Understanding Step Loading Variations
“Plans are nothing; Planning is everything” Dwight D. Eisenhower
The biggest differences between a mediocre training program and a great one are simple. A great program involves looking ahead, tracking progress, managing fatigue, and making the necessary adjustments. On the other hand, a mediocre plan involves training, guessing, and hoping for the best.
The more experience a coach has, the more it is reflected in the depth, and adaptability, or their plan. Learn to plan, and you or your athletes will find themselves on the fast-track to a personal best performance.
Today we are talking about how to set up the “mesocycle” (a 2-6 week training block) for optimal results. In order to do that, you have to know how to load in an ascending or descending fashion.
Ascending vs. descending step loading
In order to maintain high intensity long enough to hit the best possible performance, you must know how to “wave” your training cycles. When it comes to training cycles, there are three types of cycles you can run.
- Flat
- Ascending
- Descending
In a flat loading cycle, volume and intensity stay relatively the same throughout the 2-6 week period you run it.
Whenever I think of flat loading, I think of a friend of mine who high jumped with me in college. He was a rail at 6’2, 145lb (good for high jump, bad for football), and didn’t have much lifting experience. His sophomore year, he started doing squats. After a few weeks of watching him squat, I noticed something. He kept the weight on the bar at 115lb every time he lifted. I explained to him the “error of his ways”, and he actually ended up getting pretty strong and nearly breaking the school record a few years down the road. Anyways, keeping the bar at 115lb and doing 3 sets of 10 every time you go in the weight room is a perfect example of flat loading. You might get stronger for the first couple of weeks, but after that, it does you no good. On second thought, not totally untrue…. you will get very good at lifting 115lbs.
It doesn’t take an Albert Einsten, e=mc squared type to figure out that flat loading isn’t going to get you fast, stong, swole, jacked, or whatever you are looking for. The biggest place for flat loading is in competitive periods where you realize that the strength work you are doing is (surprise) not the biggest contributor to the success of yourself or your athletes.
There may be cases as well where athletes already meet the absolute strength requirements for success in their sport and you don’t need to get them any stronger. This too would be an area where flat loading would be OK. This is only talking strength training however. You may be flat loading your strength work, but there is a good chance your other training is following a different pattern. Below is a visual of what flat loading looks like.
As you can see, flat loading doesn’t change from week to week. This can also be referred to as a maintaining load. Pretty simple… and not very effective for most strength or athletic based endeavours, unless you are in the heat of the competitive season. Plus, wouldn’t you get bored doing arm curls with the orange 8-lb dumbbells after two or three weeks? I am sure you would want to at least move up to the grey 10’s after a while.
Ascending Step-Loading
With flat loading out of the way, let’s move to the standard loading scheme for many programs, which is ascending step-loading. This style of loading will increase the work-load each week until a de-load is implemented. This is done in terms of either volume or intensity, although there will be cycles where intensity is maintained while volume increases.
The essence of ascending step-loading is that each successive week is more demanding then the week before it in terms of total load via volume and intensity. In ascending step-loading, either volume or intensity increase, and neither decreases from the week before. In a fairly untrained state (such as an athlete who has has spent an offseason sitting on the couch, playing video games) most athletes can hang with these cycles for 4-5 weeks or more before they start to acclimate themselves to the loading pattern, get overcome by fatigue, and stall out out in gains.
The most common form of ascending step loading would be a 5×5 novice program such as found in “starting strength” by Mark Rippetoe. In this training program, the volume stays the same (3×5 in three exercises each workout) but the athlete will increase the intensity each week as they progress in strength because they are lifting more weight. Thus the total demand on the athlete’s body each week is going to be greater, as the total tonnage lifted goes up. The athlete will eventually stall out on this program when their body cannot continuously recover from the fatigue applied from the last few workouts (we will leave exercise variety out of the equation for now). At this point, a new loading scheme must be administered to make a better use of fatigue distribution.
Ascending step loading is perfect for the first few weeks of general physical preparation, such as when an athlete returns to training after summer vacation, but don’t make the mistake of using it for more than that first month or so of training when your athletes begin their off-season work. The reason that ascending loading patterns aren’t the best for performance improvement is that as the cycles increase in demand, fatigue builds. After several cycles, there is too much fatigue to hit the high level of required intensity to continually make gains. Simple as that.
There are much better setups to gain strength, speed and power over the course of a season. Ascending step loading is a mediocre primary method of gaining strength and power because eventually, the fatigue accumulated during the cycles will mask performance.
Reverse (“Descending”) Step Loading
When you are preparing for a competitive season, increasing strength and power is going to be a priority. To carry this out most effectively (which includes the proper management of fatigue), you will need to be doing a reverse step-loading format. Reverse step loading works very well for this because it matches increasing fatigue with slightly decreased work volumes each week, allowing the athlete to make consistent gains each week rather than begging for a deload at the end of the cycle.
Below is an illustration of what a descending step-load looks like in terms of a mid-range, 8 week, setup.
This format is pretty simple. It is actually similar to what many year long training plans look like, just on a smaller scale. In one 4 week period of training in this style, all training variables can be addressed, and the athlete will typically end the cycle stronger then when they started. After the maximal intensity has been reached in week 3, a small deload can be administered as shown above.
If the cycle is planned well, a coach can have the fourth week actually increase in intensity beyond week 3, decrease further in volume, and potentially do a max or submax for strength training. Week 5 will then look like week 1, the basic high volume/low intensity reset. Basically, you replace the week 4 deload with an intense, but low volume week. This offers less of a restorative period, but athletes with high work capacities and motivation can handle this type of setup with good results.
The general consensus amongst elite track and field coaches is that smaller cycles are better than longer ones for developing speed and power qualities. This is going to be especially true amongst more advanced athletes who adapt quickly and demand variation. The cycle below can be run as shown, or even deloaded every third week instead of getting a very high intensity/submax/maximal week. Deloading on the third week would be useful if the athlete is getting a lot of high-powered training through their sport, such as triple jumpers in track and field.
Finally, what does all this look like when competition is going on? After all, it is pretty easy to construct this type of cycle in the offseason, as you can work on getting stronger and faster without having to worry about peaking for any sort of competition. In this case, the illustration below will help you to understand a bit more about how a competition cycle might be run. The circled weeks in the illustration show where competitions are showing up in a two month cycle.
So competitions are going to limit what you are able to do in your cyclic loading to a degree. Competitive efforts are also very high intensity training stimuli, so be sure not to forget about that when it comes to the following microcycle! Up until the highest peak of the season, it is important to attempt to keep the load in at least a maintaining status, so important qualities are not lost. Fortunately, things like maximal strength and hypertrophy can be maintained for a number of weeks, or even months, especially if the administered training is focusing on some element of power or speed-strength.
I’ll cover more in part III of this series as we get into the distinction between general and specific training means. If you have a question or comment, leave it below and I’ll answer it! Until next time!
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