We have all been there, the vicious training plateau. The first few weeks or months of any training program, the weight just seems to fly on the bar, sprint times drop, and power increases. All until progress suddenly stalls, and quickly heads the other direction.
The plateau usually rears its head more as a hard dip in the road than a flat peak, which is followed by a long gradual climb to the top again. Usually when you are making great gains and crash, the crash is pretty hard. For a couple workouts in a row, you might feel like garbage, and then you work your way up again.
“I just benched 275 last week, and now it feels like I can’t do 240! Why is that? Or I finally did that 360 dunk, but it’s next week and now I can barely dunk! What gives? How do you avoid this? The key to long term training gains is through learning how to arrange training. This is done in units known as “blocks”.
So what is a training block?
A training block is 2-5 weeks of training with a planned theme lying somewhere along the speed-strength spectrum. A block can focus on strength, speed, or multiple qualities. Blocks can be concentrated, traditional ascending or descending loads, or undulating. I have found that the most effective training blocks do three major things.
- Have a loading scheme/plan
- Switch up the loading from the last block in accordance with long term goals
- Include some form of variation within the block itself
And that’s it! Pretty simple really. Have a plan, introduce intelligent variety, and don’t make big time jumps in the qualities you are training. Let’s look a bit more at what makes up training blocks.
What is a concentrated block?
Traditional training tends to focus on several qualities at once. For example, a basketball player looking to improve their total game would traditionally do training months featuring acceleration work, plyometrics, strength training, lactic acid tolerance, aerobic work and overall conditioning. This can be a bit too much to adapt to effectively all at once.
According to the theory of prominent Soviet sport scientists, gains will be greater if the focus of each 2-5 week block is narrowed down to a couple of qualities. The qualities should also be related. For example, that basketball player would do much better to focus on plyometrics and strength training in one block, rather than aerobic work and plyometrics. During the focus on the few qualities, all other qualities should be addressed from a point of maintenance.
Concentrated blocks are often “overloaded” to the point where more work is given to the athlete then they can actually recover from. This is rewarded however when the load is reduced, as the athlete will, in theory (and in practice with many elite coaches), recover to a level far beyond their original levels.
Concentrated blocks can be demanding to push through, but are rewarding if programmed correctly.
I have found great success with block loading themes, although I tend not to deliberately overload athletes too often. I tend to prefer this over concentrated loading blocks for the average client, because concentrated overloading is a risk. For concentrated overloading to work, the coach and athlete must have lots of faith in the program. Trust me, it isn’t easy to be OK with losing performance for several weeks with the promise of gaining it later. This is a psychologically demanding process for the athlete to accept when performance is dropping. Some coaches use it to get extraordinary results, but I tend to favor methodical ups and downs within a 2-3 week scheme, as I find it difficult to press into planned overtraining for more than this time period.
What is vertical integration?
Vertical integration is simply a scheme to include all aspects of training in each training block, throughout the whole year. In order to build and peak at the right time, each cycle is progressively based on more speed, and less strength. Shifting the force-time curve to the left… the usual procedure. The trick here is knowing how much to include and when, and whittling things down to the bare essentials when it is time to be ready to compete hard. Below is a chart that shows a very basic vertical integration scheme that can be used to train short sprinters. Notice, as the athlete doesn’t start out using worthless training means in the early offseason just for the sake of “building a base”. The athlete starts out using only relevant training means, just in different amounts.
How consistent should performance be throughout training?
During the competitive season, performance should be consistent. If you want to play around with concentrated block loading in the offseason, that is great, but don’t mess with it when you want to be at a high level of performance. Anecdotal experience with track and field athletes has shown that the highest performances of an athlete’s career tend to come during seasons where all their performances were within less than 2% of each other. This consistency comes through two things: High levels of motivation on the part of the athlete, and then intelligent planning by the coach.
Consistently high performances are achieved through shorter training blocks and a reduction of training monotony. Training monotony should be reduced in the strength realm by cycling the emphasis of the strength exercises, rather than constantly switching the exercises themselves. For example, rather than switching from squatting to deadlifting every 4 weeks, try switching from an eccentric to an isometric emphasis in the squat every 2-3 weeks. Or throw some bands or chains on your deadlift every 3rd cycle. Switching from a power catch to a full catch in cleans and snatches is an example of things that provide an awesome variety stimulus as well.
Bottom line, shorter cycles with higher variety provides higher consistency. This is one of the great upsides of a Westside Barbell style template for powerlifting athletes.
Stay tuned for part 2 for more ways to break through performance plateaus including managing training within each block, as well as the AIT formula for training cycles that can be used for indefinite periods of time!
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