by Danny McLarty

Perfect Bridal Workout

What’s on your mind when you walk through the doors into the gym?

If you’re Tweeting from your cell phone between sets, socializing more than lifting, or are consistently cutting your training sessions short to keep your mani & pedi appointments, you may as well stop reading this article now.

If any of the above apply to you, you need to refocus, think about what you truly want to accomplish with your health and body, and come back to read the rest of this article after you’ve had some time to reflect. The information below won’t matter unless you go into each and every training session ready to crush it!

For those of you who are ready for the next step, lets talk periodization, or — more plainly put — planned training.

Planning your training sessions, along with ways in which you’ll keep challenging yourself and progressing in the gym, is a surefire way to ensure that you’re never wasting time. Every workout you do should play a solid role in helping you reach whatever goals you’ve set for yourself.

The purpose and benefits of planned workouts should be crystal clear to anyone who doesn’t spend more time texting from her phone than lifting, so let’s jump straight into the different ways you can plan your workout — or, more specifically — three periodization methods.

1. Linear Periodization

Linear Periodization starts with high volume and low intensity (for instance, sets of 12-15 reps) and progressively increases intensity while decreasing volume (to sets of 6-8 reps or so).

With linear periodization, a trainee will spend a training phase trying to develop a specific strength quality. This usually starts with higher reps in phase one, with the reps decreasing in each successive phase.

An example of linear periodization may look something like this:

Phase I: Hypertrophy Phase (8-12 reps)

Phase II: Strength Phase (6 reps and less)

Phase III: Power Phase (3-5 reps with emphasis speed, as in Olympic Lifts and/or Speed Deadlifts)

The problem with linear periodization is that you’re constantly moving away from the quality you just spent time developing.

Here’s what I mean: A phase will often last about 8 weeks. By the time you finish with the power phase, (phase III), it will have been 16 weeks since you last worked in the hypertrophy zone. So, if you determined that it was important to work in that zone in the first place, why not at least maintain it?

2. Undulating Periodization

With undulating periodization, you work a single strength quality at each session. By changing up the strength quality throughout the week, no single quality goes untrained for an extended period of time.

An example of this for someone who trains three times weekly may look like this:

Day 1: Muscular Strength Zone (4 sets of 3 reps)

Day 2: Muscular Endurance Zone (3 sets of 15 reps)

Day 3: Muscular Hypertrophy Zone (4 sets of 10 reps)

3. Conjugate Periodization

Conjugate training means that you train more than one strength quality at each session.

Once again, no single quality goes untrained for an extended period of time. With the conjugate method, you may start off with lows reps. Later in the session you move on to higher rep sets (8-12 or 12-15 reps).

How Does This Relate to Fit Girls?

Even if your primary goal is fat loss, you should still be training many strength qualities each week, and this is where undulating and conjugate periodization styles come in.

Your fat loss phase will NOT become less effective if you spend a little time trying to maintain your strength. Conversely, if you spend week after week after week performing high rep sessions with very little rest intervals, you’ll become weaker over time.

This loss in strength will actually make your fat loss sessions much less effective long-term! Focusing on strength is one of the most fundamental things you can do to take your physique to the next level.

Let’s check out a different way to look at this whole periodization thing, broken down by your primary goal.

Goal: Fat Loss

15% of your training sessions should be devoted to maintaining strength (low rep sets with full rest between sets);
15% should be devoted to hypertrophy (sets in the 8-12 range with moderate rest);
70% should be devoted to fat loss (giant sets performed with little rest in the 10-15 rep range).

Goal: Hypertrophy

20% of the sessions should be devoted to maintaining strength;
60% should be devoted to hypertrophy;
20% should be devoted to endurance training (reps of 12-25 with little to moderate rest).

Your percentages don’t have to resemble the ones above precisely, but these examples should give you an idea of how you can focus on a particular goal without losing any of the qualities that you’ve worked so hard to improve throughout the course of the year.

The Bottom Line

It’s perfectly fine to devote a phase of training to improving a particular aspect of your fitness, but you never want to completely neglect any of the other aspects or strength qualities. Just remember, if it was important enough to train in the first place, then it should be important enough to maintain in current, and future phases.

But the most important aspect of training is the effort that you put into it. If you truly give it your all, then throwing in some smart planning will take that hard work and deliver even better results for years to come!

About Danny McLarty

Danny McLarty is a fitness coach at New Direction Fitness in Danville, California. Despite standing only 5 feet 7 inches, Danny eared a place in the Illinois Basketball Hall of Fame in 2007 for his high school and college career. He is a basketball skills coach, helping players improve their ability to get open, with and without the ball. He can be contacted by email.