Periodisation for Club Coaches
Planning a Season on Two Sessions a Week
Most of us came to periodisation through people we admire. We watch a clip from a national-team coach, or read a piece by a top S&C, and we hear about block periodisation, three-week overload cycles, deload weeks, explosive meters, monthly themes nested inside annual plans, and individualised programmes per line. It is genuinely brilliant work. It is also, if we are honest, a long way from a Tuesday night in February when half the squad is stuck in traffic and the floodlights take ten minutes to warm up.
This article is for the rest of us. The competitive club coach who has two sessions a week, a match on the weekend, a squad with mixed availability, and a season that runs longer than any neat macrocycle. The coach who likes the ideas but needs to translate them.
The good news is that periodisation at club level is not about copying a High Performance or HP model into a smaller box. It is about borrowing the underlying principles, intent, structure, recovery, coherence, and applying them to your reality. Most of what HP coaches do well, you can do well too. You just have to let go of doing all of it.
TL;DR
👉 Periodisation at club level is about intent and coherence, not volume or fancy cycles.
👉 Treat your two weekly sessions as one system, not as two separate trainings. One leans without-ball or principle-led, one leans game-context.
👉 The match is your highest-fidelity training stimulus. Plan the week from the match, not despite it.
👉 Pick one or two themes per block. The urge to cover everything is the trap.
👉 Pre-season builds capacity, in-season maintains and refines, late-season trims, sharpens, and protects energy for the moments that matter.
Some of the sources we used
What periodisation actually means at club level
Periodisation, stripped to its essentials, is just the deliberate planning of training across time so that adaptation, recovery, and game performance line up. It is intent applied to a calendar. The mistake club coaches make is reading about the elite version and assuming the smaller version of it is also smaller in importance. It is the opposite. With only two sessions a week, every minute on the pitch carries more weight, not less.
Russell Coates put it cleanly in his pre-season workshop. Pre-season, in his view, is about getting better without draining the players physically, not about getting fitter as an end in itself.[1] He also talks about making fewer choices but better ones, and about what you leave out being just as important as what you add. That is periodisation in two sentences. It also happens to describe the entire club season.
Mick Beunen, working with the Belgian Red Lions, periodises in three-week overload phases followed by a deload week, with strength as the foundation always coupled with speed and game-relevant movement.[2] You cannot copy that volume in a club environment, but you can absolutely copy the idea. Three weeks of pushing a theme, one week of consolidating it. That fits inside a club calendar without rewriting your life.
Fede Tanuscio frames the same thing through a coaching lens: a daily programme nested inside a weekly programme, nested inside a monthly programme, nested inside a year programme.[3] He calls training to train one of his pet hates, and he is right. If your Tuesday and Thursday sessions are not connected to each other or to last weekend’s game and next weekend’s game, you do not have periodisation. You have two sessions.
How to structure a week with only two sessions
Treat your two sessions as one system. Tanuscio uses a clean rule of thumb in his junior planning: one focus with the ball, one focus without the ball, across the week.[3] You can use a similar rule. One technical or principle-led night, one game-context or tactical night, both stitched to the same theme.
A useful default looks like this:
