While a little bulk is always good when it comes to impressing muscles perform like magic when they’ve been trained to provide explosion. There is a technical term regarding this mode of working and it has a lot to do with how quickly a certain muscle group goes from rest to full output and then back to rest again. While this may sound simple it isn’t. It helps here to visualize muscles like simple strings populated by beads (these are the neurons and they basically act like relaying stations on a strand of muscle telling it how fast to move). A muscle at rest is much shorter in length and all the beads are basically there together. The moment it explodes it becomes longer. Beads become spaced out along it. If you have not got enough to keep the distance between them short then the relaying stations they represent are further apart and the message which tells the muscle to move takes longer to travel along its length. This is a slight oversimplification but the analogy is good enough to hold water, so the real question is what should you do in order to have as many beads as possible along the length of the muscle?
There are two things:
Repetition. The more you repeat a certain move at 90% - 95% output the more beads you force the muscle to develop. This goes for anything you can imagine: boxing, sprinting, jumping, swinging a bat, lunging with a sword. You name it. Repeat and repeat and then repeat again until muscle failure appears imminent.
Work the entire length of the muscle under load. This is also called resistance work. Muscles are made of very flexible tissue. They like to explode in the beginning of a movement and then let the momentum carry them the rest of the way. Force them to work through an entire range of motion under as near a full load as possible.
Both of these techniques build up neurons in the muscle and give you speed and explosion which means they give you power. The second also increases the individual load bearing limits of the muscle strands which means you also get stronger. Whatever sport you do, whichever king of training, find ways to incorporate both of these in and get ready to reap the benefits.
