Principle 2: Thou Shall Not Accommodate
Going back to general exercise physiology, one will encounter many “laws”, or basic tenets upon which all training programming should be based.
In the realm of strength and conditioning, one of these is defined as the principle of accommodation.
In the athletic sense this principle states that you can expect a decrease in performance gains over time if your training stimulus is kept constant over a long period.
In athletic preparation, the stimulus is the physical exercise and the response to this stimulus is the performance enhancement specifically caused by the adaptation. By increasing the training volume or the duration of the training, the degree of adaptation will decrease.
This follows the law of diminishing returns.
For example, a relative beginner to weightlifting may see significant performance gains by using a relatively small training stimulus, whereas, with seasoned lifters, even very intense training regimens may not cause any noteworthy performance improvements.
This is why a gym newbie can increase their bench press by 50 pounds while a gym veteran will do well to increase their max by 10!
So, in order for you to avoid the loss of performance gains via accommodation over time, your training must be varied to avoid stagnation with respect to the training stimulus. This, however, creates additional concerns. By creating variety in training, your must still maintain event-specific motor patterns with sport-mimicking physiological demands. This is where the familiar term “sport-specific” training comes in.
So what does that leave you with?
Chaos will make accommodation harder!
Effective training programs must both be variable, to decrease accommodation, and specific, to maintain training transferability to the athletic event.
How can this be achieved?
To minimize or negate the deleterious effects of accommodation, your training program must be changed on a regular basis. Essentially, they must be altered in some form at a given point in time either through quantitative methods (changing the loading parameters) or qualitative means (such as changing the type of exercises or movements).
If you want to keep your performance up, make sure you don’t accomodate!
Stay tuned for the next segment in this series where we’ll take a closer look at specificity and individualization as they relate to the Law of Adaptation.
Yours in movement.
Dev Chengkalath
