Most athletes, and elite athletes especially, start their preparation for a major event many months in advance (in the case of preparations for the Olympics this can be years in advance). Without breaking down the training into small manageable chunks they would very quickly become demotivated, and even if they did not, they would not easily be able to tell if they were improving or not. For this reason, training programmes are divided into small manageable sections called training cycles that can be varied in order to work different energy systems and to offset the problems of boredom.
There are three different types of training cycle. The macro-cycle is the longest of the cycles and can be up to a year in length. This is obviously too long a cycle to maintain concentration and improvement so this is broken down into four to eight week blocks called meso-cycles. This is becoming a more manageable size but is broken up to even smaller one to two week cycles called micro-cycles.
A stepped or wave approach to the meso-cycles has been found to be more efficient than a linear or continuous method of training. The wave principle requires that a training load increase is followed by a decrease to allow adaptation to take place in the body. An example is set out below:
If you have 18 weeks to the competition, then you have one 18 week macro-cycle that can be divided into 3 x 6 week meso-cycles. Your next step is to determine the training aim during each of the meso-cycles. Depending on your current level of fitness, you may decide to focus on general endurance during the first meso-cycle. This will mean that the majority of the training during this phase will be long intervals of 20 to 40 minutes low intensity work.
During the second meso-cycle the intensity should increase and the quantity decrease. This means the work intervals will become shorter, six to ten minutes, and the power output and heart rate will increase.
The third meso-cycle would be more specific race preparation. In the case of a 2,000m race the work intervals would be focused on part of the race e.g. 4 x 1,000m pieces or 12 x 250m. This meso-cycle concludes with a period of seven to ten days of tapering.
