The SAID Principle
One of the things I used myself throughout my years of athletics was a concept called the SAID principle. SAID stands for Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand. It basically means that the more stress that’s put on the body during exercise, the body adapts to the increased workload. Example, weightlifting. Everyone starts somewhere. Some are just naturally very strong, its easier to put load onto the muscles to recuirt more motor neurons to build massive wattage to lift a bar from the ground to overhead, the snatch. Some aren’t like that. It takes time, first, start off with a light weight, the body gets used to this demand, then slowly, the tonnage and weight gets increased, then slowly, the body gets stronger. Ok, there’s a threshold here with that, some people can take and handle more demand, some can’t, everyone’s body is different. These days, I don’t practice olympic lifting anymore, so I’m back to square one if I ever do that again, I would have to work with a light weight myself, build up the tonnage, then increase it again. Since I do endurance based sports now, the training for that is different. Cycling is a simple activity, easy on the body to go a very long duration on a training session. It doesn’t completely translate to better running performance. Apparently, Lance Armstrong ran the NYC marathon once, look it up and find out for yourself. VO2 max was one of the highest that was ever recorded, but he got burned by the field of runners there. Why? He trains exclusively to do cycling, not running, that didn’t translate to winning. Running is completely different from cycling. I do cycling and running to cross train, cycling works on lung power, increasing VO2 max, and leg endurance, but running is a whole lot more than just legs. But to run a marathon time that qualifies for the Olympics, 2:18:10 is the qualifying standard for running the marathon in the Olympics, can’t do that unless there’s a lot of running volume put into the training. So that’s an example of needing to using the SIAD principle based on the sport someone does. The body is an adaptive machine, it will adapt to any stress you put on it, it’s not that hard as you think.