DEVELOP POWER IN THE WEIGHT ROOM

Pre-season training is back for most clubs and there's pretty much 7 - 8 weeks before practice games start and about 10 weeks until round 1 - not long really.

With training being back on 2 nights per week that will take up most of your energy resources for other training and whatnot, it means you can probably only get in 2 tip top gym workouts on top of that with any other training needing to be more recovery/movement based then anything that requires great output.

So if you're going to train for power/explosiveness then you better start now.

Before you train for power there's a few rules you MUST abide by to get the adaptation you're after - to be able to move with speed and force at the same time.

Speed is great in open spaces but if you're an inside mid, then speed on it's own isn't gonna cut it as you'll never get the run up into max speed to actually reach it - think a Bradley Hill type who's not an inside mid obviously but is best used on the outside.

Force is great in congestion but it needs to be converted to speed at some point if you want to break out of congestion through contact - think Patrick Cripps and Josh Kennedy who can get the ball out with 2 blokes literally hanging off them.

The perfect candidate of both force and speed is Patrick Dangerfeild - he's simply got it all like nobody else has.

Power is a pretty broad area as far as training is concerned, especially if you look at the force/velocity continuum:

As you can see force refers to maximum strength which is force irrespective of the time it takes to produce it like a 1rm bench press attempt that might take 4 - 6secs to get from chest to lockout which is high force but very low velocity.

At the other end velocity refers to speed which is speed irrespective of force required so think of bench pressing a broomstick where you could probably do 3 - 5 reps per second.

Great speed yes, bit dismal force.

The middle of the curve in the image above is what we want to look at being:

• Strength-Speed
• Power
• Speed-Strength

Power is a really the low end of strength-speed and the top end of speed-strength and to save getting overly technical, is what we'll focus on here.

OK here are the rules of training for power, which is pretty much the complete opposite of what most people do in the gym...

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