Let’s look at it like this: the first two weeks are a simple ramp up. This gives you exposure to a lot of different movements common across platforms in functional training.
We then do a week investigating mobility issues that may have surfaced during the first two weeks. It’s also good to simply apprise ourselves with (and begin to create a catalog of) movement and mobility exercises. This gets us up to week 4.
We then use all of the exercises that we laid out in the first two weeks as familiar seed exercises to use as warm ups and then proceed with a standard six week strength training cycle.
We then download on week 10 (a prescribed method to avoid injury) and then spend two weeks investigating Olympic lifting movements. The reason why we do two weeks of Olympic lifting is not to become Olympic lifters but to simply stay in contact with those movements that may have been neglected from the big 5 strength training protocol. We absolutely do not want the Olympic lifting shapes extinguished from our movement vocabulary. Later in the year when we focus on Olympic lifts, it will mean that we haven’t gone nine months without doing a proper overhead squat, front squat or clean… more on this later.
We will then move on to introduction of new programming elements in the second quarter of the year i.e. week 13.
Let’s continue to discuss and debate as this will accomplish the TRUE GOAL of this program: to instigate conversation about how we train here at ATOMIC and to help us all to get more and more onto the same page.
