500 Words a Week - Applying agile planning to my own training
This post is brought about after discussing some agile planning concepts in a recent presentation I did for the Irish S&C Network. I’m currently in my 4th week of starting a new job, so my dedication and effort to my own training has been woeful. However, as with my athletes, applying certain agile planning concepts has allowed to tick along and embrace the uncertainty.
A mistake I have made in the past when applying agile planning concepts is not having an overarching goal, so my current goals are to maintain strength and muscle mass. When I discuss maintaining strength I am referring to my ability to express strength in certain compound barbell lifts. So this brings up concept one, everyday maximum. First priority is maintaining my ability to express strength in the squat, so my first session of the week involves working up to an everyday maximum. This runs in-line with the theme of “stimulate don’t annihilate”. Working up to a casual single that doesn’t cause me a huge amount of strain/ effort, but will grease the grove enough so that I hopefully won’t lose much strength. If I’m considerably tired or not feeling it, I might aim for a double/ triple as this automatically limits the amount of weight on the bar. Thinking of Mladen’s “push the ceiling” or “pull the floor” types of programmes. This would very much be considered a pull the floor programme, as the rates of adjustment or progression are pretty small. It’s very repeatable, and potentially too easy at times and I’m not pushing myself, but we use the heuristic “consistency beats loadings”. However, there are times will I’ll go for a more push the ceiling approach, when I’ll let the reigns of a little.
If we look at the barbell loading strategy, the majority of this programme is low risk, and used with the thinking of protecting from the downside. The downside for me being losing strength. This is how we should create our programmes for our athletes, the majority of the programme is low risk and aimed at protecting from the downside (athletes getting injured). Once that has been covered, we can then pursue the upside of more saturated loading schemes to enhance physical capacities.
Briefly bringing up a point I made during my recent presentation on residual training effects. This was first highlight to me during my internship at Elon. Within academies we are unsure of the future of our athletes, the chance of making it to the first team can be low at times, however depending on the club, the chance of athletes making it to some form of first team environment can be high. As our athletes won’t always be with us, if we spend a significant time while they are with us developing certain physical qualities. Once they leave us, they will require less intense loading schemes to ensure they maintain these physical qualities throughout their first team career. Thus enabling them spend more of their adaptive resources on the sport itself.
