I think just about everyone wants to hit the ball farther.  We have covered a lot of topics on how to increase power and speed in your golf swing.  But we haven’t really gotten into the “why”.  Once you understand the why I believe it is much easier to apply those principles into your training.  To understand how power is developed, let’s first look at how muscles work. There are two parts to the activation of a muscle. First, there is the power supply. This is your nervous system. Without the signal from the nervous system, no muscle could contract. The name of the nerve that signals a muscle is called a motor nerve. Second is the muscle itself. A muscle is made up of hundreds of micro-contractile fibers, called myofibrils bundled into muscle fibers, which are bundled into muscles. The combination of the motor nerve and all the muscle fibers it innervates is called a motor unit. One motor nerve can actually supply thousands of muscle fibers.

Power is the combination of speed and force. Force is generated by the muscles. Therefore, one key to power is to recruit more motor units. The more motor units you activate, the more muscle fibers will engage and the more force you can generate. The activation of one motor neuron will result in a weak but distributed muscle contraction. The activation of more motor neurons will result in more muscle fibers being activated, and therefore a stronger muscle contraction.

The size principle states that in order to move a load, motor units are recruited from smallest to largest. In practice, this means that slow, low-force muscle fibers are activated before the fast, high-force muscle fibers. As more force is needed, motor units are recruited in a precise order according to the magnitude of their force output, with small units being recruited first. So what does this have to do with power? It is very simple, if you want to recruit more motor units (which you do for power), then you should focus your training on trying to activate the larger motor units. If you get to the large motor units, because of the size principle, you are also getting the smaller units as well.

How do you recruit larger motor units? Based on the size principle, for an explosive athlete, you want to recruit as many motor units as possible with every exercise you perform. There are two main ways to accomplish this task:

●      Lift as heavy as possible

●      Lift as fast as possible (100% effort)

With heavy loads, you are engaging all your motor units because of the amount of effort required to perform the lift. With lighter loads, you are engaging all your motor units when you give 100% effort into the movement. That 100% effort is the key to activating all your motor units with lighter loads.

For power and strength training, we want to activate the large motor units as stated earlier. Unfortunately, our large motor units were really designed for safety. In other words, if you were being chased by a tiger, these fibers would kick in to help you save your life. It is called your “fight or flight” system. They can be used to deliver a knockout punch or used to explode into the sprint for your life. Either of those activities can only be sustained for a short period of time. These muscles use a different type of energy system than other activities that we perform in a slow controlled fashion. This is energy that is stored right in the muscle and easy to access. However, since there is only a short supply of this energy, it can only last for 5-15 seconds.

Therefore, when training for power (engaging all your motor units), you literally only have an average of 10 seconds available to do this. This is why typical Olympic lifting training volumes have short numbers of reps and high number of sets. For example, the typical training recommendations that most of us have seen is 3 sets of 8 reps. Those 8 reps will definitely take longer than 10 seconds to perform. If you switch this to 8 sets of 3 reps, you now have a greater chance of developing true power.

Learning how to utilize your motor units is part of the strength training process. In order to increase strength, you can do one of two things: Learn how to recruit more motor units or develop more muscle fibers. In order to create more muscle fibers you need to tear and rebuild muscle. This requires heavy strength training, rest and recovery, plus the hormone testosterone. For many people, this type of strength training is not desirable. It has the risk of injury and inherent soreness associated with it. Kids don’t even have the levels of testosterone to really utilize this method, so it is not an option for the early developing years. The good news is, anyone can learn how to recruit more motor units.   Lift Heavy, Lift Fast.