The TRUTH About Periodization w/ John Kiely (SSOF Ep. 53)

John Kiely3:08

Yeah, well I guess just as a bit about background context of that paper, it was, I was a fully bought-in, paid-up member of the pro-periodization club. But both as a kind of hard-training athlete in a hard-training sport, and as a coach, it just, that type of thinking that typified periodization at the time just kept getting me into trouble.

So when I wrote that 2012 paper, I was an S&C practitioner. I had read somewhere that the average academic paper was read by seven people, so I thought that's okay, I can handle seven people laughing at me. But it evolved, and it took me ages to write because I was writing it at the weekends and things like that. But it seemed to land with a lot of people in a way that I definitely hadn't expected.

And the thing is, when you talk to coaches, there's this kind of, there was this big disconnect. All the experienced coaches knew that well, we can't interpret this periodization research as gospel, but the periodization research was still portraying itself as gospel in a sense. So I think my bit of writing just came at the right time through luck, but a lot of really good coaches responded really well. A lot of people didn't like it, but that's the nature of the beast.

And really I was writing that paper for the high-performance coaches who really knew the game. That's what I had, that was the audience I had in my head. So yeah, so that's the backstory to that.

In terms of what got me thinking about periodization, as I said, I started off as a believer. But I guess with just experience, and I tended to work a lot with athletes who were injured or athletes who were a little bit older, coming to the end of their career but trying to squeeze out one last major champs, and it becomes very clear when you're working in those contexts that there is no rulebook.

And the more imagined rules you have in your head, the more poor decisions you make. The more you rely on generalizations and historical examples, the less deeply you think about the actual problem in front of you. So if I just kind of try and explain that a little clearer, there's a temptation.

And I was at a track and field conference the past couple of days in the UK, and we had a big discussion around thinking for yourself versus taking off-the-shelf answers. And there was top-level coaches at this, Olympic, World Championship medalists. And they were all saying that you have to think it through from first principles, you can't take an off-the-shelf recommendation.

And the more you take the off-the-shelf recommendation, the more skewed your thinking and your answers will be. And that sounds like a very common sense thing to say, but when you look at the academic literature, that's the message that you get. You don't get any kind of subtleties around, well you have to play what's in front of you. It's like, yeah, this is your set of solutions, off you go.

So I don't think I answered all your questions there, James, so if you just want to redirect me.

James de Lacey7:14

No, no, that's a preface to this whole idea of periodization as well. But I was interested in you diving into, for a lot of the listeners, are athletes themselves, just the idea of what periodization is and what periodization isn't.

John Kiely7:40

Okay. Well, you're after tapping into a key problem in the culture at the moment, and that is we use periodization but it's not really well defined. But let me, there was a paper that came out recently which looked at all the period publications in the academic literature and what was periodization, and they were all different. I think there was over 100 of them. Okay, so that's a problem straight away. If you've got over 100 definitions of a word, that's a problem.

But I went through all of them, and they all have things in common. They all make one fundamental presumption, and that is the presumption that you, me, any of us, can predict what is going to work best for this athlete. Not only can you predict what's going to work best, but you can predict what time frame it needs to go in. So it'll take me 12, it'll take me eight weeks to get their strength up to speed, and then they'll be ready for this, and then they'll be ready for this.

So there's a whole sequence of presumptions that are normally founded on, when you dive into the literature, maybe sometimes the trail goes back to some 1954 paper from the old Soviet Union, or it goes to this couple of studies with university athletes that really were just looking at strength training over a four, six, eight week period or something like that. And you think, well you're basing this big conclusion on this ridiculously skimpy bit of evidence. And I guess to me it just seemed like a sleight of hand, like a little fake, to say, well look, here's this study that supports this, so this is true.

And I think, okay, so that all sounds very negative towards periodization. It's not meant to be. Where periodization started out was, coaching an athlete, regardless of young, old, just one athlete or a group of athletes, is ridiculously complex. It is ridiculously complex. As human beings, we don't want to face that complexity, so we try to come up with rules.

And I think that's why periodization was so easily embraced and so readily embraced, was that, hey, this is really confusing. Aha, here's a set of rules, here's a template you can plug your numbers into, and it'll tell you what to do. And then you as a coach can go, okay, I've done my due diligence, we're up and running. But that's not the case.

The case is there are very few rules. I think there are some basic rules, but there's very few rules. And we've overdone it on the imagined rules perspective, and now it's getting in our way. It's getting in the way of having a clear vision and making clear decisions.

Now let me go back to one thing, and that was what is periodization? It is a form of prediction. It is predicting time frames, predicting sequence. So if I do this first, then they'll be more ready for this, and they'll get better benefits from this, and then they'll get better benefits from this. So there's time frame, there's sequence, and then there's an assumption that people will respond broadly the same.

If I give you and me and another 30, 40, 100 people the same intervention, we'll all respond relatively similarly. We all understand we won't respond exactly the same, but we assume we'll respond broadly the same. We also assume that we'll respond within a similar time.

Frame, and we assume that the similar type of sequencing will work for all of us. So whatever, classically strength, force, power, second. And the truth of the matter is, and this is ridiculously clear from research the past 10, 15 years, is that we all respond in very, very unpredictable ways to the same training.

And part of the discussion yesterday with the track and field coaches was you can get different people can get to the same place through very different routes, or the same, sorry, different people by different routes, or you can go to different places taking the same route, if you know what I mean. So the whole game of trying to predict what will work best for an athlete is fundamentally flawed, and that sense that we can predict it is at the root of periodization.

Let me skip back a little bit, and I know I'm going on a bit now, but where periodization came from, because I think this is informative. Where it came from was, I think it was after the '52 Games, I can't remember exactly if it was '52, the '52 Olympics, Soviet Union came second to the U.S. in terms of the medal rankings, and that was a problem politically.

So they tasked this young PhD student, a guy called Leonid Matveyev, people would have heard of, and they gave him access to a lot of stats, a lot of figures in these three, it was three sports. And in these three sports, these thousands of athletes, here's what they did because they had the records, and here were the ones that achieved, here was the ones that weren't achieved.

And Matveyev did what was sensible at the time and made those assumptions that were, well, everyone will respond broadly the same way. And he just did the maths. He just got the Excel sheet or whatever was 1956 equivalent and worked out, this is the best thing to do, these are this is the best phase length, this is the best type of training to do in this phase, and that's where it came from.

He then wrote a book, Fundamentals of Sports Training. Soviet Union, for lots of different reasons, good reasons in terms of they probably had the most widespread PE program, that were probably the first to have professional coaches as a really respected profession, and all the bad reasons we know about as well with the old Soviet Union. But for some mix of those reasons, they were at the top of the sporting tree.

U.S. and the Soviet Union flip-flopped over the next few Olympic cycles in terms of one and two. Soviets never got dominance over U.S. despite what, that's what Matveyev's work was supposed to do. But that's where it came from. That's where the concept came from. It was a very old type of mechanistic thinking. If I do this, then this will happen.

If I do it, it happens to me, it'll also happen for you, it'll happen for all these other athletes. Let's just scale this out. And that's what they wanted to do. They wanted a system that they could farm out to everyone and say, do this, do this system.

James de Lacey15:22

That makes sense. That's kind of a whirlwind tour.

John Kiely15:22

But that's it, for sure. I guess there's another piece to that, and then the piece was, if you go back to '70s, '80s, Soviet athletes were nip and tuck with the Western athletes, but they were perceived as the most professional. They were perceived as in advance of the West, and there were in some ways in terms of their schools, their PE in schools, the professional coaching ease they had.

But they were way behind us in a lot of ways, where you had Western coaches who were intuitive and creative and worked with the athlete in front of them rather than on this average, non-existent typical athlete. They were getting the same results with much less resources than the Soviets had at the time. But that wasn't really recognized. We thought the Soviet system was great.

Matveyev's book gets translated to English in 1980. Lots of coaches embrace it because all of a sudden it's a solution to this complexity problem. And there was the assumption that it was supported by research, which it wasn't really by anything meaningful, at least by today's standards. So we bought in. It was the Soviet secret to success, and we bought in. And it's still biting us in the ass.

James de Lacey17:09

Having lived in Eastern Europe recently, before getting back to the podcast, I want to let you know there's a link down in the description for the Sweet Science of Fighting Underground community. You can get all the help you need for your combat sports training. You get every single Sweet Science of Fighting training program, online course, and you get access to a range of coaches within the private Discord community. So go check that out, and back to the podcast.

I mean, I've seen a lot of that in action in terms of it's coaches just, athletes like another cog on the wheel. They just do this program, everyone does this program, and that's just how it's done. And I mean, it's still like that over there, so it hasn't changed much.

John Kiely17:37

And I mean, it's interesting for me because I've worked in a number of different sports now. Every different sport has a sporting culture, seems to have a different interpretation. But so much of what we do and so much of the decisions we make is bound up in history. It's bound up in tradition. It's bound up in how we trained or how we were coached. It's bound up in a set of beliefs that we haven't really looked at and scrutinized and pulled apart and thought, well, why do I believe that? Is it just because it's what we always did?

And I think that's really the problem. And I don't think there's any problem with the coach using periodization, but not thinking that that's all I need to do. Was, use this template or use this Excel and set it up like this. That's not it at all. I think the much more important thing to plan is, well, where do I build in change? How am I going to be able to pivot?

Because if I, one thing I will guarantee you, if you were a coach who spends hours and hours and hours planning, you're going to be slow to change that plan. You will have invested, it will be, and you will have invested heavily in that plan, and that makes it harder from a decision-making perspective to pivot.

One other thing that I think is really important, and that typifies periodization logic. Periodization logic typifies the political logic of the time, the scientific logic of the time. And that is the scientific logic of the time was there was a separation between body and head, what you call the biomedical model. It was like, well, pain is directly reflective of tissue damage, for example. If I do this amount of training, I will get this disproportional output out the other end.

And of course we knew that, well, nutrition matters, sleep matters, et cetera, et cetera. But that biomedical model totally disregarded kind of mental problems, psychological issues, emotional issues. There's something that happened from here up. The body that starts from the shoulders down. But what's more than clear now in the research outside of sport is that how you feel about training, how you trust your coach, how you feel invested in your program, how you feel this training connects with your overall purpose, they're fundamental drivers of training adaptation.

They're not fuzzy little nice-to-dos. They actually affect how you respond physically to training. How much muscle grows or tendon responds or how easily are the difficulty level at which at which skills are embedded. So there's a whole belief, trust, faith, purpose, stress, not stressed, all of those non-physical factors. Are, you can't separate them from physical training. They are part of how you adapt to training.

And it's very similar to kind of nature versus nurture. You can't separate them. And the more you pull them apart and see them as distinct things, the more skewed your thought process becomes. And I think from a coaching perspective, this is a good thing because it gives you other dials that you can shift.

So somebody not responding to a training program. Now, if they believe more in that training, if they're educated a bit more to understand the rationale underpinning that program, if they understand better how it's going to lead them to their overall purpose, all those type of things will enhance their response to that training. If their belief goes for whatever reason, this isn't working, I got injured, my back is grumbly, those things will inhibit their ability to respond to that training.

And not in some, well for me it's, there's two parts to periodization. It was nobody's fault, but culturally we thought, well, you can predict adaptation because all of these thousands of people, when they did this type of training on average, this is how much they responded. And that was the biomedical model and mechanical thinking and blah, blah, blah.

Now we're in an era of, well, we don't use the biomedical model anymore. There's still a legacy in medicine and in other pursuits, but we're still buying into it in sport, or definitely in terms of sports planning. But there's a huge, we can't predict, and how you feel about your training directly affects how you physiologically, neurologically respond to that training. There are two concepts that were not prior to the periodization conversation.

James de Lacey22:56

You also mentioned about basic rules and imaginary rules of periodization. Do I may dive into a little, just a couple of the basic rules?

John Kiely22:56

Well, I guess basic rules in my head are, you...

Need to think deeply about your starting point. You can predict what will work with this athlete, but you need to be very careful on your starting point. If you start, and this is you see it across the world, across sports, preseason training: "Okay, we're going to, we're going to beat people." And then it's like, it's craziness.

So it's more, for me, it's I'm going to spend more time worrying about my starting point than about what I'm going to be doing in four weeks' time or eight weeks' time. I'm going to consolidate that starting point, and then I'm going to grow it. But I'm going to do that in the knowledge that I can't grow it quickly. If I grow it quickly, I run into problems.

Now sometimes, you've been injured, Olympics is closing in on you, you have to make some hard decisions. But you make those decisions with the athlete and it's like, "Okay, but we're going to be increasing the risk here, but these are the benefits. And if you want to perform like this or get this standard, then we need to take risks." But you do it knowingly and in a, in a shared kind of co-ownership type way.

James de Lacey24:41

Yeah. Okay. Do you want to redirect me there?

John Kiely24:41

I, that's good.

James de Lacey24:41

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Do, are there any other basic rules you have around periodization? You've got the starting point. Is there anything else that you like to, I guess, use as a guideline?

John Kiely24:41

Well, like, I wouldn't consider the planning that I do is periodization. It's more, yeah, let's go down that road. It's, it's adaptive. But I understand that if you're working in, let's say, the US Collegiate system and you're working with 200 athletes, you can't individualize periodization programs or any training program.

But I think what is totally acceptable to do then is you just make a best guess. And if you, if you like the sound of this particular type of periodization or somebody's different type of periodization, then use it. But I think you have to have, it's kind of, there's a difference than if you believe it is the best or you believe, "Well, no, this is just pragmatic for now because it's helping me manage what otherwise would be a completely, you know, an avalanche of problems or I just could not do it with the time and brain space I have available."

So I think in those context, it's okay to use a periodization program. But I think you need to know the flaws. You need to know the flaws so you can think your way through that program and go, "Well, maybe I'm not going to give him a program for four weeks. I'm going to give him a program for two weeks.

And maybe I'm not just going to give them the program, but every session for the first three minutes I'm going to give them a briefing. And in that briefing, I'm going to slip in some education. I'm slipping in some education so I'm kind of growing their background training knowledge."

I'm growing their background training knowledge so I can get good feedback from them and so we can have more evolved conversations. And those conversations can lead to you as the coach and them eventually, once they're well educated in training context, that being kind of co-owners, co-decision makers. And then you can farm out responsibility. Okay, go through your normal routine, pre-warm up, do your normal warmup, then we have a 30-second conversation and we'll, we'll finalize today's program, that type of thing.

You can scale that. But you can't do that with an athlete who hasn't been educated by you to think in that way. If they're thinking, if they're in that old model where the coach is the font of all knowledge and the coach will tell me what to do and I'll just do that, you need to educate them out of that. You need to educate them, you need to share terminology so that when you have a conversation, you understand what they're saying and they understand exactly what you're saying.

So in a sense, what I'm suggesting is we have a planning model historically that's one-dimensional: "Here's what you're doing physically." What I'm suggesting we need is a multi-dimensional planning model where it's, "Okay, here's our starting point, it's safe." Some sometimes it won't be safe because of timelines, but it's entering into that discussion with the knowledge that we're going to have to take risks. This is the last season of your career, this is the last event, we got to go for it or not, but it's your call, that type of thing.

So how am I doing there? Do you want to redirect me?

James de Lacey28:28

No, you're good, you're good. I just wanted to ask you a question on the idea of, I think most people jump into planning the training program as an athlete, or maybe someone's not as experienced in the space, as they jump straight to like a block periodization approach. They go, "Okay, I'm going to do a hypertrophy phase, then a strength phase, and then a power phase," et cetera.

And I guess, I guess it's turned to like a phasic approach to training. Is there, is there any evidence suggesting that going from, say, a hyper to strength or strength to power is any more beneficial than just other variations of periodization? I know like in terms of block periodization, I'm not so much of a fan, especially for mixed sports like rugby, et cetera, et cetera. But I think a lot of people jump down that road anyway, so might be interesting just to hear your take on that idea of moving through phases like that.

John Kiely29:19

No, I don't think there, like, there isn't, for me, there's no type of quality evidence for that. I think what there is evidence, and where experience and common sense would point you as well, is we can't do too much too soon. We have to be patient.

You, you as an athlete, you will only have a certain amount of, you will only have a certain capacity to adapt to training in any given time. So for example, in every sport there's a lot of legendary performers who won gold medals or won lots of awards who did monstrous training sessions. And there's kind of a tendency to focus in those people and try and emulate what they did, which is completely does not make sense. What worked for one person will not work for you. What worked for what one person could tolerate will break you, or vice versa.

So I'm after sliding off your question again there. Do you want to just me back in the right direction?

James de Lacey30:29

Just around the idea of going through phases like hypert into strength and into power.

John Kiely30:29

The only time I would think of those as useful are two times. One is if you, if it is pragmatic for you from a time perspective or a communication perspective. If it's lots of athletes, it's saying, "We will do this here and then we'll do this, and we'll change it." If you, if so, if it's that type of squad scenario, it works because it's pragmatic.

I don't think it works best biologically or neurologically. I think if you were also, if you're working with an athlete who maybe is new to your camp or something like that, coming from a different club, it's important to take their beliefs and considerations into account. So they believe they need to work in those type of time frames. I'd be inclined to go, "Yeah, maybe that's okay." But gradually over time, I'd engage in conversations and find out why they believe that, and then maybe if appropriate, looking to either change their beliefs or my beliefs.

So, so yeah, it, it can be pragmatic, it can be simplifying. But if, if the question is, is there a benefit, for example, of doing, doing all strength and then transitioning to, I don't know, whatever, power, it's clunky for me. It's very clunky.

Now, if it's you working one-on-one with a really high performing athlete, then it would be, "Well, you know what we're doing, we're going to change percentages." You know, 40% of our program is going to be, of our, let's say our strength program is going to be robustness, just keeping you resilient, but in a non-fatiguing way that doesn't inhibit your event-specific training. Some of it is going to be, I don't know, if we've identified some muscular weakness, we're going to address that. Some of it is going to be, "Okay, so here's more event-specific power type stuff."

And what I do over time is, because variation is good, but it's got to be handled well, I would moderate those percentages. That's an example. Now, that's a more fine-grained, fine-grained way of handling the issue of, "Well, we need this exposure and this exposure and this exposure." But it's a lot less clunky than "We're going to do this for eight weeks, and then we're going to do this for eight weeks," and assuming that there's some magical progression between "I'm doing all slow but really heavy, and now I can do my power stuff faster." I don't think that's the way either brain or body work.

Can I just ask if that kind of answered that question?

James de Lacey33:13

That answered that perfectly. Yep. I'm with you on that too. And yeah, it's, it's one of those things that I think a lot of people just fall into, like it's almost like a trap that people fall into there. But I think it's interesting as well, you talk a lot about variation within the paper.

And I know if, I think it's in Issurin's block periodization book, he talks about for training load being intensity, volume, and variation being one of the variables there to essentially spur progress. And I know I had Martin Baser on last year, if anyone wants to go back and listen to that, where he trained under Bondarchuk. And he talked about variation being with, periodization being variation being that thing that can just essentially create change within your program. I wonder if

I wonder if you're able to just dive into a little bit around the idea of variation within training, the balance, finding that balance between too much and enough.

John Kiely34:04

Perfect. And just as a note to any listeners, I'd recommend going back and listen to Martin's conversation with you. I mean, I haven't actually heard that conversation, but I know Martin. Yeah, he's in the unique position in terms of he's a periodization theorist, effectively. He's a high-performing athlete or has been for quite a while and trained under Bondarchuk. So there's kind of a unique perspective there and it's really interesting to hear his thoughts on that.

Yeah, variation, it's one of these things. Too much variation, what happens: your adaptive energy is spread too thinly. You don't really get anywhere. Maybe you improve, but that improvement is because your adaptive energy is spread across a number of different activities. You don't really get really good at your target activity.

So the way it works in most sports is at the start of the season there's a lot of variation, then coming towards competition it's kind of a pyramid if you like. There's very little and it's much more specific.

But there's lots of other potential models there could be, and again these will all be with maybe senior athletes, as in high-performance athletes. You could be, I need to be specific, I need to stay in touch with my core event and core intensities throughout the season. It does not make sense to go away from that. If I'm a triple jumper, I can't enhance my technique if I'm going at just 90% of full throttle, for example. And that happens in all sports.

If I'm a footballer who wants to enhance my deceleration ability, I can't be going slow into a turn or a stop. So for me, there's good logic to say you should stay in touch with your core movements and their core intensities all the time, but the volume can be very small.

Where we clearly run into problems is when we have these sharp changes. This block is over, going to give you a few days easy, and then we're going to go hard again in this new block. And all of a sudden we've introduced something new in this new block. Variation is good when it's managed well. You need variation to keep adapting, to stay robust. But if those variation changes are sharp, and it is the oldest story in the book, we changed our phase and then two or three weeks later people start coming down with injuries.

Why? Well, because you introduced something new that weren't used to. That exposure generated fatigue. I got a little fatigue in my calf. That changed what I was doing around my knee. I kept doing reps. All of a sudden that turns into a sore point. There's another compensation, boom, something in the chain goes.

So it's not just the case of saying variation is good, variation is bad. It is a situation of it needs to be the right amount for this athlete spread over the right time. And again, anytime I kind of say something like this, I feel like it's not a good message because it's putting the load back on the coach. There is nothing you can read about variation in a book that is going to tell you how to manage variation well with your athlete in your context.

So the easy thing to do and the way to save the kind of discomfort of having to make a difficult decision is read it in a book and do it. The book says four weeks, the book says 12 reps, whatever it is. But really we know every individual context, every individual athlete are unique.

So for me, good coaching is all about doing the hard work where the hard work is. I need to think about this. Now, I think there's one qualifier at that: you can't think about everything as a coach. So it's just picking your battles and go, I'm going to think about this problem now, I'm going to park all these problems and keep doing what we're doing. But that's a work on for me. I'm going to come back to that at some stage.

Or it may be that you get a, you talk to another coach or you learn something that changes your mind, but you're in the middle of a phase. And then it's a judgment call: do I actually go and change things now, or do I stay until the end of the phase and then work it into my program?

And I think that's really important because we need to be, when we coach, we need to be aware of how we're presented to the athlete. If we're presented to the athlete as either dogmatic, like I know I am the way, the truth, and the light, it might work for a short while, but they'll see through it eventually because you're human, you make mistakes.

Or if you're at the other end of the spectrum and it's like, oh yeah, I read this last night so I'm going to change this. And it's like new fads and new tools and everything is changed. And then the athlete is going, whoa, hang on a sec, you're supposed to know something about this, but we're changing every week.

So for me, good coaches have kind of split personalities. It's like the way I present to the athlete, which is I'm calm, I'm confident, I'm clear in my communications, I'm invested in them, I want to know their perspective. I educate them. I farm out bits of education to them through conversation. But in the back of my head I am running around in circles screaming going, I don't know if that's the best thing to do, I don't know if this will work. So you have that inner, that's the inner talk of every coach, I can tell you right now.

James de Lacey39:55

Yeah. Well, I don't know, but I think it's the hallmark of every good coach.

John Kiely39:55

It's like, how do I make sense of this? But the way you presented the athlete is, here's what we're going to do, here are the reasons, I've already, we've already talked about this, et cetera, et cetera. So it's how we present and what's going on in the little person in our head—they're very different.

And yeah, I say this, I say this because, and I think it's worth saying because it doesn't always happen. A lot of times we drop our guard because sometimes we treat coaching as something that's kind of a reflection of all, we're so invested in it, maybe we've been athletes. It's like personal. Whereas I think we should treat it more like when you go to work, you kind of hang your ego on the, you try and push your ego aside and think it doesn't matter necessarily what I think. It's that we collectively make the right decision, make the next right step forward.

And I think coaches find that hard because we're all so invested. Sometimes it's hard to kind of park your ego, park your beliefs, park your personal investment, and think, you know what, I'm standing in front of a group of athletes now, it's kind of game face on. This needs to be professional rather than if I'm just talking to a group of friends.

James de Lacey41:27

Yeah, those are good points too. And I think one paper that you referenced within your paper that kind of gives variation, it kind of illustrates a lot of the points there. So I remember when the paper came out as well, I think it was from Ron, I think it was him, the one where they did like four or five high-intensity interval training sessions a week for how many weeks it was.

And the conclusion was block periodization is superior to other forms of periodization. And then obviously look at the paper and it's like, well, if you take anyone who hasn't been doing high-intensity interval training for any meaningful frequency and you chuck them in and do five times a week of high interval training, yeah, you're going to see these huge adaptations. But the question comes after that, what do you do? Because you've literally just taken all the athletes' energy to do this one thing for a whole week. And then after that, to make progress you just have to stop and maybe just reset.

John Kiely42:18

That's a great example. And I've actually, myself and Ben Rønnestad presented together in a conference in September, so we had a kind of, yeah, because the conference wanted us to go versus a debate. But I was saying, look, I'm not doing that because it's like academic fisticuffs and everyone, you hide it piss, basically.

So we met up beforehand and talked, and he made exactly those points. No, well, this was just an isolated study, oversimplifying. And he was totally aware of that. So I would say that while people could interpret the study like that, I don't think that's what he actually thinks.

Now you mentioned Issurin, and I'm a bit more critical of Issurin—not against him personally, obviously—but I do feel he took little snippets, like a lot of people do, carefully selected research, and then to build it into a storyline. And that I'm not into. It's like, where's the weight of evidence? Don't point to one study in 1956 that I can't find and tell me that that's proof of this, because that doesn't wash and it shouldn't wash with any coach.

And the only reason people accept that level of, that low threshold of evidence is if they really want it to be true.

James de Lacey43:59

Yeah. Well, that's why Martin and I are writing that paper on training residuals that you have helped us kind of give some comments on and directions on there. Because obviously when you look back, when you look at the...

Current research on training values of a lot of these things, it's far different to the arbitrary number of days that are provided in that table.

John Kiely44:25

The residual effects are a great example. So again, and I'm not beating up on Issurin here, I really don't want it, but he referenced a 1991 paper by the Councilman, Doc Councilman, the legendary swim coach and his son, where they mention this phenomenon called residual training effects. So residual training effects: if we do this type of training for this long, the effects will last for this amount of time.

Now, that's not what Councilman said. Councilman said was that they will gradually decay if you don't keep training them. What Issurin did was put numbers on it. I forget, maybe seven to 14 days. Councilman didn't go near that. Councilman was only writing from his experience. He'd never done a study on it. Issurin said that this is a new concept.

Okay, so me being the nerd I am, I went back to the literature and there's reviews there from the 1930s saying when these farmers worked in the field, their arms got bigger, the exact same thing. When they stopped working, they got smaller. And it's ridiculous for us to think that this was a new concept, and that new concept therefore justifies block periodization. Every Roman legionnaire or Spartan soldier knew that: well, if I train, lots of things will happen, and if I stop, those things will unhappen. So that's kind of a scientific sleight of hand that kind of academics do sometimes in my book.

So sorry, I went off on one there. But residual effects is a really good one. There is no research, and I can't even think of how you design a study to find out: well, James, if you did this type of training for six weeks, then it will last for this amount of time. Nobody's ever going to be able to tell you that. What other type of training were you doing? What did you feel about the training? How stressed were you? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. A million individual factors, so many.

James de Lacey46:32

And how, even hypothetically, if you could measure how you responded and how long it took to decay, that doesn't mean anything for your future, the next season when you do it. It could be completely different because all these other non-physical factors have changed.

John Kiely46:32

Yeah, and that's just the unfortunate truth. So I guess what I would say is that, for me, good coaching is about being brave. Being brave and thinking: there are no off-shelf answers for these difficult complex questions. I need to figure it out from my brain, my context, my athletes.

You need to—I mean, the more of the research you know, the better, as long as you don't start believing it's actually true. It's all true in the specific context of that study, but you have to look at lots of studies before you get a sense of reality.

And I know—so, and I mean, everyone listening will be the same: exceptional coaches that never read a study in their lives, but they're great communicators. They can get athletes to fall in behind them. And I know people who are the opposite, really, really well-versed, but no communication, self-presentation type skills. They didn't really connect with the athletes, and it never worked for them. So that was a long kind of a dialogue there, sorry.

James de Lacey48:19

No, that was a perfect way to end this. I know you got to shoot off soon, but if anyone wants to find you and follow your work, John, when can they do that?

John Kiely48:19

I'm on Twitter at Simply Sports. I'm on Instagram as well. I'm not great on either of them, but I'm there. And I work for the University of Limerick. If anyone wants to drop me a line, they can feel free to do that there: john.kiely@ul.ie.

James de Lacey48:45

Perfect, that's perfect. All right, and we'll leave that there. But thank you for coming on, John, appreciate it.

John Kiely48:45

My pleasure. Thanks for asking.