Transcribed from video:
– This is a concept which is probably something that a lot of you have had exposure to, this idea that power equals force times distance over time. So a little bit of physics. That’s how we calculate power. Power is basically doing a lot of work in a short amount of time. Force, for all intents and purposes, today, let’s just call that load, how much you’re lifting. The distance is how far you’re lifting, and the time is how quickly you can lift. Now, when we talk about programming for absolute strength, there are three main categories that I think we can look at. There is dynamic effort work, there’s max effort work, and then you can have accessory work in there as well. And we’ll talk about how I think you can programme those three areas and a bit of a template for how you would do that. So, dynamic effort is about moving fast. We’re trying to create maximum power, and because power is force or load times distance divided by time, can you see how we can increase power by lifting more weight, by lifting that weight further, or by doing it faster? Does that make sense? Now, because we’re dividing by time, if we can do it twice as fast, we have twice as much power. But if you lift twice as much weight, you’re going to be moving so slow that it’s not necessarily going to be improving your power. Power is about doing things very quickly, which gives you a lot of strength. And what has basically been found is that at about 65% of your max load, you are hitting peak power. So if you go heavier than that, it slows you down to the point where you’re no longer being powerful. So you going from max dead lift is not necessarily your max power, because it’s so slow you’re not generating power. A lot of people only train their top end, their max effort stuff, which is not necessarily what we want. We should also, because we should train max effort, we should also be training your power, training your power by moving faster, which is why even when you’re warming up with an empty bar, move fast. Not if it’s just skill work, like you’re trying to find positions, but if you’re doing this as a training stimulus, move fast. A 20-kilo dead lift in your warm-up should be done as fast as possible. When you get to 65%, you should put the same amount of effort into a dead lift at 65% as you do at 100%. And if you do it, if you put that same effort in, you’ll be generating the same or more power, and therefore, even training at 65% is going to improve your top end strength because you’re moving that bar faster.
