We often say consistency is the most important word when it comes to training, but the key to being consistent is how you balance stress & recovery. In our latest video we emphasize some key points and elaborate on them below.

Next, everyone should understand a few principles of training:

How your body gets stronger

More stress leads to more adaptation, but if you overstress the body, it may not get tougher; in fact, it may get weaker and result in a setback. This brings up a very important part of the equation: The body gets stronger from added stress when you recover. Rest is a vital part of the process, whereas some athletes view it as avoiding training.

Diminishing Returns

The benefit of adding a new stress diminishes over time, however, and eventually, if you continue doing the same training week after week, your new fitness level will no longer improve. If, after attaining the benefits of this new training, which can take 6 weeks on average, you want to reach a higher level of fitness the training stress needs to be increased again.

How to increase stress

When you’re ready to increase stress think about volume and frequency of running per week. When doing quality sessions there are several ways to increase:

  1. Workload, or total amount of running in the session
  2. Intensity, or speed of running
  3. Recovery, or how long between intervals
  4. Frequency, or how many intervals and how often you perform quality per week

When you feel the need to increase the stress level it is not a good idea to change more than one of these variables at a time. Please note, if you’re not improving with consistent training, decreasing the stress can also lead to better outcomes. At the end of day, everyone’s focus/goal should be to avoid overtraining; to do that you must understand some of these basic principles of training and ideally maintain constant interaction with a coach.

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