REMEMBER REAL LIFE STRESS

Finally, Hough points out that aiming for your best year ever will only pay off if you keep an eye on the rest of your life. “There’s a saying in sports science: “stress is stress”. If you’ve got a job, a family, and responsibilities, that all accumulates stress on the body, and when you add the stress of training load on top of that, it’s going to make recovery even slower, in fact you probably won’t fully recover from your training at all. It’s all stress. You not only have to periodise around the season, but also around your work and family commitments as well. A good example is around Christmas, when you’ve got a lot of functions and distractions. Scheduling in a lot of high-volume training is not a great idea for everyone during this period, because with everything else going on, recovering from it will be difficult. Instead you want to be looking at shorter, sharper training sessions. That’s the essence of periodisation – not only fitting training in around competition, but also around lifestyle.