Sport & ContestGreek → English
Periodization
/ˌpɪəriədaɪˈzeɪʃən/noun
The division of a training programme, or of a stretch of history, into planned phases.
The Greek roots
περί
perí
around
ὁδός
hodós
way, road
Literally: “a going round”
The story of the word
Períodos is a lap: the circuit a runner makes, then any recurring cycle, then a stretch of time. Soviet sports science built the training sense in the 1960s, with Leonid Matveyev's blocks moving an athlete from high volume to high intensity so that peak form lands on the day of the final. Historians use the same word for the fight over where to cut the past, which is never a neutral cut.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 20th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
periodexodusodometermethod
In a sentence
Her periodization puts the heaviest mileage eleven weeks out and nothing hard in the last ten days.