⚡️SSL #014 How To Become Explosive

Nov 06, 2022

In Today’s issue of the Saturday Sprint Letter, we will talk about how to improve explosiveness to run faster.

According to Cambridge, explosiveness is “the ability to suddenly increase your speed or power”.

It plays a massive role in speed and science shows we can negatively impact explosiveness if:

fast twitch fibers are converted into slow twitch fibers
muscle fibers are lengthened to the point of decreasing muscle tension

Instead, we’re going to look at the science to make sure we improve our explosiveness.

Specifically, we're going to cover:

What is RFD?
How Does RFD Impact Speed?
3 Ways To Improve Explosiveness
2 Exercises That Require 0 Equipment

Let’s dive in.

What is RFD?

One way to define explosive strength is “the ability to increase force or torque as quickly as possible during a rapid voluntary contraction realized from a low or resting level” (study).

This quality can be improved by developing our rate of force production.

We’ll define rate of force development as “the rate of contractile force at the beginning of a muscle action” (Aagaard et al., 2002)”

In other words, how fast a muscle produces force.

As a result of improving RFD, an athlete can become more explosive since they will be able to develop larger forces in a shorter period of time.

For example:

Let’s take an athlete who wants to become more explosive in order to dunk a basketball.

If they can produce more force in a shorter amount of time, they will be able to apply more force during the limited time their feet are on the ground and achieve a higher jump.

But how does RFD impact your speed?

How Does RFD Impact Speed?

There’s evidence to support that elite sprinters have greater RFD than trained sprinters who aren’t as fast.

And if we look at an athlete sprinting, we can see why:

During a foot strike in the early part of a sprint, an athlete must voluntarily contract the muscles that extend the leg.

The faster they can contract these muscles to more produce force in less time, the shorter their ground contact times and the bigger their stride length.

This can be improved by developing your RFD.

At least in theory, since this doesn’t take into account elasticity and the technical skill of sprinting.

3 Ways To Improve Explosiveness

Based on published research, here are 3 ways to improve RFD:

Increasing muscle-tendon stiffness
Converting more muscle fibers into fast twitch fibers (from type I to type IIA).
Increasing neural drive during the early phase of an elastic movement, specifically in under 100 milliseconds.

According to The Science of Sport, there’s research that shows the following types of training improves RFD:

Resistance training
Ballistic training
Olympic Weightlifting
Plyometric training
Balance training

But only resistance and ballistic training has been shown to improve RFD in trained athletes.

2 Exercises That Require 0 Equipment

In a study with 23 Division 1 athletes, the tuck jump and cone hop had the highest RFD out of all the movements they tested.

Even more than the counter-movement jump.

This leads us to conclude that these two movements could be useful within a training program to increase RFD and improve explosiveness.

“For Cone hops, subjects were instructed to hop laterally over a 15 cm tall cone as quickly as possible”.

For the tuck jump, subjects were instructed to jump as high as possible.

With that being said, we still have to consider other factors such as the sport we are training for, max strength, coordination, and range of motion.

Here’s an example of how you could add these to your program:

Cone Hops: 15 reps, 3 sets; 2x per week
Tuck Jumps: 8 reps, 3 sets; 2x per week

TL;DR

rate of force development as “the rate of contractile force at the beginning of a muscle action
As result of improving RFD, an athlete can become more explosive since they will be able to develop larger forces in a shorter period of time.
If they can produce more force in a shorter amount of time, they will be able to apply more force during the limited time their feet is on the ground
There’s evidence to support that elite sprinters have greater RFD than trained sprinters who aren’t as fast.
only resistance and ballistic training has been shown to improve RFD in trained athletes
In a study with 23 Division 1 athletes, the tuck jump and cone hop had the highest RFD out of all the movements they tested.
Cone Hops: 15 reps, 3 sets; 2x per week
Tuck Jumps: 8 reps, 3 sets; 2x per week

Stay Fast,

Cesar

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