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The Father of Periodisation – Tudor Bompa

9/30/2016

This is a longer post than normal but track coaches and those involved in sports where peak performance is required (er are there any that don't?), will benefit... Many of my thoughts on training planning have evolved through my opportunities over the years to interview coaches and athletes at the top of their game. They've helped me raise mine.

Tudor Bompa is known as the “Father of Periodisation”. I talked to him a while back and here’s some of what he had to say on strength training for speed, key training exercises and different evolutions of training planning.

John: You’re regarded as the Father of Periodisation…
Tudor: Your statement greatly honours me, but it is slightly exaggerated. Let me share with you the evolution of periodisation. From the early years of the ancient Olympics, athletes have followed a very simple but logical method of training. They train to compete: compete in pre-Olympic and Olympic Games and then rest and relax. This is periodisation - the athlete follows training phases (now called preparatory, competitive and transition phases). In fact, this was described by the Greek philosopher, Flavius Philostratus (AD 170-245). This man deserves a great deal of respect for his ten books on athletic training, many of which have been destroyed by the passage of time. Planning, therefore, is neither a novelty nor a Russian discovery. However, a Russian professor, Leonid Matveyev, was the first to use the term periodisation in terms of planning the phases of an athlete’s training. He borrowed the term from history, where periodisation describes the phases of human history - that’s to say antiquity, middle-ages and so on.

Matveyev was the first author to really analyse statistically what the Soviet athletes used in training for the 1952 Olympic Games. His work and conclusions validated the concept of periodisation as used from 1896 to the present: that is, that the annual training plan should be divided in phases of training, each having a specific training objective (mostly physiological), and that the phases of the annual plan should be subdivided into even smaller training phases called macrocycles (of 2-6 weeks duration) and microcycles (a week of training).

John: What’s the difference between the periodisation methods that evolved in the 1950s and those of the present day?
Tudor: The difference between periodisation in the 1950s and what is widely accepted nowadays is that 1) we have created several variations of periodisation and 2) in our planning and periodised training we apply sports science more effectively. With research and through the efforts of top coaches, we constantly discover and produce better information that enriches the science of training.

John: How did you and your colleagues work out if periodisation worked?
Tudor: Many elements of periodisation have evolved as a result of a better understanding of sports science or through research at the Romanian Olympic Training Centre in Bucharest and Timisoara. It started when we tried to work out why our athletes failed to reach peak performances at the most important competitions!

In 1963 Mihaela Penes, a junior javelin thrower from Romania, was left without a coach when she moved to another city. I was approached to help her. I applied what is now known as the “periodisation of strength” to her training. At that time nobody regarded maximum strength (‘MxS’) as a key determinant of power.

The logic of the time - and one that is still held by many coaches today - was that since power is the dominant ability in javelin, as an example, power has to be trained all the time. However, my logic was different. Since power is a function of MxS you have to develop MxS first and convert it into power prior to participating in major competitions. Many coaches have ridiculed me for training MxS. They have said that “MxS will make you slow!”

However, the knowledge we now have in exercise physiology justifies what I believed and believe in. That is the scope of MxS to recruit more fast-twitch (FT) muscle fibres. This contrasts with power training that increases the discharge rate (by this Tudor refers to rate of ‘firing’) of the same muscle fibres. During the first winter with Mihaela, I tested my theory and realised that levels of power were much higher with the periodisation of strength as opposed to other athletes who followed the standard training methodology of year-round power training. In other words, the ability to produce power depends on how many FT fibres are recruited in action and how quickly the contraction of the muscles performing the athletic action occurs. This combines maximum recruitment with maximum discharge.

My thoughts were vindicated further by my practice as Mihaela achieved outstanding testing results and a national senior record. She was only 18 years old at the time and the record was in her first outdoor competition. Her improvement (over 9 metres in the first year) continued steadily for the following one and a half years.

Since Mihaela was an unknown athlete outside of Romania, I wanted to surprise all her competitors at the Tokyo Olympics. I added another different ingredient into the training plan. This was where the first attempt had to be the best of the day in both throwing and strength-power training. We did this for almost two years. In Tokyo, none of the other throwers were looking out for her and with her first throw she threw an Olympic record. Shock! And they still in shock by the end of the competition as she climbed on the podium to collect her gold medal.

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