Is Heavy Strength Training Important for Team Sports?

BY PETROS SYRAKOPOULOS


         Jumping, accelerating, decelerating, changing direction… the powerful movements in team sports are all fast and explosive. In team sports, outside of contact situations, players don’t exert force against heavy external loads. Considering all that, is heavy strength training really necessary?


The main goal of performance training for team sports is producing greater explosiveness.



…to answer this question, we must first examine what strength is:



Max Strength

         An athlete’s “Max Strength” is the maximum amount of force they can produce in a specific movement. In the bench press, that would be the maximum amount of weight the athlete can load the bar with, lower to his chest, and press back up. From the onset of muscle contraction, it takes roughly half a second (500 ms) for the human body to develop maximum muscle tension (i.e. to produce maximum force).

         Max Strength is increased by performing the main movements with heavy weight (generally 80% of your max or more), and, because of the heavy external resistance, repetitions are slow (time to complete a repetition is often more than one second).
         

         The following graph shows force development from the onset of muscle contraction to achieving maximum force:

Schematic representation of Max Strength, as it relates to force production from the onset of muscle contraction.



Explosive Strength

         An athlete’s “Explosive Strength” is the amount of force they can produce in short timeframes. The timeframe for force application during the powerful team sports movements - jumping, accelerating, cutting, etc. - is generally around 150-300 ms, so Explosive Strength is the force you can produce in the short timeframes that matter.

         In a vertical jump, where force application time is around 250 ms, the greater force the athlete can produce in that timeframe, the higher the jump will be. This is a fundamental point to understand: an athlete’s explosiveness is not an abstract concept; explosiveness is force produced quickly!


         This is what explosive strength is, on the same graph we saw before:

Schematic representation of Explosive Strength, as it relates to force production from the onset of muscle contraction.



…but the question remains: if team sports don’t involve slow movements, then why does Max Strength matter?



Max Strength and Explosive Strength Relationship


This final graph holds the key to this entire discussion: 

Effects of Max Strength increase on the force development curve.


         What the graph above tells us is that increasing an athlete’s max strength will increase the force they can apply in the short timeframes that matter: increasing their max strength will increase the athlete’s explosiveness!



…here is a short example of the impact increasing an athlete’s strength can have on their explosiveness:

         Performance22 athlete Giannis Karamalegkos broke his hand early in the pre-season preparation with Arcadikos BC. Giannis is a promising young point guard, a talented ball handler and shooter, but his general explosiveness was subpar. Turning misfortune into opportunity, we took advantage of his time away from team basketball practice to work on his leg strength. Due to the limitations posed by his broken arm, we weren’t able to do any sprinting and only did very limited jump work (substantially less jump work than he did during the off season or that he would’ve done had he participated in the team’s basketball practices).



         This video showcases a couple of things: When box squatting with 100 kg, the time to complete the first rep was 900 ms (the last of 5 reps of that set took 1.2 sec to complete), as opposed to the roughly 250 ms of force application time in the standing vertical. Despite lifting “heavy and slow”, increasing his max strength produced a marked 15% increase to his vertical jump. So, not only did his max strength increase, which can directly translate to greater effectiveness in contact situations on the court, but his explosiveness followed suit.


Heavy Strength Training an Integral Part of Performance Training

         Simplistic lines of reasoning may lead to conclusions such as: if your sport is explosive then lifting heavy is a waste of time. Lets not forget the old misperception that lifting heavy will make you inflexible or that lifting heavy will make you slow. On top of that, many coaches avoid having their athletes lift heavy for fear of injury, either because the training environment is unsafe (big groups and inadequate supervision makes for an unsafe training environment) or because they lack the necessary expertise. It should be stressed that proper form and supervision are paramount when it comes to heavy strength training, so in both cases it’s the responsible decision for the coach to not have their athletes lifting heavy (but, in the former case, it’s the coach’s job to work on improving the training environment and, in the latter, the coach should work on developing their training knowledge and coaching skills).

         Regardless, heavy strength training is a integral part of a strength & conditioning program aiming at increasing performance for team sports. Of course, max strength is only one quality to be worked on: athletes should be working across the speed-strength continuum, including exercises of varying speed and loading, within a periodized program, tailored to their individual needs, their competitive schedule and the athletic requirements of their sport and position. And they should also be working on their movement mechanics and doing any corrective work necessary. But at the end of the day, we should be using all the tools at our disposal towards building greater athleticism and increasing max strength is a fundamental part of the recipe.


Performance22 athletes working on strength and power during Early Pre Season:


A well-designed training program aimed at increasing explosiveness needs to work across the speed-strength continuum, starting from heavy strength work.





Petros Syrakopoulos is a member of the Performance22 coaching team since 2012 and is currently the strength and conditioning coach of Greek major league team Arcadikos BC. He graduated from the School of Physical Education and Sport Science of the University of Athens in 2013 with the highest grade in the school’s 30-year history.