 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Gwicky and today I want to tell you that there are types of movements that don't look like traditional strength training that you should absolutely be incorporating into your program. So, if you look at a traditional squat and you see how fast that bar moves, as I come down, it's going downward, but as I come up, I am speeding up until about halfway. And then the last half of the rep, I'm actually purposefully slowing down. Once I get past that sticking point, I am purposefully slowing down so that when I get to the top, it's not so jarring, so that I don't lose my balance. Now, in doing that, I'm spending a large portion of the rep slowing down. So, if your goal is to develop speed, to develop power, or to output more force, then you might not want to lift with purely just free weights all the time. You might want to look into something we would call a ballistic movement or even, we'll talk about the gray area later. So, a ballistic movement is one where I'm speeding up until it's done. Okay, it's totally different way. So, if I think about a squat where I just stand up and I lock out all my joints, and maybe half of that is me slowing down, well, if I think about a jump, then most of that is me just accelerating all the way up to the top. I reach my, you know, my peak power right as my feet are about to leave the ground, and that's what determines how high I jump. Also, you know, you can manipulate your limbs a little bit, as you see in the high jump, for example, and that will help me get a little bit higher. Okay, with ballistic movements, now I have this longer acceleration period. Now I have longer time to put force into whatever movement that I'm trying to do so I can focus on developing that. So, when I do a ballistic movement, it's less strength oriented, and it's a lot more force and power oriented. And specifically with the time element of this, I'm really, really emphasizing my power. That stuff doesn't have to be, you know, you don't need it in every single program, especially if you're, you know, you're just doing a strength block, and you're going to get your body accommodating to heavy weights. I don't necessarily need ballistic movements, but if I've never done them, if all I've done is five by five, then I probably get a lot out of doing some ballistic movements. Now, outside of purely ballistic, so there is a gray area. If we think ballistic means like throwing a med ball or doing a jump or something like that, and non ballistic means, you know, a normal squat or a normal deadlift, then somewhere in between we can play with that. And I like that. And that's where we see chains and bands come into play. So, you know, the secret here is chains, you throw on the bar, each chain is really heavy, really thick, about five eighths of an inch thick in each link. And they generally weigh about 20 pounds each. You put at least one on each side. And then as you get to the bottom of the squat, for example, all of those links are on the ground and they're no longer pulling the bar down. So the bar is lighter at the bottom. But as I go up, those links come off the ground. And now I feel that extra 40 pounds or so as I'm up at the top of the squat. So what this does is it slows you down. So you remember, we talked about these reps. And if I spend the last half of it slowing down, well, now, if I have something else to help me slow down, then I can keep pushing through it. I can keep pushing into this rep. I can keep accelerating for a longer period of time. I'm still going to have to slow down at some point, but I can, you know, instead of doing, instead of slowing down over half the rep, maybe I slow down over a third of the rep. And I can use that as another way to have maybe a lower impact, maybe not a pure speed, maybe more of a speed strength or strength speed type of adaptation. And the same goes for if I'm using a band. Maybe the band is pulling me down to the ground. It's just like the chains, except now it's more exponential because as the band stretches, the resistance is exponentially greater. And then the other way to think about this, still on an exponential curve, but now the bands are holding me up. So it helps a lot at the bottom and then a little at the top. And in doing that, it helps pull me out of the bottom. So it helps me get more accommodated to speeding up throughout the rep. It's pulling me along. It's so good. If you've never tried it, you have to try it. Don't even go very heavy, right? The idea here is max acceleration. So if I'm trying to get max acceleration, then I can keep the weights pretty low and I can just have really strong intent when I do these exercises. I can try to move the weight as fast as possible. And that will give me these force and power adaptations that I'm looking for.