Here is part of an email exchange between Jason Hartman and I. The guys and girls who trained with him in Lake Placid are among the most complete power-speed athletes I’ve ever come across.
Off-season training for most of the bobsled athletes consists of 3 lifts
and 3 running workouts per week preferably running and lifting on the
same day. That usually ends up being a Monday/Wednesday/Friday split
with the running workouts generally coming early in the day and the lift
happening later in the afternoon. I like running and lifting on the same
day to allow for more rest days throughout the week. Neural fatigue is
the latest craze in strength & conditioning and track world and theory
would suggest that high intensity activities like sprinting and lifting
should be separated by 48 hours to allow the nervous system to recover.
There are some athletes who prefer to have an activity everyday and lift
mon/wed/fri and run tues/thurs/sat. Honestly I have not observed any
better or worse performances using either split. Weightlifters train the
Olympic lifts and squat at very high intensities without ill effect for
days on end so I’m not entirely sold on the neural fatigue issues so
prevalent in the track and field community. The reason that I double up
on the lifting and running workouts and give days off in between is more
for joint health and allowing the spine to unload, and to also have a
psychological break from having to perform at a very high level day in
and day out.
I believe to get faster you have to run fast and to run fast you have to
be fresh, which is why the running workouts usually occur first in the
day. I also believe that fatigue from lifting and running accumulates
throughout the week and you’ll be as fresh as you are going to be and
have your best training early in the week. With that being said we
almost always plan our speed development day on Monday. This is plain
and simple and usually consists of 30-60m sprints. The 2nd day of
running usually has an emphasis on acceleration and we usually do light
sled tow work, hill sprints, or in and outs (sometimes referred to as
sprint-float-sprint. The 3rd day of running is usually another
acceleration day or an event specific day (in our case the athletes push
a bobsled on a railed track. There is not much of any conditioning
component to bobsled which is why we do not do any speed endurance or
conditioning work. I also believe in bobsled and even football your
ability to accelerate is more valuable to success and can also be
improved to a greater degree than your top speed which is why we often
have two acceleration workouts per week and not two speed development
workouts.
For lifting we usually do a push pull split where Day 1 and Day 3 are
push days and Day 2 is a pull day. On Day 1 we squat, do a big pressing
movement, a single-leg exercise, and a pressing assistance exercise. Day
2 we clean or snatch, do some low-back and hamstring assistance work,
and do upper back assistance work. Later in the off-season we also
usually include some ballistic resistance exercises like squats jumps
and maybe an unweighted jumping exercise (plyo). On Day 3 in the early
off-season when strength takes priority over power we usually follow a
similar template as Day 1 but insert less intense exercise variations
(ex. Front squat instead of back squat, overhead press instead of bench
press etc…). Later in the off-season Day 3 takes on a power emphasis
and consists of ballistic resistance exercises like weighted jump
squats, med ball throws, and some bodyweight plyometric exercises.
I will list some generalities about the structure of the lifting.
Throughout the week lifting goes from a strength emphasis on Day 1 to a
power emphasis with a moderate movement velocity on Day 2 to a power
emphasis with fast movement velocities on Day 3. Being more powerful is
the ultimate goal of training, so the organization of lifting may be
seem counter intuitive based on my rationale of being fresher earlier in
the week and your best training performances coming earlier in the week.
If the ultimate goal is to be more powerful than the lifting earlier in
the week should be where the power emphasis workouts should be placed.
It is not arranged in this fashion for a couple of reasons. Competitions
usually occur on the weekends and strength exercises that we perform on
Day 1 are more likely to cause muscle soreness than the power work that
we perform on the other days. By doing the strength work early in the
week it reduces the likelihood that our athletes will have any soreness
going into a competition, and the less fatiguing power work later in the
week may help to potentiate optimal performances in the weekend
competitions. Secondly, strength is often the most underdeveloped
ability that we see in our talent identification. To be on the Bobsled
National Team you have to be naturally gifted with speed and power. So
in the equation for power (Power= Force X Velocity) they already have
the velocity component. They have the adequate nervous system to move
fast and in reality that velocity component is not very trainable. The
force component (strength) however is usually very underdeveloped and is
very trainable. That is why we emphasize strength development early in
the week and the Back Squat is the cornerstone of our lifting program.
I am not a fan of doing a lot of volume. I believe that you should run
as little as you need to and lift as little as you need to get the
desired results. You need to stay as fresh as possible to perform
powerfully and run fast. Volume makes you feel run down and pollutes
your body with fatigue that will often mask power output. But when you
do train the intensity should be very high for as much of the offseason
as possible outside of built in recovery weeks. I don’t like lifting
light or running slow. On rest days our athletes do perform a light
dynamic warmup as activity recovery, but I do not have them do Tempo
runs as many track coach’s advocate. I believe the day of rest is more
beneficial than the low intensity track work. Because our athletes
training volume remains relatively low throughout the entire year, we do
not do anything exciting in regards to peaking. We may make some
adjustments to the amount training done prior to a big competition but
we do not drop any of the power work. To truly peak you need to have
been in a state of overreaching to then back off on the training and
catch the supercompensation at the right time. Since our training volume
is always so low and never get into that state of overreaching our
athletes are never more than a couple days of rest away from being at
their best. Often psychological stress of a big competition alone is
enough to kill the supercompensation curve which is why I don’t
experiment with getting our athletes into a state of overreaching and
then hope the supercompensation does occur. I subscribe more to the
Fitness-Fatigue model of training theory than the supercompensation or
single-factor model of training theory.