Athlete’s Improve Your Speed With This Exercise

December 20, 2009 | Filed under: Athletic Core,Baseball Training,Basketball Training,Football Training,Speed Training,Vertical Jump Training | Tags: Agility, and Quickness With This Exercise, How To, Improve Your Speed, Power, Quickness, Reation, Speed, Speed Enhancement —

I hope that most of you have got your Christmas shopping done if not you better hurry!! Speaking of Hurry, how many of you have tried everything to increase your vertical jump, improve your sprinting speed, or your first step off the dribble to blow past your opponent for a posterize dunk?

If you’ve been limiting your dynamic training to box jumps, ladder drills, or those fancy shoes that make you limp around on your toes then you’re really missing out with this great unilateral version of the deadlift.

I get asked every day, “Travis how are you so fast, sudden, and explosive?” ” what do you do with your athletes to make them so quick?” “what is your secret?”

Well, I’m going to let you in on one of my little secrets on what exercise I use with my athletes as well as myself to help improve explosive power and ensure that you blow past your opponents with your first step!!

Watch this video illustration below, please feel free to comment with any questions on what you it is you do to improve your Explosive Strength.

This exercise is very similar to a weighted Bulgarian Split Squat but its benefits are so different. The load here will feel very heavy as compared to the BSS. As with the BSS, you will use your rear leg only for balance as your forward leg does the bulk load of the work.

How To:
Place the bar on the ground in front of you as position in a wide split with your rear foot on top of a bench or box. Move the bar close enough to your body so that it almost touches your shin. As with the any deadlift, keep your hips down, chest up, and your shoulders back. Drive hard into the ground while keeping your arms locked pulling the bar off the floor. Try extending your knee and raising your shoulders together rather than your knee first and shoulders second. Lower the barbell in the same manner in which it was raised. Make sure your core is tight and yoru torso “errect” as you come up.

Benefits:

Unilateral training, vertical jump enhancement, speed training, posterior chain, core tension

FITT TIPS: Due to it’s difficulty and ROM, this is an advanced lift. The load here should be moderate as this exercise compliments your ME lower body movements. I do suggest bigger plates such as 45′s or 25 lb bumper plates as any smaller would cause to much stress on the lower spine.

Example Training Session:

General Warm Up

Foam Roll

1) Box Squat: 7×5

2) Bulgarian Split Lunge Deadlift: 3x 6-10 ea leg

3a) KB Swing: 4×20

3b) Sprinter Sit Ups: 4×20

Please feel free to comment and let me know what you do to get fast!!

-Travis Self-Strength Coach/CPT

Comments (2)

2 Comments »

This is a great website and totally agree with your training concepts. This one legged deadlift look like a great exercise. I am going to try it. Im also going to build a mauler like you guys suggested. I live in NY and we dont have places like this to train…wish we did. Any other exercises to help that first step explosiveness?…..

Comment by Mark — May 19, 2010 @ 7:17 pm
mark, thanks for checking out the site. This variation of the deadlift is a little more complex than some of the others and i reccomend establishing a good base level of strength, flexibility, and balance before throwing this into your arsenal. We’ve recently “improved” our “mauler” sled but have not posted our video on how and what so be looking for that to go up soon. as for other exercises to increase 1st step explosive power, jumping, med balls, and jump rope are just some of many but these are easy and inexpensive. good luck and thanks for visiting the site.

Comment by Travis — May 20, 2010 @ 1:26 pm