The recent article (excerpts posted below) appeared in the Special
Advertising Feature (sponsored by Hammer Strength) called Performance Points
in "Training & Conditioning" magazine, May/June 2001.  It most validly
stresses the useful point that balanced sport specific training requires that
adequate attention  be applied to conditioning of the "antagonists", but some
of its analysis warrants further analysis and modification.

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<Training Speed - Are You Training the Right Muscles?

Christine Cunningham,  MS/ATC/L, CSCS

Strength training has long been an integral component of training programs
designed to improve movement speed. It is an obvious approach since the
greater the amount of force a muscle can produce, the faster the arm/leg will
accelerate, thus producing high top speeds. The end result should be faster
pitches, longer drives, and harder serves. Unfortunately, many strength
programs for increasing movement speed have had mixed results over the years.
Sometimes they work like a charm, other times there is no noticeable change
in an athlete's performance. I have often been intrigued by the mixed results
because it seems impossible that giving the muscular system the capacity to
produce more force would not result in faster movement. Recently, however, I
came upon some research that may provide some insight to explain the
inconsistent results.

Research Insight

In any fast movement, there are two integral parts of the action:

1.  accelerating the limb to top speed, and
2.  stopping it.

Traditionally, strength training for speed has focused on improving the
strength of the muscles responsible for accelerating the movement. In other
words, training the agonist muscles. These muscles are focused on with the
assumption that if they are stronger, they can do things like accelerate the
arm faster, which will result in a faster pitch. The antagonist muscles, the
ones responsible for stopping the limb at the end of the movement, are not
trained with as much emphasis. This lack of attention to the antagonists
could explain why athletes who should be able to go faster, do not.

Studies that have looked at fast movements and strength training at the elbow
have found that when the antagonist muscle (the Triceps) was trained,
movement was faster. Yet, when the agonist (the Biceps) was trained, no
significant change occurred in the movement speed. The reasoning is simple.
At the elbow, the Biceps is stronger than the Triceps in most athletes. When
the agonist is stronger than the antagonist, the neuromuscular system limits
movement to speeds that the Triceps can safely brake, even if the Biceps
could make the arm move faster.

It is the same safety precaution you would take if driving a car. Imagine if
you had a car that could go 150 mph but brakes that could only stop you at
100 mph or slower. Would you drive 150 mph? No, and for the same reasons, the
body will not allow the arm to move faster that it can be stopped. So, the
traditional approach to strengthening a pitcher's throwing motion may not be
enough to insure that he will throw faster. Faster pitches may be more
dependent on getting stronger brakes for the accelerators.

There is one further finding of the research that is important to note. When
the stronger muscle was the braking muscle (Biceps), strengthening the
Triceps did result in faster movements. This just emphasizes the point that
the speed athletes will move is based on the strength of the weakest muscle,
which is often the antagonist.... >

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*** I will add just a few comments, then leave the rest to any other
interested readers.

That conclusion about the need for stronger antagonists often being necessary
applies most accurately to movements which do not permit some sort of
"follow-through", such as weightlifting and powerlifting, but the ability to
continue a movement via the use of an extended follow-through, as in tennis,
kicking, throwing, hitting and other very high velocity activities, tends to
diminish the need for having much stronger "antagonists".

If possible, the human body tries to use as many systems as possible to
generate, amortise or redirect energy, so that:

1.  local stresses are diminished
2.  the need for having very large local muscle mass is decreased
3.  optimal patterns of force, torque and power production can be produced
4.  enough plasticity of function is permitted so that the body is not easily
incapacitated by local deficiencies.

Another important issue is that it is not only the muscles which control
movement.    Besides the active electromechanical role played by the nervous
system, the various connective tissues such as the tendons, the connective
and elastic tissues within the muscle complex, and the ligaments also play a
vital role in controlling the transmission, attenuation and limitation of
forces or tensions in the musculoskeletal system.

As I discussed in earlier letters, my PhD research examined two important
qualities of the connective tissues of the body, namely mechanical stiffness
(the resistance of the tissues to deformation) and damping ratio (the ability
to damp out shock or irregularities in action).  If the training scheme used
does not develop an appropriate mix of these two qualities, then movement
efficiency and safety is compromised.  For example, if the muscle complex
cannot adequately damp out vibration or shock between successive activations
(as in running or jumping), other parts of the body will be subjected to
greater stresses and movement efficiency can decrease.

This is why development of flexibility is all very well, but if it is not
associated with developing tissues of adequate stiffness which have
sufficient ability to timeously damp out rapid shocks or vibrations, then the
stretch training (or rehabilitation) is deficient.

Over to the rest of you for any further comments.

Dr Mel C Siff
Denver, USA
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Supertraining/