Now that club training sessions are ramping up I have written this newsletter to hopefully act as a tool athletes can refer to and reflect on how the body is feeling and whether or not they are still in alignment with their goals.
Anyone can put together a brutal training program and it does not take any skill or knowledge to make an athlete tired and sore. Running a group of athletes into the ground or surviving an onslaught of endurance drills is not a badge of honour.
There is a window of opportunity when it comes to training where we hit that sweet spot to illicit an adaption without over training, this is called a ‘productive stressor’. More training volume on top of that in a given session is called ‘diminishing returns’ Ideally we want to dip out during the beginning of this process as the quality of the athletes training will begin to stagnate as well as physiological returns. If you continue to work past diminishing returns you will enter what is known as ‘negative returns’ this is completely undesirable as you will be working your way backwards from any effort you have put thus far into that session as well as inducing muscle fatigue that will inhibit the quality of the rest of the sessions for that week.
Monitor how you feel after a hard session that was built out of your own control and question whether you felt like the session was a productive stressor/diminishing return or a negative return. If you can hardly walk properly the next day I dare say it was the latter.
If you do too much and you can’t recover properly between sessions you will not improve!
Work hard, but work smart too and protect your goals at all costs even if it means making some tough decisions.
Kind regards, Marcus.
