Phases of Weight Training For Athletes
Some weight lifting coaches and common sports weightlifting programs do not periodize their weight training program. For optimal sport and strength performance, periodizing your training is a great way to get a competitive edge. There are 5 main phases for a weight training program. Generally, the program should last a few months to a year. The 5 phases are:
During this phase, the athlete is getting adjusted to the weights themselves from a long break or even if it’s their first time lifting. The goal of this phase is to add a bit more muscle to their frame and achieve nuclei overload. The nuclei overload is basically adapting the muscles for more potential for future growth and strength. This is also another reason why athletes that started while young are better prepared to be exceptional athletes when older; they had extra overload of their muscle nuclei from exercising in their youth. However, don’t be worried if you did not play sports when you were a kid; this is why we have programs like these.
A great protocol for a hypertrophy phase is to focus on high volume but low intensity. This means around 3-5 sets of an exercise with 8-15+ reps, to build up your nuclei. The more days of the week the athlete lifts (frequency), the more volume they can achieve. This period’s length will depend on how much the athlete has trained, with two weeks being the shorter length with as much as 6 weeks for newer athletes.
Phase Two: Basic Strength
The main focus of Basic Strength is how it sounds; building strength. Since the athlete is to focus on strength, the rep ranges have to decrease with the actual weights increasing. Typical Basic Strength programs fall under 3-5 sets of 5 reps, with 5X5 being very popular. This period is a transition from high volume to medium volume but bringing up the intensity to the next level. This period usually lasts 3-4 weeks.
Phase Three: Strength and Power
In this phase, gaining strength and not size is the goal. To increase the strength of an athlete, reps have to be lowered further. To gain power, an athlete must decrease the volume of training to be able to recover and become more explosive. Sets are generally between 3 and 5 while reps go down further to 1-3 reps per set. This phase lasts anywhere from 2-4 weeks depending the season length of the sport.
Taper, or “peaking” is the phase that athletes tend to love the most. This is when the athlete should receive massive amounts of rest, with most of the volume cut down. The goal in this phase is to get the athlete used to exerting maximum force from lots of rest. Rep ranges in this period are still between 1-3 but the volume drops to as little as 1-3 sets per session. 3x per week is optimal during this period of 1-3 weeks. After taper, an athlete should feel very energetic and powerful.
This is the hardest phase for a driven athlete. Taking a break from training. If you are really antsy to get back to training, after a few days of complete rest, you can return to light training. If the athlete is tired in any way, they should take longer rest to completely recover from a hardworking season.
This periodization of phases does not just work well for weightlifting. If you are a coach looking to change up your training, follow these principles for volume and intensity and your team will prosper.
Get active on the blog and post your thoughts and questions! There is a lot of information out there that we have to sort through getting us closer to optimization.
If you are looking to look at the diet and macronutrient side of things for optimal performance, check out my book: Optimization for Athletes: Macronutrient Edition here (https://amzn.to/2PvQNOV).
Hope you learned a lot about the different phases of training and get the chance to implement it sometime in your life.
