How Power Relates to Strength

I came across this passage in the Easy Strength book, and sharing it here will be a good opportunity for us to go over power, and how exactly it’s different, but related to strength.

The following quote is from researcher and professor Vladimir Zatsiorsky:

“It is impossible for athletes to generate a large force in a fast movement if they cannot develop similar or even greater force values in a slow motion. But don't overemphasize the role of maximal strength in power production [either]. To be a strong athlete does not mean to be a power athlete. It is true that all elite power athletes are very strong people. On the other hand, not all strong individuals can execute movement powerfully when combining large force and high velocity.”

In other words, you can’t be powerful without having requisite strength and technique.

Here’s how power is defined:

Power (watts) = work (joules) / time (seconds)

This equation states power is the rate of doing work.

Imagine you’re deadlifting at the the gym. The first lift, you just bend over a pick it up slowly. You have the strength to do it, but there’s no urgency to the lift. On your next attempt, you brace hard, take a deep breath and turn on every inch of your body. You drive your feet down and the bar is moving 5 times as fast as your previous lift. That’s power, and you can try to add power to most of your lifts in the gym. Adding intention and speed to push ups, ring rows, bench presses and squats will likely make them feel easier since you’re recruiting more muscle fibers.

Why is thinking about power important? In a seminar a couple years ago I learned that after the age of 40, power declines nearly 2% every year and strength declines 1%.

That means you lose power twice as fast than strength as you age.

Then best way to not lose it is to use it frequently. Do those medicine ball throws hard, move the barbell quickly and be snappy on your kettlebell swings. Not only will your technique and abilities likely improve, but you’ll also be exposing your body to rapid, explosive movements more regularly, and maintaining your power with your strength.

In closing, here’s one more quote from Easy Strength, from Thomas Kurz:

“Slow squats with huge weights will increase the athlete's maximal strength but they will not develop explosive strength. For someone with insufficient maximal strength slow squats may increase explosive strength but then the weight will not be huge.”

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

When Momentum Becomes Destructive

It’s remarkable how much your body can adapt to training stimulus. The key to the whole thing working though is recovery.  That’s where the adaptation actually occurs, and without adequate rest and recovery, you’re leaving performance on the table.

That’s why yesterday, even though I was on a hot streak, and I really wanted to keep my streak going, and film myself doing some easy squats, I knew a rest day would be more beneficial. It had been 12 days straight of squatting, and my body was quite used to the stimulus and volume, but I was thinking ahead.

Even though I felt good, by the end of this week, my body could have started feeling too fatigued or sore and achy. To hedge against that, I decided to skip the squats yesterday.

I’ve learned my lesson from riding the momentum too much with running. There’s been many times I’m having a great training week, I roll it into the next week without skipping a beat, to only end up taking 4 days off the following week cause I’m trashed.

Going into this Easy Strength, I wasn’t sure if I would take a rest day or not. Rest days, are of course an integral part of the plan as written, but I like to dabble in the extremes. After all, each of the 12 workouts has taken me less than 10 minutes start to finish and I always have the equipment readily available. Making it a daily practice was part of the appeal for me.

In closing, I felt like if I had squatted yesterday, I would have been doing it only to keep the streak going. The real goal here is to get freaky strong, so in keeping the goal the goal, and not letting momentum become destructive, I broke the streak and took and rest day, and today, I feel invigorated because of it.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Friday Thoughts #3

Here’s this week’s list of random thoughts on my mind.

• If you didn’t know, my son Elliot turned 3 yesterday! The old cliche, the days are slow but the years are fast totally rings true.

• Speaking of years going by fast, there are only 108 days left in 2023.

• It’s hard to imagine you’ve made it all the way into the third bullet point of this blog without having seen my video about Easy Strength and what it’s all about. But on the chance you haven’t, check it out HERE.

• If you have been following along, today is day 11. I haven’t squatted yet today, but my body feels like I’m going to stick with 225 pounds again. I’m feeling good about this because last week I had to take two “deload” days and only squatted 135. I expected the same to happen this week but I’m responding to the load and volume differently already. I may go a little heavier today with a rep scheme of 5-3-2. This would give me the opportunity to figure out an appropriate weight jump to use for next week. In other words, should I jump to 250, or would I be able to handle 275?  Either way, I’ll only do the weight if it feels easy, that’s the whole point.

• I saw this term, principle based creativity, and it perfectly sums up my program design process. I have certain principles, rep schemes, movement patterns, loading strategies, etc. Working within those principles allows me to be more creative because it provides constraints and direction. I’m of the belief that program design is both an art and a science. Having principles guides program design and through that you can develop your own style.

• That’s all for today, see you next week.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Subscribe to GAIN on YouTube

Earlier this week, as I was uploading 18 new video demos to the YouTube page, a client approached me saying, hey you should make a print out sheet with like 50 warm up exercise demos on it.

I said, all you need to do is check out the YouTube page! We have close to 400 movement demos (plus some entertaining videos that are now 7 or 8 years old).

It’s a great reference to have saved for a rainy day, or to see some of the movements we’ve been tinkering with.

Subscribe!

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Gym Lingo: EMOM

Every Minute On the Minute.

This style of workout requires focus on the clock. When doing an EMOM, you start your exercises on the top of the minute, and rest all the remaining time.

EMOM 10: 5 push ups

This means you’ll complete 5 push ups at the top of each minute, rest all the remaining time and start again at the top of the next minute. The way this is written, you would do this for 10 rounds, or 10 minutes. This is a nice way to challenges technique, build volume and sprinkle in some cardio while lifting.

Another variation of and EMOM can be with multiple exercises, with each movement getting their own minute.

EMOM 21

Minute 1: 50 second machine

Minute 2: 10 kb swings

Minute 3: 50ft sled march

In this scenario, you would complete 7 rounds of the 3 movements equaling 21 minutes total. This style of workout builds work capacity and gets more difficult as minutes on the clock tick by. It’s a great way to be time efficient and cram a lot of work in while keeping yourself on a strict pace.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Balance, Agility and Coordination

I’m reading Balance is Power, by Jim Klopman.

If you’ve seen those little blue balance blocks in the gym, called Slack Blocks, he created them.

Here, he defines agility:

Agility is the ability to control and operate one’s body at high speed, under stress and in space.

Coordination, on the other hand:

Coordination is a component of agility. Coordination zeros in body control.

Klopman’s point in the chapter is that you need to be coordinated to have the best agility and that the two are related to one another. Therefore, balance is the sum of coordination and agility, as represented in this equation.

Balance = coordination + agility

When an athlete improves their balance, they improve their coordination and agility as a result.

Not many people come into the gym considering agility a trait they need to improve, but looking at it from this perspective, it’s a key component to having a robust body.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Progress Without Pain

It’s a misnomer that all workouts need to be hard. And people are hard on themselves in the gym when they skip a set, or bail on their finisher.

Maybe some even stay away from the gym all together, because they think that it needs to be excruciatingly hard each and every session.

As someone who’s spent a lot of time in the gym, it just isn’t true.

You’ll need to push it and have some hard workouts, but more than that, you just need to actually keep working out.

And the plan that leaves you completely depleted, might not be the best for your sustainability in the gym.

Here’s a quote I came across this weekend from Mel Siff, author of numerous strength training books, the most famous being Supertraining.

“To me, the sign of a really excellent routine is one which places great demands on the athlete, yet produces progressive long-term improvement without soreness, injury or the athlete ever feeling thoroughly depleted. Any fool can create a program that is so demanding that it would virtually kill the toughest marine or hardiest of elite athletes, but not any fool can create a tough program that produces progress without unnecessary pain.” - Mel Siff

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Friday Thoughts

With the changing in season, new routines and school back in session, I swear, September is just as busy as a goal setting month as January. Regardless of what type of goal are trying to tackle, weekends can be counterproductive if you’re not prepared.

Basically, this will be a list of me sounding like a buzz kill, but someone has to remind you that you can’t keep drinking all the time and expect progress to happen.

• Instead of staying up late and trying to bank more sleep by sleeping in later, stick to roughly the same schedule that you do during the week. This tip, that I originally learned from Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, has upped my sleep consistency.

• Speaking of consistency, eat the same breakfast! On days that I have my same breakfast, eating just seems easier. It’s easier to make the better choice and have willpower later in the day.

• Even if it isn’t a workout, make time to move. I try to get a good stretching and rolling session in each weekend, especially if my body is feeling beat up from hard training. At the very least, I get out on 1 or 2 walks.

• The weekend can also a chance to prepare for the coming week. We spend an hour or two on Sunday preparing meals for the coming days. It saves time and eliminates another choice during the busy week.

Consistency is the most important part of a healthy lifestyle. Help yourself out by learning to be more consistent on the weekends.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Hardstyle

I’ve been reviewing my old kettlebell textbooks lately. I’ve been reminded of a certain way of training. Rather, it’s a training mindset more so than a methodology or rep sequence. It’s a powerful one, and useful information for anyone who wants to get stronger and stay healthy.

These book are filled with references to the Russian Kettlebell Certification (now called StrongFirst). The creator of these certifications is the author of many of these books, Pavel Tsatsouline. Pavel is credited with bringing kettlebells to America and he created this training idea I’m talking about. He refers to it as Hardstyle.

The concept with his hardstyle method is to use maximum tension and power production, throughout your entire body on all lifts, even the light ones. Make all your reps challenging. Strive for perfect technique, maximum bracing, spot on timing and seek flawlessness. Make your light weights feel heavy and the heavy ones light.

Pavel encourages very small sets, in the 1-5 rep range, even for endurance training protocols. The difficulty of the workout comes from the intensity you create, not only from the external load of the barbell or kettlebell. And keeping the rep ranges small, offers this opportunity for more first reps.

If you’ve ever deadlifted or done a kettlebell swing, you know exactly what I mean when I say the first rep of the set is much more difficult than the subsequent. This ‘more first rep’ principle is what allowed me to train up to my 500 pound deadlift a few years ago.

Adopting this Hardstyle mindset will get your more engaged with your workouts and accumulating serious strength. Focus on small rep sets that focus on maximum tension and power production. EMOMs are the perfect opportunity to practice. Keep in mind, this is the opposite of efficient movement, we’re not trying to conserve power, instead maximizing it. Conserving power often results in sloppy movement and poor technique, hardstyle is excellent technique and form each and every repetition.

When you’re a beginner in the gym, the heavy weights will eventually demand this tension from you, but when you’re experienced, you can demand the tension from the light weight sets as well, and make your light weights feel heavy.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Seacoast Cancer 5k - Team Cupcake

The Seacoast Cancer 5k is less than three weeks away!

The race is around Pease on September 24th, you can find all the other details here.

If you want to participate, you should join me in signing up for Team Cupcake.

Kendra, who created the team and is an exceptional baker, is a long time member of the gym, and one of the strongest people I know. She’s been having breast cancer treatments for the past year and this is her team.

Click here to register.

Hope to see you out there on race day!

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Gym Lingo: Suitcase Carry

The suitcase carry, or one arm carry, where you carry a single kettlebell or dumbbell by your side is a great builder of trunk strength. It challenges your grip, builds shoulder and hip stability. It pairs well with a variety of movements in the gym.

Performed between heavy squats or bench press, it can provide your body cueing to brace better and create more stiffness, and in a conditioning context we use it as a filler movement, something that allows you to keep moving and keep your heart rate elevated between bouts of a different movement or something cardio based.

Mastering a suitcase carry will have carry over to life outside of the gym. Once you’ve done a suitcase carry with a heavy kettlebell, all other objects you carry are just an opportunity to practice. Obviously, you’ll no longer be needing the wheels on your suitcase, but also grocery bags, jugs of water, kids gear, you name it. If it needs to be carried, you’ll be ready for the job.

How to do it:

• Start with the kettlebell next to your foot.

• Drive your butt back and let you knees bend, hinging through your hips, to pick up the kettlebell. Focus on pushing the ground away as you stand up.

• Keep a firm grip on the kettlebel and don’t just let it hang in your fingertips. Keep you core engaged and don’t forget to keep breathing as you take your first steps.

• While walking, keep a few things in mind:

• no shrugging your shoulder, keep it away from your ear.

• Reach your opposite hand out to the side for balance if needed.

• Keep the weight far enough from your body it doesn’t crash into your leg.

• Walk slower than normal pace. Keep your trunk upright and try your best not to lean away from the weight.

• Don’t let the weight swing around as you turn.

Loaded carries are a fantastic way to build real-world strength and an easy opportunity to push yourself hard in the gym.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Labor Day and Random Thoughts

Happy Friday. As a reminder, we will be closed on Monday in observation of Labor Day.

Here are a few of my random thoughts from this morning.

• If you’re road tripping, having visitors over or are going to be time crunched for a workouts this weekend, look no further than Coach Taylor’s 10 Workouts Under 10 Minutes.

• Get your steps in. Whenever I’m unable to make a workout, I at least try to get out on 1-2 decent walks to accumulate some steps and movement.

• Weekends, especially long ones, can be progress killers. If you’re walking, sleeping, hitting the gym and fueling like a champ during the week, and getting less sleep and going complete rogue with you food choices every Saturday and Sunday, it’ll be a long road of push and pull.

• If you haven’t in a while, take a rest day this weekend.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Keep Moving Dirt

There’s a big white flag in the gym depicting a large shovel and a spoon.

It represents a powerful saying about training.

It was introduced to me years ago by former NFL player and strength training enthusiast, John Welbourn. His quote reads, “Training is like moving a pile of dirt. Some days you move a shovel full, other days you move just a spoonful. Either way, if you moved some dirt, you’re headed in the right direction.”

Not all training sessions will be heroic. So long as you moved some dirt, you accomplished something, and took your training in the right direction.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Habit Behind the Habit

As the seasons change, and we head into September, and eventually the fall, habits are on my mind.

Habits are an important topic, especially the times of year when people’s schedules and routines change, like right now.

As we head into Labor Day, you may have a new schedule, or new routine, or even if everything in your life is going to stay exactly the same, it’s a great opportunity to closely examine your habits. Specifically, the habits the support your gym success.

These, supporting habits, are things you probably already do, but don’t put much thought into.

Things like, laying our your gym clothes the night before, prepping an after work/pre workout snack, or setting the automatic coffee before an early workout. Whether you realize it or not, these are habits too, and the can help or hurt your success in the gym.

As you navigate the world in the coming weeks, pay close attention to your habits, and notice if you have any habits that aid you in completing your fitness routine, or if you’re trying to wing it and need to form some new supporting habits.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Are Your Shoes Causing Your Balance Problem?

Put your shoe on a table or flat surface and look at it from the side.

Does the toe of the shoe sweep upward? So that the the tip of the shoe is no longer in contact with the ground?

If that’s happening to your shoe, that is not a good shoe to workout in.

This is called toe spring. As soon as you put them on your feet, they shift your balance backwards. Over time, chronic use can lead to stiff muscles and fascia your foot and lower leg.

If you stand on the ground barefoot, do your toes naturally slope off the floor like that? Probably not.

That, combined with the fact that those same shoes likely have thick and cushy bottoms, with the heel raised above the rest of the foot, are why shoes like this shouldn’t be in the gym.

All that extra padding desensitizes your feet, shifts your center of mass and makes it more difficult for your body receive feedback, or rather, makes you more likely to lose your balance.

Balance will deteriorate as you age. There a lot of things you can do to continue challenging your balance and help it stick around. Getting appropriate gym shoes, ones with stiffer bottoms, a minimal heel drop and space for your toes to spread out is an easy place to start.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Constraints, Creativity, and Motivation

One of the best ways I get creative with my workouts is to simplify my choices.

There are a lot of things to choose from, and I have them all easily accessible to me at my house and the gym.

When I don’t have a clear goal I’m striving for, I come up with constraints to get my training going.

Right now I’m only using kettlebells. It’s been about two weeks.

The classic kettlebell moves are the snatch, the clean, the swing, the press and the get up. There are no other movements I’m doing. Each day, I focus on one or two, and do the others as accessory movements or warm ups.

It’s really simplified my training routine and I’m coming up with unique workouts due to the lack of choices I have.

It’s also creating more opportunities for me to tune into my body and really focus on how it’s moving. I can compare how certain movements feel day to day, and even compare how the weights feel throughout the week.

When getting to the gym becomes more difficult, many people blame it on lack of variety in the gym, claiming a workout with more variety would be more motivating. Perhaps it’s the other way around though, maybe you don’t need more choices and variety in your routine, but less.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Stay in the Game

It’s almost two weeks after my big day in the mountains. I took 5 days off from training, and for the past week or so, have been getting into a new routine. It’s one of my favorite times of year for training. I can bask in all the aerobic fitness I built all summer and start tuning up in order to break some PRs in the winter.

I think of my training in big, year long chunks. Last year, at this time, I spent a lot of time doing rope climbs, ring dips and handstands. This year, I dusted off my kettlebells and am sharpening old skills with focus. Basically, I ride the momentum of what’s fun to do in the gym before stating a more regimented plan in September or October.

May, June and July were spent building up my running and hiking fitness. I rarely touched weights. In April, before starting all the running, I did a lot of biking and rowing to get my musculature and lungs ready for long repetitive workouts. Now, in August, I’m prepping my body for some heavy lifting this fall and winter.

My kettlebell workouts focus on moving with intention, getting my body connected while breathing and bracing. After a summer of wearing a heart rate monitor and really pushing myself on a variety of running workouts, these sessions feel chill. And they should, that’s the goal, to move around and make sure things are firing on all cylinders.

It’s hard, and actually detrimental to your progress, to go at full effort year round. When I used to try and go full speed all year round, I always missed more workouts than I finished. Try to zoom out of your training plan and realize there will be peaks and valleys, periods of higher effort and lower effort, and that’s all part of staying in the game.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Grip Strength and Longevity

In college I was participating in a peer’s research study and they needed 20 strong college-aged people.

They determined who was strong by using a hand dynamometer. This device measures one’s grip strength by pounds of force you can create while giving it your best squeeze.

This was a simple low skill way to get the right participants for their study. It was the first time I learned how grip strength can be used as a predictor for total body strength.

Recently a couple GAIN members sent me this link, What grip strength can tell you about how well you’re aging.

“A wealth of research already tells us that strength is good for us. People who lift weights are substantially less likely to develop heart disease, high blood pressure and many other chronic illnesses than those who skip resistance exercise.”

Grip strength can tell us how strong we are, and how strong we are can be a predictor for longevity.

This gave me the push to get our own dynamometer for the gym. We’ve been having fun with it over the past few days.

We’ve started calling it the truth-o-meter. It’ll tell you if you’re strong or not.

Next time you’re in the gym give it a squeeze.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Gym Lingo: Goblet

Have you ever wondered why it’s called a goblet squat when you hold a kettlebell in front of you chest and perform squats?

A few years ago we had a large number of clients referring to kettlebells as goblets. Along the lines of, “I dropped my marker and it landed over there near the goblets.” I always got a kick out of that, and it is a little confusing.

The goblet designation doesn’t have to be with a kettlebell though, you can goblet hold and dumbbell as well.

It’s not named after the implement itself. Instead, it’s due to the position of holding a weight in front of your chest like that. Legendary strength coach, Dan John, created the goblet squat around 2002.

He was holding a kettlebell in the front of chest position, did a squat and he said it was like he squatted the holy grail, or a big goblet. The name stuck.

And just like that, this simple, highly effective loading strategy, for both beginners and advanced trainee, was created.

Justin Miner

@justinminergain

Pushing Up is Weak

In college I studied to become a kettlebell master.

I remember the day, sitting in my beach house off campus, when I read this passage about a door frame from Pavel Tsatsouline in Enter the Kettlebell. I wanted to be able to pass the RKC snatch test, 100 reps with a 53-pound kettlebell in less than 5 minutes. I couldn’t fathom that test at the time. I didn’t think I could snatch the 53, and I didn’t even have access to one to find out.

The brand new set of kettlebells at school topped out at 44 pounds, and the gym I had been training at had the same. Kettlebells weren’t easily available like the are now.

This passage, about strict pressing a kettlebell, clicked in my brain and taught me how to brace, be strong and push weights (not just kettlebells) away from me.

“Stand inside a doorway, raise both arms overhead, and place your hands on the supporting beam as if you are military pressing… Grip the ground with your toes. Flex your quads and pull up your kneecaps. Cramp your glutes. Brace your abs for a punch (don’t suck them in). Breathe shallowly throughout the exercise, but without relaxing your abs…Breath behind the shield.”

“Now, push up against the top of the doorway with moderate effort. Note what it feels like. Relax. After a brief rest, gather the tension in your body from your feet up, and this time, instead of pushing up, focus on pushing yourself away from the doorway down into the ground. Try to leave foot imprints on the carpet. Note that your knees must remain locked and you back must be braced with a muscular corset.”

Try this drill and think about it the next time you’re pressing something at the gym!

Justin Miner

@justinminergain