Phase 3 – Peaking | 12 week challenge

Phase 2 of my 12-week challenge is over and I am now entering phase 3 where I will be concentrating on peaking for the end of the 12 weeks. What I mean by peaking is that I will be getting ultra focussed on everything I have wanted to achieve by the end of this challenge and making sure I finish strong and not weak. I want to make sure I hit all my SMART goals as best I can.

12 week challenge goals

Now if you remember the goal was to be in the best shape of my life at 40. But what does that actually look like? Well, I have never achieved a body fat % of less than 15% and I have never had a waist circumference of 82cm or less. So they were certainly my number 1 aims. I could have just focussed on those goals and those goals alone but that would not necessarily result in the best shape of my life. Why? Because strength and muscle mass are also important to me which is why I also assessed those metrics at the start of the challenge too. Finally, I didn’t want to sacrifice my running fitness. So basically I wanted to maintain strength, muscle mass and cardio whilst dropping body fat.

Phase 3 Peaking programme

For my last phase, I need to pull in all aspects of training, strength, hypertrophy, cardio, and core whilst boosting calorie output as much as possible. A great way to increase calorie output is to take advantage of something called excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC). This refers to the number of calories you burn off after your session is over. With resistance training and interval based programmes of high intensity and long duration, you can significantly boost your EPOC so much so that your metabolism remains elevated for as much as 48 hours post-exercise. The additional calorie expenditure from this is useful when you are trying to drop body fat.

How to boost your calorie expenditure post exercise?

Apart from exercising as hard and as long as you can another way to boost your EPOC is to disrupt the bodies homeostasis, which basically means shock it with some training it isn’t used to. So as this is my last and probably most important phase of training I need to pull something special out the bag. So far I have written all my own programmes during this challenge and although I have tried to be objective and prescribe exactly what I need and not what I want I am sure there have been some mildly unconscious consideration towards my preferences! So I have decided to recruit the expertise of another coach for this last phase of my training who also happens to be an old friend of mine from Uni. Kris Hendy is the head coach at Strength for Endurance in Bath. He has a degree in Sports Science and among lots of other qualifications, he is a level 1 Crossfit coach too. So I knew that the programme would be well written but also have a Crossfit style to it which I’m sure will disrupt my homeostasis nicely as I have almost no experience of this sport.

So here it is. A four day split with some cardio options for the remaining days. Can’t wait 🤪