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Why good training plans start with the calendar, not the exercises
How to think about training in phases so you’re not trying to improve everything at once
The difference between general work and specific work - and why both matter
The key levers that actually drive adaptation and progress
How to build towards an event so you peak at the right time
Welcome to the Evergreen Athlete podcast...
This podcast is designed for people who used to live for sport but are now in a different place. They've recently focused on their careers and families and are unsure how to train athletically as they age. They have different stressors and problems. My name is Finlay MacHugh, and this is something that I have gone through myself to help people overcome every single day. If you're here, you likely have questions about how to train and live optimally. So this is what to expect...
What You’ll Get:
About Me (Your Host):
As of writing this in February 2025, I have been a strength and conditioning coach for 15 years, and I've coached at some level for 20 (Christ, that's scary). I'm the founder of Evergreen Athlete, an online coaching platform for those over 30s who want to regain their consistency and confidence to be their best version.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Hello, and welcome back to the Evergreen Athlete Podcast. My name is Finlay. I'm the host, and I'm also the owner of Evergreen Athlete, which is an online coaching company designed specifically for former athletes and older athletes who wanna fall back in love with training. So that involves rebuilding your consistency, rebuilding control over your body, your injuries, your behaviors, and ultimately ending up feeling really confident in what you can do. Being able to turn up to events and feeling confident that you can push yourself, that you can actually hit PBs that you didn't even think you had a chance of touching ever ever again.
Speaker 1:And all of that while while having a systematic approach to training, which leads me to today's topic. Now, I've had a number of athletes competing at High Rocks in Glasgow. I've got people competing in five k's and 10 k's and half marathons coming up as well. And I've done a lot of information on generally the process the very end process of making sure that you can perform at your best for that competition. But I bet there are a lot of people out there who are interested in if you are gonna enter an event, what is the systematic approach?
Speaker 1:If I've got, you know, three months, six months, twelve months to build up towards something, how do I do that to maximize performance to make sure that I turn up safely and to be able to make sure that I can just look back and be like, right. I gave that my best possible shot. Okay? And there is a process to it. In training science, we call this periodization.
Speaker 1:Now this is a a term that I honestly I don't think we really need the word periodization. It's initially born out of dividing your training into phases and periods, which we do do to a large extent. But in essence, I think it's morphed into planning. And planning is really important because I bet that most people when they want to start training, they want to think about what exercise they're doing, sets, reps, distances, times, all that kind of minutiae. And realistically, no coach who is worth their salt in my opinion will be starting with that.
Speaker 1:They will be starting with a plan at the higher level and they will work their way down through various phases I'm going to talk about today and you will get to a stage where the exercises and the sets and the reps, they write themselves. That's the easy bit because you've done the work beforehand. And something oh, sorry. A quote that I often fall back on is one by guy called Andy Grove. He was the CEO of Intel.
Speaker 1:I've got she got it here so don't fluff it up. He basically says that reports are a medium of self discipline more than a way of communicating information. Writing the report is important. Reading it is often reading it often is not. So in essence, sitting down and spending the time to create this and to write this plan is important.
Speaker 1:Constantly referring back to it isn't necessarily as important. Now, it's important because when you do this, you can prioritize. You can look at the different stages and times in your calendar as you build up to it and you can outline what the important factors are at that particular time and also what is not because we cannot work on everything at exactly the same time. We can, however, really focus our effort on a number of different things and other things become a lower priority and they become more maintenance. So I think that's a a key factor to it.
Speaker 1:And then I think another element is that when we sit down and we do this, we look at the dates, we look at different things that are going on in our diary, whether it's holidays, whether it's work commitments, whether it is just actually how do I get to training at this particular time. And we start to make these considerations and that means that our plan is gonna be much more robust when it comes to actually starting and using it. Now, if you are listening to this, it's obviously starts as a podcast. I am also recording this for YouTube video as well. And I will put up some slides that I've used in previous presentations on top of this because I think there are some elements to this that just come across better visually.
Speaker 1:When you're looking at a calendar and I'm talking about a few different elements, I think if you can see the tables that I've put together and what the plans look like that I create for other people, that will help you solidify some of the concepts that I'm talking about. So by all means, listen to this right through. I'm gonna try and keep it short and punchy, but then if you have things that you want to follow-up and learn in more detail that I would go to my YouTube page and watch it there. And you can find that shot car. It's Finlay Evergreen Athlete.
Speaker 1:I'm pretty confident it'll pop up and you'll see my stupid little face and you'll be able to find it there. So let's start out with like where did all of this really originate from And I'm gonna go through various levels of our pyramid that I've created. Like level zero is like how do we change? Level one is how do we drive that change? Level two is how do we cheat the alter the direction of that change?
Speaker 1:Then I've got things like constraints, periodization, which is obviously the focus of this, the phase design, the program design. Now I've got six levels to that and I'm gonna talk about four of them today and there are three that I'm deliberately leaving out because it just becomes too much information to pack into one episode. And I'm sure we've all listened to a hoover moon or some sort of science based podcast where you get vomited information out and you leave it and go, wow, that was really interesting. But I haven't got a clue what I'm gonna do with any of that. Whereas I think that some of my better episodes or presentations have been shorter and people have been able to go away and have a few ideas to take away and use and ask questions.
Speaker 1:And if you do have any questions, please get in contact with me. So how do we change? Well, this is probably best to go back to the origin story. It's like where has all of this come from? And it's really been born out the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1:It's been born at a time when Russia was absolutely dominating the Winter Olympics, particularly in Helsinki. They were just winning absolutely everything. America was getting stuffed and is wondering why they're not winning and getting pretty frustrated by it. And at the same time, there was a Hungarian scientist called Hans Selya who had developed a theory called general adaptation syndrome, gas or GAS. And this was born out of his testing on rodents to see basically the kind of doses of drugs that were required to kill them off.
Speaker 1:So that sounds pretty morbid. But something that he noticed was that the the rodents who had built up a tolerance to the drugs required a bigger dose to finally finish them off. And he noticed that there were distinct phases that when he provided the dose immediately afterwards, there was a period where they were quote unquote weaker or more susceptible to being killed off. And then when they were given time to recover, they were actually stronger and required a higher dose. So we got this curve which starts, it kinda goes up, drops below the baseline and then it comes back to the top just above it.
Speaker 1:And that is the essence of general adaptation syndrome. And that is being translated across to the physical training, whatever we're doing right now, and perhaps extrapolated a bit beyond what it was intended to. But it is a really neat model to understand how fundamental level how our body changes to stress. So we I'm sure many of us can remember going to the gym, punching out a tough session. The next day you wake up, you're pretty sore, you're not really performing as best you can.
Speaker 1:And then a few days later after that, you feel a lot better and you might be a little bit stronger, you might be a little bit fitter. It's a neat model for us to follow. So essentially, Russia is actually dominating. Hans Selya has created his theory, and another element that comes with with Russia is that they were really keen on five year plans. This is from a government level.
Speaker 1:Five year plans to develop the economy, various other elements that were being used within a sporting setting for the build up for Olympics. So it's longer term planning was happening. And essentially, American coaches were seeing this and then, you know, going home, so so to speak, and being like, hey, these are some key things that the Russians are doing to improve performance. We need to get on top of this. And that well, like the where the it really originated from.
Speaker 1:And what I wanna basically point out is that it's originated from kind of folklore and not necessarily like true hardcore science and then people have extrapolated out, which I'm sure is the case for many different things. But there are a few wrinkles with it in it within it as well. The biggest wrinkle is the fact that alongside Russia doing a lot of planning and implementing this general adaptation syndrome was that they were pumping themselves full of a lot of drugs. They were and that is a really big factor. You still need to train hard.
Speaker 1:I'm sure they were still training very hard and I'm pretty sure there are other countries also doing these drugs too, perhaps not quite as well or systematically, but it is a big factor. So when people have seen the planning and the general adaptation syndrome, they might not have factored in quite as much about the drugs in it. But fortunately, we have actually gone away and we have looked and researched at it and compared periodized training versus non periodized training in both trained subjects and untrained subjects. As in people that have do a lot of training, athletes, and people that are not doing a lot of training. And what we have consistently found across that, and this is quite a difficult thing to measure because the number of variables variables that are going on, is that periodized training is going to enhance enhance your performance more than non periodized training.
Speaker 1:The it probably between anywhere between 20 15 to 25% more benefit from doing that. And a couple of factors come in here. One, you can still get pretty good doing non periodized training. Don't underestimate that. Still just simply turning up, being consistent, that is a good thing.
Speaker 1:Two, typically, if you are more trained, you're a fitter, better athlete, you're gonna need more systematic training to illicit things, whereas unstructured training is not gonna have quite as good a benefit for you. So that's if you're trying to push your performance on and you have a history of training as well, then it becomes more important that you have a systematic plan. And then if we extrapolate out like what are kind of three key things that we should understand from this approach. One, we need to provide an overload to your body. Your body needs to do something that it's not done before or to do something in a quantity that it's not done before, I.
Speaker 1:E. Weeks and weeks of consistent training to get there. Number two, you have a finite amount of this overload. You cannot just keep punishing your body week after week and expecting it to bounce back and return. There is a limit to what we can impose on it.
Speaker 1:And I've heard other people say before is that our body likes a certain amount of stress, but we need to apply over time more and more training to elicit that same amount of stress because the tolerance is higher. And that leads to my last one which is it needs to be progressive as well. As we build our tolerance, we're gonna need more. We're gonna need more variability and more changes to elicit that same stress. So it's progressive.
Speaker 1:It's finite. And then we do need overload. And this is where I move on to the second element. Like, do we drive that change? How do we drive the overload?
Speaker 1:This is more than nuts and bolts of it. And ultimately, and I actually mentioned this to someone on a call today, is we need to vary our training. We need variability in it. I my dirty omission is that when I first started lifting weights, I found a five day, maybe a six day training plan in a men men's health magazine when I was in for a dentist appointment. I stole the magazine and I followed that training plan for maybe a year and a half before I changed anything.
Speaker 1:Now, I made fantastic gains for the first three, maybe four or five months. You know, was young. Was 18 or 19 at the time. I made fantastic gains. But for the last nine months plus, I wasn't making a lot of progress at all.
Speaker 1:I remember battling with weights and not getting anywhere because I was just doing the same thing over and over and over again. And that you might familiarize with that. So to get the overload, we need to vary our training. The stimulus needs to be different to what we're used to. And we've got three main levers to pull when it comes to varying our training.
Speaker 1:We've got the training volume. So that's how much of it you're doing. That's the sets, the reps, the distance you're covering, the amount of time that you're exercising for. These are really important factors for driving change. The second one is how hard that work is, the intensity that you're working at.
Speaker 1:So this is how fast you're running, how fast you're moving in the gym, how much weight you're lifting relative to your total capacity. These are real important factors. It's also can be the complexity of the exercise. Some exercises use many more muscles and joints and that is naturally a have a greater effect on your body as a whole than exercise that just works one particular muscle group. And then the last one is density, which you could argue may be a subcategory of volume, but I've kept it as a separate element here.
Speaker 1:And that's factoring in the work to rest ratios. Are you super setting exercises, having them back to back? Are you super setting days almost? And that's not really a technical term, but are you you backing up day after day of the same stimulus on purpose for a particular reason? Are you, how are you distributing and the amount of frequency in your week?
Speaker 1:And those are the the real the three main things that we can alter in a training program to drive that overload. So if you're sitting there and you're you haven't made a lot of progress with your training, the likelihood is that none of those things have changed or you've not been deliberate about changing one of them. And this moves on to our the next layer, which is the direction of change. How do we know what of those we want to change to get the result that we want to get? And on the slide, what you'll see is you'll see a snowflake.
Speaker 1:And the snowflake is there because a snowflake is well known well known, but it's known to be a fractal. And a fractal is basically a shape that repeats itself no matter how zoomed in or how zoomed out we are. So we if we look at a snowflake, it will have the same kind of formation as a snowflake when we zoom back out of it. And this analogy has been brought up by a guy called Dan John, who's a well known strength and conditioning coach and it applies very similarly to our planning process in training. If you were to look at a toddler right up to an athlete at the very end of their sporting career, perhaps in their mid to late forties sorry, late mid to late thirties, early forties, they will go from general to specific.
Speaker 1:They will start doing lots of, you know, fun games, trying lots of different sports, and then as they go through their life, they will gradually whittle down. They will do fewer. They will do fewer until they become a specialist at their specific sport. This is very similar when someone is doing a four year training cycle perhaps leading up to an Olympics or a Commonwealth Games. Their training will start quite generally.
Speaker 1:They're gonna try and build broad fitness and then when they get closer to their event, they're gonna try and sharpen that axe and they're gonna come more and more specified towards their event. It's the same when we look at an annual calendar. It's the same when we look at a training phase. We're always traveling from general to specific. And the reason that we're doing that is a couple of reasons.
Speaker 1:One, doing very specific training for your sport as in working at the high intensities, repeating the same movements, repeating the same patterns is difficult for our bodies to recover from. It are gonna be really struggling to extract more and more gains when we're doing a lot of that style of training because we're unable to recover from it. The second thing is because it's repetitive, there's not enough variation in it to work on some fundamental underlying skills to build up towards it. And I give an example of someone that is maybe an 800 meter runner or a 1,500 meter runner or maybe even up to a fat like a fast five k runner. I mean, like someone running sub 25 for five k's.
Speaker 1:You're running that distance and doing a hard effort of five k or one of those middle kind of not middle distance, but longer but lower distance ones is not enough of a stimulus to improve your aerobic energy system and to be able to work on your the the parts ability to pump blood around your body. And we're not gonna be able to extract a lot from it. So we need to do some more general training which might be the long slow runs. It might be even some long slow biking work to work on that factor to then help you when you get to doing your five k performance. So we go general to specific and specific is the end goal.
Speaker 1:But now this is when I move on to the next kind of phase here is when we're looking at the calendar or trying to figure out how do we change it, there are lots of different methods of defining what general is versus specific. But one of the methods that I use is from a Russian hammer thrower called Bondachuk and he divides it into four separate sections. And you can think about these sections as different phases of your training calendar. We'll go into the specifics of that soon, but let's just start with the terminology. The first one is general general physical exercises.
Speaker 1:The second one is specific physical exercises. The third one is specific development exercises and the fourth one is competition exercises or competition preparation. The little bit confusion here is that because the word specific fits into the fit the second and the third phase. Whereas the most specific thing you can do is the competition at the very end. And when I talk about going from general to specific, there's like the that phrasing, but there's also like the exact terminology that's going on here.
Speaker 1:So in essence, I've got four different phases. General, specific specific development, and competition. And what we can do is we can then create basically lists of exercises or types of training that fall under those different categories depending on what our sport is. For example, if I'm training for a five k and I'm gonna work my way backwards here, my competition prep is working at the speed that I wanna run-in my five k running total distance around five k whether that split into, you know, two by two and a half k, five by one k, whatever that might look like. But I'm working very close to the demands that the sport requires.
Speaker 1:I might be doing some jumps, some leaps, some weighted sprints, whatever that might be to work on that also. As I step back, the specific development exercises, that's when your training starts to look a little bit more like what you're doing. The the movements are much more similar. You're using, you know, if you're running, you might be single limb exercises. You might be doing more work on the track and doing a little bit less base building.
Speaker 1:Then we go back to phase before which is specific physical preparation and this is more physical demands that are very similar to it. So it might be having the maximal strength that you're required. It might be being springy and reactive and jumping really elastically like you do in the sport, but it's more the physical quality rather than necessarily looking like it. So an example between an SPP or sorry. A specific physical exercise and a specific development exercise might be doing a double leg drop jump where you step off a box and you jump quickly off the ground compared to doing a single leg drop jump where you step on the ground and you jump up very high because we're running and we're typically running on a single leg at a time.
Speaker 1:Or you might wanna take that a step forward. You might step off a box, do a single leg jump, but you're going forward. Short car, that's a little bit more like the demands of the sport. And then we get to the very first stage of the you know, depending on what angle you're looking at of general physical preparation. And this is it's general.
Speaker 1:Like, I wanna stress how general this is. This is where you can for example, you're broadly working on getting fit. So if you are a runner, this is where it's a good opportunity to get a bike. Go out and do some training on a bike. Go swimming.
Speaker 1:Get on a cross trainer. Play some football or soccer with some friends. Try different sports that are gonna work on elements that are not really related to your sport that much, but are gonna build up the demands and help you out later down the line. And runners, I think typically get quite scared of doing these different things, but you've gotta also understand that this can help your performance because you've got greater variability in your training in an early stage and you're still able to maintain and build some physical qualities. Whereas when you're just doing running, running, running, that can be extremely demanding and it can generally lower your tolerance over time because it is so repetitive.
Speaker 1:So hopefully that's a this is one of the ones that I think will translate better if somebody's viewing online. And if you are viewing online as well, I've given you a couple of examples here just to show you how you can translate it through. So that's a broad one there and then I've done once more specifically for an endurance runner. And this is quite again, this is pretty broad here. This is just giving you a few ideas of the different things that you could go through.
Speaker 1:But note what we wanna do now is we can then use that in our calendar to start creating the periods or the phases of our training. So what I've got up on the screen right now is a calendar for five months worth of training for someone leading up to HireOx, which is literally happening today as this is filming. I can see it right there. Yep. And then they've got another competition the week after also.
Speaker 1:And if you have a look at that, you'll notice up the top there, you'll see the kind of lighter green colors where it has GPP, which is that general physical preparation. Then it's got another general physical preparation. And then we move into specific physical prep and then we move into specific development and then we leave into competition. So how would you build this out yourself? Firstly, find a calendar.
Speaker 1:You can create one on Google Sheets. That's exactly what I do right now. Put it in Google Calendar. It doesn't really matter. But firstly, start at the very end in mind.
Speaker 1:When is your deadline? When is your competition coming up? Put that in there. The next thing you might wanna do is to put any other kind of supplementary events or competitions that you might wanna do. So if you're doing a half marathon, you might have a 10 k or a five k event in there.
Speaker 1:We wanna earmark those all at holidays, things like that. Now there are a couple of key elements to your training calendar that are quite similar no matter what athlete you are. First thing is that if you've got a competition for this person has March sorry, March, week and a half to two weeks before that is going to be your taper. So you're gonna be lowering your training volume exponentially building up to that. That's great.
Speaker 1:That's two weeks of training kind of decided for you. We also know that the week right before that is gonna be one of your hardest weeks. We wanna really push the limits and overreach what your body's doing just before you go into a long recovery phase so that we can extract the last basically, of the last of the gains before we kind of go into that taper. And again, that is there. So that might be where you start doing some test pieces.
Speaker 1:Again, you might do some five k time trials of keeping that five k runner mark there. And then we can see I've gone for four weeks of specific development exercises. And for this particular person, because they're training for high rocks, we wanna be doing a lot of high rocks based training. So they're doing a couple of simulation work. I'm changing how what it looks like, but it's gonna replicate the demands of the sport, which in this person is for Hyrox quite a lot.
Speaker 1:So they're gonna be doing sled pushes. They're gonna be running one k intervals or derivatives of that. They're gonna be working for similar amounts of time to be able to translate the physical fitness that we've built in the phases beforehand into this. And then as we go back, this is really it depends what you're working towards. But for this person here, we were doing more of a maximal strength phase and then we had a a hypertrophy as a general strength phase then a hypertrophy phase right before that.
Speaker 1:And this is how we've just kind of gradually built it up. So in if we start at the very beginning, we built some muscle, we started to translate that muscle into strength and seeing what we can lift, then we really wanted to see how much strength we've got, then we wanted to translate that strength into the sport so they're able to use it in the in sporting conditions, then we've refined those sporting conditions, then we've had one big overreaching period, and then we've had a taper as we come down to the event and bam. We're trying to do everything we can for them to be in as a fitter place as possible. And for these, this particular person who's actually it's actually a couple that are doing it, both of them former elite athletes. And both of them have commented that we've in four and a half months, we've got got to stage where they are hitting previous lifetime personal best in their strength lifts.
Speaker 1:They are running at paces that they, again, they thought they'd never have anyone's business doing. They're doing training volumes that they never thought they'd be able to cope with being parents and being busy and trying to factor everything in. And they are really, barring a few other elements, in the best physical condition they could possibly be in leading into this event because it's very gradually built up and got them there and we haven't just jumped straight from one end to the other and made a bit of right mess of it. Okay. That was quite a lot there.
Speaker 1:If you're watching this online, I I hope that you found it really useful. If you are watching this online, go back to my podcast and find that. If you are watching this line, I also have an email list so you can get find out exactly what's coming out and when it's coming out. I'd love to hear from you on there. And if you would like to speak to me directly, then you will find me on an Instagram finlay dot evergreen dot athlete.
Speaker 1:I would love to have a chat about your training. I'm always up for questions. So I hope you found that useful. We've gone through various different phases there. We've gone through how how do we fundamentally change?
Speaker 1:How do we drive that change? How do we drive the direction of that change? And how do we actually section off into different periods throughout your year?