working on speed/quickness AND lifting weights?

[james330i]

Hey guys,

I'd like to get your take on this. I'm having second thoughts on what lifting weights is doing to my overall quickness and speed. I used to not care but since I've got into volleyball, it has become my sole motivator to hit the gym. Here's my weekly routine:

I'll do a full body routine every monday and Friday that hits my chest, back, shoulder and arms. My rep ranges change every 4-6 weeks, going from high (15 reps) to medium (10-12) to low (6-8). I incorporate supersets so I am usually spent after the routine.

Wednesday is strictly leg day. Max effort Squats, hang cleans, reverse lunges, jump squats, leg extensions and toe ups.

Tues, Thursday and Saturday are cardio days. I mix it up with regualr cardio and HIIT. I'll do deadlifts on one of those days as well along with 2 plyometric session a week.

Now my question is - while I am getting stronger, I'm not gaining weight (which is what I want) but I'm worried about how my lifting is ruining my speed and flexibily on the court!?!?

Most of my plyo. exercises focus on my explosivness while jumping (I'm happy with my vertical but no so much with my quickness).

What can I include in my routine to help with overall speed and quickness? Should I drop one circuit routine and focus entirely on workouts dedicated to improving speed and quickness?

Or does the speed and quickness come with more volleyball practice??

[mycena]

Ok I don't want to leave you hanging here so I will just let you know that I will do a bit of research and then give you some more info this evening. One thing I will say is that you work out a ton!! You must be in kick butt shape! But I will say more on that later!

[Air Diney]

The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is, when you are lifting, instead of doing ....hmm, I think you said dead lift cleans, try power cleans. Instead of just lifting the bar, lift the bar, rounding the bar up to your collar bone, and as you round it up, do a little power jump inbetween. Making sure each power clean is controled, but quick and explosive. That will help with getting your quickness down on that type of excerise anyway. You are still lifting, but adding jump and speed. I used to do these when I was on the track team for high jumping.

[mycena]

Here’s what I have to say, you can take it or leave it. And feel free to contradict me, I love other opinions. James the thing that comes to mind when I read your work out is “No wonder he isn’t as quick as he wants to be.” That is one very packed work out regime. One thing I want to impress on anyone who is embarking in a program like this is not to forget a rest day, I am assuming yours is Sunday. But don’t forget to include playing volleyball into your work out ‘plans’. Although your game might not be a big cardio workout depending on your level of play and physical abilities, it’s still work for your body and will add to your over all muscle fatigue. Tired muscles are slow.

As far as lifting, there are as many theories behind lifting as almost anything else. One person will swear by one method, someone else will do something completely different and results may be similar. A lot of it is figuring out what you/ your body does best with. Personally, I am a big fan of doing full body lifting routine. I don’t like to break days up into legs one day, arms the next or whatever. Pick your two or three days that you want to lift and pick core lifts that you are going to do on those days and then augment them with other lifts that you can switch up. Squats, cleans, and bench are like the building blocks. These lifts are really not just working one muscle group but many at once. Then you can mix up other lifts into that, lat pull downs, bi curls, tri work, lunges, calf raises. I like dumbbell work for arms work myself. I’d say pick 5 to 7 core lifts and then whatever else you think you need.

But how does stronger mix with quickness and flexibility? My biggest issue with people lifting is not working the entire muscle. Squats should go all the way down to 90 degrees, cleans should be racked, bi curls should extend to just not locked out. If you want to lose flexibility only make half your muscle strong! If your whole muscle can’t contract with equal force you will not have your full range of motion and will probably get injured. And STRETCH! That’s really what it comes down to. The more you lift, the more you have to stretch to compensate.

Ok now quickness. I am not 100% sure what you mean by quickness. Are you talking about ability to get to the ball? Arm speed when hitting? In any case, some of it is learned by playing, as I am slowly learning. Some of it is training. Plyos are a great way and you should continue to do them. One thing with lifting though is that you are training your muscles to respond to stress. If you are focusing on heavy weights, then you are probably moving slower to get those reps up. Think about maybe knocking off some weight. Increase the tempo (not too much!!) to help get your muscles used to normal motion speeds. Your training should mimic what you are going to be doing on the court. Along with plyos think about some sprints, you can just do take offs, or things like suicide sprints with the directional changes are good too.

My one last bit of advice since this is getting ridiculously long, is to think about using a med ball. Doing medicine balls exercises against a wall or with a partner makes you train all the important things. Resistance, from the weight of the ball, speed, from the tempo you can incorporate, and full range of motion because you are actually doing a complete movement. Other than that and just to make air diney happy, don’t forget your core. Strong abs and back are needed to get anything done! If you have any more specific questions, shoot away!!

---- disclaimer- this is just my personal opinion, it is not meant to be taken as a complete physical exercise routine, always see a doctor before starting any exercise program, if something hurts stop doing it.--------

[NewEnglandRT]

See my reply here (and I'm shocked none of this came from AirDiney's mouth) Vertical Jump Drills

Also, in terms of quickness..... one of the keys to vb is explosiveness. One of the things I picked up along the way when designing my workouts (my story sounds alot like your james) is while controlling the negative side of a rep, explode through the positive while focusing on good form.

In your post you mention on some days you do less reps, so I'm assuming you're doing more weight? That will lead to more bulk while it's good to once in a while find your one rep maximum use that as a guide to weight the rest of your workouts.

What is your real concern? On one hand you're dissapointed in your quickness, on the other hand you mentioned gaining weight? They don't really go hand in hand :shrug:

An important factor in this whole thing is nutrition, it's a huge factor on how your body is going to react to your strength training regimen. I'm no expert on any of this stuff, but a great book you can check out is "Power Eating" you can find it in the diet/nutrition section of your local Barnes & Noble or whatever bookstore you like. It does a great job of explaining what all the nutrition myths are, and the science behind sports nutrition, she also goes into how do design a diet around the type of results you'r looking to achieve.

One last work on quickness, you can do certain drill to enhance quickness to train your mind and body to react faster to certain things. As an ice hockey goaltender I worked on this alot. Here's a real easy one: grab a kick ball, or old volleyball (you don't want to use your brandy new molten pro touch for this one). Find a good sturdy wall with plenty or runoff room. Stand about 8 feet from the wall and this is going to sound dumb but bounce the ball off the wall and catch it (or if you want to improve some vb skill, set it into the wall). The key here is to just barely controll the ball as it comes back to you and repeat the motion. As you can control the ball, move closer to the wall. Be sure and exagerate the range of motion in your arms and keep your eye on the ball. Once you've mastered it with the large ball, move down in size the 8" basket balls make a good transition, then a tennis ball, then a raquet ball (playing raquetball is a great way to improve your quickness too). Got it down with a raquet ball..... add another ball! Alot of high level goaltenders can do this with three or four balls at a time.

That works for the upper body, as for the lower body. If you've been doing plyo then you're familiar with box jumps? Draw or imagine a box on the ground about 4-6 feet apart and jump to the corners? Well a good quickness and foot speed drill, open that box up to 15-20 feet (for the purpose of vb you may want to use court dimentions ie: front court, back court distances etc.). The key here is to move quickly! Start in one corner, let's say left back. Sprint forward, side step across (your blocking closing step will work good here) and just continue around the box, and use the diagonals as well. Wanna kick it up a notch? Do the drill while a partner tosses a ball at you, catch it and throw it back. When that's getting easy, have your partner hit down balls to you!

Remember the shuttle run from elementary school fitness tests? That's another good quickness drill.

OK enough of a novel from me

[ChrisKersey]

Cross training. Hitting the gym is great, but volleyball is not a game of slow muscle lifting. Here is my advice.

Running
Lower body strength is a must. You need a solid base. Two big excercises:

• Quick burst sprints up a moderate incline.
• Lateral shift: run your track straddling a line and instead of running straight, each step should be laterally to the other side of the line. This is not a forward speed drill, this is a lateral speed drill.

Whip Drills

• Got a net? Stand 2 feet away from it, toss a volleyball 5 feet above your head and smack the air out of it. Do 5 or more sets of 20 consecutive reps a day.
• Same exercise, but jump up to hit the ball instead of at a standing position.

Why

Because volleyball is played in a 900 sq ft space. You need forward and lateral burst speed, not stamina (within reason). You need fast arm whipping arm speed. It's one thing to pound the living daylights out of a ball, but if you have a slow strong swing, you'll get blocked twice as much as a fast weak swing. So practice a fast strong swing and you'll do well.

Predicting

Hitting and running after balls is only a fraction of the game. Reflexes and prediction are what make good volleyball players. During practice and games (always), concentrate on body language of the opposing team. You need to predict where the hitter is going to hit, and when s/he hits, you need the reflexes to react.

Reflexes
A really good habit to get into is before every practice and game, grab your volleyball and the nearest wall, and pepper with IT. Pepper partners are highly overrated (unless you're outdoors ) When I say pepper with it, I mean get close to the wall, say 2 feet for speed passing. Oh, and pass with one arm as well. One arm, two arms, stick a foot out there. Goal is to not let that ball hit the ground under any circumstances. DIVE Dangit! sacrifice! Hit the ball overhand and react to it. The more you react to fast objects, the more your body becomes accustomed to "reacting" without thinkig because of repetition.

Encouraging Words
Do all of these regularly, (discipline means doing it even when you don't feel like doing it). It's not enough to do it for a week and say "I'm a better volleyball player now." It's a career long discipline. The defense you cannot practice off the court. Play doubles as much as you can, and concentrate on the hitter as well as the setter. Get used to reading what the most likely set and hit is going to be based on body language. Use yoru peripheral vision to watch the ball.

Last last words

You don't need to gain weight... I read that and I pondered... it may be good to have more muscle mass en-toto, however think of the stress on your knees and the fact that hitting with more muscle doesn't necessarily equate to hitting harder, and even so, experience will just stand in front of your power hit and take it like a man. Think of a whip. The only reason for strong muscles is to increase acceleration of the arm. Having a little more beef behind the whip so to speak will help power, but it's not power that grounds a ball. It's quickness... keeping it away from the defense.

For the sake of understanding the problem of gaining weight... go pick up a 10 lb weight... do it right now as a matter of fact. Now think to yourself... How is this 10 pounds of weight going to affect my vertical versus the strength/speed of my hit? How will if affect every tendon attached to my knees? ... trust a veteran on this.

Chris

[james330i]

thanks for the awesome advice guys.

I'll definitely take note and incorporate some of them. I'll end up trading in some of my cardio days for more quickness/speed drills to help with my speed and reaction time. I figured these will help me more on the court then regular cardio...though I want to lose weight, I'll get that thru diet.

since i've started doing more and more compound lifts, i've noticed i have gotten more defined and have gotten leaner as well. I'm just looking for a better way to improve my speed and quickness when our sand leages start and we start playing alot more volleyball.

[kvb]

A friend of my suggested ankle weights. So I'm trying them this week. Will let you know how it goes. I'm working on increasing my vertical and improving my speed/quickness and this is just one of many things to try, but for this week I'm trying to do mainly this and see if there's any noticeable difference.

[NewEnglandRT]

I've heard alot of horror stories about ankle weights... lots of busted up joints. Do some independant research and decide for yourself. So many exersizes can be effective using only your body weight!

[set10]

If you want to be on the top of your game for the very physically taxing sand season, you shouldn't take the cardio out of your routine, cardio is ALWAYS good to do no matter what the sport. It seems to me that you need to sit down and figure out exactly what your priorities are. Become a better volleyball player, or a jacked up beefcake. Each has its ups and downs but figured out what is more important to you because there is a huge difference. My freshman year in college our "captain" was a big strong guy, could probably out lift me in roughly anything besides legs (I am also a soccer player) he would swing so hard but because of the excess weight and lack of range of motion he could not contact the ball at the proper spot so all he would do is hit it hard off the gym's back wall. Because I could hit on top of the ball I could hit much harder than him, and he is much stronger than I. Did I mention I am a setter? Needless to say we were excited when he graduated.