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Taking Vertical Power to its Maximum By Barney Fuller, Powernetics Founder
How often have we justified our failures in our training with such cliché’s as, “white boys can’t jump.” The truth is these boys and girls never will achieve their potential unless the focus and their training methods change.
When an athlete trains a muscle he conditions it into a certain behavioral and response pattern. This training has a major impact upon his speed, quickness, durability and overall athletic performance, including vertical jumping ability.
We recommend that every strength and conditioning coach develop a distinct understanding about what his training program will or will not enable the athletes to accomplish.
First, understand that we cannot build a powerful, explosive athlete by training and conditioning with slow strength movements, such as slow heavy squats. The ingredients necessary for true power development are simply not present in this exercise.
When we subject an athlete to heavy, slow squatting or leg presses we first recruit the least athletic of all the muscle fibers, while forcing the faster twitch fibers to undergo very slow neurological conditioning. The first group of fibers recruited is the red slow twitch fibers and as they fatigue or need support, the red fast twitch will immediately be activated. Finally, the white twitch will be recruited to help move the weight. Instilling slow motor impulses into the fast twitch fibers must be avoided to develop maximum explosion and power in our athletes.
The ingredients necessary for developing real power in the athlete happens when our training program requires all three of the muscle motor units (fibers) to fire in an explosive exercise. The white twitch fibers carry the greatest potential for strength, quickness and speed. The fast red twitch fibers contain the greatest potential for endurance.
Avoid Lactic Acid Build Up
One of the major problems with slow heavy squatting is the lactic acid build up that occurs in the cellular tissue and the negative effect that it has on athletic development. Slow squatting prolongs the contraction of the muscle. This traps the lactic acid in the cell until the muscle relaxes and the blood can flow in and supply the cell with the fresh food and oxygen.
After only a few reps of prolonged muscle contractions, the negative reaction of the lactic acid sets in, thus the cell literally suffocates in the acid and is unable to further contract. This is the basic reason why an athlete is only able to perform a very limited amount of work in a slow squatting exercise with heavy weights. Repeated performance of this creates soreness in the muscle and can cause extreme swelling within the cellular tissue, limiting the workout.
Powernetics contends that continuing our training focus on slow, heavy exercises is the main reason we are not seeing higher levels of athletic power potential in explosive ability and vertical jump development. When we increase the volume of work or reps in a specified time, athletes develop faster, with less lactic acid buildup. Once a muscle is deeply conditioned by slow contractions it takes a lot of power work to re-train the neuro-impulse within the muscle fiber to bring out the maximum firing potential. It is easy to understand why heavy squats are
performed at slow speeds when safety has to be the foremost concern in the weight room. But, slow weight training will always leave its mark upon the athlete.
This could not have been more evident when some years ago I took the “Super Cat,” one of our fast speed jumping and squatting machines into an East Texas high school for demonstration to a head football coach. He wasn’t impressed until I challenged him to bring the strongest and best conditioned athlete he had in the school to compete with me in some fast speed work.
The young man was a senior, weighed about 200 pounds with above average athletic stature. I was in my middle 40s at the time. We placed 300 pounds on the machine and I did a set of 30 squats in 30 seconds. The athlete could only manage 13 reps in over 20 seconds and went down into the 14th rep, unable to come up. The coach repeatedly encouraged the young athlete to speed up because he was falling behind in time.
The coach could hardly believe what he had just witnessed, but readily acknowledged how slow squatting had adversely effected his athlete.
Every strength coach should ask himself this question: “Why should I instill any slow formative influences into the muscle fibers of my athletes, when I could instill fast, explosive and more powerful influences in the fibers?”
As Powernetics has increased the range of our weight training machines, we’ve added capability to fully develop the power potential that is resident in the fast white and red twitch fibers. Our strength and power building machines offer a complete and consistent program of high repetitions in explosive training with gradual increases in resistance. These fast twitch fibers are like gold hidden deep in the mountain, and only, the right kind of tough digging or exercising will bring it out.
The slow, heavy weight training process has long been accepted in most places as the standard for strength training of our athletes. But, it has to change if we are to give our athletes the opportunity to achieve their maximum power/strength potential.
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