Everyone understands that lifting heavy makes you stronger.

What fewer people understand is that lifting fast also makes you stronger — often faster than heavy lifting alone, and with a fraction of the recovery cost.

This is not a new idea. Louie Simmons has been building monsters at Westside Barbell with this approach for decades. The conjugate method — alternating between maximum effort days (heavy loads, low reps) and dynamic effort days (submaximal loads, maximum bar velocity) — has produced some of the strongest athletes in the world. The research backs it up. And after years of programming it for military and tactical athletes, I can tell you it works in the real world too.

Here is the case for adding explosive lifting to your training and exactly how to do it.

What Explosive Strength Actually Is

Explosive strength is your ability to produce maximal force in minimal time. It is what separates an athlete who is strong from an athlete who is also powerful — and for military and tactical athletes, power is what matters in the field.

The Olympic lifts — snatch, clean and jerk — are the most obvious examples. But you do not need to be a weightlifter to train explosive strength. Plyometrics, jump squats, and submaximal barbell work performed with maximum intent all train the same quality.

The mechanism: when you lift a heavy load slowly, you are primarily training your ability to produce force over a relatively long time period. You’ve felt this — the grind on a heavy deadlift where the bar moves at about the speed of your doubt. When you lift a lighter load as fast as possible, you are training your nervous system to recruit motor units quickly and keep them firing throughout the movement. Both adaptations are valuable. Combined, they produce better results than either alone.

The Dynamic Effort Method

Dynamic effort lifting — the submaximal, maximum-velocity component of the conjugate approach — works in a specific load range. Typically 55–70% of your one-rep max, moved as fast as possible through the concentric phase. At higher percentages you start to slow down, which defeats the purpose. The goal is bar speed, not load.

In practical terms: if you are squatting, you should be driving out of the bottom explosively enough that at lighter loads you are actually coming off the ground slightly. The intent is everything — if you are moving a light weight slowly, you are not doing dynamic effort work, you are just doing light lifting.

From personal application: adding this style of training added 20 pounds to my deadlift and 30 pounds to my front squat — a 20-pound PR — in just a few weeks, alongside regular barbell work four times per week. Not the result of a perfect, optimized program. Just consistent application of the principle.

Variable Resistance: Bands and Chains

The conjugate method’s other major tool is accommodating resistance — adding bands or chains to the barbell so that the load increases as you move through the range of motion.

A meta-analysis by Soria-Gila et al. found that variable resistance training produced significantly greater improvements in strength compared to conventional barbell training alone. The mechanism: bands and chains eliminate the “sticking point” problem — the part of a lift where force production drops off and you miss the rep — by matching the resistance curve to the strength curve of the movement. As you reach the stronger part of the range of motion, the load increases to match.

The practical benefits:

• Breaks through plateaus — if you have been stuck at a specific weight for an extended period, accommodating resistance can disrupt the accommodation and drive new adaptation
• Improves rate of force development — the variable load demands acceleration throughout the movement, not just off the floor or out of the hole
• Works for both trained and untrained athletes — the research showed benefits regardless of training experience

One important note: this is a tool for athletes who already move well. Bands and chains added to a broken movement pattern will produce a faster broken movement pattern. Master the mechanics first, then add the variable resistance.

How to Add This to Your Training

You do not need to overhaul your program to get the benefits of dynamic effort work. Here are two practical ways to implement it:

If you train a major lift more than once per week: Make one session a max effort day (heavy loads, low reps, long rest) and one a dynamic effort day (55–70% of max, maximum bar speed, shorter rest). This is the classic conjugate alternation and it is extremely effective.

If you only train a major lift once per week: Alternate between max effort and dynamic effort from week to week:

• Week 1: Heavy back squat — work up to a heavy set of 3–5
• Week 2: Speed squat — 8–10 sets of 2 reps at 60%, maximum bar velocity

A few things to watch:

• Explosive lifting is a skill. Master the movement at normal speed before adding maximal intent — bad mechanics get worse when you add speed
• Keep loads below 70% for dynamic effort work. Above that, bar velocity drops and you lose the training stimulus you are after
• Drive fast through the concentric. Do not crash uncontrollably into the bottom of the movement — control the descent, explode out of the hole
• More is not better here, especially early. A small dose of explosive work applied consistently will produce better results than a large dose applied sporadically

The benefits of explosive lifting are well-established: increased strength, increased power, improved inter- and intramuscular coordination, better rate of force development, and — when performed correctly — reduced injury risk compared to grinding max-effort work at high frequency.

The Bigger Picture

This post covers the dynamic effort side of strength development. For the research on whether you can build strength and endurance simultaneously without one undermining the other, the concurrent training breakdown is the companion piece. And for how to structure dynamic effort work specifically using EMOM protocols, strength speed training with EMOMs takes the next step.

All three together form a complete system. If you want that system laid out as a structured 8-week program without having to build it yourself, Strategic Strength is exactly that — three days per week of barbell work built around these principles.