Lower Body Exercises, Speed and Acceleration
The Correlation Between Lower Body Exercises and Performance Indicators
In field sports, speed is an athletic quality that has direct impact on the game. While having a big bench press is great, it's unlikely to affect the score line. Outright pace however, can beat defenders, break the line and score in the corner. Whilst training for maximum strength is important… “speed kills”.
Recently, in an effort to increase transfer from the gym to the field I have been looking into the lower body profiling of my athletes and what exercises or strength qualities correlate strongly with speed. The exercises I have chosen to evaluate the lower body performance of my team have been as follows:
RSI (reactive strength index) or drop jump test
Vertical Jump
BB Back Squat 1RM (relative to body weight)
Broad Jump
10 and 20 meter sprint time
Why these exercises? I have chosen these exercises for a number of reasons. Most of them are very simple and easy to do and they also test a variety of different strength and power qualities. Vertical jump and broad jump are very similar exercises. However, the broad jump is in a horizontal plane and vertical jump is, well, vertical. You are testing your body’s ability to produce force through your lower body into the ground relative to your own body weight. The RSI (or drop jump) is a reactive strength test. It tests the Athletes ability to absorb eccentric load and quickly turn that into concentric force. The 1RM Barbell Back Squat is quite straight forward - you are testing the maximum strength of your lower body. I always make sure my athletes are getting their hips below their knees.
How do I test these?
I add them into the program for the day or week when I am not running a separate program for testing. Generally on a typical Thursday (G-3 with a Saturday game) I will treat it as a spark up day. This means a lighter, faster day before a game in an effort not to be too taxing, using heavy loads and to get the athlete thinking of moving fast.
Example program for a G-3
A1: Hang Power Snatch 4x3 @ 70%
A2: RSI drop Jump test 3x3
Generally speaking the lower body testing exercises are super-setted (performed back to back) with a fast Olympic lifting variant. This is sometimes referred to as contrast loading. However, the Back Squat 1RM is usually only taken once every few months during a planned test. This would take place wherever it seems logical to fit into a busy team schedule. Generally speaking this is not in season or around games. We usually have a program that progressively builds up to the test, so it is not too much of shock. The athletes are always made aware of the testing ahead of time.
Once I have collected these scores, I can begin to compare them with their speed times, of 10m and 20m. I do this with a Pearson's R correlation to get a value of correlation. A quick refresher; The closer the value is to 1 or -1 the higher the correlation, the closer it is to 0 the weaker the correlation.
As you can see in the table above all of the exercises have somewhat of a correlation with different aspects of speed. The main point I personally take from this information is that all the different tests somewhat carry over to speed. However, not one single test/exercise is the answer, and many different qualities are needed. This also highlights the need for running/sprinting based training as simply just hitting the gym wont get you fast.
The highest correlations come from Vertical Jump and Broad Jump. It is interesting that different exercises have varying correlations with different aspects of speed, such as the first 10 vs a rolling 10-20 meter.
I also found it incredibly interesting that the back squat had such a low correlation to 10 meter time, which may go against some current literature. This data is only reflective of the playing group I currently train though, and not necessarily a representative of other types of athletes.
Written by Louis Dallimore
Professional Strength & Conditioning Coach
Website: https://www.louisdallimore.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louis-dallimore-a032a37a
