Exercise 101: Plyometrics / Power Training

Once you’ve completed your warm-up, it is time to work on the quick and powerful movements of the routine. Not everyone is going to need to include these exercises, but if you are an athlete or just want to add in some variety and a great way to burn some extra calories, you may want to start adding in some plyometrics or power lifts. We want to get these activities in before the rest of our resistance training due to the high levels of stability and neuromuscular control needed to perform these exercises safely and effectively. If we were to hold them until the end, our muscles would be tired, and we would be much more likely to break form, compensate with the wrong muscles, or lose stability at our joints when we need it most. First, let’s discuss plyo’s.

Plyometrics are essentially quick movements designed to utilize the elasticity of the muscle to create faster, more powerful movement. The type of plyometric training you do will be determined by the type of activity you expect to be involved in. Take basketball, for example. Here we may want to work on squat jumps, lateral hops, and cutting actions to prepare us for the types of quick movements we would see in a game. With all plyometric work, you want to start out slow and work your way up in speed. So if we were to start working on squat jumps, we would spend the first few weeks working on jumping up and having a balanced landing, then taking a quick break before our next jump. The next level of intensity would be to jump, hold the landing for a second or two, then jump again. The last level of intensity would involve jumping continuously as fast as our muscles will allow. As anyone who plays basketball can attest, it’s not who can jump the highest, but who can jump the quickest that makes the difference. This is why the goal of plyometric routine will be to decrease the time between movements. This phase, called the amortization phase, is dictated by the delay during which the muscles must switch from slowing down movement to creating movement. By practicing landing and re-engaging a jumping movement, you muscles will learn to cut down on this transition time. Other plyometric workouts involve agility ladders, running drills, cone drills, and boxes. In all of these we work on initiating a movement, decelerating that movement, and then creating another. This is what sports are all about, so it is essential to include them in your routine if you are involved in athletics.

While plyometrics are usually reserved for training athletes, power training is often used for training both athletes and the everyday fitness enthusiast. Like plyometrics, power training is about speed. The difference, however, is that power training is about how quickly we can move resistance over a given distance, as opposed to how quickly can we repeat a movement. Examples of power exercises are Olympic lifts (cleans, presses, snatches), kettlebell swings, and medicine ball throws. In each of these movements, the goal is to produce the most force as quickly as possible in moving the resistance. Power training is important for all sports, including many recreational sports such as golf and tennis. The other great thing about power exercises is that they tend to use a lot of different muscle groups, meaning that they take a lot of effort and are great for burning up calories. Before you go out and start working on snatching though, I suggest you either find a trainer at your gym or at least watch some YouTube videos on the proper technique for each of these movements. Also, make sure that you have already been training for a while and have the proper stability to handle such activities. While having total body exercises is great, they also require clean movement, trained stabilizers, and a solid core.

Now that the quick and powerful moves are out of the way, we can now start to think about our resistance training. Next week I will go over what the sets, reps, tempo, and rest intervals are all about, what types of exercises you should be doing, and a strategy to make sure you are getting the most functional benefits from your workouts. Good luck and happy fitness!

Colin

Exercise 101: The Warm-up

The more time you spend in a gym, the sooner you will realize that everyone has their own exercise philosophy. We pick up bits and pieces of information on what we’re supposed to do at the gym, throw in the parts that we like and come up with a make-shift workout plan that we hope will help us reach our goals. The problem, however, is that this often times leads to an unbalanced exercise program where certain aspects are focused on too heavily, while other parts are left out. Have you ever seen the guy that spends half his time training on the bench? He is the epitome of the uninformed lifter. The bench is all too often the idolized lift that people look to in judging strength, and therefore it is here that this man has decided to concentrate his training.

In an attempt to sift through all the information out there, I would like to break down the different components of a training program and put them together in a way that will allow you to more easily design a program for whatever goals you may have. In this section, I will talk about the importance of a warm-up in your program and what should be included.

The warm-up should be designed to elevate body temperature, get the blood flowing, and prepare the body for the work ahead. If you’ve ever tried to jump right into a lifting session, you would know how inefficient your work is, and how weak you feel. The reason we need a warm-up is because without it, our body is not in the right state to maximize our work. In a state of rest, our blood is distributed throughout the body, with the majority residing in the liver (25%), kidneys (20%), and muscles (20%). During exercise, however, the blood in the muscles jumps to 87%, while the other areas maintain just enough to function. For this reason, it clear that if we do not warm up the muscles and get the blood in the right places, we will not be able to use our muscles to their full potential. Another important function of a warm-up is to get the muscles stretched out and ready for movement, while also activating the necessary stabilizers. Before any type of activity, it is important that our muscles are ready to move through their full range of motion, while our stabilizers are ready to support those movements without compensation.

So to get our bodies ready for the workout, there are a few steps that need to be taken. The first is using a foam roller to loosen up the muscles. Now, you may decide to only use this when you have a tight muscle that has knotted up, but truthfully, it is best if roll out as many muscles as you can, every time. Because one of our goals in the warm-up is to stretch out the muscles, it is beneficial to prepare them with the foam roller so that they are more receptive to the stretching that will take place.

Once you have properly rolled out the muscles (this involved spending 30-60 seconds rolling out each muscle), you will want to go through a series of dynamic stretches. The reason we want dynamic stretching is because this way we can both stretch and get the body moving at the same time. Here we want to do movements such as lunges, side lunges, squats, push-ups, ankle mobilization, upper back twists and extensions, and shoulder rolls. Remember, when you are stretching, you want to focus on the areas that need mobility, i.e. the ankles, hips, upper back, and shoulders.

The areas that we will focus on next will be where we need stability, i.e. the knee, low back, and rotator cuff. To activate out stabilizers, we will run through a series of exercises that hit the smaller muscles of the body. These will include the gluteus medius (band walks), the gluteus maximus (bridging), rectus abdominis (plank), obliques, (side plank), and the rotator cuff (band extensions or wall presses). Through this, we have made sure that our stabilizers are now ready to support us in the way that we will need them in exercise. As you can see, we have done what some people would consider core work here, but if you really want to work the core, there are other exercises that you can do that will focus more on strengthening, which you can put either in the resistance part of the workout, or afterward.

As you can see, there is a lot of work to be done before we even start what most people would consider the “real” workout, but if your body is not properly prepared for the training, then you end up going into a situation that is inefficient at best, and dangerous at worst. Once you are used to the warm-up, it should only take 15 minutes, leaving plenty of time for the rest of the workout.

The next post will focus on plyometrics, an optional stage that is more important for athletes, but can be integrated by anyone trying to increase power and/or reactivity. For now, let’s see some warm-ups in those workouts so that when the next stage is introduced, the warm-up is already a habit. Good luck and happy fitness!

In for the Long Haul

When you think of endurance training, you probably think of long, slow runs lasting for hours and hours, hoping that all this time will help you to reach your goals. This could be training for a competition, a friendly race or just training to look and feel your best. While this type of training can work, I am going to argue that in the end, there are better methods for producing the same (if not better) results, with much less time put in on your part. Let’s start with training for competition: if your goal is to go out and run a race, especially a long distance race, you may train by working on running the longest time possible. Take a marathon, a distance of 26.2 miles. You start running miles and miles each week to build up you stamina, and try to run even further than 26.2 miles in your training. What you are doing however, is training your body to run a very long distance at a set pace. If this is a competition, however, your goal should be to run exactly 26.2 miles, at a very fast pace. Whatever the distance for a competition, you should not be concerned with running one foot more than you have to, but rather, running the predetermined distance while keeping the fastest pace that you can. What about when you’re just running a race for fun? Well, in this case, your goal is still to finish the race, and I doubt there are many people that want to spend more time preparing for a friendly race than needed. Also, while you may not need to run the race at your fastest pace, the better your body can handle running at a fast rate, the easier it will be to run at the pace you will be running on race day. As for those of us that just want to look and feel our best, we must determine what exactly we hope long, slow distances will provide so that we can achieve these goals. Calories burned? Increased cardiovascular endurance? Lower heart rate? Lower blood pressure? Well, these too can be achieved in a shorter time, and with better results.

So, if long, slow distance running is not the answer, what is? Well, as I’m sure some of you have already guessed, interval training is the way to go. Before I get going, I would like to say that if you love running, and long, slow distance is your thing, go for it. The only thing that I would caution is that with excessive running, there are always risks for overuse injuries, but just keep those running shoes fresh (or try out barefoot running) and listen to your body and you should be good. Also, as I will explain later, if you are doing this as training for an event, I would recommend using intervals as a supplement to your training. For those of you that engage in long, slow distance because you think it is the only way to train, or think that there is a fat-burning zone that you want to stay in, then it might be time to try something new. If you haven’t read “5 Keys to Weight Loss”, go check it out and it will explain why interval training is the way to go if you are lose weight. For the remainder of this article, I will focus instead on how interval training can be used to help in long distance performance.

For this type of training, intervals are crucial. As I said before, just because you can run 50 miles at an 8 minute/mile pace does not mean that you will turn that into 25 miles at a 7 or 6 minute/mile pace. This is because your body has not adapted to running at these faster paces. What it comes down to is something called the anaerobic threshold. This is the point where your body can no longer use only oxygen to power the muscles, meaning that you must go to other energy sources. Unfortunately, these other energy sources cannot sustain you for very long. So the goal in training then is to push this anaerobic threshold as high as we can, therefore allowing us to work at higher intensities while still using oxygen as our primary source in muscle activity. This means that now our 8 minute/mile can become a 7 minute/mile, because our body can work in an aerobic state even at this faster pace. With this said, the only way to produce these results is to train at higher levels of intensity, and here is where we start with intervals.

There are two main types of intervals: short bursts of exertion followed by rest periods that are longer than the amount of time we spent working, and longer durations of hard work that will be followed by rest periods shorter than the time spent working. To better explain, let’s take the first type. This would be equivalent to wind sprints. They are very short, but you exert every last ounce of energy to complete them. A wind sprint could last for 15 seconds, but you will probably need to recover for 30 or 60 seconds, especially if you really went all out. On the other hand, if you ran a mile as fast as you could, it would probably take 5-8 minutes to complete, and you would be more than recovered after 2-4 minutes of rest. Within these types of training, there is much room for variations in the intensity, time, and work-to-rest ratio, all which factor into how hard the training is, and how it affects you. The way I like to train is with some of each. With sprints, it is most efficient if you have a heart rate monitor, but timing it out works too. Let’s say you go as hard as you can for 30 seconds. If you have a heart rate monitor, you can wait until your HR drops to 120 and go again. Otherwise, start with a 2 minute recovery, and if you feel that you are fully recovered by the end, try taking off 15 seconds the next time you go out. This type of training is making you work in an anaerobic state and push yourself to the limits, resulting in an increase in your maximum ability to do work. In turn, you will help raise your anaerobic threshold, which is a percentage of that max. So if your max was a 5 minute/mile, and realistically you ran that at 70% or a 7:08 minute/mile, you may have now pushed that max to a 4:30 minute/mile, resulting in a 6:26 minute mile at 70%. You just dropped over 30 seconds off of your time only focusing on increasing you max.

The other part of this is the longer intervals. Here I would run a mile as fast as I could and then let myself recover. You may just want to start with 2 intervals, but try to add in more as you continue to train. Also, you will want to work on decreasing your rest in-between intervals as you adapt to the exercise. If you have a heart rate monitor, use the 120 bpm mark again (your HR will begin to recover more quickly as you become more fit), or if you are just timing yourself, start by recovering for half the time it took you to complete the mile, and then take off 30 seconds every few weeks. Just make sure that you are able to recover enough so that the next mile can be run at a similar pace as the last. With this type of training, we are teaching the body to perform right at the threshold. Exercises is all about adaptation, so as we work on our mile runs, we are adapting to working at the pace that we will eventually want to maintain, and we are also maximizing our bodies’ ability to efficiently consume and utilize oxygen.

With these two types of training, whether you are a competitive athlete or just want to go out and run an event, you will in the end be able to run faster, or run longer with more ease. As far as long, slow distance running, don’t leave it out of the routine, since your body needs to adapt to the act of running for such long distances, but from a cardiovascular standpoint, interval training is the way to go (plus it takes much less time!). Good luck with your training, and I hope to see you out on the track!

-Colin