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Episode 94: Capacities for Longevity Part 2: Power
899 Plays14 days ago
In this episode of the Movement Logic Podcast, Laurel and Sarah explore why power training deserves a spot in your movement routine—especially as you age. They kick things off by reviewing the different types of strength before introducing the concept of power, breaking down the fact that, yes, there are different types of power too.
You’ll hear why power is critical for balance, fall prevention, and quick, reactive movements that keep you moving safely and independently in daily life. Laurel and Sarah explain how power tends to decline faster than strength as we get older—and why that matters—along with how the right kind of training can help you maintain and even improve it.
They share real-world examples of power in action, clear up common misconceptions, and highlight the key principles that make power training both safe and effective. Plus, they give a sneak peek into their upcoming course designed to make power training approachable, progressive, and even—dare we say—fun.
SIGN UP HERE to take a free Bone Density Course class with us LIVE April 26th 8am PT / 11am ET
Follow @MovementLogicTutorials on Instagram
00:00 Introduction and Banter
00:15 Discussion on PTs Calling Themselves Doctors
01:17 Observations about the Bench Press from Recent Classes
05:05 Upcoming Free Bone Density Class
07:08 Series on Physical Capacities for Longevity
10:11 Strength vs. Power
11:54 Importance of Power Training for Older Adults
38:43 Force-Velocity Curve Explained
44:58 Types of Power
49:08 Applying Strength and Power in Sports and Daily Life
57:19 Neuromuscular Adaptations in Strength and Power Training
01:02:35 The Stretch Shortening Cycle and Power Training
01:08:07 The Importance of Power Training for Longevity
01:21:08 Cultural Misconceptions About Power Training
01:24:53 Teaser for Our New Course on Power
01:27:48 Conclusion: The Importance of Power Training
RESOURCES
Episode 60: Dismantling Long & Lean Pt. 1
Episode 90: Capacities for Longevity Pt. 1: Strength
Sys review and MA: Power v Strength for Older Adults
Sys Review and MA: Power to Reduce Falls Risk
Force Velocity Curve (the banana!)
Episode 37: Plyometrics - More Bang for Your Bones
Lachlan James paper - Not All Strength is Created Equal + Table from NSCA with Each Classification
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Hosts' Background
00:00:00
Speaker
I'm Laurel Biebersdorf, strength and conditioning coach. And I'm Dr. Sarah Court, physical therapist. With over 30 years of combined experience in fitness, movement, and physical therapy, we believe in strong opinions loosely held. Which means we're not here to hype outdated movement concepts.
00:00:15
Speaker
Or to gatekeep or fearmonger strength training for women. For too long, women have been sidelined in strength training. Oh, you mean handed pink dumbbells and told to sculpt? Whatever that means.
00:00:26
Speaker
We're here to change that with tools, evidence, and ideas that center women's needs and voices. Let's dive in.
Should Physical Therapists Use the Title 'Dr.'?
00:00:45
Speaker
Welcome to season six of the Movement Logic Podcast. I'm Laurel Beaversdorf and I'm here with my co-host, so doctor oh with my cuppost Dr. Sarah Court. It just says Sarah Court. It just doesn't seem right without the Dr. Sarah. DPT. DPT. DPT. That's the thing. There's all this. i don't know if you follow Adam Meekins, but he's like, I don't think PTs should call themselves doctors. I understand where he's coming from because we're not medical doctors.
00:01:09
Speaker
Yeah. but But I don't know. It feels very hard earned.
Student Progress in Bench Pressing
00:01:13
Speaker
Let's talk about what we're seeing in classes lately. Bone density course, lift for longevity. Can you believe it? Next week is our last week. No, it's wild. That's blowing my mind.
00:01:22
Speaker
And it's absolutely amazing to see. I know we say this all the time, but the progress, the progress, the progress. So... Today, I just taught, actually, I was noticing because I teach the bench press um this block on this workout that I taught today, the bench press, they all now look like they know exactly what they're doing. And yes, did it take six months for everybody to look like they know what they're doing in the bench press? It did.
00:01:47
Speaker
It did. Now, so many people didn't start bench pressing until like month four because they didn't have a bench or they didn't have the rack or whatever. They didn't have the things that they needed to bench. But the bench press, I think, of the compound lifts is probably the most technical.
00:02:01
Speaker
Because of how many pieces of equipment we're working with at the same time. Like if you think of the deadlift and the squat, you're working with your body, you're working with the floor and you're working with the barbell. With the bench, you've got the with the bench press. I will say bench for short, but the bench press, you also have the bench. So you have the floor, you have the bench and then you have the bar.
00:02:19
Speaker
And so the rack putting it all together, the rack as well, right? And how high should the J hooks be? And putting it all together can take a little bit of time. And then there's also it being an upper body compound lift and the barbell being already quite heavy at baseline. It takes people a while to even build up the strength to be able to lift the whatever barbell they ended up purchasing for the course.
00:02:39
Speaker
And so. Yeah, a lot of people were using dumbbells for ah quite a long time. Oh They were able to switch over to the bar. Yeah. And now today in class, all the students that attended were using the barbell. Some of them had plates on the barbell. Nice.
Reflecting on Lifting Progress
00:02:52
Speaker
Everybody looked like they knew exactly what they were doing. The J hooks were set at the correct height. They were positioned correctly under the bar. Their feet were pressing into something. And there was ah control and more closer to vertical path of the bar. The bar looked like it was under control. and Also, some of them were expressing that, oh, just in the last couple of weeks since I dialed my technique in, I've added 10 whole pounds to the bench press. I'm like, it's amazing what technique will do for your ability to be efficient in a lift. I've noticed of all the lifts, I would say that the bench press is the one that I think has the slowest learning curve only because of the complexity of it. But I'm very happy to say that today yeah it's cleaned up and looking good. So just had to report that to you. nice don't know if you're noticing the same thing. Yeah, I'm noticing it in all the lifts where i'm like, okay, let's start. And then I'm watching my little rectangles and looking at everybody. And I'm like, this must be the most boring recording to watch back because me saying, that looks good, Susan. Great job, Karen. I like what you're doing, Leslie. Excellent. literature That's all. It's just praise.
00:03:51
Speaker
Yeah. And the other thing that I did, because we were talking about how next week is the last week of the entire course, I've been having people, when we go to do a lift, I've been having them just s scroll back to month one. and look at what weight they were using for that lift six months ago and then compare it now.
00:04:05
Speaker
Because sometimes if I think it can feel like you forget your progress, especially if you're always, if you're, which, you know, you want to be doing progressive overload. So in some ways you're always focusing on, is this the time that I can increase something, whether it's the volume or the intensity or the whatever.
00:04:19
Speaker
So it can be easy to be so focused on that kind of forward movement part of it that you forget sort of where you started a bit. And so I've been having them do that just so that they, cause sometimes also you hit a plateau and a few people were like, I've been on the same weight since month four. And I'm like, okay, that's not unusual.
00:04:34
Speaker
You know? Yeah. What is acclimating to the weight? It's acclimating to this new type of exercise. And sometimes you just end up at a one weight for a bit and then it'll keep going again. But it's just, it's been fun for them to look back and see like how far they've come.
00:04:47
Speaker
Really. It's been fun to watch them go. Holy smokes. Like yeah my squat was 25 pounds and now it's 75 pounds. It's really cool. Yeah. Very exciting.
Free Bone Density Course Preview
00:04:56
Speaker
ah Cool. Cool. We have something to invite you listeners to. And it is our free class, our free bone density course class that's happening on April 26th, 11 a.m. m Eastern, 8 a.m. m Pacific. And what is this class, Sarah? What is what are people going to show up and do?
00:05:15
Speaker
So this is part of our, we're going to be starting our bone density course, the full six month program again on May 15th. So this is like a little sample. It is the, it's actually the very first workout of the entire course. So you're going to get to experience what it feels like to do a live class with us teaching. to In the course, Laurel and I each teach separately, but for this class, we're going to co-teach the class with you.
00:05:37
Speaker
And that way you get a sense of what it's like to get feedback from an online teacher if you've never done that before. or the ability to ask questions about what you're doing. It is a barbell class. We're going to be teaching with barbells. But if you do not yet have barbells, no problem. You bring whatever dumbbells, hand weights, anything you have. If you have a broom like ah or a dowel, something to act in the place of the bar, anything like that will work as another way of creating resistance in the class. If you're like, I'm interested in this class, but i kind of want to I'd like to see what it is before I sign up for six months of it. So it's it's like a little amuse-bouche.
00:06:10
Speaker
of the sorbet sampler of ah of what the whole course is like. Yeah. And you'll get to learn a little bit about string trading along the way. So even if you're not if you're not ready to do the full course with us this cycle, there will be future opportunities. And this would just be a great way for you to just come in, say hi If you don't know Sarah and I, like meet us in real time.
00:06:33
Speaker
and maybe pick up a few strength training tips along the way. Again, that free class is on April 26th, 11 a.m. Eastern, 8 a.m. Pacific. Yes, there will be a recording. Thank you. will receive the recording and be able to watch at a later time if you're not available to make it live.
00:06:49
Speaker
And you can sign up for this free class via the link in our show notes. We're going to put it right at the top for you, right under the description of the episode.
Physical Capacities for Longevity Series Introduction
00:06:59
Speaker
Okay, this season we're diving into, as you may already be aware, we've started to dive into a three-part series focused on the physical capacities we need to maintain or improve for longevity.
00:07:12
Speaker
And by longevity, we mean more years, but we also mean more quality years, quality living. But put a pin in the phrase physical capacities because I would like to define it for our purposes in the series as well.
00:07:24
Speaker
Back in part one, episode 90 on strength, Sarah had us imagine what we wanted our lives to look like and then how strength as a physical capacity would support what we imagined.
00:07:36
Speaker
And this is what we would like our lives to look like in the final years of our life. So when we are old, the oldest old... um What is it? Young, old? Young, old.
00:07:47
Speaker
visit middle Middle, old. And oldest, old. Yeah, we talk about the differences between young, old, middle, old, and oldest, old in that episode as well, if you're wondering what that means. theres yeah um But um unfortunately, i think...
00:08:00
Speaker
Too few people strength train. I mean, that is backed up by research. Very small percentage of people are meeting the physical activity guidelines for twice weekly whole body strength training. I think it's something around 20, 25 percent.
00:08:13
Speaker
And then I think it gets worse when we look at women, especially older women. In fact, I know that it's worse. Women are less likely to strength train than men and older people are less likely to strength train than younger people. So older women are right in that Venn diagram.
00:08:27
Speaker
Yeah. So for this and various other reasons, Many of them, I think, are complex in that they're wrapped up in the societal and cultural messaging and norms and ideas that people gather about what type of exercise they should be doing based on their age or based on their gender.
00:08:44
Speaker
so it's complex. But it's something we, of course, then also address. frequently on this podcast, Sarah and I
Power Training for Older Adults
00:08:50
Speaker
are on a mission to get more older women lifting heavy shit. And we've gone into great detail about some of these more complex reasons that older women or women in general specifically don't strike train. Check out our series on long and lean, which we will link in the show notes.
00:09:06
Speaker
Okay, so physical capacities. I said that we would put a pin in that. Let's define it. When we say physical capacities, we are referring to measurable physiological qualities that determine how we as people who need to get shit done can function, are able to get shit done.
00:09:24
Speaker
So can we do the physical, sometimes quite physical work of our lives? And can we also engage... in the ideal types of activities we'd like to continue doing through our final years of life, the stuff that gives our life meaning.
00:09:38
Speaker
And so for longevity, if our goal is to be able to live in our house, to live independently, we're going to have to be able to get around up and downstairs, up and out of seats, up and out off the floor. We're going to need to be able to carry things. And if the goal is to live independently and engage in those meaningful activities to give our lives deeper meaning and enjoyment.
00:09:59
Speaker
That could be gardening, hiking, taking care of grandkids, traveling, playing golf, playing any type of sport. Then we're asking, what are the capacities, the physiological qualities that we want to nurture?
00:10:10
Speaker
that we want to grow, that we want to maintain, to be able to continue to do all of this stuff, these activities. In part one, we talked about the physical capacity of strength.
00:10:21
Speaker
We talked about different types of strength. Today, we're talking about power in part two. And then in part three, later in the season, we're talking about endurance or aerobic capacity. So I want to talk about why we're separating out strength and power, because they are often linked or just kind of lumped together, right? But they are two different things.
00:10:41
Speaker
They impact each other, but they're not the same. Strength training is the ability to produce force. And so working on that will increase your force production. Power is about creating that force quickly, right?
00:10:54
Speaker
So it's not just the force, it's force at speed. And not enough older people, as we know, and older women in particular, train strength and even fewer of them train power. But there's a lot of research. I did a very basic search and it was just like so many papers that show that the capacity of power decreases even faster than strength as we get older.
00:11:15
Speaker
And so power becomes this vital part of maintaining independence into our older years. So what is power? And I saw this, Laura wrote this equation, and it gave me just like horrible physics class flashbacks.
00:11:29
Speaker
So power is, the equation is power equals force times velocity, right? It's the ability to generate force quickly, right? Strength times speed. While ah strength training is just about producing as much force as possible, power, it's the amount of force plus how quickly you can produce it.
00:11:46
Speaker
So why in this three-part series about longevity, why we're focusing on power? You need to be able to produce force with strength, but you also need to be able to produce it quickly, which is power, in your day-to-day activities in ways probably that you might not even recognize. Like some of them are somewhat simple activities like just getting up and out of a chair.
00:12:07
Speaker
where you do need a certain amount of speed to produce it, right? Otherwise you're you're going to fail or you're going to fall backwards. And then things that you also might not necessarily consider like a power activity, like if you trip and then catch yourself from that fall, that's a quick reactive type of power. Or slamming the trunk of the car shut, although now they're all automatic, right? But I like that slam. I think it's fun. trip along or like, you know, grabbing your grandchild and swinging them up overhead. These are all power movements.
00:12:32
Speaker
thanks They're going to say grabbing your grandchild and like throwing them into the trunk. Throwing them into the trunk and slamming the door shut and going to Mexico. Child abduction. You always take things to just a delightfully extra level. like You just let Sarah go and you'll end up in Mexico with a kid in your trunk.
00:12:50
Speaker
And you don't even know this kid. You wake up hang in Mexico a car that's not yours with a child you don't know. Sounds like the beginning of a great TV show, right? Anyway, that's strength versus his power.
00:13:01
Speaker
Laurel, did you have anything you wanted to say? Got a little lost in the child abduction. Okay, yeah. So I wanted to also add that in terms of capacities to develop, we've got strength and power, right?
00:13:11
Speaker
We're going to talk a lot about the difference between them in this episode because I feel like the listeners probably have a pretty good handle on what strength is because we talk about it non-freaking stop. yeah so If we can relate strength to power, we might be able to more quickly grasp what power is, but they are separate capacities.
00:13:28
Speaker
yeah So we often hear that strength is the foundation for power. And while it might make sense to approach exercise starting with strength and then moving to power, I think it's actually ultimately not true.
00:13:41
Speaker
I think that saying that strength is the foundation for power is an oversimplification of the way that the body adapts and moves. So while building a house, yes, you need to build the base of the house, the foundation first before you erect the walls. When it comes to human movement, it's a lot more complex than buildings, which is also something we talk about a lot on this podcast.
00:14:00
Speaker
So I don't agree that strength is, quote, the foundation for power in that we need to strength train before working on power. And if this were the case, all children would start strength training before they begin youth sports because different sports and sporting movements require variety of ways of expressing power. But that is definitely not what happens. I speak from experience. like Children frequently do sports before they start strength training. So anyone can start with development of power on its own, separate from strength before they start strength training exclusively. i mean, it's a free country.
00:14:33
Speaker
However, we agree that anyone's ability to express force quickly in a particular movement could definitely be enhanced by some targeted strength training toward that specific end, whatever power movement they're trying to get better at.
00:14:47
Speaker
So I want to say that because you might think, oh, we talked about strength first and now we're talking about power. It sort of reinforces this like linear linear progression of should always start with strength and then move to power. but I don't actually agree with that.
00:14:59
Speaker
And I just wanted to say that. Additionally, when it comes to physical capacities, it's not just strength, power, and aerobic endurance that we might be talking about. There are other physical capacities that we might be considering, which could be the physical capacities of flexibility, balance, and coordination.
00:15:17
Speaker
And these will often also get thrown into the mix as being essential capacities for longevity alongside the three that we named strength, power, and aerobic endurance. And here's what I want to say about that. While I think that flexibility, balance, and coordination are certainly very important capacities to have, and they definitely aid in longevity and quality of life, they're secondary to the primary capacity of the strength, power, and aerobic endurance.
00:15:45
Speaker
In that...
00:15:47
Speaker
they tend to, to a large extent, actually follow naturally from development of the big three. So when you work on strength, you're also working on flexibility, balance, and coordination.
00:16:01
Speaker
When you work on power, you're also working on flexibility, balance, and coordination. When you work at aerobic capacity, depends on what you're doing. In general, and we're going to talk about this a lot in part three, when you have better aerobic capacity, you recover better from all forms of exercise.
00:16:18
Speaker
That is just another way of saying that you're less likely to be injured from all forms of exercise. And it's another way to say that you can probably tolerate more forms of exercise. And it's another way of saying that you will probably be able to adapt better from all forms of exercise because adaptation is just the thing that happens after you recover.
00:16:38
Speaker
So especially, you know, i want to go back to the strength being something that can is a bonus, right? Create more flexibility, can create more balance and coordination in
Balance and Coordination vs. Strength and Endurance
00:16:49
Speaker
your body. This is especially if the strength program, right? Not all programs are created equal, but it's especially if the strength program is well-rounded, meaning it's full body and it's full range of motion strength training. going to be working through your joints, full range of motion.
00:17:04
Speaker
and that it incorporates maybe some exercises that will challenge your stability a bit more in addition to your strength. Training power, as we'll find out, is particularly important for balance, actually, according to research.
00:17:17
Speaker
And then, as I said, maintaining cardiorespiratory fitness not only staves off a whole bunch of metabolic diseases, it also helps you to recover quicker, as I said. And the reason it helps you recover quicker is it basically improves your energy delivery efficiency, the way in which your body is able to deliver energy to the working muscles during exercise.
00:17:36
Speaker
Okay, so I just wanted to say a little bit there about strength does not need to precede power. You can start with power. And I also want to say something about physical capacities and acknowledge that there is more to longevity than just strength, power, and endurance or aerobic capacity.
00:17:52
Speaker
We also want to have flexibility, balance and coordination, but I think it's helpful to think of those as secondary as maybe byproducts. So just to clarify, if you're more of a visual sort of thinker, if you imagine a big circle, this is our Venn diagram, big circle contains these three big capacities, strength, power and cardiorespiratory function.
00:18:13
Speaker
Inside that big circle is another little circle. And that's that subset or secondary capacities of flexibility, balance, and coordination. So what that means is by working on the big circle qualities, the primary capacities, you will also then be working on those other capacities because it's inside the circle.
00:18:33
Speaker
But with that said, you can also just work on flexibility, balance, or coordination just on their own and it's effective, right? So things like yoga, Pilates, dance, right? They all work on these capacities, but they don't involve any really meaningful load or intensity.
00:18:51
Speaker
That's going to vary depending on what kind of yoga, what kind of dance, Pilates, all that kind of stuff. It's always going to hit a limit. We can't then continue to progressively overload the way we can in strength and power training, right? So that means you'll get some of the benefits, there's her strength and power capacities, but not a ton, right?
00:19:09
Speaker
And so there's also this factor where whatever you work on in balance, what they find in research is if you work on, for example, tree pose standing on one leg with your eyes closed,
00:19:20
Speaker
you're going to end up with a really good ability to stand on one leg with your eyes closed. But that doesn't then translate to, oh, I tripped off a curb. Will I catch myself fast enough? And more real life activities are more things like I tripped off a curb.
00:19:35
Speaker
So it's the same thing when we do passive stretching, which is what a lot of, in particular, yoga poses involve. Yes, it's going to increase your range of motion, but it doesn't build strength. It doesn't build stability in that range. It doesn't do much for your ability to perform that range meaningfully in your life, because in your life, it's less about, oh I'm just going to come over here and stand next to the laundry and lie down and do paschimottanasana. No, you have to be able to bend over and then pick the laundry up off the floor and put it in the machine or whatever.
00:20:03
Speaker
Yeah, but Sarah, isn't that why in yoga, when we work on our active range of motion, we get more strength, stability and flexibility altogether from that? Instead of working passively, we could just make the stretches active and then we'd fix the issue of it not being transferable to like load in our life.
00:20:19
Speaker
No.
00:20:22
Speaker
I could just say no. But, you know, again, to an extent, but only to the extent that in real life, you're going to hold your arm out to the side like a warrior two and just stay there. It's not really what you're doing. You might be reaching for something that has some weight, right? And then adding load to it.
00:20:37
Speaker
Yeah. My feeling generally, and I'm thinking that I might do an in-betweeny on this, we're so caught up in this idea that yoga has to be everything for everybody. And I'm like, can we just allow yoga to be Yeah. Just let it be what it is. The asana practice is amazing. And we consistently and repeatedly say we're not here to take a dump on yoga asana practice. We both love it.
00:20:56
Speaker
But why must we force yoga to be the be all and end all for all physical acts exercise? Because it's it's just not right. You know, same if you're let's say you're doing dance and you're learning a very complex.
00:21:07
Speaker
choreography. That's a lot of coordination. It's motor learning. It's a lot of neural learning. It's not going to continue to drive strength or power changes unless you're suddenly like holding onto the grandchild that you just stole from somebody and you're about to like jump and throw them into the trunk of your car. Right. So generally that's not happening with dance. So, so with all of these, they're lacking that progressive overload component. I Yeah, I think it's the progressive overload component. And I like to think of strength, power, and aerobic endurance as the ways that you get these side benefits, but the side benefits are not necessarily the best way to get the big benefits. So we can do yoga and improve our flexibility and our balance for sure, but we're not necessarily going to get stronger or to be able to produce force quickly or to improve our endurance as well.
00:21:53
Speaker
It's certainly, certainly better than being sedentary. Oh my gosh, so much better. And in fact, some styles of yoga could, if you did them regularly enough and progressively worked toward harder versions of some of the poses or a little bit faster paced flow, could certainly go a long way toward helping you meet the physical activity guidelines.
00:22:11
Speaker
for strength and cardio to a point, right? Because then it just becomes really hard for these formats that don't have exercises and sets and reps and ways of externally loading to progressively overload them because it's different every time.
Limitations of Yoga, Dance, and Pilates for Progressive Overload
00:22:25
Speaker
And you're not writing it down so you don't really know how much you did last week and how they're just so much harder to progressively overload, I think is the big thing. And then a lot of them have a ceiling on how much load you can actually be moving against. they're not built for it. They're not built to, the way that we practice yoga and Pilates in particular are not made for the same way that we do strength or power training.
00:22:46
Speaker
Yeah. So, yeah. And we'll talk more about this when we talk about aerobic endurance, that that there definitely are dance classes that I think would help you meet the physical activity guidelines for aerobic endurance. Absolutely.
00:22:57
Speaker
i mean, Zumba classes, things like that, 100%. So we don't want to say that the dance classes or even yoga and Pilates don't contribute to increases in the big three capacities. They certainly could.
00:23:08
Speaker
They're just not the lowest hanging fruit for how to do it. Right. Exactly. Okay. So to build strength, power, or cardio capacity in a way that meaningfully impacts longevity, both the intensity and the volume of that exercise must be sufficient for the person doing
Essentials of Progressive Overload
00:23:25
Speaker
the exercise, right? So we'll talk more about it, but intensity is basically how hard the exercise or movement feels.
00:23:31
Speaker
It can come down to how much load is being moved or acting as resistance. It can come down to how quickly the movement is performed. It can come down to intent of effort, like how hard are you trying?
00:23:44
Speaker
And then volume is how much of that exercise you're doing. So this is typically measured within the span of a week in research. So how much of this did you do in a week? That would be how volume is defined.
00:23:56
Speaker
So with regards to what's sufficient in terms of intensity and volume, it's always going to depend on the person. And then it's always also going to be changing. It's a moving target because as we apply the right stimulus to each individual to meet them where they are, that individual's capacity starts to improve which means what was sufficient in the beginning is no longer sufficient.
00:24:19
Speaker
And they're going to need increase either intensity or volume or both. And this is really what progressive overload is. It is to continue to challenge the person as their capacity improves in order to continue to drive changes, to to continue to drive adaptations.
00:24:38
Speaker
All right. So to keep improving strength, power and endurance, we must gradually increase either intensity, volume or both, adjusting in proportion to each other and the individual's progress. So we wouldn't probably increase intensity and volume at the same time. We would pick one and do that for maybe a week or two or three or couple months and then We would maybe hold off on increasing the one and then start increasing the other.
00:25:02
Speaker
And we do this in proportion to the individual's progress. It's responsive. OK, it's not like this is the recipe and this is how you make the fitness cake. It's like, how did the fitness land with you last week? How are you feeling? What are you capable of now?
00:25:17
Speaker
And now let's adjust accordingly. Right. Right. So as workloads start to feel easier, the stimulus must rise. yeah um If the workloads are feeling too hard, it must come down, right? Or we're going to end up with injury. Right.
00:25:30
Speaker
All right. So these adjustments to intensity and volume, they're designed to meet the individual where they are and to hit the moving target of a person's fitness, of a person's current capacity.
Programming for Strength Gains
00:25:40
Speaker
And so this all comes down to programming.
00:25:43
Speaker
Programming. Yeah. And you know what? It's not sexy. Yeah. And it doesn't make for a good Instagram reel because it's really about just putting in the work, right? So let's say the intensity got changed from one week to the next. Now you're working at this, maybe it's a greater volume or a greater load, and you're just responding to that work and doing a bit more work. then maybe a couple of weeks later,
00:26:08
Speaker
It's the same lift. It's the same exercise, right It's the same thing. So it's not about doing the most cool looking balancing pose or combination. Those are all fun to do. I love stuff like that.
00:26:19
Speaker
But it's not going to do anything to impact that progressive overload because it's, again, it's really about this kind of like day in and day out. It's very like... you know, the seven dwarves.
00:26:31
Speaker
Hi ho, hi ho. It's off to work we go, right? It's about continuously doing it over a period of time. It's a very boring thing to look at. That's why you don't see a lot of Instagram reels of people just benching for six months. But you have to engage in the same activity and then make these progressive overload changes in order to drive strength, power, right?
00:26:50
Speaker
Aerobic capacity, if that's what the exercise is. That's what really makes the improvements meaningful. right? It's not pretty, but it works, right? Strength and power endurance is not reliant on something looking like something. It's just the consistent application of these principles and progressively challenging your body over time.
00:27:09
Speaker
And whether it's strength or power or endurance, it's the process. yeah That's what matters, right? It's the programming and the process of going through planned, thought out programming that's going to take these capacities and improve them meaningfully.
00:27:23
Speaker
Yeah. And I know I'm not alone in saying that I think I, at least in the past, tended to think that it was really about the exercises or was about the workout styles or formats and that there was something special about this particular exercise or this particular format, apart from just it looked cool or I wanted to do it, but this is really how you get fit. Orange Theory is really how you do And CrossFit is really how you do it. And that's what held the secret to unlocking the changes that we wanted or that I wanted.
00:27:49
Speaker
And while exercises and formats and like the way that workouts are structured certainly affects the outcome, I think of them a little bit like the ingredients in a recipe. They're going to affect the flavor. The reality, though, is that it's the dose of the ingredients actually that matters the most for how the dish tastes. Because like you could take...
00:28:09
Speaker
a tiny itty bitty little bit of onion and put it in a chocolate cake and it wouldn't matter. Right. I thought you were going to say poop. Is that an ingredient you frequently cook with? It's not, but I heard something very disturbing about a celebrity involving poop that I'm not going to share. oh Oh God, please, please. I'm so glad I'm saying please, but I'm really thinking thank you. Okay.
00:28:29
Speaker
um So the doe the dose is really what matters yeah yeah so much. And when we say dose, we mean intensity, how much, and we mean volume, how much. And then what Sarah's saying, long-term consistent effort, strategic approach that's about responding, not about following some pre-written program as though this is the blueprint. No, it's about how are you responding?
00:28:52
Speaker
We're stressing this early on in the episode for a couple of reasons. We haven't really even started talking about power yet. Have you noticed? on proof But the reason is that, ok many people, especially older individuals, mistakenly believe that power exercises, think kettlebell swings, medicine ball, plyometrics, things like that, that they're dangerous, that they're really only for younger people.
00:29:13
Speaker
And the truth is, like strength, power can be developed by anyone when properly programmed and progressed. The key is adjusting exercise dosage to match individual abilities properly.
00:29:26
Speaker
But I think we have a very, very poor and at times I think unhealthy idea of how to dose exercise in general. um um Really unrealistic idea of how to do it.
00:29:38
Speaker
um It's a little bit like binge and purge. I feel like we're like, I'm going to get. And then we just fucking binge on exercise and then we are injured. So we're purging and we're just like sitting there yeah healing and doing nothing. Right. It's like very extreme.
00:29:52
Speaker
But I think we especially have a very poor understanding of how to dose power. Yes. Even poorer than strength, even poorer than aerobic exercise. Power exercise in general, and this is why I think power exercise in general tends to come with a higher fatigue cost.
00:30:06
Speaker
What
Research on Power Training Benefits
00:30:07
Speaker
does that mean? It leaves you feeling more fatigued. It seems like you didn't do very much, but then the next day you're like, I must have done a lot because I'm so fatigued, even more so than heavy strength training, even more so than moderate intensity cardio.
00:30:19
Speaker
High intensity cardio shares a lot of similarities with power, right? Because there's power produced in high intensity cardio. So what we'll talk quite a bit about how power exercise impacts the body differently, why we might have a higher fatigue cost from it, and how we might need to approach it differently than we do other forms of exercise, especially if we have not engaged a whole lot in power exercise, and especially if we know that we tend to overdo it with exercise.
00:30:46
Speaker
Or we just tend to be a little bit more sensitive to new forms of exercise, where we like a little bit goes a little too far of a long way for us sometimes. we're like, crap. I started this thing that was supposed to be good for me and I'm fucking injured, right? Right. Like way too hard.
00:31:02
Speaker
Yeah. And I think as well, we don't see a lot of examples of power type exercises in social media or just around us in the gym. We don't see a lot of the early progressions of it. We tend to see the more dramatic advanced versions. And then so we're like, oh, I can't possibly bound across the floor like that. Therefore, that's not for me. It Right. what What we know from research is that power training is linked to decreased falls, faster reaction times, and improved neuromuscular efficiency. and we're going to talk later on a little bit more about what that means.
00:31:33
Speaker
I found two papers that really summed up all of this. I found a bunch of papers, but there are two that I'm highlighting here because these are both meta-analyses and systematic reviews. So these are papers that took all the other research out there and summarized what they show. And so that means that the highest possible quality of research, right?
00:31:50
Speaker
The first one is called Effectiveness of Power Training Compared to Strength Training in Older Adults, a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis by El Haduchi in 2022. And we'll link these in the show notes. So this is a review of 15 different research papers, 583 participants.
00:32:05
Speaker
They tested them on a variety of some of the standardized tests that we talked about in part one of this series on strength. We talked about the timed up and go, sit to stand. um Interestingly, what I learned from this paper is that there's actually no standard test of power.
00:32:20
Speaker
currently And that one of the things the paper says is like, we should figure out one of these, right? But they found that power training showed an increased improvement in muscle power and activity tests better than just strength training, right? So people performed on these tests like the timed up and go.
00:32:37
Speaker
better having done some power training versus just strength training. That was interesting. And then the other paper that I looked at is called Effects of Power Training on Functional Capacity Related to Fall Risk in Older Adults, a Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Jimenez Lupion et 2023, right? so So these are pretty recent.
00:32:55
Speaker
And it found that power training increases the kind of functional capacity that you need things like reactive stepping, right? If you lose your balance, the ability to put your other foot forward and catch yourself, right? That's called reactive stepping.
00:33:06
Speaker
That training power increases these capacities better than any other type of exercise for older adults, right? And also generally, higher levels of power are associated with greater physical independence for older adults. And physical independence matters because it leads to independence with, as Laurel mentioned earlier, all of your activities of daily living, all of your recreational activities,
00:33:30
Speaker
Your hobbies, socializing, driving your car, having sex, traveling, all the things that we still want to do throughout our lifespan. Power really matters. We are going to get into power.
00:33:41
Speaker
We're going to try to better understand it. Like I said, we're going to try to understand it as distinct from strength, but with a lot of crossover with strength. And additionally, just as there are different types of strength, which we discussed in episode 90, part one of the series linked in the show notes, we'll discuss how there are also different types of power as well. And I'm going to link a paper in the show notes by lead investigator Lachlan James. And the article is titled Strength Classification and Diagnosis. Not all strength is created equal. Great. Okay. Before we get into the different types of power, let's just do a little review ah in case you didn't get to listen to the first episode yet. So we're going to review different types of strength.
00:34:22
Speaker
The first one is called maximum isometric strength. And this is the highest amount of force that can be produced against an unyielding, meaning unmoving object. This is tested in a single max effort process.
00:34:36
Speaker
It doesn't have a time component, right? and You're just going to do it as hard as you can. One of the tests is what's called an isometric mid-five pole, where it's like a barbell that's sitting in a rack that's been tied down in some way to the rack, and you are trying to pull it up, and it's not moving, right?
00:34:52
Speaker
In a rehab or a research capacity, this is tested with a what's called a dynamometer, where you can create resistance against an unmovable thing. But this again is this idea of if you've ever had a jar that you just cannot open, you are do that is maximal isometric strength. It should be moving the jar lid, but it's not, right? And so you are just trying to put as much force into it as you can, but nothing's going anywhere.
00:35:16
Speaker
So that's one type of strength. And then another type of strength is something called heavy maximal dynamic strength. And that is the ability to express the highest amount of force in dynamic conditions, meaning you're moving.
00:35:28
Speaker
Right. So it's not static now. Now it's moving. And this is with very heavy loads. There's not a time component. Right. You can take as long as you want to do that one lift. Right. And these kind of these kind of tests are assessed using one rep max testing or five rep max testing, depending on your performance.
00:35:45
Speaker
community. This is things like your deadlift, your squat, your RDL, like all of these lifts where we can continue to add weight to it and see what is the maximum amount of something that you can pull from the floor to your mid-phys in a deadlift, for example.
00:36:01
Speaker
So that's that. And then we have something called strength endurance. And strength endurance is the ability of a muscle or group of muscles to sustain repeated contractions or maintain one static contraction over an extended period without significant fatigue, right?
00:36:18
Speaker
So the focus with this is this sort of sustained performance, not maximal strength or power, right? So like holding a yoga pose for one minute or i don't know why jazzercise came to mind, but it felt fun, low intensity, doing a jazzercise class where you're not holding one thing, you're doing repeated contraction.
00:36:36
Speaker
So because the focus is on the length of time that you're doing the exercise, it automatically follows that the load cannot be more than light. um And then just this idea of muscle hypertrophy, right the ability to make your muscles physically get bigger.
00:36:50
Speaker
It can really happen with any kind of strength training. And there's a lot of argument back and forth about what range of repetitions is the best way to achieve it. That's not what this episode is about. So Anakma spent a bunch of time on this, but most likely you're getting the best muscle hypertrophy in that kind of moderate rep range. But even that is argued, like what is that moderate rep range? And so I'm just going to step away from that because that's not the point of this episode, but I just wanted to include that a little bit. Cool.
00:37:13
Speaker
Thanks for that. review of strength. Remember, we're comparing power and strength to say like they're different, but we're going to talk about where
Strength vs. Power Analogy
00:37:23
Speaker
the overlap is. So we are now leaving the topic of strength to now start to talk about power.
00:37:28
Speaker
Can I make a comparison that might make some sense for some people? Yeah, please. So if you've ever spent any time on the internet or other places trying to figure out what's going on with your eyebrows,
00:37:43
Speaker
I knew I was going to say the word eyebrows. Laura was going to like, what? You may have heard this phrase, which is that your eyebrows are not siblings, but they are cousins.
00:37:54
Speaker
So they're not going to be the same. They have similar, they're both on your face, but they look a little different and they're supposed to look a little different. So that's the difference between strength and eyebrow. It's like your eyebrows are, they're strength and power, not strength and eyebrows.
00:38:08
Speaker
One of your eyebrows is strength. The other eyebrow is power. Can we change our series to be about strength and facial hair? Yeah, absolutely. I've got this one mole that has a hair growing out of it that drives me mad. Every now and then just got to pull that sucker out.
00:38:20
Speaker
Get ready for your face to get a little more hairy when you go through menopause. Enjoy that. Nice. way All right, so now we're we're talking about power. So we're going to think of power in relationship to force and speed.
00:38:35
Speaker
Okay, so here is where I want to point you toward the show notes for a helpful graph. It's called the force velocity curve. Okay, so the force velocity curve is a curved line on a graph, and the graph has a y and an x axis, and if your eyes are already crossing,
00:38:55
Speaker
just imagine the letter L for Laurel. l for Laurel. Okay, so the L has two lines, the vertical line and the horizontal line, right? And they meet at a right angle. Okay, so the vertical line is force and what's represented there is that as you go up the line, force is increasing and the horizontal line is the axis representing velocity. And so as you go from the corner of the L away from it, you're seeing an increase in velocity.
00:39:21
Speaker
Okay, so The force velocity curve really tries to show a relationship between, and here's where I'm going to change it a little bit, maybe not super scientific, but I think this is a more helpful way of understanding it, which it shows the relationship between the amount of resistance you can overcome. Okay, we're going to say that's the force, right? That's the vertical line on the L and the speed at which you can move move while overcoming that resistance.
00:39:45
Speaker
It's not called the resistance velocity curve. It's called the force velocity curve. But when you see force, I want you to think resistance. Okay, what are you actually trying to move against? Or what is the resistance you're moving? It might be a barbell. It might be your body weight.
00:39:59
Speaker
Okay, when we move quickly, we cannot overcome a large amount of resistance while doing it. And this is more nerdy than what we have time for, but it basically comes down to the fact that your body needs time to generate the amount of muscle tension you'd need to overcome ah large amount of resistance.
00:40:16
Speaker
So force slash resistance is high and velocity is very low. The speed must be slow. Because the resistance is high. So this is where we have maximal force production at the top of the vertical line of the L, but close to the right angle of the L. And we can only move slowly when the resistance is high.
00:40:37
Speaker
On the other end of the curve, okay, it looks like a banana, right? With the stem of the banana pointing up and the little... I don't know, butthole of the banana? The end that actually you're supposed to open them from? Did you know that? Oh, whatever.
00:40:51
Speaker
The butthole of the banana is pointing to the right. On the other end, in the butthole of the banana, we are moving at very fast speeds, but the butthole is very low down. Okay, so it means force slash resistance is low.
00:41:06
Speaker
I think all of this will be made easier if listeners take a moment and go look at this graph that Laurel is trying valiantly to describe because it is exactly a banana with its stamina bubble. But until you take a look at it, that might not entirely be clear where the banana is. Okay, so this is not that deep, all right? We know that when we lift something heavy, we we can't sprint.
00:41:28
Speaker
And we know that if we want to get strong, we can't lift light things. So at the slow, heavy end of the curve, you're lifting heavy loads. You're exhibiting max strength. This is a heavy squat, a deadlift.
00:41:39
Speaker
You're overcoming a lot of resistance, but your speed of movement is slow because the load is heavy. One way, Sarah and I gauge, if a bone density course student has correctly selected their load is based on their speed of movement while doing the exercise. if they're just flying through the reps and it's supposed to be a heavy lift, or if they're flying through the reps at the end of a moderate set even, we might suggest that they try going a little heavier. We ask them how much weight is on the bar. you know We start to dig a little deeper to find out like, is the load they selected appropriate?
00:42:09
Speaker
For strength, is it maybe a little too light? And sometimes we figure out that there's a very good reason why it's light. And other times they're like, oh, okay. And they suddenly can lift like 20 more pounds because they just didn't realize that, okay, I need to pay attention to how fast I'm able to move in addition to all these other things I may be experiencing.
00:42:26
Speaker
That's not always the case. And when someone's moving quickly, it means that the load is light for them because everyone is going to exhibit their effort in a different way, but it can be a clue. okay Now, as we move toward the middle of the banana, okay,
00:42:39
Speaker
the amount of resistance that we have to overcome has decreased. It's not super high. It's moderate, maybe. This means that our speed of movement can be a little faster. It's maybe moderate.
00:42:49
Speaker
And this is where we start to go from where we were working on maximum force. Now we start working on power, the ability to overcome some amount of resistance with some speed attached to it. If we keep going toward the butthole, we go from power to pure speed.
00:43:06
Speaker
This is when we are sprinting. This is when we are racing to extract whatever your child or dog has put into their mouth, out of their mouth. And in order to do that, we might set down the second child and take the backpack off and make our body as light as possible so that we can get across the other side of the park where we notice that our child is holding a foreign object that they're about to insert into their mouth.
00:43:28
Speaker
You got to get their... You better become very light. Yeah. I have never sprinted faster than the time a patient of mine was leaving the clinic and I saw her start to lose her balance. And I, I honestly, I think I might have actually flown at one point. Like I've never moved faster across 30 feet to position myself to catch someone.
00:43:49
Speaker
um So yeah, that's that that's the butthole of the banana end. So that Lachlan James paper allows us to get even a little bit more nuanced than our incredibly nuanced already description of a banana with a stem and a butthole, because we're going to distinguish between qualities like maximum force and then the qualities involved when We're going for faster movement. So if you imagine the banana, there's five points along it.
00:44:16
Speaker
Some of them are mostly strength. Some of them are mostly power. Some of them are kind of a mix. This is, again, where I said your two eyebrows, right? They're not the same as each other. They're related.
00:44:26
Speaker
They have slightly different features. So we're going to specifically look. they're on the same but They're on the same banana. I mean, face. That's right. now but Now the banana has eyebrows. That's right. It's coming to life. And a butthole.
00:44:40
Speaker
I mean, what more do you need? you've got eyebrows and a butthole, that's really it. You're literally fine. There's so many places that my brain went and I'm like, reel it in, reel it in.
00:44:52
Speaker
Lifting heavy and impact training research proven ways to build bone mineral density and guard against osteoporosis. In our six month live online progressive barbell course, we teach you to do just that.
00:45:04
Speaker
If you'd like to sample a free workout from this progressive barbell course, join us. April 26th at 11 a.m. Eastern, 8 a.m. Pacific. If you already have barbells, great. And if you don't, bring your weights and a dowel or a broomstick. You will receive live feedback on technique if you want it.
00:45:21
Speaker
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00:45:33
Speaker
Okay, so for the purposes of today's episode, we're going to look at the three categories of power that are on that banana curve. So on the slower end, right, closer to the stem end of the banana, we have our first category of power that's called explosive strength.
00:45:50
Speaker
So this is the ability to produce a high level of force in a short time period against a relatively heavy load, not as heavy as a max strength. It's not the stem itself, but it's in the fruit of the banana closer to the stem. That's right.
00:46:03
Speaker
And so this might be something like a loaded jump, right? Or a kettlebell swing or an Olympic lift, like a snatch or a clean. Can I just interject and say, listeners, you may from time to time hear Sarah's 99-year-old neighbor, Victor, walking around while she talks.
00:46:21
Speaker
We apologize for any inconvenience this causes you, but I want you to remember that Victor is the oldest old and basically a living example of longevity. And that man can walk. He really can. And he can walk in hard bottomed shoes on a wood floor. Okay.
00:46:38
Speaker
So, but you know, here's where it's already confusing enough, if you understand it, because we've got a type of power, but it's called explosive strength, right? So we're defining power using the strength term.
00:46:51
Speaker
The other thing that's confusing is that the act of doing something called power lifting It's actually had nothing to do with the capacity of power. Powerlifting is the stem of the banana, right? It's the deadlift.
00:47:05
Speaker
It's the squat. It's your bench press, right? That's your like 1RM kind of thing. That's powerlifting, but it has nothing to do with power, which is really annoying. And you might be wondering what the butthole is, and it is the 100 meter dash.
00:47:16
Speaker
Yes. Okay. He just wanted to say butthole. I'm about 11 years old right now. Okay. So stay on track. So our next category, right we have explosive strength. The next one is going to be faster than explosive strength, but not the fastest power, right?
00:47:31
Speaker
And so this is called fast maximal dynamic strength. And this is the ability to express force, maximally, with either a minimal or no external load over sort of a relatively quick time period. And and we're talking about things like 300 milliseconds or greater, right? That's considered relatively quick.
00:47:51
Speaker
So this is something like a Like when you see someone do a long jump, right? There's this longer ground contact time, like a vertical jump, like a squat jump, right? You do it. There's more wind up. This is something where you might have a bit of load.
00:48:04
Speaker
So we have the first one, explosive strength, which is like a relatively higher force and but a slower velocity. Now we have like the middle of the banana where it's a little bit higher velocity and as a result, a little bit lower resistance, right?
00:48:17
Speaker
And then the last one is called reactive strength. This is the fastest strength that you can have. It does not involve any external load or resistance.
00:48:28
Speaker
And so this is something like as simple as what I talked about earlier, that reactive stepping, right? It's something where it's a much faster movement. You don't have that kind of wind up time. You have a much faster moment of contact with the ground.
00:48:42
Speaker
So like if you've ever done pogo's, right, where you just bang, bang, bang, very, very fast. um And ah that's really where we would consider it to be like a plyometric.
00:48:53
Speaker
In plyometrics, like how you decide what is plyometric or not is open for debate. a lot of people say, oh, true plyometrics is the fast ground contact time. And then other people like, no, plyometrics is when you're using the stretch shortening cycle, which we'll talk about. Anyway, historically speaking, this is how true plyometrics were defined by ah very influential, i think, track and field coach, actually, from Russia. Okay. Vertichansky, I think. I might have said his name wrong. But anyway, yeah, plyometrics.
00:49:19
Speaker
We did an entire episode about plyometrics. More bang for your bones, which we will link in the show notes if you want to learn more. about that, but definitely plyometrics and power 100% overlap.
00:49:30
Speaker
And the episode on plyometrics that we did was really trying to look at how impact training is different from plyometrics, how you can have impact without the plyometric stretch shortening cycle, again, which we're going to talk about. all Right. So when using resistance training to enhance capacities for a sport or even a performance art like dance, something skilled trainers will pay attention to.
Power in Sports and Everyday Life
00:49:53
Speaker
Right. We just spend a lot of time talking about the curve, the banana, and at what point along this force velocity continuum, these certain ways of expressing strength and power occur.
00:50:03
Speaker
Something that a skilled athletic trainer will pay attention to is what coin along the force velocity continuum do the sporting movements of the client or the performing arts movements of the client fall? What are they having to do with what type of force production are they having to do? What is the time limit for these movements? Do they need to happen quickly? Do they actually, there's a little bit more time for them to take place?
00:50:23
Speaker
And what is the resistance that this person will be meeting while moving? So is this a male, typically a male ballerina who's lifting the female ballerina, right? Or is it the female ballerina? Is it the American football lineman who's charging through hundreds of pounds of force of their opponent?
00:50:41
Speaker
Is it lightning quick ability of the soccer player to hop on and off of one foot change direction all while dribbling a soccer ball and keeping it away from their opponents? In a cheerleading team, the base, right, the person who's throwing The person up in the air, they have a much different power requirement than the tumbler who's just going like across the floor. of Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Right.
00:50:59
Speaker
The first one is, again, is that more explosive strength. That tumbler is more sort of like reactive, probably a little bit of that fast maximal dynamic. Right. So even within power, there's different capacities that we can train based on what people need. So all of these different performers of dance or sport, they'd be displaying different types of power, ranging from explosive strength to maximal dynamic strength to reactive strength.
00:51:28
Speaker
And so that athletic trainer would look at that and go, what type of exercises can I give this person to to develop this general ability to produce force given these time constraints?
00:51:40
Speaker
Right. And or given the amount of resistance that they're meeting in their sport, how can I add resistance to this production of force? and speed to this production of force. Now, that's not to say I'm going to start teaching the linemen in my strength training sessions how to crouch and ram into things.
00:51:57
Speaker
That's what they're working on in their practice. And I'm not teaching the ballerina how to dance. God, that would be terrible if I tried to teach ballerina how to dance. And I'm not teaching the soccer player how to do soccer. And we're not doing sporting drills. We're working on Exercises that can be organized into sets and progressively overloaded to bolster their their general physical preparedness for their sport.
00:52:21
Speaker
How does this relate in everyday life, right? Let's say you're not ah an American football ball player or a ballerina. How do these different types of power show up in our daily life that we should then also train?
00:52:33
Speaker
So if we think about this explosive strength, right, which is that first category, something like throwing a heavy trash bag up into a dumpster you need the power to give it a little bit of speed so that you actually make the shot, right? Taking that suitcase and throwing it into the, or maybe gently putting it into overhead compartment, right? right um One of the reasons we we encourage folks to get a rack with their barbell is so that they then don't have to grapple with the amount of explosive strength they would need to get the barbell from the ground to their shoulders to do things like front squats or strict presses, right? Right. We think that there's a lot of value in learning to do that. It's called Olympic weightlifting, but that's not what we teach in bone density of course. yeah We teach heavy strength training, right? so
00:53:17
Speaker
So the rack is what makes it so that people don't have to... right right work on their cleans right right uh all right so then we've got the next ah Closer to the butthole on the banana.
00:53:30
Speaker
Faster speeds, lighter weights than what we we're working with explosive strength. We have fast maximal dynamic strength. We need both force and speed and we're striking a balance between moving something that's relatively heavy and moving it quite quickly.
00:53:42
Speaker
So this, depending on the person, could be getting off the floor quickly, shoveling snow, right? Which is something I'm used to be familiar with and no longer have to worry about, thank God. Climbing over a fence or a wall. Hopefully you're going to give yourself a little bit of ah some momentum to get your body up. over that barrier, jumping up to grab something off of a high shelf. You might like crouch down a little bit and really give yourself a push into the ground to get up high enough.
00:54:08
Speaker
Imagine doing any of these things slowly and you'll see how they are. I'm you know, they're on the continuum somewhere in the middle, right? Like you you need you need to be able to produce force to overcome the resistance of your body weight or the snow, but you can't do it slowly. It's just not going to happen, right? So then this is a sort of middle category now aren what we're when we're giving examples of daily life activities.
00:54:36
Speaker
where it's a little bit of that fast, maximal dynamic strength, and it's a little bit of that reactive strength. So again, a little bit closer to the butthole of the banana. But this might be something like if you ever just are hopping up onto a curb or like you're feeling really energized and you're like hopping up the stairs, you're not just walking.
00:54:53
Speaker
Or like I used to do all the time when I lived in New York, if somebody was really slow walking up the stairs out of the subway, I would start bounding up the stairs next to them because I'd be like, I've got to get off from behind you. You're making me crazy, right? That kind of thing.
00:55:06
Speaker
Laurel cannot relate. That's why she's laughing. um Something like jumping over a puddle. my My dog, Henry, who I adore, is a runner, we have discovered. We have never trained him to be off leash outside. And there have been a few times where I've accidentally left the gate open.
00:55:20
Speaker
He's gone out and he just, pe he's gone down the street. Yes, it makes me, it's a horrible. And it definitely is not fun. I've caught, I've managed to catch him every time, but he thinks it's a hilarious game. So for that, you need a little bit of that fast dynamic stream.
00:55:34
Speaker
Right. you're going to get there fast. Let's say you hear a sudden noise in the middle of the night and you like jump out of bed to investigate it. Right. So that's somewhere in between that fast, maximal dynamic strength and then that pure reactive strength.
00:55:46
Speaker
Yeah. And we're just fudging in here because, of course, we have no way of measuring this, but we're trying to relate this to everyday life because this is not an episode about sports and it's not an episode about dance. It's an episode about longevity. So we're talking about like everyday type movements that we need to maintain and maybe enhance to be able to live for a long time with quality of life.
00:56:06
Speaker
Yeah. And then finally, we've got that last category, reactive strength. What I like to think of as the oh shit moments, like, yeah. This is catching yourself from a fall. This is reacting to catching a falling object. Think fast and move fast.
00:56:20
Speaker
Breaking a fall with your arm. ah Reactive push. Jumping out of the way of a moving object. Oh, shit, the bus. I didn't look both ways. Leaping or lunging to avoid some collision. so Hopefully you can see how all of these show up in sporting movements and very impressive high levels of athletic prowess, but they also show up in everyday life.
00:56:38
Speaker
So strength and power, as you're maybe hearing, are not the same, but they're not entirely separate. Power is strength expressed quickly. Power is a product. of force times velocity.
00:56:49
Speaker
The amount of force you can produce is that goes up, power goes up. The velocity at which you can move the resistance is that goes up, power goes up, right? So here's where they converge, right? So here's where being stronger might make you more powerful. Someone with a higher 1RM squat, 1RM being one rep max, the total amount of weight they can lift in the squat one time and one time only before needing to rest for quite a bit of time, if that's higher, that amount on the bar is higher, they will typically have greater power potential in jumping or sprinting than somebody who has perhaps a lower 1RM for their squat.
00:57:22
Speaker
However, that strength doesn't necessarily transfer directly into power because you'd also need to develop the explosiveness, the ability to move that weight quickly.
00:57:32
Speaker
And that's going to involve you working with submaximal loads, not maximal loads, and moving quickly against that resistance. so Strength training can improve power to a point. Raising your maximal strength raises your potential for power.
00:57:44
Speaker
But at a certain point, if you're only focusing on strength, you're only moving weight slowly. This is going to limit your power potential in your power games because it doesn't improve the speed component of power.
00:57:55
Speaker
So let's take a closer look at the specific adaptations that are taking place when training either strength or power. And in episode 90, we discussed a few of the many neuromuscular adaptations that take place from strength training.
00:58:08
Speaker
But I want to talk about how some of these are also shared by power. And then at the same time, training power is going to emphasize some totally different separate adaptations from strength. We're not going to be naming everything, going highlight a few important ones.
00:58:22
Speaker
right So as we know, strength is about producing force. Power is about expressing that force quickly. If you want to move well for life, you really need both. So a big part of power and strength is something called neural drive.
00:58:37
Speaker
And neural drive is how big of a signal you are getting from your brain, as well as the firing speed of that signal. This is going to determine how many motor units are recruited, right? So the motor units are like the individual pieces of your muscles, let's say.
00:58:52
Speaker
How many are recruited for this activity and how quickly that then fires the muscle to do what we want it to do. So with heavy strength training, we improve our neural drive because we get our body to recruit more motor units to be able to pick up the heavy thing, for example.
00:59:07
Speaker
when we're training heavy lifting, these motor units, they don't need to activate quickly. They just need to fire in the right sequence in order to be able to pick up the heavy weight, right? So it's less about doing it quickly and it's more about sustaining that force for whatever amount of time it takes to lift the weight, right? Because there's not a time component.
00:59:24
Speaker
Yeah. So now for power training, we still recruit all those motor units, but the real difference is how quickly we get them to fire. So in power training, we're focused on speed of contraction, and that's where rate coding, rate coding comes in.
00:59:40
Speaker
which is an aspect of neural drive we don't work on as much with heavy strain training. Rate coding is how quickly your nervous system activates motor neurons to cause the muscle fibers of those motor neurons to contract.
00:59:51
Speaker
Think of rate coding a little bit like the speed of a Wi-Fi signal. Sarah and I were just talking about how our Wi-Fi is cutting in and out. So the faster the signal, the faster the connection. In the body, rate coding refers to how fast your motor units, your motor neurons, fire signals to activate the muscle fibers.
01:00:10
Speaker
The faster they fire, the more force you can generate in less time. So both strength and power training improve rate coding, but power training really cranks it up. In strength training, you're firing motor units, but they don't need to fire rapidly. They're just firing to produce maximum force, like in a heavy squat, Power training, on the other hand, is all about firing those motor units quickly to generate explosive force. So now improving our rate coding, the speed that we get these motor units to fire, that is the key to improving something called rate of force development, which we're going to just refer to as RFD.
Rate of Force Development in Power Training
01:00:44
Speaker
Rate of force development, it's exactly what it sounds like, right? It's how quickly can you produce force development? once a muscle contraction has begun. So the faster that you can develop that force, the more explosive you can be. Think of a ice sprinter exploding off the block, a swimmer exploding off the whatever the thing is called that they are on.
01:01:05
Speaker
We're going to dive into the water, right? Squatting down and then jumping explosively up, right? So strength training improves our force production, but power training is really the best way to ensure that we can produce that force quickly.
01:01:18
Speaker
Athletes whose sports require explosive and fast movements, they're not just in the gym doing heavy deadlifts. They're also training with jumps and sprints and Olympic lifting. Cool. And then we have intermuscular coordination, aka being able to move efficiently.
01:01:34
Speaker
Both strength and power training improve intermuscular, so the way your muscles coordinate together, intermuscular coordination. Any type of coordination you're improving upon is specific. It's always specific to the exercise you're improving your coordination in, but also the load that you're lifting within that exercise and the speed of movement at which you're performing that exercise.
01:01:55
Speaker
So i often hear yoga teachers talk about how great yoga is for improving coordination and Pilates teachers and dance, right? And it's true, right? It's wonderful for improving coordination, but it's improving coordination specifically for moving through the yoga poses, through the Pilates exercises, um through the dance choreography.
01:02:16
Speaker
It doesn't mean improving coordination for the purpose of producing powerful movements necessarily or movements against large amounts of resistance necessarily. So we already discussed increased motor unit recruitment. Your body gets better at using more muscle fibers at once to produce force. We also get improved timing and synchronization of muscle activation, part of that coordination piece.
01:02:36
Speaker
Your muscles learn to work together at the right time for smooth and powerful movements. We also get more efficient force transfer between muscles. So the energy created in one muscle group is better passed on to the next muscle group, which happens through so The connection between the muscles, which is that soft tissue connection, fascia, right? We love fascia. We love to poeticize it.
01:02:58
Speaker
But yeah, it's helping those movements flow more smoothly together. That if efficient force transfer is part of the coordination piece. You get better at activating the stabilizing muscles that hold your body more steady when you're doing the exercise.
01:03:11
Speaker
Power training takes all of this a step further by also optimizing the stretch shortening cycle. So we talked about the stretch shortening cycle in episode 37, Plyometrics, more bang for your bones.
01:03:24
Speaker
We already mentioned it, linked in the show notes.
Stretch Shortening Cycle Enhancements
01:03:27
Speaker
To review the stretch shortening cycle, You know, let's imagine you're getting ready to jump up into the air. Before you actually jump, you're going to wind up the movement. You're going to bend your knees. You're going to lower your body, kind of like you're crouching down. And this is the eccentric phase or the stretch phase of the jump, stretch shortening cycle, right? Your muscles are lengthening. And as they do, they are storing energy, similarly to how a rubber band stores energy when you stretch it.
01:03:52
Speaker
Then when you explode up to jump, your muscles quickly shorten and release that stored energy. Your soft tissues release that stored energy. This is the concentric phase, the shortening phase, where your muscles contract to drive your body weight down into the floor so that the force is then transferred back up into your body and you leave the ground. Stretch shortening cycle.
01:04:11
Speaker
SSC. Another component to the stretch shortening cycle is that transition between the stretching and shortening phase. So this is where the analogy of the rubber band doesn't really work as well, because unlike a rubber band, when you pull the band apart, stretch it, you store that energy. When you let it go, contracts, releases that energy.
01:04:28
Speaker
And the time between pulling it apart and letting it go can be as long as you want it to, really. But in the human body, it can't. The time between stretching your tissues and then shortening your tissues for the SSC to be additive, to add to your force production, it has to be quick.
01:04:45
Speaker
This... It's called the amortization phase. It's called the transition. It has to be quick. So when you crouch down to jump up into the air, if you crouch down and just pause, you're going to lose all of the energy stored in your soft tissues as heat.
01:04:59
Speaker
And that energy won't be used then as force. It won't be used as additive force your ability to jump off the ground. So we need to crouch down and then quickly reverse that movement and jump up. And we get that additive force from the soft tissues recoil.
01:05:11
Speaker
plyometrics, but really any type of fast movement utilizes the SSC, right? So swinging a kettlebell, Olympic barbell lifts, anything where you're jumping up onto a box or jumping down or jumping at all, right? You're using that stretch shortening cycle.
01:05:29
Speaker
And it's something that we get to utilize and work on with power training. Yeah. Something that we wanted to add as well is that we get emails, we get messages from time to time asking about like connective tissue training.
01:05:40
Speaker
There's ones called things like fascia fitness, stuff like that. And asking if it's something that like maybe should I do working on this or is this an important thing to include? And i think Laurel is going to end up doing an in-betweening on this because this idea that you could train connective tissue independently of other things in your body, like your muscles, is just not a thing, right?
01:05:59
Speaker
Because when you're training muscle, you're training connective tissue right along with it. Yeah, i I always think of like if I washed a scarf that was knitted with red and white yarn and decided that I was just going to wash the white yarn.
01:06:14
Speaker
Like that's it. That's the in-betweeny. sh right it wait You can't, you're washing all the yarn, right? Right. um That's what training your connective tissue is, is, is basically like you're training all of it. It's all being trained.
01:06:28
Speaker
Yeah. yeah Yeah. So the SSC, the stretch shortening cycle helps us to be able to move faster, to generate more force, which means we can be more powerful in our movements. It's important in things like jumping, running, changing directions.
01:06:42
Speaker
And because the better your muscles are at using the cycle, the more explosive you can be. Yep. Sarah, what are your favorite exercises that utilize the stretch shortening cycle?
01:06:53
Speaker
There's some that I like more than others. I really enjoy ah rotational medicine ball slam, like just taking that thing and rotating it, slamming it into the wall. That's super fun. Cool. What about you? I like all of them. I'm really I was a power athlete in high school.
01:07:07
Speaker
was best at volleyball, which is a power sport. I love jumping and yeah I loved getting back into power movements with through CrossFit. It was so fun. I was like, we get to do box jumps. We get to do jump roping because I hadn't been doing any of that stuff. I've been in strength training, but it was all slow movement.
01:07:24
Speaker
There isn't, I haven't really encountered ah type of movement that utilizes the SSC that I don't like, to be honest, which I think is unusual because I think there's plenty that might annoy you about some of these movements just in terms of they might not feel as great in your body right now because you need to scale up to them. But I don't know that I love burpees.
01:07:46
Speaker
and Like I wouldn't say I love them. I actively hate burpees and refuse to be there. I'm just thinking about CrossFit. You do these um kipping pull-ups. Oh my God. Where you're basically using your body like a slingshot to like get your head over the bar. Maybe do a muscle ah And I like the movement, but I hate how doing them rips my hands apart. So I have all these like peripheral negative associations with some of these movements. But for the most part, I love movement explosively. Yeah. Having a dance background, I love jumping, but only specific kinds of jumps. And also jumping, not jumping that is more focused on impact, right? Where you're actually landing more stiffly, but jumping where I get to absorb the force that I really enjoy.
01:08:28
Speaker
I also, i find a snatch delightful. Yeah, nice. There's something about taking something from the ground and without even stopping. And part of it is like the sort of coordination of it and learning that taking it all the way up overhead. Yeah.
01:08:41
Speaker
This feels really badass. Yeah. Yeah. OK, so let's talk about why power is really essential for longevity. So most people at this point are probably aware that as you get older, you tend to get
Reducing Fall Risk with Power Training
01:08:54
Speaker
weaker, right? There is a sort of what they would call a natural loss of muscle, right? You have muscle atrophy, you have sarcopenia that happens as we get older.
01:09:02
Speaker
But what happens along with that is that we also start to lose our ability to move at speed, right? So it's not, people don't fall because they can't lift an incredibly heavy barbell.
01:09:15
Speaker
They fall because they can't react fast enough to catch themselves, right? So training power, training speed is really crucial for that long-term movement health, right? I like to think of it like the stronger you are, the sturdier you're going to be, the harder you're going to be able to throw off balance. But once you're off balance, it's really about how fast you can be, right? yeah So we tend to think for older people, okay, you're losing your balance, maybe you've fallen a few times already. So let's work on some quote unquote balance exercises, something like tandem walking, right? Walking with one foot directly in front of the other or single leg balancing, things like that, or even maybe some stretching or some coordination
01:09:52
Speaker
exercises. But as we pointed out, Laura pointed out earlier, these are capacities that you would get. They're the little circle inside the big circle, the primary capacities that matter the most, which are strength, power, and cardio capacities.
01:10:07
Speaker
right And so power training, I see people doing this like on Instagram, incredibly challenging looking things that look Olympic or CrossFit or involve like weights and boxes. And I'm incredibly not coordinated with external objects, let's say.
01:10:22
Speaker
ah It's just the lot in my lot in life. So I look at those and I'm like, that looks insanely hard. And therefore, maybe it's not for me. But the reality is, and somebody who maybe is a bit older as well, or maybe a little less physically conditioned might do the same thing. They might be like, I don't, why would I need to do that? I'm just trying to walk down the street.
01:10:39
Speaker
But you can start to incorporate really specific, smaller exercises, right? There is a full regression from that all the way down to things like hopping, skipping,
01:10:49
Speaker
Right. You don't have to just start doing box jumps and barbell snatches. You just want to incorporate exercises that teach your body to move faster. Right. So one of the things that I do with some of my patients who are concerned about balance, I set it up in a way that there is absolutely no chance they're going to fall.
01:11:05
Speaker
I have things around them for them to hang on to. I'll have them start to lean forward until they're so much off balance that they have to step forward with their next foot. Right. Because that's that reactive stepping that they need.
01:11:15
Speaker
Right. That's what's going to keep you resilient against the surprises of life, like tripping over something, which is what I personally do on pretty much a daily basis.
Understanding Power Training Intensity
01:11:23
Speaker
But I have enough reactive speed to be able to step with my other foot and catch myself.
01:11:27
Speaker
right? Yeah. So if you're interested and how to progress your power as a capacity, you'd want to understand or you want to hire someone who understands how to scale and progress intensity and volume of those exercises in order to ensure that you're able to recover from the exercise and adapt positively to it. And that is the case for all forms of exercise. That's not special for power. It's true for aerobic endurance and strength.
Fatigue Cost and Recovery in Power Training
01:11:51
Speaker
One of the reasons power training, plyometrics, kettlebell swings, they sometimes get a bad rap is dangerous is that people don't know how to dose these exercise formats appropriately for themselves and end up doing too much. Sometimes something that is important to realize about power training is that but has a higher fatigue cost than even heavy strength training.
01:12:11
Speaker
Yeah. And this actually reminds me, our bone density course, we talk a lot about how we get into heavy lifting because that is where the course ah progresses towards. But a lot of people are like, I can't do heavy lifting.
01:12:22
Speaker
And we're like, no, we don't start there. we still something We're not starting with an overdose of weight. We're going to dose moderately first, right? and So fatigue is kind of a complex thing. There are a lot of aspects that can play into why you might have more fatigue one day and less another day. But Why you might want to start power training and just take it like a step at a time, right? Like one sip of your drink at a time rather than chugging the whole beer, right? Is because of fatigue, right? So power training has a higher higher fatigue cost. One reason why is that it's rapid explosive movements generating force in a very short period.
01:12:58
Speaker
It's a lot more fatigue for your nervous system because we've got these huge and quick signals being sent from the brain, right? So your nervous system is going to get tired. more quickly. Your brain is tired.
01:13:10
Speaker
Yeah. And then it also is more mechanical stress, right, on your tendons and your connective tissue because of the stretch shortening cycle, as well as the impact you're feeling, right? So all of this loading more quickly leads to ah greater tissue fatigue.
01:13:25
Speaker
And so you might require more time ah for recovery between sessions of power exercises. Heavy strength training tends to be less fatiguing because you're doing these more slow, controlled movements.
01:13:36
Speaker
It still recruits those fast twitch fibers. it still places demand on the nervous system, but it isn't as rapid. So your overall fatigue from doing the exercise is just lower.
Differentiating Power from Endurance Exercises
01:13:46
Speaker
It's a lower fatigue cost yeah compared to that quicker, explosive demand that power exercises has. Something this reminds me of is how people, they'll actually use power exercises for cardio and they'll end up doing a lot of repetitions of a power exercise with very little rest. And then it does actually end up turning into cardio. It turns into an endurance effort.
01:14:07
Speaker
But when you're working on power, especially at higher intensities, you might actually need to rest longer. between sets of high intensity power exercises than you'd even do for heavy strength training sets.
01:14:19
Speaker
Because if you don't, you won't be able to perform the exercise at a given intensity with the amount of speed that you want to be able to do it at or at the amount of resistance that you want to be able to move. We tend to think of exercises like kettlebell swings or box jumps or jump roping that could potentially happen at a fairly low intent of effort as being strung together in rep ranges of 25, 30 or like jump roping, five minutes of continuous jump roping. You're probably working more on endurance.
01:14:50
Speaker
There's, again, crossover between power and endurance. And we'll talk about this in our episode on cardio. But if you're used to going to, say, CrossFit, OK, this happens a lot in CrossFit, and doing a WOD,
01:15:02
Speaker
workout of the day that lasts 30 minutes, which would be like a marathon WOD versus a six minute WOD, which is a sprint WOD, right? You're probably going to do a lot of plyometric type power-based movements in that WOD.
01:15:16
Speaker
And sometimes the amount you're going to do is ridiculous. And at a certain point, you're just going to basically be working on your endurance more than your power because the movement is going to get slow and grindy, right? And as that movement gets slower and more grindy, you're you're not really working on power as much anymore. So one of the ways we have to learn, I think, to dose power appropriately is to learn what the signals of fatigue are when we're engaging with power exercise. And they're different than when we're engaging in an endurance exercise like cardio. And it's different from when we're engaging in strength training.
01:15:51
Speaker
The fatigue signals are all different for all three of those formats. I spent a fair amount of time every week working on, I would say, fast, maximal dynamic strength and reactive strength for running.
01:16:03
Speaker
Okay. Both of which could be helpful. And i rest for a long time between fairly conservative rep ranges of sets because my goal is to be as fast off the ground, as explosive off the ground, slow.
01:16:18
Speaker
soon as I start to slow down, I'm probably not able to perform the movement as quick and sharp as possible. And the way that we get better at having a certain capacity is by the performance of that capacity, right? So if you want to be as strong as possible, you rest between sets.
01:16:35
Speaker
If you don't rest enough, you're not going to be able to lift the weight as many times as you did the first set, and you're going to be working more into endurance, right? Same thing with power exercise. So a really big misconception with power exercises is that it's just another form of cardio that utilizes jumping around in body weight. It's not. There's crossover, but they're different.
01:16:54
Speaker
All right. When you're starting to train power, of course, we've said this before, you've got to understand the relationship between intensity and volume. Intensity is how hard you're working. Volume is how much you're doing. Generally speaking, intensity and volume have an inversely proportional relationship. What does this mean?
01:17:08
Speaker
It means that if we're going turn the dial up on intensity of a particular exercise in running, we're going to add more time running fast into the week. Strength training, we're going to do more sets of a heavy lift in the week.
01:17:20
Speaker
Power, we're going to work at a higher intentive effort, land from a higher height. We're going to swing a heavier kettlebell. If we're turning the dial up on intensity, we should probably be turning the dial down on volume.
01:17:33
Speaker
Likewise, if we're going to increase the amount of the exercise we're doing, run more miles during the week, do more sets of exercises during the week, if we're going to do more repetitions of plyometric exercise or power-based exercise in the week, we probably don't want to also be turning the intensity up because as intensity goes up, volume probably has to go down and vice versa. If volume goes up, intensity has to go down.
01:17:53
Speaker
We can imagine this or intuit this by imagining trying to sprint for 30 minutes. That would not work. We can also intuit it by imagining the heaviest weight we can squat or deadlift, right? What's the heaviest weight you can pick up?
01:18:04
Speaker
And then trying to do a set of 10 or 20 of that, like that also wouldn't work, right? We could only lift it probably once or twice. These are obvious examples. Less obvious examples are when I injured my calf last year from running by generally just running too fast all the time.
01:18:18
Speaker
It wasn't how much I was running. was that I was running too fast all the time. I was running at too high of an intensity, too often. Or when we start learning the kettlebell swing, we start learning with a kettlebell that's just too heavy and we end up grinding out a whole bunch of
Minimal Exercise Requirements and Power Training
01:18:32
Speaker
reps with it. We're no longer moving quickly and crisply.
01:18:35
Speaker
I think that these types of miscalculations are far more responsible for the types of aches, pains, and injuries that we come away with when starting to exercise, much more so than bad form. Bad form is what gets blamed because it's easy to pinpoint and talk about and problem solve around.
01:18:51
Speaker
But it's really poor load management, I think, that is the bigger culprit. And I think that even if you have shitty form with a kettlebell swing, if you had picked the correct weight of the kettlebell and had done a reasonable amount of volume for where you are, you probably would have felt fine the next time. I'm sure a lot of people would disagree with me and think, no, it's really all about your form.
01:19:08
Speaker
Misdosing intensity is a mistake many make with exercise. So is misdosing volume. Increasing things too quickly, turning the dials up too quickly, turning them both up at the same time, right, is another mistake.
01:19:19
Speaker
So just to give you an idea, the CDC's minimal activity requirements for cardio are 150 minutes of moderate intensity cardio. Let's just say that, right? So you keep it simple. Okay, that's two and a half hours of cardio per week.
01:19:31
Speaker
That's the minimal effective dose, right? To stave off chronic life-shortening diseases. They suggest that you do twice weekly whole body strength training, which they don't really give you the amount of time you should spend strength training, but you can do two whole body workouts in an hour.
01:19:45
Speaker
I would say one half hour whole body workout and another half hour whole body workout. You could do an hour of strength training every
Cultural Misconceptions and Stereotypes of Power Training
01:19:51
Speaker
week. And I think that you would be meeting the minimal effective dose for strength training for the CDC. So that's a lot shorter than two and a half hours, right?
01:19:57
Speaker
So we've got two and a half hours of cardio, one hour of strength training. Now, but listen, it's not an official time for strength training. What I'm saying is that it's possible to do whole body strength training in a half an hour, especially if you're new to strength training.
01:20:08
Speaker
When it comes to power, how much time are you spending on working on your power? The CDC doesn't have a minimal activity. guideline. We know that it's important for longevity though. We know that lots of formats of cardio and lots of formats of strength training support power production, but we can also train it specifically. And I would say the amount of time you spend training power each week is probably going to be a fraction of the time you're spending strength training.
01:20:28
Speaker
So it's not going to require a lot of time. So that's good news. And one of the reasons that it probably won't require a lot of time is it's potentially higher intensity. You're going to need more time to recover from it. You probably shouldn't be doing as much power training as you are strength training. yeahp Okay.
01:20:42
Speaker
So without going into too much detail about it, because Sarah and I have already gone into a lot of detail in something we're going to tell you about pretty soon. Basically, you're going to start with a amount of volume you can tolerate and you're going to low intensity power exercises.
01:20:56
Speaker
And then you're going to ramp up that volume a little bit. And once you can tolerate a little bit more volume, you might ramp up the intensity the power exercises, but maybe lower the volume a little bit while you're ramping up intensity. And then while you're working at the slightly higher intensity exercise, eventually you might want to ramp up the volume on those a little bit. And then suddenly you're going to increase the intensity a little bit more.
01:21:13
Speaker
Maybe, right? And then there's going to be a mixture of low, moderate, high intensity down the road. But you see, it works the same way as all exercise. It's completely scalable. It's something that you can systematically and progressively overload over time.
01:21:29
Speaker
It's a format of exercise that you can absolutely take and adjust for each individual according to where they are. You're just putting a little speed on some form of movement against some amount of resistance and you work from there.
01:21:43
Speaker
All right, let's talk about power and cultural misconceptions. woo oo Strength, working on strength is starting to catch on generally for people, right? that There's starting to be an understanding that like you can't just do cardio your whole life and leave it at that.
01:21:58
Speaker
Power is a lot less well-known. It's not as famous, right? And so this is a capacity that we're trying to have people spend a little more attention on. If I went in to work with one of my older clients ah and I said, what we're going to work on is power, they would just be like, what are you talking about?
01:22:13
Speaker
I need to not fall over. There are these sort of misconceptions around it, and there are some internalized or invisible barriers or obstacles that people have in their mind already about power-based exercises. So, you know, any type of jumping or kind of polymetric movement like that The number of people who either tell me they have like bad knees or they can't do it or they have bad ankles or a quote unquote bad something, it's going to be too much impacting your joint. Your joint is not going to be able to tolerate it.
01:22:42
Speaker
This is just basically not true. And as Laurel said earlier, it's usually a question of the dosage versus the activity. Yes, if you haven't trained any power and you've had a history of knee injuries and you start doing 300 vertical jumps a day, yes, that's probably going to your knees are not going to like that.
01:22:58
Speaker
Right. So all of these ideas around things being dangerous have much more to do with the dosage of the activity than the activity itself. Right. It's the same with like poison. The dose makes something poisonous. People get very upset about mold in coffee, but there is so little mold in coffee.
01:23:13
Speaker
There is not a dose high enough to be problematic for you. I just murdered several influencers, entire platforms. But anyway, so we know that we run up against misogyny a lot with strength training, right? Strength training seems masculine.
01:23:26
Speaker
Power training is even more masculine when we think about it, right? It's these explosive, aggressive movements. And as women, we're allowed to express power, but is societally, it's supposed to look a certain way, right? You can be a dancer, right? Because that's a little more graceful, or a gymnast. Or you could play tennis, right? Because you have this like graceful movement where, yes, there's power, but the quality of the movement is, quote unquote, more feminine, right? And so it's more more acceptable for women.
01:23:53
Speaker
Then we have things like ageism and ableism around aging, which is that this idea that people as they get older, they should slow down, they should do less, right, avoid powerful movements. But just like strength training, the reality is power training is going to improve a lot of things that you need to be able to live independently.
01:24:10
Speaker
and have physical independence, right? So if you are concerned about an older adult that you're working with or someone in your life, you need to get them to start training power, right? And again, it doesn't have to be big, complicated movements. it can be very easy.
01:24:22
Speaker
And then we have this idea of strength training is sometimes seen as a meathead, gym bro kind of work. Right. Power is then only needed for athletes. Right. But that's not true. Right. Everybody needs it.
01:24:33
Speaker
And we often see these examples, like we said before, of like incredible athleticism being demonstrated. Think of somebody at the Olympics doing the long jump. Right. And they're doing these like huge bounding steps before they push off and go.
01:24:46
Speaker
And you might just look at that and be like, I don't need to be able to do that or I can't do that. I don't have the ability. So therefore, that entire category is not relevant to me. But obviously, that's not true. And then there's this idea that power training is like just really dangerous for people.
01:25:00
Speaker
And while, yes, it does involve a little bit more coordination, right? It involves a little more speed. There's a higher fatigue cost. there's more mechanical stress on the tissue. But the reality is it's like anything with proper progression. It's safe and effective, right? The risk comes more from not managing the load poorly, not from just movement is automatically dangerous.
01:25:20
Speaker
And I would say the biggest risk of all is coming from not exercising, right? Not yeah exercising in ways that maintain and improve these capacities for longevity. Yep. So Sarah, should we let the cat out of the bag about the project we were working on last time you were here and share it with the world?
01:25:36
Speaker
Yeah. Although I do want to say um this is very ah timing tb it TBD. Yes. Because we don't exactly know when this project is going to you know bearre called But we have a new project.
01:25:51
Speaker
Yeah. ah yeah Let's not say the name of it yet. not we have it Let's not unleash the name on the world, but let's tease it a little bit. I'm proud of the name. well i like Yeah. for your ideas but We have a course that we've created that is about developing explosive and reactive strength, aka power, through short, scalable, and fun workouts that you could do at home or you could do if you're a teacher within a yoga or Pilates class.
01:26:24
Speaker
And the course focuses on building power, right? The ability to exert force quickly in a safe and enjoyable way. We know that power is essential for movements like catching yourself when you trip, standing up quickly, bounding up the stairs, right? So by improving your power, you can enhance your confidence and your ability to navigate life's challenges.
01:26:44
Speaker
And then if you're a movement teacher, it's going to give you a little more insider information on how to scale power exercises, regress them or progress them, how to maybe insert them into a class that you're teaching, just a better understanding of the really wide variety of types of power exercises that exist and what you might consider when you are either regressing or progressing them so that it's both impactful but also safe for the population that you work
New Course Teaser and Podcast Conclusion
01:27:11
Speaker
with.
01:27:11
Speaker
By the end of this course, you will have nine, nine people. I hope you're impressed. Nine power exercise progressions.
01:27:22
Speaker
So nine different exercise progressions, five full workouts, and ah deeper understanding of how to scale intensity and volume to progress power safely and effectively.
01:27:34
Speaker
So if you're new to power training, if you're looking to refine your skills, I think this course is going to leave you feeling pretty capable and pretty ready to take on that challenge. It's going to be like all of our courses, a nice mix of theory and practice to empower you.
01:27:47
Speaker
If you're a teacher, maybe help you empower your students to get more dynamic, get more explosive in your life. Not in the bathroom, hopefully. And and you know how to make power, which can seem very like for the bros or the athletes or really intimidating, like how to make it fun, not silly at all, because that is not what Sarah and I are about. and We are never...
01:28:10
Speaker
not serious. How to make it fun, how to make it scalable to people who are like not athletes, right? People who don't like to jump around. How can we get them jumped around a little bit? but so aroundon Jump around. Jump around. and All right. Thank you.
01:28:23
Speaker
Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Movement Logic Podcast, all about banana buttholes. I mean, power. We hope you come away with a better understanding of power.
01:28:36
Speaker
how it's similar, how it's different from strength. Remember, power declines faster than strength with age. It may not be as famous as strength, but it is very important.
01:28:47
Speaker
And training, it is essential. It's a use it or lose it type thing. It's essential for longevity. It enhances fall prevention, supports independent living, and the ability to engage in the meaningful activities of your life. And despite misconceptions, power training is like any other type of exercise.
01:29:02
Speaker
It might be more poorly understood, but when When it is dosed appropriately to the individual, it is safe and it is accessible. We greatly appreciate you listening.
01:29:14
Speaker
Don't forget to sign up for the free class. When you sign up, you're going to get an email eventually with some link. Not right away, so don't email us. Where's the link? You're going to get it.
01:29:25
Speaker
We promise you'll get it. If you don't get it the day before the class, then email us, okay? Later on in the day. Don't email us at 6 a.m. It's coming. The link is coming. And you can click that link and join the class.
01:29:39
Speaker
Or it's okay if you can't join the class. You'll get the replay. We swear to God you're going to get it. You're going to get it. well It won't be a minute after the class ends. But it it will come to you within 24 to 48 hours.
01:29:52
Speaker
Okay. Sign up for the free class. Also, if you just like us. And why wouldn't you? you like us, give us five stars. I'm just going to say that. Like, do you like this?
01:30:05
Speaker
Five stars. No, I'm just kidding. If you appreciate and respect. No, if you if you appreciate, if you're grateful for, if you want more people to hear what we're sharing. if If you just, if you're like, fuck it, I have a second. Let me do it.
01:30:22
Speaker
Leave us five stars. We would love that. We have been getting more five stars, but we we're not getting the written reviews. I'm okay with that. but Listen, I'm not going to be greedy. If you have more than a second, write us a little review.
01:30:35
Speaker
Yeah. We would love to hear from you. All right. so we're going to close with a song. I was like that church moment. It's like church. Now let's close with a song. Power to the people.
01:30:47
Speaker
Power to the people. We will see you next week. Heard that right. We will see you next week.