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No two athletes are alike.

You all carry varied and intrinsic physical and mental characteristics. You all have your own unique strengths and weaknesses.

Because of these individual differences, you will respond to a training stimulus differently than your friend, training partner or teammate.

The bottom line is that certain training methods may elicit increased performance outcomes in some athletes but decrease the same in others. Basically, you may find doing high intensity intervals (HIIT) jacks up your endurance capacity, whereas your buddy may actually lose some endurance capacity unless he does longer duration cardio work at a lower intensity.

Different training programs, different results.

(Aside: HIIT is not the holy grail of energy systems training for everyone. Nor is long slow cardio. I still strongly believe that theses different forms of energy systems training each have their place in a well designed training program.)

Instead of blindly copying the latest training program of XYZ famous pro athlete, found on the glossy pages of the most popular fitness magazines, don’t you think it’s wiser to understand the guiding principles that form that program and apply those in a unique and creative manner instead?

By doing so, your specific needs as an individual and as an athlete will be met; strengths will be bolstered and weaknesses will be buffered.

By individualizing your training regimen, you or your athletes can invoke optimal training responses in order to achieve maximal performance outcomes.

And isn’t that what the training program is all about?

Performing Better.

Dev Chengkalath

If you want to be a better basketball player, would you go swimming?

How about if you wanted to be a better golfer…would you take up sprinting?

At this point, you’re probably all shaking your heads and wondering if I’ve gone off my rocker. In both the examples above you probably found it quite easy to say, emphatically, NO!

The principle of specificity states that athletic training adaptations are highly specific to the mode (fancy word for type) of training.

Is this really specific to your sport?

Essentially this principle deals with the transferability of training results. Or in more general terms, how much of your training will transfer to what you’re trying to improve. 

For example, if you were working through a well designed resistance training program (following the previous two principles highlighted yesterday and the day before) you’d have noticed increased strength and muscle mass.

However, if improved cardio was your main goal, you’d probably find yourself lacking.

Now, if your program was designed to rev up your cardiovascular system by pushing you through some high intensity intervals or gut-busting complexes, you’d have noticed primarily adaptations which relate to alterations in your energy systems capabilities, without seeing the same strength or size gains. 

So this takes us to a key point:

Due to this specificity of adaptation, exercise and training selection will, and should, vary from one sport or activity to another.

As with all the laws of adaptation, the principle of specificity has greater implication in highly trained athletes.

With a greater level of athletic fitness there is a greater specificity of adaptation such as those found in Olympic level athletes, who require very selective training in order to initiate any specific positive adaptation for competitive readiness.

In contrast, looking at a new exerciser, almost any type of activity (jogging, agility drills, resistance training etc.) will confer positive adaptations because the level of adaptation in the beginner at the onset is so low.

So take home point number two in this post:

Elite athletes need to be more specific to see positive changes; newbies, not so much. 

Where does that leave you?

Does that mean you should stop lifting weights or running or swimming or any of the other activities you do?

Not at all!

The more movement patterns you can learn and become efficient with, the more athleticism you’ll have. Now that alone doesn’t mean you will be a better soccer player or cricket star.

It does, however, allow you to improve those skills through optimizing your ability to practice your discipline  (e.g. increased endurance at soccer skills training session which then lets you perfectly practice your kick for 10 more minutes before you’re fatigued).

Those extra 10 minutes of kicking drills will directly improve your ability to kick better, whereas it was the fitness training that allowed you to train for the extra time.

Makes sense?

Yours in specific movement.

Dev Chengkalath

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