Another little tid-bit: The explosive movement in clapping/plyo push-ups is excellent for getting your twitch muscles ready before benching

All I was saying with my initial retort to Sir Spencer's comment about zayn's push-up variation was that- while I agree with Sir Spencer that doing super long push-ups is not the best way to strengthen the fast twitch fibers used for explosive movements, I was just stating that I did not agree it would magically dampen the power in your arms and shoulders. That's like saying sprinters should never go for a leisurely run, because they'll lose time on their 100m.

There are MANY MANY different tools out there for strengthening the body. Some work better than others. But I'm not sure if any of them actually hinder your progress.

For Spencer,
The point I want to make clear to you is that using the notion of "power" as the simple math you learn from elementary school physics is really inappropriate and mostly useless or misleading when talking about training. Of course it's nice that it's simple, the problem is that it's the wrong math to use here, for so many reasons.

Chris should have explained why the example he gave should not be interpreted this way as I am sure he was just using it as an example to make a very different point  (just that it takes more force and effort to move a heavy weight faster and that this -could- be used in training too, emphasis on the could rather than -must-).

To explain this further: For one, your definition and the example Chris used use work as displacement times force, which gives you a value of zero if you don't move, like in holding an iron cross, yet you should know very well that you still obviously use a ton of energy, stimulate muscle strength increases and muscle growth. You are producing forces often against non-ideal leverage angles, to fight gravity. It's like taking a large truck with a powerful engine revved up, set in drive gear and with your foot on the gas pedal, but the truck is connected with a cable to something so massive and heavy that it won't bulge, leaving your simplified definition with zero work and zero power. But it should be now obvious to you that it's not (it's however much horsepower the engine is producing despite the lack of motion of truck+cargo, if it made it easier for you to think, it's the same power you would compute looking at the car moving without cargo).
As I already mentioned, while you -can- use things like plyometrics to develop strength with lighter loads, you can also develop strength without ANY effective motion at all, for example isometric holds at different fixed positions of a specific motion (just to get the benefit of full range anyways).

Power would be interesting only if you wanted to know how much damage you would do to your face if you accidentally hit yourself in the face with the barbell you are lifting, obviously more if it picked up velocity. And even there you should realize that displacement and velocity builds up over time from a constant force (think of a train accelerating after a stop), so actually again you could even use 100% of your power against a weight for such a small time that the object would move very little and still slowly, while using less strength but for longer contraction would allow the weight to pick up more velocity, a situation where the opposite would happen.

And more importantly, we are talking about multiple muscle fibers here, mostly independently contractable. Each muscle fiber will feel a fraction of the total weight based on how many you can recruit simultaneously (which also changes with fatigue, adaptation, etc), which is another important reason why it's really bad to talk about total power etc as if it was a fixed quantity, because even when it is, the actual final output is not what we care about during training.
During training what we care about is how each fiber feels the training stimulus, and how other parts of the body like neural pathways and hormonal and metabolic changes also respond and adapt, creating increases in our ability to generate strength, power etc.

In fact even eating different food, taking steroids, or even doing training that doesn't even involve muscle contraction exercises can increase your strength, because again it's a physiological adaptation based on many factors, not some kind of magical replication of the exact movements you did in training. Specificity of training exercises can be very useful in most circumstances, but you don't want to invoke a good rule-of-thumb thing to actually make wrong predictions like that nothing else can ever produce strength and would actually reduce it.

For Jonsmith,
With your odd guarantee you are making the same wrong assumption (in the opposite direction) that started this thread, the main point is again that there is no magical difference between weighted or body-weight exercises, they can both be good exercises, and your muscle fibers don't even know if they are contracting because you are lifting a particular weight from the ground or because you are at an odd angle and lifting an equivalent fraction of your bodyweight in the same motion. There are 'practical' tradeoffs in each (generally easier or harder to add exact extra weight, to involve multiple muscles and support muscles together, train balance and other aspects simultaneously etc), but those are not fundamental differences related to bodyweight or weights themselves but more with the way people generally tend to use them differently.

Yo, Adrian, we did it... We did it.

Chris,
I am not advocating doing isometric or slow movements as a best way to train fast movements.
However I am making it clear that they are not useless for strength and even for speed (which was not what we were discussing anyways), and definitely not counterproductive.

In addition power is not a good metric when it leads to the types of misconceptions Spencer derived from it, as I discussed above.

And keep in mind, we are not even talking about trying to move as fast as possible but rather about increasing strength, which is a measure of how much weight you can lift (as slowly as needed), not how fast you do it.

Now, if we wanted to discuss the best way to train speed, then yes you want to train in a way that both targets existing type 2b or 2x fiber types and stimulates the integration of fast myosin heavy chains and reliance on fast oxidative metabolism in all fibers, shifting your spectrum of available fiber types. And fast movement can be a great way to do that (but not the only way, anything that induces the same changes, even say electrical stimulation at particular frequencies, where there is no movement or speed to speak of, can do that).

And again keep in mind that 1) both slow and fast fiber types produce the same amount of peak force (fast ones just transition more quickly to it), 2) isometric contractions do also target and maximally contract fast muscle fibers, and 3) there are lots of other parameters like how many fibers you actually recruit and train, how much of a stimulus you can generate for muscle growth (which gives you more material to work with, both metabolically and in terms of additional myosin chains), neural adaptations etc.
All of those are more important parameters than how the weight itself is moving, as they tell you how your muscles will adapt and explain why moving a weight faster is not the only way to increase strength, and why it's possible to increase speed even without moving a weight faster.

We are not actually disagreeing on anything -- I am not sure how this response addresses my post.  Power is a useful and crucial metric in strength, muscle mass and performance gains.  Slow movements help, of course, but neglecting fast movements will limit gains.  You really need a robust mix of both.  I am not sure why you are writing me an essay as if we disagree.

Chris,
You should know me, I write assays pretty much no matter what.

Plus the explanation is not so much directed at you but rather at all people involved in this discussion, who started with a mix of pretty different and sometimes a bit oversimplified or extreme statements that needed some correction and further discussion (for example the initial debate on page 1 between Shae and Spencer and then David on the example by zayn, etc).

I don't like doing those because after the first few my face gets all bloody and fractured..

Well, specifically, without repeating what I already said there were at least 2 points to correct:

1) In the example you gave now, for example, the point is that if you lift 400 pounds slowly and in a controlled motion over 20 seconds compared to lifting just 40 pounds in 2 seconds you were saying "hey, they are the same 'power', and the one done faster must be better for strength", where the opposite is true, the same person would get much stronger, bigger etc lifting the 400lbs, and will feel much more challenged by that.

2) In addition, the thing that was the most problematic was your use of the term counterproductive, which really implies that in the previous example, the person that lifted the 400lbs was somehow magically decreasing the amount of strength it had and becoming weaker compared to someone not lifting any weight and just sitting on the couch all day, which is a very weird claim to make.

Other problems were things like confusing strength with speed, and confusing controlled slow motion of super-heavy weights with "endurance training", which is completely unrelated and is much more of a function of using light weights.

Perhaps I should make this clear, this is not a competition to see whether you can legally say that only some of your posts contained a certain word but others didn't, and whether parts of some sentences could still be technically correct in isolation...

You asked what your misconceptions were and I explained them to you, using clear examples to make the concepts behind them as clear as possible. If some of this covers things that you already understood well, take it as a bonus rather than spending time defending individual words... The goal should be to make sure we're clear now, not trying to measure exactly how much or little you might have been wrong at a given point in the past.
So, if you understand what I explained with my example, and you still want to use the exact scenario you mentioned, you should be able to work that out on your own now.

And when you made the claim about lifting slowly being extremely counterproductive, that statement (like any others) has a ton of equivalent claims and implications, so that's how you "implied a claim". If I said the earth is flat I'm also implying that you can't go around it while going in a straight direction.