Designing a Weight Routine

[cjfalkenrath]

To all who have an answer, opinion or related questions:

My high school team is looking to start a weight routine this year and I was wondering if there are any specific lifts or lifting styles that are especially useful for water polo. There are a couple of reasons we are lifting, and I think this will help you to critique and give feedback. If you feel I have missed something, please let me know! I am in the process of typing up our prospective routine, and will post it soon. These are main things I am wondering:

• What should be our lifting focus (power, endurance, etc)
• How can we achieve these lifting goals
• What sort of weight routine should be implemented
• In your opinion, what is the most important lift for each of the muscle groups?



Our swim team tried out an interesting weight routine this year doing 21 reps in 21 seconds (A nice 50 time), which I feel could accomplish a lot of the endurance and power goals, but won’t help with size. While size is certainly not the most important element a player could have, keep in mind this is a very physically small team (Average player is about 5’10” and 145/150 lbs) and I feel gains in size would potentially enable better play. Returning to the 21 reps in 21 seconds, what sort of lifting styles (pyramids, one rep max, etc) do you reccommend?

More to come,

Chris Falkenrath

[cjfalkenrath]

*I thought I should add that it's absolutely ok just to leave a link and a caption if something I ask is addressed in an article or on a forum!

[MichaelReid]

Hello Chris Falkenrath,

Please read the articles I have written for WaterPoloPlanet.com:

http://www.waterpoloplanet.com/polo_articles.html#mike

There are training programs and warm ups in the articles that I highly recommend you use with your team.

e.g. A Strength Training Program: http://www.waterpoloplanet.com/HTML_Mike_pages/mr02_Strength_Training.html

• What should be our lifting focus (power, endurance, etc)

Learn to move first, then when good movement technique is achieved
gradually add load to build strength.

• How can we achieve these lifting goals

I am sorry, I do not understand; what exactly are your goals?

• What sort of weight routine should be implemented

http://www.waterpoloplanet.com/HTML_Mike_pages/mr02_Strength_Training.html

• In your opinion, what is the most important lift for each of the muscle groups?

Do not think muscles, think movements. Multi-joint exercises will achieve most (90%+) of what you need (e.g. squats, push ups, chin ups). There are roughly 640 muscles in the human body but you really only need 3-5 key movements to train almost all, if not all of them.

or you could just do this one movement: http://www.waterpoloplanet.com/HTML_Mike_pages/mr08_Strength_Training.html

what sort of lifting styles (pyramids, one rep max, etc) do you recommend?

Straight sets and reps (e.g. 3 x 10 reps, 2 x 20 reps, 5 x 5 reps) are fine to start with and will take you very far with these young athletes. Do not worry about doing something "advanced", simple is best even for the highest level athlete.

[cjfalkenrath]

Thanks Mike,

Those articles are exactly what I needed to see and will help us out alot in our upcoming season!

Chris Falkenrath

(Consider this case closed)