If your awesome gym can call a prowler its own, give this variation a try.
Prowler Explosions
- basically a broad jump into a prowler push
- make sure you get full hip extension
Great exercise for alactic power and alactic capacity development.
Best of Olympic Weightlifting
Pretty much only good for American football linemen. You also need to keep the lower back on a lordic curve (as is for all explosive movements).
Other sports don’t benefit from explosiveness? 😉
The only (useful) place this exercise has in training it when you go out of the GPP phase and into the SDP phase. It’s an exercise that has few aspects that mimic the linemens job/form. If you wanted to do something to get more explosive for a rugby scrum, put a bar on your back, load the weight to about game speed, and have the bar path go at an angle that is similar to a drive. Or for a wrestler, a med ball throw with one leg at 90 degrees and the other at 45 degrees straight into a bag grab (more detailed, but you get the point). The point of these is to have dynamic correspondence to the sport to make you better at the sport. Just because someone is strong and fast does not mean they are a good athlete. There are tons of really fast NFL players that are nothing compared to the people they kill in terms of strength/speed. They need to practice their sport, and drills that have a HIGH dynamic correspondence. Like this exercise does for football linemen. Now, I’m not saying jumping/throwing/sprinting are not amazing ways to improve GPP/sparial awareness/Sports performance. I’m also not saying that these things are not important. They are VERY important; however, jumping/sprinting/throwing can help increase sparial awareness(already mentioned) and that helps your body learn movement patterns faster (gymnastic also does this, which is why the Chinese use it on kids). That prowler drill honestly is very easy, and requires basic movement patterns which is why it is used in SDP. So, the reason those three main things are used to increase general speed abilities and not thing such as the prowler drill is the things already mentioned. The main 3 increase general speed/awareness/etc, while drills like the prowler push help transfer the new abilities to the sports field even more. At least this is the opinion of my new coach and I.
With regards to the rugby drill, would this be something you are referring to? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJRlkOqHymU
Yup. I’m not going to say what volume, for I don’t know a lot so much about the scrum, just the positions.
Also, James was the guy who taught Chad Smith much of what he currently knows about atheltic training. He is also my coach. I’ve learned more from him in the last 3 weeks than I have in the past year from reading elitefts Q&A, Pendlay forum, Francis Forum, a few russian books. He is a sports genius.
Now, I may have a slightly differnet (very slightly) view from James’, but his view will probably be more correct than mine. It will still be very close though.
Does James allow any shadowing work/interns? Seems like he really knows his stuff.
To be honest, I’m not sure. You would have to ask him. Just to let you know, in case you don’t know, he lives in Portugal.
wayyy too long. will not be reading
I can see this being useful for oly lifting… Might have to try it at my awesome gym (who has like 6 prowlers, btw… neener, neener, neener).