What is Periodization Anyway?

This is a “101” level approach to understanding how to plan your physical development cycles within the game of youth soccer.

You’ve probably read a dozen articles on it and attended another half dozen lectures about it…but do you utilize it to make the most out of your time with your team?

Periodization, by definition, is the planning or organization of skill development according to desired results in sport. Although originally created by sports scientist, periodization has been popularized in the modern soccer game to include tactical and technical approaches by coaches like Jose Mourinho and Andres Vilas Boas, amongst others. However popular, the idea of periodizing for soccer specificity is rarely inclusive in the main element that underpins the action and execution of results, the physiological skills. This article will be one in a series of talking points and considerations into why we may need to get away from current trends in order to better focus on including physical skills specific to greater outcomes.

Hans Seyle: The Beginning

It’s important to know the basic history and origins of a given topic, even though we know that as time passes, the original intention doesn’t always match the current trends. However this may be true, understanding the context of the intentions behind the origin and following the timeline of progression/evolution, we can see a more clear picture on the principles on how to evolve our particular interest to make it our own.

Hans Seyle became the inspiration of periodization by developing the model known as the General Adaptation Syndrome in the 1930s. This model showed that through given stress, the body will go through 3 stages of physiological change:

1. The Alarm Stage — where the body receives the initial shock of the stress implied on the system and its acute response into the “fight or flight” mode. When we initiate new exercises, progress skill demands, or have congested competition weeks of the season we bring about this stage.
2. The Resistance Stage — in this stage the athlete begins to adapt or create changes in the body’s specific system to return physical levels to normal. Although the stress may still be present and the body may still be in an aroused state, this is the sweet spot for growth in the process and must be handled with precision.
3. The Exhaustion Stage — here we have a prolonged stimulus of stress that has far exceeded the players capacity to resist the given stress and has pushed them into a phase where all aspects of performance will be drastically decreased and the likelihood of injury becomes high.
4. Super Compensation — this is not in the original model but worth noting as it is the phase where our body adapts positively (in contrast to the Exhaustion Stage) to the Resistance stage and should be our planned goal for periodization. Remember that stress is good and needed when it is handled with care and understanding that the “push” (training) has to be followed with a “pull” (rest) in order to build a resistance that is better than when we started. Positive stress is termed eustress, where the more familiar distress is negative. Again, all stress begins the same…with the Alarm, but its what follows that creates the final product.

Through the understanding of this physiological phenomenon, the Soviets took the model and applied it to their training for Olympic dominance through the 50’s and eventually into the hands of a Romanian, named Tudor Bumpa, who created the western modernization of the process and allowed the United States to enter competition with the Soviets on the Olympic stage. Fast forward to the fall of the Soviet Union and communism and its first introduction into the game of international football made its debut with the ever-so-popular sports scientist that created the beep test, Jens Bansgsbo, as well as Istvan Balyi, who developed periodization for youth in the Long Term Athletic Development Model.

So, what does Salye’s GAS theory have to do with the game of soccer and your ability to implement it at youth and sub-elite levels?

It all comes down to understanding basic physiology and planning cycles.

Periodization = Organization

Let’s take a quick right-hand turn to gain clarity around periodization through the lens of an organized youth soccer season. First off, it’s important to recognize that every team has a different level of commitment and agenda for their playing goals but the principles should never change and can be adapted into any specific environment, no matter how uncommitted or committed, an elite or sub-elite, unorthodox, old or young…your team is.

The key to organizing your season is to develop short term and long term periods of training and competition called cycles. The shortest cycle, called a Microcycle, can last as long as you want it, but traditionally represents a week’s worth of training and games. Next we have the Mesocycle that focuses on a block of time to create a goal (weeks or months) and focuses on one moment of the game that you want to progress, then each moment will have a number of principles to improve in each system of play (physical, mental, tactical, and technical, etc…). Each of these different principles carries sub-principles that are executed in the microcycles. For example: if during a 3–4 week period I want to work on our teams ability to attack from the width, I may choose to create a principle of finding the wingers in the attacking 3rd, then a sub-principle of effective crossing and runs in the box. Concurrently, we have the same for the physical system: moment = attack from the width, principle = acceleration over 20–30 yards, sub-principle = arm action & hamstring strength.

And finally, the Macrocycle is the largest format of them all, representing a 3-mile view of the larger season or year and what you want as your ultimate result (state championship, a positive experience, etc…). The idea in planning an effective process is to work from the Macrocycle backward and get more and more detailed until you bring it down to the very purpose of every individual session and the exercises that you believe will make this happen.

Below you can see an example of a periodized model that I put together for a youth club a few years ago, where we broke up a season Macrocycle (5 months) into 3 individual Mesocycles and 6 different Microcycles. This plan was formatted from extensive conversations with the coach regarding the goals of the team and its individual player's needs. The biggest takeaway that I can encourage each coach to pay attention to is that there are 2 separate Competitive Period Microcycles where we were aiming to build peak performance. Therefore, the volume and type of work that we organized within these cycles had to reflect a vision in the future that is dictated by those 2 periods. The coach obviously took the lead in the principles that dealt with the technical and tactical moments in the game, where I complimented his work through developing physical principles that matched the goals. The purpose was well timed and progressive development where we couldn’t worry about winning in the first 6 weeks because we were building for something bigger down the road.

How do you plan for the physical?…

We could write an entire dissertation on physiology and its relation to soccer, but here is the gist of just a few principles that may expand your thoughts a bit more (we can/will expand on this in future articles and discussions):

1. Physiological Principle #1 — The body does not discern between different stresses. Generally speaking, from a systemic point of view, stress is stress. Even non-physical stresses will send the body into the alarm stage and create resistance that, when compounded with a high volume of physical stresses, will push a player into exhaustion.
2. Attention: be careful how many stressors you give players at any given time. A new formation, high volumes of conditioning, and 2.5-hour practices are probably not suited for exam time. Understand the person as well as the athlete.
3. Takeaway: Don’t just put the important games and tournaments into your periodization model…include the physiological parts of the year that are stressful and outside of your control. Exams, holidays, homecoming, and big football games are all something you need to pay attention to and keep on your radar to ensure appropriate programming.
4. Physiological Principle #2 — The Law of Specificity states that specific desired results require specific training. If you want to increase flexibility, you must utilize exercises that work on the system(s) that impose mechanical changes to adapt to increase a range of motion. You can’t expect to run sprints and increase your hamstring length permanently.
5. Takeaway = I don’t care what you heard Raymond Verheijan say in an interview on developing world-class players. If you want to specifically develop physical attributes that are available at the most important moments of the game (speed and fitness), you need to train these skills off the ball, at some point.
6. Want a player to get faster.? Develop speed off the ball then come back and adapt the new speed to the ball (the ball always slows down the run and will not super compensate the ability to sprint). Want her to be 90 minutes fit? Develop aerobic capacity without the ball before specific training (the ball always adds intensity and heart rate to the movement and specific fitness adaptations cannot be controlled).
7. Physiological Principle #3 — the aerobic energy pathway is the lynchpin of all physical ability and it takes a massive amount of time to develop but a very short time to crush. No matter if you want to build a modern and athletic style of play or a more passive tactical approach, you need to have a team with the physical capacity to endure. The problem is that most coaches and athletes that I have come across, in the game of soccer, skip the foundation work of general physical preparedness and move directly into high intensity or interval training in order to achieve short term gains.
8. The aerobic system will naturally develop itself at young ages (<12 for girls/13 for boys) by just playing and training frequently. Any specific aerobic (long slow distance) training at these ages tends to have a negative side effect in terms of chronic injury termed “growing pains” which are really overloaded joints and consistently putting the body into the exhaustion stage.
9. Takeaway = Spend focused time in the offseason or early season to create moments for strategic aerobic work through low to medium intensity drills that are continuous. Ditch the short-sided play for technical/tactical patterns and exercises that are not intermittent and can be run for 15–20 minutes at a time. This is a great place to work on technical repetition and instill habits for position specific work. Trust me, every time that I have players training in an aerobic zone (65–75% of max hr), they don’t feel like they are getting much out of it. But it always works out in the end when they are injury free and 90 minutes fit.

Ask Better Questions

The way you can begin to have periodization work for your team is by asking questions that will ultimately lead you to create an environment for more effective execution on physical development.

1. How long do you want your macrocycle to be (season or year)?
2. How many mesocycles would naturally fit in this macro?
3. How many microcycles fit into the mess?
4. What are your goals for the year/season?
5. What moments in the game are most critical to your goals?
6. What physical characteristics are necessary to execute these moments?
7. What drills/exercises are most likely to elicit the characteristics that you have listed?
8. Are there more critical times within your macrocycle that you want to perform well?
9. Are there times where you are willing to downregulate volume/intensity to recover?

Next time…

We will unwrap how to develop movement/fitness qualities and how to mold the work into your soccer specific environment.

Please let me know if you have any specific questions on this topic or any other in relation to coaching performance (john@theperformanceu.com).