Know your basics: General Adaptation Syndrome

A training incentive like a Squat produces a response from your body, which will 'fight' against this external resistance. This resistance is provided for as long as possible, after which the sources available to provide this resistance are exhausted. The performance will slowly decrease until you are exhausted. This degradation, which is a catabolic process, causes a building/repairing response: an anabolic process. We can't achieve one without the other.

What you can immediately include in your training and programming is this:

• The General Adaptation Syndrome is not just training-related, but applies to all stressors. Although a stressor is specific, there is also overlap and thus a limit of stress that a body can process without breaking itself down. An extreme example is a burn out, where heavy, heavy and intense training would be disastrous because it would not promote the recovery of an exhausted body. Even though the burn out comes from mental strain.
• Programming stress (training) is therefore not just about tiring out, but as specific as possible and applying as little stress as possible to induce adaptation. The demand for more should come from the athlete becoming stronger and the possibility of more stress. Good trainers offer the minimum to achieve maximum adaptation by programming stress very specifically.
• The reason why we need to overload progressively is also clear from this graph. Because in order to get to the next phase where we recover and hopefully cause supercompensation, we need to be sufficiently fatigued. The stronger, the better conditioned we become, the more resistance we can offer against the stressor.
• Increasing the frequency in a training program, training more often, ensures that we can go through the course of the stress response more often, which can lead to more adaptation. But we must then take recovery into account. An easy way to make this measurable is performance. Where performance improves, sometimes it's about moving faster or lifting 0.25 kg more, we know that we've recovered sufficiently and supercompensation has occurred.
• In order to excel, the challenge is to be able to apply as much stress as possible that is directly in line with the goals of our athletes (muscle growth, maximum strength, etc.). The more specific, as minimalistic as possible, the more this ensures a sustainable and linear (linear over months/years, not day to day) progression curve over time.