Progress Before Periodization

Periodized exercise involves the strategic manipulation of training variables such as intensity and volume. As the baseline level of knowledge for clients and trainers alike continues to grow, periodization serves as a benchmark for “training wokeness”. If you’re not on a periodized program, you’re missing out on significant gains. It’s basic mathematics. If your training doesn’t involve percentages of a repetition max or RPE scaling, you’re falling behind the wave of training advancements.

To which I would rebut, who are you training? How long have you been training them? What are their goals?

Some alluring benefits of periodized programming is that it helps push back against inevitable plateaus through adaptive decay, overtraining, or overuse injury, among other things.

A commonality of the above list is the capacity for your training to be actually threatened by any of those factors. Athletes and skilled trainees with advanced training ages likely benefit (require) some form of structured periodization to continue seeing safe, progressive training adaptations. But for many trainers and coaches emerging in the era of online, true necessity for periodized programs is a lot rarer than we’d like to admit.

For the general public who are stepping into a gym, or at the very least, a structured program for the first time - refining perfect repetitions among a few key exercises will yield an enormous amount of progress long before structured periodization ever enters the conversation. If Barb is learning to squat for the first time, she will make more achieve more strength, hypertrophy, and / or fat loss from perfecting her technique and adding 1-2 more repetitions in flawless position and control than arbitrary 5-10% load increases per week will give her. On that trajectory, the amount of technically proficient repetitions will reduce session to session until she not only has competing movement patterns within the same exercise, but also has catapulted towards an injury or hard skill-based plateau long before it was ever necessary. Beyond that, Barb was never skilled enough at any exercise to ascertain a reliable skill-based 1RM nor has she sent it hard enough to understand actual RPE based programming.

Progression of technical proficiency and subtle increases in time under tension within proper positions week to week will be challenging enough for a new trainee. Things done better are often more effective than things done heavier, and all-the-while, the ceiling of progress on that technique will continue to be raised in the background for when a true periodized program centred around those techniques becomes necessary. Wring your progressions for as long as you possibly can.

Best,

Eric