Turning your genes on, which will cover essential topics relating to training and racing to help you make better decisions and optimize your running. In this issue we cover the concept of adaptation to training. Understanding how the body adapts to training is fundamental to developing training programs to improve your racing performances.
Training provides a stimulus for your body to adapt so it can handle a greater workload. Training hard this week, however, does not improve your performance for this weekends race. The short-term fatigue and tissue breakdown from hard training reduces your ability to perform for a few days while your body recovers. With the correct type, duration and intensity of training, followed by sufficient recovery, your body continues to adapt to a higher level, called supercompensation. Thus: training leads to fatigue, which leads to recovery, which leads to supercompensation.
Developing the perfect training program requires finding the optimal balance of training stimuli (e.g., long runs, tempo runs, speed) and recovery. Complete recovery from a hard training session typically takes from five to 10 days. This doesn't mean that you need to wait that long to do your next hard workout, but you can expect to have some residual fatigue. Depending on the severity of the workout and your personal capacity to recover, it is typical to do two to three hard sessions per week. For recovery from racing, a reasonable guideline is to allow three recovery days plus one additional day for each two kilometers of the race (e.g., about eight days for a 10K).
The time required for adaptation to an improved level is harder to determine because supercompensation is actually a cumulative effect across many workouts. Although the scientific evidence is inconclusive, it appears that a minimum of 10 days is required to obtain the full benefits of a workout. The secret to improving your racing performances is to manipulate your training and recovery so supercompensation is maximized.
To race your best, you need to recover fully and allow supercompensation to occur. Prior to a major goal race, it is wise to taper long enough to reap the full benefits of your training.
Get Your Spot for the NYRR Brooklyn Half
When you do one hard workout, you provide a stimulus for your body to improve in order to handle that specific workout, but it is moderate and short-lived. If you adhere to a training program that challenges your body week after week, however, you provide a strong, prolonged stimulus that will lead to profound adaptations within your body. Training provides stimuli (e.g., energy depletion), which turn specific genes in your body on or off, which change the rates of protein synthesis and breakdown. For example, endurance training turns on genes for the generation of mitochondria. Endurance training leads to more mitochondria in the trained muscles, which allows you to produce more energy aerobically.
Twenty years ago at the U.S. Olympic Training Center at Colorado Springs, legendary coach Jack Daniels, Ph.D., taught me the benefits of organizing training into six-week blocks, with a specific objective for each training block. It takes about six weeks to provide enough training effect to provoke a measurable improvement in your bodys abilities. Approximately six weeks of long runs, tempo runs, long intervals, or striders will provide enough accumulated stimulus and adaptation that you will not only notice the improvement but we could actually measure the change in a physiology lab.
Gene expression and the resulting balance of protein synthesis and breakdown occurs in both directions, so when you stop providing a stimulus for your body to maintain a high level of glycogen storage or aerobic capacity, detraining occurs to the current level of challenge. The body generally adapts its capabilities upward and downward at a similar rate; however, there is evidence that it is easier to reattain a training level that you have reached previously.
Shoes & Gear?
How hard you can train and how much recovery you need to improve at the fastest rate is determined by your health and lifestyle, your genetic predisposition to adapt to training, and your current training status (i.e., how hard you have been training). Each of these factors plays a large role in how to best train an individual athlete, which is why it is so important for coaches to learn as much as possible about their athletes to individualize each athletes training program.
If you are tired and stressed and your immune system is compromised, then you will not recover from hard training sessions as well as if you are at the peak of health. Improving lifestyle factors (diet, hydration, quantity and quality of sleep, overall stress level, etc.) will improve your ability to positively adapt to training. A large part of the difference between runners responses to training is determined by genetics. Some runners are programmed to adapt more slowly than others; both the number of hard workouts you can handle and the amount of recovery you need between hard sessions is partly determined by genetic factors. Regardless of your genetics, however, if you are a highly motivated runner, you can do much in your training and lifestyle to optimize your rate of improvement.
If you consistently use the concept of adaptation to training when developing your training programs, then you will have mastered the first essential ingredient to effective training.
