In short
Plyometrics (jumping, hopping, bounding) as a “missing link” for midlife women’s bone health, power, longevity, and even cognitive decline prevention—emphasizing tissue health plus neural/cognitive “rapid contraction” and whole-body stiffness.
Key claims
Crash dieting and punishing cardio backfire in midlife because biology compensates; instead, training should work with midlife physiology. Plyometrics should be introduced gradually (“drip feed”), starting with low-amplitude, low-intensity work (e.g., skipping) to build tendon/bone capacity and brain coordination before progressing. Medium/sub-max “tiers” (not maximal, low-volume efforts) are often the safest and most effective for bone stimulus and learning rhythm. Not all plyometrics must look like box jumps; the goal is landing/takeoff problem-solving and reactivity.
Notable examples
Skipping patterns (left-right rhythm), using music for cadence, “heat map” control of landing space, Federer’s relaxed-in-air stiffness, and skipping/galloping as stepping stones to faster, subconscious movement.
Guest
Matt McInnes Watson, a performance coach and plyometrics specialist (high-jump/track background; coached elite female track athletes; mentored by an Olympic high-jump coach).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOBody Recomposition Secrets for Midlife Women
0:00 to 1:34
Learn about effective strategies for midlife body recomposition and the pitfalls of extreme dieting.
“My number one body recomposition secret, the one that has helped so many midlife women lose stubborn belly fat and gain strength the real life way, can be boiled down to simply this.”
Diving into Plyometrics
1:55 to 2:45
Discussion on the significance of plyometrics for women and how it can be misunderstood.
“All right, Matt, welcome to The Body Pod.”
The Importance of Plyometrics in Longevity
2:45 to 6:39
Exploration of how plyometrics can enhance tissue and cognitive health for longevity.
“A lot might think that this might not apply to them.”
Neural and Cognitive Benefits of Plyometrics
6:39 to 12:27
Understanding the role of neural and cognitive aspects in plyometric training.
“mid-30s to 60s even, I think that you have to look at what you want to achieve with it.”
Starting Plyometrics in Midlife
12:27 to 14:00
Advice on how midlife women can begin incorporating plyometrics into their fitness routines.
“You can do the basic, I want to sit on a leg extension and improve the quality of my quadriceps.”
Introduction to Plyometrics for Women
14:00 to 15:10
Exploring the relevance of plyometrics for women in midlife and the importance of proper training.
“I did watch something that you had on YouTube about pre-plyometrics and getting of getting that started.”
Building a Pre-Plyometric Roadmap
15:10 to 18:26
Discussing the foundational exercises like skipping to prepare for plyometric training.
“and they go in and they throw out their back.”
Coordination and Body Awareness in Plyometrics
18:41 to 23:20
Understanding the importance of coordination and body awareness in plyometric movements.
“And then you start to learn things like proprioceptive awareness.”
The Cognitive Benefits of Plyometric Training
23:20 to 28:00
Exploring how learning new skills through plyometrics can improve cognitive health.
“heat map that if I put my foot out to the left or right or across me, then I'm able to control my body in that space.”
Understanding Plyometric Training
28:00 to 31:15
Learn how to effectively start plyometric training without equipment.
“Like I can't believe how bad I am at this, but also at the same time, I want to get better.”
Show all 18 chapters
The Importance of Multi-Directional Movement
31:15 to 33:39
Discover the benefits of incorporating multi-directional movements in training.
“And that I think has a much greater impact, especially to a demographic that wouldn't necessarily have done much of this before.”
Tiers of Plyometric Intensity for Bone Health
33:39 to 38:31
Explore the different tiers of plyometric intensity and their impact on bone health.
“And he really opened my eyes to variety and providing people with, I'd say, just a great diversity in how they move.”
Finding the Right Medium for Training
38:31 to 42:00
Learn how to identify and utilize the medium tier of intensity in plyometric training.
“So you need the crudest movements possible to say, I want to try and be as reactive and create as much height as I possibly can by using a simple movement.”
Building Up Plyometric Skills
42:00 to 44:00
Learn how to progressively build up to plyometric exercises safely.
“because how much does that impact when the brain is already, you're already fearful of the movement.”
Importance of Footwear in Plyometrics
44:00 to 47:10
Discover the significance of footwear choices when performing dynamic movements.
“And, and ultimately I think people also like once they've done a little bit of this, They shouldn't be too scared of, instead of doing like five sets of 10, try to do two sets of 25.”
Understanding Capacity in Plyometric Training
47:10 to 51:10
Unpack the concept of tissue capacity and its role in plyometric training.
“But once you turn up the intensity, the big limiting factor is the rate in which you hit the ground.”
The Role of Power and Force Development
51:10 to 56:01
Explore how dynamic movements enhance power output and strength training.
“Like if I do it on a Monday, can I do it before Thursday?”
Power Development Through Plyometrics
56:01 to 1:00:29
Learn how plyometrics can enhance force production and functional strength across all ages.
“coaches were pretty dumbfounded by how much force we could create in a very short period of time so So it was, yeah, it says a lot.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00My number one body recomposition secret, the one that has helped so many midlife women lose stubborn belly fat and gain strength the real life way, can be boiled down to simply this. No matter what you've been told, trying to change your body the hard way, the way that requires starving yourself, aggressively slashing calories, and squeezing in punishing workouts you dread, just doesn't work. Extreme dieting or hours of exhausting cardio are not what separates a frustrated, plateaued woman from one who actually sees a leaner, energized body in the mirror. Why? Because your midlife biology will compensate for crash diets and overtraining, slowing your metabolism and making it even harder to lose stubborn fat.
0:49And even worse, when you stop punishing yourself with restrictive plans or relentless cardio, your body can actually end up gaining more weight than when you started. Every workout, personalized macro and calorie budget and live coaching call in the Shred Happens Challenge is built around the exact physiological shifts in midlife. So you're not fighting your body, you're finally working with it. The Shred Happens Challenge opens just twice a year and space is intentionally limited. So every woman gets expert support and guidance. Click the link in the show notes to find out how to be the first in line when we open the doors for registration on October 6th.
1:33Matt McInnes Watson:Ultimately, you need to drip feed this stuff in. It's like less is more, and the more frequent, the better. Like I said, if you can do this four times a week, and you can start out with five minutes of this stuff, that's where you want to start. Hi, everyone. My name is Haley. And this is Laura. And welcome to The Body Pod. All right, Matt, welcome to The Body Pod. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate you guys kind of reaching out to me and wanting to learn more in the realms of what I nerd out on a day-to-day basis. Well, I was super impressed because obviously I found you this one weekend and I went down, as I told you, a massive rabbit hole.
2:19Bought your, I don't know, one course I haven't even open yet. And then the plyos on the app. And I was just like diving into it. And then when we asked you to be on the body pod, I was like, oh, you're getting your PhD in plyometrics. Like, oh, perfect. So you live and breathe this stuff, which is so great. And I want to really open this discussion for all of the women listening here. A lot might think that this might not apply to them. But as I have been working with midlife women, that's the only area that age group that we work that are listening right now and planning programs for them, we are hearing the message.
3:04And as I had mentioned to you in a private conversation, women are getting the message about strength training and bone health and um, plyometrics and speed and power. But a lot of these terms, I don't even know if, if we all know the correct definitions. So when I think of plyometrics, I'm thinking of, uh, box jumps, but then also more of what maybe professional athletes are doing on the regular basis. I mean, as I've, as I've mentioned on, on your Instagram, I see you do the jumps and then I do them and I'm like I don't look like that at all no I feel like you float or something you have
3:47Matt McInnes Watson:grace when you're doing it well that yeah that's that's our that's the leading part of our conversation right is that is that component right there is is giving everyone the it's almost like quiet violence it's like I talk about ballet dancers being like gracefully violent and what they do like behind that gracefulness is aggressive movement and I think that speaks hugely to females in general like we have when we look at world-class athletes and having coached some some pretty high track and field female athletes they're quietly aggressive in a way that I'm like that especially when they line up with the men I'm like you guys need to watch self because she's going to do something that's going to surprise you.
4:37Matt McInnes Watson:So it goes from the psyche of how certain women may be and also into the truly what is athletic movement. So to kind of start that conversation of what a plyometric is. And I think realistically to just a general population of people that want to move better, feel better, and continue to provide longevity to the kind of life that they want to live, not just years on a calendar. It is looking at how well we can stimulate our tissue, but also stimulate our minds and how we move. Ultimately, it comes down to the first kind of breadth of it in the history of plyometrics. And that is looking at it as a form of a shock method of training.
5:37Matt McInnes Watson:It was initially classed as the shock method. It was to stimulate the body more than what we could with barbells or just being able to jump on the spot. So if you take it all the way back to Yuri Verkachansky's work in the 60s, And it kind of bled before that as well in some of the Russian systems, but it was falling from exponential heights, you know, almost as high as head height and stimulating the body as much as we can when we land. Now I see that all the way down to coaching my mother, who's in our mid sixties to how can I shock your body in a way that obviously you're ready for right now.
6:20Matt McInnes Watson:And in my opinion, it doesn't need to be quote unquote plyometrics. You will have, you know, I work with many performance coaches that get a little hurt when you say, oh, this is a plyometrics. Like, I don't care. Ultimately, all I want to do is achieve an adaptation that we're looking for. So if you are a female in whatever middle ages kind of class that's, whether it's from mid-30s to 60s even, I think that you have to look at what you want to achieve with it. Now, my thinking over the last five years has very much been aligned with, obviously, we need to improve tissue health and that's critical.
7:04Matt McInnes Watson:Tissue health is going to drive how well we can create force and how much force we can receive. So you can reign it all the way back to being 80 years old. And the reason, one of the main reasons why you can't catch yourself when you fall is when I slam my foot out in front of me because I have to catch myself. Well, I don't have the ability to control that much force anymore. I've lost the muscular ability. I've lost then the ability to pull the muscle that pulls on the tendon that then pulls on the bone. and that is that trifecta of tissue that we want to really stimulate. And then it goes back to, well, if I don't do this training, then I have poor tissue health.
7:54Matt McInnes Watson:And then if I don't do this training, I could potentially fall because I don't have the strength to control that rapid deceleration. And therefore I hit the ground on a bony site and also fracture of the bone that I'm not training. So that's the tissue side of that thinking. I've very much been in a case of, we have this revolving cycle of things where it's like, if you don't do the training, you could potentially fall on something that is the lateral side of your hip, that is landing on the front of your knee. What does that look like? It's putting my hands out and not having that ability to absorb anything into my hands.
8:32Matt McInnes Watson:So when I don't have that initial tissue health, that's a big red flag. So how can I improve that? Well, I know that jumping and plyometrics do that to the nth degree, far beyond what we think resistance training does. Resistance training has a place. Absolutely. Everyone should be doing it. There's a multitude of reasons why you should be doing resistance training. But to continually take a step up to improve how you locomote through life, whether it is being like, heck, I want to get back into playing tennis with my friend. I want to chase children, grandchildren. I want to just be able to step out into the backyard and be like, what if I did something that was a little bit faster than I normally do?
9:17Matt McInnes Watson:Am I going to break down or am I going to thrive? So the tissue side of things is really important. But the flip side of that is the neural and cognitive things that come with plyometrics and dynamic movement. And that is very much steeped into the rate in which we contract. So if my brain is not at the same speed as the rate of fall, so if I'm falling, for example, that's the kind of oldest range we're looking at. So if I fall, it's such a rapid fall into the ground that my brain can't register it. So if I try to create force with that muscle to try and decelerate how much force I'm accepting, my brain reacts too slowly.
10:05Matt McInnes Watson:So do I have that, I call it like the cognitive highway. Am I able to send that signal up and down that highway in such a fast time that I'm ready to stabilize my body. I had never thought about that that way. And ultimately, the worst thing that happens is that I have a lot of people in my realms of coaching that talk about an individual body part improving its stiffness. So you improve the stiffness of your Achilles or your patella tendon or your lower leg, and that's great. But what a lot of people lack later on in life is your ability to create what we would call like whole body system stiffness.
10:47Matt McInnes Watson:Because if I slam my left leg into the ground, when I go to decelerate a stumble or trip, the first thing that goes is this massive hunk of meat on the top of my shoulders that weighs way too much for me to handle. So that starts to go. And then my chest follows and the whole of my torso wants to just dive past my foot. So if I can't decelerate my foot, knee, hip, spine, upper body, control my neck, then I get this whip-like, my body becomes like the end of the crack of a whip. So you lose that systemic control to be able to decelerate our bodies. So that's a really, really important component of creating stiffness and creating a rapid contraction when we need it.
11:39Matt McInnes Watson:So you go all the way back to world-class movers, they stabilize and create stiffness the fastest. And they do so in a way where when I'm airborne, I'm relaxed, I'm relaxed. And then when I need to turn it on, it's like snap of the fingers. it's like stabilize, contract, get out, relax. So when you watch Roger Federer play tennis, you're like, what's happening? How's he floating across this court? It's because he's relaxed in the air. And then when he needs to make contact with the ball, everything stiffens at the right time. His arm hips are like a whip. They connect with the ball. Then he's back into free flow and motion.
12:17Matt McInnes Watson:And so these are really, really important concepts. It doesn't matter whether you're a world-class athlete or a general day-to-day human mover, whatever you want to achieve in life. And so the neural and cognitive side of things, it starts to, for me, without that, the tissue stuff can't happen. You can do the basic, I want to sit on a leg extension and improve the quality of my quadriceps. Okay. I can do the same when I'm in a lying hamstring curl. Great. but then what happens when life slaps you in the face and you have to cut in and out of something decelerate you see these like freaky like i watch these fail videos online sometimes just for like five minutes of like you see a car comes flying in and this person like dodges out of the way of it as if it's like some miracle you're like if you didn't have the ability to just quickly change direction like that do you know what i mean like these these random day-to-day things become kind of like, oh, when I did that, yeah, I blew out my Achilles doing that.
13:20Matt McInnes Watson:It was something so simple, but I want to be able to map that out with my brain before I can even go there with the physical, physiological tissue development side of things. Honestly, we can really get into the weeds of more of that neurological stuff as we go, but the stiffness and creating a contraction at a very fast time or rate is very much top of the pyramid. Yeah. Okay. So super important. And now I want to think that all of the women on here are like, okay, great. What do I do? How do I start? I did watch something that you had on YouTube about pre-plyometrics and getting of getting that started.
14:10But then also in midlife, we have this tissue degradation that happens from this loss of estrogen. And I feel like we're in this really exciting time of life where number one, perimenopause and menopause is getting the spotlight that it has never had, that's well deserved. The strength training is starting to become a global movement, which is really powerful. um we're getting into a little the the speed and power but the data that we'll have from the next decade of information that now that women are moving they are strength training and they are starting to hear about plyometrics and jumping and all of that i'm excited to see where this space will go and what will be different for my daughter when she comes up in the ranks and gets to her 40s where I am now and what that looks like.
15:03But for the tissue tolerance, and I think that is the big thing is not rushing in too soon. I see this in the weights room all the time as women hear that they need to lift heavy and they go in and they throw out their back. And I'm like, well, deadlifting, it's not that deadlifting isn't safe. It's that you didn't have the right movement or you went in way too fast too soon. And that is the result of it. So I'm guessing that the tendon health and the tendon, I guess, the tissue demand has to be built up as well.
15:39Matt McInnes Watson:For sure. For sure. Absolutely. Yeah. There should be a kind of pre-plyometric or pre-jumping roadmap for people. So what does that roadmap look like? Well, the roadmap can, it has to be that we take the word plyometrics out of this and we're ultimately looking to get a form of landing and takeoff of, you know, very small kind of amplitude or intensity. But actually we use repetition and volume as our first level to build capacity. and we can use things that we did in the playground as children, like skipping as in not jump rope, but skipping left, left, right, right, left, left, right, right can be a phenomenal tool.
16:35Matt McInnes Watson:It is something that I use in every warmup with every client that I coach, whether they are a world-class track athlete or my 65-year-old mother. Okay. I just have to say this really quick. Skipping is hard when you have not done it for decades. Exactly. When I first started skipping, my husband was filming me for the app and he's like, what are you doing? I'm trying. You try to skip. I haven't skipped for forever. But a simple movement that we did all of the time isn't so natural when you haven't done it for 30 years. And this is the thing. This is where the neurocognitive side is coming in immediately.
17:21Matt McInnes Watson:There is a coordination aspect there that again becomes, we assume coordination, I think, to be slightly different from a very simple standpoint of, can I make all the right muscles sing at the right time together and then take that contraction off to then flip my brain and use the other side. So this like motion and locomotion requires certain muscles to turn on certain muscles to turn off and the synchronization of on off on off, but it might be it's all this rhythmical people, people talk about using music when they skip like the perfect example, went to see the Michael Jackson movie last night and like, want to be starting something would be done, done, done, done, done, done, done, done.
18:13Matt McInnes Watson:And you would skip to that. It would be perfect to skip to those rhythmical beats. So if, if you want to use music as a way to set rhythms and coordinations in your brain, that could be a really simple way to do that. There's nothing like the American express platinum card. Find out your welcome offer after you apply, which could be as high as 175 ,000 points. Learn more and find out your offer at americanexpress.com slash explore dash platinum. Terms apply. So again, these coordinations, these tension, creating stiffness, creating pre-stiffness, which is a massive part of something that we have to learn is we have to learn how to anticipate what's going to happen when we hit the ground.
18:58Matt McInnes Watson:can we get to this synchronization of movement where we have the body learn to relax contract being able to do that with hand eye coordination if my left leg goes forward is my right arm coming out in front of me or am i moving like a cowboy because that's the first thing that people go to they're like oh i've lost this like synchronization of hands and feet and it's it's you know it's very much if you if you don't use it then you're going to lose it so there is the relearning of these patterns. And then you start to learn things like proprioceptive awareness. So I'll get people to, we'll use a big open space if possible.
19:37Matt McInnes Watson:It doesn't matter how long, let's say you have 10 yards. I'm like, cool, we're going to skip forwards up. Then you're going to skip backwards, back 10 yards. Then we're going to do it laterally. Then we're going to do it back the other way. And you wouldn't believe how fooled people are straight away. And this is the first step to jumping and plyometrics. There are hundreds of small landings and takeoffs throughout this. Your feet are feeling all these different edges. They are feeling what it feels like to actually, I don't just start at these small forms of skipping and stay there. I get people to express force through these skips.
20:16Matt McInnes Watson:Can you skip for height? Can you skip for distance? Can I do it for speed? Can I do it multi-directionally? Honestly, if you did five minutes of that and gradually try to turn up the intensity of that week on week or every two weeks, you start to be like, whoa, I feel like I can really push through the ground here. I can apply force. Because when I push through the ground and create more airtime, the power of jumping in plyometrics is that I then have to deal with the subsequent landing forces. So the more force I output is the more force I have to receive on the next one. So you have this fulfilling cycle of more power, more eccentric landing forces, which then creates an adaptation for me to create more power out of the next step up in adaptation, however long that may take.
21:04Matt McInnes Watson:But skipping is very powerful. And it goes exactly the same as galloping. A gallop is a one, two, one, two, one, two. I, I, I class it as having a, a speed leg and a power leg. So when, when I, I talk to high jumpers or triple jumpers or long jumpers, when you come in, most people go one, two, one, two. And that last two is the takeoff is the jumping leg, but they use the first leg to get very fast onto the second leg. So you get this da-da, da-da, da-da. And what's great about that is we have to flip the brain. So we go from left, right to right, left. And again, your brain goes through this problem solving of really trying to understand how to, what do I do with my limbs?
21:51Matt McInnes Watson:What do I do with them in space? And then I get to a stage where I can do this subconsciously, which is another massive step when it comes to plyometrics and jump work, is this all has to become subconscious eventually. I don't want to actively think about what I'm doing. This is too fast for my brain. So my brain has to communicate this mostly from my spinal cord. It's that quick. It doesn't have time to shoot up the back of my back, reach my brain and then go back down. It's that fast. So can I synchronize my body? Can I learn to flip my body and do the other pattern? And again, you ultimately get to a stage where a month in, you're like, oh my gosh, my body is like, I'm really feel comfortable when I move in space.
22:37Matt McInnes Watson:And when I'm airborne, like I always say to people, like people then become, you hit a certain age. If you haven't jumped for 20 years, you hit a certain age and you get scared of being airborne. Yeah. Because my body's response is fight or flight and it's not flight anymore. It is fight. I'm like, oh, so I just hit the ground with all this tense, like intimidated feeling. whereas when I do a lot of even just small movements at first and getting used to creating a little bit of airtime in my movement I build this what I class as a heat map under my body whereas most people live on like a pinprick right if I go a little bit if I go a little bit out to the right or a little bit out to the left then I'm going to topple over if I leave but I want a wide heat map that if I put my foot out to the left or right or across me, then I'm able to control my body in that space.
23:33Matt McInnes Watson:And I ultimately have more movement options. Okay. So I'm like blown away. There's so many things I want to say here. First of all, I tried the galloping. It did not make it onto my app at this time. I'll say that. That was worse than the skipping. But what's really important here that has stuck in my mind is what is just as important as building up this reactivity and this tissue demand in midlife is the need for midlife women and probably men, but I don't train men, midlife women to learn a new skill. And this is all going back to learn something new. This reduces the dementia risk. I mean, all new information coming out that's so important that it's more than just the physical side.
24:26It's making your brain learn something new, almost like dancing, like a form of dancing that is shown to be really good for dementia risk.
24:35Matt McInnes Watson:It is exactly that. It is exactly that. It is doing a lot of, it's like central brain control. The brain is controlling so many things when you're in the air of understanding where you are in space, where my limbs are in space, where I put my foot down. How do I understand the orientation of my torso? So like when I start to over-rotate and my head starts to dip forward, how do I reorganize my body in space to deal with that? There are so many things that are happening in a problem-solving way that we get to a point in training where that becomes subconscious so that I then have a movement capacity to do this sort of thing in sport.
25:23Matt McInnes Watson:So it's like, I'm playing tennis. I cut on a dime on my left side and I have to rush back across the other side of the court. My body's not prepared for it. I'm consciously thinking about where I'm putting my feet down, how I'm going to get in and out of this movement. I'm not thinking about what's happening in chasing down this ball. So it's like, there's so much problem solving constantly happening and there's problem solving happening at the fastest degrees. And that in itself is truly special when it comes to the decline of cognitive health later on in life. It's okay, I can problem solve, but can I do it in faster than a blink of an eye?
26:05Matt McInnes Watson:Because certain plyometric landings are almost twice as fast in which you blink your eye. We've got some work to do, Laura. Oh, absolutely. So when you start doing these basic movements, should we be mindful of each movement? Absolutely. Absolutely. There is a degree where I think everyone is actually a lot safer than they think they are when it comes to dynamic movement. Like I'll always go with the fact that the faster you move, the more unstable you become. So you start from more of a stable velocity. So the higher you jump, the more unstable you're going to become. The faster you travel when you skip, the more unstable you'll become.
26:53Matt McInnes Watson:So you have to rein everything down. And that's why nothing has to look like a plyometric to start with. It doesn't have to look like what I do on my social media. It might not ever need to look anything like it. It sure doesn't. That's the point though. That's the entire point of it is that we're not, we're not, I mean, certain people might want to chase that. They might be like, I want to look like that. And that hats off to you. That's like, I think continued, like my journey into my sixties, seventies and eighties is to try and continually look as I do when I was 20. Now I'm 35. It's like, how can I continue to do that?
27:30Matt McInnes Watson:But for people that haven't done it and they're already in their forties per se, it doesn't have to look like it. It just has to provide you with this problem solving situation. The biggest part for me is that when people get confident to do this, they love it. I genuinely can't find a person that says, Oh, I hate doing this. It's so it either bores me or I don't enjoy what happens because most people get moving. And first of all, it humbles them. So they're like, Oh, this is crazy. Like I can't believe how bad I am at this, but also at the same time, I want to get better. Like I'm so hungry to improve what I'm doing there.
28:09Matt McInnes Watson:So it, yeah, it doesn't have to look like it. So this idea of starting slow, you can still bounce on the ground relative speed, but it's about how much takeoff height or distance or speed that is going to mitigate this, I guess, intimidating factor behind things. And so what I tend to do is say to people, you do not need equipment. You need nothing. You don't need boxes. You don't need hurdles. You need nothing. You need open space. If anything, I'd start on grass or turf or something softer just to give you a little more confidence, also to give you a little bit more volume in your legs, because the harder the surface, the less time you're going to be able to do it for.
28:52Matt McInnes Watson:And that's the harder the surface, the better in terms of like the, the utmost stimulus. Sure. But ultimately most people need to get into this, get out on some grass in your backyard, go to a park and use your own ability to create force, to be the stimulus of when you land. So however high you feel confident to jump is going to be the subsequent landing forces for the next movement. Rather than if I told you all to go and fall off of a 18-inch box, what 18 inches to me, to you, to you, is very different. We have no idea what that does for the next person. So use your own creation of force to be that initial stimulus before you chase anything crazy.
29:39Matt McInnes Watson:and ultimately if you feel like you want to be a bit softer at first be a little softer on the ground it doesn't have to be aggressive and stiff and highly like stimulating it doesn't because believe me if you feel like you need to be a bit softer it's probably what your body needs and your body's going to feed that back to you even so and being like well we still work today like I still feel that you've done some great work there so yeah it's it's listening to your body is saying, do I need any more volume? I probably don't. Less is more for most cases. And more frequency is the winner rather than hitting massive sessions twice a week.
Read the full transcript
30:19Matt McInnes Watson:Because that's normally the thing that sets you back four or five days later and you're like, I still have calf soreness. And you have to understand that there is neuromuscular fatigue attached to this. so you're going to be emotionally affected by this like i i will always say that i was i very much kind of class myself as kind of like i was in the big cats of animals when it comes to training like i fight hard on those days to train but after that i'm deep into a hole of sleep like leave me alone emotionally i'm flat i don't want to do anything so like you have to understand that if you do a big plyometric session you're gonna feel as flat as a pancake the next day like you're not going to go and lift.
31:02Matt McInnes Watson:It's definitely not going to be heavy. You're not going to be able to feel like you can sprint or run. You're going to feel flat. So we want you coming away from these sessions actually with quite a bit more in the tank so that you can continually do that every other day. And that I think has a much greater impact, especially to a demographic that wouldn't necessarily have done much of this before. Yeah. And I will say again, when I talked to you before, I mentioned that the speed and power has kind of come into my programs more in the last year, which then we had a lot of the pogos and some preliminary drills there.
31:42But I thought that pogos were just like one speed, like lightly, like I'm floating, I don't have to wear shoes and I'm doing them in all directions. And then when I saw your work and then I downloaded the app, well, there's like a medium version and there's all these different. And when you do it that way, it is exhausting. And I feel like I'm pretty fit. I mean, I'm cardiovascularly, like I can be on my bike for hours. I can do a lot of different intensities. That is exhausting for 15 seconds when you are bounding really, at least for me, really hard and fast. it's it's pogo john shocking you're talking about like you just like not on a pogo stay no you're talking about just jumping up and down yeah essentially or you could do like one foot and then the other and you travel forward or you travel back and all of these it's more like hopping laura like i would call it like hopping forward hopping back bilateral unilateral but But all of these different variations.
32:49And then you put gas on the fire and I had no idea. So it's been really fun for me to try some of these, especially as you talk about the heat map around you. Can you jump and react and can you move? Sometimes you'll jump and you're kind of at a little bit of an angle where you land. That blew my mind. And that's kind of what I've been just starting to play around with because I didn't even know it was part of the formula or it could be part of the formula.
33:20Matt McInnes Watson:Yeah. Yeah. It's the variety and variation of movement is very much comes from my mentor, Eric, who was part of an East European. He had East European mentors as Canadian coach was an Olympic high jump coach. Very, very talented athlete as well. And he really opened my eyes to variety and providing people with, I'd say, just a great diversity in how they move. And it was a really big winning formula for ultimately just preparing people to avoid injuries that you might pick up if you were to just do like everything's up and down and on the spot or just very linear in motion. and and we find that like I find that with coaching people someone says to me oh you know I do plyometrics but I keep getting this groin injury or this you know lower leg injury and I'm like well how much multi-directional work do you do how much work do you do on one leg and it often is the case that that comes back to being like well we don't really do any and so that exploration of different um directions of movement you know slightly if you can put your left foot across your body to the right?
34:36Matt McInnes Watson:What does that landing angle look like if I get on the inside edge of my foot or on the outside edge of my foot? Even just moving backwards, like moving backwards again, people don't know what's behind them. They really can't understand space behind them. So when they do that dynamically, it unlocks a special part of our brain, which I think it very much, like I work with certain defensive players in football and I'm like, it's unbelievable how they map the field. They're running backwards, watching an offense, watching a ball and I'm like, you don't understand the brain power that it takes to run backwards, trying to match the speed that that guy's running at you forward.
35:15Matt McInnes Watson:And then they flip their hips and then they watch a ball come over their shoulder. Like it's, it's amazing. And I think those are things falling apart. Sorry. My, my, my mic. So yeah, I don't think people are understanding. Like as soon as you come away from sports like that, you lose those abilities to to map those sort of things with your brain. And yeah, I feel like the more you move towards gen pop, the more you need more multidirectional movement. I understand it in certain... I work with track athletes and a guy would be like, coach, my job is to sprint in a straight line. And I'm like, okay, fair enough.
35:56Matt McInnes Watson:We'll do a lot of straight line stuff, but some of it might be multidirectional. If you're gen pop, move in all directions. You need it. again, going back to the midlife female here, and we're getting a lot of bone surgeons that are in the menopause space that are giving a lot of great feedback of, hey, okay, we need strong bones. So you're just jumping in place. But the, again, the power of the jump, there's like different tiers. And what I would put those in where before I was just, okay, you're just jumping in place and that's helping, but how much more is that helping bone when you have a little bit more of a tier two reactivity and the force is there?
36:41You're just getting more of that bone stimulus.
36:44Matt McInnes Watson:Yeah, exactly. Well, and I kind of look at it in this way too, is that, so we, I've kind of taken, again, this system very much was inherited from my mentor Eric and it was like, we have light movements, we have very, very intense movements, and then we have this in between, which we kind of class as like a medium or sub-maximal format. And ultimately, the easier the movement is, the more variety and variation you get. So that's where you do a lot of your multi-directional stuff. The medium stuff is like, how can I actually move with a little bit more speed, but do so in a way that I can still be kind of relaxed in doing it?
37:25Matt McInnes Watson:But I'm still pushing it little bit here. And then the max stuff is like, cool, I want maximal tissue stimulus here, but it's very crudely. It might be on the spot or in a straight line. And that's it really, because we understand that as you turn up the complexity of a movement, so people do this, they throw hurdles and onto boxes and down off of boxes. So much complexity brings in a reduction in intensity. So that's something that people need to really focus in on when they're trying to improve their tissue health is that because a movement feels harder, doesn't necessarily mean that it actually is an intensity increase.
38:10Matt McInnes Watson:So when you're problem solving all of these things of jump over a hurdle, then laterally over a hurdle, then up onto a box, you're probably spending more time on the ground and the output of what you're trying to achieve is probably reduced because you spend more time on the ground and therefore you get less stimulus on the tendon and less stimulus on the bone. So you need the crudest movements possible to say, I want to try and be as reactive and create as much height as I possibly can by using a simple movement. And that might just be two feet on the spot, as much height as possible. and that might be enough.
38:49Matt McInnes Watson:The other one might be, I'm going to bound from one leg to the other, like I'm kind of floating on the moon, but I'm going to do it. I'm going to do eight reps as far as I possibly can for distance on each leg. So left, right, big pushes, real big attacks into the ground. But again, it's very crudely simple. So what we class as the ping or the maximum tier, that's where we chase the biggest stimulus in terms of that effect on the bone. Now, what people also need to be very conscious of is that when you push something for maximal intent in plyometrics, the volume considerably drops. So although you may have the stimulus that is super high on the bone, let's say that that accumulates to 1 ,000 units of something, right?
39:44Matt McInnes Watson:If you drop down that intensity to more of a medium or sub-maximal intensity, you'll probably find that you'll do about 60 or 70 % more volume there, just because you're not going like, idles out, all out. And accumulatively, the overall workload might end up being 2 ,000 or 3000 units. So you have to choose your poison in that. Everyone tells me that the harder I hit the ground, the better. And you're like, great, but you can do 10 of them before you fall apart or before your knee hurts. But you can do a hundred of the medium ones and overall, that is a better bone response of overall workload.
40:28Matt McInnes Watson:So we have to be mindful of that. There's also the secondary part in that the sub-maximal stuff also can train your brain and the skills more because you have a higher volume of it and your brain can learn when it's relaxed. It can't, it can't learn as quickly when all you're doing is like, hit, hit, hit. It's like fight or flight. It's like, I've got to deal with this. I can't think about how I'm processing this or how I'm able to relax. I just have to go for it. But when I'm getting into a rhythm of things, I'm done, done, done. I can kind of have a conversation with you. I'm still hitting the ground, still figuring things out.
41:02Matt McInnes Watson:My brain is doing its job, but like there's so many more opportunities for it to improve its cognitive powers rather than being like, boom, one opportunity. And you're like, oh, I kind of missed it. I didn't have time to problem solve. So yeah, there's a lot of lessons to be learned in that. Like when I slide the intensity too high, does it give me what I want? Because I feel like I'm training for that, let's say bone stimulus, but actually, could I just get more if I was doing more sub-maximal stuff potentially? I 100 % know what these women need. The medium tier is where everyone probably will live.
41:43There's going to only be a few percent maybe that live in the very high, but the medium tier, as you said, it's a step up from the light tier, which is where we've all been living. And then the medium tier is still safe without being overwhelming because how much does that impact when the brain is already, you're already fearful of the movement. How does that stop when you actually try to do some of these more aggressive?
42:12Matt McInnes Watson:Absolutely. Absolutely. A real quick tip. If you can't find medium tier, you're like, I don't know, I'm either here or I'm up there. I'm either light or I'm super intense is I use a method that I called like a buildup. So you're just going to do on the spot. You're going to bounce on the spot on two feet. Rep one is the lightest and easiest. Rep, let's say 15. I think 15 is a good number. It's going to be a hundred percent. I want you to build up to that a hundred and you can have a partner, your coach look at you, whatever, and say, that's where it fell apart. It might be around reps eight or nine.
42:51Matt McInnes Watson:Some people, it might be six or seven. If you fall apart somewhere in there, that's where you need to stay in. That's your medium tier. So let's say seven or eight, I can start to see you lose your control of your torso. You're trying too hard or you spend too long on the ground. That's the zone that we then try to work to. Once you go past that, it looks terrible. It looks like all you're trying to do is try. Plyometrics shouldn't be an action where you actively look like you're trying to get off the ground. You have to create jump height with a very fast speed on the ground. And you can't do that by swinging your arms and grunting.
43:30Matt McInnes Watson:It doesn't work like that. This isn't lifting weights. This is deflections off of the ground at rapid speeds. So I get people to do that. I'm like, build up to that 15. Now, cool. Now bring it back down to that seven or eight or 10, wherever you felt good and bounce in there. That's your medium right there. That's your bread and butter. Live with that feeling. That feel good. Cool. Give me one, a 12. They hit it and they're like, whoa, yeah. Okay. Miss that again. Let me bring it back down to that 10. And again, we, we mop up that sub-maximal kind of intensity. And, and ultimately I think people also like once they've done a little bit of this, They shouldn't be too scared of, instead of doing like five sets of 10, try to do two sets of 25.
44:17Matt McInnes Watson:Allow volume to build rhythm. Allow that to build that like, oh, okay, I found the rhythm now. Because sometimes you're like, cool, you've got five opportunities to jump as high as you can. One, two, three, four, five. They're like, I've not even got there yet. I need to build myself into that. So yeah, don't be too scared of, you can do it in the light tier to start with, the real rudimentary bits. Do a set of 20 or 30, just bounce on the spot, side to side, left to right, and see how your body starts to find rhythm. So this is, I'm just finding parallels here. This would be like what I would instruct women coming into the weights room at the first to do a lot of repetitions, higher repetitions for movement literacy, figure out, get your body, your nervous system, turning on the right muscles and turning off others and really just getting it to where it is subconscious.
45:12And you don't have to think about what am I doing for each movement there? Do you, because I don't think this would maybe work with the more medium tier and above, but like for the, for the light tiers, a lot of the times I won't wear shoes, but do you do, do you use like, you have to use shoes for those more aggressive movements? What does that look like?
45:38Matt McInnes Watson:Yeah, I think so. For the, for the main, the main time, I think, you know, there's, there's a very big movement over the last 10 years with, with this barefoot idea. And ultimately I am an advocate for being able to get more training into people and not having something like being barefoot be the limiter of getting a stimulus into your body. Because if I can, you know, if you're halfway through a session and someone says to you, my lower legs are just, I just can't handle this with my lower legs because they're wearing no shoes or they're in barefoot shoes. Whereas the person next to them is wearing like a good solid pair of runners and they're able to continue and get the stimulus in their hamstrings and their hips.
46:23Matt McInnes Watson:If you have something that is a limiter, then it is, you're kind of losing out to it. And people say, well, why don't you wait for it to adapt? And I'm like, people don't have time to be able to do that. They want to get into this. They want to start to see themselves improving it. To do the barefoot thing is really tough. And I think if you're talking to people that maybe haven't done a lot of dynamic training in the last 20 years, the last thing they need to do is retrain their feet again. They're going to be retraining the whole of their body doing dynamic work, let alone to kind of shine a magnifying glass on their feet and lower legs.
47:02Matt McInnes Watson:You don't need to see that. I think that there is definitely some premise in barefoot with light tier. Absolutely. And I do that myself. I do that with my athletes. But once you turn up the intensity, the big limiting factor is the rate in which you hit the ground. Your foot is going to be super intimidated to whip the foot into the floor. And that's what we want. We want you to gain confidence to attack the floor because that's what's going to give you the stimulus. So don't allow it to be the limiter on volume and intensity because I think that there still is a lot to be gained with just wearing a good pair of trainers or shoes.
47:41Yeah. Well, you talked about capacity, reactivity, and rhythm and how those all go together. so if we look at i mean i feel like um rhythm is obvious uh reactivity reacting to the ground and trying to move quicker is capacity is where i feel like maybe some women would be not as sure
48:03Matt McInnes Watson:what that means but how does that piece together yeah i mean capacity can be the capacity of the the tissue to be able to withstand these landings. Like if you had to separate the time spent on the ground, the first portion might be the landing and the second portion might be how you get off of the floor or what I call a takeoff. So the capacity of the tissue to handle the landings that you're kind of providing it. So if it's, if there's a lot of force when you fall from a certain height that your body's not ready for or used to, then it's not going to have the capacity. And normally what will then happen is you will flex at the joint more.
48:50Matt McInnes Watson:You will spend more time on the ground because that aggressive, it's kind of like pulling elastic bands super quick, right? And that could be the tissue of your body, the muscles, the tendons. If you do it completely cold and you just rip on that elastic band at a high speed, the capacity of it is probably going to fail. Now I'm not saying that's going to be the same for your tissue, but it's the same in that like, you ever done that thing in the middle of the night where you walk down the stairs and you think there's an additional step and you're like, that's that. Like the tissue there obviously isn't prepared for that, but like that can almost be that same feeling if you get into dynamic movement and you don't have the capacity to deal with that.
49:32Matt McInnes Watson:So you're like, it's like a rude awakening. And so people often, they will get an initial like soreness from doing forms of jumping and plyometrics like lower legs you're going to get in the glutes you're going to get some hamstrings maybe feet certain people um certain people get it in their core like anterior core muscles get it from having to deal with the positions in the air um so building that capacity is is is paramount and that will come with exposure, but that exposure needs to be within what you can handle. There's no good saying, I'm going to do it four times a week and I'm going to do hundreds and hundreds of landings.
50:12Matt McInnes Watson:Ultimately, you need to drip feed this stuff in. It's like less is more and the more frequent, the better. Like I said, if you can do this four times a week and you can start out with five minutes of this stuff, that's where you want to start. And you want to build your capacity up to maybe doing 20 to half an hour of that three or four times a week. That would be great because that shows that you're really getting into a good body of work there. How long does that take? It's as long as a piece of string. However much time and focus you want to put into it, if it takes a year, that doesn't matter.
50:44Matt McInnes Watson:It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. So you can have that capacity. You can also then have volume capacity. Within a set, does my ability to handle these landing forces and then propel myself back off the floor, do I get to 20 reps and everything just goes, just falls off a cliff? You do have that into set capacity. You then have frequency capacity? Like if I do it on a Monday, can I do it before Thursday? Maybe not. That's when I have to understand volume and intensity and how they interact. So if I do this much volume, that's okay at this intensity. But if I do this much volume, let's say a hundred of, at a higher intensity, that's going to serve as a completely different stimulus or you know i i kind of class it as you kind of pick your poison right that's what we do right we we hit ourselves hard with these training methods and then we lick our wounds and then we come back to it right we we recover and we figure out how to use this poison to kind of yeah we're almost getting our own self-antidote we're like, oh, I can actually handle this.
52:01Matt McInnes Watson:No, yeah. Give me a little bit more. Give me more intensity. Give me more volume. But we have to understand that when I do this, what if I was to jot down how my lower legs felt out of 10, if 10's the worst and one's the best, 24 hours later, what do my lower legs feel like? They feel like an eight right now. I'm not going to train unless I'm under a three. Cool. The next day, actually there are like a five. Cool. I'm going to give myself one more day and I'm going to come back to it. Cool. Last week when I did that on a Monday, maybe that intensity was too high at that amount of volume. I either drop the intensity down and keep the volume or I drop the volume with that intensity.
52:39Matt McInnes Watson:And you just have to play on those levers. Like it's that, that idea of kind of like, what's the definition of, of, of, of stupidity. It's like, keep doing the same thing and expecting a different response. Right. So obviously there will be a learning curve there, but at the same time, learn from the immediate effects of what you're doing. Like, what did I do? I did this. That was pretty intense. That wasn't cool. How did that affect me? And just have this feedback loop. We have to get more, we have to have a greater understanding of how our bodies respond and how they respond acutely and how they respond chronically.
53:15That's the golden ticket right there because I think that it's hard. It's very individual. From what I've learned from being in the online space, is it's really people like to be told exactly what to do. And that there is a bell curve, obviously there's, this is a good range, but then there's going to be the outliers on this side and there's going to be the outliers on this side. And your job is to kind of see how you respond, see what that, I like putting a number on it because that makes it a little bit easier to give some feedback that is manageable there. But if we're looking at, this has been so fascinating, Matt.
53:58I mean, I could talk all day. It's been one of the most insightful conversations and informative. I am, you are so articulate and about the information. And such a different guest that I know our audience is going to love because, as I said, they're getting into the pogos. but I mean, I sure haven't been teaching them the medium level. So there's this whole other tier that's opened up that I will say in my own training, I have been moving. I've been adding in some more of these medium tier, whatever, bounds, leaps, whatever we're calling it, doing that. But then also moving more of the strength training, moving more load with speed, with intent of speed.
54:48and I just started my cycling journey maybe a month ago for the season. I'm super behind. It's just been a really busy year. But I got up to the top of this mountain that I do every year and the first ride of the season, it just sucks. There's no way around it. You just have to build up to it and then the next time's not as bad and the next time. Anyways, and I got up there and I felt great. And this is just, I've done this now. This is probably my 12th year in a row. and it was the first year where i feel like this type of training is the only thing that i've changed and it has made a massive difference in just uh what i've seen right off the bat with
55:31Matt McInnes Watson:yeah your what's going to be going up and your ability to create that instantly is going to be higher i mean we did we did a lot of our power output tests i was a high jumper back in the day and we did a lot of power output tests on a watt bike and we we did a six second watt bike test to understand where our power was at yeah and i thought that our skinny little high jumpers had no right in creating the forces that we did because because we were because our strength coaches were pretty dumbfounded by how much force we could create in a very short period of time so So it was, yeah, it says a lot.
56:11Matt McInnes Watson:It says a lot in that when you work on more power and more, what we class as like the rate in which you develop force or rate of force development is the phrase in biomechanics and physics is that that shows us that you're strong and that shows us that you can create strength in a very rapid nature. And it has a crossover to everything. If you want to get a stronger deadlift, if you do dynamic movement, you are going to to initially rip that bar off the ground so much quicker than you initially would without that training. It's the same with a heavy squat. You wouldn't believe how many power lifters and Olympic lifters have turned to doing a lot of our plyometric work over the last six or seven years and how much of a change they found in just being able to just create force against that stimulus.
57:00Matt McInnes Watson:So I look at it all the way down to someone in their 80s and say, do you just have that ability to create that instantaneous force. And that could be something as simple as that full idea or just having the ability to just get up off the floor and just apply force immediately. Because that's what you need. If you want to get up off the floor when you're sat there, how do I do that? Well, I create instant stiffness and then drive through a limb. It's exactly the same premise as jumping and moving dynamically, just in a random day-to-day life situation because we know how important this is now are your programs within your app is that where someone can if they want to start yeah yeah so so we do have some pretty good initial starter programs like we have a program called to return it's called return to sport it's it's a return of any kind whether you've not done something in 20 years or whether you're coming back from injury um that's a really good program on our app um and and ultimately with our app it's like it's like netflix with plyometrics you come in and you can just explore you can just drop and load any program whether you want to do the most simple like starter format of a certain sport or just general training all the way to the most advanced formats and it's just an eight week running cycle that it puts up training twice a week.
58:30Matt McInnes Watson:And you can kind of pick and choose as to how much of something that you want to do. And it ebbs and flows and gives you a ton of variety and different volumes and intensities and very much wave loads a lot over those periods of times. So it's well worth checking out if you just want to taste something like, what does this look like? like give me kind of kind of similar to what you guys are saying is this like you get in there and you're like oh my gosh i've like opened pandora's box because i've never i've never been down this rabbit hole before so if you haven't and you want you want to like show me show me show me what's behind those closed doors sort of thing and be like oh this is what you'd me and then and then when you do it is even more of an aha moment being like oh yeah i've done this in a long time my body has not felt like this position or this movement or yeah, it's, um, people just love it as well.
59:27Matt McInnes Watson:Like I said before, it's so enjoyable. It's so, it's so fun. So what is the name of your app and where can, where can women find you? So the, so the, the business that I run is called plus plows. So plus plows.com it, our app is right there in front of you to grab the, grab the programs. It's super simple. We have our own app. You just bring everything up on there. all the videos are of me jumping so you can click on every single movement and there's a video of me doing that movement so you're never kind of full shy of knowing kind of what to do you just have to watch what i'm doing on there um and you can find me a lot of what i do is on instagram it's uh it's mckinnis watson mci double n e s w a t s o n or the plyo guy you'll find me just searching that sad people called me the plyo guy and i was like well if i'm the plyo guy i'll be the plyo guy it's easier than saying your whole name so yeah we'll go with that exactly exactly so yeah that is super easy way to kind of find me on there um and you'll see me jumping around on there you won't miss it i love it thank you so much matt for your time today this has been such an incredible conversation and one that i think is so needed and i think that you are on you're i i think you're you're gonna have a very bright career i'm sure you have already but This gen pop, everyone is needing this information and there's not a lot of people dishing it out.
1:00:51So I really wish the best for you and your career. And we thought you were 28. So, yeah.
1:00:58Matt McInnes Watson:Hey, I'll take it. That was our guess. Hey, I'll take it. I'm going to tell my wife that she's going to hate that. We're both 35. So she's going to be like, excellent. I am 28. Yeah. Go with it. I love it. Thanks so much, Matt. Thank you. I really appreciate it, guys. Thanks for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a five-star rating and sharing the BodyPod with your friends.
1:01:32Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing. Victory Lane? Yeah, it's even better with Chumba by my side. Race to chumbacasino.com. Let's Chumba. No purchase necessary. VGW Group. Void where prohibited by law. CT &C's 21 Plus. Sponsored by Chumba Casino.
From the publisher
In this fascinating conversation, Matt explains why power is one of the first physical qualities we lose with age, how plyometrics improve bone health, muscle function, coordination, cognitive performance, and injury resilience, and why traditional exercise programs often miss this critical piece of the longevity puzzle. You'll learn the difference between strength and power, why learning new movement skills is so important for brain health, and how simple activities like skipping, hopping, bounding, and multidirectional movement can improve everything from athletic performance to everyday confidence.
Whether you're looking to build stronger bones during menopause, improve balance and stability, prevent falls, increase athleticism, boost cycling or running performance, or simply move through life with more energy and confidence, this episode provides practical, evidence-based strategies you can start using today. Matt shares beginner-friendly approaches to plyometric training, how to safely build tissue capacity, and why adding speed, power, and reactive movement to your fitness routine may be one of the most powerful investments you can make for healthy aging, longevity, osteoporosis prevention, and lifelong strength.
Be the First in Line for Shred Happens: Our popular 6-week challenge aimed at shredding fat and building muscle kicks off this October. Personalized calorie/macro budget, educational video calls, workouts for both gym and home, prize giveaways and an incredible community of women doing it along with you. Save Your Spot →
Hailey Happens Fitness Membership is the only fitness investment that grows with you! Get instant access to my full training system and design a training year that fits your midlife goals and body.
Start training with a 10-day free trial →