You should just be able to pile on more and more work all the time right? Like, your training should just build and build. And as your body becomes more resilient, you can just handle it. No, sir, and no, ma’am. That is not how it gets down.

But, that’s how a lot of hunters treat their training. They just keep adding and adding and adding and adding. Then they wonder why they feel like a bag of smashed assholes by the time June hits. Or why they aren’t as fit as they thought they’d be for all the work they’ve done.

Let’s talk about why just building without a break doesn’t work and what to do instead. 

Stress in General: A Quick (Maybe Too Quick…) Intro

Before we talk about waving your training intensity and volume, we have to discuss stress and how the body responds to it. We’ll do a very simplified run-through. 

Your body is always adapting to stressors. The term describing that process is allostasis. Everything is technically a stressor. Your perceptions. How much light there is in a room. A fight with your significant other. An unrelenting need to poop. All stressors. 

Then there is training. It is also a stressor. Now, different stressors elicit different responses from the body. But your body doesn’t necessarily place different stressors in different buckets. The overall stress load matters. For example, if you have tight deadlines at work, you’re in a days-long fight with your significant other, and in the middle of a hard training week, your body will get overwhelmed by stress. You’ll get sick, get hurt, or just not perform. Worse, if the mismanagement persists, it’ll start a downward trajectory that you’ll struggle to overcome.

For allostasis to work, we have to manage our overall stress load, and we have to give our body refractory periods during which it can adapt to the training stress we impose on it. 

Training Stress: A Breakdown

Okay, let’s say that you’re totally recovered from training, then you do a moderately stressful conditioning workout. The introduction of that stress puts you into the recovery phase where your body uses the available resources to adapt to the stress of the session. During the recovery phase, you’re not as trainable because your body is recovering from the last training session. Say that your fully recovered state is the baseline. The training session takes you below baseline for a given period of time until your body adapts and then supercompensates. That means the same amount, or intensity, of training stress won’t cost you the same amount of resources the next time you encounter it. This is the overt goal of training.

But here’s the deal, you have to Goldilocks the stress of your training sessions. You need just enough to get the necessary stress response from your body. Too little, and you won’t get it. Too much, and you won’t have the resources necessary to recover. 

Now, you’re not typically fully recovered between training sessions. That means you carry residual stress from one training session into the next. As such, you accumulate fatigue throughout a training week and training month. There are two types of residual training stress: specific and general. Specific residual stress has more of a local effect. General residual stress is more systemic. My colleagues Craig Weller and Jonathan Pope offer a great explanation in their book Building The Elite:

A good example of residual specific stress is muscle damage. Your central nervous system might be fully recovered but the local muscle might still be recovering. Think squats for volume on Monday followed by squats for volume on Wednesday – you probably feel just fine, but your quads are smoked. In this situation, your brain can signal the muscle to contract as intensely as it had in the previous training session, but the local musculature might not be able to deal with the stressor, and could lead to injury.

Of course, residual general stress also affects your body – one example would be running ten miles on Monday, and swimming laps to exhaustion on Wednesday – different local stressors, but large endurance load. If your cardiovascular system was insufficiently recovered from the previous day’s training session and you decide to perform a cardiac intensive workout, not only will your workout performance likely be poor, but your stress response will be amplified, increasing the cost of adaptation and pushing out the recovery timeline systemically and locally (cardiac system).

Great definitions. They offer the understanding that you must dial in proper training loads and proper training planning so that your body can manage and adapt to training stress locally and systemically – in your muscles and in your central nervous system and cardiac system.

Let’s summarize all of this for understanding. 

• Your body goes into a recovery period after you stress it with training. The length and depth of the recovery period depends on the type of training and how stressful the training session was.

• You typically don’t fully recover between training sessions and carry some residual training stress into the next training session.

• It’s important to account for residual stress by intelligently planning your training.

  
  

I’d bet you’re starting to get the picture. It takes the right amount of stress and recovery to adapt from training and improve fitness. Let’s talk about it more in-depth on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis so you understand why it’s important to wave your training stress.

Why You Need to Wave Your Training 

If you do not wave your training, your fitness will flatline. It will stagnate because you accrue training stress beyond your body’s capability to adapt.

Now, what does it look like to wave your training? We’ll break it down by training week and training phase.

Training Week

Here’s one example of how we wave training stress throughout the week.

Monday: High(er) stress (Strength training and/or intense conditioning)

Tuesday: Low(er) stress (Low-intensity conditioning)

Wednesday: Medium stress (Strength training and/or moderate intensity conditioning)

Thursday: High stress (Intense conditioning)*

Friday: Low to medium stress (low to medium intensity conditioning) or High stress (intense conditioning)

Saturday: Low to medium stress (low-intensity conditioning that might rise to medium stress levels due to duration)

Sunday: Super low stress

(*Sometimes this is a strength training session and we do a low to medium-stress conditioning session on Wednesdays. If that’s the case, we’ll do a high-stress conditioning session on Friday.)

The combination of waved stress and varying training modalities accounts for both types of residual stress so that you can put the right amount of effort into each training session without overtaxing your body. 

Training Phase (Month)

Here’s one example of how we wave training stress throughout the training month (aka training phase).

Week 1: Base (moderate volume and intensity)

Week 2: Same volume, increase intensity

Week 3: Increase volume, (maybe) increase intensity

Week 4: Decrease volume and intensity back to below base level

This format allows us to accrue stress throughout the month while getting a refractory period at the end of the month that allows our bodies to adapt to all the work we’ve done. Without that refractory period, we wouldn’t adapt to all of the training stress accrued throughout the month. It sets up for an overall increase in training stress during the next month or a shift in the type of training stress.

This is only one way that we wave our training throughout the month, but it’s a technique that you could immediately adopt to improve your training.

Surf the Wave

Waving stressors throughout the week while following the build-then-rest format from month to month allows for training adaptation without accruing too much training stress. This setup allows you to build fitness over time instead of flat lining your fitness by only building training stress without any sort of reprieve.

You can’t just pile more and more work on yourself without a break to adapt to training stress. And you can’t give yourself too much of one type of training stress in a given week without a backslide.

Wave your weeks and wave your months. You’ll be in far better condition come hunting season, provided that you’re doing the right kinds of training at the right times.

(All of this thinking is at the foundation of our Backcountry Ready Programming. Let us do the thinking and planning for you. Then you can worry about scouting, shooting, and planning the rest of your hunting prep.)