Reps, Sets, Speed of recovery?

[TheBrilliance]

I havent been to the gym for about 3 months.
I had an injury first game of the season and Im nearly back to full recovery but Id love to go back to the gym and get a little stronger and explosive.

Im 19 now and Ive been doing research on different exercises for years. I have however had some struggles coming up with the MOST appropriate attack to what I want to achieve in the gym.

Ill just let you know now im not coming on to bug you about making a fitness routine for me. I know what different exercises do and I know the time you should spend in 1 gym session.

The thing that has frustrated me for years is the effects of certain weights, prevelance of reps and sets, frequency etc.

My situation is speed and strength. Its what I want to achieve. I know what exercises to do etc. but in terms of what is right for my body, in terms of injury prevention, strength, explosiveness, football relation- I just have heard so many different rumours in the past.

Even my research on this site as a youngster proved to be futile because I was told so many things.

So if I went to the gym to gain upper body strength, and also some leg strength for speed I would do 40 mins each session (its the appropriate time limit if you attack it) and finish with a protein shake and hit the shower.

Firstly would you recommend doing a lot of leg work at the gym or just stick to plyos?

Secondly, and most importantly what pattern of exercise should I do.

Im talking High reps, low reps, slow or fast speed, set frequency, heavy weights, light weights?

I have an idea but Id love to hear some of your opinions. Thanks guys.

[desire10]

Hey mate. klc knows a fair bit about gym work so I'll leave the depth response to him, or maybe even nick.

[p793]

i'm also intrested with this topic, hopefully klc will know a bit about it. out of intrest, can i ask where you want to go with footy (i know this is completely irrelivant, jw)

[TheBrilliance]

Buddy I want to be the best I can be.

Being a professional player, playing in England and in the World Cup are what dreams are made of but ive got less than 0.001% chance of that happening.

Top league in my area most probably

[styale18]

Well for strength, exercises like barbell squats and deadlifts would be good for the lower body. They work many muscle groups and are very beneficial. I think you can do whatever weight you want but i think as long as you do the movement explosively, you'll be working those fast-twitch muscle fibers.

[soccerjj]

In my opinion i think:

1) I would recommend definately do the leg work in the gym. You cant flex bone! No matter how explosive you are if you have little strength you wont go that far that fast and reach your highest potential. In my opinion the higher your relative lower body strength the faster you will run.

Read this:

http://www.precisionnutrition.com/big-squat-fast-sprint

2)

Rep type: I highly recommend sticking to LOW reps and heavy weight, especially for the main exercises like squats, deadlifts, bench, military press etc. So for football players i would recommend almost always sticking between 3 reps to 8 reps at the maximum (normally) ( i would mostly stick around 5 repsish)

This is because anything over maybe 12 ish reps wont make you much stronger or bigger. Just make you sore and increase your stamina a bit. BUT tbh i think if you want to improve stamina you would be much better off sprinting, doing intervals, playing footy.

Anything around the 8 rep mark will make you stronger, but you will mainly just get bigger. This is know as sarcoplasmic hypertrophy. This isnt ideal for a footy player as they wont to get as strong as possible while gaining as little weight as possible. ( This does not mean muscle mass is bad, as a bigger muscle is normally a stronger muscle BUT you want to focus on increasing strength.

The 5 rep range will give you an icredible mix of muscle and strength.

3 rep range will be mainly neural gains. ( strength gains)

Relative body strength is key for footy.

Rep speed: Rep speed wants to be controlled on the way down on the negative. Then as fast as possible on the way up! We are athletes we want to be quick and lift quick. ( obviously when you are using heavy weights you wont be going that fast, but try and go as fast as possible.)

Going slow will slow down gains and increase recovery time. ( especially on negative)

In terms of sets more sets are needed for muscle building and less for strength training normally.

Another thing to note is dont try and force out extra reps ( e.g. partner help) and dont go to faliure too much.

This is so you can stay fresh for your plyos, footy practice, sprinting, endurance training etc. ( and next strength session)

Finally in terms of injury prevention
Warm up before exercise

Make sure you have a balanced body ( pushing and pulling equally matched, dont just focus on e.g. chest or quads ignoring back and hammys)

Improve flexibilty and soft tissue quality

other things just cant think of atm.

Any questions just ask!

[Juicygriot17]

Yea what soccerjj said, high weight low reps, and do it explosively for more explosiveness and speed. The faster you do your lifts, the better you'll develop the fast twitch fibers... Personally i like 3-5 reps, because i know a lot of football players worty about being too muscular, and you'll have neural gains without adding too much mass

[klc123]

Bare with me, this could come out quite lengthy, but i'll try to be brief and cut to the chase.

The way your muscle will grow and develop, is 100% influenced by the type of training you are using to fatigue it. This should be quite obvious, a marathon runner wouldn't do the same workout as an Olympic sprinter in the gym.

Why does the training type matter? Well your muscles are a complex blend of different fibres. There are many types of muscle fibre, but to keep things simple for this explanation, i'm going to ignore the intermediates and focus on the two extremes. You basically have White Fast twice muscle fibre, and red slow twitch muscle fibre.

White Fibre:
White fibre is white, because it is much more dense muscle, with less blood capillaries flowing through it. The reason for this is because this muscle works nearly exclusively on anaerobic respiration. It also uses mainly glycogen for fuel, which is basically a complex carbohydrate stored in your muscles and liver, otherwise known as animal starch.

In terms of performance, these will contract extremely fast, with a lot of power. They have very little resistance to fatigue, and will tire exceptionally fast. For all you Biologists out there, they have very little mitochondria, and glycolysis is their source of ATP, or energy. They also have a large motor neuron density, so that the signals for contraction are that much more intense. They also use a chemical called creatine phosphate for their metabolic pathway, more on this later.

Red Fibre
Red fibres are less dense muscle fibres, with plenty of blood capillaries, giving them that nice deep red colour. They have a massive capacity for aerobic respiration due to the amount of blood supply they get for oxygen. Because of this, their main source of fuel is triglycerides, or fats/oils, which release more energy through oxidative phosphorylation than glycogen alone.

If your not interested in the biology, all you need to know is that they use mainly fat for energy, and that they contract slowly, with low power, and have an extremely high resistance to muscular fatigue.

So we have established that you have these two different types of muscle fibres in your body. Genetics determine your balance of these two muscles at birth. However, the type of training you do will greatly influence this, and completely alter it if you work hard enough.

Fast twitch work out
-Heavy weight, you want so much weight that you can only do 6 reps with it.
-6 reps per set, as stated.
-Large rest times between sets, between 60-90 seconds is best.
-many sets, depending on the exercise, 4 or 5
-large recovery times between exercises when you finish all your sets, around 2 minutes.

Now is the complicated bit, how to perform the actual rep. There are two stages of a rep. Concentric and Eccentric.

The concentric period will be when your target muscle is shortening, for a bench press, this would be when your pushing upwards, with a dumbell, this would be during the lift. The concentric part of your rep needs to be done powerfully, and quickly.

The eccentric part is when your muscle is lengthening. This would be as you lower the bar to your chest in a bench press, or lower the dumbell to your side. This is the most important part for any workout, regardless of fast twitch/slow twitch training. It must be done slowly. If you have the strength, you should be doing 5 counts lowering. This part causes much more fatigue to the muscle, and will give your much more benefits.

On top of this, you will be wanting to do plyometric techniques afterwards or on rest days. These would be typically body weight exercises, done at high speed with extreme explosiveness. An example would be to get a cone, and do press ups by jumping over the cone backwards and forwards.

Slow twitch training:
I know you didn't ask for this but I thought I might as well add it for the benefit of others.

-low weight
-High number of reps
-Low number of sets.
-very little time of rest between sets, 30 seconds max.

This is easier to do for the reps, as you just do a 3-5 count for the concentric portion of the rep, and a 3-5 count for the eccentric, giving a nice balance that should be easy to maintain for the whole set. [/list]

[p793]

Yo KLC that was very insightful, could you tell me a little bit more about the slow twitch training, if its beneficial etc? do you mix the two when weight training for ultimate soccer body? Sorry for the noobyness, my gym plan is bob-basic, but I want to improve it and it's quite a confusing topic.

I'm a friend of Kilian Jacquet but we barely speak, (for those of you who don't know, he was offered to play for chelsea but he didnt want to move to england at 15, also got to chance 100, but got a pro contract now at zulte waregem)

I was talking to him a few weeks ago anyway if you're intrested, and he's an extract from the conversation.

P says:
how often are you training with your club with the new contract?
kilian says:
every day
P says:
for how long/
kilian says:
it depends, 5 times a week i have to be from 5pm to 8 pm on the club
and usually monday i train 1h and a half with the team and the other hour and a half i have 'fitness training
strength aswell
P says:
do you do weights etc, gym routine?
kilian says:
yeah, a minimum of twice a week, and if i can 3 times
P says:
cool, i also have a gym routine, however i dont want to become too muscular, and because im not with a profesioanl club, im not too sure weather i should continue,
kilian says:
yeah,well i can recommend you to do 2 exercices for each muscle
2 chest, 2 back, 2 shoulders,2 biceps and 2 triceps
and do every exercise 4 times 15 reps
so not too much weight
P says:
i see
i have been doing 3 times 10 heavy and slow for upper body exersizes, and for the legs i have been doing lighter and faster like 3 x 15
kilian says:
yeah, but you don't want to be doing less than 12 reps too often
because it's gonna make oyu stronger, but heavier asweel
aswell**
P says:
thanks for the advice
so you would reccomend
2 of each exersize
4 times
15 reps
kilian says:
2 of each muscle yeah
P says:
yes sorry
kilian says:
no problem

[nick117]

Slow twitch simply put is endurance. You build them while running long distance or doing lots of reps. It's definitely not a 50/50 balance between the two more like 80/20 fast/slow.

[desire10]

Hey nick. After reading all of this I'm starting to question the effectiveness of that lunge and jog drill you've suggested to me before. If high reps, low weight is only really beneficial for muscular endurance, then don't you think the drill is a little lacking for improving strength, considering that high weight is the way to go?

[nick117]

Simply put, i'm just putting my faith into a national track coach who gave me those drills :p.

[desire10]

Simply put, i'm just putting my faith into a national track coach who gave me those drills :p.

Well I can't argue with that can I! It's at least better then doing nothing!

[TheBrilliance]

Klc, you get into a hastle with many on this site but you are a true genius when it comes to this stuff.

Ok. So i understand the fundamentals, if i want to be explosive or if I want to have muscular endurance.

I heard the development of 'power' is semi heavy weights, 10-12 reps, at a semi intense speed. Will this help?

And as a footballer, who wants to get stronger, and a little more bulky (only slightly), yet remain nimble and not heavy, would you recommend a mixture?

[klc123]

No explosiveness is power training.

Power by definition is the amount of work you can do in a set amount of time.

For example lifting 10 kg in 1 second is more powerful than lifting 20 kg in 30 seconds.

Power lifters traing using very low reps, sometimes only 2-3 reps per set. That is how you really build massive power.

As stated though, you need some sort of balance as a footballer, so you should train your slow twitch fibres as well.

Just as a side note, if your are a body builder, you will be training both fast twitch and slow twitch muscle fibres. I'm currently doing a work out routine that varies the weight and number of reps to make sure both types of fibre are worked out, and therefore you get biggest muscle gains in shorter amount of times.

The name of the training is pretty gay, but i've been doing the program for 2 months now and I swear by it.

Here it is http://www.projectswole.com/weight-trai ... in-muscle/