Essay On Strength Training

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For some time many people thought that the best way for an athlete to see gains in there sport was to adapt a weight training program. By lifting heavy and light weights they were able to increase their overall strength and therefore become more efficient athletes. Though this is true, there are other ways that athletes have been taught to train. Along with lifting weights, training their power has been seen to be a much more efficient way of improving their athletic performance. Power is defined by the speed in which one can move an object. In strength and conditioning, power is an important measure of ones athletic abilities. So many sports focus on how fast someone can get there, and how powerful they are at doing it. Once athletes started training their power output, studies started showing that it was the best way to increase their training gains. Studies begun to show up about training power development, the idea that the more motor recruitment the athlete uses, the faster they will become. By doing powerlifting movements they noticed that they were seeing the highest amounts of motor recruitment. The law of specificity states that if you want to improve at your sport, you must train similarly. Because so many sports today are explosive and focus on speed, they must train to be fast as possible. Before athletes were focused on training for power, they were training inefficiently. Not to say that training strength training isn’t important but to follow specificity they must be training on getting faster not stronger. By focusing on moving weight as quickly as they could, they were training the correct systems in their body. The motor recruitment level was much higher in power lifting and speed was in fact affected posit... ... middle of paper ... ...pective sports. Though weight training used to be believed the most effective way of training, we now know that athletes must train their power development to see the most gains. The higher the motor recruitment, the more power will be generated through the athletes body. Power lifts such as plyometrics and explosive medicine ball throws are an efficient way to train but are not the most effective. These exercises can be used in an athletes training program but the main focus must be on olympic lifting and maximal efforts sprints. These methods are proven to be the most effective in getting the maximal motor recruitment levels from athletes. Concluding that in order to be the most effective athlete they can, they must have a power oriented lift which includes some simple power exercises but mainly focuses on the difficult olympic lifts and maximal effort sprints.

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