Athletes who compete in powerlifting contest the squat, bench press and deadlift, and the winner is the lifter with the highest total, counting only his best lift in each class. Lifters are divided by age bracket, gender and weight class. Powerlifting is a young sport, with the first world championship event being held in York, Pennsylvania, in 1964. Consult your physician before engaging in powerlifting training or any diet and exercise program.
Strength
Powerlifting is a strength sport. You train to improve your limit lifts as measured by your one-repetition maximum. As a limit lift takes only a few seconds at most, not a lot of endurance is called for in competition. There are several ways to improve your strength, and hypertrophy, or gaining muscle mass, is only one of them. Improvements in skill, the ability to quickly generate force and the ability to recruit more muscle fibers are all components that add to your limit strength.
Force
One of the aspects of producing maximal strength is the ability to generate force. Power is generated by using an optimal training weight. If your training weights are too heavy, the weight will not move fast enough. If your training weights are too light, you are not generating enough power because you are not doing enough work. This is rather like throwing a ball. A whiffle ball or ping pong ball will not go very far, neither will a shot put. A baseball, with its moderate weight, will go the farthest because the weight of the baseball is optimal for force generation. In resistance training, you will need to experiment to find your ideal training weight. Regular results indicate that this will be somewhere between 30 percent and 60 percent of your one-repetition maximum.
Skill
Skill is the ability to generate maximal results with minimal effort. While lifting a limit weight is never considered minimal effort, doing so as efficiently as possible requires many skills. Intramuscular coordination is the ability to recruit muscular fibers efficiently and in the proper order. Intramuscular coordination is the ability to get the most out of all the muscles you are using to execute a lift. Motor unit recruitment is the ability to quickly recruit more motor units, which allows you to recruit more muscle fibers. All of these abilities are trainable and best trained with near-limit weights, or at least 90 percent of your one-repetition maximum.
Muscular Endurance
Muscular endurance is the ability to perform a muscular contraction more than once. The longer you can continue to repeat the task, the greater your endurance. It is for this reason that powerlifting is not an endurance sport. Muscular endurance is required for training, as using exclusively single lifts to train will quickly result in overtraining. Muscular endurance is trained through higher repetition sets, sometimes as many as 20 per set. This also builds muscle size, which helps determine the strength of a muscle. Endurance also is built through special conditioning exercises, such as sled dragging or pushing devices such as the prowler. Long, slow cardiovascular exercise is rarely performed as it does not greater contribute to your total or your ability to perform in the gym. The exception would be when you are coming off of a long layoff and are out of condition, or need to drop weight for a meet.
References
- "Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research"; The Optimal Training Load for the Development of Muscular Power; N. Kawamori, et al.; August 2004
- "Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research"; Effect of Multiple-load Training on the Force-velocity Relationship; H. Toji, et al.; November 2004
- "Exercise Sports Science Review"; Motor Unit Synchronization and Neuromuscular Performance; J.G. Semmler; January 2002
- "Medicine and Science in Sports and Exericse"; Neural Adaptation to Resistance Training; D.G. Sale; October 1988
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