Which activity is making me slower?!
Question: I started a physical training workout a year ago (plyometric) for my legs and now my vertical leap is about 36 inches. i also started squats and i can do like 350. but then just a few weeks ago, i noticed that my 100m was slow as hell. i used to get 12.0 easy and now i can barely get less than 12.6....do you think that doing squats is making me slow, or is it the plyometrics (calf raises, jumps, 2 inch hops...)? I really dont want to be a slow piece of sh*t but i still dont want to lose the 15 inches i gained from my new workout. should i keep the current program, or should i change it somehow and get back the speed i lost (sacrificing the 35 vertical leap that i worked for the past year)?
Answers: I started a physical training workout a year ago (plyometric) for my legs and now my vertical leap is about 36 inches. i also started squats and i can do like 350. but then just a few weeks ago, i noticed that my 100m was slow as hell. i used to get 12.0 easy and now i can barely get less than 12.6....do you think that doing squats is making me slow, or is it the plyometrics (calf raises, jumps, 2 inch hops...)? I really dont want to be a slow piece of sh*t but i still dont want to lose the 15 inches i gained from my new workout. should i keep the current program, or should i change it somehow and get back the speed i lost (sacrificing the 35 vertical leap that i worked for the past year)?
you can't expect to maintain your best 100m all the time. there are always "off" days when it comes to athletic performance for a variety of reasons. sometimes they are physical other times physcological. usually when there is a decrease in athletic performance it is a sure indicator of overtraining which is basically when the central nervous system is not allowed to fully recover from continuous sessions of high intensity exercise. another thing is your stretching regimen. have you been keeping up with it? remember that the more relaxed a muscle is at rest the more force it can generate over the entire range of motion.
* me: ex-Division I - NCAA 100m & 200m sprinter & long jumper