Keys to Effective Strength and Power Workouts

Although most of us use the words strength and power as if they were synonymous, in sports science these two terms have related, but somewhat different, meanings. Strength represents your maximum muscle force.

Power represents a measure of your maximum muscle force at speed. In other words, strength determines how many suitcases you can pick up; power is a measure of how fast you lug them up a flight of stairs. Power, or high-speed strength, becomes an important element in exercise because it corresponds to the skill of developing kinetic energy, or the recruitment of strength in motion. In this sense, strength represents potential energy; power marks your ability to use it. Almost everything you do (especially in athletics) entails moving an object at speed, be it your body (in the case of running) or a projectile (as in baseball).

You hit an exercise plateau when you have maximized your strength gains through a given routine and no longer generate the force required to stimulate your muscles to progress further. It’s possible to slog through a plateau slowly, but increasing the intensity of your workout over a given time unit (i.e., the power equation) stimulates improved recruitment of your muscle fibers and yields the kinetic energy to perform better right now.

As your muscles get stronger, they also get bigger — a phenomenon known as hypertrophy (more on that in our July issue). But the most significant gains in strength and power come from training your muscles to work more efficiently. That’s why the strongest lifters are not always the largest.

The routine described here will certainly stimulate growth in your lean body tissue, but that’s not the main objective. The objective is to train your muscles to recruit existing fibers with greater force through the synergy of slow eccentric resistance, a brief pause and an explosive lift. This helps increase Strength and Power.