If you’ve ever spent any time researching training, you’ve more than likely come across the word periodization. You may have also seen the terms microcycle, mesocycle, and macrocycle. These are all nice words, but I don’t think you should worry with them.
No, all you need to understand is that training can be planned out in the short, middle, and long-term. Doesn’t that sound better?
Look, no offense to the sports science community, but we shouldn’t be overthinking this shit just for the sake of it. If you want to jump higher, lift more, or crush Fran, you need a plan! Where would you like to be in a year? Where are you now? Hint: It helps to be honest with yourself. What’s a reasonable goal for 1, 2…3 months from now? I think you’ve got the idea.
So, where do you start?
You start by understanding the block. A block is nothing more than a unit of time. It could be a week, but that’s not really that long, is it? Thinking only one week ahead certainly doesn’t seem like good planning to me.
The block could be a few months long, but it can be hard to plan out day to day training that far ahead. You just don’t know what is going to happen between now and then. What we need is a practical unit of time.
For our purposes, a 4-week block is perfect.
Now, we know that we’re trying to get better at something. Let’s assume that it’s squatting. There are four different types of workouts that we could do in this block. We could go light, medium, heavy, or very heavy. Note: a very heavy workout could utilize a lot of weight, or, a lot of reps.
Each of these workouts has an immediate effect on your body. A medium workout isn’t that bad, while a very heavy workout may take you a week to recover. Alternatively, a light workout isn’t that challenging, but will not make you stronger. In other words, each workout has a strength and fatigue after effect.
Take a look at this chart (yes, I drew it!). This is a simple 4-week block. The red line represents fatigue, while the blue line represents strength, or your performance.
Just to keep things simple, let’s assume you’re squatting once a week. On week 1, you do a medium workout. On weeks 2 and 3, you do a heavy, then a very heavy workout. Each session, you start to accumulate fatigue. I’m sure everyone has felt that before. If you keep trying to go heavier, heavier and heavier, you’ll keep getting pretty tired and plateau, even regress.
While the fatigue starts to build, your strength will take a bit of a dive. Even if you still lift the same weight, maybe you notice that you lifted it slower. Maybe you lifted it exactly the same, but you have some pain, etc.
In this model, things are going bad by week 3. But, that’s exactly what you want!
Enter the light week.
By reducing the amount of weight and reps you do during week 4, you’ll give yourself a much needed break. Once you allow the fatigue to diminish, performance will rebound. Hopefully, it will increase just above where you were at the beginning of the block.
We use this basic plan quite a bit at Faction. However, there are other ways to approach it. Here’s a model I use a lot in my own training.
You’ll notice that fatigue starts out a bit higher, tapers off during week 2, peaks during week 3, and falls off during week 4. This corresponds to heavy, medium, very heavy, and light workouts.
That loading pattern allows you to bump your performance up a bit at the end of week 2, then even more by the end of week 4.
I think these models are two of the best ways to plan your training in the short-term. Just make sure that you progress slowly, but surely. Take small jumps week to week, always focusing on improving. That may mean lifting more weight, doing more reps, lifting the same weight with more speed, or, just doing the same exact thing with better form.
Next time around, we’ll take things to the next level. What if you want to work on more than one thing at a time? What if you’re not making progress, or training for a meet?
Patience, friend. Patience.
Chris
