Speed Training Secrets

I recently received an email where the person wrote to me explaining how Olympic power cleans were the best speed training exercise he could think of because they exercise a lot of your fast twitch fibers.  This was his idea of a speed training program.

 He claimed that a lot of elite athletes do these exercises.  I don’t doubt that.  But do they do them for speed? Or for strength?

Like all exercises, it cannot be effective for both.

 The reason is because most of your skeletal muscles have both slow twitch fibers and fast twitch fibers mixed together.  These different fiber types have different functions. Having muscle speed means your muscles contract quickly. Having muscle strength means your muscles can move against greater resistance. Both are important in athletic skills, however different functions require different types of training to improve upon their performance. Therefore if you are trying to get a specific result from your training, (speed or strength) you have to train your muscles one way or another.  You cannot train for speed the same way you train for strength.  It doesn’t work that way.  I wish it were that simple. 

I wrote him back asking him to explain to me how an Olympic power clean, which is nothing more than a dead-lift followed by a reverse arm curl, can make someone faster. Was this the one special movement (a “magic bullet” of an exercise) that makes your entire body react faster?  Does trying to perform it as fast as you can make you quicker? I am not sure.

If an Olympic power clean makes someone faster, then one can argue that any exercise using your arms can be considered a fast twitch program.  This would include regular biceps curls, seated rows, triceps pushdowns, lat pull downs, dumbbell curls, skull crushers, cable pulls etc.

If these are speed training exercises, someone please tell me, because I do them primarily for strength. I never feel faster when I am done.  I always feel slower. If weight training makes you faster, as this last person suggested, why then do a lot of people have trouble improving their speed and why are so many people desperately searching for new ways to increase it?  Maybe it’s because weight lifting doesn’t make your muscles faster.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 9th, 2007 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Speed Vs. Strength. 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.