Rereading the Soviet manuals through the lens of programming changes what you see. They used the athlete as the feedback loop. They just never wrote it down.

It’s the invisible gorilla. Count the passes and you miss the gorilla walking across the court. Read the manuals looking for training methods and you miss the programming.

• Programming is the gorilla. The Soviets gave us max effort, dynamic effort and repeated effort. How they organized those methods sits underneath, unnamed. Training is not programming.

• Point A is dynamic. Point B is the target, and targets don’t move. Point A shifts with the conditions, so you keep re-aiming. Paul laid this out in his Point A post.

• Louie was programming before anyone called it that. Years of all-time world records before the science confirmed what he was doing.

Share Absolute: The Art and Science of Human Performance

The Point A Feedback Loop

Read more

Subscribe now

Every strength coach and therapist has heard it from a client: “This is getting boring.” The athlete has done the same isometrics—pressing, holding and damping—two to three times a day for weeks. The effort feels flat and the sessions blur together—because they are. So they change the stimulus.

Sometimes boredom, and the neurological stagnation responsible for its emergence, is the best sign the work is working.

Changing the stimulus is the mistake most strength coaches and therapists make. Not because they lack skill, but because they understand training and not programming.

Training is not programming. The two are different. The Soviets worked out the training methods in the 1960s. It took them until the 1980s to work out programming. In Programming and Organization of Training, Yuri Verkhoshansky defined it as the regulation of the contents of training in accordance with the athlete’s objectives, organized within a specific time frame.1

Training is the work: the methods conjugated with special exercises—like isometrics, the sets and reps. Programming is the regulation of that training (and treatment) work, over time, toward a defined Point B.

You can treat and train connective tissue. But you have to program for reactive strength.

That is the line between a strength coach or therapist and a programming strategist. The strength coach or therapist asks whether the stimulus is still working. The programming strategist asks what the stimulus is for? That one question changes how neurological stagnation is understood.

The programming strategist understands that stagnation is only a failure when the session’s intent is neurological. When the intent is biological, a bored neural network tells you the prompt has been learned and the tissue is now doing the work.

Same athlete. Same flat sessions. Opposite programming decisions.

Share Absolute: The Art and Science of Human Performance

Point A: The Current Physical State

At Absolute Sport Science, every athlete assessment begins at Point A—the current state of the athlete before any programming is designed.

• Health History A lower-extremity joint injury with a prolonged, stalled return. Dynamic activity irritates the joint and fills it with fluid (effusion).

• Treatment and Training History Every intervention to date has been subtraction—rest, removing sport practice when the joint flares, anti-inflammatories. Each one slowed the reactive strength deficit doom loop. None of them broke it. Top-down sits a neural network built by years of highly potent neurological training, on bottom-up connective tissue that has never been specifically trained, treated, or even assessed—only scanned (MRI).

• History at Level of Competition A high-output athlete who can’t currently sustain competitive volume without the joint flaring. Full neurological expression is also limited.

Below the paywall: what the biological Point B assessment revealed, the roadmap we designed from it, and why we’re holding the programming right now while the nervous system stagnates.

Biological Point B

Biological Point B has two elements, joint function and reactive strength. We assess both, because a joint can articulate cleanly while the tissue around it fails to react optimally—and as a result has a reactive strength deficit.

Read more

An NHL athlete with a bilateral reactive strength deficit in both hips since 2022. Years of the same complaints: tight, stiff, never feels loose. Then the outputs dropped. Less pop. A step slower.

When there’s no bottom-up tension in the tissue, the nervous system outputs tightness instead. It shields. That’s what a bottom-up reactive strength deficit looks like at the level of competition.

His history showed no reactive strength treatment or training in place. So we installed it, mostly from the table. The feedback loops are moving the right way:

• The closing angle block is gone. What he thought was pelvic instability was joint function, which drives neurological tightness at the hip joint level.

• Camp volume spiked, tightness didn’t. The highest volume block of the year produced significantly less tightness.

• Tightness turned into soreness. Adductors and glutes, exactly what we want sore in a hockey player.

• The game slowed down. He can see things on the ice he couldn’t before.

Output is still diminished. This is a long play. And during his latest Point A, one isometric showed how deep the problem went.

Share Absolute: The Art and Science of Human Performance

The Point A PIMA Feedback Loop

Read more

Whether you’re a free subscriber or a paid member, these recaps are designed to keep you informed and inspired—to keep you getting better at becoming a programming strategist!

Subscribe now

Tuesday Posts: Programming Insights

Tuesdays are all about actionable, evidence-based articles to level up your programming knowledge. September was a field month—we took Biological Point B into the Penn State Football building in-season, then watched the Level of Competition prove the point when Caleb Williams' hamstring met a demand his biology had never been programmed for. Here's what we explored:

September 8, 2026: The Hidden Sensor Network of the Medial Elbow (UCL) & Why It Matters

• RSI is an output measure—it tells you how the system performed, not why, or what to treat and train to change it.

• Three cadaveric studies map mechanoreceptors concentrated at the bony attachments and anterior bundle of the UCL—exactly where loading demand is highest.

• Fast-adapting Pacinian and slow-adapting Ruffini receptors in the same tissue give rate-dependent stiffening a physical mechanism.

• The conjugation point: stimulating the ligament’s nerve drives the forearm muscles that resist valgus load in milliseconds—bottom-up becoming top-down, inside the elbow. It’s the anatomy underneath July’s leading indicator at the elbow and baseball’s UCL problem.

September 15, 2026: What’s the Intent Here? Because the Language is Programming.

• Neurological vs. biological is the right split for Point B—but read the circle by row and maximal effort and dynamic effort land on both sides.

• On the dynamic effort row, a reactive strength rep and a speed-strength rep can look identical. Intent is the only thing that tells you which one you trained.

• Load management doesn’t close the in-season neurological-biological asymmetry—it magnifies it. Neurology recovers from rest. Biology detrains.

• Paid section: the five-question intent audit we run before anything goes into a program.

September 22, 2026: Penn State, Mark Latash and the UCM Hypothesis

• Penn State’s innovation runs from Dan Riley’s manual resistance in 1977 to Zatsiorsky’s Biomechanics Lab to Dr. Mark Latash’s Motor Control Lab.

• Reid Kagy brought us in during the season to present Biological Point B and the number one limiting constraint on high performance: the Reactive Strength Deficit.

• Latash’s forty-year question—what the nervous system holds constant and what it leaves free—is the same question every programmer has to answer before writing a set. That’s the hidden layer.

September 29, 2026: The Caleb Williams Scramble That Revealed the NFL’s Reactive Strength Deficit

• No one touched him. His hamstring went short to full length in a fraction of a second, then planted on a rain-soaked field it had never learned to damp against.

• Luck set the conditions. The tissue’s capacity decided the outcome—the same NFL reactive strength problem we’ve been tracking for years.

• Four games on the sideline = $2.3 million in reactive strength dead money for the Bears.

• Paid section: the phased programming strategy—IIC progression toward length, HIMAs and OIMAs, and Bulgarian dosing on the biology.

If the Caleb Williams breakdown made sense, you’re already thinking like a programmer—The Art & Science of Programming is where Point A, Point B, and the reactive strength framework get put into your hands as a strategy. Enroll now →

Share Absolute: The Art and Science of Human Performance

Sunday Paid Subscriber Videos

Sundays are reserved for our premium video content—in-depth breakdowns, Q&A sessions, and practical demos that bring the art and science to life. September’s run moved from the Dominican Republic to the paradigm problem itself, then to a Founders Meeting on training attention and a frame-by-frame NFL injury breakdown. If you’re not a paid subscriber yet, these are a great reason to upgrade!

September 6, 2026: Meeting a Real Sports Scientist: Neurological Stagnation (Paul Skenes), Signal, and Collaboration

The video companion to The Conjugate Edge #11. Jack Cecil fact-checked our Paul Skenes slide mid-presentation at Baseball As A Special Strength and took two claims off it. The model didn’t change—the noise came out and the signal got stronger. The line that stopped the room: only athletes at Neurological Point B will stagnate. Neurological stagnation and biological accommodation are different failure states calling for opposite interventions. The Halbert protocol, resistance rotation, and neurological volume dosing are below the paywall.

September 13, 2026: Neurological Abundance, Biological Scarcity

When we audit programming, we see almost entirely neurological work—a system built for powerlifters dropped into college football, the NFL, and MLB. The neural network gets exposed to every variable. The biology gets exposed to one. Every reactive strength injury you’re watching is that gap. We cover the 10% rule for neurological volume, going Bulgarian on the biology, tissue senescence in college football, and why reactive strength is the unfilled position in every organization.

September 20, 2026: John Baker Founders Meeting (Recording)

Former MLB catcher John Baker—Head Applied Mental Skills Coach for the Chicago Cubs, then VP of Performance for the Pittsburgh Pirates—joined our founding members to present Cognitive Conjugate: an emergent framework for the systematic training of attention as a trainable capacity. (Founding members only.)

September 27, 2026: Caleb Williams Reactive Strength Hamstrings Injury

The media is calling it non-contact, and it is. But the film shows something more specific—a bottom-up reactive strength injury, walked through frame by frame. A flood watch, a saturated grass field, and a tissue forced to self-organize against energy it had never seen. Why we think he can be back in three weeks, why “back” has to mean more than healed, and how Exercise 3 of our Reverse Hyper Program programs this exact scenario—built on the pendulum damping framework.

Partner Offer: Train Your Attention Like a Skill

If the John Baker Founders Meeting landed for you, here’s how to put Cognitive Conjugate into practice.

Most performers know what to do. The hard part is where attention goes when pressure rises: a mistake, the stakes, a notification, the last play. John built Performance Attention Training to train that skill in four weeks.

• Four weeks, four guided practices: focused attention, body scan, open monitoring, and connection

• Five short reps a week: no elaborate journaling

• A 10-statement Attention Score: taken before Week 1 and after Week 4, so you see what changed

• Self-paced, lifetime access: one-time purchase

This is not a relaxation app. It’s practice for holding your attention when it counts.

Absolute subscribers get it for $59 instead of $79 through October 27. No code needed. The discount is built into this link: Get Performance Attention Training for $59 →

After checkout, confirm your email to get access. If it doesn’t show up within a minute, check Spam or Promotions. Any trouble buying or getting in, reach John directly at john@baker-hq.com.

Carry This Into October

Two ways to keep building on what September covered: the Reverse Hyper Program for the hamstring and spine damping work behind the Caleb Williams breakdown, and The Art & Science of Programming for the intent and Biological Point B framework running underneath everything else this month.

Thanks for being part of Absolute this month—see you next week for more programming insights. If you found value here, share this with a colleague who’s still load managing instead of programming the biology.

Leave a comment

Mark Latash and Vladimir Zatsiorsky both left the Soviet Union before the collapse, and both landed at Penn State. Latash brought Bernstein’s repetition without repetition to the West and built two of the dominant theories in motor control. Zatsiorsky wrote Science and Practice of Strength Training. They shared a building and a handful of publications, but never a unifying theory.

Work down from Latash’s motor control and you end up at the neurological and the biological. Work down from Zatsiorsky’s strength training and you end up in the same place. That middle ground is where programming lives.

On our last day of the Penn State in-service, we assessed an athlete with an abnormal joint capsule in front of Latash. He put his own hands on the hamstring and asked whether it was coming on involuntarily. It was: neurological shielding around abnormal bottom-up biology.

We didn’t get a no...

The backstory is in Penn State, Mark Latash and the UCM Hypothesis.

Share Absolute: The Art and Science of Human Performance

What We Cover in This Video

• The Penn State In-Service: Three days in-season with the football medical and performance staffs, centered not on treatment or training but on programming: the hidden layer, the roadmap that connects Point A to Point B.

• Training Questions Are Programming Questions: The neurological-biological asymmetry, the reactive strength deficit, and why knowing the training and treatment isn’t enough.

• Three Seconds or Four?: A live programming decision from the Penn State weight room.

• Two Pioneers, One Building: How Latash and Zatsiorsky ended up down the hall from each other.

• Latash on the Table: An abnormal capsule, a shielding hamstring, and the motor control legend assessing it himself.

• The Uncontrolled Manifold, Simplified: Why the same squat never actually happens twice.

• Good vs. Bad Variability: What the nervous system stops controlling, and what it should never be fed.

The programming applications of the UCM, where neurological stagnation comes from, and the capsule case are below for paid subscribers.

Kind of the Same, Kind of Different

Read more

Subscribe now

Caleb Williams is at Neurological Point B. He’s a highlight reel, the franchise quarterback, the reason the Bears came into 2026 with real Super Bowl expectations. Late in the fourth quarter against the Vikings, a single scramble put his neurology in front of a demand his biology had never been programmed to meet.

No one touched him. The connective tissue of his hamstring had to damp the energy of a landing at full tissue length, and it couldn’t. Was there bad luck involved? Some. A water saturated field, a diving defender, a scramble at the wrong angle. But luck only sets the conditions. The tissue’s capacity decides the outcome. The Level of Competition is rarely optimal, and on that day it exposed a Reactive Strength Deficit. The good news: the deficit is fillable.

In Sunday’s video, we broke the play down frame by frame. Here’s what we saw.

Point A: The Mechanism at the Level of Competition

First-and-goal from the 6, trailing 6-3, about eight minutes left. Williams escapes around left end and senses the defender diving at his legs. To clear him, he drives his right knee up, flexing hard at the hip and knee. Then, as the leg reaches back for the ground, the knee extends with the hip still flexed. In a fraction of a second his right hamstring goes from short to full tissue length.

Then he plants, at full length, in cleats, on a natural grass field that had been soaked by heavy rain before the first snap. As we covered Sunday, a saturated field changes what the ground gives back on every plant. The energy that arrived at Williams’ hamstring didn’t match anything his tissue had experienced. Situationally, it was a bodyweight (relative strength) overspeed eccentric at tissue length, on a surface the tissue had never learned to damp against. That’s about the most reactive demand you can put on a hamstring.

At that moment the tissue had one job: damp the energy and transmit the force directionally north-south through the chain. It damped partially, then yielded.

He saw the defender coming and pulled his knee up into more hip flexion. His nervous system organized around avoiding contact. What it couldn’t anticipate was the ground. The tissue met a demand it hadn’t prepared for, on a surface the neurology had never learned to damp against.

To us at Absolute, damping is a programmable quality. The tissue’s ability to absorb and dissipate energy can be trained and progressed over time, just like strength or speed. We laid out why in The Damping Effect: A Programmable Quality, and how it plays out in time in Reactive Strength In Time Programming: Understanding The Damping Effect. On this play, the demand for damping arrived faster, at greater length, and in a less familiar form than Williams’ connective tissue and neurology was prepared for. It’s also why pendulum damping is something we program for directly in our Reverse Hyper strategy.

Watch where he grabs. It’s the middle-to-upper back of the thigh, which suggests the muscle tissue at the musculotendinous junction took the damage. That’s what happens when connective tissue is constrained at length, it does not have access to more length to damp the load. The energy has to go somewhere, and the muscle tissue is where it went.

Point A: What Williams Brings

Neurologically, he’s elite, with a network of absolute strength and speed that makes him one of the most dynamic quarterbacks in football. As far as the public record shows, he has no hamstring history.

So where’s the gap—the deficit? It’s tissue-specific. The proximal-to-middle region of the hamstring is one of the least trained areas in sport. Hinges and deadlifts load it, but most programs use those lifts for their neurological effect, not to teach that tissue to damp and transmit force at length. The neural network gets built while the tissue never gets the stimulus of damping.

The Diagnosis

This is a bottom-up reactive strength injury, driven by what we call a Reactive Strength Deficit: the gap between neurological output and the connective tissue’s ability to damp and transmit that output. Top-down, the neurology held. Bottom-up, the reaction never emerged. We’re reading film, not imaging, but the mechanism is about as clean as they come.

The diagnosis matters. Call it a “hamstring strain” and the default is rest, time, and a return-to-play checklist. The tissue heals, but it doesn’t learn reactivity and damping. Call it a Reactive Strength Deficit and the medical and strength staffs share one programming target: developing a special strength. Every day Williams is out becomes a day of programming, not a day of waiting.

The Prognosis

Here’s the encouraging part. An athlete already at Neurological Point B is in about the best position possible to come back from this. The programmer just has to solve one highly specific and nuanced problem.

We believe this can be a fast return, three to four weeks, provided it’s what the film suggests. But return has to mean something specific: connective tissue that is reactive and behaves elastically, not tissue that is merely usable that he compensates for. Getting there in-season takes the medical staff and the training staff programming in conjunction.

That’s the Hidden Layer, and how we would shape the strategy.

Programming the Hidden Layer

We don’t know anyone on the Bears staff, and we don’t have Williams’ imaging or physical assessment findings. So treat what follows as a model of how we would program this case from the moment he came off the field, not as a report of what’s happening in Chicago.

Time is of the essence, as the NFL season doesn’t pause. The Bears play every week whether Williams is available or not. Every day he’s out has to count, which means treatment and training can’t wait on each other. They have to run in conjugation from day one.

This is where the Hidden Layer of programming either emerges or it doesn’t. The inputs are well known: isometrics, eccentrics, the reverse hyper. But treatment and training is not programming. Treatment and training are the inputs. Programming is the regulation of those inputs over time, driven by real time feedback. We broke down that distinction in The Hidden Layer: Training vs. Programming. In Williams’ case, every session produces a new Point A, and every new Point A tells you what the programming options are for the next session.

We’ve covered the first two phases of hamstring reactive strength injury management before. Here’s how each applies to Williams.

Phase 1: Initial Management

The first priority is getting the neural network of absolute strength back into the injured tissue. A hamstring that has just yielded is surrounded by protective neural output. We call this neurological shielding.1 The CNS is shielding the tissue and joint range of motion, and until the network reconnects to the tissue, biological loading won’t optimally stimulate the injured tissues.

The skill is palpation and the input is IsoRamping. Palpation finds the injured tissue and tells us how it is behaving. IsoRamping then asks the neural network to generate force into that tissue, slowly ramping effort while we give it feedback through our hands. We walk through a live acute case in Initial Hamstring Injury Management: Palpation + IsoRamping.

From there, the Internal Isometric Continuum organizes everything. PIMAs, pushing or overcoming isometrics, serve two purposes early on. They’re analgesic, calming the pain response. They’re also diagnostic: the effort level at which force transmission starts to feel abnormal becomes a number we can track, a programming feedback loop. That number is the thread that runs through the entire return. We laid out the continuum for acute hamstrings in Initial Hamstring Injury Management and the companion video.

Then comes volume, which is where most rehab plans fall short. Research shows connective tissue responds to about 10 minutes of loading, then needs roughly six hours before it becomes responsive again.2 So we go Bulgarian on the biology: isometric loading three times a day, six hours apart.3 That’s 21 sessions in the first week alone. The loading starts immediately. We don’t and can’t wait for the tissue to calm down, because the tissue remodels according to the load it receives.

One more programming feedback loop to monitor is neurological shielding, experienced by the athlete as tightness. If the hamstring presents as tight, that’s a protective neural output, not a tissue that needs stretching. Stretching, scraping, or foam rolling it amplifies the shielding and adds noise into this feedback loop that we cannot have with the time constraints we are operating under. IsoRamping and positional isometrics resolve it. We covered this in Hamstring Tightness: A Neural Network Approach to Treatment.

Meanwhile, the rest of Williams’ neural network doesn’t go dormant. We utilize upper body neurological training to stimulate the neural network to output force expression, which lowers the amount of shielding that we get in the hamstrings. Lower body joint function training continues. The aim of the program is to return Williams with more reactive strength throughout the entire lower body.

Phase 2: Intermediate Management

Once the neural network is reconnected and the PIMA effort output is climbing, the intent shifts from protecting the tissue to developing it, specifically toward length. The tissue failed at length, so length is where it has to be rebuilt.

Read more

The media is calling it non-contact, and it is. But the film shows something more specific. Williams pulls his right knee up to clear a diving defender, and his hamstring goes from short to full length in fractions of a second. He plants at length, on a rain-soaked natural grass field, in cleats. The tissue has to damp the energy of that landing, and it can’t. That’s a bottom-up reactive strength injury, and in this video we walk through it frame by frame.

The Conditions Nobody’s Talking About

Look at the conditions. Soldier Field was under a flood watch going into kickoff. Forecasts called for 1 to 2 inches of rain, thunderstorms, fog, and wind gusts up to 35 mph. It was the Bears’ first home game of the season, played on a field that was saturated before the first snap.

That matters more than it sounds. Connective tissue learns to damp through exposure. Every practice and every game on a normal surface teaches Williams’ tissue what the ground gives back when his foot lands: how much it slides, how much it grips, how the energy returns up the chain.

A soaked grass field changes that answer on every plant. One plant grips deeper, the next releases sooner. The energy arriving at the hamstring no longer matches anything the tissue has seen before. So on the scramble, at full length, the tissue had to self-organize in real time to position itself and damp an energy profile it had never experienced. It partially damped, then yielded.

That’s the real lesson here. You can’t train for every surface or every storm. You can train the tissue’s ability to organize and damp energy it didn’t expect.

Absolute’s Reverse Hyper strategy trains a tissue to organize against energy it didn’t expect, from the short-to-long transition to the catch at length.

Share Absolute: The Art and Science of Human Performance

How the Reverse Hyper Programs This Scenario

One of the main programming intents of our Reverse Hyper Program was to fill the reactive strength deficit, not just in the spine but in the hamstrings. Exercise 3 is that conjugation brought into the weight room:

Read more

Subscribe now

Penn State is a powerhouse of innovation. In 1977, Dan Riley arrived from West Point with a constraint most strength coaches would have accepted: no equipment, too many athletes, and a neck that nobody was programming training work for. He didn’t go looking for a better machine. He put a partner’s hands on the athlete and called it manual resistance. In 1979 he stood up at the national strength coaches convention and handed it to the entire field. It spread because it solved the same constraint everywhere.

Riley programmed it as repetitions. 47 years later we’re using manual resistance to bring velocity to zero and hold in tissue-specific lengths + joint ranges of motion, for a target he never programmed for: reactive strength.

The necks Riley’s programming developed became the template. When Penn State won national titles in 1982 and 1986, Riley was already in Washington, where he’d spend nineteen years and collect three Super Bowl rings. His exercises didn’t travel. His logic did and the football athletes at Penn St had Point B necks we have never seen before.

That’s the part of Penn State most people in the strength world know. The part they don’t is what was happening across campus, where a different group was working out why that logic holds.

Dr. Vladimir Zatsiorsky came to the States in 1990, after 18 years chairing the biomechanics department at the Central Institute of Physical Culture in Moscow. If the name doesn’t register, the book will: he wrote Science and Practice of Strength Training. At Penn State he built the Biomechanics Laboratory, and it worked hand in hand with the Motor Control Laboratory down the hall.

We didn’t meet Riley. We didn’t meet Zatsiorsky. We got onto that campus because the tradition that produced both of them is still alive there.

Reid Kagy hired us to come in during the season. That detail matters more than it looks. In-season is when a performance staff has the least room for anything that isn’t already working, and the opening weeks of a football season are the tightest the calendar ever gets. They gave us their full attention anyway—much respect. They sat through a presentation on Biological Point B and we got into the question underneath all of it: what is the number one limiting constraint in high performance? The answer we brought them was a Reactive Strength Deficit.

Innovation at Penn State isn’t a trophy in their trophy case—but there are a lot of those too. It’s a staff culture. And it’s what put us at the edge of high performance, in the Penn State football weight room with Dr. Mark Latash.

Latash is a distinguished professor of kinesiology at Penn State and the director of the Motor Control Laboratory, which he organized in 1995 alongside Alexander Aruin and two graduate students. He has authored five books, edited ten more, and published over four hundred peer-reviewed papers. He founded the journal Motor Control, served as president of the International Society of Motor Control, and holds that society’s Bernstein Prize.

What Latash has spent forty years on sounds abstract until you realize it’s the same question Riley was answering with his hands. When an athlete produces a task, what is the nervous system actually holding constant, and what is it leaving free? Get that wrong and you program against the wrong variable.

The answer starts with a Blacksmith.

Share Absolute: The Art and Science of Human Performance

Where it Started

Back in the 1930’s Nikolai Bernstein noticed something very odd. When a Blacksmith swings a hammer, the hammers path is remarkably consistent from strike to strike, but during each swing, the path that the joints producing the movement take was not consistent. Stated in another way, each joint involved in the movement (shoulder, elbow, wrist, fingers) produced a consistent action of swinging a hammer in a multitude of different coordination patterns. At the time, this had not been observed, was entirely strange and as a result was not explained. As a matter of fact, Bernstein thought he had collected inappropriate data. Nevertheless, he ended up terming this the “degrees of freedom problem” which is based on the fact that the nervous system has vastly more moving parts (muscles and joints) than it actually needs to perform any one task effectively. This plagued the field for sixty years before any relevant evidence or explanation.

The Core Idea

The Uncontrolled Manifold (UCM) hypothesis was introduced in 1999 by John Scholz and Gregor Shoner. Their seminal paper introducing the concept provided the field with the beginnings of a possible explanation of what Bernstein observed.

For descriptive purposes it is important to define one foundational piece in the study of movement and its control. Any movement taken in isolation is produced by a set of elemental variables which essentially describe the joint angles and muscle forces needed to produce that movement. In relation to Bernstein’s observations and the proposed UCM hypothesis, we can take any task, and understand that it can be produced with a hugely diverse set of elemental variables such that there is a large number of configurations of joint angles and forces that will ultimately produce this movement outcome. If all of the combinations of the elemental variables that produced the intended outcome were to be plotted, it would trace out a subspace within a full space of possibilities. That subspace is the Uncontrolled Manifold.

The name is a little counterintuitive. "Uncontrolled" doesn't mean ignored. It means that the nervous system doesn't need to correct deviations that stay inside this subspace, because such deviations don't change the outcome that matters. Movement within the UCM is free and therefore “uncontrolled” specifically. Movement that pushes off the UCM and goes in a direction that would actually change the task-relevant outcome which changes the intent of the movement is exactly what a well-organized controller should suppress.

Getting back to Bernstein, the application of the UCM explains what he observed: each Blacksmith had the intent of hitting the hammer to a spot on a chisel, which determines the acceptable goal as an outcome of the movement. Within that goal, was displayed numerous configurations of joint angles and forces that produced it. What Bernstein actually observed is the subspace of a Blacksmiths hammer swing, which we now know as the Uncontrolled Manifold.

The Contribution of Mark Latash

Read more

John Baker is a former Major League catcher. Following retirement from MLB he served as the Chicago Cubs’ Head Applied Mental Performance Coach before becoming Director of Coaching & Player Development and later Vice President of Performance for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

John holds a Master’s degree in Performance Psychology and was directly trained in Min…

Read more

The language is programming. Treatment and training, programmed in conjugation—one strategy, one athlete, cumulative multifaceted effects that transfer to the football field.

Subscribe now

It is the same sentence we carried into the Dominican Republic in August. Different sport. Different building. Same limiting constraint. The full Penn State debrief is coming—there is more to that visit than fits in one essay.

The asymmetry, again

In the offseason, the two halves of the athlete scale together. Then the season starts. The neural network keeps scaling—every heavy session, every sprint, every snap adds output. The connective tissue does not. Without the programming of specific treatment and training, it degrades. Quietly. While the output look fine.

The gap between those two lines is a bottom-up reactive strength deficit. And the deficit is the injury. The hamstring in October. The Achilles in November. Not bad luck—the gap converting into a strain.

We have written about the neurological–biological asymmetry before. We have also written about the most common answer to it: load management. Or, as we called it then, load mismanagement.

The NBA is the clearest case. Pull the reps, manage the minutes, rest the athlete when the numbers say he is tired. It feels responsible. It is not.

Fatigue is a neurological symptom, not a biological one. The CNS recovers in 24 to 72 hours. Connective tissue does not recover from rest—it detrains without mechanical loading. Rest deloads both halves of the athlete, but only one of them comes back. Neurology recovers. Biology degrades.

So load management does not close the gap. It magnifies it. Repeat that across a season and the athlete steps onto the court neurologically ready to output and biologically compromised to transmit.

Tyrese Haliburton is what that looks like. A calf strain in Game 5, followed by around-the-clock passive care—hyperbaric, massage, dry needling, e-stim, taping. He felt good enough to play Game 7. His Achilles ruptured in the first quarter. Feeling good is not the same as being at Point B.

The answer is not to slow the neurology down. It is to scale the biology with it. Same week. Same strategy. In conjugation.

The in-service laid out the asymmetry. This essay picks up the question underneath it: how do you know which side your work is really training?

How we usually draw Point B

Point B is three special strengths plus joint function—absolute strength, speed-strength, reactive strength, and joint function. Four elements, trained and treated concurrently, with effects that multiply rather than add.

We almost always split it the same way.

Neurological Point B is two special strengths—absolute strength and speed-strength—sitting on the neural network of absolute strength. Top-down. Primarily the weight room.

Biological Point B is one special strength plus joint function—reactive strength and joint function. Bottom-up. Primarily the clinic.

That split is correct, and it is useful. It tells you whose ecology is whose. It tells a medical staff and a performance staff where their primary work lives.

Look at the circle again

Now read the same circle by row.

The top row—joint function and absolute strength—is trained with maximal effort. The bottom row—reactive strength and speed-strength—is trained with dynamic effort.

Maximal effort and dynamic effort. The two methods Louie ran in conjugation at Westside. Our strategy extends both methods to the biological side of the athlete, and the circle shows where each one lands.

But the two rows do not behave the same way. On the maximal effort side, the two elements look nothing alike. On the dynamic effort side, they can look identical. That is where intent stops being a nice idea and becomes the whole job.

What’s the intent here?

This is where programmers get lost.

Ask a coach to walk you through a session and you get a detailed answer. The exercise. The load. The sets, the reps, the tempo. What and how. Then ask one more question—well, what’s the intent here?—and the answer often gets thin.

If you cannot name the intent, you cannot name which element of Point B you trained—and you cannot know whether you closed the asymmetry or widened it.

A keen lens of Point B is what lets you break down what you are actually seeing.

In the Dominican Republic we put it this way: you're in the middle of the ocean and you have no idea where you are. Before you can start programming, you need to find out where you are—Point A—and where the island is—Point B—and then create a map to get there.

Intent is the heading on that map. Two athletes can pull the same stroke at the same pace and be rowing toward different islands. If you cannot name the heading, you do not know where the rep is taking them.

Below: how intent changes a maximal effort rep, how the same OIMA trains either half of reactive strength, a reactive strength training max on video, and the five-question intent audit we use before anything goes into a program.

Read more

The Big Takeaway

When we audit programming, we see almost entirely neurological work. Max effort, dynamic effort, run in conjugation, producing rapid neurological scaling. That system works—Louie’s Simmons’ Westside demonstrated it for decades. The problem is coaches took programming built for the powerlifting athlete and dropped it into college football, the NFL, and Major League Baseball without asking whether that athlete needed more network.

The result is the paradigm we’re in now: neurological abundance and biological scarcity.

The neural network gets exposed to every variable — different resistances, different intents, different velocities. The biology gets exposed to one: slow, monotonous repetition. So when the network needs to link into the biology across all that abundance, it can’t. The tissue was never trained there.

Every reactive strength injury you’re watching is that gap.

(Neurological abundance is Mark Latash’s term—the nervous system’s ability to explore different options for the same task. We’re extending it from degrees of freedom to force expression.)

What We Cover in This Video

• Neurocentric Programming: What twenty years of neurological scaling produced, and what it left out.

• Abundance vs. Scarcity: Why exposing the network to ten variables and the tissue to one guarantees the gap.

• The 10% Rule: Why neurological training volume should be a small fraction of the total.

• Going Bulgarian on the Biology: The Bulgarian frequency strategy, applied where it actually belongs.

• This Is a Multi-Professional Problem: Why clinical staff have to be proficient in bottom-up reactive strength work, and what conjugating actually means across the clinic and the weight room.

• Tissue Senescence in College Football: Why the athletes coming out of college are neurologically primed with tissue years older than they are — the same argument we made about the UCL.

• Load Management or Programming?: Schools are already load managing 19-year-olds. That’s a programming problem wearing a different name.

• The Unfilled Position: Reactive strength is the number one limiting constraint on high performance, and nobody owns it.

The programming—volume constraints, Bulgarian biological dosing, and how the assessment actually gets done—is below for paid subscribers.

Read more

Subscribe now

Reactive Strength as an Emergent Quality

Reactive strength has traditionally been defined through the physiological lens of the stretch-shortening cycle (SSC): the speed and force with which an athlete can transition from an eccentric contraction to a concentric one. Within the industry it is measured almost universally through the Reactive Strength Index—jump height divided by ground contact time—and that measurement has done real work for the field, giving programmers a way to quantify plyometric output and stratify athletes into appropriate training intensities.

But RSI, for all its utility, is an output measure. It tells you how well the system performed. It doesn’t tell you why, or what to treat or train to change it.

At Absolute, we’ve argued that reactive strength is better understood not as a single physiological event but as an emergent phenomenon—the athlete’s ability to respond to a stimulus and exert force, arising from the combined behavior of two distinct ecologies: a top-down neural network and a bottom-up connective tissue system. Reactive strength doesn’t live in either system alone. It lives in the conjugation between them.

The top-down component is CNS output—the ability of the neural network to compress into rapid, forceful contraction. This is where rate of force development lives, and it’s the piece most training programs already target.

The bottom-up component is connective tissue behavior. Connective tissue generates stiffness under load, and critically, the rate of loading determines the rate at which that stiffness is generated. The faster the load comes on, the faster and more completely a well-functioning tissue stiffens in response. At the Level of Competition, where loading rates vary constantly and unpredictably, this rate-dependent stiffening is what allows the athlete to be responsive (reactive) rather than merely strong.

Considering our history discussing MLB elbow injuries through the view of our Reactive Strength model, we will present an anatomical example of what this synchronization actually looks like from inside a joint. How does this happen? Where does this happen and how fast do the two systems actually talk to each other? It turns out the medial elbow turns out to be one of documented places in the body to look for that example.

Subscribe now

Where the Sensing Actually Happens

Three cadaveric studies, twenty years apart, mapped where mechanoreceptors sit within the medial elbow ligament complex and capsular tissue. These papers were not written with a Reactive Strength thesis in mind as they were surgical anatomy papers aimed at providing descriptions of of the ligaments and the sensory mapping of the tissue to direct surgical procedures However, for us they describe the details of the bottom-up sensing network of the elbow and how it creates afferent flow that would inform the system as to the potential output needed.

Two patterns matter here for the bottom-up component of Reactive Strength specifically.

The receptor population is not uniform—it’s concentrated where mechanical demand is highest.

All three papers converge on the same two hotspots: the bony attachments, where the ligament transitions from compliant mid-substance to stiff insertion, and the anterior bundle, which independent biomechanical work credits with bearing 30–50% of valgus stress depending on flexion angle, but importantly has been shown to bear most of the load during the throwing motion. It seems that the density of mechanosensors is dependent on loading behaviour.

The receptor types found give the rate-dependence claim a physical mechanism.

Pacinian corpuscles are fast-adapting—silent except at the onset or cessation of movement, tuned specifically to acceleration and rate of change. Ruffini corpuscles are the opposite: slow-adapting, continuously active regardless of rate, tracking sustained position and pressure. Having both populations embedded in the same tissue is close to what you’d expect to find if a structure’s response were meant to scale with how fast it’s being loaded, rather than responding identically regardless of speed. This is extremely important biological information that helps self-determine the resultant behaviour. This shows the sensory apparatus needed to detect and respond to loading rate is physically present, and concentrated exactly where the tissue is expected to work hardest. Combine this with the materials evidence supporting the behaviour of connective tissue under load which has been shown to stiffen faster under faster loading and the foundation of Reactive Strength about the elbow starts to take shape.

The Conjugation Point: Where Bottom-up Becomes Top-down

Anatomy alone describes hardware. What turns this into a genuine bottom up/top down system, rather than two separate ecologies that are related to each other is evidence that loading the ligament actually drives neural output.

Stimulated articular afferents create the foundation of motor output

The evidence exists, albeit in a feline model. Phillips and colleagues (1997) isolated the articular nerve branch running from the median nerve into the medial elbow ligaments of anesthetized cats and electrically stimulated it directly. The result was consistent, bilateral EMG discharge in five forearm muscles, the flexor digitorum superficialis, flexor digitorum profundus, flexor carpi radialis, flexor carpi ulnaris, and pronator teres. Every one of which has been shown biomechanically to either compresses the medial elbow or otherwise resist valgus load. Severing the nerve between the stimulating electrode and the spinal pathway abolished the response entirely, confirming the signal was genuinely afferent: ligament to cord to muscle, not local current spread.

The timing is the detail worth sitting with. Four of the five muscles responded in roughly 3.2–3.6 milliseconds—fast enough, given nerve conduction velocity and the short distance from elbow to spinal cord in a cat, that the authors could only explain it as a monosynaptic spinal reflex. Scaled to human limb proportions, they estimated a human latency of roughly 15–20 milliseconds—still well inside the window of an automatic, largely involuntary protective response.

In the language of the Absolute framework of Reactive Strength: this is bottom-up and top-down operating as a single circuit, not two adjacent systems. The connective tissue’s loading state is the input. The information from this is fed to the neural network. The muscular contraction it produces in muscles positioned to directly resist the load that triggered it is the top down output, arriving on a timescale paramount to normal behaviour of the throwing elbow.

If you want to know how to program treatment and training for a special strength that operates on this timescale, that's what we teach in The Art & Science of Programming.

Why Does This Matter?

Read more

The Big Takeaway

We just got back from the Dominican Republic running Baseball as a Special Strength, and in four or five years of Absolute, this was the first time either of us walked away thinking: that’s a sports scientist.

Most of what gets called sports science is data collection. Numbers on a spreadsheet, this correlates with that. Necessary—but it isn’t knowledge.

Jack Cecil was different. Mid-presentation on our Paul Skenes neurological stagnation case, he was already researching the slide. Afterward he asked whether we wanted it accurate, and two claims came off it on the spot.

The model didn’t change. He removed noise from it. The signal got stronger, and we were still having the same programming conversation—a better version of it.

The line that stopped the room: only athletes at Neurological Point B will stagnate. Without the right model, everything gets called biological accommodation. But a nervous system stagnating and a biology accommodating are different failure states calling for opposite interventions.

The programming—the Halbert protocol, the resistance rotation, and neurological volume dosing at Point B—is below for paid subscribers.

Watching a Neural Network Get Bored

Read more

Read more

The Case, In Order

1. Displays of the Neural Network: Acuña Jr at Point B — Jul 2025

2. Acuña Jr. Poll Results + Answer — Aug 2025

3. Ronald Acuña Jr’s Season Shows the Link Between ACL and Hamstring Injuries — Jul 2026

4. The ACL-Hamstring Feedback Loop — Aug 2026

Acuña Jr. turns in the right field corner and throws a bullet to third with no bounce. There may not be another right fielder in Major League Baseball who makes that throw. That film types him instantly: he is at Neurological Point B—his neural network is scaled, it compresses, it gives you everything you want.

And the same athlete carries two ACL reconstructions and two hamstring strains in the same season, same leg. That history, not his neurology, is his number one limiting constraint.

This is the case that shows why Neurological Point B and a reactive strength deficit can live in the same athlete at the same time—and why the network is the reason nobody sees the deficit. A trained neural network pushes force straight through a disorganized biology and produces a highlight. It can do that repeatedly, until the accommodation-stagnation cycle catches up. We don’t know the date. We know there’s a date.

Programming is the only way out: using the top-down element he already has to build the bottom-up element he doesn’t.

Learning how to read that asymmetry and program against it is exactly what The Art & Science of Programming teaches.

The programming—the measurement error, the reflexive arc, the exact in-season input and its sequencing—is below for paid subscribers.

Point B Hamsting vs. Usable Biology

Read more

Louie used to talk about them in the Dead Room. I’d have my hands in his tissue—conjugating between palpation and treatment, and he’d be talking—about Dyachkov, about the manuals he had bought through Bud Charniga, about the fact that the Soviets had people whose entire job was the science of sport. Not coaches who read. Not doctors who lifted. Scientists, employed by the state, studying the athlete as a system. That was how the Soviets built Exercise Science, he’d say. They paid people to figure it out.

He talked about them the way you talk about a species that lives on another continent. Real, documented, and not here.

In the fifteen years since, we have educated performance staffs across professional sport. You hear it constantly. We have a sport scientist. We have a whole department. You hear it, you nod, and you go work with the strength staff and the medical staff and the athletes, and the sport scientist is a name on an org chart you never meet.

Until August, at Elite Athletes Center, in the Dominican Republic. Where one of them signed up for our Baseball as a Special Strength course.

What a Soviet sport scientist actually did

It is worth being specific about what the Soviets actually built, because the word has drifted—but that is our lineage. It is the heartbeat of our conjugate strategy, and it is alive.

The best account of it in English is still James Riordan’s Sport in Soviet Society, published in 1977—the first serious academic study of the subject, written by an Englishman who had actually worked inside the Soviet system and had access to primary sources no other Westerner could get to. What Riordan documents is not a training philosophy. It is an institution: physical culture written into state policy, sport tied to labour and defence, a national apparatus with budgets, ranks, research institutes and a career ladder.

That is the part that gets lost when American coaches say the Soviets. There was no Soviet secret. There was a Soviet payroll.

By 1935 the USSR had a Unified Sports Classification System that ranked not only athletes but coaches—expertise itself was given a rank, a standard, and a ladder. That is a strange thing to do unless you believe that knowing how to develop an athlete is a technical discipline with correct and incorrect answers. By the late 1970s there were thousands of researchers working inside that apparatus, publishing across dozens of periodicals in circulations that would embarrass most of what passes for sport science literature today.

So when Louie said the Soviets had sport scientists, he was not describing a job title. He was describing a state that had decided the development of an athlete was a research problem, and then funded it like one for seventy years.

And the lens was primarily physics—but only as far as Newtonian physics goes.

Zatsiorsky is the clearest case. Open Science and Practice of Strength Training anywhere and you are reading force, velocity, work, and the relationships between them, described precisely. That is the measurement language, and it is Newtonian.

What it is not is a model of the athlete.

Soviet physiology spent the better part of a century dismantling the idea that an organism answers an input the way a beam answers a load. Neurophysiologist Nikolai Bernstein took apart the reflex arc and showed that movement is continual correction rather than execution—the same intention never produces the same command twice, because the body it is issued into has already changed. Pyotr Anokhin replaced the arc with a functional system: a loop that carries an anticipated result forward and checks the actual result against it.

Verkhoshansky and Zatsiorsky inherit that directly. The training effect depends on the state of the athlete receiving the load—not on the load. You have to know the organism before you can know what the input will do to it.

Which is Point A, stated in Russian, fifty years early.

Training max is the proof. Zatsiorsky drew that distinction not to describe a resistance ceiling but a psychophysiological one—a competition max carries the full stress response with it, the heart rate spike before the bar leaves the floor, the arousal that lets a lifter produce a number he cannot produce on a Tuesday and cannot produce again for weeks. A training max is what the system will give you without that response. Identical bar. Identical physics. Completely different organism.

That is the whole reason the concept exists—and it is why maximal effort can be run at frequency instead of burning the athlete down. It is a psychophysiological observation wearing a number.

So: the tools were Newtonian and the subject never was. The Soviets used physics to measure an organism they explicitly refused to treat as a mechanism, and that refusal is the thing worth inheriting.

Then 1991, and the apparatus dissolves...

Except it didn’t disappear. It re-emerged here, in America, in a different building. It went upstairs. It stopped being physics and became probability; regression instead of mechanics, outcome distributions instead of force curves, a laptop instead of a lab. Same job, different math.

Which is exactly why I had never met one. I was looking in the weight room.

Why Baseball as a Special Strength — and Why in the Dominican Republic

Two days at Elite Athletes Center. The education was the one we always run—The Hidden Layer of Programming: Point A, then Biological Point B—joint function and reactive strength—then Neurological Point B—absolute strength and speed-strength—and then the conjugation, where all four elements collide into baseball as a special strength.

The purpose was never to hand anyone exercises. Exercises are the cheapest thing in this field. The purpose was so that an organization could program treatment, training, and practice as one strategy in conjugation, rather than three departments that share a hallway, a budget, and nothing else. Treatment and training operates at the Level of Adaptation. Practice operates at the Level of Competition. Conjugate is what makes them one thing—the effects are multiplicative, not additive.

And we went to the Dominican Republic because that is where the baseball athlete is actually physically developed. Not signed. Not developed later, in an organization hierarchy disguised as a system, after somebody else has already made the decisions that matter. Developed—from adolescence, in academies, at the one point in a career when the connective tissue architecture can actually keep pace with a scaling neural network of absolute strength. Regenerative capacity is at its highest. Turnover is fast. The tissue will answer almost anything you ask of it. That window is not a limiting constraint. It is the single best opportunity anyone will ever have to build an athlete who is symmetrical from the start.

Consider what the UCL epidemic actually looks like from the inside. The athletes who reach the major leagues are, disproportionately, the ones whose tissue happened to stay synced with their neurology through adolescence—whose architecture kept up, not because anyone programmed specific treatment and training for it, but because the regenerative capacity was there and the volume was tolerable and they got lucky. That is the Absolute thesis on what the pipeline is selecting for. Not talent alone. Survivorship.

Then the rope frays, tissue senescence dominates culminating in repetitive breakdown and regeneration leaving a twenty-five-year-old with an elbow considerably older than he is. Regeneration slows. And the neural network does not slow with it. The network is still enormous, still producing force it took a decade to build, and the architecture underneath it has quietly stopped being able to transmit it.

That is the neurological-biological asymmetry, and it is why these reactive strength deficits and injuries arrive when they do. Not at the start of a career, when the tissue could still answer. Years in, after the biology has stopped keeping up and nobody noticed because the output looked fine right up until it didn’t. This is not just isolated to the UCL.

Whatever asymmetry an athlete carries into professional baseball, most of it was laid down—or prevented—before anyone in a major league front office ever saw him throw.

That is why the intervention has to happen there. If you introduce a programming strategy at the developmental level—one that strategically simulates the neurological and biological ecologies in conjugation while the tissue still answers freely—you are not fixing an athlete. You are changing the state of every athlete who comes out of that pipeline, and you are doing it in the window where the biology is cheap.

Because the alternative is what the game currently has. A development environment that scales neurology relentlessly, programs the treatment and training of the bottom-up element of reactive strength—connective tissue architecture—almost not at all, and then selects for the ones who survived the omission. That is a systemic reactive strength deficit, and it does not stay a deficit. It becomes a UCL, an Achilles, an oblique, a hamstring—usually years later, in a uniform somebody paid a great deal of money for—Juan Soto is current case in point. And the injury is not just a limiting constraint on the athlete, or on the organization that bought him. At the volume baseball is currently producing them, it is a limiting constraint on the entire major league.

That’s the course. That’s why we flew to the DR as those working in baseball refer to it.

The Paul Skenes case study

Day two, live case study: Paul Skenes.

The slide before it was the one the whole course had been building toward—biological accommodation and neurological stagnation, the two failure states, and the specific order in which they emerge. That slide is the reason we were discussing Skenes at all. We’ll come back to it at the end, because it is the piece of this we actually want in your programming neural networks.

What Skenes gave us was the live version: what those two states look like when they finally surface at the Level of Competition, in public, in a box score.

Take a look at these two slides:

June 2025—this is what Point B looks like: four-seam averaging 98 to 100, 102 on the ninety-eighth pitch of a game, six to eight distinct pitches, a twenty-mile-per-hour gap between the fastball and the curveball. All four elements of Point B expressing live, a nervous system in total control of its biology. We wrote that piece over a year ago, and the line at the bottom of it was: assess him now, before stagnation sets in.

Then August 2026—this is what stagnation looks like. Velocity trending down across the season. Ground-ball rate 51% as a rookie, under 40% now. Innings per start down. Thirteen home runs, more than either full season before it. Not one glaring failure. Several small declines reinforcing one another, which is precisely how stagnation presents.

I was at the front of the room presenting it, and I could see him go on his phone. Not scrolling. Working. Pulling the objective evidence and checking my slide against it in real time.

We broke. He came straight up.

This part is incorrect. This part doesn’t matter.

What he was right about

He came at two bullets.

The spin. I had “spin down roughly 70 rpm—less spin-based movement” on the board. He told me it didn’t matter, and cited Alan Nathan, professor emeritus of physics at Illinois and the person most responsible for what baseball actually understands about the flight of a ball.

He was right, and here is why. Raw spin doesn’t move a baseball. Only the component of spin perpendicular to the ball’s direction of travel—the transverse or active component—generates the Magnus force that produces movement. The component running parallel to the direction of travel, gyro spin, spins the ball like a bullet and contributes nothing. A pitcher can lose spin and lose no movement whatsoever, or hold spin and lose all of it, depending entirely on what the axis did. The number on its own has no meaning.

And spin scales with velocity. If the fastball comes down two miles per hour, spin comes down with it and the ratio is unchanged. Seventy rpm off a fastball in that range, tracking a velocity decline, is not a finding. It is the same pitch, thrown slower.

Then the measurement itself. Nathan has been explicit that there is enough noise in the inferred spin values that you can’t attach much significance to a single pitch. Seventy rpm sits inside the error bars.

The standard deviation. I had Stuff+ at 110 last season and 98 this season, described as a fall from a standard deviation above average to average. He doubted the standard deviation claim. He was right to. Stuff+ is a model output scaled to a mean of 100—whether a twelve-point drop is one standard deviation depends on the population and the sample, and the number carries its own error before it carries any meaning. I had stated a modeled estimate as though it were a measurement.

So: two bullets off the board.

And nothing happened to the case. Velocity down. Ground-ball rate collapsed. Innings per start down. Home runs up, past both prior full seasons. Zone rate down, walk rate at a career worst. Those are outputs of the organism, not artifacts of the instrument, and they still say the same thing they said before he walked up.

He didn’t correct the model. He cleaned the data the model was reading. He made it harder to argue with.

And the model he left standing is the one on that earlier slide: accommodation first, stagnation after. Hold that order. It is the whole argument.

Because the model was never the spin number. The model is inside-out special strength—the claim that baseball is a special strength expressed by an internal state, that the internal state is four elements (Point B), and that when the output at the Level of Competition flattens the way Skenes’ has, you can name which internal state produced it. That is what lets us stand in front of a room and say this is biological accommodation in conjugation with neurological stagnation, and mean something operational by it rather than something rhetorical.

He didn’t touch that. He couldn’t have—it isn’t measured by anything on his side of the wall. What he did was strip two numbers out of the evidence that were describing a tracking device rather than a pitcher, and hand the argument back to us with less to attack.

Which is when it registered what was actually happening in that room. If you want to program treatment, training and practice for baseball as one strategy, you have to understand baseball as a special strength—and to do that you need both halves: a measurement layer honest enough to say which numbers are real, and an internal model capable of saying what the real ones mean. We had spent two days teaching the second half to a room that included a man who does the first for a living, and the two halves fit.

We weren’t defending a framework. We were building something with someone.

This is the part of the Soviet system that never got exported. America imported the manuals. What it never imported was the room—physiologists and biomechanists and physicians and coaches on the same payroll, pointed at the same athlete, each one in a position to check the others’ work. Riordan’s whole book is a description of that arrangement. Louie was buying the outputs of it secondhand, through translators, forty years late.

The arrangement was never the secret. It was just expensive, and nobody here was willing to pay for it. Which is the part we want to be precise about, because we were not there by accident. We were hired. Somebody wrote a budget line for two days of programming education at a developmental academy, and that budget line is what put a sport scientist with programming strategists and a room full of coaches in front of the same pitcher’s data at the same time.

The Soviets needed a state to build that room. It now costs a seminar. That is the whole finding.

He wasn’t arguing with the framework. He was auditing Point A.

Here is what made this collaboration worth writing about.

Go read Have We Been Assessing Hitters Backwards?—his (Jack Cecil) 2020 piece at Pitcher List, built on multiple regression against per-pitch plate discipline data to produce expected walk and strikeout rates. The argument is that hitting analysis has always lagged behind pitching analysis for a structural reason: a pitcher decides what to throw, where, and how—that’s an input. The hitter reacts to all of it—that’s an output. And when you evaluate an output, you are evaluating something that could have been produced four or five different ways. A 22% strikeout rate could be three called strikes, three whiffs, or a ten-pitch battle lost to an umpire’s zone. The number is identical. The athlete is not.

So he goes underneath it. He decomposes the outcome into the per-pitch decisions that generated it, and only then does he tell you what he thinks a hitter actually is.

That is our discipline in a different currency.

A performance drop is not something we ignore—it is Point A. The Level of Competition is the ultimate feedback loop, the place where the internal state finally declares itself in public and generates data we cannot generate any other way. A complaint, a symptom, a velocity decline, a bat speed that fell off in August: all of it is Point A, and all of it is why we assess at all.

What it is not is a programming instruction. Those are outputs, and any given output can be produced by more than one internal state. A hamstring that won’t optimally output could be a hamstring, or a hip, or a neural net that has never been trained, and the presentation reads identically from the outside. The output tells you that something is true. It does not tell you what. Point A exists to take the output apart until you know which internal state produced it—and only then are you permitted to program.

Which is why the quality of the data going into Point A determines the quality of everything downstream of it. Bad inputs don’t produce a bad answer. They produce a confident one.

And the internal states we are decomposing toward are not infinite. There are two failure modes available to a trained athlete, they arrive in a fixed sequence, and almost everyone in this field has the sequence backwards. That is the slide.

He found two numbers in our Point A that were properties of the tracking apparatus rather than properties of the athlete. That is precisely the error he spends his career finding in hitters. Same move, different domain.

The discipline is identical. The refusal is identical. I will not assess this thing on a number I cannot take apart.

Five tools, four elements

He had already done something else for us, earlier in the course, that mattered more than the correction. He gave us the five tools.

This is a man who has ranked an entire farm system prospect by prospect, and who has worked inside the Angels, the Athletics, Baseball Info Solutions and TrackMan. When he tells you what the game is actually buying, you write it down.

Hit for contact, hit for power, run, field, throw. The scouting language—and it landed instantly, because it is the external target our internal model has to resolve into. We do not come from baseball. We knew we didn’t know what baseball actually wants from a body, and a real strength of Absolute is that we know what we do not know, specifically and without embarrassment. What we do know—better than anyone working today—is programming and conjugate.

So he handed us the currency of the Level of Competition, and we handed him the currency of the Level of Adaptation.

Five tools are how the game prices an athlete. Four elements are how the athlete is built. The scouts defined baseball’s Point B decades before anyone had a force plate, and they defined it well—they just defined it externally, in terms of what comes out. Absolute strength, speed-strength, joint function and reactive strength are the same target described from the inside, in terms of what has to exist for any of those five to be expressed at all.

Inside-out special strength is exactly the translation between those two vocabularies. It is not a competing model. It is the layer underneath the one baseball already has.

Why baseball is on the edge

This is the thing I flew home with.

Baseball has built the most sophisticated Level of Competition measurement apparatus in the history of sport. Every pitch decomposed. Spin axis, active spin ratio, per-pitch swing decisions, bat speed, arm angle to the degree. Physicists publishing openly on the mechanics of the ball. An entire public research culture layered on top of a private one. Nothing else in professional sport is close.

And at the Level of Adaptation, it has almost nothing.

Jack can tell you, to the decimal and with error bars, that Skenes’ output is flattening. He can tell you which parts of that flattening are real and which are instrument noise, and he will do it standing at the front of a classroom to a guy who flew in to teach. What he cannot tell you—what nobody in that building can currently tell you—is why. Whether the neural network has stagnated. Whether the connective tissue architecture has failed to keep pace with a nervous system that scaled faster than the tissue could follow. Whether this is a top-down problem or a bottom-up one.

That is not a criticism of him. It is not his layer. Nobody has been assigned that layer.

The measurement apparatus at the Level of Competition is world class and the model of the athlete at the Level of Adaptation is subjective opinion. That gap is the entire reason both of us were standing in that room in the Dominican Republic. It is also, I’d argue, the reason baseball currently leads professional sport in the injuries that come from exactly this asymmetry— bottom-up reactive strength deficits—a game full of enormous neural networks and no institutional model of the tissue underneath them.

What closes it

Inside-out special strength is that layer. Not a competing measurement—a translation.

The five tools are the outside. They describe what the game buys. The four elements are the inside. They describe what has to exist for any of the five to be expressed, and—this is the part that matters—they are trainable and treatable, which the five tools are not. Nobody can program hit for power. You can program the absolute strength, speed-strength, joint function and reactive strength that make hitting for power available to a body, and then let the tool emerge.

Which is the answer to the question Jack couldn’t reach from his side of the data. He can establish, with error bars, that the output is flattening. The inside-out model asks the next question in a form that has an action attached to it: which of the four elements moved, in which direction, and is this a neurological constraint or a biological one? Those two answers produce completely different Mondays. One says compress the network. The other says the network is fine and the architecture underneath it is failing to transmit what the network is producing.

That fork—which of the two failure states you are actually looking at, and which one came first—is the slide I keep pointing at.

And that translation is exactly what happened in the room, in real time, in both directions.

He took two numbers out of our Point A that were describing his instrument rather than our athlete. We gave him a decomposition of the remaining numbers that his framework has no way to generate—not how much Skenes has declined, but what internal state produces a decline shaped like that one. Neither of us could have done the other’s half. Both halves were required, and it took about fifteen minutes on a break.

That is not a metaphor for how the two layers close. That is the two layers closing.

Baseball is one layer away from high performance. It has the external half already built.

Neither lens closes the loop

He is in the Dominican Republic looking for the next billion-dollar talent. We are looking at what it will take to keep that talent intact once he finds it.

Same athlete. Two Point A’s. His is measured at the Level of Competition and it is enormously more precise than ours. Ours is measured at the Level of Adaptation and it is the only one that tells you what to do on Monday.

I spent a decade hearing about sport scientists from the man who's responsible for bringing Soviet training methods to the West in a chalk-covered room in Columbus, Ohio who was buying Soviet manuals to get at what they knew. It took until this August to sit across from one—and to find out that the first thing he’d do is take two of my bullets off the board.

That’s the collaboration. That’s what it’s supposed to feel like when the loop closes.

Further reading

• James Riordan, Sport in Soviet Society: Development of Sport and Physical Education in Russia and the USSR—Cambridge University Press, 1977.

• Jack Cecil, Have We Been Assessing Hitters Backwards?—Pitcher List. The input/output distinction that runs underneath everything above.

• Jack Cecil, Oakland Athletics 2021 Preseason Top 50 Prospects—Pitcher List. What evaluation looks like at scale.

• Alan Nathan, The Physics of Baseball—University of Illinois. The active-spin work behind the correction.

• Absolute Sport Science, Paul Skenes: Not Just Arm Talent—This Is What Point B Looks Like (June 2025).

The slide

Everything above is the story. This is the bit of programming information of it worth keeping.

This is the slide put up on day two, before Skenes—the one the entire course is organized around, and the one I’ve been pointing back at throughout. It is our account of the two failure states available to a trained athlete, and the order in which they arrive.

Read more

The Big Takeaway

“Conjugate” hasn’t moved since Louie Simmons—everyone’s just repeating what he said, a decade or more after he said it. Louie built an effective system, but a system and a strategy aren’t the same thing: a system says “this is how we do things,” a strategy asks “given this Point A, how do we get to Point B.”

The Conjugate Edge exists to make that shift—turning bits of information from conjugate systems, including the Soviets Conjugate Sequencing System into a real-time strategy that works in the clinical setting too, not just on the weight room. That’s the difference between plugging in someone else’s 1970s or 1990s template and actually sequencing (programming) treatment and training for the athlete in front of you today.

Learning how to build that strategy instead of borrowing someone else’s system is exactly what The Art & Science of Programming teaches.

What We Cover in This Episode

• Why “Edge”: Conjugate hasn’t moved since Louie—everyone’s repeating what he said 10+ years after he said it.

• System vs. Strategy: A system says this is how we do things. A strategy asks given this Point A, how do we get to Point B.

• Conjugate Predates Louie: A conjugate sequencing system emerged out of the Soviet Union as Tom Malinsky’s PhD thesis enabled us to know, well before Louie ever touched it—his programming for powerlifting success hijacked the word.

• Breaking the Silo Between Treatment and Training: Conjugate strategy syncs the therapist and the strength coach so they run in parallel, not in sequence.

• A Live Point A Feedback Loop: A real example of holding off on a finding because of an upcoming training max.

• Bits of Information, Not a Whole New System: The goal isn’t claiming Louie was wrong—it’s giving programmers usable pieces to run in their own setting.

System vs. Strategy, in One Example

Read more

Friday was a private session with the Pittsburgh Pirates performance staff at their academy. Saturday and Sunday were an open seminar at Elite Athlete Center. Three days, one reframe.

The Reframe: Baseball as a Special Strength

Baseball is understood as a skill, and that understanding is useful—it is what makes skill coaching possible. But the skill lens returns coachable findings: self-organizing, things the athlete solves, things a skill coach can practice, cue and rep. It does not return treatable and trainable findings. And you cannot program a coachable finding.

So if you want to know how to program treatment and training work for specific to the sport of baseball and individual to the athlete, you have to observe and understand baseball as a special strength—strength expressed under the exact neurological and biological conditions the sport imposes. Every throw, every hit, every time a ball gets fielded qualifies as a special strength. The scout grades five tools—hitting for contact, hitting for power, fielding, running, and throwing; every one of them has top-down neurological components and a bottom-up biological components.

A tool is what gets graded and coached. The neurological and biological prerequisites of those tools are what get programmed.

Friday. With the Pirates staff we built the model from the ground up—Absolute’s inside-out mental model of special strength, the neural network of absolute strength, Point A → Point B, the Neurological–Biological Asymmetry, and the conjugate strategy that answers it.

Share Absolute: The Art and Science of Human Performance

Saturday—bottom-up biology. This was Biological Point B. Joint function and reactive strength. Joint function is macro range externally and micro motion internally, governed by capsular space—and space is dynamic. It can be acquired and it can be lost. Reactive strength is emergent: the CNS outputs, the connective tissue reacts. The damping effect sits at the center of it, tissue stiff enough to self organize to transmit force rapidly and compliant enough to dissipate what would otherwise damage tissue.

Then main focus of the day was centered on framing connective tissue injuries are reactive strength injuries. Calf, hamstring, forearm, UCL, Achilles—different tissues, one mechanism, a bottom-up capacity that never scaled with top-down output. We worked through published case studies of Konnor Griffen, the Phillies, Francis Lindor and then spent the afternoon on the Internal Isometric Continuum and the three classifications—HIMAs, PIMAs and OIMAs—including the oscillatory work we have spent the last year refining.

Sunday—top-down neurology. This was Neurological Point B. Absolute strength and speed strength, and the neural network of absolute strength that produces both. We programmed and did a practical for how to take a training max. Discussed the distinction most people never make is intensity: at a stimulating intensity you are adding nodes to the network, at a retaining intensity you are turning the existing ones on.

Everything we taught is published here. If you want the mechanics rather than the lens, The Art & Science of Programming is the module that lives in the hidden layer.

Which sets up the most practical idea of the weekend—conjugating training and practice for the baseball athlete. Turn the nodes of the network on, then go use it—a training max at a retaining intensity, then straight into the cage with neural intent on the tool the Level of Competition says the athlete needs. Training converges; practice diverges. Practice can only draw on what training has made available. Use programming to get the baseball athlete to neurological Point B and practice now becomes the special strength of baseball emerging.

We closed on neurological stagnation—the accommodation–stagnation loop, and programming as strategy that gets the most out of treatment and training. The absolute conjugate strategy for baseball is to acquire the neurological and biological prerequisites of the five tools—getting the athlete from Point A to Point B.

We are already scheduling the next Baseball as a Special Strength seminar for this offseason. Make sure to subscribe and you will hear about it first.

Thank you to the Pittsburgh Pirates performance staff—specifically Orlando Crance, Ariel Mercedes, Jack Cecil and to Elite Athlete Center for hosting, and to everyone who traveled and asked hard questions for two days.

Leave a comment

Want to run this inside your program?

Friday we did exactly this with the Pittsburgh Pirates’ performance staff at their academy — the full model, built from the ground up, in their facility with their people.

We run in-house seminars for professional and collegiate programs. Tell us about your program and we’ll set up a call.

In-house seminar

The Big Takeaway

The Soviets found a neurological strength deficit decades ago and programmed their training trying to close it. We found a biological reactive strength deficit, and closing it is the wrong move entirely. This one you fill—by taking the neurology an athlete already has and funneling it to stimulate the actualization of biology that’s missing.

What We Cover in This Episode

• The Soviets’ Muscular Strength Deficit, Defined: the gap between voluntary maximal strength and absolute strength (measured via electrical stimulation)—and why that gap is purely neurological.

• Why the Best Athlete on the Team Gets Hurt Most: the highest neural nets carry the highest neurological-biological asymmetry, and that asymmetry is the bottom-up deficit.

• Don’t Close It. Fill It.: why funneling existing neurological output into the biology is the opposite move from the Soviets’ close-the-deficit approach.

• The Connor Griffin Case: why Point A means an FRA across every extremity, not just the injured joint, and how a joint function deficit elsewhere explains an overloaded UCL.

• Conjugating the Programming: using PIMAs, HIMAs, and OIMAs together—and why teaching the nervous system to dampen matters more here than adding more output.

• Any Input Can Be an Assessment: how slow eccentrics, faster eccentrics, over-speed eccentrics, and oscillatory isometrics pinpoint exactly where reactive strength breaks down.

• Where OIMAs Actually Came From: the clinical problem—tissue the athlete can’t feel—that oscillatory isometrics were built to solve.

Same Word, Different Deficit

Read more

Subscribe now

In our last substack on Ronald Acuña Jr., we highlighted his injury timeline—two ACL reconstructions, followed by two hamstring strains in the same 2026 season—both reactive strength injuries, on baseball specific efforts (base running + sprinting after a fly ball) at the Level of Competition. It is our belief that this is case study on link between the ACL and hamstrings—specifically not a strength deficit per se but an information flow feedback deficit.

Since we do not work with him directly, we are assuming that he can pass basic strength testing of the hamstrings—whatever the Braves are utilizing. Most likely they have force plate testing of the hamstrings that is showing that the magnitude of force output is there and is symmetrical between limbs. With him being at Neurological Point B—that is possessing a large neural network of absolute strength, we assume that he passed that in flying colors, but what that type of testing/assessment does not show is whether the loop between the ACL and the hamstrings—the one that lets the neurological network of absolute strength react to chaotic loading on the baseball field—has been reestablished and is intact.

If that feedback loop is what’s missing—or even lagging, general hamstring strengthening won’t rebuild it. It needs a specific input that trains the ACL and the hamstrings in conjugation, in the same rep, under the same reactive strength loading that injured his hamstrings in the first place. That’s exercise 3 in Absolute’s Reverse Hyper Program.

The Exercise that Reestablishes the ACL-Hamstrings Feedback Loop

Exercise 3 is three dynamic effort repetitions of an open chain hamstring curl on the reverse hyper, followed by a pendulum catch + damping.

The athlete uses their neural network of absolute strength to generate dynamic efforts with their hamstrings to curl into knee flexion. As the pendulum gains energy from the hamstrings curls and swings faster and faster, on the eccentric phase of is repetition, the training intent switches to use the hamstrings to catch the pendulum and damp it.

That means the hamstrings have to eccentrically absorb and stress-stiffen against real, moving energy, not static load/resistance. The knee is doing genuine deceleration work through that catch, which means the ACL isn’t a passive bystander in this exercise—it’s an active participant in stabilizing the joint while the hamstrings + ACL and other connective tissue structures of the knee joint like the capsule, do the work of killing the pendulum’s momentum.

That’s the loop, trained directly. The hamstrings can’t stress-stiffen effectively without accurate real-time information from the joint about where it is and how much tension it’s under. And the joint’s signal is only useful if the hamstrings can act on it fast enough to catch a moving load. Exercise 3 constrains the hamstrings and ACL to conjugate together and as result the ACL-hamstrings feedback loop gets stimulated and reestablished.

Conjugating Joint Function with Reactive Strength to Reestablish the ACL-Hamstrings Information Feedback Loop

Pre-exercise 3, knee joint CARs. This stimulates the articular receptors of the knee before the pendulum work starts, so the joint is already feeding accurate signal into the neural network of absolute strength before the reflexive loop gets asked to output. Post-CARs, exercise 3 locks that signal in—it’s the loop having to operate under real, moving load right after the receptors have been primed.

Two sets is the floor to make sure the loop is actually getting stimulated. And this isn’t a once-a-week input—it’s daily. For Acuña specifically, given where he sits in return-to-play, multiple sessions per day is warranted to get the loop reestablished at the rate his case demands.

The research behind why this specific movement targets the loop, and how it should be programmed into Acuña’s specific case, is available to paid subscribers.

How Exercise 3 Stimulates the ACL-Hamstrings Feedback, Loop

Read more