You are currently exploring the Fundamentals Library, which is designed to provide a basic overview of the topics that are covered in other longer articles. This article is a part of the Training Organization section.
Training Process
In first principles, the training process is simply a consistent and progressive repetitive usage of external forces to interact with the body’s internal forces in the specific way and quantity - in order to stimulate physiological adaptations to facilitate changes in our body and achieve specific performance or visual objectives.
In short, less sophisticated way - its a specific usage of forces, to stimulate adaptations, that make us stronger or better looking.
Training process can be split into different organizational timeframes in which certain decisions can be made.
For competitive athletes, it is helpful to divide training in this way to zoom out and look at the process from a big picture perspective and plan ahead with competition day prioritization in mind.
For non-competitive athletes, it is still a helpful practice, as each level of organization may be more compatible with solving specific problems.
Training Organizational Levels
We can split training process to:
- Lifting or Lowering Phase & Pause or Hold
- Repetition
- Set
- Set Battery
- Training Session
- Microcycle (typically a week)
- Mesocycle (typically 4-8 weeks)
- Block (typically 2-4 months)
- Macrocycle (typically 6-12 months)
- Olympic Cycle (4 years)
- Training Career (10 years+)
Different areas of research, practices, and types of problems have their place at different levels of organization. And each part of this process is important from the standpoint of training success. From the negative phase tempo, through the rep range, volume, progression and training block, to the trajectory of the training career.
This doesn’t mean that we have to consciously plan for each of these levels. That depends on our stage of development, our long-term goals, and our specific problems.
For most people, focusing on the execution aspect, rep sets and training sessions, and planning mesocycles is enough to achieve great results over time.
