The 10 Week Functional Power Building Program (Part 1)

This program is specifically designed to develop maximal strength, increase muscle mass, while building functional work capacity in short time domains. Said a little more plainly, this program is designed to get you big and strong without sacrificing your conditioning. Keep reading to see if this is the right program for you.

As the title implies, this is going to be the first portion of the program. It is a total of five weeks in length, with one deload week. Each session will including a heavy strength movement and one bodybuilding style movement designed to build muscle mass. There will be a 10min break and then you will finish with a WOD, and a final accessory movement. I expect each session to take around 75 minutes or so.

This program is written with 5 days a week of work, with two rest days. You can do those 5 days straight through, or you can modify the schedule. Many athletes do well with 3 days on, 1 off, 2 on, 1 off. Whatever schedule you end up choosing, just make sure that you do the workouts sequentially.

As I stated above, this program is biased towards building strength and muscle mass. It will maintain you your functional work capacity, and even increase your output if you work hard. These are some of the types of athletes this program was written for.

Ideal Athletes for This Program

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• Off season power athletes: Football, Rugby, Hockey
• Military and Police athletes that need strength and size
• Athletes lacking muscular power and size

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Obviously this program can benefit anyone, even if they don’t fit into these specific categories. These were just some of the types of athletes I had in mind when I wrote the program. Now, without further ado, let’s get into the specifics of the program. You’ll find the PDF download below.

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CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE 10 WEEK FUNCTIONAL POWER BUILDING PROGRAM PART 1

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Week 1: Functional Power Building Program

This is your intro week. This program is a fairly even mix of volume and intensity, relative to one rep max. Many of you may not be used to this volume of lifting, so make sure you are erring on the side of being more conservative with your weights rather than heavier.

This program has four different blocks built into each daily session. The top row is the strength component, where you will be lifting heavy. Recall that I often have athletes lift to a TM or technical max. This is the heaviest weight you can handle with near perfect form on that day.

The block underneath that is the muscle building component. It is designed to build muscle mass in the same muscle groups as the strength component. This is followed by a 10 minute rest, which will allow you to recover for the WOD.

The WOD is going to be shorter in overall duration than my other programs, and you will see a lot of high intensity intervals, with specified rest. This is designed to keep your power output high. The last component is a final accessory move that compliments all movements from the session, or is something that I find athletes often lack.

Week 2: Functional Power Building Program

This week steps up the intensity. We’ve added an extra set for the strength work, and increased the accessory work slightly. If you are feeling strong this week, you can also make these sessions more difficult by going for an extra rep or two on the max rep sets.

Likeweise, you can also add extra weight to the muscle building movements if you’d like. Don’t feel like you must add weight however. The goal is to increase volume and intensity gradually and the program will do this for you automatically.

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Week 3: Functional Power Building Program

This week we increase the lifting volume for the muscle build movements. For some movements we are simply adding reps, for others we are adding in some extra sets.

By now you should be used to the program and you should be feeling fairly strong. I recommend keeping the rest intervals around 2-3 minutes for the heavy strength work, and 1-2 minutes for the muscle building components. Choose whichever rest intervals suit you on the accessory work.

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Week 4: Functional Power Building Program

This is the heaviest week prior to our deload. We’ve increased the amount of heavy reps you’ll be doing for strength work. Make sure you are thoroughly warming up prior to to hitting these heavy lifts. No one ever said they failed a lift because they warmed up too much!

You should be able to add some weight for the muscle building component as well. I normally recommend adding 5 pounds a week for upper body movements, and 10 pounds a week for lower body movements, provided movement quality is maintained.

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Week 5: Functional Power Building Program

This is the last week of this portion of the program, and it is our first deload. Don’t worry, we will still be lifting heavy, but the overall program volume is reduced to allow your body to physically recover from all the work you’ve been putting in.

Resist the urge to go really heavy this week on the TM and the AHAP movements. I would recommend picking the same weight you did last week, or slightly less. Remember, this is the week where your body actually rebuilds your tissues so you can continue to progress. If you don’t give it that chance then you don’t make any gains!

Final Thoughts

In order to get the most out of this program make sure you are paying close attention to your nutrition, and recovering smartly. I would also resist the urge to try and combine this program with others. This is going to be challenging, and you probably won’t recover if you are doing a bunch of extra conditioning or strength work, in addition to this program.

Stay focused, remain consistent, and you’ll find that you are gaining muscle mass and strength before you know it. Once you finished this program you can move on to the second part of The 10 Week Functional Power Building Program. Now get out there and start training!

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