Understanding Why You May Not Be Getting Faster

Summary Outline:

• What Is Progressive Overload?
• Enough Is Enough
• Super Compensation And Why You Want It 
• Personalization Wins

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What Is Progressive Overload?

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When it comes to training you may have heard the term ‘Progressive Overload.’ Think of progressive overload like leveling up in a video game. When you start, the levels are easy, but as you get better, you move on to harder levels. In fitness, it means gradually increasing the amount of work your body does during exercise. This helps your muscles, bones, and even your heart get stronger and more efficient over time. It's like challenging yourself a bit more each time you exercise so your body can keep improving.  This is one of the most important training principles that states that you need to over time increase one of the following training variables:

Intensity: Intensity is how hard you're working. Imagine you're lifting weights. If you start with lifting 10 pounds and then move up to lifting 15 pounds, you've increased the intensity. It's like turning up the difficulty setting. You can also increase intensity in other ways, like running faster, jumping higher, or doing push-ups more quickly.

Frequency: Frequency is all about how often you exercise. Let's say you jog twice a week. If you decide to jog three times a week instead, you've increased the frequency. It's like adding more gaming sessions each week to beat more levels.

Volume: Volume is the total amount of exercise you do. Think about it like the total number of push-ups you do in a week. If you do 50 push-ups over a week and then increase it to 70, you've increased your volume. It's like doing more missions or quests in your game each week.

Changing any one of these variables can lead to a progression in total training load on the body and hopefully, with proper planning, an increase in fitness.

Enough Is Enough

Unfortunately it’s not possible to increase any one variable too quickly or you can get extremely fatigued, or worse, injured. We cannot go from running 1mile for the first time tomorrow to running 10-miles every day thereafter and expect good things to happen.

And over time there may be a limit to how much a variable can be beneficial or even increased. Imagine trying to go for 3 runs a day every day. Even if you could physically recover from the training load, 21 runs a week just is not realistic for most people.

This raises the question of ‘How much is enough and when?’

Like most topics in training, the answer is ‘It depends’ and it comes with a little help from an important thing called ‘super compensation’

Super Compensation And Why You Want It 

Super compensation is a really cool concept in endurance training that's all about timing your workouts and rest periods to get the most out of your training. Imagine your body is like a battery. When you do endurance training, like long runs or bike rides, you're using up that battery's energy. Now, here's where super compensation comes in. After you've drained some of that energy, your body doesn't just recharge back to its original level during rest; it actually overcharges a bit, sort of like adding extra juice to the battery. 

This happens because your body is adapting, preparing itself to handle a similar stress in the future more efficiently. If you time your rest periods right, allowing your body to fully enter this super compensation phase, your endurance and performance can increase beyond what they were before your last workout – bringing you to the next level of fitness you have been chasing. Think of those big breakthroughs in performance at the end of the season following the taper when everything goes right.

You're not just getting back to where you started – you're becoming stronger and more capable. That's why understanding and utilizing super compensation is a game-changer in endurance training. When you utlize this concept effectively, it helps you train smarter, not just harder, leading to better performance and fewer chances of burnout or overtraining.

Alan Couzens, an exercise physiologist, created a great graph that helps to explain this concept with respect to different types of training intensities and their associated average supercompensation curves.

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In an ideal world we can get an idea of and program training with these curves in mind to maximize training sessions to occur and progress fitness during the periods of time where the line is above the dashed line, which represents the baseline fitness. At RunByRyan we take these factors into consideration and build a program that keeps your performance at the cutting edge of the curve.

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Personalization Wins

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If your training program does not accommodate the need for rest following each training session, or the rest is too large, the next major training stimulus could be setting you up for a workout below baseline fitness levels. You usually can tell this is the case when your runs start to feel harder and slower even though you have been training really hard. 

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These super compensation curves can explain a lot of the reason that one program may work and another may not. They also can explain why one program works better for your friend John but does not work for you; we each have different physiological needs and responses to training as a result. A plan that is not personalized but still works is either luckily working well for you or could be working better.