Today’s workout is all about anaerobic metabolic conditioning. What I find with many of our speed and power athletes (especially females) is that they tend to be be rather well conditioned with their ATP-PC system (very short, explosive bouts) because oftentimes their offseason practice and skill sessions are all about skill development. These skill development sessions focus on quality of work (and rightfully so) with very short bursts, followed up by a lot of teaching time. This is great for skill development and helps develop the PC system.
Our athletes also tend to be pretty fit when it comes to the aerobic energy system, because most of our athletes actually enjoy going for a 20-30 minute run on their own a couple of days a week. For some, this is about weight management, for others it’s about stress management, and for others they run because someone somewhere told them that’s what they should do to become a better volleyball, basketball or soccer player and they’ve always done it so why stop now.
With my metabolic training, I prefer to look at the energy system that we aren’t developing naturally or in their regular practices, and that is my focus (in most of our athletes it tends to be the anaerobic (glycolitic) energy system). So, we focus a lot of our time on intense work at 90-100% workload for 20-50 seconds with a 2:1 or 4:1 rest to work ratio. Shifting our focus to what we weren’t doing before, instead of getting caught up in “sport specificity” has made a huge improvement with the overall metabolic fitness of our teams which has shown up in winning games and matches.
Today’s sample workout:
Dynamic warmup x 8 min
A Skips 4 x 15 yds
High Knees 4 x 15 yds
Butt Kicks 4 x 15 yds
Leg Cycles 3 x 15
Technique Run (80% max speed) 2 x 30 yds (walk back recovery)
Technique Run (85% max speed) 2 x 80 yds (walk back recovery)
Work set:
170 yd run (85 yds down and back) 5 x 28-30 seconds (time depending on skill level)
3:1 rest to work ratio
3 minute jog cool down
Mobility training x 8 min
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