The 2 Best Training Methods to Become More Explosive
Two secrets to improving your speed and power training to unlock your bodies potential for explosiveness
Contents:
Speed and power
Explosive training methods explained
Benefits
How to perform
How to incorporate this into your programming.
Considerations for different athletes needs
Summary & Closing thoughts
As we have discussed plenty of times before, training for power is different than training for raw strength because there is an added component of speed. We train our maximum strength not only by building raw muscular tissue but also by training our nervous system to recruit motor units to produce force. Speed, and thus power, has an even greater neurological component to it then just strength does.
Speed is more “fatigue sensitive“. This means that being tired, sore, or other bodily stress will affect speed more than it does maximum force.
This can actually be observed just from lifting weights. If you take a set close to failure the last few reps are able to be completed because you are able to produce enough force to move the weight but the weight almost never can be moved at the same speed as the initial few reps.
What this means for you is to understand that the key to getting faster is not “moving until you are tired” but rather “moving as fast as you can before you can’t remain as quick”.
Unlike hypertrophy training, “Failure” is failure to move with enough speed - not failure to complete the movement.
This means you want the body to be recovered & fresh for the training effect on the nervous system to be as effective as possible.
We spoke in a recent post about the force-velocity curve and producing power. Power is a product of strength & speed and so by improving both of these qualities, power will naturally increase greatly. It is also increasingly optimal for advanced athletes to train elements “in-between” maximum strength and speed in order to integrate their functions together.
Many “power exercises“ are simply exercises that require a significant speed and strength component simultaneously.
2 posts this week will first go over two basic methods to help incorporate this concept into your training while being gym time efficient - and the advanced “super” version in the next post.
They will help you maximally unlock your nervous systems potential for producing stronger and faster outputs.
This post will go over the basic concepts and applications so you can get started and we will go over the more advanced method right after. (Can’t fit it all in one email)