Programmed Avoidance

Periodization, arousal management, and training frequency.

Clever programming won’t save you from an inability to manage arousal. Anyone who has been training something long enough knows that inevitably gains (however you define them) start to slow.

Almost as predictable as it is inevitable, this is first interpreted (falsely) as an error. What am I doing wrong all of a sudden? Why isn’t what I’ve always been doing working anymore?

Photo by Justin Fisher on Unsplash

First, this friction is expected and often a symptom of progress. Novices improve with just about anything that keeps them consistent, engaged, and recovered. The novelty and noob gains wear off sooner or later and we’re offered an opportunity to actually improve — which is to say, change ourselves.

Second, what’s worse may be the folks that convince themselves to keep doing things “the way they’ve always done them” despite overwhelming evidence that their “training” and “fitness” protocols are leaving them broken and less capable.

The natural impulse here seems to be to look for a quick fix, low hanging fruit that’s easy to grab — a new exercise variation, a different rep-set scheme, maybe a diet hack, or miracle peptide.

If any of those things make a significant change in training outcomes — that actually matter — you’re still a novice. That doesn’t mean they’re not effective, useful, or relevant to your circumstances. It just means that your system hasn’t accumulated enough novel experience and confidence to differentiate robust causes and effect size (signal) from distracting correlations (noise).

---

Periodization Pitfalls:

Credit: NASM

From a logical perspective, traditional or linear periodization sounds excellent. However, very few of us operate in completely socially isolated containers (like military boot camps). Even professional athletes have to contend with the fact that human systems are messy and complicated, particularly when compounded with other imperfect and complicated systems (like other people).

Block periodization works a little better and offers more congruence, particularly when you think of most sports having a pre- , in- , and post- “season” interval.

Though eventually we will still run into same problems. How much more “general” preparedness does an Olympic or World-level competitor really need? Should we not be exploring whether or not their “specific” training is producing the “specific” results they’re seeking?

Undulating periodization, again conceptually, sounds intuitive, but that’s just the problem. Outsourcing our intuition to a spreadsheet leads to feeling like we are more clever planners than we are competent coaches and athletes. Changing your focus every other week effectively means you’re focusing on nothing.

Again, if that’s working for you, you’re still a novice. That’s a good thing. Keep showing up and trying hard until that stops working. Then, be honest. Evaluate. Adapt.

---

Other micro-cycle management strategies have come along to explain things differently and do have valid appeal that gets us out of the 7-day cycle:

• Build > Output > Armor (ref.)

• Stimulation > Development > Rebound (ref.)

The latter is superior in my opinion, because of exactly what we’re going to need to get at — and that is the ability to think for myself. If the spreadsheet says today is “supposed” to be an “armor day”, what if I still feel really good? Or, perhaps this is a week where I have few obligations and can get more training volume / focus in.

When I talk about “development” sessions, we’re talking about training and driving specific adaptations (like physiological systems or tactical / sport skills). This is not the same as exercising, which is far from “useless” — despite my own derogatory references to “just exercising” in the past.

When we get closer to the “truth”, we usually start to find more questions, and the one that’s creeping in now is:

“How many days per week can you train?”

I used to answer this with:

“As many as you can recover from.”

Perhaps a better question is:

“How many days per week should I train?”

To that, I have to give a different answer, perhaps:

“As many as you see positive results develop from.”

If we’re being honest, about results rather than desire, that probably means 2-3 sessions per week. A lot of people, including myself, “exercise” a lot more than 2-3x per week. At that point, what we’re really talking about largely “re-training”, not “training training” or the development of “new” abilities provoked by a “novel” stimulus we must form “new” adaptations to.

The paradox here is that, as a novice, you can increase this number as your “training age” dictates you still have a lot of room to grow, you’re probably just not resilient enough yet to recover from that volume.

By contrast, the more experienced you become and the more your training age grows (i.e. performative ability actualized), you can recover from large amounts of moderate volume, but rarely get a stimulus great enough to push you to new levels.

---

More Management?

Often we miss the point, and pundits online capitalize on leveraging these extremes for engagement. How many of the sprinting evangelists, in recent years, doting on “jogging”, have spent serious time — say 100 hours or more — steadily between 60% and 70% MHR?

Similarly, walking / rucking is poor preparation for the same “Zone 2” range. Yes, the cardio-respiratory stimulus may be the same, but orthopedically it is dramatically different. You learn to move heavy and slow, which is not good for running. As a result, your gait, cadence, and posture all change significantly.

That certainly isn’t to say any of those practices — sprinting, walking, rucking — are bad. It’s to say they have functions as well as corresponding limitations. Shocking, almost as if specific stimuli invoke specific adaptations!

The folly here is that what you’re avoiding is probably exactly where you need to work — and suffer the consequences of — or ideally learn to adequately regulate and integrate said stimuli.

It is much more comfortable to slog along under VT1 (ventilatory threshold, fuel substrate level) as well as sprint past VT2 (wast buffering threshold) and boast about “hard” training — all while avoiding the quite unpleasant work that actually needs to happen in between.

---

First Principles and Fundamentals:

Have you ever met an over-recovered athlete?

I haven’t either.

So, I usually start there. Most of the people I work with, and virtually all of the climbers and fighters I’ve ever met, don’t have a problem showing up. They have precisely the opposite problem.

I stress the importance of a long warm up, not just for the physiological components, but as an opportunity for self-inquiry, assessment, and calibration.

It doesn’t help us to push more horsepower through flat tires or test the steering agility with imbalanced suspension. Likewise, if we’re not breathing (well) we either need to call 911 or revise the day’s “intended stimulus” and our means of achieving it.

In truth, this is a microcosm of my “adjusted hierarchy of development” contrasted with CrossFit’s 2002 model. That model asserts that nutrition and metabolic conditioning should compose more than 40% of training, and adding gymnastics should take us past 60%.

It’s easy to show up to a gym and ask:

What are we going to / supposed to do today?

With a little prompting, it’s not too hard to include:

How do I feel today?

It takes a lot of practice to go a step further and decide:

How do I want to feel today?

How will I get there?

This isn’t as revolutionary as it may look, you’ve likely been copy/pasting this sort of information on daily whiteboards and spreadsheets every session. It’s hiding in plain sight under obtuse rhetoric like:

• (Training) Goal

• (Cycle) Phase

• (Weekly) Objective

• (Daily) Task

To actually be useful, this might look like:

• Goal: Improve Metabolic Conditioning

• Phase: Anaerobic Endurance

• Objective: Avoid re-injuring right shoulder.

• Task: Double mobility segment, focus on confidence and control of movement.

---

---