Coaches are human. Often too much or too little is done with volumes and intensities, common precision errors, ruin good systems. Sometimes overreaching happens in addition to staleness and flatness come competition, and then things become confusing. I don’t have the answer as this is a bit of an enigma but at least we can observe possible trends. Mladen Jovanovic was very vocal about these factors in his blog, but who is watching out in their own programs really? I would suggest reading the monitoring research coming from New Zealand and Australia right now regarding training load to get a better grasp of mistakes that many of us are unaware of. I am looking at monotony this year with one post college athlete who works with a team of coaches and therapists to see what really happens with very simple periodization planners (attached image). Contact me via PM if you are a college team and looking for a inexpensive way to plan and monitor the year for 80 Euros.
