Just a quick post today to share with you some of my favorite exercises to develop power for athletes.  Obviously there are plenty more exercises that I like to use throughout a training year, but these are just a couple of my favorite ones if you need some variation and something different from the traditional plyo exercises and the common Olympic lifts.

Unloaded squat jumps are a great exercise that I learned from Cal Dietz, strength coach at the University of Minnesota.  It allows you to jump higher by pulling down on the bands as you jump (although it doesn’t necessarily translate into more power development), but because of the height of the jump, you have more force to absorb (or decelerate) when you come back on the floor.  That really is what’s beneficial about the exercise; an increased ability to absorb forces and react to high velocities.

The second one is more of a method than an exercise itself.  It’s called the complex method, and the concept is simply to perform a heavy lifting exercise (with about 90% of your 1RM) for 2-3 reps, rest for anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes and then perform a bodyweight plyometrics exercise.  The idea is that the heavy lifting exercise will activate more fast-twitch muscle fibers that you’ll in turn be able to use when doing the plyo exercise.  In the video I perform them within 15 seconds, but ideally you’d want a longer rest.

The third one is a medicine ball throw variation that I got from Eric Cressey. It incorporates more velocity in the movement by running a couple steps and jumping before smashing the med ball into the wall. I’ll use this variation a lot with baseball players.

The last one is a variation of an Olympic lift. The reason I like it so much is because it usually is so much easier to teach and to learn than the traditional Olympic lifts. The 1-arm DB snatch is very effective to develop power and will take minimal time to master. If you haven’t already, try it!

As I mentioned in the beginning, this really is just the tip of the iceberg, as there are so many exercises to help develop power. I just wanted to share some of my favorite ones with you if you always end up using the same ones and need variety!

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This is an analogy that I stole from my colleague and friend Kevin Neeld (who’s breathing over my shoulder while I write this).  I think it clearly illustrates the message I’ve been trying to spread for as long as this blog has been going on. I’ll explain in more details after…

As requested by Kevin, a (recent) picture to give him credit for the analogy

Think of injury threshold as a bucket.  All the undesired stress and faulty movement patterns or positions you impose on your body are drops of water in the bucket.  As you accumulate these “bad” things it adds drops of water, and the bucket keeps filling up.  Sure, doing one thing wrong (e.g. deadlifting with a rounded back) might not hurt you by doing it once (water won’t spill). You might not even get injured by doing it 100 times, but it keeps adding drops of water in the bucket, and that bucket just keeps filling up, and eventually the water will spill.  This is how most injuries happen: it’s an accumulation of stresses and faulty movements that will eventually lead you to threshold.

Somebody’s filling up his bucket…

This is why I find very stupid the argument “but I’ve done this or that for 5 years; it works and I never got injured”.  My first response to that would be “you didn’t get injured…yet”.  Everything might feel alright…until it doesn’t.

Training athletes everyday, I realize the importance of this concept and need to do everything in my power to avoid the water spilling out of the bucket with all of them.  This is why I’m very picky with what my athletes do inside and outside the gym.  I wanna make sure they do everything possible to stay healthy in the long run.

The first step is to try to remove everything from their training that might contribute to filling the bucket.  Whether it is avoiding Olympic lifts with my baseball pitchers because the lifts are very stressful on their elbows and wrists, or making sure my athletes move well from their hips and don’t move excessively at the lumbar spine, it is my job to avoid those additional drops of water in the bucket.  Also, strategies such as foam rolling, corrective exercises and the like can play a big part in actually removing drops from the bucket.

One thing that is equally important to understand is that some sporting movements such as the skating stride (that is pretty unnatural for the hips) in ice hockey and the pitching motion (that puts tremendous stress on the shoulder) in baseball are contributing to adding drops in the bucket.  This is why it is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to do everything possible to limit additional unnecessary drops in the bucket, as well as contributing to take some water out with said modalities for the long term health of our athletes.

What are you doing to avoid the spill?

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