As part of my Post-Baccalaureate program at Bridgewater State College, I completed coursework related to a wide variety of physical activities, and as part of the my efforts to increase my knowledge of resistance training, especially in regard to sports, I picked up the book Explosive Lifting for Sports by Harvey Newton. It’s a great resource for using resistance training to increase your effectiveness in other areas.
The book begins with a basic overview of the terms and ideas, and clearly defines and differentiates between strength and power, and describes techniques for training for each. It also explores weightlifting and plyometrics, and gives ways to combine them for better results.
The middle section of the book describes the basic lifts – the snatch, clean, and jerk – and various other exercises that will complement these lifts, and plenty of photographs to help clarify proper form. This really helped when I was taking the NSCA-CSCS exam.
After the technical portion, there are sections on how to design an effective training program, and then a section containing example sport specific programs for baseball, basketball, hockey, football, soccer, track and field, wrestling and more. As a bonus, the book comes with a DVD-ROM disc with 24 clips of proper form of the lifts that can be analyzed frame by frame or even printed, and the clips are even enhanced by Dartfish software for clarity. The big downer for me was that it only worked with Windows, so Mac and Linux users are left out in the cold.
This book was a bargain, and would be useful at just about any level – basic understanding to advanced user. Conditioning is important, and this is a great tool for training in useful strength.
