Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes<\/p>\n
If you want to achieve your ultimate body strength for more power and speed, you need to work on developing what I call elastic strength.<\/p>\n
Elastic strength is really functional strength in a sense and something that will help you with your weight training to combat conditioning exercises to martial arts.<\/p>\n
Elastic strength is both flexible and strong at the same time. In many ways, I think it better describes functional strength because strength in real life should flex, recoil, and be super stable and strong whenever you choose within an instant.<\/p>\n
Elastic strength can snap either way almost instantly and is closer to an electrical lightning strike than the muscle recruitment connotation that the phrase “functional strength” denotes.<\/p>\n
How I like to think of strength being created is that it’s a constant blitzkrieg of lightning strikes that\u00a0 engage the muscles. At the same time, that extreme electrical charge doesn’t freeze up the muscles but makes them flexible and where one movement blends into the next with renewed vigor.<\/p>\n
If you were to spend your time in the gym with your eyes closed, you’d hear constipated breathing all around you. Really listen the next time you’re there and almost nothing you hear sounds like fluid powerful breathing when you think about it.<\/p>\n
It certainly doesn’t sound like the breath of elastic strength. Unfortunately, it sounds very much like constipated angular breathing where one breath doesn’t flow into the next.<\/p>\n
A “grunt” usually starts the lift and then a strong exhale. The breath in to recover is either a gasp or hardly heard.<\/p>\n
Then, when you really look and open your eyes, you’ll see most lifting with movements that don’t really flow from one movement to the next as one does in body weight exercises. No wonder why many weight lifters don’t have real functional strength or elastic strength.<\/p>\n
In fact, you’ll see a lot of what I call constipated movement which happens when the “Grunt”(muscle head) flexes many muscles in short heaving motions that are static and short. Shorter than they should be because too many muscles are recruited for the actual movement they’re doing.<\/p>\n
Tension creates shortness of movement\u00a0 and quick constipated breathing that doesn’t move. In turn, this creates constipated cramped movements – hence little elastic functional strength.<\/p>\n
You are what you practice. So, if you’re going to lift weights with grunts, constipated breathing, and static movements, you’re fighting against yourself to achieve your fluid optimal strength.<\/p>\n
Instead of thinking how your muscles are going to lift a weight, think about how much elastic energy it’ll take to complete your reps. When you REALLY know how to create a firestorm of electrical synapses to your muscles, those muscles with respond with powerful contractions.<\/p>\n
When your brain comprehends that your strength should contain elastic strength, then a flight plan for fluid movement has already automatically been predetermined and you’ll have energy to burn, breath to spare, while achieving fluid and powerful functional strength – Elastic Strength.<\/p>\n