Stuart McMillan
Appearances
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So you might have your 100-meter specialist also do the long jump and the triple jump. And it won't be until maybe the second or the third or fourth year of college or maybe even their first year as a pro where they start actually doing just the one or two events.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
She's made the world indoor team for USATF starting next week, I think. It definitely happens. We look at that, and there's... Yeah, they're blaming the burrito. They're blaming meat or whatever. But 100%, why would you... You run 5K. Why are you taking DECA? Why are you taking natural lung? It doesn't make sense. No, it makes zero sense. You're not doing that.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Like, that is from the meat.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
It's thousands of hours of work. It is sleeping really well. It's eating really well. It's having a good, proper life. There's no shortcut to that. There really isn't. You've got to get really, really fast to be fast. And this is even back in the drug era. You didn't take drugs to be fast. You got fast first, and then you took drugs, and that made you faster. That's how people did it.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
You don't take drugs to get fast. You don't go from 10-2 to 10-flat or 10-3 to 10-flat or 10-2 to 9-8. It doesn't happen that way. For me, it's like the most important one for me is are you training well? Is it organized properly? Are you sleeping well? Are you eating well? Are you taking whatever the good, clean supplements that you can take? And we take very, very few, by the way.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And do you have a good social life? And then all of these things come together and interact in a way that feeds your purpose of running fast. You know, that's it. Honestly, as I said with Andre, I started working with Andre in 2015. He could not squat his body weight basically, you know. Three Olympic medals, 18 months after starting the sport.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
It can be done, which shows, yeah, okay, this is being done.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah, me too.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. I asked you this question earlier. Like, do you feel like there is a single metric that is a better determinant for overall health and vitality than the ability to maximally sprint? Now, not be fast, but to go out and actually sprint maximally. Think about all of the things that come along with the ride with that. Think about VO2 max.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Like VO2 max in and of itself isn't important. It's a proxy for all of these other things that are important. The ability to sprint maximally isn't necessarily important, but it's a proxy for everything else.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
You came up with it. I'm just— Yeah, but I was applying it to specifically a task, a 100-meter sprint task, and you've taken it and—
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
It really is. No, I appreciate you. And I appreciate you showing up to those meets and talking about those meets. It's important for our possibly dying sport. So it's important that we get more people out to these meets and support track and field, the foundation of human movement.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah, I think you nailed it at the end. Their understanding of themselves, I think, is a really important part of it. You know, we find ourselves through movement and we fall in love with whatever it is, because that's what we do. And we tend to do it really well. So I coached a British sprinter for a long time. Her name is Jody Williams. I coached her for about a decade, starting in 2015.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
She just retired at the end of last season. She went when she was young. So between I think the ages of 13 and 17, she won 150 straight races in the 100 and the 200. Never lost. was the best at every single age group all over the world for five years. Finally lost and did not really transition into being an elite 100 meter, 200 meter sprinter. But this was her identity.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
She'd always been the fastest person. So when I started coaching her in 2015, 16, when she was 22, that was what she did. She was a 100, 200 meter girl, but she wasn't elite. She wasn't world-class. And we kept on pushing her towards 100 and 200 because this was what she saw herself as. And me external to that, what I saw her as as well.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And everyone else expected from her because she was the best in the world for so long. And a funny thing happened. Sort of five years into that, we did a relay, a 4x4, early season at Arizona State University. And she ran really fast in this 4x4 relay. And she enjoyed it. And she didn't enjoy getting beat in the 100 and the 200 anymore. And she said, hmm, maybe I can do the 400.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And then the 2019 World Championships in Doha, she made the British team in the 200. Didn't do very well, but ran the relay, ran the 4x4, and ran the fastest split of all the countries. She ran 49.4 in a 4x4 split. and said, okay, we're a 400-meter runner now. So sometimes it's just that. Sometimes it takes a long time for the athlete to come to the realization that this is what they connect with.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
This is who I am. You know what I mean? It's not as easy as just saying, oh, we've got a bunch of tests, and you're a 100-meter, you're a 200, you're a 400. For her, it took her over a decade to come to terms with the fact that, you know, I can't do the 100 and 200 anymore, but I could be really good at the 400.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And then two years later, at the 2020 Olympic Games, which ended up being obviously in 21, she was sixth in the 400 meters in the Olympics. Ran 49.9 twice. So it's, you know, it's in hindsight, we wonder if we moved into the 400 five years earlier, three or four years earlier, maybe she could have had a medal, but. Yeah, it's an interesting one.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
We're always using all of the different pieces of information that we have at hand. Some of it's quantitative, some of it's qualitative, some of it is just a feeling. And with Jody specifically, it was, you know, what did I better connect with? Because, you know, that's, as I said, that's why we get into sport in the first place. If we can't connect with that as an individual...
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
with why we're doing it than why we're even doing it.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah. There's probably five separate gait patterns. Walking is the first one. And typically, most people will strike on their heel. They'll roll over and they'll toe off on their toe. And we do that up to about... 2 to 2.2 to 2.3 meters a second until we can no longer do that. So we start walking. We walk really, really slow.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And if we start increasing our speed, you'll find that you'll almost self-organize into the speed that feels really nice for you. If you were going for a walk, you would self-organize towards your most efficient or your most stable velocity for that walk. And if you're not thinking about it, you will self-organize towards your most efficient mechanical solution as well. that it might be flat foot.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
It might be right up high on your heel with massive amount of dorsiflexion. It might be a little bit lower on the heel, but that's all contingent upon your individual structure, how your foot is built, how it coordinates with your knee and your hip. If you're not thinking about it, we typically will self-organize towards what is most efficient, most stable for us.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And then as we get faster and faster and faster, you'll feel that stability and that inefficiency starts to rock a little bit and you can no longer walk. And what do we do then? To get faster, we actually have to transition to a totally different gait pattern. We start to jog. Because with so much instability, inefficiency, that pattern just begins to break down and we start to jog.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Let me back up just a little bit. So if you were to walk with, let's say, your 80-year-old neighbor and you're doing a walk with her, that's probably going to be pretty taxing for you, pretty uneconomical, pretty inefficient because you have to shuffle a little bit. You're walking so slow, you're probably going to be bent over a little bit.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
But if the neighbor went in, you just continue to walk, you would speed up to your most efficient pattern. So within all of these gait patterns, there is almost like an upside down you where you start off really inefficient, unstable. As you get faster and faster and faster, efficiency increases, stability increases, and you keep getting faster and faster and faster. Stability goes down again.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Efficiency goes down again before you have to transition to a different pattern. So jogging occurs at somewhere around 20% of your maximum sprint speed. So, you know, whether that's 1.8 to 2 to 2.2 meters per second. And then we start to jog. And eventually we can't jog at that speed anymore. So we have to transition to a different gait pattern and we start to run.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And that's kind of what we were doing yesterday. In fact, you know, we spent some time running. Now it's important. You asked me about kind of heel strike and and where we are within the foot. We're thinking about the same thing throughout. And that's just to move from here to there as efficiently as we can.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Understanding that we will typically, as I said, self-organize towards our most efficient pattern. And the only time we actually think about doing something different than that is when somebody outside tells us to do something different and messes up the efficiency most of the time. So for me, it's like the big cueing, and we talked about this yesterday, right? We said flat foot contact.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And if you think about being flat foot contact and all of the different things that you do, all the different gait patterns you do, the velocity is what determines where in the foot you actually will contact. So if you're walking and you're thinking flat foot, you'll actually go heel strike, you'll roll over and your toe off.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And if you're sprinting as fast as you can, you're thinking flat foot contact. You will actually plantar flex slightly just prior to ground contact, and you'll contact the ground more towards your toes than you will if you're just walking or running or jogging.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Which is, you know, to get to your initial point as well, it's like how many of us were taught to sprint up high on our toes when we were kids? Like we all were, right? Get up on your toes. Keep your arms at 90 degrees and get up really, really tall. And that's totally opposite to what we should be doing.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
In sprinting, 100%. I feel like the longer the distance is, the less it probably matters because the velocity is so much slower. I feel like if you're going out for a jog and it's 10-minute miles, you're probably looking pretty much straight ahead of you.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And if it's a little bit darker and maybe you're on a rocky surface or something or a little bit uneven surface, you're looking down a little bit. But it doesn't seem to really have a systemic effect on how you move, but it does when you sprint. Because obviously your body's gonna follow your eyes.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So if you're running down the track and you're sprinting as fast as you can and your eyes creep up and you start looking up, then the chin is gonna follow that. And you just start this extension pattern in the entirety of the system. As soon as you lift your chin up, you get into more extension through the rib cage and the spine.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And if the eyes come up first, you're going to end up in what's known as a hyperextended position. It's too much extension. Where really what we want the eyes to do is just come with the rest of the torso. So the cue that I use for the sprinters is allow your torso to determine when the chin and when the eyes come up, not the opposite way around. Because if the eyes come first, the chin follows.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And then we get this disconnect between the head and the thorax and the pelvis. And there's just too much extension. We end up kind of just pushing our way down the track rather than bouncing.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah, 100%. Okay. Here's a question for you. When you were first taught how to squat... Mm-hmm. Were you told to look at the ceiling or up on the wall?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
I still don't understand where that came from.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah, there's a lot in that. First, running fast for me is the ultimate human activity. Like the fastest human on the planet is the fastest human on the planet where potentially maybe like the best football player is probably not the best football player. The best soccer player is probably not the best soccer player.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
There might be someone down in Argentina who could be a better NFL linebacker than choose your all-pro linebacker right now. We're sprinting. Everybody sprints, as you said. We all run when we're kids. And we figure out, or our teachers figure out, or our coaches figure out, well, Andrew, you're a sprinter, so you're going to sprint. Stu, you're a middle distance, so you go and do that.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And over the course of time, we kind of figure out whether we're good or not. And the sprinters, like the truly elite sprinters... end up being the truly elite sprinters when they are 20, 25, 30 years old. Like that's what you do. You don't move into something else if you are a super elite sprinter. So I think that's part of it is that for me.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
that you will feel better with every skip that you do. Every single one, because there's this, again, this self-organizing, co-ordinative aspect to it, where you start feeling a little bit more bouncy, a little lighter, a little bit more coordinated, a little bit more rhythmic, which feeds your jogging. So for me, that's probably the best on-ramp is just to work it into your current jogs.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And then from there, start getting a little bit more powerful with it, a little bit more expressive with it. Now we start driving the thigh up and back and get a little bit more hip extension. Now we can start talking about skips for distance where you're trying to say, okay, from here to that tree that's 50 meters away, how many steps do I need to take to get to that 50-meter-away tree?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So doing things like that.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Like it is really truly the tip of the spear in human performance. The fastest person on the planet is the fastest person on the planet. Usain Bolt is the world record holder. And he is the fastest person who's ever ran. It's probably not somebody else who, you know, in the Congo somewhere in Jamaica that could have been faster than Usain because they would have displayed themselves at some point.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah, I think that's part of it. I think step one is incorporating in so you can actually be comfortable skipping. And step two is now can we add a little bit more speed, force, velocity to that skip where it becomes in and of itself a workout. where you're skipping as hard as you can for 50 meters and walking back and doing that 10 to 15 times.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
That would be a great skipping workout. Skipping 50 meters, walking back. Yeah. Doing that 10 to 15 times. Yeah. Because that is safe. If you warm up, I'm not saying go out and do a maximal effort skip for 50 meters without doing a warmup. Do a good warmup first that includes some low amplitude skips and maybe some jogs and some stretches. Do that for 10 or 15 minutes.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
and then do some maximal amplitude skips for over 50 meters. That's a great workout in and of itself. Like a lot of really beneficial plyometric work being done there.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Well, in running, concentric is pretty important because most of running is pretty concentric dominant. You're on the ground for quite a long time and you push behind your center mass for quite a long time. In striding and sprinting, which are the two faster gates, so you've got walking, jogging, running, striding, and sprinting.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And sprinting, which is upwards of, so striding, if you think about being 75 to 90% or 80% to 95% of your maximum sprint speed. That's called striding. That's called striding. And then sprinting is anything above that, where you actually, it's purely, truly maximal. As we said, these are different gait patterns entirely. those sprinting and striding is almost entirely eccentric, entirely.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So for me, that is it. You know, and I, you know, I started coaching kind of 1984. Like I've been coaching for a long, long time. And I started coaching professionally in 1992. And I've coached many sports, many activities, many tasks. And I enjoy most of them. But for me, it is that pinnacle, that true tip of the spear that interests me the most. And that you only get from sprinting.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
You're breaking? It's all breaking. It's all breaking forces. It's how well do you handle those breaking forces. If you do not handle those breaking forces well, you're not fast. And concentric, any concentric force ability or concentric force capacity is just not a differentiator at elite speed. In fact, it seems to be reverse. So we did a lot of testing through the 90s when I was up in Calgary.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
I was working for the Canadian Sports Center in Calgary starting in 1994 or so and was there for a long time. And we had, you know, because 27 different national teams are based there and all of the University of Calgary sports teams were also there, we could test out the yin-yang for hundreds of athletes every single day.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And one of the things that we tested was concentric, isometric, and eccentric force capacities, and which ones actually related to being actually good at your sport.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And almost every single sport, the concentric force capacity, and you pick the one, whether it's peak, whether it's rate of force application, whether it's time to peak, concentric force capacity just did not at all differentiate between the elite performers in that sport and the sub-elite performers in that sport. But eccentric did all across the board.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah. If you've got a really flat grass, perfect.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
If you're an NFL football player, most likely you're playing every game at about 80% of your best. If you are 80% of your best and you got onto the 100-meter start line, forget about it. Forget about it. If you're less than 99.9% of your best, forget about it. That's why I truly, I love the sprinting events so much. And zoomed out from that a little bit.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
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 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.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And that's going to take, you know, for most people, doing a maximal skip over the course of 50 meters, 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.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
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.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
No, 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?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
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 walk, it's a small space. And when you jog, you're taking up a little bit more space. And 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.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So just think about it from that perspective. The other part is jogging and running typically happens behind your center of mass. You crash onto the ground and you push back. You have this propulsive phase. There's not a lot of a breaking phase here. There's a long propulsive phase that happens with the foot pushing back behind the center mass.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Striding and sprinting happens in front of the center mass. There's 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.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And it's also, as I said, and 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. 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.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And most of the people on the planet can walk, jog, and maybe they can run. Most people on the planet can't stride. They can't get any faster than 75% of what their capacity is because they just can't do that anymore. If you're a kid, you can do that.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
You can run, 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.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Like I started off as a strength and conditioning coach. So for me, it was more about the power, the strength, and the speed. It was all of that. And I coached bobsled for a long time. And I really, really enjoyed bobsled because, you know, these guys are massive. They're really strong and they're really fast. So that for me was really appealing.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
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. He's a good friend of mine. He published this, I think, in 2018, 19. It's called a two mass system. where the body is not acting as a spring. There's a secondary mass of the shank and the foot.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
that's contributing to up to about 8% of the total force through contact. So this elite sprinter is hitting the ground so hard that 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.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
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.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
100%.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
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, we don't do that work anymore. Everything that we do is concentric in nature. And it is, it's not just elite sport.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And that fed my obsession about this peak human performance for a long time until I had the opportunity to actually go and work with super elite sprinters. And now I can't do anything other than that. I really can't. It's fascinating to me.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
I said before that the differentiator is always in the eccentric force capacities in elite sport. Also in us, in Gen Pop, we lose the ability to apply eccentric force, whether it's fast or maximal. So 100%, I think it's so important. My dad 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.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
In 2019, he ran the New York City Marathon. Ran 5.02. 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.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And then he walks, then he skips, and then he strides, and he walks. And it's so key. It really is. For me, 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 as a measurement for
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
whatever word you want to use here, vitality or health, then the ability to safely express maximal speed 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.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
If we feel like that is important, and you can argue 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.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
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.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
It's plyometrics. Great. Love it. And it is a, like bounding is left to right. So you're left, right, left, right, left, right. Bounding is really, really difficult. Extremely challenging. Skipping is a regression from bounding. So if you can't bound, if you can bound, great. Go and do some bounding. chances are if you can't sprint, you can't bound.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
I actually prefer coaching the 200 for a couple of reasons. There's a little bit of tactics in the 200 or there's more tactics than there are in the 100. In the 100, the fastest person is going to win. In the 200, depending on how you tactically set up your race, because it's not an all-out sprint. You can't run as fast as you can for 20 seconds.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Like it's really, really hard to do real, true, you know, high quality bounding. We can all skip. So look at it that way. This is plyometrics. This is just your most simple and probably for most people, your most effective means of giving your body a plyometric activity. How else are you going to do it? You're jumping onto the box, not a plyometric. That's all concentric. It's basically useless.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
It's a waste of time. Let's find eccentric things to do. And what is your best eccentric or the one that is the simplest? The one, as you said, we spent an entire childhood doing. It's familiar to us. There's something innate in this. There really is. Skipping. So just think about it as being a plyometric. I'm going to do my plyos today. And by the way, this isn't something that I've just made up.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
There is not a sprint group on the planet that don't skip. Every single sprinter skips, every single one of them, because of the importance of this specific gait pattern. It's really important.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Whereas 100 meters, you can run as fast as you can for 10 to 11 seconds. It is all out right from the start. With a 200, you have to kind of either push out really, really hard and then smooth it out and then try to finish strong. Or you start off a little bit easier and you finish strong. Or you just go all out and you're just going to fade and see if you can stay ahead.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
If we were to put a camera above the earth and look down on everybody, you would see this very distinctly at every single gait, starting with walking. We rotate. So the pelvis rotates up and down and forward and back. So it oscillates and undulates. And then the shoulders counter oscillate and counter undulate. So the shoulders go forward and backward and up and down.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Just pay attention to this next time you're out for a walk. You can feel your hips going backwards and forwards and also going up and down. If it didn't go up and down, you'd trip yourself every step. And the shoulders do the same. And then you have a spine, which is this column of a bunch of different pieces that connects the shoulder to the pelvis.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
which also rotates, side bends, and flexes and extends. The whole system is this big torsional system, this cross-body system. And some people take maximum weight
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
utility of this system and you can see it like some of the best movers some of the best sprinters you just watch them and you can you can just see how they wind up and they coil into every single step and they just use this cross-body coordination so effectively and as you said some others are just it doesn't seem like there's any rotation going on here at all What looks better to you?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So that tactical element for that race for me is really interesting. So then you're combining everything. the capacity, you know, the actual ability to run fast and be super incredibly fast, you know, high, high velocities with the tactical component.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Who looks better? It's the ones that are using this effectively that look, okay, that just looks better. I don't know why necessarily, but that looks way more athletic.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
It really is. Yeah. It really is. And just feel this when you walk. Like when you're going out for your next walk- Just try to pay attention to what your shoulders are doing and what your hips are doing. And start thinking, am I getting my knee behind my butt when I'm walking? And what does that feel like at my hip flexor and my quad? And as I do that, what's happening with the opposite shoulder?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And is that getting wound up and is that coiling properly? Am I taking advantage of these extremely innate, extremely natural movements movement tendencies that we all have, or have I, because of the way in which I've lived or some of the things that I've done, or maybe even some of the things that somebody has told me, tried to be really square and linear with everything I've done?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Because think about it, right? When we're taught to run when we're younger, any excessive movement outside of in a straight line has been told to us, oh, that's inefficient. You're wasting energy. You're bleeding all your force. not understanding the actual biomechanical mechanism of the pelvis, the shoulders, and the spine that connects them, and how we are actually built to rotate and to bend.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And that's not to say, by the way, that more is better. Everything is an inverted U in this world almost. You know, there's a Goldilocks effect to this. It's what is right for you. Some people will use this torsional system extremely effectively and there'll be a lot of it. And some will be a little bit less. They're a little bit more linear and they'll still be good.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
That's all dependent upon their own individual and unique abilities. structure, their morphology, their genetics, how they're built and how they're born, what they do with it as they age. But the bottom line is we are all rotational beings and we need to try to find ways to take advantage of those rotational forces rather than to constrain them.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
It's one of the reasons why I really dislike this anti-rotation terminology that's come into many of the exercises that we do in the weight room. This exercise is about anti-rotation. Why do you want to be anti-rotation? We are rotational beings. You're anti-excessive rotation, but not anti-rotation.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So it's then you're thinking about, okay, who's in, if my athlete's in lane six, who's in lane seven, who's in lane eight, how are we going to determine how we run based upon what the other racers are going to do? So for me, it's a 200. That's not to say I don't love the 100. The 100 for me is the one that I, if I'm just a fan, that's the one that I'm paying attention to the most.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So I feel like that, just as you were saying before with skipping, that's the wrong terminology for me. And that's just sending the entirely the wrong message to everybody about the importance of us being a rotational being.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
This just can't be good. I think that's a really good point. I haven't thought about that actually, but I think that's a really good point. I have a rule when I'm walking that if my phone buzzes and I want to pick up my phone, I stop.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
I stop, I get out of the way of all the other walkers, I push myself up against the building and I look to what's on my phone if I feel it's important, and then I start walking again. I just despise people who walk and look at the phone at the same time because that's what you see. You see this unnatural, constrained, overly flexed posture.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And if you spend too much time doing that, I don't think you need data. You know, that's not good. It's not good to walk that way. That's not the way we're supposed to walk. Again, it's all about coming back to let's express ourselves. Let's understand what our bodies are supposed to be able to do and find ways to continue to have that ability as we age. This isn't it.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah, Usain is unique. If we look over the history of some of the elite male sprinters, There was a time, you know, when I started getting into the sport, the way to be as an elite male sprinter was hyper-focused, hyper-intense. If you think about Mo Green stalking behind his blocks and licking his lips, getting ready for this, basically he's going to war.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And it seemed like so many of the sprinters were trying to encapsulate this kind of feeling, like sprinting is eh. It's macho. It's ego. I'm coming here to knock you out. And then Usain came along with the exact opposite. And I think, you know, it's just he's out there having fun. He's, as I told the story about Jodi a little bit earlier, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
She was, for a long time, she didn't connect herself with the activity. They were two separate beings. She was doing something that she no longer really connected with. And Usain, they're like this. Like he was really expressing his entire being in the way in which he went around about this task of sprinting 100 meters or sprinting 200 meters.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And I feel like that is such an important piece with all sport and probably within all things. If you can connect your entire way of being with the thing that you're spending most of your time doing, chances are you're going to be really successful at that thing. And if you look at all the other sports, right, it's the ones that you can tell they're just –
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
really confident in who they are, in what they do, how they express themselves. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to be Usain Bolt and playing around at the line and doing things like this and jumping around. Was he always like that? Does anyone know when he was a kid? Oh, no. Yeah, he's a kid. He's a big kid. He still is.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
He's just a, you know, he brings this really childlike intensity to things. He's still intense. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
For Usain, it was 40 steps. Correct. Yeah. For many other elite sprinters, it's somewhere between 40 and 45 in the men and somewhere between sort of 47 and 52 for the women.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah, that's a really good way to put it. One really good example of this in the sprints world, and I think you were there for this. This is 2022 World Championships in Oregon. Yeah, I was there. And Noah Lyles won the 200 in an American record in 1931. And that was, for me... Like that's the epitome of just being so lost in what you're doing that you have no idea what you're looking like.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And he's just maximally expressing his everything that he's got. And he bounds across the line. I said, man, that was beautiful. Like I've never seen that. Like it was so beautiful, like totally lost in flow. And it doesn't happen as often as many who don't work in sport think it does. Not every single performance is a flow performance.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
But if you're lucky, you'll get one or two of those in your career where you just lose connection with everything that you're doing and you're just, wow, what happened? And in fact, every time that a sprinter sets a personal best, I asked him, what was that feeling like? I don't know. No idea. I don't know how that felt. I just ran.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So all of these things that we talked about, all of these incredible coaching cues that I gave you to think about when you were doing this, you forgot them all? So I just ran. I just ran. And almost always that is the answer to that. I just ran and I just connected with it. And something in the background,
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
You know, we were able to, one of the ways, I'll bring this home a little bit more, maybe practically. So we train 20 to 25 hours a week. And my goal each day is not to say a lot. Like I want the athlete to kind of find a way through things and I will encourage them and guide them and sort of facilitate this discovery. But often we'll talk about different things.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And if they're struggling with something, I'll give them a specific cue. And over the course of time, we build, you know, this library of different things that the athlete thinks about or the different cues. And then my objective coming into more of a competitive season is to try to align these cues with an emotion, what I call – what I call mood words. So, for example –
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
When an athlete is accelerating, they're on the ground for a little bit longer than when they are upright because they need to actually propel themselves forward. They need horizontal force. They need the ground to push themselves forward. So they push and they push or they drive. So cues could be drive. It could be push. It could be power. It could be pull your thighs forward.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
It could be all of these different things that are around power. But for me, the mood word that really expresses this better than anything is pressure. I want you to feel like you're applying as much pressure through the first half of this race as you possibly can. And the second half of the race is the exact opposite of that.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So we talk about things that we do technically, knees up, thighs up, step off the ground, be vertical, be expressive, be tall, all of these different cues. But really what we're trying to get to is freedom or peace. So that's what a 100-meter sprint is. It's 50 meters of pressure and 50 meters of peace. So I try to align these mood words with these coaching instructions.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And then all the athletes need to think about is this emotion or this mood word, and all the instructions come along for the ride. That is the goal. And that is, you know, going back to something we talked about quite a while ago now, probably one of the things that I love the most around 100 meters.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
is this dichotomous relationship between pressure and peace or power and fluidity or violence and rhythm. All of these things that are at opposing ends of the spectrum that every single elite athlete, regardless of the sport, can come together perfectly. If you can have the power, but if you don't have the peace, good luck.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
You can have the peace, but if you don't have the power, good luck, no chance. It's always both simultaneously. So it's, yeah, that's the massive challenge in this sport. And going back to Noah in 2022, that world championship final in the 200, incredible. That's maybe the best example of that I've ever seen. Yeah, amazing, amazing race.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah, I think that's a good way of looking at it. I think more than that, if we zoom out, I feel like society or the way in which we think about exercise now has become detached from why we actually started doing the things to begin with, movement.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
We fall in love with finding our way around the world through moving our bodies in space and time, doing whatever, whether that's hiking or playing a sport or whatever. And then we finish school and we get a job. And now we don't really move anymore. That becomes exercise. And we go to the gym and we exercise. And I feel like that's so many degrees removed from why we actually do the thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
I feel like we don't ask ourselves, is this what is really serving me? Or is this what everyone else is doing? So I'm just going to go along with it.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
and for me like i lift weights i go to the weight room i do that four or five days a week i skip every single day i run like three or four days a week i do some boxing i move my body i play i do as many different things i can i can do includes hiking and i feel like that's what we should be doing i'm asking myself what is it that i want to get out of this practice
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Is it I want to go to the gym for 45 minutes a day and get as strong as I can or as big as I can, whatever? And if that is it, great. But I need to ask myself that question. I don't feel like many of us are asking that question.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And for me, and we've alluded to this a couple of times now, is, you know, what's important about moving as we're aging and being connected with that and having the ability to continue to be able to, you know, express ourselves maximally over the course of our lifetimes, that isn't developed in a weight room. That's developed by doing those things. You know, you might appreciate this.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah. Because the movers are so much better. Like the movement there is, wow, this is incredible. Don't you want to be able to do that rather than do a squat? There's some made up exercise that somebody's told you is going to be, you know, do this and this and this for you or do a deadlift or do a bench press, all these made up things.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And as I said, those things can be good, can be fun, can be interesting, can be important. But what really is most important is can you still move your body? Can you express yourself maximally for as long into your lifetime as you possibly can? And people, I feel like they have to ask the question whether the thing that they're doing, this exercise, is it actually leading to that?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And in most cases, I think it's not.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Oh, yeah?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
You know, I don't think I explicitly, truly understood the connection. until in hindsight. You know, because when you're doing it, you're just doing it. You're just living your life and you're not really thinking about it. I'm doing these things. They have creative, probably similarities, but I'm not really understanding those. You know, I'm not thinking about them.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
You know, I started DJing in 1984, so I'd been 15. And I stopped DJing in 2010. I had a radio show in Calgary for 20 years called Level the Vibes. Shout out Level the Vibes. It still goes on to this day. Level of Vibes? Level the Vibes. Level the Vibes. Level the Vibes with my old DJ partner, Tulla. Yeah. And it's, yeah, absolutely. Like it's, I was an artist as well.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So when I was in school, everyone figured I would just be the artist. Like I was an okay athlete, but not great. I wasn't good enough to go into professional sport and make money. It was just... Art. That was it. I went to art school. And I figured out, you know, this just isn't serving me anymore. But the entire time I'm doing this music thing and I'm doing this sport thing.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And I think all of these creative outlets are just all coming together. I've always been sort of a creative coach. And I think, like, this is how I actually got into sprinting is I was a soccer player. Most of my friends were sprinters. Most of those sprinters, because I was based in Calgary, there's a big Jamaican population there. So most of them were Jamaican.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And I just got into sprinting through that. So I feel like, as I said, it wasn't an explicit connection that I understood at the time. But in hindsight, I could say, okay, me being a DJ, an understanding rhythm,
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
and putting things together, and how putting these things together influenced other things less than maybe the people that I'm playing the music for, that really served my coaching ability 100%, 100%, as did my art. It's really interesting in hindsight to look at those things and look at those, as you say, call them the transition events and these other things, the other skills that
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
you know, masters in some of the domains have.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
In track specifically? Yeah, well, any sport, sure. It's, I mean, honestly, I'm not a massive sports fan. Like I don't watch a lot of team sports. In fact, I watch no team sports other than soccer. And I watched soccer because, you know, that's the game I played. That's the game my father played. Who's your team? Manchester City.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And I think most people would agree that Lionel Messi is now playing for Inter Miami. is maybe even still at the age of 35 or 36 the best player on the planet. Because of his expressiveness? Just the way in which he plays his game and expresses himself is just perfect. And in fact, this is a really good analogy to discuss what you're talking about here.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Because in the GOAT debate, the greatest of all time debate, there's two players that come up in soccer, Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. Maradona is no longer in the mix. No, and Pele is no longer in the mix either. It's these two. Ronaldo is 40 and Messi, I think, is 36.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And I'd say probably if you took a poll of all of the millions of people that have an opinion on this, 45% of them or so would say Cristiano Ronaldo and 55%. It's that close. 55% would say Messi. But both of them are so authentically themselves, it's crazy. Like Cristiano Ronaldo is perfect. Like he is the perfect Greek god. He's 40 years old. He's about 5% body fat.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
He's big, muscular, powerful, fast. He shines. He literally is. He gleams. He does. And he plays that way, right? And he's just got a certain personality that he brings to the field. And Messi's just like this, you know, just glides around and just elusive. And you can't see him. And, oh, there he is over there.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And just the things that he can do with his feet and the ball and the interaction between his feet and the ball. It's just, oh, that's incredible. And for me, I align with more of the Messi. You know, I just love the creativity that a player like that has. Or in, you know, a little bit more up-to-date, maybe, you know, Steph, Steph Curry.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
like changed the game of basketball totally, be it wild or through being authentically himself. He's totally changed the league. He's changed how everybody plays basketball and everybody will play basketball forevermore. So yeah, I really, really appreciate incredibly beautiful and authentic movers. I don't like sport, but I love the movement part of it.
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How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah, a bit more rigid and a little bit more aggressive as well. A little more stiff upper lip. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah, I think there's a lesson in that too, right? Brazil has been the most successful national soccer team of all time. And you know, like you just said, you're not a soccer fan, but you know how Brazil plays soccer. Everyone knows how Brazil plays soccer. They dance and they play. And it's just this thing, you know? It's a party. It's a party. Yeah. And that's how they play.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And everyone kind of knows how Argentina plays as well. You just said that. You're not a soccer fan, but you know that. Nobody knows how England plays. England haven't won a World Cup since 1966. They haven't won a major title since 1966, even though this is where the sport originated from. Everyone knows how Germany plays and how Germany has always played.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
There's a way, there's a German way of playing football. There's a Brazilian way of playing football. There's an Argentinian way of playing football. There is no British way anymore. So I think there's something in that, right? Like if there's a connection where every single person that comes up from the age of four years old, they know that the way in which everybody in this country plays
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Oh, okay. I get that. And we're all on the same team and all contributing to the same system in the same way. Where in the UK, it's so disparate that no one understands it anymore.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Well, as in all things, when we're having discussions around topics like this, it's both nature and nurture. Sure. It's primarily, in this case, nature. If you don't have the genetic capacity to run fast, you won't run fast. Sorry, you just don't. You don't have enough type two fibers. Whatever it is. Proportion of type two fibers. It could be limb length. It could be joint structure.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Typically faster people have tighter, smaller joints. Typically faster people have longer tendons and smaller muscle bellies. Typically faster people have more type two X fibers. Typically, faster people are slightly taller.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So all of these contributing genetic factors, if you do not have those things, I mean, that's not even talking about some of the hormonal factors, some of the endocrinological factors, some of the neural factors that we may not even understand yet. There's all of these genetic determinants that play a part in what you are able to do. So first and foremost, we have to, yes, that is a fact.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
that almost every single, statistically, almost every single human being that's ever ran sub-10 seconds is a black athlete from, you know, evolutionarily from maybe say West Africa.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
There's been a few. So it was first Christophe Lemaitre, I believe in either 2017 or 2018, was the first white athlete to break 10 seconds. And then there's been... I feel like there's probably five, maybe six Asians now who have broken 10 seconds. Everybody else, and that's close to 200. are black.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
I would say that if you don't have the genetics, good luck. You're not even in the room. The genetics will get you in the room. Once you do in that room, what that nature is, what that upbringing is, what that environment is, That is going to determine what you do with your genetics. So for example, a massive percentage, and I don't know what this is, but it's big.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
A massive percentage of the athletes, the male athletes who have ran sub 210 in a marathon come from the same little district in Kenya. Like it's very, very high percentage. And part of that is not only their genetics, but the environment in which they're growing up in. Every single person that they know is a marathoner. Every single person they know are running in excess of 100 miles a week.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Every single person they know, these are all of the things that we need to do to be this, right? So they're seeing that from the day that they're born. So for sure, environment really matters. What you do with that nature really, really matters. But if you don't have the genetic capacity to begin with, just as I said, you don't have any chance at all. And as you said, like Jamaica...
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Sprinting is massive in Jamaica. Like it's really, really important. I would encourage you to do one thing. Go to Champs at one point, if you like track meets. This is the best track meet in the world. Champs is the Jamaican high school national championships. And it's in Kingston. And it is incredible, absolutely incredible. The stands are packed, so there's 45,000, 50,000 people.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
It's loud, it's noisy, it's boisterous, and kids are just killing themselves trying to beat each other. It's just an amazing event over the course of three or four days. Go to the last couple of days of Champs and just watch that. You just see, ah, I understand why Jamaicans are so fast. This is the environment in which many of them are operating within as they come up.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And this is like, this is, you know, I, I talked to, uh, so I'm a good friends with Donovan Bailey. Donovan Bailey was a 1996 Olympic champion. He was a world record holder in a hundred meters for a while. He's of Jamaican descent, uh, grew up in Jamaica until he was 12. He moved to Canada in 1981, which is the same year that I moved to Canada. So we've talked about this a lot.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And he said, if you know, if you do well at champs, you're set. You're going to do really well as a professional sprinter because there's nothing that has more pressure in it than actually competing well at Jamaican high school national championships. So understand what that environment does for the ability for your typical Jamaican athlete to succeed at higher levels.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And all of those pockets, you know, pockets like this exist all over the world, whether it's in Russia or whether it's in Kenya or whether it's in West Africa or whether it's in, you know, right now we're seeing some interesting things in Norway and some of the endurance sports, right? So it's for sure. Nurture is really, really important. Genetics gets you in the room.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
What you do within that room, that's up to you and your environment that you create.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Okay. Essentially we've got, you know, each muscle is really a muscle tendon unit. And if you've got a longer tendon relative to your muscle, effectively you're a little bit more plyometric. You can store and release energy a little bit more effectively than somebody who has a shorter tendon and a longer or bigger fatter, thicker muscle.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So we want really, if you want to be fast, you want long skinny tendons and small little muscle bellies.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
No, but that's part of it. First of all, let's start at the start and understand that the way you move – is going to be governed by the things that you are moving. So how you move is governed by the stuff that you've got. So you cannot move in a way in which your body will not allow.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So if you have a certain structure of your joints, or a certain mobility structure, or a certain genetic makeup, or a certain stiffness, or a certain muscle fiber type, all of those things come together. They all coalesce to sort of govern your motor strategy. So the last thing that I would want you to do, Andrew, is to copy Usain Bolt's sprinting stride. Because Usain Bolt is 6'5", 215 pounds.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
He's a little bit more dynamic than you. He's probably got slightly longer Achilles tendons than you. He's probably got tighter, smaller joints than you. He's probably a lot more elastic than you are. He's probably a little bit more coordinated than you are. So why would I want you to try to copy that?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So my job, first and foremost, is to understand how you should or how you could move based upon the constraints that you have, based upon what are known as your action capabilities. So your force capacity, your mobility capacity, all of these things that make up who you are, your height, your weight, your joint length, your joint ratios, all of these different things, your limb ratios.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So first, it's understanding that we are governed by the stuff that we have. So we should never be trying to copy someone else, first and foremost. Number two is then we should have some sort of understanding of what is the common way to do a thing. And we can probably simplify this. We kind of know a little bit about what a model looks like for a back squat or for a deadlift, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
or four, you choose your exercise. We kind of have a model for that, whether that's a mathematical model or whether that model was based upon the average of a bunch of elite movers. We kind of, okay. We can't understand what quote-unquote optimal is mathematically, but we also have to understand that we are not math.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
We are biological beings that will all move in slightly varying ways depending upon the stuff that we are moving. So yes, we look at that model, but we also look at what we've got, and we try to find somewhere in the middle that serves us. So in sprinting and in probably in most activities, we try to identify like what are the non-negotiables? What are the rules here?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Like in squatting, we know what the rules are, right? We don't want to bend to one side. We don't want to overly flex our spine. We don't want to anteriorly rotate our shoulders. We don't want to have knee valgus where our knees come in and touch each other. We don't want to have super wide feet. We don't want to have internally rotated feet when we're squatting.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
All of these things that we know that we don't do, they govern the things that we can do. So in sprinting, we have something similar. We don't know as much about sprinting as we do in some of the more, or maybe the less complex movements, more discreet movements, like a squat, like a deadlift, like a power clean. The sprinting is coordinated, it continues.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
It's rhythmic, so it's a little bit harder for us to actually study. But we do know that, as you said, one of the things you said was high knees. And most of the elite sprinters converge upon similar positions when their knee is super high. And that knee gets up to about waist height, like just almost belly button height when they're running as fast as they can.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So we know if we want to be fast, we got to kind of try and bring our knees up. And we talked about that before too, right? The difference between striding and sprinting and jogging and running. Where jogging and running happens behind the center mass and striding and sprinting is in front of the center mass. So maybe first and foremost, we think about bringing the knee up.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Knee's got to be a little bit higher. You have to think about being in front. We know that for sure every elite sprinter sets up a very stiff spring on the ground by being very, very strong and stiff and rigid through the foot-ankle complex. So you have to be stiff on impact.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So think about the analogy that I give all the time is if you think about you're a boxer or you're boxing and you're hitting a heavy bag, what would you do with your wrist and your fist? You'd squeeze it and hold it rigidly because if you didn't, it would really hurt. And if you're trying to hit it as hard as you can, you have to be squeezed.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
It's the same thing with sprinting because the forces, by the way, are pretty similar. An elite boxer hits a heavy bag in somewhere in excess of five times their body weight in less than three hundredths of a second. It's exactly the same as sprinting. An elite sprinting is in excess of five times their body weight in less than three hundredths of a second time to peak force on ground contact.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So knees are up and we're very stiff on the ground. And the third thing is if you do not have an effective hip extension pattern, You just can't move well. Never mind run fast. You have to have the ability for your knee to come behind your butt. Now, that's a hard thing to define. It's a hard thing to quantify. People ask me all the time, what do you mean? What is a good pattern?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
First of all, it was not the form. Because most of those kids, their limbs are going all over the place, right? It's how they interact with the ground. And it's this qualitative component that is really hard to define. If you watch an elite boxer hit a heavy bag, there's a pop, sound to it, pop.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
If I talk about the hip extension pattern and the importance of that, it's not just range of motion. So that's the one that you alluded to is how far behind. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And it's the same with elite sprinters or not even elite sprinters, but anybody who's fast and effective and efficient at applying force against an object. And you see that as young as we saw yesterday with 12, 13, 14 year olds, right? Some of them are just thudding on the ground and just pushing back and Kind of like Rob, your producer.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Thank you.
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How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you know, a half a kilo. It's beautiful. So we use that, but that's for different reasons. So you talked about the weight room. In the population of athletes I work with, maximum strength is at the rate of diminution returns already. We don't spend almost any time working on that.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
But this one kid, he was just far more efficient on the ground than everyone else. It was just pop, pop. and you could hear it. And I hear it. Generally, I hear it before I see it. And that's, I think, is actually what I heard first. And I looked around and said, oh, that's the kid. Like, he's a sprinter. And then you just kind of look at his form and it just looks better.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
There's just a quality to that that you don't see with these other kids. And even though limbs are going all over the place and head is going from side to side and, you know, feet are going all over the place and hands are flapping, you know, like wings, there's just a fluidity.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
At a lower level of population, maybe if you're a high school kid or if you're in your 20s when you're not super, or if you're super weak, just by increasing your force capacity, so your ability to apply force, you will get faster. Because remember what the calculation is, amount of force, how fast, direction, and body mass. So it is important.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
it just becomes less and less and less important the faster you get. And then it becomes when it's less important, when the ability to produce a high magnitude of force isn't important, what is important? So then we're starting to looking at plyometric things. And probably most specifically, I'm looking at specific isometric stuff in the weight room.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So let's look at the position in which we're applying in excess of five times our body weight. And that's when the foot is directly underneath the center mass. The foot is flat on the ground. There's about a 15 degree knee bend and there's about a five to 10 degree hip bend. So can you think about that position?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So we're pushing up against an immovable bar or holding a very, very heavy bar on one leg with as heavy as we can or as hard as we can for somewhere between three to five seconds times three to four repetitions. And we'll do like three sets of that. That's Alex Natera's work. He's one of the premier researchers in what's called run-specific isometric strength training. So it's getting strong
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Even with him looking like that, he's just doing it much more coordinated and fluid than everyone else who would look like they were trying hard. And with him, it didn't look like he was trying hard. All elite and sub-elite athletes, regardless of the sport, the best athletes are always the ones that make it look the easiest. And that kid just made it look easier than everyone else.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
in really specific positions to the task that you're trying to become better at. So that's the primary one for me, is that position where the foot is directly underneath the center of mass. There's a little bit of a knee bend, there's a little bit of a hip bend. And we do a lot of isometric work right there. And then I, and this is my bias, I do nothing bilateral at all. You mean parallel stance?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Parallel stance. Nothing. Except occasionally, if it is an issue, you know, with neural drive or whatever, I'll do some trap bar deadlifts. So some parallel stance trap bar deadlifts. I think it's a great exercise. I think that's difficult to do with a staggered stance. It's very difficult to do with a single leg stance.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
but you can load up some pretty good weight on a parallel stance trap bar deadlift. And yeah, I feel pretty good. And you get a good feeling out of that. It's not necessarily to be able to apply or generate more force. It's more about sort of neural drive than it is for anything else.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Every single other thing that we do is in a staggered stance, heel to toe, or kickstand, which is kind of the same sort of thing, just a different terminology, or split stance, or a stance where the front foot is elevated or the rear foot is elevated. So we'll do, as we've talked about quite a bit now, find opportunities to get the knee behind the butt. That's a really important position.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Can we get stronger, faster, more control, more repeatability, and more range at that position?
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How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah, I think the ability to get off your first ray, so for the big toe to bend and flex is really important. So for me, if that's important, I'm going to search for opportunities to do that as often as I can. So if I have an option to either flex the big toe or not, then we're going to flex the big toe.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Now, if you can't, and many athletes cannot, you know, there's a lot of athletes that just cannot extend to that big toe, or some athletes have bunions and just can't get over it. And that's okay. We can go on to the top of the foot, but it's not the end of the world. But I look for opportunities like that. Like I look for opportunities to extend the hip.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
How can I work hip extension exercises into everything I do? How do I look at, or do I look for... full chain or full body force transmission exercises as much as I possibly can. Ideally, from the left foot to the right hand and the right foot to the left hand, so cross body. So I'm looking for these long fascial chains, ways in which I can bring some function
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
to the work that I'm doing in the weight room, some level of transferability between the things that I do in the weight room and the things that we do on the track. Because frankly, most of the things that we do in the weight room don't transfer to the track. A squat doesn't really transfer.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
It's a totally different exercise performed in a totally different way at a totally different time, totally different weights. So the transference is very, very far. It's very nebulous. So I'm looking for ways in which we can find a way to transfer the capacities that we are building in the weight room directly to the track.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
line that goes all the way from one's big toe that's planting back across up the leg across the pelvis up the body and shoulder to the opposite tips of finger hundred percent and it's it's if if I can add to that stretch this is something that I really love Kelly about you know he's he's so much on I need you to be in control of your body
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
There is a way to do this, but then it's up to you to find out a better way for you specifically. So you've done a great job of outlining what the stretch looks like. Now, what can I do with my body to actually make this better? Do I rotate to one side? Do I side bend to one side? Do I flex the hand as well as doing this? Because this will be a better stretch than that.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Of the raised hand. Correct. If I push the knee back and try to push the heel on the ground and actually contract, if I rotate my pelvis underneath me posteriorly, like You know, do a pelvic tilt underneath me. Will that increase it? So it's always this exploratory process. There is a right way to do things, but you are an individual. We're all unique snowflakes, right?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
We're all moving different ways. And it's up to us to explore all of our uniqueness.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
androgen increasing but yeah but things like um testosterone derivatives yeah in the men and women how common is it yeah um uh now not common at all in fact i don't know of any elite sprinter that i could um definitely point to say that person is dirty none It was common. 60s and 70s, extremely common. 80s, very, very common. 90s, when testing started becoming a bit better, much less common.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah, I don't, especially not at that age. You know, at that age, you want him to be doing or her to be doing as many different events as possible. And let's just trial them all. I don't think they should even at that age at 12, 13, 14, say you're a sprinter. you're a sprinter and you're a jumper. And maybe we'll do some middle distance and we'll do some relays.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
2000s, 2010s, and 20s, I just don't know how much of it is getting done now or being done across the board. There are pockets. So we obviously know about Russia and what's going on with the Eastern Bloc and all of the drugs that they've taken. That's been state sponsored. All of that is out there. We know that for sure if you were an elite Russian athlete, almost certainly you were taking drugs.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
You didn't have a choice. Is that still true now? You didn't have a choice. No one really knows now because Russia has been banned from all sports. So you don't see Russian athletes almost anywhere. Right. I think there's a few sports that you do, but most of them now you don't see Russian athletes. But it's so hard.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Like that's a part of the culture and has been part of the culture for, you know, since the 50s. That's what we do because everyone else is cheating. So this is what we do. So it's a state sponsored system. And I feel like there's, you know, there's 150 or 160, something like that, positive drug cases come out of Kenya over the course of the last decade.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So you think, okay, there's something going on with Kenyans. Is that distance running? Distance running.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Yeah, and this one in Kenya, I understand it. I understand the Russian thing as well. Like if you're a Kenyan kid, you're 18 years old, you've got some talent, an agent comes to you and says, I'm going to give you $50,000 and I'm going to support you for the first two years of your career. And this is what everyone does anyway. And, you know, we'll take the risk a little bit.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
But we can, you know, you can actually make something of yourself, become a star, get a house, feed your family, do this, do that. That's a hard calculation for a kid to make, as it was in a steroid era in baseball. It's almost logical to take drugs at that point. These guys aren't testing me at all. So why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't Barry Bonds take drugs?
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Now, that's a different calculation for most of the rest of the world, where there isn't these practices going on in Kenya with a lot of shady people, to be honest with you. And I honestly, I do not see drugs at all in the sport anymore. There will be pockets of people, for sure. There will be a few dirty coaches. There'll be a few dirty managers. There'll be a few people doing some dirty things.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
But I'm very, very confident that the top people in all of the events are doing it clean. Very confident. That's great to hear. And I would not know the first, like I've been in this sport for a long time. I wouldn't know what to do, what to take, who to get it from.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And then we can do a couple of throws as well and see which one that you're kind of enjoying the most, number one. And then number two, what are you actually showing some expertise towards? And hopefully those two things match. And then you can start looking at specializing for the kind of event group a little bit later.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So when I look at, you know, I look at, you know, choose your athlete, I won't name any names, and you look at who they're surrounded by, I know those people well. Mm-hmm. How would they do it? I had no idea. Like, no one really knows, right? Because, I mean, the drug testing is pretty stringent now. It's really stringent. It's hard. It's really, really hard.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
What sucks more... is the reputational damage that those things do for the people who are actually doing this well and clean. Right. The 99.9% of the people who are trying to do this the right way that are being colored with the same brush. Right. And that's what really frustrates me. It was really frustrating. I've coached one athlete in my career who tested positive.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
2001 Olympic trials in bobsled. His name was Pavle Jovanovic. He was, at the time, the best bobsledder on the planet. So tested positive for nandrolone, so decadurolone. Later, it was shown that it came from his supplement. If you remember, this was 2001. Oh, yeah. You could buy GHB at GNC at that time. Correct. Late 90s up until the early 2000s.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And that comes a lot later than what many people outside of track and field think. even with, you know, most NCAA Division I college programs are pretty elite. I mean, that's some high-performing athletes. And many of those sprinters do the one, the two, the four, all the relays. And often your best sprinters are also your best jumpers.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
There were supplement companies purposefully lacing their protein with steroids to try to sell more supplements. Goodness gracious. And there's studies that show this. And they ended up, there was a group of athletes that all tested positive that sued this one company. And the company ended up just declaring bankruptcy and nobody got a cent.
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How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
And long story short, ruined his career, ruined his reputation, ended up taking his own life.
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How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
So I've seen, and this is, you know, this is just people from the outside just look at that and say, oh, just another druggie bobsledder. Just another druggie football player. Just another druggie sprinter. They're all on drugs. And they're not. They're not. 99.9% of people are trying to do this right. Like they're good people. Not making any money in this sport, especially in track and field.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
It's a different calculation, as you said, in Hollywood. or in the NFL, or in baseball, where the testing is significantly more lax than it is in track and field, or significantly more lax than what it is in almost all amateur sports. Amateur sports is almost impossible to be dirty these days. It really is. And if you just think about this, Trayvon Bromell ran 997 as a high school kid.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
He was 5'7", 135 pounds. Think that kid was taking drugs? Of course he wasn't. So if you can run 997 as a 17-year-old at that age, why can't you run 97 six, seven, eight years later after actually training and being in an elite program? Of course you can. Usain Bolt ran 1984 when he was 18 years old. He ran sub 10 when he was 19 years old. World-class. Just a kid. Just a kid. Yeah.
Huberman Lab
How to Increase Your Speed, Mobility & Longevity with Plyometrics & Sprinting | Stuart McMillan
Like these, you know, you're seeing high school kids now running ridiculously fast times. In the mile as well. In every single event, right? Every event across the board.