Previously, we’ve discussed everything leading up to the workout and the actual strucutre of your routine. Now, we’ll talk about the specific benefits you can target with your strength training program. For us trainers and coaches, we use the SAID principle: Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands — in normal-speak, that means, “you get what you train for.”
In strength training, we want to build strength, speed, and power — those are the foundations of athleticism. It’s how we train that’s going to get us there. Today, I’ll teach you how to target these “adaptations” (or specific changes in the body.)
Let’s start by organizing everything.
The Absolute Strength / Absolute Speed Continuum
There are different ways of describing how strength, speed, and power play together, but my fave so far is Eric Cressey’s “Absolute Strength / Absolute Speed Continuum.” (Fact: saying “continuum” increases your IQ by 15 points.) Don’t let the name fool you; it’s quite simple:
In strength training, there’s a spectrum that looks like this:
Absolute Strength ↔ Strength-Speed ↔ Speed-Strength ↔ Absolute Speed
The more you move to the left (Absolute Strength), the more you emphasize strength and the less you emphasize speed; the more you move to the right (Absolute Speed), the opposite happens. Each adaptation is different and can – and should be – developed separately.
To become a strong, quick, and powerful athlete, you can use this continuum to understand your sport and how to develop the right traits.
Strength
Dude, what do you bench?
– Every guy, ever
Strength, in a nutshell, is the maximal force you can exert — in the weight room, that means how much you lift.
Because the focus of Absolute Strength is lifting as much as possible, the speed of a maximal lift won’t be fast. Why? Because it’s heavy! Speed is of no concern to us — we just want to see if you have the strength to push the weight. (Heck, unless the lift was a grind, I’d think you could lift more.)
And what’s the best measure of strength in the gym? Your “one-rep max” (1RM) – the most amount of weight you can lift with just one repetition.
The 1RM, however, is not the best way to develop strength; constantly testing your 1RM – also known as “maxing out” – is a great way to overtrain and kill progress. Instead, use a heavy weight (at least 85% of your 1RM) and do that for only a few reps (6 or less).
Great exercises to develop strength are heavy, easy-to-load complex exercises like back squats, deadlifts, bench presses, overhead presses, and barbell rows. If you want to stay unilateral, try single-leg Romanian deadlifts and rear-foot elevated split squats.
Speed
Speed falls in the “Speed-Strength” and “Absolute Speed” parts of the continuum. (Doesn’t that make me sound smart?) It’s also vital in all sports — aside from just sprinting, many athletes need to accelerate objects like a club, bat, ball, racket, stick, etc. as fast as possible.
For Speed-Strength training, we want to move fast while training a little bit of strength. Thus, we can’t use a weight that will slow us down too much. A common, accepted amount of resistance is 30% of your 1RM at most.
For exercise selection, that could be jump squats for a few reps with 25% of your 1RM or rotational slams with a moderately weighted medicine ball — as long as you can move the weight with good speed, you’re fine.
For Absolute Speed training, we should use the lightest weight possible – or no weight at all. For a sprinter, that could be a sprint on flat-ground or even overspeed exercises like downhill sprinting or resistance tubing that pulls your forward. You could also use exercises like plyometrics and speed drills.
Power
Power = Strength / Time
Power lies in “Strength – Speed:” moving heavy weight – but not maximal weight – as fast as possible.
In our muscles, there are 3 types of fibers: Type I (slow), Type IIa (fast), and Type IIb (fastest). Power training develops our Type IIb muscle fibers and trains maximal muscle fiber recruitment.
With light weights – or in an untrained person – you don’t actually contract all of your muscles during an exercise; that’s something that must be trained. And even then, we usually contract our muscles in this order: Type I → Type IIa → Type IIb.
Yet with lots of Speed-Strength training, athletes like Olympic weightlifters can actually skip straight to their Type IIb fibers because of their adaptations.
Please note, however, that our one-rep max for a power exercise is somewhere between 75-85% of your 1RM for Absolute Strength. Why is it lower? Because for power, you need to move it fast – and like we mentioned before – you can’t move your strength-1RM fast.
Putting It All Together
Let’s say you’re a professional soccer player. Almost all of your sport occurs in the “Absolute Speed” part of our little continuum. Does that mean you don’t have to train the other parts?
Hell no!
(If you said, “yes,” that would’ve meant I failed you. Sad face.)
We still need to train the entire continuum because everything supports each other. If you’re missing one, you’ll limit your potential. (Notice how often I say that in this series.)
I recently chatted with a Major League Soccer strength coach, and he stressed how important it was for soccer players to lift heavy and spend some training time in the “Absolute Strength” part. Yet most soccer players don’t like lifting. (A Premier League strength coach told me the same thing — weird.) Could it be that heavy lifting makes them slower?
Possibly.
But that’s only if they spend too much time in the Absolute Strength phase. Again, we need to span the entire continuum — for soccer players, however, they just prioritize Absolute Speed instead of doing nothing but speed, speed, speed.
In the next article of this series, I’ll breakdown one of the most important parts of a strength training program: the number of repetitions. “Does low reps make you bulky or high reps?” people always ask me. The answer may surprise you. Find out which repetition range is right for you.
Throughout this seres, I’m sure you’ll have a lot of questions, so be sure to ask using the comment section of this post. Feel free to reach out to me via Facebook and Twitter to get your question answered. See you soon!
Image credit: Action Images / Henry Browne
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