Designing your training plan requires an approach that incorporates progressive overload, correct exercise selection, proper nutrition, and rest to ensure you achieve your fitness goal. It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner or a seasoned athlete. You need to be able to create a road map that leads to sustainable progress, peak performance, and injury prevention. The more you practice following a structured plan, the better you’ll be. This guide will walk you through the essentials of designing your workout program.

This is part 4 of the blog series Creating Your Own Training Plan: A Comprehensive Guide To Effective Workout Programming

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Periodization training is the process of organizing your workout programming towards a specific goal, during a given period of time. There are 3 types of cycles in periodization: macrocycles, mesocycles, and microcycles. Think of these as smaller goals that will help you get to your main goal of your training plan. Say you have a marathon 6 months away and you want to start training for it now. Those 6 months to race day is your periodization training, your training plan. Inside of that 6 month periodization training you will have macrocycles, mesocycles, and microcycles that will get you to your goal.

Before diving into the exercises, sets, reps, and intensity, it’s important to understand training cycles. Understanding what macrocycles, mesocycles, and microcycles are will help you know where you are in your phase. It’ll keep you motivated and you’ll be able to see why a particular part of your program might be making you more fatigued. Now, lets go over these training cycles.

This is exactly what it sounds like; it is the overall framework for your training. This is where you will set your major goals with the different phases needed to achieve them. As an example, if you are training for a marathon or long distance run, you may have different phases where you build your base, then increase your miles and intensity, then finally taper before race day. Your macrocycle can be as little as three months, or if you’re an olympian it can be as long as 4 years. The basic 4 phases of a periodization training program are endurance, intensity, competition, recovery.

An athlete may have 1 giant macrocycle with 3 smaller phases that are different to the mesocycle.

they can have a pre-season phase, a competition phase, and a transition phase that allows for rest and recovery.

A bodybuilder can also fall into a similar 3 phase macrocyle. They will have a bulking phase, cutting phase, and maintenance phase.

Think of the bulking phase as the pre-season where the goal is to add on as much muscle as possible. The cutting phase will then bring the individual to the lowest amount of body fat while retaining as much as possible for their competition. Finally, depending on if they have another show or not, they may enter a maintenance phase where they keep at a relatively low body fat percentage, ready to go into a small cutting phase to enter another show.

A powerlifter may choose to do a 3 phase macrocycle as well. A period where they build their base, ramp up the intensity, then a peak phase. The goal being that by the end of the base building and intensity phase, they are ready to increase their lifts for their competition.

A mesocycle is the sub-phase of the macrocycle. Depending on your macrocycle, these can be as short as 2 weeks or as long as a couple of months. These mesocycles will usually focus on one specific goal, to progressively overload, then have a short resting period, also known as deloading. You want your mesocycles to be aligned with the end game of your macrocycle.

As an example, if you are a powerlifter with 2 competitions, say one in June and one in December, You may choose to have a total of 6 mesocycles.

Month 1-2: Building your base

Month 3-4: Increase your intensity

Month 5-6: Taper

First Competition

Month 7-8: Build your base

Month 9-10: Increase the Intensity

Month 11-12: Taper

Second Competition

A microcycle is the smallest cycle in your training plan. These usually last a week or so and detail your exercises, sets, reps, and rest period. Every Exercise done will contribute to your end goal. These are very focused training blocks.

A long distance runner may do 5 runs during the week. Every run will be planned out. Below is an example of how the weekly microcycle might be planned out.

Even without going into specifics of the workout, you can see how every workout is deliberately planned. This individual wanted his most difficult workout on a Tuesday. This is likely because they are working a 9-5, having the most energy on a Tuesday. They scheduled their long runs on the weekend because they likely don’t work and can dedicate more time on their workout. Not only is this individual planning for their main goal, they are also able to schedule it around their life.