Understanding Strength and Speed: Types, Benefits, Factors
What is Strength?
People need strength to carry out a large number of everyday tasks: walking, sitting down, standing up, staying in the same position; grabbing, holding, or moving an object; pushing a door, etc.
Types of Strength
- Maximum Strength: Is applied when the weight is very significant, such as when pushing against a wall or lifting a very heavy weight.
- Resistance Strength: Is used when climbing stairs, moving light weights, skipping, sawing, etc.
- Explosive Strength: Is used in fast movements like throwing a stone, taking a run-up before a jump, etc.
Why Work on Strength?
Healthy Effects of Working on Strength
- Muscle Hypertrophy: This increases the size of the muscles and improves their response to contraction.
- Our bones become more resistant to traction.
- The risk of injury is reduced by the performance of everyday activities that require strength.
- It improves body posture.
- It improves our appearance and self-esteem.
What Factors Does Strength Depend On?
- Muscle Mass: Athletes manage to increase the number and thickness of their muscle fibers through training, which enables them to apply more strength.
- Type of Muscle Fiber: We have two types of fibers in our muscles, which are called white or red depending on their color.
- Shape and Arrangement of the Muscle: Depending on the shape and arrangement, it is possible to develop a greater or lesser amount of strength.
- Task Training and Coordination: When a motor skill is mastered, it is possible to apply more strength, and the muscles intervening in the movement contract in a coordinated way.
- Age: Strength increases with age, but the increase is very significant around the age of 11 to 12 for girls or 13 for boys.
- Gender: Generally speaking, adult men are stronger than women; they weigh more and have more muscle mass.
Speed
Although speed is considered a physical ability rather than a motor ability, it has a lot in common with motor skills and their acquisition.
- Reaction Speed: Is the time it takes for the nervous system to transmit an order to move.
- Gestural Speed or Movement Speed: Refers to the minimum time we need to perform a specific movement.
What Factors Does Speed Depend On?
- Reaction speed depends on the performance of the nervous system.
- Information travels through neurons in milliseconds, facilitating movement coordination.
- The Type of Stimulus: Whether auditory, visual, or tactile.
- Brain: It belongs to the encephalon. This is where the data is analyzed, and decisions are taken.
- Central Nervous System: This is formed by the encephalon and the spinal cord.
- Peripheral Nervous System: Nerves that branch out to the whole body from the encephalon and the spinal cord.
- The number of body segments involved influences the speed of movement.
- Training: Also gives us more speed because we can select the appropriate number of muscle and nervous fibers.
- Age: Also affects the speed of movement. Speed increases significantly between the ages of 8 and 12.
- It has been shown that athletes who specialize in sprinting have more white muscle fibers or fast-twitch fibers, thanks to which they can reach high travel speed.
- The higher the frequency of the strides, that is to say, the number of times the stride is repeated per unit of time, along with the amplitude of the leg movement, the faster our travel speed during the race.