Lifting to maintain strength gains

[Pistol Pete]

Rip I play rugby and your program has been awesome for getting me stronger/heavier and hopefully more injury resistant. However while I've been focusing on the lifts I've neglected my conditioning and season has started leaving my now 200lbs and still gaining (thanks) riding the pine. My question is what is the minimum per week I would need to lift in order to maintain my strength so I can focus on conditioning and get on the field and get back to the program? Should I keep my current work set weights for these lifts or do you think it would be appropriate/possible to push slower gains while doing conditioning (lots of repeated sprints at 1:2 , 1:3 work:rest) 4x a week?


Current work sets:
Squat 290 5lb increases per workout
Bench 165 5lb ^
Dead 350 10lb ^
Press 115 2.5lb ^
Clean 195 5lb ^

Feel free to laugh at my puny push movements, I often do.

[Mark Rippetoe]

How do you know that you cannot maintain strength increases during the season?

[Pistol Pete]

I`m positive that I can maintain gains during the season and that is my intent. The problem is my lack of anaerobic conditioning is keeping me off the game roster so I plan to hit the conditioning fairly hard for the next 2-3 weeks to remedy this. I recalled you had written somewhere that novices lose their gains fairly quickly if they stop training. Being only 9 weeks in and still very much a novice I wanted to do the minimum lift frequency for strength maintenance, while focusing on conditioning, to avoid losing any gains I had made.
Ideally I would prefer to do the following but I think It`s being overly optimistic. I guess the only way to really know is to do it.

Day 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Lift a.m Lift a.m Lift a.m sprint a.m
sprint p.m sprint p.m sprint p.m

Once a decent conditioning base is laid down the plan is to focus on lifting and let practices and games maintain the conditioning.

[Mark Rippetoe]

I'd just lift 2x/week. The 3-in-a-row thing here is not the best schedule to try for these purposes. Maybe M-Th.

[Pistol Pete]

Thanks for the advice Rip it is very appreciated.