Principles behind improved strength and quickness.
Understanding is essential to correctly training your explosion power. The better you understand, the more naturally you will perform the training exercises, and your training will yield greater and faster results. Understand this material very well before moving on.
1.
WORK SMART AND HARD, NOT JUST HARD: QUALITY > QUANTITY
Have you spent hours each day doing drills that
you thought were going to skyrocket your vertical, but only
ended up with mediocre results? You were most likely working
on your jumping endurance more than you were
working on your jumping explosion. For example, if a sprinter
wants to increase his speed, how much would he increase his
speed by drilling with two mile runs? Very little, and he may in
fact lose some of the explosion power that he needs to sprint as muscles are trained to adapt to that activity.
Often we do the same thing in our jump training; we work very
hard training the wrong aspect!
QUALITY not quantity and
INTENSITY not repetition are proper characteristics of effective explosion training. If you have a 28-inch
vertical (or a 16-inch or whatever it may be) and your drills
are in the 15-inch range, you are training your muscle
endurance, not your muscle strength. In other words, you are
training yourself to jump at certain heights for continued
periods of time. To increase your explosion, you need to be constantly
working in that high intensity improvement
zone, attempting to push that limit a little
higher.
Correct explosion training is counterintuitive.
What this means is that incorrect training feels more effective than correct training. You will be fatigued, your muscles will burn, and you will train longer, but the results will not be explosion.
So what?! So if you want to see your vertical
increase, INTENSITY must be the mode of your workouts.
If you are pacing yourself during drills you need
to do fewer repetitions. This is absolutely
essential. The drills will require that you jump and exert at maximum
intensity! Your success depends on how capable you are of HIGH
INTENSITY drilling and power output.
2.THE OVERLOAD PRINCIPLE
This principle states that in
order to achieve gains in muscle strength, you must strain
against a force greater than what you are used to. This simply means that if you can squat 200
pounds, you will have no strength gains by doing squats with 2
pounds. Overloading the muscle makes muscle fibers stronger
and capable of contracting with greater force, which
translates into more explosion.
So what?! So if you want to experience strength
gains we are going to have to load your muscles.
3. THE ALL OR NOTHING PRINCIPLE, AND HOW TO RECRUIT AND TRAIN ALL MUSCLE FIBERS.
Your muscles are made up of individual muscle
fibers. When your muscle contracts against a given force, each
fiber either fires at maximum force, or does not fire at all.
This means that when you lift an easy weight your central nervous
system only recruits the necessary muscle
fibers to lift that weight. Consequently people who do not
lift weights or who lift extremely light weights may have
muscle fibers that are not even in use by the nervous system.
This is why people who have never lifted weights often
experience a dramatic increase upon starting a strength
program; new muscle fibers are activated and strengthened. To sum up:
We know stronger muscles have the potential to contract with greater force.
We know that muscle recruitment or how many muscle units are recruited for a workout is determined by how much weight is being lifted.
We know we want to recruit and strengthen ALL muscle fibers during our training.
Research has shown that working out with 85% of the weight we can do one time will ALWAYS recruit ALL motor units. This is called:
85% of 1RM (85% of 1 rep MAX)
This can easily be found by performing the exercise with a spotter and finding the maximum amount of weight that you can do the exercise once. If you can only do the exercise with 100 pounds once, for example, then you should be working with 85 pounds on a regular basis.
Research has also clearly shown that the faster we move a given weight the more work and tension the muscle experiences, and thus the better our gains. In a sense, the faster we push against a weight the heavier it is to our muscle fibers. So here is our rule for weight lifting that you will use for all lifting EXCEPT the last set of certain exercises, and we will go into why later.
Lift with 85% 1RM (most weight you can do once for a given lift).
(This law tells us how much we should lift to recruit all fibers)
Only do as many reps as you can perform at MAX SPEED.
(This tells us how many times or how many reps to do a given lift)
For most people this means anywhere from 2 - 8 reps, and as the program develops that weight will go up. In the following chapters I will give you guidelines, but the golden rule is for you to dictate. Any time the speed of a rep is lessened, STOP. Some of you may feel like you want to go to failure, or until the muscle is completely exhausted. Now is not the time for that; muscle failure will be done on very specific terms. But as far as the bulk of the workout is concerned, you want to work out with as heavy weight as possible to recruit all fibers, in as explosively a manner as possible.
So what?! This method produces the most optimal results for muscle gain and muscle recruitment. We want to train the muscle to do none other than full recruitment, at max speed. Anything else is unworthy of your effort.
4.
THE MIND'S ROLE IN A WORKOUT AND THE IMPORTANCE OF INTENSITY
For optimal results, each rep should be treated as a single event in which peak intensity is the only possible course of action. INTENSITY, over time, applied to correct principles and practice, will produce the most opimal results a workout is capable of achieving.
Have you ever heard of stories where people were
capable of exerting near superhuman strength? For instance the
mother who is able to lift a car in order to save her baby?
The Golgi tendon organ actually
regulates how much force we are able to exert as a safety
precaution. Our body is actually capable of exerting much more
force than our ligaments and tendons are capable of
withstanding! This regulating tendon protects us from doing
so; however, in extreme circumstances the mind is capable of
overriding this tendon. This usually results in injury. NO, I
am not suggesting that we harness our abilities to the point
of overriding the body’s safety mechanism. YES, I am
suggesting that your mindset plays a role in muscular
recruitment, or how the body calls on muscle fibers to
function. Olympic lifters often "psych themselves out" before
executing extremely heavy lifts. It is literally mind over
muscle.
So what?! So when you train your mindset needs
to be such that your body recruits that maximum amount of
force, and in doing so you will increase your ability to
harness that force.
5. PLYOMETRICS: WHAT ARE THEY AND ARE THEY EFFECTIVE?
Plyometrics when done correctly are very very effective. 90% of the drills you see and videos about plyos are teaching you the wrong way to do plyometrics. Understanding how to correctly do plyos will be an enormous advantage to you. Here is an acronym to help you remember how to master plyometrics:
LAP -Load Amortization exPlode.
I know I am kind of cheating with this, and that it's corny. I am just hoping it is corny enough for you to remember.
6. "COMPLEX" EXPLOSION TRAINING
Complex training is the combination of plyometrics and weight training (resistance training). What sets our training apart is our focus on maximum explosion and intensity per rep, maximum strengthening of muscle fibers, and maximizing firing rate of each motor unit. There is absolutely no other practice known under the sun that will increase your explosion power better than the CORRECT implementation of these techniques. Period.
So what?! So stop looking for gadgets and gizmos. There are no shortcuts. Implement these techniques in your training and you will be getting the maximum amount of results possible.
