Hi Andy, thanks for your letter, you certainly have a lot of work thrown into your program, the first thing I would say is immediately stop doing the high rep work for your lower body, personally I believe that it is the wrong type of training to try and achieve muscular endurance for the lower body via weight training, you will get enough of this with your running and related training, I think it was the great man himself, Dave Tate, who said train in the gym for what you can not get anywhere else, ie; strength and power.
If you are worried about your lower body size then do a larger volume of work with higher percentage loads, like 8 x 3 with greater than 90%, or even 12 x 2, all done with 45 – 60 seconds rest between sets or a great lactate tolerance workout that I have seen on a Westside training DVD is 15 sets x 2 going every 30 – 45 secs with about 50% of max on a box squat.
Also I would move your speed work to prior your lower body weights, rather than the other way around, you need to be fresh for speed work so you can run fast, if you are tired it just becomes a conditioning session. Also you can get some metabolic conditioning work by doing complexes in the gym as well, say something like the following:
Power Clean from floor – Push Press – Front Squat – High Pull from hang – Split Jerk – Bentover Row – Romanian Deadlift
and perform 1 – 8 reps of each in a complex before returning the weight to the floor, then you could do a 3 minute hard burst on a cardio piece before starting the next complex
A very simple strength and repeated speed session is listed below for you to have a look at, if you not need to increase upper body size you can either keep the same reps from the lower body program for all exercises, or just do the higher reps for the upper body on one workout.
1 x Olympic – Power Cleans/Power Snatch
1 x Squat – Back Squat/Front Squat
1 x Hamstring – Good Morning/Dead lift
1 x UB Push – Bench Press/Incline Bench Press
1 x UB Pull – Weighted Chins/Bent over Row
Session 1
5 minutes continuous easy run then 20 x 40 seconds work with 20 seconds rest
Distance to be covered in 40 seconds of work is based on your average metres per second for a 1,500 metre time trial plus 10%, so if you run the 1500 m in 5 Mins 34 secs, your average velocity is 4.49 m/s, so the distance you need to run is 180 metres 10%, gives you a round 200m
Session 2
12 x goal line to 22m every 15 seconds
10 x 22m to ½ way line every 20 seconds
8 x try line to 40 m line every 25 seconds
6 x goal line to ½ way line every 30 seconds
AS for speed sessions you could do something like the following:
Full Movement Warm up Ladder Pattern with short acceleration out of ladder
10 – 15 minutes
10 x 22m accelerations from different starting positions full recovery between each rep
Sled Sprints 8 x 25m contrast with 25m sprint from a 3 point stance start position or Parachute and release sprint 25m with parachute then release and sprint without for 25m x 8 (alternate each session)
Stair Plyos
– Double foot take and landing every step as quick as you can x 3
– Double leg take off and landing as far as you can with each jump x 3
Training for speed is always about intensity, so after a good warm up go out and run fast, I will be posting some more speed workouts soon, this is just an example of how short a session can be to maximise results, cheers, ashley