We all know that max strength development is important in the short sprints but our main goal is the sprint work on the track, what volumes do you guys think are excessive for the track athlete? I understand there are cases where athletes may not need much max strength work but what if you have a athlete who really needs to increase his/her max strength while during moderate sprint volume on the track…
Why not factor a max strength phase into the training something along the lines of 3-1-3.
If done in this fashion the weight work need not be high volume at all in order to further increase the max strength.
The preparedness of the athlete will dictate the regulation of the loading; however, regarding medium to high level athletes something as little as 2-3 sets of 2-3 reps after speed work has proven effective in my experience.
I’m just looking for new ways to improve our max strength program from last year, the max strength work we did last year was very very intense but i think it worked out very well because we follow each strength phase with a power phase. Below you can see two of the max strength blocks we did last fall preparing for our indoor track season:
blk 1:
3x5x80
3x5x80, 3x4x85
3x90 2x95 1x100 3x92 2x97 1x102
blk 2:
55x5 62.5x5 70x5 77.5x5 85x5
62.5x3 70x3 77.5x3 85x3 92.5x3
70x1 77.5x1 85x1 92.5x1 102x1
After the second blk i was able to hit bs 535 which was a big increase from where i started at during my gpp.