My question is: how do you guys manage to make gains in strength when you train for a sport? I imagine it must be really tough even getting enough food in to compensate for calories lost during long practice sessions, especially if you have a fast metabolism. On top of that, you have a lot of extra muscular stress from sprints and such.
How do you guys do it?
the general idea is that you build strength in the off season when you aren’t competing and then just maintain it when you are doing a lot of sports-specific work.
What about an athlete who isn’t strength-training just for carryover to the sport? For example, someone who plays on a football team but is also interested in getting stronger for powerlifting.
You still build your strength in the off season. It’s pretty hard to compte in powerlifting during a football season, forget building strength just having time to go to the meets while playing is difficult enough.
Learning cycles is good in everything you do from speed, to bodybuilding to powerlifting. If you organize your cycles correclty and live by go hard or go home you can accomplish anything.
i wrestled my first two years of college and still trained for pling. my training partner is still wrestling. he’s a heavyweight so he isnt as pertinent. I weighed about 170 and cut to 157 every week. so that was a huge limiting factor in any sort of gains. most of the times, i spent the entire season pissy because i was cutting and my lifts were stalled. HOWEVER, the post season rebound gains were worth it. You just need a plan and to stay the course. it all works out. now that im retired, the numbers shot up. but i miss wrestling. its tough haha.
You eat, you do very minimal training, and I shit you not, you see gains. Before my football season started this year I was working my ass off. I took off time during season, and I didnt work out every week, I had a 370 squat, 265 bench and a 470 deadlift. My squat ent to 405, my bench went to 275 twice, and my deadlift went in the shitter haha.
I was severely overtraining though before the season.
I wrestle right now and I’m cutting around 10 pounds every week. Lifting and wrestling is tough (especially after leg days), but I cant stand not lifting so I do it anyways.
My lifts have stalled for a long time, and as much as I hate hearing “the in-season is about maintaining your strength”, my diet and getting beaten up in practice every day only reinforce that point.
I began powerlifting during my junior year of college while playing football. I didnt really have any problems making gains while being a starter. Everyone though I was nuts because I would come in and do box squats on sundays and go in and lift for an hour after a full padded practice. Lifting kept me healthy and kept me getting stronger during the season. I set every lifting record at school during my final spring semester and its only because I started doing my own lifting, stuck with it, and wasn’t an idiot about it.
[quote]StormTheBeach wrote:
I began powerlifting during my junior year of college while playing football. I didnt really have any problems making gains while being a starter. Everyone though I was nuts because I would come in and do box squats on sundays and go in and lift for an hour after a full padded practice. Lifting kept me healthy and kept me getting stronger during the season. I set every lifting record at school during my final spring semester and its only because I started doing my own lifting, stuck with it, and wasn’t an idiot about it.[/quote]
How did you manage to recover so well?
If you’re playing football, you shouldn’t be competing in powerlifting inseason. You can work on getting stronger though. It’s not hard to wake up and get into school an hour and a half before class starts. This was my last football season, but for the last two years I would wake up at 5 AM and get down to the weightroom at 6:30 AM. I would do a 3X5 or 3X3 routine for the core lifts, with not as many auxiliary lifts as would normally be included if it were the offseason. This would save me some time. I would get finished around 7:40 AM and hustle to get to class by 7:55 AM. I was sweaty a lot, and I was late a few times, but it was never really an issue for me. During the school day, I would eat peanut butter sandwiches and almonds throughout the day to get all my calories in. If you put enough effort in and eat enough food, you don’t really hurt how you practice at all.
Just remember, only lift Monday-Thursday inseason. You know what Friday is for. =)
[quote]FROGGBUSTER wrote:
[quote]StormTheBeach wrote:
I began powerlifting during my junior year of college while playing football. I didnt really have any problems making gains while being a starter. Everyone though I was nuts because I would come in and do box squats on sundays and go in and lift for an hour after a full padded practice. Lifting kept me healthy and kept me getting stronger during the season. I set every lifting record at school during my final spring semester and its only because I started doing my own lifting, stuck with it, and wasn’t an idiot about it.[/quote]
How did you manage to recover so well?[/quote]
Some of the lifting itself acted as recovery. I wasnt going in and banging out singles on good morning or anything like that. Heavy 5’s on core exercises and assistance work geared towards recovery, like for time or for a near rep max, will make you feel like a million bucks after getting the shit beat out of you in a football game.
Also, an unlimted meal plan helped. You should be eating every moment out of practice anyway but you need even more if you are going to be doing heavy compound movements outside of the other shit you have to do in season. I was probably one of 5 people to actually gain weight throughout the season.
I fight MMA and lift, which IMO is a little easier to pull off since I’m not competing in MMA every week like you would with football or whatever, but I keep my lifting to 3 days a week except during the week or two after fights when I don’t train, and I always do legs on Saturdays since we take Sundays off. Other than that I just eat a shitload unless I have a fight within a month or so and I can usually make small strength gains during my time between fights, and the last two weeks before a fight are like an extended deload. Plus the rebound in strength/size gains after cutting hard for a fight are awesome, as somebody mentioned before.
Well… i do judo, and now i have found a hobby in powerlifting, it’s kinda funny 'cause a lot of my mates have a “2nd” sport in which they practice/compete just for fun. I have a Bodybuilder buddy, a triathlete, a climber (my teacher), etc.
Well, when i’m not preparing for an important tournament, i normally train for strength, using a westside variation, depending on days that i have alivable to lift. But when a tournament is near, i drop the strength work and start doing more strength/power endurance work (which limit the amount of time in the year that i have to train for maximal strength).
Even tough, now that i’m in offseason i’m doing some bodybuilding work, obviusly gaining strength too. (kind of what teh kroc is doin’ now)
In short- Sleep a lot, eat a lot, and drink a lot of milk.
I row, so it’s not as tough on the joints as something like football would be, but as long as I keep up the recovery work, foam rolling etc. and keep my volume to something less than obscene I do just fine. It’s a long season with relatively few competitions so I really just keep up the weights most of the year, drop down to a skeleton program when I’m peaking and take a deload week before a race.
I’m a traceur/freerunner… and doing powerlifting AND Parkour at the same time pretty much destroyed my joints (I’m fine, theyjust hurt… a lot). So I learned to program in phases where I go for a few months in PL up to a competetition, then after the meet, I go into a maintenance phase and try to redirect all the newly gained strength to my sport as well as regain some of the speed/mobility that may have been lost in the process.
Eat a shitload, and cut back on lower body work if it starts screwing with game day. I’m sure its manageable if you are smart with your training and eat eat eat with a vengeance. Have a gander at this thread and read what Bauer got up to while at college: