Don’t neglect speed in favour of strength while working out

If you conducted your favourite athletic activities in slow motion, you wouldn’t be a very good athlete. In fact, you would be lucky not to get injured. Imagine trying to make a ski or snowboard turn in slow motion, or pedal up a hill on a bike in slow motion.

If that seems laughable to you, then why do you lift weights in slow motion?

If you go to a gym, you’ve probably seen it hundreds of times. A basketball player is slowly curving an arm upward to do a biceps curl. Maybe it takes them two and a half seconds. Yet in an actual game, curving an arm to guard or to hit the ball will take a fraction of a second. Perhaps a skier or snowboarder is training by doing sets of squats. Each squat may take as long as four seconds. Yet the down and up of a turn on snow takes less than a second.

Even worse, the slow-motion weight lifter may grunt and groan with the amount of resistance he or she is using — whether with free weights or machines. So think about it for a moment — how is this kind of training going to make anyone a powerful athlete?

Strength is not the only consideration when it comes to athletic power. Strength is just being strong — and maybe slow. But athletic power is strength combined with speed. If you can’t move fast, you can’t be a powerful athlete. When it comes to the bottom line, how many sports are actually slow?

Struggling to deadlift 100 pounds, or squat your body weight, may be a slow exercise because of the amount of resistance being used. But how much of the strength you gain from heavy lifting will actually ever be used in a sport or physical activity? Athletes or active people learn how to resist even gravity, perhaps the strongest force on Earth. But though gravity pulls you down fast, slow strength is useless when it comes to resisting gravity. Being able to resist gravity enough to keep from falling while in action, means active people need a special skill.

That skill is proprioception, or the art of being able to sense where your body is in space. Is your hand in the position where that volleyball is going to land? Are your feet in the right position to take you between those two trees on the snow covered slope, rather than face first into one of them? Many coaches and elite athletes believe that developing proprioception comes down to miles — miles on skis, miles on the bike, miles on the basketball court. But developing this skill also requires speed. It doesn’t do any good to get your hand in the right place for the ball after it has already passed you.

That’s the main reason to add speed to your workout. Here’s how to do it: first, look at a clock or watch second hand and count how many seconds it takes you to do a set of 15 to 20 repetitions of a dumbbell biceps curl with your regular poundage. Next, use half of that poundage, but this time lift as quickly as you can, again watching how many seconds it takes. Were you a lot faster with the lighter weight?

You may notice that lifting faster makes your technique sloppy. The lighter weight may not go exactly where you carefully position the heavier one. But developing the precision to handle the lighter weight correctly will also improve your proprioception.

In fact, use the new year to memorize a new mantra: Lighter and Faster. Keep repeating that mantra to yourself, and by the time the warmer months come around again, your athletic ability will have improved so greatly that you and those you hang with athletically, will be amazed.