Agile Periodization: Decision Making Under Uncertainty – Part 1

In May, 2017, I gave a guest lecture at Faculty of Kinesiology at Zagreb University in Croatia, thanks to the invitation by Cvita Gregov. The topic of my talk was Agile Periodization, a framework that I have been developing over the past few years.

Since I already had the slides ready, I slightly modified them and decided to record the whole thing in English.

The point of the talk is to provide the overview of the flaws of the contemporary planning/periodization, but also to provide a potential solution to the problems. The overall theme of the Agile Periodization is the utilization of the best heuristics and strategies when dealing with uncertain and complex situations, and taking risk into account besides besides solely basing our decisions on physiology and biomechanics.

This series has two parts. Part one overview the issues and limitations of the contemporary planning/periodization. Part two overview the potential solution to the problems.

In part one the following topics are covered:

• Great resources (books) that were highly influential on the development of the Agile Periodization
• Example and discussion of few annual plans by Issurin, Bompa, Verkhoshansky and yours truly
• Critique of the dichotomisation to two main constructs and the further classifications and hierarchies involved in training planning
• The flaw of thinking linearly regarding objectives and methods
• The “ludic fallacy” or the idea of predictability in training and the sources of risks
• The issues with “waterfall” planning most common in construction and other “complicated” project managements
• The concept of “jig” and top-down planning imposed on us by Universities and the books, and the approach to overcome it

This video will help you see the big picture and start questioning the “hierarchy of the bricks” rather than solely thinking about their best layering. It represents the “red” pill 🙂