Why We Train Power and Plyometrics

Of all the attributes we train, the one most often skipped is the one with the highest cost when we lose it. Explosive power, the ability to produce force quickly, is the first quality our bodies surrender with age. It declines faster than strength. It's harder to recover. And the deeper you go into the research, the clearer it becomes: training power isn't a nice add-on. It's one of the most important investments we can make in our future selves.

We program jumps, throws, sprints. Here's why.

Power predicts how well we age

Reid and Fielding, writing in Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews in 2012, made a finding that should change how everyone over 35 thinks about training: explosive power is more predictive of functional aging than maximal strength. Read that again. The ability to express force quickly, to jump, to catch ourselves when we trip, to climb a stair quickly, is a stronger signal of how we'll age than how much weight we can lift.

Power decline starts in our fourth decade and accelerates after 60 without specific training. By 70, the average untrained adult has lost roughly 30% of their muscle mass and over 40% of their power output. The drop in power happens at roughly twice the rate of the drop in strength. Translation: our raw lifting numbers can stay relatively decent while our ability to actually use that strength athletically falls off a cliff.

Power is the first quality we lose with age and the strongest predictor of how independently we'll live in our later decades.

It changes survival outcomes

A 2019 study in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology followed nearly 4,000 adults aged 41 to 85 and tested their muscle power output. Over the median 6.5-year follow-up, those in the lowest power quartile had a 4–5x higher risk of all-cause mortality than those in the highest. It's one of the largest mortality signals in the literature outside of VO₂ max itself.

And in the aging research, power output is the single best predictor of whether someone can stand up from a chair, climb stairs, and live independently into their 80s and 90s. Strength matters. Power decides whether we can express it.

The fall-prevention argument is enormous

Falls are the leading cause of injury-related death among adults over 65 in the United States. The CDC documents roughly 36 million falls per year in older adults, resulting in 32,000+ deaths and over 3 million emergency department visits. Power training is one of the most effective interventions we have against this because the muscular response that catches us when we trip is fundamentally a power response, not a strength response.

A 2021 meta-analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine of 116 randomized trials covering over 25,000 older adults found that exercise programs incorporating power and balance training reduced fall rates by 23% and injurious falls by 26%. The programs that didn't include explosive elements produced significantly smaller effects.

Bone density, hormonal health, and cognition

Plyometric and power training also produces adaptations that slower training doesn't. Mechanical loading from jumping creates higher peak ground reaction forces than traditional lifting. which is one of the strongest stimuli for bone density, especially valuable for women navigating peri-menopause and post-menopause. A 2014 study in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research showed that even modest jump-based programs (10 jumps a day) increased hip bone mineral density in pre-menopausal women.

Explosive training also drives a stronger acute hormonal response, including growth hormone and testosterone, than slower lifting at the same volume. And emerging research from the cognitive aging literature, including work from Erickson and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh, suggests that high-intensity, power-based exercise produces measurable improvements in executive function and memory in adults over 60. The brain responds to force production at speed in ways it doesn't respond to slow, grinding work alone.

Power training improves bone density, hormonal health, fall prevention, athletic capacity, and cognitive function all in adaptations that slower training simply doesn't produce.

How we train it

We program power as something both included within conditioning but more specifically as a stand-alone session. Box jumps, broad jumps, medicine ball throws, power cleans, and plyometric variations show up one to three times per week. As a stand-alone focus, a focus on power shows up every single Friday (Forever Athlete Friday). On these days, the Intent is high. We take full recovery between reps because the nervous system needs to be fresh to produce force quickly.

Every rep is a max effort — land, reset, then go again. We chase speed and quality. This is what makes power training look different from conditioning: it's more deliberate.

Why it matters for every one of us

Power training is sometimes painted as a young athlete's game. The research says the opposite. The older we get, the more critical it becomes  because the gap between people who train power and people who don't widens dramatically with each decade.

We jump, throw, and move fast on purpose. Not because it's flashy. Because it's the single most reliable way to keep our bodies athletic, our bones strong, our brains sharp, and our independence intact for decades. Of all the choices we make in our training week, including a few minutes of real power work might be the highest-ROI decision we make for the next forty years.

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