Fitness Training Principles

Fitness Training Principles

Have you ever asked yourself why you are into exercise? You may come up with a number of reasons: to improve your health, to de-stress yourself, to lose weight or to gain muscles. It might even be because everybody's doing it! Even if you are exercising because it is the 'in thing', it's really good provided you know how to get the best out of your fitness training regimen. And in order to do so, you should know the principles of fitness training.

More and more people all over the world are hiring fitness trainers and personal trainers. Do you know why? If you don't, it's nothing unlikely. Even the people who pay big bucks for hiring celebrity fitness trainers do not usually know why these trainers seem to work miracles with every one of their clients! Well, they simply implement the principles of fitness training into their clients program to get the desired results, even if they never say to explicitly.

By now you must be really interested to know the principles of fitness training. So without further delay, here goes:

1. Specificity: this principle states that in order to strengthen or develop one part of your body, you must do specific exercises targeted at that particular part. So, if you want to improve shoulder mobility, you must try out shoulder mobility exercises and not those affecting hip mobility.

The principle of specificity has a great impact on strength training too. Not only should you directly train the muscle groups you are looking to develop, you must also train them via training the associated muscle groups. This is perhaps the reason why specificity is the keystone of every athlete's training program.

2. Overload: this principle states that muscles in your body will only develop and become stronger when they are forced to work beyond levels they are normally used to. So, you must increase the exertion or load on your muscles at a gradually increasing pace in order to facilitate better adaptation and also get favorable results. 

Some ways in which you can do this are:

By increasing the resistance 

By doing more reps with a particular weight 

By doing more sets 

By taking shorter breaks between sets and thus increasing the overall intensity of your workouts.

3. Recovery: this principle states that it is as important to rest after exercise, as it is to exercise, if you want to achieve your fitness goals. This is because exercise leaves your body in a state of turmoil and rest allows it to recover and start the process of development.

4. Adaptation: when you place your body under exertions, it reacts by increasing its ability to cope with those exertions. This is the reason why the principle of progressive overload works. Another point here is that adaptation occurs when you are rest after a workout.

5. Reversibility: when you stop training, the benefits also stop accruing after a period of time. Various muscle groups developed because of training, may soon revert to their previous shape and definition.