AmpedTraining Blog
2009 January 2 | Comments Off
By Matt
Something I’ve noticed over the last year or two is a trend towards including ‘plyometric’ exercises in workouts and other ‘information products’ geared towards women.
For those of you that don’t know, a plyometric exercise is a movement that’s rapidly loaded and then instantly reversed. Any jumping, bounding, or hopping movement falls into this category to some degree.
The idea is that some of the connective-tissue elements of the muscle complex can store energy from being rapidly loaded, and this energy can be reversed to provide a more powerful movement. The appropriate analogy here is a rubber band – when you land from a jump, the connective tissues around your muscle act in the exact same way. There’s a quick, powerful stretch which stores the energy.
This is labeled the stretch-shortening cycle (SSC), and it’s one of the most widely-studied phenomena in sports science. A lot of sports have a need for the ability to absorb and rebound force, and plyometrics have been repeatedly demonstrated to be very effective at training this ability.
The key thing to remember is that typical strength training doesn’t train the SSC; what plyometrics train, and how they train it, is a completely different thing from strength training. I’m reiterating this so you don’t get it in your head that it’s just a different kind of muscle exercise. Plyometric training is a dominantly neuromuscular effect – there’s little to no actual effect on the muscle fibers. More on plyometrics
2008 July 4 | Comments Off
By Matt
I wrote this the other day after seeing yet another esteemed strength coaching expert repeat an all-too-common myth: the idea that cortisol, a key stress hormone in our bodies, is harmful to the athlete. This is based on the idea that cortisol increases during a workout, and cortisol is catabolic; therefore this is Bad Juju.
As you’ll read, there’s more to it than this simplified explanation.
A Closer Look at Cortisol
