500 Words a Week - Concepts that helped me with planning/ periodization

When I started my first full time role, I struggled in making a programme I was truly happy with and that I felt had a positive impact on the lads. I had so many ideas of what I wanted to do, and I tried to do all of them to not a huge amount of success. I was also confused with how to deal with the uncertainty present in our calendar, in that games would often be on different days every week and most weeks we had two games. On top of this, our lads were only in the building for a limited amount of time, what would be a 40-minute gym session got pushed to 25 minutes or shorter on occasions.

Mladen Jovanovic’s concepts helped me dramatically with some of these problems. Some of these concepts are building a minimum viable programme, agile planning and using a barbell loading strategy. Is it better to spend 1 year building a product that you think is going to be great, spending the full year waiting until you believe it’s perfect to release it? Or is it better to spend 2 months building a minimum viable product (a product with just enough features to be usable), release it, get feedback, and iterate (agile planning)? Over the process of the year, you could have gone through this iterative cycle many times. At the end of the year the product would look significantly better than if we waited for 1 year until we believed it to be perfect to release it. This describes the process of iteration and introduces building a minimum viable programme. With our minimum viable programme, we are trying to make our programme simple enough to hit all of the identified important qualities with some form of loading, and ensure these are being addressed consistently.

Agile Planning

Minimum Viable Programme

The barbell loading strategy adapted from Nassim Taleb’s work, discusses how we must first protect from the downside and then when the moment is right invest in the upside. We protect from the downside by ensuring we are always hitting the identified important qualities (like above). This may be ensuring every week we are doing something to hit strength, speed and power qualities or/ and ensuring every key muscle group gets some form of stimulus. Investing in the upside is when time allows we saturate certain qualities to a greater degree with the intention of improving this quality and reaching new levels of performance. For example, you have a week without a game so you push the boat on your strength stimulus.

Barbell Loading Strategy

Mladen makes a wonderful point, in that certain qualities are more likely to improve performance by protecting from the downside, rather than reaping the benefits from the upside. In team sports, increasing strength may act as a shield that makes athletes more robust and more receptive to improving other qualities rather than directly improving performance.

In these 500 words I’ve only provided a taste of some of Mladen concepts, I would encourage you to look into his books and his website.