Tick Tock

Our series continues on as we build upon the lessons from Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV.

You’re now aware that a stronger athlete is a faster athlete, ARX is the best tool available for developing fast-twitch muscle fiber expression, and that it’s the safest tool for an athlete’s strength training.

Building on those themes, another thing that often gets misunderstood is time commitment.

If you asked a strength & conditioning coach why the athletes are spending so much time each week in training, you’ll probably get a response indicating that “it takes as long as it takes,” “that’s how much is required,” or the more honest, “this is the most efficient way we have available to us.”

With a big room full of weights, this is mostly true.

Luckily, there are more alternative options today than ever before:

• Flywheel devices
• Elastic bands
• Variable-resistance weight stack devices
• Manual resistance
• The best of all worlds, read on to learn more…

With a weight, you’re forced to under-load yourself (as we’ve discussed) to avoid injury, and so that your set can continue past one repetition. See this graph for example:

Those red peaks represent the force production in the eccentric phase.

The black peaks represent the force production in the concentric phase.

ARX gives you both in perfect proportion every time, maximizing your force-producing capacity.

The horizontal line represents a weight, which is the same weight all the time and doesn’t maximize your capacity to produce force. That is, if you lift 225lbs, you have to lower 225lbs even if you could have lowered much, much more than that.

With this concentrated dose of the “active ingredient” in resistance exercise (mechanical tension), it’s no wonder an athlete can accumulate the required training volume in such a small period of time. 10+ hours per week of strength & conditioning work can easily turn into one-to-two weekly hours of ARX use.

Additional Read: The Best Tool For Building Muscle

Think About It

What could an athlete do with an extra eight hours per week?

That’s thirty-two hours per month that can now be spent analyzing game film, practicing drills and other sport-specific skills, or engaging in other useful training modalities (recovery tech, mobility, etc).

Imagine a whole team having that time freed up. And then imagine how those hours would compound month after month, year after year, and what type of competitive advantage would begin to build as your team got better training results than the competition and suffered fewer injuries while also accumulating hundreds of additional hours of practice than the competition.

Another W for ARX

If you’re keeping score from our previous installments, you’re now up to speed that ARX:

• Provides a superior training stimulus compared to weights
• Provides this stimulus with a drastically lower risk of injury, while making athletes more resistant to future injury in the process
• Takes a fraction of the time commitment of traditional programs

But we’re not done yet. In the next installment we’ll add yet another reason to include ARX in your athletic strength & conditioning program: superior quantification of athletic performance.