Exercise Selections for One Microcycle (see tables 2-5)
- Week 24 in January until Week 32 beginning of March.
Exercise Order
- Due to novice participant, core and assistance exercise order incorporates alternated upper and lower body exercises, and alternated push and pull (Kraemer & Ratamess, 2004).
- Note: some exercises do not follow the strict push/pull structure in order for assistance exercises to complement core movement patterns.
Training Load and Repetitions
- Estimated 1 repetition maximum (RM) testing for core exercises, as participant has beginner status and directly testing 1RM is too stressful for the body.
- Multiple RM testing for assistance exercises due to smaller muscle recruitment during exercises.
- Five RM testing exercises selected are back squat, shoulder press, lunge, lat pull down and calf raise (Baechle & Earle, 2008).
- Load for core exercises estimated when filming exercise videos and calculated using ≤67% 1RM for muscular endurance.
- Load for assistance exercises estimated when filming exercise videos and calculated using multiple RM testing based on goal repetitions.
- Load for prehabilitation, core stability and flexibility exercises is body weight to enable technique.
- Goal repetitions for muscular endurance for core exercises is 12 (Day & Johnson, 2012), for assistance, prehabilitation and core stability exercises is 15 (Fleck & Kraemer, 2004).
- Stretches are held for 30 seconds (Woods, Bishop & Jones, 2007).
Volume
- Participant performs 2 sets of each exercise (Fleck & Kraemer, 2004).
- Three sets of flexibility exercises are performed (Woods et al., 2007).
Rest Periods
- Prehabilitation, core and core stability exercises - 30 seconds rest between sets (Wagner et al., 2010).
- Assistance - 60 seconds rest between sets (Kraemer & Ratamess, 2004).
- Flexibility - 10 seconds between sets.
- Administer 2 minutes between upper and lower body exercises, and core stability exercises. This allows the participant's respiratory and cardiovascular systems to recover efficiently (Sforzo & Touey, 1996).
Table 2. Exercise selections, order, training load and repetitions, sets and rest for prehabilitation exercises
Table 3. Exercise selections, order, training load and repetitions, sets and rest for core and assistance exercises
Table 4. Exercise selections, order, training load and repetitions, sets and rest for core stability exercises
Table 5. Exercise selections, order, training load and repetitions, sets and rest for flexibility exercises
