Periodization, Not Just for the Ends of Sentences

You probably want to achieve a lot with your training. You want to be flexible, strong, have great endurance, and look amazing. All of these are great things and worth pursuing. There’s just one problem, and I’m sure you’ve bumped into it by now: you can’t do them all to a high degree at once. Well, you can try. But as you’ve learned, you’ll either do them badly or burn yourself out. What are you supposed to do, then? How can you be a flexible, strong, sexy beast who can go the distance? The answer is in a little thing called periodization. And, no, it has nothing to do with punctuation or a woman’s cycle. Below you’ll learn about what it is, why to use it, and some of the big ideas on how to put it into practice.

Periodization is just a fancy way to say “organizing your training across time to achieve a specific goal.” In other words, it’s having a plan. It is not just doing what you feel like doing or think is a good idea on that particular day. There are two main types of periodization: block and conjugate. The first one is about developing one quality at a time (such as strength, size, flexibility, endurance, etc.) The second is raising multiple qualities at the same time. Both work well if done right. Both will screw you up if done badly. You’ll learn all the details of both in future articles. What they both have in common is that they aim for progress. You’ve got a series of workouts that build upon each other to get your body to adapt in a certain way. Kind of like how your marketing campaign has bits that build on each other to drive up sales.

Not exactly how you want to be in daily life.

But why bother with it at all? Why not just blast everything as hard as possible at once? This all comes down to one thing: your body’s ability to recover isn’t infinite. Your body can only handle a certain amount of stress before it taps out in some form or another. If you’ve ever worked hard for long hours on little sleep for several weeks, you know what I mean. Things start falling apart. You start getting sick, your body starts aching, your brain gets foggy, and you generally become more useless. If you do it too long, you’ll find yourself sitting on your couch for literally hours just staring at a wall because you’re too spent to do anything else. Guilt ensues and you probably start having an existential crisis. So let’s avoid that by periodizing your training (and life, while you’re at it.)

What periodization all comes down to is progressive overload and balance. First, what’s progressive overload? It’s thoughtfully adding more and more over time, forcing your body to adapt. Notice the word “thoughtfully.” If you can bench press 100 pounds for a set of five and you decide the next workout you’ll try to bench 150 for five, that’s not progressive overload. That is what’s known as “stupid.” Progressive overload would be doing 105 for five. Then 110 the next workout, then 115. See? You’re thoughtfully adding more over time. It doesn’t have to be just weight either. You can add reps, make the range of motion you go through on the lift bigger, move the weight faster, have more control over it, etc. There’s a saying about flaying felines and a multitude of methods that applies nicely here. But why not just keep the workouts the same? Because your body is fairly smart. Imagine you did the same workout over and over again. The first time you did it, you’d get a lot of benefit from it. The second, you’d get slightly less. Eventually, you’d get nothing from it. You’d simply maintain what you have, whether it’s size, strength, flexibility, or endurance. Progressive overload is how you avoid falling into this trap.

Next up is the idea of balance. There’s a common misconception that balance means devoting equal time/energy to everything. Wrong. Balance means everything has the right proportion in order to make the whole function well. You know this is true because you don’t spend your time like that. You have family, friends, work, fitness, sleep, and personal time. You don’t spend four hours per day on each of those things. Instead, you figure out roughly how much time you need to devote to each in order to be fulfilled/happy. The same is true for training. You don’t spend an equal amount of time on each quality. You devote the right amount of time to each thing. It might be ten minutes of stretching a day, three hours of lifting a week, and two hours of cardio per week. However, just like with the rest of your life, you can’t do a lot of everything at once. If you add one thing, you have to take out another. As I’m sure you’ve noticed, if you spend more time working, then you’ll spend less time with family, friends, or yourself. If you’re going to spend more money on meth and roulette, you have to spend less on your mortgage and 401k contributions. I don’t recommend that, but you do you. And, if you’re going to add more muscle-building work, then either endurance or strength work or both need to drop somewhat. You’ll have to shift the workload towards what you’re trying to develop and dialing it back on the rest.

Periodization, with its twin principles of progressive overload and balance, is what you need to make progress and not turn yourself into a burnt-out bag of injuries. You’ll need to figure out the things you want to achieve, then come up with a plan of how to get there or delegate to a pro to do it for you. You can absolutely achieve all those things you want to in fitness and in life. The thing is that you’ll only be able to do it if you’ve got a plan.