Implementing Oscillatory Training and Olympic Lifts into OCTS

Hi Coach!

I just finished going through the OCTS courses on your website - fantastic resource!
I’ve got two follow-up questions if you’re open to answering (any time is really appreciated)

For context, I work as an S&C coach mostly with basketball and volleyball players at the high school level

  1. Oscillatory training

I’ve heard a few coaches discuss using oscillations when developing elastic athletes. Do you have any experiencing implementing these? I know in the course you talk about using double-contraction in accumulation on concentric day, but my gut would say that oscillatory work would be best suited to the explosion or peaking phase on isometric day.

  1. Olympic lifts

I’ve seen a lot of your athletes on your IG utilising cleans and snatches within their training. Are these utilised as the “pulling” exercises on the concentric and isometric days? I can’t think of a way to use an eccentric emphasis on these lifts.

Thank you in advance!
Jason

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Just thought I’d update:

I ended up purchasing the fast twitch training course and spending some more time going through articles on thibarmy.

That course, combined with “optimised power training” ended up answering most of my questions on the system.

Looking forward to getting to know these methods :slight_smile:

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First, I’m in the process of updating the OCTS course. It honestly only includes a fraction of the methods that I use and doesn’t cover programming enough. My “Theory and Application…” book/ebook covers a bit more (even though it was written more than 15 years ago).

Oscillatory training is something that I do use. I didn’t include it in the original course because my course was only theoretical and oscillatory training is very hard to explain properly without demos. Plus, it’s a very advanced method and I felt that the system already included a lot of complex methods.

Anyway, I use three main oscillatory methods.

  1. Overcoming oscillatory isometrics
  2. Yielding oscillatory isometrics
  3. Rapid-fire isometrics (which is the version most commonly associated with oscillatory isometrics and originally taught by Dan Fichter who was one of the original Inno-sport/DB hammer coaches)

First, oscillatory means that you go from maximal muscle tension to full relaxation to maximal muscle tension in a cycle and extremely rapidly. If properly executed yu will have a '“rebound” when you go from relaxation to tension without even thinking about lifting the weight/moving your body.

Overcoming” is a form of isometric where you are trying to move a source of resistance that can’t be moved, for example pushing or pulling against safety pins in a power rack with a bar. Neurologically this is more similar to a concentric action.

“Yielding” is a form of isometric where you are holding a weight (or body position) in place, preventing it from falling down. This is neurologically more similar to an eccentric action.

So if we look at the three types of oscillatory isometrics:

Overcoming oscillatory isometrics: You push/pull against a set of safety pins with a bar, as hard as possible for 1-2 seconds. Then you abruptly shut down all force production for a fraction of a second before tensing as hard as possible immediately after the initial tension was released. If this is done properly, there will be a brief period where you are no longer applying force on the safety pins, but it will not be long enough for the bar to move away from the safety pins significantly (or at all).

Yielding oscillatory isometrics: You are holding a weight (or a position), contracting the muscle(s) involved as hard as possible. You then abruptly shut down force production and re-establish as fast as possible. In this version, the goal is to have almost no weight/position “drop”/movement.

Rapid fire isometrics: These are very similar to the yielding oscillatory isometrics. The difference is that you allow a bit more of a “drop” and “catch” abruptly stop the weight as it dropped. Typically the RFI is done with a lighter weight than the YOI and the RFI is done mostly at the weakest part in the range of motion (or the most lengthened) position whereas the YOI is done at a strong position (for example, I often use it at the end range of a heavy bench press).

You are correct, there are best used in the isometric day of the realisation/explosion phase.

Well, we do all of our olympic lifts from the hang or blocks.

So we can do an eccentric emphasis by doing the “lowering to the hang position” as a slow eccentric (or having an isometric emphasis by pausing at the hang position).

The same can be done with loaded jump squats…

No, as the hip hinge pattern

Awesome, I look forward to that!

Never considered OOI before but the method makes sense. Would you say the difference between the two is that higher forces are achieved with OOI, whereas quicker relaxation times can be produced with YOI?

This actually answers a seperate question I had about placing rebound reps and depth jumps vs drop-catches and altitude drops on eccentric and isometric days.

Am I correct in thinking that rebound reps are best suited to eccentric days, and altitude drops on isometric days?

Makes perfect senses. Do you then still use complexes during accumulation periods on the eccentric and isometric days, or let the tempo (e.g. 5s lower) provide the time under tension?

Yes, that’s what I do

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