Dr Mike Israetel - Recovery

Dr Mike Israetel talks about the importance varying your mesocycles during the year to promote recovery.

Transcript:

Next up is something sort of technical sounding but I will explain it really quick : mesocycle and annual volume manipulations. What does that mean? It means that we can’t always push the volume and the intensity maximally.

So, for example, in bodybuilding training, you have multiple mesocycles, like month or two months long periods between deloads, where you’re pushing it hard {...}. Every couple of months, it’s probably a good idea to switch to strength training to just drop the amount of volume you’re doing so that your body can recover a little bit in a different way, just basically recover from the staleness of doing this super high volume. In team sports, competition sports, you’ll have dedicated low volume blocks, like strength blocks, power development blocks, to give you a break from higher volume and resensitize your body and allow you to breakdown a lot of fatigue, especially the kind that anything but low volume can break down. {...}

So, basically, if your training looks identical every mesocycle, you probably have a problem, and you should do lower volume strength training or a power development phase, depending on your sport, every now and then.