Power Tower Book

I have posted many thoughts and pictures on Social Media over the years highlighting various Power Tower and sprint training exploits, both here at Liberty University and during my time as the sprint coach at Penn State University, and it was through these postings and word of mouth that I received quite a few requests via email from coaches throughout the country for Power Tower training information and advice. After the fifth request and five personalized emails later (some totaling more than 10 pages in a Word document), I decided to write a book on power training for swimming and share what I have learned throughout my career, with the hope of inspiring coaches and athletes alike to reach new levels of creativity and competitive success in our sport.

There have been many articles and a few books in the swimming world written about sprint training, and the two Sprinting books by Sam Freas are some of my favorites on the topic. It was Sam's first book, Sprinting: A Coach's Challenge, that first inspired me to become a speed coach, and I still have the original copy I bought as college freshman back in 2002. To my knowledge however, there are few if any books or articles of any great length or detail devoted entirely to power training, and thus I have set out to write a guide on power and sprint training that while all-encompassing, focuses primarily on the Power Tower and other power training techniques and toys.

In the book I will share with you my personal beliefs on power and speed training and what worked for us at Penn State, where I was the sprint coach from 2006 - 2009, and what is currently working here at Liberty, where I have been the head coach since starting the program from scratch in 2010. I will also share my thoughts on the influence that was a volunteer position at the University of Arizona in the summer of 2007, where I was mentored by Rick DeMont and Frank Busch, and learned much regarding power and speed from the Arizona staff.

With regards to my current position at Liberty, we have had a bit of sprint success here at LU in a short amount of time, and have done well taking average sprinters out of high school and training them to be elite level NCAA Division I student-athletes. I have been contemplating the mysteries of the Power Tower at the Division I level for ten years now, and this book will detail everything I have learned in those ten years, along with the many unanswered questions and thoughts I still have for the future of sprint swimming and power training as a whole.

The goal is to have this book published professionally in order to maximize its reach and availability. If working with a publisher does prove successful I will self-publish and offer in an eBook format similar to my first book Letters to Chad: Building A Summer League Swim Team, a humorous look at summer league swimming from my earliest coaching days.

I do not have an exact time frame for completion of the book, though I am making steady progress and have a soft goal of launching in time for the 2016-2017 school year. I have already surpassed 15 pages and I am still in the first of ten planned chapters. As a sneak preview, the first five chapters are listed below -

1. Introduction
2. Pure Power
3. Power Endurance
4. Drilling
5. Kicking

I plan on providing a plethora of real world sample practices and specific sets from PSU, Zona, and Liberty, and will scratch the surface of the strength & conditioning and swimming literature regarding power and speed training as well. While the point of the book is not to immerse the reader completely into the aforementioned science of power and speed, there is much to contemplate in the research that I believe is worthwhile to the discussion.

Be sure to sign up for our newsletter for updates and check back often as we move towards the fall of 2016, and as always, Train Fast!


Jake Shellenberger