Power and speed. There’s a myth out there that some athletes have it, and some just don’t. That could not be further from the truth. We’ve trained thousands of athletes, and everybody can get faster. People can get a lot faster and a lot more powerful, and I’m going to share with you the three secrets to improved power and speed.
The first secret of power and speed is to get stronger. Getting stronger is done best in the weight room with an external load. The key is to train your muscle fibers and elicit the response from those fibers in your body. This allows you to get stronger and to improve your strength to weight ratio, also known as your relative strength. The biggest predictor of your body strength is how high you can jump. Doing vertical jumps is the number one thing you can do to improve your power and your speed.
The second secret to improve your power and speed is sleep. Sleep calms down the nervous system and allows you to regenerate. This means that while you’re sleeping, you’re able to produce more strength, more force, higher levels of power, more focus in the gym when you’re training, and more concentration when you’re playing your sport. Once you start following a strict sleep schedule, you’re going to play at a much higher level than you ever could play before. If you want to be a better athlete, you need to sleep more. It’s that simple.
The third aspect to improving your speed and your power is stretching. Stretching allows your body to get faster by improving your mobility and your flexibility. Stretching improves your stride length, which means you’ll be able to cover more distance per step, and that’s the biggest thing that we want to improve when we stretch, so we’re able to achieve a greater range of motion.
The second thing stretching does is lessen neural inhibition. If a muscle is tense, or not as flexible, the nervous system will send a reduced signal to that working muscle because it’s afraid of injury. When you’re able to stretch and you’re able to get into greater ranges of motion, it lessens that inhibitory signal. You can be more powerful, and you can express the strength that you have in your body. Stretching is especially important for improving your speed and your power.
The third key to increased power and speed is supplementation. There are two supplements that recommend that are absolute game changers. The first supplement is Alpha GPC (Alpha glycerylphosphorylcholine). Alpha GPC is taken in liquid form and crosses the blood brain barrier, and it gives you choline, which gets depleted when you do activities that require concentration, like any hand-eye coordination, sports or even sprinting. Alpha GPC is something that can provide nutrients to your brain and allow you to have more focus, and more concentration.
The other supplement that I absolutely love is called tyrosine. Tyrosine is an amino acid that is derived from red meat, and is a precursor to the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is important for drive and energy. The great thing about tyrosine is that it works every single time. It delivers amino acids right to your brain, and you’re switched on. You could see how powerful a nutrient tyrosine could be and how we could use it in our own lives to help us improve our mental cognitive function and our performance on the field. Tyrosine is very safe. It’s highly effective, and I highly recommend it.
So those are four separate ways to improve your speed and power. Try incorporating these into your training and see what happens to your speed, and your power.
