the four principles of training

Most everyone in our track and field group has applied the four primary principles of training, sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. Regardless, it’s interesting to understand how it all works.
 
These principles of training are adaptation, overload, specificity, and recovery.
 
Our bodies constantly undergo the process of physiological adaptation. Two obvious adaptations occur in childhood and aging – but now let’s focus on our lifestyle. Our bodies adapt to our lifestyle regardless of how active or inactive we become. Sometimes we can readily see these differences in physique, especially in the highly trained versus the couch potato.
 
Then there’s a process that’s less visible yet far more important: what takes place physiologically. Throughout our lives we all waver between positive and negative physiological outcomes. When we cannot do our workouts, negative adaptation will occur. When we return to activity, we begin the process of positive adaptation. A positive adaptation lifestyle benefits our health and is an absolute necessity for physical training.
 
Overload: a key process
 
The logical question now is: How best to achieve positive adaptation? We begin with overload. Overload training consists of doing more than what one has been accustomed to doing. If the couch potato decides to take a 10-minute walk today and increases by one minute each day for the next few weeks, he/she is overloading and will experience chronic positive adaptation. In this case, chronic refers to long- term. It takes weeks for a beginner to achieve positive adaptation. It may take months or even years for the chronic exerciser to achieve positive adaptation.
 
Interestingly, “acute” or “immediate” adaptation is what we experience when exercising. For example, heart rate, blood pressure, ventilation, blood flow and so on all increase to meet the stress of exercise. Achieving chronic adaptation through overload will ease the acute response while doing the same work.
 
Overload in a workout can be applied in many ways. With interval training, one could increase the length, number, or intensity of intervals, or reduce the recovery between intervals. (Please, not all at the same time!) Overload works by judiciously increasing stress on the body through exercise that causes it to positively adapt. Once we understand this, we recognize that the terms chronic overload and training are synonymous. 
 
Overload has limits
 
A word of caution: we cannot use overload continuously. We all have our genetic limitations. The closer our training brings us to these limitations, the harder we have to work and the more difficult it is to overload. That is why Olympic athletes do a maintenance level of training for a few years before overloading in small increments over long periods of time to get to that peak (genetic) potential.
 
Also important to the long-term trainer, which most of us are, is that doing the same workout will maintain our fitness but not improve it. That is OK, because it’s impossible to constantly overload, and maintaining a high level of fitness is highly desirable because we avoid the dreaded negative adaptation.
 
The next necessary principle is specificity: adaptation is specific to the activity and its intensity/duration. If you want to improve your swimming, then you must swim. To improve running, you must run. Even though these and other activities may have similar physiological requirements such as power or endurance, they require these traits from different neuromuscular unit patterns. Requirements can differ even within the same activity. The neuromuscular recruitment pattern and energy system requirements of a sprinter are quite different from those of a long-distance runner and even a middle- distance runner.
 
The vital stage of recovery
 
Finally, we have the principle of recovery. Chronic adaptation/training takes place between bouts of exercise. Overload exercise stresses the body’s acute physiological response to adapt so that it can better handle the stress in the future. For example, the body can increase its vascularization, muscle hypertrophy, and cardiac output.
 
These changes do not take place immediately after exercising. An overload session results in microscopic injury at the cellular level. The body overcompensates in its repair, resulting in positive adaptation. We know we need time to recover from muscle soreness and stiffness; but even if we don’t experience post-exercise discomfort, microscopic injuries still occur and can accumulate. Recovery includes rest, of course. We can also recover by doing a different workout the next time. Using different neuromuscular patterns and energy systems gives the previously used systems time to recover.
 
A caveat! As we age, we see our performance and training abilities decrease. To put this in a positive perspective, consider that at any age people vary widely in their ability to respond to exercise, or for that matter, everyday activity. Those who do what we do at the track, I estimate, are in the top 1% of ability, and maybe even higher. Research tells us that as a group we will live longer than the average American – and more importantly, because of our physiological fitness, we’ll have a better quality of life.
 
Congratulations to all. Keep it up.
 
Arthur Bourgeois
BS, MS, PED in Exercise Science 
Professor Emeritus, Plymouth State University