Coach owns this8 min read

Periodization for an individual sport

Season structure when the calendar is tournaments, not fixtures.

Periodization is planning training in blocks so that fitness peaks when it matters and fatigue does not arrive at the same time. Tennis makes this harder than team sport, because there is no fixture list handed down in August. The athlete chooses their tournaments, and they can lose in round one or play six days straight.

The nesting

Block	Length	What it decides
Macrocycle	A season, or half of one	The target events and the overall arc
Mesocycle	3 to 6 weeks	The phase focus, such as building capacity or sharpening
Microcycle	One week	The actual distribution of hard and easy days
Session	One training block	Type, planned duration, planned intensity, drills

Phases

General preparation. Build the base. Highest volume, lowest specificity. Gym work and aerobic capacity carry more of the week.
Specific preparation. Volume comes down, intensity and court specificity go up. Patterns start to look like match play.
Pre competition. Sharpening. Short, sharp, high quality work. Fatigue is deliberately shed.
Competition. Maintain, do not build. The matches are the load. Training exists to keep feel and top up what matches do not provide.
Transition. Genuine rest and unstructured movement. Skipping this is how you arrive at next season already tired.

Planned against actual

The plan is a hypothesis. The useful artefact is the comparison between what you planned and what happened. A week planned at 3000 AU that landed at 5200 AU tells you something real, whether that is a long tournament run or a coach quietly adding sessions.

In Athlivate the coach and the S&C lead author the plan together. Nothing writes it for them.

Scope

This page is education, not medical advice. If something hurts, or a pattern worries you, book an assessment with a physiotherapist. They own that decision.

Pain, injury and availability

The vocabulary to describe a problem accurately, and who decides what.