Last week, we looked at why power matters. Not just as a physical trait, but as a fast loop: input and output. Living in that split-second between losing your footing and catching yourself—your body is either primed for it… or it isn’t.
Call and response.
So. If you aren’t regularly training power, consider this your warning shot across the bow. Opportunity before the threat, stumble or whatever shade of the unexpected life might throw at you, to better prepare. To train your nervous system to respond before the rest of you even knows why.
Your call to action.
But first, the boring important stuff.
You should consult your GP prior to any program of exercise.
This isn’t a program—just an intro to the concept. Still, the goal is to improve your life and help prevent emergencies, not cause them.
So, if you haven’t been exercising regularly, get the all clear first.
Make two appointments now.
First, with your GP—call them, now.
Then set a reminder to come right back here after your check-up.
So not one, but two appointments, right?
Go.
Otherwise, let’s get into it. As I said last week, the main issue here is not that people don’t care about power training; they just don’t know it matters. But, there is a further subset of those who might be interested—even for strictly fitness benefits— but rule it out because it looks, or feels, risky.
And even if we accept that avoiding it only makes you more vulnerable, not less, it doesn’t change the fact that these movements might seem unsafe if you’re unsure or out of practice.
All perfectly understandable.
So I’m going to show you an on-ramp to power training that is safe and doable for all. I train a couple in their 70s, and, for all the reasons outlined, their age makes this training more critical. This is how they went from powerless—nothing remotely powerful for decades—to now-included-in-every-session powerhouses.
And the difference it makes? From slow, timid, and cautious movement—the physical reflection of a mindset that is only rational when living on the ragged edge of capacity every minute of every day—to the sort of assured, deliberate movement that only comes with options and the confidence of being armed with physical potential.
Life changing.
And it all begins with:
THE GOLDEN RULE
Never move into pain. Ever. There is a very distinct difference between an exercise-induced burn/discomfort and pain.
You are always the best (and only) judge of your fitness and ability, and this overrides the dictates of any program (Leftfield or otherwise).
Right? Does that rule out injury? No, you could get injured getting out of bed in the morning — especially if you don’t train. But you pay attention to what is happening, and you apply some common sense. Like most things in life: don’t be a dumbarse.
And if you are, don’t come crying to me.
Power exercises can be incorporated into a warmup, the main ‘work’ portion of a program, for conditioning, or all three, but there are a few key things to keep in mind.
Train it frequently. A little, and often, goes a long way. And by a little, I mean;
You want to be fresh. As detailed last week, the adaptation here is neurological, so, just like learning any skill, you don’t want to be fatigued.
Train it early in the session. You want to be warmed up, but fresh.
Ideally, you would train all the main movement patterns, but at a minimum;
Train the upper and lower body, and we’ll look at an exercise for each below. The lower body will help you recover from a slip, the upper body will protect you if you don’t, and both will help reorient yourself in space to fall to your best advantage.
Remember:
POWER = FORCE x VELOCITY
So both are critical.
A slow grinding lift/exercise is not eliciting power (no speed)
But nor is even a lightning-fast shadow jab (no resistance)
Click the image below to see an example, on the proviso that it’s offered purely to help illustrate this point and as an elite demon of power more generally.
That guy can lift much more than that tyre. However, he couldn’t throw it. That’s what you’re looking for—a sweet spot that demands force while allowing speed.
But, somewhat paradoxically, it is more your intent and corresponding effort to move quickly over any absolute measure of speed that makes the difference.
Okay, so those are the broader brush strokes: Frequent, fresh, forceful and fast.
As with any other form of training, there is a whole world to explore here, so we are barely going to scratch the surface by looking at a few specifics and how you might program them.
THE EXERCISES
Jumping (in place, forward, backwards, sideways)
Skipping, bounding, sprinting
Medicine ball throws and slams
Fast feet or agility drills
Plyometrics like clapping pushups— adjust the height so you can move fast.
[While they are fantastic exercises for this purpose, I don’t advise Olympic lifts (ever against the clock, for the love of God) or other ballistic weighted exercises like kettlebell swings without 1:1 (not YouTube) coaching.]
As we do at Leftfield, you might space one or more of these exercises throughout a warmup, graduating from 60 to 80 to 100% effort. Don’t worry about the numbers—just start easy, wake up body and mind, and build up until you feel suitably primed for a maximum effort.
Whether it’s part of the warmup or not, you would still do this before any power exercise, so you might as well just make it part of the warmup.
Then, if you wanted to include it in a program, you would train it first. So a session format would be:
Warmup
Power
Strength/ Hypertrophy— or whatever else your focus is.
Conditioning
Cool Down
THE NUMBERS
Are low. Power is taxing. It varies between exercises, but you typically want to be in the 3-7 range. So you’d do 3-5 sets of only 3-7 reps, with a long 3-5 minute rest in between—remember you want to be fresh.
So, first of all, consider the 3-7 rep range to determine the difficulty of the exercise.
If you try a clapping pushup from the ground and barely get 2. It’s too tough.
If you bring it up to kitchen bench height, and can do 8, it’s too easy.
So somewhere around couch height will be about right.
Having determined the difficulty, what is more important is how many reps you actually do.
It's a maximum effort, right? So if you're on rep 3 and you think you've had your best effort, stop the set. If you've got a best effort still left in you, go for it.
Continue to assess on a rep by rep, set by set basis:
After each rep, ask yourself— Can I do a better one? Yes, keep going. No, stop.
And after your rest, if you don’t feel as if your best effort for the day is still to come, don’t even start the next set.
Noting that more is not better. You don’t get powerful by doing anything that is not powerful. And you only dramatically increase the possibility of injury.
Further, always reset between reps, treating each as a fresh effort so that 1 set of 5 reps is more like 5 x 1 rep, not 1 x 5. If that’s difficult to understand, I mean if you’re doing broad jumps—and you will be— you’re not bouncing along like a kangaroo. I like to turn around to ensure the reset.
Jump. Turn. Reset. If your best rep is still in the tank— jump back.
Again, you will always start at an easy 50-60% effort before building up, and this applies both for warming up and to build confidence.
As with any other form of training, intensity is scaled to your ability to perform the exercise well, so your jump is not how far or high you can go, but how well you can land safely.
And not just safely, you’re going to land like a cat. Quietly. Controlled. Absorbing force, not resisting it. Push the ground away on take-off, but accept it on landing.
If barely getting off the ground is where you're at, that's perfectly fine, but you don’t even need to do that. Even pretending to jump— directing force into the ground but never leaving it, works well.
Okay, before we get to the exercises.
ONE FINAL POINT
You will improve steadily and quickly, but you can’t recoup your power mojo in the first, second or even tenth session. And you never will if you don’t make it to a second session because you were a dumbarse in the first one and trying to make up for lost time or hurry things along.
Impatience is a problem in fitness more generally:
But only more so with power when the soreness to be expected from any novel movement is only squared by impact. So go easy. Let your body adjust.
If you’ve waited until now to build power into your life—no hyperbole—this is your lucky day. Keep it that way by taking the time to do it properly. And don’t worry, this is the quickest way to go about it anyway.
Start with half what you think you can do— and half it again. Assess 12 and 24 hours later, and adjust from there.
You might get all warmed up today and, following the protocol above, do two broad jumps that are neither broad nor jumps.
And that’s fine. That’s better than fine. You’re not chasing performance—you’re building it.
The only job of your first experience is to ensure a second.
The only job of your second is to ensure a third.
And so on until the (many, many, many) benefits are so undeniable you’d have to be a damn fool not to continue.
Or not to start…
SHOWTIME
Right. For an upper-body exercise, you could try the plyometric (sometimes known as a clapping) pushup. For reasons I’m not going into today, don’t bother with the kneeling ones as shown in the clip, just adjust the height as detailed above— so you can move fast.
Like any pushup, this is a moving plank, so create enough tension through the body to ensure all force is directed through the hands and isn’t ‘leaking’ via shifting hips or other areas To help with this, think about pushing the ground (or bench or whatever) away from you—rather than you away from it.
And for the lower body we’ll begin with the hip-hinge—a skill in itself—, but while you can spend many minutes here trying to coach the correct position we’re going to skip straight to the good stuff because, as we’ve covered, you’re going to employ some common sense, but also because, where this movement is concerned, it's the best method to help you get out of your own way.
Pick a spot on the floor/ground about 3-5 feet away? Jump to it.
And I'll stop you the instant before takeoff.
Or, imagine you were playing tennis, and Federer was about to serve to you.
In either case, the position you're likely to adopt is going to be broadly the same: feet roughly hip-width apart, hips back, head up, back straight.
Because that is the athletic stance: upright, balanced, and loaded with potential. As a physical 'ready for anything,' this position bookends many athletic movements, as it does with your new exercise: the broad jump.
I’ll hand you over to GMB for the details.
You can do either of these exercises at home, with no equipment and little space. Further reducing the list of available excuses, because you’re going to be resting for 3-5 minutes between sets, you can work them in with housework, emails or any number of other little tasks. Or— and here YouTube is an option—pair them with a mobility drill to do in your rest time, and take care of aches and pains into the bargain.
And, however you look at it, for what’s on offer here, a bargain it is.
Of course, these are just two exercises, but, in any case, every exercise/object/effort… everything, is scaled to your level of confidence and ability. If a medicine ball is too much, lift a couch cushion over your head and try and throw that through the floor. Pick it up (keeping your back straight) and repeat.
SUMMARY: THE RULES OF POWER
Start fresh, not fatigued
Go for intent, not speed
Reset between reps
Land soft. Like a cat.
Stop when your best effort is behind you
Less is more.
Ensure the next session. Always.
This is already too long for a holiday weekend, and the idea is that you go and do something about it, so we’ll leave conditioning and an exercise that — for sheer bang-for-buck, is the best power exercise of all— and a constant in all Leftfield programming, until next week.
Which means it’s time for… lead us out, maestro.
THE LEFTFIELD EASTER CHALLENGE
The 4-day Challenge (easy)
Enjoy a few easter eggs, some hot cross buns, and maybe a few drinks, offset with some daily exercise.
The 30-day Challenge (difficult)
Spend four days going bananas, overdoing the eggs, buns and everything else in sight, knocking back drinks and moving only if you have to. And at least 26 days working back to where you are now.
No prizes for guessing what you might do for that daily exercise.
Don’t be a dumb bunny. Ba Dum Tss
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Enjoy your Easter.
- OLI