Want your students to remember the main principles of training? These are the ‘golden rules’ to keep athletes motivated, help them to progress and avoid injury during their fitness training.

Understanding these main principles of training will help your students when it comes to designing training programmes and working out how to improve athlete performance.

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What are the main principles of training?

Specificity

Specificity means ensuring that training is relevant to both the individual and the sport.

For example, Usain Bolt, as a 100m sprinter would focus his training on speed and power. Whereas Mo Farah, who is a long-distance runner would concentrate on his cardiovascular fitness and stamina.

Progressive Overload

Progressive overload involves gradually increasing training frequency, intensity, time or type over the training period, ensuring that the body is pushed beyond its normal rhythm. Doing this too quickly can cause your performance to plateau or could even cause an injury.

Reversibility

Reversibility refers to the ability to scale training back in the event of an injury, for example. It is better to scale the training back rather than take a complete break from training if possible because this helps to maintain motivation.

Tedium

Tedium refers to the variety required in order to avoid boredom and keep athletes motivated. By keeping athletes motivated, they will work harder and stick to training regimes, ultimately helping them to improve their performance more quickly.

Variety can also help to reduce the risk of injuries such as strains and stress fractures caused by overuse.

We hope you found this poster helpful!

If you liked this, you might also like our ’11 Key Components of Fitness’ poster.

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The Main Principles of Training