As we finish up on our current program (contrast training) I think I can say most of us have seen some impressive gains when it comes to strength. I have witnessed and received messages of many personal bests, but it has come time to start to change our program because if we keep pushing our body’s to the maximum like we have been we are going to break down.
Some of you might say we are already broken down! In this most recent program we have just completed, you might have noticed I have implemented a few new exercises or early progressions of exercises I want you guys to eventually master. This next 3 weeks is a continuation of these progressions as well as an increase in power related exercises. Power related exercises are ones that require to push load very quickly.
The graph above demonstrates what I am trying to do here, when we lift heavy things we strengthen the force side of the curve because heavy things move quite slow and thus we exert a hell of a lot of force to overcome it for example, a max effort on the bench press. Then when we lift things a fraction lighter (30-50%) very quickly we increase the right side of the curve. By implementing this program we shift the line upwards and to the right, now what does this mean to you guys. Well it means that we can lift higher loads at a faster rate, which transpires in to a term called functional strength. If we have high functional strength capacity it transcends in to many other benefits, like injury prevention, illness prevention, higher metabolic rate, higher muscle mass, central nervous system synchronicity (co-ordination) and most of all fat reduction. The more functional strength we have the better I can sleep at night cause at the end of the day this is the most important component to health and wellbeing, if we have good functional strength the rest of the health and fitness spectrum will look after themselves.