Lower body hiatus

[Sean Gregory]

Due to a knee injury, I'm being forced to take a break from all the best exercises (squats, deadlifts and sprints!). I've been trying to come up with a program that I can follow for a couple of months that will limit strength loss, build my gymnastic skills, improve my press, weighted pull-ups, and weighted dips, and I would be interested in some feedback. I'm not particularly interested in putting on a lot of mass, just getting stronger.
I plan to follow a 5/3/1 strength progression, but I'm wondering if a more beginner starting strength type progression would be more beneficial.

Monday - front lever, planche work - press - WOD*
Tuesday - back lever, L-sits - weighted pull-ups
Rest
Thursday - front, planche - weighted dips
Friday - back lever, L-sits - stiff-legged deadlift - WOD*
Rest Saturday, Sunday

*WOD's will be in the range of 3-10 minutes, mostly push ups, pull ups, back extensions.

I'm a mountaineer, and my primary goal with all of my training is to be a stronger faster climber (hard-hiking, and technical climbing). Whatever I can do while injured to prevent the most amount of regression is what I want for now.

My training background is a couple of years of competitive olympic lifting. Then a couple of years of crossfit, interspersed with starting strength, CA WODS, and injuries. Before injuring myself most recently, I had a Squat 1rm of 260, and DL 1rm of 330. I'm 21, 5'9'' and 160#.

[Steven Low]

Looks ok to me.

Try it out and see how it goes.

[Sean Gregory]

So I did a couple mesocycles of this, and it worked great. Bumped my press 1RM from 130 to 145, and weighted pull-ups 1RM from 55 to 75. Front levers are coming along, but had to stop the planche progression because of some forearm pain. Bodyweight dropped to 150 unfortunately.

Now, with success there, I have another fitness query...

I am enrolled in an outdoor school for next September, and I need to be in superior climbing fitness. First, I obviously need to undo the leg atrophy, which I have started with Squat and deadlift (no knee pain!) linear progression (re: Starting Strength) . Eating a lot, and trying to rest a lot to get my strength back. But I've lost almost all of my endurance and aerobic fitness. Structuring a program after that point however, is where I am having some trouble.

Here's what I'm thinking:
S - Rest
M - Squats + Cleans (5/3/1), short sprints
T - Metcon (>15 minutes)
W - Press (5/3/1), Rowing intervals
Th - Rest
F - DL + BP (5/3/1), short sprints
S - Intervals

This is interspersed with a fair amount of downhill skiing (Whistler baby!). I'll follow this until April, when I will throw in a day of 3 hr weighted hill climbs on saturdays to replace the intervals, and some ring work (won't have access to either hills or rings until then).

This is all conjecture from my uneducated standpoint, and I'm not really sure how to most effectively train for long (>6 hours of climbing for several days at a time with a heavy pack) endurance! Should I:
- include more hill climbs with less strength training, or this too taxing/inefficient?
- less conditioning for more aerobic work?
- I'll be doing manual labour for the summer on a golf course, which is fairly exhausting. Will this be too much work? What should I cut form the program?

To use Steven Low's analogy, I've have a good engine (strength), but the rest of my car (muscular endurance and cardiovascular ability) is suffering.

Any input is appreciated.

[Sean Gregory]

So, I've put some more thought into this and, to answer my own question, I think this will be too much volume. Instead, I'll cut it down to 2 days a week of heavy lifting, 1 day of 3+ hours of hill climbing, and 1 short intense metcon.

One thing I'm still not at all sure of though, is how does endurance training and strength training compete with each other in the body. Everything I read describes them as being opposite ends of the spectrum, so would it be more beneficial to train one, then the other (cyclically), or does training them both simultaneously generate similar results.