The height and breadth comment by Charlie is really what I wa driving at. The Bulgarians can repeat heavy lifting so much because the recovery is short (relatively), but the individual sessions must be short because the stress is more intensive. Now with sprinting multiple sessions could be used (?) but a day (at least) recovery is needed to recovery before another sprinting workout.
Another question: considering the Bulgarian-method (or whatever name you want to use) is the use of shorter, more intense, multiple sessions better to maximize recovery and minimize stress and therefore better than 1 big session (3-4 hours) or even 2 medium session (1.5-2 hrs each)?
It seems doable if your schedule permits.
hard days - 2 sessions in the morning (45-60 min each) separated by 30-60 min, 4 hours break and then 2 more sessions (45-60 min each) separated by 30-60 min
easy days - 1 session
There are some implications for this use especially at the college level where classes arent always in one chunk of time.
You can spread the high intensity componants out, but, eventually, the spread of the individual session will begin to encroach on the next high intensity session. Say you train 2pm to 5pm for the total high intensity routinely. The next high intensity sessions starts 45hrs later. if you do 3 high intensity sessions with 4hrs between. The sessions might look like 9am to 10am, 2 to 3:30pm, 7:30 to 8:30 (to do the same work in split format there has to be addnl time for the repeat warm-ups) Now the recovery from end to start of the next would be 37.5hrs. You have to decide how the trade-off works for you (and I hope my math works- I’m bagged, so you should check!)
The recovery time would be very short. You would need alot of recovery methods. Not for athletes who do not have access to regular massage OR sauna, or their own on call doctor!!! A very high risk of overtraining. I remember one of my training partners at university was a greek sprinter (Constantinos Boukis).
At the end of term he went back to Athens, when we started uni again, he told me of two guys called Pavlakakis and Papadias. They would turn up at the national training facility, do very very fast light snatches then go home. Come back sprint multi 100m flat out with 45 min recovery. Then go home. I never thought much of it, but its all coming back now!!. I never asked about the volume of sprints or the number of sprints undertaken. It all sounds very similar to the Bulgarian principles. What Costas did mention was that both guys suffered from multiple injuries, that was what he thought prevented them from progressing.
The point is, these guys were looked after by the National set-up, given what they wanted, but because the training was extreme, it took alot out of them.
He carried out this sort of training for a short while. He became listless, tired and his skin looked a mess. He looked ill. In saying this he did manage to run a 10.7 secs improving from 11.5 secs at the Greek nationals back in either 98 or 99 I think.
The volume might max by the end of the GPP but there’s more to it than that. The CNS stress can vary wildly within a given volume. Everything must be monitored.
Depends entirely on the individual and the length of the GPP. One of the products I’m thinking of is a complete workout record of some athletes- with the warning that this is for this one individual, and that this is just the means to understand their results.
I’m really pumped if a product like that is in the works…I’ve been doing this for a year now and kept a detailed journal-it’s dispassionate tally of workload and results has shown me training mistakes that I was not perceptive enough to feel without a thorough re-read of my own program.
Your potential product may only be a case study of one, Charlie, but we can all learn a hell of a lot from a case study of one.
I think that would be a wonderful product and an important learning tool. I know your concern has always been people trying to copy other athletes’ programs, but it is ultimately the responsibility of the reader to use the information correctly.
Furthermore, if you include the training records for several athletes there will probably be less tempation to copy any given program, since the reader sees there are several ways to skin a cat. It would probably also help if the workout records have some annotations explaining why something was included in one athlete’s program and not another’s (and vice versa), or why something was added to or dropped from a given athlete’s program.
As a further thought, if possible, I think it would also be very helpful if some of the training records followed an athlete from the beginning level through to world class, so we can understand how their training (and your methods) evolved over the years.