Individualizing Training

"Everybody's different"

"How you feel is a lie"

"Listen to your body"

Catch phrases meant to either nudge you toward or away from individualizing your training.  

Here's the thing though, we as humans KNOW with verifiable certainty that people respond to training stimuluses differently.  

It's not even a topic that people realistically debate. Yet some people remain reluctant to individualize their training.

Individulaizing your training is the most important thing you can do after making a commitment to training. There are lots of layers that need to be individualized, too.

• Intensity:  RPE is instrumental here.  It helps you get the right weight on the bar based on your capability for the day.

• Exercise Selection:  This needs to be based on a detailed weakness analysis and an understanding of how to address them -- in the context of the training being done right now.

• Special Methodologies:  Myo Reps, Density work, superloading, etc, etc.  All of them are effective for certain people.

• Periodization Strategy: Different lifters respond at different rates.  Some adapt to a stimulus rapidly, others take a long time to fully adapt.  It varies pretty widely and that drives a lot of how the training strategy is constructed

And of course each point can be expanded into whole classes. Take care of the lowest levels first.  Don't worry about individulizing your periodization plan until you've got regular volume and intensity covered first.  Exercise Selection should also come pretty early on and can be more detailed than a lot of people think. Then, later, you can start to cover periodization strategies and determine how to individualize all the components of a training cycle.

One thing the first four things have in common is that they take place at the microcycle level. They happen very close to where the athlete executes the training.  This is key because it's important to see that the bulk of individualization, one of the most important things in training. happens at the level of the microcycle. Proper execution of the training is CRITICAL for progress.

Patrick Ciera