What makes a good training plan?

9/8/2022

The latest blog post comes from our very own James Kennedy. Here he takes you through the main tenets of a good training plan - it's more than just progressive overload and feeling tired afterwards!

A good powerlifting program should be unique to an athlete, targeting their specific weaknesses, allowing them to build muscle and add strength consistently. This can be achieved using any number of different strategies - linear periodisation, daily undulating periodisation, block periodisation or rate of perceived exertion-based programs all have helped thousands of people become stronger over the years. On paper, these plans can often look vastly different but all good programmes share common characteristics which form the basis of effective training programmes.

The first is the principle of specificity. The Specificity Principle states that training should be relevant and appropriate to the sport for which the individual is competing (1). In powerlifting, that means you should be doing exercises that make you better at the squat, bench press and deadlift. It’s a simple concept, but this forms the basis for all subsequent decisions made in designing a program. For powerlifters, specific training must develop the necessary skills and physical features required for powerlifting - technical prowess in the competition lift, improved strength and force production, and increased size of the muscles involved. What does that mean in practice? Well, a training plan which has equal focus on front squats, standing military press, and bent over rows as it does on back squats, bench presses and deadlifts, is less specific than one which focuses mostly on back squats, the bench press and deadlifts. As such, for a powerlifter, the second plan would be more appropriate.

The second principle of good training programmes is overload. The principle of overload states that to keep making progress on an exercise you must find some way to make it more difficult (2). Basically, to continue to get stronger you need to lift more weight. This can be done by keeping the weight the same and adding reps - if you can turn an old 3 rep max into a 5 rep max, you’ve gotten stronger - but it’s typically done by adding weight to the bar. You may start by doing 3x5x100kg in week 1, followed by 3x5x102.5kg in week 2, 3x5x105kg in week 3, and so on, to progressively overload the movement and keep progressing.

The third characteristic of well-planned training is recovery. This idea is best summed up by old-school bodybuilding slogans such as ‘muscles grow outside the gym’. When you train you are putting your body and muscles under stress - it’s recovering from these stressors which allows you to gain strength and grow muscles. A good training plan should involve a microcycle split (a fancy way of saying the smallest unit of training within a broader plan - usually a week) which allows you to recover from your workouts before the next workout. Train, recover, repeat.

The fourth part of planning good training is having a strategy for fatigue management. As you train, your body accumulates stress and becomes fatigued - you’ll feel run down and sore, training will require a lot more mental effort and the weights will feel heavier. Personally, when I become fatigued I physically feel heavy - like every movement takes more effort. A scheduled, or planned, reduction in volume or intensity (or both!) when needed allows the fatigue you’ve accumulated to dissipate, meaning you can return to training and continue to make gains. Commonly, this type of training phase is known as a deload or pivot block and is usually around 1/3rd of the length of the preceding training block. Importantly, this is not the same as time out of the gym! During a planned reduction in training volume or intensity, you should still be training - and a good plan or coach will make sure you are!

The fifth aspect of a well-designed training plan is strategic variation. By strategically and systematically changing exercises, weights, and rep ranges, good training plans help lifters avoid injury, stay engaged in lifting and maximise long-term success. This can take a considerable number of forms and can be used in conjunction with the principle of fatigue management. For example, during a deload or pivot block, you may find yourself doing sets of 10 on a different squat variation (see below) or tempo work. This kind of variation makes training fun - you get to do different exercises, in different rep ranges for a week or two before returning to your normal training.

For an example of a bit of a change up in training, click here.

Finally, a good, well-designed, and well-planned training programme will utilise phase potentiation. This is a complex subject, with a fair amount of debate around it in the academic world, but it does matter to powerlifters and we’ll explore how in more detail in an article later this month. Broadly, the idea behind this is that the order of training blocks matters for the medium to long-term success of the lifter. A good training plan may start with a training block focused on building muscle, followed by a block focused on strength where you take the muscle you build in phase 1 and make it stronger. This would then be followed by a peak block, where you practice doing heavy singles to improve your ability to use that new strength. There are a lot of ways to organise training in this way, but the key to look out for is that a training plan shows a progression - from week to week and from training block to training block. A sample plan may begin in block one by working in the 6-10 rep range, followed by the 3-6 rep range in block two and the 1-3 rep range in block three. This would take you from a focus on hypertrophy to strength to maximal strength and would allow you to build on each previous block to a peak - hopefully on the platform!

These 6 ideas are the core of a good strength training programme: it should be specific to what you’re trying to achieve, progressively overloading the exercises to ensure progress, with a volume that allows you to recover from each session and a plan to deal with fatigue accumulation such as pivot weeks or deloads. A good training plan should also sensibly and strategically vary the exercises, rep ranges, and tempo of the movements that you are performing; this reduces your injury risk, targets weak muscle groups, and keeps training fun. The final step of a good training programme is to take advantage of phasic training; this approach allows you to build technique and muscle, improve your strength, and peak at the appropriate moment - on the platform.

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