April 14, 2010 in Articles, Workouts by James Dawson Martin

Periodization: Training Smart, not just hard

Periodization: periodization is planning and structuring your training into specific phases – either by manipulating intensity – reps, tempo, rest, or weight and volume of load lifted. It can also be about taking someone from point A to point B in a structured and goal defined way.

A microcycle phase – refers to one week of training

A mesocycle phase – refers to two-four months of training

A macrocycle phase – refers to one to four years of training

Periodization is a form of structured training that is popular amongst athletes.

Coaches across the world structure an athletes program based on their current level of fitness, season of training, and competition.

For example, a football coach will have his athletes on a strength and mass routine during off season, before bringing in a period of recovery, and then changing it to endurance, speed and more agility later on – this is all part of periodization.

Periodization allows you to train certain times with higher volume and load and then have you go through a new cycle phase of recovery training so that you do not overtrain.

Where many people make mistakes is that they think training too much and too hard will cause overtraining. The truth is that by manipulating our training to include periodized recovery weeks - reduced volume – will stop overtraining from being able to occur.

As you can see, bodybuilders and anyone wanting to increase lean muscle can see the importance of periodization for further growth and fat loss.

You are able to plan weeks of intense, heavy lifting and then structure in weeks of higher rep, higher volume training, before tapering off and recovering.

We get all the benefits of strength training, lean muscle building – and we recover before we overtrain!

Perdiozation is becoming more popular with bodybuilders because of this.

Training hard is great.. But training smart as well as hard is the key to results.