Power comes in the form of a simple action, such as jumping up.
The term muscle power often confuses athletes because it is often (mis)used as a synonym for the word strength. In fact, many of the strongest people, ironically referred to as frames, lack power, unlike less massive athletes. Power is a combination of strength and speed.

It may seem crazy to think that strength does not require power, but it does. In its purest form, power does not require speed at all. Imagine a man holding a car in the balance after an accident while his child tries to get out from under it-it might require tremendous force, but not power, because the action produced is static and there is no speed involved.

Imagine a kung-fu master performing a U-turn punch with such speed that he can knock the flame of a candle half a meter away. Such a trick requires tremendous speed, but because the arm moves at a very low load equal to just the inertia of its own mass, there is no great force and therefore no great power.

The true power is somewhere in the middle. It is a combination of speed and force. The higher the load, the greater the force and the lower the speed. The lower the load, the more speed and less power. This middle way of true power is best achieved by doing light, low-load exercises (such as hand or leg kicks) rather than lifting giant barbells. Mother Nature herself gave us the golden mean: you have to move your body weight with great speed, like acrobats or parkour masters do. This is the true meaning of power in athletics.

Functional speed is the ability to move the body quickly over a short distance
Let me tell you something that may seem strange at first glance: I'm not really interested in pure speed. What do I mean by pure speed? Legendary coach Al Murray has an answer to this question: "You can talk about speed and that some athlete is the fastest in the world, but it's often incorrect. You can't say a person is fast because they can run a large number of kilometers in a record time, because that has to do with endurance. But if a person is able to develop high speed over a short distance or to perform a single action very quickly-a hand, foot, jump, run, or turn-then I understand it as speed." Al Murray. Modern Weight-Training (1963).

Some athletic training books take this idea too literally-they put too much emphasis on speed tricks: teaching you to flip and catch coins or catch a ruler that another athlete has flipped. Unfortunately, this pure speed is useless, because only in exceptional circumstances do we have to act with one limb or part of the body. In the course of evolution, the human body has learned to move as a whole. This is why I am more interested in functional speed, which involves moving the whole body as much as possible.

This book will teach you how to move your whole body at lightning speed. In the real world, in sports or extreme situations, moving only part of your body is not enough, no matter how fast you can do it. Imagine the following situations:

A soldier dives into the water to get out of the line of fire;

An athlete jumps over an obstacle;

a fighter dodging a blow from an opponent;

a fugitive quickly overcomes a wall to evade pursuit;

an acrobat jumps with a flip in the air in order to land safely.

These are all examples of the application of speed in the real world. The movement is performed with the whole body. That's why the exercises presented in this book will be built around moving the whole body as fast as possible (you may notice here that speed and power overlap: moving the whole body at a fast pace requires power, which depends on body mass).

Agility is the ability to change direction quickly and in a coordinated manner.

Dexterity is a more complex phenomenon, it requires a change of speed, such as in a curve lift (arrows show the directions of force application)

The problem of modern plyometrics is that the exercises develop power, but not dexterity. An athlete can have tremendous power and still lack agility. Powerful athletes are able to make explosive movements in one direction, but they lack the ability to change direction at high speed using other muscles in the body. Where the movement occurs in multiple directions or at high speed several times in a row, dexterity is required (in this sense, dexterity can be thought of as complex power, as opposed to simple power, which is expressed in unidirectional movements).

Take the backflip, for example. An athlete could be able to perform powerful but be completely unable to perform backflips (power - dexterity). Why not? Because the nervous system* lacks the ability to change directions and engage all muscle groups while maintaining the equilibrium and precision needed to execute the skill successfully. The same is true for extension lifts, forward somersaults, and to some extent power lifts at the point.

The exercises in this book will allow you to develop tremendous dexterity. You train power simply - like strength - agility should be trained as a skill. I will explain the difference between these types of training and introduce the methods you need to develop optimal power and dexterity.

Reflexes

There is a fourth characteristic: reflexes. Often amateur and professional athletes use this term incorrectly. Usually the word is used in reference to the body's ability to produce a defensive reaction to an external action, such as to dodge hitting an object ahead or to catch an arrow in flight. This is not entirely true. Reflexes actually serve a more mundane, less heroic function. They are automatic, programmed movements of the body in response to any action.

Imagine that you are going down the stairs and accidentally stumble. Whether you hit your face on the floor or your feet automatically balance your body depends on how well you have reflexes. Reflexes are much faster than thought because they bypass thought processes. When something happens so fast that the brain doesn't have time to react, reflexes kick in, and the nervous system instantly performs thousands of calculations and adjustments to keep the body safe.

If all of this is happening the moment you stumble, imagine how intensely your reflexes must be working so that you can bring your arms forward in time to do a cartwheel, or land safely after a forward somersault.

In short, if you want to develop tremendous power, speed and agility, you have to develop your reflexes to a certain level. With practice, they will appear to you on their own. Once you have made ballistic power movements involuntarily, many movements have to be made involuntarily - something that happens faster than the brain can process. When you do an explosive push-up, somersault, or curve lift, you have to correct your movements and land, and it all happens in a split second. And in order to do that, you have to train your reflexes. Although many of our reflexes are innate - also called natural or unconditioned reflexes, we can train our nervous system to respond more effectively to different situations - these reflexes are called conditioned reflexes.

Conclusion: If you train properly by doing the exercises described in this book, your motor reflexes will automatically develop to the level that a black belted karate fighter possesses, and you won't even need to catch arrows, my young ninjitsu art lovers.

Most athletes who train in the gym work on strength, but true athleticism as well as the dexterous movements typical of young people will always be beyond their reach because they do not fully understand how to develop the three most important qualities of explosive technique: power, functional speed and agility (your reflexes also play an essential role, and they can be seen as a result of developing these three qualities).

If you follow the recommendations, you can develop these three qualities, and much faster than strength. Anyone who is able to move can quickly learn to develop tremendous power, a special kind of explosive power that many people think is characteristic of wild animals or superheroes from comic books. But most training methods are not able to help you in this. You have to forget about the non-functional methods of strength training, which trainers in gyms are paid to learn. You have to re-pump the basic movements, and you have to do it right.

Five key principles

Many of the traditional calisthenics methods that have been used for years to develop whole-body strength and agility, borrowed in part, for example, from the martial arts, have been scrapped to the margins of history for lack of use. Instead, people used modern toys like cones, elastic bandages and other devices.

To make matters worse, only a tiny percentage of people do explosive exercises, and those athletes who train for speed, power, and agility usually do so in a hurry, on occasion, because they need these qualities for soccer, hand-to-hand combat, or another sport. Sadly, most of the people who go to the gym don't specifically train for strength/power at all! They are taught to build their workouts around exercises, in bodybuilding, with weights and machines. Because these movements are done smoothly, slowly and the muscle (or muscles) work in isolation, there is actually a degradation of the muscles and nervous system in terms of the body's inability to move quickly or in a coordinated manner.

You can teach your body to move quickly, like lightning, using explosive techniques, as acrobats do, as it is programmed in your super-predator DNA. The training system is based on a number of unconditional principles:

Work with your own weight.

Exercise in a spartan way.

Train all parts of the body at the same time.

Focus on a limited number of exercises.

Apply the sequence principle.

Work with your own body weight.

Why is it so important to use traditional methods of training with your own body weight? They are unbeatable methods of physical training in all cases. Take explosive movements, for example. A person cannot be considered an explosive athlete unless they possess three qualities: power, functional speed, and flexibility. However, there are very few methods used today that can develop these qualities all together, at the same time.

Let's take a look at the three main modern methods and compare them to explosive calisthenics exercises, such as flips, power exits or curve lifts. The following three methods are the most common today.

Platform work, that is, plyometric platform jumps or platform push-ups.

Cone training, which means zig-zagging between cones on the weightlifting floor or in the gym.

Weightlifting, so-called quick lifts: jerks, presses, lifts.

To see how effective these methods are in developing the three qualities for our definition of an explosive athlete, three questions need to be answered.

Power: does the athlete have to move with power and high speed?

Functional speed: does the whole body move quickly?

Agility: does the body have to change direction at high speed?

Working from the platform (plyometrics) develops power because the load moves quickly. It also develops functional speed because the whole body moves. But platform work is not very effective in developing dexterity because most of the techniques are variations of the athlete's vertical movements - the angle of movement does not change, which is very important for the development of true dexterity.

Cone training develops agility because the body has to change direction quickly at significant speeds; it also develops functional speed because the whole body moves at a fast pace. But since the load is relatively light, this type of exercise is not much different from running-it does not develop power. (One of the reasons why taper exercises have gained popularity in schools is that they don't require much exercise - these exercises are fairly safe, and anyone can do them regardless of their level of strength development.)

Weightlifting develops power because it involves the application of force at maximum speed. However, these exercises do not require dexterity because the body does not change direction - there is a simple vertical movement of the weight. In addition, during the lifting of the projectile, the legs do not or hardly lift off the floor, which does not meet the criterion of functional speed (rapid movement of the whole body). The body does not move a significant distance.

Alone, none of these three methods is capable of sufficiently developing explosive technique. Now compare the three methods to the explosive calisthenics methods: the extension lift, the forward somersault, the backward somersault, and the power lift at point-blank range. These exercises are undeniably advantageous over up-and-down weight movements because they involve rapid movement of the weight (body mass)-power. They also require rapid whole-body movement-functional speed. Finally, the dexterity criterion is also fully realized because the body has to change direction at high speed.

Power, functional speed and flexibility are standard criteria for the components of an athlete's explosive technique, but you can develop your own approaches if you wish.

Each technique is valuable in its own way in its field: platform jumps develop overall power, power athletes can benefit from Olympic weightlifting, and cone exercises are useful in certain sports, such as soccer. But if an athlete wants to maximize explosive technique and has the three qualities of explosive technique, any one method taken in isolation will not suffice. The approach taken in traditional calisthenics overcomes this obstacle.

Work out the Spartan way

In addition to being an effective way to work out explosively, traditional methods of working exclusively with your own weight are also very convenient. They require little or no special equipment. For the most part, all that is needed to perform the "explosive six" exercises described below is a floor, a wall, and a bar to hang on.

When beginners hope to learn explosive exercises such as flips, for example, at a modern day gym, they are usually given rubber bands to help them perform power lifts; gymnasts use mattresses and blocks, wedges and pull-ups, cords, and other similar devices.

If you're new to training with your own weight and are worried that you'll have to do gymnastics first or buy a bunch of expensive equipment to learn how to safely perform power tricks like somersaults or deadlifts, remember a simple truth: thousands of generations of our ancestors perfected these techniques, and they were quite successful a thousand years before the birth of Christ. Of course, all this junk hadn't even made it into people's heads yet.

The ancient Minoan athletes developed incredible explosive power (not to mention reaction speed, which saved their lives more than once) by doing somersaults over an attacking bull. No ropes, no mats, no foam - the athlete would jump, leap over the bull and land with his feet on the ground. It was dangerous, but can you imagine the level of concentration it developed? Think about that the next time you complain that you can't afford to go to the gym. The British school of calisthenics in the 1930s already had exercises involving formal partners-in this case to help perform backflips.

Spartan training also involves doing it yourself.

Train all parts of your body at the same time

In real life, you don't need a fast leg or arm. Some people, when talking about boxers, claim as if they have fast arms, but this is incorrect. In fact, a boxer's entire body is involved in a punch: legs, waist, torso, shoulders and arms. All parts of the body have to move fast - you can't create speed otherwise. The same is true for punching - ask any fighter about fast legs and he will tell you that the stomach and upper body are just as important in creating speed.

The harsh reality of everyday life also tells us that we need a fast body, not fast body parts. In combat, in military athletic training, in sports, you have to move your whole body. You know that's true. There's no point in having super-fast fingers, trained by games on a computer console, if they grow out of a moss-covered pile of crap. You may not be able to do the individual speed tricks that some athletes love: flipping and catching cards or quickly intercepting coins dropped from your elbow. We don't need such extremes. These kinds of skills-even juggling, which some boxers used to do-are too specific. They won't give you speed in any other situation.

The best way to develop explosive power and speed is to choose only exercises that involve the whole body. You need to work as many muscles as possible to make full use of your body's potential. Of course there are exercises that develop some parts of the body more intensely than others - clap push-ups obviously train the upper body, pogo stick jumps are apparently good for working out the shin muscles. However, as you master more advanced exercises, you'll notice that a series of exercises trains the whole body as a unit: powerful push-ups allow you to progress to advanced exercises involving the legs, and a series of jumps quickly activates the arms and abdominal muscles, which gives extra power.

Whole-body exercises have the advantage of developing integrated power. The body has a true unity of image-the total is greater than the sum of the parts. An athlete who tries to train each area of the body separately (in isolation) to develop power cannot be as fast or as mobile as an athlete who has trained these areas as a whole. If you know what hard power training is, you will realize that the strongest men and women in the world are those who train their bodies with exercises that work the whole body at once, which allows them to realize the full potential of their training systems. Power and speed training systems are not significantly different.

Basic concepts and tips

Explosive Six

Explosive Six.

The workout technique is based on six different types of movements-the big six. Here they are:

Push-ups.

Squats.

Pull-ups.

Leg lifts.

Bridge stance.

Push-ups in handstand.

They help effectively pump strength and gain muscle mass, but if you need to develop power, speed and agility, you'd be better off looking for another exercise.

Just as the big six is the most effective calisthenics movements for developing strength and building muscle mass, the explosive six is a set of the most effective exercises you can do to develop explosive power and speed in your own body. An intense workout with the explosive six will allow you to develop speed, agility, and explosive power throughout your body. If you can perform them all, you will be like a ninja who has been possessed by the spirit of the lynx.

Explosive Six:

Jumps

Power push-ups

curls.

forward somersaults

back flips

explosive power outputs on the bar

Ten steps

Ten Steps

The six basic movements are broken down into ten different exercises, the Ten Steps. The first step is the easiest and should be completed by any athlete in more or less decent shape. In sequential kalistenika a series of gradually complicating techniques is called a series. Starting with the first stage, each technique becomes progressively more difficult until you reach the highest stage. The tenth is the most difficult exercise, which is the master's level.

In a series of explosive exercises, the simplest ones make up the more difficult exercises - all the way up to the master's step!