First Type of Periodization

 

Virtually anyone who has exercised has dabbled in the first type of periodization, whether he or she knows it or not. This form of periodization requires your body to improve at the same rate every day, day after day, indefinitely. So on New Year’s Eve, if you decide you want to run the Western States 100 (a 100-mile trail run through the Rocky Mountains), you would run one mile on January 1, then two miles on January 2, and so on. And you would expect to be able to run 28 miles by January 28, and by mid-April you’d be all set to tackle the Western States 100.

 

Essentially this form of periodization dictates:

Week 1: Easy exercise

Week 2: Moderate exercise

Week 3: Harder exercise

Week 4: Hardest exercise

Repeat, with no recovery or rest weeks. Training load keeps increasing steadily month to month.

 

The flaw in this type of periodization is that if you exercise today, you aren’t necessarily armed with the benefits tomorrow, or the next day—and in 100 days you will certainly not be able to run 100 miles.

 

This example illustrates the point rather dramatically, but the same rule is true for small, incremental advancements as well. In the first two weeks, training won’t be challenging enough for people who are already fit; they lose two weeks. For people who are in bad shape, in the first two weeks their fatigue will develop faster than their improvements or adaptations; these people will get worse and worse day after day, not better and better.

 

Every day, your ability to train or perform is the difference between how fit you are from previous training minus your level of fatigue. You are getting better, but if you are becoming more fatigued faster, it overwhelms your fitness. We call this overreaching (which is different from overtraining, because you can recover in a few days). Effective training plays on the edge of how much you can recover and how much you can train. In reality this first type of periodization can fall over the edge.

 

 

Second Type of Periodization

 

This modality of periodization is used by most coaches we know. It allows your body to catch up after the hardest week of exercise.

 

Week 1: Easy exercise

Week 2: Moderate exercise

Week 3: Harder exercise

Week 4: Hardest exercise

Repeat.

 

Exercise load does not necessarily escalate month to month (for example, Week 1 of the second month would not be harder than Week 4 of the first month). This type of periodization doesn’t take advantage of the fact that you are in the best condition when you are fresh after the first week. And the hardest week always falls when the athlete is already fatigued.

 

Third Type of Periodization

 

This form of periodization takes full advantage of the recovery week preceding the start of each cycle.

 

Week 1: Hardest exercise

Week 2: Hard exercise

Week 3: Moderate exercise

Week 4: Easiest exercise

Repeat.

 

This modality of periodization dictates the hardest week after the easiest week, which makes sense; you are in the best condition when you are fresh. The difficulty with the third type of periodization, however, is that even though the exercise in each successive week is “easier,” it will feel harder due to the work you have done the previous week. Say, for example, you run 70 miles in the first and hardest week. In the second—supposedly easier—week, you run 55 to 65 miles, but it will feel like 80. During the third—and even easier—week, you run even fewer miles, but since it has been three weeks now since your last period of recovery, it is going to feel very difficult, and it will stretch your body tremendously. During the fourth week, you do active recovery, and will it be welcome! And when the cycle is repeated, the easiest/hardest weeks are in sync.

 

Some people will experience a huge leap in their performance when the cycle resumes with the first—and hardest—week again in the next cycle. For this reason, some athletes use this form of periodization to peak for a specific event. But it’s important to know yourself; some people also find themselves overreaching. This is where training becomes more art than science. You have to know yourself and judge whether it works for you.

 

 

Fourth Type of Periodization

 

This modality works somewhat in reverse of the previous one. It’s what we most often counsel people to use when they are in competition season.

 

Week 1: Hard exercise

Week 2: Easy week or tapering (for details on tapering, see our book "Faster, Better, Stronger: Your Fitness Bible, Chapter 7, “Better Rest”)

Week 3: Competition or hardest exercise

Week 4: Active rest*

Repeat.

 

The fourth type of periodization is successful because the hardest week is always followed by active rest, so recovery and adaptation are allowed to occur. Unlike the first type of periodization, the fourth modality doesn’t place demands on your body that increase indefinitely. Instead, rest weeks are built in.

 

The program we provide in our book, "Faster, Better, Stronger," also dictates rest days as an integral part of each week’s schedule. Week to week in our program, you will essentially plan the same sort of pattern, although the design gets a bit more sophisticated. You will alternate hard and easy sessions, by turns having days when you challenge your cardiovascular system and days when you challenge muscular adaptation. Each of your systems will leapfrog ahead at its own pace while the system or systems you worked most recently are recovering, rebuilding, and preparing for their own leaps. While periodization in its strictest form will help you to prepare or peak for an event or a time period in the future when you want to be at your best, in our book we also apply it to your program on a day-by-day and week-to-week basis to capture your body’s tiptop response. We do this by recommending exercise that alternates types and builds from easiest to hardest and then allows rest and recovery before building again.

 

This form of periodization will help ensure your success. The tempo of hard and easy days also changes as you gain fitness. In the beginning we will give you only one hard day followed by two easy days (totaling just two hard days each week) because in the beginning you are also training your ability to recover. Say you start with heavy days on Sunday and Thursday: At first it will take until Tuesday for you to feel recovered. However, in time you will feel recovered by Monday. When that happens, we will urge you to do three heavy days a week and then four, eventually progressing to two hard days back-to-back to stimulate even more improvements.

 

In our experience, when people realize that the march of improvement will not be steady, and they factor in fatigue and rest, over days and weeks, they learn how to pace their exercise and their expectations. And they succeed. Proper periodization makes improved fitness possible for everyone, and it doesn’t stop after twelve weeks—it works for the rest of your life.

 

 

*Active rest in this context means doing the same workouts but at a lower intensity and volume, or

working on specifi c techniques you need to develop to avoid injury or improve your per for mance.

 

Skating, I used the second modality in the early phase, but

when I wanted to have a big peak, I used the fourth mode.

—Eric