Understanding the Difference Between Strength and Power Can Make the Difference Between a Winning and Losing Season.

Many coaches and athletes mistakenly confuse strength with power and often consider both to be one and the same. They are not the same thing, and understanding the difference between the two is very important in developing athletic performance. You probably know a lot of really strong athletes who are slow, but how many athletes do you know who possess a great vertical jump and are also slow? We will bet the answer to that question is, “Not a single athlete.” Hopefully this short discussion on strength and power will bring some relevance to the importance of both in athletics.

In the simplest terms, strength is a measurement of how much force an athlete can generate without considering time. For instance, an athlete’s maximum squat is 400 pounds and his maximum bench press is 250 pounds. When his strength is measured by those maximum lifts, we didn’t care how long it took for him to complete the repetition— one second or 20 seconds to complete the lift—because time is not a factor for measuring strength. However, when you measure power, you are measuring how fast an athlete generates force, not how much force he generates. This is important to understand because how fast an athlete generates force (or power producing capability) is directly proportional to how fast the athlete can accelerate and how high he or she can jump.

Power is a function of strength, but strength is not power—and it is power that dictates speed. Have you ever wondered why two athletes who are approximately the same height and weight with similar leg strength (say 350-pound maximum squat) have radically different vertical jump performance? The vertical jump is a measure of explosive leg power or how fast an athlete can generate force with their legs. In the example above, the athlete who jumps higher can apply 350 pounds of force to the ground more quickly than the athlete with the lower jump performance. Both athletes have the same strength but generate their maximum force output (350 pounds) at different rates. The athlete with more power generates force faster, and given similar body weights and height, is going to be the faster athlete every time.

Strength is good and should be trained, but don’t overlook training for power. Just because you have a lot of strong athletes doesn’t mean you are going to field a fast team. We all are pretty informed on how to develop strength with traditional weight-training exercises, but the next obvious question is, “How do we train to develop power?”

Any explosive lift such as the Olympic lifts are great for developing power. These are specific exercises where the athlete tries to move the weights at high speeds very quickly. There are, however, disadvantages to these training techniques:

(A) They are more risky exercises with respect to injury.

(B) It takes a considerable amount of training to learn the proper lifting technique for the Olympic lifts.

(C) They are not that functional with respect to the training simulating common movements you make on the field of play.

(D) These are not exercises that female athletes will typically engage in.

The most accommodating training technique for developing power is light load, high-speed training using sport specific motions. It has been discovered that training at high speeds with light loads is an effective means to develop the body’s ability to generate power at high speeds.

Any training device that allows athletes to apply light resistances to sports specific movements which allows quick acceleration will be highly effective towards developing explosive power that will effectively translate to better performance on the field of play. These devices in most cases are usually elastic in nature because elastic bands have relatively little mass and athletes can accelerate and decelerate very quickly when working against elastic bands as opposed to heavy weights.