All about that base, no worries

Understanding the intricacies of a peak and all its nuances and complexities is an absolute art. Many people speak of peak training and how to and when to peak without possibly understanding the intricacies of a peak. An overriding factor that may slip past us as coaches or athletes is that in our desire to do well in the here and now, we forget to look back at the process — where we have come from and what we have been able to achieve chronically in our training. 

If you haven’t been training continually for 12-18 months with 12-20 hours consistently, you should never be considering — or even thinking about — a direct peak. Form can be improved, but chronic training load is crucial to a peak — far more important than your acute load. Balancing your acute load is important but should never take precedent over your chronic load. Without that load, you should not be discussing peaking for optimal performance. If you are approaching a competition, then use the comp as a learning process, never skip competition. The most important psychological aspect to develop is your competition mind. Do not make the mistake of not competing to train. The most important training you will do is competition and understanding your competition self.

Over the year, it’s not necessarily about your 1RM, your 5K PB, or your fastest times — it’s about your average times and lifts over the course of that year or several years. The data prescribed or analysed over years, months, and weeks is always far more important than today’s data or numbers. As long as you, the athlete, or coach, have an in-depth understanding of what today’s numbers are a part of, you have an awareness of where you are coming from and what you can grow into.

Ultimately, it’s about the baseline of your form, and the consistency of numbers over time, rather than current form this week. All too often we see athletes trying to rush peaks and weaknesses or rush form forward, and ultimately, this is the stem of most overuse injuries — trying to get somewhere you haven't earned just yet. For the most part, your final competition place or result of a match will be determined by your weakest areas of the sport or your consistency over the elements of said sport, not your top end numbers or scores.  

Having this long term development plan is the only way to peak. Look through the worlds’ elite — it’s not a coincidence that they have several years, working up, not winning, learning themselves, building the base, making mistakes, and finally with due diligence, a peak. Very few athletes come into a sport and just start winning. They build a base. If you are chasing wins now, looking for cookies without turning the oven on, you will live in a perpetual reality of underachievement.

This is where marshmallows come into it. 

In the well-known ‘marshmallow study’, children were told they could have one marshmallow now, or two if they waited until later. This tests their ability to delay gratification. When the studies follow these children throughout their life, the group that waits — and opts for no reward now but double later — are the group that are higher earners, and more often live society’s definition of ‘a better life’. 

Some people will be able to project forward and think: ‘I’ll feel better getting two later, or maybe I can share the other one with a friend and make someone else happy’. These are the people who aren’t taking the shortcuts to get to the goal.

Athletes are often offered that marshmallow. They may want to cash in their wins early, be tempted by a feeling of ‘I've made it’, or give in to impatience with a ‘get there right now’ mindset, and try to ‘peak’ before they’re ready. 

Our job as coaches is to help people to understand why they need to wait until the afternoon for the gratification of two marshmallows. We help them steer away from the shortcuts, think things through, and have a better understanding of the long-term process. It’s our job to not allow the athletes into a false security laden in mediocrity, but open their eyes to what they are capable of. 

We are inherently lazy. Our brains want the easy way out, we want gratification now, we want to feel as if we have made it, we search for gratification. It’s about calmness and control now. Going to a comp to learn, using a year, two years, or longer on building a base, growing experience, believing you are capable of more. 

As always, reality vs expectation is the hard bump. We can attribute many sporting psychological issues to attempting to speed up and hasten the process of peaking, reaching for a certain form or trying to achieve a dream when the base work has not yet been done. You will encounter, and we encounter, many people who assume a peak happens at the end of a hard or long training block. It’s just simply not the case. Truth is, most athletes have never peaked, they have experienced good form, or felt good, but a peak, a real peak, a well-planned structured peak over 3-5 years is rare. 

When you’re arriving at the open — don’t look at your current numbers, look at your averages. How many kilometers have you run this year? How many minutes on the rower? How many pistols have you done in total? How many chests to bar? Your peak and form lie there, and so should your psychology and self talk — not in what you’ve just done, just achieved, or how tired you feel today. You must feel tired today for those averages to look good over the year. Fancy training phases and  fancy periodisation are primarily there to get you through these averages and make sure that base is in place. Trust it, follow it, stay true to it and yourselves. 

It is all about that base and if you have that base, it’s no worries. You can have confidence going into your events. If the base isn’t there, the psychological pressure of winning, doing well, peaking, will always outweigh the reality of the disappointment which is about to become you. Have confidence, have security in the averages, not the one-off good or bad result.