Basic Principles of Exercise: Principle of Specificity

Swimming Tips by Coach Ian Lee of =http://www.thatswimteam.org]THAT Masters Swim Team.

Basic Principles of Exercise:

Over the last few weeks we have been focusing on drills for our ?Tips Of The Week.? This week we are going to focus on one of the basic principles of exercise. The fundamental principle that we are going to focus on this week is the Principle of Specificity.

Principle of Specificity states that your body responds specifically or exactly to the stress placed upon it. This has ramifications on your workouts in several ways, which impact the type of training you do, and how you move your body.

To help explain some of the impact it has on you and how you should train for your sport here are some explanations and analogies.

1. Your body will adapt to the type of stress you put on it. These adaptations will relate to this type of stress being placed on the body and where they are being placed. For example if you want to be strong you must create demands from your body that require these changes. You can run 20 mile a day and you will not become strong because the demands you are placing on your body do not relate to strength they relate to endurance. This relates to your swimming in that if you want to swim a certain speed and distance you must train in relation to that speed and distance. Sprinters must do swimming at maximal effort levels to create the demands on there body that will elicit these types of specific changes. If you want to swim distances then you must swim endurance based sets that will demand these physiological changes. If you want to do distances at a certain speed then you need to begin demanding this from your body in the form of pace work. So if you have goals you must understand how they relate to your training, and also do some of your goal help or hinder each other.

2. These adaptations will impact the Recruitment of Muscle types and ROM (Range Of Motion). Your muscles will only get stronger in the range of motion and the angles you move them. This relates to your training in several ways. If all of your training is running, you will not improve the muscles used for swimming. To some of you that have been training for an extended period of time this may seem obvious, but you need to make sure you take this thought process further. Your muscles will only get stronger in the range of motion you use them. If you are swimming strokes certain ways the muscles being recruited will get stronger. However the muscles not being activated will not make any adaptations. So when you try to make a technical change you will begin to use untrained, or less trained muscles. Often this means you have to slow down, and possibly shorten distances until these muscles have caught up with the muscles that have been trained. This is why when you make a stoke change you will often see a slowing of speed until the newly recruited muscles catch-up in strength and endurance. Then you will see the overall speed improvement. This slowing down can be a very frustrating aspect of training.