We know the benefits of explosive exercise like clapping push ups, changing grip pull up, Bulgarian split squats. That is, they help increase power and speed. So if I do these with endurance rep ranges, such as 15+ reps, will it increase my strength or will it increase my endurance?
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Mainly your endurance. But your strength will significantly increase too. – Kneel-Before-ZOD Aug 07 '14 at 04:20
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1You mentioned body weight plyo-ish stuff, but folks train squats like that too. Once every week or so you can drop the weight and focus more on moving much quicker. Rippetoe talks about it in starting strength. – Eric Sep 23 '14 at 02:42
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Bulgarian split squats are explosive? – Dave Liepmann Mar 28 '15 at 03:16
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The discussions here about fast fibers and so on seem interesting. But among all these answers someone should point out at the great risk explosive exercises pose for those that are unfit, specially unfit middle-aged people. For instance, jump squats with weak and untrained muscles surrounding the knees are disastrous (except for those holding patents on knee replacements) – Mephisto Mar 28 '15 at 18:30
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By changing an exercise from doing regular push ups to doing clapping push ups, what happens is that you activate your fast twitch motor fibers. So what makes you stronger faster, by doing explosive training, is the fact that you are training the muscle fibers which are more capable of hypertrophy and strength increase. By doing regular medium speed body building reps you utilize a combination of fast- and slow-twitch fibers, but leaning more towards the slow ones. Fast-twitch fibers only get activated at maximal effort, such as during 1RM lifting, or when moving a sub1RM weight as fast as possible.
When you do 5 reps per set that way, you stimulate myofibrillar hypertrophy of the fast-twitch fibers. But the neat thing is that, if you do it the same way, but increase the number of reps, you enter the realm of sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. The difference is that, due to the higher effort, fast-twitch fibers are selectively recruited and trained, which leads to sarcoplasmic hypertrophy and increased endurance of the fast-twitch fibers.
The thing that most people get confused about is how to activate different types of fibers, and it has profound effects on training. Everyone knows that lifting 100% of your 1RM activates fast-twitch, but the notion that you can activate fast-twitch fibers seems to get lost once the weight goes down. There are two parameters that affect which type of fiber you activate: the % of 1RM and the speed of execution. As the weight is lowered, the speed of execution has to be higher in order to stimulate fast-twitch. This is the reason why body-weight exercises, despite being low weight, can stimulate fast-twitch fibers and large gains in strength.
However, in order for a muscel fiber to hypertrophy, it must fatigue. Bu doing low-weight training, you can never fatigue the fiber enough in the myofibrillar 3-6 rep range. In essence, doing low-weight exercises, you can only trigger sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. By alternating these two methods you can maximally stimulate the fast twitch muscle fibers, and as such achieve the fastest and greatest increase in strength and explosiveness. It also seems as if sarcoplasmic hypertrophy aids in subsequent myofibrillar hypertrophy by improving the intracellular milieu (see Supertraining by Mel Siff)
One more thing... When doing an explosive exercise, you start of by utilizing the biggest and most fast-twitch motor units. Since they cannot sustain prolonged contraction (they get fatigued, which again, is stimulus for adaptation), the second most fast-twitch motor units take over. So what happens when you are doing high rep explosive training is that you train your fibers from fast to slow, yielding a higher stimulus for growth and strength increase. Doing classical body building, you start of by utilizing the medium size motor units, and once they get fatigued, the faster twitch fibers activate to overcome the weight; so you train, in essence, bottom-up.
Darko Sarovic
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By definition an explosive exercise has to be explosive. How explosive is it if you do for over a dozen reps?
The value in and whole point of explosive exercises comes from the dynamic effort. By going for more reps you potentially decrease the efficacy of the exercise where explosiveness is concerned.
Going for more reps while retaining some explosive factor will help your strength endurance for sure. It's a different energy system altogether from plyometrics and endurance, and will compliment both.
jonbaldie
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How an exercise affects you depends on who you are. Doing explosive exercises for high reps might improve muscle endurance for one person while building muscle mass in another. It depends on how those people structure their training and where their physical attributes are in relation to the exercise.
Speaking generally, doing high reps of explosive exercises tends to make the exercise less explosive. Then it starts working other attributes like muscle endurance, cardio, strength, and hypertrophy.
Dave Liepmann
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