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How is power used in athletic contests?

This is an excerpt from Applied Sport Mechanics 5th Edition With HKPropel Access by Brendan Burkett.

Power refers to the amount of mechanical work done in a par­tic­u­lar period. In everyday life, we use horse­power as a ­measure of the power of machines and engines, such as ­those involved in the Indianapolis 500.

• One ­horse­power is the ability of a machine (or a ­human) to move 250 kg (550 lb) a distance of 0.3 m (1 ft) in 1 s.
• In the metric system, power is ­measured in watts (746 W = 1 hp).

How is power used in athletic contests? Using a weightlifting example, imagine two athletes lifting barbells of the same weight. One takes 2 s to lift the barbell overhead, and the other takes 1 s. They lift the barbell the same distance. In this comparison, the latter athlete is more power­ful. Why?

• The two athletes moved the same weight over the same distance and performed similar amounts of mechanical work.
• The second athlete, however, took less time than the first and therefore is considered more power­ful.
• ­Because power is the rate of force produced over time, in the majority of training scenarios power is a more impor­tant component than strength—­which is simply how much mass can be moved, regardless of how fast.

­Here’s another example illustrating power. Let’s imagine that two athletes (­we’ll call them Isabella and Emi) race against each other over 100 m. They cross the line in a dead heat in 10.0 s. And let’s say that on the day of the race, Isabella is more massive than Emi. Isabella is therefore more power­ful ­because she moved more mass than Emi did over the same distance (100 m) in the same time (10.0 s). This scenario also indicates that power differs from strength (the ability of a muscle to exert force) ­because strength does not necessarily imply the application of force with speed. Perhaps on this basis, the sport of powerlifting, which tends to ­measure strength rather than power in squats, the bench press, and the deadlift, should be called “strength lifting.”

In many sports, power is tremendously impor­tant ­because a slow application of force ­will not get the job done, particularly in throwing and jumping events; in the snatch and clean and jerk in Olympic weightlifting; and in gymnastics, in which skills such as back and front somersaults cannot be performed slowly (MacKenzie et al. 2014). Successful ­performance in ­these events demands that ­great force be applied quickly over a par­tic­u­lar distance.

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