Man's Take Magazine

Athletic Power Generation Guide – Part One

Introduction

So you want to learn to be powerful? I’m not talking about basic strength. I’m talking about explosive, bone crunching, high jumping, boulder hurling, truck pulling POWER! I’m not really suggesting you do any of these things, but wouldn’t you like to have the functional strength to be able to? Imagine how it would transform your sports potential to be able to swing more powerfully, punch or kick harder, or move far more weight.

Do you want to learn the secrets to power system development? Do you want to learn to be functionally stronger, and not just able to lift heavy weight at the gym? I’m talking about translating that gym strength into real life. Because I have news for you, it does not translate directly for many reasons.

With great athletic power, comes great athletic performance. Strength gains from traditional resistance exercise have a minimal yield in real life activities. In fact, sometimes this “gym strength” can degrade performance due to lack of flexibility, limited range of motion, reduced speed, and poor endurance.

The power program discussed here lends itself well to many applications, from sports to self-defense. It can even help with performance in many careers. This new power can boost your confidence and in some cases it can truly change your life.

Who the Hell…

So how am I such an expert? I’m not a world’s strongest man competitor, an naturally gifted athlete, nor am I even a big bulky guy. I learned how to generate massive power through years and years of practice. Much of my insight comes from 25 years of martial arts training, plus working with some top exercise coaches and trainers. Power comes from body mechanics. It is through many years of carefully observing these mechanics that I’ve devised this program.

As a trainer, coach, and martial arts instructor I’ve worked with some incredibly talented and powerful athletes. I find that in those with extremely high levels of innate athleticism… I’m talking about raw athletic talent, they just automatically seem to be able to generate huge power in most everything they do.

I wanted to find out why that is, because I’m not one of those people. I’m by no means an elite athlete, but I have had to compete against them and those who were much larger and stronger than I was. I just wanted to be able to match their power, or at least come close enough to be competitive.

Seriously…

Let’s stop and be realistic here for a moment. If you weigh 150 pounds, can you match the power of a 300 pound man who has low bodyfat and is very athletic? Probably not. But have I seen it happen? Yes, absolutely. I’m sure you want to know how.

The simple answer is that the larger man, while athletic, wasn’t using all of his weight, or he had poor balance. So the larger man may be using larger muscles to create power, but the smaller man used all of his bodyweight to generate the power, instead of just isolating specific muscles.

This creates a strength mismatch. For example, if I were wrestling with someone and I wanted to hyperextend his arm at the elbow, I could match his strength versus my own by using my arms. But to insure success, I should mismatch the strength. To do so, I could clamp my legs over his body and head, lock the arm to my chest, and extend my entire body.

In this case my opponent would have to overpower the strength of my hips and core muscles with only his biceps. That is a strength mismatch. It’s also a leverage mismatch, because as my hips extend naturally they become a fulcrum for the elbow to bend against, causing leverage that further degrades the strength through that joint.

Much of this boils down to total body coordination and the origin of power in the body. We’ll get into more specifics in the guide, plus show you how you can test and increase your own power. This is not about lifting weights at the gym. This is about coordinating the body to move in unison. General strength is secondary to this coordination. 

Breaking Stuff

Before we get into details, let me give you a very specific, yet simplistic example of this concept using a static object. Remember, this is oversimplified to illustrate a concept, it does not account for the full physics and body mechanics behind the motion.

Let’s say your goal is to break a board with your foot. Hieeeyaaaaa!

First let’s assume this board is flat and horizontal, about a foot off the ground. How would you break it? You’d try to stomp on it, right? If you pick up your left leg and lean back onto your right, and then smash your left leg downward. You’d probably break the board.

Let’s say this is a very sturdy board and you are looking for optimal power. Just stepping on it is not enough. What you are going to do? If you just try to stand on it, you’ll put lots of weight into it, but it’s not going to generate enough power to break it.

What you need to do is combine the force of your muscles, in this case your glutes, hip, and thigh muscles straightening the leg, with the sudden impact of all of your bodyweight. And to be perfect, you need to time it so they both happen at the same instant. So you’ll need to jump up in the air, cock your leg upward as you jump, and smash it down as you come down on the board. You may also need to counterbalance with the other leg to create more force.      

Wham! It snaps like a twig. Why? Because the impact of your full weight accelerated by gravity and the muscular force of your large muscles were applied simultaneously, and combined into one huge point of impact. That impact was spread over the surface of your foot or shoe and transferred to the board. One way you could make this effective as far as damage goes would be to focus the impact over a tiny area, in this case the resulting pressure of your landing. To accomplish this you would strike with a surface smaller than the whole foot, such as the heel or ball of the foot. This would greatly increase the overall pounds per square inch of force because the total surface area delivering the force (the square inches) would be much smaller. 

It’s Not Rocket Science, but it May Be Closely Related.

Are you still with me? Simply put we want more raw power delivered into a small area, so it doesn’t get distributed across too much of the board. If you ran the board over with a tractor trailer you would certainly impart more energy than you could with your foot, but it would be too distributed to break it.

If the surface area is too small, the force will not transfer across the board. If you struck it with a knife blade, or you happened to be wearing high-heeled shoes (please tell me you’re not wearing high heels during power training), then the force is more likely to leave a gouge in the board rather than break it. The tractor trailer is likely to leave lots of little pock marks where it squished into the asphalt surface below the tire.

If you thinking this sounds like watered-down physics, you’re correct. But that’s only because this was a simple example. If we were to try to examine the physics of the same maneuver with the board held upright, there would be many more variables, most importantly perhaps the type of kick used to break the board. This would ultimately depend on the angle the board was presented. But generally speaking the idea would be to deliver as much force as possible through the motion of the limb.

Depending greatly on the height of the board, most of the kicker’s weight would be on the leg not kicking. If possible, the goal would be to transfer much of their weight into the moving leg. Of course if the board were very high this would be difficult without a running/jumping start.

It should also be noted that it’s often very difficult to generate power in a jumping move as first described because the person delivering the kick has no means of grounding or push-off while they are airborne. This can greatly reduce the amount of power generated. This is something we will discuss in more detail later. Suffice it to say in our original example another method of breaking the board would be to drop our weight fully by flexing one leg and kick out with the other.

The good news is we don’t need to use calculus to determine the myriad forces contributing to our arcing roundhouse kick. Instead we just need to focus on some simple concepts, and then practice them and be ready to adjust them as necessary.

Don’t worry… stay with me. We’re going to throw the physics out the window in a minute. Well, mostly.

Technique Rocks

I’m not trying to bore you with physics, but I do want to stress that this is not a discussion of “proper technique” from an antiquated source, or from some long-standing tradition or coaching anecdote. Major League Baseball players don’t swing a bat based on some tradition that dates back 100 years. Coaches try to look at their body mechanics and incorporate kinesiology and physics to analyze their swing. They then find ways that allow the player to generate more force by incorporating stronger (and usually larger) muscles, such as the core instead of the arms. If you watch baseball, you’ll often see this in the form of a change in batting stance.

In golf it goes one step further. Not only do are the golfer’s swings analyzed and mapped using high speed video equipment, but the manufacturers tailor the golf clubs using scientific principles and materials so the club delivers a more powerful blow to the ball (likewise the balls are engineered to be aerodynamic and to bounce off the club in various ways depending on the golfer’s swing).

The important point here is that the knowledge and technology exists to easily find the most powerful way to perform any given action. But without the elaborate high speed cameras, you can still find the optimal way to perform a powerful action just by following some rules during practice and making constant adjustments. Likewise you can train in functional movements that will increase strength in the areas you need it.

Little People Move Big Weight

Are you familiar with Olympic weight lifting competitions? This is where a competitor tries to get a whole lot of weight over his or her head using one of a few methods. The two primary categories are the clean and jerk and the snatch. If you watch this sort of competition, you’ll see that many of these people are lifting staggering amounts of weight over their heads. In fact, they are able to lift quite a bit more than their own body weight.

Would you be surprised if I told you that a person weighing under 128 pounds (58Kg) lifted 310 pounds of weight (141Kg) in the Olympics in the Clean & Jerk competition? I’m going to bet you weight more than 128 pounds, but can put 310 pounds over your head? I hate to break it to you… but this is actually the women’s record.

The men’s record is 370 pounds (168Kg) in the 123 pound (56Kg) division. The overall men’s record for Clean & Jerk is almost 580 pounds (263Kg) and the women’s overall record is just over 400 pounds (182Kg). For more records checkout the International Weightlifting Federation web site.

So how do these people lift so much weight over their heads? Aren’t people that strong supposed to be huge and bulky, and thus much heavier? You might think so, but the records tell another story. If you watch a guy who weighs less than 170 pounds put over 462 pounds over his head, you might rethink the answer to that question.

One interesting thing I noticed about the world record holders in weight lifting (power lifting) is that generally speaking the ratio of weight lifted to body weight decreases as the competitors get heavier. The best I see among the adults is three to one, and only the 56Kg man managed to do this by putting up 168Kg. That’s pretty impressive when you think about it… That man’s bones, joints, and muscles had to hold all of his weight plus balance three more of him over his head. All the weight presses down through the wrists, elbows, shoulders, spine, hips, legs, knees, ankles and finally through the feet and into the floor. It’s pretty amazing to me.

In our original example of trying to break a horizontal board, the big man had an advantage of more bodyweight, while the smaller man had the advantage of being able to jump higher use more gravity. The records prove that the little guys are proportionally more powerful than the larger men.

POP QUIZ

Quiz time! I know you hate them, but bear with me. This one isn’t graded. After that little discussion about power lifting, what do you think the top three factors would be in performing these lifts optimally? Have you guessed yet?

The first one is pretty obvious, and that’s proper technique. There’s a specific form for lifting the weight, and in a competition it must be followed. So this has to be the number one factor. Technique trumps everything else. A great deal of coordination is required in order to execute each part of the technique at the proper time. The technique itself achieves maximal leverage on the weight being lifted, and thus adhering to this format will create efficiencies. There will be slight variations for each lifter, depending on their body.

The second factor I would say is balance. One could argue this is part of technique and goes with coordination, but I think balance is a thing of its own. If you don’t have good balance, you won’t be able to perform the technique, especially with lots of weight. Balance comes with practice.

Flexibility is also a part of achieving balance. For example, an Olympic lifter can maintain total balance while in a deep squat. Try this: squat all the way down without rounding your back. That alone is difficult. But now try to touch your calves to your hamstrings (with your back straight). To do this properly your heels should be flat on the floor and your knees should not hang past the line of your toes.

The third thing is speed. In this case I’m talking mostly speed under the bar. This is even more important in the other lift I mentioned, the snatch. But in either the snatch or the clean & jerk, there’s a strong upward pull on the bar, and the lifter abruptly drops his or her weight underneath the rising bar and then switches direction to keep the bar moving upward.

Did you notice what’s missing from that list? Strength seems to be conspicuously missing, but not because it’s of no importance, certainly. Strength is definitely the fourth factor on my list, but the question only asked for the top three. Someone very strong can assuredly lift the weight above his head without need of good technique, but he will never be able to match someone of equal strength who excels in the three factors mentioned above.

We also should try to determine the type of strength needed. It’s both plyometric strength throughout the whole body, and some isometric strength, which is strength from a fixed angle. Most of the power stems from the core and upper legs, although the shoulders and back (the trapezius primarily) does do much of the pulling once out of the deadlift phase. At that point everything transfers to the legs and it becomes a front squat.

Once at shoulder height there is a pause, and the upper legs again are used along with the shoulders (the deltoids mainly this time) to propel the bar overhead until the elbows or locked and the triceps fully flexed. The arms are also employed somewhat in the pulling and pushing phases, as are many other stabilizing muscles, including the core and feet for balance, and even the forearms and wrists to control the grip on the bar. As you can see, this requires complete body strength. If one part of the body is weak, other parts will need to compensate, or that part will need to be trained until it is stronger.

By performing the lifts at a near maximal level, the weakest parts will automatically adapt first. Just make sure it’s not your balance that fails first (and you fall over) or your wrist/grip strength and you end up dropping the bar on your head or neck.

Disclaimer: This was only an example. I do not necessarily recommend that you start Olympic weight lifting. Power lifting is a difficult and sometimes dangerous sport that requires healthy joints, a healthy back, and knowledgeable supervision.

The Real Quiz

 Let’s pick one action. In this case we’ll pick an action every man is familiar with: the punch. Let’s assume we want to learn how to throw a rear-hand cross punch with maximal power. This is not a looping haymaker, but rather a straight punch.

Maybe you’re a boxer, kickboxer, or mixed martial arts fighter, or maybe just someone who wants to have absolute knock-out power with a single swing in a self-defense situation. Whatever the case, let’s say your goal is to obtain massive power from a punch.

Here’s the quiz. Rank the 4 exercises below in the order in which you think they’ll help you improve this action.

_____ Bench Press

_____ Practicing the Punch on a Heavy Bag

_____ Push Press (Overhead)

_____ Cable Machine Hip Turn (oblique)

Now it should be said that there are different variations of each exercise, and results may vary for each individual. But based on the body mechanics and my  years of martial arts training and observation, here is how I would rank them.

First of all, I hope everyone had Practicing Punching as number one. Clearly you cannot gain maximal power until you have perfected the technique. So this needs to be first and foremost. No matter what anyone else tells you, I hope that you come to understand that the best way to truly build functional strength in an activity is by performing that activity. Remember that technique always ranks first.

The next progression might be to use weighted gloves or to use a stretch band for resistance. Proper technique is still key, but we might want to add some resistance to our practice. That’s all fine, but I’m sure you’re looking for something beyond “practice.” 

So what’s next? I’m going to go with the Cable Machine Hip Turn, followed by Push Press, and then finally the least effective thing is going to be Bench Press.

Some might argue between the hip turn and the push press as the more effective exercise, and I will admit it’s somewhat of a toss up, depending on where your strength lies. I would say that a plyometric hip turn with a medicine ball (rebounding off a wall) might be better than both for the same purpose.

I’m sure some of you had Bench Press as first or second. This answer, I’m sorry to say, is flat out incorrect. At first glance, the bench press looks functionally related because the arm follows a similar path. But the position of the body nullifies the bulk of the strength gains when applied to punching.

I have nothing against doing bench presses, but they aren’t going to make a huge impact on your punching power like push presses or explosive hip turning motions will. Why? Because the power of a punch is not in the arm, chest, or shoulder, it’s in the hips and legs. The bench press removes these essential body parts from the power-generating equation.

To generate power we need to connect with the ground. In the case of a bench press the whole back is connected to the ground and you’re moving against gravity. That’s fine for building general muscle and even strength, but it simply does not translate into a punching motion.

The punch power starts at the ball of the foot as it pushes off the ground. The rear quadriceps flex and may straighten a bit, but most importantly the abs and obliques engage as the rear hip juts forward violently. The shoulder twists as the hips turn and the triceps simultaneously fire to extend the arm fully. The triceps do generate some power, but it’s infinitesimal compared to what the legs and hips generate.

If the puncher were to lift his rear foot up, all the power would leak out of the motion. There might still be speed, but upon collision the puncher would be forced backward, delivering virtually none of the energy to the target.

There is another popular punch in MMA called the “Superman Punch” which involves a jumping motion and a violent backward thrust of the leg to compensate for it being disconnected from the ground. This is a different but related method of power generation. The momentum of a flying forward lunge coupled with the rear-thrusting leg compensates for the “power leak” due to becoming disconnected from the ground.

Those bench press muscles of the shoulders and chest act primarily as stabilizing muscles to the joints supporting the punch. They keep the punch in line, but they don’t contribute directly to the power. In the case of a hook or upper cut punch, the shoulder and chest do contribute some degree of power, but again it’s a tiny fraction of what the rest of the body generates.

In Part Two of the Athletic Power Generation Guide we’ll break down the steps involved in generating massive power. We’ll also analyze the punch in more detail…

Related posts:

1. Athletic Power Generation Guide – Part Two

One Response to “Athletic Power Generation Guide – Part One”

1. Feldner says:

   September 30, 2010 at 4:09 AM

   What a great blog. Im truly a fan of your writing as well as your writing style. Dont stop writing. Keep up the good work.