The Problem With Periodization - By Charles Staley - Staley T...

Interestingly, the best approach to periodization may be a cross between both approaches - a concept that I've never seen anyone else write about. It's an amalgam of the "serial" approach and the "concurrent" approach. In other words, you use a multi-stage, serial progression against the backdrop of a high degree of specificity. The best of both Worlds.

Let's look at how this might look for the sport of powerlifting. Using the oldest approach we covered earlier, if you had 18 weeks to train for a meet, you'd go as heavy as possible, using sets of 1, pretty much every workout, unless you were sick or injured.

Using the second approach, you might do general fitness training for the first 3 weeks, then work on hypertrophy for 6 weeks, maximal strength for 8 weeks, and finally a deload on the 18th week.

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First, you'd always put the lion's share of your energy into the 3 competitive lifts. You might (and probably would) perform a handful of "assistance" lifts to bring up weak attributes that can't be addressed purely by working the competitive events. These attributes might include things like injury rehab, hypertrophy, speed-strength, or work capacity. As competition nears however, less-specific work recedes to free up resources for more-specific tasks.

If recovery is needed, it is not obtained by switching to non-specific tasks or lower intensity brackets, it's facilitated by lowering training volume. In other words, instead of performing 6x2 with 90% on the bench, you might perform 2x2 with 90%. As a powerlifter, you must live and die by the 3 competitive events. They always take priority over everything else. The only exceptions to this rule are as follows:

1) One or more of these 3 lifts causes or exacerbates an injury which now must be addressed.
2) One or more of these 3 lifts is no longer a primary weakness. An example of this might be a lifter with an exceptional bench but a poor squat. In this case it becomes prudent to redirect resources away from bench training and toward squat training.

Finally, any approach worthy of being called "better" must be capable of "turning on a dime:" as the weakest link is improved, it is no longer the weakest link, and a new weakness becomes the new weakest link. Your training approach must be flexible enough to address this reality at any given time.

The approach I've outlined is how all smart athletes train, and it's how all smart trainers and coaches train their athletes. All successful training systems utilize the principles I've discussed above, even if you don't know it, and even if the people using those systems don't know it.

I hope this article sparks your creative thinking on the subject. If it has, please share your thoughts by clicking the discussion link below!

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