Today’s episode features Jake Tuura. Jake is a collegiate strength and conditioning coach, currently working at Youngstown State University. Prior to YSU, Jake was an assistant S&C coach at the University of Minnesota-Duluth. Jake runs the website jackedathlete.com which helps athletes gain copious amounts of muscle, hit PRs in the weight room, and improve athletic performance.

Jake recently wrote one of the most popular articles of the year on Just Fly Sports “Jacked and Athletic: Training Wisdom for Simultaneous Muscle and Performance Gain” where he laid out a fantastic blend of ideas on muscle, strength and tendon training. He is also well known on his Instagram where he frequently deadlifts over 600lbs, dunks basketballs, and shows means of how he integrates the work of great minds like Adarian Barr and Dr. Keith Baar. As with many young coaches who are helping to push the field forwards, training themselves is a huge portion of the equation.

Jake is actually a big reason that I got Dr. Keith Baar on the show, as the results he’s gotten from Dr. Baar’s methods have been outstanding in helping him resolve his tendon and knee pain. He also has great practical thoughts on the fundamental differences between athletic movement and what happens in most barbell lifts as they are traditionally coached. On today’s show Jake and I chat about hypertrophy and muscle building in the context of athletic development, Jake’s case against the “hypertrophy phase” of training, barbell cluster training for athletes, and his vertical jump training ideas.

Today’s episode is brought to you by SimpliFaster, supplier of high-end athletic development tools, such as the Freelap timing system, kBox, Sprint 1080, and more.

Key Points

How to increase muscle mass while trying to stay as athletic as possible

Jake’s case against the “hypertrophy phase” in sports performance programs

Utilization of cluster training for performance

Jake’s own experience with tendon training methods and means

How Jake used squatting every day to reduce his knee pain

Case studies and examples of implementing Keith Baar’s tendon health session trainings

Jake’s recent experience in jump training and “meathead dunks”

Jake Tuura Quotes

“(In barbell squats) If you take someone at 75% and make them do a set of 10, you are going to get some pretty ugly compensation to get all those reps” “(As an athlete) If you are going to do things that involve training to failure, try isolation type movements” “(For hypertrophy-clusters with an athletic emphasis) Instead of traditional 4×10 at a load where you are grinding it out and it feels terrible, you do double the sets and half the reps” “If you are killing yourself in the weightroom with grinding reps, you are not going to be able to go and perform high quality skill work” “For 2 months I squatted every single day, go in do few warm up sets, max out… after this, I went to the court to play basketball… no knee pain” “Load your tendon over and over… load it in the morning and load it in the evening… if you give me an excuse to lift twice a day, I’m going to use it” “I feel much more sturdy doing (long duration extreme ISO’s), by doing them I can manage my tendon pain so much… I dunked every day for 10 days with no pain” “(Regarding Jake’s tendon pain) rest did not help one bit” “Band assisted jumps are not the movement of dunking a basketball… maybe you are not going inside edge… maybe your timing is way off. It’s not just physiology there are so many components to athleticism that you are missing if you are not going and doing it” “(2 Things to improve jumping and dunking) … getting on the court more often, and doing the tendon stuff to stay healthy”