Training for a college athlete during the season.

I play golf at a D2 University and have gone through the full Beginner Template (all three blocks), General Strength and Conditioning Template (10 weeks), and The Bridge (8 weeks) over the last couple of years. I have paused my training while I am at school as I didn’t know what to do during the season, and we had lifts here. I feel like I should be doing my own thing outside of team lifts to give me an advantage and continue to get stronger and after listening to the podcast about Tiger that gave me some ideas, but I was wondering if you could give me a more detailed approach to this.

In case you were wondering, we “workout” 2 days a week and we do a lot of “Golf specific” workouts. Lots of things like, dead-bug dumbbell bench, 3/4 off body dumbbell bench, one leg trap bar deadlifts, and a lot of band stuff. I don’t necessarily hate the things we do as in season it keeps me feeling good, but at the same time I feel like if I was continuing to get strong while staying away from failure and using lower RPE 6-7, I would benefit and gain an advantage over the field.

Anyway, I just wanted to know if you had any ideas to help me or if you think that what we do as a team is good enough. Thank you for all of the content and templates that you have made, and everything that you have done with Barbell Medicine!

Cooper,

Thanks for the kind words and the post. Hope you’re hitting them well in prep for February.

Sounds like you’re pretty well trained given your history. I’d typically advocate for 2x/wk lifting “in season” with 3-4 lifts a piece. However, the 2x/wk sessions with the golf team make me think that’s likely to be too much, especially if you have a tournament. I’d probably do something like this on a 2-week schedule:

Day 1, week 1
Squat x 4-6 reps @ RPE 6-7 x 2-3 sets
Row variant x 8-12 reps @ RPE 6-7 x 2-3 sets
biceps and triceps stuff within ~ 10 min

Day 2, week 1
Bench x 4-6 reps @ RPE 6-7 x 2-3 sets
Deadlift variant x 5-8 reps @ RPE 6-7 x 2-3 sets
Forearm stuff within ~ 5 min

Day 1, week 2
Squat variant x 5-8 reps @ RPE 6-7 x 2-3 sets
Press (or variant) x 5-8 reps @ RPE 6-7 x 2-3 sets
​biceps and triceps stuff within ~ 10 min

Day 2, week 2
​​Deadlift x 4-6 reps @ RPE 6-7 x 2 sets
​Bench variant x 6-10 reps @ RPE 6-7 x 2-3 sets
Forearm stuff within ~ 5 min

I’d take 2 days off before any tournament you cared about as well.