Marilia’s Powerlifting Blog

I recently found myself without a well defined competition schedule after another one of those unbearable federation desintegrations that so often take place in Brazil. Coincidentally, I happened to be reviewing the chapter on periodization on my permanently-edited (I must make myself stop this) book on powerlifting.

I read Issurin’s paper on block periodization and it appeared to me that he addressed important issues as applied to powerlifting and strength sports in general. More to the point, the idea that it is more productive to limit the number of motor tasks being trained in each block, taking into account their retention up to the last block within a certain meso-cycle makes a lot of sense.

We handle potentially dangerous tasks concerning Central Nervous System responses. Every top powerlifter I know has had a nasty encounter with CNS overtraining. Another aspect of our preparation to be taken into account is the retention efficiency of task. Issurin’s idea that mixed training strategies overwhelm the athlete’s organism (in our case, I would say it overwhelms our CNS) explains much of the poor results we get when insisting on complex, extremely varied multi-task protocols.

I decided to plan my last meso-cycle according to these principles, in what I saw appropriate for powerlifting, and achieved interesting results. We’ll obviously have to wait until a next competition to verify this.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 1st, 2009 at 7:31 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.