Fatigue, Fitness & Preparedness
Fatigue – how well recovered you are.
Fitness – how able you are to lift at your best.
Preparedness – how ready you are to show your fitness.
These three are all interrelated, and to get the most out of your training you can be clever and periodise your workouts, to allow for the best of all worlds.
So how are these concepts linked?
Well to get fitter we all know you need to apply stress to the body, so we can recover and get stronger. Therefore, we need a certain amount of fatigue to improve our fitness levels. However, when we are fatigued we are not in the best position to show our fitness, in other words our preparedness suffers when we are tired.
So what can we do? If we want to get fitter we need to produce fatigue, but when we are fatigued we lose are preparedness and therefore cannot perform at our best. This is where periodisation comes in handy.
Periodisation
Essentially there are a few types of training; Strength, Hypertrophy and Power. Periodisation is how you distribute these different methods across a period of time, and there are literally a gazillion (yes that many) different ways you can do this.
In general; strength training is more intense, as you are training with higher %s of your 1 rep max, Hypertrophy work is higher in volume as you are doing a greater number of reps and Power is lower in both intensity and reps as it is all about force production.
Fitness can be improved by both volume and intensity. Fatigue is largely determined by the amount of total volume performed, to decrease your fatigue you’ll want to lower your volume. With lower volume therefore you will have greater preparedness, and therefore can lift with more intensity.
So we can go through a period of time where volume is high but intensity is lower. This will build our fitness, but will also produce a high degree of fatigue, but that is OK because we aren’t required to show to lift maximally. You may call this a volume block.
Now we have built up our fitness, we want to show it off. Best way to do that? Drop our volume and increase the intensity. So fatigue will be lower, so we will be able to show our fitness plus our fitness is maintained due to the higher loads used. This might be called an intensity block.
And there you have it, a very simple explanation of two blocks you could implement into your training. The length of those blocks could differ greatly, they could be 4 weeks long or just a week long, they could even be done within the same week…as I said the possibilities are pretty much endless. Whats best? I recommend trial and error.
Thank you and #REVIVESTRONGER
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