Speed Training Secrets

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?

Immediately after doing strength training these athletic skills cannot be done very effectively. Why? Because all of these athletic skills require that your muscles have a specific target distance to contract to very quickly.

However, the fast twitch response within your muscles gets wiped-out or stripped away with strength training. This happens because the repetitions in weight lifting causes your muscle’s memory to become ‘confused’ in regards to having an exact distance to contract to when performing an athletic skill.

This is what’s known as ‘dumbing-down’ your muscles and is why you’ll always feel tired, heavy and sluggish (i.e., slow) following weight training or plyometric training.

Here is an example: Have you ever tried to comb your hair after a weight lifting session? It’s a weird sensation like your muscles have lost their ability to make instinctive movements on their own.

Repetitions with weights create multiple (even an infinite number of) stopping points within the range of motion, whereas muscle speed is optimal when the stopping point is well defined.

Training programs that cause the muscle to make repetitive movements are not capable of conditioning the muscle to respond with the lightening like speed that it is capable of.

With weight training or even plyometrics training, the slow twitch muscle fibers will become stronger to do more repetitions and to move heavier loads, however, with regards to speed

* The fast twitch fibers, for the purposes of speed and quickness, are basically ignored, and

* The fast twitch response programmed into your muscle memory gets wiped out.

When your ‘muscle memory’ gets wiped-out, your muscles need to ‘rethink’ how they will perform a task. Until the memory is reestablished, movements will be slower and more awkward.

Now, there may appear to be an increase of speed associated with many types of training but do not confuse an increase in muscle contraction speed with an increase in coordination you may develop in performing certain plyometric exercises.

Certainly better coordination will help you perform an athletic skill, and increased coordination is common to all types of training that’s done on a daily basis, but it is only the first step towards developing blazing speed and quickness.

When training to increase muscle speed, you should feel lighter and more responsive following a workout. This is because your muscle memory and your fast twitch muscle fibers will have improved in their ability to perform their natural functions - that is speed and quickness. And training for this type of speed should not be strenuous or time consuming.

The one thing that will give added speed and quickness to your sports skills is increasing muscle contraction speed. And that means getting a fast twitch response by conditioning your fast twitch fibers specifically for speed and quickness.

Sometimes what we have been taught to believe makes it hard to get past negative thinking.

Make sure you read this article which will explain more about what I have just talked about:

“Today’s isometrics outperforms plyometrics and other programs for speed training.“

http://www.athleticquickness.com/page.asp?page_id=47&source=AR-04b

Next Time: Fast Twitch Fibers and Fast Twitch Response: Why having muscles with a specific target distance to contract to is critical to superior speed.

Always glad to help!

Dr. Larry Van Such

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 11:14 am and is filed under Lessons in Speed Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.