Training

1. The first principle of training is specificity. A training plan must consider the demands of your intended goal, the physiological and psychological capacities these demands require, your own balance of attainment of these capacities in relation to the balance required for your goal, the time required to develop each, and the sequence in which they are best developed.
   
   The most important capacities are those pertaining to the physiological systems of energy production: Oxidative, Glycolytic Anaerobic, Alactic Anaerobic, and the Neuromuscular capacities associated with muscle development and the distribution of slow and fast twitch fibres.
   
   

2. Principle two of training is consistency/reversibility. Consistency means that types of training need to be repeated at regular intervals in order to build on previous development. Reversibility means that, if if you don’t repeatedly train a capacity, it will diminish at a certain rate of decay. To avoid this decay, once your required capacities and their balance are determined, portions of your training must be allocated to address each of them. In other words, you must make sure that a week or a month of training consists of the right distribution of training types for your purposes.
   
   Benchmark workouts of selected training types repeated at regular intervals, typically each four to six weeks, can be used to measure the progress, or else decay, and balance of adaptation and thus to inform your future training needs.
   
   

3. The third principle is variation.
   An optimum sequence of progression gradually leads to the attainment of those capacities that are most specific to your race. Over the span of a year, or even an entire career, some capacities will depend on prior development of more general capacities. And to ‘convert’ foundation capacities to specific capacities requires workouts designed to mediate between the different types of training. Thus training needs to be qualitatively and quantitatively altered in response to circumstances.
   
   Alternating types of training on consecutive days can enable you to train a certain capacity while resting another. Moreover, when, after several weeks, improvements from repeating an exercise start to diminish, a different exercise of the same type, ie. addressing the same capacity, can break through staleness and bring new improvements.
   
   However, beware of irrationally seeking variety for its own sake and thus undermining the principle of consistency.
   
   

4. The fourth, and perhaps most fundamental, principle of training is progressive overload. The stress of training must be gradually increased for further adaptation to take place. This can be done by altering one of the parameters to make an exercise more stressful, while maintaining the consistency of other parameters.
   
   However, the sequence, or periodisation, of progression needs to be considered. A foundation, a general capacity to train, must be developed before you can do the intense work that prepares you for maximum performance, and then a balance between freshness and training effect must be sought just prior your peak competition.
   
   Typically, the quantity of work done needs to be increased before intensity can be addressed. Thus training frequency, duration, number or distance of repetitions, need to be gradually increased before decreasing them and instead increasing the intensity or speed of the work performed. Total workload as well as intensity must be carefully monitored and not permitted to raise too rapidly. The hallowed rule of thumb is ‘don’t increase frequency, intensity, or duration more than 10-20% per week‘. And, when peaking up over the last couple of weeks before the big race, while intensity has to be maintained, the quantity of work needs to be reduced.
   
   

5. Principle five is recovery. Adaptation occurs not while exercising but when resting after exercise. Workouts must alternate in the degree of stress they place on a capacity and a workload must not exceed the ability of the body to recover from it. This means that you plan for between one, and no more than three, workouts per week to be of high performance. The function of the rest of your workouts is to set the stage for these key workouts. The non-key workouts can be moderate sessions for the maintenance of a parameter that is not currently being increased in the high performance progressive overload workouts, or else easy sessions for ‘active recovery’. Also take into consideration non-training life stresses. These can equally result in excessive fatigue and impact on your training and health.
   
   The main consideration is to be fresh when it counts: in the key progressive overload workouts.

Training plans that prescribe a specific workout and intensity for each day do not account for how well you have adapted to the work you have already done. By looking back over a training diary you can see what capacities you have recently attended to and which ones need further attention. You can also see how rapidly you have increased your overload, when you have last worked very hard, and whether you are due for some recovery or else a higher training stimulus.

Additionally, your biometric statistics such as Bodyweight, Resting Heart Rate, Heart Rate Variability and Working Heart Rates and Recovery Heart Rates for benchmark workouts will help you to decide whether you are adapting to a regime and can ramp it up or you are fatiguing excessively and need to ramp it down. Performance at various benchmark workouts can inform you regarding the balance of capacities you have developed and whether the emphasis on certain workout types needs to be altered to fit you more closely to the specific demands of your chosen goal.

Having said this, there can be much benefit from using published programs as flexible models from which to adapt your own customised regime. For example, providing you can ascertain that a Workout of the Day that you have spotted fits the specific requirements of your goal, the capacity needing training on that day, your fitness, and your stage of preparation, by all means use it. Programs such as the Concept2 Interactive Guide, The Pete Plan, and the Wolverine Plan offer excellent features and a degree of flexibility. But to gain maximum individualised training benefit, as distinct from a team training benefit, you must be prepared to deviate from the details of such programs in an informed manner.