Originally posted by: brikis98
Originally posted by: conorvansmack
I'd keep doing the same exercises, but I'd increase the reps to 8 - 10. I'm not sure what weight to start at. Brikis linked
this chart earlier in another thread. I figure if I stay around 70% of my lifts, I should do ok. I haven't done any 1RM lifts, so I'm not really sure where I am as far as that goes. I'd still increase the weights, but at a much slower rate. Does this sound like a good plan?
To be honest, I don't think this is a great approach. The first thing I'd reocmmend is that you read the
"What is Fitness?" article from the CF journal. This will help you understand the different aspects of fitness & athletic performance, the different energy systems involved, and the effects different types of training have on them. For example, "endurance" is only one of the many physical skills you need to excel at sports: stamina, strength, power, speed, coordination, etc are also crucially important. Moreover, endurance itself can be broken down into anaerobic endurance (using the phosphagen and glycolytic pathways) and aerobic endurance (using the oxidative pathway).
Keeping that in mind, your idea of upping the reps per set to 8-10 is probably not going to be particularly effective. For one thing, using that chart above, you can see that 8-10 reps is typically the best choice for "hypertrophy" or increased muscle mass size and not a great choice for either strength/power or anaerobic endurance. To really help your anaerobic endurance, you have to go quite a bit higher in the rep range, usually to 20+ reps per set. Of course, if you
only used such high rep sets, you would really struggle to maintain the strength/power you've been building using 5 rep sets. And ultimately, all of these rep ranges would only help your anaerobic endurance, without too huge of an impact on your aerobic endurance, which is equally important for sports.
Therefore, I would instead recommend one of the following two approaches:
Continue lifting heavy, but add some "cardio" on the side
Stick with your current lifting routine so that you can maintain your strength & power. On off days, add some form of cardio to help improve your stamina, aerobic and anaerobic endurance and so on. Start light at first so your body can get used to recovering from the added load and then gradually ramp up the intensity. Some light running or biking 2-3 times per week would be a good way to begin. After that, replace one of the lighter cardio sessions with something tougher, such as interval training. Consider also the occasional
Crossfit metcon style workout. Tabata intervals, for example, are supposed to be extremely efficient at improving both aerobic and anaerobic capacity.
Switch to Crossfit for the summer
This is a much bigger change, but also one that's likely to produce much better results. As the "What is Fitness" article explains,
Crossfit is designed to develop general physical preparedness (GPP) and will help you both maintain (or increase) your strength/power, while significantly boosting your work capacity, which will include improvements in stamina, endurance, and all other physical skills. This is done by combining weightlifting, gymnastics, running, climbing, etc, training with low reps, medium reps and high reps, using heavy weights and light weights, max effort workouts and metcon workouts, and so on.
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