CT, as I have read more and more throughout the years it seems like a large, large portion of programs and protocols have a 6 week time frame built in to them. Your 6 weeks to super hero, built for bad, the original HPMass, Hypertrophy layers was recommended to be 4-6 weeks, Charles Staley’s new “Stack 10” training… Hell, Even Wendler now recommends doing 2 cycles in a row before deloading(6 weeks), and many of his spec phases are 6 weeks. Today’s T-Nation article recommends 6 weeks training unilateral movements. This is just a small sampling of the stuff I see that is recommended to be 6 weeks in length.
Now… obviously there is nothing magical about this number, but it is a curiosity how so many programs seem to have stumbled upon this number as an effective time frame for concentrating on a particular training quality.
Is this how long it takes the body to “stagnate” before you should move on to something else? Or is it the general time frame one can really push the limits before we start seeing a return on investment? Or is it just a random number that I’m looking too much into?
[quote]Lonnie123 wrote:
CT, as I have read more and more throughout the years it seems like a large, large portion of programs and protocols have a 6 week time frame built in to them. Your 6 weeks to super hero, built for bad, the original HPMass, Hypertrophy layers was recommended to be 4-6 weeks, Charles Staley’s new “Stack 10” training… Hell, Even Wendler now recommends doing 2 cycles in a row before deloading(6 weeks), and many of his spec phases are 6 weeks. Today’s T-Nation article recommends 6 weeks training unilateral movements. This is just a small sampling of the stuff I see that is recommended to be 6 weeks in length.
Now… obviously there is nothing magical about this number, but it is a curiosity how so many programs seem to have stumbled upon this number as an effective time frame for concentrating on a particular training quality.
Is this how long it takes the body to “stagnate” before you should move on to something else? Or is it the general time frame one can really push the limits before we start seeing a return on investment? Or is it just a random number that I’m looking too much into?
Any light you can shed on this?[/quote]
I think that those who work with a lot of clients empirically find the 6 weeks duration to be the best “effort to return” period… past 6 weeks you still get results from a program (heck, some people can get results from doing the same program for life!) but for the majority of the population the results slow down too much to justify the efforts (keep in mind that not everybody love the iron game so much that just the fact of training is satisfactory enough).
When I was working with a lot of pro athletes, I used 4 weeks phases. Gifted individuals are fast adapters and need a tad shorter phases. The shortest I’d go is 3 weeks though, and really, when doing 3 week phases I normally do two 3 week phases that constitute a 6 weeks cycle (the training approach is the same, but we have two short cycles lasting 3 weeks where intensity and volume is wavec up and down).
I also think that most experts agree that 6 weeks is the shortest period of time to get significant and important results. If you ask a coach what is the shortest period he would need to cause a noticeable change in the physique of someone most would say 6 weeks.
Thanks for the response. I kind of noticed this with the Layer system now that I look back on it. Strength shot up very fast, peaking at about the 6 week mark, and then kind of waved + or - 5% for the next six weeks with occasional PR’s in the cluters/HDL portion.
Seems like something to consider going forward, really push one quality (strength, hypertrophy, density, conditioning, etc…) for 6 weeks and then focus on another.