Friday Thoughts 133
Welcome to this week’s editing of Friday Thoughts, where I share what’s been on my mind this week. Enjoy.
Velocity Based Training
If you want to get strong it’s important to know how speed plays into strength.
Maybe you’ve heard the equation force = mass x acceleration (F=Ma)
To apply this in the gym, force is how much strength you can produce which is equal to weight on the bar x the acceleration of the bar.
I’ve always leaned on this principle. Put more force into the ground, recruit more motor units to move more explosively and in turn, that will help you move more weight. And provide a way to train strength without always going heavy.
I recently got a barbell speed sensor for velocity based training (VBT). It’s a string that attaches to a barbell and measures the velocity of the bar in meters per second.
It’s really cool.
Based on the speed of the bar, I’ll be able to determine: is this heavy enough? Too heavy? Too light? Too Slow? Just the right speed?
I’m excited to tinker with a new metric. Especially something I have trained and thought about a lot, but never been able to put a number on it before.
Here are some Zercher squats from the other morning. The target velocity for strength is under .6 m/s - in other words, if it’s too fast, it’s too light to elicit a strength response. These reps were right in that zone of accelerative strength, which I wanted.
Each rep slows a little, but not dramatically.
Heavy Swings
We talked about swinging the heaviest kettlebell in the gym this week. Shoutout to Adam, who became the third person to ever even swing the 203 pounder at GAIN. That kettlebell is brutal, it falls so fast and tried to fling you backwards. Swinging a kettlebell that is more than a 150 pounds heavier than that—crazy.
Speaking of Velocity
Here is a video of Karlos Nasar from Bulgaria. When I took the USA Weightlifting cert a few years ago they cite that the snatch is one of the fastest movement in all of sports. Especially from the knee to the hip. Watch this in slow mo and the full speed clip plays afterwards. The display of precision and power is awesome.
Sports Specific
I’ve really enjoyed this content from this jujitsu strength and conditioning coach. In this video here he breaks down a “sport specific” jujitsu workout, and while the exercise selection is good, there’s a lot to be desired from the programming. Mostly it’s just way too much shit. You can accomplish more with less when it comes to strength training. And while the jujitsu reference won’t be relevant to any of you, these kinds of programs show up for all sports. Strength for running videos and programs often have way too many movements with high reps and light weights. Training like that just wastes time and makes you sore. And doesn’t actually impact your muscles, tendons, ligaments, and nervous like good old heavy weights.
The New Gluten Free
I’ve written in the past year how protein has had a big come up.
It’s all over the place. Protein coffee, cookies, pretzels, high protein pizza, protein water (seriously) and so much more.
Protein’s big marketing push didn’t change peoples’ relationship with protein though. It’s not as easy as getting a protein coffee from Starbucks. I feared that we were missing the point about eating enough protein to recover from workouts and build new muscle.
Think of the irony: we have a protein shortage but people still aren’t eating enough protein.
Thanks for reading, see you in the gym!
—Justin Miner