Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan, part 1
(No Ratings Yet. Click to Rate!)
Loading ...This’ll just be some introductory words, since I haven’t solidified everything just yet. I might leave it the way I have it now–I’ve got some workouts planned out, and a general idea of which order to do them, and I might just leave it in this more flexible plug-in-each-day format, or I might set my workouts a month in advance and try to stick to it.
Anyways, the summer training goals are thus:
- Eliminate Ankle/Knee woes: Top priority for me, since this hinders any other sort of progress I might make physically. I played this weekend with no braces of any sort, just a week after my ankle was poor enough to shut me down for Easterns, which is a good sign already.
- Get into “Better Shape.” Defined for me in a few ways below, with the specifics to follow:
- Improve my Vertical. It’s definitely fallen in the past year+, at least partly due to #1 above. I’m planning to incorporate plyos in addition to fixing myself up to this end.
- Improve my Strength:
- Primary focus on posterior chain–back, hamstrings, glutes. Weakness in the posterior chain is a large part of why I’ve had knee troubles, and strengthening it will make me immediately faster.
- Secondary focus on core strength, primarily rotational for throwing power
- Tertiary focus on the quads and calves
- Quaternary focus on the upper body, especially the shoulders
- Train for General Physical Preparedness (GPP), i.e. bodyweight conditioning, intervals, basically exercise to improve my work capacity and ability at any given moment for any given action.
That sums it up pretty well. Spent a good day or two working out all the stuff I’ve gotten so far, including goal setting and workout planning, and I’m excited to follow through on it.
As for workouts, I started in earnest yesterday with a strength workout. Right now the plan is to train strength monday, GPP tuesday, condition Wednesday (CW practice takes its place every other week), plyos/explosive strength Thursday, and do more GPP Friday, with weekends open for either tourney play or an extra workout or two depending on the week/my discretion.
GPP is done more than once during the week because it’s relatively low-impact, helps foster recovery from the higher-impact work, and works on a broader scale and one more applicable in the long-term in terms of fitness, I think.
I’ll post some workouts as I get to doing them, most likely, to give an idea of what I’ll be doing, but for now I’ll just post what I did on Monday. Today the gym was closed due to the 4th of July, so I only did a lighter workout for my hands, knees and ankles, the ancilliary stuff.
Yesterday I did 4 circuits of:
5x Front Squat + Push Press w/Dumbbells (crossfit has an exercises page that details both of these better than I can)
4x Weighted Pull-up
8x Romanian Deadlifts w/Dumbbells (essentially deadlifts starting with the weight already at your knees and lifting from there)
Approx. 1 min between sets, 1:30-2:30 between circuits. With the right weights it made for a solid bit of strength work, hit the shoulders/back pretty well and worked the legs enough as well (I didn’t want to do too much lower body the day after a tourney).
I then followed that up with some wrist curls to take advantage of forearms already tired from handling heavy dumbbells, particularly in the front squat/push press combo.
Warm-up was 2 rounds of the crossfit warmup. I really like how the warmup basically hits everything you’d want to work on a given day, meaning you don’t need to spend lots of time focusing on working everything at once with each workout.
I’ll leave it at that for now. I’ll definitely be making a few more posts on what I’ll be doing over the course of the summer, when the muse comes to me (just learned the names of the 9 muses in my Classical Mythology course the other day. As Professor Tatum has reminded us, “You can’t do anything without the muses”).
