Explosive power is an important factor in athletic performance, and heavy weight training is a critical foundation in maximizing your explosiveness. It’s a great way to increase strength, improve power output, and activate muscles that wouldn’t otherwise be engaged.
But how do you incorporate heavy weights into your routine? In this post, we'll look at the benefits of heavy weight training for explosive power, tips for selecting weights correctly, and sample exercises to help you get started. So if you want to take your athleticism up a notch with some serious gains in explosive power, read on!
Explosive Power Defined
Put simply, explosive power is the ability of a person to generate instantaneously maximum force in applications such as jumping, throwing, and sprinting. Increasing one’s explosive power will directly improve performance in short-term exercises such as weightlifting, hurdle jumps and sports like football and basketball.
Those looking to increase their own explosive power should combine heavy strength sensitive training with general strength training principles. This involves manipulating variables such as intensity and rest intervals, to name just two. Explosive power is an attained trait, not an inherited one - while some people have a predisposition for greater fast-twitch muscle fiber composition, anyone can increase their explosiveness with the correct type of program tailored to suit them!
Importance of Explosive Power in Athletic Performance
Explosive power is an essential element in athletic performance, as it contributes to improved speed, force production and agility. Heavy weight training has long been considered the best way to achieve explosive power and improve overall athletic performance. There are sport specific plyometrics that can be laid atop a foundation of strength training, but there's no way around needing a strength base for omptimal performance.
This type of training forces the body to generate as much power as possible to lift heavy weights, developing rapid contraction of the muscle fibers, as well as recruiting a greater number of fibers to perform a lift. When regularly incorporated into athletic training regimens, heavy weight training significantly increases an athlete’s explosive power output, giving them a greater competitive edge against their opponents.
The Benefits of Heavy Weight Training for Explosive Power
- Increased strength
By focusing on heavy weights with low reps, you can experience increased strength that is not typically experienced when lifting lighter weights, due to broader fast twitch muscle fiber recruitment. Your muscles recruit fibers based on need, starting with the minimum number of muscle fiber contractions to peform a task. The greater the demands of an exercise, the more muscle you engage.
Through heavy weight, high tension resistance training, enhanced core stability and improved coordination will be experienced as well, especially if you're doing classical free weight or barbell training (rather than machine best exercises), making it an ideal choice for those looking to reach peak physical performance.
- Improved power output
By performing heavy weight exercises such as squats, deadlifts, rows, and presses with heavy loads and slow repetitions, muscles are forced to generate substantial amounts of force in a short time frame - this is exactly what is needed for explosive power. Muscles then adapt to higher loads, and because your overall bodyweight doesn't change to the same degree as your max strength, you're pushing a lighter load (your body) through space with far greater force = ballistic speed.
A consistent heavy weight training program will not only help athletes become stronger and more explosive but also help to reduce the risk of muscle pulls and tendinitis due to increased muscle strength.
- Enhanced muscle activation
By increasing the resistance of a strength-oriented exercise, heavy weight training forces the muscles to work harder and recruit more muscle fibers when compared to lighter weight exercises. This enhanced muscle activation results in improved power, speed, agility, and overall athleticism. Heavy weight training can be safely done so long as the athlete has correct form and adheres to predetermined rep ranges.
With heavy weight training, athletes will soon reap the benefits of increased explosive power throughout their routines.
How to Incorporate Heavy Weight Training into Your Routine
- Tips for selecting weights
Heavy weight training can be a great way to challenge your body and increase your strength. However, selecting the right weights for this type of training is important. Before beginning heavy weight training, it is important to know when and how heavy weights should be used.
For heavy weight exercises, it is best to use high amounts of weight in low repetitions (3-6), allowing you to safely strain the muscles the right amount. When selecting heavy weights, start light and increase gradually over time, as your body gets used to the intense strain of heavy weight exercises.
Despite this stipulation, many still ask... "but how do I know how much weight that is?" If you're aiming for sets of 5 reps, choose a weight that you could not lift with all your might for 6-7 reps. It takes testing. Don't be afraid to trial different weights, starting light, and increasing with control. With time, your confidence will grow to know exactly what you can lift and for how many reps. Then it's a game of slow, incrementaly progress, by gradually increasing the weight over time.
Taking these precautions will not only help you stay safe in heavy weight training, but also further your progress more effectively.
- Sample exercises for improving explosive power
To incorporate this type of workout into your routine, focus on exercises like deadlifts, back squats, bench press, and shoulder presses, all with a barbell. The barbell provides greater stability over free weights, and therefor allows for greater loads on the bar. Due to the heavy weight, the lifts don't need to be done quickly or in explosive fashion to reep the benefits. The same fibers needed to leap and sprint are activated with slow and controlled heavy weight training.
In addition to this base of strength, adding sport specific, or functional plyometrics, such as box jumps, medicine ball throws, kettlebell swings and plyometric push-ups, will help convert your base of raw strength into functional power. The difference here lies more in neural conditioning, movement patterning, and engaging the elastic energy of tendons. These should be seen as icing on the cake of your strength training base.
Each exercise encourages powerful muscle contractions, designed to increase speed and power - making them ideal for improving explosive power. And when one becomes competent with more explosive plyometrics, they can add weight for elite level ballistic weight training.
When performing heavy weight training exercises like these, make sure you have a spotter or use lower weights in order to execute the exercise safely and effectively in the beginning.
And finally, always warm up prior with lighter weight and controlled movement for at least a couple sets in order to reduce the risk of injury.
In Conclusion, heavy weight training is an ideal way to build explosive power. By challenging the body in unique ways, heavy weight exercises can increase muscle activation, strength and power output - allowing athletes to reach peak physical performance. When executed safely and correctly, heavy weight training can be incorporated into any routine as a powerful tool for increasing explosive power.
Now that you understand the benefits of heavy weight training, why not try incorporating it into your routine? By properly warming up and using correct form, you can safely add gains to strength, size, and performance. So go ahead and give it a go - you won’t regret it! esp
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