Periodization: beginners guide

What is Periodisation?

Young people play more than 1 sport

Most people start off with Tudor Bompa’s Periodization or, in this country, Frank Dick’s sports training principles when learning about periodisation. They cover the basis premise about modulating volume and intensity over a period of time to allow overload and adaptation to take place.

The problem is that these theories have been taken from predominantly single energy system sports such as shot putt or marathon running, in events that have one or two relatively short seasons a year.

Trying to reverse engineer these concepts into multiple sprint field sports that have very long seasons with very short off seasons doesn’t really work.

There has been a paucity of research that compares different periodisation strategies with each other compared with a control group who do standard training.

As a result, coaches either stick to linear periodisation, or 1 or 2 variations within this theme (myself included). There is a need for decent research that analyses what aspects of periodisation would be most useful at different stages of an athlete’s career and also for different parts of the season.

At present it appears that any periodisation- linear, daily undulating, weekly undulating, accumulation and intensification- works on beginners in strength training. It may be true to say that experienced athletes may benefit more from periodisation of modality and intensity with less manipulation of volume.

A few years ago I put together a 4 year plan for young athletes looking at overall themes of training, rather than detailed session plan. As Gary Winckler points out, there i sno point in planning in detail more than 2 weeks ahead, because things change too much.

As Von Clausewitz said “No plan survives contact with the enemy“.

Periodisation is great as an overarching principle, but is must be flexible and adaptable.

Further reading:

• Periodisation strategies here
• Planning your in season training

(I know it is the US spelling, but Periodisation doesn’t get typed into search engines much!!)