Unlock Athletic Potential: A Training Approach for Busy Athletes

Maximize Gains, Minimize Time: An Outline to Smarter Athletic Development

Oct 22, 2023

Are you striving to improve multiple physical qualities simultaneously? Do you participate in a sport that demands various energy systems and diverse power and speed requirements? Perhaps you're dedicating your time at the gym to enhance your physical attributes? If so, you've probably pondered the challenge of managing your time to continue progressing in your sport.

I've witnessed numerous individuals attempting to juggle multiple aspects of their athletic development only to fall short. If you're using a traditional concurrent periodization model, aiming to progress in multiple physical attributes at the same time, you might find yourself hitting a plateau due to a lack of resources allocated to each area of development.

However, for many athletes, time is the primary resource constraint. Customizing a concurrent periodization program can be the key to maintaining progress without sacrificing overall fitness.

For a practical application of this approach, read further in the Examples section. If you're eager to delve deeper into this topic, please continue reading.

Framework

In sports requiring a wide spectrum of energy systems and a diverse power/speed profile, setting priorities is crucial to making meaningful progress. Let's face it, most people, including professional athletes, often struggle to find the time to manage the overwhelming training volume needed for sustained growth.

Dr. Mike Israetel's framework of volume and adaptation [1] proves invaluable in this regard. He defines several critical volume landmarks:

Maintenance Volume (MV): The training volume required to maintain your current fitness level.
Minimum Effective Volume (MEV): The volume necessary to stimulate muscle growth; anything below this level may merely maintain your current state.
Maximum Adaptive Volume (MAV): The range of training volumes in which you experience the most significant gains.
Maximum Recoverable Volume (MRV): The total volume at which recovery demands surpass your ability to recover. Training at or above this level will stall or even decrease your fitness level.

In a world where time is precious, it's crucial to ponder one question: "How can you continue making progress with limited time?"

For athletes with constrained schedules, the key lies in finding out how little they can do while still making progress. In other words, what is the minimum effective volume for each essential physical attribute? Equally important is understanding how little you can do while maintaining your current level, or your maintenance volume for each of these attributes.

Most individuals lack knowledge of these critical numbers (MV and MEV) for each physical attribute essential to their sport, and they tend to fall into one of two categories:

Attempting to increase the volume for every physical quality (a classical concurrent periodization approach).
Ceasing training in all areas except for one or two physical attributes at a time (a classical block periodization approach).

The issues with these approaches are evident:

You are likely to reach maintenance volumes for all essential attributes but may not reach the minimum effective dose required for substantial progress, maintaining your fitness level but not advancing.
Some athletes end up emphasizing training for only one physical attribute, likely achieving the maximum adaptive volume in that area. Unfortunately, they may simultaneously fall below maintenance volume for all other attributes, resulting in a loss of fitness in those domains.

Example

It's clear that progress hinges on a balanced allocation of training for various physical attributes. For time-strapped athletes, this often means employing undulating periodization to focus on select physical qualities, working to reach the MEV while maintaining fitness levels in other relevant areas.

You might be surprised by how low these MEV numbers can be [2] [3]. Keep in mind that individual differences should be considered for each athlete, and it's possible to reduce training volume by as much as 70% to maintain aerobic capacity, for example.

Let's illustrate this concept with an example: Imagine you're a hybrid athlete looking to progress in both a 5k (rowing aerobic capacity) and upper-body pushing strength (squat).

You have a tight schedule, allowing for three weekly sessions: two one-hour sessions during the week and a longer 2.5-hour session on the weekend.

The first step is to find your minimum effective dosage, and while reasonable guidelines exist, it's primarily a trial-and-error process to determine your MEV and MV. Once you've identified the MEV and MV for your aerobic capacity and upper-body push strength, creating a training program becomes much easier.

For the sake of simplicity, let's assume these are your numbers:

Aerobic Endurance Capacity (AEC):