Aaron King (00:00):

Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Aaron King with coach Bob King and today's topic kind of builds off of what we did the other day. It's all related. I mean, everything's related, it's all kind of training. But today's topic is power training and I'll kind of let you do more of an intro, really what you want to hit on that. But we've been talking a lot about in the past, how squatting impacts first, you know, acceleration was first five yards or 10 yards steps one and two. Then we even talked the other day about CrossFit circuit training, how that fits into things. So today's topics a little bit

Coach Bob King (00:32):

More specific, very specific power. We'll go into the baseline physics of it. It's not hard, but powers by definition are force times distance. In other words, if, if for example, we went out and started pushing a car that requires X amount of work. It requires energy. So if we take all these physics principles and work backward, let's say, okay, I have a lot of energy. Energy is defined as the capacity to do work. Work is forced times distance power is how much time does that take. So if you're not going out and start pushing a car that ran out of gas and it takes us a minute to go 30 feet, that's our, that's our power output. If it takes us, if we can come back and go 30 seconds, we have more power involved because we have gone that same distance with the same mass in a shorter amount of time.

Coach Bob King (01:27):

So when you come into power so important in sports force times distance is work. And we do that all the time in the weight room, but it typically is slow. Now I'm going to go all over the map with some of the sports and things and clear up things in the Olympics. When you see people lifting weights, everybody can go online and look. And if you Google weightlifting, those Olympic lifts come up. Those are actually powerlifting, which is the squat bench. And deadlift is not power at all. It's work, but you don't call it to work lifting because you're trying to see how much force you can apply over a distance against a weight. Therefore it is not powered off. Cause you can do a squat and take seconds and seconds to do that. Olympic lifting you can't. If you're gonna do a power clean, it better be quick.

Coach Bob King (02:18):

So power in essence, as we talk about it all about speed. And so if, if a guy runs you know, a five, five 40 and football and he weighs 185 pounds, not good, no power there, but you get some of these guys that are 185 pounds and running you know, for four less, they are fast. Yes, but they can generate some power. I'll give you an example. When dirty cowboy days, I was on the sideline, of course, in we were playing the 49ers and one of the wide receivers caught a route to our sideline. I was standing there going to do one of those TV things. I was going to grab him when he went by. He almost took my arm to the third row. Cause he so powerful, even though he's just a kind of what we'd say, a little wide receiver.

Coach Bob King (03:03):

And so the speed changes the game. Same thing with anything. If I take a little bullet and threaten you with my fingers, you're going to laugh. Put the bullet in the gun, what happens? Power. It explodes. It has speed. So that's, that's kind of the, you know, the, what do you we'll call it? The physics for dummies, including myself, power is the speed in a work effort. So powerlifting, not power Olympic lifting weightlifting, but powerlifting. Actually. Now for the athlete, we had to be very careful because if I talk long enough about the importance of power and get people excited about it, you can overdo that. Like you can't any training element. So if you take what I was just saying, strength is an element of power speed that goes with that speed time strength. So as you're in the weight room, get strong, but don't neglect speed training.

Coach Bob King (03:59):

The speed that translates into those squats and everything you do, it makes you more powerful, and that this picks a sport. So if you're swinging a baseball bat, you're swinging a tennis racket golf club coming off the line of scrimmage, football, dunking, a basketball power, power power. So it's all subliminally in some cases behind all sports movements give you a big example and try to tell people all the time track and field power is always involved. Speed is always involved in ShotPut and the disc is throwing, you know, you're in the ring with these big guys, but if they are slow, they can't generate enough force to generate enough power, to get the implement, to go where it needs to go. So speed and strength have got to go together to get power.

Aaron King (04:45):

I think back to the nineties early on, and this is gonna go way back to the early days where I think it was a Dallas morning news article talking about what you guys were doing. Right. And it was, it was, it was back in the day when people thought, if you lifted weights, it was going to mess up your shot.

Coach Bob King (05:02):

Yeah. And basketball was always just, I can't lift her mess up my shot. And so these guys, the NBA players are just unbelievable human beings and individual athletes. So we would have guys coming in and I worked them into the program and we had a couple of things that went on. First of all, there was a kind of a game they played at the practice where you said DOT's out and you went around the three-point line and you the 10 shots I call it and you shoot three-pointers. You make 10 in a row, you got 500 bucks. Now that's the pros folks. That's the NBA. You can do it. And so I had more than one guy come up and do his weight workout and go down and make 500 bucks. Right. Dude, where's my 10%, you know, I mean, you know, you lifted weights, you got, you got active.

Coach Bob King (05:49):

And so what it did is help activate your muscles. And so the speed of their lift when they jumped, you know, it's a jump shot. It was always an enhanced same thing we had guys come in before games and we're talking about 15 minutes for tip-off Bob put 300 on the bar. No, you can do it, but you're not going to do it. So we would have guys coming in the lift just to kind of bounce this. We had a significant speed program in our offseason. And when we had days off, we would do speed work. So we kept the power formula going. So there was never a lopsided just get big and strong. My big guys needed to six, nine, and bigger guys really needed to be strong inside, but we got to make them make sure they can get off the floor.

Aaron King (06:32):

Yeah. They take a little longer to develop at that length. Yeah. I would say,

Coach Bob King (06:36):

Well, it does, but you know, when you have a long lever, like seven-footers legs and arms and when it starts picking up speed,

Aaron King (06:42):

It's like those pictures that are like Randy Johnson's and everything where they're all that centrifugal force. Okay. Was there, you had an article? Yeah.

Coach Bob King (06:50):

Well, there's, there's this thing I found in one of my little pocket or mechanic science magazines and it, it gave us some examples. You know, we hear it all the time w horsepower. And so what some guy and his name is James watt, who came up with the, you know, what we know is Watts now? Not the football player, dad, or anybody, but it talks about it's ironic. Yeah. And he, JJ watt, they go together, but the horsepower is the 555 pounds per foot, pound per second. And that is a lot. And so that's what a horse can generate. So if you start putting together what a horse can do in terms of time and work and convert that into what we have. So if you had, you know, 430 horsepower, Holy mackerel, you know, that's, that's amazing.

Coach Bob King (07:42):

Now what I did is I pull this article out because it gives some really interesting examples about one flat out bicycle burst that can give you a single horsepower. I mean, just, you got to go hard as all get out. There are all kinds of things in here at one enormous deadlift, a foot-pound, a foot bound is the work it takes to lift one pound, the distance of one foot to exert 33,000 of those, the equivalent of one horsepower, an eager engine, a horse would have to be able to drag 10,000 pounds, three feet. And that is just unbelievable. Three, you know, 10,000 pounds. So when you start putting all these things together with work energy and power, they are staggering. So if you can, you know, just horses are phenomenal beasts, and that's obviously why they have come to be horsepower, but you are just looking at what separates certain levels. And I always say this to people who are trying to go to college or pro speed separates levels, because there are plenty of strong players athletes out there. You start putting speed into that athlete, and you are now talking about a very powerful individual, right?

Aaron King (08:56):

Well, that was one of the things I, and I'm alluding to the kind of, I think what'll take you to the next deals is my, the Bobsled was a great example of that. Getting that thing going from zero to two fast required quite a bit of power. And it was funny because you have guys that are just top-end speed. Some guys that freaked all-around other guys that could squat them tired, Jim but you're, it, it was a transition of power into that downhill. That was always fascinating to me. I was good in the zero to 10 one of the faster guys at that, but when it came, to the downhill, my top end was just, just not there compared to some of these track guys that came in and I just couldn't catch the slot. And once you get down that ice but what was the kind of the analogy or the example?

Coach Bob King (09:50):

Well, we're talking about to man, to man bobsled a five horsepower, five horsepower, and that's bobsled. Yeah. Two-man bobsled five horsepower. And so that's significant because when you're talking about, you know, 10,000 pounds for three feet, you're talking about 50,000 pounds for three feet, which now they're exerting against a sled going as you know about on the ice. And so there it's talking about the athlete must generate enough force to break the inertia of a 305 75 pound sled. And so what that means is zero to something, you know, and so whatever the speed they can develop, but displacement. So when you start talking about the movements in athletics, displacement is, is when nothing's moving and now we gotta move it, whether it's an opponent or the implement a ball or whatever. And so I don't know where I became a speed, you know, enthusiastic in my training career, but speed separates levels. If I can get you strong and make you fast, you're a very powerful, effective athlete. Yeah. It seems like,

Aaron King (11:01):

What would you say kind of is the evolution there? Do you have kind of a recollection of really what was, I think it was probably Russia with the Olympic lifting that kind of transition, or maybe led to more of the spoilers

Coach Bob King (11:12):

I can't give a real solid time question. Well, if you go back into the history of its sixties, late in the mid-sixties, I mean, somebody will say, yeah, but what about Paula Anderson in the fifties? And all that we started getting kind of just effectuation with Eastern Europe. And so it would be, you know, the Romanians Bulgarians and, and whatever the Russians, whatever they were doing was what we need to do. And so it, it got over here to America. We had some defections from the Eastern block where coaches would come over and start training us. And in the early days, there was just way just not enough knowledge way too much ignorance on where does this, where does this apply? But we just knew that the and Eastern Europeans were always going to be successful in the Olympic lifts in the games.

Coach Bob King (11:59):

And we tried to emulate that. And then we realized that, Hey, man, those are just powerful athletes. And it transferred into our sports as a, not as a training device, not just an Olympic sport, but now we're going to do those lifts from the Olympics in sports because those guys are so powerful and I might add, it's not at all it's unknown how flexible those athletes are. And so when you look at the Olympic lifters, their flexibility is enormous because they virtually will sit on their heels when they catch a bar and then the extension overhead in the statue. So from fingertip to toe, when they're moving, they are extremely flexible. And there was a study one time suggesting that they were second and flexible to the gymnast. Yes. So I'll buy it, I've seen it. And so we took, we took the Olympics, lifts, put them into sports and found out, man, not only could they lift a lot of weight, they just got faster and more explosive power because the speed of movement increased and therefore they just, you know, demonstrated more power developed

Aaron King (13:07):

How much training was going on in football? And the, like, obviously you got that strength, conditioning position evolved. Well, the late seventies, eighties.

Coach Bob King (13:15):

Yeah. I know. I don't want to talk too much, but in the late sixties, when I was in high school we, Scott, squatted and power cleaned and there was no knowledge. Right. We just did bar in it, in college, in the seventies, it was insane what we would do with power cleans and power cleans with a push press. Right. And it wouldn't appear jerk, but just get it overhead. I mean, it was unbelievable. And I can simply say you probably can from college that's as strong as I ever was. And those training sessions

Aaron King (13:45):

And then transition, I mean, the lifting started, but the speed training specifically.

Coach Bob King (13:52):

Yeah. Speed training is the most recent development, I think in sports because power was so eighties, I guess, really when the power started taking a big, big push, and then late eighties, early nineties, there became more of a speed element and maybe mid, but I mean you just, you ran fast because you were fast. And I re I distinctly know through college and high school, that's all I did and just

Aaron King (14:17):

Run hills and just kind of the old school stuff.

Coach Bob King (14:19):

Exactly. And so we're still working the best. Well, I don't know, there's no question, but I do know from the early days of my athletic career, as they taught us to run, they taught us poorly because now we look back and look at what we're doing. I think you really told me to do that. So we don't do almost anything that was taught in the late sixties, early seventies at all. And so what you have to keep in mind with coaching, it's, it's basically a passed down generation to generation activity. So, however, my coach, coach, mate, I will coach you, who will then you will coach the next person at the same time. There became a school for that. In other words, here came the Eastern Europeans and whatnot, and they were the scientists, literally not just as a title, but they were literally sports scientists that we just hadn't heard of.

Coach Bob King (15:13):

And so they came over and they started teaching us about the Olympic lifts and the power development and how it affects things, limb length, everything that applied to physics of motion. And we just, we got better at it and we realized we can learn this. And so that's where we, we took off in the mid-eighties into the nineties and got better at besides just saying, Hey, go run fast. Let me show you how to run fast. And here's some training devices we can use that will help improve that speed. So we combined them. And so we had you know, is a as a high school coach, we did the power lifts and the Olympic lifts. And then we worked on the track and we were quite successful, you know, through football. And I was a head track coach. So we were able to be fast and all of our events, it just on a side note, we used to, you know, I taught, coached at 1630 200 meters. You need to learn how to win a 200-meter race. If you're close, we're going to win that. So it speeds plays into everything plus strength, boom. You have power.

Aaron King (16:16):

All right. So any, any we already at our time what, what kind of final thought would you leave on that or summary state?

Coach Bob King (16:23):

Yeah. Action item action. The item would be, this is that I think it's power development as a specific event, which we talk about plyometrics explosive training. I'm good twice a week with those. I don't want people to make that. Well, I'm just going to, I'm just going to do explosives and plyometrics. No, what you need all of it. So you need to lift, you need to speed train and you need to do specific explosive movements. And so we'll train our speed specifically, maybe three days a week two days on the, on the power movements. So for example, if I'm doing explosive plyometrics, I won't do Olympics on the same day. I don't want to duplicate.

Aaron King (17:00):

Okay. And that's, that's pretty much a full-time program. That's when you have the time flexibility. Okay. one more kind of just for our coaches, I've noticed a lot of schools pretty much across the board. How about the four days, four days, 45 minutes. How are you splitting that up?

Coach Bob King (17:19):

Well, we'll spread it out cause it's all connected. And if you do one thing today and don't do it tomorrow, it doesn't disappear. Right. So I can do a squat. Then the next day I can do, you know, my explosive training and then I can do my speed training and let them just all blend it. It's just amazing how fast the body in this day and age with the amount of training we have available and do that, how much you can get in, in a short amount of time. And so we have peered eyes with our segments. We will do a block of training for maybe 20 minutes and then go to the next thing and then day two, a whole, a whole different group of exercises and drills, but it linked to the day before and we'll look to the day after.

Aaron King (18:00):

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And that's where it comes into resources, time, discipline some guy, some, as we know if you're, if you're listening to podcasts, if you're a coach specifically dealing with the team I saw it when I went, I went into 60 different schools around the DFW area for middle schools to just observe and it's mind-blowing the resources, the kids, the everything's factor. Yeah. So if you have questions, let us know and we can help maybe even create more articles and add it to the webinars as we do that too. How can you really get the best out of your time if you're trying to do more with what you have and w just make the best of it. That's what we're here for. So again, if you have questions, comments, the feedback I'm on Instagram and Twitter at @DeepSnap. Coach Bob King is @coachbobking Twitter and Instagram.

visit KingSportsTraining.com. We're going to creep keep creating content there and keep it coming. So I'll talk to you all next time.