How many of you have looked at your training diaries only to find months of hard training and zero progression? Why did you bother?!! What I find surprising is how well strength levels can be maintained when volume and intensity are significantly reduced. Track and field athletes have forever used maintenance strength workouts during competition periods. In fact, maximum strength often increases (early) during this phase as the body is finally permitted an opportunity to super compensate from the preceding periods of borderline overtraining.
I suggest maintenance and progressive training be incorporated during the same cycle. As an Olympic lifter, I previously advocated traditional training cycles where squats and pulls peaked together. I now feel that this approach prevents optimum progression in either exercise as the body has a finite capacity for adaptation. I feel a better approach is to maintain one quality and improve the another. If for example, the pull is being emphasised, squat volume is halved and intensity dropped, on average, by 10%.
Yes athletes put too much emphasis on the weightroom and dont realize strength levels can be maintained easily without doing to much too volume or intensity work. Once you have hit maxium level of strength it can be maintained easily and emphasis can be put on the track rather then the weightroom 100% of the time. It was interesting most of Ato’s Pr’s were run while not a max strength. I have found the same thing. Also it seems like I am never really to far away from my maxes in the weightroom no matter what percentage I am working with. Thoughts?
This goes to the heart of Charlie’s vertical integration approach. You can’t emphasize everything at once. You need to progessively focus on one quality at a time while maintaining the others.