Basic Training Assumptions
Here are the first 7 of Joel Friel’s training principles. Joel Friel is an endurance coach who has written extensively on this subject
1. Training must be physically stressful. The whole purpose of training is to physically and appropriately challenge the body. From this challenge the body adapts and becomes more capable of handling a given level of stress. To be effective the training challenge should be specific to the stress anticipated in the goal event for which you are training.
2. Adaptation to a specific physical stress is called “fitness.” This puts to rest old arguments about who is more fit – a golfer, weight lifter or marathoner. Each is equally fit for the unique physical demands of their sports. For example, if you want to define fitness as the physical skill required to hit a ball a long way accurately with a stick then the golfer is the fittest.
3. Another product of stress is fatigue. If you challenge the body many physiological changes other than fitness can occur. You may have depleted carbohydrate stores, damaged muscle cells, altered body chemistry, etc. Taken as a whole these changes are called “fatigue.”
4. Fitness and fatigue trend similarly. You may not have thought about this before, but there is a strong link between fitness and fatigue. If you are fatigued from training then you stressed the body adequately enough to create the potential for fitness. If the workout did not cause any fatigue at all then it also did not produce the potential for fitness. So, when fatigue is rising you can expect the same thing from fitness. The opposite is also true.
5. In order to race well one must reduce fatigue. This is what tapering before a big race is all about – reducing fatigue. You don’t want to go into important races tired. There is no benefit from doing that. Racing when tired most assuredly will produce less-than-stellar performances.
To this I would add: Adaptation requires recovery time or else the body may get increasingly fatigued without moving the fitness level higher. eventually this results in “burn out: in which the athletes fitness actually deteriorates.
Ralph