Power punishes and speed kills. While popular memes for athletic performance and sports success, let’s look at these differently.
Your power can punish you, and your speed can kill your execution of an exercise.
Adding speed and power are traditionally the last variables to be added to a movement or exercise. Once you add speed and power, the math can change significantly. For example, during walking, an individual typically takes a 2x bodyweight load with each step. Running, however, can take that to a 5x bodyweight load and 10x or more sprinting or running downhill. That is a huge difference and one not to be taken lightly.
Get it? Lightly…
Moving on.
This also appears in the pushup. A student can have excellent pushup form until speed and/or power are added to it. And if you are using The Quick and the Dead protocol, you need to have your pushup dialed in as you add power to it.
Once you have your hard style pushup dialed in—hard style plank position, active negative, 90-degree elbows 45 degrees from the body at the bottom and spiraling external rotation energy to the top—you can think about adding power.
Watch out for these issues as you do: Leading with the head—dropping and leading with the head so the nose vs. the chest would touch first, is a common issue as you add power. Shoulders go first—trying to be powerful out of the bottom can lead to losing midsection stability and letting the shoulders drive up first out of the bottom. Elbow driven—the elbow can become the primary “driver” of the pushup, especially once the shoulders start to go first out of the bottom, and a lack of control on the quick descent can change the elbow angles, reducing contribution from the chest and shoulders. Weight shifts back to the feet—instead of the weight staying over the hands and wedged into the feet, it can end up moving back into the feet to “unload” the upper body somewhat, making it feel more powerful. This can exacerbate all the other issues above or be caused by them.
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