Focused Performance Training

🌙 Unraveling the Science of Sleep and Recovery 🌟

1️⃣ **Muscle Repair and Growth:** During deep sleep, your body releases growth hormone (GH), which is essential for muscle repair and growth. GH stimulates tissue regeneration, aiding in the recovery of micro-tears that occur during intense training.

2️⃣ **Tissue Healing:** Sleep is a prime time for tissue healing. Increased blood flow to muscles and reduced inflammation during deep sleep speeds up the repair of damaged tissues, helping you bounce back faster.

3️⃣ **Neurological Restoration:** Sleep is like a reset button for your brain. It enhances synaptic plasticity, making it easier to learn new skills and adapt to training. Your cognitive abilities are sharpened, contributing to better performance.

4️⃣ **Hormonal Balance:** Sleep optimizes hormonal balance, including cortisol (stress hormone) regulation. This reduces the risk of overtraining and helps maintain a positive anabolic environment in your body.

The tips below are great starting points to enhancing your sleep and therefore recovery:

🌙 **Consistent Schedule:** Maintain a regular sleep-wake cycle to synchronize your body's internal clock, optimizing hormone release.

🌙 **Sleep Environment:** Create a sleep sanctuary – a cool, dark, and quiet room promotes deep sleep and tissue repair.

🌙 **Screen Time:** Limit exposure to screens before bedtime. The blue light can disrupt melatonin production, affecting sleep quality.

Periodization of training is a widely utilised framework in the field of sports and fitness to optimise an athlete's performance over time or a training block. It involves the systematic organisation & planning of training loads, volumes, and intensities to achieve specific goals, such as improved strength, endurance, or skill development.

This approach relies on the assumption that all individuals will adapt to training and stimuli at the same rate with the same response (strength vs power vs tendon stiffness). However, when applied within a chaotic or unpredictable environment (such as life or pro-sport), the traditional approach to periodization can face challenges and limitations.

I do believe that in the early stages of coaching development, coaches should explore this methodology and approach to understand the upper and lower limits of volume and intensity prescription. However, this approach should be approached without being married to your plan and understanding where you can make adjustments and be flexible.

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face” - Gandhi (probably)

I have a high propensity to structure and organisation as a result of my personality, so understanding this and being comfortable with chaos and having systems in place to adapt and achieve what I need has been a challenge. However, by doing this I’ve given myself the bandwidth to explore more concepts and avoid being married to approaches, (outside of being flexible).

The application of periodization in chaotic environments is not inherently flawed, but it requires careful consideration of its limitations and adjustments to accommodate the unpredictability. Coaches and athletes must strike a balance between maintaining a structured approach to training and the need for flexibility and adaptation. Hybrid models that incorporate elements of periodization while allowing for real-time adjustments can be particularly useful in such situations. Ultimately, the success of periodization in chaotic environments depends on the ability to adapt and find a compromise between structured planning and the realities of the situation.

Want a free or voucher? Throughout August if you help a mate out with their performance and training by referring them to FPT and they sign up you’ll get the choice of either voucher.
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If you refer two you can get two vouchers!
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This offer is just for August!
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So if you know someone that’s been struggling with their training and/or performance and need help do them and yourself a favour and send them my details and tell them to drop me a message!!
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The Is/Ought Gap is a heuristic that was developed by Understanding where you are now and where you want to get to is vital for developing a plan of attack for your goals. Everyone is going to have their own individual means of attacking or closing this gap between where you are now (is) and where you want to be (ought).
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Being able to assess your current state and desired or required end state for a training block is paramount to determining the best tools or approaches to get you there. Without understanding these two points it limits your chances of achieving your goals and/or desires.
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If you aren’t sure of how to assess these two areas and have just been hoping that what you’ve been ought to carry over to your sport performance then do yourself and your performance a favour and reach out.
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Having a coach who understands how to effectively assess where you are now and where you need to be is vital for developing a plan moving forward.
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Trying to look after this while being an athlete and performing to the best of your ability isn’t an effective use of your time. You will be trying to balance too many hats and end up half assing both. You need to go into the unknown - a chaotic & challenging place - in order to progress and move forward. Staying in a comfortable and easy place isn’t going to move you forward.
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Take the leap. Let me look after your physical prep and you worry about performing.

This builds on my post early on in this week about aerobic power and endurance tests.
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I'm curious where do you stack up?
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Are there other tests you think have a place in this testing battery?
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Based on your test results, where do you think you would best be served spending your time to develop your aerobic power and/or capacity better?
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Do you not know how to answer those questions?
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If not, let me know, I'll jump on call with you and talk you through them so that you have a better understanding of your capacity and where your time woudl be best spent to improve your performance.
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Tactical Personnel must be prepared for a wide array of activities, environments, tasks, missions and roles.
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To successfully prepare them for this wide array of opportunities we need to have a wide base of general preparedness. This includes above-average levels of absolute and relative strength paired with above-average levels of aerobic power and endurance.
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But, within military contexts these tests are done poorly on average, they are either a sub-maximal attempt to screen for health or a tick and flick exercise.
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This post covers 4 tests that I have found valuable to identify current aerobic power and capacity, where the limiting factor may be and if it needs attention or not.
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Not to mention, the data that we collect needs to be of use, I don't like collecting data unless I can utilise it in program development and/or decision-making processes in this area. These two tests have a large impact on that.
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If you aren't assessing these areas and would like more help, I have experience in this field can help.
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You're gonna want to hit save on this one - trust me.
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Velocity Based Training isn't some new fad that's only been around for the last 5 years or so. It's been around since Soviet Russia and (I think) the first time it was used was in eastern block weightlifting gyms...
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But as technology increases and brilliant people refine methods, it will start to become more and more accessible. For example, if you have an iPhone you can be using VBT for free right now. has developed an app which is pretty accurate at measuring velocity just through your camera phone.
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So those of you who are interested and would like to dabble, that is an excellent starting point.
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But how do you get started? Well, I use these tables pretty heavily in my programming as they provide me with a pretty good gauge of how far someone will be from failure if I give them a minimum velocity of X.
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So, realistically I can prescribe Reps in Reserve or Rate of Perceived Exertion with a lot more accuracy and objective feedback. This allows me to walk the line of hard training without overtraining with a great deal of accuracy.
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If you want to make this more accurate, you can simply do a test whereby you take 75, 80 and 85% to failure. You take in the fastest rep for each set and the slowest rep. Oh and guess what? The slowest rep or last rep before failure will be pretty much the same velocity regardless of load.
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Layer this with subjective feelings of RPE, start collecting data, and you'll be able to see some cool trends and if you are recovering between sessions.
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Oh and here's a cool tip as well - start looking at your lighter loads - around 70% - see how fast you're moving them across a period of time. If that speed starts to increase (given that your ROM and technique remain the same), then you've got some very solid info that indicates increases in strength.
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This framework is something I talked about in depth at my latest ASCA presentation.
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Having a system to teach movements such as the weightlifting derivatives provides me with the capacity to breakdown almost any movement pattern and teach it in a way that is easy to understand.
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Whats more, it provides a really intuitive way to progressivley overload the athletes as they become more proficient in the movement pattern.
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If we applied this to deceleration, we can look at the end position or desired finish position (as open to intepretation as it is) and identify what that position looks like and whats required then gradually build strength (if its not already possesed).
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From there we can gradually either increase the complexity of achieving that position by manipulating constraints in the exercise. At the most simple level, a jump to single leg landing. At the more complex level, a hard sprint into a sudden deceleration based on an external cue with lots of ambient and/or distracting noise.
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The options are endless and are up to the coach to decide what is the most appropriate for that athletes level at that point in time.