Couple of thoughts on resistance training program design for athletes

[duxx]

Couple of thoughts on resistance training program design for athletes

Here is the link to “article”. Please let me know what you guys think…
Thanks!

[Juggler]

Two thoughts –

You state “Major Assistance Exercise like single leg movements and horizontal pulling should be done and can be rotated every 2-4 weeks for overall athletic development”. I know single leg exercises have been debated before, so I won’t get into that, but I question whether they are appropriate for beginners. These are people who are not yet coordinated with weight exercises and it seems the injury risk out weighs the benefit. IMO, you are correct when you state that they don’t need a lot of different assistence exercises, and it seems like single leg work is getting too fancy.

I notice that your rep scheme calls for sets of 5 for major lifts but 10s for assistence. Does this not lead to imbalances, since the muscles that get trained with 5s are getting stronger faster than the ones trained with sets of 10? Especially when one of your main lifts is bench, which every guy is going to push hard, and the antagonist groups are trained with rows, which everyone hates, so they will be possibly going through the motions with 10 reps and not getting as strong there as the “front muscles” are.

While I think your overall breakdown of exercises into categories can be helpful for coaches, I think that telling the athletes some movements are primary and others secondary can lead to them dropping the “less important” work or easing off on it, when in fact that may be the very thing that athlete needs most. So I’d be careful about how you present this concept to your athletes.

Edit: Okay, I guess that was three thoughts :rolleyes:

[duxx]

@Juggler

You state “Major Assistance Exercise like single leg movements and horizontal pulling should be done and can be rotated every 2-4 weeks for overall athletic development”. I know single leg exercises have been debated before, so I won’t get into that, but I question whether they are appropriate for beginners. These are people who are not yet coordinated with weight exercises and it seems the injury risk out weighs the benefit. IMO, you are correct when you state that they don’t need a lot of different assistence exercises, and it seems like single leg work is getting too fancy.

And how about single leg work helping into ballance transfer to double leg movements? It depends on your definition of “begginer” — my major definition are athletes who have some prior experience in their sport, thus 1-2 single leg work exercises are not too bad on my opinion, but if we define “a begginer” a 65 yo woman, then you are right!
Without going into the single leg work discussion … :rolleyes:

@Juggler

I notice that your rep scheme calls for sets of 5 for major lifts but 10s for assistence. Does this not lead to imbalances, since the muscles that get trained with 5s are getting stronger faster than the ones trained with sets of 10? Especially when one of your main lifts is bench, which every guy is going to push hard, and the antagonist groups are trained with rows, which everyone hates, so they will be possibly going through the motions with 10 reps and not getting as strong there as the “front muscles” are.

Yes, you are right here… but look at conventional training programms — the have NO pulling motions, no balance btw push/pull, so better this than nothing…
Look at this as total work (volume) done: 3x5 reps for push (15reps) and 2sets of 10 (20reps) for pull? You can also use undulating rotations for assistance exercises. Or consider pull/chin ups as core lift and then you will fix this “disbalance” even more…

@Juggler

While I think your overall breakdown of exercises into categories can be helpful for coaches, I think that telling the athletes some movements are primary and others secondary can lead to them dropping the “less important” work or easing off on it, when in fact that may be the very thing that athlete needs most. So I’d be careful about how you present this concept to your athletes.

Thanks for the tip! I will have this in mind! thank you!