Strength Is Not Power

Hey {{first name | reader}},

It's Tuesday, which means your weekly fitness check-in. Welcome to Week #34.

At Iguaçu, Margot and I stayed inside the park, which meant a shuttle to the gate and a shuttle back, every twenty-five minutes, no exceptions. One rainy afternoon we had two minutes and four hundred meters.

We made it.

I was a fast kid. I won at tag because nobody could catch me, and that particular gift eventually turned into medals, which is more than I can say for most of what I was good at when I was eight.

I can still sprint for a bus. I can still keep up with a ten-year-old.¹

I just don't train for it anymore.

I never decided to stop.

For about twenty years, much of what I did required me to move fast. Ballet from age five, which is where the jumping came from. Hurdles, which are just sprinting with obstacles and consequences. Basketball camp, where I was too small to do anything except move quickly and hope.

None of it was called power training. It was just training.

Then at some point I got serious about strength, and everything in the gym slowed down. Four days of lifting. Controlled tempo. Progressive overload. A spreadsheet. Cardio on the other days, which is a different kind of slow. Saturday hikes, which are the slowest thing I do and my favorite.

Somewhere in there, the fast work disappeared from the program.

Here's what I gave up without noticing.

Power is force multiplied by velocity. Strength asks how much force you can produce. Power asks how quickly you can produce it.

And the speed part is particularly vulnerable to age.

Muscle mass declines as we get older. Strength generally declines faster than muscle mass, and power faster still. The exact rates vary considerably by age, sex, and study, so I am not going to give you one of those suspiciously precise statistics involving a percentage sign. The direction, though, is remarkably consistent.

Part of the reason is that aging affects the whole neuromuscular system: fast-twitch muscle fibers shrink, motor units are lost and remodeled, and muscles become slower at producing force.

Researchers have recently proposed a name for the resulting loss of power: powerpenia. Apparently aging needed another ugly noun.

The important part isn't the noun. It's what power predicts.

Getting out of a chair. Climbing stairs. Walking quickly. Recovering your balance when your foot lands somewhere you did not intend it to land.

My aunt broke her hip two years ago, and I wrote then that recovery wasn't really about the hip.² Falls have a before, too. There is a fraction of a second between the stumble and the floor when your body gets a chance to fix the problem.

Strength matters. Power is strength delivered before gravity closes the argument.

So why did I stop training it?

Because strength is legible and speed isn't.

I can tell you what I deadlifted in March and what I deadlifted last week. I can tell you how many pull-ups I did Tuesday morning. I cannot tell you how quickly I moved any of those things.

There's no obvious PR. No neat number to chase.

The spreadsheet had no column for it, and I let the spreadsheet decide.

The honest version of the research is that power training isn't a miracle. A 2022 meta-analysis in JAMA Network Open compared high-velocity resistance training with conventional strength training in older adults and found a modest advantage for physical function, based on low-certainty evidence.

Modest. Not transformative.

And that's fine.

Because I'm not replacing strength training with power training. I'm not trying to become fast again. Whatever I had at eight is not coming back, and I have no interest in finding a track to confirm this.

I can just move some of the weights I already lift with more intent to move quickly.

There is a difference between losing something to time and losing it because you quietly stopped asking your body to do it and then called the result aging.

Four hundred meters in the rain to catch a shuttle is not a sport. It's just the ability to do something quickly when the thing needs doing quickly.

I'd like to keep that.

Question: Isn't jumping around a good way to get hurt at my age?

Answer: It can be. Fortunately, power training does not require you to start jumping around.

High-velocity resistance training can be extremely boring-looking. Take a movement you already know, use a light-to-moderate load, move the weight up as quickly as you can while maintaining control, then lower it normally.

Fast does not mean ballistic. It does not mean sloppy. It does not mean launching a dumbbell through the ceiling of the gym.

Plyometrics — jumps, hops, bounds — add impact, landing skill, and additional demands on your tendons and joints. They can be useful. They are not mandatory.

If you haven't jumped intentionally in twenty years, Tuesday is probably not the day to discover box jumps.

Own the movement first. Then add speed.

I mostly stay on the ground, and at the moment my elbow has opinions about pressing fast too.

Myth: Power training is for athletes.

Reality: Athletes just have better branding.

An athlete trains power to jump higher, sprint faster, or throw farther.

You use it to get down a curb, catch a railing, put a suitcase in an overhead bin, stand up quickly, and cross a street on a light that was never long enough.

Those aren't athletic feats. They're the ordinary transactions of being a person with somewhere to be, and every one requires force delivered on a deadline.

Strength is what you can do.

Power is whether you can do it in time.

Turkey on rye. Mustard, not mayonnaise. Pickles.

This is what I eat in an airport, and it is one of the few things in an airport I trust.

Sliced turkey. Dark rye or a rye crispbread. A serious amount of grainy mustard. Dill pickles or cornichons on the side, or inside the sandwich if the construction allows.

If there's a hard cheese available, add it.

If the only bread is soft and terrible, pull it apart and put the contents on a plate and eat them with a fork.³

The reason this works isn't that it's virtuous. It has protein, some carbohydrate, enough salt to taste like food, and requires no heating, sauce decisions, or optimism about an airport kitchen.

Every airport has some version of it. Most of them are edible.

Buy it before you're hungry.

The meal you choose while walking calmly through the terminal is almost always better than the one you choose at the gate after your flight has been delayed and you've started regarding a family-size bag of Chex Mix as dinner.

AARP, “Why Power Training May Be More Important Than Strength Training.”

Yes. AARP.

I have made my peace with it and you can too.

It's the clearest plain-English explanation of this I found, and it's free, which is more than I can say for most of the research. Two exercise physiologists explain the strength-versus-power distinction, why speed matters as we age, and how to add it without immediately turning your workout into track practice.

There are ten illustrated exercises at the end, most of them scaled for someone starting from nothing.

Which is why it's the one to forward to a parent.

And also why you should read past the first half. The exercises may not challenge you.

The premise might.

The velocity set.

Pick a lift you already know well — goblet squat, leg press, dumbbell press, machine chest press, whatever is already on the program.

Choose a weight you could normally lift for twelve to fifteen clean reps.

Do three.

On every rep, drive the weight up as quickly as you can without changing the movement. Lower it under control.

Rest a full minute.

Do three sets.

Two things will feel wrong.

The weight will feel too light.

And the set will end while you still have plenty left.

That's the design.

You're not training to be tired. You're training to produce force quickly.

Watch the reps. A little slowing is normal. If the third rep is clearly slower than the first, that's your ceiling for the day — end the set there.

For once, the goal is not to grind.

Stay strong,

{{first name | reader}}

P.S. I made the shuttle. Nobody was timing me and nothing was at stake. I'd still like to be the person who makes it.

Just like I like to be the person who wins the hike.