When Not To Have A Training Schedule

I’m sitting here in a cold-induced post-travel haze evaluating my next round of training. My athletic objectives for the year have crystallized somewhat since December, and the focus of this round is the ground work for a big challenge in the fall. I have some goals along the way, however, so I’ll need to throw a few peaks into the schedule. Since some of the peaks are power oriented it presents a unique challenge given my fall birthday challenge will require massive increases in endurance.

The first thing that I ask people about making training schedules is their goals. Without an objective it’s hard to make a plan. You’re better off just following along with someone else (doing 90x, Crossfit workout, etc). It’s only when you have goals that you need to create your own plan. My goals at this time are:

1. Tick my climbing hit list for the year
2. Get ready for a big birthday challenge in the fall
3. Prep for the world duathlon championships next year

During the long days of summer I often just throw thoughts on training aside and get outside. In general I think it’s a great plan, provided you make time to do it, because if you spend enough time playing outside fitness follows. This year has more focused goals than most. I’ve got to improve my wattage on the bike and my speed in running, since I haven’t raced seriously in a few years. I also need to make some sacrifices by playing less and training more if I ever want to send my mega climbing project. I still need long days—a lot of them—and since long days diminish your ability to train for power I’m relishing the chance to push my body beyond where it’s gone before. I foresee a lot of suffering on the horizon, but the here and now presents a challenge.

The Giro d’ Italia kicks off in a week and riding a virtual Giro would be a great way to build my cycling base. As fun and tempting as it is I’m not going to do it. I’d like to take the current climbing form I have and knock off some of my list before it gets hot. Therefore, May is going to be a peaking phase in climbing and a preparatory phase for both riding and running.

This means that climbing days will be focused on getting stuff done. Redpointing and climbing hard, not training. Biking and running will be base miles. Not all slow aerobic miles but not racing either; just a lot of quality time on the roads and trails. When I’m training like this I don’t focus on much gym stuff and, instead, stick to a maintenance workout schedule. For this I’ll use p90X +. The synergist moves of X+ don’t work as well into long training programs (because they work too many areas at once) but are great for keeping your muscles in balance, which is vital when you’re performing at 100%.

Due to my immediate goals I think it’s best to not have a set schedule. This is hard to impress upon many of you Beachbody faithful because all of our programs come with schedules. For performance, however, when you are pushing your body to its maximum on some days, it’s better if you can listen to your body and base your training on how it feels. Train hard when you’re training and rest when you need rest. No compromise.

Performance windows are short. You can’t peak all the time. My current plan is to get as much done as possible before it gets hot, and then get back to a more set training scheduling leading to another big peak in the fall. I’ll post my numbers at the end of the month so you can see how this worked.

Synergy & P90X Plus

I’ve been doing a combination of P90X Plus along with riding, running, and climbing to try and bring my training back into focus. All the hubbub surrounding the Mexico trip, along with the small injury I suffered beforehand, put a kink into the schedule. With a month before a planned trip to Europe I’m trying to round out my overall fitness prior to departure, which will complete my base training for a planned big year ahead.

This is slightly different than the plan I drew up and began in December. But as I said then, it’s almost never the right course of action to complete a training program without some alteration. What happened, besides the slight injury that altered my climbing training, was that I began putting so many miles into running that my other fitness suffered. The main problem was lack of consistent sleep. With my aging dog requiring a lot of attention it’s been rare to get more than a few uninterrupted hours of sleep over the last few months. This kind of thing can wreak havoc with recover and training, especially volume, needs to get adjusted as necessary when it occurs.

The key to regaining lost fitness and keeping what I’ve gained in other areas is synergy; finding a training schedule that concurrently taxed many energy systems at once. For this I’ve been using the 90X Plus workouts. Sometimes it’s best to training energy systems separately because it builds strength more efficiently. The down side with this approach is that you then need some time to integrate this fitness together. When you have less time training synergistically, where you train across styles and energy systems, is more apropos. Crossfit follows this model, as does P90X Plus.

The downside to X Plus is also its upside: synergy. Because you train a lot of systems at once, including the kinetic chain, it’s a very efficient system for getting overall body fitness quickly. But because it’s training so many things together the workouts don’t plug into the 90X schedule very well, making it harder to use to affect targeted body composition changes, especially where hypertrophy (size) is concerned.

This style of synergistic training creates, as one of my bodybuilding friends put it, “skinny fit guys”—a club he has no interest in being a member of. I, however, am a poster child for the skinny fit guy club as I feel fat no matter how fit I am because nothing improves your strength for gravity sports as much as losing weight. Right now, my goal is to get as skinny and as fit as I can in three weeks time.
pic: romney showing the advantages of strength to weight ratio gained by training many systems at once.

Shakeology Cleanse

Here’s a little inside information for the Straight Dope faithful. It’s a three day cleanse (I’m doing this week) that’s becoming a standard part of our diet guides. It came from Mike Karpenko (Beachbody coach who once worked for me in the office and still runs our test groups with me) as an evolution of a cleanse I’d done using Shakeology as a substitute for our current fasting formula. Mike spruced it up a bit, we turned it loose on our test groups, and voila!

I’ve just returned from a weekend in Moab for Romney’s birthday (and birthday challenge, report coming soon). Along with a fair amount of exercise we did a fair amount of reveling. I mean, it’s the off-season and pints are two bucks around town and what else are you going to do on a birthday weekend? Therefore, even though I spent four to six hours each day running around I feel like pig that’s been fattened for slaughter, making this a perfect time to flush my system and bring everything back into homeostasis.

This is a performance-oriented system designed to support hard training. It’s not the Master Cleanse. The goal is to promote flushing junk from your system and regulating hydration levels. It’s calorically restricted to be sure. But in its 1500 or so calories will be more nutrients than most people get by eating well over twice that amount. The key is caloric efficiency; getting the most nutrients possible out of the fewest number of calories.

It’s too fat restrictive for a lifestyle plan. I’m on a low cal cycle of the ABCDE diet so it’s the kick start to that. After three days I’ll roll this into a 1600 calorie a day plan with additional calories added for sports performance only—this means targeted calories consumed during and immediately after workouts don’t count in the daily total.
The plan consists of three Shakeology shakes* a day with a salad in the evening. If the shakes are plain (Shakeology and water only) I can add three pieces of fruit. The salad is unrestricted as far as veggies go, with 4 ounces of a protein source (if it’s meat or fish and slightly more if it’s a veggie source like legumes), and two tablespoons of an olive oil/vinegar dressing. For fatty acids, each salad will also contain a tablespoon of chia seeds (or flaxseed or hempseed). Plenty of water washes it all down. Coffee, tea, and herb teas are fine as long as they are sans additives, as all are performance enhancing. In three days I plan feel recovered from the weekend and ready to roll into my final prep phase for the Copper Canyons.

* Any meal replacement or protein shake could be substituted but I’d recommend adding at least a greens formulation to this to try and equate Shakeology’s 70 ingredients.

pics: romney's run looking less than the promised "red hot" conditions, rare postholing conditions on castleton, celebrating romney's "never say never" birthday challenge.

Sore, Hungry, & Slow

There are a few indicators that let me know a training program is working. The big three are getting sore, getting hungry, and then getting slow. You can’t avoid this scenario if you are incurring any kind of serious body composition change. In this article I explain the process in some depth.

Sore, Hungry, and Slow: 3 Signs That Show Your Program Is Working

I wrote it a few weeks ago, back in my hypertrophy phase, but I couldn’t post it then because the newsletter I wrote it for is new and the archive page wasn’t set up yet. It’s an important piece of information because too many people back off their training instead of pushing through and allowing their body to adapt. There are times when you shouldn’t push through pain but there are times when it’s essential.

I’m still getting sore adapting to longer and longer runs but my climbing training is in power mode, where soreness means injury. During power training you should finish your workout feeling as though you didn’t do much. Slowness, too, has vanished. When your muscles are growing during the hypertrophy phase you get slow. Power is training these new muscles to get strong, or fast. You should get faster and faster as you train power, and never be sore.

You can be hungry in any training cycle but it’s also a part of the hypertrophy stage. Your muscles are hungry because they are growing. I was very sensitive to the changes in the ABCDE diet during hypertrophy. All three symptoms would increase during my low calorie phases, almost instantly; an indicator that training is on the rivet, where it should be.

pic: an obvious indication of a family in hypertrophy phase.

One Louder

Power training is a delicate balance between rational and irrational. Yesterday’s harebrained scheme pushed it too far but, hopefully, not so far as to interfere with my program. As Nigel wrote on my Facebook last night, “it’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.”

I mentioned the dangers of power training the other day. Whenever I’m at my limit I’m always trying to gauge whether or not it’s too much and attempting to back off before I hit the inevitable “one move too many”. Until Sunday, each successive workout was building on the prior workout fairly substantially. But my program isn’t for one sport. It’s a hybrid with the aim of concurrently building different energy system fitness for different sports at the same time. Friday I’d done a hard 2.5 hours of running on the trails. Saturday Romney and I did an easy six. Easy, but still six hours on uneven snow with probably 4,000’ of elevation gain. Sunday I was a little tired.

In all training for climbing I used to have a rule that if I warmed up and didn’t feel right I bagged the workout. (I still have it, though I haven’t seriously trained for climbing in ages so used to seemed more appropriate). So after 30 minutes or so of easy climbing I stopped.

Yesterday I completed my warm-up. I wasn’t feeling strong but proceeded anyway because I felt fine, just not strong. I’ve been upped the resistance I use on the simulation I’ve set of my project each workout. Day one it was everything I could do to just do the moves, and then complete the three individual sections. Subsequent workouts added weight (using a vest) until I could hike each move first today. Today the plan was to add ankle weights.

Then I got a bright idea (these inevitably go wrong). Instead of using my small ankle weights on my ankles I opted for the larger ones and put the small weights on my wrist. I did a few easy moves on big holds and then cranked up Big Bottom and went for my project.

And wrong it went. I tweaked a finger. Not bad, but definitely a tweak. Feeling that it might be minor enough to finish the workout as long as I stopped climbing I rested and then began my hangboard session. It lasted two sets or so before I became certain it was at least some kind of injury and was off to ice. This morning it feels good. Almost 100%, but still, almost. Time will tell. Certainly shutting the workout down was the right choice .Whether I stopped early enough remains to be seen. If I did I’ve dodged a shit sandwich.

The crazy thing, really, is that can’t stop thinking about whether I can do the moves weighted down as I was. I think that I can, in fact, if my joints remain intact. And that is the crazy drug of power training. Our bodies only go to 10. We’re always trying to push them to 11.

video:ben's i-phone captures an attempt on the delicate slab climb, 'lick my love pump.'

Power & Aging

Power is the strength athlete’s Holy Grail. Power (absolute strength) training is our crack. It’s addicting, and I’ve know many athletes over the years who eschew everything, even their sport’s performance, in pursuit of numbers that indicate absolute strength. 100% efficiency is the goal. At 101% you’re injured. It’s the one thing in sport that truly is extreme. It’s dangerous. It’s fun. And it’s vital if you want to achieve your body’s potential.

Yesterday I had one of the best training sessions I’ve had in years. I did all the moves on my project simulation with a 10lb weight vest. I increased my performance on every set of my hangboard workout. I did a few moves on the campus board that I’ve been too scared to even attempt this decade. When it was over I felt as though I was just warming up. I iced my fingers as a precaution. I’ve been down this road many times and had an idea of what was in store.

This morning my heart rate was high, the first indicator of breakdown. My morning yoga practice was then very difficult. I’m much stiffer than normal; a reaction to the microtrauma incurred from trying to recruit high threshold muscle cell motor units. Over the coming weeks I’m going to have to be very careful. I’ve not completed a power training phase without injury or overtraining in at least a decade.

Aging sharpens the edge the strength athlete teeters on. Our fast-twitch muscle fiber decreases, as does the amount of various hormones that allow us to access it. The fast-twitch muscle we have recovers even slower than it did when we were young. And those inevitable 101% attempts set us back even further. It’s no surprise that there are hoards of aging endurance athletes. There are very few power athletes.

I try and explore the boundaries of both power and endurance. My challenges appear endurance oriented on the surface, mainly because anything that may be remotely impressive to an onlooker is their volume. But the thing of interest, for me, is the limit of human performance and this includes absolute strength. For this reason there is always a power element involved. Boulder problems, onsighting climbs, reacting to single track during the night, etc, all require engaging fast-twitch muscle fibers.

We don’t make power workouts for Beachbody. We have power elements within our workouts. Both P90X and Insanity have a lot of plyometric work, which is the essence of power training. But it’s tempered so that you can do a lot of reps. Absolute strength training is about maximal recruitment and, ultimately, the one rep max. But this like training under the Sword of Damocles. At some point it’s going to fall. To train for health and fitness it isn’t necessary. Only athletes play beneath it.

The quandary is that power training is healthy. High recruitment leads to hormonal release which is effectively anti-aging. The closer to 100% you can safely train the more effective your workout program will be. And that’s why I’m here, playing the lab rat so that you don’t have to. My goal is to find what that safe range is, and then how to increase it. This time, damnit, I’m going to get it right!

pic: photos of yore: phil campusing at the castle.

Hypertrophy

I’ve been asked to log more actual workouts. I don’t often do this because I find it boring when I read it on other sites. I guess, however, this would depend on the person. I’d love to hear about Patxi Usobiaga or Alberto Contador’s training. But that’s always a secret. As a middling weekend warrior I certainly don’t have any training secrets, so if it can help anyone out to hear what I do I’ll record it.

Here in my first cycle of training enthusiasm has been low due to “the worst” inversion anyone around here has seen. Each day is an evaluation over whether training in this air has actual benefits. I can always drive 15 minutes up the hill to get out of it, which I usually for my runs. Gym training has sucked but I’m sticking to the schedule regardless.

Climbing days consist of a lengthy warm-up, usually 30-45 minutes of bouldering, followed by the hangboard workout outlined in this post. I then do a series of lock-off and reaches on the systems wall. I do 4 sets of 8 reps for each arm for jugs, pockets, and undercuts. I also do an aerobic workout on this day of about an hour of hiking, running, or sitting on my trainer in the time trial position.

The next day I ARC train, which is low level climbing without getting pumped to increase capillarity. I’ve been doing one set of 30 minutes in the garage. This days also includes something aerobic, as well as my foundation or stabilizer exercises. I do this for both upper and lower body. I will actually post video of these movements at some point in the future because everyone should be doing them.

My lower body day is a series of one leg movements. Most of these can be found in various Beachbody workouts, and perhaps all of them in Tony Horton’s upcoming One on One for one leg workout, which he made for me (but it’ll be great for everyone, I promise). I also do some core work on this day. Since I’ve had a break from both I’m starting slow on both fronts. I set of 30 for each leg on ten different exercises, followed by one of Beachbody’s short ab or core routines. I build on each workout as I progress, trying to keep from getting sore. I finish this day with a harder run or ride or brick (ride/run). One day a week I’ve been building mileage. Last week I did a three hour run. This week is was 4:15. I’ll keep increasing this to get ready for Mexico in March.

Oh, yeah. I also start almost every day with 20-30 minutes of yoga.

Even though the focus is hypertrophy, the bulk of my hours training are doing low-level aerobic work. This is the burden of the endurance athlete. Still, my main focus in this cycle are my resistance workouts. And given that I was coming off a break these are almost foundation work as much as pure hypertrophy. This is cool because I don’t want to gain much muscle mass and my goal is to prepare my muscles for the upcoming strength training phase.

pics: even in the most challenging circumstances, the members of Team Zissou keep moral high.

ABCDE Diet

During this cycle of training I’ll be experimenting with something called the ABCDE diet. The only additions will be that I won’t be trying to gain mass, only some targeted muscle gains along with fat loss, and it will be vegetarian. For those of you interested in mass, Bryan Carney at Beachbody will be our guinea pig in that arena.

The diet was conceptualized over a decade ago by Torbjorn Akerfeldt, who tested it on himself while studying medicine in Sweden. The acronym stands for anabolic burst cycling of diet and exercise. It’s basically a periodizational diet plan that’s a bit of a hybrid of the two dietary strategies that I use to get results with clients: structured periodization (like the P90X diet plan) and zig-zag dieting (short periods of alternate low and high cal days, using for either gaining or losing).

My diet plans work. I had decades of anecdotal testing prior to Beachbody, followed by our message board community, “the largest test group ever assembled”. I didn’t invent my diet strategies, but have tweaked them over the years. I almost always get success but there are still a few gray areas. Akerfeldt’s theories could fill in these gaps.

In essence, his plan is a giant zig zag platform; two week cycles of both undereating and overeating. He claims this helps you gain mass without the common mass achiever’s side effect of associated fat gain that must be lost later. Whether or not this plan works as well as he states is still up for debate. After all, it hasn’t become a best seller and isn’t widely practiced.

What intrigues me are a couple of points of science that seem to be the missing link in my observations.

Basically, our genes control the expression of enzymes. These enzymes control every aspect of our metabolisms, including the activation of different pathways and the rate at which chemical reactions take place in our bodies. [Outside biochemical system enzymes are often referred to as catalysts.] Evolution has given our genes the ability to control the production of these enzymes as well as their activity level. Due to this fact, the body will be able to adapt to different food intakes as well as become prepared or "primed" for a future, sudden change in the diet.

This explains why periodizational dieting works (something that I knew from experience but didn’t have the science figured out.) And Akerfeldt has taken it a step further by noting that, in the same way we adapt to exercise, our bodies adapt to dietary change—specifically in about two weeks time. So by altering how you eat every two weeks you can, if done correctly, improve the efficiency of how your muscles cells utilize nutrients.

While Akerfeldt is interested in mass this theory should be applicable for anything you’d like to do when it comes to re-designing your body because a body in an adaptive phase is far more open to suggested changes. Since he is targeting mass, he combines the diet with something called “bag theory”:

The "bag theory" is not mine--it was developed by a scientist named D.J. Millward, a well-known researcher who has extensively studied the muscle-building process. His immense knowledge and research could help a lot of bodybuilders. Basically, Millward has observed three things: 1) the almost unlimited extent to which increased food intake can promote protein deposition during "catch-up growth" in malnourished patients, 2) both active and passive stretch will mediate anabolic and anti-catabolic influences, and 3) the cessation of normal muscle growth coincides with the cessation of bone growth.

There are "connective sheets" surrounding the individual muscle fiber [endomysium], bundles of muscle cells [perimysium], and the entire muscle [epimysium]. These sheets can be thought of as a series of "bags" acting to conduct the contractile force generated by actin and myosin in muscle fibers to the bone by the tendon.

Again, this has a practical application beyond mass. It’s essentially helps you get more nutrients inside of your muscle cells. Sure, that means growth, but it also means performance. In theory, this should enable you to truly spot train, or sports train, because you can choose to stretch areas where you’d like more muscular efficiency.

The vegetarian angle is simply to test my own theories about anabolic dieting and meat.

That’s enough for today. There will be plenty more in the New Year.

Scheduling

There are two absolutes when beginning any training program.

1 - You should write out a structured training program and try to stick to it.

2 - Don’t necessarily stick to it.

All programs should have a plan with some scientific basis. The science can be as absurd as you want, as I’m all about testing as it’s the best way to learn, but there should be a scientific theory about what you’re trying to do. If not, just go out and play. Writing a schedule should be somewhat painstaking because you’re trying to anticipate all of the possible scenarios and variables. Then, once your theories are soundly structured, you’ll want to do your best to follow it or you’ll never learn whether or not your theories work.

To stick with an entire program, however, should almost never happen. Besides life getting in the way the biggest program variable is your body’s recovery ability. If you aren’t recovered you should not stick to your schedule. If you’re always recovered your planned program was probably too easy. Therefore, build your schedule knowing that it will change. If you have time, plan what you’ll do to stay on track when the schedule goes awry.

Here’s my program through March. As iron clad as it looks now I’m certain I’ve overlooked something and that it will change. As we move into the program I’ll eventually present each individual workout so you can see what I’m doing.

The dietary component of this plan will be vegetarian. But it will be fully applicable to carnivores as well. It will also be revolutionary. Keeping in mind that revolutions don’t always succeed, follow my plan at your own risk.

For reference: HYP is hypertrophy, ARC is aerobic restoration and capillarity, MAX REC refers to muscle cell motor unit recruitment, or power, training, PE is power endurance (can be a number of different energy systems that will be based on the sport targeted), and Patxi days are massively long training days based on Spainish climber Patxi Usobiaga's insane training schedule.

P90X...Y & Z

I’ve been writing a series of articles about how to customize P90X for various sports. I’d point you to the series but the archive pages aren’t up yet. I will as soon as they are. My next training cycle will be a part of this series. Even though I’m not using 90x (though I will use many movements from it and perhaps some workouts when I don’t have time to concoct my own) it will help you understand the principles, which are the same no matter what program you are adapting.

The first question I ask everyone adapting x towards another purpose is “what are your goals?” Without this it’s impossible to structure anything significant. P90x is a great foundation program. If you don’t have goals, just doing variations of it will keep you fit and ready for life’s encounters. With goals, however, your template changes because you must now focus on not only the activity(ies) at hand but also the different energy systems that will enhance your chances of reaching your goals. Training can vary from X-like to, well, not X-like at all.

One thing that’s a constant is a periodizational approach. All training programs address various systems one at a time. In my case, as you’ll see, it’s a bit different because I’m trying to train for three separate sports while also improving at another sport. To do this I’m using my experience at training for a single sports as well as my penchant for doing many different things that tax completely different muscle fibers and energy systems.

True training starts tomorrow, December 25th, 2009. The end of this round of training is April 1, at which time I want to have my strongest climbing base in 15 years, a good running base, and a decent biking base.

Since I’ll be racing with the Raramuri in Mexico in early March I NEED a sound running base—it’s a 48 mile race with, I dunno, 20,000 feet of elevation change, minimum, and it also includes a 66 mile “taper” that is a cultural exchange with The Running People that leads up to race day. I’m not going down to try and win, or even impress, the Raramuri. I’m just there for the experience and a chance to meet them. But I also don’t want to die, or come back injured. As my friend Jamil said, the Raramuri are “no joke” when it comes to running great distances fast. I need to have some miles under my feet.

My injury is not, nor will it be, 100%. Those of you who follow this blog know that I’m still in recovery. It’s going well, very well, but it’s also something I need to constantly moderate. But I’m now able to train at damn near 100% intensity. And as long as I keep my benchmarks constant I’m confident that recovery will continue.

That’s the announcement. The details will follow. The basic schedule looks like this. For you Xers, this should look familiar:

Block one: 3 weeks (focusing on hypertrophy and aerobic conditioning)
Transition/Recovery: 6 days
Block two: 3 weeks (focus on power for climbing/biking, and power/endurance for running)
Transition/Recovery: 6 days
Block three: Feb 15-27 (focus on power/endurance for climbing/biking and tapering for running
Transition: Feb 27-Mar11 (running in Mexico. Rest for climbing/biking. Heaps of running)
Block four: Mar 11-April 1 (power/endurance training for climbing/biking and running [speed work])

I’m also going to be playing with an absolutely cool, and hopefully revolutionary, diet theory. So stay tuned!
pic: in the new team kit and in need of earning it (http://www.ritteracing.com/story/)