Peaking at the Right Time for GAA: How to Periodise Your Gym-Work

As athletes, we want it all.

Bigger, leaner, stronger, fitter, faster, and more powerful.

In pursuit of this holy grail, you’ve probably noticed a few things:

1. You only have a certain amount of time to train, and trying to cram training all these aspects into your week can be tough.
2. You can’t progress all aspects at once. Trying to get bigger means you might lose a bit of leanness. Optimising for endurance might mean strength won’t increase as much.
3. You want different things at different times of the year. You might not care about losing a bit of abdominal definition in winter if it means you can pack on a bit more muscle. And when it comes to championship time, you probably care more about performing at your best on the pitch than you do about your bench press PB.

With these things in mind, your training focus will, and probably should, change throughout the year.

Contemplating these changes ahead of time will allow you to plan how and when you’re going to prioritise and progress each quality at the appropriate time.

The process of systematically planning these changes in training ahead of time is known as periodisation.

Splitting up the Year

For most sports, the season works in a yearly cycle, so it makes sense to plan your training across that period of time.

Even if you’re someone who doesn’t play sport, it can still be useful to think of your training over a yearly cycle. For example, you might want to get lean for a summer holiday, or shift your strength focus to winter when outdoor conditions are less favourable to running, or peak for a marathon that’s at a specific time of the year.

This yearly cycle would be applicable to the structure of a season for athletes in most sports: GAA, soccer, rugby, track & field, jiu-jitsu, golf etc.

When we look at these sports, there is generally an off-season period, a pre-season period, and an in-season period.

The off-season and pre-season generally make up roughly half of the year combined, and the in-season generally makes up the other half of the year.

With that in mind, you can divide the season into 4 blocks:

1. Off-season
2. Pre-season
3. Early In-season
4. Late In-season

Given that there are 52 weeks in a year, you can divide these into 4 x 12-week phases (that’s 48 weeks total), leaving 4 weeks throughout the year for holidays, planned or unplanned de-loads, minor injuries, and other scheduling issues (you could obviously choose a different amount of weeks, based on your own needs).

Each of these 12-week phases will focus on a specific set of adaptations, building on the previous phase, and setting you up for the next.

To read the full article go to knowyourselfperformance.com/articles/training/periodisation