I think it boils down to the athlete, if the athlete wants to have longer workouts on Mon/Thur and much shorter workouts Tue/Fri then I think weights on speed days would work best. Last year I did TB weights on speed days and found my bench press was shit, after performing sprints, jumps, throws, ol’s, and squats; I had little energy for upper body work.
Yea thats tru but the speed work is most important. Whatever you got left you put that into the bench or whatever. But is also depends on if the pahse of the year
I remember reading on this forum that Charlie also did this in pre comp when the lifting and speed vol/int was lower. Also most of us are not performing the vol/int that Charlie athletes were performing.
I would disagree with this statement. There are other questions that need to be answered, such as ‘how close to 5RM are the 5 x 5 sets’? And how many track athletes do you know that can do 5 reps with 2 x bodyweight? An 180lb. athlete who can do 5 reps at 2 x bodyweight as part of a 5 x 5, at the intensities discussed above, would have a 1RM of around 435-440lbs. Do you know many 180 sprinters, other than elite, that bench that much? I doubt CF was limiting his response to the very few athletes on this board that can perform at that level.
While I may be wrong and CF may correct me, I think you may be underestimating the CNS load that a demanding benchpress workout can provide, even in the 1-1.5 x bodyweight range, especially if we’re talking about warmup plus 25 reps twice a week. Its not that you can’t recover, but you may be dipping too deeply into the CNS pool, which would still have detrimental effects on the sprint side of things.
He’s not talking about the 5x5 method but general upper body workouts.
Fair enough. But if you are lifting at intensities high enough to have a positive training effect, I think everything stands, regardless of the exercises or rep schemes.
Clearly, I meant 1.8-2.0bw for 1rm, not for a full 5x5 workout. Even so, you are getting minimal fatigue and the rest between workouts is the exact SAME as CF’s! CF has lifting MWF (so 48hrs recovery) and this one simply has the 2/3 the work (2 5x5 workouts versus 3 or whatever). The workloads are distributed over a longer time frame AND you still have the same amount of rest.
I don’t care how common or not common it is for a 180lb sprinter or anyone else to have a 1.8-2.0x bw bench press. The fact is, you are not getting significant amounts of fatigue from it to the point where you need more than 48hrs to recover from. You are going to have next to no issues doing it the say after speed. Plenty of programs have high intensity work, in some form, DAILY. Literally daily for months on end. The key is how the work is distributed, as Charlie has said numerous times. Let me guess, you think Charlie never has multiple hard days in a row? So when someone goes up to Toronto, they aren’t sprinting 3 days in a row… And the GPP template doesn’t have 6 days a row of lifting?
Sorry, but you just clearly missed the whole point of my post.
And yeah, if someone is doing 1.0x bw for 5x5, they are not generating significant fatigue. Just like a 12.0 second sprinter isn’t causing enough fatigue to need 10 days of rest after a PR.
If you are too fatigued from 2 5x5 workouts at the low loads you are talking about AND having 48 hours until your next high intensity stimulus to be able to sprint effectively, you should take up another sport.
I should be ok performing upper body work into the heat of spp? Why do you perform upper body work on tempo days, is it because time etc?
Depends on your strength levels and what the workouts are like. If you are doing heavy singles and doubles AND you’re strong… you might have some issues. If you are doing normal workouts and lifting within your limits, you shouldn’t have issues with that set-up IMO. I think upper on tempo days is just an easy way to implement things. It isn’t necessarily better/worse than any other set-up as it is about how you implement it. It can be convenient though if you do tempo + bench + finish off with GS/BB circuit. Also, after a sprint session and doing cleans/squats/other assistance, I don’t have that much energy left and since I am going to be having a day very easy or off after the upper lifting anyway, I don’t see too much of an issue in spreading out the work a bit.
There is a coach on this board that has a lot of success going speed+upper, tempo+lower, rest/very easy, repeat. In the end, it is how you distribute the workloads. You could alternate lifting and sprinting daily (like CF’s GPP) if the set-up was designed for it…
Very good points, the main reason why I like TB lifting is it makes tempo days very short usually 60mins and I’m done for the day. Last year I didn’t have much motivation to attend weight workouts and the TB setup was great because I only had to see the weight room two days per week.
To what extent ARE you trying to accumulate strength during the comp phase, if at all? Is it purely about converting/optimising the gains made in gpp or is there a place for ongoing development, particularly if meets are quite well spaced out (3-4 weeks) ?
If you have a long outdoor season like CF you could have blocks of races follow by 2-4 weeks of rest/max strength blocks.
That’s what I have programmed with some of my athlete’s. One of them has just finished a 3 week block of races, now into a 4 week block of training before racing again to peak late June.
By the way tamfb I owe you a big thanks to that thread you started Nov/Dec re 12 week weights programme. You offered 2 choices and had good feedback. I slightly re jigged the prefered model and used it during SPP2. Their lifts have improved and more importantly so have their starts. 
Charlie
In Weights for Speed you discuss how you started out using 10 primary lifts mainly because the limited CNS output allows for this. However clearly doing all of these at 5x5 would not be possible as the total volume per session (50 sets) would be massive. How many sets did you do (I guess something like 2x10)? Also two more quick questions: What sort of recovery between sets (in the 5x5)? and how many reps/sets for the secondary lifts?
Thanks
Weights for Speed Part 3 was very useful all around. All that was provided in the two prior videos (I & II) was again summarized well here and the breakdown of cleans has been already useful in our program.
We had been doing hi-pulls (2nd pull) this spring however not in the way it was laid out in the video by CF.
With all comments made on this thread I am reasonably assured of a good working summer!
Hmm, where is that?
I expect that the lifts would be spread out over the weekly programme. If you have a look at the graphs with the GPP DVD you will see that in the early preparation CF included 5 lifting units (if I remember rightly).
Actually, in 1984 we did all 10 each session in 3 sets of 10, with varying emphasis in the initial lifting stages, but dropped some lifts through the season, that was the last year we did such an extensive lifting program.
Its not often I’m right, but hey, I’m wrong again.