Prof.: Alberto Conejero López
III.1 T EMARIO
I am an explosive lifter. Always have been and always will be.
When I was younger and weighed 17 stones/238 pounds (instead of 26 stones/365 pounds like I do now), I ran 100 metres in 11 seconds. Pretty fast for a big dude.
With that said, I favor explosive lifting for all lifters and like the idea of compensatory acceler-ation training (CAT).
Before I talk about speed and lifting explosively, a word of warning again: never lift explosively until you have at least 40% of your max on the bar. This will minimize the chances of you hyper-extending any of your joints at lockout.
Warning over, let’s progress…
CAT simply means that you will accelerate the bar as quickly as possible on the concentric motion of your lifts. It doesn’t matter whether you have 50% or 105% of your max on the bar—
you drive that bar as fast as you can.
Sure, the bar will not move quickly with a near maximal weight, but you must try. As Louie Simmons says, you cannot move a heavy weight slowly.
I feel that lifting explosively on all your sets has several benefits over trying to grind your weights up slowly:
• It teaches aggression.
• It develops speed (naturally fast lifters get faster and grinders get quicker too).
• Speed can help you blast through sticking points as if they weren’t there.
In case you are wondering, on the eccentric phase (lowering phase) of a lift, I believe you should lower the bar as quickly as possible, while maintaining control. You must maintain control, unless you want broken ribs on the bench press and squats that go down but don’t even get an inch out of the hole.
While lifting with as much speed as possible, there are two important rules:
1. You maintain your form.
Bar path must be identical on 50% and 100% of your max. I have seen lifters move 60% of their max with very impressive speed but their max does not go up for years. The reason why is obvious, but they are too stupid to see it—they are lifting their speed weights through a different path to their max weights.
AB
This is especially true on the deadlift. Keep your form tight.
2. You must stay tight.
There can be a temptation to lose tightness with lighter weights in an effort to move quicker, but you must stay tight.
Remember: abs, lats and fists of steel on everything you do in the weight room.
It has correctly been said recently that the easiest way to improve a beginner or intermediate athlete in any sport is to raise their absolute strength. I agree, because when strength goes up, many other attributes tend to follow.
However, if we look at sports, what tends to separate the elite from the merely good is SPEED.
In boxing and MMA, speed kills (nearly literally).
In middle distance running it is very often the guy with the sprint finish who prevails.
In tennis, a fast serve is a mighty weapon.
In soccer, fast forwards are a nightmare for defenders.
The most dominant golfer of all time is an awesome athlete who swings his clubs fast—Tiger Woods.
I could go on but the case is clear.
Generally speaking, speed wins the day in all sports. (Please note, I respect darts, chess, snooker and the like, but I do not call their competitors athletes and I do not consider such pursuits as sports. I consider them games and not worse than sports, just different.)
The strength world has its fair share of grinders (slower lifters), but if you are unsure whether or not fast lifters do well, consider this list of names and think about how dominant they have been and how fast they lift: Andy Bolton, Mariusz Pudzianowski, any weightlifter (it’s impossible to be slow in weightlifting), Andrey Belyaev.
Ultimately, the choice is yours. Grinding can work, but I favor lifting as fast as possible. And if you compete in sport and use your weight training to improve your performance in that sport—
you should lift how you expect to play… and the best play fast. Every time, in every sport.
One final point of consideration. I have no science to back this up, but my instinct tells me that fast lifters may put less strain on their muscles and joints than ‘grinders’. Think about it. When I pulled 1,008lbs, I had to generate in excess of 1,008lbs—that is a lot of strain on the body. Would I rather that strain lasted 4 seconds or 15? I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions on that point.
We must stress that speed must never come at the expense of tension.
Moving a 50% weight fast does not demand high tension. Unfortunately, if you do not focus on staying tight, you will only get good at moving light weights fast (a quality Russian scientists call “high speed strength”)—and fail to see any improvement in your max. Because you are practicing a totally different skill.
Hence learn to get tight before trying to get fast.
Former Senior RKC Rob Lawrence made an insightful observation:
The trick is to move as quickly as possible without sacrificing the level of tension nec-essary to sustain the load. If you want to whip your arm out in
front of you, it should be as loose as possible; but if you want to push up a bench press, the speed will necessarily be limited by the amount of tension you need to maintain to support the barbell.
Beginners should emphasize tension first! If you try to teach speed right off the bat, the trainee will confuse “moving fast” with
“making jerky movements”. Two different things. That is why [Pavel’s book] Power to the People! emphasizes tension above all.
Once you have the requisite base of tension, that's when you start trying to ramp up the speed.