Functional Method athletes have just finished a deload after completing The Open and quarterfinal workouts and now the new off season can begin!
As a lot of you already know, the start of the off season is the perfect time to strip everything back to basics and start the rebuild for the next season. UFM athletes will be running a short 4-week preparatory limiter cycle before the Dyad athletes align back up with the yearly programming structure. This year we’ll be intertwining parts of the UFM + Dyad cycles to allow for more community workouts which means you get to push hard on the same workout with more of your fellow athletes.
In the next 4 weeks we’ll be focusing on laying good foundations for the upcoming cycles. The priority will be on efficient movement mechanics to develop good habits. We’ll be doing that, as always in our three-pillar format.
Gymnastics For our gymnastics pillar, we’ll be directing our focus towards the development of strict and positional strength. We have progressions in place to increase our strength + strict volume tolerance in our strict HSPU, strict T2B + strict pull ups. Here, we are after the improved development in movement specific strength alongside the increase in positional awareness. We will also be including isometric progressions in the same movement patterns to solidify strength in our usually weaker end ranges which sets a great base and helps reduce injury risk when we move into kipping gymnastics.
The upcoming programme is designed to improve the skill and efficiency of our common gymnastics’ movements, therefore spending the time now on strict strength will make the upcoming training progressions that little bit easier.
Strength After spending a lot of time focusing on strength lifts under fatigue and time sensitive situations during The Open season, its now time to go back to the foundations of strength. Building our raw strength numbers is now the priority. Before we dive straight in to multiple compound strength progressions in 4 weeks time, we’re first ramping our way into percentage strength work. We have linear front squat progressions to get our bodies used to heavier loads again. Alongside this we are running a power clean positional progression, where we highlight important segments of the lift through pauses in certain portions of the pull and receiving position. Again, as we mentioned before, this cycle is all about building a solid foundation to work from, so movement quality is the priority. Finally, there will also be low percentage snatch work to continue working on our movement quality in our Olympic lifts.
Engine Our engine pillar will primarily be build around making improvements in our monostructural elements, such as rowing, biking and running. We’re removing them from traditional functional fitness pieces for the 4 weeks to develop our capacity in each individual discipline. We’re also putting a focus on Nasal breathing to help develop our aerobic output, something that gets neglected during The Open season. We will still have one traditional ‘for time’ workout a week, so all the athletes can get their fix.
Extras In the background we’re bringing back our body armour sections of programming. Body armour is as it sounds; bullet-proofing our bodies to withstand volume and loads whilst lowering the risk of injury and burnout. This will be split into upper, lower and midline. We’ll be working in hypertrophy rep ranges to help add some size and increase the strength potential of our muscles, ready for more strength and hypertrophy work in our following cycle
On Saturdays we’re encouraging athletes to attend team gym workouts to make sure we’re still enjoying training with others, if this is not possible for some athletes then we have an interval session option to complete in its place.
The season schedule is set, so lets get to work!