Posted by Cris LaBossiere (24.66.94.141) on February 03, 2004 at 13:31:27:
In Reply to: Re : Improvements. posted by Juerg on February 03, 2004 at 12:17:18:
Juerg is right again. Once a person adapts to a given load of training, they may not adapt further, and I have found they may detrain, even though training loads are consistent.
Remember the “overload principal”. The body at times needs a new stimulus to adapt too. What stimulus? I don’t know, and like Juerg alludes to, the “cook book” coaches and “training manuals” don’t know either. However if some history of the athlete is known, and some measurements are taken, then we can, with our experience and knowledge, decide what stimulus will be the best for the athlete at the time, then we wait a couple days and measure again. Then repeat: educated guess + check results of educated guess based training = true result. The more true results we have to measure the more accurate our training, and the better our “educated guess” becomes for the next cycle. Eventually a good coach working closely with an athlete will be able to reduce guesswork and be able to control with very good reliability, the fitness of the athlete. Then after training all kinds of athletes for 10 years or so the coach will have experienced most of the possible variables in current training mistakes so they will be able to pinpoint the right training for an athlete with less measurements and more accuracy.
I’ll give you an example: I have a cycling athlete who experienced about 10 days of consistent drop in watts for the same heart rate. Training appeared to be “textbook perfect”, so what was wrong? He didn’t have a cold; nutrition was great, and no other stress or injury.
The “repair”: I gave him one simple set of specific intervals for one day. Two days later he had regained what he lost over the prior 10 days (about 15 watts) plus another 2 or 3 watts. Now he is back to stable gains.
The intervals were very specific in time and duration, and were made based on my 6 years of training him.
There is no one simple miracle training formula. Many people thirst for what is impossible to drink. They are desperate to quench their thirst and will go crazy trying.
I get asked a lot how many athletes I train. My answer: I have worked with over 2000 athletes, but I only train with 3 or 4. Because this is my full time job and I do nothing else, I can handle about 15 athletes, but I typically have 3 or 4 very dedicated athletes, another 5 or so semi-committed athletes, then another 5 to 15 dedicated general fitness clients.
Coaching is constant measuring and monitoring and creating normative data for each individual. One coach cannot effectively train more than a handful of athletes at one time. Perhaps a coach can “manage” large numbers of athletes, but a coach could not effectively train each one, there is simply too much data to review.