Experimenting and Testing

Ok so alotta the stuff I will be doing in this program will be just as this title says experimenting with what I think will work and testing to see if it does. Even though there already are tried and tested methods that do work already I myself have tried a lot of them. I have been from one side of the playing field (crossfit) to the complete other (typical long distance running training), for endurance training. An I see benfits and drawbacks in both.

I won't go into complete detail as to what I have seen in both because it would take far to long to write and I doubt anyone really wants to know, but I will say the two major things that I liked and disliked in both.

Crossfit gave me a great strength and endurance starting point and I saw results from it almost instantly. However, after I saw those results I started to stagnate as far as endurance went, also with crossfit sometimes I would worry if honestly I was going to get seriously injuried or not. Why? because sometimes I would let the thought that my time for the workout was more important than my form, now is that crossfits fault..NO..its mine and it took me getting hurt to realize that I was stressing to much about the time/speed than I was my form which is never a good idea.

Long distance training gave me the break that I needed from all the short hard workouts, it let see the true beauty of my sport an how when you just slow down a bit you can actually take in everything that your doin. It also taught me that there's more than one speed your body can use (my one speed is overdrive), an by using different speeds, in running at least, you can train your body to be ready for whatever might come at you race day. All though, I found that without any strength training and continued pounding on the ground my body could only handle about four weeks of this before I started to see overuse injuries (runners knee and achillies tendonists) also I found that if I didn't include intervals into my training my mental state started to get soft, I always just wanted to go easy.

So what I think is if you could meet in the middle with these two things, keep the intervals,tempos,and long runs just space them out to let one day of rest between each, keep the strength just not max out and use only 50% to 70% of my one rep max on circuits, and finally periodize training, that you could possibly get the best of both worlds.

Now how that's how I'm experimenting with it but how do I test it? Well, for running there's really two ways I'm going to test it 1 way is a race every month or so nothing huge a 5 or 10k probly at most, but other way I can judge my progress is through the long runs. By doing this ill be able to see two different aspects of my running ablity, speed(races) and endurance(long runs).

As for strength, well since I'm not going for absolute strength there's really no point in doing 1 rep max test every three months because more than likely they won't show anything. Instead ill gauge my performance on if I can stay injury free, if my speed goes up, and if my long endurance goes up. If those three things are good then I must be doing something right, but if not an I'm feeling really tired, heavy legs, etc. then I'm overtraining and I have to make adjustments.

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