Hi all. So here is the situation - after 27 hours of travel I landed last night in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I will be here for the next six months training muay Thai full time - six days a week, twice a day. I have heard there is a gym with reasonable weightlifting equipment about 5 kilometers from here.
I really don’t want to come back home with my new skills but also super weak. The plan is to lift weights once a week and I would like to at least maintain my strength if not get stronger, but I’m not sure if that will be possible, training as much as I will be.
I’m not super strong, but do have a 2X body weight deadlift (375 @ 180 lbs) that I would really like to hold on to. When home I mostly follow 5/3/1 but if someone wants to give advice on what to do when I can only lift one day a week that would be super helpful. Mostly interested in maintaining the DL.
For anyone who is interested or if it is helpful, below is the muay Thai training schedule I’ll be following:
I know one guy who lifts fot PL who cuts to one day a week going into competitions. In your case, at 12 rather intense workouts a week already, I think you may be pushing it pretty close to overtraining if you lift to failure on all competition lifts even once a week. Perhaps get into the training first, see how you feel?
Barring that, just doing 5x5 of bench, squat, overhead, and dl once per week should be better than doing nothing, but monitor yourself and make sure you’re not getting too beat up.
You flew to Thailand and are training Muay Thai twice a day for five hours a day in preparation for a fight (I assume) and you’re worried about your deadlift?
Seriously, if your priorities weren’t in order, you should not have gotten on the plane.
Thanks, devildog_jim - reading through the Dan John article now and I think it’ll be helpful. I think, obviously since I plan to lift once a week and this template is for twice a week, I’ll just halve it and use that as a starting point. I guess I won’t know how much all this cardio is going to cut my strength until I get into the swing of things, but I like the idea of spending a long time at the gym during my one session and focusing mainly on two lifts (in my case I’ll probably choose deadlift and push press.)
Fightingirish26 - no need to worry about my priorities friend, I want to be as prepared as possible for my fights (I plan to fight a bunch while I’m here) and part of having an advantage in fighting, as well as anything else, is doing what your opponent is not. I’m in the birthplace and the center of muay Thai, and while I plan to train as hard as I can and be as prepared as possible there is almost no way I can have as much experience as my opponents. I can, however, be stronger.