Am I overdoing it with this schedule?

R

Rakoczy

0
Sunday - Track workout in the evening
Monday - Full body workout in the afternoon
Tuesday - Track workout in the evening
Wednesday - Full body workout in the afternoon
Thursday - Off
Friday - Team practice (plyos 7-8, practice 8-10 pm)
Saturday - Team practice 12-2 pm, full body workout at 3

The fall soccer season just ended, so over the winter we've just got the Friday and Saturday practices. Other than that, everything is optional and I'm just doing it to try and be in the best possible athletic shape for when the season starts again in the spring.

Track workouts - typically around 2000 meters total, starting with longer distances that become shorter towards the start of the season (i.e. five 400 meters in December, then twenty 100 meters in March).

Full body workouts - bench, rows, pull-ups, military press, dips, squats, dead lifts, lunges, calf raises, core

Is this a good schedule to continue with to the spring? I will be mixing up the full body workouts in terms of sets, reps, and different lifts. If it's not a good schedule, what should I change?
 
your full body workouts are too spaced out. you shouldnt have five days before the next one.
 
are you trying to focus on cardio or muscle building? and if its the off season then shoulding you be working more on your aerobic system with some an-aerobic?
 
Underdog: I'm doing a full body workout every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. I'm assuming you missed the one on Saturday.

Blindside: I'm not really sure. The way I imagined it, I'd be putting on some muscle (weight room) while doing speed endurance stuff (i.e. 400 meter sprints). Then this winter, starting in January, the whole team is doing a 4-week running clinic. I had wanted to have strong speed endurance and muscle base before that. Then after the running clinic I'd shift to shorter distances and less intense weight lifting (more sets, fewer reps, overall not as high a load as before).

I'd love to know what you think of that.
 
Rakoczy said:
Underdog: I'm doing a full body workout every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday. I'm assuming you missed the one on Saturday.

Blindside: I'm not really sure. The way I imagined it, I'd be putting on some muscle (weight room) while doing speed endurance stuff (i.e. 400 meter sprints). Then this winter, starting in January, the whole team is doing a 4-week running clinic. I had wanted to have strong speed endurance and muscle base before that. Then after the running clinic I'd shift to shorter distances and less intense weight lifting (more sets, fewer reps, overall not as high a load as before).

I'd love to know what you think of that.
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Your full-body workout spacing is fine.

In terms of your resistance training progression, you don't have a whole lot of time to work with. If I were you, I'd start lifting in under and endurance-based program and then move to a strength-based program combined with plyometric strengthening exercises.
 
Rakoczy said:
Illini:

I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Could you elaborate a bit?
Click to expand...

Basically, you should try to periodize your program, which means breaking it up into sections. Specifically, break it into an endurance phase, and then move into a strength/power phase.

Endurance phase:

Since it's soccer, and soccer demands endurance, make your endurance phase last at least half of your remaining time to train. Strength training for endurance involved lower weights and a higher volume of reps. Specifically, you should work at a light to moderate weight, for 2-3 sets, at 13-18 repetitions, with only about 45-60 seconds of rest. This regiment will elicit the greatest endurance adaptation response in the muscle tissue, while your cardio regiment will elicit endurance adaptation response in the cardiovascular system.

You should also super-set (working a muscle group a second time) major muscle exercises (ie. bench press, squats, etc) with a second exercise that is somewhat destabilized, to build stability and further exhaust muscles. An example would be bench pressing, and then moving to a push up with you feet on a core board, bosu, or stability ball. Another would be back squats, followed by split squats with one leg on an unstable surface like an airex pad or coreboard.

Strength/Plyo Phase:

After you hit the halfway point, or somewhere shortly thereafter, you should shift your resistance training focus to strength adaptation. This means changing your regiment to moderate to heavy weight, 3-5 sets, 6-8 reps, with a minute to 2 minutes rest between sets. Supersetting becomes optional, and it is still good to utilize some destabilized training... just remember to reduce the weight a little bit. You'll notice that we jumped from 13+ reps to 6-8 reps, skipping the 9-12 rep range, the hypertrophy range. As you're training for soccer (and you don't have a whole lot of time left to train), you're not looking to put on a lot of muscle mass, so the hypertrophy phase isn't that useful... so we skip that.

Also, add in plyometric, agility, and speed exercises now. Exrx.net has a bunch of good exercises, as does Nike's soccer-specific sparqtraining.com pages. These exercise types are going to be critical, not only in helping you develop your game, but also in helping you develop your dynamic biomechanical systems in order to prevent injury.

Also, this would be a good point to transition one of your weekly cardio workouts to an interval-type training. An example would be to sprint for 1 minute and jog/walk for 1-2 minutes. Obviously this is higher intensity stuff, so you'll only be going for 20-30 minutes, as opposed to the length of a typical steady state cardio session (30-60 minutes). The interval training will cause your body to adapt so that it can more easily transition from the energy requirements needed for more aerobic and paced action, to the higher intensity anaerobic sprint action.

Hope this explains enough without getting too much in the weeds. Let me know if you have any more questions.
 
Illini:

Thanks a lot. That's great advice, really appreciate it. I'll set something up soon.
 
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