Train smart to maximize results.

At some point in your training you may ask yourself, "How good can I be?" "How fast can I run?" "How far?" This is what athleticism is all about, digging down to find your limits, running in pursuit of your own personal best. Understanding and applying a few important training principles can help you improve your running performance and continue to better your own personal best.

Specificity of Training

The purpose of training and conditioning for running is to improve your running performance. While that may sound redundant, the principle is an important one. Specificity of training refers to making an impact on the specific skills, movements, muscles and energy systems that are used during running. For example, while swimming is an excellent form of exercise with many important benefits swimming improves swimming. Although a great method to maintain cardiovascular conditioning when injured, or for cross training to help avoid overuse injuries, swimming develops the skills used for swimming, not running.

Adaptation

The adaptation principle explains how the body is able to accomplish extraordinary things that once were impossible. Adaptation allows the runner to transform from the 12-minute-mile jogger to the three-hour marathoner. Without training and the adaptation that results, no one could improve his performance. The key is to understand that the gains in stamina, speed, and strength are made during rest and recovery, not during running or other training activities.

Conditioning gains take place as the body adapts to the stress created by training. The body calls on the stored elements that are made available by rest, and the nutrients provided by diet. These elements provide what is necessary for the body to develop muscular strength, endurance, and aerobic capacity to meet those stress demands again. As the body recovers from the stress of training, it becomes conditioned to these activities and, over time is better able to complete them in a more efficient manner--in other words, performance improves through adaptation.

Progressive Overload 

Overload occurs when the body is confronted with greater than normal activity and training loads. The challenge of executing a movement that is either new, harder, or for a longer period of time than is usual results in fatigue, tissue breakdown, exhaustion and muscular failure. Adaptation can then take place during recovery and the result is increased strength, endurance, and aerobic capacity, and a new opportunity to repeat the cycle again for further increases.

Improvements in performance can only result from this process. It is the underlying physiology that is the genius of the human body making it possible to accomplish things you never thought possible. Without progressive overload, aerobic conditioning will plateau and eventually decrease. By following the very same training regimen over a period of time, the neuromuscular system becomes familiar with the same stimulus and becomes stale. Further improvements in performance can only be achieved by progressively increasing the demands on the system.

Understanding this reveals several important insights. You can see why performance can decline before improvements are seen, and how the likelihood of injuries increases when training intensity is too high or not enough time is given for recovery. And, it gives you the understanding you need to cycle your workouts and use periodization to maximize your own training and to prevent overtraining.

Cycling and Periodization

Periodization uses training cycles to apply the principles of specificity, adaptation, and progressive overload to achieve the gains your hard training is intended to produce. Training cycles vary the training loads progressively over a period of time. Training cycles help to prevent injury and to keep performance from leveling off in those frustrating plateaus that anyone who tries to get better at any sport knows only too well. Periodization is a workout plan that calls for a specific training load with a specific purpose in a designated period of time. At the end of one training cycle another is begun with a new training objective and a new training load.

Most training cycles are broken down into a minimum of three different training periods. A base phase is usually designed to develop a base of aerobic capacity, muscular strength, and endurance. The next training period is called the developmental phase. It is during this period that noticeable increases in work capacity and skill development are intended to occur. This period is when the activity level is highest. The peak period is intended to bring you to peak performance and is usually planned to end just prior to a competition.

Beginners are often full of enthusiasm from the success of early training sessions, and make the mistake of thinking that since four days a week is good, five or seven must be even better. It usually doesn't work out as anticipated. At best, the body and mind become stale, and training plateaus occur. At worst, it is the perfect setting for injury and overtraining syndrome. Understanding the basic training principles used by the pros will help you to become more efficient, to avoid injury and overtraiing, and to produce inspiring improvements in your running. Understand the basic training principles and train smart to get the results you want. (Dale Guilford is a track and football coach in Idaho Falls, Idaho and is a regular contributor to Running & FitNews.)