Welcome to the final day of the 5-Day Conditioning Program Challenge. We’re going to wrap up by talking about how to manage volume and intensity to personalize your program.
The reason it’s so important to manage your volume and intensity is because it’s easy to cross the fine line between undertraining and overtraining. This line only gets finer as your conditioning improves since you have to train more often to see progress.
Regardless of your fitness level, you also need to manage volume and intensity to balance the stress of what happens inside and outside the gym.
The constrained theory of energy production suggests that there is an upper limit to the amount of energy your body can produce in a day. If you deplete this energy by responding to life stress and training stress, you won’t have enough left over to rebuild and improve your tissues. This is what I call a recovery debt.
This is another reason why it’s crucial to monitor your volume and intensity: you have to use the limited amount of energy you have appropriately, given the other energetic demands your body faces from day to day.
How do we manage programs?
Program management boils down to making small adjustments in volume and intensity based on recovery and fatigue each day.
Effectively managing your program means being proactive rather than reactive by preventing fatigue accumulation (recovery debt) or lack of progress (plateaus).
We can do this by measuring recovery and fatigue using a variety of simple and effective monitoring tools, from Morpheus to morning resting heart rate and RPE.
What does daily management look like?
The simplest, most meaningful way to adjust your training is in response to your daily recovery level. The following chart is a good reference for how to change your planned volume and intensity for each level of recovery:
Remember, recovery isn’t necessarily about how you feel; it’s about what your body can handle and bounce back from.
For example, if your recovery is low, it doesn’t mean that you can’t perform well at a high intensity. It simply means that it will take your body longer to recover if you do. Doing this over and over again will eventually cause a recovery debt and lead to overtraining.
Putting it all together:
Let’s revisit the sample weekly training template from Day 4. Since our training days are organized by specific volumes and intensities, it’s easy to adjust our plan based on recovery. Simply change the training day category.
If your recovery is below 80%, avoid Development days by switching to a Stimulation day.
Getting volume and intensity right when your recovery is moderate (60-80%) is the most important part of managing your program. This is crucial to avoid accumulating fatigue.
In general, you should manage recovery by reducing volume before intensity. However, there is a point where reducing volume isn’t enough to prevent a recovery debt. This is when it’s time to reduce your training intensity.
How to manage low recovery:
If your recovery is 60% or less, avoid training at high volumes and intensities and focus on Rebound Training, regeneration methods, or resting.
Make sure to only use regeneration methods sparingly to prevent your body from getting used to them. This would cause the methods to lose their effectiveness. It could also hinder your progress, since your body needs some level of stimulus to trigger improvement.
In other words, it’s important to only use regeneration methods when your recovery is low to ensure the methods are effective when you need them most.
Today’s challenge:
Here are the final steps to creating your own conditioning program:
- Identify which tools and technology you’re going to use to monitor and manage your daily recovery
- Review the program you’ve outlined over the last 4 days and evaluate whether you can adjust volume up or down based on recovery and fatigue. Then create alternative workouts to make adjusting easier.
- Get to work! Follow your conditioning program for the next 8 weeks, retest, and report back.
Even though I’ve only brushed the surface of how to write conditioning programs, you can get started and see real results with the program you’ve created here. But, if you’re ready to dive deeper and learn how to get the most out of the body’s conditioning potential, I have three ways for you to do that:
The first is by reading my book, Ultimate MMA Conditioning. While I originally wrote it with MMA athletes in mind, the principles I cover apply to any individual in any sport.
The second is by getting your own digital recovery coach, Morpheus, and taking your day-to-day management to an unparalleled level of precision.
The third is by joining the free Insider’s List for my online conditioning coach certification. If you want to become 100% confident in your ability to write conditioning programs for anyone, I created this with you in mind.
Inside my certification, I’ll show you all my best training methods and when to use them, plus how to manipulate everything from motivation to nutrition to squeeze more out of your conditioning.
You can join my free Insider’s List and save $200 off the full course price when it opens Sept 10th by completing the form below: