Workout of the Week #14

Welcome to workout of the week number 14, an integrated strength and power development workout, and it’s also an upper lower split.

As I mentioned before, I probably need to find a bit more space on that page to get the longer and longer titles into that PDF. So it’s a 4 day upper lower split, and the goal is, that we want to work on strength and power simultaneously. That’s why it’s integrated, give me a minute, and I explain what that means; so the training goal is maximize strength and become more explosive also known as strength training and power development.

So what does integrated mean?

We have seen in previous strength programs, and strength workouts, where we had a strength day and a power day, so now we don’t separate these days, we do it in one.

What does that mean?

We do something that is called complex or contrast training, there’s a slight difference between the two. Many people use it interchangeably, I am guilty of that myself. What we are seeing in this strength and power training or in this strength and power workout is strictly speaking a contrast training, not a complex training. But I tend to say complex at times as well.

So inside the membership, you will find a short presentation on how to use contrast training for track cycling, but the principles of contrast training are pretty much the same, and you can use them for your sports.

Anyway, what is complex training or contrast training?

In very simple words, you use the combination of a heavy load and a light load. Then that’s why it’s actually called contrast, because you’re contrasting a set of a heavy load followed by a set of light load.

And you can also reverse it you can do the light load first and the heavy load second. I’ll have a course upcoming or hope at some point soon, where I’ll take you through different advanced power training methods. And there I’ll outline the differences of the heavy light contrast versus the light heavy contrast. But for now in this example we use a heavy-light contrast, meaning heavy load followed by a light load.

The training variables. As I mentioned by now, you might have heard we have heavy load and light load, we use 85 to 100% of the 1 RM for the heavy load, and 0 to 15% of the 1 RM for the light load.

The rep ranges. We do 1 to 3 repetitions for the heavy load and 2 to 6 repetitions for the light load. The training exertion for the heavy load is hard to near maximum, and for the light load, it’s a light exertion. Important here, we want to definitely stay away from maximum exertions.

The training effort is for the heavy load a maximum effort, and for the light load it’s a dynamic effort and that is done either ballistically or plyometric, or combination of ballistic and plyometric.

Let’s have a look at the exercises.

On our heavy loading we use Olympic lifts, variations of the Olympic lifts, squatting movements, deadlifting movements, pushing movements and pulling movements. And for the light loads it’s very simple jumps and throws. The exercise order. We go from most complex to least complex.

And if we look at some more training variables, the training frequency is 4 days a week, it’s a station training, the training organization is a station training, the training split is the upper lower split. And in this upper lower split, we have two lower body strength and power sessions, and we have two upper body strength and power sessions.

How does it look?

Let’s have a look at our program, and we jump right into it. So here we are inside of our program, the 4-day upper lower integrated strength and power training split. You get an overview of the program, you see how to structure the workout throughout a week. You can change the structure, but this is pretty much what I would suggest. And then if we look at our workout number one the lower body strength and power, here you can see we use complexes, and the first complex is a power clean and a medicine ball scoop. The idea of these complexes, contrasting complexes is, that we use mechanically similar movements. So we use a power clean followed by the similar movement the medicine ball scoop, but with a much lighter load.

So how does that look? You can see here the, power clean 87.5% of the 1 RM for 3 reps and the med ball scoop 15% of the 1 RM for 4 reps. So what’s 15% of the medicine ball scoop? The simplest way to do that is as I outlined in workout of the week number 6, where we looked at strength and power development, you use a parent exercise for the ballistic movements. So for example for the medicine ball scoop the parent exercise could be the power clean, the parent exercise for the medicine ball power drop, which we’ll look at in the next session, the upper body would be the bench press.

So you can use that as a guiding principle. There are also more accurate methods, but from a practitioner standpoint that works very very well.

So the next one we do a back squat and a bounce drop jump. What is a bounce drop jump? There are two different types of drop jumps, basically it’s dropping down from a box and then jumping back up. You can jump either only jump in the air, or you can jump onto a box. The bounce drop jump is defined by having a short, as short as possible as a ground contact, where the counter movement drop jump, which will be used in session number 3 is classified as you drop down, and you try to maximize jump height, so the contact time on the ground will be a bit longer, but therefore you’ll be able to jump a bit higher. So, a slight and subtle difference, but an important difference.

And then we do our bulgarian split squat followed by the single-legged box jumps. So single-legged, unilateral work.

Let’s go to the strength workout number two, the upper body strength and power. So here, I alluded to our bench press and the medicine ball power drop. The next complex, we do a pullup and the medicine ball slam. Here we do only two complexes, but then we do four sets, instead of three sets.

And then workout number three, our lower body strength and power again, and then we’ll see a similar structure to what we saw in work on number one. We have a hang power clean followed by a medicine ball scoop, we do a front squat followed by a counter movement drop jump, so longer contact times on the ground, but jumping a bit higher. And I want to mention that so the bounce drop jump does not mean you’re not intending to jump as high as possible you are intending to jump as high as possible, but because you’re trying to keep the ground contact time as short as possible you just won’t be able to jump as high as with a counter movement drop jump. And then we do our step ups followed by step up jumps.

And then for our last session, last workout, the upper body strength and power. We again have 1A and 1B, followed by 2A and 2B. This time we have a vertical push, and so we do the shoulder press followed by the medicine ball push press, preferably we do it seated to take the lower body out of the equation. And then we do our bench row followed by the medicine ball slam.

And that concludes the four workouts. You download that PDF and you can get the glossary explaining things more in detail, you can read a bit about me, you can see what other people have to say like my athletes and my colleagues and my mentees, and you can also go and visit the website where you can join the membership, and where you get the 4 week customizable program.

Let’s go back and finish the presentation.

So we’re back. What are our next steps? So you download the program, that’s the first step, the next step is you join the membership, there you get the four-week customizable strength & power program, meaning the excel file, where you can then also fill in your weights, you can fill in the RPE; as you experienced it. And you can also change exercises, if you would like to.

And the last thing, if you have any energy left, you like this video and you subscribe. I see you next week with the next workout, and if you missed the previous workout you can watch it right here.