Power Curve Training

by Tyler Hass

 

I recently read a very interesting article called "Evolutionary Fitness" by Art DeVany. In it, he used a mathematical function called a Power Curve as a model for animal behavior. It was observed that animals spend the majority of their lives in states of either very low intensity or very high intensity work, but only a small amount in the middle. For example, a cheetah might spend most of its day lazing around waiting for the hunt to begin, but once it has begun, it is an all-out sprint to the prey. During the day, the cheetah does not spend an inordinate amount of time jogging or working at medium intensity to maintain its level of fitness. These short bursts of high-intensity activity are enough to keep the animal fit for survival.

Sprinters are a fine example of anaerobic fitness, they are both strong and lean.
Contrast this with the model of exercise employed by most humans. It is very typical to spend a great deal of time at rest, which does fit our power curve. However, the hour spent on the treadmill and the eight minutes doing crunches both fall into the dead zone of the power curve model. Medium levels of intensity are often labeled on fitness machines as "the fat burning zone" or the "cardio zone". As a result, most people mistakenly spend most of their time at this level. This leaves us with high intensity work, which is all but absent in the lives of most people. I think this is the greatest mistake most people make in their approaches to physical conditioning. The simple fact is: strength and health go hand in hand. The old-time strongmen knew this, but for some reason, people today associate health with "cardio-gods" like triathletes and strength with freakish bodybuilders. I would not consider either of these groups to be as healthy as a well-rounded strongman. I think the Power Curve model bridges the gap between these two modern generalities and surpasses both of them in terms of general health benefits.

Figure 1 shows the amount of time spent in each level of intensity. The intensity progresses from walking to jogging and then sprinting on the far right.
Figure 1 shows the overall activity model presented by DeVany in his Evolutionary Fitness program. The intersection of the red curve with the y-axis represents the state in which you spend the majority of your time, at rest. Eventually as you go further along the horizontal, the intensity of activity picks up. Walking fits within this sector, and people do spend a great deal of time walking. Eventually, the curve drops down to zero (intersection with the x-axis). Jogging, Zumba and 8-minute abs programs all fall within this level of intensity, which is nearly absent in our Power Curve model. As the curve continues to the right, it descends into negative values. Ignore this and consider all the values to represent a positive measure of time. There is no such thing as negative cumulative amounts of time, at least in my understanding of the universe. As the curve travels to the right, the cumulative amount of time begins to increase again. The level of intensity also begins to rise, meaning that we tend to spend a greater majority of our time working at high intensity as opposed to medium intensity. This brings up one important question though, how can a person possibly spend so much time at the highest level of intensity. The answer is that the effects of high intensity work have a longer lasting effect on your body. Notice how long it takes for your breathing and heart rate to normalize after high-intensity work. The effects on your body linger for quite some time, so we will consider this entire period of recovery to fall under high-intensity.
Prolonged low intensity exercise does burn fat, but it is catabolic to muscle as well. With high-intensity exercise, you can burn fat while preserving as much strength and muscle as possible.
Another interesting application of Power Curves is to look at the dispersion of the load and the intensity of training, see figure 2. What this curve demonstrates is that high intensity work should be done at both high concentration, such as an intense 30-45 minute workout, and with high dispersion, like "greasing the groove". The way to apply this curve to your training is to do an occasional workout that is fairly long and taxing on your body and the rest of the time, "grease the groove" with a set every hour or two. The hard workouts will provide adequate stimulus for the development of anaerobic work capacity, while the dispersed heavy sets of low reps will build a high degree of maximal strength. The increase in maximal strength will have the additional benefit of increasing the intensity of your hard workouts because you will be able to handle heavier weights. Working in this manner can lead to very quick improvement in both strength and anaerobic work capacity, both of which are good indicators of health.

The scale of intensity here starts at the highest and then drops down to zero. In the negative range, the intensity starts to pick up again.

The dispersion factors starts at a very high density, as in a workout and then progresses towards "Greasing the Groove" on the far right.
The next application of Power Curves is in how you choose which lifts to work on at any given time. One important consideration is that is difficult to improve if you are constantly shocking yourself with new stimulus. Thus, there must be some regularity in your training. This brings us to an important point: you cannot develop all physical attributes at the same time. For example, the development of endurance conflicts with the development of maximal strength, thus it is not logical to train them concurrently. The solution to this problem is cycling. Every two to six weeks, it is important to change your training variables. Take a look at figure 3, which explains how I organize my training goals. At any given time, I train a small number of lifts and spend a great amount of my energy working on those specific lifts. This results in very fast adaptation because you are working hard on only a few specific things, which means your body will adapt to better handle them. Always remember, strength training is an adaptive process. Work does not make you stronger, it is the adaptation that occurs during rest that makes you stronger. At the same time, I also train a wide variety of other lifts, nearly equaling the training load I dedicate to my target lifts. The key is that I choose a wide variety of lifts and keep the volume very low on each one. Thus, I might spend half of my training load working on two lifts and the other half of my training load on ten other lifts. I do this because I feel it is important to at least maintain the proprioceptive feel of a variety of different lifts, which means you will not lose as much ground when you return your focus onto that lift. You will probably not improve on these ten lifts, but you will at least maintain your strength in them while you are making major improvements in another area.
Pick a small number of lifts to focus on during each training cycle and then add the rest at very low volumes. Specificity does not have to come at the expense of variety in this program. Switch your focus to a different set of lifts every 2-4 weeks.

In this graph, the highest training loads are farthest away from the x-axis, including a relatively high volume in the negative portion of the graph.

The x-values show how you should progress from your "focus" lifts to the auxiliary or assistance lifts.

In your workouts, focus on going for high-intensity. Include a great variety of lifts in each workout, starting with grinds and working your way into ballistics. Most of your time should be spent on your focus lifts, but feel free to do a bit of everything.
Figure 4 describes a principle similar to the one presented in figure 3. The main point I am making with this example is that people should train for their specific goals, but also incorporate a wide variety of stimuli not related to their specific goals. The reasons are endless but include: greater variety puts less wear and tear on the body, it is generally more fun to do some cross-training, and there are very few sports where an athlete would not benefit from having skills in other areas. However, do not interpret this graph to mean that a powerlifter should run marathons. What it might mean is that a powerlifter should incorporate some sprinting, gymnastics or kettlebell work into his routine. For a person looking for general fitness, this point is not even worth worrying about. However, there is one area on the graph that requires explanation. It is where the curve intersects with the x-axis, or the dead zone. This is an area between what is highly specific to your goals and work that is of a general nature. This middle point represents exercises that mimic sports movements, but in a poor or even detrimental way. For example, a tennis player would not benefit from playing with a heavier racket because it would mess up his timing. This type of training should be avoided in most cases.

This figure illustrates how the volume should vary with the specificity of the exercise towards your goals. It shows two peaks of volume, one consisting of General Physical Preparedness work and the other for Goal Specific or Sports Specific training.

Do not follow the Power Curve model with great precision. Allow for a certain amount of randomness, as would be expected in nature.
In conclusion, there is a wide variety of ways you can look at Power Curves as a model for the development of physical fitness. The benefits are, fast adaptation, great variety of skills incorporated, varied training loads and better health. However, do not think that every program you design must rigidly follow a Power Curve model, for this reason I did not place any numerical values on the axes in the graphs. This article is simply food for thought. Stay tuned next month when I design a training program based on Power Curve mathematics! In the mean time, be sure to read Pavel's Greasing the Groove article.