Thoughts.

Step 1 in my planning process is always to think about my goals for training.

Some of these goals are more implicit, such as “Become a better ultimate player.” As I’ve alluded to before, these sorts of non-specific goals don’t really do a lot to inform my planning, so it needs to be broken down further.

These are my current general goals:

• Continue to improve strength. I’m not yet at a point where I’m looking to prioritize skills,conditioning, etc to the complete detriment of strength, so I still want to be making progress in this foundational quality.
• Continue to provide stimulus for muscle growth/weight gain. It won’t be as explicitly a focus as it was previously (and granted, my numbers haven’t gone up tremendously over the past months), but while I’m happy at 140 there’s always more room for growth. Once I’m properly in-season this goal will fall by the wayside, but until that time I’ll take what I can get, with strength gain still the primary focus.
• Develop qualities in the speed-strength and absolute speed end of the spectrum. As Eric Cressey describes here (for baseball, but with some obvious carryover to ultimate), there is a spectrum of capability in translating one’s strength into more sport-functional speed; I’ve made big gains in the strength end of the spectrum and should have ample room to refine that and translate it into game-impact speed.
• Prepare my body for ultimate-specific on-field impacts – running, changing direction, jumping, throwing. This goes along with the previous goal, but takes more specific work – you can only get so used to running without, you know, actually doing it.
• Even out imbalances in strength and mobility for injury prevention/general health. Not too much explanation needed here; an imbalanced body is an injury-prone body, and I’d hate for my work on the above goals to go to waste.

Those are the big-picture foci; this is both the easiest and the most necessary part of planning one’s training. In order to translate this into the meat and potatoes of a workout plan, we need to do more research – what are the optimal methods to achieve each? And more importantly, what methods can I personally make work with my circumstances, motivation, and time?

More on this in the next post – until then, if you haven’t already, start thinking about your big-picture training goals – do they align with what you’re currently doing? Is there a need to re-evaluate and re-work your approach? No time to re-assess like the present!

Related posts:

1. Planning My Training – Gathering Tools
2. Strength Training Without Weights – General Concepts
3. Strength Training For Ultimate – General Considerations
4. Pre-Season Training – The Lifts
5. Pre-Season Training – Agility, Plyometrics, Movement Training