Transcription
Just get a brief recap of the general parameters for an excellent power and strength training program. Okay, let me hit you with these rapid fire, and then you can maybe come ask questions along that. Remember those modifiable variables, okay? So let's go through them in order, and then what they mean specifically for power versus strength.
So, modifiable variable number one is called choice. So, which exercises do I select for strength and for power? Or speed or strength, we want to select compound movements. You don't often see people doing maximum strength work for like a tricep kickback, right? It's typically multiple joint movements and typically complex, um, movements. In selecting these compound movements, we generally want to actually think about exercise selection of movements rather than muscle groups. So this is an important distinction because we'll see this is a different answer when we get hypertrophy. What I mean by that is when we think about again, strength training, we tend to think about bodybuilding concepts. We go to the gym and we do things like, "I got to make sure I get my chest today," and "I got to make sure I get my hamstrings." And now you're selecting exercises based on a muscle you want to work. For strength development and power, we want to think about movements rather than individual muscle groups. So there should be like things like, "I need to train explosive hip extension," which is like a, a, a vertical jump or something like that. I, I want to train pushing or pulling movements, or I want to train rotation. I want to train rotation, which is a whole area we haven't gotten into, which is very important for overall health and wellness longevity. So we want to select big movements by the muscle, the movement patterns that we want to introduce, and we just want to select a reasonable balance between these. I don't care what the exact ratio is. You just don't want to go an entire six months without doing anything in this rotational area, or an entire, you know, 8 to 10 weeks without doing something, um, uh, that's a lower body hinge, right? So any number of examples there. So just think about the rough movement patterns: upper and lower push and pull, uh, and then some sort of rotation that puts you in a pretty good spot. If you're using the 3x5 method and you're going to pick as little as three exercises, just pick one from each one of those groups. Pick a rotation, pick a, a push, and pick a pull. We select our exercises based on that. We generally then, uh, because of that, as a case, we don't worry about things like eccentric versus concentric because you're dally doing a whole body athletic movement, right? Which the eccentric concentric portion is going to be folded into that. You really can't separate them out, right? So that's exercise choice, our first variable.
The next one is exercise order. So because the everything driving power and strength is quality-based, you want to do these at the beginning of your workout. You would not want to do anything fatiguing before this. So no cardiovascular training, no other, uh, repetition to failure stuff. If you do those before and now you're slower, all you've done is practice getting slower. And so these need to be done when you're fresh. You also need to do them when you're very fresh because they are the most neurologically demanding. They're complicated, they tend to have multiple steps, and they're often in multiple planes, and coordination is a difficult thing. And if you're trying to do all that at maximum speed, your nervous system needs to be tremendously fresh. And so any amount of fatigue here is only going to compromise results. Um, to kind of recap that, uh, one of the major mistakes when training for strength and especially power is people worry way too much about fatigue. Those things should not be part of the equation. In fact, if they are, that's a very good sign you're not doing this correctly. These are non-fatiguing movements, especially speed and power.
The next one after that is volume. And we sort of hit volume and intensity, which is the other one. Um, we, we talked about that the volume is basically identical between power and strength. Um, the, the general number we're going to look at here is something like three to 20 sets total per workout, per workout. Um, but that would be like 20 would be a little bit of a special case. Three to five is what I told you earlier, right? I'm just saying like sometimes you can actually go quite higher in cases, but that's the general range. And once somebody finishes the 3x5 workout for power or strength, if they decide they want to throw in some calf raises and curls and totally a forearm work or a little bit of joggy on the treadmill or something, that's okay. Absolutely. There is, you have very little, little risk of interference for things like speed and power strength. You have a little bit of a risk only because now you're introducing fatigue, which if you're really pushing strength, that might compromise your recovery. So that, that's a, that's a really nice, uh, heuristic to pay attention to is you can, but just be careful. Energy starts to matter at that point. Um, if you're really truly trying to maximize strength, you would do nothing at all outside of that training. Um, if you're just like, "I kind of want to get stronger and some other things," and you're willing to lose strength, you know, 5% of your strength gains, then you're, you're totally fine.
Um, the same can be said, by the way, for super setting. So super setting is an idea that says, like, "Wait a minute, you're telling me, dude, I got to take five minutes in between each set?" Well, that's not so much a problem nowadays with, um, smartphones because people are filling their inter-set intervals with social media and texting, correct? You, you don't really have to go that long. In fact, there was actually a study that came out in the last month that showed, you know, like really, two minutes is probably sufficient for most people. Having said that, if you really are trying to push maximum strength adaptations, like three to five is very, very reasonable. Um, you're, those training sessions are long because you have to take, you're spending more time not doing anything than you aren't doing something, but you're trying to maximize quality. So that's just sort of like part and parcel. Um, if you're not super worried about it, you can actually do super setting, which is, let's imagine again, you're going to do some some lunges and while your legs are resting doing their three to five minutes, you can go over and do an upper body row or pull. And when your upper body's resting, you're going back to legs. So that really cuts your time in half. Is it ideal? No. We actually ran a study, uh, maybe 10 years ago in our lab, and we looked at that specifically, and we did see a reduction in strength performance in the super setting group relative to the group who did not super set. The question then it becomes like, is it enough for you to care? So if you were, if I were to say, "Hey, I can cut an hour off of your workout time, but you will lose 5% of your strength gain." Almost everyone would take that exchange with the exception of people who are getting close to competition or really trying to set a new lifetime PR or something. Then you might say, "No, I don't want any interference there. That last little margin is what I care about. Give me the extra rest." Great. So it's not a, "Does it work? Does it not work?" It's always a, "What are you willing to give up, uh, versus get?"
The last one is frequency. And we've already sort of indirectly talked about that where frequency can be as high as you'd like in this area. It really depends on your recovery. If you're really truly pushing maximum strength, you probably do need a few days to recover, although that's dependent upon you. But speed and power can be done multiple times a day, almost every day, basically. Um, the one exception would be maximum sprinting speed. You need to be careful there for things like hamstring, uh, and injury, especially if you're pretty fast. So you want to be a little bit cautious of that. But if you're doing easier movements, um, like medicine ball throws or kettlebell swings or something, you could do those quite often as long as the volume is, is staying pretty low.
Last little piece here is progression. How do I progress over time? So I mentioned this earlier, but just wanted to fill this gap right back in before we head over to hypertrophy, which is 3 to 5% increase per week of intensity in general. Um, and you can do upwards of about 5% increase in volume per week over time. And I generally recommend running that for, uh, at longest eight weeks, but probably most realistically, you want to go about five weeks or so and then have some sort of a deload or back off week. If you do that, you're, you're generally going to be in a pretty good spot.
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