Functional programming can be very complicated, leaving many athletes and coaches at a loss where to start. It doesn’t have to be that way! Functional programming is only complicated because we don’t have a simple method of establishing goals, and breaking them down into achievable pieces. This article is going to help you design a full year of programming to push your performance to all new levels.

I’m going to be honest here. I expect many athletes to ignore most of the advice in this article, and that is exactly why most athletes stop making progress after a year or two. Planning your yearly schedule is about as exciting as doing your taxes, but just like forgetting your taxes, not having a plan can land you in hot water!

Why Do Functional Athletes Need a Yearly Program?

Most folks think in the short term. We tend to focus on the next WOD, or next competition, but rarely do we take a step back and think where we would like to be in a long enough time frame.

Your body needs time to make changes. New athletes will always make huge progress in their first months of hard training, but as any intermediate or advanced athlete can tell you, the gains slow down the longer you train!

Most of you reading this site are probably in your intermediate training phase or getting close to it. This means that you need to measure your progress in months, not weeks.

For an intermediate athlete I generally expect them to make between 10-15% improvement in any given physical trait in one year’s time. This might mean improving your squat from 250 pounds to 275 lbs, or dropping your mile run time from 9 minute miles to 8 minute miles.

Sure, some of you can make much faster progress, but I’d point out that it is probably in an area that isn’t well developed. If you’ve never done much upper body training it’s easy to go from zero pull ups to 3 pull ups, and that’s a 300% improvement!

Goal Setting for Athletes

As with anything in fitness, your plan needs to be measurable. This applies to your yearly programming template as well. The first thing we need to do is to determine your three biggest deficiencies. This is easier than it sounds.

The first, and easiest method, is to pick the three types of sessions you do in the gym that are your least favorite, or perhaps those you tend to skip? Do you avoid running WODs, or anything with burpees? These are the areas you need to focus on.

If you want to be a little more scientific about it then check out this article where I break down how to evaluate your current fitness ability by comparing various strength and conditioning ratios. You will quickly see that you need some work in certain areas.

Here is a list of common deficiencies I see in my athletes.

Overall Strength

Aerobic Conditioning

Upper Body Pressing Strength

Upper Body Pulling Strength

High Skill Movement Technique

If you still aren’t sure about what your biggest deficiencies are then I would recommend asking your coach, or a fellow meathead and get their honest opinion.

Now that we have a good idea where we need to focus our efforts, let’s learn how to create a yearly program using the template.

Your Yearly Functional Fitness Programming Template

This template is very straight forward. You don’t need a complicated plan to achieve great results. In fact, if you look at many top athletes, they aren’t doing anything you or I aren’t, they are simply doing more of it.

Here is the basic yearly programming template.

Quarter 1 : Primary Deficiency

Quarter 2 : Secondary Deficiency

The first thing you will notice is that training is broken down quarterly. You must test and re test at the end of each quarter for the deficiency you are focusing on. In my 11 years of lifting and coaching, I’ve found that 3 months is the perfect amount of time to show great progress. You must test and re-test to insure you are accurately measuring your program’s effectiveness.

For the yearly template we will designate our biggest deficiency as primary, and we will work to attack it first. We will then rank order the rest of our deficiencies in order of importance and attack them in subsequent quarters.

Now that we’ve gone over the full year we need to discuss what each quarter will look like.

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Your Quarterly Training Template

Your quarterly program will be made of three cycles, each of which are one month long. Each month is 3 weeks of hard training, and 1 week of deload where we keep the intensity high, but lower the overall training volume.

Here is an example of a monthly training template for athletes.

3 Months

3 Weeks Hard, 1 Week Deload

Now you have a good idea of what your yearly training plan should look like, broken down to the monthly level. Next we will look at some example templates for different types of athletes.

Example Yearly Training Program for Strong Athletes

This is a theoretical template for an athlete who is fairly strong, but whines and complains anytime a run over 400m is brought up.

Here is the yearly template.

Obviously this athlete needs to work on conditioning, so we will designate that as our primary deficiency. You will notice that I’ve still included a maximal strength block afterwards because there will be some strength decrease after a heavy conditioning block.

High Skill movement is a natural follow on after a strength block. This might look like an olympic lifting block with emphasis on more difficult gymnastic movements.

How to Pick Your Tests

This is easier than you might think. For conditioning I would choose something like 10 minute assault bike for max calories. This involves large muscle groups and it is the same length as most WODs. There are also loads of results in Beyond the Whiteboard to compare yourself too.

For maximal strength testing, I would choose either the big three total or maybe use press instead of bench press. You could also choose Snatch and Clean and Jerk total but that starts to get into efficiency in technique rather than pure strength.

In a high skill movement block I would choose something like max reps for time in the movement(s) I was focusing on. If I was working on full snatches I might do 5 minutes for max reps at a moderately heavy weight, roughly 70% of my 1 rep max. If you go too light you are really testing your energy systems, and if you go too heavy then you will be testing strength, not efficiency of movement.

Now that we’ve gone over how to train strong athletes why don’t we talk about well conditioned athletes.

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Example Yearly Training Program for Well Conditioned Athletes

These athletes are your natural runners, triathletes, and obstacle course racers. They have very well developed energy systems, and are lacking in strength.

Here is an example yearly training template.

Here we are starting off with hypertrophy. Ultimately these athletes need more muscle mass before they can begin to add appreciable amounts of strength. Remember there are only two ways to increase strength, add muscle mass, or increase neuromuscular efficiency.

The general theme of this template is to increase muscle mass and then convert it to usable strength with general strength programming, and then specific strength in the olympic lifts.

Additional Programming Tips

This programming method is fairly simple, and linear in it’s approach. That doesn’t mean that we don’t work on other aspects of fitness during each block, but we should put the majority of our effort towards correcting our biggest deficiencies .

For the strong athletes this might be only hitting a heavy lifting session twice per week, with other sessions devoted to WODs and pure conditioning.

For the weaker athletes that might be relying on the WODs to maintain their conditioning, and lifting 4-5 times per week. You still need to work all aspects of fitness but the frequency and intensity that you are practicing these aspects change depending on the goal.

Final Thoughts

Too many athletes stress out about their programming. It does matter, and a good program can make a huge difference, but I always say that a mediocre program executed with high effort, beats a world class program that is half assed.

If you put some honest thought into your weaknesses and spend a few hours planning out your year you will see results. Don’t stress if you might have done slightly better or if you should have made a certain modification. In the end it doesn’t matter. The quality of work you put in will make all the difference.

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