| The Principle of Adaptation
The body adapts to stress in a highly specific way. Adaptation is the way the body 'programs' muscles to remember particular activities, movements or skills. By repeating that skill or activity, the body adapts to the stress and the skill becomes easier to perform.
Adaptation explains why a beginning athlete is often sore after starting a new routine, but after doing the same technique for weeks and months, the athlete has little, if any, muscle soreness. This also explains the need to vary the routine and continue to apply the Overload Principle if continued improvement is desired.
The Principle of Use / Disuse
Once you understand the Principle of Adaptation, you understand the need for rest. However, how much rest is enough and much is too much? The Principle of Use/Disuse implies that you "use it or lose it." This simply means that your muscles hypertrophy with use and atrophy with disuse.
The main problem here is finding the correct balance between stress and rest on the muscles. There must be periods of low intensity between periods of high intensity to allow for recovery. The periods of lower intensity training, or the rest phase, is a prime time for a bit of cross training. Cross training allows you to let over stressed muscle groups rest and recover, while still providing cardiovascular conditioning and providing muscle balance by working the muscles that aren't as integral to your sport.
The Principle of Specificity
Related to the principle of adaptation is the principle of specificity. Because the body will adapt in a highly specific way to the training it receives, a strong athletic foundation is needed before specific training methods will work optimally.
The Specificity Principle simply states that for these reasons, training must go from highly general training to highly specific training. For example, if you are a sprinter, you may start out with easy running and general strength training in the way of plyometrics or sprinting out of the blocks. If you try to do explosive, high intensive training too soon, you will run the risk of such training being ineffective and possibly resulting in injury. The Principle of Specificity also implies that to become better at a particular exercise or skill, you must perform that exercise or skill. To be a good diver, you must dive. The point to take away is that a runner should train by running and a swimmer should train by swimming. There are, however, some great reasons to cross train, as discussed previously.
Final Thoughts
While there may be other "principles" of training you will find on the web and in text books, these six are the cornerstone of all effective training methods. These cover all aspects of a solid training foundation in athletics. Once put together, the most logical training program involves a periodized approach which cycles the intensity and training objectives.
The training must be specific not only for your sport, but to your individual abilities (tolerance to training stress, recoverability, outside obligations, etc.). you must increase the training load over time - allowing some workouts to be less intense than others - and you must train often enough not only to keep a detraining effect from happening, but to also force adaptation.
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