So, You Want to Be an Athlete?

By: Duncan Roman

You’ve decided you want to up your game. Much like King Arthur, you’re on a quest – you seek the holy grail (of gainz & performance).

But how do you do it?

With the plethora of information made available via social media, it can be hard to distinguish the good from the bad.

THE FORMAT FOR HOLY ATHLETIC GAINZ

Here is a simple, but highly effective way to structure your training sessions. This format allows for high levels of autonomy in your sessions, while still following basic principles of training.

This means you can do any split you want, any exercise you enjoy, and still reap the benefits – eventually finding your holy grail of human performance.

Outlined below are the principles used to develop each training session, regardless of specific exercise or individual. These are present in every session in some shape or form.

 1. Performance/Output:

Start your session with: max effort sprints – with or without resistance, max effort Jumps and multi effort jumps – with or without load, depth drops, drops and jumps into sprints. The list goes on. Combine jumps, sprints, rolls, crawls, drops – things that require athleticism, effort, coordination. Be creative.

 2. Muscle:

This is the Meat and Potatoes of your session – Heavy strength or power work. But make sure loads are higher (RPE 6-9 range, or about 75-97% 1RM)

Lift heavy – get as many quality sets in as you can until fatigue prevents you from producing high outputs. This could be as few as 2 or as many as 6 sets of heavy squats, bench, deadlift, rows etc.

the goal is to improve the strength capabilities and structural qualities of muscle tissue via heavy loads

 3. Energy system/Metabolic

once you’re fatigued from the heavy strength work, and producing high force isn’t possible anymore, we shift focus to bias more hypertrophy and “metabolic” conditioning…this means more moderate weights, higher reps usually 8-15 and pushing close to failure (usually within 1-3 reps)

4. Tissue Quality:

Lastly, address the quality and strength of connective tissues – tendons, passive elements of the muscle tissues etc. ISOs or tempo-based work is a great way to help keep tendons happy and strong.