Time-limited Periodisation: Jan ‘23
Hey from Tom and Emma at High North Performance,
We hope you all had a wonderful festive period, and you’re now starting to pin down some targets and ambitions for the new year. Let’s get into this month’s edition of In-Form:
Musings
So, naturally at this time of year, the concept of periodisation tends to be on the minds of many athletes and coaches…
Training studies, and the practices of top-level athletes suggest that it can be useful to periodise training volume across the year, as well as on a smaller scale, such as every 4 weeks.
As an example, a good strategy can be to gradually ramp up volume throughout the year, and then taper this down when you come into your competitive season.
You might also periodise volume over a 4-week block, gradually increasing this over the first 3 weeks, and then taking a recovery week in the final week.
However, these distributions require a high training time availability and flexibility - this availability needs to exceed the amount of training volume you can comfortably tolerate week-on-week in order to see benefit.
That’s because one of the main purposes of volume periodisation is that it allows you to apply periods of training overload, and then reduce volume to allow your body to recover and adapt.
If you’re time-limited, and can comfortably string together multiple weeks of training at your highest training time availability, does it really make sense to be periodising your training like this, so that some weeks you’re not training as much as you have time to?
In these circumstances, we think that a better approach is to implement a flat training load (sometimes referred to as a ‘basic week’), which makes the best use of your available time.
This means, if you have 8-hours per week to train, you aim to complete close to 8-hours per week most weeks, without worrying too much about periodising your volume. This will keep your fitness level at least maintained, or likely slowly increasing.
Then whenever you have the opportunity for extra training time, you can increase that volume to create an overload of training stress and stimulate a more sizeable boost in fitness (given appropriate rest following the overload).
With this periodisation strategy, ‘recovery on demand’ is often a good approach to take. So rather than planning a recovery week every, say, 4-weeks, recovery weeks are used when the athlete starts to show signs that they are fatiguing. Or if it’s been quite a while (e.g. 7-weeks) since the last lower-volume week, a reduction in training might be planned regardless to help maintain mental engagement/motivation.
Here’s a great article by Alan Couzens on this topic, which we go back to regularly.
Science
In this month’s paper review, we opted to write about an older (2014) paper, which we’ve found is very informative on a number of different areas:
This paper takes a deep-dive into the training data of 11 XC skiers over the year leading up to their most successful gold-medal winning competition at the Olympics or World Championships.
It’s rare to get such detailed insight into such elite athletes, and we think there are some interesting learnings that arise from this paper.
Our detailed paper review is here. These are our key take-homes:
The world-class athletes in this study didn’t do more intensive training (in terms of volume) than you’d typically see from average-level athletes. The key difference between the training of elite and amateur athletes was overall training volume, which amounted to 700-900 hours/year in this study.
Towards the beginning of the training year, the athletes’ training was more pyramidal, and became progressively more polarised as they got closer to their main competition (for an explanation of these terms see here).
86% of total endurance training time was spent at a ‘Zone 1’ intensity below 1.1mmol/L lactate. This is lower than most athletes will perform their long endurance rides. We believe this is done to minimise metabolic and muscular strain caused by the high power outputs sustained, even at low lactate levels. This supports a theory that high-level athletes who ride at a high absolute power outputs may need to reduce the power they perform their long endurance rides at e.g. down to ~50-60% FTP, whereas less well trained athletes (and potentially also female athletes) who ride at lower absolute power outputs may benefit from slightly higher powers (e.g. 70-80% FTP) in their long endurance rides.
The athletes didn’t conform to science-based ‘best practices’ when tapering for their key events. This is probably due to the high density of races leading up to the Olympics/Word Champs. We set out some pragmatic best practices for tapering in a condensed racing season in our detailed paper review.
News
In all honesty, this last month, we’ve mostly been busy reviewing our athletes' past year of training, and percolating ideas for how we can improve upon things for next year!
That being said, we wanted to give you a heads up that we’ve got some exciting new premium resources in the early stages of creation, designed to be affordable and digestible products specifically for self-coaching athletes (and coaches too).
The first of these should be launched some time in the first part of this year, and you’ll be the first to know when they’re live 👍
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That’s it for this month! A quick reminder for those looking to start their training for 2023, we have a selection of conditioning plans that could be a good starting point if you’re fairly new to training, or have had an extended break. If you already have some residual fitness, our base plans could be a good fit.
As always you can find our Cycling Physiology Guide and Hill Climb Handbook on our website too!
Thanks,
Tom & Emma
