Oddbean

I know very little about Olympic lifts but aren’t some of them training “explosiveness”? I think the speed aspect is deliberate. And the injury risk is understood and accepted. I imagine the avg gym-goer doesn’t understand that, to your point about safety and injury avoidance. In other words speed ≠ power ≠ strength ≠ hypertrophy. There are different ways to prioritize each of those 4 with tempo, load, rest, RPE, etc

Training for explosiveness isn’t a thing. You can make your muscles stronger and that can make you more explosive in certain sports or activities. But if you want to be more explosive in basketball and dunk on people, you need to practice the dunks and develop your body. Doing a power clean isn’t necessary for that.

That’s a hyper-specific example. I agree power cleans are not applicable to dunking. I’d argue they are applicable to American football lineman. But that is outside of my point. Training fast twitch muscles is definitely a thing. Which is what I meant by explosiveness. But to circle back, it depends what you want to get out of the gym. I’m probably being that “ackshually “ asshole. My intention is to highlight edge cases of goals at the gym. At a macro level, most people are at the gym for strength and aesthetics. I agree injury prevention is extremely important to avoid major setbacks or worse.

High intensity training targets the fast twitch muscle fibers better too. The explosiveness that American football athletes get is from practice and muscle growth. https://youtube.com/shorts/41sx6OtWBOM?si= https://youtube.com/shorts/choGmv5Ms9M?si=

Is this guy your boyfriend that you’re obsessed with? Just teasin 😂 I would definitely learn new things from his videos. I wasn’t aware you can target fast twitch fibers with slow tempo reps.