Personal Evolution Fitness Programming StructureA theoretical template for the design and implementation of the Personal Evolution scheduleThe Personal Evolution fitness programming structure is something of confusion for many people. Understandably, a lot of people like to know why they are doing certain things. For many who train with us there is an innate understanding of our methodologies through pure familiarity. To others it can seem almost entirely random. There is a method to what we do, however it defies common, mainstream understandings of fitness. Most fitness programming structures tend to be segmented and repetitive. We believe this common method to be limiting simply because it doesn’t foster an environment of variance. That is the first difference in what we do. It is not segmented, several aspects of fitness come into the equation in most workouts. For a rugby team the requirement is that they exert strength, speed, power, endurance etc, all within the same game. So it doesn’t make sense that they are training for each of these aspects separately. The same goes for most disciplines and for life’s demands in general. Our fitness programming structure is varied and you will probably not find the same stimulus pattern from one week to another within our schedule. This keeps the body ready for anything and everything. However, it cannot be entirely random for best results. Even something designed to condition maximum variance has to have some structure. This guide was written to help provide a template of the basic Personal Evolution fitness programming structure. It is not designed as a programme as such. What we do is not design set fitness programmes. What we do is create a varied training structure so as to condition all necessary fitness aspects without conflicting on each other. So the fitness programming structure is somewhat theoretical, however it does provide our most common structure. Training CycleThere are many ways to cycle your training schedule. Look in any gym and people will be doing all sorts of training splits. The common training cycles used widely cannot be employed by Personal Evolution because they are generally extremely one-dimensional. Look at body building as a common example. Body builders will most often train very few muscle groups within each session and a split may look like this: Monday: Chest, shoulders, triceps. Wednesday: Back, biceps. Friday: Legs, abs. This trains individual muscle groups, which is totally out of line with what we do. The Personal Evolution methodology aims at training movement patterns, not muscle groups. Training movement patterns ensures many muscles are being coordinated and working in synchronisation with each other to produce movement. Athletic training programmes are similarly segmented, although they don’t split muscle groups like this. Common athletic conditioning splits fitness aspects. With a training schedule that works on endurance one day, strength in another, skills in another etc. Physical training produces physical memories. If you train separately for all these aspects, all you are conditioning your body for is the ability to apply them separately. In our methodology we combine skills with endurance so that they may be ingrained neurologically in order to create the ability to access them under such circumstances outside of training. This is to simulate the conditions under which these skills will be required. This occurs in most of our session types, not just ones requiring endurance. In addition to this we also work separately on skills, strength elements, gymnastic elements and singular movements. Our programming, like virtually no other programming that exists today, works on simulating the broadest range of fitness adaptations within contexts that are more likely to occur in real life or athletic situations. SESSION TYPES Peripheral Adaptive Endurance/ Metabolic Conditioning (PAE/MetCon) Don’t be fooled, PAE is not typical endurance training. We are not referring to long, slow endurance. PAE is a structure that applies aspects such as speed, power and strength as well as skills in a continuous session where fatigue has a major influence on execution. PAE involves every imaginable element combined into a more or less continuous session that generally exceed 30 minutes. These sessions may involve Olympic weight lifting, gymnastics, specific athletic skills, plyometrics, sprinting, agility drills etc. This category also includes other forms of metabolic conditioning such as single element “cardio” type exercises like rowing, running, cycling, swimming and the like. PAE and MetCon can include any and all exercise elements into one session, it’s not the individual exercises that make it PAE, it’s the structure and intensity. Strength, Power and Speed These three aspects come under the one banner. This is because all of these are interdependent. You can’t have power without strength, you can’t have great speed without power. SPS sessions will generally have more rests between rounds, sets and exercises than PAE sessions. Sessions of this nature usually consist of a small number of strength, speed and/or power exercises. It could be simply snatch for 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 reps. A repeat sprint session would come under this category as would a session super-setting push-press with squat jumps, to give you a general idea. Skills Skills may incorporate anything that requires at least a base level of learning before being able to competently perform it. So skills include gymnastics elements such as handstands, cartwheels, vaults, hand-springs etc. Other skills are specific athletic abilities, Parkour drills, practice of complex weight lifting movements and anything else that has a learning curve. Coordinating all these sessions into a training cycle is what gives it the random appearance. In one training cycle, each session type must be incorporated. However, sessions need to be placed where they will not create conflict with each other. You wouldn’t place a skill session right at the end of a cycle after a PAE session simply because you will have markedly decreased neurological efficiency to perform the skills properly. So a cycle that seems random generally has more structure than it may appear to have. THE TRAINING CYCLE Macro-view Training cycles are structured to incorporate all modalities. This includes training days and recovery days. The cycle we generally use follows one of two cycle types. The first is three days on, one day off. This is optimal as by day three there is sufficiently decreased efficiency and by day four the body needs to recover in order to remain effective. The training cycle may also be divided into five days on, two days off. This is to fit in with the common schedule for most people. This has to be structured a little more carefully, simply because by the end of day five the body is generally significantly fatigued with pronounced decreases in neurological efficiency. The following is a theoretical training cycle. Here we will provide a structure for both cycle types. Three on, One Off This cycle structure is fit into a 12 day cycle. This makes it easier to structure in advance and gives a better overall view. The structure here would work like this… Days 3, 7 and 11 would be PAE, days 2, 6 and 10 are strength and days 1, 5 and 9 are skill sessions and days 4, 8 and 12 are rest days. If you study this closely you will notice that skills sessions are performed when an individual is at their freshest and most efficient, strength is next because skills will have left the individual with still a lot in reserve and would not have taxed the body extensively. PAE is placed last before a rest day simply because it is the most taxing and because it is good to do this type of training when the body is already partially fatigued to increase difficulty and realism. Five on, Two Off This is a typical 7 day cycle structure designed to fit into the average person’s work schedule. The structure of a five day cycle may be built on a purpose basis. For instance, those needing more skills work will include more skills sessions whereas someone with higher skill development might include more PAE sessions incorporating skills. The following are two examples of how a seven day cycle might work for two different people with a different purpose or need… Example One: Days 1 and 3 are skill sessions, days 2 and 4 are strength sessions and PAE is performed on day 5 at the end of the week before the rest days (6 and 7). For someone focussed on metabolic stimulus or applying skills more in context, the cycle might look like this… Example Two: Day 1 is skills, days 2 and 4 are strength sessions and days 3 and 5 are PAE sessions. SCORING AND RECORDING Although there are many ways you can track progress within the wide and varied programming of Personal Evolution, there are certain ways used within the structure of our training schedule. The following will discuss how we score and track the three different types of training. PAE/MetCon PAE utilises several different modes of scoring typically. However, one must take into account that the weight lifted on strength components will be a factor, the length of rest periods needed, jumping height and many other factors. The following are the three most common ways of quantifying a PAE workout.
Strength, speed, power Strength, speed and power can be scored and monitored any number of ways. You can measure weight lifted, time to sprint a certain distance and countless other ways. The following are the most common way we use.
Skills Skills are quantified any way you see fit. Skill sessions are hard to track in terms of numbers. The best way to track progress here is by monitoring your progression level of each element. If you can do a tuck planche one day and a full handstand a few weeks later then you have made progress. The actual progressions from one level of skill to another is a topic for another discussion and requires visual demonstration. ApplicationThe preceding programming template did not pre-date our current workout schedule. Rather, this exists to demonstrate the organic development of an effective structure based on application and observation. Our experience and feedback have demonstrated that such a structure is unequalled in overall response and adaptation. Such knowledge may have been next to impossible to gather if it weren’t for feedback and high-stakes practice and observation. Personal Evolution’s best results come from workouts that draw from a wide variety of reliable sources such as intimate knowledge of physiological responses, current research, application and feedback over time. The goal for this programming structure is that it will develop in the athlete an eye for detail and understanding of how and why certain responses occur. It encourages the athlete to apply variance and equally develop new skills, physiological adaptations, metabolic stimulus in all of the energy pathways, development of quality movement in every imaginable plane and cross pollination of aspects of fitness that would not normally coexist acutely or chronically. We believe that this template does at least a reasonable job of expressing the structure and nature of the training ideologies we use. It was designed to somewhat formally express Personal Evolution objectives. Application of the structure is not intended to be highly formal. We do not teach “programmes” in the usual sense. It was an idea of the mainstream fitness industry to create set programmes with a limited array of movements and specific fitness aspects. This mainstream ideal was developed to better monitor and keep tabs on how people trained and to better impart each expert’s “system”. Without a set programme, the coach loses the ability to sum up their system in a neat little package. This is the path of least resistance and not necessarily the most effective one, it’s just the one that exists. Application of Personal Evolution’s methodology requires unique thought and continuous development. What we do now is almost certainly not exactly what we will be doing in three years time. Take this theoretical fitness programming structure as a guide to understanding, not necessarily something to be followed like a set dogma or system. Sometimes it won’t work exactly this way. Apply the methodologies, perform the schedule of workouts and aim to gain your own understanding. You might draw conclusions that we have not come across as yet, if so then we would appreciate the feedback. The application of our core values and objectives needs to be experienced firsthand. This is how we came to this structure template, not the other way round. If something works, accept it, appreciate it and be happy with it. This is how we have drawn the conclusions we have.
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