Dear Mark: Periodization Training, My Ideal Garden, and “Real” Strength
For today’s edition of Dear Mark, we’ve got a quick three-parter. First, I briefly cover periodization training, explaining how and why I think everyone participates in it (even if they don’t know it yet). Next up is a question about my ideal garden. Now, I’m no gardener, but I do have some ideas about what kinds of food I’d like to grow. I give my personal list of calorie-dense and nutrient-dense produce (green thumbs, criticism is welcome). Finally, I discuss the difference – if any actually exists – between “real” and “neuromuscular” strength.
Let’s go, shall we?
Hey Mark,
I’ve searched around the blog but I found nothing. I was really interested in hearing your opinion, if any, on periodization training like so many athletes and fitness enthusiasts incorporate for better results?
Cheers
Oliver
I think it’s a very sound, very solid concept of training. At its most basic, periodization refers to alternating training intensity and training volume. If volume is high, intensity is low; if intensity is high, volume will be low. You don’t lift heavy weights for high reps, but rather heavy weights for low reps and lighter weights for more reps. Periodization training breaks up an athlete’s training schedule into periods of varying intensity and volume, usually depending on a number of factors including fatigue, markers of overtraining, timing of competition (intensity will often be reduced before competition in favor of technique work), and (most importantly) how the individual athlete responds to training. This guy might handle longer periods of high intensity better than that guy, who needs more frequent breaks from the intensity.
It’s usually applied to serious athletes who are going to be competing, whether at the elite or amateur level, but anyone who works out likely does a kind of periodization training – even subconsciously.
One easy example is dropping intensity after recovery from illness – I know whenever I’m coming back from feeling under the weather, I’ll keep the training real light for a few days until my body is good to go. I want to keep things moving, but pushing too hard will only extend my recovery.
Autoregulation training is a kind of intuitive “on the fly” periodization where the athlete increases and decreases intensity/volume at his or her own pace according to how they feel on a day to day basis. This is how I “periodize,” and some evidence suggests that with accomplished, experienced athletes, it’s even more effective than linear periodization, where the periods are predetermined. Note that these were experienced athletes with extensive lifting experience, not newbies with a brand new gym membership.
Anyone who trains and listens to their body is going to naturally fall into periodization. It’s the people who push, push, push without paying attention to their performance and how they feel doing all that pushing who will fail to shift toward a lighter period when necessary and hamper their training in the process. At the same time, if you always have a ton left in the tank but fail to push yourself, you’ll be relegated to suboptimal results.
Thus, even if you’re not formal about your periodization, modulating intensity and volume according to your needs and performance will generally elicit favorable results. I wholeheartedly approve.
Dear Mark,
I’m planning on putting together a garden. I want the most nutrient dense and calorie rich foods without resorting to beans and white potatoes. Basically, I want it to be the closest thing to primal that agriculture can be.
If you were to grow the perfect garden, what would you grow?
Thanks,
Sarah
You want nutrients and calories?
Without worrying about soil health or interspecies relationships or seasonal congruency or climate or anything like that (in other words, real details that anyone growing a real-life garden would have to think about)…
I’d start with a variety of leafy greens: several types of kale, chard, lettuce, and spinach. These will provide phytonutrients, minerals, and bulk for Big Ass Salads. Plus, they are self regenerative. If you pluck a leaf of kale, it will regrow several times over. Almost no calories, though.
I’d do some squashes. Butternut, delicato, acorn, etc. These are nutritious, for sure, but they also provide calories in the form of healthy carbs. And nothing quite compares with some cinnamon-ginger-grass-fed butter slurry atop baked butternut squash.
Berries. If you can get them to take, they’ll spread like wildfire. Blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, plus any of the other more obscure berries will provide high plant pigment-based polyphenols, soluble fiber, and a fine companion to fresh whipped cream, coconut milk, and/or Greek yogurt.
Sweet potatoes will get you calories in a major way. If you go for purple Okinawan potatoes, you’ll even get the benefits of polyphenol pigments (and great taste).
Other green things are good, too, so I’d probably have to grow broccoli, asparagus, and tatsoi.
Green beans are easy to grow, they stay out of the way by climbing up trellises, and they too go well as a side dish to just about everything.
Oh, and herbs. I’d be sure to grow tons of herbs. I want so many herbs that I could have a rosemary, basil, and sage salad if I wanted.
Round it out with some cabbage (purple and green), some carrots (purple and orange), heirloom tomatoes, garlic, and onions? I think you’ve got yourself a realistic, attainable, nutritious, calorically-dense garden.
What about you? What would you have in your garden?
Dear Mark,
How long does it really take to add strength? In coach Somers book, “Building the Gymnastic Body”, he states that it takes 6 weeks to add actual strength. He goes on to say that the gains in reps and weight experienced in the beginning are the product of neuromuscular facilitation. What’s your take on the subject?
Dillon
That’s the widely accepted timeframe for actual structural strength – muscular hypertrophy, the physical growth of skeletal muscle. However, a recent review of the evidence found that “morphological” changes commence immediately upon initiation of strength training (PDF). Your muscles won’t grow right away, but the changes that eventually result in growth begin right away.
What is “actual strength” though? I think making a distinction between “real” and “imaginary” strength is confusing and unnecessary. Neuromuscular facilitation is just as legitimate and “physiological” a way to build strength as hypertrophy.
You’re learning how to synchronize and activate the motor units (a bundle of muscle fibers with a nerve cell) that make up a muscle cell, to utilize them as a cohesive group rather than a ragtag bunch of misfits. Groups of motor units contract (flex/move) the muscle, so the more synchronicity your motor groups have, the more effective (read: strong) your muscular contractions will be.
You’re learning how to selectively activate the agonist and synergist muscles of a movement while inhibiting the antagonists of the movement. In other words, you’re figuring out how to activate the right muscles for a given movement. Strength is a skill, and learning that skill is part of getting stronger.
That’s it for today, folks. Thanks for reading and keep the questions coming!
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Posted By: Mark Sisson
We grow a lot of veggies, fruit berries, (and meat); but we couldn’t without thinking of soil health, rotation and two greenhouses (and lots of bird protection). Climate isn’t always your friend. We do lots of nice pasture.
Why the hate on white potatoes? First off, white potatoes have a very high water content – they are not calorie dense. They are also one of the most immediately satiable foods on Planet Earth, making them ideal for weight loss. Let’s not forget they are one of nature’s only sources of complete protein. You can live on nothing but white potatoes for a long time before deficiencies are an issue – much longer than muscle meat and greens.
There is nothing more primal than a white potato. Eggs and potatoes are possibly the most simple, perfect meal possible.
That was supposed to say “nature’s only vegetarian sources of complete protein.”
I am starting out on my Primal journey and had been thinking of growing some of my own vegetables. Rabbits!!! Little, cute.. but eat their way through anything I plant. I have areas netted off but you can only go so far with that.
I am also horrified at how little upper body strength I have. I started carefully doing the exercises, I walk a lot, do pilates and cycle so thought I was fairly fit. Then tried press ups. Can’t do a full body press, have to bend my knees. That galvanised me into ordering a door bar to do chin ups. My husband fitted it today – and it has given him and the dog the best laugh they have had for ages! The sight of me struggling to even get my toes off the ground convulsed them, they egged me on with shouts of ‘when are you going to start? Come on then, get a grip, lift!’
Well, I can’t. I have had to raise my leg level at an angle and do the chin ups that way.
So, here’s to all round body fitness, not just lower body :0) And more hours of merriment for husband and dog..
When I fence off my garden, I make sure that the fencing meets the ground and maybe even have the pointy ends poke out. I’ve also planted marigolds in my garden. Deer and rabbits don’t like how they smell. (My mom recommends laying human hair around, but that’s kinda gross.)
I saw a great idea for growing lettuces and other shallow-root greens. Attach some lengths of rain gutter to a fence or the side of the house, at a slight angle. Fill with dirt and then add seeds. You’ll have zigzags of greens growing in no time. They’ll also be high enough off the ground to keep the bunnies out.
Beth,
Just start with negative chins. Step on a stool to get your head over the bar and then lower yourself slowly, in about 2 to 3 seconds.
Make sure to lower through the whole range of motion. You’ll be doing full chins in no time!
Thanks Tom, I will try that – when no one is looking! I am building up my arms this weekend in another way. We have about a foot of snow, so clearing our long and rather steep drive is giving me a fairly decent workout!
I live in an apartment, but am fortunate to have a landlord that gives me some garden space. It’s only a small segment, but we make the most of it. I grow tomatoes, zucchini or yellow squash (not both, not enough room), jalapenos, basil and dill, and lettuce. I live in the Midwest, so that limits what I can grow (bell peppers and cilantro have been no-shows for me when I’ve tried them). I’ve also tried onions, but uprooted them too soon. They were still babies.
My advice is to plant things you know you’ll eat and use a lot. Also, start small since it can be overwhelming to have a large garden. This year, I want to expand and have a separate area for herbs. Hopefully the landlords will be ok with that.
I don’t think I could go through a summer without planting a big garden. The fresh veggies you get from a home garden are so much better than the stuff you get at the grocery store, it’s incredible. My favorite garden crops are these:
Cool weather veggies: broccoli, kale, snow peas, snap peas, carrots, beets (golden and red).
Warm weather veggies: tomatoes, peppers, pole beans
Compost is an absolute must!! Build a simple compost pile/bin, and throw all your veggie scraps and other biodegradable materials into it, and spread the finished compost on the garden every year. I have been doing this for years, and my garden soil just keeps getting better and better. Your garden soil is like gold…….nourish it and protect it and it will reward you many times over with fantastic and nutritious produce. I use raised garden beds, and never use anything but a spade to turn the soil over (no rototiller, and never walk on your garden soil).
Yeah – it’s incredible how the fertility can increase when you don’t keep busting the ground up and exposing it to the air. Good work!
We grow avocados. We also have a passion fruit vine to feed our parrot, a tiny tangerine shrub and a lime. Nothing else grows in our yard due to all the shade from the avocados. I have learned that a lot of the weeds in the yard are edible so now what used to be my roof-top herb garden is a weed garden and I eat the weeds.
I’m a Master Gardener, writer for Mother Earth and other magazines and the creator of floridasurvivalgardening.com. Your choices are excellent and echo our own. My family and I are all primal (thanks to you) and we grow a ton of our own produce organically, share it with friends and church members… and also share the knowledge on our site. On green beans, I grow “yard-long” beans because the yield is incredible – and the taste is excellent. Also, kale is a killer winter crop. A lot of you could probably plant it now, provided you’re in roughly USDA zone 8 or higher. Mustard is another good winter crop, and it’s healthy. Tasty boiled greens – heck yeah. If anyone has questions, I’m happy to answer them.
Periodization is a method of sport-specific athletic training for competitive sports. Since most do not train for competitive sports, hardly anyone uses it.
It’s not accurate to suggest periodization is little more than alternating training intensity and training volume. People merely working out to be fit are not doing periodization.
Specifically, periodization applies a timing method to training for sport so that when the day arrives for a competitive event, the competitng athlete has his body ready for peak performance. Back in the days when commie Soviets were desperate to show communism as superior to Western republics and capitalism, the Soviets tried to master periodization in their pursuit of Olympics dominance. Though made famous by Soviet Olympic weightlifters, Fins had experimented with periodization in track and field long before the Soviets.
A guy named Matveyev came up with a pseudo-scientific model, with all of the appearance of scientific principles, which many accepted and then misinterpreted what he said to do. This is why many say periodization involves low intensity/high volume training progressing to high intensity/low volume training. It is way more than merely that.
Proponents of periodization describe the period between successive competitive seasons as a macrocycle. Within that macrocycle, trainers push athletes through microcycles.
Assuming a layoff from a previous season (post-competition, restoration transition phase) or having never competed before, the athlete starts with a prep microcycle of aerobic workouts to ready the body for training. Next comes a strength microcycle, where the athlete trains for maximal strength. After which comes a conversion microcycle during which specialized, sport-specific training converts maximal strength into maximal power, speed or endurance.
Periodization proponents attempt to time this training, using statistics of past training efforts and ongoing measurement in attempt to get the athlete at the peak of maximal power, speed or endurance right at the moment of first competition.
Garden tips for Northeastern US, if you only want a few large Winter squash plants (like Butternut, which are resistant to bugs and wilt) and don’t have a lot of space, trellis them on a sunny fence, treat the root zone to plenty of compost and compost tea during the growing season, and in late Summer when the vines are heavy with green fruits, start pruning off the new vine growth at the nodes and commence pruning off all baby squashes (they are delicious in a saute). This will help all your others mature before frost. I got fifteen large fruit off three plants this way last Summer, and they only used a few square feet of ground space in the garden.
Plant spinach in late Summer for Autumn harvest instead of Spring. It often warms up too fast here and they just bolt right away.
Leave some unpicked Kale plants in the ground to overwinter. In Spring they will send up MASSES of flower stalks that can be snapped off and eaten raw or flash-cooked. Cut the flower shoots while immature and green, before the yellow blooms show. They will look like slender broccoli rabe, but much more tender and non-bitter. Delicious.
OH- and if you enjoy spicy greens, grow some Osaka purple mustard greens in your garden for fresh eating. They take up less space than Southern mustard, are prettier in the garden, have the same fiery character, are easier to clean, and are wonderful in salads or served as an edible bed for any meat.
Great as the greens on a roast beef sandwich too, when I’m being bad
you forgot beets!