What Are the Benefits of Power Training?
Power is the foundation of every sport that relies on athletic abilities.
You need it for:
- quick feet and higher ground reaction forces
- changing directions rapidly and dribble skills
- high velocity throws and kicks
- jumps and getting off the block with the highest acceleration
- olympic weightlifting and high impact sports
As you see most of these skills are essential on the field but do you need power training if you are a casual lifter or work out at home?
Power training is the queen of strength training, and as such typically requires the use of heavy weights, or less heavy weights but high velocity.
Either way, further positive changes can be attributed to the increase in intensity (in other words as you tap into your anaerobic zone) such as:
- increased growth hormone production and testosterone, both of which potentially enhances muscle hypertrophy as well as reduce body fat
- prevents osteoporosis through enhancing bone density
- Power training also inherently works the core.
It is because this kind of workout is best used with big compound exercises where the legs are heavily involved in creating a stable base to conduct force through your core to your upper body. The core needs to be sufficiently contracted in order to effectively drive force from the legs to the upper body.
In plain terms, you just can’t act explosively with a bulged belly and sleeping glutes. Try throwing a heavy object and watch how your whole body is braced automatically. That’s the essence of power training, and this is why it’s so effective when it comes to building muscle or keeping a lean body mass.
The Power Training Zone
In the video, you can see that the means of power training is very broad. There are endless tools to choose from and exercise variations just as light weights and heavier ones. So it’s absolutely reasonable to ask how to set up power training in your workout.
Power training doesn’t necessarily require complex and expensive equipment. As you see in the video it can be implemented just as effectively even in your home. The exercise variations and tools are rather up to you once you understand the principles.
3 Principles of Power Training to Take Into Consideration:
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Use the right resistance.
This is typically between 30-80% of the weight you can lift only once, called your 1RM (repetition maximum). This is the optimal zone where you can still move the weight relative quickly. That is still 50% of a range for loading, which gives you quite a lot of freedom.
What percentages you use in this zone depends on your goals whether you want to emphasize strength or speed.
If you increase the weight towards the 80% you still get a mix of strength and speed but with an emphasis on strength.
On the opposite if you work with lighter weights and prioritize speed moving towards 30% of your 1RM, you still get a strength training effect, but with emphasis rather on speed.
Provided you try your best to accelerate the weight as fast as you can, it really only comes down to the amount of loading used which qualities you will get benefit from, strength-speed or speed-strength. More about this you can read on Scienceforsport, where the concept of the force-velocity curve is illustrated. -
The amount of your voluntary effort, the so-called rate of force development aka explosiveness
That means how quickly you can gather the necessary level of muscle tension to overcome the load in question.
Whatever we call it, when it comes to power training, just try to move the weight as quickly and fast as possible. Put another way, the deceleration phase of the movement should be very brief with the only effort to concentrically move the object. This is because deceleration is going to happen anyway unless you use such light weight that we no longer talk about power training.
Depending on the amount of load and the exercise, the deceleration will be longer or shorter. Either way, just keep in mind to move as fast as you are capable of. -
Exercise selection as the last principle of power training
In order to harvest all the fruits of power training, in general, as said earlier, you want to use compound, whole body exercises. While snapping a finger is quick and powerful too, it won’t do the trick for muscle gaining and fat loss.
Therefore stick with exercises that force you to brace your whole body and really make an effort.Power training is highly anaerobic which means you can’t sustain your maximum amount of effort too long. Because of that, typically if you can move the weight with the same speed for more than 10-20 seconds that means you are either not trying hard enough or the chosen weight is too light.
However, this is a rough number and highly dependent on the exercise. For example, if you check in the video the band punch with rotation at 2:04 and the tire flip at 2:50 you see that the two exercises differ in terms of the speed of their execution. The latter (tire flip with higher force production) can’t be performed as repeatedly as the banded punch. It doesn’t mean that it’s less effective. It just the two exercises are different in nature.In general, if you look at all the exercises in the video you can see that power training in most cases is not about rushing the reps, nailing them one after the other (the exception being a sprint for example).
It is rather about quality muscle work. Very focused attention on generating force in the least amount of time.Where in the exercise that peak force is achieved is again up to the nature of the exercise.
Take the tire flip again. Pulling it off the ground is slow initially, but as the body achieves its end range of extension and gets stronger, movement velocity becomes higher and higher. It doesn’t have to be fast in all the phases of the movement.But what about then the quick deceleration mentioned earlier? It still holds true that you need to maximally accelerate the weight in the concentric phase, however, it is again, very exercise-specific.
Take a sprint for example where you want no perceived deceleration, just take one leg after the other as quickly as possible.
Then take the medball throw in 0:18 in the video, where Ross is taking a momentary rest between the reps. The reason for this is first, Ross Enamait is focusing on performing with absolute best quality repetitions, second, the medball is heavy enough that it’s not possible to toss it around with visible speed.So to wrap up, the visible speed of the object you are moving doesn’t matter, so long the weight is roughly between 30-80% of your 1RM and you are trying your best to accelerate it with maximum voluntary effort.
Two Words Though Before You Jump Into Power Training
Don’t stretch too long prior to your power training.
It has been said to relax your muscles and nervous system too much for a super alert state, a primed up nervous system that is essential to power training.
That doesn’t mean you can skip mobility, in fact when you move with so much effort, it is even more important to have all your joint ranges of motion available, required to perform the exercise safely with the best quality.
Last but not least, make sure you are rested enough on the day you want to do a power workout. A fatigued nervous system will cause decreased force production. Which is the exact opposite of power, and if you repeatedly do your workout in such a manner, you subconsciously tell your body to start declining the abilities necessary for this skill aka decondition yourself.
Here comes into picture my last advice, which is a set should only last so long you can keep up maximum speed, effort and quality with a given weight. The moment this 3 character drops, that’s the end of the set. Rest plenty to recharge and start a new set once you feel you’re able to move quickly again.
It’s really this inner feedback that determines how many reps and sets you should perform in a given session unless you have a set program to follow.
