Strength Training Manual: The Agile Periodization Approach [Print Replica] Kindle Edition

Although I have been studying and working in the field of strength and conditioning for the last decade, I have a weird confession. I rarely buy books or articles on training anymore. When I first started, I would devour a book a week and drown myself in mountains of research studies attempting to learn as much as humanly possible. After a while, I began to realize that training was more so an arte-scienzia, and that most books and articles on training failed to add anything productive beyond the musings from the original greats like Zatsiorsky, Siff, Verkhoshansky, Pfaff, Al Vermeil and Charlie Francis to name a few. I continued to pour over the classics from Bosch, Poliquin, and countless other masterpieces, but during undergrad, I began to notice the field was moving away from the art and philosophy of training, to an intellectually impoverished, reductionist, myopic variant deemed the “evidenced-based” movement. Having been mislead by the allures of this movement early on in my career, (with the countless injuries and lack of improvement to show for it!), I began to focus more on the art and philosophy aspects of the profession as this appeared to yield the most benefits for most of the populations I trained.After undergrad, I pivoted slightly into the field of nutrition and increased focus on the psychological elements involved in the interplay of nutrition, training, and behavior change. Although I still read training research, devoted 25-40 hours weekly to in-person observing and/or training for many years after graduate school, and read numerous fantastic, informative articles from the likes of Carl Valle and other great coaches; overall my purchases and consumption of training centric books sharply decreased over the years. It wasn’t last year when I made my first training book purchase, as my friend and fellow strength coach Mladen Jovanovic released his magnum opus, Strength Training Manual: The Agile Periodization Approach. As a big fan of Mladen’s work in the past, I was excited to dive in. After finally finishing this beast of a manual, I can happily conclude that I am grateful that this was my first training related purchase in years.Unlike the unrelenting production of noise and unnecessary garbage that typically circulates academia and the internet nowadays, Mladen’s introduction alone provides content that is worth the price of admission. Paralleling my own journey, Mladen has similarly realized the power of philosophy, and the utility of outside fields like psychology research pertaining to intuition, personality, and statistically informed risk management paradigms to effectively counter the numerous pitfalls that commonly plague the industry today. This process in turn provides a stable base for formulating an effective, agile, periodization framework. Building off this base, Mladen provides a comprehensive approach to designing training programs and navigating the innumerable possible conflicts or challenges that can arise during training cycles.Written in a casual, conversational tone, Mladen’s work is easy to read but does not lack depth. The ability to convey complex ideas in a simple, accessible manner is yet another testament to Mladen’s abilities and I often found myself pausing to reflect on the countless astute observations loaded in each chapter. His humor and personality are interspersed throughout, and the tone conveys both confidence, edge, and a strong personality. Some readers might be offended by the lack of political correctness or a filter, but you can tell that Mladen is sick and tired of the ideological nonsense that frequently plagues the field. That being said, the confidence is well earned as Mladen’s ideas are both legit and effective. They are backed by both sound philosophical and scientific arguments as well as decades of elite-level experience. If you are interested in a training book that is informative, insightful and unlike any other training book you’ve ever read, I strongly recommend reading Mladen’s manual.Check it out!

One of the best reads on strength training in totality. It’s not just about a book based on the physiology occurring in the human body, it’s more on the ’agile’ planning during an athletes year and how to apply these different methods throughout it.

If you're a lifelong learner in the world of strength and conditioning, no doubt you've read the perennial works of Verkoshansky, Issurain, Bompa and the other big-hitting Eastern European coaches of the USSR's Golden era of sports. These have long been considered great works, with many elevating them to the status of 'biblical texts'. For decades, strength coaches have fallen in love with the plan-in-advance approaches the texts espouse and these days, long-term planning is rarely challenged or critiqued. Indeed, the underlying premise that the effects of training are predictable, is assumed to be true.Since the Golden Age of the USSR on the world sporting stage where these texts and ideas emerged (some of which, are still invaluable), the dynamics of sports preparation has changed. The status quo is no longer planning for world-class athletes in 4-year training cycles who do nothing else but train and compete in their sport; nor, are they assisted by the 'supplements' that became popular during the 70's and 80's. In reality, 'plan in advance' strategies espoused by the 'Old Gods' rarely work out in practice; if it did, we would expect to see linear and consistent progress from our athletes across time... which we know is simply not the case.In reality, sports planning is marred with uncertainty; and the Strength Training Manual is an antidote to this. Rich in storytelling, archetypal frameworks, and heuristics or 'rules of thumb', it assists in decision making in an environment where it's more important to recognise what you don't know, then what you do.The Strength Training manual is in many ways, the New Testament; it adds much-needed context to our 'biblical texts' and explains why our much-loved periodisation models rarely turn out the way we expected them to. It refines our thinking, replacing rigid periodization structures with adaptable, 'agile' frameworks, 'rules of thumb' and shortcuts to make the life of a strength coach easier and more effective.This piece of work will no doubt in time, find itself on the bookshelves of every open-minded strength coach who is keen to elevate themselves out of dogmatic thinking and into a world of more pragmatic, practical and effective coaching.

I first want to point out that there are a ton of variables I am now adding to my spreadsheets to track athletes. I found that to be the best part of the book in my opinion. If you're new into the S&C field, I'd recommend this as a good but complicated source. The reason it is complicated is due to Jovanovic's intellectual philosophy and him terming things completely different from what I've read and learned about in S&C. In fact that first couple of chapters are basically going over his terminology and philosophy (it can be annoying as you don't really need to know his terminology for the CSCS or maybe conversing with other practitioners in the field (except for Jovanovic)). Once you get past the terminology, Jovanovic does bring up some great points in terms of training athletes and really having an 'agile periodization' program as there is never a team in which all the athletes show up for their lifts.