When you think of ‘power’ training, you may automatically think of Olympic Weightlifting movements such as the snatch and clean and jerk. You may picture huge weights, being hoisted off the floor by men who look like they’re one step away from being full caveman.
It’s an understandable link to make, but it’s wrong. Whilst those movements are powerful, explosive movements, they’re not the only way to train yourself to become more powerful.
In this article we’re going to look at ways to train power. We’ll look at why you should introduce power training to your workouts and what the benefits are, regardless of your age, gender, fitness goals and all the rest of those things. By the end of the article, I hope you’ll be introducing power training into your sessions at the gym.
What is power?
First things first. What’s power?
Power and strength are different. To put it simply, strength is your ability to move a heavy weight from one point to another. Think of a heavy deadlift - you’re moving the weight from the floor to full extension. It doesn’t matter how fast or slow that happens. That’s a movement that requires a lot of strength.
Power is your ability to move a weight (however heavy) at speed - the speed bit is the most important part here. Think of a shot put - the thrower has to generate a lot of power to throw the ball as far as he can. To do so he has to generate a lot of speed. This is a powerful movement.
You can be strong without being particularly powerful, but to generate power you need a bit of strength.
Why is it important to train for power?
Power training helps you to learn effective lifting technique. It also makes you a far more rounded, fitter athlete. Being more powerful will help you to resist injury more, you’ll be able to generate more force, you’ll learn new training methods, you’ll burn more calories in the workout and finally, it’ll compliment all of your other aspects of fitness and training that you’ll have been working on.
You don’t want to leave gaps in your training if you want to be truly fit.
How do we train for power?
Simple - we execute movements at high speed, with high quality. They don’t have to be especially heavy, in fact research shows that if you want to develop power, the emphasis should be on speed over weight.
There’s also a suggestion that power focussed training should be kept to short periods of time - maybe keeping power training blocks to 4-6 weeks at a time. This helps to keep things fresh, but it also reduces the injury risk over the longer term.
What this means is that developing power should be seen as something we work on occasionally, dropping it into an overarching training programme, rather than going all out, all of the time to work on it as a stand alone ability. When you look at power training approaches, this makes sense. They’re very physically demanding and as such, you want to ensure you maintain quality over quantity.
Power training exercises to add into a workout
If you want to maintain a level of power, without focussing on it all the time (which is what most of us should do), you could include plyometric drills into your workouts. Here’s a few suggestions in the video…
What you’ll notice here is that there’s not a massive amount of weight being lifted - the focus is on generating force and speed. It’s important to maintain this movement quality as well, so the advice is to use lots of sets, with short rep ranges.
Power training is a lot different to what many people expect - it’s not all huge weights. In fact, you can do so much power training with the equipment we have at AdMac Fitness. We use battle ropes, slam balls, kettlebells, bodyweight exercises and combine them with more traditional approaches such as barbells and dumbbells.
The AdMac Fitness team have your power needs covered!
Training for power - a summary
To summarise, here’s what the evidence suggests when it comes to developing power in the safest and most effective way…
Lift lighter weights at high speeds – explosive movements are the fundamentally important part
Keep power training to short blocks
Do a lot of sets (5+), with low reps (3-6)
Movement quality is key. Don’t go to full fatigue
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If you want your health and fitness journey to be guided by the best personal training team in East London, get in touch with us at AdMac Fitness. We operate from our private personal training studio in Bow, E3. Contact us on 07921465108 or email us at admacfitness@gmail.com. We look forward to hearing from you!