Speed Work: Does It Work?

Training Powerlifting
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this guy who trained westside for years and got much stronger told me not to bother with dynamic effort until im squat/bp/dl at least 600/400/600. he just told me to use repetition effort until then because doing DE with light weights will not elicit a big enough training response. he also told me that percentages should be above 70% because 50% of a max raw lift is almost nothing.

i blew my knees out while speed squatting on a fast eccentric. i only have a fast concentric phase now. the eccentric phase is 1-3 seconds on all my reps.

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[quote]KBCThird wrote:

[quote]StormTheBeach wrote:
Fundemental errors with both arguements:

For the “Speed Work Doesn’t Work” camp:

Dynamic efforts (speed strength) use low %'s for bar weight… with 20% to 30% added in accommodating resistance. So, relatively, speed work is done with 70% to 95% of a competitions max, depedning on the wave. [/quote]

Storm, I’d never heard that accommodating resistance is “necessary” for DE work. Is that in more recent articles, or simply from your own experience?[/quote]

I did my DE work with straight bar weight for about 6 months. Finally broke down and bought bands, and have been doing me DE days with some type of bands for the past 9 months. I can’t even begin to quantify what a difference it has made. My maxes in all 3 lifts shot up considerably after just a month of using them, and the gains over the past 8 months have been markedly better than what I was getting for the 9 months before incorporating bands.

You really have to accomodate the resistance, otherwise your rate of force development is just too short. Not to mention that the bands will give you accelerated eccentrics, which will lead to a more forceful concentric as well.

As others have mentioned, training at 50% bar weight with no accomodating resistance, especially for a raw lifter who isn’t close to the strength of the Westside guys, won’t be very beneficial. At the same time, if you load up 75-80% in straight barbell weight, it’s just too heavy out of the hole/off the chest to work at the speed you should be working at. On the other hand, 50-60% in barbell weight with another 20-25% in band tension by the time of lockout works out great for me.

One last thing I’d note, and that others have mentioned, is the need to adjust for each individual. You need to use as much weight as you can while still moving the bar explosively. The weight needed will vary for the type of lifter (raw v. equipped, various levels of strength etc.) and the exercise used. Put 15-25% of your max in band tension, then try different barbell weights until it gets too heavy to move quickly. Run three week waves in that 10% range just shy of when you lose the necessary barbell speed. Then switch up the exercise or band tension for another 3 week wave.

You can get plenty of RE work in after your ME and DE exercises each week. Unless you’re one of those freaks who can handle ME DL/squat work twice a week and are already very fast, I see no need reason that someone shouldn’t incorporate DE work.