My season was unfortunately cut early due to a damn injury in city league basketball. Now I’m about to start more lifting to gain some size and strength. Since it’s hard for me to gain weight while sprinting a lot (too many calories burned), is one sprint workout enough per week to at least maintain some reasonable sprint motor patterns and fitness?
I’m curious as to other’s thoughts on this. I was thinking of doing something like this in the workout:
3 x 15m
2 x 30m
1 x 60m
1 x 150m
(All with full recovery)
Since I’m mostly a 100m guy is this adequate? Any other examples or thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.
I have tried something similar in the past (for different reasons). It worked ok for about a month (times were still moving in the right direction), then i needed to add more sprint workouts. My weakness was usually in the start, so a concentration on strength made sense in my context.
It would probably be best to try to fit at least 2 speed workouts a week and fit your diet to your training and not visa versa. Fitting your diet will be harder, but it will pay the most dividends.
I’m trying to put on about 10-15 pounds. I’m 154 right now and want to get back up to around 165-170 lean. I’m naturally lean (about 6-7% most of the time) but have to eat obscenely large amounts of food to gain weight. Sprinting and tempo workouts lean me up even more so I don’t mine losing a little fitness (and gaining a little fat) if it helps me gain muscle. All I was trying to figure out is if one sprint workout per week would at least maintain some decent acceleration, max speed, and speed endurance. I’m not trying to improve my speed right now, just gain size. At 5’10", I’ve run my fastest times when I was 165 lb. or over.
I agree with 100% with Davan, the first thing you should be looking at in terms of weight gain is caloric intake, not calories burned. What’s going into your body is going to determine what your body can put out for you. I know of more than a few cases of people who were stingy weight gainers, who after watching what they ate could still manage a full track workout (2-3 days intense running + tempo) and gain a good 15 lbs over the course of about 2 months.
There are some very simple things that you can do that will probably help you gain some weight. First if you have no clue what type of caloric intake you have, just take a week or two and chart your food intake.
Once you have an idea of what your going to need to up your calories by around 750 per day give or take. To do this try to add some high caloric foods as well as add an extra small meal. High calorie foods include red meat, poultry, fish, potatoes, milk, etc.
Personally when I see my weight start to dip I add in an extra meal of around 5-6 eggs (apprx 100 calories per egg if scrambled) and a glass of milk (150 calories per 8 oz). Although I would not recommend this log term due to the high cholesterol.
The point is you need to monitor your calorie intake or it will be like playing russian roulette with your weight, you’ll never know where its going to be if you dont know what your taking in, and dropping running in this case will do little to increase your weight.
I eat 5-6 meals per day. I try to get at least 30 grams of protein per meal along with plenty of carbs and fat (EFA’s, olive-oil, nuts and seeds, real butter, etc…) Post workout I jack up the carbs (around 100 grams) and add about 40 grams of protein with no fat in this feeding. I take 1/2-1 full teaspoon of creatine daily and do not cycle it. Other than that I take a multi, EFA’s (Udo’s oil and fish-oils), and some Branched chains and extra Gluatamine (usually Biotests surge with extra carbs and protein).
When I count my average calories I’m usually between 2400 and 2700 kcal/day. I plan on increasing this to over 3000 kcal/day consistently with more lifting (4 days per week) and less sprinting (1, maybe 2 days per week at most).
2400 - 2700 calories per day really is not that extraordinary for an athlete, the way you were talking I was expecting that you were closing down buffet lines and still losing weight.
Although your diet looks pretty sufficient overall I would think about upping your calories to atleast 3500 per day, and even with this increase I wouldnt expect much more than around a lb or 2 increase per week.