Injury Prevention; Mid-Season Strength Training
For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere and, in particular, New England, many athletes are climbing out of their winter pain caves and relishing the warmer weather and outdoor workouts. This is also the time when most athletes are transitioning from their base or low-build phases into more focused build cycles that target more specific adaptations. The same can, and should, be applied to your strength training. In this post, I will dive into what mid-season strength training should entail, the adaptations you should target, as well as give a few examples of how this might look in your training plan.
For argument's sake, let’s define “mid-season” as the period of time between the end of your base and/or low-build-phase and the beginning of your race-specific, specialty phase. Just like how the base phase is used in endurance training to prepare the body for the harder work to come, your lifting should follow the same sort of pattern. During your base phase of lifting, you should have focused on compound lifts and increased the load gradually so that your bones, muscles, and tendons had time to adapt and respond to the stress placed upon them. Now that we are entering the mid-season phase, we aren’t interested in putting any more stress on the body than is necessary. The key is to maintain what you have built during the base phase as well as introduce some light, bodyweight plyometrics because that is what you will focus on during the racing part of your season.
Maintenance lifting will look slightly different for everyone based on their lifting experience and how their body responds to weight training in general. If you are someone who has built up a strong base of weight training, you can probably handle some extra lifting volume during maintenance compared to an athlete who has just begun lifting weights for the first time. Also, if you are an athlete who tends to feel more fatigued after their weight training sessions, you will have to experiment to see how much lifting volume you can tolerate without it having a negative effect on your endurance workouts. Remember, we are training to be endurance athletes, not strength athletes, so the endurance workouts should be priority number one.
To transition your lifting workouts to mid-season maintenance mode, there are a few basic ideas you should follow.
Do not include any max lifts or repetitions to failure
Decrease your heavy sets by roughly ten percent
Depending on your lifting volume, decrease the number of sets performed for each exercise and increase the repetitions
Include short sets of plyometrics to introduce speed and power development
Let’s take a simple base-phase lifting workout and I will show you how I would modify it to become a great mid-season workout.
As you can see, this base-phase workout follows a pretty standard three-set, ten, eight, six repetition scheme with ascending weight distribution. This is fairly common and hits most of the major muscle groups, both upper and lower body. For some athletes, this might be just half of their workout while others might complete these two mains sets and call it a day. Remember, this is just a snapshot for example purposes.
Here is how I would modify that same workout to better suit a mid-season transition.
Taking a look at this workout, you can see that I have dropped the sets from three to two and dropped the repetitions to just six per set. The weight should also come down a bit, but again, depending on your background, you might be able to tolerate the same weight as during the base phase. I have also added a third main set at the end to introduce plyometrics which will start to build speed and power. Depending on your goal for the workout, the plyometrics can come at the beginning, middle, or end of the workout. Here, they are at the end so the body can learn to develop speed and power with some fatigue in the legs. The upper body lifts have also been decreased to body weight and bands. This also helps to cut down on fatigue during this period of training.
Lifting weights during your entire season is important to ward off injury and is beneficial to your strength and power as an athlete. But if you follow a periodized training approach, the same should be applied to your weight training. By adhering to a few simple principles, you can decrease fatigue during the important training cycles in your plan without losing the benefit of increased strength during the early part of your season.
