Throughout your fitness journey, you’ll undoubtedly have different goals and objectives along the way. Different training outcomes require strategies for acquiring peak performance. A term that gets tossed around the fitness world quite a bit is periodization. What’s that, you ask?
Recall from a previous entry (link HERE if you want a refresh) that there are two main variables to track in exercise: volume and intensity. Volume represents a total measure of training. For example, running five miles (5 x 1,600meters per mile) gives you a volume of 8,000 meters (m). Lifting 5 sets of 5 reps with 155 pounds on the bench press is 3,875 (5x5x155) total pounds lifted. In short, volume is the quantity.
Next up, intensity represents the degree of effort. For that same 5-miler, somebody running at a 4 meters-per-second pace runs with greater intensity than somebody running at 3 meters per second. Note this does not take internal measures of intensity, such as heart rate, into account. File that one away for another blog. Intensity is the quality of training.
Let’s say you complete one week’s worth of training. To calculate an overall training effect, you would multiply the volume x intensity for each day you train. This will give you a number of arbitary training units. You may have heard this called ‘load’. Well, the purists out there hate the term load, but let’s use it anyway. On day 1, you complete a workout that has a total lifting volume of 4,500m. You take an average of the resistance lifted and find that it was 38lbs (I know, I know, one of those units is metric and one is not). If you multiply the volume (4,500) by intensity (38) to get a load of 171,000. Repeat this for all other days of training and your daily training load might look like this:
Nice. So where do we go from here? Back to that periodization thing. Training is broken down into cycles based on overall goals. The smallest, a micro cycle, can be a short as one training week, like the example above. These are the stepping stones of larger cycles to come. Next up, meso cycles make up the various ‘training blocks’ that we do. Distance runners will often complete mesocycles at high altitude to stress their cardiovascular systems more than normal. It’s not uncommon for body builders to go through ‘cutting phases’ which focus on caloric deficits in order to be as lean as possible before a competition. Depending on the person, these cycles can last months at a time. Check out the chart below. The bars are split up into multiple micro cycles which combine together to create one meso cycle.
Finally, macro (large) cycles represent an entire training cycle. Elite and highly competitive athletes who participate in the Olympic games will sometimes use each four-year period as one marco cycle.
Periodization breaks the overall macro cycle into more manageable meso cycles. From there, micro cycles represent the weekly goals of training. Experiment with your own goals and measure the total training LOAD (purists be damned).
Next time, we’ll talk about various models of periodization.
