Building Speed & Explosive Power in the Upper Body
Upper body dynamic training info to develop powerful pushing, punching, throwing, and pulling actions
Table of contents:
recap and upper body considerations
What aspects of power training to focus on for the arms and shoulders
Best exercises to add rapid force ability when hitting, pushing or pulling
Routines to add to any strength program
Closing thoughts and advanced programming
Plyometric recap + Upper Body Considerations
Most plyometric training is focused on the lower body. In fact, almost all explosive training generally focuses on the lower body. This is obviously because functionally, an explosive (i.e. fast and powerful) lower body Is generally in higher demand in most activities because our legs are what provide us locomotion and general movement while our upper bodies tend to be used to manipulate objects and thus are more dependent on their strength and not as much the velocity they move at.
That being said, there are many scenarios where developing the upper body musculature to produce high impulses the way we train the lower body to do so can be very advantageous in many sports or for recreational strength enthusiasts. All actions such as throwing, pushing, hitting, or pulling someone/something away will be significantly affected by your body’s ability to produce force quickly on top of the maximum amount of force you can produce. (Power/velocity on top of max strength)
However, it’s important to note that the way most people try to train upper body plyometrics & power training methods is very bad and has several problems in application we will discuss. (Plus how to avoid/fix them)
Just like your lower body, we can apply strategies to the upper torso to produce similar adaptations so that you can punch and throw with more power as well as even improve coordination and lower risk of minor injury.
To recap our discussion on plyometrics quickly:
Every explosive action contains one or all of these three components → The eccentric, concentric, and the amortization phase of a movement.
The eccentric phase is the absorption of force in flexion, while the concentric phase is the production of force in extension. In between these two actions is the amortization phase, where your body turns momentum into moving from the eccentric to the concentric.
When talking about maximal strength in each of these directions we are talking about the maximum amount of force you can eccentrically lower or concentrically lift. When talking about the speed component it is influenced by your “force absorption” on the eccentric and the “rate of force development“ (aka RFD) on the concentric. So when we are training for what we described as “elastic strength” in our intro to plyometrics post, the ability to quickly redirect forces, we want to improve our ability to absorb force, redirect it, and apply our maximum amount of force as fast as we can after.
There are a number of elements that will improve and contribute to the qualities we just mentioned. They include adding muscle mass and tendon strength along with improving the nervous system‘s skill at producing each of those outputs. As we know there are a lot of factors that go into developing maximum power and velocity in the body but based on my experience and some technical nuances I believe the basic elements that are worth focusing on specifically for the upper body’s ability to produce power are the:
• stretch-shortening-cycle, which is essentially the amortization phase; redirecting the force from eccentric to concentric. This is the speed and power with which you can redirect force.
• rate of force development; how fast you can accelerate through a range of motion
• ballistic training techniques; this is to explode with some weighted implement without there being an eccentric phase *after* the explosion - it implies and usually means that you will be throwing something ie medicine balls, javelin, etc
• specific sport action drills designed for power development (usually using the whole body - legs and arms); this includes actually punching a bag or pads with a set up to develop power rather than endurance, pitching baseball or batting, maximum power shots on net/wall in ball or puck sports, etc
There are more elements that go into producing maximum power in general training but these specific components tend to be the best baseline to focus on producing upper body power with because most actions that will require force development of that nature with the arms and shoulders will tend to be actions where RFD and full body coordination are the central factors that determine the magnitude of the output you can produce. For example, a punch or throw will primarily require force and speed on the concentric only, combined with coordination from transferring power through the legs and midsection to the arms.
The stretch shortening cycle will improve any action that requires pulling back the arms and recoiling them like in many ball passes, combination punches, or multi action upper body movements.
Obviously this isn’t wildly different from training the lower body but it is wise to understand some of these considerations.
To summarize them:
• most upper body power actions actually derive a ton of their total power outputs from the lower body. Therefore if your goal is to increase power outputs in upper body based actions then you should also be putting efforts in to make the lower body more explosive and strong as that will likely improve power as much if not more than solely the upper body training.
• The above also means that much of your upper body training could benefit from some explosive work requiring the entire body to explode on a coordinated concentric action. Any exercise where an impulse from the legs is transferred to the hands could have a coordinated benefit to transfer power from the ground to the hand/fist.
• One major difference between lower body and upper body plyometrics/ballistic/dynamic effort training is that lower body explosive movements are not as high impact. This means that in most exercises rep for rep the movements don’t create as much of an impact on the body. Well they don’t fatigue and tax you as much it also means that you probably will require more repetitions or a more strongly stimulating exercise variation to make real progress. (It’s very common that people program upper body plyometrics with the exact same format as they do their lower body and end up making very little progress because they simply aren’t stimulating the nervous system enough – this also leads to some of the myth that you “can’t develop punching power”. Which, I probably don’t need to remind you again but, is a lie.)
• when training a “true plyometric” or reactive exercise that develops the “stretch-shortening cycle” for the upper body, Use variations of exercises that actually do isolate the upper body. This is because you’re trying to stress the upper torso’s ability to absorb and redirect force on its own and thus it is better to leave the legs out of it because they will take away from the specific stress we’re trying to apply to the arms and shoulder. (Other exercises involving the legs could be beneficial though)
Exercises to Build Power in the Upper Body
What I’m going to provide in this post are some upper body explosive exercises/routines that you can use at the beginning of an upper body or other workout to ramp up the nervous system and develop your rapid force production capabilities without interfering with the rest of the training session.