Originally Posted by
verynecessary
Originally Posted by
I3
Originally Posted by
verynecessary
Originally Posted by
wawaweewa
Originally Posted by I3
Whats better for strength - or for a basketball player
I.E. Squats 3x10 (challenging weight but quality over quantity)
or
Squats 3x10 (light weight) x8 (moderate) x 6 (heavy)
.. would it be ideal to train every muscle group this way (dropsets) or would a 3x10/4x10/5x10 with a comfortable weight suffice and then mix in a dropset/failure every once in awhile to spice them thangs up?
Unless you're training for looks or secondary exercises you should go heavy.
If you're training for sport you need to do heavy squats. You're looking for strentgh and speed and you increase those traits by consistently placing more and more stress on your body.
i agree. go with the heavy sets to recruit the most fibers at one time. playing ball should be enough to get that light work in from jumping, changing direction, etc. plyometrics will help you better utilize your strength gains.
Thanks for the heads up.. so basically just go heavy and stick consistent with reps and sets - increasing the weight when I can?
Another thing, do you have any good sources or articles on Plyos? I've been doing the P90x plyometrics programme, but im getting used to it, the only thing I can do to get more out of it is possibly concentrate more on technique more. Is it possible to do Plyos with weights? That would be my worst nightmare...
yea since your goal is to gain strength, you can just go heavy and increase poundage steadily until you plateau. no real need to deviate from that until you get stuck. lighter weight will help you with strength endurance if you do high reps, but that should come anyway with conditioning.
i never considered the p90x "plyos" real plyos... not to say they don't work, but for athletics you want to doing low volume, high quality plyos. from a performance standpoint, you shouldn't overload on plyometrics because the emphasis is on the speed of execution, maximal explosiveness/reactiveness. once you get fatigued, it becomes a conditioning exercise, so ideally you should be doing these right after your warmup, and not at the end of a workout. if you perform plyos slow, it's turns into cardio. plyo routines should be short, with lots of rest inbetween reps and sets. you should come away from it not feeling like you did a whole lot really.
plyos with weights are possible, but if anything very minimal weights. think medicine balls type of weights. what's good about med balls is they translate to better coordination. a weight vest would work also, just as long as it isn't heavy enough to slow you down. the key here to train for greater and faster muscle fiber recruitment as well as reactiveness. i'd say it's better to keep the weighted exercises separate from plyos. you can do clean & jerk, snatch, jump squats, etc. after a plyo session... high weight, low reps. i like one arm dumbbell snatches
for basketball, the main plyo exercises i'd focus on for jumping are box jumps (jumping off a box and rebounding as quickly as possible into a max effort jump) and altitude drops/drop jumps (jumping down off a box and landing silently with as little movement upon ground contact as possible). set your box jump height about where your rebound jump is highest, and then increase the box height as you improve; you can probably use the same height for altitude drops. there are a few random plyo-type exercises that also have some benefits (like jumping side to side or front to back consecutively as many times as possible in a short interval (10-20sec).