Blimey, it's been a mental summer and I know I've been neglecting you. Now that we've got the small matter of the Olympics out the way (I'll pull together my thoughts on that at some point I promise) I thought I would leave you with this short sharp post on a Friday afternoon.
When you sit down to put together your training programme have a think about how much time is spent training the various areas. There are many ways to look it and I'm not even going to try and talk about movement patterns. Just think how much of your programme is focused on each of these areas:
Upper Body
Core
Lower Body
There will always be exceptions to the guideline that I'm about to suggest and that's fine, just make sure you can back up your argument with a sound reason. We all know we need to work the kinetic chain for athletic development but the key is figuring how to TRAIN THE CHAIN!
Here's a general rule of thumb that I consider each time I develop a programme:
Upper Body - 20%
I know I know, this may come as a surprise to many people but you really don't need to allocate sooooooo much of your training time to developing your upper body.
Core - 30%
Why so little time on the core? Well if you have a decent programme with compound structural lifts, you're going to be working your 'core' pretty hard throughout the session so you really don't need to spend a whole heap of time focusing specifically on it during your session.
Lower Body - 50% This is where you need to focus most of your attention. I know you can't see them in the mirror but trust me on this, strong and powerful legs are the key to developing a solid athletic based training programme.