle book, but we're not trying to jam it full of 800 hyperlinks. If you buy the Kindle book once it's available, which it might be by the time you listen to this, depending upon when you listen, you're still able to get the extra electronic PDF document that we have.
And that's the one that'll have tons of sample programs we'll have videos in there for literally every exercise in the [00:10:00] programs. So you'll have all that stuff there. So it is a standalone book. And what we also did is a little bit different, is I wanted to structure it in the way you would do a training session.
So what we ended up doing was, we have a short review of Triphasic 1 versus 2. And then we divide it up into three phases. Ha. Triphasic. So first part is the turn on. The second component is train. The third component then is transfer. So the entire book is framed around those three concepts. And what you realize is that matches how you would set up your training.
When you turn on, you're going to do some sort of warm up. You're going to have the training component, which has a bunch of different components to it. And then you're going to have your transfer component, and I think the transfer component is where a lot of programs are very lacking. It's one thing, like we said, to create strong [00:11:00] athletes in the gym.
It's another thing to get all of that performance to transfer to the field, because that's where it's going to matter. And even if you're just training for better health, I do think performance is very underrated. Like for all the programs I do with my own clients, even the ones who are not. High level athletes are ones who are not even competing in anything athletic at all.
I still view everything through the lens of performance because that's the measurement of output of your physiology. And now there are different things that different risks and different advanced strategies that may not use with them because at the end of the day, they are not making or losing millions of dollars based on their performance.
So it may not be worth the risk, but I still want them all to move very well. I don't want them to have pain. Most of the time they have an outside thing outside of the gym that they want to maintain or get better at. Maybe it's playing pickleball, maybe for myself it's like kiteboarding, surfing, [00:12:00] snowboarding without pain, playing with their kids, whatever.
So I still view the standard training in that same lens of turn on, train, and then transfer. Again, I may not get as hyper specific for me personally with my clients as the transfer section. But it is set up where there's a bunch of different concepts and we tried to make the concepts as best we could Very much plug and play.
So we talked about the goat warm up We've got many different versions of that and you can add that into your clients program now You may have to start with something that is very regressed, but we're also educating you on why we're doing that And even in that area, we go into some, kind of basic neurology, but stuff you probably haven't seen such as like different types of eye movements and why they're important.
Everything from psychotic eye movements, mood pursuit, virgins vestibular ocular [00:13:00] reflexes, maybe all that sounds like mumbo jumbo. But giving you a breakdown of here's some of the basic eye movements. That's not an exhaustive list. Why those are important because what I find is those.
movements tend to get lost in people even if they're just an office worker. And if you're a high level athlete, those things are going to be incredibly important. So the basic rundown is the book table of contents is set up in terms of turn on. This is going to be your warm up. We talked a lot about RPR, Reflexive Performance Reset, which I'm a huge fan of.
Originally, I learned that from Cal who brought in Douglas Heal. So the training I did originally was with Douglas. and then did more training with Cal and Chris Corfis. Before COVID, I did teach a bunch of RPR courses throughout the U. S. and Canada and even Australia. So it was super fun, but maybe we'll probably ramp more of those up again once both of us have more time.
And RPR is [00:14:00] very useful at changing recruitment patterns. Now, again, we're not going over all the RPR drills in here, but we do give you the three basic ones. We talk about the compensation patterns that are poor. So for example, your ideal compens or I should say not compensation pattern, but the ideal pattern you want for hip extension is going to be, let's say, right side glute max, right side hamstring, opposite side QL, quadratus lumborum.
That is what you would want for recruitment pattern and order or sequence for, I would even say reduction of pain with movement. Especially for high level performance. Now if you have a track athlete, and their hamstring is the main thing that is firing before the glute max, not only are they going to be a little bit slower, they're now also at a risk of a hamstring issue.
Because the hamstring is now being overused and in the wrong pattern. [00:15:00] If the QL is the first one to fire, you're at a risk of a back injury. Because that one is trying to, in my little air quotes here, Take over for hip extension. So we talked about that. We talked about the core patterning. What is the best way to get your core to work?
It is not by just imagining someone's going to hit you in the stomach. You want the core to be very fast and reflexive. Go into all the different variations of the GOAT drill, why that's super useful. And then how do you structure your warm up? Talk a little bit about the dynamic warm ups. Neither one of us are a big fan of static stretching.
So We're expecting a big book on static stretching and you're going to be sorely disappointed on that. The training section, we've got a bunch of different methods on this. It's generally divided into the training a la weight training. And then also we've got a huge area on the aerobic system. Which again is something you probably are not expecting from a strength and conditioning let's say textbook.[00:16:00]
I do call it a textbook. Maybe I'm biased because I was one of the co authors, obviously, but it's 250 friggin pages and there's like 156 references in it, so I'll call it a textbook. So we have the weight training section and then we have the conditioning or the aerobic portion. The reason for the aerobic section is, I think it is a very undervalued component of a strength training component.
setup. For example, even if you are a power lifter, a hammer thrower or someone whose goal is just speed and power, the aerobic system is what is allowing you to get back to baseline. This can be between sets, between exercises, between days, between weeks. It's that aerobic system, your body's ability to use oxygen and different fuel sources, fats and carbohydrates, ideally fats for a lower level intensity work, That is creating the ATP, the energy to get you back to baseline [00:17:00] faster.
I have lost count now of how many athletes I've done programming for or one off even sessions. And their biggest rate limiter was actually their aerobic system. And they were, I'd say, more of a lifting, speed, power athlete. Or they just were someone who just enjoyed lifting and got stuck. So we talk about all different types of aerobic systems.
in terms of training, conditioning, how to increase your VO2 max. So one of the best ways to measure your aerobic system is by doing a VO2 max test. If you're not a complete goon like I am and have a freaking metabolic heart at your house, which I think is pretty awesome. But if I don't need to spend several thousands of dollars to do it, we give you some other tests you can do to figure out what it is.
And then a whole bunch of different systems everything from auto regulatory methods to. Different methods, like, functional, reserve range, coordinated conditioning, [00:18:00] and many other methods. I'd lost track of how many freaking aerobic methods we have in here. There's a bunch. I think we've probably got at least a dozen different ones.
But then we show you how do you put all these things together so it makes sense in your program. A lot of programs I've seen with aerobic training for lifting athletes of any form. It doesn't look very good. They just slapped in some aerobic stuff and called it good. Oddly enough, we don't really use much running at all in this book because higher and larger mammals running, I'd rather usually throw battery acid in my eyes.
Doesn't look very good. Some athletes can get away with it, but you definitely don't have to go run in order to get a higher level of aerobic base. The training portion in terms of the weights. We talk about the supermax method, which has been extremely effective. How to add an even heavier eccentric component.
The Cal's done a lot of work with this using a single leg safety bar squat. You can use [00:19:00] this with also a yoke bar or a Mars bar. There's different methods, even if you don't have those bars. Six different ways, or you can, we got five actually, that you can still safely use that method without any specialty equipment.
Talk a little bit about the Triphasic Compressed Model. This is an updated version and a shorter version of what was originally done in the Triphasic I book. And then the main part is what we call the Tri Block System. If you think about what are the three things that athletes need to focus on in terms of an outcome, it's going to be strength, speed, and power.
If you just divide it real simply into three phases, those are going to be your main three. You need to get stronger, you need to get more powerful, or you need to get faster. And we all know that those are highly interrelated to each other. Sometimes if you're just not very strong, I'd argue most of the time, you need to get stronger [00:20:00] in order to get faster, or in order to create more power.
However, we've all seen athletes that are very strong, maybe by limit strength, but they're not super fast and they're not super powerful. So how do you train for those specific ones? And then how do you know which one you should actually train for? When do you know if you should do a power focus block or a speed focus block?
So we have a free tool that we talk about that shows you literally exactly how to do that. All you have to do is time one of the runs. You literally put it into this program. It's a pro performance optimizer, and it will actually tell you, Hey, this athlete needs to work on strength. Hey, this athlete needs to work on speed.
Hey, this athlete needs to work on power. So you have a completely auto regulated system to know exactly When to train each phase and for how long like to me if I was the person doing [00:21:00] this I would have written a whole friggin book just on that and sold it for a lot more money, but that's just me So that's just one of the components in here You can apply that with all your athletes actually and we've got also little areas of coaches corner So the kind of going very deep on specific things Such as the fast switch repeatability sprint model.
We've got little science corners. We geek out on everything from monkeys doing different types of dopamine drugs to eye movement, eye function, cardiovascular function, vessel regulation. So if you want the high level overview of what to do that's in there, if you want the Uber detailed nitty gritty, super geeky stuff that's in there too.
But we tried to make it a nice blend of both, where you're not going to need four exercise physiology books next to you and a dictionary to try to read it. But we do have those areas of where you can [00:22:00] go deeper into specific things also. Because to me, that's, those little areas I do find super interesting.
So for example, we've got a whole breathing rabbit hole. What is the best way to breathe? Nasal versus mouth breathing versus everything else. That's in here too. So tons of stuff. And then at the end and the transfer section, again, I'm not going over every single thing in here. Cause it's take forever.
We have the main components of transfer. So one of the main components is something called performance pattern cycling. How do you solve ball bad patterning? In essence, if your athletes maybe are doing exercises correctly but Cal found this out by watching athletes over COVID. And seeing that the sequencing of the order was messing up their recruitment pattern.
Now you could do some stuff to fix it by using RPR, but you realize that how you sequence [00:23:00] exercises in specific orders made a big difference if you're trying to get your athletes to move better and to see that transfer on the field. Another component was the angular shank loading model. What positions should you be in for strength, power, and speed?
The short version on that is a wider stance. It's going to be more power and strength focused. A narrow stance is going to be more speed focused. So literally this is something you could drop into any training system immediately. If you are working on a strength phase, and let's say you're doing an RDL, then taking a wider stance will make more sense for transfer.
If you're doing that in a speed phase, for whatever reason, then you would do a more narrow stance. And this comes from if you watch high level sprinters, when they're doing the acceleration phase, their stance is a little wider, and as they reach [00:24:00] top end in speed phase, it becomes more narrow. I also talk about three way foot integration, what is your foot doing from both a static and a dynamic position this is also the performance foot shift, how you should move your feet.
Just think of your feet as like the tires on a high level car. Many athletes, especially if they're playing in supportive gear, like hockey players, ankles are taped all the time, et cetera, their foot and ankle performance is really bad and their body will limit their performance in order to try to protect some of those joint spaces.
And what is less speed and power and obviously an increase in injury risk also. So ways you can work with that, some specific ones. Another one is a functional transfer complex. How can you sequence and come up with different pairings to make sure that your work is transferring onto the field?
So we've got five of those. So for example, one of them [00:25:00] is a glute ham raise plus a bent leg prime time. So you can add these pairings directly to your exercises today. And then last we have the transfer of trinity. This is a three by three principle where you have your different phases. So you have your strength phase, your power phase, and your speed phase, and then we outline what would be the other components you can add to them and how you would add them in order for that to be transferred to the field then. So that is a little bit of a crash course of the past nine years of my life. Cal actually added so much new stuff that I actually just literally threw away everything I had worked on up until about three years ago and started over. It's one of the things of writing a book is as stuff keeps progressing, especially with people like Cal who always have new great stuff, then it gets harder to draw a line in the [00:26:00] sand.
It is up to date of all the great stuff he's got going on right now. It is available on Amazon and we have a special link for it. You can just go to www. tryphasic2, that's tryphasic and the number 2 dot com and that will redirect you to Amazon. If you're listening to this right as it came out, we do have approval for most countries right now.
If your country is not on there and you cannot find it on your country's Amazon, please let us know. Some of the international ones are taking a little while to get approved. We just had four more that were approved today. So it should be available in your country. Again, contact us. If it's not, we'll do whatever we can to try to get it.
Listed there and then I'll also put a little preview down below. So if you want to learn a little bit more about different muscle compensations and get 11 pages of [00:27:00] texts from the Triphasic 2 book for free you can enter your email there and that will put you on to the insider newsletter list where we've got a ton of stuff going out.
We're probably going to do a bunch of bonus items at times. We've got a lot of information and more in depth videos on different components of it, different sections of the book, maybe a little Q& A, who knows. So all that stuff is going to be available on the newsletter, which you can get to by getting 11 pages on muscle compensations down below.
So thank you so much for all the interest so far, it's been amazing. One of the fears I had is working on something for so long. And then just wondering if anyone was still interested in it since it buried my head in the sand and the research to try to get it done as soon as possible. And so far the early feedback, a couple people, a bunch of people just got their books in [00:28:00] the U.
S. yesterday. It literally just came out a few days ago. So far the initial feedback's been awesome. So thank you to everyone who has purchased it. We really appreciate it and you'll be able to get it on Amazon now. Go to www. triphasic2. com. As I mentioned before, we may have some other formats.
We are working on a Kindle version. That's going to be a little while because we've got to do a bunch of formatting specifically for Kindle. As soon as that's alive that will, you'll be able to see that on Amazon there also. And as I mentioned at the top of this podcast we're going to get Cal on here, ask him all my crazy questions, get a bunch more information out to you.
And then I will try to push that one out as soon as I can once we can get that recorded. So thank you so much. If you have any other questions or anything else related to the book, please contact me. You can contact me through the [00:29:00] website. And if you have people who are interested in the book and want to know, Hey, what is this all about?
Please forward them this podcast, and thank you so much for all of your support. Really appreciate it. Now that this is out, I have two other books I need to finish, actually. So, I'll give you a little hint on that. One of them is about a high flux rate on walking. We are like 90 percent done with that, but had to get the Triphasic II book out first.
My buddies, Dean and Jeb, we'll have them on the podcast here once that's live. And then with my co author, Gina Massey, who's an RD, doing a book for human kinetics on the metabolic flexibility for performance and body comp. That'll be out sometime next year. So we're in the process of reorganizing the rough drafts on that.
We've been working on that now for Man, I think it might be coming up on two years. So a lot of book writing [00:30:00] and then I'm also doing an ebook on how to jump 10 to 20 feet if you're kite boarding, but that's probably not related to this audience. So lots of good stuff coming up. Thank you so much as always for listening.
If you pick up the book, I would love to hear your feedback and pass this on to anyone else who's interested. We have much more stuff coming up on the podcast. A ton of great guests also. We've got a huge amount of guests already booked for next year and super stoked about that. So thank you so much.
Talk to all of you very soon.
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