Sunday's Workout - Dynamic Effort Lower Body

We went to the Freedom Fight Title Quest Mixed Martial arts fight on Saturday night and were treated to some amazing fights. As always conditioning plays such a crucial role in allowing these athletes to continue into the later rounds. Watching these guys is definitely motivating to say the least. So throwing some Prowler pushes into our Sunday workout was influenced by our Saturday night outing.

The goal of Dynamic Effort (DE) training is to improve the ability to accelerate loads. High rates of acceleration require very high forces. Consequently DE training improves rate of force production which contributes to maximal strength. We use accommodating resistance modalities such as chains or bands to increase the tension on the muscles as the natural strength curve of the exercise gives us improved leverage.

Generally we start with a bar weight equal to about 50% of your 1RM and then add either chains or bands to give a top position weight of between 90-110% of your 1RM. The goal is to then explode from the bottom as hard as possible so that you are accelerating right through to the top position.

That said, here's what we did yesterday:

Warmup:
Skipping 10 min
Foam Roller: Quads, IT Band, Hams, Glutes, Adductors, T-Spine.
Tennis Ball: Piriformis
Band external rotator cuff work to warm up in prep for the low bar position.

DE Box Squats (did a few warm-up sets of 5 reps with various band tensions then decided to use chains.)

2x95 + 1 set chains
2x115 + 2 sets chains
2x135 + 2 sets chains
10x2x155 + 2 sets chains
We took just as long a rest between sets as it took the other person to do their set.
So around 30-45 seconds rest. I haven't weighed them yet, but I'm pretty sure each set of chains is around 60 lbs.

DE Deadlifts - For this exercise we sat the bar on the ground inside the rack and just threw a doubled up monster miniband over the bar from the two band pins.

I haven't had deadlifts in my program for the past 8 weeks, so going pretty light we did:
10x1x185 + 1 doubled monster mini. (I would estimate the tension the band added was close to 100 lbs at the top.

After this a little volume work..

Dumbbell Step-ups 2 warm-up sets then 3x10
45 degree hypers w/bands 3x10

Reverse Hypers 1x20x20lbs fast, 1x15x20 slow w/ 2 sec isohold at top, 1x15x20
(unilateral)
Grappler Barbell Twists: 16 x bar, long handle 2x8 x bar

Hanging leg raises 20, 15, 15, 9

Then after all this we headed outside to push the Prowler.

Here's some video footage of our work outside!




We even got my brother in law's baby girl to try giving the Prowler a push.. but she wasn't into it! LOL


So all in all it was a pretty brutal session. Thankfully we'd just changed the water in the hot tub and it was still a balmy 74 degrees.. so we hopped in to cool down afterwards.

That's it for our training logs. A new week is upon us!

Have a great one!
:)
Shane