Reply With QuoteIt is. That's why it's sub-optimal. Just do two workouts, A/B, and live with the reduced tonnage.Originally Posted by francesco.decaro
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Female NLP on 2 days/week
I finally convinced a friend of mine to let me coach her the lifts (to the best of my knowledge) and do a linear progression, but she recently started swimming 3 times a week, 1 hour and a half sessions, on a swimming team and that's her main priority right now. So it's basically 4.5 hours of cardio every week.
She will train 2 times a week and I was wondering how I could program that.
Should I just start with a higher volume?
Mabye 4 sets of 5 on squat, bench and press and also 4 sets of 5 for deadlift, which would result in about the same number of weekly reps as a regular LP? 12 sets seem like a lot to do in a single session though.
Or mabye increase sets on squats only and keep all the other lifts on 3 sets?
It's seems almost impossible to match the same volume of a 3 day schedule without having too much intensity on a single session.
My choice would be focusing on squats for 4 sets of 5 and keeping the other lifts at 3 sets and monitor how much fatigue she accumulates during the week and mabye lower the volume. (I know she could just eat a lot more to recover from it but I don't want her to risk gaining too much fat since her main goal is swimming and aesthetics for now, but don't worry I will increase her calories gradually when the program starts and make sure she gets enough food)
The next problem would be when she will eventually reach a plateau and I will have to go from 5 reps to 3, I'd have to do 7x3 on squats and 5x3 on the other lifts resulting in 17 sets on a single session. I know women can take more volume and rest for a shorter time than men but it still seems like a lot.
These are all the things I can think about but I'm sure I will get a better solution to this from you.
If this has been addressed already I just ask you to please direct me to the source.
Thank you a lot!
TMPHBITEU
It is. That's why it's sub-optimal. Just do two workouts, A/B, and live with the reduced tonnage.
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Okay, so I should do this even when adding PCs and chin-ups/back extensions later in the program, which would result in deadlifting and power cleaning only twice a month?
Also don't you think her 3 days of swimming would interfere too much with a low volume in the gym and counteract any strength adaptation? It would basically be like someone running 4.5 hours a week and only doing 2 days of strenght training. You don't suggest doing that much cardio even on a regular 3 day LP because it would interfere with your strenght gains, so is keeping the volume this low the best thing to do? Is it possible to suggest increasing the volume gradually as she makes progress (assuming this 2 days a week will keep on going for a long time)? Or switching to a H/L/M earlier so the light session can offer more volume but not too much stress against her swimming practice (which is MWF by the way so I think the best days to train would be Tuesday and Friday so she can have a rest on thursday before overlapsing weight training and swimming on Friday, and a long rest on the weekend)
I know this is a lot of questions but this is gonna be my first time trying to coach someone and program for them and it took me a long time to convince this friend, so I wanna make sure the program goes on smooth and she can have the best results and stick to it.
Thanks again for taking the time
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I don't know about the other stuff, but I have yet to see a person gaining too much body fat while swimming three times a week. If she's gonna be doing the NLP in addition to it, she would have to eat truckloads of food to gain any noticeable fat. No idea why that is, but I can attest to it with 15 years of swimming experience. The only reason I managed to gain weight during the NLP was because I quit swimming for six months, and I expect a lot of it will go away once I hit the pool again. So eating should be a non-issue.
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That was one of the arguments that convinced her, actually. She's being followed by an online PT who's keeping her at 1300-1500 kcal a day because she said she wanted to look better and she does not have any noticeable excess fat at all and really struggled to keep her diet in check for the last few weeks, binge eating in the weekends and nervously following her diet during the week, losing a few pounds in the process.
I expect to get her up to at least 2500 kcal as quick as possible so she can go back to eating like a human being
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If you can convince her not to do some weird dieting and eat as much as she wants to for two or three weeks, and if she does three swimming practices plus two NLP sessions per week, she will notice that she hasn't gained any body fat. I think that one should be enough to dispel any doubts she has about her body. Jesus, swimming is so effective at keeping body fat down, most of the female swimmers I know just give up on any sort of training during the summer months, so they don't look "too buff".
As far as training goes, an increase in her squat numbers will soon cut some strokes from every length of pool due to vastly improved kicking. When she sees that one, she should be even more convinced. Shaving strokes for a swimmer is like pumping heroin directly into our brains.
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I'm really hoping that'll be the case. sport athletes who have never done weight lifting are really stubborn sometimes😅
I'm sure it'll be fine
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If she gets some doubts, just tell her a swimmer dude on the forum promises she will shave off a stroke in freestyle and maybe 1,5 strokes in backstroke for every 50 pounds she adds to the squat and deadlift and every 25 pounds she adds to the bench and press.
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I'll try that, thanks a lot!
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