These four training principles help you to achieve your fitness goals effectively and sustainably. We’ll show you how to use them in your personal workout.
Training principles are general principles in training theory and sports science. They support and guide you in your training so that you can make efficient progress and achieve long-term success.
The training principles that we present to you here apply to all sports as well as to rehabilitation, prevention and other fitness areas. It doesn’t matter whether you are performance- or competition-oriented or whether you practice leisure sports.
It is important to know that your progress also depends on other factors. This includes nutrition in particular, which is not the focus of this article. You can find out more about exercise and nutrition in these articles, for example:
- Muscle building through nutrition: You should consider this
- Eat before or after exercise? This is how you do it right
- Vegan diet and sport: is that possible?
Training principle 1: Principle of progressive increase in load
Progressive loading is all about increasing your training load regularly. This is for the purpose of maintaining the effectiveness of your training and making progress. Your body is adaptable, gets used to constant stimuli and accordingly stagnates if you don’t increase the load.
You can progressively increase your load in small steps over several weeks. To do this, you can combine and alternate the following methods:
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Increase the intensity of the load, for example by using more weight or increasing your speed.
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Increase load density, for example by shortening the break times.
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Increasing the load, for example by increasing the number of repetitions of a set of exercises.
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Increase exercise frequency, for example by exercising once more per week.
Training principle 2: principle of varying loads
This training principle is about constantly exposing your body to different stimuli. The aim is to improve your performance and thus counteract monotony and stagnation.
To do this, you should systematically change your training sessions at certain intervals. For example, you can alternate phases of heavy physical exertion with phases of reduced physical exertion. Exercises, break times, sets and repetition numbers can be varied.
Another idea is to go beyond your sport and complement it with other sports. If you usually do strength training, you can expand the range of your training with bouldering, martial arts, swimming, yoga or mobility training, for example.
Training principle 3: Optimum relation between stress and recovery
This training principle states that after each effective training session, a certain period of recovery is necessary so that you can set the next training stimulus with the same load or more. As a result, your body becomes stronger, more enduring and faster over time.
During the recovery phase itself, muscle growth also takes place. So that you can optimally increase your performance, you should plan a break of about two days between training sessions of the same muscle group.
During this time you can support your body as follows:
- Restful sleep phases
- Light exercise, such as walking and stretching
- Nutritious diet
- Wellness units, such as massages or sauna sessions
Training Principle 4: Principle of Durability and Continuity
In order for you to make progress towards your goals, you should do your training regularly and over a longer period of time. A one-off training session can be a nice change, but it doesn’t lead to a fundamental and visible change. Sustainable change requires patience, time and work.
More specifically, this means that you should generally implement two to three training sessions per week over several weeks and months. If you observe the training principles described here, you will be able to see how you are slowly but surely approaching your goals.
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