How much capability you gain from given workouts over weeks or months depends on how “useful” those workouts were. If your workouts are less useful, your progress will be slower, and if your workouts are more useful, your progress will be faster.
I define how useful a workout is by whether the type and amount of stress applied by the workout is the best for your body on that day.
There are four important factors that we want to think about within the cycle of stress and adaptation:
- Specificity: What is being stressed? We need to stress the specific tissues and energy systems that we want to get stronger. Getting tired playing basketball isn’t going to make you a faster cyclist.
- Signal: How much are we stressing the specific tissues or energy systems? Think of this as a signal to adapt. If we stress a tissue or system a lot, we are signaling the body to adapt a lot. Typically we represent this by workload, a multiple of intensity and duration.
- Recovery: How long is it going to take us to recover from the stress? If it’s a lot of stress, it’s going to take a long time to recover from. If you don’t recover enough, you won’t get the benefits of the workout. If you recover too much, you’ll get the benefits of the workout, and then lose them again!
- Timing: Where are you in the stress/recovery cycle when you do the workout? Are you adding lots of stress on an already tired system? Are you recovering an already rested tissue? Or are you stressing a system or tissue that’s recovered enough to be stressed again?
The challenge of training is that not all workouts are equally useful.
Non-specific stress makes the workout less useful.
Low signal makes the workout less useful.
A lower ratio of signal to recovery makes the workout less useful.
Stressing already tired systems is less useful.
Resting already rested systems is less useful.
Thus, if your workouts are less useful, your progress will be slower, and if your workouts are more useful, your progress will be faster. Every day the coach or self-coached athlete should be looking at whether the specificity, signal, timing, and recovery are appropriate.
