Over the past six months at Outlaw SFR we have been extremely fortunate to be able to continue in our mission and stay operating throughout this worldwide pandemic.
Adaptations were made for the health and safety of our athletes and clients, but we did not let that stop us in fulfilling our mission statement of Relentlessly pursuing peak performance through hard work and consistent training. Weeks of outside training, social distancing, and mask-wearing still consisted of gains in power, strength, and demonstrated our athletes’ commitment to getting better.
We have just finished up a 4-week phase within which we were able to consistently be back in the weight room. This yielded benefits that were not only appropriate and slowly progressive but immense in terms of strength for some of our athletes.
We employed a strategy called Autoregulated Progressive Resistance Exercise (APRE). Simply what we did was load the bench press and trap bar deadlift to a near maximal effort every week. The athletes had a goal of performing 3 repetitions with this near maximal weight each week, and the current week’s weight was based on the performance from the previous week, hence progressive.
We had some athletes increase their estimated one rep maximum by 70 pounds, which is substantial by anyone’s estimation in four weeks of training. Other athletes made small gains each week amounting to a gain of 20 pounds in their estimated one rep maximum, which usually equates to a “good summer of training” only they did it in four weeks.
In total, we had up to 24 athletes complete this APRE phase on any week but had a consistent showing (all four weeks completed in both lifts) by about 10 athletes. (13 for the bench press, 8 for the trap bar deadlift) I have taken the data from those 13 and 8 athletes, estimated a one-rep maximum (1RM), and averaged it across the four weeks of training.
As these results show, we are still getting stronger. We are committed to setting athletes up for success and providing effective coaching. At Outlaw this summer we persevered and we got better because of it.
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