Periodization: Be at Your Peak When it Counts
Would you like to join the PSI Periodization Club? Email ivanh@psipt.com for details.
Why is this important to you? Most Americans are dissatisfied with their current fitness status. Injury, fear of injury, fatigue, and the lack of a real plan commonly prevent many from reaching their athletic potential. Give yourself the best opportunity to diminish the risk of overuse injuries or repetitive strains so you can continue to train and compete at your full athletic potential.
There could be a host of reasons why you are considering periodization. Training for a race or simply to lose 20 pounds. Whatever the reason, the principles of periodization will be the same, the intensity and frequency of training will differ.
In order for periodization to work, you will need a strategy that is almost bipolar in nature in that it combines increasingly hard effort workouts— with rest days and rest weeks. Over the weeks and months, this hard/easy schedule is the paradigm shift that gives your body time to heal, recover, and build newer, bigger, stronger, faster muscles and connective tissue.
The Basic Laws of Periodization
1st: Recovery
The most important thing to remember is that continuous training is futile if recovery is not provided. No one every became stronger during a workout, it’s only after, when time for recovery is provided that your fitness improves. Recovery is built in to all periodization training models. It is needed whether you feel like you need it or not, each week has hard and easy days of training. Every four weeks a lighter week is provided for recovery at the end of the training year you get to kick back a bit for 4-6 weeks.
2nd: Train hard or Train long
In Periodization training the volume of training (weekly mileage) is always inversely related to the intensity of those workouts. In other words, The harder you work the less work is scheduled on your plan. So as the your training progresses towards your competition phase and the intensity of your workouts increases, your weekly volume of training must come down.
3rd: Change it up
Central to Periodization Science — no one type of workout should be performed for more than 8 weeks at a time. The human body reacts to the stress of training with an increase in natural anabolic hormones that help you adapt to the stress. Usually after about 8 weeks, armed with these powerful hormones your body will adapt to any one type of stress and the hormones fade as the body no longer sees that particular type of training as stressful. Continuing to perform the same type of training will then create a state of overtraining. That is when the training stimulus must be altered to create a different type of stress and trigger another hormonal upsurge. In this way, Periodization training has been called natural doping because it keeps your hormonal system peaked throughout the year.
To Go Faster You must Train Slower
Although it is counter intuitive, low-intensity exercise, in the beginning of your training, is the best way to run faster later.
Whether you compete in 5ks, marathons, or Ironman triathlons, you are best served by a developing a monster aerobic system. Building it requires extended periods of low intensity exercise to force these adaptations— and can be seriously sidetracked with even an occasional bout of higher intensity work.
The other key adaptation your body undergoes during Base Training is the development of a strong, resilient physical and mechanical infrastructure
We’ll be covering the the 6 Phases of Periodization in an upcoming post. If you are interested in more information about Periodization training or would like to join the PSI Periodization Club please email Dr. Ivan Huergo at ivanh@psipt.com