The purpose of this program is going to be to start getting the athletes in physical and neuromuscular condition to come back and begin training and practicing at a high level again. The goal of the weightroom is going to be improving vertical and horizonatal force production and explosiveness. Lucky for us, the weightroom is great place to be able to improve force production through exercises like cleans and squats, and posterior chain work is going to aide in this force production as well by allowing us to prestretch our hamstrings in our penultimate step before takeoff and create stored elastic energy allowing us to utilize the stretch shortening cycle and create even more vertical force. Hopefully most of the athletes have access to a gym of some sort at this point to be able to do this work.
For the warmup, we will do a general warmup to increase blood flow and body temperature that will prepare your body to lift weights. Next is the training, we utilize weekly and monthly undulation of volume and intensity. The days go Day 1- Medium intensity day, Day 2- Light intensity Day, and Day 3 High intensity day. Again, this is because we want to maximize recovery of the central nervous system, and the light day being in the middle of the week, in between the medium and heavy day will be the best opportunity to do this. I want to now move on to the program I have written. The 12 weeks you see here are going to be basically the general preparation work we need to return to training the way we should be. We are going to be doing some isometric and eccentric work in these first two mesocycles because we want to use this time to get specific movement patterns back that we may have lost with lighter reps and decent volume. After this program you will have built a strong foundation to start a strength cycle. From here, we can build up strength for awhile to improve force production needed to then work into a strength-speed phase, and speed-strength phase, and eventually peak in a speed phase where we are going to be able to optimize all the force and power work we have done to be the most explosive we can be. I am going to implement jumps in this training program during the starting strength phase and these will also be progressed with what phase we’re in so basically to start working on jumps that will not require much use of the stretch shortening cycle into jumps that are going to utilize the stretch shortening cycle to the fullest when we are in the speed phase. Now I will just go through day by day to explain my thought process of using the exercises that I did. I want to start with the warmup that I have implemented. The stationary movements are all most of the same that they have been doing just to get loose and warm. I added in some iso holds. The purpose of these iso holds is that they are going to be good for tendon health and motor unit recruitment. I then am implementing a snapdown and vertical jump progression. The snapdowns are important at this time of the program because we want to develop the brakes before we press on the gas so basically these are going to be important for being able to absorb force. We then have 3 vertical jumps, which is said to be a great warmup exercise to get the CNS firing specifically in the movement patterns we are implementing in the weightroom. The SID’s are speed improvement drills. This is essentially a part of the warmup to get blood flow as well as working on technical mechanics and getting the muscles firing that are used in sprinting especially since there is a running aspect of the program at this point. We want the body to be readily prepared for all the movements and forces it is going to endure over the course of the training day. So day 1- medium day, we are going to start with Complex 1 which is a snatch high pull, hang snatch, and squat to press. We will do these because we want to get some work capacity back and this is a great complex to do that. I know Jeremy had taught them this so it shouldn’t be a problem with technique, however if there is, we can change out the barbell and just do medicine ball overhead tosses and squat to presses for now if need be. This is paired with rotator cuff work because we always want to implement shoulder heath work with the Olympic lifts and especially a snatch movement to keep the shoulders healthy. Keeping the shoulders healthy is also going to be important to diving because if you are diving head first into the water with arms overhead, there is going to be impact on that shoulder girdle that we want to keep healthy. This complex 1 will eventually progress into a hang squat snatch and a power snatch. The snatch is an exercise that transfers specifically to jumping because of the power of the angular acceleration of the hip which is also seen in jumping, and if you read “Transfer of Training in Sports” by Bondarchuk, it shows that the snatch is a great exercise to transfer to jumping events, along with the clean and squat which I will get to later. We then move onto a front squat. The front squat is the epitome of a vertical force production exercise, as shown in many studies about vertical force production in many athletes that the deep front squat is going to have a lot of transfer to vertical force production. We are then going to do hypers and the reasoning behind this is to strengthen the glutes, which is going to be good for low back health, and also because the glutes are one of the biggest, most powerful muscles and strengthening these are going to deem well on jumping ability. Now I have in a pushup, which I agree that upperbody work isn’t going to have a huge amount of transfer to jumping, and can even be negative if you build on too much mass. However, I kept the volume low, and I wanted to put some upper body work in because even though we think of jumping as mostly in the legs, we still have to build some elasticity in the upper body as the arms do play a pivotal role in a swinging fashion in max effort jumping. And since this is a horizontal push, I need to pair it with a horizontal pull, again to keep the back strong and shoulders healthy. To end Monday, we have a basic Paloff Press which is an anti-rotation exercise that is going to build the deceleration forces needed to emphasize the acceleration force in all the twists and turns in diving. Moving on to Day 2- Light/low Day, we start with a clean pull. I want to start with a clean pull because here we are working on explosive vertical force from the floor, as well as working on technique for the power clean, and it is a less CNS intense movement than a full clean which is why it is on the low day. From here I go to a DB Split Squat, and it is always important to work on single leg exercises in a jumping sport even when we are jumping bilaterally for a couple reasons. One, we want to see if there are any asymmetries of strength in one leg or the other and be able to work on that, and two, we always penultimate step in jumping and this is also a single leg movement that is going to use a lot of hamstring and posterior chain which is exactly what the split squat is going to work. The split squat in meso one is also a 3 second iso hold at the bottom, and this is because I want to start building strength in positions and also because iso split squat holds are going to be a great exercise for the patellar tendon health which might bother some athletes especially in a jumping sport and with all the running we are currently doing. This split squat is on the low day because since it is single leg we are not going to be able to load it nearly as much as we would a back squat so it is not nearly as taxing on the CNS. Next is the single leg hip thrust, and again I like the single leg work because we can tell asymmetries, but also because this exercise is going to be like an anti-rotation exercise for the pelvis, which will keep the pelvis strong. We then move on to more posterior chain work which is a band pull through and this is going to be slightly more explosive glute work but we want to build some strength first and eventually this will probably turn into a medicine ball throw when we get into more of a power phase. Next we have IYT’s and again these are just for shoulder health, which I again think will be important in diving and this program. We finish with planks to get some core work in at the end of the training session. Now we move to Day 3- heavy/high day. I’m starting with the hang clean plus front squat and this is an exercise that will be progresses into a power clean by the end for a lot of the same reasons I said the snatch was a valuable exercise. But I am starting it here because I want to restart teaching the clean from a high to low progression so we are getting good technical pulls from the hang position and then getting good catches and eventually we will progress into a full catch and a clean from the floor, and finally into the most powerful exercise of the power clean. We then move on to the back squat which again is going to be a great exercise for vertical force production, and it is on the high day because this is the exercise that we are going to be able to load the most, making it the most taxing on the central nervous system. In the second meso, these are going to be eccentric emphasized squats because at this time we want to start building eccentric strength early so we can fully maximize the use of the SSC later on. If you aren’t able to control your eccentric force and turn that into a fast and powerful concentric vertical force then you are missing out on some power which is why we are doing the eccentrics early so we don’t have to worry about them later on when we are trying to develop power and speed. These backsquats eventually will also be paired with a PAP (post-activation potentiation) jump once we start to get into the strength phases. This is a great pairing of exercises because the way PAP jumps work is that we are going to hit a set of relatively heavy backsquats for relatively low reps and from here we will have maximal motor unit recruitment and firing and we will immediately go into a jump, and since we have all these motor units firing, we will make the jump even more explosive leading to even better adaptations. After this we move to RDL’s. These are great posterior chain work for eccentrically lengthening the hamstrings which is going to be important with all the running going on now since sprinting is constantly contracting those hamstrings, but we have to put these RDL’s at the end of the week because it would be somewhat dangerous to run sprints after doing RDL’s so I put these at the end of the week to combat that. With all that being said about the RDL’s, these are also good for the same reasons I talked about the posterior chain work earlier in the first paragraph. Lastly, we have a vertical push and pull in DB OH press and pull ups. Like I said before we don’t need a lot of upper body work, but we do need a little bit to make sure the upper body is healthy and so we can use our upper body to our advantage in jumping. Then we finish with an anti-lateral flexion movement in farmer’s carries which are going to strengthen the obliques and lateral parts of our core. In conclusion, the means and methods of the program, which are the sets, reps, intensities, and tempos of the exercises, are going to be what really executes the progression of this program from the phase we are in now all the way into the speed phase. There will obviously be progressions and exercise progressions that play a role in this as well, but when we put all of these means and methods together, we are going to be able to fully realize the power and force production necessary to be the best athlete we can be.
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