 Rider: Carter Gray Photo: Zachary C. Bako Joel YounkinsHigh Performance Coach I'm not going to lie, as I write out the title of this blog post, it really takes me way back to the beginning days of my career. Circa 2012 I believe, I wrote an article for Racer X Virtual Trainer...Wait...Make that a 3 part series on this same topic. And what's crazy, is still today, this same concept is something I use and practice on a daily basis in my coaching and training for all of my clients.
If you're at all familiar with Track and Field, you may have heard about Canadian Sprinters Coach, Charlie Francis who was a very big influence on my coaching career. And many principles that I learned from him, expanded well beyond just sprinting for track and field. Even though he passed away in 2010, right before I got into coaching, he left a ton of material that I dove head first in and often times (okay a lot of times) obsessed about. Even still today I go back through the old videos, article, and forums just a proper refresher. One big topic that he often went over was the concept of the High/Low Model. A model that myself and many other performance coaches have implemented and interpreted to align with my coaching/training philosophy. The High/Low Model is essentially a way to set up a weekly plan, training split, schedule, etc. Most people set up training schedules based on body parts or means of exercising. For example, it can be upper-lower days, it can be the classical chest on Mondays, back on Tuesdays, etc. Or people sometimes create themes, like lift one day, condition on another. That's great and all to have a plan, but the High/Low Model takes all that a big step further. The High/Low Model accounts for training stress, specifically the stress as it relates to your Central Nervous System (CNS aka your brain and spinal column). You separate your days into either a high stress day, or a low stress day. And the goal, is to not have two high stress days back to back. A high CNS stress day typically takes approximately 48-72 hours to recover from. The day or two after the high stress workout, you perform low intensity days or rest/recovery days. Low intensity days still allow for work to be done, but in a fashion that will allow and promote the body to recover from the previous high intensity day. You may be asking, "what does a high and a low intensity day look like?" I got you! But before we go on...I'm going to warn you that we're about to go on a little ride :) A high intensity day, is a day where we place high intensity exercises and methods to produce a high degree of training adaptation to the body. These days get the most taxing stuff in them that push your true performance. Things like squats, deadlifts, plyo/shock jumps get placed in the gym and on the track you would do sprints and motos...sprints first ;) When done with the right intent, these types of activities are highly stressful to the CNS. This is where you make core changes to the body and rewire yourself as an athlete. You primarily use your CNS to elicit high intensity racing outputs out on the track, why this is extremely important to understand. If you don't create the pressure/stress on the CNS and stick with only surface level training, you only get surface level results... A low intensity day is built around the exact opposite to keep the intensive CNS work to a bare minimum. You want to perform exercises and drills that still allow you to get better as a racer, but while your CNS is recovering, it can handle the more surface level exercises. These would be things like ab training, assistance exercises, low intensity plyo/jump training. And for riding it can be things like technique work, starts, or non-taxing technique work. All important and needed stuff to complete your program, but they're non-taxing to your CNS. While you're easing off of the throttle of stress of the CNS on your low days, your CNS can recover while you work on other areas of your game. For example, if you did sprints and motos on one day (high CNS work), the following day while your CNS is recovering, you could be doing a low intensity cycle in a lower heart rate zone (Zone 2). The low intensity cycle will not negatively impact your CNS recovery (it will in theory actually help it) and it will allow for the lighter work to fit in and be completed. What's important to know, is that it's about creating the response of the workouts to either create stress on the CNS, or to let it recovery and allow extensive work to be done. It's not always about just the exercises and methods, it's how it all fits together. It's an overall concept, theme, and a way of thinking and planning your training. When you're training, if you're going to "trash yourself" at all, you should just "trash yourself" completely all in one day. When you spread out the "trashing" throughout the week, the CNS never really has time to recover (remember the 48-72 hour recovery rule) and will leave you feeling heavily fatigued and brain fog on the weekends when you race. This is important to know, because you can easily do this where you're rarely letting your CNS recover. In a real world example of what a lot of high level-elite racers do, is Race on Saturday (the highest CNS activity), rest on Sunday, heavy gym work on Monday (high CNS), do motos and sprints on Tuesday (high CNS), back to the gym Wednesday for a hard workout (high CNS), ride again Thursday (high CNS), rest on Friday, and back to racing on Saturday again... What ends up happening is out of a 7 seven day week, is that you stress the CNS, 5 times out of the week. Whereas, you really don't want to have anymore than 3 high CNS days a week, that's including the race too. The rest of the days NEED to be low CNS days, or rest/recovery days. This is where very fast, hard working racers get themselves into trouble. They keep working harder and harder and can't figure out why they're flat on race day. It takes them until they take a week off to start feeling good again. There's endless ways to set up a program, but the reality is, that Saturday race is a High Day, and then from there, Tuesday's and Thursdays, could be your other two high sessions of training. And that can take on a lot of forms depending on so many different factors. Sunday, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday would then all either be Rest/Recover Days, or Low Intensity Days. What gets really fun in my shoes, is that what might be a High Intensity Day for most racers, may be actually a Lower Intensity Day for others. Riders like Jeremy Hand and Quinn Wentzel who have been with me for years, many times can do a harder gym workout with me and it leaves them feeling refreshed where that same workout may absolutely fry a lower trained racer. So it really comes down to knowing, what's really a High Intensity Day vs a Low Intensity Day, there should be an extremely high degree of awareness of what's going on with the CNS and what the goal and focus is of each day and each training session. If you have more questions than answers at this point, that's a good sign, it means you're learning, you're in problem solving mode to improve, and really taking all of this all in. Welcome to my world :)
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