We all strive to see progress from our efforts, although we all enjoy (most of the time) being active and taking part in a sport or activity nearly all of us still want to feel a sense of achievement from progressing towards our chosen goals. For a large percentage of us these goals centre upon times, distances and positions, not all our goals have to centre on these factors and many goals can be focused upon more personal and perception based outcomes (more on that in a future blog), but to help us achieve such goals and for us to be able to feel a sense of fulfilment and success we require to see improvements from our investment in training.

CONSISTENCY is essential as this provides a regular training stimuli which your body will respond to, when you consider the time frame of weeks to facilitate adaptation it is essential to sustain a period of regular training to achieve improvements.

TRAINING LOAD is essential to create a stimulus for your body to respond to, a training load that is too low for your current fitness level will see regression of your fitness as it will not create adaptation. A training load that is too high for your current fitness will increase your chances of over training, illness and injury all reducing your chances of sustaining consistency within your training.

RECOVERY is essential as this is when our bodies regenerate and adapt to the training load undertaken, it is the other side of the coin to training and an area where many people fall short and limit their progression. In my experience as a coach its often not a case of training harder but recovering better that enables individuals to realise their goals and see improvements in performance.

These foundation bricks are often over looked in favour of looking into more complex training methodologies, distribution and training types but until these foundations are established and underpinning your training the peak of your pyramid will always fall short of its potential.