Random Training = Random Results.
You might get faster, you might get slower, or you might make no progress. In order to increase your fitness level, a few things need to be in place that are crucial to your athletic success and should be considered when you are designing your plan.
They are: PROGRESSION, GRADUAL INCREASE, and QUANTIFY TRAINING
Progression:
Your body reacts to a stressor (the workout), recovers and adapts to the stressor with increased strength, speed, endurance or power. If you apply the same stress load every week, you won’t progress.
This is common knowledge in regards endurance; you have to increase mileage or endurance each week to reach a race goal. Strength, power, and speed work require a similar progression. You must add greater stress loads each week and recover to move forward.
If you add too much stress too quickly or without proper recovery, you’ll overload your system and weaken your performance rather than increase it.
Gradual Increase:
It is important to try not to increase your weekly stress load more than 10%. A good goal is 6-8%. Weekly volume includes intensity and duration. It’s also important that an increase in intensity requires greater recovery time even if duration stays the same.
As intensity increases, volume should come down. This progression may seem slow, but even a 1% increase in fitness per week is enormous progress throughout the season.
Quantify Your Training:
Measure your training’s effectiveness. If your goal is simply to complete a race, you should only be concerned with endurance. A steady increase in duration or mileage will get you to your goal. Strength, speed, or power intervals should be similarly quantified.
Each week gradually increase the number, duration, or intensity of your intervals. Quantifying your results will motivate you to make progress. Write down your plan so you can see the progress you make. This can be done with a training log.
Monthly field tests are another way to quantify your progress. After a rest day, record your average heart rate, speed, and distance over a 30 minute time trial or a standard beep test. Try to keep the test conditions consistent.
Rest and recovery should also be quantified. Make sure you reduce your volume every fourth day and fourth week for complete mental and physical recovery. It’s important to note that your body is weaker after a workout and only gets stronger is it recover properly. Keep a log of your sleep, resting heart rate, and stress levels to indicate signs of overreaching or over-training.
Overloading, Overreaching, and Overloading: Overloading is part of a normal training process. It means increasing the stress on your body to cause adaptation to the stress. It’s normal to feel short-term fatigue with overload. Overreaching occurs when you continue to train at abnormally high loads, or increase them for about two weeks.
Performance noticeably decreases and fatigue becomes longer lasting, but with a few days of rest, it is quickly reversible. If you ignore overreaching, you enter the third stage: overtraining, which can take months to recover from.