Are you stuck in a cycle of constant racing with no real structure? This article explores the importance of periodisation in running – the strategic breakdown of your training year into specific phases to maximise performance and avoid burnout.
It explains how failing to transition between training phases can lead to injury, stagnation, and frustration.
Learn how to train smarter by mastering your general prep, specific prep, taper, competition, and—most overlooked of all—transition phases, so that your body recovers and your performance peaks when it counts.
TRANSITION TROUBLES
The esteemed author Leo Tolstoy, best known for his iconic War and Peace, once wrote that, “Spring is the time of plans and projects”. We associate the seasonal shift with change and transitioning and this should serve as a metaphor for how we approach our running. What happens when we are stuck in one season and unable or unwilling to transition? Let me tell you a small story….
I was at a coaching conference a year or two ago and a well known senior coach was sat next to me and he happened to be taking a phone call from an athlete. His facial expressions and sighs were a sure sign of a man in clear psychological anguish and eventually he pressed the button on his mobile which ended the call bringing some kind of respite to his obvious misery. “What’s up?” I casually asked as he was still resisting the urge to pull the hair out of his scalp. “Bloomin’ road runners!”, he replied, “Problem with them is their season starts on January 1st and ends on January 31st! They don’t understand periodisation”, he whined, shaking his head in unadulterated frustration as he left the building presumably to get some fresh air.
So exactly why was he frustrated and what does this word ‘periodisation’ really mean?
Periodisation
The genealogy of the term can be traced back to the pioneering work of the Hungarian-Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye whose studies on systemic stressors in the 1950s became known in academic circles as General Adaptation Syndrome. A decade or so later the groundbreaking work of Selye was applied to a sports-specific context by the likes of the Russian, Leo Matveyev, and the Romanian, Tudor Bompa. Their work on the value of a cyclical method of planning the training of athletes to bring them to a performative peak meant that periodisation as we understand it in the twenty first century, was born and was alive and kicking if still in its infancy.
Training Cycles
You may well have heard coaches and some fellow athletes talking about their training macrocycle (typically a season); mesocycle (normally a few short months) and / or microcycle (typically a week or a few days). Why is this important for you? At the start of each year typically you should have goals which will be centred around certain key races, such as a big city marathon or attaining that 10k PB- that’s where the macrocycle comes in. In order to achieve your goals over a set macrocycle you need to break your training approach down into different mesocycles. This may mean that in the winter months for example you choose to race cross country and or do more hill work. In the summer you may be on the roads much more and a minority of you may have a track season for instance. In order for you to avoid injury and exhaustion these mesocycles need to be broken down still further into microcycles. Within each training week you will need passive non weight bearing days of recovery if not total rest and periodically you may have short blocks of time which are deloading periods which allow your body to regenerate.
Bridging
By being clear on the above you can begin to periodise your training and know when and how to transition or ‘bridge’ typically between five phases of the periodisation cycle. This enables you to then plan to peak your performances periodically.
Typically you will need to break your work down into the following phases:
- General preparation phase
This may for example typically include aerobic base building and strength and conditioning work enabling you to scaffold your work with more specificity.
- Specific preparation phase
The work which you do in training to smash a 5k PB for example will need to be materially different from that required to attempt a marathon. Your work for the former may need to be more speed endurance based whereas for the latter it will inevitably be more aerobically dominant.
- Pre-competition phase
Before embarking on that assault on a half or full marathon for instance you will need some kind of taper whereby the frequency, intensity and volume of your training will be reduced in the days leading up to competition leaving you feeling fresh and ‘race ready’.
- Competition phase
It may be that you are intent on having one goal race if it’s say the London Marathon or the Great North Run for example but additionally the competition phase may involve a window of opportunity spread over a few weeks if not a couple of months where you feel able to attack a range of goal-based races.
- Transition phase
After a goal-based marathon or a period of goal based races over an extended period of weeks you will simply need to deload and go back to Phase 1 in the cycle. Why? If you fail to do so (a) you will go stale and your performance will plateau and then often dip; (b) when this happens we tend to naturally panic as athletes and wrongly believe we are not training quite hard enough so we redouble our efforts and train that bit more intensely. Then what happens? Bang- we get injured, forcing us to deload.
Transition Troubles
Transition Troubles occur when we fail to plan to periodise our running. Its where we wittingly or often unwittingly plough through a calendar year stumbling along as best we can from race to race. The problem is if we don’t take a break and transition, our body will do it for us through burnout and injury. So we want our minds to be in control of when and how we transition rather than giving that power to our over stressed bodies.
At this point we have come full circle to the aforementioned coaching conference where I sat alongside the frustrated coach who needed a breath of fresh air if you recall. Be honest, ask yourself whether YOU are the type of athlete who could have been making that phone call to the exasperated coach who knew that his prospect was failing periodising their work and was sailing their ship towards the iceberg of injury.
The above leaves us with the following questions for self-reflection:
- How have I planned my ‘big picture’ or microcycle?
- How long do my supporting meso and microcycles need to be to facilitate the vision of my ‘big picture’?
- Why is it important that I disaggregate my general and specific preparation phases and what’s different about them?
- How long does my pre-competition phase involving me tapering and proverbially ‘sharpening up’ need to be?
- When, how and why am I planning the transitory phases in my training which allow me to deload and my body to regenerate?
Team NLC coach Matt Long brings a wealth of experience to the table, having served as an England Team Manager. A recognised leader in coach education, Matt is the recipient of the prestigious British Milers’ Club Horwill Award and has authored over 400 coaching articles.
