Adaptation Criteria
- The body can adapt to practically any natural stress as long as following conditions exist
- Warm up
- Muscle and joint structures
- Specific movement(s) used for exercise or sport
- Sufficient recovery between training bouts
- Physical Overtraining
- "Lighter" or lower volume days or periods can be scheduled into program
- Increases of intensity or volume are progressive and regular
- Small increases of intensity between adaptations
- Small increases of weekly training volume
- Orthopedic structures are free of Mechanical Impairments
- Previous injury or disease
- Past injury is the greatest predictor of future injury
- Orthopedic imbalance
- Antagonist strength ratios
- Flexibility
- Adaptation is still possible even with deficiencies
- Previous injury or disease
- Variation
- Required for continued adaptation to avoid accomodation (See SAID)
- Warm up
- Theoretically, no movement is contraindicative if the first 4 criteria above are met
- Injury can occur if orthopedic structures have not adapted to movement, or stress
- Exercises form needs to be relatively consistent so the risk of injury is reduced and adaption can occur.
- Current contraindicative movements from some authorities propagate "over generalizations"
- Also see
Initial Level of Fitness
- The response to exercise is dependent upon level of fitness.
- More dramatic increases in fitness can occur when fitness is initially low.
- Eg: Strength gains are very rapid for beginners.
- Eg: Bed ridden person gets out of bed and walks around the room
- increases in strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, and cardiovascular fitness
- Improvements in fitness increase at a slower rate when higher levels have already been obtained
- Eg: Strength gains are relatively slow for someone who has trained with weights for many years.
- Eg: An elite athlete walks around in a room
- no increase in any measurement of fitness
- If walking where in lieu of their normal training the athlete would eventually experience decrements of performance over time due to detraining
- More dramatic increases in fitness can occur when fitness is initially low.
Detraining
- Fitness levels will gradually decrease if specific training is not continued at a minimum level of intensity, duration, and frequency
Muscle Memory
- Retraining after detraining
- Muscle mass and strength can increase rapidly near previously obtained levels
- In as little as several weeks to a few months of resumed training
- Even if previous levels of training were obtained decades earlier