This principle concerns the periodic cycles in athletes’ training. Over a long period, many components of long-term training repeat and return periodically. This order of structuring a training program is called periodization. At least four major factors determine the periodic changes in the character and content of training:
a) Cyclical nature of nature. Exogenous rhythms are among the fundamentals of organic life; seasons change as does day and night, determining all
biological activities. Months and weeks naturally divide social and economic life into historical and traditional cycles that are incorporated into general life; the weekly vacation rhythm, for instance, is fixed throughout life. There is no doubt, then, that all biological, social and industrial activities are subordinated to exogenous rhythms of nature. It would be strange if sport were an
exception.
b) Adaptation as a general law. As has already been stated, the law of
adaptation determines athletes' training in general. Following this law, athletes should prevent excessive accommodation to habitual loads. Accustomed-to stimuli lose their effectiveness; in order to regenerate their adaptability, athletes should have training programs and exercise regimes that change periodically. In other words, excessively stabilized and fixed training programs lead athletes to an adaptation barrier where they are forced to dramatically increase the magnitude of their habitual workloads to obtain the same results. From this viewpoint, periodic change of the training program is a consequence of the law of adaptation.
c) Sharing main tasks. Serious training in any sport is characterized by complexity, diversity and variety; the main training tasks related to the development of general and sport specific motor abilities, technical and
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tactical skills, may be enormous in terms of magnitude and numbers. Obviously, all these tasks should be systematized and shared in time.
It is well known, for instance, that certain technical skills should be based on the appropriate motor ability level. Accordingly, some basic work precedes more specific technical mastery; competition links these two and produces training cycles. Periodically repeating such cycles allows athletes to accomplish these tasks successfully. Consequently, cyclic training design is the only possible way to provide an effective way to share main tasks.
d) Competition schedule. Each athlete’s preparation is focused on certain competitions which are held periodically. National and international sports federations as well as the International Olympic Committee oversee the frequency and timing of competitions. A typical schedule of competitions includes domestic and regional trials, national and international events, like continental and world cups and championships. Thus, the schedule strongly determines the apexes of the athlete’s preparation and, consequently, periodic changes in the training program. A prominent example of this can be found in the Olympic Games. The quadrennial cycle of Olympic preparation is considered by National Olympic Committees as the most important periodic unit in the athlete’s long-term preparation.
All of the above shows that periodic training units or so-called training cycles should form the basis for planning and analysis. Consequently, cyclical training design is one of the specialized principles of athletic training. The periodic training units were defined and utilized some time ago. One of the first systematic
presentations of training cycles was done in the mid-1960s by Prof. Matveyev of the USSR (Matveyev, 1964, 1981). The basic principles laid out then remain relevant and useful to this day. Despite the variety of different sports, disciplines and events, periodic training units are used everywhere, even though several terms have been confused and used in conflicting manners. Up-to-date specifications of periodic training units are presented in Table 1.10.
41 Table 1.10
Hierarchy and duration of periodic training units
Time duration Training unit
Four years – period between Olympic Games
Quadrennial (Olympic) cycle One year or a number of months Macrocycle ,
may be annual cycle A number of months as a part of the
macrocycle
Training period
A number of weeks Mesocycle
One week or a number of days Microcycle A number of hours (usually not more
than three)
Workout or training session
A number of minutes Training exercise
It is worth noting that all of the training units relate directly to appropriate parts of the planning, where the training program, as the final product of this process, is structured on the basis of the cyclic principle of training design.
Summary
Athletes’ training is the primary component of athletic preparation that also includes competing and recovery. The athletic preparation contains physical, technical, tactical, psychological and intellectual preparations, which have their own tasks and particulars. The basic terms and concepts necessary for analysis and planning, i.e., goals, content, means and methods of training, were considered and commented on in this chapter.
The training related principles of adaptation elucidate the fundamental process of the athlete’s adjustment to training workloads. To recapitulate, three general factors - stimulus magnitude, exercise specificity and the athlete’s
accommodation – determine the responses to training and adaptation. The stimulus magnitude is regulated by training volume, training intensity and exercise novelty.
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These three load components are particularly important in light of the overload principle, which postulates that fitness gains require that the stimulus magnitude exceed the accustomed to level.
The specificity principle of training adaptation, highlights the transfer of training results from one task (auxiliary exercise) to another (main exercise). There is training transfer of technical skills that is extremely important for movement
perfection, and training transfer of motor abilities that determines the effect of any fitness program. Accommodation, as a principle of training adaptation, deals with the increase in work potential, where the athlete achieves higher levels of sports
performance and there is a decrease in the athlete’s reactions to a constant physical load, enabling them to deal with standard workloads more economically.
The supercompensation cycle as the most comprehensive mechanism of athletic fitness improvement, elucidates the training process in light of the interaction between load, fatigue and recovery. The supercompensation principle was developed with regard to a single workout and to a workout series. According to this principle, the single load or sum of several loads evoke a phase of fatigue and recovery with a subsequent phase of increased work potential (supercompensation phase), which can be exploited for the introduction of a new stimulus and to prepare for the next step in the progression. Despite a number of limitations and provisos, the supercompensation principle remains as the basic one in training theory.
An updated version of the specialized principles of sports training were also presented. They include: (1) the principle of specialization which relates to social aspects, selection of a specific sport for further perfection, and the determination of event-specific priorities; (2) the principle of individualization that refers to the psycho-physiological features of athletes; (3) the principle of variety that deals with sources and characteristics of training stimuli variation; (4) the principle of load interaction that relates to positive, neutral and negative impacts within contiguous workouts; and (5) the principle of cyclical training design that corresponds to and supports the general idea of training periodization.
43 References for Chapter 1
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