I have written in my blog and lectured about various aspects of overtraining, overreaching, and monitoring athletes over the past 4 years now (like THIS article from February 2010). One statement that I often hear from people, “Overtraining doesn’t really exist. Most people are just a little overreached if anything but people don’t ever really get to a true overtrained state.”

This is a silly statement, of course, as people can absolutely get to a true state of overtraining where serious damage to their bodies take place. Also, many of the individuals who make this statement don’t even monitor anything with the athlete, so I am not sure how they are qualifying whether the athlete is overreached or not anyway.

Recently, I received an email from an athlete who would be considered “overtrained,” and I thought I would share the brief exchange I had with them to give people an idea of what overtraining may look like. Sadly, this is not the first email I have received like this (and it probably wont be the last). I have received several emails or phone calls over the years from people telling me their story and really trying to figure out where to go or what to do in order to get their health back in order. Obviously when you get to a state like this there is the need for medical intervention. Finding a quality sports medicine doctor who understands training (and overtraining) is key.

Overtrained Athlete:

I read your article on overtraining which is no doubt what I have had for many years actually. Due to the fact my performance has went down and hasn’t come up for three years.

My question to you is what is a person to do if they are over trained? In terms of recovery? And goals of competition again in the year to follow? I should note that I have had kidney pain and infection of the kidney for over a year now and it doesn’t seem to go away. And constant weight gain even with a high level in terms of time and intensity? But not do to over eating.

Thank you and have a nice day

Regards,
Overtrained Athlete

My Reply:

Have you gone to the doctor? This seems like you have really gone past the point of no return here and will need medical intervention.

Overtrained Athlete:

Yes I have and he doesn’t seem to be concerned. I just keep getting antibiotics for kidney infection. But I think its because of chronic dehydration due to waking up from frequent urination and excessive thirst with no explanation. And doctor can’t explain it.. I wonder if its because of adrenal fatigue?

My Question to the Athlete:

How did you get yourself to this point? What sort of training were you doing?

The Athlete’s Answer:

Well I guess a few years ago (4) years. I had a coach that pushed me really hard for a year and the goal was to be strong and lean so we did a lot of strength training in the gym and long LSD rides and I did get strong and lean. And I was winning races but then I went elite or to you..cat1/2. The following year and in the same time as I was preparing I noticed my weight started going up and every time I trained my legs would be so swollen I couldn’t put my pants on. And my performance was really going down. And so my coaches approach was to increase intensity to develop power so I trained for three years doing 12 hrs a week with a group ride with strong men on Saturdays and Sunday three hour ride and two more days doing one hour hard intervals on trainer and then other days doing endurance stuff for hour and half. I would say I can’t do this I’m too tired and I got told its just mental.. You can do it.  I said maybe I’m not eating  enough because I’m up all night.. And I got told no don’t eat anymore then your husband or kids would because I will get fat. But I was clearly working harder then they were. And I just got fatter and more sore. Now I don’t know what to do because  I’m heavier then ever and even a 45 minute jog and I can’t get pants on because my legs get so swollen. The last few days I’m feeling more tired and sore then ever like having flu or after surgery feeling. Surely the pros don’t have this problem? But I can’t really say when the last time I actually didn’t follow a program. Or have ever had More then a week off.

So….Does Overtraining Really Exist?

This was a terribly extreme case. The individual has been taking antibiotics for a kidney infection that has lasted over a year!! I also wonder what it looked like when their legs were so swollen that they couldn’t pull their pants up! Cases like this are crazy and obviously, the last email above where they described the type of training that got them to this point was upsetting. I can’t believe that, with those sorts of symptoms, the coach would suggest that the athlete is “not tired” and that “it’s just mental”.

While a lot of times athletes may be “overreached” it is important to remember that the line between an overreached state and an overtrained state is a blurry one. Additionally, given the difficulty of diagnosing overtraining syndrome it makes it incredibly challenging to know where your athlete is without monitoring or having a process of evaluating whether training is getting what you want or pushing you further down into the dumps.

The only true difference between overreaching and overtraining is the time it takes for the athlete to recover back to baseline levels. Commonly there is a drop in performance output and when the individual is in an overreached state it may take a week to ten days to recover while an overtrained state may take significantly longer and, as with the case above, it could be over a years time in order to recover – provided that the athlete can find the right medical professional to help them get back on track.

The fact that training breaks us down a little bit should not be of concern. Whenever we train we get two things:

• Fitness – We get more fit. We get stronger. We improve our endurance, etc.
• Fatigue – We break down a little bit. We accrue some fatigue and our body needs to attempt to rally the troops a little bit and help us adapt to the training stimulus we just applied.

As I like to say when it comes to explaining what happens during any training session, “There is always a cost of doing business.”

Sometimes we can train very hard for a week or two and accrue a lot of fatigue and then, when we allow the athlete to recover that fatigue dissipates and there is a rise in performance as the fitness gains, previously being masked by the fatigue that has accumulated from training, now begin to manifest themselves. In this case, a little bit of overreaching provided us with a fitness gain. This sort of training is only possible when we monitor the athlete in order understand how they are adapting (or not adapting) to the training program and when we may be pushing too hard and when we may need to back off (as well as allowing us to also know when we can push harder).

A number of physiological mechanisms seem to be related to overtraining:

• Autonomic nervous system changes
• Glycogen depletion
• Decline in immune function
• Hormonal adaptations (Ex., decreased cortisol response, decreased testosterone : cortisol ratio, etc)
• Increased systemic inflammation
• Changes in cardiovascular response to exercise (Ex., decreases in Max HR and VO2max)
• Changes in mood
• Decreases in performance
• Loss of concetration
• Disturbances in sleep

The number of factors related to overtraining make monitoring the athlete incredibly complex as there are a number of things to consider, hence the reason the diagnosis of overtraining is so difficult. Often the diagnosis can be made only when the athlete has gone off the deep end and their health is in a lot of trouble. To top it off, there are a few different ways of looking at overtraining. Mel Siff, in Supertraining, discussed Local and General Overtraining and other researchers have discussed Basedow and Addison Like Overtraining.

• Local Overtraining – Overtraining specific to a body part or region of the body. This type of overtraining is commonly associated with local tissue or joint pathology due to excessive stress or strain from practice, competition, or training.
• General Overtraining – Overtraining that is more systemic and has an impact on the body overall. While local overtraining may be thought of as being “musculoskeletal”, general overtraining can be thought of as being more physiological. General overtraining can be broken down into Basedow and Addison Like, as I mentioned above.
• Basedow Overtraining – Often referred to as “sympathetic” overtraining for the branch of the autonomic nervous system that tends to predominate when in this state. This type of overtraining is thought to occur due to an imbalance between training and recovery with the addition of high levels of psycho-emotional stress or other non-specific stressors. The way I think about this type of overtraining is that the body is constantly trying to fight in your favor and try and adapt. It is always “on” and “rallying the troops” to adapt to the stress that you are placing on it.
• Addison Like Overtraining – Often referred to as “parasympathetic” overtraining for the branch of the autonomic nervous system that tends to predominate when in this state. This type of overtraining also has to do with an imbalance between training and recovery, however, this type of overtraining is accompanied by a bit of adrenal insufficiency and hormonal alterations. I tend to think of this type of overtraining as your body basically protecting you from yourself. If, in Basedow Overtraining, the body is trying to “rally the troops” and is always “on”, in Addison Like Overtraining the body is basically saying, “I’ve had enough. You need to take a break otherwise you are going to hurt yourself. I am going to make you so tired that you wont want to train. I am going to make you so sore that you wont want to train. I am going to decrease your immune system so that you get sick and are forced to take a break.”

There is a lot to think about when it comes to overtraining. No one has the solution and everyone is still looking for the best methods of evaluation to understand where their athletes are between the lines of fitness and fatigue. In understanding the various physiological factors and types of overtraining we can begin to try and formulate ideas regarding what to monitor and how to evaluate training. Too many people just write training programs, fly blind, and hope for the best. Additionally, a lot of coaches in the profession are only or primarily concerned with the “movement” component of training and they do a great job of evaluating and training it. This sort of focus may go a long way when considering local overtraining but may fall short of truly understanding the athlete without a hollistic, physiological perspective. While the programs may be sound from a movement perspective and they may have good exercise selection and balanced joint movements, this is only one aspect of training that needs to be considered. Understanding physiologically how the athlete is adapting is just as important and will provide the coach with a greater appreciation of overreaching and overtraining.

Hopefully more coaches will begin to look at the various physiological aspects of overtraining and start to create methods of evaluating their athletes to better understand how they are tolerating the stresses we apply to them.

A strength & conditioning coach needs to be a great juggler as there are many things that they need to be aware of when considering the training they prescribe to their athletes:

• Physiology
• Biomechanics
• Nutrition
• Psychology
• etc…

What it all comes down to is that, as coaches, we apply stress to the athlete and ask their bodies to adapt to that stress. Being able to juggle all the things that influence how an athlete will adapt to training stress is no easy task and it is important to remember that no two athletes adapt the same way to the same program.

One of the most difficult things to do is to train large groups of athletes while simultaneously trying to be aware of all of these potential influences with regard to each individual athlete’s adaptation to the program. However, as my friend Mark McLaughlin likes to say, “Learn to train one athlete first and then you will understand how to train multiple athletes.”

Not only do I agree with this statement but I think it is an excellent experience that all coaches should have. Oftentimes coaches get right into working with teams and dealing with the logistics of handling large groups of athletes (as well as adopting the approach of the individual that they perform their internship or graduate assistance program under) without ever having the opportunity of working with one single athlete and trying to fully understand all the potential ramifications of their training program – train in “fantasy land” so to speak. Without that experience these coaches often have a hard time seeing the big picture when it comes to trying to apply more than a stock strength and fitness/conditioning program. If the coach does get the experience to actually train just one athlete they often have a hard time breaking away from the type of general program that they would apply to a larger group of athletes, even though the logistics of the two situations are totally different and the single athlete situation would afford you greater freedom and flexibility within the program.

Of course, there are great coaches, who I have the pleasure of also calling friends and learning a lot from over the years, who work with large teams and, because they have learned to train one athlete first, are very aware of the individual response to training. Guys like Nate Brookreson, Jeff Fish, Keith D’Amelio, David Tenney, and Charlie Weingroff all understand this concept and have done a great job applying it. Of course, when in the team environment nothing is ever 100% perfect and there are logistics that may handcuff you in certain situations compared to training one athlete; however, because these guys understand the individual response to training, even though there may be logistical concerns at times, they are able to be aware of things with their team of athletes that other coaches are not and, when necessary, create systems to address any individual concerns.

I have had the opportunity of being on both sides of the fence – single athletes, small groups of athletes, and then larger groups of athletes (high school or junior high teams) and having the understanding of how to train one athlete first has been incredibly helpful. This past weekend I had the pleasure of meeting a young coach, Neil Baroody. Neil is about to graduate from college and is looking to do some work as a fitness coach for a club soccer team in the New England area, however, this past summer he had the opportunity to work with just one single athlete and it sounds like he had a great experience. He got to do a lot of different types of testing and evaluation, he got to be highly specific with his training prescription and recovery modalities, and he got to coordinate a sound training approach that may not have been possible with a big group of athletes. The summer experience is something that will serve Neil well going forward in the profession, when working with the club soccer team, because he will now be aware of the individual response each athlete has to training because he “learned to train one athlete first.”

Crossfit is an incredibly popular training system at the moment for a variety of reasons one of which being that the workouts are extremely challenging and demanding. A study recently published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research set out to evaluate the fitness adaptations that take place during a 10 week Crossfit training program (Smith MM, et al. Crossfit-based high intensity power training improves maximal aerobic fitness and body composition. J Strength Cond Res 2013. Published ahead of print.).

Subjects

The study began with 54 healthy participants of varying fitness levels; however, only 43 completed the study (23 males/20 females) and were able to return for the post training re-test (more on that later).

Methods

The subjects body composition and Vo2max were tested at the start and end of the study to evaluate for changes.

Following the initial testing the subjects performed a 10 week, periodized, CrossFit training program at a CrossFit affiliate gym. The program utilized basic gymnastic activities (handstands, ring work, etc) and multi-joint exercises such as the squat, press, deadlift, and Olympic lift variations. The training program had some variation to it, adding an element of periodization, where some exercises were performed as a time trial (best time) and others were performed in an as many reps as possible style for  a prescribed time domain (E.g., 10 or 20min).

Results

The subjects who completed the entire 10 weeks (43 of them) all experienced significant improvements in both VO2max and body composition changes (decreases in body fat percentage) leading the researchers to conclude, “Our data shows that high intensity power training (which is what they refer to CrossFit as in this study) significantly improves Vo2max and body composition in subjects of both genders across all levels of fitness.”

My Comments (The Nitty Gritty)

First I’ll begin by making some obvious statements which, may not be so obvious given that marketing and hoopla tend to cloud rational thinking:

1. CrossFit is not that novel. Circuit training and calisthenics have been around for hundreds of years.  Training over a broad range of mixed time and modal domains is certainly not a new thing.

2. What CrossFit did do is create and environment and a culture that made that stuff cool and exciting for people, “Hey, it really sucks to suffer when I work out hard but if I suffer with a group of my friends it really isn’t that bad!”  In that regard, I think CrossFit has done a great job motivating a lot of people to get off their butts and exercise. This is a good thing.

3. High intensity interval training or really hard aerobic power type activities, which make up the brunt of the energy system demands during a CrossFit workout, have been shown to improve things like VO2max and Body Composition so do these results really come as a surprise? This stuff has been looked at in hundreds of studies by now.

Now to the not so obvious stuff – the devil is in the details

While the fitness and body composition results seen in this study are certainly impressive, as they are in many studies on high resistance interval training (as I alluded to in point number three above) the most concerning thing about this study and the biggest thing that concerns me with CrossFit is that of the 54 original subjects only 43 were able to complete the study. Nine of the subjects dropped out citing overuse or injury (two of the 11 dropouts cited time restriction as a problem in completing the study).

This sort of dropout rate is a bit hard for me to handle and I believe it has to do with the type of activities chosen from CrossFit workouts, the intensity with which those activities are performed, and the frequency of high intensity workouts within the training week (IE, poor sequencing of training intensities over the week). We don’t see this sort of dropout rate in traditional High Intensity Interval Training studies (usually performed on a bike, treadmill, or rower) and yet we similar exercise benefits. This sort of stuff makes me question the utilization of CrossFit as a training system because the risk seems to outweigh the reward.

My Take Away Conclusions

1. Hard workouts are great. Hard workouts are fun. Pushing yourself is awesome. But, you need to do so with safe exercise selection and have a training program that takes into account your abilities to adapt. This means you need to look at the training week and sequence things properly to ensure that you aren’t killing yourself in the gym everyday and training yourself into a rut. A training program should make you a healthier person, not crush you and deteriorate your body.

2. Olympic lifting exercises should not be used as exercises to be performed “as many reps as possible”. They are highly technical exercises and the athlete should have adequate rest before performing their set.

3. Things like deadlifts and exercises that place the spine in a compromised position as fatigue sets in should not be performed for “as many reps as possible”. This is just asking for trouble.

4. Qualify people to do certain exercises. Sure, gymnastics skills are great and can be a fun addition to a workout; however, not everyone is immediately qualified to perform these activities – just like not everyone is immediately ready to squat, deadlift, or olympic lift. Make sure you have some sort of way to qualify individuals to perform these exercises. This goes beyond skill and technique and should first include ensuring that they have the requisite joint ranges of motion and stability to handle the exercises. Once they are qualified then spend time on technique. Once technique is solid then condition. Do not just throw people to the wolves.

5. Structure your training in phases so that you don’t go high intensity all the time and run the risk of breaking down. The body can only tolerate so much high intensity or maximal effort work. All high intensity interval training programs should have phases where that intense stimulus is removed or minimized to allow the body to not only recover but to also work on developing the aerobic system, which can be helpful in moving the lactate threshold further to the right and allowing the individual to tolerate greater amounts of high intensity work once you get back into that phase of training.

One of the emails I always seem to get is from people asking me, “What’s your training template?”.

This is a difficult question for me to answer because I believe it is impossible to have a set template that works for every individual.  I realize that having a template helps to make things more automated but in reality, we can train a monkey to put exercises into an excel sheet but we cannot teach that same monkey to understand the needs of the individual and tailor the training program to meet those needs.

Rather than attempting to force the athlete into a set template or system I’d prefer to fit the template or system to the athlete, ensuring that they get what they need.  I talked about some concepts of“giving the body what it needs” in an old blog article, Classifications of Massage, and my friend and colleague Mark McLaughlin talked about “giving the body what it needs” in training with his recent blog post article Advanced Training Methods For High School Athletes.

I talked about some of my ideas with regard to how I think about training program design during my practical lecture on the Strength in Motion Seminar DVD. One of the things I talked about was trying to select exercises last and instead first thinking about and considering what I wanted to get from the individual physiologically. This allows me to choose the appropriate methods, set up the training week, and then, finally, I can select my exercises (based on the athletes needs, limitations, and abilities). Thus, things don’t ever seem to end up as a template where I always do the same thing with every person. Different people may have very different training programs depending on what they are training for and where they are in the training process.

Some Rules

Some rules that I do live by when thinking about training programs:

1. Think about what you want to achieve with the program from a physiological standpoint, choose the training methods that meet those goals, and then select the exercises that make the most sense for the individual.

2. Follow days of higher intensity and higher stress with days of lower intensity and lower stress to allow the body ample time to recover and adapt.

3. Enhance Requisite Competencies and don’t assume that just because an athlete is “elite” or at the highest level that these qualities are already developed (you’d be surprised!).

4. Enhance overall general fitness before developing specific fitness.

By sticking too these simple rules you can then create individualized programs and create training themes for each day and then pencil in the appropriate training methods for each athlete that represent said training theme ensuring that the athletes get what they need rather than trying to fit them to a strict template or system that may be appropriate for one athlete and not so appropriate for another.

Several days ago I posted the following quote from a Charlie Francis lecture I was watching onto my Facebook page and finished it with a few comments of my own:

“A pitcher should have a pretty good aerobic component. They need to recover and they need to be able to heat their joints which the aerobic capacity allows them to do. The power component is big but the aerobic component is big too.” -Charlie Francis

My comments: Now the real fun is in figuring out the ways of developing that capacity without killing the beast and turning them into an endurance athlete (as they used to do to pitchers back in the day). For some reason everyone hears “aerobic” and they get scared but I think much of this fear comes from a lack of understanding how to train the system in order to develop sport specific work capacity.

What followed was an enormously long discussion (something like 180 total posts) about Charlie’s quote and a lot of people misunderstanding what Charlie Francis was saying. That misunderstanding probably stems from Charlie using the term “aerobic” which tends to make people feel uncomfortable and think that if something is “aerobic” then it is is some way not “athletic” or not necessary for any other sport besides endurance sports. The interesting thing is that if we removed the word “aerobic” and changed it to the phrase “work capacity” (or just “capacity” as I did in my comments that followed) most people probably wouldn’t have a big problem. The issue is more one of semantics then anything else because if you heard Charlie Francis discuss the training approach there is probably little that anyone would disagree with.

The Power-Capacity Continuum

All sports lie on a continuum between Power and Capacity. Power is the ability to do something for a shorter period of time but do it at a maximal or near maximal effort and then enjoy a complete or nearly complete recovery period. Capacity is the ability to either do something for a long period of time, such as run a marathon, or be able to express high, powerful efforts repeatedly with minimal or incomplete rest. Not only can all sports be classified on this continuum but energy systems can be classified in this manner as well:

Aerobic Power
Aerobic Capacity

Anaerobic-Lactic Power
Anaerobic-Lactic Capacity

Alactic Power
Alactic Capacity

The Power-Capacity Continuum looks something like this:

POWER	<————>	CAPACITY
Olympic Lifting		Marathon
Power Lifting		Ironman Triathlon
Track and Field Throws

 

As you can see, on both ends of the spectrum are the extremes. To the left you have events that require huge amounts of output but are followed by long periods of rest and on the right you have events that require you to perform efforts for an incredibly long period of time with no rest at all.

As I stated earlier, all sports fall somewhere on this continuum between the two sides and most team sports are closer towards the capacity side as they require the expression of high energy outputs followed by minimal or incomplete rest and they require this to be done over the course of an entire game or match.

Using the Continuum to Evaluate Sport

To successfully use the continuum you need to first understand where the sport in question lies keeping in mind that various positions within the sport may be shifted towards one direction or the other.

For example, teams sports are generally “capacity” driven. While the athlete needs to output high amounts of power and strength to often be successful they need to do so over the course of a game with minimal or incomplete rest periods as well as be able to recover adequately and perform in a similar manner over the course of a long season. Thus, these sports are often categorized as being “alactic-aerobic” or requiring a large work capacity to support the athlete’s ability to consistently repeat their effort at the highest level. Now, when we start to look at positions within the various sports we see can see even more distinctions. Here are some examples that come to mind:

• Football is a sport skewed toward capacity and alactic-aerobic in nature (even more so now a days with teams running hurry up and no huddle offenses). However, the guy on my team that does nothing other than run back kick offs does not need as much capacity as my running back who gets 40 carries a game because the guy running back the kick offs pretty much goes in, does his thing, and then gets a really long rest period before he needs to do it again. While many of the guys on the field are skewed towards the capacity side the kick off returner is skewed more towards the power side.
• Baseball is an interesting sport as there can be a huge amount of downtime for most of the guys on the field (especially the designated hitter – who would be skewed most towards the power end of the continuum). The players in the field are not as capacity driven as the pitcher, who needs to make 100 or more pitches at extremely high velocities over 5-6 innings with brief rest intervals (longer rest period when his team is batting obviously). The pitcher needs a pretty sound alactic capacity to keep repeating those efforts.
• In soccer you would see a similar difference between various positions on the field with regard to the amount of running guys do and the speeds at which they do it. Additionally, the goalie would lie more towards the left of the continuum than the others players on the field.

Training for Sport

Once you analyze where the sport is on the continuum you must then determine ways of going about testing the athlete to see what sort of qualities they currently posses and what sort of qualities they are currently lacking. This will allow you to plan training and determine which qualities to train first. Unfortunately, one size does not fit all. As we see above, while all sports have similar general qualities (which I discussed in my article Developing Requisite Competencies) after a certain period of time it is essential to then begin to focus on the specifics of the sport and raising the sport specific qualities necessary for success. As I discussed above, this may mean that some players on the team, depending on position, may have different targeted training goals. Just because they play the same sport may not mean that they should have the same training program.

As you develop the training program keep in mind where on the continuum the sport falls and ensure you are preparing the athlete for those sports demands. This may include thinking outside of the weightroom (remember, strength isn’t the only factor in developing sports fitness). When thinking about capacity sports be sure to choose methods that work towards the similar demands of that sport. Initially, you may start very general as training specifically for the sport may require the athlete to first develop overall fitness, mobility, or foundational strength in order to progress further. Dr. Drabik, in Children & Sports Training: How Your Future Champions Should Exercise to be Healthy, Fit, and Happy, makes the following distinctions (pg. 94):

“General endurance is the ability to perform over a long time any physical effort involving numerous groups of muscles that has a positive influence of sports specialization.

Directed endurance is the ability, based on aerobic fitness, that creates the functional basis for special endurance. In training methods the structure of movement is identical and the character of an athlete’s effort is similar to that of the sports specialization.

Special endurance is the ability to perform efforts typical in a given sports discipline, for the same duration as that required in the discipline, while preserving the necessary quality of techniques.”

The methods you choose to employ within each of those three “buckets” is up to you but the phase of training should have a theme and a goal of achieving some sort of physiological outcome.

Sequencing the Training Week

The Charlie Francis quote that started this article created quiet a stir because Charlie used the word “aerobic”. What it really comes down to is that the aerobic system is critical as it underlies all other energy systems and the more developed the aerobic system is the better the other energy systems can function. This does not mean that a baseball pitchers needs the aerobic capacity of an Ironman Triathlete but it does mean that they need to develop a work capacity (noticed I didn’t say “aerobic capacity” because that phrase tends to upset people) to support the demands of the sport.

In training, it is impossible to go hard every single day – I shouldn’t say it is “impossible”. It is entirely possible but it is also entirely reckless and potentially damaging to the individual. Thus, the week needs to be sequenced properly. Charlie Francis was fond of the “high-low” approach where he group high intensity training stresses on one day and low intensity training stresses on other days as a way of allowing the athlete  at least 48hrs to recover from the intense training. Generally, the “high” days were more powerful, short, alactic efforts and the “low” days were more extensive in nature – even for the fastest 100m sprinters in the world at the time (a sport that would be shifted much more to the left of the continuum) Charlie understood the importance of general fitness and developed their aerobic systems to a certain level using things like tempo runs and various circuit training methods to build them up to a certain point and then maintain that while they focused more on sprinting and preparing for competition. They did very little work in the “middle zone”, which Charlie referred to as being “Too slow to be speed work and to fast to be recovery work”. This work tends to be more lactate producing and isn’t really representative of the energy system demands for American Team Sports (as I wrote about in a previous article, Some Thoughts on Training the Lactate System).

As a way of honoring this “high-low” approach one should sit down and determine the training methods at their disposal that represent high and low training stressors, determine what aspects these training methods target (which energy systems and are they more power or capacity driven), and finally sit down and structure the training week in a way that makes sense and has a good balance between intensive and extensive training and allows the athlete efficient time to recover and adapt so that they can make adequate improvements.

Wrapping Up

What we can learn from all of this:

1. All energy systems can be broken down into “power” or “capacity”
2. All sports lie on a continuum between power and capacity
3. Different positions within the same sport may lie in different places on the power-capacity continuum
4. Developing work capacity in general before transitioning to sport specific work capacity is important
5. The aerobic system drives all other energy systems and is a key target when developing general work capacity
6. Choosing training methods appropriately is essential when setting up the training week
7. Training methods can generally be classified as either “high” or “low” stressors
8. Sequencing training through out the week is the key to ensuring that the athletes not only get the most out of the high intensity days but are also able to recover and optimally adapt to those training days