Periodisation For Muscle Growth: The Emperor’s New Clothes

In my early years of coaching, periodisation always eluded me.

In my own training I’d never really used it. I deloaded when I needed to, switched exercises when something stopped working, and changed session structure when my schedule or my gym access changed. That was it. Then I started coaching, and suddenly periodisation was everywhere. Textbooks, courses, and especially social media made a big deal of it. It sounded fancy and important, like the kind of quality thing a real coach should be delivering to clients.

But I could never figure out what periodisation for muscle growth was actually meant to do. If a client and I had just run a successful full-body hypertrophy mesocycle and we’d maxed out the current lifts, I never knew what came next. I tried different combinations, I bluffed and faked my way through it, and over time I noticed it didn’t really make much difference. The clients kept growing, the lifts kept moving, and this big important thing I was supposed to be doing turned out to be the emperor’s new clothes.

Strength Peaks, Muscles Don’t

Periodisation exists because of a specific problem. A powerlifter has a meet day. On a particular Saturday in March they have to express their absolute peak force, and to do that they need to taper, manage fatigue, build technical skill, and arrive primed. Macrocycles, mesocycles, microcycles, the whole architecture is designed around peaking on a date.

If you’re not peaking on a date, you don’t have that constraint.

Strength is a performance outcome. It depends on the nervous system’s ability to recruit muscle fibres and on the technical skill of lifting heavy. Both of those degrade with cumulative fatigue, which is why peaking matters.

Hypertrophy is just the muscle cells physically getting bigger. There is no peak day for a quad. The muscle doesn’t need to express anything on a specific Saturday, it just needs to keep getting trained hard enough, often enough.

This is the mismatch the whole industry papers over. Using peaking logic to build muscle is using the wrong tool for the wrong job. Right method, wrong sport.

Same Volume, Same Muscle Growth

In 2022, Moesgaard and colleagues published the periodisation meta-analysis everyone should have read. They looked at every trial where the two groups did the same amount of work, just structured differently. For maximum strength, periodisation won. For muscle growth, the effect size was 0.13. In plain English, that’s nothing meaningful.

They also compared linear versus undulating periodisation. Effect size 0.05, they produce the same muscle, the spreadsheet was theatre.

In 2026 the American College of Sports Medicine published its updated Position Stand on resistance training. The authors rolled up 137 systematic reviews and over 30,000 participants. Their conclusion on periodisation matched Moesgaard’s: it doesn’t reliably move the needle on muscle growth. While they were at it, they said the same about training to absolute failure, set structure, exercise complexity, equipment type, and time under tension. None of them reliably moved the needle either.

The variables that actually move it are weekly volume (at least ten working sets per muscle group), how close you take your sets to failure, and progressive overload. And progressive overload doesn’t even have to mean "more weight". Plotkin’s 2022 RCT showed that adding a rep at the same load grew muscle just as well as adding load at the same reps, so pick whichever you can manage today.

That short list is what muscle growth actually responds to.

Twelve Weeks On One Plan

A few years ago an intermediate-advanced lifter started working with me. He arrived on a beautifully periodised programme that rotated phases every four weeks. Strength block, hypertrophy block, deload, power, back to the start. It looked clever and read clever, but he wasn’t getting stronger and he wasn’t getting bigger.

I asked him to do something almost embarrassingly simple: run the same plan, with the same exercises and the same reps, for twelve weeks. No changes, just try to add a rep or a small load each session.

Twelve weeks later his lifts were the highest they’d ever been, and he hadn’t expected any of it. From that point on we only changed things when he hit a wall, not when a calendar told us to, and those walls didn’t come every four weeks. Sometimes they came at eight, sometimes at fourteen, sometimes at twenty.

The programme was completely fine. The problem was he’d been abandoning it every month, mistaking restarts for periodisation.

Routine Over Periodisation

The right tool is unglamorous, which is why it doesn’t sell programmes.

Here’s what the research and the coaching room both point at:

Train each muscle group two to four times a week.
Do at least ten working sets per muscle per week.
Leave one to three reps in reserve on most sets, and take the last set of each exercise close to or all the way to failure.
Every session, try to add a rep or a small amount of load to something.
If you fail to match the previous session’s reps or load for two sessions in a row, that’s your deload: cut volume and load by roughly half for a week, then go back to adding reps.

That’s the whole template. You can run it for years. Change exercises when one stops working or stops feeling good, change session structure when your schedule, gym access, or priorities change, but leave the basic logic alone.

The boring answer is the right one. It doesn’t generate the engagement that a 12-week scientific hypertrophy mesocycle does, there’s no app for it, no certification course around it, no spreadsheet to sell.

Steelmanning Periodisation

There are two real objections worth taking seriously.

The first is the Dr. Mike one. His company, Renaissance Periodization, has built much of its profile on mesocycle periodisation, and Dr. Mike is evidence-based to his core. His own published research actually lines up with the meta-analyses. The mesocycle structure he teaches is a useful way to organise autoregulated deloads, progressive volume increases, and watching how clients respond to training stress. Those things all work. The formal names (MEV, MAV, MRV, phase potentiation) help teach the system, but they’re not what’s doing the actual work. Strip the labels off, run the same approach, and you get the same muscle. Dr. Mike is right about the approach, the audience just tends to confuse the labels with the lever.

The second objection is harder to dismiss. Most periodisation studies run under sixteen weeks, and hypertrophy is slow, so a real periodisation effect might only show up past six to nine months. De Souza’s 2018 trial (the second half of it) and Kraemer’s 9-month 2003 trial in female tennis players both hint at this. The Kraemer group on undulating periodisation gained 3.3 kilos of fat-free mass over nine months, compared with 1.6 kilos in the non-periodised group.

If that pattern is real (and it might be), the simplest explanation is that fatigue catches up to you given enough time, and a periodised plan handles it better than a non-periodised one. You can get the same effect with autoregulated deloads though. You don’t need named phases, you need to be honest with yourself about when you’re stalling and act on it.

Trust The Boring Answer

If I could send a note back to the version of me bluffing periodisation through coaching calls in 2014, it would say to trust the boring answer. Stop trying to make periodisation work for muscle growth. It’s solving a problem your clients don’t have.

Make them lift hard, lift consistently, and progress something every session. Deload them when their performance actually stalls, not when a calendar says it’s time. That’s almost the entire thing.

Periodisation is a beautiful tool for the wrong job. There is no peak day for a quad, and you don’t owe your clients a four-week reset every time the plan is finally working.

If you’d rather have a coach who tells you to keep doing what’s working when it’s working, that’s what coaching with me looks like.

Photography: Sam Sabourin on Unsplash.