Where There Is [No Struggle], There Is [No Strength] – Part 2

How to Pimp yo’ Programme

In Part 1 I introduced to you the concepts of progressive overload, deloads and periodisation. You learnt that you have to push, and push hard to create enough stress to stimulate a positive response from your body.

However, you cannot push all the time, as without sufficient time off (deloads) you cannot grow stronger to overcome the beating you have taken. These two are played against one another in something called periodisation, which is essentially how you set up your training programme.

In todays article I am going to go over some of the programme variables you have at your disposal, and how you can use them to individualise your training. Furthermore, I am going to touch on setting your programme up for success, manipulating your intensity and volume. Combining this information to help you pimp yo’ programme.

Reps, sets, load, rest…
When developing your programme you have a lot of tools at your disposal, not just exercise selection but also your rep and set scheme and load used amongst others. The combinations will produce different training effects, and they all overlap.

The above table clearly shows you the variables you can manipulate and how you can select appropriate zones to allow you to train towards your goals. Now you must remember, if you want to get bigger, you sure want to be training in the hypertrophy zones.

However, to get the most out of these zones you need to be using heavy loads, so you also want to be strong, therefore it makes sense to utilise some strength protocols.

Furthermore, to be strong you also need to develop power, this will directly influence your strength. Yet we must not forget endurance, although having arguably less importance to muscle hypertrophy it will allow for us to maintain performance for longer.

As you can see each help one another develop to a degree. This is true for almost any goal. So you want to use each protocol in your training programme, but you can prioritise those that benefit your overall goal most.

Volume & Intensity
Volume and intensity were introduced to you in Part 1.

Volume can be thought as total number of reps x load used, Intensity can be thought as the % of your one rep max. The two are manipulated to bring about specific training effects. They do not go well together, because you can’t lift a tonne of weight for a lot of reps. Likewise you don’t want to go to the gym, lift puny weights and not do many sets. There is a balance needed.

In general most programmes call for a high volume, low intensity phase followed by a high intensity, low volume phase. Many reps with relatively light loads is called accumulation/extensification. Fewer total reps but heavier loads is called intensification.

The first phase is generally used to lay the foundations for the second. Imagine gathering your building material and then hammering it together, that’s extensification and then intensification. The lengths of each of these can be manipulated, you can also choose to extensify and then intensify different exercises at different times. Maybe your bench is a weak point so you keep a higher level of volume on this lift for longer before ramping up the intensity. So you can intensify your other prime lifts beforehand and then focus all your efforts on bench press when the time arrives.

This brings us to The Principle of Individuality. When selecting your approach you must look at a persons weak and strong points, training background, injury history, goals, time available and level of training proficiency.

That last point came up in part 1, and essentially it is your training age, the amount of time you have been lifting with a decent training and nutritional programme behind you. As a novice your intensity doesn’t need to be very high to push progress, you can pretty much improve with any variable of strength, speed and hypertrophy used. Whereas someone more experienced will need clever manipulation of the above, light loads all the time won’t spur progress but nor can we lift heavy non-stop.

What have we learnt?

• You need to use different training variables to produce certain characteristics (strength, hypertrophy etc.).
• Each characteristic interplay with one another and want to be included in your programme. The degree to which depends on your goals.
• Volume and intensity need to be manipulated in a periodised fashion. Both can’t be high, both don’t want to be low.
• In general a high volume phase will then lead into a high intensity phase. This is called extensification and intensification.

For a look at periodising your training according to your training age be sure to check Part 3.

Periodise For Gainz!

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

Training to Failure – Is it necessary?

Train hard or go home right? Well it’s a little more complicated than that, our bodies respond to training to failure in interesting ways. This differs by person and the impact isn’t necessarily positive, it depends on what you are trying to achieve.

Last week my guest blog post was published on Fit Pro Client Recipes on how you might want to approach training to failure. You can find it by following the link below:

http://www.fitproclientrecipes.co.uk/training-to-failure/