How To Peak Your Strength

One of the key skills of a strength and conditioning coach is to not simply write a training plan or programme, but to write a training cycle. That means instead of just movements assigned to days for sets and reps, we're looking at longer term progressions, overloads and recovery cycles to guarantee our athletes or clients continually get better. This will often include the aim of "peaking" for a specific date. An event, a competition, or a race day where you want to be at your absolute best. Better than you ever have been. So how do you peak your strength as an everyday athlete? Let me explain. Fatigue Masks Fitness The basic concept of a training peak is that fatigue masks your fitness. You cannot perform at your best, your absolute maximum, better than ever before, if you have fatigue floating around in your body. And one thing that is really good at generating high amounts of accumulated fatigue is training really hard. So we have to create this differentiation between testing and training. When you're training, you're not testing. Training volumes will be too high to allow for peak performance due to the accumulated or residual fatigue. And when you're testing, you're not training. Testing is so high intensity that you cannot do it repeatedly, and you will not gain a training effect from these sessions. This means that to peak your strength, you need to gradually taper down your training from a period of accumulating lots of training work, overreaching volumes and intensities you've never done before, and allow that fatigue cause by that overreaching to leave the system.

When you do this well, you will feel invincible. Stronger than ever before. More powerful than ever before. And most importantly fresher than ever before and 100% ready to go. The Taper To achieve that freshness at the end of a block of hard training, we need to taper down our training. This helps improve recovery by decreasing the demands on our physiological systems, and allow us to turn up to each training session fresher and fresher, allow us to achieve higher and higher intensities of work, and eventually hit our peak. This will traditionally be done over 3-4 weeks but can be longer or shorter dependent on the athlete, sport and competition schedule. You ideally want it to be as effective as possible while being as short as possible, as when you're tapering you're not training. You're not creating new strength or fitness capabilities. You're actually just realising the capabilities you've already created. So the longer your tapers, the less training you're doing overall. So you want a highly effective, but short as possible taper. Volume vs Intensity There are two kinds of taper you can do. A volume taper, where you gradually decrease the volume of work (sets x reps) you do in your training while maintaining intensity. Or an intensity taper, where you gradually decrease the intensity (%/RPE) of training while maintaining the volume. For strength, power, sprinting, jumping, throwing and other high intensity sports, I recommend you do a volume taper. This is because you want to maintain that capacity you have developed to work at a super high intensity, so you need to keep it in your training. But by bringing down the volume of work, you can still create that freshness. The higher the velocity of the performance you're looking to maximise, the quicker the detraining effect will be from reducing training intensity. For example, sprinters will get slower for not sprinting for a few days. Jumpers will jump shorter for not jumping for a few days.

Lifters will not be able to lift quite as heavy if they stop lifting heavy for a couple of weeks. So when peak performance is the goal, we need to maintain intensity in our training by choosing a volume taper. Example Volume Taper Here's an example of what a volume taper could look like for a strength athlete on a single compound lift. Something like a squat, press or deadlift.

Final Training Week: 5x3 - 85%

Taper Week 1: 4x3 - 87%

Taper Week 2: 3x3 - 90%

Taper Week 3: 2x2 - 95%

Peak Week: 1x1 - Max

Across the 5 weeks we descending from 15 reps, to 12 reps, to 9 reps, to 4 reps, into a peak of one maximal rep.

Each week as the total number of lifts in a session decreases, the recovery demand also decreases, and the athlete gets fresher, even as intensities stay high. Peak Week

In a peak week the aim is to do just enough to maximise performance. The worst thing you can do is too much, so always err on the side of caution. As a starting point I usually program the last lifting session for strength athletes 3 days prior to testing to allow for complete recovery. This can change +/-1 day after a few training cycles if we learn that a particular athlete responds better to longer/shorter total rest period.

The final high intensity session will be 6 days prior +/- 1 day. The last session per testing will be technique focussed and lower intensity. Additional Techniques

Everything above will be plenty to help the vast majority of lifters to effectively taper and peak their training into something like a 1RM test. But there are some other simple techniques and principles that I follow when tapering a strength athlete or client.

Back Off Sets

Instead of always using straight sets as in the example taper above, we could work up to a heavy set, and maintain some volume in our training by using back off sets. These are additional works sets done at a lower intensity to our top set and could look like this:

1x5 - 85%

2x5 - 75%

Or

1x3 - 92%

2x3 - 82% These can be excellent for those with higher training ages, where the absolute load of their top end sets are very high, and very fatiguing.

Compound/Isolation Accessories When aiming to maximise freshness and minimise fatigue, the accessories we chose can have a huge impact.

Heavier compound accessories like bent over rows, pull-ups and split squats can add to the recovery demand of a session due to the heavier loads and greater overall muscle recruitment. Choosing lighter isolation style movements instead can lower that demand, and make the session much easier to recover from. Eccentric/Concentric/Isometric Bias

Exercises that bias the eccentric (lengthening) phase of a lift (e.g. nordic lowers) are likely to create a higher recovery demand, and induce great DOMs post session. Concentric biases exercises that focus on the shortening phase of a lift (e.g. box jumps) will have a much lower recovery demand and much lower likelihood of creating DOMs post session. Isometric exercises where the muscle doesn't lengthen or shorten under tension (e.g. isometric mid thigh pull), will create very little muscle damage while creating very high force, and are great for in-season athletes due to the low recovery demands and low chances of significant soreness. Reduced Variety Novel stimuli from new exercises/variations/technique are great for training phases where we're aiming to force the body to adapt to training demands. But novel exercises, movements and techniques are also very closely linked to increased soreness which we don't want in a testing/peaking phase. As such tapers/peaks should include much less variety in exercises than usual. This isn't that time to start hitting 4x10 rear foot elevated split squats after 6 months of not doing them. Coaching

And that, is the basic concept of how to taper your training into a performance peak. If you want me to manage your next training cycle, including helping you peak your performance into new levels of strength and power you've never achieved before, just click HERE.