PERIODISATION FOR GROWTH &
LONGEVITY
In Training by Eugene TeoJune 16, 2016
Much of my programming, especially in the initial phases, is focused on
‘innervation’ training – emphasising the ‘mind-muscle connection’ and
consciously contracting and squeezing the target muscle – typically from
unorthodox angles and using sub-maximal weights.
The problem with this is that it won’t build as much overall muscle mass – The
weight is light and sets are rarely taken to failure – so there isn’t much force or
muscle damage being created to stimulate growth – so the focus is on blood flow
and pump to stimulate small improvements.
On the other hand, training for strength, under heavy loads and to failure are all
critical factors necessary for growth. Push your body with progressively heavier
weights and take yourself to that point of eyeball-bursting pain once in a while
and you stimulate the hypertrophic response.
The downside to this is that under these circumstances, the body has absolutely
no idea of your goals of thick lower lats, quad sweep, a full upper chest and wide,
capped delts. All it cares about is not getting squashed under a heavy bar. So in
the interest of survival, it will do whatever it needs to to move the weight.
Your body will emphasise dominant, efficient muscle groups at the expense of
your lagging, inefficient body parts. The heavier or closer to failure you go, the
more significant this dominance in recruitment becomes – exacerbating issues
from both an aesthetic and rehab perspective.
Spending all of your time focusing on beating last week’s performance and
continually getting stronger will undoubtedly cause a positive growth response –
but you’ll also wind up accruing injuries from failing to correct structural
imbalances with dominant body parts will continuing to grow, with your
weaknesses become further highlighted.
You can probably guess where I’m going with this – there’s a middle ground.
Both approaches are needed to progress optimally. The art of programming
comes down to the periodisation of the above – whether it’s within a session or
across a training cycle to create a strong, aesthetically pleasing, injury-free
physique.
ENTER PERIODISATION. .
The best piece of advice I can give anyone is to train to a plan.
Periodisation has been around forever. In just about every sport I can think of,
there is always a focus on planning out training cycles to achieve certain
benchmark goals.
For performance athletes like powerlifters, olympic lifters, gymnasts and fighters,
this is common practice – Plan out 16 weeks, or in some cases the entire year,
methodically and follow it and peak perfectly for that competition.
Somewhere along the way, most physique athletes completely forgot about this
basic principle. Instead of mapping out short and long term goals, and setting
realistic training protocols to meet them, I’m seeing a lot of athletes going in and
training blindly.
Heavy sets, volume work, forced reps, drop sets, isoholds, supersets and other
intensifying techniques are thrown at every workout, with the person driving
themselves into the ground every single session, 7 days a week with no rhyme or
reason.
Don’t get me wrong, as I said above I’m a huge fan of training hard and training
to failure as a basic stimulus for growth – ON OCCASION. One of the biggest
mistakes I’ve seen is the overuse of intensifying techniques or load in every
single session, and consistently pushing things to failure in a rush for better
results. The worst offenders of this generally occurs in the pre contest period, in
the last 4-6 weeks.
In most cases, what’s the outcome? Injury, mental burnout and diminished
results. I’ve seen a lot of unnecessary injuries and lack of results from people
both in their off seasons and pre contest periods from simply training blindly.
There’s a time for everything – and like it or not, a lot of the time, less is more.
While it may sound hardcore to “treat every session like it’s your last”,
realistically, you need to come to terms with the fact that like anything, fat loss
and muscle growth takes time and intelligent planning.
If you have no idea on how many sets, tonnage and volume you’re performing in
a session – and how that relates to other sessions and ultimately a training cycle,
then you are training blind and missing out on a lot of useful information and
progress.
HERE’S W HAT TO DO..
1) Map out your timeline – where do you want to be in 6-12 months, or more?
What goals and deadlines are you setting for yourself long term in terms of
strength and size?
2) Set your start point – that’s today. Where are you currently at with respect to
structural balance, strength and body composition – relative to your goal?
3) Bridge the gap. Reverse engineer the process. Let’s say you’ve got a goal of
adding 5kg of muscle over 12 months – While it’s hard to quantify that into
weekly or monthly averages due to physiological variances – we know one thing
for sure – for you to be 5kg bigger, you undoubtedly WILL be stronger. So you
might start there.
We know relative strength and volume work are both vital for growth – so it
comes down to splitting that up into shorter 3-6 week microcycles. We also know
how vital it is to maintain integrity of joints and connective tissue, and to preserve
and improve structural balance – so that needs to be prioritised as well.
A simple set up may look like this
Phase 1 – Structural Balance & Innervation – high exercise variety, reps and sets
Phase 2 – High Volume – Higher reps, lower sets and weight shifted. Focusing
on blood volume and muscle damage.
Phase 3 – Relative Strength- Low volume & reps, higher amount of sets and
weight shifted. Focusing on explosiveness and relative strength
Spending anywhere between 3-6 weeks in each phase before repeating.
The next and most important step comes in analysing your data and making
informed decisions – How successful was the last phase? What movements
worked well? How much strength did I gain? How much did my bodyweight
increase, whilst body fat decreased? Did a certain phase yield more benefits to
me? How can I adjust this to make it better?
Most importantly – Am I on target to achieve my goal outlined from Day 1? If not..
How can I adjust the next 2-3 microcycles to make up for lost time.
Everyone is individual – some people will yield more from a Relative Strength
phase, whilst others thrive of High Volume. There is a caveat emptor to this –
Even if you tend to flourish from a particular style of training – it is simply a matter
of time before it starts to yield diminishing returns. Knowing when to back off and
change into the next phase is crucial for long term success.
The possibilities are endless.
THE 3 LAWS OF HYPERTROPHY
In Training by Eugene TeoNovember 3, 2015
In the relentless quest for the ‘perfect program’ and building a lean, muscular
physique – the whole concept of programming and training has become far more
complicated than it needs to be.
In spite of all the latest training methodologies currently in circulation, there are
only 3 factors or ‘laws’ that need to be manipulated in order to stimulate growth.
1. HYPERAEMIA & BLOO D VESSEL
OCCLUSION
This one’s simple – and the most commonly used in traditional bodybuilding
programs. This is ‘pump’ work. The goal is to increase blood flow to the target
area (hyperaemia) and decrease oxygen availability to the target area
(occlusion). Usually you’ll see higher rep schemes, lower weight and higher
overall volume being prescribed to prioritise this factor. Giant sets and super sets
also fall into this category.
Interestingly, you don’t need to use the fancy cuffs on your limbs to
perform Occlusion Training – basic constant tension reps with a deliberate
squeezing contraction and shortened range will create the same effect – Try a
bicep curl with a tempo of 3030, without allowing the elbow to fully extend at the
stretch.
2. MUSCLE DAMAGE
The more you break down a muscle fibre, the more you will stimulate it to grow –
provided you give it sufficient nutrients. This law is all about creating as much
metabolic stress and tearing down tissue. In short – it hurts. This is where you’ll
see a lot of the common high intensity techniques being used – forced reps,
negatives, band work, isometric holds, partial reps and forced stretches are just a
few of the techniques often employed in intelligent programming to maximise
growth via muscle damage.
3. INTRA -MUSCULAR TENSION
The more Tension you place on a muscle, the more it will grow. Now what is
Tension? It’s not about squeezing or necessarily thinking about the muscle.
In essence, Tension is a fancy term derived from Physics on how to create
maximal Force Output.
TENSION/FORCE = WEIG HT X ACCELER ATION
What we want is maximal Tension. Based on the equation above that means we
can manipulate two variables – weight or acceleration (speed).
To maximise tension you need to simply lift a heavy weight – as fast as possible
– this creates as much Tension as possible, which then yields a maximal
stimulus for growth.
Note, Tension has NOTHING to do with ‘squeezing’ the muscle against the load
as typically preached amongst bodybuilding circles.
Being an equation, if you were to decrease the weight lifted, you could then
increase the acceleration of the lift – which could then potentially yield just as
much, if not more tension. Finding the sweet spot here is the key to maximising
this Law, whilst staying injury free.
Do the math yourself, if you move an extremely light weight really fast, or even
worse – an extremely light weight really slow – the overall product in the above
equation is going to be significantly less no matter how hard you are focusing on
contraction and ‘feeling the muscle’ – there simply isn’t enough Tension to
stimulate growth. So don’t do it.
On the other hand, there is certainly a lot of reasoning behind moving a moderate
weight fast and a just as plausible case for moving, or attempting to move, a
heavy weight fast – so do that instead. This will maximise the Tension output on
the equation and stimulate growth.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Now for the fun part – formulating a program to maximise The 3 Laws of
Hypertrophy
A Base Plan would consist of the following
•
•
•
Heavy work, typically for lower reps with an explosive tempo (Intramuscular
Tension)
Higher rep work, typically with lighter weight and potentially a constant
tension tempo (Hyperaemia/Occlusion)
Pain inducing work, the kind that leaves you questioning your faith in
humanity at the end of a set. Typically requiring someone screaming at you
with a gun to your head because no person in their right mind would take their
body to that point of exertion and muscle damage on their own accord.
(Muscle Damage)
Though many people may have a bias to one Law over another, there isn’t
necessarily one that is better than the other – it is all contextual. That being said,
an intelligent program should be taking all of these variables into consideration
and an intelligent coach or athlete will know when to manipulate and use these 3
Laws. Furthermore, these Laws all overlap – a Giant set could easily be
performed in a way that stimulates intense muscle damage – whilst also fulfilling
the role of hyperaemia/occlusion.
This could be periodised into weekly, fortnightly or monthly microcycles –
devoting a certain amount of time to each – how you go about doing this is
entirely dependent on yourself and your goals. Alternatively, you can combine
them all into a single session.
Here’s a sample Leg routine
Lying Leg Curls
Goals: Primary – Hyperaemia/Occlusion, Secondary – Muscle Damage
Similarly to John Meadows, I like to use Leg Curls early on in a session – for one,
it pre-pumps an area that is typically under developed, but it also helps to open
up the hips and warm up the knees for squatting.
Perform sets of 15 – incrementing up in weight. Once you reach a top weight for
15, perform an additional 3 sets of max reps – resting for 30-40 seconds between
work sets.
Tempo – Explosive concentric, 2 second pause in the contracted position, 4
second controlled negative – stopping short of full knee extension.
High Bar Back Squats
Goal: Primary – Intramuscular Tension
Time for some power based work. This is a bodybuilding based program – we’re
not pure strength athletes – so the goal isn’t to necessarily lift the heaviest weight
imaginable. Performing these slightly later in a session as opposed to first thing
allows us to decrease the required load – being far safer on the joints/lower back
while still maximising Tension.
Perform sets of 6 – incrementing up in weight on each set. Instead of 6 constant
tempo reps, each repetition is to be done as a ‘maximal single’ – to do this, take
a deliberate pause to reset at the top of each rep, inhale forcefully and descend
into the next rep. Explosively drive up out of the hole.
Keep incrementing up in weight to an explosive 6 rep maximum with perfect
technique. Then perform 2 additional sets of 6. Take longer rests between work
sets, allowing for complete ATP and neural recovery.
Constant Tension & Pause Squats – Your choice on positioning (Front, Low
Bar, High Bar, Safety Bar, Smith Machine etc) – If your lower back can’t handle
so much squatting in a session, opt for a Leg Press.
Goal: Primary – Hyperaemia/Occlusion, Secondary – Intramuscular Tension
Perform 4 sets of 8. On these, you are to perform the first 7 reps constant tension
style – controlled eccentrics, no pause at the bottom, controlled concentric and
no lock-out at the top. On the 8th rep – you’re going to do a 2 second pause in
the hole, then drive up as explosively as possible to full extension.
Bulgarian Split Squats superset with Leg Extensions
Goal: Primary – Muscle Damage, Secondary – Hyperaemia/Occlusion &
Sadness
Start with Bulgarian Split Squats – load up with a dumbbell and support yourself
in a rack for balance. Perform sets of 10 each side, incrementing weight on every
set. Switch the starting leg on each superset to avoid blasting one leg over the
other. On the last rep of each set, perform a 10 second iso-hold in the stretched
position.
Immediately follow this up with Leg Extensions – perform these with feet dorsiflexed and your upper torso bent forward. Hold the peak contraction for 3
seconds and control the eccentric. Maintain a constant weight here – one that
you can handle for 20 reps on the first set, then go for as many reps as possible
on each subsequent round.
Between each superset, take 30 seconds to get each of your quads into a deep
stretch. That’s about 60-80 seconds rest total, then start again.
Perform 3 supersets for the prescribed reps. On the final superset, perform a
drop set on the Leg Extensions for an additional 10-15 reps.
Dumbbell Stiff Leg Deadlift
Goal: Primary – Hyperaemia/Occlusion
Perform 3 sets of 20 reps – keep these reps slow and controlled. Avoid following
through to full extension to keep constant tension on the hamstrings and glutes.
PURSUE PERFORMANCE, NOT
FATIGUE
In Training by Eugene TeoNovember 27, 2016
I’ve had countless people come to me with adrenal issues, niggling injuries and a
general apathy and demotivation for training. Actually, it’s not just training – it
tends to bleed into the rest of their life and sucks the soul out of their personality
altogether. But more on that another day..
While a lot of it comes back to poor periodisation and programming – the main
underlying issue I see is poor fatigue management.
No, I’m not just talking about getting enough sleep, knocking back your peri
workout shakes and hitting your macros. Most of the time, it’s not even about
periodisation or program design – though that does play into it.
What I’m talking about is the tendency to chase fatigue in the gym – pushing
every set to failure or with the overuse of intensifiers like drop sets, forced reps,
rest pause etc, and the disregard for what really matters – performance.
Don’t get me wrong – there’s a time and place to push and for all of the
intensifiers – and I absolutely love redlining it – I don’t think there’s anything quite
as satisfying as leaving it all in the gym and stumbling out to the car, only to
cramp up, collapse and puke in the middle of the parking lot.
But understand this – no amount of work you can do today will ever equate to, or
surpass the amount of work you can do across a week or extended training
cycle.
There’s a huge component to this that a lot of people overlook – Focusing on
Performance and Progressive Overload.
Let’s say you did 8 reps at 100kg on a given exercise last week. This week, you
hit your 8, and you feel fresh – and knock out 9 or 10 reps and still have more in
the tank. You’ve ticked the box of progressive overload and outdoing your
previous performance. Fantastic.
Most people will crank hard at this point – and extend out until they reach
complete failure – maybe reaching 15 reps. Fantastic-er – right?
What ends up happening next? You step into the gym next week – and instead of
having a manageable goal to hit, you’ve set the bar unrealistically high for
yourself, and there’s a good chance instead of getting to 15+ reps – you wind up
at 9 or 10 – and fail.
What follows is an ‘unsuccessful’ training session and lowered training morale –
which tends to negatively effect the rest of the session and future sessions.
A better option is to predetermine your targets, hit them, and stop. 9 times out of
10, I’m leaving the gym with plenty left in the tank – and I want my clients to as
well. Instead of destroying yourself in the gym – strive for consistent progression.
If you get an extra rep or two out than the previous week, and you KNOW you
had more in you – that will fuel your fire for next week. This builds momentum
and motivation, whilst avoiding injury and burnout from redlining every single
session.
Just because you’re feeling ‘on’ on a given day, doesn’t mean you should drive
yourself into the ground. As satisfying as it may feel, you don’t need that
excruciating pump or to be completely wiped at the end of your session to
progress.
Don’t Fight for Fatigue – Pursue Performance