Behind the Whiteboard: What Goes Into a Training Cycle?

Since we opened doors in 2011, we’ve always taken pride in differentiating ourselves through our workout design. In a world of increasingly available opportunities to change, we have kept our calibration by prioritizing a few basics. Though every few years, we make subtle tweaks to the execution, at it’s core the following principles when creating a four-week training cycle have remained relatively untouched for the last decade.

Intent

At the very heart of what makes P360, P360, is that each day has a purpose. After all, an aimless plan gets you to an aimless destination, and we don’t like that. We fundamentally believe that we have an obligation to get you the best results possible and we just don’t see any way to make the argument that random training achieves better results than purposeful training. For example, let’s pretend that you and I set out to separately summit Mt. Everest. You’ve got a map and a plan and I’m just out for a casual stroll up the hill, no real agenda, plan or checkpoints. Just la-dee-fucking-da. You’re odds off getting to that peak and my odds of ending up a popsicle are both strong. In more realistic context, let’s say that you want to do a pull-up. Do you think that working on pull-ups on Tuesdays for four straight weeks is better than getting to it whenever your Coach feels like magically making it appear on the board?

There are a few infallible truths about fitness and high among them is this: repetition and frequency yield the fastest improvement.

While your daily workouts aren’t as extreme as climbing Everest, the analogy holds. A plan with purpose rules all.

Daily Focus

This means that in each cycle we always assign the following themes.

• (2) Strength Days: Monday & Wednesday
• (2) Conditioning Days: Tuesday & Thursday
• (1) Build Day: Friday

Let’s examine how each daily focus works. 

Monday & Wednesday: STRENGTH

These workouts are focused around a barbell and include a two-tier workout. The first tier is a lower intensity portion dedicated towards a featured lift, like a Back Squat. There will also be a secondary movement so that you perform the first tier in a superset, often for five sets.

After, the workout will feature a 20 minute conditioning portion performed at challenging weights, to keep a strength focus and bias.

Tuesday & Thursday: CONDITIONING

Our CONDITIONING days are higher intensity workouts performed at moderate (not light) loads. They follow one of three guidelines and program design structures.

• Anaerobic, 30″ – 3′: Short, peak intensity work sets followed usually by a prescribed amount of recovery.
• Hybrid, 5′ – 10′: Moderate duration, performed at high intensity.
• Aerobic, 25’+: Longer duration, performed at moderate intensity

Friday: BUILD

Our BUILD days are about one thing and one thing only: building athletic muscle. Rep schemes focus on higher rep output, typically eight and above to target more of a hypertrophy outcome and less of a strength one. These workouts are performed at more of a steady, moderate pace to allow plenty of recovery between movements and sets. We are far less concerned with intensity, in fact, we specifically throttle back on it to ensure you don’t mistakenly turn it into a conditioning workout.

Here’s how this might look in practice.

• Monday: Back Squat (Strength A)
• Tuesday: Hybrid (Conditioning A)
• Wednesday: DB Floor Press (Strength B)
• Thursday: Anaerobic (Conditioning B)
• Friday: Lunges (Build)

As we wrap up this ‘Daily Focus’ section, I want to take a moment and stress to you that the key term here is ‘focus’. It does not imply exclusivity. Meaning, just because Friday is a BUILD focus, it should not imply to you that we don’t build muscle Monday through Thursday. Please be smarter than that. It’s simply that on Friday it gets prioritized. Same should be said for every other daily focus. Think of the week together as a building a Chipotle bowl. You’re adding individual items down the line, but once you get home it gets mashed up all together and consumed as a sum of its individual parts, not separated. Unless you’re a sociopath.

Appropriate Pairing

It’s easy to make a list of tasty ingredients, but getting them to end up a deliciously moist soft and buttery scone requires some precision. In our world, that arrives in the form of movement pairing. For example, of the two STRENGTH focused days, one is always an upper body focus and one a lower body focus. In addition, the BUILD day is always going to be a different movement pattern that the STRENGTH days. If we are doing something like a squat on a Monday, then Friday will almost certain have a hinge or upper body focus. Additionally, you’re not going to see a ton of repetition of movements in a given week. For example, if you do a push press on Monday you are not going to see that movement again the rest of the week, same goes for the secondary movements like ring rows, kettlebell swings, and burpees (barring few exceptions).

It’s also important to understand that we are a total body everyday concept, so there are going to be some naturally repeating patterns. We try to avoid overuse of certain muscle groups, but much of that is going to be on the user (you) to have some common sense and not to try and attend every workout.

Week 4 “Finals Week”

We believe that what gets measured gets managed, and what gets managed, gets improved. So for those who are able to display safe movement pattern while under fatigue, at the conclusion of every cycle we have a different measurable each day of the week. It could be a strength test like a 2R back squat, a skill test like a max Turkish Get Up, a Become More Club entry opportunity like Flight or Prison Yard Club, or a benchmark score-based workout.

Scalability

Finally, we always have our staple options, as all of our main movements will always have a starting progression and an advanced performance-based option. This is often most obviously reflected in the major lifts, so for example:

Main: 8R Back Squats @ 60%
Progression: 10R Goblet Squats @ 75%
Performance: 3R Back Squats @ 90%

While our workouts are not for everyone, they are most certainly for anyone. We’ll never leave a man or woman behind simply because they can’t quite do something just yet.

To recap:

• Everyday has a purpose that is consistent for four weeks before refreshing.
• Every cycle culminates into Week 4 “Finals Week.”
• You’ll always have options to ease the learning curve, or to keep you advancing.

See you on the floor.