Problem with Track Season

Bigger Stronger Leaner Competitive Bodybuilding
1

Hey, I have a problem with upcoming outdoor track season. Right now my workout schedule is:

Monday - Chest
Tuesday - Legs
Wednesday - Rest
Thursday - Back/Biceps
Friday - Shoulders/Triceps

However track season is gonna be taking up a lot of time and I need to find a way to get all my lifts in without letting DOMS interfere with my track peformance.

The schedule for track is:

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday - Practice

Tuesday and Friday - Meets

I will have to do my leg workout on friday or thursday after the meet to allow myself time to recover from the soreness. Can anyone think of a new schedule I could use?

2

I find that full body workouts reduce the DOMS I would normally get from a split.

I normally don’t really like full body workouts that much and prefer splits, but during ski racing season I have the same problem and I cannot deal with a lot of soreness from my legs because I need to be able to ski very frequently.

3

[quote]bball_mc wrote:
Hey, I have a problem with upcoming outdoor track season. Right now my workout schedule is:

Monday - Chest
Tuesday - Legs
Wednesday - Rest
Thursday - Back/Biceps
Friday - Shoulders/Triceps

However track season is gonna be taking up a lot of time and I need to find a way to get all my lifts in without letting DOMS interfere with my track peformance.

The schedule for track is:

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday - Practice

Tuesday and Friday - Meets

I will have to do my leg workout on friday or thursday after the meet to allow myself time to recover from the soreness. Can anyone think of a new schedule I could use?[/quote]

Which is your priority, track or lifting? Are you doing track just as a fun activity, but your main goal is getting bigger, or do you mainly want to be better at track and use lifting to aid your performance?

If you are just doing track for fun, you probably wouldn’t be asking this question, since it wouldn’t matter too much what your performances were like. You would still have to reduce your lifting a little and eat a lot more, but being fully recovered for meets wouldn’t matter.

If, however, you want to do well in track, the bodybuilding-type split you’ve set up will have to take a backseat. I am assuming you are a sprinter (correct me if I’m wrong). It seems like you are going to be doing a ton of CNS intensive stuff (2 track meets/week!), so the practices can’t involve more than recovery/low intensity stuff.

Two high intensity sessions/week over an extended period of time is about all most people can handle. (Well, people can “handle” a lot more work, but their sprint performances would start to suffer.) I would do a full body strength workout once a week just to maintain. Anything more and you might be applying more stress than your body could recover from.

As far as timing, there are not many recommended times when you have meets twice a week, but your idea of doing it the day after the meet to lengthen the recovery period for the next meet is a good one.

Do you really have 2 meets every week? Most track teams in my area only have 1 meet/week at most. If you find a week with only 1 meet, and you don’t want to use it as a deloading week, then you can either do a high-intensity full body weightroom workout or a high-intensity sprint practice instead (but not both).

4

I think smallmike gave some great advice, you also did not list what event you are doing, which would help also.
Finally, have you asked your coach? He is a coach for a reason.
You generally get doms more from once a week per bodypart sessions, then more frequent. For less soreness work bodyparts more frequently.
Also you need to decide what your goal and priority is. And tell us, before we could give decent advice.

5

[quote]smallmike wrote:
bball_mc wrote:
Hey, I have a problem with upcoming outdoor track season. Right now my workout schedule is:

Monday - Chest
Tuesday - Legs
Wednesday - Rest
Thursday - Back/Biceps
Friday - Shoulders/Triceps

However track season is gonna be taking up a lot of time and I need to find a way to get all my lifts in without letting DOMS interfere with my track peformance.

The schedule for track is:

Monday, Wednesday, and Friday - Practice

Tuesday and Friday - Meets

I will have to do my leg workout on friday or thursday after the meet to allow myself time to recover from the soreness. Can anyone think of a new schedule I could use?

Which is your priority, track or lifting? Are you doing track just as a fun activity, but your main goal is getting bigger, or do you mainly want to be better at track and use lifting to aid your performance?

If you are just doing track for fun, you probably wouldn’t be asking this question, since it wouldn’t matter too much what your performances were like. You would still have to reduce your lifting a little and eat a lot more, but being fully recovered for meets wouldn’t matter.

If, however, you want to do well in track, the bodybuilding-type split you’ve set up will have to take a backseat. I am assuming you are a sprinter (correct me if I’m wrong). It seems like you are going to be doing a ton of CNS intensive stuff (2 track meets/week!), so the practices can’t involve more than recovery/low intensity stuff.

Two high intensity sessions/week over an extended period of time is about all most people can handle. (Well, people can “handle” a lot more work, but their sprint performances would start to suffer.) I would do a full body strength workout once a week just to maintain. Anything more and you might be applying more stress than your body could recover from.

As far as timing, there are not many recommended times when you have meets twice a week, but your idea of doing it the day after the meet to lengthen the recovery period for the next meet is a good one.

Do you really have 2 meets every week? Most track teams in my area only have 1 meet/week at most. If you find a week with only 1 meet, and you don’t want to use it as a deloading week, then you can either do a high-intensity full body weightroom workout or a high-intensity sprint practice instead (but not both).
[/quote]

I’m looking for a mixture of both getting bigger and improving my track performance. I know that’s a pretty bad answer so I’m gonna say lifting more so. I don’t think we’ll have meets every week like that… I have to schedule lying around somewhere I’ll find it. And yea I’m a sprinter… I ran the 400m in state and a 50, 400, and some relays in regular meets.

6

If you want to get bigger and improve your track performance at the same time, I think the best thing to do would really be to focus on eating. Don’t jack the calories up too fast so your body won’t convert the excess into fat for storage. Just be consistent.

As far as workouts, I would still switch to a full-body split and lift twice a week at most. You will be surprised at the gains you can make doing heavy compound movements while eating big at the same time.

I’m not going to tell you what your priorities should be, but if you are good enough to go to states in the 400, then I would really focus on improving that. Unless you plan on competing in college, high school will probably be the only opportunity you have to run in organized meets. You have all of college, and the rest of your life, to get bigger. Heck, you even have all off-season to get bigger as well. Don’t be afraid to devote 3 months to working on your speed.

7

I’m an ex-400 meter runner in HS and college. Here is some advice I would give, from someone who has been in a similar situation.

My suggestions would be:

  1. What everyone else has said: use total body workouts rather than splits. I’ve done 3 to 4 total body workouts per week through most of track season when I was in college, and it never caused a problem. Of course, I have a freakishly high tolerance for volume, so your mileage my vary.

  2. If you are lifting to failure, stop lifting to failure. Nothing creates DOMS like going all the way to your RM. Lift heavy, but leave some reps in the tank.

  3. Do your heaviest lifting on the days when you do CNS intensive track workouts like pure speed work or plyos. Your body can only recover from so many CNS heavy days per week. Your track coach has probably already given you as many as he thinks you can tolerate. Don’t go adding more.

  4. Focus on lifts that are sport specific. The olympic lifts are perfect. Deadlifts, squats, and heavy presses are great, so is lat work. Cut out the isolation stuff and cut out most lifts that don’t require you to stand on your feet and exert force against the ground.

  5. If you want to be a 100 meter runner instead of a 400 meter runner, keep trying to gain weight. I’m only 5’9 and 165, and I felt in my last couple of years of college that I was really a little too heavy for a quarter miler. The lifting helped my start a lot, but I ran through fatigue much better at a lower weight.

  6. Identify which meet it is you want to peak for. Presumably this is region or state. 4 or 5 weeks before this meet, scale your lifting back to basic maintenance levels. 1 to 2 weeks before this meet, quit lifting entirely. You might lose a little size or strength, but you will run much faster. I’ve seen guys hack as much as half a second off of their 100 times by not lifting the last couple of weeks before conference.

  7. You can’t win a 400 in the first 200 meters but you sure can lose it. don’t make stupid mistakes on the backstretch. If you can walk after the race you didn’t run hard enough.

Hope this helps.

8

[quote]
I’m not going to tell you what your priorities should be, but if you are good enough to go to states in the 400, then I would really focus on improving that. Unless you plan on competing in college, high school will probably be the only opportunity you have to run in organized meets. You have all of college, and the rest of your life, to get bigger. Heck, you even have all off-season to get bigger as well. Don’t be afraid to devote 3 months to working on your speed.[/quote]

Yea man, I agree.

I ran track in high school, it was probably one of the best things I did. I just wish I trained harder for it. Make the most out of it while you can. You can always get bigger in college, but you might not run track in college.

Personally I don’t think many people will be able to get big and run track competitively at the same time. Track workouts and meets take a lot out of you, the body will just be overwhelmed. I tried to keep running 6 days a week + my lifting regime and it was impossible. I was just way too tired.

If you are still hell bent on getting bigger while improving performance, definitely make sure you are eating enough. 5 meals a day at the least.

Track workouts + lifting = Insane amount of calories.

9

Something I left out last night, and only now thought of:

If you lift heavy on a speed work day, do it after practice, not before. Speed workouts won’t do much for you unless you are fresh enough to give 100% effort.

My suggestion would be 2 or 3 total body workouts. Maybe one on monday after speedwork, and one on friday after the meet. If you add a third, put a lighter day somewhere in between.

10

Thank all you guys a whole lot for the advice. I’ll try to do two total body workouts a week. I’ll probly start on a weightgainer too.

11

Another suggestion:

Weekday meets usually mean jack to anybody that is pretty good. If you ran at states for the 400, you shouldn’t worry about those meets.

Want to be ready by saturday for the invitationals? You could also lift mon/tues/wed going with legs on monday, combo tri/chest, then back/bi day.

I’ve done that before and found that to work quite well. What have you done previous years?

12

[quote]itsthetimman wrote:
Another suggestion:

Weekday meets usually mean jack to anybody that is pretty good. If you ran at states for the 400, you shouldn’t worry about those meets.

Want to be ready by saturday for the invitationals? You could also lift mon/tues/wed going with legs on monday, combo tri/chest, then back/bi day.

I’ve done that before and found that to work quite well. What have you done previous years?[/quote]

Yea I see what ya mean… I’m just a freshman too so I have a long time left for weekday meets.