The cardinal rule of training: Above all else, be consistent. Don’t do things that might negatively affect your performance.  

The General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) cycle refers to the body’s response to stress and adaptation in strength training. It consists of three stages:

1. Alarm Reaction Stage: This is the initial shock to the body from the training stress. The body experiences distress as it is forced out of homeostatic equilibrium. There may be muscle soreness, fatigue, and a sudden decrease in performance capabilities.

2. Resistance Stage: The body begins to adapt to the training stress during this stage. Physiological changes occur like muscle hypertrophy and neural adaptations that increase strength and power. The body is resisting the stress and reaching a new level of homeostasis. Performance begins to improve again.

3. Exhaustion Stage: If the body is exposed to the training stress for too long without adequate rest, the body’s resources become depleted. There is a decrease in performance, overtraining effects, injury, staleness, and possible psychological burnout.

Adaptation occurs after the application of the training stress. Allow adequate time for recovery, but not so long that the adaptation has started to decline. Aim to train at the point of maximal adaptation.

Questions to consider:

What is the minimum stimuli or stress that results in an adaptation? 

What is the result of a greater applied stress? Is the alarm phase lengthened or is the performance decrement greater?

Are the resulting adaptations greater?

If the alarm phase is lengthened does the greater adaptation compensate for the longer GAS cycle? 

If we train before we fully recover, we create a greater decrement; overreaching. 

Allow adequate time to recover, we super compensate – the increase in performance is greater. 

How do we adhere to consistency if we rest for long periods?

The two-factor Fitness Fatigue Model: GAS requires stress and a real decrement in performance. In the Fitness Fatigue Model, fitness improves from the start, such as neuromuscular adaptation, but fitness improvement might be masked by fatigue.  

Comparing the two models offers different ways in which the body can improve performance; some are immediate and others require time for structures in the body to change. Fatigue is not a necessary outcome for training to be effective. 

When performance capabilities are enhanced via multiple bouts of training, it represents the summation of training.

Tangible and intangible adaptations: simply put GAS offers tangible adaptations, while the Fitness Fatigue Model offers nontangible adaptations. 

A practice model lends itself to intangible adaptations. Skill reflects the athlete’s ability to control their body accurately, efficiently, and promptly. Capacity is the athlete’s ability to express a given quality. Improvements in skill are made through intangible adaptations, while improvements in capacity are made through tangible adaptations. Although it can be hard to identify when the skill ends and the capacity begins.  

The ability to express force in a particular movement is also a skill

Many of the capabilities that people train for (agility, velocity, power, acceleration) are just variations of a person’s ability to express force. Sure the movements in which they express their capabilities might be different but they still need to express force. 

For endurance, we are often interested in the total amount of work done (work is a combination of the amount of force expressed and the distance moved). Work is the energy needed to apply a force to move an object a particular distance. Power is the rate at which that work is done. 

What skills and capacities are we training?

Force production

Endurance 

Mobility 

Load capacity and tolerance 

Movement skill 

Movement economy 

Decision making 

When planning training; Fatigue qualities and freshness requirements. 

High Freshness/high Fatigue: High-intensity efforts. 

High Freshness/low fatigue: Examples include, “strides” or agility training where high levels of concentration, velocity, or acceleration are required. 

Low Freshness/high fatigue: For example, hypertrophy training can be completed when the athlete is tired. 

Low Freshness/low fatigue: technical and recovery sessions fall into this category. 

Pareto principle: 20% of your training in “hot” sessions will account for 80% of your performance improvements. 

Corollary 1: Ensure you perform the “hot” sessions with optimal quality.  

Corollary 2; Avoid activities that might affect your ability to perform the hot sessions with optimal quality.  

Feel and technique can drive “recovery” sessions through autoregulation. 

Low-intensity work aids in increasing work capacity and base building. Improving technique involves “greasing the groove.” 

Finally, incorporate some working at high intensity to complement the speed and rate of force development (RFD). 

The principle of progressive overload needs to be viewed alongside the principle of diminishing returns; otherwise, we could increase load infinitely, which of course, doesn’t happen. 

Possible reasons for diminishing returns viewed through a GAS lens:

1. The body becomes accustomed to the load applied, even if the same relative load is applied, leading to a reduced alarm phase.  
2. The body has a finite ability to recover; even if the alarm phase is as deep, the body is not able to compensate as much as it did before. 

The body’s “adaptive capacity” is reduced with continued exposure to progressive overload. Wave loading is a loading protocol designed to work alongside “adaptive capacity.”As loads increase through the peak we worth through progressive overload strength gains and in the troughs reestablish skill-based gains 

Rules for wave loading: 

Quickly reaching our maximal efforts in the waves during the early weeks means the wave program is short; start light. Progress slowly. 

Rather than starting a new wave when you are no longer improving, avoid chasing hard gains and risking reduced adaptive capacities, and shorten the length of the waves by starting a new wave before reaching the peak of the current wave. Keep reducing the length of the wave on the back of reducing adaptive capabilities. 

Peaks and troughs can make sense when chasing a winning performance but make little sense when we are working on a general quality like squatting.  

4 Principles for creating an annual plan:

1. General to specific.
2. Progressive overload; typically from high volume to high intensity. 
3. Periods of build-up but not necessarily peaking. 
4. Post-competition; recovery period 

Methods of planning: 

Linear

Block; accumulation, intensification, and transformation. Similar to three to six linear progressions in a year.  

Undulating; overload in a week can be volume or intensity-driven no separate periods of high volume and intensity.  

My own gut feeling is to lockdown specifics not in a yearly plan but in a phasic manner. Maintain flexibility in the overall plan and lockdown in specifics for the quarterly/phasic plan.  

If you can predict what happens next, you have a clear understanding of the system. If not, you have some work to do.  

Session plan principles: 

Activities based on freshness/fatigue requirements. High skill; RFD and freshness at the start of the session.  

Recovery 

It’s important to understand the expected mechanism of adaptation and the effect any recovery modality will have on the adaptation. For example, in the GAS model, not blunting the alarm phase is helpful.  

Intensity: Do we take a % of a recent performance maximum or today’s maximum, which might reflect fatigue? 

Consider intention: Relaxed sprinting at high speed is very different from lifting weights as quickly as possible.  

Context-specific: Task-specific. 

Velocity-based training is useful when limiting efforts (by stipulating a target velocity) near the peak. 

Consider arousal: An inverted U-shaped graph is a useful starting point. 

Density; A fixed number of repetitions in a given timeframe.  

Or approach “maximal” efforts when the athlete is fatigued, thus limiting efforts as “true maximal” is not possible in a fatigued state. Injury risk is something to be mindful of.