Power and Speed Training

Anatomy of power and speed training

Essential Element: Power
Power is the ability to generate high amounts of force over a short period of time.
So while your strength refers to how much force your muscles can exert, your power refers to how quickly that force can be exerted.

For example, if you're completing a strength-oriented task, it doesn't matter how long it takes you to complete that task, whether it's lifting a weight, moving a couch, or climbing a flight of stairs. Instead, all that matters is that the task gets completed, and doing something slowly doesn't necessarily take away from the “success” of a strength-based movement.
But when your goal is power, speed counts. The speed with which you lift that weight, move that couch, or climb that flight of stairs dictates how successful you were at quickly recruiting your muscle – which is why power is often referred to as speed-strength.

So why is power important for an endurance athlete, who seems to be moving relatively slowly across a course, especially compared to, say, a 100m sprinter?
It all comes down to the fact that training for power doesn't really train your muscles as much as it trains your nervous system. When you train for power, your central nervous system learns to control your muscles in a more efficient way, creating enhanced muscle utilization without the negative effects of too much muscle bulk. I like to think about it this way: power simply allows you to “fine tune” your strength (which you've hopefully been building, right?).

As a matter of fact, as long as you follow the power training rules you're about to learn, such as keeping the number of repetitions low, lifting light weights fast, and moving quickly, your power training will increase your ability to maximally utilize muscle without a significant change in your muscle size (or muscle fiber tearing and subsequent soreness).
This handy advantage of being able to more effectively recruit the muscle you already have, without necessarily increasing muscle mass, means that you'll need to recruit fewer muscles fibers for any given intensity. So power is like putting a faster engine in your car without actually increasing the body mass of the car or the weight of the engine itself. This results in lower energy costs, less muscular fatigue, and ultimately, better endurance performance.

So in summary, power training for an endurance athlete bestows:
-Recruitment of more muscle fibers without addition of muscle mass…
-Ability to train for quick movements and high force potential without creating soreness…
-Better economy and efficiency, even at relatively lower speeds…

Each of these reasons is why I tend to favor more light and fast power-based workouts and fewer heavy and slow strength-based workouts as I or an athlete I coach gets closer to an actual race. We've already put in the work, possibly gotten some extra muscle fibers, and built our brute force capability with our off-season or early-season strength workouts, and now it's time to simply learn how to grab as many of those fibers as possible when it really counts.
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Training Strategies for Increasing Power
There are three primary strategies for increasing power as fast as possible: plyometrics, speed-strength sets, and complex sets.
Each of these strategies are based around the same concept: the “inhibition reflex”. You’ve probably heard this story: a small child is trapped under a burning car, and in a feat of superhuman strength, the child’s mother rushes to the car and lifts the entire vehicle, rescuing the child from certain death. You may have also heard that chimps and gorillas can be ten times stronger than humans, and capable of bending steel bars, punching through walls or throwing huge boulders. Now don't worry: your training is not going to require you to lift cars or bend steel bars. But both the mother and the monkey are relying on a complete rewiring of a special mechanism that the body has built in to keep a muscle from tearing from excessive force. This mechanism is the inhibition reflex, and here is how it works:
Built into every muscle is a special organ called a Golgi tendon organ (GTO). When your muscle contracts and generates a force, the GTO fires off nerve impulses to your spinal cord, and your spinal cord responds with an inhibition reflex. This nervous system inhibition signals your muscle fibers to limit force production when the muscle has increased tension.
While this mechanism is certainly a convenient way to keep you from, say, tearing your biceps while you're lifting a couch, it can unfortunately inhibit your sports performance when you’re trying to push the pedals hard or run up a hill. In the case of the mother saving her child from a burning car or a gorilla escaping from the zoo by bending steel bars, the brain has overpowered the inhibition reflex, resulting in a higher threshold of the GTO.

Now here’s the good news: Just like the mom and the monkey, you can increase the excitatory threshold of your GTO to improve your maximum power. In other words, you can “turn off” just a little bit of your body's natural protective inhibition. A poorly trained person will always have a GTO that kicks in before much force can be produced, but with proper training, you can trick your muscles into contracting at a higher force and speed before the muscle-protecting inhibition kicks in.

Here’s how: By teaching your body how to have a faster “stretch-shortening cycle,” you can make your GTO less likely to send signals to limit force production when the muscle has increased tension. This allows for greater contraction force than you would normally be able to produce during a movement, a strength or power exercise, or during endurance activities swimming, cycling or running.

The stretch-shortening cycle is simply the period of time it takes your muscle to transition from an “eccentric” phase in which a muscle is lengthening (such as when your foot lands during running) to a “concentric” phase in which the muscle is contracting (as when your foot pushes back off the ground). This entire cycle is trained through explosive, powerful movements, which are often referred to as plyometrics.

Now that you know how to trick your muscles into power, it's time to learn the three main strategies that will let you get the job done. Each of the following strategies will train your GTO by to absorb a force and then contract to produce a new force as quickly as possible, thus decreasing the time of your stretching-shortening cycle.
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Power Strategy #1: Plyometrics
In simplest terms, plyometric training can be described as any activity that involves a rapid stretching of a muscle (eccentric phase) immediately followed by a rapid shortening of that muscle (concentric phase). Hopping, skipping, bounding, jumping and throwing are all examples of basic plyometric movements.
Each of these movements is based around something the stretch reflex you've just learned about – relying upon the concept that when your muscle is rapidly stretched, elastic energy in the muscle’s tendon components is built up and briefly stored in those tendons, and when the muscle then contracts, the stored energy in that tendon is released, thus contributing to the speed of a movement or contraction.

Plyometric exercises promote high movement speed, lots of muscle fiber recruitment in a short period of time, and trained release of the powerful elastic energy stored in your tendons. This means that when your foot strikes the ground, it spends less time in contact with the ground, leaves the ground more quickly, and moves you along at a faster speed.
When training with plyometrics (or any of the other power strategies you're about to learn), the delay between the stretching, eccentric phase and the shortening, concentric phase needs to be very short, about no longer than a quarter second, and this is why all plyometric exercises need to be characterized by fast powerful movements (frankly, when I watch most endurance athletes do plyometrics they do them quite slowly and usually after they've already been fatigued by long run or a previous day's workout – so they're getting zero bang for the buck out of that “plyometric” workout). So plyometrics explosively or don't do them at all.

Here are some of the best plyometric movements you can use in your endurance training program:
#1: Depth jumps
Jump off a raised platform or box, land on both feet, and immediately jump as high as possible. For this and any other of the leg exercises in this article, you should minimize ground contact time.
#2: Single-leg hops
With one leg, hop up onto a slightly raised surface. Even jumping up onto a (non-moving) treadmill belt is fine.
#3: Bounds
Run, but with oversized strides and maximum amount of time spent in the air. Every time your foot strikes the ground, push off as hard as possible to maximize stride length.
#4: Clap push-ups
In a variation on the standard push-up, push up explosively, clap hands, and land. You can do these from your knees if necessary.
#5: Med ball throws
Take two to four steps and throw a medicine ball explosively from the chest as hard as possible toward a wall or training mat. Extend arms fully when throwing.
#6: Med ball slams
Hold a medicine ball overhead, then slam it into the ground as hard as possible. Catch and repeat. As a reverse alternative and similar exercise to medicine ball slams, you can do “muscle-ups” when in the pool, pulling yourself up and over the pool wall.
#7: Power skips
Perform playground-style skipping, with your knees exploding towards your chest as high as possible. As with bounds, your goal is to maximize time spent in the air and powerfully drive your knees towards your chest.
#8: Jump rope
Perform double or alternating leg rope jumping, with a focus on minimizing ground contact time and getting as many jumps as possible in the allotted period of time.
#9: Hurdle hops
This side-to-side movement is included because lateral motion is missing from most endurance training programs. Over a line, tennis ball can, cone or step bench, jump side to side as many times as possible in the allotted amount of time. You can jump with one leg (more advanced) or both legs.
Here’s how a sample plyometric routine looks, and during race season or the build-up to a race, you only need to do a program like this once per week to get results:

Depth jumps – 10 jumps from 3- to 5-foot box
Clap push-ups – 10
Single leg hops – 10
Med ball throws – 8
Power skips – 20 yards
Bounds – 40 yards
Medicine ball slams – 8
Hurdle hops – 10 per side
Jump rope – 20 seconds

To schedule an appointment and learn more, Call Steve, In-Training Sports | 561-281-8330
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