Pump Up The Volume

Pump Up The Volume

With the games about 43 days away, we’re ramping up our training volume (and yes, the music is going up too) to peak for the 2013 Open. I wanted to take today’s post to talk more about peaking and volume.

First of all, I hope everyone realizes you can’t be at your “peak” all the time. At your highest level of performance, you’re running the on the razors edge of injury and over-training. You can’t stay there for long as your body needs to recover or you’ll get injured. Our experience has been that we want to start peaking for big events about 6 weeks out. I don’t like to do this more than 2-3 times max per year.  Trying to peak more than that will usually result in sub-optimal performance or injury.

I have our 2013 athletes increasing their volume for the high rep AMRAPs we’re going to see. So each week we’re increasing our total reps for things like push-ups, pull-ups, dips, squats, box-jumps etc. by no more than 10% more than the previous week. This is important. There’s a temptation to increase more quickly, but resist it! You’re feeling good, you’re getting excited about the Open, and you want to do more. Don’t.

As you ramp up your volume, listen to your body. You may feel a twinge or tighness or soreness in a joint or muscle group. Respect it and back off  for a day or two until it’s better. Those twinges are simply your body being overloaded by the increased volume. Give it time to catch up. If you’re smart about it, we’re talking about 48 – 72 hours. Remember the rule of RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation)  to handle those little hot spots.

We’re upping our volume, and our met-con work, which makes it all the more important to eat right, get lots of rest and sleep, and adjust accordingly if you’re not. I want you all to really use your training logs and track food and sleep and volume. Work hard on our abbreviated strength cycle, it’s important to keep up your max strength even though we’re doing less strength volume.

As we get closer to the Open, we’ll be switching over to a taper protocol to make sure everyone is well rested and ready to kick ass for the Open. More on that later.

Finally, I want to give huge props to everyone who’s been working skills and technique. So many folks have been getting muscle ups and bar muscle ups, double-unders  as well as strength and Oly PR’s –  it’s really exciting to see.  I can’t thank my coaching staff (and your hard work) enough for all the improvement that we’re seeing.

Keep up the great work!

–Shawn