The Brick Training Method: The Championship Training Cycle
One of the biggest challenges strength and conditioning professionals face is how to organize their training blocks. These “blocks” are often referred to as Macro cycles, Meso cycles, and Micro cycles, but if you are like me, when you see or hear those terms you have to pull out the NSCA text-book to get a quick refresher of what exactly these terms represent again. For the sake of simplicity, I refer to them as the Annual Block, the Specific Block, the Weekly Block, and the Daily Block.
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Coach Brouillette,
When you enter the pre season phase with a sport such as basketball, how are you programming in term of your foundation lifts in the weight room. I guess I am confused if a 12 week cycle with athletes working up to potential 1rm numbers should coincide with pre season, or if your reach the end of that cycle more towards the end of the summer and use the pre season phase to transition more to power? Any insight in this regard would be helpful. Enjoy your blog greatly, thanks for putting out this information.
Everyone does this a little bit different. My heaviest max effort work will be completed more towards the end of summer with a shift in focus to more bar speed and conditioning as we approach pre-season. I think working heavy 1rm work right before pre-season is not a good idea for the simple fact that the likelihood of injury goes up significantly as your training intensity increases. The last thing I want is tight low backs and/or tweaked muscles right before we start the season. Also, as we approach our pre-season our running and conditioning volume gets very high and trying to do hard max effort work in the weight room while doing intense running is asking for problems. If you want some more specific info on this topic just shoot me an email and I would be more than happy to answer any specific questions you have.