If you spent some time puzzling over part 1 and part 2 of my “Difference Between Cyclists and Weightlifters” graphs, you’re well prepared for what we’re doing here. The foundation of those two graphs is this belief: first, be an athlete; second, be awesome in your sport.
Nothing replaces technical preparation in a sport. But having a reserve of the qualities that your sport technique is made of goes a long way toward making you awesome in that sport. So as you build your training menu, you need to identify the athletic ingredients, assemble them into a few tasty session recipes, arrange those into a palatable menu, then perhaps rotate your menu seasonally.
As with most restaurant concepts, it all starts with the ingredients.
What Are Athletic Ingredients?
Specific example: Grant Holloway and Aries Merritt were never world-class fast in the 100 or 400, but they were college-fast. They used that fundamental quality – speed – as the massive foundation to being world-record fast in the sprint hurdles.
Another specific example: Valarie Allman is unbelievably strong with a 120 kg (264 lb) power clean at 70 kg (154 lb) body weight. While her mark in the clean is far better than Dan John’s “good enough” standard for female athletes (a 275 lb deadlift), it is barely over 60% of the USA C&J national record in weightlifting. Yet that base of incredible strength allowed her to throw the discus farther than any woman in US history, farther than any woman at the Tokyo Olympic Games, and farther than all but 14 other women in history.
As you think through your own training, oh player-coach, you have to build yourself into an athlete first.
In fact, until you’re state-level as a youth or national-level as a teen or international-level as a master/adult amateur, you have to build yourself into an athlete *only*. If you focus on the right things during practice, such as getting high-quality reps and attacking your weaknesses, and if you devote 80% of your time to sport practice with the other 20% for other stuff, then the minimal strength & conditioning you take on has no need at all to be sport specific.
…except…
You still need it to be sport relevant. And that’s what you’re designing a menu around: developing relevant, productive athletic ingredients.
The Athletic Ingredients To Your Training Recipes
In power sports, you need extreme central nervous system capability. Um…you need power. The ability to move fast and produce large forces quickly.
In endurance sports, you need extreme aerobic efficiency. You know…endurance. The ability to do sub-max work for a long time.
In field sports, you need both. Rather, you need a little bit of everything. Speed, power, aerobic endurance, quick recovery, agility, armor.
When self-coached athletes look at qualities this vaguely, they select ingredients that, at best, come together as Saturday afternoon’s leftovers casserole or, at worst, come together as an overuse injury.
Well-meaning ultimate players came to me in 2016 burnt out from 3 mile jogs in the morning, bodybuilding after work, 10 x 200 meter “sprints” at practice, and a HIIT class on the weekend, with the shin splints and eye twitches that come from all that stimulation.
I put them on an extremely limited menu of hill sprints, deadlifts, and long walks for a few weeks before we slowly added in other pieces – and their on-field performance took off.
When you work with a coach, you get a philosophy, principles, metrics, menu, and recipes as a package. You pay time, money, and trust for their expert assessment of what you need and when you need it.
When you think through your own training ingredients, start with what you need as an athlete based on your weaknesses relative to the level of play you’re targeting. You have to determine which ingredients will make the list difference, then have the discipline to use as few of them as you need to get better.
Rank the following 17 qualities from most critical to least critical in helping you reach the next level:
- Sprinting speed
- Jumping height
Jumping distance - Throwing distance (heavy object >1 kg or 2 lb)
Throwing distance (light object <1 kg or 2 lb) - Impact force (to intentionally deliver against other people)
Impact force (to knowingly absorb from the ground or other people) - Agility/lateral movement
- Strength (moving a heavy thing)
- Hand-eye coordination
Hand-foot coordination
Balance (static, like on one leg)
Balance (dynamic, like landing a flip or jumping on a beam) - Recovery from sprinting, striking, throwing
Recovery from running, riding, rowing, or something else cyclical and below maximum effort - Flexibility (static or with no external load)
Mobility (dynamic, under muscular control, or while supporting a load) - Steady endurance / pacing
My argument is that the Top 5 you selected are the *only* ones worth developing in your S&C work. So every recipe you construct should contain at most 5 ingredients. Anything less critical than #5 is a nice-to-have that will come along fine from sport practice.
Assembling Training Recipes
I have nothing new to contribute here. Verkhoshansky & Siff’s Supertraining covered this, The East German Textbook Of Track & Field covered this, John Jesse’s The Encyclopedia of Wrestling Strength and Conditioning covered this, The Charlie Francis Training System covered this, and Dan John and Pavel’s Easy Strength covered this. If you’re going to be self-coached, you need to spend a little time reading.
Put a session together with these guidelines:
Speed/power before anything else. Stop when quality drops off, which is typically <10 max effort reps. Take long rest periods, like 5-20 min between max efforts.
Sensitive skills go second, like balance, precision, or complex hand-eye/hand-foot coordination.
Strength *or* anaerobic capacity (hard intervals) comes next, at low volumes (15-25 strength reps; 5-20 big efforts).
If you did strength, you can do easy aerobic endurance last. If you did intervals, you can do flexibility or low-volume strength last.
Take this information and prepare 6 training sessions for yourself, with all the details like warmups and rest. Here are two example sessions, the first from my hurdle session last week and the second from my mid-season rugby plan in college.
Masters Hurdler
Qualities: speed + recovery from sprinting
* Activation warmup (1 dynamic, elastic drill each minute for 14 minutes)
* Walking-marching-skipping trail leg and lead leg over 5 hurdles
* Timed sprints (3 x 40y from 3pt start, on turf in flats; 5 min rest between)
* Hurdle work in a 6-round circuit (roughly one action each 90 seconds) with…
* Medicine ball throws x 10 x 15lb
* Standing broad jumps x 2
* Top speed mechanics over 6 mini-hurdles x 2
* Long stretching session at home
College Rugby Outside Center
Qualities: impact + speed + agility + recovery from sprinting + hand-eye coordination
* General warmup (my warmups were dumb at the time, with lots of jogging and stretching that felt terrible)
* Tumbling warmup (this was excellent!)
* 20y of shoulder rolls
* 20y of forward rolls
* Seat roll to acceleration x 3 R/L
* 1-leg hops forward and laterally
* Hill sprints (8 x 15y really steep, about 3 min rest)
* Lunges + bear crawls (100y total)
* Conditioning shuttles 5 x 20-15-10-5 out & back finishing with a forward roll into an footwork/obstacle course)
* Deadlift, pullups, and dips in the weight room, essentially 5 x 5
This was around 10am and we had practice at 6pm.
With your own 6 training recipes planned, lay out your strength and conditioning menu by putting them in order across the week.
Crafting An S&C Menu
All the guidance above about sequencing ingredients applies to sequencing a week. But there’s a bit of revision to do to your recipes.
The first few years that I structured my own training, as in the rugby example above, I wanted to do everything in every session. This meant sessions took 75 – 120 minutes more often than not. It also meant that I needed huge amounts of space and equipment without interference. That was possible when I was an engineering junior with mostly late-afternoon labs, had a premium student rec center adjacent to 8 athletic fields, and carried essentially no commitments outside myself.
Now, I have a full-time job, a part-time coaching practice, three kids, a spouse, and a fair number of social commitments. Sessions these days need to be 60 minutes or less, with the least change between training modes and the least possible equipment.
When planning your week, you have to account for practice time and demand, life demands, available time to train, and available equipment.
Take the last one – equipment availability – seriously. My local high schools lock their tracks in the winter and put away all the hurdles. To keep my training momentum, I built PVC hurdles that I can haul in a wagon and I often sprint on a baseball diamond at my local park in cleats…without that bit of improv, I might not be hurdling at all.
Another example: if your best time to strength train is right after work and your best location is the commercial gym by your downtown office, consider that you don’t have the luxury of idling through 5 minutes rest on the sole squat rack in the facility nor is your equipment going to be waiting for you after you walk away during a complicated strength circuit because the environment is so crowded. You’ll need to compromise one of your “bests” here: train at a comparatively unpleasant time or get gear to use at home.
You can do a lot with a pull-up bar, ab wheel, two kettlebells, and some space on the floor. You can do a lot with a jump rope at the playground. You can do a lot with a flight of stairs and a resistance band. Think this through, because consistency trumps volume or intensity and convenience facilitates consistency.
You need to plan your week carefully.
What days can you consistently train? What equipment/facilities are available to you on those days? How stressful is your life/work typically on each of those days?
There are infinite ways to arrange training, all of which depend on your situation and your needs. So I only offer these ideas for consideration:
1. Check on your Top 5 qualities – how important are they all *really*? Which ones improve others (like speed, it improves jumping every time; like strength, it improves impact absorption; like recovery between efforts, which improves aerobic endurance)? Give the high-importance, high-transfer qualities the most attention.
2. Could you use only 1-2 ingredients per session with sessions spread across the week? You’re trading short-term gains for long-term gains – will that work for the timeline to your goals?
3. How much work can you actually recover from? It’s not about how awesome this training week was, but about how awesome this training YEAR was…and you don’t train much when you’re injured.
4. One more time, which qualities actually make a difference in you moving to the next level? It’s not just all the ingredients you want; it’s which ingredients do you NEED to level up?
Here are two more examples from my own athletic career, one a typical week when I was focused on being excellent in mountain bike races (yet failed epically) and one when I was a competitive weightlifter with a short-lived CrossFit habit.
Intermediate XCM MTB racer
Monday: kettlebells (strength-focused) and long walk
Tuesday: hill repeats at low cadence with DH skills
Wednesday: tempo intervals and stretching
Thursday: heavy lifting and stretching
Friday: rest
Saturday: long easy ride
Sunday: hot laps (mostly DH skills, but a bit of race-pace work to this)
Low-class weightlifter + above-average CF athlete
Monday: rest (long, easy bike ride most weeks)
Tuesday: AM bodyweight met-con + PM powerlifting
Wednesday: AM jerks & squats + PM snatch
Thursday: AM cleans & presses + PM met-con
Friday: rest
Saturday: weightlifting total + met-con
Sunday: mobility and technique work
Both of these layouts had their issues, yet they worked for those periods of my life. For perspective, here’s a week right now…
Masters hurdler
Monday: rest
Tuesday: speed + lifting
Wednesday: stretch (this is essentially rest)
Thursday: hurdles + power circuit
Friday: lifting (if time allows, but usually rest)
Saturday: speed + lifting
Sunday: stretching + long walk/easy ride (essentially rest)
Notice there are basically 4 days of rest now!
I train down the street from my house either at a local middle school or in a public park with a hill, so my training “commute” is less than 10 min. We have two “gyms” in our house – the barbell and rack in the garage; the kettlebells and stationary bikes and small equipment in the basement. So I have had to optimize for limited time – yet still only get about 5 hours to train in a week! 3.5 hours are specific to my sport (though I mix other qualities into practice using med balls or KBs or measured jumps), so my 3 x 20-40 minute lifting sessions have to cover everything else.
Laying out your menu has to serve two goals:
- Recipes are only built with your 5 main ingredients (not all of them every time)
- Menu has to be productive and sustainable in YOUR situation
If you take time to really think this through, you’ll find a realistic training menu that works for you.
Thinking Seasonally About Your S&C Menu (aka “LTAD Planning”)
For sports with lots of qualities, there is no reason to have a fixed training menu year-round. My weightlifter+CF athlete period was actually my rugby off-season. It built up my strength, mobility, and recovery between efforts at a time when I didn’t need so much work on impact, balance, or speed. (Well, I still needed more speed, but I was a meathead and a bonehead in college, so I assumed lifting more would make me faster…)
Working on different qualities at different times while keeping the ultimate goal in mind is called “long-term athletic development.” Doing so intentionally, with an idea of year-on-year progress for at least 4 years and at most a lifetime is the product of thoughtful planning.
Think about your year the same way: ideally you have 2-3 sports you can train for spread across the year, so can rotate your training menu to align with each of those. Further, ideally you have objectives in sport farther out than next season, so you can compromise “short-term” qualities now to build slower, more critical qualities.
As a hurdler, I need speed and flexibility NOW…but I need strength and balance for longevity and I need jumping and throwing qualities for my combined events future. Plus, I need to not drive myself so crazy with 3 x 40y sprint sessions that I quit the sport entirely in 5 years.
An unbelievable year for me as a masters hurdler would be track, weightlifting, cycling. If I have the fortitude, I’ll back off from hurdle work in September, get strong and mobile for weightlifting through January, then play outside for winter and spring, getting back out for maximum-effort speed work by April.
Next year, maybe I stick with track and weightlifting, but I snowboard and hike a lot instead of ride. And in 5 years, as I bring in new track events, maybe I enter another Highland Games season before I spend the winter rowing.
I tend to fear losing my hat if I go to tie my shoes…since I loathe the thought of NOT developing speed, even if it means I could develop a larger strength base to build speed on top of later, I am inclined to do that one thing year-round. Without an intervention, there would be no variety to my menu at all, like your favorite fried chicken place that has sold the same 4 options for ten years.
I don’t bake this fear into every training session these days because I know I don’t have time. I lean on tools to intervene on that response as a self-coached athlete that I didn’t have when I started.
The troubles with a fixed menu are getting bored and getting hurt. Rotating your menu can prevent both, while helping you make progress for years to come.
Could you commit to your Top 5 now, with a promise in the off-season to address the next 5 qualities that matter? If so, you need to build a second menu made up of another 6 recipes. You may even need a third.
The work you do on these recipes and this menu now could serve you for years of training. That’s LTAD planning.
Ultimately, your decision about whether to rotate the menu comes entirely from your athletic restaurant concept. That concept – the “how” behind your menu and the guide for your LTAD planning – emerges from your metrics, principles, and philosophy. Those are the tools I have now that I so desperately needed a decade ago. You’ll need the same tools to guide your training when life inevitably disrupts your plans or when fear keeps you repeating sessions that no longer make you better.
So naturally, dear player-coach, that’s where we’ll go next! See you right here next week.