How to Measure Your 'Explosiveness': Simple Test for Athleticism
Using reactive testing to gain knowledge of yourself or another and guidelines on where to focus your training to get more explosive based on your results
Contents:
Identifying Weaknesses is Essential
RSI/RSR scales
How to Test Yourself
Interpreting Test Results
How to Structure your Training Based on Results
Joint Emphasis Considerations
Closing Thoughts
Different Tools for Different Fools
Identifying Weaknesses and Assessing your Unique Needs is KEY for Success
As I discuss on Twitter all the time, “true” long-term athletic development is a multi-stage process with varying optimal pathways for individual athletes based on the body and needs they have.
What works for one person won’t necessarily be best for another. This is not because they have an entirely different response to training due to their genetics so much as the fact that the physical factors holding back their performance might be different.
This is the most important concept to get across in order to make a “true athletic transformation” – which I consider to be where an individual makes more than just “moderate” improvements. To make serious progress over a long period of time, diligent improvements need to be made across various qualities and these improvements depend on what weaknesses need to be targeted in the individual athlete and thus the lowest hanging fruit + highest ROI trading protocols can be targeted and implemented.
Bodybuilders do this with visual assessments of their “lagging body parts“. Powerlifters and other strength athletes do the same for body parts and qualities holding back their squat, bench, and deadlift performance.
However, for more broad and dynamic athletes (football, soccer, recreational trainee, etc) this can become less clear as many qualities regarding athletic performance can be less visual, or otherwise more subtle than obvious. This is especially true when discerning the specific “micro-causes” of a “macro-weakness”.
An example of what I mean by this is:
Let’s say that your speed is very clearly a factor holding back your best performance. However, we might consider “speed“ on the field the “macro-problem” (the general issue holding you back) where we might be unsure of what the “micro-causes“ for the lack of speed in the athlete might be (i.e. “*why* you are slow”).
This provides us many questions that we need to be aware of and ask to diagnose the current needs of the athlete and then be able to put together intelligent training protocols that will actually make a difference in their speed.
In this example, let’s say we have two athletes with the same problem – Athlete A and Athlete B are both considered “slow”.
Athlete A, however, is slow most likely because his overall strength, and therefore force he can put into the ground, is very low and his body composition is poor (he is over 20% body fat“.)
The lowest hanging fruit and most likely highest ROI approach for him would be to focus on losing body fat and improving strength, mainly in the lower body.
Athlete B is strong and has a fair body composition, but we find that their speed is not what it should be given their body composition and strength levels. At this point we could begin diving into less “foundational” and more subtle problems such as sprint form, or very likely, explosive ability and their force velocity profile/reactive or elastic strength (how fast they can contract muscle, how fast their brain creates force, how “elastic” their tendons are, etc).
This post and upcoming series will go over assessment tools that you can use right now to identify weaknesses in your performance that are holding you back from your long-term fitness and athletic goals and eventually culminate in program templates that you can use throughout an entire training year to make consistent progress in whatever areas are important to you.
In this post specifically, we will be going over the reactive strength index and using simple test methods to determine if tendon elasticity or muscular rated of force development/explosiveness are the limiting factors in your overall athleticism. As well as provide general protocols for where to focus your training depending on how you score.
First things first, however, I have made it clear many times that there are foundational strength standards that should be met or being primarily strived for before any athletes training shifts further away from “strength work“. If you haven’t already, please read these posts (here & here) and reference the strength standards that should be largely met as a long-term goal.
If you do not meet or are very close to meeting most of these goals your immediate primary focus should be hitting 3/4 of those strength standards (specifically the squat).
Remember the training hierarchy. (Required Reading)
This post is going to be focusing more on the “level 3” block on the pyramid which implies that “level 1” foundational health goals and “level 2” basic strength, hypertrophy, physical fitness and athletic activity is met within reason.
As explained in previous posts, you are free to run these tests for the purpose of self-knowledge as well as engage with almost any training type you’d like – but it is important to know that your primary focus needs to be the foundations first which is where you will find the most immediate and impressive improvements right away. (Remember to target your current weaknesses and lowest hanging fruit first)