The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Grind of Off-Season Training & Periodization

Training and motivation from October through December is tough. The CrossFit Games are far enough away that the incredible motivation we get from watching has drifted away, and the potential excitement of the Open starting and generating the good feelings of a new season isn’t quite close enough to get us fired up. 

So we have the everyday grind of October through December. It’s starting to get cold in the states and Europe so it’s always slow to get started each day, and down under the sweltering heat is starting to make the gym almost unbearable. 

It is however during these months that the true base of our fitness is laid to set us up for success when the competition season starts to roll around. It’s during these months that we have the most opportunities to make physiological changes to truly improve our fitness. It is during these three months that champions are made and legacies are cemented.

What all of this comes down to is proper periodization in our training program. So what does this look like? Here are two simple principles to understand with proper program periodization. 

Start With the End in Mind

One of the principles of an intelligently periodized program is that the training needs to be progressively more challenging over the course of the year. So you need to know where you’re supposed to end up, and how much time you have to get there, in order to know where to get started.

One of the common pitfalls that athletes make is they ride the excitement of starting a new training year and they want to do everything all at once. However we need to strip back the layers in order to build a better foundation. So if we start with all the hardest types of training first, we have nowhere to go after that. For a proper linear periodization, we need to progressively get slightly more challenging training throughout the year. 

Turn the Dial on Volume and Intensity

When layering the base of our fitness early in the season, we can lean into volume a little bit more because our intensity should be lower. An elegantly designed program is always playing with the balance between volume and intensity. So when we are stripping everything down early in the year, especially these October through December months, we can add some appropriate volume. 

This dance between volume and intensity all comes down to giving our body exactly what it can recover from. If we do too much of one, the other, or both, we start to dig ourselves a hole where we are doing a lot of work and doing it hard, but not able to properly recover to realize the adaptations we are aiming to get from our training. 

So when we’re in the doldrums of the training season and we’re building the base and hammering away at our weaknesses, let’s try not to jump too far ahead to the flashy stuff. Don’t worry, we’ll get there, but we need to do it in a responsible way or else we won’t be able to maximize our training for the year. 

The good news is that at PRVN we do all of this for you. You can rest assured that all of our programs are intelligently and elegantly designed to help you get the most out of your time in the gym and your year of training.