Q: Will sprint training lead to benefits in boxing because you'll have the capacity to fire off punches at a greater speed and force? What are the other benefits of training your CNS through sprint training other than the running aspects in sports?

A: To a great extent yes. Both from a tonic influence and from a training influence. I do boxing training and oftentimes I will do so after a sprint workout. It's always amazing how much faster I move for a perceived level of effort.

The same thing can be experienced if you take basketball players and run a brief session of max speed sprints then put them on the basketball court. Things seem to go in slow motion, the court seems very small and the working effort to cover ground is substantially reduced.

Another example is how boosting the running speed will also improve agility. The 2 are fairly dissimilar yet speed is more like the glass that agility drinks from...increase the size of the glass and you increase everything.

There are five principles of developing sport-specific strength based on the perspective of dynamic correspondence:

The Amplitude and Direction of Movements

The Accentuated Part of the Working Amplitude of Movement

Dynamic Effort - The level of effort. Speed of movement is critical.

The Speed of Displaying Maximum Effort-

The common goal is to teach the athlete to develop more force in less time.

Regimes of Muscular Work

In this case, the amplitude of movement, dynamic effort, and speed of displaying maximum effort are intensified and enhanced throughout the whole body with the sprint training. Since the amplitude of movement and speed of displaying maximum effort are greater in sprinting then just about any other activity, those 2 sport specific qualties can transfer well into other activities.

Q: Is there a point where increasing strength no longer helps performance in speed-strength activities even if speed is kept constant or improved?

Increasing strength will fail to yield a positive response with the existence of any of these conditions.

1. When bodymass increases to the point that the strength to weight ratio becomes compromised.

2. When speed of movement or rate of force development become compromised due to excessive mass or lack of sport specific training.

3. When the overall time required to build that strength detracts from the time necessary to master your sport.

4. When the volume of strength training generates soreness, muscular, and neural fatigue which "temporarily" masks the ultimate expression of speed strength. (fortunately in this case the speed-strength rebounds above and beyond baseline once the volume of planned strength work is tapered).

For what it's worth, I have yet to see an athlete who focused on "strength" training (not bodybuilding training), and kept his bodyfat under 10%-12%, who ever reached the point where strength became negative.

Q: I recently purchased your vertical jump bible. I am planning to play a lot of basketball over the summer (4 or 5 days a week) to improve my conditioning, but i was wondering if there was any way to modify your jump workouts to get effective results even while playing a lot of basketball. (currently i am doing beginner plyos with novice weight lifting).

Well about the only thing you can do is cut down on the frequency. If you're playing lot of basketball you can totally eliminate plyometric work and just focus on the strength work.

Now let me go out on a rant here. I would recommend you not worry so much about conditioning and instead worry about your skill in basketball and your physical strenght and power capacities. You're probably gonna run yourself into the ground with all those games. I was telling someone the other day, you can take ANY normal person with 2 legs and a heartbeat and in 6 months time maybe less have them out completing a marathon! ANYBODY can build conditioning. It's easy to build. It responds quite quickly and predictably. It might suck a little bit doing it, yet there's nothing real complicated about it.

Now how about something like running a 4.5 fourty yard dash? How many people can do that? Probably fewer then 1 in 50,000 people. Think of a city with a million people. Go through all the sports teams from all the high schools, college teams, and professional teams.....how many people do you think can run a legitimate 4.5 fourty in a city like that?? Probably 20 or less. If we were talking about a 40 inch vertical it would be even less then that. Probably 1 in 100,000 or less.

So building the speed and power is much much much more difficult. The qualities needed to do so are completely INVERSE to those needed to go out and run a marathon! Therefore the main goal is to get that speed and power up and not interfere with that with an excessive amount of conditioning work. You gotta give a little to gain a lot. If in doubt, I always recommend people cut back on that stuff especially if the body composition is in place. You can maintain about 90% of your conditioning with one 20-30 minute conditioning workout once per week. Then starting a month or so before the season you can start to increase the volume of tempo interverals and you'll be right back to where you were before. Ian King used to coach many professional Rugby sports teams. Now you wanna talk about conditioning, those guys run their ass off during a game. He said during the offseason he likes to limit their energy system work to one 20-30 minute session.

Now the drawbacks to this are that for the average person, they have crappy diets so without all the extra conditioning they turn into fat pieces of shit. That's why people have to learn to eat properly to control their bodyfat level instead of eating like crap all the time and relying on too much nonspecific exercise. But anyway, that's my rant.

Q: Whats the difference between high repetition bodyweight squats and high rep.weighted squats(using weighted vest,loaded bar etc.) Why is it that you can do bodyweight squats every day but with weighted its just different story.why? How can you build great endurance and strength together?

You can't build great strength and endurance together....some strength and some endurance yes, good strength and good endurance? Yes. But "great" no. If that were the case then endurance runners would be able to run as fast as sprinters and sprinters woudl be able to run as long as endurance runners.

The difference between bodyweight squats and loaded squats is the resistance...the resistance determines the adaptations. The more resistance the more muscle fibers recruited.

The effect will be determined by how close the resistance is to your maximum in a given movement. In order to strengthen the muscles in a given movement requires that the resistance at least be 40% of your maximum (for beginners) and up to 80% of your maximum for advanced trainees. Squatting your bodyweight most likely represents less then 40% of your maximum so bodyweight squats have zero effects on strength.

If you do hundreds of them they can increase endurance, yet if you're after increased power your time would be better spint squatting with resistance. The reason you can do bodyweight squats everyday is because they're so light they don't really do anything. In order to strengthen muscles it's necessary to use a load heavy enough that you often tear down muscle protein and fatigue the other neuromuscular aspects and this requires recovery time.

Hope that helps

-kelly