08/10/2022
All in a day’s work… It is important to have an understanding of the principles of strength and conditioning and how they directly affect human performance.
These principles help coaches to select appropriate exercises at the right time of year at intensities that put athletes in the best possible position to perform at their highest level.
Individuality:
People will have unique responses to the same training stimulus due to individual characteristics such as biological age, training age, gender, injury history, anthropometrics, mobility, etc. So training should be adjusted to an individual’s needs.
Specificity:
Physiological adaptations to training are specific to muscle groups trained, the speed and intensity of the exercise, metabolic demands placed on the body, and the specific movement taking place.
Overload:
For adaptations to occur an individual should continually increase the demands placed on the appropriate body system. This requires progressively increasing the training stimulus by manipulating key training variables (intensity, volume, duration, frequency).
Progression:
Overloading should occur at optimal time frames, in phases throughout a given year, to help maximize physical performance. Gradual increases of demands placed on the body will result in improvements over time.
Diminishing Returns:
An individual’s current level of training dictates their ability to see further improvement in performance. Novice athletes will see relatively quick gains in performance when they first start training and as their body becomes more adept it becomes more difficult to illicit those gains in performance.
Reversibility:
The effects of training will be lost if the training stimulus is removed for a prolonged period of time.
While not an all inclusive list these are the generally accepted key principles that help coaches compile yearly training programs for their athletes. The better our understanding of how to marry these concepts throughout the year the better we can prepare our athletes to compete at their highest level.