Lesson 11 · Planning the year
The yearly training program: periodisation, peaking and tapering
No athlete can be at their best in every week of the year, and a plan that pretends otherwise produces someone who is neither ready in March nor still standing in September. A yearly program is the decision about when to be at your best, and everything else follows from who gets to make that decision.
A rugby league squad plays a twenty-five round season that starts in March and finishes, for most clubs, in September. A professional tennis player can enter tournaments in almost every week of the year, on three different surfaces, and chooses which ones to play.
Both need a yearly plan. Write down the single biggest difference between the two plans, then say what causes it. Then the harder question: which of the two athletes finds it harder to peak for a specific date, and why?
- Describe the phases of competition — off-season, pre-season and in-season — and state what each phase is for.
- Explain what sub-phases add, and why a season is not planned as one undifferentiated block.
- Explain peaking and tapering, including what a taper reduces and what it deliberately does not.
- Use sport-specific attributes, the fitness components and skill requirements of a sport, to decide what each phase should contain.
- Compare a yearly program for an individual sport and a group sport, and explain every difference from the structure of the competition rather than from habit.
- Yearly training program — the plan that distributes training across a full competitive year.
- Periodisation — dividing that year into phases with different aims, so that fitness peaks when it is needed.
- Off-season — the phase after competition ends, prioritising recovery, rehabilitation and the retention of a general base.
- Pre-season — the phase before competition, building the general and then the sport-specific fitness the season will require.
- In-season — the competitive phase, where the aim shifts from developing fitness to maintaining it while performing.
- Sub-phase — a shorter block within a phase with its own aim, for example a general preparation sub-phase followed by a specific preparation sub-phase.
- Peaking — arranging training so the athlete's best performance occurs at a chosen time.
- Tapering — the planned reduction in training volume before competition, with intensity largely maintained.
- Sport-specific attributes — the fitness components and skill requirements a particular sport actually demands.
- Fitness components — the qualities a program develops, such as aerobic capacity, speed, strength, power, agility and flexibility.
A yearly program exists because an athlete cannot be at their best all year, and pretending otherwise produces an athlete who is neither well prepared in March nor still standing in September. Periodisation is the answer: divide the year into phases with different aims and let the emphasis move between them.
| Phase | Aim | Typical volume and intensity | Content emphasis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Off-season | Recover from the season, complete rehabilitation, and retain enough base that pre-season does not start from nothing | Both low, with a genuine break at the start | Rest, cross-training, rehabilitation of carried injuries, correction of long-standing weaknesses |
| Pre-season | Build the fitness the season will demand, in the order that general work supports specific work | Volume high early, then falling as intensity rises | General conditioning first, then sport-specific conditioning, skill development and finally tactical and match-like work |
| In-season | Maintain fitness while competing, and keep athletes available | Volume reduced, intensity maintained | Maintenance conditioning, recovery, tactical preparation for specific opponents, management of load around fixtures |
Two claims are worth making precisely, because both are commonly written the other way round. The off-season is not a total break. Reversibility from Lesson 7 is unforgiving: plasma and stroke volume fall within a couple of weeks and a substantial part of aerobic capacity within about eight, so a completely inactive off-season means pre-season is spent recovering ground rather than gaining it, and it raises injury risk on return. A short complete break followed by reduced, varied activity is the defensible design.
And the in-season is not a holding pattern. The aim changes from developing to maintaining, but maintenance is an active decision, and the striking thing about it is how little work is needed: fitness can largely be maintained on markedly reduced volume provided intensity is preserved. That is exactly the shape of a taper, and it is why volume is the variable that gets cut when the fixture list gets crowded.
Across the whole year, volume moves a great deal and intensity moves much less. Almost every phase decision is a decision about volume.
Quick check: Which best describes the change in training from pre-season to in-season?
The syllabus lists sub-phases as its own sub-point, which tells you that dividing the year into three is not considered enough. A fourteen-week pre-season run as one uniform block would have to choose a single emphasis and hold it for fourteen weeks, which either builds a base and never converts it into sport-specific fitness, or starts sport-specific and has no base to build on.
| Sub-phase | Weeks | Emphasis | What it makes possible next |
|---|---|---|---|
| General preparation | 1 to 5 | High volume, moderate intensity, aerobic base, general strength, movement quality | Tolerance of the higher intensities the next sub-phase requires |
| Specific preparation | 6 to 10 | Volume falling, intensity rising, sport-specific conditioning, power, position-specific work | Fitness expressed in the movements and energy systems the sport actually uses |
| Pre-competition | 11 to 13 | Match-like intensity, tactical work, trial matches, load management | Readiness to compete, and information about selection and combinations |
| Taper | 14 | Volume cut, intensity held, recovery prioritised | Arriving at round one fresh rather than fatigued |
Read down the last column and you can see the logic. Each sub-phase exists to make the next one possible, which is the same argument as specificity and progressive overload from Lesson 6, applied over months rather than weeks. It also explains the most common planning error in school programs: jumping straight to sport-specific high-intensity work because it looks like the real thing, without the general base that lets an athlete tolerate it.
Sub-phases operate in-season too. A long season is usually divided around the fixture list, with heavier blocks in the gaps between important matches, lighter loads in congested weeks, and often a mid-season block that behaves like a miniature pre-season for a squad that has a break.
True or false: A completely inactive off-season is poor practice, because reversibility removes a substantial part of aerobic adaptation within about eight weeks and pre-season is then spent regaining ground rather than making it.
Peaking is arranging the program so that best performance arrives at a chosen time. Tapering is the mechanism: a planned reduction in training in the days or weeks before competition, so that the fatigue accumulated during hard training dissipates while the fitness it produced remains.
That sentence contains the whole idea. Hard training produces both adaptation and fatigue, and fatigue masks the adaptation. Fatigue also dissipates faster than fitness decays. A taper exploits the gap: cut the work enough that fatigue clears, but not for so long that the adaptation starts to reverse.
| Variable | What happens in a taper | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Volume | Reduced substantially, often by around a third to a half | Volume is the main source of accumulated fatigue, so it is the variable to cut |
| Intensity | Maintained, and sometimes raised in short efforts | Intensity is what maintains the adaptation; cutting it turns a taper into detraining |
| Frequency | Maintained or slightly reduced | Keeping athletes training regularly preserves skill, rhythm and routine |
| Duration of the taper | Days to about two weeks, depending on the sport and the preceding load | Too short and fatigue remains; too long and reversibility begins to bite |
The mistake that undoes a taper
Reducing intensity along with volume is the most common error, and it produces an athlete who is rested and slow. A taper drops the amount of work, not the quality of it. The second error is tapering for too long: at some point fatigue has cleared and further reduction only starts to remove the fitness the training built.
Peaking is also constrained by how many peaks a year can contain. A genuine peak is a narrow window, so a program can support only a small number, and each must be chosen deliberately. That constraint is the hinge of this lesson's comparison: an individual athlete usually has a small number of target competitions and can peak for them; a team plays a fixture list it does not choose and must be competitive every week.
Fill the gaps. Dividing the training year into phases with different aims is called . In a taper, training is reduced while intensity is largely maintained. The phase whose aim is to maintain fitness while competing is the phase.
The phases are a container. What goes inside them is decided by the fitness components and skill requirements the sport demands — which is specificity from Lesson 6, operating at the scale of a year. Two programs with identical phase structures can contain almost entirely different work.
| Tennis, an individual sport | Rugby league, a group sport | |
|---|---|---|
| Demand profile | Repeated short high-intensity efforts with short recovery, over matches of unpredictable length, sometimes on consecutive days | Repeated high-intensity efforts with contact, over a fixed eighty minutes, once per week |
| Dominant fitness components | Agility, speed, anaerobic capacity, a strong aerobic base for recovery between points and matches, shoulder and trunk strength | Muscular strength and power for collisions, speed and repeated-sprint ability, aerobic base for recovery, and position-dependent emphasis |
| Skill requirements | A large individual technical repertoire, adapted to three surfaces, executed without teammates | A smaller individual repertoire, but heavy collective demands: structure, communication and combinations |
| Individual variation within the group | Not applicable; the program is the athlete's | Large and structural: a front-rower and a winger have different demands within one squad and one program |
| What this dictates | A program built around the athlete's own weaknesses, surface transitions and chosen tournaments | A common squad framework with position-specific and individual variation inside it |
That last row is the same "hold the structure, vary the dose" rule from Lesson 10, now operating over a year. And notice that in the group sport, the variation is not merely a matter of fitness levels — it is structural, because different positions genuinely do different jobs.
Odd one out. Three of these are characteristic of a well-designed taper. Which one is not?
Everything above converges on one comparison, and the whole of it follows from a single fact: the individual athlete largely chooses their competition calendar, and the team does not. Nearly every difference below is a consequence of that.
| Aspect | Individual sport | Group sport | Reason |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phase boundaries | Set by the athlete around chosen target events, and can be moved | Set by the competition draw, and cannot be moved | The team's calendar is externally imposed |
| Number of peaks | Few, and deliberately chosen; other events may be treated as preparation | Ideally one, at finals, but the team must be competitive every week to get there | A team cannot afford a deliberately underprepared round |
| Tapering | A full taper before target events, with training blocks between them | A repeated weekly mini-taper into each fixture, and a fuller taper only into finals | Weekly competition leaves no room for a long taper mid-season |
| Individualisation | Total: the whole program is written for one athlete | A common framework with position-specific and individual variation inside it | One squad, many roles and many starting points, but a shared timetable |
| Off-season | Often short and self-scheduled, sometimes barely present in a year-round circuit | Clearly defined and collective, because the competition genuinely stops | A fixed season creates a real off-season; a continuous circuit does not |
| What is monitored | One athlete in detail, so small changes are meaningful | Squad-level load plus individual monitoring, with availability for selection as a central measure | Team performance depends on how many players are available, not only on how fit each is |
And, as always, say what is the same. Both need phases and sub-phases. Both must respect reversibility in the off-season. Both cut volume and hold intensity to taper. Both derive their content from the fitness components and skill requirements of the sport. The principles are common; the constraints are what differ.
Trace every difference back to who owns the calendar. The individual athlete's plan is built around chosen dates; the team's plan is built around dates chosen for it.
Two truths and a lie. One of these statements about yearly programs is false. Find it.
Activities · build and compare two yearly plans
For each decision, name the phase or sub-phase it belongs in and justify it in one sentence.
A player finally has surgery on a shoulder that has been troubling them since round eight.
The highest weekly running volume of the entire year is scheduled.
Training volume is cut by 40 per cent while short efforts stay at competition speed.
Trial matches are played and combinations are tested, with load managed rather than maximised.
Match each term to its meaning.
- Periodisation
- Tapering
- Peaking
- Sub-phase
- Dividing the training year into phases with different aims
- A planned reduction in training volume before competition, with intensity largely maintained
- Arranging the program so best performance occurs at a chosen time
- A shorter block within a phase, with its own aim
Athlete A is an 18-year-old competitive swimmer whose year contains two target meets, in April and again in December. Athlete B is an 18-year-old netballer in a squad whose season runs from March to August, with finals in the last two weeks and no mid-season break.
| Question | What your answer must contain |
|---|---|
| Where do the phases fall? | Approximate months for off-season, pre-season and in-season, and what sets each boundary |
| How many peaks, and when? | The number, the dates, and why the calendar allows or prevents more |
| How is tapering handled? | The pattern across the whole year, not just one taper |
| What is individualised? | What is common, what varies, and what causes the variation |
Then finish with two judgements. Which athlete's program is more constrained, and by what? And name one feature that is identical in both plans, explaining why the difference in calendars does not touch it.
Lock it in. In one sentence, explain why a taper cuts volume but holds intensity, referring to what each of the two is responsible for.
Compare a yearly training program for an individual sport with one for a group sport.
Compare requires similarities and differences on the same criteria. Two programs described in sequence is the failure mode; the marks are for holding them against each other.
Plan: set the criteria, run both against each, then draw out what the comparison means.
The two programs will be compared against the structure of their phases, how peaking and tapering are managed, and how the program accommodates the athletes it serves.
The underlying structure is shared. Both divide the year into pre-season, in-season and off-season phases with sub-phases inside them, and both follow the same progression: general conditioning and volume in the off-season and early pre-season, increasing specificity and intensity as competition approaches, maintenance during the season, and recovery afterwards. Both apply progressive overload across the year rather than within a single week, and both taper before major competition to allow accumulated fatigue to dissipate while fitness is retained.
The decisive difference is the competition calendar. The individual athlete typically targets a small number of identified events, so the program can be built backwards from a known date and peaked precisely, with a full taper producing the best performance on the day it is required. A group sport plays a long fixture list, often weekly for months, with the most important matches at the end, so a single peak is impossible; the program must instead maintain a high performance plateau across the season and peak only modestly into finals.
Individualisation differs correspondingly. The individual program is written for one athlete's measured strengths, weaknesses and injury history, so every variable can be optimised. The group program must serve a squad with different positions, fitness levels, injury statuses and training ages, so it is built at team level with individual modification beneath it — and it is constrained by shared facilities, fixture scheduling, travel and the recovery demands of weekly competition, which leave far less discretionary training time than an individual athlete has.
The comparison shows that both programs pursue the same physiological logic and differ because their competition structures differ. The individual program optimises for one moment; the group program optimises for consistency across many, which is why in-season group training is dominated by maintenance and recovery rather than by the development work an individual athlete continues throughout.
The two programs will be compared against the structure of their phases, how peaking and tapering are managed, and how each accommodates the athletes it serves. The underlying structure is shared: both divide the year into pre-season, in-season and off-season phases with sub-phases, and both progress from general conditioning and volume in the off-season and early pre-season toward increasing specificity and intensity as competition approaches, then maintenance in-season and recovery afterwards, applying progressive overload across the year and tapering before major competition so accumulated fatigue dissipates while fitness is retained. The decisive difference is the competition calendar. An individual athlete typically targets a small number of identified events, so the program is built backwards from a known date and peaked precisely, with a full taper producing the best performance on the day required. A group sport plays a long fixture list, often weekly for months with the most important matches last, so a single peak is impossible and the program must sustain a high performance plateau across the season, peaking only modestly into finals. Individualisation differs correspondingly: the individual program is written for one athlete's measured strengths, weaknesses and injury history so every variable can be optimised, whereas the group program serves a squad of differing positions, fitness levels, injury statuses and training ages and so is built at team level with individual modification beneath it — constrained further by shared facilities, fixture scheduling, travel and the recovery demands of weekly competition, which leave far less discretionary training time. The comparison therefore shows both programs pursuing the same physiological logic and differing because their competition structures differ: the individual program optimises for one moment, the group program for consistency across many, which is why in-season group training is dominated by maintenance and recovery while an individual athlete continues developmental work throughout.
Explain how tapering improves performance despite reducing training load.
Explain asks for the mechanism, and the stem contains an apparent contradiction — less training producing better performance — which your answer must resolve.
Plan: name the principle that dissolves the puzzle, build the linked pairs, then answer directly.
Performance on any given day reflects fitness minus fatigue. Training raises fitness and simultaneously accumulates fatigue, and because fatigue dissipates far faster than fitness declines, reducing load allows fatigue to fall while fitness is largely retained — so measured performance rises.
Reducing volume allows the accumulated consequences of hard training to resolve: muscle glycogen stores are fully replenished, minor muscle damage from repeated loading repairs, and the neural and hormonal signs of accumulated stress return toward baseline, which means the athlete arrives at competition able to express the fitness they have rather than performing through residual fatigue.
Fitness is not lost over the same period because reversibility acts slowly relative to a taper's length, and because intensity is maintained while volume is cut — the adaptations depend far more on the intensity of the stimulus than on its total volume, so preserving hard efforts at reduced frequency retains the adaptation.
This is why a taper reduces volume substantially while keeping some high-intensity work, and why its length must match the fatigue accumulated: too short and residual fatigue remains, too long and reversibility begins to erode the fitness the taper was protecting.
Performance on any given day reflects fitness minus fatigue: training raises fitness while simultaneously accumulating fatigue, and because fatigue dissipates far faster than fitness declines, reducing load allows fatigue to fall while fitness is largely retained, so measured performance rises. Reducing volume lets the accumulated consequences of hard training resolve — muscle glycogen stores are fully replenished, minor muscle damage from repeated loading repairs, and the neural and hormonal markers of accumulated stress return toward baseline — so the athlete arrives at competition able to express the fitness they have rather than performing through residual fatigue. Fitness is not lost over the same period because reversibility acts slowly relative to a taper's length, and because intensity is maintained while volume is cut: the adaptations depend far more on the intensity of the stimulus than on its total volume, so preserving hard efforts at reduced frequency retains them. This is why a taper cuts volume substantially while keeping some high-intensity work, and why its length must be matched to the fatigue accumulated — too short and residual fatigue remains, too long and reversibility begins eroding the fitness the taper was protecting. Tapering therefore does not improve fitness at all; it removes the fatigue that was concealing the fitness already built.
Go back to card 01. The biggest difference is who owns the calendar: the tennis player chooses which tournaments to enter and can build phases around them, while the rugby league squad is handed a draw and must be competitive in every round of it. On the harder question, most people say the tennis player, because the season is long — but the team is the harder case. The individual can peak for a chosen date and treat other events as preparation; the team must be good enough every week to reach the finals it wants to peak for, so it never gets a long enough uninterrupted block to taper into. Write down whether you had that the right way round, and what you would change about your first answer.
Multiple choice · 5 questions
MC 1. The main purpose of the off-season phase is to:
- A. reach the highest training volume of the year
- B. maintain competition fitness while playing matches
- C. recover, complete rehabilitation and retain enough base that pre-season does not begin from nothing
- D. peak for the first round of the season
MC 2. During a taper, the variable that is deliberately maintained is:
- A. training volume
- B. total weekly distance
- C. the number of rest days
- D. training intensity
MC 3. Why is a pre-season usually divided into sub-phases rather than run as one uniform block?
- A. because each sub-phase builds the capacity the next one requires, so general work precedes and enables specific work
- B. because athletes become bored by long blocks of similar training
- C. because competition rules limit how long a squad may train together
- D. because sub-phases allow intensity to be reduced across the whole pre-season
MC 4. A team's yearly program uses repeated weekly mini-tapers rather than one long taper in the middle of the season. This is because:
- A. team athletes recover faster than individual athletes
- B. the team competes every week and cannot afford an underprepared round, so there is no space for a long mid-season taper
- C. tapering has no effect in group sports
- D. team sports do not use periodisation
MC 5. Two squad members, a front-rower and a winger, follow the same yearly program with different conditioning content. The best explanation is that:
- A. the front-rower is less fit and needs an easier program
- B. individualisation is not possible in a group sport
- C. the two players are at different stages of skill acquisition
- D. sport-specific attributes differ by position, so a common framework carries position-specific variation inside it
Short answer · exam style
SA 1. Understand Band 4 Describe the aim of each of the three phases of competition, and explain why the off-season should not be a period of complete inactivity. (4 marks)
SA 2. Analyse Band 5 Explain how tapering produces a peak in performance. Refer to what happens to fatigue and to fitness, and identify two ways a taper can be designed badly. (5 marks)
SA 3. Evaluate Band 6 Compare a yearly training program for an individual sport with one for a group sport. Refer to phases of competition, peaking and tapering, and sport-specific attributes, and identify what does not differ between the two. (7 marks)
📖 Comprehensive answers (click to reveal)
Multiple choice: 1 → C. 2 → D. 3 → A. 4 → B. 5 → D.
Activity 1, indicative answers: 1 → Off-season. Surgery and the rehabilitation that follows need a period in which no competitive performance is required, and the off-season is the only phase that offers one. 2 → Pre-season, in the general preparation sub-phase. Volume peaks early in pre-season while intensity is still moderate, because the aerobic and structural base built here is what allows the athlete to tolerate the higher intensities of specific preparation. 3 → The taper, at the end of pre-season before round one or ahead of a target event. Cutting volume while holding intensity is the defining signature of a taper, and it is what allows accumulated fatigue to clear while adaptation is retained. 4 → The pre-competition sub-phase. Trial matches provide match-like intensity and selection information without the load being maximised, which is exactly the bridge between specific preparation and the taper.
Activity 2, indicative answers: Athlete A, the swimmer, has two target meets, so the year is built as two cycles. Roughly: a short off-season after December, general preparation in January and February, specific preparation into March, taper into the April meet, a brief recovery block, then a second build through the middle of the year with specific preparation in October and November and a taper into December. Two peaks, set by the athlete's chosen meets, and tapering is a full taper into each of the two targets, with training blocks between. Individualisation is total: the whole program is written from this swimmer's own testing and weaknesses. Athlete B, the netballer, has phases set by the draw: off-season roughly September to November, pre-season December to February with general then specific preparation and a taper into round one, and in-season March to August with finals at the end. Ideally one peak, at finals, but the squad must be competitive every week to qualify, so the practical pattern is a weekly mini-taper into each fixture, with a fuller taper only into the finals series. Individualisation is a common squad framework carrying position-specific and individual variation. The netballer's program is the more constrained, and the constraint is the externally imposed draw plus the need to be competitive in every round. Identical in both: the taper mechanism itself, cut volume and hold intensity, because it depends on how fatigue and fitness behave in a human body rather than on the shape of a competition calendar. Credit equally for naming the need to respect reversibility in the off-season, or for the derivation of content from the sport's fitness components and skill requirements.
SA 1 (4 marks): Off-season [1]: recovery from the season, completion of rehabilitation, correction of long-standing weaknesses, and retention of a general base. Pre-season [1]: building the fitness the season will demand, with general conditioning preceding sport-specific conditioning, skill and tactical work. In-season [1]: maintaining fitness and availability while competing, with volume reduced and intensity maintained. Why the off-season is not complete inactivity [1]: reversibility means adaptations are lost when the stimulus is removed, with plasma and stroke volume falling within one to two weeks and a substantial part of aerobic capacity within about eight, so a fully inactive off-season means pre-season is spent regaining ground rather than making it, and returning to load from a detrained state raises injury risk. The defensible design is a short complete break followed by reduced, varied activity.
SA 2 (5 marks): The mechanism [3]: hard training produces both adaptation and fatigue, and fatigue masks the adaptation [1]; a taper reduces training volume substantially while maintaining intensity, so the stimulus that preserves the adaptation is retained while the main source of accumulated fatigue is removed [1]; because fatigue dissipates faster than fitness decays, there is a window in which the athlete carries the fitness without the fatigue, and that window is the peak [1]. Two design errors [2]: reducing intensity along with volume [1], which removes the stimulus maintaining the adaptation and produces an athlete who is rested but slow — a taper cuts the amount of work, not the quality of it; and tapering for too long [1], because once fatigue has cleared, further reduction only allows reversibility to begin removing the fitness the training built. Credit also for tapering too briefly after a very heavy block, so fatigue is still present on competition day.
SA 3 (7 marks): The organising point, worth stating explicitly: the individual athlete largely owns their competition calendar and the team does not, and nearly every difference follows from that. Phases [2]: an individual sets phase boundaries around chosen target events and can move them, and in a year-round circuit may have almost no real off-season; a team's boundaries are set by the draw, cannot be moved, and produce a clearly defined collective off-season because competition genuinely stops. Peaking and tapering [2]: an individual selects a small number of peaks, treats other events as preparation, and takes a full taper into each; a team ideally peaks once at finals but must be competitive every week to get there, so it uses repeated weekly mini-tapers and a fuller taper only into the finals series. Sport-specific attributes [2]: both derive content from the fitness components and skill requirements of the sport, but an individual program is written wholly around one athlete's demands and weaknesses, while a group program is a common framework carrying position-specific and individual variation, because different positions genuinely do different jobs within one squad and one timetable. What does not differ [1]: the principles. Both need phases and sub-phases in which each block enables the next, both must respect reversibility in the off-season, both taper by cutting volume and holding intensity, and both derive their content from the sport's demands. The principles are shared; it is the constraints that differ.
This lesson zooms out. Lessons 9 and 10 planned a single session; this one distributes those sessions across a year so that fitness arrives when it is needed. The principles have not changed — progressive overload, specificity and reversibility from Lessons 6 and 7 are all still doing the work — they are simply operating over months.
Keep two artefacts. The volume-and-intensity curve across the year, annotated with the phases and sub-phases, is the single most useful diagram in this inquiry question. And the six-row comparison table, with who owns the calendar written beside every row, is the answer to any compare question this dot point can ask. Lesson 12 turns to the psychological strategies that operate inside all of this.
Mark lesson as complete
Tick when you've finished the practice and review.