Most people think that increasing your power makes you:
- smash tackles
- sprint faster
- dominate collisions
- jump higher
That’s not accurate.
In fact, chasing power (force x velocity) isn’t that useful…
If you want to move yourself faster, jump higher, or hit someone harder –
You need to change momentum (mass x velocity)
Power doesn’t change momentum. Impulse does.
(…bare with me, this will get practical…)
There’s two ways to increase impulse (force x time)
1: You produce more force
And/or
2: You do it over a longer period of time
For example, two athletes are racing.
Steward produced greater force in less time during his first step (higher peak power) than Furbank.
Yet Furbank ran faster because he generated greater total impulse — even though his force was lower, he applied it for longer by pushing through the entire ground contact.
That’s the theory, how do you apply it.
Most broadly lump exercises into the “power bucket”:
- Olympic lifts
- Sprinting
- Loaded jumps
- Band training
- Box jumps
- Bounds
- Hops
Broad jumps - Sled sprints
- Medicine ball throws
Blindly labelling them all as power exercises is reductionist and utterly useless.
A 60kg trap bar jump will show high peak power outputs (kinda heavy x kinda fast)
But if your goal is to increase top-end speed running
It’s going to have limited transfer
As the time window is vastly different
(Takes ~0.7seconds to produce that force on a trap bar jump and top-end sprinting ground contact takes 0.08seconds).
So instead of asking “does this exercise produce high power”
Ask “does this improve my ability to produce impulse in the time windows available within my sport or activity?”
Let’s apply it:
A) Building Acceleration
You have longer contacts ground contacts (120–200 ms early phase).
So, you can train impulse by:
- Sled pushes
- Hill sprints
- Bounds
- Accelerations (duh)
B) Max Velocity
Now time is restricted (~80–90 ms).
So you must increase:
- Elasticity
- Stiffness
- RFD
You could train impulse by:
- Skips
- Downhill sprints
- Assisted sprints
- Top-end sprinting
C) Collision Dominance
Momentum = mass × velocity. Impulse determines how much momentum changes during contact.
So, improving collision dominance means:
• Improve body mass (eat like an adult, lift weights, get jacked)
• Improve approach velocity (sprint, sled sprints, etc)
I won’t stop using the word “power” in my content
(Top 10 “impulse exercises” would fall on deaf ears…)
But you should be chasing impulse > power.
TLDR: If you want to move yourself — or your opponent — faster and more explosively, you need to increase momentum.
Momentum changes from impulse (force × time), not peak power (force × velocity).
Jack
