A Periodised Reactive Training Plan

The following outline does not prescribe day by day workouts but proposes types of training so that variations relevant to the above capacities and orchestrated towards a particular goal, can be rationally selected on any day.

To train each energy pathway, work of various intensities and modes needs to be distributed over micro periods of between seven to nine days. However, the types of work will alter in priority over the training cycle. Muscular Strength, Peak Power, Stamina, a foundation for Cardio Vascular Fitness, and then Muscular Endurance and Lactate Threshold, all need to be mainly built in the first two phases of preparation and only maintained in the third phase, the last two months of the season, when Oxygen Uptake, Anaerobic Capacity, and speed at VO2max become the main considerations.

To use this plan, you designate a type of training per day in consideration of types of development required at a particular stage of training, and then on any particular day you choose a variation of that training type depending on how your body feels and what level of that type of training you had been able to accomplish in the previous week or two. This allows you to inject variety but also perform similar workouts that can be gradually overloaded and compared and evaluated in terms of progress.

The Macrocycle

The planning Macrocycle, or training season leading to a major competition, for me is usually a year but may be considered six months if there is to be a mid year peak for a Head or long distance event. Stages of preparation within the macrocycle can be described as Mesocycles or Phases and are orchestrated to first lay a physiological foundation for training, then to build the capacity for more intense training, then to increase intensity of training leading to maximum performance, and finally to recover from this macrocycle in order to start the process all over again for the next season of competition. The mesocycles can be further broken up into microcycles, most commonly lasting  a week to nine days, within each of which there is a balance of workout sessions or types. Sometime a Block of 3-4 microcycles can be used to emphasise or increase a a single capacity.

Mesocycles or Phases

This training plan thus consists of four Mesocycles or Phases: The General Preparation Phase of foundation conditioning, the Specific Preparation Phase building more specialised race fitness, the Race Preparation Phase in which intensity is ramped up and then tapered to a peak performance, and The Transition Phase of regeneration from the previous season’s schedule. Phase three, Race Preparation, can not be longer than about eight weeks before chronic fatigue starts to set in. A six-month plan predicated on competing in two peak events per year would allocate a week to the transition Phase and about two months each to the other phases. For a twelve month plan I would extend the first two phases from two to five months each but keep the Race Preparation Phase at two months.

Within the General Preparation and Specific Preparation Phase it is also possible to design ‘Blocks’ of specialisation targeting weaknesses detected in benchmark workouts. If either of these Phases plateaus, ceases to make progress in less than its five months, a week of Regeneration or a specialised Block of two or three weeks can be introduced to re-stimulate progress.

Each Phase differs from the others chiefly in terms of the distribution of workout types performed within its Microcycles.

• In Phase 1, General Preparation, intense work needs to be done only once per week and rarely above Threshold pace, the bulk of training being Light, Moderate or Long Duration together and some Gym & Power Strokes. You might plan your week to include 2-3 Strength & Power Stroke Sessions, 1 Tempo Session, 1 Firm LSR Session, 1 Hard LSR Session, 1 Long Duration Session, 1 Moderate Session and 1 Light Session. The main goal is to build Peak Power and duration of training per week rather than intensity.

• In Phase 2, Specific Development, a second intense session can be introduced per week. This may be a Cruise Interval (Threshold) session or a sub race pace Short Interval Session with perhaps a few Sprint Repeats once per week either within a continuous piece or after adequate rest following another workout. Stroke Rate and Return drills can to also be introduced once or twice per week and integrated within light or moderate training sessions.

• In Phase 3, Race Preparation, the final two months before the key race, everything needs to be orchestrated around improving the pace of two High Intensity Interval Training and/or Sprint Repeat Sessions per week. Other forms of training need to be only at maintenance or recovery level.

Typically what happens with intense work over Phase 2 and Phase 3 is that Firm Training gets faster until it becomes Cruise Interval Training, Cruise intervals become faster and shorter to become High Intensity Intervals. Their number increases and/or their recoveries get shorter while trying to sustain the same pace. Then the number of repetitions in the High Intensity Intervals decreases while their recoveries and their pace increase so that they become Sprint Repeats adding an anaerobic icing to the aerobic and neuromuscular training cake just before the peak race.

• In Phase 4, the Transition Phase of one to four weeks, it is best to pursue ‘recreational’ exercise to refresh both the body and mind before commencing a new cycle of training. The necessary ‘detraining’ that occurs means that you cannot restart your next phase with quite the quantity of work you were doing before the transition but need to build up slowly once again.

Microcycles or Weeks

For convenience, because a seven-day Microcycle fits most easily into our social organisation, I will outline the present plan in terms of Weeks. However, in order to cover and distribute all necessary fitness components, a Microcycle could also be extended to around nine days or even a fortnight. Any longer tends to create too big a gap between similar types of training for optimum training effects to take place.

An average week contains one to two hard sessions – Threshold, VO2max, or Anaerobic – which advance by increasing the number of repeats first and then decreasing the number but increasing pace. To determine how much to increase the pace of each interval set, use the Pete Plan principle: go your fastest on the last interval and then use the average split over all intervals as the target pace of the next session.

Alternatively, you could increase the length of each piece or decrease the rest periods while holding the same pace before ultimately increasing pace. In fact, any one of a range of parameters can be selected to intensify or increase over a block of microcycles before converting them to increased speed or to increased duration for which that speed can be sustained.

The rest of the workouts in any microcycle are Easy, meaning that you train at a pace that produces little Heart Rate Drift and your general aim is to gradually increase the duration you can maintain in each Session and per week rather than to increase pace. One of these Sessions every week in the first two phases aims to be of particularly long continuous duration to stimulate the development of heart stroke volume.

To develop endurance of the skeletal muscles one or more of these sessions can be at the same comfortable pace but at lower stroke rates requiring more force per stroke.

Although the tables below are in the form of weekly schedules, training should progress on a reactive rather than prescriptive principle. The general distribution of Training Types should be maintained but the placement of easy and hard session including, if necessary, occasional days of complete rest, is best determined by how generally fatigued you feel and what work you have recently done. Beware of the euphoria of a great Hard Training Session that makes you think you should do it again the next day. It is better to look over the last fortnight’s workouts and gauge what kind of workout you precisely need and from which you have adequately recovered. Inevitably, if you respond to how your body feels, the days of the week allocated to types of training will change, but essentially the same sequence can be picked up after any deviation..

Only one intense workout, a Tempo session. However the Long Duration session can also be stressful as can the Hard Low Stoke Rate Session. If you need a complete day of rest per week or per fortnight, you could replace the Moderate workout scheduled here for Sunday rather than Tuesday’s Easy day which is a valuable recovery device. 

One High Intensity Interval Session and one Cruise Interval Session become the key workouts. The Long Duration Session is still useful but less important at this stage. Again, if you need a Rest day, replace a Moderate session.

When Peaking up for the key event, the emphasis is on active recovery together with some sharpening up strides and two Anaerobic Sprint Repeat sessions per week.

Block Periodisation

In Phase 1 (General Preparation), and to some extent also in Phase 2, as I previously noted, it can be useful to allocate 2-4 week Blocks to a special emphasis associated with a weakness in your fitness profile.

For example, for three weeks you might focus almost entirely on strength development and perform only the least maintenance work on other components of your fitness. In the next block you might choose another emphasis or else return to a balanced ‘concurrent training’ regime.

Such blocks of training can be used to correct any imbalance in your profile and to circumvent the ‘interference effect’ between different training components and in order to to get past sticking points or plateaus in your progress. Benchmark workouts will tell you which emphasis you might need, to what extent you have made progress, and whether your maintenance components have been sufficient.

Progressive Overload

Which metabolic energy system is being trained in any workout depends on the intensity of work relative to current fitness, the duration of each effort, and the duration and nature of recovery between efforts. The actual pace required for these intensities increases as you get fitter and is improved by increasing frequency, duration, intensity, or density of training.

The specific parameters you can vary to increase training stress include the number of training sessions per week, total training time per session and per week, the number of repeats at a certain pace, the length of these repeats, the number of sets of repeats, the amount of recovery between repeat and sets, the type of recovery whether passive or active and at what pace, the pace or intensity of the repeats, their stroke rate, their work per stroke, and any additional form of stress such as added resistance bands, incline of the erg, additional drag, or isolation of a body part or segment of the stroke.

A basic principle is to increase quantity before quality. To continue improving, you normally first need to increase the frequency of training sessions, or the duration, or number of repeats at your current pace within a session, or, alternatively, to increase density – reduce the recovery periods or increase the pace at which active recovery takes place. But, ultimately, you need to increase the intensity or pace of each effort.

Weeks and sessions of overload are increased in an ascending wave pattern interspersed with weeks and sessions of reduced load during which recovery and supercompensation can take place.

During all but the final weeks of your training season, the increase in quantity or quality of any type of workout that you perform in a single session, or over a week, should be determined by the training types and workloads to which you have been able to adapt in previous workouts. However, no matter how light your sessions were when you began training, if you steadily increase, and wait for your body to adapt, you will reach a point of maximum volume before having to increase the density or intensity of work in a similar patient fashion. For example, increasing first the quantity of work at a controlled Threshold pace by increasing the length of Tempo pieces or the number of Cruise Intervals reaches a limit until it helps to transition into High Intensity Interval Training where the goal becomes to perform each week at a slightly faster pace. But, as you approach your key competition date, to achieve even greater intensity, you then reduce volume and increase recovery between the intense pieces.

Overview

In a nutshell: planning does not mean specifying an exact workout schedule, but knowing which parameters need to be advanced and which need to be maintained at various stages. The goal, then, is to address all the necessary parameters and advance the appropriate ones however far you can in each timespan with consideration of recovery needs and signs of possible overtraining.