Have you ever thought why a coach (or coxswain) asks for power-10s and not power-9s. It turns out that al-Khwārizmī may be partially responsible for our adoption of 10 in everything from 10 reps, 10-week mesocycles and, yes, power-10s.
al-Khwārizmī, the inventor of algebra, apparently brought the base-10 system to the west in the first century AD. The Chinese are credited with inventing the system and there is evidence of its use as early as 14th century BC. The Mohenjo Daro, anticipating 3 x 10 minute intervals, may have used a form of base-10 about 5000 years ago.
The base-10 system probably seems pretty logical: we have 10 fingers--a built-in, primitive abacus. And fingers and numbers are both called--probably not coincidentally--digits. We can be grateful, I suppose, that our number system isn't based on Anne Boleyn, who allegedly had six fingers on one hand. If Henry the 8th had decreed a Boleyn-based system, might we now be doing Power-11s?
Actually, she probably didn't really have 6 fingers, but apparently a lot of people do.
The Maya had a pretty logical number system too. Add up fingers and toes, et voilà: a base 20 system. Power-20s anyone?
Imagine if we had adopted the Babylonian base-60 system! The power might diminish some in power-60s.
On the other hand, training might be a tad easier if we followed the Nunggubuyu and their base-5 numbering system.
There is no intrinsic magic about 10 vis a vis human physiology and performance. 10-minute intervals are not likely to elicit more or better physiological adaptations than 9-minute or 11-minute ones. Think about that the next time your coach asks for 10 x 500m pieces on the ergometer. Ask your coach if he's asking for 10 because of how many fingers he has or for some other reason. (You might prepare yourself to do 10 sets of pull-ups as penance).
Back to fingers, there are 12 phalanges on the four fingers of one hand. So what, you say? Well, the Sumerians may have based their duodecimal number system on that fact. And from that, they and others, may have contrived a day consisting of 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of nighttime. Of course, in such a system, a winter hour lasts a lot less than a summer hour (think about that for a second). I have the same experience with 20-minute intervals: the second seems to last a lot longer than the first.
Blame the Babylonians
As mentioned earlier, the Babylonians used a base-60 system, and as you might suspect, we probably inherited some of their sexagesimality(!) in the counting of minutes and seconds. A minute has 60 seconds and and an hour has 60 minutes (in case you forgot) and that just seems normal and comfortable now. But, really it's a somewhat arbitrary historical artifact. We could just as easily based our time of day on the metric system, but no, we followed the Babylonians.
If instead our hours and minutes were based on the Huli people of Papua New Guinea, we might have just 15 minutes per hour. That would make a one minute on and one minute off workout last eight of our current minutes. Or maybe not if we also had 15 hours in a day.
Apparently there was no 60-minute hour originally. Instead, the Babylonians decided that a "double-hour" had 120 of our modern minutes. And, according to the Wikipedia entry (and I'm not making this up!), instead of seconds, the Babylonians used a unit called the barleycorn (about 3.33 seconds). [Don't trust everything you read on Wikipedia.]
The Babylonians also probably invented the month and that was very likely related to the moon logically enough (otherwise we might have 60-day months). The week, on the other hand, is apparently an arbitrary creation based on a quarter of a lunar month. Many training regimens are based on weeks (8 weeks of base training, 4 weeks of lactate threshold training, 2 weeks of anaerobic capacity training, etc). Indeed, you could easily argue that the most basic unit of our training schedules (see this Google search for example) is a quarter of a lunar month. One might call that a bit of lunacy (if one were prone to bad puns).
Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, is said to have created a 10-month, 304-day calendar, with December being the 10th month. Apparently there was some period -- presumably about two months worth-- of inter-year time. That sounds like some annual training plans: 10-months on, two-months off.
Julius Caesar, advised by an astronomer, rearranged the calendar a bit, creating 12 months and screwing up leap years. Augustus Caesar partially fixed the leap year problem and Pope Gregory XIII really straightened things out. As a result, my brother-in-law (born February 29) gets a true birthday every 4 years, which strictly interpreted, really messes with his age handicap in masters rowing events.
Constantine converted to Christianity and persuaded people to take Sundays off. Many rowers still take one day off a week (though it is seldom Sunday).
The bottom line is much training advice is based on the number of fingers and toes of normal people (apologies to polydactyl readers), the quirky Babylonians, the decisions made by ancient Roman politicians and maybe a religious figure or two. At least al-Khwārizmī provided the scientific imprimatur of a mathematician. It's still a hodge podge of random, seemingly arbitrary choices and hardly the basis for anything regarding physiology and athletic performance.
Therefore, from now on I will be structuring my training on the left-truncatable prime numbers, this after I'll move my tongue from my cheek...which leaves more room for my foot.
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