CoachGeorgeMerino

Why Your Weight Room Strength Didn’t Transfer to the Field Explosive Strength Deficit Ever have an athlete who could squat a house but only had a 19” vertical jump? Your strongest weight room kid had no burst on the field. There’s a reason. It’s called the Explosive Strength Deficit (ESD). In Science and Practice of Strength Training, Vladimir Zatsiorsky and William Kraemer define explosive strength as “The ability to exert maximal force in minimal time.” The speed at which you apply strength is called Rate of Force Development (RFD). And that’s the missing piece. An athlete can be very strong, but if they can’t apply that strength quickly, it won’t transfer to sport. The goal of training is to improve RFD and close the ESD gap. The good news, RFD is highly trainable. The most effective methods are: • Short sprints • Jumps and plyometrics • Medicine ball throws • Dynamic effort lifts (later in development) Sprinting is the most explosive thing an athlete can do. No barbell exercise approaches the speed or force production of a maximal sprint. If you want to improve a skill, you must train it frequently enough that the body adapts. This is the SAID Principle. Want to run faster? You have to sprint regularly. Do sprints before lifting for three reasons: Max effort – athletes are fresh and can sprint with full intent. Potentiation – sprinting primes the nervous system for heavy lifts. Injury reduction – careful asking fatigued tissue for maximal outputs Jumps train lower body power output. They improve the ability to put force into the ground and redirect the body explosively. Think of jumps as one-shot efforts, separate from continuous plyometrics. Examples: • Box jumps • Single-leg jumps • Multi-directional jumps Jumps should be done early in the workout while the athlete is still fresh. Medicine ball throws develop explosive power in planes barbells and jumps can’t train. They’re also excellent for linking the upper and lower body in explosive movement. Like jumps, throws should be done early in the session, ideally after sprints. If you want your athletes’ weight room strength to show up on the field, you have to train how fast they can use it. That means training Rate of Force Development. Here's what an example week could look like: