What Happens When You Train?
Whenever you train, two key things take place:
Fatigue: Everyone, even the most elite athletes, experiences tiredness during training. This fatigue causes a temporary dip in performance—you'll eventually reach a point where you can't lift a particular weight, even if you're super fit.
Improvement: Training enhances your capacity for certain tasks over time. For instance, focusing on squats will ultimately boost your lower body strength, leading to hypertrophic responses in your quads and glutes.
In essence, while your performance capacity decrease immediately after training due to fatigue, with proper rest and recovery—— your fatigue will diminish and performance capacity will go above the baseline causing an improvement in fitness.
This fitness-fatigue model of training is rooted in the Stress-Adaptation theory of training. The model net effects is a result of supercompensation phenomenon that produce the overall results of General Adaptation Syndrome.
Key Insights
GAS theory suggest that adaptation to stress in required to increase performance. Stress triggers muscle damage, initially reducing force production, but as you recover, new muscle fibers emerge, boosting your strength
This suggests that fitness begins at training, each strength training repetition is to increase the athlete’s ability to coordinate the recruitment of muscles resulting in an uptake in skill. There is no adaptation happen during training although the neuromuscular system is undergoing changes, simply because the athlete performance capacity do not realized in constant fatigue.
This two models depicts training involves skill coordination and physiological changes. Although neuromuscular improvements begin during workouts, real adaptations occur post-training when you're free from fatigue.
Practice vs. Training
Practice is about skill acquisition. A tennis player must master serving techniques before trying to hit it hard over the court. An aspired powerlifter need to learn proper breathing tecnique for force production before attempting 1REP Max.
Training is to improve performance output. The task is for physiological adaptation, so a training overload is expected.
The center concept here is each physical activity session (practice/training) should result in performance capability ( adaptation ) which could be either be skill or physiological structure of the body.
Rest and Recovery
Adaptation kicks off during rest. The common rest-recovery protocol includes nutrition ( prioritizing macros), hydration, sleep and mental well-being. A simple concept I often explain to client is training induce a stress response that mobilize body energy system. Recovery replenishes them, enhancing your strength, size and endurance.
In my opinion, building a solid DAILY routine that incorporates good sleep, healthy diet and relaxed mental state is the foundation of a robust fitness routine. It automatically ensures you stick to the schedule and building adherence to your fitness goal.
You do not need to overcomplicate recovery.
