By Michael Krueger
Periodization has been around for quite awhile now. The Soviets did a lot of research and application of this technique back in the 1960s and, along with some help from steroids, kicked the world’s collective butts in most strength sports. With some subtle and not so subtle variations, it has endured as the best way for competitive athletes to train.
So, what does this method have for those of us who aren’t competitive athletes, but still want to get the most from our training?
How it Works
Many lifters believe that if you train with all out effort, brutally beating your muscles every time you train, you will get big and strong. They say all you need to do is eat massive amounts of food, wait long enough between exercise bouts to allow for recovery, and then repeat the process again and again. This will in fact work for awhile, but it isn’t sustainable over the long term.
Periodization is little more than planned change. It is understood that your body will eventually adapt to a given stressor, thereby limiting the effectiveness of that stressor to induce further improvement. Study after study confirms that you need to make some changes or your ability to continue to progress will be blunted.
This is what periodization is designed to prevent: staleness, burnout, injury, frustration, and failure. Planning for the seemingly inevitable plateau might appear to be a bit on the defeatist side, but this isn’t so at all. By planning you actually avoid the “plateau” and replace it with an anticipated “cycling.”
Some might say this is semantic jibber-jabber, but it really isn’t; it works well on two different levels. As I’ve mentioned before, fitness has a huge mental component, and if your head isn’t in the game, your body sure isn’t going to be. By planning your cycles you demonstrate an understanding of how progress works so you won’t be disappointed when your gains start to slow and the workouts become mentally tough to the point of being onerous. At this point the planned changes kick in and your workouts become fresh and exciting again.
On the physical side, cycling allows a break from the brutally hard work you’ve been doing for the past weeks. Muscles need a lot of time to adapt as well as nutrients and rest to grow. If you push your muscles to their maximum, and then continue to try and force more out of them, they will fail. Sometimes the failure is quite spectacular, culminating in torn muscles and ruptured tendons. Other times, your performance just starts to degrade. Each workout, your numbers get poorer and poorer. You are tired all the time and may even get sick with niggling little infections. This is your body telling you that you have overtrained and are now going to have to pay the price, and the price may be very high indeed. Overtraining, while rare in recreational athletes, can and does affect anyone who doesn’t train smart and heed the warning signs. It can takes weeks, months or even years to completely recover, and that is assuming you will actually ever fully recover.
Complicated?
If you have ever seen a periodization chart mapping out workouts, weights, exercises, intensity, volume, nutrition, and myriad other variables, you would be right in thinking this is way too complex for the average person to become involved in, much less find beneficial. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that way.
You have probably noticed how making a small change in an exercise can have a big effect on how well it works. What periodization does is put those small changes into an organized plan. For instance, changing from a sitting to standing position on an overhead press or altering the width of your grip on the bar can completely change the exercise. Switching rep schemes or the number of sets or even just the order of the exercises makes a huge difference. This keeps your mind fresh, challenges your body, and forces adaptations in both.
In its simplest form, find your starting point and work until you hit the point where you aren’t making any more progress. Once you get there, don’t make an all out effort to smash through it; instead, end the cycle, back off, and then begin again. You start the new cycle with increased poundage in comparison to where you began the previous cycle, or with new rep ranges or different performance criteria for the exercises. The idea is that each time you end one cycle and begin a new one, you come back a little stronger than you were before.
Traditionally, the cycles run about 12 weeks with a low weight/high rep phase, a medium rep/medium weight phase, and finish with a high weight/low rep phase. Each of these phases are meant to place a particular type of stress on your body: muscular endurance, followed by hypertrophy and, finally, strength and power. This can be programmed very methodically to bring you to a competitive peak on a specific date.
This is where I diverge slightly from the classic periodization training; it is done primarily out of pragmatism and for simplicity’s sake.
Real Life Adaptations
I’ve had some interesting discussions with some of my clients regarding the periodization of their programs, or more precisely, the lack thereof. The truth of the matter is that many people don’t work out consistently enough or hard enough for periodization to enter into the equation except on the most basic of levels.
The problems begin with consistency. If you miss a couple of scheduled workouts per month or ever miss two in a row it is difficult to realize any huge benefit from the progression built into periodization. If you are a chronic routine switcher or like to “try new things” on a lark, or if you have a competitive streak and try to beat your work out partners in impromptu contests you probably won’t get a lot out of periodization.
If you don’t like to work out with a high degree of intensity and don’t push yourself to your max, then periodization will be of limited benefit to you. If you have trouble staying focused on what you are trying to accomplish or sticking to a plan or you don’t like to keep records, then perhaps this isn’t the way to go for you.
But, even for those who don’t fit into the classic periodization mold, there is still something that you may gain from it. If you are willing to always try for a little more, one more rep or one more pound, and then when you can’t increase anymore, lower the weight and start over again with a little more weight than when you started, you will get stronger.
This is the simple message that periodization has taught us, and it applies to everyone. Work hard, regularly increase the weight until you no longer make your target rep count, and then lower the reps and continue adding weight until you are doing the lowest number of reps with which you are comfortable, then reduce the weight, raise the reps, and begin again.
A Lifelong Quest
If you apply the lessons of periodization, even loosely, you will get stronger and you may avoid burnout. Developing fitness takes time and the smarter you go about it the better the results.
If you want to continue to steadily improve week after week, year after year, and decade after decade, periodization is the way to go. Not a bad return for a little planning.
Michael Krueger is an NSCA-certified personal trainer. He got his start in fitness training while serving in the United States Coast Guard. He works with firefighters and others in and around Madison, Wisconsin. He is available to fire departments, civic organizations, and athletic teams for training, consulting, and speaking engagements. He has published numerous articles on fitness, health, and the mind-body connection and was a featured speaker at the IAFC’s FRI 2009 Health Day in Dallas, Texas. E-mail him at MKPTLLC@gmail.com.
