If you’ve trained at anything for more than 6 months, you’ll have come up against the infamous trade-off, experienced throughout the lands by many a frustrated athlete, bodybuilder or amateur fitness fan.
You train for muscle and gain muscle but gain a little fat. So, you do the logical thing and lose the fat. But the muscle disappears. You go back to bulking and get bigger, only to start feeling fluffy again.
The cycle continues for a couple of years at which point you look back and realise that you haven’t really progressed from Day 1.
You simply rode the ‘Gainz and Shredz’ rollercoaster only to end up back at the start.
There’s a similar ride waiting for anyone wanting to be an ‘All Round Athlete’ – one of those people who has high levels of strength, power and endurance (and of course, impressive body composition).
You focus on strength and see your lifts go up. However, when challenged to a 5k race, you realise your work capacity has dropped massively so you ramp up your cardio, start running up mountains and cycling for two hours at a time.
Soon enough, a deadlift test comes around and you see your numbers have fallen again and you dropped lots of muscle, so back to the barbell you go!
Is it just luck, genetics or drugs that enable someone to ‘do it all’?
Well, that stuff can play a part but there is a way for you to make dramatic improvements in all areas of your performance and it forms the basis of most of the programs created for Storm Force Performance.
I’ve used it for gaining muscle, training triathletes, getting ready for Strongman competitions, improving running pace quickly and getting the right amounts of power endurance for a Sub 3 minute 1km row.
The beauty is it doesn’t discriminate across sports or goals because it’s rooted in science and maths, not emotions and fitness fads.
This method is known as Cyclic Prioritisation.
It’s a fancy way of saying that we always train everything, but we emphasise one or two elements in each program to improve those numbers, whilst maintaining the other areas.
Another way to look at it would be the old adage, “A rising tide lifts all ships”.
In strength training and/or body composition coaching, the terms used are Accumulation, Intensification and Peaking.
World-renowned strength coach Charles Poliquin was a fan of rotating between Accumulation and Intensification phases to get the best strength and muscle gains in an individual.
Accumulation
These phases would be your typical bodybuilding phases.
Typically an accumulation phase will include relatively higher rep ranges, moderate weights and shorter rest breaks designed to increase muscle damage with a resultant over-compensation in muscle mass.
Intensification
These phases target strength and neurological improvements which could then be carried into another accumulation phase for further muscle growth.
Typically an intensification phase will include fewer exercises, more sets of those exercises, heavier weights and more rest between sets.
You may have already noted the difference to the common, commercial approach which is to just keep trying to gain muscle month after month never deviating from the classic 8-12 rep range.
When training for a particular sport, the concept is similar in that we’re trying to develop a particular capacity that we can carry over to, and build off in the next phase.
For instance, in developing an annual plan for a triathlete, we would see the following phases:
Structure
This phase aims to work on weaknesses identified in previous races/seasons (mobility, strength, injury issues) as well as changes to metabolic performance such as fat utilisation as a fuel. There would likely be more gym work and activity away from the sport.
Prep
Now we can move forward with an increase in training hours, building a massive endurance base with more Heart Rate Zone 2 work and some speed skills.
Base
Next, we increase the intensity of the endurance work, bring in some maximal strength training and start to develop more force and power.
Build
This phase sees further increases in intensity with more training in Heart Rate Zone 4 and 5 designed to take the handbrake off at the top end of performance.
Peak and Race
These are short periods of reduced volume to enable recovery before a race.
This method of Cyclical Prioritisation is based around an annual training plan and again, everything is always being trained but an emphasis is placed on one or two elements of the sport with a peak being achieved for the big race.
Within each phase the type of gym work, long-steady work and intervals will chance to elicit a particular response.
What about an All Round Athlete – someone who wants impressive levels of everything without competing or excelling in one particular sport such as powerlifting?
In this case, I would look to cycle the following:
Hypertrophy
Training to gain lean muscle tissue
Strength
Training the body to move heavier weights
Power
Training the body to move itself or external loads more quickly
Power Endurance
Training the body to be able to perform high intensity work repeatedly
Endurance
Training the body to be able to complete long bouts of work at a steady pace
Again, every program phase will contain most or all of these, but we choose to focus on one whistle maintaining the other one.
This may mean a greater number of sessions performed with a particular adaptation in mind or if time is more limited, the proportion of each session dedicated to a particular adaptation will increase or decrease around the objective.
Of course, all of the above necessarily considers many, many factors and requires a lot of questions to be asked before program design for any particular goal.
That’s where the magic lies!
This is why a program based on Cyclic Prioritisation produces superior results in the medium-to-long term compared to constant guesswork, switching between training methods or only training what you’re good at!
Whatever your goal, we need to reverse engineer it, program phases into the time we have, then maximise the impact of every week, every session, every set and every rep.
It doesn’t have to require any extra time or effort, but it needs to be more focused and productive.
