What is Periodization?
When working to improve your fitness, there are many different variables that come to mind. Some of these include hypertrophy, strength, power, anaerobic capacity, muscular endurance, and cardiovascular endurance. Trying to achieve all of these can come off as a lot to juggle. With this in mind, it’s probably best to not randomly approach your training and do something unexpected every day. Rather, having a good plan in place to properly progress over time is probably the better idea.
Well, periodization is a systemized approach to accomplishing this. Another feature of periodization is that you need not include every fitness variable mentioned in the paragraph prior, as not all will be equally applicable to you. In the remainder of this article, we’ll discuss what periodization is based off of, and a few instances in how you would utilize the concepts in different scenarios.
What periodization is based off of
When you complete a training session, a level of fatigue is induced in the day(s) following. Once you have recovered from this fatigue, you experience a period where your fitness is above the baseline level from before the training. If no further stimulus is experienced, then you will enter a period of detraining and over time return to baseline. This idea is called general adaptation syndrome and was originally produced to describe the response to stressful stimuli of any kind. Overtime, the model has been adapted to be more specific to fitness, but the general concepts remain the same. A major goal of periodization is to manage these increases in fitness and fatigue in a way that most productively improve athleticism over time.
Further, an important component of periodization is the fact that maintaining athleticism in certain aspects of fitness is easier than improving them [1]. For example, it has been shown that strength training 1x/week is sufficient to maintain muscle and strength up to 32 weeks. Similarly, endurance can be maintained training 2x/week. For both of these variables, higher frequencies are likely needed to promote improvements. However, the ease of maintaining progress makes it more feasible to improve one and maintain the other.
The magnitude of each of these concepts is also very dependent on the fitness level of the individual or team in question. For example, an untrained group of high school freshman would likely have a much easier time improving both strength and endurance at the same time than an NFL team would. In addition, the degree to which fitness and fatigue are produced is likely greater in the high school freshmen than it would be for the NFL team.
With all of these in mind, it’s clear that good periodization is highly individualized to the person or team it is being implemented for. As previously stated, fitness level is a major factor when drawing up a program. The needs of the individuals in terms of type of fitness and sport specific movements required is also highly variable. For instance, programming for a cross-country runner would look very different than it would for an American football linebacker and also very different than it would for general population trainees.
Lastly, something that changes how periodization looks is if the person being trained is training for general fitness or if there is a season/competition coming up. If there is a season or competition on the horizon, then there is an accompanied degree of complexity to the program. Later in this article, we will look at both examples.
The structure of periodization
There are certain frame works put in place that you follow when programming a properly periodized plan. First, let’s discuss the time cycles of periodization. The longest is a multi-year plan. Underneath the multi-year plan are macrocycles. These can range anywhere from multiple months to a whole year. Under macrocycles are mesocycles, which normally last 2-6 weeks. Last are microcycles which include daily or weekly fluctuations.
Multi-year plans are mostly important for high school or college athletes in which a coach works with the athlete for multiple years. Macrocycles are important if there is a specific season or competition you are training for. If there is one season or competition, then the macrocycle will last a year. If there are 2+ seasons or competitions in a year, then a macrocycle will be half a year. If someone is just training for general fitness and wants to improve multiple fitness variables (i.e. no planned season/comp coming up), then a macrocycle can be however long you want. The mesocycles make up the macrocycles and each one normally has a specific goal or goals. Microcycles can be used to describe and plan the progressive overload within a mesocycle.
If you are training for a season or competition, then the periods around the competitive events are termed the off-season, pre-season, in-season, and post-season; in order. In the off-season, the training is normally geared towards general fitness with high volume and low intensity. As you progress and transition into the pre-season, the training intensity becomes more specific to the sport with higher intensities and lower volumes. During the in-season, normally only the amount needed to maintain skill and fitness is done to ensure ample performance in matches or competition. The post-season can be seen as one big deload. Athletes are often encouraged to perform random recreational activity at low volume and intensity to promote ample recovery. The trends throughout the mesocycles can be visualized below, in order from off-season to in-season:
When writing a periodized program for someone who trains for general fitness and does not have a season or competition, then less complexity is needed. For example, say you’re someone who wants to get stronger and improve your endurance. I’d use a year as the macro cycle. You could perform three 4-week mesocycles geared toward improving strength and hypertrophy, three 4-week mesocycles geared toward improving conditioning and endurance, and then one more of each to complete one year. In each scenario where you are improving one variable, you are maintaining the other. Following a plan like this will likely yield superior results than trying to improve both at the same time.
Conclusion
Of course, there are many points to periodization that were left out of this article. Heck, whole textbooks have been written on this subject. However, I hope I have been able to provide you with a basic understanding of what periodization is and perhaps some direction for your own training.
References
Maintaining Physical Performance: The Minimal Dose of Exercise Needed to Preserve Endurance and Strength Over Time
PubMed ID: 33629972
Haff, Gregory G., Triplett, Travis N., 2016, Essentials of Strength Training & Conditioning, 4th edition.
