The 5 Week Strength and Conditioning Program for Intermediate Athletes (Part 1)

It can be hard to find a solid strength and conditioning program that isn’t written for brand new athletes, or advanced lifters. This program is designed as a well rounded plan that will increase your strength, and improve your metabolic conditioning. It does not require specialized equipment, and can be completed in most commercial and home gyms. Keep reading to see if this program is right for you.

When I write a new program, my first step is always to ask what type of athlete am I aiming to improve? As you might imagine, increasing someone’s 10k run performance, is a bit different than increasing their Fight Gone Bad score.

For this program I came up with a few different types of athletes that I wanted to help out. First and foremost, I wanted to create a program that didn’t require special equipment that only functional fitness athletes use. This means you won’t find any wall balls, gymnastics rings, or assault bikes in the program. These are all great fitness tools, but not everyone has access to them.

I then considered what time of the yearly training cycle this program would fit into. This program is meant to fall into the off season for most athletes. If you’re a football player, or team sport athlete, this will be an excellent plan to increase your base of fitness for your competitive season.

This program can also serve as a starting block prior to moving onto more difficult programs such as my Fitness Competition Series, that last’s for 6 months. This intermediate program is designed for athletes that need strength, and metabolic conditioning, and have at least 6 months experience in the gym.

I’ve avoided programming very complex movements like full snatches or muscle ups, not because they aren’t great exercises, but because they are more difficult for newer athletes, without good coaching, to perform correctly. Trust me, this program is still very hard.

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Who This Program is Designed For

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• Athletes with at least 6 months experience in the gym
• Athletes who have safe technique on the major lifts
• Team sports athletes in the off season: Rugby, Football, Hockey, Soccer etc
• Advanced athletes returning to training after a break

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Before we get into the details of the program, I want to cover a few commonly asked questions about my programs. All my programs are written with a vertical column being one day’s worth of work. Yes, you can split the work up if you want, or change the schedule slightly. Your best bet is to get each week’s work done in 7 days. It doesn’t have to be in the exact manner that I specify it. Try to avoid pairing this program with other programs. It is very difficult to do this correctly. Now, without further ado, the program.

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CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE 5 WEEK STRENGTH AND CONDITIONING PROGRAM FOR INTERMEDIATE ATHLETES (PART1) PDF

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The 5 Week Strength and Conditioning Program for Intermediate Athletes (Part 1)

As the name implies this is going to be the first 5 weeks of the program. For the first week, I want you to get used to the training volume, movements, and challenges.

Week 1

This is the first week of the program, and as you can see it’s a lot of work! Each session should take you around an hour, or slightly more. This includes a warm up and cool down. Here’s week one.

You can see that this program is 5 days per week. As I stated above, you can do this as written 5 days back to back, or you could do something like 3 days on, 1 day rest, 2 days on, 1 day rest. As long as you get the work in, you’ll be fine.

Each session will start with a heavy compound movement. There will also be accessory movements, and lifts that will help you achieve enough volume in the right muscle groups, to build some mass and strength.

Week 2

No doubt you will have noticed that many of the elements are the exact same. For this 5 week cycle, we will be working with the same movements, and aim at increasing the total weight lifted, as well as the total amount of reps you are able to achieve each week.

If you take a second to examine the movements in this program, you’ll see that you really only need a minimum of equipment such as: bar and plates, dumbbells, pull up bar, and a box for jumping. If you don’t have everything that’s ok, this is easily modified to accommodate. Just put a comment below and I’ll give you my recommendations.

Week 3

This week is the first week where the lifting becomes very heavy. By now you’ll feel a little more confident, and hopefully you will have gotten used to this routine. That means as a coach, I have to make it harder, so you keep improving!

Please pay attention to the notes where I ask you to leave a rep or two in the tank. I do this for a reason, as it is a bad idea to take every set to failure. You can’t recover well from that type of training, and your risk of injury goes up.

Likewise, try to stick to your percentages as well as you can. If you find you are missing lifts then you are probably using an unrealistic max. You can always put the reps and weight you’ve lifted into a rep max calculator, and it will give you your estimated max. These percentages should be challenging, not long grinding reps with questionable form!

Week 4

This is the heaviest week of this cycle. I’m going to push you within a rep or so of failure on your main lifts, and I will expect that you increase your load when able, on your accessory movements.

At this point some of you might be close to setting new personal records in these lifts, but resist the urge to go for a small PR. You’ll have plenty of time to set new records later on, and they’ll be much bigger than what you can manage at this point.

I would also expect that you are starting to feel a little run down this week. The best way around this is to take a little more time in your warm up and try to sleep a bit more during the week. Hang on, because we have a deload coming!

Week 5

The promise land has arrived. It’s time to deload. You can expect that you will still lift relatively heavy this week, but the overall volume is reduced. This reduction in volume allows your body to recover from the weeks of hard training

These lifts and workouts will feel a little too easy after going very hard in previous weeks. Resist the urge to add in a little extra work. Remember your body needs time to physically repair itself.

The best way to explain the importance of this process is to think about rubbing sand paper on your skin. If you did this a lot, and never gave your body a chance to recover, you would have a bloody scab all the time. If you did it a little each day, and gave your body time to get used to this stressor, then you would gradually build up a callus. Be smart and stick to the program!

If you like this kind of program but want something with a little more detail then check this out!

Nutrition

You won’t go very far with a good training plan, and terrible eating practices. I recommend reading my Ultimate Nutrition Guide first. This will make sure you understand the basics of nutrition, and how to eat like an athlete. News flash, if you are avoiding a category of macronutrient like carbs, or fats, then you are leaving a lot of performance on the table.

I then recommend downloading my Nutrition Calculator. This is a great tool. It will tell you how much you should be eating, and give you macro recommendations. It will also help you track your body fat, and estimate how many calories each session actually burns. It’s also totally free!

Recovery

Most of recovery simply boils down to being an adult. You need 7-8 hours of sleep a night, and you need to stay hydrated. You don’t need to carry around gallons of water and pee every 15 minutes however!

Check out this article where I review research based recovery methods. You’ll find that things like icing, cryo treatments, and massage have limited use, in very specific circumstances.

Your best bang for your recovery buck, is simply to cool down with very easy cardio, like walking or cycling for 10 minutes after each session. You’ll feel better, and actually gain more muscle.

There is also some research indicating that wearing tights while training, and afterwards, can help you gain muscle and strength. Most importantly they drastically reduce muscle soreness. They are a must after a hard training session.

If you want my most popular muscle building program then check this out.

Final Thoughts

This can seem like a lot of work, but I alway tell my athletes that the hardest part about fitness is taking that step in the gym on a day you don’t have any motivation. That is what separates folks that complain about never setting PRs from those that regularly show improvement.

Consistency is the most important factor. This program won’t help if you do it perfectly for one week, then fall off the band wagon for the rest of it. Focus on your goal of becoming a better, stronger athlete, and before you know it, people are going to be asking you to train them!

If you liked this program then check out part two!

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