So power is defined as a combination of speed and strength. I.e. moving a resistance quickly. There are a few key things to think about before you go about increasing your power. One is something I call ‘cross sectional muscle recruitment’ (to be honest I don’t know the official term)
Sciencey bit
When a muscle works it is very rarely using all of the muscle fibres. For example, if an athlete is bench pressing 50% of their maximum lift, the situation is more such that 50% of the fibres are working at 100% than 100% of the fibres working at 60%. This ties into power because if you want to shift a resistance quickly, the more muscle fibres working the better.
So to increase power, a common technique is to get the muscles used to needing to recruit a lot of fibres in the cross section of the muscle to move the resistance at all (not necessarily at speed). This is done by using heavy weights; or, by using less muscles, but ill come back to that. The next thing is when the muscles are used to recruiting high percentages of the fibres, to immediately take away the resistance and perform the movement.
For example being a sprinter, a lot of our training sessions use chains attached to harness that looks something like this:
(side note: as this blog goes on you will see me post pictures of my own training and training group, but this is the best i can do at the moment :-))
After about 4 sets of 30m at 100% BALLS OUT speed, we will take the weight off and do around 60m. At this point the muscles are used to needing to recruit a high percentage of fibres to get moving, and so we can run like a ROCKET. The reason why we go so fucking fast is because we’re using more muscle! the muscle is already there we just need to teach the nervous system to activate it.
This explains why athletes like Cristope lemaitre ( let me get a picture)
is one of the skinniest white dudes you will EVER see, yet is an ABSOLUTE powerhouse, he doesn’t have a lot of muscle, he just knows how to use it correctly.
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Speed | Strength | Power 