500 Words a Week - Concepts that helped me with planning/ periodization part 2
As mentioned in my first blog post around planning/ periodization, I struggled dealing with the uncertainty that is involved in academy football where fixtures can change and there are times of congested fixtures. Some of Mladen’s Agile Periodization concepts greatly helped with my ability to plan a robust programme that could be adapted easily to match the changes in the schedule or deal with players missing sessions for various reasons.
However, when I first started implementing Mladen’s concepts, I feel I fell in at the deep end and labelled traditional periodization methods as dead. This goes against a common theme that I try to bring across in this blog, in that we take and apply knowledge from both sides of the argument, we never completely dismiss any concepts/ methods. Reflecting upon my naïve understanding on agile periodization at the time, I went almost too agile and didn’t saturate certain physical qualities enough. I also disregarded creating an overarching periodization framework for my athletes, believing that this was anti – agile periodization.
My time interning at Elon and reading more around Agile Periodization (particularly Mladen’s book), helped show that you can take from both sides of traditional periodization while using concepts from agile periodization (read previous blog post).
Think of periodization as a road trip, or a bag packing holiday. You want to plan your trip enough that you have a rough idea about where you want to go, with some places along the way you would like to see, so you don’t get completely lost. However, you don’t want to plan everything so that you can deviate from the plan at times to visit places you hadn’t planned on visiting or follow some friends you’ve made along the way.
A paper I recently read helped me to further reframe my thinking from my past mistakes:
Addressing the confusion within periodization research - Hornsby
From this, we see some of the agile periodization concepts could be considered more planning models as they are driven by day-day and week-week programming decisions, and don’t follow an overarching periodization scheme/ strategy. Periodization is a conceptual outline that deals with timelines and fitness phases with a goal in mind, it creates a time and direction for training volume, intensity, and task specific factors. Your programming/ planning drives your periodization phase.
As my good friend, Josh Davidson said to me upon discussing the paper mentioned above; “Have a plan and apply the principles of training. There are many methods and it might be that some are more optimal in a given context”.
To conclude, have some form of overarching plan/ periodization scheme, but don’t plan the year into microscopic detail. Use an agile planning system to support your overall periodization scheme and plan the programming.
Agile Planning
Also, you have to know the rules before you can break them. Appreciate the concepts of traditional periodization.
