-
Workout planning is essential to maximize results, and it helps you avoid improvisation and calibrate intensity, recovery, and goals.
-
Linear periodization involves sequential phases of training: aerobic, strength, anaerobic, and peak physical, to prepare gradually.
-
Follow the rules: start with easy workouts, gradually increase volume, reduce mileage with intensity, and move from general to specific.
Schedulingworkouts is important, not to say essential, to get the most out of each and every session.
It is not a case of giving yourself over to the art of improvisation.
Should you be followed by a professional coach it will be up to him to build a training plan that calibrates weekly mileage, specificity and intensity of workouts, recovery and rest.
If, on the other hand, you are your own coach and independently provide for the planning of your workouts according to the goals you have set for yourself, you will be the one who will have to pay close attention to all these aspects.
Linear vs. nonlinear programming
First, you have to choose between two types of periodization: linear or nonlinear.
Linear periodization is the best known and most widely used.
It follows a pattern that involves:
- A first phase in which we focus on building aerobic capacity;
- a “strength phase” involving a block of work that focuses on building strength through, for example, hill runs;
- a phase in which we engage in anaerobic training in which we “play” with speed and changes of pace;
- a final phase where you reach the peak of your physical condition and try to familiarize yourself on a hypothetical race pace, should the season goal include one.
Nonlinear periodization differs in that there is no clear distinction between each of the training phases.
Regardless of the time of the season, one always works to a greater or lesser extent on both the development of endurance, power, speed and strength.
What changes is the frequency and intensity with which one devotes oneself to each phase.
4 rules for goal-proof programming
1. From easy to difficult Don’t be in a hurry to hit the ground running from the beginning of the season.
You will have plenty of time to increase the difficulty of workouts and complicate your life.
Start with workouts that are easy and overall undemanding.
Keep in mind that an easy workout does not necessarily mean that it will be easy for its entire duration: for example, you can incorporate a few tempo changes or strides to give that little bit of brilliance to an easy workout in which a steady pace has been maintained. 2. Increase volume step by step Your weekly mileage and overall training volume should increase over the course of the season.
Run after run, week after week you can increase and intensify the frequency and intensity of your workouts, until you reach the peak phase that will coincide with the moment of maximum effort to be followed by a discharge phase to recover energy before the final test: that of the race, should there be one scheduled. 3. As the intensity increases, decrease the volume The peak phase related to the intensity of the workouts should coincide with a decrease in weekly mileage.
This leaves you freer to focus on speed, making you work on reactivity and explosiveness without getting too tired. 4. From General to Specific Your training plan should always move from an initial phase where you do not work on any specific skills, to sessions dedicated to developing specific skills.
The initial general training phase prepares and predisposes your body to be able to handle and cope with the training stimuli of the phase that will follow, which is the specific phase.
Both phases have a single goal: to make you able to cope both physically and mentally with the entire period of training in preparation for your goal. (Via Run by Outside)