I am an athlete coaching myself and am planning for the next track season. The goal is to peak in late March and May but I dont want to start training too early. Right now my plan is to do general strength circuits and lift. Then in septemper start the acceleratoin phase of a S to L program. I guess my real question is when should i start the accel. phase inorder to peak in March and what should I do before that.
Any help is appreciated.
let me add i am training for 100/200
I coached myself this year (with more competitions to go) looking for peak performance in June/July, though I’ve already PR’d indoors and out.
I also stopped my season after the first week of May (the season prior) and took a couple months off over the summer due to injury and started up my GPP phase August one.
I don’t think you need to wait so long to worry about peaking early. “Peaking early” is more of not being able to stay free and constantly apply appropriate stimulus as needed. Starting Aug 1, if you do a 7-9 week GPP and then a 12 week SPP (pretty standard), you’ll be ready for the beginning of the indoor period. Do some meets, unload, train a couple more weeks and then peek for your meets in late March through May.
Until August, you could do some general fitness type stuff. Get healthy, continue to do weights, some basic acceleration development and maybe submaximal max velocity stuff and rest up.
Sounds pretty straight forward- good stuff!
I am an athlete coaching myself and am planning for the next track season
Do you have access to coaching? Self-coaching is fraught with danger.
Aren’t we all our own best coaches?
I’ve had done this quite successfully over a number of years, however not without chiming in with the occassional consultant- other various coaches to run over planning ideas, check mechanics and holding the odd stopwatch.
In saying this though, during my earlier years I did encounter some wonderful mentors that I could base my original coaching ideologies from aswell.
thanks for the replies. I do have a coach but he never gives his athletes any workouts until we have mandatory practice in Janurary. And at that point we do tempo work with little to no accel development through out the year.
So it would be alright to some light accel work and sub maxV to mantain what i gained this passed season? This would be done on top of the general fitness and lifting.
What do you think of doing some tempo work as part of “general fitness phase” or should i leave it for gpp and spp?
I don’t see why you can’t incorporate all of those at once (with the correct planning and sequencing). Virtually all training plans include some form of general fitness and low intensity work throughout the week, whether it is through tempo, general strength circuits, medball circuits, pool workouts, etc.