Forces and Force Development
If there is one thing to take away from Bondarchuk’s most recent book, it is that what we call strength is not a singular concept. The book is a difficult read, but it is does lay out why the athletes with the highest maximal strength are not necessarily the fastest or the most explosive. Each of those activities feature different types of strength and should be trained differently.
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I also have used the shot put example from Zatsiorsky book many times to explain what our goals are in the weight room. nice article!
It’s the age old trap of equating weight lifting strength to strength in other movements and actions. People can gain huge amounts of strength doing other activities than weight lifting. Whether or not those other activities transfer to the event is the same question as whether weight training transfers to the event (throwing) in question.
For years I’ve heard discussions about strength that assume weight lifting strength IS strength. It’s one type of strength, not all types of strength. After a season of riding a bicycle fast up hills, my legs got very strong. It transferred wonderfully to javelin throwing, but not to weightlifting. Was it enough for javelin? No, I needed weights too. But weightlifting alone was insufficient. So know your strengths! Don’t assume weightlifting is the only way to gain useful strength for throwing.
Great Comments Duncan! We should link up and have a good chat one day soon.
Great article Martin! Very interesting information and examples. I used the 21m thrower with a 220-240kg bench example as a means for trying to “back in” to a prediction of how far I would throw given my bench PR and it was pretty darn close to reality. Has anyone tried calculating out a predicted distance based upon a wider range of bench press values to illustrate the non-linear relationship between rising Fmm and distance thrown? It would be very interesting to see such a graph and then compare it to a given individual’s PR for the throw and the BP. Perhaps I will have to go bug one of the physics guys here at my office (ha ha) to build a little spreadsheet! What might also be interesting would be to poll your readers to have them input their respective PRs for shot and bench and see how that plots out. Could be an interesting follow up article assuming everyone is truthful. Thanks again for the great article.