Is this from Adaptation in Sports Training (what a book!) or something else?
Is that like the old Russian charts with no scales or numbers that show a period of huge loading followed by a massive supercompensation? I don’t believe that crap. Yessis told me the same thing. Something like “the more exhaustion you can cause in an athlete without getting sick or injured the more the supercompesation beyond the original state”.
So if I totally exhaust someone in a mesocycle they will have the best possible supercompensaton? Somehow I doubt that. Makes for a good story though.
Tony Schwartz wrote:
The organization of the load is a specific stressor to which the athlete can adapt.
Just as long-term exposure to any stressor (a particular exercise, set or rep scheme, etc.) will render it of insignificant strength to induce adaptation, so too can the long-term use of a particular loading structure.
Concentrated loading gives the athlete a new stressor to adapt to. It is not the only way to elicit positive adaptations in an athlete who is no longer responding to “typical” training protocols, but another tool that can be utilized.
Charlie Francis wrote:
A brief summary:
1: Those who are likliest to need concentrated loading are also those who are least likely to have a problem with it.
2: The duration of the concentrated load varies by event demand. For example RFD (shorter) vs Absolute Strength (longer), even though none is very long overall, even though absolute str events are usually to the left of RFD events.
3: The likeliest candidates have events concentrated to the left of the F/T curve, moving from Left to Right. For example, a 100m man will be more likely to need and thrive on concentrated loading than a 400m man.
4: Concentrated loading can be done in ANY of the High Intensity elements of the program, not just weights, and, if it is done in one place, it should be avoided in others during that period, with the exception of slight overlaps in events to the far Left.
I think the organization of the load(s) is extremely important not just the magnitude of concentrated training volumes(“exhaustion”).
Depends again on how the organism is depleted. If you follow my points from the article on the front of the site, you can see that is it the cumulative effect of the numbers of advances strung together, not the height or breadth of any one session.
If you follow my reasoning, you must view the second part of your reply as weighed againt the first part.
Duration cannot be prolonged beyond a certain point safely and will not be constant. That point will be forever shortened by the intensification of the high-intensity sessions.
Good point and following up on the point of only marginal lowering of intensity in the down periods, it can be any of the high intensity elements that are kept close, not necessarily all over brief periods. An example in the taper period might be near max lifts but sub max sprints to balance between the needs for recovery and stimulation of the entire organism.
Charlie,
Are there any guidelines as to what high intensity elements are kept close to the highest intensity levels and which are submaximal for the deload period? I know, generally, how your taper period is organized but what about in non-competition training periods? Weights seem like the most appropriate answer to me, when dealing with periods of high intensity speed work- this sound about right?
Depends entirely on when in the season and the level of the athlete. Of course, in the taper period, it is essential to minimize risk at a time when it’s too late to recover from injury, so weights are preferred. You also have the option to select from within the menu of lifts and or types of speed, etc.
Thanks Charlie.
Some more thoughts/questions:
Since there is a general trend of intensification throughout the offseason and the athlete’s performance level is rising (hopefully 
) the athlete will be more able to stress their system and thus be in a greater need for recovery. It seems that you would move from keeping sprinting at a high intensity early on in the year to weights at high intensity later in the offseason training period. This is assuming that the weights could provide greater recovery from the training while still providing a high intensity stimulus, although I guess sprints could as well via manipulation of height and breadth…
How does the level of the athlete figure into this?
From the this example aren’t you stimulating one part of the nervous system while minimising another? E.g., a balancing act between stimulation of the PNS and CNS? I’ll have to think about your other reply - thank you.
Let’s be clear that we’re talking about the down period. The possibilities are endless and dependant on the individual. A few examples:
1:A thinner individual may not have the capacity to generate enough general stimulus via weights.
2: An intermediate strength athlete might maintain all his lifts at near-max during a late down period while a stronger athlete might stay near-max in only one lift.
3: Movement through the season in a S-to-L program allows the possibility of maintaining some near-max Spec End for some athletes during the down week while reducing the intensity of the speed componant to sub-max. Reducing SE from multiple to a single run can reduce the vol/duration of this high intensity element, even though it is the longest duration element in the program.
4: A high level athlete like Ben could not maintain any near-max sprints or Spec End during the down period because of the world record levels of ALL the key distances in his training regime (0 to 150m), meaning that the weights would play a bigger role.
5: Performances on the order of what Ben could generate (height of the stimulus) dictated the possibility that the period between the need for the next max stimulus could extend over most, if not all of the down periods from mid phase until the longer taper.
Just a few thoughts (and you were waiting for the “Secret East German Table” to be published!)
Lol, you got me. As usual I am looking for too many specifics when it really does depend highly on the situation. :o
Thanks for the reply, those are some good examples. Example 4 is what I was trying to get at when I mentioned improving performances. I am a little bit confused about your statement in 5, does this mean someone like Ben would or would not need a high intensity stimulus during a down period?
Ben might NOT need a near max stimulus during down periods of shorter duration later in the phase though the taper would be too long for that.
What is the difference between a world record time and a PR time of a near max sprint? What if the world record is 9.99? What if it is 9.69? Does the actual speed mean everything or is it all relative to the individuals maximum speed?
I think in premise there might be some truth to this although Verkoshanksy has written that it’s not about the maximum exhaustion but optimal levels of fatigue that lead to an optimal rebound.
And while the Russians may very well have used this, it’s by no means the only way to succeed at the high level and probably has some major drawbacks.
Consider the Bulgarian Olympic lifters for example, who train nothing like that. Rather, they use a fairly standard 4 week cycle of 3 weeks of increasing volume (number of series to daily max) followed by a down week. No massive overloading, no exhaustion of the athlete, just cycles of progresion and regression to allow for adaptation.
Like what is described in CFTS.
Even if the Russian approach does yield a greater improvement over time (although we might question that: if they use a 6 month cycle of 3 months of exhaustion and 3 months recover to get a 6% improvement, is that better than using more moderate cycles to get 1%/month for 6 months without having to blow your athlete out of the water), it has drawbacks
One is injury. Verkoshanksy’s new book describes cycles wher depth jumping is done on consecutive days. While I’m sure this has a (read this in a Russian accent) ‘profound impact on the neuromuscular system’), I think it also has the risk of ending careers.
Two is that, during the period of high loading, you can’t do any decent technical training b/c you’re tired all of the time. In Verkoshanksy’s MAC/block system, you don’t start to include high intensity elements until you’re well into the supercompensation phase from the specific loading phase. So that’s 2-3 months with no high quality speed work and minimal technical training for a sprinter.
Three is that the danger of missing the supposed ‘peak of supercompensation’ is probably higher compared to a system like Charlies (or the Bulgarians) were athletes are simply kept within a close %age of their best with smaller perturbations to the system.
Story: so last year, my coach (speed skating) got involved with another coach, who was trained in the Russian system. That coach buried his athletes with volume and intensity during summer dryland. With the exception of me (who refused to do his training because I knew it was idiotic), everyone of them was injured at some point. All were overtrained. This continued onto the ice for several months. The goal for them (not me, I’m still devleoping) was Olympic trials in December. Only one skater held on. He peaked in February.
Swimmers, so far as I can tell, continue to train this way. A friend of mine (collegiate swimmer) described his training thusly “We would swim 2 hours/day 6 days/week for months. You get slower and slower and slower and then you taper and get faster and faster and faster and hopefully you hit your peak at the right time.” It’s a crapshoot and ‘missing a peak is most of what you hear about’.
I suspect that the Russians made this work by having so many athletes that even if they overtrained and injured a majority, and most of the others peaked at the wrong time, as long as a couple survived the training and peaked correctly, they could claim success.
Lyle
The output itself dictates the degree of stimulation so, indeed it changes the parameters as performance rises even if the athlete is PBing all through.
Do you have any literature to support these statements:
- Bulgarian 3-1 approach
- Russian block training duration of 3 months and 3 for recovery.
Verkoshanksy has a series of articles in the New Studies in Athletics Archive. Note: the link doesn’t seem to be working right now.
In the examples of actual annual plans, the heavy block loading phase is typically 2-4 months long although the actual duration depends on how many full phaes you work through in a year.
For a triple periodized plan, the length of heavy loading is shorter than a double periodized plan which is shorter than for a single annual plan.
He states in those articles that the ‘realization’ of the long-term delayed training effect is roughly equal to the length of heavy loading during loading phase. So if you depress functional parameters with 3 months of heavy training, you get an increase for the next 3 months as volume is reduced. It’s during that phase that you intensify competition loading to take advantage of the LDTE. It’s also in Supertraining although I don’t recall durations being specified.
I can’t source the Bulgarian scheme right now but I know I have seen it described that way in terms of loading somewhere. Rather than varying intensity (they work at daily max as everyone knows), they vary the number of times that a daily max is hit to stress the organism with an increasing number of approahces to daily max each week for 3 weeks followed by a down week.
I’ll see if I can track it down.
However, ignoring that, the piont I was trying to make is that hte idea of burying an athlete for weeks or months on end with volume/intensity is only one approach to this and clearly a lot of successful athletes don’t do it the Russian way.
Lyle
Verkhoshansky states:
A reduction in the amount of strength work, providing a chance for the body to recover and advance to a higher functional level, is quite important at this stage. A brief period of active rest provides good recovery after intensive high-volume strength work, and speed-strength may rise by 10-15%.
It is important for jumpers and throwers to use high-volume strength work in such a manner that it provides a steady increase in speed-strength throughout the yearly cycle, but yet does not interfere with technique work.
Practical experience and experimental data suggest the need to isolate the magnitude (the total work) and duration (the distribution over time) of strength training volume. Specifically, the “concentrated” and “distributed” variantsshould be distinguished. The “concentrated” variant involves a concentration of strength work over a limited span of time; the “distributed” variant involves a distribution of the same or slightly greater volume of strength work over a prolonged period of time.