It’s true- the leaves are changing, the days are getting shorter and sweaters are coming out of the closet.
For most of you, welcome to the offseason: a phase of the year that often brings mixed emotions for endurance athletes. On the one hand, you finally get your schedule back with more time than you productively know what to do with. You aren’t stuck to a schedule that prescribes your daily wake-up time and hijacks your weekends. On the other, you miss that hit of endorphins from the long ride and notice your pants have shrunk over the past couple of all-you-can-eat-dessert-buffets.
But the fall also brings time to plan for next year and with that, consideration of the way in which you set up your training. There are a myriad of thoughts and strategies to do so, including simple incrementally increasing your distance or speed, undulating intensities, and different forms of PERIODIZATION, which is roughly a way of sequencing your training so that different times of year focus on different components of your training. Most athletes use some form of periodization, if for no other reason than the climate often requires it, but it can be a great tool to plan your training and adaptation to the stress you impose on yourself.
But despite the best laid plans, preparing a training season is a lot like dribbling a football on a rooftop. You can try and try to have it do what you want, but it’s not likely going to go that way.
That’s where this series comes along, as I think it is a very good insight into the mind of an elite coach, physiologist and training programmer and the considerations that are presented help to question what we often take for granted and explore what we may have never considered.
The series of 4 posts by Stuart McMillan and Matt Jordan really do a good job of outlining what makes exercise physiology an art-form. These are two of the best in the strength & speed biz, from a performance-on-demand perspective, and both have made great inroads in developing repeatable applications of exercise science. It’s tough for Sport Scientists to consider these factors while trying to establish the science, but as you read through, you might consider how periodization fits and is practiced as the application of exercise principles. Even though this series is primarily on athlete’s and elite sport, we see time and again, the physiology and the planning, across the health & fitness spectrum is based around similarly important fundamentals.
“These coaches understand that periodization is not about the model you choose but a process of discovery for each athlete in terms of how the elements of specificity, training load, time course of adaptation and inter-system interactions lead to peak performance at various time points throughout an athlete’s career.”
Despite what the best physiologist, coach or physician will attest, although we ‘expect’ the body to respond and perform in certain ways, other external considerations (non-training stress, the ability to adapt and recover) provide a nearly-impossible task of truly analyzing and predicting performance success. As much as we would like to be able to ‘predict’ performance (and as much as our jobs somewhat depend on that), we need to have an open mind to the ongoing stresses that infiltrate our clean, direct “equal-and-opposite-reaction” expectation, and instead create a foundation of preparedness that allows for dynamic, reliable and responsive prescription of exercise training. This is why ‘sustainable performance‘ (more on this in a later post) should be the goal- creating a system that generally can perform within certain parameters when required. To do so means a solid ‘base’ of training, a slow and purposeful approach towards health & fitness objectives, consistent and manageable stresses, and ample time and resources for recovery. The breakthrough performances do happen, but are often followed by a breakdown period. For those of us who aren’t going for a one-hit-wonder, but rather a lifetime of continued participation in our activities, it’s even more important to ensure that the body and mind can develop reliable tolerance to stress.
Ensuring that we take into account life events, current sleep patterns, application of exercise stress and physiological response thereto, will help to establish a true assessment of exercise as a modality that can influence the body in the ways we hope it will.
“Periodization is a reverse engineering process based on a specific gap-analysis where the coach is responsible for managing, integrating, and organizing all aspects of the training load – from mental-emotional factors to musculo-skeletal and neural factors. As Brett Bartholomew described in his section of this extended post, coaches are also responsible for programming to build athletic character and elite training habits. How is this reflected in your periodization approach? All of this planning occurs alongside careful monitoring of the individual biological response with respect to key performance indicators in order to tease out the nuances of what works best for whom.”
That doesn’t mean that planning your training is a waste of time- in fact, as it goes, if you fail to plan, you are likely planning to fail. Importantly, you still need to establish where you may want to focus on significant skills and conditioning tactics- perhaps you will do more volume-based training in the winter, and progress your intensity after your duration gets to a predetermined max. You may try to work on your biomechanics early in the season, not worrying about building volume while you focus on pain-free strides or efficient pedal strokes. These focuses are good and very much necessary, but you must be adaptable to the unpredictable adaptations of your body- good days may mean calling an audible and doing intervals, while a fatigued day may require you forego the hill climb and do a recovery bout of cross-training instead.
Take Home Message: Establish a practice of consistent, purposeful, adaptable training towards a fundamental element that aligns with your training goals.
Now as you pick up that next pumpkin-spice latte, and sit down with your calendar, don’t get stuck in the details about exact schedules, about mileage, or about training stress, because the moment you take that first step out the door, your plan is going straight out the window.
#MotionMatters 