 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Coyke. Over the past few weeks, we've been talking about periodization and writing training programs. And now today what I wanna do is start to show you maybe a bigger picture of it. Yesterday we talked about macro cycles and that is a pretty big picture, but there's a different ways that you can approach your macro cycles. And today what I wanna talk about is probably the most useful one because everyone goes through this. And that is linear periodization. So linear periodization is, one, absolutely the easiest to program for and understand. And two, works really, really well for beginners. So the idea is progressive overload. I just keep putting on 5% every week. I continue to overload the body. And as long as I am very present in my training sessions, as long as I'm pushing myself and as long as I'm not skipping any sessions, I'm gonna see really, really good progress if I just stick to a linear periodization scheme. So whatever adaptation you're tracking, over time it's gonna have this line of best fit upward and rightward. That is the secret of linear periodization is that it's super simple to do and it helps you stay on task. It helps you stay focused on your goal. Now we're gonna, I also want to outline some of the issues that arise here. So linear periodization works for at least a year and sometimes longer than that. But as I get more and more trained, maybe after about two years of very particular, very focused training, I might stop being able to increase the weight every single week. And that's just, you know, the law of diminishing returns in your body. As I, you know, I can't just continue to put five pounds on every week because five pounds by 50 would mean I'd put 250 pounds on my bench press every year. And that is a little unreasonable when you think about it, especially after two years, now I'm benching 900 pounds. That's maybe an exaggeration. So at a certain point, linear periodization stops working. And so then I have to look at it and I have to take a step back and I have to say, okay, well, maybe now I'm not gonna put on five pounds every week on my lifts. Maybe now I'm gonna put five pounds on my lift every month. And, you know, hopefully a little bit more, but then I start to, I get away from this 5% every week and I start to pre-plan. This week is gonna be easier. This week is gonna have a lot of volume. This week is gonna have less volume, but more intensity. And I continue to build upon these things that way. But I just wanna mention that because I think that is a confusing piece of programming for a lot of people. They hear a lot about powerlifting programming and block periodization. And you get into that stuff later on. You can get into that stuff, especially if you're a trainer and you've been really serious about your lifting for so long. Like you probably need to do stuff like that unless you just had a kid and you're hardly finding time to get into the gym or whatever. But for most of your clients, especially in their first year, you just need a good linear periodization strategy. You just need to be very diligent about getting in the gym, about recovering, sleeping enough, eating enough. And you need to be really particular about your progression. Okay, just five pounds or 5% every week will get you really, really far by the end of the year.