Mladen Jovanović

I’ve started a Substack. It’s a place where I’ll be writing more regularly about training theory, physiology, skill acquisition, and the messy middle between science and coaching practice. The first post is now live: “Thresholds, domains, and the confusion around vV̇O2max/MAS and CP/CV” If you want clearer thinking around performance, not recycled takes and repackaged jargon, subscribe here: agileperiodization.substack.com More to come. PLEASE RT!!! #SportsScience #ExercisePhysiology #EnduranceTraining #Coaching #AgilePeriodization

For anyone who may be interested, the following link gives free access to this new publication in @_JSAMS for 50 days! sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Endurance intensity gets messy fast. LT1, VT1, CV, CP, MAS, MSS, ASR, threshold, VO2max, Zone 2… Useful concepts. Easy to turn into alphabet soup. So I built Endurance Map Builder: a practical map of speeds, paces, domains, zones, and methods. Preview video: youtube.com/watch?v=AsFOnL… Product: payhip.com/b/DSc7p €9.99 Use the map. Coach the athlete. #agileperiodization #endurance #sportscience

@GingerGtraining No, but will try to get CEUs. @WSWayland how do I start the procedure? 😉

@Physical_Prep Does this possibly count towards NSCA CEUs?

Most coaches don’t need more information. They need better thinking. Your plan looks perfect on paper. Then real athletes happen: fatigue, chaos, schedule changes, noisy data, different responses, and all the usual mess. That is where coaching actually begins. Agile Periodization: Philosophical Foundations is a 10+ hour course on the mental models behind better coaching decisions: 🗺️ Map vs Territory ⚖️ Robust vs Optimal 🧭 Explore vs Exploit 🏎️ Substance vs Form 🛠️ Tools, not Truths 🔁 Iterative Planning 📊 Bayesian Updating Not abstract philosophy. Practical tools for thinking, judging, adapting, and coaching under uncertainty. 7 modules. 10+ hours. €49. Link: payhip.com/b/iA3qU Please RT!!!

I got tired of pretending endurance zones are simple. VT1, LT1, CV, CP, MAS, MSS, ASR, threshold, VO2max, Zone 2, Seiler zones… Useful concepts. Messy map. So I built Endurance Map Builder. Web app + Excel workbook + manual. It turns athlete anchors into a practical map of speeds, paces, domains, zones, and methods. Not a full program. A map for better coaching decisions. €9.99 payhip.com/b/DSc7p Please RT! #agileperiodization #endurance #sportscience

If diversity is a strength, then it’s a strength of the Right. In fact, the Right has a stronger claim than the Left does.

A man spends 50 years teaching at MIT. He knows his time is running out. So he records one last lecture — everything he knows, distilled into a single hour. He died 5 months later. This is that lecture. The most important hour you'll watch this week. 👇 Bookmark it for later

Pleased to see that our joint ESSA & ACSM expert statement on “Physical Activity and Exercise Intensity Terminology” bit.ly/4rJ94Ky & bit.ly/4nT7Pq5is received some thoughtful feedback from the research community bit.ly/3RNJVRu bit.ly/4tH0EU0

Drowning in information. But wisdom is a desert.

It’s a thoughtful conceptual sharpening with nice probabilistic framing for simulations, and the structuralist pursuit of a unified logico-mathematical ontology has some intellectual appeal for theory-building. Classic high-theory sports science: profoundly elegant in structure, yet low on demonstrated impact when it meets actual athletes and coaches.

The same session is never really the same session. “Dose → response” is useful, but too simple. The athlete must first perform, and that performance is shaped by current state: sleep, fatigue, pain, motivation, confidence, readiness, context. Then the dose creates a response, but response ≠ just adaptation. It can be skill acquisition, activation, protection, fatigue, injury, or some weird nonlinear “other” effect. Better model: Current state → Perform → Dose → Training effect → Current state The practical question: What training effect am I trying to buy today? Article: agileperiodization.substack.com/p/training-eff… #agileperiodization

When was the last time you moved without thinking about it? Not the last time you exercised. The last time you just moved — instinctively, fluidly, athletically — without any gap between what the moment demanded and what your body did. For a lot of athletes over 40, that memory lives somewhere in the past. And the gap between that memory and what's happening now is one of the most disorienting things an athlete can experience. Nobody has written the book that takes elite athletic movement science and delivers it directly to the adult over 40 who still identifies as an athlete. Until now. The Lifelong Athlete. Available now on Amazon. a.co/d/0iOWOApT

I’m pleased to share that my new article titled “Towards High-Accuracy Athletic Injury Predictions Using a First-Principles Modelling Approach: Theory to (Future) Practice” has just been published in @SportsMedicineJ . It was a deliberate decision to publish this article alongside my recent paper on defining athletic injury, as these two papers are intended to sit together. This article represents the fourth of five works that I consider to be my core conceptual contributions on injury (one more to come). The other two so far are my injury framework in JSAMS and my 2024 article on causality also published in Sports Medicine, “Athletic injury research: frameworks, models and the need for causal knowledge.” Across the sports science and sports medicine literature, the inability to accurately predict injuries is commonly attributed to their multifactorial and complex nature, which has led to increasing emphasis on complex systems modelling approaches. In this article, we outline that accurate prediction does not require modelling entire causal systems, as formalised within the Causal Markov Condition. We argue that this is the case for injury as well, with injury prediction being more a measurement problem, that is, obtaining accurate measurements of the variables that matter. This article is intended to provide an explicit framework for predicting both gradual onset injuries and a range of tissue failure injuries as well. Within the discussion section of this article, my co-authors and I outline three potential directions for researchers to pursue using the approach presented here. It is my intention to dedicate my career to pursuing some of these paths, particularly those that I believe have the highest chance of making a major impact on this problem. Accordingly, I will be launching the “Kalkhoven and Norris Injury Research Lab” at Western Sydney University with my colleague at WSU and co-author Dr @DNorrisSC. Moving forward, we will be dedicating ourselves to innovation in this space. We will also be partnering with Assoc. Prof. @edwardswb and Dr @cfirminger who I consider to be among the world leaders in injury research, and who form part of the extraordinary Edwards Group at the University of Calgary. We have a number of exciting projects in this space that we will be collaborating on. Finally, I would like to say that I truly believe there are real solutions to the problem of injury prediction. I would not be working so extensively to specify this problem if I did not believe that meaningful progress is possible. While this is an extremely difficult problem, this article outlines that it is in fact solvable, and we are committed to doing everything we can to make significant strides in this area. I hope you all enjoy the article. Thank you to my co-authors @DNorrisSC, @francoimpell, and @edwardswb, and to the reviewers of this article. link.springer.com/article/10.100…

🚨 Just Published 🚨 DECELERATION specific isometric exercises acutely enhance change of direction performance in academy ⚽️ players ✔️ 8th min most pronounced gains & with early DEC-ISO position ✔️ Application to pre-training or competition warm-ups for COD sports 🏈⚽️ 🏀👇

RDL / Hinge variations are an opportunity to explore movement expression in a way that be tailored to your athletes and clients needs. But getting the barbell hinge down is the first step, then hinges of all types become an opportunity to explore. Velocity, force and amplitude all become your play thing.

Sci-Hub is an evil website that pirated 85M+ research papers and made them freely available And now they've added AI to their database to make Sci-Bot. It answers your questions using latest, full-text articles. But DO NOT use it. We should all try to make billion-dollar academic publishers richer. I'm putting the link below so you know how to avoid it.

“One-Size Training Is Breaking Your Squad” Here’s an uncomfortable truth. If you’re running the same conditioning session for every player on your panel — the same reps, the same distances, the same intensity — you’re not just leaving performance on the table. You’re building injuries. Your sprint athlete doesn’t need more aerobic volume. They need a base. Your aerobic athlete doesn’t need more long runs. They need a speed ceiling. Your hybrid player doesn’t need more of the same. They need a direction. The research backs it up. The GPS data backs it up. And if you look hard enough, your physio’s injury list backs it up too. There’s a better way. And it starts with knowing who you’re actually training. #InjuryPrevention #LoadManagement #gaaperformance

Gym Archetypes open.substack.com/pub/agileperio…

Two weeks without mobile internet improved mental health more than antidepressants and reversed roughly 10 years of attentional decline. Screen time dropped 49% (314 to 161 min/day).