From Babies to GrandBubbies: Everyone should be power training!
If you attended our workshop at the Noho On store on January 29th, this might sound familiar. We took participants through three tests assessing different aspects of power using three distinct jumps on our Kinvent Delta Force Plates:
Countermovement Jump (CMJ) – Great for assessing peak (highest) power.
Squat Jump – Measures strength/force production and power without the benefit of momentum.
Drop Jump – Evaluates Reactive Strength Index (RSI), or how well you absorb a landing and immediately jump again.
When people think of power training, they often picture huge athletes lifting ridiculous amounts of weight or Olympic sprinters tearing down the track. And sure, those are valid forms of power training.
But what exactly is power training, and why do we think it’s so essential?
In the world of exercise, power is a formula, typically expressed as:
Power = Work ÷ Time
which breaks down into:
Work = Force × Distance
and is usually expressed in metric units.
We can also simplify this as:
Power = Force × Velocity
using either metric or imperial units.
Regardless of the formula used, here’s what we need to know to calculate power:
How much force was used to move something (a joint, a body) over a certain distance, over a given period of time.
Let’s calculate an example using the jump scenario:
Let’s say you weigh 100 lbs and can apply 2x your bodyweight into the ground as you prepare to jump up.
If you apply 200 lbs of force into the ground, jump 8 inches, and do it in 0.25 seconds:
Power = (200×8) ÷ 0.25 = 6,400 lbs/sec
Remember: This value represents power over an entire second, while this example takes place in just ¼ of a second.
Don’t get caught up in the numbers—focus on the concept: Moving with force very quickly generates a given power number.
Power, like anything else, can be trained and improved.
Power training develops either speed-strength—moving very fast—or strength-speed, applying lots of force but more slowly. For example, if your one-rep max (1RM) squat is 200 lbs and it takes 5 seconds to complete, power training would have you working at around 30% of that load, aiming to finish the rep in half the time.
The Force/Velocity Curve shows that when force is high, velocity is low—and when velocity is high, force drops. Some movements, like Olympic-level sprinting, happen so fast a muscle can’t even contract maximally. We won’t get into every sub-category of power training here, but remember this:
Higher load = slower movement
Lower load = faster movement
To quote my former podcast partner and mentor, Dr. Paul Juris:
“So What?”
Other than being a cool data point, how does power actually help us?
Power isn’t just for sprinters and lifters—it shows up in everyday life.
Picture this: You’re stepping off a curb and misstep. Do you catch yourself, or do you fall? The difference is power—how quickly and forcefully your muscles contract to pull your center of mass (COM) (typically around your belly button) back over your base of support (BOS) (your foot). Whether you’re a toddler learning to walk or a senior navigating busy streets, your ability to reposition your COM over your BOS in under 0.25 seconds can prevent injury.
Power also plays a big role in more obvious ways—throwing a punch, tracking and hitting a tennis ball, cutting quickly in sports, and even long-distance running. The more power you produce, the easier it is to generate forward momentum with each stride. You’ll cover longer distances, get off the ground faster, and increase your stride rate.
In other words:
Longer stride × More strides per minute = Kicking butt in your next race
Ok, so now that we know what power is and why it’s important, how do we train for it?
Power training has its roots back several centuries, but in the mid-1950s, Russian sports scientists really devoted themselves to studying what they referred to as “Special Speed” or speed-strength training, aka power training. One particular scientist, Yuri Verkoshansky, is credited for developing a yearly structure in which an individual focused their training on developing different strength capabilities such as endurance, hypertrophy, and power. This is what is known today as linear periodization and is still widely used in college and professional athletics.
My personal opinion is that linear periodization is great if you are a professional or college athlete who can plan their years in advance and devote all their time to their exercise schedule.
For the rest of us, I think it is critical to work on power training year-round.
My reasoning is simple: All of us already are and need to be power-expressing at least, if not training anyway.
Just using the sidewalk example from before, or being able to lift your kids, or control your dog lunging for a squirrel, requires power.
Therefore, I think all of us regular folks should be training for it all the time.
Will it reduce your peak capacity to develop power? Yup, probably.
Classic power training requires a lot of time over a brief section of a year. Rep ranges are typically 1-4, and sometimes the rest between reps is 2-5 minutes, sometimes longer!
Also, classic power training often involves Olympic lifts, box jumps, medicine ball throws, and sprints—all of which are fantastic but take considerable time and effort to learn and perform safely. Just google “Crossfit Injuries” if you need some proof of what happens when this isn’t the case.
For someone who has thirty minutes to get their entire workout in,
the opportunity cost of not doing other hypertrophy, max strength, range of motion, and endurance training in that time period outweighs the risk of not fully exploiting your power-generating capacity.
GG’s Sneaky Power Training Tips
When I am working as a trainer for a client, I often have to figure out how to get some power training in without eating up a ton of time, teaching Olympic lifts, or having access to jump boxes or velocity-based tracking tools.
In order to move very rapidly or to move a very heavy object, you need to recruit something called Fast Twitch Fibers. I won’t go into a full physiology lesson here (there are great YouTube tutorials like this one if you’re interested in learning more). But it’s important to add another layer of what we’re trying to do in our training environment to improve our power. We’re trying to exercise in a way that will exploit our ability to recruit fast twitch fibers. Remember, the core of power training is very simple: force × velocity, so we can focus on either end of that spectrum to recruit our fast twitch fibers.
For the most part, we’re going to focus on the velocity side of the force/velocity curve to train power.
Here are some things I incorporate regularly in my training sessions with clients to develop power:
Increase Rep Speed
Let’s use the leg press as an example.
When someone is starting to fatigue near the end of the set, instead of slowing down, I’ll bark at them to speed up!
Usually only in one direction (fast up, slower down), but it can be either direction of the rep or it can be both.
If you’re using the same load but performing the rep twice as fast, you’ve improved your power output. This can be applied to any exercise, but exercises that are free weights based and require good technique & stability, such as a barbell squat, should be done carefully to avoid injury.
Cluster Sets
Cluster loading is a method where you break up one set into 2 (or potentially more) micro sets.
For example, instead of one set of ten reps, you would do five reps at a given velocity, take anywhere from a 15-120 second break, and then do another five at the same velocity.
What’s the point?
Well, fast twitch fibers fatigue very quickly—the fastest fast twitch fibers fatigue within seconds—so by the end of a ten-rep set, some of those fibers have already fatigued out, and you’ve significantly lost velocity.
By taking a short intra-set break, you can clear out some of the metabolic waste buildup that is accumulating and playing a role in fatigue (Tufano et al., 2019). A short break intra-set break can facilitate maintaining the velocity you had in the first half of the set.
Jumps/Hops/Leaps
To be clear on the vernacular (Broer, 1973):
A jump is starting on two feet and landing on one or both.
A hop is starting on one foot and landing on the same foot.
A leap is starting on one foot and landing on the other foot.
Shorter height jumps, hops, and leaps encourage power production not only in the take-off phase but also the landing phase, particularly if you have to “stick” the landing—get your entire body still in one second.
I use these often in warm-ups, after warm-up but before weight lifting, or between weightlifting sets of other body parts.
Even jumping rope, the average person hits the ground 2X PER SECOND.
While the other components of power—the force you generate, the height you go—are lower, training at that velocity is excellent, particularly if you don’t do a lot of velocity-specific training.
While I love box jumps, they aren’t always available or may not be available in the size appropriate for you right now.
Slow Eccentric Focused Training
WHOA GG, you just wrote several pages of power training being biased towards moving fast, and now you’re encouraging moving slowly, for power!?
Yes. Hear me out:
As we get older, our body starts stripping down our fast twitch fiber warehouse and the ability to use them effectively—IF YOU ARE NOT SPECIFICALLY TRAINING to maintain them (Gries et al., 2023).
The eccentric phase of an exercise has some very interesting neurological properties (more on this in a future newsletter) that use MORE OF YOUR FAST TWITCH FIBERS. Having good power is highly reliant on having good development of your fast twitch fibers.
Eccentric-focused training, done slowly with control, can drive high levels of fast twitch fiber recruitment—essentially, you’re stocking your pantry with fast twitch fibers (Pearson and McGuigan, 2017).
THEN, you do bullet points 1 & 2 (above) in your training so you teach your brain HOW TO USE these fast twitch fibers explosively.
Mental Intention
One of the most influential papers I ever read that helped shape my view of Power training was Intended Rather Than Actual Movement Velocity Determines Velocity-specific Training Response, authored by D.G. Behm and D.G. Sale (1993).
In the study they had 8 men and 8 women perform high velocity contractions on one limb, while the other limb was constrained from moving, but the person THOUGHT about trying to move ballistically.
The results were surprising:
BOTH sides improved significantly in producing high velocity movements; the driver of the improvement seems to be the repeated efforts to execute ballistic contractions and the rapid force development during each contraction, whether there is movement or not! The specific type of muscle action, whether isometric or concentric, appears to play a lesser role.
HOWEVER - while this speaks to how the brain may organize high velocity movement, isometrics - the non-moving contractions - DO NOT condition the muscles, joints & nerves to the strain they undergo at high velocity. So, this isn’t necessarily an either-or situation. Use both conditions where appropriate.
I hope this is helpful! Try sprinkling some of these concepts into your next workouts and see how things feel. I always encourage questions, comments, and spirited debate, so feel free to reach out!
Until next time,
GG
References
Douglas, J., Pearson, S., Ross, A., & McGuigan, M. (2017). Chronic adaptations to eccentric training: A systematic review. Sports Medicine, 47(5), 917–941.
Gries, K. J., Raue, U., Perkins, R. K., & Trappe, S. (2023). The impact of lifelong strength versus endurance training on muscle morphology and function in older men. Journal of Applied Physiology. https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.00208.2023
Tufano, J. J., Brown, L. E., & Haff, G. G. (2019). Theoretical and Practical Aspects of Different Cluster Set Structures: A Systematic Review. Sports Medicine, 47(4), 837-858. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-016-0627-0