Archive for January, 2007

Part 8 - How To Train For Speed

Monday, January 15th, 2007

This is the last of 8 in a series about maximizing speed and quickness in your specific sport

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I hope these lessons have been helpful and given you the motivation to get out there excel in your sport with more speed and quickness in all of your athletic skills.

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Part 7 - How would you know if a ’speed’ training program is really a strength and endurance program in disguise?

Sunday, January 14th, 2007

This is the 7th of 8 in a series about maximizing speed and quickness in your specific sport.

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Ask yourself these three questions about your ’speed’ training program:

1) Does it require repetitions?
(You already know how repetitions affect muscle speed)

2) Does it take longer than ten minutes to complete?
(Speed training, as the name implies should be fast and not time consuming.)

3) Do I feel tired, heavy, and sluggish afterwards?
(Do you feel slower instead of faster when you’re done?)

If you answer yes to these questions, then you do not have a speed training program. You have a strength and endurance program.

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Part 6 - Neuromuscular Re-education: Muscles and nerves working together for extraordinary quickness.

Saturday, January 13th, 2007

This is the 6th of 8 in a series about maximizing speed and quickness in your specific sport. 

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Through proper training muscles and nerves will learn and develop the neural networks and motor pathways necessary for exceptionally quick and immediate responses.

Technically this process is called neuromuscular reeducation, but it is simply how the body learns a specific sequence of movements without you having to think about how to do it.

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Part 5 - Fast Twitch Fibers, Fast Twitch Response and Muscle Memory: The key to greater speed.

Friday, January 12th, 2007

This is the 5th of 8 in a series about maximizing speed and quickness in your specific sport. 

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Your muscles are composed of basically 3 different fiber types. The fast twitch fibers are responsible for the speed of muscular contraction, or in other words how fast the muscle will contract or how quickly movement will occur.

And a fast twitch response is defined as the ability of a muscle to rapidly contract a specific distance over a short period of time.

When muscles have a specific target distance to contract to, and when you start training them to respond that way, their rate of contraction - and therefore their speed -  increases significantly.

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Part 4 - Why does training with repetitions wipe out the fast twitch response in a muscle?

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

This is the 4th of 8 in a series about maximizing speed and quickness in your specific sport.

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Remember, for optimum speed there are two things that need to happen:

First, the muscle’s memory needs to be ‘programmed’ so that the muscle contracts instinctively to the exact distance and with the same motion as the athletic skill.

Second, the speed at which the muscles contract needs to be maximized by fast twitch muscle fibers.

Have you ever tried to throw a baseball, swing a bat or golf club or kick a football after lifting weights or doing plyometric exercises?

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