My goal is to gain a lot of strength during this offseason. Last season my best 400m split was 52.9. I am aiming to drop that to 50.xx by the end of next season. The problem is that I am moving, and the fitness center there has limited machine exercises, but has a rack of dumbbells, the highest being 45 pounds. I am new to lifting and have only ever lifted free weights once. My question is what dumbbell exercises are most effective, especially for the legs?
I am also debating between running everyday and lifting three times a week, or lifting 3-4 times a week while running 3 times a week. Any suggestions and advice will be greatly appreciated.
I would strongly encourage you to learn the basic movements like a squat and a dead lift properly and then put them in place in your training.
If you can only use dumbbells the exercises I can think of that would benefit you are mostly single leg exercises such as:
-Bulgarian Split Squat (can also be done with th front foot elevated)
-Lunge (can also be done with front foot elevated, or reverse)
-Step-Ups
-Pistol Squats
-Single leg Romanian dead lifts
-Single leg dead lifts (king dead lift)
-Single leg calf raises
As for you plans to run everyday, I wouldn’t. I would structure my off-season according to the time I have and then plan backwards basically. But to help you with that, we would need more information, ie length of off-season, bodyweight, body fat% etc.
Thanks for the quick reply. My offseason lasts until November, then indoor season starts. The Track season usually ends around early to mid may depending on how far you go. I am turning 17 in a couple weeks. I am 5’8’’, 145 pounds. I have not had a body fat % measurement.
Yeah I agree with tamfb, you need access to a better facility for your training. It shouldn’t be that hard to find a relatively decent one nowadays.
As far as your body fat % is concerned I don’t think you have a lot since you are very light and I don’t think that you are skinny fat.
So I guess you have about 4 months left maybe, for preparation? I would split it up into a strength phase of about 3 months and a more sport specific phase of 1 month. Since you are a absolute beginner I recommend you check out Rippetoe’s Starting Strength to learn the movements the correct way and start implanting his basic training approach. Don’t freak out, he has some benching and over head pressing in there but this won’t hurt you. If I was you I would just stop pushing the bench press as soon as you can bench your bodyweight and do 10 pull-ups with good form.
During the strength phases, just concentrate on the lifting, since you are new you will make a lot of gains fairly quickly. Just eat healthy (don’t under eat, being all afraid of gaining “soooo much weight”) and lift heavy as far as you can. Do some tempo runs during the strength phase, maybe twice but not more than 3 times per week for low volume. You can go the full distance though (400m) if you want to, just keep the volume between 800-1200m.