On this episode we welcome Drew's hero to the conversation: Dr. John Kiely. He established himself as a serious athlete with several Irish national championships in kickboxing and Muay Thai and ultimately won the Irish heavyweight boxing championship twice. After his competitive career he set out on his career in strength and conditioning which has taken him to the highest levels of sport in Europe. He's coached world champions and Olympians in a wide variety of sports, he's coached teams at the highest levels of soccer and track and field. But what he's best known for now is his writing, much of which is critical of periodization theory, especially the way many of its traditional paradigms are based on outdated stress science. At its root, this is a conversation about how humans are not robots, and the non-physical components of training are almost certainly more important than the details of the physical aspect.