Posts Tagged ‘Plyometrics’
Plyometrics Training: What Is It Exactly?
December 13th, 2009 | Author: admin
What Are Plyometrics?
I can’t tell you how many times I deal with different athletes that simply do not have a real understanding of plyometrics and truly how important they can be to increasing your vertical jump along with improving any explosive movements you may want to improve.
Plyometrics in essence, is a very specific type of exercise that is very specifically designed to produce, fast, powerful movements, and improve the functions in your nervous system. These type of exercises are generally used by athletes to improve their performance with sports. The exercises themselves are specific plyometric movements that causes the muscle to load and then contract in a very rapid sequence, use the strength, elasticity and innervation of muscle and the surrounding tissues to do things like jump higher, run faster, throw farther, or hit harder which is all dependent on the desired training goal. Plyometric exercises are used to increase the speed of force of muscular contractions with the ultimate goal of increasing the height of a jump
Procedure:
Plyometric training exercises involve the practicing of very specific plyometric training movements that are designed to toughen tissues and train nerve cells to stimulate in a specific pattern of muscle contraction to enable the muscle to create as strong a contraction that it possibly can in the shortest amount of time.
There are 3 main phases that occur during a plyometric contraction:
1) Eccentric Phase: This is the initial phase of the contraction that involves first a rapid muscle lengthening movement
2) Amortization Phase: This is the next phase and one of the most important phases. The amortization phase is that brief moment that you are actually at a complete stop.
3) Cocentric Phase: The final phase is when the explosive muscles shorten and this enables the muscles to work together in doing the particular motion for the exercise.
These plyometric movements and exercises have the sole intention of developing your muscular power. They act on the nerves, muscles and tendons to increase the amount of power you can use without necessarily increasing your maximum strength capacity,
Physics Of Muscular Power
In essence, the amount of muscular power you have is determined by how long it takes you to convert strength into speed. This ability to convert strength into speed in a very short period of time is what it going to enable your body to do athletic movements that are beyond what your body’s raw ability may be.
Basically, what this means is that you can squat 1,000 pounds 100 times and you still may not be able to jump as high as someone that can squat 250 pounds 2 times. It’s not just raw strength that will determine the amount of muscular power you have but the speed at which you can do the movements.
Muscle Tendon Component
In order for a muscle to cause movement, the must shorten which is also known as a concentric contraction. While there is a maximum amount of force that a certain muscle can contract, if the muscle is lengthened at the same time it is loaded just prior to the contraction, it will end up producing a greater force via the storage of the elasticic energy.
And for this to take place most effectively, the amortization phase, that short phase where you are actually at a complete stand still, needs to be as short as possible. By shortening the amortization phase, you are essentially making the muscle tendons act as a rubber band. You want to lengthen the rubber band and release it as quickly as possibly to get the best results and your muscle tendons act the exact same way.
Bringing It All Together:
Now that we’ve gone through what’s going on when you do plyometric exercises, I wanted to just do a quick summary and pull this all together.
In essence, plyometrics are all about training your muscles to work faster by lengthening and shortening your muscles as fast as possible and the real key you are looking for is to shorten the amortization phase as much as possible.
Keep in mind that you can’t eliminate the amortization phase completely. Any time that you are going one direction and then changing directions, there is going to be a point in time that you have to come to a complete stop but if you can minimize that as much as possible, you will start to strengthen the muscular power and will be able to start using those muscles faster than what your initial potential was.
Plyometric exercises are truly a great way to increase your vertical jump, run faster, and flat out train your muscles to work quicker. Just make sure that you are training correctly and have a proven routine that you know works and you can find the best routines that I’ve found when you sign up to my newsletter here.