You put your workouts in each week, you get rest and recovery, and consistently increase the challenge of your workouts. Naturally, what should follow is a steady increase in fitness over time. This is what we like to see when we zoom out, looking back at our progress. However, when zooming back, in this progress is all but steady. Actually it can appear quite chaotic. With attention to your training balance, you will see an increase in fitness.
Most of us believe that when we do strenuous activity we ‘break down’ our body, then ‘build them up’ when we eat and recover. While this is an easy to understand idea, it’s barely scratching the surface of what’s really going on in a sea of the body’s processes.
Each type of activity we do affects us differently, stimulating different pathways of fitness adaptation. How strenuous the activity was affects how long it takes to recover. Whether or not you are sleeping or eating adequately will affect your rate of recovery. This can go on for a long time until we have named each component of your workout and recovery regime but this isn’t always necessary. There are two main concepts about your fitness trends over time that are especially worth keeping your eye on. Stimulus and Recovery. When these two are balanced in a well structured training plan, we see increased fitness over time.
Concept 1: Stimulus and Recovery
We all have felt that overwhelming tiredness after a bout of hard work, maybe even lasting days on end. The feeling of heaviness, and tiredness may be ignored for some time. In the end, it catches up to us. We’ve dug ourselves into a hole, feeling as though we’ve burned all of our resources, and we finally settle down to rest. What happens next is near magical as the body enters a state of recovery
Finally in a state where energy isn’t needed to move around or deal with stressful environments, the body goes into recovery. Structures like tendons, ligaments, and muscle tissues regain repair and even go into supercompensation, leaving them stronger than before. After enough time of rest, you feel that you’re ready to get back at it often feeling slightly fitter. You’ve surpassed your fitness from before and you’re ready to use it.
Using your newly gained fitness you challenge yourself, once again dipping into energy reserves until you are satisfied and decide to settle down to rest. The previous process repeats in a cycle of catabolism and anabolism, ‘breaking down’ and ‘building up’. Over time your fitness increases. The type, intensity, and duration of your workouts is your stimulus. If this stimulus is the same workout repeated over and over, there will be fitness gains, but only for so long. Once your body has been stimulated and adapted many times in the same way it will become efficient. With this efficiency comes a need for a more challenging stimulus.
Concept 2: Training Balance
Finding the balance of your training and recovery is no easy thing so I will not downplay its complexity. I will however put it in very clear terms what does and does not work for progressing your fitness.
1)Hard Workout + Inadequate Recovery=No gain/possible loss of fitness, unsustainable
2Medium Workout + Adequate Recovery=Gain in fitness, sustainable
3)Easy Workout + Adequate Recovery=Small gains is fitness, very sustainable
To reach high levels of athletic performance hard training is necessary, but just as necessary is the high quality recovery. To attain good health, live long, and gain energy, easy to moderate training load is recommended combined with an equally balanced level of recovery. To overwork and under recover is detrimental to your fitness and should be avoided.
So these concepts seem simple but now take a look at your current workload and compare it to your recovery. Do they seem balanced? Have you noticed your fitness increasing, decreasing, or staying the same over time? These are important questions to ask ourselves. If we answer honestly, we discover that these two factors are often out of balance and to blame for a lack of progress. Once we have discovered that we need to adjust our training balance, we can begin identifying the changes that will support our future fitness. When we set goals around these changes and follow through, our fitness responds, and we progress.
Stayed tuned for Part II of the Fitness Isn’t Flat series where we look closer at Stimulus and Fatigue!