Ann Chisholm, owner and coach at Tropos Fitness Club in Victoria, British Columbia, stands before a crowd of about 20 women huddling in a circle under an outdoor tent, eager to learn about strength training despite the rainy weather. The group shouts out guesses. Adductors!—Chisholm agrees.
They’re up there, but there is something more important, Chisholm says. This is the last session on the last day of FeistyFest, a three-day movement and educational festival for women held in September in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania, and none of the previous groups guessed the third one correctly, Chisholm says, before revealing the answer: “Power explosiveness!” You can think of your explosive power as those first couple of seconds of your movement, the initial burst, Chisholm says. You’re recruiting fast-twitch muscle fibers, which quickly contract and generate high force, and activating your nervous system, which fires signals to your muscles at a high speed to help you coordinate complex movements.
When she sees them happen most? While moving laterally—“when you have to move quickly or in a different direction.” And that’s where explosive power comes in to help. When you run, your body absorbs two to three times your body weight, which puts a lot of pressure on your joints and ligaments.
Explosive power helps you control those forces safely and efficiently, while also improving speed, stride efficiency, and joint resilience. Let’s start with the bad news: a 47-year Swedish study from 2025 published in the Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle concluded that explosive power peaks in women at 19 and in men at 27. That’s when your body starts losing its first line of defense against sudden physical stressors, and you become more injury-prone.
Explosive power complements strength training, building on it. While strength training is all about the maximum amount of force a muscle can generate, explosive power helps you apply that power as quickly as possible. Especially if you’re new to training your explosive power, adding one or two movements to your strength training session to start and slowly building up from there is the way to go, Chisholm says.
Chisholm is an ultrarunner, but she also used to play basketball, where agility and explosive power are essential and require training. Blending these two experiences, as a trainer, she programs athletic-style workouts that always include explosive power-focused moves in strength sessions. She starts with three Rs.
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