I am heading off for a showcase this weekend so I won’t be able to time a 35 or 65. I do run a 3.85 30 YARD and a 7.1 60 YARD if that helps.
As for my lifts… they are extremely subpar. That’s part of my incentive for doing a westside workout because I heard they are great for gaining strength. I box squat 275×3, I don’t bench with bar due to the stress on the rotator cuff which is bad for baseball but I do use dumbbells, 70 lbs. x 3. I can clean 155 lbs.
My sprint form is not great. It has improved but due to the fact I grew up playing hockey, I’ve struggled with the linear aspect of sprinting. I will get myself on tape soon and I will post that as soon as I can.
I read over that link, and yea I can understand where it is coming from, but with the problem is with the wide ranging information present (almost all of it useful), I don’t know how to set up a template. Mike Young talks about his 2-3 Olympic Lift days in addition to circuit days, then he furthers the discussion by talking about the importance of non-weight room exercises such as plyos. How can you work that into a week in addition to sprints? If you could clarify that it would be a big help.
Finally, you mentioned how you thought that I shouldn’t lift heavy more than 3 times a week (not disagreeing here). Do you think lengthening out my template to an 8 or 9 day schedule with an additional sprint day would help or is the Westside format itself more geared towards powerlifters and not athletes, specifically when it comes to sprinting.
*Finally, I found another program that follows some, but not all of the Westside principles, but also takes some of Mike Youngs advice on his LSU thread. It’s another relativley popular program, The Clemson Power Program (https://www.scribd.com/doc/3228494/Clemson). There is a sample week on page 46 and 47 (only takes in the weight room work), if you could read it over and see if you think something like that would work better as compared to a typical westside workout (well, a Joe Defranco westside workout).
Thanks for all the help.
The reason I ask for different distances is because of how times are measured in track. A 30m and 60m mean a lot more to me than a 20 and 50 yd. A 35 and 65 yd more or less correspond to those distances, though those two times more or less tell me what I need to know. I’m esimating you could run about a 4.35 30m and a 7.6 60m. If those are electronic, then they aren’t bad. If they are hand timed, that’s a different story. Regardless, you can probably run a lot faster at your strength levels. I could only squat 245 when I was running those times. In fact, I am probably only slightly stronger than you and I walked onto a track and ran similar times despite weighing 35 pounds more (which I detailed in this thread https://elitetrack.com/forums/viewthread/8046/ ). So most likely strength isn’t your most pressing issue, it’s probably technique and power/elastic strength (which is also evidenced by your clean and 30 time).
A basic template usually cycles three kinds of days:
High intesnity (heavy weights, plyometrics, speed work)
Low intensity (Tempo, circuits)
Rest
So in the LSU thread you will see Mike do some heavy lifting, and then the next day he will do a weight circuit. So even though they both involve weights (and the athlete may lift up to six times a week), the goals and effects on the body are different. I’m not opposed to lifting every day, in fact I like circuits more than tempo in a lot of situations. However, heavy lifting more than three times per week is a lot of high intensity work to recover from. Most people can’t recover from four high intensity days unless they use really low volumes, spend a lot of time on recovery, or have some ‘help.’ Powerlifters can get away with a lot more ‘help’ than many other athletes.
If you want to keep the Westside template, I would do a rolling four week schedule. It might look like this:
Week 1:
Day 1: Max Bench
Day 2: Max Squat
Day 3: Dynamic Bench
Week 2:
Day 1: Dynamic Squat
Day 2: Max Bench
Day 3: Max Squat
And so on. I would encourage you to get away from the Westside split for three reasons. 1) I don’t think strength is your limiting factor. 2) It limits the different kinds of strength you work on. It was designed for powerlifters, and so any application outside powerlifting needs some heavy modification. And 3) since strength isn’t your limiting factor, you need to spend your time a lot more on technique, plyometrics, and olympic lift variations such as the power clean.
As for the template you posted, I think it’s still too much Westside. I would rather you did something like what 400stud posted in the hypertrophy thread (https://elitetrack.com/forums/viewthread/509/ ). They start tweaking his weights here: https://elitetrack.com/forums/viewthread/509/P45/ .
