Training principles for sport - Everything you need to know:

Understanding the key training principles for sport is important when managing your nutrition. In order to get the most out of an exercise program, alongside good nutrition, here are some key principles that should be followed to improve your physical fitness and performance:

Individual differences: we are all unique and will have different reactions to exercise programs and nutrition. This is why it is important to have your own customised program suited for your nutrition needs and the type of sport to gain the best results.

Overload: is used to increase strength and endurance. It involves adding a new resistance or time/intensity to a training session. To increase an aspect of fitness, the demands is continually increased. For example, to increase strength, you need to lift heavy. This also needs to be considered alongside adequate rest and overload needs to be gradual to avoid injury.

Progression: in order to increase your fitness level, you need to gradually increase intensity as well as duration of your training. By increasing your workload gradually, you will improve fitness and lower risk of injury. However, if you increase too slowly, you will not see too much improvement. Within this, there is need for rest and recovery so the body is not under continual stress, resulting to exhaustion and/or injury.

Adaptation: the body will become familiar with the same type of exercise at the same level. It is important to improve and adapt to harder training. You need to increase your duration or at a higher intensity at times to prevent the body getting used to the training level.

Use/Disuse: it's important to keep up the fitness. When we stop and are not 'using' the body, we lose fitness quickly. Muscles atrophy with less use, and we lose fitness when not exercising.

Specificity: training should closely match the activity that you are trying to improve. The more relatable training, the more benefits you will see. If training is not specific enough to your sport, it may take more time to achieve your goals.