Eccentric Training for Speed and Power With Angus Ross

Based on Episode 104 of the Just Fly Performance Podcast, a conversation between host Joel Smith and Angus Ross, a strength physiologist at High Performance Sport New Zealand.

Eccentric training sits at the edge of what most speed and power coaches actually use, and that is where Angus Ross does some of his most interesting work. Ross is a strength physiologist at High Performance Sport New Zealand who spends his days trying to make already-fast athletes faster. His case for supramaximal eccentric work is not that it replaces plyometrics or sprinting. It is that overloading the lowering phase can change the muscle itself, push it toward a faster contracting isoform, and build the tendon integrity an athlete needs before piling on high-impact plyometrics. Along the way he gets into how to actually measure stiffness, why a powerful athlete can still have mushy single-leg feet, and when to reach for velocity-based training or even electrical stimulation.

Key Takeaways

• Overload the lowering phase to change the muscle. Ross points to research that high-speed eccentric work can shift muscle toward a faster contracting isoform, an adaptation the plyometric data does not show as clearly.
• Sequence eccentrics before plyometrics. He periodizes supramaximal eccentric and isometric work first to build tendon and muscle integrity, then moves toward faster eccentrics and plyometric-dominant work, keeping a little of each throughout.
• Measure stiffness, do not eyeball it. A drop jump (ground contact time, flight time, and body mass) or sprint data gives a leg-stiffness number, and a short ground contact usually means a stiffer athlete with a quicker stride rate.
• Match the method to the athlete’s body. Big throwers who cannot absorb truckloads of plyometrics can get similar qualities from controlled eccentric overload, and Jonathan Edwards built his eccentric base with heavy power cleans rather than endless bounding.
• Protect fast-twitch fiber with velocity cutoffs. Capping bar-speed loss inside a set (roughly 20 percent, not 40) keeps grinding reps from down-regulating fast-twitch fiber, which matters most for speed and power athletes.

How to test reactive strength and leg stiffness

Before Ross prescribes anything, he wants a number. He is candid that the lab methods for stiffness get complicated fast, so he leans on field tests that correlate well with them and that most coaches can actually run.

One of the ones is a drop jump, which probably most people have access to, either a jump mat or a high-speed camera to get ground contact time and flight time.

Feed ground contact time, flight time, and body mass into a published calculation (he references the Morin group’s work), and you get a stiffness estimate you can track over time, single leg or double leg. The single variable that drives it is how long the foot stays down.

The biggest influence on the calculation is the ground contact time. People that get off the ground quickly generally are stiffer, and we know that if you get off the ground quickly, your stride rate is quicker.

He draws a careful line between stiffness and the reactive strength index that many coaches already collect. They are related but not the same thing, so treat RSI as a broad athleticism screen and read the contact time underneath it.

That’s a good test, but it won’t give you stiffness per se. It’s almost a power measure. If they achieve a good RSI through a very small contact time, then they’re probably stiff.

For a coach, the practical move is to log contact time alongside jump height, not jump height alone. Two athletes can post the same RSI while one bounces off the ground and the other sinks and grinds, and only the contact time tells them apart.

The single-leg stiffness gap that quietly caps sprint speed

Ross’s favorite cautionary tale is 20 years old and still shapes how he tests athletes. He had a sprinter who looked like a monster on paper and on a double-leg jump, yet kept losing at top speed.

One of the athletes was probably the most powerful athlete in the group by a good margin, but he was a 10.79 100 meter runner. You put him in a double leg drop jump, he’d destroy everybody. But when we did it in a single leg, he had these very weak, mushy feet.

He would collapse and would get destroyed by the 10.2 guys in the single leg stuff. And that was a bit of a light bulb moment for me.

The lesson is that a double-leg score can hide a single-leg problem, and sprinting is a single-leg event. Ross also pushes back on splitting stiffness into vertical and horizontal buckets. To him it is one quality of the leg as a spring.

I’m not sure there is such a thing as vertical and horizontal. Stiffness is the quality of the leg spring.

Coaches can act on this without a lab: test drop jumps on one leg, watch for a foot that caves inward, and treat a big single-leg deficit as a rate-limiting step worth training directly, most obviously through the foot and calf.

Eccentric training versus plyometrics for building stiffness

This is the heart of the episode. Ross does not frame eccentric training and plyometrics as rivals so much as different tools that overlap on stiffness but diverge on everything else.

Arguably both of them will impact stiffness positively, so in that aspect they might be interchangeable, but they are still pretty different. If you’re good at power bounding, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’d be a great sprinter.

The separator, for him, is what eccentric work can do that plyometrics has not clearly been shown to do: reshape the muscle at the tissue level.

There’s a couple of papers that show data that you can use high-speed eccentric work to change the morphology of the muscle towards a faster isoform.

That leads him to a concrete order of operations across a training year, which coaches can lift almost directly.

If I was gonna periodize it, I might be doing some supramaximal eccentric work, maybe with some isometric work initially, then you might morph towards faster eccentric work and then morph towards more plyometric dominant work. But probably you’d keep a little bit of each element in throughout.

Part of the logic is risk. Slow, overloaded eccentrics let you build tissue tolerance before the athlete ever absorbs full plyometric or sprinting forces.

There might be less risk in that for somebody initially going slow eccentrics, overloaded, incrementally developing that integrity of the muscle and tendon, and then moving towards the plyos later on.

Who supramaximal eccentric work fits best

Ross is clear that the method is not universal. It earns its place with athletes who cannot, or should not, live on high-impact bouncing. His historical example is triple jump great Jonathan Edwards, who was steered away from heavy plyometric volume and found another road.

He couldn’t do boatloads of plyometrics like most triple jumpers would do. He found a different way of answering the question, and he did it by getting silly strong. This was a 74 kilo guy power cleaning more than twice body weight, and that gave him these eccentric qualities.

The same reasoning protects heavy athletes whose body mass turns every ground contact into a large impact.

To do truck loads of plyometrics when you weigh 130 kilos or 300 odd pounds, it’s pretty hard on the body, because those impact forces are huge, whereas we can control more in an eccentric fashion with some overload work.

The takeaway for a coach is to profile the athlete first. A light, elastic jumper may need very little eccentric overload, while a big thrower or an athlete with a plyometric contraindication can build the same qualities at a fraction of the joint cost.

Changing the training stimulus every week

One of Ross’s newer experiments has nothing to do with a specific exercise and everything to do with tempo of change. Drawing on Louis Simmons and the conjugate idea, he started shrinking his blocks all the way down.

I started thinking, what would happen if you change the whole paradigm every week? Instead of having three, four-week, six-week blocks, you had one-week blocks and then you repeated that.

The results, honestly reported, are mixed by athlete, which is the point. Advanced athletes who go stale on a repeated stimulus tend to thrive on it.

With some athletes it’s worked great, others feel like they don’t get enough time on a stimulus. I’ve been quite astounded at the changes we’ve got in a six-month period for senior athletes that are already at a world level.

He also answers the obvious objection, that you cannot improve a lift you rarely train, with a surprise his own athletes have run into.

If you’re getting generically better, you’ve been doing that exercise for X number of years, that’ll come up too. Haven’t done power cleans, and I’ve just done a PB which has been stuck for five years.

Ross runs this as a preparatory phase, not a whole season, and pairs it with athlete buy-in: older athletes want a say in their program, so the weekly change becomes a collaboration rather than a mandate.

Fascial-driven versus muscle-driven athletes

Ask Ross why some athletes detrain overnight while others peak off two weeks of rest, and he does not reach for fiber type. He reaches for tension in the connective tissue.

I think it’s more likely that you’re a really fascial animal, and so you lose a bit of tension and tightness in your system. And so you become kind of floppy, for want of a better word.

I don’t think that really rapid detraining is necessarily a function of muscle. I think it’s a loss of tension in the spring, in the fascia.

Practically, this changes how he tapers. A fascially driven athlete may need a little load right up to competition to hold their tone, while a muscle-driven athlete can sit down for two or three weeks and come back firing. Knowing which type is in front of you is the difference between peaking an athlete and flattening them.

Velocity-based training to protect fast-twitch fiber

Ross calls himself a late adopter of velocity-based training, but he now uses bar speed as a live guardrail against training the wrong quality. The research that moved him is the velocity-loss work on how far to let a set decay.

There’s a couple of papers, something like 20% drop off in speed versus 40% drop off in speed. They showed that if you limit the drop off in speed to 20%, you don’t decrease fast-twitch fiber, whereas if you go to 40%, so you’re grinding reps at the end of a set, then perhaps you are compromising fiber type.

He sets a tight velocity cutoff for his power athletes and stops the set when bar speed falls off, which keeps the work fast and specific instead of turning it into a strength grind. That specificity is the whole argument.

Strength is reasonably specific to the velocities you do it at. Grinding a bench press at 0.3 of a meter per second is probably of limited relevance to even a shot putter.

For a coach without a full velocity system, the usable principle is simpler than the hardware: end explosive sets while the reps are still crisp, and save the deep, slow grinding for athletes and goals where hypertrophy is the actual target.

Electrical stimulation for rate of force development

Ross closes with the most experimental tool on his bench, electrical muscle stimulation, and he is honest about both the theory and its limits. The appeal is a recruitment pattern you cannot get voluntarily.

There’s that whole concept of preferential recruitment of fast-twitch muscle with EMS. You get this reverse order of recruitment, the opposite of the size principle.

He has seen it move the needle, citing a case study on an Olympic weightlifter and a more recent sprinter study, and his own trial with a rower.

They used a sprinter population, national level guys, and they showed gains in speed, both zero to 10 and flying 10 meter times.

Every time we did it, he got an improvement in his vertical jump, which was kind of cool.

The honest caveats matter as much as the wins. The sessions are brutal, response varies widely from one athlete to the next, and Ross flags that cheap stimulators break and that some commercial devices hide their settings. He treats EMS as a promising add-on for elite power athletes, not a first move for the general athlete.

Frequently asked questions

What is eccentric training, and why does it help sprinters?
Eccentric training loads the lengthening or lowering phase of a movement, often with supramaximal loads the athlete could not lift concentrically. Ross values it because research suggests high-speed eccentric work can shift muscle toward a faster contracting isoform and build the tendon integrity a sprinter needs before absorbing heavy plyometric and sprinting forces.

Is eccentric training better than plyometrics for building stiffness?
Ross says both improve stiffness, so in that narrow sense they can be interchangeable, but they are not the same tool. He tends to sequence supramaximal eccentric and isometric work first, then faster eccentrics, then plyometric-dominant work, keeping a little of each element throughout the year.

What is the reactive strength index, and does it measure stiffness?
The reactive strength index is a good general measure of athleticism and elasticity, but Ross cautions it is not stiffness itself. A strong RSI achieved through a very short ground contact usually points to a stiff athlete. To estimate leg stiffness directly, he uses a drop jump (ground contact time, flight time, and body mass) or sprint data plugged into a published calculation.

How often should you change your training program?
For advanced athletes who go stale, Ross has experimented with a completely different one-week block every week during a preparatory phase. Some athletes respond dramatically, others feel they never get enough time on any one stimulus, so he treats it as one option rather than a rule and does not run it through a whole season.

Can electrical muscle stimulation improve speed and power?
Possibly, for elite power athletes. EMS can preferentially recruit fast-twitch fibers, and Ross points to a weightlifter case study, a sprinter study showing faster zero-to-10 and flying 10 times, and a rower who improved his vertical jump. He is quick to add that the sessions are brutal, individual response varies, and device quality is uneven.

About the authors

Angus Ross is a strength physiologist and strength coach at High Performance Sport New Zealand, where he works with speed and power athletes. He holds a PhD from the University of Queensland and has competed as a winter Olympian. [VERIFY current role, Olympic sport and years, and credentials before publishing.]

Joel Smith is the host of the Just Fly Performance Podcast and the founder of Just Fly Sports, a former collegiate strength and track and field coach who focuses on speed, power, and athletic development. Listen to the full episode with Angus Ross on Just Fly Sports.