THE PURPOSE OF TRAINING
The purpose of training is to stimulate the body to improve, not to destroy it.
The correct correct amount of training and recovery will stimulate the body effective and bring about a positive change in the body's physiological systems, improving your performance.
The goal of training for endurance sports is to enhance systems specific to the event as fast as possible. When training is correctly structured the time between stimulus and a positive response is reduced. To achieve the a correct understanding of adaptation times of the human physiological systems is essential, which of course vary as athletes mature and continue to train.
If your body becomes over stimulated, performance will suffer. This can occur purposefully through over reaching and there will be a transient delay between stimulus and response. An example of this is undertaking some key workouts at either high intensity or over distance training to induce normal levels of stress and fatigue. Over reaching is a short term decrease in performance and has a positive impact on the overall training progression.
By not allowing sufficient work to recovery periods, the body is unable to overcome the fatigue from over reaching and becomes over trained. Over training is characterised by a long term reduction in performance and health problems. Rather than the stimulus delaying the response time for a positive response, after prolonged periods the reverse occurs where the rate of negative performance increases.
Common causes of over training include: prolonged high training loads, rapid increase in training loads, insufficient recovery, poor diet, lack of training diversity, long racing periods.
The optimal training stimulus is three weeks of progressive overload following an initial maintenance week and followed by a recovery week. The first week of training occurs at normal training levels such that there is no extra stress can be achieved through increases in intensity or volume interspersed with appropriate recovery days to overcome the over reaching and enable quality in subsequent sessions where it is required. The final week of training is a recovery week to allow super compensation of your entire body's systems.
During this week training loads are much lower than the normal or maintenance week and include frequent rest days. Super compensation can take longer than a week which is why a maintenance week of normal load is essential before increasing the load again.
Throughout the loading period, the exact level of load and recovery periods is determined by the time of year, age and training background of the athlete. An experience elite athlete can absorb more physiological stress than a beginner so different strategies and work to rest ratios are applied on an individual basis.
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