PERIODISATION: BUILDING A SEASON, NOT A SIX WEEK PANIC

The Technique

1. Open a calendar before you open a programme. Write in the fixed dates first: the trip, the event, the shoot, the work block you cannot move, the fortnight you are on a plane. Then rank them honestly. One or two dates a year are A-priority, where you want to arrive genuinely peaked and will accept being slightly undertrained in some other quality to get there. Three or four are B-priority: you turn up fit, you shave a few days off the hard training, you do not restructure the year. Everything else is C-priority and you train straight through it. Most athletes fail at this step by treating every trip as an A. If everything is a peak, nothing is, and you spend the year mildly tapered and never actually strong.
2. Learn the four phases and what each one is for. Transition is the deliberate off switch: two to four weeks of low structure, low load, other sports, letting joints and motivation reset. General preparation is the biggest and least glamorous phase, where you build the raw materials - maximum strength, aerobic capacity, tissue tolerance, range of motion - with almost no resemblance to riding. Specific preparation narrows the focus: the same qualities are now expressed in positions, speeds and durations that look like your sport. Competition phase is maintenance plus sharpening, where training exists to keep you intact and fast, not to build anything new. Each phase answers a different question, and running the wrong phase at the wrong time is the most common planning error there is.
3. Understand why general fitness has to precede specific fitness. Broad qualities take a long time to build and decay slowly. Sharp, specific qualities build fast and fade fast. That asymmetry is the whole logic of the phase order: you spend the far months building things that will still be there in six weeks, and the near weeks building things that would have evaporated if you had built them early. It is also why an eight week scramble before a trip cannot produce what a year produces. The scramble can only work on the fast-building qualities, so it delivers a rider who feels sharp for three days and then falls apart, because nothing underneath was ever built.
4. Handle volume and intensity as a trade. Within a block, one goes up as the other comes down. A conventional structure runs three sub-blocks: accumulation, where volume is high and intensity moderate and you feel permanently slightly flat; intensification, where volume drops and loads climb and the work gets short and heavy; realisation, where total work drops again and everything is about speed and expression. If you try to raise both variables at once you are not periodising, you are just adding, and the block ends in a stall or a strain. Write the intended volume and intensity direction on each block before you write a single exercise.
5. Choose a weekly loading pattern that matches your training age and your riding load. The common conventions are three weeks of building followed by one easier week, or two and one for older or higher-mileage athletes, or an undulating pattern where hard and easy alternate inside every week rather than across weeks. None is superior. The choice is driven by how much unplanned load your sport dumps on you: if your riding volume is unpredictable, fixed four week cycles will collide with reality and you are better served by an undulating week you can shuffle. Decide the pattern in advance so that the easy week is a plan, not a rescue.
6. Build the peak deliberately and briefly. The convention for a taper is to cut volume substantially while holding intensity and keeping frequency roughly the same. You keep touching heavy and fast so the nervous system stays switched on, and you strip out the accumulated work that is creating fatigue. For most athletes that process runs about one to two weeks, less for a pure strength peak, more if the preceding block was very high in volume. Peak form is not a plateau you can sit on. It is a window, it is measured in days, and the only way to have it on the right days is to have counted backwards to place it there.
7. Now plan backwards. Put the A-date on the calendar. Count back the taper and mark it. Count back the specific preparation phase, typically six to eight weeks, and mark it. Count back the general preparation phase, typically eight to sixteen weeks, and mark that. Whatever is left at the front is transition and unstructured base. Do the arithmetic and you will usually discover one of two things: either you have far more runway than you thought and should be building slowly rather than panicking, or the date is closer than the phases will fit and you need to decide, now and in writing, which quality you are going to sacrifice. Both answers are useful. Neither is available to somebody planning forwards.
8. Treat the plan as a hypothesis with review points. Book a short testing battery at the start of each phase and repeat it identically: a strength expression, a jump, an aerobic measure, a mobility screen, and your body mass. Five items, half an hour, same order, same conditions, written down. At each phase boundary you compare, you decide whether the last block did what it was supposed to do, and you adjust the next one. A plan you never test is a wish. A plan you test four times a year becomes, after two years, a genuinely personal map of what your body responds to and how long it takes.

Common Mistakes

Grading every trip as an A-priority. Fix: allow yourself two A-dates per year, maximum, and write the grades on the calendar before you write any training, so the ranking is made cold rather than in the excitement of a booking.

• Building specific fitness first because it is more fun. Fix: put the sport-shaped work at the end where it belongs. If you cannot resist it, keep one low-volume specific session per week during general preparation as a taste, and leave the rest for later.
• Adding volume and intensity in the same block. Fix: nominate one variable to rise per block and hold or reduce the other. Write the direction at the top of the block so you are reminded every session.
• Skipping transition because you feel fine. Fix: schedule it anyway, at the same time each year, after your biggest date. It is a planned reduction, not a reward for being tired, and it is what makes the following general preparation phase productive rather than a dig out of a hole.
• Planning forwards from today. Fix: always start at the date and count back. Forward planning quietly assumes you will have enough time, which is precisely the assumption that produces a six week panic.

The Drill

Build a one page annual plan. One sheet, fifty two columns, one per week. Mark your A, B and C dates. Colour each week by phase. Write the volume and intensity direction on every block. Then mark the four testing dates at the phase boundaries, and enter your current numbers in the first column: a heavy squat or hinge, a broad jump, a repeatable aerobic test, one mobility measure, and morning body mass. The standard is simple and strict: point at any week in the year and state its training focus in under five seconds without thinking. If you cannot, the plan is not finished, it is decoration.

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