3 Reasons You’re Not as Powerful as You Could Be

Working with athletes is a tough task.

Unlike adults who often have a singular focus such as getting stronger, improving movement, or what have you.

Training athletes requires a unique blend of improving every physical quality. I’ve said multiple times, health and performance are mutually exclusive.

This piece is written for the individual who wants to recapture power while retaining, or even enhancing, their gains. I cannot consider the heresy of asking you to renounce strength to restore athleticism.

However, the longer I have a singular focus on strength sports, the more I surrender athleticism. There’s a point where excessive practice of high forces at low velocities will deplete speed and power.

I believe you CAN have it all. You just can’t do it all.

Raising attributes across the board 2k-style means that, at times, some will need to be maintained while others are augmented.

Many of us share a similar origin story: would-be athlete who didn't cut it/plagued by injuries finds redemption in the weight room.

Strength training was either a means to rebuild a broken body or a competitive outlet we desperately sought in “retirement.” Or both.

Below I’m going to share a few thoughts on how I reconcile these competing ideas for the individuals who want it all: speed, power,and strength.

REASON #1 - You’re At Your End Ranges

I give credit to Bill Hartman for this terminology. In his paradigm two global movement strategies are available: compression and expansion. They are a function of how you create pressure in your body by moving fluid and air. If you compress you are producing force and when you expand you are absorbing force. These strategies balance movement and output.

Expansion and compression are linked with inhalation and exhalation, respectively. During breathing, the joints respond to pressure changes from inflating and deflating lungs.

Most coaches and athletes neglect the greatest catalyst for power, proper breathing mechanics.

What really matters in being powerful is not what you think it is. It all boils down to your body’s ability to properly position your ribs on top of your hips.

If you want to be powerful, your starting position has to be a nice stacked position of your ribs on top of your hips. Consider the image below, what do you see?

I see an athlete in complete extension, exposed, and at their maximum end ranges.

If you’re already at your end range, where else is there to go?

For athletes, this could impede hip rotation that is required for effective loading and unloading of a hip to cut or dump a pelvis so far forward that the shin must cast out when sprinting thereby threatening the hamstrings.

Recapturing some expansion capabilities implies the need for increasing joint variability, but it appreciates that orientation of the axial skeleton is the gateway rather than gratuitous volumes of mobility drills.

This Begs the Question: How Do I Do This and When Do We Need Intervention?

Whether working with athletes or Gen pop creating arbitrary problems to be the source of a solution can be a slippery slope.

Not everyone has symptoms, pathologies, or movement deficiencies that need to be addressed.

The greatest way to quantify an intervention is to gather as much information as possible regarding how much stress (external and internal) this individual has experienced.

A youth or novice individual with 0-1 year of training in the weight room, little external stress, and only 3-5 years of playing experience should not be put through a “movement assessment.” Furthermore, an adult who has never seen the inside of the gym should be either.

They need to be addressed holistically (stress levels, work, life, sleep etc).

Contrarily, if an individual has 10-15+ years of playing experience, training etc - they inevitably are going to display patterns of compensation that stress has induced.

I advise entering the octagon with much more than breathing exercises. They can be useful, but you will not woo-sah your way to athletic capabilities.

A strong, superficial compressive strategy may require loading to create expansion. If this is confusing, consider the fact that many a meat monkey thinks that 225 on a squat feels better than an empty barbell. External load, to a point, can assist.

There are levels to how much compression can be created as a strategy. Recall that you are managing pressures. By shifting posture and loading (e.g., moving from a back squat to a front squat), you can influence the management of compression and expansion. The body will move through the path of least resistance.

Anecdotally, using training blocks to retain strength while improving movement capabilities has helped me feel and move better. Implementation requires you identify joint ROM, how that manifests when you move, and altering loading strategies to recover some range of motion.

Full range of motion is never the goal. A person with a wide ISA will not become a narrow, or vice versa. Restoring dynamic capabilities of the ISA is one of the goals. This is indicated by the bucket handle action of the lateral ribs during breathing. The lateral ribs should move superiorly and laterally during inhalation, and back during exhalation.

1. Stack it: Align the pelvic and thoracic diaphragm

One of the initial goals is to stack the ribs on top of the pelvis. This aligns the pelvic and the thoracic diaphragm with each other and allows the management of internal pressures. Anterior orientation alters the length tension relationships and restricts ROM. This is a position you want as an option, not necessarily as base. Whether you have a narrow or wide ISA, if you’ve put up big numbers in the weight room often equate to superficial compressive strategies.

2. Stop Over Committing to Unilateral Work

Fight fire with fire. Use compression (load) on one side to influence expansion capabilities on the other. Developing ventral cavity control (i.e., the “stack”) implies sagittal competency. If you do not have sagittal competency, you will cheat the frontal and transverse planes. However, you do not only need to do sagittal based exercises to achieve sagittal competency.

The solution to this problem is often solved by prescribing some unilateral work. Unilateral is fantastic. It covers a lot of ground.

In my own experience using unilateral exercises with my athletes and conversing with them about the movements, most of them tell me that they feel an element of athleticism with the unilateral strength exercises. I imagine that this is due in part to unilateral exercises emphasizing cross-body patterns and putting the joints in positions with more degrees of freedom, requiring more stability.

Here are some of the reasons that I personally like using unilateral strength exercises, especially early in a developmental training progression:

1. Unilateral strength exercises are naturally more unstable, emphasizing stability, coordination, and balance in the face of more degrees of freedom.
2. Due to greater instability, athletes should perform unilateral strength exercises with a controlled tempo, emphasizing time under tension for greater local muscular endurance and hypertrophy.
3. Unilateral strength exercises will reduce the overall axial load, allowing for a period of unloading the spine while emphasizing strength and tension of the local leg musculature early in the training process.
4. With split patterns and positions, mobility may be trained against load in positions like deep hip/knee flexion, hip extension, and ankle dorsiflexion while minimizing spinal compression
5. They align with ground contact time in early phases of acceleration and match the force velocity curve

However, unilateral work falls short in the presence of neurological output. In order to reach your genetic output as it pertains to power, you must prime your nervous system. This is why we talk so much about aligning your strength work with a well designed speed program. In early phases of the sprint you want to use more unilateral work and as you progress in intensity/distance with the sprint you utilize more bilateral work to prime the nervous system, shorten GCT, and mitigate PNS soreness.

3. Leverage Training Residuals: You Aren’t Going to Get Weaker

If speed, power, and strength are the goal, then you must allocate training cycles where max strength is in maintenance (read: retained, not detrained) while other competencies are developed. If top end strength is your ultimate goal, this may not be a worthwhile pursuit. You will never be as strong as you could when you seek to increase athleticism.

In more modern terms, vertical integration coined by the late Charlie Francis has gained more popularity. Simply put, training multiple equalities year around to ensure no physical quality is ever truly lost.

This is extremely important for coaches who work with athletes in random spurts of time throughout the year. An 8 week off-season, home for 2 weeks, or even a couple of days. It is very hard to create a high level program when the training time is always being cut short.

I’ve talked in the past about why you should align your training model to your business model for better results. I will explain more about this in another article.

When athletes come home from school or when their professional seasons are done I always start with layering in a quick strength phase. This is the easiest quality to restore and provides a great base to work off of.

Let’s say an individual comes back to work with you for two weeks.

An example would be a larger GPP based warm up to get their heart rate up, improve work capacity, and slightly fatigue them before they work up to a top set of 5 for the day. This is to ensure they don’t over strain a detrained structure.

You want to see where they are at and even if they need to improve strength at all. If not, you can move on to restore lost physical qualities.

As it pertains to power development, this is one of the easiest physical qualities to restore. Improving top end strength while laying in true speed work and exercises at higher velocities.

In the early phases, you'll be working through inefficient or compensated patterns. Develop efficacy and capacity and avoid the Siren call to demonstrate strength with a one-off random max workout. It’s a skill to grind through circa-max weights, and you can train this again down the road as you build the foundation.

When you trust the process, become deliberate with your execution, and acquire lost movement capabilities you have the beginnings of creating a real monster. One capable of demonstrating strength, power, speed, and stamina. I believe when done correctly you can be much stronger, more powerful, and more robust.