Bottoms-Up Periodization (pt. 1)
1 Introduction
1.1 What is periodization?
As periodization is discussed at length in many free-to-read resources online ([1], [2]), only a quick overview will be given here to give context to the discussions taking place later. Within sports training exists this easy-to-use framework for coaches in order to prepare an athlete for a big competition: Periodization.
Simply put, periodization is the planning and organisation of an athlete’s training, usually into blocks or 'periods' that have a set goal (these periods are referred to as mesocycles individually and macrocycles as a whole). This goal will depend on how close to competition the athlete is, and thus how 'specific' to the competition (see: specificity [3]) the training needs to be.
To give a naive example as to how this is used in the context of powerlifting, consider an athlete that is 12 weeks out from a competition. A common periodization scheme used in this situation would be to give the athlete:
4 weeks of hypertrophy training
4 weeks of general strength training
4 weeks of specific strength training
Now, please note that proper application of periodization is not as simple as this, and formulating an overall macrocycle structure comes with the consideration of other important principles such as fatigue management.
The idea behind this setup is that for a powerlifting competition, the utmost important skill an athlete can have is performing heavy singles on the day of competition, so it would make most sense in terms of applicability to the day of competition, to have the closest 4 weeks aimed at improving the athlete's ability to perform these heavy singles.
Note: naively, if no other principle was interplaying with periodization and specificity here, one would think maxing out the three lifts during this last mesocycle would be the best way to practice for maxing out on meet day, but even without one being overly familiar with the principles of fatigue and recovery, this may not seem like the best plan of action.
Working backwards from here, it wouldn't be a bad idea to have the 4 weeks preceding this to be focused on building a more 'general' base of strength in the athlete that can be fined-tuned for the competition in the following 'specific strength' block.
Finally working our way back to the first 4 weeks, a simple understanding of how the body works might suggest that before implementing the strength block, it wouldn't be a terribly bad idea to focus on growing the fibres which we exert the forces through during the following blocks. Having a hypertrophy phase at the start of the 12 weeks could help increase the athlete's work capacity that will in turn increase the efficacy of the following blocks.
Outlined above is an overly-simplified approach to using a protocol called 'block periodization' in order to construct a macrocycle of training to prepare an athlete for a competition. Now that the main goal is understood, we can expand on this topic under the framework of 'Bottoms-Up Periodization', or BUP.
1.2 Introduction to BUP
We here at Odyssey Strength like to refer to our implementation of periodization as 'Bottoms-Up' periodization. It all boils down to one simple idea:
Letting the athlete's response determine the structure of their training.
How is this done? Well not easily anyway. It is quite a bit more involved on the coach's side than other periodization implementations. As a coach, you must pay close attention (and put trust in) both training data, and various forms of self-reported data from the athlete. For this reason, it is imperative for the existence of a healthy, trusting relationship between coach and athlete.
Paying close attention to this data can answer important questions like:
How long should the mesocycles be?
How is my athlete responding to this block compared to previous blocks? What are the variables/controls in this situation?
What is the athlete's attitude towards their current block? (and how can I as a coach improve this attitude in future blocks?)
If it isn't apparent yet, the core of BUP is learning how to effectively collect and interpret different forms of data from your athlete, and use this to structure future training.
Once one is acquainted with BUP, it's pros, it's cons, and its work-arounds, it's hard to see any other reason to use a less athlete-focused approach other than laziness, or system-worshipping.
The first step in applying BUP in programming, is usually identifying useful variables that can be easily altered. This along with response data from the athlete will help you interpret how the chosen variable(s) affects your athlete. The latter of these two will come later. For now, let's just explore examples of training variables and how to alter them.
-Mesocycle Length:
If you recall from our example of block periodization in the previous section, we chose each mesocycle to be 4 weeks in length. Why? For the purpose of the example, splitting 12 weeks into 3 equal blocks of 4 weeks seemed reasonable. But in general, why assume a certain mesocycle length for a given athlete is optimal? Why not treat it as a variable and explore what works for the athlete? Playing around with mesocycle length and finding what an athlete responds best to is known as 'testing their time-to-peak', or 'TTP testing'. To fully understand this, we need to know how to break mesocycles up into 'microcycles' or more generally 'exposures', and also what it means for an athlete to 'peak' in a general sense outside of just competing. These will be explained when we explore TTP further later on.
-Rep Scheme Response:
Within general training blocks, is there a particular rep range in which the athlete shows a peak in response to? In other words, say there is a particular rep set-up throughout a certain block, that when compared to previous data your athlete seems to respond well to, how do we interpret this as a useful training variable and how do we control it? How do we know that it's the rep scheme that the athlete is responding well to, and not any of the other variables in the block? If your athlete is coming out of a successful block and you suspect that the rep scheme had something to do with it, why not pivot (pivot blocks are described in detail later on) into an extremely similar block, where just the rep scheme is varied a little, and everything else is kept constant?
Doing this multiple times can help you identify whether or not you should give much thought to your hypothesis about the rep scheme. Blocks used to test hypotheses about what is causing a particular athlete response are referred to as 'exploration blocks'. Due to time constraints, you obviously can't just run 30 similar exploration blocks and compare data to statistically confirm or reject your hypothesis, but small samples of blocks are still useful in identifying what likely works for an athlete, and what doesn't.
The last point I want to include on the topic of treating rep schemes as a variable, is how this relates to two of the other important principles of strength training, namely variation and specificity. How does one know that they aren’t introducing variation just for the sake of it? If you know your athlete is currently responding well to sets of 4, why change it massively for the sake of variation? If the body needs a new stimulus and variation is needed in the context of rep schemes, this will be obvious from all the training data you've been collecting.
In terms of specificity, if my athlete is 4 weeks out from competition and i know that they are really responding well to sets of 10, what's stopping me from giving them purely sets of 10 going into the competition? From a specificity point of view, this doesn't seem specific to heavy singles on the competition day at all. The interplay of athlete response and specificty will be covered in more detail in later blog posts.
The Next Step: After identifying variables and altering them over time, we need to track and interpret the resultant data. In the examples above it is quite clear what needs to be tracked; the variable, and a marker of 'success'. The marker of success should assign a number to the given setup that represents how well/badly the athlete responded to it. A common marker of success is short-term variations in estimated 1-rep max, or 'E1RM'.
With every success marker one must be able to interpret it properly and give weight to how accurately it describes the actual physiological response of the athlete to the setup. For example, one could use a standard RPE chart to calculate E1RMs, or instead one could devote some time to constructing an RPE chart specialised to the athlete by conducting a series of tests over time. The latter chart will be given more weight as it more accurately represents the response of the athlete.
2 How to track and interpret training data
2.1 Odyssey's setup
To start off the section, I think it is useful to first lay down our general approach to block design in order to follow and track athlete response. This is not what we always do, but it is for the most part how we approach collecting data for new athletes, or even older athletes if we have some new hypotheses we would like to test. I think it's important to note that the less data we have on an athlete, the less we will stray from this setup, along with the main principles of strength training while beginning our data collection. The end goal is to completely follow athlete response, but in order to do so we must start with a more rigid setup.
The key-points in the setup are:
The same microcylce is repeated over and over until the end of the macrocycle
Use a top set with backdowns approach
Use RPE-based training
Why do we do all this?
Firstly, a microcycle is a training plan, generally a week long that is repeated over and over throughout the block. This is done to force the body to adapt to this particular setup, so we can gather data on that setup.
Note: microcycle length doesn't have to be a week in length and can be either individualized, or chosen to make block lengths match up with a comp date in a specific way
Next let's talk about the top-set/backdown setup. The most important point to note here is that the leading stimulus will be from the work that forces the most adaptation, ie, the heaviest set of a session (assuming the other sets are of a similar stimulus or have much less of an impact). This allows us to measure response to the rep and RPE setup of the top-sets throughout the macrocycle. The backdowns can then be varied independently to track the response to overall volume. The top-set/backdown setup is merely a way of partially separating different variables and introducing 'dials' in order to vary and tune them to athlete response.
Now let's move onto why we use RPE. The body doesn't care about the weight on the bar explicitly. The main factor forcing the body to adapt is the exertion required to complete the sets. Now if you assume E1RMs don't vary an awful lot between sessions, then one could use percentage-based programming and approximate the trends that one would get from just tracking exertion. This seems quite contrived though, why not just explicitly track the actual exertion instead? On top of this, due to external factors and being unable to fully predict the complex systems of the body, E1RMs tend to fluctuate quite a bit over short periods of time, in a way that we can't account for as coaches. Fatigue accumulation is hard enough to measure and plan for as is, let alone daily fluctuations on top of that due to any number of external stressors. In this sense, RPE training acts as an auto-regulator for fatigue.
Something important to note on RPE, is if an athlete isn't nailing a certain RPE exactly but is close enough, then this is still fine as what the coach is tracking as response to 'RPE 7' is actually tracking the response to what the athlete calls an 'RPE 7'. As long as the 'RPE 7' label is consistent and within reason, the data is still just as useful and interpret-able.
When would we not use RPE? Programming for a specific athlete is always done with many variables in mind, and may not be the optimal situation, but the goal is to get the best result as possible given the situation. RPE is definitely in general way more useful a tool than percentage-based programming in this setup, but what if the athlete really dislikes RPE, or simply does not want to be held accountable for searching for top sets? One has to also consider the willingness of an athlete to stick to the programming while constructing the program, and if this is affected then the use of RPE should be weighed against the willingness of the athlete to adhere to your programming, in order to reach the best solution given the circumstances.
2.2 Pivot Blocks
To discuss the collection and interpretation of training data further, we must discuss 'pivot' or 'washout' blocks. Pivot blocks generally have two main functionalities:
They function as a deload phase at the end of a training or accumulation' phase
They re-sensitize the body to a new stimulus and ensure the effect of the previous block on the data we get from the next block are minimized.
The deload aspect of the pivot block will not be discussed here as information on fatigue accumulation and dissipation can be found in various places online such as [4].
Scenario: We just finished a block with an athlete where the top sets took the form 5 reps @RPE 8. We now want to gather data on, and test the effect of rep ranges close to 5 reps further, so we transition to a block with top sets of the form 4 reps @RPE 8. We want to go into a new block with the assurance that we've done everything we can within reason to ensure the new block's starting conditions are similar to the starting conditions of the previous block. How this is done is taking a period of time (usually 1-3 weeks depending on the athlete's normal block length) to force the body to adapt to completely new stimuli that have little to do with the setup of both the previous or proceeding blocks. If this is done between every training block then we can assume that there is little carry-over in terms of short term adaptations from one training block to the next.
Note: If blocking short term adaptation carry overs from block to block was our sole-purpose, then the best thing to do would be to assign movements that had absolutely nothing to do with powerlifting. This requirement of 'washing out' adaptations is not our only goal though, we also have goals such as retaining fitness and keeping some specificity. Depending on the current goals and distance from competition, one must manage the interplay between washing-out and specificity very carefully in order to ensure the athlete does not lose important aspects of fitness for competition.
2.3 Time to Peak (TTP)
As discussed earlier, a very important variable to track and individualize is mesocycle length, or how long an athlete takes to reach peak adaptation to a particular stimulus.
The main question that this attempts to answer is how many exposures to a certain stimulus does it take for the athlete's body to adapt? Due to the likes of fatigue accumulation, the body does not keep adapting for ever in our current setup. As a result, there must exist a number of exposures in which peak adaptation is reached. Any fewer exposures and the athlete is missing out on further adaptation, and any more the athlete will begin to go through negative adaptations.
This is where the core question of the variation principle comes in: What determines if two stimuli are different enough to warrant somewhat independent adaptation responses from the body?
Let's first consider purely exposures to squatting. Say I squat a top set of 4 reps @RPE 7 on Monday and then I squat a top set of 4 reps @RPE 8 on Thursday. Will my body adapt to these stimuli independently? Probably not to any noticeable extent.
This is an important point as perhaps I know my athlete takes 4 exposures to peak in adaptation to squats, and I give him the 4 reps @RPE 7 top-set on Monday and the 4 reps @RPE 8 top-set on Thursday. How many weeks will they take to peak? Probably less than 4 weeks. The answer isn't as easy as two weeks either. One has to be aware the 'closeness' in response to the two top-sets, but also the 'closeness' in time in which they occur, as how the body adapts to a stimulus depends on how often the athlete is exposed to the it.
Note: Discussing just squats above might imply that we vary the number of exposures to the individual lifts. This can be done by adjusting frequency throughout a microcycle, but all the lifts will naturally peak after the same length of time as they are all tied together by overall fatigue
Although I just discussed the variation of RPE above, it should be clear how this also applies to rep schemes. Maybe less obviously, the above discussion also applies to movement variations. Does your contrived variation incur a unique response when compared to the movement profile of a more standard variation, or does most of the variation just come from load-reduction because it's harder?
Above I have laid out the main considerations one needs to have when testing an athlete's TTP. The actual testing is quite straight forward. Give the athlete a microcycle to repeat and take note of when performance begins to decline. You might want to continue training just beyond this decline to ensure that what you saw was a global peak, and not just a smaller peak before the main one. Be careful not to overtrain your athlete though, and be wary of blocks going on longer than 6/7 weeks. Long periods without fatigue dissipation are dangerous, and maybe a better idea is to fit in more exposures per microcycle, or decrease the microcycle length, instead of just running the mesocycle for a longer time. After you think you have found the athlete's TTP, pivot and go into a very similar block with slight variations and search for the peak again. The more data you gather throughout blocks, the clearer your picture of the athlete's TTP will be.