I’m always intrigued when I see or read about some new way to train your muscles specifically for speed. Just the other day I was watching television and the people were demonstrating how they would train their muscles to get faster.
The exercises they were showing consisted of the following:
1) One exercise consisted of a large resistance band. The band was fixed to something on the wall and the person (facing the wall as well) was pulling the bands with both hands back towards them (similar to a rowing motion on a weight machine), over and over again, as fast as possible.
Not a bad idea. It's a very functional exercise that will help develop strength in you erector spinae muscles of the lumbar spine, along with extensors of the arm such as your lats, posterior deltoids and teres minor muscles.
2) Another exercise consisted of a person who had a very large resistance band tied around his waist and another person was holding on to the other end about ten feet behind him. The person in front then started to run and the person behind him holding the band was following too, except they were trying to run at a slower pace, thus producing tension in the band to make it harder for the first person to run.
Again, not a bad idea. For the most part, its safe and there should be a low risk of injury. Exercises like these help train your quadriceps, hip extensors, and calf muscles.
3) Another of their speed training exercises consisted of what appeared to be markings (made of either tape or paint) on the floor in the shape of squares. The person then began to randomly jump with both feet in and out of these squares, with the coach/trainer, encouraging the athlete to go “faster and faster”.
A very nice exercise for helping increase your coordination. Also a good exercise for improving balance as well as strengthening your ankles in all planes of motion.
4) And finally, the last exercise they showed was an athlete holding on to two small dumbbells weighing about twenty pounds each. They were performing biceps curls and again, the coach/trainer was encouraging the athlete to do them faster and faster.
Great exercise. More of a finishing type of exercise where you are trying to get the last extra burn in the biceps and perhaps brachialradialis muscles before moving on to a different body part.
At first I thought this was a program teaching people just a few more ways to train their muscles to get stronger; something different you could do to break up your normal workout.
When I heard the host of the show state that these exercises were a breakthrough in speed training, I was somewhat surprised.
With all due respect to these well meaning individuals, there is no way any of these exercises will make you faster any more than what a lot of people would normally be doing when they go to the gym in the first place. To call these exercises a breakthrough in speed training is a bit of a stretch, in my opinion.
Here’s why:
First of all, with regards to training with resistance bands, whenever you train with them, you should be aware that when you start an exercise, you are typically at your weakest. This is because your joints are typically fully extended where you cannot get much leverage (think arm bars in jiu jitsu) and there is no momentum from the exercise that you can initially take advantage of such as is common with plyometric training. Combine this with the resistance band having not yet been stretched to a point where its resistance has any impact on the exercise, and you can see where the beginning of any exercise using an un-stretched band will have little or no effect on your conditioning.
This is the case for the first exercise mentioned above during the rowing motion. The only real effect of this type of training is the latter part of the exercise and even then, its only from a strength perspective, not speed. Due to the change in resistance that bands provide when being stretched, performing repetitions with them is not the best way to utilize them from a strength and/or speed perspective. Knowing how to maximize the benefits of a hyper-elastic resistance band is critical to developing fast muscle contractions and we will discuss this in a later article.
The second exercise mentioned above is also a good exercise, and one that is recommended, since it is likely to train certain muscle groups involved in the running motion in direct relation to running itself.
Where this exercise is likely to disappoint you as it relates to helping you increase your running speed, is that the muscles trained during this exercise only affect about half of the muscles needed for sprinting faster. How can this be? Well, if you look at the muscles that are undergoing resistance for this type of an exercise, you will notice that it involves your 1) hip extensors, 2) knee extensors, and 3) ankle plantarflexors. (Note: Your hip flexors and knee flexors do not undergo ANY additional resistance with ANY running motion since these muscle groups are brought into action only when the leg is OFF the ground.)
The hip extensor muscles are: a) the Gluteus maximus and the three hamstring muscles. Yes, hamstrings. Your hamstring muscles cross two joints, the hip and the knee, and therefore, not only are they known for knee flexion, but also hip extension.
The hamstrings are: b)semitendinosus, c) semimembranosus, and d) biceps femoris.
The knee extensors are, the Quadriceps: a) vastus rectus, b) vastus lateralis, c) vastus medius, and d) vastus intermedius.
The ankle plantarflexors are: a) gastrocnemius, b)soleus and c) the plantaris.
This is a total of 11 muscles that undergo resistance with this type of exercise where you are running down a track with a band attached to your waist.
So what’s wrong with that you say?
Well, nothing, if all you are wanting to train is these muscle groups. However, as we have pointed out numerous times on this website, your hip flexors play a huge role in sprinting but don’t receive any attention during these exercises and are also likely not to receive any attention in the gym either (see article #11).
Your hip flexors determine how fast you can get your trailing leg out in front of you and back into postion on the ground and also helps establish the length of your stride. These factors pay a huge role in how fast you will run.
There are 7 muscles that make up your hip flexors that more often than not go untrained every single day. This leaves a huge deficit (almost 40%!) in your training and is why when you think you are trying something new and different with exercises such as these, you really aren’t doing anything new and different with regards to the muscles that are being trained for sprinting.
But I’ll say it again; running with resistance bands tied around your waist is a good idea. It helps break up you workout and perhaps gives you a more natural workout as it relates to running.
However, just realize that it isn’t that much different than what you might already be doing in the gym on the squat rack or leg extension machine.
This is why you may not see any gains with this exercise since you may have already peaked these muscles’ strength by doing other exercises. And as far as this exercise is concerned, the same applies when you run down the track with a parachute or weight sled.
The third exercise involved an agility technique of jumping in and out of painted squares on the floor. Great functional exercise that primarily targets the calf muscles.
This exercise will help you with your coordination along with helping to strengthen your ankle joints. Strong ankle joints is a huge benefit to any athlete, since it is one of the easier joints to injure due to the amount of weight and varying angles of stress placed on it.
As far as a being part of a breakthrough speed training technique that the show advertised, I really didn’t see how engaging in a good game of basketball, with all the changes in direction, wasn’t already accomplishing the same thing. Still, for those who don’t play basketball a very functional type exercise to engage in.
The last exercise involved performing biceps repetitions with 20 lb dumbbells over and over again to exhaustion. This is what a lot of people like to do with a lot of different types of exercises and call them speed training routines.
I’ll go along with that to a point, however here is where you might run in to trouble with this type of training; Fast twitch muscle fibers, of which the biceps is loaded with, along with the long muscles in the legs, tend to fatigue very quickly.
This is why most sprints are usually of shorter distances since it is very difficult to produce fast muscle contractions for longer than 20 seconds without there being a significant drop off.
The challenge with doing this type (fast repetitive weight lifting) of training to a point of immediate exhaustion and then beyond is that physiologically you start to develop slow twitch muscle traits within the fast twitch muscle.
This is not to say that you are converting one type of fiber to another, but you do start to develop more capillaries per cross section along with increasing the number of energy producing parts of the cell known as mitochondria. High capillary per cross section and high numbers of mitochondria are slow twitch fiber traits, not fast.
Increasing them with most weight training routines typically results in hypertrophy within the muscle where the size of the muscle grows.
There’s nothing wrong with that except that if you are adding size and weight to muscles that aren’t involved in the motion you are trying to speed up, you end up with extra body weight that is likely to slow you down.
Finding the right strength to body weight ratio is one of the keys to increasing your athletic speed and is something that will be discussed in a later article. So from a functional standpoint, using low weight and fast reps are great exercises to help finish off a body part.
They help to bring a lot of blood into the muscle and give you a great pump when you’re through.
But being a breakthrough in speed training, there isn’t that much different than what has been typically done to the biceps for years.
In an upcoming article, we will explain how to take advantage of the hyper-elastic properties of the resistance band and use it to force an immediate over-stimulation of the muscle.
Learning how to take advantage of the hyper-elastic properties of the resistance band and using it to force an immediate over-stimulation of the muscle targets your fast twitch muscle fibers. This results in quicker and more powerful muscle contractions without adding any significant body weight that might be counterproductive to your athletic speed.
More about the resistance band and speed development.
Always glad to help.
And remember, at AthleticQuickness.com, “We’ll bring you up to speed!”
Dr. Larry Van Such
