Hello everyone, I’m new to the forum so please bare with me. My question is how much speed work should be done in conjunction with practice and strength training. We currently practice 3 times/week and I strength train on top of that 4 times/week West Side style. So far conjugated periodization has worked well for my strength levels but I want to gear my training more towards speed development. I play lacrosse and I’m a midfielder. We have what I consider a “hard practice” once a week, the other days focus more on stick work and learning the offense and defense. What sort of things should I be doing to help develop my speed and speed-endurance, as both are key to my position and sport. I tried to find this out for my self but the amount of info on this site is fantastic, but a bit overwhelming! Thanx.
Hi Juan, welcome
Do you think you could outline the lifting and practice by day?
That would help us help you.
We practice Tues., Thurs., Sat. We pretty much do something different everyday, our coach likes to keep us on our toes. Practices last 2 hours and once a week we’ll scrimmage the last half of practice. The scrimmage day is the most “intense” day of the week. The other two days are “moderate to moderate-intense.” As far as the lifting goes, Monday is lowerbody/strength-speed, Tues is upperbody/speed-strength, Thurs lowerbody/speed-strength, Friday upperbody/strength-speed. I use three 4wk cycles going from 5RM/5RM/3RM/1RM week to week, saving a rep or two depending on how I feel except on week 4 when I go balls out. I keep my total volume moderate to intense depending on how I feel. I train the power lifts and their derivatives but I don’t know how to adjust this style of training to suit the demands of my sport or for speed development, or whether or not this is the correct way to train for my sport! My strength has improved and I feel a little faster/agile, but I’d like to devote my training time to speed development and to suit the demands of my position/sport. Sorry for the long post, just trying to be thorough.
Forgot to post my numbers
5’9 150lbs, don’t know vert. jump but I can grap rim w/one hand
Squat: 285lbs (Parallel)
Deadlift: 385lbs (I don’t know what the deal is there, maybe bad technique and/ strong lower back 
???)
Front Squat: 225lbs (Full)
Bench Press: 235lbs
Incline BP: 195lbs
Decline BP: 235lbs
Are you doing any speed work currently? All I see is lifting and practices. This means that you probably rarely ever actually get to max speed during a training week.
We run sprints at the end of practice except after scimmage:
5-30yd runs, rest 30 secs
5-50yd runs, rest 30 secs
Come to think about we xrl8, I don’t have a “real” speed training component in my training, I just run/cut as fast as I can at practice, and I really don’t know jack about speed training. I just browsed through your football training thread and am trying to figure how to go about training for speed. I’m thinking I should drop a weight training session for a speed day, probably the heavy upperbody day.
Any suggestions?
In practice with any lacrosse team in the united states (and I think that covers 80% of them in the world) you’re going to be doing intensive tempo for your “sprints”. To steal ESPN3’s words, after the first sprint, there is no speedwork.
I would suggest monday as your speed day as you will be fresh for it and will be able to lift afterward.