The Death of Periodization

MOPs & MOEs is proudly sponsored by Teamworks — the performance operations platform trusted by elite military units and professional sports organizations worldwide. Teamworks brings your scheduling, communications, athlete monitoring, and readiness data into one unified system — so your leaders stay informed, your people stay connected, and your unit stays ready. No more scattered spreadsheets or missed messages. Just one platform built for organizations where performance is the mission. Learn more at teamworkstactical.comWe are also supported by TrainHeroic — the coaching and programming platform built for strength and conditioning coaches who train serious athletes. Whether you're programming for a military unit, a tactical team, or individual athletes, TrainHeroic gives you the tools to build and deliver professional training programs, track athlete progress, and communicate directly with your people — all through one app. Your athletes get world-class programming on their phone; you get the visibility to actually coach them. Start your free trial at trainheroic.comThe Death of Periodization — Drew and Alex Go to WarDrew wrote an article called "The Death of Periodization," posted it on LinkedIn to see what would happen, and then got into fights with people on Instagram for a week. This episode is the full breakdown — what periodization actually is, why it doesn't work for tactical populations, and what to do instead.What we get into:Defining the thing first — because not a single person in the online discourse could do it. The NSCA definition: the logical and systematic process of sequencing training interventions to achieve peak performance at appropriate time points. Every version of periodization, whether block, linear, nonlinear, conjugate, or West Side, shares the same five assumptions. The most important one: that biological adaptations follow a predictable course. They don't.Why periodization is a Soviet export — and what that means. Most of the foundational periodization literature is mapping sports science onto communist economic planning. General adaptation syndrome is not a predictive model. It's a descriptive model. Hans Selye never explained what makes something stressful, never told you how much stress causes adaptation, and never specified when the resistance phase begins or ends. Also, his exhaustion phase was death. Not fatigue. Death. The field of stress physiology left him behind decades ago.The Milo and the bull problem — and why progressive overload is almost universally misunderstood. Milo didn't get stronger because the bull got bigger. He was able to lift the bigger bull because he got stronger. The causal arrow runs the other way. What to do instead — navigating versus forecasting. Shorten the prediction window to what the environment actually allows you to control. A week at a time. The low-hanging fruit problem. You've got people debating intricately periodized strength plans for soldiers who are failing a two-mile run where the passing standard is a ten-minute mile pace. That's what this conversation is really about.Also in this episode:Joey Chestnut vs. Usain Bolt in the Glizzy Gauntlet — one hot dog, then a hundred meters. The Army's new testosterone testing program — rapid fire thoughts, concerns about fertility consequences, and thoughts and prayers for military endocrinologists.Mentioned in this episode:Drew's articles — The Death of Periodization and The Art of Training at mopsandmoes.comJohn Kiely — Periodization Theory: Confronting an Inconvenient Truth; Periodization ParadigmsThomas Kuhn — The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigm shiftsFranco Impellizzeri — operational frameworks and self-fulfilling prophecy in periodizationMatt Clark — Eight Myths Weaken Combat ReadinessLong and Strong — the Mops and Moes training program on TrainHeroic Views expressed are those of the speakers and do not represent any official organization.