Mark Claxton's Training Leading Up To DFAC World Cup
Why Abbreviated Training?
What Was Your Training Like Leading Up To DFAC World Cup?
I was training four to five times a week and I wouldn't put rest days on any specific day because I worked shifts at the time. I would just trained whenever I could and sometimes I'd end up training five days a week and some weeks I was training four. My training was in phases. I've cycled through routines, so there's certain things that I enjoyed more than others and that I found beneficial at that time I was running it, but if I was to try and return to them now I wouldn't be able to do them. I'd have quite an elaborate training split. At one point my weakness was my back, I came to a point with deadlifting where I was just getting SI joint issues every time I would perform the lift. The risk versus reward for things like deadlifts was skewed for me at that time and not being knowledgeable enough to know how to deal with it, I thought “ok, I'm going to make up for that by training back twice a week” so I tried that and split my back training into two workouts. so more pull downs in one session and rows in another session. I looked at my strong points, which for me was my chest so I thought, well I'm going to train chest and then abbreviate back training by performing all my pulldown movements afterwards and tag biceps on the end. I would do quads and calves together in a separate workout, that would be fairly abbreviated because it was such a big muscle group and it would fatigue me quite a lot. The following workouts would be shoulders and triceps and back and hamstrings, but this would be all the other parts of my back, so I would include all my “off the floor exercises” with hamstring exercises like deadlifts or any other hip hinges. I did a lot more rows as well. Any pulling exercises above the head, w’ere on the other day when I trained chest and I really enjoyed that. That seemed to help me quite a lot. It helped my hamstrings and it certainly helped my back. At that time I was training a lot higher volumes than high intensity. I would always just do multiple sets of an exercise although fast forward a couple of years I think my ability to work within a set went up and I wouldn't have been able to do that now. If I tried something like that currently, I think there'd be too much crossover between hamstrings and quads. I feel like my hamstrings would be too fragile and even though I'm training quads, hamstrings and glutes are also involved a lot.
