What is the principle of training that states what you do in the gym should be relevant and appropriate to your desired outcome?

The best way to achieve optimum results in exercise and fitness is to follow a plan. But not just any plan, such as “I’m going to run 5 miles every day” or “I’ll lift the heaviest weight I can every time I work out.” Your body is an amazing machine that responds to specific stimuli in distinct ways, and your brain is constantly working to protect the body from threats – like way too much stress on the muscles and tendons from continuous all-out hard exercise.

Principle (noun): 1. a basic truth or theory;  2. an idea that forms the basis of something;  3. a law or fact of nature that explains how something works or why something happens.

Fortunately, exercise science gives us five basic principles we can incorporate into a fitness program that will develop the changes, or “adaptations” we desire, in a safe and lasting way. These five principles are:

• The Overload Principle
• The F.I.T.T. Principle
• The Specificity Principle
• The Rest and Recovery Principle
• The Use It or Lose It Principle

The Overload Principle and the F.I.T.T. Principle work together, so let’s review these first.

The Overload Principle is considered the most important concept in exercise. In simple terms, it means that your body will adapt to the demand you impose on it. For example, when you lift a heavy weight you haven’t lifted before, or you complete a hard cardio workout that puts new demands on your heart and lungs, physiological changes will take place that will allow you to do this more easily next time.

Because the body is so adaptable, the demands we put on it must gradually and progressively increase over time in order to achieve long-term fitness gains. These demands must be applied slowly, because too much too fast causes the body to react negatively to excessive stress. (For more about this concept, read The Body’s Response to Stress – Understanding the General Adaptation Syndrome.)

So it’s important to strategically vary your mode of exercise, intensity and duration of training in order to get better, stronger or faster. This is where the F.I.T.T. Principle comes in.

F.I.T.T. stands for Frequency, Intensity, Time and Type. These are the four areas where increases in workload or demand can be made in order to progressively overload the body so it adapts in the desired way.

Frequency means how often an exercise is performed. After any kind of exercise, your body begins a process of repairing and rebuilding stressed tissues. It’s important to find the right balance of work and recovery that provides just enough stress for the body to adapt as well as recover for the next session.

Intensity is the amount of effort or work completed in a specific exercise. For example, walking at a conversational pace is low intensity, whereas sprinting for 400 yards is high intensity. In strength training, factors that influence intensity are the weight itself (load), the number of sets and repetitions, the tempo of the repetitions, and whether a level of instability has been added (such as standing on one leg while doing shoulder presses.) Once again, just enough intensity to overload without overtraining, injury or burnout is what’s important here.

Time is simply the duration of the exercise session. It’s a function of intensity and type.

Type means the type of exercise performed – strength training, cardio, or a combination of both. The type of exercise is tied to the Specificity Principle, discussed next.

This table illustrates how to combine the Overload Principle and the F.I.T.T. Principle for strength training or cardiovascular training:

The Specificity Principle is, quite simply, that the exercise you do should be specific to your goals. For example, if your goal is simply health and weight management, focus on total body strength, cardio and a healthy diet. If you are a runner wanting to improve your race times, include speed workouts in your training. If you’re a cyclist training for a 100-mile ride, focus on building up longer distance training rides at an endurance pace.

The Rest and Recovery Principle is critical to achieving gains in fitness. The body simply cannot tolerate too much stress, and over time will instead “shut down” in order to protect itself. This results in overtraining syndrome, burnout, excess fatigue, and a weakened immune system. (Read The Body’s Response to Stress – Understanding the General Adaptation Syndrome.) Exercising every day is perfectly fine – just not the same exercise at the same intensity. Especially with strength training, it’s important to allow at least a day between sessions to allow muscles to repair and rebuild. However, working different muscle groups on different days (what’s called a “split routine”) will allow for this recovery period for one muscle group while working another. Low intensity cardio can be done every day, but rest between intense sessions. Rest and recovery are important for your mental state too!

The fifth principle, while not specifically targeted to fitness adaptations, is still important to be aware of – Use It or Lose It. Most everyone is aware of this concept at some level, as it applies to many things in life. With respect to the body, muscles build strength (called “hypertrophy”) with use, and lose strength (“atrophy”) with lack of use. This includes not only the skeletal muscles, but also the heart and even the brain (although it’s not technically a muscle.) How quickly atrophy occurs is dependent on many factors, and will be the subject of a future blog post.

Incorporating these principles into your fitness routine will ensure you get the best results in the most efficient way, while preventing injury and overtraining.  But it can be complicated. As a virtual fitness coach and personal trainer certified through the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM), I have the knowledge and experience to develop a progressive program specifically designed for you and your fitness goal. We’ll work together, on your schedule, to get you where you want to be, safely and effectively. Contact me today for a free consultation!

The principle of specificity states that training should be relevant and appropriate to an individual’s goals to produce the desired effect. To get better at cycling, you need to cycle. To get bigger biceps, you need to train your biceps. You are not going to get big biceps cycling.

Connected to this, training should go from general to specific to really maximise results. Your general conditioning is your foundation for more specific training in the future. If you want to run the 100 metres in under 10 seconds in the summer, you start by preparing your body in the winter with general conditioning work that gets progressively more explosive, fast and specific.

The client I reassessed wants to pass the physical fitness test to enter the Fire Brigade. This individual wasn’t particularly active so the first 8 weeks were focussed on very general fitness to create the foundation for the more specific training.

So, this individual’s training program consisted of…

1. Moderate intensity cardio to get some base aerobic fitness.

2. High repetition and low weight resistance training to safely introduce resistance work. This included compound exercises where appropriate but also machine weights at this introductory stage. All muscle groups and movement patterns were targeted.

3. Traditional circuit style sessions with me to combine the two and add variety. Circuit training is a great way to train aerobically whilst also performing resistance training. I also used the circuit training to teach technique for fundamental movements.

So, how did this individual do at their first reassessment? Here are the areas where this individual performed incredibly well…

1. Aerobic fitness improved considerably. Their resting heart rate after a 3 minute step test improved from 150BPM to 100 BPM. The bleep test result improved dramatically from level 3/7 to level 5/0 (and that is without any focussed anaerobic training – i.e. learning to cope with high intensity cardio).

2. Upper body strength improved fantastically. In the old fashioned ‘bang out as many push ups as you can in 1 minute’ test, this individual could only perform 22 knee push ups originally, but at their reassessment they completed 22 full push ups (with great form). With weights, this individual could perform, on average, 3 times as many reps with the same weight on a military press, bench press and seated cable row.

However, not everything improved dramatically…

1. Leg strength improved marginally as measured by a leg press test and a wall sit.

2. Core strength improved only marginally with the plank test and got worse in the sit up test.

Now here’s where we refer to the principle of specificity. After the assessment, this individual and I spoke in depth about his program. As it turns out, he had been skipping some of the leg exercises and most of the core exercises on his program. His test results has precisely highlighted that fact that you cannot improve in a component of your fitness if you don’t train that component – your legs won’t get stronger if you only bang out pull ups every day!

These test results also highlighted another very important point - be honest with your trainer! I was delighted with this individual’s reassessment (it was a great reassessment) but I was also delighted that he was totally honest with me. We could then discuss why certain exercises had been skipped and what we can do in the future to make it easier to perform those exercises. I think that this is particularly important when it comes to weight loss and diet – we are here to help! If you don’t tell us the truth, we can’t help you.

#specificity #principlesoftraining