‘Do not lift weights’ coaches and so called experts say.  ‘It’ll make you slow and too bulky’ they declare.  ‘Just look at those bodybuilders’ they’ll add to back this up.  Unfortunately for athletes that are coached by an anti-weight training coach, they will never achieve their potential in their chosen sport.  Here are the facts.

Speed in any movement is a product of the following qualities: explosive strength, acceleration ability at the beginning of the movement (which is a product of strength), development and maintenance of maximum speed and resistance to fatigue¹.  So strength is important to at least two out of the four factors for speed – explosive strength and acceleration.  It is also very well correlated in the research that speed of movement increases with muscular strength². Lastly greater levels of muscular strength means a longer time to exhaustion and a greater ability to resist fatigue during endurance activities.  You can now see why the Russians came up with the adage that ‘strength is the mother of all qualities’! 

Now to take things further, the predominant patterns of movement for most sports is acyclic locomotion and activity. Acyclic activities involve completing a movement at random intervals (e.g. throwing a punch in boxing or a sprinting during a game of soccer) compared to cyclic activities where the movement is constantly performed (e.g. swimming for 200m).  In all acylic activities, speed is determined by the muscles ability to overcome significant external resistance³.  And how do we teach ourselves to overcome significant external resistance? We get stronger by lifting weights.  Taking theory into practice, the fastest human beings on the planet are sprinters.  There has not been an international elite sprinter in at least the last 30 years who has not completed serious weight lifting as part of their training.

So we have learned that lifting weights will make us quicker and faster but we will still get too big right?

Not at all.  Properly designed resistance programs can make you stronger without adding any body mass.  It is seen countless times in the sport of weightlifting and gymnastics.  If you flick through footage of elite 48kg and 53kg class female weightlifting ( I have included a video below), you will see petite small women lifting massive amounts of weight overhead.  Often they will lift more than 150% of their body weight in a snatch!

The key to making sure you do not put on any unwanted body size is actually keeping the repetitions low and using enough weight to avoid natural anabolic hormone increases following the lifting⁴.  These increases in hormones will of course make you bigger if you do not know how to structure your training to avoid them.  In fact, using high resistance and low repetitions is exactly how elite gymnasts and weightlifters train.  They rarely (if at all) lift over 5 repetitions and the majority of their work is done at close to maximum.  The take home point here is that if you are worried about increasing your body mass, you need to know how to manipulate hormones through weight training to design your workouts.   

For the whole inflexibility thing with resistance training, let us make sure we know what type of flexibility is important first.  Dynamic flexibility (compared to static flexibility) is the most important type of flexibility for both sports and life in general.  As an example of why this is, there are countless cases of individuals being able to touch their toes in a hamstring stretch.  However these same individuals will tear their hamstring when they run at a certain pace due to a lack in dynamic flexibility at a certain rate.  As a rule of thumb, you actually want to decrease the difference between dynamic and static flexibility to reduce injuries in sports.

Weight training completed correctly through a full range of motion is inherently an dynamic flexibility movement.  And the research actually shows us that full range of motion strength exercises increase static flexibility and also decrease the difference between dynamic and static flexibility¹.  This means that the athlete who can touch their toes in a hamstring stretch will NOW be at less risk of pulling that hamstring due to strength training.  Plus they will have greater static flexibility which again means less likelihood of injuries.  The last thing to muse over is that Olympic weightlifters are the second most flexible athletes behind gymnasts in all sports and all they do is lift weights. 

So as you can see if completed correctly, lifting weights will only make you faster and more flexible for your chosen sport!

References

1. Siff, M.C. "Supertraining", Supertraining Institute: Denver USA (2003)Another myth bites the dust. 

2. Kusnetov, V & Fiskalov I (1985) “Correlations between speed and strength in cyclic locomotion” Teoriya i Praktika Fizicheskoi Kultury 8:6

3.  Farfel (1939) & Donskoi (1960) quoted in Siff, M.C. "Supertraining", Supertraining Institute: Denver USA (2003) p. 137

4. Häkkinen K; Pakarinen A. Acute hormonal responses to two different fatiguing heavy-resistance protocols in male athletes. Journal of Applied Physiology (1985) 1993;74(2):882-7