How Periodization Can Help You Avoid Burnout and Achieve Sustainable Growth
Have you ever been on a roll only to get derailed after a few days, weeks, or months? Do you find yourself alternating between periods of immense focus interspersed with long bouts where you feel like you’re stuck in the mud and can’t get anything going?
This happens to everyone, and chances are high that it will happen to you, again.
Life is a cycle of ups and downs. Everyone, from elite athletes to the most average of janes will experience a downturn in performance and productivity at some point. It is an inevitability. Just as an elite powerlifter can’t continue to hammer away at their personal best week in and week out, neither can you expect to sustain your optimal levels of output indefinitely without crashing and burning out.
You can’t escape it, so you may as well accept the reality that you will have some bad days, including some awful, terrible, no-good days. Doing so will make it so much easier for you to give yourself some grace, reverse momentum, and get back on track.
This idea of peaks and valleys in performance is a well-known concept in athletics. Which is fortunate for us because we can leverage the lessons learned by the sports greats to our own advantage.
This is where the concept of periodization comes in.
Unlocking Sustainable Performance: The Power of Periodization
In strength training, periodization is a method of planning and executing a training cycle for maximum long-term results by varying the intensity, volume, or duration of effort over different periods of time. It helps optimize performance, prevent overtraining, and avoid boredom by ensuring that the athlete receives optimal doses of stimulus and recovery. I.e., push the athlete to induce a level-up but don’t burn them to the ground.
One of the hard lessons I’ve had to learn is that constantly striving to do more, whether it is lifting more weight than last time or reading more pages than the previous day or writing more code than the previous week is not sustainable and not conducive for long term success. In fact, doing so is self-destructive because when the bad day comes around (and it always does) I get down on myself because I have wired myself to expect peak output at all times.
Consequently, the failure crushes me. Procrastination takes root and self-sabotage seethes. Soon, I find myself engaging in a variety of behaviors that I know are not good for me, yet I justify them anyways (overeating, oversleeping, cancelling on my friends, drinking during the week, etc.). This milieu may continue for weeks, if not longer. Eventually, I muster up the courage to pull myself out of the rut. This is usually precipitated by a small win, such as setting a PR in the gym or going out with friends for the first time in weeks and getting some much-needed encouragement.
And therein lies one of the keys behind periodization — starting out small. The other key is adopting a “waveform” approach to training — building to a peak followed by a “deload” period. The math nerds reading this can liken this idea to that of a sine wave (love you guys). The rest of us can imagine a series of rolling hills (or waves, since I literally used the word waveform moments before).
The idea is, you can’t maintain 100% effort on anything all the time. You must responsibly manage fatigue to ensure growth without burnout.
Let me give you 2 examples of how I apply this to my life: One in sports and the other in my work as a programmer and aspiring writer:
1: I strength train and practice BJJ in 5-week cycles.
Week 1: Low volume, low intensity. Leave the gym feeling better than when you came in. Don’t push it. Emphasize technique.
Week 2: Medium volume, medium intensity. Get into the groove. Prepare the body and mind for what is to come.
Weeks 3–5: Progressively increase intensity aiming for a culmination of a max effort push. This is where the “level-ups” are realized.
2: Writing and programming:
The structure here is not as formulaic as my training is. That’s because the work here is not as formulaic.
Although I know that every Thursday I’m going to do 5x5 (five sets of five reps) in the squats (or every Sunday my BJJ gym is going to be doing full effort matches), I don’t think it is conducive to expect X amount of lines of code or X amount of words written on a set schedule (I welcome disagreement on this point) because I’ve learned that the projects that I work on rarely end up looking what I thought they would like at the end. Rather, they often change in scope or content from day to day. Therefore, I must be more flexible in my goals and expectations.
The exact approach varies according to the nature of the project but here are some guidelines I’ve found that work best for me:
- For any project I have a list of “non-negotiables” these are the objectives I absolutely must get to on a daily or weekly basis.
- Built into the former is a system of standards, ranging from “just showing up” to “maximum effort”. Combined, I know that, if nothing else, if I can do the minimum of my non-negotiables on any given day, I’ll continue to make steady progress.
- Often, this combination looks something like: a minimum of 15 minutes spent on writing/coding/reading on a rotating schedule.
- Every 10 days I take a mandatory full day off. I don’t do anything related to my work these days. No emails. No articles. I completely disengage. This is my opportunity to be as disconnected as possible, to engage in whatever silly behavior I deem as not worth my while during my “on” times.
- More challenging days are sprinkled into my schedule based on priority and availability. I make sure that I am regularly able to allocate a chunk of time for deep, meaningful work. I try to never go longer than a week without engrossing myself fully in what I’m doing for an extended period of time (rarely for more than 6 hours in a day, however).
- If the fire is burning hot and I manage to string a series of hyper productive days in a row, I try to keep the streak alive but never, absolutely never, do I skip my “rest day”.
Finally, what makes this style “periodized” is the planned execution of low volume weeks in between periods of high effort. This necessitates planning ahead. This is considered unsexy by many because it requires addressing puzzling questions such as:
- What is my goal for this project?
- Why am I doing this? What is it worth to me?
- What do I hope to learn or create at the end of it?
The times that I neglected the planning process before embarking on a new project are the times that I inevitably gave up on the project. If you wish to apply periodization to your projects, you must outline the project, even in a rudimentary way, ahead of time. Otherwise, you won't be able to manage your workload intelligently and eventually will succumb to burnout.
In the rollercoaster of life, experiencing peaks and valleys in our performance and productivity is inevitable. By embracing the concept of periodization, we can learn valuable lessons from athletes who strategically balance intense effort with necessary recovery. Just as athletes optimize their training cycles for long-term success, we too can apply periodization to our work and personal lives, managing fatigue, avoiding burnout, and achieving sustainable growth. So, accept the reality that your journey, whatever it entails, will have ups and downs, and plan intelligently, so you too can harness the power of periodization to reach new heights, over and over again.
