Periodisation Theory: Confronting an Inconvenient Truth with John Kiely | EP#148

Triathlon periodisation and periodisation in general is tradition-driven more than evidence-led. John Kiely is a researcher on the one hand and a coach and practitioner on the other, and today he explains why periodisation is no holy grail, and certainly not backed by the scientific research. 

• The flaws in the available research on periodisation, and the incorrect conclusions drawn from these flaws.
• The importance of buy-in and the psycho-emotional state of the athlete.
• How training variation and a good decision-making process beats periodisation.
• A 21st century approach to decision-making in training. 

0:53  -

• John is a researcher at the University of Central Lancashire, as well as a coach and consultant. 
• John does a lot of practical work and has worked directly with the coaches of Olympic and World Champions in three major sports.
• He has coached a Paralympic track medalist, a European Champion, numerous combat sports athletes as well as kids. 
• From a team sports perspective, John has worked as a consultant for rugby teams, and he is the Director of Fitness for the Gary Owen rugby academy. 
• John has also been an advisor for top professional football clubs. 

5:40 -

• Periodisation hasn't been studied extensively. There is more work from the strength training realm, but less in other areas. 
• Strength training lends itself to academic study as it can be easily quantified. 
• If you review the literature, it generally suggests that if someone has a structured training programme they perform marginally better than someone without. 
• 'Structured' in this context can still be simple, for example:
  
  An experimental group in a study may have more variation in their training but in an organised way. 
  
  A control group may have no variation or random variation.
• The best resource is the research by Greg Nuckols in the USA. 
• The research findings have been translated into 'periodisation works', but periodisation is a lot more complicated and multi-phasic. 
• The research in multi-phasic training programs is minimal, and thus tells us very little. 
• Essentially we have no idea what the best way to organise training is based on the research. 

10:55 -

• Periodisation came from the Soviet Union and it was a very regimented design.
• The length of training phases depended on the theorist but was generally 3-5 weeks. 
• There is a difference between a periodised programme and a planned programme - i.e. there are more guidelines in a periodised programme. 
  
  It is a pre-planned, pre-organised, non-reactive way of organising your training. 
• For example: If I want to develop my power, first I have to do strength training for a specific period of time, then I do power training for a specific period of time. It's a very mathematical process which you follow regardless. 
• If you drill down to the key differences:
  
  Periodisation templates offer a way to plan a long-term training programme over the course of a season.
  
  Coaches may set a structure to their training, but will alternate that structure based on emerging information (e.g. observation of athlete or athlete feedback). 
• We have all accepted that 'periodisation is best', but individual periodisation theorists have argued back and forth about which way is ideal. 
• The most well known theorists that have argued back and forth are Matveyev, Verhoshansky, and Vladimir Issurin but this has left us with a belief based system. 
• If you try and dig into the science of why a certain way of periodisation is best, the scientific rationale is extremely weak.

19:01 - 

• The periodisation logic has been a quest for finding the best training plan, which suggests such a thing exists.
  
  This isn't necessarily the case, there may instead be what is best for a particular person at a particular time. 
• Periodisation is a mechanical procedure: if you work at this intensity, this many times, for this duration, you will get X. It assumes a predictability about training outcomes.  
• Training studies introduce an intervention, average all the responses to it, and make decisions on its effectiveness based on that. 
• However, the response of individuals to training is extremely broad and unpredictable, which is not factored in to periodisation. 
• In periodisation there's an implicit belief that how much you improve is based entirely on how much you put in, which may well not be the case. 
  
  I.e. you could put genetically engineered twins through the same training plan, but if they're in different nutritional states they may respond differently. 
• Your psycho-emotional state (e.g. what mood you're in, your interpretation of the relevance of the training session) impact on your individual response to the training you do. 
  
  Periodisation theory fails to account for this.
• It's an academic disconnect - the periodisation literature that has been published neglects these factors.  

24.52 - 

• There are some emerging studies assessing periodisation and other impacting factors.
• There has been more research around athletic injury, showing that if you are an individual predisposed to stress, and currently under stress, you are more likely to get injured. 
  ​
  You will also be slower to rehabilitate, either due to the injury or due to illness.
  • Stress being psycho-emotional stress, such as relationships, disagreement with coach, perception of injury. 
• Health is fundamentally influenced by what we think, how we think, our history of stress and how vulnerable to stress we are. 
• This isn't an argument necessarily against periodisation, but again, our training culture in general. 
  ​
  We haven't really bought into this understanding of the impact of stress on health. 
• This needs to be built into how we deal with athlete, plan training, and communicate that plan to the athlete. 
  ​
  Although there isn't a 'best plan', a plan that is well thought-through and clearly explained to the athlete,  who believes in it and has high expectations for it, the athlete will perform better. 
• Anything that gives coaches the message that an ideal plan is decided separate from the athlete without considering all the other impacting factors, is a fundamental problem.
• Traditional training programmes only focus on the mechanical stressors, not on the psycho-emotional (e.g. the 'why' of the training plan).  

29:12 - 

• Defining stress is difficult. It can be any stimulus that changes chemistry in your brain, and can be both positive and negative. 
• The change in chemistry drives downstream chemical changes - for example, it may change the amount of circulating hormones in the body, or inflammatory agents. 
• We have rhythms in our brain that are set up to prepare us for the forecasted challenges of that day. 
• Things go wrong when we are stressed for prolonged periods (e.g. worrying about work). 
  
  This puts you at risk of disease and disability factors. 
• From a training perspective, too much stress can mean you get injured or unwell more, and you'll take longer to recover. Your adaptation for training will also get blunted. 
• If the chemical foundation on which you're overlaying the training stimulus is different between two people, the adaptation will be different. 

• My interest is in how can we be better at organising, planning and managing training - ultimately, I don't care if the club or person I'm working with calls it periodisation or planning.
• The important part is how it's implemented and managed, and how information is collected and used to inform what you're going to do next. 

• It's easy to knock traditional periodisation because it's so clear that people respond in diverse ways to training.  
• A lot of periodisation logic was built on archaic stress theory from the 1930's based on Seyle's work, but this has now evolved dramatically. 
• He argued that stress was a medical and physiological condition, and psychological stress was something separate.
• Since the mid 1960's, stress has been considered a bi-directional phenomenon, with physical stress affecting your mental state and vice versa. 
  
  We've been slow to absorb this in our coaching culture. 

36:09 - 

• Athletes need some degree of organisation to their training, but there is no one best way to do this. 
• Coaches need to look at the athlete and their training history, to gain a sense of what this athlete adapts to and what they need. 
  ​
  From this you can construct a logical starting point. 
• There's a number of trade offs: e.g. variation versus monotony. 
  
• We know that variation helps, and spending time at low intensity for long periods can help.
• Seiler's research can provide a guide when planning training. 
  ​
  He recommends judicious use of high intensity work, but offers no indication of how to organise that. 
  ​
  My suggestion is think sensibly about your planning.  

44:02 - 

• When it comes to periodisation, nobody knows exactly the right structure. Design the structure that works best for your context. 
• Once you manage the change in training intensities and volumes carefully, the structure may be less important. 
  
  There's a trade off between structure and agility. You can adapt training because of various reasons related to your athlete. 
  
  The better the communication between athlete and coach, the better the training planning will be. 
• As a coach, you can't plan effectively if you're not setting aside time to discuss how your athlete is getting on. 

• 19-week Strength Training Program for Triathlon (coupon code "LAUNCH" for 60% off until 30 September)
• The Triathlete's Strength Training Formula | EP#81
• Triathlon Strength Training in 2018 - The Definitive Guide
• Triathlon periodisation with Chris Myers | EP#112
• Periodization Paradigms in the 21st Century: Evidence-Led or Tradition-Driven?
• Periodization Theory: Confronting an Inconvenient Truth
  

Connect with John Kiely

Connect with host Mikael Eriksson

Hi! I'm your host Mikael,

I am a full-time triathlon coach and an ambitious age-group triathlete. My goal is podium at the Finnish national championships within the next few years.

I first started the website Scientific Triathlon in autumn 2015 as a passion project to share my learnings with a larger triathlon audience. Later on, in early 2017 I started the podcast That Triathlon Show. 

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