Rate of force development has become popular in the strength and conditioning world, but not so much in rehabilitation.
After an injury, we often work on strength and power, but we must also work on producing force as quickly as possible to benefit athletes.
In this episode, we discuss how to measure RFD and how to incorporate it into the rehabilitation process for an injured athlete.
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#AskMikeReinold Episode 342: Rate of Force Development in Rehabilitation
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Show Notes
• Understanding Rate of Force Development
• Using Force Plates to Help Program for Athletes in the Gym
Transcript
Jackson Boggs:
For today, we got one from Christian from San Diego. He says, “Rate of force development has become popular in the strength and conditioning world. How do you incorporate this into the rehab setting and have you guys started to work on this with your athletes returning from injury at Champion?”
Mike Reinold:
Awesome. Good one, Boggs. Third base, Boggs. Yeah, rate of force development, right? We’ve been, I would say, at Champion with our athletes, we’ve been using force plates now for several years. We’ve been using even velocity-based training stuff. What we did in the strength and conditioning world, I would say, is we realized that it’s not just about how strong you are, it’s not just about how powerful you are, but it’s about how you can use that together. And a lot of times what that comes to is like, okay, how fast can we produce that force so that way we can use it in that athletic environment? D’s trying to get open. It’s how fast can he explode off the line and try to get a nice deep path. See how I brought that back into our previous conversation? That was good. But you know what I mean?
Sometimes I think in rehab, over the years we’ve said, okay, we’re not good at loading. Okay, we’re probably better at loading now. Okay, now we’re not good at return-to-sport progression. Okay, we’re probably better at that. I think this might be that last thing. I shouldn’t say that. There’s always going to be something else we suck at, right? But this is that next thing that I think we haven’t focused enough on, rate of force development. So who wants to start this one off? Dan, you want to talk a little bit about RFD?
Dan Pope:
Yeah, for sure. What I will say is that if we had Jonah or Dewey on here, they could talk about how they do it more specifically. But in rehab context, I think it is really important. And that was one of those topics at the Sports Academy annual meeting, talking about how rate of force development lags behind other traditional strength indicators. So let’s say post-op ACL, check the quad strength, looks pretty good. The rate of force development might not be there. And the other piece, I think you can test this just like you would test anything else. Obviously, it depends on the dynamometer that you have. We use the ones from Vald and they can actually check the rate of force development. The thing that we have trouble with, and I’ve tried several times, is that in the setup, if you have someone sitting, pressing against a handheld dynamometer and trying to kick directly into that, sometimes I think the data might be off just because of the way you have to kick into this thing aggressively.
Some folks are kind of protecting how fast they’re kicking. It’s a little odd. It’s a strange setup, although I’ve tried it a few times. It’s not perfect. I actually had this discussion a little bit with Jill Monson’s group, which they talked about rate of force development and how they tend to measure it, and they use more jumping as an indicator. And that makes sense, right? Rate of force development is very important when you jump. The only thing I will say is that if you’re using things like force plates, which we use at Champion, which I obviously do recommend that you do use, if you have access to it… I think folks are still able to compensate a little bit. So I think if you’re going to do any sort of serial testing, if you’re going to be testing quad strength, if you’re going to be looking at jumping, it’s probably worthwhile to incorporate rate of force development into your testing as well.
Maybe we put this a little bit later into the athlete’s rehab because producing force really quickly is obviously a little bit more strain or stress on that area. And then, basically, you can utilize exercise based on whether or not they have those deficits. So if I have an athlete that still has a strength deficit, I want to try to make sure that I work on that. But if the rate of force development is good, maybe I don’t have to do as much power exercise for that area. Niwa chatted a little bit about this prior to the podcast, when I think about rate of force development, it’s just trying to be more powerful. And I think, generally speaking, we can cue that with our athletes, we can program that. So are you asking your athletes to move quickly under load? Are you having them go at an average or normal pace? What are the cues that you use for the athlete? And then based on your testing, you can use more or less of those exercises in those cues… So on and so forth.
Mike Reinold:
And to your point, Dan, even on force plates, you can jump slowly and powerfully. And that’s an interesting thing to do. If you’re not specifically teaching somebody how to do that back in the rehab process, sometimes they don’t understand that they have to produce force quickly. And I would say even just now with my experience working with younger athletes, even in a baseball population with throwing, and now even just as a coach in youth sports with my children, you can see some kids that are really good at rate of force development, and some kids that aren’t. You see those kids that just swing slowly, or they run slowly. That feels weird. And then you have that other kid that gets up there and wants to destroy the ball. And I don’t know if that’s teaching them intent or if it’s rate of force development, but we talk about that in the gym all the time with our youth athletes.
One of the first things we teach them is intent. That you have to get in there and you have to try to… I’m going to take this med ball and not just throw it against the wall, I want to smash it into the wall. And you do that sort of thing. I just think it’s a skill. It’s a different thing that we aren’t always working on. Right. So, interesting. I have a question for the group. I think Lenny, you might know this. I think everyone might know this too, a little bit. With our handheld dynamometers, most of the ones we’ve used in the past do measure rate of force development. Even some of the cheaper models like the Tindeq and stuff do. But it was my understanding that perhaps it’s the sampling rate. I don’t want to say this incorrectly, but is it that that data might not be completely accurate with a handheld dynamometer? Does anybody have any info on that they want to share?
Lenny Macrina:
Yeah, I think that was traditionally correct. I think we use the Vald Dynamo. I think their sampling rate, from what I understand, is more than appropriate to get accurate data for rate of force development. I use it a little, and I use it when I’m testing quad strength. And then also when we use the force deck, when we’re doing jump testing, like drop jump testing, or kind of movement jump testing as well, we’ll try to look at that and analyze it. So again, it’s a curve. It’s a curve how fast they can produce a maximal force. If you think of it… Again, people don’t watch our videos. You picture a steep increase in the speed at which they’re producing a force, comparing it to the other side, and you’re looking at basically old school curves, like old school slopes that we used to learn in geometry class or trigonometry class, whatever class that was.
And you’re looking to see which curve is steeper, more or less. As a simplified version, you want a very steep curve. You want them to produce a force really fast over a short period of time. And in my world, the ACL world, they just can’t do that. It looks like they can, but when you isolate the quad or you have them do some kind of a specific movement, they still struggle for months and months and months after what you think they’re ready to do. And so that’s that be all, end all check. Can they produce a huge force quickly? And usually, no.
And like you said, we have to be training that. I use GymAware, which is just a software that helps to give visual feedback on producing a force quickly in a certain amount of time, and giving just a quick feedback on are they doing a squat quickly, are they doing a trap or a deadlift quickly, quick enough for the amount of power I’m trying to produce? And that’s just a little visual cue for them to be able to move quickly. So we use GymAware in our facility. Yeah.
Mike Reinold:
I like that, Lenny. That’s a good point. Sometimes it’s coaching. It’s teaching them, “Hey, don’t just jump. I want you to jump as fast as you can.” That sort of thing, right? Sometimes it’s that, but I like the visual component feedback, that you can do on both the force plates and the VBT, the velocity-based training stuff with our GymAware. To see that I actually think is helpful, and to see the curve and say, “Hey, make this curve steeper next time,” and let them reconcile that as they go through… “Okay, if I try this, it works better.” I think that’s a great way of development. Dan?
Dan Pope:
Yeah. Well, I have a couple of thoughts now after hearing all this stuff. I do think one of the things that some of the velocity-based training is helpful for is that typically you kind of stop your sets once your speed drops off. So quality is really important. So I think getting technology involved is really neat. Back in the day, I have a power lifting background and a guy named Louis Simmons, rest in peace, was very popular for talking about dynamic effort work where the intent of the sets is speed. It’s just basically power work with the heavier load. And what’s kind of nice about some of this technology is it’ll tell you when you’re falling off the wagon a little bit. So maybe in your set and rep prescription, you’re trying to keep people away from failure, maybe having kind of shorter sets and getting a little feedback about how fast you’re doing those sets, you can kind of rest adequately so that you can move quickly and then stop exercising once you get to the point where you’re no longer kind of working that quality.
So I think that is helpful. And then going back to what Lenny had said too, this is totally an anecdote, but whenever I tried to measure rate of force development, my numbers are so all over the place that I’m just like, “Is this data helping me at all?” Right? So that was my gripe with that. And I think a lot of it is maybe I’m not… Because I think Tindeq whatever has a setting where it only picks up between 20% and 80% of how hard you’re pushing. And that would actually be pretty nice, if there’s a better way we can kind of set up the Vald that would make it more consistent, maybe that would help. But I think in general, just the setup makes it challenging. So the data’s all over place. And maybe that’s just how rate of force development is from day to day, but that’s been my experience with it.
Mike Reinold:
Yeah, I think even the Tindeq has some limitations too with that. I think it’s hard to do, right? It’s such a quick period of time. Everybody says you don’t need isokinetics anymore, but maybe you do, or some do that. But trust me, we’re not going to buy one, but you get it. Dave, what’s up? From your perspective, Dave, obviously you have a lot of explosive athletes and stuff. What are some things you do to work on this with your athletes?
Dave Tilley:
Yeah, I think there’s kind of two layers. One is the more traditional sense of most people think about this with lower extremity type injuries. And so when you think about the rehab process, we’re trying to go from the basics of range of motion, and then basic strength, then we layer on power. And if you look at most field and sport athletes in particular, a lot of the ability for them to be really highly competitive is very explosive, quick burst reaction movements. And so soccer, field hockey, lacrosse, you’re versus somebody else and you have to make a quick step on somebody and get ahead of them, or kind of get outside of them. And that is very explosive rate of force development. So I think when you’re programming for lower extremity type stuff, a lot of your drills have to be aimed at, if they’re in the end stage of rehab, either that reactionary explosiveness or also just drills that set up that first impulse of movement.
So you think about somebody doing a banded sprint start, where they’re not sprinting 10 yards, but they’re just doing literally the first three steps off the line, so to speak, or when they’re lining up with someone to go, or also a lot of the other planes of rotational or kind of cutting and pivoting… You want to really make sure somebody is comfortable getting in and out of that kind of deep amortization phase and explosively jumping the other way because, again, think about field sports where they’re trying to get around somebody dribbling or whatever. And so when you program, you want to think about that, like Dan alluded to. Maybe it’s four sets with a two-minute rest in between, where you’re doing something in between, but you’re really letting someone’s PCR system fully recover to train maximal effort.
And I have a girl, super high level field hockey player right now, who’s coming back from a hamstring strain and her end stage rehab. It’s a 45-minute session. The majority of her session is resting and waiting to recover between super explosive bouts. So banded sprint starts, or step up, skip jumps, and stuff like that. So I think you want to program for that. But the other area, I think… I spent a lot of time working in lumbar spine rehab areas for a lot of rotational athletes, baseball, softball, and then obviously gymnastics. Those sports, baseball, and things like that, are explosive body weight sports and the amount of force and torque going through someone’s spine in the end stage of throwing or hitting in particular, or gymnastics… Is that it’s really important to train that type of stress on their spine.
So whether someone’s doing throwing, and it’s rotational, or hitting, that’s where people get fractures, right? Guys fracture their back when they swing really hard, explosively. So med balls are a really great way to progressively load somebody into that movement, whereas you would do three reps of, to your point, Mike, I want the ball to explode, you throw so hard. I want you to slam this ball as hard as you possibly can. Or we say, “Throw to the ceiling and hit the ceiling.” So trying to give somebody three reps of literally maximal effort med ball throws is, in my opinion, more viable at the end of rehab than giving somebody 15 to 20 sets of box jumps or whatever.
Mike Reinold:
I like that. I think I’ll end with one other note of something I’ve been thinking about as we’re going through this episode here, that neurocognitive training right now is popular, right? We’re learning a lot about it. We’re starting to integrate it more and more because we do know it was one of the things that we probably missed out on. But keep in mind with neurocognitive training, sometimes that leads to a delay. You have to process a lot of stimulation and then make a reaction to it. Just realize that that’s just one end of a spectrum of things that we need to work on. And you’re certainly not working on rate of force development if you’re focused on neurocognitive training, at least initially. Now, maybe the endgame of all this is that you can do all this and produce force rapidly with a neurocognitive stimulus, but jeepers, that’s hard at the beginning for people.
So keep that in mind. If you’re just doing all neurocognitive training, because that’s what seems cool on Instagram, you’re probably missing out on some key things. So just like everything else, we have to work on all abilities, all levels of athleticism, all ways that we integrate information to produce strength and power. So kind of keep that in mind with rate of force development. I don’t want you to miss out on that either.
Awesome. Great episode. Thanks again. If you have a question like that, head to mikereinold.com, click on that podcast link, and fill out the form to ask away. And please be sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, whatever you listen to, and we will see you on the next episode. Thank you.
