A progression to help with sprinting...

[Pawn]

Greetings,

I'm looking into how to incorporate some additional training (or tweaking existing training) to help in my performance when playing soccer.

Stats
Male, 33, 350 lbs, 6'4'', 48'' waist
Squat 410x5
Bench 217.5x5
Dead 435x5
Press 150x5

Training
4 day split (531 / practical programming 4day hi/lo hybrid... monthly PRs)
+1 cardio session -- either soccer or heavy prowler push

Nutrition
2900 Cal, P - 245 grams, F - 105 grams, C - 245 grams

Progress
Weight is currently going down... ~1 lbs per week (~12 lbs in the last three months)
Lifts are all going up... (531s monthy PRs has kept me less beat up and run down than when I was hitting 5rep PRs weekly... it also makes the above sets not 5RMs, just the heaviest lifted at this point)
This is all good.


I have found there to be significant improvement in my play, speed, cardio, agility. I currently can keep up with the majority of the people on the field (even at double the body weight). Currently I only run (or even jog) on the pitch.

Is there something that I could add or tweak that would provide more targeted improvement... or will my best improvements still be through body composition changes and general strength increases??

Additionally, how would you 'program' sprints... or are they considered a 'technical skill' and you would use a progression of sled drags and squats to train for them?

Thank you for your time.

[Brent Carter]

Is there something that I could add or tweak that would provide more targeted improvement... or will my best improvements still be through body composition changes and general strength increases??

This in addition to skill practice which may include sprinting.

A progression of sled drags is not specific to sprinting since it will alter the mechanics of the movement. It is, however, great conditioning. You get strong then you sprint if your sport requires it. Seems like you already knew that though.

[CarteringKat]

Pawn

I spent 6 year of my life training to run long distance for track and field. 4 years in high school and maintained that for 2 years after graduation.

In all my (fairly) limited experience with running. Sprinting is as much a skill as it is genetics. The ability to move as fast as you can (i.e. power) in a straight line is only slightly limited to conditioned. Read: A person genetically gifted enough to run 100 meters faster than me will always run 100 meters faster than me. However, the interesting thing about conditioning as with all things is that while my 100 might have been relatively slow, I could run 100 meters 25 times within a second of the fast guy in the beginning and hold that pace throughout the rest of the workout while the fast guy continued to slow down. Obviously this doesn't mean he is slower than me, just that I had the dedication to train to maintain that pace much longer than he could. Any moderately gifted dedicated person could blow me out of the water even then. Now this conditioning might not exactly be sprinting, but it does indicate a higher working capacity and certainlyhelped with running the 1600 faster.

As far as targeted improvement, I might have missed something. What exactly are you trying to improve? Are you trying to keep getting weight off? Are you trying to be faster than everyone on the field?

I'll assume its field one for now until corrected. If that's the case conditioning work with sprints will definitely benefit your performance on the field over time. I experienced the same thing going from cross country to soccer. I could stay on the field longer and harder than everyone else on the team even though I wasn't as fast as all the guys in the beginning of a practice or game. It made me invaluable in the last half of games because I could keep chugging while everyone else was "losing steam".

There are tricks to be done that will actually increase the effectiveness of a particular sprint workout and I only got into those my last year of high school. One example is nutrient timing. Fasted running puts your body in a glycogen "depleted" state and forces an adaptation to a less fueled internal environment. I used this strategy to great effect when training for a half marathon in both my long distance and conditioning runs. I typically did this by training those in the morning.

Just some food for thought. I would be incredibly interested to hear your thoughts.

[Pawn]

Thanks for your response.

This in addition to skill practice which may include sprinting.

Okay, so it would be appropriate to add some skill work in... but keep primary strength training and diet largely untouched.

Right now I'm setup as so:
Thurs: Heavy Bench / Volume Press
Fri: Heavy Squat / Pull Accessory
Sun: Heavy Press / Volume Bench
Mon: Deadlift / Volume Squat / Prowler
Wed: Soccer

My thought would adding in an hour of skill work (wind sprints / agility drills) on the Saturday after Heavy Squats... I'm assuming it shouldn't impact my recovery for Deadlifts on Monday and I founding running (in a soccer context) the day after deadlifts sucks pretty bad.

Are there any obvious flaws in this plan?

[Brent Carter]

One example is nutrient timing. Fasted running puts your body in a glycogen "depleted" state and forces an adaptation to a less fueled internal environment.

Not advisable as this will also decrease performance therefore work done therefore adaptation. But this is getting into nutrition and Robert Santana would be the better person to respond. Even an ultra marathoner will refuel during a performance. Glucose packets are your friend.

My thought would adding in an hour of skill work (wind sprints / agility drills) on the Saturday after Heavy Squats... I'm assuming it shouldn't impact my recovery for Deadlifts on Monday and I founding running (in a soccer context) the day after deadlifts sucks pretty bad.

Sounds fine.

[CarteringKat]

Not advisable as this will also decrease performance therefore work done therefore adaptation. But this is getting into nutrition and Robert Santana would be the better person to respond. Even an ultra marathoner will refuel during a performance. Glucose packets are your friend.

Its a good thing I wasn't talking about performance days sir I was talking about training days. Fueling for a performance marathon is incredibly in depth and in reality starts a week out if you know what you're doing. I had very good luck training my 6 mile training runs for my half marathon fasted in the morning and when fueled properly on performance day I felt like I was running with robotic aids attached to my limbs. It has a documented training advantage as well as an anecdotal mental advantage.

[Brent Carter]

Right, and how do you perform? To the level that you are trained. Thus if it inhibits performance on training days your PERFORMANCE during the competition will also be hindered.

[CarteringKat]

Frankly I was speaking from anecdotal evidence that fasted longer runs of 6-ish miles helped me run a faster half marathon. I have the training logs with my mile splits and they were faster than when training before. Conventional half training programs typically hold that you run longer than 6 miles to train for 13. Given similar amounts of time to train(around 2.5 months) to train for 2 different half's, how could I go from the longest training runs of 9 miles to 6 mile training runs and still decrease my half marathon times 16 minutes? Did I know what I was doing? Frankly the answer is no. I didn't do any strategy planning and both runs were done at my discretion of pace based on how I was feeling because that's just how I run. 16 minutes from 1:45 to 1:29 is no joke in my opinion.

I you want a study this one talks about glycogen deplete training. 1 leg was exercised twice a day for an hour each session every other day and the other was training every day for an hour. The twice a day legs showed just about quadrupled their muscular endurance in the "low" leg.

http://www.physiology.org/doi/full/1...iol.00163.2004

While I don't see it a full proof study here, but I think the study indicates something yes? Maybe the two a day legs had better recovery conditions because they had the day between training sessions? Maybe not. I would love to hear your thoughts.

[Brent Carter]

Which is why anecdotal evidence on ONE lifter/ athlete is not all that useful in the application of principles/assumptions to MANY lifters/ athletes.

As for the study I think the results could simply be an explanation of having a greater stimulus in one overload event as opposed to smaller more frequent ones. There are quite a few shortcomings to this study and remains yet to convince me of the efficacy of training fasted as being superior to training in a fueled state. BTW both conditions in this study were actually performed in a fasted state. So that very well may have affected the outcomes right there. Poor design and fairly poor interpretation of data.

In fact this was taken directly from your linked article:

Coaches and athletes should be careful not to draw practical consequences of the present study with regard to training regimens. In the real world, training on a high muscle glycogen content may allow the athlete to train for longer periods and thereby obtain better results

It's also 13 years old. Perhaps you could find something more recent? On second thought as I stated earlier, I'm just not that interested in debating the effects of fasted vs fed. Please reach out to Santana to continue this debate should you desire.

Now, despite all this back and forth I have been training fasted for well over 5 years. However I am under no allusions that it improves my performance. It's simply a practical matter of training at 6-7am. I'm not waking up at 4am to eat then wait for food to digest then train.