(by Sergei Beliaev, Founder of Super Sport Systems)
In our previous article, The Purpose of Season Plans, we asked a basic professional question:
What should a Season Plan actually accomplish?
We concluded that an effective Season Plan should provide answers to several basic questions:
- What is the athlete’s current ability?
- What is the athlete’s season-end goal?
- How should performance progress between those two points?
- What training is required to produce that progression?
- How do we control actual development against what was planned?
A Season Plan should provide a detailed road map for moving the athlete from the current level of performance toward the established goal.
This naturally leads to the subject of this article:
What methodological system can satisfy these requirements?
To answer this question, we examined the concepts coaches commonly use to construct Season Plans and asked whether they provide the methodological tools needed to build such a road map.
In theory, all major training concepts were created to improve athletic performance, and many represented substantial advances when they were introduced. However, today’s understanding of the Training Process places much greater demands on our ability to evaluate, prescribe, organize, and control athlete development.
The question, therefore, is not whether these concepts were valuable or progressive when they appeared. The question is whether they satisfy the requirements of season planning today.
To answer it, we need to look at how the methodologies commonly used in season planning actually developed.
For generations of coaches, the answer to season planning has seemed almost self-evident: Periodization.
But how much do we actually know about Periodization and the history of its development? Once you learn the facts, your opinion of Periodization’s role in season planning may change.
The modern concept of Periodization is primarily associated with Lev Matveev. Tudor Bompa later introduced and popularized these principles in the West, but both belong to the same conceptual tradition, which originated in the former Soviet Union in the 1960s and reached Western coaching approximately a decade later.
The structure and definitions of Periodization became deeply embedded in coaching education and practice. Training cycles, preparatory and competitive periods, phases of development, manipulation of volume and intensity, loading and recovery, and preparation for peak competition became standard elements of the way coaches think and speak about seasonal planning.
Eventually, Periodization and season planning became almost synonymous.
Historically, this transformation was an important development because Periodization represented one of the first systematic attempts to organize the Training Process over extended periods and contributed to the emergence of the Methodology of Sports Training as a scientific field.
However, organizing the Training Process in time and managing athlete development are not necessarily the same task.
If we compare Periodization with the requirements for a Season Plan established at the beginning of this article, important limitations become visible.
Here, I must address a possible impression that our criticism of Periodization originates from 3S or represents a modern rejection of an established theory. It does not.
The scientific discussion of Periodization’s limitations began decades ago, largely within the same professional environment where the concept originated.
One of its strongest critics was Dr. Yuri Verchoshansky, a leading Soviet specialist in the Methodology of Sports Training and the creator of several influential training concepts.
His criticism was not simply that Periodization was old or that different organizational structures might work better. He questioned whether its methodological tools were sufficient for managing the Training Process.
Discussing the formal division of training into cycles, stages, and periods, Verchoshansky argued that such fragmentation destroys the integrity of the Training Process and leaves the coach with a subjective selection among possible solutions based on the method of “trial and error.” Most importantly, he concluded that Periodization offered no strict objective basis for selecting the optimal solution.
His second criticism is equally relevant today. Prof. Yuri Verchoshansky identified as one of Periodization’s major deficiencies the fact that it provided essentially only two ways of regulating the training effect: volume and intensity of training load. He connected this limitation directly with failure to account for the specificity of adaptive responses to different forms of training work.
Periodization provided a structure for organizing training over time, but it did not provide sufficient objective mechanisms for determining how the athlete should develop within that structure or how specific training decisions should produce the required progression of performance.
This limitation became increasingly important as knowledge of human adaptation and Exercise Physiology expanded.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Exercise Physiology developed rapidly worldwide. Scandinavian, German, Soviet, and other scientific schools produced important knowledge about energy metabolism, aerobic and anaerobic capacity, cardiovascular response, fatigue, recovery, and adaptation to physical exercise.
This work substantially changed our understanding of what happens to the athlete under training stress and also exposed an important limitation of Periodization. The concept could organize training into periods and cycles and manipulate general characteristics such as volume and intensity, but it could not objectively determine what physiological effect a prescribed training load was producing in a particular athlete.
To be fair, this element had never been studied in Periodization. And the subject of study, as we will see later, determines the boundaries of application of a training concept.
The point is, Exercise Physiology and the Methodology of Sports Training study very different phenomena: the human organism under physical stress in Exercise Physiology, and the Training Process in the Methodology of Sports Training.
At the same time, Training Methodology heavily depends on and incorporates knowledge produced by Exercise Physiology and other adjacent sciences. But physiological knowledge—or knowledge produced within any other specialized field—does not automatically become a methodology for constructing and managing the Training Process itself.
This becomes particularly important when we examine one of the most influential developments of that period.
Dr. Alois Mader’s work emerged directly from the high-performance sports environment and addressed the need for objective physiological evaluation and training control.
His research sought quantitative relationships between standardized physical loads and the athlete’s metabolic response. Blood lactate provided a measurable indicator that could be connected with physical power and the energetic demands of exercise.
The development of the Anaerobic Threshold concept was enormously important because it gave coaches and scientists something they badly needed: an objective physiological reference for evaluating athletes and controlling training.
Mader’s original interest in the fixed 4 mmol/L threshold was its usefulness as a quantitative indicator for estimating endurance power on a real power scale and connecting physiological response with the energetic demands of the work being performed.
For the first time, prescribed external work could be systematically compared with a measurable internal physiological response.
This represented a major advancement in sports science.
But the Anaerobic Threshold concept focused primarily on physiological evaluation and training control. It did not provide comprehensive methodological ideas for constructing and managing the athlete’s complete Training Process through a season.
Over time, similar to what had happened with Periodization—and what Verchoshansky and others later criticized—the application of the Anaerobic Threshold training concept expanded far beyond its original purpose, with one important difference: it remains a prevalent training concept today.
Once researchers could measure physiological characteristics, using them to prescribe training was an understandable next step.
A physiological threshold became an intensity reference. Intensity references became training boundaries. Training boundaries became Training Zones. Physiological responses increasingly became training objectives, and eventually physiological classifications began determining what kinds of exercises athletes should perform.
A methodology developed to evaluate and control physiological response was progressively transformed into a methodology for prescribing training.
What makes this transformation particularly important is that the creator of the Anaerobic Threshold concept, Dr. Alois Mader, later objected to what had happened to it.
Looking back at the development of the concept, Mader wrote:
“For me it was later on a big disappointment that the direct relation of the ‘Anaerobic Threshold’ to the ‘energy demand’ was neglected and went completely out of view for so called ‘reasons of simplicity’.”
He described what followed as the beginning of a “scientifically wrong and unreal conception” in which intensity was interpreted solely in terms of blood-lactate concentration.
Mader was even more explicit about the subsequent transformation of the threshold into a training prescription. Referring to the assertion that Individual Anaerobic Thresholds are directly coupled with the “optimal training intensity” for developing endurance performance, his assessment was unequivocal: “grievously wrong.”
The problem was not the validity of physiological measurement itself. The problem was the methodological leap from measuring a physiological characteristic to using that characteristic as a criterion for determining how the Training Process should be constructed.
Nevertheless, Anaerobic Threshold-based approaches became enormously influential and eventually assumed a role substantially larger than the scientific problem from which they originated.
As a result of these developments, coaching became heavily influenced by two powerful, yet independent bodies of knowledge.
Periodization provided principles for organizing training over time.
Physiological concepts provided objective information about the athlete, physiological responses, intensity classification, and increasingly training prescription.
Both represented important advances in sports science and training practice. Both ultimately served the same practical objective—improving athletic performance—but they approached it from different directions because they were created to solve different problems.
In reality, coaches needed both to design and control their training. As a result, the two approaches increasingly became combined in practice, and over time this combination came to be perceived as a unified methodology for season planning.
Jan Olbrecht’s book The Science of Winning provides a useful illustration of this development.
Physiological concepts associated with the Mader tradition became dominant in guiding practical coaching decisions. Athlete evaluation increasingly focused on aerobic and anaerobic characteristics, which then influenced training objectives, classifications, intensities, and exercise prescription.
This gave coaches a sophisticated physiological basis for deciding what to train.
However, when the question became how those objectives should be organized throughout the season, Olbrecht still relied on the familiar structure of Periodization.
This demonstrates how two conceptual systems developed to solve different problems became combined in practical season planning.
The combination contains valuable professional knowledge and remains commonly used today. The problem arises when it is treated as a complete methodology for managing the Training Process.
We can now compare this structure with the requirements for an effective Season Plan established at the beginning of this article.
Periodization tells us how the season can be organized. Physiological concepts help evaluate the athlete and classify physiological characteristics and training loads. Coaching experience and practical knowledge provide exercises and workout structures.
What remains unresolved is how these elements connect.
More fundamentally, the question is what these elements need to be connected for.
A Season Plan should not simply determine what type of training belongs at different stages of a season. It must connect the athlete’s current ability with the desired future performance and determine what the athlete needs to do today—and throughout every subsequent stage of training—to arrive at the required result on the established date.
This changes the professional task from simply organizing training to managing athlete development through the Training Process.
The commonly used model does not provide a methodology that connects athlete evaluation, training objectives, exercise prescription, seasonal organization, and ongoing control within a single Training Process directed toward the required progression of athletic performance.
The existence of valuable knowledge at each level does not automatically establish those connections.
And this is the element missing from the picture.
The problem, therefore, is not the absence of knowledge. Periodization, Exercise Physiology, and practical coaching methods have all made substantial contributions to sports training. The problem is that concepts created to solve different parts of the training problem have been combined without a common methodology that connects them within a single managed Training Process.
This is precisely the role of the Methodology of Sports Training—the scientific discipline whose object of study is the Training Process itself.
A comprehensive and effective Season Plan cannot be constructed without the knowledge and participation of Training Methodology.
The challenge is therefore not to replace Periodization with another arrangement of periods, phases, or training blocks. Nor is it to add more physiological variables, Training Zones, tests, or training data. The contemporary task is to reduce the enormous complexity of athlete development into a formalized, measurable, and manageable model of the Training Process—one capable of connecting today’s training decisions with the performance required weeks or months in the future.
This is the problem the Ergometric Training Concept (ETC) was developed to solve.
ETC provides a common methodological framework connecting athlete evaluation, performance requirements, training targets, adaptation, training-load progression, and the required progression of athletic performance. 3S is the practical implementation of this methodology, translating these relationships into the training-design and management tools coaches can use throughout the season.
In practical terms, the objective is straightforward: not simply to organize what an athlete will train this season, but to determine what this athlete needs to do today—and every day that follows—to arrive at the desired performance on the required date.
This represents a fundamentally different approach to Season Planning: instead of organizing training and expecting the desired performance to emerge, the Training Process is constructed and managed around the development required to reach an established result.
The question now becomes particularly interesting in the age of Artificial Intelligence. AI has access to an enormous body of sports-training information and is increasingly being asked to perform professional coaching tasks. If we give AI an athlete’s current performance, a desired result, and a target date—and ask it to construct the Training Process between them—what methodology will it actually use?
That is the question we will examine next.
Previous Article(s) in Season Planning Series: