Progression by Rudnev

It is fairly pointless to list all possible ways to progress in training. The idea behind any progressiong is simple: gradually increase the load. The load itself can be defined as the weight lifted, the duration of the set, the reps, the reps per minute and whatever else you can come up with. One of the first posts of this blog referred to the Russian EDT, very simple progression. Recently I came across an article by SL Rudnev on the Rostov GS site, Variability of Preparatory Programs for Classical Competition, at this link: http://www.fgsrostov.aaanet.ru/Rudnev_2.doc . I want to reproduce it here as an example of another Way.

The idea of the plan is to increase the duration of the sets without changing rest intervals. It consists of eight steps.

Step 1.
10 x 1’00”, rest 1’00”
Tempo – 14.min

Step 2.
8 x 1’15”, rest 1’00”
Tempo – 13.5 min

Step 3.
6 x 1’40”, rest 1’00”
Tempo – 13 min

Step 4.
5 x 2’00”, rest 1’00”
Tempo – 12 min

Step 5.
4 x 2’30”, rest 1’00”
Tempo – 11.5 min

Step 6.
3 x 3’20”, rest 1’00”
Tempo – 11 min

Step 7.
2 x 5’00”, rest 1’00”
Tempo – 10.5 min

Step 8.
1 x 10 = competition

Nice and simple. In my opinion the jump from two 5 minute sets to one ten of minutes may be a bit steep, so one can use intermediate steps, such as doing a set of six, seven and eight minutes first. Nice and simple. You achieve one step – progress to another. Feel free to tweak the volume up and down from session to session.