Is Your Strength Training Making You SLOW and Weak

Hey, I’ve been in the gym a lot recently and have seen some awful sights. So I wanted to put this post up about strength training and speed.

FORCE = MASS X ACCELERATION
So increase the force and you increase the holy grail of sport speed, acceleration.

With that in mind, the gym must be the best place possible to get faster.

So, with Men’s Health in hand, you toddle off to the gym to get stronger. In all those magazines and Internet sites there’s plenty of information on how to lift weights to get faster. And don’t forget the core work to prevent injury.  
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There’s a wealth of information out there on how to get strong. Nearly all of it based around the body building industry. Everyone at the gym is an expert. All the talk is about split routines, super sets, drop sets, German volume training etc.

When you think of a body builder, speed and agility isn’t the first thing that runs into your head is it.

Your body is really clever. When you stress it, it repairs itself a little bit stronger so that next time it can cope easier. The thing is, it’s so clever that this adaptation is very specific. In fitness jargon we call it Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand. So if you stress your body with the bench press, your body will adapt to be stronger at the bench press. If your sport requires you to push something away while having a support behind your back then your quids in. Otherwise it’s of very little physical benefit.

But hey, your chest and arms look good, no?

It’s the ego that drives it, the same ego that drives us to be competitive. You want to see improvements in the mirror and improvements in the weights or reps. This means that exercises that co-ordinate and link several areas of the body – as they would be required to do in sport and life -are ignored, while adding weight and maxing out trumps movement technique.

What happens is you get very strong in poor movement patterns that don’t relate to your sport, in ever decreasing ranges of movement. Your body always prefers the way it’s strongest, so you will adopt the poor movements you’re encouraging in the gym. and you will eventually become weak outside these patterns. This leads to injury.

So what should you do? 

Perfect good movements. Once they are perfect (and only then) should you load this movement. If you load a poor movement, you’re gonna get hurt. Add load to the movement, then speed it up

 When you are developing a movement, repeat it and repeat it, but NEVER take it to fatigue. Lots of sets of low reps (3-5) is the way here. While you’re resting between sets, do some accessory exercises that may help the movement (e.g. for the squat you could incorporate a glute stretch and core firing) free up what’s stiff and fire up what’s weak/dormant.

At Speed Academy, I find that athletes get much faster purely by mastering the basic movements of squat, push and pull. No clever exercises or equipment. These are fundamental movements that your body needs to be able to do. Perfecting these clears up many dysfunctions and transfers well into sporting movements. Once we’ve established a perfect foundation, we can go from simple to complex, stable to unstable, controlled to explosive, body weight to external load.

Master the basics and lose the ego. I would always suggest you spend some time with a certified strength and conditioning coach to help you with technique. I don’t care if you can squat twice your bodyweight for 10reps. You’ll get huge benefit from clearing up your weaknesses and dysfunctions. You’ll move faster and with more power. Then start to loads it up again.

I’d like to hear any problems you may be having with your gym routines.Just drop your comments below and I’ll post the replies on here.

Yours in speed

Rob

  

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