Gosh I love peaking. It’s so fun. I met my wife when everything in my life was peaking. Our 1st wedding and our post wedding celebrations happened when we were peaking. Our baby came along when our preparation for her arrival was peaking. We moved into our new construction house when everything was peaking, though we were delayed big time. And this is just life events stuff.
There’s peaking for the start of school and trips and reunions. Peaking for work and parties, holidays, photos and sports.
Peaking for Sports
Sports. That’s my jam. Outside of peaking for papers, quizzes, tests and finals in school, and peaking for my business (launch, events, marketing and programs), peaking for sports is closest to my heart, especially when I learned more about how to peak.
In it’s simplest form peaking is just being at your best when it’s the most important time to be at your best. People do it naturally and with support from their environment, community, schedule, etc…but when I learned how to program it and train for it, boy did the lights go on and my excitement level rise up.
Who doesn’t want to be at their absolute best when they care the most.
The guys I play basketball with comment often about my speed or strength or quickness or energy and have me cover the youngest (17 y/o) and best players (25 y/o), even though I’m one of the oldest and I don’t think I’m old, I’ve just been around longer than the guys I’ve play with.
They have reason to comment because I try to plan my week and day to peak for basketball. Why? Because it’s so fun, rewarding and energizing to play your best and do your best when you care. It gives you so much more energy and vitality that you bring into everything else you do in the rest of your life (can’t you tell by the energy in my writing).
How do we peak?
In our group personal training program it’s primarily linear periodization, which is building each week and each month / program by doing a little more than the previous. We add resistance, reps, sets and rounds each week known as progressive resistance overload. We increase the resistance and skill levels and either decrease or increase the reps each month depending on what’s complimentary to our goals and then we peak all of it for the last phase of the quarter. When I write we peak all of it for the last quarter of the phase I try to focus on power endurance for this last phase of our adult training programs so that our clients show up fittest for what’s important to them.
Side Bar Story
Back when I was an Athletic Trainer full time, I started working at a large high school during the spring sports pre-season. As a h.s. athletic trainer you have roughly 1 hour to do treatments, evals and rehab before you have to go to the fields and provide sports medicine supervision. Well I had a line of 20-30 kids out the door, all lined up for evals because of some pain or another. It was impossible and stressful, to do a good job and give each kid attention and get out to the fields to watch practices and games on time. I knew this wasn’t sustainable, especially since most of the injuries were conditioning related injuries, which means the kids got hurt because they were out of shape.
That summer I decided to lean more into my Strength & Conditioning credential and introduced the Cincinnati Sportsmetrics Program (a plyometric program) at the school and co-created a strength & conditioning program at Springfield College, called Pride Sports Performance, and invited as many h.s. athletes that wanted to come and train that could. When fall arrived, the numbers of poor conditioning related injuries dropped dramatically. It made my job so much easier.
When I moved to Boston, I leaned in all the way to the proactive side of injury risk reduction by focusing on strength & conditioning vs. the reactive side of dealing with poor conditioning related injuries I saw as an athletic trainer. I’ve never looked back, however my Licensed and Certified Athletic Trainer credential gives me a competitive advantage because of the granularity I see when watching people move, or in the assessment, questions, palpation and rehab skills I have when problem solving pain and dysfunction.
So now with my clients and myself peaking is not only about being your best when you care the most, but also about being in shape enough (resilient, durable and available) to reduce your injury risk while participating in activities that you care about most.
4 Phases vs. 3 Phases
Our summer quarter, aka Q3, is the only quarter of the year that has 4 phases. All other quarters are only 3 phases in length. A phase is usually a 3 or 4 week long program that has a specific goal like endurance, hypertrophy, strength and/or peaking and contributes to the theme of the quarter (Q3 theme is beach season ready, summer sports ready, peak for fall sports, races, events and photos).
Why 4 Phases?
The reason the summer quarter is 4 phases long is because historically speaking the transition from August to September for my clientele and myself is when life gets real busy real quick and the transition from summer vacation mindset to back to school, back to work, back to routines, schedules, meetings and producing is a lot of pings and demands all at once and my philosophy is when life stress goes up, training stress goes down. So when life gets full, demanding and stressful real quick, don’t skip workouts because they help you manage stress, get focused and grounded, keep your metabolism high and help you to be and perform at your best, but do reduce the cognitive (thinking) demands. Keep it simple stupid (KISS). Use the same theme and exercises from the summer and instead of focusing on overreaching and trying to get stronger and learn new skills, focus instead on doing variations of the summer movements explosively and challenge anaerobic strength & power endurance and recovery. Training anaerobic strength & power endurance will help you get leaner, lighter, quicker and more burst oriented, which is very complementary to fall sports and races, plus it’ll help keep your brain sharp for events, work and external demands and have you peaking physically and aesthetically for photos.
Low Cost
The cost is low, meaning you recover quick, though there is some soreness to be expected from the change of focus on building strength to going fast with insufficient recovery. Your thinking is low, because you know the exercises you’re doing as you spent the last 3 months learning them and all I do is meet you where you are on that given day, tell / show you what we’re doing today and then coach up your technique and give you confidence so you get the most out of your time.
No asks of your brain, only of your body and the body gives back more than what it takes out.
Guest Month
This is also perfect for welcoming in guests. Because the existing members already know what they’re doing, I can give more attention to the new people, trials and guests so they can feel comfortable and learn how to train in our program while watching first hand what they’ll be able to do as they keep showing up and putting in their reps.
2 Options
- Speaking of guest day. Do you want to be my Very Important Guest and try us out or do you know someone who might love what we do here at Change Your Body Boot Camps? If yes, you can sign up and/or refer at https://bootcampboston.com/vig.
2. Get the Programming. Maybe our schedule or training in groups or even 1v1 doesn’t work for you, but you wanna get and do the training that we do, so you can train at home, work, the gym, while traveling, etc… on your own and on your own timeframe. You can get on the pre-sale list now for the new app I’m building in which you’ll get the same, safe, results-oriented programming we do in Change Your Body Boot Camps, every month. These are designed to let you do cool things in life, update your identity and change your family tree. You can get on the pre-sale list here: https://bootcampboston.com/do-cool-things-pre-sale.
Thank you for reading.
Make it count, whatever it is,
Coach Mike
