Thoughts. » summer workout plan

Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan: General Physical Preparedness (GPP)

Mackey — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 03:19:00 +0000

For yesterday’s workout, I did:
5 Pull-ups (had to go to jumping with rest around the 4th time through)
10 Sit-ups (on a back extension machine, so my torso was suspended parallel to the ground)
15 Push-ups (eventually had to take a break after the first 10 to avoid failure)

in order, as many times as I could in the span of 20 minutes. I was going off of memory of a Crossfit workout, which had the same 5/10/15 in 20 minute structure, but had 10 push-ups and 15 squats as its standards to go with the 5 pull-ups.

In any case, the main benefit is still there: improving GPP (at least, the GPP work I’m doing) means, simply, improving one’s capacity to do work. In a broader sense, it means being trained in such a way that one can respond to any sort of athletic challenge; it’s something of an opposite to the specialized training one does to improve at a single sport. A workout like this, where one is doing defined movements but asked to repeat them over and over with little rest, works towards improving work capacity. I feel like this sort of work will have the most lasting impact in terms of my fitness, as it’s self-feeding in a way–as one improves, one can in turn do more with less recovery. My hope is that it’ll pay off on the ultimate field in terms of being able to go longer, harder, and recover quickly to maintain such a level, and it’ll also allow me to do more training without dying in the long run, which is always a plus.

Essentially, it’s more “basic fitness” type work, instead of strength or speed or power work. I figure all of these are important pillars upon which an athlete is built, and that it’s better (particularly since this is my off-season) to be good to great in all areas than exceptional in a few, because the weak links in your fitness will limit your ability to use what you really excel at.

Today was going to be an interval work-type day (I was hoping to hit the hills at the golf course), but downpouring weather has forced a postponement. I figure I can get some good hill sprints in along with plyos tomorrow, perhaps in a separate morning/evening type deal or maybe both at once. We’ll see.

Chuck Wagon practice this weekend up in Hanover, should be good. SEAD (Summer Enrichment At Dartmouth, a program for underprivileged highschoolers), for which I am a mentor, is also starting this weekend, so things will be busier for the next couple weeks.

Related posts:

Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan, part 1

Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan: Ankle Strengthening

Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan: Plyos

Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan: Plyos

Mackey — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 04:14:00 +0000

Plyos were on Thursday. I’ve been busy enjoying my sophomore summer and have taken the past few days off, relatively speaking.

Anyways, plyos. Thursday I did week 3 from Air Alert (starting at week three may have been a wee bit overambitious, but I wasn’t unable to finish any of the sets). I also did some plyo pushups for the upper body.

Right now, the plan is to give air alert a try, see how much I like it/it works for me, and potentially include it wholesale at a later date. So far, so good. The exercises are all really good (I haven’t done squat hops yet), I was particularly fond of the “leapups” where you jump from a quarter squat, as it really targets the knees and should be really good for strengthening and for preparing them for the shock absorption necessary to jump (and land).

I feel like Air Alert has a pretty solid emphasis on strengthening the calves/ankles as well as the knees, and less of an emphasis on strengthening the “traditional” jumping muscles, the quads. I like it a lot, and it makes great sense–balance is key; one’s quads are already plenty strong, but improving/augmenting the link between them and the ground will result in a corresponding increase in jumping power. Just the day after doing the plyos I felt like I had finally gotten back my jumping ability of old in practice. Might’ve just been the extra confidence from knowing that I’m working to improve my ups, but it felt great.

I suppose it would behoove me to write a bit about the why and what of plyos.

On the most basic level, plyos train the muscles you already have to work more powerfully. The explosive activity plyometrics use trains your neuromuscular pathways to be more efficient at being explosive, to recruit more muscle fibers faster, and in the appropriate order of muscle firings–that is, by doing focused, explosive jumping, your body learns how to use your jumping muscles better. I’m also pretty positive it has a positive effect towards developing fast-twitch fibers in your muscles, though that’s a bit more gradual.

I’m training plyos now in order to see improvement now, to some extent, but also with the hope that if I take a step forward now, maintenance during the season and points thereafter will be easier than improving it later (of course, improving later upon the improvments made now would be ideal).

I’ve mostly been cutting short on my GPP workouts, when I finally get around to doing one (Tuesday) I’ll do a post about it. I’m a big fan of GPP, it’s relatively easy to work on.

Related posts:
Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan, part 1

Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan: General Physical Preparedness (GPP)

Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan: Ankle Strengthening

Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan: Ankle Strengthening

Mackey — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 15:52:00 +0000

Devlin just blitzed me asking what I do for my ankle strengthening, so I figured it was worth posting here, too.

— Devlin wrote: wrote:
what work are you doing for ankle strengthening?
— end of quote —

I’ve done some work with theraband, working up/down and left/right motions, and some rotational work going CW and CCW with theraband as well.

I haven’t been doing it lately, but walking around barefoot on the sides of your feet or the heels/toes is prettty good stuff to do.

I’ve been doing some flexibility stuff too, it’s primarily for the knees but it works on flexibility in the ankles…I can find the link for you if you want, it’s the “18 tips for bulletproof knees” that the Lean & Hungry Fitness blog linked to a week or two ago.

When I’m in the gym I also like to do one-legged quarter squats on stability balls/discs. you’ve got instability under the ankle, so motion in general helps work on proprioception (the ankle’s ability to “know” its position–good proprioception means the ankle adjusts faster and on its own to avoid rolling) and balance, and doing quarter squats helps work the knee as well as putting the ankle in a different position. I like to do these one-legged, with the other leg held out either forward, to the left or right, or behind the foot that’s squatting, to work the knee and ankle in different planes.

I also do a lot of general ankle rotating/massage-type stuff on a daily basis to help my range of motion and try and get the swelling down, since they both still have some residual swelling. icing would be smart on my part, but I haven’t been doing it at all lately. I have been taking ibuprofen on a pretty regular basis though, which has helped.

Most of my knee/ankle work consists of the above stability single-leg squats and flexibility work. I also figure I get some benefit out of squatting and the like as well, from a functional standpoint.

Related posts:
Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan: Plyos

Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan, part 1

Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan: General Physical Preparedness (GPP)

Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan, part 1

Mackey — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 02:56:00 +0000

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”).

Related posts:
Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan: Plyos

Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan: General Physical Preparedness (GPP)

Mackey’s Summer Workout Plan: Ankle Strengthening