Why is Having Power Important in Sports?

For today’s blog post, I am going to talk about the physical intangible I firmly believe to be king when it comes to majority of team sports: Power.

I don’t want to sound like a physics textbook, but I do want to briefly state the basic equations for power.

• Power=force x velocity

• Power= work/time

I really enjoy using the last equation when it comes to explaining the importance of power development in sport because time truly is an athlete’s enemy.

In virtually any sport, you don’t have unlimited time to make a play. More often than not, the outcome is determined by who gets to a certain point the fastest, who gets to the ball first, or who reacts to a certain stimulus the quickest.

A classic example showcasing the limited time athletes have involves hitters in baseball/softball. MLB hitters have around 400-450 milliseconds to react and make a decision to swing or not, and 150 milliseconds to get the bat around against pitchers throwing 95+ MPH.  Not a lot of time right? The examples can go on and on for every sport, whether it is baseball/softball, volleyball, basketball, soccer, etc. The main point is that athletes can’t afford to be caught off guard and perform their movements slowly.

Knowing that athletes have limited time to perform their dynamic sporting action, the real question becomes how do we improve this ability to be powerful and explosive?

First, athletes must have a foundation of strength. Strength, or the ability to exert/absorb force, lays the foundation for all dynamic movements such as sprinting, jumping, and throwing. If athletes can’t produce and absorb force through the ground, they will not be very powerful.

However, being strong is only part of the equation. Once sufficient strength and technique/body control are developed, athletes must be able to display this strength QUICKLY. I like to say that there is a reason why powerlifters and bodybuilders are not the best athletes in the world.

This is where traditional speed and explosive work becomes extremely effective. Movements, such as sprints, reactive changes of direction, jumps, and throws, help to improve athletes’ abilities to generate force rapidly.

I personally believe athletes require a certain blend of strength and speed. There are points of their athletic career where focusing on strength contributes more to improving power/explosiveness and there are other points of their career where emphasizing speed and velocity will help more in becoming powerful and explosive. 

The important thing is that we know when to utilize each training emphasis. 

This is where the importance of testing comes into play. By continuously testing an athlete’s speed, power, and strength, we can determine what physical qualities may be the weak link in the chain, and then we can use this information to help build a training program that will actually help to improve an athlete’s power production!

Obviously there is much more to training and athletic success than power and many other physical qualities contribute to successful athletes, but for the majority of athletes, I believe it is important for them to know that they can’t just be strong and they can’t just be fast…they have to have both.

This is why developing explosive power is king.