How to Develop as a Great Coach: Have a Plan, Part I
The General and Foundational Training Periods
Great coaches have a plan. Or as it is otherwise known in sports circles, a periodization model.
Periodization is the organization of timing and sequencing of different training exercises.
Here’s the periodization model I use. There are 5 distinct training periods, all of which have different focuses and goals:
General
Foundational
Specific
Performance
Transition
There are many different names for the various periodization periods. Coach Renato Canova has only 3, he calls them General, Fundamental, and Specific. Zatsiorsky has 4 periods he calls Accumulation, Transmutation, Realization, and Transition. Others call their periods other things. The names don’t matter as much as the basic concepts of what happens during each period.
The timing of training is important because there are many training effects to consider. Namely:
Acute Effects — changes that happen during exercise.
Immediate Effects — changes that happen as a result of a single training session and is manifested soon after the workout concludes.
Cumulative Effects — changes that occur as a result of continued training sessions over a small period, like a mesocycle (6 - 12 weeks).
Delayed Effects — changes that are not fully realized until after a given time interval as a result of a consistent block of steady training.
Residual Effects — changes retained after the cessation of training beyond time periods which adaptions take place.
This matters because every workout has acute and immediate effects, but only a series of workouts over a consistent period of time can result in cumulative, delayed, and residual effects. And it is the latter three effects which have the biggest influences on significantly improving a runner’s race day performance.
When I think about the periodization of workouts I consider first the individual. What are their training and performance strengths and weaknesses? What areas do they need to upgrade to perform at a higher level? What is holding them back?
What I use to guide my analysis of each runner is an inventory of their strengths/weakness as they relate to 5 main biomotor qualities for athletes:
Stamina
Speed
Strength
Skill
Suppleness
To illustrate how the various training periods, training effects, and training direction of the 5 biomotor abilities help organize a training plan, let’s look at how to design a periodization model for an entire year for a hypothetical emerging elite 5,000m runner.
Perhaps this runner possesses adequate Speed and Strength levels because they were primarily a 1500m runner in college. But their Stamina, Skill of movement, and overall Suppleness is weak and needs improvement.
From this, albeit primitive, assessment I can then prioritize the 5 qualities for this individual to craft a training direction to upgrade the most outstanding biomotor abilities.
For this hypothetical runner, their biomotor development priorities would be, in order, 1. Stamina, 2. Skill of Movement, 3. Speed, 4. Strength, and 5. Suppleness.
With biomotor priorities clear, I can now set up their periodization plan.
My General Periods always have the same emphasis, no matter the athlete. Why? In this period, the focus is on general, all-around fitness upgrades. The aim is to elevate a runner’s general fitness which will later be translated into specific fitness.
In my General Periods, the #1 priority is to introduce Strength upgrades in the form of strength training in the gym and hilly runs. The #2 priority is to introduce Speed & Skill upgrades (which are closely related) in the form of short sprints while fresh, both on the track and uphills. Next is Stamina. And finally Suppleness.
This period can last 4 - 8 weeks depending on the athlete and available time horizons.
Also, it should be noted, that all qualities are trained discrete and separate. What this means is there is no mixing of biomotor qualities in an individual session. Speed sessions are focused only on speed. Stamina work is only performed during a stamina session. Etc.
In Foundational Periods, I then shift the focus to upgrading the one biomotor quality decided as the most outstanding limiting factor.
In the example, we decided on Stamina.
What training would look like during this block is a dominant emphasis on Stamina work. For this hypothetical emerging elite 5K runner this could be 3 - 6 days a week of frequent, moderate bouts of Stamina focused running.
What this could look like for this hypothetical 5K runner is the following weekly training pattern:
Monday — 4 - 6 x 1 Mile @ 15K pace w/ 60” recovery
Tuesday — 5 Miles Steady (Heart Rate of ~150 bpm)
Wednesday — 5 Miles Steady (Heart Rate of ~150 bpm)
Thursday — 2 - 3 x 2 Mile @ @ 15K pace w/ 2:00 recovery
Friday — 5 Miles Steady (Heart Rate of ~150 bpm)
Saturday — 5 Miles Steady (Heart Rate of ~150 bpm)
Sunday — Hilly Easy Longer Endurance Run
In that example, no session is longer than 40 minutes and the effort is moderate. But the frequency is high. This is due to the acute and immediate effects of fatigue being short, usually disappearing overnight. The runner gets 30 miles a week — or approx. 3 hours — of running at a steady effort which I define as a heart rate of roughly 150 bpm.
Over 10 weeks, that adds up to 30 hours of steady running. Which is a sufficient accumulation of work to produce significant cumulative and residual training effects of advancing the runner’s basic Stamina.
Speed and Strength sessions are still performed throughout the week too, but those are entirely separate sessions, usually performed on alternating days in the afternoon after about 4 - 6 hour period of rest. Since Stamina improvement is the biomotor focus, those sessions are done first, while the runner is most fresh, after a night’s sleep. Since these sessions are moderate efforts the immediate effects of fatigue are not high. So a brief 4 - 6 hour break can see the runner of this caliber almost fully restored before the afternoon sessions focused on secondary qualities.
I have the advantage of working with adult runners who can do double days, you may not — and that’s OK.
If all you can afford is one training session per day then alternate days to stress each biomotor quality, like so:
Monday — Stamina
Tuesday — Speed
Wednesday — Strength
Thursday — Stamina
Friday — Speed
Saturday — Stamina
Sunday — Strength
Whatever biomotor quality is the priority should be performed most frequently during the Foundational Period.
Again, don’t mix biomotor training stimuli in this period. The aim is to keep the stimuli short, frequent, and moderate so the runner can recover within 24 hours. And that’s best accomplished by workouts which only stress one biomotor quality at a time.
As you’ll see in Part 2, mixing biomotor qualities within a workout increases the intensity of the session and with it the recovery needed between each workout session.
In Part 2 I’ll cover, along with some more examples, the Specific Period, Performance Period, and Transition Period.