Elitetrack: Sport Training & Conditioning

I'm trying to come up with a summer weight program and was wondering if anyone had any experience using the westside split? The testemonials i have heard sound promising - gaining strength without weight, but the setup itself is completely foreign to me.

I'd like to know how you'd set this up. Can someone explain this to Rice and myself?

what happened to all the other posts? should i retype my explanation of the split?

mike had to correct a "bug" or something so he said that all posts from the last 2 days have been deleted.

Yes cockysprinter, please repost everything you had on here previously.

The westside split is a form of conjugated periodization. Conjugated perfiodization is one which works all elements necessary to the sport in a balanced manner all year long. There is very little if any fluctuations in volume and intensity at the macrocycle level. There are however often minor changes in volume and intensity at the micro and mesocyle levels. More specifically, the westside split is aimed at developing the power lifts (squat, bench, deadlift) where max strength is the primary quality necessary to excel. It splits training up into 2 types of days: max effort (~max strength) and dynamic effort (~speed). A typical week looks like this:

Day 1: Max Effort Bench
Day 2: Max Effort Squat / DL
Day 3: Dynamic Effort Bench
Day 4: Dynamic Effort Squat / DL

There are too many nuances of the westside program to mention here but if you want more details just go to http://www.elitefts.com/

Mike, how do you feel about using this sort of split for sprint training, more specifically, during the off season?

come on mike, i am anxiously waiting for your reply to this thread

A true WSBB program would be ok for a sprinter if it were used in an off-season where the primary objective was increasing strength. Otherwise, I think it would need some modification. I've been using a weight lifting program that isn't modeled after the WSBB split but follows similar (eastern/soviet-block) principles with a couple of my post-grad athletes for the past 4 mesocycles and have seen unreal results in strength, speed, and power indicators. I credit this more to the total application of the underlying concepts though to the whole training program rather than to just the weight lifting program alone. I hate to do this but I'd rather not discuss the specific details of this setup at the present time (to be fair to my HPC clients).

When you say you can't discuss it, do you mean the variation that you do, or the westside setup itself?

I think he means the setup he uses since that's how it sounds from the post and he does discuss the regular Westside setup on the 5th post in this thread.

mike thats too bad you would rather not tell us the plan you put your athletes on.  i read an article (dont have the link handy) that talked about modifying the wbb split to better suit athletics.  it suggested using repetition days instead of dynamic days and some other stuff i dont remember.

however, i was wondering what you might think of this mike.  if you modify your weights program so that each day better suits the stimuli better on the track.  i dont know about the other people on this board, but my weight training is consistently the same each day of the week i do it :wink:.  i dont know if i can do this right but…here goes.  on days such as accel dev and maxV use 'max effort ' type days.  on days for special endurance, use a percentage of max that will cause a lot of lactic acid, just like your running would do on the track.  and on days for intensive tempo, you could use those rest-pause techniques that were mentioned in another thread.  and maybe for speed endurance you could use something similar to the special endurance workout or an ME day, but higher reps.

Originally posted by cockysprinter
mike thats too bad you would rather not tell us the plan you put your athletes on.  i read an article (dont have the link handy) that talked about modifying the wbb split to better suit athletics.  it suggested using repetition days instead of dynamic days and some other stuff i dont remember.

Sounds like Defranco's article:
http://www.t-mag.com/nation_articles/311west.jsp

that was the article i was referring to.  any comments on what i suggested?

Mike Young - 12 May 2004 12:59 PM

A true WSBB program would be ok for a sprinter if it were used in an off-season where the primary objective was increasing strength. Otherwise, I think it would need some modification. I've been using a weight lifting program that isn't modeled after the WSBB split but follows similar (eastern/soviet-block) principles with a couple of my post-grad athletes for the past 4 mesocycles and have seen unreal results in strength, speed, and power indicators. I credit this more to the total application of the underlying concepts though to the whole training program rather than to just the weight lifting program alone. I hate to do this but I'd rather not discuss the specific details of this setup at the present time (to be fair to my HPC clients).

Can you now talk about the training you did with these clients?

Sure. I'll give a brief rundown now and follow up when I have a little more time.

Basically we did 2 consecutive blocks of a 3 day rotation followed by a rest day. The general theme for each day was very focused with as little crossover as possible:

Day 1 & 4: strength & low end power….concentric strength was emphasized. We would do things like resisted runs or hills for sprints (nothing longer than 20m), very heavy pulls or squats…often starting from the pins or using a box (no OLs); heavy MTs w/o countermovements, and short jumps (SLJ, VJ…often with no CM and sometimes resisted).

Day 2 & 5: speed & upper end power…fast eccentric power was emphasized. We would do things like 10m flying sprints; jump squats with light weight, OLs usng 50-60% of max; MTs using a light ball and countermovement; and dynamic-reactive plyos.

Day 3 & 6: metabolic conditioning; circuits, some extensive tempo; general strength, etc.

Day 7: Rest

I was super specific (even more than usual) about the pairings and exercise selections of every aspect of every day from the warmup all the way through the cooldown with the aim of making every aspect of every day very focused on a particular range of the force-velocity / speed-power spectrum. I think this is part of what made it work. The fact that the stimuli on days 1 and 2 were very high intensity but very different in nature allowed me to do 2 high intensity days back to back twice a week. Also, I felt there was a potentiating affect from day 1 on day 2. I had unreal results with this setup (based on test results from my standard tests) but it was for a unique athlete population (bobsled / skeleton athletes) who are strange birds in the sporting world in that technique development is minimal (other than for the load) and their is no real maxV and definitely no speed endurance component to the sports. I also used this setup with a 7.67m LJer and found it difficult to integrate technical training. His test performances went way up but this was in the GPP when we weren't really doing any technical training at all. With this guy I ended up using a hybrid setup with three days as above and three days of more traditional training. This ended up being better for his LJ development.

what you described seems difficult to understand (to me anyways) maybe because of how specific you made this out to be, this seems so specific that it wouldnt apply to sprinters, you would have to modify it completely different according to athletes in different sport, However the concept would be similar or the same, no?