Written by You’ve done it. You got yourself in the gym several times per week and are seeing awesome results; your pant size is down and your arm size is up. What more can you ask for? However, a few more weeks down the line and you start noticing that results are slowing and in some areas of your training –strength perhaps, has stalled. You have already exhausted most of the programs on Bodybuilding.com and don’t know if you need to choose a new pre-workout or maybe some kind of muscle-building supplement in order to get you to see results again… can progress just stop like this?
Sure it can, if you don’t plan your training properly.
Periodization is important for plenty of reasons. It is an effective and proven way to ensure that the results you are aiming for can be achieved within a certain time-frame. Proper periodization is a methodology that will have you working as smart as possible in the gym, and will make every training session count towards your goal in both the short and long term. It is a guide to be able to specifically build what you want, and avoid what you don’t want, but is it simple? It depends. What are you looking for? No one can put 10lbs of muscle on you in 12 weeks (naturally) unless you’re a beginner, but then again you wouldn’t be worrying about this if you were a beginner. So let’s look at some ways you can periodize your training depending on your training age in order to continue to see results.
First Things First: What Are You Aiming For?
Strength? Power? Size? Sport-Specific? Rehab?
You need to decide what you want before you can plan it out. Remember that most things cannot directly be worked on non-stop all year round. So once you decide what you want to work on, you need to decide when you want to work on it (i.e do you have a competition to peak for, or are you just looking to improve this modality for personal reasons.)
Once you have those aspects figured out, it’s time to find a way to fit these goals into your training in a way that will breed continued results.
Splitting Your Focus & Creating a Timeline
As mentioned earlier, once you find your goal there requires more planning than just smashing yourself in the gym for 12 weeks straight. A very common way to structure your training for your new goal is to change your program and phase every 3 to 4 weeks.
Why?
Well, considering that most of the people reading this are intermediate to advanced trainees, you’re looking for adaptation to the training stimulus, but nothing more than that. Changing phases and introducing different movements, rep schemes, and intensity brackets will help to create a new stimulus for your nervous system to adapt to, as well as setting phase-specific goals to make things continually interesting. One of my most influential teachers, Stephane Cazeault prefers 3-week phases as opposed to 4-week. His philosophy allows for more work to be done within a 12-week macrocycle (4 programs instead of 3) and also eliminates the need for a de-load week since the new change in stimulus will allow for CNS recovery at the same time.
This undulating method would like like this:
Weeks 1-3 – Volume Stimulus
Weeks 4-6 – Intensity/Load Stimulus
Weeks 7-9 – Volume Stimulus
Weeks 10-12 – Intensity/Load Stimulus
This fashion allows a change in the main stimuli to elicit progress and adaptation without completely fatiguing the nervous system into crashing. However, there are many exceptions to these rules. Those in sports like Powerlifting or Olympic Weightlifting might prefer another approach since their sport and training are so closely tied; choosing to change intensity and volume much sooner, sometimes every 1 to 2 weeks. Others that are more strictly bodybuilding might prefer longer phases with a de-load, as the goal is complete fatigue with less focus on the nervous system.
Exercise Selection & Rep Schemes
Once you figure out how you would like to split the stimuli for your goal the job becomes choosing movements and rep schemes that will allow you to progress appropriately. Now the job becomes aligning your goal with a strength quality:
Relative Strength – Maximally improving strength without changing body weight
Functional Hypertrophy – Improving strength and moderately increasing muscle mass
Hypertrophy – Maximally increasing muscle mass
Strength Endurance – Increasing a muscle’s ability to contract repeatedly while minimizing fatigue
Here is where you have generally the most liberty. In theory, if you want to increase one of these attributes you would stick to just one, but in reality you can span over a couple of these qualities and see great results. Keep in mind there will also be many rep variations to choose from. What is more important is that the strength quality that is associated with your main lifts that you want to improve/muscle groups you’d like to grow stay generally within the parameters of the strength qualities above.
When it comes to exercise selection, once again variation is generally necessary for most. For example, the Bench Press is one of the most sought after lifts to improve among regular gym goers, bodybuilders, and even some athletes (take an NFL combine, for example), however, preforming a flat bench press for 12 weeks straight will create a plateau extremely quickly. It is therefore more effective to change the main pressing movement every phase in order to see continued results. In contrast to that, if someone wanted to improve their Back Squat, you could effectively improve your squatting numbers by increasing the frequency and using the Back Squat in every phase of the 12 weeks.
What’s important to note here is that Upper Body movements require much more variation than Lower Body Movements.
So now for the fun part, let’s look at a simple example of the A-Series of a 12-week cycle looking to improve and advanced trainee’s relative strength in the Back Squat and Bench Press:
Weeks 1-3
- Upper Body 1:
- A1) Incline Bench Press, Barbell 5 x 4-6
- Lower Body 1:
- A) Barbell Back Squat 5 x 4-6
Weeks 4-6
- Upper Body 2:
- A1) Bench Press, Barbell 5 x 2-3
- Lower Body 1:
- A) Barbell Back Squat, 5 x 2-3
Weeks 7-9
- Upper Body 1:
- A1) Overhead Press, Barbell 6 x 6,4,2,2,4,6
- Lower Body 1:
- A) Barbell Back Squat 6 x 6,4,2,2,4,6
Weeks 10-12
- Upper Body 2:
- A1) Bench Press, Barbell 6 x 3,2,1,3,2,1
- Lower Body 1:
- A) Barbell Back Squat 6 x 3,2,1,3,2,1
Of course there is always more to add as far as eccentric methods, speed methods, different grip lengths and widths, and all those will play an important part in the periodization of this program, but I wanted to keep this simple. This program allows for both the stimulus of volume in one phase and intensity/load in the next eventually allowing a peaking phase to finish off the 12-weeks and hopefully achieve the desired goal.
Once again this is for a more advanced trainee as the intensity spread is very small. Keep in mind also how the main upper body lifts change in each phase, but the lower body lift stays the same.
Using periodization methods will allow you and your clients to be able to train for specific goals and allow you to make the most of the movements you train instead of either fatiguing your nervous system or beating a movement to death by repeating it constantly when it may not be the right time.
Next time, we’ll take a look at what intensifiers we can add to make a specific goal more achievable!
James
