What does Power Training Do?

You ask ‘What does Power Training do?’

Well, congratulations!

This means you understand the difference between Power Training vs Strength Training

Power Training vs Strength Training – what is the difference between Strength Training and Power Training?

And you understand what Power Training is

What Is Power Training?

I have experienced over and over again, that understanding the concept of Power Training isn’t always that easy for people.

In order to understand What does Power Training do, you have to comprehend the underlying principles of muscular adaptation.

This article and video covers

Basic mechanisms of muscular adaptation
How power training can help to improve these adaptations
A practical approach to the planning of the training program

What are the underlying mechanisms of muscular adaptation?

First of all, you need to understand what the motor unit is?

I have explained what a motor unit is and how motor units work in the articles

In a nutshell, the motor unit is the connection between the ‘muscle’ and the nerve that is activating this ‘muscle’.

There are different mechanisms to use and activate these motor units

The recruitment– Recruitment means the number of motor units that can be activated.
Firing frequency– It means how quickly the motor units can be activated.
Synchronization -This basically refers to the synchronization between different motor units so that they can all fire and work at the same rate.

What does Power Training do to improve these mechanisms?

For force production, it’s mainly important to recruit as many motor units as possible and the firing frequency is not as important as the rate of recruitment.

What does that mean?

In a classical strength training, which is all about force production, it is important to overcome the resistance, how fast you can overcome the resistance is of secondary importance.

I have outlined an example of that in the article

For power production, it’s more important how fast the motor units can be activated, in this case, the firing frequency is more important than the rate of recruitment.

In sports, very rarely it’s about how much force you can apply; it’s more about how much force you can apply in a short period of time.

I have outlined a few specific examples in the article

The 101 of Power Training for Beginners

Where you can see, that for most sporting actions, whether it is running, throwing, kicking or jumping you have a window of somewhere between 100 to 400 milliseconds to apply force.

Therefore, it’s very important that the firing frequency and the synchronization are optimized.

Power Training program: A practical approach

So, how do you incorporate a Power Training program into your overall plan?

As the saying goes ‘All roads lead to Rome’, similarly there are many approaches to rollout and structure your strength training program and power training program.

In a nutshell, I normally start out with

A period of strength development and maximum strength, which leads to improvements in the rate of recruitment and you are able to recruit more motor units after that strength training cycle.
After the completion of the strength training cycle follows a cycle focused on power production training. The rationale for that is, now that you have maximized the rate of recruitment and learned how to activate more motor units, you teach these motor units to be activated faster.

Concluding What does Power Training do

Whilst strength training focuses on overcoming resistance, power training focuses on overcoming resistance in the shortest period of time.

In order to plan and structure your power training, you need to understand the underlying principle of muscular activation.

If you want to improve your power production capabilities, in most of the cases you need to have a solid maximum strength period before transitioning into a power development period.