Are programs only designed for peaking?

Michael,

Awesome question!
My personal short answer: Peaking is relative 😉

Your schedule for building up to club season is acceptable… if you only have that amount of time to work with.
By the way, try not to do too many things at once. There is a reason for working on qualities in blocks rather than all at once. At the very least, keep S&P on its own and only do track/conditioning stuff as you ramp up through to Sect/Reg/Nats. Track and conditioning is very vigorous and can hurt you if you don’t build a proper base first.

If you have lots of time prior to that, I would recommend immediately getting on Program.Zero and its pre-requisites; spend time on other days exploring how your body moves. One place to guide you is looking at your injury or problem history. It can be due to anything in your life. For example, I’ve sprained my ankle countless times, so I always work on my ankle mobility and tripod feet almost every day. The sooner I improve it as part of Program.Zero, the more I get out of advanced programs like Program.One

Now, about my short answer (peaking is relative), think small wins over time. As an example, my next goal is to improve my technique for MP programs! So I’ll do all the basic entry programs and try to do them technically well. I can set specific dates based on the programs to film myself and then review them or share it with us here and get some feedback of my performance. If that went well, great! I’ll jump onto Program.One now and hopefully maintain this quality and add weight to see how I go. Probably this will be your program leading up to season instead.

Every moment you can make time to improve your performance should be used. Especially when you have a long break from harsh regular season. That’s the best time to tinker and explore!

Michael,

Psoas/knee strengthening – What does it involve? Where did you get the prescription?
Did you tear an acl or something?

I recommend sitting through the F.U.T.U.R.E. lecture and learn about injury management and movement quality coaching. Learn and get to know what to look for. Also, if you can find someone to help you perform an FMS, it will help us at MP point you in the right direction.

Your schedule is fine. Spacing our evenly and the way it works for you.

Being “in shape”/conditioning is a big world in itself. The key is getting a heart rate monitor and testing how your heart performs with different demands. Each person can be very different.
At worst, even if you dont do dedicated conditioning this early in the off-season, you aren’t really getting out of shape. You’re lifting which is itself a way of increasing movement efficiency and this energy efficiency.

Personally, i am more concerned about your injury management. Best is to be seeing a physiotherapist…

Michael,

I’m loving these info exchanges, it’s exactly what we need everyone here to do!

I just want to you to confirm that you’ve gone through your physio prescription thoroughly and that the issues are not giving you grief at the moment?
The FMS also considers injury history and pain during the test. Important to have a thorough report 🙂
Give our regards to Ren 🙂

Our programs will make your body stronger and function better, so you do not necessarily have to do the stuff your physio prescribed previously. The physiotherapist’s aim is to reach painless functional movement. Strength &Conditioning takes over once that has been achieved, so if your FMS has no Zero scores, you just do our programs and its all good.

Having the occasional run or additional activity isn’t bad… We just need to be smart about the particular type of activity. Let’s say, 5mile run, which is high impact and very linear as well as small range of motion; not the best thing to do on a regular basis.

There also is energy systems of the body. Briefly, there’s aerobic, lactic-anaerobic and alactic-anaerobic energy systems. They all influence each other. HIIT works the anaerobic side of things but someone like me is missing a lot of aerobic heart rate stuff.

So if you want to do conditioning, i’ve been doing aerobic heart rate things for weeks now. I vary my activities and try to utilize low impact stuff. The heart does not distinguish between activity, it just needs to pump at the required rate.

Swimming, beach jog, water runs, freestyle, mix up rowing/bike/step-mill in the gym, low intensity shuttles… I can go on forever.

Michael,

1) Good overall high overview plan. Think about how the activities you are peaking for. If tryouts are two full days like a camp, the 12 week programs make sense to me. I’m a bit apprehensive at giving recommendations because it is so subjective.

2) Personally, I got one with a chest strap monitor. I’m not confident with the wrist-only ones. The features are a matter of convenience but here’s some useful ones: Intervals, manual HR zone settings, some water resistance. Mine is a Polar RS300x, very old discontinued model, but i got it dirt cheap and it does the job.

Your schedules are fine don’t worry about it. As long as you can recover from it, you’ll get better.