How to Move Like an NFL Athlete (Power Training)

Ever wondered how NFL athletes move with such power and explosiveness? While genetics play a role, most of us can improve our athleticism by focusing on power-based training.

In this post, inspired by Jerred Moon from the Garage Gym Athlete Podcast, we’ll explore why power matters, how to incorporate it into your workouts, and the benefits of becoming a more explosive athlete.

The Importance of Power-Based Training Power is often overlooked in traditional training programs, partly because it comes with a higher risk of injury. However, power isn’t just about lifting heavy weights; it’s about lifting heavy things quickly. Power-based training is crucial for developing athleticism, improving performance, and staying injury-free in daily activities or sports.

Jerred explains that power equals work divided by time, meaning the faster you can perform a movement with a load, the more power you generate. This is a fundamental equation in physics, but it directly applies to fitness. Whether lifting a barbell or jumping, the speed at which you can do it impacts your overall power.

Three Essential Components of Power Training

1. Lift Heavy Things
   Heavy lifting is foundational for power development. Squats, deadlifts, bench presses, and other compound movements build the strength necessary to be explosive. This strength forms the base of any power-based workout.

2. Lift Fast
   Speed is just as important as strength. Dynamic efforts like lifting lighter loads quickly (e.g., 30% of your one-rep max) train your body to generate force more rapidly. This method is used by elite athletes, and even lightweight training performed with speed can increase power.

3. Jumping (Plyometrics)
   Jumping is the essence of explosiveness. Broad jumps, tuck jumps, and other jumping exercises focus on generating power through your hips, which are critical for athletic movement. Incorporating jumping into your routine will make you more explosive in all movements.

Why Pursue Power-Based Training? Power and explosiveness aren’t just for NFL athletes. Developing these traits makes you more athletic overall. Whether you want to perform better in sports, prevent injury, or simply feel more capable in your daily life, training for power is key. It boosts testosterone levels, maintains mobility, and helps you retain functional athleticism as you age.

Key Takeaways

• Lift heavy, but also lift fast. Speed is a critical component of power.
• Jumping exercises are essential for developing hip power and overall explosiveness.
• Power training enhances not just your ability to lift, but your ability to move athletically in sports and daily activities.

By incorporating these elements into your fitness routine, you can build the power needed to feel more athletic and perform better in all areas of life. For those looking for more guidance on power-based training, Jerred suggests checking out the programming at Garage Gym Athlete.

Conclusion You don’t need NFL-level genetics to train like a pro. Focus on lifting heavy, lifting fast, and jumping regularly, and you’ll start to see improvements in your power and athleticism. Remember, becoming a more explosive athlete is about working smarter, not just harder.

If you’re ready to take your training to the next level, visit GarageGymAthlete.com to start your journey.

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Thanks for listening to the podcast, and if you have any questions be sure to add it to the comments below!

To becoming better!

Podcast Transcript

Jerred: How can you move like an NFL athlete? Would that power, would that explosiveness, how can you be more athletic? Ladies and gentlemen, this is the garage gym athlete podcast. I'm Jared moon. And. I was recently having a conversation with someone about. How to be more explosive and why though, why that matters? But the reality coming back to the question how do you move more like an NFL athlete, be powerful like them in all honesty, if you want to move exactly like an NFL athlete and be just as powerful some of us might need to go back in time and get a different mom and a different dad and different genetics to be able to be at that level. I'm not going to tell you exactly how you can be an NFL athlete, but I'm going to tell you how you can be more powerful and why that matters in today's podcast. When I was in the military, I was at this. Training camp and they had an outside fitness instructor, it wasn't just like a military instructor.

They had brought in a different organization to come train us. In strength and conditioning. And I remember one of the things that we were doing were these bounding broad jumps. And I have always been really good at jumping, just naturally, but then my training. Dramatically escalated that in my twenties, because I was doing all the right power base training to be able to jump.

And so going back to this, a training in the military, we were doing these bounding broad jumps. And I, my broad jumps were covering like twice the distance of trainees. Next to me, it got to the point where the instructor stopped us in county, came and asked me, and he's what do you do for training?

Like, how are you able. To jump like that. Now I don't quite have the hops, like I used to. I'm still. Enough to impress my 12 year old. And my ten-year-old when I jump over things or do really high box jumps and stuff. But I want to talk about the pros and cons of this training and ultimately how to pursue it more because it is like a super power when you can jump in you're explosive and you're powerful.

Now, why would you want to add some, have this trait, this ability to move. Powerfully and explosive. This in my opinion is what's missing in a lot of training programs. Today is this power based training. There are ways to do it safely. I'm going to talk about some of the cons, but there are ways to do it safely.

And I think the reason most training programs are avoiding anything that's power-based is because the risk of injury is higher. When you start doing the things that are required to generate more power. So I think that's the only reason it's not in most programs is because there is an injury element that people are scared of.

I'm going to talk about how to avoid that, but that is the biggest con because to become more powerful, you are going to have to lift some heavy things. You're going to have to do some jumps. You're gonna have to do all these things that typically if done with poor form or too much weight or the combination of poor form and too much weight, you can end up hurting yourself.

Okay. I know I've hurt myself with heavy weights over the years off and on. I've talked about. On this podcast. So there, To me. That's not a problem to me. That's that is the price I pay for doing the thing that I love. And I'm going to get some bumps some bruises, some scrapes. But the fact that I'm going to, I'm not going to work through those things.

I'm going to rehabilitate them completely and then come back in a different way. Is my approach. Now, if you want to start adding these things to your training. And you want to be more powerful, more explosive, because you want to maintain that athleticism. You want that edge. You want all that comes with it increased testosterone, all these things that come with more power-based training. Here's how you do it. There are three main ways you can do it, but if you want to think about power, just conceptually for a minute. Because again, I like to go conceptual when I'm giving these kinds of things.

So people can just start to think about whether or not they are actually doing something. Power is an actual equation. Okay. It's an actual equation in physics. So power equals work divided by time. So basically if you can. Do work faster. That's more power, you're creating more power. So if we go just straight to lifting, if I'm lifting 500 pounds off the floor from a deadlift 500 pounds, but it's one of those slow, ugly lifts.

And it takes me five to seven seconds to get to lock out at the top. That's a certain level of power, right? That's work 500 pounds divided by time, seven seconds. But if we wanted to. Go faster 500 pounds and say I'm just like 500 pounds is nothing for me. I'm super powerful athlete. I'm explosive.

And I lifted in one second. I have generated way more power, even though athlete one and athlete, you are lifting the same amount of weight. There's way more power when you're doing things faster. So now if you just start to think about your own training, any time you can. Do something. Faster you are generating more power.

It doesn't always have to be more weight. It could just be faster. It could be actually very lightweight in faster. So we'll talk about the three ways to do that. The first you do need to lift heavy things. You do need to lift heavy things, heavy weights. Are essential for generating power. I think the ability to lift a heavy load is the prerequisite to being able to jump high, be explosive, have all that power.

You have to lift heavy things. I typically recommend lifting heavy things with a barbell and doing deadlifts squats, presses, bench, press, those kind of things. Just having it somewhere as a base of training like we do in garage, gym athlete. We're always including those things. Somewhere in the program. The second thing you need to do is you need to lift fast.

So if we're like, I just talked about conceptually how you need to be faster, but you need to lift fast. And we typically prescribed that through dynamic efforts. So lifting a lighter load, but for speed, quality and speed. So if we're talking about, something taken from Westside barbell, like 10 sets of two reps at 30% of your one rep max, this can be on the deadlift.

This could be on the bench press. This could be on the squat. So you're taking 30% of your winner at max. Not very heavy. You're only doing two reps, three reps, but you're doing it for speed. You're being super explosive. That's not a type of training, a lot of people do. But when you do that I've even seen people jump, do a very light, like very lightweight jump with barbells on their back.

And they exp they are very explosive athletes that the athletes who are able to do this. And that's all they're doing. They're just lifting a load, but they're increasing, they're decreasing the time. So the faster you can be with lifting a load, the more power you're going to be.

So the problem that most people think is that you need really heavy weights really fast when that's not very easy to do, or even moderate loads as fast as you can. And that's still in that injury zone. To me, it's like, All right, I'm going to do 70%. 60% of my wonder at maximum goes hard as I can, as fast as I can. But you're still not able to be that fast because you haven't generated that power. So let's just back it way, way down. And just go fast with 30%, 10%, 5%, just the bar, just as a light kettlebell, something like that.

If you can start moving those loads faster, you will start to generate power. Now, the last thing without any weight required is just jumping. The ability to jump is like the definition of power. So broad jumps, tuck, jumps, any kind of jump that you can get, just jumping as high as you can, any kind of jumping thrown into your programming, which we do.

A lot of it typically is called plyometrics. But plyometrics opens a whole can of worms. So I'm just going to say jumping. So the more jumping you can add into your daily routine. And the reason I say jumping, as opposed to like plyometric with your upper body or anything, is because the hips are everything.

When it comes to generating power and being explosive as an athlete and maintaining these things throughout your life. If you do those three things, you make sure that you have some base of heavy lifting, not lifting heavy all the time. But you have a base of there. You have this base of strength and you're able to do those lifts. You are working on fast lifts, safely.

You're moving loads quickly, and you're doing that safely with perfect form super-light loads. We already discussed all that. And then if you're jumping, if you're doing all three of those things, you're going to be an incredibly explosive and powerful athlete. It's going to make you more athletic.

It's going to make you who you really want to be because. My problem with some training programs these days is it has athletes trying to combine all this stuff like running in a straight line for. 40 miles per week and then some barbell training. And maybe you look okay. But I know you don't feel okay.

I know the athletes are doing that. They don't feel okay. They're not very mobile. They're not truly athletic. They couldn't probably play a sport, but they can run in a straight line really far, really fast, and they can lift some weights. But to me, that's not who you want to be. You want to be athletic.

You want to be able to play pickleball without being injured or go play, a game of pickup basketball, these kinds of things without injury, and to be truly athletic. So these are some ways that you can add some power to your training and reasons that you'd want to. But I'm going to, I'm going to cut it off right here for all of our athletes who are experiencing this training.

We appreciate you. I'm implementing all these things into our programming as is if you are new here and you want to find out about power BI based training, how we combine all these different methods, go over to garage, gym athlete.com, sign up for a free trial, and we would love to have you. Remember, if you don't kill comfort will kill you.