Not only will you look like a SWAT team badass, weighted training vests may improve your quickness and agility, finds a new study from Australian and Finnish researchers.
The joint research team strapped weighted vests onto eight recreational athletes and told the men to wear the vests 3 days a week whenever they weren’t exercising or sleeping.
After 3 weeks, the participants had shaved more than a tenth of a second off their times on a figure-8 running course, the study says. A tenth of a second might not seem like much. But the course was just 20 yards long and took only 5 seconds to complete.
The study authors credited the lower times to improved change-of-direction ability, which depends on quickness and agility—skills that are especially important in sports like basketball, football, and soccer.
How do the vests work? Like baseball players who swing weighted bats before stepping to the plate, a weighted vest imposes “hypergravity” on your body. That hypergravity forces the muscles in your legs and core to work a little bit harder, explains study author Timo Rantalainen, Ph.D., a research fellow at Australia’s Deakin University. That extra work provokes adaptations in the motoneurons and fibers of your muscles, and those adaptations lead to improved performance, Rantalainen says.
Past studies have shown that wearing a weighted vest during exercise could improve performance among highly trained athletes. But the Aussie-Finnish study was the first to indicate weighted vests offer performance gains independent of other types of exercise, even among guys without a lot of training experience. (If you want to speed up your gains, then try these three tips for big gains.)
What does that mean for you? Whether you do Ironmans or play pickup hoops once a week, wearing a weighted vest while you train can offer significant performance benefits. “Based on the scientific evidence, I can’t understand why training with a weighted vest isn’t more popular,” Rantalainen says.
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