As you become more and more efficient when training, the stress you can tolerate at a muscular level, nervous system level, or with regard to a certain energy system in a single workout, goes up drastically. However so does your ability to stress these systems…
Over the course of many workouts, the body’s systems can become burned out at one or many different levels of recovery. A method commonly used by elite level trainees and athlete is Daily Undulating Periodization, or D.U.P.
The benefit of DUP is that it rotates the training “stress” from workout to workout. DUP is most commonly used in the strength and power world to keep lifters from overtraining their nervous system while also rotating the intensity of their training in a very different fashion than typical linear progression models. This same concept can be applied to hypertrophy and physique training.
Traditionally you would train your entire body under similar conditions, whether you are focusing on a strength, high volume, or metabolic phases for hypertrophy.
Much like a power athlete can burn out their nervous system easily, a person training for hypertrophy can burn out their body’s ability to recover from volume, tissue damage, oxidative stress, or acidity. A hypertrophy DUP cycle rotates the metabolic stresses that are typically overburdened with hypertrophy-style training. If you have ever had an insane leg workout during which you really felt the intense ‘burn’, then went to train another body part the following day only to fatigue very early, this is the exact thing that DUP is designed to prevent.
If our goal were to maximize total training output during every workout each week, your ability to recover from every training stress, would probably not be ideal.
Those who are the closest to pushing the envelope on recovery will notice the biggest difference from this style of training, even those who are not approaching their limits yet should still experience benefits from the variation it imparts on your training.
This hypertrophy DUP cycle will consist of 3 training types:
Neurological
Neurological-based workouts will be lower reps, more rest, heavier loads, and faster tempos. Power and strength-type movements require high voltage firing from the nervous system to contract a lot of tissue at once. The CNS is generally the most fatigued system from these types of workouts. Most people don’t know that a fatigued CNS typically takes at least a day longer to recover than the muscle tissue itself. This means you could “feel ready” to train before you CNS is ready for maximal output. By not overloading the CNS on consecutive days, we can allow it to recover while you train the other types.
Volume
These workouts will be the most familiar to bodybuilders and those training for hypertrophy. These workouts will stress the body via accumulating stress on the tissue. There will also tend to be a lot of stress on glucose transport and the faster energy systems. Overall, this type of training tends to be the most inflammatory.
Metabolic
These workouts are the most dense meaning the highest work:rest ratio, so lots of reps and not a lot of rest. This creates a high amount of stress on the body’s metabolism to keep providing energy, leading to a high degree of acid production and oxidation. So acidosis and oxidative stress are the main concerns here. These workouts create great improvements in metabolic efficiency, and are very effective for conditioning as well as building muscle.
However, chronic acidosis and oxidative stress can catch up to you if you can’t correct it fast enough, leading to performance and recovery drop-offs. When these systems are fatigued, all energy production in your body decreases leaving you feeling tired, flat, and your workout performance flat-lining. Giving you body a break from high lactic/oxidative workouts is a great way to allow your body to catch up on clearing acid and oxidants.
In summary: throughout this program you will be training every body part through each system, but never the same system two consecutive days. This means that your body as a whole has more time to recover from each type, while taking advantage of a fresher energy system in the next days workout.
Time to step up your game with Daily Undulating Periodization!
BPak
