Peaking at the Right Time: How to Periodise Your Gym-Work Throughout the Year

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As athletes, we want it all.

Bigger, leaner, stronger, fitter, faster, and more powerful.

In pursuit of this holy grail, you've probably noticed a few things:

1. You only have a certain amount of time to train, and trying to cram training all these aspects into your week can be tough.

2. You can't progress all aspects at once. Trying to get bigger means you might lose a bit of leanness. Optimising for endurance might mean strength won't increase as much.

3. You want different things at different times of the year. You might not care about losing a bit of abdominal definition in winter if it means you can pack on a bit more muscle. And when it comes to championship time, you probably care more about performing at your best on the pitch than you do about your bench press PB.

With these things in mind, your training focus will, and probably should, change throughout the year.

Contemplating these changes ahead of time will allow you to plan how and when you're going to prioritise and progress each quality at the appropriate time.

The process of systematically planning these changes in training ahead of time is known as periodisation.

Splitting up the Year

For most sports, the season works in a yearly cycle, so it makes sense to plan your training across that period of time.

Even if you're someone who doesn't play sport, it can still be useful to think of your training over a yearly cycle. For example, you might want to get lean for a summer holiday, or shift your strength focus to winter when outdoor conditions are less favourable to running, or peak for a marathon that’s at a specific time of the year.

This yearly cycle would be applicable to the structure of a season for athletes in most sports: GAA, soccer, rugby, track & field, jiu-jitsu, golf etc.

When we look at these sports, there is generally an off-season period, a pre-season period, and an in-season period.

The off-season and pre-season generally make up roughly half of the year combined, and the in-season generally makes up the other half of the year.

With that in mind, you can divide the season into 4 blocks:

1. Off-season

2. Pre-season

3. Early In-season

4. Late In-season

Given that there are 52 weeks in a year, you can divide these into 4 x 12-week phases (that's 48 weeks total), leaving 4 weeks throughout the year for holidays, planned or unplanned de-loads, minor injuries, and other scheduling issues (you could obviously choose a different amount of weeks, based on your own needs).

Each of these 12-week phases will focus on a specific set of adaptations, building on the previous phase, and setting you up for the next.

So What Quality Should You be Peaking and When?

Ultimately, you generally want to be performing at your best in the late in-season, usually the "business end" of the season, where the most important matches/races/meets/competitions are happening.

Planning to perform at your best at a given time of year in this way is a part of periodisation known as peaking.

In terms of priorities for improving athletic performance, nothing beats being an expert in how to play your sport from a tactical and skills perspective.

But when it comes to your physical preparation, the quality you'll likely want to prioritise is power.

That is your ability to produce more force with greater speed.

Optimising power will mean faster sprinting, quicker turning, and higher jumping ability, as well as improved ability to push off opponents and avoid getting caught up in tackles.

Correlational studies have also shown power to be a reliable predictor of athletic success.

So, why not just train for power all the time?

Firstly, as previously discussed, you have other goals that you want to achieve throughout the year.

But more than that, your ability to produce power is dependent in part on your strength (how much force your muscles can produce).

Furthermore, your strength is in part dependent on how much muscle mass you have.

So working backwards, that means in order to optimise power output, it’s beneficial to have worked on building muscle mass, then increasing the contractile ability (strength) of that muscle, before then increasing the ability to use that strength at speed (that is, power).

With that in mind, you can align those goals with the phases of the season mentioned earlier, using the off-season to work predominantly on hypertrophy (increasing muscle size), the pre-season for focussing more on strength work, and the in-season for focussing more on power development. This should allow you to maximise power output when it matters most.

However, that doesn't mean you have to only focus on the aspect you're prioritising at that time.

For example, when focussing on hypertrophy, you should still be including smaller amounts of strength-focussed and power-focussed work to prepare you for the upcoming phases.

And when focussing on power, for example, you should still include smaller amounts of hypertrophy-work and strength-work in order to maintain the progress you've made in those areas.

What Does This Look Like Practically?

The relationship between volume and intensity is an important consideration here.

Higher intensities (heavier weights and higher speeds in this case) require lower volumes (fewer reps in this case).

This is obvious in a sense: You can only lift extremely heavy weights for a small number of reps before you fail to be able to lift them.

The opposite is also true: higher volumes (more reps) require that you decrease the weight you're lifting.

This is important when it comes to the changing nature of your goals throughout the year.

Hypertrophy is generally optimised by higher volumes. i.e. more total reps.

Strength is generally optimised by higher intensities. i.e. more weight lifted.

Power is generally optimised by even higher intensities. i.e. more weight lifted at higher speeds.

Given our plan to progress our focus from hypertrophy to strength to power, we can suppose that 2 things will occur as the year goes on:

1. Intensity will be lower at the start and increase as the year goes on.

2. Volume will be higher at the start, and decrease as the year goes on.

That forms a graph as shown below, and this lines up with what most strength and conditioning textbooks will say about periodisation.

In reality, the change won't be as linear and smooth as it looks.

During training phases (such as the 12-week examples) themselves, and even within a training week, there can be fluctuations in volume and intensity (more on this in future articles).

Plus, as mentioned, it's important to include a baseline level of each attribute in each phase even when focussing on one attribute.

But the general premise still remains:

As the season goes on, the volume will decrease (through decreasing the number of weekly sessions and/or the total number of reps), but the weights you're using (in the case of barbell/dumbbell exercises) and forces you’re producing (in the case of plyometrics etc.) will move closer to maximal efforts.

In Practice, What Might This Look Like?

The off-season could consist of 3-5 gym sessions per week, consisting of 3-6 sets of 10-20 reps of the main exercises in those sessions.

The pre-season could consist of 3-4 gym sessions per week, consisting of 3-5 sets of 4-10 reps of the main exercises in those sessions.

The In-season could consist of 2-3 gym sessions per week, consisting of 2-3 sets of 2-6 reps (many of these done at higher speeds) of the main exercises in those sessions.

(Take those numbers with a pinch of salt, since they will vary based on the individual and the specific training methods used, but they represent the general trends of volume and intensity outlined above).

What if This all Seems a Bit Complicated?

If all this seems a bit complicated, you're probably early on in your training experience.

If this is the case, getting into the weeds of periodising your training is probably more hassle than you actually need.

For you, simply focus on getting stronger.

Especially for those early in their training experience, training for strength has not only been shown to increase strength (obviously) but also been shown increase muscle size and power output, thereby achieving the goals set out above, without the need to over-complicate it.

So, if in doubt, just focus on getting stronger, without the need to change this focus much throughout the training year.

However, if you are well-experienced, have achieved a solid level of strength already, and want to optimise your ability to perform to your highest potential when it matters, it may be time to start looking at planning and periodising your training.

Conor O’Neill, Know Yourself Performance

To find out more about how you can work with me, click the image above or go to knowyourselfperformance.com/coaching

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