Another Personal Goal: Improving on Functional Strength and wanting to improve my Vertical Jump!

Ok...feel good about my volleyball play this whole week...but like any athlete be it professional, amateur or purely recreational...we all know we can only get better with proper strength and conditioning approaches which TT does in fact incorporate which is an added bonus for me as a TT member. Getting back into volleyball again (purely recreational at this point...I still take it seriously though!! I guess my competitive juices have resurfaced! Haha!) after playing 2 sessions in one week alone (that litterally lasted 2 hours a session), I can firmly say that my personal fitness has gotten a new meaning for me in terms of how I plan to approach my training now. Basic skills and mechanics are still pretty fundamentally sound here which is a good thing..it’s really just getting back to the actual speed of the game once again that I want to improve on as far athletic performance goes. Endurance wise...I feel great. It’s those other things that make a whole lot of difference in sports: functional strength. Those little things that pack a punch in your game like how to put more power in your hits, more thrust at the hips at a “joust” at the net, solide blocking techniques, more speed when trying to make an effective pass to the setter without pulling a groin in the process (that’s very common in any sport), how to react to a broken play, etc. I want to know how to incorporate total body workouts in relation to the sport (still total body is it for me. It’s just last week and maybe this week which may be approached a little differently as I want to determine a few things as far as a few exercises are concerned). Those are just some of the things I want to fine tune with my training. I’m glad I did some 1 rep maxes last week because that tells me how intensely I should be training here on out without risking any setbacks in continued strength gains.

Today I did a few exercises taken from Craig Ballantyne’s TT BW Workout for Athletes which I read up on the other day. May modify it a little bit but I played with a few of the exercises and I like it. May incorporate a few functional strength exercises specifically for volleyball play but Craig’s Athlete Specific TT workout actually covers most of it to start with so that’s a good thing (some I’ve done it the past in some of Craig’s other great programs). Will still be hitting the weights but with more emphasis on a limited number of exercises such as the squat, jumps, calf work, shoulder rotation work and exercises specifically geared towards the sport of volleyball. Core training will still be my primary focus!

Anyway, after a park workout this morning in the Southern California sun (with my 8 lb medicine ball again. I take that with me because it bounces good), I was in my garage this morning with something in mind as a list of things to do this morning. I wanted to see what my actual vertical jump was. So I put my shoes on and did some height measurements, measured my vertical arm span length, put a line of tape right at the tip of where my fingers were against the wall and started jumping at a 3 step tempo as I was reaching as high as I could at an imaginary target on the wall and softly landing on both feet. After 6 attempts, I had a good idea what part of the wall that was and I did an unofficial measurement of 22 inches. I would like to add more inches so I’m reading up on how to improve on that.

Feel kind of bad about myself yesterday. Since the wife did get me some Bowlfex DB’s...I really didn’t open the boxes up in the garage to assemble and get started with them. I actually kept looking at the package this whole week and as much as I wanted to be like a kid opening a birthday present, I kind of thought of three things here: 1) I have DB’s as it is 2) I have a commercial gym membership for days I want to go heavy and 3) I have my own body to work with that work just the same and it’s “built in” if you will. So I told my wife that I wanted to return them back and invest in a recumbant bike and she was all for it so I just got a proform recumbant bike ordered online today (for the same amount of a set of Bowflex DB’s) and it should be shipped in a week or so. I think that was a smarter purchase I think.