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There’s a debate among personal trainers – should you periodize your clients’ workouts or not?

Many of us were taught that a periodized plan is better than an unperiodized plan if you want to build better personal training programs – an idea supported by ample research. However, as Jon Goodman has noted, this flies in the face of the realities of personal training (click to read after) – periodization works when client schedules are predictable, but that’s not how it usually shakes down.

Sure, it may be great for a collegiate sports team that HAS to train when the strength coach dictates, but not for busy professionals who may only work out with you a day or two a week, or who regularly miss sessions due to commitments, time constraints, or (honestly) lack of motivation.

However, there’s a middle way. It’s called daily undulating periodization (DUP).

DUP is based on the idea that as a body is exposed to a particular stimulus, it adapts so that the stimulus won’t disrupt homeostasis as much anymore, causing decreased adaptation over time. In layman’s terms, if you do the same type of workout all the time, your body will stop adapting and getting bigger and stronger.

Most periodized plans get around this constraint by changing the volume and intensity over time, leading to specific adaptations that build upon each other. However, as previously mentioned, heavily periodized plans generally just aren’t feasible in the constraints of personal training.

DUP, rather than changing the stimulus every few weeks or months, proposes that you’ll get better results by changing the stimulus every training session, and never allowing your body to fully adjust to a particular combination of volume and intensity.

This idea isn’t just theory either – it has solid scientific backing. In fact, one study showed that a DUP setup produced essentially double the results in 12 weeks when compared to a traditional linearly periodized plan.

The two programs were set up like this (from Rhea et. Al. 2002):

The DUP group experienced almost exactly 2x the results.

28.8% vs 14.4% improvement on bench press, and 55.8% vs. 25.7% improvement on leg press. And these weren’t rank beginners either – on average they’d be training for about 5 years.

The awesome thing for personal trainers:

DUP can work great in almost any client’s plan.

Simply pick three combinations of sets and reps – maybe 3×10, 4×6, and 6×3, and cycle through them session to session. If they cancel a session – no problem! Just pick up where you left off. The DUP principles are still intact. Just add weight each time a particular set/rep scheme comes back up, and progress them linearly independent of each other. If your client stalls on one of them, just substitute a set/rep scheme that accomplishes the same basic purpose, and keep rolling.

Additionally, this approach breaks up the potential monotony for a client. Lots of trainers have some stock set/rep schemes they always come back to, but DUP can provide better results, and the client knows they can look forward to something a little bit different each session.

If someone’s primarily interested in strength, sticking with the main lifts or their close variations is best for maximizing neural development as well as muscular, but DUP can accommodate variety if your client is more training just general health and enjoyment.

A weekly setup could look like this:

Monday

Knee-dominant lower body lift 4×12

Upper body push 4×12

Hip-dominant lower body 4×12

Upper body pull 4×12

Accessory work at your discretion

Wednesday

Knee-dominant lower body lift 3×8

Upper body push 3×8

Hip-dominant lower body 3×8

Upper body pull 3×8

Accessory work at your discretion

Friday

Knee-dominant lower body lift 5×5

Upper body push 5×5

Hip-dominant lower body 5×5

Upper body pull 5×5

Accessory work at your discretion

Knee dominant exercises could be any sort of squat, lunge, leg press, hack squat, or step up.

Hip dominant exercises could be any sort of deadlift, hinge, good morning, or back extension

Upper body pushing is any sort of press

Upper body pulling is any sort of row, pull up, or pull down

Those rep ranges aren’t set in stone either. If a client’s bias is hypertrophy, then go with a few more reps per session, and if their primary goal is strength or fat loss, stick with lower rep ranges.

Feel free to change the ratio of days focusing on a particular characteristic as well. If you split it up so that sets above 10 reps are primarily for hypertrophy, sets below 5 reps are primarily for strength and sets between 5 and 10 reps train a combination of the two, there’s no hard and fast rule that you have to keep everything in a 1:1:1 ratio – one workout in each rep range each training week like in the previous example.

For a more hypertrophy-focused client, it could be 2:1:1 in favor of sets with more than 10 reps. You could set it up like this:

Monday: Hypertrophy (sets of 10-15, with a total of 40 to 60 reps)

Wednesday: Strength (sets of 1-5, for a total of 10 to 20 reps)

Friday: Hypertrophy

Monday: Intermediate (sets of 5-10, for a total of 20 to 40 reps)

Wednesday: Hypertrophy

Friday: Strength

Obviously, you could bias lower rep work for a more strength-based client as well.

The beauty in this approach is that it doesn’t matter too much how often someone is working out or what their goals are – as soon as they exhaust their linear gains, DUP works better than haphazard workouts, and even just as well, if not better than, traditional periodized programs. Add to that its massive feasibility advantage for the constraints of personal training, and DUP is a handy weapon in your arsenal.

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