Velocity and Force Output

Every movement we do as human beings on planet earth is created against a gravitational constraint. The rate of gravity is 9.8mps(aka roughly 22mph) which is why when you see people run very fast, lift heavy weights or jump very high or for long distances it's impressive to watch. It's not just the free body out in space creating force. It's a body that is under constraint of 22mph expending incredible energy in order to go break free from that constraint. When you were a baby this is one of the reasons why it took so long to learn to motor develop. You were learning to resist gravitational forces when rolling, crawling, walking and eventually running. Now at a lighter bodyweight and a smaller frame size this is easier but the reality is that every single one of us on earth has already embraced this challenge in order to stand upright and move around on two legs.

What this means is that every effort we put forth has a speed or velocity that can be measured. If you are competing in the 100 meter dash it has a time for the finish of each runner. The person who creates and maintains the greatest amount of velocity is the winner with the shortest time. In strength training this gets lost in translation a little bit but the reality is still the same. The more velocity/force you can create with your body the more weight you will be able to lift. Now eventually the heaviest weights move slowly. Not because athletes intend to move the bar slowly but because you are compounding gravitational force with a bar, kettlebell, dumbbell, etc. If you can move a weight quickly then by definition it is not heavy for you.

When training it's important to understand that force/velocity output has a biological reality associated with it. Some days you are rested, fed, hydrated, recovered well from the stressors of life and some days you are not. There is a pretty big swing in the force/velocity reality of training. Somedays you are sharp physically and are laser focused mentally/psychologically. Other days you are sharp physically but lost mentally/psychologically. These are not the days to ask for your greatest amount of physical output. Same thing if it goes the other way. So there is a rather wide amount of capacity that indiviuals express over time. As you train for longer periods of time you get to see this play out empirically and anyone who has trained for long enough understands this reality.

The training process in this regard must be able to account for these dips and rises with kinesiological capacity. You can not expect robot like work to be done week in and week out because people aren't robots. They are biological beings that have energetic swings. If you don't account for this basically what happens over time is that they get over trained and they get injured. So it's not even possible to consider that you can give 110% effort every single week, day, month or year in training because it is not a biological reality. It's absolute and utter nonsense to approach the process from this perspective.

What matters most in this understading about training and velocity is that you are stronger on the days when you can create more velocity with the same training weights. If you track the velocities of your lifts then what you will learn is that there are somedays you are lifting the same weights slower and faster. Depending on your readiness on the day the reality is that you may or may not be capable of setting personal bests in the gym. Now ultimately if you train with a velocity tracker of some kind what you learn is that the days when you are moving your regular training weights the fastest are the days when it would be wise to attempt lifting heavier. In contrast atttempting to lift heavier just because you are "feeling it" is not exactly a objective test of readiness. YOLO'ing your way through the training process is not exactly a recipe for long term improvement.

Instead of just winging it and going for it when you have the subjective feedback loop firing hot(or is that just the pre-workout talking?). What would be a wiser course of action would be to plan to lift weights that are within your ability for 3-6 months. As you are able to consistently move the same bar, kettlebell, db faster with less effort what you are demonstrating is a motor qualitative change. You not only are able to lift the weight you own it! If you plan to lift between 50-80% intensity with your lifts for a long enough period of time what happens is that the body adapts to this stress and now it receives those weights as 40-70% stressors. Lift with those same weights even longer and your body will receive those stressors as 30-60%. How fast does the weight move when it feels 20% less intense?

A LOT FASTER!

When you consider how to train and how to approach training in the long context of life it becomes important to think about how fast you are going to make your weight jumps. Now stable adaptations to stress are normal everywhere else in life but for some reason with strength training and weightlifting in a lot of circles we are still woefully bereft of intelligent approaches. In HS you don't go up a grade level for 9 months to a year. Why? It's a lot of information to absorb and learn. College is the same thing. It usually takes 4 years for an undergraduate degree, 2 more for a masters degree and 2 more for some doctorates. So we have precedents for this process being developmental. Let's borrow some of that mindset. Lift weights faster and adapt smoother to this process. There is only reward to gain and less risk associated with it.