How much is enough?
We’ll keep a lot of our focus in the weight room, but will talk a lot about speed and how it impacts weight room decisions. I don’t think I have yet to meet a guy who can’t lift more or that doesn’t want to come into the weight room every day. At any rate, there is a curse and blessing to being young, ok, lots of curses but we need to get control of this big one.
“The problem with that is nobody believes it until they can’t, which is usually an injury."
Non Scientifically speaking, everybody’s body has to absorb the training, Scientifically, that is, there has to be time to adapt to the stress of training. Never forget this, stress is cumulative. Sure you can always do more until you can’t. The problem with that is nobody believes it until they can’t, which is usually an injury.
Just the other day I was listening to a guy tell me how his body was shutting down after he was going hard twice a day. He was in great shape and pretty shredded, but you cannot ignore the fact that stress will catch up to you.
When we look at training for the purpose of athletic development, I break it down into three categories: Lift, Run, Jump (LRJ).
Here are some reminders that span all those categories:
We do all of those things, hard.
Fresh is best
recovery is strength
Absorb the training
stress is cumulative
Let's talk about everything being connected for a second because that is the critical point think so many people miss. If we lift run and jump in a training week, then the legs could have as many as 10-12 training sessions in our 6 days/week offseason program. Lifting, speed, conditioning, explosive training are all major leg stressors. You have to pay attention to this as you think about your stress and the possibility of acute injuries.
Once our athletes have been with us for a year or more and we consider them to be veterans, we find that less can be more. Make no mistake, the grind is still there, but we ramp things up at the right time and let the body recover during the periods of time where it makes sense and competition is far enough out. The need for recovery is huge.
We will use what I call “specials” to spice things up or to shock the system, but those range from one workout to one in a 5-day week, then back to our normal.
As far as the schedule goes, here are the training guidelines I suggest:
Non-Athlete:
Strength training: 2-3 days/week
Cardio of some kind: 4-5 days (AHA guidelines).
Athletes:Train aggressively, but intelligently
Strength: 3 days
Speed: 2-3 days
Conditioning: 2-3 days
Explosive training: 2 days all spread out over 6 days.
This is all related to our athletic development programs, if you are not training for competition, but want to have speed and conditioning as part of your training as a weekend warrior, the one thing you can drop is the jumps. You just need to make sure you are getting some form of cardiovascular training.
Therefore, get a periodized program that rotates loads, exercises, sets and reps and looks down the road for recycling and unloading. Then you have to make sure you actually follow the program.
