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S.A.I.D

Exercise33

The sports training principle known as S.A.I.D. or Specific Adaptations to Imposed Demands means that your muscles, tendons, and nervous system will grow and develop based upon the way you exercise them. In other words, if you train by lifting weights very slowly, you will not do much to improve actions that require you to move quickly, such as, golf, tennis, basketball, or martial arts. In fact, running for endurance causes the body to adapt by making fast twitch muscle fibers change into slow twitch ones. Therefore, training slowly may prevent you from moving as fast as you could before the training; if your desired activity requires speed or quickness, you must train for speed and quickness.

Heavy squats will build great lower body strength; however, you will not necessarily see your vertical jump height increase proportional to the increase in your squatting weight. To improve your jumping height, practice pylometic jumping drills. Even though your arms move similarly to a punch when you are performing a bench press, heavy bench pressing will not make you punch much harder or faster unless you also practicing punching drills. Since martial arts require twisting and moving in more than one plane of action, you need to train with twisting in all three planes of movement. Multi-planar exercises are more complex and more difficult to perform properly so most people need to be taught how to perform these exercises correctly. One plus is that they usually require less equipment.

Heavy slow lifting may be great for hypertrophy (making muscles grow); however, it will not help to give you the explosive power you need for the martial arts. In fact, training for strength in a manner in which you are not going to use the strength can be detrimental because you may develop more strength than your body can safely control. This is one reason why athletes are always injuring their hamstrings. They train to go forward or up, but they do not train to decelerate or stop.

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