SportSciencEngineering: Strength & Power

Strength

Muscular strength is the maximal ability to produce force. This is expressed as your ability to handle and move your body weight and/or external loads. Strength is the foundation of all athleticism. Without a strong base of strength you cannot develop power, speed or agility to its full potential. Think of strength as a cup. You can fill that cup with power, speed, agility and skill, but if your cup is small then you can only fit so much in there. Strength training increases the total amount of maximal force you can produce, and therefore increases the size of your cup.

Increased levels of strength have been shown to have a positive effect on many aspects of athletic performance such as jump height, sprint speed and change of directions ability. Besides performance benefits, there are numerous health benefits to strength training as well, including; increased bone mineral density, decreased injury rates, reduced back pain, and improved body composition. Although the benefits of strength training for athletes are well established, the problem is that sport practice alone does not adequately stimulate a significant strength adaptation response from your body. That is why strength training has become such a game changer since it was introduced and became more widespread among athletes since the 1970’s.

The best way to develop athletic based strength is through ground based transfer exercises. The body is built to transfer, not isolate, force; transfer exercises are multi joint and multi muscle movements that train this ability. Ground based exercises are essentially exercises that are done standing with your feet on the ground. Exercises that require you to push your feet through the ground will have the greatest transfer to accelerating, sprinting, jumping, decelerating, etc. Focusing the majority of training on ground based transfer exercises though a full range of motion simulate the postures, flexibility, balance, stability and coordination demands in competitive athletics; which improves function and joint integrity. You can never go wrong the basic core strength lifts. All of our Lumberjacks do squats, front squats, deadlifts, lunges, pressing movements, pulling movements and Olympic lifts with the differences being the manipulation in volumes and intensity.

Power

Power is the ability to express force rapidly. Sometimes this can be referred to as speed strength or explosiveness. In competitive athletics there is very limited time to express force, therefore strength is useless if you cannot apply it quickly. Likewise, the ability to express force rapidly is useless if the force generated is very small. Once a base of strength is established and you can produce high amounts of total force, then training for power will develop the ability to express that force rapidly. Variations of the Olympic lifts (clean & jerk and snatch), medicine ball throws, and plyometric drills that include jumping, hopping and bounding drills are how we develop functional power.

Benjamin Servias

M.S. Kinesiology: Exercise Science

NSCA-CSCS, USAW L-1

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Strength & Power