How to use Emerging Strategies for controlled progression?

Throughout the 50 years that powerlifting has been around, many training methods have gone in and out of favor. Many of the near east countries played an important role in developing them, and the research they carried out in the late 1970s is still relevant to powerlifting periodization today.

Periodization

Periodization is a way of organizing training into smaller periods, called mesocycles, macrocycles, and microcycles.

Each period can focus on developing a slightly different quality.

For example, an 11-week mesocycle could look like this:

4-week hypertrophy macrocycle
4-week strength macrocycle
3-week peaking macrocycle

Then these macrocycles get broken up even further into microcycles.

Microcycle length is more often than not 1 week, but you can break up your training into shorter periods, e.g.( A rest B rest )repeat, would be a 4-day microcycle.

Top-down programming

As with everything during these times in some of the near east countries, training plans for international-level powerlifters used to be centrally planned. Before the birth of powerlifting, bulgarian weightlifters had their training programmed up to 12 months in the future.

This method is called top-down programming (writing all of your training in advance based on principles for the general population), and it has its pros and cons, but for powerlifting, it has some flaws:

The complexity of top-down programming makes using data from research very hard. Information noise is everywhere, it is caused by many parameters that depend on each other.

For example, an athlete might lift at a vastly different percentage of 1rm each week. How do we know what % is driving the most progress? Or how can we know if an athlete increased their deadlift strength from a lower deadlift rep range or higher squat volume? As you can see, it's hard to pinpoint what exactly is driving the progress.

It's based on an average person and fit for the general population. But we know that a human isn't just a few lines of code that you can type and it'll always spit out the same result.

Soviet methods were developed for many lifters at once, which means they lack individualization. Someone might respond subpar to a program that works best for most of the population.

It's predetermined, which makes it hard to adjust the program when things aren't going as intended.

Bottom-up programming

The hardest thing in coaching isn't creating a program that works for an individual, it is knowing when and how to change it, what to do if it stops working and how to modify it for the needs of your clients.

With the bottom-up programming, we aim to improve the typical top-down training approach and make it better suited for each athlete. It all boils down to one simple idea:

Letting the athlete's response determine the structure of their training

This method isn't as easy to implement as it first seems. It requires trust and mutual respect between the coach and the client, but when used correctly, it can help answer some important questions:

How a change in a single variable influences the client's response?
How long should a mesocycle be?
How does an athlete respond to a set of new variables?

Emerging strategies structure:

Emerging strategies is an example of a bottom-up method. It was developed by Mike Tuscherer and aims to simplify the process of periodization. With fewer things changing from week to week, it becomes easier to know what exactly is driving the progress.

The simplified model of emerging strategies:

Create a microcycle with the variables that you want to test. Most often this step is just writing a single week's worth of training, but microcycles can differ in length.
Run it over and over again until you/your athlete stops making progress for at least 2 weeks.
Sometimes your training can stall for a week, but then you start progressing again. That's why the mesocycle ends after 2 weeks of stagnation. 2 weeks of stagnation imply that the progress you can make by repeating the same microcycle has come to an end.
You just measured TTP (time to peak), one of the key variables in EM.
It measures how many exposures to a given stimulus it takes before you stop progress. E.g. if you were adding weight for 5 weeks, and then stalled for 2, your TTP is 5 exposures or 5 weeks. This value shouldn't change much over time (your TTP will be almost the same years from now) and across different lifts(squat, bench, and deadlift TTP should be similar).
You run a pivot block.
Pivot blocks are a replacement for a typical deload. Instead of keeping the same exercises but cutting the intensity/volume, you experiment with new movements. The goal of a pivot is to wash out, rest, and re-sensitize an athlete to training again. That's why you keep a pivot easy and stray away from your regular exercises.
You repeat the process with different variables. Create a new microcycle, run it for as long as TTP allows, and see the response.

Making changes

EM might seem simple, but it's actually very involved. You need to closely monitor how an athlete responds to a given stimulus.

Mesocycles in EM are broken down into 2 categories:

Exploration blocks, where you test new methods, and variables and measure the response. You don't yet know if these blocks will be successful or not, but sometimes you might find that an athlete responds well to something you'd never think of otherwise. Exploration blocks are mostly run in the off-season

Development blocks, where you use something similar to what worked well in the past. These are used to build strength reliably and are your best bet for peaking before a competition.

In exploration blocks, you track how each lift responds to its new variables. For example, you might try running a mesocycle where you program 1 top-set set of deadlifts and then speed back-offs at less than 70%. If the method works, you take notes and might rerun the same method for deadlifts in the future development block. If not, you just move on and try something different.

In the second part of this article, I'll take a deeper look at some exact EM frameworks to help you get started with your first block using this method.