Improve Your Power and Athleticism
In my 14-plus years as a strength and conditioning coach, the one constant in my association with college and professional athletes was that the fastest or quickest athletes were also the most powerful.
In other words, the fastest running backs, receivers, or defensive backs were also the ones who could jump the highest or farthest. The NHL players who could skate the fastest were the ones who were most able to accelerate light training loads in the weight room. Speed and quickness are definitely synonymous with power.
Athletes who are more powerful will definitely give themselves a greater opportunity to dominate. The volleyball or basketball player who can jump higher, the running back/receiver who can make sharper cuts, the hockey player who can stop on a dime, or the baseball/softball player who can generate a more powerful swing will outperform their opponents.
It is no secret that college recruiters and those in the NFL and NHL intently look at the vertical jump and broad jump to determine a player’s athleticism before signing or drafting them.
Let’s take a look at how you can improve your athleticism so you can also dominate your sport!
The most important thing an athlete can train is something known as rate of force development. This is the initial acceleration of a run, jump or skating stride. The first step in training rate of force development in young athletes is improving the skill of the movement. As strength coaches at Dynamic Sports Performance, we must first teach athletes how to properly squat and recruit their posterior chain--glutes and hamstrings--in athletic movements.
We constantly see young athletes who are unable to properly use their body to their advantage because of improper technique. Once an athlete can master control over their body, we can then enter higher level training. Unfortunately, most athletes try to progress too quickly and attempt to perform complex weight training exercises, such as Olympic lifting techniques, before demonstrating proper postural control.
After mastering control, developing strength is crucial for young athletes in adding power. Countless scientific studies point to a correlation between absolute strength and power especially for young, inexperienced athletes. The bottom line: if you get stronger in your lower body, you will be more powerful. After increasing strength, one of the most important factors in training to become more powerful is to accelerate training loads. In conversations with some of the world’s best sport-science researchers, all point to the intent to move training loads as fast as possible, regardless of whether the load is heavy or light. As a result, when squatting with a heavier load, you must try to move it as fast as possible on the ascent even though the bar’s movement speed is slow. Focusing on every repetition is crucial to power gains.
After training with heavier loads and a conscious intent to explode, keeping in mind that technique is in no way compromised, more specific means of power enhancement may be required to push your power gains higher. My challenge in the NHL, and my assistant David Mikel’s challenge in NFL Europe, was to increase power and speed in the world’s best athletes. As a result, the strength coach must analyze the sport and determine the specific muscular contractions needed for success. For example, a football lineman needs tremendous starting power when coming off the ball to engage with opposing linemen. Conversely, a volleyball or basketball player must have great reactive strength in landing from a jump, with the requirement of either immediately jumping back up or moving laterally to follow the play. Whatever the specific requirement, training must then follow to improve those qualities. For example, with higher-level volleyball players, we train them in an exercise called drop jumps to improve their reactivity off the ground. Conversely, in training an offensive/defensive lineman, an important exercise is the power clean in an effort to improve starting strength/power.
A final forgotten element of power development is deceleration. Think of a basketball player who is chasing down a loose ball under the opposition’s goal. They can run after the ball, allowing their momentum to carry them out of bounds. Or if they had the ability to quickly stop after getting the ball, they could possibly lay it up or pass. So learning to quickly stop or arrest downward momentum is important in many sports. Quickly decelerating and reversing direction will also increase vertical jump height and cutting ability.
Think of your need for power development in two different horse-race scenarios. In the first, one horse pulling a cart full of feathers is racing against a group of four horses pulling the same cart of feathers. If the cart weighs almost nothing, who wins? The answer is the fastest horse. Adding more horses increases horse power, but not their collective speed. In fact, if one of the four horses is quite slow, he may slow the pack down. Scenario two is exactly the same with one exception: the cart is filled with lead. Who wins the race? Obviously the four horses should win the race by a landslide because collectively they have greater power against a heavier load. Scenario one is analogous to a sprinter in a 100-meter race while scenario two is analogous to a football lineman having to drive his opponent off the line. Both need power, but each need a specific type of power. Find your power needs, train it properly and progressively, and then dominate your opponent!
Mark Nemish:
Mark is the owner and performance director of Dynamic Sports Performance in Ashburn, VA. He has been a strength and conditioning coach for 14-plus years at the college and professional levels. He can be reached at 703.858.5016 or by email: results@dynamicsportsperformance.com.
Website: www.dynamicsportsperformance.com
