Periodization is a term used in strength and conditioning. It simply refers to the systematic planning of training.
This is often done through seasons (pre-season, post-season, in-season, off-season, etc) and cycles (8 week squat cycle, 12 week aerobic endurance, etc).
When your goal is to peak at a specific time in a given year, i.e. March Madness for basketball, a coach or athlete may reverse engineer their training system to be organized around such a goal.
The seasonal structure of sports makes periodization easy.
Training for life, however, may look like being able to carry groceries inside one day and hiking 12 miles the next day.
How do you choose what training to prioritize? How do you organize your workouts to create “peak” performance when you most need it?
First, you must understand what you functionally need in order to participate in life.
You need to be able to:
- Breathe
- Support your body weight and any additional load.
- Recover from injury and illness.
If you are training for life, “functional” training would incorporate all of these aspects.
As each of us differ in our medical histories, epigenetics, training ages, and even mental health states, our training should also be differentiated for individual application.
This is where understanding “scaling” in CrossFit, “rate of perceived exertion or RPE” in powerlifting, and “percentages” in weightlifting, are crucial to your success.
Once you understand what is required of you, you must evaluate how effective you are in these areas.
For breathing, the evaluation may look like one of the following:
- I can walk 2 miles but cannot jog for more than 1 minute without becoming winded.
- I can do “Fran” and feel incredibly winded, but after 5-7 minutes my breathing has returned to normal.
For supporting your bodyweight and any additional load:
- I cannot get up and down off of the ground without assistance.
- I can get up and down off of the ground without assistance.
- I can squat 100 lbs and push a sled with additional weight for 200 yards.
For recovery from illness or injury:
- When I wake up in the morning, even though my back is stiff, I can safely move and begin warming my body up within 5-10 minutes.
- If I sit for more than 30 minutes, it is difficult to walk with a normal gait.
The goal of self-evaluation is to pay attention. This enhances your own awareness of whether what you’re doing or not doing in the gym is increasing your functional capacity in life.
Then, AND ONLY then,
Experiment.
Choose 1 variable in each area that you can specifically change, test, and evaluate. If you have trouble moving your bodyweight or any additional load, a single variable you may change would be to decrease your body-weight by improving your nutrition. This looks like:
Change – Incorporate 1-3 habit(s) to improve nutrition and create a calorie deficit.
Test – Let’s say you lose 10 lbs. Go ahead and try to get down to the floor and up from the floor.
Evaluate – How much easier/harder was that? Did you need less assistance? If yes, keep this as your only changed variable until progress stagnates. If no, pick another variable and begin again.
As you begin to experiment and evaluate more, you will notice a natural scaffolding of training, nutrition, and habits begin to build.
You find you prefer 12 week squat volume cycles over 8 week hypertrophy cycles, that you feel better when you sleep in a pitch black room, and that you feel best when you eat more carbs vs. fats.
You can “peak” your performance each day by applying the principles that work best for you.
This is periodization for life.
