Strong Base.

This may or may not be news to you, but fitness social media/marketing have skewed many perceptions of almost every corner of exercise and training. The amount of misinformation that is spewed out daily is alarming, and I’ll refrain from giving my full thought on the matter. But it’s important to understand that most of exercise and performance is relatively simple. It does have some more complex pieces in the more high performing athletes, I will say. Though in general, getting stronger, getting your heart rate up, and using/resting/fueling your body is the key.

Anyway, what I do want to focus on today is the concept of training for athletic purposes… and even more specifically, what should you be giving your attention and effort to.
Now before we get into it, I realize that there are many nuances such as season, level, age, and in some cases sport. However, I will be giving a general training outlook for someone looking to build a solid athletic progression plan, or at the very least understand where they should start. The main irrelevant athlete type for this article would fall into the strictly long distance endurance group.

So let’s get into it.

The cheat code to better results in power, speed, and explosiveness is simply increasing the amount of weight you can move in a few key exercises. Yep, I told you it was simple. So, here they are: squat, clean, pull-up, push press, and dip.
You could argue that the deadlift and bench press belong on this list, but in my opinion they’re not necessary… and this is coming from someone that enjoys both of these movements. The reason they aren’t is because if we’re trying to keep it as simple as possible, both of these exercises already have an equivalent on the key exercises list. Your deadlift if being performed with the clean, and your bench press is being covered by the dips and in some respects the push press. I also wouldn’t knock you if you interchanged the dips and bench press.

I can already feel you rolling your eyes and saying “get a load of this guy”. Mainly because I’m insinuating that you only need five key exercises to increase general power, speed, and explosiveness. Which I am. At least as a foundation to the other modalities.

The other catch is not only should you be increasing your strength with these exercises, but it’s that you need to focus on getting that strength to a certain point. We'll look at the squat. For males squatting, we’re looking at ~1.6-8x your body weight on the bar, and then for females about ~1.3-5x. If you aren’t at this point then plyometric/explosive specific training (other than some warm-up or joint/movement work) is in my opinion a waste of time. The transfer over from actually being strong in these key exercises will give you those massive increases to most of the other modalities of training.

Now obviously you could keep pushing the strength higher than the goals given will still have benefits. However, at some point it becomes minimal and the other type of work will serve as the driver. But nonetheless, hitting the benchmark goals should be your first priority.

Squats:
Males - ~1.6-1.8xBW | Females - ~1.3-1.5xBW
Cleans:
Males - ~1.1-1.2xBW | Females - ~0.8-0.9xBW
Push Press:
Males - ~0.85-0.95xBW | Females - ~0.6-0.7xBW
Pull-Up:
Males - 10-15 strict reps OR +25-50% BW for 3-5 reps |
Females - 3-8 strict reps OR +10-25% BW for 3-5 reps
Dips:
Males - 15-20 strict reps OR +45-90 lb for controlled reps |
Females - 8-15 strict reps OR +25-45 lb for controlled reps
*Bench Press: Males - ~1.3-1.5xBW | ~0.8-0.9xBW

And again, nuances are a thing. Especially from lift to lift due to body types and sport. Regardless these are a good target to begin training towards. If you’re looking to jump higher, run faster, hit harder, or whatever, these should be your main focus first and foremost. Then you can add more of the fancier stuff.

Repeatable performance comes from the boring repetitive stuff. Just as in the sport of Jiu Jitsu, you have to perform and practice a technique hundreds if not thousands of times for you to become proficient in it. Getting stronger in these exercise establishes the motor-neurons and signals, along with building the density it takes to perform at higher levels. Do the boring stuff. Get strong.

Progression in Strength is Key

These aren’t the end-all-be-all, but they are important. If you focus on building these key exercises, you’re become a very strong and explosive athlete.

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