Olympics Debrief | Part 3: How to plan your training

Read this article in under 2 minutes to work out your training plan!

As you know, the Olympics were delayed by a whole 12 months, to the day. Forget the economic and logistical challenges, let’s just focus on the impact this has on the ATHLETE.

In this e-mail is slightly different, I wanted to give you some key points to plan your training, you can skip there by clicking HERE.

Don’t the athlete’s just keep training?

That’s just not possible. As I mentioned in my last e-mail, we should always periodise training, this allows for the body to recover, adapt, improve and peak for performance without sustaining fatigue, overtraining and injury.

This means, by delaying the Olympics by 1 year, coaches had a very difficult decision to make with their athlete’s last year. Stop immediately when lockdown’s commenced or continue with the season as normal.

There was an even split and there certainly hasn’t been an even split over who did what and whether that benefitted their performance at the Games.

If it were me, I would train my athlete’s (remotely via video is what I did) continuing through 2020, not tapering but instead ‘ending’ your season slightly earlier so you can recover then enter a hard training period for 2021.

How should I plan my training week?

It does depend on training experience and history but a good plan to follow involves building in the following:

1. 2 Days offper week (yoga and walking is encouraged on off days)
2. Keep 2 days minimum between ‘QUALITY‘ days, these are the hardest sessions
3. If you want to be faster, you MUSTtrain for speed once every 5 days
4. Maximise time by putting similar movement’s and training requirements on the same day , for example heavy lifts and sprints
5. Do you rest enough between sets, you probably don’t.
6. Fitness= <90s | Hypertrophy = 90s+ | Power/Strength/Speed5mins-10mins rest!
7. If you’re tired, don’t necessarily always do max effort work, instead, focus on building or technique.
8. Every 8 weeks, plan a lighter load or de-load week to allow your body and central nervous system to recover.

There is a real scientific method to planning training, this is what I do for all of my clients.
You might not be sure how best to plan your week or month of training, it’s time for you to work with a coach, so…

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Take a look at our Online Training Plans HERE.

Coach Arj