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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. ---------------------------------- <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.... > ------------------------------------------- *** 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/