MovementLink Workout Programming

Online Course

Class 1: The Big Picture

At MovementLink, we are constantly testing and updating our workout programming based on the latest scientific principles and methods and anecdotes from world-class athletes and coaches. We take a periodized approach (explained below) to programming our workouts and consider a wide variety of aspects that we’ll discuss here in this online functional fitness programming course. We will start at the highest level view and work our way into the extreme detail of how to choose exercises, weights, reps, and time domains to generate a specific stimuli for a specific workout. First, let’s take a look at some terminology that will aide us in the discussion. Please note, that the actual definitions of the below terms will be more general than what is provided below. We have provided you a description of the definition of each term in the context of how we use it within MovementLink’s programming.

Programming - The actual design of the workouts and workout program. The MovementLink programming is designed with periodized macrocycles (defined below) with the intent of being customized to develop P.A.T.H. Results within the context of an individual’s real life. Through functional movements performed at relatively high intensities, WODs will develop skills that have real world transfer and usability whether it’s for sports or just everyday life.

P.A.T.H. Results - Performance, Aesthetics, Tissue and Joint Health, and Overall Health and Wellness. MovementLink is not willing to sacrifice one for the other. These four areas work together to create a foundation for individuals to be incredibly fit, pain free, and capable for their entire lives. Technique that carries over to the real world is the secret to elite performance and resolving pain. The application of the programming concepts we will explore are extremly depending on the results we are after. For more in depth information on our “Why”, check out the page linked here.

Performance - We should be fit and capable of incredible things. We should have access to full ranges of motion of every muscle and joint in the body. We should have the stability, knowledge, and movement patterns to put our body in optimal positions in the gym, in life, and in sport. We should be able to go hard and fast, slow and long, lift heavy things, control our body-weight. We should be able to have fun and enjoy any opportunity that we want to. All around fitness and performance gives us the freedom to do whatever we want to do.

Aesthetics - We workout hard and we deserve to look fit. There are many other lifestyle factors that contribute to aesthetics, but your workouts should promote the body you want to have. Marathon runners, bodybuilders, power lifters, and yogis all have their own look. MovementLink workouts provide extremely fit, natural looking, defined bodies.

Tissue and Joint Health - You are only as old as how you feel. We need to workout in a way that promotes feeling great. Programming needs to have adequate volume and intensity to maximally promote results, but not too much to accumulate fatigue that someone cannot recover from. Moving properly, working on recovery, and optimal res and sets are key to your body feeling and moving great. It’s not all about resolving pain. When our tissues and joints are healthy, positions can be optimized for maximal performance instead of running around with a parking break on.

Overall Health and Wellness - It is true, you can perform at an elite level and you can have a body builder body at the elite level without being healthy. Everything we do at MovementLink it is to optimize health along with everything else. We are unwilling to sacrifice this. Our goal is for MovementLink principles to have a positive effect on every health marker.

WOD - Workout of the Day. The WOD is the workout plan for a specific date. MovementLink WODs typically have between 1 and 3 sections and are organized and designed considering the information below.

Day Type - At Movement link, each day of the week will have a specific day type in which the WODs will be structured. This allows us to provide a workout every day of the week and makes it easy for athletes to customize their workout plan and rest day(s) based on which and how many day types fit their goals, schedule, and other hobbies and activities. Currently, the MovementLink programming follows these day types:

• Mondays - Lower Body Strength + Short MetCon

• Tuesdays - Lactate Zone 2 Training + Max Heart Rate Finish

• Wednesdays - Upper Body Strength + Short MetCon

• Thursdays - Power + Long Lower Body MetCon (Running Program Option)

• Fridays - Cardio HIIT (High-intensity Interval Training) MetCon

• Saturdays - Long MetCon (Running Program Option)

• Sundays - Long Upper Body MetCon

To see how to design your custom weekly program within the MovementLink programming, check out this article: Choosing Which Days to Workout.

MetCon - Short for Metabolic Conditioning and refers to a high-intensity workout that utilizes functional exercises. As the body works it relies on three energy systems to get the job done: 1) Phosphagen, 2) Glycolytic, and 3) Oxidative. Although, depending on the effort, there may be one primary energy system at work, typically all three are working at various degrees.

Phosphagen Energy System (Anaerobic) - Capable of providing extremly high energy, but stores only last for a few seconds of effort relying on energy stored directly in the muscles. When store run out, power output drops as we fall back on our glycolytic system for more energy.

Glycolytic Energy System (Anaerobic) - Capable of producing high levels of energy from a few seconds to up to an hour plus of hard effort. This energy system relies heavily on blood glucose which is carbohydrate nutrition is so important for longer, very high effort events like races or multiple workouts in a day. They glycolytic energy system is the main system of most high-intensity workouts.

Oxidative Energy System (Aerobic) - Capable of providing sustainable energy for all day, easier efforts. The oxidative energy system is mainly fueled by our cells’ mitochondria as they take in oxygen, fat, and recycled lactate as fuel and create energy for us to use as a biproduct. Our Oxidative energy system is what is targeted in our Lactate Zone 2 Training.

Anaerobic - Effort thresholds that last from a few seconds to a couple of minutes. The amount of time we can sustain anaerobic exercise depends on the intensity of our effort, but anaerobic efforts are inherently unsustainable as the fuel sources are limited. Our anaerobic efforts ostly utilize our phosphagen and the glycolytic energy systems. This is exercise that is more explosive, strength-related, and powerful in nature.

Aerobic - For longer duration and easier efforts, the aerobic system, the oxidative pathway, is the primary energy source utilizing oxygen, fat, and recycling lactate. The other pathways are also utilized in aerobic training, just not to a significant level relative to the oxidative pathway.

Minicycle - A smaller block of WODs. MovementLink utilizes 7-day Minicycles that correspond exactly with the days of the week.

RM - Rep Max. Typically before “RM” will come a number, say, “5.” A 5 RM would mean the maximum you could lift five times.

RTM - Rep Technical Max. A 5 RTM would mean the maximum you cold life five times with very good technique.

Intensity - Intensity has two different meanings for our purposes. First, intensity is the out-of-breath, try hard, dizzying feeling we get from going hard, having high heart rates, and high lactate blood levels. Intensity is also in reference to weights and is typically provided as a percentage of a 1 RM. So, Back Squat (65%), would mean using a weight that is an intensity of 65% of your 1 RM for that exercise.

Volume - This is reps multiplied by the weight lifted. In MovementLink programming, volume is typically tracked and controlled depending on the intensity. Higher intensities produce a larger fatigue relative to the absolute volume than lower intensities, so as volumes increase, intensities decrease and vice versa.

Yearly Calendar - For MovementLink programming, each calendar year is made up of 2 distinct macrocycles, each typically 25 weeks long. Events, races, competitions, holidays, and specific community goals will ultimately determine what the yearly calendar look likes.

Macrocycle - MovementLink’s periodize programming is designed in Macrocycles. MovementLink’s macrocycles contain multiple, smaller mesocycles, each having a specific focus: Hypertrophy (muscle-building), Strength, Peaking, and Benchmark Week. You will see the macrocycles referred to with their own distinctive, and usually “Punny” name. Things like, The Upside Down, Gains World, A PR is Born, etc. A macrocycle is a series of mesocycles, organized to work together to add structure and effectiveness to a workout plan.

Periodization - Periodization refers to the organization of mesocycles within the larger macrocycle in a way where each subsequent mesocycle is enhanced by the specific type of gains made in the previous mesocycle. For example, we start by building muscle, then we work to strengthen that new muscle, then we work to make the new, strong muscle coordinate as best as possible.

Mesocycle - A series of minicycles (weeks) that work together to create a block of programming. Each mesocycle is designed to be a holistic cross-training program, but one that has a slight bias towards a specific stimulus. The periodization of MovementLink programming orders each mesocycle in a way that builds on top of each other. MovementLink utilizes mesocycles in this order:

1. Hypertrophy - The purpose of the hypertrophy mesocycles is to build and grow new muscle. In a typical program, there may be anywhere from 1 to years worth of hypertrophy mesocycles in a row, but in MovementLink programming, we typically do 1 or 2 hypertrophy mesocycles before moving on to our strength phase. We still lift heavier, but our program tends to bias towards more muscle building work as we feel the risk to results ratio for our goals is slightly better for hypertrophy work vs heavier lifts, more reps provides a good foundation of technique for when we do go heavier and harder, and there are still some strength gains to be made during hypertrophy phases. A hypertrophy mesocycle is typically between 2 and 6 weeks and MovementLink programming will typically use 3 weeks to optimize adaptations across the weeks, keep things exciting to progress through, and move on before plateaus or boredom take place. Volume is typically higher and intensities for muscle building will average to be around 65% of a 1 RM. Workouts average out to be longer with relatively lighter weights than the later mesocycles, but keep in mind that they just average out that way and the MovementLink programming always keeps overall metabolic conditioning high. Each larger muscle group responds well to 1-2 hard hypertrophy WODs each week. In the hypertrophy phase, a much wider range of exercises are utilized and the specificity of the WODs to the individuals’ goals starts wide and will increase with each mesocycle. This is a great time to change and improve technique as the high volume nature will provide a ton of practice to develop. This is also a good time to break down exercises into smaller parts to improve them and then piece them back together as we progress through the following mesocycles. Also, for competitive athletes, as events near, fueling performance becomes a priority, so the hypertrophy mesocycles, because they are the furthest away from planned events, are the best places for elite athletes to work on changing their body composition.

   Goal: Build Technique and Change Body Composition

   Volume: High

   Lower Average Intensities (~65%) with sets of 5-30 reps for muscle building and around 3 for more explosive exercises like Olympic weightlifting.

   Specificity: Low, utilizing a wide range of exercises and variations.

2. Strength - The purpose of the Strength mesocycle is to strengthen the newly developed muscle from the hypertrophy mesocycle(s). In a typical program there maybe anywhere from 1-4 strength cycles in a row, but in MovementLink programming, we typically do 1 strength cycle before moving on to our peaking phase. Strength mesocycles are typically between 2 and 6 weeks and MovementLink programming will typically use 3 weeks for the same reasons as our 3-week hypertrophy mesocycles. Volume is typically lower than the hypertrophy mesocycles, but intensities will be higher for strength building and will average to be around 75% of a 1 RM. Each larger muscle groups can handle around 1 hard strength WOD and is complimented well with 1 hypertrophy WOD each week. This is a great time to challenge your newly improved technique and really solidify it as what you do. This is a good opportunity to progress any exercises that were broken down into smaller parts towards the full exercise by the end of the cycle or to prepare for the full exercise in the peaking mesocycle.

   Goal: Progress Technique and Strengthen Movement Patterns

   Volume: Medium

   Medium Average Intensities (~75%) with sets of 3-6 reps and around 2 for more explosive exercises like Olympic weightlifting..

   Specificity: Medium, utilizing a narrower range of exercises and variations.

3. Peaking - The purpose of the peaking mesocycle is to teach the body how to maximally perform with its new, strong muscle and techniques. This is where the specificity of the athlete’s WODs would be more customized to their particular goals. If someone is training for a CrossFit competition, the movements would now be performed to maximize performance based off of typical competition design and standards. A typical peaking phase is 2-8 weeks and MovementLink typically uses a 3-week Peaking mesocycle. Volume will be lower than both the strength and hypertrophy mesocycles as intensities will average to be 90%+. With athletes needing more time to acclimate to 90%+ lifts, MovementLink’s peaking mesocycle provides opportunities for 90%+ and 1 rep maxes throughout the cycle with the intent to taper fatigue to set new strength personal records (PR’s) during this phase or immediately after.

   However, most people do not have competitive CrossFit goals, and so at MovementLink, the peaking phase provides a lot of options. Most will actually choose the options that create a hypertrophy or additional strength mesocycle as the increased risk of lifting at max weights does not fit everyone’s exercise risk-to-benefit ratio. Additionally, with MovementLink’s macrocycles typically being designed around events and races, the peaking mesocycle will be customized to things that will fit that event’s specific demands.

   Goal: Challenge and develop fitness specific to goals

   Volume: Low

   High to Maximal Average Intensities (~90%) with sets of 1-3 reps and 1 for more explosive exercises like Olympic weightlifting. Note: many will choose to change this peaking mesocycle into another hypertrophy or strength mesocycle to better fit their goals.

   Specificity: High, utilizing a exact exercises, range of motion, and requirements in line with goals, event, or competition.

4. Peaking and Taper - Some athletes test by entering a competition or race and some just want to test out a fitness benchmark or skills. Performance gets a major boost when hard work is followed by a back-off period. To manage fatigue to peak for an event or just to manage fatigue in general as part of a yearly plan, MovementLink utilizes a 1 week Peaking and Taper mesocycle.

   Goal: Dissipate fatigue, recover, and hone skills.

   Volume: Low

   Medium to Low Average Intensities (<80%) utilizing less fatiguing amount of reps per set.

   Specificity: High, utilizing a exact exercises, range of motion, and requirements in line with goals, event, or competition.

5. Event or Competition - This can be on a specific day, across a weekend, the whole next week, or on specific days across the next weeks, but the goal is to have the body prepped, technique tuned, and accumulated fatigue from hard training dissipated, so we are at our best.

Fatigue Management - Fatigue accumulates not just from one workout to the next, but over time. By working in de-loads, what we call transition weeks, and tapers, we can help our body recover fully and realize the full performance potential of our hard work.

De-loads or Transition Weeks - These weeks are designed to have less volume and to give our body a break from heavier weights. Between each mesocycle we incorporate a transition week to manage fatigue, so we can fully realize the gains from the previous cycle and are prepared to handle the challenges of the next mesocycle. We do not add a transition week after our peaking cycle or after our Peaking and Taper cycles, because those mesocycles are already designed for this purpose.

MovementLink’s programming builds on itself through the year and year-after-year. One cannot simply look at one day, one week, or one month of workouts and understand the methods and principles behind MovementLink’s program. The context of the entirety of the year must be taken into consideration. MovementLink programming design controls and varies volume and intensity to optimize the stimulus and maximize results. Contrary to popular belief, the mantra of “one more rep,” and working as hard as you can every single day, does not produce elite athletes. This mentality produces athletes destine to perpetually plateaued and injured. MovementLink’s programming principles are designed based on world-class training principles common across many disciplines: Olympic Weightlifting, Power lifting, Gymnastics, Bodybuilding, Endurance Events, and Track and Field, and Sports. The key is working towards P.A.T.H. Results and adjusting for the context of each individuals’ goals and the reality of their lives. When technique is the priority of the best in the world in every discipline, we must trust in value of efficient movement building technique brings and the scientific approach to prioritization and optimize training volume and intensity. We cannot just go as hard as we can all the time to maximally produce results. Optimal stimulus when delivered in waves produces maximum adaptations from training. Certain efforts, like a max deadlift, can take 2 weeks to fully recover from whereas recovering from a max push press is just a matter of days. We cannot simply design workouts one at a time, go hard, and expect to maximize results. We need to plan, so we can manage fatigue to optimize P.A.T.H. Results. Let’s continue to take deeper look!

SRA Curves

Stimulus, Recover, Adapt. For every movement, energy system, and volume and intensity combination, there exists a theoretical SRA curve. The MovementLink program optimizes the interactions of the SRA curves generated from WODs within the scope of the bigger picture. This way, over-time, fatigue is managed in a way that delivers supercompensation.

Fatigue - In this context, fatigue is more of a long-term thing. Fatigue is how you feel, how you perform, your motivation levels, and your propensity to get sick. The more fatigued, the less you can squat, the slower your mile time, etc. Fatigue is interesting as it accumulates. This is why when intermediate/advanced athletes follow an elite-level workout program, they can hang with it for a few weeks, but eventually, get burned out, injured, sick, become unable to lift the weight prescribed in the program, and/or don’t make good progress. Because they are not at the elite level and are not following elite-level recover protocols, over time they cannot recover adequately, even if just by a little each day. When accumulated fatigue is not managed properly, it is a detriment to progress and is what plagues many trying so hard to get to the next level with the working as hard as you can every single day mantra.

Supercompensation - After a workout, if we think of recovering as moving back towards our original fitness level and adaption as moving higher to a new fitness level, supercompensation is more of a delayed adaptation to training that would produce bigger adaptations than without the delay. After you take a look at the SRA curves, you may want to come back to this definition as it will make more sense once you see it in action.

There are a few potential scenarios to discuss that will help show why more is not always better.

Let’s look at SRA Curve #1 above: 1 workout followed by a rest day. The horizontal black line is your starting level of fitness with the y-axis being your overall fitness. The workout is the stimulus shown by the red line curving downward. Think about it this way: Let’s say you go to the gym and warm-up. You then do one of two things. You either test your fitness or you workout and then test your fitness. If you tested your fitness, it would be at the horizontal black line. But, if you worked out and then tested your fitness afterwards, the fatigue from workout would create a short term decrease in fitness. You would actually be less fit in the short-term because of your workout. This is why the red stimulus curve is downward. But, as we all know, once we recover from the workout, our fitness should, hopefully improve. If our workouts are appropriate, we will recover back to our original level and adapt based on the stimulus to become more fit. Our goal in our scientific approach to programming is to maximize the adaptation curves.

Let’s look at two more scenarios with one workout and one rest day. There is an optimal amount of work from which we can recover and adapt maximally. In SRA Curves #2 and #3 above, the dotted lines represent optimal stimulus. SRA Curve #2 shows that if we don’t work out hard enough (solid red line) that the total adaptation we get is sub-optimal. Now, going back to the more is not always better, in SRA Curve #3 if we workout more than our bodies can effectively recover from (the solid red line) then the adaptation we get from that scenario is also sub-optimal. This is an interesting scenario as each rep you do beyond what you can efficiently recover from actually is working to get you less results. One more rep is not always better. There may simply too much fatigue to maximally recover. In both the too little and the too much scenarios we can still make progress, but it’s not maximal. In MovementLink programming, we are careful to elicit the response we are looking for for that WOD’s place in the cycle to maximize adaptations.

But, it gets more complicated as we do not workout one day on and one day off…so why? Simple answer, to take advantage of the bigger results created by supercompensation.

Linking SRA Curves

Now, let’s look at SRA Curve #4. Supercompensation is an additional boost to adaptation created from an appropriate amount of accumulated fatigue. MovementLink program design includes 2-3 days on followed by 1 day of rest. As you can see in SRA Curve #4, when we workout day after day, we are actually making ourselves less fit. This should make sense because if you worked out hard 3 days in a row and then tested your fitness, you will be less fit after day 3 than if you tested before day 1, after day 1, or after day 2. But, when we back off a bit from training, we can recover and adapt to levels of fitness higher than where we began.

If we try and fully recover and adapt from each individual workout, then we will not be stressing our bodies enough to maximize our results. When we pair WODs together day after day, all of the SRA curves produces from each WOD combine together. If we combine WODs and rest days in a balanced way to accumulate appropriate amounts of fatigue, we can build bigger adaptations. But, we need to back off to realize these adaptations. This doesn’t mean not working out, it simply means working in easier workouts and easier weeks of workouts to allow our body time to realize our potential gains.

Just like SRA Curves #2 and #3, we could do too little or too much, allow for too much or too little recovery time, or not cut back enough once we have accumulated fatigue which would all cause us to miss out on potential adaptations. The way in which we combine WODs together needs to be optimally planned and not just thrown together randomly.

Within MovementLink’s bigger macrocycles, within each mesocycle (Hypertrophy, Strength, Peaking, Benchmark), each week has appropriate and varied volume and intensities to maximize adaptations long-term. If you test yourself randomly in the middle of a cycle, you will likely not see much, if any, gains. But, at the end of the cycles, we are peaked and ready to set new PRs. If there is an event one of our athletes has in the middle of the cycle, we simply taper appropriately leading into the event to bounce their fitness up.

In the SRA Curve #4, the stimulus, or the fatigue of the WODs, was constant. We can further control and manage fatigue to maximize adaptations by purposeful making some workouts easier and some workouts harder. Like we said before, for every movement, energy system, and volume and intensity combination, there exists a theoretical SRA curve. Some are longer than other and some are shorter. Some muscle groups respond best to more training frequency and some respond best to less. This can be easy to imagine because if you do a hard lower body day, your upper body may be fine the next day. It’s the interaction of SRA curves that need to be considered to properly manage fatigue and produce P.A.T.H. Results.

One of the biggest programming mistakes we see is the simple lack of planning and understanding. We typically see gyms do a couple of amateur things. First, they just come up with random workouts with no bigger plan in place. They look at the workouts they did in the last few days and they create a workout that looks different to keep it “constantly varied.” “Constantly varied” should not mean random and without a plan. The next mistake gyms make is they want to do a “strength” cycle. So they grab a strength program off the internet, usually these gyms LOVE to do a Smolov Russian Squat Cycle, Hatch Squat Cycle, or Wendler’s 5-3-1. Please don’t misunderstand me, these programs are great, but they are designed to be stand-alone, complete programs that are highly planned according to the SRA curve concept discussed above. So what do you think happens when a gym simply takes one of these programs and then throws metabolic conditioning on top of it? Of course athletes are over-trained and are not maximizing results. Most of these gyms eventually figure this out and then will take just one or two workouts a week from one of those programs and then add their metabolic conditioning. This will likely produce better results than their first method as the volume is more reasonable, but this must be done with the understanding of proper stimulus to be able to implement it in a way that is maximally effective. Without purposefully controlling for fatigue, you can get better, but there will be a lot of potential for the effort that is being missed out on.

So, how do we know and build optimal workouts? How do we create easier days that are not too easy and how do we create harder days that are not too hard?

Prilepin’s Chart was created by studying the journals of thousands of world-class weightlifters and has become the gold standard in weightlifting and power lifting as a tool to manage daily fatigue levels.

First some more definitions:

Minimal Effective Volume - The minimum amount of work required to elicit adaptations.

Optimal Recoverable Volume - The amount of work that will elicit maximal adaptations.

Maximal Recoverable Volume - The maximum amount of work that an athlete can handle and still make positive adaptations.

Although every athlete is different, as a simple example of minimal, optimal, and maximal recoverable volume using Prilepin’s Chart, if we look at doing reps at 75% of an athlete’s 1 rep max, we can see that the minimal number of reps to produce a stimulus would be around 12, and optimal number of reps would be around 18, and a maximal number of reps would be 24 (Row 70-80 on Prilepin’s Chart). That means if a workout was programmed to have 30 reps at 75% intensity, reps 25-30 not only would be the hardest and take more time, but the reps may actually be a detriment to an athletes progress making. More is not always better. When we are managing fatigue, we can maximize results by using a variety of effort levels. We can work in “easier” days and “harder” as we control for the combinations of SRA curves. The interesting thing here is that we can get bigger results by mixing minimal, optimal, and maximal, efforts than if we simply did optimal efforts every workout. We need to be ready for anything and we can get bigger gains by mixing.

For MovementLink programming, based off of our experience, we have expanded on Prilepin’s Chart to include percentages down to 20%, effective reps/sets of body-weight movements, and bigger sets in our 55%-90% range for hypertrophy as well. We also have our own protocols to control for the different effects of more fatiguing lifts like the deadlift, lifts that can handle more volume like the bench press, and muscle groups that can handle more frequency like the abdominal muscles. By building the MovementLink program off of standards for volume and intensity and creating WODs withing a specific framework, our programming can be more scientific as we can consistently implement rep schemes and make adjustments based off of real performance data in the gym. This is how we can hone in on best practices for a gym community and understand how to make small adjustments depending on the athletes fitness level.

Volume and Intensity Variance within a Macrocycle

More Classes will be released in the future!!!

Let’s Get to Work!